The People vs. Alex Cross (32 page)

Snowflakes hit my face. With my free hand, I tugged out the radio and turned it up. There was no longer screeching coming over it, just a dense hiss.

“This is Alex Cross,” I said. “Copy?”

Out of the static, I heard clicking and fragments of an unfamiliar voice. I turned it off, stuffed it back in my coat, tried my cell. No service.

The snow flurries turned to thick heavy flakes.

They’re going to get away,
I thought.
The sadistic bastards are going to get away.

There was an intersection ahead, and I stopped. The snow covered the leaves, making it impossible for me to say which way Edgars had taken Gretchen Lindel.

I tried to recall the satellite view of the property. The shed and the wounded HRT agent were somewhere to my left. The knoll at the rear of the property—where Mahoney had sent four agents—was somewhere straight ahead of me. That unidentified smudge on the satellite picture was down the right fork in the trail.

I went with my instincts, twisted the ATV throttle, and went right. The snow slapped my face, got in my eyes, and forced me to drive at a crawl.

Ten minutes later, the snow squall ended as abruptly as it had started. I rolled downhill to a wide, shallow, iced-over creek, seeing where Edgars’s machine had broken up the ice. My instincts were dead-on. I drove across the creek, noticing the sky brightening in the east.

How far ahead were they? Were those four people back in that booby-trapped building all dead? The HRT guys said they hadn’t moved when the booby trap went off. Or was Edgars taking Gretchen to where he had the other blondes stashed?

One hundred yards beyond the creek crossing, I lost the tracks and drove on through virgin snow to a turnabout walled in by pines. A dead end.

But Edgars had come this way. I was positive. That ice had absolutely been freshly broken, and those tracks …

I drove back, shining the headlights on the crossing, seeing ice covering the creek upstream. I used my flashlight to look downstream. The ice there had been broken up to where the stream disappeared beneath a steep embankment, eight,
maybe ten feet high, and covered with green and tan vegetation frosted with new snow.

Where the hell had they gone? I couldn’t imagine any machine climbing straight up the side of that wall of …

I looked closer at the embankment. Green plants? That was impossible. The leaves had fallen. The ferns were dead.

I drove into the creek and rolled slowly to the embankment, headlights on and my flashlight playing around. Even through the frosting of snow, I could see I hadn’t been looking at plants but at thin strips of dull green, gray, and brown cloth, thousands of pieces sewn into a huge swath of camouflage fabric that hung from a stout length of black metal bolted into the rocks above me.

I grabbed the radio again and turned it on. The static was weaker. I triggered the transmit button, said, “This is Alex Cross, come back.”

Almost immediately a garbled, oddly familiar voice answered.

“Batra?” I said.

The voice replied, but I couldn’t understand a word.

I said, “Repeat, this is Alex Cross. I am in pursuit of Edgars, who has Gretchen Lindel. I am somewhere in the northeast quadrant of the estate.”

The voice came back even more garbled.

I almost stuffed the radio in my pocket but then had a moment of inspiration and said, “If you can hear me, track me by Find My iPhone.”

I put away the radio that time, traded it for my service weapon. Staring at the camouflage curtain, I hesitated, anxious about what might be waiting on the other side. I killed the headlights, teased the throttle. The bumper touched the fabric
and then ripped apart the Velcro that had been keeping it closed.

I held my pistol in my left hand, rested the barrel on the handlebar, eased off the safety, gave the throttle more gas, and went through into darkness.

BREE GAPED AT
the smoking Uzi machine pistol mounted on a thin metal post inside the open cabinet. A long banana clip hung below the gun, too big for just ten or fifteen shots.

Mahoney coughed and shifted. The gun pivoted his way, and she saw the thin scarlet line of the laser sight fixed to its barrel pass six inches over the wounded agent’s head. It stopped.

“What the hell’s going on?” Sampson whispered, crawling up beside her.

She pulled back, said, “Remote-control Uzis. Unless …”

Bree peeked around the corner again, flashed the light at the machine pistol and the cabinet, looking for a camera.

Mahoney groaned and shifted, and the couch moved, hitting a table behind it. The lamp on the table wobbled.

The Uzi opened up again, that same left-to-right, right-to-left spray of bullets; it cut the lamp in half, and then the gunfire continued on toward the kitchen. Bree looked up after the
shooting stopped, saw that the slugs had hit some of the same things they’d hit during the first barrage.

No, she took that back. They had ripped into
the exact same things
at the
exact same height
.

“No one’s operating that gun, Ned!” Bree shouted. “I think there’s a motion detector involved. See it?”

“No,” he grunted, sounding weaker.

An agent yelled down from upstairs that he had to move his wounded men.

“The whole place is booby-trapped!” Sampson yelled. “Hold your position!”

“One’s critical! He’ll die if we don’t move him!”

“You’ll all die if you come down those stairs,” Bree shouted as she wriggled back past Sampson and crawled to a low line of untouched cabinets next to the stainless-steel stove.

She looked in three cabinets before she finally found the items she wanted. She grabbed them and scooted back to Sampson.

“What’s with the cookie sheets?” he asked.

“Motion,” Bree said, then she called out, “Ned, if you can, get down.”

She flung one of the cookie sheets over the counter that separated the kitchen from the living area.

The Uzi lit up, rattling bullets left to right, right to left again. She threw another cookie sheet and then a third before the action of the machine pistol locked open, the breech and barrel smoking hot.

She stood up cautiously, saw Ned lying on his side by the couch. His eyes were open but glassy, and his breathing looked shallow.

“We’re clear!” she shouted to the FBI agents upstairs as she ran to Mahoney. “Get your men out!”

Kneeling by Alex’s old FBI partner, Bree refused to cry. “You with me, Ned? Talk to me.”

Mahoney nodded and blinked. “Gut shot.”

“I can see that.”

Sampson came up behind her. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital, and the jamming’s still going on.”

“Help me get him up,” Bree said.

They lifted Ned to his feet. Mahoney passed out from the pain, becoming deadweight, and Sampson got him up on his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Bree ran in front of him to the front door and stepped out into the falling snow, shouting, “Alex? Agent Batra?”

A flashlight went on. Keith Rawlins called timidly, “Just me, Chief Stone.”

Sampson came out the door with Mahoney over his shoulder.

The snow fell in big flakes and coated the pavers as they hustled across the courtyard to the Tahoe Mahoney had driven into the estate. Rawlins stood outside it, looking as bedraggled as a cat in the rain.

“Drop the rear seat backs, would you?” Sampson said.

Seeming grateful to have something to do, Rawlins sprang into action, saying, “The jamming system is remarkable.”

“We know,” Bree said impatiently. “Where’s Batra’s car?”

“When the jamming started and then all the shooting, she decided to drive out, try to call for reinforcements.”

“Good,” Bree said as Sampson put Mahoney in the back of the Tahoe. “Where’s—”

“Don’t leave yet!” an FBI agent yelled down in the courtyard.

He carried a badly wounded man. They’d gotten
blood-clotting agent into a chest wound, but his breathing was ragged and harsh.

“Get him in,” Bree said. “And the next one.”

“I’ll drive,” Sampson said, going through Mahoney’s coat pockets and finding the keys.

Everything was moving fast, and Bree was still in semi-shock from the ambush, so it was not until she saw Sampson throw the Tahoe in reverse and fishtail back down Edgars’s long driveway that she realized the snow had stopped.

She felt confused and overwhelmingly tired. She looked up at the sky, saw the clouds parting and a shaft of moonlight shining through, making the frosted courtyard look like a movie fantasy.

“Did Alex go with Agent Batra?” she asked Rawlins.

“Uh, no.”

She turned to look at him. “What? Where is—”

Thaa-wumph!

Bree felt the ground tremble. The muted explosion sounded like it had come from deep inside the mansion.

“What was that?” Rawlins said, backing away.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I …
where
is Alex?”

“Dr. Cross? He—”

A second, much louder explosion cut him off; it lit up one of the second-story bedrooms like aluminum in the sun, blew out the windows, and ignited a fierce blaze. Yellow, orange, and ruby flames billowed out of the mansion and licked at the shake-shingle roof.

Bree moved back fast, feeling dread grow in her stomach. “Where’s Alex, Rawlins?” she shouted. “Where’s my husband?”

THE HEAVY CAMOUFLAGE
curtains flapped shut behind me. My eyes adjusted. I was in a storm-drain culvert, a good ten feet in diameter. Either the potential existed for extreme flash-flooding in the creek or Edgars had put the culvert in place as an escape route. I was betting that the smudge I’d seen on the satellite view was dirt from an excavation.

Forty yards ahead of me, the culvert ended, and gray light was building.

If Edgars and Pratt knew I was trailing them, they could be waiting at the other end of the culvert. But by my reckoning, the culvert had to pass beneath the dirt road that ran along the estate’s eastern boundary, which meant the other end would leave me somewhere inside the Michaux State Forest.

They’re not waiting to ambush me,
I thought.
They’re getting out of here and as far away as possible.

I gunned the throttle and shot out of the culvert, feeling exposed, a target.

But no shots rang out as I left the creek bed for a trail through hardwood trees. With dawn nearing, I could see tire tracks, obscure at first but growing more distinct the farther I followed them.

As I drove, I tried to anticipate Edgars’s next move. Either he was in full flight mode, in which case I would find his UTV abandoned and the tracks of a car leaving the area, or he had something more sinister planned.

In my mind, I saw Gretchen Lindel writhing in the truck bed. I began to fear that Edgars did not intend to take her or any of the other women with him. If he was as ruthless as I thought he was, he would kill Gretchen and the other blondes. Maybe he already had.

No witnesses,
I thought.
He’ll want no witnesses
.

It was full daylight when I reached the rim of a bluff that looked out over a broad patchwork of farmland a good five miles from the estate. Looking down the steep trail, almost a quarter mile below me, I could see a farm, or at least the roof of a ranch-style home, most of a steel building, and definitely Edgars’s side-by-side Honda Pioneer 1000 parked in the snow beside it.

I switched off the Kawasaki and left it. Carrying my pistol and my phone, I sidestepped down the hillside, staying tight to the brush, hoping no one would spot me from below. I kept checking my phone for service, but there was none.

My ankle and shin were swollen and unhappy, but I refused to stop.

Snow was starting to melt off branches when I reached the rear of the farm. I stopped behind a tree, listening, watching. Nothing moved in the yard. Nothing showed in the windows of the ramshackle ranch house.

The three overhead doors on the long side of the steel building were closed. The porthole windows in the doors looked covered. The small sash window twenty feet to the right of the back door, however, was not shaded. I could see bright, glaring light inside.

I checked my phone. Still no service. But the fact that Edgars was a master coder, a creature of the dark web, made me check to see if he had Wi-Fi. He did, a password-protected access called Pharm, and another, Pharm Guest. I tried to log in to that one, thinking I could e-mail or text Bree, but it too required a password.

Inside the steel building, someone let loose with a heart-wrenching scream.

I clenched my jaw and went over the fence, moving with a stiff, painful gait. The scream faded and died. When I reached the rear window, I ducked beneath it, got to the right side of the sash, and turned to face the back door.

“No!” a woman screamed.

“Please!” another yelled. “Just let us go!”

I snuck a peek through the window and saw a John Deere tractor and some other farm equipment parked around a large open space in the middle of the building. Running down from pulleys attached to a steel beam overhead, seven taut cables were clipped to leather restraints around the wrists of Gretchen Lindel and six other women, who dangled in a line, arms stretched overhead, their toes barely brushing the floor.

I couldn’t tell exactly who was who among the other six at first or second glance. They were soaked in dark blood that dripped and pooled beneath them. Only Gretchen was clean.

Six others?
I thought.
Seven all together? I thought there were only six blondes missing.

In any case, three of the women looked unconscious, their chins sagging to their chests. Gretchen and the other three had their heads up, were focused on the two men in black clothes moving around them.

Wearing the GoPro camera on his head, Nash Edgars seemed agitated, hopped up, like he was on something chemical and a lot of it. In his left hand he held an SLR camera and in his right an AR-style assault rifle with a halo sight.

Edgars kept moving, videoing the women and the other man, who wore a black balaclava and carried a red plastic bucket and a knife with an obsidian-black blade that curved tightly back toward an ornate knuckle guard. It was the same knife I’d seen in several of the mock-execution videos.