“Arrest us?” Now that he was over the hump, the first guy decided to show a little chin. “What are you going to arrest us for?”
“I’m a cop, remember? I’ll think of something.”
“What about my car, man? That’s like five hundred bucks’ damage!”
“Charge it to your clients,” I told him. “Believe me; they can afford it.”
Chapter 89
I GOT CALLED into Ramon Davies’s office again the next morning. He even had a desk jockey waiting outside the door to my office when I got there.
“What does he want?” I asked the officer. There were no good possibilities running in my mind, only very bad ones. Like more bodies.
“I don’t know, sir. Just to meet with you. That’s all I was told.”
I’ve heard that Woody Allen leaves his actors alone when they’re doing well and only directs them if there’s a problem. Davies is kind of the same way. I hated these walks to his office.
When I got in there, he had someone waiting with him. I recognized the face from the White House but didn’t know the name until Davies introduced us.
“Alex Cross, this is Special Agent Dan Cormorant. He’s from Secret Service. He’d like to talk to you.”
Cormorant was the one who had accompanied President Vance into the chief of staff’s office the other day when I visited. I assumed he was here at his boss’s behest.
“We’ve met, sort of,” I said, and shook his hand. “I don’t suppose you have anything to do with the two PIs outside my house last night?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Imagine that.”
“Alex.” Ramon cut me off with a raised voice and hand signal. “Be quiet and let’s get to this.”
Cormorant and I sat down across the desk from him.
“I’m not going to dwell on how we got here right now,” Davies said, and the implication was clear. We’d talk about it later, in private. “But I will tell you what’s going to happen next. Alex, you’re going to make yourself available to Agent Cormorant and provide him with any case-related materials he needs. When that’s finished, you’re going to report back to me that you’re ready for a new assignment. I’ve got a quad homicide in Cleveland Park with your name written all over it. Big case, serious crime.”
I heard the words, but my mind was elsewhere. If I had to guess, I’d say that Ramon was embarrassed at having the Secret Service foisted on him, probably by the chief himself. He’d never spoken to me like this before, but I decided to bite my tongue until I had a chance to see what Cormorant was all about.
The meeting ended pretty soon after that, and I walked out with Cormorant, back toward my office.
“How long have you been with the presidential detail?” I asked him. “That’s some rarefied air.”
“I’ve been with the Service for eight years,” he said, not quite answering my question. “Philadelphia PD before that, and for what it’s worth, I know how much you don’t want me here.”
Rather than getting into it, I asked, “So where are you guys on Tony Nicholson at this point? Where is he now? If I can ask that kind of question.”
He smiled. “How much do you already know?”
“That he was in Alexandria until eleven o’clock Friday morning, and now he’s nowhere to be found. At least not by Metro.”
“Then we’ve got the same information,” Cormorant said. “That’s part of why I’m here. This is a big mystery, Detective Cross. And a dangerous one.”
He struck me as a little looser than a lot of the guys I knew at the Service, although that’s all relative. And the question remained—was he here to legitimately pursue this case or to bury it?
In my office, I took out the latest disk from Nicholson and handed it to him. “Most of the physical evidence is with the Bureau, but this is new.”
He turned it over in his hands. “What is it?”
“Is the name Zeus already familiar to you? I’m guessing it is.”
He looked at me but wouldn’t answer.
“Cormorant, do you want my help or not? I would actually like to help.”
“Yes, I’ve heard the name Zeus,” he said.
“Supposedly, this is him. On the disk.”
“Supposedly?”
“It’s a homicide. White male assailant with a distinctive ring on his right hand. I’m not going to make any assumptions, and you shouldn’t either.”
It’s comments like that last one I should really work a little harder at keeping to myself. I saw Cormorant stiffen right up.
“What else do you have?” he asked. “I need to hear everything, Detective.”
“I need a little time to pull my notes together. But I can get you whatever I have by tomorrow,” I told him.
“What about copies?” He held up the disk I’d given him. “How many of these are floating around?”
“That’s the only one I know of,” I said. “It came out of Nicholson’s safe-deposit box. He was using it to bargain. Of course, if we could find him—”
“Okay, then.” He shook my hand again. “We’ll talk soon.”
After he was gone, I ran over the conversation in my head and wrote down everything I could remember. How many lies had Cormorant told me already? And by the same token, other than the one I’d just told him about copies of Nicholson’s disk, how many more would I have to tell before this was over?
Chapter 90
HERE’S HOW CRAZY/PARANOID things were getting. I had stopped using my own phone, and stuck to prepaid ones, changing the number every forty-eight hours or so.
After my meeting with Cormorant, I ran out to get a new one and used it to call Sam Pinkerton at the Washington Post.
Sam and I originally met at the gym where we both work out. He’s more into Shotokan, whereas I’m straight boxing, but we’d spar anyway, and have a drink once in a while too. So it wasn’t completely out of left field for me to call and ask if he felt like grabbing a quick one at Union Pub after work.
I spent the rest of the afternoon chasing Tony Nicholson’s shadow and pretty much getting nowhere that I hadn’t been before.
Then, just after five, I walked up Louisiana and along Columbus Circle to meet with Sam.
Over a beer, we shot the breeze and played catch-up, about how our kids were doing, what we thought of the DC school budget fiasco, even the weather. It felt good to sit and have a seminormal conversation for a little while. My days had been too crowded for regular life lately.
On the second round, things heated up and got a whole lot more pointed.
“So what do you have brewing at work these days?” I asked.
He leaned back in the booth and tilted his head at me. “Did this meeting just start?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a case going, and I’m trying to take the temperature on a few things out there.”
“As in, over there?” He pointed in the general direction of the White House, which was his beat, and only a few blocks from the bar. “Are we talking about legislation or something else? I think I already know the answer.”
“Something else,” I said.
“I assume you don’t mean the president’s sixtieth-birthday thing?”
“Sam.”
“’Cause I can get you in if you want. The grub’s going to be pretty good. You like Norah Jones? She’ll be performing. And Mary Blige.”
He knew he was doing me a favor, and he wasn’t going to let it go by without busting on me a little.
“Okay, here’s something,” he said. “You know the blog Jenna Knows? I get a call the other day from Jenna herself. Now, you’ve got to consider the source on something like this, but suffice to say she had some pretty wild shit. I can’t go into any detail right now. You might want to buy me another drink in about two days.” He drained his glass. “Unless you want to tell me what the hell you’re working on.”
“No comment. Not just yet,” I told him. And I also thought, Mission accomplished. Whatever else happened,
this thing was at least set in motion, with or without me.
“There is one other thing, though,” I said. “It’s a little unconventional.”
“My favorite convention,” he said, and spun his finger in the air at the waitress for another round.
“Off the record. If anything happens to me in the next few days or weeks, I want you to look into it.”
Sam went still and stared at me. “Jesus Christ, Alex.”
“I know it’s a strange thing to say. More than a little, I guess.”
“Don’t you have—I don’t know—an entire police department looking after you?”
“It depends on how you mean that,” I said, as the next round came to the table. “Let’s just say I’m calling for backup.”
Chapter 91
TWO WEEKS AGO, hell, last week, Tony Nicholson had been popping five-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne when he was thirsty. Now here he was, huddled in the rain at a filthy I-95 truck stop like some third world alien on the run.
Mara waited inside, watching through the plate glass window of the Landmark Diner. When he looked back, she tapped her wrist and shrugged, like maybe he’d forgotten they had somewhere else to be.
He knew, he knew.
The alternative to this had been no alternative at all—rotting in a cell at the Alexandria Detention Center. At least now there was the promise of passports, plane tickets, and enough cash to get them off this plasticized continent for good.
But his contact was late, and Nicholson felt a little more paranoid with every passing minute. On top of it all, his bad knee was only getting worse in the rain and cold, and it throbbed like a sonofabitch from standing too long.
Finally, another five minutes later, there was movement in his line of vision.
A panel truck of some kind flashed its lights from across the front parking lot. Nicholson looked over, and the driver motioned him to come that way.
He motioned again—more urgently.
Nicholson’s heart jumped into his throat. Something was off. It was supposed to have been a car, not a truck, and the meeting point was supposed to be right here, where people could see. Where nothing funny could happen.
Too late. When he looked back at the diner again, Mara was gone. A little boy stood where she’d been, hands cupped around his face behind the glass, looking out at him like this was a remake of Village of the Damned.
Pulse racing, Nicholson motioned to the driver that he’d be right back, and gimped toward the door at what he hoped was a natural enough pace.
Inside, the restaurant and newsstand were mostly empty, with Mara nowhere in sight.
A quick check of the deserted ladies’ room told him what he already knew: This had just officially become an individual sport. He continued out the back door by the loos and kept moving.
The rear lot was quiet and looked empty. He’d parked the rental maybe fifty yards away, which right now seemed like fifty too many. When he checked over his shoulder, someone was coming out the same door he’d just used—maybe the truck driver, maybe not; it was hard to tell in the blowing mist and rain.
He broke into an excruciating, lopsided run, but now he could hear faster steps than his own slapping the wet pavement behind him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the panel truck again, skirting the lot. Pete’s Meats, it said on the side, and even now some part of his brain registered the irony.
Mother of God, I’m dead. So’s Mara. Maybe she is already.
He got as far as one hand on the rental-car door. A calloused palm slapped over his mouth, absorbing any scream he had to offer. The man’s arms were massive, and Nicholson felt himself twisted around as though he were a small child.
For a split second, he felt sure his neck was about to be broken. Instead, something stabbed up under his chin, creating a stomach-churning flash of pain and disorientation.
His vision fluttered. Parking lot, sky, and car all swam together in a blur, until the curtain came down for Tony Nicholson and everything went far, far away.
Chapter 92
NICHOLSON WOKE UP in the dark, on cold ground, but at least he was alive. He was completely naked, he realized, and his wrists and ankles were bound.
A horrible ache blazed up in his neck when he tried to look around. But he was still in the game, which was all that really counted now, wasn’t it?
There was a building of some kind behind him, dimly lit from the inside. Everything else was just shadows and trees. A stack of firewood, maybe. Machinery of some kind near the building. What? A snowblower? Lawn mower?
“He’s waking up,” a voice said, not far away from him.
Nicholson heard footfalls and the sound of sloshing water. As the steps came closer, a flashlight beam lit the ground in front of him. He saw a pair of feet in dark cordovans.
“Welcome back, Tony. Thought we lost you back there. Here you go!”
When the splash of water hit, it jolted him like an electric shock. His whole body seized with the cold, and his breath came in crazy accordion gasps he couldn’t control.
“Get him up,” someone else said.
They hoisted him under the arms until his bare ass landed on a wooden chair. The flashlight caught just glints of things—a face, a stump, a flash of silver in someone’s hand. Gun? Phone?
“Where’s Mara?” he slurred, as she suddenly came to mind.
“Don’t worry about her right now. Least of your problems. Trust me on that.”
“We had an arrangement!” He sounded pathetic and he knew it. “Promises were made to me. I did exactly as I was told!”
Something sharp pricked at the crown of his head. “Who else knows about Zeus?” one of the men asked. His tone was bland, conversational.
“No one! I swear! Nobody knows. I did my part. So did Mara!”
A stinging line, almost like fire, ran straight down behind his ear to the back of his neck. There was a slight breeze, an air current, but it lit up the pain like acid.
“Not Adam Petoskey? Not Esther Walcott?”
“No! I mean… they might have figured a little out. Adam wasn’t as careful at the end as he was at the beginning. But I swear to God—”
Two more cuts slashed across the front of his chest and down his abdomen. Nicholson screamed both times.
He drew in his stomach muscles as if he could somehow escape the blade even as it continued down slowly, separating skin from skin, until it stopped just at the base of his cock.
“Who else, Nicholson? Now would be a good time for you to get chatty.”
“Nobody! Jesus, God, don’t do this!”
He was crying now, moaning out of control. It was all so incredibly unfair. He’d spent his adult life trading in one kind of a lie or another, and now here he was, caught in the truth.
“I don’t know what it is you want,” he blubbered at them. “I don’t know anything anymore….”
Somewhere behind him, a third voice came out of the dark. It was different from the other two, with the kind of Dukes of Hazzard redneck twang Nicholson had looked down on ever since he came to America.
“Hey, fellas, let’s move this along, all righty? I got some work of my own to attend to.”
And that’s when Nicholson gave up the last piece, his lifeline—at least he hoped so.
“I gave a disk to the cops. Zeus was on it. Detective Alex Cross has the disk!”
Chapter 93
IT TAKES WHAT it takes. That had always been a favorite expression of Nana’s—one part stubbornness, one part optimism—and it kept running through my head these days. I wasn’t giving up on this case, any more than I was giving up on her.
The entire intensive care unit at St. Anthony’s, Five West, was more than a little familiar by now. I knew all the nurses and some of the patients’ family members. In fact, I was in the hall that night, chatting with a new acquaintance about her father’s brain injury, when the alarm went off in Nana’s room.
Alarms weren’t always a reason
to panic on Five West. They rang all the time, for slipped finger clips and some electronic glitch or another. The rule of thumb was that the higher and more obnoxious the sound got, the more you needed to be concerned.
This one started low, but by the time I got inside Nana’s room, it was up to a hard wail. One of the nurses, Zadie Mitchell, was already in there.
“What is it?” I asked Zadie. “Anything?”
She was adjusting Nana’s O2 clip and watching a wave pattern on the monitor, so she didn’t answer right away.
Another nurse, Jayne Spahn, came in behind me. “Bad pleth?” she asked.
“No,” Zadie said. “It’s accurate. Page Donald Hesch.” She hit the hundred-percent-oxygen button on the ventilator and started suctioning Nana right away.
My heart was pounding now. “Zadie, what’s happening?”
“She’s desaturating, Alex. Don’t worry yet.”
I wasn’t so sure. Even with the ventilator, all the excess fluid in Nana’s system made it a constant struggle for her heart to circulate enough oxygen. For all I knew, she was drowning in front of my eyes.
Dr. Hesch came in a couple minutes later, with Jayne and one of the staff respiratory therapists. They squeezed between the machines to work on Nana. All I could do was stand by, listen in, and try to keep up.
“She was bolused this morning for MAPs in the forties. I’ve been suctioning blood-tinged sputum since we paged you.”
“Did she get a gas today?”
“No. She’s a hard stick; her last gas was two days ago.”
“Okay, go up to ten and try to get a reading in an hour. Let’s see what dialysis does in the morning. I’ll check her X-ray in the meantime.”
Hesch rushed back out without another word, and Jayne took me by the elbow into the hall.
“She’s having a rough night, Alex, but she’s going to get through this okay.”
I watched Nana through the door, where Zadie and the RT were still working on her. It was such a helpless feeling, not being able to give her what she needed, even something as basic as oxygen. Especially something like that.