I drove to Sampson’s home, a route I could do blindfolded, or at least without consciously thinking about it, which was good because my mind was on other things that night.
I had the screenshot of M’s last message on an old phone in my pocket, but I didn’t need to pull it out to remember it. The first three or four lines, the taunting tone, and the fish-head stuff were designed to get me anxious, to remind me that M was bizarre and unpredictable and actively plotting against me. He was trying to keep me under pressure, but I could avoid it by simply not dwelling on those parts of his message.
Those last few sentences were harder to shake.
Now things get interesting, Cross. This will all make perfect sense soon.
M is for...
I decided he was playing a game based on dwindling time, attempting to get me to burn mental energy as I tried to anticipate his next move. But there was more.
“He knows the whole M-thing bothers me,” I murmured as I slowed for a yellow light turning red on Pennsylvania Avenue. “What it stands for. Who he really is.”
Out of habit, I glanced in the rearview and saw five cars in the other lane — a service vehicle, a pickup truck, a minivan, a white Jeep, and a small black SUV.
The light turned green. I drove on toward the Beltway, the circuit of highways that girdle the nation’s capital, and my mind once again returned to that last sentence: M is for...
Moriarty.
That just popped into my head, an idea left over from the talk with Rivers earlier in the afternoon. And then, even though I knew it was impossible, I couldn’t help but think...
Mastermind.
M is for Mastermind. Kyle Craig’s alias.
Driving onto I-295 north, I dismissed the idea that Craig was somehow still alive, still playing some long and deadly game with me. But someone was playing a long and deadly game with me. Or was this all like a cat with a live mouse, the feline batting at the rodent with his paw every now and then, entertaining himself before the kill?
A horn blared behind me, startling me from my thoughts. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the delivery truck in the lane next to me veer off toward the East Capitol Street exit, revealing a black BMW SUV behind it.
It could have been another black SUV, a sheer coincidence, but my instincts screamed that I was being followed by someone.
I decided to test my instincts, and I stomped on the gas as I entered a curve.
When I came out of it, I scanned the highway ahead, saw it was nearly empty, then glued my attention to my rearview mirror.
The BMW roared out of the curve before I thought it would, in my lane now, right behind me, a total abandonment of the sophisticated tail job.
Whoever was driving no longer cared about being spotted.
He was coming after me.
And he was coming fast.
Chapter 55
I sped up as I snatched my pistol from my shoulder holster and set it on my lap.
The BMW kept coming, headlights on high.
My left hand went to the side-view mirror control; I flipped it to the right and eased off on the gas pedal. The SUV closed the gap as we passed the Minnesota Avenue Metro stop.
He tried to come right up on my bumper, his high beams filling my car. But then I twitched the control on the passenger-side mirror.
Two years before, my older son, Damon, had been backing up in a crowded parking lot and grazed a telephone pole with that mirror. The accident bent the mirror mount slightly, which, we discovered, had a strange usefulness: if someone came up behind you with his headlights blazing, you could tilt the mirror up and in, and the other car’s right headlight beam would be reflected back at the driver.
Which is exactly what happened. When the BMW was about fifteen feet off my bumper, its right high beam reflected off the mirror and shone dead in the driver’s eyes.
He threw a hand up and hit the brakes as I goosed the Mercedes’s accelerator. I opened a gap of sixty yards passing Eastland Gardens.
But I was so shocked at what I’d just seen, I barely noticed.
In the split second before the driver threw up his arm and hit the brakes, I’d gotten a look at him: a man in a dark suit and tie, black gloves, mid-forties, tinted glasses, sandy-blond hair, and the unmistakable nose, cheekbones, and prominent chin of disgraced and deceased former FBI special agent Kyle Craig.
The mental images of Craig throwing up his arm to block the glare were so vivid they almost blinded me to a panel van coming off the ramp from Maryland State Highway 50.
I hit the brakes, and the van swerved, horn honking, just in front of me. We barely missed colliding.
When I was sure we were not going to hit, I looked frantically in the rearview and side-view mirrors, trying to see the BMW. But it wasn’t back there.
Indeed, there were no headlights anywhere close behind me. Impossible.
I clawed at the passenger-side mirror control and this time aimed it wide to the right. I caught flashes of the BMW running dark under the highway lights and coming up alongside me so fast, I got rattled.
I knew I should pull an evasive maneuver, hit the brakes, and let him pass. Instead, I rolled down the passenger-side window and kept glancing over, trying to see Craig through the tinted windows even as I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man was dead and gone.
The panel van hit the brakes in front of me. I had no choice but to do the same. The BMW shot forward and passed into my headlight glare.
The driver-side window rolled down. I couldn’t see his face, but I sure heard his voice. It seemed to boom back at me.
“M said you’d never learn, Cross!”
Then his gloved hand came out of the window and whipped something sideways and back at me. A blue balloon burst off my windshield, coating it with dark liquid and blocking my view.
I hit the brakes hard and swerved right, praying I could see something of the road in that bent side-view mirror. When I got over on the shoulder, I was gasping, sweating. Whatever liquid was in the balloon was now smeared across my windshield, and my headlights looked like they had a copper tint.
I almost pressed the spray button on my wiper control, but something stopped me. From the glove box, I retrieved my Maglite, then I got out on the passenger side to avoid being run over by passing cars.
The BMW and the panel van were nowhere to be seen as I stepped up next to the front quarter panel and shone the flashlight on my windshield. The liquid was a deep, dark red and already setting up into a tacky gel in the cooling breeze.
I touched some, rubbed it between my fingers, and then sniffed enough of a copper odor to know the blood was not fake.
Chapter 56
John Sampson looked at the windshield in his flashlight beam.
“You drove over here trying to see the road through that?” he asked, gesturing to the small area I’d cleared directly in front of the steering wheel.
“I didn’t want to tamper with the evidence any more than I had to.”
“Why blood?” Ned Mahoney asked.
Ned had been working late downtown and came over as soon as I called. We were in Sampson’s driveway. An FBI forensics unit was on its way.
“No idea,” I said.
“You get a look at the guy who threw the balloon?” Mahoney asked.
“Yeah. You’re not going to like it. I certainly don’t like it.”
Sampson said, “Lot of that going around.”
I paced away from the car, still wrestling with what I’d seen, then I turned and gazed at the two men I trusted most in life.
“The man driving that car looked just like Kyle Craig.”
“Oh, c’mon, Alex,” Mahoney said, groaning. “Get over it. The man is dead.”
Sampson said, “You killed him, Alex.”
“I know! I know! At the very least, whoever was driving that BMW had an uncanny resemblance to what I imagine Craig might have looked like... had he...”
They both reacted with squints.
“Come again?” Sampson said.
“That’s it,” I said. “That guy looked like a pre-op Kyle Craig who’d aged. You know, like when we take photographs of people and have computers age them? But think about it. The real Craig had his face completely rebuilt by that plastic surgeon in Florida so he could impersonate an FBI agent before I figured it out and killed him.”
They were quiet for a moment.
Then Mahoney said, “Unless that wasn’t the real Craig you killed.”
“My head aches,” Sampson said. “Is that even possible?”
“No,” I said. “It was Kyle Craig who died that night. The guy I saw could have been him before the facial work. Even his voice sounded like Craig’s.”
“What, you had a chat during a car chase?” Mahoney said.
“He yelled out the window so loud, it could have been amplified: ‘M said you’d never learn, Cross!’ He had the same kind of drawl Craig used.”
“And then he threw the blood balloon at you?” Sampson said.
“Correct.”
“What the hell is this sick bastard up to?” Mahoney said.
“Sick bastards, plural,” Sampson said. “If Pseudo-Craig is to be believed, then M told him you would never learn.”
“Pseudo-Craig,” I said, and I smiled. “I like that. And correct.”
To my relief, John smiled back.
The forensics team showed up and peeled off and bagged several strips of blood before giving us the go-ahead to turn on Sampson’s hose and wash off the rest.
“You don’t think I’m nuts, do you?” I asked Mahoney.
“About seeing Craig? Nah. You say you saw someone who could have been his pre-op older brother, I believe you. Now I have to go home and get some sleep.”
“I appreciate it, Ned.”
“Anytime, my friend.”
We watched him go.
Sampson said, “Beer?”
“Definitely.”
He went to a fridge in his garage, got two bottles, and handed me one. I took a long draw off it, loving the cold pouring down my throat.
Lowering the bottle, I said, “I was on my way here to see you when Pseudo-Craig splattered me.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. I was upset and wanted to apologize again in person. I don’t take our friendship or brotherhood for granted. It will never happen again.”
Sampson’s head bobbed before he looked me in the eyes. “We’re good.”
“Thank you,” I said, holding out my beer. “I need everything about you in my life, John, now more than ever.”
He clinked it, said, “Ditto, Alex.”