“Don’t get hit by a bus.”
I laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll try not to.”
I grabbed a jacket, cap, and gloves. I was putting them on when Bree came through the door looking like she’d taken a pummeling.
“Are you going for a walk?” she said. “I need one.”
After putting my arms around her and kissing her on the lips, I said, “I would love to go for a walk with you.”
That pleased Bree. She snuggled into my chest for a long hug before we went outside into the chill air and headed north toward Pennsylvania Avenue. As we walked, she told me about her frustration at her inability to make headway in the Betsy Walker murder case and about how Chief Michaels was calling her twice a day for updates.
“I don’t know what’s behind this pressure he’s putting on me.”
“Sounds like he’s up for a big job or he’s going to run for elected office.”
Bree thought about that. “So he needs a coup, and I’m the one who’s supposed to manufacture that?”
“I’m not saying I’m right. Just conjecture.”
She rubbed her temple, then stopped and fell into my arms.
“Hey,” I said, patting her back.
“I just need a hug, that’s all.”
“I love you,” I said. “And you can have as many hugs as you need.”
“Thank you, baby,” Bree whispered. “I love you too.”
Someone called out from behind us, “C’mon, get a room, why don’t you?”
We broke our embrace to see John Sampson hustling toward us. It had been a while since I’d seen my oldest friend and former partner at DC Metro.
“When’d you get back?” I asked, shaking his hand.
“Four hours ago,” he said.
“Good trip?” Bree asked.
“The best,” Sampson said. “I was ready to go back to work tomorrow completely refreshed, but I guess I had to start early.”
We both looked at him with puzzled expressions.
“I just got a call from a friend with the Virginia State Police,” Sampson said. “A mutual acquaintance of ours, Sergeant Nick Moon—”
“I know Moon,” Bree said.
“I do too,” I said. “He’s a guest instructor in mixed martial arts and submission techniques at Quantico.”
“That’s him,” Sampson said. “Good guy. And he’s dead.”
“What?” Bree said. “How? Line of duty?”
“He was in uniform,” Sampson said. “A couple of teenagers found him lying dead beside his cruiser, which was still running.”
“Shot?”
Sampson shook his head. “Looks like he’d been in a fight. Three of his right fingers were broken. His larynx was crushed. The knuckles of his left hand were split and bloody. The top of his skull was fractured from kicks, and his neck was broken.”
“Jesus,” I said. “His service weapon?”
“Snapped in his holster.”
“So he was surprised,” Bree said. “Hit without warning.”
“Still,” I said. “The Sergeant Moon I remember was a fighting machine. You’d have to be one hell of a warrior to kill him.”
“That’s exactly what my friend said: a professional killed Moon.”
Thinking about the sniper who’d killed Senator Walker and then about Kristina Varjan, the Hungarian killer for hire spotted at Dulles Airport, I said, “As in an assassin?”
“He said Special Forces kind of badass, but sure, assassin would fit.”
Bree said, “No one saw the fight?”
“Happened way out in the middle of nowhere,” Sampson said. “But the state police may have gotten lucky.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Moon’s left hand, the one with the split knuckles. It had to have connected with one hell of a punch. There was blood evidence at the scene that wasn’t Moon’s.”
Bree said, “And there’s probably DNA on his knuckles. That helps.”
That did help, but in my gut, something churned, a sensation that grew the more I thought about the shooting expertise of Senator Walker’s killer, the CIA’s concerns about Kristina Varjan, and how one of law enforcement’s best self-defense men had turned up beaten and dead by his cruiser in a way that suggested a pro.
“Alex?” Bree said. “What is it? What are you thinking?”
I licked my lips before gazing at Sampson and Bree in turn.
“I’m thinking it’s odd that we’ve had two, maybe three professional killers around suddenly, and I’m feeling like they’re all here for some reason beyond Senator Walker and Sergeant Moon.”
Chapter 38
Shortly after nine in the morning, Pablo Cruz pressed down the last strip of blue painter’s tape on the floor of an abandoned factory in the far northwest corner of Maryland. It was a vast space that had once held huge textile looms and massive cutting machines.
The machines had been removed and sold for scrap a long time ago, leaving the silhouettes of their footprints on the filthy concrete floor. Cruz barely glanced at them. He studied the maze of tape he’d been laying down since the afternoon before.
The maze stretched almost the entire length of the space, more than one hundred and twenty-five yards by the range finder Cruz had brought in to help him transfer dimensions from old blueprints onto this factory’s floor.
Looking from the blueprints to the tape diagram, he thought he’d come close, probably within inches of the actual spaces he’d be dealing with the day after tomorrow.
Day after tomorrow, Cruz thought, feeling a thrill go through him and checking his watch.
Cruz tried to ignore the second thrill that shivered up his spine. This would no doubt be the pinnacle of his career. The crowning achievement.
If he survived.
That last thought sobered him, yanked him out of fantasy and back to the task at hand. He zipped his down coat up under his chin and saw his breath in the cold air as he studied the maze once again. Then he closed his eyes and tried to see it in his mind, tried to imagine himself moving through all the various hallways, rooms, and passages.
When he’d gotten halfway through, he stopped imagining and opened his eyes.
He’d been studying the diagrams so much, Cruz felt ready to go at least that far. Halfway. Just to see what he’d already memorized. He got out a phone, found the stopwatch, and started it.
He walked confidently to marks indicating steps and climbed them to a guarded door. He would have the proper identifications. They would put him through a metal detector and find nothing.
They would pat him down, probably find the resin webs around his forearms and wrists, but he had a perfect excuse. They would search his bag, but they would recognize nothing. They would let him through.
With that certainty firmly in mind, Cruz proceeded, still at that steady, relaxed pace, until he reached a large square room in the maze. He slanted to the opposite corner of the room, and another passage. There he broke into a jog, as if he’d needed to be somewhere five minutes before.
When he reached a T, he broke left, crossed the mouth of an even larger space, and started to slow as he moved toward the mannequin from the storage unit. He’d set it up at the intersection of two passages.
If he had to shoot early, it would be here.
Cruz walked confidently, hands out, palms up, toward the mannequin. Ten feet shy of it, he snapped the fingers of his left hand back toward his wrist.
A Kevlar-reinforced nylon bullet slammed into the mannequin’s throat and blew out the back of its neck.
Cruz did not stop to admire the destruction. Instead, he pushed on, reloading the graphite derringer and trying to see if he remembered the diagram past midpoint.
He went to a closet in the maze, gave himself sixty seconds to change clothes and credentials, and then hurried up another long passage. He hesitated at a door on the right and looked ahead a moment before going inside.