Cross Fire (5 page)

They retrieved Mitch’s cash and took whatever else Tyrone and Cosmo had on them. Then Denny pulled the thugs back into a couple of stalls.

“Punks don’t know who they’re messing with!” Mitch crowed in the hall. His eyes were practically shining, even with blood running down over his lips and onto his shirt.

“Yeah, well, let’s keep it that way,” Denny said. He’d wanted them to be seen at the shelter tonight, but at this point they’d more than accomplished their mission. “You know what? Grab your stuff. Let’s get you that bottle of Jim Beam.”

LIKE A LOT of the law enforcement brotherhood, FBI Case Agent Steven Malinowski was divorced. He lived alone — except when his two daughters visited, every other weekend and one month out of the summer — in a decent-on-the-outside, kind-of-pathetic-on-the-inside little ranch in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Accordingly, there wasn’t much to come home to, and he didn’t pull into his driveway until just after eleven thirty that night. His gait, when he got out of his Range Rover, had at least a few beers in it, a shot or two as well, but he wasn’t drunk. More like out-with-the-boys tipsy.

“Hey, Malinowski.”

The agent’s whole body jerked, and he reached for the holster under his jacket.

“Don’t shoot. It’s me.” Kyle stepped around the corner of
the garage and into the light of the streetlamp just long enough to give a glimpse of his face. “It’s Max Siegel, Steve.”

Malinowski squinted hard at him in the dark. “Siegel? What in Christ’s…?” He let the flap of his jacket fall back again. “You almost gave me a damn heart attack. What the hell are you doing here? What time is it anyway?”

“Can we talk inside?” Kyle asked. It would have been three years since Malinowski and Siegel had spoken; the voice had to be good but not perfect. “I’ll go around back, okay? Let me in.”

Malinowski looked up and down the street. “Yeah, yeah. Of course.” By the time he let Siegel in through the sliding-glass door to the kitchen, he’d turned off the lights in front and pulled all the shades. There was just the hood light on over the stove.

He dropped his weapon into a kitchen drawer and pulled two longnecks out of the fridge. He offered one to Max.

“Talk to me, Siegel. What’s going on? What are you doing here at this hour?”

Kyle refused the beer. He didn’t want to touch anything he didn’t have to.

“The op’s completely blown,” he said. “I don’t know how, but they found me out. I had no choice but to come in.”

“You look like shit, by the way. Those bruises around your eyes —”

“Should have seen me a week ago. A couple of Arturo Buenez’s boys worked me over pretty good.” Kyle patted the army-green duffel on his back. Inside was the liquid stun gun and water pack, wrapped in a thick blanket. “This was everything I managed to get out with.”

“Why didn’t you signal?” Malinowski asked, and that was the one thing Kyle had never been able to figure out — how Max Siegel was to have made contact with his handler in an emergency.

“I was lucky to get out at all,” he said. “I’ve been lying low in Florida until I could get up here. Fort Myers, Vero Beach, Jacksonville.”

Maybe it was the beer, but Malinowski didn’t seem to notice that Kyle hadn’t actually answered the question he’d been asked. How could he? He didn’t know the answer.

“So, who else should I be talking to?” Kyle asked.

The agent shook his head. “Nobody.”

“Not DEA? Anyone in DC?”

“There’s no one, Siegel. You were out there on your own.” He looked up suddenly. “Why don’t you know that?”

“Give me a break, man. I’m all messed up. Look at me.” Kyle took a step closer to where Malinowski was leaning back against the range. “Seriously, really look at me. What do you see?”

Malinowski smiled sympathetically. “You definitely need some rest, Max. It’s good you’re here.”

The guy didn’t have a clue, did he? This was just too much fun to stop.

“I’ve seen Kyle Craig, Steve.”

“What? Hang on —
the
Kyle Craig?”

Kyle spread his arms and smiled. “
The
Kyle Craig. In the flesh.”

“I don’t understand. How the hell does that figure in…?”

It was like watching numbers add up across Malinowski’s face. And just when he seemed to come up with the right
answer, Kyle made his move. His Beretta was out and pressing into Malinowski’s chin before the guy even saw it coming.

“Amazing what they can do with plastic surgery these days,” he said.

Malinowski’s half-finished beer clunked to the floor. “What are you talking about? That’s… impossible!”

“I’m 99.99 percent sure that it’s not,” Kyle told him. “Unless I’m imagining all this. Consider it in an honor, Steve. You’re the first and last to know what I look like now. Are you honored?” Malinowski didn’t move, so he pushed the Beretta a little deeper into his face.
“Are you?”

Now he nodded.

“Say it, please.”

“I’m… honored.”

“Good. Now here’s what’s going to happen. We’ll be moving to the back of the house, and you’ll be getting inside that filthy bathtub you never clean.” Kyle patted the duffel on his back again. “Then I’m going to unpack, and you and I are going to talk some more. I need to know some things about Max Siegel.”

HE WAITED TWO MORE DAYS, spent a few nights around DC, got himself laid at the Princess Hotel. Then Kyle brought Max Siegel in from out of the cold once and for all.

It was an unbelievable thrill, driving Siegel’s newly leased BMW past the familiar guard booth and down into the Hoover Building parking garage. Every security measure in the world, and here they were, waving Mr. Most Wanted himself right into FBI headquarters.

Sweet.

Siegel’s ID got Kyle right up to the fifth floor. They met with him in one of the Strategic Information Operations Center (SIOC) conference rooms overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue — two reps from the Gang and Criminal Enterprise Section, one from the Directorate of Intelligence, and two assistant directors from the main and field offices in DC.

AD Patty Li seemed to be in charge of the meeting. “I
know this is a stressful time, Agent Siegel, but there’s something you need to know. Your original handler, Steven Malinowski, died two days ago.”

Kyle kept up his professional composure, with just the right amount of emotion. “Oh my God. What happened to Steve?”

“Apparently he dropped dead of a heart attack in the shower at his home.”

“This is unbelievable. I was at his house yesterday. I knocked on his door.” He stopped and ran a hand over his million-dollar face — the master performer in action.

“You were right to contact us directly,” Li said. “Once you’ve made your report and received a full debriefing, I’m putting you on administrative leave —”

“No.” Kyle sat up and looked Li straight in the eye. “Excuse me, but that’s the last thing I need right now. I’m ready to go back to work.”

“You need to acclimate. Sleep in, go to a game, whatever. You’ve been someone else for years, Max. That takes a toll.”

The whole thing was like great food, great sex, and driving 120 with the headlights off all at the same time. Best of all, these Friendly But Ignorant pinheads were eating it up like free doughnuts.

“With all due respect,” he told everyone in the room, “I’d like my record to speak for itself. Give me a fitness-for-duty eval, if that’s what you need to do. Just don’t sideline me. I want to work. Trust me, it’s what I need.”

There were some open glances around the table. One of the drug-squad guys shrugged and closed the personnel file in front of him. This was Li’s call.

“Just for the sake of argument,” she said, “what did you have in mind?”

“I believe I’m up for SSA,” he told her, which was true. “That’s what I want.”

“Supervisory special agent? I see you haven’t lost any of your ambition.”

“I’d also like to stay right here in Washington, ultimately in the field office. I think that’s where I can do the most damage,” he said — just a touch of self-deprecation to keep them on the line.

There would be no promises today, but Kyle could tell he’d pretty much cinched it. And the field-office placement, while not strictly necessary, was a nice bit of gravy.

That facility was over in Judiciary Square, maybe a stone’s throw from the Daly Building. He and Alex could practically string up a couple of tin cans between their offices and play catch-up. How much fun would that be?

Now it was just a matter of time until they met again.

I OFFERED UP a couple of Washington Nationals tickets to the Fingerprint Examination Section for a fast turnaround with the sniper hits. They got me some results that morning.

A single print had been found on an otherwise freshly cleaned area of glass where the shots had been taken. And, as it turned out, it was a match for two other prints found on-site — one on a stair rail between the building’s eighth and ninth floors, and another on the crash bar of a ground-level steel door that had almost certainly been the shooter’s exit point.

That was all the good news, or at least the interesting news. The bad part was that our print didn’t match any of the tens of millions of samples in the IAFIS database. Our presumed killer had no criminal record to help point the way to his arrest.

So I widened my net. Recently I’d been to Africa and back,
chasing down a mass murderer who called himself the Tiger. As part of the fallout from that case, I’d struck up a pretty good rapport with a guy named Carl Freelander. He was Army CID, embedded with the FBI in Lagos, Nigeria, as part of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. I was hoping Carl could help me cut a few corners with the investigation.

It was late afternoon in Lagos when I caught Carl on his cell.

“Carl, it’s Alex Cross calling from Washington. How about if I ask you my favor first, and we do the chitchat later?”

“Sounds good, Alex, minus the chitchat, if you don’t mind. What can I do for you?” This was one of the reasons I liked Carl; he worked the way I did.

“I’ve got a print on a homicide, two kill shots from two hundred sixty-two yards. The guy obviously had some training, not to mention good equipment, and I’m wondering if maybe there’s a military connection.”

“Let me guess, Alex. You want a red phone into the civil database.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Yeah, okay. I can run it by CJIS,” he said. “Shouldn’t take too long.”

CJIS stands for Criminal Justice Information Services, a part of the FBI that’s based in Clarksburg, West Virginia. This was one of those loopy situations — calling halfway around the world to access something so close to home, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

Less than two hours later, Carl was back with some discouraging news.

“Your boy’s not U.S. military, Alex. Not FBI or Secret
Service either. And I hope you don’t mind, but I ran it through ABIS at Defense while I was at it. He’s never been detained by U.S. forces, and he’s not a foreign national who’s ever had access to one of our bases. I don’t know if that helps or not.”

“It gets rid of some of the obvious possibilities anyway. Thanks, Carl. Next time you’re in DC —”

“Drinks and all that, sure thing. I look forward to it. Take care, Alex.”

My next call was to Sampson, to share the news, such as it was.

“Don’t worry, sugar, we’re just getting started,” he told me. “Maybe this print didn’t even come from our guy. That crime scene was crawling with our people the other night — and you can bet not everyone was wearing gloves.”

“Yeah,” I said, but a different possibility had already wormed its way to the front of my mind. “John, what if it is the shooter’s print, and he
wanted
us to find it? Maybe it gets him off, knowing we’re going to waste our time chasing it down —”

“Oh man, no. No, no, no.” Sampson knew just where I was headed.

“And maybe that gives him exactly the confidence he’s looking for — when it comes time to do it all over again.”

I WAS THERE for Bree outside of Penn Branch when she got off that afternoon. I couldn’t wait to see her, and when she finally came out of the building, it brought a big smile to my face.

“This is a nice surprise,” she said, and gave me a kiss. We’d stopped trying to draw a line around that stuff at work anymore. “To what do I owe the pleasure? This is a
treat.
”

“No questions,” I said, and opened the car door for her. “I want to show you something.”

I’d been planning this for a while now, and even though work was starting to pile up again, I was too stubborn to give up on my scheme. I drove us along North Capitol Street, over to Michigan, and then to the edge of the Catholic University campus, where I parked.

“Um, Alex?” Bree looked out the windshield — and almost
straight
up.
“When we talked about a small wedding, I think I should have been a little more specific.”

The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is one of the ten biggest churches in the world and, for my money, the most beautiful in Washington, maybe in the whole country.