Crisscross

  Above and behind them, the thud! of an explosion.

  “What—?” Jamie started to say, but Jack clamped a hand over her mouth.

  He tried to shut out the sound of the rain, the feel of it pelting his face and hair, tried to funnel everything into his eyes as he studied the area around the car. Movement on the far side of the road caught his eye. Was that—? Yeah, a man had stepped out of the trees and was crossing toward the car. He stopped by the hood.

  His face was little more than a pale blur, but he seemed to be looking up the hill, waiting for whatever he’d heard to happen again.

  It wouldn’t. Jack had figured the bomb would go off sooner or later. He was glad it had happened now.

  He put his lips against Jamie’s ear and whispered, “Wait. Don’t move.”

  Pulled out the car keys, then crouched and began to snake through the remaining brush toward the front of the car. The rain’s loud tattoo on the hood and roof covered his approach. Reached the front bumper and moved around it until he was only a few feet from the sentry. Raised his Glock and hit the unlock button on the car remote. As the locks clicked up and the interior lights came on he leaped to his feet and caught the guy whirling toward the passenger compartment, pistol up and ready but pointed in the wrong direction.

  “Freeze right there!” Jack shouted. “Freeze or I’ll shoot you dead so help me!”

  It sounded B-movie-ish, he knew, but what else do you say? However it sounded, it worked. The guy turned into a statue.

  “Hold it just like that,” Jack said as he came up behind him.

  He pressed the muzzle of the Glock against the back of his neck, then pulled the pistol from his hand. It had the weight of a .45.

  “Heavy artillery,” he said as he stuck it in his waistband. “Who were you expecting?”

  The guy had a pinched face and thin hair plastered against his scalp. He said nothing.

  “Be a good TP and put your hands way up.” Jack did a quick one-handed pat down but found no other weapon.

  “Now…lie facedown in the middle of the road.”

  “Hey, come—”

  Jack jammed the muzzle harder against his neck. “Look, Mr. Temple Paladin. You haven’t done anything to me so I’m giving you a chance. One way or another you’re gonna wind up facedown on the road. Now, you can be there breathing or you can be there not breathing. Makes no difference to me. Which’ll it be?”

  Without speaking he did a slow turn, took two steps, and stretched out facedown on the wet asphalt, arms extended at right angles from his body.

  “Jamie!” he shouted. “Into the car!”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a dim shape emerge from the brush and make a beeline for the passenger door.

  “Over here! You’re driving!”

  “I d-don’t think I can.”

  “You can and you will.” He held out the keys. “Here. Get it started.”

  Jack never took his eyes off the man in the street. He’d been a little too agreeable. You don’t argue with a man with a gun, sure, but this guy was playing it a little too meek and mild for one of Brady’s enforcers. Might mean a lot of things, but to Jack it meant Mr. TP had a backup weapon, one he’d missed in his pat down. Probably in an ankle holster, just like Jack’s AMT .380, but he hadn’t wanted to risk squatting to check.

  He felt the keys tugged from his hand, heard the car door open and close, the engine start.

  He opened the rear door behind Jamie, found the window button and lowered it.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” he warned the guy, privately hoping he would.

  Jack backed behind the door and moved his pistol into the open window space. He knelt on the back seat and slammed the door, keeping the TP covered all the time.

  “Go!”

  As soon as the car began to move the TP rolled over and—sure enough—reached for his ankle. Jack fired off three quick shots, hitting him twice. He kept an eye on his thrashing form until the car rounded a bend and he was out of sight.

  “You shot him?” Jamie said.

  “He had a second gun. Probably going to try for our tires.”

  “Did…did you kill him?”

  “Hope not. Better for us if he’s alive.”

  25

  Ears ringing, Jensen regained his feet. He wiped his eyes and looked at his hand. It glistened with red.

  “Shit!”

  A spot on the front of his scalp, just where his hairline would have been if he’d had any, stung when he touched it. He looked around and saw Hutch, on his feet and looking fine.

  “You okay?”

  Hutch nodded. “I ducked behind the couch. But you…”

  Jensen touched the spot again. “Yeah, I know. How bad is it?”

  Hutch stepped closer and peered at the wound. “Not bad. Maybe an inch at most.”

  Jensen moved into the kitchen area and grabbed a roll of paper towels. He ripped off a sheet and pressed it against his scalp.

  Cut by his own bomb. Shit, this was embarrassing. When he got his hands on this son of a bitch…

  Hutch said, “Hey, what’s the story with that guy in the driveway—or what’s left of him? Who—?”

  Jensen stiffened. Through the ringing in his ears he thought he heard three pops from somewhere outside.

  He turned to Hutch. “Were those—?”

  Hutch was already on his way to the door. “Damn right!”

  Jensen followed him to the car where Hutch got back behind the wheel and Jensen squeezed into the front seat.

  The good news was that Lewis had found the pair; the bad news was he’d had to do some shooting. Jensen hoped the mystery guy was still breathing.

  They backed around and roared down the driveway. As they again passed the scattered remains of Cooper Blascoe, Jensen made a mental note to get back here ASAP with some garbage bags and clean up whatever parts of the old fart hadn’t already been carried away by the local wildlife.

  Hutch skidded the car to a stop as they hit the pavement. Someone was writhing in the middle of the road.

  “Hey, that looks like Lewis!” Hutch said. He pushed open the door and started to get out.

  Alarm flared through Jensen as he scanned the area and didn’t see the Crown Vic.

  “The car’s gone! Shit! They took off! Get back in here and go after them!”

  “But Lewis—!”

  “Damn asshole let them get the jump on him. He’s on his own!”

  “Fuck that!” Hutch said. “He’s one of us. A few minutes ago you didn’t want to leave a car in the bushes, but now it’s okay to leave a bleeding guy? Where are you coming from? What’s a cop gonna do if—”

  “All right, all right!” He was right. “Drag that sack of shit over here and put him in the back.”

  Jensen sat and fumed. Lewis had been wounded and left here to slow them down. But they still had a chance to catch them if they drove like hell.

  A slim chance, but a chance.

  Friday

  1

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  Luther Brady had already guessed that. A call from Jensen on his private line at this hour of the morning could mean only trouble. Serious trouble.

  “Go ahead.”

  Luther listened with growing dismay as Jensen described the night’s events. His stomach was burning by the time the man had finished.

  “You’ve got to find them.”

  “I’m full into that right now. But I have to ask you something: After all the face time you spent with this guy, why didn’t your xelton pick up that he was a phony?”

  The question stunned Luther. The audacity! How dare he?

  And yet…it was a question he had to answer.

  “I don’t know,” Luther said as his mind raced around for a plausible explanation. He tried to buy some time by acknowledging the problem. “My xelton has no answer, and I’m baffled as well. A Fully Fused xelton such as mine should have been able to pierce his masks in a moment, but it didn’t.
That’s virtually impossible…unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  Brady smiled. He’d just come up with an explanation. A doozy.

  “Unless this man has achieved FF.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “No, it’s not. How many temples do we have? Do you know every man worldwide who’s reached FF? Of course you don’t. He’s a rogue FF. It’s the only explanation.”

  “But why would an FF try to harm the Church?”

  “Obviously his xelton became corrupted. If it can happen to our PD, of all people, it can happen to a lesser man.”

  He let that sink in. That was the same line he’d fed Jensen and the HC when Cooper Blascoe became a risk: The PD’s xelton had gone mad and, as a result, Blascoe had gone even madder. The corrupted xelton had allowed him to get sick and was refusing to heal him. Just as a human could become a WA, so could a xelton.

  Far out, far out, but they’d all believed. Because they wanted to believe. To doubt would destroy the foundation on which they’d all built their lives. They had to believe.

  “You mean—?”

  Luther had had enough of this.

  “Forget him for now. He and his corrupted PX don’t worry me half as much as Grant. She’s had it in for the Church and now you can bet she knows everything. Well, almost everything. She can’t know about Omega because Blascoe didn’t. Noomri, what a mess! We’ve got body parts up at the cabin and a muckraking reporter with a tape of Blascoe saying who knows what. You’ve got to stop her before she talks.”

  “I’m on it. I have a clean-up detail heading for the cabin. They’ll remove what needs to be removed and burn the rest. As for the tape, can’t we say it’s a fake?”

  “A voiceprint analysis comparing her tape to Blascoe’s voice on one of our own instructional tapes will make us liars. She’s got to be stopped, Jensen.”

  “I know. I’m—”

  “I mean stopped—as in, I do not want to hear from this woman again. Do you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Find her.”

  Luther hung up and rose from his bed. Sleep now was out of the question. He strode into the office area, sat at his desk, and pressed the button for the globe.

  He stared at its glowing lights, twinkling in the darkness of the office, and wanted to cry.

  So close. He was so close to completing Opus Omega, to fulfilling all the required tasks. The end was in sight. A year…he needed just another year or so and all would be in place. Everything had been going so smoothly…

  Until now.

  Damn that woman. Ruination. Disaster. Cooper Blascoe, the beloved PD, not in suspended animation but held prisoner and fitted with a bomb, and then…blown to pieces.

  The Church would deny everything, of course, but the tape would damn them.

  Luther groaned and closed his eyes as he envisioned the fallout: Members fleeing in droves, recruitment coming to a standstill, revenues constricting to a trickle.

  Revenues…he needed money, lots of it, to acquire the final sites. Final because they either were prime real estate or the owners refused to sell. They couldn’t all be pushed in front of subway trains.

  As a matter of fact, the new column was scheduled to be planted on the Masterson property tomorrow night.

  But if that woman exposed the Blascoe debacle, it might be the last.

  Luther slammed his fist on the desktop. He could not allow one lousy woman to threaten the greatest project in the history of mankind.

  Yes! The history of mankind.

  For Opus Omega had not begun with Luther Brady. Oh, at first he’d thought it did, but he had soon learned otherwise. He remembered the day in England when he’d begun to excavate a patch of moor he’d purchased in York. He’d found a bare spot in a field of wild rape and decided that would be as good a place as any to bury a pillar. But after digging only a few feet into the soft earth his crew discovered the top of a stone column. As they excavated around it Luther was stunned to see the symbols carved into its granite flanks—identical to the ones on the concrete column he’d prepared for this site.

  Someone had been there ahead of him—hundreds, maybe thousands of years before. The conclusion was inescapable: Opus Omega had begun long, long ago. It was not Luther Brady’s exclusive task, as he had thought. He was merely another man chosen to continue an ancient undertaking.

  No, more than continue. He, Luther Brady, was determined to finish Opus Omega. The ancients had been at a disadvantage, lacking the means to travel to the necessary sites, let alone transport huge stone pillars. He was positioned to use all the modern world’s learning and technology to bring Opus Omega to its fulfillment.

  But one woman could bring his life’s work to a grinding halt.

  One woman.

  Jamie Grant had to be stopped.

  2

  “I understand, Jack,” Jamie said, “and I appreciate your concern, but I know what I’m doing.”

  Like hell you do, Jack thought.

  He was driving through Midtown, heading east along Fifty-eighth, and they’d been arguing for more than half an hour.

  Jamie had done pretty well behind the wheel, racing the Vic down the winding mountain road and speeding them to the highway. Jack would have preferred to be in the driver’s seat but didn’t want to waste the seconds it would have taken to switch places. When they’d reached 84 he’d made her turn west instead of east. He’d guessed that Jensen would expect them to head back to the city, so they went the other way.

  It had worked. No sign of pursuit, even though he’d had Jamie set the cruise control at sixty-five and stick to it. Under any circumstances, Jack feared being pulled over, but more than ever tonight. Not having a valid identity would be small potatoes compared to explaining how they’d wound up splattered head-to-toe with blood and tissue from Cooper Blascoe.

  Jamie had held up until they pulled off the interstate at Carmel and waited to see if Jensen would show. The meltdown occurred a few seconds after she stopped the car. First a sniff, then a tear, and then Jamie Grant, hard-nosed investigative reporter, was sobbing in his arms. Jack held her, patted her back, told her what a great job she’d done, and that she’d be okay, everything would be okay.

  Eventually she regained control and seemed embarrassed. The good news was that throughout the long wait by the exit ramp he’d seen no sign of Jensen and company. Heading the wrong way had worked.

  They’d found an all-night Wal-Mart and bought clean clothes. Jack grabbed the wheel then and took the long way home.

  They’d been arguing since they hit North Jersey about where Jamie would spend the night. Her place was out of the question—probably had half a dozen TPs glued to it—as was Jack’s. He hadn’t let her know his name, and he sure as hell wasn’t letting her know where he lived. So he’d been pushing for a hotel room somewhere in the wilds of Queens. He’d sleep outside her door if necessary.

  Jamie wanted none of it. She insisted that he drop her off at The Light.

  “You think they won’t be watching your office too?” Jack said. “It’s stupid to go back there.”

  “Jack, I’ll be under guard. You’ve seen the security there during the day, and it’s even tougher at night. You’ve got to be buzzed through the door, and Henry, the night guy, is armed.”

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

  She reached over and patted his hand. “I’ll be fine. I’ll take a cab and get dropped off right at the door. What are they going to do—grab me off the street in front of Henry? He’ll buzz me in and I’ll be safe for the night. I can work on transcribing the interview without worrying.”

  “I think you should call the cops. You’re a taxpayer—get some of it back in protection.”

  She looked at him. “‘You’re a taxpayer’…kind of an odd turn of phrase, don’t you think? I mean, so are you.”

  Jack could have told her how he’d never sullied his hands with a 1040, but didn’t want to get into t
hat.

  “Let’s forget turns of phrase. Call the cops.”

  “No way. Not yet. I want to get this story filed first. If I call in the gendarmes now, I’ll have to tell them about Coop and—”

  “‘Coop’?”

  She blinked and Jack noticed her eyes glistening. “He wasn’t a bad guy, just an old hippie. A gentle hedonist. He didn’t create Dormentalism as it is today, he isn’t responsible for what Brady’s done to it. He didn’t deserve to die…to be blown up…and I can’t help thinking how he’d still be alive if I’d just left him alone…”

  Her voice choked off in a sob, but only one.

  Jack thought about asking her if her meltdown in Carmel was the reason she was being so hard-nosed about not hiding out or getting help. He decided against it. Probably only get her back up.

  “The cops, Jamie? What’s wrong with getting them involved now instead of later?”

  “Because in order to get protection I’ll have to tell them why I’m in danger, and that means telling them what happened to Coop. And once they hear that, I’ll be trapped in an interrogation-deposition situation for hours, maybe days, during which—”

  “At least you’ll be safe.”

  “—the story of what happened up there will leak out, and every paper in the city will be screaming their takes while mine remains unwritten and unfiled.”

  “Yeah, but the stories will be about you. You’ll be famous.”

  “Like I care. I want to break the story—me. Nobody else. Where I come from, that’s important. I’ll be safe. Really.”

  “Really? Remember Coop? They blew him up.”

  She threw up her hands. “Look, I’m through talking about it. Stop someplace where I can get a cab.”

  Jack sighed. He knew an immovable object when he saw one—Gia could be just as intransigent. His instincts urged him to head straight for the on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge and cross the East River. He wanted to find a motel room and lock her in it until she saw the light.

  But he couldn’t do that. He’d fight tooth and nail if someone tried to lock him up, so how could he do that to her? It went against everything he believed in.