Blackjack (18 page)

The blond man handed the mug shot behind him, without looking. “Wanda …”

Wanda snatched the mug shot and placed it on a photoimage enhancer. She pixilated it carefully, then used a digital scanner to break the face into tiny components, each with its own number/letter series. She was playing her keyboard like a first-chair cellist, her face glowing with the joy of the chase.

As she worked, her movements told Cross that this genre of hunting was Wanda’s
raison d’être
. As each new piece of information came up on her screen, she reacted in a distinct but subtle parallel to a woman being worked up to orgasm.

The same process occurred, much more dramatically, with the face itself. Cross watched as it progressed from the original through the various stages of plastic surgery to its current configuration, which bore no resemblance to the original mug shot.

At Wanda’s touch, information continued to play across the screen:

Wanda hit a final button and a printout flowed into her hands. She handed it over to the blond man, who, in turn, passed it to Cross.

“Satisfied now?”

“You got yourself a deal,” Cross replied.

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means that I’m gonna do what you want done,” Cross promised. “But I got other business first. Now, what else have you got on this freak?”

“The priority—”

“Two things,” Cross said, his voice as deceptively transparent as an ice cube. “One,
your
priority doesn’t mean a thing to me. Two, as it turns out, I have to do this other business to get something I need to do the work
you
want done.”

“Perhaps we could—”

“Shut up and let the man do his job,” Percy cut the blond man off.

Tracker and Tiger were silent. That frightened the blond man a lot more than Percy’s growling. And he was truly terrified of Percy.

“
NO WAY
I can interview him?”

“Not a chance,” the blond told the man at the other end of a phone conversation. “We came to
him
, not the other way around. But we
do
have video of him interacting with us, if that would be any help.”

“All right, partner,” the consultant said. “Send what you’ve got over that special little modem of yours—I’ve got the one you gave me all hooked in. Not just the video, now—everything
you put together before you decided he was the man for the job.”

“How fast can you—?”

“I’ll call you when I’ve got something to say,” the consultant answered, a split second before he pushed the “end” button on his cell phone.

CROSS STEPPED
off a commuter flight, picked up the rental car waiting for him, and drove straight to a pawnshop that was on the permanent Watch List for local law enforcement.

His hair was a tangle of blond curls, and he sported a prominent beauty mark on his cheek. An earring dangled from his right ear on a long chain. Anyone who looked closely enough would see the “ball and chain” symbol for a submissive in a “collared” relationship.

Cross exchanged only a few words with the proprietor. They entered a back room. When Cross left the pawnshop, he was carrying a small suitcase.

A no-tell motel took his cash. Cross changed his clothes, then re-entered the rental car. First, he plugged a memory stick into the car’s data-port, disabling its GPS. Then he drove for a little less than two hours, totally fixed on his objective, never noticing the urban grit give way to a scenic countryside.

He arrived at what looked like a college campus. A closer look would reveal it to be a minimum-security prison. Cross, now dressed in a conservative suit, with the fool-the-eye disguise removed, entered the prison, carrying an attaché case. He was processed through, enduring only a scanner—no pat-down searches were required at this security level.

Next stop, the Visiting Room. It was an open plan, no barriers between visitors and convicts. Lots of people were visiting, children playing with their sort-of-incarcerated parents; unarmed guards in neat uniforms circled quietly, observant but lacking the hyper-alertness of security staff in real prisons.

Cross was directed to a corner table. He waited patiently until an inmate walked over to him. The man was tall, slender, handsome to the verge of “pretty,” with a pencil mustache highlighted against his café-au-lait skin.

The two men’s heads moved very close together; they spoke in barely audible whispers.

“Just get him out to the South Yard anytime after two-thirty tomorrow afternoon,” Cross said.

“Man, I don’t know if I can do that. It ain’t like we tight or nothing—I don’t hardly know the dude.”

“Save it, Maurice. One, you owe me. Two, talking people into things is your game. And, three, I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Look here, bro.…”

“Wait. There’s still a number four.”

“Which is …?”

“You remember your old pal Ace? He told me to give you a message: You
don’t
get this guy out into that South Yard tomorrow afternoon, you better lock up. For the whole rest of your bit, understand? You can’t do that here, so you’ll need a transfer. And you’d better tell the Parole Board you’d rather do more time, too. The longer you stay Inside, the safer you’ll be.”

Maurice nodded, not happy about it, but resigned to the realities of his life … one of which was men like Cross.

CROSS WAS
in full camo gear, which covered not just his body but his head and hands as well. He worked his way through the hills surrounding the institution he had visited the day before. A quick glance at his watch—13:56—confirmed he still had plenty of time.

Methodically, he set up a sniper’s roost. Next, he removed a rifle from its case, found a comfortable prone position, and dropped the heavy barrel’s bipod to steady the scope.

A thin smile cracked his masklike face when he saw Maurice on the yard. The pimp was talking earnestly to a white male, gesturing wildly with his hands to emphasize whatever he was saying.

Cross dialed in the man’s face, then slowed his breathing. When certain he could get off a round between heartbeats, he slowly squeezed the trigger.

The target’s head exploded, followed immediately by the
cccccrack!
of a high-power cartridge.

Cross carefully disassembled his sniper’s rig and repacked everything, working quickly but unhurriedly.

Then he made a careful retreat through the wooded hills. He stopped near a big tree marked by a freshly dug trench in the ground, lined with some sort of metallic cloth.

His camo gear came off first. By the numbers. When everything was stowed away, including the sniper rifle, Cross dressed himself in conventional hiker’s clothing.

A piece of polished steel confirmed his restored appearance. Cross then removed a pair of large glass-stoppered bottles from behind the tree. As he poured the contents of each bottle into the trench, they formed a new substance, which immediately went to work. Cross watched as everything inside began to liquefy, then carefully resealed the metallic cloth with his gloved hands.

It only took minutes for Cross to replace the divot, check
the scene to make certain he’d left no trace of his presence, and move out.

“
I CAN’T
believe it,” the young cop said. “I mean, how could a sniper pick him off at that distance? That’s almost half a mile.”

“I guess when they say ‘low security’ that about covers it,” McNamara replied.

“That man you sent—”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” McNamara answered, using the cold voice he saved for special occasions. Professional occasions. “And neither do you.”

“Okay,” the young cop replied, his eyes wet. “But I’ll never forget it, anyway. And if he ever—”

The young cop stopped himself from saying anything more. The man he had been talking to was already gone.

“
ALL I
can do is give you a stack of rule-outs, partner.” The consultant’s voice came through the van’s multi-speaker system.

“I’ll take whatever you have, Doctor,” the blond man said. “For one, he’s no sociopath.”

“But he makes a living—”

“No offense, my friend. But if you keep sticking your two cents in, this conversation’s going to take a long time. I get paid by the hour. And a lot more than two cents.”

Tiger giggled. Percy threw his thousand-yard stare. Both aimed at the same target.

“The sociopath diagnosis was ruled out because I couldn’t find even a trace of narcissism. And no question but the man
has some real loyalty to others. But the absolute tell was when you were able to link him with that car bomb. The target was head of a cartel operating out of Guatemala—the first one to use MS-13 soldiers in America, in fact.

“You don’t know who paid him, but no question that Cross brought a whole team down there years ago. The mission had something to do with a diplomat’s daughter. Remember, I’m looking at papers with the usual spook blackouts of key data, so that’s the best I can do.