The People vs. Alex Cross (33 page)

The hooded man walked around behind Gretchen Lindel, who twisted, trying to see him, and dumped a bucket of blood over her head. She shuddered and trembled with revulsion but did not cry out.

“Last baptism before the fire,” he said, and I recognized his voice. It was Pratt, Edgars’s bodyguard.

Pratt dropped the empty bucket next to a second assault rifle leaned up against the tractor’s tire. He came around behind another of the alert women and pressed that wicked-looking knife to her throat.

She began to shriek and shriek. “Nash! Don’t let him! Please don’t let him! I’m not one of them! I’m Latina! I’m not a blonde!”

Edgars, the cameraman, came in close and laughed. “You’re a blonde in this scene, Lourdes.”

“Please, Nash,” Lourdes Rodriguez said, weeping. “You don’t have to do this!”

“Of course we do,” Edgars said in a reasonable tone. “It
wouldn’t be a real snuff film if we didn’t snuff the blondes at the end.”

Pratt took the knife away from Rodriguez’s throat and gestured to one side at two stout green metal tanks about five feet tall and two feet around. They were chained to a metal post.

“We’re giving you a chance,” Pratt said. “You can die by the knife or take your chances and pray you pass out from the gas before this whole place ignites and blows you to kingdom come.”

Still videoing their reactions, Edgars moved sideways toward the gas tanks. He put the AR down, reached behind the tanks, and came up with a gas mask, which he tossed to Pratt before getting a second for himself. He put it half on his head, knelt, and retrieved the assault rifle.

Pratt said, “So what is it, ladies? Knife or fire?”

“Can’t you just make it look like we died, like all the other times?” another of them whimpered, and I recognized her. Delilah Franks, the bank teller.

“Everyone’s had it with special effects,” Edgars said. “We’re going all the way. For the first time. Show her, Pratt. Wake up the others. Let them see tough little Gretchen die first. Then they can decide how to go.”

I STIFF-LEGGED AND
hopped to the back door. The handle turned and the door swung slowly open on well-oiled hinges. I smelled something dead.

Sliding inside, my back to the wall, I saw Pratt forty feet away. He’d kicked awake the other three women and gotten behind Gretchen Lindel. His right leg was extended to the rear, braced against the floor. His left knee was pressed into the teenager’s spine, arching her back. Pratt had her by the hair too, her head wrenched back, his wicked-looking blade at her windpipe.

“Scared now, blondie?” Pratt said.

“No,” Gretchen said. “You can’t hurt me.”

“Oh yes, I can.”

He was so close to Alden Lindel’s daughter, I didn’t dare try a killing shot, and I didn’t want to shout a warning that might cause him to slit her throat. I aimed at the meat of Pratt’s extended right leg, touched the trigger, and fired.

The slug went through his right ass cheek, spun him around, and broke his pelvis. He fell down screaming, the flung knife clattering away.

I limped hard and fast to my right, seeing Edgars spin toward me with the cameras and the AR. Just as he opened up in full automatic, I dived and landed behind a steel seed spreader. Slugs clanged off the spreader and punctured the sheet-metal wall behind me.

The shooting stopped. The women were all screaming and crying. Pratt moaned in agony, then shouted, “Kill him! Shoot his ass, Nash!”

Amid the shouting and the confusion, Edgars yelled, “Come on out, Cross. Join the wrap party for the whole cast and crew!”

Saying nothing, peering all around me, I noticed a three-inch gap between the bottom of the spreader and its wheels. I rolled onto my side and extended my right arm and pistol, trying to spot Edgars’s feet and lower legs.

But he was too far to my right, blocked from view by the blade of a small bulldozer. I needed the man to move.

“The FBI is surrounding this place, Edgars!” I yelled out. “Put your weapons down!”

“Bullshit,” Edgars said, holding his ground. “The FBI would never let you come in here alone. I’ve hacked into their systems, read their protocols.”

“They’re right behind me. I radioed them my position!”

“Impossible. I’ve jammed everything within ten miles.”

That idea seemed to embolden him because he burst out from behind the bulldozer blade at a steep retreating angle, so fast I had no shot. He skidded to a stop right behind the gas tanks. Definitely no shot.

Unaware of what I could and couldn’t see, Edgars kept
his camera rolling, set his rifle on the ground, and stood back up.

He’s filming and needs a free hand to open the gas valves,
I thought, realizing in a split second that I had only one option, and I needed to take that option right now or never. I aimed at the top turret of the halo sight, right above the AR’s action, and fired my .40 S&W.

The hundred-and-fifty-grain bullet hit the turret, blew through the sight, and smashed into the action with four hundred foot-pounds of energy. The gun went skidding across the concrete floor and under a combine’s blades.

I pushed myself up into a crouch, saw a shocked Edgars spin away from the gas tanks, yank down his gas mask, and run toward the combine. I took off after him, gun up.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!” I yelled a moment before I smelled the propane hissing full force from the tanks.

With my left arm and jacket sleeve across my nose and mouth, I hobbled past the women and Pratt, who was unconscious, and the tanks. Edgars was flat on his belly thirty feet beyond them, reaching under the combine. I feared shooting because of the gas. Before I could get close enough to jump on him, he twisted around, pointing the rifle and the camera at me. I skidded to a stop, aiming my pistol at him.

“Shoot him!” Lourdes Rodriguez screamed.

“Shoot him!” the other women cried.

Edgars bellowed from inside the mask, “He shoots, you all die!”

I stared at him. “
You
shoot,
we
all die.”

“Maybe that’s the point.”

“Why the hell are you doing this, Edgars?”

He looked at me as if I were stupid and said, “I hate blondes. I always have. Bitches, every one of them.”

“No one will see your last little film if you shoot and blow this place up.”

He beamed at me through the glass eyeholes of the gas mask. “The cameras are streaming, uploading over Wi-Fi.”

“We can all walk out of here.”

“No, we can’t,” he said, and he looked over the top of his busted sight at me. “Best thing? I can’t miss from here, so I get to see you die first. Just a half second before we all go up in flames.”

For the first time, I felt woozy from the gas. Edgars lifted his camera higher and glanced at the screen on the back as if trying to frame me, the gas canisters, and the women behind me for one final shot.

“All blondes must die eventually,” Edgars said. “And cops and geniuses.”

“Don’t!”

He pulled the trigger.

THERE WAS A
clank and a tremendous bang, and my heart almost stopped; I expected the gas to ignite and blow up the tanks, and me and everyone else with them.

Instead, Edgars screamed and writhed on the concrete floor, his bleeding hands clawing at the gas mask, his rifle three feet to his right, ruptured and smoking. Adrenaline poured through my veins, making me shake so bad that several moments passed before I realized what had happened.

Damaged by my earlier shot, and set to full automatic fire, the action of Edgars’s gun must have backfired, jammed, and exploded, sending chunks and slivers of metal back into the coder’s face and neck.

Edgars tore off the gas mask. His left eye was punctured and weeping blood. His cheeks and forehead were gashed horribly, flayed open, and gushing blood.

My head swooned from the gas. Throwing my jacket sleeve
across my mouth again, I kept my gun on him and moved forward fast, meaning to subdue and handcuff him.

But when I got close, Edgars lashed out with his steel-toed boot and connected squarely with my bad ankle. I felt something snap. A bolt of fire shot through me; my leg buckled, and I went down on my side.

My ankle felt like someone had set a torch to it. My stomach turned over from the agony and the gas, and my head swam; I thought I was going to pass out.

“The gas!” Gretchen Lindel cried weakly behind me. “The gas!”

I shook my head, saw Edgars struggling, trying to get to his feet. I aimed my gun at him but didn’t shoot because he seized up before he could fully stand, looked at me puzzled, and then felt his neck.

Something had ruptured, probably the carotid, pumping out blood. He staggered, moving his lips but making no sound, and then fell for the last time.

The gas,
I thought through a building daze.

Forcing myself up onto all fours, I turned my back to Edgars and crawled toward the tanks. I reached the post they were chained to and, holding my breath, used the post to pull myself to my feet.

I grabbed the knob to the hissing gas valve, tried to twist it shut. But it wouldn’t budge. Neither would the other one. They were locked open somehow.

My stomach roiled. I fought the urge to puke. But then I looked to Gretchen Lindel and the other six women hanging from the cables. Heads down. Bodies slack. They were dying.

Dying.

My head spun again, and I almost went down for a second time.

You’re dying, Alex.

It was Bree’s voice. It was Nana Mama’s voice. And my children’s voices. All at once, telling me to fight.

In a haze I raised my head, looked around, saw the door where I’d entered the building.
Open it, Alex.

Not enough air.

I saw the window I’d looked through.
Break it too,
I thought.

Not enough,
the voices said.

Turning my thickening, spinning head, I looked past the dying women and spotted my only hope.

Do it,
my family said.

My love for them surged up inside me. I used it to steel myself and push away from the post and the gas tanks. The pain in my ankle felt electric, and it jolted me, made me more alert and more determined.

My head started to pound. Every step was brutal. With every breath I wanted to stop, lie down, and surrender. But my family’s voices kept urging me on, telling me that pain was temporary, but death was not. Death was …

I reached the long wall of the steel building and fell against it, gasping, tasting the gas, and feeling like my ankle and my head were going to burst at the seams and split apart. Dark dots danced before my eyes, gathered, and threatened to blind me.

Dad!

Alex!

On the edge of collapse, I reached up and flailed at three buttons on the front of a metal box attached to the wall. I missed, groped, stabbed at them again, and felt them click one by one.

Nothing happened, and for a single, disbelieving moment, I thought there was no hope. That I was—

Gear engaged. Electric winch motors turned. And one, two, and then three of the overhead garage doors began to rise.

I ducked under the one closest to me and felt a strong cold breeze hit me in the face as I stumbled and went to my knees outside in the melting snow and mud.

I coughed and swooned but then scooped up a handful of snow and cold mud and splashed it in my face. I had to go back. I had to get them out.

I crawled back and saw Pratt lying motionless on top of his gas mask. Taking a big breath, I scrambled to him, rolled him over, and put the mask on.

After opening the door I’d come through, and the window, and feeling the air moving, I found the ropes attached to the cables holding the women and cut them all down.

One by one, I grabbed them and, still crawling, dragged them out into the snow. They were all outside and breathing when I heard the chug of a helicopter, looked back toward the bluff, and saw a Life Flight chopper coming in for a landing.

SHORTLY AFTER FOUR
that afternoon, Eliza Lindel broke down sobbing in Bree’s arms. I leaned over on my crutches and rubbed her back.

“Please,” she cried softly to me when she drew away from Bree. “You’ll have to come with me to tell Alden.”

I glanced at Bree, who nodded.

“Of course,” I said.

Gretchen Lindel’s mother wiped at her tears, then reached up and kissed my face. “I want you to know that you’re a good man, Dr. Cross.”

My eyes started to water. “Thank you.”

Bree held her hand. I followed them through the door at the far end of the kitchen into Alden Lindel’s small world. The shriveled man in the bed took his eyes off the latest
Game of Thrones
episode.

Eliza Lindel came around me and shut it off. “Dr. Cross has news, Alden.”

His eyes went to the tablet. The synthetic voice said, “Gretch?”

I smiled. “She’s safe, Mr. Lindel. They’re all safe. She’s on her way here. We tried to convince her to stay in the hospital, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

Lindel shut his eyes tight, and then he looked to his tablet. “Thank God,” his mechanical voice said. “Thank God.”

Tinker, the Jack Russell terrier, started barking and yipping with excitement in the kitchen.

“Mom? Dad?” Gretchen cried weakly.

An EMT was pushing her in a wheelchair. She’d been washed clean of pig’s blood and wore a pair of hospital scrubs. An IV in her arm was connected to a bag mounted on a pole attached to the chair.

Her mother ran to her and hugged her, and they sobbed with joy, the little dog dancing on her hind legs and barking madly. They all went to Alden’s side. The dog jumped on his bed. Gretchen got up on wobbly legs, threw her arms around her dad, and kissed him.

“I never gave up, Dad,” she said, weeping. “They tried to reach inside and destroy me, but they couldn’t. Because of you, and what you taught me, they couldn’t.”

He broke down, made choking sounds of love, which Bree and I took as our cue to slip out, our job done. Outside, we smiled like happy idiots. It was a crisp late-fall afternoon, and I felt damn lucky to be alive.