Page 39 of Cross Down
“Deacon, right?”
“That’s right, Elizabeth Deacon.”
“You just gonna call up Langley and ask them to put you through?”
I put the Cherokee in reverse, make a turn, and head back to Route 210. “No, I’m going to call someone who has sources all around the globe,” I say. “I bet we’ll have her home address in less than an hour.”
“She your girlfriend?”
I don’t answer right away. “I should be so lucky.”
I want to put some miles behind us in case a concerned citizen saw me putting a gun to Mel’s head, and once we’re north of Fayetteville, Mel says, “How did your CID interview go? More than just chitchat?”
“She took me off post so she could interview me without any official records. She asked me why I was here and what you and I talked about, and after a while, I got bored and left.”
Mel says, “I bet she was pissed. How did you manage to slip out without all sorts of bad things happening to you?”
“I reminded her that I was in the Individual Ready Reserve, that unless I was called up, she had no authority over me. Then I left.”
Mel shakes his head. “Why didn’t you do that back at the café’s parking lot? Why wait until you were taken away?”
I say, “I wanted to find out what they know. Mel, she pressed me on Afghanistan. That means the army also knows something about our trip being linked to the terrorist attacks, and they’re doing their very best to find out why. I also noticed something else.”
“What’s that?”
“The CID special agent looked spooked, like she sensed something big was coming and she and her investigators couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”
Chapter
45
Maynard is inMcLean, Virginia, sitting on a picnic bench near a McDonald’s playground, doing his best to ignore the cheerful sounds of the kids playing as he updates the Boss on the past twenty-four hours.
When he’s done, the Boss says, “We’ve an emerging situation and I want you to take care of it. Personally. Especially since the hit on Sampson was a failure.”
“Absolutely, sir,” Maynard replies, feeling good that the Boss isn’t blaming him for that mess, three unidentified dead men found in a small motel in rural North Carolina. Even made goddamn CNN.
The Boss says, “Sampson has met up with an army buddy of his from Fort Bragg. It looks like they’re getting the band back together, the survivors who went to Afghanistan. Their reunion needs to be terminated quickly and efficiently.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pick three of your finest. I’ll contact you in a few hours with the target situation. I want you on Sampson. When other members of that Afghan unit make themselves known, I’ll assign teams to them as well.”
“Very good, sir. But what about Alex Cross? Today’s mission didn’t get the job done.”
“His time will come in another day or two. Anything else?”
“No, sir,” he says.
The Boss disconnects, and Maynard starts eating his Quarter Pounder with Cheese, in his opinion one of the finest burgers in the land, no matter what the prissy foodies say. All Maynard knows is that a Quarter Pounder in Virginia tastes the same as one in California, and that’s a fine achievement indeed.
As he eats his lunch, Maynard thinks,The Boss’s voice is really starting to irritate me. He’s been working for the Boss for more than two years, preparing this operation, doing the planning, sweating, and bleeding to get to this point, and he’s had enough. He wants to know who the hell the Boss is and what his credentials are. He thinks of the voice synthesizer the Boss uses. Supposedly it’s impossible to clean it up to get to the real voice, but from his years working at the National Security Agency, Maynard knows there are back doors to all sorts of encryption that will allow him to run a recording of the voice through software and hear the real voice.
He looks at his phone. According to the Boss’s orders, it should be a low-tech burner phone. But today it’s not. It’s a government-issue device from where he once worked, and it has astounding abilities.
Time to find out who the hell he’s working for.
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