Page 97 of Cross Down
Lighting up seven-year-old Willow Sampson.
The girl calls out again, her voice frightened, and now Bree understands what she’s saying: “I’m up high. I’m up high!”
Bree nearly sobs with relief. “You sure are, hon, you sure are! Hold on, we’ll come up and get you.”
Chapter
109
The alarm onhis clock radio is set for six a.m., but as usual, Maynard gets up a couple of minutes beforehand. A habit he picked up in the NYPD and a habit that’s saved his life at least twice when he got up before armed operators broke into his place to kill him.
He dresses and emerges from the guest bedroom of this house they’ve been using for the past two weeks as an operational base. He smells coffee and meets up with Willis, a sweet-looking woman who was with the Army Rangers before she joined the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and applied her killing talents overseas.
She’s dressed as a U.S. Park Police officer, and she hands over a coffee mug that saysWORLD’S BEST GRANDPAand walks out the open sliding glass door to the rear deck.
Maynard follows her and takes a sip of the coffee, and she says, “Gorgeous morning.”
It is a gorgeous morning. This Virginia estate that’s owned by a mortgage company has a large rear lawn, where mist is shrouding a grove of trees. Maynard sees movement, and then three deer cross the distant yard.
Not a bad start to the day, even though he’s now seen the text messages informing him that the mission to snatch John Sampson’s girl didn’t succeed last night. Which is fine, he thinks, because on a battlefieldyou never get a 100 percent success rate. You just strive to do so all the time.
“Certainly is,” Maynard says, but he’s distracted, thinking that at this moment, scores of vehicles—Amazon delivery vans, UPS and FedEx trucks, unmarked white vans—are on the move, closing in on the District of Columbia, ready to use this beautiful day to make history.
“You know your history?” Willis asks.
“Of course,” Maynard says.
She says, “Remember what Ben Franklin said when the Constitutional Convention was winding down in Philadelphia?”
“Sure,” Maynard says. “A woman came up to him and said, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’”
Willis finishes the quote. “‘A republic, if you can keep it,’ Franklin told her. What do you think the good doctor would have said about what’s going to happen today?”
Maynard sips his coffee. “Probably ‘Nothing lasts forever.’”
Chapter
110
Deacon drives expertlythrough the busy lanes of traffic on I-695. I keep my pistol in my lap, still not trusting her.
“Do you have that circuit board with the serial number I gave you?” I ask.
Deacon makes an abrupt lane change; horns blare behind us.
“Elizabeth? Do you still have it?”
“No,” she says.
“Where is it? At Langley, being analyzed and traced?”
“No,” she says, going even faster.
“Where is it, then?” I ask, losing my patience with her.
She gives me a glance. “It’s back in Afghanistan. In pieces.”
I stare at her in disbelief.
