Cross Fire

hit him with a flashlight beam, we saw clearly the dark hole at the back of his head, washed clean by the rain. His body had lodged in the corner of the half wall that ran around the roof, holding him up that way.
    One look at his face, and I recognized Mitch Talley. Now, suddenly, my legs were like Jell-O. This was too much, it really was. Mitch Talley was dead? How?
    “Jesus.” The patrol officer with me leaned in for a better look. “What is that, nine millimeter?”
    “Call it in,” I told him. “Get an APB on Steven Hennessey, aka Denny Humboldt. He couldn’t have gotten far yet. I’ll call CIC. We need to shut this neighborhood down — now. Every second counts.”
    Unless my instincts were way off here, Hennessey had just broken up the Patriot sniper team, for whatever reasons of his own.
    If I were him, I would have been running like hell. I would already be out of Washington and I’d never look back.
    But I wasn’t Hennessey, was I?

Chapter 99

    DENNY DROVE AROUND for hours. He stayed north and stopped at a couple of different drugstores in Maryland. He bought a Nationals ball cap, a shaving kit, a pair of weak reading glasses, and a box of chestnut-brown hair dye.
That should do it.
    After another stop, in a Sunoco bathroom in Chevy Chase, he made his way back down to the city. He parked in Logan Circle and walked the two blocks over to Vermont Avenue, where the familiar black Town Car was waiting.
    Zachary gave a rare unguarded smile as Denny slid into the backseat.
    “Look at you,” he said. “All set to fade into the woodwork. I’ll bet you’re good at it, too.”
    “Whatever,” Denny said. “Let’s get this done. So I can fade away, as you say.”
    “It sounds as though things went off well enough, assuming the news reports are to be believed.”
    “That’s correct.”
    Zachary stayed where he was. “They didn’t say anything about an accomplice, though. Nothing about Mitch.”
    “I’d be surprised if they did,” Denny said. “This lead investigator, Cross, likes to keep his cards close to the vest. But, believe me, it’s taken care of. And I don’t really want to talk about Mitch anymore. He did his job well.”
    The contact man studied Denny’s face a little longer. Finally, he reached over the front seat and took the pouch from the driver. It seemed right this time, but Denny unzipped the bag and checked, just to be sure.
    Zachary sat back now and seemed to actually unclench a little. “Tell me something, Denny. What are you going to do with all that money? Besides getting a new name, I mean.”
    Denny returned the smile. “Put it somewhere safe, for starters,” he said, and tucked the pouch into his jacket as if to illustrate the point. “Then after that —”
    There was no rest of the sentence. The Walther fired from inside his pocket and caught the driver in the back of the head. A spray of blood and gray matter hit the windshield.
    The second shot took care of Zachary, right through those pretentious horn-rims of his. He never even got to reach for the door. It was over in a matter of seconds — the two most satisfying shots Denny had ever taken.
    Except, of course, not Denny. Not anymore. That was a pretty good feeling, too. To leave this all far behind.
    No time for celebrations, though. The car had barely gone quiet before he was out on the sidewalk and back to doing what he’d always done best. He kept moving.

Chapter 100

    THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS following the hits at the Harman were a full-court press like I’d rarely seen in Washington. Our Command Information Center had traffic checks going on all night; Major Case Squad put both units on the street; and NSID was told to drop all nonessential business, and that was just inside the MPD.
    Details were operating out of Capitol Police, ATF, and even the Secret Service.
    By morning, the hunt for Steven Hennessey had gone from regional to national to international. The Bureau was fully activated and looking for him everywhere it was possible for the Bureau to look. The CIA was involved, too.
    The significance of these murders had really started to sink in. Justices Summers and Ponti had been the unofficial left wing of the Supreme Court, beloved by half the country and
foxes in the henhouse,
basically, to the other half.
    At MPD, our late-afternoon briefing was like a march of the zombies. Nobody had gotten much sleep overnight, and there was a palpable kind of tension in the air.
    Chief Perkins presided.