I, Alex Cross

there, he had someone waiting with him. I recognized the face from the White House but didn’t know the name until Davies introduced us.
    "Alex Cross, this is Special Agent Dan Cormorant. He’s from Secret Service. He’d like to talk to you."
    Cormorant was the one who had accompanied President Vance into the chief of staff’s office the other day when I visited. I assumed he was here at his boss’s behest.
    "We’ve met, sort of," I said, and shook his hand. "I don’t suppose you have anything to do with the two PIs outside my house last night?"
    "Don’t know what you’re talking about," he said.
    "Imagine that."
    "Alex." Ramon cut me off with a raised voice and hand signal. "Be quiet and let’s get to this."
    Cormorant and I sat down across the desk from him.
    "I’m not going to dwell on how we got here right now," Davies said, and the implication was clear. We’d talk about it later, in private. "But I will tell you what’s going to happen next. Alex, you’re going to make yourself available to Agent Cormorant and provide him with any case-related materials he needs. When that’s finished, you’re going to report back to me that you’re ready for a new assignment. I’ve got a quad homicide in Cleveland Park with your name written all over it. Big case, serious crime."
    I heard the words, but my mind was elsewhere. If I had to guess, I’d say that Ramon was embarrassed at having the Secret Service foisted on him, probably by the chief himself. He’d never spoken to me like this before, but I decided to bite my tongue until I had a chance to see what Cormorant was all about.
    The meeting ended pretty soon after that, and I walked out with Cormorant, back toward my office.
    "How long have you been with the presidential detail?" I asked him. "That’s some rarified air."
    "I’ve been with the Service for eight years," he said, not quite answering my question. "Philadelphia PD before that, and for what it’s worth, I know how much you don’t want me here."
    Rather than getting into it, I asked, "So where are you guys on Tony Nicholson at this point? Where is he now? If I can ask that kind of question."
    He smiled. "How much do you already know?"
    "That he was in Alexandria until eleven o’clock Friday morning, and now he’s nowhere to be found. At least not by Metro."
    "Then we’ve got the same information," Cormorant said. "That’s part of why I’m here. This is a
big
mystery, Detective Cross. And a dangerous one."
    He struck me as a little looser than a lot of the guys I knew at the Service, although that’s all relative. And the question remained — was he here to legitimately pursue this case or to bury it?
    In my office, I took out the latest disk from Nicholson and handed it to him. "Most of the physical evidence is with the Bureau, but this is new."
    He turned it over in his hands. "What is it?"
    "Is the name Zeus already familiar to you? I’m guessing it is."
    He looked at me but wouldn’t answer.
    "Cormorant, do you want my help or not? I would actually like to help."
    "Yes, I’ve heard the name Zeus," he said.
    "Supposedly, this is him. On the disk."
    "Supposedly?"
    "It’s a homicide. White male assailant with a distinctive ring on his right hand. I’m not going to make any assumptions, and you shouldn’t either."
    It’s comments like that last one I should really work a little harder at keeping to myself. I saw Cormorant stiffen right up.
    "What else do you have?" he asked. "I need to hear everything, Detective."
    "I need a little time to pull my notes together. But I can get you whatever I have by tomorrow," I told him.
    "What about copies?" He held up the disk I’d given him. "How many of these are floating around?"
    "That’s the only one I know of," I said. "It came out of Nicholson’s safe-deposit box. He was using it to bargain. Of course, if we could find him —"
    "Okay, then." He shook my hand again. "We’ll talk soon."
    After he was gone, I ran over the conversation in my head and wrote down everything I could remember. How many lies had Cormorant told me already? And by the same token, other than the one I’d just told him about copies of Nicholson’s disk, how many more would I have to tell before this was over?

Chapter 90

    HERE’S HOW CRAZY/PARANOID things were getting. I had stopped using my own phone, and stuck to prepaid ones, changing the number every forty-eight hours or so.
    After my meeting with Cormorant, I ran out to get a new one and used it