I, Alex Cross

about a month ago, when a beautiful girl in a negligee stumbled out of the woods in front of his truck.
    "Truth be told, I thought it was my lucky night," he said, "until I saw what kind of terrible shape she was in. Any bigger caliber on that slug in her back and she would have been dead."
    Even so, the girl had insisted that Johnson keep driving, at least until they were across the state line. He finally got her to an ER just outside Winston-Salem.
    "Still, Annie wasn’t hanging around for any cops to show up," he went on. "She told me she was either leaving there on foot or in my truck, so I drove her. Probably shouldn’t have, but what’s done is done. My wife and I have been looking after her ever since."
    "Her name is Annie?" I asked.
    "I’ll get to that part," Johnson said.
    "Why did she come forward when she did?" I asked them. All I knew was that the contact between Mr. Johnson and Mahoney had started before the names Constantine Bowie and Zeus had ever made it into the headlines.
    "That’s a little complicated," he said. "She still hasn’t told us everything. We don’t even know her real name; we just call her Annie to keep things simple. When I tried putting out some feelers, there wasn’t much I could say, so I don’t think people took me too seriously. At least, not until Agent Mahoney here called me back. He was following up on a call I’d made to the FBI field office in Mobile."
    "And where is she now, Aubrey?" Ned asked.
    "Not far." Johnson took a set of keys off the counter. "I’ll let her speak for herself, but I will tell you this much. That fellow they’re calling Zeus on the news? She says you all got the wrong man. She isn’t Annie, and he isn’t Zeus."

Chapter 106

    JOHNSON LED US back through the village in his truck, almost to the mainland bridge.
    Then he turned off and parked at the Dauphin Island Marina. Fewer than half of the slips were occupied, and the office and snack shack on the waterfront both looked closed and shuttered for the season.
    We followed him up one of the three long docks to a sport fishing boat called the
May
. A heavyset woman, presumably Mrs. Johnson, was waiting on the deck. She looked at us a lot more skeptically than her husband had.
    "This them?" she said.
    "You know it is, May. Let’s go."
    She didn’t move. "This girl’s been through a living hell, do you understand me? You need to go easy with her."
    I had no quarrel with the attitude; actually, I was grateful for it. We assured Mrs. Johnson that we’d be good with the girl, and then followed her down to the little cabin below deck.
    "Annie" was sitting in the crook of the dining banquette, looking drawn and nervous. Even so, she was an obviously beautiful girl, with the kind of china doll features that Tony Nicholson seemed to have favored for Blacksmith Farms. Her cargo pants and baggy pink sweatshirt were either borrowed or thrift shop specials, and she had a gray canvas sling on her right arm. She was huddled over, and when she moved, I could see that her back, where she’d been shot, still hurt quite a bit.
    Mahoney started with introductions and asked if she was willing to give us her name.
    "It’s Hannah," she said, tentatively at first. "Hannah Willis. Is that something you can help me with? Becoming somebody else? Witness protection, or whatever it is you use these days."
    Ned explained that the US Attorney’s office would decide if she even needed to testify, but if so, then yes, she was a perfect candidate for WitSec. In the meantime, he assured her, we wouldn’t record anything that she had to tell us.
    "Let’s start with what happened to you," I said. "The night Aubrey picked you up in his truck."
    She nodded slowly, mustering the memory, or maybe just the will to tell it. May Johnson sat next to her, holding her hand the whole time.
    "It was supposed to be some kind of private party at Blacksmith," Hannah said. "We didn’t know anything except the client code name.
Zeus
. You think maybe he has a high opinion of himself? Code name is a god?"
    "Was this party held in the apartment over the carriage barn?" I asked.
    "That’s right." She seemed surprised that I already knew. "I’d never been up there before. I knew the pay was better."
    "When you say ’we,’ " Ned asked, "how many of you were there with Zeus?"
    "Just me and one other girl, Nicole," she said. "Although I doubt that was her real name."
    It also wasn’t the first time I’d heard it used in a conversation