Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

“Hey, Dad, look!” Ali cried, pointing to the little TV on the counter.

I glanced over and saw the bizarre image of a bearded driver in an Amish buggy looking up at a low-flying, pale white blimp that was dragging a thick steel cable more than a mile long across fields and through trees.

The newscaster said that sometime during the night the blimp had broken free of its mooring at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where the military tested everything from cannon rounds to chemical weapons. The blimp was part of a top secret over-the-horizon surveillance system currently being evaluated. The army believed the blimp’s cable had snapped due to gale-force winds that had struck coastal Maryland overnight.

“I’ve seen that thing,” I said. “The blimp. A couple of times last week from the Eastern Shore.”

The newscaster said the heavy cable had already damaged multiple high-tension lines and several homes and buildings. The army had crews trailing the blimp and trying to figure out how to bring it down safely.

“Runaway blimp,” Nana Mama said, shaking her head.

“You don’t hear that every day,” I said, pouring myself some coffee.

Before I could take a sip, my phone buzzed, alerting me to a text, and then another, and then a third. Annoyed, I set the coffee down and dug the phone from my pocket.

Call me.

Kerry Rutledge.

Urgent.

A fourth text came in. A phone number.

I took my coffee, went out into the great room, and called the young woman who’d survived the road-rage attack.

“Dr. Cross?” she said.

“Right here, Kerry,” I said. “What’s so urgent?”

“You told me to call if I remembered anything more. I did. I mean, I do.”

She sounded breathless, almost panicked.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s calm down a little, and then you’ll tell me what’s going on. Where are you?”

“At a rehab center in…I can’t remember that,” Kerry said, and she took a deep breath. “But I do remember now that the motorcycle was a dark Honda, big, with a windshield and, like, a lit-up dashboard, you know?”

“How do you know it was a Honda?”

“It was on the gas tank. I could see it in the light from the dashboard.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, but it’s probably nothing.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” I said.

Kerry said, “There was something on the windshield, a decal, on the lower right-hand corner. It was square and I keep thinking that there was an anchor and a rope on it.”

“An anchor and a rope on a decal?” I said. And then a memory was triggered, and my heart began to pound a little faster. “A decal like a parking sticker?”

Chapter

89

Bree sat at her desk drinking her second cup of coffee and reading over reports of complaints against one of her detectives. She tried to pay close attention to the details of the report and to the detective’s response, looking for differences and similarities. She hated second-guessing a cop who’d been acting in the heat of the moment, but if she was going to do t

he job right, she had to study the situation before rendering judgment.