Cross (Alex Cross 12)

This was getting better and better by the minute.

Chapter 24

I COULD DEFINITELY SEE why Ned Mahoney wanted me here.

A heroin factory estimated to have more than a hundred and fifty kilos of poison, street value at seven million. Cops versus cops. It looked like a no-win situation for everybody involved. I heard Captain Moran say, “I’d tell you to go to hell, but I work there and I don’t want to see you every day.” That sort of summed things up.

No one inside was showing signs of surrendering—not the drug dealers, not the guys from SWAT. They also weren’t allowing any of the lab workers trapped on the fourth floor to leave. We had the names and approximate ages for some of the lab workers, and most of them were women, between fifteen and eighty-one. They were neighborhood people who couldn’t find other jobs, usually because of language and education barriers, but who needed and wanted to work.

I wasn’t doing a whole lot better than anybody else at figuring out a possible solution or an alternative plan. Maybe that was why I decided to take a walk outside the barricades at around ten. Try to clear my head. Maybe an idea would come if I physically put myself outside the box.

By now there were hundreds of spectators, including dozens of reporters and TV camera crews. I strolled a few blocks along M Street, my hands dug deep into my pockets.

I came to a crowded street corner where people from the neighborhood were being interviewed for TV. I was starting to walk by, lost in my thoughts, when I heard one of the women talking between wrenching sobs. “That my flesh and blood trapped inside. Nobody care. Nobody give a damn!”

I stopped to listen to the interview. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty, and she was pregnant. From the

look of her, she was due any day. Maybe tonight.

“My gramma is seventy-five. She inside to make money so my kids can go to Catholic school. Her name Rosario. She a beautiful lady. My gramma don’t deserve to die.”

I listened to a few more emotional interviews, mostly with family members of the lab workers—but also a couple with the wives and kids of the drug crew trapped inside. One of the runners in there was just twelve years old.

Finally, I headed back inside the barricades, the inner perimeter, and I went looking for Ned Mahoney. I found him with some administrative types, suits, and Captain Moran outside one of the command-post vans. They were discussing shutting off the building’s power.

“I’ve got an idea,” I told him.

“Well, it’s about time.”

Chapter 25

THE BUTCHER WAS STILL hanging around the police barricades in Washington, and he knew he shouldn’t be there. He was supposed to be home in Maryland hours ago. But this was worth it. The craziness of it all. He wandered through the crowd of looky-loos, and he was feeling like a kid let loose at a state fair, or at least what he thought a kid at a state fair would feel like.

Hell, they even had ice cream and hot dog vendors at the scene. People’s eyes glistened with excitement; they wanted to see some real-life action. Well, hell, so did he, so did he.

He definitely was a crime-scene junkie, and he thought it stemmed from the days spent with his old man in Brooklyn. When he was little, his father used to take him on fire and police calls that he intercepted on his two-way. It was about the only good thing he ever did with the old man, and he figured it was because his father thought he’d look like less of a freak if he dragged a kid along beside him.

But his father was a freak. He liked to see dead bodies, any kind—on a slab of pavement, inside a crashed car, being hauled out of a smoldering building. His crazy old man was the original Butcher of Sligo—and much, much worse. Of course, he was the Butcher now, one of the most feared and sought-after assassins in the world. He was the Man, wasn’t he? He could do whatever he wanted to, and that’s what he was up to now.

Michael Sullivan was pulled out of his reverie by the sound of somebody talking into a mike at the hostage scene. He looked up, and it was the detective again—Alex Cross. It almost seemed like fate to him, like ghosts calling to the Butcher from the past.

Chapter 26

I FIGURED MY IDEA was a long shot, and definitely out of left field, but it was worth it if it could save some lives. Plus, nobody had come up with anything better.

So at midnight we set up microphones behind a solid row of police cars and transport buses parked on the far side of Fifteenth. It looked impressive, if nothing else, and the TV cameras were all over it, of course.

For the next hour, I led family members up to tell their stories into the mikes, to reason and plead with the men inside to put down their weapons and leave the building, or at the very least to let the lab workers out. The speakers stressed that it was hopeless not to surrender and that many of those inside would die if they didn’t. Some of the stories told at the mikes were heartbreaking, and I watched spectators tear up as they listened.

The best of the moments were anecdotes—a Sunday soccer game a father was supposed to referee; a wedding less than a week away; a pregnant girl who was supposed to be on bed rest but who came to plead with her drug-runner boyfriend. Both of them were eighteen.

Then we got an answer from inside.

It came while a twelve-year-old girl was talking about her father, one of the dealers. Gunshots erupted in the building!

The gunfire lasted for about five minutes, then stopped. We had no way of telling what had happened. We knew only one thing—the words of their loved ones had failed to move the men inside.

No one had come out; no one had surrendered.