Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

“Vic, do you know that two children have been taken from this school, maybe kidnapped?” she snapped. “One is the secretary of the treasury’s son? The other is Katherine Rose’s little girl? The actress Katherine Rose Dunne. How do you think I’m doing? I’m a little sick to my stomach. I’m angry. I’m also petrified.”

“I just meant hello. Hello, Jezzie? I know what the hell has happened here.”

But Jezzie Flanagan had already walked away, at least partly to keep from saying anything else to Victor. She did feel nervous. And ill. And mostly, wired as hell. She wasn’t so much looking for familiar faces in the crowded school lobby, as the right faces. There were two of them now!

Charlie Chakely and Mike Devine. Her agents. The two men she had assigned to young Michael Goldberg and also Maggie Rose Dunne, since they traveled back and forth to school together.

“How could this happen?” Her voice was loud. She didn’t care that the talk nearby had stopped and people were staring. A black hole was cut into the noise and chaos of the school lobby. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper as she questioned the agents about what had happened so far. She listened quietly as she let them explain. Apparently, she didn’t like what they had to say.

“Get the hell out of here,” she exploded a second time. “Get out right now. Out of my sight!”

“There was nothing we could have done,” Charlie Chakely tried to protest. “What could we have done? Jesus Christ!” Then he and Devine skulked away.

Those who knew Jezzie Flanagan might have understood her emotional reaction. Two children were missing. It had happened on her watch. She was an immediate supervisor of the Secret Service agents who guarded just about everyone other than the president. Key cabinet members and their families, about a half dozen senators, including Ted Kennedy. She reported to the secretary of the treasury himself.

She had worked unbelievably hard to get all that trust and responsibility, and she was responsible. Hundred-hour weeks; no vacation year after year, no life to speak of.

She could hear the upcoming scuttlebutt before it happened. Two of her agents had royally screwed up. There would be an investigation—an old-fashioned witch-hunt. Jezzie Flanagan was on the hot seat. Since she was the first woman ever to hold her job, the fall, if it came, would be steep and painful, and very public.

She finally spotted the one person she’d been looking for in the crowd—and hoping not to find. Secretary of the Treasury Jerrold Goldberg had already arrived at his son’s school.

Standing with the secretary were Mayor Carl Monroe, an FBI special agent she knew named Roger Graham, and two black men she didn’t recognize right off. Both of the blacks were tall; one of them extremely so, huge.

Jezzie Flanagan took a deep breath and walked quickly over to Secretary Goldberg and the others. “I’m very sorry, Jerrold,” she said in a whisper as she arrived. “I’m sure the children will be found.”

“A teacher” was all Jerrold Goldberg could manage. He shook his head of close-cropped white curls. His eyes were wet and shiny. “A teacher of children, little babies. How could this happen?”

He was clearly heartbroken. The secretary looked ten years older than his actual age, which was forty-nine. His face was as white as the school’s stucco walls.

Before coming to Washington, Jerrold Goldberg had been at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street. He’d made twenty or thirty million in the prosperous, thoroughly crazy 1980s. He was bright, worldwise, and tested on his wisdom. He was as pragmatic as they came.

On this day, though, he was just the father of a kidnapped little boy, and he looked extremely fragile.

CHAPTER 8

I WAS TALKING to Roger Graham from the FBI when the Secret Service supervisor, Jezzie Flanagan, joined our group. She said what she could to comfort Secretary Goldberg. Then the talk quickly turned back to the apparent kidnapping, and the next steps to be taken.

“Are we a hundred percent sure it was this math teacher who took the children?” Graham asked the group. He and I had worked closely together before. Graham was extremely smart, and had been a star in the Bureau for years. He’d co-written a book about busting up organized crime in New Jersey. It had been made into a hit movie. We respected and liked each other, which is rare between the Bureau and local police. When my wife had been killed in Washington, Roger had gone out of his way to involve the Bureau in the investigation. He’d given me more help than my own department.

I decided to try to answer Roger Graham’s question. I’d calmed down enough to talk by then, and I told them what Samson and I had picked up so far.

“They definitely left the school grounds together,” I said. “A porter saw them. The math teacher, a Mr. Soneji, went to Ms. Kim’s class. He lied to her. Said there was a telephone threat and that he was supposed to take the kids to the headmaster’s office to be driven home. Said the Secret Service hadn’t specified whether the threat involved the boy or girl. He just kept on going with them. The kids trusted him enough to go along.”

“How could a potential kidnapper possibly get on the teaching staff of this kind of school?” the special agent asked. A pair of sunglasses peeked from the breast pocket of his suit. Winter shades. Harrison Ford had played him in the movie made from his book. It wasn’t bad casting, really. Sampson called Graham “Big Screen.”

“That, we don’t know yet,” I told Graham. “We will soon.”

Sampson and I were finally introduced to Secretary Goldberg by Mayor Monroe. Monroe did a little bit on how we were one of D.C.’s most decorated teams and so on and so forth. Then the mayor ushered the secretary inside the headmaster’s office. Special Agent Graham trailed along. He rolled his eyes at Samson and me. He wanted us to know it wasn’t his show.

Jezzie Flanagan stayed behind. “I’ve heard about you, Detective Cross, now that I think of it. You’re the psychologist. There was an article in the Washington Post.” She smiled nicely, a demi-smile.

I didn’t smile back. “You know newspaper articles,” I told her. “Usually a pack of half-truths. In that case, definitely some tall tales.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “Nice to meet you, anyway.” Then she walked into the office behind Secretary Goldberg, the mayor, and the star FBI agent. Nobody invited me—the psychologist-detective of magazine fame. Nobody invited Sampson.

Monroe did poke his head out. “Stick around, you two. Don’t make any waves. Don’t get pissy, either. We need you here. I need to talk with you

, Alex. Stay put. Don’t get pissy.”