Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense (13 page)

“Two-five this is two-six. Private Sonman is wounded, and a little girl here also needs immediate medical assistance. I’m on the top floor of—”

Jonas fell silent.

A grenade rolled up next to him and rested against the leg of the little girl.

There was no pin in it.

Jonas saw his death, and he even had time to look over at Sonman, who now stared at him with a wide smile—
clown smile
—red and grotesque, the kind that said the
real
good jokes were only seconds away. Sonman’s outstretched hand was empty save the grenade pin, which was hooked around his dirty thumb.

There was just enough time to do
something
, to move, to make a life and death decision.

“Two-six, please report. Two-six, please report.”

With the two seconds he was afforded, Jonas pushed himself off the ground and lunged as hard as his legs could manage toward the open window.

Jonas flew. He soared as would a bird, but only because the explosion in the room sent shockwaves through his body, propelling him as though he had wings.

He stared down at the corrugated tin canopy three stories below, the one he would soon smash through with all hundred and eighty pounds of human weight and fifty pounds of gear.

WASHINGTON D.C. APRIL 18

THE FIRST
thing he noticed was the heat. Seeing the candle flames, he thought for a second the room was burning.

He jolted in his chair before he saw Anne, who spoke to him in a tone not quite soothing.

“It’s okay, Jonas. You’re here with me. I was hypnotizing you, remember?”

With those words, he did remember. He remembered it all, and he knew he would never be able to push it all away again. He sank back into his chair and tried to control his breathing. “People pay you for this?”

“It was important for that to happen,” she said.

“Was it?” he shot back. “That’s supposed to cure me of something? I’m supposed to be able to have closure now or something?”

She shook her head. “Don’t mistake my intentions, Jonas. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not here to help you. I’m only here to help my work.”

He stared at her through the diffused light. “You’re cold.”

“I’m professional.”

“And how did it help
you
?”

She crossed her legs and leaned forward toward him with excitement, as if finally revealing a secret stored for years. “I got an imprint from you. An image. A feeling of intense familiarity in things you have been a part of. When you were under and as I touched you, I saw Sonman—not clearly, but clear enough. I felt him, a sense of his presence in your life. It’s the same imprint I received shaking your hand at the funeral, the connection with Calloway. The same imprint I received when I touched the pamphlet. I think Sonman is who we are looking for. Sonman put that pamphlet on your desk. I think Sonman is who killed Calloway. And the student.”

Jonas wanted to protest, to tell her that her powers of intuition were nothing but imagination left unharnessed by logic. He wanted to tell her PFC Rudy Sonman had died that hazy afternoon in the Mog. He wanted to tell her that Sonman’s body, already wounded by an M16 bullet, was torn apart by the grenade blast.

But he couldn’t tell her that, because Sonman’s body had never been found. The girl was found, or what was left of her, as were the remains of the girl’s mother, father, and baby sister. But there was no evidence Sonman had even been in that room.

“I need to leave,” Jonas said.

“No, Jonas. Not yet. I have more questions.”

Jonas stood. His legs felt weak, as if he’d just finished a long sprint in a shallow tide. “I know you do, which is why I’m going to leave now. Call me in a few days. Maybe we can continue then. For now, I just want to sleep.” He turned and walked toward the door. “Hopefully without dreaming.”

She followed him, and as he opened the door she opened her mouth as if to offer one more protest to get him to stay, but she caught herself and closed her lips.

Then she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, allowing her lips to skim a few extra inches on the side of his face. Her breath was warm and inviting, and when she pulled away, she did so only partially, staying close enough for Jonas to see tiny flecks of gold in her otherwise brown eyes.

“Be safe, Jonas.”

• • •

Outside the night was cold and still. Jonas pulled his keys from his jacket pocket and pressed the button on the remote. The rental car winked at him from across the street. The sweat on his face cooled.

He crossed and went to open his car door. It was then he paid closer attention to the car parked twenty feet or so behind his. It was unremarkable—a Honda Accord, he guessed. Shit brown. But it was the only car parked remotely close to his own, and there was someone sitting inside.

Waiting.

Jonas could only see the faintest of silhouettes, which made the figure look like a black paper cutout taped to a chalkboard. A small orange glow blossomed and then faded, and Jonas knew the man—
it was a man, wasn’t it?
—was smoking.

Smoking and waiting.

The figure turned his head and blew smoke out the cracked window. The smoke billowed in a stringy cloud for just a moment before fading into the night air. Jonas was close enough to smell it.

Jonas didn’t feel threatened, yet he waited a few seconds before getting in his car. There was something just
not quite right
about the person waiting in the car. Jonas didn’t know why, but he had trusted his instincts enough times to know they usually pointed him in the right direction. So Jonas stood outside his car, waiting, and offered the occasional glare at the Accord to let the driver know Jonas knew he was there.

Instinct usually not being enough, Jonas finally left, pulling away from the curb and looking one more time at the Accord in the rearview mirror. Nothing suspicious. Just some dude smoking a cigarette. That’s all.

Jonas drove a few blocks toward home before deciding to make a quick loop and drive back by Anne’s house. He couldn’t stop thinking about the one possibility that made the least amount of sense: the man in the Accord was Sonman. Jonas knew it wasn’t true and the idea wouldn’t even have had a home in his mind had he not just spewed the whole story to Anne just moments before.

But what if Sonman was alive? Jonas thought. Don’t I have a duty to at least look at the guy in the car?

Duty, Jonas thought.
It’s always about fucking duty with me
. Maybe I need to see a shrink about that.

He turned onto Anne’s street and discovered his sense of duty would not be appeased that night. The Accord was gone, and the still-smoldering remains of a cigarette on the cold asphalt were the only traces of the stranger in the car.

JONAS WASN’T
ready to go home. He needed answers, and in D.C. answers were readily available if you had the time, patience, and contacts to be able to ask the right questions. What Jonas lacked in time and patience he more than made up for in contacts. He scrolled though the contacts on his BlackBerry as he drove downtown.

“Yeah,” the gravelly voice said on the other end of the line.

“Chuck, it’s Jonas.”

“Yeah?”

“You sleeping?”

“Yeah, Jonas. I’m sleep-talking.”

“I mean
were
you sleeping?”

“Does it fucking matter? I’m awake now and I’m talking to you. What do you want?”

“I need to know about Rudy Sonman.” The pause was too long. “Who?”

“Don’t shit me, Chuck. You know exactly who that is.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The silence could have settled in nicely on the moon. “How bad?” Chuck asked.

“How bad what?”

“How bad do you need the info? Would this take care of my chit with the Senator?”

Jonas considered. Sidams had done the Major General and his boss a nice little favor two years ago by leaning heavily on a Pennsylvania defense contractor who had demanded a five hundred percent markup on Kevlar body armor.

“Yeah, we’ll call it even. Where?”

“Hay Adams. Give me a half hour.”

Jonas hung up and pressed down on the accelerator, thankful for all the beautiful back channels that came with his job.

• • •

It was late, but not too late for Off the Record, the hotel bar of choice for hushed conversations among the Washington elite, questionable, and unabashedly criminal.

He walked through the lobby of the Hay Adams hotel and into the lounge, immediately spotting an aide to the Senior Senator from Texas. Jonas loathed the Texas Senator and felt only slightly less antipathy for the aide, a churlish man in his mid-forties who would lobby for oil drilling within the asshole of his own grandmother. The aide was sitting next to someone Jonas didn’t know, and the men seemed to barely hold each other’s attention. Jonas nodded as he passed them.

Major General Charles Ogilvy was already there, a feat that seemed impossible. But he was, and if Jonas had awoken the man it wasn’t obvious. He wasn’t in uniform, but the creases on his slacks could have cut diamonds. His bald head was smooth and black, and only the freckles of grey in his eyebrows belied a few decades and wars in his service to his country. Jonas had met the Vice Director of the Joint Staff through Senator Sidams, and the hardened veteran had softened to Jonas when he found out Jonas was a Ranger. The two men shared a friendship that consisted of the occasional drink and jokes at the expense of Navy pukes, and years ago Jonas shared with the Major General what had happened to him in Somalia. His memory of events had been sketchy then—not like the details he could suddenly recall in the past two weeks—but he remembered Private Rudy Sonman. Ogilvy said he’d look into what happened to Sonman, but he’d never called Jonas back about it. Once, when Jonas pressed him on it, the Major General had said only this:
Leave it alone
.

Ogilvy wasn’t smiling when Jonas sat across from him. “How long’s it been, Chuck?” Ogilvy was two decades older than Jonas and outranked almost every person in the military, but Jonas never called him
sir
. It went against every instinct Jonas had, but Ogilvy had always insisted on it.

“Least a year. You look like shit.”

“I get that a lot.”

“Heard about your Beltway heroics.” The Major General shook his head. “Dumbass.”

“I get that a lot, too.”

“Bet you do. You all patched together again?”

Jonas no longer wore his wrist cast. “Good as new. You drinking?”

“Let’s see. It’s eleven at night and my wife is wondering what the hell I’m up to. Got to be at work at oh-eight-hundred. Hell yeah, I’m drinking.”

“Nice to hear.” Jonas signaled the waitress. “Grey Goose gimlet, up.”

Ogilvy looked up. “Two fingers of Wild Turkey.”

“Rocks?” she asked.

“Not even if my life depended on it.”

“Sure thing.”

As she walked away, Ogilvy turned to Jonas.

“So, Sonman. Thought you buried him a long time ago.”

“I thought so, too,” Jonas replied. “But recent events caused me to do a little grave robbing.” He told Ogilvy about the memories he had since the car accident. Then he told him about Anne and what happened during the hypnosis session. He ended with Anne’s hypothesis about the serial killer, the religious pamphlet on Jonas’s desk, and the smoking man in the car just an hour earlier. Through it all, Ogilvy soaked in the information with little more than a few slight nods of his head and the occasional widening of his eyes.

“Let me get this straight. You think the man who tried to kill you in Somalia is not only alive, but is the same person responsible for the crucifixion murders?”

“I just—”

“Shh,” Ogilvy cut him off. “Let me finish. And this same person, one Rudy Sonman, has come to Washington to do the same thing to you?”

Jonas was silent.

“OK, you can talk now.”

“I don’t know,” Jonas finally conceded. “I have nothing to go on, I know. Nothing real.
No actionable intel
. But...”

“Not true,” Ogilvy said. “You have the advice of a palm reader.”

“
Psychic criminologist
.”

Ogilvy rolled his eyes enough to see out the back of his head.

“She’s well respected,” Jonas said. “She does work for the

FBI.”

Ogilvy leaned forward. “My kid works for the FBI, and he sucked on so many paint chips as a kid I’m surprised he can find his own dick.”

“Wow. That’s kinda harsh.”

“Doesn’t make it less true. My point is she’s grasping at straws, and she’s got you doing the same thing.”

Jonas closed his eyes for a moment and hoped he would find the answers he wanted written in neon letters on the inside of his eyelids. He didn’t.

“It just seems like...it’s just odd that I started remembering these things and she picked up on it. It makes me want to know more.”