The air traffic controller broke into their conversation. “American eight-three-nine, turn southeast fifteen degrees. Descend to two thousand.”

  “Looking for that river,” Carpenter said.

  “Affirmative.”

  He fed the instruction into the onboard computer and watched gauges as the aircraft followed his commands. “God, I love this. When I started flying this route, you had to come in manual to make sure you didn’t hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge. It freaked you out. Now you couldn’t hit it if you tried.”

  As the captain caught sight of the river and lowered the landing gear, Waters said, “You going to make a pilgrimage to this Chicago rib mecca soon?”

  Carpenter groaned. “Would that I could, but the great Leon’s is no more. My favorite was his rib tips. He’d smoke them and then chop them up into two-inch chunks with a cleaver and dump them in a paper bucket with his sauce, fries, and two pieces of Bunny Bread right there in front of you. Best ribs ever.”

  “Leon die or give up?”

  “Heart attack, I think. It’s why now I just sample good ribs occasionally. Otherwise, you end up like Leon, and my old man and I have too much fun to look forward to for that.”

  “Fun in Boise?” Emma said skeptically.

  “I’m telling you, Idaho’s a beautiful place. You should see it sometime.”

  The lights of Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia were brilliant as the plane descended. He could see the bridge and the runway five miles away.

  “You deserve it, Harry,” his copilot said. “How many years you put in?”

  “Twenty-six in the saddle, eight in the air force before that,” he said. “Honestly, Emma, I kind of hate flying now. Can’t wait to get in my Chevy Trail Boss with Terri and the dogs and light out for Idaho and a better life.”

  They crossed over the bridge, their landing lights illuminating the north end of the park. As Carpenter was scanning readouts and looking at the runway, he caught the impression of a vehicle at the far end of the empty parking lot. Something hot, orange, and pulsing came ripping out of the vehicle right at them.

  Carpenter had flown combat missions in Kuwait. He knew they were machine-gun tracers even before the heavy .50-caliber bullets began to rake the jet.

  “Sorry, Terri,” he said to his wife before the cockpit windshield blew out.

  Chapter

  4

  Davis watched the first tracers and bullets find and chew up the jet’s left wing and engine and then saw a rain of 180 .50-caliber armor-piercing bullets smash into the nose, the cockpit, and the forward landing gear.

  The plane stuttered in the air, still under computer control and still in full descent as it passed over the parking lot, the van, and the now empty machine gun. The jet wobbled and drifted right, crossing the backwater of the Potomac. The rear gear touched down, and for an instant Davis thought he’d failed, that the jet would land and that he’d had zero impact.

  But then the right wing dipped wildly. Sparks flew like thousands of Roman candles when the wing smashed down onto the tarmac, causing the jet’s back end to skid violently. The wing broke off entirely, and the fuselage and other wing went tomahawking down the runway.

  On the next big impact, the second wing came off. A forward section of the fuselage, including the cockpit, broke away and flew off the runway.

  On the third impact, the remaining jet fuel exploded, shredding what was left of American Airlines Flight 839. The wreckage finally came to a stop far down the runway. Flames belched into the night sky.

  Davis felt zero regret for murdering however many people he had just killed.

  God, I hate Floridians, he thought as he thumbed his phone’s screen again. Old fat-ass do-nothings in wheelchairs. Serves them right that they were the first ones to get what they all deserve. Every single one of them.

  When Davis heard sirens and saw the red flash of fire trucks speeding onto the runway toward the burning mass, he calmly gave his phone and the laptop a final order. Seven hundred yards away, the van blew apart.

  Davis biked north. He’d stop when he was two or three miles up the path, pull the chip from the burner phone, break it, throw both items in the river, and move on to safer surroundings.

  Chapter

  5

  John Sampson and I were inside a brick apartment building in Southeast Washington, DC, near the border with Fairmount Heights, Maryland, so we didn’t hear the machine-gun fire.

  But we sure heard the dull thud and roar of the explosion that followed.

  “What was that?” a distraught Eileen O’Dell said, her hands trembling. “Oh my God, what was that?”

  “Whatever it was, it was far away, Eileen,” Sampson said, trying to keep her calm. “I know this is difficult, but anything you can tell us about Trey’s routine, especially in the morning, might help us figure out who did this to him.”

  Eileen’s twenty-five-year-old husband, Trey O’Dell, had been shot to death around four a.m. that same day. He was the fourth young man to die in a very-early-morning ambush on the streets of the nation’s capital since the beginning of the year. Sampson and I had been assigned to the case of what the media was calling the Dead Hours killings.

  John was a senior detective with the Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide unit. I used to be with MPD’s homicide unit as well, but now I worked as an investigative consultant to both the department and the FBI, where I’d once served as a profiler. I rubbed at the ache in my chest, still getting over a wound that had almost cost me my life.

  “I don’t know what I haven’t told you and the other officers already,” the new widow said, on the verge of breaking down again. “Didn’t anyone see it happen?”

  “No one has come forward yet,” I told her. “But you said it was his normal route?”

  “Not always, but often enough. He kept a diary of his runs, the routes and everything, you know. You’ll see it all on his laptop.”

  “What about the early hour? Was that unusual?”

  “No,” she said. “Trey never needed much sleep. He was always up early. And he liked to run before work.”

  “What’s the name of the school where he taught?” Sampson asked.

  “Woodrow Wilson.”

  “Good school,” I said.

  “He was a good teacher,” she said, her voice quivering. “The kids loved him. Everyone loved him. I just don’t understand how I can go to bed and he’s there and I wake up and the police are pounding at my door and he’s not.” She started crying again. “This isn’t supposed to happen to newlyweds. It just isn’t.”

  I felt terrible. They’d been married in June and moved down from Boston after Trey landed the teaching job.

  “You said your mother and sister are on the way?” I asked, handing her a tissue.

  Eileen dabbed at her eyes as she nodded, then blew her nose. “Mom and Eva should be here in an hour or so. And Trey’s mom and dad after that. How am I going to get through this?”

  “With their help,” Sampson said.

  “They’ll hold you up if you hold them up,” I said.

  She nodded, looking blank and bleary-eyed. “At least they didn’t have to see him.”

  I knew she’d gone down to the morgue earlier in the day to identify her husband. “You were brave, saving them from that.”

  “Or I’m an idiot,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever forget what I saw.”

  “You’ll never forget him,” Sampson said. “But that other memory will fade.”

  “I hope so,” she said as more tears rolled down her cheeks. “I can’t take this feeling much longer.”

  I said softly, “My first wife was murdered, Eileen. It’s part of why I do what I do. I can tell you the next few days are going to be rough. But your family is coming, and it takes time, a lot of it, but you will get through this. You will have a life again. You will know happiness again.”

  She cried harder. “That’s the problem. I don’t want to be happy again.”

  Before either of us could answer, my cell phone and then Sampson’s dinged with texts telling us to call dispatch.

  “I’ll take it,” I said, walking over to the other side of the simply furnished living area. “This is Alex Cross,” I said when the dispatcher answered.

  “Drop whatever you’re doing, Dr. Cross, and head to Reagan Airport,” she said. “A jet just crashed and exploded on the runway. The chief and the FBI want you and Sampson there pronto.”

  Chapter

  6

  By the time we left Eileen O’Dell, promising to check on her later, sirens were wailing everywhere as police and fire crews raced to Reagan National. Two helicopters were in the sky when we pulled out, bubble on, our siren joining the chorus.

  Sampson headed west toward the river. The police-radio chatter was all about forming a cordon around the airport and the subsequent traffic snarls that were knotting in and around the Fourteenth Street Bridge.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to get there or why they called us in,” Sampson said. “And why the FBI? This is NTSB’s show all the way.”

  “Unless the plane didn’t crash on its own.”

  “I’m not hearing them say that,” he said, gesturing to the radio. “And we’re driving into a mess.”

  I put on the AM station WTOP and learned that all air traffic bound for Reagan was being diverted to Dulles International. My cell phone rang: supervising special agent Edward Mahoney, my former partner at the FBI and one of the Bureau’s top crisis managers.

  “Ned,” I said, putting him on speaker. “Did you call us in?”

  “I did,” he said, panting. He sounded like he was running. “Where are you?”

  I told him.

  “Don’t go to the bridge,” he said. “It’s a parking lot. Get to the wharf opposite Nationals Park on the Anacostia River. We’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

  He hung up, and Sampson hit the gas.

  Five minutes later, John was running out to the wharf, passing the empty slips of the DC Sailing Club; I followed him, although I couldn’t move as quickly, given my recent chest injury. When we reached the water’s edge, a big MPD Harbor Patrol Zodiac-style boat was coming hard up the river at us, searchlights on, blue bubbles flaring but thankfully quiet.

  John and I looked beyond the boat, farther down the Anacostia and across the Potomac, and saw wind-whipped flames, the flash of many lights, and a great billowing plume of black smoke rising above the runway’s south end.

  “Reminds me of when the Pentagon got hit,” Sampson said. “I thought we were done with that crap.”

  “We were. And now we aren’t,” I said.

  Mahoney stood in the bow of the approaching police boat, a lean, intense man with a remarkable ability to plan and execute large, complex investigations for the FBI. He was also one of my closest friends, someone I trusted as completely as I trusted Sampson.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen Ned as sober or grim as he was when we climbed aboard, joining a team of twenty agents from the FBI, NTSB, and ATF.

  “What’s going on?” Sampson said. “We were told it’s a crash.”

  “American Airlines flight coming in from West Palm Beach. A hundred plus were on board,” Mahoney said. “They’re searching for survivors. And we’re getting unconfirmed reports of gunfire just before the jet went down.”

  “Unconfirmed?” I said as the boat turned and headed toward the Potomac and the airport.

  “Affirmative, but something very big definitely exploded right afterward in Gravelly Point Park, off the north end of the runway.”

  Sampson said, “I’m calling Willow.”

  I said, “She’s safe with Jannie and Nana Mama at my house.”

  “Still,” he said and he turned away to phone his young daughter, who was in the care of my eighteen-year-old daughter and ninety-something grandmother. His wife had died a while back, and Willow was his pride and joy.

  “Terrorism?” I said to Mahoney.

  “Looking that way.”

  I said, “You’re running the show?”

  “For now. Lucky me.”

  I sent a text to my wife, Bree, who used to be chief of detectives for MPD and would know well what my life was about to become: a single-minded, all-consuming search for hard evidence amid the chaos, suspicion, and rumor that was sure to whirl around the hunt for the killer or killers of one hundred innocent people.

  As we left the Anacostia and headed into the Potomac, the sky began to weep and drizzle, which made the lights and the fire and that black plume of smoke even more surreal and nightmarish.

  Big searchlights slashed the river. Above us and circling around the airport were five helicopters. The one closest to us was from a local television station.

  Mahoney barked into his radio, “Get the goddamned press back. I want a no-fly bubble around that runway a mile in every direction. If they give you any guff, tell them I’ll shoot them down.”

  Chapter

  7

  The television choppers had backed off by the time the bow of the Harbor Patrol boat nudged the riprap along the riverbank, some three hundred yards from the wreckage. We jumped off one by one and scrambled up the bank to find a hellish scene playing out, the soundtrack a deafening symphony of sirens that seemed to be wailing near and far and coming from every angle.

  Five fire engines surrounded the biggest piece of the fuselage. Through hoses, firefighters were shooting foam at it and the scorched tail section. More fire engines were blaring and braying as they and several ambulances sped down the runway from the north toward the mangled nose and forward fuselage.

  Two ambulances were already there. EMTs were running to the largest unburned section of the jet. Other EMTs and firefighters were walking both sides of the runway, scanning for survivors. No one was stopping.

  “This is going to get rough,” Sampson said, gesturing ahead of us at a small human leg clad in denim, the foot in a red sneaker, lying in the low wet grass.

  From that point on and with every step we took, the scene turned so horrific and macabre that I could process it only by seeing it as a battlefield rather than a crash site. Chunks of twisted airplane wing, jagged strips of metal, and human body parts were strewn around the runway north and south of where the aircraft had exploded. You could see the scorch line where that had happened.

  And still the sirens wailed.

  “Goddamn it, I can’t think,” Mahoney said and barked an order into the radio. Over the next minute, the wails and din slowed and faded until there was only the shouting of the firefighters working on the wreckage. The flames were gone. The plume of smoke was thinning. But the air was still acrid with the smell of spent jet fuel, seared metal, the foam, and charred flesh when Ned gathered us and the top law enforcement commanders.

  “We are processing this as a crime scene until further notice,” Ned said. “NTSB?”

  “Supervising investigator Bob Holland,” a man in his forties said, raising his hand.

  “Thanks, Bob. You will control the collection of all physical evidence relating to the crash, but your people will work alongside my agents, who will document the remains so we can get them removed, identified, and returned to their loved ones as soon as possible. ATF?”

  A tall redheaded woman in a blue windbreaker raised her hand. “Agent Alice Kershaw.”

  “Glad to have you, Alice. I want your people in that park north of the runway,” Mahoney said. “Tell me what blew up out there and see if there’s evidence of weapon fire prior to that explosion.”

  Calvin Stetson, a captain with the Virginia State Police, said, “At least fifteen people who were outside the terminal told us they heard automatic-weapon fire.”

  “Can a machine gun bring down a jet like that?” Sampson asked.

  Kershaw said, “Taliban has brought down jets and choppers with them.”

  I said, “Why not a surface-to-air missile or something like it?”

  Mahoney said, “Because there are hardly any Stingers out there that are not accounted for or destroyed or so old that they can’t be fired. The Bureau and DIA are vigilant about tracking them down if they get the slightest rumor of one anywhere in the world. Even the Chinese SA-seven knockoffs.”

  “But a machine gun?” Sampson asked.

  “Easier to find and obtain,” Ned said. “Especially if you’re willing to skip the federal licensing process and go to the black market.”

  “Or the dark web,” Kershaw said. “There are plenty of heavy guns available if you know where to look.”

  “We’ll figure that out later,” Mahoney said, and he clapped his hands. “Let’s do this right, people. The victims and families deserve nothing less.”

  Chapter

  8

  We were there all night while Mahoney’s team of investigators grew and fanned out under his direction. Scaffolding was helicoptered in. Within three hours of the crash, a bank of spotlights had turned sections of the runway as bright as a baseball park.

  Over the years, Sampson, Mahoney, and I had worked closely on dozens of cases. We were all fine investigators on our own, but together we were far more than the sum of our parts. Knowing that, Ned had John and me shadow him as he moved among agents and officers from seven different law enforcement agencies, listening to their concerns, giving them guidance, and asking question after question after question. He reported in to the FBI director on the half hour.

  We heard that the media was giving the crash blanket coverage. We didn’t need to hear or see it to know that Washington was on edge and in shock. You could feel it coming off almost everyone who was at the crash site that evening.

  John and I stayed quiet for the most part, listening, inhaling information as Mahoney got it. Around ten in the evening, we learned that more than fifty charred corpses remained in the largest section of the fuselage.