Cross Down

An hour outside of Ft. Bragg, Sampson pulls into a gas station and gets the name of a quiet hotel. On the way to his lodging, he listens to talk shows covering the news of various attacks all orchestrated by “others” and filled with hate. In his room, he gets to work.

In the motel, Sampson forces himself to think about the mission in Afghanistan that Mel Carr referenced, but a noise distracts him.

Three attackers blow through the motel room door and fire on a shape in the middle of the bed. When they pull the blankets back, they find only pillows. Suddenly, a fourth figure appears.

John Sampson is lying in the back of his car, a motion detector aimed at his motel room door. When the sensor goes off, he slips on night vision goggles and takes out his gun, following the attackers into his empty motel room. He quickly kills two, attempts to save the third for questioning, and then leaves when the third man willingly dies to avoid interrogation.

As Sampson approaches Ft. Bragg, he realizes how organized his adversary is, and how dedicated.

At Ft. Bragg, Sampson meets Carr at a café and tells him about the two attempts on his life. Carr tells him that two of the men who went on the Afghanistan mission two years ago with them were murdered at Ft. Irwin, but their deaths were listed as suicides.

Lisa wears a fake badge as she walks down the halls of George Washington hospital. She has a syringe in her pocket containing something that will kill Cross but remain untraceable. Outside Cross’s door is a DC Metro police officer.

In the cafe, Carr explains that a soldier told him he’ll end up dying by suicide too. Someone is taking out the team that went into Afghanistan, one by one. Sampson realizes he is the target, not Cross. As he processes this, two women in the cafe pull out guns and approach them.

At George Washington hospital, Lisa finds Cross’s room and enters past the police officer, with whom she chats casually. In the room, she takes out the syringe and prepares to inject it, but an angry woman she hadn’t noticed pulls a gun on her.

In the cafe, the two women hold up CID badges and demand compliance, which Carr and Sampson are forced to give. Sampson is driven to a brick building off base and put in a small room with nothing but a desk and a legal pad.

In Cross’s room, Cross’s wife Bree holds a gun on Lisa. When Lisa attempts to inject the syringe, Bree shoots her in the arm.

The CID officer interrogates Sampson about the mission in Afghanistan. He refuses to answer, announces that he is leaving, and demands his service weapon, which she returns.

Lisa awakens to find herself handcuffed to a medical bed. Several doctors come in, and then Bree comes in with the gun.

Sampson finds Carr waiting for him when he gets back to the cafe. They drive to an out-of-the-way location before Sampson pulls his gun on Carr, recalling Mahoney’s warning to trust no one.

Bree continues to interrogate Lisa, whose ID proved fake, prints returned nothing, and DNA will reveal the same. As Lisa is wheeled out for surgery on her arm, Bree notices a tattoo, the insignia of the US Army’s 1st infantry division.

Carr explains that he got out of CID control because of his affair with a CID higher-up whose husband is also an investigator. He threatened to reveal the affair to her spouse if she didn’t spring him. This appeases a suspicious Sampson, and they decide to find the CIA officer in charge of the Afghanistan mission.

Maynard calls the Boss, who tells him to take out Sampson and any other members of the Afghanistan team who emerge. Maynard wants to find out who the Boss is.

Sampson calls Cross’s wife, Bree, who tells him about Lisa’s attack on her husband. He asks Bree to get the contact details for Elizabeth Deacon, the CIA officer who ran the classified Afghanistan operation two years prior. Bree works for a private contracting security company and will return results.

Maynard’s car is pulled over, and all four passengers armed and ready to kill the trooper who approaches. They shoot her quickly, then proceed to get the car washed and new plates installed.

Sampson and Mel stop for the night in an old cottage and call the CIA lead on their former mission, a woman named Deacon, and another soldier, Paco Ruiz. Together they try to recall their mission as Carr explains that the other members of the mission were murdered. One soldier, Bastinelli, lives off the grid in New Hampshire and is not on the call. They recall rumors of a whole village leveled near their mission site in Afghanistan. They also recall an aid camp near the village, but details are fuzzy.

Maynard and his team advance silently on Sampson and Carr’s position in the cottage.

Sampson suspects that the attacks in the US could be revenge for the leveling of the village if it were bombed by US forces. Suddenly, while on the video call, Ruiz’s screen slips and they see that he was decapitated. Meanwhile, Sampson realizes that it’s too quiet outside.

Maynard’s team throws a flash-bang into the cottage and advances.

Sampson and Carr react to the severed head by overturning a table, which shields them from the worst of the flash-bang. They escape the cottage to the woods, but Carr is shot in the head.

In the Pentagon, General Grissom’s meeting winds to a close. Principals are dropping out of the meetings, which Grissom knows is a sign that they sense failure. Only Doris Landsdale from Homeland Security is still fiery. She believes that the police and states should take the lead so as not to militarize the US government, curbing civil liberties and turning into a police state. Grissom believes if they do not act decisively, there won’t be a nation at all.

Maynard’s team is intact. They took out Carr and only received superficial injuries in return. Maynard instructs his team to move out—they’ll go after Sampson again tomorrow. With a wave, Maynard yells into the woods, “[l]ater, John” (154).

Sampson lays low in the woods and watches Maynard wave at him. He realizes he knows the man.

Laurie Pierce, a GWU graduate student, is waiting for her boyfriend Arthur Foss, the son of wealthy east coasters. She believes he’ll propose tonight. She climbs into his Uber car, and he pulls out a ring to propose.

Mahoney arrives on the scene of the latest DC attack. A car bomb took out an Uber, killing both passengers and the driver. Five pedestrians were also killed. Mahoney calls Sampson, but it goes to voicemail again.

Sampson crawls out of hiding, changes clothes, and drives to a parking lot, leaving Carr’s body behind. He crawls under the car and finds an after-market box, realizing his adversaries tracked him by satellite. He thinks about Maynard, whom he knows is former Army Special Forces and New York Police officer who worked at the Treasury, then the NSA. Sampson puts the tracker box on a UPS truck and then heads for Deacon’s house in Vermont.

Sampson needs a new car. He waits outside a restaurant until two women arrive in a Lexus, and he follows them inside. He easily swipes the keys, throws his gear in the new car, and heads north. He tosses his phone into a river and keeps going.

Bree visits Cross in the ICU. His condition crashes as she arrives. Nurses and doctors work furiously as Bree holds his hand.

A reporter named Justin interviews General Grissom and asks about the string of terror attacks that killed several hundred Americans. The reporter tells Grissom that Doris Landsdale believes he’s overreaching and that the attacks are only loosely linked. Grissom tells the reporter to print that Landsdale doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Doctors and nurses work on Cross while Bree continues to hold his hand. Later, GWU’s director of security tells Bree that Lisa died in surgery.

Humphrey and George, a former police officer and former firefighter, respectively, load their shotguns in Atlanta and prepare to break up a Black Lives Matter meeting. Meanwhile, the president gives a speech informing the nation about the coordinated attacks. Outside a remote Idaho farmhouse, three more terrorists approach a Neo-Nazi militia meeting with their guns drawn. In Boston, a reproductive clinic is bombed, while in Michigan, anti-abortion activists are shot. Snipers in Seattle, Detroit, Austin, and El Paso aim. By dawn, scores of people are dead.

Justin, the reporter who interviewed Grissom, is killed in his home office by the woman who was his story’s key source. The president’s speech ends with a plea for calm in the face of terror.