James Patterson - Thriller - Stories to Keep You Up All Night

Then he showed them the scrap of paper he'd found in Lily's closet.

"That's not a rune," they said, their agitation increasing exponentially. "It's Arabic."

He awakens into darkness and a rude snuffling, as if a large and hostile dog is just outside the door. He's off the bed in a shot. When had he drifted off to sleep? He cannot remember and, in any event, it does not matter. Time has crept on, but it is still the dead of night.

Reaching under the pillow, he brushes a water bug off the blued barrel of his semiautomatic pistol. Over the years, it has served him well, this weapon. On its grips is a series of notches, one for each of the people he has shot to death with it. In this way, the dead are always with him, like lovers who have disappointed him. In this way, he can confirm where he has been, how he has reached the place he is now. To anyone else, this train of thought might seem perverse, even illogical, but then he's never been foolish enough to put his faith in logic.

He rechecks the pistol, although there's really no need, his spy-craft is precise, something in which he prides himself. It is fully loaded. He takes out a second clip, puts it in his left pocket, then another for good measure, which he puts in his right pocket.

At that moment, the room is flooded with noise and the door shudders on its hinges. He lunges for the jalousie, pulls it open. The night, fired by a million Buenos Aires lights, comes flooding in, nearly blinding him. He forgets his commitment to remain in the room and flings open the window. Beyond the crumbling concrete ledge is a black metal fire escape, onto which he swings. The noise from inside the room is deafening, and without a backward glance he hurls himself up the metal rungs, climbing breathlessly without pausing for even an instant to take in the high sky, the rearing black mountains. But when he gains the rooftop, the first thing he sees is the spangled ocean running up to spend itself on the wide swath of sand, whose color and curve matches exactly the shape of Lily's eyelash.

He looks around. The landscape he has ascended onto is flat as a bare stage, smelling of creosote and decayed fish. Here and there rise the squat shapes of ventilator housings, but in fact the rooftop is dominated by the skeleton that holds fast the enormous neon sign advertising the hotel: EL PORTAL, the doorway, as if it were a pleasure palace instead of a water-bug-infested hellhole. This he understands completely. It is nothing more than a stage set, a huge construct of brightly colored fantasy trying to mimic reality. But up close, its ugly black ironwork looms like a depressing image of urban sprawl.

Sounds come from below him, chaotic and harsh, and he backs away. Gun at the ready, he finds the nearest of the blocky ventilator housings and crouches down behind it. Anyone who follows him up will come into his sights. At his back the neon sign perks and sizzles, throwing off colored light like a dying star. He sees pigeons wheeling across the lurid sky. Far below him a dog barks, a forlorn sound he somehow comprehends.

All at once, there is movement above the parapet-a shape, a silhouette darker by far than the glittering night, and he squeezes off a shot. The shape, more visible now, resolves itself into a figure. The figure comes at him even as he squeezes off shot after shot. He throws away the empty clip, retreats to another ventilation housing as he slams home the second clip. Immediately, he begins firing again until that clip, too, is empty. Retreating to the crisscross metalwork of the sign stanchion, he reloads with his last clip. Clambering into the nebula of colored lights as if it were the last remnant of his past, he fires, this time knowing the figure will still come on, unwounded, unfazed and undeterred…

He awakens into darkness and a cold sweat, half his mind still paralyzed. In a way, the nightmare seems more real than his present reality. It is certainly more real than anything in his past. The pounding on the door comes as if on cue, as if his nightmare was presentiment. But he puts as little faith in the paranormal as he does in the rational.

No dogs snuffling, instead a human voice from beyond the barrier. He flicks off the safety of his gun and makes his winding way through the blizzard of torn, cut and folded magazine pages (he dare not trample them down!) to a spot just beside the door. He's onto them! He is too clever to stand in front of it, his enemies are all too likely to send a spray of machine-gun bullets through it, having lured him to it with the coaxing voice.

He takes a breath, lets it out slowly and evenly in precisely the same way he will soon squeeze the trigger of his weapon. Then he whips around the upper part of his torso so that he can put his eye to the peephole. He looks out, blinks, looks again, then whips his body back to safety. He hears the voice again-the familiar voice of his son.

"Christopher?" His voice is eerily thin, cracked from disuse.

"Dad, it's me. Please open the door."

He takes another breath, lets it out, striving to calm his mind. But it's no use, his son is here. Why?

"Dad?"

"Stand away from the door, son."

Risking another look through the peephole, he sees that Christopher has done as he asked. In the peephole's fish-eye lens he can see all of him now. Christopher is dressed in a lightweight linen suit over a white polo shirt. Polished loafers with tassels are on his feet. He looks as if he's just stepped off the plane. "Dad, please let me in."

He wipes sweat off his face. Hand on the chain across the door frame, he pauses. What if his enemies have captured Christopher and are using him against his will? He'll never know, standing on this side of the door. He slides the chain off, unlocks the door and says, "All right, son. Come on in." Then he steps back, waiting.

Christopher comes through the door and, without being asked, shuts it behind him.

"Lock it, son," he says.

Christopher complies.

"What are you doing here?"

"I've come to get you, Dad."

His eyes narrow and his hand grips the gun with more force. "What d'you mean?"

"You killed Mom," Christopher says.

"I had to-"

"You had no orders."

"There was no time. She was a double working for-" "Dad, you're mistaken."

"Certainly not. I saw her put the intelligence-"

"In the birdhouse," Christopher says. "That was you, Dad. You put the intelligence there."

He takes one terrible staggering step backward. "What?" His head has begun to hurt. "No, I-"

"I saw you do it myself. I took pictures-"

"That's a lie!"

Christopher smiles sadly. "We never lie to one another, Dad. Remember?"

His head hurt all the more, a pounding in the veins that cradle his brain. "Yes, I-"

"Dad, you've been ill. You still are." One hand held out in entreaty. "You thought Mom was onto you and you-"

"No, no, I found that scrap of paper with the rune on it!"

"The Arabic letter, Dad. That was yours. You're fluent in Arabic."

"Am I?" He presses his fingertips into his temple. If only his head would stop pounding he might be able to think clearly. But now he is unsure of the last time he's thought clearly. Could Christopher be right?

But then something odd and chilling occurs to him. "Why are you talking like this? You know nothing of your mother and me-of our secret life. You're a designer of computer software."

Christopher's eyes are soft, his smile all the sadder. "You're the software designer. That's why you were recruited to the Agency, that's how you were doubled-on one of your trips to Shanghai or Bangalore, they don't really know where, and right now it's not important. What is important is that you give me the gun so that we can walk out of here together."

A spasm of irrational rage causes him to lift his weapon. "I'm not going anywhere, with you or anyone else."