James Patterson: Cat & Mouse

“I noticed,” Sampson said without looking at me. He patted my leg. We took in big sips of air.

We didn’t have to wait long. Soneji began another volley of shots. Six shots. Why six shots each time?

He knew we’d be coming for him. Hell, he’d invited me to his shooting spree.

“Here we go,” I said.

We ran across the marble-and-stone corridor. I took out the key to the anteroom, squeezed it between my index finger and thumb.

I turned the key.

Click!

The door wouldn’t open! I jiggled the handle. Nothing.

“What the hell?” Sampson said behind me, anger in his voice. “What’s wrong with the door?”

“I just locked it,” I told him. “Soneji left it open for us.”

DOWNSTAIRS, a couple and two small children started to run. They rushed toward the glass doors and possible freedom. One of the kids tripped and went down hard on his knee. The mother dragged him forward. It was terrifying to watch, but they made it.

The firing started again!

Sampson and I burst into the anteroom, both of us crouched low, our guns drawn.

I caught a glimpse of a dark gray trap straight ahead.

A sniper rifle pointed out from the cover and camouflage of the trap. Soneji was underneath, hidden from view.

Sampson and I fired. Half a dozen gunshots thundered in the close quarters. Holes opened in the tarp. The rifle was silent.

I rushed across the small anteroom and ripped away the trap. I groaned-a deep, gut-wrenching sound.

No one was underneath the tarp. No Gary Soneji!

A Browning automatic rifle was strapped on a metal tripod. A timing device was attached to a rod and the trigger. The whole thing was customized. The rifle would fire at a programmed interval. Six shots, then a pause, then six more shots. No Gary Soneji.

I was already moving again. There were metal doors on the north and south walls of the small room. I yanked open the one closest to me. I expected a trap.

But the connecting space was empty. There was another gray metal door on the opposing wall. The door was shut. Gary Soneji still loved to play games. His favorite trick: He was the only one with the rules.

I rushed across the second room and opened door number two. Was that the game? A surprise? A booby prize behind either door one, two, or three?

I found myself peering inside another small space, another empty chamber. No Soneji. Not a sign of him anywhere.

The room had a metal stairway-it looked as if it went to another floor. Or maybe a crawl space above us.

I climbed the stairs, stopping and starting so he wouldn’t get a clear shot from above. My heart was pounding, my legs trembling. I hoped that Sampson was close behind. I needed cover.

At the top of the stairway, a hatchway was open. No Gary Soneji here either. I had been lured deeper and deeper into some kind of trap, into his web.

My stomach was rolling. I felt a sharp pain building up behind my eyes. Soneji was still somewhere in Union Station. He had to be. He’d said he wanted to see me.

SONEJI SAT as calm as a small-town banker, pretending to read the Washington Post on the 8:45 A.M. Metroliner to Penn Station in New York. His heart was still palpitating, but none of the excitement showed on his face. He wore a gray suit, white shirt, striped blue tie-he looked just like all the rest of the commuter assholes.

He had just tripped the light fantastic, hadn’t he? He had gone where few others ever would have dared. He had just outdone the legendary Charles Whitman, and this was only the beginning of his prime-time exposure. There was a saying he liked a lot. Victory belongs to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.

Soneji drifted in and out of a reverie in which he returned to his beloved woods around Princeton, New Jersey. He could see himself as a boy again. He remembered everything about the dense, uneven, but often spectacularly beautiful terrain. When he was eleven, he had stolen a.22-caliber rifle from one of the surrounding farms. He kept it hidden in a rock quarry near his house. The gun was carefully wrapped in an oilcloth, foil, and burlap bags. The.22-caliber rifle was the only earthly possession that he cared about, the only thing that was truly his.

He remembered how he would scale down a steep, very rocky ravine to a quiet place where the forest floor leveled off, just past a thick tangle of bayberry prickers. There was a clearing in the hollow, and this was the site of his secret, forbidden target practice in those early years. One day he brought a rabbit’s head and a calico cat from the nearby Ruocco farm. There wasn’t much that a cat liked more than a fresh rabbit’s head. Cats were such little ghouls. Cats were like him. To this day, they were magical for him. The way they stalked and hunted was the greatest. That was why he had given one to Dr. Cross and his family.

Little Rosie.

After he had placed the severed bunny’s head in the center of the clearing, he untied the neck of the burlap bag and let the kitty free. Even though he had punched a few airholes in the bag, the cat had almost suffocated. “Sic ’em. Sic the bunny!” he commanded. The cat caught the scent of the fresh kill and took off in a pouncing run. Gary put the.22 rifle on his shoulder and watched. He sighted on the moving target. He caressed the trigger of his deuce-deuce, and then he fired. He was learning how to kill.

You’re such an addict! He chastised himself now, back in the present, on the Metroliner train. Little had changed since he’d been the original Bad Boy in the Princeton area. His stepmother-the gruesome and untalented whore of Babylon -used to lock him in the basement regularly back then. She would leave him alone in the dark, sometimes for as long as ten to twelve hours. He learned to love the darkness, to be the darkness. He learned to love the cellar, to make it his favorite place in the world.

Gary beat her at her own game.

He lived in the underworld, his own private hell. He truly believed he was the Prince of Darkness.

Gary Soneji had to keep bringing himself back to the present, back to Union Station and his beautiful plan. The Metro police were searching the trains.

The police were outside right now! Alex Cross was probably among them.

What a great start to things, and this was only the beginning.

HE COULD see the police jackasses roaming the loading platforms at Union Station. They looked scared, lost and confused, and already half beaten. That was good to know, valuable information. It set a tone for things to come.

He glanced toward a businesswoman sitting across the aisle. She looked frightened, too. White knuckles showing on her clenched hands. Frozen and stiff, shoulders thrown back like a military school cadet.

Soneji spoke to her. He was polite and gentle, the way he could be when he wanted to. “I feel like this whole morning has to be a bad dream. When I was a boy, I used to go-one, two, three, wake up! I could bring myself out of a nightmare that way. It’s sure not working today.”

The woman across the aisle nodded as if he’d said something profound. He’d made a connection with her. Gary had always been able to do that, reach out and touch somebody if he needed to. He figured he needed to now. It would look better if he was talking to a travel companion when the police came through the train car.

“One, two, three, wake up,” she said in a low voice across the aisle. “God, I hope we’re safe down here. I hope they’ve caught him by now. Whoever, whatever he is.”

“I’m sure they will,” Soneji said. “Don’t they always? Crazy people like that have a way of catching themselves.”