Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross Kill

In retrospect, it felt like he had, and I’d fallen for it. Where was all the training I’d done? The protocol? I’d reacted on emotion, charging into the pines after him. Just the way Soneji had wanted me to.

That bothered me because it made me realize that Soneji understood me, could predict my impulses the way I could predict his a dozen years before. I mean, how else would he have known to be at the cemetery when I was there to exhume his body? What or who had tipped him?

I had no answers for that other than the possibility Soneji or The Soneji had us bugged. Or had it just seemed the rational thing to do at some point, given the fact that I’d seen someone who looked just like him at least three times now?

These unanswerable questions weighed on me the entire ride home. I felt depressed climbing from the taxi and waiting for the receipt. Soneji, or whoever, was thinking ahead of me, plotting, hatching, and acting before I could respond.

Climbing the porch stairs, I was beginning to feel like I was a fish on a hook with some angler toying with me, messing with my lip.

But the second I stepped inside the house, smelled something savory coming from Nana Mama’s kitchen, and heard my son, Ali, laughing, I let it go. I let everything about the sonofabitch go.

“Dad?” Jannie said, coming down the stairs. “How’s John?”

“He’s got a fight and a half ahead of him, but he’s alive.”

“Nana Mama said it’s, like, a miracle.”

“I’d have to agree,” I said, and hugged her tight.

“Dad, look at this,” Ali called. “You can’t believe how good this looks.”

“The new TV,” Jannie said. “It’s pretty amazing.”

“What new TV?”

“Nana Mama and Ali ordered it off the internet. They just installed it.”

I stepped into our once cozy television room to see it had been transformed into a home theater, with new leather chairs, and a huge, curved 4K resolution HD screen on the far wall. Ali had on a repeat of The Walking Dead, one of his favorites, and the zombies looked like they were right there in the room with us.

“You should see when we switch it to 3D, Dad!” Ali said. “It’s crazy!”

“I can see that,” I said. “Does it do basketball?”

Ali took his eyes off the screen. “They’re right in the room with you.”

I smiled. “You’ll have to show me after dinner.”

“I can do that,” Ali said. “Show you how to run it from your laptop.”

I gave him the thumbs up, and then wandered through the dining room to the kitchen upgrade and great room addition we’d put on two years before.

Nana Mama was bustling at her command-center stove.

“Roast chicken, sweet potato fries, broccoli with almonds, and a nice salad,” she said. “How’s John?”

“Sleeping when I left,” I said. “And dinner sounds great. Nice TV.”

She made a deep inhaling sound, and said, “Isn’t it? I can’t wait to see Masterpiece Theatre on there. That Downton Abbey show.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.

Nana Mama looked over her shoulder, gave me a sour, threatening look, and said, “Don’t you be mocking me, now.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Nana,” I said, trying to hide the smile that wanted to creep onto my face. “Oh, I thought you said you weren’t going to let the lottery money change our lives.”

“I said I didn’t want some big mansion to get lost in,” she snapped. “Or tooling around in some ridiculous car. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some nice things in this house, and still do some good for people. Which reminds me, when is my hot-breakfast program going to be able to start up again?”

I held up my hands. “I’ll find out tonight.”

“I’m not getting any younger, and I want to see that ongoing,” she said. “Endowed. And that reading program for kids.”

“Yes, ma’am, and you’re sure you’re not getting younger? Isn’t there a painting of you in some attic that shows your real age?”

She tried to fight it, but that brought on a smile. “Aren’t you just the smoothest talker in—?”

“Dad?” Ali cried, running into the kitchen.

He looked petrified, on the verge of crying.

“What’s the matter?”

“Someone’s taken over my computer,” he said.

“What?” Nana Mama said.

“There’s this crazy man on the screen now, not The Walking Dead, and he won’t turn off. He’s holding a baby and saying, like, over and over that he’s going to come for you, Dad, even from the grave.”

In the video clip, Gary Soneji was just as I remembered him: out on one of Grand Central Station’s train platforms, holding the infant, and taunting me.

I’d never seen the video. Never knew it existed, but it was definitely legitimate. After viewing the clip six or seven times, I could see my own shadow stretched in the space between me and Gary Soneji. The camera operator all those years ago had to have been right off my left shoulder.

Was the cameraman a fluke? A random passerby? Or someone working with Soneji?

The clip started again. It appeared on endless loop.

“Dad, this is giving me the creeps,” Jannie said. “Turn it off.”

“Gimme the remote and the computer, Ali,” I said.

“I’ve got homework on this computer,” he said.

“I’ll transfer your homework to the one in the kitchen,” I said, and gave him a gimme motion.

He groaned and handed it to me.

Bree came in the front door. I hit the Power button on the remote, but the screen did not turn off. Instead, it broke from that endless loop to Kelly green.

I tried to turn the screen off again, but it jumped to black, slashed diagonally with a golden beam of light. The camera zoomed closer to that light and you could see a silhouette of a person there.

Closer, it was a man.

Closer still, and it was Soneji.

He was giving the lens the same quarter profile we’d seen in the still image that Gary’s Girl posted on the website forum, the one where his eye and the corner of his mouth conspired to leer right at me.

But this time Soneji spoke.

In that cracking, hoarse voice I’d heard earlier that day in the pine barrens, Soneji said, “You’re not safe in the trees, Cross. You’re not safe in your own home. The Soneji are everywhere!”

Then he threw his head back, and barked and brayed his laughter before the screen froze. A title appeared below: www.thesoneji.net.

“What’s that, Dad?” Ali asked, upset.

I stormed to the screen, followed the cord to its power source, and tore it violently out of the wall.

“Alex?” Bree said. “What’s going on?”

I looked at Ali. “Was that Walking Dead episode streaming from Netflix?”

“Yes.”

Yanking out my cell phone, I looked to Bree and said, “Soneji hacked into our internet feed.”

“I’ll shut the router down,” Bree said.

“No, don’t,” I said. I scrolled through my recent calls and hit Call. “I have a feeling it will be better if the link’s still active.”

The phone picked up. “Yes?”

“This is Alex Cross,” I said. “How fast can you get to my house?”

Forty minutes later, as we were finishing up Nana Mama’s roast chicken masterpiece, and fighting over who was going to get the last wing and who the last sweet potato fries, there was a sharp knock at our side door.

“I’ll get it,” I said, put my napkin down, and went out into the great room and unlocked the door that led to the side yard and the alley behind our place.

I did not turn on the light, just opened it quickly and let our visitors inside. The first was Ned Mahoney, my former partner at the FBI. The second was Special Agent Henna Batra of the Bureau’s cybercrime unit.