James Patterson: Truth or Die

She said she’d be here in twenty minutes. That was hours ago. Did they get to her? Am I next?

He’d thought about leaving town, but it was already so late. There were no buses, trains, or planes he could catch at this hour, and he knew you had to be twenty-five to rent a car. His driver’s license couldn’t get him a beer, let alone a Buick.

All in all, the only real option was a taxi, but that didn’t feel like a good idea, for some reason. Just his gut instinct.

No, he would wait it out until morning, stick with his plan.

It was a good plan, extremely well thought out, with the highest attention to every detail. Of course, when you’re sporting an IQ that approaches the boiling point of water, anticipation is your stock in trade. You see the future before others do. You live it, too.

“The Boy Genius!” declared his hometown paper back in Amherst, New Hampshire, in a front-page story when Owen was only four. By then, he had memorized the periodic table, could read and write in three languages, and was doing complex algebra. The photo accompanying the article showed him shaking hands with Steve Jobs at a “Pioneers of Tomorrow” conference at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

For an entire year after that, Owen wore only a black mock turtleneck everywhere he went.

Elementary school was finished at age six, junior high at eight, and then high school when he was eleven. At fourteen, he was the youngest ever to graduate from Cal Berkeley, earning summa cum laude and salutatorian honors. He would’ve been valedictorian if it hadn’t been for a B+ in comparative Russian literature. Even geniuses have their blind spots.

Next up were combined MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School and MIT at age seventeen, after which Owen spent nearly two years at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, aka the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, studying what had become his true passion: artificial neural networks.

That was when the two men first approached him, one night as he was leaving the library. They were Americans.

“How would you like to help save the world?” one asked.

Owen laughed, not taking him seriously at first. “Only if I get to wear a cape,” he said.

A predilection for sarcasm commensurate with sapience , read the extensive psych profile of Owen that the two men had already seen.

“No, I’m afraid there’s no cape or even a skintight suit,” said the other man. “However, you will get to be a part of the digital age’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project.”

Owen liked the sound of that. Loved it, to be more precise. It was his chance to make history. And who doesn’t want to do that?

But that was then.

Now, less than a year later, here he was hiding out in a cramped hotel room — in Manhattan, no less — hoping against hope that he’d live to see another sunrise.

Turned out, Owen Lewis had the one problem he never thought he’d have. Not in a million years. Or certainly, at least, not before his twenty-first birthday.

It was why they wanted to kill him, the Boy Genius.

He knew too much.

Without once taking his eyes off his scuffed-up laptop and the live feed from the hallway, Owen bit off another triangle of the twelve-dollar Toblerone from his minibar and dialed Claire Parker’s cell for a third time. And for the third time the call went straight to voice mail.

Something was wrong. He just didn’t know what. There were a few plausible explanations as to why she hadn’t shown up at his room, ranging from the relatively harmless to the absolute worst-case scenario. He could speculate all he wanted, but that was all it would be. Speculation. The important thing now was whether or not she was the only one who knew his location.

She wasn’t.

Two minutes later, the image of the man stepping off the elevator at the other end of the hallway told Owen so much at once that his brain tingled with overload, which was no small feat.

Male... solo... decent physique... running shoes... baseball cap with curled bill... no room key in hand... no suitcase or carry-on...

The man paused by the elevator bank to look at the directional sign for the rooms on the floor. If he’d just been checking in, thought Owen, he’d almost certainly have had luggage. If he’d been staying at the hotel already, he’d have had no need to look at the sign.

Plus, with that curled bill on his baseball cap, he could shield his face from any security cameras in the hotel.

But most incriminating of all?

None of that mattered.

The guy could’ve been a blind midget wearing a clown suit, and it wouldn’t have changed anything. It was four in the morning and he was heading straight toward room 1701. Thirty yards away and closing.

As if his chair had springs, Owen jumped up and slap-closed his laptop, stuffing it in his already packed backpack along with the wireless receiver for the transmitting camera outside in the hallway.

He sprinted into the bathroom, where he’d already filled the tub to the brim with water, not an inch of porcelain left dry. With a hard yank, he turned the shower on full blast.

As for the hotel’s hair dryer, it was already plugged in, the surge protector dismantled and the outlet rewired to deliver the maximum current possible. Suffice it to say, that sort of thing doesn’t get a chapter in Electrical Wiring for Dummies .

Quickly backing out of the bathroom, Owen took one last look at the setup before shutting the door, his eyes darting about to make sure all the elements were in place.

The shower curtain drawn closed, tucked inside the tub.

The cord of the hair dryer knotted around the towel bar to ensure that it would remain plugged into the outlet no matter what.

And the floor mat strategically placed on the tile floor to ensure that Owen wouldn’t slip when he came barging in behind the guy.

From the room next door.

This was the plan, all right. Based on two things Owen knew as surely as he knew that sunrise was only a few hours away.

The first was primal. Sometimes in life it’s as simple as kill or be killed.

Second, professional hit men aren’t exactly suckers. You can’t expect them to fall for the “I’m in the shower” trick simply because you’ve got the door to the room cracked open and have the water running. They’ll search the rest of your room first, top to bottom.

So hiding behind the armchair in the corner or squeezing yourself under the bed? Probably the very last dumb idea you’ll ever have.

No, if you want the true element of surprise, you need to think outside the box. Better yet, come up with your own box.

Just make sure there’s a connecting door.

“I’d like two rooms,” he’d told the clerk at the front desk when he checked in. “And they need to be adjoining.”

Owen slipped through the double doors separating room 1701 from 1703, pulling the first one closed behind him. His heart was pounding like a jackhammer against his chest, but he couldn’t help noticing that it wasn’t just fear. As crazy as it sounded, he also felt a twinge of excitement, a sort of in-the-moment buzz of anticipation that came from an intellectual curiosity always in hyperdrive. A prodigy’s conceit, if you will.

In other words, he desperately wanted to know if his plan would work. And there was only one way to find out.

Pressing his ear up against the door, all Owen could now do was wait and wonder.

“Will you walk into my parlor?” said the Spider to the Fly.

I owned only one cell phone, as opposed to Claire’s three, and it was pinned to my ear as I entered the lobby of the Lucinda at four in the morning, pretending to be completely engrossed in a conversation.