Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

Will we drive off into the sunset after all this? Sara Rosen wondered. Oh, I think not. I don't suppose that we will. What will happen to us, then? Oh, what will happen to us? What will become of Jack and Jill?

“I've only been to the Cipriani in my dreams,” she confessed to Sam. “Only in dreams. But, yes, I've been there many, many times.”

“Is this all a dream, Monkey Face?” Sam asked. His look was serious for a moment. She couldn't help thinking how precious every moment like this was, and how fleeting. She had secretly yearned for this all of her life, for one truly romantic experience.

“I think it's a dream, yes. It's like a dream anyway Please don't wake me, though, Sam.”

“It's not a dream,” Sam whispered. "I love you. You are the most lovable woman I've ever met. You are, Sara. You're like staying at the Cipriani every day for me. Please believe that, Monkey Face.

Believe in us. I do."

He clasped Sara from behind and pulled her closer. She savored the sweetness of his breath, the smell of his cologne, the smell of him.

He began to move inside her and she felt herself melting into a liquid force. She did love him -- she did, she did, she did. Her hands ran all over him, touching, possessing. There had never been anything like this before in her life, nothing even close.

She slithered up and down on his long, powerful pole, his strength, his exquisite malehess. Sara couldn't stop herself now, and she didn't want to. She was choking with her own passion.

She heard her voice crying out and almost didn't recognize herself. She was joined with him in a simple rhythm that got faster and faster as the two of them came closer to being one --Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill, Jack and Jill!

THEIR FAIRY TALE ended with a quiet, almost disheartening thud, and Sara felt herself crashing back to earth, tumbling, being rushed along in a powerful tide. Monday morning meant a return to the dreary work world again, to real life.

Sara Rosen had held “normal,” boring jobs around Washington for fourteen years, ever since she'd graduated from Hollins College in Virginia. She had a day job now. A perfect job for their purposes. The dreariest and weariest of jobs.

That morning, she rose early to get ready. She and Sam had separated on Sunday night at the Four Seasons. She missed him, missed his humor, missed his touch, missed everything about him. Every inch.

She had gotten lost in that thought. Inches. Millimeters. The essence of Sam. His tremendous inner strength. She glanced at the luminescent face of the clock on her bed stand. She groaned out loud. Quarter to five. Dammit, she was already late.

Her bathroom had a yoga corner with a custom-made leather mat. No time for that, though her body and mind ached for the discipline and the release.

She took a quick shower and washed her hair with Salon Selectives shampoo. She put on a navy Brooks Brothers suit, low pumps, a leather-strapped Raymond Weil watch. She needed to look sharp, look alert, look freshly scrubbed this morning.

Somehow, she always came out like that anyway. Sara the freshly starched.

She hurried outside, where a grimy yellow cab was already waiting at the curb, wagging a tail of smoke. The wind whooped and howled up and down K Street.

At five-twenty, the yellow cab pulled up in front of her workplace. The Liberty Cab driver smiled and said, “A famous address, my lady. 50, are you somebody famous?”

She paid the driver and collected change from a five-dollar bill.

“Actually, I might be someday,” she said. “You never know.”

“Yeah, maybe I'm somebody, too,” the driver said with a crooked smile. “You never know.”

Sara Rosen climbed out of the cab and felt the early December wind in her face. The pristine building before her looked strangely beautiful and imposing in the early-morning light. It appeared to be shining, actually, glowing from the inside out.

She showed her ID card, and security let her pass inside.

She and the guard even shared a quick laugh about her being a workaholic. And why not? Sara Rosen had worked inside the White House for nine years.

Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

PART 3

THE PHOTOJOURNALIST

THE PHOTOJOURNALIST was the last piece in the complex puzzle. He was the final player. He was working in San Francisco on December 8. Actually, the photojournalist was playing the game in San Francisco. Or rather, he was playing around the outer edges of the game.

Kevin Hawkins sat in a scooped-out, gray plastic chair at Gate 31. He contentedly played chess with himself on a PowerBook. He was winning; he was losing. He enjoyed it either way Hawkins loved games, loved chess, and he was close to being one of the better players in the world. It had been that way ever since he'd been a bright, lonely, underachieving boy in Hudson, New York. At quarter to eleven he got up from his seat to go play another kind of game. This was his favorite game in the world.

He was in San Francisco to kill someone.

As he walked through the busy airport, Kevin Hawkins snapped off photograph after photograph -- all in his mind.

The prizewinning photojournalist was outfitted in his usual studied-casual manner: tight black cord jeans with a black T-shirt, tribal bracelets from several trips to Zambia, a diamond stud earring. A Lcica camera was looped around his neck on a leather strap decorated with engravings.

The photojournalist slipped into a crowded bathroom in Corridor C. He observed a ragged line of men slouched at the urinals.

They are like pigs at a through, he thought. Like water buffalo, or oxen, taught to stand on their hind legs.

His eye composed the shot and snapped it off. A beauty of order and sly wit. The Boys at the Bowl.

The urinal scene reminded him of a clever pickpocket he had once seen operate in Bangkok. The thief, a keen student of human nature, would snatch wallets while gents were in midstream at a urinal and were reluctant, or unable, to go after him.

The photojournalist couldn't forget the comical image whenever he entered an airport men's room. He rarely forgot any image, actually. His mind was a well-run archive, a rival to Kodak's vast storehouses of pictures in Rochester.

He peered at his own image, a rather haggard and pasty-white face, in one of the cloudy bathroom mirrors. Unimpressive in every way, he couldn't help but think. His eyes were war-weary, an almost washed-out blue. Gazing at his eyes depressed him -- so much so that he sighed involuntarily.

He saw no other mind pictures to take in the mirror. Never, ever, a picture of himself.

He started to cough and couldn't stop. He finally brought up a thick packet of despicable, yellowish paste. His inner core, he thought. His animus was slowly leaking out.

Kevin Hawkins was only forty-three, but he felt like a hundred.

He had lived too hard, especially the last fourteen years. His life and times had been so very intense, often flamboyant and occasionally absurd. He had been burned, he often imagined, from every conceivable angle. He had played the game of life and death too hard, too well, too often.

He started to cough again and popped a Halls into his mouth.

Kevin Hawkins checked the time on his Seiko Kinetic wristwatch.

He quickly finger-combed his lank, grayish blond hair and then left the public bathroom.

He merged smoothly with the thick corridor traffic rolling past on the killing floor. It was almost time, and he was feeling a nice out-of-body buzz. He hummed an old, absolutely ridiculous song called “Rock the Casbah.” He was pulling a dark Delsey suitcase hinged on one of those cheap roller contraptions that were so popular. The “walking” suitcase made him look like a tourist, like a nobody of the first order.