Cat & Mouse

I scooped out a shovelful of ash. Something came with the ash. It was hard, heavier. My expectations weren’t high. I was still just collecting data, anything and everything, even the contents of an old stove. I emptied the ashes onto the worktable in a pile, then smoothed it out.

I saw what the small shovel had struck. I flipped over the new evidence with the tip of the shovel. Yes, I said to myself. I finally had something, the first bit of evidence.

It was Alex Cross’s detective shield, and it was burned and charred.

Someone wanted us to find the shield.

The intruder wants to play! I thought. This is cat and mouse.

Chapter 83

Ile-de-France

DR. ABEL SANTE was normally a calm and collected man. He was widely known in the medical community to be erudite, but surprisingly down-to-earth. He was a nice man, too, a gentle physician.

Now he desperately tried to put his mind somewhere other than where his body was. Just about anywhere else in the universe would do just fine.

He had already spent several hours remembering minute details from his pleasant, almost idyllic, boyhood in Re

He needed to be somewhere else, to exist anywhere else but where he actually was. He needed to exist in the past, or even in the future, but not in the present. He was reminded of The English Patient-both the book and the movie. He was Count Almasy now, wasn’t he? Only his torture was even worse than Almasy’s horribly burned flesh. He was in the grasp of Mr. Smith.

He thought about Regina constantly now, and he realized that he loved her fiercely, and what a fool he’d been not to marry her years ago. What an arrogant bastard, and what a huge fool!

How dearly he wanted to live now, and to see Regina again. Life seemed so damned precious to him at this moment, in this terrible place, under these monstrous conditions.

No, this wasn’t a good way to be thinking. It brought him down-it brought him back to reality, to the present. No, no no! Go somewhere else in your mind. Anywhere but here.

The present line of thought brought him to this tiny compartment, this infinitesimal X on the globe where he was now a prisoner, and where no one could possibly find him. Not the flics, not Interpol, not the entire French Army, or the English, or the Americans, or the Israelis!

Dr. Sante could easily imagine the furor and outrage, the panic continuing in Paris and throughout France. NOTED PHYSICIAN AND TEACHER ABDUCTED! The headline in Le Monde would read something like that. Or, NEW MR. SMITH HORROR IN PARIS.

He was the horror! He was certain that tens of thousands of police, as well as the army, were searching for him now. Of course, every hour he was missing, his chances for survival grew dimmer. He knew that from reading past articles about Mr. Smith’s unearthly abductions, and what happened to the victims.

Why me? God Almighty, he couldn’t stand this infernal monologue anymore.

He couldn’t stand this nearly upside-down position, this terribly cramped space, for one more second.

He just couldn’t bear it. Not one more second!

Not one more second!

Not one more second!

He couldn’t breathe!

He was going to die in here.

Right here, in a goddamn dumbwaiter. Stuck between floors, in a godforsaken house in Ile-de-France somewhere on the outskirts of Paris.

Mr. Smith had put him in the dumbwaiter, stuffed him inside like a bundle of dirty laundry, and then left him there-for God only knew how long. It seemed like hours, at least several hours, but Abel Sante really wasn’t sure anymore.

The excruciating pain came and went, but mostly it rushed through his body in powerful waves. His neck, his shoulders, and his chest ached so badly, beyond belief, beyond his tolerance for pain. The feeling was as if he’d been slowly crushed into a squarish heap. If he hadn’t been claustrophobic before, he was now.

But that wasn’t the worst part of this. No, it wasn’t the worst. The most terrifying thing was that he knew what all of France wanted to know, what the whole world wanted to know.

He knew certain things about Mr. Smith’s identity. He knew precisely how he talked. He believed that Mr. Smith might be a philosopher, perhaps a university professor or student.

He had even seen Mr. Smith.

He had looked out from the dumbwaiter-upside down, no less-and stared into Smith’s hard, cold eyes, seen his nose, his lips.

Mr. Smith saw that.

Now there was no hope for him.

“Damn you, Smith. Damn you to hell. I know your shitty secret. I know everything now. You are a fucking alien! You aren’t human.”

Chapter 84

“YOU REALLY think we’re going to track down this son of a bitch? You think this guy is dumb?”

John Sampson asked me point-blank, challenging me. He was dressed all in black, and he wore Ray-Ban sunglasses. He looked as if he were already in mourning. The two of us were flying in an FBI Bell Jet helicopter from Washington to Princeton, New Jersey. We were supposed to work together for a while.

“You think Gary Soneji did this somehow? Think he’s Houdini? You think maybe he’s still alive?” Sampson went on. “What the hell do you think?”

“I don’t know yet.” I sighed. “I’m still collecting data. It’s the only way I know how to work. No, I don’t think Soneji did it. He’s always worked alone before this. Always.”

I knew that Gary Soneji had grown up in New Jersey, then gone on to become one of the most savage murderers of the times. It didn’t seem as if his run were over yet. Soneji was part of the ongoing mystery.

Alex Cross’s notes on Soneji were extensive. I was finding useful and interesting insights all through the notes, and I was less than a third of the way through. I had already decided that Cross was a sharp police detective but an even better psychologist. His hypotheses and hunches weren’t merely clever and imaginative; they were often right. There’s an important difference in that, which many people fail to see, especially people in medium-high places.

I looked up from my reading.

“I’ve had some luck with difficult killers before. All except the one I really want to catch,” I told Sampson.

He nodded, but his eyes stayed locked onto mine. “This Mr. Smith something of a cult hero now? Over in Europe, especially, the Continent, London, Paris, Frankfurt.”

I wasn’t surprised that Sampson was aware of the ongoing case. The tabloids had made Mr. Smith their latest icon. The stories were certainly compelling reading. They played up the angle that Smith might be an alien. Even newspapers like the New York Times and the Times of London had run stories stating that police authorities believed Smith might be an extraterrestrial being who had come here to study humans. To grok, as it were.

“Smith has become the evil E.T. Something for X-Files fans to contemplate between TV episodes. Who knows, perhaps Mr. Smith is a visitor from outer space, at least from some other parallel world. He doesn’t have anything in common with human beings, I can vouch for that. I’ve visited the murder scenes.”

Sampson nodded. “Gary Soneji didn’t have much in common with the human race,” he said in his deep, strangely quiet voice. “Soneji was from another planet, too. He’s an ALF, alien life-form.”

“I’m not sure he fits the same psychological profile as Smith.”

“Why is that?” he asked. His eyes narrowed. “You think your mass killer is smarter than our mass killer?”

“I’m not saying that. Gary Soneji was very bright, but he made mistakes. So far, Mr. Smith hasn’t made any.”