Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(78)

“Shut up,” he said, losing all affect, turning asocial, amoral, and moving his gun to aim at my face. “Alex Cross, welcome to the dead.”





CHAPTER 100





I HAVE HEARD OTHERS DESCRIBE the surreal moment when they faced certain death. They say that time seemed to slow.

Neuropsychologists know that time doesn’t slow in these moments.

Instead, the brain, faced with the possibility of extinction, secretes chemicals that ignite parts of the mind rarely used. The brain lights up, electrically brilliant, and runs so fast that it is able to receive and process information at hundreds of times its normal speed.

And so, for a person confronted with death, events seem to slow.

In the split second between M’s last words to me and his finger tugging the trigger, I saw every nuance in that man’s face, smelled the foul odor coming off him, and heard glass tinkle and bones crack before blood burst from his chest.

M arched and twisted as he shot.

His bullet almost took off the tip of my right ear and embedded in the wall behind me.

His lower body sagged. His left hand slammed on the desk, and he tried to get the pistol back on me.

I’d already taken two strides and launched over the top of my desk. My left hand knocked his gun arm aside. My right forearm and all my weight hit him square in the chest.

We crashed against a bookcase and fell to the floor. My fist was instantly back, elbow high.

But M wasn’t moving.

For one heart-wrenching moment, I thought I’d gone too far and killed him before he could tell me where my son was.

Then I saw his chest moving as he labored for breath, and blood still spurted from his wound.

“Great shot, John,” I said, gasping. “He’s down, but alive. We need an ambulance.”

I threw his pistol aside, tore off my sweatshirt, and pressed it against the exit wound. M’s eyes came half open, and he coughed and choked, trying to get air.

“Don’t move,” I said. “There are EMTs coming. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney.”

I continued through the Miranda warning, and M’s eyes opened wider. I thought I saw fear in them.

“Can’t move my legs,” he whispered when I was finished. “Can’t feel a thing.”

Sirens wailed toward the house. “Where’s my son?”

He closed his eyes.

“It’s over, M. Where’s my son?” He didn’t reply.

I felt like smashing him in the face, but boots were pounding up my stairs.

I got up, shaky, nauseated. Ned Mahoney was first through the door, with Bree right behind him.

“You good?” Mahoney asked.

“Better than him,” I said, going to hug Bree.

She had tears in her eyes but pushed me back. “I love you, baby, but you’re covered in blood.”

“His blood,” I said as the EMTs came into the little office, which was now packed. “Let’s get out of their way.”

We climbed down the stairs and stood there looking at each other.

“I am never watching you act as bait ever again,” Bree said.

“And for the rest of my life, I will never drink another drop of whiskey.”





CHAPTER 101





Soon the rest of the family will be like him and Granny, gasping and clawing for air.

That text had been M’s undoing.

The week before, in the moments after I got that text, I’d had a strange reaction that I couldn’t explain at first.

Granny, gasping and clawing for air.

Then I realized that M had to have known about Nana Mama’s attack.

Except that was impossible. Only six people had known: Me, Bree, Nana, Jannie, Sampson, and Mahoney. That was it.

We hadn’t called for an ambulance. We hadn’t called anyone.

There was only one explanation: M had bugged our house.

Two hours after Bree left with Nana and Jannie for Ned’s beach house, there was a knock at my front door. Keith Karl Rawlins, the FBI cybercrimes contractor, was there, posing as a fumigation specialist. He said the construction next door had turned up signs of termites, and he offered me a free check.

Soon after, we knew that M had not only been listening to us via bugs in four different rooms but also watching us on two separate fiber-optic cameras, one in the kitchen and one in my attic office.

How and when he’d placed them was a complete mystery to us, but there was no doubt the cameras and bugs were feeding wirelessly to a small transponder mounted high on a telephone pole across the street; the transponder sent it to the internet by satellite.

When Rawlins and I met with Mahoney away from my house later that day, Rawlins wanted to take down the transponder and analyze it, but I overruled him.

“He doesn’t know we know he’s watching,” I said. “We can use that, draw him out.”

“How?” Mahoney said.

“By setting me up as bait,” I said. “Ultimately, he wants me in some kind of showdown, I think, lured by the promise of rescuing Ali.”

We decided I had to start acting as if Ali’s abduction had been a crushing blow that left me a weak, despondent, self-destructive loser, incapable of playing any game, much less a life-or-death one. M would fear that he’d never get that final conflict.