“You read that damn article years ago?” I said.
“And in my spare time, I’ve been playing you ever since. Plotting, executing, outfoxing. All while you bumbled and choked at every turn. World’s greatest detective.” He snorted. “I don’t think so.”
Despite the put-down, I realized M, or whatever his name was, had just told me quite a bit about himself, intrinsic things. He’d shown me the cracks in the facade and perhaps given me tools to widen those cracks.
“You won,” I said. “It’s true. You beat me. Whatever your name is, whatever your reason, I suppose you are now the greatest criminal on earth.”
He made a low humming noise in his throat but said nothing, just watched me.
“It follows, doesn’t it?” I said. “You defeat the best detective, you’re number one.”
After a moment’s pause, he said, “I suppose it does follow, yes.”
“They’ll be talking about you for years.”
M hummed again.
“Right there with the immortals,” I said. “John Wilkes Booth. Ted Bundy. Lee Harvey Oswald. John Wayne Gacy. Kyle Craig.”
M made a clucking sound, said, “I am more than all of them combined.”
“You’re not too far off. They’ll write books about your life. Maybe make a movie. But that will be long after you’re dead.”
M said nothing, and he never took his eyes off me.
I said, “Do you know they have a place where they bury people like you?”
“You don’t understand, Cross. There’s no one like me.”
“But there are. Sadists. Serial killers. Assassins. Predators so vicious, whose crimes are so heinous, that their own relatives refuse to retrieve their bodies for proper burial. Cemeteries refuse the bodies too, something about not wanting them to defile a sacred place. So you and all your buddies are taken to this remote corner of Marine Base Quantico and buried under nameless headstones. I thought you’d want to know where you’re going to end up eventually.”
As I spoke, I watched his eyes shift from impassive to soulless.
“Many other men have made the mistake of trying to get inside my head,” M said, raising the pistol. “They had no idea what I was capable of, and neither do you.”
Starting in the pit of my stomach, terror swept through me.
I held up both palms, said, “Please, don’t shoot, M—”
“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.
With plainclothes agents watching my house from every angle and a pin mike inside my collar, I’d started drinking that night.