Alex Cross 03 - Jack & Jill

by James Patterson

  NO ONE heard me shouting. I could barely hear my own voice in the melee. There was too much noise and confusion inside Madison Square Garden.

  I pushed ahead anyway, desperately following the phalanx that looked like the rabble at a prizefight from my vantage point. The smoke from the bomb had created a kind of strobe-light effect.

  “Change the escape route! Change the escape route!” I shouted over and over.

  We finally entered the whitewashed concrete tunnel. Every sound echoed bizarrely off the walls. I was right behind the last of the Secret Service agents.

  “Don’t go this way! Stop the President!” I continued to yell in vain.

  The tunnel was full of late-arriving special guests and even more security guards. We were pushing forward against a strong tide coming the other way.

  It was too late to change the route now. I pushed and shoved my way closer and closer to President and Mrs. Byrnes. I desperately searched the crowd for the face of Kevin Hawkins. There was still a chance to stop him.

  Every face I encountered registered shock. The eyes I saw were wide with fear, and they were searching my face. Suddenly, there were several loud pops in the heart of the tunnel. Gunshots!

  Five shots seemed to explode inside the tight phalanx of people around the President. Someone had gotten inside the defense perimeter. My body sagged as if I’d been shot myself.

  Five shots. Three quick—then two more.

  I couldn’t see what had happened up ahead, but suddenly I heard the eeriest sound. It was a high-pitched wail, a keening.

  Five shots!

  Three—then two more.

  The keening sound was coming from where I had last seen fleeting glimpses of President Byrnes, where the shots had exploded just a few seconds before.

  I shoved my body, all my weight against the crowd and forced myself toward the epicenter of the madness.

  It felt as if I were trying to swim out of quicksand, to pull myself free. It was almost impossible to walk, to push, to shove.

  Five shots. What had happened up ahead?

  Then I could see. I saw everything at once.

  My mouth felt incredibly dry. My eyes were watering. The bunkerlike tunnel had become strangely quiet. President Thomas Byrnes was down on the gray cement floor. A lot of blood was flowing in rivulets, spreading down his white shirt. Bright red blood drained from the right side of his face, or maybe the wound was high in his neck. I couldn’t tell from where I was.

  Gunshots. Execution-style.

  A professional hit.

  Jack and Jill, those bastards!

  It was their pattern, or close to it.

  I waded forward, roughly, shoving people out of my way. I saw Don Hamerman, Jay Grayer, and then Sally Byrnes. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.

  Sally Byrnes was trying to get to her husband. The First Lady didn’t appear to be hurt. Still, I wondered if she was a target, too. Maybe Jill’s target? Secret Service agents were holding Mrs. Byrnes back, trying to protect her. They wanted to keep her away from the bloodshed, from her husband, from any possible danger.

  I saw a second body then. The shock was like a low hard punch to my stomach. No one could have anticipated this terrible scene.

  A woman was down near the President. She’d been shot in her right eye socket. There was a second wound in her throat. She appeared to be dead. A semiautomatic lay near her sprawled body.

  The assassin?

  Jill?

  Who else could it possibly be?

  My eyes were drawn back to the motionless figure of Thomas Byrnes. I was afraid that he was already dead. I couldn’t be sure, but I believed he’d been hit at least three times. I saw Sally Byrnes finally reach her husband’s body. She was weeping uncontrollably, and she wasn’t the only one.

  CHAPTER

  92

  JACK SAT STILL and calmly watched the maze of bumper-to-bumper cars and tractor-trailers stalled on West Street near the entrance to New York’s Holland Tunnel.

  He could hear radios blaring on each side of his black Jeep. He observed the troubled and confused faces inside the cars. A middle-aged woman in a forest-green Lexus was in tears. A thousand sirens screamed like banshees on the loose in mid-town.

  Jack and Jill came to The Hill. Now everyone knew why, or at least they thought they did.

  Now everyone understood the seriousness of the game.

  Turn off your news reports, he wanted to tell all these well-meaning people approaching the tunnel out of New York. What’s happened has nothing to do with any of you. It really and truly doesn’t. You’ll never know the truth. No one ever will. You can’t handle the truth, anyway. You wouldn’t understand if I stopped and explained it to you right here.

  He tried not to think about Sara Rosen as he finally rode into the long, claustrophobic tunnel that snaked beneath the Hudson. Beyond the tunnel, he drove south on the New Jersey Turnpike, then on 1-95 into Delaware and points father south.

  Sara was the past, and the past didn’t matter. The past didn’t exist, except as a lesson for the future. Sara was gone. He did think about poor Sara as he ate at the Country Cupboard near the Talleyville exit on the turnpike. It was important to grieve. For Jill, not for President Byrnes. She was worth a dozen Thomas Byrneses. She had done a good job, a nearly perfect job, even if she had been used right from the start. And Sara Rosen had definitely been used. She had been his eyes and ears inside the White House. She had been his mistress. Poor Monkey Face.

  As he approached Washington about seven that night, he made a vow: he wouldn’t sentimentalize about Sara again. He knew he could do that. He could control his own thoughts. He was better than Kevin Hawkins, who had been a very good soldier indeed.

  He had been Jack.

  But he was no longer Jack.

  Jack no longer existed.

  He was no longer Sam Harrison, either. Sam Harrison had been a facade, a necessary safeguard, a part of the complex plan. Sam Harrison no longer existed.

  Now his life could be simple and mostly good again. He was almost home. He had completed his Mission: Impossible, and it was a success. Everything had gone almost perfectly.

  Then he was home, pulling into the familiar rounded driveway that was filled with colorful seashells and tiny pebbles and a few children’s toys.

  He saw his little girl come running out of the house, her blond hair streaming. He saw his wife close behind her, also running. Tears rolled down her cheeks and down his own. He wasn’t afraid to cry. He wasn’t afraid of anything anymore.

  Jesus God, mercy, the war was finally ended. The enemy, the evil one, was dead. The good guys had won, and the most precious way of life on earth was safe for a little while longer—for the lives of his children, anyway.

  No one would ever know how and why it had happened, or who was really responsible.

  Just as it had been with JFK in Dallas.

  And RFK in Los Angeles.

  And Watergate and Whitewater and most every other significant event in our recent history. In truth, our history was not knowing; it was being carefully shielded from the truth. That was the American way.

  “I love you so much,” his wife whispered breathlessly against the side of his face. “You are my hero. You did such a good, brave thing.”

  He believed it, too. He knew it deep within his heart.

  He wasn’t Jack anymore. Jack no longer existed.

  CHAPTER

  93

  IT WASN’T OVER!

  At a little past noon, the Secret Service received news from the NYPD of another homicide. They had strong reason to believe it was related to the shooting of President Byrnes.

  Jay Grayer and I rushed to the Peninsula Hotel, which is just off Fifth Avenue in midtown. We were completely numb from the horror of the morning and still couldn’t believe the President had been shot. Even so, we had all the details of the latest murder. A chambermaid at the hotel had discovered a body in a suite on the twelfth floor. There was
also a poem from Jack and Jill in the room. A final poem?

  “What is the NYPD saying?” I asked Jay during the ride uptown. “What are the details?”

  “According to the initial report, the dead woman might be Jill. Jill could have been murdered—or maybe she committed suicide. They’re reasonably certain the note is authentic.”

  The mysteries inside horrific mysteries continued. Was this death part of the Jack and Jill scheme, too? I thought that probably it was, and that there were even more layers to unravel—layers upon layers—before getting to the core of the horror.

  Grayer and I emerged from a gold-plated elevator onto the crime-scene floor. New York police were everywhere. I saw emergency medics, SWAT team members in helmets with Plexiglas face masks, uniforms, homicide detectives. The scene was instant bedlam. I was worried about evidence contamination, leaks to the press.

  “The President?” one of the New York detectives asked us as we arrived. “Any word? Any hope?”

  “He’s still hanging in there. Sure, there’s hope,” Jay Grayer said; then we moved on, away from the cluster of detectives.

  At least a dozen New York police and FBI agents were crowded into the hotel suite. The ominous sounds of police sirens rose from the streets below. Church bells pealed loudly, probably at nearby St. Patrick’s Cathedral, just south on Fifth Avenue.

  A blond woman’s body lay on the plush gray carpet next to an unmade double bed. Her face, neck, and chest were covered with blood. She was wearing a silver-and-blue jogging suit.

  A pair of wire-rim eyeglasses were on the rug near her Nike sneakers.

  She had been shot execution-style—as the early victims of Jack and Jill had been.

  One shot, close to the head.

  Very professional Very cold.

  No passion.

  “Was she ever on any of our suspect lists?” I asked Grayer. We knew that the dead woman’s name was Sara Rosen. She had been cleared as part of the White House staff. She’d escaped detection during two “thorough” investigations of the staff, and that was the scariest piece of evidence yet.

  “Not that we know of. She was something of a fixture at the White House communications office. Everybody liked her efficiency, her professionalism. She was trusted. Jesus, what a mess. What a disaster. She was trusted, Alex,”

  Part of the left side of her face was gone, ripped away as if by an animal. Jill looked as if she had been caught by surprise. Her eyebrows were arched. There was no fear in her eyes.

  She had trusted her killer. Was it Jack who had pulled the trigger? I noticed the smudging around the wound, the gray ring. It was a close-range discharge. It must have been Jack. Professional. No passion. Another execution.

  But is this really Jill? I wondered as I bent over the body. The contract killer Kevin Hawkins had died at St Vincent’s Hospital downtown. We knew that Hawkins had disguised himself as a female FBI agent to get into Madison Square Garden. He had used the concussion bomb to get his target where he wanted, when he wanted. He’d been waiting in the exit tunnel, dressed as a woman. It had worked. What was Kevin Hawkins’s relationship to this woman? What in hell was going on?

  “He left a poem. Somebody did. Looks like the others,” Jay Grayer said to me. The note was in a plastic evidence bag. He handed it to me. “The last will and testament of Jack and Jill,” he said.

  “The perfect assassination,” I muttered, more to myself than to Grayer. “Jack and Jill both dead in New York. Case closed, right?”

  The Secret Service agent stared at me and then slowly shook his head. “This case will never be closed. Not in our lifetime, anyway.”

  “I was just being ironic,” I said.

  I read the final note.

  Jack and Jill came to The Hill

  Where Jill did what she must.

  Her reason drove her

  The game is over

  Though dead Jill’s cause was just.

  “Fuck you, Jill,” I whispered over the dead body. “I hope you burn in hell for what you’ve done today. I hope there’s a hell just for you and Jack.”

  CHAPTER

  94

  NOWHERE was the news of the shooting taken any harder than in Washington. Thomas Byrnes was loved and he was hated, but he was one of the city’s own, especially now.

  Christine Johnson was in shock, as were her closest friends and most everyone that she knew. The teachers at Sojourner Truth and the children were completely destroyed by what had happened to the President in New York City. It was so horrifying and stark, but also so unbearably sad and unreal.

  Because of the shooting, all D.C. schools had canceled classes for the afternoon. She had been watching the nightmarish TV coverage of the assassination attempt from the first moment she got home from school. She still couldn’t believe what had happened. No one could believe it The President was still alive. No other bulletins were being released.

  Christine didn’t know whether Alex Cross had been at Madison Square Garden, but she imagined that he had been there. She worried about Alex, too. She liked the detective’s sincerity and his inner strength, but especially his compassion and his vulnerability. She liked the way he looked, talked, acted. She also liked the way Alex was bringing up his son, Damon. It made her want children even more herself. She and George had to talk about that. She and George had to talk.

  He arrived home before seven that night, which was an hour or two early for him. George Johnson was a hard worker in his corporate law job. He was thirty-seven years old and had a smooth, attractive baby face. He was a good man, although way too self-centered and, truthfully, a little bit of a buppie at times.

  Christine loved him, though; she accepted the good and the bad. She was thinking that as she fiercely hugged him at the front door. There was no doubt of it in her mind. She and George had met at Howard University and been together ever since. That was the way she believed it ought to be, and would be as far as she was concerned.

  “People are still out there crying in the streets,” George said. After the hug, he shucked off his wool Brooks Brothers suit jacket and loosened his tie, but he didn’t go upstairs to change. He was breaking all his usual patterns tonight. Well, good for George.

  “I didn’t vote for President Byrnes, but this has really gotten to me anyway, Chris. What a damn shame.” There were tears in his eyes, and that started her up again, too.

  George usually kept his feelings to himself, everything all bottled up. Christine was touched by her husband’s emotion. She was touched a great deal.

  “I’ve cried a couple of times,” she confided to George. “You know me. I did vote for the President, but that’s not it. It just seems as though we’re losing respect for every institution, everything permanent. We’re losing respect for human life at a very fast rate. I even see it in the eyes of six-year-old schoolchildren. I see it every day at the Truth School.”

  George Johnson held his wife again, held her tight. At five eleven, he was exactly her height. Christine rested her head softly against the side of his. She smelled of light citrus fragrance. She’d worn it to school. He loved her so much. She was like no other woman, no other person he’d ever met. He felt incredibly lucky to have her, to be loved by her, to hold her like this.

  “Do you know what I’m saying?” she asked, wanting to talk with George tonight, not willing to let him disappear on her, as he so often did.

  “Sure I do,” he said. “Everybody feels it, Chrissie. Nobody knows how to begin to make it stop, though.”

  “I’ll fix us something to eat. We can watch the dregs on CNN,” she finally said. “part of me doesn’t want to watch the news, but part of me has to watch this.”

  “I’ll help with the grub,” George offered, which was rare. She wished that he could be like this more often and that it didn’t take a national tragedy to get him in touch with his emotions. Well, a lot of men were like that, she knew. There were worse things in a marriage.

  They made a vegetarian gumbo tog
ether and opened a bottle of Chardonnay. They had barely finished supper in front of the TV when the front doorbell rang. It was a little before nine, and they weren’t expecting anyone, but sometimes neighbors dropped in.

  CNN was covering the scene at New York University Hospital, where the President had been rushed after the shooting. Alex Cross had appeared with various other officers who had been at the scene of the shooting, but he wouldn’t say much to the media. Alex looked upset, spent, but also, well—noble. Christine didn’t mention to George that she knew him. She wondered why. She hadn’t told George about Alex’s visit to their house late one night. He had slept right through it; but that was George.

  Before he could get up off the couch, the doorbell rang a second time. Then, a third ring. Whoever it was wouldn’t go away.

  “I’ll get it, Chrissie,” he said. “Don’t know who in hell that could be, this time of night. Do you?”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “All right, already,” he snapped. Christine found herself smiling. George the Impatient was back.

  “I’m coming for Christmas’ sake. I’m coming. I’m coming. Hold your water, I’m coming,” he said as he hobbled toward the door in his stockinged feet.

  He peered through the peephole, then turned to look at Christine with a questioning scowl on his face.

  “It’s some white kid.”

  CHAPTER

  95

  DANNY BOUDREAUX stood on the shiny, white-painted porch of the schoolteacher’s house. He was dressed in an oversized army-green rain poncho that made him look bigger than he actually was, somewhat more impressive. The Sojourner Truth School killer in the flesh! He was in his glory now. But even in his megahyper mood, he sensed that something was wrong with him now.

  He didn’t feel good, and he was getting sad—kind of depressed as hell, actually. The machine was breaking down. The doctors couldn’t figure whether he was a bipolar disorder or conduct disorder. If they couldn’t, how the hell was he supposed to? So what if he was a little impulsive, had huge mood swings, was a social misfit? The fuse was lit. He was ready to blow. Like, who cared?