Cat and Mouse

Tasmania. Then there was Thomas Watt Hamilton, who invaded the mind space of virtually everyone on the planet after his shooting spree at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland.
    Gary Soneji desperately wanted to invade everybody’s mind space, to become a large, disturbing icon on the world’s Internet. He was going to do it, too. He had everything figured out.
    Charlie Whitman was still his sentimental favorite, though. Whitman was the original, the “madman in the tower.” A Bad Boy down there in Texas.
    God, how many times had he lain on that same tower, in the blazing August sun, along with Bad Boy Charlie?
    All in his incredible mind!
    Whitman had been a twenty-five-year-old student of architectural engineering at the University of Texas when he’d gone tapioca pudding. He’d brought an arsenal up onto the observation deck of the limestone tower that soared three hundred feet above the campus, and where he must have felt like God.
    Just before he’d gone up in the clock tower, he had murdered his wife and mother. Whitman had made Charlie Starkweather look like a piker and a real chump that afternoon in Texas. The same could be said for Dickie Hickock and Perry Smith, the white-trash punks Truman Capote immortalized in his book
In Cold Blood.
Charles Whitman made those two look like crap, too.
    Soneji never forgot the actual passage from the
Time
magazine story on the Texas tower shootings. He knew it word for word:
“Like many mass murderers, Charles Whitman had been an exemplary boy, the kind that neighborhood mothers hold up as a model to their own recalcitrant youngsters. He was a Roman Catholic altar boy, and a newspaper delivery boy.”
    Cool goddamn beans.
    Another master of disguise, right. Nobody had known what Charlie was thinking, or what he was ultimately going to pull off.
    He had carefully positioned himself under the “VI” numeral of the tower’s clock. Then Charles Whitman opened fire at 11:48 in the morning. Beside him on the six-foot runway that went around the tower were a machete, a Bowie knife, a 6mm Remington bolt-action rifle, a 35mm Remington, a Luger pistol, and a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver.
    The local and state police fired thousands of rounds up onto the tower, almost shooting out the entire face of the clock — but it took over an hour and a half to bring an end to Charlie Whitman. The whole world marveled at his audacity, his unique outlook and perspective. The whole goddamn world took notice.
    Someone was pounding on the door of Soneji’s hotel room! The sound brought him back to the here and now. He suddenly remembered where he was.
    He was in New York City, in Room 419 of the Plaza, which he always used to read about as a kid. He had always fantasized about coming by train to New York and staying at the Plaza.
Well, here he was.
    “Who’s out there?” he called from the bed. He pulled a semi-automatic from under the covers. Aimed it at the peephole in the door.
    “Maid service,” an accented Spanish female voice said. “Would you like your bed turned down?”
    “No, I’m comfortable as is,” Soneji said and smiled to himself.
Well actually, senorita, I’m preparing to make the NYPD look like the amateurs that cops usually are. You can forget the bed turndown and keep your chocolate mints, too. It’s too late to try and make up to me now.
    On second thought
— “Hey! You can bring me some of those chocolate mints. I like those little mints. I need a little sweet treat.”
    Gary Soneji sat back against the headboard and continued to smile as the maid unlocked the door and entered. He thought about doing her, boffing the scaggy hotel maid, but he figured that wasn’t such a good idea. He wanted to spend one night at the Plaza. He’d been looking forward to it for years. It was worth the risk.
    The thing that he loved the most, what made it so perfect, was that nobody had any idea where this was going.
    Nobody would guess the end to this one.
    Not Alex Cross, not anybody.

Chapter 29

    I VOWED I would not let Soneji wear me down this time. I wouldn’t let Soneji take possession of my soul again.
    I managed to get home from New York in time for a late dinner with Nana and the kids. Damon, Jannie, and I cleaned up downstairs and then we set the table in the dining room. Keith Jarrett was playing ever so sweetly in the background. This was nice. This was the way it was supposed to be and there was a message in that for me.
    “I’m so impressed, Daddy,”