Cat and Mouse Read Free Page B

seemed scary to him even at thirteen or fourteen. It still did.
Starkweather, Hauptmann, Whitman, Soneji
.
    He had been shooting rifles since he was a boy in the deep, dark woods surrounding Princeton, New Jersey. During the past year, he’d done more shooting, more hunting, more practicing than ever before. He was primed and ready for this morning. Hell, he’d been ready for years.
    Soneji sat on a metal folding chair and made himself as comfortable as he could. He pulled up a battleship gray tarp that blended into the background of the train terminal’s dark walls. He snuggled under the tarp. He was going to disappear, to be part of the scenery,
to be a sniper in a very public place. In Union Station!
    An old-fashioned-sounding train announcer was singing out the track and time for the next Metroliner to Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and New York’s Penn Station.
    Soneji smiled to himself —
that was his getaway train
.
    He had his ticket, and he still planned to be on it. No problem, just book it. He’d be on the Metroliner, or bust. Nobody could stop him now, except maybe Alex Cross, and even that didn’t matter anymore. His plan had contingencies for every possibility, even his own death.
    Then Soneji was lost in his thoughts. His memories were his cocoon.
    He had been nine years old when a student named Charles Whitman opened fire out of a tower at the University of Texas, in Austin. Whitman was a former Marine, twenty-five years old. The outrageous, sensational event had galvanized him back then.
    He’d collected every single story on the shootings, long pieces from
Time, Life, Newsweek
, the
New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Times
of London,
Paris Match, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun
. He still had the precious articles. They were at a friend’s house, being held for posterity. They were
evidence — of past, present, and future crimes
.
    Gary Soneji knew he was a good marksman. Not that he needed to be a crackerjack in this bustling crowd of targets. No shot he’d have to make in the train terminal would be over a hundred yards, and he was accurate at up to five hundred yards.
    Now, I step out of my own nightmare and into the real world
, he thought as the moment crystallized. A cold, hard shiver ran through his body. It was delicious, tantalizing. He peered through the Browning’s telescope at the busy, nervous, milling crowd.
    He searched for the first victim.
Life was so much more beautiful and interesting through a target scope
.

Chapter 8

    Y OU ARE there
.
    He scanned the lobby with its thousands of hurrying commuters and summer vacation travelers. Not one of them had a clue about his or her mortal condition at that very moment. People never seemed to believe that something horrible could actually happen to
them
.
    Soneji watched a lively brat pack of students in bright blue blazers and starched white shirts. Preppies, goddamn preppies. They were giggling and running for their train with unnatural delight. He didn’t like happy people at all, especially dumb-ass children who thought they had the world by the nuts.
    He found that he could distinguish smells from up here: diesel fuel, lilacs and roses from the flower vendors, meat and garlic shrimp from the lobby’s restaurants. The odors made him hungry.
    The target circle in his customized scope had a black site post rather than the more common bull’s-eye. He preferred the post. He watched a montage of shapes and motion and colors swim in and out of death’s way. This small circle of the Grim Reaper was his world now, self-contained and mesmerizing.
    Soneji let the aiming post come to rest on the broad, wrinkled forehead of a weary-looking businesswoman in her early to mid-fifties. The woman was thin and nervous, with haggard eyes, pale lips. “Say good night, Gracie,” he whispered softly. “Good night, Irene. Good night, Mrs. Calabash.”
    He almost pulled the trigger, almost started the morning’s massacre, then he eased