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 an
ybody.
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,” Jannie commented as we circled the table, putting out the “good” silverware, and also glasses and dinner plates I’d picked out years ago with my wife, Maria. “You went all the way to New York. You came all the way back again. You’re here for dinner. Very good, Daddy.”
She beamed and giggled and patted me on my arm as we worked. I was a good father tonight. Jannie approved. She bought my act completely.
I took a small formal bow. “Thank you, my darling daughter. Now this trip to New York I was on, about how far would you say that might be?”
“Kilometers or miles?” Damon broke in from the other side of the table, where he was folding napkins like fans, the way they do in fancy restaurants. Damon can be quite the little scene stealer.
“Either measurement would be fine,” I told him.
“Approximately two hundred forty-eight miles, one way,” Jannie answered. “Howzat?”
I opened my eyes as wide as I could, made a funny face, and let my eyes roll up into my forehead. I can still steal a scene or two myself. “Now, I’m impressed. Very good, Jannie.”
She took a little bow and then did a mock curtsy. “I asked Nana how far it was this morning,” she confessed. “Is that okay?”
“That’s cool,” Damon offered his thought on his sister’s moral code. “It’s call research, Velcro.”
“Yeah, that’s cool, Baby,” I said and we all laughed at her cleverness and sense of fun.
“Round-trip, it’s four hundred ninety-six miles,” Damon said.
“You two are… smart!” I exclaimed in a loud, playful voice. “You’re both smarty-pants, smartalecks, smarties of the highest order!”
“What’s going on in there? What am I missing out on?” Nana finally called from the kitchen, which was overflowing with good smells from her cooking. She doesn’t like to miss anything. Ever. To my knowledge, she just about never has.
“G.E. College Bowl,” I called out to her.
“You will lose your shirt, Alex, if you play against those two young scholars,” she warned. “Their hunger for knowledge knows no bounds. Their knowledge is fast becoming encyclopedic.”
“En-cy-clo-pedic!” Jannie grinned.