Cat and Mouse Read Online Free PDF Page A

my index finger and thumb.
    I turned the key.
    Click!
    The door wouldn’t open! I jiggled the handle. Nothing.
    “What the hell?” Sampson said behind me, anger in his voice. “What’s wrong with the door?”
    “I just locked it,” I told him. “
Soneji left it open for us.
”

Chapter 12

    D OWNSTAIRS, a couple and two small children started to run. They rushed toward the glass doors and possible freedom. One of the kids tripped and went down hard on his knee. The mother dragged him forward. It was terrifying to watch, but they made it.
    The firing started again!
    Sampson and I burst into the anteroom, both of us crouched low, our guns drawn.
    I caught a glimpse of a dark gray trap straight ahead.
    A sniper rifle pointed out from the cover and camouflage of the trap. Soneji was underneath, hidden from view.
    Sampson and I fired. Half a dozen gunshots thundered in the close quarters. Holes opened in the tarp. The rifle was silent.
    I rushed across the small anteroom and ripped away the trap. I groaned — a deep, gut-wrenching sound.
    No one was underneath the tarp. No Gary Soneji!
    A Browning automatic rifle was strapped on a metal tripod. A timing device was attached to a rod and the trigger. The whole thing was customized. The rifle would fire at a programmed interval. Six shots, then a pause, then six more shots. No Gary Soneji.
    I was already moving again. There were metal doors on the north and south walls of the small room. I yanked open the one closest to me.
I expected a trap.
    But the connecting space was empty. There was another gray metal door on the opposing wall. The door was shut. Gary Soneji still loved to play games. His favorite trick: He was the only one with the rules.
    I rushed across the second room and opened door number two. Was that the game? A surprise? A booby prize behind either door one, two, or three?
    I found myself peering inside another small space, another empty chamber. No Soneji. Not a sign of him anywhere.
    The room had a metal stairway — it looked as if it went to another floor. Or maybe a crawl space above us.
    I climbed the stairs, stopping and starting so he wouldn’t get a clear shot from above. My heart was pounding, my legs trembling. I hoped that Sampson was close behind. I needed cover.
    At the top of the stairway, a hatchway was open. No Gary Soneji here either. I had been lured deeper and deeper into some kind of trap, into his web.
    My stomach was rolling. I felt a sharp pain building up behind my eyes. Soneji was still somewhere in Union Station. He had to be.
He’d said he wanted to see me.

Chapter 13

    S ONEJI SAT as calm as a small-town banker, pretending to read the
Washington Post
on the 8:45 A.M. Metroliner to Penn Station in New York. His heart was still palpitating, but none of the excitement showed on his face. He wore a gray suit, white shirt, striped blue tie — he looked just like all the rest of the commuter assholes.
    He had just tripped the light fantastic, hadn’t he? He had gone where few others ever would have dared. He had just outdone the legendary Charles Whitman, and this was only the beginning of his prime-time exposure. There was a saying he liked a lot.
Victory belongs to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
    Soneji drifted in and out of a reverie in which he returned to his beloved woods around Princeton, New Jersey. He could see himself as a boy again. He remembered everything about the dense, uneven, but often spectacularly beautiful terrain. When he was eleven, he had stolen a .22-caliber rifle from one of the surrounding farms. He kept it hidden in a rock quarry near his house. The gun was carefully wrapped in an oilcloth, foil, and burlap bags. The .22-caliber rifle was the only earthly possession that he cared about, the only thing that was truly his.
    He remembered how he would scale down a steep, very rocky ravine to a quiet place where the forest floor leveled off, just past a thick tangle of bayberry prickers. There