Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

Snapshot!

Snapshot!

His heart almost couldn’t take it. He wasn’t used to this sudden improvising.

He thought about getting caught, after all of these years, and on such an unbelievably important job. He had a vision of total failure. He felt—he felt something.

He dropped the Luger into the jumble of legs, trousers, satin and taffeta gowns, high-heeled slippers, highly polished dark cordovans.

“Was that a gunshot?” a woman shrieked. “Oh, God, Phillip. Someone’s been shot.”

He backed away from the spectacle as just about everyone else did. The Grand Foyer looked as if it were ablaze.

He was part of them, part of the fearful, bolting crowd. He had nothing to do with the terrifying disturbance, the murder, the loud gunshot.

His face was a convincing mask of shock and disbelief. God, he knew this look so well. He had seen it so many times before in his lifetime.

In another tense few moments, he was outside the Kennedy Center. He was heading toward New Hampshire Avenue at a steady pace. He was one with the crowd.

“Seems Like Old Times” raced through his head, playing much too fast, at double or triple speed. He remembered humming the tune on his walk in. And as the photojournalist knew, the old times were definitely the best.

The old times were coming back now, weren’t they?

Jack and Jill had come to The Hill.

The game was so beautiful, so delicate and exquisite.

Now for the greatest shocker of them all.

CHAPTER

45

AGENT JAY GRAYER called me at home from his car phone. I was in the middle of reading approximately two hundred background security checks done on White House personnel by the Secret Service uniformed division. The deputy director was speeding downtown to the Kennedy Center complex, doing ninety on the beltway. I could hear the siren blaring from his car.

“They struck again. Jesus, they made a hit at the Kennedy Center tonight. Right under our noses. It’s another real bad acid trip, Alex. Just come.” He definitely sounded out of control.

Just come.

“They hit during intermission of Miss Saigon. I’ll meet you there, Alex. I’m seven to ten minutes away.”

“Who was it this time?” I asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I almost did

n’t want to hear the answer. No, not almost. I didn’t want to hear the victim’s name.

“That’s part of the problem. This whole thing is nuts. It wasn’t really anybody, Alex.”

“What do you mean, ‘it wasn’t really anybody’? That doesn’t make sense to me, Jay.”

“It was a law student from Georgetown University. A young woman named Charlotte Kinsey. She was only twenty-three years old. They left one of their notes again. It’s them for sure.”

“I don’t get it. I do not get this,” I muttered over the phone. “Goddammit.”

“Neither do I. The girl might have caught a bullet meant for somebody else. She was out with a Supreme Court justice, Alex. Thomas Henry Franklin. Maybe the bullet was meant for him. That would fit the celebrity pattern. Maybe they’ve finally made a mistake.”

“I’m on my way,” I told Jay Grayer. “I’ll meet you inside the Kennedy Center.”

Maybe they finally made a mistake.