Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

That morning she was being watched, but she didn’t know it. This one time, Maggie Rose would have cared. This one time, it mattered very much.

Maggie Rose was at Washington Day School in Georgetown, where she was trying to blend in with the other hundred and thirty students. At that moment, they were all singing enthusiastically at assembly.

Blending in wasn’t easy for Maggie Rose, even though she desperately wanted to. She was the nine-year-old daughter of Katherine Rose, after all. Maggie couldn’t walk past a mall video store without seeing a picture of her mother. Her mother’s movies seemed to be on the tube about every other night. Her mom got nominated for Oscars more often than most actresses got mentioned in People magazine.

Because of all that stuff, Maggie Rose tried to disappear into the woodwork a lot. That morning she had on a beat-up Fido Dido sweatshirt with strategic holes front and rear. She’d picked out grungy, wrinkled Guess jeans. She wore old pink Reebok sneakers—her “trusty dusties”—and Fido socklets picked out from the bottom of her closet. She purposely hadn’t washed her long blond hair before school.

Her mom’s eyes had bugged when she’d spotted the getup. She said, “Quadruple yuk,” but she let Maggie go to school that way anyway. Her mom was cool. She really understood the tough deal Maggie had to live with.

The kids in the crowded assembly, first- through sixth-grade classes, were singing “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. Before she played the folk/rock song on the auditorium’s gleaming black Steinway, Ms. Kaminsky had tried to explain the message of it for everybody.

“This moving song, by a young black woman from Massachusetts, is about being dirt poor in the richest country in the world. It’s about being black in the nineteen nineties.”

The petite, rail-thin music and visual arts teacher was always so intense. She felt it was a good teacher’s duty not only to inform, but to persuade, to mold the important young minds at the prestigious Day School.

The kids liked Ms. Kaminsky, so they tried to imagine the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. Since the tuition at Washington Day was twelve thousand dollars, it took some imagination on their part.

“You got a fast car,” they sang along with Ms. K. and her piano.

“And I got a plan to get us out of here.”

As Maggie sang “Fast Car,” she really tried to imagine what it would be like to be poor like that. She’d seen enough poor people sleeping in the cold on Washington streets. If she concentrated, she could visualize terrible scenes around Georgetown and Dupont Circle. Especially the men with dirty rags who washed your windshield at every stoplight. Her mother always gave them a dollar, sometimes more. Some of the beggas recognized her mom and went apeman crazy. They smiled like their day had been made, and Katherine Rose always had something nice to say to them.

“You got a fast car,” Maggie Rose sang out. She felt like letting her voice really get up there.

“But is it fast enough so we can fly away

“We gotta make a decision

“We leave tonight or live and die this way.”

The song finished to loud applause and cheers from all the kids at assembly. Ms. Kaminsky took a queer little bow at her piano.

“Heavy duty,” Michael Goldberg muttered. Michael was standing right next to Maggie. He was her best friend in Washington, where she’d moved less than a year ago, coming from L.A. with her parents.

Michael was being ironic, of course. As always. That was his East Coast way of dealing with people who weren’t as smart as he was—which meant just about everybody in the free world.

Michael Goldberg was a genuine brainiac, Maggie knew. He was a reader of everything and anything; a gonzo collector; a doer; always funny if he liked you. He’d been a “blue baby,” though, and he still wasn’t big or very strong. That had gotten him the nickname “Shrimpie,” which kind of brought Michael down off his brainiac pedestal.

Maggie and Michael rode to school together most mornings. That morning they’d come in a real Secret Service town car. Michael’s father was the secretary of the treasury. As in the secretary of the treasury. Nobody was really just “normal” at Washington Day. Everybody was trying to blend in, one way or another.

As the students filed out of morning assembly, each of them was asked who was picking them up after school. Security was tremendously important at Washington Day.

“Mr. Devine—,” Maggie started to tell the teacher-monitor posted at the door from the auditorium. His name was Mr. Guestier and he taught languages, which included French, Russian, and Chinese, at the school. He was nicknamed “Le Pric.”

“And Jolly Chollie Chakely,” Michael Goldberg finished for her. “Secret Service Detail Nineteen. Lincoln town car. License number SC-59. North exit, Pelham Hall. They’re assigned to moi because the Colombian cartel has made death threats against my father. Au revoir, mon professeur.”

It was noted in the school log for December 21. M. Goldberg and M.R. Dunne—Secret Service pickup. North exit, Pelham, at three.

“C’mon, Dweebo Dido.” Michael Goldberg poked Maggie Rose sharply in her rib cage. “I got a fast car. Uh huh, uh huh. And I got a plan to get us out of here.”

No wonder she liked him, Maggie thought. Who else would call her a dweebo? Who else but Shrimpie Goldberg?

As they walked out of the assembly hall, the two friends were being watched. Neither of them noticed anything wrong, anything out of the ordinary. They weren’t supposed to. That was the whole idea. It was the master plan.

CHAPTER 4

AT NINE O’CLOCK that morning, Ms. Vivian Kim decided to recreate Watergate in her Washington Day School classroom. She would never forget it.