Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

“What’s he shooting?” I asked.

“He’s moving fast, jittery,” Jacobson said. “My bet’s meth.”

It made sense. In jail these days, meth was passed around like hors d’oeuvres at a party. In the past few years it had become just as popular on the streets of DC. And Fowler was a known user.

“Okay, so depending on how long he’s been on this particular tweaking binge, he could go rhino on us at any moment,” Nu said.

A meth addict on a binge is chaos walking and talking. In the first day or two, his emotion swings. Gregarious one moment. Paranoid the next. Euphoric, and then drowning in the depths of depression. At a certain point, however, usually after he’s spent many days awake, the drug triggers a bout of wild rage, and the tweaker goes rhino trying to destroy anyone and anything around him.

“Any sense of how close we are to that?” I asked Jacobson.

The SWAT officer shook his head. “Not from what we saw.”

“Do we have the listening device planted?” McGoey asked.

Jacobson shook his head again. “Too much snow and ice. We were nervous that if he heard us try to clean the outer window, he might open fire on the hostages.”

“Smart,” I said.

Nu informed us that his men had been able to get permission to enter the homes adjoining the Nicholson residence and were already moving into position.

“I’m putting two snipers to a house, and assault teams in range of every door-front, back, patio, kitchen, garage. If we can distract Fowler at the front door-where these kinds of guys tend to concentrate their attention-we may be able to go in through the back.”

“Alarm system?” I asked.

“Good point,” Nu said. “I’ll have it shut down.”

The discussion had turned to going after Fowler. It frustrated me, but if the man wasn’t going to talk to us, what else could we do?

“Let’s talk about timing,” McGoey said. “I think the longer we wait…”

I noticed something that made me stop listening to him in the middle of his sentence. I saw, over Nu’s shoulder and out through a slit in the tarps, a bundled-up woman tromping through the four inches of snow that now coated the city. She was walking right toward us. I caught a glimpse of her face in a flashlight beam.

It was Bree.

What was wrong? Why was my wife here?

CHAPTER 12

“Excuse me, gentlemen. I’ll be right back,” I said as I broke away from the group, and Bree entered the shelter.

“Hey,” I said, going to her. “What’s wrong?”

She drew back her hood.

“Wrong?” Bree asked in a whisper. “When I left the house, Nana was crying her eyes out, sure that you were going to die on Christmas Eve.”

My stomach churned. “Look, I’m fine. You can see for yourself. I’ll call her.”

“She’s gone to bed.”

“Which is where you should also be.”

“Do you think I could possibly sleep, Alex?”

I sighed. “Bree, you of all people know how this works.”

“I know how it works for you,” she said. “I can say no to the job but you can’t, Alex. That’s not good for you or your family. Especially at Christmas.”

“Sometimes you can’t say no, even if it is Christmas,” I said. “Sometimes you have a lunatic meth head who decides that the holiday is a perfect time for him to take his ex-wife, their three kids, and her new husband hostage.”

Bree hugged herself, looked away, and said, “You have a family who all feel like other families in a crisis come first for you.”

“That’s not fair, Bree.”

“Maybe not,” she said, looking back at me. “But I thought it was important that you know that your children think that.”

My head felt heavy. So did my chest. I said, “I am sad beyond words to hear that, Bree. And there is nothing I want more at this moment than to go home right now and then get up in the morning tomorrow and unwrap presents. But I honestly don’t know how I’d live with myself if I did that and then heard that this guy murdered his entire family when I might have been able to prevent it.”

Bree gazed at me; she reached up and touched my cheek with her chilled fingers. “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I just want you to remember that there are consequences to everything.”

I nodded, wondering if our relationship was starting to suffer the consequences of me being me. “I love you,” I said. “And I have to go back to work so I have a chance of being with my family on Christmas morning.”

My wife’s eyes were filled with a mixture of understanding and resignation. She touched my cheek again. Then she turned away and left the shelter. I went out into the storm and called after her, “Be careful driving.”

She called back over her shoulder, “I’ll pray for you, Alex. It’s all I can do.”

CHAPTER 13

Bree kept walking and disappeared behind the police barrier into the storm. I stood there, staring after her, my mind whirling with thoughts of my family.

What was I doing? Ramiro and Nu and McGoey were all first-rate at their jobs. The deputy chief had called me in part, I guessed, as a way to calm down the congressman. But did I really have to be present? Couldn’t I leave this situation in their capable hands and follow Bree home?

“Alex!” McGoey called.

I turned, squinted into the wind and the snow, and saw him standing at the flaps of the tent.

“It’s Fowler,” he said. “He picked up. He wants to talk to you.”

“Me?” I replied, already moving toward him, already compartmentalizing.

“He didn’t ask for you exactly,” McGoey said. “Just anyone but Ramiro.”

I walked through the shelter, brushing the snow off my hat and jacket, and climbed into the van, trying to fully move on from my conversation with Bree. I had to completely divorce myself from the sadness and anxiety she’d stirred in me. If I didn’t, I’d be in no condition to negotiate with a madman.

Ramiro handed me his phone.

“Henry Fowler?” I said.

He coughed. “Who’s this?”

“My name is Alex Cross,” I said.

There was a long pause before he said, “I’ve heard of you.”

“And I’ve heard of you,” I said. “You’re an impressive man, Mr. Fowler.”

He laughed acidly at that. “I’m a fucking loser, Cross. Let’s call it what it is, because I am, in no way, the man I was.”

“If you say so,” I replied, then paused. “So what are we doing here?”

“We?” Fowler said. “There’s no we here. There’s just you, Cross, and all your well-armed friends out there, the members of the jury, looking to spoil my fun.”

Fun. I shut my eyes. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It meant that he planned to toy with his hostages and us. He would enjoy that, so he would try to draw out the experience. This was looking like it was going to be a