The Witnesses

by James Patterson

  Gray laughs, puts his pistol away. “Only joking. That’s all.”

  “Sure,” Abraham says. “And your sense of humor just doubled your invoice.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The intelligence officer known as the Big Man moves as fast as his bulk allows him down the corridor leading to his office, because the morning news of the latest terrorist attack in the London subway has forced him into work two hours ahead of schedule.

  Just outside his office, an IT worker—and who cares what her name is—is standing there in response to the call he had made downstairs. The Big Man passes over his handheld device and says, “It crapped out on me last night. Get me a new one, transfer the information, and let me know immediately if there were any calls I missed.”

  “Very good, sir,” she says, and she moves quickly past him as he unlocks his door and goes inside.

  Not much time and a lot of work to do, and the only thing he does is to grab a fresh legal pad. He leaves, heading to an urgent staff meeting to deal with what’s going on in London.

  He locks his office door behind him and is about six feet down the hallway when he thinks he hears his office phone ringing.

  Should he go back?

  No, he thinks.

  It can wait.

  It has to wait.

  London is burning.

  He keeps moving.

  CHAPTER 35

  In a new rental vehicle, Gray Evans slowly drives along a quiet street in Levittown. By God, there it is, the little house that holds his target.

  Quiet, with a fence out at the rear and no easy means of escape.

  Right in front of him.

  The trunk of his rental car has enough firepower to outfit a Georgia county sheriff’s department, and he’s tempted—oh, is he tempted—to park the car, pop open the trunk, and go in: a blitz attack.

  No delay, no waiting around, just go right in and start blasting.

  Very tempting.

  He slows down…it’s a small house, one-story, and, based on what he knows about Levittown, it’s probable this house doesn’t have a basement or an attic.

  Could be pretty easy.

  Could be.

  He speeds up.

  He hasn’t stayed alive this long by relying on “could be.”

  An hour later he leaves the town offices of Hempstead, New York, which govern the hamlet of Levittown. He’s spent some time with the easygoing and friendly town officials, who have passed on the tax records for the property where the Sandersons are living.

  The best part of this research is that the tax records present the house as a typical one-story Cape Cod, with no basement and no attic. It has only seven rooms: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, and living room.

  Thanks to these very courteous small-town officials, he now has a detailed floor plan of how best to kill the person he needs to kill.

  Still…even with all this information, he needs to tilt the playing field more in his favor.

  How best to get in and do his job?

  He has an idea. He checks his watch, thinks he needs to call a new intel source—though Abraham is breathing, he might as well be dead to him—to confirm the information on Teresa’s law enforcement connection.

  If all goes well, within the hour, his target—and, if need be, the entire Sanderson family—will be dead.

  CHAPTER 36

  The Big Man unlocks the door to his office and walks in. He’s exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, and the day ahead of him stretches like one long session on a chain gang. He’s unable to move, unable to do anything besides react to what’s going on across the Atlantic.

  “Sir?” A tapping noise at the side of his open door. The IT tech from the morning comes in and says, “Here’s your new phone, sir. All information, passwords, connections, and files successfully transferred.”

  He holds his thick hand out, gives her a quick “thank you”—even if he doesn’t know her name, there’s no need to be rude—and she leaves as he powers up the phone. He starts sliding through the screens, checking and seeing—

  What the hell?

  Pressing the phone against his ear, he listens to the message again and drops his new piece of equipment on his desk. Then he picks up his secure interior line and dials four digits. When the man on the other line picks up he says, “Did I or did I not receive a notification from a James Williams, from Department G-17, last night?”

  “Ah, sir, it appears—”

  “There was no follow-up!” the Big Man yells. “None!”

  “Ah—”

  “Why wasn’t I promptly informed?”

  “Sir, a call was made to your office this morning and—”

  “That’s not confirmation!” he yells. “You and your section have just killed four innocents…” My God, what a screw-up! He goes on, “And by the end of the day, you and Williams will be in custody, pending an internal review.”

  The Big Man slams the phone down, takes a breath, picks it up again, and dials another number.

  “Domestic Operations.” A female voice.

  He checks the nearest clock for the time. Do they have enough of it?

  “We have an emerging situation in Levittown, New York,” he says, checking a file and then rapidly giving the woman the address. “I need a response team.”

  “When?”

  He takes another breath, knowing this isn’t going to end well.

  “As of last night,” he finally says.

  CHAPTER 37

  Lance hasn’t slept well. After a quiet and strained breakfast, it seems like everyone in the household is off in their own little world. Lance helps Teresa with the dishes and checks in on Sam, who’s back at work at the small desk, putting together his dinosaur model, hunched over in concentration, looking like one of those old medieval engravings of a monk working on an illuminated manuscript.

  Lance asks, “How’s it going?”

  Sam says, “About halfway done.”

  His boy doesn’t lift his head, and Lance is sure the kiddo is still ashamed over last night’s events, and so he leaves him alone and checks on Sam’s sister.

  Sandy is on her immaculately made bed and he says, “How are you doing, honey?”

  She turns a page, and he recognizes the book he had given her about Hannibal. “I’ll be finishing this book at about 2:00 p.m. today, Dad.” Another page flip. “And there are no other books to read.”

  “I’m sure I can find one.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” she says crisply. “I’ve checked every room in the house, the bags, and the shelves. This is the last book.”

  “Then we’ll have to get you a new one,” he says.

  “Good,” she says. “I’ve talked to Jason. You need to talk to him. He says we can only go shopping for new books if all of us go together. So we need to go together, but we can’t, because you told Sam he had to stay in his room.”

  Lance says, “We’ll take care of it, sweetheart.”

  “Good,” Sandy says, and for a moment, Lance has the ugly thought that his young daughter has just dismissed him. She doesn’t mean it, he tells himself.

  He goes to the kitchen for a post-breakfast cup of coffee and surprises Teresa, who seems to have been looking through some of her photographs from Tunisia. He hasn’t yet seen the one that’s up on her computer. It seems to have been taken in a marketplace somewhere back there.

  Teresa jumps and closes the photo program. Quickly she says, “How are the super kids?”

  “One’s being quiet for a nice change, the other one’s concerned she’s about to run out of books.”

  Teresa says nothing, goes back to her laptop. When he’s finished with his coffee, he steals another glance at her laptop.

  No photo program.

  No Word document.

  Nothing to do with her book.

  His wife is quietly playing solitaire, like she’s…

  Killing time.

  Jason is at the rear door where he dragged Sam in last night,
looking out at the backyard. There’s shrubbery and an old wooden fence. Shouts and cries can be heard from young children playing on the other side of the fence, and Jason’s head moves with every sound.

  To be this alert all the time…Lance is impressed by the skill, the dedication, the strength this man has.

  “Can I get you something, Jason? Cup of coffee? Orange juice?”

  “No, sir, I’m fine.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Lance says. He stands there uncomfortably, like he’s been called to the principal’s office, and he says, “You know…when we got here, we were told it’d be less than a week before we’d leave.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  Lance says, “So we might leave today.”

  “You might.”

  “Then…I want to thank you for everything. I…we’ll never forget what you’ve done for us.”

  Jason slowly turns and says, “I haven’t done a damn thing for you.”

  The man’s face is troubled, like he’s under some extra, awful burden. Like he’s got more on his shoulders than just the job of protecting the four of them.

  Jason clears his throat. “I need to tell you something. I shouldn’t…but I will.”

  The sound of the doorbell ringing startles Lance, making him spill some hot coffee on his hand.

  Jason brushes by him. “Lockdown. Now.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Jason is pleasantly surprised at how quickly the Sanderson family moves under his direction. No fuss, no raised voices, moving like boots nearing the end of basic training. In the tiny bathroom he scoops up Sandy—“You be a good girl, all right?”—and puts her in the bathtub, and Sam jumps right in without being asked. He moves the kids around so Sandy is lying down, with her brother nestled on top.

  Sam looks up, eyes wide with fear. “I…”

  “Quiet,” Jason says. “Protect your older sister, okay?”

  Sam nods silently. The last he sees of the boy is when he picks up the heavy Kevlar blanket to drape it over his cuddled form.

  The mother and father are seated on the floor, legs pulled up so he can walk by. Considerate. As he moves past them, something odd happens.

  Teresa, the wife, holds her hand up.

  What?

  It comes to him what she’s looking for, and he gives the hand a quick squeeze and steps out in the hallway, closing the bathroom door behind him. There’s a little click as it’s locked.

  Good. First time they had done this, as a drill, the father had forgotten to lock the door.

  Nice to see everyone doing well today.

  The doorbell rings again and Jason quickly moves to the front door, gives a quick look through a side window, sees it’s a cop standing there.

  Cops again, he thinks. He wishes there were that many cops in his neighborhood when he was growing up in Seattle.

  He opens the door, sees the man’s wearing a New York State Trooper uniform, and immediately knows why the guy is here: Teresa has a relative in the force.

  “Yes?” he asks. “Can I help you?”

  The trooper, in his immaculate gray uniform, campaign hat, bright purple necktie, and shiny badge pinned to his shirt, looks friendly and apologetic. “This is going to sound strange, but could you bear with me for a moment, sir? I’m looking for my cousin, Teresa Sanderson, and her family.”

  Jason is running through what to say to this friendly young man before shooing him away, when the phone belted to his side starts to screech at him.

  He glances down for a second.

  It’s a second long enough.

  The trooper has a pistol in his hands and with two loud, bright hammer blows, Jason is shot twice in the chest.

  CHAPTER 39

  Lance has his arm around Teresa. The sound of the two gunshots seems to echo in the tiny bathroom, and Teresa screams, and from the bathtub, Sam starts yelling—his voice muffled by the Kevlar—“It’s my fault, it’s my fault, I used the computer, it’s my fault!”

  He starts crying and Sandy shrieks, and Lance goes over to the bathtub, lifts the Kevlar blanket, looks at the scared faces of his children, “It’s okay, it’s okay, you just stay there, okay?”

  Lance drops the blanket, sees that Teresa’s face is pale with shock, her hands tightly clasped, and says, “What about—”

  Suddenly, he shuts up. Neither one of them has a cellphone, because both were confiscated days ago when Teresa was in the middle of calling her mother.

  He looks to Teresa, then looks up at the tiny window over the toilet.

  Trapped.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  Teresa yelps and crawls over to him, curled next to him by the bathtub. Their son and daughter are wailing from underneath the protective blanket.

  “Guys?” A new voice from outside. “There’s been an incident. It’s safe now. Come on out. I’m a state trooper, just like Leonard. More police will be here any minute.”

  Teresa grabs Lance’s upper arm, whispers, “That’s not the phrase to get us to open the door…what does it mean?”

  Lance says, “It means Jason’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 40

  After he gets no response from the family locked inside the bathroom, Gray Evans tries the handle once again.

  Still locked.

  Okay, not a problem.

  So far, the procedure’s going fine, and Gray sees no reason why it shouldn’t keep on going so. Hell, even an hour ago, his second intel choice, Neil, was quick and efficient over the phone, getting him the name and address of a local off-duty state trooper. Gray had killed the man with a quick bullet to the head and haphazardly gotten dressed in his uniform, clipping its accessories in their most likely places.

  And now it was simple—the entire family in one room.

  Gray stands back, takes position, starts to aim his pistol at the doorknob, and then it begins to turn.

  “Okay, we’re coming out.” A shaky male voice comes from inside.

  Perfect. How sweetly perfect.

  The door opens a crack just as Gray hears the creak and scrape of a window opening…

  The door opens a little more. A woman is standing on the toilet, shoving a small figure through the tiny window, its legs going through—

  “Hey!” he yells, bringing up his pistol, wondering where the father is, and—

  A man comes from behind the door.

  With something in his hand.

  Gray turns and—

  Yells as the man sprays him in the face and eyes with something harsh and burning.

  CHAPTER 41

  Ronald Temple is lightly dozing in his Barcalounger when the sound of two gunshots wakes him up. His consciousness goes from zero to sixty in one second. He’s served on the job with officers who freaked out when they heard a truck backfire or a manhole cover slam shut, but Ronald has always known better: someone has just fired two shots next door.

  He scrambles up in the chair, blanket sliding off, .38 revolver in his lap, as he shakily picks up the phone, dials 911.

  When the male operator answers and goes through the usual bored answering shtick—“911, what is the nature and location of your emergency?”—Ronald carefully says, “Shots fired,” rattles off the address next door, and drops the phone.

  He doesn’t have time to answer questions or fill out the operator’s checklist, so he grabs the revolver and heaves himself off the chair.

  Thank God Helen is out shopping. He doesn’t want her here, where she’d be both in danger and telling him not to do what he’s about to do.

  Ronald tears the oxygen hose away and makes his way to the entryway with his lungs burning.

  His hands are shaking.

  Damn it, like a rookie alone on his first night shift!

  He puts the revolver down, goes to the portable oxygen tank, cranks it up, drapes the tubes around his head, and opens the door.

  Picks up the revolver.

  This time he won’t screw up.

  This time he won’t be hidi
ng home, drunk.

  Ronald goes to the house, revolver still shaking in one hand, his other hand dragging his green oxygen tank behind him.

  This time he will do what has to be done.

  CHAPTER 42

  Eyes burning—bringing back a memory of being exposed to tear gas during basic training—Gray swears, stumbles back, and fires off two shots at the door as it slams in front of him.

  Damn it!

  He wipes at his eyes, swearing again. Whatever the son of a bitch sprayed at him is burning and clouding up his eyes. He can feel them swelling.

  Time to move.

  He moves away from the bathroom, going through the kitchen and living room, bouncing off a chair, until he ends up at the front door. The big guy he had shot earlier is still on the floor, and Gray wants to make sure his rear is secure, so he fires another shot at the guy’s head before springing out the door.

  Gray is out the door and—

  Thump!

  Can you believe the luck?

  He’s bumped into the two kids, who have fallen to the lawn, crying.

  But his eyes are burning and he can’t tell which is which.

  No matter.

  He grabs one and then the other, starts running a hand over their heads and—

  “Stop right there!” a man shouts.

  CHAPTER 43

  Ronald Temple is on the lawn of his odd neighbors, revolver in both of his shaking hands, aiming it straight at the man standing in front of him, who looks nice and sharp in a New York State Trooper’s uniform. The officer has his arms around the young boy and girl who live here. Ronald’s lungs are burning and his legs are so weak he feels like his knees are about to give way.