SUDDENLY NERVOUS and paranoid, I peered back at the door to the hotel room. It was closed and locked tight. Nobody there, nothing to worry about. Christine and I were safe here. Nothing bad was going to happen to either of us tonight.

Still, the moment of fear and doubt had raised the hairs on my neck. Soneji has a habit of doing that to me. Damn it, what did he want from me?

“What’s wrong, Alex? You just left me.” Christine touched me, brought me back. Her fingers were like feathers on the side of my cheek. “Just be here with me, Alex.”

“I’m here. I just thought I heard something.”

“I know you did. No one is there. You locked the door behind us. We’re fine. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

I pulled Christine close against my body again and she felt electric and incredibly warm. I drew her down onto the bed and rolled over her, holding my weight on the palms of my hands. I dipped and kissed her sweet face again, then each of her breasts; I pulled at the nipples with my lips, licked them with my tongue. I kissed between her legs, down her long legs, her slender ankles, her toes. Just be here with me, Alex.

She arched herself toward me and she gasped, but she was smiling radiantly. She was moving her body against me and we had already found a nice rhythm. We were both breathing faster and faster.

“Please, do it now,” she whispered, her teeth biting into my shoulder near the clavicle. “Please now, right now. I want you inside.” She rubbed my sides with the palms of her hands. She rubbed me like kindling sticks.

A fire ignited. I could feel it spreading through my body. I entered her for the first time. I slid inside slowly, but I went as deep as I could go. My heart was pounding, my legs felt weak. My stomach was taut and I was so hard it hurt.

I was all the way inside Christine. I knew I’d wanted to be here for a long time. I had the thought that I was made for this, for being in this bed with this woman.

Gracefully and athletically, she rolled on top of me and sat up proud and tall. We began to rock slowly like that. I felt our bodies surge and peak, surge and peak, surge.

I heard my own voice crying yes, yes, yes. Then I realized it was both our voices.

Then Christine said something so magical. She whispered, “You’re the one.”

Paris, France

DR. ABEL Sante was thirty-five years old, with longish black hair, boyish good looks, and a beautiful girlfriend named Regina Becker, who was a painter, and a very good one, he thought. He had just left Regina ’s apartment, and was winding his way home on the back streets of the sixth arrondissement at around midnight.

The narrow streets were quiet and empty and he loved this time of day for collecting his thoughts, or sometimes for not thinking at all. Abel Sante was musing on the death of a young woman earlier today, a patient of his, twenty-six years old. She had a loving husband and two beautiful daughters. He had a perspective about death that he thought was a good one: Why should leaving the world, and rejoining the cosmos, be any scarier than entering the world, which wasn’t very scary at all.

Dr. Sante didn’t know where the man, a street person in a soiled gray jacket and torn, baggy jeans had come from. Suddenly the man was at his side, nearly attached to his left elbow.

“Beautiful,” the man said.

“I’m sorry, excuse me?” Abel Sante said, startled, coming out of his inner thoughts in a hurry.

“It’s a beautiful night and our city is so perfect for a late walk.”

“Yes, well it’s been nice meeting you,” Sante said to the street person. He’d noticed that the man’s French was slightly accented. Perhaps he was English, or even American.

“You shouldn’t have left her apartment. Should have stayed the night. A gentleman always stays the night-unless of course he’s asked to leave.”

Dr. Abel Sante’s back and neck stiffened. He took his hands from his trouser pockets. Suddenly he was afraid, very much so.

He shoved the street person away with his left elbow.

“What are you talking about? Why don’t you just get out of here?”

“I’m talking about you and Regina. Regina Becker, the painter. Her work’s not bad, but not good enough, I’m afraid.”

“Get the hell away from me.”

Abel Sante quickened his pace. He was only a block from his home. The other man, the street person, kept up with him easily. He was larger, more athletic than Sante had noticed at first.

“You should have given her babies. That’s my opinion.”

“Get away. Go!”

Suddenly, Sante had both fists raised and clasped tightly. This was insane! He was ready to fight, if he had to. He hadn’t fought in twenty years, but he was strong and in good shape.

The street person swung out and knocked him down. He did it easily, as if it were nothing at all.

Dr. Sante’s pulse was racing rapidly. He couldn’t see very well out of his left eye, where he’d been struck.

“Are you a complete maniac? Are you out of your mind?” he screamed at the man, who suddenly looked powerful and impressive, even in the soiled clothes.

“Yes, of course,” the man answered, “Of course I’m out of my mind. I’m Mr. Smith-and you’re next.”

GARY SONEJI hurried like a truly horrifying city rat through the low dark tunnels that wind like intestines beneath New York ’s Bellevue Hospital. The fetid odor of dried blood and disinfectants made him feel sick. He didn’t like the reminders of sickness and death surrounding him.

No matter, though, he was properly revved for today. He was wired, flying high. He was Death. And Death was not taking a holiday in New York.

He had outfitted himself for his big morning: crisply pressed white pants, white lab coat, white sneakers; a laminated hospital photo ID around his neck on a beaded silver chain.

He was here on morning rounds. Bellevue. This was his idea of rounds anyway!

There was no way to stop any of this: his train from hell, his destiny, his last hurrah. No one could stop it because no one would ever figure out where the last train was headed. Only he knew that, only Soneji himself could call it off.

He wondered how much of the puzzle Cross had already pieced together. Cross wasn’t in his class as a thinker, but the psychologist and detective wasn’t without crude instincts in certain specialized areas. Maybe he was underestimating Dr. Cross, as he had once before. Could he be caught now? Perhaps, but it really didn’t matter. The game would continue to its end without him. That was the beauty of it, the evil of what he had done.

Gary Soneji stepped into a stainless-steel elevator in the basement of the well-known Manhattan hospital. A pair of porters shared the narrow car with him, and Soneji had a moment of paranoia. They might be New York cops working undercover.

The NYPD actually had an office on the main floor of the hospital. It was there under “normal” circumstances. Bellevue. Jesus, what a sensational madhouse this was. A hospital with a police station inside.

He eyed the porters with a casual and disinterested city-cool look. They can’t be policemen, he thought, Nobody could look that dumb. They were what they looked like-slow-moving, slow-thinking hospital morons.

One of them was pushing around a stainless-steel cart with two bum wheels. It was a wonder that any patient ever made it out of a New York City hospital alive. Hospitals here were run with about the same personnel standards as a McDonald’s restaurant, probably less.

He knew one patient who wasn’t going to leave Bellevue alive. The news reports said that Shareef Thomas was being kept here by the police. Well, Thomas was going to suffer before he left this so-called “vale of tears.” Shareef was about to undergo a world of suffering.