21st Birthday by Patterson, James (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📕

18TH ABDUCTION

(with Maxine Paetro)

As Lindsay investigates the disappearance of three teachers, Joe is drawn into the search for an international war criminal everyone thought was dead.

19TH CHRISTMAS

(with Maxine Paetro)

Lindsay’s plans for a quiet festive break are undone when she receives a tip-off that the biggest heist ever to hit San Francisco is being planned for Christmas Day.

20TH VICTIM

(with Maxine Paetro)

When simultaneous murders hit LA, Chicago and San Francisco, SFPD Sergeant Lindsay Boxer is tasked with uncovering what links these precise and calculated killings.

LAKE MARIE

New Hampshire

An hour or so after my daughter, Mel, leaves, I’ve showered, had my second cup of coffee, and read the newspapers—just skimming them, really, for it’s a sad state of affairs when you eventually realize just how wrong journalists can be in covering stories. With a handsaw and a set of pruning shears, I head off to the south side of our property.

It’s a special place, even though my wife, Samantha, has spent less than a month here in all her visits. Most of the land in the area is conservation land, never to be built upon, and of the people who do live here, almost all follow the old New Hampshire tradition of never bothering their neighbors or gossiping about them to visitors or news reporters.

Out on the lake is a white Boston Whaler with two men supposedly fishing, although they are Secret Service. Last year the Union Leader newspaper did a little piece about the agents stationed aboard the boat—calling them the unluckiest fishermen in the state—but since then, they’ve been pretty much left alone.

As I’m chopping, cutting, and piling brush, I think back to two famed fellow POTUS brush cutters—Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush—and how their exertions never quite made sense to a lot of people. They thought, Hey, you’ve been at the pinnacle of fame and power, why go out and get your hands dirty?

I saw at a stubborn pine sapling that’s near an old stone wall on the property, and think, Because it helps. It keeps your mind occupied, your thoughts busy, so you don’t continually flash back to memories of your presidential term.

The long and fruitless meetings with Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle, talking with them, arguing with them, and sometimes pleading with them, at one point saying, “Damn it, we’re all Americans here—isn’t there anything we can work on to move our country forward?”

And constantly getting the same smug, superior answers. “Don’t blame us, Mr. President. Blame them.”

The late nights in the Oval Office, signing letters of condolence to the families of the best of us, men and women who had died for the idea of America, not the squabbling and revenge-minded nation we have become. And three times running across the names of men I knew and fought with, back when I was younger, fitter, and with the teams.

And other late nights as well, reviewing what was called—in typical innocuous, bureaucratic fashion—the Disposition Matrix database, prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center, but was really known as the “kill list.” Months of work, research, surveillance, and intelligence intercepts resulting in a list of known terrorists who were a clear and present danger to the United States. And there I was, sitting by myself, and like a Roman emperor of old, I put a check mark next to those I decided were going to be killed in the next few days.

The sapling finally comes down.

Mission accomplished.

I look up and see something odd flying in the distance.

I stop, shade my eyes. Since moving here, I’ve gotten used to the different kinds of birds moving in and around Lake Marie, including the loons, whose night calls sound like someone’s being throttled, but I don’t recognize what’s flying over there now.

I watch for a few seconds, and then it disappears behind the far tree line.

And I get back to work, something suddenly bothering me, something I can’t quite figure out.

BASE OF THE HUNTSMEN TR AIL

Mount Rollins, New Hampshire

In the front seat of a black Cadillac Escalade, the older man rubs at his clean-shaven chin and looks at the video display from the laptop set up on top of the center console. Sitting next to him in the passenger seat, the younger man has a rectangular control system in his hand, with two small joysticks and other switches. He is controlling a drone with a video system, and they’ve just watched the home of former president Matthew Keating disappear from view.

It pleases the older man to see the West’s famed drone technology turned against them. For years he’s done the same thing with their wireless networks and cell phones, triggering devices and creating the bombs that shattered so many bodies and sowed so much terror.

And the Internet—which promised so much when it came out to bind the world as one—ended up turning into a well-used and safe communications network for him and his warriors.

The Cadillac they’re sitting in was stolen this morning from a young couple and their infant in northern Vermont, after the two men abandoned their stolen pickup truck. There’s

still a bit of blood spatter and brain matter on the dashboard in front of them. An empty baby’s seat is in the rear, along with a flowered cloth bag stuffed with toys and other childish things.

“Next?” the older man asks.

“We find the girl,” he says. “It shouldn’t take long.”

“Do it,” the older man says, watching with quiet envy

and fascination as the younger man manipulates the controls of the complex machine while the drone’s camera-made images appear on the computer screen.

“There. There she is.”

From a bird’s-eye view, he thinks, staring at the screen. A red sedan moves along the narrow paved roads.

He says, “And you are sure that the Americans, that they are not tracking you?”

“Impossible,” the younger man next to him says