01 – First Daughter

02 – Last Snow

03 – Blood Trust

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Edward Carson is just days away from being sworn in as President of the United States when his daughter is kidnapped. McClure is the one man he can trust to go to any lengths to find his daughter and bring her home safely.

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This is for my cousin David.

With great love and affection.

And for my lost child …

January 20

Inauguration Day

Alli Carson sat in the back of the armor-plated limo, sandwiched between Sam and Nina, her Secret Service detail. She was just three days shy of her twentieth birthday, but with her father being inaugurated President of the United States today, she’d scarcely had time to think about what she might get in the way of presents, let alone contemplate what she was going to do to celebrate.

For the moment, it was all about her father. The inauguration of Edward Carson, former senior senator from the great state of Nebraska, was celebration enough. Even she had found it interesting that the media had made such a fuss over the exit polls showing that her father was the first president to be significantly helped by a massive African-American turnout. Those votes had been the result of a national campaign engineered by her father’s formidable election machine in conjunction with the powerful black religious and political organization, the Renaissance Mission Congress. Her father had successfully run as the anti-Rove, basing his campaign on reconciliation and consensus building, for which the RMC had been the standard-bearer.

But for the moment, everything else was subsumed beneath the intricate and laborious plans for today, which had been ongoing for more than six weeks, as directed by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. The speeches, balls, cocktail parties, media ops, and shamelessly opportunistic sound bites had begun five days ago, and they would continue for another five days after her father was sworn in, an hour from now.

After eight years of the executive branch being at loggerheads with the legislature, today would usher in a new era in American politics. For the first time, a moderate Republican would be president—a man who, though a fiscal conservative, was unabashedly pro-choice and pro-women’s rights, which put him at odds with many Republicans and the religious right. Never mind. His mandate had come from young people, Hispanics and African Americans who, finally deciding it was time for their voices to be heard, turned out in record numbers to vote for Edward Carson. Not only did they find him irresistibly charismatic, but they also liked what he said, and how he said it. She had to admit her father was clever as well as smart. Still, he was of a species—the political animal—that she despised.

Alli didn’t even try to peer through the windows. The heavily smoked, bulletproof glass afforded only a glimpse of a world blurred in shadow. Inside, she was cushioned in a plush backseat, illuminated by the soft glow of the sidelights. Her hands were pale against the dark blue leather seat. Thick auburn hair framed an oval face dominated by clear green eyes. A constellation of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose like grains of sand, an endearing touch to a beautiful face. It said something important about her, that she deliberately didn’t cover her nose with makeup.

An engine of anxiety thrummed in the pit of her stomach. She’d given her iPod to the driver to plug into the stereo. A wash of fuzzed-out guitars, thumping bass, and steaming vocals from a band called Kill Hannah made the air shimmer and sweat.

“I wanna be a Kennedy,” the singer chanted, and Alli laughed despite herself. How many times had she had to endure the same question: “Are the Carsons the new Kennedys? Are you the political dynasty of the future?”

To which Alli would reply: “A Kennedy? Are you kidding? I don’t want to die young.” She’d said it so often, in fact, that it had become an iconic line, repeated both on hard news shows and late-night TV. It had even led to an appearance on Saturday Night Live, where they’d dressed her up like Caroline Kennedy. These antics didn’t exactly thrill anyone else in the Carson family, most of whom were seriously deficient in the sense-of-humor department.

They turned west onto Constitution Avenue NW, heading for the Capitol, where, as convention dictated, the swearing in of Edward Carson and his vice president would take place.

“What about Random House?” Nina, on her right, said suddenly. She had to raise her voice over the music.

“What about it?” Alli said.

Sam, on her left, leaned slightly toward her. “What she means is, are you going to take the deal?”

Sam wore a dark suit of a conservative cut, starched white shirt, striped tie. He had thinning brown hair, soft eyes, and an oddly monkish air, was broad, tall, and powerful. Nina had a long, rather somber face with an agressive nose and large blue eyes. She wore a charcoal gray worsted suit, sensible shoes with low heels, a pale blue oxford shirt buttoned to the collar. Both Secret Service agents had earbuds so they could communicate with their brethren in the presidential motorcade.

“The memoirs of the First Daughter. Well, in this age, public humiliation is a badge of courage, isn’t it?” Alli put her head back against the seat. “Ah, yes, the spellbinding saga of me. I can’t wait to read that, so I can only imagine how everyone else will be clamoring for it.”

“She’s not going to take the deal,” Nina said to Sam over her head.

“You think?” Sam said sardonically. Then he allowed a smile to creep onto his pock-cheeked face. “Right. She’s no Paris Hilton.”

Alli said: “Hey, listen, what Paris Hilton got before anyone else was the difference between exposing things about herself and being exposed. Why fight our tabloid culture, she asked herself, when I can make a mint from it? And that’s just what she did. She made exposing yourself cool.”

“You’re not going to make a liar out of Nina. You’re not going to take the deal.” Sam frowned. “Are you?”

Alli screwed up her mouth. “Real men would take bets.” She didn’t like being so predictable.

The limo made a dogleg to the right, onto Pennsylvania Avenue NW, passing under the four lanes of Route 395, and onto the ring road that swung around the sprawling Capitol building.

Another song came on, “Neon Bible” by Arcade Fire, shaking the interior of the limo, and, strangely, Alli found herself looking at Sam’s hands. They were square, callused, vaguely intimidating hands, reminding her of Jack McClure. She felt a quick stab deep inside her, and a darkness swept across her consciousness, like a veil lowered for a funeral. And just like that, the engine of anxiety morphed into a singular sense of purpose. She was looking at the world now as if through a telescope.

They were almost at the Capitol, rolling slowly, as if in thick, churning surf. She became aware of the press of people—dignitaries, politicians, security guards, military men from all the armed services, newscasters, celebrities, paparazzi—their heaving mass impressing itself on the smoked glass.

She was aware of the tenseness of her body. “Where’s Jack?”

“My old buddy’s on assignment,” Sam said. But something in his voice alerted her.

“His assignment is here, with me,” she said. “My father made me a promise.”

“That may be,” Nina said.

“You know how these things go, Alli.” Sam leaned forward, grasping the inner door handle as they rolled to a stop.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “Not about this.” She felt a sudden inexplicable fear invade her, and she felt the brush of the funeral veil. “I want to talk to my father.”

“Your father is busy, Alli,” Nina said. “You know that.”

From out of her fear came a surge of outrage. Nina was right, of course, and this made her feel helpless. “Then tell me where Jack is,” she demanded. Her green eyes were luminous in the sidelights. “And don’t tell me you don’t know.”

Nina sighed, looked at Sam, who nodded.

“The fact is,” Nina said, “we don’t know where Jack is.”

“He didn’t check in this morning,” Sam added.

Alli felt a small pulse beating in the hollow of her throat. “Why haven’t you found him?”

“We’ve made inquiries, of course,” Sam said.

“The truth is, Alli …” Nina paused. “He’s vanished off the radar screen.”

Alli felt a tiny scream gathering in her throat. She rolled the gold-and-platinum ring around her finger nervously. “Find him,” she said tersely. “I want him with me.” But even as she spoke, she understood the futility of her words. Jack was gone. If the Secret Service couldn’t find him, no one could.

Sam smiled reassuringly. “Jack handpicked us to protect you. There’s nothing to be concerned about.”

“Alli, it’s time to go,” Nina said gently.

Sam opened the door, stepped out into the wan January sunshine. Alli could hear him whispering into his mike, listening intently to security updates.

Nina, half out of her seat, held Alli by the elbow. Alli smoothed down the skirt of the suit her mother had bought for her and insisted she wear. It was a mid-blue tweed with a hint of green in it that matched the color of her eyes. If she wore anything like this on campus, she’d never hear the end of it. As it was, her image would be plastered all over the papers and the evening news. She wriggled inside the suit, itchy and overheated. As was her custom, she wore a minimum amount of makeup—she had not given in on that one—and her nails were cut almost as short as a man’s.

When Sam nodded, Nina urged her charge forward, and Alli emerged from the plush cocoon of the limo. She saw the Unites States Marine and Air Force bands standing at attention to either side of the inaugural platform and, on it, the Speaker of the House, who would make the Call to Order and the opening remarks; the Reverend Dr. Fred Grimes, from whom the invocation and the benediction would come; and two mezzo-sopranos from the Metropolitan Opera, who would sing arias during the musical interludes. There was the vice president and his family. And her father, chatting with the Speaker of the House while her mother, head slightly bowed, spoke in hushed tones with Grimes, who had married them.

Then, Alli was inundated by a swirl of people, voices, microphones, hundreds of camera shutters clicking like a field of crickets. Sam and Nina cut a protective swath through the straining throng, guiding her at long last up the steps of the inaugural platform, draped in the American flag, the blue-and-gold symbol of the president’s office affixed to the center podium, where the speeches would be made, the swearing in would take place.

She kissed her mother as she was embraced; her father turned, smiled at her, nodding.

Her mother said, “Are you okay?” as they pulled away.

“I’m fine,” Alli said in a knee-jerk reaction that she didn’t quite understand. The breeze picked up and she shivered a little. As the marine band struck up its first tune, she put her hands in the pockets of her long wool coat.

Sunlight shone like beaten brass on the faces of the most important men in the Western world. She moved a step closer to her father, and he gave her that smile again. The I’m-proud-of-you smile, which meant he didn’t see her at all.

The last bars of the fanfare had faded and the Speaker of the House took the podium for the Call to Order. Behind him rose the facade of the Capitol, symbol of government and freedom, its dome glimmering as if with Edward Carson’s promise of a new tomorrow. Down below, among the pale fluted columns, hung three huge American flags, the Stars and Stripes billowing as gently as fields of wheat glowing in sunset.

Alli’s right hand found the stitches in the satin lining of her coat, her nail opening the basting until there was a small rent. Her two fingers encountered the small glass vial that had been secreted there. As if in a dream, she lifted out the vial, closed her fist around it in her pocket. There was a ticking in her head as she counted to herself: 180 seconds. Then she would open the vial of specially prepared anthrax.

And like the contents of Pandora’s box, out would come death in amber waves of grain.

Part 1

One Month Ago

1

Exhausted light from a winter sun swooned onto the black Ford Explorer as the vehicle crunched down the gravel drive toward the porte cochere of an impressive colonial mansion. A blaze of headlights from the armored vehicle momentarily sent a shiver of anticipation through the knot of reporters clustered around the mansion’s columned entrance. They leaned forward, but could see nothing behind the bulletproof smoked-glass windows. News vans sprouting satellite feeds were drawn up as close as the squad of Secret Service agents would allow. These men—young, crew-cut, square-jawed individuals from Texas, Iowa, Nebraska—looked as sturdy as grain-fed steers.

The Explorer rolled to a stop. From its rear door, a Secret Service agent alighted, turned, tensely watched the crowd with hawk eyes as the POTUS, the President of the United States, emerged. As he climbed the brick steps, the front door opened and a distinguished-looking man emerged to vigorously shake his hand. At this moment, the news crush started, moving forward, the reporters trailing crews in their wake. Flashbulbs went off, reporters began calling out questions to the president, voices cawing urgently like crows discovering roadkill.

One of the reporters holding his microphone out toward the president had worked his way to the front of the press’s storm surge, ostensibly to get himself heard over the rising din. No one took notice of him until he lunged forward. Pressing a button caused the fake mike to fall away, revealing a switchblade. Instantly, the alert agents converged on him, two of them disarming him, wrestling him to the top step before he could attack the president. Another had drawn the president into the relative safety of the open doorway, the man the president had come to see having retreated indoors and into the shadows.

All at once, shots rang out; the agent who had hold of the president instantly shielded his charge. Too late. Three, four red stains appeared on the president’s shirt and lapels.

“I’d be a goner,” the actual POTUS said, picking his way across the colonial mansion’s reverse side in his small, quick, emblematic strides.

At his side, Dennis Paull, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who had also witnessed this latest Secret Service training session, said, “It’s an unfortunate factor of the aftermath of the election, sir. The Service was obliged to hire an additional two hundred fifty agents to protect the candidates. There was very little time to train them to the depth usually required.”

The president made a face. “Thank the good Lord none of them are in my detail.”

“I’d never allow that to happen, sir.”

The president was tall, silver-haired, possessed of the intangible trappings accruing from power. He had successfully faced down many a political opponent both at home and, increasingly, abroad. The secretary, barrel-chested, bearded, with ears as whorled as a cowrie shell, was the president’s most trusted advisor. At least once a week, most often two or three times, the president saw to it that they spent private time together, chewing over both the increasingly slippery political climate and delicate matters known only to the two of them.

In companionable silence, they passed through the facade of the colonial mansion mock-up via the fiberboard front door. On the top step, the agent who had played the president was rising to his feet. The red paintball “hits” to his chest had ruined his shirt and suit. He was otherwise unharmed. His “assassin” came walking along the lawn, holding what looked like an assault weapon but was in fact a BT-4 Pathfinder paintball rifle.

“Assumptions kill,” one of the Service instructors boomed to his charges with terrifying authority. “The lone assassin theory is antiquated. In this networked day and age, we have to prepare for cadres, coordinated attacks, tined and vibrating like tuning forks.”

While the squad of Secret Service personnel was being debriefed—perhaps criticized was a better word for the severe dressing-down—by its chief instructor, the president and Secretary Paull, followed by their contingent of Secret Service personnel handpicked by Paull himself, moved off down the driveway. They were in Beltsville, Maryland, at the main Secret Service sanctuary, far away from everything and everyone—especially prying eyes and ears.

“I was afraid of this response, which is why I insisted on seeing the scenario myself,” the president said. “When I meet with the Russian president, I want to be absolutely certain our people are prepared for anything, including whatever E-Two might throw in our faces.”

“The latest manifesto we received from E-Two was a laundry list of the administration’s so-called sins: lies, distortions, coercions, and extortions,” Secretary Paull said. “They’ve also trotted out evidence of our ties to big oil and certain private defense contractors. Our counter has been to whip our usual mass media outlets and individual pundits into discrediting that laundry list as the ravings of a lunatic left-wing fringe.”

“Don’t make the mistake of taking this organization lightly,” the president said. “They’re terrorists—damnably clever ones.”

“The relevant point as far as this discussion is concerned is that the manifesto didn’t even hint at assassination.”

The POTUS snorted. “Would you if you were planning to assassinate the President of the United States?”

“Sir, let me point out that terrorists thrive on taking credit for their disruptions of normal life. So I would think, yes, at the very least they’d hint at the violence to come.”

The hubbub from the Secret Service debriefing had dispersed. Behind them, the elaborate state set was deserted, awaiting its next scenario. Their shoes crunched cleanly against the gravel. They kept to the wanly lit center, a narrow aisle between the massive bare-branched oaks and horse chestnuts that lined the driveway.

“The Service can do better,” Paull said decisively, knowing what the president expected of him. “It will do better.”

“I take that promise extremely seriously,” the president said.

A bird twittered happily on a branch above their heads. Higher still, a parchment cloud floated away without a care. The early morning was free of mist, waxy as a spit-polished shoe. They navigated a turning and now, save for the Secret Service bodyguards, were absolutely alone.

“Dennis, on a personal note, how is Louise?”

“About as well as can be expected,” Paull said stoically.

“Will she recognize me if I come to see her?”

Paull looked up at the bird and it flew off. “Truthfully, sir, I can’t say. Sometimes, she thinks I’m her father, not her husband.”

The president reached out, squeezed the secretary’s arm. “Still, I want to visit her, Dennis. Today.”

“Your calendar’s full, sir. You have to prep for your meeting with President Yukin.”

“I’ll make time, Dennis. She’s a good woman. I know inside she’s fighting the good fight. We must strive to be inspired by her courage.”

“Thank you, sir.” Paull’s head bent. “Your concern means the world to both of us.”

“Martha and I say a prayer for her every night, Dennis. She’s always in our thoughts, and our hearts. God has her in his hands.”

They moved toward an old stone cottage, the gravel clicking under the soles of their shoes. The Secret Service detail, discreetly out of earshot, moved with them. The two men were like lightning bolts within a passing cloud.

“About Yukin.”

The president shook his head, and they continued on in silence. At the president’s behest, Paull unlocked the door of the stone cottage and they went inside. The praetorian guard took up station outside, backs toward the stone walls.

The president turned on lamps in the small stuffy room. The cottage was the original structure on the property. The government had turned it into a guesthouse for senior staff of other branches of the military intelligence community who were occasionally asked to lecture or teach a course here. The living room, low-ceilinged, bound by beams, was furnished simply, tastefully, masculinely in blacks and umbers. A leather sofa and easy chairs were arranged around a stone fireplace. A wooden Shaker sideboard held crystal decanters filled with a variety of liquors. Historical etchings were hung on the walls. There was no carpet to soften the colonial wide-plank floors.

It was cold inside. Both men kept their topcoats on.

“Yukin is a thieving, lying sonovabitch, if ever there was one,” the president said with considerable venom. “It galls me no end to have to make nice to him, but these days it’s all about commodities: oil, natural gas, uranium. Russia has them in spades.” He turned to his secretary. “So what do you have for me?”

The president needed leverage in his upcoming meeting with Yukin. Paull had been tasked with providing it. “It’s common knowledge within the intelligence community that Yukin’s appointees are former KGB apparatchiks who once served under him, but what isn’t common knowledge is that his new head of the newly state-owned RussOil used to be Yukin’s personal assassin.”

The president’s head jerked around; his statesman’s gaze bored into Paull. This was the look that had gotten him elected, that had bonded Britain’s prime minister and France’s new president to him. “Mikilin! You have proof of this?”

Reaching inside his coat, Paull produced a Black File. Across its top right-hand corner was a diagonal red stripe, a sign of its Most Top Secret status. “The fruits of six months of work. Your hunch about Mikilin was right on the money.”

As he scanned the contents of the file, the president’s face broke out into a huge smile. “So Mikilin ordered the poisoning of that ex-KGB agent because the agent had acquired a copy of Mikilin’s KGB dossier and was about to sell it to the highest bidder in London.” He smacked the file with the back of his hand, satisfaction in his voice. “Now I have Yukin—and Mikilin—just where I want them.”

He tucked away the file, shook Paull’s hand. “You did a stellar job on this, Dennis. I appreciate your support, especially in these waning days.”

“I despise and mistrust Yukin as much as you do, sir. It’s time he was taken down a peg or two.” Paull’s hand strayed to a bust of President Lincoln. “Speaking of which, have you read the brief I gave you regarding China?”

“Not yet. I was saving it for the long plane ride.”

“I’d be grateful if we discussed it now, sir. Behind the scenes, there’s a profound shift going on in the heart of mainland China. The regime in Beijing, having had to abandon communism in the new economy-driven international marketplace, has nevertheless decided that they dare not openly embrace capitalism. Yet they are in need of an ideology, because, as Mao showed them, a single ideology is the only way to unite an enormous nation with such a disparate population. Our veteran China watchers have had hints that Beijing has decided that ideology should be national atheism.”

“But that’s monstrous,” the president said. “We’ve got to nip that in the bud.”

“What worries our China-watchers, sir, is that the adoption of a new ideology may signal other changes in Beijing’s policies—specifically an assault on Taiwan, which is why it’s imperative for you to bring up the subject with Yukin. He has no love of Beijing or its aspirations.”

“Thank you for that, Dennis. Beijing will be topic one once I get Yukin under my thumb.” The president moved a curtain slightly, glanced out the window at their escort. “My praetorian guard,” he said.

“The cream of the crop,” Paull acknowledged.

“But what about afterward?” the president said softly. “What happens in twenty-one days, when I hand the reins of power over to Godless Edward Carson?”

“Begging your pardon, sir. Intelligence reports tell me that Edward Carson and his wife attend church every Sunday.”

“A joke, surely.” The president pursed his lips as he did when events ran away from him. “This is a man who has pledged to fund stem-cell research, stem cells from fetuses.” He shuddered. “Well, what do you expect? He believes in abortion, in the murder of helpless innocents. Who’s going to protect them if not us? And it gets worse. He doesn’t understand, God help us all, the fundamental danger same-sex marriage poses to the moral fiber of the country. It undermines the very principles of family we as Americans hold dear.” The president shook his noble head and quoted Yeats, “‘What rough beast … slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’”

“Sir—”

“No, no, Dennis, he might as well be one of those First American Secular Revivalists or E-Twos.” The president gestured. “Those missionary secularists, who have what they call—can you believe this?—a zealous disbelief in God. Where in hell did they come from?”

Paull tried not to wince. No one else in the Administration was brave enough to tell the president, so as usual it fell to him to deliver the bad news reality was sending the president’s way. Therefore, the guillotine was always hovering six inches above his neck. “I’m afraid we don’t know, sir.”

The president stopped in his tracks, turned to Paull. “Well, find out, damnit. That’s your new assignment, Dennis. We need to wipe out this cancer of homegrown traitors PDQ because they’re not simply atheists. Atheists, thank the good Lord, have a long history of keeping their traps firmly shut. They know their place, which is outside the clear-cut boundaries of God-fearing society. Are we not a Christian nation?” The president’s eyes narrowed. “No, these sonsabitches can’t stop yowling about the evils of religion, about how they’re engaged in the final battle against theological hocus-pocus. Good Lord, if that isn’t a sign that the devil walks among us, I just don’t know what is!”

“Time is running out, sir.” As he often did, laboring against the monolithic born-again tide of the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor, Paull was trying to get the president to focus on reality-based decisions. “So far, E-Two has remained completely invisible, and as for the visible First American Secular Revivalists and other like-minded organizations who aren’t radical—”

“Not radical?” The president was irate.“All those hell-bent bastards are radical. Goddamnit, Dennis, I won’t countenance a bunch of homegrown terrorists. Find a way to wipe ’em out, find it pronto.”

The president, hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat, stared up at the ceiling. Paull knew that look only too well. He’d seen it an increasing number of times over the past year as, one by one, members of the president’s inner council had left the Administration, as the enemy took over Congress, as opposition mounted to the president’s aggressive foreign policy. No matter. The president stood fast. There were times when Paull forgot how long ago the president had sunk into a bunker mentality, circling what wagons were left, refusing to listen to any form of change. And why should he? He was convinced that the success of his legacy depended on his unwavering belief that he was carrying out the will of God. “I’m like a rock, pounded by the sea,” he’d often say. “Yet steadfast, immovable.” In these latter days, he’d taken to calling himself the Lonely Guardian.

“To think that it’s almost Christmas.” The president made a noise in the back of his throat. “Time, Dennis. Time betrays us all, remember that.”

The president gripped the back of the sofa as if it were the neck of his worst enemy. “I’ve spent eight years doing my level best to pull America out of the pit of immorality into which the previous Administration had sunk it. I’ve spent eight years protecting America from the most heinous threat it’s every faced, and if that meant exercising the power of this hallowed office, if it meant turning the country around so that it would know its roots, know itself, see itself as the righteous Christian nation it is, then so be it.” His eyes were filled with righteous pain. “But what do I get for my hard labor, Dennis? Do I get the thanks of a nation? Do I get accolades in the press? I do not. I get protests, I get excoriated in the liberal press, I get blasphemous videos on YouTube. Does no one understand the lengths I’ve gone to to protect this nation? Does no one understand the importance of my legacy as president?” He rubbed the end of his nose. “But they will, Dennis. Mark my words, I will be redeemed by history.” He regarded his companion. “I’ve made sure that we’ve become Fortress America, Dennis, a stalwart redoubt against the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. But now we have to contend with traitors from within. I won’t have it, I tell you!” By way of punctuation, the president added his no-nonsense nod.

“Now let’s pray.” He got down on his knees and the Secretary followed suit while their cadre of bodyguards turned their backs. The two men bowed their heads, clasped their hands against their striped rep ties. Sunlight glittered off the president’s polyurethane hair. My hair’s gone white, my beard is shot with gray. I feel the weight of the world crushing me, Paull thought. The expectation of greatness, the dread of making a mistake, of missing a vital piece of intel, of being one step late to the dance of death. Jesus, if he only knew. We’ve all aged a century since we came into power, all except him. He looks younger now than when he took office.

“Lord, we humbly beg thee to come to our aid in our hour of need, so that we can continue your work and hold back the turning of the tide that threatens to overrun all that we’ve labored so hard for these past eight years.”

A moment of silence ensued as the two men regained their feet. Before they took their leave of the guesthouse, the president touched his secretary’s sleeve, said in a low but distinct voice, “Dennis, when on January twentieth of next year I step aside, I want to know that everything is in place for us to retain our grip on Congress and on the media.”

Paull was about to respond when the sound of a helicopter sliced into the pellucid morning like a knife, exposing in him a sense of foreboding. And with that his cell phone rang.

It had to be important; his office knew whom he was with. He connected, listened to the voice of one of his chief lieutenants, his stomach spewing out acid in pulsarlike bursts. At length, he handed the phone to the president.

The president waved it away, clearly annoyed at having been interrupted. “Good Lord, just give me the gist, Dennis, like you always do.”

This is why he hasn’t aged, Paull thought. “I think you’d better hear this yourself.”

The president’s voice was querulous. “Why?”

“Sir, it’s about Alli Carson.”

The president reached for the phone.

2

“Are you all right? Can you move?”

Jack McClure heard the voice, but he could see nothing. He tried to move, but between the seat belt and the airbag, he was held firmly in place.

“I’ve called nine-one-one,” the familiar voice said. “There’ll be an ambulance here soon.”

Jack could smell hot metal, and the sickly sweet scent of fresh blood and gore.

“Bennett?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” Captain Rodney Bennett was his boss in the Falls Church, Virginia, ATF Group I, specializing in Arson and Explosives.

“I can’t see.”

“There’s blood all over your face,” Bennett said softly.

Jack lifted his right arm, which seemed to move okay. Using the cuff of his bomber jacket, he wiped his face clean. More blood trickled down his forehead into his eyes. Probing with his fingertips, he discovered a laceration at his hairline, put one hand over it. Then looked to the right. Part of the guardrail, ripped open by the impact of the crash, had twisted through the windshield, shearing off the passenger’s-side headrest, which it would have done to Jack’s head if he’d crashed a foot to the right.

Wind blew into the Escalade, drying the sweat on Jack’s scalp to a salt crust. The rain had stopped. Clouds swirled high above, dirtying the white sky.

“Jack, what the hell happened?”

Disoriented, hearing the sounds of approaching sirens, his mind was cast back to other sirens, other flashing lights.

Another car crash.

Seven months ago he’d been in the office, a phone to his ear, coordinating a raid on a high-end cigarette smuggler, the end of a six-month sting operation for which Jack had been the front. He would have liked to be in the field, on the front line, but he was all too aware of his limitations, he knew Bennett placed him where he was invaluable, and that made all the difference to him. Bennett was one of the only people in his life who knew what Jack was and accepted it.

Jack, with a satellite map on the computer screen in front of him, barked out new locations to the team leaders. His cell phone buzzed; he ignored it. The buzzing stopped, then almost immediately, started again. While bellowing orders, redirecting one of the field units, he risked a glance at his cell. It was Emma.

The field units were redeploying in an attempt to take the high ground. He had a special talent for seeing the larger picture, for examining a situation in three dimensions—the more complex, the better, so far as he was concerned. His tactical expertise was unmatched.

The cell buzzed for a third time. Damnit, what mess had his daughter gotten herself into this time? Work phone pressed sweatily to one ear, he answered his cell.

“Dad, I’ve got a real problem, I’ve got to talk to you—”

“Honey,” he said, “I’m in the middle of a crisis. I haven’t got time for this now.”

“But, Dad, I need your help. There’s no one else—”

A harsh voice crackled in his other ear. “We’re taking fire from the high ground!”

“Hold on,” he said to his daughter. Then into the landline, “Get down and keep down.” He manipulated the map on the screen. Lots of writing wriggled by like shining fish vanishing into an undersea cave. If he took the time, he could read the words, but … “Okay, take three men, move six meters to your left. You’ll have cover from the stand of trees.”

“Dad, Dad? …”

Jack, heart beating fast, said, “I’m here, Emma, but I don’t have—”

“Dad, I’m leaving here.” By here, she meant Langley Field College, where she was a sophomore.

“Honey, I’m happy to talk, but just not now.”

Then the shit really hit the fan. “We’re on top of ‘em, Jack!” he heard in his other ear.

“Get the second team moving now!” Jack shouted. “You’ll have them in a crossfire.”

“I’m going to drive over to you.”

Jack could hear the sudden crackle of automatic fire. His annoyance flared. “Emma, I have no time for your adolescent games.”

“This isn’t a game, Dad! This can’t wait. I’m coming—”

“Jesus, Emma, didn’t you hear me? Not now.” And he hung up.

The cell buzzed again, but he’d already returned to the fray.

The raid was successful. In the hectic aftermath, Jack forgot all about the call from Emma. But that didn’t last. Seventeen minutes later, Jack got another call. At high velocity, top light flashing blue and white, he sped to the scene of the accident, Saigon Road, off an isolated stretch of the Georgetown Pike at Dranesville District Park. The area—thickly treed, sparsely inhabited—had been cordoned off with yellow tape, a squad of uniforms was buzzing around a pair of state police detectives, and four burly EMTs were trekking back and forth between the crash site and the two ambulances, red lights flashing on their long white roofs.

Jack got out of the car and, for a moment, could do nothing, not even think. His brain seemed frozen. At the same time, his legs felt as if they would no longer support him. There was a large elm tree to which the car seemed attached. Tire marks, a laminate of rubber burned into the road behind the car, wove a crazy zigzag into the tree. Jack flashed on Emma’s call. He’d been too immersed in the raid to register how distraught she was. Is that why she had lost control of the car? Had she plowed into the tree before she could regain control?

One of the uniforms approached him, hand outstretched to stop him. “What the hell happened?” Jack shouted into his face as if the crash were his fault.

The uniform barked something that Jack didn’t hear. Mechanically, Jack showed his ID, and the uniform backed off.

When Jack saw the rear of the car—oddly pristine compared with the rest of it—he felt a chill pass through him. He recognized the tags on the vehicle—a blue ’99 Toyota Camry. It was Emma’s car, all doubt now erased.

“Will someone tell me what the hell happened?” he shouted again.

All during the drive he’d been telling himself that it had to be a mistake, that it wasn’t Emma’s car that had careened off the road at speed, ending in a head-on with a tree, that the dead girl driving it wasn’t his daughter.

That was a fool’s notion, a desperate attempt to alter reality. He saw her the moment he arrived at the crash site. Emma had been thrown from the car. He squatted beside her on hard ground blackened by oil and blood. His daughter’s blood. Bending over, he cradled her head as he had on the day she was born. My god, it’s true, he thought. It wasn’t a nightmare from which he’d awake shaken but relieved. This was real; this was his doomed life. Why had she called him? What had she wanted? Where was she going in such a panic? He’d never know now. Her life, brief and bitter, came rushing at him like a locomotive, and she struck him full-on—a healthy pink baby he rocked to sleep, a toddler he helped navigate the obstacles in the living room, a little girl he regarded with a certain amount of awe as she climbed the playground jungle gym or whooshed down the slide, the beauty of her dark, liquid turned-up eyes as she waved to him on her way into first grade. Now came the wrecking ball that demolished them both in one cruel swing.

She was gone. In an instant. In a heartbeat. Like a cloud or the wind. After she broke away from his orbit, what had he ever done to take an interest in her, to show her that he loved her? Worst of all, where was he when she’d needed him the most? Where was she now? He wasn’t a religious man, he held no illusions about heaven and angels, but it was inconceivable that she had vanished into nothingness. He was overcome by the horror that his time with her hadn’t even begun. Wishful thinking, that’s all his thoughts amounted to, because he had no beliefs, there was nothing to hold on to here but the battered head of his only child, his baby, his little girl.

Where had he been when she had been pushed out from between her mother’s legs? Making sure a shipment of XM 8 lightweight assault rifles, stolen from Fort McNair, didn’t fall into the hands of the Colombian drug-runners who very badly needed them. In the wrong place, just like today.

It was immensely difficult to keep looking at her, to absorb every burn, laceration, contusion, but he couldn’t bear to turn away, because he was afraid that he would forget her. He was afraid that once this moment was over, she would be like a life only dreamed.

3

Three crows rose from the empty field of grass that was being obliterated by the erection of four McMansions. The crows, wing feathers iridescent, circled once and were gone. Maybe they knew where Emma was now.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” Jack said. “Fortunately, you don’t get a say in this,” Bennett said. Jack turned his head as two EMTs lifted the gurney he was on into the ambulance. Inside, one of them sat on a bench and monitored his pulse. She was small, compact, dark, Latina. Eyes the color of coffee unadulterated by milk. She smiled at him, showed even white teeth. Bennett sat beside her.

Jack’s mind seemed to drift, as if the jolt he’d received in the crash had dislodged him from the present. He saw himself standing in National Memorial Park over the freshly dug hole in the ground into which Emma’s mahogany casket would be lowered as soon as Father Larrigan ceased his interminable droning. Sharon was standing beside him, but apart. There might have been a continent between them. For her, he didn’t exist, or rather, he existed in a world full of horror and death she could no longer inhabit. They’d yelled and screamed at each other, dishes had been hurled, a lamp that caused a flurry of flame that Jack quickly stamped out. No matter. The fight went on as if no bell had rung, until they came to blows, which was what they wanted or, at least, needed. Then all was still, save for Sharon’s quiet sobbing.

Father Larrigan was done and the casket began its mechanical descent into the ground.

“No!” screamed Sharon, breaking to the casket. “My little girl! No!”

Jack made a move toward her, but Father Larrigan was closer. He put a sheltering arm around her.

Sharon leaned against his big Irish frame. “Why did Emma die, Father? It’s all so senseless. Why did she have to die?”

“God works in mysterious ways,” Father Larrigan said softly. “His plan is beyond human understanding.”

“God?” Sharon shoved him away from her in disgust. “God wouldn’t take the life of a young innocent girl whose life hadn’t yet begun. No plan could be so cruel, no plan could excuse my daughter’s death. Better to say it was the work of the devil!”

Father Larrigan looked like he was about to faint. “Mrs. McClure, please! Your blaspheming—”

But Sharon would not be denied. “There is no plan!” she howled to Father Larrigan, to the unfeeling sky. “There is no God!”

As Jack sucked in pure oxygen, his brain ceased its wandering. He opened his eyes.

“Ah, you’re with us again,” Bennett said.

He sat with only one buttock on the bench, tipped slightly forward. “D’you feel up to telling me what happened, Jack? Last I know you defused the packet of C-four the perp set in the basement of Friedland High School.”

To the EMT woman’s distress, Jack slipped off the oxygen mask. “The perp broke free of custody, I don’t know how. I know my way around that basement, I knew he must be headed for the Bilco doors on the east side—besides the stairs, they’re the only way out. I went after him. He hot-wired the principal’s car, took off. I took off after him.”

“You lost him?”

Jack tried to smile, but grimaced instead. In the aftermath of the crash, his head throbbed, but his body buzzed with the excess adrenaline it was still pumping out. “There’s a steep embankment about a half mile back. He swerved into me there. I braked, swung into him, and he did a three-sixty while going off the edge.”

The EMT strapped the mask back over Jack’s nose and mouth. “Sorry, I need to get him back on oxygen.”

Bennett shot her a glance. “Is he in shock?”

“No, but he will be if you keep this up.”

Bennett frowned disapprovingly. “I mean, how’s he doing overall?”

“There’s no outward sign of concussion.” She tightened the straps of the mask. “No broken bones, and the laceration to his scalp is superficial.” Noting Jack’s pallor, she recalibrated the flow of oxygen. “But I’m not a doctor. He needs to be properly evaluated.”

The chief nodded vaguely. His face was fissured by hard decisions, painful failures, bureaucratic frustrations, cragged with the loneliness that only men like Bennett and Jack could feel. We’re a breed apart, Jack thought. We inhabit the world just like everyone else, but we walk through it as shadows. We have to in order to find the places where the vermin live, worm ourselves in to lure them out, or to chop them into tiny pieces. And after a while, even if we’re extremely vigilant, we become so used to being shadows that we don’t feel comfortable anywhere else but the darkness. That’s when, like it or not, in order to save ourselves, in order to preserve our way of living, we sever our ties with normalcy, because it becomes more and more difficult to make that transition back from the shadows into the light, until it becomes impossible altogether. And then here we find ourselves, deep in the places where only shadows exist.

The ambulance came to a stop, and the EMT woman opened the rear doors. Jack was rolled out of the ambulance, wheeled through the automatic doors of the emergency room.

“I’ll handle all the paperwork,” Bennett said to the admitting attendant.

“But the patient has to read and agree to—”

“I have power of attorney for the patient,” Bennett said in his brook-no-argument tone of voice.

The attendant bristled, gathered herself around her ample bosom. “Do you have proof?”

Bennett whipped out a pad and pen, stared at her ID tag. “Ms. Honeycutt, is it?” He scribbled on the pad. “Gimme the name of your supervisor.”

Ms. Honeycutt’s glare was as sharp as a scalpel as she handed over the clipboard, but whatever was on her mind she kept to herself, which was all Bennett required.

Jack was sent down for X-rays and a CAT scan. Then his laceration was cleaned and dressed while he was hydrated intravenously.

When Bennett pulled aside the opaque curtain that had been drawn around Jack’s cubicle, Jack said, “No breaks, no concussion. Are you satisfied now? Can I get the hell out of here so I can get back to work?”

“In a minute,” the chief said. “Your ex is here.”

Jack sat up in the bed. “Damnit, not now.”

“Too late,” a husky female voice said.

Jack, sliding off the bed and onto his feet, saw Sharon appear like a fallen angel.

She smiled. “Hi, Roddy.”

“Sharon.” The chief leaned forward, pecked her on the cheek. “Good to see you again.”

Looking at Jack frown, she said, “I’m glad someone thinks so.”

She made her way past Bennett, who behind Sharon’s back, gave Jack a small nod of encouragement before disappearing back into the holy hell of the ER, although at this precise moment, Jack didn’t really know which was more of a holy hell, outside the curtain or inside.

It was as she stood silently contemplating him that Jack became acutely aware that he was without trousers. Her hair was lighter than it had been when they were married, and she wore different makeup. She looked both familiar and strange to him, as if she had gone through a mysterious transformation.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Rodney called me.” She ran a hand through her hair, golden highlights glinting in the overhead fluorescents. “He said he thought you were okay but maybe I should come down and see for myself.”

There was some shouting and the hasty squeaks of doctors’ rubber-soled shoes on the ER’s rubberized floor. The curtain rippled behind him as a patient was wheeled into the next cubicle. From the raised, rushed voice, Jack gathered that there was a lot of bleeding that needed to be stopped, stat.

“I don’t know why you bothered,” Jack said. “Aren’t you too busy fucking Jeff?”

Color rose to her cheeks. “Your best friend is still in the hospital.”

Jack felt the muck that had lain on the streambed of his mind being stirred up once again, and his heart began to shrivel. He could end this fight now, before it escalated out of control, but some part of him that was not finished punishing himself goaded him on. “He stopped being my best friend when he took you to bed.”

“Neither of us meant it to—”

“Bullshit! Those things don’t just happen. You both wanted it.”

Her gray eyes stared placidly into his. “I wanted a shot at happiness, Jack. Something I came to realize you know nothing about. After Emma died, I spent six months in mourning. I went on Prozac so I wouldn’t tear my heart out.”

He stood, stunned, rooted to the cold linoleum. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you needed Prozac even more than I did. The difference is, you didn’t get help. You wallowed in your pain, the self-flagellation became your reason to live. You became a black hole. I had to get out before you sucked me into it with you.

“I was so tired of you chasing criminals, of never knowing when you’d come home, if you’d come home.” She took a step toward him. “Without you, our bed grew cold.”

In the next makeshift cubicle, the doctors’ voices rose. They were losing the patient. A spray of blood hit the other side of the curtain, which ballooned out briefly.

“Dear God,” she started, “what’s happening over there?”

“Forget it,” Jack said. “There’s nothing to be done.”

Sharon’s eyes turned back to him. All the fierceness had gone out of her. Like a tire running flat, she seemed suddenly wobbly, unsure of herself. “Anyway, I’m no longer seeing him.”

“Found someone better already?” Jack snapped.

To her credit, she ignored his dig. “He’s intent on pressing battery charges against you. I tried to persuade him he was making a mistake, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Jack felt his heart skip a beat. Is that why she’d broken up with Jeff? Had she sided with him? He stared at her, too many emotions flitting through him for him to recognize even one. After all that had happened, all that had come between them, she still had the uncanny ability to draw him like a flame. And yet he felt the gulf that lay between them: the broken promises, the lies, the guilt—the unforgiven. It had substance, the form of life. It felt like the holding of one’s breath just before the onrush of a storm.

Beyond the stained curtain, there was silence, the activity had ceased, the doctors had gone on to the next urgent case. The patient was lost.

In a clumsy attempt to counteract the gulf, he moved closer to her. “Do you think I stopped loving you?”

Her lips parted, and her breath fanned his cheek. “No, I think you loved me. I know I loved you.” Putting her hand on his biceps, she pushed herself away from him so gently, he didn’t—couldn’t—resist.

Despite his best intentions, he couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. She had kept so many things from him, even before they’d split up: the depths of her grief, her depression, taking Prozac. He lashed out in twisted fashion. “So you show it by spreading your legs for—”

She slapped him then.

He noticed that her lipstick was the same bloody color as her nails, which meant that she wasn’t biting her nails anymore.

“Why did you make me do that?” Her voice was filled with sadness. “I didn’t come here to rehash the past. I wanted … I want to offer you a bedroom, a good home-cooked meal, if you like.”

He had no idea how to respond.

She gave him a nervous smile. “I went back to church, Jack.”

He looked at her in bewilderment. He felt disoriented, as if he were in a forest of mirrors. Who was this woman standing in front of him? Not his ex-wife, surely.

“I suppose you think I’m either crazy or a hypocrite after the tongue-lashing I gave Father Larrigan.” With a long finger, she swept a wisp of hair off her face. “The truth is, the Prozac didn’t work. Nothing did. My heart was too damaged. The Prozac masked the pain, but it didn’t take it away. In desperation, I turned to the Church.”

He shook his head mutely.

“I’ve found a measure of peace there.”

“Don’t you see that all you’re doing is running away from the world, Shar?”

She shook her head sadly. “You have a perverse way of turning something beautiful to ashes.”

“So you’ve found religion,” Jack said. “Great. Another secret revealed.”

Sharon pulled open the curtain, said, not unkindly, “You need to get it into your head, Jack. We all have a secret life, not just you.”

4

After returning with Bennett to HQ, Jack took a long-overdue shower. In the locker room, he found a set of fresh clothes on hangers waiting for him, but was surprised they included a rather expensive suit of midnight-blue worsted wool, a pair of English brogues, a similarly expensive Sea Island cotton shirt, and a fashionable though decidedly conservative tie. He’d never worn such extravagant clothes; nor could he imagine his chief having an allowance for them in his budget.

He had just finished knotting his tie when Bennett returned.

Jack closed his locker door. “So tell me, what am I doing in this monkey outfit?” He tried and failed to straighten the knot in his tie. “Who am I going undercover as? A Secret Service agent?”

“Actually, you’re not far off the mark.” Bennett gestured with his head. “Come on.”

He led Jack out the rear door, where a smoke-windowed limo idled. Bennett opened the rear door and they climbed in.

Jack settled into the backseat. The moment the chief sat down beside him, the limo took off at an almost reckless speed.

Jack stared at his boss. “Where are we going?”

Bennett was looking straight ahead, as if at a future only he could see. “To your new assignment.”

Bennett, elbows on his bony knees, laced his fingers together. Jack felt his own muscles tense, because he knew that tell: Bennett’s hands got busy when he was agitated, so he laced his fingers to keep an outward semblance of calm. But Jack wasn’t fooled. During the time he’d been in the hospital, something very big and very nasty had landed in the chief’s lap.

“Okay, give. What the hell’s happened?”

At last, the chief turned to face him. There was something in his gray eyes Jack hadn’t seen before, something that clouded them, darkening them in a way Jack hadn’t thought possible. The chief’s voice was dry and thin, as if the words gathered in his throat were choking him. “Alli Carson, the president-elect’s daughter, has been abducted.”

“Abducted?” Jack’s stomach felt a drop, as if he were in a suddenly plunging elevator. “From where, by whom?”

“From school, from under the noses of the Secret Service,” Bennett said dully. “As far as who took her, no one’s been contacted, so we have absolutely no idea.”

And then, with a shock like a splash of cold water, Jack understood. For the first time since he’d known the man, Rodney Bennett was frightened to death.

Truth to tell, so was he.

Langley fields was a private, closeted all-girl’s college, very chichi, very difficult to get into. It was situated more or less adjacent to Langley Fork Park, which was just under seven and a half miles due north from the Falls Church location where the ATF had its regional headquarters.

The sun had broken through the overcast, throwing the passing buildings and trees into sharp relief. Telephone lines, black against the sky, marched into the vanishing point ahead.

“In just a few weeks from now, Edward Carson is going to be sworn in as President of the United States, so there is an absolute, airtight media blackout,” Bennett said. “You can just imagine the intense feeding frenzy that would attach itself to the news. All the talking heads and bloggers in Medialand would speculate—wildly, perhaps recklessly, but in the end uselessly—about the identity of the perpetrators, from Al-Qaeda and Iran to the Russian Mafia and North Korea to god alone knows who else. These days, everyone has a reason to hate our guts.”

Bennett, staring out the window as they barreled along the Georgetown Pike, frowned. “I don’t have to tell you that the soon-to-be First Daughter’s abduction has caused an intelligence mobilization of nine-eleven proportions.” He turned to Jack. “The head of the special task force in charge of the investigation has requested you, not simply because you’re my best agent by far, but I assume because of Emma.”

That was logical, Jack thought. Emma and Alli both went to Langley Fields; they were roommates and good friends.

When the limo turned onto Langley Fields Drive from Georgetown Pike, it was met by a fleet of unmarked cars. There was not a police or other official vehicle to be seen. The limo stopped while the driver handed over his creds; then a grim-faced suit with an earful of wireless electronics waved them through the tall black wrought-iron gates onto the school grounds, which were guarded by a twelve-foot-high brick wall topped by wrought-iron spikes. Jack felt sure those metal points were more than decorative.

Langley Fields was the epitome of an exclusive, expensive women’s college. The colonial-style white brick buildings were scattered across a magnificently groomed campus whose expansive acreage now revealed volleyball and tennis courts, a softball field, an indoor gym, and swimming facilities. They passed a professional dressage ring on their right, behind which was the long, low clapboard stable, its doors closed against the winter chill. Beside it, neat golden bales of pale hay were piled high.

The limo crunched over blue-gray gravel, moving along a sweeping drive toward the sprawling administration building. Jack pressed the button that rolled down his window and stuck his head out. At regular intervals, unmarked cars had been pulled unceremoniously onto the immaculately tended lawns, green even at this time of year. Beside them, more suits with ear candy consulted with the outdoor staff or were either setting out or returning in search parties of three or four.

Jack counted three sets of K-9 unit dogs straining at the ends of their handlers’ leashes as they tried to catch a trace of Alli Carson’s scent. High overhead a stationary helicopter whirred, no more than another bird with acute vision. With the president-elect’s priority visits, the chopper wouldn’t betray any unusual activity to the school’s neighbors, Jack surmised.

The suits watched the limo’s slow passage, their pale gimlet eyes narrowing as they spotted Jack. Their mouths turned down in disdain or outright hostility. He was an outsider come to take their Golden Fleece, make it his own. As they realized this change in the order of things, they bared their teeth slightly, and, aggrieved, their cheeks puffed up.

The car came to a stop under the porte cochere, held aloft by massive fluted Doric columns. Jack stepped out, but when the chief didn’t follow, he turned, bent into the interior.

“This is as far as I go.” Bennett’s face was impassive, but his fingers were firmly laced together on his lap. “Your ass belongs to someone else now.” His lips seemed to twitch in a grimace. “A word to the wise, Jack. This is a different arena. You go off the grid, they’ll for damn sure make you wish you were dead.”

5

Jack, ID’d at the front door, was taken in through the vast echoing vestibule, with its domed ceiling, huge ormolu-framed mirror, and ornate spiral staircase to forbidden upper floors. A crystal chandelier hung like a cloud of tears caught in the moment before it’s drops fall to earth.

The familiar polished mahogany console with its gold-tipped cabriole legs, delicate as a fawn’s, stood to the left, a large bouquet of purple-blue hothouse irises rising from within its glass bed. To the right, through mahogany pocket doors, was the sumptuous drawing room used for teas given by the headmistress or for holiday parties. Jack stood for a moment, transfixed, as he stared in at the room’s yellow walls, yellow flowered sofas and chairs, white trim. He saw himself with Sharon and Emma, having tea with the headmistress. He remembered their hostess had worn an unfashionable dress. In sharp contrast to Emma’s shockingly short pleated skirt and formfitting V-neck sweater, the dress was ankle-length, covered with tiny Victorian flowers amid twining vines. In fact, it was Emma’s alterations of the college’s dress code—what the headmistress labeled subversive—that was the subject of the conference over tea, scones, and clotted cream. Jack had been proud of how his daughter stood up for her rights, though both the headmistress and Sharon had been scandalized. Inevitably, his gaze was magnetized to one of the sofas where Emma had sat, ankles primly crossed, hands in her lap, staring at a spot somewhere over the headmistress’s left shoulder, her expression for once solemn as an adult’s. She spoke respectfully when asked for an explanation, throughout seemed contrite. But this, Jack suspected, was merely a ploy to end the inquisition. Tomorrow, he was willing to bet, she would show up in class as outrageously dressed as before. The memory made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. From the moment the limo had entered the gates of Langley Fields, he was plunged into the past, and now he knew there was no escape.

He was about to turn away when his eye was caught by a slight rippling of the window drapes. His escort cleared his throat and Jack put up a hand. Quickly crossing the room, he pulled aside the drape. The window was firmly shut, but there came to him the hint of a smell: mascara, makeup, something Emma had used on her face. Behind him, he heard a whisper. Burnished light seemed to fall on the narrow space between the window and the drape. A shadow moved, a whisper like wind through a field of grass. Was it his daughter’s voice?

A tiny thrill shot up his spine. “Emma?” he said under his breath. “Are you here? Where are you?”

Nothing. The smell had vanished. He stood for a moment, lost in time, feeling like an idiot. Why can’t you face it? he told himself. She’s gone. But he knew why. During the six months while Sharon was popping pills behind his back, while she and Jeff were finding shadowed corners to couple in, while his marriage was falling apart, he’d spent every minute of his spare time trying to piece together the hours before Emma’s death. The truth was, he hardly slept, using the nighttime hours to prowl, run down leads, talk to snitches. Emma’s cell phone, crushed in the accident, was no help, but he got a friend at the phone company to pull her records. He worked the list of numbers, building charts of her friends and acquaintances, but always the nodes and connectors circled back on themselves, like a snake eating its tail. He laboriously read the transcripts of her text messages for the previous two weeks, the longest the phone company kept such things. He scoured the hard drive of her laptop, looking for suspicious e-mails, links to Internet chat rooms, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous Web sites. It was like the dark side of the moon in there, the hard disk was clean of such ubiquitous detritus. If this had been a spy novel, he’d suspect it had been purged, but Emma was no spy and this wasn’t a novel. He spent hours with Alli Carson, braced the faculty and staff at the school. He interviewed every neighbor of the school’s in an ever-widening circle until even he understood he’d exhausted all possibilities. He’d run down all Emma’s girlfriends until the father of one had taken out a restraining order on him. He’d followed every possible lead, even ones that appeared improbable. For his tireless and often frenzied efforts, he’d come up with nothing. After six months, he was no closer to finding out what had frightened his daughter so thoroughly. She’d always been something of a fearless creature. Not reckless, so far as he knew—though he’d finally had to admit to himself that he’d known Emma not at all. The bitter truth, as Sharon had said, was that their daughter had a secret life from which, even in death, they were excluded.

“Emma, I want to listen,” he whispered into the space between the curtain and the window. “Honest I do.”

Moments later, amid an eerie silence, he returned to his escort and was taken away, down the paneled corridor hung with photo portraits of the college’s more illustrious alumnae, who had achieved fame and fortune in their chosen fields. Before he reached the end, the door to the headmistress’s office opened and a woman came out. Jack’s escort stopped, and so did he.

Closing the door firmly behind her, the woman strode toward him with her hand outstretched. When he took it, she said, “Jack McClure, my name is Nina Miller.” Her clear blue eyes regarded him steadily. “I’m a special operative of the Secret Service and the Department of the Treasury,” she said with exquisite formality. “I’m assisting Homeland Security First Deputy Hugh Garner. The president has appointed him to spearhead this joint operations task force.”

Nina Miller was tall, slim, proper. She wore a charcoal gray man-tailored worsted suit, sensible shoes with low heels, a pale blue oxford shirt buttoned to the collar. All that was missing, Jack observed, was a rep tie. This one was trying too hard to fit into an old-boys network that obviously wanted no part of her. She had the narrow face of a spinster, with a rather long, aggressive nose and a pale, delicate complexion that seemed as translucent as a bowl of light.

She gestured. “This way, please,” as she led him to the end of the hall, opened the door to the headmistress’s three-room suite. It had been transformed into another world.

The first room contained the desks of a pair of administrative assistants, as well as file cabinets in which were stored meticulously maintained documents on each student, past and present. For the time being, at least, the assistants were sharing space in their boss’s office. A forensics field crew laden with machinery Jack could only guess at, agents with the latest surveillance equipment, and what seemed like a battalion of liaison personnel now clogged the space. The room was sizzling with electronics from multiple computers, hooked up variously to satellite nets, closed-circuit TV cameras, and every terrorist and criminal database in the world. A battery of laser printers continuously spat out minute-by-minute updates from CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the Secret Service, NSA, DOD, Pentagon, as well as the state and local police in Virginia, the District, and Maryland. Uniformed people were making calls, receiving them, barking orders, exchanging faxes, making more calls. Their pooled knowledge was like a living thing, a city of shadows being built out of the ether through which information traveled. Jack could feel the low-level hysteria that gripped everyone in the room, as if they had the jaws of a rabid dog clamped to their throats. Their shared concentration, like a stale odor, like sardines too long in the can, made him want to draw back to catch a breath.

Beyond, one could go left into the headmistress’s office proper, or right into a room she used for private conferences. It was into the latter room that Jack was led. His silent escort left him at the door, disappearing presumably to handle other pressing concerns.

When Jack stepped into the room, a man looked up. He was perched impatiently on the edge of one of the two facing sofas separated by a glass-topped coffee table. Nina raised a hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled. “This is First Deputy Hugh Garner.”

“Please sit down,” Garner said with a smile as narrow as his retro tie. He was a tall man with prematurely gray hair, severe as his smile or his tie. He had a face Jack associated with a late-night TV pitchman—smooth of cheek, shiny of eye, his manner confident or glib, depending on your point of view. One thing Jack could see right away: He was a purely political creature, which put him at odds with Jack, and therefore dangerous. “You need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible.”

He offered a sheaf of papers—forensic reports, possible witness interviews, search results, photos of everything that had been vacuumed up from Alli and Emma’s room. (Jack couldn’t help thinking of it in that way.)

Nina Miller settled herself by scooping the sides of her skirt under her thighs. Her eyes were bright, inquisitive, completely noncommittal.

Garner said, “First thing: We’ve sent out a news brief on the reason for government agents here, as well as the whereabouts of Alli Carson.”

Jack, preoccupied with the reports, did not immediately respond. He had stood up, moved over to the window so sunlight spilled across the pages. He kept his back to the others, shoulders slightly hunched. He tried to relax his body without much success. The letters, words, clauses, sentences on the pages swam in front of his eyes like terrified fish. They swirled like snowflakes, spiraled like water down a drain, pogoed like Mexican jumping beans.

Jack was having trouble finding his spot. Stress always did that to him, not only made his dyslexia worse but interfered with the techniques he’d been taught to work around it. Like all dyslexics, he had a brain designed to recognize things visually, not verbally. The speed of his thought processes was somewhere between four hundred and two thousand times faster than for people whose brains were wired for word-based thought. But that became a liability around written words, since his mind buzzed like a bee trying to find its way into a blocked hive. Dyslexics learned by doing. They learned to read by literally picturing each word. But there was a host of disorienting trigger words, such as a, and, the, to, from—words crucial to decipher even the most elementary sentences—for which no pictures existed. In his lessons, Jack had been asked to make those words out of clay. In fashioning them with his hands, his brain learned them. But stress broke the intense concentration required to read, stripped him of his training, shoved him out onto a rough sea of swirls, angles, serifs, and, worst of all, punctuation, which might have been the scratching of a mouse against a wedge of hard cheese for all the sense he could make of it.

“There’s no way of knowing, however, how long our disinformation will hold up. On the Internet, where every blogger is a reporter, there’s a limited time we can keep something like this a secret,” Garner continued.

Jack felt the others’ eyes on him as he crossed the room. He spoke up, more to distract himself from his growing terror than from a need to engage Garner. In fact, his fervent wish was for a sinkhole to open up under Garner and Nina Miller, swallow them whole, but no luck. When he looked, both of them were still alive and well. “How long do we have?”

“A week, possibly less.”

Jack turned back to the gibberish that spitefully refused to resolve itself into language.

“You aren’t finished yet?” Garner said from over Jack’s right shoulder.

“I’m sure Mr. McClure needs a moment to orient himself to our standards of methodology,” Nina said, “which are quite different from those of the ATF.” She walked over to Jack. “Am I right, Mr. McClure?”

Jack nodded, unable to get his vocal cords out of their own way.

“ATF, yes, I see.” Garner’s laugh held a rancid note. “I trust our protocols aren’t too difficult for you to follow.”

Nina pointed to paragraphs on certain pages, read them aloud, as if to speed the process of familiarization by highlighting elements the team found of particular interest. Jack, his stomach clenched painfully, felt relief, but with it came a flush of secret shame. His frustration had morphed into anger, just as it always did. Trying to control that poisonous alchemical process was the key to maneuvering through the briar patch of his disability. He shuffled the papers as if scanning them for the second time.

“The reports contain no pertinent information, let alone leads or conclusions as to which direction the investigation should go,” he said. “What about the private-security people, any last-minute changes in the night watchmen, and have you reviewed the CCTV tapes for last night?”

“We’ve interviewed the security personnel.” Nina took the file from him. “No one called in sick, there were no sudden personnel substitutions. Neither the men on duty nor the tapes showed anything out of the ordinary.”

Had Nina read off sections of the report to help him? Had she somehow found out about his secret? Bennett wouldn’t have given him up, no matter the pressure, so how?

Garner said, “Edward Carson prevailed on the president to have you reassigned to us. I’m not one to beat around the bush, McClure. I think his interference is a mistake.”

“A moron could understand president-elect Carson’s line of reasoning,” Jack said with a deliberate lack of edge to his voice. “I’m intimately familiar with the college grounds and the surrounding area. And because my daughter was Alli Carson’s roommate, I’m familiar with her in ways you or your people can’t be.”

“Oh, yes,” Garner sneered. “I have no doubt Carson considers those assets, but I have another take. I think this intimacy is a personalization, and will play as a detriment. It will distort your thinking, blur your objectivity. You see where I’m going?”

Jack glanced briefly at Nina, but her face was as closed as a fist.

“Everyone’s entitled to his opinion,” Jack said carefully.

The narrow smile appeared like a wound. “As the head of this task force, my opinion is the one that counts.”

“So, what?” Jack spread his hands. “Have you brought me here to fire me?”

“Have you ever heard of ‘missionary secularism’?” Garner continued as if Jack hadn’t spoken.

“No. I haven’t.”

“I rest my case.” Garner flipped the file onto the carpet. “That’s about all those reports are good for—floor covering. Because they’re built on old-school assumptions, we have to give those assumptions the boot or we’ll never get anywhere on this case.” He perched on the edge of the sofa again, linked his fingers, pressed the pads of his thumbs together as if they were sparring partners about to go at it. “It can be no surprise even to you that for the past eight years the Administration has been guiding the country along a new path of faith-based initiatives. Religion—the belief in God, in America’s God-given place in the world—is what makes this country strong, what can unite it. Move it into a new golden age of global influence and power. But then there are the naysayers: the far-left liberals, the gays, the fringe elements of society, the disenfranchised, the deviants, the weak-willed, the criminal.”

“The criminal—?”

“The abortionists, McClure. The baby killers, the family destroyers, the sodomites.”

Again, Jack glanced at Nina, who was flicking what appeared to be a nonexistent piece of lint off her skirt. Jack said nothing because this argument—if you could call it that—was nonrational, and therefore not open to debate.

“There’s a Frog by the name of Michel Infra. This bastard is the self-proclaimed leader of a movement of militant atheists. He’s on record as claiming that atheism is in a final battle with what he terms ‘theological hocus-pocus.’ He’s far from the only one. In Germany, a so-called think tank of Enlightenment, made up of Godless scientists and the like—the same dangerous alarmists proclaiming that global warming is the end of the world—are promulgating the devilish notion that the world would be better off without religion. The president is beside himself. And then there’s the British, who haven’t had a God-driven thought in their heads in centuries. The God Delusion is a book written by one of them.” He snapped his fingers. “What’s his name, Nina?”

“Richard Dawkins,” Nina said, emerging from her near-coma. “An Oxford professor.”

Garner waved away her words. “Who cares where he’s from? The point is, we’re under attack.”

“What’s further aggravated the Administration,” Nina continued blandly, “is a recent European Union survey asking its citizens to rank their life values. Religion came in last, far behind human rights, peace, democracy, individual freedom, and the like.”

Garner shook his head. “Don’t they know we’re in a religious war for our very way of life? Faith-based policy is the only way to fight it.”

“Which is why this Administration is hostile to the incoming one.” Having awoken, Nina now seemed on a roll. “Moderate Republicanism as represented by Edward Carson and his people is a step backward, as far as the president is concerned.”

“Okay, this is all very enlightening,” Jack said, “but what the hell does it have to do with the kidnapping of Alli Carson?”

“Everything,” Garner said, scowling. “We have reason to believe that the people who planned and carried out the kidnapping are missionary secularists, a group calling itself E-Two, the Second Enlightenment.”

“That refers to the ongoing—often violent—conflict originating in Europe’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment,” Nina said.

“A so-called intellectual movement,” Garner sneered, making the word synonymous with criminal.

“Reason over superstition, that was the Enlightenment’s battle cry, led by George Berkeley, Thomas Paine, who returned to the pioneering work of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo, and Isaac Newton,” Nina said. “And it’s E-Two’s credo as well.”

“I never heard of them,” Jack said before he could stop himself.

“No?” Garner cocked his head. “Your ATF office was forwarded the official memos Homeland Security sent around. The last one was—what?—but three months ago.” He leered like a pornographer. “If you didn’t see it, either you’re negligent or you can’t read.”

“What makes you think this organization is involved?” Jack, the bile of anger feeding the heat of his shame, asked. “The most likely suspects are Al-Qaeda or a homegrown derivative.”

Garner shook his head. “First off, the terrorist chatter’s been elevated for about ten days now, but you know that ebbs and flows, and a lot of it is just trying to play with our minds. There’s nothing there for us. Second, there have been no unusual movements in the suspected cells we have under surveillance.”

“What about the cells you know nothing about?” Jack said.

Nina looked at Garner, who nodded.

“Show him,” he assented.

Nina fanned out a handful of forensic photos of two men, naked from the waist up, with fatal wounds on their backs.

Jack studied the visuals with a relief only he could fully comprehend. “Who are they?”

“The Secret Service personnel assigned to guard Alli Carson,” Garner said while Nina’s lips were still opening.

Jack felt an unpleasant prickling at the back of his neck. The news just got worse and worse. The photos showed the respective bodies in situ.

“The killers are professionals,” Garner said with an unforgivable degree of condescension. “They know how to kill quickly, cleanly, and efficiently.” He pointed. “They took their wallets, keys, pads, cell phones. Just to rub our noses in it, I guess, because we’ve locked down everything belonging to or attached to these two individuals, so there’s nothing the perps can do with the personal items. And see here.”

Beside each body, partially wedged beneath their left sides, were what appeared to be playing cards.

He peered more closely. “What are those?”

Garner dropped two clear plastic evidence bags onto the photos. Each one contained a playing card. Drawn in the center of each card was a circle with a familiar three-pronged symbol: a stylized peace sign. “During the war in Nam, U.S. soldiers used to leave an ace of spades on the bodies of their victims. These E-Two sonsabitches are doing the same thing, leaving their logo on their victims.”

Reaching down to his feet, he pulled a document out of a briefcase, read it out loud. “Faith-based initiatives and policies are spreading from America to Europe, where faith-based reasoning is taking root in the burgeoning Islamic populations of France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, et cetera. All too soon, Muslims will be running for office in these countries, and faith-based initiatives will begin there….” There followed a list of statistics showing the alarming rise of Muslims into Europe, as well as increasing militance of certain sections.

“Here.” Garner handed over the manifesto. “Read the rest yourself.”

Jack, who was inordinately attuned to such undertones, wondered whether Garner suspected—or, worse, knew. Chief Bennett had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Jack’s secret under wraps, but with the Homeland Security geeks, one never knew. They were as zealous as a Sunni imam, and if they didn’t like you—and clearly Garner didn’t like Jack—and if they felt threatened by you—and clearly Garner felt threatened as hell—they would move heaven and earth to find the skeleton in your closet, even if it was an enigma wrapped inside a conundrum.

Jack stared down at the impassioned tract, which was signed “The Second Enlightenment.” It contained a stylized peace sign identical to those on the playing cards found on the Secret Service detail.

“It’s official now,” Garner said. “E-Two are terrorists of the first rank. They won’t hesitate to kill again—I can guarantee you that because E-Two’s manifesto calls for a drastic change in the current president’s faith-based policies before he leaves office. We believe that it is seeking to discredit him in front of the entire world, to sabotage his legacy, to force him to admit that his policies are wrong.” He took the document back from Jack. “It’s clear from the evidence that E-Two has abducted Alli Carson. I want all our energies concentrated on this organization.”

“Sounds like a leap of faith, rather than a leap of logic,” Jack said.

Garner squared around, bringing to bear every asset that had allowed him to climb the jungle gym of federal politics. “Do I look like I care what it sounds like to you, McClure? Goddamnit, you’re in my army now. The President of the United States has tasked me with getting Alli Carson back, alive and as quickly as is humanly possible. I’m telling you how. Either you’re with us or get out of our way.”

“I’d like to see some hard evidence—”

“The E-Two cards on the bodies of our fallen soldiers aren’t enough for you?” Garner rose and, with him, Nina.

The atmosphere had deteriorated from unpleasant to toxic. Jack went to the window, stood staring out at the neat manicured lawns.

He gathered himself. “I need to see where it happened.”

“Of course.” Nina nodded. “I’ll take you.”

“I know the way.”

Garner’s knife-edge smile just barely revealed the tips of white, even teeth. “Of course you do. Nevertheless,I’ll accompany you.”

6

Light, melancholy as a ghost, tiptoed into the room through a pair of mullioned windows. It was northern light, dismal, vagrant, at this time of year almost spectral. Hugh Garner had peeled back the yellow-and-black tape that marked the boundary of the crime scene like an admonishing finger, but as he was about to step across the threshold, Jack blocked his way.

Jack snapped on latex gloves. “How many people have been through here?”

“I don’t know.” Garner shrugged. “Maybe a dozen.”

Jack shook his head. “It looks like a shit disco in here. You sure took your time getting me over here.”

“Everything in this ‘shit disco’ was tagged, photoed, and bagged without your expertise. You read the reports,” Garner said with peculiar emphasis.

“That I did.” Jack knew by now that the only thing keeping Garner from kicking his ass off the grounds was the president-elect. Even the president couldn’t say no to Edward Carson without looking like something you picked up on the sole of your shoe.

“If you find anything—which I seriously doubt—it’ll be analyzed by our SID division at Quantico,” Garner said. “Not only is it the best forensic facility in the country, but the security is absolutely airtight.”

“Is that where you sent the two bodies?”

“The autopsies were done by our people, but the bodies are housed locally.” Garner took out a PDA, scrolled through it. “At the offices of an ME by the name of—” He seemed about to read off the name but, struck by a sudden idea, turned the face of the PDA so Jack could read it.

“Egon Schiltz,” Jack said, his brain vainly trying to decode the scrawly squiggles on the PDA screen. Mercifully, his guess was more than a shot in the dark. Schiltz was medical examiner for the Northern District of Virginia. Despite sharp political differences, they had a friendship that went back twenty years.

Returning his attention to the present, Jack entered the room, carefully placing one foot in front of the other until he stood in the center. It was perhaps twenty by twenty, he estimated, not small by dorm standards. But then, Langley Fields wasn’t a standard college. You got what you paid for, in all areas.

The floor was plush wall-to-wall carpet. Beds, dressers, chairs, lamps, desks, closets, sets of shelves—there were two of almost everything. Alli’s laptop, its hard drive ransacked by IT forensics, sat on her desk. The shelf above her bed was a clutter of books, notes, pins, pennants, first-place trophies she’d won for horseback riding and tennis. She was an athletic girl and intensely competitive. He took several steps closer, saw the bronze medal for a karate competition, and couldn’t help feeling proud of her. Owing to her diminutive size and with Schiltz’s daughter in his mind, he’d convinced her to take it up in the first place. His eyes passed over the spines of the books—there were textbooks, of course, as well as novels. Jack had been taught to locate a spot outside himself on which to fix his rabbity mind. The point was fixed. Like a spinning dancer trained to concentrate on a single point in the distance in order not to lose his balance or grow dizzy, it was essential that Jack concentrate on the point and stay there to tame the chaos in his mind. Otherwise, trying to make sense of letters and numbers was as futile as herding cats. He couldn’t always locate it. The more extreme the tension he was under, the less chance he had of finding the point, let alone holding on to it.

He located his center point, six inches above and behind his head, and the whirling hurricane inside his head dissipated, his disorientation melted away, and he was able to read the book spines with minimum difficulty: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Natsuo Kirino’s Out, Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind.

Garner shifted from one foot to another. “After Emma’s death, Alli Carson refused to have anyone else move in with her.”

On what had been Emma’s side of the room, nothing remained of her presence but a small stack of CDs. Everything had been taken by either him or Sharon, as if they were the contents of a house they were never going to share again. Seeing the CDs kindled a flame of memory: Tori Amos, Jay-Z, Morrissey, Siobhan Donaghy, Interpol. Jack had to laugh at that one. The day she moved in, he had given her an iPod—not a Nano, but one with a whopping big eighty-gigabyte drive. And as soon as she was able to rip tracks into MP3s, there went the CDs. Jack picked up the Tori Amos CD, and the first song his eye fell on was “Strange Little Girl.” His heart, thumping and crashing like a drum set, threatened to blow a hole in his chest. His hand trembled when he put the CD back on the small stack. He didn’t want them; he didn’t want to move them either. Her iPod was living at home, untouched. He’d palmed it from inside the wrecked car without anyone seeing, the only thing miraculously undamaged. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d promised himself he’d listen to the music on it, but so far he’d failed to work up the courage.

“So difficult,” Garner continued, “I can only hope you can do your job with a clear head, McClure.”

Jack was immune to the taunts. He’d been derided by eighteen-year-old professionals drawing on depths of sadism Garner got to only in dreams. He stood very still now, transferring his gaze from the specific, allowing it to sweep the room instead. He had what in the trade was called soft eyes. It was a phrase difficult to translate precisely but, more or less, soft eyes meant that he had the ability to see an area, a neighborhood, a house, a room as it was, not as it was expected to be. If you went into a crime scene with preconceptions—with hard eyes—chances were you’d miss what you needed to see in order to make the case. Sometimes not. Sometimes, of course, there was no case to be made, no matter how soft your eyes were. But that was a matter out of Jack’s hands, so he never gave it a thought.

Jack walked straight down the center of the room, peered out and down through the windows. They were on the third floor, it was a straight drop down to a blue-gray gravel drive, no trees around, no hedges to break a fall, no wisteria trunk to climb up or down. He turned around, stared straight ahead.

Garner pulled ruminatively on the lobe of his ear. “So far, what? See anything we missed, hotshot?”

Soft eyes be damned. While Jack’s dyslexia robbed him of his ability to see verbally, he received something valuable in return. His multisensory mode of seeing the world tapped into the deepest intuition, an area closed off to most human beings. This same strange quirk of the brain caused Einstein to fail at schoolwork yet become one of the greatest mathematical minds of his century. It was also what allowed Leonardo da Vinci to conceive of airplanes and submarines three hundred years before they were invented. These great leaps of intuition were possible because the geniuses who conceived of them were dyslexic; they weren’t tied down to the plodding logic of the verbal mind. The verbal mind thinks at a speed of approximately 150 words a minute. Jack’s mind worked at a thousand times that rate. No wonder certain things disoriented him, while he could see through the surfaces of others. Take the crime scene, for instance.

Alli had slept here last night until just after three; then something happened. Had she been surprised, driven out of sleep by a callused hand clamped over her mouth, a cord biting into her wrists? Or had she heard a strange sound, had she been awake when the door opened and the predatory shadow fell on her? Did she have any time before being overpowered, before she was gagged, bound, and spirited out across the black lawn under the black sky? Alli was a smart girl, Jack knew. Even better for her, she was clever. Maybe Emma had been secretly envious of her roommate’s ingenuity. The thought saddened him, but wasn’t everyone envious of someone, wasn’t everyone unhappy with who they were? His parents certainly were, his brother was, up until the moment the bomb took him apart on a preindustrial Iraqi highway, somewhere in the back of beyond. After the explosion and the fire, there wasn’t enough left to make a proper ID, so he remained where he died, staring endlessly into the hellish yellow sky that seemed to burn day and night.

These disparate thoughts might have confused a normal mind, but not Jack’s. He saw the room in a way that neither Garner nor any of the forensic experts could. To him what he was processing was a series of still frames, three-dimensional images that interlinked into a whole from which his heightened intuition made rapid-fire choices.

“There was only one perp,” he said.

“Really?” Garner didn’t bother to stifle a laugh. “One man to infiltrate the campus, soundlessly murder two trained Secret Service agents, abduct a twenty-year-old girl, manhandle her back across the campus, and vanish into thin air? You’re out of your mind, McClure.”

“Nevertheless,” Jack said slowly and deliberately, “that’s precisely what happened.”

Garner could not keep the skepticism off his face. “Okay, assuming for a moment that there’s even a remote possibility you’re right, how would you know just from looking at the room when a dozen of the best forensic scientists in the country have been over this with a fine-tooth comb without being able to come to that conclusion?”

“First of all, the forensic photos of the Secret Service men showed that they were both killed by a single wound,” Jack said, “and that wound was identical on both of them. The chances of two men doing that simultaneously are so remote as to be virtually impossible. Second, unless you’re mounting an assault on a drug lord’s compound, you’re not about to use a squad of people. This is a small campus, but it’s guarded by security personnel as well as CCTV cameras. One man—especially someone familiar with the campus security—could get through much more easily than several.”

Garner shook his head. “I asked you for evidence, and this is what you come up with?”

“I’m telling you—”

“Enough, McClure. I know you’re desperately trying to justify your presence here, but this bullshit just won’t cut it. What you’re describing is Spider-Man, not a flesh-and-blood perp.” Garner, folding his arms across his chest, assumed a superior attitude. “I graduated second in my class at Yale. Where did you go to school, McClure, West Armpit College?”

Jack said nothing. He was on his hands and knees, mini-flashlight on, looking under Alli’s bed—

“I’ve been Homeland Security since the beginning, McClure. Since nine-fucking-eleven.”

—not at the carpet, which he saw had been vacuumed by the forensics personnel, but at the underside of the box spring, where there was a small indentation. No, on closer inspection, he saw that it was a hole, no larger than the diameter of a forefinger, in the black-and-white-striped ticking.

“What is it exactly you ATF people do again? Handcuff moonshiners? Prosecute cigarette smugglers?”

Jack kept his tone level. “You ever dismantle a bomb made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil set in the basement of a high school, or defuse a half pound of C-four in a drug smuggler’s lab while the trapped coke-cutter is trying to set it off?”

Garner’s cell phone buzzed and he put it to one ear.

“You ever run down a psycho whose lonely pleasure is trapping girls and beating the piss out of them?” Jack continued.

“At least I can read without contorting my brain into a pretzel.” Garner turned on his heel, walked out of the room, talking urgently to whoever was on the other end of the line.

Jack felt the heat flame up from his core, move to his cheeks, his extremities, until his hands began to tremble. So Garner knew. Somehow he’d burrowed back into Jack’s past to discover the truth. He wanted to lash out, bury his fist in Garner’s smug face. It was times like this when his disability made him feel small, helpless. He was a freak; he’d always be a freak. He was trapped inside this fucked-up brain of his with no chance of escape. Ever.

Something glimmered briefly as he shone the tiny beam of the mini-flash into the hole. Reaching in, he felt around, extracting a small metal vial with a screw top. Opening it, he saw that it was half-filled with a white powder. Tasting a tiny bit on his fingertip, he confirmed his suspicion. Cocaine.

7

Nina Miller lit a clove cigarette, stared at the burning tip for a moment, and gave a small laugh. “Reminds me of my college days. I never lost my taste.” She inhaled as slowly, as deeply as if she were drawing in weed, then let the smoke out of her lungs in a soft hiss. Behind her, the sun was going down over the low hills. A dog was barking, but the sound was high-pitched, from an adjoining property, not one of the K-9 sniffers.

She was standing outside of the west dorm, where Alli’s room was, leaning against the whitewashed brick, her slim left hip slightly canted. Her right elbow was perched on the top of her left wrist, the left arm hugging her waist. The slow light placed her in the elongated shadow of the roofline.

“Find anything of interest?” she inquired.

“Possibly,” Jack said.

“I saw Garner storming out. You got to him, didn’t you?” Jack told her about his single-perp theory.

She frowned. “It does sound hard to believe.”

“Thanks so very much.”

Her eyes slid toward his face. “Like Garner, I was trained to follow the forensic evidence. The difference between us, however, is that I won’t simply dismiss your theory. It’s just that I never had an intuition of how to unravel a case. I don’t think real life works like that.”

Jack felt sorry for her. It was a peculiarly familiar feeling, and then, with a start, he realized it was how he had felt toward Sharon most of the time they were married.

“One thing I will guarantee you,” Nina said, breaking in on his thoughts, “that kind of argument won’t fly with Garner.”

That was when Jack handed her the metal vial. “I found it hidden in the bottom of Alli’s box spring. There’s cocaine inside.”

Nina laughed. “So you found it.”

“What?”

“Hugh owes me twenty bucks.” She pocketed the vial. “He said you wouldn’t find it.”

Jack felt like an idiot. “It was a test.”

Nina nodded. “He’s got it in for you.” Abruptly detaching herself from the wall, she threw down her cigarette butt. “Forget that sonovabitch.” She moved off to the west, Jack keeping pace beside her.

“Back there,” he said slowly, “when you read sections of that report …”

“I knew you were having trouble.”

“But how?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

They went along, paralleling the dorm. Just beyond it was a utility shed. At first it appeared that they were going to skirt the shed. Then, with a look over her shoulder, Nina opened the door.

“Inside,” she said. “Quickly.”

The moment Jack stepped through the narrow doorway, Nina closed the door behind them. The interior contained a plain wood table, several utilitarian chairs, a brass floor lamp. It was as sparsely furnished as a police interrogation cubicle. The small square window afforded a view down over the end of the rolling lawn to a tree-line beyond which was the wall that bordered the property.

Two people occupied the room. A cone of light from the floorlamp illuminated the sides of their faces. Jack recognized them: Edward Carson and his wife, Lyn. The soon-to-be First Lady, dressed in a dark, rather severely cut tweed suit, a ruffled white silk blouse held closed at the neck with a cameo the color of ripe apricots, stood at the window, arms wrapped tightly around herself, staring blindly at clouds shredded by the wind. Fear and anxiety drew her features inward as if every atom of her being were psychically engaged in protecting her missing daughter.

Jack glanced at Nina. She had learned about his secret from Edward Carson.

Though the president-elect looked similarly haggard, the moment Jack and Nina entered, his sense of moment forced his political facade back on. Back straight, shoulders squared, he smiled his professional smile, the sides of his mouth crinkling along with the corners of his eyes. Those eyes, so much a part of his extraordinary telegenic image, possessed, in person, a glint of steel that did not come through on the TV screen. Or, mused Jack, maybe he was in war mode, all the knives at his disposal being out.

He was sitting at the table, a Bible open to the New Testament. His forefinger hooked at a section of the text, he began to recite from Matthew chapter seven. “‘For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?’”

Edward Carson stood up, came around the side of the table. “Jack.” He pumped Jack’s hand. “Good of you to come. I have best wishes and Godspeed for you from Reverend Taske.” He kept a firm grip on Jack’s hand. “We’ve all come a long way, haven’t we?”

“Yes, sir, we have, indeed.”

“Jack, I never got a chance to thank you properly for your help when we needed to evacuate my office during the anthrax attack in 2001.”

“I was just doing my job, sir.”

Carson’s eyes rested on him warmly. “You and I know that isn’t true. Don’t be modest, Jack. Those were dark days, indeed, marked by an unknown American terrorist who we never found. Frankly, I don’t know how we would have gotten through it without the ATF’s help.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Now the president-elect’s other hand closed over Jack’s and the familiar voice lowered a notch. “You’ll bring her back to us, Jack, won’t you?”

The president-elect stared into Jack’s eyes with the intensity of a convert. Despite his big-city upbringing, there was something of the rural preacher in him, a magnetic flux that made you want to reach out and touch him, a call to arms that made your pulse race, rushed at you like a freight train. Above all, you longed to believe what he told you—like a father communicating with his son, or at any rate what in Jack’s mind was how a father ought to communicate with his son. But that was all idealistic claptrap, a pasteboard cutout, a larger-than-life image from the silver screen, where happy endings were manufactured for captive audiences. Unlike reality, which had never been happy for Jack and, he suspected, never would be.

“I’ll do my best,” Jack said. “I’m honored you asked for me, sir.”

“In all honesty, who better, Jack?”

“I appreciate that. Sir, in my opinion the first order of business is to create a plausible cover story.” Jack’s gaze swung to the woman by the window, who was holding herself together by a supreme force of will. He recalled Sharon in a similar pose, as Emma’s coffin was slowly lowered into the ground. He’d heard a whispering then, just as he’d heard in the main building. Sharon said it was the wind in the treetops. He’d believed her, then.

He inclined his head slightly. “Mrs. Carson.”

Hearing her name, she started, summoned back into this time, this place. She seemed thin, as if she’d lost her taste for food. For a moment she stared bleakly into Jack’s face; then she came away from the window, stood in front of him.

“Ma’am, do your parents still have that olive farm in Umbria?”

“Why, yes, they do.”

He looked at Edward Carson. “It seems to me that would be a good place for Alli to be ‘spending the holidays,’ don’t you think?”

“Why, yes, I do.” The president-elect put his cell phone to his ear. “I’ll have my press secretary get right on it.”

Lyn Carson moved toward Jack. “Now I know what you must have gone through, Mr. McClure. Your daughter …” She faltered, tears gleaming at the corners of her eyes. She bit her lip, seemed to be mentally counting to ten. When she had herself under control, she said, “You must miss Emma terribly.”

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

Finished with his call, the president-elect signaled to his wife and she stepped away, turned her back on them to once again contemplate the world outside, forever changed.

“Jack, I have something to tell you. You’ve been briefed, no doubt, given the theories, the evidence, et cetera.”

“About E-Two. Yes, sir.”

“What do you think?”

“I think there’s a hidden agenda. E-Two may be a prime suspect, but I don’t think it should be the only suspect.”

Lyn Carson turned back into the room. Her lips were half-parted, as if she was about to add something, but at a curt shake of her husband’s head, she kept her own counsel.

When he spoke again, it was in the same tone, Jack imagined, with which he held sway over backroom caucuses—hushed and conspiratorial. “What’s important, Jack, is that you not leap to judgment like these political hacks. I want you to follow your own instinct, develop your own leads. That’s why I expended a great deal of political capital to have you reassigned.”

Lyn Carson held out her hand. It was very light, very cold, no more than the hollow-boned wing of a bird, but through it pulsed the iron determination of a parent. The terrible agony in her eyes he recognized as his own.

“I’m so awfully sorry.”

Her words had a double meaning, and he knew it. She was talking about both Emma and Alli.

“Bring our daughter back to us.”

“I’ll return her to you.” When he squeezed her hand, the bones felt as if they truly were hollow. “I promise.”

Tears overflowed from Lyn Carson’s eyes, fell one by one at her feet.

8

“You shouldn’t have promised,” Nina said. “You can’t guarantee you’ll find Alli, let alone bring her back.”

Jack found it interesting and enlightening that Nina Miller had been privy to his conversation with the Carsons. Garner’s deliberate exclusion was an all-too-graphic example of the schism within the task force, behind which, of course, was the disagreement between the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party currently in power and the moderate wing about to take that power away from them. It was no surprise that a political agenda governed the task force. This was precisely what Bennett had warned him about, and he knew there was no good news to be had here.

“What I can guarantee is hope,” Jack said shortly. “Hope is her food and drink. Only hope will keep her going through the darkest hours.”

“Hope dangles people from a slender thread,” Nina said. “It’s patently unfair.”

They had been striding down the hallway. Now Jack stopped, turned to her. “Do you know anything about darkest hours?”

Nina stood staring at him. She didn’t answer, because apparently she had nothing to say.

“I’ve had my darkest hours,” Jack continued. “And now the Carsons are having theirs.”

He stood very still, but there was so much energy coming off him that Nina, as if slapped in the face, took an involuntary step back.

His eyes glittered. “I will bring Alli back, Nina. You can make book on it.”

Jack led her to the right, skirting the shed. There was a swath of lawn, rather narrow by the standards of the rest of the property, beyond which lay a thick stand of fluffy pines and large, gnarled, very old oaks. By the time they reached the trees, Jack had determined that Nina had low-slung hips and a walk that, defying the odds, was distinctly sensual.

“I want you to know …” Nina stumbled over a stone as well as her words.

“What?”

“I’ve … had my darkest hours, too.”

Jack, navigating through the rooty trees, said nothing.

“When I was a kid.” Nina picked her way under tree branches, over exposed roots, the knuckles of angry fists. “My older brother … he molested me….”

Jack stopped, turned back to regard her. He was startled at her admission, which couldn’t have been easy to make. But then again, it was often easier to confess to a stranger than to someone you knew.

“And when I fought back, he beat me. He said I needed to be punished.”

Jack felt a ping, like the ricochet of a steel ball bounding from bumper to bumper in his own shameful pinball machine. “You know that’s not true.”

Nina’s face was pinched, as if she wanted to make the past disappear. “He’s married, got two kids. Now he’s got a whole new family to dominate. How I hate him. I can’t stop.” She made a little sound in the back of her throat that was either a laugh or a sob. “My parents loved God, they believed in his loving kindness. How wrong were they?”

“When we were growing up,” Jack said, “parents were unconscious when it came to their effect on their kids.”

Nina paused for a moment, considering. “Even if you’re right, it doesn’t make what they did better, does it?”

They resumed their trek through the stand of weeping hemlocks and pin oaks. He heard the rustle of the wind through brittle branches, the hiss of faraway traffic, the call of a winter bird. The melancholy sounds of winter.

At length, Nina said, “Where are we going?”

“There’s a secret path.” Jack pointed ahead. “Well, it isn’t a secret to the juniors and seniors, but to the adults …”

They had reached the far side of the tree-line. He took three or four steps to his left, moved some brush away, revealing a narrow, well-trod earthen path through brambly underbrush and the occasional evil-looking hemlock.

“Except you.”

He nodded. “Except me.”

Nina followed him along the twisting path, at times half bent over in order to avoid shaggy low-hanging branches. Their shoes made dry, crunching sounds, as if they were walking over mounds of dead beetles. The wind, late for an appointment, hurried through the hemlocks. Grim bull briars and brambles pulled at them.

“With all the manicured lawn, why hasn’t the school pulled this stuff out?”

“Natural barbed wire,” Jack said.

“What do the kids do in here?” With a hard tug, Nina pulled her coat free of a tenacious bramble. “Drugs and sex, I expect.”

“I have no doubt that drugs and sex are on the students’ minds,” Jack said, “but so is escape.”

Nina frowned. “Why escape from the lap of luxury?”

“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

“Who told you about it? Emma?”

Jack’s laugh held a bitter edge. “Emma never told me anything.” Like so much in life, this was a matter of trust. Edward Carson certainly trusted Nina, and she had bravely trusted him with her secret, and that had touched him in a way she could never imagine. “It was Alli. She was worried about Emma.”

“Worried? About what?”

“She never said. I got the impression there was only so much she was prepared to tell me. But she did say that several times when Emma thought she was asleep, she crept out of the room. Alli said the one time she followed her, she saw her vanish down this path.”

“Did she go after Emma?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“I take it you don’t have a teenager. I went after Emma myself.”

“And what happened?”

They had reached the high brick wall that surrounded the property. It was guarded on this side by a double hedge: low, sheared boxwood in front of tall privet. Jack was already behind the boxwood, had found the slight gap in the stately privet. Pushing aside the sturdy branches, he vanished into the thicket.

When Nina tried to follow him, she found the privet was so thick, she was forced to leave her coat behind, press herself bodily into what she was sure had a moment before been a gap. Shouldering her way through, she found herself on the other side, almost flush up against the brick wall. Jack was on his haunches, hands pulling at the bricks. To Nina’s astonishment, they came away easily until he had a pile of approximately twenty, which left a hole in the wall large enough for a human being of small to normal size to wriggle through.

“I followed her through here.”

Crouching down, Nina saw a wedge of lawn, the bole of a tree, and beyond, a field at the end of which were stands of oaks, birches, and mountain laurels.

“I saw her meet someone; I couldn’t tell who, it was just a shadow standing beneath that tree,” Jack said. “Either she heard a noise or some instinct caused her to look back. She saw me, she came after me, pushed me back to this side, snarling like an animal.” Jack sat back on his haunches, his eyes far away. “We had a real knock-down, drag-out shouting match. She accused me of spying on her, which was, of course, the truth. I told her I wouldn’t have had to spy on her if she wasn’t sneaking around in the dead of night. That was a mistake. She blew up, said what she did was no business of mine, said she hated my guts, said some things I don’t think she really meant, at least I hope not.”

Nina was kind enough not to look at him directly. “You never found out?”

Jack dived through the hole in the wall.

On hands and knees they picked their way through. There was about the hole the stink of the grave, a sickly-sweet scent that reminded Jack of the time when he was a kid and the neighbor’s black cat got stuck inside the wall of his room and died there, giving off the stench of slow decay. The neighbor, an old woman married to a male harem of feral cats, wanted the black one back, to bury it properly beneath her fig tree, but Jack’s father refused. “It’s good for the boy to smell death, to understand it, to know it’s real,” he explained to her papery face and sour breath. “He needs to know that his life isn’t infinite, that death will come for him, like it does for everyone, one day.”

In starless night, he lay in rageful silence, listening to the sound of his own ragged heart as he breathed in the stench that penetrated to the pit of his stomach until, unable to keep to inaction, he ran across the hall, there to violently lose his supper in the low porcelain bowl. In the adjacent room, his parents made love aggressively, raucous as sailors on shore leave, with no thought that they were not alone.

Jack and Nina stood close together on the other side. Jack wondered whether Nina was thinking the same thing he was: Is this how Alli’s abductors smuggled her out of the school? Over Nina’s right shoulder, the hills rolled on, leading eventually to the Georgetown Pike.

Saigon Road, the site of Emma’s crash, lay just five miles west down the Pike. He felt a stirring, as if a cold wind were blowing on the back of his neck. A prickling of his scalp. Was Emma here in some form or other? Was such a thing possible? In the course of his work, he’d come across a psychic who believed that spirits of the dead who had unfinished business couldn’t cross over into the light or the dark until that business was finished. These thoughts sent his mind racing back to when Emma was alive.

At Sharon’s fierce insistence, Emma had applied to Langley Fields. Jack saw no need for his daughter to be sequestered in what seemed like a four-year straitjacket, but Sharon had prevailed. The education was exceptional, she argued, and Emma would be exposed to a wide variety of students from all over the world. All Jack saw was the pretension of the consumerati: Mercedes, Bentleys, and tricked-out Hummers disgorging siliconed mothers, cell phones blaring Britney Spears, yapping dogs the size of New York City rats, the flash of platinum Amex cards held aloft. He had been obliged to take out a second mortgage on their house in order to pay the exorbitant tuition. He fervently wished he’d fought harder, insisted that she attend Georgetown or even George Washington, the other colleges to which she’d wanted to go, but Sharon had dug in her heels, wouldn’t listen to either him or Emma. She wanted her daughter to have the kind of education she herself had always dreamed of getting, but never had.

Nina said, “I feel I should warn you that if Hugh Garner got wind of our roles in his task force, he’d find some way to discredit us with the powers that be, so that even the president-elect couldn’t save us. That’s what a political animal would do.”

“I don’t concern myself with politics,” Jack said, his mind still engaged by Emma.

“I’m with you on that, but you’d better give it some attention now.” Without her coat Nina shivered against the advancing chill of evening. “Hugh Garner is a political animal, par excellence.”

Jack took off his coat, but before he had a chance to sling it across her shoulders, Nina shook her head.

“Alli’s life is beyond adversarial parties, beyond politics altogether.”

“I suppose it would be,” Nina said dryly, “in another universe.”

Nina looked around at the thick stand of old oaks, gnarled into fantastic shapes, the sly shadows moving in and out beneath the cathedraled branches. “This place reminds me of something. I almost expect the devil to come bounding through the trees.”

“Why d’you say that?”

Nina shrugged. “Ever since childhood, I’ve expected dreadful things to happen that I can’t escape.”

Jack inclined his head. “It’s only the path the students take into the heart of the trees.”

“Who knows what goes on here?”

They picked their way through the failing light into the clotted shadows of a dense copse of trees. The heavy rain had thickened the underbrush considerably, made the ground springy, in places almost marshy, impeding or slowing their progress. A moment later, ducking around a low-hanging tree limb, they burst out into a tiny clearing. The last rays of slanted sunlight turned the copse’s heart a reddish gold, as if they had stumbled upon a coppersmith’s workshop. An immodest west wind molded Nina’s skirt to her well-muscled thighs, provoked eerie sounds from the interweaving of branches that spread weblike all around them.

At the base of a tree, where the root flare rose up just above the ground, was a mound of freshly dug earth.

“What have we here?”

She followed Jack as he knelt beside the mound of earth. Scooping the earth aside revealed a recently dug hole. Jack pulled out an odd-shaped item six or seven inches on a side wrapped in oilskin.

Nina’s mouth opened. “What the hell—?”

Carefully, Jack brushed off the dirt and skeletal leaves that had adhered to the oilskin, peeled back the moist covering, revealed inch by inch what was inside.

Pale, almost opalescent flesh appeared to bleed in the ruddy sunset light. It was a hand, smallish, delicate of fingers, ringed, nails blunt-cut like a boy’s. Nevertheless, it was the hand of a young girl—a young girl who had been immersed in water, judging by the deeply wrinkled flesh of the fingertips.

Nina looked at Jack, said, “Dear God, is it Alli Carson’s?”

Without touching the hand, Jack scrutinized the gold-and-platinum ring on the pale, cold third finger.

“This is Alli’s ring,” he said. “I recognize it.” He pointed. “Also, look at the nails, no polish or clear lacquer. Alli’s nails are square-cut, like a boy’s.”

“God in heaven,” Nina said. “She’s been drowned.”

9

“I’ve just been reading over E-Two’s latest manifesto,” the president said when Dennis Paull entered the Oval Office. He had to make way for the National Security Advisor, who was just leaving.

Paull took a seat on the plush chair directly in front of the president’s desk. The flags against the wall on either side of the thick drapes shone their colors in the burning lamplight. He felt as tired as they looked. Everyone around him did. In perpetual crisis mode, only the president, who leaned heavily on the advice of his close coterie of neo-conservative consultants, appeared sparkly eyed and rested. Perhaps, Paull thought, it was his faith, his vision, the absolute surety of the path his America was on, that made him burn so bright. Paull himself was ever plagued by doubts about the future, guilt about the past.

“The National Security Advisor brought it over himself.” The president raised the sheets of paper. “This is pure evil, Dennis. These people are pure evil. They want to bring down the country, weaken it, make it more vulnerable to foreign extremists of every stripe. They want to destroy everything I’ve worked toward for eight long years.”

“I don’t disagree with you, sir,” Paull said.

The president threw the papers to the carpet, trampled them underfoot. “We’ve got to root out E-Two, Dennis.”

“Sir, I told you before that in the short time left us, I didn’t think we’d be able to do that. Now I know it for a fact. We’ve been scouring the country for months without the slightest success. Wherever they are, we can’t find them.”

The president rose, came out from behind his desk, paced back and forth across the thick American blue carpet. “This reminds me of 2001,” he said darkly. “We never found the people responsible for those anthrax attacks. That failure has stuck in my craw ever since.”

Paull spread his hands. “We tried our best, sir, you know that. Despite millions of dollars and man-hours, we never even got to first base. You know my theory, sir.”

The president shook his head. “Blaming a rogue element inside the government is mighty dangerous speculation, Dennis. Just the sort the National Security Advisor guards against. And he’s right. We’ve all got to work together, Dennis. Circle the wagons. So let’s not hear any more of that kind of treasonous talk.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, if we can’t find even a trace of E-Two—” The president held up his hand. “We require a change in tactics. Forget about a direct assault on E-Two.” His eyes narrowed. “We must make an example of these people. We’ll go after the First American Secular Revivalists.”

Paull was careful not to let his concern show. “They’re a legitimate organization, sir.”

The president’s face darkened. “Goddamnit, in this day and age we no longer have the luxury of allowing terrorists to hide behind the banner of free speech, which is for good, honest, God-fearing Americans.”

“It’s not as if they’re being funded by a foreign power.”

The president whirled. “But maybe they are.” His eyes were gleaming, always a dangerous sign. “President Yukin, who, as you well know, I’ll be seeing in a few days, has just announced that he wants to stay on in power.” The president grunted. “Lucky bastard. They can do that in Russia.” He waved a hand. “With the evidence in the Black File you’ve provided me, I think I can get more out of him than concessions on oil, gas, and uranium.”

Paull, truly alarmed, stood. “What do you mean, sir?”

“I think Yukin is just the man to provide whatever evidence we need that the Chinese are funneling funds to these missionary secularists.”

Paull smelled the National Security Advisor all over this. The president didn’t have the mind to come up with such a scheme.

“I mean, what could be more obvious?” the president went on. “You yourself told me that Beijing is in the process of setting up a Godless state. Americans have a long history of bitter antipathy toward mainland China. Everybody will be only too willing to believe that Beijing is attempting to export that Godlessness to America.”

Jack had tried Egon Schiltz’s cell, but it was off, and he knew better than to leave a message on his friend’s voice mail.

Egon Schiltz was not an old man, but he sure looked like one. In fact, give him a passing glance and he might be mistaken for seventy, instead of fifty-nine. Like a hairstylist, he was round-shouldered, with prematurely gray hair so thick, he preferred to wear it long over his ears. In every other way, however, Egon Schiltz appeared nondescript. One curious thing about him: He and his wife had tied the knot in the ME’s cold room, surrounded by friends, family, and the recently and violently departed.

He and Jack had become friends when Jack was asked to investigate missing cartons of fry, as embalming fluid was known on the District’s streets, where it had become one of a number of increasingly bizarre drugs illicitly for sale. On anyone’s list of bad drugs, fry was near the top, one of the long-term side effects of ingesting fry being the slow disintegration of the spinal cord. Certain bits of evidence were leading the police to suspect Schiltz himself of trafficking in fry, but after a long talk with Schiltz, Jack didn’t like the ME as a prime suspect. Jack went looking for the middle man, in his experience usually the easiest to latch on to, since he was usually less off the grid than either the thief or the pusher. Using his contacts, Jack found this particular fence, put the hammer to him, and came up with a name, which he gave to Schiltz. Together, they worked out the way to trap the thief, a member of the ME’s staff too impatient to wait for his state pension. Schiltz never forgot Jack’s faith in him.

Schiltz’s offices, sprawled on a stretch of Braddock Avenue in Fairfax, Virginia, were in a low, angular redbrick government building in that modern style so bland, it seemed to disappear. Using mostly the Innerloop of the Capital Beltway, it took Jack just over twenty minutes to drive the 16.7 miles from Langley Fields to Schiltz’s office.

“Dr. Schiltz isn’t here,” the diminutive assistant ME said.

“Where is he?” Jack demanded. “I know you know,” he added as her lips parted, “so don’t stonewall.”

The AME shook her head. “He’ll take my head off.”

“Not when he knows I’m looking for him.” Jack leaned in, his eyes bright as an attack dog’s. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

She bit her lip, said nothing.

“Call him,” he said now, “and tell him Jack needs to see him, stat.”

The Indian woman picked up a cordless phone, dialed a number. She waited a moment, then asked to speak with Dr. Schiltz. In a moment, he came on the line, because she said, “I’m so sorry to bother you at dinner, sir, but—”

“Never mind,” Jack said, hustling out of the office.

Egon Schiltz was an Old Southern type. His meals were sacred time, not to be interrupted for anyone or anything. A creature of habit, he always ate his meals at one place.

The Southern Roadhouse, set back in a strip mall as nondescript as Schiltz himself, was fronted by gravel ground down over the years to the size and shape of frozen peas. Its mock Southern columns out front only added to the exhausted air of the place. At one time, the restaurant had had a platoon of white-gloved attendants, all black, to greet the patrons, park their Caddies and Benzes, wish them good evening. It still had two sets of bathrooms at opposite ends of the U-shaped building, one originally for whites, the other originally for blacks, though no one connected with the place spoke about their history, at least not to strangers. Among themselves, however, a string of ascendingly offensive jokes about the bathrooms made the rounds like a sexually transmitted disease.

Jack walked in the kitchen door, showed his ID to the chef, whose indignation crumbled before his fear of the law. How many illegals were in his employ in the steamy, clamorous kitchen?

“Dr. Schiltz,” Jack said as they made room for the expediter, bellowing orders to the line chefs. “Has he finished his porterhouse?”

The chef, a portly man with thinning hair and watery eyes, nodded. “We’re just preparing his floating island.”

“Forget that. Give me a clean dessert plate,” Jack ordered.

One was produced within seconds. The chef nearly fainted when he saw what Jack put on the center of it. With a squeak like a flattened mouse, the chef turned away.

Holding the plate up high in waiterly fashion, Jack put right shoulder against the swinging door, went from kitchen to dining room with snappy aplomb, and immediately stopped so short, the hand almost slid off the plate. Egon Schiltz sat at his customary corner table, but he wasn’t alone. Of course he wasn’t. He made it a point to have dinner with at least one member of his family even when he was working late. Tonight was his daughter Molly’s turn. Same age as Emma, Jack thought. Look at them talking, laughing. Is that what it means to have a daughter? All at once, his eyes burned and he couldn’t catch his breath. Jesus God, he thought, it’s never going to get any better, I’m never going to be able to live with this.

Molly, catching sight of him, leapt up, ran over to him so quickly that Jack had just enough time to raise the tray above the level of her head.

“Uncle Jack!” she cried. She had a wide, open face, bright blue eyes, hair the color of cornsilk. She was a cheerleader at school. “How are you?”

“Fine, poppet. You’re looking quite grown up.”

She made a face, tilted her head. “What’s that?”

“Something for your father.”

“Let me see.” She rose on tiptoes.

“It’s a surprise.”

“I won’t tell him. It’s in the vault, I swear.” She put on her most serious face. “Nothing gets out of the vault. Ever.”

“He’d tell by your reaction,” Jack said. You can say that again, he thought.

She waited a moment until she was sure Jack really wouldn’t let her in on the surprise. “Oh, all right.” She kissed his cheek. “I’ve got to go anyway. Rick’s waiting for me.”

Jack looked down into her shy smile. She still had her baby fat around her jawline and chin, but she was already a handsome young woman. “Since when have things become serious between you and Rick?”

“Oh, Uncle Jack, could you be more out of the loop?” She caught herself then. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

He ruffled her hair. “It’s okay.” But it wasn’t. He heard a sharp sound, was sure it was his heart breaking.

Molly turned. “Bye, Daddy.” She waved and was off out the front door.

Schiltz sighed as he flapped a folded copy of today’s Washington Post. “Speaking of Rick, I was just underscoring to Molly how religion and adherence to God’s commandments will protect her against the wages of sin, which these days are all too evident. Senator George is the object lesson du jour. I suppose you heard that august Democrat has been exposed as an adulterer.”

“Frankly, I haven’t had time for Beltway gossip.”

“Is that why I don’t see you anymore? How long has it been?”

“Sorry about that, Egon.”

Schiltz grunted as he slipped the paper into his briefcase. He nodded at the plate Jack was holding aloft. “Is that my floating island?”

“Not exactly.” Jack placed the plate on the table in front of the ME.

Schiltz redirected his attention from Jack’s face to the severed human hand on the dessert plate. “Very funny.” He took up the plate by its edge. “Would you tell Karl I want my floating island now.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Your presence is needed elsewhere.”

Schiltz glanced at Jack. Carefully, he placed the plate back down on the immaculate linen tablecloth. Not even a crumb of roll marred its starched white surface. The same could be said, in terms of emotion, for Schiltz’s face. Then he broke out into peals of laughter. “You dog, you,” he said, wiping his eyes. He stood up to briefly embrace his friend. “I’ve missed you, buddy.”

“Back atcha, Slim.” Jack disentangled himself. “But honestly, I need your help. Now.”

“Slow down. I haven’t laid eyes on you for months.” Schiltz gestured for Jack to sit on the chair vacated by his daughter.

“No time, Egon.”

“‘No time to say hello, good-bye, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!’”

Schiltz quoted the White Rabbit in Bugs Bunny’s voice, which no matter his mood made Jack laugh.

“There’s always time,” he continued, sobering. “Give the hysteria of logic a rest.”

“Logic is all I have, Egon.”

“That’s sad, Jack. Truly.” He took a Cohiba Corona Especial out of his breast pocket, offered it to Jack, who refused. “I would have thought Emma’s tragic death would have taught you the futility of a logic-based life.”

Jack felt sweat break out at the back of his neck. His face was burning, and there was the same sick feeling in the pit of his stomach he’d had when he’d seen Emma in Saigon Road. In order to steady himself, he turned the chair around, pushed aside his holstered Glock G36, sat straddling the seat. “And you think faith is better.”

“I know it’s better.” Schiltz sat back, lit the cigar, turning it slowly, lovingly between his thumb and first two fingers as he took his first tentative puffs. “Logic stems from the mind of man, therefore it’s limited, it’s flawed. Faith gives you hope, keeps you from despair. Faith is what picks you up and ensures you keep going. Logic keeps you lying facedown in the muck at your feet.” He waved the gray end of the cigar. “Case in point: I’m certain you’re convinced that Emma’s death was senseless.”

Jack gripped the table edge with both hands.

“I don’t. She left us for a reason, Jack. A reason only God can know. I believe that with all my heart and soul, because I have faith.”

Say what you want about Schiltz, he knew how to hunt and he smoked only the finest cigars. These attributes were sometimes all that kept Jack from strangling him.

“Jack, I know how much you’re hurting.”

“And you’re not? You knew Emma as well as I know Molly. We had cookouts together, went camping in the Smokies, hiked the Blue Ridge together.”

“Of course I grieve for her. The difference is that I’m able to put her death into a larger context.”

“Egon, I need to make sense of it,” Jack said almost desperately.

“A quixotic desire, my friend. The help you need you will find only in faith.”

“Where you see faith, I see doubt, confusion, chaos. Situation normal, all fucked up.”

The ME shook his head. “I’m saying this as a friend: It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

Jack reflexively blocked that advice by going on the offensive. “So what is faith, exactly, Egon? I’ve never quite been able to get a handle on it.”

Schiltz rolled ash into a cut-glass ashtray. “If you insist on reducing it to its basic elements, it’s the sure and simple knowledge that there’s something more out there, something greater than yourself, than mankind: a grand plan, a design that can’t be comprehended by you or by any other human being, because it is numinous, it is God’s design, something only He can fathom.”

“What about the angels? Can they fathom God’s plan?”

Schiltz expelled a cloud of highly aromatic smoke. “You see how logic binds you to the earth, Jack? It ensures you dismiss with a joke anything you can’t understand.”

“Like angels on unicycles, for instance.”

“Yes, Jack.” Egon refused to rise to the joke. “Just like angels on unicycles.”

“Then Emma, up in heaven, must know God’s plan for her.”

“Certainly.”

“She’s content then.”

Schiltz’s eyes narrowed slightly behind the aromatic blue smoke. “All who are in heaven are content.”

“Says who?”

“We have the Word of God.”

“In a book written by men.”

Egon gave Jack a look he might have reserved for the devil. “I suppose there’s only one way to get rid of you tonight,” he sighed.

“What do you want me to tell you about the hand?”

“Whether or not it belongs to Alli Carson.”

That got Schiltz’s attention. His white eyebrows shot up, cartoonstyle. “The president-elect’s daughter?”

“The same.”

Jack and Schiltz faced each other in the autopsy room, lights low to cut down on the glare from all the stainless steel and tile.

Schiltz snapped on rubber gloves, placed a magnifying lens over his right eye. Then he adjusted a spotlight, the beam illuminating the hand. He bent over, his shoulders rolled forward, a hunchback in his ill-lit garret beside the stone belfry. “Waterlogged as hell,” he said gloomily, “so you can forget about anything like DNA testing.” His fingertips moved the hand. “Interesting.”

“What is?” Jack prompted.

“The hand was sawn off, expertly.”

“With a chain saw?”

“That would be a logical assumption.” Was there a touch of irony in his voice? He held up the hand, stump first. “But the markings indicate otherwise. Something rotary, certainly. But delicate.” He shrugged. “My best guess would be a medical saw.”

Jack leaned in. The stench of formaldehyde and acetone was nauseating. “We looking at a surgeon as the perp?”

“Possibly.”

“Well, that narrows it down to a couple hundred million.”

“Amusing.” Schiltz glanced up. “Here’s what I do know: This was done with a sure hand, no remorse in the cut, no hesitation whatsoever. Plus, the immersion in water has made the pruning permanent. He’s betting we won’t be able to get fingerprints to make an ID.”

“So—what?—the perp’s done this sort of thing before?”

“Uh-huh.”

Jack held up the gold-and-platinum ring in its plastic evidence bag. “I took this off the third finger. It belongs to Alli Carson.”

“Which doesn’t speak to her state of health.” Seeing Jack blanch, he hastened to add, “All it means is your perp has access to her.” Schiltz used a dental pick to scrape under and around the nails, one at a time. “Look.” Holding aloft the implement so that the working end was directly in the light, he said, “What do you see here?”

“Something pink,” Jack said.

“And shiny.” Schiltz put the end of the pick close to his eye. “This is undoubtedly nail polish. Plus, the nails are newly cut, so my guess is that for whatever reason—”

“The perp cut this girl’s nails and removed the polish,” Jack finished for him. He stood up. “Alli Carson never wore polish; her nails were square-cut, like a boy’s. This isn’t her hand.”

“You may be sure, Jack, but I’m a forensic pathologist. I need proof before I say yea or nay.” He went to a sink, filled a pan with warm water. Immersing the hand in it, he gently loosened the skin, worked it off, starting at the wrist. The gray, amorphous jellyfish swam in the water. With the care of a lepidopterist working on a butterfly’s wing, Schiltz unrolled the translucent material.

“Ami!” he called.

A moment later, the AME poked her head into the room. “Yes, sir.”

“Got a fingerprint job for you.”

Ami nodded, took a place beside him.

“Left hand,” he said.

Ami put her left hand into the water. Schiltz rolled the skin over her hand like a glove. Ami air-dried the skin by holding her left hand aloft. Then he fingerprinted the human glove.

“You see,” he said, rolling each finger on the ink pad, “wearing the skin smooths out the pruning.” He held up the fingerprint card, nodded to Ami, who removed the skin, took the card, and went away. “We’ll soon know whether or not this hand belongs to Alli Carson.”

He took the severed hand out of its warm-water bath, laid it back on the metal examining tray, studying it once again. “Care to make a bet?” he said dryly.

“I know it’s not hers,” Jack said.

Several moments later, Ami popped back into the room. “No match in any system for the Jane Doe,” she said. “One thing is certain, she isn’t Alli Carson.”

Jack breathed a huge sigh of relief, dialed Nina’s cell, told her the good news. Pocketing his cell, he tapped a forefinger against his lips. “Alli’s ring, the nails cut to Alli’s length, the water pruning of the fingertips—clearly, someone wants us to believe this is her hand. Why play this grisly game? Why go to all the trouble?” Why had he taken her? What did Alli’s abductor want? “What sick mind has maimed a girl Alli’s age just to play a trick on us?”

“A very sick mind, indeed, Jack.” Schiltz turned the hand over. “He cut the hand off while the girl was still alive.”

Rain made a stage set of the parking lot, beaded silver curtains slid down the beams of the arc lights. Jack walked through the glimmer of the near-deserted asphalt. After jerking open the car door, he slid in behind the wheel, fired the ignition. But he didn’t pull out. The events of this morning overran him. His head pounded; every muscle in his body seemed to be screaming at once. Leaning over, he opened the glove box, shook out four ibuprofen, crunched down on them, wincing at the harsh, acidic taste.

He thought about the girl’s hand. The abductor had immersed it in water so they wouldn’t be able to ID her through fingerprints. But Egon had used it to prove that the hand didn’t belong to Alli Carson. And yet the abductor had sawn the hand off while the girl was still alive? Why had he done that? Everything else that Jack had seen led him to believe that this man was methodical, not maniacal. What if he wanted them to know that Alli was still alive? He’d made certain of that by cutting off the hand of a living girl. But he hadn’t cut Alli’s hand off. Why not? Jack’s thoughts chased each other like flashes of lightning. He rubbed his forehead with the heels of his hands.

Beyond the lot, out on the interstate, an unending Morse code of lights flashed across his face, strobed against his eyes, doubling his headache. Neon signs flashed pink and green like bioluminescent creatures deep in the ocean’s heart. A horn blared, carrying the diminishing sound behind it like a tail. The rhythmic thrash of the windshield wipers was like his father’s admonishing finger. With a convulsive lunge of his hand, he turned off the ignition, watched the rain slalom down the glass.

Alli, he thought, where the hell are you? What’s happening to you?

He was powerless to stop his thoughts moving toward Emma. His longing to talk with his daughter, so that she could spread the balm of forgiveness over him, brought tears to his eyes. His hands shook.

It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Schiltz’s advice came back to him like an echo in a cave. He knew his friend was right, but God forgive him, he couldn’t stop. He was like an alcoholic with a bottle to his mouth. Every fiber in his being ached for the chance to say he was sorry, to tell Emma how much he loved her. Why was it, he asked himself despairingly, that he could acknowledge his love for her only now, when it was too late? He slammed his fist against the steering wheel, making the car shiver around him like Jell-O.

He looked up, unsure whether it was the rain or his tears he was seeing. He felt, rather than saw, a shimmer, as if the shadowy air at the corners of his vision rippled like the surface of Bear Creek Lake. Startled, he looked around and smelled Emma’s scent. Was that her face he saw staring back at him in the rearview mirror? He whirled around, but his nose was filled with the cloying stench of hot metal, stripped rubber, and burnt flesh.

Gasping, he wrenched open the door, stumbled to his knees on the asphalt, head hanging down. The rain fell on him with an indifference that made him pound his fist against the car door. Pulling himself up on the door handle, he peered through the rain-beaded window. The backseat was empty. As he rested his forehead against the glass, his mind whirled backwards, into the dark whirlpool of the past.

He had taken Emma, Egon, and Molly to Cumberland State Forest to hike and fish in Bear Creek Lake. The girls were ten. He had bought Emma a Daisy air rifle. One afternoon she had come running back to camp, her eyes streaming with tears. She had aimed her rifle at a bluebird sitting on the branch of a pine and pulled the trigger. She’d never believed she would hit the bird, let alone kill it, but that’s precisely what had happened.

She was heartsick, beyond consoling. Jack suggested that they have a funeral and burial. The physical preparations seemed to calm her. But she’d cried all over again when Jack shoveled the dirt over the pathetic fallen bird. Then Emma took the air rifle, hurled it with all her strength into the lake. It sank like a stone, ripples spiraled out from its grave.

That was the last time Jack could remember really being with his daughter. After that, what happened? She grew up too fast? They grew apart too quickly? He was at a loss to understand where the time had gone or how Emma had changed. It was as if he had fallen asleep on a speeding train. He might never have woken up if it hadn’t been for the crash.

Schiltz opened the door in response to Jack’s pounding. His rubber gloves were slick with unspeakable substances.

He moved away from the door so Jack could come in. “You look like roadkill. What happened to you downstairs?”

Jack, immersed in the horror of his own personal prison, almost told Schiltz about his ghostly visitations, but he had a conviction that they weren’t visitations at all, merely wishful thinking, as if he could wish Emma back to life, or some transparent semblance of life. On the other hand, who but Egon, seeing God’s hand in the incredible, the unexplainable, might understand. Nevertheless, Jack chose to keep silent on the matter. It was too personal, too humiliating—he’d seem like a child lost in a ghost story.

“I ran into something that disagreed with me.” Sharon constantly accused him of hiding his true feelings behind sarcasm. What did she know?

The offices were shadowed, hushed. Carpeted and wood-paneled, they were a jarring contrast with the banks of stainless steel deathbeds, sluicing hoses, giant floor drains, vats of chemicals, rows of microscopes, tiers of body blocks used to elevate the cadavers’ chests for easier entry, drawers filled with the forensic implements of morphology and pathology: bone saws, bread knives, enterotomes, hammers, rib cutters, skull chisels, Striker saws, scalpels, and Hagedorn needles to sew up the bodies when work was done. Jack and Egon skirted the X-ray room and the toxicology lab, went through the standards room, as refined as a Swiss watchmaker’s, as blunt as a butcher shop, where cadavers as well as their major organs were weighed and measured. Even in the short corridor they felt the icy breath of the cold room, dim, blued, impersonal as a terminal, hushed as a library.

“So what brings you back? Nowhere else to go on a rainy December night?” Schiltz gestured at the wall of cadaver containers. “Since I’m not full up, I could give you an overnight berth in my Japanese hotel. It’s quiet as the grave and a gourmet continental breakfast is served in the autopsy room starting at eight. Would you like an upper or a lower berth?”

Jack laughed. Egon had the uncanny ability to dislodge his depressions.

“I’m interested in whichever berths the two Secret Service men are in.”

“Ah, yes,” Egon said. “The men in black.”

Having a sense of humor—the darker the better—was essential for an ME, Egon once told Jack. “Professional detachment only gets you so far, because eventually someone gets under your skin,” his friend had once told him. “After that, it’s every macabre jokester for himself.”

Schiltz moved Jack along the rows of gleaming stainless steel containers, opened two side by side at waist height. “In my fascination with your floating island, I forgot all about them. Maybe it’s because I didn’t do the original autopsies. The law now mandates that in cases of deaths of federal officials, pathologists from the Army Forces Institute of Pathology do the work.” He shrugged. “Idiotic, if you ask me, but that’s the government for you.”

The two cadavers lay on their backs, even features waxy, doll-like, their chests cut and sewn back up in the autopsy T-scar that went from just beneath the collarbone to the lower intestine. “The pathology is yesterday’s paper so far as your new compadres are concerned. They came, they saw, they were dead-ended.”

“Nothing at all?” Jack said.

“I performed my own autopsies just to make certain. Not so much as a partial print, a stray hair, a scrap of skin, paint or dirt under the nails. No hint of anything that might lead you to ID the perps.” Schiltz shrugged again. “Not much to see, either. One stab apiece—hard, direct, no hesitation whatsoever—interstitial, between the third and fourth dorsal ribs, straight into the heart.” He paused. “Well, sort of.”

Jack’s own heart had begun a furious tattoo. “What d’you mean?”

Schiltz turned the first cadaver onto one side, shoved it to the far side of the deathbed, turned it on its stomach. As he performed the same procedure with the second body, Jack peered at the entry wound.

“See here. I peeled back the muscle so I could get a closer look at the interior wounds. Smooth as silk, so the assailant didn’t use a serrated blade, but there was a slight curve to them. I can’t quite make out what sort of blade would leave that signature.”

But I can, Jack thought. He’d seen that odd, slightly arced wound before, once, twenty-five years ago. His subsequent investigation, all on his own, both dangerous and difficult, had unearthed the murder weapon: a thin-bladed knife, known as a paletta. It was used by professional bakers to spread batter or apply frosting. The truly odd part was this: A paletta had a rounded end. It was totally useless for a stabbing attack. This one, however, was unique among palettas: the murderer had ground the end into a mercilessly sharp point.

“You okay?” Schiltz peered into Jack’s frozen face.

“You bet,” Jack said in a strangled voice.

“Stole up behind them and bingo! No fuss, no muss.” Schiltz’s slightly bored tone indicated he’d been over this terrain numerous times in the past twenty-four hours. “Most professional, not to say impressive, especially in light of the victims’ training. In fact, I would venture to say the stabs were surgical in their precision. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t have done a better job of it myself.”

Jack hardly heard his friend’s last sentence. He was frozen, bent over in the space between the deathbeds, his gaze flickering back and forth between the two wounds. His galloping heart seemed to have come to an abrupt and terrifying halt inside his chest.

It’s absolutely stone-cold impossible, he told himself. I shot Cyril Tolkan while he was trying to escape over the rooftop where I’d trapped him. He’s dead, I know he is.

And yet, the evidence of his own eyes was irrefutable. These stabs were the hallmark of a killer Jack had gone after twenty-five years ago, after a murder that had left him devastated, sick with despair.

Part 2

10

Jack, at fifteen, often cannot sleep. It might be a form of insomnia, but most likely not. He has good reason to stay awake. He lives in a slope-shouldered row house so close to the border of Maryland, it seems as if the District wants it exiled. At night, bedeviled by a fog of anxious stirrings, he lies in bed, staring at the traffic light at the junction of New Hampshire and Eastern Avenues. He lives, eats, and breathes by the rhythm of its changing from red to green. Outside his window, at the eastern border of the District, the city roars, barks, whines, squeals, growls like a pack of feral dogs, glassy-eyed with hunger. Inside the row house, the darkness is filled with dread. It seems to grip his head like a vise squeezed tighter and tighter until he gasps, shoots up in a fountain of bedclothes. This moment is crucial. If the light is green, everything will be okay. But if it’s red … His heart pounds; the roaring in his ears dizzies him. Disaster.

When he could bear to look back on those nights, he understood that the color of the traffic light didn’t matter. The reliance on the pattern set by unknown city workers is an illusion of control over the parts of his life he dreads. But like all children, he relies on illusion to keep his terrors in Pandora’s box.

Between the hours of one and three in the morning, his ears are attuned to the heavy tread of his father’s footsteps as he returns from work. This particular night is no different. It is June and stifling, not even the smallest squares of laundry stir on the line. A dog lies wheezing asthmatically in the ashy buttocks of the empty lot next to the auto chop shop. An old man wheezes, coughs so long and hard, Jack is afraid he’ll hawk up a lung.

The sounds creep in, as if the apartment itself is protesting his father’s weight. Every one of the tiny but separate noises that mark his father’s slow progress through it sends a squirt of blood into Jack’s temples, causing him to wince in pain.

Sometimes that was all that happened, the sounds would gradually ebb, Jack would lie back down, his heartbeat would return to normal, and eventually, he’d drift into a restless sleep. But at other times, the first bars of “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas creep into his room, and his heart starts to pound and he has to force himself not to vomit all over the sheets.

“I’d be safe and warm …”

The three slices of pepperoni pizza Jack had for dinner rise as if from a magician’s wand.

“… if I was in L.A….”

Stomach acid burns his throat, and he thinks, Oh God, he’s coming.

The melody takes on a life of its own. Like the notes of a snake charmer, it’s filled with an ominous meaning at odds with its original sunny disposition. And like the cobra that hovers and strikes at will, digging its fangs deep into flesh, his father stalks him, the thick black belt he bought in a biker shop in Fort Washington, Maryland, held loosely in his left hand.

It was a time-honored ritual in the McClure household, this whipping. It would have been so much better if the cause had been alcohol because then it wouldn’t have been Jack’s fault. But it is Jack’s fault. How many times has his father browbeaten the fact into him?

And Jack’s mother, what is her part in this ritual? She stays in her bedroom, behind a tightly closed door that leaks “California Dreamin’” every time her husband wraps the belt around the knuckles of his left fist. Jack, a living example of Skinnerian psychology, prepares himself for the pain when he hears the first bars of flower power sweetly, innocently sung.

Fists aren’t what frighten Jack, though his father possesses the big, knuckly rocks of a bricklayer or an assassin. By adult standards, his father isn’t particularly big, but with his dark eyes, sullen mouth, and broken nose, he seems like a colossus to Jack. Especially when he’s swinging the belt. Following Neanderthal instincts, he turned the biker belt into an ugly, writhing thing. Its armor of metal studs, its crown a buckle big as two fists are not enough. He filed the corners to points one sunny Sunday when Jack was out playing softball.

“Tell me a story, read me a book,” his father says as he opens the door to his son’s room. He looks around at the unholy mess of clothes, comics, magazines, records, bits of candy bars and chocolate. “Books, books, where are the friggin’ books?” He bends down, swipes up a comic. “Batman,” he says with a sneer. “How the fuck old are you?”

“Fifteen,” Jack answers automatically, though his mouth is dry.

“And all you can read is this junk?” He shoves the comic in his son’s face. “Okay then, brainiac, read to me.”

Jack’s hands tremble so badly, the comic slips through his fingers.

“Open it, John.”

Dutifully, Jack flips the pages of the comic. He wants to read, he wants to show his father that he can, but his emotions are in turmoil. He’s filled with fear and anxiety, which automatically extinguish what progress he’s made in decoding English. He stares down at the comic panels. The speech balloons might as well be written in Mandarin. The letters float off like spiky sea creatures with a will of their own.

He sees them, but he cannot make heads or tails of what they might be. It’s garbage in, garbage out.

“God almighty, it’s a fucking comic. A six-year-old could read it, but not you, huh?” His father rips the comic from him, flips it into a corner.

“Hey, watch it,” Jack says, leaping up.

His father sticks out his right hand, shoves him back onto the bed.

“That’s issue number four.”

“How the hell would you know?” His father stomps over to the corner, rips up the comic. Batman and his bat-cape are parted.

His father carefully removes his prized gold-and-diamond cuff links from his shirt, knocks a pile of comics off Jack’s dresser with a backhand swipe, lays them down on the open space. Then the beating starts. The belt uncoils from his father’s fist like an oily viper. It whips up, then down, striping Jack’s rib cage. And as the lashing commences in earnest, his father punctuates each singing strike with a litany of words.

“You don’t talk right.” Crack! “You act like a goddamn zombie when I ask you to do something.” Crack! “You fidget and procrastinate because you’re too stupid to understand me.” Crack! “Christ, fifteen years old and you can’t read.” Crack! “I was already hauling garbage when I was fifteen.” Crack!

He is breathing hard, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “Where the fuck did you come from?” Crack! “Not from me, that’s for damn sure!” Crack! “A hole in the ground, that’s it.” Crack!

His rage is immense, as large as the Lincoln Memorial, as large as the sky. He is a man who looks upon his son and is diminished. As if something in his seed is defective. He can’t bear the thought. Having a son like Jack fills him with rage; the rage fuels his violence.

“Your mother must’ve fucked some sideshow freak—” Crack! “—while I was out trying to make ends meet, John.” Crack! “John. They call the losers who go to whores johns.” Crack! “You’re a pinhead.” Crack! “A half-wit!” Crack! “You give morons a good name.” Crack! “Stupid would be a big step up for you.” Crack! Crack! Crack!

Jack’s body absorbs the excruciating pain with its usual indifference. In fact, it grows hard and tough under the abuse. It’s the words that penetrate to his inner gyroscope, fragile, delicately balanced in the best of times. The litany of hate knocks the pins out from under the gyroscope, the heavy machinery flattens Jack’s tattered self-esteem, burying it in the muddy flats at the depths of his being. Belief is as ephemeral as a cloud, shape-shifted by invisible forces. How easily other people’s beliefs masquerade as our own. The enemy outside invades, and we, young and impressionable, are vulnerable; the enemy is so insidious that we’re changed without even being aware of it. Our cloud shape is altered as we are propelled onward through life.

Afterwards, Jack lies on the blood-smeared sheets. His room is invaded by the howls at the edge of the city. The traffic light at the intersection of Eastern and New Hampshire blinks from red to green and back again. Once again, it has predicted his fate. But now the light is ignored. Jack’s mind is busy continuing the punishment his father has meted out. He straddles a widening fault line. This fault line is his; he has manufactured it out of his dim brain, he has spun it from all the things he can’t do, all the things he tried to do and failed. His father is right. His fault, his fault line, growing bigger and wider every day.

Instead of lying in a pool of sweat, waiting for the constellation of dreaded sounds, Jack takes to wandering the flyblown streets. Night shreds like smoke, manhandled by streetlights, neon signs blinking and buzzing like wasps, aggressive arc lights setting filling stations afire in blinding auroras. Shiny faces move in and out of his vision, crossing streets at a cocaine-induced angle, shuffling past him in a bog of alcohol fumes. Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against wind or rain, he leans against a lamppost on Eastern Avenue, watches the world spin by without him.

It seems as if he has lost himself in the haze of the city. In shopwindows, he looks blurred, as if he is out of focus with the rest of the world. He realizes just how badly out of focus when he is taken behind the local discount electronics store by members of the local gang and beaten senseless for no particular reason save that he’s white.

“Yo disrespected us, coming onto our turf.” The gang leader spits into Jack’s face as Jack sprawls in the filth of the back alley. He is tall—at least a head taller than Jack—and rangy. His eyes are buggy. “We find you here again, we pin yo pale mutherfuckin’ ass to the rear end of a garbage truck.” He kicks Jack insolently in the groin. “You listenin’ t’me, whitey?”

Jack tries to nod, instead groans with the pain.

He must have passed out after that because when he opens his crusted eyes, dawn has crept into the alley. The gang leader and his cabal are nowhere to be seen, but Jack isn’t alone.

A man of middle years with an angular face the color of freshly brewed coffee is crouched on his hams, regarding Jack with sympathetic eyes.

“Can you move, son?” He has a voice like liquid velvet, as if he is a singer of love songs.

Fully awake now, racked with pain, Jack pulls himself up against the slimy brick wall at the rear of the electronics shop. He sits with his legs drawn up, wrists resting loosely on his knees. Sucking in deep breaths, he tries to deal with the pain, but it covers so many parts of his body, he feels dizzy and sick in the pit of his stomach. All of a sudden, he rolls over and vomits.

The man with the velvet voice watches this without surprise. When he’s certain Jack is finished, he rises, holds out his hand. “You need to get cleaned up. I’ll walk you home.”

“Don’t have a home,” Jack says dully.

“Well, I doubt that, son. Honest, I do.” The man with the velvet voice pushes his lips out. “Mebbe it’s a home you don’t feature going back to at this point in time. Is that it?”

Jack nods.

“But you’ll want to, I guarantee that.” He bends a little, taking Jack’s hand in his. “In the meantime, why don’t you come with me. We’ll mend what needs to be mended, then call your folks. They must be frantic with worry about you.”

“They probably don’t know I’m gone,” Jack says, which probably isn’t true, but it’s what he feels.

“Still and all, I do believe they have a right to know you’re okay.”

Jack isn’t sure about that at all. Nevertheless, he looks up into the man’s face.

“My name’s Myron. Myron Taske.” Taske smiles with big white teeth. “Will you tell me yours?”

“Jack.”

When Myron Taske realizes that’s all Jack is going to say, he nods. “Will you let me help you, Jack?”

“Why would you want to help me?” Jack says.

Myron’s smile deepens as it grows wider. “Because, son, that’s what God wants me to do.”

Myron Taske is minister of the Renaissance Mission Church farther down Kansas Avenue NE. The clapboard building that houses the church had once been a two-family attached house, but first one family defaulted on their mortgage, then the other. The building was put into receivership by the bank.

“Which was when we bought it,” Taske says as he leads Jack through the side door into the rectory. “Lucky for us, one of the bank’s vice presidents is a member of our congregation. We were searching for a new home and this became it.” He winks. “Got it at a good price.”

“But this area’s filled with gangs, crime, and drugs,” Jack says, and winces as Taske applies peroxide with a swab to his numerous scrapes, cuts, and lacerations.

“And where better to accomplish God’s work?” Taske indicates that Jack should take off his shirt. “Which begs the question, what were you doing on that wild corner in the middle of the night?”

“Hanging,” Jack says sullenly.

“Why weren’t you home and in bed?”

Jack shrugs off his shirt. “I thought it would be safer out on the street.”

The reverend stares at the black-and-blue marks across Jack’s rib cage. Softly, he says, “You didn’t get those tonight, did you?”

Jack bites his lip.

“Father or brother?”

“Don’t have a brother, do I?” Jack says defensively. How would things go for him at home if he said his father is beating him? Anyway, it isn’t his father’s fault that Jack is so stupid.

Myron Taske, silent, contemplative, continues his work patching Jack up. As it turns out, he is a singer, every Sunday, leading the choir in three joyous songs at the end of his sermon. He loves to sing love songs of a sort, love songs to God’s grace and goodness here on earth as in the heavens. This he tells Jack as he bandages him up.

“Everyone here is black?” Jack says.

Myron Taske leans back, regarding Jack over small eyeglasses he has set on the bridge of his nose for the close work. “Anyone who wants to be closer to God is welcome here, Jack.”

Finished with his work, he packs up the first aid kit, stows it back in a large armoire that dominates one wall. On the opposite wall is a painting of Christ’s face, resplendent within a golden aura.

“Do you believe in God, Jack?”

“I … I never thought about it.”

Myron Taske purses his lips again. “Would you like to now?”

Before Jack can answer, a sharp series of raps comes on the door: three short, two long.

“Just a minute!” Taske calls, but the door swings inward anyway.

The doorway is entirely filled by a man of humongous height and girth. He must weigh close to 350 pounds. He is the color of a moonless night, his eyes yellow, teeth very large, very white, except for his left incisor, which is gold. Embedded in its center is a gleaming diamond. His hands are the size of other people’s feet, his feet the size of other people’s heads, his skull as bald as a bowling ball and twice as shiny.

“Jeremiah Christmas, Gus, didn’t you hear me?”

Gus’s face, scarred along both cheeks, is like a black lamp that sucks all the daylight out of the room. His gravelly voice is just as terrifying.

“Sure I heard you, Reverend.” He walks into the room on legs whose thighs are so thick, they make him slightly bandy-legged. “I wanted to see for myself who you picked outta the gutter this time.”

“News travels fast,” Jack says, without thinking. He sucks in his breath as Gus’s yellow eyes impale him on a stake.

“Good news travels fast,” Gus rumbles. “Bad news travels faster.”

“Gus is a storehouse of aphorisms,” Myron Taske says for Jack’s benefit. “A vast storehouse.”

Gus’s enormous belly shakes when he laughs. He moves into the room like a sumo wrestler, like a force of nature.

Still with his eyes on Jack, he says to Reverend Taske, “This one’s different, though. He’s white.” He squints, addresses Jack without missing a beat. “That’s one butt-ugly beating handed to you.”

“It was my fault,” Jack says.

“Yeah?” This seems to interest Gus. “How you mean?”

“I was standing on the corner over Eastern.”

Gus nods his monstrously huge head as he circles Jack. “And?”

“And I got dragged into the alley and beaten. Guy said to me I disrespected him.”

Gus appears on the verge of annoyance. “By doing what-all?”

“I was on his turf.”

Gus’s gaze swings to the reverend. “Andre,” is all he says.

Taske nods sorrowfully.

“Shit, I told you the preachin’ wasn’t gonna work on him.” Gus is clearly disgusted.

“How many times have I told you that kind of language has no place in God’s house, Augustus,” Reverend Taske says sternly.

“Apologies, Reverend.” Gus looks abashed.

“Don’t apologize to me, Augustus.” He gestures with his head. “Do your penance, seek God’s forgiveness.”

With one last look at Jack, Gus lumbers out, slamming the door behind him.

There is a silence, out of which Jack struggles by saying, “I suppose now you’re going to tell me not to worry, that his bark is worse than his bite.”

Reverend Taske shakes his head ruefully. “No, son. You don’t want to get in the way of Gus’s bite.” Slapping his palms against his thighs, he says, “Are you ready to go home now?” He looks at his watch. “It’s already after eight.”

“I’m not going home,” Jack says stubbornly.

“Then I’ll walk you to school.”

Jack ducks his head. “Don’t go to school. They don’t want me.”

There is a small silence. Jack is terrified Myron Taske will ask him why.

Instead, the reverend says, “I’ll call Child Services at nine, make sure the beatings don’t continue.”

Jack bites his lip. Child Services. Strangers. No, then they’ll find out how stupid he is, and his father will be even angrier. “Don’t call anyone,” he says in a voice that catches Taske’s attention.

“All right, for the moment I won’t,” the reverend says, after a moment’s pause, “on one condition. I’d very much like you to come back, because it seems to me that you’re ready to talk about God.”

Jack remains dubious, but he has no choice. Besides, Reverend Taske is so nice, there’s a chance he’ll get to like Jack, as long as Jack manages not to look or sound stupid around him. That means, among other things, keeping away from any printed matter the reverend might want him to read. Filled with anxiety, he nods his assent.

“Believe me, the first step is the most painful, Jack.” Smiling, Myron Taske claps his hand gently on Jack’s shoulder. “You’re lost now—even you can’t deny that. Consider that in finding God you will find yourself.”

11

The First Daughter awoke in a room of unknown size; the walls and ceiling, lost in shadows, seemed to mock her. She might have been in a bunker or an auditorium, for all she knew. Whether there were windows here was another mystery impossible for her to solve. A bare lightbulb, surrounded by the knife-edged penumbra of an industrial Bakelite shade, dropped a scorching bomb of light onto her head and shoulders.

She sat bound to a chair that seemed hand-hewn from the heart of a titanic tree. Its ladder back rose to a height above her head; its seat was of woven rush. Lacquered canary yellow, its surfaces were tagged in a graffiti of swooping red and purple, suggesting both bougainvillea and sprays of blood.

Her wrists were fastened to the muscular chair arms with thick leather straps, her ankles bound similarly to the chair legs, as if she were a madwoman in a nineteenth-century asylum. She was dressed in new clothes, not in the sleep shirt and boys’ boxers she’d worn to bed. Her feet were bare. She felt the vague need to urinate, but she clamped down on it. She had far bigger problems.

Alli couldn’t remember how she got here; she barely recalled the callused hand over her mouth, the nauseating odor of ether rising into her nostrils like swamp gas. After all, it could have been a nightmare. Now she smelled her own sweat, a stew of terror, rage, and helplessness.

“Hello? Hello! Is anybody there? Help! Get me out of here!”

Her straining voice sounded thin and strange to her, as if it were an elastic band pulled past its limits. Sweat rolled down her underarms, rank with fear. Tremors seized her extremities, held them hostage.

This is a dream, she thought. Any minute I’ll wake up in my bed at Langley Fields. If this were real, my bodyguards would have rescued me by now. My father would be here, along with a battalion of Secret Service agents.

Then a mouse ran across her field of vision—a real, live mouse—and she shrieked.

Black hoodies up over coffee-colored heads, the two young black men overran the block of T Street SE between Sixteenth Street SE and Seventeenth Street SE, the way dogs mark their territory. The Anacostia section of the District was not a good place to be if you weren’t black, and even then if you were like these two big, rangy twenty-year-olds, you’d best be on the lookout for Colombians who, sure as hell if they caught you, would accost you, take all your cash, then, like as not, break your ass.

These two were searching for Salvadorans, runty little critters whom they could handle, on whom they could take out their rage, take their cash, then, like as not, break their asses. For years now, the Colombians, who owned the drug trade, had been muscling into the heavily black areas like Anacostia. Skirmishes had turned into battles, front lines fluid day to day. There had yet to be a full-blown turf war, though that level of hostility was in the air, corrosive as acid raid. In the Colombians’ wake, slipstreaming like second-tier bicycle racers, came the Salvadorans, nipping at their heels, trying to dip their beaks. That’s the way things worked in Anacostia; that was the pecking order, written in broken bones and blood.

In any event, it was broken bones and blood these two were out for, so when they saw the big old red Chevy drawn to a stop at the traffic light at Oates, fenders sanded down to a dull desert hue, they sprinted in a pincer move, rehearsed and deployed scores of times. These two knew the timing of the lights in Anacostia as if they had installed them themselves; they knew how many seconds they had, what they had to do. They were like calf-ropers let loose in a rodeo, the clock ticking down from 120, and they’d better have made their move before then if they expected to get the prize. Further, they knew every car native to the hood—especially those owned by the Colombians, bombing machines with high-revving engines, ginormous shocks, astounding custom colors that made your eyes throb, your head want to explode. The sanded-down Chevy was unknown to them, so fair game. Inside, a young black male, making that mistake that outsiders made now and again, stopping in Anacostia instead of bombing on through like a bat out of hell, red traffic lights be damned. There wasn’t a cop within three miles to stop him.

The truth of it was, he shouldn’t have been here at all, so he deserved everything that came to him, which included being hauled out of his car, thrown to the tarmac, derided, pistol-whipped, and kicked until his ribs cracked. Then, tamed and docile, his pockets were ransacked, his cellie, watch, ring, necklace, the whole nine yards disappearing into deep polyester pockets. Took his keys, too, just to teach him a lesson, to be deftly whipped underhand into the yawning slot of a storm drain, there to click-clack-click derisively. The two thugs then fled, howling and whooping raggedly into a night with its head pulled in tighter than a turtle’s.

Ronnie Kray, drawn out of a back room by epithets and racial slurs hurled like Molotov cocktails, watched from behind a thickly curtained window as the two punks leapt down the street, whooping, guns raised, the flags of their gang, high on blood-lust. He knew those two, even knew where they had procured those guns, just as he knew every shadowy creepy-crawly of this marginalized neighborhood where civility had been mugged, civilization had fallen asleep and never woken up. He knew the lives they led, the lives they couldn’t escape. He used that knowledge when he had to. Those guns, for instance, were as old and decrepit as the building stoops, no self-respecting District cop would be caught out on the street with one. But those guns—cheap, disposable, out of control—were all the young men had; in the way young white men in Georgetown had their parents to protect them, these thugs had their guns. And like parents, rich or poor, the weapons would probably fail you when you most needed them.

Ronnie Kray was curdled by these thoughts as he surveyed the graffitied row house fronts, the cyclone fences hemming in patches of dirt and half-dead grass across the empty potholed street. Fear had cleared the area as efficiently as a canister of tear gas. From the fumy gutter a sheet of newspaper lifted into the air, as if being read by one of the many mournful ghosts washed up on the shore of this wasteland. At length, his gaze settled on the one other moving thing in his field of view: the pulped young black man crawling along the gutter, this low thoroughfare the only one open to him. Even so, he quickly exhausted himself, spread-eagled like a starfish in spillage, much of it his own.

Ronnie Kray watched, observant as a hawk overflying a field of rabbit warrens. He could have gone out to help the young man, but he didn’t. He could have called 911, but he didn’t. In truth, those ideas never crossed his mind. Kray was a missionary, and like all good missionaries, his mind ran along one track. Missionary zeal precluded any deviation whatsoever from his chosen path. So he stood behind the curtain, watching the world at its lowest, meanest ebb, and took heart, for only at the darkest depths, only when all hope is lost, does the catalyst for change raise a spark that turns into the flare of a thousand suns.

The moment was at hand; he knew it as surely as his heart beat or his lungs took in air. At last, when all movement had ceased, he turned and padded silently away, through a front parlor wrapped in the dust of ages. Everywhere lay teetering stacks of old books, abandoned magazines, forgotten vinyl phonograph records in colorful cardboard jackets. They weren’t his, so he didn’t feel the compulsion to categorize, alphabetize, catalog them, or even to align their edges so they wouldn’t make his teeth grind every time he saw them.

On the paneled hallway walls were hung black-and-white photographs of a girl, not more than twenty, with intelligent, wide-apart eyes. The flattened, slightly grainy images of her face were the result of an extended telephoto lens like those used in police and DEA surveillance. In all the photos, the backgrounds were smeared and blurry. But in one or two could be made out a piece of the flag of the United States.

The kitchen was a cheery shade of yellow. It had wooden cupboards, painted a glossy white. Gaily striped café curtains were drawn across the windows. He paused at the soapstone sink, slowly drained a tumbler of cold water, then, after washing the glass with soap and steaming hot water he set it upside down in the precise center of the drainboard. He opened the refrigerator. Inside, all the metal racks had been removed to make room for the girl he’d curled into it, her knees kissing her chin. Her eyes were filmed, her blue-white skin a crush of crepe paper. Her arms were placed on her thighs. Her left hand was missing. Reaching into the triangular space between her heels and her buttocks, he removed a small cloth sack.

Off the kitchen was a small room. Once a pantry, the windowless room was outfitted with a small stainless steel sink, a cupboard straight out of a Grimm fairy tale, a beaten-up chest of drawers salvaged from the street and rehabbed with an exacting attention to detail. At the chest, he opened drawers that were filled neatly with chemical reagents, gleaming scalpels, retractors, sterile syringes, vials of sera all in perfectly neat rows set within mathematically placed metal dividers. He took out a pair of surgical pliers, put it in the right-hand pocket of his overalls.

Reaching up, he opened the cupboard. Pseudocerastes persicus coiled around the semidarkness, neat as a sailor’s rope. The light spun off scales the pale pink of human flesh pulled inside out. The Persian horned viper raised her head, body uncoiling slowly. The supraorbital horns made her appear as sinister as a demon. Just below the horns, the ruby eyes opened and the forked tongue flickered out. Then, catching sight of the cloth sack, her jaws hinged wide, revealing erected fangs, hollow with venom.

“Ah, Carrie, you sense it, don’t you?” Kray crooned softly. The pink inside of her mouth was almost erotic. People were so predictable, Kray thought bitterly. But you never knew about Carrie. That was the delicious part of it, like a spice only he knew about. She could wind herself lovingly about his wrist for years and then one day sink her fangs into the meat between his thumb and forefinger. He felt—it was a French word—a frisson, yes, that was it—he felt a frisson electrify his spine.

“Dinner is served.” Opening the sack, he dumped the contents into his slightly cupped palm. The rat lay on its side, dazed, lethargic from the cold. Out snaked Carrie’s wide, triangular head, its tongue questing. Coiling around Kray’s wrist, the viper’s demon head hovered over the slowly stirring rat.

“That’s right,” Kray sang. “Eat your fill, baby.”

The forked tongue quivered; the head reared back. Just as the rat, warming, rolled onto its pink feet, Carrie struck, her flat head lanced forward, her fangs sank to the root into the rat’s neck. The rat’s eyes rolled, it tried to extricate itself, but so powerful was the nerve toxin that it couldn’t even move.

Now comes the most beautiful part, Kray thought as Carrie began the long process of swallowing her prey. The miracle of death overtaking life a centimeter at a time. Because, though paralyzed, the rat was still alive, its eyes rolling in terror as its hindquarters were sucked into the viper’s throat.

Afterwards, Kray returned to the back room, where he drew out a key attached to a loop on his overalls by a stainless steel chain. Inserting the key in the lock, he walked through.

On the other side, he shut the door, locked it carefully behind him, turned, and said to Alli Carson, “What have they done to you?”

12

When Jack walks out of Reverend Taske’s rectory into the church proper, the first thing he sees is Gus sitting in a pew. His eyes are closed, his lips are moving soundlessly, but the moment Jack tries to glide past, his eyes open, and though he’s staring straight ahead, he says, “First time in a place like this, kid?”

Jack feels a tremor run down his spine. “You mean a black church?”

Very slowly, Gus turns his head. His eyes are boiling with rage, and Jack shrinks back into the shadows. “I mean a church, kid.”

Jack, hovering, doesn’t know what to say.

“I’m talkin’ God here.”

“I don’t know anything about God,” Jack says.

“What do you know ’bout?”

Jack shrugs, dumbfounded.

“Huh, smart white kid like you. Think you got all the perks, right?” His lips purse. “What you doin’ in these parts, anyway? Why ain’t you tucked away nice an’ cozy in yo’ own bed?”

“Don’t want to go home.”

“Yeah?” Gus raises his eyebrows. “Rather be beaten up in a alley-way?

“I’m used to being beaten.”

Gus stares at him for a long time; then he lumbers to his feet. “Come outta there, kid. Only rats stick to the shadows.”

Jack feels like an insect stuck on flypaper. His muscles refuse to obey Gus’s command.

Gus squints. “Think I’m gonna hurt you? Huh, that already been done real good.”

Jack takes a tentative step forward, even though it means coming closer to the huge man. He smells of tobacco and caramel and Old Spice. Jack’s frantic heart lurches into his throat as Gus lays a hand on his shoulder, turns him so that the early morning sun, colored by the handmade stained-glass windows in the church’s front, falls on him.

“That little muthafucka Andre.”

He looks up into Gus’s eyes and sees a curious emotion he can’t quite identify.

“Past time someone taught him an’ his crew a lesson, what d’you think?”

Jack feels a paralyzing thrill shoot up his spine.

Gus puts a thick forefinger across his lips. “Don’t tell the rev. Our secret, right?” He winks at Jack.

Mean streets flee before the grilled prow of Gus’s massive Lincoln Continental, white as a cloud, long as the wing of a seagull. Jack, perched on the passenger’s seat, feels his heart flutter in his chest. His hands tremble on the dashboard. Below them, dials and gauges rise and fall. Gus is so huge, his seat has been jacked to the end of its tracks, the back levered to an angle so low, anyone else would be staring at the underside of the roof.

Beyond the windshield, the climbing sun bludgeons blue shadows into gutters and doorways. The wind sends sprays of garbage through the early morning. Soot rises into miniature tornados. An old woman in garters pushes a shopping cart piled high with junk. An emaciated man, fists clenched at his side, howls at invisible demons. An empty beer bottle rolls into his foot and he kicks it viciously. The old woman scuttles after it, stuffs it into her cart, grunting with satisfaction.

But this ever-changing scene with all its sad detail nevertheless seems distant and dull compared with the interior of the car, which is alive with Gus’s fevered presence. It is as if his inner rage has frightened the very molecules of the air around him. It feels hot in the car, despite the roar of the air conditioner, and Jack somehow intuits that this unnatural heat is exceedingly dangerous.

Jack went once to the zoo with his class at school, while he was still going to school. He was both drawn to and terrified by the bears. In their black bottomless eyes he saw no malice, only a massive power that could never be harnessed for long, that could turn instantly deadly. He imagined such a bear in his room at night, raising its snout at the small sounds his father made, its wet nostrils flaring at the scent of his father’s approach. The music would mean nothing to the bear; it ignored Mama Cass and the others. And when the door to the bedroom swung inward, the bear would swat the man down before he could raise the belt. Of course, no such creature existed—until the moment Jack stepped into the white Lincoln Continental, felt the electricity sizzling and popping as it had through the bars of the bear’s cage.

“You know where Andre hangs out,” Jack says because he has a desperate need to banish a silence that presses on him like a storm descending.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Gus says as they round a corner.

Jack is trying hard to follow, but everything that’s happened to him over the last several hours is so out of his ken, it seems a losing battle. “But you said—”

Gus gives him a swift look, unreadable, implacable. “It’s not for me to punish Andre.”

They drive on in silence, until Gus flicks on the cassette player. James Brown’s umber voice booms from the speakers: “You know that man makes money to buy from other man.”

“It’s a man’s world,” Gus sings, his voice a startling imitation of Brown’s. “True dat, bro, it fo’ damn sho is.”

At length, they draw up in front of the All Around Town bakery on the ground floor of a heavily graffitied tenement. Through the fly-blown plate-glass window, Jack can see several men talking and lounging against shelves stacked with loaves of bread, bins of muffins, tins of cookies.

When he and Gus walk through the front door, he is hit by the yeasty scents of butter and sugar, and something else with a distinct tang. The men fall silent, watching as Gus makes his way toward the glass case at the far end of the narrow shop. No one pays any attention to Jack.

“Cyril,” Gus says to the balding man behind the counter.

The balding man wipes his hands on his apron, disappears through an open doorway in the rear wall, down a short passageway lined with stacks of huge cans, boxes, and containers of all sizes, into a back room. Jack observes the men. One curls dirt from beneath his fingernails with a folding knife, another stares at his watch, then at the third man, who rattles the pages of a tip sheet he’s reading. None of them look at Gus or say a word to each other or to anyone else.

The balding man returns, nods at Gus.

“C’mon,” Gus says, apparently to Jack.

Jack follows him behind the counter. As he passes by, the balding man plucks a chocolate-chip cookie off a pile in the case, gives it to him. Jack chews it thoughtfully, staring at the containers as he walks by.

The passageway gives out onto a cavelike room with a low ceiling the color of burnt bread. It is dominated by a line of enormous stainless steel ovens. A cool wind blows from a pair of huge air-conditioning grilles high up in the wall. Two men in long white aprons go about their laconic task of filling the kneading machines, placing pale, thin loaves into the ovens in neat rows.

Standing in the center of the room is a squat man with the neck of a bull, the head of a bullet. His wide, planular olive-gray face possesses a sleekness that can come only from daily shaves at a barbershop.

“Hello, Cyril,” Gus says. He does not extend his hand. Neither does Cyril.

Cyril nods. He takes one glance at Jack, then his round, black eyes center on Gus. “He looks like shit, that kid.” He’s got a curious accent, as if English isn’t his first language.

Gus knows a put-down when he hears one. He chews an imaginary chaw of tobacco ruminatively. “He looks like shit ’cause a Andre.”

Cyril, divining the reason for the visit, seems to stiffen minutely. “What’s that to me?”

Gus puts one huge hand on Jack’s shoulder with an astonishing gentleness. “Jack belongs to me.”

The bakers are looking furtively at the two men as if they are titans about to launch lightning bolts at each other.

“I would venture to say Andre didn’t know that.”

“Andre an’ his crew beat the crap outta Jack.” Gus’s voice is implacable. The inner rage informs his face like heat lightning.

Cyril waits an indecent moment before acquiescing. “I’ll take care of it.”

“I warned you ’bout that muthafucka,” Gus says immediately.

Cyril shows his palms. “I don’t want any trouble between us, Gus.”

“Huh,” Gus grunts. “You already been through that bloodbath.”

The Lincoln Continental is singed with invisible fire as Gus drives them away from the bakery. Gus, brooding, is like a porcupine with his quills bristling.

“That muthafucka,” he mouths, his eyes straight ahead. And Jack doesn’t know whether he means Andre or Cyril.

“You know that bakery isn’t a bakery,” Jack says. “First off, there were no customers, just some men standing around.” He’s afraid of what he’s said, afraid that Gus’s seething will find its outlet in him. But he can’t help himself; it’s part of what’s wrong with him. His brain is exploding with everything he saw, heard, intuited, extrapolated upon.

“Course it ain’t only a bakery. Fuckin’ Cyril runs drugs ’n’ numbers outta there.”

Times like now, when he can focus on what his own brain has recorded, when it shows him the big picture, when he can “read” the signs and from them build a three-dimensional model in his mind, he has a clarity of thought he finds exhilarating. “I mean they’re making something more than bread there.”

Brakes shriek as all at once his words sink in. Gus pulls the Continental over to the curb. The engine chortles beneath them like a beast coming out of a coma. Gus throws the car into park. His seat groans a protest as he twists around to stare at Jack.

“Kid, what the hell you talkin’?”

For once Jack isn’t intimidated. He’s in his own world now, secure in what he has seen, what he knows, what he will say.

“There was the smell.”

“Yeast and butter and sugar, yah.”

“Underneath all those things there was another smell: sharp and blue.”

“Blue?” Gus goggles at him. “How the fuck can a smell be blue?”

“It just is,” Jack said. “It’s blue, like the smell when my mother takes off her nail polish.”

“Acetone? Nail polish remover is all acetone. I use it to take glue spots offa stuff people bring in to my pawnshop.” Gus’s expression is thoughtful now. “What else, kid?”

“Well, that cookie the guy gave me was days old. It should’ve been fresh. Plus which, whatever he had on his hands wasn’t flour or yeast, because his fingertips were stained orange by what he had on them.”

Gus appears to think about this revelation for some time. At last he says, as if in a slight daze, “Go on. Anything else?”

Jack nods. “The room with the ovens should’ve been hot.”

“Course it wasn’t hot,” Gus says. “It’s hugely air-conditioned.”

“Still,” Jack persists, “no heat came from inside when they opened the oven doors. The loaves were too thin to be bread. That wasn’t dough they were putting in, it was something that needed drying.”

“How the hell—?”

“Also, that guy Cyril is scared of you.”

“Huh, you betta believe he is.”

“No,” Jack says, “I mean he’s scared enough to do something about it.”

Gus frowns. “You mean he actually wants to move against me?” He shook his head. “No way you could know that, kid.”

“But I do.”

“Cyril an’ I have a treaty—an understanding. Between us now it’s live an’ let live.”

“No, it’s not.”

Something in Jack’s voice—some surety—gives Gus pause. “What are you, kid, a oracle?”

“What’s an oracle?” Jack says.

Gus stares out the side window. “You like fried pork chops an’ grits?”

“I never had grits.”

“Shit, that figures.” Gus makes a disgusted face. “White folk.”

He puts the car in gear.

13

Alli Carson saw the handsome man smile, remove himself from the doorway, pull a folding chair from the shadows. He straddled it, arms folded across the metal-tube back. He radiated a kind of magnetism, strong as her father’s, but entirely different: steely, opaque. All she saw when she looked into his face was her own reflection.

“They tied you up, poor girl,” he said gently. “I asked them not to do that, but do they listen to me?”

“Who—?” Alli’s tongue felt thick and gluey. “I’m so thirsty,” she managed to choke out.

The man stepped into the shadows, returned with a glass of water. Alli stared at it, desire flooding her, but fear, too, because there was an unknown world all around her. What horrors lurked there, waiting?

Leaning over her, he tipped the glass against her lower lip. “Slowly,” he said as she gulped. “Sip slowly.”

Despite her aching thirst, Alli obeyed him. When at last the glass was drained, she ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who are ‘they,’ who are you? Why have you brought me here, what do you want?”

He had soft eyes and such a large masculine presence, it seemed to fill the entire lit space.

“Be patient,” he said. “In time, all your questions will be answered.”

She wanted to believe him. That way lay hope. Hope that she’d soon be freed. “Then can’t you at least untie me?”

He shook his head sadly. “That would be most unwise.”

“Please. I won’t run away, I swear.”

“I’d like to believe you, Alli, really I would.”

She began to cry. “Why won’t you?”

“The others might come in at any time, you see, and then who would be punished? Me. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

She felt desperation fluttering in her breast like a caged bird. “For God’s sake, before they come!”

“Are you kidding me?” He said in a voice that lashed her like a whip, “You can’t be trusted. You’re a liar—and a cheat.”

Alli, confused as well as disoriented, said, “I—I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

He produced a thick manila folder, which he opened on his lap. With a shiver, she saw a snapshot of herself stapled to the top sheet of paper. Wasn’t this a scene from a film she had seen? And then with an internal shriek she realized that her mind and body had parted company, that she was looking at herself from a distance, or another dimension, where she was safe, would always be safe because nothing could touch her.

She heard someone with her voice say, “What are you holding?”

“Your life.” He looked up. “You see, Alli, I know everything about you.”

The schism inside her deepened—or widened, whichever. “You don’t … You couldn’t.”

His eyes flicked down, skimming information with which she could see he was clearly familiar. “You were born Allison Amanda Carson—Amanda was your maternal grandmother’s name—on January twenty-third, daughter of Edward Harrison Carson and Lyn Margaret Carson, née Hayes, married thirty-seven years this past September fourteenth. You were born in Georgetown University Hospital, your blood type is O-negative. You attended Birney Elementary, Lincoln Middle, and—let’s see—Banneker High School. At age five you fractured the ulna in your right forearm. At age eight you twisted your left ankle so severely, you were required to wear a cast for seventeen days. Neither injury had a lasting effect.

“In ninth grade you were diagnosed with Graves’ disease by your pediatrician—what’s his name?” He turned a page. “Ah yes, Dr. Hallow. He recommended you for treatment at Children’s Hospital, where you stayed for six days while tests were being performed, medication prescribed and evaluated in your system.”

He looked up into Alli’s stricken face. “Have I left anything out? I thought not.” Returning to the file, he struck himself lightly on the forehead and a smile spread over his face like taffy melting on a July afternoon. “But of course I have! I’ve failed to mention Barkley. Philip Barkley. But you called him—what? Help me out here, Alli. No? All right, all on my own then. You called him Bark, isn’t that right? Bark was your first love, but you never told your parents the truth about you and Bark, did you?”

“There was a reason.”

“Of course. There’s always a reason,” Kray said. “Human beings are so good at rationalization. Did you or did you not tell your parents the truth about Philip Barkley? A simple yes or no will do.”

Alli gave a little moan, appearing to sink as much as she was able into the chair.

“You see the futility of your current predicament?”

It was a measure of her mental paralysis that it wasn’t until this moment that the thought occurred to her. “How could you possibly know about Bark? I never told anyone about—”

“That night on the raft?”

She gasped. “It’s impossible! You couldn’t know!”

“And yet I do. How to reconcile this seeming impossibility?” He cocked his head. “Would it help if I tell you that my name is Ronnie Kray?”

Some inarticulate sound got caught in the back of Alli’s throat, and she almost gagged.

I’m a prisoner, Lyn Carson thought for the first time in her life. She, her support staff, and her bodyguards were in a motorcade, on their way from a luncheon, where she’d spoken to the Washington Ladies’ something-or-other, to a fund-raiser where she was standing in for her husband, who was God knew where, doing God knew what. This morning, she had been on Good Morning, America. She barely remembered what she’d said.

Normally, she loved these functions; they allowed her to feel senatorial—and now presidential—all on her own without feeling like Edward’s elbow. But these days, she was so preoccupied with thoughts of Alli that the luncheons, fund-raisers, photo ops … these days what an effort it was to keep her smile intact, the tasks that usually filled her with joy dragged by like a ragged filmstrip. What a useless process life is, she thought as the armored limo sped her crosstown, traffic peeling away, pedestrians peering briefly, wondering which member of the government was passing by. Without Alli, my life is without purpose.

In desperation, she pulled out her cell phone, dialed an overseas number. Checking her watch, she calculated it would be just after dinnertime in Umbria. Blue shadows would have already fallen over the olive groves, the ancient stone house would be lit by warm light and the smells of tomato sauce and roasted meat would have permeated the thick-walled rooms. Perhaps music would be playing softly.

“Hi, Mom,” she said when the familiar voice answered. “Yes, I’m fine, everything’s fine. Of course, Alli misses you, too.”

She listened for some time to the melodious drone. Not that she was uninterested in what was fresh in the market that day or the old man who pressed their olives into fragrant green oil, the one who was teaching her to speak like an Umbrian. It was simply that her parents’ world seemed so far away, so carefree it was almost criminal. She felt suddenly older than her own mother, who continued rabbiting on about this year’s oil, the cinghiale they’d eaten for dinner, the series of paintings her father was completing.

Suddenly, she realized that this was no respite. As long as Alli was missing, there was no respite for her. She could run herself ragged with daily tasks, mindless work, but it wouldn’t change reality one iota. The nightmare descended on her once again, roosting on her shoulder like a vulture.

“I’ve got to go now, Mom.” She almost choked on her emotions, had to bite back the words that threatened to keep tumbling out: Mom, Alli’s been abducted. We don’t know whether she’s alive or dead. “Our love to you and to Dad.”

She snapped the phone shut, bit down on it until the metal showed the marks of her small white teeth.

“On that note, maybe we should talk about Emma, your best friend,” Ronnie Kray said. “Our mutual acquaintance.” He slipped a photo out of the file, held it up for Alli to see. It was a snapshot, slightly grainy, of two girls walking across the Langley Fields campus. “Recognize the two of you? You and Emma McClure.”

Alli, staring at the photograph, remembered the moment: It was October 1, just after noon. She remembered what they were talking about. How could she forget! Seeing that intimate moment preserved, knowing that she and Emma had been spied upon gave her the willies. Then it hit her like a ton of bricks: The surveillance had been going on a long, long time. Someone—maybe the man facing her—had wormed himself into her bed, under her skin, wrapped himself around her bones, lying out of sight while she, unknowing, went about her life. She had to fight the queasy churning of her stomach. Having read both 1984 and Brave New World, having her own life so tightly controlled, she was under the impression that she knew the meaning of intrusion. But this invasion was monstrous, Big Brother on steroids.

“I told Emma about Bark.” Her mind was racing so fast, she grew dizzy, even more disoriented. “Emma told you?”

“Did she? What do you think?”

“What do I think?” she echoed stupidly. She felt as if she were in an elevator whose cable had been cut, was now in free fall. “I knew her. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t.”

He cocked his head. “May I ask what might seem an impertinent question? What in the world were you doing slumming? Emma McClure wasn’t from your socioeconomic class. She was rough-and-tumble, from the wrong side of the tracks, as we said back in the day. Not your kind at all.”

Alli’s eyes blazed. “That just shows how much you don’t know!”

His face hardened like a fist. “I thought we were friends. I was even thinking of untying you, despite the danger it would put me in. But now …”

“Please untie me. I’m sorry I talked to you that way.” Her cresting fear made her voice quaver like a glass about to shatter. “I’ll never do it again, if only you’ll untie me.”

He shook his head.

The pain congealed with outrage into an intolerable barb inside her. “You can’t treat me like this! My father will move heaven and earth to find me!”

Abruptly, Kray took out surgical pliers. Alli thought she was going to pass out. What was he planning to do to her? She’d seen plenty of films filled with scenes of torture. She tried to remember what happened in those scenes, but her mind was blind with panic. Her terror mounted to unbearable heights.

She watched him stand up. She was shaking now, couldn’t take her eyes off the pliers, which, glowing, swung in a short arc, back and forth. Then, without any warning, Kray disappeared into the blackness.

Alli couldn’t believe it, but she actually began to weep. She tried to stop, but her body wouldn’t obey. Some animal part of her nervous system had been activated. What she was feeling she could neither believe nor abide: She wanted him back. The feeling was so powerful, it was as physical as the pliers.

He was her only connection to the outside world, to life. “Don’t leave me alone!” she wailed. “I don’t care what you do to me, I’ll never tell you about Emma,” she said through her tears.

“Quite the little loyalist, aren’t you?” His voice came from the darkness. “No matter. As it happens, I already know all I need to know about Emma McClure.”

She felt a wave of nausea as her terror ratcheted up.

“No, no! Please!”

She wanted to shrink into the chair, to disappear like him, but she remained in the cone of light. She hung her head, the blood pounding in her temples.

“What is it?” Kray said, his voice suddenly soft. “I’m a reasonable man. Tell me.”

She shook her head. Her fear clouded her eyes.

Kray stepped into the light. “Alli, please speak to me.” His features took on a rueful cast. “It’s not my fault. You forced me to frighten you. I didn’t want to, believe me.”

For a moment, utter stillness held her in its grip; then she began to weep, her breath fluttering like a spent leaf. “I need … I need to go to the bathroom.”

Kray expelled a tender laugh. “Why didn’t you say so?”

He unstrapped her from the chair, and she whimpered.

“There,” he said.

She stared at him, wide-eyed, so stunned, her brain refused to function.

He brought over a bedpan.

“This can’t be happening,” she said more to herself than to him. “I won’t.” She was sobbing and begging all at once. “I can’t.”

He stood in front of her, arms crossed like a corrections officer, detached, observant, his smoke-colored eyes on hers.

“Please!” she begged. “Don’t look. Please, please, please turn away. I’ll be good, I promise.”

Slowly, he turned his back on her.

Stillness overcame her then, as her mind tried to accommodate. But it was so hard. Each time she thought she had a handle on her new reality, it turned upside down: good was evil, kindness was pain, black was white. She felt dizzy, alone, isolated. Terror crept into her bones, freezing the marrow. But, oh, her bladder would burst unless she peed, peed right now! But she couldn’t.

“Emma didn’t tell you a thing.” She was trembling, the muscles in her thighs jumping wildly. “How do you know about me and Bark?”

“I’ll tell you, Alli, because I like you. I want you to trust me. I know because there was a microphone in your dorm room. When you confessed to Emma, you were also confessing to me.”

Alli closed her eyes. At last, head bowed, shivering, she let go, the sound like rain spattering a tin roof.

14

The POTUS and Secretary Paull sat together in the backseat of the president’s heavily armored limo on the way from the White House to where Air Force One was waiting to take the president and his small party to Moscow to meet with the Russian president, Yukin. In the briefcase that straddled the president’s knees was the Black File Paull had provided, proof that Yukin’s handpicked head of the state-owned RussOil was his still-active ex-KGB assassin.

The president could have taken Marine One, his helicopter, to the airfield but with its privacy shield between the passenger compartment and the driver, the limo provided absolute privacy, something with which the president, in the waning weeks of his Administration, had become obsessed.

“This abduction business,” the president said, “how is it progressing?”

“We’re following every lead,” Paull said noncommittally.

“Ach, Dennis, let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?” The president stared out the bulletproof smoked-glass window. “We’ve been blessed with a bit of great good luck. This business, unfortunate as it may be for the Carsons—and God knows every day I pray for that young woman’s safe release—has provided us with the excuse we need to excise the missionary secularists—all of them.” He turned back, his eyes burning with the fire of the devout. “What I want to know is why hasn’t that already happened?”

“The president-elect’s agent—Jack McClure—has been following a very promising lead.”

“Well, you see, Dennis, now you’ve just put your finger on the nub of the problem.”

Paull shook his head. “I don’t understand, sir,” he said, though he was quite certain he was reading the president all too well.

“It appears to me that Jack McClure is gumming up the works.”

“Sir, I believe he’s on to a lead that could bring us Alli Carson’s abductor. I was under the impression that our first priority was her safe return.”

“Have you forgotten our previous discussion, Dennis? Give the order to Hugh Garner, and let’s get on with it. By the time I return from Moscow, I want the First American Secular Revivalists in custody. Then I’ll address the nation with the evidence he’ll have trumped up from his FSB security force.”

“I’ll inform Garner as soon as you board your flight, sir,” Paull said with a heavy heart. He wondered how he was going to finesse this ugly—and quite illegal—situation the president had dropped into his lap. At the moment, he saw no alternative to turning Garner loose on the FASR, but he held out hope that if he insisted that Jack McClure assist in the operation, the president-elect’s man could find a way to mitigate the damage. Of course, that would put McClure squarely in everyone’s line of fire. He’d take the heat if he got in Garner’s face, but that couldn’t be helped. Agents in the field were designed to deal with whatever heat was thrown at them. Besides, McClure was expendable; Paull’s agent in the Secret Service wasn’t.

During the secretary’s ruminations, the limo had arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. Paull, who had been debating all morning whether or not to bring up an extremely delicate subject, finally made his decision as the presidential limo rolled to a stop on the tarmac twelve yards from the near-side wing of Air Force One.

“Sir, before you leave, I have a duty to inform you …”

“Yes?” The president’s bright, freshly scrubbed face seemed blank, his thoughts already thousands of miles away in bleak, snow-driven Moscow. He was, no doubt, licking his chops at the prospect of putting Yukin in his place.

“Nightwing missed his last rendezvous.” Nightwing was the government’s most productive deep-cover asset.

“When was that scheduled for?” the president snapped.

“Ten days ago,” Paull replied just as crisply.

“Dennis, why on earth are you telling me this moments before I leave for Moscow?”

“He missed his backup dates four days ago and yesterday, sir. I felt it prudent not to bother you before this, hoping that Nightwing would surface. He hasn’t.”

“Frankly, Dennis, with your plate so full, I don’t understand why you’re even bothering with this.”

“Assets are a tricky lot, sir. We ask them to do a lot of dodgy things—wet work. There’s a certain psychology to people who kill without remorse. They tend to think of themselves as the center of the universe. This is what makes them successful, it’s what keeps them going. But I’ve seen it happen before—every once in a while some developmental aspect becomes arrested. Their urge to be someone—to be special, to become known—overrides their self-discipline.”

“What is this, psychology one-oh-one?” the president said testily.

“Sir, I want to make my position clear. When an asset’s self-discipline disappears, he becomes nothing more than a serial killer.”

The president’s hand was on the door handle. His expression revealed that he already had one foot on Russian soil. “I’m quite certain that isn’t the case with Nightwing. My goodness, he’s been an invaluable asset for upwards of thirty years now. Nothing’s changed, I assure you. Stop jumping at shadows. I’m quite certain there’s a good reason for his silence.” He smiled reassuringly. “Concentrate on the missionary secularists. Let Nightwing take care of himself.”

“The trouble with the president’s suggestion,” Paull said, “is that no asset—even one as productive and, therefore, sacrosanct as Nightwing—should be allowed to be so independent. In my opinion, that’s a recipe for lawlessness and, ultimately, the corruption of basic moral principles.”

“The president came to see me.” Some wavering spark inside Louise’s mind had roused her from her stupor. “Isn’t that nice?”

“Very nice, darling.”

Paull sat with his wife on the glassed-in porch of the facility where she lived. He could feel the radiant heat coming up through the flagstone floor.

“Daddy,” she said, “where am I?”

“Home, darling.” Paull squeezed her hand. “You’re home.”

At this, Louise smiled blankly, lapsed back into her mysterious inner world. Paull stared at her face. The dementia had not dimmed a beauty that still made his heart ache. But now there was this glass wall between them, this horrifying divide he could not bridge no matter how hard he tried. She was as lost to him as she was to herself. He couldn’t bear the thought, and so as he’d done before, he’d come and talk to her as if she were the close confidante she never could have been when she’d been young and vibrant. He had of necessity shut her out of his work life; now, to fashion his time with her into a memory he could take back with him into the real world, he spoke his mind to her.

“I inherited Nightwing eight years ago, Louise. What troubles me most is that though I’m his handler, I’ve never laid eyes on the man. Can you believe it? The rendezvous are dead letter drops, always in a different District hotel designated by Nightwing himself, a sealed message left for ‘Uncle Dan.’”

He shook his head, becoming more concerned as his thoughts were made concrete by his words. “At first, Nightwing provided us with intel on Russia and mainland China. More recently, he’s widened his field to include priceless datastreams of intelligence regarding decisions being made behind closed doors in key Middle Eastern states, some of which are our purported allies. These datastreams invariably proved reliable, invaluable, so you can see why the president insists on treating him with extreme kid gloves. But Nightwing has been involved in questionable assignments; he’s a law unto himself. Is it any wonder I’m disturbed that I know virtually nothing about him? His file is unusually thin. I have an unshakable suspicion that the information it contains is more legend than real. Who created the legend and why remains a mystery. Nightwing’s previous handler is dead, so there’s no one else to ask, and believe me I’ve spent many fruitless nights poring through the Homeland Security database—it incorporates those of the CIA, FBI, and NSA now—without finding any mention of Nightwing whatsoever. More than once it’s occurred to me that the file was written by Nightwing himself.”

Louise’s hand in his was cool, as if he were addressing a marble statue, marvelously carved but, for all that, still stone. He wondered whether she heard him, whether his voice was familiar to her, like a favorite radio station one listened to when one was young. He liked to think his voice made her feel safe, secure. Loved. Tears welled in his eyes, temporarily blinding him. He plowed on with his discussion, more determined than ever to make of this visit something private and intimate he could savor later, when out in the bustling world, he’d think of her here, entombed in the labyrinth of her own mind.

“In fact, Louise, only two men know more about the asset than me: the president and the National Security Advisor. Given the president’s nonchalant attitude toward the asset suddenly falling off the grid, I’m beginning to suspect that against all protocol, one of those two men has been in touch with Nightwing without my knowing. However, I’m all too aware that trying to confirm that suspicion is a sure way to commit political suicide.”

No, he decided, as he pressed the speed-dial key for Hugh Garner’s cell, he’d have to take the president’s advice and concentrate on Alli Carson’s abduction and the FASR. For the moment, he had no choice but to leave Nightwing—file name Ian Brady—to his own devices. However, if the National Security Advisor now had the inside track with the president, it was time he himself made contact with his own powerful ally, because all at once the political landscape had turned to quicksand. Despite the danger, he had to make a decisive move before it sucked him under.

The call completed, he freed his hand from Louise’s limp grasp. When he leaned over, kissed her pale lips, a tremor of love and yearning passed through him as he thought of her, rosy-cheeked and laughing, her long hair glinting in sunlight, lifted through the air by his strong arms.

15

“Well done, McClure,” Hugh Garner said. “As if we didn’t have enough trouble, you’ve given us another girl—approximately the same age and weight as the First Daughter—who’s also missing. She’s either dead or wishes she was; at the very least, she’s severely maimed.” He slapped three sheets of paper he was holding. “But according to the ME’s report, we have no way of identifying her.” He smirked, looking from Jack to Nina. “Which one of you lovelies is going to volunteer to tell Edward Carson and his wife this bit of inspiring news?”

“I will,” Jack said. “I call him on an hourly basis, anyway.”

“One of these days I trust you’ll surprise me, Jack.” Garner tossed aside Schiltz’s chilling report. “But, no, I need you with me, so, Nina, it’ll be you who provides the Carsons with this morning’s update.”

Nothing on Nina’s face betrayed what she might be feeling. She was dressed today in a smart suit over a blouse with pearl buttons up to her neck, where a tasteful cameo was pinned. How a woman could appear demure and sexy at the same time was beyond Jack.

They were grouped around a desk in the makeshift command center at Langley Fields. The desk was littered with the day’s early dispatches from the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, as well as every regional and municipal law enforcement agency that had been dragooned by Homeland Security into the search for Alli Carson.

The trio was the eye of a carefully controlled storm of activity that raged around them. No less than thirty operatives were crammed into the headmistress’s outer office, working the computers that were hooked into the nation’s deepest surveillance networks. Many were simultaneously on the phone, distributing phoned-in leads that other operatives in the field needed to run down. Bags from McDonald’s, KFC, barbecue joints, along with half-empty boxes of subgum chow mein and moo goo gai pan were strewn about. Garbage cans were piled high with empty soda cans. The greasy odors of stale food, sweat, and fear made a permanent fug impossible to escape.

One of these drones had accessed the national missing persons database for the entire District, Virginia, and Maryland, but the printout was useless. Save for the usual slew of runaways from Omaha to Amarillo who had disappeared into the bowels of the District, there was nothing to help them.

“Let’s get to work,” Garner said to Jack as Nina left them.

He led Jack out via the rear exit that gave out onto a dimly lit corridor, down a short flight of concrete steps to the custodian’s area. Here was a warren of workshops and storerooms containing all the many implements and supplies required to keep an upper-tier college like Langley Fields looking shipshape for the parents who paid tens of thousands for the education of their sons and daughters. No fine school could afford to look shabby, and with a large campus like this one, the maintenance was constant.

Clearly, however, the custodial staff was elsewhere because when Garner led Jack into the largest of the workshops, it was deserted, save for two hooded men and their armed guards. They were sitting on opposite sides of the room, facing away from each other. Between them, along the wall, was an oversized soapstone sink and several workbenches above which hung pegboards thick with handsaws, hammers, awls, levels, metal rulers, and planes. Screwdrivers, chisels, pliers, and wrenches of every imaginable size were clustered in one area. Some of the benches had vises bolted to them. The smells of glue and oiled metal were strong in the air. Between the pegboard sections were windows that afforded a peaceful view out over the rose garden, now an army of thorny miniature stick soldiers on a half-frozen parade ground.

“What is this?” Jack said, alarmed.

Garner pulled him back into the hallway for a moment.

“We’ve brought in the co-leaders of the First American Secular Revivalists,” he said in a low voice. “A number of FASR members have vanished, only to resurface as part of E-Two. At the very least, FASR is a training ground for E-Two terrorists. In our estimation, it’s a legit front for the revolutionary group.”

“Brought in? Are these men criminals?”

Ignoring Jack’s question, Garner concluded: “Keep your mouth shut, bright boy, and you just might learn something.”

Returning inside, Garner signaled to the guards, who jerked the prisoners’ chairs around, pulled off their hoods. The men blinked, disoriented. They stared at each other, then at Garner and Jack, their eyes wide open. They were clearly terrified.

“Who are you?” one of the men asked. “Why are we here?”

Garner strode over to the soapstone sink, inserted a rubber stopper in the drain, turned on the cold-water faucet full-blast. As the water began to fill the sink, he said, “Peter Link, Christopher Armitage, you’re members of E-Two, the missionary secularist terror group.”

“What?” both men said nearly simultaneously. “We’re not!”

Garner stared down at the rising water. “Are you telling me you’re not missionary secularists?”

“We believe that organized religion—all organized religion—is a danger to modern-day society,” Chris Armitage, the man on the right said.

“But we’re not terrorists,” Peter Link said from the opposite side of the room.

“You’re not, huh?” Garner signaled to Link’s guard, who unshackled him, hauled him up by the back of his collar, frog-marched him over to where Garner was standing. Garner turned off the cold-water tap. The sink was filled to the brim.

Link stared from Garner’s face to the gently rippling water. “You can’t be serious…. What do you think this is, a police state?”

Garner slammed his fist into Link’s stomach. As the man doubled over, Garner grabbed both sides of his head, jammed it into the sink. Water fountained up, foaming as Link began to thrash.

“You can’t do this!” Armitage shouted. “This is America—we’re guaranteed the right of free speech!”

Garner hauled the sputtering, choking Link out of the water. The guard grasped his arms as Garner turned to Armitage, dug in his jacket pocket, flipped open his ID for the other man to see. “As far as you and your pal here are concerned, I am America.”

Stowing his ID, he got back to work torturing Peter Link. But as Link went under for the second time, Jack put a hand on Garner’s arm.

“This isn’t the way,” he said softly. “You’re being foolish.”

He sensed that was the wrong thing to say. Garner kept his hands on the back of Link’s submerged head as he glared into Jack’s face.

“Get your fucking hands off me, or I swear to God you’ll be next.”

“You brought me in for my help,” Jack said quietly. “I’m giving you my opinion—”

“I didn’t bring you in, McClure. In fact, I fought to keep you out. But the new president will have his way, even if it’s the wrong way.”

Using the edge of his hand, Jack struck Garner’s elbow at the ulna nerve, breaking his grip on Peter Link. Jack hauled him out of the water. Tears streamed out of Link’s eyes, and he vomited water all over himself.

“Jesus Christ!” Armitage shouted, terrified.

Garner broke away from Jack, stalked over to Armitage, yelled in his face, “You don’t get to use those words!” He was seething, his shoulders bunched, his hands curled into tight fists. A pulse beat spastically in his forehead.

Jack, seeing that Link was semiconscious, laid him down on the floor. He knelt beside him, checked his pulse, which was erratic and weak. Looking up, he said to Garner, “I sure as hell hope you have a doctor on premises.”

Garner opened his mouth to say something, apparently thought better of it, hauled out his cell phone. Not long after, the door swung open and a physician appeared. He hurried over to where Peter Link lay in a puddle of water and his own vomit.

Jack rose and said to Garner, “Let’s take a walk.”

The sky was piled with ugly-looking clouds, ready for a fight. A stiff wind hit their faces with a chill edge, making their noses run, their eyes water.

“I’ll have your career for this,” Garner said as they walked past the dormant rose garden.

“You’d do best to cool down,” Jack said, “before you make threats.”

Garner stalked ahead, then whirled on Jack. “You challenged my authority in there.”

“You exceeded your authority,” Jack said quietly. “We’re not in Iraq.”

“We don’t have to be,” Garner said. “This is a matter of national security. We’re dealing with homeland terrorists, traitors to their own way of life.”

Jack peered into Garner’s face. He was determined to keep his voice calm and steady. Someone had to be rational in this discussion. “Because they don’t think like you or the current Administration?”

“They kidnapped the First Daughter!”

“You don’t know that.”

“Quite right. Thanks to you, I don’t. Not for certain, anyway. On the other hand, we have E-Two’s signature at the scene of the crime.”

“Someone else could have left those,” Jack pointed out.

Garner laughed bitterly. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“To be honest, I don’t know what to believe, because we don’t yet know what’s going on.”

Garner began to walk back the way they had come. “Right. Let’s get back to the interrogation so we can find out.”

Jack turned, blocked his way. “I won’t let you continue torturing these people.”

“You can’t stop me.”

Jack flipped open his cell phone, put it to his ear. “I’m due to call the president-elect anyway.”

Garner put up his hands. “Look, look. I’m here to find the people who snatched the president-elect’s daughter. What’s your excuse?”

“Torture doesn’t work,” Jack said. “Either the subject clams up till he dies or, more likely, he lies. He tells you exactly what you want to hear, but it’s not the truth. Fortunately, there’s a better way to determine if these guys are the perps.”

Garner licked his lips. Jack could see his ire ebbing slightly.

“So what’s your bright idea?”

Jack folded his cell phone, put it away. “I go back in there, talk to Chris Armitage. Then I let him go.”

“Are you insane? I won’t allow it!”

“We release him and, when he’s recovered, Link as well,” Jack said. “We follow them. Put them under twenty-four-seven surveillance. If they’re involved, we’ll know it soon enough.”

After considering a minute, Garner nodded. “This is your idea, you do the surveillance yourself.”

Too late, Jack saw how Garner would make him pay for challenging him. Though Jack wanted more than anything to detach himself from Garner, run down his own lead with regard to Cyril Tolkan, he knew he couldn’t wriggle out of this assignment, so he nodded his assent.

“I’ll need help keeping an eye on the two men.”

“That’s your problem. Take care of it.”

As he was walking away, Garner called after him, “You have forty-eight hours, bright boy. And after you fail, Iwill have your career.”

16

“Why is the light out?”

From out of the absolute darkness, Alli Carson felt the air against her face and she shrank away, certain that he was going to hit her. In the days she’d been here, he’d never struck her, but the threat of violence was always in the air, keeping her immersed in a sea of terror. She was too frightened not to sit in it.

“What have I told you?” Kray’s voice seemed disembodied, the heart of the darkness itself. “No talking except at mealtimes.”

She kept her head up. He didn’t want to hurt her, merely to teach her a lesson not yet learned; she knew this now.

“You need to focus your mind, Alli.”

She could tell by the placement of his voice that he had sat down in front of her. She felt a little thrill of accomplishment at her newfound ability to discern the nuances of movement in sounds. This was Ronnie Kray, the same man Emma had met, whom Emma wanted to know more about. Now it was her turn. She had to keep that thought in the forefront of her mind. Emma had taught her how to be tough, how to go her own way. Emma was also fearless, a trait Alli had never been able to grasp. Perhaps now was her chance. Be brave, she told herself. Fate has put you in the same hands as Emma. You have the chance to finish what she started. You have a chance to understand this enigmatic man.

“You have a keen mind,” Kray continued, “but it’s been dulled by your sheltered life. You’ve been taught to believe that you live a pampered life, but that’s a lie. The truth is you live the life of a prisoner. You’re forbidden to go where you want, you’re forbidden to say what you want. You can’t even make friends without your father’s knowledge, so that their private lives can be invaded by the Secret Service, just as yours is. You don’t own yourself, Alli. You’re a puppet, dancing to your father’s tune.”

A chair creaked, and Alli knew that he had sat back. A whisper of cloth told her that he’d crossed one leg over the other. I can see, she thought, without seeing. She was grateful to him for having kept the light off, grateful for the opportunity he’d given her to sharpen her senses. For the first time since she’d known Emma McClure, she had stepped outside herself—the self, as Kray had so accurately said, that had been created for her.

As if divining her thoughts, Kray said, “You exist at the pleasure of your father. The Alli Carson the country—the world—knows is a confection, a Hershey bar: an all-American girl, with all-American values, all-American ideals. When have you ever been allowed to say what’s really on your mind? When have you been allowed to voice your own opinion? Your lot in life has been to further your father’s political career.”

She heard his voice, and only his voice.

“Isn’t that right, Alli?”

The darkness made it grow in power, until she could see it glowing like a jewel in her mind.

“You have your own opinions, don’t you?”

For a long moment she said nothing, though she felt the answer fizzing in her throat, clamoring to be exposed, to have its own life at last. Still, she bit it back, afraid. She realized just how familiar this fear was, how she had been afraid for years to say what was really on her mind, as opposed to what her father’s handlers had insisted she say publicly. Only Emma had known her real mind, only Emma could have taught her how to be fearless, but Emma was dead. She lowered her head and felt a great sob welling up in her breast, and hot tears leaked out of her eyes, ran down her cheeks, dropped onto the backs of her hands. It was so cruel, so unfair that her one true friend had been taken from her….

“Focus, Alli,” Kray said in the manner of a professor to an inordinately bright student with ADD. “It’s important that you focus your mind, that you shake off the dullness of the old automaton Alli Carson, that you hone your mind to a diamond edge. Now, tell me, do you have your own opinions?”

“I do,” Alli said, her throat unclogging as the words she’d been wanting to say flew out. She felt herself transported back to campus, walking with Emma, who had more or less asked her the same question: Do you have your father’s opinions, or are they your own?

He sighed, it seemed to her with pleasure.

“Then perhaps there’s a chance I can reach the real Alli Carson. There’s a chance I can undo what’s been done to you.”

The creak of the chair. “You wish to speak.”

How did he know that? she wondered. What marvelous power he possesed!

“You have my permission.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Because I have to.”

He said it in a way that shook her. She didn’t know why yet, she was too stunned by her own reaction, but she was beginning to have faith now that she would come to understand what was happening to her, and why.

She felt him lean in to her, felt the aura of his warmth as if she held his beating heart in her hands.

“I want to share something with you, Alli. I have absolute faith in what I’m doing. Beyond that, I’m a patriot. This country has lost its way. There’s a shadow over democracy, Alli, and its name is god—the Christian god in whose name so many ethnic people have been attacked, decimated, or destroyed: the Aztecs, the Inca, the Jews of Spain, the caliphs of Constantinople and Trebizond, the Chinese, blacks, our own American Indians. Sinners all, right?”

She could hear his breathing, like the bellows fanning a fire, expelling a hard emotion with each word. This emotion was familiar to her; she understood it without being able to define it. And she felt Emma close beside her, whispering in the nighttime dorm room in Langley Fields, so far away now, so very far. She began to weep again, silently—for Emma, absolutely, but also for her own fractured self, for the life she had been forced to live, for everything she had missed: friends, laughter, goofing around, being silly. Being herself, whatever that might be. That thought brought yet more tears and a weight in her chest she could scarcely bear.

Through it all, Kray remained silent, holding her hands in the dark, keeping contact. She was unspeakably grateful for the silence, the human contact.

“For more than a decade,” he said when her tears had at last subsided and her breathing returned to normal, “there has been a conspiracy to hijack democracy. It’s only in the last eight years that it’s crawled into the light. Under the guise of knowing what’s best for America, a cabal of right-wing fanatics has made a pact with religious fundamentalists whose fervent wish is for a pure and Christian America. This alliance is a new twist on what Eisenhower ominously called the military-industrial complex. He feared it would take over the running of the country, and those fears were realized. Big Oil runs America, Big Oil determines our foreign policy. If the Middle East wasn’t filled with oil, we wouldn’t care one bit about who kills who there. We wouldn’t even know what a Sunni is, let alone why he wants to kill his Shiite neighbor.

“But now the religious right has forced itself into the mix, now we have a president who believes he’s doing the work of god. But I and millions like me all over the world don’t believe god exists. Then whose work is the president doing?”

Alli listened to him with all her senses. She felt taut as a drumhead, taken out of herself, given the privilege to emerge from her own body, to hover like a ghost above the human proceedings below. And with this sensation came a feeling of energy, and of power.

“You and me, Alli, we’re being trampled by this religious stampede masquerading as a democratic government. How many times does this president have to say that he doesn’t care what the people or the Congress think, he knows what’s best for us, he knows what’s right? He means his god knows, but his god doesn’t exist. His morality is a delusion invented by the so-called righteous to bolster their claim that every decision they make is right, that all criticism directed at them comes from a radical left-wing element. They’ve tried to make an unswerving belief in god synonymous with patriotism, a healthy skepticism in god synonymous with treason. We have to fight this false morality; we have to stop it before its infection goes too far.”

With one last squeeze, he let go of her hands. “Now you know me. I haven’t said any of this to another living human being.”

He stood up; she felt his presence receding. She wanted to cry out for him to stay, but she knew she mustn’t. She’d learned her lesson.

“I want to trust you, Alli. That’s my most fervent wish. But you’ve still got to prove yourself worthy of trust.” His voice was growing fainter. “I believe you can do it. I have faith in you.”

17

Jack never went home again. But he is afraid that his father will try to find him, that he will use the authorities to drag Jack back to the room with the stoplight blinking outside the window, hostage to the creaks and groans of his father’s nighttime footsteps. He knows he needs to disappear.

Where do you go when you disappear off the grid the authorities have constructed? Back in the day, you joined the army; before that, if you had a romantic soul, it was the Foreign Legion. But those gilded days have been long drained to black-and-white. Off the grid for Jack means staying with Gus.

Gus owns the Hi-Line, a pawnshop on Kansas Avenue, where the sidewalk is sticky with spent body fluids, and at any time of the year a dank and gritty wind rattles folding gates on dilapidated storefronts.

Jack shows up outside the gated storefront at 7A.M. the day after the incident at the All Around Town bakery and waits there until Gus arrives.

Gus shows no surprise whatsoever. “Huh, white boy develop a taste for grits.” He unlocks the gate, rolls it up. “I mightta known.”

“I’m not going home.” Jack follows Gus into the Hi-Line, a long, narrow space with glass cases to the right, a wall of mirror to the left. It’s impossible to do anything in the Hi-Line, even pick your nose, without Gus seeing it. “I want to work for you.”

Gus turns on the fluorescent lights, then the air conditioner, which begins to rumble like an arthritic pensioner.

“Well, I mightta said no, despite what Reverend Taske tol’ me.” More lights come on at the rear of the store. “Huh, he thinks he knows everything ’cause he’s got a direct pipeline t’God.” Now the lights in the glass cases flicker once before illuminating the pawned goods. “I made some calls after I dropped you off yesterday. Now I gotta better line on Cyril.”

Gus steps behind the line of counters, checks the till, puts in a stack of bills. He looks up, an expression of mild surprise on his face. “My name’s Augustus Turlington the Third, no lie. My name alone would get me into any country club in America. Until they see my black-ass face, that is.” He grunts. “So what a you doin on the customer’s side a the counter, anyways? You never gonna learn the business from there.”

The Hi-Line is habituated by tattooed bail-bondsmen, furtive pornographers, rough-and-tumble Colombians, burly pimps, sallow-faced pushers, and beat cops on the take preceded into the fluorescent-lit shop by their bellies.

At first, Jack’s job is simply to follow Gus’s orders, or so it seems to his clients. But what Jack is really doing is observing them, in the way only he can, absorbing the nature of the up-front business deals.

“I want you familiar with what I do here,” Gus says that first morning. “I want you familiar with the folks who run in an’ outta here on a reg’lar basis, got me?”

Gus lives in a large house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the Maryland border. Improbably, it’s surrounded by trees and thick shrubs. Jack has his own room on the top floor. When he looks out his windows, he imagines he’s in a tree house, all leafy bower, safely green. There is a bird’s nest dotted with bits of fluff and droppings in the crook of a branch, as empty now as it was full in the spring. In the mornings, the green bower is spangled gold; at night, it’s frosted by a silvery glitter. Except for the birds and, in August, the cicadas, it’s quiet.

Sometimes, though, Jack hears music. There is a part of him that quails deep inside, but it’s the music itself—slow, sad, resigned even in its seething anger that draws him. Gradually, he conquers his inner fear enough to creep downstairs. Now he hears the male voice, deep, richer, more burnished than James Brown’s. He sits down on the bottom riser, arms clasped around his bony knees, rocking slightly to the rhythm. For an hour or more, he is inundated by the river of sorrow, soaking up sounds that seep into his bones, that in their sadness seem to lift him up on a golden chariot, transport him over the gummy rooftops, the blinking traffic lights, the blaring horns, screeching brakes, the drunken shouts, into a realm of pure bliss.

After the last notes die away, Jack climbs back up the stairs, crawls into bed, and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Every night he hears the music, the ritual is the same: the soft creeping down the stairs, sitting alone, but not alone, connected to an invisible world by the music, by the lyrics, by the voices of men who’ve seen things he can’t even imagine.

Weekends Jack is being taught the ways of God by Reverend Taske. His weekdays are spent at the Hi-Line observing, cataloging, and collating the sad parade of used bric-a-brac that down-at-the-heels customers bring in for Gus to evaluate and, if he deems them desirable, shell out meager cash payment. Most never return for their pawned goods, Jack learns soon enough, though they may be dear to them in ways no one else understands. Every month Gus holds an auction to sell what’s been there for a half year, the term of the Hi-Line agreement. Always there are several treasures among the old guitars, Timex watches, cameos, and gold lockets. He makes money on these transactions, to be sure, though after less than a week on the job, Jack is quite certain his living is made in the back room.

During one such auction, Jack comes across a box of comics. Excited, he begins to paw through them, until he realizes that these are his comics. His father must’ve come in one weekend while he was with Reverend Taske, pawned them. At once, Jack knows that his father never had any intention of coming back for them. A terrible sense of freedom overwhelms him, a sorrow and a joy commingled precisely like that curious emotion that draws him to the bluesy music Gus plays at night.

For a moment, he contemplates asking Gus to take the cost of the comics out of his salary. Then he opens one, begins to read it. Almost immediately, he puts it aside, opens another, then another and another. He puts them all aside. Then he takes the box, puts it on the auction counter to be sold.

It’s only when he looks up that he sees that Gus has been watching him all along.

One morning about a week after the auction, there’s a present waiting for him when he comes down for breakfast.

He stands staring at the large package resting on the kitchen table. Gus, in a chef’s apron, his fingers white with flour, says, “Well, go on, kid, open it.”

“It’s not my birthday.”

Gus expertly pours four circles of batter into a smoking cast-iron skillet. “You don’t want me t’have t’give it to someone else, do you?”

Jack feels himself being impelled by Gus’s words. His fingers tremble as they rip open the paper. Inside is a square box with a grille on one side. He opens the top: it’s a record player. Inside are three albums, one by Muddy Waters, one by Howlin’ Wolf, one by Fats Domino.

Gus, flipping corncakes, says, “Life without blues music, now that’s a sin. Blues tells all kinds o’ stories, the history of the people composed it.”

He slides a plate of corncakes onto the table. “Eat yo’ breakfast now. Tonight we’ll listen to these records together. No sense you sittin’ all by yo’self on them hard stairs.”

After six weeks, Gus decides Jack is ready to observe the backroom deals. The back room is a frigid twelve-by-twelve bunker outfitted with a sofa and two La-Z-Boy easy chairs, between which rests a sideboard on which sits an array of liquor bottles, old-fashioned and highball glasses of sparkling cut crystal. A girl comes in once a day to clean, dust, and vacuum. Gus is extremely particular about the environment in which his deals get hammered out.

Jack fears that these deals somehow involve drug-running because that is one of the businesses Cyril Tolkan is into, and it seems clear to him that Cyril and Gus are rivals. He needn’t have worried. The deals are of another nature altogether.

His first day in the back room, Gus tells him, “All my life I was a outcast, someone who wanted t’be happier’n my daddy, but every time I tried, there was a white man standin’ in my way. So finally I gave up, went back here t’my own world where I’m the king of the castle.”

Through the back door of the Hi-Line come a succession of police detectives. Although they all look different physically, they seem the same to Jack’s brain: they’re hard, flinty-eyed, dyspeptic. To a man, they’ve seen enough—often too much—of the streets they are sworn to protect: too much rage, too much bitterness, too much jealousy and envy, too much blood. They inhabit a swamp eyeball-deep in organized prostitution, drug smuggling, murder for hire, turf warfare. They have murder in their sleep-deprived eyes. Jack can see it; he can smell it, taste it like the tang of acrid smoke.

They all want the same thing from Gus: shortcuts to turn their perps into collars. They want to make arrests, no fuss, no muss, arrests that stick, that won’t blow back in their faces like street litter. This Gus can do, because what Gus trades in, what makes him his living, is information. Gus’s castle may be at times too small to suit his taste, but it’s populated by a battalion of corner snitches, gang informants he set in place, embittered turncoats, ambitious politicos—the list seems endless.

Whatever these detectives want, Gus usually has or, if not, can get in a matter of days. All for a price, of course. They pay, with reluctance and a show of crankiness. They know the value of the goods.

One of Gus’s regulars is a detective by the name of Stanz. His face is as crumpled as a used napkin; his shoulders as meaty as a veteran boxer. His nose is a mess, broken in street brawls when he was Jack’s age and never properly fixed. He smokes like a demon, speaks as if his throat is perpetually clogged with tar and nicotine.

Decades on the force haven’t dimmed his clothes sense. He opens the button on his smartly tailored suit jacket, lifts his trouser legs fractionally before he sits down on the sofa. He lights an unfiltered Camel, inhales mightily.

“You did good on the Gonzalez thing.” He hands a thick white envelope to Gus. “That particular sonovabitch won’t be making money off coke or anything else for the foreseeable future.”

“We aim to please.” Gus stuffs the envelope in a pocket without opening it. Obviously, he trusts Stanz.

“Speaking of which.” The detective picks a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “My boss is on my ass like you wouldn’t believe about the deuce murders over McMillan Reservoir.”

Gus frowns. “I tol’ you. I’m workin’ on it.”

“Working’s not good enough.” Stanz hunches forward, perching on the edge of the sofa. “These past three weeks my life’s been a living hell—no sleep, no downtime—I can’t even get my usual tug-and-tickle, for fuck’s sake. You know what that does to a man my age? My prostate feels as big as a goddamn softball.”

The ash trembles precariously at the end of his Camel. “My tit’s in the fire, Gus. Three weeks of interviewing, reinterviewing, poring over old cases, canvassing the neighborhood, scouring every fucking trash can and Dumpster for the knife or whatever the fuck sharp instrument was used to kill the vics. I feel like I’ve run the marathon, and what do I got to put in the report to my loo? What’s he gonna report to the chief of detectives? What’s the chief gonna say to the commish and the mayor? You see the bind I’m in? All that goddamn pressure has more than a trickle-down effect. I’m the guy where the shitstorm’s gonna hit.”

He grinds out his Camel, stands. “Get me the name of the perp.” He points at Gus. “Otherwise I’m pulling my business, and where I go everyone else is gonna follow.”

Gus’s eyes go hooded, and Jack, feeling the dangerous crackle of heat lightning in the room, involuntarily takes a step back.

Gus says in the lazy voice that Jack has already determined means trouble, “You been on the force—what?—thirty years now?”

“Thirty-three, to be exact.”

“No.” Gus shakes his head. “Thirty-three years, eight months, seventeen days.”

Stanz stares, blinking. He has no idea where this is going, the lug. But Jack does, and he can’t help smiling a secret smile.

“That’s a long time,” Gus drawls. “Lotta shit piles up in those years.”

Understanding comes at last to Stanz. “Now, wait a minute.”

“Five years ago, the Ochoa takedown,” Gus continues as if Stanz hasn’t said a word. “Along with the thirty kees of coke, twenty-five mil was found with him, but only twenty-three made it into the police evidence room. Eighteen months ago, a Hispanic down. Forensics found a gun in his hand, but we both know that when you shot him he was unarmed, ’cause you bought the gun from me. And, my goodness, I have the paperwork to prove it.”

Stanz’s face is flushed red. “Hey, you told me—”

“This’s a game you don’t wanna be playin’ with me.” Gus’s inner rage has boiled up into his eyes.

Stanz turns away for a moment, gathering himself. At length, he says, “I’d never threaten you, Gus. You know that, we go back a long way.”

Gus’s bulk fills up the space; his rage seems to have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Stanz is trying his best not to breathe hard. “We good now?” he asks.

It looks like he can’t wait to get the hell out of there.

18

“Is Pete going to be all right?”

“The doctor says he will be,” Jack said. “He’s been taken to Bethesda Medical. He’ll get the best of care.”

Jack had volunteered to drive Chris Armitage home. A fine mesh of sleet slanted down from a pewter sky. The car’s tires made a hissing noise as they slithered along the road.

Armitage shivered. “Until they torture him again.”

“He won’t be tortured again.”

“Damn straight he won’t.” Armitage was huddled against the passenger’s-side window, as far away from Jack as he could get. “I’m filing a complaint with the Attorney General’s office.”

“I’d advise against it.” Jack got on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, heading toward the District. “If you do, Garner will haul you in again. I also guarantee the Attorney General won’t ever see the complaint.”

“Then I’ll take it public—any one of the news outlets would jump at this story.”

“Garner would love that. In the blink of an eye, he and his people will prove you’re a crank, and whatever credibility you’re trying to build for your movement will be shot to hell.”

Armitage regarded him for a moment. “What are you? The good cop?”

“I’m the good guy,” Jack said. “The only one you’re likely to meet in the next few weeks.”

Armitage appeared to chew this over for some time. “If you’re such a good guy, tell me what the hell is going on.”

Jack maneuvered around a lumbering semi. “I can’t do that.”

Armitage’s voice was intensely bitter. “This is a nightmare.”

Every twenty seconds, Jack’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “Tell me about your organization.”

Armitage grunted. “For a start, we’re not E-Two. Nothing like it, in fact.”

A gray BMW 5 Series had taken up station two cars behind theirs.

“But you know about E-Two.” Jack was careful to keep whatever tension he was feeling out of his voice.

“Of course I do.” Armitage pointed. “Can we get some more heat? I’m freezing.”

Jack turned up the heater. “It’s the fear draining out of you.”

“Who says it’s going? I feel like it’ll be a part of me for the rest of my life.”

Jack switched to the center lane. The gray BMW waited several minutes, then followed.

“Every movement has its radical element,” Armitage was saying, “but to tar us with the same brush—well, it’s like saying all Muslims are terrorists.”

There was an exit coming up. Jack switched to the left lane. “You’d be surprised at how many Americans believe that.”

“Fifty years ago, most Americans believed that Jews had horns,” Armitage said. “That’s part of what’s wrong with this country, what we’re fighting against.”

Here came the gray BMW, nosing into the left lane.

“I can imagine Garner and his people still believing that,” Jack said tartly.

“Why do you say ‘Garner and his people’? Aren’t you one of them?”

“I was brought in to keep them honest.” That was one way to look at it, Jack thought. “Their philosophy isn’t mine.”

“Anyway, thank you. You probably saved Peter’s life.”

Jack was aware of Armitage studying his face.

“Unless it was all an act. Was it?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?” Armitage said.

Jack laughed. “You don’t.”

“I don’t see what’s funny,” Armitage said in a wounded voice.

“I was going to say, you have to take it on faith that I’m telling the truth.”

Armitage managed a smile. “Oh, I have faith—faith in mankind, faith in science, faith that reason will win out over the engines of reinforcement built up by religion. Reason doesn’t require a priest or a rabbi or an imam to exist.”

“You sound very sure of yourself.”

“I ought to,” Armitage said. “I used to be a priest.”

This interested Jack almost as much as the gray BMW did. “You fall out of bed?”

“I know what you’re thinking—but, no, it wasn’t a girl. It was more simple than that, really, and that made the revelation ever more profound. I woke up one day and realized that the world of religion was totally out of sync with the world I was living in, the world all around me, the world I was administering to. The bishops and archbishops I knew—my spiritual leaders—didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the real world, and furthermore, they didn’t care.”

Armitage put his head back; his eyes turned inward. “One day, I made the mistake of voicing my concerns to them. They dismissed them out of hand, but from that moment on, I could tell that I was a danger to them. I was shut out of policy decisions even within my own parish.”

They continued to move south on the parkway. “So you left.”

Armitage nodded. “Whatever ties I’d felt with the irrational, faith-based world were severed. I found myself drawn instead to physics, quantum mechanics, organic chemistry—not as a scientist, per se, but as a means of understanding the world. I discovered that all these disciplines are empirical absolutes. They can be defined. Even better, they can be quantified. They’re not subject to interpretation.

“Look, organized religions poison everything. They keep people superstitious, ignorant, and intolerant of anyone who’s not like them. They also falsely bestow power on people who have no business being in power.”

“Speaking of which,” Jack said, “hold on.”

He had been keeping to just under the speed limit, but with the off-ramp just over a hundred yards away, he floored the gas pedal. The car jumped forward. Jack hauled the wheel over, entering the center lane to an angry blare of horns. He slowed abruptly to allow a truck to get in front of him, then wedged the car into the right lane, onto the off-ramp at a frightening rate of speed.

Behind them, he could hear the shriek of rubber being flayed off the BMW’s tires, the scream of horns, squeals of brakes being jammed on.

Armitage twisted around as far as his seat belt would allow. “You didn’t lose them,” he said.

“When I want to lose them,” Jack said, “I will.”

He prepared to turn off Dolley Madison Parkway almost immediately, making a left onto Kirby Road, but up ahead he saw one of those wheeled temporary signs with a grid of tiny lights blinking a message. The problem was, he couldn’t read it. The array of lights swarmed like a hive of bees. He was coming up on it fast, there was no time to find his set point, to command his dyslexic brain to read what it refused to read, so he made the left off the parkway.

“What the hell are you doing?” Armitage shouted, bracing his hands against the dashboard.

Jack could see what he meant. The access to Kirby Road was blocked off. They sliced through a pair of wooden barricades, hit a potholed roadbed partially stripped to the bone. Workmen scattered, shouting and gesticulating wildly. The car dipped into a pothole, then bounced upward, coming down hard on its shocks.

The wheel vibrated under Jack’s hands. “What did the sign say?”

“What d’you mean?” Armitage was bewildered. “You could read it as well as I could.”

“Just tell me what it said!” Jack shouted.

“It said Kirby Road was under construction for the next half mile.”

There was no help for it now. “Hang on,” Jack said grimly.

They jounced over the rutted roadbed, Jack swinging the car back and forth in order to avoid the deepest holes. The bone-jarring half mile seemed to take forever; then the car reared up onto smooth tarmac. Jack could see the gray BMW negotiating the road behind them.

Swiveling back around, Armitage said, “Why is someone following us?”

“Damn good question.”

Jack flicked open his phone, dialed his ATF office, which was not five minutes away. “It’s McClure; get me Bennett,” he said as soon as someone answered. Chief Rodney Bennett came on the line right away.

“How’s it hanging, Jack?”

“I’ll know in a couple of minutes, Chief. I’ve got a high-powered tail on me. Late-model gray BMW Five Series. Three minutes from now I’ll be on Claiborne Drive. I need a stop ’n’ shop.”

“I’m all over it,” Bennett growled.

“Right. Later.” He folded away his phone.

“Open the glove box,” he said to Armitage. “Take out a pad and pen.”

Armitage did as he was told.

Precisely three minutes later, Jack took a left onto Claiborne Drive. This was a high-rent district with large, gracious homes, spacious front lawns, expensive landscaping.

Jack, one eye on the rearview mirror, saw the gray BMW corner after them, its distinctive front end just entering Claiborne.

“Why are you slowing down?” Armitage was truly alarmed now. “They’ll be on top of us before—!”

“Shut up and take down the BMW’s tag number,” Jack snapped.

“Got it,” Armitage said, scribbling hurriedly.

Jack heard sirens on Kirby, heading straight for them.

With the BMW close enough to rear-end him, he suddenly veered to the left. The BMW jumped the curb, plowed over a lawn, through a low hedge of boxwood, veered out of sight around the side of the house just as a pair of ATF cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, tore up Osborne Drive, bracketing Jack’s car.

19

“The man we got t’see, he don’t like people he don’t know,” Gus says. “Plus, he don’t like whitey, so that makes two strikes against you.”

“You want me to stay in the car?” Jack says.

Gus turns the wheel over, rolls slowly down T Street SE. “Huh. You stay in the car, the Marmoset he liable to come over, shoot you through the head. He don’t ask me, should I do sumthin’. It don’t smell kosher to him, he acts.”

“What’s a marmoset?” Jack asks.

“Some kinda monkey, I think, likes the treetops in forests, sumthin’ like that, anyway.”

“You ever see one? I mean a real marmoset.”

“Me, no.”

Gus’s eyes are scanning the street. Jack can feel something in Gus condensing with concentration.

“When you think I got time t’go to the zoo?” Between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Gus pulls into the curb, turns off the engine.

“This here’s Anacostia, no place fo’ you, okay? So jes’ keep close t’ me, don’t say a word, and do yo’ thing, got me?”

“Gotcha,” Jack says.

The Continental’s enormous engine ticks over like a clock winding down. The heat of the early evening seeps in, begins to weigh on the air-conditioned air. Gus grunts, opens the driver’s door.

They’re on a street of narrow row houses sided with peeling wooden slats. Tiny overgrown front yards are divided by cyclone fencing. A huge German shepherd starts to bark, throwing itself against the fence as its jaws snap.

“Hey, Godzilla.” Gus strolls over to the fence, Jack right behind him. “Marmoset’s neighbor keeps Zilla half-starved so he’ll go for anybody gets too close.” Gus digs in his pocket, pulls out a handful of dog biscuits, launches them over the fence. “Can’t stand to see a animal mistreated.”

As Godzilla cracks down on the first biscuit, Gus and Jack approach the next house. “My father, he was a dogcatcher,” Gus says. “Man, he hated his job—dealing with ’em alla time—the rabies, the mistreatment, he come up against it all.”

Gus leads them up the steps of a house painted the color of the evening sky. It has neat white shutters and a roof without the tar paper patches of its neighbors.

“This it here.” He raps on the door.

There’s a short pause, then, “Come on in,” a male voice calls.

The instant Gus opens the door, three gunshots ring out, and Gus throws Jack unceremoniously back out onto the stoop. Jack’s ears ring, he can’t hear a thing, but from his prone position he sees Gus pull a Magnum.357 from his jacket, bang open the door. He shouts something to Jack as he vanishes into the interior, but Jack can’t hear what it is.

Jack pushes himself up and runs inside. As he passes the door, he sees three bullet holes ripped clear through the wood. It’s strange to feel himself moving, but to hear nothing except the ringing in his ears, beneath which is a dead, all-encompassing silence. It’s as if the world has been stuffed solid with cotton balls.

Sprinting after Gus, he finds himself in a dimly lit room, so cluttered with books, records, magazines, strewn clothes, hats, shoes, sneakers that it seems like a maze. The ceiling fixtures have been removed, leaving bare patches like the hide of a mangy dog. Instead, a multitude of lamps on tables, chairs, the floor provide weird colored light. It’s a moment before Jack realizes that all the lampshades are draped with colored bits of fabric, dimming the illumination as well as dyeing it.

Across the room he sees Gus lumber back toward him from a butter-yellow kitchen. The Magnum is pointed at the floor. Gus says something to him, gesturing emphatically with his free hand, but Jack is still deaf from the aftermath of the gunshots, possibly in shock, and keeps on coming.

He sidesteps a precariously stacked pile of books, stumbles clumsily over another, larger mound. It has one red mark on its back, like a chalk mark or a brand. Then it hits him. First, his balance deserts him, then his legs turn watery, and he falls.

On his hands and knees, he finds himself not six inches from a thin, scarred face. The eyes, open wide, stare back at him. Then he becomes aware of the trickle of blood leaking from the corner of the half-open mouth, the horrific stench of offal, and he screams, leaping backwards, tripping over a pair of boots, tumbling onto his backside, his legs in the air. It would be funny if Jack weren’t so terrified. He pushes himself to his feet, smacks blindly into the wall in a desperate attempt to run out of the house. His only thought is to get as far away from the dead man as he can.

He’s crying, and he’s sick, vomiting onto the floor. He can’t get the sight of those staring eyes out of his mind. He wants only to have time run backwards, to be back in Gus’s air-conditioned Continental, safe and secure, before this all began.

Then Gus grabs him by the collar, hauls him off his feet. Jack is hysterical, kicking and screaming, and the fact that he’s still half-deaf makes everything worse, as if he’s living out a nightmare from which he can’t pinch himself awake. Nothing is real, and yet everything is all too real: those eyes, the blood drooling out of the half-open mouth, the stench of excrement and death, of a human body letting go of life. It’s all too much. His fists beat a silent tattoo against Gus’s shoulders; his shoes swing back and forth into Gus’s shins.

Then he’s outside and Gus has let him go and he doubles over, gagging and retching, feeling as if every atom in his body is exploding in pain and terror. He is empty inside. His guts feel as if they have been turned inside out. Every nerve in his body is firing at once, making his limbs jump, his torso twitch.

The night enfolds him, or is it Gus? Gradually, he comes down from the precipice where shock and terror pushed him. Gradually, he becomes aware that Gus has gathered him into his arms and is rocking him like a baby.

Then he hears the sirens start up and knows his hearing is coming back. At first they’re a long way off, but quite rapidly they come nearer and nearer.

“You okay t’go?” Gus asks.

Jack clings to him tightly, his face buried in Gus’s massive chest.

With Jack in his arms, Gus gets to his feet. He takes Jack back to the Continental, fires the ignition. They’re just turning the corner onto Sixth Street NE when the rear window is briefly awash in red and white flashing lights. Sirens scream close at hand, then rapidly diminish as Gus puts on speed.

A dozen gray blocks later, Gus pulls up to a phone booth.

“I gotta make a call,” he says. “On’y be a minute, kid, ’kay?” His eyes study Jack slowly, carefully. “You’ll be able to see me the whole time.”

Jack watches Gus squeeze half his bulk into the phone booth, feed the slot. His teeth start to chatter. Chills run through him, and as he imagines that that horrific stench has invaded the car, he starts crying again.

It’s only when he sees Gus striding back that he wipes his eyes and nose. He hiccups once as Gus slides behind the wheel. They sit in silence for a time. Gus stares straight ahead. Jack tries to piece himself together, but every now and again a half-stifled sob escapes him.

Finally, he manages, “Was that … was that …?”

“The Marmoset?” Gus nods. “Yeah, that was him.”

“What … what …?”

Gus sighs. “Remember that double murder at McMillan Reservoir Stanz wants me t’help him with? The Marmoset was my man onna case.” Gus looks around. “He got close to the bone, seems like.”

“Too close,” Jack says with a shiver.

Gus puts his arm across the seat back. “Anyway, ain’t nuthin’ fo’ you t’worry yo’self ’bout.” His brows converge in worry. “Don’t you believe me?”

“I was thinking of the Marmoset,” Jack says. “I was thinking that he should be buried, not pawed at by people who never knew him.”

For a long time nothing more is said. At last, Gus fires the ignition. After putting the car in gear, he eases out into the street.

Jack doesn’t know where they’re headed; he doesn’t care. He has sunk back into the world he knew through newspapers, TV, and the movies must exist, yet could never have imagined. It has come upon him too soon, its implications too much for him to handle. He wonders at all the tears he’s shed because he can’t remember shedding even one before this. He made it an iron-bound rule never to cry when his father beat him, not even when his father slunk back across the apartment and the strains of “California Dreamin’” winked out like a fearful light. He never cried when Andre and his crew took him into the alley behind the electronics store. Tonight, it seems, he can’t stop.

It takes Gus just eleven minutes to get to 3001 Connecticut Avenue NW, the front entrance to the National Zoo.

Jack turns, peers out the window. “Gus, it’s night. The zoo isn’t open at night.”

Gus opens the door. “Who says it ain’t?”

“Looka how small he is.” Gus stares up through the branches at the tiny black-and-white face staring down at them. There are other marmosets elsewhere in the large cage, but this one, having taken notice of them, has come the closest. The others are busy eating fruit held in their claws or gnawing at the tree with startlingly long lower incisors.

Jack studies the black eyes staring down at him. The face looks so full of intelligence and insight, as if the marmoset sees a world at once smaller and bigger than he does.

“What’s he thinking?” Jack says.

“Who knows?”

“That’s just it.” Jack’s voice is full of wonder. “No one knows.”

Gus puts his arm protectively around Jack’s shoulders. “Don’t get too close now, kid,” he says gruffly. “Mebbe these things bite.”

Jack doesn’t think to ask Gus how he managed to get the zoo open at this hour, because he knows Gus won’t tell him. Anyway, he doesn’t want to spoil the magic of the moment, which has temporarily banished all thoughts of death, thousand-mile stares, the stench of death. There is life here, strange and beautiful, its strangeness making it all the more vibrant. Jack feels his heart beating strongly in his chest, and a kind of warmth suffuses him.

“Hello, marmoset,” he says. “My name is Jack.”

20

Alli Carson, being fed a hamburger, rare, with mustard and slices of crisp Mrs. Fanning’s bread-and-butter pickles, looked into Ronnie Kray’s face, so close to hers. His expression was altogether unthreatening. He might have been a mother bird feeding her chick.

She savored the tastes in her mouth, then, almost reluctantly, she swallowed. In his other hand he held a coffee milk shake with one of those bendy straws stuck into its thick foam. He brought the straw to her lips and she sucked down the sweet drink.

“How do you know my favorite foods?” she asked quietly. She didn’t fear him now. She had learned that she was allowed to speak without permission during mealtimes.

Kray smiled in a way that somehow drew her to him. “I’m like a parent,” he said in a voice as quiet as hers. “I’m the father you always dreamed of having, but never thought you would.”

She made a motion with her head, and he gave her more burger. While she chewed, her eyes never left his face.

“I know what you like,” he continued. “And what you don’t. Why would I want to know that, Alli? Because I value you, because I want to please you.”

Alli sucked down more of the coffee milk shake, swallowed. “Then why am I bound to this chair?”

“I bought that chair in Mexico seven years ago, at the same time I purchased a painted sugar skull, on the Day of the Dead. The chair is my most prized possession; you’re privileged to sit in it. Up until I put you into it, only I have sat in it.”

Intuiting her hunger, he fed her the last of the hamburger. “Do you know about the Day of the Dead, Alli? No? It’s the one day of the year when the door between life and death is open. When those alive may talk to those who are dead. If they believe.” He cocked his head. “Tell me, Alli, what is it you believe in?”

She blinked. “I … I don’t know what you mean.”

He hunched forward, forearms on his knees. “Do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” she said immediately.

“Do you truly believe in God—or are you parroting something your parents believe?”

She looked at him for a moment, her mouth dry. Once again, it was as if he had peered down into the depths of her soul; it was as if he knew her from the inside out.

“I’m … I’m not supposed to say.”

“There you have it, Alli. All your life you’ve been walled away from the rest of the world. You’ve been told what to say and what to think. But I know you better. I know you have your own thoughts, your own beliefs. I won’t judge you the way your parents do. And there’s no one here, except you and me.”

“What about the others?”

“Ah, the others.” Leaning in, Kray wiped the corners of her mouth. “I’ll tell you a secret, Alli, because you’ve earned it. There are no others. There’s only me. Me and my shadow.” He chuckled.

“Why did you lie to me?”

“Lessons need to be learned, Alli. You’re beginning to understand that now. Lessons learned obviate the need for lying. And, here’s another secret I want to share with you: I don’t enjoy lying to you.” He sat back. “You’re special, you see, but not in the way your parents have hammered into your head.”

Loosening the bonds on her wrists, he took her hands in his and said, “You and I, Alli, together need to undo all the senseless hammering, all the disservice that’s been done to you. Welcome to the beginning. In this place, you’re free to speak your heart. You’re freer than you’ve ever been in your life.” He let go of her hands. “Now, will you tell me the truth? Do you believe in God?”

Alli studied him. After the whirl of confusion, doubt, and fear, her mind seemed clearer than it had ever been. How could that be? she asked herself. Looking into Kray’s face, she saw that in time she’d have the answer.

“No,” she said, her voice firm. “The idea that there’s an old bearded man somewhere in heaven who created the world, who listens to our prayers, who forgives us our sins makes no sense to me. That Eve was made from Adam’s rib, how stupid is that?”

Ronnie Kray regarded her with a contemplative air. “And do you believe in your country—in the United States?”

“Of course I do.” She hesitated. “But …”

Kray said nothing, and his absolute calmness soothed her.

Now the dam broke, and out gushed feelings she’d been holding inside ever since Emma, her only confidante, had died. “I hate how the country’s become a fortress. The president and his people have nothing but utter contempt for us. They can do anything, say anything, wriggle out of any wrongdoing, sling every kind of mud, hire people who slander their political enemies, and no one has the guts to stand up and say they’re wrong, they’re killing hundreds of people every day, they’ve trampled all over due process, they’ve blurred the separation of church and state, because anyone who dares oppose them is immediately branded a traitor, a dangerous left-wing lunatic, or both.”

“They’ve done that to your father.”

“Yes.”

“But he’s survived their slings and arrows to become the next president.”

“Yes.”

“Yet he hasn’t spoken out, he hasn’t denounced the alliance between the Christian fundamentalists and the Administration. Does that mean he agrees with the present Administration? Did the Administration’s media attack dogs pull their punches in return for his lack of criticism?”

She could sense him preparing to leave, and she felt a sharp pang of imminent loss.

“What do you think he prays for when he and your mother attend church every Sunday?”

“I …” All at once confusion overwhelmed her again. “I don’t know.”

“Now you have surprised me,” Kray said.

She heard the sharp disapproval in his voice, and her blood ran cold.

“I—”

Kray put a forefinger across his lips. “Mealtime’s over.”

Retying her wrists, he rose, vanishing into the gloom.

21

Nina Miller caught Jack’s call while she was in the middle of the Potomac.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said.

“One moment,” Dennis Paull said. “I need to see the Mermaid.”

Nina squinted into the wind. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

“Just set it up,” Paull said brusquely.

She gave him a curt nod as she walked aft, away from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They were on his 185-foot yacht, big enough to contain an aft upper deck that served as a pad on which the small private helicopter that had brought Nina sat, its rotors quivering and flexing in the wind gusts. The pilot inside the cockpit was ready to lift off at a moment’s notice.

Paull watched Nina out of the corner of his eye as she lit a clove cigarette, her back to him, cell phone to her left ear. He worried about her. He worried whether he could trust her. But then, Dennis Paull worried about every person he spoke to or came in contact with during his grueling twenty-hour days. He was playing a dangerous game, and no one knew it better than he did. Over the years, how many people had he or his people uncovered who were playing their own dangerous games? Of course, he was at the eye of the storm, the calm center from which, like an Olympian god, he could look in all directions at once. But he didn’t fool himself; he didn’t allow his exalted position at the right hand of the president to dull his caution or dim his vigilance.

He’d been living on a knife-edge for almost two years now, the midpoint of the president’s second term in office. His stomach always hurt; his nerves vibrated so badly that he couldn’t recall the last time he had slept soundly. Instead, he’d taught himself the art of catnapping—five minutes here, fifteen there—during the day. In the dead of night, as one of his days bled into the next, he sipped strong black coffee and carried out the spinning of his web. For good or ill, he was in too deep now to have second thoughts, for if he were to succeed, he needed to commit to his plan absolutely. Any waver of intent would be lethal.

He put on the smile he used for intimates—if one could use that word for those in his inner circle, because Secretary Paull had no true intimates. This the job had taught him a long, painful time ago.

His thoughts threaded away on the spume purling from the sleek bow of his yacht as Nina walked back to where he stood just forward of the cabin. It was a blustery day, spitting intermittently. Not a fit day for a boat ride, which was why Paull was here on the water instead of in an office that might very well be bugged or an open space where whatever he said was at the mercy of a parabolic microphone on the top of some innocuous-looking van. His yacht was swept three times a day for bugs, and that included the entire hull. Plus there were sophisticated jamming devices fore and aft installed by a friend of his at DARPA, the Department of Defense’s advanced weapons program.

To the uninitiated, Paull mused, these precautions might seem the product of paranoia, but as William S. Burroughs aptly said, Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.

“That was McClure,” Nina said, folding away her phone. “He wants me to meet him at the headquarters of the First American Secular Revivalists.”

Paull didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s he doing there? FASR is supposed to be Hugh Garner’s responsibility.”

“Garner’s got it in for McClure.”

They were into the wind, no one who wasn’t in spitting distance could hear them, not even the crew, who Paull had made certain were all inside. “What the hell is McClure up to?”

“I don’t know,” Nina confessed, “but it seems clear he doesn’t believe E-Two is behind the kidnapping.”

“Then who the hell is?”

“I don’t know, sir, but I have a feeling McClure is closer to finding out than we are.”

The secretary looked thoughtful. “From now on, I want you to stick close to him.”

Nina took a drag on her clove cigarette. “How close?”

The secretary’s eyes bored into hers. “Do whatever it takes to keep him close. We’re rapidly running out of time and space to maneuver.”

Nina’s gaze was cool and steady. “How does it feel, I wonder, to pimp someone else out?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “You’d better get over there pronto.”

Nina turned, headed aft.

“And Nina,” he called after her.

She turned back, pulled her hair off her face.

“Make sure you start thinking of him as Jack.”

Inside the polished mahogany cabin, the yacht’s captain ignored the helicopter as its rotors started up. A moment later, it had lifted off with the woman passenger aboard. The captain didn’t know her name, didn’t care what it was. His job was simple and he was doing it now, transcribing onto the tiny keypad of his BlackBerry from scribbled notes he’d taken of the conversation Secretary Paull had just had with the visitor. rowing up with a deaf sister had made him proficient in lip-reading. Finished with the transcription, he pressed the SEND key, and the e-mail was instantaneously transmitted directly to wherever the president was at the moment, no doubt eagerly awaiting its arrival.

His job concluded for the time being, the captain set his BlackBerry down beside the pair of powerful binoculars through which he’d viewed the conversation in question. Then he got back to maneuvering the yacht through the wind-tossed afternoon. He’d never had an incident at sea aboard any of the yachts he’d captained, and he wasn’t about to start now.

22

“Every action invites a reaction. No, no.” Kray rocked slightly from one foot to the other. “Every action causes a reaction. The religious right’s infiltration of the federal government finally has had its proper reaction: us, the enemy. The missionary secularists, the Army of Reason.” He laughed. “It seems ironic, doesn’t it, that without them there would be no us. They created us; every extreme gives rise to the opposite extreme.”

He bent down, untied Alli’s wrists. “Hold your arms over your head.”

It was phrased as a suggestion rather than a command. Nevertheless, Alli complied, but after only a few seconds she was obliged to fold them in her lap.

“I … I can’t,” she said. “I don’t have the strength.”

“I have a cure for that.”

Kneeling, Kray unbuckled her ankles and legs. With his arms around her waist, he helped her to her feet. She stood, wobbly as a toddler, her weight against him from her hip to her shoulder.

With his coaxing, she took one tentative step forward, then another, but her legs buckled and Kray had to hold her firmly lest she collapse onto the floor like an invalid.

“I think you might have to teach me to walk all over again,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

“You won’t need me to do that, I promise.” He took her out of the room that had been her home for several days. He helped her shower and dress, and she felt neither embarrassed nor ashamed. Why should she? After all, he had watched her defecate and urinate; possibly he’d watched her sleep. Could there be anything more intimate?

There was not an inch of her he didn’t know. It had taken just over a week for him to become a part of her.

In the kitchen, he pulled out a chair for her. She sat with one arm on the table, where cartons of orange juice and milk, and several water tumblers stood in a precise cluster. He poured her a glass of orange juice with pulp, the kind she liked best.

He waited until she had drained the glass. “After lunch, we’ll go for a walk around the house. You’ll get your strength back in no time, you’ll see,” he said. “Now, what would you like to eat?”

“Eggs and bacon, please.”

“I think I’ll join you.” Kray opened the refrigerator so that the door to the interior was outside of Alli’s field of vision. The other girl sat folded, as if she were performing a contortionist’s trick. He pulled out a carton of eggs and a stick of butter from the shelf on the door. A pound of thick-sliced bacon was on the lower shelf near the girl’s stiff, blue feet. Her skin looked bad now; it was starting to slough off like snakeskin. Very soon now, Kray knew, he’d have to move her, either to the freezer in the basement—though that would necessitate cutting her up into sections—or somewhere else, a landfill or an empty lot, perhaps. But not yet. He was reluctant to let her go. She’d been so useful to him. He’d sedated her while he cut off her hand so as not to cause her pain. She didn’t deserve that; she had a home here now, and he didn’t want to abandon her. It wasn’t her fault that he’d needed her to make sure the authorities knew Alli wasn’t dead and buried. He was on a strict timetable. He required the urgency only a search for a living girl would bring.

Arms full, Kray kicked the refrigerator door closed, lined up the ingredients on the counter next to the stove, placed a cast-iron skillet on the burner, turned on the gas. So as not to expose his fingers to grease, he used one of the gleaming knives on a magnetic wall rack to peel off six slices of bacon, then laid them side by side in the skillet. Turning up the heat made them sizzle. The rich scent permeated the kitchen.

When the bacon was golden brown, he set the slices on a paper towel, drained off the fat from the skillet. Without washing it, he sliced off a thick pat of butter, plopped it in the skillet to melt. Then he put the carton of eggs, a stainless steel bowl, and a whisk on the table.

“How about you scrambling the eggs?”

Once again, it was a suggestion rather than a command. Alli knew she was free to say no. But she didn’t want to say no. She opened the carton, broke six eggs one by one on the rim of the bowl, poured in a dollop of milk, then began to whisk the mixture.

“I don’t know how anyone can eat those Eggbeaters,” she said idly.

“Or an egg-white omelette, for that matter,” he answered.

Quite quickly her arm began to tire. But she rested it briefly, then began again, bringing a pale yellow froth.

“Ready,” she said.

Kray took the bowl from her, added three twists of salt, two of pepper, then tipped the contents into the skillet. He stirred the eggs a bit with a white plastic spatula.

“White bread?”

“Whole-wheat today, I think,” Alli said.

“In the pantry.” He put down the spatula, went into the small room. Immediately he turned around, stood watching her from the shadows. She rose, one hand supporting herself on the tabletop. Then she walked over to the stove. Her hand passed the knives in the wall rack, picked up the spatula. She stirred the eggs in the skillet. She hummed to herself.

Satisfied, Kray found a fresh loaf of whole-wheat bread, tucked it under his arm. Then he reached up, opened the cupboard. Carrie was curled and winding in her dark cave. Her red eyes stared at him enigmatically.

He put a finger across his lips, whispered to her, “Shhh.”

Kray closed the cupboard door, returned to the kitchen.

Alli turned her head. “Almost done,” she said.

Was that the ghost of a smile on her face?

They ate, sitting across from each other.

“I was right about you,” he said at length. “Despite your hothouse upbringing, you’re not a fool. You despise privilege.”

Alli swallowed a mouthful of egg and bread. “Fear and loathing.”

He nodded. “Hunter Thompson.”

She looked up, not for the first time surprised by him. “You’ve read him?”

“Because he’s a favorite of yours.”

A shiver went through her—of pleasure, not fear.

“Tell me what you liked most about Thompson.”

Alli didn’t hesitate. “He was a subversive. He thought civilization was hypocritical, he loved to show how good people were at rationalizing their actions.”

Kray bit off a piece of bacon. “In other words, he was like us—you and me.”

“What do you mean?”

Kray wiped his mouth, sat back. “From my point of view, the civilization Thompson was writing about is inextricably entwined with religion. And what is religion, after all, but totalitarianism? The strictures god presented to Adam and Eve, that both the Old and New Testaments describe, are nothing more than a series of laws so extreme, so prohibitive, they’re impossible to adhere to. In the so-called beginning, in the garden of Eden, god tells Adam and Eve that he’s provided them with everything they could possibly desire or ever will desire. The only thing is, see that tree over there? That’s the Tree of Knowledge. If you want to find out what’s really going on, you need to eat the fruit. But hey, wait a minute, eating the fruit is forbidden, so forget that knowledge thing, who needs it anyway when I’ve given you everything you want. So, in essence, religion insists we live in ignorance—but that’s perfectly okay, because we have our priests and ministers to tell us what to do and what to think.

“Shall I go on? Okay, how about ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ The commandment doesn’t say don’t screw another man’s wife, that would be doable. Instead, it gives you an impossible task: It forbids you even to think about screwing another man’s wife!

“You see what’s happened here? Religion was invented by men in order to create sin. Because without sin there can be no fear, without fear how do you control large numbers of human beings? Add to that an elite theocracy that periodically issues edicts as it sees fit, in order to keep itself in power, and the definition of totalitarianism is complete.”

Alli took a moment to absorb what Kray said before replying: “What about the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin?”

A knowing smile spread across Kray’s face. “The Vatican acquiesced to Hitler. In fact, it rushed to knuckle under in 1933, signing a treaty with Hitler forbidding German Catholics to participate in any form of political activity that criticized the regime. After the war, it provided documents, false passports and the like, enabling Nazis to flee to South America, and no German was ever excommunicated for war crimes. The historical connection of the Christian churches with fascism is undeniable and a matter of public record. Hardly surprising, when you think about it. Totalitarianism attracts totalitarianism. Its members are absolutists—by definition, they cannot apologize for their transgressions. Think about it for a moment. Totalitarianism whether it be religious in nature like the Christian church or political in nature like history’s fascist states is all faith-based. Absolute faith in one’s infallible leaders.

“At least we secularists have the freedom—and the duty—to admit our mistakes, and to correct them.”

Alli, eyes turned inward, was lost in thought. She was absorbing everything, like a sponge. “It’s true. I see things that frighten me,” she said at length. “A group of people with tremendous power and inflexible views, everyone else afraid to speak up, more limits put on personal freedoms.” She pursed her lips. “What does it mean? It’s unthinkable, but could it be that we’re inching away from democracy?”

“The very fact that you’re asking the question is cause for celebration.” Kray pushed his plate to one side. “Now you tell me. Your opinion is as important as mine.”

Her lips curled in an ironic smile. “Even though I’ve lived a life of privilege?”

“Precisely because you’ve lived a life of privilege,” Kray said seriously.

She rose, gathered the plates and cutlery.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I’m stronger now.” Her hands full, Alli walked over to the sink with decidedly less difficulty. Her back to him, she began to wash the dishes.

Kray stood. “Alli?”

“Yes?”

“You’re free to go any time you want.”

Alli scrubbed a plate free of yolk and grease, placed it with great deliberation on the drainboard rack. “If I go home,” she said without turning around, “I’ll stop learning.”

23

“Stop ‘N’ shop,” Armitage said, “what’s that?” He was even more jittery now. His face was as white as the sleet bouncing off the car’s windshield.

Jack turned down Kirby Road about five miles from Claiborne. “It’s when you intercept a perp—a suspect—grill him about where he’s going, why he’s in the area, what he’s got in his vehicle.”

“Where’s your probable cause?”

Jack pulled out his gun. “Here’s my probable cause.”

“You can’t just—”

“What are you, an ex-priest and an ex-lawyer?”

Armitage fell silent. While he tried to gather himself, Jack said, “Give me the BMW’s tag number.”

Armitage showed him the pad, but Jack’s emotions were running too high, he was under too much stress for him to be able to get to the mental place where he could concentrate enough to make sense of what Armitage had jotted down.

“Read it to me.”

Armitage looked at him quizzically.

“I can’t take my eyes off the road,” Jack lied. He’d never get over the shame of his disability.

Armitage read off the license tag.

Jack called Bennett back. “I need a check on a gray late-model Five series BMW, tag number two-four-nine-nine CXE. Right. Thanks.”

Jack closed the connection. They drove awhile in an uneasy silence.

At length, Armitage said, “I didn’t sign on for this.”

“You want out?”

Armitage looked at Jack, seemed abruptly ashamed.

“Tell me more about the FASR.”

Armitage ran a hand through his soaking hair.

“Come on,” Jack urged, “the talking’ll do you good.”

“All right.” Armitage licked his lips nervously. “What we believe, first and foremost, is that an ethical life can be led without religion. In fact, it’s religion of all stripes that most batters the ethical life into submission. The word of the lord God is the best method devised by man to twist ethics, morality, to escape the consequence of your actions. The pious can get away with all manner of heinous crimes—burning people at the stake, quite literally turning their guts inside out—all in the name of God. The so-called laws of religion have been rewritten over and over in order to justify the actions of the religious elders.”

It was at that precise moment that Jack felt a slight prickling at the back of his neck. The hair on his forearms stirred as if magnetized, and his eyes were drawn to the rearview mirror. For a moment, he thought he was losing his mind, for there sat his own beloved Emma looking back at him with her clear eyes, as alive as she had ever been.

“Dad—”

He heard her voice! It was definitely her voice, but when he glanced over at Armitage, it was clear that the other man had heard nothing. Jack scrubbed his face with his hand, glanced again at the rearview mirror, which now showed the road behind, traffic moving in normal locomotion. No one was in the backseat.

He swallowed hard. What was causing these hallucinations? he asked himself. They had to be hallucinations, right? What else could they be?

With an enormous effort, he returned his attention to the man sitting beside him. He had been going to ask him another question entirely, but what came out of his mouth was, “Does that mean you don’t believe in God?”

“God doesn’t enter into it,” Armitage said matter-of-factly. “It’s what religion has done in God’s name that we’re rebelling against.”

“Then you have in common with E-Two their desire for a Second Enlightenment.”

Armitage sighed. “We do. But we strenuously disagree with their methods. They’re extremists, and like all extremists, they’re wholly goal-oriented. They see only the shortest distance, the straight path to victory, and that invariably involves violence. As with all extremists the world over and down through history, the means to their goal is of no interest to them.”

“That much I get.” Jack was watching the side mirror, but nothing suspicious showed itself. His cell buzzed. It was the president-elect. Jack must have missed his hourly check-in. He answered the call, assured Edward Carson that in pursuing his own line of investigation he was making progress. There was nothing more he could say with Armitage sitting right next to him. Carson seemed to understand that Jack wasn’t in a position to speak freely and he rang off.

“What I don’t understand is why Garner and his people think you’re an E-Two training ground,” Jack said.

“That’s a sore point, I admit.” Armitage folded his arms across his chest. “Over the past months—I don’t know how many, but certainly it’s under a year—a number of our younger members have left. In fact, they’ve dropped out of sight. We’ve heard rumors that some of them surfaced in E-Two, but so far as we know, that’s all they are—rumors.”

At least Garner has something right, Jack thought.

“If we’re a training ground,” Armitage went on, “it’s totally inadvertent. This is still a free country—” He looked pointedly at Jack. “—more or less. Neither Pete nor I nor anyone else can control what our members do. Unlike the Church, we’ve no wish to.”

Jack’s phone buzzed. It was Bennett.

“You sure about the number you gave me?”

“Two-four-nine-nine CXE,” Jack said.

“Then you’ve got a problem, my friend.” The voice was tight, whispered.

“How serious?”

“That BMW is a Dark Car.”

“What the hell is that?” Jack said.

“There’s no registration attached to that particular tag, no info in the data bank whatsoever.” There was a slight pause. “Which means it belongs to a government black ops division. They have no official oversight.”

Jack’s mind was racing. “Which means they can do pretty much whatever they want.”

“And here’s why: Only four people are authorized to send out a Dark Car,” Bennett said. “The president, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security.”

“How would you know that?” Jack asked.

“Same way I know that all Dark Cars are foreign because no one would think of U.S. government agents using anything but an American vehicle.” Bennett chuckled. “I guess the time when you thought you knew everything about me is over.”

“Thanks,” Jack said.

“For what?” his contact said before hanging up. “We never spoke about this.”

“What?” Armitage said. “Who can do whatever they want?”

“Whoever was in the car.” Jack paused for a moment, thinking the situation through. “It’s not registered. Officially, it doesn’t exist. Neither do its occupants.”

Armitage moaned. “This really is a nightmare.”

“Not if you keep your head.” Jack turned to Armitage. “I’m going to tell you what this is all about. At this point, I think you deserve some context.”

Armitage’s eyes were wide and staring. Jack wondered whether he’d be able to keep his wits about him.

“A few days ago, two Secret Service agents were murdered. The E-Two logo was found at the scene of the crime. That’s why Garner and his people came down on you. This is the opening they’ve been praying for to discredit the entire missionary secularist movement. I’m afraid this Administration is going to do its best to paint your people as criminals—worse, actually, they’ll say you’re homegrown terrorists. They want to destroy you.” Jack paused. “But there is a way out.”

Armitage’s bitter laugh dissolved into a sob. “You must be seeing something I’m not.”

“Very likely,” Jack said. “If you can marshal your resources to help me find the killer, you’ll have the best weapon you can hope for to fight the media firestorm the Administration is planning to rain down on you.” He watched a speeding car pass by. “The problem, as you can see, is that you don’t have much time. I can hold these people off for a day, maybe three, but that’s it.”

Armitage groaned. “What d’you need from me?”

“For starters, a list of your defectors,” Jack said. “Then you and I are going to have to run them down.”

Armitage stared out the window at the low sky, the driving sleet. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“You tell me.”

Armitage pointed. “We’d better get to my office then, as quickly as possible, so I can access the encrypted database.”

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Kansas Avenue. Just south of the junction of Eastern and New Hampshire,” Armitage answered. “You ever heard of the Renaissance Mission Congress?”

Jack said he had.

“Back in the day, before it moved to larger, more luxurious quarters, it was known as the Renaissance Mission Church. We moved into its original building two years ago. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Armitage didn’t know the half of it, Jack thought.

His phone beeped. It was Chief Bennett.

“How did the stop ’n’ shop go?” he asked with no little apprehension.

“It didn’t,” Bennett said. “I don’t know what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into, Jack, but I got an official reprimand and a strict ‘stay clear’ order from the commander.”

“Sorry, Chief, but you also got them off my tail.”

A blur at the corner of Jack’s eye made him reach for his Glock. There was a loud crack, the car swung on its shocks as the bullet entered the car’s metalwork, and Armitage screamed. A second gunshot shattered the windshield, and Jack used the butt of his gun to punch out the crazed sheet of safety glass. Wind and sleet filled the interior, half-blinding him. But his mind had already formed the three-dimensional picture of his car, the road, the BMW. He could see the angles, feel the shifting vectors even as they formed and re-formed.

Just ahead of them, off the driver’s-side fender, rode the gray BMW. Jack could see that the expert driver was jockeying for the perfect position, to enable the shooter to have a clear line of fire. The professionals were leaving nothing to chance.

The scenario was clear in his mind, the playing field existed in his world, and there was no one better at its mastery.

Jack’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, his mind performing a thousand calculations in the blink of an eye. He braked suddenly. The Toyota behind them screeched to slow down, rear-ended them at a reduced speed, jouncing them sharply against their seat belts, then back against the seats. In the following moment, when most people would be in shock, Jack’s brain figured vectors, speeds, distances. Then he slammed the BMW’s right rear fender.

The BMW spun clockwise; then everything happened very quickly. Jack put on speed. The BMW careened out of control, veering sharply to the left, its rims sparking off the wet tarmac. Jack caught a glimpse of the driver desperately scrambling to regain control, the shooter off-balance, white-faced. Then the BMW struck the left-hand guardrail at speed, its rear end rose up angrily before the car punched through the rail, spun crazily down the slope at the side of the parkway.

A moment later, flames flickered and an explosion of debris geysered up as the gas tank cracked. Jack floored the car, heading for Kansas Avenue NE, smack in the middle of his past.

Part 3

24

Alli Carson lay drowsing in the pantry, on the folding cot Kray had provided for her. The sheets and blanket were tucked up around her chin. Her face was flushed but calm. Kray, standing over her, emptied a syringe into the crease behind her left earlobe, where the puncture would never be noticed. On the counter below Carrie’s lair was a full syringe, capped to keep the needle sterile. Kray dropped the empty syringe in the hazmat waste bin, bent over Alli, began to whisper in her ear.

Alli’s mind was adrift on a cloud that shape-shifted first into her favorite toys as a child: Splash the dolphin, Ted the giraffe, and Honey the teddy bear. They romped and laughed as she played with them, before dissolving into other images. At first, these images were jumbled, smeary, and confusing, but presently they resolved themselves into scenes intimately familiar to her. Specifically the incidents that more or less defined her life up to the moment she was abducted.

Her mind brought her back to just before she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease. At thirteen, she suffered moods so black, her mother took her to a psychologist. She referred Alli to her physician, who in turn referred her to an endocrinologist, who finally made the diagnosis. Her pituitary gland was affected, her eyes bulged slightly, her mood swings were vicious, the bouts of anxiety left her limp and exhausted, drenched in her own sweat. There were times when she was sure she was losing her mind. Lying on her bed, she would stare up at the ceiling, lost in the blackness of the universe, the essential futility of life. Future, what future? And why would you want one, anyway? Her heart galloped faster and faster until it seemed as if it would burst through her chest. Methimazole prevented her thyroid from producing too much hormone, so gradually the anxiety loosened its grip on her, her heart rate returned to a normal trot, her eyes ceased to bulge.

These memories, running one over the next, vanished into a pearly mist, only to be replaced by visions of the summer when she went to camp for the first and only time. She was fifteen. She’d begged her parents to let her go, not only to separate herself from the suffocating atmosphere of a senior senator’s entourage but also in order to get a sense of how she’d do on her own. She needed a venue where she could explore who she was. She met a boy—an unutterably handsome boy from a wealthy family in Hartford. His father owned a huge insurance firm that generated obscene profits. His mother was a former Ford model. All this Alli learned from the boy, whose name was Barkley, though with the particular cruelty of teens, everyone called him Bark. Well, almost everyone; the kids on work programs at the camp in order to pay for the privilege of being there had another name for him, Dorkley.

That a portion of the community—so tight-knit, it was incestuous—reviled Barkley only endeared him to Alli. He was a misfit just like her; she could relate to his being marginalized. After dinner, they took walks in the long cobalt twilight, hanging at the edge of the softball field or on the sloping muddy shoulder of the lake. Often they stared as one at the raft moored in the center of the lake. They sat close together, but they never brushed shoulders, let alone held hands. And yet a certain magnetism, plucked out of the droning summer air, drew them, caused them perhaps to feel the same longing, an ache deep down in a place they could not identify. Once, they spoke about the raft in an argot they understood better than anyone else at camp—as Oz, Neverland, the other end of the White Rabbit’s hole, heavily romanticized worlds that were home to Others, the people so special or different, they didn’t belong in Kansas or London or the English countryside.

That night they spoke while the last smears of color faded under the onslaught of darkness. The air grew chill and damp, and still they did not move. Their talking had come to an end; there seemed nothing left to say. It was difficult for Alli to remember who began to strip first. In any event, there came a time when they stood in their underwear side by side, feet in the cool, still water. They heard a bullfrog out on the lake, saw water spiders skimming the surface. All the lights were behind them, up the hill where the buildings were situated. Here their own world began, and Alli, with a shiver of intent, pushed aside her anxiety about her nude body as she slipped out of undershorts and bra.

Wading into the water, arms held high, they lay down in the deliciously cool water, as if it were a bed. Alli did an excellent crawl out to the raft, arrived there seconds before Barkley. She hauled herself, dripping, from the water; he was right behind her.

At first they lay on their stomachs, out of modesty perhaps or because this was the way most children slept. They were still more children than adults, knew it, clung to its safety.

As a certain fear flooded her mind, Alli said, “I don’t want to do anything. You know that.”

Barkley, head on folded forearms, smiled slowly. “Neither do I. We’re just here, right? Just us. We’ve left all the knuckleheads behind.”

Alli laughed softly at how sweetly he used words that were so, well, dorky. It occurred to her that his very unhipness was another reason she liked him. Preening boys, showing off their cool in the most obvious and ostentatious manner, had a tendency to buzz around her because they wanted something from her father, if only to bask in the penumbra of his celebrity. Proximity to power was a potent aphrodisiac for boys of that age, and would be, until they had gathered their own. Later in life, it would be the women who’d be buzzing around these boys’ moneyed hives.

They lay side by side on their softly rocking island, silent, listening to the slap of rope against the raft’s pontoons, the lap of water, and in the humming night the occasional bellow of the bullfrog, the call of a skimming loon on its way to nest for the night, the eerie hoot of an owl high overhead. Who turned first? Alli couldn’t recall, but all at once they were lying on their backs, their eyes focused on the spangled blackness of the sky, not on the pale flesh beside them, a blobby blur in the corners of their eyes.

“I wish we were up there,” Barkley said, “on a spaceship heading for another planet.”

He was a sci-fi nut, reading Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl. Alli had read them also, saw through them. They were men from the dying pulpmagazine world—men with amazing ideas, granted, but they weren’t writers, not when you compared them with her current favorites, Melville, Hugo, Steinbeck.

“But the planets have no breathable atmosphere,” Alli said. “What would we do when we got there?”

“We’d find a way to survive,” Barkley said in a very grown-up tone of voice. “Humans always do.” He turned his head, looked at her. “Don’t we?”

Alli, mute, felt paralyzed beneath his serious gaze. Trying to put herself in his head, she wondered what he thought of the body stretched out before him. She herself had not looked at his.

He rose up on his side to face her, head propped on the heel of one hand. His hair was golden, his skin glowing. All of him seemed golden. “Don’t you want to fly far, far away, Alli?”

A moment ago, she would have said yes, but now, forced to make a decision, she didn’t know what she wanted. She thought she’d miss her family, no matter how annoying and stifling they sometimes could be. She didn’t want to be without them, and then the revelation hit her: She was a conventional girl, after all. The thought depressed her momentarily.

“I want to go back.”

She sat up, but Barkley put a hand on her forearm. “Hey, it’s early yet. Don’t get spooked, no one can see us, we’re safe.”

Reluctantly, she lay back down, but a subtle shift had occurred inside her, and she was unable to keep her thoughts at rest.

As if sensing her unease, Barkley wriggled up behind her, put one arm gently around her. “I’ll just hold you close, I’ll protect you, then we’ll swim back, okay?”

She said nothing, but her body nestled back against his and she gave an involuntary sigh. Folding one arm beneath her cheek, she closed her eyes. Her thoughts, like fireflies, darted this way and that against the blackness of her lids. Eventually, though, she felt a warmth spread from Barkley to her, the fireflies dimmed, then vanished altogether as she fell into peaceful slumber.

She was awakened slowly, almost druggily, by a repeating rhythmic sound and a persistent sensation. Drawn fully out of sleep, she realized that it was pain she felt, pain and pressure in a localized area, the place between her buttocks. It was then that she realized that the rhythmic sound and the pressure were connected. Barkley, grunting, held her tight against him. Sweat slicked the surface of her back, spooned against his front, and a peculiar musky scent dilated her nostrils, roiled her insides.

“What are you doing?” Her voice was thick, still slurry with sleep.

His grunting became more intense.

All at once, she snapped fully awake. She felt something rubbing against her bare buttock.

“Have you lost your mind?”

For what seemed like an eternity, she struggled silently in the prison of his arms.

It was only later, in the relative safety of her bunk, that she began to realize that she had been the victim of violence. At the moment, she was defeated by shock and terror. Her little body shook and quivered with each masculine thrust. She wanted to curl up into a ball, a crushed and discarded paper bag. She wanted to cry, she wanted to beam herself to another planet like they did in Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty, she thought despairingly. But she remained locked in the sweaty embrace of this monstrous octopus that had risen up from the muck of the lake to entwine her in its tentacles.

Suspended time ticked away like taffy being pulled in slo-mo. She was no longer there, on the bucking raft, pinned to sun-beaten wooden slats. Pine trees on the shore ruffled; a sinister cloud, spreading like mist, masked the bone-white moon. An owl hooted, and a squadron of bats winged low over the water like Darth Vader’s TIE fighters. But she was deaf and blind to the world around her. Her mind fled down pitch-black hallways that smelled of him, of them, of sweat and fear, of wood-rot and despair. But this place wouldn’t do, so she went deeper, to a fortress her mind made impenetrable, and there she pulled up the drawbridge, locked herself away like a princess in a fairy tale, retired to the keep in the still center.

Without knowing how, she wormed her way to the edge of the raft. Perhaps Barkley was done and simply let her go. Rolling into the still, black water, she gasped, wept as she swam back to shore.

She never told her parents what had happened that night. In fact, she scarcely spoke a sentence to them in the aftermath, preferring to grunt or not to respond at all to their probes. In those months when autumn strode confidently after summer, her mother badgered her about dating Barkley, who, she felt certain, was the perfect match for her daughter. In fact, Alli was boxed into going to dinner with Barkley and both their parents. What seemed to her in summer handsome was now in autumn reptilian. She felt her stomach heave at first sight of him, and when forced to sit beside him, all appetite fled her like a mouse at the pounce of a hungry cat. What followed was an excruciatingly awkward, secretly embarrassing evening. Over ashy coffee and cloying flourless chocolate cake, Barkley, his nose firmly up her father’s ass, contrived to tell him a joke. At the same time, hidden beneath the table, he slithered his hand between her thighs. Alli leapt up and fled the restaurant, for which, later, she was severely reprimanded. She’d broken her mother’s strict rules of social engagement, and that was that.

That might have bothered the old, proper Alli, her mother’s clone, but that girl was dead, left at the mercy of the sweaty octopus on the raft. When she’d dropped into the lake, the black water closing over her head, swirling her hair across her face, there had come a breach. Her old self turned to misty cloud that masked the illumination of the moon. She left behind everything she had felt or believed. In the process, she shriveled, closed up like a clam inside its striated shell. But alone with herself she was safe.

In time, even her mother came to dimly realize that something was wrong. Since neither tough love nor punishment worked, she sent Alli to a psychologist, which made Alli retreat even further into her citadel of solitude. She was reduced to weaving lies in order to avoid being sucked into that cold, impersonal office furnished with psychobabble. She never once considered what the solemn man sitting across from her made of those lies; she didn’t care. She had already developed a healthy cynicism about males, and as for trust, forget about it.

Within six weeks, unable to make any headway, the shrink recommended a meds psychiatrist, who met with Alli for twenty minutes. Diagnosing her depression, he handed her a smile along with a prescription for Wellbutrin XL.

“We’ll give the Wellbutrin several weeks. If it doesn’t do the trick there’s a whole galaxy of medications we can try,” he said. “Worry not, we’ll have you right as rain in no time.”

She promptly threw the little cream-colored pills into a trash bin at the pharmacy.

In Alli’s drugged mind, it was now three years later. She heard “Neon Bible” by Arcade Fire as if from a long distance away. Superimposed over it was the drone of a familiar voice, repeating instructions she found so rudimentary, a half-wit could follow them. Still, they were repeated to the cadence of “Neon Bible” until they became as much a part of her as her lungs or her heart.

Presently, on a cloud of memory, she drifted off again, into her past. She had met Emma McClure on her first day at Langley Fields, and from that moment on she knew she wanted Emma to be her roommate. The college had assigned her someone else—a blonde from Texas, whom she loathed on sight; her accent alone set Alli’s teeth on edge, not to mention her obsessions with high-end clothes and imported beauty products. Alli lobbied for a switch, for she and Emma to be together, and finally the administration acceded to her request. It wasn’t that she’d demanded they do as she asked; she didn’t have to go that far, merely point out that she’d mention the “stressful” situation to her father. The headmistress didn’t want Edward Carson on her case; no one would, not even the president.

There were reasons Alli liked Emma. Emma came from the wrong side of the tracks, from a family that had to take on debt to send her to Langley Fields. She was smart, funny, and, best of all, utterly without pretensions. Born into a family with, it seemed to her, nothing but pretensions, Alli lived in fear that this trait lay buried in her DNA, sealing her fate, would at any moment turn itself on like a geyser, humiliate her to tears. And when, at Emma’s insistence, she read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, she understood that Emma was a kind of talisman, her subversive bent a magic charm that could immunize Alli against her screwed-up hereditary disease.

Plus there was an edge, a toughness to Emma, the hardy scuff picked up in the street. She was fearless. Privilege, Alli had reason to understand, made you soft, vulnerable, fearful, as if your body had been turned inside out, pink and pulsing. It was a hateful disfigurement, one she felt powerless to reverse until Emma came into her life.

Then everything changed.

25

“It’s a total blackout,” Chief Bennett said, “as if the Dark Car never crashed.”

“What about the gunshots on Kirby Road?” Jack asked.

Bennett shook his head. “Only a small item about a milk truck that caught fire.”

The two friends sat in Tysons Corner in a small coffee shop with a striped awning out front and bistro tables inside. From where Jack sat, he had a good view through the front window of the leafy side street and the occasional passing car. As soon as he had dropped a thoroughly rattled Armitage off at his office, he called Bennett. Then he ran every red light to get here. The pursuit by the Dark Car, the shooting, and its aftermath had shaken him more than he cared to admit. He felt as if he had entered a new and far more dangerous arena.

Bennett turned his coffee cup around and around as if something about its symmetry made him uncomfortable. “Someone very high up in the government food chain is spinning the news at a furious clip,” Bennett said.

“According to your information, that would be the president, the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, or the National Security Advisor. Why in the world would any one of them want me dead?”

Bennett watched a middle-aged man enter, then slide into a booth where a young woman waited for him. She smiled, took his hand in hers. Bennett lost interest in them.

“I’ve been in this business thirty years,” he said. “I’ve never run up against a brick wall like this. Jack, I’ve made a career of getting around the brick walls of various government agencies, but this one’s different. None of my contacts can help me—or they won’t.”

“Too scared?”

Bennett nodded. “I’m sorry, Jack. I should have followed you, should have protected you.”

“It’s not your job.”

“I agreed to have you seconded to Hugh Garner’s band of merry men.” He gave Jack a lopsided grin. “I knew more or less I was throwing you to the dogs.”

Jack nodded. “You warned me. But it was Edward Carson who asked for me. I don’t see how you could’ve refused.”

There was an unhappy pause while the waitress refilled their cups. Bennett’s eyes strayed out through the side window, across the avenue. Following his gaze, Jack saw the bottles of wine, whiskey, designer vodkas, aged rums artfully displayed in the window of the shop across the street.

“I suppose it doesn’t get any easier.”

Bennett shook his head. “It’s like a siren’s call.”

“As long as you’re securely lashed to the mast like Ulysses.”

Bennett’s gaze swung back to him. “I lost my wife because I was drunk all the time; I’m not about to go off the wagon now.”

“I’m happy to hear it.”

Bennett poured half-and-half into his cup, along with lots of sugar. That was his treat. “Speaking of wives, you ought to get back with Sharon.”

“I was wondering why you insisted she come down to the hospital.”

“To be honest, Jack, she was glad I asked. I think she wanted to come.”

Jack sipped his coffee, said nothing.

“I know you’re still pissed about her and Jeff.”

“You could say that. He was my best friend.”

“Jack, what he did—he was never your friend.”

Jack’s eyes slid away, staring at nothing.

“Sharon did it to get back at you, because she blamed you for Emma’s death. She made a mistake.” Bennett’s voice was low, urgent. “Jack, don’t fuck things up with this girl. She loves you.” He gave a little laugh. “Shit, you’re not the hard-hearted bastard you think you are.”

As Jack turned onto Kansas Avenue NE, he saw Nina waiting for him. He’d called her while walking out of the coffee shop in Tysons Corner. She leaned against her black Ford, smoking one of her clove cigarettes. She looked unaccountably fetching in boots with sensible heels, dark slacks, and a navy peacoat buttoned up to the chin. She seemed oblivious of the sleet.

The Hi-Line had been transformed into the Black Abyssinian Cultural Center. The electronics shop behind which Andre and his crew had beaten the crap out of him was now a ninety-nine-cent store. Otherwise Kansas Avenue looked much the same. It was still filthy and decrepit, no place for the Renaissance Mission Congress. But the old clapboard building, still peeling, still deeply tarnished with mildew, did seem peculiarly appropriate for the First American Secular Revivalists.

Jack got out of the car and led Nina into the building that held so many memories for him.

Where there had once been pews and pulpits was now a large work space divided into cubicles by cheap, movable half walls, each equipped with a desk, cordless phone, computer terminal, and the like. A soft murmur of voices filled the area where once a choir had opened up their throats and their hearts to God.

The cubicles were filled by an eclectic army of men and women whose ages Jack judged to be from their early twenties to their late sixties. They all looked extraordinarily busy. Only a young girl glanced up as they went past.

Armitage—and presumably Peter Link—occupied a separate office, what had once been Reverend Myron Taske’s rectory. Jack, in the center of the room, looked around. The huge armoire was still against one wall, Taske’s battle-scarred desk was opposite, but everything else was different—modern, sleek, gleaming. Maybe it was the new furniture that made the room look so small, Jack thought. Or perhaps it was his memory playing tricks on him. Either way, as in the Langley Fields buildings, Jack felt a dislocation—as if he were both here and not here. He wondered if that was how Emma felt when she appeared in the backseat of his car.

By this time, Armitage was behind his desk. “You said you wanted a list of members who had defected over the last eighteen months.”

Jack cleared his throat. “That’s right.”

Armitage nodded. “I can do that.”

His fingertips flew over his computer keyboard, typing in the algorithm that would decrypt the FASR database. A moment later, he was scrolling down a list, cutting and pasting into a new document. He pressed a key, and the printer began to hum. Then it spit out two sheets of paper. Armitage leaned over, pulled them out of the hopper, handed them to Jack.

Jack was aware of Nina very close beside him, leaning in to read the list so easily, so effortlessly, he felt a stab of envy. For him it was a struggle of the first order. He concentrated in the way Reverend Taske had taught him, remembering the three-dimensional letters Taske had made for him, so Jack could feel them, understand their individual nature in order to recognize them in two dimensions, make sense of their sequences. The letters stopped swimming away from him, began to gather like fish around a coral reef. Jack began to read the names, slowly but accurately.

“See anyone you know?” Armitage asked.

Jack, concentrating fully, shook his head.

Nina looked around, said to Armitage, “Honestly, I don’t get what you’re all about.”

“It’s not so mysterious, despite what the talking heads on Fox News claim,” Armitage said. “I and people like me don’t want to live in a ‘Christian nation,’ we don’t want members of the Administration to be anointing themselves with holy oil. Above all, we don’t want a president who believes he’s doing the will of God. We simply want the freedom to explore the unknown, wherever that might lead.”

“Where d’you stand on the human soul?”

“Several leading scientists around the world who are missionary secularists believe that what we call a soul is in fact electrical energy, that when the body dies, that energy lives on. That’s one of the mysteries they’re trying to solve.”

“And God?”

“God is a personal matter, Ms. Miller. Many of us believe absolutely in God, in whatever form. It’s not God that we’re fighting against. It’s what’s done in God’s name by all the ‘systems of religion.’

“Here, let me give you an example from history.” He rummaged around his desk until he found a hardcover book titled Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “These are the words of William Blake, the eighteenth-century English visionary:

‘All Bibles and sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors:

That man has two really existing principles, viz., a body and a soul.

That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the body, and

Reason, called Good, is alone

from the soul.

But the following contraries to these are true:

Man has no body distinct from the Soul—for what is

called body is that portion of the soul

discerned by the five senses …

Energy is the only life, and is from body, and Reason is

the bound or outward

circumference of energy.’”

Armitage closed the book, set it aside. “What William Blake is saying is that there is no evil inherent in human beings. I believe him. The story of the poisoned apple from the Tree of Knowledge is a fiction created by men who, from the first, sought power over others by keeping them ignorant.”

Nina said, “Still, I don’t understand your preoccupation with finding the meaning of things. What if there is no meaning?”

“Keeping yourself in ignorance is the Church’s idea,” Armitage said calmly. “Knowledge is wisdom, Ms. Miller. Wisdom is power. Power provides individuality.”

“It also feeds the ego,” Nina said. “An excess of ego breeds chaos.”

“Come on.” Jack took Nina by the elbow, moved her toward the rectory door. “This guy can debate you until Gabriel comes calling.” As he hustled her out the door, he said, “Thanks for your help, Armitage.”

“Anytime.” Armitage was already back to work, scanning his e-mails.

“I just may take you up on that.” Jack closed the door softly behind him.

As soon as Jack and Nina left the FASR offices, a young woman in her early twenties got rid of her current call. She was pretty, dark of hair, fair of cheek. In fact, in looks, size, and age she was remarkably similar to the homeless girl Ronnie Kray had picked up off the street for the use of her left hand, the girl who was now moldering in his refrigerator.

The pretty FASR worker dialed a local number. Almost immediately, she heard the familiar male voice on the other end.

“Yes, Calla.”

“He just left,” Calla said into the receiver.

“You’re certain it’s him,” Kray said.

Calla looked down into the open drawer of her desk. Among the pens, pencils, erasers, paper clips, and spare staples was the small photo of Jack McClure Kray had given her. It had the same flat, slightly grainy look as the photos of Alli Carson that hung on the wall of Kray’s house in Anacostia.

“Absolutely,” Calla said.

“Tonight. Same time, same place.” Kray broke the connection.

26

“Goddamnit!”

Secretary Dennis Paull rarely lost his temper, but as those who worked closely with him could attest, when he did fly into a rage, it was best to say, “Yessir!” and get out of his way.

“Goddamnit to hell!” The Secretary of Homeland Security had his cell phone jammed so tightly to his head, circulation was being cut off to his ear. “The occupants were roasted alive, then.”

He listened intently to the harried voice on the other end of the line. The call had come in just as he was about to go into a debriefing with the POTUS, the Secretary of State, and one of the ranking generals—he forgot who, they all looked, spoke, and thought alike—who had just returned from the successful arm-twisting of the Russian president, Yukin. The POTUS was jubilant. He told Paull to get his fanny over to the West Wing, that they were all going to gorge themselves on beluga caviar, a parting gift from Yukin, who had knuckled under to the president’s agenda.

Paull had been on his way to see his wife, not that she would recognize him. But when he failed to see her during the week, his heart broke all over again, and thoughts of their courtship and early years together would flood through him like a riptide, threatening to spin him away on whatever mysterious current had snatched her away from him. For an insane moment, he had contemplated the unthinkable: defying the president, sitting with Louise, holding her hand, willing the puzzlement out of her eyes and mind, willing her back to him. But then his survival instincts, honed by decades inside the Beltway, came to the fore and saved him.

Paull was about to say something but caught himself in time. He was standing on the blue carpet that led to the Oval Office. He was surrounded by polished wood paneling, cream paint, and the hushed sounds of a staff that ran like a well-oiled machine. Like the emanations of magnetic north, he felt the waves of power so close to the Oval Office. He was not fooled, however; the power lay in the office, not in the man who temporarily inhabited it. He strode down the hall, and then ducked into a small room, an extra office that was deserted. His phone was specially designed by the magicians at DARPA, ensuring that his conversations would sound like gibberish to anyone picking up the bandwidth. Nevertheless, he was cautious about his own voice being overheard.

“You’re sure they’re dead,” he said into the phone.

“They had no time to get out,” the man on the other end of the line said. “And believe me, no one short of Superman could have survived that blaze.”

“How the hell did this happen?”

“The best I can tell, McClure pissed them off. He got on to them; he sicced his ATF pals on them. They couldn’t believe it, so they went after him.”

Paull rolled his eyes. Why did he have to suffer these incompetents? But he already knew the answer. Incompetents were who this Administration hired. “And,” he prompted.

“They got a little overzealous.”

Paull had to count to ten before he could say in a low voice, “You call firing handguns on the parkway ‘overzealous’? This wasn’t a termination mission, for the love of Mike.”

Silence on the line.

Paull felt as if his eyes were bugging out of his head. “It sure as hell wasn’t a termination mission.”

“Sir,” the disembodied voice replied, “they sure as hell thought it was.”

“What about your car?” Nina said.

Jack drove south on Kansas Avenue. Considering the gray BMW, he thought it best not to be driving his car the rest of the day. “After we’re done, you can drop me back here.”

“It may be nothing but a burned-out husk by that time,” Nina said.

“Or it might not be there at all and I can requisition a new one.”

“Har-har.” Nina banged down her door lock. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“Take a look at the list.”

Nina took up the two sheets Armitage had given them, her eyes scrolling down the list of names. “What am I looking for?”

“Known criminals.”

“Let’s see.” Nina ran her forefinger down the list on both sheets. “Nope. Nothing shouts out at me.”

Jack made another turn, onto Peabody Street NW. He checked the rearview mirror. He was justifiably paranoid about tails. “Try the second sheet, fourth name from the bottom.”

“Joachim Tolkan? What about him?”

“Twenty-five years ago, his father, Cyril, was a notorious criminal in this section of the District.” Jack put on some speed. “Ran numbers, drugs, and explosives out of the All Around Town bakery.”

Nina laughed. “That’s where I get my croissants and coffee. There are maybe a dozen of them throughout the District.”

“Back in the day,” Jack said, “there was only one.”

Perhaps Nina heard something in his tone. “You knew the father, this Cyril Tolkan.”

“He murdered someone.” Jack slowed as they approached the old tenement, home of the original All Around Town bakery. “Someone close to me.”

Nina frowned as Jack pulled to a stop on Fourth Street NW between Kennedy and Jefferson. “This isn’t some kind of personal vendetta, is it, because we have no time for extracurricular activities of any nature whatsoever.”

Jack was sorely tempted to describe in detail Hugh Garner’s manhandling of Peter Link, but decided against it. Instead, he said, “I have a hunch. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll drop it and we’ll be back to square one.”

He knew he was on edge. Why would any of the four order him tailed and attacked? Was it Armitage they wanted silenced? The state of unknowing was not a pleasant one for him. He resisted the urge to call Bennett; he knew the chief would contact him as soon as he had dug up anything of substance.

A bell sounded as they entered the bakery. The place was much as he remembered, full of the delicious swirl of butter, sugar, yeast, baking bread. He remembered in vivid detail the first time Gus had taken him here. In his mind’s eye, he could see Cyril’s goons standing around, reading the racing forms, waiting for their orders to dispense drugs or weapons, pick up payments, and if the envelope was a little light, to deliver a bloody payment of their own. He remembered the balding man behind the counter who gave him a chocolate-chip cookie. And Cyril himself, with his dark, olive eyes, his Slavic cheekbones, and his sinister air. Today, however, there were only a couple of elderly ladies buying their daily bread. They smiled at him as they walked out with their sweet-smelling purchases.

“Name’s Oscar. Can I help you?”

A short, squat man in a baker’s apron, with a monkish fringe of hair around the circumference of his milk chocolate scalp and a wide flat nose that must once have been broken regarded them with curious eyes and a welcoming smile. The current All Around Town bakery was a couple of light-years from the shop Cyril Tolkan had presided over.

“I’ll take a square of crumb cake.” Jack turned to Nina. “And you, sweetheart?”

Nina, unfazed, shook her head.

Jack grinned at Oscar. “The missus is a bit shy in this neighborhood.”

“I understand completely.” Oscar had a spray of freckles over the flattened bridge of his nose. He placed Jack’s crumb cake in a square of paper on the top of the glass case. Addressing Nina, he said, “How about a chocolate-chip cookie?” He picked one out of the pile, held it out. “No one can resist one of our chocolate-chip cookies.”

Jack remembered. Even stale it was good.

Nina gave a tight smile, took the cookie.

Jack took out his wallet.

“The cookie’s on the house,” Oscar said.

Jack thanked him as he paid. He bit into the crumb cake, said, “Delicious.” As he chewed, he said, “I wonder if Joachim is around.”

Oscar busied himself arranging a tray of linzer tortes. “Friend or business?”

“A little of both.”

Oscar seemed to take this nonanswer in stride. “The boss’ll be back tomorrow. He’s in Miami Beach, for his mother’s funeral.”

Jack looked around the room, munched on his crumb cake. “You know what time he’ll be in?”

“First thing in the morning,” Oscar said. “I just got off the phone with him.” He took a tray of butter cookies from a thin lad who’d appeared from the oven room. “Any message?”

“No.” Jack finished off the crumb cake, brushed his fingertips together. “We’ll be back.”

Oscar held aloft a couple of cookies. “Something for the road?”

Jack took them.

27

The Renaissance Mission Church is more than a place of worship for Jack; it’s his schoolhouse. It doesn’t take long for Reverend Taske to unearth the root of Jack’s reading difficulties. As it happens, he’s studied a bit about dyslexia, but now he studies more. Every evening when Jack arrives after work at the Hi-Line, Taske has another idea he’s found in some book or other pulled from libraries all over the District.

One evening Jack is particularly frustrated by trying to read a book—this one is of poems by Emily Dickinson. He lashes out, breaks a glass on Reverend Taske’s desk. Immediately ashamed, he too-quickly picks up the shards, cuts the edge of his hand. After throwing the glass into the wastepaper basket, he goes over to the armoire, takes out the first aid kit. As he does so, his eye is caught by something on the floor of the armoire. Pushing aside some boxes, he sees what looks like a door.

Just as he’s pushing the boxes back in place, Reverend Taske comes in. Within the blink of an eye, he seems to take in the entire scenario. He holds out his hand, and once Jack gives him the first aid kit, gestures for Jack to sit down. He looks at the cut on Jack’s hand.

“What happened?”

“I was having trouble reading,” Jack said. “I got angry.”

Taske searches to make sure no tiny bit of glass has lodged itself in the wound. “The glass means nothing.” He begins to disinfect the wound. “But your anger needs tending.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says.

“Before you allow your temper to flare, think about why you’re angry.” Taske bandages the cut, then indicates the armoire. “I expect you’re wondering where that trapdoor leads.” He regards Jack sternly. “I can trust you, can’t I?”

Jack sits up straight. “Yes, sir.”

Reverend Taske gives him a wink. “You see, back in the thirties, when liquor was outlawed, these buildings were under the control of bootleggers—people who dealt in illegal liquor. There’s a tunnel under here that leads into Gus’s back room.” He closes up the kit, puts it away. “Now, let’s get back to Emily Dickinson.”

“I’ll never be able to get it,” Jack says in despair.

Taske bids him put down the slim volume. “Listen to me, Jack. Your brain is special. It processes things in a way mine can’t—in three dimensions.” He hands Jack a Rubik’s Cube. “The idea here is to get a solid color on each side of the cube. Go on. Give it a try.”

As Jack turns the cube, understanding comes to him full-blown, and he manipulates the mind-bending puzzle. He hands the cube back to Taske. Each side is a solid color.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” Taske says. “All the current literature claims you wouldn’t have trouble solving Rubik’s puzzle, but four minutes!” He whistles. “No one else I know can solve this, Jack, let alone so quickly.”

“Really?”

Taske smiles. “Really.”

Though it’s in a run-down neighborhood that could charitably be called marginal, the Renaissance Mission Church attracts a high level of media coverage and, therefore, attendance from local politicos. This is due to the benevolent work Reverend Taske does, rehabilitating hardened criminals of thirteen or fourteen, turning them into citizens of the District who make tangible contributions to their neighborhood. Taske’s admirable goal is to rehab the entire area, not by inviting white entrepreneurs to take over failing black businesses, but by creating black entrepreneurs who have the tools to turn these businesses into moneymaking operations. Unfortunately, in his neighborhood, the businesses that make the most money are those that run numbers, deploy prostitutes, deal drugs. Old habits are hard to break, especially those that have proved painlessly lucrative for their bosses. No schooling is needed, no learning to abide by the laws of the Man. No need to become civilized—or even civil, for that matter. All that’s required is muscle, guns, and a pair of brass balls.

That includes Andre. After taking his lumps from his boss, Cyril Tolkan, for beating up on Jack, Andre has moved up Tolkan’s crooked corporate ladder with alarming rapidity. Part of his motivation, of course, was to get out of Tolkan’s doghouse, but far more worrying is the flame of his ambition, which is burning brighter than even Gus had imagined. Andre never comes to the church anymore, and ever since Reverend Taske returned from Andre’s new lair with a black eye and a lacerated cheek, he doesn’t even mention his name. Gus, enraged, wanted to go after Andre himself, but Taske wouldn’t let him. Jack happens to overhear their conversation early one Sunday morning, which takes place in the rectory, where Jack is laboriously working his way through The Great Gatsby. The novel is interesting because, like Jack himself, Gatsby is an outsider. But it becomes downright fascinating when Jack, thumbing through a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald he takes out of the local library, learns that the author was, like Jack himself, dyslexic.

“I’ve had enough standin’ aside while Andre goes off on ev’rybody,” Gus says.

“You just can’t abide him taking business from you,” Reverend Taske responds.

“Huh! Looka whut he did to you!”

“Occupational hazard,” Taske says. “You’re not my daddy, Augustus. I can take care of myself.”

“By turnin’ the other cheek.”

“That’s how I was taught, Augustus. That’s what I believe.”

“Whut you believe ain’t nuthin’ but a jackass’s brayin’.”

Jack sucks in his breath. He is compelled to get up, creep down the hall, put his eye to the crack between door and jamb he makes by pulling with his fingertips. In his limited line of vision, the Reverend Taske is eclipsed by Gus’s planetary shape.

“Because your ire is up, I’m going to ignore your insult to me, Augustus, but I can’t overlook your blasphemy toward God. When we’re done, I want you to make penance.”

“Not today, Reverend. I gots no truck with turnin’ the other cheek. Moment I knuckle to that, I’m shit outta business. You-all gonna tell me that if I don’t do fo’ myself, God will?”

“I am concerned for your immortal soul, Augustus,” Taske says slowly and carefully.

“Huh, you best be concerned with things that matter, like whut you gonna do ’bout expenses round here now that yo’ famous bank vice president got indicted for embezzlement. Reg’lators gone pulled the plug on all his deals, including the one that’s been keeping this place afloat fo’ three years.”

Jack hears the creak of a chair, figures the reverend has sat heavily down. “You do have a point there, Augustus.”

“Now, you know I make a lotta money, Reverend, an’ I’ll give you as much as I can.”

“The church isn’t here to drain you of every penny you make.”

“Still an’ all,” Gus perseveres, “whatever I can muster won’t be enough. You gotta think long-term.”

“If you have a suggestion,” Taske says.

It’s at that point that Jack knocks on the door. There is a short startled silence, at the end of which Taske’s voice bids Jack enter.

Jack stands in the doorway until the reverend beckons him into the room. “What can I do for you, Jack? Having trouble decoding Fitzgerald’s prose?”

“It’s not that.” Jack is for a moment at a loss for words. Taske looks weary, older. Why hasn’t he noticed this before? Jack asks himself.

“Augustus and I are in the middle of a discussion, Jack,” Taske says kindly.

“I know, that’s why I came in.”

“Oh?”

“I couldn’t help overhearing.”

“Huh, you betta close that door good,” Gus says, “so you the on’y one.”

Jack shuts the door firmly, turns around. “I heard about the money crisis.”

“That’s none o’ yo’ business,” Gus says darkly.

“I think I have a way out,” Jack says.

The two men seem to hang suspended between disbelief and raucous laughter. The thought that a fifteen-year-old has seen a way out of the fiscal quicksand the Renaissance Mission Church has unceremoniously found itself in is, on the face of it, ludicrous. Except, as both men know, each in his own way, this is Jack—and Jack is capable of extraordinary leaps of logic that are beyond either of them.

So Taske says, “Go ahead, Jack. We’re listening.”

“I was thinking of Senator Edward Carson.”

Taske frowns. “What about him, son?”

“He was here last week,” Jack says. “I read the papers—you assign me to do that every day, and I do.”

Taske smiles. “I know you do.”

“I noticed that Senator Carson got a lot of great press out of his visit here. He even spent some time with the parishioners before and after the service. He said he used to sing in his choir back home in Nebraska. I heard him accept your invitation to sing with our choir today.”

“All true,” Taske agrees. “What exactly is your point, Jack?”

“There’s an election coming up this fall. Senator Carson’s campaign war chest is big. According to the papers, he’s the party’s great future hope. The bigwigs are rumored to be grooming him to run for president one day. Him being here last week and this, I think the rumor’s true. But to make a successful run, he’s going to need every vote he can get. Last time I looked, there weren’t too many blacks living in Nebraska, which is where the Renaissance Mission Church comes in.”

“Huh. Sounds like the kid’s on to sumthin’,” Gus says. “Yes, indeed.”

Taske’s mouth is half-open. Jack can just about see the gears mesh in his mind, the wheels begin to turn.

“I don’t believe it,” Taske says at length. “You want me to offer him votes for funding.”

Jack nods.

“But we’re one small community church.”

“Today you are,” Jack says. “That’s the beauty of the idea. You’re always talking about expanding beyond the neighborhood. This is your chance. With Senator Carson’s backing, the Renaissance Mission Church could go regional, then national. By the time he’s ready to make his run at the presidency, you’ll be in position to offer him the kind of help he’ll need most.”

Gus laughs. “This here boy thinks as big as the sky.”

“Yes,” Taske says slowly, “but he has a point.”

“Carson’s gotta go for it,” Gus cautions.

“Why won’t he?” Jack says. “He’s a successful politician. His livelihood depends on him making deals, accommodations, alliances. Think about it. There’s no downside for him. Even if you should fail, Reverend, he gets a ton of national press for helping a minority raise itself off its knees.”

“Jack’s right. The idea makes perfect sense,” Taske says. He’s chewing over the idea, looking at it from all angles. “And what’s more, it just might work!” Then he slams his palms down on the desk as he jumps up. “I knew it! The good Lord bringing you to us was a miracle!”

“Here we go,” Gus growls, but Jack can see he’s as proud of Jack as Taske is.

“My boy, who would have thought of this but you?” The Reverend Myron Taske takes Jack’s hand, pumps it enthusiastically. “I think you just might have saved us all.”

28

Lyn Carson stood at the bedroom window of the suite high up in the Omni Shoreham Hotel. Dusk was extinguishing the daylight, like a mother snuffing out candles one by one. Ribbons of lights moved along Massachusetts Avenue, and the skeletal structure of the Connecticut Avenue Bridge was lit by floodlights. She and her husband were here for a few days to escape the depressing reality that each hour of each day pressed more heavily in on them.

Alli was somewhere out there. Lyn tried willing her into being, to stand here, safe beside her.

Hearing Edward moving about in the sitting room, she turned. She knew why he liked this storied hotel above all others in the District. Though its architecture was blunt to the point of being downright ugly, it was downstairs in room 406D that Harry Truman, whom Edward so admired, had often come to play poker with his friends Senator Stewart Symington, Speaker of the House John McCormack, and Doorkeeper of the House Fishbait Miller.

Just then, her husband’s cell phone rang and her heart leapt into her throat. My Alli, my darling, she thought, running through the open doorway. Her thoughts swung wildly: They’ve found her, she’s dead, oh my God in Heaven, let it be good news!

But she stopped short when Edward, seeing the look on her face, gave her a quick shake of his head. No, it wasn’t news of Alli, after all. Churning with disappointment and relief, Lyn turned away, stumbled back to the sitting room, half-blinded by tears. Where are you, darling? What have they done to you?

She stood by the window, watching with a kind of irrational fury the indifferent world. How could people laugh, how could they be driving to dinner, having parties, making love, how could they be out jogging, or meeting under a lamppost. How could they be carefree when the world was so filled with dread? What was wrong with them?

She clasped her palms together in front of her breast. Dear God, she prayed for the ten-thousandth time, please give Alli the strength to survive. Please give Jack McClure the energy and wisdom to find her. God, give my precious daughter back to me, and I’ll sacrifice anything. Whatever you want from me I’ll gladly give, and more. You are the Power and the Glory forever and ever. Amen.

Just then she felt Edward’s strong arms around her, and her shell of toughness—hard but brittle—shattered to pieces. Tears welled out of her eyes and a sob was drawn up from the depths of her. She turned into his chest, weeping uncontrollably as black thoughts rolled through her mind like thunderheads.

Edward Carson held her tight, kissed the top of her head. His own eyes welled with tears of despair and frustration. “That was Jack. No news yet, but he’s making progress.”

Lyn made a little sound—half gasp, half moan—at the back of her throat.

“Alli’s a strong girl, she’ll be all right.” He stroked her back, soothing them both. “Jack will find her.”

“I know he will.”

They stood like that for a long time, above their own Washington, the world at their feet, the taste of ashes in their mouths. And yet their hearts beat strongly together, and where hearts were strong, they knew, there was fight yet left. There was hope. Hope and faith.

A sharp rap on the door to the sitting room caused them both to start.

“It’s okay.” Edward Carson kissed her lightly on the lips. “Rest a little now before dinner.”

She nodded, watched him cross the bedroom, close the connecting door behind him. Rest, she thought. How does one rest with a heart full of dread?

The president-elect pulled the door open, stood aside so Dennis Paull could enter, then shut and locked it behind him.

“Nina delivered your message,” Carson said.

“The Secret Service agents outside?”

“Absolutely secure. You can take that to the bank.” He walked over to a sideboard. “Drink?”

“Nothing better.” Paull sat on a sofa that faced the astonishing view. “What I like most about flying is that you’re so high up, there’s nothing but sky. No woes, no uncertainty, no fears.”

He accepted the single-malt with a nod of thanks. Carson had no need of asking what Paull drank. The two men had known each other for many years, long before the current president had been elected to his first term. Two years into that first term, when Paull had been faced with carrying out yet another semi-legal directive he found personally abhorrent, he was faced with a professional dilemma. He might have tendered his resignation, but instead he’d gone to see Edward Carson. In hindsight, of course, Paull understood that he’d already made his choice, which was far more difficult and dangerous than simply throwing in the towel. He’d decided to stay on, to fight for the America he believed in in every way he could. His plan began with the alliance he and Edward Carson formed.

This was surprisingly easy. The two men held the same vision for America, which included returning the country to a healthy separation of church and state. Though fiscal conservatives, they were moderates in virtually every other area. They both disliked partisan politics and despised political hacks. They wanted to get on with things without being encumbered with pork barrel politics. They wanted to mend fences overseas, to try to undo the image of America as bully and warmonger. They wanted their country to be part of the world, separated from it only by oceans. At heart, each in his own way, had come to the same inescapable conclusion: America was at a critical crossroads. The country had to be healed. To do that, it had to be resurrected from the little death of the current administration’s policies. Otherwise, intimidation, divisiveness, and fear would be the legacy of the last eight years.

Neither of them was a starry-eyed idealist; in fact, over the years, they’d each brokered difficult deals, made compromises, some of them painful, in order to achieve their goals. But both did believe that the country was on the wrong path and needed to be set right. So they had agreed. Whenever he could, Paull would secretly work against the Administration’s weakening of democratic freedoms, and in return, Edward Carson would name him Secretary of Defense.

The two men sat in what under other circumstances would have been a comfortable silence. But between them now was the specter of Alli’s abduction and possible death.

“How are you two holding up?” Paull had noticed the president-elect’s reddened eyes the moment he walked through the door.

“As well as can be expected. Any news from Jack?”

“Jack is doing everything he can, I’ve made certain of that,” Paull said. “And he’s protected.”

“Protected.” Carson’s head swung around. “From who?”

Paull stared down into the amber drink, watching the light play off the surface. Only amateurs drank single-malt with ice. “I’d like to say I knew for certain, but I don’t.”

“Give me the next best thing, then.”

Paull had been told that no bodies had been found in the wreck, which meant that Jack had somehow survived the attack. He thought for a moment. “The knives are out. All signs point to the National Security Advisor.” He lifted his eyes. “Trouble is, I suspect he’s not in it alone.”

Paull, staring into the president-elect’s eyes, knew Carson understood he’d meant the president.

After a moment, Carson said very deliberately, “Can you get proof?”

Paull shook his head. “Not before January twentieth. Given time, I think I’ll be able to find a chink in the National Security Advisor’s armor, but I very much doubt I’ll get further.”

Maintaining plausible deniability was any president’s first priority, his most potent line of defense. Carson nodded, sipped his drink. “Getting one will have to suffice, then. It’ll be your first order of business come January twenty-first.”

“Believe me, it’ll be a pleasure.”

The ship’s clock on the mantel chimed in the new hour. Time lay heavy on Edward Carson’s shoulders.

“Look at them down there, Dennis. It’s that hour when the workday is over, when everyone lets out a sigh of relief on their way home. But for me, does evening bring darkness, or the end of my daughter’s life?”

“Do you believe in God, sir?”

The president-elect nodded. “I do.”

“Then for you everything will be all right, won’t it?”

It was late when Nina dropped Jack off. His car, windshield replaced, was waiting for him at the lot of the repair shop. Jack climbed into it warily as well as wearily. He felt as if he’d been beaten with a nightstick for the past few days. Had he slept in all that time? He couldn’t remember. He opened a bottle of water, drank it all down in one long swallow. Speaking of essential functions, apart from the crumb bun he’d wolfed down, when had he last eaten? He vaguely recalled scarfing down an Egg McMuffin, but whether that was this morning or yesterday, he couldn’t say.

It occurred to him that he was hungry. He held the sugar cookies from the All Around Town bakery in his hand, but he didn’t eat them.

Instead, he methodically checked out the environment. He was looking for another Dark Car. No word yet from Bennett on who had sent out the first one. He didn’t know whether that was good news or bad news. He was almost too tired to care.

Finally, he admitted to himself that what he really wanted to do was look in the backseat to see if Emma had magically appeared once more. A flicker of his eyes told him that he was alone in the car. He set the sugar cookies on the seat beside him. An offering or an enticement?

“Emma,” he heard himself say, “are you ever coming back?”

He was appalled at the sound of his own voice. Frightened, too. What was happening to him? Was he cracking up? Surely he hadn’t seen Emma, surely he hadn’t heard her voice. Then what had he seen, what had he heard? Was it all in his head?

All of a sudden, these questions were too big for him. He felt that if he sat with them any longer, his head would explode. He started the car, headed for Sharon’s. She lived in a modest house, one of many identical in shape and size, in Arlington Heights. It took him thirty-five minutes to get there. During that time, he had ample opportunity to make sure an Audi or a Mercedes hadn’t taken the place of the gray BMW.

The lights were on when he pulled into the driveway, and now that he thought about it, he didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad thing. Before he left the car, he checked to see if the cookies had been eaten. They lay against the crease where the seat met the back. They looked sad, forlorn, as if they knew no one would enjoy them. Jack, halfway out of the car, licked his forefinger, picked up a small constellation of crumbs that had formed around the cookies, let them melt on his tongue. He could feel the tears well hotly, so close did he feel to Emma.

He rang the bell, his heart hammering in his chest. Sharon pulled the door open. The scent of chicken and rice wafted out with her, making his mouth water. She regarded him with an unreadable expression. She wore a skirt that clung to her thighs, a sleeveless blouse that showed off her beautiful golden shoulders. Nina would have appeared pale and wan beside her, anorectic instead of willowy. She said nothing for a moment.

“Jack, are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure, it’s just that I can’t remember the last time I had a decent meal.”

“You were on your own so long, I often wondered why you never learned to cook for yourself.”

“The tyranny of shopping makes me anxious.”

She gave him a tentative smile as she moved aside so he could enter.

Jack closed the door behind him. He took off his overcoat, slung it over the back of the living room sofa. Unlike the old house with its familiar creaking he’d moved into when they split, Sharon preferred a modern place. She had busied herself repainting walls in colors she chose, picking out warm carpets, filling each room not only with furniture but accessories as well—scented candles, a log cabin quilt hanging on the wall, small dishes filled with lacquered shells and gaily striped marbles. No unicorns, thankfully, but a variety of other knickknacks and souvenirs, along with keepsakes and photos of Emma and Sharon as a child in handmade frames. None of this, however, made up for the house’s complete lack of character. Unlike his house, it was a two-story box to live in, nothing more. He found being here disorienting and overwhelming. He’d never get used to Sharon living here, living without him.

What did he have of Emma’s? He thought of her iPod, pushed to the back of his ATF locker. One night he took it home and couldn’t sleep. Then again, he must have because at one point he started up from a horrific dream of standing paralyzed and mute as Emma’s car hurtled into the tree. He could hear the crack of the wood, the explosion of glass, see the twists of metal spiraling inward. The car door snapped open, and a shape already curled in death shot out, struck him full in the chest. Then he was sitting up in bed, screaming and shivering, sweat pouring off him like rain. He spent what was left of the night commiserating with Nick Carraway in the pages of his beloved, tattered copy of The Great Gatsby, and was never so glad to see the first blush of dawn turn the darkness gold.

In Sharon’s new digs, he picked up one of the photos of Emma, but the image seemed flat and empty, a shell of what once had been a vibrant and mysterious girl. As for photos of other people in Sharon’s life, he knew there would be none.

Sharon had no past, and so couldn’t understand what appeal it could possibly hold for Jack. She had parents, but she never saw or spoke to them. A brother, as well, in Rotterdam, where he was an international lawyer. For reasons he’d never been able to fathom, Sharon had cut herself off from her family, her past. When they were dating, she told him that she had no family, but after they were married, he found photos in the trash, spilled out of an old cigar box. Her mother, father, and brother.

“They’re dead to me,” she’d said when he’d confronted her. She’d never allowed the subject to come up again.

Did that mean, he often wondered, that Sharon didn’t dream? Because he dreamed only of his past, iterations of it with intended outcomes, or not, bizarre twists and turns that he often remembered after he awoke, and laughed at or puzzled over. It seemed to him that there was a richness in life that came with the years, that only your past could provide. It was unbearable to him to think, as Schopenhauer had written, that no honest man comes to the end of his life wanting to relive it. But it seemed possible to him that Sharon believed just that, that her erasing of her past was an attempt to relive her life.

He put the photo back, turned away, but his mood didn’t improve. The house’s aggressive homeyness produced a hollowness in the pit of his stomach. As for his heart, it had gone numb the moment she appeared at the door.

Below her short skirt, Sharon wore little pink ballet slippers with teeny bows and paper-thin soles. They made her movements around the house elegant and silent, even on the hard tile of the kitchen floor. No matter which way you looked at them, her legs were magnificent. Jack tried not to stare, but it was like asking a moth to ignore a flame.

Sharon opened a glass-fronted cabinet over the sink, stretched up to reach a pair of stemmed glasses. Her figure was highlighted in such a way that Jack felt the need to sit down.

She uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured. “Fortunately, I made enough food for two.”

“Uh-huh,” was all he could muster because he’d bitten back one of his acerbic replies.

She brought the glasses over, handed him one. “What?”

“What what?”

She pulled a chair out, sat down at a right angle to him. “I know that look.”

“What look?” Why all of a sudden did he feel like a felon?

“The ‘Baby, let’s get it on’ look.”

“I was just admiring your legs.”

She got up, took her wineglass to the stove. She stirred a pot, checked the chicken in the oven. “Why didn’t you say that when we were married?” Her voice was more rueful than angry.

Jack waited until she paused to take a sip of wine before he said, “When we were married, I was embarrassed by how beautiful you are.”

She spun around. “Come again?”

“You know how you see a hot movie star—”

Her face grew dark. “Where do you live, Beverly Hills?”

“I’m talking about a fantasy figure, Shar. Don’t tell me you don’t have fantasies about—”

“Clive Owen, if you must know.” She took the bird out, set it aside to allow the juices to settle. “Go on.”

“Okay, so I’m alone with … Scarlett Johansson.”

Sharon rolled her eyes. “Dream on, buddy.”

“I’m alone with her in my mind,” Jack persevered, “but when I try to—you know—nothing happens.”

She dumped the rice into a serving bowl. “Now that’s just not you.”

“Right, not when I’m with you. But Scarlett, when I think about her—really think about her—well, it’s too much. I’m wondering why the hell a goddess like that would be with me. Then the fantasy goes up in smoke.”

She stared intently at the steaming rice. Her cheeks were flushed. After a time, she seemed to find her voice. “You think I’m as beautiful as Scarlett Johansson?”

If he said yes, what would she do? He didn’t know, so he said nothing, even when she turned her head to look at him. Instead, he got up, rather clumsily, and helped her serve the food.

They sank back down into their respective chairs. Wordlessly, she handed him the carving utensils and wordlessly he took them, parting the breast from the bony carcass, as he always did. Sharon served them both, first slices of the chicken, then heaping spoonfuls of rice, and broccoli with oil and garlic. They ate in a fog of self-conscious silence, sinking deeper and deeper into their own thoughts.

Finally, Sharon said, “You’re feeling okay now?”

Jack nodded. “Fine.”

“I thought …” She put her fork down. She’d hardly eaten anything. “I thought maybe after the hospital you might call.”

“I wanted to,” Jack said, not sure that was the truth. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

Sharon settled in her chair. “All right.”

“It’s about Emma.”

She reacted as if he’d shot her. “I don’t—!”

“Just let me—” He held up his hands. “Please, Shar, just let me say what I have to say.”

“I’ve heard everything you need to say about Emma.”

“Not this you haven’t.” He took a deep breath, let it out. He wanted to tell her, and he didn’t. But this time seemed as good as any—better, in fact, than any of their recent meetings. “The fact is—” He seemed to have lost his voice. He cleared his throat. “—I’ve seen Emma.”

“What!”

“I’ve seen her a number of times in the past week.” Jack rushed on at breakneck speed, lest he lose his nerve. “The last time she was sitting in the backseat of my car. She said, ‘Dad.’”

Sharon’s expression told him that he’d made a terrible mistake.

“Are you insane?” she shouted.

“I tell you I saw her. I heard her—”

She jumped up. “Our daughter’s dead, Jack! She’s dead!”

“I’m not saying—”

“Oh, you’re despicable!” Her brows knit together ominously. “This is your way of trying to weasel out of your responsibility for Emma’s death.”

“This isn’t about responsibility, Shar. It’s about trying to understand—”

“I knew you were desperate to crawl out from under your guilt.”

Her wildly gesticulating hands knocked over her wineglass. Then she deliberately knocked over his. “I just didn’t know how desperate.”

Jack was on his feet. “Shar, would you calm down a minute? You’re not listening to me.”

“Get out of here, Jack!”

“C’mon, don’t do that.”

“I said get out!”

She advanced and he retreated, past the seashells and the colored glass, the postcards Emma had sent to them from school, the photos of her as a child. He scooped up his coat.

“Sharon, you’ve misunderstood everything.”

This, of course, was the worst thing he could have said. She flew at him with raised fists, and he backed out the front door so quickly that he stumbled over the top step. She got to slam the door on him once again. Then all the downstairs lights were extinguished and he knew she was sitting, curled up, fists on thighs, sobbing uncontrollably.

He took a convulsive step up, raised his fist to hammer on the door, but his hand flattened out, palm resting on the door as if by that gesture he could feel her presence. Then he turned, went heavily down the steps, returned to his car.

29

Jack thought he was heading home, but instead he found himself pulling into Egon Schiltz’s driveway right behind Candy Schiltz’s Audi A4 Avant wagon. He got out, walked to the front door, pushed the bell. If Sharon wouldn’t talk to him about Emma, maybe Egon would. Jack checked his watch. It was late enough that he was sure to be home by now.

Schiltz lived in the Olde Sleepy Hollow area of Falls Church. His house was a neat two-story colonial the family had lived in for decades. Schiltz had paid just north of $100,000 for it. Back in the day, that wasn’t exactly cheap, but these days it was worth conservatively fifteen times that.

Molly came to the door, gave an excited shriek as he whirled her up and around.

“Molly Maria Schiltz, what is going on!”

Candy came bursting into the entryway, but as soon as she saw Jack, the look of concern on her face changed to a broad smile.

“Jack McClure, well, it’s been too long!” she said with genuine pleasure.

He kissed her on the cheek as Taffy, their Irish setter, came bounding in, tongue lolling, tail wagging furiously.

“We’ve finished dinner,” Candy said, “but there’s plenty of leftovers.”

“I just ate, thanks,” Jack said.

While he and Candy went into the family room, Molly trooped upstairs to do her homework.

“I have cherry pie,” Candy said with a twinkle in her eye. “Your favorite, if memory serves.”

Jack laughed despite his black mood. “Nothing wrong with your memory.”

Seeing no way out, he allowed her to bustle around the open kitchen, Taffy happily trotting at her heels. She was a statuesque woman with ash-blond hair and a wide, open face. In her youth, she’d been a real beauty. Now, in later middle age, she possessed a different kind of beauty, as well as an enviable serenity. She cut a slice of pie as generous as her figure, took a bowl of homemade whipped cream out of the refrigerator, piled on a huge dollop.

“Milk or coffee?” she said as she plunked the plate and fork down on the pass-through. Taffy came around, sat on her haunches, her long, clever face turned up to Jack.

“Coffee, please.” Jack rubbed Taffy’s forehead with his knuckles, and the dog growled in pleasure. He picked up the fork. “How many people is this portion supposed to feed?”

Candy, pouring his coffee into a mug she herself had made in pottery class, giggled. “I can’t help it if I still consider you a growing boy, Jack.” She padded over with the mug. She remembered he liked his coffee straight. “Anyway, you’re looking far too gaunt to suit me.” She put a hand over his briefly. “Are you getting along all right?”

Jack nodded. “I’m doing fine.”

Candy’s expression indicated she didn’t believe him. “You should come over here more often. Egon misses you.” She indicated with her head. “So does Good Golly Miss Molly.”

“Molly’s grown up. She’s got her own friends now.”

Candy pulled a mock face. “D’you think she’d ever stop loving her uncle Jack? Shame on you. That’s not how this family works.”

Jack felt as if he were dying inside. Here was a picture of his own family life … if only so many things had happened differently. “The pie’s delicious.” He smacked his lips. “Is Egon upstairs? I’d like a minute of his time.”

“Unfortunately, no,” she said. “He called to say he was staying extra late at the morgue, some kind of hush-hush government case. But you should go on over there. He’ll be happy for the company. And you know Egon, he can lend an ear with the best of them.”

Candy flattened down the front of her dress. “I wish you and Sharon would patch things up.”

Jack stared down at the remains of crust. “Well, you know how it is.”

“No, I don’t,” Candy said rather firmly. “You love each other. It’s obvious even to a nonromantic like my Egon.”

Jack sighed. “I don’t know about love, but Sharon doesn’t like me very much right now. Maybe she never will again.”

“That’s just defeatist talk, my dear.” Candy put away the pie and washed the whipped cream bowl. “Everything changes. All marriages survive if both of you want it to.” She dried her hands on a green-and-white-striped dish towel. “You’ve got to work at it.”

Jack looked up. “Do you and Egon work at it?”

“Goodness, yes.” Candy came over, leaned on the pass-through. “We’ve had our ups and downs just like everyone else, I daresay. But the essential thing is that we both want the same thing—to be together.” She looked at him with her wise eyes. “That’s what you want, isn’t it, to be with her?”

Jack nodded mutely.

Candy pushed the plate aside and began to shoo him out of the family room. Taffy barked unhappily. “Go on now.” She kissed him warmly. “Go see my man, and I hope he makes you feel better.”

“Thanks, Candy.”

She stood at the door. “You can thank me by showing up on my doorstep more often.”

Quiet as a morgue, Jack thought as he entered the ME’s office. In times past, that little joke would have put a smile on his face, but not tonight. He walked down the deserted corridors, hearing only the soft draw of the massive air conditioners. There was a mug half-filled with coffee on Schiltz’s desk, but no sign of the man himself. The mug was inscribed with the phrase WORLD’S BEST DAD, a years-ago present from Molly. Jack put his finger into the coffee, found it still warm. His friend was here somewhere.

The autopsy room was similarly still. All the coldly gleaming chrome and stainless steel made it look like Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. All that was needed were a couple of bolts of lightning. A dim glow came from the cold room. Jack stood on the threshold, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He remembered the time he’d taken Emma here. She was writing a paper on forensic medicine during the year the vocation had fired her interest. He’d been here many times, but he found it enlightening to see it through her eager, young eyes. Egon had met them, taken them around, explained everything, answered Emma’s seemingly endless questions. But when she said, “Why does God allow people to be murdered?” Egon shook his head and said, “If I knew that, kiddo, I’d know everything.”

Jack saw that one of the cold slabs had been drawn out of the wall. No doubt holding part of the hush-hush work that chained Egon to the office so late at night. Jack stepped forward, was on the point of calling out Egon’s name when he heard the noises. It sounded as if the entire cold room had come alive and was breathing heavily. Then he saw Egon.

He was on the cold slab, lying facedown on top of Ami, his assistant. He was naked and so was she. Their rhythmic movements acid-etched the true nature of Egon’s hush-hush work onto Jack’s brain.

Jack, his mind in a fog, stood rooted for a moment. He struggled to make sense of what he was seeing, but it was like trying to digest a ten-pound steak. It just wasn’t going to happen.

On stiff legs, he backed out of the cold room, turned, and went back down the corridor to Egon’s office. Plunking himself into Egon’s chair, he stared at the coffee. Well, that wasn’t going to do it. He pawed through the desk drawers until he found Egon’s pint of singlebarrel bourbon, poured three fingers’ worth into the coffee. He put the mug to his lips and drank the brew down without even wincing. Then he sat back.

For Egon Schiltz—family man, churchgoing, God-fearing fundamentalist—to be schtupping a cookie on the side was unthinkable. What would God say, for God’s sake? Another of Jack’s little jokes that tonight failed to bring a smile to his face. Or joy to his heart, which now seemed to be a dead cinder lying at the bottom of some forgotten dust heap.

He thought about leaving before Egon came back and saw that his “hush-hush work” was now an open secret, but he couldn’t get his body to move. He took another slug of the single-barrel, reasoning that it might help, but it only served to root him more firmly in the chair.

And then it was too late. He heard the familiar footsteps coming down the corridor, and then Egon appeared. He stopped short the moment he saw Jack, and unconsciously ran a hand through his tousled hair.

“Jack, this is a surprise!”

I’ll bet it is, Jack thought. “Guess where I just came from, Egon?”

Schiltz spread his hands, shook his head.

“How about a clue, then? I was just treated to the best cherry pie on God’s green earth.” Was that a tremor at the left side of Schiltz’s head? “And speaking of God …”

“You know.”

“I saw.”

Schiltz hid his face in his hands.

“How long?”

“Six months.”

Jack stood up. “I just … what the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I was … tempted.”

“Tempted?” Jack echoed hotly. “Doesn’t the Bible tell us again and again, ad nauseam, how God deals with the tempted? Doesn’t the Bible teach you to be strong morally, to resist temptation?”

“Those … people didn’t have Ami working next to them every day.”

“Wait a minute, if that’s your excuse, you’re nothing but a hypocrite.”

Schiltz was visibly shaken. “I’m not a hypocrite, Jack. You know me better than that.” He sank into a visitor’s chair. “I’m a man, with a man’s foibles.” He glanced up, and for a moment a certain fire burned in his eyes. “I make mistakes just like everyone else, Jack. But my belief in God, in the morals he gave us, hasn’t changed.”

Jack spread his arms wide. “Then how do you explain this?”

“I can’t.” Schiltz hung his head.

Jack shook his head. “You want to cheat on Candy, go right ahead, I’m the last person to stop you. Except I know from personal experience how affairs fuck up marriages, how they poison the love one person has for another, how there’s no hope of going back to the love.”

Schiltz, elbows on knees, looked up at him bleakly. “Don’t say that,” he whispered.

“Another truth you don’t want to hear.” Jack came around the desk. “If you want to risk a broken marriage, who the hell am I to stop you, Egon? That’s not why I’m pissed off. I’m pissed off because you go to church every Sunday with your family, you’re pious and righteous—you denounce so-called sexual degenerates, ridicule politicians—especially Democrats—who’ve had affairs exposed. It’s been easy for you to identify sinners from your high pedestal. But I wonder how easy it’ll be now. You’re not one of God’s chosen, Egon. By your actions—by your own admission—you’re just one of us sinners.”

Egon sighed. “You’re right, of course. I deserve every epithet you hurl at me. But, my God, I love Candy, you have to know that. I’d rather cut off my right arm than hurt her.”

“I feel the same way, so don’t worry. I’m not going to tell her.”

“Well, I’m grateful for that. Thank you, Jack.”

An awkward silence fell over them.

“Weren’t you ever tempted, Jack?”

“What does it matter? This is about you, Egon. You and Candy, when you get right down to it. You can’t have her and Ami, too, because if you do, you’ll never be able to hold your head up in church again. I doubt even God would forgive that sin.”

“Feet of clay.” Schiltz nodded. “I’ve been laid low.”

There was a rustling in the corridor and a moment later Ami entered, a clipboard in one hand, a pen in the other. She froze when she saw Jack. “Oh, I didn’t know you were here, Mr. McClure.”

“You must have been away from your desk.” Jack saw her eyes flicker.

She was about to hand her boss the clipboard when she saw his stricken face. “Is everything all right, Dr. Schiltz?”

“Egon,” Jack said. “You should call him Egon.”

Ami took one look at Jack, then at Schiltz’s face, and fled the room.

“Go on, make jokes at my expense, Jack.” Schiltz shook his head ruefully. “God will forgive me.”

“Is this the same God that was supposed to look after Candy, or Emma?”

“I remember,” Schiltz said. “I remember when everything was different, simpler.”

“Now you sound like an old man,” Jack said.

“Tonight I feel old.” Schiltz sipped his bourbon and made a face. It wasn’t single-barrel or anything close.

They were sitting in a late-night bar off Braddock Avenue, not far from the office. It was attached to a motel. While the interior was not quite so seedy as the motel itself, the clientele was a whole lot seedier. A low ceiling with plastic beams, sixty-watt bulbs further dimmed by dusty green-glass shades, torn vinyl-covered banquettes, a jukebox ringing out Muddy Waters and B. B. King tended to attract a fringe element right at home with the bleak dislocation of midnight with nowhere to go, no one to be with.

“Think of your daughter, then.”

Schiltz shook his head. “I can’t think of Molly without thinking of Emma.”

“Actually, it’s Emma I came to see you about,” Jack said.

Schiltz’s face brightened considerably.

“It’s something … well, something I can’t explain.”

Schiltz leaned forward. “Tell me.”

Jack took a deep breath. “I’m seeing Emma.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I heard her talk to me from the backseat of my car.”

“Jack—”

“She said, ‘Dad.’ I heard her as clearly as I’m hearing you.”

“Listen to me now, Jack. I’ve heard of these manifestations before. Actually, they’re not uncommon. You think you’re seeing Emma because your guilt is too much to bear. You feel you’re complicit in the tragedy, that if you’d been able to pay more attention—” Schiltz held up a hand. “But we’ve been over all that too many times already. I’m genuinely sorry that nothing’s changed for you, Jack.”

“So you don’t believe me, either.”

“I didn’t say that. I fervently believe that you saw Emma, that she spoke to you, but it was all in your head.” Schiltz took a breath. “We die, we go to heaven … or to hell. There are no ghosts, no wandering spirits.”

“How d’you know?”

“I know the Bible, Jack. I know the word of God. Spiritualism is a game for charlatans. They play on the guilt and the desperate desire of the grieving to speak to their loved ones who’ve passed on.”

“It isn’t just life and death, Egon. There’s something more, something we can’t see or feel. Something unknown.”

“Yes, there is,” Schiltz said softly. “His name is God.”

Jack shook his head. “This is beyond God, or the Bible, or even his laws.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“How can you not even accept the possibility that there’s something out there—something unknowable—that isn’t God-based?”

“Because everything is God-based, Jack. You, me, the world, the universe.”

“Except that Emma’s appearance doesn’t fit into your God-based universe.”

“Of course it does, Jack.” Schiltz drained his glass. “As I said, she’s a manifestation of your insupportable grief.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Schiltz presented him with an indulgent smile. “I’m not.”

“See, that’s what I think gets you religious guys in trouble. You’re so damn sure of yourselves about all these issues that can’t be proved.”

“That’s faith, Jack.” Egon ordered them another round. “There’s no more powerful belief system in the world.”

Jack waited while the bourbons were set in front of them, the empty glasses taken away.

“It’s comforting to have faith, to know there’s a plan.”

Schiltz nodded. “Indeed it is.”

“So if something bad happens—like, for instance, your nineteen-year-old daughter running her car into a tree and dying—you don’t have to think. You can just say, well, that’s part of the plan. I don’t know what that plan is, I can’t ever know, but, heck, it’s there, all right. My daughter’s death had meaning because it was part of the plan.”

Schiltz cleared his throat. “That’s putting it a bit baldly, but, yes, that’s essentially correct.”

Jack set aside the raw-tasting bourbon. He’d had more than enough liquor for one night.

“Let me ask you something, Egon. Who in their right mind wants a fucked-up plan like that?”

Schiltz clucked his tongue. “Now you sound like one of those missionary secularists.”

“I’m disappointed but hardly surprised to hear you say that.” Jack made interlocking rings on the table with the bottom of his glass. “Because I’m certainly not a missionary secularist.”

“Okay. Right now because of Emma’s death you’re cut off from God.”

“Oh, I was cut off from that branch of thinking a long time ago,” Jack said. “Now I’m beginning to think there’s another way, a third alternative.”

“Either you believe in God or you don’t,” Schiltz said. “There’s no middle ground.”

Jack looked at his friend. They’d spent so many years dancing around this topic, holding it at bay for the sake of their friendship. But a line had been crossed tonight, he felt, from which there was no turning back. “No room for debate, no movement from beliefs written in stone.”

“The Ten Commandments were written in stone,” Schiltz pointed out, “and for a very good reason.”

“Didn’t Moses break the tablets?”

“Stop it, Jack.” Schiltz called for the check. “This is leading us nowhere.”

Which, Jack thought, was precisely the problem. “So what happens now?” he said.

“Frankly, I don’t know.”

Schiltz stared into the middle distance, where a couple of dateless women who had given up for the night were dancing with each other while Elvis crooned “Don’t Be Cruel.”

His eyes slowly drew into themselves and he focused on Jack. “The truth is, I’m afraid to go home. I’m afraid of what Candy would do if she found out, afraid of the disgrace I’d come under in my church. I can tell you there are friends of mine who’d never talk to me again.”

Jack waited a moment to gather his thoughts. He was mildly surprised to learn that whatever anger he’d felt toward Egon had burned itself out with the bourbon they’d thrown down their throats. The truth was, he felt sad.

“I wish I could help you with all that,” Jack said.

Schiltz put up a hand. “My sin, my burden.”

“What I can offer is another perspective. What’s happened tonight is a living, breathing test of your iron-bound faith. You live within certain religious and moral lines, Egon. They allow for no deviation or justification. But you can’t fall back on any religious fiction. God didn’t tell you to have an affair with Ami, and neither did the devil. It was you, Egon. You made the conscious choice, you crossed a line you’re forbidden to cross.”

Schiltz shook his head wearily. “Would Candy forgive me? I just don’t know.”

“When I saw her earlier tonight, she told me in no uncertain terms just how strong your love is for each other. You’ve been through bad patches before, Egon, and you’ve managed to work through them.”

“This is so big, though.”

“Candy’s got a big heart.”

Schiltz peered at Jack through the low light, the beery haze. “Have you forgiven Sharon?”

“Yes,” Jack said, “I have.” And that was the moment he realized that he was telling the truth, the moment he understood why her unreasoning outburst had cut him so deeply.

Jack cocked his head. “So who are you now, Egon? You see, I can forgive what you’ve done, I can look past the part you play, the lies you’ve maintained, and still love the man beneath, despite your betrayal of Candy and Molly—and of me, for that matter. You’re my friend, Egon. That’s what’s important in life. Friends fuck up, occasionally they do the wrong thing, they’re forgiven. The religious thing—well, in my view, it’s not relevant here. It’s what you do now as a man, Egon, as a human being, that will determine whether you live the rest of your life as a lie, or whether you begin to change. Whether or not that includes telling Candy is entirely up to you.”

The Everly Brothers were singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” The two listless women on the dance floor seemed to have fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

“This is a chance to get to know yourself, Egon, the real you that’s been hidden away for years beneath the Bible. I’ve seen bits of him out in the woods with our daughters, fishing, looking up at the stars, telling ghost stories.”

Schiltz downed the last of his bourbon, stared down at the table with its empty glasses, damp rings, crumpled napkins. “I don’t believe I fully understood you, until tonight.”

He turned away, but not before Jack caught the glimmer of a tear at the corner of his eye.

“I don’t …” Schiltz tried to clear the emotion out of his throat. “I don’t know whether I have the strength to get to know myself, Jack.”

“Well, I don’t know either, Egon.” Jack threw some money on the table. “But I’d lay odds that you’re going to try.”

30

The Spanish Steps, running on Twenty-second Street, between Decatur Place and S Street NW, was part of the luxe, lushly treed Dupont Circle area of Washington. Its formal name was the rather dull Decatur Terrace Steps, but no one, especially the residents of the Circle, called it that. They preferred the infinitely more romantic name that conjured up the real Spanish Steps in Rome. By any name, however, it was a delightful stone-and-concrete staircase guarded on either side by ornamental lampposts and crowned at its summit by a leonine fountain. By day, children could be seen running and squealing around the mouth of the great beast from whose mouth water spewed in a constant stream. At night, it gathered to itself a certain Old World charm that made it a favorite assignation spot of young lovers and adulterers alike.

Calla stood waiting for Ronnie Kray at the top of the steps. She had arrived a few minutes before midnight so that she could drink in the nighttime glow that illuminated the steps in a sepia tint. One of the lamppost lights on the right was out, and the resulting pool of shadows spilled across the stairs in a most pleasing manner. Couples strolled arm in arm, perhaps kissed chastely, then ran across the street laughing or stood on the corner, waiting for their radio-dispatched taxis to arrive.

Though she worked long and hard for the First American Secular Revivalists, and was as rational as the members who sat on either side of her, she was, at heart, a true romantic. Perhaps this was why she was drawn to Ronnie. Though she knew he was in his mid-fifties, he looked a decade younger. Perhaps that was because he was possessed of a romantic streak with which she could identify. Besides, he treated her like a lady, not like a kid, the way many at FASR did, especially Chris and Peter. She hated that they never took her suggestions seriously. Ronnie did. Ronnie got her, and she loved him for that.

She couldn’t help furtively watching a young couple sitting on the steps, perhaps halfway down, necking. Calla imagined herself in the girl’s place, her lover’s hands on her warm flesh, and envied her. She’d come to Washington three years ago from Grand Rapids in search of a husband with a good job and solid family values. But finding that kind of man proved more difficult than she had imagined. She’d dated men who were either windbags or hopeless narcissists. And she’d deflected a number of married men who wanted to bed her, sometimes desperately. Switching to plan B, she’d thrown herself body and soul into FASR, a cause she believed in—fine for her sense of justice, bad for her love life.

As if from an invisible vibration, her head swung around and she saw him coming, stepping off the street onto the rectangular plaza at the top of the stairs where she waited for him.

“Hello, Ronnie,” she said softly as he bent, his lips brushing her cheek.

“You came.”

“Of course I came!” She looked deep into his dark eyes. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You could have changed your mind,” Kray said. “People do, at the last minute.”

“Well, I don’t,” Calla said firmly. He had taught her to stand up for what she believed, even with Chris and Peter. Terrifying and exhilarating all at once, like being on a roller coaster.

She shivered in the gusts of wind swirling around the fountain. The lovers on the steps had left, no doubt for a warm bed somewhere. The steps were clearing of people.

He put his arm around her. “Are you cold?”

“A little.”

“Then let’s get some hot coffee into you. Would you like that?”

Calla nodded, rested her head on his chest. She liked the bulk of him, the heft. She often thought of him as a sheltering cove.

He began to lead her down the steps.

She tugged against him gently, almost playfully. “Don’t you want to go to Cafe Luna?”

“This is a special night.” He continued to steer her down. “I’ve got a special place in mind.”

They entered that area of the Spanish Steps where, because of the burned-out bulb, shadows billowed out across the stone and concrete like ink from an overturned bottle.

“Where are you taking me?” Calla asked. “Have we been there before?”

“It’s a surprise,” was all he said to her. “I promise you’ll like it.”

Huge trees rose far above their heads, the skeletal branches scratching the sky, as if trying to dig the diamond-hard stars out of a setting made milky by the District’s million lights. In among this winter bower Calla shivered again, and Kray held her tighter, one arm around her waist.

All of a sudden, he lurched against her, as if his left ankle had turned over on a stone. She stumbled against the trunk of one of the trees and, as she did so, Kray stabbed her once in the back. So precise was the thrust, so practiced the hand, so unwavering the intent, the wickedly sharpened paletta did the rest.

Kray held her lifeless body and glanced around. Had anyone been looking, they’d have seen a man holding his drunk or ill wife, but as luck would have it, no one was about. Kray slowly laid Calla’s body at the bole of the tree. With quick, practiced movements, he snapped on surgeon’s gloves, pulled out the cell phone he’d taken from one of Alli’s Secret Service guards, put it into her hand, pressed her fingers around it, then threw it into a nearby evergreen bush. Then he picked up the paletta. It was such a superb implement; it had penetrated through cloth, skin, and viscera with such ease, there was hardly any blood on it. He pocketed the weapon and, his mission accomplished, vanished into the shadowy forest of swaying trees.

31

It’s a universal law of teenhood that the bully always returns for more. Maybe he’s drawn to what he perceives as weakness, because other people’s weakness makes him stronger. Maybe he’s a sadist and can’t help himself. Or maybe he just can’t leave well enough alone. In any event, Andre returns to Jack’s life, stronger, meaner, more determined than ever.

It’s as if he’s been biding his time, accumulating power, calculating his return like a general who’s been forced to make a strategic retreat from the field of battle. The source of his newfound power isn’t only his patron, Cyril Tolkan, but a supplier he’s found on his own—a man named Ian Brady.

“One thing fo’ sho,” Gus says with a fair amount of scorn, “Ian Brady ain’t no black man. Shit, Ian Brady ain’t no American name, no way, no how. But, shee-it, he a ghost, that man, ’cause none a my snitches know shit ’bout him. I mean, who the fuck is he? Where he come from? Who’s his contacts? He got so much fuckin’ juice, he could light up alla D.C.”

This tirade occurs one evening when Jack and Gus are at home, listening to James Brown. Jack has made a couple of purchases at the local record store and is eager to both hear them and share them with Gus. In the wake of Gus’s rant, he wonders whether he should keep the LPs under wraps, but having brought up the subject during dinner, he has no choice.

“Huh! I mighta known!” Gus says, holding the cardboard sleeves in his massive hand. “Elvis Presley an’ the Rolling Stones. White boys, jus’ like you. And some of ’em look like they ain’t eaten in weeks!”

“Just listen, will you? You’re such a hard-ass!”

“Well, I heard Elvis, an’ he ain’t half-bad. So play this here other, so’s I can see whut yo’ taste in music’s like.”

Jack carefully slides the James Brown disc back in its sleeve, then rolls out the black vinyl disc of Out of Our Heads, puts the needle down, and out blasts “Mercy, Mercy.” After the last jangling bars of “One More Try” fade into the walls, Gus turns to Jack, says, “Play dat again, son.”

Jack puts the needle back on the first cut, and Mick Jagger starts it up.

Gus shakes his head in wonder. “Shee-it, fo’ skinny little white boys, they sho-nuff do shout.”

Jack now goes regularly to the library on G Street NW. At first, he went because Reverend Taske urged him to, but lately he’s realized that he likes going. Because of Taske’s training, he’s tamed his fright of reading new texts; it’s become more of a challenge, a way out of the strange little world his dyslexia shoved him into.

He loves the dusty air, golden with motes of history. He loves opening books at random, finding himself engrossed, so that he goes back, starts at page one and doesn’t stop until he’s devoured the last word. Unlike movies and TV that show him everything, even if he doesn’t like it, books transport him into the world of his own imagination. As long as he can create pictures from the words he reads—scenes filled with characters, conflict, good and evil—he can build a world that’s in many ways closer to the one other people inhabit. And this makes him feel less like an outsider. He feels he is that much closer to rubbing shoulders with the passersby on the street. This is the atmosphere that draws him day after day into the dusty quietude, calm as a still lake. But in those depths something waits for him, as it does almost every teenager: the fear that recurs, the fear that needs to be faced.

Jack comes face-to-face with his one Monday afternoon. He’s back in the stacks, pulling down massive treatises on his latest passion: criminal psychology. A head in the book precludes vigilance. But who would think to be vigilant in a District public library? That’s how Andre thinks, anyway. He’s been following Jack to G Street every day for a week, until he’s familiar with the schedule. It says something about just how deep his feelings of vengeance run that he’s been on surveillance for five straight days when he could be negotiating his next shipment of smack from Ian Brady.

But some things are more important than H, more important than greenbacks, because they cry out to be resolved. And, frankly, Andre can’t rest easy until this particular matter is resolved to his satisfaction.

Jack doesn’t hear him as Andre creeps up from behind. Andre, in crepe-soled shoes he’s bought for the occasion, approaches slowly, relishing the end to the ache that’s been inside him ever since Cyril Tolkan delivered his punishment.

At the very end, he makes his rush, silent, filled with the power of righteous rage. He grabs Jack by his collar, lifts him bodily into the air, slams him against the rear wall. Shelves tremble; books spill onto the floor. Andre, his eyes alight with bloodlust, jams a forearm across Jack’s windpipe both to silence him and to subdue him as quickly as possible. Though he’s filled with a desire for vengeance, Andre is nothing if not pragmatic. He doesn’t want to get caught in here with a dead or dying body. He has no intention of going into whitey’s slammer, either now or ever.

With a tiny snik! he flicks open his switchblade. His victim seems so stunned, his hands aren’t even up, trying to pry his forearm away. Maybe he doesn’t have enough oxygen to act. Either way, it doesn’t matter to Andre, who jabs the point of the blade in toward Jack’s diaphragm. He’s aiming for the soft spot just below the sternum, to drive the long, slender blade upward into Jack’s heart.

Jack’s hands, down by his sides, have not, however, been idle. His left hand has kept its grip on the thick hardcover book he’s been reading, and now, as he hears the telltale snik! of the switchblade, he reflexively presses the tome to his chest. The point of the knife encounters cotton, pasteboard, and paper instead of flesh. Andre’s eyes widen in surprise, then squeeze shut as Jack’s knee plows hard into his testicles.

As Andre begins to double over, Jack’s windpipe is freed. He sucks in a great lungful of air, brings the book up, jams its edge into Andre’s neck. To maintain the maximum force, he’s obliged to keep both his hands on the spine of the book and so lacks the means to force Andre to drop the switchblade. This weapon now swings back and forth like a pendulum with a razor’s edge, grazing first Jack’s ear, then his shoulder. With each wild pass, Jack feels searing pain, and hot blood begins running down him. The next arc could find his carotid artery.

Gritting his teeth, he jams the book harder into Andre’s throat, hears a crackle like a sheet of paper being crumpled prior to being thrown away. Then Andre’s mouth opens wide, emits a sound like a grandfather clock about to break down.

Jack, staring into Andre’s bloodshot eyes, begins to cry. Part of him knows what’s happening, what the outcome will be, but that part must stand aside while the organism is in danger. Andre, in a last, desperate attempt to kill, brings the edge of the switchblade up to the level of Jack’s ear. He points it inward, aiming for the canal opening. Jack, terrified, shifts his weight. The corner of the book penetrates into the hole made by the fracture of Andre’s cricoid cartilage. All air is cut off.

Andre’s knife hand moves. The point of the switchblade is almost at the canal opening. Jack leans in with all his weight; more of the book pushes inside Andre. Andre’s knife hand begins to tremble; the momentum falters. Tears are streaming down Jack’s cheeks. They fall onto Andre, into his wound. Andre’s eyes stare at him. They are unreadable.

There is now a contest of wills. Andre can no longer breathe, but he holds the knife. All he has to do is summon the strength to jam it point-first into Jack’s ear. There is a moment of stasis, when the power, the wills of both boys are held in balance. Nothing moves. The small sounds of the library, the occasional whisper, the soft pad of footfalls, the tiny, very particular sound of a book being slipped out from between its neighbors, all seem exaggerated, like the sounds of insects deep in the forest. All the trappings of civilization have become irrelevant, useless. All that remains are the tiny symphony of sounds and the beating of your own heart.

Nature abhors stasis; like fame, it’s fleeting, though its seconds may seem like minutes. Jack feels the point of the knife enter his ear canal, and he twists the corner of the book. Andre’s eyes roll up; his lips are drawn back in a rictus. He has nothing left, only a helpless rage that ushers him rudely from life to death.

Jack, panting like a sick dog, lies against Andre’s crumpled form. He feels as if a light has gone out in the depths of his soul, as if he has lost a part of himself. He is in shock, stunned at what has occurred. There are no words, no thoughts in his head adequate to what he’s feeling. Soon enough, he begins to shake with a profound chill. The strong copper taste of blood is on his tongue, but whether it’s his blood or Andre’s or both is impossible to say.

In a dim dead-end of the library where no one comes, he lies in a daze, in a kind of trancelike state, remembering an Indian parable from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna he came across weeks ago. It happened that a tigress, large with an unborn cub, attacked a herd of goats. As it sprang forward to grip in its teeth a terrified goat, the goatherd shot it. The tigress fell, and in that moment before she expired, she gave birth to her cub. The cub grew up with the goats, eating grass and, mimicking its adopted brothers and sisters, bleating. Until the day a male tiger found the herd. It quite naturally attacked the youngster, who did not fight back, but only bleated. The male tiger gripped the adolescent by the scruff of his neck, dragged him to the river.

“Look at our reflections,” the male tiger said. “You and I are as brothers. Why do you bleat like a goat? Why do you live with them instead of feasting on them?”

“I like grass,” the adolescent replied.

“Because grass is all you know.”

Whereupon the male tiger leapt upon a goat, tore out its throat. The adolescent was close enough to the feast to taste the goat’s blood. Then he put his head down and bit into the flesh, which he discovered he liked much more than the taste of grass.

The male tiger lifted his head, watching the adolescent gorge himself on goat meat. With his great muzzle covered in blood, he said, “Now you and I are the same. Now you know your true Self. Follow me into the forest.”

Jack, weeping still, gets to his feet. He dries his eyes and, finding his shirtfront bloodied, grabs his jacket off the back of a chair, puts it on. He finds that if he buttons the jacket up to his neck, the blood is hidden.

On the verge of leaving, he turns to regard Andre. What has happened has affirmed a notion embedded in his subconscious for a number of years: It isn’t simply his dyslexia that’s made him an Outsider. He won’t bleat and run like a goat. He won’t ever rub shoulders with the passersby on the street; he doesn’t want to. Like the tiger, he stands apart. The jungle is his home, not the cultivated field.

32

Once every two weeks or so, Secretary Dennis Paull scheduled a senior staff meeting at dawn, much to the grumbling of those closest to him. There was no obvious reason for doing this except to keep them on their toes, which is what pissed off his senior staff because it cut into their social lives. God forbid they should attend one of Paull’s senior staff meetings with a yawn or, worse, hungover. The secretary would hang them out to dry in front of their colleagues.

The meetings were held at Fort McNair, which was a building that didn’t look like a fort and was in the heart of downtown Washington. No one understood why the meetings were held at an army base and not at Homeland Security HQ, but no one had the intestinal fortitude to query Secretary Paull. Consequently, people thought he was simply eccentric and this behavior, along with numerous other peccadilloes, simply became part of the Beltway lore concerning him.

This was precisely what Dennis Paull had in mind. He never did or said anything without a specific reason, though that reason, like the moves of a chess player, was not always readily apparent. The reason Paull scheduled the meetings at the crack of dawn was because virtually no one was around. The reason he held them at Fort McNair was that it was a place within which even the president couldn’t track him.

This particular morning, at precisely 0617, Secretary Paull called a ten-minute break, pushed his chair back, and strode from the conference room. He walked down a number of halls, went down a flight of stairs, up another just to reassure himself that he was absolutely alone. Then he ducked into the men’s room at the rear of the third floor. No one stood by the row of sinks; no one was using the urinals. He went down the row of stalls, opening each door to ensure no one was in temporary residence.

Then he banged open the door to the last stall in the row and said, “Good morning, sir.”

Edward Carson, the president-elect, who had been reading the Washington Post, stood up, folded the paper under one arm, and said, “No need to call me sir yet, Dennis.”

“Never too early to get started, sir.”

The two men emerged from the stall. “Imagine what the Drudge Report would say about this,” Carson grunted. “We’re all alone?”

“Like Adam before Eve.”

Carson frowned. “What news of Alli? Lyn is beside herself.”

Paull knew it wasn’t presidential for Carson to add that he was also beside himself. Presidents never lost their cool, no matter how dire the straits. “I believe we’re closer to finding her today than we were yesterday.”

“Knock off the media-speak,” Carson said testily. “This is my daughter we’re talking about.”

“Yessir.” Paull rubbed his chin. “The ball is in your man’s court. I’ve given McClure every ounce of freedom I possibly can without showing my hand to the POTUS.”

Carson’s frown deepened. “But is that going to be enough, Dennis?”

“I’d be lying if I said I knew for sure, sir. But you and McClure go back quite a ways, from what you tell me, and you’ve said he’s the best man for the job.”

“And I stand by that,” the president-elect said stiffly.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Paull went on, “my agent agrees with you.”

“The only thing that’s going to make me feel better is the safe return of my daughter.”

There was a sudden noise outside, and both men went completely still. Paull held up a finger, crossed to the door, pulled it open quickly. One of the cleaning personnel was turning a corner. When he was out of sight, Paull ducked back into the men’s room, shook his head in the negative.

“I had to deliver Yukin into the POTUS’s hands,” Paull said. “I had the evidence against Mikilin, and I gave it to the POTUS before he left for Moscow. I attended a celebration of sorts following the POTUS’s return. He’s got the Russian president in his back pocket now, so does he demand exports from RussOil, as I suggested? Does he forge a pact to create a joint strategic uranium reserve, as I also suggested? No, of course not. Instead, he’s spent the ammunition I gave him obtaining Yukin’s promise to back the POTUS when he makes his final national-policy address to the nation. In it, he’s going to charge that the government has direct evidence that Beijing is funding E-Two, and that the First American Secular Revivalists are, in fact, a front for E-Two. And where d’you think that bogus evidence will come from? Moscow, of course. And no one will be able to say it’s false.” Paull crossed to the door once again, put his ear to it. Satisfied, he returned to where Carson waited for him. “The POTUS is going to declare war on the missionary secularists of any and every stripe.”

“I want to help you, Dennis, but until Alli is returned to me safe and sound, my hands are tied. As long as there’s a suspicion that either E-Two or the FASR is behind her abduction, I can’t make a stand against the president.”

“I understand your overriding concern here, sir, but we’ve had a complication.”

Carson’s blue eyes bored into the secretary’s. “What kind of a complication?”

“The men I sent to keep McClure safe were compromised.”

He’d caught the president-elect’s full attention.

“Compromised in what way?”

“The POTUS’s people gave them orders to terminate.”

A deathly silence overtook them. “Jack’s safe?”

“Yessir, he is.”

“I don’t want another incident like that,” Carson said. “Am I being clear?”

Paull stiffened. He knew a rebuke when he heard one, and this one was well deserved. “Absolutely, sir.” Somewhere along the line, his careful security net had been breached. He had to find out where with all possible haste.

Carson stepped away, regarded his pale, lined face in the mirror, then turned around. “Dennis, if the POTUS got on to your men, then he knows. Jack’s not the only one in terrible danger. We are, too.”

“Yessir.” Paull nodded. “That’s the goddamned truth of it.”

33

It had been a long time since Jack woke up with a splitting headache. He clambered out of bed with the unusual care of a mountain climber with vertigo. Crawling into the shower, he turned on the cold water full-blast so that no one would hear him screaming.

Ten minutes later, when Nina called, he had crawled out of the muck of the sea and had grown a spinal cord. He figured by the time she showed up, he had a chance of being halfway human.

Still, he insisted on driving them over to the All Around Town bakery. The day was cool but sunny, which made a welcome change of pace. But according to AccuWeather, there was another front coming in that wasn’t afraid of dumping three inches of rain or something worse on them.

He was in no mood to talk, but soon enough he noticed Nina repeatedly glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.

Finally, she ventured an opinion on his physical state. “You look like crap.”

“That’s what a week without sleep will do to you.” He eyed her speculatively. She was dressed in a gray flannel suit over a cream-colored cashmere sweater. “On the other hand, you look as fresh as a plate of sushi.”

“And just as cool.” Nina laughed. “I’ll bet good money you were thinking that.”

“Actually,” Jack said, “I was thinking about what we’ll do if Joachim Tolkan hasn’t shown up from his sad trip to Miami Beach. Or, even worse, if the story he fed Oscar was a lie.”

“Since when did you become a glass-half-empty guy?”

“Since last night,” Jack said, more to himself than to her.

“What happened?”

“My ex happened,” Jack said bitterly.

“I’m sorry, Jack.” Nina put a hand briefly over his. “I once tried to get back with an old boyfriend. All that did was make me realize why we broke up in the first place.”

Wanting to get off the subject of exes, Jack said, “I grew up around here. A lot of memories, good and bad. Mysteries, too.”

“What kind of mysteries?”

“A double murder up at McMillan Reservoir, for one.”

“It went unsolved?”

Jack nodded. “Not only that, I remember there was no info at all on who was killed.”

“That is odd,” Nina acknowledged.

Jack turned a corner. “Then there was Ian Brady.”

“Who was he?”

“No one knew who he was or where he came from. But he had a huge amount of juice—too much, I’d say, for a local drug dealer. He was supplying heroin, God alone knows what else. Other suppliers were caught or killed, but not Brady. No one could lay a finger on him.”

There was a sporty cabernet-colored Mercedes coupe parked in front of the All Around Town bakery, and Jack took this as a good sign. The bell rang as they walked in, and there was Oscar behind the counter.

“Boss just got here,” he said as soon as he saw them enter. “Wait right there.” He disappeared into the back. A moment later, he returned with a man whose only genetic connection with his father was his olive-gray complexion. He was tall and slim, dapper as his dad, though.

His expression was quizzical, curious, free from his father’s dark guile. “Oscar said you wanted to see me.”

“That’s right.”

Nina produced her Homeland Security ID. Jack made the introductions, gave their condolences for his loss.

Joachim Tolkan held out his hand.

Jack hadn’t expected this. He didn’t want to shake Joachim Tolkan’s hand, the son of a murderer, but he saw no way out. The moment he took Joachim’s hand, he felt an electric shock travel up his arm. It was as if he’d made contact with Cyril Tolkan from beyond the grave.

“Are you all right, Mr. McClure? You went white there for a moment.”

“I’m fine,” Jack lied.

“We just need a couple of moments of your time, Mr. Tolkan,” Nina said in her best neutral voice.

“No problem.” Joachim Tolkan lifted an arm. “Why don’t we continue this discussion in my office? That way we can all sit down and relax.” He turned to Oscar. “How about some coffee for our guests?”

As Nina passed Oscar, he handed her a chocolate-chip cookie, along with a wink.

Tolkan led them back through the oven room, hotter than Hades despite the exhaust fans and air-conditioning. To the right was a door through which he took them.

Jack found himself in a surprisingly large, pleasantly furnished office, complete with an upholstered sofa, coffee table, a pair of lamps. A full bathroom was to the right and beside it a short hallway that led to what appeared to be a bedroom.

“I stay here to all hours,” Joachim Tolkan said, noticing Jack’s scrutiny. He shrugged. “Anyway, no point in going back to the house these days. It’s become the soon-to-be ex’s territory.”

As Tolkan settled himself behind his desk, Oscar arrived with a tray filled with mugs and a carafe of coffee. Oscar slid it onto the low table in front of the sofa and left, closing the door behind him.

“Help yourselves.” When neither Jack nor Nina made a move to the tray, Tolkan said, “I’m curious. What does the Department of Homeland Security want with me?”

“Were you a member of FASR?” Jack said.

“So far as I know that’s not a crime.”

“You dropped out three and a half months ago,” Nina said.

“Again, not a crime.” Tolkan laced his fingers together. “Where, may I ask, is this going?”

Jack walked slowly around the room, studying everything. “E-Two.”

Tolkan blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You can,” Jack said, turning to him, “but it won’t do any good.”

Tolkan spread his hands. “What’s an E-Two?”

“Doesn’t read the paper, apparently.” Nina, perched on the arm of the sofa, took a tiny bite of her chocolate-chip cookie. “My, this is good.”

“Listen.” Jack advanced toward the desk. “We’re not in the mood for lies.”

Tolkan shook his head. “Lies about what?”

Was it Jack’s imagination, or was Joachim Tolkan becoming more and more like his late father, Cyril? He found the thought intolerable. He was just about to lunge at Tolkan when, entirely without warning, Nina skimmed her cookie right at Tolkan’s head. The edge struck him just over the left eye, the impromptu missile shattering on impact.

Tolkan’s hand flew to his face. “What the hell—!” Jack reached over, grabbed Tolkan by his lapels, dragged him up off his comfortable chair so that he was half-hanging over his desk. Cookie crumbs and bits of chocolate were strewn across his Hermès tie.

“You haven’t been listening to us, Joachim.” Jack’s face was flushed; there was a murderous look in his eye. “We don’t have time for your fun and games.” Jack hurled him back into the chair. “Tell us about your involvement in E-Two.”

Now it was Tolkan’s face that was white. He looked visibly shaken. “I was sworn to secrecy.”

“Your allegiance is admirable,” Nina said with a chill Jack could feel, “but misplaced.”

“Spill it, Joachim!” Jack thundered.

Tolkan expelled a little squeak. “All right, but there really isn’t much to tell.” With a trembling hand, he pushed his hair off his forehead. “I heard about E-Two through someone I worked with at FASR. I quit when he did because he said FASR was too slow and poky, too conservative to get anywhere. He said if I was really serious about change, there was another group we could join, one that would get things done. Sounded good to me, so I said okay. Then I come to find out that E-Two’s methods are violent.”

“That didn’t attract you?” Jack said.

“What? No.”

“But your father was a violent man.”

Joachim regarded Jack with the proper amount of fear. “What does my father have to do with it?”

Jack said, “The rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the poisoned tree.”

Tolkan shook his head. “You’ve got it wrong.”

Nina crossed her arms. “So enlighten us.”

Tolkan nodded. “The truth is once I was old enough to understand how my father could afford all the luxuries I enjoyed as a kid, I stayed as far away from him as I could. It sickened me the way he’d take us all to church on Sunday, how he’d kneel, say his prayers to Jesus, quote from the Bible, and then go out and do … the things he did. I wanted no part of him, his contacts, his blood money. I worked my way through college, got an MBA from Georgetown.”

Nina came down off the sofa arm. “So how come you wound up here?”

“I worked for Goldman Sachs for a year and hated every minute of it. When I quit, I decided I wanted to be my own boss. The bakery was still going, more or less. I saw an opportunity. I stepped in, invested in advertising, in a community-outreach program. Gradually I built up the business to the point where I needed to expand.”

“And look at you now,” Nina said.

Jack put his fists on the desk. “So you expect us to believe that you never joined E-Two.”

“I didn’t,” Tolkan said, shying away. “I swear it.”

“What happened?” Nina asked.

“I felt ashamed of myself. I went back to FASR, but they wouldn’t have me. Chris said I could no longer be trusted.”

Jack said, “This friend of yours—”

“He isn’t a friend.”

“Colleague, whatever.” Jack pulled himself up. “Does he have a name?”

“Ron Kray.”

Nina checked the printout Armitage had given them. “He’s here,” she said, and read off his home address.

“That’s a phony. Kray told me. He’s very private.”

Jack wondered why the name seemed familiar to him. He racked his brain, but the answer remained frustratingly out of reach. “So where does Mr. Kray live?” he said.

“He never told me and I never asked,” Tolkan answered. “But he said he works at Sibley Memorial Hospital.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Jack said. “It’s a rehab place for the elderly. Physical and psychiatric.”

Tolkan nodded. “Ron’s a nurse there. A psychiatric nurse.”

The modern layer cake of Sibley Memorial occupied a wide swath of real estate on Sleepy Hollow Road outside of Falls Church. Nina suggested they call to see if Kray was on duty, but Jack disagreed.

“First off, I don’t want to take any chance of him being tipped off we’re coming. Secondly, even if he’s not there, the HR department is bound to have a current photo of him.”

As it turned out, Kray wasn’t on duty. In fact, the head of the psychiatric department told them he hadn’t worked there for over two years.

They were directed to the HR department, where they obtained Kray’s last known address, which matched the one on the list Chris Armitage had given them. Kray’s photo ID, however, had been destroyed.

Kray lived on Tyler Avenue, not more than six minutes away. Nina was silent during most of the drive. At length, she turned to Jack.

“You must think I’m quite the neurotic.”

Jack concentrated on his driving. This was somewhat of a new area for him, and he wanted to make sure he read every road sign.

Nina took his silence for assent. “Yeah, you do.”

“What do you care what I think?”

“For one thing, we’re working together. For another, I like you. Your mind doesn’t work like anyone else’s I’ve ever met.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

She offered a nod of assent. “In a very short time, I’ve come to trust what you call your hunches.”

“Would you call them something else?”

She nodded. “I would, yes, if I had a word to describe them. Whatever they are, they’re far more than hunches, though.” She put her head back. “You know, if I spend any more time with you, I’ll start to doubt everything I thought was true.”

She put a hand over his. “We had a moment there under the old oaks where Emma escaped from school at night.” Her forefinger curled, the nail scratched lightly, erotically along his palm. “Why don’t we take it from there?”

He braked until he could decipher a street sign. Also, to clear the air between them.

“Listen, Nina, I’m flattered. But just so there’s no misunderstanding, I’m not into on-the-job screwing.”

“Too many complications?”

The image of Sharon was beside him, with her long tanned legs, hair swept across her face, that mysterious look in her eyes he loved because he never quite knew what it meant or foretold. “Among other things.”

“What if we weren’t partners? I could arrange—”

“It wouldn’t matter.”

“Well, that’s candor for you.” Nina removed her hand. “Your ex still under your skin?”

He swung onto Tyler, slowed to a crawl.

“Okay, forget it. Privacy’s something I respect. There is, in any case, a kind of privilege in loneliness. It makes you feel alive, introduces you to yourself.”

Jack felt annoyed. “I didn’t mean that.”

“You just didn’t say it.” She took out a clove cigarette, lit up. “I have a question. D’you have any idea who Emma met underneath the oaks?”

“My daughter’s life was a closed book to me. It was as well hidden as a spy’s dead drop.”

“You never followed up on it?”

“With who?” A nerve she had nicked flared up. “My daughter’s dead.”

34

Jack went up the flagstone path, knocked on the door. Immediately, a dog began to bark. He heard a scuffling inside, then the patter of feet. The door opened, revealing a middle-aged woman in a housecoat. A cigarette was dangling from her mouth.

“Yeah?” She looked Jack square in the eye without a trace of apprehension.

Jack cleared his throat. “I’m wondering if Ron Kray is home.” The dog continued barking inside the house. The woman squinted through the smoke trailing up from her cigarette. “Who?”

“Ron Kray, ma’am.” Nina stepped up.

“Oh, him.” The woman expelled a phlegmy cough. “He used to live here. Moved out about, oh, six months ago.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Nah.” The dog’s barking had become hysterical. The woman ducked her head back inside. “For God’s sake, Mickey, shut the fuck up!” She turned back. “Sorry about that. People make him nervous. He’s probably gonna leave a deposit on the kitchen linoleum.” She grunted. “At least the carpet’ll be spared.”

“You wouldn’t happen to still get any of Kray’s mail,” Jack said.

“Not a one.” The woman took a mighty drag on her cigarette, let out a plume of smoke like Mount Saint Helens. “Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

“You did fine,” Jack said. “Can you tell me the address of the local post office?”

“I’ll do better than that.” The woman pointed the way, giving him detailed directions.

Jack thanked her, and they picked their way back down the flagstone walk.

“The post office?” Nina said as they climbed back into the car.

Jack glanced at his watch. “We just have time to get there.” He pulled out, drove down the street. “Tolkan said that Kray was a private man. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone else getting his mail. I’m betting he filed a change-of-address form before he left.”

They headed east on Tyler, while Nina finished her cigarette, turned right onto Graham Road, right again on Arlington Boulevard, then a left onto Chain Bridge Road. The post office occupied a one-story pale brick building. It looked like every other post office Jack had been to, outside and in.

He walked up to the counter, asked to see the postmistress. Ten minutes later, a hefty woman in her mid-fifties appeared, walking none too quickly. It seemed to Jack that all postal employees were constitutionally incapable of moving at anything but a sluggish pace. Then again, maybe they learned it at some secret government academy.

Jack and Nina showed their credentials, asked for a forwarding address for Ron Kray. The postmistress, who had a face like a boxing glove, told them to wait. She disappeared into the mysterious bowels of the building. Time passed, people walked in, got on line, waited, inched forward. Forms were filled out, packages were rubber-stamped, more forms were filled out, letters and more packages were rubber-stamped. People who failed to fill out the proper forms were sent to the corner stand to correct their mistakes. Jack was at the point of risking a federal offense by hurdling the counter to go after the postmistress, when she reappeared, inching snail-like toward them.

“No Ron Kray,” she said in her laconic manner. She spoke like a character straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel.

Jack took a pad and a pen, laboriously wrote down Kray’s last known address, the house they’d just come from. Tearing off the top sheet, he handed it to the postmistress, who looked as if her recent labors had tired her out. “How about a forwarding from this address?”

The postmistress peered down at the slip of paper as if it might possibly do her harm. “I don’t th

ink I can—”

“From six months ago, give or take a week.”

The postmistress looked at him bleakly. “Gonna take some time, this.”

Jack smiled. “We’ll be waiting.”

“I get off work in twelve minutes,” she pointed out.

“Not today, you don’t,” Nina said.

The postmistress glared at her, as if to say, Et tu, Brute? Then, in a huff, she shuffled off.

More time passed. The line gradually dwindled down, the last customer finally dealt with. A collective sigh of relief could be felt as the postal workers totaled up, locked their drawers, and followed their leader into the rear of the building.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she was having a cup of tea back there,” Jack said. “She looks the vindictive type.”

“Jack, about Emma—I was just trying to help.”

He looked away, said nothing.

She bit her lip. “You’re a hard man.”

She waited a moment. They were alone in the front of the post office, the entry doors having been locked.

She peered into his face. “Could we start over?”

Jack returned slowly from the black mood of last night. “Sure. Why not?”

She caught the tone of his voice. “You’re not very trusting, are you?”

“Trust has nothing to do with it,” he said, a wave of leftover anger washing over the wall of his normal reserve. “Life has taught me how not to love.”

At that moment, shuffling footsteps forestalled further discussion. The postmistress had reappeared and was heading straight toward them. She was holding a handful of forms. Nina snatched them out of her hand just as she was saying, “There are six—well, I never!”

Nina was scrutinizing them, for which Jack was grateful. Considering the tense circumstances and the watchful eyes of the postmistress, he’d have had a difficult time focusing.

Nina went through the forms one by one, shook her head. “We’re going to have to run all of these people down.” Suddenly, her eyes lit up. “Wait a minute!” She flipped back to the fifth form. “Charles Whitman. Now that’s odd. Charles Whitman was the name of the sniper who climbed the University of Texas tower in August of 1966 and in an hour and a half killed fourteen people and injured a whole lot more. Someone at the scene, I forget who, said, ‘He was our initiation into a terrible time.’”

“I remember, that was a local shopowner. I saw him interviewed.” Then Jack snapped his fingers.“That’s why Ron Kray sounded familiar to me. Ronnie Kray and his twin brother, Reggie, were a pair of notorious psycho killers in the East End of London during the fifties and sixties.”

“We’ve got him!” Nina said. “Our man’s using both Kray and Whitman as aliases.”

Jack took Kray/Whitman’s change-of-address form from her. Concentrating hard, he began to read the new address. It was in Anacostia; that much he got right away. But the street and the number eluded him, swimming away on a sea of anxiety. Of course, the street name was simplicity itself, and part of his brain had recognized it at once. The problem was, it had shied away from recognition.

“He’s at T Street SE,” Nina said.

Then she read off the number, and Jack’s hand began to shake. Their target, Ron Kray, Charles Whitman, whatever his real name was, the man who might very well have abducted Alli Carson, was living in the Marmoset’s house.

35

Few people know where Gus and Jack live; even fewer come to visit. So when Detective Stanz shows up one evening at the Maryland end of Westmoreland Avenue, Jack has cause for a certain degree of alarm. For a time, Stanz and Gus stand out on the porch, jawing away. Stanz lights a Camel, and smoke comes out his nostrils. He looks like a bull in one of those Warner Bros. cartoons, except there’s nothing funny about him. He seems to carry death around with him under his left armpit, where his service revolver is holstered.

Jack, lurking inside, hears the words “McMillan Reservoir,” so he’s reasonably certain that after the Marmoset’s murder, whoever Gus put on the double murders hasn’t come up with enough to satisfy Stanz. But apparently he’s come up with something, because Jack hears Stanz say, “I say let’s go now. There’re questions I want to ask him.”

Gus nods. He walks into the house, uses the phone out of Jack’s hearing. He returns to tell Jack that he’s going off with Stanz, that he’ll be back in a couple of hours. As he watches the two men step off the porch, Jack hurries to the desk where Gus keeps an extra set of car keys. Slipping out of the house, he just has time enough to start the white Lincoln Continental, put it in gear as he’s seen Gus do, roll out after Stanz’s dark-colored Chevy. Jack deliberately keeps the headlights off until there’s enough traffic so that neither man will pick up the Continental. He’s only ever driven around the near-deserted streets of the house, with Gus beside him talking softly, correcting his errors or overcompensations. The sweat rolls into his eyes, pours from his armpits. His mouth is dry. If a cop stopped him right this moment, he wouldn’t be able to say a word.

With a desperate effort, he finds his equilibrium. Thankfully, he only has to concentrate on the Chevy and the colors of the traffic lights. If he needed to read street signs, he’d be completely lost. He pushes a button on the dashboard, and James Brown starts shouting “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” Singing along, he thinks fleetingly of how far he’s come since “California Dreamin’” sent ugly shivers up his spine.

He notices that the Chevy is heading more or less toward the reservoir area and wonders who it is that Gus recruited to take the Marmoset’s place. It’s an unenviable position, one that almost certainly requires a higher degree of compensation than Gus is used to paying. But then, that expense will no doubt be borne by Stanz and the Metro Police.

They are traveling north on Georgia Avenue NW, overshooting the reservoir. When Stanz’s Chevy turns right on Rock Creek Church Road, Jack switches off his lights, feeling he knows where the rendezvous with Gus’s snitch is going to take place. His hunch is confirmed when he follows the Chevy onto Marshall, and then Pershing Drive. They are now skirting the west side of the flat black expanse of the U.S. Soldiers’ & Airmen’s Golf Course. Bare trees loom up in groups that no doubt vexed the duffers making their slow rounds during daylight hours. Now, however, the trees have the course to themselves.

After flicking its headlights twice, the Chevy rolls to a stop on a section of road hemmed in on both sides by trees. Immediately, Jack sees Stanz and Gus emerge from the Chevy. Stanz has kept the headlights on, and the two men follow the twin beams that cut through eerie shadows, straight down the road. Pale moths flutter, spending themselves in the glare.

Cautiously, Jack emerges from the Continental, making sure the door swings shut noiselessly but doesn’t latch. Keeping to the side of the road, he creeps from tree to tree, stepping from shadow to shadow to make sure he won’t be seen.

He’s close enough now to see that Stanz and Gus have been joined by a male figure. He stands just outside the beams of light, and Jack moves forward to try to get a look at his face. He still isn’t sure why he felt compelled to follow Gus. He knows he’s worried. Someone murdered the Marmoset because he got too close to whoever killed those two men at the McMillan Reservoir. Jack read the news story, was mildly surprised to find that there was no information about who the victims were. The article said that the identities were being withheld pending notification of the respective next of kin. But in the increasingly smaller follow-ups, no mention was ever made of the victims’ names.

As he inches closer, Jack can see that the three men are in animated discussion. Stanz’s hands are hewing the air like axes. His mouth is going a mile a minute.

“—you mean, you can’t get a name? I need a goddamned name!”

“I haven’t got one,” Gus’s snitch replies.

“Then I’ll damn well find someone who—”

“I guarantee you’ll never get the name of the murderer,” the snitch says, “either from me or anyone else.”

Jack starts as he sees Stanz pull his service revolver. If it isn’t for Gus’s intervention, Jack feels certain Stanz would have shot the snitch. As it is, Stanz leaps at him, gets in a roundhouse right before Gus grabs him around the waist, holds him bodily in check.

“Get outta here,” Gus growls. “Go on now!”

“That’s right,” Stanz howls in fury, “run away with your tail between your legs, you good-for-nothing nigger!”

Gus hurls Stanz to the ground, stands over him with the detective’s gun in his huge hand. “I’ll take alotta shit from you, but not this.” He empties Stanz’s service revolver, throws away the bullets. Then he drops the gun. “Don’t come round my place no more, heah?”

As he stalks away, Stanz yells, “Don’t expect to be paid for this!” And then as Gus squeezes behind the wheel of the Chevy and drives off, “Hey, are you leaving me here? What the fuck!”

Gus is waiting for Jack in the side yard under the shadows of the big oak. Jack, rolling in with the lights off, doesn’t see him until he steps out. Jack brakes and Gus looms up to the driver’s window, which Jack rolls down.

“Since you got yo’self used t’drivin’ the boat, you can follow me t’ the precinct so I can drop off this piece-o’-shit Chevy.”

Gus lets Jack drive on the way home, as well. He says, “Whut you ’spect t’do, out there onna golf course?”

His voice isn’t pissed off; it isn’t even querulous. If Jack didn’t know better, he’d think there was a note of tenderness.

“I was worried.”

“Huh, ’bout me?” Gus pulls out his Magnum.357.

Jack says nothing, concentrates on making it home without getting lost. He supposes this to be a lesson, what’s behind Gus’s decision to let him stay behind the wheel.

“You bring a weapon, kid?”

Jack is startled out of his thoughts. “Uh, no.”

“Why the hell not?” Gus puts away the enormous gun. “Whut you think you could do out there if things got ugly?”

“They almost did,” Jack says, happy now to speak up.

“Huh, don’ take no chances like that again, heah?”

Jack nods.

“They’s a key behin’ the kitchen door.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Bottom right-hand drawer of my desk. They’s a snub-nosed .38. Jus’ right for a young feller like you. It’s loaded, but there’s a coupla boxes of ammo inna back.”

“I don’t like guns,” Jack says.

“Huh, who the fuck does?” Gus shifts in his seat. “But sometimes there jes’ ain’t no substitute.”

Jack wants to stay awake. In fact, with all the excitement, he’s certain he will. But Gus turns on the stereo. Music, familiar, earthy, shuffling, comes from his room, wraps Jack in a cocoon of melancholy history, and soon he’s in a deep sleep.

He opens his eyes to see a bird on the branch of the oak outside his window. It’s perched near the empty nest. Its head swivels as it looks in, peers around. It’s morning. A thin, milky light stretches across the bare plank floor. Jack throws the covers off, stumbles to the bathroom to empty his bladder and splash cold water on his face.

He wonders what Gus is going to make for breakfast this morning. He hopes it’s wild-blueberry pancakes. Since he doesn’t smell anything cooking from downstairs, he knows there’s time enough to put in his request with the chef.

Padding out into the hallway in just his underwear, he yawns hugely, scratches his stomach. He knocks on the partly open door of Gus’s bedroom, calls his name, and walks in. The curtains are drawn and it’s dim, still night here.

Gus is lying on the bed, the sheets and blanket rucked beneath his huge frame. He’s facedown, his arms splayed wide. Jack assumes he’s in a drunken stupor, calls his name more loudly. Getting no response, he pulls the curtains. Morning steps into the room, floods the scene.

Jack sees the bedclothes are black and shiny. He sees Gus’s mouth half-open, as if he’s about to yell at someone. He’s staring right at Jack.

“Gus?”

Then Jack sees a knife with an odd-looking hilt jammed into Gus’s back.

Much later, after the police have come and gone, after he’s given his statement, after Reverend Taske has come, prepared food for Jack, after the house empties of light and life, Jack goes to the stereo, puts on Out of Our Heads. As Mick Jagger begins his aural strut, Jack stands fixed, staring at nothing at all. He knows he’ll spend the night down here—maybe many nights to come. He can’t bring himself to go upstairs, either to his room or to Gus’s. But he wonders if that bird is still in the oak. He wonders what he was looking for.

Nearly a month after that, Detective Stanz comes to see him at the Hi-Line, the running of which Jack has taken over. Stanz walks slowly along the length of the glass cases, as if he’s in the market to buy one of the odds and ends displayed there. But Jack knows why he’s here. The only mystery is what took him so long to show up.

At last, he gets to where Jack is standing behind the register. He clears his throat. “You have some, uh, documents that Gus was keeping for me. I’d, uh, I’d like to have them back.”

Jack considers for a moment. “I know what documents you mean. They belonged to Gus; now they belong to me.”

Stanz’s face looks like a fist. “Why, you little—!”

Jack reaches under the counter, pulls out a plain manila envelope. “I have one of them here.”

He opens it, so Stanz can see the photocopies of the paperwork Stanz signed when he got his safe-deposit box at the Riggs National Bank.

Stanz snorts. “So what? Most everybody has a safety deposit box.”

Jack slides a photocopy of another document from under the paperwork. “Not when two million dollars of Luis Arroyo Ochoa’s money goes from the box to this offshore account in the Caymans.”

Stanz goes white. He grips the display case so as not to lose his balance. “But this is impossible! Those accounts are sealed.”

Jack nods. “So I understand, but that tax lawyer you went to who set up the account? He works for Gus.”

Stanz wipes his sweating face. He moves to gather in the damning evidence against him, but Jack is quicker. He spirits the folder away.

“There’s a price for everything,” he says.

Shooting him a bleak stare, Stanz says, “What’s yours?”

“I want to know who murdered Gus.”

Stanz breathes a sigh of relief, and Jack knows why. He was terrified that Jack would demand half of the two million he stole. But Jack wants no part of Ochoa’s blood money, and he’s quite certain neither would Reverend Taske. Besides, Gus provided generously for Renaissance Mission Church in his will, just as he provided for Jack.

The detective licks his lips. “What about the other one?”

“The receipt for the gun you used to kill Manny Echebarra is safe with me, Detective Stanz. No one needs to see it.”

Stanz ponders the unexpected situation he finds himself in. At length, he nods. “As it happens, I can help.”

He holds out his hand. Jack gives him the folder and he stashes it away.

“The knife we took out of Gus’s back is so unusual, it took the ME two weeks to track it down,” Stanz says. “It’s called a paletta. It’s used in bakeries. Gus introduce you to any bakery-store owners? Yeah, I thought so. His calling card, right?” His glittery eyes regard Jack without even the smallest measure of sympathy. This is a business transaction, pure and simple. “The thing of it is, there’s no prints, so we can’t prove anything. The Metro Police’s hands’re tied, know what I mean?”

Jack, his mind already fixed on Cyril Tolkan, knows precisely what he means.

36

Unlike other places in his past Jack had visited recently, the Marmoset’s house looked just as he remembered it, with its deep-blue exterior and white shutters. It must have been repainted recently, he thought.

With the real possibility of a kidnap victim inside, along with her abductor, Jack wasn’t prepared to take any chances of some overeager idiot tipping Kray/Whitman off. He got no argument from Nina. What he didn’t tell her was that, incredible as it seemed, he was now quite certain that Kray/Whitman was the same person who had killed the two nameless men at McMillan Reservoir, the Marmoset, and Gus twenty-five years ago. He was also the man who had abducted Alli Carter, and Jack had little doubt that he would slip his paletta into Alli Carter’s back if he was given the slightest hint his lair had been compromised. What he couldn’t work out as yet was the overarching pattern into which all these terrible offenses fit, because there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that all the crimes were somehow connected. He was drawing close, however, because he could sense its color in his mind: a cold, neon blue, as beautiful as the developing pattern was ugly.

There was something else the developing pattern told him: In gunning down Cyril Tolkan for Gus’s murder, he’d gone after the wrong man. Now, as his mind rolled all the emerging facts around, he had to wonder whether his stalking Tolkan was a case of deliberate misdirection. After all, it was the unique murder weapon that both Stanz and Jack had found most incriminating. The paletta was used in bakeries; Cyril Tolkan owned one: the All Around Town bakery. But though Jack had killed Tolkan twenty-five years ago, the strange filed-down paletta was being used again as a murder weapon. Jack didn’t believe the paletta turning up again was a coincidence, nor did he think it was a copycat killer, simply because twenty-five years ago the murder weapon had never been revealed to the public. That meant Gus’s murderer had been alive all this time. But why surface now, and why abduct Alli Carson?

Jack sat stunned, trying to regain his equilibrium as past and present rushed headlong at each other.

At last, he roused himself. “I know this place,” he said as they sat in the car where they’d parked down the block. “I’ll take the back, you take the front.”

They synchronized their watches. It was dusk, the light grimly fading from the sky as if whisked away by a sooty broom. The air was cold but still. Dampness lay on the ground like trash.

“Give me ninety seconds from the time we split up to get into position,” he continued, “okay?”

Nina nodded and they both got out of the car. Together, they glanced at their watches as they parted company on the pavement. Jack counted to himself as he made his way down the side of the house, past a couple of garbage cans on his right, a chain-link fence on his left. Jack thought of Zilla, the huge German shepherd Gus treated so well.

He arrived at the back door with sixteen seconds to spare. On his way, he’d passed three windows. Two were heavily curtained, making it impossible to see in. The third looked past lacy curtains to a kitchen, yellow as butter. It was deserted.

Inserting a pair of hooked picks into the lock, he manipulated them so that they simulated the turn of the proper key. The door popped open at almost the same time Nina was knocking on the front door. Glock drawn, Jack went from room to room, listened for any human sounds in between Nina’s insistent knocking. It was dim, gloomy, full of bad memories that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards. In the hallway, he paused at the line of photos. His hair stood on end—they were all of Alli Carson. They had the telltale flatness associated with a long telephoto lens. Then his breath caught in his throat, for there in the middle was a photo of Alli and Emma walking together on the Langley Fields campus. As he stared at the two girls, Emma’s image seemed to flicker, grow wavy, and move toward him. He could swear she knew he was here; he thought the smile on her face was for him.

As if from the wrong end of an amplifier, he heard her call to him. He wanted to answer her, but the fear of Kray/Whitman being in the house kept him silent.

Nina’s renewed banging on the front door caused him to jump, but that was hardly the source of his fright. He passed into the foyer, reached out and opened the door to let her in. A quick negative shake of his head let her know he hadn’t found anyone, but he led her silently to the photos in the hallway.

With his left hand, he indicated that she should check the second floor. He went room by room: the cobwebby basement, smelling of raw concrete and damp, the living room with its astounding volcanoes of books, magazines, papers of all kinds. The bathroom was clear, as was the kitchen. It was curious, though. The living room and foyer were just as he remembered them, cluttered and musty, but the kitchen and bathroom were neat and spotless, shining like a scientist’s laboratory. It was as if two completely different people inhabited the same place: the ghost of the Marmoset and Kray/Whitman.

To the left, he found a closed door. Trying the knob, he ascertained that it was locked. His picks were of no help here. The lock was of a kind he hadn’t encountered before. He stood back, aimed, then shielded his eyes as he fired the Glock at it. The resulting percussion brought Nina at a dead run.

He kicked in the door, found a room with only a huge painted wood chair. At one time, probably when the Marmoset had lived here, the room had had a window. Since then it had been bricked up and painted over. It reeked sourly of sweat, fear, and human excrement.

The two of them returned to the hallway, went down it until they found themselves back in the cheerful kitchen.

“Check everything,” Jack said.

They opened closets, drawers, cabinets. All the utensils, bottles, cans, mops, brooms, dustpans were arranged in order of utility and size. The oven was empty inside. Nina pulled open the door to the refrigerator.

“Look here.”

She knelt in front of the open refrigerator. All the shelves had been removed. She pointed to the bottom, where something translucent was wedged between sections.

“I think that’s a piece of skin.”

Jack nodded, his heart thudding in his throat. “Let’s bag it, get it over to Dr. Schiltz. I have a feeling it belongs to our Jane Doe who had her hand amputated.”

Nina donned a pair of latex gloves. “Let’s pray it doesn’t belong to Alli Carson.”

As she produced a plastic bag and tweezers, Jack moved to the pantry door. It was closed but not latched. Gingerly, he pulled it open.

He expelled a long sigh of relief. The First Daughter was wedged into a corner, her back against the far wall where it met a set of cabinets. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her shins. She was rocking gently back and forth, as if to comfort herself.

Jack squatted down to Alli’s level.

“Alli?” He had to call her name three or four times before her head swung around, her eyes focused on him. By this time, Jack could hear Nina speaking to HQ. She was asking for an ambulance, the Carson family doctor, who was standing by at Langley Fields, and an armed escort. She had initially asked for Hugh Garner, but for some reason Jack couldn’t make out, wasn’t able to speak with him.

“No sirens,” Jack said softly, and Nina relayed the message.

Jack edged closer, and Alli shrank back. “Alli, it’s Jack, Jack McClure. Emma’s father. Do you remember me?”

Alli regarded him out of depthless eyes. She hadn’t stopped rocking, and Jack couldn’t help thinking of the room with the monstrous chair, the straps, the smell.

“Don’t be afraid, Alli. Nina and I were sent by your father and mother. We’re here to take you home.”

Something in what he said put the spark of life into her eyes. “Jack?”

“Yes, Alli. Jack McClure.”

Alli suddenly stopped rocking. “Is it really you?”

Jack nodded. He held out one hand until Alli reached out, tentatively took it. He was prepared for her to draw back, but instead she launched herself into his arms, sobbing and shaking, holding on to him with a desperation that plucked at his heart.

He rose with her in his arms. She was trembling all over. Nina moved in beside him. She was opening the drawers in the cabinet, one by one. All were empty, save the top one, which held an assortment of the usual handiwork tools: hammer, level, pliers, wire-cutter, a variety of screwdrivers and wrenches.

Alli began to whimper again, and Jack put one hand at the back of her head in an attempt to calm her. With the other, he fumbled out his cell phone, pressed a button. A moment later, president-elect Edward Carson came on the line.

“Sir, I have your daughter. Alli is safe and sound.”

There was a brief rustle at the other end of the line that could have been anything, even Carson brushing away some tears. “Thank God.” His voice was clotted with emotion. Then Jack heard him relay the news to his wife, heard her shout of relief and joy.

“Jack,” Carson said, “Lyn and I don’t know how to thank you. Can we speak with her?”

“I wouldn’t advise it, sir. We need to extract her fully and assess her health.”

“When can we see her?”

“The ambulance is on its way,” Jack said. “You can meet us at Bethesda.”

“We’re on our way,” the president-elect said. “Jack, you made good on your promise. Neither Lyn nor I will forget it.”

At the same moment Jack put away his cell, Nina opened the cupboard over the small sink. Nina recoiled when she saw the horned viper slither down onto the countertop. The evil-looking wedge-shaped head with its demon’s horns quested upward. The viper was hungry, and she was annoyed. Her tongue flicked out, vibrating, scenting living creatures.

Jack dug the pliers out of the drawer. The head moved forward, far faster than he could follow, but midway toward him a shadow fell across it, slowing it. Jack felt a breath of cool air brush the nape of his neck. With a well-aimed swipe of the pliers, he stunned the snake. Gripping the viper’s head between the ends of the pliers, he squeezed as hard as he could. Though its brain was pulped, the viper’s body continued to thrash, slamming itself this way and that in a random fury for a long time.

Nina struggled to regain her equilibrium. “Jack, are you all right?”

Unable to find his voice, he nodded.

“It was coming straight at you; I was sure it would bite you.”

“It would have,” Jack said, a little dazed himself, “but something slowed it down.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nevertheless, something did. A shadow came between the snake and me.”

Nina looked around. “What shadow, Jack?” She passed her hand through the space Jack indicated. “There’s no shadow here, Jack. None at all.”

Alli twisted in his arms, taking her face out of his shoulder. “What happened?” she whispered.

Jack kicked the snake’s body away. “Nothing, Alli. Everything’s fine.”

“No, it isn’t, something happened,” she insisted.

“I’m taking you out of here, Alli,” he whispered as he took her back out through the kitchen and down the hall. “Your folks are coming to meet us.”

The Marmoset’s house was crawling with the heavily armed detail Nina requested. Along with them came two EMS attendants with a rolling stretcher, a nurse, and the Carson family doctor. But Alli refused to be parted from Jack, so he and Alli, with Nina at their side, strode out of the house with the escort.

Alli put her lips to his ear. “I felt something, Jack, like someone standing beside us.”

“You must have blacked out for a minute,” Jack said.

“No, I felt someone breathe—one cool breath on my cheek.”

Jack felt his heart lurch. Could it be that Alli had felt the shadow, just as he had? His mind lit up with possibilities.

He climbed into the ambulance with her clinging to him. Even when he managed to get her onto the stretcher so that the doctor could examine her, she wouldn’t let him go entirely. She was clearly terrified he’d leave her alone with her living nightmare.

He gripped her hand, talking of the good times when she and Emma were best friends, and gradually she relaxed enough for the doctor to take her vitals and administer a light sedative.

“Jack …” Alli’s lids were heavy, but the abject horror was sliding off her face like a mask. “Jack …”

“I’m here, honey,” he said with tears in his eyes. “I won’t leave you.”

His voice was hoarse, his breathing constricted. He was all too aware that this is what he should have said to Emma a long time ago.

Part 4

37

The early January sunset was painting narrow bands of gold and crimson across the low western sky when Jack met with Dr. Irene Saunderson on the wide, Southern-style veranda of Emily House.

“I’ve tried every way I can think of—and any number of new ones—to get through to Alli,” Dr. Saunderson said. She was a tall, stick-thin woman with dark hair pulled severely back into a ponytail, accentuating a high forehead and cheekbones, bright, intelligent eyes. She looked like a failed model. “She either can’t or won’t tell us what happened to her.”

“Which is it?” Jack said. “Can’t you at least tell that much?”

Dr. Saunderson shook her head. “That’s part of what’s so frustrating about the human mind. I have little doubt that she’s suffering from a form of posttraumatic stress syndrome, but at the end of the day, that tells us next to nothing. What’s indisputable is that she suffered a traumatic episode. But what form the trauma took or what the actual effect on her is, we can’t determine.”

She sighed deeply. “Frankly, I’m at a dead end.”

“You’re the third shrink to say that.” Jack unbuttoned his coat. A thaw had set in with a vengeance. “What about physical damage?”

“The exhaustive medical workup shows that she wasn’t raped or physically harmed in any way. There wasn’t even a superficial scratch on her.”

“Is there a possibility of Stockholm syndrome?”

“You’re thinking of Patty Hearst, of course, among many others.” Dr. Saunderson shrugged. “Of course it’s possible that she’s come to identify with her captor, but she’s shown no indication of hostility toward us, and given the relatively short amount of time she was with her abductor, it seems unlikely. Unless, of course, he used drugs to accelerate the process, but there was no sign of chemical markers in her blood workup. As you know, the president’s own medical team at Bethesda took charge of her when you brought her in.”

“It’s been three days since I asked to see her,” Jack said.

“You can see her right now, if you like,” Dr. Saunderson said, brushing aside his complaint with a shrink’s easy aplomb.

They always know what to say, Jack thought, even when they’re wrong.

“Shall I take you to her room?”

“Actually, I’d rather see her out here.”

Dr. Saunderson frowned. “I’m not so sure that’s such a good idea.”

“Why not? She’s been cooped up for the better part of ten days. This is a pretty place, but it’s still a prison.” Jack smiled his most charming smile. “C’mon, Doc. You and I both know the fresh air will do her good.”

“All right. I’ll be right back.” She was about to turn away when she hesitated. “Don’t be surprised if Alli exhibits some erratic behavior, extreme mood swings, things like that.”

Jack nodded.

Alone on the veranda, he had a chance to take in the antebellum atmosphere of Emily House, a large, rather overornate confection whose exterior might easily have been used for a remake of Gone with the Wind. Save for knowing its true purpose, Jack would not have been surprised to find himself mingling with couples drinking mint juleps and speaking in deep Southern drawls.

Emily House, named after a former president’s dog, of all things, was a government safe house in the midst of fifty acres of Virginia countryside as heavily guarded as it was forested. Over the years, a good many heads of state, defectors, double agents, and the like had called it home, at least temporarily. It was painted white, with dove-gray shutters and a blue-gray slate roof. A bit of fluff on the outside, belying the armor-plated walls and doors, the bullet- and bombproof windows, and more cutting-edge security paraphernalia than Q’s lab. For instance, there was a little number called ADS. ADS stood for active denial system, which sounded like something Dr. Saunderson might claim Alli was suffering from. However, there was nothing nonsensical about the ADS, which was to all intents and purposes a ray gun that shot out a beam of invisible energy that made its victims feel as if their skin were burning off. It wasn’t handheld; it wasn’t even small. In fact, it looked rather like a TV satellite dish perched on a flatbed truck or a Humvee. But it worked, which was all that mattered.

Jack, hearing a door open, turned to see Alli with Dr. Saunderson right behind her. It had been only three days since he’d last seen her, but she seemed to have aged a year. There was something in her face, a change he couldn’t quite figure. It was another visual puzzle he needed to decipher.

“Hey,” he said, smiling.

“Hey.”

She ran into his arms. Jack kissed the top of her head, saw Dr. Saunderson nod to him, then withdraw into Emily House.

Alli was wearing a short wool jacket, jeans, an orange Buffalo Brand shirt, a screaming eagle with a skull in its talons silkscreened on the front.

“You feel up to a walk?” he asked her.

When she nodded, he took her down the steps, along the crushed gravel. There were a number of formal gardens around Emily House. This time of year, the low boxwood maze was the only one still green.

Alli ducked her head. “We can’t go too far, you know, without catching the attention of the guards.”

Jack listened closely not only to her words but also to her tone of voice. There was something sad there that touched the sad place inside him. This young woman had spent all her life at the end of a leash, watched over by stern men to whom she could never relate. He resolved to talk with her father about the new Secret Service detail that would be assigned to her when she came home. She deserved better than two more anonymous agents.

“How are they treating you?” he asked as they moved between the low hedges.

“With kid gloves.” She gave a thin laugh. “Sometimes I feel like I’m made of glass.”

“They’re making you feel that way?”

Alli shrugged. It was clear she wasn’t yet ready to talk about what happened, even with him. Jack knew he needed to take another tack altogether.

“Alli, there’s something only you can help me with. It’s about Emma.”

“Okay.”

Was he mistaken, or did her eyes light up?

“Don’t laugh, but there have been moments during the past few weeks when I could swear I’ve seen Emma. Once at Langley Fields, then in the backseat of my car. Other times, too. And once I felt a cool breath on the back of my neck.”

Alli, walking silently, stared at her feet. Jack, sensing that she’d had enough urging recently, chose to let her be. He listened, instead, to the wind through the bare branches, the distant complaints of a murder of crows, crowded onto the treetops like a bunch of old ladies at a funeral.

At length, Alli lifted her head, regarded him curiously. “I felt the same thing. When you were holding me, when that snake—”

“You saw the snake?”

“I heard it.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“You were busy.”

The words stung him, though that was hardly her intent. The wound his inattention had inflicted was still as raw as on the day he’d held Emma’s lifeless body in his arms. There wasn’t anything that could prepare you for the death of your child. It was unnatural, and therefore incomprehensible. There was no solace. In that light, perhaps Sharon’s turning to the Church was understandable. There came a time when the pain you carried inside you was insupportable. One way or another you needed to grope your way toward help.

They had reached the heart of the maze, a small square space with a stone bench. They sat in silence. Jack watched the shadows creeping over the lawns and gardens. The treetops seemed to be on fire.

“I felt her,” Alli said at last. “Emma was there with us in that horrible house.”

And it was at that moment, with the utterance of those words, that Jack felt them both brushed by the feathers of a mystery of infinite proportions. He felt in that moment that in entering the boxwood maze, in finding their way to its center, they had both touched a wisdom beyond human understanding, and in so doing were bound together in the same mysterious way, for the rest of their lives.

“But how is that possible?” He spoke as much to himself as he did to her.

She shrugged. “Why do I like Coke and not root beer?” she said. “Why do I like blue more than red?”

“Some things just are.”

She nodded. “There you go.”

“But this is different.”

“Why is it different?” Alli said.

“Because Emma’s dead.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what that means.”

Jack pondered this a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t either.”

“Then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t feel Emma’s presence,” she said.

“When you put it that way …”

With the absolute surety of youth, she said, “How else can it be put?”

Jack could think of any number of alternatives, but they all fell within the strict beliefs of the skeptics, scientific and religious alike.

And because he felt the wingtips of mystery still fluttering about them, he told her what he’d never been able to tell anyone else. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, his fingers knit together, he said, “After Sharon and I broke up, I started to wonder: Is this all there is? I mean life, the world that we can see, hear, smell, touch.”

“Why did it come up then?” Alli asked.

Jack groped for an answer. “Because without her, I became—I don’t know—unmoored.”

“I’ve been unmoored all my life.” Alli sat forward herself. “Sometimes I think I was born asking, Is this all there is? But for me the answer was always, No, the world is out there beyond the bars of your cage.”

Jack turned to her. “Do you really think of your world as a cage?”

She nodded. “It’s small enough, Jack. You’ve been in it, you ought to know.”

“Then I’m glad Emma came into it.”

“For such a short time!”

The genuine lamentation broke Jack’s heart all over again. “And she had you, Alli, though it was only for a short time.”

It was growing cooler as the shadows extended their reach across the vast lawns, hedges, and flower beds. Alli shivered, but when Jack asked her whether she wanted to go back inside, she shook her head.

“I don’t want to go back there,” she whispered. “I couldn’t bear it.”

Without thinking, Jack put a protective arm around her, and to his slight surprise, she moved closer to him.

“I want to tell you about Emma,” she said at last.

Jack, stunned, said nothing.

Alli turned her face to him. “I think that’s why she’s still here. I think she wants me to tell you now. She wants you to know all about her.”

38

It took the better part of an hour for Jack to convince Dr. Saunderson and the powers that be at Emily House that Alli wasn’t joking when she said she couldn’t spend another night there. In the end, though, he was obliged to call in the big gun.

“She’ll be with me, sir,” Jack said to the president-elect.

“That’s what she wants, Jack?”

“It is, sir.” Jack moved away from where Dr. Sanderson sat in a pool of lamplight behind her enormous ornate desk. “Frankly, I don’t see any other way to get through to her. Every other avenue has been exhausted.”

“So I understand,” Edward Carson said gloomily. “All right, then. You have until noon tomorrow.”

“But, sir, that’s hardly any time at all.”

“Jack, the inauguration is the day after tomorrow. No less than three top shrinks have evaluated her without coming to any conclusion except that she hasn’t been harmed. Thank God for that.”

“Sir, it’s imperative we find who abducted her.”

“I applaud your impulse as a lawman, Jack, but this is nonnegotiable. Alli has a duty to be at my and my wife’s side at the ceremony. We didn’t go through all this secrecy only for her to miss the most important photo op of her life. And after all, what’s important is that Alli’s safe and sound. I don’t care to know about what happened to her, and frankly I’m not surprised she doesn’t want to relive it. I sure as hell wouldn’t.”

It must be single-mindedness, Jack thought, that put such a hard, shiny shell around all politicians, conservative, liberal, or independent. He knew the president-elect’s mind was set. No argument would sway him. “All right, sir. I’ll deliver Alli tomorrow at noon.”

“Good,” Carson said. “One more thing. I must insist on a Secret Service detail.”

“I understand how you feel, sir,” Jack said, thinking their presence might not be a big problem, but it would have to be dealt with. “Just so you know, right now seeing a detail isn’t going to be good for Alli. I need her to open up about what happened while she was in captivity. Feeling hemmed in is going to make that job more difficult than it already is.”

There was silence on the other end of the line while Carson mulled this over. “All right, a compromise, then. I want them on the roads with you. They’ll exit their vehicle only in case of an emergency.”

“And then, sir, I’d like to pick her permanent detail. I’ve a couple of people in mind. I don’t want a repeat of what happened at Langley Fields.”

“You’ve got it, Jack, we’re on the same page there,” Carson said. “Now let me settle matters with Dr. Saunderson.”

Alli turned when Jack emerged from Emily House. She’d been standing on the veranda, watching the guards crisscross the lawns at random intervals. He saw the anticipation in her face, but also the fear.

“Well?”

Jack nodded, and immediately relief flooded her face.

On the way to his car, she said, “I want to sit in the backseat.”

Jack understood immediately. On the way back to Washington, he kept one eye on the road, one on the rearview mirror, checking on the vehicle carrying the two-man Secret Service detail, and on Alli.

“Tell me where she was sitting,” Alli said.

He knew she meant Emma. “To your right, just a little more. Okay, right there.”

Alli spent the rest of the drive in that position, her eyes closed. A certain peacefulness settled over her, as if she had been transported out of time and place. Then, with a jolt, he realized that her near trancelike state reminded him of what had stolen over him after he’d killed Andre in the library. And he wondered whether he and Alli were two tigers, whether it was now his turn to lead her into the forest.

The old wood-frame house stood as it always had at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the border in Maryland. The house and its attendant property had resisted the advances of time and civilization. The huge oak tree still rose to a height above the roof; there was still a bird’s nest in its branches outside Jack’s bedroom. The forested area was, if anything, thicker, more tangled.

It was to Gus’s house he took Alli. His home, the place Sharon had refused to move into, rejecting his past. In fact, she couldn’t understand why he didn’t sell it, use the proceeds to pay for Emma’s tuition at Langley Fields rather than taking out a second mortgage on their house. “You own that horrid old thing free and clear,” she’d said. “Why not just get rid of it and be done with it?” She hadn’t understood that he didn’t want to be done with it. Just as she hadn’t understood that the house and property had been a place he’d taken Emma and, quite often, Molly Schiltz, when the girls were younger. They adored climbing the oak tree, where they lolled in the crotches of its huge trunk; they loved playing hide-and-seek in the wild, tangled woodland behind the house. They’d spread out like sea stars on the huge living room sofas, listen to Gus’s old LPs—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, whose over-the-top stage antics they imitated so well after Jack showed them the electrifying concert video of him performing at the Apollo in Harlem.

On his way up the front steps, Jack noticed the Secret Service vehicle parked down the block, in front of the neighboring house. From that vantage point, the detail had an ideal view of the front and side of the house.

Jack padded into the kitchen, put the Chinese takeout on the counter. When he returned to the living room, he went over to the old stereo, selected a vinyl disc, put it on the turntable. A moment later, Muddy Waters began to sing “Long Distance Call.”

Alli began a slow circuit, stopping here and there to peer at a photo, a book, a row of album covers. She ran her fingertips over an old guitar of Gus’s, a stack of Jack’s individually cased Silver Age comics of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Dr. Strange. His stacks of videocassettes of old TV shows.

“Wow! This place is exactly the way Emma described it.”

“She seemed to like it here.”

“Oh, she did.” Alli looked through the cassettes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Sea Hunt, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Bob Newhart Show. “She liked to come here when you weren’t here. To be alone.”

“What did she do here?”

Alli shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe she listened to music; she was nuts about the iPod you gave her. She took it with her everywhere. She made playlists and listened to them all the time.” She put the cassettes aside. “She never told me what she did here. See, she had secrets from everyone, even me.”

Jack, watching her, experienced a piercingly bittersweet moment, because as happy as he was to have her here, her presence—in a way that was most immediate, most painful—served to remind him of what he could have had with Emma. At the same time, he was overcome with a feeling of protectiveness toward her.

It had taken him some time after Emma’s death to realize that the world had changed: it would never again feel safe, never have the comfort it had held when Emma was alive. Its color had changed, as if cloaked in mourning.

And there was something else. Through Alli, he was coming closer to Emma, he was beginning to understand that he and his daughter were not so very different. It seemed that Emma knew how similar they were, but Emma being Emma, she needed to go her own way, just as he had when he was her age. All at once, he experienced a jolt of pure joy. It seemed to him that he and Emma would have come together again, that they would have reunited, perhaps as soon as the day she had called him. She was coming to see him, after all. What had she wanted to tell him?

“Abbott and Costello.” Alli was holding a cassette aloft. “Can we watch this? Emma talked about them, but I’ve never seen them.”

Shaking himself out of his reverie, Jack turned on the TV, slid the cassette in the slot. They watched “The Susquehanna Hat Company” bit until Alli laughed so hard, she was crying. But then she didn’t stop crying, not when the bit was over or when Jack popped out the tape. She just cried and cried, but when Jack tried to hold her, she shied away. He left her alone for a bit, going upstairs, sitting in Gus’s old room, which, now that the bed was gone, he could bear to be in. He spent time thinking of Ronnie Kray, trying to imagine him, trying to imagine what a serial killer could want with Alli. Had he meant to kill her? If so, he’d had plenty of time to slip his filed-down paletta into her back. Had he meant to torture her before he killed her? If so, there was no sign that he’d begun. Besides, torture wasn’t part of Kray’s MO. And if there was one thing Jack had learned in dealing with criminals—even the cleverest ones—it was that once established, an MO never changed. The same aberrant impulse that drove a person to kill another human being also ensured it be done the same way every time, as if it were a kind of ritual of expiation.

So, to sum up, at great jeopardy to himself, Kray had abducted Alli Carson from the grounds of Langley Fields. If it wasn’t to kill her or to torture her, then what was his motive? And why had he abandoned her? Had they been lucky, had he simply been shopping for supplies when he and Nina raided the house? Could he have been tipped off? But how, and by whom? The more Jack worked the puzzle over, the more convinced he was that Alli was the key. He had to get her to talk.

When he came downstairs, she was sitting on the sofa.

“Sorry I freaked out,” she said.

“Forget it,” Jack said. “You hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Let’s have something anyway.” Jack padded into the kitchen. Alli was right behind him. She helped him open the cartons, spoon out the food onto plates. Jack showed her where the silverware was, and she laid out neat place settings.

Alli was a carnivore, so Jack had ordered spare ribs, lacquered a deep-red, beef chow fun, roast pork fried rice, gai lan in garlic sauce.

Apart from the sticky ribs, they both used the wooden chopsticks that came packaged with the meal. Alli looked as if she’d been born with them between her fingers. Jack had been taught by Emma.

“I used to be a vegetarian, but that was before I met Emma.” She managed a wistful smile. “She could eat more pork than anyone I ever met.” She swirled the glistening noodles around with her chopsticks. “I made fun of her, you know? And she asked me why I was a vegetarian. So I told her about how animals are treated, and then slaughtered, all of that. She laughed and said if that was my reason for not eating meat, I was a hypocrite. ‘Can I borrow your suede jacket? How about your leather skirt, or one of your belts? And how many pairs of plastic shoes do you own?’ She told me about how small farms are breeding cows, pigs, sheep, chickens in humane ways. She told me about slow farming, sustainable methodology, hormone-free raising. She said if I wanted to be a vegetarian that was my business, but that I ought to do it for the right reason. She was so damn smart. She’d done her research, instead of just spouting talking points like me. What really amazed me about her was that she never made a choice just for the hell of it. There was always a reason behind what she did.”

Who was this girl he was hearing about? “It never seemed like that to Sharon and me. All we saw was chaos and rebellion.”

“Yeah, well, there was that, too.”

“I wish I’d taken the time to see more.”

“Well, it might not have mattered.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Emma was a master in letting you see what she wanted you to see, and nothing more.” Alli pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them. “I’ll tell you how it started with me. Emma didn’t have a lot of friends. It wasn’t because other girls didn’t try. They did. Everyone wanted to hang with her, but Emma didn’t want any part of a pack, even though it would’ve been so easy for her to be a leader. See, she saw herself in a totally different light. We both saw ourselves as being different, Outsiders, you know, with a capital O.”

The fact that his daughter had lived with the same sense of being an Outsider that Jack had lived with all his life shocked him to his core. Or maybe, if he was honest with himself, what shocked him was that he hadn’t recognized her as being an Outsider.

“The thing for me was that I always thought my being an Outsider was because of my father’s political ambitions,” Alli went on. “From as far back as I can remember, all he talked about, all he planned for was being president. There were times I actually thought he’d started making plans to become president when he was in grade school.

“Anyway, it was Emma who made me realize that being an Outsider had nothing to do with my father; it came from inside myself.”

Old Muddy had segued into the slow, rueful “My Home Is in the Delta,” one of Gus’s favorite tracks.

He said, “So Emma thought of herself as an Outsider.”

“She didn’t just think it,” Alli said at once. “She was an Outsider.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“At first, I didn’t understand it either.” Alli gathered up Jack’s plate and cutlery, put it on top of hers, took the small stack to the sink.

“Leave those,” Jack said, “I’ll take care of the washing later.”

“That’s all right.” Alli turned on the water. “I like doing this because no one’s told me to, no one’s even expecting me to.”

She squeezed some dishwashing liquid onto a Dobie, set about her job with some concentration. “I didn’t understand it,” she said, “until I took the time to get to know her. Then it hit me: Unlike most girls our age, Emma didn’t define or judge herself in terms of other girls her age. She knew who she was from the inside out. And because of that, she had a kind of—I don’t know—a savage energy.”

Finished, Alli dried her hands, returned to the table, and sat back down. “It was Emma who introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson, a modern-day Outsider if ever there was one. But she also suggested I read Blake.” She cocked her head. “You know William Blake?”

Jack felt a little thrill travel through him at Blake’s name. He had read and enjoyed Blake during his time in the District’s public libraries, which continued long after he was once again left on his own. But he couldn’t forget the telling excerpt Chris Armitage had quoted to him and Nina the other day. “I do.”

“Emma adored Blake. She identified with him intensely. And when I read him, I got her fully, because her favorite quote was this.” She closed her eyes, her brow furrowed in concentration. “‘I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s. My business is not to reason and compare; my business is to create.’”

“Emma wanted to create something.”

Alli nodded. “Something important, something lasting.”

“What, exactly?”

The tears came again, leaking out of the corners of her eyes.

A sudden awful premonition gripped Jack’s heart. “What is it?”

Alli rose, paced around the room. Muddy was in the middle of “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had.”

She bit her lower lip, said, “Honestly, I don’t know whether I should tell you.”

“Alli, you’ve come this far,” Jack said. “Emma doesn’t need to be protected anymore.”

“Yeah, I know, but …” She exhaled slowly, said, “She was going to quit school.”

Jack was flooded with relief. “You mean she didn’t like it at Langley Fields.”

“No, I mean school—any school.”

Now Jack felt bewildered. “But what was she going to do?”

“Oh God, I don’t want to break a trust.”

“But you said Emma wanted you to tell me,” Jack said. He found that he was perfectly serious.

Alli nodded, but her expression was bleak. She came and sat down close to him. “She was going to do what she felt she had to do.” There were tears in her eyes. “She was making plans to join E-Two.”

39

The image of Calla Myers hung in the air, the projector enlarging her face to Hollywood size. No one in the room, least of all Secretary Dennis Paull, failed to notice the resemblance to Alli Carson.

“Gentlemen,” he heard the noxious Hugh Garner say in his most authoritative voice as he held up a bagged-and-tagged item. “We now have our smoking gun.”

Paull was part of a very select audience seated in Sit Room W in the Pentagon. With him were the president, the Secretary of State, and the president’s National Security Advisor. They sat around a polished ebony table. In front of each man was a pad, a clutch of pencils, glasses, and bottles of chilled water. After the meeting, all the writing materials would be gathered up and burned.

“This cell phone belonged to one of the murdered members of the Secret Service detail guarding Alli Carson,” Garner continued. “It was found near Calla Myers’s body. At the time of her death, the victim was employed by the First American Secular Revivalists. While it’s a sure bet that the late Ms. Myers didn’t kidnap Alli Carson, her implication is now all but assured.

“My guess is that she was getting ready to defect. She was going to the police with the cell phone. One of her compatriots found out about her act of heroism and killed her. She must’ve heard her attacker coming because she managed to toss away the phone. It was found in our initial search of the crime scene on the west side of the Spanish Steps, clear evidence that the FASR or E-Two is behind the abduction of the Alli Carson.”

“Well done, Hugh,” the president said. “Now if you’ll excuse us.”

“Yes, sir.”

Garner marched out of the room like a good soldier, but not before Paull caught the sullen look on his face.

The president cleared his throat. “This little item combined with the documentation President Yukin has provided will spell the end of the missionary secularists in America.”

He turned to Paull. “Dennis, I’m ordering you to begin taking members of the First American Secular Revivalists into custody. Since you have been unable to make any headway in identifying anyone in this underground E-Two, I want each one of the prisoners interrogated on the subject.” He raised a finger. “I needn’t remind you that my term of office is just about over. I personally won’t feel as if our job was finished unless we bring these homegrown terrorists to justice. I certainly don’t trust the incoming president to get the job done, so it’s entirely up to us.”

Paull, secretly fuming under the president’s veiled rebuke, nodded, said enthusiastically, “Consider it done, sir. Now that we have the weight of evidence, we can attack in a more public way that was closed to us before.”

“Good.” The president, appearing immune to Paull’s cleverly worded response, rubbed his hands together. “Now, to the business of what comes after January twentieth.”

The Pentagon was built on secrets, but Paull observed that today there was about this room the deathly hush of secrets held close to the chest. On his desk, Paull had a rosewood plaque given to him by his mentor. On it was engraved in gold leaf the famed Benjamin Franklin quotation: THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET IF TWO OF THEM ARE DEAD. Paull was never more aware of the wisdom of that saying than he was now. As he looked around the room, it seemed to him that the atmosphere was rife with secrets. Perhaps this is what happens when the skein runs out, he thought, when after eight years of hard decisions, close calls, and the need for frantic spin control, the trust among even the closest of colleagues turns rancid. He’d been warned by his mentor that the last days of an Administration are gripped either by ennui or by desperation. Neither was healthy. Both revealed the corrosive workings of corruption. Each man had to face his moment of realization: Either the power had worn him down to a nub or he couldn’t live without it. Over time, his mentor told him, all that’s left to flush away is sewage, the entropy of power slipping through your fingers.

“Gentlemen,” the president continued, “how goes our sub rosa campaign to ensure the continuance of our influence on Congress and the media when Edward Carson becomes president?”

Here, now, Paull faced the truth of his mentor’s words. He was disgusted with the tenor of this meeting, the scrounging of Caesar facing the blade of the ides of March, railing against time and history. But he knew he couldn’t allow the underlying wretchedness to blind him to the extreme danger of these last few orders. The desperate animal was the most dangerous animal. The question he had to answer, and soon, was which one of these three men was the most desperate and, therefore, the most dangerous.

It fell to Paull to discover for himself what form of damage eight years of power had worked on these three men. Which one was a nub, which one a junkie?

The Secretary of State, a large man with the flushed face of an inveterate drinker and the twinkling eyes of Santa Claus, was the first to take the president’s challenge by the horns.

“If we stay the course, we have nothing to fear. The evangelicals are still our broadest base, though admittedly the NRA is less fickle.”

“There’s a growing problem with the NRA’s power,” the National Security Advisor said. He was a Texan, with a leathery face, a raspy voice, and the no-nonsense, faintly intimidating demeanor of a federal marshal in the 1880s. “Latest figures find an alarming decline in the number of hunters nationwide. Our concern has been given an environmental spin by our media outlets. We’re worried because hunters keep the deer population in check, hunters are pro-environment, that sort of thing. Of course, the real worry for us is that faced with declining membership, the NRA is going to lose its clout on Capitol Hill.”

“Now that would be a real shame,” the Secretary of State said. “Can we find some way to funnel money in their direction to make up for the shortfall? By God, we don’t want them running out of money to pay their lobbyists.”

“I think we can twist some well-heeled arms in that direction,” the National Security Advisor replied.

The president turned to his Secretary of Homeland Security. “Dennis, we haven’t heard from you yet.”

Paull tapped a pencil on the table. “I’ve been thinking on the evangelical issue. We have all the usual suspects tied up, but the growing influence of the Renaissance Mission Congress is a real concern. I’ve gone over the post-election breakdown a number of times, and each time I’m more impressed. There’s no doubt its influence swung the election in Carson’s favor. It got out the black votes in every state with appalling efficiency.”

“What’s your point?” the Secretary of State said. “Surely you’re not advocating we turn Reverend Myron Taske into another Martin Luther King, Jr.”

“God no.” Paull poured himself some water to cover the wave of revulsion that washed over him. With all his heart, he prayed for God to protect him from people like the Secretary of State. “It happens that Carson’s own man, Jack McClure, has a relationship with Reverend Taske. With that in mind, I’ve been running a Secret Service special operative, Nina Miller, who I made sure joined Hugh Garner’s joint-operations task force.”

Once again, Paull paused to take a drink of water. As he did so, his gaze caressed the room like a lover, absorbing every texture, gesture, shift of body or head without seeming to do so. All these men were suspect; all of them, in one way or another, could have infiltrated his security measures. He was hoping one of them would betray himself—even by as little as the flicker of an eyelid—as he revealed the nature of the very operation his enemy had discovered.

“Now that McClure has found Alli Carson,” Paull continued, “the task force is disbanding. However, following my orders, Agent Miller has formed a bond with McClure. She now has his trust.” He turned directly to the president. “Here’s what I meant to do from the beginning and now propose to you: Agent Miller will get McClure to use his influence on Reverend Taske to take our side.”

“I’ve met with Reverend Taske several times,” the president said. “He’s as honest as he is black.”

The National Security Advisor nodded. “We’ve vetted Taske thoroughly. He won’t abandon Carson.”

“He will if we convince McClure that Carson’s values are not what they seem to be,” Paull said. This was a total fabrication, one that his enemy in this room would discover when Jack didn’t denounce the president-elect. But by that time it would be too late. All he wanted now was to buy enough time to get them all through the next couple of days. “What I’ve learned from my agent is McClure’s an odd duck—loyal in the extreme, but quick to turn on a dime if he thinks he’s been betrayed. I can use that to my advantage.”

“He sounds unstable,” the Secretary of State said. “I don’t like it.”

“Unstable or not,” the National Security Advisor said, “I like the shot. Dennis is right on target as far as the Renaissance Mission Congress is concerned. It’s powerful and getting more so every day. Of course, it would be ideal if we could wrap up the RMC and the Hispanic vote in one tidy ball, but I’m as much a realist as the next man. I know a goddamn pipe dream when I see one.”

“I concur.” The president nodded. “We’ll give Dennis his head with the McClure mission.”

“Dennis,” the National Security Advisor said, “if there’s any assistance I can provide, I’m only a call away.”

“I appreciate that,” Paull said. “That might be just the boost I need.” When there are ice cubes in hell, he thought.

The president held up a hand. “Please, all of you, keep our accelerated timetable in the forefront of your plans. Dennis, McClure has to be wrapped up and delivered before the twentieth.”

When Dennis Paull exited the Pentagon, he pulled out his cell phone, punched in a speed-dial number, said, “Latent,” and rang off. A moment later, he ducked into his limo, which took him to the nearby Nordstrom department store. Paull strode inside, went immediately to the men’s store. There, he spotted two of his men. While the first one covered his back, checking for tails, Paull went up to the second agent, took the large shopping bag out of his hand, proceeded to the entrance to the dressing rooms, outside of which another of his agents stood guard.

Inside, only one booth was occupied. Paull chose an adjacent booth, spent the next four minutes stripping off his fedora, midnight-blue cashmere overcoat, Brooks Brothers suit, Paul Stuart shirt and tie. He put his black brogues aside. From the shopping bag, he donned a pair of stovepipe-leg jeans, a blue chambray shirt, a pair of brown Lucchese cowboy boots.

Thus dressed, gripping a dossier he’d extracted from inside his overcoat, he knocked on the dividing wall between his booth and the other occupied booth. The fourth of his agents appeared with a brown shearling coat and a dun-colored Stetson for Paull. As the secretary vacated his booth, his agent, who was the same weight and height as Paull, entered, dressed himself in his boss’s clothes. He was the one who exited Nordstrom by the same doors Paull had used to enter. He climbed into Paull’s limo, which whisked him away. At the same time, Paull took a side door out to the mall, where an Empire taxi idled, waiting for him, its driver one of Paull’s agents.

The taxi took off as soon as Paull climbed in, swinging onto Washington Boulevard, heading toward Arlington. On the corner of Fourteenth and North Wayne, Paull got out, walked around the block to make sure he was clear, then went up North Adams Street. Just past where it crossed Fifteenth, a Metro Police car sat waiting. Paull opened the rear door, got in.

“All clear,” Paull said. “Do you have any news?”

“Yes, sir.” The agent dressed as a cop nodded. “The captain of your boat reads lips.”

“Damn it to hell!” Paull’s fist struck the armrest. “Who’s he reporting to?”

“It’s a mobile number we can’t get a handle on.”

“That figures.” He thought a moment. “How about a date and time the call was made?”

“That I can do,” his agent said, then gave the information to him.

Paull stared out the window at the civilians hurrying past him on errands to buy fish or pick up flowers. Little People, the National Security Advisor called them, with an arrogance typical of this president’s Administration. Of course, Paull himself was a member of the Administration, but right now he felt like a rat in the woodwork who suspected a slew of tomcats were waiting to snap off his head the moment he poked it into the open. “This is beautiful. Just beautiful.”

He nodded. “Okay, let’s get going.” And he opened the thin dossier, reading it one more time and wondering at the paucity of genuine information on Ian Brady, the government’s own crown jewel asset. But even in these few paragraphs, there was something for him, he was certain of it—trouble was, he was damned if he knew what it was.

“Howdy, cowboy,” Nina Miller said when he picked her up in the shadows of North Taft Street.

Paull shifted over. “I do look a sight, don’t I?”

She tossed his Stetson onto the front seat. As she settled herself beside him, he said, “We’ve got a problem.”

“Another one,” she inquired, “or the same one?”

That made him laugh, despite his foul mood. “I think all our problems devolve back to one person.”

“I only wish it was Hugh Garner,” Nina said. “Him I can handle.”

“He needs decommissioning, that’s for certain,” Paull acknowledged. “Any ideas on that score?”

“Jack told me he practically drowned Peter Link, one of the heads of the FASR. He would’ve done the same to Chris Armitage if Jack hadn’t stepped in.”

“Forget it. The president just ordered the arrest and interrogation of all FASR members.”

“Then it’s begun.”

Paull nodded grimly. “Despite all our efforts.”

“Jack’s, too. He intervened, stood up to Garner to stop the torture by threatening to call the president-elect. It was no idle threat, and Hugh knew it, so he backed down. But now he hates Jack’s guts.”

“All useful bona fides,” Paull said thoughtfully. “Is Jack one of us?”

Nina made a waffling gesture with one hand. “I don’t yet know whether he has a side. He seems to be the most apolitical person I’ve ever met. Systems—any system—are abhorrent to him.”

“So what is he, then?” Paull asked.

“Actually,” Nina said, “from all the evidence, I’d say he’s a humanist.”

Paull seemed lost in contemplation.

The police car had taken the Curtis Memorial Parkway and was now on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, heading into Georgetown. The early morning fog had lifted, revealing a high sky filled with sunlight. There was only a light breeze. Paull, who hated overheated vehicles, had rolled down his window partway. He enjoyed the crisp air on his face and neck.

“The problem,” Paull said, his eyes half-closed against the wind, “is that despite all my high-tech efforts at security, I’ve been undone by a very low-tech methodology: lip-reading.”

“Someone on your yacht?”

He nodded. “The fucking captain, of all people.”

“Wasn’t he properly vetted?”

Paull shot her a pitying look. “We’re talking someone inside the White House, very high up. All the vetting in the world is useless against being turned by someone of that stature.”

The car took M Street, then turned north on Rock Creek Parkway.

“Surely you don’t believe that the president recruited him directly?”

“I do not,” Paull said. The car pulled to the side of the road within Rock Creek Park. “Walk with me. The driver will pick us up at the food shack two miles on.”

They climbed out of the car and began to walk. The police car was soon gone. Paull had left his ridiculous Stetson in the front seat. The sun was but a sheen behind the tissue of white clouds. Nina pulled the collar of her peacoat up around her neck; Paull jammed his hands in his pockets as they set off together, surrounded by trees and brush.

“I’ve been thinking hard about your question,” Paull said. “No, the president is too wily to initiate anything against me on his own. I’m not even certain that he’s aware of the death of those two men who were following Jack to protect him. Therefore, he has to have a middle man.”

“You mean a hatchet man.”

“Call him what you will, Nina, we have a very potent enemy in the Administration.”

“It’s imperative we know his identity, don’t you think?”

Paull nodded. “I most certainly do. Because the president is involved, even if it’s on a nontactical level, our man has to be either the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor.”

Nina shuddered. “I wouldn’t want either of them as an enemy.”

“I hear you,” Paull acknowledged, “but that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.”

They were nearing a fork in the road, and he directed them to the right, along a high embankment. A stream glimmered dully below. Apart from a smattering of passing cars, there was no one about.

“The good news is that I’ve worked out which one it is,” Paull continued. “The message the captain sent was on the same day you and I met on the yacht. The time was a few minutes after you left. At that time, the president was on his way to Moscow to meet with President Yukin. He could have taken the call himself, of course, but that seems unlikely. The president maintains a high level of plausible deniability by using selected intermediaries he deems expendable.”

“Both the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor were with him on Air Force One,” Nina said.

“So they were, but only one of them has knowledge of—and therefore access to—a specific high-level asset. I’m this asset’s handler, that’s how important he is. He’s abruptly dropped off the grid, he hasn’t made his dead drops in months. However, I have reason to believe that as recently as last week, this particular asset has been in touch with someone else in the Administration. I am very much afraid this high-ranking official is using this asset—a murderer without a speck of conscience—for his own purposes.”

“What purposes?”

“That I’m not at liberty to disclose.” How about kidnapping Edward Carson’s daughter so the crime can be labeled an act of terrorism and laid at the missionary secularists’ door, Paull thought. “At first, I suspected it might be the president himself, but now I think it might be the only other person who knows of the asset’s existence: the National Security Advisor.”

“So the National Security Advisor has been working, at the president’s behest, against us.”

Paull nodded. “It seems most likely. But I’ve bought us some time. I told him that I’ve been running you with an eye to getting closer to Jack McClure.”

“That’s too close to the truth.”

Paull smiled thinly. “Have faith; that’s as far as the truth goes. I sold them the story that I’m going to find a way to poison Jack against Edward Carson. Jack then goes to Reverend Taske, gets him to turn the power of the RMC against Carson.”

Nina shook her head. “What I wouldn’t give for fifteen minutes inside that brain of yours.”

“Now that we know who we’re fighting,” Paull said, “we’d better rally the troops and man the ramparts.”

“Good God, you’re not talking about an all-out war, are you?”

“Not out in the open. But we’ve already felt the first shot across our bows—the turning of two of my men, plus my captain. Our first order of business is to root out any others. We can’t mount a reasonable response if the opposite side knows every move we make.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Nina said.

“Use the Secret Service facilities, not Homeland Security’s.”

“Gotcha.”

They walked a bit farther, lost in their own thoughts.

“Now tell me what’s new with our boy, Jack,” Paull said.

“Sir, do you recall a double murder at McMillan Reservoir about twenty-five years ago?”

“That would be Metro Police territory, wouldn’t it?”

“Apparently not this one. I checked Metro’s records of the incident. There aren’t any. According to Jack, there was very little in the papers. I checked out his story, and he’s right. For that kind of crime, there was precious little ink spilled—not even the names of the victims. Everything was hushed up, so it must have been at a high government level.”

“What’s McClure’s interest in the double murder?”

“I don’t know, we haven’t had time to talk about it at length,” Nina said. “But he also has an intense interest in a local drug supplier working at the same time. Jack said no one knew who he was or where he came from, but that he had a tremendous amount of juice. No one could ever lay a hand on him, a man named Ian Brady.”

For a moment, Paull thought that he’d been struck by a car that had jumped the curb. For certain he was having an out-of-body experience. When he was able to gather his scattered senses, he said, “Come again?”

“Did I say something—?”

“That name.” Paull snapped his fingers impatiently. “Give me that name again.”

“What? Ian Brady?”

“That’s the fucking one.”

Beside her, Paull stared off into the distance, his eyes seeing nothing. Brady was the key, the lynchpin to events unfolding all too rapidly. A serial murderer, a schemer, most probably a psychopath—this was the asset Paull had inherited. The most important intelligence asset stretching back twenty-five years. This was the monster he was forced to protect, whose whereabouts he no longer knew. Who did, then? His mind snapped into perfect focus. “Get Jack McClure,” he said to Nina. “Bring him to me ASAP.”

Nina took out her cell phone. “I’ll call him right now.”

“No,” Paull said. “It’s all too likely that our cell conversations are being monitored. I don’t even want to use mine without prearranged coded signals.”

“I’ll find another way,” Nina said.

Paull nodded gravely. “I know you will.”

40

“Get it into your head, Jack,” Sharon had said in the ER. “We all have a secret life, not just you.” Now Jack knew the real truth of her words. His daughter was living a secret life right under his nose. It was as if he’d never known her at all—which was, of course, a deficiency that Sharon had accused him of repeatedly. But, given what she’d said to him, he determined that he had to know whether or not she knew about Emma’s radicalization, her secret life.

“If she felt so strongly about the blurring of religion and government,” Jack said, “why didn’t she join a peaceful organization like the First American Secular Revivalists?”

“Because she was Emma,” Alli said. “Because she never did things halfway, because she was strong and sure of herself. Above all, because she felt that the pack of evangelicals who had invaded the federal government were warmongers, that the only way to get their attention, to attack them, to expose them was with a radical response.”

“She hated the warmongers so she became one herself?” Jack shook his head. “Isn’t that counterintuitive?”

“The philosophers say fighting fire with fire is a legitimate response as old as time.”

They were walking in the tangle of trees and underbrush behind the house. The sky was turning black, as if with soot, and a cold wind shivered the tallest branches. Jack was turning over what Alli had said because there was something about it that stuck in his mind, that seemed to loom large on the playing field he’d been thrust onto.

He stopped them at the bole of a gigantic oak. “Let’s back this up a minute. Emma knew that your father would win the election, or at least that this current administration was on its last legs. Why not simply wait until the new regime came in?”

Alli shook her head. “I don’t know, but there was an urgency in what she had to do.”

“All right, let’s put that aside for the moment. You said that she wanted to expose the Administration with a radical response.”

“That’s right.”

“Did she tell you what she meant by that?”

“Sure. E-Two wants to provoke an extreme response from the Administration.”

“But there’s sure to be bloodshed.”

“That’s the whole point.” Alli licked her lips. “See, the bloodier, the more militant, the more brutal the response, the better. Because E-Two is out to show the entire country what this Administration really is. They won’t be able to round up the E-Two members easily. From what Emma said, they’re all young people our age—no one over thirty. When there’s blood on the streets, when America sees their own sons and daughters slaughtered, they’ll finally understand the nature of the people who are exporting war and death to the world.”

Jack was rocked to his core. “They’re planning to be martyrs.”

“They’re soldiers,” Alli said. “They’re laying down their lives for what they believe in.”

“But what they’re planning is monstrous, insane.”

“As our foreign policy has been for eight years.”

“But this isn’t the way.”

“Why not? Sitting on their hands hasn’t worked so well, has it? Anyone who has said or tried to do anything to protest faith-based initiatives has been ridiculed or, worse, branded a traitor by the talking heads controlled by the Administration. God, look at what wimps members of the opposite party have been through an illegal war, scandals, evidence that the government muzzles its scientists and specialists on the topics of WMDs and global warming. If the parties were reversed, you can bet this president would’ve been impeached by now.”

Why was it, Jack thought, that he felt as if he were listening to Emma and not Alli? A strange thing was happening to him. It had begun when he and Alli entered the house and now had continued as they moved out into woods. There was the very curious sensation of the world finally starting to make sense to him—well, if not the whole world, then his world, the one he’d kept hidden from others and which kept him apart from them. Like his ability to sense Emma, though she was no longer in this world, at least by the limited understanding of man-made science, he felt as if his world and the one that had always been closed to him were beginning to overlap. Hope rose, completely unfamiliar to him, that one day he might even be able to straddle both, that he might live in one without giving up the other.

This gift he very badly wanted to bestow on Alli. To this end, he said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

Alli regarded him with skepticism. “Not another shrink. I’ve had my fill of probing and prodding.”

“Not another shrink,” Jack promised.

Rather than return to the front of the house where he’d parked, he took her through the underbrush. On the other side was parked Gus’s white Continental, which Jack kept in pristine condition.

Alli laughed in delight as she climbed into it. Behind the wheel, Jack turned the key in the ignition, and the huge engine purred to life. With the lights extinguished, he rolled away without the Secret Service detail parked on Westmoreland being any the wiser.

He turned on the tape player, and James Brown took up “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in midsong.

“Wow!” Alli said.

Yeah, thought Jack. Wow.

Ten minutes later, when they arrived at Kansas Avenue NE, they couldn’t get near the old Renaissance Mission Church building. Barriers had been erected on the street and sidewalks on either side of it. There must have been more than a dozen unmarked cars and anti-terrorist vans drawn up on the street within the barriers.

Jack’s heart seemed to plummet in his chest. Telling Alli to wait in the car, he got out, flashed his credentials to one of the twenty or so suits milling around. Then he saw Hugh Garner, who was spearheading the operation, and put away his ID.

“Hello, McClure,” Garner said. “What brings you here?”

“I have an appointment with Chris Armitage of FASR,” Jack lied.

Garner pulled a face. “So do we, McClure. Trouble is, we can’t find him, or his pal Peter Link.” Garner inclined his head. “You wouldn’t know where they’ve got to?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be here talking to you,” Jack said. “I’d like to speak to someone else in the FASR offices.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible.” Garner looked smug. Hailed by one of his detail, he turned, gave a couple of orders, turned back to Jack. “No one’s here. This office has been shut down.”

Jack thought of all the busy, dedicated men and women he’d seen on his way into Armitage’s office. “Where is everyone else?”

“In federal custody.” Garner grinned. “They’ve forfeited their rights to due process. They’ll be held as long as necessary. Neither you nor anyone else can see them without a written order signed by the National Security Advisor himself.”

Jack rocked back on his heels as if struck a blow. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The president went on the air an hour ago with evidence supplied by the Russian president himself that the FASR and E-Two are being funded by Beijing.” Garner’s grin widened. “Under the Anti-Terrorism Act of December 2001, they’ve all been charged with treason.”

Just south of where the sawhorses blocked off the avenue was an alleyway. Jack drove the car around to Chillum Place, parked in a deserted lot. Alli said nothing; he knew she understood perfectly well what had happened.

“Why are we here?” Alli said at last. “Sitting in the dark with the lights out and the engine off?”

“We’re moving to the edge of the world,” Jack said quite seriously. “We’re heading off the grid.”

“What’ll happen when we get there?”

“Tell me more about Emma.”

Alli felt a familiar terror clutch her heart. Ever since Jack and Nina had rescued her, she had felt as if she had a fever, racked by bouts of anxiety, cold sweats, dreams of menacing shadows whispering horrible things to her. She saw Kray everywhere, as if he were stalking her, monitoring her every move, every word she said, every breath she took. Often, alone, she shook, chilled to her bones. Kray had become the sun, the moon, the clouds in the sky, moving as she moved, the wind rattling through the trees. He was always with her, his threats mingling with his ideas, the strange and powerful openness and freedom she had felt with him. These contradictory feelings confused and terrified her all the more. She no longer knew who she was, or more accurately, she no longer felt in control of herself. Something eerie and horribly frightening had happened to her in that room with him. Truth to tell, there were moments she couldn’t recall, which was a relief. She so didn’t want to probe beneath the unfamiliar surface of that vague unease at not remembering. Something had slipped away from her, she felt, and something else had been slipped into its place. She no longer was the Alli Carson who had lain sleeping in her dormitory room.

On the other hand, there was now, there was Jack. She liked him immensely, and this led to a certain sense of trust. He made her feel safe as no other human being—armed or otherwise—ever had. She envied Emma now, having this man for a father and then, realizing all over again that Emma was dead, shook a little, felt ill with shame for even having the thought. Even so, the thought of talking to him about Kray, about what had happened, set off a panicky feeling she was unable to understand, never mind try to control.

“Emma once said to me that we never really see ourselves,” she said in an attempt to calm herself as well as to answer him. She felt that as long as she continued to speak about Emma, her friend wasn’t truly dead, that a part of her—the part of Emma they saw and heard—would remain. “She said all we ever see of ourselves is our reflection—in mirrors, in water. But that isn’t how we appear at all. So we had this game we played at night. We’d sit on the bed facing each other and we’d take turns describing each other’s faces in the most minute detail—first the forehead and brow, then the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the mouth. And Emma was right. We got to know ourselves in a different way.”

“And each other,” Jack said.

Alli stared out the windshield into the emptiness of the lot. “We already knew each other better than if we’d been sisters. We’d found each other; we loved each other. We shared the night with all its loneliness, its subversiveness, its secrets.”

All at once, it was as if Emma were sitting there beside her, and with a sob, she began to cry. She should be here, Alli thought. She’d understand what happened to me, she’d be able to tell me why I’m feeling so strange, why everything feels threatening. Everything except Jack.

“Secrets like who Emma met under the oak trees outside Langley Fields?”

There was a silence for a moment as Alli squirmed in her seat. Inside her mind, a pitched battle was in progress between what she wanted to say and what she felt compelled to hold back. “Okay, I lied to you about that, but it was only to protect Emma, the part of her life she’d entrusted to me.”

“So you know who she met?”

Alli bit her lip. As a cloud skims across the moon, a shadow came over her, her eyes lost their focus, her gaze seeming fixed on a distant shore. Her stomach was tied in knots; she could feel the cold sweat breaking out under her arms, at the small of her back. She couldn’t backtrack now, and yet she knew she mustn’t tell Jack Kray’s name. If she kept to what Emma had told her, she thought she’d be all right. Talking about her friend, feeling closer to her was just about the only thing that calmed her. So she continued the process already begun by Kray himself of cleaving her thoughts in two: talking about the acceptable, pushing down the forbidden.

“Emma said his name was Ronnie Kray.”

Until this moment Jack had thought the phrase “made his blood run cold” was merely a literary one. Now he experienced it literally. Emma had met with a serial killer, the man who had abducted Alli. Did Alli know that? He judged that now, as she was just beginning to open up, was not the time to tell her.

“But she suspected from the get-go Ronnie Kray might not be his real name,” Alli said.

Every strangely wired synapse in Jack’s brain was singing now. “Why would she question that?”

“Emma had done a lot of reading on the pathology of being an Outsider. In fact, she’d practically memorized a book called The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. That’s where she got the term, that’s how she knew she was one. She also read another book of Wilson’s called A Criminal History of Mankind, I think. Anyway, she’d heard that name Ronnie Kray and looked it up. He was one of a pair of murderous twins in the East End of London. Their pathology fascinated her, and I think that was one of the reasons she even listened to this guy in the first place.”

“They shared E-Two’s point of view.”

She nodded.

Jack felt the tug of his daughter. This important history had happened while he was obliviously going about his job. His daughter’s life had slipped through his fingers like grains of sand. “Didn’t she understand the potential for danger?”

“Of course she did,” Alli said. “That was the lure, that was why she wouldn’t back off. Then she began to suspect that Ronnie Kray was keeping secrets, so she set out to discover what they were.”

“I can’t believe this,” Jack said, because he truly couldn’t.

“Why not?” Alli said. “It sounds just like what you’d do.”

There was no point mentioning that he was an adult with years of training. “I knew she didn’t follow Kray blindly.”

“Emma never did anything blindly.”

“Not even drugs?”

“Especially not drugs. For Emma, taking them was a kind of, I don’t know, social experiment.”

“How d’you mean?”

“She wondered whether being stoned would allow her to approach another level of being an Outsider. To touch—I don’t know—the infinite.”

“And did it?”

“Uh-uh. It disappointed her. She was so sure there was something just out of reach, but so far out there, it was beyond our comprehension.”

“I’ve had the exact same feeling,” Jack said.

Alli nodded. “So have I.”

He had a thought. “So did she really want to join E-Two or did she want to find out more about Ronnie Kray?”

Alli shrugged. “Emma’s motives were never simple. One thing I do know: She was far too smart simply to follow the pied piper. Her bullshit alarm was totally scary.”

Jack thought of the times she’d busted him on his screaming matches with Sharon, how he’d let her words go in one ear and out the other. Why had he done that? Why had he devalued her opinion? Or was the truth of what she was saying too difficult to face?

“There’s something else,” Alli said. “I got the feeling that because she knew how dangerous her being with Kray was, she kept a journal.”

This interested Jack immensely. “I searched everything after her accident,” he said. “I couldn’t find anything.”

Alli’s fear returned full force. “Maybe I’m wrong. It’s only a hunch. I mean she never said anything to me directly.”

Still, it was something to ponder, Jack thought. Maybe he’d overlooked something.

“C’mon, let’s go,” he said, getting out of the car. When she’d joined him, he took her down the alleyway and around behind the buildings on Kansas Avenue. They had to be careful as they approached the rear of the FASR building, as it was lit up like an airport runway, crisscrossed by federal agents in flak jackets, riot helmets, and assault rifles loaded with rubber bullets.

Jack moved them back into the shadows of the hulking warehouses on their right, crouched down, making their way past the activity. As they moved farther down, the light continued to fade until they were once again engulfed in deepest shadow. At the back of the building that used to house the Hi-Line, they crept along until they reached what looked like a windowless wall. Jack moved his fingertips along the wall until he found the join he was looking for, the outline of the door Gus’s detective clients used to come and go without being seen.

Slipping a credit card out of his wallet, he slid it into the join on the left side. A moment later, though Alli heard no sound at all, he gripped the join with the tips of his fingers and the door opened outward.

They slipped in together and Jack immediately closed the door behind them. They were in almost complete darkness. Ahead of them was a thin line of warm light coming through the crack between an inner door and the floor.

Stepping up to the door, Jack turned the knob and, opening it, crossed the threshold. Chris Armitage whirled around, grabbing for a length of pipe.

Jack said, “Down, boy. You could get yourself killed that way.”

Armitage had the look and posture of a hunted animal. “How the hell did you find us?”

As he said this, Jack looked behind him at Peter Link, asleep on the sofa. “Let’s just say that I know these buildings were the haunts of bootleggers in the thirties, complete with escape routes to outwit the police.”

Armitage’s mouth twitched sardonically. “Seems nothing much has changed since then.” He sighed, put aside the pipe. “I suppose they enlisted you to take us in.”

“I had to dodge a Secret Service detail to get in here unnoticed,” Jack said. Then he turned and beckoned.

Armitage’s eyes opened wide. “Good God.”

“Chris Armitage, this is Alli Carson, the soon-to-be First Daughter. Alli, Chris is the co-head of the First American Secular Revivalists.

“What’s left of it,” Armitage said. “Hey, Alli.” Then, to Jack: “Why on earth did you bring her here?”

Jack smiled. “I thought you and she ought to meet.”

“My organization has just been smeared by the President of the United States with the help of the Russian president.” Armitage let go a bitter laugh. “This is hardly the time for a get-together.”

“I don’t see that you have anything better to do,” Jack said.

Armitage nodded. “I can’t argue there.” He lifted an arm. “Sorry I don’t have much in the way of conveniences to offer you.” He pointed at a half fridge. “There’re Cokes in there, a couple of cartons of juice. And frozen food.”

Jack and Alli shook their heads as they sat on facing chairs. Armitage perched on the edge of the sofa.

“How’s Link?” Jack asked.

“Out like a light, as you can see.” Armitage ran a hand through his hair. “He’ll be okay. Thanks for asking. Thanks for everything.”

Jack waved away his words. “I’d like to ask you about a former member of FASR. A man you know as Ronnie Kray.”

“Oh, him.” Armitage rubbed his chin. “Interesting guy, actually. Very smart, very intense. And he’d done his homework—he knew all the ins and outs of every argument we’re propounding. He was so well versed, in fact, that Peter and I wanted him to make some personal appearances with us, you know, to get the word out.”

Armitage opened the half refrigerator. After offering them a drink, he took out a can of Coke, popped the top. “Above all, Kray had a quality about him—he was quite charismatic. That was another reason we wanted him to take a more active role. But he turned us down.” He gulped down some soda. “He told us he could only spare us a couple of days a week. Plus, he said he was strictly a behind-the-scenes type of guy.”

“Did you believe him?” Jack said.

“Interesting question. In a funny way, I did. He had trouble interacting with the other FASR members. He lacked—what?—for want of a better phrase, social graces.”

“In what way?”

Armitage rolled the soda can between his palms. “He had no tolerance for people who didn’t do things his way—and at the speed of light. He pissed off more than his share of coworkers because he didn’t seem to have an inhibitor switch. Whatever was on his mind, no matter how harsh, he’d just say it. I recall one time, I brought him into the office to talk to him about the effect he was having on the people he had to interact with. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll get their act together.’”

“I’d like to fill out my mental picture of him,” Jack said. “Would you mind describing him to me?”

“Not at all.” Armitage thought a moment. “To begin with, he was a good-looking guy, but in an interesting way. Dark, smoldering—and charismatic, as I said. He was tall and slim. He was in good shape. He looked like he was in his late forties, but I got the feeling he was older than that, certainly in his mid-fifties.”

Jack’s mind was engaged on two levels. While he was using Armitage’s description to build a mental picture of Kray, he was watching Alli for signs of anxiety or nervousness. After all, the man Armitage was describing had abducted her and held her captive for a week. But she seemed oddly detached, as if her mind was far away.

Armitage swallowed the last of the Coke, set the can aside. “I think he was actually popular with the women. The men felt they had to defend themselves against him.”

“Did you know,” Jack said, “that Ronnie Kray also goes by the name of Charles Whitman?”

“What? No. Of course not.” Armitage looked and sounded genuinely shocked.

“Do you vet people—do background checks?”

“Sure. We don’t want anyone with a record to be on our rolls. But frankly, it’s rudimentary at best; we’re all chronically overworked.”

Jack nodded in sympathy. “I imagine he was counting on that. I doubt those two names are the end of Kray’s deception.” He turned to Alli. “What d’you think?”

“Alli,” Armitage said, “you know this man?”

Panic gripped her with such force that for a moment she could scarcely catch her breath. “A friend of mine did,” she squeaked. “Jack’s daughter, Emma.”

“I wonder,” Jack said in a perfectly neutral voice, “whether you don’t know him, as well.”

Alli’s panic escalated to an almost intolerable pitch. It was all she could do not to jump up and run out of the room. “Me?” He knows, she thought. He knows Kray took me. “I never met him.”

“Haven’t you recently been with someone who fits Chris’s description of Ronnie Kray?”

Alli said nothing, but Jack observed a certain tension take hold of her like an invisible hand.

Jack shrugged. “Perhaps I’m mistaken.” He turned his attention to Armitage, who had been following that byplay with a certain confused interest. “We’d best decide what to do with you and Peter. You two can’t stay holed up here forever.”

Alli was thrust back into the midst of her mental battlefield. On one side was Ronnie Kray, terrifying in his omniscience; on the other was Jack, her savior, who understood her in the same way Emma had. And thinking of Emma, she felt her friend’s great strength and courage flow into her. Would Emma lie to Jack? Alli knew she wouldn’t, so how could she herself do it?

“I was,” she said faintly.

“Have you thought about how to get yourself out of this prison?” Jack said to Armitage.

Alli’s guts were churning. “That was the man who took me from Langley Fields,” she persisted.

Jack turned to her. “You don’t say?”

Alli’s expression was stricken. “I … I’m sorry. I know I should’ve told you sooner.”

“I’m curious why you didn’t.” Jack knew it was crucial to keep any admonition out of his voice. He could see the terror shimmering in the faint sweat on her face.

Alli put her head down. “I was keeping Emma’s secret. I thought if I said one thing, it would lead to the rest.”

“But then you told me about Emma wanting to join E-Two. You could’ve told me about Ronnie Kray any time after that.”

Alli wedged her hands beneath her thighs, her arms as straight as boards. “He said if I told anyone about him, he’d come after me and kill me.”

“How would he know?”

Alli was crying again; she simply couldn’t stop. “I don’t know, but he knew everything about me, right down to what I did with a boyfriend, my doctors, what hospital I was born in.”

Jack wanted to take her in his arms, but he intuited this was the wrong time, the wrong place. He’d read that victims of abduction or rape often react negatively to being touched, even when that’s what they really want.

Alli panted as if she’d just finished a hundred-meter sprint. Emma, she thought wildly, please help me be strong. Then, with a start, she realized that she had Jack. In many of the important ways, Jack and Emma were alike, which was why she trusted him as much as she did, why she could talk to him on some level about her very private dread. “He’s in my dreams. He’s always there.”

Jack felt his stomach contract. “What does he say? What does he want?”

She sobbed. “I can’t remember.” A tremor went through her like an earthquake. “Whatever he wanted, you got to me first—you saved me.”

He could see how terrified Alli was of this man. How could she not be? He had held her entire life in his hands. Suddenly, he had a vivid mental image of the photos taken of her with a telephoto lens that had hung in the Marmoset’s house, especially the one of her and Emma walking across the Langley Fields campus.

How, he asked himself, had Ronnie Kray—or whoever the hell he was—come to have all that info? Some of it, like the hospitals and doctors, was a matter of public record, but other things, like intimate details of her personal relationships, certainly weren’t. If this guy was a spook, Jack could see it. But a civilian? He’d have to be psychic.

In the back of Jack’s mind, his oddly aligned synapses had been playing with the 3-D puzzle he was assembling in his head. Now the puzzle turned in a different direction, and he saw the shape of a missing piece.

“Alli,” he said with his heart pounding in his chest, “do you recognize the name Ian Brady?”

“Sure.” She nodded. “He and his partner, Myra Hindley, were responsible for what were known as the Moors murders. They went on a two-year killing spree from, I think, sixty-three to sixty-five.”

Ka-thunk! Jack could hear the missing piece fall into place. Proof that the man who abducted Alli, who killed her Secret Service detail, was the same man who, twenty-five years ago, had murdered the two unnamed men at McMillan Reservoir and, shortly thereafter, the Marmoset and Gus.

Jack had gone after the wrong man; Cyril Tolkan had been responsible for many crimes, but murdering Gus wasn’t one of them. So how clever was Kray/Whitman/Brady to have used a hand-honed paletta to kill, knowing full well that it would lead investigators to the wrong man?

Come to think of it, didn’t this serial killer use the same MO now, twenty-five years later? He’d left clues to lead investigators to FASR and E-2 and away from himself. Everyone had taken the bait—except Jack, whose mind was already hard at work fitting pieces of the puzzle together. At first, it simply hadn’t felt right, and then, little by little, as more pieces of the puzzle appeared for him to manipulate like a Rubik’s Cube, he had started to gain an inkling of his quarry.

Now he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt: This man was his personal nemesis. Kray had played him for a fool once; Jack would track him down this time, or die trying.

At that moment, his cell phone buzzed. He’d set it on vibrate before they’d left the house. He was getting a text message, just three letters: WRU. It was from Nina, but what the hell? Jack never texted, had no idea of shortcuts.

He showed the phone’s screen to Alli. “What does this mean?”

“‘Where are you?’” Alli looked at him. “She needs to see you.”

Jack thought a minute. Having slipped the Secret Service detail, it wouldn’t do to show up at a meet with Nina with Alli in tow, and he certainly wasn’t going to drop her off at the house, SS detail or no SS detail. They’d blown their coverage once; he couldn’t afford to take the chance they’d do it again.

What location could he give Nina that wouldn’t seem suspicious? He was about to ask Alli to text Nina back, but then reconsidered. It was odd for Nina to be texting him, rather than phoning. Given the specter of the Dark Car, Jack wasn’t in any frame of mind to take a chance. He logged on to the Web, called up Google Maps. He already had several saved. Choosing the one he wanted, he sent it to Nina. It wouldn’t show up as anything useful to potential eavesdroppers.

“Okay, we gotta go.” He and Alli rose. “For the time being, sit tight. You have enough food for a week?”

“I think so, yeah.” Armitage crouched down, opened the half fridge. “Plus, when the Coke and juice run out, we’ve got plenty of water.” He glanced up. “But that’s really all academic, isn’t it? The minute the people who run this place return in the morning, we’ll be screwed.”

“No, you won’t. I know them.” Jack still owned the building; because he charged his tenants way under the going rate, they’d do anything for him. “Trust me, they won’t bother you.” Jack shook Armitage’s hand. “I’ll get you out of this, Chris.”

Armitage nodded, but he looked less than sure.

41

Jack’s first choice would have been Egon, but who knew where he was at this hour. Jack wasn’t about to call the house to find out. That left him but one other option, so he took Alli to Sharon’s.

He wanted to call her to warn her, but at this point, he was afraid to use his cell phone. Instead, he stopped at a drug superstore, bought a burner—a cheap cell phone with a pay-as-you-go plan. After setting it up, he dialed Sharon’s number.

As soon as he heard her voice, he said, “I need to come over. Is it okay?”

“After what happened the last time?”

“It was just an argument. Don’t make a big deal over it.”

“Big deal? Jack, don’t you understand? Emma was the central argument of our life together.”

She was right, of course, but he didn’t have time to get into it with her. “Listen to what I’m saying, Shar. I need your help. Now.”

There was a slight hesitation. “Is everything all right?”

“Not quite.”

“What’s going on?” A different quality in her voice. The saber had been sheathed, the charger’s hooves stilled. “You’re scaring me.”

“We’ll be there in fifteen.”

“We? Jack, who are you with?”

“Not on the phone,” he said, and disconnected.

He got into the Continental and took off.

Paranoia running at peak level, Jack checked out Sharon’s neighborhood within an eight-block radius. That seemed excessive, even to him, especially since he could think of no reason why Sharon should be under surveillance. But since he still didn’t know who had sicced the Dark Car on him—or even why—the more thorough he was in his security check, the better he’d feel.

Having ascertained there was no surveillance in the area, he pulled into Sharon’s driveway. Alli hadn’t said a word since she’d translated the text message from Nina for him.

With the engine still running, Jack turned to her. “You okay?”

“I guess.” She put a hand to her temple. “My head hurts.”

“Sharon’ll get you some Tylenol as soon as we get inside.”

“You guys broke up, didn’t you?”

Jack nodded.

“Are you going to get back together?” Alli asked.

Jack sighed. “I’d be lying if I said I knew.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Emma talked about you guys a lot because what upset her the most was the fighting. She couldn’t bear it.”

Jack opened the window a crack. The heated canned air was getting to him.

“Plus, she thought it was all her fault.”

“That’s not true!”

“That’s funny, because she said you were always fighting about her.”

Jack shut up then. There was a peculiar feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he’d just overeaten and now had to get rid of the food at any cost. He opened the car door, got out. Leaning against the car, he realized that he was having trouble breathing.

Alli slid out, came around the front of the Continental to stand beside him. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“Don’t give it a second thought.”

There had come a moment when, looking back, he saw that their fighting had been incessant. And about what? Nothing. They fought because it had become a habit, because they were locked in combat, like ancient enemies who no longer knew how their enmity began. He was sick of it. There had to be a better way to deal with each other than through the armor of anger.

He nodded. “You’re just telling me something both Sharon and I should’ve realized long before now.”

Sharon looked scared out of her wits when she opened the door.

“Alli!”

“Hello, Mrs. McClure.”

“Come on in.” Sharon took a look over their shoulders before closing and locking the door behind them. “Now what’s this all about, Jack?”

They went into the living room, sat down on the L-shaped sofa.

“I’ll get you something for your headache,” Jack said.

“No,” Alli said. “It’s gone now.”

Jack regarded her for a moment before turning to Sharon. “I need a safe haven for Alli,” he said. “Just for a short time while I take care of some business.”

Sharon looked skeptical. “Alli, why aren’t you home with your parents?”

“It’s a long story,” Jack began.

“I’m asking Alli, Jack.”

“It’s not for her to answer that question.”

“I think it is,” Sharon persisted. “Alli?”

Alli looked down at her hands. “This is what Emma said it was like, being with you.”

“What?” Sharon said. “What did you say?”

“You wanted her to answer,” Jack said softly. “Hear her out.”

Sharon glared at him, but remained silent. Perhaps the rattle of sabers was all she was prepared to deliver. Still, Jack could hear the snorting of her warhorse champing at the bit to head into battle.

Intuiting the silence as a tacit acknowledgment that she should go on, Alli took a deep breath. “There’s no use arguing over this,” she said softly. “Jack’s right. If he can’t tell you why I’m not with my parents, I can’t either.” She lifted her head. “But it’s important I stay with you, that he’s free to do whatever he has to do.”

Sharon sat back, looked at Jack. “Did you put her up to this?” Seeing the expression on Jack’s face, she raised her hands defensively. “Sorry. Sorry.” She nodded. “Of course you can stay with me, Alli.” She smiled. “As long as you want or need to.”

Alli ducked her head. “Thank you, Mrs. McClure.”

Sharon’s smile widened. “But only if you call me Sharon.”

Jack found Nina’s car idling at the curb outside Sharon’s house. Before he could open the door, the passenger’s-side window slid smoothly down, and Nina, leaning over from behind the wheel, said, “Backseat, jack.”

Curious, Jack opened the rear door. Sliding onto the seat, he found himself next to a rather short barrel-chested man with a neatly trimmed beard and the calm demeanor of a sage.

“Jack,” Nina said, “meet Dennis Paull, Secretary of Homeland Security.”

“Jack, it’s good to finally meet you,” Secretary Paull said as he briefly enclosed Jack’s hand in a hearty grip. “Nina has told me a great deal about you.”

“Has she?” Jack caught Nina’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Spying on me?”

Paull laughed. “Keeping an eye on you is how I see it. Nina works for me undercover. She’s a damn good operative.”

“I’m in no position to dispute that,” Jack said.

Paull laughed again. “I don’t trust people without a sense of humor, Jack. And d’you know why? Because nothing murders a sense of humor faster than keeping secrets.”

“Nina’s a barrel of laughs, I can vouch for that,” Jack said. “She’s the only one I ever met who used a chocolate-chip cookie as a missile.”

That got an appreciative chuckle out of Nina.

“Okay, now that we’re one big, happy family, let’s get down to brass tacks,” Paull said. “Jack, I think you’re looking for some answers, and I have them. I sent out the Dark Car manned by two of my agents in order to keep an eye on you. They had orders to protect you should anyone make a move against you. Unfortunately, the National Security Advisor—perhaps with the blessing of the president—countermanded those orders.”

What have I gotten myself into? Jack asked himself. “Why would anyone want to make a move against me?”

“We’ll get to the details in a moment,” Paull said. “Now, suffice it to say that you’re Edward Carson’s man. As you might imagine, the president-elect is seen as something of a threat to certain individuals in the Administration. There’s an initiative to get certain matters the president deems pressing sewn up before the twentieth.”

“Like rounding up the First American Secular Revivalists.”

Paull nodded. “Among other suspect groups.”

“The FASR’s only crime is that their philosophy is in direct opposition with the current Administration’s,” Jack said.

“As you no doubt understand, Jack, this Administration has serious perception issues. The world—and the players in it—are what it says they are, no matter the reality.”

“Don’t you understand that the FASR is being made a scapegoat?” Jack said. “You guys can’t find E-Two, so you’re going after the easy target.”

“Please don’t confuse this Administration with the truth, Jack.” The secretary shifted in his seat. “Now, I think you may have an answer for me. You know a man named Ian Brady.”

It wasn’t a question, and Jack’s eyes sought out Nina’s again. “Yes, sir. Twenty-five years ago, he was a major drug supplier in my old neighborhood.”

“Which was?”

“Not far from McMillan Reservoir.”

Secretary Paull passed a hand across his brow. It was clear Jack had delivered his answer; trouble was, it was the answer Paull had been afraid of because it confirmed his dark analysis of who Ian Brady really was.

“You need to forget McMillan Reservoir, Jack.”

“That’s a bit hard to do, sir. This man, Ian Brady or Charles Whitman or Ronnie Kray, whatever he’s calling himself today, is the one who abducted Alli Carson and murdered her Secret Service detail in cold blood.”

“Nevertheless, you must forget him.”

Jack would have said, What the hell are you talking about, sir? except he knew exactly what Paull was saying. The last piece of the puzzle he’d been assembling in his head—the most crucial one—had just fallen into place. No wonder the IDs of the vics at McMillan Reservoir were never revealed. It was the same reason that the crash of the Dark Car and the deaths of the two agents in it never made the news.

Jack’s mind replayed the moment at McMillan Reservoir when he’d followed Gus and Detective Stanz, when Gus’s snitch said, “I guarantee you’ll never get the name of the murderer, either from me or anyone else.”

“Brady’s protected,” Jack said to Paull. “You’re protecting a serial murderer, a kidnapper.”

“Not me, Jack. The government. That’s why the order to my Dark Car agents was countermanded at the highest level. There was concern that you were getting too close to Brady.”

“A legitimate concern.”

The secretary’s face looked like you could pass a steamroller over it without making a dent. “This is a matter of national security.”

“How many illegal acts have been committed in the last eight years in the name of national security?”

“Jack, please. This is a friendly memo—the most friendly.”

“I understand, sir. But I have to do this.”

Paull breathed out a long sigh. “Look, I’m trying to protect you, you do understand that?”

“Yes, sir, I do, but that won’t change my mind.”

Paull looked away. He hadn’t for a moment thought he’d change Jack McClure’s mind, but he had to be absolutely certain of this man.

“From this moment on, you’re on your own.” Paull said this very softly, very distinctly.

“I’m prepared for the risk.” Jack knew nothing would be settled inside himself until he hunted down Ian Brady and either brought him in or shot him dead.

42

“How I wish you and Jack were my parents!”

“Good Lord!” Sharon was standing in the kitchen. So astonished was she by Alli’s statement that she dropped the egg she was transferring from its carton to the heated pan. The yellow yolk burst like a water balloon, slowly threading across the stove top, through the clear, glutinous albumin.

She’d gone with her first instinct, which was to make Alli something to eat, so they had repaired to the kitchen, a room that always made her feel secure. If she was being honest with herself, Alli’s presence here unnerved her, though her nervousness had nothing to do with the fact that Alli was the president-elect’s daughter. It was all down to the fact that Alli had been Emma’s best friend. They were the same age, and though one would hardly be taken for the other, it was difficult for Sharon to look at Alli without seeing her own daughter. She was beset by a profound ache she thought she had put aside. The poisonous stone of Emma’s death was still inside her.

Mindlessly, she turned off the burner, began to sponge up the mess. “Why on earth would you say such an extraordinary thing?”

“Because it’s true.”

Sharon wrung the remains of the raw egg into the sink. She held the broken shell in her cupped palm. “But I’m sure your parents are wonderful people.”

“Excuse me, but all you know about my mom and dad is what you see on TV or read in magazine articles,” Alli said.

She stood with her back against the pass-through into the living room. She appeared to Sharon to be poised beyond her years—certainly more poised than Emma had ever been. What I wouldn’t have given for a child like this, a voice inside her wailed. And immediately she put a hand to her mouth, appalled at the thought. God forgive me, she moaned silently. But her quick prayer of penance made her feel no better, just dirty. She panicked for a moment; if prayers no longer worked for her, what would? The truth of it is that prayers are only words, she thought, and of what comfort are words at a time like this? Hollow things like the shell of an egg with the inside drained away.

“You’re right, of course,” she said, desperately trying to soothe her way back into normalcy. “Please forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive, Mrs.—Sharon.”

Alli came and took the glistening shell out of Sharon’s hand. In that moment, their hands touched and Sharon began to weep. It took only an instant for the dam to burst, for all the feelings, methodically and efficiently tamped down and squashed, to reassert their right to life. Father Larrigan’s assurances of “It’s God’s will” and “Emma’s death is part of God’s plan” crumbled beneath the weight of hypocrisy. Sharon, queen of denial, was quite unprepared for the abyss, so that the dam not only burst but disintegrated entirely.

She rocked back and forth with inconsolable sobs. Knowledge comes through suffering was one of Father Larrigan’s favorite bromides. But in a flash of knowledge, she saw that it wasn’t a bromide at all; it was yet another way for the Church to maintain control over its increasingly unruly flock. We all must suffer because of Eve’s First Sin, we all deserve to suffer in this life so we may be redeemed in Heaven. What better way to keep people yoked to the Church? Surely God didn’t mean these con artists to speak in His name. Oh, the insidious cleverness of it!

Now her sorrow was joined by her rage at being duped, her terror at life’s random cruelty. All was chaos, uncontrollable, unknowable. With this came the stark realization that Jack was right. Her newfound religion was nothing but a sham, another way to deny her feelings, to convince herself that everything would be all right. But deep down where she was afraid to look, she knew nothing would ever be right again because Emma had been snatched from her and Jack for no good reason. And then she thought, despairingly, what possible reason could justify her daughter’s death? None. None on earth or in heaven.

Gradually, she became aware of Alli holding her hand, leading her into the living room, where they sat quietly side by side on the sofa.

“Can I get you something?” Alli asked. “Some tea, a glass of water, even?”

Sharon shook her head. “Thank you, I’m feeling much better now.”

But what a bitter lie that was! In her mind’s eye, she could see the inside of her church, the gloomy atmosphere, the confessional, where priests heard and absolved your sins if you recited the canned blather of Hail Marys or Our Fathers. But Father Larrigan wasn’t full of grace, nor was any priest. The flickering candles mocked those whose prayers they carried in their flaring hearts, the paintings of Christ, bleeding, dying while angels fluttered like so many moths over his head. And the gold! Everywhere you looked were gold crosses tinted rose or moss green by the saints in the stained-glass windows. And old-lady tears, old-lady prayers, old ladies with nowhere else to go, their lives over, clustered in the doorway, complaining about their backs and their bladders. She was not an old woman! Her life wasn’t over. It wasn’t too late for her to have another child, was it? Was it?

Wrenching herself away from her pain, she smiled through her tears. “Anyway, never mind me.” She patted Alli’s knee, and there it was again, that astonishing electric sensation that had made her weep. She managed to hold back the tears this time, but it wasn’t easy. “It’s you we were speaking of. You live a life of such privilege, Alli. You’re admired and envied by so many young women, sought after by so many young men.”

“So what?” Alli said. “I hate that privilege means the world to my parents. It means nothing to me, but they don’t get it, they don’t get me at all.”

Sharon regarded her sadly. “I never got Emma, you know. All that anger, all that rebellion.” She shook her head. “There were times when I thought she’d surely burst from keeping so much from us.”

“The secrets we keep.”

Sharon clasped her hands together. “I think secrets deaden us in the end. It’s like having gangrene. If you keep them long enough, they begin to kill parts of you, starting with your heart.”

“Your heart is still beating,” Alli said.

Sharon looked away, at the photo of Emma on a horse. She could ride, that girl. “Only in a medical sense, I’m afraid.”

Alli moved closer to her. “You still have Jack.”

“Seeing you here …” Sharon bit her lip. “Oh, I want my daughter back!”

Alli took her hand again. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Sharon looked into Alli’s eyes. How young she looks, she thought. How vulnerable, how angelic. She felt all of a sudden a great, an overwhelming desire for solace, for a peace inside her churning self. She wondered whether she possessed the strength to find it. The Church couldn’t provide it, nor all the prayers spoken by all the faithful in the universe. In the end, there was only what she could summon up from inside herself.

“Yes, please,” she said. “Tell me about Emma.”

Sharon confounded Jack utterly when he returned to the house.

“I have an idea,” she said brightly, “why don’t you and Alli spend the night here? Alli can have the spare bedroom, and this sofa is very comfortable. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve fallen asleep on it.”

Jack, mindful of the Secret Service detail he’d left behind, his brain turning over the problem of how once and for all to track down Ronnie Kray, heedlessly said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

Sharon’s face fell. “But why not?”

Seeing her stricken face gave him pause. He saw her on the sofa next to Alli, both women, torsos twisted, turned toward him. It was their proximity to each other, as if they were intimates, as if they had been talking of intimate things when he walked in. There was something about Sharon’s face, an expression he felt certain he’d never see again.

“It would be so nice,” Sharon said, “all of us together.”

Jack, his mind changing gears, thought she might be right. “Why don’t we all go to my house? It’s larger and—”

Seeing the change come over Sharon’s face, he stopped in midsentence.

“Jack, come on. You know that house gives me the creeps.”

What was the use? he thought. No matter what he said, she’d never agree to go there, let alone spend the night.

“Alli and I have to go,” he said.

Sharon stood up. “Why, Jack? I know you’re not comfortable here, but just this once, stay here with me.”

Jack shook his head. “It’s impossible, Shar. Alli’s Secret Service detail is expecting her to be at the house.”

“You mean you deliberately ditched them to bring her here?” The sabers were rattling again, the warhorse stamping its huge hooves.

“It was necessary,” Jack said.

“As far as you’re concerned, it’s always necessary to break the rules.”

“Not always.” How easy it was to fall back into the old patterns. “Sometimes I bend them.”

“Stop, please!” Alli cried.

They both turned in her direction.

“This isn’t anything to fight about,” she said. “You’re just fighting for the sake of fighting.”

“Alli’s right,” Sharon said. “Half the time I don’t even remember what we’re fighting about.”

“Then come with us,” Jack said. “Spend the night.”

“I’d like to,” Sharon said. “Really I would.” She shook her head. “But I’m not ready, Jack. Can you understand that?”

“Sure,” he said, though he didn’t, not really. If it wasn’t for the Secret Service detail, he would have consented to stay here tonight. What was it about Gus’s house she despised so? He couldn’t work it out. He’d asked her so many times without getting a satisfactory answer, he had no desire to go over that old turf again. Besides, like her, he was sick to death of fighting.

“I guess it’s time for you to go, then.” Sharon embraced Alli, and they kissed. She stood in the lighted doorway, watching them as they went down the walk to Jack’s car, and she shivered, as if with a premonition, or a feeling of déjà vu, as if she’d experienced this helpless moment of sadness and loss before.

43

There was, no question, a certain gloom about Jack’s house, a fustiness manifested by huge odd-shaped rooms, old gas lamps gutted and wired for electricity, massive furniture, not a stick of it built after 1950. Perhaps it was all this Sharon objected to, why she had opted for predictable square rooms, low ceilings, modern furniture—a house gaily lighted but without charm.

But there was also history here—chaotic, warty, fascinating. It was, as Alli had recognized, the residence of an Outsider, past and present. Could that be why Emma liked it here and Sharon didn’t? Jack asked himself as he climbed up the stairs with Alli. Sharon wasn’t an Outsider—that kind of life, often in conflict with rules, regulations, even, sometimes, the law, both baffled and frightened her. She was comfortable only within the well-defined bounds of society. That was why she’d been so hell-bent on Emma going to Langley Fields, which was so Establishment. And it was why Emma had gotten into continuous difficulty there. A round peg in a square hole. Outsiders never fit in; you could never change them. But until the day Emma died Sharon hadn’t given up hope.

Jack showed Alli into the guest room, which was next to his. In all these years, he’d never been able to sleep in Gus’s bedroom. Years ago, he’d hauled the bed Gus had been murdered in out back and burned it. More recently, he’d turned the bedroom into a media room with an enormous flat-screen TV on which he watched James Brown concerts as well as baseball and films he bought on DVD. He felt certain Gus would’ve liked that.

“The bathroom’s fully stocked,” he said. “But if there’s anything else you need, it’ll be in this closet here.”

After they said good night, he watched her go into her room, close the door behind her. He thought about what might be going on in her head, all the things she had told him, all the things she hadn’t. In his room, he called Carson, told him all was well and that he was slowly making progress.

Jack turned off the light, lay on the bed with his clothes on. He felt bone-weary, sad unto death. The experience of learning about Emma’s secret life was a two-edged sword. Gratitude and remorse flooded him in equal measure. Tonight he felt an outsider even from himself.

He must have fallen asleep because suddenly he opened his eyes and knew time had passed. It was the middle of the night. Traffic sounds were as scarce as clouds in the horse latitudes. He felt that he lay on the bosom of the ocean, rocked gently by wave after wave. He was aware of an abyss beneath him, vast, lightless. Light filtering in through the window seemed like the cool pinpoints of ten million stars. He was as far from civilization as he had ever been. Unmoored, he had said. And Alli had said, I’m unmoored, too.

It was then that he heard a sound, like the wind sighing through branches, like moonlight singing in the trees. Rain pattered on the roof, and a voice whispered, “There’s someone in the house.”

Sitting up, Jack saw a slim figure silhouetted in the open doorway.

“Alli, what is it? What did you hear?”

“There’s someone in the house,” she whispered.

He rose, took his Glock and went toward her. She turned, retreated into the hall, as if to show the way. Shadows lay against the wall like wounded soldiers. The silence was palpable, even the house’s normal creaks and groans were for the moment stilled.

“Alli, where are you going?” he whispered at the receding figure. “I want you to go back to your room, lock the door till I come for you.”

But either she was too far away or chose to ignore his warning, because she went down the stairs. Cursing under his breath, he hurried after her. A strange form of peacefulness came over him as he followed the slip of a shadow down the hallway, through the dining room and kitchen. Off the kitchen was a pantry that Gus had used for a storeroom and a half bath situated between the kitchen and the mudroom.

The mudroom was a space that was never used, either by Gus or by Jack. It seemed the oldest part of the house mostly because of its chronic disuse. It hadn’t been painted for years. There were cobwebs in the corners with the desiccated corpses of unidentifiable insects who’d met their end in their sticky strands. An old chair rail hung half off the wall, and an old-fashioned wooden hat rack leaned drowsily in one corner. The floor was constructed of ancient slate tiles, eighteen inches on a side. Many were cracked, some fractured entirely. One or two were missing.

As Jack crossed the kitchen, he could see Alli unlock the back door, disappear outside. Jack followed her. At once, he was engulfed by the odors of rotting wood, roots, and the mineral tang of damp stone. He pushed through into a deeper darkness as he moved into a patch of the forested area behind the house.

“Alli,” he said softly. “Alli, enough. Where are you?”

The tangle of branches, dense even in the dead of winter, kept the city at bay. The sky, grayish pink like old skin, was intermittently swept away by the wind. Rain seeped down, bouncing off twigs and vines, taking erratic pinball paths. Save for this, all was still. And yet there was the sense of something stirring, as if the wild area itself were alive with a single will, had turned that will to a specific intent.

Jack, his anxiety rising, peered through the rain, through the Medusa’s hair of the thicket. It was impossible to know which way she’d gone, or even why she would lead him here. In and out of faint lozenges of city light he went, turning this way and that, searching, until he seemed to be in a maze of mirrors, where he kept coming upon his own reflection.

He was certain he hadn’t dreamt that whisper, certain that Alli had been standing in his doorway. After all, who else could it have been? Then, the fine hairs on his forearms stirred, because he heard the voice again.

“Dad …”

Dennis Paull, climbing the open stairs of the Starlight Motel in Maryland, was nearing the end of another grueling day. Part of it had been taken up by a meeting with Calla Myers’s parents. He could, of course, have had one of his assistants meet them, but he was not one for delegating difficult assignments. Calla Myers had been killed on his watch. There was no excuse for her death; its dark stain would be etched on his soul forever, to take its place alongside many other similar tattoos. But somehow this one seemed darker, deeper, more shameful, because she was a civilian. She hadn’t put herself in harm’s way as the two Secret Service agents had. That she’d been murdered in precisely the same way as the agents was no longer a mystery to him.

Paull had no illusions about going to heaven, but since he believed in neither heaven nor hell, it didn’t really matter. What concerned him was the here and now. He had conjured up all the right phrases of sympathy for the Myerses. He had even sat with them afterwards, while the mother wept and the father held her blindly, even after he’d run out of words of brittle solace. He tried not to think about his own wife, his two sons, tried not to wonder how he would react if someone came to him with unthinkable news. He’d had a brother who’d died in the Horn of Africa in the service of his country. Even Paull hadn’t known the details of his mission. Nor had he cared to know the details of his death. He’d simply buried him with full honors and gone on with his work.

Having checked three times for surveillance, Paull walked along the open gangway on the second floor of the motel, inserted a key in the lock of a room at the far end, opened the door, and went in.

Nina Miller was sitting on the bed, her long legs stretched out, crossed at the bare ankles. She’d kicked off her sensible shoes and now looked fetching in a pearl-white silk shirt. Her dove gray wool skirt had ridden partway up her muscular thighs. She was a fine tennis player, as was Paull. It was how they’d met, in fact. Now they played mixed doubles whenever they had a chance, which, admittedly, wasn’t often.

Nina put down the book she was reading—Summer Rain, by Marguerite Duras—a first edition Paull had given her last year for her birthday. It was her favorite novel.

“You’re looking luscious.”

She smiled. “I could have your job for workplace sexual harassment.”

“This isn’t the workplace.” Paull bent, kissed her on the lips. “This isn’t harassment.”

“Flatterer.”

Paull pulled over the desk chair, sat down beside her. “What have you got for me?”

She handed him a thick manila folder. “I back-checked the dossiers of every member of the D.C. Homeland Security office. Everyone’s clean, so far as I can tell, except for Garner.”

“Hugh’s my deputy.” Paull shook his head. “No. He’s too obvious a choice.”

“That’s precisely why the National Security Advisor recruited him.” She pointed at the open file she’d compiled. “Over the past eight months, Hugh has met five times with a man named Smith.” She laughed. “Can you believe it? Anyway, Mr. Smith is Hugh’s acupuncturist. He also happens to be in the office adjacent to the National Security Advisor’s chiropractor.”

Paull, paging through the file, said, “I see their appointments overlapped on those five occasions.”

Nina folded her hands in her lap. “What d’you want to do?”

Putting the folder aside, Paull leaned over her. “I know what I want to do.”

Nina giggled, took his head between her hands. “I’m serious.”

“I couldn’t be more serious.” His lips brushed the hollow of her throat. “How’s your friend Jack McClure?”

“Mmmm.”

Paull raised his head. “What does that mean?”

She made a moue. “You’re not jealous, are you, Denny?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She pushed him away. “Sometimes you can be so starchy.”

“I only meant that considering Hugh Garner hates McClure’s guts, perhaps between us we can work out a way for him to take care of Hugh for us.”

Her mouth twitched. “What a Machiavellian mind you have.”

Paull laughed appreciatively as he manipulated the tiny pearl buttons down the front of her shirt.

Tossing the file on the floor beside the bed, she said, “I’ve gotten as close as I can to Jack. He’s carrying a Statue of Liberty-size torch for his ex.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Nothing you’ll have to worry about,” she said. “You don’t have a heart.”

“Birds of a feather.” He made a lascivious grab for her. “Anyway, what could be better than an affair with no strings attached?”

“I can’t imagine.” She gripped his tie, pulled him down to her.

Jack turned and saw her, framed between two trees, her skin pale in the ghostly light.

“Dad …”

“Emma?” He took a step toward her. “Is that you?”

The rain, gaining strength, beat down on him, water rolling into his eyes, mixing with his tears. Could Emma have come back to him? Was it possible? Or was he losing his mind?

He moved closer. The image wavered, seemed to break up into a million parts, each reflected in a raindrop spattering black branches, glistening brown bark, pale gold of dead leaves. She was all around him.

Jack stood in wonder as he heard her voice, “Dad, I’m here….”

It wasn’t the voice of a person or a ghost. It was the sough of the wind, the scrape of the branches, the rustle of the brittle leaves, even the distant intermittent hiss of traffic on faraway streets, avenues, and parkways.

“I’m here….”

Her voice emanated from everything. Every atom held a part of her, was infused by her spirit, her soul, the electrical spark that had animated her brain, that made her unique, that made her Emma.

“My Emma.” He listened for her, to her, heard the wind, the trees, the sky, even the dead leaves call his name, felt her close all around him, as if he were immersed in warm water. “Emma, I’m sorry. I’m sorry….”

“I’m here, Dad…. I’m here.”

And she was. Though he couldn’t hold her, couldn’t see her, she was there with him, not a figment of his imagination, but something beyond his ken, beyond a human’s ability to comprehend. A physicist might call her a quark. Werner Heisenberg, architect of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, would understand her being here and not here at the same time.

Jack returned to the house dripping wet, feeling at once exceptionally calm and subtly agitated. He couldn’t explain the feeling any more than he could the last half hour, nor did he want to. Heavy-limbed, he wanted only to return to his bed and sleep for as many hours as he could until sunlight splintered the oak tree outside his window and roused him with warm and tender fingers.

Before he did so, however, he peeked into Alli’s room, saw her sleeping peacefully on her side. Silently closing the door, he tiptoed back to the bathroom to dry off. Then he stumbled into bed and, after pulling the covers up to his chin, passed into a deep and untroubled sleep.

44

Jack felt as if he were walking a tightrope. On the one hand, he had promised Edward Carson to deliver Alli at noon today; on the other, he needed to find some way to get Alli to open up about Ian Brady because she was his only link to him. She’d been with him long enough; it was possible she had seen or heard something that could lead him to the murderer.

“Alli, I know how hard this must be for you,” he said as she came down to the kitchen, “I know this man is scary.”

Instantly, she turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He ignored the deer-caught-in-the-headlights glassiness of her eyes, plowed relentlessly on. This might be his last chance to get her to talk about her ordeal. “Alli, listen to me, we need to know why Kray abducted you. He didn’t do it for a lark, he had a plan in mind. Only you and he know what that is. You’re the key to what happened.”

“I’m telling you I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“But have you tried?” Jack said. “Really tried?”

“Please, Jack.” She began to tremble all over, absolutely certain that she was close to something terrible, that she was approaching a pit of fire into which she could not help but walk and be consumed. Even Jack couldn’t save her now. “Please stop.”

“Alli, I’m sure Emma would want you to—”

“Don’t!” She spun around, her face flushed. “Don’t use Emma that way.”

“All right.” Jack held up his hands. He knew he’d gone too far. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” The more he pushed her, the more agitated she became. He wasn’t going to get anything more out of her this way or any other way he could think of. Like it or not, he had to back off.

He smiled at her. “Are we good?”

Alli tried to smile back, but all she could do was nod numbly.

They were just sitting down to breakfast when Jack heard a car pull up outside. Assuming it was the Secret Service detail, he crossed to the front door, stepped outside to tell them not to come into the house. Instead, he saw Egon Schiltz’s maroon classic station wagon, a superlative 1950 Buick Super Model 59 Estate Woodie Wagon, with its unique Niagara Falls bumper, real birchwood side panels, the original straight-eight-cylinder engine with 124 horsepower and GM’s then-innovative Dyna-flow automatic transmission. In truth, it should have been in a showroom or bombing down Victory Boulevard in L.A., but it was Egon’s second child, and he drove it everywhere.

He raised an arm as he got out of the woodie. “Finally. I tried all yesterday to reach you, but you weren’t answering your cell phone, and Chief Bennett gave me a number for the task force that’s no longer in service.”

Jack came down off the porch. The mild air was still in place; there was only the hint of a chill in the air, low sunlight already melting silver hoarfrost.

“How are you, Egon?”

“Ask me in a month.” Schiltz gave a wry smile. “I came clean with Candy. I think she would’ve moved out, except for Molly. Molly must never know, that’s something the two of us absolutely agreed on.”

“If you agree on one thing, more will follow. You two should see someone.”

Egon nodded. “I want to. I’m sure Candy does, too. She just needs some time.” He scratched the back of his head. “You’re a good friend, Jack, thank you. I feel …” He sighed heavily. “It turns out you know me better than I know myself. Living a lie isn’t for me, which is why I’ve stopped going to church for the time being.” He leaned back against the mottled trunk of a tree. “It’s not so bad. Truthfully, I don’t think Molly misses it at all. I tried to make her see the light, but it’s no good, you see. It doesn’t work. You want for your child everything you yourself didn’t have, only to discover she wants only what she wants. And in the end, you’re meaningless, really. It’s her life.” He rubbed his hands briskly. “She never really got God. Either you believe or you don’t. There’s no point going through the motions.”

“I hope you haven’t stopped believing, Egon.”

The ME produced a rueful smile. “That would make my entire life a mockery. No, no, I still believe in God, but what you made me realize is that there are many paths to redemption. I’ve got to find mine. The Church can’t help me.”

Jack clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Everyone needs the freedom to make up their own mind.” He gestured with his head. “D’you want to come in? I can fix you some breakfast.”

Egon glanced around. “Not if you have guests.”

“In that case,” Jack said, “let’s take a walk.”

They went around the north side of the house. It was colder here; the green Bilco doors were still rimed with a thin layer of ice, the fallen leaves stuck together with the glue of winter.

“Something mighty queer is going on,” Egon said.

Jack was automatically on alert. “In what way?”

“You heard about that girl, Calla Myers, being stabbed to death on the Spanish Steps the other day. The District ME is an old bridge buddy of mine. He called yesterday morning, and I met with him. He told me that the stab wound was in the same place as the ones on the two agents guarding Alli Carson. I showed him the photos of the wounds, and he confirmed the one that killed Calla Myers was identical.”

“Did you confirm it on her body?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Egon said. “The body wasn’t in his morgue. The feds whisked it out of there along with his preliminary findings.”

Jack was hardly surprised, since it was clear that Calla Myers was Ian Brady’s latest victim. But the very fact that he’d targeted her set Jack’s synapses to firing overtime. Another Rubik’s Cube was forming in his head, and he didn’t like the shape of it one bit. He’d heard the president’s address. Direct evidence linked Calla Myers, a member of the FASR, to the murders of the SS agents. That was part of the rationale used to close down the Kansas Avenue office and take its members into custody. What did it mean that Brady—a federally protected person—had murdered Calla Myers? Brady had killed the Secret Service detail. In the initial briefing, Hugh Garner had told him that the detail’s cell phones hadn’t been found. In an instant, the Rubik’s Cube in Jack’s mind slid into focus. Of course the phones hadn’t been found; Brady had taken them. And now he’d planted one with Calla Myers to implicate her and, by extension, the FASR.

Egon broke into his thoughts. “Jack, are you still with me?”

Jack nodded. “I was just thinking about Calla Myers’s murderer. I think I know who it is, but I have no idea what his real name is or where to find him.”

“I just might be able to help you there.” Egon took out a small pad, flipped it open. “As I said, my friend hadn’t finished his autopsy on Calla Myers when the feds took her away, but he did note something interesting. He hadn’t yet put it in his prelim, because he needed to check it out, so the feds don’t have it.”

Schiltz consulted his pad. “As per the MO, there were no fingerprints whatsoever except for the vic’s, which leads us to the inescapable conclusion that the perp wore gloves of some sort. My friend found traces of a superfine powder on Calla Myers’s coat, in the place under her left arm consistent with where someone who had his arm around her would place his hand.

“It took him some time to figure out what this powder actually was.” Egon glanced up. “You’ll like this, Jack. What was on Calla Myers’s coat was logwood powder. Logwood is a heartwood extract from Haematoxylon campechianum, found in Central America and the West Indies. When mixed with a carrier, such as ethyl alcohol, glycerine, or Listerine, it becomes a black pigment used for tattooing.” He snapped the pad closed. “And, by the way, Calla Myers had no tattoos.”

Jack’s heart leapt. “So the logwood powder came from the perp.”

Schiltz nodded. “Whatever else this sonovabitch is, he’s also a tattoo artist. But here’s the best part. Almost all tattoo artists buy pre-mixed pigments. None of those use logwood as an ingredient. Your man mixes his pigments by hand.”

“I liked the white Continental better,” Alli said as she slid into Jack’s car.

He laughed as he put the car in gear. A moment later, he picked up the Secret Service detail in his rearview mirror. It was 11:20. The minutes were counting down to when he’d lose his access to her. It was now or never.

“Alli, there’s something I’ve been wondering,” he said. “Did the man who abducted you have a tattoo?”

Alli went rigid. She stared straight ahead.

“Alli, honey, it’s all right for you to tell me.”

“I only saw his arms.” Alli slowly shook her head from side to side. “He didn’t have any tattoos.”

Jack, heading for the Carsons’ house in Chevy Chase, did his best to keep to the minimum speed. He didn’t want this drive to end yet.

“Alli, I know Ronnie Kray frightened you terribly, but it would be helpful if you could tell me something more about what you saw. Anything at all.”

Alli, still sitting rigidly, said nothing.

“I want to catch him, Alli. You want that, don’t you?”

She bit her lip, nodded.

“You’re the only one who can help me.”

Tears began to run down her cheeks. “I wish Emma was here. She could tell you what you want to know.”

“You can, too.”

Her eyes squeezed shut. “I’m not brave like she was.”

Despite his best efforts, they’d entered Chevy Chase. This was it, then. The end. Jack relented. “Alli, your father has agreed to let me pick the detail guarding you.”

“I want you,” she said at once.

He nodded. “I’ll be there, just not the whole time. But you can absolutely trust Nina and Sam. I know them, I’ve worked with them. They won’t let you down.”

He turned onto the Carsons’ street, a cul-de-sac, saw more Secret Service agents in cars and on the sidewalk. They all watched him as he drove toward the large federal-style brick house at the end of the cul-de-sac.

“Home,” he said.

“It doesn’t feel like it.” Alli shifted in her seat. “Nothing feels right.”

“As soon as you get back to your routine, it’ll all feel as familiar as it did before.”

“But I don’t want to get back to my old routine!” She sounded like a spoiled child.

Jack pulled into the driveway where Edward and Lyn Carson were waiting. He shut off the engine, opened his door, but Alli made no move to open hers.

“Alli …”

She turned to him. There was desperation in her eyes. “I don’t want to leave you!”

“You have a responsibility to your parents. Tomorrow you’ll be the First Daughter. From now on, you have to act like the First Daughter. The whole country will be watching.”

“Please don’t make me.”

“Honey, it’s what has to happen.”

“But I’m afraid.”

Jack frowned. “Afraid of what?”

“To leave you, to be here, I don’t know.”

By this time, the Carsons, concerned, had come up to the car. Lyn Carson opened the passenger’s-side door, leaned in.

“Alli? Baby?”

Alli, still turned toward Jack, silently mouthed, Please help me.

Jack felt torn into a thousand shreds. He had failed Emma, he didn’t want to fail Alli as well. But what could he do? The president-elect had given him an order that he was powerless to ignore. Alli wasn’t his child. So he did the only thing he could do. He leaned over, whispered in her ear, “I’ll see you later, I promise. Okay?”

As he pulled back, he saw her nod. Then she turned, got out of the car and into her mother’s arms.

“Jack.”

Edward Carson was at his side as he got out of the car. The president-elect pumped his hand then impulsively embraced him.

“There are no words.” His voice was clotted with emotion. “You’ve brought our girl back to us safe and sound, just as you promised.”

Jack watched Alli. Her mother, arm around her waist, walked her up the brick steps to the open front door.

“That’s right,” Lyn Carson said. “Random House wants you to write a memoir about growing up to be the First Daughter.”

“She’s a special young woman,” Jack said. “I want Nina Miller and Sam Scott assigned to her permanent detail. Nina and I were partners in finding Alli. I worked with Sam at ATF until he transferred to the Secret Service three years ago.”

Carson nodded. “I’ll make the necessary calls right away.” He looked at his wife and daughter for a moment, before turning back. “Jack, Lyn and I would like you at the inauguration, up on the dais with us. You’re like a member of our family now.”

“It would be an honor, sir.”

In the doorway, Alli turned, gave him a tentative smile, and with a sweep of her mother’s arm, vanished into her world of privilege and power.

45

Who was Ian Brady? In other, more normal circumstances, Jack would have been preoccupied with finding that out. However, this case was anything but normal. What concerned him now was not who Ian Brady was but why he had chosen that name. Clearly, his other aliases—Ronnie Kray and Charles Whitman—followed on in a straight line from the first.

It was Jack’s experience—the experience of any knowledgeable lawman—that criminals, even the highly intelligent ones, chose their aliases for a reason. An FBI profiler who had been brought into the ATF office on a case some years ago had said that giving meaning to an alias was a subconscious urge criminals found irresistible. In other words, they couldn’t help themselves. Of one thing Jack was certain: The name Ian Brady held special meaning for this man. The trick was to find out what that meaning was.

With his paranoia at full mast, Jack bypassed the computers hooked up to the federal network, which included his own at the ATF office in Falls Church. What was required, he thought now as he made his way out of Chevy Chase, was a public cybercafé. Twenty minutes of hunting from behind the wheel of his car unearthed one on Chase Avenue, in Bethesda. He sat down at a terminal, typed the name Ian Brady, but all he got was a bare-bones recap from Wikipedia and About.com. On the other hand, after some false leads, he found a distributor of logwood, the substance Brady had inadvertently left on Calla Myers’s coat. Taking down the address and phone number, he walked outside, checked the environment for tags. In the shadow of a storefront, he got out his cell burner, punched in the number of the distributor. He got nothing, no automated message, no voice mail. He wasn’t all that surprised. The distributor was so small and obscure, it had a rudimentary Web site. Customers could order its product online, but other than that, the site looked as if it hadn’t been updated in months.

S&W Distribution was on the outskirts of the curiously named Mexico, Pennsylvania, 160 miles north of Chevy Chase Village. It took Jack just under three hours bombing down I-83N and US-22W to get there. By the time he exited PA-75S, it was already late in the afternoon. The sun, low in the sky, was bedded on thick clouds into which it expanded and slowly sank. Shadows lengthened with the beginning of winter’s long twilight.

S&W occupied a ramshackle building a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks that brought Mexico all the business it was going to get. It was impossible to tell what color the structure had originally been painted or even what color it was now. Jack’s heart sank because at first sight, the place looked abandoned, but then he saw a young woman come out the front door. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket over a ribbed turtleneck sweater. As he pulled up, she settled herself on the clapboard steps, shook out a cigarette, lit up. She watched him with gimlet eyes as he got out of his car, walked toward her. She had an interesting, angular face. Its slight asymmetry made her appear beautiful. She was slim and small. She appeared to be in her late twenties.

As he approached, he heard a train whistle. The tremor in the tracks built as the train thundered toward them. The unsettled air of its bow wave crashed over them like a hail of gunshots. The young woman, her long hair flying across her face, sat as calmly as if the only sound to be heard was the crunch of Jack’s shoes on the pebbly blacktop. Smoke dribbled from the corner of her mouth, and now that he was closer, he could see the tattoos on the backs of her hands, either side of her neck: the four main phases of the moon. She must have dyed her hair black to match her eyes, but the tips were golden. She wore a silver skull ring on the third finger of her right hand. The skull seemed to be laughing.

In the aftermath of the cinder swirl, Jack flashed his ID, watched as her eyes tracked uninterestedly to the information. He began to wonder whether it was tobacco she was smoking.

“Do you work at S-and-W?” he asked.

“Used to.”

“They fired you?”

“The world fired them. S-and-W is history.” She jerked a thumb. “I’m just cleaning out the place.”

Jack sat down beside her. “What’s your name?”

“Hayley. Can you believe it? Ugh! Everyone calls me Leelee.”

“How long did you work here?”

“Seven to life.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “A fucking jail term.”

Jack laughed. “You’re a hard piece of work.”

“It’s self-preservation, so you can be sure I try my damnedest.” She watched him out of the corners of her black eyes. “You don’t look like a cop.”

“Thank you.”

It was her turn to laugh.

“How far along are you with the—” He jerked his thumb. “—you know?”

She sighed. “Not nearly far enough.”

“I’m trying to track down a customer of S-and-W’s,” Jack said. “He’s a tattoo artist who mixes his own pigments. I’m hoping he ordered logwood from you.”

“Not too many of those,” Leelee observed. “It’s why S-and-W was overtaken by history. That and the fact that the owner never came around. The fucker stopped paying his bills altogether—including my salary. If I wasn’t hired by the mail-order company taking over the building, I wouldn’t even be here now.” She shrugged. “But who cares? Odds are the new company’ll go belly-up, too.”

“Do you know something your new bosses don’t?”

“That’s the way the world works, isn’t it?” She stared at the glowing tip of her cigarette. “I mean, we’re all sheep, aren’t we, persuading ourselves that we’re different, that we’re beautiful or smart or cool. But we all end up the same way—as a little pile of ashes.”

“That’s a pretty bleak outlook.”

She shrugged. “Par for the course for a nihilist.”

“You need a boyfriend,” Jack said.

“Someone to tell me what to do and how to do it, someone to leave me at night to go out with the guys, someone to roll over in bed and snore his way to morning? You’re right. I need that.”

“How about someone to love you, protect you, take care of you?”

She tossed her head. “I do that myself.”

“I see how that’s working out for you.”

Through her armor, she gave him a wry smile.

“Come on, Leelee, you need to believe in something,” Jack said.

“Oh, I do. I believe in courage and discipline.”

“Admirable.” Jack nodded. “But I mean something outside of yourself. We’re all connected to a universe more mysterious than what we see around us.”

“Think so? Here’s the truest thing I know: Don’t for a moment let religion or art or patriotism persuade you that you mean more than you do.” She took another deep drag, gave him a challenging, alpha-dog look. “That comes from a play called Secret Life. I bet you never heard of it.”

“It was written by Harley Granville-Barker.”

Leelee’s eyes opened wide. “Shit, yeah. Now I’m impressed.”

“Then give me a hand here.”

“I could bust your hump, but you’ve taken all the fun out of that.” She swept her hair behind one ear. “Does your tattoo artist have a name?”

“Ian Brady,” Jack said. “Or Ronnie Kray. Or Charles Whitman.”

Leelee took the butt from between her lips. “You’re shitting me.”

“He was a customer, right?”

“More than.” She didn’t look as if she was interested in smoking anymore. “Charles Whitman owns S-and-W.”

The evening was furry with sleet, but as Jack worked his way south toward the District, it became an icy rain his wipers cast off either side of his windshield. The roads were slick and treacherous, peppered with spin-outs and fender benders, which slowed him down considerably. He returned from Mexico with an address for Charles Whitman. He had no way of knowing whether this was Brady’s current residence, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. The approach had to be thought out in detail.

As soon as he entered the house, he turned on the stereo, along with the lights and his stove top. But the only meat he had—a steak—was frozen solid, so he turned off the burner, sat down at the kitchen table with a jar of peanut butter and one of orange marmalade. Using a teaspoon, he scooped out mouthfuls from one jar then the other.

Afterwards, he went through his LP collection without finding anything he wanted to listen to. That’s when he came upon Emma’s iPod. He’d stuck it on top of a Big Bill Broonzy album that contained two of his favorite songs, “Baby, Please Don’t Go” and “C C Rider.” Tonight, he didn’t want to hear either of them.

He took up the iPod, plugged it in because the battery was low. Using the thumb wheel, he browsed through Emma’s collection of MP3s. There were the usual suspects: Justin Timberlake, R.E.M., U2, and Kanye West, but he was startled to see tracks by artists he loved and had played for her: Carla Thomas, Jackie Taylor, the Bar-Kays.

Searching through the shelves that housed his records and videocassettes, he found the box containing the iPod dock he’d bought but never used. He took it out, plugged it into the aux receptacle in the back of the stereo receiver. Then he put the iPod into the dock.

He decided to listen to something of Emma’s at random. This turned out to be an album for some reason called Boxer, by a band called The National. He thought of Emma, imagined her listening to these muscular songs—he particularly liked “Fake Empire”—wondered what would have been going through her mind.

As the music played, he fired up his computer, went online. According to Leelee’s records, the address where Brady had his logwood delivered was on Shepherd Street, in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He pulled up Google Maps, punched in the address, and clicked the HYBRID button, which gave him both the map and the satellite photo of the area. The address was only five or six miles southeast of where he was born. The thought gave him the shivers.

Forty minutes later, he got up, rummaged around the house for several items he thought he might need, stuffed them into a lightweight gym bag. He checked his Glock, shoved extra ammunition in his pocket, grabbed his coat. On the way out the door, he called Sharon. There was no answer. He disconnected before her voice mail picked up. With a sharp stab of jealousy, he wondered where she was. What if she was out with another man? That was her right, wasn’t it? Yes, but he didn’t want to think about it. He climbed into his car, his heart hammering in his chest. Driving to Shepherd Street, he thought, this could be it, the end of a road twenty-five years long.

46

What were the odds that Ian Brady lived in a hotel just four miles from Jack’s house? Yet this was what Jack saw as he cruised by the address Leelee had given him. RAINIER RESIDENCE HOTEL. SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM CORPORATE LEASES AVAILABLE the sign out front read. He didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down until he turned the corner onto Thirty-first Street, where he pulled into the curb and parked. The first thing he did was to check out the rear, which was flat, save for a zigzag of tiered black iron fire escapes. It gave out onto a concrete apron and, just beyond, a modestly sized blacktop parking lot, lit by sodium lights, from whose hard glare he kept his careful distance. But there was no rear entrance, most likely because of the same security concerns that had led to the installation of the parking lot lights.

Walking back to Shepherd Street, he found himself across the street from an ugly U-shaped structure hugging a courtyard with four withered trees, a Maginot Line of evergreen shrubs, fully a third of which were as brown and useless as sun-scorched newspapers. The hotel itself was three stories of pale yellow brick. Access to the apartments was via metal staircases at the center and either end of the U, along raw concrete catwalks that ran the length of the building. There was a coarseness about it, a glittery shabbiness, like a Christmas present wrapped in used paper. Had it been painted turquoise or flamingo, it could have passed as a down-at-the-heels Florida condo.

Jack kept away from the occasional dazzle as passing cars lit up sections of the sidewalk. He crossed the street, found his way to the manager’s apartment. Even through the door he could hear the blare of the TV. Waiting for a seconds-long silence, he rapped hard on the door. The blare started up again, louder this time, which meant a commercial had come on. A moment later, the door was yanked open the length of a brass chain.

Dark eyes in a square, heavy-jawed face looked him up and down. “Not interested.”

Jack put his foot across the doorjamb, flashed his ID even as the door began to swing shut. “I need some information,” he said.

“What kind of information?” the manager said in a voice like a pit bull’s growl.

“The kind you don’t want to give me while I’m standing out here.”

The dark eyes got small and piggy. “You’re not from INS? All my workers are legit.”

“Sure they are, but I don’t care. I’m not from Immigration.”

The manager nodded, Jack took his foot away, and the door closed enough for Pig-Eyes to unlatch the chain. Jack walked into a low-ceilinged apartment with small rooms made even smaller by enough sofas, chairs—upholstered and otherwise—and tables of all sizes and shapes to furnish the Carson’s Chevy Chase mansion. The manager muted the TV. Images of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble chased themselves across the screen.

“You have a tenant here by the name of Charles Whitman?”

“No.”

“How about checking your records?”

“No need,” Pig-Eyes said. “I know everyone who lives here.”

“How about Ron Kray?”

“No Kray here.”

“Ian Brady.”

Pig-Eyes shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

Jack considered Brady’s propensity for misdirection. Alli had told him that the real Ian Brady had a female accomplice. “How about a Myra Hindley?”

“No,” Pig-Eyes said, “but we got a Myron Hindley. You think he’s the one you’re looking for?”

“Do the apartment doors have peepholes?” Jack said.

Pig-Eyes seemed confused. “Yeah, why?”

“Are all the door locks the same as yours?”

“You bet. House rules. I gotta be able to have access to all the apartments.”

“I need a broom, a wire hanger, and the key to Myron Hindley’s apartment,” Jack said. As the manager went to fetch the items, Jack added, “If you hear any loud noises, it’s just a truck backfiring.”

Myron Hindley’s apartment was on the third floor, at the far end of the building. Hardly a surprise, since that’s precisely where Jack would have situated himself if he were in Brady’s place. He had two choices: The first was to go in the front door. The second was to climb up the fire escape to the apartment’s two rear windows. Since it would be far easier for Brady to flee out the front door than climb out the window, he decided to make a frontal assault. He wished Nina were here to take the back of the building, but she was with Alli. Besides, ever since the explicit warning he’d received from Secretary Paull, he’d decided to continue after Brady alone. This was his fight, not hers.

Every six feet, bare bulbs were screwed into porcelain fixtures in the ceiling of the catwalk. On the third floor, Jack took off his shoes, covered his right hand with both socks. Reaching up, he unscrewed each lightbulb as he progressed down the catwalk. The circles of illumination winked out one by one. After he’d disabled the last bulb, he put on his socks and shoes. His feet were freezing, and he had to wait several minutes for the warmth to come back so that he had full maneuverability.

With only the ambient wash from streetlights and the odd passing vehicle to illuminate the catwalk, Jack set the gym bag down on the concrete, opened the zip, took out a small can of WD-40 and a pair of bolt cutters. Then he took off his coat, hung it on the wire hanger, buttoned it, put the collar up. Then he twisted the top of the hanger so it wound around the butt of the broom handle. He stood this makeshift scarecrow against the railing of the catwalk directly opposite the door to Myron Hindley’s apartment.

Standing to one side of the door, he sprayed the key Pig-Eyes had given him with WD-40. It slid right in as he inserted it into the lock. But he didn’t turn it over. Instead, he picked up the bolt cutter. He rapped on the door, very loudly. Just as he pulled his fist away, three bullets exploded through the door, ripping holes in Jack’s overcoat. The broom crashed over onto the catwalk.

Jack turned the key, opened the door. As at the manager’s apartment, the door opened only to the length of the chain, which Jack promptly snipped in two with the bolt cutter. Drawing his Glock, he kicked open the door. Expecting another salvo of shots, he held his ground. When none came, he pitched himself across the threshold curled in a ball, came out of it with his Glock aimed into the room.

“Relax,” a voice said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Jack found himself confronting a figure sitting at his ease in an upholstered chair that had been pulled so that it faced the front door. Only one lamp was on, so that he was cast in half light, enough so that Jack could see the handgun gripped in one hand. It was lying on his right thigh, the barrel aimed casually at Jack.

“Sit down, Jack,” the figure said. “It’s been a long run. You must be tired.”

Jack could feel the power of the man as a fish is drawn to the baited hook. “I don’t know whether to call you Myron, Charlie, Ronnie, or Ian.”

The figure shrugged. “What’s in a name?”

“Who are you?” Jack said. He was struggling against an unnamed fear that had spread its black wings inside him. “What’s your real name?”

“I didn’t invite you here to answer questions,” the figure said.

Jack felt a laugh forced out of him, but it sounded brittle and shaky. “You invited me?”

Brady shrugged. “Leelee told me you were on your way.”

Now the fear took flight; he was in its shadow. As if he’d received a blow, he took an involuntary step backwards.

Brady bared his teeth. “Where d’you think she got all her ideas?”

Feeling a chair behind his knees, Jack sat down dazedly.

“Truth to tell, I’ve run you like a rat in a maze.” In a trick of the light, Brady seemed to have inflated, to be larger than life. “Every time you got to another point in the maze, I moved your cheese.” He waved the hand with the gun. “For instance, Calla Myers called me the moment you left the FASR office. I knew it was only a matter of time before you followed the clues I left to the Marmoset’s house. Oh yes, I’m familiar with Gus’s nickname for him.”

Jack felt poleaxed. All the hard work he’d done to get here, the arduous path he’d followed, had been created by this monster. “It was all to get me here?” he said like a pupil to his professor. “Why?”

“That question I’ll answer. I’m as tired as you are, Jack. I’ve had a good run, but now, like the president, my term has come to an end. And like the president, it’s time for me to look to my lasting legacy.”

He shifted slightly, and Jack could see him better now. Chris Armitage had described him well. He was handsome, distinguished even, with the kind of sexual magnetism he imagined Leelee would go for. Jack found him as sinister-looking as his horned viper and twice as terrifying.

“Your term stretches back far longer than eight years.”

“All the more reason for it to come to an end.” Brady leaned over, reached for the neck of a bottle of liquor, which he lifted into the light so Jack would be reassured. “Polish vodka. The real thing, not the watered-down crap you get here. Care to join me?”

Jack shook his head.

Brady shrugged. “Your loss.” Hoisting the bottle, he took a long swig, then smacked his lips.

“Okay.” Jack rose, gestured with the Glock. “Time to go.”

“And where would you be taking me? Not to the police and certainly not to the feds.” He possessed a crooked grin that gave him the aspect of a crocodile. There was something primeval about him, immutable, like a force of nature. This elemental quality was the source of his power. “You’re the one they’ll lock up, Jack, not me.”

Jack stood, the Glock pointing at the floor. “Why did you kill Gus?”

“No questions, remember? Not that it matters—you already know the answer to that one. Gus wasn’t going to give up looking for me. That idiot detective, Stanz, would have finally let it go, but not Gus.” Brady lazily tilted his head to one side. “But that isn’t the question you really want to ask, is it?”

An icy ball formed in the pit of Jack’s stomach. “What d’you mean?”

“C’mon, Jack. I killed Gus inside his house. You were asleep down the hall. You want to know why I left you alive.”

Jack, realizing he was right, said nothing.

“It’s a mystery, Jack, like many others in this life destined to remain unsolved.”

Jack aimed the Glock at him. “You will tell me.”

“Are you going to shoot me? That would be a blessing. My term would end in a blaze of glory because my bosses would lock you up and throw away the key. Lawyer, what lawyer? You wouldn’t even get a phone call. No, they’ll stick you in solitary in a federal high-security penitentiary.” He gestured with his gun, careful not to point it at Jack. “So sit back down, have a drink.”

Jack stood where he was.

“Suit yourself.” Brady sighed deeply. “We’re both orphans, in our own ways. I murdered my parents, as you should have.”

“If you’re trying to say we’re alike—”

“I must say you made up for it, though, when you killed that street thug, Andre.” Brady chuckled. “In a library yet. Brilliant.” He took another hit of the Polish vodka. “I’m going to tell you a secret, Jack. I have not one grain of faith in me. Early in life I wanted to get past all of life’s tricks, small and large, to get to the heart of things.” His eyes lit up. They were the eyes of Ron Kray, Charles Whitman, Ian Brady. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Jack? That’s your search, too.” He nodded. “Instead, what have I become? Life’s ultimate trickster. You see, there’s nothing left of me but tricks. That’s because I discovered that there is no heart of things. I think there used to be, but that was a long time ago. Life’s hollow, like a tree full of burrowing insects. That’s what humans are, Jack. They’ve burrowed into life with their frenzied civilization, their running after wealth and fame, their attempts to deny the body’s decay. They’re all insane. What else could they be, making such an unholy mess of things? They’ve hollowed life out, Jack, till there’s nothing left but the shell, the illusion of happiness.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Ah, but it’s true, and your daughter knew it. Emma heard what I had to say, and it drew her like a moth to a flame. Too bad she died so young—I had big plans for her. Aside from killing, mentoring’s what I do best. Emma had real potential, Jack. She could have become my most ardent pupil.”

With a savage cry, Jack launched himself at Brady, crashed into him with his leading shoulder. The chair tipped backwards, and they both tumbled head over heels in a tangle of arms and legs, fetched up against the wall under the rear window. Jack punched Brady in the nose, heard with satisfaction the cartilage fracture. Blood spouted out, covering them both. At almost the same time, Jack felt the Glock being ripped from his hand. He felt around blindly for the other gun, saw Brady raise the Glock. A moment more, he’d shoot Jack. But then Jack saw where the Glock was pointed and, in a flash of insight, knew that Brady meant to shoot himself in the head with Jack’s gun. He meant what he said about going out in a blaze of glory. He was going to end his reign by ensuring that Jack would spend the rest of his life in prison.

With a desperate swing, Jack knocked the Glock from Brady’s hand. It went skittering across the floor. He hauled Brady to his feet, but one foot trod on Brady’s gun. It was, like everything else in the area, slippery with blood. Jack lurched forward, taking Brady with him as they pitched through the window in a blizzard of shattered glass. Brady teetered for a moment with Jack over him, the two of them in stunned equilibrium. Jack tried to pull back, to right himself, but Brady was too far. Without Jack’s weight to hold him in place, he began to slide headfirst out the window. Jack made a grab for him, but Brady slapped his hands away.

Brady stared up into Jack’s face without expression of any kind. “Makes no difference. You’ll never stop it.”

The next instant he plummeted down three stories to the concrete apron. Jack, covered in blood and shards of glass, scooped up his Glock, ran out of the apartment, along the catwalk. He clattered down the stairs three at a time, around the side of the building.

Brady lay in a grotesque heap. He might have survived the fall, but the impact had broken his neck. His handsome face, under the harsh sodium glare of the parking lot lights, was a patchwork of seams, as if over time it had been stitched together. The eyes, devoid of their animating spark, were only buttons now. Stripped of charisma, he was nothing remarkable to look at. He was dead, Jack was dripping blood, and twenty-five years of rage, sorrow, and feeling abandoned drained away like grains of sand.

47

Walking into the vast hushed public library on G Street NW put Jack immediately at peace. The dry, slightly dusty scent of books came to him like a breath of fresh air, bringing back memories of so many hours happily poring through books to his heart’s content. There was a certain kind of quiet here that calmed and stirred him at the same time. It was like being in the ocean, feeling your body light and buoyant and, at the same time, attuning yourself to the galaxy of unknown life that seethed beneath the surface. The knowledge of the world lay before him, the wisdom of history. This was his cathedral. Here was God.

It was the morning of January 20. Inauguration Day. For a few hours, Jack had slept in his car before waking up just before dawn stiff and tired, his eyes full of grit. He went home, stripped off his bloody clothes, climbed into a hot shower, and putting all thoughts aside, stood under the cascade for fifteen blissful minutes. Then he scrubbed himself with soap, rinsed, dried off.

Fighting the urge to call Sharon, he dialed Alli’s cell.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come by last night.”

“That’s okay.” Her voice sounded furred with the remnants of sleep. “I missed you.” There was a slight hesitation. “I had another dream last night.” She meant about Ian Brady.

“Can you remember it?”

“He was talking to me, but his voice was all gauzy. It—I don’t know—I had pictures in my head, like a movie. I was walking through a crowd of people.”

“Were you trying to get away from him?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Alli, you don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

“What d’you mean?”

He heard in her voice that she’d come fully awake.

“This is just between the two of us, right?”

“Right.”

“That’s why I couldn’t come see you,” Jack said. “I was with him. And now he’ll never hurt you again.”

He heard her sharply indrawn breath. “Really?”

“Really. I’ll see you at the inauguration, okay? Now let me speak with Nina.”

After a short pause, Nina came on the line.

“Good idea not contacting me on my cell. Are you calling from a pay phone?”

“A burner I bought a couple of days ago.” He paused to stare out his bedroom window, where the branches of the oak tree reached toward the sky. “Listen, Ian Brady’s history.”

“What?”

“I tracked him down last night to a residence hotel in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He’s dead.”

“What a relief.”

“Brady wanted to die, Nina. I’ll give you the details after the inauguration, okay?”

“It’s a date,” she said. “Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

Downstairs, he pulled the suit Chief Bennett had waiting for him those long weeks ago when he was being prepped for his assignment to Hugh Garner’s joint task force. He stripped off the dry cleaning bag. He turned on Emma’s iPod. He wanted to hear more of her music while he dressed. Alli had said that she was always making playlists. Seeing a playlist category in the iPod screen, he clicked on it. Oddly, there was only one, called Outside. He set it to play. Immediately, “Life on Mars?”—David Bowie’s famous song about alienation—started up.

As Jack listened, he put on a freshly laundered white shirt, buttoned it up. “Life on Mars?” segued into the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” As he knotted his tie, on came Screamin’ Jay Hawkins singing “I Put a Spell on You,” a good deal more raw and powerful than subsequent versions.

After reknotting his tie three times, he got it right. He slipped on his jacket and was about to turn off the iPod when he heard Emma’s voice coming out of the speakers. He stood, transfixed, listening to the aural diary of her three meetings with Ian Brady. This was how the entry ended:

“Finally, I said to him that if he saw me as his Myra Hindley, he was sorely mistaken because I had no intention of either fucking him or falling under his spell. This was the one time he surprised me. He laughed. I had nothing to fear. He said that he already had his Myra Hindley.”

You’ll never stop it.

Stop what? What had Brady planned?

Jack walked through the library’s stacks. With each book he touched, he sensed a new door open to him. This was the place where his disability vanished, where he could read without the tension and frustration his dyslexia usually caused him. In the shadowed aisles he recognized Andre, Gus, Ian Brady, Emma. Each of their lives had meaning, a certain force that would remain with him even after death; of this, he was absolutely certain. Though they were beyond him now, still he sensed them, as an animal scents spoor and in its mind forms an image of what had once been there and has since moved on.

The truth was, Jack still felt the spoor of Ian Brady’s mesmeric power, even though he was quite certain Brady had lied about his connection with Emma, had in fact been baiting him. Of course, this was precisely what Brady had meant to plant inside him, but Jack was only human, prey to human doubts and fears, just like anyone—anyone save Ian Brady perhaps.

Without quite knowing how it happened, Jack found himself at the section of the library that held the books of Colin Wilson. He ran his finger along the spines of the books until he found the intimidatingly thick A Criminal History of Mankind. Taking it down, he went over to a trestle table, sat down, and opened it up.

He was astonished to discover that the introduction was all about the real Ian Brady. Wilson had had a ten-year correspondence with Brady in prison. Wilson’s conclusion was that “even an intelligent criminal remains trapped in the vicious circle of his criminality, and cannot escape.”

Brady was involved in what Wilson termed a “dominance syndrome” with Myra Hindley, a young woman he seduced, deflowered, and somehow coerced into being his accomplice for a horrifying string of rape/murders over a two-year period. It was Myra who lured the teenage victims into her car so Brady could perform his acts of extreme cruelty and degradation. The real mystery was how he converted a young innocent like Myra Hindley into a criminal.

Jack paused. He could not help thinking of his Brady and Emma. Emma heard what I had to say, and it drew her like a moth to a flame. Too bad she died so young—I had big plans for her. Aside from killing, mentoring’s what I do best. Emma had real potential, Jack. She could have become my most ardent pupil. What had he wanted with a Myra Hindley? So far as Jack could tell, Brady was a loner—whatever missions he performed for the government were strictly on his own. Anyone with him would have been a liability. So what, then, was he up to?

Jack went back to reading. On page twenty-nine, he came across the most heinous of Brady’s crimes. He and Hindley picked up a ten-year-old girl. They took pictures of her (Jack couldn’t help but think of the photos of Alli and Emma on the wall at the Marmoset’s house), recorded her pleas for mercy, then killed her and buried her on the moor, where another of their young victims was buried. “Later,” Wilson wrote, “they took blankets and slept on the graves. It was part of the fantasy of being Enemies of Society, dangerous revolutionaries.”

Sickened by what these two people had done, Jack looked up. Into his head now came something else that his Brady had said to him last night: I’ve had a good run, but now, like the president, my term has come to an end. And like the president, it’s time for me to look to my lasting legacy.

Jack understood that Brady had wanted to die last night: he’d tried to shoot himself with Jack’s Glock, he’d brushed Jack’s hands away when Jack tried to save him from his fall. Might it be that this was why Brady had kept Jack alive that night, because he suspected this moment in his future would come, that he wanted someone worthy to finish him off? Truth to tell, I’ve run you like a rat in a maze. Every time you got to another point in the maze, I moved your cheese. Jack had not only successfully negotiated the maze, but he’d also survived the horned viper’s attack, the fusillade of bullets coming through the apartment door.

So Brady knew he was going to die last night, and yet he was looking to his lasting legacy. What might that be? Not his clandestine work for the government. A lasting legacy involves notoriety—a very public display. And he had very deliberately invoked the president. Why had he done that?

Another three-dimensional puzzle was forming in Jack’s head as his brain made connections with the speed of light. Brady’s MO was misdirection; he’d used it time and again. What if there was a second reason for him talking about Emma being his disciple, besides wanting to enrage Jack? Emma was never meant to be his Myra Hindley. What if—?

You’ll never stop it.

Jack stood up so fast, he nearly overturned the table. The sound of its legs banging back on the floor was like a thunderclap in his mind. As he ran out of the library, he checked his watch. As usual, he’d lost himself in thought and reading. It was far later than he’d realized. The inauguration was about to begin and, with it, Ian Brady’s lasting legacy.

48

“Alli, it’s time to go,” Nina said gently.

Sam opened the door, stepped out into the wan January sunshine. Alli could hear him whispering into his mike, listening intently to security updates. When Sam nodded, Nina urged her charge forward, and Alli emerged from the plush cocoon of the limo into the seething crowd of politicians, foreign dignitaries, celebrities, the talking heads of worldwide media outlets, religious leaders, including Reverend Taske, head of the Renaissance Mission Congress, her father’s special guest, military personnel in full-dress uniforms, Secret Service details crisscrossing the area with the concentration of marines landing in enemy territory.

Alli took all this in as if she were watching a film. Ever since she’d heard the first bars of Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible,” she’d felt as if she were back in her dream with Ronnie Kray whispering in her ear. She felt detached and at the same time marvelously clearheaded. She had one mission to accomplish; everything else fell away as if off a steep cliff, vanishing from view. Her life was simple; all that was required of her was to remove the vial she somehow knew was basted into the lining of her coat and, at the proper moment, open it. What could be simpler? Her mind hummed along on the track Kray had set for it, using a combination of persuasion, fear, and a drug cocktail that included an efficacious dose of the horned viper’s venom to metabolize the chemicals out of her system so quickly, it would be undetectable.

She was nearing her parents now. Her mother kissed her; her father smiled through her. The fanfare was playing, the Speaker of the House was preparing to take the podium for the Call to Order. Among the columns of the Capitol building hung three huge American flags. Above them, the dome glittered in sunlight.

Jack, snaking his way through the crowd, used his credentials at various Secret Service checkpoints. Approaching the dais was like negotiating the nine circles of hell—the closer he got, the slower his progress. The last bars of the fanfare faded, and the Speaker of the House took the podium for the Call to Order. Jack passed the final checkpoint and was admitted to the short flight of folding stairs up to the dais. He saw Reverend Taske, Secretary Paull, the National Security Advisor, the outgoing president. He looked past them for Alli, saw her between her mother and her father. She had a kind of faraway look on her face he’d seen a number of times before, and now all the tiny bits of strange behavior that he had observed, that had taken up residence in his brain, fell into place: her behavior when he’d taken her to see Chris Armitage, her dream. And afterwards: Nothing feels right, she’d said to him. I’m afraid…. Please help me. What had Brady done to her? Had he hypnotized her, drugged her? Perhaps both. In any event, he’d turned her into a time bomb. The fuse had been lit, and now, as he saw her reach into the lining of her coat, he made a beeline for her.

He saw Sam, who turned at the movement Jack made across the dais. Sam’s eyes met Jack’s, and he smiled until he saw Jack pointing. The vial was out, Alli’s hand was curled around it. Sam saw it at the same moment Jack did. With a practiced move so smooth as to be virtually undetectable, he wrested the vial out of her hand, put his free arm around her, held her firmly against his chest.

And that was it, Jack thought, as he moved at a more leisurely pace toward them. Ian Brady’s legacy had turned to ashes. Whatever substance he’d instructed Alli to release remained safely in its vial. The Speaker of the House finished the Call to Order, and the Reverend Dr. Fred Grimes began his fervent invocation and benediction.

“Let us pray. Blessed are you, O Lord, our God. Yours, O God, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor; for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.”

A stir began behind him. He turned in time to see Hugh Garner and three of his minions mounting the dais, heading directly for him. Clearly, Brady’s body had been found. No doubt the pig-eyed manager of Brady’s apartment complex had ID’d Jack.

“Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and to give strength to all.”

Jack, zigzagging farther into the crowd on the dais, kept his eye out for Nina. She’d give him some help, provide cover for him while he slipped away. She should have been on the other side of Alli. There was still part of the last Rubik’s Cube missing.

“As President Lincoln once said, ‘We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.’”

At last, he caught a glimpse of Nina, moved toward her. She was standing on the other side of Edward Carson. He risked a glance behind him. Garner, in a classic pincer move, had ordered his two agents to the other side of the dais in order to intercept Jack while he closed from behind.

“O Lord, as we come together on this historic and solemn occasion to inaugurate once again a president and vice president, teach us afresh that power, wisdom, and salvation come only from your hand.”

As Brady himself would understand better than most, what Jack needed now was a bit of misdirection. He tried to get Nina’s attention, but her gaze seemed fixed on Edward Carson. Beneath the reverend’s words, he could hear the commotion closing in behind him as Garner pushed through the dignitaries packing the dais. The missing piece of the last Rubik’s Cube was this: Why had it been so easy to stop Alli? No one’s lasting legacy—let alone Ian Brady’s—would hinge on the actions of a coerced twenty-year-old.

Then, in his head, he heard Emma’s voice as clearly as if she’d been alive and standing beside him. He said that he already had his Myra Hindley. That was before Brady had abducted Alli. So if he wasn’t grooming Emma to be Myra Hindley and she wasn’t to be Alli, who was his accomplice, whom would he trust to carry out his legacy after his death?

“We pray, oh Lord, for President-elect Edward Harrison Carson and Vice President-elect Richard Thomas Baer, to whom you have entrusted the leadership of this nation at this moment in history. We pray that you will help them bring our country together, so that we may rise above partisan politics and seek the larger vision of your will for our nation.”

Jack felt Garner’s grip on his shoulder, trying to turn him around. He saw Nina leaning in toward the president-elect. But her mouth was closed, her jaw set. She reached into an inner pocket of her coat, and at that moment Jack knew. The last piece of the Rubik’s Cube fell into place. The real Ian Brady had used a woman younger than he for his accomplice, but not so young as his victims, not so young as to be unreliable. Someone just like Nina Miller.

Jack drew his Glock, fired one shot into Nina’s heart. He saw her mouth open in shock, saw her body spin around; then Garner slammed him to the floor of the dais. Someone kicked the Glock away; Garner struck him a blow to the back of his head.

“Use them to bring reconciliation among the races and healing to political wounds, that we may truly become ‘one nation under God,’” the Reverend Dr. Fred Grimes intoned just before the screaming began and all hell broke loose.

49

“Sometimes we all need luck in addition to skill,” Secretary Dennis Paull said. “And you, Jack, had both today.”

Jack was sitting in a small cubicle inside the offices of Homeland Security. Across the table from him were Secretary Paull and Edward Carson, the new President of the United States. It was eight hours after the incident. Since then, Jack had been under arrest, in isolation, just as Brady had predicted.

“That was quite a heroic thing you did today, Jack.” Carson waved Paull’s protest to silence. “You saved not only my life but the lives of hundreds of people, all vital to the running of this country. That was a vial of anthrax Nina Miller was about to open.”

Jack moved his head from side to side with some difficulty. His body still throbbed and ached from the beating Hugh Garner and his cohorts had delivered in the aftermath of the shooting. “And the vial Alli was carrying?”

“Confectioner’s sugar,” Paull said. “Thank God.”

Personally, Jack didn’t believe God had anything to do with it, but this was neither the time nor the place to say it. “Is she all right?”

“In light of what’s happened, she’s being evaluated more carefully this time,” the president said.

Paull opened a slim file. “The doctors found a small bit of matter encrusted in the fold behind one ear.”

“So Brady did drug her.”

Paull nodded. “So far, the lab has identified Sodium Pentothal and curare. There’s another, more complex substance the techs are still trying to analyze, but they figure it must be something that caused her to metabolize the other substances with unusual rapidity.”

“Jack,” Carson said, “do you know how he got to Nina Miller?”

“No, but I can make an educated guess,” Jack said. “Nina was traumatized early in life. Her brother molested her.”

“We know all about that,” Paull cut in. “It’s in her file. Her psychological profile was perfectly normal.”

“Profiles, like Alli’s medical exam, can be faulty,” Jack pointed out. “Even more so with psych tests. Nina couldn’t bear the fact that her brother was a successful married man.”

“Wait a minute.” Paull held up a hand. “Nina’s brother was killed twelve years ago in a drive-by in Richmond, Virginia. One shot through the head.”

“Why would she lie to me about that?” Jack’s synapses began firing again. “Did the cops ever find out who the killer was?”

Paull shook his head. “Apart from the bullet, there was no evidence—no motivation either. They gave up, said it was a case of mistaken identity.”

“What if it wasn’t?” Jack said. “What if Nina met Brady twelve years ago? What if he proposed a plan: He murders her brother, and in return, she becomes his accomplice.”

Paull began to sweat at the thought of the terrible mistakes he’d made professionally and personally.

“Brady was like a chess master—he planned his moves far ahead of time,” Jack continued. “The night he went out the window, he told me he’d killed his parents. At the time, I thought he was simply goading me, but now I can see a pattern. He felt he was justified in killing his parents, for whatever reason. Taking a look at Nina’s file gave him his opportunity. My guess is he sought her out. Nina felt that there was a privilege in loneliness. She said it made her feel alive, introduced her to herself. People like her are split off from themselves. They’ll pass even the most stringent psychological testing because at the moment, they believe what they say.”

Paull winced. He could feel Nina’s sweat-slicked body moving against him, her breath in his ear, her deep groans. He felt quite faint.

Jack shifted to rid himself of a stab of pain. “In the course of my investigation, I met a young woman, tough and smart—in many ways a younger version of Nina. Brady got to her. She was a nihilist just like him. I’m betting he found the darkness in Nina and pried her open. He was a master at mentoring.”

In his mind’s eye, Paull saw an image of himself walking into the bookshop where he’d ordered Summer Rain, Nina’s favorite novel. The dealer insisted he examine it before he bought it. It chronicled the struggle of an immigrant family, rootless and uneducated, marginalized by an indifferent society. He’d thought nothing of it then, but in light of what had happened since, he agreed with Jack. Nina’s love of the book was a reflection of her inner darkness. Why hadn’t he recognized it? But of course he knew. He’d blinded himself to the signs because her detachment, her rootlessness, her lack of desire for commitment or a family made her the perfect mistress.

“Good God.” President Carson ran a hand through his hair. “This entire episode is monstrous.” He turned his telegenic eyes on Paull. “My Administration will have zero tolerance for psychopathic agents, Dennis. You and your brethren are going to have to devise an entirely different yardstick to measure your candidates.” He stood. “Excuse me, I’m going to deliver the same message to the new director of national security.”

He leaned over the table, gave Jack’s hand a hearty shake. “Thank you, Jack. From the bottom of my heart.”

After he’d gone, Jack and Paull sat across from each other in an uncomfortable silence.

Jack leaned forward. “I’m only going to say this once: For the record, despite his best efforts, I didn’t kill him, he killed himself.”

“I believe you.” Paull’s voice was weary. “What went wrong, Jack?”

Jack rubbed the back of his head. “Brady—or whatever his name is—was no good to you anymore, sir. All he wanted was to impose a lasting legacy. He wanted to make a statement of the greatest magnitude. I imagine you’ll agree that obliterating virtually the entire U.S. government at a time when the reins of power were being exchanged, when the country was most vulnerable, more than qualifies.”

“Are you saying he was making a political statement?”

“I doubt it. Brady had moved beyond such considerations. He despised humankind, hated what he felt civilization had done to the world. He felt we were heading toward a dead end.”

“You have my personal thanks.” Secretary Paull stared at Jack for a long time. At length, he cleared his throat. “On another note, you’ll be pleased to know that there’s no sign of the organization known as E-Two. Frankly, I suspect it never existed. The former Administration required a domestic bogeyman to go after its main objective—the missionary secularists. Maybe E-Two was fabricated by the former National Security Advisor.”

“Or maybe Brady came up with the idea,” Jack said. “After all, misdirection was his forte, and those FASR defectors had to go somewhere.”

“A bogus revolutionary cell? Could be.” The secretary shrugged. “Either way, I’ve ordered the members of the First American Secular Revivalists released and reinstated. And, by the way, I protected them while they were in custody. No one interrogated them or harmed them in any way.”

“I know you did what you could.”

Paull rose, walked to the door.

“What was his name?” Jack said. “His real name?”

Paull hesitated only a moment. “Morgan Herr,” he said. “Truth be told, I know precious little about him. I’d like to know more, but for that I’d require you and your particular expertise. If you’re interested, come see me.”

February 1

Under the buttermilk sky of an early dusk, Jack stood at the front window of his living room, staring fixedly at the bleak view of his driveway. All the crispy leaves were gone. Overnight, a bitter front out of the Midwest had nailed shut the coffin of the January thaw. All day long, the District, home to mild winters, had been shivering.

Earlier in the day, he’d driven the white Lincoln Continental down Kansas Avenue NE. Parking outside the Black Abyssinian Cultural Center, he hurried across the pavement and through the door. There, he collected the month’s rent, minus an amount for the time Chris Armitage and Peter Link occupied the back room. The leaders wanted to pay the full month’s rent, but Jack said no. He drank a cup of dark, rich African hot chocolate with them, thanked them, and left.

Trashy wind, full of cinders and yesterday’s newspapers, followed him down the block to the FASR office. Inside, everything looked more or less back to normal, except that Calla Myers’s desk was unoccupied, wreathed in black ribbon. A number of lit candles clustered on the desktop in front of a framed photo of her with some of her coworkers. They were all smiling. Calla was waving at the camera.

Peter Link was out on assignment, but Jack spent a few minutes chatting with Armitage. He knew he’d made a friend there.

Jack abandoned the window and its bleak view to put a Rolling Stones record on the stereo. “Gimme Shelter” began, simmered to a slow boil. “War, children,” he sang in a melancholy voice along with Mick and Merry Clayton, “it’s just a shot away.”

He returned to the window, waiting. Tonight, he had a date with Sharon. He had no idea how that was going to go, but at last she had agreed to come to the house, Gus’s house, the house of Jack’s adolescence. If he and Sharon didn’t kill each other, then next Saturday the two of them would spend the afternoon with Alli. It was Alli’s idea; maybe she wanted to play matchmaker—or peacemaker, anyway.

He thought about Alli and her effect on him. There was a time when he didn’t know himself or the world. Worse, he couldn’t accept that he didn’t know himself, so he kept pushing everyone away. Without intimate mirrors, you have no hope of knowing yourself. So he kept Sharon and Emma—the two people best equipped to be his intimate mirrors—at arm’s length, while he deluded himself into thinking his job came first, that saving strangers was more important than allowing anyone to know him.

He recalled his first encounter with Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. He hadn’t liked the book, because he was too young to fully appreciate it. But with living comes wisdom. Now a line from the book surfaced in his mind. There’s a moment when Steppenwolf is struck by a revelation. In order to understand himself, and therefore the world, he needs to “traverse, not once more but often, the hell of his inner being.” This, Jack understood, was the most difficult thing a human being could attempt. Simply to try was heroic. To succeed, well …

He heard the soft crunch of the gravel, and then Sharon’s car nosed into the driveway. She pulled in to the right, parked the car, and got out. She was wearing a black ankle-length wool coat, black boots, and a tomato-red scarf wrapped around her throat. Aching to see her long legs, he leaned forward until his nose made an imprint on the glass and his breath turned to fog.

She stood for a moment, as if uncertain which way to go. Jack held his next breath, wondering if she was contemplating getting back in her car and driving off. That would be just like her—or at least just like the woman he had known.

Low, cool sunlight came through the branches, speckling her face. It shone off her hair, made the color of her eyes clear and rich. She looked young, very much as she had when he’d first met her. From this distance, the lines of worry and grief weren’t visible, as if time itself had been obliterated.

Jack saw her gazing at the house, taking in its shape and dimensions. She took a step toward him, then another. As she moved, she seemed to gain momentum, as if her intent had focused down. She looked like someone who had made up her mind, who knew what she wanted.

Jack understood that completely, and his heart swelled. His love for her was palpable, as if he’d never loved her before, or even knew what love was. Perhaps he never had. It was all too likely that the consequences of pain and loss had driven love from his heart. But not, it seemed, from him altogether. This was Emma’s gift to him. She had taught him not only to recognize love but to seize it as well.

Sharon mounted the steps. He left the window and never again thought the view through it was bleak.

He felt Emma all around him, like the collective shimmer of stars on a moonless night.

There are many paths to redemption, he thought. This is mine.

He heard the knock on the door, and opened it.

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Acknowledgments

From the very first day I started writing fiction, I’ve been influenced by many sources, but none as telling or important as Colin Wilson’s brilliant book The Outsider.

As an Outsider myself, I never really understood who I was or how I fit in (or didn’t!) until I read The Outsider.

For this, and especially for all the help and inspiration his body of work provided while mapping and unraveling some of the characters in First Daughter, a heartfelt thank-you to Colin Wilson.

First published in the UK in 2012 by Head of Zeus Ltd.

Copyright © Eric van Lustbader, 2008

The moral right of Eric van Lustbader to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB) 9781781850060

ISBN (XTPB) 9781781850077

ISBN (E) 9781781850541

Head of Zeus Ltd

Clerkenwell House

45-47 Clerkenwell Green

London EC1R 0HT

www.headofzeus.com

Contents

Cover

Welcome Page

Dedication

January 20: Inauguration Day

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part 2

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part 3

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Part 4

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

February 1

Acknowledgments

Copyright

McClure must investigate the final days of a US senator killed in a hit-and-run incident. The trail leads him deep into Eastern Europe, attracting the unwelcome attention of the Ukrainian police, the FSB, and the Russian mafia.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Capri | April 1

Everything comes to an end. Love, hate, betrayal. The greed of wealth, the lust for power, the comfort in religion. In the final moment, everyone falls, even the kings of empires and the princes of darkness. In the silence of the tomb, we all get what we deserve.

Reassured that for him that particular moment is a long way off, he boards the cramped and crowded bus at Piazza Vittoria for the vertiginous ride down the mountainside into Capri village. The driver’s square metal fare box is closed and locked and he will not take money for the ride. This is the Caprese version of a strike against management for higher pay. No marches, no shaking fists, no amplified rhetoric. Calm and considered, slow as the pace of the island itself, the protest has been going on for three years.

The two-lane road down which the bus wheezingly careens is steeply pitched, harrowingly twisting. Traffic whizzes by in the opposite lane so close the trucks appear ready to kiss the bus. The road is decorated on one side by sprays of brilliant bougainvillea, on the other by views of the Gulf of Naples, glittering in the sun. Occasionally, in the mysterious niches of the rock face, miniature painted plaster statues of the Virgin Mary can be seen, bedecked with wilted flowers. He has seen the open-air factory near the beautiful cemetery in Anacapri where the statues are made, white bisque with blank eyes turned out of rubber molds, ruffles of rough edges that must be removed with a knife. Many of the passengers, mostly the older women, touch forehead, chest, and shoulders in the sign of the cross as they pass these hallowed places where pedestrians were struck down.

All the orange plastic seats are occupied. Bags shifting between bare knees. Long hair floating on a hot breath of wind. Brief arias of Italian conversations, the loud, brutal bite of German. Handprints on the glass, greasy chromium poles, the stirring of silent bodies in the grip of the forces of gravity. He stands, staring out through the window at the cloudless sky, the cobalt water, the yachts and pleasure boats. He sees a packed hydrofoil cutting a scimitar swath through the bay from Naples and he wonders whether this is the one.

Watching the hydrofoil, it occurs to him that the port of Mergellina was the last real thing he can remember. When he himself stood on the eleven o’clock hydrofoil as it bounded across the bay, when frenzied Naples faded into the heat haze, when the steeply rising slopes of Capri had appeared as if from the deepest portion of his memory, he had entered a land of lost time. He felt as if he was seeing the rocky shore as Augustus Caesar had known it more than two thousand years ago. And just then he had caught a glimpse, high up atop the rocks, of the remains of the Villa Jovis and quite without conscious volition had projected himself either backward or forward in time into that palace of stone and grass and magnificent ruined baths.

A young man in a red-and-blue checkered swimsuit, taking full advantage of the unnaturally warm spring, dives off the bow of a sleek teak and fiberglass sailboat into the dark water. A brief creamy splash, then his blond head appears as he wipes water off his long Roman nose. He waves enthusiastically to a woman in large sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat who has appeared on deck. Her feet are spread wide, one hand presses her hat to the top of her head to keep it from whirling away. Her swimsuit is comprised of three tiny yellow triangles.

Ten forty in the morning and already the back of his neck feels sticky. A line of sweat snakes down the indentation of his spine. His face itches. The bus lurches around a hairpin turn and a body is thrown against him. He smells a light citrus scent and turns, aware of the heat emitted from bare skin. A Caprese girl of eighteen or nineteen in a short, unnervingly tight turquoise skirt and a lime green sleeveless Lycra top that looks to him like underwear. The perfect curve of a tanned arm, and underneath the smooth hollow that leads inexorably down to the lift of the young breasts. So vulnerable and at the same time so remote, as if she is part of another lifetime, another universe. Which, of course, she is. This does not stop him from staring at the intimate dewlike sheen that licks the shadowed dell from which floats toward him the unmistakable aroma of freshly peeled lemons. Her face is partially hidden by the thick curtain of her long dark hair, but he can catch a glimpse of coffee eyes, a generous Sophia Loren mouth. And her ass. My God, the Caprese have magnificent buttocks! Even the mothers. All that climbing up and down steep inclines. All day, all night. Better than a StairMaster. The modern-day Romans are wrong to disdain the Caprese as peasants. But when you have your nose in the air it’s difficult to appreciate the treasures that lie close to the earth.

A sudden longing pierces him, drawing him to her as if she is a lodestone, the very center of True North to which he has long ago become attuned. With the tension of a biologist encountering a potentially new species, he studies the tiny silken hairs on her taut forearm, and at the back of her neck as she lifts a slim hand to swing the waterfall of her hair out of the way, the long pale sea-creature cilia at the arching of her nape.

This Caprese girl, fresh as a spremuta. He wishes he was holding her hand, brushing against her rocking hips, listening to the music of her lithe legs as they walk side by side through the peaceful earthen aisles of the mountaintop cemetery. They would stop and silently watch the women on their knees, plunging their hands into buckets of soapy water, scrubbing down the carved marble of their family grave sites, arranging freshly cut flowers in green glass vases married to the cool surface of the tombstones by black iron rings. How he would love that and how utterly bored she would be. To judge by the blank look on her face, a bracing macchiato and a spin into Tod’s is more her speed.

He is close to her, his thoughts caressing her as intimately as would a lover’s hand. And yet she is utterly oblivious. Lips moist and half open, she cracks her chewing gum. He laughs silently, at her, at himself. How foolish fantasies are, and at the same time how compelling. He cannot imagine anything more powerful.

He inhales her deeply, recognizing an alchemical change: His reaction to her has released a powerful sensation inside himself. It is both exhilarating and frightening, an eely thing dredged up from the darkness of his youth when he wandered the debris-strewn streets of Manhattan at three in the morning with the Outsider’s contempt for the humdrum world. How he cherished being other—a lone wolf watching the sheep all moving in the same direction. And how he feared the loneliness it brought with it. Possibly, he tells himself, he was searching for her, just this one, this perfect creature, but immediately he knows this as a conceit. There is no one that does everything for you, and so you keep searching beyond love, beyond companionship, because part of the human condition is not being satisfied, for if you were there would be nothing left save death. Dissatisfaction, he tells himself, is the engine that drives life.

This girl, this fantasy needs to be belted down neat like a triple scotch. She is there to make him forget, to help ease the pain inside him that has become an illness. This moment in time, this present, is for him little more than a dream. He is still living in the moment that occurred three hours ago but that continues like a whipping, devastating in its excoriation.

The creaking bus turns a corner and for a moment he can see the ribbon of road behind them, running up the steep, verdant mountainside to the Hotel Caesar Augustus. His heart seems to turn over in his chest like a dropped stone. Mia’s final, brutal, horrifying sentence said it all, wrapping up the last two weeks in the soiled brown paper it deserves.

The bus, gears grinding ominously, staggers the last half kilometer into the open-air depot at Capri village, where he changes for the bus down to Marina Grande. Fifteen minutes later, he arrives. The bus begins to disgorge its load into a street clogged with people and vehicles all, it seems, needing to go to the same place at the same time. Those seven hateful words, the bland look on her face that revealed not a trace of bitterness or remorse, made him want to smash her face with his balled fist. He is filled with rage, a swamp through which he is struggling as he swings off the bus. He hits the pavement, his heart aching, his nerves raw.

Craning his neck, looking around for her, he feels the stir of resentment like a hungry dog’s growl, sharp and craven. He hears Mia’s closing line in his head, perfectly, devastatingly choreographed.

“Don’t worry about me, I’m well fucked”

This woman, moving like a siren of the sea, circles him still like a hungry beast.

He wishes Cloe had come, because it would mean that she has forgiven him, that she’ll take him back. He imagines what it would be like to catch sight of her through the crowd, to watch her walk toward him. He would find it a jolt to see her here, the open arms that the real world holds out to him in forgiveness. Yes, forgiveness.

He is thinking of what he will say to Cloe when he calls her this evening, the new beginning that might now be his; the betrayal that will be forgotten, because he’s quite certain that Cloe would never hurt him as cruelly as Mia hurt him. He is imagining as if it is a film he is expertly splicing together: the mise-en-scène of betrayal, and he begins to wonder (because all good films are juggling acts of counterbalancing forces) what is the opposite of betrayal. He walks amid the squall of people. His steps quicken, his heart pounds as he takes out his cell phone. He’ll call Cloe now, confess everything, tell her it’s all over and done with, a bad dream consigned to history. She’ll understand, of course she’ll understand.

He sees what will happen reflected in the eyes of a wisp of a girl striding toward him, sees it an instant too late. He is still absorbing her look of horror when the narrow Caprese van strikes him full on and kills him instantly.

Part 1

Lady Macbeth:

“The sleeping and the dead

are but as pictures.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

1

Moscow | April 5

Jack McClure, cell phone to his ear, stood in his hotel suite, staring out at the arc-lit onion domes of Red Square. It was snowing. The last snow, it was predicted, of a protracted and, even for Russia, frigid winter. Red Square was nearly deserted. The swirling black wind swept the last of the tourists, shoulders hunched, digital cameras stuffed inside their long coats to protect them, back to their hotels where steaming cups of coffee waited, spiked with vodka or slivovitz. Jack had arrived here a week ago with the presidential entourage on a trip that was both politically necessary and culturally important, which was why the First Lady and the First Daughter had been invited along. The trip had been arranged—brokered might be a more accurate term—by General Atcheson Brandt, who had commanded a wing in the Gulf War. He was both a decorated veteran and, now that he’d retired, a revered military analyst for both CNN and ABC. He knew everyone in Washington who mattered. When he spoke, senior politicians of both parties listened. Though the former administration’s mini cold war with Russia, and President Yukin in particular, had raged for eight years, General Brandt had made it his business to keep the private lines of communication with Yukin open. His public criticism of the former administration’s hard line against Russia had led to a brief summit between Yukin and the former president. Though nothing of substance had come of it, General Brandt had been praised on both sides of the Senate aisles for his efforts.

However, at the moment General Brandt was far from Jack’s mind. Jack hadn’t said a word for the past three minutes and neither had Sharon. Rather, they were listening to each other breathe, as they often did when they lay in bed together in Jack’s house in D.C. While Jack listened through the phone, he thought of her coming home after work, shedding her clothes layer by layer, until she was in her bra and the bikini underpants she always wore. He imagined her sliding into bed, pushing backward, feeling with her buttocks for that shallow indentation his absent body had left behind like a memory. He imagined her eyes closing as she drifted off to sleep. And then imagined she descended further. What did she dream of when all the artifice and layers demanded by civilization melted away, when she reverted to who she had been as a child, when she was certain no one was watching or, at least, able to pierce the veil of her sleep? He liked to imagine that she dreamed of him, but he had no way of knowing, just as he had no way of knowing who she really was, even though he knew her body almost as well as he knew his own, even though he’d observed over and over her every tiny motion, day and night.

He knew these questions assailed him because he was so far from home—traveling with the newly elected president of the United States, his longtime friend, Edward Harrison Carson, as Carson’s strategic advisor.

“What does that title mean exactly?” he’d asked Carson, when the two had met the week following the inauguration.

The president had laughed. “Just like you, Jack, cutting to the quick of everything. I pulled you out of the ATF to find my daughter. You brought Alli back to me when no one else could. I and my family feel safest with you close.”

“With all due respect, Edward, you have a platoon of perfectly competent Secret Service operatives better suited than I am to guard you and your family.”

“You misunderstand me, Jack. I have far too much respect for you to offer you a babysitting job, even though nothing would please Alli more. Besides, on a practical level, your special abilities would be wasted in that capacity. I have no illusions about how difficult and perilous the next four years are going to be. As you can imagine, there are already no end of people who are clamoring to whisper advice in my ear. Part of my job is to allow them this access, but you’re one person I’m inclined to listen to, because you’re the one I trust absolutely.

“That’s what ‘strategic advisor’ means.”

Sharon had begun whispering, which meant, according to the routine their calls had fallen into over the week Jack had been in Moscow, it was time for them to talk. Jack turned and padded in bare feet past the table with the photos of her and Emma he took everywhere he went, across the carpet to the bathroom. He was about to turn on the water, in order to defeat the listening devices planted in every room. No fewer than four representatives of the Russian government swore there were no such listening devices. But ever since the first night when Secret Service personnel had discovered one, he and everyone in the president’s service were warned to take precautions when speaking to anyone while in the rooms, even if the conversation seemed innocuous.

He heard voices rising up from the hot water pipes behind the toilet. Over the course of the week, he’d occasionally heard a drift of voices from the room on the floor below, but had never before been able to make out a single word. This time, a man’s and a woman’s voice were raised in altercation.

“I hate you!” the woman said, her raw emotion vibrating through the pipe. “I’ve always hated you.”

“You told me you loved me,” the man said, not plaintively, which might be expected, but with the guttural growl of a stalking male.

“Even then I hated you, I always hated you.”

“When I was pinning you to the mattress?”

“Especially then.”

“When I made you come?”

“And what was I screaming in my own language, do you think? ‘I hate you, I’ll see you in hell, I’ll kill you!’”

“Jack?”

Sharon’s voice in his ear caused him to twist on the water full force. He wasn’t one to eavesdrop, but there was a vengeful, knife-edged sharpness to both voices that not only compelled listening, but made it almost impossible to stop.

“Jack, are you at a party?”

“In my room,” he said. “The people downstairs are going at it tooth and nail. How are you?” An innocuous enough question, but not when you were forty-six hundred miles apart. When so much distance separated you, there was always a question in your mind: What is she doing, or, its more far-reaching corollary, what has she been doing? It was possible to tell himself that her day proceeded precisely as it did when he was there: She got up in the morning, showered, ate a quick breakfast standing at the kitchen counter, stacked the dishes in the sink because there was time to either wash them or put on her makeup but not do both, went to work, shopped for food, came home, put on Muddy Waters or Steve Earle while she prepared dinner and ate it, read an Anne Tyler or Richard Price novel or watched 30 Rock if it was on, and went to bed.

But he couldn’t help wondering if her day differed in some significant way, that it had been added to, that someone else might have inserted himself into her day or, far worse, her night, someone handsome, understanding, and available. Now he couldn’t help wondering whether this fantasy was jealousy or wish fulfillment. When, three months ago, Sharon had moved back into his house, he was certain they had reconciled the differences that had driven them apart in the first place. The intense physical desire for her that had first drawn him to her had never truly been entirely extinguished. But the fact was, they were still the same people. Jack was dedicated to his work, which Sharon resented, because she had no such dedication. She’d tried several different careers, all without feeling the slightest attachment to them. At first, she’d set herself up as a painter, but though technically accomplished she lacked passion—and nothing good, or at least worthwhile, can be created without it. Typical of her, she’d then drifted into dealing art, figuring to make easy money, but again her lack of conviction, or even interest, predetermined her failure. Finally, she was hired by a friend who worked at the Corcoran but was let go after less than a year. As a result, she now toiled joylessly in real estate, work that was tied to the vagaries of the economy, which, he imagined, could only further stir the pot of her simmering anger—at him, at the world, at her life without their daughter. He couldn’t help but think that she wanted him home for dinner every evening as a kind of revenge, for enjoying his job when she clearly didn’t. This was a desire that made him feel as if he were being strangled. He had always been an outsider—from his dyslexia to his unorthodox upbringing he’d never fit in and, as he’d finally been able to admit to himself if not to anyone else besides Alli Carson, he didn’t want to. One of the things that had bonded him with Alli was that they were both Outsiders. Sharon was conventional in most things; in all the others she was regressive. In the beginning, he’d loved her despite their differences, loved the smell of her, the sight of her both naked and clothed, the intense way she made love. Now Emma, or, more accurately, Emma’s memory, stood between them like an immense, immovable shadow that limned their differences with a cutting edge that was painful.

“Who’s that I hear whistling?” he said now.

“My mom. She arrived yesterday.”

Sharon’s mother had never liked him. She hadn’t approved of the marriage, telling her daughter that it would end in tears, which of course it had. That triumph of hers was in no way mitigated by Sharon having returned to him. Their daughter—her granddaughter— Emma was dead, killed at age twenty in a car accident. As far as Sharon’s mother was concerned it had all ended in tears, no matter what happened from now on.

“Jack, when are you coming home?”

“You asked me that yesterday and the day before.”

“And yesterday and the day before you said you’d find out.” She made that noise where her tongue struck the roof of her mouth. “Jack, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to come home?”

The subject, he suspected, would not be coming up so insistently if her mother hadn’t arrived with all her pernicious baggage. “I told you when I signed on with Edward—”

“My mother said you never should have taken that job, and I have to say that I agree with her.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you cared about me, if you cared about repairing the damage to our marriage, you would have found a job closer to home.”

“Sharon, this is starting to feel like déjà vu all over again. I can’t—”

“That’s your answer to everything serious, isn’t it, making jokes. Well, I can’t take that anymore, Jack.”

Silence on the line. He didn’t know what to say or, rather, didn’t want to say something he’d regret. It was strange how intimate conversations became attenuated—how emotions seemed muted, almost murky—when transmitted over long distances, as if the phones themselves were having the conversation. Perhaps it was his alien surroundings—his present, and therefore his priorities so different from her familiar ones.

“You didn’t answer my question.” Her voice sounded thick, as if during the interim she’d been crying.

“I don’t know. Something’s come up.”

“Something’s always coming up.” Her voice had sharpened like a knife at the strop. “But that’s precisely what you want, isn’t it? You—”

The rest of her acerbic response was drowned out by a sharp, insistent rapping on the door he had come to associate with the president’s Secret Service staff.

He took the cell away from his ear and ducked back into the main room, which was at once anonymous and oppressive, a hallmark of what passed for modern Russian decor. It was on the top floor of the vast H-shaped hotel, whose somewhat faded hallways reminded Jack of The Shining. The entire floor was allocated to President Carson, his family, and his entourage.

Dick Bridges, the head of Carson’s Secret Service detail, filled the doorway. He made no move to step inside, but silently mouthed POTUS, the Secret Service acronym for the President of the United States. Jack nodded, held up a forefinger in countersign: a moment. Now, Bridges mouthed, and Jack stepped back into the bathroom where the water was still running.

“Sharon, Edward needs me.”

“Did you hear a word I said?”

He was in no mood for her mother-instigated bullshit. “I’ve got to go.”

“Jack—”

He killed the connection. Back in the room, he stepped into his shoes and, without bothering to tie his laces, went out into the hallway. President Carson, flanked by two agents, was standing in front of the metal fire door that led to the stairwell, which had been blocked off to the floor below. They had the aspect of men who had been talking together for some time: Their heads were tilted toward one another, their mouths were half open, and familiar glances were being exchanged. All of these small observations told Jack that something of significance had arisen at this late hour.

Therefore, he was on high alert when Bridges opened the fire door and they all trooped onto the unpainted concrete landing. There was an unfamiliar mineral odor, as sharp as it was unpleasant, but at least there were no electronic eavesdroppers.

“Jack, Lloyd Berns died in Capri four days ago,” the president said without preamble. Lloyd Berns was Carson’s minority whip in the Senate and, as such, his death was a serious blow to the president’s ability to ram through legislation crucial to the new administration.

Now Jack understood why Carson and his bodyguards had been in conference. “What happened?”

“An accident. Hit and run.”

“What was Berns doing in Capri and why did it take four days to find out he died?”

Carson sighed. “We’re not sure, which is the problem. He was supposed to be on a fact-finding tour in Ukraine, up until ten days ago, that is. Then he disappeared. Best guess from our intelligence boys: He was taking time off from a failing marriage or—and this isn’t unrelated—in Capri with someone else. He had no ID on him and everything grinds slowly in Capri. Three days passed before it occurred to someone in authority that he might be American, so finally a rep from the consulate was contacted and dispatched, and so on and so forth.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “Be that as it may, I’ve got to get back to D.C. to straighten out the political mess.”

Jack nodded. “I’ll get packed right away.”

The president shook his head. “I’m wondering if you could stay with my wife and Alli. You know how important this accord with Yukin is. Once it’s signed, Russia will no longer aid Iran’s nuclear program, and American security will reach a new level. This is particularly imperative now because our armed forces are dangerously overextended, exhausted to the edge of endurance, and opening the current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia on yet another front would be disastrous. If my family leaves with me it could damage the fragile detente I’ve managed to form with President Yukin. I can’t have that; he and I are only days away from finalizing and signing the accord, and my entire first year as president hinges on the signing.”

The president seemed abruptly older, as if he’d aged five years since Jack last saw him, fifty minutes ago.

“And, Jack, on a private and very unpleasant note, Alli has begun to act out again—she’s unnaturally willful, contrary, sometimes it seems to me irrational.” His eyes seemed to be speaking another language entirely. “You’re the only one that can make her see reason.”

Alli had been psychologically traumatized. Her abduction was bad enough, but the man who had kidnapped her had also brainwashed her. Ever since Jack had brought her home, a team of psychologists had been working with her. But, more than that, she’d wanted Jack near her as much as was possible. The two of them had forged a close relationship and now, like her father, Alli trusted Jack over and above anyone else in the world, including her parents, with whom she’d always had a difficult and not altogether pleasant relationship.

Jack did, of course, understand. So even though he wanted to return to Washington to advise his old friend or, failing that, to be sent to Capri to find out the details of Lloyd Berns’s death, he did not argue with Carson’s suggestion.

“All right,” he said.

The president nodded, and the Secret Service contingent left them alone in the putrid stairwell. It was at this point that Jack realized every detail of this clandestine meeting had been meticulously planned.

When the two men were alone, Carson took a step toward Jack and handed him a slip of paper. “This is a copy of Berns’s itinerary in Ukraine. The cities I’ve marked are off the official itinerary, but it’s Kiev that was his last stop. Also, remember this name: K. Rochev. Rochev was the last man he saw or was due to see before he abruptly left Ukraine for Capri.”

Jack looked at him. “In other words, you have no idea what the hell he was doing in Kiev.”

Carson nodded. His concern was evident in his eyes, but he said nothing more.

All at once, Jack understood that the babysitting assignment was for the Secret Service personnel’s benefit. This was the real assignment. He smiled. It was part of Carson’s genius to get what he wanted either by suggestion or by leading the other person to the conclusion he desired.

Jack did not look at the writing, which, because of his dyslexia, he’d have to concentrate on fully in order to read. “I guess I’m going to Ukraine to find out what Berns was doing and why he left.”

“I think that’s the best idea. There’s a private jet with diplomatic privileges waiting for you at Sheremetyevo, but you can wait until tomorrow morning, if you wish.” Carson squeezed Jack’s shoulder. “I appreciate this.”

“Part of my job description.” Jack frowned. “Edward, do you suspect something?”

Carson shook his head. “Call it caution or paranoia, the choice is yours. In any event, as Dennis Paull has detailed in his most recent security briefing, my enemies from the previous administration are still powerful, and all of them have very long memories, especially when it comes to revenge. They fought like wild dogs against my nomination and, when I won it, they tried everything they could think of to undermine my candidacy. That they’ve made conciliatory statements in the press doesn’t fool me for a minute. They’re after my blood, and it seems damn lucky for them that Berns is dead, because they know better than anyone that without him I’m going to have the devil’s own time with the Democratic-led Congress.”

Jack did not say that killing Carson’s right-hand man was an extreme way of crippling him, because he’d had firsthand experience with people within the previous administration. He knew what they were capable of and that their thinking did not exclude murder. They’d arranged for Alli to be kidnapped, had almost succeeded in an attack on Carson at the inauguration, and while the perpetrators were either dead or behind bars, the people who had calculatedly planned the attack remained safe to this day behind veils of plausible deniability that even Carson with all his might and power couldn’t penetrate.

The president’s grip on Jack’s shoulder tightened. “Jack, I won’t bullshit you, this could be a wild-goose chase, but if it’s not, if Berns was killed or if he was involved in something that could turn into a scandal, you’re the only one I can trust, you’re my friend and you’re apolitical. I want you on this until you can tell me whether I’m right or wrong.” His eyes grew dark, indicating that he was deeply troubled. “And one other thing. No one is to know what you’re up to, not even Dick.”

“You don’t trust Bridges?”

“I trust you, Jack,” Carson said. “That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

2

Sleep was impossible after that disturbing conversation. Jack put on earbuds and fired up Emma’s iPod, which he took with him wherever he went, and putting it on random play, listened to “I Call My Baby Pussycat” by Funkadelic and “Like Eating Glass” by Bloc Party, before he felt suddenly claustrophobic alone in his suite with his daughter’s music and a half-dozen electronic listening devices, so he put the iPod aside and took the elevator down to the immense gilt-and-marble lobby with its overstuffed velvet furniture, musty samovars, and gimlet-eyed staff. He shivered slightly as he strode through the space, his steps echoing hollowly.

The bar was to the right, the room only slightly less imposing than the lobby itself. At least the lights were lower, the half-moon banquettes giving the illusion of intimacy. To his left was a curved bar of polished metal, macabrely lit from underneath, in front of which were twelve modernist stools. Not too long ago this bar and others like it all over Moscow were filled with free-spending oligarchs, businessmen who had made hundreds of millions of dollars buying up the huge corporations privatized during glasnost. Snapping up the companies for cents on the dollar, they’d been made rich beyond their wildest dreams virtually overnight. Yukin had ended all that when he’d decided to take back the corporations. Now the oligarchs were in a panic, scrambling to find the money to pay for the debts they had amassed while leveraging their nonexistent businesses when their short-lived power was at its zenith. Now the bar and others like it all over the city were as empty as a subway car at three in the morning.

Jack went past the bar itself and saw a Secret Service agent nursing a club soda. He turned his eye from an empty banquette at the rear at which he was planning to sit to the one the agent was keeping an eye on, and saw Alli Carson. She was sitting by herself next to a window that looked out onto the snow-covered square, occupied only by architecturally florid buildings, all of which had a history steeped in blood and power. She looked so small, almost lost, vulnerable against the high-back crescent, but he knew better. This part of her physical appearance was caused by Graves’ disease, a form of hyperthyroidism that made her look sixteen rather than twenty-two. Beyond that illusion, she was tough as reinforced concrete and smarter than many people twice her years. Her skin was pale against the bloodred material. Clear green eyes below a thick fall of auburn hair dominated an oval face. A constellation of freckles danced across the bridge of her nose. She wore jeans and a T-shirt that read SEX IS DEAD across the front. She could not have looked more out of place.

“I’ll have whatever she’s having,” he told the somnolent waiter as he slid into the banquette beside her.

Alli’s slim fingers gripped the glass. “It’s not a Shirley Temple,” she said.

He grinned. “Good God, I hope not.”

She laughed, which was the point.

“Where’s your mom?”

“In bed,” Alli said. “She might be asleep, or not. She only took the Xanax ten minutes ago.”

“She still having trouble sleeping?”

“She hates it here. She says the Russian women are too piggy to be impressed with her.”

The waiter came with Jack’s drink, which turned out to be a White Russian, a bit sweet for him, but what the hell, he thought.

As he lifted his glass, she said, “You’re not leaving, too, are you?”

He had learned early on not to lie to her; he’d needed to earn her trust. Besides, she was too quick to be gulled. “I’m not going with your father, no.”

A ghost of a smile played around her generous mouth. “Which means you’re going somewhere” Her gaze slid slyly sideways. “What are you doing for him?”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“Whatever it is it’s got to be more interesting than sitting around this dump.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“Talking to Dad again? Didn’t your bullshit meter go off? The Russian boys are Neanderthals and the Russian girls are sluts—what’s to like?”

“There’s a lot of history here.”

“Which no one wants to talk about because it’s been entirely rewritten,” she said dryly. “I’m begging you, take me away from all this, Jack.”

“I wish I could, Alli, really.”

“Fuck. Fuck you!”

“Don’t be like that.”

“How would you like me to be?” Her eyes flashed. “Docile, meek, girlish?”

“Now you’re confusing me with your father.”

“How can you be friends with him?”

Then again, Jack thought, she could still be startlingly immature. “He’s a good man, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a good father.”

As quickly as her anger had sparked, it winked out. “Fuck.” But now her voice had softened. “I hate this life, Jack, really, it sucks beyond belief.”

“How can I make it better?”

She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “If only.” Then she downed the last of her White Russian with such force the ice cubes clacked against her front teeth. “One day it’ll get better, or it won’t, right?”

She began to slide out of the banquette.

Against his better judgment, he said, “So how are you doing?”

Alli paused. “About as well as you.”

It was a smart answer, Jack thought, or else it was a smart-aleck answer. Maybe, knowing Alli, it was both. “That would have made Emma laugh.” Emma, who had been Alli’s roommate, best friend, confidante, and closest ally against Alli’s parents. “Remember the time I came to watch you in a relay race? You were the anchor, remember?”

“I remember.”

“She let me sit next to her and though she didn’t say a word I could see how proud of you she was. She didn’t get to her feet, she didn’t applaud like everyone else when you pulled away and won.”

Alli was quiet for some time as if lost in the past. “That night when I came back from celebrating, the room was dark and I thought she was asleep. I went into the bathroom and undressed as quietly as I could. As I got into bed I saw there was a small box lying on the blanket. I moved it into a bar of light slanting through the window. Inside was a leaping silver cat on a chain.

“As I held it up, she said, ‘It’s a cheetah, the fastest fucking animal on four legs,’ and turned over and went to sleep.” Alli stood up. “I’ll never stop missing her and neither will you.”

He watched her walk away, but he was seeing Emma. Alli was right, he would never stop missing the daughter who he’d allowed to drift away from him, who’d called him right before she crashed her car into a tree and died on the spot. Although, improbably, there had been times afterward when she’d appeared to him, even talked to him.

Which opened up four possibilities: His extreme guilt had caused him to conjure her up from the depths of his unconscious, as the shrink he’d consulted suggested; he was insane; his dyslexic brain was playing tricks on him; or the incorporeal part of Emma had survived her physical death. Any one of those scenarios filled him with dread, but not for the same reasons. He wanted to believe that there was more to reality than life and death, which were, after all, man-made concepts. He wanted to believe that Emma still existed in some form. To him that was the definition of faith: to believe in something that science was unable to explain. When Emma had been killed he’d lost whatever faith he might have had; when she returned to him he’d regained it.

Alli and her escort had been swallowed up by the lobby, and he was alone in the bar. The hush of a mausoleum wrapped itself about the room. The lamps glimmered like shale in a riverbed. The snow tap-tap-tapped feebly against the windowpane, a starved beggar wanting in. He’d only taken a couple of sips of the cloying White Russian, and he pushed it away now. Catching the waiter between catnaps, he ordered a single-malt whisky with water on the side. Then he pulled out the slip of paper with Lloyd Berns’s itinerary in Ukraine and concentrated on reading it.

Jack’s dyslexia caused his brain to work thousands of times faster than what was considered normal. He could not understand, at least not easily, anything that wasn’t in three dimensions, which meant that he could solve a Rubik’s Cube in about ninety seconds, but writing, which was two-dimensional, was an arduous task. He had to decipher it as if it were a foreign language or a code. He’d been taught to master his disability by a minister who’d sheltered him after he’d run away from his father, who had constantly beaten him for being unable to learn at school. It was only later, as an adult, that he had discovered that his dyslexia could be a devastating asset in deconstructing crime scenes and crawling inside asocial and psychotic minds.

He was running down the list of unfamiliar city and street names when he heard someone order a vodka in a voice as sharp as it was familiar. Glancing up from his task, he saw a young blonde in a black dress and high heels, perched on one of the bar stools. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail that reached to the hollow between her shoulder blades. Though that hairstyle was most often used by women with thin hair, this was not the case with the blonde, whose hair was as thick as it was lustrous. Her large, slightly uptilted eyes were the mineral color of carnelian. She had wide lips that might have been sensual had they not been down-turned in a distinctly unattractive scowl.

She was sitting beside another woman of approximately the same age, with dark hair and eyes, dressed in a flashy dress of hunter-green, which was so short most of her thighs were pearled by the light. When the blonde spoke again, Jack racked his brain as to where he’d heard that voice before.

The blonde tossed her head. “So I said, ‘I’ll see you in hell.’”

And Jack knew hers was the female voice from the room below him.

“Then I threw the lamp in his face and the bulb burned his cheek.”

The brunette laughed. “Fucker got off easy.”

“You bet,” the blonde with the carnelian eyes said. “If I see him again I swear I’ll kick his balls into the other side of Red Square.”

“Well, honey, here’s your chance,” her companion snickered.

The blonde turned toward the entrance and so did Jack. He saw a large, bearlike man with dark hair, oiled like an American gangster from the thirties. There was a ruddy burn on his cheek, no doubt from the lightbulb. He wore one of those gaudy silk suits that only Russians think are fashionable, a chunky gold watch, and an even chunkier gold pinkie ring. He held himself like Tony Soprano coming in heavy to a Mafia sit-down. Even Jack, who didn’t know him from a hole in the wall, wanted to kick his balls into the other side of Red Square.

The blonde swiveled around to face her lover, or ex-lover, who, as he came toward them, was leering at her. Jack could see, if no one else in the bar could, that there was going to be serious trouble. He wished he’d left with Alli, because he had no desire to get involved in a fight that was none of his business. On the other hand, as the Soprano wannabe moved, Jack glimpsed the butt of a 9mm pistol in a chamois shoulder holster in his left armpit. He edged to the end of the banquette and turned halfway outward, giving him a clear field to get to his feet quickly if the need arose.

The man sauntered up to where the blonde and her girlfriend sat. The blonde was swinging her left leg as if in time to unheard music. Jack could see her smiling, but the smile seemed wicked, deadly even. The man, cocksure and armed to the teeth, appeared oblivious to the bloodlust in her heart, or possibly he felt invulnerable meeting with her in this public space. After all, what would she dare do to him that he—or his 9mm—couldn’t handle?

He was about to say something to her when, with an upswing, she buried the toe of her high-heeled shoe in his groin. He grimaced, making a face not that different from his leer, and bent over almost double. Because he was on the man’s left side, Jack could see what the blonde couldn’t: Her lover reached for the 9mm.

Jack was out of the banquette. He took two long strides to the bar and brought the edge of one hand down on the man’s hairy wrist. The gun clattered to the floor, the waiter jumped back, and the bartender signaled for security.

The blonde’s lover lunged clumsily past Jack, the fingers of his right hand grabbing the woman’s throat, throttling her. She gave a soft gurgle, like an infant at the breast. Jack punched the man in the throat, and that was the end of him or, more accurately, the fight in him. By that time, two of the hotel’s security team had arrived. One of them dragged the ex-lover away while the other picked up the 9mm with his bare hand. He seemed unconcerned with leaving his fingerprints. Obviously, they did things differently in Moscow, Jack thought, wondering fleetingly what the Russian crime scene unit was called. This thought took his mind off the murderous look the blonde’s ex-lover shot him as he was dragged away.

“Are you all right?” Jack said to the blonde, whose hands tentatively fingered her throat.

“Yes, thank you.”

He nodded, about to move away, when she added: “My name is Annika, and this is Jelena. We were about to go clubbing. Why don’t you join us?”

“It’s been a long day and I was just on my way up to my room.”

“Please. I’d like to repay your kindness.” She gestured at the empty stool beside her. “The least I can offer is a drink.”

Jack really wanted to get back to his room and prepare for the assignment he’d been given, but it would be rude to refuse. “One drink.”

She nodded. “One drink only. Then, if you like, I myself will escort you to the elevators. I’m staying here, too.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t help hearing the shouting match earlier this evening.”

She made a face. “Jelena said that everyone in the hotel must’ve heard Ivan and me.”

He sat on the indicated stool and nodded after the departing figures. “I guess we’ll need to give statements to the police.”

At this, both women laughed. “I see you haven’t been in Moscow long,” Jelena said. “The police are too busy shaking down businesses and taking American dollars from people like Annika’s boyfriend—”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Annika interjected. “Very ex.”

“Whatever.” Jelena shrugged. She spoke English with no foreign intonation at all, unlike Annika, whose English was freighted with a heavy Russian accent.

“I see you have no trouble talking to strangers.”

“If I did, I’d be out of a job,” Jelena said. “I handle the hotel’s overseas bookings.”

Annika signaled the bartender. “What will you have …”

“Jack,” he said. “Jack McClure.”

Annika nodded. “What’s your poison, Jack McClure?”

“Single malt,” Jack said to the bartender. “Oban, please.”

“Right away, sir.” The bartender went to retrieve the bottle of scotch.

“I hope you have a strong constitution, Mr. McClure.”

“Shut up, Jelena.” Annika shot her friend a daggered look before turning back to Jack. “Ignore her. She’s developed a lurid imagination from reading too many American thrillers.”

“I have no idea what the two of you are talking about.”

The bartender set his drink in front of him, then backed away as if they were all radiating plutonium.

“You might as well tell him, Annika.”

“That seems like a good idea,” he said, taking a sip of his Oban.

Annika sighed. “My ex—his name is Ivan Gurov—is a minor— and I stress minor—member of a Russian grupperovka.” Her eyes locked on his. “You know this word?”

Jack did. “He’s part of the Moscow mafia.”

“He’s a fucking criminal,” Jelena said with more emotion than she’d shown up until now.

“As you can see, Jack, Jelena didn’t approve of my involvement with Ivan.”

“He’s a bloodsucker,” Jelena said, clearly warming to the topic. “He’s trash washed up in the gutter, who’d as soon slit your throat as look twice at you. He gets more pleasure out of blood than vodka, that’s for sure.”

“My friend needs to learn to have an opinion,” Annika said with a good-natured laugh.

“And you need to watch out behind you,” Jelena said soberly. “You, too, Mr. McClure. I saw the look Ivan gave you.”

“I take it that means he won’t be thrown in jail.”

“His friends would see he got out in a heartbeat,” Annika said, “which is why the police won’t bother pursuing the matter.”

“More likely they don’t want to wind up in an alley with a bullet in the back of the head,” Jelena said. “They have a serious aversion to being taken out with the garbage.”

Jack took another sip of his scotch. “Count me in on that group.”

“Don’t worry,” Annika said. “Jelena tends to overstate the case when it comes to Ivan. He’s pretty far down the grupperovka food chain.”

Jelena made a derisive sound. “That doesn’t stop him from killing people.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“I hear things, Annika, same as you.” She shook her head. “You’re so naïve sometimes.”

Jack had had about enough Halloween stories for one evening. He had zero interest in seeing Ivan Gurov again, but he didn’t have any expectation that he would, especially since by tomorrow morning he’d be in the air, on his way to Ukraine.

He finished his drink and stood up. “Ladies, it’s been interesting, but all things considered it’s time for me to leave.”

“You see what you did, Jelena,” Annika pouted, “you’ve driven away another man.” She rose and threw some money on the bar. “I promised to make sure you got to your room.”

“That’s right,” Jelena said with a sardonic edge. “That disgusting pig of yours might be hiding in the elevator.”

Jack held up his hands. “Ladies, I like women fighting over me as much as the next guy, but, really, I can find my way upstairs by myself.”

Alone in the elevator, he still felt Annika’s cat’s eyes following him, and he wondered whether she or Jelena had been seriously coming on to him. Maybe that was just male ego talking. Then again, it could be that both of them had been flirting with him, which had long been a fantasy of his, one he shared with about a billion other men. One thing was for certain, his brain and theirs had been vibrating on two distinct frequencies. Between the assignment in Ukraine, secret from even the president’s staff, and the escalating friction with Sharon, his mind had no room for flirtatious Russian women, especially when one had a mobster for a boyfriend, ex- or otherwise.

He got off at the top floor, nodded to the Secret Service personnel on duty, and entered his room. Something about his talk with Carson in the stairwell bothered him. Why had he dismissed his bodyguards before he brought up the subject of Jack’s assignment? When Jack had queried him, the president had said: “I trust you, Jack. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

Did Dennis Paull suspect a mole inside Edward’s staff—in the president’s own Secret Service detail? If true, it would be a devastating blow to Edward’s work guiding the administration. What if his political enemies—who, as he said, were still powerful—knew his every move before he made it? Carson hadn’t spoken their names, but Paull had: Miles Benson, the former director of the CIA, a hardheaded, take-no-prisoners war veteran; and Morgan Thomson, the former national security advisor, the last of the credible neocons, bellicose, nervy, with recently revealed ties to several companies manufacturing war materiel. Between them, the two men had almost sixty years of service and networking inside the Beltway, formidable opponents indeed. They could not only stymie the president’s agenda, but also undermine his standing in the country. These days, polls were everything. The appearance of failure was all that was needed to send Carson’s popularity skidding.

He thought about calling Sharon, but he needed something to calm him. Maybe a hot shower. As he stripped off his clothes and padded into the bathroom, he made a mental note to follow up on his line of reasoning, either with or without Carson’s approval.

He turned on the shower, and had to wait for the hot water to come up, but a man’s voice arrived before the heat did.

“Toss the entire fucking room.”

Jack, listening closely, turned off the water and put his head near the pipe.

“I want to find her secrets, something I can use against her.”

Ivan was speaking in Russian, a language Jack had learned while at the ATF because of his work with terrorists. He’d used Rosetta Stone to learn Russian, Arabic, and Farsi, all within an eight-month period. He already had been fluent in Spanish. As long as the foreign language was delivered aurally, his dyslexia allowed him to be an astonishingly quick learner. He was able to see the words, phrases, tenses, and colloquialisms in three dimensions as he heard them, and thus remember them instantly and without need for repetition.

He sat on the edge of the claw-foot tub, bent over, straining now to pick up every word. Clearly, Ivan hadn’t been handed over to the police. So much for law and order in Russia.

“I thought you knew this bitch inside and out,” another male voice said now.

“Do you know your bitches inside and out?” Ivan said irritably.

“My bitches are tyolkas. Young girls in heat are unknowable and, anyway, who the fuck cares? There’s tons of new tyolkas at Bushfire every night— Hey, what’s this?”

“What’ve you found?”

“Hmm, just a pair of sweaty panties. This bitch is a pig.”

“If I know her, she left them there on purpose, just for prying eyes like yours,” Ivan said. “Which means we’ve been looking in the wrong places.”

“I already checked under the drawers and behind the toilet tank.”

“Too obvious.”

“Ah,” said the second voice, “let’s try the shower drain.”

There was an answering grunt, then, a moment later: “Found something—look, a monofilament line tied to the drain, almost invisible in this light.”

“What’s on the other end of it, Milan Oskovich?” Ivan said in a hushed voice, made slurry by its journey up the pipe.

Jack leaned forward, the better to hear.

There was no sound from below, and for a moment, Jack was afraid the two men had left the bathroom. Then: “It’s a necklace,” Ivan said.

“A cameo,” Milan corrected.

“No wonder she hid it, it must be worth a lot of money, especially on the black market.”

From what Jack had seen of Annika’s attitude and style, she did not seem the type to wear a cameo.

Apparently, Milan didn’t think so either, because he said, “I’m not sure she hid it for its monetary value. Could the cameo be hiding something inside?”

Silence again, and Jack found that his muscles were tensed as if anticipating a blow.

“Fuck!” Milan said. “It’s an ID.”

“She’s FSB.” Ivan’s voice held a note of incredulity.

Jack knew that the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service or FSB for short, was the successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB.

Milan was laughing. “You poor dope—you’ve been fucking an undercover FSB officer.”

“Shut up!”

“You’d better not let Arsov get wind of this.”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

Jack knew from his pretrip briefings that Kaolin Arsov was the head of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka in Moscow.

“He’ll have your nuts over an open flame.”

Jack heard the sound of a brief scuffle, and he imagined the two thugs going at it. Why was he listening, this had nothing to do with him. But at once an image of Annika, blond hair and carnelian eyes, long legs crossed one over the other, flashed across his mind. He heard the silvery peal of her laughter, which morphed into Emma’s last appeal: “Dad, help me!”

“Calm the fuck down.” Milan was panting hard. “You can be sure I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s the bitch you have to worry about, not me.”

“I know that.”

Silence again, then a length of unintelligible whispering. What was Ivan dreaming up, Jack wondered.

“Annika? It’s Milan…. No, for God’s sake, don’t hang up. Ivan’s been shot…. That’s right, shot. He’s alive, but … We’re at Bushfire … on Tverskaya … That’s right, near Red Square, just down the block from Nightflight. No, I haven’t called anyone else. Ivan said to call … You’ll come, then? All right, we’re around back in the alley.”

“Let’s go!” Ivan said. “We’ll only have a couple of minutes to beat her there.”

3

The snow had left a moon of dubious value, but the wind had picked up, turning the flakes that had settled into the gutters or at the base of stony walls shooting upward, striking Jack’s face like grains of sand. With his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat and his shoulders hunched against the near-arctic chill, he crossed Red Square on the diagonal, on his way to Bushfire, whose address he got from the leering concierge on his way out.

“Hold onto your wallet, gospadin,” the concierge had said as he wrote on a slip of paper.

“Just tell me the address,” Jack had told him, ignoring the useless paper.

As he’d crossed to the elevator on the top floor, his eyes had met those of Alli, who was leaning against the door to her room, smoking one of the clove cigarettes that were among her new passions.

“Go to bed,” he said.

She exhaled a cloud of aromatic smoke. “I will when you do.”

He glanced down to where she was looking, jammed the Sig Sauer P250 further down in his waistband.

The elevator door opened. “I won’t be long.”

“I’ll wait up,” she said as he stepped in. “You can tell me all about where you went.”

The doors closed on her enigmatic smile. Jack shook his head, wondering what it would take to get the murk of her incarceration out of her system. Perhaps she’d never fully overcome what had been done to her; who knows what psychic damage the brilliantly deranged Morgan Herr had inflicted on her? Who knows how deep it went? Not her phalanx of shrinks, who had finally released her into her parents’ custody because she either derided or ignored the therapists who had tried to get her to open up about her nightmare experience at Herr’s hands. The only thing known for certain was that he hadn’t raped her, which was a blessing. But what, exactly, had he done to her? That was the billion-dollar question.

The buildings, flood-lit from below, seemed even more monumental limned against the milk-and-ink sky. The darkness lent the onion domes a fairy-tale aspect that belied the structures’ lugubrious history. But, then, as Alli had so rightly pointed out, history was being rewritten here every day. He walked quickly, but not with his head down as most people tend to do in such unpleasant weather. Instead, he was on the lookout for Ivan and Milan, though he was certain they had made it out of the hotel before he’d even had time to dress. More pressingly though, he was looking for Annika, because if he saw her he could cut her off, tell her what he’d overheard, and drag her away from heading into the ambush. But apart from an old babushka, thin and arched as a black alley cat, he saw no one.

Briefly, he asked himself what the hell he was doing. He was here on presidential business, he had a charter flight waiting to take him to Ukraine at Carson’s request. It seemed the height of madness to be striding across Red Square in the dead of night toward an ambush between two Russian mafia hit men and an FSB agent. Part of him said that Annika could take care of herself, but another, deeper part— the part that had been permanently scarred by his daughter’s death— said that unless he intervened she’d be found dead tomorrow morning with a bullet in the back of her head. If this were America he could phone the police, but as Annika herself had pointed out, this was Russia, and Russia had a very different set of rules that had little or nothing to do with the law. He’d have to get used to this new reality for as long as he remained here.

But, at the moment, there was a deeper issue at work. For him, the present was always infused with the past. What if he hadn’t been too busy with a drug bust to listen to Emma when she’d called for his help? Would she still have lost control of her car? Would she have veered off the road and careened into the tree? He would never know, of course, but he could ensure nothing like that happened again. He knew it wasn’t his job to save Annika; he scarcely knew her. He knew it was potentially a stupid thing he was trying to do, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He knew she was going to die; he could never live with himself if he allowed that to happen.

On the far side of Red Square Jack found the street named Tverskaya, and at once spotted the club’s entrance due to the knot of young people and the lineup of panting bombila, the gypsy taxis that cruised Moscow’s streets, tying up traffic. They either crawled along, nose to taillight, trolling for fares or, once they had one, hurtling at gut-wrenching speed to their destination. At those times, they were like living bombs, hence their name.

Bypassing this morass, he went around the block, cautiously approaching the alley where Ivan and Milan lay in wait for Annika. He supposed she had been lured here at the thought of finding out more about the workings of the Izmaylovskaya from Ivan as he lay dying. Clearly, she had given up on him otherwise. Perhaps he was too far down in the hierarchy to be of continuing use to her. Having milked him of whatever he had whispered in her ear in the afterglow of sex she was prepared to move on—or, more accurately, upward.

At the head of the alley he drew his Sig and paused, both to allow his eyes to adjust to the gloom and to remain hidden from Ivan and Milan. He needed to pick them out of the murk or, failing that, to figure out where they might have secreted themselves. As his eyes adjusted, his brain began to compose a three-dimensional construct of the alley, complete with doorways, windows, two scarred metal Dumpsters backed against a building wall, piles of trash tied up in plastic bags, and the heavily stained ground itself, strewn with random bits of garbage, used condoms, and wads of dirty tissues in among the small drifts of snow, yellow where it wasn’t already crusted with soot.

He’d tuned his ears not only for any sound of the two criminals, but also for the crunch of Annika’s high heels, which, he realized now, would do her no good in the slippery alleyway. In fact, they would be a hindrance. He had mapped the entire scene now, had determined that the best and most likely place for Ivan and Milan to strike was the gap between the two Dumpsters. While it was cramped, especially for a man of Ivan’s bulk, it had the twin advantages of being in heavy shadow and of being concealed from either end of the alley.

And that was the problem, because now a shadow fell tentatively across the far end of the alley, only to remove itself almost immediately. Jack knew it had to be Annika. For a moment, he considered running around the block in order to get to her before she entered the alley, but then he saw her moving in the uncertain light. She entered the mouth, and for a moment the blaze of light from the street behind her made it impossible to see even her outline, which winked in and out of existence like a ghost.

Jack had no choice now but to enter from his end and hope he got her attention before Ivan and Milan attacked her and he was forced to fire his pistol. As he moved toward the Dumpsters and Annika, his eyes picked out a length of PVC pipe. It wasn’t metal, but it would have to do. He scooped it up, then picked up his pace, waving the white pipe in the air to get Annika’s attention. This he did, but it proved the wrong strategy because it both startled her and diverted her attention from Ivan and Milan who, hearing the sound her high heels made as they struck the ground, jumped out from the gap between the Dumpsters.

Jack saw the dull flash of Ivan’s 9mm and threw the length of pipe at him. It struck him on the shoulder, and he turned his back on Annika, then squeezed off a shot at his attacker. Jack ducked down and fired off an answering shot. From his position, he saw Annika had one shoe in her hand. She slammed the end of the heel into Milan’s head just above his hairline, and with a grunt he reeled back against the brick wall.

Hearing his compatriot’s outcry, Ivan squeezed off another shot, possibly to keep Jack in place, then turned back to Annika. He was just leveling the 9mm at her when Jack leapt onto him. When the two men crashed heavily to the pavement, both the Sig and the 9mm clattered into the alley. Annika made a grab for the Sig, but with a herculean effort, Ivan kicked it away from her. The 9mm lay somewhere, hidden in shadow.

Jack drove his fist into Ivan’s midsection, but the big man seemed to scarcely feel it. Instead, he grabbed hold of Jack’s chin, pushed it upward, exposing his neck. Jack twisted away, and Ivan’s fist struck him on the side of his neck. A split instant later and Ivan would have punctured his throat. The man was even bigger at close range, and his rage was palpable. Jack ducked and weaved, got in a punch here and there, but was being methodically beaten to a pulp. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Annika make a run at Ivan. She hit him without visible effect. He lashed out at her with one massive arm, and she careened backward, crashed to the ground, and Jack knew there would be no more help from her.

In the moment after the swipe when Jack’s attention was momentarily diverted, Ivan turned him, had him in a choke hold. Now he was trying to bend him backward. Jack put all his energy to moving forward, crawling with agonized slowness across the width of the alleyway to the shadowed spot where he surmised the Sig had fallen. Hand-to-hand, he was no match for the huge Russian. The handgun was his only hope now.

His breath came in shallow pants, his eyes felt as if they were bulging out of their sockets as Ivan increased the pressure on his windpipe. His mind was whirling, blinding flashes of light interspersed with vast reaches of blackness that threatened to pull him down into their unimaginable depths. The alley canted over, as if about to spill him out onto his ear. He could no longer distinguish up from down, right from left, and so was nearing the end of his ability to keep going. He was drifting, as if leaving one world on his way to another, and he heard her voice, Emma’s voice, as he’d heard it several times after her death. Once, he had even seen her glimmering between the trees behind his house, the house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, his sanctuary, where he’d once lived with Gus, the big, black pawn shop owner, after he’d run away from his abusive father.

“Dad,” his daughter called. “Dad, where are you?”

“Emma …?”

“Dad, I’m looking for you and I can’t see you. Where are you?”

“I’m here, Emma…. Follow my voice. I feel like I’m very close to you.”

“I see you now, Dad.”

He heard her gasp of dismay.

“You have to go back …”

“Go back where?”

“You have to go back, Dad…. You’re right near the gun. …”

That was when he felt something metallic strike his knee. Scrabbling around with his right hand, he found not the Sig, but Ivan’s 9mm. He gripped it, his finger on the trigger. He was right up against the alley wall, and he bent over as hard as he could. Ivan’s forehead struck the wall, his grip on Jack’s windpipe loosened enough for Jack to turn the 9mm around.

He fired two shots into Ivan’s stomach.

The next thing he knew Annika was dragging him up out from under Ivan’s inert bulk.

“Come on!” she said breathlessly, “we’ve got to get out of here!”

“What?”

“You shot a member of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka.”

“Only a minor member, you said.” Gasping to fill his burning lungs, half dead, part of him still in that gossamer nowhere he’d drifted to, he was still only half aware of what had happened.

“You think that’ll matter to Kaolin Arsov?” Annika’s expression was grim. “He can’t allow one of his men—any one—to be shot dead without immediate retribution. Like the heads of all the families, his reputation rises and falls on two things: discipline and revenge.”

He took her proffered hand, began to stumble down the alley away from the body.

“Drop the gun!” she said. “For God’s sake, drop the gun and let’s get as far away from here as fast as we can!”

Jack, in awkward turns running and shambling, let go of the handgun, as he’d seen Michael Corleone do so many times in The Godfather. He stumbled over a leg, and noticed Milan sprawled facedown, as unmoving as Ivan. Were they both dead, he wondered briefly. Then they were back on the brightly lit street and Annika was hailing a bombila, wrenching open the back door, shoving Jack into the interior, and climbing in after him.

“We’ll hole up in Jelena’s apartment until I can make some calls,” she said as she gave the driver an address.

“Emma?”

“Emma?” Annika echoed. “Who is Emma?”

Jack, tears in his eyes, averted his face. He’d almost said “my daughter,” but instead replied, “No one.”

He cranked down the window and pushed his face out into the night. Emma, Emma, how I wish I could have saved you.

“Hey, I’m already freezing my ass off,” the driver protested.

But the bracingly cold wind was precisely what Jack needed to clear his head. The adrenalin was still pulsing through him, and he knew it would be some while before the pain Ivan inflicted on him would manifest itself. Meanwhile, there was the current situation to contend with. His brain, coming around, began to work at its usual lightning speed.

He hunched forward. “Forget that address,” he shouted to the driver over the harsh whistle of the wind. “Take us to Sheremetyevo.”

“The airport?” Annika said. “Why would we want to go there?”

Jack sat back as the bombila changed direction, heading for Ring Road. “Like you said, we need to get as far away from that alley as quickly as we can, and that’s just what we’re going to do.”

4

Everything is in the process of being lost. That’s what Emma’s death had taught him. His marriage, too, for that matter. Even at the beginning, in the first ecstatic blossoming, the seeds of loss had been sown, predestined even, looked at in a clear-eyed manner.

These thoughts rolled once again through Jack’s mind as he and Annika jounced along in the bombila. Once they were outside Ring Road and on their way to Sheremetyevo, Annika dug out her cell phone and made a call, he assumed to her superior at the FSB. However, it quite rapidly became clear that she wasn’t getting the response she had expected. After she had accurately described in detail what had happened in the alley behind Bushfire, she was silent, listening intently, her face screwed up in a frown of concentration and, then, frustration. Finally, her voice rose and she began to speak Russian in quick-fire bursts that lost Jack near the beginning. All at once, she cut the conversation short and threw her cell phone onto the floor of the bombila.

“What’s up?” Jack asked. Annika had said nothing to him after she’d queried him about their destination, not a thank-you for saving her life, nothing. Until the phone call, she had appeared sunk in contemplation without any sign of animation whatsoever, as if she were in the bombila by herself. Jack supposed her withdrawal was a reaction to the violence she had endured, the imminent threat to her life, the struggle to survive that required every ounce of energy. It wouldn’t be at all out of place for her to be in shock. Assuming so, he had preferred to give her a chance to calm down before he started querying her. Now a new, ominous element had been added to the mix.

“I’ll tell you what’s up,” she said. “We’re screwed, totally and indelibly screwed.”

“I don’t see why. Ivan was a low-echelon thug and you’re with the FSB.”

She turned her head so sharply he could hear the crack of the vertebrae in her neck. “Where did you hear that?”

“The same place I learned about the ambush. Ivan and Milan were in your room, looking for revenge. They found the cameo you’d hidden in the drain.”

“Fuck me!”

“Hiding your ID in a cameo was a mistake. A cameo is not your style at all.”

“That cameo was my mother’s.” She stared out the window for a moment, her expression opaque. When she turned back to him, she said, “The problem isn’t Ivan, it’s Milan. Ivan knew nothing, which is why I broke it off with him, but he, you know, didn’t want to let go.”

“You’re apparently very accomplished in bed.”

She stared at him for a moment with her lambent eyes. This close to her, even in the dim light, he could see silver flecks flare in their mineral color as the bombila passed streetlamp after streetlamp.

Apparently deciding not to comment, she said, “It’s Milan I was after, and once he discovered who I really was, he set the trap. Of course I took the bait, because it was he who called, because I knew he would be there, that with Ivan out of the way I could start on him.”

“They fucked you six ways from Sunday.”

She tilted her head. “I don’t know that curious idiom, but I’m sure I catch your meaning.”

They were on the final approach to the airport, and she bent down and retrieved her cell. “The real problem isn’t even Milan, though that’s bad enough. Milan was tied to a man named Batchuk. Oriel Jovovich Batchuk is a deputy prime minister, a close confidant of President Yukin’s, they go back all the way to St. Petersburg, where they served together in the municipal government. Even in those days, Batchuk did all of Yukin’s dirty work. The two developed a remarkably effective modus operandi. Yukin targeted successful businesses in the St. Petersburg area and sent Batchuk out, armed with paperwork that accused the company—its principal owner or its board—of malfeasance, of not being in compliance of arcane laws, whatever. Basically, it didn’t matter because the charges were all phony, but the resulting shit storm landed the company or the individuals themselves in court, where judges owned by Yukin handed down decisions favorable to him. Unlike in America, here you can’t lodge an appeal, or, more accurately, you can, but there isn’t a judge who pays it the slightest attention.”

The interior of the bombila was lit up in the sodium glare of Sheremetyevo’s arc lights. Jack, leaning forward, told the driver where to drop them off.

“Yukin and Batchuk got rich as very young men,” Annika continued. “Now both have risen to the ultimate level, and the same MO is being repeated, only on a national scale. Yukin is using Batchuk and the power of the federal courts to retrieve the largest, most lucrative privatized companies by finding arcane accounting discrepancies or fabricating multiple charges of fiduciary malfeasance against the officers and the oligarchs behind them, many of whom had skimmed off profits to pay him and his people. It started with the takeover of Gazprom and has only escalated from there.”

“But what is a deputy prime minister doing with a high-level member of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka? He must have every government agency on his payroll.”

“Batchuk is far more than a simple deputy prime minister,” Annika said. “He’s at the head of a shadowy secret service agency that flies so far under anyone’s radar it doesn’t even have a name, or, at least so far as anyone can ascertain, anything other than a designation: Trinadtsat.”

“The number thirteen, possibly Directorate Thirteen?”

“Trinadtsat is not a part of the FSB, it’s over and above FSB and every other secret service agency controlled by the Kremlin.” She made a face. “This is why my directorate cannot help me in this situation—and I cannot help you. Everyone above me is paralyzed with fear now that Milan Spiakov is dead. I am, as they say, radioactive. I cannot return to my job or to my normal life, from which I have been summarily expelled.”

“I’m sorry, Annika, but I’m in somewhat of the same situation.”

She shook her head. “No, no, you are American. Americans always have more options.”

Which is why we’re at this part of Sheremetyevo now, Jack thought. It will be far easier for Edward to get me out of Ukraine than it will be from here. Besides, I still have my assignment.

He could see the private plane Carson had set aside for him. Its cabin lights were on. As Edward promised, the crew was waiting for him. As he directed her to walk with him toward the plane, he said, “I want to get this straight. Thirteen is under Yukin’s command alone.”

She nodded. “Yukin and Batchuk’s, yes. But perhaps Trinadtsat is not its name at all. What little is known is speculation, anecdotal, often contradictory, but one thing seems clear: Batchuk stands at the previously unthinkable nexus between an unknown arm of the federal secret service and the grupperovka.”

“It’s as if Yukin is covering all his bases.”

Annika shook her head. “Again, I don’t understand this idiom.”

“I mean he’s marshaling all the forces, even those who have traditionally been enemies.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. He’s presiding over an unholy alliance.”

“But why? What purpose does Thirteen have?”

They’d arrived at their destination. Jack, having failed to agree on a price beforehand, was presented with an outrageously inflated fare. That was before Annika spent the next minute and a half berating the driver with a string of colloquial curses, the meanings of which were too obscure for Jack to fathom. However, the driver understood well enough, because Annika came back with a figure one-tenth of the one the driver had first presented. Jack paid and they climbed out of the huffing bombila.

“Who knows what Yukin and Batchuk are planning?” she said. “Something sinister, surely.”

The night had turned mild. Whatever was left of the snow was either melting or being swept away by a moist southerly wind. A diadem of lights had constructed another sky—low, metallic, artificial, without the stitching of stars in the soft sky high above it.

“Now,” she said, looking around, “please tell me why we are here.”

He pointed. “You see that plane ahead of us? It’s going to get us out of here.”

She pulled up short. “Who are you, Mr. McClure?”

“We passed ‘Mr. McClure’ back in the hotel bar.”

Her eyes were full of doubt. “You are someone with his own plane. An American oligarch.”

“No, I’m not a businessman,” Jack said, urging her to continue on toward the jet and its welcoming mobile stairs. He found it curious that an FSB agent didn’t know who he was, that he worked for the President of the United States. “And the plane isn’t mine. It belongs to a friend.”

“A very rich and powerful friend. So you are his, what—vice president?”

Jack thought that was funny, though in truth there wasn’t much to laugh about in their situation. “Let’s just say that like Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, I’m a deputy prime minister.”

She eyed him even more suspiciously. “America has no prime ministers.”

“Well, not yet, anyway.”

“You really have no idea who I am or who I work for?” Jack said.

“Should I? If you’re someone from the international pages of the newspaper you’re beyond my field of expertise or even interest.”

Having taken turns in the small restroom cleaning up as best they could, Jack and Annika were seated in the private jet as the cockpit crew went through their final checks. The captain had told Jack that he had his instructions, had submitted the flight plan to the airport personnel, and was otherwise ready to take off.

“I was wondering why you were at that hotel at the same time I was.”

“Perhaps we’re meant to have a passionate affair.”

She said this with such an acid tongue Jack could think of no possible response.

“Yes, that’s it,” she said in the same knife-edged tone of voice. “I’ve followed you all the way from—where in America are you from, Jack McClure?”

“Washington—the city, not the state.”

Annika, having made her point and clearly uninterested in his answer, turned away, stared out the small Perspex window at the airport.

There seemed to be an odd tension between them now, as if in the last several moments they had become antagonists. Jack was an unusually astute judge of character, but he found this woman unreadable, as if she had multiple personalities cycling around her brain clamoring to be heard. In this respect she reminded him of Alli.

At length, she said in a more modulated voice, “My focus is, or at least has been, on infiltrating the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka, with an eye toward gathering evidence against Arsov. Now I’m beginning to believe that someone felt threatened by the investigation, that I was set up to be taken out of the picture.”

“They could have sent you to Siberia.”

She turned back to him. The flecks in her eyes had turned the color of gunmetal. “The sudden outside pressure would have set off alarm bells inside the FSB and thus brought unwanted attention on Thirteen. No, this was a better way to handle me, making me a pariah.” Her face was set in a grim mask. “Now I will be hunted, very possibly killed, by my own people.”

“At the cost of Milan’s death?”

She shrugged. “I’m quite certain there’s already another ready to take his place. That’s how these things work. Surely, you understand that people like Milan—people like me—get thrown under the wheels from one minute to the next.”

Jack nodded. “It happens in my country, too.” Then, without waiting to think about it, he said: “You haven’t said anything about what happened in the alley.” The moment he said it, however, he knew he’d made a mistake.

Annika turned to him, her full lips compressed into a line as thin and distant as the horizon. “What is there to say? Two men died and we’re alive. What would you have me do, Jack McClure, break down and sob on your shoulder? Do you feel a need to comfort me? Do I look like I need comfort?”

“You look like you aren’t used to comfort.” With her friend Jelena in the hotel bar she had seemed so flirty, “We were about to go clubbing. Why don’t you join us?” But now she was all titanium and steel. “In fact, you were friendlier when we first met.”

He could see that with this comment she had retracted her claws and was now plunged deep in thought. “It’s just—” Her voice seemed to fail her and she cleared her throat, unsure for a moment whether to continue. “I’m sorry, but I get my back up when I’m frightened.”

She had said this last with her face averted, as if ashamed of any emotion deep enough to crack her outer shell, even if only temporarily. “It’s an ugly trait, I know, but I get frightened so infrequently, you see …” She had turned back, was laughing softly and much too briefly. She waved a hand as if her words were written on a blackboard, erasable. “I keep asking myself why you came after me. Why would you do that? After all, we’re strangers, between us there is no obligation or, rather, there wasn’t. Anyway, every time I asked myself this question I came up with the same answer. To you, I’m not a stranger because you must work for an American secret service agency.” She glanced around. “Is this a CIA plane?”

“No, it isn’t,” he said, “and I’m not a Secret Service agent.”

Annika regarded him levelly, trying to gauge the truthfulness of his words. “Would you tell me if you were?”

“I would now, yes.”

She reached out a hand and he saw how pale it was, how long and tapered the fingers were. Was it a kind of benediction she was giving him or was he the recipient of a mysterious divination? “I believe you,” she said, as if she had been able to read something that couldn’t be seen, but which she nevertheless had conjured up with her white hand. She sighed then. “There’s something else, something underneath, if you know what I mean.” Her hands arranged themselves in her lap, crossed one over the other, as if tired from their recent work. “I suppose my prickliness is the result of spending too much time alone. Jelena is right. Damn her, she’s almost always right, and isn’t shy about bringing up her stellar record as often as possible. Anyway, I’m no good with people, at least not in my private life.”

“What about Jelena?”

She gave him a small, wintry smile. “Jelena isn’t a friend, she’s like a sister or a priest who, despite her sharp tongue, chooses to hear my confession without judging me. And therein lies the other, better reason not to acquire friends. It’s not what you do that is your life, it’s what others think you’ve done, or not done, whatever the case. In this way, the truth becomes a lie, and eventually the lie takes on a life of its own, independent of you. Do you see how you lose control of your own life, because without quite knowing how it’s happened you’ve become what other people think you are.”

A shaft of light from the headlights of a moving vehicle outside on the tarmac briefly spotlighted Annika’s face. She was really quite a striking woman, even when she was in full-bore diesel mode, but more so now when her lips had relaxed into their natural shape and a bit of color had returned to her cheeks.

“Being in the secret service plays a role in that, don’t you think?” Jack said. “It erodes your sense of yourself. You become what your handlers want you to be, the lies you need to tell to accomplish your mission become the truth, and soon enough you lose the ability to tell the one from the other, you don’t know any other way to act or react.”

“You know about this difficulty.” Her face clouded over with renewed suspicion. “I thought you said you weren’t an agent.”

“I’m not, but I know a number of people who are, and they all say the same thing. Well, if they don’t admit to it I can see it in how they act.”

For the first time since they had met in the bar, she showed a spark of genuine interest. “But in my case, the damage had been done long before I ever came to the FSB.”

“Your father?” he guessed.

“A variation on a theme perpetrated over and over on women.” She pulled a cigarette out of the handbag she’d managed to pluck off the muck of the alley, but then remembering where she was, she dropped it back into the bag. She frowned. “My brother and I shared a bedroom, not so very uncommon in this country. From the time I was twelve, my brother raped me, night after night, with a hunting knife at my throat. When he was finished, while he was still on me, while he was still in me, he said, ‘If you tell anyone I’ll slit your throat.’ And then, to make his threat tangible, he nicked a place on my body, made me taste my own blood. ‘So that you never forget to hold your tongue,’ he said. Every night for eighteen months he cut me afterward, as if I were an imbecile who couldn’t learn.”

The turbines moved to a higher pitch, the thrumming and vibration in the cabin becoming more noticeable, but Jack could see that the movable stairs were still in place. His attention returned to Annika. There wasn’t a hint of self-pity in her voice.

“Where is he now?” Jack said.

“My brother? In hell, I trust. Not that I have the slightest interest in finding out. I’m not a victim.”

She said this last with a good deal of force, almost venom. Not that Jack could blame her, but in this he suspected she was wrong, because her brother’s words—“If you tell anyone I’ll slit your throat”— whispered into her ear night after night had acted like a physician’s evil tincture, poisoning her against keeping anyone close, anyone who could protect her, who could hurt him or interfere with his heinous activities. So she kept her own counsel, closed herself off from anyone who could help her—“I’ll slit your throat”—so in that sense she had succumbed to her brother, she was still his victim. Her strength, which was both prodigious and multifaceted, was all in the hard shell she had erected to protect the still vulnerable core.

In life, like often cleaves to like. He and Alli had bonded because they were both Outsiders. He wondered whether he could make a dent in Annika’s armor, and thought it worth a try. “With me, it was my father,” he said slowly and deliberately, putting equal weight on each word so that she would pay attention, so that she would understand the gravity of what he was saying. “He beat me because he said I was stupid, because he came home drunk every night, and I suppose because he hated himself and his life. One night, I’d had enough and left.”

“Yes, of course, you’re male.” Annika’s tone was resigned rather than bitter, as if she had contemplated this inequity so often it had become banal. “Males can move about at will, can’t they, while women, well, where can they go? Even when a situation is atrocious, intolerable, there are only home and family, even though both are toxic, because slavery and death wait out on the street.”

She shivered, as if from an intimate memory. Then she turned her head again, abruptly nervous once more. “Shouldn’t we have taken off by now?”

At that moment, an aide came down the aisle toward them.

“I’m sorry for the delay, Mr. McClure,” he said, “but there’s someone who requires a word with you.”

These aides of Carson’s were always so proper, so formal, Jack thought, or perhaps that was just the way things were with any presidential staff, where deference and protocol were a way of life.

Annika looked alarmed. “Who—?”

“Relax,” Jack said as he rose. “Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it.”

He was heading forward toward the door when Naomi Wilde, the head of Lyn Carson’s Secret Service detail, stepped smartly into the cabin.

Damnit, Jack thought, what the hell is she doing here? Has something happened to the First Lady?

Wilde was smiling, though in an embarrassed fashion, as if she’d screwed the pooch in some way she couldn’t mend. This was odd, because Naomi Wilde was a take-charge agent, a woman who was superbly trained. She had confidence enough for her entire team, but now she had the look of a fish on a riverbank, a woman who finds herself in a situation for which she has no answer or, rather, only one answer, which is not to her liking. She was breathing air when she should be breathing water.

“Sorry about holding you up, Mr. McClure,” she said, “but as you’ll see I had no choice.” She stepped fully into the cabin as if impelled, and someone brushed by her as if she didn’t exist or was of no further use.

At once, Jack understood Wilde’s state of extreme discomfort. He thought, Oh, Christ, no, because he was staring into the grinning face of Alli Carson, the First Daughter.

5

“Hi, Jack, surprised to see me?” Alli said as soon as she stepped into the cabin.

Jack was staring at Naomi Wilde, who winced at the look, then resignedly shrugged her shoulders. It was astonishing how Alli could reduce people like Wilde—professional, superbly trained, loyal, and brave—to Silly Putty. This was her particular genius; in the interval after the inauguration and its immediate aftermath, she had learned to use her fragile mental state to get whatever she wanted. Take me out of school to go to Russia? Okay. Let me hang out with Jack instead of you and Mom? All right, honey. Jack could only imagine the conversation between Lyn and her daughter this time. Had she threatened to run away, a mental fugue state, a bout of depression so serious she might spiral down into suicide? All these possible symptoms of what she had been through had been meticulously explained to her by the doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists at Bethesda, the medical facility where presidents and their families were treated. Obviously, she had absorbed the details, so that she could wield them like weapons on the field of her family battle. Edward had said that she had begun acting out again. God only knew what her real mental state was.

Regaining his composure, Jack stepped in front of Wilde so as to block her view of Annika. The last thing he needed was to answer awkward questions about who she was and why she was here and the fact that she hadn’t been vetted.

“What the hell is she doing here?”

Wilde again winced visibly as she said, “She’s going with you.”

“What? She can’t. It’s not secure.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Mr. McClure.”

Just then, Jack’s cell phone rang.

“You’d better take the call,” Naomi Wilde said. “It’s the FLOTUS.” She meant the First Lady of the United States.

Jack put his cell to his ear with some trepidation. Alli’s expressed preference to be with Jack had caused some friction between him and Lyn Carson. What he expected now was a severe dressing down, culminating in a stern order to send her daughter back with Wilde.

“Hello, Jack.” Lyn’s voice was cool in his ear.

“Ma’am, if I may, Alli can’t come with me,” he said. “It’s out of the question.”

“Good luck with that.” Wilde gave a brief nod toward Alli. “I’ll wait outside, Mr. McClure. I won’t leave until you escort her to the limo or you take off.”

“I’m afraid neither of us have a choice, Jack,” Lyn Carson said. “Much as I hate to admit it, she’s better off with you.”

“Edward would never allow—”

“Edward’s not here,” the First Lady’s curt voice cut in. “He’s in the air on the way back to the States, he doesn’t have to deal with his daughter or her threats to slip her guards and lose herself in the Moscow streets. Can you imagine what a nightmare that would be? And you know better than most why I don’t dare keep her under lock and key.”

“But Mrs. Carson, you can’t expect me to take her now.”

“I can and I do. Listen to me, Jack. I know we’ve had our differences, and maybe I’ve never told you how much I appreciate everything you’ve done—and are doing—for my daughter. But tonight I’m asking you to keep her safe. I have important state functions I need to attend over the next week. I don’t want to be at any of them, but I have no choice, it’s my job now and I have to do it. The same goes for you.

“Need I repeat that Alli has threatened to ‘go off the reservation,’ as she colorfully puts it. You know her, Jack, she doesn’t make idle threats. The American press has been on her like flies ever since the … incident at the inauguration; they’ll ask too many awkward questions and when she doesn’t appear at the functions with me the Internet blogosphere will go ballistic.”

Jack turned to see Alli walking down the aisle toward where Annika sat, swiveled around to face her.

“Jack is married. He told you that, didn’t he?” she said to Annika.

“The subject never came up,” Annika said. “Not that it matters.”

“No?” Alli eyed her with one eyebrow arched. “I’d have thought otherwise. You look like you’re ready to jump into the sack with the man who’s standing closest.”

Jack, feeling desperate, said, “Lyn, this is a very bad idea.”

“If you have a better one, let’s hear it,” she said.

“Jump into the sack?” Annika repeated in confusion.

“Fuck,” Alli said. “You understand the word ‘fuck,’ don’t you?”

“Okay, okay.” Jack felt boxed in by both Alli’s impetuosity and her mother’s inability to control her. “She stays with me.”

“Thank you, Jack. I won’t forget this kindness.”

“It’s hardly a kindness when—” But he was already talking to dead air. Snapping shut the phone he hurried back down the aisle.

Annika smiled placidly into Alli’s scowling face and said, “Jack McClure, who is this delightful imp?”

Without hesitation, Jack said, “She’s my surrogate daughter.”

This sentence, spoken to a person Alli didn’t know, had the same effect as Aladdin rubbing the grime off the magician’s lamp. The real Alli, or rather the Alli Jack knew in their quiet, private moments together, appeared like a genie with the power to charm whoever laid eyes on her.

“My name’s Alli. Jack’s my father,” Alli said, taking off her midnight blue parka and plopping herself down on the seat across from Annika.

“I’m Annika.” She held out a hand, which Alli took briefly.

She looked Annika over critically, analytically, as if she were Anna Wintour interviewing a potential assistant. “But, really, you are thinking of him as a fuck puppet, aren’t you?”

Annika appeared not to have taken offense at any of Alli’s deliberate provocations. Not yet, anyway. “What makes you say that?”

“Look at you, I’d get a nosebleed in those fuck-me pumps. Look how you’re dressed with the tops of your boobs popping out, look how you’re made up with lips and nails the color of blood. And, my God, you smell like a well-used whorehouse.”

“My friend and I were going clubbing,” Annika said mildly.

Alli leaned across the aisle and leered at her. “Oh, yeah, that explains it.”

“You know, I think this is your problem, not mine,” Annika said. “You’re acting like a jealous lover.”

Alli recoiled as if bitten, which, in a sense, she had been. “What the fuck?”

“Yes, you have the best of both worlds. You have a father who isn’t really your father.” Annika pressed her advantage in a way that, though not quite cruel, led Jack to believe that in fact she had been stung, or at the very least had been made to feel that she had entered a field of battle. “It’s okay to have a crush on this man, isn’t it? To have fantasies about him, sexual and otherwise.”

“You don’t know me at all,” Alli said as stiffly as a soldier addresses his superior.

“On the contrary,” Annika replied, relentless, “I know you quite well. Unlike Mr. McClure, your real father is a constant shadow looming over you. You prefer to think of him as an impostor, even while you crave his approval and his love.”

“Hello, ladies,” Jack said, stepping between them, both literally and figuratively, “getting to know one another?”

“Fuck no,” Alli said, standing up. “She’s a stone-cold psycho.”

Jack put his hand on her shoulder. “Sit down, Alli, we have some things to talk about.”

“Mr. McClure,” Annika said with a certain urgency, “it would be prudent to leave, don’t you think?”

“In a moment,” Jack said as soothingly as he could. “This situation has to be straightened out before we can take off.”

“What situation?” Alli said. “Let’s go. I’m ready, the psycho-bitch is ready, what’s the problem?”

“You,” Jack said. “You’re not going with us.”

Alli crossed her arms over her breasts. “Oh, but I am.”

“Alli, be reasonable—”

“Not my strong suit.”

Despite himself Jack allowed his anger to spill over. “Don’t play the damaged girl card with me.”

“I am damaged. You know that better than anyone else.”

“You’re too smart to be damaged in the way your doctors and your parents fear.” Jack stared her down; someone had to be the alpha dog, otherwise things would remain out of control. “You know it and I know it, so let’s cut the bullshit. You know the rules. Whatever mind games you play with other people you don’t play with me.”

She broke off the staring contest and gazed down at the floor. “I’m dying back in that hotel room, Jack.” Her voice had shrunk to the size of a grain of sand. “I can’t go back. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Where I’m going is too dangerous—”

“Not too dangerous to take the psycho-bitch, is it?” she said acidly.

“Apples and oranges,” Jack said sternly. “Alli, set your mind to it, you’re going back. I can’t let anything bad happen to you.”

She rose again, facing him, her face imploring. “But, don’t you get it, if I stay one more night in that hotel room something bad will happen to me. I’m not kidding, no bullshit.”

Jack hesitated, which was when Annika made a tactical mistake.

“Surely you don’t believe her, Mr. McClure,” she said. “You’re not seriously considering letting her stay on board.”

Alli remained silent, which was the smartest thing she could have done. In fact, thinking about it afterward, Jack suspected that she had played him and Annika perfectly. She knew how to get what she wanted in all kinds of weather, the heavier the better. At the moment, however, he was otherwise occupied. He knew her well, better than her parents and certainly better than her doctors, whom she delighted in tricking. The desperation in her eyes was genuine. He’d seen it before when he’d rescued her from the house where Morgan Herr had kept her imprisoned.

That look—the desperation—was utterly naked, unbridled, elemental, a world unto itself, and as such it had the ability to stop time, or, in a less fanciful description, to make the past manifest itself in the present. With that look she and Jack were hurtled back in time to the moment when he’d rescued her, when danger was as palpable a presence as a hand on the throat or the plucking of a sleeve from out of a nighttime crowd. There was an understanding between them that at that moment nothing was safe, nothing was certain, that all around them lay peril and the gaping unknown. There is no more powerful situation in which to forge true intimacy, a bond that cannot, or perhaps more accurately will not, be broken.

Which was why Jack now turned to the waiting aide and said, “Close the door and let’s get under way.”

Alli didn’t look at Annika, she didn’t gloat as she might well have done. Instead, she kissed Jack chastely on the cheek and murmured, “Thank you,” in his ear, before returning to her seat and strapping herself in.

“Don’t make me regret what I’ve done,” he said in return, but in truth part of him was already regretting it. He was ready to ignore his promise to the First Lady. Even as they began to taxi out onto the runway he felt the urge to call the aide over, tell him to stop the plane. As he took a seat, he told himself that Wilde must have already departed in the limo, but whether this thought was a form of consolation in order to lessen the burden of guilt that was already beginning to weigh on him or an actual fact he never found out because he quite deliberately kept himself from looking out the window to see if, in fact, the limo had left and, with it, his other option. He’d made his choice, now he’d have to live with it.

6

“What’s up with you?” Jack said.

“What’s up with the psycho-bitch?”

“Please don’t call her that.”

“I’ll stop calling her a psycho-bitch when she stops acting like one,” Alli said. “Which will be never.”

Jack had taken Alli to the rear of the aircraft as soon as it had taken off and reached cruising altitude.

“Jack, what is she doing here? I mean, who is she, anyway?”

Jack glanced over her head, checking to see that Annika was still in her seat. “She and I got into some trouble, which is why she’s here. She can’t go back to Moscow, to her old life.”

“You mean she fucked up her life, now she’s going to fuck up yours.”

“It’s not that simple, Alli.”

“Okay, then explain it to me.”

“The less you know about this, the better, believe me.”

“Now you sound like my father.”

“Low blow,” Jack said, and they both laughed at the same time. “Still,” he said, sobering quickly, “two men were killed tonight, two criminals.”

“So what’s the problem? The police—”

“This is Russia, Alli. The police aren’t to be trusted. They’re in the pocket of either the Russian mafia or elements of the federal government, both of which are as corrupt as they come.” He looked at her. “In any case, one of the criminals was so highly connected that Annika’s bosses have turned their backs on her. They may even send people after her.”

“To bring her back?”

“To kill her.”

“You’re kidding, right? Tell me this is a joke—I don’t care how sick it is, maybe I deserve it, but just tell me—”

“It’s no joke, Alli.” He sighed heavily. “Now you know why I didn’t want you coming with me.”

She was silent for some time. The plane hit an air pocket and dipped unexpectedly, obliging them to hold on for a moment. Jack reached for one of the overhead bins, Alli grabbed on to him, pressing closer.

She bit her lip. “The only reason I fought to come on this boring trip was so I could be near you.”

“Alli—”

“Listen to me. I feel safe only when I’m with you. It doesn’t matter where you go, Jack. I can’t be on my own now—I can’t be with my parents or their handlers or the doctors. When I am, I’m filled with a nameless dread, or maybe it isn’t so nameless, right? We know him— you and me and Emma.”

“Morgan Herr is dead, Alli. You know that.”

“And yet I feel him close to me, breathing against my neck, whispering horrible things in my ear.”

Jack put his arms around her. “What kind of things?”

“Things from my past—people and places, things that only Emma and I knew, and sometimes not even Emma; things I’m deeply ashamed of, things I’d rather not remember, but he won’t let me forget. It’s like he crawled inside my head and somehow, I don’t know how, he’s still there, living and breathing, whispering to me, whispering …”

Her last words dissolved into racking sobs. She pushed her face into his chest and he rubbed her neck in order to soothe her and, in another sense, soothe himself because he felt her pain almost as if it was his own, a twin, two melancholy trains running along the same track, which led to Emma, perhaps only a memory of her, perhaps not; best friend to one, daughter to the other. But part of him wasn’t sympathetic at all. He sensed that a good deal of her persistent anxiety stemmed from pushing down those very incidents in her past, because the more she turned away from them the more they tore at her, exacerbating her anxiety, stoking her fear. For the moment, at least, it was easier for her to believe that Morgan Herr was instigating those thoughts, rather than admit to herself that it was her own mind struggling to work through the most emotionally devastating days and nights of her past.

“I wish Emma were here,” she said in her soft little girl’s voice.

Jack stroked her hair absently. “Me, too.”

“Sometimes I can’t believe how much I miss her.”

Alli said it, but it might just as well have been Jack. “She’s in our memory, Alli, which is what makes memory so precious.” He detached himself from her so that he could look her in the eye, to confirm to her, if she didn’t already know, that they were traveling along the same track. “It’s this same memory that holds your dark days— Emma’s, too, for that matter, as well as mine—and I think you can figure out for yourself that it’s all one, the dark days and the bright, shining ones. Of course we both want to remember Emma, and we do, but for you the cost of holding your dark days at bay has become too great. If you push them away then you risk losing Emma as well.”

“It can’t work that way—”

“But it does, Alli. Whatever’s happened to you is a part of you; you can wish it hadn’t happened, but you can’t deny that it did.”

“But every time I think about the dark days I break out into a cold sweat, I start to shake, and I hear a screaming inside myself I can’t silence, and then I’m sure I’m losing my mind, and the fear starts to build until I can’t stand it anymore, and I think …”

True to her word, she had started shaking, tiny beads of sweat appearing at her hairline. Jack held her close again. “I know what you think, honey, but you’re never going to act on that thought. You understand that, don’t you? You’re not going to kill yourself, there’s far too much life inside you.”

He waited until he felt her nod wordlessly against him before going on. “Whatever happened to you, you’re still who you always were. Morgan Herr didn’t have the power to take that away from you. In fact, it was in those dark days that you found your own courage, you found out who you are.”

“But he programmed me. I did what he wanted me to do.”

She looked up at him, a little girl again, stripped of her tough young woman’s armor, her smart mouth, her arrow-swift rejoinders learned in a culture that grew its children into adults before their time, a culture that moved far too swiftly, becoming fixated on the glossy surface of things. He saw her as her father never would, an unspeakable tragedy that Jack, a man who had lost his only child, was struck by more deeply than most.

“No one knows the future,” he said, “we all accept that, but we don’t really know the past very well, either. We know only what happened to us, not what happened to those around us. We have no idea, for instance, how what they did or didn’t do affected us. Once you accept that we’re aware of only a sliver of what happened, you can see how nothing is simply how we remember it. We create our own past, our own history, it’s all fractured, pieced together, and yet this is who we become, imperfect but human.”

“We’ll be landing inside of twenty minutes.” Annika smiled into Jack’s face. “I’ve made this flight before, a number of times.”

“Then you know Ukraine.”

“Intimately.” She turned, looked back at Alli’s sleeping form. “For a young girl—”

“She’s twenty-two.”

“She can’t be just seven years younger than I am,” Annika said. “She looks sixteen.”

“Alli has Graves’ disease. It screws around with the pituitary gland.” He pointed to the side of his neck. “Her growth process was compromised when she was a teenager.”

Annika showed some surprise, or perhaps it was pity, it was difficult to say with her, a woman trained to be guarded even when she didn’t have to be.

Then she shrugged. “Well, no matter. I will be leaving you as soon as we set down.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jack said.

She raised an eyebrow. “No? Why not?”

“You said yourself that the FSB might be sending people after you.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said stiffly.

“Of that I have no doubt.” Jack pursed his lips in thought. “On the other hand, you’ll be easier to track down if you’re on your own.”

Annika tossed her head, dismissing his words. “I have many friends in Ukraine.”

“Friends or colleagues?” His pause was deliberate. “Ex-colleagues now. And if Batchuk is as powerful as you say, if he’s even half as vengeful as most Russians in high places, he’ll have compromised some, if not all, of your contacts.”

In the ensuing silence, both became aware that the aircraft was slowly losing altitude. Annika had been right on the money as to the length of the flight.

A range of emotions passed across her face like clouds brushed by a freshening wind. She seemed to be digesting his words, or possibly considering the range of her next moves. “Do you have an alternative to suggest,” she said slowly, “or are you simply stating a fact?”

“I’m doing both.” Jack led her to glance at Alli again. “Look, maybe her coming aboard is a godsend for us.”

Annika appeared on the verge of laughing in his face. “How could that possibly be?”

“We enter Ukraine as a family: mother, father, daughter. That will throw your FSB pals off the scent, at least for a while.”

“Really?” Annika cocked her head to one side. “And what passports are we going to use, Mr. McClure?”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

“No, I thought not.” Annika nodded. “But that’s all right. I’ve been working out a plan while you and the girl were huddled together in the back. Assuming we’re flying to Kiev …”

“We are.”

“At least something’s gone right tonight. I know someone there.” She held up her hands, palms outward. “Don’t worry, he’s not an ex-colleague, he’s someone I unearthed on my own, the head of the airport immigration staff, who’s always in need of money to feed his gambling habit. You have money, I take it.”

“Don’t leave home without it.”

“Dollars, not, God forbid, rubles, which don’t do anyone any good, not even us Russians?”

Jack nodded.

“All right, then.” She pulled out her cell phone. “Let me get to work. Once my greedy friend escorts us past Immigration, there’s someone else I know who can forge us documents so we can become your mythical family and move about the city. Names?”

Jack thought a moment. “Mr. and Mrs. Charles. I’m Nicholas, you’re Nora.”

“Nora.” Annika wrinkled up her nose. “I don’t think I like this name.”

“Would you prefer Brandi, or maybe Tiffany?”

“Nora it is,” Annika said, already dialing. “And the girl?”

“Emma,” Jack said without thinking, because in this instance thinking would be fatal; thinking would point out all the flaws in this insane plan, just as it would put into glaring headlines the terrible risks he’d chosen to take the moment he’d decided to try and protect Annika from Ivan and Milan.

They took their seats and strapped in as the Fasten Seatbelt sign came on. Annika was chattering away on her cell, which meant that she had at least been able to contact her immigration official. What if he hadn’t been on duty, or was on vacation—though who in Ukraine took vacations at this time of the year?—or, worst of all, wasn’t answering his phone? But another, more benign outcome seemed to be taking place, so for the moment Jack sat back and tried to look at the situation from all angles, as he worked on thinking his way out of this jam.

His first option, once they were on the ground, was to call Edward, but he didn’t know whether that was the smartest option or the stupidest. The very last thing he wanted to do was to involve the President of the United States in what could turn out to be a major international incident. Relations with President Yukin were fragile enough as it was. Carson had spent the better part of this past week trying to undo the damage his predecessor had inflicted on U.S.-Russian relations over the past eight years. So in a clearheaded moment Jack decided that the man who could help him the most—the most powerful man in the free world—was also the most vulnerable and, therefore, off-limits to him.

His next option was to contact Dick Bridges and persuade him to use his clout in the Department of Defense to get him and Alli out of Kiev using a cadre of the clandestine agents from the CIA or the NSA. That plan also had its risks, not the least of which was Carson’s own warning not to let Bridges know what Jack’s mission was. If Bridges was working for Edward’s enemies and Jack told him what was going on, Jack would personally sink Carson’s administration before it even got rolling.

The third and last option he’d thought of involved calling Chief Rodney Bennett, his old boss at ATF. The problem there was that Bennett ran a regional office. Jack had no idea whether he had the contacts higher up to trust with this highly flammable information.

Precisely when had this situation become toxic, Jack wondered. When he’d overheard the conversation between Annika and Ivan? When Annika had been accosted by Ivan? When he’d become aware that Ivan and Milan had invaded Annika’s room? Each increment of last night was like a tiny glass tile with its own color, shape, and texture, meaningless on its own, but when pieced together they had led him to this fugitive place, where only the unknown awaited.

The aircraft kissed the tarmac with only the slightest of bumps. By this time Annika was on her second call and Jack had come to the glum conclusion that for the moment he was alone in hostile territory with the First Daughter and a Russian Security Service agent he scarcely knew, and both FSB assassins and grupperovka liable to play Whac-A-Mole with them if their faces popped up in the wrong place.

The man who came on board with a slim-hipped swagger provided by his position was named Igor Kissin. He was not, as Jack had expected, Annika’s contact, but the contact’s emissary, a younger facsimile, who was authorized to take Jack’s money for the service Annika had been promised.

He glanced at Alli, and for a split instant Jack was terrified he had recognized her from photos in the press directly following the inauguration but then his lidded eyes moved on, tracking past Jack, who he didn’t look directly at, not even when he accepted payment. His burning black eyes were only for Annika, who he appeared to devour with his gaze. His high cheekbones and vaguely almond eyes hinted of his Asian ancestry. His skin was dark, glossy as satin, his mouth and jaw cruel and barbarous. Jack had no difficulty imagining him as a Cossack, bearing down on fleeing peasants as he set fire to their crops and houses.

“We should go now,” Annika said, after the money had changed hands.

Alli was slipping into her coat when Igor said, “Wait.” He had a deep, abrasive voice that rumbled through the cabin like mountain thunder.

They all turned to look at him.

“There are still matters to be resolved.”

“What matters?” Jack said.

Igor was still staring at Annika, and when he spoke it was clear he was addressing her: “Administrative matters.”

“Dmitri and I have an understanding,” Annika said calmly but firmly. “The transaction has been consummated.”

“With him,” Igor said, “not with me.”

“I’m not giving you more money.” Jack would have said more but Annika’s raised hand stopped him.

“It isn’t money Igor wants,” she said. “Is it?”

Igor continued his obscene scrutiny of her. “There is the matter of consummation.”

Taking a step between them, Jack said, “I won’t allow—”

“Stop it!” Annika was looking at him. “Stop it now!” Her voice, though very soft, had about it the unmistakable steel of command.

“Annika—”

She smiled ruefully and, on her way past him, placed her hand briefly against the side of his face, so that he felt burned or marked in some mysterious way. “You’re really quite sweet.” When she took Igor’s hand she was still looking at Jack. “Stay here now, yes? Stay here with the girl. When we return, all will be well.”

Then she led Igor back down the aisle to the rear of the aircraft, where they vanished into the restroom.

Alli came up beside him. She looked disheveled, smaller than usual, as if her unhappiness had altered her, or had diminished her presence. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and dark circles had already risen like bruised half-moons beneath them. She glanced up at him. “Jack, you’re not actually going to let her bang this sleaze-bucket.”

“This is Russia; I can’t interfere.”

“Jesus,” Alli said, “do you believe this psycho-bitch?”

7

Their first view of Kiev in the flickering gold-and-blue dawn light was of wide boulevards, vast circular plazas, monumental buildings guarded by Doric columns or crowned with blue and green cupolas. Golden domes, burning in the first rays of dawn, rose above the rest of this city that straddled the banks of the wide, periwinkle blue Dnieper River. The streetlights were still on. A tepid rain had recently ceased falling, the cobbles of the streets sleek and shining as snakeskin.

Their taxi from the airport dropped them at the Metrograd shopping complex in Bessarabskaya Square, where Annika directed them toward the modern facade of a branch of a restaurant chain. On the way into the city, Annika had assured them that it would be open for breakfast at this early hour. Stretching their legs, Jack and Alli had been surprised and pleased to find the weather here far milder, though more humid, than it had been in Moscow. Alli unzipped her coat and already had it off before they entered the restaurant. She looked different now, with her hair cut short. Not wanting to take chances after the scare with Igor, Jack had insisted she cut her hair before they left the aircraft. In the taxi, he’d told Annika that they needed to find hair dye for her before the day was out.

In the cheerful interior, amid brightly colored balloons and cartoonlike paintings of dva gusya, the two geese of the popular folk song that gave the restaurant its name, they sat on café chairs at a blond-wood table and ordered the first food any of them had had in twelve hours.

“We must wait several hours for the documents—the passports— that Gustav is preparing for us.”

“Can I sleep here?” Alli said.

Outside the plate-glass windows, the sky was clearing, revealing a cerulean sky as the city stretched, yawned, and came to life around them. The rumble of traffic rose and fell like a drowsing giant periodically clearing his throat.

Annika ordered more coffee, drinking it black this time. It steamed like a stoked engine. “Stop looking at me that way,” she said.

“What way?” Jack’s voice held the rueful tone of voice of a child caught at the cookie jar.

“Like I’m an exhibit at the zoo, or the sex museum.”

“Was I doing that? I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

She was partially right. “I don’t—I don’t know how you could have done it.”

“It’s not for you to know.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is, but you don’t want to acknowledge it.” She sipped her coffee as if it weren’t scalding. “In any event, we’re safely here, just as I promised.”

“But the price—”

She put down her half-empty cup. “You want me to be just the way you imagine, and when I’m not you’re disappointed in me.”

“In my country women don’t do what you just did with Igor.”

“Yes, they do, you just don’t know about it.”

Jack looked down at the smeared remnants of his breakfast. He could hear Alli’s calm, even breaths as she slept, and he thought of what he’d told her about the past, that you only knew what happened to you, not to others around you, and even then wasn’t everything distorted by the unreliable lens of memory?

“Would you like me to tell you something about this city?” Annika said this in an altogether different tone, as if the last contentious exchange had never happened, or had happened to two other people.

“Yes,” he said, grateful to be brought out of his thoughts. “I know nothing about Ukraine besides its difficult history with Russia and the secret naval base in Odessa.”

“War,” Annika observed, “that’s all you men know.” She fished a cigarette out of her purse and lit it with a metal lighter, took a first, long inhalation, and let it out slowly and luxuriously.

She regarded him for a moment through the veil of smoke. Then she said, “Kiev, the mother of Slavic cities, was founded by nomads, fifteen centuries ago, if you can believe it. The name is derived from a man, Kyi, a knyaz, a prince of the Polans, a tribe of eastern Slavs who, along with his two brothers and a sister, felt this place on the western bank of the Dnieper was an ideal point on the transcontinental trade route, and he was right. Now, of course, the city spans both banks, but the left bank only came into being in the twentieth century.” She blew out another languid cloud of smoke. “That this story is shrouded in myth only makes the current inhabitants all the more certain of their beloved city’s origin.”

Just then, a pair of police officers entered the restaurant. Annika’s hand froze halfway to her mouth, the glowing end of her cigarette releasing its curl of smoke, rising toward the ceiling. Jack didn’t think they should stop talking, but just as he was about to open his mouth he realized that his accent was something he should keep to himself right about now. He could see Annika tracking the cops’ movements as they crossed to a table and sat down facing each other. They took off their hats, stroked the greasy hair off their low foreheads as if one were the mirror image of the other, and settled themselves to look at menus.

As a waiter arrived at the cops’ table to take their order, Jack was acutely aware of how vulnerable he and the women were without identity papers, of how fragile was the line between freedom and incarceration. All it would take was for one or both of the officers to saunter over and ask for their passports, and they would be undone. He felt a cold sweat creep out from under his arms, slide down his spine to rest like a serpent at the small of his back.

Annika had unfrozen and was now sipping at her coffee again. “Don’t look over there,” she said, smiling. “Stare into my eyes as if you love me. We’re a family, remember?”

He did as she asked, but the serpent, restless in its anxiety, kept coiling and uncoiling, creeping him out.

As if sensing this, Annika said, “I have the keys to a nice flat not far from here. An apartment, you Americans say.” Her smile broadened as if to help ensure that he would not look away. “From Igor. You see, he isn’t all bad.”

Jack was aware that he was still judging her decision on the plane. He didn’t like that in himself, especially under the current circumstances, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

“It has two bedrooms,” she continued, “so the girl can have her privacy.”

“That leaves the other bedroom for us.”

“Yes,” she said, “it does.”

A dirty joke told by one of the cops to the other caused both to laugh raucously, and their voices never lowered, reverberating around the restaurant. They rose; they’d come in for coffee and pastry only, it seemed, and had wolfed both down in record time. As they passed through the open door, their voices faded slowly, as if reluctant to relinquish the vigilance of their masters.

“Wake the girl,” Annika said, “we should leave.” “The police are still outside, smoking cigarettes and ogling female legs.”

“All the better,” she said, putting money on the table, “they can ogle my legs.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call her ‘the girl.’ She has a name.” Annika gave him a level stare in which he could discern no irony. Nevertheless, she said in a light tone, “So do I, but she feels ‘psycho-bitch’ fits so much better.”

The cops, slouched against the wall, did, indeed, ogle Annika’s legs as she, Jack, and Alli walked away from them, and she even turned her face to them, presenting them with a warm smile.

“Was that so smart?” Jack muttered.

“Flirting with the police is not a suspicious action.” Annika kept their pace up in the face of a brisk wind. “In fact, just the opposite.”

Since Jack had no experience in the matter, he made no comment. She took them into a department store, where they all bought a change of clothes, as well as a package of hair dye for Alli. The entire time the women were shopping Jack kept a keen eye out for police officers, but all he saw were glum, overweight shoppers who paid them not the slightest attention.

Twenty minutes on Kiev’s crowded streets brought them to a yellow brick building with a trio of cupolas rising from its copper roof like doffed hats.

Annika rang a bell, one of many in four long ranks next to the locked doors. A moment later, they were buzzed into an antechamber, where she was obliged to repeat the process. The dim, cathedral-like vestibule smelled of wet wool and old shoe leather. Their footsteps set up echoes, like protestations for old inequities perpetrated on the souls the building had once harbored.

The agonized groans of the tiny elevator caused Jack to say, “We’ll walk down on the way out.”

“This way,” Annika said, as they went down the dusty fourth-floor corridor, which in better times or at night would be lit by the bare bulbs screwed into cheap plastic sockets bolted into semicircular niches in the walls.

At the far end, they stopped in front of a door on which she rapped twice, then three times, then twice again. Afterward, nothing. The bellicose sounds of a TV show rolled along the hallway like a damp fog.

At length, Jack heard a scratching on the other side of the door, as of a dog or a cat. The door jerked inward and a pair of eyes magnified by wire-rimmed spectacles peered out at them from a long, sallow, emaciated face.

“Hello, Dyadya Gourdjiev.”

At the sight of Annika, the old man’s face lit up like a neon sign. “My child!” he cried as she flew into his arms. “Too long, my little one, too long!”

“What’s going on?” Alli asked. “Lazarus is too old to be her father.”

“She called him ‘uncle,’” Jack said. “Anyway, I think you mean Methuselah. Lazarus was the beggar Christ supposedly raised from the dead.”

“He ought to do it with this guy before he turns to dust,” Alli whispered conspiratorially.

Annika made the introductions and asked Dyadya Gourdjiev to speak English because the girl didn’t understand Russian.

“Who does?” Dyadya Gourdjiev said with a grave laugh as he welcomed them into his apartment.

Jack supposed he was expecting a broken-down musty mess, typical of old people who live on their own and, with eyesight and attention to detail failing, continue to exist in squalor without ever being aware of it. The apartment smelled of lemon oil and applewood. It held none of the sickly-sweet scent caused by the imminence of death.

True, the apartment itself was old, as was the furniture, which had been built in another age. But all the exposed wood shone, the brass and copper lamps glittered, and the floor gleamed with a new coat of wax. Not a mote of dust emerged from the deep pillows of the sofa as they sat while Dyadya Gourdjiev went into the kitchen to brew tea and set out an enormous tin of homemade cookies, “baked by my girlfriend, who happens to live next door.”

He must have been eighty if he was a day, Jack judged, but apart from the peculiar thinness of the old man and a slight stoop to his shoulders, which might just as well have stemmed from his profession rather than time, he exhibited none of the unsteadiness of body or vagueness of mind normally associated with old age.

His voice was still strong and sonorous, and his eyes—easy to examine, enlarged as they were through the twin lenses of his spectacles— twinkled and sparked like the man he must have been fifty years ago. But his skin was so thin that it appeared blue from the ropy veins that were now so close to the surface.

He made a great fuss over Alli, believing, as most people did, that she was much younger than she was. Jack thought it interesting that Alli didn’t disabuse him of his mistake. Possibly, he thought, it was out of deference to Dyadya Gourdjiev’s extreme age, but it seemed just as likely that she was in need of the coddling the old man provided without hesitation or wanting anything in return. She was not immune to his obvious pleasure in her.

When the tea had been served in glasses set in metal holders with handles, and the cookies nibbled on, at least by Alli, Dyadya Gourdjiev finally sat in a large leather chair that exuded like perfume the odors of sweet tobacco and lanolin.

“I must say, Annika, you always arrive with fascinating people in tow and under—well, what would one say—remarkable circumstances.” Dyadya Gourdjiev chuckled like a Dutch uncle. “I imagine that’s one of the reasons I so look forward to your visits.” He leaned forward and patted her hand affectionately. “Which, despite being exhausting, are too few and far between for this old man.”

“You’re not old,” Annika said. “You’ll never be old.”

“Ah, youth,” said Dyadya Gourdjiev, addressing everyone in the room now, “forever flirting with the concept of immortality!” He chuckled again, as if signaling that he forgave Annika her delusion. “The truth is when you get to be my age living becomes a deliberate act of will. Nothing works quite right, the mechanics, the mechanisms of the body and the mind so interconnected begin to erode, and yet we go on.” He squeezed the hand he’d just caressed. “Because of those who love us and those we love most fiercely. In the end, there’s nothing else to life, is there?”

“No, Dyadya Gourdjiev,” Annika said with tears in her eyes, “there isn’t.”

The old man took out a linen handkerchief, newly washed, pressed, and meticulously folded. Like an opthalmologist, he used one corner to soak up each tear before it slid down her cheeks. “Now, little one, tell me what mischief you’ve got up to this time.”

Annika flicked a quick complicit glance Jack’s way, possibly to warn him to keep quiet before addressing the old man. “This is one time I think saying nothing is the best option.”

For a moment Dyadya Gourdjiev said nothing. While they had chatted, sipping their tea and nibbling on sugar cookies, the light from outside was caught in the sheer lace curtains on either side of the windows, honing their outlines, lending them a substance they otherwise would never have. Now that weight gathered in the room so densely time itself seemed to slow to a crawl. Everyone—even Alli, whose attention was apt to wander—was watching Dyadya Gourdjiev for a reaction, as if they were scientists drawn to a volcano they feared would erupt after decades of uninterrupted slumber.

“I don’t like the sound of that, little one,” he said after a time during which he appeared to be struggling with his response. He pulled out a thick manila packet, which he opened. Tipping it, he slid out three passports. “Now that you’re an American, little one, you no longer need a visa to enter Ukraine, but I’ve provided one in the event you choose to be Russian once again.”

“Thank you, Dyadya Gourdjiev.”

She leaned forward, gathering up the documents, but as she moved to stuff them back into their manila envelope, the old man put a hand over hers, stopping her.

“You must answer me this, little one: Do you think I’m too old to be of help beyond what I’ve already provided?”

Annika appeared alarmed. “No, not at all, Dyadya Gourdjiev, it’s just that I …”

Jack immediately saw his opportunity and took it. “What Annika is trying to say is that I need some help finding someone here and she wasn’t sure she should ask you.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev took his hand away from Annika’s and sat back in his chair. He eyed Jack with a keen appraiser’s eye, honed through decades of experience. Slowly, a smile spread across his face and he lifted a forefinger, moving it back and forth through the air in mock admonishment.

“I see what you do, young man, don’t think I don’t, but—” he poked the air with the finger “—if you’re serious, let me hear what you have to say, because, after all, I’m quite certain my Annika wishes only to protect me, though the truth is I’ve never required her protection before.”

“Today is a different day, Dyadya Gourdjiev,” she said.

“Hush, child. Let the young man speak his piece and then we’ll see if he’s come to the right place in Kiev, hmm?”

Jack put his hands together, trying to block out everyone but the old man. He wondered whether what he was about to say was a breach of security, in light of who Annika was and who she had worked for. But that couldn’t be helped now; for the moment, all he could do was forge ahead into the dark and see what happened next.

“Six days ago, a man named Lloyd Berns was killed on the island of Capri, off Naples.”

“I know where Capri is,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. “I may be a forger but, by God, I’m not a philistine. In fact, it might surprise you to learn that in my youth I was something of a Roman scholar. I spent two weeks on that magnificent island, tracing the latter part of the life of Augustus Caesar.” He waved a hand for Jack to continue.

“What’s important is that Berns should not have been in Capri at all. He was scheduled to be here in Kiev. In fact, he was here in Kiev until about ten days ago, when he took off unannounced.”

“And just who was this Lloyd Berns, young man?”

“He was a senior United States senator.”

There ensued the suffocating silence one normally finds only in the deepest recesses of forgotten libraries or long-buried reliquaries.

Dyadya Gourdjiev was staring up at the ceiling in contemplation. “So one would assume that you also are in politics, Mr. McClure.”

It was the first time the old man had addressed him by name. “In a manner of speaking,” Jack said.

Dyadya Gourdjiev’s head came down and his eyes snapped into focus on Jack’s expression. “If that is the case,” he said slowly and evenly, “why are you here? Why aren’t you in Capri?”

“I want to speak to the last person Senator Berns was with before he left Kiev.”

“And you need my assistance for this?”

“All I have is a name. Actually, it’s only an initial and a surname: K. Rochev.”

“Rochev, Rochev.” The old man closed his eyes, sat repeating the name as if needing to taste it on his tongue. Then his eyes opened slowly, marking him with a sly, reptilian look. “I knew a Karl Rochev, but I haven’t seen him for a very long time.”

“He’s here in Kiev?” Jack said.

“He may still be.” Dyadya Gourdjiev shrugged. “But I have no doubt there are many K. Rochevs in Kiev. It’s not, after all, such an uncommon name. Besides, this man may not have been a Kiev resident at all.”

There was an intimidating darkness about him now, a gathering of energies, like glue or ink, a hint of what he must have been like in his prime, when his frame was filled out with muscle and he sparked with power. Something about him had changed the moment Jack had mentioned Rochev. The avuncular cheeriness had vanished, replaced by a professional wariness, even though Jack had been brought here by Annika, or possibly even because of that very fact. What was clear, however, was that he knew far more about Karl Rochev than he was letting on. Why was he holding back, Jack asked himself, and if he’d decided on that tack, why hadn’t he simply lied outright and said the name was unfamiliar to him?

A possible answer was not long in coming.

“You can trust Mr. McClure, Dyadya Gourdjiev,” Annika said. “He saved my life last night and, in doing so, put his own in jeopardy. If you know something about this man Rochev that could help Mr. McClure, please tell us.”

Jack noted with interest that she used the plural, please tell us.

The old man interlaced his fingers and a frown further creased his forehead. The darkness he had summoned still held about his summit, guardians from a time far distant in every way save in memory. No one had been able to touch him in the old days and, Jack was certain, no one was going to touch him now. He might be old, but the accretion of power could not be scraped off him even with a jack-hammer.

“I must tell you that I find it most disturbing that a member of the United States Senate was with Karl Rochev.”

“If Karl Rochev is the man I’m looking for, which I very much doubt,” Jack said. “Besides the fact that there might be dozens of men in Kiev, perhaps as many as a hundred, with that name. I’d find it too much of a coincidence that the first man Annika takes me to in Kiev can identify this K. Rochev.”

“I see your point, young man.” Dyadya Gourdjiev shook his head slowly. “In fact, I have no doubt that the more you ponder it, the more likely it seems that Karl is the wrong K. Rochev.”

“That’s right,” Jack said.

“There’s no reason to disagree with your analysis of the situation, except that in a few moments’ time you may change your mind.”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t see how.”

“Of course you don’t. Nevertheless, grant me a moment more of your time.” Dyadya Gourdjiev’s expression had become grave. “Karl Rochev and I grew up together in the same rotting slums of Kiev. We were both beaten many times by the Russian occupiers and, because of those beatings, we made a pact to revenge ourselves. I became a forger, creating identity papers for the underground. Karl was always the man of action. When we were boys, it would be he who led us on forays against Russian soldiers. Even his pranks—before we were old enough to arm ourselves and to shoot to kill—had a sadistic bent to them. In those days, he was not a man who thought hard and long, he was too impatient, too restless. Not surprisingly, he became an assassin in the guerilla war against the Russians. He accepted all the assignments believed to be suicidal, that no one else would willingly take. It wasn’t that he was reckless, mind you, I don’t believe he had a death wish. The worst you could accuse him of was being myopic. He didn’t think about anything beyond the present moment. In other words, possible consequences were of no interest to him. He was assigned to murder a Russian colonel or general, he knew it was right, and he did it. He never failed. Never.”

“He was never wounded?” Jack asked.

“That depends,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, “on how you define wounded.” He paused to pour himself more tea, though by this time it was room temperature. He appeared not to notice or mind as he sipped it. “Those who didn’t know him well, which was almost everyone he worked with, claimed that no, he had never been wounded. And in a sense that was so. Not a scratch, not a drop of blood marred his assassination record. But I, who knew him like a brother, knew that his work had wounded him grievously. One does not become an assassin without serious consequence. You are killed, either in the midst of a mission or in the bathtub having a relaxing soak in the treacherous aftermath. What does it matter, you may ask, either way you’re dead. Well, yes, but in the first example you’re lying in a foul ditch somewhere far from home, food for the worms. In the second example, you’re home safe and sound—at least your body is. It’s your mind or, rather, your heart, that has died.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev put down his glass, which was now empty, save for the dregs of tea leaves, dark as dried blood. “My old friend Karl Rochev belongs to the second example. It is said, or written about, that every time one murders a human being part of you dies. This is said or written by artists or journeymen who have not killed, and so don’t know the truth.”

The old man was silent for a time; his eyes slipped slightly out of focus. Sounds rose up from the street and entered the room like sunlight, coagulating on the carpet at their feet.

At last, Dyadya Gourdjiev expelled a deep sigh. “The truth. There is a millipede, I’m told, somewhere in Asia, the Mekong region perhaps, that manufactures cyanide. The truth is this act of killing another human implants just such a creature. With each death, the insect releases more of its poison, until the heart of the assassin withers and dies. In just this way, Karl Rochev became a man without conscience, without a moral compass. Without his heart, he lost interest in distinguishing good from evil.”

“So when there was no more need for an underground, when Ukraine freed itself from the Soviets, he became a criminal,” Jack said.

“A politician,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. “But then, as we all know, the two are indistinguishable.”

8

“This is why I know Karl is the man you seek.” Dyadya Gourdjiev snared a cookie between two fingers free of the crooks and unnatural bends of arthritis. As he contemplated it, he turned it, revealing first the top, then the bottom. “Politicians,” he said. “Your senator and Karl, two sides of the same coin, pulled inexorably together even from opposite sides of the world.”

The old man gave the cookie to Alli then, taking another, popped it into his mouth whole, crunching on it happily. When he’d swallowed the last crumbs, he continued, “Your senator—what was his name again?”

“Lloyd Berns,” Jack offered.

“Yes, your Senator Berns would have had to meet with Karl if he wanted to get anything accomplished in Ukraine.” He cocked his head. “Have you any idea why the senator was in Kiev?”

“So far as anyone knows, he was here on a Senate fact-finding mission, but his very last appointment was with K. Rochev,” Jack said, “and it wasn’t official, which is what caught my attention.”

The old man eyed him carefully, listening perhaps for a misstep on Jack’s part—if, for instance, Jack had said “what caught our attention,” which would have given him the opening to ask who, precisely, Jack worked for. As a lifetime forger, he was not in the habit of asking such questions outright.

“Then it’s Karl you want to speak with.” He stood and walked across to a hand-rubbed rosewood table with cabriole legs as delicate as a fawn’s. For a moment, he rummaged through some papers until he found a much earmarked address book. He didn’t look like the kind of man to rely on Outlook. He made two quick phone calls, then turned back to his guests.

“As I suspected, you won’t find him at the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, our parliament. Likewise, it would avail you nothing to seek him out at home; you’d find only his wife and his mother, though, in truth, there’s little to distinguish them.” He shook his head. “No, if history is prelude to the present, today being Friday, Karl will be with his current mistress. He will be with her all weekend.”

“Do you know her name or where he might be keeping her?” Jack asked.

“As I said, Karl and I haven’t been in touch for years. It’s a curious thing with longtime compatriots in their old age, they sometimes have a falling out. Ours was quite bitter. He’s dead to me. However, all is not lost, Mr. McClure, if I can find a certain number.” He paged through the book, moistening his forefinger every so often to ease the process. “Ah, here it is. Milla Tamirova.” Reaching for a pencil, he wrote a few lines on a scratch pad, ripped off the top sheet and, turning back, handed it to Jack. “Milla Tamirova was Karl’s mistress at the time he and I parted ways. I very much doubt that she still is, since he changes girls like other people rotate the tires on their cars. But she might know who his current one is.”

“Why would she know that?” Jack asked.

“All of Karl’s mistresses came from one stable.”

“Why bother paying?” Alli asked. “So far as I can see there seem to be a hundred willing girls for every man in Moscow and I imagine the same’s true here.”

The old man smiled as he wagged a finger at her. “A clever one here. Of course, there’s a reason. The stable mistress trains all the girls in different, er, disciplines.”

“Your friend’s into fetishes,” Alli said without blinking an eye.

“Well, well.” For a moment, Dyadya Gourdjiev seemed at a loss for words, or perhaps he was busy reassessing the young woman he’d mistaken for a childlike adolescent. “And what do you know of fetishes, young lady?”

“That there’s at least one to satisfy every possible psychological itch.”

“Indeed.” Dyadya Gourdjiev stood with his hands clasped behind his back. “Karl’s into bondage, serious stuff, very unpleasant.”

“Not for everyone,” Alli said so dryly she drew a sharp look from Annika.

“Clearly not,” Jack said, already troubled by Alli’s interjections, which illuminated a topic she’d never brought up with him. “If you’ll allow me to use the phone, I’ll call her right now.”

“I don’t think that’s the best idea,” Annika said.

Dyadya Gourdjiev nodded. “I agree. A woman like that is highly likely to be suspicious of a man like you.”

“Let me do it,” Alli said.

Jack snorted. “Yeah, right.” He waved a hand. “Forget that. It’s bad enough you’re here altogether.” He held out the paper the old man had given him. “Annika, you make the call.”

Alli snatched the paper before Annika could take it. She stood in front of Jack with her legs planted firmly on the carpet. “Listen to me. This woman will get suspicious of anyone wanting to know where her former lover is now. I mean she might not respond at all or if she does she might give us a bum address or if she gives us the right one she could call him the minute we leave.”

“Alli, stop this nonsense right now—”

Dyadya Gourdjiev took a step toward her. “Mr. McClure, what harm is there in allowing Alli to finish her thought?”

“I don’t want her involved in this.”

The old man shrugged. “It appears to me that she’s already involved.”

Alli grabbed the ensuing shocked silence by the horns. “Look,” she said, excited now, “I call Milla Tamirova—”

“And say what?” Jack asked. “You don’t even speak Russian.”

“No matter,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. “Milla speaks perfect English.” He rubbed two fingers against his thumb. “And why not? English is the language of money.”

“I’m going to tell her that I’m his daughter and I need protection.” Alli went over to where Dyadya Gourdjiev stood, as if seeking protection from Jack’s further protests. “That’s why I need to find him.”

She picked up the phone.

“I’ve slaved your cell phone to mine,” Jack said. “So just press the Two button if you get into trouble.”

“I’m not going to get into trouble,” Alli said. “I can take care of myself.”

He knew that wasn’t an idle threat. One of the things he’d been doing with her was training her in physical combat. She was a quick learner, which was no surprise to him, since she’d been athletic in college. Emma had taken him to see her in several track meets. He’d also taught her how to shoot a pistol; they’d spend an hour twice a week at the ATF firing range in Virginia.

“If you get into trouble,” he repeated, “I’m only a floor away.” He tapped the butt of the Mauser Dyadya Gourdjiev had given him, along with a box of bullets.

They were on the second floor of Milla Tamirova’s building on Andrivyivsky Spusk, a beautiful street filled with markets, steepled churches, and tiered wedding-cake buildings that wound its way up from the lower part of the city, known as Podil, to the upper city. Rochev’s former mistress occupied a corner apartment on the third floor. She refused to speak over the phone. In fact, it appeared that she was about to hang up, but once Alli broke down in tears, her voice quavering pathetically, she had agreed to see Alli. When did Alli learn to cry on cue, Jack asked himself as he watched her work over Tamirova like a champion boxer.

“And don’t get cocky, okay?”

She stared at him steadily now. “Okay.”

As she turned away to sprint up the iron fire stairs, Jack took her elbow and gently turned her back to him. “Alli, are you sure you want to do this? We can find another way—”

“I’m so sure, Jack.” Her gaze met his without guile. “Besides, it’s already set up.”

Then she gave him a quick grin. “You don’t want to queer the pooch.”

This response caught Jack flat-footed. For the first time since Emma’s death, the spark of life had returned to Alli. She was visibly excited about using her skills, being part of something other than the hurt and pain that soaked through her insides. It was at this moment that Jack understood something about her that her entire battery of doctors had missed: What she needed more than anything else was to be drawn outside herself, to be engaged by the world, to be given a challenge, to feel once again her own expertise. Morgan Herr had taken away her sense of control. Jack saw that from the moment she had formed this plan she had set herself on the road to regaining what had been snatched from her, what now mattered most to her.

He nodded to her and smiled. Kissing her cheek, he let her go, watching her scamper up the steps with a newfound energy.

“I hope to God you know what you’re doing,” Annika said.

Jack’s gaze was fixed on the place on the stairs where Alli had vanished. “That makes two of us.”

Milla Tamirova opened the door the instant Alli knocked. She must have been waiting at the door. She was another in a long line of Slavic blondes with magnificent bone structure, porcelain skin, cornflower blue eyes, and breasts with no need of being inflated with silicon. She had the kind of feral, predatory face men found irresistible, at least around the bedroom, which meant that she wore her sexuality outside her skin. Alli despised her on sight.

Nevertheless, she smiled winningly as she stood on the threshold, aware that the older woman was scrutinizing her as if she were a frog pinned to a board, its insides exposed for study.

“Pajalyste chawdeetzye,” Tamirova said, taking an abrupt step back. “Oh, forgive me, I forget that you don’t speak Russian. Please come in.”

She continued to peer at Alli as she shut the door and led her guest into a tastefully furnished room full of chintz and striped satin fabrics. Heavy drapes half covered the windows, the furniture was large and looked deep enough to get lost in, which, Alli thought, was probably the point.

Tamirova, her painted lips moving softly, said, “I find it odd that a child of Karl’s wouldn’t speak Russian.”

“I was brought up in America,” Alli said with an ease that amused her almost as much as lying to her doctors. “It’s only recently that I found out my origins—a photo, a name, a date, and a street name. I Googled it and came up with Kiev.”

The scrutiny clearly over, Tamirova raised her arm. “Sit down. Please.” She spoke English almost as well as Annika, one of many languages, she said, part of her training to be all things to all clients. She wore a long sea green robe of some material that both clung to her slim curves and seemed to foam around her ankles, which were strapped into high-heeled shoes. Who wears high-heeled shoes when they’re home, Alli asked herself.

When they were comfortably settled, Milla Tamirova said, “Have you any idea who your mother is?”

“Not a clue,” Alli lied without hesitation. She cocked an eyebrow. “You’re not my mother, are you?”

“Heavens, no!” Milla Tamirova chuckled deep in her throat. “I’ve never been pregnant—well, except one time and then, you know …”

“Don’t you ever think of what that baby would have been like?”

“I wouldn’t have been a good mother, I don’t have—what do you call it in English—?”

“A conscience?”

“A maternal instinct.” A small smile played around her full lips. “Perhaps someday you’ll understand.”

“I hope to Christ I never do.”

“Is that what they teach you in America? Religion?” She lifted a hand. Her nails were longer than Annika’s. “You can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.”

“I’m twenty-two.”

“Good lord!” Milla Tamirova stared at her without seeming comprehension.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Alli said.

“Down the hall, second door on the left,” the older woman said as if still in a trance or plunged deep in thought.

Alli made use of the bathroom, flushed the toilet, ran water over her hands and dried them. Then she did a bit of reconnoitering. She saw Milla Tamirova’s bedroom directly across the hall, lushly feminine and inviting, except to Alli, who was revolted. Further down, where a second bedroom might logically be, was a closed door. Alli stood in front of it for a moment then, reaching out, turned the faceted glass doorknob. And came upon the dungeon.

Along the left wall was an array of whips and crops of all kinds, made of different materials. Below it, an assortment of manacles linked by chains. In front of this display was a Western saddle, complete with stirrups and cinch, thrown over a custom-made sawhorse. In the center of the right wall was a floor-to-ceiling mirror, on either side three tiers of dummy heads on each of which was a full-head mask of either leather or black latex. Below each one, lined up like little red soldiers, were what she knew were gag balls. The one small window had been blacked out and was covered with thick metal grillwork straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo.

This regimental exhibit was unsettling enough, but it was the object in the center of the room that riveted her attention: a massive wooden armchair bolted to the floorboards. On each arm and on each of the front legs was a leather restraint with metal buckle. The sight of the chair, so similar to the one Morgan Herr had tied her into for the better part of a week, gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Do the tools of my trade interest you?” Milla Tamirova leaned against the open doorway. She had lit a cigarette while Alli was in the bathroom, and now she exhaled a cloud of pale smoke toward the high ceiling.

Alli couldn’t take her eyes off the chair, which both repelled and fascinated her. The atmosphere seemed saturated with sweat and sexual musk. “I want you to tell me about this.”

“The mechanics of bondage are simplicity itself.”

“Forget the mechanics.” Alli circled the chair as if in a death spiral. “I want to know about the psychology of it.”

Milla Tamirova, smoking slowly, studied her for some time. “It’s not about sex, you know.”

“It’s about power, right?”

“No,” the older woman said, “it’s about control, gathering it to you and letting it go.”

Alli turned to look at her. “Control.” She said this as if it were a word that Milla Tamirova had invented, one that was as potentially fascinating as it was inscrutable.

Tamirova nodded. “That’s right.”

“Give me an example.”

Milla Tamirova seemed to flow, rather than walk, into the dungeon. “Take this chair, for instance. The client is strapped in. He begs to be released, I ignore him. He says he’ll do whatever I want and I say, ‘Anything? Anything at all?’ and he nods his head, eager, avid, greedy, even, for the punishment I will mete out.”

A loathsome shiver crawled down Alli’s spine. She felt as if she were witnessing the beginning of an accident, a car crash, perhaps, the two vehicles heading toward each other at high speed.

“Why?” she said in a whisper. “Why do they do it?”

“Why does anyone do anything? Because it feels good.” Milla Tamirova exhaled noisily, like a horse or a dragon. “But that isn’t what you’re asking, is it?”

“No.”

“Mmm.” The older woman circled the chair, or perhaps it was Alli she was circling, as if drawn by a desire to see all sides. “These men are very powerful. They spend their days at the top of a pyramid of power, barking out orders to those groveling around them. Strange to say, they find this state of affairs enervating—all these people asking them what to do, waiting to be given orders, drains them of energy. They come to me to be rejuvenated. To them, being in a position where they not only don’t have to give orders, but are forced to obey them is sweet release.”

She stopped, curled her fingers around the back of the chair. “You understand, don’t you, that this is all theater. There’s nothing real about it, except as it exists in their minds.”

“You hold no malice toward them.”

“Quite the opposite, I …” Milla Tamirova broke off and, relinquishing her position, walked to where Alli still stood in front of the chair. “What happened to you, child?”

Without taking her eyes from the chair, Alli clamped her lips together.

The older woman took Alli’s hand in hers, but as she began to move it toward the chair, Alli jerked it away. Milla Tamirova then reached out and put her own hand on the chair arm.

“Can you do that?”

Alli shook her head.

Milla Tamirova sat in the chair, her hands lying along the arms. “Touch my hand, child. Just my hand.”

Alli hesitated.

“Please.”

Taking a deep breath, Alli placed her hand over Milla Tamirova’s. She began to have trouble breathing.

“I’m going to take my hand away,” the older woman said. “Do you understand?”

Alli, her eyes wide with terror, nodded.

Slowly and gently Milla Tamirova slid her hand out from under Alli’s. For a moment, Alli’s hand remained hovering above the gleaming wood and leather. Then, closing her eyes, shuddering with fear, she let her hand drop. With the touch of the cool wood came a terrifying vision of Morgan Herr’s repulsively handsome face, the evil words whispered in her ear.

“Alli, open your eyes. Now look at me.” Milla Tamirova smiled. “It’s all right, yes? You’re here with me. Everything is fine, isn’t it?”

Alli barely found the strength to nod.

“Now—” Milla Tamirova rose. “Why don’t you sit where I was sitting?”

Alli felt her gorge rising, she was gripped by a kind of panic that throbbed behind her eyes, that threatened to take over her entire being.

“It’s important for you to sit in the chair.”

“I … I can’t.”

Milla Tamirova engaged Alli’s eyes. “As of this moment, you’re ruled by your fear. Unless you face it, unless you conquer it, you’ll live in fear the rest of your life.”

Alli felt paralyzed, completely powerless. It was as if she had once again been stripped of conscious volition.

“And then,” the older woman continued, “whoever did this to you, whoever abused you will have won.” She smiled. “We can’t have that, child, can we?”

“It’s too much,” Alli said, breathless. “I can’t.”

“Can’t, or won’t?” Milla Tamirova surveyed Alli’s pale, sweating face. “In here, you’re in full control. You’re the one who decides whether or not to sit in the chair.”

“I want to leave.”

Milla Tamirova lifted an arm. “Leave, then.” Her smile was rueful. “No one can make you do what you don’t want to do.” Alli was in the doorway when she added, “Without knowing it, you’ve made the memory sacred, you must understand that.”

Alli looked at her without seeing, her eyes watching something that had already happened, someone who was dead now. “The memory is profane.”

“And that is precisely where religion fails us.” Milla Tamirova’s hand seemed to caress the thick arm of the vile chair. “Memory cannot distinguish between the sacred and the profane, because it annihilates time. What was profane in the past memory makes sacred in the present.” The fingers—long, stark, bloodred at their ends— seemed, like memory itself, to have a life of their own. “This is the only possible explanation for why you hold on to your fear, why you cannot let it go.”

“Control,” Alli whispered. “That’s what I want.”

“It’s what we all want, child.” She paused for a moment, then walked toward Alli.

At that precise moment, as if they were two cars heading toward one another, Alli passed by her so closely she could smell Milla Tamirova’s pleasant, earthy scent.

Alli lowered herself into the chair, her arms placed where the older woman’s had been moments before. Her heart beat so hard it was almost painful, and she felt as if she were on fire, as if at any moment she would spontaneously combust. But gradually she became aware that what she felt was a seething energy that coincided or perhaps was the aftermath of the cresting of her terror. She felt the chair beneath her buttocks and thighs, her elbows and wrists. She looked at the restraints and they were just pieces of leather and metal, they weren’t talismans of voodoo or black magic that forced her back into that week of despair and fear. At least for the time being, that memory became manageable instead of overwhelming. Still, she couldn’t look at it for long without feeling blinded or perhaps plunged into a darkness beyond all comprehension.

She got up from the chair because she wanted to, because she could. She still felt her flesh tingling where it had made contact with the wood through her clothes.

“Would you like some tea?” Milla Tamirova asked. Her face held an expression that might have been tenderness or even solace, that Alli couldn’t quite digest. “Or perhaps something stronger to celebrate your small victory.”

“Where’s my father?” Alli said.

“You said you need his protection. From what—or should I say, from whom?”

“Nothing,” Alli said. “I lied because I was afraid you wouldn’t see me otherwise.”

Milla Tamirova frowned. “You were probably right. Not that it matters, I don’t think it would be a good idea for you—”

“I want to see him.”

“I understand.” Milla Tamirova shook her head. “But your father is a very dangerous man, there’s no telling how he’ll react to the news that he has an illegitimate daughter. Better for you to stay away.”

“Okay, you’ve done your duty, consider me warned.”

Milla Tamirova closed the door to the dungeon behind them as they walked out into the hallway. “You just took a first step, that’s all it was. Don’t mistake it for a silver bullet. You have a long, dark journey ahead of you.”

Alli would not meet her penetrating gaze. She wished she understood; she’d rather bite her tongue than admit she didn’t.

“I wish you’d take my advice, even though you don’t like me.”

“That’s not true,” Alli said, “or, at least, it isn’t now.”

“I appreciate your candor.” Once again, the rueful smile played across Milla Tamirova’s lips. “You still won’t take my advice, will you?”

Alli shook her head. “Where is he holed up?”

“Excellent choice of words.” Milla Tamirova swept them both across the living room to the front door. “That would be his brand-new dacha, just outside the city. Here’s the address.” She pulled the door open. “Go to him, then. Perhaps you’ll be in time for the christening.”

9

Why does memory persist, Jack asked himself, long after the details of an event or a person become frayed or indistinct? The core of memory remains like a dream or a stain on a photo that is rapidly growing blank.

Karl Rochev’s dacha, deep in the thick woodlands past the far boundaries of Kiev’s eastern suburbs, blighted with hideous Soviet-era apartment complexes marching to nowhere like the undead, bore the dimensions and hallmarks of an old farmhouse. The wooden frame had been augmented and, in some places, replaced by massive fieldstones, lending it at once a more stolid and more militaristic aspect.

Jack, sitting with Annika and Alli in the car he had rented, could easily imagine the structure the dacha must once have been, because it was eerily similar to his own house. He felt a shiver run through him as the image in memory overlaid the image he stared at now.

The dacha sat at the end of a winding driveway, newly planted with evergreens yet to reach a height sufficient to completely screen the house from the road. It was ablaze with light, every window emitting a cheery butter yellow that held at bay the gloom of the failing afternoon. A cool wind ruffled the feathery tops of the pines, creating a dreamy sound not unlike the surf. Otherwise, the stillness was absolute. Clouds had rolled in with the twilight, obliterating both shadow and birdsong.

Jack rolled the car off the road and into the low overhang of hemlock branches. Rooting around, he found an old toothpick in the glove compartment, which he leaned up against the gearshift. As they got out, he made certain that the vehicle could not be spotted by someone driving by. He had already taken the precaution of switching license plates on the car with one they’d found parked on a suburban side street, so he felt that he’d done all he could to protect them. Then he looked around in all directions. Nothing but close-knit stands of evergreens greeted him. There was not another house in sight, the only vehicle theirs.

As they were about to start down the driveway, Annika said, “This man is dangerous. Maybe we leave the girl with the car.”

“Stop calling me ‘the girl,’” Alli said sharply.

“Stop calling me ‘psycho-bitch,’” Annika responded.

The two women glared at each other for a moment, then Alli turned away and snorted in disgust.

“I’m not leaving Alli alone out here,” Jack said. “She comes with us.”

Annika shrugged, as if to say, It’s her funeral, and they went down the driveway, following Jack, who, as much as possible, kept to the lightless areas nearest the line of six-foot evergreens.

Jack signaled them to halt when they were more or less three-quarters of the way to the dacha. Again, he looked around. Apart from a large black crow high up, guarding his nest, the edge of which Jack could just make out, the view was scarcely different than it had been at the driveway’s head. The sense of isolation or desolation was acute, the atmosphere as far from the bustle of Kiev as you could get, which, Jack supposed, was the point, especially if you planned to use the dacha as a trysting spot.

It wasn’t until they were on the broad veranda that Jack saw that the window on the far left was wide open. He tried the knob of the front door, but found the door locked. Motioning the two women to stay put, he moved along the veranda until he was beside the open window. Deep red curtains rippled like sails, and from inside he heard the sound of a stereo or radio playing Sergey Rachmaninoff’s sumptuous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which conjured up images of Karl Rochev and his new mistress on an oversized bed covered with satin sheets.

For a time, he listened for other sounds: voices, footsteps, the clink of crystal and cutlery, but apart from the silky music, there was nothing. Ducking his head, he climbed over the sill. Inside, he drew the Mauser, the thick curtains still concealing him from whoever might be in the room. The scents of wood smoke and a perfume sweet and sharp came to him. With the Mauser slightly raised, he parted the curtain and like a magician appearing on stage found himself in a living room dominated by the kind of massive stone fireplace one found in old hunting lodges. A fire was crackling along merrily, providing a warm glow. Twin sofas faced each other, a low table between. The room was deserted, as was the adjacent dining room. He checked the rather large kitchen with its simple trestle table around which were grouped four ladder-back chairs. To the left was the back door. No one lurked in the small, windowed pantry on the right. In the entryway, a huge spray of dried flowers, garlanded with pinecones, filled a globular ceramic vase on a narrow wooden side table. He walked to the front door, unlocked and opened it for the two women. Then he headed for the stairs to the second floor.

Putting his back against the wall, he ascended without a sound. The second floor consisted of three rooms and a bath. The first room was set up as an office, the second as a library, wood-paneled, redolent of the two snifters of cognac and a half-smoked Cuban Cohiba in a heavy cut-glass ashtray. Jack stepped into the room, picked up the cigar, and smelled its tip. It had only recently gone out. Back in the hallway, he saw Annika and Alli making their cautious way up the stairs. They looked at him inquiringly and he shook his head, indicated that he was heading toward the third and last room, doubtless the master bedroom suite.

The door was ajar. Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody was nearing its end. While he still had the music for sound cover, he crouched down and opened the door with the barrel of the handgun. It swung open on a room almost as large as the living room, but carpeted and somehow cozy. To one side stood a delicate-looking escritoire on which was a photo of a man past middle age, still handsome in a rough-hewn Russian manner, dressed in a hunting jacket, standing in front of the dacha—Karl Rochev. A sitting area with a love seat faced a pair of windows that overlooked the deep forest and the fall of night. Porcelain lamps in the shape of graceful women were lit on either side of the bed, which was even larger than the one Jack had imagined. Not that it mattered.

The sheets were rucked back like foamy surf to reveal the lower sheet, rumpled and stained, on which lay a woman’s naked body in an angle of repose so relaxed that, apart from the arrow or spear sticking up straight from her left breast, she might have been asleep.

Behind him, Jack heard the women enter the room. The nude girl was very pretty, angelic, even. With her golden hair and blue eyes she might have been Annika’s sister.

“Take Alli out of here,” he said to Annika.

“Too late,” Annika replied. She went into the en suite bathroom and when she returned said, “No one’s in there. Where the hell is Rochev?”

“Maybe he fled after he killed her,” Alli said. And when the others turned to look at her, she added, “Isn’t that what killers do?”

“Assuming the murder was premeditated,” Annika said.

Alli turned ashen, and ran into the bathroom where they heard her retching and vomiting.

“She’s right about one thing, Rochev isn’t here,” Jack said. “The faster we get out of here the better.”

“In a moment.” Annika knelt on the bed.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She was peering at the murder weapon, which had a slender shaft perhaps three feet or a little more in length. “There’s something odd about this thing.”

Jack heard the sound of running water, then Alli appeared, looking whey-faced and red-eyed. He held out a sheltering arm and she came to him, putting her arms around him and hugging him tight. Her face was averted from the mess on the bed and she was trembling violently.

“Can we leave?” she said in a small, lost voice.

“Absolutely,” Jack said. “Annika, what’s odd about that thing, it’s an arrow, right?”

“No,” she said, touching the end. “See here, there’s no fletching.” Then, quite shockingly, she grabbed the shaft in both her hands and, with a grunt, pulled it so violently from the victim’s chest that for a moment the corpse rose up, its white back arched, until Annika could tear the murderous tip from the flesh.

Backing off the bed, Annika brought the weapon over to him and held aloft its business end, steeped in blood and viscera. “You see, the tip is diamond-shaped. Very unusual, very distinctive.”

Alli caught a glimpse of it and began to whimper.

“Let’s go,” Jack said, heading to the bedroom door.

He heard Annika following him down the stairs. In utter silence, they crossed the entryway. The Rachmaninoff was done, and a viscous, choking silence pervaded the dacha. Alli had begun to hyperventilate, and Jack urged her to take slow, deep breaths. He pulled open the door and they stepped out onto the veranda. The gathering wind had brushed away the late-afternoon clouds and now, in the aftermath of sunset, the sky was a deep pellucid blue. He looked up into the evergreen, searching for the vigilant crow, but it was gone from its perch, leaving the nest unprotected.

“Back!” he said. “Back inside the house!”

Floodlights snapped on from the tree line on either side of the driveway, blinding them. Then came the furious shouts, followed by gunfire.

10

“SBU, Annika shouted over the hail of gunfire as they retreated into the dacha. Ukrainian Security Service. “Shoot first, ask questions afterward. This is their method of operation.”

“They were waiting for someone to show up,” Jack said, “and we obliged them.”

Annika slammed the door shut and locked it. Jack was holding on to Alli, shielding her from the possibility of a bullet that might find its way through the wooden door. Handing a reluctant Alli off to Annika, he ran to the hearth. Grabbing fire tongs, he picked a burning log off the fire, brought it back to the entryway, where he kicked over the side table. The ceramic vase crashed to the floor, spilling its contents. The hail of bullets had ceased, but the shouts of the SBU operatives were growing louder as they ventured nearer the veranda. Jack kicked the dried flowers up against the front door, making sure the pinecones were visible.

Jack dropped the burning log onto the highly flammable pile. With a whoosh, the pine pitch in the cones ignited and flames exploded. Almost immediately, the paint started to peel off the door, smoldering, catching fire itself. Soon enough, the wood was starting to burn. Jack ripped the curtains off the nearest window and threw them onto the pyre.

“Annika, your lighter,” he said. “The fluid.”

She nodded, fished in her handbag, and drew out the lighter. Unscrewing a knob on the bottom, she emptied the lighter fluid onto the curtains, then stepped back as the flames roared upward so intensely they began to lick the ceiling. The heat was fierce; paint was peeling and melting everywhere. The side table was afire.

“Let’s go!” he said, grabbing Alli’s hand and, with Annika on his heels, ran through the house. In the darkened kitchen, he said to Annika, “Take Alli into the pantry and open the window. The high hedge will protect you.”

Annika nodded in understanding. “What about you?”

“I’ll follow you,” he said. He gave Alli a smile of encouragement. “Get going. Now!”

He waited, watching through the open pantry door as Annika opened the window and climbed through, then turned back, helping Alli over the sill. Then he went through the drawers until he found a flashlight and a roll of black electrician’s tape. The flashlight was military issue, large and heavy, with a thick waterproof coating. He attached it to the end of a broom handle with a length of the tape. Then he positioned two chairs in front of the door and rested his makeshift contraption on the top slat of the chair backs at a height that he estimated was the one at which he would hold the flashlight if he were coming through the door. He unplugged the toaster, then carefully crept to the door and tied the end of the toaster’s cord to the knob, then unlocked and unlatched the door. He crept back to the flashlight, paying out the cord as he went.

He could hear crashes from the front of the dacha. Either the SBU men were attempting to knock down the fiery front door or trying to gain entrance through the same open window he’d used. Either way, he’d run out of time.

He pulled on the cord attached to the knob. The door opened inward, and as he switched on the flashlight, the beam shot out into the night. Immediately, shots were fired by the men who, as he surmised, were stationed at the rear of the dacha.

He dropped the cord and, scuttling across the kitchen into the pantry, climbed through the open window to the area behind the hedge where Annika and Alli waited, crouched over. Even from behind this screening they could smell the fire and, if they craned their necks, see the lick of flames shooting up into the darkened sky.

Jack led them out through the side of the hedge furthest from the back of the dacha and the men who must already be rushing, guns blazing, through the back door. On this side of the house, there was only a narrow expanse until the tree line rose up, black and solid-seeming as a stone wall. Jack took Alli against his shoulder, ran crouched over across the open space and into the evergreens. Behind him, Annika kept pace.

She was almost into the first pines when a black shape shot across the open space and slammed her to the ground. In the lurid, inconstant light of the growing blaze Jack saw the man claw his way on top of her. He had a handgun out, but Annika batted it away with the edge of one hand. He was bent low over her, panting like a bloodhound. The firelight illuminated his long, lupine face, lips pulled back from teeth clamped tight in his effort to subdue her.

Annika kicked upward, managing to upend his balance for just a moment, but she was unable to overcome his superior weight, and he struck her a hard blow on her cheek. Jack saw droplets of blood, black as tar in the light.

“Stay put,” he whispered to Alli.

Her eyes were wide and staring. “Jack!”

He squeezed her shoulder briefly. “No matter what happens, don’t leave the protection of the trees.”

The SBU goon had drawn his fist back to deliver another heavy blow and Jack was already outside the tree line, moving toward him, when Annika drove the arrow or spear or whatever it was that Karl Rochev had used to murder his mistress deep into the man’s chest. His eyes opened wide in shock and pain, his cocked fist went slack. Then Jack was on him, pulling him off Annika, giving her a hand up.

“Come on,” he urged as she bent over the body. He saw her pocket his pistol and then her hands were busy with another task. “What the hell are you doing?”

She had one shoe on the man’s chest, her hand gripping the shaft of the weapon.

“For God’s sake, leave it!”

“No,” she said. “We have to take it with us.” With a great heave, she ripped the diamond-shaped point out of the flesh and fabric.

Then, regaining the dense shadows of the forest, they were off and running from the burning dacha and its complement of Security Service agents.

It was Jack’s dyslexia that allowed him to lead them unerringly through the maze. As they had walked down the driveway on the way in, his mind had formed a three-dimensional map of the area surrounding the dacha. Their car lay just as they had left it, hidden beneath the screen of intertwined hemlock branches. He motioned them down and they sat on their hams while he listened and looked for anything out of the ordinary. It had been the crow’s absence that had warned him of people in the area. The bird would never have abandoned guarding its nest had it not been scared away by the surreptitious creep of huge creatures on the ground.

Still, he had them hang back while he moved cautiously forward, crouched and tense, his Mauser at the ready. Moving against the car, he pulled open the rear door, stuck the muzzle of the Mauser inside, but there was nothing to see. Climbing in, he stuck it over the driver’s seat back. The car was deserted. Checking the gearshift, he found the toothpick just as he’d left it. He let out a breath. No one had been in the car. Still, he checked the trunk before he signaled Alli and Annika that it was safe to approach.

Gathering Alli to him, he put her into the car. He turned, scanning the woods again as Annika rose and ran toward them. He saw a dim glint in the trees at the same instant a shot spun Annika around. She fell, and Jack, pumping off three shots on the run, grabbed her, hauled her to her feet and, one arm wrapped around her slim waist, brought her back to the car. As he maneuvered her into the backseat he could see the wound, which by its size looked like it had been made by a rifle bullet. He slid behind the wheel as floodlights began to appear through the narrow gaps in the hemlocks and pines.

He turned the ignition, put the car in gear, and sped out onto the road without turning on his headlights. In the rearview mirror he could see figures rapidly receding as he floored the accelerator. Several shots rang out but they either went wide or the car was already out of the range of their guns. He wondered briefly why the sharpshooter who had shot Annika wasn’t firing his rifle. Surely, they were still in his range.

“Alli,” he said as he drove over a rise, “see how badly Annika is hurt.”

Without a word, she climbed over the seat back into the rear, crouching beside Annika, who was lying on the seat.

“It’s her arm,” Alli said.

Jack risked a glance in the mirror. She hadn’t flinched or needed to turn away. Over the rise, he turned on his headlights, looking for a turnoff or a crossroads. The road reared up ahead, devoid of traffic. That wouldn’t last long, he knew. At this moment, the SBU was probably radioing their coordinates. Therefore, it was imperative they get off this road and change directions as soon as possible.

“Annika,” Jack said, “how are you doing?”

“Nothing broken, I think.” Her voice sounded faint or thin, as if she were far from him. “Just a flesh wound.”

“Nevertheless, we’ve got to get the bleeding to stop.”

“I know a doctor,” she said, “back in Kiev.” She gave him the address and the area of the city.

Jack signaled Alli and she scrambled back to the front seat. “The map I got from the rental office is in the glove compartment,” he said.

It took her a few minutes to locate the street Annika had named, then she traced a route in reverse to where they were now. Since she’d been the navigator on the way out of the city, she had no difficulty planning out a route.

“There should be a turnoff somewhere in the next quarter mile,” she said. “A left turn, then straight for three miles. At the light make a left again and we’ll be headed back to the city.”

The Kharkivskyi neighborhood of Kiev lay on the south end of the left bank of the Dnieper River. It was a fairly new neighborhood, harking back only to the 1980s. It was filled with lakes and beaches; because of its sandy soil few trees lined the blocks of modern high-rise buildings. Dr. Sosymenko lived in one of these Western-style apartment complexes, virtually indistinguishable from the neighbors with which it stood shoulder to shoulder.

Sosymenko had a ground-floor apartment, which was lucky since Annika was as bloody as a stuck pig. Alli had ripped a sleeve from her shirt to tie off the arm just above the wound, so now it was barely oozing blood, but the left side of Annika’s clothes was soaked through.

The doctor opened the door to the sound of the bell. His eyes opened wide at the sight of Annika leaning on Jack’s arm. He must have seen her like this before, because after his initial reaction he nodded them in, not wasting time with introductions or asking her what had happened—actually, it was obvious that he was looking at a gunshot wound.

“Let me get her into the surgery,” he said in Russian. He was a small, round man, dapperly dressed in a suit and tie despite the late hour. He had a knot of a nose, ruddy cheeks, and a small mouth almost as red. Apart from a fringe of ginger-colored hair above his ears he was bald. He took Annika across a carpeted living room and into a hallway leading to the rear of the apartment. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he said over his shoulder. “You understand?”

“I speak Russian,” Jack said.

“Good. There’s food and drink in the kitchen. Please feel free to help yourselves.”

With that, he disappeared with Annika through the door to the surgery, which he closed behind them.

Jack turned to Alli. “Are you okay?”

“I could use a drink.”

“What, exactly?” Jack said, heading for the kitchen, which was through an arched doorway off the living room.

“I don’t care, vodka, anything,” Alli said.

She went off to the bathroom to clean herself up, and when she returned, he had two glasses of iced vodka on the coffee table beside the worn brown tweed sofa in the living room. Shelves on two walls were filled with groups of thick textbooks interspersed with a wide variety of antique clocks, porcelain vases, and copper teakettles. There were paintings on the wall, portraits of an imperious-looking woman who might have been the doctor’s late wife, and a young man who was either his son or possibly himself at an earlier age. The heavy curtains were closed against the night and the heat was at sauna level. Jack took off his coat, already sweating, and Alli plopped herself down on the sofa.

“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked as he watched her sip the liquor.

“First things first,” she said in her best hard-boiled voice.

He came across the carpet, crouched down in front of her, and set her glass on the table. “How are you?”

Her eyes searched his face.

“Doesn’t matter, really.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugged, took a long pull of her vodka, made a face. “God, this is awful, why do they drink this stuff?”

“To take away the pain.”

She turned her head for a moment, as if remembering something important. “‘I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man’s.’” She recited the lines from a William Blake poem that was Emma’s favorite. “‘I will not reason and compare; my business is to create.’ When I say that, I know she’s still here with us, that for some reason she hasn’t left both of us. Why is that, Jack? Is it because we still have something to learn from her or that she has something to learn from us?”

“Maybe it’s both,” he said.

“Have you seen or heard her? You promised you’d tell me if you had.”

Jack bit his lip, recalling the sound of his daughter’s voice in his head when he was falling into unconsciousness.

Alli, growing anxious at his hesitation, said, “You have, haven’t you? Why don’t you want to tell me?”

Jack took a long swig of the vodka, feeling the liquid fire all the way down to his stomach, where it began to burn like a furnace. “It’s part of the reason Annika’s here with us. Two people were trying to kill her. I intervened and was almost knocked out.” He wasn’t going to tell her that he’d shot Ivan to death. “I heard Emma then, she was calling to me. I felt so close to her, closer than I’d ever been.” He took a ragged breath. “I think I was close to dying. Her voice led me back.” To that blood-spattered alley behind Bushfire, but he didn’t finish the thought.

“Oh, Jack! So she is here with us.”

“Yes, but in some way I can’t pretend to understand.”

She let out a long sigh. “She’s looking out for us, protecting us.”

The vodka fumes were rising up into his esophagus. “I don’t think it’s wise to count on that.”

Alli shook her head as if shaking off his words. “I told you once that growing up I felt like I was in a cage—so many rules and regulations, so many things I, as a fast-rising politician’s daughter, was forbidden to do. All I could do was look longingly through the bars and try to imagine what the real world might be like. And then you came along and I began to see what it was, I began to understand that quote from Blake and why it was Emma’s favorite.”

The door at the end of the hall was opening. Annika emerged with Dr. Sosymenko.

“Jack,” Alli said with some urgency because their time alone was coming to an end, “I like it here, outside the cage.”

“Even when you’re puking your guts up?”

She nodded. “Or when I’m crouched in a forest or tying a tourniquet around what’s-her-name’s arm. Especially then, because I can breathe without feeling a pain in my chest. I know I’m alive.”

Jack, noting that it was the first time she’d referred to Annika as anything other than “the psycho-bitch,” rose to welcome Annika back and to thank Dr. Sosymenko. One step at a time, he thought.

“The wound was clean,” the doctor said as soon as he and his patient entered the living room, “and because of the tourniquet the loss of blood was acceptable. I’ve cleaned everything, bandaged the wound, and given Annika a shot of antibiotics. She also has some painkillers and a vial of antibiotic tablets she needs to take twice a day for the next ten days, not a day less.” He turned to Annika, whose left arm was in a sling. “You understand me?”

She nodded, smiled, and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

He clucked his tongue and, addressing Jack, said, “Please take care of her; she does such a poor job of it herself.”

“I’ll do my best,” Jack said.

“All right then.” Dr. Sosymenko rubbed his hands together briskly.

Annika adjusted her arm in the sling. “There’s one other thing.”

Dr. Sosymenko produced a wistful smile and said to Jack, “With my dear Annika there is always one more thing. She’s like that American detective, what’s his name, Columbo. That detective makes me laugh—and he’s so clever!”

Annika, unperturbed, said, “I wonder if you’d mind giving us the name and address of your antiques dealer.”

“Not at all.” The doctor went into the kitchen and rummaged through several drawers, returning with a small notepad. “Are you thinking of becoming a collector of teapots?”

“I found what might be an old Russian weapon. I’d like it identified.”

He nodded. “A weapon, of course, what else would appeal to you, my dear?” He chuckled. “In that event you want Bogdan Boyer, a Turk, but his first language is English, which makes things easier. He’s a specialist in many things, weapons included.” He neatly wrote several lines on the pad with a ballpoint pen. Tearing off the top sheet, he handed it to Annika.

Annika thanked him as she folded away the slip of paper.

“He opens at ten A.M., not a moment before. Tell him you’re friends of mine and he won’t try to overcharge you.”

Annika seemed shocked. “You associate with a dealer who’s dishonest?”

“Bogdan isn’t dishonest,” Dr. Sosymenko corrected punctiliously. “He overcharges when he thinks he can get away with it. That’s being a businessman.”

The apartment to which Igor had provided the key was in the Vinohrader, an older district, but because of its beautiful park, it had a softer and therefore more welcoming atmosphere than many of the newer districts. The apartment itself had the advantage of being high up, and the windows in the living room overlooked the park. The rooms were not large, but they were adequate for the trio’s needs, which at the moment consisted largely of showering and sleeping.

The floorboards creaked beneath his feet, not eerily, as if he were in a haunted house, but in a comforting way, the sound of a fire in a grate, cozily cracking through burning logs. This apartment, furnished comfortably, painted in warm shades of biscuit and toast, felt lived in by a benign presence, as if it belonged to Dyadya Gourdjiev. There were drawings on the wall of sinuous nudes and young faces incongruously filled with wisdom, and a depiction of a Tibetan mandala over one end of a sofa, which stood against the wall opposite the windows. Thick curtains hung to either side of the windows, which were concealed by blinds, directing the street light upward onto the plaster ceiling with its molding of twined acanthus leaves. There didn’t seem to be a speck of dust anywhere.

By mutual consent, Alli went into the bathroom first. She had just stepped out of the shower, winding a towel around her small body, wondering dispiritedly if she’d ever look any older than she did now, when Annika walked in.

“I hope I’m not intruding,” Annika said.

Alli turned away to wipe the condensation off the mirror over the sink. “Too late for that.”

“I feel like I have fifty layers of sweat, dirt, and blood on me. I’m dying for a shower, but Dr. Sosymenko said I can’t get the dressing wet.”

“Why don’t you ask Jack? I’m sure you’d love to get him in the shower with you.”

Annika closed the door behind her. “I was wondering if you would help me.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Alli. You.” Annika kicked off her shoes and started to fumble behind her, trying to find the zipper on her ruined dress. “But first I have to get undressed, which I see is damnably difficult with one hand.” She turned around.

Making sure her towel was tucked in tight, Alli unzipped the dress and helped Annika off with it. They had to maneuver the sling off before it was possible, and Alli saw the tears spring into Annika’s eyes.

“Are you all right?”

Annika nodded, but a flash of pain had compressed her lips into a thin line.

Alli reached into the shower, turned on the water, then unhooked the other woman’s bra. Annika stepped out of her thong and, leaning against the sink, rolled down her ripped and filthy stockings.

She stepped awkwardly over the tub rim while extending her left arm outside the shower curtain. Alli ripped the other sleeve off her ruined shirt, wrapped it around the bandage to help keep it perfectly dry.

Alli tilted the mirror until Annika’s reflection appeared, the side of her neck slick and shining, trisected wisps of hair plastered to the porcelain skin. There was something intensely intimate about watching someone soaping their naked body, possibly because they were unaware of your presence, their expression at once relaxed and engrossed, as if in meditation. Even the most well-armored personality seemed vulnerable to scrutiny. The tip of Annika’s tongue appeared between her lips, moving slightly as she concentrated on soaping herself with one hand while not slipping.

“So what’s your story?” Annika asked so suddenly that Alli startled, as if she’d been caught smoking in bed.

“I don’t have a story.”

It was an automatic defense that Annika saw through at once. “Bullshit, everyone has a story. Why do you look seven years younger than you are?”

“Graves’ disease,” Alli said, thinking she’d gotten off easy. “It screws around with growth and development.”

“So you’ll be stuck looking fifteen all your life?”

Alli was startled again because the question echoed her own thought. “Hell, no. At least I hope not.”

“Why not? I think it would be kind of cool. Everyone’s aging around you.” She laughed. “Just think, when your daughter is fifteen everyone will think you’re twins.”

For some reason, Alli didn’t think that was funny, and said so quite emphatically.

“So now we’re back to my original question: What’s your story?” Annika turned slightly, putting a further strain on the arm Alli was keeping dry. “It sure as hell isn’t your Graves’ disease, you got over that years ago.”

“How would you know that?”

“You talked about it without hesitation. But there’s something else, isn’t there? A kind of shadow hanging over you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Alli saw Annika’s reflection shrug.

“It’s always possible, but I doubt it.” She tried to rotate her arm. “Hey, you know, I can’t wash my back.”

Alli cursed, unwound her towel and, drawing aside the curtain, put one foot into the shower. She took the soap Annika offered and used quick, circular motions to lather her back. Annika moved the shower-head up a bit and bent her head forward so some of the spray reached her back. There were a series of vertical scars down her back.

“What’re these?” Alli asked.

“Just what they look like,” was Annika’s laconic answer.

“You’re done.” Alli put the soap back in its dish and, maintaining the angle of Annika’s left arm, stepped out onto the tiles.

A moment later, Annika turned the shower off. The silence in the small room seemed deafening. Alli let go and Annika stepped out. Wow, she is smokin’ hot, Alli thought a moment before she handed the other woman a towel.

As Alli rewrapped herself, Annika said, “You have a beautiful body.”

“I don’t.”

“Who told you that?”

“I only have to look in the mirror.”

“Tell me, have you ever been with a boy?”

“Been with? You mean in the biblical sense? You mean have I been fucked.” Alli shook her head. “Christ, no.”

“Why Christ? What does Christ have to do with it?”

“It’s just an expression.”

Annika shook her head. “Americans and their religion.” She began to dry her hair. “You know, with your hair short you remind me of Natalie Portman.”

Alli scrutinized herself in the mirror. “Come on, what bullshit.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“I can think of several reasons.”

“All of them leading to Jack, I suppose.”

Alli couldn’t help laughing, and then Annika was laughing, too. She saw that Annika was having difficulty drying her back. Without being asked she took part of the other woman’s towel and began to soak up the droplets of water.

“Don’t worry, they don’t hurt anymore.”

Nevertheless, Alli continued carefully patting dry Annika’s back. The scars set her thinking about cruelty, pain, dissolution, loss, and, inevitably, death. “I had a friend.” The words came out almost before she realized it. “Emma. She was Jack’s daughter. We were best friends at college. She was killed late last year. She drove her car into a tree.”

“That’s terrible. You weren’t with her?”

Alli shook her head. “I would have been killed, too.” She took a breath. “Or maybe if I’d been there I could’ve saved her.”

Annika turned around to face her. “So that’s it. You have survivor’s guilt.”

“I don’t know what the fuck I have,” Alli said in despair.

“Two days shy of my seventeenth birthday I was out partying with my boyfriend and my best friend. I drove us from party to party, we got drunker and drunker. And then on the way out to the car to go to yet another party I’d suddenly had enough. To this day, I don’t know what happened, it was like a switch had been thrown, as if I was seeing us from another perspective, as if I was floating above myself, dispassionately observing. All at once, I realized how stupid it all was, the partying, the drunkenness, vomiting and then drinking again. What was it all for? So I called it a night. My boyfriend agreed, no doubt because he didn’t want to miss an opportunity to climb all over me, but my best friend—Yuriy—he was always up for more, always, a real party animal, that’s the right phrase, yes?”

Alli felt a terrible foreboding in the pit of her stomach, a dreadful upwelling of dark and dangerous thoughts that contained the poisonous seeds of suicide. “Yes.”

“I had the only car, so Yuriy said he’d walk to the next party. I begged him not to but he insisted—it wasn’t far and, anyway, he said, the night air would sober him up enough to enjoy getting drunk all over again.”

Annika stood in front of the mirror as Alli had done moments before. “That was the last time I saw Yuriy alive. He was hit by a truck running at high speed. They said he was thrown twenty feet in the air. You can imagine what was left of him when he landed.” She shook her head. “What would have happened, I have asked myself endlessly, if I hadn’t gone back home, if I’d driven us to the next party? Wouldn’t Yuriy still be alive?”

“Or your car could have been struck by the truck and all of you killed.”

Annika stared hard at herself in the mirror. Then she nodded. When she turned around she saw that Alli was weeping openly, uncontrollably. After a time Alli regained her composure. When she moved to unwrap her shirt sleeve from around the bandage Annika stopped her.

“Don’t,” she said. “I want to wear it.”

11

Why are emotions—some of them, the deepest, most important ones—inarticulate or muddy, as if filtered through a fishing net or a sieve? This was the question that Jack asked himself as he sat on the lid of the toilet and, while the shower was running, punched in Sharon’s cell number. Midnight in Kiev, which meant it was five P.M. back home in D.C. No answer, which could mean anything, including her looking at his number coming up on her screen and deciding not to answer. That would be like Sharon, the Sharon that once was, the Sharon who over the past weeks had started to reemerge.

He tried the home number with the same result, didn’t leave a message. What was there to say? Already the sense of her was fading, as if she were made of celluloid exposed to sunlight. Emma, dead for five months, was clearer to him, so clear, in fact, they seemed to be on either side of a thin pane of glass, transparent but unbreakable.

He turned the phone off, put it on the edge of the sink, and stepped into the shower. He almost groaned aloud. The hot water felt so good on his aching muscles, the soap sluicing off the layers of sweat and grime. There was blood, dark as ink, under his fingernails. Prying out each crescent was like reliving each incident that had happened to him since leaving his hotel in Moscow on his crazy, quixotic mission to save Annika. Since then, he’d been nearly killed, had shot two men, come close to being picked up by the police, found a naked girl murdered in a truly bizarre fashion, been saved by a crow, and narrowly escaped from an SBU stakeout.

He put his face up to the spray, feeling the soft battering like a masseuse’s hands. There were a growing number of questions to be answered, such as why were the SBU on stakeout at Karl Rochev’s dacha? Had they already been inside and seen the murdered woman? Probably not, otherwise the house would have been crawling with crime scene investigators. So why were they there? Who were they waiting for? Rochev, a confederate, or, chillingly, Jack and Annika? But, if so, how had they known they’d be coming there—the only other person who knew where they were going was Dyadya Gourdjiev. It seemed absurd to suspect him; nevertheless, Jack filed the possibility away. And then there was the mystery of the SBU sharpshooter who had winged Annika: Why hadn’t he shot at them as they were driving away?

It wasn’t any one of these questions that nagged at him, but all of them, and all the while his unique brain was working on the whole picture as if it were a Rubik’s Cube, moving incidents around in order to see them in three dimensions and thus find their proper place in the puzzle he’d been presented.

He turned off the water. Pulling back the curtain, he reached for a towel and saw Emma sitting in the precise same spot where he had sat moments before, trying to call Sharon. Jack pulled the towel around him as if his daughter were still alive.

“Hi, Dad.” Emma’s voice was soft, almost like the sound the spray of water made shooting out of the showerhead. “Mom’s not home.”

“Emma.” He felt his knees weaken and he lowered himself onto the edge of the tub. “Emma, is it you or are you in my head?” Was this image of Emma merely a manifestation, a more concrete expression of that thought?

Emma, or the image of Emma, crossed one leg over the other. “You’re in a dark place, Dad, so dark I can’t see. I don’t know whether I can help you here.”

“That’s all right, honey.” Tears glittered in Jack’s eyes. “That’s not your job. It’s time for you to rest.”

“I’ll rest” Emma said, “when I’m dead”.

There was a knock on the door, shifting his attention.

“Jack, I have to pee,” Alli said from the other side of the door.

He stood up. “I’ll be right out.” But when he looked at where his daughter had been sitting a moment before, she was gone like a will-o’-the-wisp.

He and Annika hadn’t discussed their sleeping arrangements, but crossing the living room he saw no linens or pillows piled on one end of the sofa, so he pushed open the door to the larger of the two bedrooms, which was already half open like a question or an invitation. The room was roughly a square, with windows on two walls, both covered with old-fashioned Venetian blinds. Street light shone through the slats, painting tiers of parallel bars across one upholstered chair, across a faded hook rug, up one side of the bed and across approximately a third of it. The overhead light was off, but one lamp threw a scimitar of light on the empty side of the bed, which was actually two double beds pushed together.

The bedspread and blanket had been rucked back to the foot of the bed. Annika lay beneath the top sheet, turned away from him. She hadn’t bothered redoing her hair, which as a consequence lay rather wildly along one cheek, snaking down her neck to cover one shoulder and the shallow indentation between her scapulae. Her injured arm lay on her hip outside the sheet. He couldn’t be sure in the dimness but it looked like it was still wrapped with Alli’s shirt.

Jack unwound the towel, found some of his new clothes, put on a T-shirt and underpants. The moment he sat on the bed he was overcome with exhaustion. Every muscle in his body, it seemed, was crying out for rest. He climbed under the covers gingerly so as not to wake Annika and, switching off the lamp, put his head on the pillow. The bars of street light seeping through the blind were thrown into prominence, looking like a staircase or a bridge to Emma’s world, whatever or wherever that might be.

Slowly he stilled his breathing, but as sometimes happens when one is exhausted, sleep did not immediately come. While his body longed for surcease his brain was on fire problem-solving. He knew from experience not to interfere with this fiendish engine when it was on a roll.

Annika stirred. “Jack?”

“Sorry I woke you,” he said softly.

“You sighed.”

“I did?”

“Yes, you did,” she said. “Why did you sigh?”

“I don’t know.”

She turned onto her back and he saw her face, freshly washed without a scrap of makeup, illuminated only by the bars of light, and it struck him how utterly desirable she was. She was also beautiful, but that he had seen the first time they’d met at the hotel bar. But what was beauty? Large eyes, full, half-parted lips to be ensnared by, deep cleavage and powerful thighs to catch the breath, but all of these were surface considerations, delicate and ephemeral enough to be invalidated by a nasty comment, a violent temper, or a lack of understanding. Desirability took into account all those things, and more.

“Did you take your antibiotic?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How’s your arm?”

“It hurts.”

“Time for one of Dr. Sosymenko’s magic pills.”

She tossed her head. “I don’t want a painkiller.”

Jack reached for the twist of paper that held the pills. “Stop being a stoic.”

“That’s not it. I don’t want my mind impaired.” She stared up at the ceiling.

They lay side by side for some time steeped in a silence that seemed to crackle with silent electricity or a confused magnetism to which he was both attracted and repelled. But perhaps repelled was the wrong word. What was it called when you wanted something you knew or at least suspected was forbidden? It wasn’t just Sharon he was thinking of, because even without Emma’s doom-laden pronouncement the ship that had been carrying them back to land had hit a violent squall where all hands were in the process of becoming lost. It was also that Annika was a member of an undercover unit of the Russian Federal Police—or had been, at any rate. You could call her a spy without fear of contradiction. Not for the first time since Emma’s death, since his marriage had fallen apart, since, especially, Emma had appeared to him, he wondered whether he’d become unhinged, whether he was in the grip of some long-form mental illness in which he was slowly spiraling down toward insanity. How else to explain the situation he now found himself—and Alli!—in? But deep down he also knew that his inability to help his daughter when she needed him the most would color everything he did for the rest of his life. Saving Alli from Morgan Herr had been an attempt to atone for his mortal sin; so, too, his compulsion to save Annika from Ivan and Milan.

“What are you thinking?”

Annika had drawn closer while he’d been plunged into his black thoughts. Her scent was like the beach, slightly salty, redolent of freshly washed dark places. Her heat made the hair on his arms stand on end.

He hesitated only moments. “To be honest, I was thinking about my daughter.”

“Emma, yes, Alli told me. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Those words, so often repeated by cops all over the world in whatever language, including himself, took on an altogether different aspect when Annika spoke them because there was genuine emotion behind them.

“Thanks.”

“Alli seems to miss her almost as much as you do.”

“They were very close,” Jack said. “In fact, at school they were everything to one another.”

“What a tragedy.” It was unclear from her tone whether she was talking about the two friends or about herself. Possibly it was both, coming together at the junction of present life and memory. “Jack, let me ask you a question. What if you see a truth no one around you sees? What if everyone, including teachers, friends—former friends!—think you’re a liar and a freak?”

“I think that’s what happened to Emma,” Jack said. “I know it happened to me.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I’m ashamed to say that was another thing about her I don’t know.”

“Don’t be ashamed. You loved your daughter, there’s nothing more important, is there?”

“No, I don’t believe there is.”

He heard a rustle of the bedsheets, then felt her hand take his. It was cool and slim and dry, and yet it created an electric shock that ran all the way through him.

“Did you feel that?” she whispered. “I felt it.”

He turned his head to find that she was looking at him.

“I can’t see the color of your eyes,” he said. “It’s an amber that glows as if with a light inside it.”

She moved her head off her pillow and onto his. “Better?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me more about Emma.”

Jack thought a moment, considered whether he should answer such an intimate question. “She loved music,” he said at length, “blues and rock. And she loved the philosopher-poets like Blake.”

Annika looked at him questioningly. “And?”

“My knowledge of her only goes so far.”

“All this is in your memory.” Annika said this with a curious intensity. “You remember her.”

“Yes, but more as a dream, really, the way you dream when you’re at war, to take yourself away from painful reality.”

“Yes, a war,” she said, as if she understood him completely. “In war you do what you have to do.” But her voice carried a note of insincerity or self-delusion, as if this were a sentence she told herself over and over until, for her, it became the truth. Then, unaccountably, her voice softened. “Nothing is ever what it was, do you recognize this? Every moment immediately dissolves into the next one, seconds and minutes are diluted until your past becomes what you want it to be, as if memory and dreams become so intertwined you can’t tell them apart.”

“The terrible moments become less so as the present dissolves the past into memory.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly.” She moved even closer to him, her smooth, aromatic skin brushing against his. “This is how we survive. The terror dissolves like dreams when we wake up and go about our daily routine.”

“I wish Alli felt that way, but I know she doesn’t.”

Another silence consumed them. Apart from the hiss of an occasional vehicle passing by outside, there were no street sounds, not even a dog’s querulous bark.

After a time, she sighed. “I’m tired.”

“Go to sleep, Annika.”

“Put your hand on me. I want to feel you, I want to be connected …”

Reaching out, he cupped his hand over the tender ridge of her hip, soft as silk. She stirred languorously, and his hand slid to the top of her thigh, hard-muscled and powerful. He could feel his heart beating slowly. It felt good to be near her, their warmth mingling. The soughing of her breath came to him like wind in the trees or distant birds calling to one another.

“There’s no time for us now,” she whispered, but she might already have been asleep.

12

“It’s called a sulitsa or, less commonly, dzheridom,” Bogdan Boyer said. He was the antiques dealer Dr. Sosymenko had recommended. His shop was in Gorodetskogo, near the Maidan Metro stop, though they had driven from the apartment, after dying Alli’s hair dirty blond and wolfing down a hasty breakfast, because it wasn’t conveniently located near the Metro.

Boyer, a small man with the pinched, avid face and busy hands of an inveterate collector, turned the murder weapon over and over under a large magnifying glass with an illuminated fluorescent ring. He sat scrunched on a high stool, much as Bob Cratchit must have sat hunched over his ink-stained desk in his dismal little cell, as Charles Dickens described his tanklike workspace.

“The sulitsa is one of what’s known collectively as splitting weapons, because—see here, how the point is diamond-shaped, beautifully functional—they were forged to pierce armor,” Boyer said, warming to the task Annika had given him.

“This is a missile spear, though it was also used for close-to stabbing, hence it’s nickname, ‘the lunger.’ Weapons like this one and the much larger boar-spear, which had a spade-shaped point, were used by Russian soldiers as far back as 1378 in a fierce battle in Ryazansk along the Vozhe. The Russian Cossacks, the mounted regiments, used these splitting weapons to defeat the invading Tatar army.”

He looked up at Annika. “It’s interesting, but I can’t give you much for it. Apart from a collector here or there and possibly a museum, there’s no market for these things. Besides, it’s incomplete.”

“Incomplete?” Jack said. He was keeping an eye on Alli, who was rummaging through the bowels of the overcrowded, overheated shop. “What do you mean?”

“Typically, sulitsa came in threes, packed in an elaeagnus, a small cured leather quiver that sat against the left hip.” He shook his head. “Without its brothers—or sisters—” He grinned at Annika “—it’s worth next to nothing.”

“I’m not interested in selling it,” Annika said. “I want to know who its owner is.”

Boyer frowned. “That might be difficult.”

He picked up his phone and made several calls. While he did so, Jack went to find Alli, who had disappeared behind a glass case filled with copper teapots and kettles. He found her examining a sheet of paper—no computer printouts here. The sheet was a written list of shipments that had either gone out over the past several days or were about to be packed and shipped. Beside each item was a name. She pointed wordlessly to the name “M. Magnussen,” and his address written just below an item labeled, “Three sulitsa (a set) in original elaeagnus, ca. 1885, prov. J. Lach.” FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY was noted in red.

Seeing that he was having difficulty reading the list, Alli beckoned him to bend down so that she could whisper the notation as well as the name and address of the intended recipient in his ear.

Jack had her put the paper back where she’d found it, then he took her hand and led her back to the front of the store.

Boyer was just putting down the receiver. He smiled insincerely. “I’m afraid I’ve had no luck.”

“No matter,” Jack said. “Thank you for your time.” He took the murder weapon and turned to Annika. “In any event, we’re late for your appointment. Dr. Sosymenko has to change your dressing.”

Annika played along smoothly, though she must have been as taken by surprise as was Boyer. “Oh, yes, I got so engrossed here I forgot all about it. Come along, darling,” she said and, taking Alli’s hand, walked out the door with Jack right behind her.

“What was that all about?” she said when they were out on the street.

“In the car,” Jack said. “Now!”

He flipped Annika the keys and she slid behind the wheel while he got in beside her and Alli climbed into the backseat.

As she started up and pulled out into traffic, she said, “Do we have a destination or should I drive in circles for a while?”

“Drive in circles,” Jack said, staring intently at the off-side mirror.

“That was a joke, Jack.”

“I know, but I want to make sure we’re not being followed.”

“Okay,” she said, turning right at the first stoplight, “I give up.”

“Alli found a bill of lading in the back of the shop for a set of those sulitsa complete in their quiver about to be delivered to a client by the name of M. Magnussen.”

Annika nodded. “Which means Boyer was lying to us.”

“So who the hell was he calling?” Jack said.

“The SBU or the cops?” Annika ventured.

“Or maybe this Magnussen, who asked him to be on the lookout for anyone coming around with a spare lung sticker.”

“You’re thinking he’s the killer,” Alli said, hunched forward, her face between them.

“That’s right, you heard Boyer, a single sulitsa is worthless. Magnussen ordered a new set of sulitsa because he used one from his original set to kill Rochev’s mistress.”

“But why would anyone use one of those things to commit murder?” Alli asked.

“D’you think the police would know what they’re looking at?” Annika made another right. “It would simply confuse them.”

“Except,” Jack said, “if someone else other than the police found the body. Someone smart enough—”

“—or interested enough,” Annika cut in.

“Yes,” Jack continued, “to pursue the investigation.”

“Which is why,” Alli said, “he gave Boyer instructions to call him if anyone came in inquiring about it.”

“By the way,” Jack interrupted, “see that dark sedan two cars back? We are being followed.”

Annika proved herself as adept as Jack at flushing tails and getting rid of them, which was, he thought, one advantage of her being trained by the FSB. On the other hand, he couldn’t bring to mind another.

She spent the next ten minutes lulling them into thinking they hadn’t been made before she tore through a red light, leaving an angry chorus of blaring horns and squealing brakes. She made a right, then an almost immediate left, rolling down an alleyway so narrow the brick walls sheared off their side mirrors. A third of the way along, she turned off the engine, and they sat waiting. Forty seconds later the black sedan sped by the alleyway, and Annika immediately fired up the ignition, and they rolled to the far end of the alley, where she turned left.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Jack gave her the address. “The collector’s named M. Magnussen.”

“Doesn’t sound Ukrainian,” Alli said.

“Or Russian, for that matter,” Annika added, as she navigated through Kiev’s crowded streets.

“Whatever his nationality,” Jack said, “there seems to be a clear line back to my starting point. Senator Berns is killed by a hit-and-run on Capri after having flown from here. The last person he met with was Karl Rochev, whose mistress has been murdered in bizarre fashion with an antique Cossack weapon, and Rochev himself is nowhere to be found. Now it seems clear that the murder weapon belonged to this M. Magnussen.”

“Whoever he is,” Alli said.

Whoever Magnussen was, he was wealthy. He lived outside the city, in one of the areas so high-priced that not a high-rise or even a block of cement was to be seen. Instead, rolling farmland not unlike that of rural Virginia protected his domicile from the ravages of the modern-day city. The driveway to his estate was a half mile long, snaking through dense stands of pine forest that would have completely obscured the house from the road even if it were only a hundred yards from it. The structure, which stood on a shallow knoll, was modeled after an English manor house with two wings attached to either end of a long central section that faced the visitor with both the square shoulders of a soldier and the chilly contempt of a high-court magistrate.

“This place looks like any minute Keira Knightley is going to draw up to it in a gilded horse-drawn carriage,” Alli said.

She wasn’t far off the mark, Jack thought. The place was fit for a nineteenth-century baron or viscount, but a dead one. The place was lightless and, as they soon discovered, locked up tighter than a duck’s behind.

“Not making sense,” Alli said.

Which was also true, Jack thought, unless Magnussen, having gotten the warning call from Boyer, packed up and flew the coop in the hour or so it had taken them to drive out here. It would have taken them far less time if they hadn’t been slowed down by the dark-colored sedan tailing them. And then, of course, he understood.

“Magnussen’s gone,” he said. “The purpose of the tail was not to see where we were going, but to slow us down. Boyer must have gone to the back of his shop the moment we left and seen the bill of lading out of place.”

“Nevertheless,” Annika said, “it couldn’t hurt to take a look around the grounds.”

They set off in a more or less northeasterly direction, making a full circle of the property. The dull, clammy morning had been swept away by a freshening wind out of the west, but high up the remnants of the morning’s clouds drifted across the sun. They came first to an apple orchard, the orderly rows of gnarled trees looking abandoned and forlorn. Next came a fenced-in section that in the summer would be bursting with rows of pole beans, cabbage, cucumbers, and lettuce, but now lay fallow.

By this time they were behind the manor house, approximately at a forty-five degree angle to its right-hand wing, moving in a counterclockwise direction. Coming over a rise they spotted a finger of water that turned out to be a small lake or perhaps a large pond, it was difficult to tell from their present position. But what surprised them was a small family cemetery set in the adjoining lowland planted with mature weeping willows, which so craved water. Here were the headstones of perhaps four or five members, Magnussen’s forebears all, from what Jack could glean as he scanned them. The letters M and S were for some reason the easiest for his brain to interpret immediately.

“Father, mother—and a brother, I think,” Alli said as she came up beside him. “Each stone has the places they died, along with the dates.” She squinted through the watery sunlight. “The father was ten years older, but curiously, though they both died during the same week it wasn’t in the same place.

“Who’s the smart one?” Alli said. “Daddy could have made the money.”

At that moment, they heard Annika calling them. They turned, saw her standing on the opposite rise, waving them on. Jack, wondering what she’d found, strode up the gentle incline, Alli scrambling after him.

“Look.” Annika pointed to their left, as soon they gained the modest crest.

Now Jack could confirm what he’d suspected, that Magnussen, spending like a drunken sailor, had had the pond or lake built, because on a spit of land that perfectly bisected the body of limpid water was a stone pergola, a folly in the classic Roman style. But the pergola, per se, wasn’t what had caught Annika’s attention; rather it was a seated figure drenched in the shadows beneath the pergola’s dome. From their viewpoint they could see that the figure, bent slightly forward, forearms on knees, had the aspect of a person deep in contemplation.

They descended the far side of the rise, walked on the damp, mossy ground around the skeletal willows whose branches arched overhead in a tangle of rheumatic fingers. Skirting the edge of the lake they walked out onto the small peninsula. From this angle it was impossible to tell anything about the figure other than it was male.

“Magnussen?” Jack called out. But if Magnussen had flown the coop as Jack had surmised this man wouldn’t respond to that name. He didn’t, remaining in the same position, plunged deep in thought.

They approached ever more cautiously until Jack, his spine tingling, moved around in front of the figure. He looked hard at the man for a moment, then very quietly said, “Alli, stay where you are, please.”

Her curiosity piqued, she felt the urge to take a step forward, but something in Jack’s voice stayed her. “Why? What’s going on?”

By this time Annika had joined Jack in front of the figure, whose eyes were fixed on the horizon. The man was sitting on a gaily painted wooden Adirondack-style chair. It was difficult to see at first for all the blood and the gaping hole in his chest, but the top of each thigh where it creased with his abdomen was punctured by a sulitsa— seemingly identical to the one that had killed the young woman— which some force, terrible in its rage, had driven all the way through muscle and fat so that the points had buried themselves in the wood beneath, pinning the victim in place.

“It’s the man in the photo at the dacha,” Annika said. “This is Karl Rochev.”

Jack knelt in front of yet another example of man’s barbarity. “Which means that our prime suspect in his mistress’s murder has himself become a murder victim.”

“Not that it matters, we’re at a dead end.” Annika sighed. “This murder tells us very little.”

“On the contrary,” Jack said, rising to his feet. “It’s proof that Senator Berns’s death wasn’t accidental. He was murdered because of something Rochev told him, something the senator was about to tell someone else.” He reached out to touch one of the shafts, then thought better of it, stuffed his hands in his pockets instead. “This leak is being sealed one hole at a time.”

Part 2

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war,

death after life does greatly please.

—EDMUND SPENSER, 1590

13

Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko used one thin, reddened hand to shake out a cigarette and put it to his mouth. He slid open the slender box of wooden matches he always carried and lit the match. For an instant the sharp scent of sulfur sucked the oxygen out of his nostrils, causing a little gasp, an involuntary exhalation. Slowly and deliberately, as he did all things large and small, he put the flame to the tip of the cigarette, then took a deep pull on the harsh, black Turkish tobacco and held the smoke in his lungs until his mind ceased its hurrying. A hurrying mind was a disorganized mind, and a disorganized mind made mistakes. Ever since he had become a homicide detective in the FSB, that had been his philosophy; it was so simple, so succinct, so true that in his twenty-odd years running down murderers and serial rapists he’d never had cause to change it even one iota. This was precisely the sort of man Kirilenko was: practical, stolid—his few detractors accused him of being plodding, dull, even pedantic. On the other hand, his benefactors understood that this persona—bland and gray as the federal building in which they all toiled—was a carefully constructed facade. They saw him as being smart enough to follow orders to the letter, possessed of a quiet rectitude that ruffled no feathers and that allowed him to run his investigations as he saw fit. Everyone knew him as relentless; once he sank his teeth into an investigation he never let go until he’d reached a satisfactory conclusion, which meant a conviction of the perpetrator, or his death, whichever came first. That was about the only thing Kirilenko wasn’t fussy about. Incarceration or death, it was all the same to him because these death-wielding perps infuriated him. He looked on them as something other—other than human, less than human, a subspecies inferior even to animals.

Having gotten what he needed from it, Kirilenko blew out the Turkish smoke in a rush, then inhaled slowly and deeply. Behind him he could hear the small, familiar sounds of his men sifting through the charred remains of Karl Rochev’s dacha, but he paid them as much mind as he would the noises coming from the seats around him in a sports stadium, inconsequential until proven otherwise.

His attention was focused on the mattress his men had salvaged from the upper floor bedroom just before the staircase collapsed. It lay now among the trees, brushed by dead leaves and blades of un-mowed grass. On the bed was the twenty-two-year-old body of Ilenya Makova, Rochev’s current mistress or, he corrected himself, his late mistress. She was lying on the charred and smoldering mattress, a ragged hole opened up clear through her. On close inspection he could see that the wound had been inflicted by neither a bullet nor a knife. It looked malevolent, ugly, ancient, as if whatever had killed her had been used to rip her insides out. But whatever that weapon might be, it was nowhere to be found.

His gaze moved now to the digital photo on the screen of the cell phone in his hand. One of the men assigned to this detail by the FSB had had the presence of mind to snap a photo of the three people as they emerged from the front door before the fire started: Ilenya Makova’s killers. Sadly for him that man was Mondan Limonev, the one member of the division he worked out of who he despised more than any other. Worse still, he instilled both a sense of fear and distrust in Kirilenko. Limonev, a dead-eyed killer if Kirilenko ever saw one, was just the sort of animal Kirilenko had spent his entire adult life hunting down and bringing to justice. It offended him no end that this creature should be employed by the FSB. In his fantasies he’d discovered many novel ways to exterminate Limonev, none of which, sadly, he was at liberty to put into action.

The photo on Limonev’s cell was grainy, slightly blurred. Three figures. By narrowing his eyes slightly, he could recognize a male and two females. This, in itself, was a mystery. Why would Rochev hire three people to kill his mistress? Why would he want her dead in the first place? Kirilenko knew him as a serial fucker—he cheated on his wife with a roster of women as professional as they were beautiful. He’d never seen fit to kill one before so why start now? And, anyway, where was he? Disappeared from work, from his home, and not in a tryst at his own private love hotel.

But first things first. Back to the killers: Not only were there three of them, but it seemed that one was either an adolescent or a midget. Neither fit the usual profile of a professional hit man who, so far as Kirilenko’s extensive experience decreed, worked solo. But, actually, that meant little, since his experience also confirmed that professional hit men would use any tactic they could think of to throw him off the scent. As of this moment, none of them had succeeded; he’d run each of them into the ground. One of the reasons he always tracked down the perp, the murderer, strangler, shooter, knifer, was due to his orderly mind, which allowed him to know more about each situation than anyone around him. He absorbed a crime scene with all his five senses, then allowed his mind to look for patterns. A crime scene, steeped in death, in anger, violence, fear, even disinterest, was the very definition of chaos. Death disordered life. Many of the killers he was after were, in their way, as detached as he was. The difference was outrage. Murder outraged him, whether it be premeditated or accidental, professional or amateurish. To him, the taking of a life—any life—was unthinkable, a sin worthy of full retribution, lawful or otherwise. The taking of a life was a violation. It created a state of affairs unto itself, one that had nothing to do with society, that existed, throbbing painfully, outside the boundaries of civilization. Let the punishment fit the crime. Nevertheless, he lived with these acts of cruelty, with the most heinous of insults, as if they were lodgers who had overstayed their welcome in his mind and who would not now relinquish their place in his life for love or money.

He tried zooming in on the faces of the perps, but the man appeared to have his arm raised in front of his eyes, the woman was in the process of turning away, and the face of the adolescent or midget was lost behind the woman’s body. He was about to try zooming in on her face when he saw that she was gripping something in her hand: an arrow or a short spear, something with a wicked tip, meant to tear the insides out of its victim: the murder weapon. Now he moved up the image to the woman’s face. By zooming in, though not too much, he could discern her features. With a sickening lurch of his stomach he recognized Annika Dementieva.

“There is no trace of the marksman, the man in the woods who fired his weapon.”

The thin man with the saturnine face had emerged from the wreckage of the dacha to stand beside Kirilenko’s car. Kirilenko, becoming aware of his approach, had quite sensibly pocketed Limonev’s phone with its incriminating photo. He’d be damned if he’d share inside information with this man. As for Limonev, he had made a mental note to have the Ukrainians get him a replacement cell immediately.

“He wasn’t one of mine,” Kirilenko said, “so he must have been one of yours.”

“He wasn’t,” the man said. “Anyway, I wasn’t supplied with a marksman, you know that.”

“When it comes to you people,” Kirilenko said without rancor, “I know nothing.”

“Well, take my word for it.” The thin man glanced back over his shoulder. “Perhaps one of the SBU men, you know how undisciplined these Ukrainians are.”

Kirilenko regarded the man impassively through the smoke passing out of his half-open lips. “Do you judge Russians as harshly as you do the Ukrainians?”

“We have high regard for you,” the thin man said with some asperity. “I thought we’d made that perfectly clear.”

Kirilenko continued his study of the man. He had golden hair and the ruddy cheeks of an athlete. Unconsciously, Kirilenko rubbed the backs of his hands, reddened and stiff with a rheumy ache. “It wasn’t one of the Ukrainians,” he said. “They know not to make a move without checking with me first.”

“They despise you,” the thin man said.

“But they fear me more.”

“And whom do you fear, Kirilenko?”

Kirilenko took his time drawing on his cigarette, holding the smoke deep so his lungs could absorb the nicotine. Releasing the smoke, he said, just before he turned away, “Not you, American, if that’s what you think. Certainly not you.”

“Magnussen or one of his people was at it a long time,” Jack said after some deliberation. “Rochev must have had something or known something Magnussen wanted very badly.”

“What did they do to him?” Alli said.

“It’s bad enough to give you nightmares.” Jack rose, and Annika was left to inspect the corpse on her own.

“The people who did this,” she said, “are professionals—experts, I must say, in torture and the application of pain.”

“Spoken like a professional yourself,” he said.

She looked up at him. “What an odd thing to say. Do you take me for a torturer?”

He deliberately ignored her comment. “Whoever they are, they must have a strong international connection to plan and execute a hit-and-run murder on Capri. It’s a small island with extremely limited vehicular traffic.”

Alli was staring out at the fiat expanse of the water. “But Annika’s right. We’ve hit a dead end. There’s nothing left for us here and we have no way of finding out where Magnussen went.”

“Not necessarily.”

Jack led them back over the shallow crest and into the lowland of the cemetery. The afternoon was waning; the sun, exhausted from its misty journey, was sinking as if weighted down by the earth or by sorrow. The lengthening shadows seemed to thrust the headstones across the grass like accusing fingers.

“Alli, didn’t you say that Magnussen’s parents died on the same day?”

She nodded. “But in different places.”

Jack examined the headstones, one by one. Using his fingertips to trace the outlines of the chiseled letters allowed him to read what had been written more easily and quickly. “They died on August first, seventeen years ago. Magnussen’s father passed away here, on these grounds, but his mother died in Alushta.”

“Alushta is on the east coast of the Crimea,” Annika said. “It’s filled with expensive villas that overlook the Black Sea.”

“Bingo! That’s where Magnussen’s gone,” Jack said.

Annika frowned. “What? How could you possibly know that?”

“His mother was buried there.”

“I don’t see the connection.” Annika shook her head. “Maybe she was on vacation, maybe she was visiting friends.”

“In that event she would have been brought back here to be buried,” Jack said with such perfect logic that Annika was unable to contradict him.

“But a villa—”

Jack’s mind was working faster than the others could match or even imagine. “Look at this spread here. This family was wedded to money and prestige, they wouldn’t have remained here all year long. The summers are hot and unpleasant, aren’t they?”

Annika nodded, still dubious.

“Where would the Magnussens go in the summer? I’m willing to bet they own a villa in Alushta.”

“This is ridiculous, you’re not the Delphic oracle.”

“In a way he is,” Alli interjected. “Jack’s mind works differently than yours or mine, he can see things we can’t, make connections we can’t until much, much later.”

Annika stared at Alli as if she’d grown wings or had been struck by lightning. “Is this a vaudeville act between the two of you, or some idiotic sleight of hand trick?”

“Why would it be a trick?” Alli said so fiercely that Annika seemed stopped in her tracks.

“If you’ve got a better idea,” Jack said to Annika, “now would be the time to tell me.”

Annika looked away for a moment, her gaze roaming over the back of the manor house in the distance. “Seriously?” she said as she turned back to him. “You think Magnussen has gone to ground in Alushta?”

“So who was he then,” the golden-haired American said, “the marksman who took a shot in the woods?”

He was not a tall man, nevertheless he was imposing, like all the American agents Kirilenko had met or had seen in surveillance photos. He was possessed of a confidence that bordered on arrogance. Kirilenko envied him or, at least, was jealous of his sense of entitlement. The world was his oyster, he moved about in it as he pleased, with an ease Kirilenko imagined only in his dreams. Kirilenko, the good silovik, who was tied to Russia as if by a chain-link leash. And he thought: I am faithful, like a dog, and the American is my master. He holds my fate in his hands—hands that do not ache in the cold, are not reddened and chapped, aged before their time. He has not seen what I’ve seen. And then with the briefest flash of contempt like heat lightning that comes and goes in one breath: What does he know of life, anyway? What can he know, he’s American.

Was it contempt Kirilenko felt for the golden-haired American or was it pity? His name was Martin, like the bird. Harry Martin. But what was his real name? Likely Kirilenko would never know.

“Harry Martin,” the American had introduced himself when they first met, “from Latrobe, Pennsylvania.” And when Kirilenko had looked at him blankly, he’d added, “You know, the home of Arnold Palmer, surely you’ve heard of the legendary golfer.”

Kirilenko just barely stopped himself from laughing in Harry Martin’s face. God in heaven! While Russians were struggling to survive, Americans were playing golf.

The two men sat side by side now in the backseat of Kirilenko’s car, drinking hot coffee from a thermos one of Kirilenko’s men had fetched.

“So who was he then?” Harry Martin repeated. “Any theories?”

They appeared to be two old friends chatting about something inconsequential, a sports match, perhaps, or the prospects of a favorite soccer team.

“I don’t deal in speculation, only facts,” Kirilenko said with a good deal less irritation than he felt. It wouldn’t do to rub the American the wrong way, he had too many powerful friends who, with one phone call, could seriously impact Kirilenko’s career, not to say his life. Just knowing this caused him a level of stress he found intolerable. Harry Martin was like an itch he couldn’t scratch, and it was driving him to distraction.

All at once he threw open the car door and stepped out into the waning day. The air smelled of smoke, charred fabric, and burnt plastic. While he was facing away from Martin he took out the cell phone and sent the photo of Annika Dementieva emerging from Rochev’s dacha to his assistant with specific instructions. A moment later Martin clambered out and without a glance at Kirilenko strode into the woods beyond what had once been the front porch of the house.

“All your men out of here?” he asked.

Kirilenko pocketed the phone as he followed the American into the woods. “The SBU also. It’s just us here now.”

“I need theories,” Martin said as they wound through the thick stand of hemlocks. He switched on the flashlight Kirilenko had given him. “I need something.”

Swallowing his emotions, Kirilenko said in his best fatalistic tone, “Someone has taken Karl Rochev, by force I would guess, judging by the corpse impaled to the mattress back there. It wasn’t us and I guarantee it wasn’t the SBU. Which means that there’s another faction in this mysterious, unnamed pursuit of yours.”

“Another faction.” Martin turned this phrase over as if it were alien to him or an idea to which he needed to adjust. He trained the flashlight’s beam on the forest floor as they picked their way across the soft earth. “Then we’ll have to find them, whoever they are. And we’ll have to eliminate them.”

Kirilenko made a noise deep in his throat. It was a kind of warning, as primitive as it was inarticulate, not that Harry Martin would notice, or even care. “And how do you propose we do that?”

Dying light, red and yellow, seeped through the evergreen boughs. Martin knelt, running his fingertips lightly over the nest of evergreen needles, pointing out to Kirilenko a muddle of fresh footprints, none of them made by the boots of his men. “A man, a woman—and these.” One set was significantly smaller than the other two. He stood. They were very close to the road. “We pick up the perpetrators’ trail and follow them back to the source.”

He seems so sure of himself, Kirilenko thought bitterly, even though he’s in a land foreign to him, among people who don’t even speak his language. Such an American trait.

They walked to the edge of the trees.

“This road goes in only two directions,” Kirilenko said. “Several miles away is a turning that takes you back to Kiev, otherwise it goes straight to the city of Brovary.”

“What’s there?” Martin asked.

Kirilenko shrugged. “It’s the shoe-making capital of Ukraine.”

“We split up. You go on to Brovary, see if you pick up their trail. I’ll take my man and two of yours and head back to Kiev and try to do the same. At least it’s a city I know.”

Kirilenko felt a wave of relief flood him. It was a minor miracle to have this gorilla off his back.

Martin nodded at the twilit road that unspooled before them, a tar-black ribbon, vanishing into the darkness of the evening. “Wherever Rochev is you can be sure of one thing: These three people will take us there.”

14

“Dad—”

There were people, Jack knew, who confused the word “haunt” with memory. Since Emma had appeared to him, spoken to him, answered his questions and asked some herself, there were people— Sharon among them—who were absolutely certain that he had confused haunted with memory, that what he had mistaken for an encounter with his dead child was nothing more than his memories of her resurfacing, asserting themselves in order to ensure that she wouldn’t be completely lost to him, that she would remain with him until his own dissolution, whenever that might come, years from now, or tomorrow.

“Dad—”

Jack knew they were wrong. Emma remained, some essential part of her that death could not touch or even alter. She remained because their relationship was, in some essential way, incomplete, their time together, though cut short, had not ended. Her will survived the car crash that had stolen her life away in brutal fashion, before she could feel the joy and pain of adulthood.

“Dad—”

Jack heard Emma as they returned to Igor Kissin’s apartment.

“Dad, I’m here.”

The door swung open and he stepped into the apartment. While the others went about their business, he looked for his daughter—his dead daughter.

“No, Dad, over here!”

At that moment, his cell phone rang. It was Sharon, and he took the call.

“Hello, Jack,” she said in a cool, preternaturally calm voice, “do you know yet when you’re coming home?”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t, Sharon, I told you—”

“Then I’ll leave the key under the doormat.”

His eyes flew open. “What?”

“I’m leaving, Jack. I’ve had enough of you not being here.”

And all at once he understood that they had returned to square one, to the point they’d been at immediately following Emma’s death, when she’d blamed him for not taking Emma’s call, for not somehow intuiting that their daughter was in mortal peril, that her car was about to veer off the road into a tree. Months later, Sharon had sworn to him that she’d put her anger and bitterness behind her, but he saw now that she hadn’t. Perhaps she’d been telling him the truth, or the truth as she understood it at the moment, but then she’d been fooling herself or, more accurately, hiding from herself, which every human being did from time to time.

He didn’t blame her for that failing, how could he? But he blamed her for not telling him the truth now, because she knew the truth. It wasn’t his job or the fact that he was overseas, far from her at the moment, it wasn’t that he couldn’t tell her when he’d be home again. What she meant was, I can’t forgive you for not being there when Emma needed you, I can’t forgive you for not preventing her death.

He said nothing into the phone because there was nothing to say. She’d had a revelation or maybe her mother had forced the revelation on her. But for the first time he realized that it didn’t matter. The truth was the truth; it did no good to fight it.

“Good-bye, Jack.”

He said nothing, not even then, he merely folded the phone away, and looked around the apartment as if trying to find his bearings, or an answer for what had just happened, though he knew perfectly well where he was and that he was now alone.

At the far end of the sofa, directly below the painting of the Tibetan mandala, was a shadow of a deeper substance, curled like a cat. Curious, because Jack could remember reading something about the mandala in the writings of Carl Jung. What was it? Jung believed the mandala, which in Sanskrit meant both completion and essence, to be the perfect manifestation of the human unconscious.

As he walked to the sofa and sat down near the curled shadow, he wondered whether this was what he was looking at now: a manifestation of his unconscious.

“Hello, Dad.”

That was what everyone else but Alli believed, that this manifestation of Emma came from deep inside himself, but he knew that she was something more. He knew it as surely as he knew he was sitting here on a brown velvet sofa in this unexpectedly homey fourth-floor apartment in Kiev.

“Hi, honey.” He squinted into the shadows. “I can’t really see you.”

“Don’t worry, that’s normal.”

He laughed under his breath. “There’s nothing normal about this, Emma.”

“We’re both Outsiders, Dad, so for us it is normal”

He shook his head helplessly. The truth was he’d been an Outsider for so long that he didn’t know what the word “normal” meant, if he ever had.

“Your mother—”

“I know. Don’t be sad, it was inevitable”

“You sound so grown-up.”

“You and Mom, it never worked, not really.”

“There certainly was heat.”

“Heat isn’t enough. There was nothing solid, ever.”

Jack put his head back. “No, I suppose not.” Tears leaked out of his eyes.

Then he felt a stirring beside him, as if someone had opened a window. A cool breeze kissed his cheek.

“You’ve got to stop dwelling on it, Dad.”

“Your mother? No, I—”

“The car crash.”

She was right about that, too. He supposed death might give you a unique perspective on what had gone before, a form of omniscience not unlike that of an immortal.

“You remember ‘The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning’?”

He nodded. “Sure. That Smashing Pumpkins song is five-starred on your iPod.”

“There’s no more need to pretend cause now I can begin again.’” Her voice, lost in time and space, was a haunting soprano as she sang the lines from the song.

“What are you saying?”

“What if my death was only the end of the beginning?”

Jack, his heartbeat quickening, turned more toward her, or the darkness where she now dwelled. “Can that be true?”

“I’m saying that your guilt is still eating you alive. I’m saying that the thing you’re fixated on is over and done with.”

“That moment I lost you and for months afterward the terrible past seemed interminable, repeating itself like a virus, but then later it’s as if it happened in a millisecond, so quickly that I never had the chance to take action or even make the right choices.”

“I don’t think about that, and neither should you.”

He shook his head. “I wish I could understand.”

“I know it’s confusing, Dad, but think of it this way: Maybe I’m here now because I’m still disobedient, even in death.” Her laughter rolled over him like gentle surf. “I don’t know, I have as little experience with this as you do. I know you want answers, but I don’t have them. I have no idea where I am or what I’ve become—although it seems likely I’m what I’ve always been, right? I do know there’s no point in trying to figure it out. What it boils down to is faith and acceptance. Faith that I’m really here, acceptance that for some things there is simply no answer.”

“I don’t want you to fade away, like everything else. Emma—” and he gave a little cry, aching with despair and, yes, she was right, guilt.

“Jack?”

He turned his head sharply at the sound of Alli’s voice.

“What are you doing?”

And then, as he looked at her blankly, she sat down beside him. “She’s here, isn’t she?” Her breath seemed to catch in her throat. “Emma’s here!”

He was about to answer her when he saw Annika standing in the doorway to one of the bedrooms, observing them. How long had she been there? Had she overheard his conversation with Emma—at least his side of it, which would have sounded absurd to her?

“Let’s talk about this another time,” he told Alli. “We’re all exhausted.”

“But—”

“Questions later.” He pulled her up with him as he rose to his feet. “Right now it’s time to rest.”

At the doorway to the master bedroom, Jack paused, watching Alli pad into her room and softly close the door. Then he turned to Annika, but before he could say anything she beat him to it.

“Come in,” she said. Her smile widened. “I didn’t bite last night, did I?”

He smiled. “I think Alli is right about you.”

“Me being a psycho-bitch or wanting to get you into bed?”

He laughed, but the truth was that in these surroundings and this close to her he felt a frisson, an erotic charge that made him momentarily short of breath.

On his way to the bed he passed close enough for his hip to brush against her, where she sat, her legs crossed at the knee. Her wrists, which perched on her knee, were delicate, so thin they looked eminently breakable. He knew better. His gaze inevitably dropped to her legs, long, powerful, and gleaming in the illumination from the bedside lamps she must have put on when she’d entered the bedroom.

“You know you have this obsession to protect everyone,” she said.

He came and sat down on the bed next to her. “Is that such a bad thing?”

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

“Why did you ask me in here?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Last night … our connection …” She looked away for a moment. “I don’t want to be alone. I’m tired of being alone.”

“What about Ivan?”

She snapped back into focus. “Are you trying to insult me? Ivan was an assignment.”

He nodded. “I won’t sleep with you, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

“I’m not angling for any damn thing. My arm hurts and I need some rest. We all do.”

“All right then.” He slapped his thighs and, rising, went to the doorway. “I’ll be right outside on the sofa.”

As he was about to cross the threshold, she said: “I know who the girl is.”

Her timing was impeccable. He turned and stared at her.

“I know she’s the American president’s daughter.” She cocked her head. “Do you take me for a fool?”

“You told me you knew nothing about affairs outside your line of work.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know you then, I didn’t know whether I could trust you, so I thought it better to lie. The truth is, I can’t bear to be the victim of ignorance. Besides, it seemed important for you to keep your secret, changing her hair, her appearance, whatever, and since then I’ve wanted to help you keep that secret. I would keep it now, even if we were captured, even if the FSB hurt me.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.

She shrugged again.

“Why would you do it—protect Alli—if it came to that?”

“You know why. When I look in her eyes, when I listen to her voice, I see myself.”

“Even when she calls you the psycho-bitch?”

“Especially then, because her high emotion betrays her.”

Jack took a step back into the bedroom. “How do you mean?”

“That look in her eyes, the sound of her voice when the anger engorges her throat, when it seems as if she’s strangling on emotion, I know that look; I saw it every day when I looked at myself in the mirror. And that sound …” She shuddered. “The news stories were vague, even the so-called in-depth articles, but something very bad happened to her.”

“Yes,” he said as he sat beside her, “it did.”

“You saved her from whoever abused her. I can see that, too, in her eyes when she looks at you.”

Now it was his turn to look away. “She was abducted, bound to a chair and brainwashed, perhaps more, I don’t know. She won’t talk about it to anyone.”

“She’ll tell you.” Annika’s voice was as soft as a caress as she laid a hand over his. “She needs time, that’s all.”

Jack turned to look at her face. “How can you be sure?”

“Because she wants to tell you, she needs to tell you. I think she’s coming to grips with the realization that she can’t move on until she does. I believe that’s why she wanted so badly to be the one to talk to Milla Tamirova.”

Jack frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Milla Tamirova has certain … equipment, shall we say, that I think drew Alli.”

Jack was growing alarmed. “What kind of equipment? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Milla Tamirova is a professional mistress—that is to say she has a dungeon in her apartment.”

A chill sped through his system and he shivered. “Why in the world would she want to revisit—”

“To relieve herself of the terror, to conquer it. The only way to exorcize it is to demythologize it, to see it in the light of day, to understand that once she overcomes her terror she’ll no longer be its victim.”

Jack sat bent over, elbows on knees, hands clasped loosely in front of him as if in rumination or, maybe, prayer. Then he looked up. “I had no idea. I should be with her.”

Annika’s hand clasped his and he felt her steely strength. “Leave her alone for the moment. Allow her to regain her innate power. She needs to think about what Milla Tamirova must have shown her. If you interfere now, she’ll move away from both you and the hard work that lies ahead of her.”

Sighing deeply, Jack covered his face with his hands and lay back on the bed. Annika, turning, regarded him with empathy and perhaps a bit of pity.

“She’s yours, Jack, for better or for worse.”

“It’s all for the better,” he said, “believe me.”

“I do.” She hitched herself fully onto the bed, keeping off her left arm as she did and, before he had a chance to say another word, lay down on top of him. “There, that isn’t so bad, is it?”

Alli, fully clothed, lay on the bed. She was staring at the ceiling, but in fact she was seeing the restraint chair in the center of Milla Tamirova’s dungeon. In her mind’s eye she sat in that chair, felt the restraints, hard, twisted, and nasty, against the insides of her wrists. She felt little electric shocks go through her, as if sparks launched from a nearby fire were singeing her, burning off the pale, almost transparent hair on her arms.

The demonically handsome face of Morgan Herr, whose pseudonyms Ronnie Kray, Charles Whitman, Ian Brady were all notorious serial killers, hovered over her, whispering in her ear. He told her things about herself—intimate things that she was certain only she could know, including private conversations she’d had with Emma, everything they’d discussed in their dorm room at school—as if he’d crawled inside her head and insidiously appropriated the details of her life.

She shuddered so deeply that her torso came off the bed as if through a bolt of electricity. She felt the familiar, horrific nausea rising in her, and she fought to stay where she was, held at bay the urge to flee to the bathroom and kneel beside the porcelain bowl to puke up her guts.

No, she told herself in a remarkably steady voice, you no longer need to do that. Morgan Herr is dead, there’s nothing more he can do to you. Whatever is happening, you’re doing it to yourself.

And yet, once again, as she’d felt in Milla Tamirova’s dungeon, she was paralyzed, completely powerless, as if she had once again been stripped of conscious volition.

“Whoever did this to you, whoever abused you will have won.” Milla Tamirova had smiled. “We can’t have that, child, can we?”

But Milla Tamirova didn’t know, because Alli didn’t dare tell her, the other reason for her feeling powerless. The urge to cut herself open, to have the secret spill out with her guts, left her shaking and drenched in cold sweat. She could feel the bed vibrating beneath her, or was it her own body that was making the bed quiver?

“You’re a coward,” Morgan Herr’s voice echoed in her head. “You’re a little, sniveling bitch, and who paid for your cowardice? Tell me, who paid?”

Racked with sobs, she lay back down on the bed and, turning on her side, pulled the coverlet over her. Sometime later she was plunged into a sleep where, in dreams, she strode across the leafy campus of Langley Fields. Emma, whispering beside her, had the sun on her face, so her eyes, usually as transparent as lake water, were hidden in the glare. Then Alli passed into the cloud of shade thrown by a pear tree, and as she turned to Emma, she screamed and screamed, and could not stop screaming.

Jack pushed Annika off him, not roughly but firmly, so that there would be no question of his intent.

Part of him felt as if he should be thinking of Sharon, but Sharon was far away in every manner imaginable; she was lost to him in the way he’d been afraid he’d lost Emma. He realized now that from the moment he’d first met Sharon, from the instant of their first incandescent coupling, they were headed toward dissolution, like a body that sinks beneath the waves and, in a split instant, becomes nothing more than a reflection, a reminder of what was or, possibly, what might have been. But, in any event, it was losing its coherence, if it had any to begin with, as it plunged headlong into oblivion.

Emma had been their only chance to stay together, but, really, that was a false hope. For a moment he forced himself to imagine his life had Emma not died, and the inescapable conclusion was that as far as he and Sharon were concerned nothing would be different. From the moment Emma was born, they disagreed on everything concerning their daughter, a dangerously scattershot method of child-rearing, but they were both blinded by their immaturity. It was the wrong moment for them to become parents, and they didn’t handle it well, taking their fundamental differences into a more public arena.

The other part of him was both hard and on fire. Though he fought against it, his breath came in short, hot pants, as if he were nearing the end of a long, grueling race. He knew the thoughts of Sharon and dissolution were meant as a distraction from his current situation, but his mind refused to stay thrust back in time, returning again and again to the seductive stimuli his five senses brought in.

He drank in Annika’s scent, felt the warmth of her body, heard the soft soughing of her breath, like wind through the treetops. He could not help but savor the taste her lips had left on his, the first bite into a fresh peach.

He turned his head to see her lying on her right side, facing away from him. Her body was curled up slightly, lending her a more vulnerable appearance, as if she were already asleep, but he could tell by her breathing that she was still awake.

Her blouse, or what was left of it, had ridden up, revealing her bare back. The sight of the scars took his breath away. They must be from the eighteen months she had been incarcerated. The abuse she had suffered had been extreme, or one manifestation of it had been extreme. How extreme had Alli’s abuse been, how profound her terror and her suffering? How deeply was Morgan Herr embedded in her psyche? “The terror dissolves like dreams when we wake up and go about our daily routine” she had said, which set him wondering. At the moment when Annika’s scars lay revealed to him, when it crossed his mind to touch them, to ask her how she had come by them, it occurred to him that there was something voyeuristic, even obscene about poking around in a person’s sordid past. That’s what people did these days, however, and the more sordid the deeper the urge to pry, to learn why, when logically the opposite should apply. But there was nothing logical about the reflex to stare at a car wreck, to watch, spellbound, as bodies were pulled from the wreckage, to think: How badly hurt are they? Are they alive or dead? Thank God I’m here, safe and sound, passing by this disaster, but, hang on, slow down, I want to see more, blood and all.

Without a clear understanding of what he was doing or the consequences that might ensue he reached out. As he curled his hand over her hip she emitted a sound that was neither a sigh nor a moan, but contained the essence of both. That sound acted like a trigger, releasing him from whatever safety mechanism that had short-circuited what he had been feeling ever since he’d crossed the threshold of the bedroom.

“Forget it,” she said in a voice partially muffled by the pillow or perhaps her arm. “I don’t want you now.”

Laughing softly he removed his hand and turned off the second lamp, enveloping them in twilight. And yet it seemed to him that he’d been plunged into darkness so absolute it was possible to lose his bearings, as if he were at sea beyond sight of all land. He wondered whether he should go or remain on the opposite side of the bed, trying to find a place comfortable for himself, at which point she turned around as lithely as a gymnast, folded her arms around him, and pressed her soft, half-open lips to his. He could feel her panting breath as his mouth closed over hers.

Their bodies moved in concert, in a back-and-forth rhythm not unlike the tide that rules the seas. They were like engines revving up, yearning to be released, longing for the fury that only a vehicle at speed and slightly out of control could generate, summoned like a genie or a djinn from shadows where no one looked.

Lost inside her he became unmoored from a sense of either place or time, dimly aware that in plummeting toward oblivion he sought an end to the dissolution of his life.

15

“Lloyd Berns’s death was almost certainly the work of Benson and Thomson.” Dennis Paull, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, leaned forward tensely, seeking to keep his voice low. He was speaking of two prominent members of the previous administration, Miles Benson, the war vet and former director of the CIA, and Morgan Thomson, the former national security advisor, the last of the neocons who had managed to maintain his power, due mainly to his ties to companies manufacturing war material.

On one of those dank District days when winter and spring, for a short time evenly matched, fought one another to a standstill, five of the most powerful men in the capital, and therefore in America, clustered beside the newly turned grave of Senator Lloyd Berns, following the mournful pomp and circumstance of his funeral and burial among the fallen heroes of the country at Arlington National Cemetery.

Paull was huddled with President Carson; Vice President Arlen Crawford, the big, rangy, sun-scarred former Texas senator; Kinkaid Marshall, the new head of NSA; G. Robert Kroftt, director of Central Intelligence; Bill Rogers, the national security advisor; and General Atcheson Brandt, who had handled the delicate arrangements with Russian president Yukin for Carson’s historic U.S.-Russian security accord. This meeting had convened following the services, after Berns’s family—his wife, sister, two sons, daughter, various in-laws, and grandchildren—had stood stiffly, wept, and thrown handfuls of dirt on the coffin. Around the six men, at a discreet distance, was a constellation of Secret Service operatives, all staring outward across the sea of headstones, bouquets of flowers, mourners, miniature American flags, and the occasional eternal flame.

“You’ve given us no proof, Denny,” Marshall said, “but even if you had, what have they accomplished with Lloyd’s death?”

“I’ve already appointed Ben Hearth as the new whip,” President Carson said, “and he’s tougher with the opposition than Lloyd ever was. I’m not suggesting that Benson and Thomson aren’t still formidable enemies, but that particular motive’s a no-go.” He spread his hands. “What else do we have?” He briefly considered bringing up Jack’s mission, then almost at once dismissed the notion.

“Setting aside the matter of Senator Berns’s demise, I’m still of the opinion that our most pressing business concerns the changes taking place inside the Kremlin even as we speak.” This from CIA Director Kroftt, who was understandably alarmed by the recent developments in Russia.

Vice President Crawford nodded emphatically. “The severe downturn in Russia’s energy-based economy has made those inside the Kremlin—especially President Yukin—nervous about the longevity of the country’s influence.”

“The fact is,” Kroftt continued, “Russia as a power has been in retreat ever since the end of the Cold War. The West’s decision to formally recognize Kosevo as an independent Serbian state marked the nadir of Russia’s sphere of influence. Ever since then, the Kremlin has been spinning its webs at light-speed, manufacturing a plan that would bring the country back into prominence.”

“Pardon me, but if I may interject an observation and some pertinent facts,” General Brandt said, “the Baltics, the Balkans, the Caucasus, all of Central Asia and Central Europe, in fact, are experiencing the same fate as Russia’s.”

Carson, watching Lloyd’s family marching slowly toward the limousines that had brought them here, saw a small boy turn and stare back toward his grandfather’s grave. Carson recognized him because he was the only one of the grandchildren who had remained completely dry-eyed during the burial. But now, with his back to his family, free to vent his terror and his sadness, he wept openly. Perhaps he was remembering how his grandfather had taken him to the zoo, or to a movie, letting him stuff his face with chocolate and ice cream. Certainly he had no inkling that his beloved grandfather had left behind a mistress, a mysterious younger woman who might herself be mourning his passing, wherever she was. And seeing the sadness leak out of this child reminded him of his own daughter so far away in every manner imaginable. The thought pierced his heart, made him want to run to the child, pick him up in his arms, and tell him that everything would be all right.

“However,” Brandt continued, “Russia maintains a distinct advantage over its surrounding neighbors in that, owing to its rich stores of oil and natural gas, it maintains an enormous amount of reserves, both in funds and in currency, more than all the other countries combined. Moreover, it owns and controls the natural gas that supplies virtually all of Western Europe.”

“True enough,” Kroftt affirmed, “as far as it goes.” He cleared his throat as he handed around Xeroxed dossiers. “However, my Russia desk has prepared a white paper, the major thrust of which is this: Based on the successful military incursion Russia recently made into Georgia we envision an imminent reemergence of Russian power using a three-pronged strategy through military, intelligence, and energy means. What this, in effect, means is that the era of Russian retrenchment is over. Yukin intends to extend its sphere of influence outward once again, to encompass Georgia and Ukraine, to name only the first two strategic expansions.”

“This is all purely conjecture, and in fact has been put forward in other forms by other members of the intelligence community.” Closing the dossier, which he had skimmed with a practiced eye, General Brandt turned to Carson. “Sir, as you know, I’ve had many one-on-one meetings with President Yukin over the past eight years and in all that time I’ve never once caught a glimpse of this bellicose scenario.”

“I beg your pardon, General,” Crawford drawled, “but I can’t think how it would benefit Yukin to let you in on what he’s planning. On the contrary, as you can see by the previous administration’s hostile response to Russia’s war with Georgia, he would take great pains to keep you from knowing anything at all.”

“It’s the previous administration’s grievous errors vis-à-vis Russia I’m trying like hell to amend,” General Brandt said. “What we don’t need is a return to our old adversarial position, which resulted in the bitterest of exchanges between the White House and the Kremlin.”

“The Kremlin’s time has come and gone, which is why it’s flailing away at anyone or anything it believes is antagonistic to it.” The CIA chief thumbed through the dossier. “As you all can see from the exhibits on page five we are most concerned with Ukraine because strategically it’s the cornerstone of any Russian expansion. Ukraine’s location gives Russia access to the Black Sea and, from there, the Mediterranean. Without an integrated Ukraine, Russia is vulnerable to the south and the west. Furthermore, the preponderance of a Russian-speaking population, along with the fact that Ukrainian transport is already entwined with Russia’s agricultural, industrial, and energy businesses, make it an absolutely vital acquisition.”

Kroftt let the pages of the dossier flutter closed. “All that being said, there’s yet another aspect to Russia’s designs on Ukraine that make us the most uncomfortable. As he’s done with Gazprom, Yukin has nationalized Russia’s uranium industry. Like China, Russia sees no viable future without atomic energy to take the place of coal, oil and, yes, even natural gas. The trouble is that Russia itself has fewer uranium resources than its geologists had forecasted even three years ago. That means Yukin must venture outside Russia’s current borders in order to build up its reserves.”

General Brandt cocked his head. “Have you heard something I haven’t, Bob? Because there’s been no indication that Ukraine is or even could be a significant source of uranium.”

For the first time, the CIA chief looked less than confident. “That, of course, is the conundrum we’re wrestling with. The General is correct. As of this moment there has been no major uranium strike in Ukraine.”

General Brandt looked vindicated. “Sir, I’m not trying to dismiss the hard work the CIA has put into this white paper, but the fact is that during the past eight years so much damage has been done to our relationship with the Kremlin that just to get President Yukin to agree to the summit with you took untold hours of blood, sweat, and tears. I respectfully submit that now is not the time for rash action, saber rattling, or even accusations. Sir, together we’ve made significant progress. We’ve forged a diplomatic detente with Russia. Now you’re about to sign an accord that will solve the worldwide deadlock on the Iranian nuclear weapons threat and bring a renewed level of security to the American people.” He looked around at each grim face in turn. “Do we really want to jeopardize what will turn out to be your presidential legacy on the basis of one intelligence report? Besides, as we are all painfully aware, our military capability abroad is already stretched to the breaking point.”

“Edward,” the vice president said in his deceptively soft Texan drawl, “you can’t deviate from our position now. The press will excoriate you; your own party will accuse you of flip-flopping on an issue you made a cornerstone of your first one hundred days in office.”

There was silence for a moment as everyone looked to President Carson for an answer. He’d staked much of his reputation on this rapprochement with Russia. He’d expended a great deal of political capital on the two bills the Congress had failed to pass. If he failed with the accord with Yukin he risked being dead in the water for the rest of his term—and forget about a second one. No matter his private thoughts on the subject, everyone present knew the president had no choice.

Carson looked over for the young boy, but he was gone now, bundled into the back of one of the anonymous-looking limos. Was he crying still, or had he put his stoic face back on in front of his family? It’s going to be all right, Carson thought. Then, his attention returned to the matter at hand, he sighed. “The General is right. For the moment we bury this intel; what we have spoken of here today goes no further.” He turned to his CIA chief. “Bob, in the meantime have your people follow up on this intel. I want specifics. If and when your boys unearth a smoking gun, we’ll move on it, but not a moment before. And Dennis, continue to pursue all avenues regarding the investigation into Lloyd’s death. If there’s something to it I want to know about it pronto. Okay?” He nodded. “Good. Thank you, gentlemen, for your valued input and opinions. Now it’s time to return to Moscow. General, you have just under two hours to get your kit together and hustle on over to Andrews. I want you with me when I meet with President Yukin again. Dennis, you’re with me.”

As soon as they were in the presidential limousine and on their way to Andrews Air Force Base, Carson turned to Dennis Paull, his longtime confidant, and, slapping the CIA white paper against his thigh, said, “To be honest, Denny, this report concerns me, especially Yukin’s designs on Ukraine. The incursion into Georgia was bad enough, but if he decides to make a move against Ukraine how can we stand idly by?”

“The report is intel, and like all intel it shouldn’t be taken as gospel,” Paull said as he settled back in the plush bench seat. “Besides, after six years of constant battles, our military is in need of withdrawal from the field, the men need time to stand down. But even if the intel is correct it wouldn’t change a thing, would it? Your intent is on record, your position clear.” Pulling a cigar from his vest pocket he stuck it between his teeth and went searching for a match or a lighter. “It doesn’t matter what action Yukin takes or is planning, it doesn’t matter if you like the sonuvabitch or if you hate him. The accord has got to be signed and with all due haste.”

“I agree, but Brandt has been urging me to rush past minor points in the negotiations.”

“Ignore him, get what you want out of Yukin,” Paull said firmly. “But I must point out with the security accord signed Yukin’s hands will be tied, he won’t be able to follow the scenario Bob has outlined, not with us as allies. No, the best way to stave off Russian expansion is to follow through on your promise as quickly as possible.”

Carson threw the dossier aside. “In office less than ninety days and already my hands are dirty.”

“The nature of politics is to have dirty hands,” Paull astutely pointed out as he lit the cigar. “The trick is to govern without being concerned with your dirty hands.”

“No, the trick is to wash them constantly.”

Paull puffed away contentedly. “Lady Macbeth tried that without success.”

“Lady Macbeth was mad.”

“It seems to me that madness is inherent in politics, or at least a preternatural ability to rationalize, which can be a kind of madness.”

“The ability to rationalize is a trait common to all humans,” Carson observed.

“Maybe so,” Paull said from within a cloud of aromatic smoke, “but surely not on such a massive scale.”

Carson grunted. “Anyway, it’s not the first time I’ve gotten my hands dirty.”

“And we both know it won’t be the last.”

Reaching over, Paull pressed a button and the privacy glass slid into place, ensuring that their conversation couldn’t be overheard even by the driver or the Secret Service escort riding shotgun.

“Speaking of which,” he said in a soft voice, “I want to run an investigation on everyone in the cabinet.”

The president sat up straight. “You suspect someone? Of what?”

“Of nothing, of everything.” Paull took the cigar from between his teeth. “Here’s how the situation looks from my particular vantage point, Edward. Frankly, I don’t trust anyone in your inner circle. It’s my opinion that Benson and Thomson have taken steps to ensure they know what your moves will be before you implement them.”

“Denny, what you’re saying—”

“Please let me finish, sir. Consider: Your first two initiatives have been shot down in Congress, embarrassing defeats for a newly elected president. Recall that Lloyd Berns had assured you that he’d have the votes from the other side of the aisle to ensure the bills’ passage, but unaccountably he was wrong. It was as if someone had spoken to the right congressmen before Berns, which could only have happened if the opposition had knowledge of the decisions of the inner cabinet.”

The president blew out a little puff of anxious air. “Come on, Denny. I’ve known you a long time, but this sounds preposterous. What you’re intimating is that a member of my cabinet is leaking information to my enemies.”

“I’m not intimating it, sir, I’m stating it straight out.”

“On the basis of what? Circumstantial evidence, a series of setbacks that are normal—”

“With all due respect, Edward, the string of setbacks we’ve suffered are anything but normal.”

The president made an exasperated sound. “But there could be any number of explanations, all of which might be perfectly innocent.”

“Innocence doesn’t belong in politics, you know that. And, if I may say, in the position you’re in you don’t have the luxury of kicking suspicions into the gutter. If I’m right, your enemies have already started to poison your presidency. We’ve got to short-circuit your enemies, and I mean right now.”

Carson considered for some time. At length, he nodded. “All right, Denny. Begin as soon as you get back to the office. Pick your team and—”

“No. All the work is going to be done by me alone, unofficially, outside the office. I don’t want to leave a trail of any kind.”

The president rubbed his temples. “You know this is the sort of assignment Jack ought to be handling.”

“Naturally, but you and I have sent him on what I trust is a parallel course.”

“I detested lying to him.”

“You didn’t lie, you withheld knowledge, and for a damn good reason.”

“Jack is a friend, Denny. He brought my daughter back to me. I owe him more than I can ever repay.”

“Then trust in his abilities.” Paull stubbed out his cigar. “For the moment, that’s all we can do.”

Entwined, cradled by the softly breathing night, Jack and Annika spoke in the secretive tones of ghosts:

“What do you think is happening beyond these walls,” Annika said, “in the hallway, the other apartments in this building, out on the street, in other sections of the city? It’s impossible to know, just like it’s impossible to know who’s thinking about us, thinking about following us, extracting the secrets we keep so close to us, who harbors thoughts of murder and mayhem.” She turned in his arms. “What are your secrets, Jack, the ones you keep closest to you?”

“My wife left me—twice,” Jack said with a vehemence that was almost like menace. “Who the hell knows what secrets are held inside the human heart.”

Annika waited a moment, possibly to allow his anger to subside, before she said, “What happened on the sofa beneath the Tibetan mandala?”

Jack closed his eyes for a moment as he felt his heart beating hard. “Nothing happened.”

“So you were talking to a ghost, is that it?”

“I was talking to a secret.”

“A secret Alli knows.”

“She and I, yes.”

“This just underscores what I said. We know so little, less than what seems apparent, less even than we believe.” She placed her hand on his arm, moved it down to the back of his hand, tracing the veins. “So you won’t tell me your secret, but I’ll bet it has nothing to do with your wife, or ex-wife, because she’s just a word now and words fade with incredible quickness. It has to do with your daughter, with Emma.” Her fingers twined with his. “Was she out there on the sofa? Is she there now?”

“Emma is dead. I told you that.”

“Mmm. Is she one of the things we don’t know about?”

“What do you mean?” He knew exactly what she meant, but Emma was too intimate, too precious to share.

“I’ve killed a man, as you know, but still I know nothing about death. Do you?”

“How could I?”

“Yes, how could you. I have asked myself that very question many times since I saw you on the sofa, and the answer I’ve come up with is this: I think you know more about it than I do. I think you were talking to death, or something like death, under the Tibetan mandala.”

“What an insane notion.”

He halfheartedly sought to disentangle himself, but she climbed on top of him, reached down for him, her fingers encircling. “We all have insane notions, now and again.” She squeezed gently, bringing him to readiness. “It’s the human condition.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev was in the midst of making coffee, strong enough to keep him up for the rest of what remained of the night, when a pounding on the front door set his heart to racing. Setting down the plastic dipper full of freshly ground coffee he stepped out of the kitchen, padded on slippered feet across the living room. The pounding came again, more insistent this time, if that were possible.

“Who is it?” he asked with his cheek nearly against the door.

“Open up,” came the voice from the other side, “or I’ll have the damn knob blown off!”

Figuratively girding his loins for what was to come, Dyadya Gourdjiev flipped open the lock. No sooner had he begun to turn the knob than the door fairly exploded inward. Had he not stepped nimbly aside the edge of the door would have cracked the bone above his eye socket.

Two men rushed inside, one of them slammed the door shut behind them. He was the muscle, the one with the Makarov pistol. The other man was Kaolin Arsov, the head of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka family in Moscow. Dyadya Gourdjiev had been expecting him more or less from the moment Annika and her new friends had left his apartment.

Arsov had the eyes of a predator and the complexion of a dead fish, as if he preferred darkness to sunlight. Perhaps he was allergic or in some perverse fashion averse to natural light of any sort. He looked like the kind of man you wouldn’t want to cross, a man whose strong arm you’d want with you in, say, a knife fight or a street brawl, even if his judgement was suspect. He’d sell his brother to the highest bidder—Dyadya Gourdjiev knew that he had, in fact, done just that—in order to gain territory and prestige, but once given he’d never renege on his word, which was, in his neck of the world, the only true and lasting measure of a man.

“Gospodin Gourdjiev, what a pleasure it is to see you again.” His lips were smiling, but his eyes remained as cold and calculating as any predator.

“I’m afraid I can’t say the same.” Dyadya Gourdjiev held his ground, which was the only way to play this situation. Arsov could smell fear and indecision from a mile away. Weakness of any kind or to any degree was what he sniffed out, using it like a cudgel against his prey, because for him the world was strength and weakness, nothing existed in between. Not that Dyadya Gourdjiev thought that Arsov considered him prey, but in the end the difference was negligible. Gourdjiev was someone to intimidate, knock around a little, someone from whom he could get information. That was how Arsov would play it, anyway; there were no surprises with men like him, who were akin to steel girders, neither bending nor breaking, thinking themselves invincible.

Arsov shrugged as he swaggered around the living room, picking up a statuette here, a framed photo there, studying them with blank eyes. He returned them in deliberately haphazard fashion, a silent warning to Dyadya Gourdjiev that Arsov had the power to turn his world upside down. “No matter. I’ve come for Annika. Where is she?”

“In the back of beyond,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. “Far away from your clutches, I expect.”

“And of course you helped send her there.” Arsov paused in his perambulation and grinned with teeth that were preternaturally long, wicked as a wolf’s. “Wherever there is.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

Arsov leered. His breath was sour from vodka, cheap cigarettes, and a stomach that could tolerate neither. “I don’t believe you.”

“I can’t help that.”

Arsov’s head flicked only slightly, but his muscle cocked the hammer on the Makarov

“That’s not a good idea.” Dyadya Gourdjiev held his ground like the front line against a putsch.

Arsov beckoned his man with a wave of his hand that was almost perfunctory, or negligent, as if the life or death of Dyadya Gourdjiev was of little moment. “I’ll decide whether it’s a good idea or not, old man.”

“He’s right, Arsov, it’s not a good idea.” The man who spoke had emerged from the kitchen as silently as an angel, or a demon. He was wide shouldered and slim hipped. With his wire-rimmed glasses he looked like a professor, or perhaps an accountant. And yet there was something in him that made the observer wary, set him back on his heels, as if struck by a sudden fistful of air. A discernable chill invaded the room, as if the man had sucked the oxygen out of it.

Arsov’s eyebrows arched in hateful surprise. “I had no idea you might be here.”

Oriel Jovovich Batchuk spread his hands. “And yet, here I am.” His basilisk gaze alighted on the muscle. “Put that idiotic thing away before you hurt yourself.”

The man, mumbling something, looked to his boss for guidance.

“What’s that?” Batchuk said.

“I said I don’t take orders from you.”

Everything happened at once then. The muscle lifted the Makarov, Arsov started to speak, and Batchuk raised his left arm as if he were about to direct traffic, or hail a friend on the street. Something small launched out of the space between his sleeve and his wrist, blurred through the air, and buried itself in the center of the muscle’s throat. The man dropped the pistol, clutching at his throat with his trembling fingers. He gasped, his lips took on a distinctly bluish tint. A white froth foamed out his half-open mouth as he collapsed in a heap.

“Who do you take orders from now?” Batchuk said with contempt rather than irony. Then he turned his attention back to Arsov, smiling without revealing a single iota of emotion. “Now, Arsov, what were you saying?”

“I have a legitimate grievance,” Arsov said, his gaze magnetized by his own man, now nothing more than flesh poisoned by a dart coated with hydrocyanic acid. “Annika Dementieva must pay for the murder she committed.”

“You leave Annika to me.”

Arsov’s eyes at last engaged Batchuk’s. “You yourself guaranteed me complete noninterference.”

“I said I will deal with the matter.” The deputy prime minister cleared his throat. “There will be no more interference in Izmaylovskaya business.”

Arsov nodded. As he was about to step over his fallen bodyguard, Batchuk said, “You brought it in, you take it out.”

Grunting, the mob boss dragged the corpse to the front door and opened it. As he was about to drag him over the threshold, Batchuk added, “A grievance doesn’t excuse vulgarity. You’re in society now, Arsov, you’d do well to remember that.”

The door slammed behind the two men and, in three strides, Batchuk crossed the room, locked the door, and turned back to his host.

“The vermin that comes in off the street these days.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Perhaps I should send an exterminator over for a week or so.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Oriel Jovovich.” Dyadya Gourdjiev returned to the kitchen to continue preparing the coffee.

“Still,” the deputy prime minister said as he leaned against the doorway, “it might be prudent.”

“I’d really prefer not.” Dyadya Gourdjiev set the coffeepot on the fire ring, took down two glasses as large as beer steins. “You’ll do what you want, in any event.”

“It’s a deputy prime minister’s prerogative.”

“I’m talking about long before you rose to that position.” Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to face Batchuk. “I’m talking about the young man I knew, the young man who—”

“Stop! Not another word!” Batchuk raised a hand, a singularly violent gesture that might have been directed as much at himself as at the older man.

Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled, much as a father might at a mischievous child. “It does my heart good to know that all the feelings haven’t been squeezed out of you by Yukin and his murderous kind.”

Batchuk waited until the steaming glass of coffee was in his hand and he had sipped it graciously. “You knew these people were going to come, didn’t you?”

“I knew it was a possibility, yes.” Dyadya Gourdjiev took his coffee, padded back into the living room, and made himself comfortable in his favorite chair.

After spooning in sugar, Batchuk followed him, stirring the coffee with a tiny silver spoon. He remained standing for some time, as if to remind Dyadya Gourdjiev of his superior status. Apparently he thought better of the stance, because he did not continue the conversation until he had settled on the sofa obliquely across from the older man.

“Do you know why Arsov is interested in your daughter?”

For just an instant Dyadya Gourdjiev looked startled, fearful even. Then he gathered himself. “No, and I’m not interested.”

“You trust her too much.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev did not respond. He wondered whether this statement was an admonition or an admission of envy. It could be either, or both, he decided. Batchuk was impossible to read, he’d proved that many times over. Dyadya Gourdjiev was reminded of a video he’d seen of an elephant safari in Rajasthan, in northwest India. Nothing but a sea of tall grass could be seen in front of the people on the elephant, until, with the quickness of a heartbeat, a tiger appeared. It ran directly toward the elephant and, in an astonishing attack, leapt onto the head of the elephant and severely mauled the mahout. Tigers aren’t supposed to attack elephants, but unlike other big cats tigers are as unpredictable as they are deadly. In Dyadya Gourdjiev’s mind Batchuk was aligned with this tiger.

“Oriel Jovovich, please. Trust is an absolute, either you trust someone or you don’t. There’s no halfway position.”

Batchuk, sipping his coffee, appeared to mull this over. “I don’t trust anyone, why should I? People make an industry out of lying to me. Sometimes I feel as if there’s a cash prize awarded to anyone who can put something over on me.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev knew this was absurd, but he also knew that this was the only place for Batchuk to safely blow off steam while someone listened. This spoke directly to the matter of trust, which, in Russia these days, was uppermost on every silovik’s mind.

“Every day, it seems, there are new people joining the applicant’s pool for the cash prize.” Batchuk made a face. “And, you know, it’s impossible to kill them all, or at the very least, put their balls to the fire.”

“Yet another industry underwritten by the Kremlin.”

At this, Batchuk laughed. Actually he smiled, which, for him, was more or less the same thing. “Time hasn’t dulled the edge of your sword. Your daughter doubtless gets her smart mouth from you.”

“I was happy to give her whatever I could.”

On the face of it, this was a simple, declarative statement, and yet with these two men nothing was simple, everything possessed layers of meaning that struck at the very core of their friendship, if their relationship could be called friendship. It was at once less and much more; there was, perhaps, no word adequate for what they meant to one another, or how entwined their pasts were. Several months ago, Annika had used a word, perhaps it was American slang, or possibly English, that had stuck in Dyadya Gourdjiev’s mind. In speaking about an associate of hers she had said, “what we really are is frenemies.” She’d supplied the explanation when he’d asked for it: The word was a contraction of the phrase “friendly enemies,” though she admitted that the actual relationship was far more complex than that, that this was the norm for frenemies.

Were he and Batchuk frenemies? He shrugged mentally. What did it matter? Why was there always a human desire to put a name to everything, to neatly sort, catalogue, pigeonhole even things like relationships that by their very nature were so complex they defied classification? They liked one other, admired one other, even trusted one another, but there would always be friction between them, always a bitterness and, on Dyadya Gourdjiev’s part, a profound disappointment whose origin could not be erased or forgiven. And yet here they were like two old friends who confided secrets to one another they’d never reveal to anyone else. It was their shared secrets, their shame, envy, and dispassion, that bound them tighter than father and son, than brothers. There was bad blood between them, but there was also love—curious, mystifying, impossible in any creature other than a human being.

“There you can’t be faulted,” Batchuk said with a tone that implied that there were other matters for which he still held Dyadya Gourdjiev liable.

Finishing off his coffee, Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled as if with secret knowledge, an expression that infuriated Batchuk and also put him in his place. “Now you must tell me why you’ve come here. I need some facts to offset the armada of innuendo you’ve been launching.”

Setting aside his cup, Batchuk rose and walked to stand in the entryway. He stood for a moment, hands in his pockets, frowning as he stared down at the smear of blood Arsov had left behind.

“Kaolin Arsov is no one to count as an enemy,” he said, as if speaking to the polished tips of his expensive English shoes. “To have the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka aligned against you is to court disaster.”

“This is Trinadtsat-speak.” Dyadya Gourdjiev shook his woolly head. “To think it comes to this. Warnings of this nature would never have been necessary even two years ago.”

“This is a new world, it’s being remade every day,” Batchuk said. “If you don’t have a spade in your hand then get out of the way.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to confront the younger man. “Trinadtsat is your doing, I warned you that it would be your undoing. Crawling into bed with the grupperovka was a grave mistake—”

“It couldn’t be helped,” Batchuk interjected.

“—and now, as you yourself have discovered, it can’t be undone. You’d have to exterminate the Izmaylovskaya, and even Yukin doesn’t have the stomach for that.”

“Circumstances had come to a head, they demanded to be dealt with by the harshest possible measures.”

“And now you have your wish.”

Batchuk sighed and looked back at Dyadya Gourdjiev as he covered the smear of blood with the heel of one shoe. “The truth is I face reality every minute of every day. The truth is the grupperovka—most notably the Izmaylovskaya—have both the power and the access to avenues crucial to the success of Trinadtsat.” He lifted a finger. “And make no mistake, Yukin needs Trinadtsat to succeed. His entire vision for Russia’s future rides on it.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev scrutinized him now because he knew they were coming to the crux of the visit. Oriel Jovovich Batchuk was a long way from the Kremlin; he hadn’t come all this way to simply vent his frustrations, or to seek advice. Not this time, anyway.

Batchuk took a step forward and put his hand on the doorknob. Looking back over his broad shoulder he said, “It’s your daughter.”

“Yes, of course, it always comes back to Annika, doesn’t it? And do you know why? People want to see what’s best for them, not what actually exists. You do nothing but pretend, to yourself as well as to me. You try to reshape events in the past to suit yourself when we both know very well that what happened—the terrible events that must never be mentioned—is immutable, it can’t be changed and, therefore, expunged, no matter how hard or in which ways you try.”

Batchuk’s eyes glittered; no one else on earth would dare speak to him that way. When he was certain Dyadya Gourdjiev was finished, he continued his own thought to prove to the old man how little he thought of what he’d said. “She’s like a spanner in the works. I don’t know what she’s been up to—I suspect you don’t, either, not that it matters, I know you wouldn’t tell me even if you did. But I know she’s not stupid enough to tell you.”

“She’s not stupid at all,” Dyadya Gourdjiev felt compelled to say. “On the contrary.”

“Yes, on the contrary.” Batchuk opened the door, the empty hallway looming in front of him. There was a smear of blood there, too, too large for him to cover with his heel, or even his entire shoe. “And that, essentially, is the problem. She’s too smart for your own good.”

“My own good?” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, reacting to the warning.

“Yes,” Batchuk acknowledged as he stepped into the echoey hallway. “And hers.”

16

Jack awoke with the scent of Annika on him, and it was as if he were in another world, as if he’d eaten a bowl of peaches last night and now smelled of them. Nevertheless, opening his eyes, he immediately felt a kind of remorse. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself, because he had, immensely; what occurred to him were the consequences, because experience had taught him that there were always consequences from having sex with another human being, no matter what your partner claimed at the time. If you had any emotions they were bound to be stirred by intimacy of any sort. He’d known plenty of guys who hadn’t cared who they’d slept with—to a man they were either in loveless marriages or divorced. In any case, they still inhabited the same bars where, back in the day, they’d always scored. Now, however, they felt old, isolated from the feverish pace of a dating scene they no longer belonged to, or even understood.

Next to him, Annika was still asleep, her cruel scars rising and falling with her slow breathing. She turned, then, her head still burrowed in the pillow, facing him. For a moment, he did nothing but watch her, as if, in her sleep, she would tell him something about herself. But she remained resolutely a mystery, as, in fact, all women were mysteries, and he wondered now whether he knew her any better than he knew Sharon. On the face of it, an absurd notion, equating a woman he’d just met with the woman he had lived with for twenty-three years. But the truth was staring at him with Annika’s quiescent face, which held no expression, or perhaps just the hint of a smile, as if her dream were more real to her than the world around her, than Jack himself. It made him wonder whether it was possible for one person to know another. Weren’t there always surprises, like layers of an onion being peeled away only to reveal another person, one we scarcely knew, or had for years tried our best not to understand, preferring a manufactured reality that reflected the things we required?

This was what he’d done with Sharon, and now that the reality he’d manufactured had cracked and crumbled away he knew Emma was right: they’d never had a chance. And yet, in retrospect it was heartbreaking to see how one misstep had led to another, and another, and so on, small accretions of mistakes that had become a life less lived. It seemed odd to him, even ludicrous that he had once held her in his arms, that they had whispered intimacies to one another, that they could have said “I love you,” in any conceivable setting. That time had collapsed in on itself; it was the opposite of when you walked into a house you used to live in or a room you’d once known like the back of your hand and nothing had changed. Now that house, that room, that woman were all changed, unfamiliar to him, as if observed in another man’s life. He closed his eyes for a moment, wanting to completely uproot all the acrid memories and stark revelations cropping up in his mind like weeds after a soaking rain.

Lifting the covers, he rolled out of bed carefully enough not to wake her. Slipping into clothes, he opened the door and padded into the living room, where Alli, already awake, sat curled on the end of the chocolate velvet sofa directly beneath the mandala. She held a mug half filled with hot tea, which she handed to him as he sat down beside her.

“Have fun?” she said as he took a sip.

Jack tried to assess her tone. Was she disapproving, pissed, being ironic, or trying for casually adult? He came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Sitting beside her made him realize how foolish his brief stab of fear had been; he’d never be like those former acquaintances of his, not as long as he had Alli. “She’s yours, Jack, for better or for worse,” Annika had said last night.

“Did you?” he said at length.

She took back the mug of tea he offered her. “I didn’t even have to put my ear to the wall.” When he looked over at her, she added mischievously, “I heard everything.”

His face drained of blood. “I’m sorry you heard anything.”

“I didn’t.” She laughed. “But now I know what the two of you did.” Leaning over, she sniffed him. “Besides, you smell like a rutting animal.”

“Charming.”

She shrugged, utterly unconcerned. “Hey, we’re all animals when you come right down to it.”

“So you don’t disapprove?”

“Would you care?”

He considered for only an instant. “Yes, I think I would.”

She looked surprised, or perhaps a better word would be amused. “Thank you.”

Jack took the tea back from her. He was feeling both the warmth and the caffeine.

Watching him sip what was left of the tea, she said, “Now I want to hear all about the visit from Emma.”

Alli was the only one who believed that Emma had returned, or hadn’t actually gone away, he’d given up trying to figure out which. It was a relief being able to confide this aspect of his life, which was both eerie and joyous.

“And then you’ll tell me everything, right?”

Her face screwed up in a quizzical look. “About what?”

“You know about what, about what happened to you when you were with Morgan Herr.”

With the mention of her abductor’s name her expression changed subtly. Perhaps he was the only one who would have noticed, and a wave of regret washed over him, because the last thing he wanted was to alienate her. But he was trusting Annika now, trusting what she had said to him last night: “She wants to tell you.”

Alli cocked her head to one side, a bad sign, he knew. “Are you proposing a quid pro quo?”

“I’m asking—”

“Like a politician? Is that what you are now?”

“Forget it.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t want to know.”

“Why not?” Her voice changed suddenly, grown deeper and darker, as if with an adult’s disappointments and loss. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“It’s too late, it’s over, there’s nothing in the past except tears.” The little sound she made caused him to look over, to see that she was crying, the tears overflowing her lids and rolling down her cheeks.

“Don’t take her away from me, I already miss her too much.”

“I’m not taking anything away from you,” he said as he gathered her into his arms, “least of all Emma.”

But it wasn’t just Emma she meant, he was certain of that, she was also saying, Don’t take away my chance to tell you. And now he knew for a certainty that Annika had been right. So he recounted word for word—a quirk of his dyslexic brain—his conversation with Emma last night, and when he was finished, she said: “Is it true what she said about you and Sharon?”

He nodded. “We were just fooling ourselves. There’s nothing left, because there was nothing to begin with, nothing but sex.”

“‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,’” Alli said, quoting Yeats, one of the poets she’d learned to love from Emma. “Emma always said everything that’s born holds the seeds of its own destruction.”

And Jack thought again of dissolution, of how being an Outsider, of hiding in the shadows, observing without yourself being observed, was its own form of dissolution long before the advent of death.

“Did Emma say that or did Morgan Herr?”

“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Alli said, pulling away, “but they both did.”

Jack felt a shiver run through him, as if Herr had somehow managed to walk over his grave. “Did Emma get her philosophy from him?”

Alli shook her head. “No, but on some level they were both nihilists. I don’t think Emma ever saw the point in life, and I know he didn’t.”

“He said that to you?”

“Not in so many words.” Her eyes could not meet his. “He didn’t have to.”

“I’ll make us more tea,” he said gently.

“No. Stay here, don’t leave me.”

He settled back into the sofa cushions. It was getting toward nine; he knew they needed to get moving because the longer they stayed in Kiev the colder Magnussen’s trail would become. On the other hand, he was reluctant to make a move that would break the tenuous strand to Alli’s past she had begun to spin. Besides, with her wounded arm, Annika could use all the sleep she could get.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

She smiled at him, but it was thin and brittle enough to put him on edge. What could be coming? he wondered. What had she been bottling up inside her since her abduction?

“Emma knew him way before I did.”

Jack knew this, just as he knew she was speaking of Morgan Herr, whose name she couldn’t bear to say.

“Emma saw something in him—she never told me what—but I imagine they sat around and talked about how things were falling apart, how the center couldn’t hold, how chaos ruled everyone and everything.”

Jack wanted to interject a comment, but he bit his lip instead, trying to warm his abruptly chilled extremities.

“He was charismatic, girls especially were drawn to him—as you know. But with Emma it was different. She wasn’t sucked into his orbit, she never adored him or was fooled by his charming exterior. She knew what he was; in fact, I’m convinced now that was why she spent time with him. He was an Outsider on a level it would never occur to her to go. Emma would never harm another human being, but I think she wanted to know why he would.”

Jack was listening very carefully, even though Alli was talking about his daughter and not about herself. Or was she? He knew that whatever had happened to her during the week she had been under Morgan Herr’s control had had a profound effect on her, possibly even changed her, perhaps forever. Whatever this thing was she had been struggling with it for months, trying to understand it, or to see it for what it really was.

“I … I never told you the truth, during that time before the inauguration.” Alli stared at her hands. “He told me not to.”

Jack couldn’t help himself now. “Of course he told you not to, that was part of the brainwashing.”

She shook her head, slowly but firmly. “It wasn’t only the brainwashing—I mean I don’t remember that part. I wanted to do what he told me to do. I wanted to carry the anthrax, I wanted to hurt all those people. I hated my parents so much for all the years they didn’t—”

She broke down abruptly and Jack took her to him again, feeling her body wracked with sobs.

“I was weak. Emma would never have been so stupid to do what he wanted—she knew that beneath the charismatic exterior he was the worst kind of monster. I knew nothing, he hooked me when he got inside my head, he knew all the strings to pull, all the buttons to push. He knew where I was weak, which was easy, because, unlike Emma, I had no strength anywhere inside me, and he knew that, too.” Her sobbing had taken on epic proportions. “How do you fight someone who knows you better than you know yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said gently. “I don’t think anyone—”

“Oh, but Emma could, and that’s the point. I’m a product of privilege, there isn’t anything I wanted that my parents didn’t get me—every piece of crap, no matter how expensive. And what did that do? It made me soft—that’s what he said to me, ‘You’re soft as the underbelly of a sow, you wallow in money, prestige, privilege, and what have you to show for it? You make me sick to my stomach, but you can change that, you can become tough as nails, hard as a rock if you set your mind to it. Like your best friend, like Emma.’”

She clutched at him as if he were a lifeline, as if he were the only resource she had to keep her from drowning in the deep sea of her emotions. “And I wanted to be like Emma so, so much. He knew that, just like he knew everything else about me. He knew how much I envied Emma, he knew that even though I loved her I was jealous of what she had—not money, not prestige, not privilege, those were all as phony, as ineffectual as I was. She was tough, she was hard, she could be anything she wanted to be, and it all came from inside herself. She was everything I ever dreamed of being, and I was nothing, nothing at all.”

“What’s going on here?”

Jack held Alli tighter as if needing to protect her from Annika’s question. “Nothing,” he said. “She’s out here in the back of beyond, she’s just homesick, that’s all.”

“That’s all?”

He heard the skepticism in her voice and he said more harshly than he had perhaps intended, “That’s enough—more than enough.”

“Of course it is.”

Annika turned and went down the hall into the bathroom. Through the closed door he could just barely hear the sound of running water over Alli’s slowly weakening sobs.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.”

“That’s what I want. You don’t know …”

But he did know, because it was what he wanted, too. Emma’s death had been a nightmare, and then Alli’s abduction, a nightmare for everyone. Where was it going to end, when was it going to end? If everything was moving toward dissolution why wasn’t it ending, why were both he and Alli still suffering so?

With a conscious effort, he pushed her away from him, held her at arm’s length until he willed her to look at him. “You’ve got to stop torturing yourself, that’s only your guilt talking. You’re brave and smart and resourceful. Maybe Emma was the catalyst, but those things came from inside you, they’re nobody else’s, they’re yours.”

Alli’s eyes, still enlarged with tears, locked onto his, and a wan smile crossed her face. “Guilt isn’t all that binds us, is it, Jack? I’d hate to think—”

“It’s not,” he said. “Of course it’s not.”

“That’s what Annika thinks, I’m sure of it.”

“Does that bother you?”

She tried to laugh, wiping away the tracks of her tears. “I wish it didn’t.”

“She’s the psycho-bitch, remember?”

Now Alli did laugh. “She isn’t, you know she isn’t.”

Jack was somewhat surprised. “What changed your mind?”

“I don’t know, I—”

“Enough crying, for pity’s sake!” For the second time, Annika interrupted them. She had emerged from the bathroom, her head to one side, drying her hair with a towel. “With that flood of misery anyone would think you’re Russian. Come on, what are we waiting for?”

Both Jack and Alli jumped up as if they were stung. As Alli passed Annika on the way to the bathroom, Jack said, “We need to get to Alushta. Driving will be the safest way.”

“Also the slowest.” She threw her damp towel onto the sofa cushion where Alli had been sitting and, before her, Emma. She watched to see if he would protest, or even comment. When he didn’t, she continued. “It will take us too long to get to the coast by car. Besides, there are regular roadblocks between here and the Crimean peninsula to catch contraband. Thankfully we have your private jet.”

“It’s not my private jet,” Jack said, “but I take your point.”

While Alli padded by him to get dressed he pulled out his cell phone and punched in the pilot’s number.

“Give me forty minutes and we’ll be ready to go,” the pilot said, “but I need to log a flight plan. Where are we going?”

“To the airport nearest Alushta,” Jack told him, “in the Crimea, on the Black Sea coast.”

“I’ll get right on it,” the pilot said, and disconnected.

Forty minutes later the three of them arrived at Zhulyany Airport.

“Simferopol North Airport.”

“Where?” Kirilenko pressed the cell phone to his ear so hard the cartilage ached. “Where the hell is that?”

“Crimea.” His assistant’s voice came through the ether hard, abrupt, and ominous, like a nail punched through a tin can. “She showed up on the Zhulyany Airport CCTV as she passed through into the VIP terminal.”

“The VIP terminal?” Kirilenko, driving back to Kiev from the wild-goose chase in Brovary, was trying to process information that was coming at him too quickly. “First, tell me, was Annika Dementieva alone?”

“She was with a man and girl,” his assistant said.

Kirilenko pulled out Limonev’s cell phone and looked again at the low-resolution photo of the people caught emerging from Rochev’s dacha. In his mind’s eye he saw again the three sets of footprints in the woods: the man’s, the woman’s—and the girl’s. Yes, yes, he thought excitedly, he was onto something here. “Did you get photos of them from the CCTV images?”

“Of course. They’re on your desk.”

“Tell me you discovered why Annika Dementieva and her friends were in the VIP terminal.”

“I have the information right here.” There came the sound of shuffling papers. “They boarded a private jet that’s on its way to, as I said, Simferopol.”

Kirilenko scowled. Something was not adding up here. “Since when does a fugitive have access to a private jet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, dammit, bloody well find out!”

“I already tried,” his assistant said. “But the jet is American, under full diplomatic protection. I can’t find out a thing about it, except its next destination, which, if you have the right contacts, is public knowledge.”

His assistant was of course trying to recoup points he’d lost with his boss, but Kirilenko scarcely noticed. He’d broken out into a cold sweat. This must be Harry Martin’s doing, he thought, panic-stricken. That sonuvabitch has been playing me, he’s known all along about Annika’s ties to Karl Rochev, or at least suspected them. As soon as I brought him to Rochev’s dacha he must have known. That was why he sent me to that absurd town, Brovary, while he returned at once to Kiev. It was a ruse to keep me occupied while he reeled Annika in like a fish. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes. Christ, he thought, what are the Americans up to?

Such was the turmoil of his mind that he almost missed what his assistant said next: “As I said, Simferopol North Airport is in the Crimea, approximately midway between Balaklava and Alushta.”

His initial panic turned to outrage at being manipulated by the Americans—of all people!—and then to rage at Henry Martin in particular. In so doing he managed to gather himself. If that was how Martin was going to play it, he told himself grimly, then that’s how it would be played all around.

“I’m only twenty minutes away from Kiev,” Kirilenko said, heading directly for the airport. “I want to be on the next flight out from Zhulyany to Simferopol North.”

“Two seats, I assume, one for you and one for Harry Martin,” his assistant said.

“One seat.” Kirilenko put on speed. “If Martin asks, I’m still in Brovary, my nose to the grindstone. And if word of where I’ve gone should leak to the Americans I will personally shoot you in the back of the head.”

17

Harry Martin, hanging on the phone in the middle of a bustling Kiev street, didn’t like his job—in point of fact he loathed it with a seething, poisonous intent. The truth was he was sick to death of all the double-dealing, disinformation, obfuscation, and outright lies that came so easily to him. And that, of course, was what he despised most of all—that all the artifice was second nature to him now, ingrained like the whorls of his fingerprints or the pattern of his DNA. He simply did not know any other way to live, if this was living at all, which he’d begun to seriously doubt. And therein lay the rub, as the good Bard wrote, he thought, because the only thing to fear was doubt. He knew from his mentors that the moment you allowed doubt to creep into your thinking—doubt about your ability, about the people around you, about the dark and gravelike profession you were in—you were as good as dead. It was time to get out while you were still on your own two legs, rather than lying in a coffin stiff as a log. Doubt made you hesitate, doubt clouded your judgement and, worse, dulled your instincts, because, really, when you came down to it, your instincts were all that kept you alive. Instincts and, to an extent, experience.

Feeling as apart from those around him as the shadows on the building facades, he listened while the electronic connections were made, one by one, like the tumblers of a lock or a safe falling into place. He knew his call was being routed and rerouted through a complex network. This was how his boss liked his security; this was how it was done, no questions were ever asked by anyone within the system, least of all Martin himself.

Doubt felled few of his kind, however. More often, if it wasn’t a bullet or old age, years of stress delivered the knockout blow via a dyspeptic stomach, ulcers, or worst of all, irritable bowel syndrome. Nothing, he thought, would take you out of the field faster than having to hug the porcelain horse unexpectedly and in debilitating succession. Martin had developed none of these symptoms. Not that he didn’t feel the stress; it worked its corrosive magic on even the most inhuman of agents. But he relieved the stress by being angry; the more stress he felt the angrier he got. Anger kept him sharp, kept him close to his instincts. Even more important, it kept doubt at bay.

“Yes?”

At last his master’s voice entered his ear via his cell phone. “Can you talk?”

“What do you have for me?” General Atcheson Brandt, said.

“There’s another faction in the field,” Martin said.

“What, precisely, do you mean?”

Martin could feel in those words the General coming to full attention, as if he were a pointer who’d smelled blood. “Someone else was at Rochev’s dacha—someone who belongs neither to Kirilenko nor to the SBU.”

“I trust you can be more specific,” Brandt said with all the considerable asperity at his disposal.

Martin began walking, more to dispel nervous energy than toward any specific destination. His lack of success in finding Annika Dementieva was going to be last on his discussion list with the General.

“There was a sharpshooter hidden in the woods,” Martin said. “He took a shot at one of the people who were in the dacha—” He stopped right there, knowing he’d made a mistake.

“You let them get away?” Brandt’s voice was like a rumble of thunder heading Martin’s way at tremendous speed. “How did that happen?”

At this very instant Martin hated his job with a malevolence that set his heart palpitating. “There was a fire, confusion, everything collapsed into chaos, and when we—”

“Most convenient, that fire, wouldn’t you say? Most clever.”

Martin, leaning wearily against the plate-glass window of a men’s clothing store, found himself staring at an Italian cashmere sweater he yearned for but couldn’t afford. He needed to slow his heart rate, to learn not to hate so much, but it was too late, the venom was in his blood, in the very marrow of his bones.

“Yes, sir. They used the fire to escape.”

“They, you keep saying ‘they.’” Brandt’s voice buzzed in his ear like a trapped wasp. “Who, precisely, are ‘they’? Besides Annika Dementieva, of course.”

That was the crux of the issue, Martin thought sourly—he didn’t know and, worse, he couldn’t tell the General that he didn’t know. It was clear that he had to change the subject, go on the offensive, take the pressure off himself, deflect the General’s questions by raising others the General needed to answer.

“I hope to God you haven’t been keeping anything from me—”

“Keeping what?” the General said. “What are you talking about?”

“—because out here in the field where tough decisions, terrible decisions, life-and-death decisions have to be made in an instant, not knowing the complete playing field could prove fatal.”

“Listen—”

“If you know anything—anything at all—about this other faction, who, it must be assumed, are after the same thing you are, then I need to know about it now, not tomorrow, not later.”

“I don’t cotton to being interrupted.”

The General’s voice was like a fistful of fury, and Martin knew it was fortunate that he wasn’t in the same room with his boss. There was a story about Brandt: As a senior in the Academy he threw a rival out a second-floor window, breaking his leg. Anyone else would have been summarily expelled, but Brandt was so brilliant, his family so well connected, that no disciplinary action was taken nor was there a civil suit filed. Though the story might very well be apocryphal it nevertheless served the General well, having lent him a mythical sheen all through his career.

“It goes without saying that if I knew anything about a rival faction in the field I’d let you know,” the General said, filling the awful void that had sprung up between them. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’ll tell you one thing: I sure as hell am going to find out.”

While staring at the cashmere sweater with its V-neck, double stitching, and magnificent silky texture, he discovered that he didn’t believe the General, not for a minute. On the contrary, he knew in his bones, in their very venom-riddled marrow, that the General was lying through his teeth. Of course he knew about “another faction,” he’d known from the beginning of this wretched assignment. And at that precise moment Martin suspected this mission would be the death of him. Worse—far worse, as far as he was concerned—he finally understood, with a godforsaken clarity, the underlying reason why he loathed his job with a seething, poisonous intent. The General was like Harry Martin’s father, so much so, in fact, that he now couldn’t for the life of him understand why he hadn’t seen it before.

“In that regard,” the General carried on, “your instructions vis-à-vis Annika Dementieva are hereby changed. Finding her and taking her into custody will no longer suffice. I want her terminated ASAP.”

Leaning with his forehead against the cool plate-glass window, he closed the phone and at the same time thought, It’s that damn cashmere sweater. It reminded him so much of the one his father used to wear around the house, swapping his suit jacket for the sweater, but never taking off his tie, not at dinner, not afterward. Martin remembered wondering whether his father slept in his tie, except the next morning he’d emerge from the marital bedroom in a crisp white or blue shirt with a different tie knotted perfectly at his Adam’s apple.

I want that cashmere sweater because it was my father’s, Martin thought now. He turned away from the shop window display, lurched over to the gutter and, bending over the gap between two parked cars, vomited up his breakfast. He hadn’t done that since he was fifteen and, sneaking home after curfew, had encountered his father in the light-less foyer, who had struck him so hard across the face his outsized knuckles had drawn blood from his son’s nose and cheek. Turning on his heel, the old man had climbed the stairs and closed the door to his bedroom without uttering a single word.

Martin had raised himself to his knees and, without thinking, spent the next twenty minutes wiping his blood and vomit off the wooden floor, scrubbing and polishing the boards until they shined even through the darkness. With each tread he climbed, his dread at encountering his father again mounted until, as he reached the second-floor landing, his hands were shaking and his knees refused to carry him any further. He collapsed there, rolling onto his side, curled up like an injured caterpillar, and eventually fell into a sleep made fitful by images of himself running from a pack of grinning dog-faced boys in military uniforms.

Standing abruptly erect Martin staggered away from the scene of his unspeakable humiliation and sought refuge in a tea shop down the block, where he slid onto a chair by the window and stared bleakly at the hurrying masses of bundled, red-faced Ukrainians. What his mind saw, though, was the General, or rather his father—now they were murderously interchangeable. He thought when he’d buried his father that would be the end of his misery, his suffering, his neediness, but no, he had chosen a job, or perhaps it had chosen him, that mimicked the relationship he had found both intolerable and indispensable. What was he now in middle age, he asked himself, but the same adolescent whom he’d despised for so desperately needing the approval of a man he loathed. How does the human mind do it? he wondered. How can it thrive on antithetical, antagonistic, diametrically opposed absolutes?

And then, his mind still unable to let go of that cashmere sweater, he began to think of Sherrie because—and this was the really strange part—in the wintertime she had liked to walk around the apartment in an oversized man’s V-neck cashmere sweater. Just the sweater and nothing else, her long, pale legs emerging from the bottom, and when she turned around, a glimpse of the bottom of her lush buttocks. She liked to tease him that way, a behavior that must have been a form of revenge, because one evening when he returned from overseas—Munich or perhaps Istanbul, he couldn’t remember which— she was gone: Sherrie, her suitcase, and her cashmere sweater; the drawers in the bedroom, the shelf in the bathroom, the half of his closet he’d ceded to her empty. The smell of her lingered like a last cigarette, but only for a day or so. By that time he’d called her more than a dozen times, had gone by her apartment at night, like a stalker, looking for lights, for her silhouette against the drawn Roman shades. Nothing moved, nothing remained, and eventually he forgot her.

But he hadn’t forgotten her, because here she was now, or at least the memory of her, as he stared bleakly out into the crowded Kiev street, haunting him as if she had just left him moments before, or yesterday, instead of three years ago. He wished she were here now, though what he’d say to her he had no idea. Not that it mattered; he was alone. There was no Sherrie, or any of the girls before or after her, whose faces folded into each other along with their names. They were all gone, they’d never actually been there, he hadn’t let them.

The waitress took his order, returning almost immediately with a small pitcher of cream and miniature bowls of sugar and honey. She smiled at him but he didn’t return it.

His eyes were red-rimmed with bloodlust, his heart a blackened cinder beyond any hope of repair or remediation. He wanted neither; he wanted only to kill someone, to steep his hands in blood, Annika Dementieva’s blood.

“Yukin is going to want tangible concessions,” General Brandt said as he and President Carson landed in Sheremetyevo airport. “That’s how it works here, they’re Russians, talk means nothing—less than nothing. People say things here—Yukin among them—they don’t mean. The air needs to be filled with buzzing, any form of buzzing will do, in fact, the less truthful the better.”

“I know all this,” Edward Carson said. “Lies obfuscate, and as far as the Russians are concerned, the more obfuscation the better.” He wore a neat charcoal suit with a red tie and an enamel pin of the American flag affixed to his lapel. Brandt, on the other hand, had decided to come to Russia in his military uniform, complete with his chestful of medals. Uniforms impressed the Russians, they always had. They were like the worst bullies on the block, lashing out with strained aggression to compensate for their insecurities. They knew better than anyone that the Western powers viewed them as semicivilized, as if they were apes pretending to be human beings.

Having slowed to nominal ground speed, Air Force One turned off the runway and began the long slow taxiing to the VIP terminal.

“We have prioritized the concessions we’ve put into the final draft of the accord,” Carson continued, “chief among them the revision of our missile defense deployments around Russia.”

“The conservatives are going to scream about that one,” the General said.

“They forfeited the right to complain when they fucked things six ways from Sunday when they were in power,” the president said. “Besides, General, you and I both know the technology for the missile defense system is still not in place. If we had to implement it today or next week or even six months from now it would be a joke.”

“It’s real enough to President Yukin.”

“Because it surrounds Russia like a noose.”

The General nodded. “I’ve gone on record on both ABC and CNN that our proposed MDS is the main reason for Yukin’s recent aggression into Georgia.”

Carson lifted a finger. “One thing I need to make clear. Yukin can’t expect unilateral support from us, I’m not coming to him on bended knee.”

“Absolutely not. That would give him an advantage he’d never relinquish. But that can’t happen now, because he wants something from us only we can give him.”

“I hope to God you’re right, General. Everything depends on this security accord being signed.”

Brandt sat back, never more sure of the plan he’d outlined to the president days after his taking over the Oval Office. It was crucial, he’d argued, to enlist Russia in the crusade to keep nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands. They knew through intelligence and back-channel diplomatic sources precisely what missile parts Russia was selling to Iran. Nothing the previous administration had done had had any effect on Yukin’s business dealings with Iran, a result Brandt had predicted with unerring accuracy. Carson was different, however; he’d listened to reason, had agreed when Brandt had outlined an alternative method of weaning Yukin away from the dangerous Iranian teat.

If the diplomatic rapprochement was the foundation method, then the security accord was the cornerstone to its success. Which was why Brandt was replaying in his mind the disturbing phone call from Harry Martin. Of course he knew about the other faction in the field—that was the whole point of Martin’s mission to intercept Annika Dementieva. Annika was the key to everything. That Martin had not yet been able to find her was unsettling enough, but the fact that he had now gotten wind of the other faction meant that it was far more advanced in its plans than he knew about or had been led to believe. One of two conclusions could be drawn from this: Either the other faction had suddenly gained in power or the sources he’d been relying on had underestimated it. Neither possibility was a happy thought, especially with the accord signing imminent.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and standing up. “I need to make a call.”

Going forward down the wide aisle, he punched in a number that was too secret to keep either on his speed dial or in the cell’s phone book. It was a number he’d committed to memory the moment it had been given to him.

As the connection was going through he reflected on just how much he hated dealing with the Russians. To a man, they were a treacherous lot, the long shadow of Josef Stalin stretching into the present. They were all Stalin’s students, the General thought, whether or not they were aware of it. His viperous double- and triple-dealing became the political template—not to mention the KGB’s modus operandi—set in the kind of monumental stone it was impossible to undermine, let alone destroy.

Brandt himself had become a secret student of Stalin’s, of his history of blood, broken bones, and broken promises, in order to prepare himself for taking on the Soviet Bear. The dissolution of the USSR hadn’t fooled him the way it had others. Russia’s power might have been broken, but he knew it to be temporary; its flinty spine, fortified by Uncle Joe’s vampiric shadow, was still very much intact.

“I have three minutes.”

The voice in Brandt’s ear caused him to bristle inwardly, but he swallowed his outrage because he knew that, in fact, he only had three minutes. “My man in the field has just informed me that the opposition is gaining ground.”

“Even if that’s the case,” Oriel Jovovich Batchuk said, “these people are no match for Trinadtsat. They have neither the manpower nor the resources to take advantage of the situation.”

Batchuk wasn’t denying it! Brandt massaged his forehead with his fingertips while shielding his eyes with the palm of his hand, dispelling the possibility that anyone on board Air Force One might inadvertently see the expression of consternation on his face. “It seems to me that we have to entertain the possibility that the situation on the ground is being rewritten even as we stand here talking to one another.”

“A hiccup, that’s all,” the deputy prime minister said. “We still hold the high ground, that’s all that matters.”

Batchuk had power in spades, that was indisputable, but what they were aiming for was so complex that no one man could guarantee its success. Acknowledging this reality was, after all, the prime reason he and Batchuk had forged this risky alliance and even riskier plan, why each of them was wagering their power and their influence—everything they possessed—with their respective presidents. For Brandt, however, there was another matter: money. He’d never had it, had been forced by his expertise at political maneuvering to be around those who did, and he burned with envy. He wanted his share of the gravy train and God help anyone who stood in his way.

“To ensure our success,” he said now, putting stress on every word, “I’ve put out an immediate sanction on Annika Dementieva.” He expected a response, possibly an irate one, from Batchuk, but his words were met only by silence. “I’m convinced she’s causing this hiccup, as you call it. A cure is needed, even for a hiccup.”

“I would find it difficult to disagree with you,” Batchuk said. “Who has been given the assignment?”

“Harry Martin. He’s the assassin-in-place.”

“Where is he at the moment? At Zhulyany, I assume.”

“If he was at the Kiev airport,” the General said, growing annoyed at the note of condescension in Batchuk’s voice, “I’m sure he would have told me.”

“Hmm, interesting.”

Now the General really was annoyed. “How so?”

“Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko, the FSB officer your man Martin is supposed to be shadowing—”

“I know who the hell Kirilenko is,” the General said, beginning to lose his temper despite himself.

“Kirilenko’s name has just shown up on a flight manifest departing Zhulyany in forty-three minutes, bound for Simferopol North Airport in the Crimea.” Batchuk cleared his throat, the better to emphasize what he said next: “Either your man Martin is an incompetent or he’s decided to play both ends against the middle.”

“I know Harry,” the General said, “and he’s neither.”

“Then figure out your own explanation,” Batchuk said.

The General immediately phoned Martin and informed him of Kirilenko’s whereabouts. The moment he heard the surprise in Martin’s voice he resolved to put another man in the field ASAP. This he did the moment his call to Martin was over.

He shifted from one leg to another, his body creaky and diminished inside the perfectly pressed uniform with its splendid show of medals and commendations.

“General, it’s time.”

The president’s voice, strong and firm as always, caused him to return down the aisle at his usual crisp pace to where Carson was now standing, waiting for the door to open while the contingent of Secret Service operatives buzzed around him like horseflies.

“You look gray-faced, Archie,” the president said under his breath. “Is there anything wrong, anything I need to know?”

“No, sir,” Brandt said, struggling to regain his composure, “of course not.”

“Because we’re on the firing line now, about to go into battle and, to paraphrase Sonny Corleone, I don’t want to come out of this aircraft with only my dick in my hand.”

The General nodded. “Understood, sir. I have your back, your guns are loaded, and all your ammunition is dry and awaiting your orders.”

“That’s the spirit,” Carson said with a tight smile.

The flight attendant spun the door wheel and it opened inward. The first of the president’s agents took command of the rolling stairs, then others checked out the immediate vicinity. For a moment, they spoke with their opposite numbers in the Russian secret service, then one of them turned, gave a brief, reassuring nod to his commander in chief.

“Okay, General,” the president said. “Here we go.”

These days Dennis Paull never slept; he never stayed in one place for very long, either. It was as if he needed to keep one step ahead of the banshee that was on his trail. That banshee—or demon or ghost, whatever you wanted to call it—had a name: Nina, the woman he’d had an affair with who had almost killed Edward Carson at his inauguration. Only Jack McClure’s timely intervention had saved the president. For that Paull would be eternally grateful. If only Jack could exorcize the demon or ghost or banshee that haunted Paull’s waking life, but Jack was just a man, not a sorcerer.

Paull, who had set up a temporary office in a Residence Inn on the outskirts of the District, planned to spend his nights unearthing all there was to know about the members of Edward Carson’s inner circle. He sat at a drab desk in front of his souped-up laptop, scanning a screen full of information from yet another government database he’d hacked into. Factoids from the public and private lives of Vice President Crawford, Kinkaid Marshall, G. Robert Kroftt, and William Rogers floated across his screen like messages from a phosphorescent universe. He was particularly interested in Crawford. Like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson before him, Carson had been drawn into a shotgun wedding with the old-line and conservative Crawford in order to carry Texas and the other swing states in the old South. The two men never got along. Though their public face was all smiles, behind closed doors their politics was fraught with friction and, at times, animosity. Though Crawford wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the intransigent members of the party, Paull didn’t like him; he certainly didn’t trust his style of backroom wheeling and dealing. Who knew what insidious pols Crawford was in bed with.

This was the work Paull had been doing since he arrived at just after six in the evening. It was now half past eleven. To one side was an open cardboard box with the remaining two slices of pepperoncini pizza from Papa John’s. He rose, went to the bathroom, and washed the olive oil off his hands. Then he crossed to the window, peering through the slatted blinds at the smeared headlights on the highway. The traffic’s constant drone made him feel as if he were inside a beehive, an appropriate sound track for his working environment.

All at once he shivered and, focusing on the reflection of the room in the glass, thought he saw Nina, or more accurately her shadow, passing from right to left. Whirling, he confronted the half-dark room, lit only by the lamp that shed a pool of light over the desk, his work area, one corner of the stained pizza box, bloody with tomato sauce.

He wanted to laugh at the empty space, at his own foolish fears, but something stopped him, a sense of foreboding, perhaps, that he couldn’t shake. There was, for him, a sense of things ending, instead of beginning as they should have with the installation of the new administration. The world appeared to be sliding away from him, as if it were falling off the edge of a table into darkness.

Of course he was furious for allowing himself to be deceived by Nina, but that was in the past and it belonged there. Nevertheless, he was still furious, possibly more so, because he couldn’t forget her, because he missed her. She hadn’t been just another fuck, she hadn’t been just another sexy woman. When she betrayed him she’d devoured a piece of him he now knew he’d never get back. In the wake of her betrayal he felt diminished, not simply foolish or abashed. She’d stolen something vital.

Turning back to the window he stared out at a world hustling by, indifferent to his pain. He was alone, as he would be in the moment before death took him, and this made him think of his father, who was alone when he died because Paull was busy studying for his graduate school finals. He wished his father were here now, because he was the only person Paull had ever been able to confide in. Even Edward Carson, arguably his best friend, didn’t know everything Paull’s father had. The man had been compassionate enough to forgive Paull his sins and mistakes no matter their severity. “Why wouldn’t I forgive you,” he said once, “you’re my son.” And then, continuing, said, “Your mother’s gone and forgotten. You’re all I’ve got, I have to forgive you.” And yet he died alone, Paull thought, as we all do, whether we forgive or not, whether we hold people close to us or push them away, as Paull had his own wife, who was in the final, horrifying stages of Alzheimer’s, locked away in a facility. He went to see her less and less these days; she didn’t know him, but what did that matter, he had an obligation, didn’t he, he’d taken an oath: in sickness and in health. But he’d distanced himself from her, both physically and emotionally. She was like a painting, or someone perpetually asleep, dreaming a life he could never understand. Did a radish dream, or a head of cabbage? She never responded in the slightest way to the music he put on during his visits—Al Hibbler singing “After the Lights Go Down Low,” for instance, or the Everly Brothers singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” songs they had loved and, in their youth, had danced to. He’d thought of this, a calming consolation, when six months ago he’d taken up one of the spare pillows and prepared to lower it over her face that, in her infirmity, had grown round and shiny as a metal globe. She wouldn’t know what was happening, what he was doing to her, and if she did, he was certain she’d be grateful. What kind of life was this she led? Even cows had it better, but not, perhaps, radishes. He was seconds away from doing it, his fingers gripping the sides of the pillow, his mind already made up, set on its path, when the music came on: Roy Hamilton’s “Don’t Let Go.” It seemed somehow sacrilegious to commit murder—even compassionate murder—while that song was playing (“I’m so happy I got you here/Don’t let go, don’t let go”), and something inside him shifted, everything changed and, turning, he put the pillow back where he’d found it. Then, without a backward glance at his wife or the radish, he left and hadn’t been back since.

He turned back into the hotel room, away from the glare of the headlights, and sat back down at the dingy desk and the endless lines of information scrolling across his laptop’s screen.

Why wouldn’t he forgive Nina, she was all he had.

But Nina was beyond his forgiveness, Jack had shot her through the heart before she’d had a chance to poison everyone at the inauguration with the vial of anthrax given to her by Morgan Herr. This, then, was Dennis Paull’s dilemma as he sat scrolling through the so-far innocuous mountain of electronic data: He was indebted to Jack McClure for saving Edward Carson, but he hated Jack for killing Nina.

Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko had just enough time to swing by his office and pick up the photos his assistant had pulled off the CCTV cameras at Zhulyany Airport before transferring to a waiting FSB vehicle that took him, at reckless speed, to board his scheduled flight to Simferopol.

While his driver was weaving through the clogged arteries of Kiev he studied each of the three photos. The first was of the three people: Annika Dementieva he could see clearly enough. Behind her, his face partially obscured, was a man who looked vaguely familiar. Kirilenko spent several fruitless minutes trying to place the visible features before moving on. The second photo was of the young girl, who bore no resemblance to anyone in Kirilenko’s memory bank. He studied this photo in a rather abstract manner; for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what she was doing with the two adults. To his knowledge, which was extensive to the point of encyclopedic, Annika Dementieva had no sisters, and the girl was too old to be her daughter. So who on earth was she? Sighing in frustration he turned to the third and last photo, which was a full-face shot of the man. Almost immediately a galvanic shock rode up his spine. He knew this man, he worked for the President of the United States. What the hell was he doing with Annika Dementieva?

Kirilenko stared out the window, seeing nothing but his own muddled thoughts. He knew his duty was to inform his superior of this shocking development, but something—a stubbornness, resentment, a feeling of being at once played and betrayed—stayed his hand. He was tired of being manipulated. Bad enough to be fucked over by the Americans, that kind of treatment was a given, but to be fucked by his own people, who had to know they were throwing him into an international arena filled with land mines, was more than he could tolerate. But there was something else—something deeper—at work in his mind. He was finally in possession of information not available to his superiors; now, fate had given him a modicum of power, and he was not willing to part with it so quickly. Shoving the photos away, he resolved to keep his own counsel until he could determine just what was going on.

It was too bad for Kirilenko that he wasn’t carrying the only copies of the photos his assistant had taken off the airport CCTV. Twenty minutes before he’d arrived, Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, standing in front of Kirilenko’s desk, confronted his assistant. He received the latest oral report from a young man he’d found it ridiculously easy to suborn, with half his mind still chewing over his disturbing conversation with Gourdjiev

When it came to the subject of Annika there could be no equivocating, no ending, no exit for either of them. No matter how hard either of them tried to fight it their roles were set in stone, there was no reversing position, no going back. But the knowledge of what had happened, of what could never be changed, was a hateful thing, a spider spinning its malevolent web in his mind. And this was because of one simple fact he’d never uttered to anyone, but which he suspected Gourdjiev knew: Even if he possessed the impossible power to change the past, he wouldn’t. He did what he had to do, something a man like Gourdjiev could never understand, let alone condone. Batchuk was a man who could not afford to second-guess himself; rather, he preyed on others’ not wanting to know, not wanting to see the truth about themselves or those whose acquaintance was politically or financially important to their careers; preyed on people afraid of conviction, of being wrong, who would rather close their eyes and listen to his guidance. Gourdjiev had done that once—only once—to his unending sorrow, a situation Batchuk could read on his face every time they met.

A certain silence made it clear that Kirilenko’s assistant had finished his oral report. Nodding, Batchuk ordered him to make copies of the photos. He took them without comment and, turning on his heel, left.

He was already on his cell phone as he descended in the elevator and exited the huge, intimidating lobby of the FSB building, striding through the slush of Red Square.

General Brandt, seated next to President Carson and across a gleaming marble table from President Yukin, received Batchuk’s call at a most inconvenient time. Nevertheless, seeing who was calling, he excused himself, went out of the room and partway down the corridor, out of earshot of the various Secret Service personnel from both sides who were flanking the door like sphinxes.

“There’s been a new development,” Batchuk said without preamble. “Annika Dementieva isn’t moving on her own. I’m looking at a photo of her from one of the closed-circuit cameras at Zhulyany Airport. She’s with two other people, one of whom is the American Jack McClure.”

“President Carson’s Jack McClure?” the General said, and almost immediately regretted the stupidity of the question. Of course it was Edward’s Jack McClure. “I don’t understand.”

“Carson is playing you,” Batchuk said tersely. “He’s got an agenda he’s keeping from you, which means he no longer trusts you.”

The General gave an involuntary glance over his shoulder, toward the silent bodyguards and closed door that led to the negotiating room, where Carson was even now locking horns with Yukin. “But that’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible,” Batchuk said with unconcealed fury. “Clearly. This is on you, General. McClure is your mess, I suggest you clean it up with all the haste you can muster.”

“I can’t imagine what Carson is playing at, putting McClure into the field, and with Annika Dementieva, no less.”

“It doesn’t matter what either of them are up to. McClure needs to be extinguished, expunged, immolated. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly.” The General was too taken aback to be offended by Batchuk’s taking control. They were facing a mess, he’d trusted Carson, and in doing so had allowed matters to get out of control. They were all finished if McClure remained alive, of that he was absolutely certain.

“Don’t worry,” he said, gathering himself. “McClure won’t live to see another sunrise, that I promise you.”

18

“Who’s hungry?” Jack said as they entered the echoing Arrivals hall at Simferopol North Airport.

“I am,” Alli said immediately. “I’m starved.”

“Good, so am I.” Jack led them over to a crowded cafeteria-style coffee shop with food that looked as if it had been prepared last week. Nevertheless, they loaded up their plates, paid for the food and drinks, and took their trays to the lone empty table near the checkout, a location lousy for a peaceful meal but ideal for watching passengers as they stumbled off their flights.

They dug into leathery pirogi, cabbage rolls, and pungent kovbasa, washed down with glasses of cherry-red Crimean wine. While he ate Jack kept one eye on the waxing and waning stream of humanity. From the other side of the table Annika watched him. He knew what she was thinking: If they were hungry why not just go into Alushta, where they’d have their choice of restaurants with food better than what they were eating now? She said nothing, however, doubtless waiting for him to provide an explanation.

“Karl Rochev, the last person Berns visited before he left Kiev for Capri, was tortured and killed on the grounds of Magnussen’s estate,” Jack said.

Annika shrugged. “The evidence seems straightforward. Both Rochev and his mistress were killed with sulitsa, the antique Cossack splitting weapon. Magnussen is a collector of antique Russian weaponry, including sulitsa. Magnussen just ordered replacements for his sulitsa. Ergo, he killed Rochev and his mistress. It couldn’t be simpler.”

“It isn’t simple at all,” Jack corrected her. “Did whoever killed Rochev and his mistress also kill Senator Berns in Capri, or order his death? If so, then we’re dealing with a conspiracy of international proportions and unknown dimensions. Some of what we know is fact and some of it is supposition or deduction, however you want to look at it. Either way, at this point, before our investigation goes any further, we have to ascertain what is fact and what could turn out to not be supposition at all, but rather the product of imagination and invention and, therefore, a dead end or, worse, an erroneous conclusion.”

Annika stared at him with a baleful look. “And how do you propose to find out? Ask Magnussen himself?” She gave a short, derogatory laugh.

It was now just over an hour after they had sat down, and the next flight from Kiev had arrived, spilling its passengers out onto the concourse. Jack’s eye was drawn to a well-built man with reddened hands who had stopped to light a cigarette with the haste of an addict. He wore his hair in the same rumpled way he wore his cheap, shiny suit. Everything about him shouted Russian bureaucracy, but without the accompanying dullness. Instead, he emanated something toxic—the odors of fear and death congealed into a gluey substance that lodged in the folds of his neck and made his cheeks shiny as a wax effigy.

Jack, who absorbed and analyzed all these intangibles in less than a second, answered her in what at first appeared to be an enigmatic manner: “Who do you think that is?”

Annika shifted her gaze while she admonished Alli. “Don’t stare, for the love of God.”

Alli obeyed, albeit with a pout.

“There’s a man who just came in from Kiev,” Jack explained in a low voice. “It looks as if he’s trying to find someone by showing what might be photos or sketches to airport personnel.”

“Christ, I know him.” Annika, worrying her lower lip, had turned back. “That’s Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko. He’s an FSB homicide detective. The man’s a fucking bloodhound. What’s he doing here?”

“I think he’s after us,” Jack said.

“But how? It’s the Izmaylovskaya who is after us. We killed Ivan Gurov and Milan Spiakov, two members of the grupperovka family.”

“Unless Kirilenko is Trinadtsat.” Jack turned to her. “You told me Trinadtsat was composed of members of the Izmaylovskaya and the FSB.”

“Not FSB, per se,” Annika corrected. “Batchuk’s people, who could be FSB, but are also likely to be Kremlin apparatchiks, interior ministers, secret services, who the hell knows who he’s recruited.”

“That certainly doesn’t rule out your friend Kirilenko.”

“He’s not my friend,” Annika said sharply. “I hate his guts.”

“Part of a long line, I gather.” Jack nodded. “Look, he’s heading toward the airport facilities.”

“I wonder what he’s up to?” Annika said.

“Let’s find out.”

Jack rose, and the others with him. Staying within the clots of people, they followed Kirilenko as he entered a corridor with doors on either side. Hanging back, they saw him open a door on the left, halfway down the corridor, and as he went inside, they hurried along toward it.

“He’s gone into the CCTV control room,” Annika said.

“What does that mean?” Alli asked.

“He’s going to look at the closed-circuit video tapes of arrivals and departures,” Annika said.

“I’m willing to bet he has photos of us.” Jack rubbed his jaw meditatively. “We must have been picked up on the cameras at Zhulyany Airport in Kiev.”

Annika took an involuntary step back. “Which means he’s recognized me and has photos of the two of you.”

“Alli’s disguised,” Jack said, “but do you think he knows who I am?”

“Doubtful,” Annika said. “But even so it won’t take long for him to discover who you are.”

Jack eyed the closed door. “Then we’ll have to stop him from finding out.”

Dennis Paull had been staring at his computer for nine hours straight, scrolling through one restricted database after another in search of a chink in the cabinet members’ red, white, and blue armor. His bladder was full and he felt as if all the low-grade mozzarella he’d consumed had congealed in the pit of his stomach like a bocce ball. Pushing himself away from the screen, he rose and stumbled into the bathroom to relieve himself.

When he returned to his battle station he saw that a new piece of information had popped onto his screen. He’d just used his cursor to copy it when it vanished. Switching windows, he brought up a new Word document into which he deposited—he hoped, he prayed— what he’d snagged off the database. An instant later two lines of enciphered words appeared on a field of pristine white, followed by an echelon code Paull knew belonged to General Atcheson Brandt.

For a moment he stared at the gibberish, trying to place the cipher pattern, which seemed familiar to him. Then he had it: It was a particular NSA cipher used exclusively for Eyes-Only interdepartmental communications on its cell phones.

Switching to another Firefox tab, he logged on to the Department of Homeland Security site, then, using his proprietary ID code, accessed his department’s algorithm database. Once there, he fed the two lines of enciphered text into the algorithm engine, hit the Enter key, and sat back, waiting for the database to find the algorithm that would decipher the message Brandt had just sent.

While he waited he thought about the choices he’d made in his life, the people he had had to befriend, rely on, depend on, even though he knew that at some point, if the opportunity arose, they would betray him or denounce him in order to advance their own career path. With the possible exception of Edward Carson he was surrounded by a pack of sharks all too eager to take a chunk out of him the moment they smelled blood in the water, or even before, in some cases. And yet he’d gone ahead and forged these alliances, even, when the occasion demanded it, putting himself in these people’s debt. He forced himself not to see what he didn’t want to see, what would otherwise stop him from doing what had to be done in order to rise to his position of power within the current administration.

Was there nothing people like General Brandt wouldn’t do to gain power, he asked himself rhetorically. Was there really no line that these people—he among them—wouldn’t cross to keep accumulating power?

A moment later he had his answer. The two lines of gibberish were replaced by the deciphered text: XEX ANNIKA DEMENTIEVA AND JACK MCCLURE.

Jesus, he thought as he ran a trembling hand through his hair. Jesus Christ. At first he thought it must be a mistake, perhaps he inputted the encrypted text incorrectly, so he sent it back through the department’s algorithm engine, careful to get each letter right. The same message came back at him like a punch in the solar plexus.

It couldn’t be, but there it was in front of him in black and white. “EX” meant that General Brandt had put out a sanction—an immediate death sentence—on the subjects. The “X” prefix meant “use all available methods at your disposal.”

“Kirilenko must have been with the team that surrounded us at Rochev’s dacha,” Annika said.

“What a joke,” Alli said. “He must think we killed Rochev’s mistress. That’s why he’s coming after us.”

Jack and Annika stared at her. “It’s no joke,” they both said, more or less at once.

They were still in the mouth of the corridor leading to Airport Services. Jack was looking around for security personnel who were sure to be patrolling the area, while Annika kept an eye on the door to the CCTV control room through which Kirilenko had disappeared not five minutes ago.

“There’s no doubt he’s looking for us,” Annika said. “And, as Alli pointed out, now we’re suspects in three murders.” She shook her head. “There’s no help for it, we’re going to have to terminate him.”

“What?” Jack spun around. “Are you crazy? We can’t attack an FSB officer.”

“I didn’t say attack.” Annika’s carnelian eyes never looked harder. “I said terminate.”

“As in kill?” Alli said.

“Yes, dear. We have to kill him in order to save ourselves.”

“I won’t hear of it,” Jack said.

“Then we’re doomed.” Annika indicated the door with her chin. “Unless we put him six feet under, I promise you this sonuvabitch won’t stop until he’s either killed us or dragged us back to Moscow in manacles.”

A look of pure terror distorted Alli’s face. “Jack—”

“If not for us, then for the safety of the girl,” Annika pressed her point. “For so many reasons, we can’t allow anything to happen to her.”

Jack shook his head. He knew she was right, but he wasn’t willing to give in just yet. “There’s got to be another way.”

“I’m telling you there isn’t, we’ve got to do it now while we have the chance,” Annika said urgently.

As if to underscore her anxiety, the door to the CCTV control room opened. They shrank back into the shadows as Kirilenko emerged, his face marred by a smug look that told Annika everything she needed to know.

Without another word to either of her companions, she sprinted from the shadows and, while he drew out his cell phone, she delivered a vicious blow to his kidneys, wrapped her crooked arm across his throat, and with astonishing power, jerked him backward off his feet.

General Atcheson Brandt was the last person Dennis Paull had suspected of treachery—so much so, in fact, that in nine hours of eye-watering work he hadn’t yet gotten around to shining his investigatory spotlight on Brandt or his life.

Paull had finally quit his room, reeking of human sweat and the peculiar odor of heated electronics. It was two thirty in the morning and he was walking down the hallway of the Residence Inn, looking for the cigarette vending machine he’d noticed when he’d checked in. In these days of universal smoking bans, cigarettes were hard to find, never mind an old-fashioned vending machine that sold them. Nevertheless, there was one here, crouching on a brown carpet whose pattern failed to hide stains even steam cleaning couldn’t get out.

He hadn’t smoked in twenty years, but the pressurized developments of the last half hour had caused his old craving to reassert itself. He’d tried to fight it, but it was no use. Like most vices, once it lodged in your mind it couldn’t be denied.

Slitting open the pack, he tore the filter head off a cigarette, then lit it with a match from a pack thoughtfully provided with his purchase. He used the key card to his room to open the side door to the parking lot, went out into the chilly night. It had rained sometime while he’d been working and the concrete walkway was slick and wet; cars gleamed in the security lights. The hum of traffic from the highway was reduced to the inconstant hiss of occasionally passing cars on their way to or from mysterious errands. What were people doing up at this hour, he wondered. Whatever it was he doubted they had the weight of the world on their shoulders as he did.

The smoke, deep in his lungs, calmed him, or at least gave him the illusion that he had time to make a decision. The night was quiet, not another soul stirring in all of the Residence Inn, though as he looked up at the facade he could see lights on in several rooms, a reminder that insomnia lurked like a ghost here as everywhere.

He smoked the cigarette down to the end without coming to a decision. His mouth felt dry and stale, but he ripped off the filter on another cigarette, stuck it between his chapped lips, and lit up. With the information he had on General Brandt the road before him forked in several directions. He could inform the president, but that would surely distract him, in the process derailing the delicate negotiation process with President Yukin. He could call Jack and warn him, which again would expose his knowledge of the General’s treachery. McClure was a good friend of Edward Carson’s—they knew each other long before Paull himself met Carson. Therefore, Jack could be counted on to inform the president ASAP even if Paull begged him not to disturb Carson until the crucial accord was signed.

As Paull walked up and down the walkway, growing colder and colder, he realized that he was on the horns of a serious moral dilemma. How could he allow Jack to remain uninformed about the sanction? How could he allow the U.S.-Russia accord to be disrupted? He had no doubt that General Brandt was insane. He had determined that his own self-interest was paramount, anyone who threatened it was to be terminated. He could call Edward and tell him what he’d discovered, but he had no solid proof and the call would only serve to muddy waters that were already fouled.

Grinding the second butt beneath his heel, he scrabbled in the pack. He was going through cigarettes as if they were Tic Tacs. Well, why not, considering the behemoth he was confronting. The fact that Jack had somehow become a clear and immediate danger to Brandt was of less concern to Paull than why Jack was threatening the General’s self-interest.

What the hell was the General up to? And then he remembered a bit of the conversation he’d had with Edward Carson in the presidential limo following Lloyd Berns’s interment. The president had complained that Brandt had been pushing to sign the accord. Why would he do that, Paull asked himself. Of course the General was one of the primary supporters of the current rapprochement with Russia. In fact, Carson had leaned heavily on the General’s advice for why to engage Russia and how. But Brandt was smarter than to advise the president to elide over minor details Carson wasn’t comfortable with, especially with the Russians.

However, his restless mind was turning over the question of paramount importance at the moment because there was a clear-cut decision to be made: To warn Jack or not to warn Jack, that was the question. And the answer hinged on morality and self-interest, one of which was clear-cut while the other was nebulous, open to interpretation of every kind. He wasn’t like Edward, whose enduring sentimental feelings for family and friends was both a weakness and a blinder to the harsher aspects of reality. Paull understood the truth that the president refused to acknowledge: The notion of morality was a squishy subject, never more so than nowadays when there were mountains of information, factoids, and electronic data to sift through that provided a multitude of reasons for making or not making a decision. There were always extenuating circumstances, hidden explanations coming to light like corpses in a river appearing at the first spring thaw. Nowadays there were any number of ways to make a decision understandable, credible, acceptable, convincing.

All of which led him to one inescapable conclusion: He needed to pursue the inquiry into General Brandt’s sanction without informing anyone, not the president, not Jack. His own self-interest was and must remain paramount. He had no other recourse now, none at all.

“We didn’t kill Rochev’s mistress,” Jack said, waving the CCTV photos he’d found. “She was dead when we found her.”

Kirilenko, disarmed and bound to a chair with lengths of electrical flex Annika had found in a nearby utility closet, said nothing. They were in a spare office Jack had discovered, reluctantly but needfully, because they had an unconscious body that required a quiet place to rest and come around, which Kirilenko did when Annika slapped him sharply across the face. Now there was a red blotch there like a congenital wine stain. The space was a standard office with a desk, table, several wooden chairs. A filing cabinet stood against a wall. Old-fashioned venetian blinds obscured the single window.

“We went to the dacha looking for Karl Rochev,” Jack continued. “We wanted to talk with him, that’s all.”

Kirilenko, maintaining his silence, ignored Jack and Alli completely, his baleful gaze fixed on Annika leaning nonchalantly against a wall, her arms crossed over her chest, watching him like a hawk inspecting a snake.

“When we didn’t find him there we decided to leave, and that’s when we ran into your people.”

Kirilenko continued to glare at Annika, but with a smirk that made Jack think he was privy to information vital to them.

Apparently Annika thought the same thing because she came off the wall and smashed her fist into Kirilenko’s jaw. Blood spattered onto his suit lapels and his lap.

“That’s enough,” Jack said, grabbing hold of her right arm, which she’d already cocked for another blow.

“Someone had to knock that smirk off his ugly face.”

“And you’d be just the one to do it, eh?” Kirilenko said as he spat a thick wad of pink spittle onto the bare concrete floor. “Wild, short-tempered, out of control—in sum, a classic rageaholic—all the reports were right about you.”

Annika, pulling away from Jack, lunged at him with her head. “If by that you mean I’m impossible to control then you’re damn right.”

Alli interposed herself between the two, forcing Annika to look at her, not Kirilenko, and so throttling down on her anger level. After a moment of cooling Annika put a hand on her cheek and nodded her thanks.

For the first time Kirilenko looked at Jack. “What I can’t work out is why you’re with this very dangerous creature. She’s a murderer.”

“We’re all murderers here, Kirilenko,” Annika said.

“What about the girl?”

Jack leaned in beside Annika. “Leave her out of it.”

“Too late,” Kirilenko said. “From my point of view she’s as culpable as either of you.” He jerked his head away from Annika’s bared teeth. “She’ll pay the same ultimate price you two will, that’s a promise.”

Annika stood back, hands on hips. “You see, what did I tell you? There’s only one way to deal with a man like him.”

“Yes, by all means kill me,” Kirilenko said. “It’s the only way to stop me from taking you in, or killing you for your crimes.”

“We’ve committed no crimes,” Jack said.

“That’s what they all say.” Kirilenko shook his head. “Once, just once, I’d like to be surprised, but, no, you murderers are as sadly alike as crows.”

“There has to be another way,” Jack said, ignoring him. “It’s simply a matter of finding it.”

“Good luck with that,” Annika said. “I don’t know about you but I don’t plan to be here when security comes around to check all the vacant rooms.”

Jack took her by the waist and half dragged her into the far corner.

“Let’s stop this insanity,” Kirilenko said softly, conspiratorially to Alli. “Untie me and I’ll make sure you won’t be arrested or incarcerated.”

“You’re the one who’s incarcerated,” Alli said, “and it’s you who’s trying to bargain.”

She took a step toward Kirilenko, who was grinning at her like a monkey. He seemed sure he had taken the proper measure of her.

“I won’t be incarcerated forever and when I—”

“You think I’m the weak link, that you can somehow terrify me, but I’m not afraid of you.”

“Alli,” Jack said sharply, “please put your ear to the door. If you hear anyone coming let us know.”

“You should be.” Kirilenko clacked his teeth together like a chimpanzee or a crocodile. “If you don’t listen to me I swear I’ll bite your head off.”

“Alli …,” Jack warned.

Alli, staring down Kirilenko, spat into his face, then she turned and, crossing the small room, obediently put her ear to the door.

“You asked for it,” Jack said to the Russian in a mocking voice, before turning back to speak in low tones with Annika. “You’re not going to kill him, that’s out of the question. Besides, he knows something.”

“What if he’s simply pretending he knows something?”

“What if he’s not?”

But Jack’s attention was now divided. He was watching Alli, who had come away from the door in the wake of their conversation. She had begun to walk back toward Kirilenko.

Annika, becoming aware of Jack’s growing agitation, turned to watch. “What the hell is she doing?” she said under her breath.

“Alli, get away from him,” Jack said sharply as he strode toward her.

But before he could get to her, she waggled in front of Kirilenko’s face the cell phone she’d scooped up from the corridor floor as the others were dragging his body in here.

“It’s you who should be frightened,” she said. “I have your life in my hand.”

Jack pulled her back. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“You missed this,” she said to Jack as she proffered the phone in the palm of her hand.

“This girl has balls,” Annika said with a laugh, “you have to give her that.”

Jack, noting the sour look on Kirilenko’s face, wondered whether Alli was onto something. He was about to pluck up the cell, when he changed his mind. “Check it out yourself,” he said. “You earned the right.”

Alli hesitated, looking as if she didn’t quite believe him. Then, seeing no contradiction in his expression, she flipped it open. She spent a few minutes scrolling through different menus before she apparently came upon something of interest. Reversing the screen, she showed Jack and Annika the grainy photo of the three of them as they emerged from Rochev’s dacha.

“Mine is the only face identifiable,” Annika said, peering closely at the image.

Alli zoomed in on a portion of the photo. “Look at what you’re holding.”

“The sulitsa,” Annika breathed.

“What the hell is a sulitsa?” Kirilenko still had the remains of his own blood and Alli’s spittle on his cheek. “What did you use to kill Ilenya Makova?”

“At last we know her name,” Jack said, taking the phone from Alli.

“I didn’t kill her, none of us did,” Annika said. “As Jack said, we found her with this thing—this antique Cossack splitting weapon— sticking out of her—”

“I don’t believe you, Annika Dementieva.”

“—so deeply she was impaled to the mattress.”

Kirilenko moved his head from side to side. “I know you.”

“The fuck you do.”

“I know people just like you, I know you killed her.”

Jack pushed his way past a seething Annika and said to the Russian, “Listen to me because I’m only going to say this once. Annika is intent on killing you and I’m now inclined to agree with her.” He adjusted Kirilenko’s ugly tie so that the knot bit into his Adam’s apple. “Against my better instincts I’m going to give you this chance. Tell us what you know.”

“And then what?” Kirilenko said. “She’ll kill me anyway, I see the look in her eyes.”

“She won’t kill you if you answer my questions.”

Kirilenko laughed. “You think you can stop her?”

“Yes,” Jack said softly and slowly. “I do.”

The Russian peered into Jack’s face with his weary gaze. “Fuck you, Americanski. Fuck you and your entire decadent fucking country.”

Following his numerous night visits Dyadya Gourdjiev had slept uneasily until noon. He dreamt that it had been raining for days, possibly weeks, and his apartment was developing cracks in the poorly constructed ceiling, around the cheap aluminum window frames. As a result water was leaking in from so many places it was impossible to caulk or patch them all. As soon as he dammed one up, two appeared in its place.

He awoke entirely unrefreshed. As he lay staring up at the ceiling, spider-webbed with cracks, he knew what must be done. Hauling himself out of bed he padded to the bathroom and with some difficulty relieved himself. Then he shaved his cheeks pink with a straight razor, carefully brushed his hair, dressed in a neat suit and tie in the best Western style, and ate his usual breakfast of black coffee, toast, butter, and Seville orange marmalade. He chewed slowly and thoughtfully. He felt like the root of a tree, the years fallen on him like the rusty leaves of autumn. He washed the dishes and cutlery, stacked them neatly in the drainboard, dried his hands on a dish towel.

In the closet next to the front door he extracted the things he needed, including his lambswool overcoat and soft cashmere scarf in the signature Burberry plaid, which he wrapped around his neck, making certain his throat was well protected against the strong April wind. Shrugging on his coat, he opened the door, went out into the corridor, noting that the bloodstain, now a dark, almost purple brown, had not yet been cleaned up. Everything continues to slide downhill, he thought, to erode, to sicken, wither, and die.

He met no one in the elevator, but as he saw the charming widow Tanova coming in from the street with an armful of groceries, he smiled, holding the elevator door open for her. She returned his smile, thanked him, and asked him over for tea and her homemade stollen later in the afternoon, an invitation he accepted with genuine pleasure. The widow Tanova had lived almost as long as he had, she understood the nature of life, what was important and what must be let go. She was someone he could talk with, confide in, commiserate with, mourning the losses they had suffered. Also, she had great legs—stems, as they said in the old black-and-white American films he still adored.

Waiting until the elevator and its comely occupant were on their way up, he crossed the now deserted lobby and, pulling open the heavy front door, stepped out onto the yellow-brick stoop. He drew a breath of the chilly air deep into his lungs as he glanced both ways along the street. There were no pedestrians and few moving vehicles. But there was the car, just as he’d expected. He saw it immediately, a gleaming black Mercedes—in their supreme arrogance these people felt no need for discretion, vigilance, foresight, or even tact: last night being a perfect case in point. There were two men sitting in the front seat, flamboyant as every member of the Izmaylovskaya learned to be. Like a fucking cult, Dyadya Gourdjiev thought.

Having looked this way and that he strolled away from the car on the opposite side of the street, then crossed the street and turned back. When he was abreast of the vehicle he stopped and tapped on the driver’s window. The driver, startled, slid down his window in reflex. Even before the window was fully down Dyadya Gourdjiev had his Glock out. He pumped two bullets into the man on the passenger’s side as he was reaching for his pistol, then shot the driver between the eyes.

At once, sliding the Glock into the deep pocket of his overcoat, he sauntered away with jaunty insouciance. It was as if with each step several years had melted off him until, at the corner, he had been resurrected into the strong young man he’d once been.

As he turned the corner he began to whistle “Dva Gusya,” the old folk tune his mother used to sing to him when he was a child.

Annika produced Kirilenko’s gun, which, as a member of the FSB, he was allowed to carry on all modes of public transportation. Aiming it at him, she cocked the hammer back. At that moment, the cell phone in Jack’s hand began to burr.

“Whoever’s calling you, will have to wait,” Jack said, “possibly forever.”

“It’s not his phone,” Alli said. “I checked.”

“Whose phone is it?” Jack said, staring at it.

Alli took the phone out of his hand, manipulated several keys to access the SIM card information. “A man named Limonev.”

Annika took a step forward. “Mondan Limonev?”

Alli looked up at her. “You know him?”

She nodded. “I know of him. He’s said to be a contract killer for the FSB.”

“A despicable lie put about by anarchist enemies of the FSB,” Kirilenko said sourly.

But Jack, studying his face, saw a different answer the Russian was afraid to voice, or possibly in the course of plying his profession he had come to believe the lies he uttered every day.

Annika came to stand beside Jack. “Limonev is also rumored to be a member of Trinadtsat.”

Kirilenko’s upper lip curled in a sneer. “Now that’s simply laughable, especially since I very much doubt this Trinadtsat exists.”

Limonev’s cell had received a text message, not a call. “Well, now,” Jack said, concentrating hard on reading the two words in Cyrillic, “this is an interesting development.”

He showed it to Annika, who laughed and said, “Jesus, these people eat their own.”

“I’d like to show it to you,” Jack said to Kirilenko.

The Russian remained stone-faced. “I’m not interested.”

“No? But you should be. It proves everything Annika has said.”

Jack held the screen in front of Kirilenko, who managed to hold down his curiosity for all of thirty seconds before his eyes slid back. They fastened on the text message, which consisted of two words:

TERMINATE KIRILENKO.

19

Having tracked Kirilenko, Mondan Limonev arrived in the Crimea. He’d spent four years here, a time when he’d been happy— almost carefree, or what might pass for carefree in a man of his dark calling. Six commissions, all assassinations of Russian oligarchs who had fled their country after the tide had turned against them. Limonev was unique among FSB assassins inasmuch as he was paid per commission. His fees were exceptionally high, but Yukin and Batchuk were more than happy to cough up state money for the exclusive privilege of his services. They knew that the moment he was handed a commission the target was as good as dead.

Kirilenko had been no exception. Using his FSB elite-level credentials Limonev quickly canvassed the airport personnel in the Arrivals hall, one of whom had seen Kirilenko enter the CCTV monitoring station. Kirilenko had left by the time Limonev reached it, but with his usual thoroughness, Limonev made a complete circuit of the hallway. Further down he saw something lying against the wall. Reaching down he retrieved a slim box of wooden matches. He’d seen Kirilenko strike matches from this very box numerous times. Drawing a handgun, he put one foot silently in front of the other. At each door he paused to place his ear against it. Such industriousness paid off when he heard Kirilenko’s voice seep through the fifth door. He had his hand on the doorknob and was about to turn it when he heard other voices he could not identify. Listening carefully, he determined that these people, whoever they were, had managed to capture Kirilenko, something of a feat in its own right. However, it was Kirilenko alone who interested him.

The moment Kirilenko’s brain registered the text message he broke out into a cold sweat.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” he said. “There’s no way, no way at all.” He looked up at Jack. “This is a trick.”

“How could it be a trick?” Jack asked in a pleasant, almost friendly voice.

Kirilenko indicated Alli with his chin. “The girl. She must have done something when she had the phone, manufactured that message.”

“Don’t be idiotic.” Jack shook his head. “How could she—or any of us, for that matter—know about Mondan Limonev, who he was, or that he was a member of your team at the dacha?”

Kirilenko stared at Alli as if he was seeing her for the first time. Then his eyes went out of focus as the bleakness of his current situation began to sink in. At length he nodded. “Fuck it,” he said to Jack, “what d’you want to know?”

“What can you tell me about Trinadtsat?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Are you a member of Thirteen?”

Kirilenko reared back as much as his bonds would let him. “I don’t know a thing about it. I keep my head down and my nose clean. I’m a detective, not an apparatchik. I’m a field man, small potatoes.”

Unsure whether the Russian was telling the truth, Jack tried another tack. “I could understand why the Izmaylovskaya might be after Annika, but what were you and your people doing lying in wait for us at Rochev’s dacha?”

“My people. You mean your people.” Kirilenko nodded. “That’s right, Americans. The Americans are after Annika Dementieva.”

“You’re full of shit,” Jack said. “What Americans?”

“I’m dying for a cigarette,” Kirilenko said. “There’s a pack—”

“I know where the pack is,” Alli said, fishing it out of his pocket.

Jack put a cigarette between Kirilenko’s lips and Annika lit it with her lighter.

Kirilenko took a deep drag and slowly let out the smoke. “Harry Martin, you know him?”

“Harry Martin sounds like a made-up name.”

Kirilenko nodded. “That would be my guess. In any event, the man—whatever his real name is—is no fiction. He’s a spook, of that you can be sure. I was assigned to be his support.”

“Why? What’s he here for?”

“I don’t actually know because he didn’t tell me. I took him to Rochev’s dacha because that’s where he wanted to go. You know the rest.”

“Pretend I don’t know a thing,” Jack said. “What else do you know about Harry Martin?”

“Only bits and pieces, what I picked up overhearing parts of his cell phone conversations, presumably with his handler.” Kirilenko took another drag deep into his lungs. When he spoke again the smoke drifted out of his mouth and nostrils as if he were a dragon. “I overheard a word—Aura. I have no idea what it means, but I’m fairly certain that whatever else he’s after he needs to talk with that one.” He indicated Annika with a lift of his chin.

Jack turned briefly to Annika but she shook her head. “I never heard of Aura.”

Jack returned his attention to Kirilenko. “If you were assigned to Harry Martin, where is he?”

“I ditched him after I saw that photo and identified Annika Dementieva.” The acrid smoke drifting upward caused his left eye to half close. “I’m tired of being pushed around by everyone, my superiors included.”

“Is that why they want you dead?”

Kirilenko blew out smoke and shuddered. “I have no fucking idea why a sanction was put out on me, nor who authorized it. Like I said, I’ve kept my head down and my nose clean.”

“Not clean enough, apparently; you’ve picked up some serious shit on the way to the office,” Annika said dryly.

“Maybe it’s because you ditched Harry Martin,” Jack said.

“Everything went into the shitter when I was assigned to him,” Kirilenko said morosely.

“Who did you get the assignment from?” Jack said. “Who do you report to?”

“It wasn’t him, or at least it didn’t begin with him, though my boss is the division head. When he called me into his office he said he’d been given the directive. He didn’t seem happy about it.”

“Who?” Annika said. “Who would give him his marching orders?”

Kirilenko shrugged, then winced at the pain the gesture caused him. “You know the FSB, it’s a fucking mare’s nest of bureaucracy above division level. There are so many competing siloviks vying for power it’s difficult to know where anyone stands.”

Annika took out her cell phone. “What’s the name of your boss?” When Kirilenko told her, she punched a number on her speed dial and began to speak into the phone.

“I think we should untie him,” Alli said.

Retracing his steps down the hall Limonev hurried though the Arrivals hall and out the glass doors. He ignored the taxi lineup, and went swiftly around to the side of the building. From the layout of the Arrivals hall, he determined the window that led to the room where Kirilenko was being held. Looking for the most likely escape route, his gaze passed over the westernmost runway, the drop-off and subsequent field that led up to the parking lot. It was to the lot he went, stationing himself on the top of a car that overlooked the route. Then, using the replacement cell phone the SBU had given him, he called airport security and reported a disturbance in one of the airport facilities offices. Immediately following, he opened the case he’d been carrying and assembled the Dragunov, slamming home the ten-round magazine. Then, stretched out on his small but perfect patch of high ground, he put his right eye to the 4X PSO-1 telescope sight and waited for events to unfold.

Jack, listening to what Annika was saying, at first missed her comment. People spoke to other people in varying ways. His brain was a repository of those different intonations. That was how he knew Annika was talking to Dyadya Gourdjiev, asking him about Kirilenko’s boss.

Alli was already behind the chair to which Kirilenko was bound by the time he’d diverted his attention back to her.

“What are you doing?”

“Untying him,” she said. “I think that’s what we should do.”

“You’re the one who spat in his face.”

“I didn’t like what he said to me, that doesn’t mean I hate his guts.”

Annika folded away her cell. “I’ll know who assigned you to the American spy in a couple of hours,” she promised. Then, seeing Alli unwinding the electrical flex from Kirilenko’s crossed wrists, said, “That’s a mistake we’ll all regret.”

“I don’t think so,” Kirilenko said.

“There’s a surprise!” Annika still held his pistol in her hand, though it was no longer pointed at him.

“Listen, in light of everything that’s happened here I have a proposal to make.”

Annika snorted. “This from a supposedly incorruptible FSB homicide investigator?”

“Let’s hear what he has to say.” Alli threw the unwound flex into a corner.

Jack was about to answer her, but into his mind came the image of Alli bound to a chair, which was immediately supplanted by the memory of Annika explaining why Alli had wanted to go to Milla Tamirova’s apartment, or, as Annika put it, to her dungeon. Kirilenko sat in the chair into which up to a moment ago they’d bound him. Jack knew Alli couldn’t help but equate his position to hers, and who was to say she was wrong.

Kirilenko made no aggressive move, or even an attempt to rise from the chair. He did nothing but massage his wrists in order to return circulation to his terribly chapped hands.

Lifting his head, he addressed Annika frankly, “My proposal is this: You kill Mondan Limonev and I’ll take care of the American Harry Martin who’s been sent to find you.”

“Wait a minute,” Jack said, “I think I’ve seen this film.”

“Strangers on a Train, yes, I’m familiar with it.” Kirilenko stopped his massage to gratefully put another cigarette between his lips. He leaned forward as Annika lit it. “But I’m not joking.”

“Aren’t you the great detective who relentlessly runs down murderers?” Annika said with understandable skepticism.

“Yes, yes, of course you would say that. I would, too, in your position.” Kirilenko expelled smoke in a deep sigh. “In the last half hour it’s occurred to me that you and I have been cleverly set up. I may not know what’s going on, but I’m convinced that you didn’t kill Ilenya Makova.”

“We’ve been trying to find out who did,” Jack said. “The trail has led us here.”

“I believe that, as well.”

Annika was obviously still a skeptic. “What could possibly have changed your mind so quickly? You’re known as the great crusader against murder and rape; your convictions, your sense of right and wrong must be immutable.”

“It’s true I hate criminals and that my outrage at the taking of a life is absolute, but my hatred of mistakes trumps them all. This is why in my twenty-two years as a manhunter I’ve never brought down the wrong perpetrator. When it comes to my employers I may be deaf and dumb, but I’m not blind. I’m aware that a percentage of their activities is criminal. Head down, nose clean, that’s what’s needed to survive in their system.” He peeled a bit of tobacco off his lip, eyed it for a moment before flicking it away. “But I suppose that’s true of any system, the larger the system the greater the need to ignore the illegalities going on around you, the more vital it is to keep your mouth shut.”

“Illegalities!” He’d clearly hit a nerve, and Annika was outraged.

“Look, I’m not in the directorate that spends its days and nights trumping up charges against the officers of legitimate companies and the oligarch owners on Yukin’s and Batchuk’s orders. I’m not throwing innocent people in prison to rot for the rest of their lives. I’m not terrorizing their wives and mistresses, I’m not putting my gun to the back of their heads and pulling the trigger.”

“But you won’t do anything to stop it.”

“My God, be realistic, what could I do?”

“Then explain to me why they do it.”

“Like everyone else you want answers, you want to know why people do evil things. But evil can’t be parsed, because, in fact, it’s too simple, too stupid. And, anyway, why would you want to understand it, why the desire to dissect it? Don’t you understand that devoting your energies to the subject gives it a power, a rationale, a legitimacy it doesn’t warrant?” He smoked for some time, seemingly deep in thought, then he looked up. “As for me, self-interest is the best rationalizer, isn’t it, and, let’s face it, these days you can’t live your life without employing some form of rationalization.” He looked at them all in turn. “So the long and the short of it is I’m different from my coworkers because I’ve learned to adapt when I discover that I’ve been wrong. Considering the sewer in which I work, I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.”

Now, having explained himself, he looked at Annika. “My proposal?”

Jack said to her, “You’re not seriously considering—”

“The idea has a logic,” Annika said. “A symmetry I find immensely appealing.”

“Annika, really—”

“Can you think of another way we’re going to stay alive long enough to find out who killed Rochev?”

“Wait.” Now Kirilenko stood, but there was nothing threatening in his body language. “Karl Rochev is dead?”

Jack explained how they had been led to Magnussen’s estate by the odd murder weapon, how they had found Rochev, who bore the clear signs of torture before he’d been killed by the two sister sulitsa.

Kirilenko was about to reply when they heard a sharp scraping from the corridor. Then the door opened inward.

Harry Martin arrived at Simferopol North Airport one pissed-off human being. During the flight from Kiev he’d done nothing but seethe inwardly, feeding a rage that felt overwhelming by the time he emerged in the Arrivals hall. All he could think of was putting a bullet into the back of Kirilenko’s head. It had been Kirilenko who had misdirected him, ditched him, humiliated him with General Brandt. Now he understood why Kirilenko had so easily agreed to separate when he himself had suggested it, thinking that by heading back to Kiev while sending the Russian off on a wild-goose chase he’d be able to find Annika Dementieva on his own.

He scrutinized the passengers milling around the Arrivals hall as he would examine his past, looking for the one person on which his laserlike attention was currently fixated, so he could expunge the memory of what had happened.

So many things in Martin’s past needed extermination or exorcism, depending on whether your bent was practical or metaphysical; he’d concluded long ago that it all amounted to the same thing. The past was a vast swamp, reeking of mistakes, betrayals, lies, and delusions. If he’d had any say in it he’d obliterate his past and everyone in it. Wouldn’t that be sweet, he thought as his eyes swept the concourse, searching for Kirilenko.

Perhaps they’d both disappeared—Kirilenko and Annika Dementieva—and he’d never be able to find either of them. Then he could walk away and never come back. But he doubted that would happen because he knew all there was to know about disappearing. Harry Martin was a legend—in spook terminology, a fiction, like a short story or a novella. And what an exacting effort it took to maintain him! Creating him had been a snap, a conjuror’s trick backed up by documents the Legends Department had manufactured like the air in a plane or a refrigerator, canned, artificial, recirculated, hermetically sealed. He was a ghost built up like a Frankenstein’s monster from the pasts of people long dead. That’s where the legends wonks got their ideas, God knows they had none of their own. But with every lie he told Harry Martin became more difficult to sustain. The short story became a novella with a crisscrossing of fabrications that took immense care to keep from contradicting each other.

By this time he had circumnavigated the Arrivals hall, cataloguing each person, but without seeing Kirilenko. He took another visual sweep of the hall. As he glanced down the corridor leading to Airport Services he saw a security guard stepping across the threshold of a doorway on the left perhaps two-thirds of the way down the corridor. Something in the man’s expression—surprise, shock, even— warned Martin even before the man collapsed. As he was dragged inside, Martin was sprinting down the corridor. He pulled his ceramic pistol from its hard leather holster at the small of his back, thumbing the safety off. He reached the door just as it was being shut. Throwing the bulk of his leading shoulder between the door and its frame he kicked the door backward, so that it slammed wide open.

He just had time to register Kirilenko’s presence, other people on the periphery of his vision, when he fired blindly. He was fixated on Kirilenko, who had thrown himself behind a table. He aimed and was in the process of pulling the trigger when he heard a deafening noise.

Blown violently backward by the bullet that entered his skull, Harry Martin was dead before he hit the floor.

20

“I hope you rot in hell,” Kirilenko said, spitting on Harry Martin’s corpse.

Jack wasted no time riffling through Martin’s suit. He found his cell phone, a wad of cash, passport, two credit cards, an international driver’s license, and little else.

“There’s nothing here to indicate this man was anyone other than Harry Martin,” he said.

“No surprise there.” Annika was busy going through the security guard’s uniform. “Ah, but look what I found,” she said, holding up a set of car keys.

At that moment there came a hammering on the door, along with querulous voices raised in mounting fear. Jack grabbed the chair on which Kirilenko had been sitting, wedged the back under the doorknob at an angle so the back legs were braced against the floor. At the same time Annika raised the blinds on the window, only to find that the glass was reinforced with wire mesh. The hammering became more insistent, they could hear someone calling for help or backup, they couldn’t distinguish which. Annika took a second chair and smashed it into the windowpane, then she repeatedly slammed it against the wall until one of the legs came loose. She gripped this, hacking away at the wire mesh to make a hole large enough for them to get through.

They heard a shot from behind them and the door lock exploded inward. Now the only thing between them and the officials in the corridor was the angled chair, which was already shuddering from the pressure being exerted on it from the other side of the door.

“Let’s go!” Annika said, helping Alli through the aperture she’d made.

Jack went next, then Kirilenko. Finally Annika herself climbed out. Without any other choice, they began to run away from the building, a route that took them directly onto one of the runways. A jet was just on the turn from the taxiway onto the head of the runway. They could hear its engine winding up to launch it along the runway and into its glide path up and away from the airport.

Behind them the office they had vacated was swarming with people, screaming and shouting. A shot was fired at them, and they broke into a ragged zigzag as they reached the runway itself. By this time the jet was already rolling along the tarmac, picking up speed with the firing of its four massive engines.

Over the mounting roar they could just make out the high-low sound of a police car siren, and then, as Jack threw a glance behind them, the car itself careened into view. They were so close to the oncoming jet they began to choke on the fumes, and Jack pulled Alli close to him, away from the nearest engine on the outside of the jet’s left wing. They bent over double as they ran awkwardly across the vibrating tarmac, the foreshortened sight of the oncoming plane making it look as large as an apartment building.

The careening police car, putting on speed, was heading directly for them, and Jack, realizing their only hope was to maneuver so the plane was between them and their pursuers, led the way. The vectors formed their three-dimensional patterns in his mind, changing as their position changed in relation to the jet. He could see the one path that would keep them safe. Holding Alli’s hand, he continued on across the tarmac even as the jet threatened to intersect their path. It was so close now it blotted out most of the sky, like the onward rush of a hurricane or a tornado, the sky black and shiny and so close above their heads its windswept underside turned into a scythe.

Heads down, huddled on their knees like refugees, they clung to one another as the storm came upon them, the huge belly of the aircraft rushing by above them, the two sets of enormous wheels hemming them in on either side before they sped by at teeth-rattling speed. Then the four of them were freed, up and running again toward the far side of the tarmac, choking on the fumes pluming off the engines, their eyes tearing, the lining of their noses inflamed, the backs of their mouths aching and dry.

The jet had taken off from the western runway. Just beyond a wide verge, a steep slope led down to a grassy field on the far side of which was the parking lot, including the separate area for employee vehicles. They crossed over the verge and scrambled down the slope as the jet was lifting off the tarmac. The police vehicle, which had stopped to allow it to pass, had reached the runway.

The incline was too steep for the police car, which stopped on the verge to allow three uniformed cops to disembark and sprint toward the slope. They half slid, half skidded down the incline. One of them tripped, lost his gun, and had to make a detour to retrieve it. Then he was up and running, but because he was ashamed that he had lost ground to his two fellow officers, he stopped, planted his feet at shoulder width, and, cradling the butt of his Makarov in one hand, aimed at the fleeing figures and fired round after round until the pistol was empty.

Dyadya Gourdjiev was in a box. Just five minutes after receiving the call from Annika and making one of his own he discovered that he was being shadowed by two men, one behind him, the other in front of him. This was the nature of the box, a method of surveillance employed when you were sure of the target’s superior skills at countering surveillance.

He was perhaps six or seven blocks from the street outside his apartment where he’d shot to death the two Izmaylovskaya hit men. Arsov would not be pleased, but the last thing on Gourdjiev’s mind was Arsov’s displeasure. These two men who had him in a box could not be handled the same way because they weren’t grupperovka goons, they were government men, Kremlin men, Trinadtsat, and therefore under Batchuk’s direct command. He knew they must be Trinadtsat because they wore the signature black leather trench coats. The moment Batchuk had asked about Annika, having come all the way from Moscow, Dyadya Gourdjiev knew that she had gotten herself into terrible trouble. It wasn’t often Batchuk asked him about her—he knew better—it had been several years, in fact. Perhaps his interest stemmed from her two companions, but Gourdjiev doubted it. Batchuk’s interest was in her, no one else.

As he strolled along Kiev’s windswept streets, dragging his surveillance box with him, he wished he knew what she was up to, but Batchuk had been right about one thing: She was far too canny to tell him about her plans. She would never expose him to the risks she herself was taking. He wished, too, that he could talk her out of taking such risks, but he knew it would be a fool’s errand. Annika was an extremist; he’d seen it in her almost from birth. This was who she was and no one, no circumstance or experience, could change that. But there was another reason why he’d never tried to talk her out of the life she’d chosen: He was secretly proud of her, proud that she was fearless, tough, and clever. He’d taught her, true enough, but she brought a great deal to the table: You couldn’t teach someone to be clever, just how to be cleverer still, and as for being fearless, he was convinced that was a genetic trait.

As he moved at a normal gait he continued to check the box he was in, using any reflective surface he came upon: shop and car windows, the side mirrors of parked vehicles. The two shadows varied their distance, occasionally allowing people to get between them and their assignment in order to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

At this point there was no possibility of losing them; he hadn’t the time. Besides, he had no problem with them knowing where he was going, it might even give them a laugh.

The brothel was on the west bank, in the Pechersk district, in a beautifully restored postwar building with a splendid view of the river that more or less bisected the city. He could have ascended in the tiny elevator, but he preferred to take the stairs, which were wide, curving, and ornamented with a polished, hand-turned wooden railing that felt good and solid beneath his fingers. By the time he reached the third floor he was only slightly winded, but his legs felt terrific. He hadn’t been this exhilarated in years.

The young girl took his coat and scarf into her booth just inside the vestibule. Ekaterina, in one of her more provocative ensembles that showed off her long legs and her ample breasts, came bustling out, and kissed him on both cheeks. Linking her arm through his, she asked him what he was in the mood for, the usual or something a bit different. She spoke in French, because it lent her establishment a degree of upscale romance.

“Mon habituelle.” My usual.

“Toujours la même fille,” she said with a heartfelt sigh. Always the same girl.

“Mais une tellement belle fille” he replied. But such a beautiful girl.

She led him through a door she unlocked with both an eight-digit combination and a key that hung around her neck.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” she said, switching to English because it was an idiom with no analog in either French or Russian. They stopped in front of one of the many closed doors lining both sides of a wide, imaginatively lit hallway. “Just remember,” she whispered, rolling one impressive breast against his arm, “if at any time you change your mind, you’ve only to ask.”

He thanked her in his charming, rather formal old-school manner. Waiting until she had disappeared behind the locked door at the end of the hallway, he knocked on the door twice, waited five seconds, then knocked three times.

Without waiting for a reply he opened the door, stepped through, shut and locked the door behind him. He found himself in a square, dimly lighted room with furniture covered in yellow and pink chintz. The one window overlooked a steep green bank down to the somnambulant Dnieper River. Young children, overseen by their mothers, rolled down the embankment, laughing and shrieking, while two lovers lost in themselves stood arm in arm staring out across the gun-metal water.

“Did she try to get you into bed?” Riet Boronyov said.

Gourdjiev nodded. “Again.”

“She wouldn’t charge you, you know.” Boronyov jackknifed his small but very fit frame off the bed on which he’d been reclining, almost as if he had been daydreaming. “She’s hot for you.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev thought of the widow Tanova, her tea and fresh-baked stollen, and laughed. “She’s just rising to a challenge.”

“Don’t tell me you think you’re too old,” Boronyov clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, “because I wouldn’t believe it.”

“I’m not here to speak about Ekaterina or my sex life.”

“No, of course not.” Boronyov gripped the older man’s hand in friendship. “But it would make her happy, and a happy employee is a productive employee.”

“I don’t see how Ekaterina could be more productive than she already is. You take a great deal of money out of this business.”

“Indeed.”

Boronyov looked more like a bug-eyed wizard than an oligarch. When you were a billionaire, Gourdjiev thought, you could afford to be strange-looking without fear of anyone commenting on it. Everyone wanted to be your friend, unless they were too terrified to approach you, and those people were of no use to you anyway. “But because of that shitbag Yukin this is the only one of my businesses that’s currently making money. He and that cocksucker Batchuk are appropriating every last vestige of capitalism I acquired in the nineties. It’s all illegal, of course, but the judges have their heads stuck so far up Yukin’s ass they can’t hear the complaints.”

Gourdjiev had heard this rant many times before, of course, but like Batchuk, Boronyov needed to find some temporary release from his resentment and outrage. He was a capitalist, after all, and anyone who interfered with the free market system was anathema. Besides, his companies and much of his fortune had been stolen by a rigged system, rife with legal nihilism. Had he not fled Moscow just ahead of the armed commandos Batchuk had sent to take him into custody, he would be in a Siberian prison now, stripped of both freedom and money.

It had been Gourdjiev who had warned him of his imminent arrest, not because he held any particular love for the oligarch, but his business model was sadly preferable to that of Yukin and Batchuk, whose level of corruption was staggering both in its scope and its abuses. He had needed Boronyov’s brains and contacts.

Unlike Yukin and, no doubt, Batchuk, Gourdjiev viewed the reign of the oligarchs as a necessary evil, a bridge between Soviet Communism, which had proved to be an abject failure, and a free-market economy. But the oligarchs’ hubris had sealed their own doom. High on the enormous wealth they had amassed in just a few years, they began to shoulder their way into the political arena. Yukin, whose instincts for self-preservation were acute, moved against them as soon as he detected a threat to his absolute power. He brought down the monarch of the oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the head of Yukos, the largest oil company in Russia. With Khodorkovsky’s fall the other oligarchs turned into Yukin’s fawning toadies. All save a precious few. To Gourdjiev’s way of thinking Yukin’s steps to renationalize the largest companies in Russia smacked not of socialism, but of a twenty-first-century fascism that was far more pernicious.

“I need to know who gave the FSB orders to assist an American spy who went by the legend ‘Harry Martin,’” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. “And I need to know the name of Harry Martin’s handler.”

Boronyov sat down in one of the chintz chairs and crossed his legs. Surrounded by yellow and pink he looked healthy and robust. Perhaps he was, perhaps life outside Russia agreed with him, or maybe it was his new clandestine life in which he was reveling, his life as a dissident.

Steepling his fingers he said with a Mona Lisa smile, “These are strange days, indeed. I sometimes feel as if I’ve become a seer.” His smile deepened. “Odd to say, but exile can sometimes do that. Wrenched away from the nexus, you become an Outsider, and in order to not merely survive but to be resurrected you’re forced to change your point of view, forced from the subjective to the objective. It’s like putting on a pair of contact lenses, or recovering from cataract surgery, everything becomes clear, sharply delineated. Motives reach the surface at last, and all becomes transparent.”

“So you know the aim of Trinadtsat.”

“I know it as well as I know the aim of AURA.” He rose, and with that the color seemed to drain from his face. “But far more importantly, I know your role in both.”

After the first shot, Jack put himself between Alli and the gunman, but they had already made significant progress through the field and the bullets lacked the range, falling harmless behind them. Still, there were two cops running full tilt at them, steel truncheons gripped in their hands like batons in a relay race. Unlike their compatriot, they hadn’t bothered to draw their sidearms, having decided to concentrate on closing the gap between them and their quarry.

“We’re never going to make it,” Annika said. “They’ll be in pistol range any minute now.”

“What do you suggest?” Jack said.

Before he had a chance to react, she slowed and, turning, drew her gun. “Keep going!” she shouted. “Don’t slow down!”

Jack had to drag Alli along with him as she started to drop back. “Come on!” he said urgently. “She’s right.”

“We can’t just leave her,” Alli cried.

“If we stop we’ll all be killed.” He nodded at the figure sprinting ahead of them. “In this instance Kirilenko has the right idea.”

Behind them, Annika knelt and, cupping one hand beneath the butt to steady the gun, aimed at the leading cop. Her left arm felt as if it were on fire. She took long, deep, slow breaths to manage the pain. The cops saw that she’d stopped and began a peppering fire in order to distract her, but she ignored the bullets whistling by her, squeezed off one shot, missed. The second shot caught the lead cop in the right side of his chest, spinning him around before he collapsed. The second cop started to zigzag, stutter-stepping in order to make himself a more difficult target. He fired as he came, forcing Annika to roll, come up on one knee, squeeze off a shot, then roll again.

Looking back, Alli broke away from Jack’s grip and ran back toward Annika. She ignored Jack’s yell, closed her ears to the pounding of his feet behind her. Neither Annika nor the cop were as yet aware of her, and she dropped her gaze to the field across which she ran. At last finding what she was searching for she slowed and scooped up a rock. Planting her feet with her left leg forward, she threw it with unerring accuracy. It struck the cop on the forehead, just a glancing blow, but it was enough to stop him in his tracks, enough time for Annika to come up on one knee, aim, and shoot him twice in the chest.

“My good Riet Medanovich,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, “you should know there are two members of Trinadtsat downstairs even as we speak.”

“So after all this time you were playing us.” Boronyov drew a small-caliber pistol from his vest pocket. “You’ve betrayed us and everything we stand for.”

“Don’t be idiotic, I’ve done nothing of the sort,” Gourdjiev said dismissively. “Do you actually think you know what Trinadtsat is all about?”

“I know they’re after the same prize we desperately need if we’re to align ourselves with AURA and rise again as a dissident force Yukin can’t stamp out or bully.”

“Then you don’t know anything. Do us both a favor and keep your mind on what you’re meant to do. AURA needs your expertise and your contacts.” Gourdjiev put his back against the window and leaned on the broad sill. “Now please tell me what I want to know about who gave the FSB orders to assist Harry Martin and who Martin’s handler was.”

Boronyov said, “Let’s go down and talk to Batchuk’s ambassadors of pain.”

Gourdjiev was genuinely alarmed. “And announce to them that you’re still alive after all the trouble we went through to ‘kill’ you? That’s the last thing we’re going to do.” He came off the windowsill. “Where is this sudden aggression coming from?”

“Your relationship with Oriel Jovovich Batchuk. You two go way back, you grew up together, had each other’s back for years.”

A whiff of a revelation came to Gourdjiev. “This suspicion isn’t your style, Riet Medanovich.”

“No? Whose style is it?”

“Kharkishvili.”

Boronyov stared at him, silent as a sphinx.

“You understand what he’s doing.”

“He’s questioning the special relationship you have with Batchuk.”

As a gesture of frustration Gourdjiev jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ve explained that.”

“No, you’ve explained nothing, or at least not to anyone’s satisfaction.”

“Be truthful, Riet Medanovich—”

“Have you been truthful with us?”

“I set you all up,” Gourdjiev said. “You, Kharkishvili, Malenko, the others. And now you think—”

“Kharkishvili says it’s all a con—a long con you cooked up with your good friend Batchuk.”

“That’s insane,” Gourdjiev said. “And furthermore don’t tell me you believe it, because I’ll laugh in your face.”

“At this delicate stage, when everything is at stake, it really doesn’t matter what I think or believe.”

“I see. All that matters is what Kharkishvili believes.”

“Think what you will.”

“Oh, I know what he’s done, Riet Medanovich, I’ve known it for some time,” Gourdjiev said. “Ever since I brought him on board he’s sowed the seeds of distrust in order to gain power, in order to displace me. It’s a ploy as old as time, but what it will do is rend us asunder, in civil war we will all fail.”

“He has a better plan.”

“That’s what all would-be tyrants and usurpers say.”

Boronyov appeared unmoved, or at least unconvinced. “We can end the speculation, distrust, and suspicion right now. All we have to do is go downstairs and talk to the ambassadors of pain.”

“Who was Harry Martin and who was his handler?”

Boronyov stared at him unblinkingly for a moment. “You know who I’m going to have to call to get the answers.”

Gourdjiev waved his hand in the air, Boronyov punched in a number on his cell phone, and spoke briefly to Kharkishvili. “All right,” he said finishing up. “Five minutes,” he said to Gourdjiev, who turned to stare out the window.

The kids and their mothers were gone but the lovers were still there, holding hands, talking perhaps about wedding plans. Their whole lives were ahead of them, Gourdjiev thought. His legs had begun to ache.

He did not turn around even when Boronyov’s cell burred. A moment later Boronyov said, “Harry Martin is a deep-cover assassin out of the American National Security Agency. His handler is General Atcheson Brandt.”

Good God, Gourdjiev thought in mounting agitation, now I know why he was after Annika. However, when he turned back to Boronyov his face was serene and untroubled.

“Now let’s forget all about you going downstairs. Yukin and Batchuk think you’re dead. You’ve got to remain in the shadows.”

Boronyov lifted the gun. “That assumes we’re going to allow these men to walk away.”

Gourdjiev’s mind was working overtime. “You want us to kill the deputy prime minister’s men?”

“No,” Boronyov said, unlocking the door, “I want to watch while you kill them.”

Jack grabbed Alli around the waist, swung her off her feet, and ran with her toward the far side of the field where, on a rise, a chain-link fence separated it from the parking lots. No one followed them. Annika was up and running after them. As she came abreast of them she gave Alli a fierce grin. Fifty yards still separated them from the fence. Kirilenko was scrambling up the slope toward it. Gaining the crest, he hooked his fingers through the links and began to climb. There was no razor wire at the top so he had little difficulty reaching it.

They were close to him, having reached the slope themselves. They were scrambling up it when they heard the sharp crack. Kirilenko’s body arched backward as he lost his grip. The second bullet took part of his skull off, and he tumbled backward toward them. His trousers caught on a link, and he hung there, upside down, his rageful eyes glaring at them fixedly as blood turned his hair black and shiny as oil.

Mondan Limonev folded the butt of the SVD-S Dragunov sniper rifle. He spent precisely twenty seconds admiring what he’d done to Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko, whose corpse hung like a plastic sack of garbage from the chain-link fence. Without conscious thought he broke down the lightweight Dragunov with its polymer furniture. It was gas-operated, quieter yet more deadly than other rifles, and it fit in a case small enough to carry beneath one arm, like a baseball bat or a pool cue. The 7.62x54R steel-core rounds he’d fired into Kirilenko had done a satisfying amount of damage.

For precisely ten seconds he listened to the rushing of blood in his inner ears, the tympani of his heart within his ribs, and he felt the familiar exhilaration. There was nothing like the proximity to death to make him feel alive, vibrant, potent. What was life but mastery over others? He inhabited a universe of gods, who could snuff out mortal life with the slow pull of a trigger or the flick of a shining blade. What was Kirilenko now, nothing his mother would recognize, that was for certain.

He rose from his position on the top of a parked car and, clambering down, walked through the lot at a measured pace.

“Christ, is he dead?” Annika said.

“As a doorpost,” Jack, who was in a better position to see, answered.

“We’re pinned down here,” Annika said.

It was Jack who saw the figure rise from the top of a car in the parking lot and, with a small case under one arm, leap down and begin to walk away.

He led Alli and Annika to a spot along the fence far enough away from Kirilenko so Alli wouldn’t have a clear look at the aftermath of the murder. “I don’t think he’s interested in us.”

Peering through the fence he waited until he could no longer see the figure, then he said to Annika, “Okay, it’s safe. Up you go.”

She scaled the chain-link fence without question and, as soon as she was on the other side, Jack boosted Alli up. Climbing and scrambling, she rolled her body over the top and descended until she was met with Annika’s outstretched hands. Jack followed, ascending and descending as quickly as he could.

Once in the parking lot Annika took them to the area cordoned off for airport personnel. Fortunately, there weren’t that many cars, as a majority of the workers used public transportation to and from the airport. With less than twenty-four cars to check, they found the one they were looking for within five or six minutes, a beaten-up Zil. By that time, however, more sirens were tearing through the afternoon, pitched louder as the police cars approached the airport from the city of Simferopol.

Annika slid behind the wheel with Alli beside her. Jack took possession of the backseat, armed with the pistol they’d taken from Kirilenko. Annika started the car without difficulty, eased out of the parking space, and drove to the exit as the convoy of police cars careened by. Jack noted that her hands were perfectly still on the wheel, not even the hint of a tremor visible.

After the police cars had passed, she waited, breathing deeply and slowly. The tension mounted to almost unbeatable levels, Alli squirming in her seat, but it was imperative they avoid the danger of calling attention to themselves by appearing to flee the scene. In this way, three minutes crawled by while their hearts beat furiously and their pulses pounded in their temples.

At last, Annika put the Zil in gear, took a left turn out of the lot, and drove south toward Simferopol and, eventually, the coast around Alushta. Jack, with his back to them, kept an eye out behind them for any sign of a police vehicle. He counted six civilian cars on the road behind them, but nothing official. With a sigh of relief he swiveled around, watching, as Annika and Alli did, the unlovely countryside that would, at length, lead them to Magnussen’s villa on the Black Sea coast, where, he hoped, many questions would be answered.

Three cars and a hundred yards behind them a man known only as Mr. Lovejoy drummed his blunt steel-worker’s fingers on the steering wheel of his rented car. Though it might be something of a conceit to think of himself as a steel worker, his blue-collar Detroit background dictated his way of thinking. Uncomfortable with the suits he’d been obliged to rub shoulders with when he’d come to D.C. as a very young man, he had transferred out of the office and into field work with what some around him had deemed unseemly haste. But he was happy now and never looked back.

He’d asked for and by the grace of God had received a rental with a cassette player, an old but serviceable Toyota. The first thing he did after starting up the car was to slide in a cassette, turn the volume up to maximum, and when the first few bars of Breaking Benjamin’s “Evil Angel” ripped and roared through the interior, his lips drew back from his teeth in a contented grin.

His gaze fixed on the Zil, he saw himself as a winged creature who, having caught sight of its prey, rides the thermals high above, following, following in twists and turns, dips and rises, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

Riet Boronyov accompanied Dyadya Gourdjiev out of the brothel. In the elevator Gourdjiev pulled out his gun and replaced the three bullets he’d fired earlier. Boronyov looked on with a mixture of superiority and tacit approval. Downstairs, the lobby seemed as chill as a meat locker, colder certainly than the outside temperature, which had moderated as the afternoon wore on.

The two Trinadtsat agents, stalwart and intimidating, were cooling their heels on the corner, smoking indolently, speaking very little, and generally acting as if they owned the block of buildings. They saw Gourdjiev approaching at the same time and their hands went to the pockets of their ominous black trench coats. Gourdjiev already had his gun aimed at them, and he shook his head, causing them to freeze for a moment, then slowly remove their hands, presenting them in what in other people could have been interpreted as a sign of surrender or placation. Not in these two, of this Dyadya Gourdjiev was certain.

It was at this moment that Boronyov, walking behind the older man, chose to show himself. The Trinadtsat agents, even as well trained as they were, could not keep the expression of consternation off their faces. Their bewilderment served as entertainment for Boronyov, and he laughed, reveling in their dire predicament.

That was when Gourdjiev turned the weapon on him and shot him point-blank in the side of the head. Boronyov’s laughter turned to a burbling gurgle and then to stunned silence as he pitched to the pavement.

The Trinadtsat agents scarcely had time to register what had happened when Gourdjiev said, “Bring this traitor to Oriel Jovovich Batchuk. Tell him Boronyov is a gift from me. Tell him he can stop looking for Annika Dementieva. He now has the answer to what she is doing here in Ukraine.”

21

After hours of wildly pumping adrenaline a stunning fatigue had set in. Jack lay back against the seat, closed his eyes, and allowed the vibration of the car to lull him to a kind of shallow sleep.

“Dad. Dad, tell me that story again.”

He opened his eyes, turned his head slightly, and there was Emma sitting beside him. So it wasn’t a dream, or perhaps it was, perhaps he was still sleeping.

“Which story?” His voice was so soft it barely registered over the road noise. Besides, Alli and Annika were talking to each other in low tones.

She was turned partway toward him, her right leg drawn up beneath her, the other one hanging down, the heel of her shoe tap-tap-tapping against the seat. “The one about the scorpion and the turtle.”

“I told you that so many times.”

“Dad, please tell it again.”

There was a tension in her voice, an intensity he found disquieting, so he told her about the scorpion and the turtle who meet on the bank of a river. The scorpion asks the turtle to ferry him across on his back. “Why would I do that?” the turtle says. “You’ll sting me and I’ll die.” “I can’t swim,” the scorpion says. “If I sting you I’ll die, too.” The turtle, a logical creature, is swayed by the scorpion’s reply, so he allows the scorpion to climb on his back and out they go into the river. Midway across, the scorpion stings the turtle. “Why?” the turtle cries. “Why did you lie to me?” “It’s my nature,” the scorpion says, just before they both drown.

Jack looked into Emma’s dark eyes, as if trying to peer beyond the veil of life. “Why did you want me to tell you that story again?”

“I wanted to make sure you remembered it,” she said.

“How could I forget it?”

“That’s what I thought, but I guess you need a reminder.”

“I don’t understand, honey.”

“Dad, everyone is lying to you.”

He was suddenly tense. There was a knot in his stomach. “What do you mean everyone is lying to me?”

“You know what I mean, Dad.”

“I don’t. Everyone, like Edward?”

“The president,” she said.

“And, what? Alli?”

“Alli, as well.”

“Why would Alli lie to me? Come on, Emma. What is this?”

“Dad, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

“You always tell me things I don’t know,” he said.

“About us, yes. The two of us. That’s why I’m still here. But about everything else, no, I can’t.”

“The way you say it … as if it’s some kind of law.”

“I suppose you could look at it that way.”

“A universal law, like physics or quantum mechanics?”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles just in case he really was sleeping. But when he opened them, whether in fact he was asleep or awake, he found himself alone in the backseat. There was no one to answer his question.

“Nothing is inherently good or evil,” Annika was saying to Alli as Jack looked around for his daughter, “it’s just disappointing.”

“Give me an example,” Alli said.

Annika, her eyes on the road, thought for a moment. “All right. In ancient Rome, there was a man, Marcus Manlius, who had masterminded the plan to save the Capitol from destruction when Rome had been overrun by the Gauls. This was in, oh, three ninety, B.C. Anyway, in the aftermath of the war that drove the invaders out, as in all wars, the soldiers who had so bravely defended their homeland were now out of a job, and soon so deep in debt they were thrown in prison, an injustice Marcus Manlius would not tolerate. He used much of his great fortune to buy these heroes their freedom, an act of altruism that pissed off the patricians of the city, so much so that they accused him of building his own private army in order to force his way into power. The plebs, incited by the patricians’ charges, sentenced Marcus Manlius to death. They threw him off the Tarpeian Rock.”

Alli remembered that the Tarpeian Rock had fascinated Emma because it was the spot where criminals were hurled to their death. It was named after the traitor who opened the gates of Rome to the Sabines for the promise of gold bracelets. Instead, when she let them in, they crushed her with their shields, which they wore on the same arm as the bracelets so coveted by Tarpeia—a vestal virgin, no less! How ironic. She was buried at the base of the rock that came to bear her name, which rose from the summit of a steep cliff on the southern face of Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Forum.

Rome had been founded by thieves, outlaws, murderers, and slaves who’d been clever enough to escape their masters. The only trouble was there were no women, which is why these early Romans, as they called themselves, decided to steal females from the neighboring Sabines. It was this infamous rape—the Latin raptio, meaning kidnapping—of the women that led to the Sabines’ revenge, using Tarpeia as their cat’s-paw.

This dark side of Romans—of Rome itself—had caught and held Alli’s attention, because in addition to being responsible for the invention of roads, the aqueduct, and numerous other innovations, it was the Romans who, infamously, had created the homicidal system of election. Those leaders they didn’t like, learned to dislike, feared, found fault with, or about whom they invented transgressions (out of envy or greed) were murdered forthwith. Alli, having been born to and brought up in the incubator of politics, felt the tension, the unspoken fear of assassination that swirled around her father in ever thicker layers the higher on the political ladder he climbed. And when she’d come to Moscow she almost immediately had intuited how similar it was to ancient Rome, how much the modern-day political system had been infected by that of the Romans: institutionalized murder as a means to an end.

“So,” Alli said after her moment’s thought, “what you’re saying is that even the best intentions turn to shit.”

“I’m saying that all of us are doomed to disappointment. I’m saying I embrace that disappointment because it’s the ultimate leveler, it doesn’t care about class or money or power. It’s the great reaper.”

“You mean the grim reaper,” Alli said. “That’s death.”

Annika shrugged. “Take your pick.”

The call came in to Dennis Paull’s cell phone at three thirty in the morning. He was in the middle of a labyrinth of data he’d finally been able to pull off of General Brandt’s cell phone records, as well as a definitive report on his comings and goings over the last year. In fact, Paull was busy reading the item that interested him the most: two unofficial round-trip flights to Moscow, both in the last six months, both over weekends, that were neither recorded or expensed by any government agency. That wouldn’t have necessarily set off an alarm bell in Paull’s mind, but there were a number of oddities. For one thing, General Brandt paid cash for first-class tickets. For another, both flights had been on Aeroflot, not Delta, an American airline, which by all rights he should have taken. Where in the world did the General get ten thousand in cash for two trips to Moscow? He hacked into the General’s bank account at District National. A day before the withdrawal, ten thousand was wired into the account from Alizarin Global, an entity Paull had never heard of.

His cell buzzed. He was plunged so deep in thought he almost didn’t answer it.

A local number not recognized by caller ID. “Hello?”

“Mr. Paull?”

“Yes?”

“This is Nancy Lettiere, we’ve met several times. I run the Alzheimer’s wing at Petworth Manor. I’m sorry to report that Mrs. Paull expired at three eleven this morning.”

For a long time after that Paull sat very still. His eyes still ran over the lines of information on his laptop just as they had during the long hours before the call, but now nothing registered in his brain, which was suddenly filled with a dreadful little refrain repeated over and over—“You weren’t there, you weren’t there, you weren’t there when she died”—as if it were a ridiculous children’s song coming out of a ghostly radio in her room. All at once he was suffocating in the sickly-sweet odor of her, of … good God, he couldn’t even say her name, she’d been a vegetable for so long. And yet now he was choking on what was left of her, of Louise, as if he’d inhaled the ashes of her funeral pyre.

He pushed back his chair, rose, and left the room without retrieving his coat. The fire stairs echoed harshly with his hurried footfalls. Outside, he lit a cigarette, but almost immediately the night manager appeared behind the glass door, pointed to the cigarette, and shook his head vigorously. Paull took a deep drag and blew the smoke against the glass.

The night manager frowned, slid his key card into the slot, and opened the door. “I’m sorry, sir, but federal regulations prohibit any smoking within twenty feet of the building.”

Paull said nothing, stood looking at him while he continued to smoke.

“Sir, did you not hear me? If you persist I’m going to have to call the authorities—”

He gave a startled yelp as Paull grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him up against the wall, then struck the man in the stomach. As he doubled over, Paull hit him in the side of the head, then flush on his nose, which immediately gushed blood.

For a moment Paull drew smoke into his lungs and let it out in a luxurious plume. He was dizzy with the onrush of adrenaline. At length, he knelt down and showed the night manager his credentials.

“I am the fucking authority, buddy.” He hauled the man to his feet and pushed him roughly through the door. “So fuck off before I turn you in as a suspected terrorist.”

Alone again, Paull stamped out his ruined cigarette and lit another. He stepped out onto the asphalt lot. Shouldn’t it be raining, he thought, gloomy weather to match his mood? Instead, a brilliant butter-colored moon rode in the sky, and all at once he was thrust back twenty-eight years, when he used to read Claire Goodnight Moon. He read it so often that she had soon memorized it and then she recited it aloud with him as he read.

He took another long drag and let the smoke drift out on its own. Seven years ago Claire had visited for a long weekend with her then boyfriend, one of those young men full of entitlement based on an inflated assessment of their own self-worth. She was nothing but smiles and laughs, even when they had gone together to visit Louise, who, at that time, might on occasion still recognize her daughter.

Following dinner on Saturday night, in an awkward attempt at male bonding, the boyfriend had invited Paull out onto the back porch. Producing a pair of cigars, he boasted that they were Cubans. Not a good way to get into Paull’s good graces. Nevertheless they smoked together companionably for a time while the boyfriend spoke about his important job on Wall Street, his conservative views on politics, religion, and morality, his plans for the future, which appeared to include Paull’s daughter.

It wasn’t until late in the day on Sunday that Claire told him she was pregnant, that she wanted to marry the boyfriend as soon as possible, which, Paull intuited, was the underlying reason for the visit. He did not argue with her, he said scarcely anything at all. She no doubt thought he took the news quite well, but then he’d done an excellent job of making her think he liked the boyfriend who, Claire made clear, as yet knew nothing of her changed physical state. In fact, she was excited about telling him, having picked out the time and the place that to her seemed the most romantic. “It’ll be just like a scene from the movies,” she gushed, her eyes shining.

For his part, Paull chose his own time and place to tell the boyfriend, watched in satisfaction as the young man choked on an inhalation of Cuban cigar smoke when he delivered the news.

“I expect you to do the right thing and marry Claire,” he said, which was a risk he’d carefully calculated. Instead, as he’d suspected, the boyfriend cleared out, wanting nothing to do with a child conceived out of wedlock. What a hypocrite, Paull thought. He had no trouble taking my daughter to bed before their wedding night but his moral righteousness kicked in the moment the consequences of his reckless fornication reared their ugly head. He was enraged and had been since the cigar-smoking incident of the night before when the boyfriend had stupidly revealed himself, telling Paull how important he was, how much he made, talking about the house he had his eye on in Connecticut, giving his bona fides for buying Claire at any price, as if she were an expensive cut of meat, or a racehorse, he rode her well enough.

The only problem was Claire. Instead of being grateful to him for saving her from such a shallow hypocrite, she railed against him endlessly, screams and tears bursting forth in equal measure before she slammed out of the house. Certain that her hysterics would pass he allowed several days to go by before he phoned her. She wouldn’t take his calls, and to this day never again spoke to him. He had a grandson, this much he knew, but whether or not his daughter had married, or married the hypocrite, or whether she was a single mother he had no idea. Once, he’d hired a private detective to find out, but paid him off a day later, sick of the whole sorry issue. The only thing he was grateful for was that Louise was too far gone to understand the unpleasant mess that without warning had been dropped into his lap.

As for Claire, he rarely thought about her now, except at odd times like these, and then he recalled her not with a twinge of nostalgia, but with a pang of disappointment. He did miss knowing about his grandson, even if he was the offspring of entitlement and hypocrisy, but only because someone would have to wean the boy off those tendencies before they poisoned his system. He found it sad, tragic even, that it wouldn’t be him.

The thought of his anonymous grandson living an unknown life burned his skin as if he had thrust his arm into the furnace that would soon enough consume the sadly wasted remains of Louise. He stared down at his open hand, pulsing with blood, and for the first time came face-to-face with what it meant to be alive, to look back and see nothing but loss, a diminution of self, of his soul. He backed up against the cold wall that still held a smear of the night manager’s blood, slid slowly down it. The moon was hidden from him now. Goodnight Claire, goodnight nameless little boy of seven, goodnight moon.

Upstairs in his darkened room, which sudden and unwanted sentiment had caused him to vacate, a brief but telling hacker’s probe scanned General Brandt’s private data over which Paull had been poring like the devil’s advocate, then it captured the ISP address of Paull’s computer. Within fifteen minutes of the probe being withdrawn an anonymous car hit the road, driven by a man who looked like an accountant, or possibly a schoolteacher, but who, having received his orders, was fully weaponized and ready to destroy life.

Mr. Lovejoy knew this road like the back of his hand. The Crimea had been his theater of operations for five years now. Not that he’d ever gotten used to it. The food still lay like a leaden ball in his stomach, his skin always itched from some fungus or other, and he hadn’t slept in the same bed for more than three straight nights. The saving grace was the women, who were young, tall, blond, and plentiful. They loved foreigners, particularly Americans, who they hoped to rope into marriage in order to get them out of the hellhole into which they had been born. Once you knew that about them you could entice anything out of them. Mr. Lovejoy was looking forward to this evening’s festivities, which he’d already set in motion, anticipating a quick resolution to this commission.

The road had risen up as it reached the cliff face. Already he could see the aquamarine sparkle of the Black Sea as the road began its long sweep around the coastline. Checking his odometer he saw there was less than a kilometer to the apex of the curve where the commission would be, as he put it, realized. It was time and, pressing down on the accelerator, he moved the Toyota into position.

The great sweep of the Black Sea, now darkly bruised by lowhanging clouds on the horizon, was rapidly opening up as he approached the apex. The Zil had already entered the first part of it. Swinging out into the oncoming traffic lane, he put on a sudden burst of speed. A moment more and he’d slam his off-side front fender into the left rear quarter of the Zil, launching it into a death spiral that, by his calculations, would send it over the cliff during its second rotation.

“More speed!” Jack shouted from the backseat.

“Hang on!” Annika called back to him.

As he saw the Toyota pull out into the left-hand lane, he added, “Jesus, he wants to send us over the cliff.”

“This damn auto.” Annika’s hands gripped the wheel as firmly as possible, but it had begun to vibrate alarmingly as the Zil started to shimmy. “If I go any faster we’ll go over the damn cliff without his help.”

“Here he comes!” Jack said. “Alli, curl yourself into a ball and stay that way.”

He rolled down the window and began firing at the oncoming Toyota, but their own car was behaving badly, shaking as if at any moment it would fly apart from the excessive stress it was under. Jack was thrown back and forth, making it impossible to get off a clean shot.

“Annika, for God’s sake, put on more speed!”

She did as he asked, and for a moment it appeared as if the maneuver would work. They began to pull ahead of the Toyota, but then something lurched, forcing Annika to flutter the brake to stop them from flying off the road into thin air.

In that moment, the Toyota hit them and they slewed badly, beginning their spin. Jack, thrown against the open window, caught a glimpse of the Toyota before they spun around in a circle.

Annika threw the Zil into neutral and turned off the ignition. The car continued to spin, coming perilously close to the edge before she was able to regain a semblance of control. Not that it mattered, Jack thought, because the Toyota would hit them again, the driver finishing what he had started. But as he caught a second glimpse behind them, something slammed so violently into the Toyota it rose into the air. An instant later, it exploded, hurtling down the cliff face, and the choking smell of burning gasoline engulfed them.

By this time, Annika had brought the Zil to a shuddering stop on the right verge of the road.

“Alli,” Jack said, scrambling across the backseat, “are you all right?”

She came slowly out of her defensive position and, slightly dazed, nodded. It was then that Jack saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and, turning, watched a figure walking down off the high embankment on the landward side of the road. In one hand he carried an M72 LAW, an antitank weapon, the lightweight successor to the World War II bazooka, but he held it loosely, pointed at the ground. His size made it look like a child’s toy. The man continued to walk heavily across the road toward the Zil. Jack’s mind was working on the appearance of this man in the same way it had calculated the vectors of their run toward the oncoming jet, trying to find explanations in the extraordinary, working backward from the moment the Toyota exploded to the filthy back alley in Moscow. He came up with various explanations, possibilities, conflicting judgments, and fantastic speculation, but, unfortunately, no definitive conclusions. He had come to one of those moments when assumptions are derailed by a reality you could not have imagined, like turning a Rubik’s Cube and finding a fourth dimension you hadn’t calculated into your reasoning. In fact, for the moment the rational had been obliterated, logic was of no use whatsoever. Death and life had merged, or changed places, and everything else had come to a standstill.

“Stay inside the car,” he told Alli.

She turned and, peering out the driver’s side window, saw the man coming across the road. “Who is he? Jack, what’s going on?”

“Please, Alli, just do as I say.”

As if in a trance he opened the door and got out. The large, bearlike man came on, his slicked-back hair shining in the sunlight, and Jack experienced an eerie chill that went clear through him. The fourth dimension of the far side of the Rubik’s Cube was almost upon him. In an attempt to make sense of the present his mind flashed back to the hotel bar in Moscow, where the man facing him had been arguing with Annika and her friend; the back alley where the bearlike man and his partner had lain in wait to kill Annika; the pitched battle that had followed, at the end of which the bearlike man lay in a pool of his own blood.

In self-protective reflex Jack pointed the gun at him, but Annika, having emerged from the collapsing automobile, strode quickly up to him and pushed down the barrel.

“This isn’t possible,” Jack said as the hulking figure stopped in front of him. “I shot you dead in the alley behind the Bushfire club.”

“Aren’t you going to thank me? No?” Ivan Gurov waggled the M72 slightly. “Don’t be rude. Without me you would have gone over the cliff instead of the American agent sent to kill you.”

Part 3

Portia:

“Think you I am no stronger than my sex,

Being so father’d and so husbanded?”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

Julius Caesar

22

“Dad, everyone is lying to you.”

With the echo of Emma’s voice in his head Jack turned on Annika. “What the hell is going on?” He was so filled with fury his voice had turned guttural. “What are you playing at?”

“There’s an explanation—,” Annika began.

“Of course there’s a fucking explanation.” His voice rose even more. “You and Gurov were in on this from the beginning. Do you think I need an explanation from either of you now? I used Gurov’s gun to shoot him, but it couldn’t have been loaded with live ammo. That scene in the alley was a con.” He turned on Gurov. “The other man, your pal …”

“Spiakov.”

“Yes, Spiakov, where is he?”

Gurov shrugged. “Six feet under, I imagine. We required verisimilitude.”

“Verisimilitude.” Jack turned back to Annika. “You murdered a man for verisimilitude?”

“It had to be real,” Annika said. “At least part of it.”

Jack was only dimly aware of Alli getting out of the car and approaching them, precisely what he told her not to do. “What I want to know is why you lied to me. Why are you offering an explanation now, at this late date?”

“Because now we’ve gotten you here,” Annika said simply. “Because, dammit, it’s time.”

“You told me you hated Gurov, that he was an assignment.”

“He is part of my assignment.” Annika was getting worked up herself. “I only lied to you when it was absolutely necessary.”

“And that makes it okay? That’s a forgivable offense?”

“Don’t confuse me with your ex-wife, who lied to you constantly,” Annika said hotly. “Believe me, I haven’t confused you with anyone else. You’ve made that quite impossible.”

“What is that, your idea of a fucking compliment?”

Jack took a threatening step toward her, and the confrontation might have degenerated into physical violence if Alli hadn’t stepped between them before Gurov could make a move.

“Stop it, the two of you!” she cried.

“If you’ll only give me a chance to explain,” Annika said, taking her cue from Alli.

“Jack, don’t you want an explanation?” Alli chimed in.

“I already have an explanation.” It was clear he was furious. “She’s been lying to me from the moment I met her.”

“Maybe she had a good reason.”

“There’s no good reason for lying,” he said.

“You know that’s not true.”

“Why are you taking her side?”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side,” Alli said. “Anyway, even if you don’t want to know what’s really going on, I do.”

That slowed him down a bit, at least enough for Annika to say, “I’m sorry, Jack, really and truly sorry.”

He saw a change in her, perhaps because she was asking for forgiveness, but, probing beneath the surface, more possibly because of her proximity to Alli, or Alli’s palliative words, as if being near Alli or even hearing her voice changed her subtly, brought her back to herself, whatever lay under her mask, in her unknown and unknowable heart Jack had talked about last night.

“If this could have been done another way,” Annika continued, “I promise you it would have been. But we had no choice.”

“We?” he said, more calmly in response to his probing. “Who is ‘we’?”

“AURA,” Annika said.

But immediately his anger fired up. “The entity or business or whatever you claimed to know nothing about.”

Alli put a hand on his arm. “Let’s not go there again,” she said.

“It may be necessary.” Jack’s eyes were on Annika.

“We’ll deal with that then,” Alli said as if she were the smartest person in the group. Certainly she was the calmest.

He looked over at her, and taking in her tentative smile, nodded his assent. “All right,” he said to Annika, “who or what is Aura?”

She said, “It’s an acronym for the Association of Uranium Refining Allies. It’s made up of—”

All at once, Ivan Gurov stepped forward. “Annika, no. This is a very bad idea.”

She shook her head. “He has a right to know, Ivan.”

“This could lead to dire consequences.”

“Your job is done. Stay out of it.”

Addressing Jack again, she continued: “AURA is made up of a group of Ukrainian businessmen, certain international energy interests in the Ukraine, and a small circle of dissident Russian oligarchs.”

The moment Ivan Gurov had returned from the dead Jack had seen the nature of the universe into which he had plunged. Now, at last, he saw its structure, as clearly as if he were looking at a scale model of Earth’s solar system.

“So we have AURA on one side,” Jack said, “and Yukin, Batchuk, and their creation, Trinadtsat, on the other.”

“Observe, Ivan, this is a man who sees more than you or I,” Annika said. “A man who—how shall we put it?—sees around corners. How much he has gleaned from only the stray bits and pieces he’s picked up along the way, he’s a chess master who sees the endgame forming the moment his opponent makes the first move.”

The sound of an approaching car brought them all into awareness of their surroundings.

“I think,” Gurov said, glancing dubiously at the wreck of the Zil, “I’d best get the car.”

The car in question turned out to be a clunky cab, decrepit but, because of that, absolutely anonymous.

“Where are we going?” Alli said.

“The Magnussen estate,” Ivan Gurov said.

“You knew this all along,” Jack said to Annika. His anger was still smoldering.

She shook her head. “I swear I didn’t know where we needed to go. It was protocol. In the event we got picked up I couldn’t tell our interrogators our destination.”

“Interrogators,” Jack said. “Charming.” And Alli shuddered.

“Mikal Magnussen’s father purchased fifty-five acres perched on a cliff overlooking the Black Sea,” Gurov said as he drove, “high up so he could look down on his neighbors, all of whom consider themselves rich.”

It was five thirty on an evening marked by towering clouds building along the horizon. Not a breath of wind stirred the trees. It was just over thirty-one miles from the airport to the thickly forested area above Alushta where Magnussen’s father had built his summer compound. They had already come seven-tenths of the way, so in less than twenty minutes they turned off the road and came to a stop before stainless-steel gates, modern and as impregnable-looking as a castle’s portcullis. The gates were attached to a pair of fluted twelve-foot-tall granite columns.

Gurov rolled down his window in order to press a red button and recite something, perhaps a code phrase, into the grill of a small speaker. A moment later, the gates swung soundlessly open and they rolled through, tires crunching on a wide, looping bed of crushed shells.

The Magnussen estate was something out of a storybook, or a gothic novel, possibly Wuthering Heights, because its high stone walls, turreted garrets, and dizzying spires were more appropriate for the English or Scottish moors than for a seaside playground. Nonetheless it was impressive and, furthermore, gave an excellent window onto the elder Magnussen’s predilections.

As the taxi approached the house a pair of black-and-white Russian wolfhounds came bounding out of the front door, their eyes bright and curious, their pink tongues lolling.

“Boris and Sasha,” Gurov said helpfully.

“Don’t look at me, I’ve never been here,” Annika said, in response to Jack’s silent query. “I’m surprised that Ivan has, but then I shouldn’t be, our sliver of the world is so compartmentalized— watertight, as we say. That’s how superior security is built brick by brick from the foundation up.”

The wolfhounds—thick, shining coats; small, spear-point heads— pounced on the people as they piled out of the car. Initially they went right to Gurov, but gradually they became interested in Alli who, alone among all of them, knelt on the gravel, engaging them at their own level.

As Jack watched her distractedly a man appeared, came down the wide front steps, and approached them with the easy gait of someone born to money or power, possibly both. So this is Mikal Magnussen, he thought, making his first appraisal of the man he took to be the leader, or one of the leaders, of AURA.

He was a sturdy, even stolid man with startling platinum hair and even more startling blue eyes. His nose, like the prow of a wrecked ship, and ruddy, almost feminine lips, advertised an unsettling dissidence that set off in those who met him a sense of impending disaster. He wore a casual outfit that made Jack think he’d spent the afternoon hunting grouse. The wolfhounds circled him like moons, their tails wagging unrelentingly, licking his polished knee-length leather boots. Those boots, the color of burnt sulfur, were another curious contradiction: hunting boots, clearly handmade of glove-soft leather, without a scratch on their gleaming surface.

His bowlike mouth broke into a smile as he held out his hand. “Jack McClure, at last you’ve found us.” His hand enclosed Jack’s in a firm, dry grip, but he spoke to the others. “Ms. Dementieva, thank you for bringing him, and Ivan, thank you for ensuring they got here safely.”

He had not yet let go of Jack’s hand, and now he returned his attention to him. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. McClure. May I introduce myself? My name is Grigor Silinovich Kharkishvili.”

Dennis Paull did not see it coming, but then you never do, not this kind of ferocious death, or at least deadly intent. There are people out there in the world who mean you harm, who think of your ending, plot your demise as meticulously as a military campaign. These people don’t matter in the end, the ones who wish you harm, who conspire at arm’s length, studying methods of destruction in small, windowless rooms, swept daily for electronic listening devices, only to return home at the dwindling of the day to their wives and families, their potent cocktails and robust meals. It is their agents, the ones who you come face-to-face with, who matter, because they’re the ones who carry your destruction in the palms of their hands or on their fingertips as if it were a bottle of champagne to pour over you, or a bouquet of flowers to lay on your grave.

Having been up all night, neither wanting nor needing sleep, Paull prepared to go to his day job as Secretary of Homeland Security. He showered in very hot, then very cold water, shaved and dressed. Uncharacteristically, he spent five minutes aligning the dimple in his tie so that it was in the exact center of the knot. His fingers worked both tirelessly and unconsciously as his mind ticked off the items on his agenda today. The first was stopping off to make arrangements at the funeral home where he’d instructed Nancy Lettiere to send Louise’s body, then the office for six meetings that would take him through two o’clock, possibly three. At four, he was scheduled to hammer out interagency protocol with Bill Rogers, the national security advisor. At five thirty he had a phone appointment with Edward Carson who, he was certain, would be anxious for an update on what he had discovered about the activities of the president’s inner circle. There might be some time to wolf down a bite of food somewhere in there, but he doubted it, so he resolved to stop at a McDonald’s or a Denny’s, whichever popped up first, for a breakfast on the run.

Slipping his laptop into its case, he went out of the room, down the echoing concrete stairs, and out the side door to the parking lot. He stood for a moment, checking the immediate vicinity for anomalies, an action now habitual, so ingrained he couldn’t move from place to place without this specific scrutiny.

Having visually cleared the area he walked to his car, pressed the button on his key ring that popped the trunk. Bending slightly, he placed the laptop inside. He was just beginning to straighten up when he felt the sting in the side of his neck. His hand shot up in reflex. He just had time to register the tiny dart protruding from his flesh when he collapsed, unconscious, his head and torso inside the trunk.

A moment later a man strolled up, nonchalantly rolled Paull’s hips and legs into the trunk with the rest of him, picked up the car key, closed the trunk and, sliding in behind the wheel, drove Paull’s car sedately out of the Residence Inn parking lot.

“Please. Call me Grigor.”

“You’ll forgive me if I get right to the point,” Jack said, as Annika walked back outside to take a call on her cell phone. “Where is Mikal Magnussen, the man who murdered, or ordered the murders of, Karl Rochev and Ilenya Makova?”

Kharkishvili raised his eyebrows. “You know Ilenya’s name, you are unusually well informed.” He led Jack and Alli into a solarium at the rear of the mansion. He turned, smiling at Alli. “And this lovely young lady is …”

“My daughter,” Jack said.

Kharkishvili’s brows knit together. “I have a daughter more or less your age. She’s in school in Kiev, where her mother looks after her.”

“My mother is dead.” Alli stared unblinkingly up at his face. “My father is all I have.”

Kharkishvili cleared his throat, obviously taken aback. “Would you like to sit here while your father and I take a stroll? There’s a fine view of the surrounding hills and forests—”

“Hell, no.”

He glanced at Jack, who gave him no help at all. “As you wish.” He seemed to say this to both of them, his tone one of disapproval rather than of concession. He cleared his throat again, clearly uncomfortable discussing matters in front of Alli, whom he took to be a teenager. “Rochev had to be eliminated—he had ordered Lloyd Berns’s death. Why? Because Berns, having learned about us, about AURA, was going to leak the information to General Brandt, and Brandt would have told Yukin, who would have informed Batchuk, and then a Trinadtsat extermination squad would have been dispatched to kill us all.”

“And Ilenya Makova?”

“Ah, well, killing Rochev’s mistress was collateral damage. He was there with her in the dacha, but managed to escape the property.”

“Not that it mattered,” Jack said with controlled vehemence. “He was captured, brought to Magnussen’s estate outside Kiev, and tortured before he was killed.”

“That, I’m afraid, was an instance of, how best to put it, unbridled enthusiasm.”

“What a clever way to put it,” Alli said, but then, seeing Jack’s admonishing look, at once shut her mouth.

“You can use any clever phrase that comes to mind, but the outcome is the same: Rochev was tortured. Why? Because your killer— Magnussen or whoever he was—couldn’t control himself.”

Kharkishvili, aware that Jack had thrown his phraseology back into his face, said, “I don’t want a fight with you, Mr. McClure.”

“You may have no choice,” Jack said.

Kharkishvili hesitated, then laughed. “I like you, sir.” He wagged a finger. “I see where your daughter gets her sharp tongue.”

“Do you think this is a joke?” Jack said. “Torture, collateral damage, murder—none of them are what I’d call a laughing matter.”

“Of course they aren’t.” Kharkishvili spread his hands. “What I mean to say is that none of us has complete control over events. I assure you that the perpetrator of these unfortunate atrocities has been punished.”

“Meaning?”

Kharkishvili pointed out the window. “You see that large blue spruce up on the rise there?” He crossed to a glass door that led out to a flagstone terrace, beyond which appeared to be an apple orchard. He opened it and gestured. “Shall we walk across his unmarked grave together?”

“Your dog could be buried there,” Jack said, “or your ex-wife, or nothing at all.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Where is Mikal Magnussen? I want to ask him some questions.”

At that moment Annika appeared. Catching Jack’s eye, she motioned for him to join her on the other side of the solarium. Jack walked over without excusing himself.

“Harry Martin was an NSA hit man,” she said in a low whisper, “under the control of General Atcheson Brandt.”

“I don’t understand,” Jack said. “Why was he sent after you?”

Her expression of concern deepened. “The NSA must have found out about us. Your president is determined to sign this treaty with the Kremlin.”

Jack shook his head. “Even so, he would never authorize the NSA to do Yukin’s dirty work.”

“I want to take your word for it,” Annika said, “but then what’s the explanation?”

Jack thought a moment. “General Brandt is the joker in this particular deck.”

“What?”

“I have no idea what Brandt is doing handling an NSA assassin, that doesn’t track.”

“Mr. McClure.” Kharkishvili was beckoning. “If you’ll come with me …”

Jack stepped outside and together they walked through the apple orchard to the rise beneath the blue spruce.

“So then?”

Jack rubbed the toe of his shoe over the freshly turned earth, dug deeper. “Nothing is buried here,” he said, “or at least no one.”

Kharkishvili was eyeing him closely. “Are you saying that I lied to you?”

“Without hesitation.”

Kharkishvili stood with his hands clasped behind his back, breathing deeply. “This sense, or ability, is why you’re here now, Mr. McClure.” His eyes met Jack’s. “You see, we need you.”

“I don’t know what ability you’re talking about.”

“We’re inside a puzzle now, Mr. McClure. A Gordian knot, if you will. You have a special gift—a way of seeing around barriers that keep other people paralyzed.”

“I think you have me confused with someone else,” Jack said. “I uncovered your lie, but Annika fooled me.”

Kharkishvili nodded. “But there came a time when you began to have doubts about her, wasn’t there?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact there was, when we came out of Rochev’s dacha into the ambush.”

A vague smile played across Kharkishvili’s mouth. “Yes, we anticipated that probability.”

Sixteen diverse bits of information formed a pattern on the Rubik’s Cube in his mind. “Wait a minute, it was Gurov who shot her in the woods. He aimed for the fleshy part of her arm, a minor wound, it’s true, but my doubts vanished when she was hit.”

“You see what I’m driving at, Mr. McClure. It takes so little information for you to grasp the big picture, to determine how vectors intersect. You were the one who found your way here; Annika had no idea where we were, we couldn’t allow that. Compartmentalization is our watchword.” He brought one hand from behind his back, gesturing for them to walk to the cliff face. As they came down off the small rise the wolfhounds appeared, racing each other to Kharkishvili’s side.

“If you have any doubts about how Annika fooled you, I would counsel you to keep in mind that people don’t simply lie, because lying is never simple. Lying leads to complications—the more one lies the greater the complications. I think that’s clear enough, but for our purposes we must take these thoughts a step further, a mental exercise people rarely bother with because they’re essentially lazy.”

They were nearing the rocky promontory; the mansion rose on their left, a guardian of titanic proportions. The water looked as dark as its name. The dogs were excited either by the height or the sight of the seashore where, perhaps, Kharkishvili or Mikal Magnussen ran them on occasion.

“People lie for a reason, or for a cause, something, at any rate, larger than themselves,” Kharkishvili continued. “The causes—the things that are larger than any individual, larger, even, than a group of like-minded individuals such as AURA. Which is where you come in, because now everything that surrounds AURA seems a threat, at least to us who are on the inside. We have been blinded, made paranoid by our growing peril, so we cannot be trusted. How can we, when we cannot even see past point A to see whether point B will connect with it or destroy it. You have found the land of the blind because you can see for miles. You’re the one with the ability to make sense out of the chaos of life. You see, interpret, understand the disparate elements, you can sense if they connect or not. This is why we need you, Mr. McClure, why no one else will suffice.”

“So this was all a test,” Jack said. “The clues, the bits and pieces, like breadcrumbs in a labyrinth.”

“Oh, nothing we devised was so easy as that, Mr. McClure, but I take your point.” Kharkishvili nodded. “A practical test, yes. Why? Because we had only read about your abilities, and personally I find written reports unreliable. However, an eyewitness account, now that’s an entirely different matter.”

Jack felt the sea breeze against his cheek, saw the wolfhounds chasing their own tails. “You know what? I think you’re all nuts. If you needed me so badly why didn’t you just ask me?”

“Because you wouldn’t have come, and even if you’d had a mind to your president wouldn’t have allowed it.”

“Why?”

“Because our meeting, should it have become a matter of public record, would have jeopardized his precious accord with the shit Yukin. Because as far as the shit Yukin is concerned, as far as his ass-wiper Batchuk is concerned, we’re dead, this group of dissident Russian oligarchs: me, Boronyov, Malenko, Konarev, Glazkov, Andreyev—hunted down and killed by the FSB’s crack assassin, Mondan Limonev. Except that Limonev works for us. All these secrets I lay in your care, Mr. McClure.” He spread his arms wide. “I trust you.”

“You don’t know me. Why would you trust me?”

“Because Annika says I should. Because she trusts you.”

“That’s of no interest to me,” Jack said, though it was impossible to be immune to what Kharkishvili had said. “Edward Carson is my friend as well as my employer. I won’t betray him under any circumstances, so it seems you do have the wrong man, after all.”

Kharkishvili sighed. “Your President Carson is being betrayed even as we stand here. I think you’d better hear the whole story before you make a decision that could have dire consequences not just for AURA but also for the United States.”

“You must hate my guts,” Annika said when she and Alli were alone in the solarium.

“Not really.” Alli was watching Jack and Kharkishvili walking between the martial lines of apple trees. “But I am disappointed.”

Annika produced a rueful laugh. “Yeah, I definitely deserved that.”

“Why did you do it?” Alli asked. “Why did you lie?”

Leaning over, Annika pushed a lock of newly shorn hair off Alli’s forehead. “I had no choice.”

Alli moved away. “Don’t change the subject. That’s what my father and all his friends do when a question is too difficult or embarrassing. It’s a politician’s trick, and I hate it.”

Annika went and sat down in a teak chair, sinking back into the patterned cushions. “I explained to Jack as best I know how.” She gave Alli a rueful smile. “But I know that some actions can’t be explained away, some actions stay with you, like a stigma. I was prepared for that with him, but not with you.”

“Oh, please, don’t bullshit me.” Alli crossed the room, leaned against the glass windows, staring out at the now deserted apple orchard with its sharp, twisted branches seeming to scrape the mottled gray and blue sky.

Annika watched her as she moved, as she crossed her arms over her breasts, as she looked longingly out onto the empty grounds. “The truth is fixed, immutable,” she said, “because if it contains even a grain of a lie, it’s no longer the truth.” By examining the girl’s face she could work out just how much Alli missed Jack when he wasn’t with her, but also a terrible sadness. There was a strong cord between them, no doubt, she thought, but there was also something dark there, a lie of some measure, or perhaps something unspoken, an omission, a truth deliberately unsaid. “But a lie comes in infinite gradations, it can be judged on a scale, whereas truth cannot, you see, because a lie can contain a grain of the truth, or even a great deal of truth and still remain a lie. But of what sort, on what level?

“You can tell a, what, a white lie, I think it’s called in English, isn’t it?” When Alli didn’t answer, didn’t even move from her blank contemplation, she continued undeterred. “You’re not punished for telling a white lie, are you? You needn’t feel remorse or guilt, or wish you could take back your words.”

“Why do you say it as if it’s about me,” Alli said. “It isn’t about me.”

“I was just using a figure of speech,” Annika replied, a deliberate lie. “How would I know if you had lied, or to whom?” She paused, as if expecting an answer, then went on. “Anyway, a lie can be useful when the truth won’t do, when it’s too sad, for example, or too shocking.” Alli twitched, one shoulder rising involuntarily as she sought to protect herself from the assault of Annika’s words.

“The point is you make a choice when you tell a lie, or even when you withhold the truth—”

“Stop it!” Alli said sharply. Her face, when she turned it toward Annika, was very pale.

“—even in instances when you must tell a lie in order to protect a person you’re close to or love, or in order to serve a higher end. This is what happened to me.”

The two women eyed each other, almost, it seemed to Annika, as if they were gladiators in the Forum, overlooked by the Tarpeian Rock, the ancient burial place of betrayal. She felt energized by this electric charge, by the hope that the ongoing conflict between them would jolt the girl out of her traumatized shell.

“Every lie has its moment when it’s believed,” she said, with her teeth slightly bared, “even by those whose nature it is to doubt, or to be cynical. Lies are seductive in nature because they’re what you want to believe, or contain an element, a seed of the distrust you yourself harbor, though you may not even be aware of it.”

Alli gave a strangled little cry as she peeled herself from the glass. “Is this the way you think you can gain my trust?”

“I never even considered gaining your trust. The man who kidnapped you, who held you hostage, stole your trust, and you’re incapable of getting it back.”

Tears sprang to Alli’s eyes as she tore out the door, stumbling across the flagstone terrace, around the side of the house, blindly following some strange, self-destructive instinct that took her toward the cliff face and the falloff to the churning water below.

23

Dennis Paull awoke in a room full of windows. Early morning light flooded the polished wood floor, by which he knew he wasn’t in a hospital or institutional room. He wasn’t bound, either. He was, however, disoriented. Where was he? What happened? The last thing he remembered … Christ, his head hurt.

“I have something for that headache.”

He turned his head at the sound of a woman’s voice and immediately experienced a tightness where the dart had sunk in. The woman was dressed in a conservatively tailored suit that was too stylish to have been bought on even a G-15 salary.

“Dr. Denise Nyland. I’m a neurologist.” She smiled as she held out two pills in one hand and a glass of water in another. “Here, these will help.” When he hesitated, she added, “They’re just Tylenol, I assure you.”

He took them from her and, when he had checked the logo imprinted on each tablet, he swallowed them with the entire glass of water.

“I know you must have a lot of questions, Mr. Secretary,” she said. “All of them—and more—will be answered shortly. In the meantime, I suggest you rest while I tell you where you are.” She glanced out one of the windows, where a marble fountain plumed water into the air. Beyond were lawns and carefully sculpted shrubbery, even perhaps a small maze, though from his present angle he couldn’t be certain. He rose from the chair in which he’d been placed and at once felt a wave of dizziness, so that he was obliged to sit right back down.

“You’re in Neverwood, an estate owned by the Alizarin Global Group. I’m employed by the firm.”

Paull fought his way through the vertigo and the pounding in his head to pay strict attention. Alizarin Global was the entity that had paid for General Brandt’s off-the-grid trips to Russia. He’d never gotten around to Googling it, his mind taken up by grief, remorse, self-pity, and rage following the news of Louise’s death.

“Then you must be the one who concocted the chemical that was on the dart.” Paull had trouble enunciating, as if his mouth had been shot up with novocaine.

“Neverwood is in Maryland, precisely ninety miles from the White House,” Doctor Nyland said, pointedly ignoring his remark.

Paull frowned, which caused the pain in his head to eddy up. “Why was I brought here?”

“In a moment, Mr. Secretary, all will be made clear.” That professional smile, clean and icy as a toothpaste ad, held no malice whatsoever. “For the moment let it suffice to say that no one means you any harm. As soon as you are briefed, you’ll be handed the keys to your car. You’ll be free to go without any strings attached.”

“What is Alizarin Global?”

Doctor Nyland merely smiled. “Good-bye, Mr. Secretary. I wish you a pleasant day, wherever your journey leads you.”

And then he was left alone for precisely six minutes. He timed it on his watch, which hadn’t been taken from him. Using his time alone productively he went through his pockets and determined that, apart from his car keys, his possessions were present and accounted for.

At the six-minute mark the door opened and a young, pleasant-faced man entered the room. He was dressed in a dapper business suit, and he smelled vaguely of a cologne nearly as expensive as the clothes he wore. Clipped to the breast pocket of his jacket was a small laminated tag in the shape of a hexagon. It was orange, or perhaps a warm red. It bore no type or name; it must be, Paull intuited, Alizarin Global’s logo.

“Good morning, Mr. Secretary,” he said briskly, with the same slick smile that had animated Dr. Nyland’s face. He clipped an identical logo tag to Paull’s jacket. “I imagine you’re hungry.” Stepping back, he gestured to the open doorway. “There’s coffee waiting, and freshly baked croissants with homemade strawberry jam. I understand strawberry is your favorite.”

Without comment Paull followed him out into a hallway with hunter green walls, brass light sconces, and paintings of famous sailing ships of the 1900s. The man approached double pocket doors made of carved ebony, which he slid soundlessly open. He stood on the threshold, indicating that Paull should enter. As soon as Paull did, he slid the doors shut.

Paull found himself in an old-fashioned drawing room, complete with a marble fireplace, a baby grand piano, a pair of oversized chesterfield sofas, a wet bar along one wall opposite another filled floor to ceiling with books. An enormous bay window overlooked a pond elegantly spanned by a Japanese-style bridge. A brass ship’s clock, crouched atop the mantel, chimed the time.

Two men sat in facing Queen Anne chairs, between which was a coffee table laden with a chased silver coffee service for three. To one side stood a hotel-style server’s cart. The moment Paull walked in the two men rose as one. He recognized them immediately: Miles Benson, former director of the CIA, and Morgan Thomson, the national security advisor during the previous administration. Benson was one of those leather-necked battle vets for whom posters were invented. His face, though dented and deeply scored, was the more powerful and commanding for its battered mien. He had high cheekbones and a fierce Clint Eastwood squint. His manner was no-nonsense, even his glance was brusque, and yet Paull was willing to bet that he saw everything. Thomson was slender, ferret-faced, with a long, sharp-edged nose and hooded rodent eyes that looked out on the world with inveterate suspicion. He was virtually lipless, the better to show bright, white teeth, which were as sharp as his erudite tongue. His intellectual prowess was legendary in neocon circles, and even beyond, which made him the quintessential pundit on talking-head TV.

These two seemingly had nothing in common, and yet during the two terms in which they had been in power they had forged an unshakable alliance on which, until near the end, the former president had relied. These two had shaped his policy and were responsible for the shambles of his legacy. Unrepentant and every bit as arrogant as the day they had assumed their respective posts, they refused to believe that any decision they had made was wrong or misguided. The world, in other words, was their world, reality to the contrary. Complete control had been their aim as well as their hubris, because nothing so grandiose could be controlled by two men, a hundred, or even a hundred thousand.

All of this recent history flashed through Paull’s mind in the three seconds it took for the two men—Edward Carson’s archenemies, who plotted his destruction—to reach him and, with smiles a millimeter thin, pump his hand.

A moment later, Paull said, “Your behavior is outrageous, bordering on the criminal. I’ll have my car keys now.”

“Of course,” Benson said, dropping them into his palm.

Without another word Paull turned to go. He was almost at the door when Thomson said in the plummy tones of his television voice, “Of course you’re free to leave, Mr. Secretary, but it will be a pity if you don’t get to see your daughter and grandson.”

Paull stood frozen for the space of several thunderous heartbeats, after which he was compelled to turn back to face them. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your daughter, Claire, is in the room across the hall. Your grandson is with her.”

Paull was virtually stupefied. “Why are they here?”

Thomson had clearly taken point. “They came to see you.”

“Don’t make me laugh. My daughter hasn’t wanted to see me since before my grandson was born.”

“She does now,” Thomson assured him. “We told her that you were terminal.”

“You people are insane.” Turning away, Paull put his hands on the grips of the sliding doors and began to push the doors apart.

“Aaron,” Thomson said in his richest tone. “Your grandson’s name is Aaron.”

Paull, filled with conflicting emotions, whirled on his tormenters. “None of this will mean a damn to me when you’re taken into custody. Kidnapping a member of the United States government is a federal offense punishable by—”

“No one’s being arrested,” Benson said sharply. “No one’s going to jail.”

“He can’t help himself, the military has marked him for life.” Thomson said this in an equable, almost a kindly manner. He raised a hand. “Why don’t we all sit down. Aren’t you even the least bit curious as to why we want to talk with you?”

Turning, Thomson sat down on one of the chesterfields and poured coffee into the three cups. “I don’t know about you, Mr. Secretary, but I’m famished.” He looked up expectantly. “Is your opinion of us so set in stone that you won’t give us a chance to explain the … unorthodox method by which you were brought here?”

“Unorthodox?” Paull echoed.

Thomson shot Benson a significant look. In response the ex-military man cleared his throat before saying, “I apologize for the extreme methodology that brought you here.” He crossed to the chesterfield, accepting the cup Thomson offered. “However—and here I think you’ll agree—I seriously doubt that we could have induced you to come here any other way.”

Thomson nodded at his compatriot’s conciliatory tone. Taking up another cup, he lifted it as a token offering to Paull. “Please believe us, Mr. Secretary, you’re a guest here. An honored guest.”

Paull, his best dubious face forward, slowly settled himself on the chesterfield across from the two men. He put three sugars in his coffee, a dollop of half-and-half, and stirred with a tiny spoon. While he did this Benson opened the warming cart and produced plates of croissants, eggs, bacon, and small, precise triangles of buttered toast. All very civilized, Paull thought, as he sipped his coffee, which was strong and rich, much better than the swill he would have bought at McDonald’s or Denny’s.

“If I may,” Thomson said, “your mistake was in hacking into General Brandt’s bank account. We monitor it twenty-four-seven.”

“But, as it happens,” Benson said, “your mistake was our good fortune, and I’ll tell you why.” He added Tabasco sauce to his eggs, took a bite, and nodded appreciatively before setting down his fork as if he were already full. “Brandt is our man on the inside.”

“Brandt isn’t a member of the cabinet,” Paull said.

“He’s in an even better position, he’s an advisor who has Carson’s ear, especially on all matters Russian.” He shrugged. “Given what you’ve been up to the last several days I don’t suppose that comes as much of a shock to you. However, we’ve become increasingly concerned with the General.” He pursed his lips, as if he’d just bitten down on something acrid. “You remember Colonel Kurtz, I imagine.”

“Heart of Darkness,” Paull said. “Joseph Conrad, a great book.”

“Thank God your frame of reference isn’t Apocalypse Now,” Thomson said. “Coppola made a mockery of that masterpiece.”

“Back to Kurtz,” Paull said. “Are you trying to say that General Brandt is insane?”

“Well, if not,” Benson said sourly, “he’s certainly in his own private heart of darkness.”

For the first time Thomson looked disconcerted. He lifted a hand and scratched his eyebrow with the back of his thumb, a gesture that eerily mimicked the intelligence officer played by G. D. Spradlin, who briefs Captain Willard on his assignment to terminate Kurtz in a memorable scene near the beginning of the film.

Benson, who Paull could tell wasn’t prepared to deliver what he intuited as bad news, cleared his throat again. “In point of fact, and despite what my esteemed colleague said, the allusion to Apocalypse Now isn’t unwarranted.” He paused for a moment as if unsure how to proceed. “You do know that the character of Kurtz was based on the much decorated Green Beret, Colonel Robert Rheault?”

“During the war in Vietnam,” Paull said, digging back in his memory. “Wasn’t Rheault relieved of his command?”

“That’s right,” Benson said, sitting ramrod straight. “He was accused of murder.”

A small but terrible finger of ice seemed to pierce Paull’s gut. “What does that have to do with General Brandt?”

Thomson, sitting stonily beside Benson, was positively white-faced.

Benson briefly glanced at him before he said heavily, “General Brandt has issued an immediate sanction on Jack McClure.”

Paull knew this, of course, but he saw no advantage in letting them know it. In fact, quite the contrary. He was now sure that he had more information about Brandt’s latest activities than they did, which meant that, like Kurtz, like Rheault, Brandt had lost touch with his superiors, or at least his coconspirators. As Benson had said, the General was now in his own private heart of darkness. What this meant for all of them he had no idea, but much to his own consternation, he became aware of a subtle shift in how he perceived these two men. Not that enemies had suddenly, recklessly morphed into friends, but the polar opposites of black and white seemed to be breaking down into shades of gray.

At length, he said, “How the devil does General Brandt think he can order a sanction?”

“That,” Thomson said, at last unthawing, “is what we’ve brought you here to discuss.”

Ever vigilant when it came to Alli, Jack saw a blurred shadow out of the corner of his eye and knew it was her. He turned away from Kharkishvili to see Alli racing across the rocky headland toward the cliffs edge. Without a second’s thought he broke away and ran, calculating vectors as he did so, in order to ensure he would intercept her before she … did what? Was she going to hurl herself off the cliff? Was she suicidal? Had she exhibited any warning signs that he might have missed when he was paying attention to Annika?

The dogs, barking hysterically, followed him, loping uneasily, as if they had picked up on his mounting anxiety. She was still running full tilt toward the cliffs edge when he caught up with her. Her headlong momentum pulled him along for a pace or two, which brought both of them perilously close to the steep drop-off. The dogs growled, their haunches quivering, the hair at the back of their necks ruffled, until he had dragged her back from the brink.

They fell to the rocky ground, and the dogs moved in, licking their faces until Kharkishvili called them off, and the wolfhounds scampered back to where he was standing some distance away.

“Alli,” Jack said, out of breath from both his sprint and the fright she had given him, “what on earth do you think you’re doing?”

“Get off me!” She shoved him. “Get away from me!”

She was crying hysterically, and probably had been, judging by her tear-streaked cheeks, for some time.

“What happened?” he said, alarmed. “What’s gotten into you?”

She turned her head away, into the grass, her body wracked by sobs.

“Alli, talk to me.” Annika had said that Alli wanted to tell him what Morgan Herr did to her, that her need to tell someone about her week of terror would eventually override her reticence. “You can tell me anything, you know that, don’t you?”

She struck him then, just a glancing blow to the side of his head, but he was shocked enough to lose his grip on her, and she scrambled away, first on all fours, like a wounded animal, and then, regaining her feet, making another jagged, confused run for the edge of the cliff.

Jack sprinted after her and, scooping her up, ran back in the direction of the manor house, but he stumbled over an outcropping of rock and had to put her down. For some reason he wasn’t seeing clearly, and when he raised a hand to his eyes it came away wet with tears. He sat on the grass, panting and crying, while all three wolfhounds circled the two of them protectively as he had seen them do with Kharkishvili.

To his credit the Russian kept his distance. He had turned toward the mansion, where, Jack saw, Annika had emerged. Taking in the scene, she began to run toward him. Long before she got there Kharkishvili intercepted her, turning her away so that Jack and Alli could remain alone.

Jack felt the sea wind in his hair and on his cheeks. It was soft and moist with salt and phosphorus. The clouds overhead seemed unable to stir, as if some great hand had pinned them in place. He tried to listen for the crash of the waves, but he heard nothing. It was as if the world were holding its breath.

“Alli,” he said softly, but made no move to touch her, or even to move nearer, “you don’t want to kill yourself, I know you don’t.”

Trembling and shivering, she stared at him, red-eyed, and shouted, “I’ve had fucking enough of people climbing inside my head, telling me what to do!”

“Alli, please tell me—”

“I can’t, I can’t!” she cried. Her hands curled into fists, and then they began to beat against his chest, as if he were the physical manifestation of the terror that gripped her.

In the face of her mounting hysteria he knew he had to remain calm. He didn’t stop her attack, but he didn’t withdraw from it, either. “Why can’t you?”

“Because …”

She seemed to want to hurt him, and perhaps through him, herself.

“Because—” Her voice was so thin and cracked he had to pull her close to hear her. “—you’ll hate me, you’ll hate me forever.”

“Where did you get that idea? Why would I hate you?”

“Because I lied to you.” A dreadful fear seemed to come over her. “I lied, I didn’t tell you the whole truth.”

He closed his arms around her and said in her ear, “I could never hate you. I love you unconditionally.” Kissing her on her cheek, he said, “But I think you ought to tell me whatever it is that’s causing you so much pain. It isn’t healthy to sit with it.”

She snorted in tearful derision. “You say you love me, but that’ll all change the moment I tell you.”

“Do it then.” He held her at arm’s length so he could look her in the eyes. Her fists had uncurled, the fingers trembling against his chest. “Let me decide instead of you deciding for me. Trust me. Trust us.”

The light had gone out in her eyes, she stared at him as if without recognition, and he pulled her to him again, murmuring to her: “Don’t go away, Alli. Stay here with me, you’re safe, you’re safe,” just as he had when he’d rescued her from the black place where Morgan Herr had taken her.

Her head lay heavily against his chest, she seemed to be scarcely breathing.

“Alli, please, I won’t hate you, no matter what, I promise.”

He felt her sigh against him, a long exhalation that was as much resignation as it was a surrender. Her entire body seemed limp and frail, as if she needed to give up everything, even her physical presence, in order to make the terrifying leap he asked of her.

“I … I lied to you about what happened the morning Emma was killed.”

“What?” He had expected some terrible revelation about what Morgan Herr had done to her, not this.

“I knew it.” She squirmed in his arms, trying to pull away. “I knew I shouldn’t’ve opened my big mouth.”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “Go on. What happened that morning?”

Her voice was muffled, as if she were talking into him rather than to him, as if she wanted to speak to something inside him with which she desperately needed to connect. “I … When you asked me I told you that I wasn’t around, that I didn’t know what Emma was up to.”

“You told me in retrospect you thought she was going to see Herr.”

“That was the lie. I knew where she was going because she told me.” Alli’s voice was further clouded by guilt and despair. “I was there. She asked me to drive her, she said she’d been up all night and was in no shape to drive.” She was weeping again as she clung to him. “I told her I couldn’t, I gave a totally bogus excuse because I was scared, I didn’t want to get involved. And because I was so chicken-shit, she died. If I’d been driving nothing bad would have happened, she’d be alive now.”

24

“Iran,” President Yukin said, “is a topic of the utmost strategic importance.” He shook his craggy head. He had eyes like nuggets of coal that had been burned deep into his face. The bulb of his nose was pocked and cratered, possibly from a childhood disease. “I have said this before, President Carson, but I see that I must say it again in order to underscore the weight the Kremlin reserves for such matters.”

“You needn’t bother,” Edward Carson said. “I am well aware of the special status between Russia and Iran.”

“Special status?” Yukin mashed his fleshy lips together, as if he wished to grind Carson’s words to ash. “No, no, you misunderstand us. We have certain business dealings, yes, but as for—”

“Such as sending them nuclear reactor parts and refined uranium.”

That statement hit the room, or more accurately, Yukin’s ears, like a detonation. An awkward silence ensued. Carson, Yukin, General Brandt, and Panin, a high-level Kremlin apparatchik who had not been further identified, were sitting in a palatial room inside the Kremlin. The ceilings, twenty feet in height, perhaps more, were arched as in a cathedral, a comparison whose irony wasn’t lost on Carson.

“Since the debacle in Iraq your fact-finding spies have been notoriously inaccurate,” Yukin said at length. “This lie is but another example.”

At Carson’s gesture the General removed a dossier from his briefcase and handed it to his commander in chief. Without a word the president opened the dossier and spread half a dozen photographs on the table. One by one, he turned them so they faced Yukin.

“What’s this?” Yukin said, not even bothering to look at them.

“Surveillance photos of enriched uranium being transferred from Russian transports to Iranian transports.” Carson’s forefinger tapped a photo. “Here you can clearly see the symbol indicating radioactive material.”

Yukin shrugged. “Photoshopped.” But something was caught in his eyes, a shadow mixing anger and embarrassment at being caught out.

“I have no intention of making these photos public.” Carson gathered up the photos, shoved them back in dossier, and slid it across the table to Yukin. “But I must be clear: The position of the United States on the security accord will not change from where it was an hour ago, or yesterday. You cease your dealings with Iran and we dismantle the missile shield around Russia, we become security allies. We are done making changes; it’s time for us to sign the accord that will prove to be invaluable to both of our countries.”

Yukin sat very still for some time. The breathing of the four men seemed to come in concert, inhalations and exhalations caught on the tide of tension that had sprung up in the room moments before. Then the Russian president gave a brief nod. “You’ll have my answer within the hour.”

“This has become a perilous game,” General Brandt said as he and Carson strode the frigid Kremlin corridors, the president’s usual entourage strung out behind them. “If you had told me you were going to show Yukin those photos I would have cautioned you to find another way.”

“There was no other way,” Carson said shortly.

“Mr. President, may I point out that you’re on the verge of signing the most historic accord with Russia in the history of the United States, one that will ensure the safety of the American—”

“I seem to be more concerned with the American people than you are,” Carson snapped. “I won’t sign the accord with the points that Yukin has insisted on.” He didn’t care for Brandt’s admonishing tone, the inference that he, a neophyte when it came to the Russians, had acted rashly, that he should have deferred to the old Russian hand. “I get the feeling that Yukin is playing us to see how far he can push us, how many of his demands we’ll accede to. I won’t have it. I won’t be pushed around, either by him or, quite frankly, by you, General.”

“General Brandt,” Benson said.

“Where to begin with General Brandt?” Thomson said as if he hadn’t been interrupted. He sighed, as if stymied by the enormity of the task before him.

“We recruited Brandt some time ago,” Benson said helpfully.

“Three years, more or less,” Thomson leapt back in. “Midway along in the second term. We saw the handwriting on the wall. The president and his other senior advisors were hell-bent on continuing down the same path we’d all started down when he was first elected.”

“It wasn’t working anymore,” Benson said. “The commanders were telling us that privately, and the troops were worn down. The stop-loss program, though increasingly necessary, was, in practical terms, a disaster, plus it was a PR nightmare.”

“Just the fact that we needed stop-loss should have sent a signal to the president’s advisors, but they ignored it, just like they ignored every news event or incident that contradicted their vision.”

Paull was familiar with stop-loss. It was a program instituted by the military, who, running short on recruits, abrogated the rights of its members to be rotated out of service. Stop-loss kept them in and fighting on the front lines in Felluja or Kabul, or wherever the power that be deigned to send them.

“How does this information tie in with General Brandt?” Paull said.

Again an expression of discomfort briefly crossed Thomson’s face. “In the waning days of the administration we found ourselves without power, or nearly so. The fact is we’d been effectively blocked from the president.”

“By whom?” Paull said, wondering if they’d divulge this secret, a yardstick by which he might judge both their sincerity and their veracity.

“Dick England,” Thomson said at once. England had been the director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, a unit set up by Carson’s predecessor and now, happily, dismantled.

“England hated our guts,” Benson said with some venom. “He was a power freak, he formed an alliance with the secretary of defense, on whom the president relied for much of his foreign policy.”

“The war,” Thomson said heavily, “was the secretary’s idea and he pushed hard for it.”

“I thought the war was your idea,” Paull said, “and Benson’s.”

“Even to the point of fabricating evidence of WMDs,” Benson said, with the stoic intonation of the seasoned warrior.

“He couldn’t have done that without the connivance of the director of the CIA,” Paull said.

Benson’s smile was bleak and far from friendly. “He couldn’t and he didn’t.”

“Though we tried hard, the three of them proved too much for us,” Thomson said, “and we were shut out.”

“It was time to abandon ship,” Benson continued, picking up the thread of the original conversation, “so we decided to cast our net into the private sector. Eventually, we decided on Alizarin Global.”

“Which is where General Brandt comes in.” Thomson sighed as he poured more coffee for Paull and for himself. “We didn’t particularly like him, but because of his ties with President Yukin we needed him to help us fast-track a deal with Gazprom, crucial to Alizarin, before a competitor could sew it up. Bottom line, we thought we could trust him.”

“We were wrong.” Benson stood up and walked to the piano, stood staring at it for some time, as if hearing an oft-played melody— possibly a martial air—in his head. Or perhaps he was fantasizing the methods by which he’d murder Brandt. He turned back abruptly, his face tense and grim. “And now he’s left us hanging by the short hairs. This is something neither we nor President Carson can permit nor withstand.”

Thomson put down his cup. “This is why we brought you here, Mr. Secretary. We had neither the time nor the means to engage you in any other way.”

Paull found he had no more taste for coffee, or for any of the food, for that matter. “What is it you think I can do?”

“Wait,” Thomson said. “You haven’t heard the worst part.”

Edward Carson sat alone in temporary seclusion, as much as any American president can be alone. He sat in his suite at the hotel across Red Square from the Kremlin, a generous pour of single-malt scotch at his elbow. Peering out the window he could see that it had begun to snow again this late in the season, as if he were in Wyoming or Montana. Astonishing, really. He watched with a kind of detached interest as the snowflakes swirled and spent themselves like moths against the windowpane.

Then he pulled out his cell phone and called Jack.

“Jack, where the hell are you?” Carson said. “More to the point, where the hell is my daughter? Lyn tells me that she bundled Alli off on you. I could be pissed off at her but, frankly, it’s easier to yell at you. Did you think about what a security risk this poses?”

“It’s never left my mind, Edward. I argued against taking her, but I don’t have to tell you what Mrs. Carson is like when she makes her mind up about something.”

“What was she thinking?”

“She was terrified that Alli would slip her handlers and take off for parts unknown in a city she scarcely knows, a city, I might add, that’s far more dangerous than the aircraft she and I took to Kiev.”

“I take it she’s not still in the aircraft,” the president said.

Jack’s long relationship with Carson allowed him to shrug off the sarcasm. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, spill it. How’s my daughter?”

“The Ukrainian air has done her a world of good, she’s much improved.”

This welcome news instantly deflated Carson’s anger. “Well, dammit, it’s about time. Lyn will be relieved, let me tell you.” He grunted. “She’s not getting in your way, is she?”

“On the contrary, she’s proved extremely helpful.”

“Well, that’s a surprise. But look here, Jack, I don’t want her put in harm’s way. I think you should ship her back here.”

“She’s not a package, and anyway there’s isn’t a chance in hell that she’ll come.”

“She listens to you. If you insist—”

“Edward, listen to me, this may not be the safest place for her, but what is, the rehab facility she was in? You already know she won’t talk to anyone there, but she’s talking to me. Whatever she went through has to come out, it’s eating her alive.”

Carson was silent for a moment. “All right, dammit. If she’s making progress to being normal again that’s the important thing.” Not knowing how else to respond, he tackled a topic he could handle: “Now, have you found out whether Lloyd Berns’s death was accidental or premeditated murder?”

“I’m making significant headway, but I don’t yet have the shape of the situation.”

Jack’s voice seemed thin and attenuated, as if it was coming from the dark side of the moon, but the president began to absorb the details of Jack’s journey through Ukraine, and what he had uncovered to this point.

“You’ve made good progress, Jack,” he said with a sigh. “Keep me informed. And, Jack, give Alli my love.”

“Will do.”

Carson disconnected and put away his cell. It was times like this, he reflected, weighed down by events, realizing that he was a constituency of one, when he fell back on his beloved Shakespeare. He’d always been drawn to the kings, even as a college student. And no Shakespearean monarch had captivated him more than Henry V, a humane ruler who understood what it meant to be isolated by his royal blood. But, cannily, he also knew that royalty was differentiated from the common man merely by pomp and circumstance, or, as Shakespeare put it, ceremony. This was never made more clear to the reader, or viewer, than when Henry disguised himself in a cloak and hood and sat among his troops on the eve of battle, talking with them, sharing stories, arguing with them as if he were one of them. Nothing would better prepare him for the coming deathly morning than trading barbs with his troops, treading the same ground, muddying his boots in the same muck, having them reach him with their lewd and tumultuous voices.

But who did he have? He felt alone and isolated, no longer trusting General Brandt, but having been given no valid excuse to dismiss him or to send him home. Denny was half a world away, immersed in his clandestine research. For every selfish reason he could name he bitterly regretted sending Jack away.

He stood up, sipping his scotch while he gazed at the Kremlin with a jaundiced eye. He was also beginning to regret staking the first ninety days of his presidency on this Russian accord. It had been General Brandt who had talked him into it, Brandt who had pointed out that what the American people wanted and needed most was a sense of heightened security, an outcome that shutting down the Iranian nuclear program would accomplish. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be done without Yukin’s help.

Brandt might be right about all that, he thought now, but the fact was he didn’t trust Yukin, and now he didn’t trust the General either, which was why he’d resolved to bring the surveillance photos into play now, rather than keep them in reserve.

Not that he himself was innocent—he had no illusions on that score. This was why he loved Shakespeare—because his kings were so self-aware. Not for them the delusions of lesser mortals; they were clear-eyed even in their madness. They knew their hands were covered in blood, that they had committed murder, that they had given difficult orders on which lives rose and fell, hung in the balance, and were ultimately plowed under the bloody fields of battle. Neither had they conveniently forgotten the plots and betrayals that had paved their way to the crown.

Into his wandering mind now came one of his favorite lines from Henry V: “What infinite heart’s ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy!”

He lifted the glass to his lips, but he’d already finished the scotch. The remainder of the Talisker was in the bottle on the other side of the room, but instead of going for it, he put down the empty glass and headed for the connecting door.

A youngish, gangly individual who looked uncomfortable in his boxy suit looked up at the president’s appearance, startled and pale beneath his African-American brown. He was already reaching for the portable defibrillator as he said, “Sir, are you feeling—?”

“Relax, I’m fine.” Carson sat down in the chair opposite the person known colloquially as Defib Man, the doctor who trailed after him in case he had a heart attack. “Sit, sit.”

The president looked over at the ultraportable computer Defib Man had set back on his lap. “Catching up on the news in the real world?”

“No, Mr. President, I’m e-mailing my daughter, Shona.”

“What school is she in?”

“Well, it’s a special school. She’s crazy about horses.”

“Does she ride English or Western? My daughter rides—”

“Neither, Mr. President. She’s got Asperger’s syndrome. She concentrates very well, especially on the things she likes, and in that sense she’s something of a genius, but she has no emotions.”

The president’s brow furrowed. “I don’t follow you. Surely she loves you and your wife.”

“She doesn’t, Mr. President, not in the normal sense, anyway. She doesn’t feel anything—-joy, sorrow, fear, love.”

“And yet you said that she’s crazy about horses.”

“Yes, she’s discovered a way to breed them that’s some kind of breakthrough, though to be honest I don’t get it. They fascinate her, but on a level neither my wife nor I can fathom. Maybe they operate on her level, who knows? Basically, she’s in a world of her own making. It’s as if there’s a glass bell jar around her that nothing can get through. What makes it all the worse is that she’s perfectly self-aware. She’s a prisoner of her own mind, and she knows it.”

With a pang the president thought of his own daughter who, in hindsight, had been lost to him a long time ago, there was no use pretending otherwise. He couldn’t understand her the way Jack seemed to; worse, he was losing patience with her. Whatever she had gone through was over and done with, why couldn’t she put it behind her like a normal human being? There was only so much time he could devote to her and her issues. He was used to solving problems, not having them continue to unwind like an endless ball of twine. How the devil had he and Lyn given life to a creature who seemed to feel nothing toward them except contempt? Of course that begged the question of what he felt about her. Of course he loved her, he had to love her, she was his daughter. As such he would protect her with his life, but that didn’t mean he had to like her, or that he should accept who she was. What did she know of the real world, anyway? She exhibited only disdain at the compromises he had been forced to make in order to gain and retain his political power. These days his emotions tended to swing from praying she’d pull out of her depression or whatever the hell she was wallowing in to being fed up with her unacceptable and childishly narcissistic behavior. Lyn had always been in the habit of acceding to her whims and threats, never more so than now, but he was coming to the end of his tether.

Defib Man stirred uneasily causing Carson to think, Heartache here, too. We’re both unlucky fathers, there is no real difference between the two of us. He said, “I’m truly sorry …”

He was groping around in his memory when Defib Man said, “Reginald White, sir. Reggie.”

“Yes, of course. Reggie. Very good.” He trusted his kilowatt smile to burn away his lapse. “I’m hungry, Reggie. Are you hungry? What say we get something to eat?” He reached for a phone, but one of his protectors got there first.

“What can I get you, sir?” the Secret Service agent said.

“How about a burger—no, a cheeseburger deluxe. How would you like that, Reggie?”

White seemed slightly terrified, as if his world had been turned upside down. “Surely, Mr. President, you have more important things to do than have a burger with me.”

“As it happens, Reggie, I don’t. And even if I did, this is what I want to do now.” He turned to the agent. “A pair of cheeseburgers deluxe. And French fries. Do you like French fries, Reggie? Good, who doesn’t. We’ll share a large order then. And a couple of Cokes.”

Then he turned back to Reginald White. “Now I want to hear all about Shona and her breakthrough. You have good reason to be proud of your daughter.”

“It gets worse?” Paull said.

Thomson nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

As if on cue Benson returned to the chesterfields, but now he sat beside Paull, rather than opposite him. “Now comes the chapter and verse on General Brandt.”

“Not until I see my daughter and grandson,” Paull said.

“We don’t have time—”

“You’re the one who brought my family into the mix, Benson.” Paull stood. “I have enough to go to the president, which will save him, but not, unfortunately, the two of you.”

Thomson, alarmed, rose as well. “If you let us explain fully—”

“Be my guest,” Paull said, “after I see my family and after I tell them that I’m not dying.”

“Consider,” Benson said. “They might not then wish to see you.”

Paull shook his head. “You really are apiece of work.” He cocked his head. “Now I think about it I’m not going to make this easier for you. You’re going to tell them I’m not terminal. It’s your lie, you wriggle out of it.”

Benson looked bleakly over at Thomson, who gave him an almost imperceptible nod. Then he got up heavily, straightened his jacket, brushed down his trousers, and sliding open the pocket doors, led the way across the hall to a somber study, devoid of sunlight.

Paull was at once terror-stricken. He hadn’t seen his daughter in seven years, hadn’t ever laid eyes on his grandson—Aaron, he had a name to which Paull was about to put a face. He realized that he could take Claire’s rejection, she had become for him a shadow, an image in a photo, slightly faded from time and the slippage of memory. She had become, in a way, like Louise, shut away in her own private Petworth Manor, as if she, too, suffered from Alzheimer’s, her forgetting him not of her own volition. It was easier, or at least less painful, to think of her as debilitated, ill, not in control of her mind or her emotions. In this way he had frozen her like a butterfly in amber, a small child he could still remember sitting on his knee while together they recited the words to Goodnight Moon.

But now here she was, rising from the floor where she had been sitting beside Aaron, smoothing down her skirt as Benson had smoothed his trousers, a small but telling gesture both of propriety and of nervousness. He both recognized her and didn’t recognize her because the photo in his mind had become faded and fragile, thin as rice paper.

They stood looking at each another, silently assessing the damage and wear time had assessed on human flesh and the human heart. Claire was older, yes, but also more beautiful, as if when he’d last seen her the Great Sculptor hadn’t quite finished his work.

“I’m sorry about Mom.” She spoke first, her voice subtly deeper and richer than he remembered it, but also stiff and awkward, as if she wasn’t sure who she was addressing.

“It’s for the best. She’s peaceful now, herself again.” His voice was just as stiff and awkward, and he realized with astonishment that it was quite possible, likely, even, that he had faded from her consciousness as surely and inevitably as she had from his own.

“My grandson,” Paull said, almost against his will, because it would be Aaron’s rejection he could not bear. His throat felt tight and parched.

She looked down at the boy with a jerky little motion of her head, as if her mind and her body were not quite in synch. “Aaron, please stand up.” Her voice changed, became clearer, declarative when she addressed her son.

The boy—Aaron—unfolded from his position on the floor, where he had been using an iPhone application and turned, stood facing Paull in ranked row with his mother.

“Aaron,” Claire said, “this is your grandfather. His name is Dennis.”

“Hello,” Aaron said.

The boy was taller than Paull had imagined, but then he had no expertise with seven-year-old boys, no frame of reference except his memories of Claire at that age. Much to Paull’s relief he didn’t look like his father, or rather Paull’s rancid memories of his father. Rather he looked like Paull himself, which made Paull’s heart stop momentarily; it was as if he were looking into the face of immortality, another him just starting out along life’s rough road.

“Hello, Aaron,” he said, his heart in his mouth, and then despite what he’d said to Benson, he added eagerly, almost avidly, “Mom may have told you that I’m ill, but I’m not.” He found that he could finally smile. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“Dad,” Claire said, “is that true?”

But Paull remained mute, entranced by his grandson. It was difficult to know whether he even heard her.

She turned to Benson, her face flushed with anger and resentment. “Is this true, Mr. Benson? You said my father was terminal.”

“Yes, well, that was something of an untruth.”

“Something of an untruth?” Claire echoed. “Good God, man!”

She was leaning forward at such an angle that she was forced to take a step toward him, an aggressive step, it seemed to Paull, who had come out of his near-trance, a threatening step, as if it were a prelude to an assault. Benson faced her like the ex-military man he was, ramrod straight, but his eyes were filled with battlefield humiliation.

“You lied to me and my son, added to our anguish and … My mother just died, you unspeakable toad!”

Benson held his ground, but made no reply because there was nothing he could say, no excuse he could fabricate in the face of her wrath—and wrath was the right word, Paull thought, because there was something old-fashioned, unfashionably traditional about her anger, and this made him proud of her. And it was precisely in that moment when the faded and fragile image he had of her collided with the Technicolor force of her actual presence and became concrete, past and present dissolving into each other and, by some mysterious alchemical process, leading him home.

He turned to Benson now and said, “My family and I would like some time alone.”

Benson opened his mouth, possibly to reiterate that time was of the essence, but between the looks on both Paull and his daughter he ended up keeping his mouth shut.

After Benson departed, Paull was alone with the ghosts and demons that had bedeviled him even as he valiantly and vainly tried to push them far down into his subconscious.

“So,” Claire said, her voice once again thin and terribly strained, “you’re okay, you’re well.”

He nodded, suddenly unable to speak.

“But how is it that you’re here, what do these people want?”

“I don’t know yet.” Paull felt safe talking about Benson and Thomson.

“These are important men.”

“Well, they were,” he acknowledged. “Perhaps they still are, who knows. They kidnapped me, more or less, and once I was here told me that I could see you and Aaron if I listened to them.”

“I notice you didn’t listen to them.”

“I turned the tables on them, instead.”

“That’s so you, Dad.”

He cleared his throat, wished he had a glass of water to hide his question behind. “Are you …” He felt a fresh rush of terror, as if he was entering a haunted house, or the lair of a dangerous animal. “Are you married?”

“No, I’m not.” It was a simple, declarative statement, devoid of ruefulness or self-pity. “Lawrence never came back, he hasn’t seen Aaron. I wouldn’t want him to.”

“I see.” He had been right about that privileged bastard.

This flow of information was followed by a self-conscious silence during which Aaron looked from one to the other, his brow furrowed in a distinctly unchildlike manner, as if he were trying to parse the currents and undercurrents of emotions swirling around him.

“It must have been tough those last months with Mom,” Claire said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get to see her more often.”

“That’s all right, I—” He stopped in mid-sentence. It would be so easy to keep, and even embellish on, the fantasy she had of him spending time with Louise when he hadn’t. Guilt and remorse were powerful foundations on which to reunite, to ensure that she would love him again. Initially he’d had that impulse, the same selfish inclination that had kept him away from Louise. It was possible, he thought now, that Claire had succumbed to the same impulse. But he could not go through with it. This wasn’t a time for selfishness or for lies. It occurred to him that, difficult though it might be, he could manage to bear Claire’s and Aaron’s rejection far better than he could a lie that brought them together under a false flag.

“Honey, the truth is I did what you did. I spent far less time with your mother than I should have. The truth is …” He looked away for a moment, at Aaron, who was watching him with a child’s disconcertingly piercing gaze. And it was this gaze that gave him the courage to continue. He smiled in gratitude at Aaron before he got on with it. “The truth is I couldn’t bear to see her in that state. She didn’t know me, didn’t respond to the songs we loved together. She didn’t even know where she was. She was locked away in a place that had no key.”

There were tears glittering in Claire’s eyes. “I spent so much time hating you, shutting you out…” She paused long enough to catch her tears with a slender forefinger. “I put you in the same horrid room where Mom was. I couldn’t bear to see either of you, I didn’t want Aaron to see his grandmother like that, to remember her only as …” She took a hesitant step toward him. “Now she’s gone and I realize that nothing can bring her back, nothing can bring back the days before …” She couldn’t help but glance at her son. “But here you are, Dad.” And then, rather defiantly, “Aaron is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“I can see that so clearly, so very clearly,” Paull said, meaning every word.

25

“Jack, I’m sorry.” Alli turned her face into his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about, honey. You had no way of knowing what would happen. And what if the two of you had died, have you considered that possibility?”

She shook her head mutely.

Jack’s heart constricted. He felt blindsided by Alli’s revelation. He didn’t blame her for her decision, he didn’t see it as a betrayal of her deep and abiding friendship with Emma, only a deep and abiding ache in his heart that she had been carrying this anguish around in addition to her terror at what Herr had done to her.

“Jack, please say something,” Alli said with a clear note of desperation.

It was no good wondering what would have happened if Alli had been behind the wheel the morning of Emma’s death, Jack knew; no one would ever know what it was that caused Emma to swerve off the road at speed and into the tree. He could ask Emma, of course, the next time she appeared, but he suspected that she didn’t know or couldn’t remember. And, in any case, she had already urged him to move on from his own guilt, and this set his mind, expanding outward to absorb the different points of view, on the right track.

He saw Annika standing beside Kharkishvili, watching them, and he turned Alli away from her to face him. “Listen to me, we’re both carrying guilt about the choices we made the morning of Emma’s death, and maybe that wound will never fully heal, but I can assure you that we’ll never know unless we let go of the guilt and stop punishing ourselves. That’s what Emma wants for us now, more than anything.”

Alli’s eyes were glittering with held-back tears. “I don’t know … I don’t know if I can.”

“You have to want to. Alli, so much has been taken away from you.” A dark flicker passed across her face and it seemed as if she might crumble in front of him. He continued, still calm but with a subtle underlayer of urgency. “It’s time you put things back inside yourself.”

She shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“I think you know.” He took a breath. “Did you think Herr was going to kill you, that you were going to die?”

“I want to go back inside.”

“No one’s stopping you.” Jack was careful not to take hold of her.

Alli looked away, chewing on her lower lip, then nodded in a jerky motion. “At one point I was absolutely sure I wouldn’t survive.”

“That’s when it happened,” he said, “a little death, a partial death, your mind preparing itself for oblivion.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re both alive and dead.” Jack moved closer to her as he lowered his voice. “Something in you died, or at least grew critically ill, during that week with Herr.”

“You’re wrong, you’re wrong!” she cried.

“If you can see yourself from this perspective, everything you say and do makes perfect sense. You’re full of rage, contempt, spite, then you turn around and become the most warm and loving creature imaginable. You have trouble sleeping, and when you do sleep, you’re beset by nightmares. You adore Emma but are also terrified of her, terrified Emma will somehow seek vengeance for what you see as your betrayal of her—walking away from her when, in hindsight, Emma needed you most.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I want to die now.”

“Is it comforting to say that, because I don’t think you really mean it.”

Anger flashed in her teary eyes. “Don’t tell me what I—”

“Alli, stop this.” His voice was stern but not unkind. “You know, I was really pissed off at you when you showed up on the plane. I was going to send you back, but your mother more or less coerced me into taking you. But during the few days you’ve been with me I’ve seen something in you—a determination, as well as a fierce will to survive—so don’t tell me that you want to die because I know it’s only something you’ve gotten into the habit of saying or thinking. It isn’t real, you know it isn’t.”

Alli seemed calmer now, or at least better able to listen to what he had to say. She was still in shock, so he understood that it would take her some time to digest their conversation, to allow her thoughts and emotions to find the equilibrium from which she could definitively move on.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, put her head against his chest, leaning heavily against him as if she were exhausted.

Having walked slowly in their direction, Annika apparently decided it was now more or less safe to approach them. “Jack, Alli’s violent reaction was my doing.”

“You’re going to have to explain that.”

And Annika did. She told him about the conversation she’d had with Alli, how it had become more abrasive, more contentious, how she had been trying to force Alli out of her debilitating shell.

“What were you thinking?” He put his arm protectively around Alli’s shoulders, holding her close.

“I forced her to look at herself,” Annika said softly. “She had to get to this place, she had to sink so far down the only way to go was up.”

“And what if she had jumped off the cliff?”

She put her hand tenderly on the back of Alli’s head. “She’s not suicidal, Jack. If she had been she’d have killed herself before this.”

Jack looked at her and knew what she said was true. He looked around then as if suddenly aware of their surroundings and saw Kharkishvili standing at some remove, watching them with a mixture of pity and forbearance. The oligarch called his wolfhounds, who bounded toward him, and he turned with them at his heels, heading back to the estate at a quickened pace.

“We’d better follow him,” Jack said, eyeing the rapidly darkening sky. The wind had picked up, gusting in off the water, and the sudden dampness foretold the coming rain.

Deputy prime minister Oriel Batchuk was waiting outside Dyadya Gourdjiev’s building when Gourdjiev returned home. He lurked in the doorway like a wraith, wrapped in his leather trench coat, which was both sinister and absurd. He had a thirties-style fedora pulled low on his forehead. He looked like he was auditioning for The Thin Man or Five Graves to Cairo, and in another time and another place the sight might have tickled Gourdjiev’s funny bone. As it was he felt only a deep sense of fate having its way with him.

As he approached, Batchuk stepped out of the doorway, but he brought his own shadows with him.

“I received your burnt offering,” he said, referring to the sacrifice of Boronyov, whose still warm corpse Gourdjiev had laid at his agents’ feet, “but this time I’m afraid it’s insufficient.”

Gourdjiev stood his ground, trying his best to appear unperturbed. “Meaning?”

“This time Annika has gotten in the shit too deep, beyond even my ability to cover for her.”

Gourdjiev let go of a sudden spurt of anger, deep-seated and long-simmering. “Is that what you’ve done? I wasn’t aware that you’ve ever done anything for her—”

“Contrary to your peculiar delusion of omniscience you don’t know everything.”

“Please. You’ve been too busy doing things to her.”

The two men stood staring at each other with such malevolent intensity that it was possible to entertain the incredible notion that they were trying to destroy one another with their minds.

“I understand and sympathize with your frustration,” Batchuk said at length. “Only Annika and I know what happened. She won’t tell you and I certainly won’t.”

“She was only five, only a child!”

“She certainly didn’t act like a child.” Batchuk’s smile was both smug and contemptuous. “You see, you never really knew her, you never suspected what she was capable of, you missed the point of her entirely.”

“I’m the one she calls dyadya.”

“Indeed you are.” Batchuk’s tone made it clear this statement was anything but a concession. “And you’re the ignorant one, the scales have not yet dropped from your eyes. Unlike Saul of Tarsus you haven’t yet had your road to Damascus moment, but then it seems you were untimely born.”

“Untimely born?”

“‘Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me,’” Batchuk quoted. “Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.”

“For a devout atheist you’re quite the biblical scholar.”

“I like to probe the weaknesses of my enemies,” Batchuk said, with a meaning directed at Gourdjiev. The tenuous cord was broken, they were no longer frenemies. “In any event I came to warn you, or more accurately, to give you the opportunity to warn Annika. I’m coming for her—me, myself, not someone I’ve hired or ordered to do a piece of work. This I do personally, with my own hands.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev fairly trembled in barely suppressed rage. “How can … This is monstrous. How can you do this?”

“Given the decisions she has made how can I not?”

“You know what this means.”

Batchuk nodded. “I do.”

“Nothing will ever be the same between us.”

“My dear Dyadya Gourdjiev,” Batchuk said, using Annika’s nickname for him in a mocking manner, “nothing was ever the same between us from the moment I first saw Annika.”

“I did what I thought was right,” Annika said, “but I know I don’t always make the right choice.”

Jack studied her at some length. They were standing in the entry-way to the Magnussen mansion, just outside the bathroom where Alli had gone. Neither of them wanted to leave her alone at the moment, and as for Jack, the feeling of having been boxed in by both Alli’s impetuosity and her mother’s inability to control her had reasserted itself with a vengeance. And yet he knew quite well that there was no use in railing against this situation; as he had since he’d taken off from Sheremetyevo he resigned himself to the responsibility of keeping her safe, both from others who might want to kidnap her and do her harm, and from herself.

“In that you and Alli are alike,” he said. “She seems to lack the ability to know what’s good for her, or maybe it’s her own self-hatred that pushes her to seek out dangerous situations.”

Annika smiled what might best be described as a secret smile, or at least an ironic one, as if his words had triggered hidden memories.

“You see her in such a clear and perfect light, Jack, I admire that, I really do. I mean, she’s such a complex person, not that most people aren’t complex, but there’s something about her that—”

She stopped abruptly, as if changing her mind, and her eyes seemed to drift away to another time, another place. It wasn’t the first time Jack had observed this phenomenon in her, and he was struck by its similarity to what he sometimes observed in Alli. And now, as this particular Rubik’s Cube shifted perspective in his mind, he began to wonder how many more similarities there were between the two women.

Her carnelian eyes came back to him, in the light of the entry way their mineral quality making them transparent. “Jack, you don’t hate me for what I did, do you?”

“Did? What did you do?”

“What I said to Alli.”

“No, not at all. She needs all the help she can get, even if that help is sometimes difficult for her to hear.”

“I’m relieved then.” She placed a hand on his arm. “After all that’s happened—”

“But that’s just it.” Jack suddenly decided to take the bull by the horns. “I don’t know what happened to you.”

“What? I told you.”

“But you didn’t, not really. When I first saw the scars I decided not to ask you how you got them because I thought it might be an invasion of your privacy, but now I’d like to know.”

“Why? Why is it important now?”

“I’ve already told you, you have a particular affinity for understanding a young woman you met just days ago. I want to know how that works.”

Soft echoes of footfalls, of muffled voices came to them now and again. Since their arrival the mansion had come alive as if it had been waiting for them. A number of cars were parked on the generous expanse of gravel outside and the interior exhibited the air of expectancy, the bustle of hastily arranged preparations.

“It works,” Annika said, “because we’re both broken.”

Her mineral eyes studied him with a frightening intensity. In those eyes it was possible to get lost, moreover, to want to get lost. Jack felt himself losing his sense of time and place, and he enfolded her in his arms, felt the slight tremors of her emotions firing along her bare arms.

“It works,” she said, “because, like her, I was taken. It works because I’m just like her.”

“Darling, you’ve only taken one bite of your stollen,” the widow Tanova admonished. “Did I put in too much cinnamon?”

Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled vaguely. “No, Katya. I was just thinking about the past.”

Katya Tanova came and sat beside him at the dining room table. They were in her apartment, which was smartly furnished in the latest Western style. She was not a person to become stuck in amber like so many of her friends who had not moved on from the things they had liked in their thirties and forties. Their homes were like museums or mausoleums, depending on your level of cynicism. Katya’s public persona—cool, proper, even a bit formal—was in stark contrast with her private demeanor, or at least her behavior with Gourdjiev, which was very private, indeed. With him she was like a young woman, coquettish, bantering. She often threw her head back and laughed, or else she engaged him with an intellectual rigor he found positively erotic.

“For most people that’s not so good, darling, but for you it’s terrible.”

He nodded with gravity. “That may be true, but I can’t help it.”

“She came to see you, didn’t she? You saw Annika.”

He stared out the window at the hideously bare branches of a tree.

Katya wore a sleeveless flowered dress short enough to show off her strong legs, but not so short as to be unseemly. She had kicked off her shoes when she sat down. Her feet, wrapped in sheer stockings, were quite beautiful.

“You always become so melancholy when you see her. And the past—”

“Sometimes I can fool myself into thinking I’m happy, or satisfy myself at being so clever at this game or that. Once in a very great while I can even feel young again, but it always fades, this feeling, and then I realize that I’ve simply deluded myself. I expend so much energy trying to ignore the past, or forget it or—and this would be best of all—erase it, but it comes back to haunt me again and again.” He turned from the window with a bleak smile. “How can it not?”

“But, darling, how can you keep blaming yourself, when—”

“It wasn’t my fault? I should have known, I should have foreseen—”

“How could you, you’re not a sorcerer.”

“If only I were, I could obliterate the past, alter it with a wave of my hand!” he cried in anguish. “Such a terrible ending. No one deserves that.”

“Especially not Nikki. She was your wife but she was my best friend, we both miss her terribly.” Katya put her hand over his. “But we’re not really talking about Nikki now, are we? She’s dead and gone, beyond pain, beyond suffering. But Annika—”

“I cannot quantify Annika’s suffering, because to this day I don’t know what happened to her.”

“And if you did know, of what possible use would it be to you, except to bring you more heartache and self-recrimination? And, darling, you are full up on those things already.” She pushed the plate of stollen closer to him. “Come now, have something to eat, you’ll feel better.”

“Dammit! Nothing’s going to make me feel better!” He pulled away from her, in almost the same movement rose, and in rising, swept the plate off the table. It crashed to the highly polished floor, where it burst into a hundred pieces. Crumbs of stollen went everywhere.

He stood against the wall, biting his knuckle, while Katya’s Siamese crept out from under the sofa, where she had slunk at the instance of commotion, and with her head down and shoulders working, began to methodically eat the pastry.

Katya said nothing. She went into the kitchen, returned with a broom and dustpan, and knelt down.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Stooping, he very gently took the implements from her hand and spent the next several minutes cleaning up. The cat came up to him and, arching her back, rubbed herself against his leg. When he was finished there wasn’t a shard of china, a crumb of stollen left on the floor. The Siamese, licking her lips, didn’t seem to mind; she’d eaten her fill. Katya had trained her to be dainty in her eating habits. A genuine little lady.

“I’ll wax the floor tomorrow,” Katya said, gesturing for him to sit down opposite her after he had returned from emptying the dustpan.

He did as she bade, sat silently with his hands clasped between his legs like a schoolboy caught making mischief.

“Darling, listen to me, there are some things in this life we aren’t meant to know, some questions, though asked over and over, that have no answer. You must try to accept this, though I know better than most this cuts across the grain of your personality. You’re a man born to find the answers to the thorniest questions, and when this becomes the norm, it isn’t easy to look at a blank wall and say, Is this all there is? Because, yes, that’s all there is, darling. When it comes to Annika there are essential secrets in her heart you cannot know. The darkness behind that wall is hers, not yours, no matter what you may believe. I know you’ve taken this as a failure—’I should have known, I should have foreseen’—these are the words of the seeker. As Apollo brought light to the world each day you find answers—but because you don’t have the answer to what happened to Annika—”

“I should have protected her.”

“In a perfect world, yes,” Katya said, “but, darling, in a perfect world you wouldn’t need to protect her.” Her eyes found his and she smiled. “This world is far from perfect, however, and nothing is easy or quick or the way we want it to be. The world is incomprehensible, and the harder we strive to understand it the more mysterious it becomes. And do you know why? Life is all moral compromises, and with each compromise we make a tiny piece of us gets lost. And when it isn’t compromises that we must make, it’s sacrifices, and sacrifices change us irrevocably, until we look like that tree outside.

“Consider what you have sacrificed for Annika—you have gone to the edge of the world, the place where even maps fail, where the devil resides, in order to keep her safe. I beg you to ponder that the next time you feel compelled to say ‘I should have known, I should have foreseen.’”

“Yes, yes, it’s true,” he said in a voice that betrayed him, for his mind thought one thing and his heart felt another. It took some effort to return her smile, but by the look on her face he knew that she appreciated it. “Everything you said is true.” He looked around as if awaking from a dream. “I’ll buy you a new plate.”

“Thank you, but don’t bother. That wasn’t the first one you’ve smashed and it won’t be the last.” She laughed. “That’s why I put out this particular service, it was a wedding present from my mother and I never did like it. It’s so, I don’t know, Victorian. Very her—not me at all.”

“Your mother and her lies,” he said, with a rueful shake of his handsome head.

“Lies are what drew you and me together,” she said. “Lies we had to create and then, far worse, perpetuate, in order to go on living. And these lies required both moral compromises and sacrifices that, while regretting, we wouldn’t change. I lied to my husband and you lied to Batchuk. I became friends with my husband so he would never find out how much I loathed him, and his money allowed me the freedom to live my life. For him I did not exist as a sexual object, or, if I did, it was only for a matter of months, if not weeks.

“As for you, my darling—” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You made your peace with Batchuk because everything in your world depended on your alliance with him. It took all your skill and charm to convince him that you were sincere, since he knew very well that you had every reason to want him destroyed. How did you manage it, I wonder? I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, even though I’ve certainly honed my acting skills over the years.”

“He made a request of me and I complied,” he said. “There was someone in his way, someone he couldn’t touch, couldn’t even get near. I could. Simple as that.”

He stood up and, hands in his trousers pockets, stood staring out at the gnarled tree.

“You of all people, darling, should know that nothing is simple,” Katya said, “especially when finding an answer brings an end to a life.”

“I know you’re not judging me, because you know very well what was at stake. When he made the request he knew I’d have to comply, which is why he enjoyed asking me. The idea of giving me an order appealed to him. It must have given him immense satisfaction knowing I would do it, knowing that he was causing me pain at the same time he was ridding himself of a thorn in his side he couldn’t pull out himself.”

“It was that death that kept Annika safe, is that what you’re saying?”

He nodded, but didn’t turn around. “What Batchuk did was monstrous, unspeakable, depraved. It’s as if Stalin has risen from the grave.”

Katya rose, then, and went to stand by his side. “You’re not thinking about anything foolish, something that could get you killed, are you? Leave matters the way they are.”

“It’s too late, events have been set in motion. Batchuk is here in Kiev. He is looking for Annika.”

“You trained her well.”

“Because I was forced to make a deal with the devil. Are you saying I should withdraw my protection?”

She slid her arm around his waist. “Look at that tree. It has withstood drought, hailstorms, lightning, and torrential rains that turned the ground around it to a river of mud. But there it is. Its roots never gave way, it was never split asunder. It may be ugly and leaning, it may not be as tall as it once was, but it abides, darling, it abides.”

“Time,” Miles Benson said, standing in the doorway to the shadowed study. The brightest light came from Aaron’s iPhone. “Mr. Secretary, it’s imperative that we finish our conversation now.” But so fierce was the glare that Claire gave him he had no recourse but to take a step back, just as if she had pushed him.

“All right,” Paull said, but he never took his eyes off his daughter, who, it seemed to him now, had never looked more beautiful. She had been a child when she had left him; now she was a mature, self-confident woman. How the devil had that happened, he wondered. Seven years wasn’t that long a time; on the other hand, it was a lifetime for small creatures, an eternity for others. Claire had made the most of those seven years, and what had he done with the time?

“Wait for me,” he said to her. “I won’t be long.”

“Even if you are,” Aaron said, his bright, transparent eyes serenely regarding his newly discovered grandfather, “Mom and I won’t leave without you.” He looked up at Claire. “Right, Mom?”

Morgan Thomson was waiting for them. He had opened the glass doors to the library and when he saw them approaching, said with a sweep of his hand, “Let’s take a walk.”

There was a Japanese-style footpath made of slate-colored stepping stones, each slightly different yet related to one another, that led down to the pond and the moon bridge. As they neared the water Paull could see flashes of black, white, silver, and orangey-gold beneath the surface as the ornamental carp swam into the sunlight and out. Much to his surprise Benson took out a handful of dry food and sprinkled it on the surface. The greedy carp rose, their mouths open and gasping to suck in the food.

Assuming the professorial demeanor he so adored Thomson said, “Believe it or not this accord is going to consolidate President Yukin’s power both inside and outside Russia.”

At once Paull thought back to his conversation with Edward Carson in the limo on the day they had buried Lloyd Berns. Carson had voiced consternation that Brandt was trying to push through the accord despite the president’s unease. Paull assumed an expression of bland attention.

Thomson’s hands were clasped behind his back, his head tilted slightly upward as if he were sniffing the air for eavesdroppers, or clues to their ultimate fate. “As you no doubt know, since Yukin has been in power the government’s ownership of companies comprising the Russian stock market has ballooned from twenty-five percent to forty percent.”

“If that isn’t totalitarianism,” Benson said, staring down at the swarming carp, “I don’t know what is.”

“He has also made a mockery of the state governors’ races,” Thomson continued as if Benson hadn’t spoken. “No one can get on a slate unless expressly endorsed by Yukin.”

“Or his lord high executioner, Oriel Jovovich Batchuk,” Benson said without apparent irony.

Thomson shrugged. “It amounts to the same thing. Batchuk is deputy prime minister, he’s thrown in his lot with Yukin, he rises and falls on the strength of Yukin’s power. But in a sense Miles is correct: In his own right Batchuk is a formidable opponent.”

“A fucking latter-day Stalin,” Benson said. “There’s so much blood on his hands they say he lives in an abattoir.”

“Very funny,” Paull said.

“He’s a Russian,” Benson said levelly, “so who the hell knows, it might be true.”

“He’s a clever bastard, this Batchuk.” Thomson’s eyes met Paull’s. “More clever, even, than Iosif Vissarionovich.” He meant Stalin.

“Where is this all leading?” Paull asked.

“An excellent question.” Thomson began to move, and the other two men followed him as he mounted the moon bridge. At the apex of the arc he stopped and, placing his forearms on the railing, stared down into the depths of the pond. “General Brandt has made some sort of private deal with President Yukin, the details of which we have no idea, but I can tell you unequivocally that the moment we discovered the fact we severed all ties with him. Nevertheless, Brandt is out there operating on his own, taking the law into his own hands, and we have no way of stopping him.”

“Batchuk is in charge of Trinadtsat,” Kharkishvili said to Jack, “which is a secret cadre—”

“I know what Trinadtsat is,” Jack said.

“You surprise me at every turn, Mr. McClure, you really do.” Kharkishvili’s eyebrows arched. “But possibly you don’t know this: Trinadtsat was created by Batchuk for one reason—a secret discovery of an enormous deposit of uranium—possibly one of the largest in the world—in northeastern Ukraine, very near the Russian border. Add to this the fact that the Kremlin has determined Russia’s own inground supply of uranium is far smaller than had been thought, and you have a major crisis in the making.

“What is crucial to understanding why the current situation has become a crisis is that Russia is firmly committed to nuclear power,” Kharkishvili continued. “We—that is, the members of AURA— were and are just as firmly committed to keeping the nuclear power industry in private hands in order to mitigate the Kremlin’s expansionist plans. We fought Yukin as long as we could, but he consolidated his power too quickly and too well. With Batchuk’s help he got inside our defenses, accused us of fiscal malfeasance or, in cases when that didn’t work or wasn’t for some reason sufficient, outright treason. He seized our companies and would have sent us to Siberia if we hadn’t been warned and fled here to Ukraine.”

Heavy weather had blown in off the Black Sea, and rain was beating at the windowpanes as Jack, Annika, and Alli sat at an enormous gleaming wood table in the vast dining room of Mikal Magnussen’s manor house. Four members of AURA sat at the table, big-shouldered men with guileful eyes but a singular lack of delicacy. Between them lay platters of food and cut-crystal flasks of vodka, slivovitz, and soda water, a feast for more than a dozen, but not one was eating.

“Now the worst has happened,” Kharkishvili continued. “With us gone, Yukin has nationalized the uranium consortium, just as he did with Gazprom. Yukin has come to the same conclusion we did almost a decade ago, that Russia’s dependence on foreign oil—especially Iran’s—puts it at a strategic disadvantage. That’s why he’s agreed to this U.S.-Russian accord. He doesn’t mind making concessions as far as his traditional business ties with Iran as long as he has a steady supply of uranium.”

“But without the huge Ukraine uranium strike he won’t have it.”

They all turned as a man entered the room. He was darkly handsome with the rough-hewn features of a Sean Connery or a Clive Owen. His hair was shot through with gray, the color of his eyes, as if he’d trekked through a snowstorm to arrive here. And, who knew, there may have been a number of metaphorical snowstorms in his past.

He turned to Jack. “I’m Mikal Magnussen, I apologize for not being available when you arrived.” He paused now, waiting while an aide appeared at Kharkishvili’s side and whispered briefly in his ear. Kharkishvili shot Annika an involuntary glance, which was so quick, so circumspect, it was possible that only Jack noticed it.

“So Yukin means to steal it,” Magnussen said, “using soldiers who are Trinadtsat personnel.”

“It’s my understanding that it takes a decade to get a uranium mine up and running,” Jack said. “I don’t understand how an incursion into Ukrainian territory is going to accomplish anything.”

“Ah, well, here’s the true genius of Batchuk’s plan.” This from Malenko, another of the dissident oligarchs. Burly and bald, making him look like a tenpin, he had the prominent jaw of a carnivore and tiny ears absurdly low on his skull. “The troops will be sent in under the guise of aiding Ukraine, but once they’re in the area they won’t leave. Instead, they’ll set up a perimeter so that Russian tanks can roll in across the border.”

“It’ll be a fucking mini-Czech,” Glazkov, another oligarch, said, referring to the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, “except the Russians will stop at the border to the uranium discovery.”

“They can’t just invade Ukraine on any pretext,” Jack said.

“They will, just as they did in Georgia, where their troops are still deployed,” Kharkishvili said.

“The economic situation in Ukraine, particularly the east, is dire, so much so that riots have broken out in several cities and are gaining momentum throughout the country.” Magnussen had talked to the table, but remained standing. “Experience tells me that Yukin will use this economic crisis to doubtless claim his troops are there to protect both Russian and Ukrainian interests.”

“But our problem—and yours, Mr. McClure—is not only the Kremlin,” Kharkishvili said, “but one of your own countrymen. Yukin is being aided by an American by the name of Brandt. A general in your military, an advisor to your president.”

“General Brandt is the architect of the current accord being hammered out between Yukin and President Carson,” Jack said. “Carson’s success as president is more or less tied to the accord being ratified by both sides.”

“That security accord is pure poison. Once it’s signed Yukin and Batchuk will send their Trinadtsat troops across the border into Ukraine, Russia will take possession of the uranium strike, and because of the accord with the United States no one will dare to stop him.”

“The United States itself—President Carson—will stop him.”

“Do you really think so?” Magnussen said. “You know very well that the prime reason for President Carson agreeing to the accord is to get the Iranian nuclear card off the table. In this particular matter Yukin will be as good as his word. He has decided to throw Iran to the wolves in exchange for this massive uranium strike, which will serve Russia’s burgeoning nuclear power plant needs for decades to come.”

Jack’s mind was working furiously. “If Carson lifts a hand against the Russian incursion into Ukraine, he risks Yukin reinstituting its nuclear commerce with Iran. And of course he doesn’t dare do that; the entire architecture of the accord is to neuter Iran’s nuclear program.”

Kharkishvili nodded. “You have it entirely.”

All of a sudden Jack’s mind gave him a different view of the situation. “This is about General Brandt, isn’t it?” he said. “Brandt has a private deal with Yukin; in return for getting the accord done he’s going to receive a piece of the action here in Ukraine.”

There was absolute silence in the room. Kharkishvili turned to Magnussen and said, “You see, Mikal, I was right to entrust this part of our plan to Annika.” He turned to her. “You found us the perfect person, my dear. Congratulations.”

“So as you can see,” Thomson said, “the problem is Brandt. He has moved beyond our control. We have no power in this administration, but you do.”

Paull took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You recruited Brandt and now you want me to clean up his dirty work, and yours?” He laughed. “Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because if you don’t,” Benson said, “your president is going to end up with egg on his face—egg that won’t be easy to scrape off, I can assure you—when the deal Brandt has made with Yukin comes to light.”

“After which, he can kiss a second term good-bye.” Thomson was still in professorial mode. “You and Edward Carson have a personal relationship, don’t you? I mean to say you’re friends.”

“‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,’” Benson said, quoting the oft-heard TV ad. “Bottom line, General Brandt is driving the president’s car and he’s very, very drunk.”

Paull ran a hand through his hair, but he kept his expression neutral. He felt as if he were walking on eggshells around these two. Right now he needed to take a step back in order to assess the rapidly shifting situation with a clear eye and a calm mind. It was apparent that these two men made their living feeding off other people’s weaknesses and mistakes, but now they themselves had made a mistake or a miscalculation. Or they had seriously underestimated Brandt. From the evidence they had put forward so far this was a possibility that they had overlooked, and Paull was not about to bring their attention to it. The two choices as outlined were, one, General Brandt had gone Kurtz, as Benson so colorfully put it, or, two, he had cleverly outmaneuvered them, using their resources to forge his relationship with Yukin only to abandon them as the metaphorical clock ticked close to midnight. Yukin and Carson were about to sign the historic accord that, if Thomson and Benson were telling the truth, would give the world the picture of a high-level American military man, one of the president’s closest advisors, in league with the president of Russia.

There was, of course, the other possibility, standing out as surely as a black swan: that the two of them were working a con on a massive scale in order to get him to stop Carson from signing an accord that would do the very thing the president and everyone in his administration was praying for it to do: pull the plug on Iran’s nuclear program. Without Russia’s imported parts, fuel, and expertise the Iranians would have no choice but to drastically scale back the program, or shut it down entirely.

This was the enigma presented to Dennis Paull, the web from which he needed to extricate both himself and the president without damaging the president’s reputation or jeopardizing the security accord. It reminded him of the classic conundrum of an explorer traveling through a country inhabited by two tribes. The members of one tribe always tell the truth, the members of the other tribe always lie. The tribe that always lies are headhunters and cannibals. The explorer comes across a tribal hunting party, which quickly surrounds him. However, he is unable to distinguish which tribe they represent, and now he understands his dreadful predicament. He needs to ask two questions: the first is, Which tribe are you from? The second is, Will you eat me? But whichever tribe the men belong to they are going to give the same answer: We’re from the tribe that never lies, and we’re not going to eat you. And yet the outcome will be polar opposites, either the explorer will be safe or he will die a horrible death.

Paull was now facing a similar situation, lethal in the political sense with no room to be wrong. Were Thomson and Benson members of the tribe that tells the truth or the tribe that lies? If he acted on their information and they were in fact lying, he would jeopardize not only Edward Carson’s presidency but the future security of America. But if they were telling the truth and he didn’t act, out of a belief that they were lying, the same terrible scenario would come about.

“Why did General Brandt order a sanction on Jack McClure?” Paull asked.

“We don’t know,” Thomson said, “except to say that Brandt must feel that McClure presents an immediate danger to his private deal with Yukin.”

Now Paull knew he had to tell the president, get the sanction rescinded before Jack was killed. He wished with very fiber of his being that Jack McClure were with him. Jack would unravel this seemingly no-win situation, because he’d be able to see the sides of it Paull could not. But Jack wasn’t here, and Paull knew he’d have to make the crucial decision as to what to tell Carson himself. He racked his brain to find a way out, or at least to swing the odds from fifty-fifty to a percentage that was more favorable to him and the president.

What was clear, what he had hard evidence proving, was that General Brandt had seriously—terminally—overstepped his authority. This fact—the only one Paull had—argued that Thomson and Benson were telling the truth. That conclusion was far from certain, but what in this life, he asked himself, was ever certain? He had to trust these two, but only as far as he could throw them.

“All right,” he said, breaking the lengthy silence, “I’ll call the president.”

26

Oriel Batchuk sat in the ultrabright, candy-colored confines of the Baskin-Robbins in the Globus shopping center on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, which rose on one side of Kiev’s Independence Square. He was surrounded by bubbling Ukrainians dressed in Tommy Hilfiger or Pierre Cardin, trying their hardest to be American.

His mind, drifting, returned to the past, to his confrontation with Dyadya Gourdjiev, an encounter he had hoped never to have, but that he saw now, with the perfect clarity of hindsight, was inevitable. Their relationship was bound to end in tears, as the British were wont to say, because it was all artifice, meticulously constructed by the two of them out of lies, fabrications, disavowals, and obfuscation. The truth was they had both made compromises and, yes, sacrifices—not so very difficult for men who lacked a moral compass—in order to live in the world with one another, in order not to tear the other limb from limb. The emotions that ran between them, that bound them together in a private arena, were both lava hot and ice cold, how could it be otherwise, considering the hideous stroke of fate that had befallen them?

But of course now that he looked around the Technicolor store with blind eyes he realized that it was no coincidence that he had ordered the rendezvous here at this particular place, because it was on this very spot, long before Globus was even an idea in the mind of its developer, that he had first seen Nikki. She had been walking with Gourdjiev, he remembered the moment as if it had been transferred from his retinas, seared into his brain, an image that could neither fade nor crumble. That first sight of Nikki transcended time, existed outside it, as if he had caught a glimpse of a creature beyond human ken. For Batchuk, who had never before allowed himself an emotional connection with another human being, the response to Nikki was galvanizing. In fact, he was forced to sit down, though it was not yet time for his meeting with Gourdjiev. He watched, transfixed, as Nikki, arm in arm with Gourdjiev, floated at his side. Then she detached herself and, running past startled shoppers, flew into the arms of a tall, regal-looking man with black hair and hazel eyes. The man, laughing, lifted her up, whirling her around while Gourdjiev stood by, a fatuous grin on his face.

When Nikki planted a kiss on the man’s lips a tiny, involuntary noise escaped Batchuk’s mouth, terrifying him. It was as if an ice pick had been shoved into his belly. He felt sick and dizzy, and was thus at a disadvantage when Gourdjiev left the blissful couple and came to where Batchuk was slumped over in his chair.

“Are you ill?” Gourdjiev said as he slid onto a chair opposite Batchuk. “You’re sweating like a pig.”

“An excess of vodka last night,” Batchuk improvised, “or I should say this morning.”

Gourdjiev laughed as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Your partying will be the death of you, Oriel Jovovich, of that there can be no doubt.”

This was in the days before Batchuk had been named deputy prime minister, before Yukin has ascended to his self-styled throne, but the two were already close, stars rising in tandem through the perilous firmament of the Russian political chop shop. In fact, it was Batchuk who had introduced Yukin to Gourdjiev, who was then already the éminence grise in the power politics of Ukraine, in all of Eastern Europe, in fact. At that time it was essential to have Gourdjiev’s backing and influence in order to rise to the first tier of power. Batchuk, who loved Roman history, thought of his friend as Claudius, a man who had decided to step away from the bloody turbulence at the center of Eastern European politics, but not from the corridors of power, where he manipulated people and events from deep within its shadowed recesses. Like Claudius he was an unprepossessing man, a man you assumed to be in the twilight of his life, who, like the generals of antiquity, was content to gaze out over the Palatine hill to the magnificent centurion cypresses, dreaming of past glories. Until you came in contact, or perhaps conflict was the correct word, with his astonishing intellect.

For many years Batchuk had stood in awe of Gourdjiev, dealing with Yukin and others as the older man did, with discretion, shrewdness, and diabolical foresight, but try as he might Gourdjiev’s mind was always six or seven steps ahead of him, and in denying the lack in himself he began to envy Gourdjiev, and this malice slowly and inexorably curdled their friendship.

“Who is that man with Nikki?” he said almost as soon as Gourdjiev sat down. He had not meant to, but to his dismay—or, more accurately, horror—he couldn’t help himself.

“That’s Alexsei Mandanovich Dementiev,” Gourdjiev said.

It disgusted Batchuk that he could not take his eyes off her. He’d heard about her, of course, but until this moment Gourdjiev had kept her away from him. Was it by design, he wondered. He watched Nikki and Alexsei, absurdly jealous that they seemed to fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, as if their births were also the birth of a shared destiny. They cleaved to one another, so blissful only a cataclysm, he was certain, could separate them. He said naively, stupidly, “They’re seeing one another?” and immediately despised himself for it.

“You could say that.” Gourdjiev laughed again. “He and Nikki are getting married next month.”

With a start, Batchuk returned to the unpleasant present. The candy-colored world of the Baskin-Robbins, with its yammering kids and harried-looking parents, turned his stomach. Sick to his soul, he rose and stalked out, only to return and glare at them all.

“I’ll call the president,” Jack said, “and tell him what’s going on. He’ll take the appropriate actions as far as General Brandt is concerned.”

“He may, indeed, do that,” Magnussen said, “but do you really think he will hold up the signing of this historic accord based on your say-so?” He shook his head. “We have no hard evidence of Brandt’s personal involvement.”

“But I know he ordered a sanction on Annika,” Jack said. “That, surely, is overstepping his authority.”

“It may or it may not, we have no way of knowing,” Kharkishvili said. “But the thornier issue, the conundrum that we cannot even begin to solve, is if someone is behind General Brandt and, if so, who it is. This is why we need you. Because getting rid of Brandt, even stopping the signing may not be enough to keep Yukin and Batchuk from ordering their troops across the border. You have no idea how desperate Russia is for new energy sources, how far Yukin is prepared to go in order to obtain them.”

“Either way,” Jack said, “I’m going to have to inform the president.”

Magnussen nodded. “We understand that, but before you do we needed to let you know the immense stakes. If Russia moves across the border into Ukraine without that treaty being signed it will trigger a regional war that will quite rapidly escalate, dragging your country into it.”

Jack looked from Magnussen to Kharkishvili. “In other words we’re all damned if the accord is signed and doubly damned if it’s not.”

Kharkishvili nodded. “Unless you can come up with a solution. Annika was right from the beginning: I think you’re the only one who can.”

“What if there is no answer?” Jack said.

“In that event I fear we’re all doomed.” Kharkishvili looked around the room at each of the faces, each one grimmer than the last. “Then everything will come to an end, the greed of wealth, the lust for power. In that final moment, everyone will fall, even the kingpins of empires.”

President Edward Carson had just returned from the Kremlin, having received Yukin’s full agreement to the accord. To Carson’s mild surprise the Russian president did not object to the time of the signing tomorrow evening at eight o’clock, local time, noon back home—more than enough time, after the Internet sites and the blogosphere had their say, for all the major news feeds to have developed think pieces that would be popping up on TV just in time for the six and seven o’clock newscasts.

He was sitting down to the first decent meal he’d had in days when his cell phone rang. His entire entourage, including the press secretary, jumped to attention because he was sitting across the table from the senior political correspondent from Time, who was about to engage him in a major interview that would be the magazine’s cover story next week.

The president took the call because it was from Jack. Excusing himself, he stood and whispered into the press secretary’s ear, then hurried out of the hotel dining room, accompanied as always by his Praetorian guard who, in this instance, was loaded down with equipment designed to jam any attempt at electronic eavesdropping.

“Jack, what progress?” Carson said. “And is Alli okay?”

“Alli’s fine, better than fine, in fact.”

“Well, then, it seems that being with you is the best medicine for her.” Carson was immensely grateful. Whatever flicker of jealousy he might have felt was extinguished by Jack’s revelations. His voice seemed to bore through Carson’s head like a power drill.

“Let me get this straight,” Carson said, as he stared through one of the hotel’s plate-glass windows at the snow piling up in Red Square, “you’re telling me that General Brandt has some kind of private deal with Yukin regarding a uranium strike in northeast Ukraine?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“But what about Alizarin Global?”

There was a pause before Jack’s voice buzzed in his ear. “I never heard of Alizarin Global.”

“Neither did I until ten minutes ago when Dennis Paull called.” A young woman was struggling across the vast expanse of Red Square, bent forward into the wind. Carson was happy he wasn’t outside, but at this moment that was about all he was happy about. “It’s some kind of multitentacled conglomerate that has employed both Benson and Thomson. They, in turn, hired Brandt to help them make a deal with Gazprom. According to what they told Dennis, Brandt has made this side deal with Yukin. They fired him the moment they found out, but he’s ignored their communications. He’s acting in his own interest, not theirs. They’re convinced he’s gone insane.”

“Edward, I suppose I don’t have to point out that we’re talking about your political enemies here. What makes Paull think he can trust them?”

“He doesn’t, not really. But, concerned about intelligence leaks, he’s been immersed in a sub-rosa investigation of everyone in my inner circle, during the course of which he found evidence that Alizarin did, indeed, fund Brandt’s winter trips to Moscow. Now Brandt is so out of control he authorized a sanction on you. Naturally, I canceled it the moment I got off the phone with Dennis.”

“Is anyone left in the field?”

“No,” Carson assured him, “all the agents have been successfully recalled.”

There was a short silence while, Carson supposed, Jack absorbed the shocking news. At length, he said, “I can see how I’d be a threat to him, but what I can’t understand is how he’d know it. How would Brandt have knowledge of where you sent me and what I’ve been doing?”

“A good question,” Carson said. “I think you’d better find the answer.”

“I’m trying to do just that,” Jack assured him. “What about the accord?”

“From what you’ve just told me there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of signing it, Jack,” Carson said bleakly. “If I refuse to sign it, or even move to postpone the ceremony after Yukin has bent over backward to meet all our demands, I’ll not only look foolish, but I’ll destroy whatever political capital I’ve gained during the run-up to the signing.

“No, unless you can come up with another solution, the signing will commence at eight tomorrow evening.”

Jack, putting away his cell phone, was running the multiple vectors of the information the president had given him. Much of the information seemed contradictory or an outright lie. He didn’t for a moment think that Benson and Thomson had anyone’s best interest in mind except theirs. According to the president they didn’t want the accord with Yukin signed. It was their contention that both the accord and its chief architect, General Brandt, were a danger to the country, but were they telling the truth? From the damning evidence that Paull had discovered it seemed they were telling the truth about Brandt. Were they then lying about the danger inherent in the accord? He already knew from Kharkishvili the likelihood of events if it was signed tomorrow. If he was to find a way out of this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t conundrum he had less than twenty-four hours to do it.

His musings were interrupted by Kharkishvili striding purposefully toward him.

“Mr. McClure, I’m glad I caught you. I’ve received some alarming news.”

At once Jack’s mind sprang backward to the aide bending over Kharkishvili, whispering in his ear, and that strange, circumspect look Kharkishvili had given Annika.

“Annika’s uncle Gourdjiev has shot one of AURA’s members, a dissident oligarch and a friend of mine by the name of Riet Medanovich Boronyov”

“I find that difficult to believe,” Jack said. “What on earth would cause him to murder one of your people?”

“I have no idea,” Kharkishvili confessed. “Nevertheless, he shot Boronyov in front of two of Batchuk’s men and gave the body over to them, this was confirmed by an eyewitness.” Kharkishvili appeared genuinely distraught. “This is a disaster, because Boronyov was one of the dissidents who, as far as Batchuk and Trinadtsat were concerned, were dead. We made certain of that. Now Batchuk knows better, and it’s a fair bet he’ll check on the others who were supposed to be dead, all of us here, me included.”

Now Jack gleaned another piece of the puzzle: Like Annika, Dyadya Gourdjiev was a part of AURA, but if so why had he killed a man who their enemies already thought was dead?

“Perhaps Boronyov was a double agent,” Jack said, “secretly working for Batchuk.”

Kharkishvili shook his head emphatically. “Impossible. We met as young strivers, I ate Sunday dinner with him and his family, we shared business deals.”

“All of which proves nothing,” Jack pointed out, “except that he was a perfect candidate for a double.” He’d already thought of the reason this could not be true, but before he had a chance to speak, Kharkishvili shook his head even more vigorously.

“No, I fear it’s Gourdjiev who’s the traitor. He and Batchuk have a long history together, longer, closer even than the one I had with Boronyov. For years, he has pretended to be Batchuk’s friend, but what if that was also a ruse, what if they’re actual allies, working hand in hand?”

“There is, or was, no double inside AURA,” Jack said with authority. “If Batchuk knew you were alive all the time you’d all be dead by now, there would be no AURA to oppose him and Yukin.”

“And yet Gourdjiev must be in league with Batchuk now,” Kharkishvili said. “There is no other explanation for his action.”

“You don’t like Dyadya Gourdjiev, do you?”

“What?”

Jack could see that Kharkishvili’s annoyance was masking both shock and consternation, and he knew that he had hit on something vital. “You don’t like Gourdjiev and I’d like to know why.”

“So would I.”

The two men turned to see Annika, who had come up silently behind them and was now standing with her feet slightly apart, arms crossed over her breasts, between Kharkishvili and the relative sanctuary of the dining room.

General Brandt, sitting in an arcade off Red Square that had an unobstructed view of the brooding walls and towers of the Kremlin, wondered what it would be like to be all energy. Watching the snow falling in endless curtains he tried to imagine the world from a snow-flake’s point of view: the pure cold, the clean symmetrical design, the absolute quiet. Who wouldn’t want that time to think undisturbed by civilization’s anxieties, tensions, and clumsy attempts at manipulation. The urge to maintain control was unknown in a snowflake’s world, and it was better off for it.

Every hour of every day control was slipping away from him. He could no longer bench press twice his weight, his arthritic left knee made it impossible for him to run a mile a day as he had for decades since he was thirteen, his hair was becoming fine as well as thin, he could no longer eat chili dogs or Tabasco without suffering the consequences, and there were nights when he gazed at young girls with the detached wistfulness of an old man. There was no doubt about it, his body was deteriorating at an alarming rate, coming apart at the seams, as it were, and more and more he found that he no longer wanted to be a part of it or, more accurately, in it. How much easier it would be to be pure energy, not to have to worry about his rotting flesh, which continued to betray him at every turn.

He was at a loss to say when this nihilistic worldview had come over him, perhaps he’d always had the seed of it deep inside his pragmatic, highly regimented mind. With a paranoid’s unmatched cunning he suspected the seed had started to take root the moment he retired from the military, which had been his stern father and his comforting mother for over forty years. The world outside the military seemed a strange and unpleasant place for him, until he learned to back away from it just enough so that it lapped at the fringe of his reality and nothing more. Being a talking head on TV was an excellent way to insulate himself, to remain unapproachable, solitary, hidden in plain sight. The more he appeared on TV, the more the idiot anchorpersons asked their fatuous questions, the further he receded into himself. All glory is fleeting, to paraphrase George Patton, one of Brandt’s patron saints, but that was fine because he had had enough of glory, TV had made him sick of it, or more accurately, what passed for glory in this postmodern age. Now all he craved was security, which his pension did not assure, especially because his Down’s syndrome son needed care far above and beyond what his health insurance was willing to pay. It seemed odd, not to mention unfair, that after spending his entire adult life in the service of his country he had become obsessed with money, something that in his younger days he didn’t think about at all because his housing, food, and travel expenses were all paid for by the United States Army.

He looked at his watch now as the waiter brought him a double espresso with a shot of vodka, which he drank quickly with a sharp tilt of his head like the old, grizzled Italian fisherman he’d met in Key West. He liked the Keys; it was his long-cherished dream to move to Marathon or Islamorada and fish, bask in the sun, and get stone drunk at ten in the morning whenever the hell he felt like it.

As soon as he finished his heavily fortified coffee he checked his watch again and frowned. It was past time for Yukin to call him via his encrypted line. He signaled the waiter for another double, and sat brooding, his head sunk between his bony shoulders, glowering at the spotlit facade of the Kremlin as if he could will Yukin to call him. The silence was deafening, mystifying, which required drowning in alcohol and caffeine. He downed his second drink as fast as he had the first, so fast, in fact, that the waiter hadn’t yet left the table.

“One more,” Brandt said in excellent Russian. “And bring the bottle.”

The waiter nodded and departed without comment.

And that was another thing, Brandt thought gloomily, Moscow was too fucking cold, even in April—I mean, snow, for chrissakes! This furtive spring might as well be January. Unconsciously he rubbed his palms down his thighs in an attempt to bring more circulation into them. At least the drinks had warmed his belly.

The waiter arrived at approximately the same time as his cell phone buzzed. He let it ring, his heart heavy in his chest, until the waiter had set the coffee and the bottle of vodka on the table and left.

“Yes,” he said, the cell clamped to his ear.

“Everything is sealed and delivered, it’s just wanting signing,” Yukin’s familiar voice said in his ear. “He loved that I caved on all those provisions I never wanted. You were quite correct; causing him to focus on the minutia of the accord was the way to get it done.”

The General drained half the cup in one swallow, then unscrewed the top of the bottle and poured an imprudent amount of vodka into his espresso. And right then and there he felt the intense hatred for the Russians—not just Yukin and Batchuk—he’d always felt but had suppressed for so many years, that had caused him unnumbered ulcerous bouts and sleepless nights as soon as he had been taken out of the field in order to deal with them face-to-face. A faceless enemy, he’d been taught, is the best enemy because he’s the easiest to hate, but the Russians put the lie to that lesson with a big, emphatic exclamation point. They were children, really, inasmuch as children haven’t learned how to act in civilized society, but who act out all the naked and embarrassing whims and desires of their ids without thought of either propriety or consequence.

“The accord is everything we could have hoped for,” Yukin said, sounding jollier and jollier. “Thanks to you, I’ve got everything I want, everything I need, and so will you, we’re in the home stretch, be sure of it, and I’ll tell you why. Do you remember the man you met here in December, Kamyrov?”

Indeed the General did, a hairy, slope-shouldered ape of a man with the manners to match. Brandt had a vivid memory of a dinner with the two men on a gelid, snowy night, Kamyrov expounding on methods of bringing antagonistic men to heel, his face gleaming with grease, unchewed bits of red meat lodged between his teeth. “The man you installed as president of Chechnya.”

“Homicidal maniac is more like it,” Yukin said. “I sent him in there because of his reputation as a strongman, because I needed to get control of the terrorist insurgency there. Since he’s been in power he’s ordered the murder of a dozen former military men, political challengers and their bodyguards—bodies are turning up all over the place: Budapest, Vienna, Dubai—it’s becoming embarrassing, the local police chiefs are understandably pissed off at having to scrape our offal off their streets, but Kamyrov is doing such a terrific job of neutering the insurgents I have no choice but to keep him there. But what the hell, it seems that these people have an appetite for destruction. Me, I just feed that appetite.

“I bring this up because eastern Ukraine has fallen into a severe economic depression, there have already been riots there as there have been in Moldavia and parts of Germany. This expanding civilian unrest is just the excuse we need to move our troops into northeastern Ukraine and keep them there, and after the accord with the United States is signed no nation will dare rise up against us. Thank you, General. As requested by President Carson’s press secretary, I have scheduled the formal signing for eight o’clock tomorrow night in order to get the maximum exposure on American television. When we sign the accord in front of a thousand news cameras your part in our little play will come to an end and your account in Liechtenstein will be filled to overflowing with gold bullion.

“Tell me, General Brandt, how does it feel to be a wealthy man?”

“Oriel Jovovich.”

The sound of Limonev’s raspy voice brought Batchuk back to the present, back to the eyeball-searing interior of Baskin-Robbins.

“A strange place to meet.”

“Let’s go.” Batchuk rose to his feet. “I have a job for you.” As usual, remembrance of things past had turned his mood sour; he felt no inclination toward small talk.

“You could have texted me the way you always do,” Limonev said as they rode the escalator to the underground garage. “I sent you the number the minute my new cell was activated.”

“This one’s different,” Batchuk said without looking at him. “It demands a different level of security.”

Limonev said nothing more until they had walked between the ranks of parked cars and were comfortably settled in the deputy prime minister’s luxurious Mercedes sedan.

“We’re going together?”

“It’s a two-man job.” Batchuk guided the Mercedes up the ramp and out onto the busy street. Twenty minutes of battling traffic at either a dead crawl or flying along at insane speeds brought them to the Ring Road, which Batchuk took around to the northeast, where he swung off the exit to the slums and Skol’niki Park. He pulled over at the park’s outskirts and they went into it, heading down a gentle slope to the lake known as Pulyaevskiye prudy. It was too cold and snowy for the homicidal gangs and addicts to be out; in fact, this particular area of the park was all but deserted. Snow continued drifting out of the hard, porcelain sky, swirled and blown sideways by gusts of damp wind that seemed to make the snowflakes expand, grow heavier, as if they had turned from frozen water into silver or glass tiles.

At the edge of the lake Batchuk glanced at his watch. “He’ll be coming soon. He has an appointment on the other side of the park.”

Limonev squinted through the snow. “Perhaps in this weather he won’t come.”

“He doesn’t give a shit about the weather.”

“I’ll need to be able to recognize the target.” Limonev glanced in every direction to ensure that there was no one close to them. “As usual a photo of him would be best.”

“Of course.” Batchuk slipped a snapshot out of the breast pocket of his black leather trench coat. “This is the man I want you to kill.”

Limonev looked down at the photo of Riet Medanovich Boronyov, his eyes closed, his face waxen and gray. There were flecks of blood on his lids and along one cheekbone.

Batchuk had already produced an MSP internally silenced, blunt-barreled pistol. Now he shoved it against Limonev’s chest and fired a round.

Limonev lost his balance and fell to his knees in front of Batchuk. One hand, shaking as if palsied, fumbled for his gun, but with an almost negligent wave Batchuk knocked it away.

“Unfortunately I gave you the same order fourteen months ago.” Batchuk took the assassin’s chin in his hand. “How many?” he said. “How many of the oligarchs are still alive?” He raised Limonev’s head and stared into his bloodshot eyes. “Kharkishvili, Malenko, Konarev, Glazkov, Andreyev—you claimed you had killed them all. Did you, or are they as alive as Boronyov was until a few hours ago?”

Limonev licked his lips, opened his mouth, and spat into Batchuk’s face. With a sound of disgust Batchuk pushed the face away and, raising the MSP, fired the second round point-blank between Limonev’s eyes.

“I never give the same order more than once,” he continued, as if his companion were still alive. Pocketing the MSP, he threw the other man’s gun into the lake, retrieved the photo from Limonev’s grasp, and then, bending over, dragged him into the water and left him there.

“If it’s true that Gourdjiev and I don’t always see eye to eye,” Kharkishvili said, “it’s also true that we also have nothing but respect for one another.”

“Tell me something,” Jack said. “Who is AURA’s leader, you, Magnussen, who?”

“There is no leader,” Kharkishvili said. “We reach agreement by consensus.”

“That sounds both unwieldy and impractical,” Annika said with an obvious measure of skepticism. “Just look at the United Nations, which eats up so much time and money without ever managing to get much of anything accomplished.”

Kharkishvili brushed his fingertips across his forehead, as a sign either of impatience or of annoyance. “We’re not the United Nations— and I assure you I’m not set on a road to character assassination. AURA would never have been possible without your dyadya. I and the other oligarchs would not be here, in all likelihood we wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him taking on the dangerous task of informing us in advance that the FSB was coming for us.”

His eyes seemed to have retreated into the depths of their sockets, where they lay hooded and troubled. “I know he found out about the government’s move against us from Batchuk, and I must tell you that I cannot for the life of me fathom how he is so successful at playing both sides of the fence.”

“That’s only a part of his genius,” Annika said with more than a trace of pride. “But it seems both odd and counterproductive for you to have a problem with a relationship that provides you with such vital information.”

“If you don’t mind my saying it,” Kharkishvili said, “it’s the other side of the relationship that I find disturbing.”

“I do mind you saying it,” Annika said. “You certainly had no problem when the information he got from Batchuk saved your life and the lives of the other AURA oligarchs. He would have been summarily executed had Batchuk found out.” Her ire aroused, she took a step toward Kharkishvili. “In addition, I wonder what AURA would have done if he hadn’t engaged Magnussen and his multinational task force of engineers and surveyors to test and report on the feasibility of mining the uranium strike?”

Jack’s eyes went out of focus as his brain began to give him another view of the puzzle that had been resolving itself piece by piece from the moment Edward had informed him of Lloyd Berns’s death on Capri when he should have been here in Ukraine. For the first time he understood that there was the possibility or probability of a double agent inside AURA, and if there was, he suspected who it might be, though something about the setup didn’t track, and he knew there was more information needed before he made any accusations that could backfire on him and Alli.

“Do you think he was convinced?” Miles Benson said, one hand on the quivering flank of the British Labrador.

Morgan Thomson blew on his chilled hands. “I know Dennis Paull. He loves Edward Carson, he’d throw himself under a bus before he’d let anything untoward happen to him.” He shifted the shotgun from one shoulder to the other. “Whether or not he believed us I really can’t say. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because as far as he’s concerned, by calling Carson he did the right thing.”

The two men crouched in a thatch blind they had built themselves at the eastern edge of the Alizarin Global property, waiting patiently for dawn and the flights of ducks that would come with it. For them duck hunting was more than a pleasant pastime, it was a way to blow off steam, to release themselves from the pressure-cooker of their professional lives. Other men might have availed themselves of the services of an upscale brothel, or even something more exotic, but these men had extensive experience with entrapment. How much graphic, even obscene, incriminating evidence they had gathered on their enemies over the years was a subject for statisticians.

“The General has outlived his usefulness.” Benson’s gaze was fixed on the tenuous band of pink that wavered on the eastern horizon.

“Not quite. He was the mark from the beginning,” Thomson said as he put his shotgun to his shoulder and aimed it. “Now he’ll become our scapegoat.” He pulled the trigger, the bird fell through the sky, and the Lab took off like a shot. “Our dead duck.”

“I’d feel a whole helluva lot better,” Benson said, squinting like Clint Eastwood, “if we had heard from our man in the field.”

“He had instructions to maintain communication silence when he was in place.”

“Yes, but I want these last obstacles to be taken care of.”

Thomson watched with pleasure as the Lab returned with the duck in its mouth. There was blood on the dog’s dark muzzle and its eyes were alight with the ecstasy of doing what it was born to do, what it had been trained to do.

As it set the duck gently down at Thomson’s feet, he said, “You worry too much.”

“I’m paid to worry too much,” Benson said sourly.

While Annika met with Magnussen and Kharkishvili, Jack and Alli walked through the manor house. It was some hours after the AURA session had broken up. Since his conversation with Edward Carson, Jack had been trying to fit all the disparate pieces together to form a coherent whole—he knew it was out there, he could feel it forming, coalescing, the problem was it kept changing shape and scope as it was appearing to him.

Over the years he’d discovered that his mind was often at its best when he walked or ate, mechanical functions that allowed his brain to digest and reorder the seemingly random bits of information it had picked up. There was a great deal of pressure on him both from Edward and AURA to find a way out of the escalating crisis, but he’d made Kharkishvili and Magnussen promise to leave him alone until he had need of them.

“Jack,” Alli said, “I’m hungry.”

He nodded. “Me, too. Let’s find the kitchen.”

Was it his imagination or had she grown up in the last couple of days, did her features seem more set, had the last vestiges of her girlhood been swept away by the intense events compressed into the short time they’d been together? It was as if she had unlocked an invisible door and, having stepped out into the light of day, or in this case, the ample lamplight of the manor house, was at last allowing herself to be seen, instead of cowering in the shadows of her misery and anguish.

Like everything else in the manor house the kitchen was vast. Bubbling with activity just before and at mealtimes, it was manned now by a sous-chef and a couple of servers who doubled as kitchen assistants. They were going over the recipes for tomorrow, and paid Jack and Alli scant attention, but when they approached the enormous double refrigerator the sous-chef broke off his discussion and came over to them, asking what they’d like to eat, there were plenty of leftovers from dinner. Neither of them wanted the rich food they had already rejected so they both settled on vegetable omelets.

There was a plain wooden table where, Jack suspected, the kitchen staff ate at odd times. He and Alli pulled out chairs and sat while the sous-chef broke eggs into a stainless steel bowl and began to whip them with a bit of water and heavy cream.

“How did you manage at the meeting?” Jack asked.

“That sleazeball Russian I was sitting next to, Andreyev, wanted me to come to his room tonight because I owed my life to Ivan Gurov,” Alli said.

Vasily Andreyev, with skin the color of putty or suet, and the black button eyes of an evil doll that, having been shunted aside for newer playthings, harbored the need for revenge.

“Don’t give me that look, I can take care of myself.” She tossed her head. “I tuned him out by thinking about what you said before, and I know you’re right. I’ve been so intent looking over my shoulder for death to steal up behind me, I was already half dead. When I was taken … that week might have been a month or a year, I didn’t know, I became unmoored from the present, or maybe from time itself. Nothing felt right, there were periods when time passed at a glacial pace and at other times it seemed as if hours were compressed into seconds.”

Jack put his elbows on the table, leaning forward, listening to every word she said. With the crackle of the frying eggs no one could overhear what she was saying.

“When I went to Milla Tamirova’s apartment, when I went into her dungeon, sat in the restraint chair, I began to realize that the feeling of being unmoored, of being outside time never left me during the months after you rescued me. Now I think it has, now I want to look ahead, to experience the new, and even the old, which will feel like new to me, just like I’ve been doing since we got here.”

The eggs arrived, sided by thick slices of the dense Ukranian brown bread. The sous-chef placed the plates in front of them, along with silverware, and went to pour tea out of a large, ornate samovar standing on a corner of the work counter.

Alli took up her fork and dug into the glistening eggs. “In the middle of hearing about what flawless skin I had,” she continued, “it dawned on me that the only time I’ve been happy—really happy— since Emma’s death is when I’ve been with you and Annika. The adrenaline rush of the present annihilated the past, at least for a short time, but it also began to resurrect my sense of time and place.”

Jack chewed on a slice of bread, which was intensely flavorful, slightly sour, and slathered with salted butter. “You feel more yourself now.”

“I don’t know about that, because I was only beginning to learn about myself when Emma died.” Alli looked thoughtful. “What I feel is different, as if I’ve just thrown all the sandbags off an air balloon and now I’m rising up toward….”

“Toward what?”

“I don’t know, exactly, but I think now that I have a kind of gift. When I listen to you talking to other people, or when I listen to them talking among themselves, if the conversation goes on long enough, I have a sense of what they mean, not what they’re saying necessarily, but what they’re trying to get across or, more often, what they’re trying to hide. And, it seems to me, that the longer the conversation goes on the clearer their real purpose becomes, or maybe I mean how important their lies are to them.” She cocked her head. “Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so.” Jack was wolfing down the omelet. “But give me an example, anyway.”

“All right, let’s see …” She screwed up her face in thought. “Okay, here’s one, that Russian sitting next to me—”

“Andreyev, the lecher.”

She laughed softly. “That’s right. Well, when I mentioned that we had met Dyadya Gourdjiev he started talking about him, and though there was nothing negative in what he said—quite the opposite, in fact—I began to sense that he was lying, that he didn’t like him at all, and when he mentioned Kharkishvili—and only in passing—I just knew that Andreyev had aligned himself with him.”

Jack was thinking of his recent conversation with Kharkishvili, who had denied any kind of rivalry between him and Gourdjiev. If Alli was right in her observations then Kharkishvili deliberately lied to him and the situation within AURA was more complex than he had been led to believe, which in all likelihood might lead to difficulties in his dealing with these people even if he did come up with a solution to the problem of how to defuse Yukin’s plan. He resolved to test her belief at the earliest opportunity.

At that moment Kharkishvili came into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a bottle of beer. He nodded at Jack in a stiff, almost formal manner.

“I need to ask this guy some questions,” Jack said, rising. “I’ll be right back.”

He was halfway to where Kharkishvili was standing, working an opener under the crenelated cap of the bottle, when the floor began to tilt under his feet. He took a step to correct it and felt as if his knees had turned to jelly. He began to pitch over, but before he hit the floor he heard Alli screaming. Then he plunged headlong into oblivion.

27

It wasn’t often that Dyadya Gourdjiev thought about Nikki, in fact there were entire months when she never entered his mind. She was, however, never far from his heart. The essence of her filled his mind now as he stepped off the plane into Simferopol North Airport. He’d made no secret of his plans, booking the seat and traveling under his own name. He thought this would make it easier for Oriel Batchuk to follow him; he didn’t want anything to impede his enemy’s progress.

Gourdjiev took his time even after he picked up his weekend bag from the luggage carousel and walked outside to the long-term lot and got into the car he always left there when he was on his way back to Kiev or, every once in a while, Moscow. It was an ancient Zil that wheezed every time he stepped on the brakes, but he loved it anyway. It smelled like home.

He could not get Nikki out of his mind, perhaps he didn’t want to because thoughts of her brought him back to Batchuk. He recalled with startling detail the moment Batchuk had first seen Nikki because that was the moment death had attached itself to him, and from that moment forward a shadow followed in Batchuk’s wake. Other people would experience it as intimidation, but Gourdjiev was not so easily fooled, because when he looked into Batchuk’s eyes all he saw was catastrophe and death.

From time to time he had mentioned Nikki to Batchuk—after all, there were occasions when it was impossible not to—but he had bent over backward to make certain the two never met. He made dates for Batchuk to come over to the house for dinner only when he knew that Nikki would be busy with her girlfriends or, latterly, with Alexsei Mandanovich Dementiev, to whom he had introduced Nikki at a gala at the State Opera House. He had no notion as to whether they would take to one another, but he was immensely relieved when they did, and it was only when Alexsei asked for her hand in marriage that Gourdjiev contemplated allowing Batchuk to catch a glimpse of her.

In fact he had orchestrated their meeting so that Batchuk would see Nikki and Alexsei together, see how much in love they were, and no matter what he thought of Nikki would understand that that path was closed to him forever.

Now, driving away from the airport in the Crimea, Gourdjiev could scarcely believe the lengths to which he had gone to keep Nikki and Batchuk from meeting. Had it been a dream, a premonition, or simply intuition, he could no longer remember. But it seemed to him that he had awoken in the middle of the night with a vision of Nikki and Batchuk together, Nikki weeping bitterly, inconsolably, and it was as if he had been afforded a glimpse of a tragic future so that he could ensure that it would never happen. He knew Batchuk’s taste in women, knew just what he liked most to look at and to feel, and there was no doubt in his mind that Nikki fell right into that category. What she might have felt about him he couldn’t say, but over and over again he had seen Batchuk pursue what he wanted, persistent, implacable until he got it. It might be an exaggeration but Gourdjiev had come to believe that there was scarcely a woman Batchuk wanted who would not eventually accede to him. Long experience had taught him that the only way to view Batchuk was through a cynic’s eyes because Batchuk was at his most dangerous, his most disingenuous when it appeared that he was being sincere.

He swung onto the highway without it fully registering. His mind was back at that meeting when he’d seen the dreadful expression on Batchuk’s face as he watched Alexsei swing Nikki around outside the mall jewelry store. Good Christ, that was very nearly the worst moment of my life, Gourdjiev thought. He wished to whatever god existed that it had been, everything might have ended differently.

Watching Nikki, Batchuk had the look of an angel, as if an ethereal glow were illuminating him from the inside. Gourdjiev knew that meant trouble on whatever level, but he pushed the thought aside as people will terrifying nightmares or worst possible outcomes because the human brain won’t allow it. It was like contemplating your own death—the incomprehensible end of all things known and comforting—the level of fear was simply too great to maintain. Some benign circuit breaker in the brain turned off that possibility, or shoved it so far back into the realm of unreality or fable that it faded from consciousness. This is precisely what happened to Gourdjiev when he saw Nikki’s image fill Batchuk’s eyes to overflowing. Some part of his brain switched off, saying: No, no, no, let’s get on with the real, the present, the pressing now, and for the next twenty minutes the two men talked about their plans as if nothing untoward had happened.

And yet it had, Gourdjiev thought, as he accelerated toward the coastline and, beyond, the violent and turbid Black Sea. The malevolent seed had been sown despite his best efforts, and immediately began to germinate, cracking open and springing to life in the black soil of Batchuk’s mind.

Gourdjiev neared the coast with its high, dark, bruised-looking clouds, trembling with thunder and rain. He did not have to glance in the rearview mirror to know that he was being followed, he had felt it the moment he had arrived at the airport, the sense that someone was watching his every move. There was a vehicle behind him, of this he was certain, he was being followed, either by Batchuk or by someone Batchuk owned.

One glance in the mirror would tell him. He knew Batchuk so intimately that he could pick out his outline even through the rain-spattered windshield. And yet he kept his gaze on the road ahead as it wound through the landward incline of the brooding cliff face. The truth was he preferred not to look, preferred to be unsure of the identity of his pursuer, of one thing at least, because everything else was laid out before him as if it had already occurred, as if he were locked into a trajectory that, no matter how he tried to twist away or fight against it, would lead him to some final place filled with tragedy.

Fifteen minutes after Dennis Paull drove out of the Alizarin Global compound with Claire beside him and Aaron heavy-lidded and drowsing in the backseat, he found a spot by the side of the road where, this late at night or early in the morning, he was certain he could not be observed. He got out of the car, went around, and opened the trunk. He fired up the laptop and within minutes found that it had been hacked. Because of the safeguards he had installed the hacker’s electronic fingerprints were all over the file system; Paull knew that he had made a complete copy of the information on the hard drive.

That was fine by Paull, he’d expected no less. Despite what he’d told the president he had used insecure servers to gather information. He needed stone-cold proof as to the identity of the man in Carson’s inner circle who was passing on classified information to Benson and Thomson, and if he didn’t have the time to do it himself he was determined to let the culprit do it for him. When he had exited the Residence Inn that morning he had known that sooner rather than later someone would be coming for him. That’s why he’d planted this dummy laptop in his trunk days ago. His real laptop, the one with all the hacked information, was stowed in a secret compartment below the spare wheel well that he opened now by the light of the small, recessed bulb on the inside of the trunk lid.

He turned it on, and plugged in a 3G Wi-Fi card. Almost at once his private, shielded network was activated. He had a good signal, even out here. He inputted information and set up the parameters of the various Internet searches he wanted the automated software to perform, then closed the trunk and got back behind the wheel.

“Tomorrow I promise we’ll be off to do some celebrating.” He was looking at sleepy Aaron, but he knew Claire understood he meant it for both of them. “Would you like that, kiddo?” He used to call Claire kiddo when she was Aaron’s age.

“I sure would, Grandpa.” His grandson looked around and yawned. “Where are we gonna celebrate?”

Paull grinned at Aaron’s image in the rearview mirror as he put the car in gear. “It’s a surprise.”

“Before I saw you and Aaron this afternoon,” Dennis Paull said, “I thought it was all slipping away from me, everything I had ever wanted out of life, that even before I died there would be nothing left, nothing to live for. Everyone had left me prematurely: your mother, you, and Aaron, who I’d never seen before today.”

The three of them were in the spacious room at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Maryland Avenue where he was putting Claire and Aaron up for as long as they wanted to stay after the funeral. His first instinct had been to invite them back to the house, but on second thought he decided it was presumptuous. The house where he and Louise—mostly Louise—had raised Claire was crammed with too many memories, good and bad, for both of them. Better, he felt, to take it slow.

“But you had your work,” Claire said without rancor, as she closed the door to the bedroom where she had put Aaron to bed, “and it seemed to us—Mom and me—that was all you cared about or needed.”

Paull felt as if he had been set on fire by his own guilt. “Yes, I can see how I must have given that impression so many times.” He took her hand. “I’m so very sorry, Claire.”

“Don’t be sorry, Grandpa.” Aaron stood in the doorway, speaking with the meticulous seriousness only a seven-year-old could display. He was wearing Buzz Lightyear pajamas. “Mom and I will take care of you.”

This elicited a burst of laughter from Claire. “Oh, Aaron.” She went over and kissed him on the cheek. “Now go on back to bed, honey.”

Paull bit his tongue so that he wouldn’t say what he was thinking: No, I’ll take care of you and your mother, because he knew Claire would hate that. He had to get used to her being grown up, an adult who could take care of herself.

“We’ll make the arrangements for your mother’s funeral tomorrow and do the service early,” he said. “I promised Aaron a celebration.”

“You’ve changed.” Claire could not keep a touch of wonder out of her voice.

“Surprised?”

“Frankly, yes, Dad. I didn’t think you could, or rather that you might want to.” She sat in a plush, upholstered chair. “What happened?”

“I got older and wiser.” He perched on the corner of the coffee table as if to reassure her that this was her room, her space. “That may sound facile or a cliché, but in my case it’s true. I guess I had to get to be a certain age to understand what I was missing, to understand what I’d done wrong, but until today I didn’t know what to do about it.”

“You mean the president doesn’t need you twenty-four-seven?”

“No, he’s got Jack McClure for that.” Paull took a quick glance at the bedroom door, which was still slightly ajar. “Besides, even if he did I’m with my family now.”

This was absolutely true as far as it went; however, and most unfortunately, at the moment catching up with Claire and his grandson weren’t the only things on his mind.

“I think it’s time for you to get some sleep.”

“I’m not tired.”

“All right,” he said, “then tell me what your life has been like these last seven years.”

She sighed and put her head back against the cushion. “We’re living in Baltimore, which I don’t particularly like.”

“Then why are you there?” Paull asked.

“I have a good job—great, really—that pays really well. I create greeting cards that are sold over the Internet.”

“Surely you can do that anywhere,” Paull said. “You could move back here.”

The instant the words were out of his mouth he regretted it. Claire’s face clouded over and her gaze went to the closed drapes through which, at any moment, the first light of dawn would seep. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea, Dad.”

“Sure, stupid of me. You and Aaron have your own lives.”

“But we don’t have much family, do we?”

Both father and daughter looked at the little miracle of Aaron who, standing in the doorway, his pajamas emblazoned with the phrase TO INFINITY AND BEYOND! was apparently far too excited by the events of the long day to sleep or even to lie in bed. And now Paull wondered whether Claire’s self-imposed exile to a city she did not like was punishment not only for him, but for herself.

He thought she was about to respond, he wanted her to respond, but at that moment his cell phone vibrated. He wanted to ignore it, did his best to ignore it, in fact, but a moment after it stopped, the vibration returned, this time in a different pattern, and he knew that he had no choice. Excusing himself he padded across the carpet to the bathroom, but even before he got there he had his phone out and was reading the text message.

It was one of three that he had prewritten in the event of new information being picked up by any one of the three programs he was running on his laptop. This one was from the proprietary search engine he had a part in developing. Unlike others available to the general public, this one had the ability to dig through corporate filings and other ephemera to come up with answers to questions such as the one Paull had given it this evening: Who owns Alizarin Group?

It seemed the program had the devil’s own time plowing through a mountain of labyrinthine document filings, shell companies that led nowhere, phantom bank accounts, and the like. Nevertheless, it persevered, as he had designed it to do, but now he knew the privately held company was owned by seven partners. He had no idea what to make of that; he knew of only one man who could.

Oriel Batchuk, driving along an unfamiliar highway in the Crimea, would have been shocked if Gourdjiev wasn’t aware that he was being followed. He did not appear to care, which did shock Batchuk. He had no idea what his old friend and foe was up to, just as he couldn’t fathom what had motivated Gourdjiev to shoot Boronyov, a man whom Limonev had assured him was already dead. Gourdjiev had told Batchuk’s men that finding the fugitive oligarch was why Annika was in Ukraine, but Batchuk hadn’t believed that tale for a moment. Gourdjiev had a plan, that much was certain—not knowing what it was worried him.

Gourdjiev, always so mysterious, so circumspect, was nothing of the sort now. It was when people started acting out of character that the real problems started, Batchuk knew from cold, hard experience, the first instance of which appeared with Nikki. Through his twenty-minute talk with Gourdjiev he had become increasingly enraged first that Gourdjiev had deliberately blocked any possible meeting with her, and second that when it did happen, he made certain to push her impending wedding in his face. The cruelty of Gourdjiev’s actions was not lost on him, and the reverberations from that affront had never ceased.

That day Gourdjiev had acted out of character, he had indicated through deeds rather than words that Nikki was off-limits, that she was better than Batchuk and so deserved better than him, a man named Alexsei Dementiev.

Ahead of him the filthy Zil Gourdjiev was driving turned off the highway onto a secondary road that appeared to lead to the coast. Batchuk made certain that he never lost sight of the car; he was on the lookout for a quick switch, where a second car and driver waiting by the side of the road would allow the drivers to switch vehicles, thus throwing off any pursuit, but no such vehicle was in evidence.

Batchuk returned to his contemplation of the past. He was powerful enough even at that time to start an investigation into Dementiev’s life and, if necessary, manufacture evidence that would disgrace him or put him behind bars. But Batchuk quickly determined that neither of those outcomes would do him any good because Gourdjiev would know what he had done and would not only come after him but also put Nikki out of his reach forever. He would not have that. In his confused state he didn’t know what he felt for Nikki beyond a potent erotic attraction, but he did know that getting to her, fucking her until she couldn’t walk, was all he wanted, all he could think of now. How strong a component revenge was even he couldn’t say.

He could see the Black Sea through a sudden squall of rain, ominous clouds hanging low on the horizon. Not for the first time he considered the possibility that Gourdjiev was leading him into a trap, that either the shooting of Boronyov or Gourdjiev’s loaded remark to his men was the bait. This thought caused him to recall their most recent confrontation, when he had stepped out of the shadows of Gourdjiev’s building, confident that he had the upper hand, when their escalating emotions had driven him to lay down his ultimatum: “I came to warn you, or more accurately, to give you the opportunity to warn Annika. I’m coming for her—me, myself, not someone I’ve hired or ordered to do apiece of work. This I do personally, with my own hands.”

And now, for the first time, it occurred to him that the trap might have already been sprung, that possibly it had clamped him in its teeth the moment he had gone to tell Gourdjiev that his—what had he called it?—his burnt offering would not save Annika this time. What if, he asked himself now, that entire heated conversation had been choreographed by Gourdjiev? He was more than capable of such a Machiavellian stratagem.

It was a stratagem that he had used himself with Nikki and Alexsei Dementiev years ago, in another, simpler world, driven only by emotion, pure or impure. He had been invited to the wedding and he had gone, taking one of his many women, he could no longer remember which one. He kept away from the couple of honor. Not surprisingly Gourdjiev’s eyes were upon him the entire night, but even if he hadn’t been under scrutiny, he had resolved to keep his distance as a first step in his stratagem. Patience was his ally when it came to Nikki, he knew this in his bones, though his flesh felt like it was on fire every time he caught sight of her. And when she danced, in the center of the ballroom floor, his heart nearly stopped.

In the weeks that followed he did nothing at all but go about the business of following in Yukin’s shadow and, like his mentor, amassing more and more power as he rose in prominence and influence. It was just over two months from the wedding date that he contrived to cross paths with Alexsei Dementiev in a perfectly natural way so as not to arouse Gourdjiev’s suspicions. It was hardly difficult; Dementiev worked as a state prosecutor, his whereabouts known and documented by any number of ministries with which Batchuk had powerful contacts. Batchuk made it vital that Dementiev depose him for an important case he was prosecuting for Yukin. Afterward, they went to lunch. Having committed to memory every fact aggregated in Dementiev’s government file, Batchuk invited him to play tennis, a sport the young man adored, at the indoor facility owned and operated by his club. Dementiev wasted no time in accepting, and in this way, among others cleverly devised by Batchuk, the two men became friends. And so it came about that Alexsei Dementiev himself introduced Batchuk to Nikki when he brought him home for dinner, the first of many nights that the three of them—and sometimes four because Batchuk was careful to bring a date now and again—spent together, eating, talking, and drinking the excellent vodka Batchuk was sure to bring.

Early on in his relationship with Dementiev, when they had gone out drinking after a tennis match, Batchuk had determined that the prosecutor did not have the capacity for alcohol he himself did. One night, eight months later, when the three of them were alone, they drank so much that near midnight Dementiev passed out, obliging Batchuk to help Nikki carry him to bed, after which the two of them returned to the living room, where a welter of dirty plates and servers awaited them. Batchuk obligingly helped her clean up. Space in the kitchen was at a premium, and more than once their bodies brushed against each other.

Nikki was not the kind of woman to fuck a friend while her husband lay insensate in the next room so Batchuk didn’t try, though he had to summon up all his willpower not to take her forcibly and relieve the demonic itch that afflicted him like an allergy or a response to poison. When it came to Nikki’s effect on him poison was not too extreme a word. When he was in her presence—and, eventually, even when he wasn’t—he felt ill, disoriented, dizzy as he lost track of who and where he was. It was only when he was alone with her, so drunk he could taste, or thought he tasted, his heart in his mouth, that he was comfortably numb. But then the gray morning would come and his mind would be beset by the thought of what Alexsei Dementiev had, what he didn’t have, and it was all he could do not to tear his hair out.

Patience, he counseled the raging part of him. Patience.

And then one day his patience was rewarded.

Batchuk’s mind snapped back into focus as he saw Gourdjiev’s Zil turn off the secondary road, down a gravel driveway that led to a high wall into which was set an electronic gate that opened for the car, then immediately closed behind it.

Beyond the wall, set on a rocky promontory, he spied a large and imposing manor house that he knew he must penetrate. He pulled over his car, doused the lights, and began to formulate a plan.

28

Jack, bent over a toilet, was retching, his eyes watering, his guts still spasming.

“It’s all right,” he heard a voice say from behind him, “it’s all out of his system.”

A pair of strong hands pulled him upright, led him over to the sink where he washed out his mouth and put his head under the cold, gushing water. Then he was being dried off with a towel. He heard the toilet flush and had a sense that that sound had been going on for some time. There was a terrible taste in his mouth, part supersweet, part salty, that made him shudder. He heard the toilet seat being lowered and then he was seated on it, the damp towel over his face, another one, rolled and soothingly cool, at the back of his neck.

“Tell them he’s all right,” the voice said. “I’ll bring him out in a minute, just be patient.”

He felt ill and exhausted, as if he’d just returned from a fifteen-round boxing match where his midsection had been systematically pummeled by Lennox Lewis. Pulling the towel off his face he looked up and saw Kharkishvili grinning down at him. Kharkishvili handed him a glass of water.

“Drink, my friend. After puking up your guts for twenty minutes, you’re seriously dehydrated.”

Jack drank the water, feeling better with each swallow; however, his head thundered and his throat ached. He handed back the glass, which Kharkishvili refilled from a nearly full pitcher.

“What happened?” His voice was a thin, ugly rasp, as if his throat and vocal cords had been seared.

“Poison,” Kharkishvili said. “You were poisoned.” He refilled the glass, handed it back. “Good thing I was in the kitchen when it happened, I’ve had some experience with poisons.” He chucked darkly. “You know, in my line of work—which, I assure you, the less you know about the better for both of us—you need to know many ways to skin a cat.” He waved a sausagelike hand. “The important thing is I got you to swallow water with sugar and salt, which caused you to expel everything in your system.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You wouldn’t, you were raving but not, fortunately, unconscious.” Kharkishvili nodded. “Now drink up and return fully to the land of the living.”

A sudden fear pierced the slowly dissipating fog in his mind. “Alli was eating the same food I was, is she all right?”

“Perfectly. She’s outside, everyone was evacuated while we interrogated the kitchen staff. Please keep drinking.” Kharkishvili refilled his glass. “It wasn’t the food that was tainted, it was your fork.”

“How?”

“Arsenic, an old but reliable methodology.”

“Who, the sous-chef?”

Kharkishvili shook his head. “One of the assistants, we have him in custody.”

Jack drained his glass; he was feeling better with every moment that passed. “How long ago was he hired?”

“I inquired of Magnussen; he was hired six days ago.”

Kharkishvili was proving to be a good man. Jack’s brain, which had felt as if it had been encased in jelly, was functioning again, enough, at least, for him to remember his conversation with the president, who had assured him that, the sanction canceled, no more government agents were in the field.

“I want to speak with him,” he said. He rose, took two tottering steps, and sat back down.

Kharkishvili frowned, making him look something like the ogre in the story of Jack and the beanstalk. “In your condition I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Please have Ivan Gurov come in, then bring the poisoner here,” Jack said, a certain snap returning to his voice. “We don’t have time to worry about my condition.”

Kharkishvili nodded and left.

When, in due course, Gurov poked his head in the doorway and asked how Jack was feeling, Jack said, “Ivan, the assassin who followed us here, the one you blew off the road, do you know anything about him?”

“I checked with Passport Control at Simferopol North. His name was Ferry Lovejoy.”

“A government-assigned legend.”

“Ah, yes.” Gurov nodded. “A false name to go with the false papers the American government gives its agents overseas. But, no, I checked with FSB in Moscow. Neither Mr. Ferry Lovejoy nor anyone matching the surveillance photo I took of him is in their database.”

Jack’s mind was working at such speeds that he felt momentarily dizzy. “It’s now more imperative than ever that I speak with my would-be murderer.”

“Mr. Kharkishvili has him outside.”

“Good. But first, please have Alli come in, would you.”

While Kharkishvili went to fetch Alli, Jack put a hand on the porcelain sink and levered himself up. For a moment he stood swaying slightly. He spent his time slowing his breathing in order to get his heart rate back to a normal level. All the while his mind was running full tilt. He now had almost all the pieces to the puzzle, though there were still important gaps to fill in. He hoped he could do that before the deadline of tomorrow night, or was it already tomorrow? He glanced at his watch, but his fall had shattered the crystal face and it had stopped working.

He pulled out his cell phone and that was when he saw that there was one voice mail message. It had been flagged URGENT.

Alli embraced him. “Are you all right?” She had arrived before he could pick up the message.

“I’m fine.”

“Then what are you still doing in the bathroom?”

He smiled. “It makes an excellent interrogation cell.” He pulled her closer to him. “Now, listen, in a moment Kharkishvili is going to bring in the man who tried to poison me and I’m going to talk to him. You’ll watch him, listen to him, assuming he says much of anything, which is doubtful. That shouldn’t matter to you, you’ll evaluate his facial and body movements, which will tell me a lot. Okay? Think you’re up to it?”

“Of course I’m up to it.” Her eyes were large and liquid. “I’m just … I can’t believe you’ll trust me with this.”

Jack brushed back the fringe of hair from her forehead. “It’s not my trust you can’t believe, Alli, it’s your trust in yourself.”

A moment later Kharkishvili appeared with a slight, dark-haired young man who Jack recognized as one of the kitchen assistants.

“This is the sonuvabitch,” Kharkishvili said, manhandling him through the doorway. “His name is Vlad, so he says.” He glared at Vlad. “He’s Ukrainian, that much is for certain, the accent is unmistakable.”

“Sit down.”

When Vlad made no move, Kharkishvili pushed him roughly down onto the closed toilet seat.

“You can do whatever you want to me, I’m not going to talk,” the young man said.

Jack ignored him. “Vlad, I’m going to tell you a story. This happened a long time ago, in seventeenth-century Italy. A Neapolitan woman named Toffana marketed a cosmetic, Acqua Toffana. It was a face paint that, as was the custom of the time, made women’s faces very pale, almost white. This Acqua Toffana proved astoundingly successful among the married women of the area, who were counseled by Toffana herself to make sure their husbands kissed them often on both cheeks while they were wearing the makeup. After six hundred of these unfortunate men died, turning their wives into rich widows, the authorities finally discovered that the main ingredient of Acqua Toffana was arsenic. It was the arsenic that gave it its white color.”

He shrugged. “But being an expert poisoner I suppose you know the history of arsenic. However, not expert enough, it seems, because I’m still here.”

Slouched on his uncomfortable plastic seat, Vlad looked at him, trying to seem bored. As befitted his profession he had a thoroughly unremarkable face, except for his eyes, which, when Jack looked closely, were yellowish and slippery as oil. They stared out at the world with what seemed a false stoicism, as if they were lying in wait for the enemy to appear.

“Who do you work for?” Jack said. He waited for an answer, but Vlad said nothing. His surface was as bland, as blank as the surface of polished marble, calm and curiously unconcerned by his incarceration.

“I know it’s not the United States government, Vlad, so do you work for the FSB?” Jack paused again to allow Alli to make her assessment. “Perhaps it’s the Ukrainian Security Service who employs you.”

Another pause; the silence from Vlad was deafening.

He leaned in suddenly, careful not to block Alli’s view. “I know you and Ferry Lovejoy work for the same firm.” He knew no such thing, but he wanted to observe, and wanted Alli to observe, Vlad’s reaction.

Vlad’s brow furrowed convincingly. “Ferry …? I’m not familiar with that name.”

Jack smiled, using his teeth. “You work for Alizarin Global, so did Lovejoy, but he’s dead now. Ivan Gurov blew him off the road to this manor house, didn’t he?”

Kharkishvili grinned wolfishly. “Absolutely.”

“Is that supposed to frighten me, because—”

“Okay, we’ll dispense with the formalities,” Jack said, standing up. “I have neither the time nor the inclination to interrogate you further, so I’m going to hand you over to the Russians, Vlad. Let them deal with you. Believe me, whatever information you have they’ll squeeze out of you.”

Jack made a motion with his head and Kharkishvili hauled Vlad to his feet.

A look of contempt hardened Vlad’s face. “You won’t hand me over to the Russians, you won’t be allowed to do it.”

“Allowed?” Jack said, pouncing on the word. “By whom? Who do you work for, who inside AURA?”

“It’s Andreyev, isn’t it?” Alli had stepped up to stand beside Jack. “You’re taking orders from Vasily Andreyev.”

Vlad spat onto the floor. “Vasily Andreyev is an old fool.”

Kharkishvili cuffed him hard in the back of the head.

“Manners,” Jack said, but Vlad had already revealed as much as he was going to. “Take him away,” he said to Kharkishvili.

When he and Alli were alone, he said, “Tell me what you observed.”

Alli considered. In that moment Jack saw no trace of the overprotected, narcissistic young woman who had been abducted at the end of last year.

“I’d say he definitely works for a private company.”

“What seemed to frighten him, anything?” Jack asked.

Alli’s face tensed in concentration. “One thing: being turned over to the Russians.”

Jack nodded. “That was my impression also, which tells me that the company he’s working for isn’t American, or at least not primarily American.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “Okay, what else?”

“I got the feeling that he doesn’t know Ferry Lovejoy, whoever he is.”

“The assassin who Ivan Gurov killed.” Jack had come to the same conclusion.

Also, who or what was going to stop Jack from handing Vlad over to the Russians?

“And what’s the deal with this mysterious company that sent them?”

“I’m not sure,” Jack said, “but I intend to find out.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev parked his comfortably rumpled Zil outside the front door of the manor house just as the first pallid streaks of dawn light cracked open the black-and-blue dome of night. Getting out of the car he shivered in the damp chill air and steeled himself for what was to come.

Magnussen, Glazkov, and Malenko had emerged to welcome him, but not, predictably, Kharkishvili. Though clearly startled by his unplanned visit they nevertheless were warm in their greetings.

As he walked into the entry way he felt himself transported back to the past, back to when he became aware that Oriel Batchuk was spending an inordinate amount of time at Nikki’s house. That, in fact, was why he had come over unannounced that night, he had hoped to surprise Batchuk and, in front of Nikki, tell him in no uncertain terms to stay away from her and from Alexsei. Batchuk had easily seduced Alexsei with his power, privilege, and his ability to obtain for him the plum cases that had advanced his career, and would continue to do so. By virtue of Batchuk’s magnanimous helping hand the couple had moved out of Alexsei’s cramped one-bedroom into a spacious, light-filled two-and-a-half-bedroom in a luxurious building within walking distance of Red Square. Gourdjiev had also taken note, not without some alarm, that Alexsei had begun wearing made-to-measure British designer suits and Nikki was dressing in the latest Western fashions.

But that night Batchuk was nowhere to be found, instead he walked in on a screaming fight between Alexsei and Nikki. At first no one answered the door, but when he became insistent Nikki opened the door a crack.

He was stunned to see her looking disheveled, her face pale, her carnelian eyes fever-bright. There was a snarl on her lips that she was too upset to hide or modify as she stared out at him. She hadn’t wanted to let him in, had begun to close the door on him when he’d planted his foot on the lintel. Then he’d leaned into the door and pushed it open, stepping inside.

At once Alexsei rushed out of the bedroom where, it seemed, their argument had escalated into a full-scale battle of harsh words, hurled invective, insults, and accusations.

“It’s him, isn’t it!” Alexsei shouted. “How dare you let him in?” When he saw that it was Gourdjiev standing in the entryway, he turned away, but he was hardly mollified. “Now you call your father to take your side.”

“I didn’t call anyone, Alexsei.”

“Liar! You call Oriel all the time!” he shouted as he whirled around.

“He calls me,” she said, “it’s not the same thing.”

“It is if you accept the call.” Alexsei’s lips were drawn back from his teeth.

“You’re making something out of nothing,” Nikki said.

“Do you deny you see him during the day?” he snarled. “Go on, deny it, it would be just like you. Deny it and I’ll have my proof of what sort of woman you are, because I’ve seen you two.”

“You’ve been spying on me?”

“I saw the two of you having lunch, bent over the table together, your foreheads were practically touching, I saw it and there were other prosecutors there as well.”

“Alexsei, think for a minute, if I were having an affair with Oriel would either of us be stupid enough to meet in public, let alone at a restaurant frequented by your colleagues?”

“I know him, he wants to throw the affair in my face, he’s out to humiliate me, he wants everyone to know that he’s taken you away from me.”

“You speak of me as if I were a horse or a sack of wheat.”

That was when Gourdjiev turned on his heel and left. No good would come from him inserting himself between them, especially when emotions were running so high. It was only when he emerged from the building and saw the spotlit domes of the Kremlin that he knew there was only one place for him to go.

“Is everything all right?” Magnussen said now, wrenching Gourdjiev back to the present. They stood in the villa’s entryway. “We didn’t expect you.”

“Yes, I know,” Gourdjiev said, “but there was no place else to go.”

Batchuk was inside the perimeter of the manor house before he saw a guard. The brick wall surrounding the property was high but not particularly difficult to scale or to get over. The real difficulty was in keeping his silhouette from being seen in the gloaming of dawn. There were no trees on the cliff top, no foliage to mask his movements, but luck was with him, a light fog was billowing in off the water in ghostly waves.

Dropping down off the top of the wall he heard faraway barking and he crouched down, still as a rock. If there were dogs on the property, particularly hunting dogs, they would present a problem. With the onshore wind they would already have picked up his scent, or would at any moment. Close to the front of the house he saw the Zil. As he watched, a guard emerged from the house and drove the Zil around to where a number of other cars were parked.

As soon as the guard was back inside Batchuk ran as fast as he could, zigzagging, still bent over, heading for the left side of the manor house. He reached it without incident, but now he heard a chorus of barks, close enough for him to identify them as belonging to Russian wolfhounds. Wolfhounds were not in themselves dangerous, they liked people too much, but they would certainly sound the alarm for those inside the house. Any moment now other guards would come pouring out, following the dogs who, he was now certain, had picked up his scent.

He knew the feeling, he’d had a hound coming after him the night Nikki told him that she couldn’t see him anymore, that Alexsei had found out about them and was causing a terrible row. She told him unequivocally to stay away when he said he was coming to make sure she would be safe.

“I don’t need you to feel safe,” she had told him. “I don’t need you at all.”

“You do need me,” he had replied like an idiot, as if he were seventeen, “I know you do, Nikki, no matter what you say you can’t hide it from me.”

“You are so deluded,” she shot back, “I was a fool, weak and sad, and you caught me in that moment, you took advantage of me and climbed all over me.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said, “you loved every minute of it, it was you who climbed all over me, if memory serves, you couldn’t get enough.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she shrieked, clearly terrified.

“I did what you wanted me to do, nothing more.”

“Liar! It was what you wanted.”

“You can’t fight it, Nikki, I don’t understand why you even try.”

“Idiot, because I’m married.”

“You’ll divorce him, I’ll make it easy for you.”

All at once she sounded desperate. “I pledged my heart, my life to Alexsei, don’t you get it? But, no, I don’t suppose you do, why would you? You have no soul, no humanity, you’re heartless, pitiless, you want what you want, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

“Then why did you give in to me? Why did you scream over and over in ecstasy?” He barely got out the last word when she hung up on him.

An hour later Gourdjiev came for him, baying at his door, and he had had no choice but to let him in, no choice because Gourdjiev knew he was home, and if he’d ignored the repeated knocking he’d become a prisoner in his own apartment. He had plenty of power, it was true, but so did Gourdjiev; he had no wish for an all-out war that would bring an end to both their political careers, he had too much on the line to take that risk. And so he opened the door, accepted his medicine, the righteous indignation, the affronted anger, the howl of the animal that feels its offspring threatened.

Visibly chastened, he did not argue, he acquiesced. Whatever Gourdjiev wanted of him he did without argument or protest, let him win this battle, let the war wait in abeyance, all the players frozen in place, until the moment when he himself dictated that the next act would begin.

But the dogs would not wait, the wolfhounds came tearing through the carefully manicured foliage—sculpted boxwood and cotoneaster, as close-clipped as a general’s hair—to where Batchuk had crouched under the eaves at the back of the house, but he was no longer there, and they ran in dizzying circles, barking and yelping, their nostrils full of his scent, but with nowhere to go.

“That badger again,” one of the guards said, after he and his companion had had a thorough look around, “or maybe this time an opossum.”

Jack was just finishing up his call with Dennis Paull, having at last found the time to answer his urgent voice mail, when he caught sight of Annika. She was in the entryway, talking with Dyadya Gourdjiev, of all people, obviously just arrived, as he stood in his water-beaded overcoat. At this hour, as misty dawn light crept slowly up to the manor house, everyone should have been sleeping, they should have been in bed hours ago, sleeping through the small hours of the morning, when the country was quiet and indolent, dreaming of yesterday or the day after tomorrow, when sorrow’s heartbeat was stilled at last, overcome by hope. But Vlad’s attempt on Jack’s life had turned the world within the manor house upside down; at Kharkishvili’s urging several of the guards had hustled the inhabitants outside while Ivan Gurov and his crew interrogated the kitchen crew, discovered Vlad’s treachery, and slowly, feeling shaken, chilled, and desolate, everyone had filtered back inside, where they puddled in the library, knocking back glasses of slivovitz and watching each other with ambushed eyes.

Jack told Paull his location and said, “Now have my would-be NSA assassins turn their skills to good use,” before he disconnected.

Dyadya Gourdjiev had seen Jack, and Annika turned and ran toward him, flung her arms around him, and held him tight.

“I was so frightened for you,” she whispered in his ear. “I was terrified they had succeeded.”

“They?” he said as he held her at arm’s length. “Who do you mean?”

“The Americans, of course.” Her carnelian eyes studied him with complete candor. “The Izmaylovskaya’s reach doesn’t extend to the Crimea. At least you’re safe from them, if not from your own despicable people.”

She had put him in danger the moment she had lured him into the alley behind the nightclub in Moscow, but there had been no real danger from Izmaylovskaya revenge, she was with him, and the supposed dead Ivan Gurov, loyal, brave, and more clever than he appeared, had been watching over both of them. Then the game had unexpectedly opened up, as General Brandt sent NSA agents after them, and now, after those agents had been withdrawn from the field, another—Vlad the Poisoner—had been dispatched by Alizarin Global. For what reason? Why did Alizarin want to kill him? Time to find out.

“Annika, listen, I need to speak with Vasily Andreyev, but I want you and Dyadya Gourdjiev with me as witnesses. I know Gourdjiev just arrived and he must be tired, but can you see if you can convince him to do that now?”

“All right.” She nodded and went back to the entryway, where Gourdjiev was immersed in what appeared to be a heated discussion or argument with Kharkishvili, who had stopped on his way out.

She touched his arm and, though reluctant to cut short the discussion or argument, he could not refuse her. She spoke briefly in his ear and he glanced at Jack, who stood ready and waiting. Then he nodded, said something curt to Kharkishvili that, to Jack, looked something like, “Don’t forget what I’ve told you, we’ll continue this later.” Kharkishvili stalked out as Annika and Dyadya Gourdjiev approached him.

Having taken a stroll around the main level with Alli, his brain had automatically memorized the floor plan as a three-dimensional space. He therefore knew that the best place for privacy was the old-fashioned drawing room. It had mullioned leaded-glass windows out to the west side of the house and only one entrance, double doors that opened onto the short corridor that ended with the kitchen, pantry, and back door.

Jack found Andreyev, his hair disheveled, his black button eyes furtively glancing at Alli every chance he got. A glass of slivovitz in one hand and a cigar in the other, he stood against the mantel; either he or it required propping up. The other oligarchs were now nowhere to be seen, Andreyev said that Magnussen had suggested they go for a walk to clear their heads before breakfast, but he hadn’t felt up to it. So that’s where Kharkishvili was off to. Two guards and, of course, the three Russian wolfhounds had accompanied them. By Jack’s count that left Alli and two guards remaining on the property. Gurov was gone, transporting Vlad the Poisoner back to Simferopol North Airport for delivery to the FSB. The emptying out of the manor house suited Jack’s purpose.

Andreyev accompanied Jack and Alli out of the library, down the rear hallway, and into the more private drawing room, where Annika and Dyadya Gourdjiev greeted them. Jack saw in Annika’s face a sense of great expectation, of a mystery about to be solved. As for Gourdjiev, he had his usual sphinxlike expression, calm and unruffled, despite the tension of the moment.

“You should have told me you were part of AURA,” Jack said as he clasped the old man’s hand. His grip was still firm and sure.

“No need to burden you with something you didn’t then need to know.” He gave Jack a grandfatherly smile. “Annika tells me that you will solve the dilemma of the uranium field, of Yukin’s land grab, the specter of a spreading conflagration.”

Jack’s eyes flicked to her and back. “Annika puts great faith in me.”

“She does,” Gourdjiev acknowledged. “She has from the very beginning; she is an unerring judge of character and, just as importantly, of potential.” He paused, waiting expectantly.

“May I ask,” Andreyev said in his furtive manner, “why you have brought me here, Mr. McClure?”

“Certainly.” Jack put him firmly under his gaze. “I am extremely unhappy with the unwanted attention and inappropriate advances you have made on my daughter.”

“You must be mistak—”

The beginning of Andreyev’s transparent denial was cut off by two short bursts of semiautomatic fire. Jack, racing to the double doors, was about to thrust them open when they opened from the outside. Oriel Batchuk stood in the doorway, an OTS-33 Pernach machine pistol in his hand. Reacting immediately, Jack chopped down on his wrist, knocking the Pernach to the floor, but Batchuk shoved past him, raised his left arm at Andreyev as if he were accusing him of being alive. The lethal dart struck the oligarch in the neck. Clawing at it, he fell to his knees, the terrible clicking sound of massed insects coming from his throat before he pitched over, dead.

“Step back.” Batchuk swiveled his arm. “Step back or Annika dies next.”

Jack did as he said, and Batchuk, crouching down, plucked the Pernach off the floor. “All right,” he said, standing and pointing the machine pistol at them. “Time to disarm yourselves.”

“Time to disarm yourself,” Batchuk said.

“I will kill you now.” Alexsei Dementiev was silhouetted in the doorway of his apartment, in which Batchuk was already standing, a Makarov pistol in his hand.

During one of his earliest evenings there before his affair with Nikki began, Batchuk had made a wax impression of her key, had a copy made so that he could gain entrance any time he chose. Though he was not given to introspection, he nevertheless understood that the complete domination of her privacy was essential to his conquest. At work, at court, inside the Kremlin, or elsewhere in Moscow, it pleased him to know that he was always, in one way or another, intimate with her.

“I’m not joking or bluffing,” Alexsei said.

His face was drawn, deeply etched with tension and misery. To Batchuk he looked ten years older than when they had first met at court, only eighteen months ago.

“I’m quite certain you’re not, I assure you that I take the threat quite seriously.” But by the way Alexsei held the pistol Batchuk knew he was no expert in firearms. In fact he wondered whether Alexsei had ever fired a Makarov, or any pistol for that matter.

“You deserve to die.” Alexsei was growing tenser, more anxious. “For what you have done to my wife I will be justified in taking you out with the rest of the garbage.”

“Tell me, Alexsei,” Batchuk said, “have you ever killed a human being?” He cocked his head. “No? As someone who has killed many men, let me assure you it’s no easy thing, no, not at all. You never forget the face of the first person you kill, the look in his eyes as the light goes out.”

“I’ll welcome that look in your eyes.”

“That expression haunts you, Alexsei, follows you down into dreams, into the deepest recesses of your mind, lodged there like a lesion or a tumor that can’t be treated, can’t be eradicated no matter what you do.”

Something flickered in Alexsei’s eyes, some disturbance or doubt roiled up by Batchuk’s words. In that instant of doubt or hesitation Batchuk lunged at him, slapping him across the face so hard that Alexsei, totally unprepared, reeled back against the door frame.

Batchuk ripped the pistol from his hand. “You’re a buffoon, Alexsei, a patsy. I used you to get to Nikki. Do you really think I’d be friends with someone like you, someone who lets his wife be taken away from him?”

Alexsei, enraged at both his rival and himself, came at Batchuk, roaring like a bear. Indolently, almost carelessly, Batchuk swiped the barrel of the Makarov across Alexsei’s face.

“That’s right, she was going to leave you, leave your poor, pathetic life behind to be with me.”

Alexsei would not stop, he continued to grapple with Batchuk until Batchuk had no choice but to take Alexsei’s head in one hand, his neck in the other, and twist in one powerful motion that broke the vertebrae.

Dyadya Gourdjiev, glancing briefly down at the handguns he, Annika, and Jack had placed on the carpet of the drawing room, heard Batchuk say, “Now sit down, all of you, and I’ll outline the situation.”

As they sat, Batchuk continued, “The two guards are dead, the others are away with the dogs, so that leaves just us, not that I have much time, but then killing doesn’t take much time.”

“Whatever you do, leave the girl out of it,” Jack said, indicating Alli. “She has nothing to do with this.”

“She’s here, isn’t she, she’s seen my face.” Batchuk shook his head. “No one is exempt.”

“Oriel, your battle is with me, let the others go,” Gourdjiev said sharply.

“I told you I was coming after Annika, I told you she had overstepped even your protection, did you think I didn’t mean it?”

“He’ll come after me, I know it,” Nikki said as she lay in the hospital room.

“Have no fears on that score,” Gourdjiev said soothingly, “I’ll protect you come what may.”

“And the child.”

Gourdjiev took her hand. “Of course the child, she’s the product of your and Alexsei’s love.”

Nikki closed her eyes. “He’s coming soon, Papa, when I’ll be weak and helpless.” Her eyes flew open. “Oriel has an instinct for knowing when people are most vulnerable. Promise me you’ll keep her safe.”

“I swear, Nikki, calm yourself.”

“Her name is Annika, I want to call her Annika.”

She was a perfect baby. Gourdjiev remembered holding her in his arms, so tiny, so pink, so Annika, and the world seemed all right again. But then five years later everything came undone, Nikki had killed herself, Annika was gone, and Gourdjiev knew that he had failed daughter and granddaughter both.

“I have an instinct for knowing when people are most vulnerable,” Batchuk said, “and now that I’ve caught up with you both it’s time to end our decades-long game of charades.”

“I prefer to call it a game of cat and mouse,” Gourdjiev said.

“Call it whatever you want,” Batchuk leveled the machine pistol, “it’s over.”

At that moment, Alli moved.

“Keep still, girl!” Batchuk shouted so loudly that Alli jumped and he almost shot her.

Jack took a step forward, Batchuk swung his machine pistol around, and Annika rushed him. She buried her fist in Batchuk’s belly while Jack wrested the Pernach away from him.

“His left arm!” Gourdjiev shouted, leaping to his feet. “He’s got a dart launcher!”

Indeed Batchuk, through eyes streaming with tears, struggled to level his left arm at Gourdjiev. Jack knocked it sideways an instant before the dart was launched, causing it to embed itself harmlessly in the crown molding that joined wall to ceiling.

“Let me go,” Batchuk said. Though he was being restrained by Jack, he addressed Annika, as if they were alone in the room.

“Why would I do that?” she said. “You’re a monster.”

“It’s your grandfather who is the monster. I swore never to talk about it, never to tell you, but what are oaths now, in the end the promises we make all fail, they’re meant to be broken.”

“How evil you are,” Annika said. “You’re rotten with malevolence, nobody knows this better than I do.”

A peculiar light shone in Batchuk’s eyes. “You think you know the meaning of evil, but you don’t, Annika, because it’s your grandfather who’s truly evil.”

Gourdjiev took a step toward them. “Don’t believe a word he says, Annika.”

“Yes, not a word of it, but here is the truth of it: Nikki and I were in love, she was the only woman I cared about, to this day that’s the truth.”

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit you,” Gourdjiev said.

Batchuk kept his gaze firmly on Annika. “It was your grandfather who schemed to keep us apart. He never let me even meet your mother until it was too late, until she was already engaged to Alexsei.”

“No,” Annika said, “my mother and father were in love.”

“Alexsei loved her, of that there can be no doubt.” Batchuk shook his head. “But as for Nikki, no, she thought she loved Alexsei until we met, and then she knew the truth of it. Even though she was married neither of us could help ourselves, we became lost in each other—nothing, no one else existed.”

“What he’s saying is nonsense,” Gourdjiev said. “He’s simply trying to justify his actions.”

“Annika,” Batchuk said, “it was our love, your mother’s for me and mine for her, that caused Alexsei to feel so threatened. If we’d just had a quick tumble, if our connection was purely physical, do you think he would have become so maniacal with her? No, he knew, just as she knew that her love for me meant that their marriage was over.”

“You killed him,” Gourdjiev said. “You broke Alexsei’s neck.”

“He gave me no choice, he was out of control, nothing less would have stopped him from tearing me limb from limb.”

“So now you claim the murder was self-defense,” Annika said.

“Yes.” Batchuk nodded. “Absolutely.”

Gourdjiev took another step toward him and at last his antagonistic intent was unmistakable. “And that same night was it self-defense when you raped my daughter the moment she came home while her poor dead husband was bundled in a closet?”

Batchuk’s face filled with blood. “I did no such thing!”

Annika’s eyes were full of shock and rage. “Did you? Did you rape my mother the night you killed my father?”

“I never raped her,” Batchuk said. “There wasn’t a time I touched her when she didn’t want it, didn’t beg for the release only I could give her.”

Annika slapped his face, very hard, the energy rising in her from her lower belly through her arm into the tips of her fingers, the imprints of which could be seen on his cheek white on red, and then an instant afterward, red on pink.

Gourdjiev kept moving in, as if for the kill. “And what do you call it, also self-defense, when you stole Annika away from her mother?”

“You mean from you, Annika was never Nikki’s child, she was yours, you tried with all your power to make sure of that,” Batchuk said. “But yet it most certainly was self-defense. I took her from you, from your clutches, because she’s mine.” He turned to Annika. “You were conceived the night I killed Alexsei Dementiev in self-defense, you were conceived after he died, in the frenzy of passion your mother and I shared.”

29

“Is this true?” Annika said to Gourdjiev, breaking the stunned silence. “You knew?”

“Not right away, of course not.”

Jack could see that the old man was on the defensive now, which was just where Batchuk wanted him. He risked a glance at Alli, who had come off her chair and was standing very near Gourdjiev as if to stop him if he leapt to throttle Batchuk. He could tell that she was totally absorbed in the psychological fireworks.

“But gradually, as your mother’s mental condition began to decline, I got some inkling. At first I thought her depression was a result of Alexsei’s death, but then, as the months turned into years I grew convinced that something else was eating her alive. Finally, five years from the day of Alexsei’s murder, I got it out of her, how she had come home that night to find not Alexsei waiting for her, but him, Oriel Batchuk.

“I was out of my mind with rage and anguish, all I could think of was how to revenge myself on him, so much so that I lost sight of her, I failed to realize just how deeply in the grip of her depression she had sunk. That night I stayed with her and with you, and that night she slit her wrists, silently, on the bathroom tiles, while you slept and I plotted revenge.”

“There you have it,” Batchuk said, triumph creeping into his voice, “the anatomy of true evil.”

Annika put the machine pistol to the side of his head. “Move away, Jack,” she said.

“Annika.” Alli had moved from Gourdjiev’s side to Annika’s. “Don’t, he’s your father.”

“You don’t know what he did to me, the years I was with him.”

“I did what you wanted me to do, nothing more.”

“Liar! It was what you wanted.”

“You’re wrong, I kept you safe,” Batchuk said, “safe from him.” He glanced at Gourdjiev

“I didn’t need you to keep me safe.”

“Annika, no matter what he did in the past, no matter what he is now, he helped bring you into the world,” Alli said. “Without him you wouldn’t exist.”

“At this moment,” Annika said, “I wish I didn’t exist.”

“You don’t mean that,” Alli said.

There were tears in Annika’s eyes. “I’m going to blast his goddamned skull open.”

“Don’t, Annika, don’t. You’ll never be able to live with yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter, I want to die, but before I do I will see his blood spattered all over this room.”

“I hate my father, too.” Alli was pleading with her. “But I couldn’t bear the thought of him dying.”

“Whatever he did, it couldn’t be anything like what this man—”

“Your father.”

“—did to me.”

“Crimes are crimes,” Alli said. “Whether they’re of cruelty or of neglect what matter does it make, they’ve changed us, and they can’t be taken back or absolved or forgotten, but the cycle has to end somewhere, so why not here, why not now, with you?”

“You’re right.” Annika smiled at her, a slow, sad, rueful smile. “It has to end.” Then she pulled the trigger. Batchuk’s blood, brains, and bits of bone flew outward in a hail of red and pink, an explosion so violent its human shrapnel covered them all, so massive it seemed as if he had detonated from the inside out.

Beneath a gauzy and indistinct sky Dennis Paull stood with his daughter and grandson at Louise’s grave site just across the Chesapeake in Virginia. He and Claire had each dropped a shovelful of dirt onto the lowered coffin.

“Mom, why did you and Grandpa put earth in the hole with Grandma?”

Tears glittered in Claire’s eyes. “So part of us can stay with her and love her always.”

To Paull’s surprise and immense pleasure Aaron stepped forward, stooped down to grab a handful of earth, and dropped it on top of theirs.

Even though they had come here to bury his wife his thoughts weren’t diminished by her death and loss, rather they were filled with the return of his family. How, he wondered now, had he deserved this miracle? Had he been a good man, righteous, strong in his convictions, repentant for his sins? And what did the answers matter, the universe didn’t care, every event was random, chaos ruled, there was no answer for any question, large or small, only compromises and, perhaps, if one was as lucky as he was, sacrifices.

His arm was around Claire’s shoulders, his eyes were on Aaron, who was perhaps dreaming of the promised celebration later this afternoon, but for Dennis Paull the celebration had already begun.

A deafening silence now engulfed them all, made their legs numb, their hearts thud in their chests, numbed their minds. What remained of Oriel Jovovich Batchuk lay half in, half out of the drawing room, his blood was all over, but not a single drop of Vasily Andreyev’s had been spilled.

“So, it’s over at last,” Gourdjiev said, breaking the awkward silence. “Annika, I’m so terribly sorry you had to hear that.” He went to her, tried to put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.

“Don’t,” she said, moving away from him.

Jack gingerly unwound Annika’s fingers from the machine pistol. When he took it from her she made no protest, instead she took Alli’s hand and held it tight.

“I knew you were right, I wanted to … but I couldn’t.”

“It’s all right,” Alli assured her, “it’s all right.”

Annika stood staring down at her grandfather’s nemesis—her father—with a kind of terrified disbelief. She was holding Alli’s hand so tightly their fingers were white. Jack knew it wasn’t healthy for any of them to remain in this abattoir.

“We need to clean up,” he said.

Annika nodded, but she didn’t move. There were bits of bone stuck to her cheeks and nose, oblique smears of blood elsewhere on her chest and face, including her lips. Gourdjiev stepped agilely over the body and stood in the hallway waiting for them, silent, wrapped in his own enigmatic thoughts. He did not look at his bloody hands.

“How are you?” Jack asked Annika.

Her carnelian eyes were pale and bleak, as if all the mineral quality had leached out of them. “I haven’t the faintest notion, my mind is numb, I feel lost and alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Jack said. “Come on, you and Alli need to clean up.”

He nodded to Alli, and she guided Annika out of the drawing room, past Gourdjiev, stoop-shouldered and gray, and into the bathroom. Jack led the way into the kitchen, where he and Gourdjiev cleaned up as best they could, using the kitchen sink.

Jack watched warm water sluice the muck off his hands. “It’s true, isn’t it, everything Batchuk said.”

Gourdjiev stared out the window over the sink. “Most of it, anyway.”

“So for years you knew he was her father.”

“Yes.”

“But she didn’t.”

“Not until a few minutes ago when you heard about it yourself.”

“It’s no wonder she killed him.”

“To be shot to death by your own child.” Gourdjiev turned back into the kitchen, slowly washed his hands as if reluctant to part with the tangible evidence of Batchuk’s death. “I wish I could say that I felt satisfied, but I fear that revenge is not all it’s cracked up to be; in fact I’m finding it’s rather meaningless. His death won’t bring my Nikki back, it can’t mitigate her pain, and now I think it’s very possible that Annika is lost to me as well. If that happens I’ll have nothing.”

Jack, aware that Annika and Alli had come into the kitchen, their faces and hands clean if not their clothes, said, “Not to worry, you still have Alizarin Group.”

“What, I didn’t hear you.”

“You heard me well enough,” Jack said. “I know you own Alizarin Group. There are six other partners, but you’re Alizarin’s guiding hand.”

“I’m afraid you’re sadly mistaken, young man.”

Jack hefted Batchuk’s machine pistol. “The only thing you should be afraid of is me.”

“I don’t understand.”

During this exchange Gourdjiev was gradually transformed from an old beaten-down grandfather to a stern, ramrod-backed businessman with the keen, knowing eyes of an expert poker player. No wonder he had outsmarted Batchuk, Jack thought. And he knew that he had to guard against succumbing to the same fate.

“The man who poisoned me was employed by Alizarin Group, your company.”

Annika stared at him. “Dyadya, is this true?”

“What nonsense, of course it isn’t.”

“He’s lying,” Alli said. “I was with Jack when he interrogated Vlad. He works for Alizarin Group.” She and Annika stood close together, as if they were sisters standing up to their parents. “Anyway, when Ivan Gurov delivers him to the FSB the truth will come out.”

“That’s not going to happen.” Gourdjiev sighed. “Ivan Gurov’s vehicle was intercepted on the way to the airport and Vlad was rescued. Unfortunately, Gurov chose to put up a fight and was killed.”

“What are you saying?” Annika looked as if she had about hit her breaking point. “Your people murdered Ivan?”

“He gave them no choice, Annika. He wouldn’t let Vlad go.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. “Then it was you who ordered Jack killed?”

“Not killed,” Gourdjiev corrected, “poisoned by arsenic, debilitated, perhaps hospitalized, not dead, never dead.”

“But why?”

Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to Jack and said just as if he were asking for the time, “Do you want to tell her, I’m certain you have figured it out by now.”

Jack hesitated, not because he didn’t know the answer but because he wasn’t sure he wanted to play Gourdjiev’s game. Then he shrugged mentally. “It was Alli, she really threw a wrench into your plan. It’s a joke, funny when you think about it, but that’s how life is, Gourdjiev, a spur-of-the-moment decision, something from out of left field you couldn’t possibly have anticipated. Given her real identity you couldn’t afford the scrutiny from the American government that would be the inevitable result of my bringing her here, so you thought up a way to take the spotlight off her and put it on me. My government would be so busy trying to find out who had tried to poison me they’d forget all about Alli and what happened to her here, that was why you risked exposure to rescue Vlad, why your people killed Gurov. He recognized them, didn’t he, or at least one of them. You couldn’t allow either Gurov or Vlad to talk, now neither of them will.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev nodded as if immensely pleased with a prized pupil. “And of course you figured out my plan.”

“It seems that you’ve been playing both ends against the middle. You were never going to share the astronomical profits from the uranium strike, either with Yukin or with AURA. You wanted it for yourself.”

“Not at first.” Gourdjiev kept one eye on the muzzle of the machine pistol. “I put AURA together to go after the uranium strike, but rather quickly I saw that AURA was going to fail, principally because Kharkishvili turned against me, he split the AURA members, it was becoming ineffective.” He shrugged. “So I decided to have Alizarin step into the breach.”

“But there was a problem,” Jack said, “a seemingly insurmountable one, which is where I come in.”

Now Gourdjiev laughed. “I very much regret that I ordered Vlad to dose you, you have a remarkable mind. Unique.” He nodded admiringly. “I’ve known the president of Ukraine, Ingan Ulishenko, since he was a young man. I went to him with our proposal, but all he saw was sovereign land, potential profits being taken away from him. He refused to believe that there was an imminent threat from Trinadtsat, from Yukin and Batchuk. He would not allow us to buy the land.”

Jack had not raised the weapon, had made no threatening move against Gourdjiev. “What you needed was an outside source to confirm what you’d told him, someone unimpeachable, someone Ulishenko could neither ignore nor refuse.”

“An American in government, close to the president, but who was totally apolitical.”

“Someone Ulishenko would be sure to trust.”

“No one else fit the bill, Mr. McClure.”

“Which is why your grandfather would never kill me,” Jack said to Annika. “He needs me and, as it happens, I need him. I’m going to make sure Alizarin Group gets the uranium field.”

The solution had come to him sometime when he was washing Batchuk’s grisly debris off his face. He had tried to come up with an alternative, but it was no use, his brain told him that he’d found the only one, even though it wasn’t perfect—wasn’t even, to his way of thinking, good—but there was no other path to take, and now he wondered whether Gourdjiev had hit upon it before him.

“The accord with Yukin must be signed, President Carson made that perfectly clear. But if he does sign it Yukin will move into Ukraine and use the accord to stay there. That isn’t acceptable, either. I talk to Ulishenko, tell him what Yukin is planning. He’ll have no choice but to sell the uranium field to Alizarin Group. Alizarin is a multinational corporation that Yukin can neither touch nor attack, so as to his energy ambitions in Ukraine he’s stymied. Plus, he now must abide by the accord he will sign tonight with the United States.”

Jack turned back to Gourdjiev. “In addition to the purchase price, Alizarin Group will pledge fifty percent of all profits from the field to the Ukrainian government.”

“Ten percent,” Gourdjiev said.

“Don’t make me laugh. Forty-five percent or I tell my government what you’ve done. They’ll shut Alizarin Group down like a toxic waste dump.”

“Twenty-five percent or I walk away and let Yukin have his way.”

“Without me to confirm to Ulishenko the imminent threat posed to his country by Yukin you and Alizarin are dead in the water,” Jack said. “Thirty-five, that’s my final offer.”

“Done.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev held out his hand.

“Jack, you’re not really making a deal with him,” Alli said.

“I have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” she said, “you taught me that.”

“Not this time.” Jack grasped Gourdjiev’s hand, and at that moment they all heard the clatter of rotor blades descending.

“What’s happening?” Gourdjiev said.

“The cavalry,” Jack said, “has arrived.” Just as Dennis Paull promised.

30

From the back of the immense, ornate salon in the Kremlin, Jack watched as Alli stood on one side of the First Lady, Lyn Carson, Mrs. Yukin on the other, as President Edward Carson and President Yukin used pens specifically designed for the historic signing of the U.S.–Russian security accord. Alli was wearing a long sapphire blue dress that made her look very grown-up. While video and still cameras dutifully recorded the momentous occasion Jack’s gaze fell on Yukin’s face, alight with pleasure and a certain amount of secret triumph, the origin of which only he, Carson, Annika, and Alli knew. An hour from now, when Ukrainian national television broadcast Dyadya Gourdjiev and President Ulishenko jointly announcing that the tract of land in the country’s economically ravaged northeastern section was sold to Alizarin Group, Yukin’s demeanor would change markedly. Alizarin would pledge thirty-five percent of the profits to Ukraine and immediately begin hiring thousands of unemployed citizens to work the largest uranium strike in Asia.

After the signing, the seemingly endless photo ops and interviews began, neither of which Jack chose to be a part of, despite Carson’s requests to the contrary.

“I can serve you best,” Jack told the president, “by remaining in the shadows.”

Uncharacteristically Alli had agreed to stay by her parents’ side during this tiring and dreary process, or rather, Jack reflected, it was a new characteristic, one that spoke to her recent adventures, insights, and sense of herself. As he watched her move about the room with the Carsons and the Yukins he felt a great surge of pride for who she was and what she might now become.

He spent the time with Annika, who had flown back with him and Alli from Kiev, where the helicopter manned by Paull’s people had let them off.

“I don’t think I’ll ever speak to him again,” Annika said.

Jack knew she meant Gourdjiev, a man whose name she no longer spoke, much less called dyadya.

“He was trying to protect you.”

“Really, is that what you think?” She looked at him skeptically. “Or are you just trying to make me feel better?” She held up a hand to forestall an answer she did not care to hear. “The truth is he was trying to protect himself. As long as I remained ignorant of the facts of my conception he didn’t have to answer awkward or embarrassing questions.”

“It seems odd that Batchuk didn’t tell you he was your father when you were with him.”

They were standing by a window that must have been fifteen feet high. She looked away from him, out onto Red Square, where it had begun to snow again, according to the weather forecasters the last snow of winter.

“The truth is as simple as it is ugly: He didn’t want me to know I was his daughter, not then, anyway. He was too busy mourning my mother’s death and staring into my eyes—studying my face brought her back to him as nothing else could. And, of course, there was the other thing.” Tears glittered beneath her lashes. “To tell me that he was my father would have destroyed the sexual bond he tried to establish between us.”

Jack felt a sudden chill render him all but speechless. “When you were five?”

She continued to stare out at the snow, she neither answered nor moved her head, there was no need.

She wiped her eyes with her forefinger and turned to him suddenly with a thin smile. “I’m sorry, Jack, sorry for lying to you, deceiving you, putting you through the wringer with Gurov’s supposed death, but it was necessary.”

Was it, he wondered. He supposed that depended on your point of view. He could begrudge her her elaborate deception, but to what end? He had seen firsthand how Sharon’s rage at him had destroyed not only their marriage but Sharon herself. As long as she held on to that anger she would never be able to trust anyone, she’d be alone and in anguish for the rest of her life. That was a path he had turned away from some time ago.

“There’s one other thing I can’t fathom,” he said now. “How did you know I’d follow you to the alley that night?”

She put the flat of her hand against his chest. “You’re a decent man, you weren’t going to let me walk into an ambush where you were convinced that I would surely wind up dead.”

He shook his head. “I’m not buying that answer. You could never have been certain that I would come, even after you were careful to tell me in the hotel bar that the Moscow police were worse than useless.”

Her smile was cunning, which had the startling effect of turning her into a sexual creature he did not want to resist. “I studied you, Jack. I knew what had happened with Emma, I knew how your ex-wife blamed you, how you blamed yourself, how, to compensate and to try to make amends you couldn’t resist someone in peril, especially mortal peril.” When he made no comment, she went on, “Tell me you didn’t think of Emma when you made the decision to leave the hotel and come after me.”

“You’re right,” he said, after a time, “Emma was all I thought about that night.”

“Once again, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Leaning forward, he kissed her. “I don’t want to hear you say you’re sorry again.”

“Don’t worry,” she put a hand behind his head, caressing him, “you won’t.”

Jack saw the Carsons coming and remembered that Edward had invited him to dinner after the ceremonies.

“I’m going to have to go,” he said, reluctantly breaking away from her.

“Meet me tomorrow,” she said, “in the lobby of the Bolshoi Ballet at seven forty-five.”

And then she was gone, vanishing in the dense swirl of people.

“I hope I didn’t scare off your lady friend,” Edward Carson said. “I was going to invite her to dinner.”

“That’s all right, sir, I don’t think she cares much for this place.”

Carson looked around. “Who the hell could?” He put his arm around Jack’s shoulders. “Once again I owe you a debt I can never hope to repay.”

“No need, sir.”

“On so many levels,” the president continued, “not only me, not only Lyn and me, but the country itself. Dammit, Jack, no one else could have figured out a way to make this damnable security accord a success.”

“I appreciate your faith in me.” Jack didn’t want to talk about a success that involved Dyadya Gourdjiev getting everything he wanted. Instead, he looked around. “I haven’t seen General Brandt.”

“And you won’t. He’s being held incognito and in strict isolation aboard Air Force One. The Justice Department has been notified and will deal with him in due course, as will every other knotty problem of state, when we arrive home tomorrow.” His smile was broad and, for once, relaxed. “Tonight we eat, drink, tell jokes, and best of all, listen to the stories you and Alli have to tell about your adventures in Ukraine. For this one evening we’ve all earned the right to forget about the difficulties of yesterday and whatever may come the day after tomorrow.” He took Lyn’s arm and nodded in Alli’s direction. “Now how about you escort Alli back to the hotel; everything has been prepared for us in my suite.”

The new day dawned just as it had ended, with snow. The presidential motorcade set out for Sheremetyevo, where Air Force One was fueled and waiting. Jack, sitting beside Alli in the limousine directly behind the one carrying the president and First Lady, was looking forward to interrogating the General. Carson had promised him an hour alone with Brandt before anyone else had a crack at him. The president was of a mind to grant Jack pretty much anything he asked for.

“Sorry to be going home?” Jack asked half in jest.

“As a matter of fact,” Alli said, “I am.”

They had reached the Ring Road, coming up on the exit that led to the airport. The snow had lessened and, according to the latest forecast, would be nothing but a memory in an hour or so, but the night had been frigid, and with the overcast predicted to hang around for the next couple of days the sidewalks and roads would remain slick. Jack thought about Annika and the date at the Bolshoi for tonight that he would not now make. He’d called her and left a message on her voice mail telling her of his change in plans. Carson had been expected to stay another day, but the itinerary had abruptly changed because of embarrassing difficulties Ben Hearth, the newly appointed Senate whip, was having keeping the conservative wing of their party in line.

“I miss Annika,” she said, “do you?”

“I wish we were staying longer.” Jack looked out the window at the bleakness of Moscow. “I wanted to see the Bolshoi.”

Alli smiled. “But not with me.”

He smiled in return. “No, not with you.”

Alli was silent for a moment, staring at the motorcycle cops flanking their limo. “Maybe she’ll come to Washington, maybe you’ll come back here.”

“Maybe.” He put his head back; he was suddenly very tired. The moment he closed his eyes he saw Emma. He smiled at her but something was wrong.

Alli must have seen the change in his expression because she said, “Don’t be sad, Jack.”

“I’m not sad, exactly, I—”

The rest of his thought was cut off by her scream. His eyes snapped open to see everything in frantic motion. The presidential limo had skidded, most likely on a patch of black ice, and was now veering off the roadway. Still spinning, it plunged down the verge onto the median, where it struck something buried under the snow. It flipped over as it slammed into a high-tension pole. The cables broke free and swooped down like black crows out of an icy sky, striking the limo, sending a powerful charge through the car.

Alli was still screaming and Jack was out of their limo, running with the Secret Service agents toward the wreck. Sirens were wailing, people were shouting, the entire motorcade had come to a halt, the press corps piling out and running, too, cell phones out, calling, texting, Twittering, whatever means would get the news out the fastest, spreading it to all four corners of the globe even before those on the scene could determine the condition of the president and the First Lady.

Alli caught up with Jack as he waited for the two agents who were closest to swing the cable off the limo. The moment it was safely aside, he wrenched on one of the rear doors. The limo was resting on its roof, there was a welter of security personnel, both American and Russians. Because the Russians were being turned back, their commander decided his men should form the perimeter, keeping back the howling press corps.

By this time Jack had wrenched the door open. He took one look inside and handed Alli to one of her detail.

“What’s going on?” she cried. “Jack, tell me what you saw!”

Putting his head back inside Jack saw Lyn Carson cradling her husband’s bloody head. All the personnel in the front were mangled, clearly dead. Defib Man checked on the president, shook his head, and started to cry.

“Mrs. Carson,” Jack said, “Lyn, we’ve got to get you out of there now.”

She did not move, did not respond, and Jack climbed in over the body of his good friend. When he began to pull her away, Lyn screamed. Her eyes were wide and staring, she was clearly in shock. Then there were other hands helping him, and slowly the Carsons were separated. That’s when he saw that the front of Lyn’s coat was soaked through. At first he thought it was Edward’s blood and, indeed, some of it undoubtedly was, but when she passed out as they tried to extricate her he knew that something was very wrong.

They took the president and First Lady—Edward and Lyn— straight to Air Force One, where the president’s trauma surgeon was standing by in the plane’s operating room for Lyn Carson, who had sustained abdominal damage. The American medical team worked on her for six hours, and even then the team leader could not give a definitive long-term prognosis. She was, however, stable enough for Air Force One to take off. By that time the snow had ceased, and a silver sun briefly showed its face through a crease in the thick cloud cover.

During those six hours Jack stood holding Alli, who, after asking him what he had seen, had said not a word. She stared down at her father, gray as ash, shiny as a melted candle, without an outward sign of emotion. This continued for so long that Jack grew worried. He spoke to her several times in halting phrases; his tongue felt as if it were swollen. He himself needed time to grieve over the loss of Edward Carson, but it had not yet become a reality, it was too immense, too unthinkable to take in so quickly. How could Edward Carson, the President of the United States, die in a car crash, how could he be dead? He couldn’t be, no one believed it except the Secret Service detail, because they had been trained for this moment, hoping it would never come, but prepared for it mentally and physically nonetheless. Dick Bridges, the detail’s leader, was dry-eyed and stoic, there was never a moment when he wasn’t in command, when everyone wondered whether they could count on him. After he had supervised the loading of the agents who had been in the lead limo into the belly of the aircraft he returned to the president’s body as a member of the Praetorian guard stands by his Caesar, even in death.

Jack had not heard from Annika and he did not now expect to. It was just as well; he wouldn’t know what to say to her, how to respond, his mind was here by the side of his fallen friend, his leader, and Alli.

Just before the doors closed Jack left Alli’s side and stepped out onto the moving stairs. He was surrounded by grim-faced Secret Service agents, silent in their sober grieving. Their regret was so palpable he felt buffeted by it. There was nothing special to look at, Sheremetyevo was much like other airports in other countries, and yet to him it was utterly unique.

Everything comes to an end, he thought. Love, hate, even betrayal. The accumulation of wealth, the scheming for power, the barbarity, the cruelty, the endless lies that capture what we think we want. In the final moment, everyone falls, even the would-be kings of empires like Yukin, even the princes of darkness like Dyadya Gourdjiev. In the silence of the tomb, we all get what we deserve.

While he was thinking these thoughts, while he was taking his last breaths of the chill Moscow air, his phone vibrated. He almost didn’t take it out of his pocket, almost didn’t look at who was attempting to contact him at this inopportune moment. He both wanted and didn’t want it to be Annika. Compelled to look down at the screen he saw that she had replied to his call via an e-mail. He opened it up and read:

Dearest Jack,

My grandfather warned me not to tell you, but I’m breaking protocol because there’s something you have to know; it’s the reason I haven’t come, why I won’t come no matter how long you wait, why I’m not being melodramatic when I say that we must never see each other again.

I killed Lloyd Berns. I sought him out in Kiev and then in Capri, where, free of his official escorts, it was easy to do what I wanted with him. I ran him down. He had made a deal with Karl Rochev— two stubborn birds of identical corrupt feathers—that threatened AURA’s plans. My grandfather knew the president would open an investigation into Berns’s death and suspected that he’d assign you because Carson trusted you, and only you, and you were already with him in Moscow.

I know you must hate me, I’ve been preparing for that since the moment I built up the file on you. There is little point in reiterating how desperately my grandfather and I needed your unique expertise, no one else could have unraveled the Gordian knot that had stymied and bedeviled us. So you hate me now, which is understandable and inevitable, but you know me; what I can’t stand is indifference, and now, no matter what, you’ll never be indifferent to me. So, in that regard, I’m content, though certainly not happy. But, then, it seems to me that I’m not destined to find happiness, or even, perhaps, to fathom its nature, which is as mysterious to me, or maybe alien is the correct word, as prayer.

Whether or not you choose to believe it, we all run afoul of forces we cannot see, let alone understand. This is not to excuse, or even to mitigate what I did. I don’t seek absolution; I don’t know its meaning and I don’t need to. I neither regret what I did nor feel pride in it. In peace as in war sacrifices must be made, soldiers must fall in order for battles to be won—even, or perhaps especially, those that are waged sub-rosa, in the shadows of a daylight only people like us notice.

Dyadya Gourdjiev and I won our battle over Oriel Batchuk and America got what it wanted from Yukin and the Kremlin. That’s all that matters, because you, me, all the pieces on the chessboard have no meaning without it.

Annika

“Mr. McClure.” Dick Bridges tapped him on the shoulder. “Everyone is waiting. I must ask you to go inside now and take a seat, the captain has received clearance for immediate takeoff.”

Jack took another look at the e-mail, as if on a second reading the words, the meaning would change, as if this time he would not find out how terribly, how deeply, how completely Annika had betrayed him, how she and her grandfather had spun lies and deception in concentric circles, layer upon layer, each one inside another, protecting each other, like Russian nesting dolls.

He gazed out at the last snow of April. Alli had said, “Maybe she’ll come to Washington, maybe you’ll come back here.”

It was possible that one or the other of those futures would come to pass, but today as he ducked back inside the sad, lonely, silent plane, he very much doubted it.

We hope you enjoyed this book.

To read the next gripping instalment in the Jack McClure series, read on or click here.

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To find more books in this series, click here.

For an invitation from the publisher, click here.

First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Forge.

This edition first published in the UK in 2013 by Head of Zeus Ltd.

Copyright © Eric van Lustbader, 2010

The moral right of Eric van Lustbader to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB) 9781781850770

ISBN (TPB) 9781781850787

ISBN (PB) 9781908800343

ISBN (E) 9781781853016

Head of Zeus Ltd

Clerkenwell House

45-47 Clerkenwell Green

London EC1R 0HT

www.headofzeus.com

Contents

Cover

Welcome Page

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part 2

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part 3

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Copyright

Alli Carson, once the president’s daughter, now a trainee FBI agent is the number one suspect in the murder of her boyfriend. Suspended from her work, bewildered and alone, Alli must find a way to contact the one person she can trust: Jack McClure.

Table of Contents

For Victoria

Prologue

Vlorë, Albania

Two young women running. They look like girls, little slips of girls as they fly down ancient cobbled streets, past the blind facades of stone houses, darkened by another of the frequent blackouts. Pale candlelight flickers against windowpanes, medieval and mean, a city within a city. The younger is a girl, barely thirteen, though taller and more filled out than her companion, yet far short of womanly.

Cathedral spires, still silvered in moonlight, ignore the thin thread of red dawnlight tingeing the eastern sky. Stars glimmer defiantly like blue-white diamonds. There is no wind at all; the stillness of the trees is absolute, the shadows they cast impenetrable.

An old man, thin and brittle as the branches above his head, is roused from his drunken stupor by the anxious click-clack of shoes as the women cross his small square. He stirs, regarding them from the stone bench that serves as his home. His arms are crossed over his bony chest as if in reproof. Noticing him, one of the women stops abruptly, slips off her shoes. Now both barefoot, they silently flee the square like shadows before the rising of the sun.

They enter an evil-smelling alley. Garbage overspills dented cans. A creature lifts its head, growls, baring its yellow teeth. Its ears are triangular, and very large, making it look more like a jackal than a dog. The women swerve out of its way, race to the far end of the alley. The street beyond is nearly as dark. It is littered with ripped signs, shoes, and caps rioters left in their haste to retreat from the truncheons and guns of the advancing militia.

They turn a corner, the taller woman now in the lead. The smell of roasted corn and the sharp odor of urine assail them. Halfway along the street, the taller woman stops in front of a door. About to knock, she hesitates, turning to look into her companion’s eyes. Emboldened by the nod of encouragement she receives, she raps sharply on the door with her scabbed knuckles. No sound, and reaching past her, her companion slaps the flat of her hand insistently against the wood.

At last there comes a stirring from inside the house, a scraping followed by a hacking cough. The door opens a crack and a woman with gray-streaked hair and sunken cheeks opens her ashen eyes wide. She is gripped by the look of a hare who sees in the fox’s presence its imminent death.

“Liridona!”

“Hello, Mother,” the taller woman says.

Her mother gasps. “What have you done? Are you insane? How—?”

“I escaped.” Liridona gestures. “With the help of my friend, Alli.”

For just an instant, the expression on Liridona’s mother’s face softens. Then the abject terror returns and she says to Alli, “You stupid, stupid girl.”

“Listen, your daughter was a prisoner,” Alli says.

Liridona’s mother says nothing.

“Did you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Her eyes are fixed on a spot above her daughter’s head, as if she is willing herself to be far away.

Alli turns Liridona around and pushes up her shirt to reveal a constellation of weals made by cigarette burns.

“What’s the matter with you?” she says. “We need your help. We’re both in terrible danger.”

The older woman has averted her gaze. “I know that better than you.”

Alli can tell that beneath the mother’s mechanical tones lie glimmers of pain, fury, and, worst of all, resignation.

“Will you help us get to the ferry for Brindisi? In Italy we’ll be safe.”

“You’ll never be safe.”

Alli is undeterred. “Please. We have nowhere else to turn.”

Another cough explodes from behind Liridona’s mother. All at once, the door is almost wrenched off its hinges and Liridona’s mother is shoved out of the way to make room for a huge, hulking man dressed in a sleeveless undershirt and pajama pants. His darkly bristled cheeks and close-set eyes give him the appearance of a wild boar.

He spits heavily, then, stepping out into the street, he peers beyond them, looking both ways. “Foolish girl!” His hand lashes out, striking Liridona across the face. “Go back to where you belong. You’ll get us all killed!”

As Liridona cowers, Alli shoulders past her. “This is your daughter.”

The boar-man glares at her.

Liridona flinches, then bursts into tears. “I tried to tell you,” she sobs.

Alli says, “She’s your child, your flesh and blood.”

He takes one more look around. “Christ!”

He hurriedly steps back into the shadows of the doorway and slams the door in their faces.

Alli pounds on the door with her fist, but to no avail. She is about to try to find another way in when her gaze is drawn to the eastern end of the filthy street. The sun, rising, spills its light along the cobbles like liquid fire. Out of that dazzle emerge two men armed with handguns. The instant they realize they’ve been seen they sprint toward the two women.

Alli grabs Liridona by the back of her shirt, whirls her around, and pulls her along. Liridona stumbles after her as they run in the opposite direction. But they are already winded from their long run, and the two men gain on them at an alarmingly rapid clip.

Up ahead, Alli hears the chiming shouts of sounds like a demonstration. Changing direction, Alli heads them toward the boiling knot of students occupying a nearby plaza ringed with rugged hawthorns and lindens. Like the trees, banners rise ahead of them, calling for bread and clean water, decent sanitation, heat and light. Power! Power Now!

Young people are everywhere, piling into the plaza, fiercely determined expressions on their faces as they begin to chant in unison. The raw, seething power of youth shakes the lindens like a sudden storm, and it seems as if hope is rising as inexorably as the flowers of spring.

Grabbing Liridona by the hand, Alli plunges into the maelstrom of bodies. All around them, the air shudders with the angry shouts of the demonstrators. Fires are being lit, fueled by the garbage piled in the gutters. Acrid smoke swirls, mingling with a fog that seems to have risen from the sewer grates, overrunning the streets and the plaza like an army of vermin.

A great shout erupts as a group of about ten young men rock a car back and forth, harder and harder, until, with their combined strength, they upend it. The massed shout gains hurricane force. There the car sits like a turtle on its back. Someone opens the gas tank.

At almost the same moment, the morning trembles to the high-low wail of police sirens. Everything starts to happen in double-time. A length of rag is inserted in the car’s gas tank, its visible end lit; the mass of humanity seems to hold its breath.

The car explodes just as the militia appears, pouring out of fog-bound streets into the plaza. Harsh orders, magnified through a portable amplifier, are fired like flares over the heads of the protesters. Then guns are fired, and the melee commences.

Among it all, Alli and Liridona dodge and sidestep their antagonists, sweeping aside fluttering banners, leaping over the fallen, trying to keep themselves from being trampled by the mob, which flows first one way, then another. A clear line of sight is all but impossible, eyes tear from the smoke and debris.

It is then that the two men appear out of the blur of bodies and faces. They grab Liridona and, as Alli tries to attack them, one of them slams the side of her head. She staggers, loses her grip on her companion, and, slammed by rushing bodies, goes down facefirst. Sprawled on the ground, she is kicked and struck by fleeing feet and tramping boots. She almost loses consciousness, but, gathering herself, manages to regain her feet just in time to see the two men dragging Liridona away.

Wading deeper into the growing madness, she fights her way after them. The car fire has spread, and one of the hawthorn trees becomes a column of flame, its widening plume of smoke a dark banner rippling ominously over all their heads. Alli coughs, her lungs burning. A young woman hits her in the face, a boy drives his elbow into her side in his panic to get away from the militia. The armed men wield metal truncheons, which rise and fall in concert like a thresher in a field of wheat. She gasps and continues on, reeling and in pain, but she will not allow Liridona out of her sight. But the fog, a metallic brown from gunpowder, garbage, and the grit of the streets, thrusts itself against her like a living thing. She is buffeted by the currents of running people. Screams find her as insistent as the tolling of bells from the cathedral, which seems to watch indifferently with its elongated El Greco face.

Alli loses sight of Liridona altogether, and her heart beats even faster in her chest as she plows her way through the mob, nearer now to the mass of truncheons lifting and falling, to the sprays of blood and bone, to the tilted bodies, to the cries of pain and terror.

Then she spots one of the men, his tall frame sinister as a bat, rising for a moment above the heads of the students. Her way lies directly in the path of the militia. There’s no time to circle around, so she plunges ahead until she is close to the line of truncheons, advancing en masse like a phalanx of Roman soldiers. On hands and knees, she makes herself inconspicuous, crawling through the melee, squirming through the legs of the militia until she eels her way through to the other side.

Regaining her feet, she looks around, sees the men pushing Liridona around a corner. They are no longer in the plaza. She is on the fringe of the mob, running as fast as she can toward the corner. Running with her heart in her mouth, running toward the sudden roar of gunshots that spurts at her like sleet from around the corner.

“No!” she cries. “No!”

Hurtling around the corner, she is jerked off her feet. She stares into monstrous eyes. One is blue, the other green. They regard her as if each has a separate intelligence, both cold as permafrost.

For a moment, she is paralyzed by those eyes, or, more accurately, the twin intelligence behind them. And she thinks, Not him, anyone but him. Then, from somewhere out of her sight, she hears Liridona weeping, and, like glass shattering against stone, the spell breaks. But the instant she tries to struggle free, the barrel of a gun is shoved into her mouth.

“Once again, quiet,” a voice like a constricting iron band says. “Before the end.”

The air shivers.

Part 1

Blood Sport

One Month Ago

You can’t have a pact with God and with the devil at the same time.

—The Skating Rink, ROBERTO BOLAÑO

1

Washington, D.C.

“She’s dead.”

These words, spoken by his daughter, jerk Jack McClure out of sleep.

Covered in sweat, he turns in the darkness of his bedroom. “Emma?”

The faintest cool breeze stirs the hair on his head.

“She passed by me a minute ago, Dad. Or is it an hour?”

Hard to tell, Jack thought, when you’re dead.

“Emma?”

But the ghostly voice was gone, and he felt the sudden lack of her. Again. A great abyss on whose edge he teetered like a drunk reeling out of a bar. He drew a breath, gave a great shudder, and lunged for his cell phone. Punched in the number of Walter Reed Medical Center and heard the familiar voice of the night nurse.

“Mr. McClure, how odd you should call at this moment. I was just about to dial your number.” She cleared her throat and when she began again her voice had taken on a formal, almost martial tenor. “At two fifty-three this morning, the former First Lady, Lyn Carson, expired.”

“She’s dead.” The echo of Emma’s voice caused another shiver to run down his spine.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the night nurse said.

“Have you notified Alli?”

“I haven’t yet, but as instructed I’ve called Mrs. Carson’s sister and her brother-in-law.” She meant Henry Holt Carson, Alli’s uncle. “As well as Secretary Paull, of course.”

“Okay.” Jack thumbed the sleep from his eyes as he swung his legs off the bed. “I’ll take care of informing Alli.” He padded toward the bathroom.

“Sir, is there anything—?”

“At the end … did she regain consciousness?”

“No, sir, she never did.”

“Stay with Mrs. Carson.” He squinted as he turned on the light. “I’ll be right over.”

*   *   *

“It’s the end of an era,” Dennis Paull said as he and Jack stood by Lyn Carson’s bedside.

No one knew that better than Jack. Ten months ago, he had been in the vehicle following the president’s limousine in Moscow when the limo had skidded on a patch of ice. Almost everyone in that car, including President Edward Harrison Carson, had died. All except Lyn Carson, who had slipped into a coma. Despite two surgeries, the first on board Air Force One, the second here at Walter Reed, she had failed to regain consciousness. Both procedures had succeeded only in prolonging her twilight life.

“Did you call Alli?”

Jack nodded. “Several times, and they said they’d get the message to her.”

“What about her cell?”

“Fearington has a strict policy about cell-phone use.” Fearington was the FBI Special Ops school in Virginia.

“Even for this?” Paull shook his head. He was now Jack’s boss. He had hired Jack after President Carson’s fatal accident. Jack, who had worked for ATF, had been tapped by Carson as a strategic advisor immediately following his old friend’s inauguration. That all ended as abruptly as it had begun, and Paull, seeing his opportunity, had scooped Jack up. Now Jack tackled the antiterrorism assignments that daunted Paull’s other agents, using his dyslexic mind to unravel puzzles no one else could handle.

“Rules are rules.”

Paull took out his phone. “We’ll see about that.” While he was waiting, he said, “You must’ve moved heaven and earth to get her in there.” Then he held up a finger. “No answer.” He closed the connection.

“Fearington periodically goes into lockdown as a drill.”

Paull nodded and put his phone into his pocket.

“But the truth is Alli did her own heavy lifting,” Jack went on. “She passed the entrance exams with the highest marks they’d seen in more than a decade.”

“Smart little thing.”

Jack snorted. “It takes more than smarts to get into Fearington. After her father was killed, she wouldn’t talk to anyone, even me. She curled up into an emotional ball. But there was so much anger inside her that when I took her to my gym, she slid on a pair of boxing gloves and started pounding the heavy bag.”

Paull laughed. “I’d like to have been a fly on the wall.”

“Yeah, she almost broke her right hand. Then I began to teach her how to box and, damn, if she didn’t pick up all the fundamentals right away. At first, she didn’t have a lot of power, as you can imagine, but then, I don’t know, something clicked inside her. She was like a ghost—it seemed as if she could anticipate my punches. She has this ability. By reading a person’s face she knows whether they’re lying or telling the truth. Now she’s extended this ability to knowing what they’re about to do.”

“So she put the boys down?”

“Did she ever!” Jack said. “But admiration wasn’t what she got from a lot of her classmates.”

Paull nodded. “I can only imagine. Fearington’s a men’s club. Didn’t you warn her?”

“Well, I reminded her.” Jack sighed. “Not that it did any good. She was determined. No one and nothing was going to get in her way.”

*   *   *

Alli Carson was pulled from sleep, roughly and without warning.

“Get up, Ms. Carson. Please be good enough to rouse yourself.”

Alli turned over, opened her eyes, and was almost blinded by the fierce glare from the overhead light. Who had turned it on, who was barking orders at her? Her mind, still fuzzed with the dream of Emma’s face glowing in the light of—what?—a streetlamp, a full moon, an unearthly luminescence?

“What is this? I don’t under—”

“Please do as I say, Ms. Carson, quickly, quickly!”

“Commander Fellows?”

“Yes,” Brice Fellows said. “Come, come, there’s no time to lose!”

She sat up. The oversized T-shirt she slept in was black, covered in white silk-screened skulls. Though twenty-three, she looked more like sixteen or seventeen. Graves’ disease had interfered with her growing, so that she was slight, almost pixieish, just over five feet in height, her tomboy figure more suited to an adolescent than an adult.

“Can you please tell me—?”

“Hurry, Ms. Carson. The police are outside.”

Fellows glanced around the dorm room, pointed to a chair on which she had casually tossed the clothes she had been wearing during dinner. Beyond was an empty bed with the covers pushed back.

“Where—where is Vera?” Alli asked.

“You don’t know what happened to her?”

“No, I don’t.” Beneath her anger at this treatment, she felt a wave of fear rising inside her. “She fell asleep before I did. She was there when I turned off the light.”

A catch in the commander’s voice. “Well, that, at least, is a relief.

“Now, please, Ms. Carson, get dressed.”

“Where is Vera?”

“She’s in the infirmary.”

A clutch in the pit of Alli’s stomach. “Is she okay?”

“At the moment I can’t say.”

“Commander, you’re scaring me.”

“Please, Ms. Carson, just do as I ask.”

Crossing to the chair, she drew on a pair of black jeans and a thick turtleneck sweater of the same color. She always dressed in black. Sitting on Vera’s bed, she placed her palms against the bottom sheet as if to make certain that Vera wasn’t there. Then, drawing her shoes over, she stepped into them.

“Here, you’ll need this.”

He passed her her leather jacket. She swung it around and zipped up.

“Come with me.”

She stood up, silently, with a fiercely beating heart.

Beyond her door, the hallway was only dimly lit, so as not to awaken the other recruits on the floor, she assumed. She saw two police detectives, a three-man forensics team, and a pair of Secret Service agents, one of whom, Naomi Wilde, had been the head of her mother’s detail. Cops and the Secret Service? What in the world had happened?

All at once, her heart skipped a beat. “Naomi, is Vera all right?”

“Keep your voice down.”

She turned to see three forensics techs snapping on latex gloves before they stepped into her room. Turning on the lights, they began to methodically go through it.

“What are they looking for?” Then Alli turned back to Naomi. “Please,” she begged. “Just tell me if Vera is okay.” But Naomi’s face was as blank as a field of snow.

“Ms. Bard is in the infirmary,” Naomi said.

“I already know that,” Alli said. Something in her voice had spoken of a forced detachment, which caused Alli’s stomach to clench in anxiety. If Naomi wasn’t in control of the situation …

“She’s been drugged. She was disoriented, sick to her stomach. She went out into the hallway without, apparently, knowing where she was, and collapsed. A security guard found her.”

“What?” A chill ran through Alli. “My God, how … who would do such a thing? I want to see her—!”

“Ms. Carson—”

“Hey, Vera’s the only one here who gives a damn about me.”

A member of the forensics team emerged from Alli’s room holding a plastic evidence bag with something in it. Approaching one of the Metro detectives, he handed over the bag and whispered in the detective’s ear, before disappearing back inside the room.

The Metro detective cocked his head. “Interesting you should say that now.”

Alli turned on him, her cheeks aflame. “What the hell does that mean?”

He held up the bag. “This bottle contains traces of Rohypnol. Roofies in common street parlance, the date-rape drug. It was found under your bed.”

“What?”

“You deny it’s yours?”

“Of course I deny it.”

“So it’s your claim that you didn’t drug your roommate?”

“What the what? Why on earth would I?”

“Please keep your voices down,” Commander Fellows interrupted.

“Ms. Carson,” the detective said in a steely voice, “I must insist you come with us now.”

She looked around. “Just let me find my cell phone.”

“The academy is in lockdown. You know the rules.” The commander gestured to the doorway. “This way, Ms. Carson.”

She knew better than to argue further with Fellows. He ran Fearington like an Army boot camp, and talking back would only get her into deeper trouble. Fearington was one of only a couple of elite academies that fed the government secret services. Like its brethren in other regions of the country, Fearington was a closely guarded secret. Its cadets were the cream of the crop, exhaustively vetted and tested before being chosen to fill its ranks. The courses were rigorous, both physically and intellectually. It had taken all of Jack’s skills to get Alli accepted into the examination phase; following Jack’s intensive tutelage, she had done the rest. But from the very first day, she had been acutely aware of the fact that she didn’t fit the traditional Fearington mold.

As she was marched down the hallway and out onto the grounds, she wondered dazedly why she was in trouble. Her legs were shaking and the core of her felt cold. Nevertheless, she had no choice but to take her first step into the nightmare.

*   *   *

“Gentlemen, what a surprise finding you here.”

This was how Henry Holt Carson, oldest brother of the late president, announced himself as he walked through the door into his sister-in-law’s room. Immensely wealthy and influential, he wore a silk-and-cashmere made-to-measure suit that Jack estimated must have cost at least five thousand dollars. On his feet were John Lobb shoes, mirror-shined, but not, Jack was certain, by Carson himself. His cold blue eyes, huge as an owl’s, studied them both, but failed, Jack noted, to even glance at Lyn’s corpse. But then, she was dead, Jack thought, and of no use to him.

“Interlopers to the end, I see.” His lopsided smile failed to blunt the barb of his remark.

He was in every way his brother’s polar opposite. A hard-nosed businessman, he distrusted and detested politicians, especially the ones he couldn’t buy off. He owned mining interests in the Midwest, for which he was forever buying pollution credits so he could continue pulling ore out of the ground and refining it. More recently, he had bought up a number of regional banks at bargain basement prices, merging them into one, InterPublic Bancorp. He had been married and divorced four times that Jack knew of. He had children, but, according to Edward, could neither remember their names nor what they looked like. He was an empire builder through and through. But, somehow, possibly because of his affection for all things familial, Edward had forgiven his brother his peccadillos and loved him as one ought to love a brother. It was anyone’s guess how the elder Carson felt about Edward. A rock might reveal more of its personal nature.

He moved into the apex of the triangle with them; he was the kind of man who was continually conscious of his power vis-à-vis those around him, perhaps out of a deep-seated sense of inferiority. After being expelled from high school for defecating on the principal’s chair, retaliation for some slight, imagined or real, he had toiled fifteen-hour days in an iron smelter’s, working his way up to foreman, then day manager, from which position he had obtained a bank loan in order to buy the company. From that moment on, the path of his life was set.

“We all had a deep and abiding fondness for Lyn,” Jack said.

“My brother’s wife has passed to her final reward, McClure.” Henry Holt Carson’s head, as round as a medicine ball and almost as large, swiveled in his direction. “She doesn’t give a good goddamn whether you’re here or not. If she ever did.” This unnatural head, with its great eyes and turnip nose, sat atop sloping shoulders seemingly without the benefit of a neck. He had the overlarge, rough, slabbed hands of a hod carrier, and his face was deeply scored by wind, sun, and backbreaking work. Though he was now an owner, he made it an ironclad rule never to sit behind a desk. He was vocal in his contempt for those who, as he put it, were that disgusting modern mythological beast, half man, half chair. As a consequence, he never sat when he could stand, never walked when he could run. And he never spoke when he could order or accuse.

Now he looked around. “Why isn’t my niece here?” Dark clouds gathered along his brow. “Has she been informed?”

“We tried.” Paull’s voice was mild and even. “It seems that Fearington is in lockdown.”

The clouds were fulminating. “At this ungodly hour?”

“Rehearsal lockdowns are designed to come at inconvenient times,” Jack said. “As in real life.”

“Indeed.” Which was what Henry Holt Carson said when he didn’t know how to respond and didn’t want to lose momentum. He abhorred silence the way nature abhors a vacuum. “This is unacceptable. The girl needs to know the altered state of her mother.”

“Is that what you call it?” Jack said.

“Listen, you”—Carson’s stubby forefinger stabbed the air like a dagger—“you’ve already done enough to that girl. As far as this family is concerned, you’re a fucking menace.”

“Oh, I see. This isn’t about Alli at all, is it?”

Carson took a step toward him. “The fuck it isn’t.”

Paull put his hands up. “Rancor isn’t appropriate, especially at this moment.”

The two men ignored him, glaring fixedly at each other.

“The. Fuck. It. Isn’t,” Carson repeated, emphasizing each word with a degree of menace. “And then you go and let my brother get killed.”

“Now it comes out. No one could have—”

“You should have.” Carson squared his shoulders like a linebacker ready to make an open field tackle. “I mean, that’s what Eddie was always saying about you—Jack can do this, Jack can do that. According to him you were a fucking wizard.”

“He had a squad of Secret Service agents whose job it was—”

“They weren’t you, McClure.” He was up on the balls of his feet now, his hands curled into fists. “They. Weren’t. You.”

At that moment, Paull’s phone burred. Something about the moment, the phone ringing in the dead of night, or the portentousness of the sound, stopped the escalating argument in its tracks.

The two men stared at Paull as he drew out the phone, checked the number on the readout, then took the call. For what seemed the longest time he said not a word. But his gray eyes slid across the room and met Jack’s. His expression was not encouraging.

“All right,” he said at length. “Make certain nothing gets out of control.” He sighed. “Yes, I know it’s already out of control. I meant—for God’s sake use your head, man!—don’t let it go any further. I’ll be right there.”

He closed the phone and stood staring into space for some time.

“Well,” Jack prompted, “what is it?”

Paull, seeking to pull himself together, turned to Jack. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and said, “That was Naomi Wilde.”

Jack’s adrenaline started to flow. “The Secret Service agent?”

Paull nodded. “She’s at Fearington. The lockdown isn’t a drill, Jack.”

*   *   *

Fearington’s grounds were as dark as an abandoned coal mine. Not a light shone, not a figure could be seen in the blackness where trees, training courses, and firing ranges loomed. It was as if she and her detail were the only ones on the academy campus as they crunched through a thin layer of frost. Her breath appeared before her like an apparition. Then, from behind her, lights popped on in the dorm rooms, first one, then others, like eyes opening. Heads in silhouette told her that some of her fellow classmates had been roused, despite the stealth of her detail.

She was led across the campus. Not a word was spoken. She could hear the soft crunch of their shoes in the icy grass, the brief slither of material against material. Just last week there were patches of snow, like the last tufts on a balding man’s scalp. Still, the cops’ shoulders were hunched against the chill. Out past the obstacle course, they turned left into a dense copse of towering beech trees, and she felt even more surrounded, hemmed in, and helpless.

All at once, the lead detective murmured into his wireless mike and three huge generator-driven floodlights snapped on, one after the other. They were trained on a space between the trunks of two trees. Alli gasped and, staggering, almost fell. Only the hand of Naomi Wilde, cupped around her elbow, kept her from pitching headlong onto the bed of fallen leaves.

There, in the midst of the Fearington campus, was the naked body of a young male. He was upside down, his ankles and wrists bound and tied to the tree trunks. His skin was a sickening blue-white.

Alli, staring at Billy’s body, felt the familiar steel wall spontaneously spring up, shielding her from trauma. Her unconscious had manufactured this mental wall during her weeklong captivity; it was a defense mechanism over which she had no control. She felt the disassociation, the sense of watching a movie instead of living life. This was happening to another girl, the protagonist of the film. She remained perfectly impassive, watching the film as, frame by frame, it unspooled toward its unknown climax and denouement.

After some time, she became aware that the others had come to a halt and now stood in a semicircle with her roughly in its center. They were all staring at her with the stern demeanor of tribunal judges. Her mind was filled with the ominous rat-tat-tat of military drums, and with a determined effort she put this, too, beyond the barrier of her inner wall.

One of the detectives, a beefy man with the splayed stance of a flatfoot, was directly behind her, and she heard his voice now.

“Well?”

Alli, spellbound in horror, felt her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth. She could not utter a word.

“What, no shock, no hysteria, not a tear shed?” Flatfoot said with a voice like an ice floe. “Christ, you’re a cold bitch.” He pressed his fingertips against her shoulder blades, propelling her forward. “Here is William Warren.” He came after her, like a hunter with the fox in his sights. “You knew him, oh, yeah, you did.” His laugh was like the braying of a mule. “You and he did what together behind that big old tree?”

2

Commander Fellows took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “It’s a beautiful night.” He cocked his head. “That’s a nightingale singing, very peaceful, very romantic.” He turned to her. “This is the spot, isn’t it?”

“What spot?”

The detective’s voice grew quills. “You know what spot, Ms. Carson. This is the trysting spot where you and the victim—”

“William,” Alli said. “He has a name.”

Commander Fellows appeared to have difficulty pulling himself together. He cleared his throat, but said nothing.

Alli was studying the ground at her feet. “Won’t someone have the decency to at least cover him up?”

“This is a crime scene,” one of the Metro detectives said in a weary voice. “Premeditated murder. A capital offense.”

“The ME isn’t here yet,” said Flatfoot. “Nothing gets touched until he’s done his thing.”

Alli could see the lie on his bulldog face as surely as if it were a new scar livid on his cheek. More likely the ME had been ordered to hold off until they could get her here to see the atrocity in all its grisly panoply. Why? Ordered by whom? She racked her brains for answers, but the buzzing inside her head, caused by the pulsing of adrenaline, kept her from thinking clearly.

In the end, she turned to Naomi. “You know me, tell them I couldn’t have committed such a horrible crime.”

Naomi’s partner, a square man with a mole on his chin, said, “We aren’t authorized to get involved.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I was assigned to the FLOTUS and to Alli,” Naomi said. “I have a personal stake in the matter.”

Fellows cleared his throat. “Ms. Carson, I want you to know that I think highly of you—very highly, despite your … despite the traumatic experiences of your … your recent past.”

Fellows was gripping his hands in a link-fingered ball, flexing the fingers back and forth in a rhythm that reminded Alli of crazy Captain Queeq and his stainless steel balls.

“We’ve had a hotly contested internal debate regarding your, er, psychological break. A number of prominent board members feel strongly that the pressures you have been subjected to are a cause for concern and, I must admit, review.”

“What?” Alli said. “I’m acing all my courses. Ask any instructor.”

“And then there’s the matter of your, uhm, diminutive size.”

“And yet these Metro yardbirds seem to think this little slip of a thing could kill a big, strong, healthy man and string him up upside down between two trees.”

The first detective, clearly of higher rank than Flatfoot, stepped into the circle. He had prematurely white hair, stooped shoulders, and a bad case of razor burn. His name was Willowicz and his partner was O’Banion. He beckoned her to follow him as he went around the body to the back. There, he switched on a flashlight, illuminating a kind of scaffold, roughly made of tree branches lashed together with twine, onto which Billy’s body had been strung. A rope, invisible from the front, was tied to the top of the scaffold. It rose straight up into the tree, where it had been looped around a thick branch. The other end hung down.

Willowicz took hold of the free end of the rope with a hand encased in a latex glove, and tugged. “You see how this works, Ms. Carson. The victim was attacked, his body was affixed to the scaffold as it lay on the ground. Clearly, the killer had prepared ahead of time. Looping the rope over the branch created a fulcrum which made it possible to hoist the corpse into the vertical position it’s in now.” He paused, a small smile creeping into his face. “Anyone could do it, I assure you, even you.”

“But then you already knew that,” O’Banion said.

“You’re grotesque,” Alli said, “you know that?”

His laugh was as grating as nails on a chalkboard.

Willowicz led her back around to the front. “As you can see, the victim has been stabbed, not once or twice, or even a half-dozen times, but repeatedly, beyond…” He turned back to her. “A preliminary count has taken us past fifty. I’m quite certain there are more.”

“That’s why he bled to death?”

“No.” Willowicz pointed. “The vast majority of the cuts are superficial, barely scoring the subcutaneous layers. But they were all near nerve ganglia.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Alli said, “You’re saying that Billy was tortured.”

She did not miss the sharp glance exchanged by the detective and Commander Fellows.

“Do you think he was tortured, Ms. Carson?” Willowicz said.

“Well, the evidence points to it, doesn’t it.” She paused, her terror, horror, and grief once again threatening to overwhelm her. At once, she was cast back into the nightmare of her weeklong imprisonment. Then she took a mental step back, as Jack had taught her to do, disengaging herself from the intimacy of emotions. It was imperative now for her to think clearly and reason the situation out, which she was unable to do when overcome with emotion. Billy was dead, she had to accept that. All death is terrible, but this was beyond comprehension. Why would anyone torture Billy, and then attempt to frame her? “However, that theory leaves one question unanswered.”

Willowicz put his hands behind his back. “And what might that be?”

“I don’t know,” Peter McKinsey, Naomi Wilde’s partner, said. “You seem awfully cool for someone whose lover of five months has been brutalized and killed.”

“If you’ve got nothing constructive to contribute, fuck off,” Alli said. Addressing Willowicz, she said, “You said he bled to death. None of these subcutaneous cuts, even en masse, would have done the trick.”

Again, that sharp look was exchanged by Willowicz and Fellows.

“So how did poor Billy die?” Alli said.

Willowicz beckoned with a crooked forefinger. Something about his demeanor reminded Alli of a Grimm’s fairy tale witch or ogre, anyway someone delighted to be up to no good. “Come closer.”

She walked over the uneven ground. The crunch of even her light weight pierced the paper-thin layer of ice, and with each step she seemed to sink farther into the boggy ground beneath.

A sickly smell enveloped Billy, of rotten meat, ice cream, and fecal matter. She gagged once, and then, because everyone’s attention was on her, caught hold of herself and fought down her rising gorge. Billy’s eyes were so swollen and bruised she had first thought they were covered in flies. Deep contusions showed around the spiderweb of cuts like dark clouds gathering around the heart of a storm. His face was so distorted that, close up, she scarcely recognized him. There could be only one reason why he had been slowly and systematically taken apart.

“What did he know?”

“Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it,” O’Banion said. “The other is that there was a single killer. A crime of passion.”

“You’re still at this angle,” Alli said.

“We go by the odds,” said Willowicz. “In these cases, the person closest to the vic is the perpetrator.”

“Not this time.”

Both detectives regarded her stonily.

Naomi Wilde, never far from her since she had stumbled, said, “We thought you might be able to shed some light on what happened here.”

Alli said nothing, but delivered an Et tu, Brutus glower. Then, she turned to the corpse and looked into Billy’s face, trying to stare past the terrible beating he had sustained, into the mind of the boy she had known, briefly but wildly. Even before she had been traumatized by her kidnapping and brainwashing two years ago, she had had difficulty with intimacy. She was embarrassed and ashamed of her body, which was small and immature. Now, through first Jack’s and then the academy’s help with physical training, her arms and legs were toned. But to her they still looked like a girl’s limbs, totally lacking the womanly curves of her contemporaries.

Naomi wrapped an arm around Alli’s shoulders. “Whatever you know, you have to tell us.”

“All I know is that I had nothing to do with this monstrous … this atrocity.” She shook her head. “It’s beyond me how anyone could do this to another human being.” If Jack were here he’d know that for a lie. During her time with him and Annika in Russia and the Ukraine she had witnessed examples of the hatred and contempt for human life some people harbor deep in their hearts or just beneath their skin. And with the Russian agent Annika, at least, she had discovered depths of human betrayal she had not even been able to imagine, even growing up in the snake pit of American politics.

“Ms. Carson,” Willowicz said, “no one believes you don’t know what happened here.”

Alli felt her heart constrict. “How can you say that?”

“You and the victim were having an affair—illicitly, as it happens, on the grounds of the academy. But two days ago something happened. The two of you were seen in an argument—rather violent, from all reports—in a bar in town. Harsh words were exchanged. As a result, he stalked out.”

“So, what, you think I tortured him and strung him up like an attic ham in revenge?”

“The theory tracks,” O’Banion said. “It hits closest to home.”

Alli shook her head. She had fallen down the rabbit hole, and now was sinking deeper and deeper into Nightmareland.

“Maybe he had another girl on the side and you found out. Maybe he was fed up with you.” O’Banion shrugged, as if whichever motive it turned out to be made no difference to him.

Alli stared at him. “You’re an idiot.”

When he took a step toward her, Naomi intervened. O’Banion’s eyes were yellow and feral as he squinted over the agent’s shoulder. “You think because you’re the president’s daughter you can talk to us like that? Fuck you!”

“Now, hold on,” Naomi said.

“And, by the way,” he said to Alli, “your old man was a dickhead.”

McKinsey became a shield between the detective and Alli. “Calm down.”

“And fuck you, too, sonny! You better tell her to watch her mouth.”

“Back off, Bluto,” Naomi said.

“Screw you, nanny dearest.”

When the detective remained rooted as a tree, she lowered her voice. “I said back the fuck off, or I will take you in for disobeying an order from a federal agent.”

A pulse beat furiously in O’Banion’s temple, then he turned his head and spat onto the ground. “Remember what I said.” He pointed to Alli as he returned to his previous position.

Willowicz, who had observed the escalating emotions through skeptical eyes, now stepped up. “This is a homicide—a civilian homicide. As I see it, you and the woman are here to ensure the safety of the late president’s daughter. My partner and I appreciate your role in this matter, really we do. But the fact remains that this crime is in our jurisdiction and is under our purview. I control the crime scene, I control the interrogations.” He flipped open an old-fashioned notebook. “Now here’s how I see matters falling out. We have a murder of both premeditation and deep emotion, but we have no witnesses. Commander Fellows here has assured us that no outsider has breached the academy’s perimeter tonight.”

“Billy had no trouble—”

“We have filled that breach, Ms. Carson,” Fellows said icily. “I can assure you that there are no others.”

Willowicz looked from Alli to Fellows, as if they were combatants, before he continued. “So, no interlopers. But your roommate, Ms. Carson, was drugged … at about midnight, Fearington’s doctor estimates.”

“I was asleep,” Alli said.

“Well, the problem there is the only person who could corroborate your claim can’t.” Licking his fingertip, he turned a page in his notebook. “Which means that at any time after lights out you could’ve stolen out of your room and, if you were careful enough—well, pretty much gone anywhere on the grounds unobserved, am I correct?”

He was looking directly at Alli, but she said nothing, principally because an idea was dawning on her, and the horror of why these people were so insistent on pinning Billy’s murder on her literally took her breath away.

“So you had opportunity. Tell us a little about the victim.”

She took a couple of deep breaths in an attempt to regain her composure. “Billy worked at Middle Bay Bancorp. He was a loan analyst.”

“Sounds like a snoozer.” O’Banion looked her up and down. “Still waters, yeah.”

Willowicz pursed his lips. “How’d you hook up with him?”

Alli tried to ignore the insinuation, but found herself rising to the bait anyway. “We met at a bar.”

“Uh-huh. Which one?”

“Twilight. In Georgetown.”

Willowicz made a notation. “Yeah, been there for twenty years.”

“The bar for vampires.” O’Banion guffawed.

Willowicz ignored him. “What did he do when you approached him?”

Alli’s cheeks flamed. “He came up to me. I was dancing and—”

“What?” O’Banion interjected. “Like pole dancing?”

Alli’s cheeks continued to flush. “He came up to me, like I said.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Maybe. A little. I don’t know.”

Willowicz nodded. “Then what?”

“We danced … together.”

“And things progressed from there.”

“Oh so very fast.” O’Banion leered.

“And this first meeting was how long ago?”

“About five months.”

“And you’ve been seeing the victim ever since.”

“Yes.”

“When did you see him last?”

A slight hesitation, for which she could have bitten her tongue. “This evening—well, yesterday, now.”

Willowicz’s head came up like a pointer scenting game. “When, exactly?”

“After dinner. About eight.”

“Did you have permission to leave Fearington?”

Alli shifted from one foot to another. “No.”

“So you sneaked out.”

Alli stared at him, unflinching. She had no wish to look at Commander Fellows. “Billy begged me. He said it was urgent.”

“Uh-huh.” Willowicz was scribbling some more. “And?”

“And that’s it. I never found out what he wanted to talk to me about.”

Willowicz’s eyebrow arched. “Why was that?”

“I was supposed to meet him at Twilight. Just as I came around the corner, I saw him walk off with someone.”

“Who?”

“I have no idea.”

“Man or woman?”

“The person’s back was to me.”

“Tall, short, thin, fat?”

“The figure was in shadow.”

“So it could have been a woman.”

Silence.

“Your contention is that you never spoke to the victim at any time yesterday?”

“No, as I said, he and I had a brief phone conversation.”

“You never spoke face-to-face.”

“No.”

In typical interrogator’s style, Willowicz now switched subjects without warning. “And so you had motive.”

“Motive,” Alli said, taken aback. “What motive?”

Again, Willowicz turned a page. “As it happens, the victim had met someone—a week ago. Her name is … let’s see, Kraja. Arjeta Kraja.”

“Fucking foreign names.” O’Banion snickered. No one else moved or said a word.

Willowicz looked up from his notes. “You know this Arjeta Kraja, Ms. Carson? Ever met her?”

“No,” Alli said. “No, I haven’t.”

“Interesting.” Willowicz held out his hand and O’Banion placed something in it.

When Alli saw that it was a photo, her heart sank. Reluctantly, she took it when Willowicz handed it over, a surveillance photo of three people talking casually outside a local bar.

“Man, she’s smokin’ hot,” O’Banion said.

“Ms. Carson,” Willowicz said, “would you be good enough to identify the young woman with you and William Warren.”

Of course it was Arjeta Kraja.

*   *   *

On their way out of the hospital, Henry Holt Carson said, “Mr. Secretary, I believe your phone’s about to ring,” just as Paull’s phone buzzed.

Paull gave him a sharp glance.

“I think you’d better answer it,” Carson said with a perfectly straight face. The gloating was all in his voice.

Paull thumbed on the cell phone and put it to his ear. He listened for close to ten seconds before he said, “Yes, sir,” and closed the connection. “Jack, go on ahead. I’ve got an appointment at the White House.”

“At this hour?” Jack said.

“This president never sleeps,” Carson said. Then, turning to Jack, he said, “Why don’t I give you a lift?”

“I have my own car—”

Carson waved a hand. “I’ll have someone come and fetch it.”

Jack recognized a summons when he heard one. He watched his boss cross the parking lot and approach his car. Stars were blurred by the city’s artificial dome of light and the slow creep of dawn. A chilly wind blew off the Potomac with a dampness that pierced his thick coat like a spear.

Jack turned back to Carson. “What’s going on?”

Carson shrugged his meaty shoulders. “Why ask me?”

“Because,” Jack said, “you seem to have orchestrated this entire scene.”

Carson appeared unperturbed.

Jack hurried to Carson’s Navigator and they climbed into the backseat. Carson’s driver turned the SUV around and drove away from the hospital.

Jack turned to Carson. “Now what the hell was that all about?”

Carson held up a finger. “Excuse me.” He punched in a number on his PDA. After a moment, he said, “Harrison, it’s Henry.… Yes, damnit, I’m well aware of the time. Get dressed and haul your ass over to Fearington Academy.… Nothing, I hope, but on the other hand my niece seems to be in trouble.… What sort? I’ve no damn idea.”

After he closed the connection, he sat brooding and silent.

Jack said, “Who are you bringing on board?”

“My lawyer, Harrison Jenkins.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“I hope not, but the world doesn’t run on hope.”

They drove on in a fulminating silence. Sitting next to Henry Holt Carson was akin to living near a blast furnace going full bore.

“You never answered my question about orchestrating that scene back there with Dennis.”

“Persistent little fucker, aren’t you?”

“That’s no answer.”

“I’ve been around politicians all my life.” Carson stared straight ahead, his arms folded across his chest. “Say, I don’t have to be worried, do I?”

“About what?”

“You being able to read the street signs, that’s what.” He glanced in Jack’s direction, though not directly at him. “Dyslexia’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

“Especially,” Jack said, “if you know nothing about it.”

Carson laughed with his teeth bared. “You’re a fuckup, Jack. I’ll never forgive you for my brother’s death.”

“That’s your choice,” Jack said. “But in the same way you’re ignorant about dyslexia, you know nothing about Edward’s death or the circumstances leading up to it.”

“I’m uninterested in your litany of excuses, McClure.”

“We’re like oil and water,” Jack said, “destined never to inhabit the same space.”

Carson grunted. “What the hell my brother saw in you is beyond me, McClure. And the fact he allowed you unlimited access to Alli was a grave mistake.”

“Alli is an adult. She can make her own decisions.”

“She’s a psychological train wreck and you know it. Kidnapped, brainwashed, traumatized further by her father’s sudden death and her mother lingering on in a vegetative state.” He shook his head. “No, what she needs is the firm guidance of an adult who cares about her.”

“She has me.”

“And how’s that going?”

They had drawn up to the front gates of Fearington Academy, which was ablaze with the blinding dazzle of cop cars and unmarked vehicles. After showing their credentials to three different police in ascending order of rank, they were directed and waved through. The car crunched the gravel as Jack headed toward the obstacle course to the left of the main building.

Henry Holt Carson leaned over slightly. “My brother allowed you too much control over Alli, McClure. That’s a mistake I aim to correct tonight.”

3

“Well, here’s something you don’t see every day.”

The ME, a tall, rangy man in his midfifties with skin like a lizard and eyes like burnt-out pits, was crouched just to the right of Billy Warren’s corpse. His name was Bit Saunderson; he viewed corpses the way a philatelist views stamps. His forensic people had snapped photos from every conceivable angle, taken shoe prints from the crime scene area, and had departed as silently as clouds drift across the sky.

“Look here.”

He was speaking to Willowicz, but no one stopped Alli from having a look herself. Saunderson’s knees creaked like masts at sea as he moved to give them a view of the side of the corpse’s neck.

“Yeah, we noticed,” Willowicz said, “but what the fuck is it?”

“It’s a bit of a plastic straw. See, it’s pink-and-white striped.” Saunderson touched the protruding end with the tip of his gloved finger. “Neatly punctured the carotid, too. This is how your victim exsanguinated.”

Willowicz scratched his razor-burned jaw. “That speaks to a working knowledge of the human body.”

“Anatomy is a first-semester class at Fearington.” Commander Fellows had begun to look green around the gills.

“Aced her courses, she said,” O’Banion growled as he took up position directly behind Alli.

Naomi Wilde frowned as she bent over for a look. “But why a straw, of all things?”

O’Banion was virtually breathing fumes from his sour stomach down Alli’s neck. “Why don’t you ask her?”

Saunderson turned his half-dead face up to Wilde. “Like sucking an ice-cream soda, you can control the volume of flow.”

A deep and horrific silence ensued, which ended abruptly with O’Banion’s bray. “Doc, please, you’re telling us that Ms. Carson might be a vampire?”

“You’ve been seeing too many horror films, O’Banion.” The ME shook his head. “No, this is something far worse. Your perp is a deeply disturbed individual—a psychopath, though there’s nothing textbook about him. He—”

“Or she.” O’Banion stared at the back of Alli’s head with newfound venom.

Saunderson took a breath. “Your killer is both a sadist and, I would venture to guess, insane, or at least has become unhinged.”

“Traumatized,” Willowicz said. He, too, was watching Alli as if she were already in a cage. “As from a terrible ordeal.”

Saunderson, clueless as to his true meaning, nodded. “Something in the past, yes, that’s a distinct probability with psychosis.” He tapped the straw. “Who else would think of varying the flow of blood in order to prolong a victim’s agony?”

*   *   *

Harrison Jenkins, Carson’s attorney, drove up minutes after Jack had exited the car. Carson was walking back and forth over the frosty ground like a caged animal impatient to be fed. Jenkins was one of those sleek men you see giving sound bites on CNN or Fox News. His gray hair was thick, and long enough to cover the tops of his ears, his cheeks were a healthy pink, and, Jack noted, he had perfectly manicured nails that shone like ten tiny mirrors. He gave the impression of being tall, but up close he was less than median height, maybe five six. He was carrying a battered leather briefcase. His expensive overcoat was open, revealing a steel-gray suit, white shirt, and a striped red tie. There was an enamel pin of the American flag on the lapel of his overcoat. All he needed, Jack thought, was a bald eagle perched on his shoulder. He walked like a lawyer should, as if he owned the ground over which he strode. Jack supposed he should be grateful for Jenkins’s appearance, but something about the man chilled him.

Carson whirled around when he saw his attorney approach.

“Anything more you can tell me?” Jenkins asked as he pumped Carson’s hand.

Carson shook his head. When he introduced Jack, a small, secret smile played briefly across Jenkins’s face. Then he asked Jack to brief him on Alli’s recent history.

When he had finished, the attorney said, “In your opinion, as of today, is she of sound mind?”

“Absolutely,” Jack said.

“I strongly disagree,” Carson responded.

Jenkins blew air through his nostrils like a racehorse at the starting gate. Then, putting his PDA to his ear, he walked several paces away from them and spoke into it for several moments. When he returned, he said, “Right, let’s get this show on the road.”

Following the directions they’d been given, they skirted the obstacle course, where shapes reared up out of the gloom of a false dawn like pieces of a wrecked ship, then they descended a shallow embankment via a set of narrow stairs, and almost immediately turned left, threading their way through a copse of old trees that smelled of leaf mold and loam. Up ahead was a fierce pool of light, as concentrated as a key spot illuminating an actor on stage. In this case, however, the actor wasn’t moving.

Jack felt as if he were in an elevator whose cable had been cut.

“Jesus Christ,” Carson muttered, “what the hell is this?”

Then Jack saw Alli walking toward them out of the blinding light. She was between two suits who looked to him like Metro police detectives. Behind them came Naomi, McKinsey, and Commander Fellows, but Jack’s attention was riveted on Alli. She was in handcuffs. He began to make a move, but Jenkins, anticipating him, grabbed his arm to restrain him.

“In these matters I’ve found that methodology is better than instinct,” he said softly, so only Jack could hear.

“For God’s sake, she’s been arrested.”

“Mr. McClure, let me handle it.”

Jack, after a moment’s thought, allowed Jenkins, whatever his reaction to the horror of the crime scene, to take point. The lawyer strode toward the semicircle of people, with Jack and Carson flanking him, as if they were a raiding party. The moment she spied Jack, Alli’s eyes lit up, but despite how well she seemed to be holding up Jack could tell that she was badly shaken.

“Do you think that’s a wise move, Detective O’Banion?” Jenkins said.

O’Banion looked blankly at Jenkins. “Who the hell’re you and how d’you know my name?”

“I’m Ms. Carson’s attorney, Harrison Jenkins.”

O’Banion sneered. “An ambulance chaser.”

“Watch yourself, Officer,” Jenkins said.

“I’m a detective.”

“Then act like one.”

When O’Banion continued to glower at him, Willowicz stepped up. “Alli Carson is under arrest for the murder of William Penn Warren.”

“I assume, Detective Willowicz, that you’re referring to the victim strung up behind you,” the lawyer said as he picked his way among the trees.

“D’you know what’s in my service jacket, as well?” Willowicz said in a mild tone of voice.

Jenkins nodded. “Everything I need to know. Wounded twice in the line of duty, a medal of honor.”

All this from the one phone call Jenkins had made. Jack was impressed, despite himself. He despised lawyers almost as much as O’Banion, because they had a knack of knitting a skein of gray areas and half-truths into a story a jury could believe in.

“Jack, this is a crazy mistake,” Alli said. “Please listen to me.” She recounted what had happened and how she had come to be a suspect in William Penn Warren’s torture and murder.

“All of this is circumstantial,” Jenkins said, unperturbed.

Willowicz nodded. “True enough.” He held up a plastic evidence bag. “On the other hand, our forensic team found a vial with traces of Rohypnol under Ms. Carson’s bed and this bloody knife in a trash bin behind her dorm room.”

“Please hand them over, and whatever other evidence you have,” Jenkins said.

“What?” O’Banion stood with his feet planted in a clearly combative stance. “Back off, windbag, this is our jurisdiction.”

The small, secret smile Jack had noticed earlier had returned to Jenkins’s face. “Tell me, Detectives, just how did you wind up at the scene of the crime?”

“We caught Commander Fellows’s call,” Willowicz said.

“So, what you’re telling me is that the commander invited you here to Fearington.”

“That’s right,” O’Banion said.

Jack could already see the changed situation dawning on Willowicz’s face.

“Fearington is federal property,” Jenkins said.

“What?” both detectives said at once.

“The federal government bought this parcel three years ago.”

Jack knew a cue when he heard it. Stepping forward, he presented his ID. “Jack McClure, Department of Homeland Security. You have no jurisdiction here. I’ll be taking over this case, Detectives.”

“Oh, you’ve fucking got to be kidding,” O’Banion said.

Willowicz said nothing because he knew which way the wind was blowing. He handed over the bags with the vial and the bloody knife.

“What’s this?” The ME appeared out of the trees. “Those are my evidence bags.”

Jack showed his ID. “Not anymore.”

“How is this homicide a matter of national security?” Saunderson looked put out.

“That’s a matter of national security,” Jack said.

“But the body—”

“I’ll take care of the body.”

The ME looked alarmed. “This is highly irregular.”

Ignoring him, Jack turned to Alli. “Uncuff her,” he said.

O’Banion took out the manacle key. “We won’t be forgetting this.”

Keeping his eyes on Alli, Jack beckoned to her the instant she was free. But before she could get to him, Jenkins intervened and, taking her by the elbow, steered her away from Jack, toward her uncle.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jack said.

“Taking my niece to a place of safety,” Carson said.

“You have no—”

“Leave it this way, Mr. McClure,” Jenkins said in a low voice. “If you take Ms. Carson into custody it will look bad for her when I go before a federal judge tomorrow.”

“But—”

“Henry is family. He’s got power and influence, which is what she needs right now.” Jenkins caught Jack’s eye. “You can see this is the best course for Ms. Carson.” He cast a glance at the departing cops and ME. “In any event, you’re needed here. If you’re taking over the case, you need to examine the crime scene as well as interview Detectives Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee before they can get together and cook up a story.” Seeing Jack’s gaze wandering to Alli, he added, “Besides, you heard what O’Banion said: ‘We won’t be forgetting this.’ I need you to ride herd on him, make sure he doesn’t make good on that threat.” He smiled. “That’s what you folks do best, isn’t it, deflect threats. So do it.”

*   *   *

Dennis Paull passed through the six layers of security to reach the West Wing, then was vetted one more time, though in a totally different way, by Alix, the president’s press secretary. Paull liked her far more than he did the president. Arlen Crawford, a big, rangy, sun-scarred Texan, had been Edward’s vice president, a marriage of political convenience that had pleased neither man. Each was strong where the other was weak, but their political ideas, and, worse, ideals, had worked at cross-purposes.

“Morning, Dennis,” Alix said cheerfully, “I see we’re all up early today.”

“Duty calls.”

She nodded. “So I heard.”

They began to walk together toward the Oval Office.

“How are things with your daughter and grandson?”

“Claire and Aaron are settling down nicely, thanks.”

“It was fun meeting them.”

“Aaron hasn’t stopped talking about you.” He laughed. “I don’t know what you did to impress him—”

“I let him wear Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Rider hat.”

Paull nodded. “That would do it, all right.”

They were now nearing the door to the Oval Office and Alix stopped, her face suddenly grave. “Dennis, you know I’m a loyal person. I work for the Old Man, but…”

He paused, waiting and suddenly on edge.

“I just … well, I just wanted to say watch your back.”

Before he could formulate an answer, she had stepped forward, planted a kiss on his cheek, and was heading back down the red-carpeted hallway. He turned. It was deathly still. Even the faint whisper of air from the hidden vents seemed ominous.

Nestling Alix’s nugget of intel in the forefront of his mind, he rapped sharply on the thick double doors, turned the knob, and entered.

Dawn had come, seeping through the thick-curtained windows. The president was alone, which surprised Paull. He was sitting on one of the matching sofas that faced each other in the area in front of his desk. On the low glass-topped table was a chased silver tray and an antique silver service from which Crawford was pouring himself a cup of coffee. Significantly, beside the tray lay a black dossier with the yellow EYES ONLY stripe across its cover.

“Dennis, come on in.” He gestured. “Good of you to join me.”

In his soft, West Texas accent he made it seem as if Paull had had a choice.

“Help yourself,” the president said, stirring in a tablespoonful of sugar. “The tarts and hot cross buns are just out of the oven.”

Seating himself across from the president, Paull poured a cup of coffee and took a hot cross bun on a small china plate. Fully concentrated on Crawford, he neither drank nor ate. Crawford had proved himself the kind of man who takes to the presidency the way a chef takes to the cutting board. In the space of the ten months since he had ascended to the highest office, he had quietly but methodically dismantled all of his predecessor’s initiatives, replacing them with others that conformed to his conservative agenda.

“Sorry to get you out of bed at this hour.”

“I was already up,” Paull said. “Your call caught me at Walter Reed.”

“You’re not ill, are you, Dennis?”

“No, sir. Lyn Carson died.”

“Ah.” The president put down his cup and stared up at the ceiling, as if watching out for Lyn in heaven. “Sad business, Dennis. My condolences. I know how close you were with the family.”

Paull couldn’t help but ponder the question of a double meaning. When he was with Crawford he was always aware that he had been one of Edward Carson’s closest friends and advisors, even though in his first meeting with Crawford after he’d been sworn in as president, he said to Paull, “I just want you to know, Dennis, that I value loyalty above all other traits.”

Leaning forward, Crawford refilled his cup. As he sat back, he gestured at the dossier. “We have one helluva problem.”

Paull took the file onto his lap and opened it. On top of a significant pile of papers was a black-and-white photo, a head shot of a man who Paull judged to be somewhere between forty and forty-five. It was impossible to see the face clearly or even to make out particular features, other than a full beard. It could be anyone.

“Who the hell is this?” he said.

“It’s not so much who,” the president said, “as what.” He cleared his throat, watching as Paull began to leaf through the intel that lay below the image. “His name, as you can see, is Arian Xhafa.” He pronounced the last word “Shafa.”

“He’s Albanian,” Paull said. “Why should we care about him?”

“That’s what I thought,” Crawford said. “Read on.”

Paull did, rustling pages as he scanned them. Xhafa was the kingpin of the Albanian Mafia, of which there were at least twenty competing clans. That is, before Xhafa’s rise to power. Like Mao or Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of feudal Japan, Xhafa had vision—more than that he had the muscle to cajole, bully, extort, murder, and maim his way to the top of the heap by uniting all the clans.

“He calls his men freedom fighters,” the president said, “and I suppose in some respects they are—fighting for Albanian freedom in Macedonia. But their true business is smuggling, though by the evidence in your hands, they’re not averse to a bit of murder-for-hire. There.” He pointed. “Read the particulars on that page.”

Paull ran his finger down the sheet. Three hundred Macedonian soldiers slaughtered in Bitola, almost the same number in a pitched battle on the outskirts of Resen. The text was punctuated by highly graphic photos of mass graves, gaping pits filled with bodies, exposed to the photographer’s lens like raw wounds. Firefights in the mountain villages around Struga, resulting in ruins, cindered, smoking as if just leveled. Scattered around were charred bodies, warped and curled, barely recognizable as being human. The next page held more horrors, a series of photos showing the victims of assassinations, both inside Macedonia and in more far-flung places, such as Greece, southern Italy, even Turkey and Russia, that Xhafa or his people were suspected of carrying out. These areas were so remote, the countries involved of so little interest to Americans, that the atrocities barely made any of the papers and certainly were not rating fodder for CNN or FOX, let alone the three legacy networks.

“This fucker’s a real live monster,” the president said with obvious distaste. “No one’s going to give a crap how we take him out, guaranteed.”

But that would be far from easy. Xhafa’s base was the impregnable city of Tetovo, in western Macedonia—coordinates 42° 0' 38" North, 20° 58' 17" East—an area as wild and lawless as Afghanistan or western Pakistan. Xhafa, clever fellow that he was, had played on the theme of Albanian freedom, making the rational case that freedom for Albanians was unattainable unless they were united in their efforts against the Macedonian government.

However, in the three years since he had come to power, the main thrust of his activities had been to increase the efficiency of the clans’ smuggling operations. This included expanding the white slave trade, exporting Eastern European girls from ten to eighteen from their native countries to Italy, England, and the United States. Most often, these girls were sold to Xhafa’s representatives by their own parents, desperate and poor beyond measure, who could see no monetary upside to female offspring.

Paull, pausing in his reading, glanced up. “Surely this is a job for Interpol, not Homeland Security.”

“The Pentagon disagrees. They believe Xhafa to be extremely dangerous and so do I. Listen, after the last decade of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Yemen, America’s image abroad is in desperate need of rehabilitation. Edward was on the right track with the arms deal he signed with Russia just before his death. And I’m fully aware of President Yukin’s attempts at double-dealing. Without you and Jack McClure, the deal would never have gotten done.”

He looked around the room, as if suddenly self-conscious or overwhelmed by his surroundings. “In tonight’s TV address I’m making human rights one of the ribs of my agenda. We can’t have young girls—hell, girls of any age—being shipped into the United States and sold into prostitution rings. The traffic in human beings is enormous. Every six minutes another girl is sold or snatched off the streets. The trade is epidemic; it has become a worldwide scandal. Think how the image of the United States will profit when we bring Xhafa to justice.”

“Have the DoD send in a team of Special Forces—”

The president sighed. “Look at page ten.”

Paull pulled it out. It was an “Eyes Only” field SITREP from General Braedenton, the head of DoD, to the president himself. In brief, a Special Forces SKOPES unit of six highly trained black ops agents had been dispatched to Macedonia two weeks ago with orders to take out Arian Xhafa with all due speed. DoD monitoring lost contact with the unit thirty-one hours into the mission.

“The SKOPES unit never returned and was never heard from again,” Crawford said.

“How in the hell did Xhafa manage that?”

The president looked like he’d just seen a dog run over by a car. “That’s one of the mysteries. This man is not like other crime lords; there’s something different about him.”

“He’s smarter?”

“Among other things,” the president nodded, “such as sophisticated weaponry to take out an entire SKOPES unit.”

“Sophisticated weaponry takes big bucks.”

The president’s expression became even more pained. “Simply put, we aren’t authorized to send military into Albania. Besides which, the military can’t cut it in that region—the mountainous terrain works against them. No, this is strictly black ops. A small guerrilla unit is what’s needed. And don’t talk to me about Interpol. Those monkeys can’t find their own assholes.”

“Nevertheless, with all due respect, sir—”

“Loyalty, Dennis.” Crawford’s voice was soft but with a backbone of steel. “I want you to find Xhafa and shut him down … permanently.”

Paull sighed in resignation. “All right. I’ll get a task force to work up a plan ASAP.”

“That’s just what you won’t do.” The president set down his cup. “I want you to handle this job personally.”

Paull felt as if he were a whiplash victim of a car crash. “Sir, I don’t understand. A secretary of HS doesn’t—”

“It seems to me, Dennis—and I say this as a compliment, though I fear you’ll take it otherwise—that secretary of HS was never the best use of your talents.” He turned and took a thick Eyes Only dossier off his desk. “For ten years, during your assignments in the field, you never once failed to complete a mission. Plus, you never lost a man.”

“Once,” Paull said. “I lost a man once.”

“No.” The president paged through the dossier until he reached the page he was looking for. Running his forefinger down the page, dense with typescript, he said, “The agent, Russell Evans, was wounded by friendly fire. You carried him on your back for twenty-five miles until you crossed over from hostile territory.”

“By then he was dead.”

“Through no fault of your own, Dennis.” The president closed the dossier with a decisive slap. “You received a medal for that mission.”

Paull, chilled to his marrow, sat very still. He was hyperaware of his heartbeat and his breath, as if he were a scientific observer monitoring this unreal scene. “What is this,” he said in a voice he did not fully recognize, “a sacking?”

“What makes you say that?”

“A demotion, then.”

“Dennis, as I feared, you’ve completely misinterpreted what I’ve just said.”

“Do you want me to step down as secretary of HS?”

“Yes.”

“Then I haven’t misinterpreted anything.”

Crawford hitched himself to the edge of the sofa. “Listen to me, Dennis. I know you don’t trust me. I know your loyalty was to Edward, and since we never saw eye to eye on most matters…” He allowed his voice to trail off, as if he was thinking ahead three or four steps. Or, anyway, that was Paull’s interpretation of the small silence.

Then the president’s eyes reengaged with Paull’s. “I value you, Dennis, perhaps—and I know this will be difficult for you to believe—perhaps more than Edward did. This job he put you in—it’s not … You’re not a politician. Your expertise is in the field—it always has been. That’s where you shine; that’s where you’ll be of the most use to me—and your country.”

“So the decision has been made.”

Crawford looked at Paull for a moment. “Dennis, answer me this: Have you been happy the last year or so? Happy in your job, I mean.”

Paull said nothing. He sat thinking of a future that now seemed as treacherous as quicksand. “Since the deed is done, it doesn’t matter what I say.”

The president steepled his hands together, elbows on his knees. “The reason I scuttled Edward’s initiatives is simple: They were doomed. The health care bill—he had to get into bed with big pharma in order to even get it cobbled together. It had more pork in it than a pig farm. The attack on the merchant banks—too punitive and difficult to get through Congress. Edward would have expended all his remaining political capital on this agenda, and he would have failed. His presidency would have foundered. I’ve been given a chance to right the ship, and I’m taking it.”

“Right is right,” Paull said sourly.

Crawford laughed and shook his head. “Dennis, I’m going to take a chance. I’ve decided to trust you enough to tell you a secret.”

He paused as if needing another minute to make up his mind. Despite himself, Paull edged forward, the better to hear what the president had to say, because Crawford was speaking now in a hushed tone.

“I’m a conservative by design, not by conviction. Not many people know this; Edward certainly didn’t. But I have to deal from strength with certain powerful elements in this country. In any event, I want to do what’s right for the country, and as of this moment what we need more than anything else is fiscal responsibility. I’m going to see we get it.”

“That involves appointing someone else as HS secretary. Is that what you’re going to say in your address?”

Crawford waved away Paull’s words. “I’m doing away with the position. Your man Dickinson, who’s director, is more than capable of handling the department. Hell, he already is. He’s an organizational wizard, isn’t he?”

“That he is,” Paull admitted.

The president spread his hands wide. “Well, then, there you have it.”

“What’s to be my new title?”

Crawford’s smile spread across his face like jam. “Officially, you’ll be ambassador at large. Unofficially, you’ll be in charge of a SITSPEC, reporting directly to me.”

This might have some potential after all, Paull thought. SITSPEC was gov-speak for a situation-specific black ops group that, in theory at least, could comprise two people or two thousand.

“If this is the way it will be, I want some terms.”

“Name them, Denny.”

“I don’t want oversight.”

“Define oversight.”

“The group is at Black ICE level. We’re dark to Congress, the CIA, and DoD. I report to you, and act on your mandates or ones I deem appropriate and necessary, period.”

The POTUS stroked his chin. “Well, now, Denny, I don’t rightly know whether I can do that.”

“Okay.” Paull stood up. “Then I’m out, sir.”

For a moment, Crawford looked up at him, then he gestured with one hand. “Aw, sit down, would you?” When Paull did, he added, “Give the group a name, Denny.”

Paull thought a moment. “Chimera.”

“The monster that changes its shape. An apt creature to destroy Arian Xhafa.” The president nodded, pleased.

“The fewer people around you who know, the better.”

“Agreed, but you’ll have to stick Chimera somewhere,” he continued. “Let’s start with the department you know best, Homeland.”

“I want Jack McClure,” Paull said without hesitation.

“That’s it? One person?”

“For now.”

“Take him, then.” The president began to talk about the details. “This crime spree is spreading like a virus. You pull the plug and America’s image starts to shine again. As of this moment, you have Alpha Authorization to procure anything you require for this mission. I want you to bring me Arian Xhafa’s head.”

Paull was leafing through the file. “I’ll need a better photo of Xhafa.”

The president looked pained again. He produced three more photos, placing them side by side with the first one—grainy, slightly blurred surveillance photos obviously taken with a long lens. He pointed to each one, in turn.

“Xhafa could be this man, or this one, or this one. More likely he’s none of these three. We just don’t know.”

“A bio?”

“Ditto. We don’t know his parentage or where he came from.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“This is a very special person we’re talking about, Denny. A dark prodigy, a creature of pure evil.”

“Like Kurtz in his jungle temple.”

“No, Denny. Kurtz came from civilization. Xhafa was born in a dark place and there he resides, with the power of a mythical monster.”

Paull scraped a hand across his chin. “How could he have amassed so much power and influence?”

“McClure likes solving real-life puzzles, doesn’t he?”

Paull rose. As he reached the door, the president’s voice caused him to turn back.

“There’s something else that isn’t in the dossier. Arian Xhafa has more money than an Albanian crime lord ought to have.”

“The sophisticated weaponry,” Paull said.

The president nodded again. “What’s the source of his capital, and, just as troubling, how was he able to obtain the weaponry? You need the highest-level contacts for that. Two more mysteries you’re tasked with solving.”

“You’re not asking for much, are you, sir?”

The president produced a thin smile. “Has to be done, Denny, and now. Along with the sudden influx of capital came the ambition to expand his organization outside the borders of Macedonia and Albania—starting with Italy because it’s so close, just across the Adriatic, as well as Spain, France, and Germany.

“The Albanians moved in on the Italian Mafia’s territory when the Italian police successfully splintered the mob. Power abhors a vacuum. Xhafa saw his opportunity and jumped in with both feet. Now he has to be stopped before he turns his people into a full-fledged international criminal operation.”

“So this isn’t a strictly humanitarian mission.”

President Crawford smiled an ironic smile. “Jesus, Denny, when is it ever?”

4

The moment the shrink left, Alli broke down and cried. She wept as she hadn’t wept in nearly a year. Her sobs were deep and heartfelt, all the more so because she had forced herself to keep them in abeyance for the hundred minutes or so that the shrink was questioning her. He was a small, dark man with a scraggly beard and a sharp nose. He smelled faintly of tobacco and loss.

Now that she was alone, she desperately wanted to hear Jack’s reassuring voice. But the lawyer had taken away her cell as evidence and there was no phone in her uncle’s study where she sat on a voluminous, high-backed chair, so familiar to her from the days when her father took her here and she hung out while he and Uncle Hank went downstairs into the cellar to talk. As a young girl, it had never occurred to her to question why they chose the cellar. Later, however, it became clear that they had ensured that the cellar was the most secure place in the house. Security was the last thing on her mind as she thought about the current nightmare in which she was enmeshed.

The study was exactly as she remembered it, filled with Old World–carved, hand-turned wood, a coffered ceiling, bookcases from floor to ceiling, and an immense stone fireplace over which a stuffed buck’s head with impressive antlers gazed down on her with, she was sure, steady compassion.

Forty-five or so minutes later, her uncle and his lawyer appeared.

Alli was struggling to blot out the sight of Billy Warren, drained of blood, cut all over, his carotid breached as if by a vampire’s fang, but the image refused to be banished. It hung in her mind like a guest who, overstaying his welcome, now threatens to take over your home.

“Alli,” Henry Holt Carson said, as he sat down on the sofa facing her. “How are you feeling?” Behind him stood Harrison Jenkins, as immobile as a cigar store Indian.

“How d’you think I’m feeling,” she said dully.

“I’m afraid I have no idea.”

“That’s just the problem!” She honed the accusatory note to a fine point. “Why are you keeping me here? Why can’t I even call Jack?”

“McClure is busy, trying to clear your name, one hopes,” Carson said. “Besides, by court order you cannot leave here.”

“Then I want to speak with him.”

“In time, perhaps.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Alli, I wish you’d learn to curb your tongue.” He shifted, obviously uncomfortable. Then he set two prescription vials onto the low table between them. “The psychopharmacologist who interviewed you…”

At the word she stared at the vials. “You want to give me drugs?” She leapt up and, with a backhand swipe, sent the vials flying across the room. “I’m not taking any fucking drugs!” She was white and trembling.

“Alli, I don’t think you understand the true nature of your situation.”

“Henry, allow me.” Jenkins came around and gestured for Alli to sit back down. When she did, he sat on a chair next to her. “The detectives were anxious to take you into custody. I used a technicality to forestall them. Nevertheless, I had to go before a federal judge this morning and defend you with the district attorney breathing down my neck. This much you know. A horrific crime has been committed and there is a tremendous amount of pressure from all sides to find the murderer and bring him or her to justice.”

“I didn’t kill Billy!” Alli cried. “Why won’t anyone listen?”

“I didn’t say you killed him. Frankly, I believe you’re innocent, but there are two pieces of incriminating evidence that say otherwise”—he held up a hand to stop her protest—“or lead to the conclusion that someone very clever has, for whatever reason, set you up.” He took a breath. “Can you think of anyone who would have cause to implicate you in a capital crime?”

She glanced at her uncle before shaking her head. Her eyes drifted away. “No.”

Jenkins studied Alli for a moment, then turned to Carson. “Henry, please give me a few moments.”

Carson frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Henry, I imagine there is a backlog of calls impatiently awaiting your attention.”

Carson grunted, rose, and, crossing the carpet, went out the door, closing it softly behind him.

Jenkins took a deep breath, then turned to Alli. “Now, my dear, what is it you wish to say?” Seeing her quick glance at the closed door, he added, “Anything you tell me is privileged information … even from your uncle.”

Alli worried her lower lip before she put her elbows on her knees. “Someone is framing me. I mean there’s no way I dosed my roommate or killed Billy. God!”

He nodded sagely.

“You don’t believe me.”

“What makes you say that?”

Alli ran a hand through her hair. “This is a nightmare.” She cleared her throat. “Everyone thinks I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

Jenkins waited a moment. “That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s your contention that you’re fine.”

“I didn’t poison anyone, I didn’t kill anyone.”

He slid back in his chair and pursed his lips. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

“I’d like to speak to Jack.”

“Would you now?” Jenkins had a way of saying no without actually saying the word. “It is your uncle’s opinion that you have formed a … how shall I put it?… an unnatural attachment to Jack McClure.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed. “And you believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. I work for your uncle.”

She stared out the one window at the snaking gravel driveway. All of a sudden, she took up a poker from the fireplace and slammed it against the window. It bounced off, as if the pane was made of rubber. Alli swung again and again, grunting with each swing, without even a single crack to show for her effort.

She whirled on Jenkins just as the door burst open and a man with the massive sloping shoulders and raw, red face of a weightlifter rushed in.

Jenkins raised a placating hand. “It’s all right, Rudy. No harm done.”

As if to prove his words, he crossed to where Alli stood and took the poker from her. Rudy relieved him of it, and, with a last look at Alli, went out of the study, closing the door behind him.

“The windows are both bulletproof and alarmed,” Jenkins said.

Alli turned to the attorney. “I used to come here when I was a kid. I broke that window once. When did that happen?”

“Five years ago,” Jenkins said. “Maybe six.”

“So I’m a prisoner in my uncle’s house.”

“I’m afraid so.”

His words hung in the room for some time. A phone rang distantly and then stopped. A dog began to bark somewhere outside, its excitement rising.

“You’re both mental as anything.” Her voice was thin and ragged with despair. She felt herself crawl back into the shell she had created for herself when she had been kidnapped.

Jenkins appeared to be aware of this, because he said in his most soothing voice, “The most absurd aspect of the accusation is, of course, the torture. Scientific study tells us that the female of the species, though she can be as cold-blooded and capable of murder as a male, rarely has the stomach for torture. On the other hand, it is the torture of William Warren, so disturbing by its very nature, that is dictating this rush to judgment, at least in my estimation. It’s also the largest question mark. What did his killer or killers want from him? What information did he possess that they needed to go to such extreme lengths to get from him?”

He regarded her steadily. Clearly, he was looking for an answer from her. She shook her head. “I can’t say. I really didn’t know him that well.”

“Come on, Alli, you two were carrying on a love affair for five months.”

“That’s just it,” Alli said, “it wasn’t a love affair.”

“No, what was it then?”

“I was…” Her eyes darted away for a moment. “I was trying to regain a sense of myself, to, I don’t know, feel my body again, to be in control of it again.”

Jenkins sat studying her for a while, or perhaps he was pondering her words. At last, he said, “Did you care about Mr. Warren?”

“Of course I did.” She hesitated, but it was clear she had more to say. “But not … just not in the way you think.”

“What do you think I meant?”

“We weren’t lovers in the classical sense—like Romeo and Juliet.”

“If memory serves, Romeo dies.”

She snorted in derision.

“About the psychopharmacologist,” Jenkins went on. “One of the things he said about you in his report is that, in his opinion, you’re lacking in affect.”

“I think he’s lacking in affect.”

Jenkins gave her a tight smile. “What his diagnosis means is that, basically, you have difficulty locating your emotions. Sometimes you can’t find them at all. In other words, there are times when you just don’t care about anything … or anyone.”

She looked away again.

“His evaluation will hold a great deal of weight in the course of the investigation. Typically, people who can’t feel—”

“I told you,” she flared. “No fucking drugs!”

“You’re not listening to me,” he continued doggedly. “Your reaction to your boyfriend’s death—or rather your lack of one—was duly noted by everyone at the crime scene, including those sympathetic to you.”

“You can’t possibly understand.”

He spread his hands. “Now is your chance to enlighten me.”

She stared at him, stone-faced.

Jenkins sighed heavily. “In return for you being held in your uncle’s recognizance instead of in a federal holding cell, the judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation.” He took another breath and let it out slowly, as if anticipating the coming storm. “You must comply with the psychopharmacologist’s diagnosis, which, of course, includes your taking whatever psychotropic medications he prescribes.”

Alli leapt up again and retreated behind the chair back, as if he were a lion from which she needed saving. “I can’t! I fucking won’t!”

“I’m sorry.” Jenkins regarded her with what seemed to be genuine pity. “I’m afraid you have no choice.”

*   *   *

Daylight seeped into the grove of trees with the blue-white flicker of a television screen. Jack, exhausted and frightened for Alli, had been scrutinizing the crime scene for hours. The detectives had made their reluctant exit, but Naomi Wilde and Peter McKinsey remained, along with Fearington’s commander, Brice Fellows, who had had sandwiches and thermoses of strong black coffee brought out from the academy’s commissary. Fellows, to his credit, stood back, sipping coffee, silently observing him as he worked. Jack was unfamiliar with McKinsey, but he had gotten to know Naomi well enough when she was guarding the FLOTUS. Carson had plucked Naomi out of her daily assignments specifically to guard his wife. That was how Edward Carson did things—by instinct. In thinking of Lyn Carson, Jack realized that no one had informed Alli that her mother was dead. On reflection, Jack supposed such news was better left undelivered for the time being.

Jack had spent his time wisely. As soon as there was sufficient natural light he switched off the spots and got to work. He had learned to distrust spotlights, which tended to distort perspective and played havoc with the impressions received by his brain. Circling the body in ever closing circles, his dyslexic brain literally took pictures of the corpse—not only the ashen color and unnatural granular quality of the skin, the grotesque disfigurement of body and face, but aspects other people could not see or perhaps accurately interpret. His brain, however, worked more than three hundred times faster than other people’s, and so it could recognize tiny anomalies and dislocations, and, in the time it took a human being to inhale and exhale, analyze them.

This was how he discovered the fracture below the left eye. It was precise, like a break a surgeon would make in the process of resetting a bone. There was, also, a deliberateness about it that intrigued him. He said nothing of either his find or his musings to the people in the grove with him.

He stood up and said to Fellows, “Commander, do you really believe Alli capable of this crime?”

Fellows’s meaty shoulders lifted and fell. “To be honest, Mr. McClure, I found myself a failure at human psychology the moment my wife of twenty years walked out on me without a word of explanation.”

He turned. “Naomi?”

She shook her head. “I can’t imagine it.” Her brow furrowed. “On the other hand, she’s like a closed book to everyone except you, so I’d ask you the same question: Is she capable of this kind of protracted violence?”

“Absolutely not,” Jack said.

“But we have the vial with traces of roofies under her bed,” McKinsey pointed out, “and a bloody knife in the trash behind her dorm.”

Jack nodded. “We’ve yet to determine whether it’s Billy’s blood on the blade, or if her prints are on the haft.”

“And if they are her prints?” Naomi asked.

He waved away her concern. “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble setting her up. This has been meticulously thought out.”

“What about the bizarre nature of the murder?” McKinsey said. “The knife wounds, draining the victim of blood?”

“Red herrings,” Jack said, “designed to get us going around in circles.”

McKinsey made a noise in the back of his throat.

“What,” Jack said, “you think there’s a vampire infesting Fearington?”

“Of course not, but don’t you think it’s possible that when Alli found out about this other girl…” He snapped his fingers.

“Arjeta Kraja,” Naomi cut in helpfully.

“Right. Isn’t it possible that when Alli found out Billy was boffing Arjeta Kraja she flipped out?”

“And the sky could be falling,” Jack said acidly. “Let’s deal with reality.”

McKinsey shrugged, as if to say, I tried.

“Something stinks in this setup.” Jack peered again at the corpse. “It’s weird, gothic, over the top. We need to find out where the stink is coming from.”

“We need to talk to this Arjeta Kraja,” Naomi said. “ASAP.”

Jack nodded, only partly engaged. There was another thing he was reluctant to share with Naomi and McKinsey. He had the nagging suspicion that Alli knew more about this girl than she had let on. Why she would keep that secret was anyone’s guess, but Jack knew Alli well enough to know that she must have a damn good reason. She better have.

No one would tell him where she was taken. Jack had called Henry Carson’s townhome in Georgetown without luck.

Jack, his mind made up, turned to Fellows. “I want to interview Alli’s roommate.”

*   *   *

Vera Bard lay on a bed in the academy infirmary. The pinkish light of dawn streamed in through windows and a small skylight high up in the ceiling. The walls were painted a cheerful yellow, but the floor was institutional gray linoleum, a veteran from another era.

The nurse led Jack over to Vera’s bed. Alli’s roommate was a dark-haired girl with large, slightly upswept chocolate eyes, an assertive nose, and a wide, expressive mouth.

“Please, just for a few minutes,” the nurse cautioned. “She is still very weak.”

Fluids dripped into Vera’s arm and her eyes were hooded, as if she was having trouble staying awake, but this only made her seem sultry. She looked vaguely Eurasian. Her long hair had lost its sheen to sweat; it lay lankly on the pillow in thick, Medusan coils. Still and all, Jack observed, she was an exceptionally beautiful young woman.

He sat on a painted metal chair and introduced himself. “Vera, would you tell me what happened last night?”

“I … I don’t know.” Her voice was soft and husky. “I went to bed as usual, read for a bit, took my pill, as usual, and went to sleep.” She licked her dry lips. “The next thing I knew I woke up here.”

“Alli was in the room when you went to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“And while you were reading?”

“Yes.”

“Did you two talk at all?”

“Before I went to the bathroom we were talking about…” Her brow crinkled. “I can’t remember about what. Boys, maybe.”

“About Billy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“And after you came back from the bathroom?”

Vera shook her head and a lock of hair fell across her cheek.

Jack sat for a moment more. He smiled at her. “I’m sorry for what happened.”

Vera seemed not to have heard him. She licked her lips again. “I want to see Alli.”

“I’ll speak to Commander Fellows.” Jack rose. “By the way, what medication are you taking?”

“Crestor. I have high cholesterol.”

Jack nodded and smiled. “Thank you, Vera.”

*   *   *

On the way out of the infirmary, Jack encountered Naomi.

“DNA is going to take at least a week,” she said, “but the forensic team found Alli’s fingerprints on the water glass beside Vera’s bed.”

“Anyone else’s?”

“Just Alli’s.”

Jack’s cell phone buzzed, and then Dennis Paull was speaking rapidly and tensely in his ear. He strode down the hall, away from Naomi and McKinsey, who had appeared.

“A new position?” Jack said after a moment. “Is Crawford kicking you out?”

“Not exactly.” Paull further explained the changes. “You’re coming with me, Jack. I’m pulling all the details together. At midnight you and I are going to fly to Macedonia, then trek west into the mountains to a shithole called Tetovo, where we will terminate this sonuvabitch Arian Xhafa.”

Jack bit back a protest. Though Paull had made it clear that he was sympathetic to Alli’s plight, Jack suspected he’d simply argue that there were other people—Naomi Wilde chief among them—who were perfectly adequate to being Alli’s advocate. Besides, in Harrison Jenkins she had one of the most savvy criminal attorneys on the planet. Jack could hear him now: Forget it, Alli’s in good hands. The trouble was, that was only half true. No one knew Alli the way he did, and she wasn’t about to open up to anyone else, Naomi included. And keeping silent wouldn’t help her cause one iota.

Instead, he said, “Just like that? From what you’ve told me he’s exceptionally well defended and well armed. He won’t be easy to kill.”

Paull laughed. “I may have spent the last several years behind a desk, Jack, but believe me when I tell you that I still have a trick or two up my sleeve.”

5

Alli, walking slowly around her uncle’s study, spent the slowly ticking seconds dragging her fingertips across the tops of books, the contours of artifacts and souvenirs, the outlines of framed photos of her uncle with presidents past and present. She paused at a photo of the two brothers and stared at her father. He was smiling into the camera, his hand on his older brother’s shoulder. Judging by the hazy mountains in the background, they were out west somewhere, doubtless at one of her uncle’s ranches. He clutched a ten-gallon hat in one fist.

She was certain she ought to feel something at the sight of her father’s face—a sense of remorse, of pain, of a space inside her into which he had once warmly nestled—but she felt nothing. It was as if her heart had been turned to wood, burned to ashes in a fire, and was now a heart in name only, a hollow vessel, useless as a desert in which nothing could live.

She tried to think of incidents in the past—her time with Emma, Jack’s daughter, and more recently, her adventures with Jack himself in Moscow and the Ukraine. All of it felt like a dream, or a film she was watching without becoming fully engaged. Briefly she tried to fight her way out of the disassociation, but it was too difficult for her to defeat. There was a good reason for that, too. Without being aware of it, she had developed a mechanism for keeping her distance from the week of terror when she had been imprisoned in the small, lightless room and subjected to …

She was still in a prison, one of her own making.

A barrier came up, like a wall of lead stopping Superman’s X-ray vision. Her own X-ray vision—her habit of peering backward into that one section of her past, examining that week, picking at it as if it were a scab that wouldn’t heal—had to be thwarted at all costs, even to the loss of feeling in the present.

She made a little inchoate sound in the back of her throat, as a fox will when caught in a spring-loaded trap, when it is about to gnaw off its paw to regain its freedom. The truth was she longed to talk with Annika, though this was the one thing she must always keep from Jack. It was Annika who had convinced Jack to let her go see the mistress Milla Tamirova, who had taken Alli into her BDSM dungeon and made her confront her terror at being tied into a chair. Why had Annika done this? Because she, too, had been held hostage. She knew the hell into which Alli had descended because she had inhabited that very same hell. Unlike Alli, however, she had managed to escape. If only she could meet with her again, but neither she nor Jack knew where she was.

Despair took her up and shook her as a terrier will shake a rat it has caught. She wanted to cry, but her eyes remained dry. She took up a Frederic Remington bronze sculpture of a cowboy on a horse rearing up at the sight of a rattlesnake, and raised it over her head. She felt a burning desire to smash it into a glass vase, but lowered it back onto the shelf.

She knew the noise would bring Rudy, who might decide to stay in order to ensure she didn’t commit more acts of vandalism. Being imprisoned again, even in her uncle’s study, was making her nuts. An icy ball of panic had sprung up in her gut, and with each rotation was increasing in size. She had to get out of here, and soon. She needed to find Jack, but she had no way of contacting him. There must be some kind of way out, said the joker to the priest. She laughed silently and grimly. Jack had told her there was always a way.

She looked around the study, inhaled the familiar scents of leather, her uncle’s cologne, the remnants of cigar smoke floating like dust motes in the air. Closing her eyes, she tried to recall afternoons when she was a little girl, curled up in this very chair, inhaling the same scents. She had often been left alone while the grown-ups had conversed as only grown-ups can. She couldn’t remember how that had occupied her time. Despite the changes in seasons and times of day, all the afternoons blended one into the other.

Abruptly, her eyes popped open. She had spent her alone hours exploring the nooks and crannies, drawers and shelves of Uncle Hank’s domain. Unfurling her legs, she rose from the chair and, taking small, silent steps, she approached the huge burl walnut desk. As a child, it had seemed as enormous as a battleship or a castle, and filled with as many secrets.

But what had seemed like treasures to a little girl—a box of matches, a handsome humidor, a photo of a little girl—didn’t now. She no longer played with the brief and tiny flames, the odors of cigars repulsed her, and the little girl in the photo was Caroline, Uncle Hank’s daughter from his first marriage, who was now either dead or alive, but was, in any event, as lost to him as if she had fallen off the edge of the world. She had known Caroline, if only briefly. Playing with her, she had seen a darkness in her eyes. Only much later, long after Caro had vanished, after she herself had gone through a period of fear and suffering, had she recognized the nature of that darkness. Caro had been consumed with an inarticulate pain and rage. She had hit her breaking point and was gone. After the disappearance, Uncle Hank had questioned her, apparently believing she might know what happened to Caro. After that day, Alli had never heard him mention her again.

With her fingertips caressing the desktop, she wondered what secrets lay within the depths of her uncle’s burlwood castle. She started from the bottom up, figuring that secrets were safest in the depths. The left lowest drawer held a strip of hanging files, all pertaining to InterPublic Bancorp—memos, letters, quarterly P&Ls, and the like. She pawed through them with little interest, the bottom of the file holders scraping against the bottom of the drawer. The drawer just above was not as deep. It contained the usual stacks of pads of various sizes, packs of yellow pencils, a red plastic child’s sharpener, gum erasers, and various sorts of tape. How very neo-Luddite of Uncle Hank, she thought. Save for some spent pencil shavings and a broken bit of pencil lead, the top drawer was entirely empty. The wide middle drawer directly above the kneehole was filled with the sort of accumulated odds and ends—paper clips, staples, rubber bands, and Hi-Liters in several colors—endemic to all offices. The three drawers on the right held, variously, stacks of political magazines like The Atlantic; a half-filled bottle of single-barrel bourbon, along with a pair of shot glasses in a holder; a paper packet of cough drops; a metal flask, dry as a bone inside; and a grease-stained take-out menu from First Won Ton, in Chinatown. She scanned it quickly. One item, a Chef’s Special, spicy fragrant duck with cherries, was circled in pencil. Beneath the menu was a photo of Caroline and her mother. Caro was young, ten or eleven maybe, but already you could see that she strongly resembled her mother, Heidi, who was tall, slim in an athletic way, blond—pale as a ghost, really—with a high, intelligent forehead and light eyes; it was impossible to tell what color from the photo and Alli didn’t remember her well enough to recall whether they were blue or green or hazel. Mother and daughter looked like two equestrians, models out of a Ralph Lauren ad. Sad now to think of Heidi somewhere on the West Coast and Caro in the particular level of limbo reserved for the disappeared. Alli put the photo and the take-out menu back, and closed the drawer.

Perhaps there was nothing.

She sat back on her heels, rocking back and forth thoughtfully, as she stared at the desk. On an impulse, she pulled open the drawer with the hanging files. She pushed them back and forth on their metal tracks, listening to the scraping, dry as an insect’s chirrup. All at once, a frown creased her face and, pushing the files as far as she could to the rear, she peered down at the bottom of the drawer. Looking again at the outside, it appeared as if there was a two- or three-inch differential. Rapping a knuckle against the bottom of the drawer, she heard a hollow echo, but feeling around there was no way in. Pulling the files toward her, she drew the drawer out to its fullest extent. A tiny half-moon indentation in the wood presented itself.

Hooking her fingernail into it, she pulled and was rewarded with a meticulously milled rectangular piece of the drawer’s bottom detaching itself. Inside the hidden cubbyhole she found a cell phone, and that was all. She double-checked the space before fitting the cover back on, pushing the files back into place, and closing the drawer.

She walked to the study door, pressed her ear against the carved and polished wood, and heard the murmuring of her uncle’s voice as he talked with other men, then the muffled slam of the front door. Crossing to the window, she was just in time to see her uncle and Jenkins climb into the backseat of a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car, which immediately drove off in a spray of gravel.

Returning to the wing chair, she curled up and examined the cell. Though it was a brand she recognized, the model was one she had never seen before. She wondered whether it was an old model. Most people threw away their old cell when they got a new one; they did not hide it away in a secret compartment of their desk. She pressed the On button. The phone lit up immediately, connecting to a network. So it wasn’t an old phone, or, if it was, its SIM card was still active. Plus, the battery was fully charged.

She waited for the network to give her a signal, but nothing showed except a tiny red SOS.

“Shit on a fucking stick,” she muttered. She’d heard stories of certain hotel chains using wireless dampers to keep their clients from using cell phones in their rooms, forcing them to use the hotel’s more expensive wired system, but why would Uncle Hank employ one in his house, except as a security measure.

She stuffed the phone in her pocket and tried to get a grip on her rising panic.

*   *   *

Interviewing Arjeta Kraja was proving frustrating, principally because she seemed to have vanished.

“It’s as if she never existed at all,” Pete McKinsey said when he, Naomi, and Jack rendezvoused in the small suburb closest to Fearington.

“Her name doesn’t come up in any government database,” Naomi said, consulting her PDA. “Nor does she possess a driver’s license, health insurance, or even a Social Security number.”

“Family?” Jack asked.

“Negative.” McKinsey shuffled from one foot to the other as if he were itching to go someplace.

“Friends?”

“Not anyone we could find when we canvassed the area.”

“So either she’s a ghost,” McKinsey said.

Jack nodded. “Or she’s an illegal immigrant.”

“Either way,” Naomi said, “she’s gonna be a bitch to find.”

“Which is going to take time,” McKinsey said.

They were talking like partners now, or an old married couple.

“Time is the one thing we don’t have,” Jack told them, and because he didn’t want to tell them about his leaving with Paull, he gave them a song and dance about Alli’s legal status, as if Jenkins had given him an update. “So we need to find the girl now.”

McKinsey was clearly unhappy with being given what was, in his estimation, an impossible task. “How do you propose we do that?”

*   *   *

Twilight, the bar both Billy Warren and the elusive Arjeta Kraja had supposedly frequented, was on a seedy section of M Street, about as far from the tony shops and town houses as you could get and still be in Georgetown. A sign on the door said that it was closed, but when Jack hit the brass plate the door opened. When they walked into the dimly lit interior, they were greeted by air that smelled burned.

Detective Willowicz, smoking idly, sat on a tipped-back chair, his ankles crossed on a table. Detective O’Banion was behind the bar, drinking what appeared to be whiskey from a shot glass. No one else appeared to be around.

Williowicz exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Well, what do we have here?”

“Place is closed,” O’Banion said. “Wassamatter, can’t read?”

“I could ask the same of you,” Jack said, then to Willowicz: “I thought I told you the case had been turned over to my department.”

Willowicz contemplated the glowing end of his cigarette. “I think I might have heard something of that nature. What’s your memory of it, O’Banion?”

O’Banion pulled at his earlobe and shrugged. “In this town, anything’s possible.” He poured himself another shot. His fingernails were filthy.

“So what are you doing here?” Naomi said.

“Satisfying an itch.” Willowicz watched them with a jaundiced eye.

“Checking the liquor license.” O’Banion swallowed his whiskey. “Shit like that.”

“The Metro police need detectives for that?” McKinsey was shuckling back and forth like an engine revving up. “You guys must really have screwed the pooch.”

O’Banion laughed nastily and slammed the shot glass down on the bartop. “Shut it, Nancy.”

“Where is everyone?” Naomi said. “The day manager, the bartender?”

“We just got here,” Willowicz said.

“How the fuck should we know?” O’Banion added.

“That’s enough,” Jack said. “You two can clear out.” He took out his cell. “Your captain is waiting.”

Willowicz dragged his feet off the table and stood up. “The thing of it is, my partner and I don’t like being treated like second-class citizens.”

“Then stick to your own turf.”

“We see this situation and it reeks,” Willowicz said. “Where you see a former president’s daughter, we see a perp.”

“No,” Jack said, “you see an easy way to wrap up this case. It doesn’t matter to you if she’s guilty or not.”

“Oh, she’s guilty.” O’Banion came around from behind the bar. “Guilty as fuck.”

“It’s just a matter of time before we prove it.” Willowicz brushed by them and out the door, O’Banion hard on his heels.

“Metro has a hard-on for Feds.” McKinsey relaxed visibly. “We’re always treading all over their cases, so all they can do is shit on us.”

“The hell with them.”

“Seriously.” Jack turned and walked toward the short corridor that led to the restrooms and the rear. “Where the hell is everyone?”

Then he paused. What had he sensed or smelled?

“Blood,” Jack said, sprinting down the corridor. He heard Naomi and McKinsey just behind him.

“McKinsey,” he called. “Restrooms.”

He heard McKinsey banging open the doors, then his raised voice: “Clear!”

Two men sat in side-by-side chairs facing the far wall of the small, cramped kitchen. Jack came around to face them. It was not a pretty sight. Both their faces looked like sides of raw meat. Blood had spilled down the front of their shirts, buttons ripped off, the flaps spread open. More blood oozed down their necks onto their chests. Based on their clothes, one seemed to be the bartender, the other the day manager.

Naomi knelt in front of the bartender. “Dead.”

Jack pressed two fingers against the manager’s carotid. “So’s this one.”

Both McKinsey and Naomi drew their firearms simultaneously.

“What the hell is going on?” Naomi said.

“It answers the question,” Jack said, already on the move, “why there were Metro detectives where there should have been no Metro detectives.”

6

“Well?”

“Everything has gone according to plan.”

Henry Holt Carson nodded. His shoulders were hunched against the brittle wind. The sky looked like porcelain and it seemed to him as if the sun would never shine again. Like the residents of Seattle, he was getting used to the gloom.

“Paull is gone?” he asked.

President Crawford nodded. “And, as you predicted, he’s taken Jack McClure with him.”

“Good.”

Carson looked around him. This time of year the Rose Garden was a rectangle of mush and fertilizer, the sturdy rose stems prickly and dangerous as a porcupine’s back.

“I still don’t quite understand,” the president said.

Carson closed his eyes for a moment. A pulse beat in his forehead and he was certain a migraine was coming on. As was his wont, he fought against it. “They were too close to my brother.”

Crawford’s brow furrowed deeply and he snorted like a horse. “Do you think they suspect?”

“I don’t know.” Carson put a hand to his head. Yes, a migraine, definitely. “I hope to God they don’t.”

“But McClure—”

“My brother told me all about McClure’s monstrous brain.”

“Then you know it’s only a matter of time before he figures it out. That can only lead to more blood being spilled.”

“Yes,” Carson said through gritted teeth. He did not nod or move his head in any untoward way. “That’s why I want him gone. By the time he does figure it out, it’ll be too late. The only way to him that wouldn’t cause suspicion was through Dennis Paull.” He clamped down on the migraine but, as always, it was getting the better of him.

“Still, I worry.”

“The American people pay you to worry.”

Carson turned, fumbled in his trousers pocket, opened the silver-and-gold pill case, shook two pills into his mouth, and swallowed them with the little saliva he had left. The migraines seemed to suck him dry, until his tongue felt as if it were as big and unwieldy as a zeppelin.

The president eyed his Secret Service detail, circling the garden like a murder of crows. He took a hesitant step toward his friend. “Hank, I think you’d best sit down.”

Carson waved him off. “I’m fine.”

“Of course you are. But, you know, I find I’m a little peaked.” He sat on a stone bench. “Here, sit down beside me so we can continue our private talk uninterrupted. I haven’t much time before the budget meeting.”

Carson came and sat, holding his body as delicately as if it had turned to glass, which, in a way, it had.

Crawford looked away for a moment, out over the grounds to Washington itself. The White House was like a pearl sitting in the middle of an oyster, peacefully protected. However, today the president felt anything but peaceful.

“I knew this job was going to be difficult,” he said after a time, “and I prepared myself for it.” He stared down at his hands, folded priestlike in his lap. “But as for the complications…” He allowed his voice to drift off like mist off the Potomac.

“Life is complications, Arlen. The higher you climb the more they pile up, until you have one cluster-fuck after another.”

“Well, then, this must be the mother of all cluster-fucks.” Crawford took a breath. “Then again, maybe we’re not speaking of complications at all, maybe it’s compromises.”

Carson said nothing; he was too busy trying to keep his thoughts from being shredded by the cyclone of his migraine.

“Maybe it’s selling the house down the river without even a wave good-bye.”

Suddenly, the president’s words flooded into his brain, and he turned his head ever so gently. “For the love of God, do not tell me that you have cold feet, not at this late date. Fuck, Arlen, I moved heaven and earth with both the party caucuses and Eddy to get you the vice president’s position. We had a plan, from the very beginning we had a plan.”

“No, Hank, you had a plan.”

“Have it your way.” Carson massaged his temples, slowly and methodically. “What mattered then is the same thing that matters now. You hitched your name to my star. You rose as I rose.”

“You need me, Hank.”

The laugh caused Carson some pain. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself? The truth you keep avoiding is this: You need me far more than I need you. If you bail on me now there will be dire consequences. You knew from the very beginning, when you’re in, you’re in for life. Your decision is irrevocable.”

The president shook his head. “That was then. From where I’m sitting now—”

“You’re sitting in the perfect place for what needs to be done. Fate had a hand in this, the same fate that took Eddy from me. Scales of justice.”

Now it was Crawford’s turn to laugh. “What a hypocrite you are, Hank. There is no justice in this world. It’s men like you who see to that.”

*   *   *

Out on the street, there was no sign of O’Banion or Willowicz. Jack called in to the Metro detectives’ unit. Willowicz and O’Banion existed, Carson’s lawyer had been read their jackets, but the real Willowicz and O’Banion were on temporary leave. So who were these two masquerading as the Metro detectives, and who were they working for? The only way to find out was to ask them, so Jack sent McKinsey and Naomi out to search the surrounding blocks. Maybe the bogus detectives got careless and left some trace behind, though he doubted it. Those two were hardened professionals who left nothing to chance.

He stayed behind, preferring to check the crime scene without distractions. While he studied the two new victims, his mind was feverishly at work. First Billy Warren gets himself tortured and killed, but not before the perp goes to the trouble of setting Alli up as the killer. Then Arjeta Kraja goes missing. Billy, Alli, and Arjeta were all seen here at Twilight, and now the manager and bartender, the two people who might have had some information about the trio, wind up murdered by two goons pretending to be O’Banion and Willowicz.

He bent down to check that his finding here with the bartender was the same as the one he’d noticed on the manager. Yes, it was true: In both cases the bone just below the left eye socket had been fractured, just as it had been on Billy’s face.

He recalled the fracture beneath Billy’s left eye. Ever since then he’d been going under the dubious hypothesis that Arjeta Kraja had killed Billy. After all, excluding Alli, she was the prime suspect in the triangle, and, further, if she were in love with Billy, she’d have reason to want to pin the murder on Alli. It was a shaky premise because the fracture was precise. It couldn’t have been made by someone in a rage. Further, the theory didn’t explain Billy’s torture. If she loved him, she might, in a rage, kill him. But torture him? No way.

And now, with these two murders, the hypothesis was evaporating altogether. Arjeta Kraja killing these two in league with O’Banion and Willowicz? It didn’t track for him. Of course, O’Banion and Willowicz could be behind all three murders, but how to explain the deliberateness of the fracture?

The bogus O’Banion and Willowicz were obvious muscle; working stiffs. Someone far more clever than they had mapped out this scenario. Something was horribly wrong, but even with racking his brain, he couldn’t figure out what. He didn’t have enough pieces of the puzzle yet.

One thing was for certain, however: The link between these murders and Billy’s completely exonerated Alli. So he called in to his office to get the crime scene covered. He directed them to have the three corpses sent to his old friend Egon Schiltz, an ME he trusted absolutely. He was about to head out onto the street in search of McKinsey and Naomi when an image flashed through his mind, and he turned back.

The manager’s left hand was on the table, the palm open as if offering something when he was killed. His right arm hung down at his side, partially obscured by the table. Jack went around and took a longer look at what his brain had glimpsed the first time. The manager’s left hand was a fist, so tight the nails had scored bloody half-moons in the skin of his palm.

Crouching down, Jack pried open the fingers one by one. Something bright and shiny dropped to the floor. He picked it up and, rising to his feet, took it over to the light streaming in through one of the windows flanking the front door. It was a small metal badge, such as one would pin to a lapel or a collar. It was octagonal and had some writing on it, but all Jack’s brain saw was the shape. The writing itself was a tiny whirlpool of moving units. He tried to concentrate, as Reverend Myron Taske had taught him to do, by creating the entirely quiet spot in the air just to the right of his head. He tried looking at the badge from that viewpoint, which allowed him to calm the whirlpool of mysterious symbols, painstakingly turn them into the three-dimensional letters he had learned to identify, so he could read. All he could discern was that the badge contained no words in English. As to what language the words might be, he had not a clue. He had learned to speak many languages, perhaps in compensation for his difficulty in reading, but it was moments like this, when he was confronted by the wall of his dyslexia, that still vexed him.

Fighting the intense frustration and helplessness that threatened to overwhelm him, he picked his way to the plate-glass window, as if daylight and the passing traffic could calm him. He wondered why the club manager had been so desperate to hold on to the badge, to keep it hidden from his killers. At the same time, he was calculating who to take the badge to—a linguistics professor, an expert in local criminal gangs, or an underground slacker. The possibilities were virtually endless and made his head hurt.

He stared out the window. It had begun to rain, rather a soft gray mist that muted colors and softened edges so that everything seemed the same, like time-abraded soapstone, the present already faded into a past that could never be retrieved.

All at once, he felt a cool breeze stroke his cheek.

“Emma?”

“I’m here, Dad. It seems easier to be near you when…”

Jack, hearing his dead daughter’s voice in his head, stared at the corpses.

—When I’m near someone dead, I understand.

“Not dead. Newly dead. Before the body has cooled. While the spirit is still undecided about whether to go into Darkness or into the Light.”

—But, you, Emma, you’ve chosen neither. How is that possible?

“How is life possible? How is any of this possible?”

—I have no answers, Emma.

“Neither do I.”

—Nevertheless, I’m happy you’re here.

*   *   *

Out on the street, McKinsey and Naomi split up. McKinsey went east, Naomi west. McKinsey had been seconded into the Secret Service after a stellar six years as a Marine in first the Horn of Africa and then Fallujah. Again and again, he had engaged the enemy at whites-of-their-eyes range and lived to not tell the tales. Those grisly tales were locked away in his brain, under lock and key demanded by the various security acts his government imposed on him. He was proud of those secrets, proud of the kills he’d made in the service of his country, for he fervently believed in protecting America, whatever it took. He would have willingly given his life for that belief, but, when it came to war—and specifically guerilla warfare—he was too smart, too wily. The Marines were sorry when he was rotated out for the second time. Then the DoD decided it had a more important task for him.

McKinsey walked easily and loosely, without a trace of military bearing, blending perfectly into the foot traffic on the streets. At the same time, his well-honed radar—an ability to sense anything out of place on the field of battle or in enemy territory—combined with his keen sight to vet each person he glimpsed, even if it was only for a second. He quartered his immediate environment with military precision while appearing to window shop. It was important, he knew, to check the interior of shops, cafés, and restaurants, because contrary to how movies and television shot these things, foot chases were more often slow and plodding, more a question of thinking like your prey than being faster with foot and gun.

He paused in front of a café, thinking he’d spotted Willowicz, but a waitress moved out of the way and he saw that he was mistaken. Nevertheless, he entered the shop, checking the L-shaped space in nooks and crannies not visible from the street. Then he went into the men’s room, checked all the stalls, before finding his way back out onto the street. He was now a number of blocks from Twilight, having moved in an expanding spiral from the locus of the nightclub. He went into a public garage and looked around.

Clear.

*   *   *

Naomi’s trek west soon took her past several boutiques and a medium-sized restaurant, which she entered, ignoring the manager, picking her way around the tables and banquettes, searching for any sign of O’Banion and Willowicz. She checked the kitchen, where workers looked at her curiously, sullenly, then she backtracked to the men’s room. She was neither shy nor squeamish. Taking out her ID, she held it in front of her as she kicked open the door and strode in. One man, at a urinal, jerked around, wetting his polished brogues. A younger man, at the sink, looked her up and down in the mirror and gave her a wolf whistle. She grinned at him, then turned her attention to the stalls.

Naomi had come to the Secret Service because her older brother had expected such a career path for her. She adored him; he had brought her up after their parents had died in a plane crash over the Himalayas. She had been six, a vulnerable age. She had missed her parents terribly, particularly her mother. Her brother hadn’t been able to do anything about that. Instead, he had instilled in her a sense of self-worth and of purpose before he had shipped off to Afghanistan. Eight months later, he had been returned home in a body bag.

She had chosen the Secret Service, partly because she could not bear to leave D.C., which was her hometown. An orphan had to feel close to something from her past, and, for her, the District was it. Still, she missed her brother, who was still her best friend. She was closed and she knew it; after her brother had moved to New York, she had isolated herself. She had some acquaintances, a couple of drinking buddies, both male and female, and an employee of DoD whom she counted on from time to time for a booty call. That was it. Except for Jack McClure, for whom she had been carrying a torch ever since they had first met when he was in ATF and still married to that bitch, Sharon. Now that he was officially on his own, though, she found that she lacked the skills, or tools, to let him know how she felt. The fact was, she was as terrified as she was attracted—a cul-de-sac from which she had yet to extricate herself.

Finding neither of the false detectives inhabiting the dank stalls, she retraced her steps to the kitchen, passing through it, and out the back door into a grim alley lined with garbage cans. A Dumpster hulked not far away and, because she was nothing if not thorough, she lifted up the green top and peered in. Using a metal rod she found in the alley, she held her nose and stirred the garbage, jamming the rod into several spots. Garbage and more garbage. She dropped the rod, closed the top, and visually checked either end of the alley.

Choosing one end at random, she moved off.

*   *   *

Walking up the garage’s ramp, McKinsey thought about the Horn of Africa. That dungheap was never far from his thoughts. Fallujah had been blindingly bright with danger, and any number of his buddies had perished there, most in terrible ways he’d rather forget, but in Fallujah he knew the enemy, even when it was a hurt teenager packed with explosives. He could smell death in the air, and he knew how to deal with it.

The Horn of Africa was an entirely different story—a morass of terror and betrayal. Death lurked not only in every shadow and around every corner, but in the brilliance of sunlight, an extended hand, a warm smile, a whisper of friendship and support. Nothing was as it appeared to be. It was all dark theater, complete with masks, trapdoors, and unknown ringmasters out to skin you alive and string you up for the vermin to feed on. In all his travels around the world, McKinsey had never felt the sting of such implacable, bitter hatred as he had in the Horn of Africa. He liked it there; it was like living on Mars.

Soon enough he reached the topmost level, and walking to the gray late-model Ford, he pulled the passenger’s side door open and got in.

“What the fuck?” Willowicz said. “This McClure bastard is going to screw everything up.”

7

Jack experienced Emma’s laugh as another breath of cool air on his cheek. He no longer bothered to wonder whether he was losing his mind, whether the ghostly visitations or whispered voice were real or figments of his guilt-ridden brain. The truth was she knew things he didn’t, things he couldn’t know.

—Emma, where are you?

“Who knows? I’m in twilight, neither light nor darkness.”

—Shades of gray.

“Not even that. Everything is just gray … unchanging gray.”

—I’m so—

“Don’t say it, Dad. Don’t say you’re sorry. We’re both in a different place now.”

—I wish that were so.

“There is peace here, total and absolute, but it’s just out of my reach.”

—I don’t understand.

“I don’t either. But it’s why I’m here, in this place, close to you, unable to reach you. I feel like Sisyphus.”

—Cursed to eternally roll the stone up the hill, only to lose control of it, seeing it roll down to the bottom and trudging back to try again.

“Yes. But that doesn’t mean I’m not learning.”

Jack was surprised.

—Learning. In what way?

“I can see things now—see them clearly, in a way that was impossible to do when I was alive.”

—Your perspective has changed.

That odd breath of a laugh. “There is no perspective here, Dad, just as there is no time. Everything just is. You’re so involved in criminality it became an obsession of mine. I studied every text I could find on human criminality, but it wasn’t until now—to put it in life’s terms—”

—Terms I’ll understand.

“If you like. Anyway, I can see now that the criminal personality—Dad, you’ll really like this—is formed from two sides of a coin, both terribly dark. On one side, criminality is born of misdirected resentment, a logic, if you want to call it that, of self-destruction. Remember how you and I were drawn to the paintings of Paul Gauguin? At one point, his beautiful, mysterious work was the only thing we could agree on. You know why, Dad? Because of his philosophy. He wrote, ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.’ An Impressionist painter wrote that! Can you believe it?

“Anyway, the other side stems from being totally self-absorbed, like the Roman Emperor Nero. What the hell, the little prick inherited virtually limitless power before he had a chance to grow up. To him, no one outside of himself was real—what happened to them didn’t matter in the slightest, so murder, rape, torture, and mayhem were beneath his notice.”

Good God, Jack thought. This can’t be happening. And yet, he couldn’t help himself …

—Where is she, Emma?

“Where’s who?”

—You know. Annika. Where is she?

“You swore you never wanted to see her again.”

—That was almost a year ago. A lifetime.

“Even if I did know, Dad, I couldn’t tell you. I’m not your guide through this darkness.”

Did she know? Jack wondered. And then realized he had said it out loud.

“Jack?”

He almost cracked his neck, turning around so fast. Naomi and McKinsey had reentered Twilight.

“We lost them,” she said.

McKinsey, looking around, said, “Does who know?” He couldn’t keep a smirk off his face. “Who were you talking to?”

Ignoring his comment, Jack told them about the fractured left eye socket that linked the murders here with Billy Warren’s.

“That exonerates Alli,” Naomi said with clear relief.

McKinsey shook his head. “Or it could signal that she’s not in it alone.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Naomi said. “You don’t know her.”

“In my experience,” he told her, “nobody knows anyone. Not really.”

Jack wanted to move in a more fruitful direction. “Look what I found.” He showed them the badge. “The manager was clutching it in his fist, as if he wanted to protect it from O’Banion and Willowicz.” As they examined it in turn, he said, “Either of you make any sense of the writing?”

As they were shaking their heads sirens sounded, rapidly approaching.

Naomi took the badge, fingering it as if the writing were in braille. “I think I know someone who can help us.”

“I bet my wife knows plenty of linguists,” McKinsey said. “She’s a professor at Georgetown.”

“The person I’m thinking of isn’t a linguist.” Naomi was turning the badge over and over, as if trying to coax a sense memory from it. “I think I’ve seen something like this before.” She glanced up at Jack with a penetrating look. “If I’m right, we’re headed into a very dark place.”

*   *   *

Alli slept because of exhaustion, but also to escape the horror of the present, the gruesome image of Billy bound to the tree, blue-white as the moon, and just as distant.

Curled in her uncle’s wing chair, she was dreaming about the last snow of winter. It drifted down upon the vast, terrifying expanse of Moscow’s Red Square like glittering confetti. Lights that illuminated the onion domes of Saint Basil’s seemed to enlarge each flake to a monstrous size. Alli breathed in the frozen, knifing wind as she ran through the clusters of tourists, Red Army soldiers, and cassocked Russian Orthodox priests—robins, hawks, and ravens picking over the ground for sustenance.

She ran in frantic circles, as if lost, rudderless, without any thought save to find Annika. A strange form of hysteria gripped her, as if she were dying, and only Annika could save her. She pushed past people, who whirled like the snowflakes, their eyebrows and lashes powdered white, their eyes staring past her as if she didn’t exist, or was already dead. Her dread increased exponentially, tightening her chest, making her heart pound as if she were running a long and terrible race.

And, against all odds, she saw Annika, light hair and deep mineral eyes, outlined against the stark, massive edifice of the Kremlin. She was staring at Alli, but made no move toward her as Alli struggled against the tide of people that tried to pull her away toward the dark, shadowed fringes of Red Square where certain death lurked like a staircase at night. Still, she kept struggling forward, only to find that she was in a different section of Red Square altogether, seeing Annika from a different angle, now closer, now farther away. Grimly, she pressed on, determined.

Then, all at once, breathless and on the verge of tears, she stood before Annika, who was dressed in an ankle-length coat embedded with the bones of what might be small animals. Alli wanted nothing more than for Annika to take her in her arms and rock her like a child.

But Annika said, “Why have you come all this way to see me? Life is a doomed enterprise.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Talk is a hopeless activity, like looking at a blank page.”

“Please don’t say that!”

“Would you rather I lie to you?”

“You lied to Jack.”

“But not to you, never to you.”

“You lied to him, don’t you see it’s the same thing.”

“I lied to protect him, I lied because I loved him.”

“Do you love him still?”

Annika looked at her pitilessly. “How can I help you?”

“Please answer me.”

“Why? Would you understand? What do you know of love, how it can shape a heart, how it can twist it, shatter it. Have you experienced irretrievable loss?”

“Yes, yes! We both have. We’re the same, you and I—”

“No, Alli. I am darkness, I am death.” She stepped away into the spiraling snow, and called back, her voice echoing off the walls of the monolithic Kremlin and Saint Basil’s, “Don’t come after me.…”

Alli awoke with an unpleasant start. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt. She looked around, disoriented, surprised to find herself still in her uncle’s study. Her vision was blurry. When she put her hand up to her face her fingers came away wet with tears. She had been crying in her sleep.

She leapt off the chair as if she had received an electric shock, and turned when she heard the door open. Rudy, the guard who looked like an ex-professional wrestler, came into the study. He closed the door behind him and picked his way across the polished wooden floorboards toward her. He had an odd, almost delicate way of walking that was entirely silent, as if he were barefoot. She watched him, fascinated, as he put his right foot in the precise location his left foot had just vacated.

It was only when he was very close, and about to swing it, that she saw the iron poker in his hand.

8

Dime-Store Slim had one hand. Seemingly, he was proud of it, or rather the stump, which had ingenious metal pincers affixed to it, as if he was in the process of turning into a crab-man or the creature from Predator.

He certainly had a personality to match, Jack thought, as Naomi Wilde introduced him and McKinsey. Dime-Store Slim was very tall, very narrow, and very dark-skinned. He had kinky hair, which he wore in a 70s-style Afro, like an outrageous hat on a runway model. On him, though, it looked ominous rather than incongruous or theatrical, as if that pitch-black cloud of unknowing could reach out and swallow you alive.

Dime-Store Slim liked to shake hands with his pincers, which he proffered in an unavoidable gesture. In fact, he thought it was hilarious to witness other people’s consternation and embarrassment. In contradiction to his slight frame, he exuded a powerful menace that was impossible to ignore or to deflect. You simply had to deal with it, Jack realized, long before McKinsey did. He was amused to see how uncomfortable Slim made the Secret Service agent.

“Why’d you think I’d know what this is?” asked Slim, slouched on a chair with his long legs up on a crate of Mallomars, fingering the badge Jack had handed him. They had found him in the rear of his Smoke Shop in a section of Northeast Washington so burned out it seemed an irredeemable slum. Slim seemed to like it that way. Even if this ant hill was grubby, he was king of it. Plus, the area was among the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. That, too, was quite all right with him. The more dangerous the better. Piratically, he wore a large .45 semiautomatic stuck in the waistband of his jeans.

McKinsey’s expression darkened as soon as he noticed the handgun. “D’you have a permit for that weapon, son?”

Slim was off the chair in a flash, his Doc Martens banging loudly against the floor. “Who you calling ‘son,’ fool?”

Compounding his error, McKinsey flashed his ID. “The United States government, that’s who.”

Slim had the .45 out, the muzzle stuck in McKinsey’s face, before the agent knew what was happening. “Ain’t no United States government in this part of the world, motherfucker.”

“Easy.” Naomi held up her hands placatingly. “Let’s all stand down.”

“Tell him that,” McKinsey said in a voice that was thin and strained to the point of breaking.

“She ain’t gonna tell me, nuthin, motherfucker.” Slim cocked his head toward Naomi. “Why you bring these fools into my house, anyways?”

“We all need someone to laugh at,” Jack said, before she could answer.

There ensued a kind of stunned silence, during which McKinsey’s face turned red and Naomi’s mouth formed a tiny O. Then Slim started to laugh. He laughed so hard he could no longer keep up the pretense of being pissed off. He stepped back, slid the .45 back into his jeans, and returned to his beat-up old lounge chair.

“Fuck!” His forefinger jabbed out at Jack. “I know whys you brought this motherfucker, um-hum.”

He nodded, and then brought out a pack of rolling paper and a plastic bag of pot, deliberately, to Jack’s way of thinking, antagonizing McKinsey further. The agent stiffened and Jack saw Naomi’s hand grip his arm.

“Why don’t you go back outside and make sure we aren’t disturbed,” she said in a soft voice.

After hesitating enough to regain a modicum of self-respect, McKinsey said, “Fuck this shit,” and, shaking her off, stalked out of the shop with a gunshot bang of the front door.

“Nice fucking sonuvabitch,” Jack said, which returned Slim to a state of helpless laughter.

At length, he wiped his eyes, rolled his joint, lit up, and offered to share. They both declined.

“Straight’n’narrows, the two of you.” But it wasn’t said unkindly.

“The badge,” Jack prompted.

“The what?”

Jack pointed to the small metal object he was holding.

“Oh, you mean this? What the fuck, do I look like Sherlock-motherfucking-Holmes?” He lifted his head and hollered, “Grasi! Get your ass over here!”

A moment later, a dark-headed kid, who could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, sauntered into the back room. His starkly corded body marked him as a gym rat. So far as Jack could see, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He wasn’t muscle-bound like a lot of gym rats; rather, he’d sculpted his body to become a lean, mean, fighting machine. The normally laughable description that reminded Jack of a scene in the comedy Stripes was never more apt.

“We call him Grasi,” Slim said, “because he’s got some fuckin’ unpronounceable foreign name, don’t you, Grasi?”

Grasi grinned. He wore black jeans, custom high-tops, and an anachronistic leather vest over a white T-shirt that showed plenty of his chest. He had a ton of bling around his neck, and tattoos, most of them amateurish-looking. “Can’t buy a fucking vowel to save my life.”

Slim tossed him the octagonal badge. “You got a name for this?”

Grasi deftly caught it with his fingertips and held it up in front of his face. In almost the same motion, he tossed it back to Slim. His eyes slid sideways. “Never seen anything like it before.”

Slim sighed. “And there you have it, sports fans.” He shrugged as he handed the badge back to Jack, and said to Naomi, “I always try to be of service, but…” Again his shoulders lifted and fell.

“Thanks, anyway,” Naomi said. “It was worth a shot.”

Grasi turned to go.

“Hold on a minute,” Jack said. “Can you show me where the bathroom is?”

Grasi nodded disinterestedly, and Jack followed him out into the shop proper.

*   *   *

Peter McKinsey stood with shoulders hunched, hands thrust deep into pockets containing any number of concealed folding weapons whose honed steel both energized and soothed him. He was oblivious to the light rain or the passing vehicles. With chin jutting and lips pursed, he was sunk deep inside his thoughts.

He had met Willowicz six months into his tour of duty in the Horn of Africa. Willowicz’s name was different then, but the man was the same. McKinsey and Willowicz felt an immediate kinship, possibly because they held the same worldview. Their intense and uncompromising gung-ho attitude was nothing more than a facade beneath which existed a rich layer of nihilism. The interesting thing was that neither was conscious of this Nietzschean tendency; they would have vociferously denied it, even if confronted with the truth.

They were fearless, which meant that they were reckless in everything they did, skating along the edge of the black ice of death without ever succumbing to its embrace. They killed, maimed, tortured, and slaughtered the intractable enemy with the righteous zeal of Crusaders or priests of the Spanish Inquisition. They liked to invoke God’s name while they laughed, splashing in blood and gore, grinding guts and organs to the consistency of motor oil. Spurred on by the seemingly limitless enmity they encountered every minute of every day and night, there was nothing they wouldn’t do to their enemy to make him give up secrets out of the agony they inflicted, never thinking for a moment that these secrets might be concocted in order to end the pain. But no matter how many of the enemy they destroyed, the full measure of the satisfaction they craved never materialized. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how much pain they inflicted, they could never engender in their prey the terror they longed to see. These people were different, inhabiting an entirely different plane of existence than the Americans.

“They’re not human,” they would tell each other, over the stink of their high-minded work or, later, during bouts of heavy drinking. “If they can’t feel terror, they can’t feel any emotion. They’re for sure not human.” If it wasn’t satisfaction, it was impossible, during those sessions, to know what emotions McKinsey and Willowicz felt.

That was then. Today they were back home, in different jobs, but with precisely the same mind-set. The trouble was, neither of them could leave behind their time in the Horn of Africa. Like a malarial fever, their exploits rose into their consciousness, regular as an ocean tide, dragging with it a swath of man-made sludge: cracked skulls, congealed blood, fractured bones, and bits of gray matter. It was not enough; nothing was enough. And so the two of them existed like creatures of the dark, bloodthirsty, vampiric, unwilling or unable to readjust to a civilization hamstrung by laws that entangled the forward thrust of their urgent missions.

He didn’t like being left out of whatever was happening back inside Slim’s crap-joint, but he recognized he only had himself to blame. Seeing these people lounging around with .45s in their belts infuriated him. If he had his way, he’d fire-bomb every one of them. Fuck civil rights. People like Slim didn’t deserve to hide behind the laws that were meant to put them in the slammer. He belonged facedown in the gutter. Not for the first time, McKinsey wished he were back in the Horn of Africa.

“I dream about that place,” he’d said to Willowicz as they’d sat in the gray late-model Ford. There was no need to be more specific, they spoke in the shorthand of war when they were together.

“Every night,” Willowicz said. “But sometimes I think it’s a place I made up.”

McKinsey stared out the window at the grayness. “What are we doing here?”

“Our jobs,” Willowicz said. “Like always.”

McKinsey nodded, but with the air of a person staring at something he could see with no real clarity.

“Everything was clear-cut over there,” Willowicz said, as if reading his friend’s mood. “Here, nothing makes sense.”

“We did what we wanted, what was needed. Now what? We put one foot in front of the other. Like old men whose lives are behind them.”

“We’re in a goddamn fog of unknowing.”

McKinsey let out a long breath. “McClure changed ME’s on us. The new one, Egon Schiltz, isn’t on our payroll.”

“Then we’ll put him on it.”

“Sadly, no.” McKinsey sounded disgusted. “Schiltz is a personal friend of McClure’s. He won’t bite and, what’s worse, he’s sure to inform his pal of the approach.”

Willowicz shifted in his seat. “Then I’ll kill the fucker.”

“Good idea. That for sure won’t alert McClure.”

Willowicz drew his neck in like a turtle. “Or we can do nothing. Like toothless old men.”

A short, poisonous silence ensued.

“Fuck it!” McKinsey kicked open the door and launched himself out.

Leaning over, Willowicz said, “Be careful of that dirtbag McClure.”

McKinsey made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and started down the ramp.

Now, with the rain in his face, he shook out a cigarette and lit up. Smoke drifted past his eyes, obscuring a world he despised, a world in which he did not belong.

*   *   *

Grasi pointed out the grubby door of the toilet and started off toward the front of the shop.

“Hey,” Jack said, “what’s your real name?”

The teenager turned back. “Everyone calls me Grasi.”

“Even at home? Even your mother?”

“I have no mother.” Grasi said this matter-of-factly, without a hint of remorse or self-pity.

Jack came toward him. “‘Grasi’ is a Romanian word. It means fat. You aren’t fat.”

“It’s a fucking joke, man.”

“You Romanian, Grasi?”

The youth stuck out his jaw. “What the fuck of it?”

Jack shrugged, even as he lunged forward, grabbed hold of the bling around Grasi’s neck, and yanked it off.

“Little fuck-nuts!” With a soft snik! a switchblade appeared in Grasi’s fist.

As he advanced, Jack threw the bling back to him. All except one piece: a gold pendant in the shape of an octagon. Jack had noticed it when Grasi was supposedly studying the badge. When he spoke, Jack knew he was lying.

Jack held the pendant and the badge side by side. “They’re identical,” he said.

Grasi flicked the tip of the wicked-looking blade.

“You’re smarter than that,” Jack said. “I’m not your enemy.”

Grasi laughed. “Fuck you, you’re not my friend.”

“That depends.” Jack kept his eye on the tip of the blade. “I’m the only one who can keep you out of jail now.”

“I ain’t done nothing, fuck-nuts.”

Jack held up the pendant and the badge. “These say you’re lying. We’re investigating three very nasty homicides. This badge is our only clue. D’you get it? You know something I need to know. If you hold out on me, I’m going to throw your ass in jail for suspicion of murder and obstructing a federal homicide investigation. Believe me, you won’t like it in federal lockup. The inmates there eat your kind for breakfast.”

For a moment, Grasi looked around, his eyes rolling madly. Then he licked his lips and flicked the switchblade closed. “Thatë. My name is Thatë.”

*   *   *

With the iron poker’s fall, Alli felt a scream bubbling up into her throat. She forced it aside, converting it into a shout of defiance, as she ducked behind the wingback chair. The poker slammed into the padded top, splitting the fabric, flaying off stuffing, as it would have Alli’s skin and flesh.

Rudy, expecting her to make for the door, backed up to stand squarely in her path. But Alli had no intention of heading for the door, at least not yet. She lunged toward the fireplace and grabbed the ash shovel, which was unwieldy but with its wide head approached the defensive-offensive combination of a medieval mace.

Rudy, seeing her struggle with the shovel, laughed.

Good deal, Alli thought. In situations like this her diminutive size was a tremendous advantage. Because she still carried the appearance of a young girl, she was treated as such. She waited, showing Rudy how difficult it must be for her to hold the shovel for any length of time, let alone swing it as a weapon.

“You’re dead, you know that,” Rudy said as he came at her, poker held high.

Alli didn’t bother to answer. Instead, she watched the weapon, its increasing arc, as Rudy, massive shoulder bunched, drew it back and swung it at her.

The poker made a whistling sound, like a bird in flight, or an arrow. She waited for the last minute, as Jack had always instructed her, then brought the broad shovel head into the path of the arc. A hard ringing, like a struck bell, and sparks flew. She staggered beneath the power of Rudy’s blow, more than was necessary to steady herself.

Rudy, a fierce grin plastered across his face, moved in, cutting off her line of retreat, backing her up against the fireplace.

“There’s a fine spot for them to find you.” His rising excitement turned his voice guttural. “Curled in the fireplace with the soot and the ash.”

“When people talk, their attention wavers,” Jack had told her, and, as usual, he was right. Even as Rudy was mocking her, she lowered the shovel as if it had become too heavy for her, and swung it hard into the side of his left knee.

He groaned as the joint crumpled and he lost his footing. The poker fell to the floor as he grabbed his knee in agony. Alli tossed aside the shovel and ran. As she passed him, she kicked him in the side of the head. Then she leapt over him and, sprinting across the study, threw open the door, and raced out into the hallway.

Behind her, she could hear Rudy cursing, climbing noisily to his feet, then shouting to his fellow guards, alerting them to her escape. One of them appeared in the hallway ahead of her. He drew his sidearm and she backed up, turned, and heading back, raced around a corner, taking the first branching that presented itself.

She knew the layout of her uncle’s house well, though she hadn’t been in it for years. Now she headed for the kitchen, which had both a back door and a large larder with a trapdoor down to the root cellar, which Uncle Hank had converted into a temperature-controlled wine cellar.

She could hear the heavy tramp of thick brogues pounding behind her, and Rudy’s voice bellowing like that of a maddened bull. By her count, there were three guards. She knew, more or less, where two of them were, but where was the third?

She got her answer a moment later, as he stepped out of a shadow and slammed her in the back just before she reached the kitchen. He drove her into the bathroom from which he had just exited. Arms pinwheeling, her lungs gasping to pull in air, her foot skidded on the floor mat and she slid into the gleaming porcelain wall of the bathtub. Her left arm broke the plane of the plastic shower curtain, and she pulled it down around the guard as he reached over to grab her. Driving her body upward, she sought to entangle him in the stiff folds. She smacked away his grasping fingers. She could see his features twisted and distorted with effort through the translucent curtain, and when she slammed the heel of her hand into his nose a bright red rose of blood bloomed on the plastic, obscuring his expression. But she could feel the growing dismay and, possibly, panic in the frenzied movement of his limbs, the uncoordinated shaking of his head like a wolf in a trap. She popped him one more time on the bridge of his nose and he lay still.

She turned, pushed the body off her, and stood, slamming the door shut. There was a pounding in her head and she felt her gorge rising. The taste of stomach acid burned her throat. She shivered as she put her ear to the door, waiting for the sound of brogues to resume, but instead she heard whispers and recognized Rudy’s voice. Intuition told her what they were talking about. She could not use the little-girl act on Rudy again, and now was certain she couldn’t use it on the other guard, either. Bending down, she drew the unconscious guard’s .38 from its holster.

“Conlon!” Rudy called. “Conlon, are you okay?”

The cool heft of the handgun in her fist felt good, her forefinger lying beside the trigger like a cobra ready to spit its poison. There was an intoxication that came from holding a loaded gun, a sense of power that seemed to flow from the weapon into her hand, racing up her arm and into her brain. And it was this disorienting, larger-than-life feeling that caused her to remember what Jack had told her. “I’d rather face an adversary with a gun than one with a knife,” he’d cautioned her. “Guns make you overconfident, they make you feel as if you can overpower any adversary, and that’s where the real danger to you raises its head.”

The problem was simple enough: She was in a cul-de-sac with no other egress but the one door; there was no window in this interior bathroom. This was why Rudy and his partner hadn’t stormed in. They didn’t know the situation in here, other than the fact that Conlon had been neutralized. But that also meant she was now armed, so they were waiting for her to emerge, at which time they would grab her and disarm her before she had a chance to shoot either one of them.

A shootout would only get her killed or wounded, so she couldn’t risk even poking her head out the door to assess the situation. She had to make do with whatever was available in the bathroom.

Her hands were shaking, her heartbeat elevated, her breathing erratic. Turning to the medicine cabinet over the sink, she scanned the shelves. She’d heard about spray cans, any of which she could have put into service now, but nowadays only pump sprays were available, and were of no use. But, scrounging around in the cabinet under the sink, she found a bottle of drain cleaner. Judging by its weight, it was at least half full. Her fear was palpable, a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth. She sought to tame it, because eradicating it was a waste of time.

Several deep breaths later, she jammed the bottle into the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, and turned her attention back to Conlon. He was still unconscious. Watching him softly breathe, an idea occurred to her. It might be crazy, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of a better alternative.

Temporarily sticking the .38 into her left front pocket, she bent and, grunting, lifted Conlon in his sticky cocoon onto his feet. It seemed a long, laborious project, but at last she had him on his feet, propped against the wall beside the door. She took a moment only to regain her breath, then, yanking open the door, she pushed him into the hall.

A moment later all hell broke loose.

Someone grabbed for Conlon as he fell into the hallway. In a blur of motion, she tossed the contents of the bottle of drain cleaner all over the front of the suit’s shirt. He immediately recoiled, shouting in shock and pain, Conlon’s insensate body toppled to the floor, and that was all the time she got. She tore herself away from other hands clawing at her from behind.

Vaulting over the fallen men, she ran toward the open doorway to the kitchen, but as soon as she got there she was forced to jump over the body of the cook or the gardener—one of Uncle Hank’s staff, anyway—which lay crumpled just beyond the doorway. With no time to find out if the man was dead or alive, Alli made for the back door. After being trapped in the bathroom, she had no desire to trap herself again down in the wine cellar.

She reached the glass-and-wood door more or less at the same time as her pursuer. She felt his powerful hand on her shoulder, pulling her backward, and, drawing the acquired .38, she whipped the barrel at his face. She heard a satisfying crunch of bone fracturing, and, released, she whipped the door open and fled outside.

It was raining, and she skidded badly on the slick flagstone surface leading to the gardens that comprised the inner circle of property at the rear of the house. She heard his breath first, then felt him on top of her as she struggled to regain her footing.

“Got you now, you little bitch,” Rudy said.

9

Jack moved the young man deeper into the rear of the shop to make certain no one overheard them.

“Go on,” he urged.

“Underground,” Thatë said.

“How far underground?” Jack asked.

“Not far enough … now.” Thatë made a disgusted sound at the back of his throat.

Jack saw that McKinsey had turned around and, staring through the front window, was watching him and Thatë talk. He wondered if McKinsey could lip-read. Turning his head away, he said to Thatë, “I want you to move into a section of the store where we can’t be seen from the street.”

Thatë did as Jack asked, and Jack soon followed him.

“I don’t like those two,” Thatë said, clearly referring to McKinsey and Naomi.

“You don’t like me, either.”

“Yeah, but them I’d knife—for real.”

“You really are a badass.”

Thatë didn’t know how to take that, so he did not respond.

“About the octagon symbol,” Jack prompted.

“A club.”

“I know all about clubs.”

“Not this kind of club.” Thatë’s eyes cut away, as if he’d rather be anywhere but here.

“And that would be?”

“Shit, don’t make me say it.”

“If I don’t,” Jack said, “someone else with a uniform and a much different attitude will.”

Thatë put his head down. Maybe this kind of life was getting too much for him, maybe he wasn’t cut out for it.

“Nothing legal about it.”

Jack took a step toward him. “You’d better have more for me than that.”

“Hold on. Don’t lose your shit all over everything.” The boy worried his lower lip, which was growing redder by the moment. “The club has a name. The Stem.”

Jack was going to say that he never heard of a club named the Stem, but instead he held his tongue. Something here didn’t feel right, the way it hadn’t felt right at the Billy Warren crime scene. He studied Thatë’s face, which held an expression of anticipation. In this situation it was the wrong emotion, as if he was waiting to see if “the Stem” held a special meaning for Jack.

Jack looked at the octagons—the badge and the pendant. He could focus on the one word that was identical to both of them. After a short struggle, he said to Thatë, “Pronounce this word for me.”

“What?”

“This word.” Jack tapped the octagons.

Thatë’s eyes slid away again for a moment, and Jack could read him now. He might as well take advantage of the teen’s nervousness.

“Speak it!” he ordered sharply.

“Rrjedhin.” The word almost caught in Thatë’s throat, but he managed to splutter it out.

That was a word in a language with which Jack was familiar. Without missing a beat, he said, “Sa jveç jeni?”

*   *   *

Rudy smelled unpleasantly of blood and sweat. He was as heavy as a Brahma bull and, lucky for Alli, as ungainly. His wounds had both maddened and impaired him. Blood streamed down his face, forcing him to blink continually to clear his vision, and it seemed as if his left knee, where Alli had struck him with the ash shovel, was shattered, because he dragged the leg behind him like a wrecked ship. But as she tried to get up, he used it like a club, the massive limb slamming against her hip so that they both cried out in pain at the same time.

But Rudy’s fist was already in her face, the heel of his hand pushing the underside of her jaw back, back, exposing the soft, vulnerable flesh of her throat. She heard a deep, guttural growl that threatened to turn her insides to water. She fought the desire to close her eyes, to let go, to release herself utterly into the undertow of his fury-fueled power and strength. There was a terrible, enervating moment when she experienced the female’s sense of acquiescing in the face of the male’s overwhelming brute physicality, both of body and personality. But then, remembering who she was, how close to both death and madness she had been, she shook herself awake, shook herself alive, and drove her forefinger straight up Rudy’s left nostril, pushing farther even as his head whipped back and forth like a bronco trying to unseat its rider. The soft, moist flesh of his sinus yielded to her fingertip, the arc of her nail slicing through tissue. Up farther into the bone of his skull, searching for the cavity that would end the threat to her life.

With a herculean effort, he threw her off him, clear over a hedge of azalea bushes. She rolled into a thick stand of pitch pines just beyond, the needles sweeping across her face like bony fingers. She could hear him snorting and moaning, flailing to regain his feet.

“I know where you are, little bitch! You’re beginning to believe you’ll get away, but fuck if you will!”

Rolling through the bed of fallen needles, she reached behind her for the .38, but it was gone. She must have lost it when Rudy had tossed her. Rudy began to crash through the azaleas, dragging his left leg behind him. Then she remembered the cell phone.

Pulling it out of the pocket of her jeans, she saw to her immense relief that there was a signal, now that she was outside the house. Her heart hammered wildly as she punched in Jack’s cell number.

She groaned as it rang and rang. She prayed for him to answer. Instead, she got his voice mail. “I’m at my Uncle’s Hank’s hunting retreat in Virginia. The guards he hired are after me.” She recited the address. “I’m out back with a fucking ginormous dirtbag on my ass. Please, please, please get me the fuck out of here.”

*   *   *

How old are you? That was what Jack had asked.

“Shtatëmbëdhjetë,” Thatë said. Seventeen.

“Ju jeni shqiptar.” You’re Albanian.

“Si nuk ju flas shqip?” How do you speak my language?

Jack smiled and tapped the side of his head. “You’re going to take me to the Stem.”

All the color drained from Thatë’s face. “No.”

“Yes,” Jack insisted.

“Ju lutem, mos bëni mua.” Thatë began to shiver. “Ata do të vrasin mua.”

“Who’ll kill you?” Jack asked. “Who are you so afraid of?”

But the teenager was in a panic, shaking his head back and forth, and Jack suspected he’d gotten everything out of him he could.

“All right.” Jack handed him a pad and pen. “Don’t say another word, just give me the Stem’s address.”

Thatë’s hand shook as he wrote a line on the pad. Jack took the writing implements back, then he asked for the teen’s cell. He took note of the number, then added his own cell number to the other’s phone book. “Now we know how to get in touch with each other. Mirë?”

“Mirë.” Thatë nodded weakly.

The vibration of Jack’s cell had become too insistent for him to ignore any longer. He hadn’t wanted to be disturbed, especially by Dennis Paull, who he was concerned might be calling him to move up tomorrow’s departure time. Jack needed every hour he could get in D.C.

But it wasn’t Paull; it was Alli. Shit, he should have picked up the call right away. Even as he was listening to her desperate message on his voice mail, he was heading out of Dime-Store Slim’s. He heard Naomi’s voice asking a question behind him, but there was no time to answer. He slammed open the door and sprinted out into the rain-slick street.

*   *   *

Alli, shivering with the chill rain and the tsunami of adrenaline racing through her, lay in the shelter of the copse of pitch pines, to give Rudy less of a target. There was no use running. He had a gun and she didn’t. The minute she turned tail he would spot her and bring her down. Better to wait here and think of how to avoid being found.

And then, as she heard him rooting around in the fringes of the evergreens, she realized her error. She was thinking like a rat or a mouse—like the prey. She forced herself to forget that Rudy was armed. How would she deal with him? It was up to her, she knew. Even if Jack picked up the voice mail right away, who knew where he was and how fast he could get here? No, she couldn’t—she shouldn’t!—count on him. It was up to her to stop Rudy.

The obtrusion of a root caused her to shift her position. Rolling over, she found herself momentarily looking up into the webbed branches of the pitch pines. That’s when the idea came to her. Rudy was drawing ever nearer. Scrambling to her feet, she grabbed hold of the lowest solid-looking branch and swung up. Though their wood was soft, pitch pines were easy climbs, with plenty of long, spreading branches. Carefully, she moved upward until she sat on a thick, nearly horizontal branch perhaps fifteen feet above the carpet of needles. A quick glance above her head convinced her that there was no point in climbing higher.

Staring at the roughly circular area below her, she waited for Rudy. Not the prey now—the hunter.

Soon enough, she heard him picking his way through the underbrush. He certainly was making no effort to be quiet, and when he came into view she realized why. In his left hand he held the .38 she had lost. His own .38 was in his right. He knew she was unarmed; he had no need to be discreet.

She knew she had to time this right; she wouldn’t have a second chance. She bolstered her courage with the belief that her small size would work in her favor. As he came under her perch, she slid off and fell with legs spread. Landing on his shoulder, she clamped her thighs tight around either side of his head.

He staggered with the shock and the unexpected weight, but instinct took over instantaneously. He raised both weapons, firing them blindly. Alli knocked them sideways, then reached down to his face. The best wound is a new wound, she thought, as she attacked his nostril again, inflicting such pain that he roared and tried to use the .38s as cudgels, battering them blindly against her thighs and hips.

But she had got her grip and wasn’t going to let go. His head raised up in order to lessen the pain, but all this did was give her finger easier access. As she plunged it in all the way, his eyes rolled up, his left knee gave out, and he toppled over. He swung out wildly as he fell, the side of the gun barrel in his right hand slamming into her ribs, knocking the breath out of her. She tumbled off him, lost her hold on his nostril, and fell heavily to the ground.

On hands and knees, bleeding profusely from his nose, Rudy crabbed his way after her. He was almost upon her when she grabbed a broken branch. It was old and rotten, but it would have to do. She swung it in a shallow arc into his left knee. Rudy screamed, grabbing for the agonized joint. Alli snatched up the .38 he had let go of and, reversing it, brought the heavy butt down on his temple once, twice, three times.

It was some moments before she realized that Rudy had stopped moving. She stared down at his ugly face. Blood still oozed from his nose, and a thick dribble of it stained one corner of his mouth. Without thinking, she took his own .38 and lay it beside Conlon’s. The two weapons looked incongruous on their bed of rough, brown needles, as if they were now without will, without a reason to exist. She wished they would dissolve into the earth.

Staring into Rudy’s bloated face, she was never more repulsed. His aggression was enough to put her off men forever. She was reminded of a story Emma had told her of Attila the Hun’s death, which, Emma had said, with a grim laugh, had served him right. He had died when a major artery burst in mid-thrust, as he was deflowering one of his beautiful virgins. She wished the same fate for Rudy, a true Vandal in the historical sense, who had delighted in terrorizing her.

Alli found she was weeping. All around her the rain dripped and slithered. She tasted it on her lips, felt it sliding down the back of her neck. Both the rain and her tears tasted of blood. She knew she should move, but she could not. Like the guns, she lay on the bed of needles, without will or volition, resting, heart pounding in her chest, waiting.…

That was how Jack found her.

She looked at him as he knelt down to scoop her up. “My hero,” she whispered. And, then, in a louder voice, “You look like crap.”

Jack laughed, and at that moment cop cars, sirens blaring, started to converge on Henry Holt Carson’s house from both east and west.

10

Dennis Paull was at Claire’s apartment in Foggy Bottom when he heard about the debacle at Carson’s country residence. The news came via a text message. He stared at it a moment in disbelief, long enough for his daughter to ask what was wrong.

“Nothing,” he said, sliding his PDA back into a breast pocket.

“Business, Dad. Always business.” Her voice was mocking rather than admonitory.

“The government never sleeps.”

She laughed. “No, Dad. It’s you who never sleeps.”

She put a delicate-fingered hand over his. They were sitting on a sofa in her living room, companionably, even lovingly, side by side, in a manner he’d never have believed possible up until about a year ago. That’s when he and Claire had reconciled, when he had met his grandson, Aaron, for the first time. For him, it was love at first sight; he was certain Aaron felt the same way. At seven, he’d been in desperate need of a father figure, and Paull had striven to be just that, rather than the indulgent grandfather that might be the norm. Claire’s strong suit wasn’t discipline, something every child required, in his opinion. Clearly, Claire agreed, because she allowed him his head with Aaron. On the other hand, he was careful not to criticize her parenting skills, which were exemplary in all other aspects.

In some respects, he still felt as if he were walking on eggshells around her. He was dismayed that he no longer knew her. When she came back to him, she was, to all practical purposes, a stranger. She didn’t even look the way he remembered her. She had left him when she was still a girl. Seven years later, she had returned a woman. While a certain disconnect should not have come as a surprise to him, it nevertheless did. She was his flesh and blood. He and his wife had raised her, and now it seemed to him as if she were someone else’s daughter. His heart fractured at the thought, though he never for a moment allowed her to see his pain. Besides, the break was essentially his fault. Recognizing that was his first giant step toward reconciliation, both with Claire and inside himself.

“How long will you be gone, Dad?” Claire stirred half-and-half into her coffee. She liked it light, no sugar, but strong, he had learned. When she had left, she hadn’t been drinking coffee at all. So many differences!

He sighed. “I wish I could say.”

“Even if you knew, you wouldn’t tell me, would you?” She smiled to show him there was no need to answer.

He glanced around the room. It astonished him how quickly and easily a woman could make a home cozy, warm, and bright, right down to the photos and little knickknacks and souvenirs. All he required was a laptop, a comfortable lounge chair, and a well-stocked bar. Oh, and his stack of history books—the history of warfare, the fall of the Roman Empire, the history of medicine, of philosophy, of the struggle between Catholics and Protestants, between Christianity and Islam. The depressing fact was that they all came down to one thing: war, killing, death.

“What will you tell Aaron?”

“The truth, so far as I know it.” She took a sip of coffee, then put her cup down. “One thing I’ve learned out of all this pain, Dad, is the importance of the truth. I strive to raise Aaron with that in mind.”

Paull studied his daughter. He didn’t know whether to pity or admire her. Perhaps it was both. That’s how life was, anyway, he thought, always a series of choices, always a series of contradictions, some of which could be untangled, others not. It was learning to distinguish one from the other that proved to be a bitch.

But, he thought now, just the fact that he felt pity toward her was a prime example of how long he had lived in the shadows, because one couldn’t survive there without learning to lie. Where he toiled, lies were a necessity. And very soon—so soon, in fact, it was disorienting—lies became the norm. That was where he was at when he began manipulating the man Claire wanted to marry. The result? She had told him to go fuck himself when she found out, married the man without Paull knowing, and then divorced him. In the meantime, his wife got old and sick, and he just lost interest in everything.

That’s what had happened to him, he reflected, and to so many of his compatriots. The ones who it hadn’t happened to were dead. So, too, his wife, but he had been given a second chance with Claire and with Aaron, and he meant to make the most of it.

He couldn’t take his eyes off Claire. She was so beautiful he had difficulty believing that he’d had a hand in creating her. She didn’t look like either him or Louise. Maybe like one of Louise’s aunts, or possibly a little like his own grandmother, his father’s mother, who was definitely a looker. Despite her looks, she had no one. She’d left her idiot husband and now wanted nothing to do with him. Aaron despised him, so happily there was nothing more to say on the subject.

“Are you seeing anyone new?” he said.

“Oh, Dad…”

“Just asking.”

She considered for a moment, turning her cup around in its saucer. “Okay, there is someone.” She held up a hand. “Before you start the inquisition, I’m putting the subject off-limits. We just started dating and … Well, there’s nothing more to tell.”

“Okay.”

She cocked her head, her deep gray eyes inquisitive. “Really?”

He nodded, smiling. “You’re a grown woman, Claire. You can make your own choices.”

She put a hand over his again. “Thank you, Dad.”

Sad commentary on their past relationship, he thought, that she felt she had to thank him for considering her an individual. He sighed internally. More muddy water under the bridge, one more sin to atone for.

He rose. She looked as if she were about to say, Leaving already? but instead she bit her lip and, rising as well, produced a bittersweet smile and kissed him on the cheek.

“Be safe,” she whispered.

He headed for the door. “Tell Aaron I love him.” He turned back to her. “You, too.”

That bittersweet smile was still in place as he walked out the door.

*   *   *

“What the fuck happened here?”

McKinsey said it, but Naomi felt it. They had arrived at almost the same time as the first state police responders, having done their best to follow Jack’s reckless driving. On their obligatory tour around Henry Holt Carson’s country estate, Naomi was gripped by trepidation. The place was crawling with state police investigators and forensic personnel. A veritable armada of official vehicles, including SWAT armored trucks, filled the driveway, overflowing onto the immaculate lawns. Surely an overreaction, she thought, until she saw the havoc wreaked: the cook and gardener recovering from being knocked out cold by person or persons unknown, one guard’s chest burned to a crisp and a second one with a broken nose, and the third …

“I have a bad feeling about all of this,” she said as she stared down at the corpse of Rudy Laine.

“Join the club.” McKinsey, glancing up, got rainwater in his eye. “Once again in the fucking trees.”

“The fun never stops.” Naomi knelt down beside the body. “As advertised, dead as a doorpost.”

“And twice as ugly.”

She sighed, rising. “Does anyone know what the hell went on here?”

“Not the cops, but a million bucks says McClure does.”

She checked her phone, frowning. “He’s not answering his cell. No one knows where he is.”

“Ditto the First Daughter.” McKinsey put his hands on his hips. “Odds are they’re together.”

Naomi said nothing, but she knew that he was probably right. Jack had a habit of going off the reservation, but this was a particularly bad time for it. The Virginia State Police were howling to question Alli—at the very least. She was the prime suspect in Laine’s death.

“The two guards said Alli Carson attacked Laine in the library, ran out, struck Conlon down as he was about to exit a bathroom, then she and Laine got into it for real. The fight spilled out to the rear of the house, he heard gunshots being fired. One guard was busy in the shower washing off the drain cleaner he said Alli threw at him, but by the time Conlon got here the other one was dead and the First Daughter was gone.”

“What if the guards are lying?”

McKinsey shot her a skeptical look. “I know you’ve got a soft spot for the girl, kiddo, but come on. First off, the guards’ stories corroborated one another.”

“They had time to concoct it before the police arrived,” Naomi pointed out.

“Secondly, they work for Fortress, one of the most highly regarded security firms in the country. The First Daughter’s uncle hired them to keep her safe and out of lockup.” He spread his hands. “Face it, everything’s against her.” He cast a glance back over his shoulder to where Henry Holt Carson and Harrison Jenkins stood conferring heatedly with a chief of the state police. “Murder, battery, violating a federal judge’s order of recognizance, I don’t know if even her uncle’s contacts or his famous lawyer’s legal tricks can save her from being locked up and indicted.”

Naomi was busy using her phone to go online.

McKinsey stared down at Rudy Laine’s corpse. “Man, for a little girl she packs some wallop.”

We can thank Jack for that, Naomi thought distractedly. “You forget, she’s not a little girl.”

“Well, right now what she looks like is a murderer.” He squinted. “And if McClure has spirited her away, that makes him an accessory after the fact.”

*   *   *

Paull’s next stop was the VIR section of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The VIR section was where new weapons ready for the field but not yet in the distribution pipeline were available to Alpha-level personnel.

He tried to keep thoughts of what complications the death of one of the men guarding Alli Carson might cause him—meaning, very specifically, how badly the incident would distract Jack from their mission to track down and kill Arian Xhafa. He’d punched in Jack’s cell number several times, always canceling the call before it could be made. There was nothing he could do for either Jack or Alli at this point, and he preferred not to hear whatever lies Jack would tell him regarding his involvement.

Paull needed Jack, of that he had no doubt. Given what the president had told him about Xhafa’s capabilities, there was no point in going to Macedonia without Jack’s brilliant tactical sense and his uncanny ability to figure out how the enemy thinks and, therefore, what traps, disinformation, and the like he would toss into your path. No matter what, Paull needed Jack on that plane with him at midnight.

Meanwhile, he had to pick out the weaponry that was both portable enough for a difficult mountain trek in hostile territory and powerful enough to both counter Xhafa’s firepower and assure his annihilation.

Slowly and methodically, he walked up and down the aisles while his assigned DARPA sorcerer, as the engineers were called familiarly, explained the uses of each strange-looking item.

After a time, Paull began to hum “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The president had been right—he wasn’t meant to be a desk jockey no matter how high up in the hierarchy that desk might be. He was back in his element, as happy as a pig in mud.

*   *   *

McKinsey and Naomi were about to leave the crime scene when Henry Holt Carson waved them over. His face was grave, by which Naomi deduced that his conversation with the state police chief hadn’t gone well.

“The police have issued a warrant for my niece’s arrest in connection with this disaster,” he said without preamble.

Jenkins looked like he’d just lost his beloved pet dog. “Hank—”

Carson held up a hand. “I want you two to find Alli before the police do.”

“Hank, this is inadvisable,” the attorney said. “Inserting yourself into a second—”

Carson glared at him. “What did I tell you?”

“You pay me to protect you.”

“I’m thinking of Alli now,” Carson snapped.

“When we find her,” Naomi said, “then what?”

“Call me,” Carson said. “I’ll tell you where to bring her.”

“Hank, I’m an officer of the court,” Jenkins protested. “I can’t be a part of what is most certainly a felony crime, and I can’t allow you to be part of it, either.”

“I can’t hear you, Counselor. You’re not here.” Carson cocked his head. “In fact, I’m quite certain I just heard you drive away.” He addressed the two Secret Service agents. “Harrison Jenkins isn’t here, is he?”

“No, sir,” Naomi said.

McKinsey shook his head.

“Christ on a crutch.” Shaking his head, Jenkins took his leave, picking his way back to where his car was parked.

“Now then,” Carson said, taking a deep breath.

“Sir, with all due respect,” McKinsey interjected, “we’re Secret Service.”

“My niece is still Edward Carson’s daughter, all that’s left of the former First Family,” Carson said shortly. Then he waved a hand dismissively. “Besides, I cleared it with your boss. For the time being, you report to me and to me alone. Is that clear?”

“Yessir,” they said more or less simultaneously.

“Then what are you still doing here? Get to it.”

*   *   *

Alli, cocooned in a blanket Jack kept in the trunk of his car, smiled up at him, then fell back to sleep. Jack bent over her, kissed her lightly on the forehead, adjusted the blanket slighty, then tiptoed out of the room.

He found Thatë down the hall, listening to Kid Cudi on his iPod, a pair of cheap earbuds cutting him off from the rest of the world. Jack pulled the cord and as the buds popped out of the teenager’s ear, said, “Everything’s going to sound like crap with those.”

Thatë shrugged. “It’s supposed to sound like crap. That’s the point.”

Jack wanted to tell him how ignorant he sounded, but instead, sat down in a chair opposite the kid and said, “Take a listen with these.” He handed him the Monster Copper earbuds he had bought to listen to the music on Emma’s iPod, an essential part of her he was never without.

Thatë shrugged, supremely indifferent, as he plugged in the earbuds and fit them into his ears. Three seconds after he pressed Play, his eyes opened wide, and he turned to Jack and mouthed, “Fuck me!”

Jack watched him listening to music he’d never really heard before. They were in a kitchen-cum–living room, tattered and gloomy in an all too authentic way that would make most young Goths cream in their tight black trousers.

Thatë lived in a bombed-out building in a section of Southeast Washington that could have been Beirut. The neighborhood was as desolate as a creaking old tree in winter. Out on the pocked and pitted street, trash held a special position of reverence. It was used as clothing, housing, shelter from a storm. The endless inventiveness of the destitute was forever on display. Inside, bare bulbs hung from lengths of wire, though at any given moment the electricity might or might not work. In one corner, the ceiling plaster was distended like a pregnant woman’s nine-month belly, sopping with moisture, as if she had just broken her water. In the tiny, airless bathroom, there was a plastic bucket of water beside the toilet to ensure flushing. The apartment smelled of old pizza and pot. Forget dust; soot was everywhere, greasily ingrained on every horizontal surface. Occasionally, small sounds came from inside the walls, as if creatures were scuttling through the tenement’s arteries and veins.

As for Thatë, he seemed perfectly at home in a place that had the impermanence of an army tent or an Alaskan house. He was one of those people who wore grime like a tattoo or a piercing, a rebel yell that very deliberately gave the finger to society.

Jack got him to listen to Howlin’ Wolf from a playlist on Emma’s iPod. His eyes lost their focus as he sank deeper and deeper into the music. Thatë might be a teenager, but he had the eyes of an adult who had already been witness to too many despicable acts. It was likely he had committed some of those acts himself.

At length, the playlist came to an end and Thatë pulled off the earbuds. His face seemed transformed.

“Shit,” he said.

“Yeah.” Jack gestured to the refrigerator. “Beer?”

The kid nodded, still half in a trance.

Jack rose and opened the refrigerator, which wheezed like an asthmatic. Beer, Coke, a couple of half-eaten slices of congealed pizza, and not much else. At least the beer was imported.

“That girl’s too young for you,” Thatë observed.

Jack handed him a bottle, then twisted off the cap of his own bottle and took a slug. “She’s my daughter.”

Thatë looked away and picked at a scab on the point of his elbow.

“Where are your parents?”

Thatë took a swig of beer. “Don’t have parents.”

“You mean you don’t talk to them.”

“I mean I never met ’em.” The kid rolled the bottle around on the table, making a pattern of wet circles. “Good thing, too. I’d probably kill them.”

“Maybe they’re already dead.”

“Christ, I hope so.”

“No school for you, I see.”

“I’m in school. I don’t want trouble with the law.”

“So who’s subbing for you?”

“Fuck if I know,” Thatë said with a sly grin. “Twenty bucks a day does it.”

“I doubt that,” Jack said.

“Okay, an eighth a week.”

There was an upside-down cross and a skull with an arrow through it on the kid’s right biceps.

“Where’d you get the tats?” Jack said.

Thatë shrugged. “Here and there.”

“Not in this country.” When Thatë made no reply, Jack added: “Albania.”

“Shit, no,” the kid said rather defensively. “Russia.”

That told Jack a lot. “Which family?”

The kid was still picking at his scab. “What?” His fingertip was bright red.

“Which family of the grupperovka?”

Thatë jumped as if Jack had jabbed him with a burning needle.

“I know about the Russian mob,” Jack said. “I’ve had dealings with them.”

“No shit?”

The kid stared down at the Monster earbuds. He handed them back with no little reluctance. His body shifted subtly. By the alert way he sat, Jack could tell that his disinterest was feigned.

Jack leaned over to take a closer look. “Initiation, right? So which family became your parents?” He had seen these same tattoos on Ivan Gurov in Moscow last year. “No, wait, let me guess.”

The kid laughed, but he shifted again and Jack knew he was uneasy. “Izmaylovskaya. Am I right?”

“Jesus Christ!” Thatë stared at Jack as if he were a demon from hell. “Who the fuck are you?”

Jack finished off his beer and set the bottle down. He had nowhere to go until after dark. “I’ll tell my story,” he said, “if you’ll tell me yours.”

*   *   *

“I think we should split up,” Naomi said.

McKinsey regarded her with no little skepticism. “Are we really gonna do this?”

“I am.”

“What the fuck’s in it for us?”

She contemplated him in the same way someone would a slice of moldy meat. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I just don’t like taking orders from some entitled prick.” He shrugged. “I’m just a working stiff.”

“Yeah, in a Giorgio Armani suit.”

“What? I like to look good on the job. You think I’d be caught dead in one of those Simm’s specials the other guys wear?”

Naomi shook her head as they headed toward their car. “No matter. I think you should follow up with the state police chief who’s taken over this case.”

McKinsey raised an eyebrow. “And you?”

“I’m going to check out the guards’ background.”

“A complete waste of time, if you ask me.”

Naomi hauled open the car’s door and got behind the wheel. “Then it’s a good thing I didn’t ask.”

*   *   *

After dropping McKinsey off at his own car, Naomi drove to G Street NW, where Fortress Securities had their offices in one of those gigantic stone-faced buildings, fraught with dentils and Doric columns that dwarf any human who walks up the glittery white steps.

Fortress was on the seventh floor. Walking into its lobby, you could imagine yourself in the waiting room of a medium-sized advertising firm. The space was formed almost completely from horizontal planes of veined white marble, cut glass, bronze tubing, and glittering black granite. The only clue as to Fortress’s actual purpose was the bas-relief of an ancient Greek helmet, sculpted out of bronze, that rode over the receptionist’s head like the cloud of combat.

When Naomi produced her ID and asked to see Fortress’s president, she was politely but firmly told to wait while the receptionist—a young man in a sleek dark suit—spoke quietly into the mike of the headpiece encircling his head like a halo.

A short time later, another young man in a sleek dark suit escorted Naomi down a softly lit, carpeted hallway, lined with paintings of famous battles throughout history. Naomi recognized Alexander the Great, the great Spartan stand against Xerxes’s Persian army, Ajax and Achilles outside the walls of Troy, Napoleon at Waterloo, George Patton rolling over Europe, and so on and on, a seemingly endless display of man’s propensity for bloodlust and warfare. It was no surprise to Naomi that not one woman appeared in any of the paintings.

Andrew Gunn, the president of Fortress, rose from behind his desk as she was ushered into the room. Her guide immediately withdrew, closing the door behind him. Gunn seemed to unfold like a praying mantis. He was tall and thin with prematurely white hair and a nose like the prow of a ship. His steel blue eyes regarded her out of a rugged face, as scarred and pitted as the curve of the moon.

He came around, extended his hand, and smiled. His teeth seemed to shine in the muted afternoon light. Naomi had dealt with the top echelons of the private security firms. They all seemed to fall into two groups. Either they were ex-Marines, hard, angry, and bloodthirsty, or they were ex-CIA assets, anonymous, slippery, and bloodthirsty. She found it interesting that Gunn fell into neither of these camps. Rather, he seemed like a good old American cowboy, the way he had been played by Gary Cooper or depicted in the iconic Marlboro Man ads. He smelled good, as well, like the woods at night.

Instead of returning behind his desk, he led her to the far more informal seating area, which was comprised of an ultramodern sofa, two matching chairs, and a low coffee table made of a thick slab of white granite.

As they settled themselves, he said, “I assume, Ms. Wilde, that your visit concerns the death of one of my men, and the attack on two others.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

He shook his head. “Well, then, I’m at a loss to understand the involvement of the Secret Service.”

“The prime suspect is the First Daughter.”

“Ah, Henry Holt Carson’s niece.”

“That’s right.”

His serious expression deepened. The frown made him look like a caricature of himself, as if he wasn’t used to frowning. “With all due respect, I find the notion that this young girl could have overpowered three of my men inconceivable.”

“Nevertheless, Mr. Gunn, that is very well what might have happened.”

He spread his hands. “Surely there must be another explanation.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, but perhaps together we can find out.” She took out a small memo pad. “Mr. Carson came to you directly?”

“Yes, that’s right.” The phone rang, but Gunn ignored it. “Hank and I are old friends.”

“So you and Mr. Carson have done business before.”

“I said we’re friends.”

Naomi glanced up, trying to discern whether Gunn’s mood had changed. “Has he had occasion to avail himself of your services before?”

“Once.”

Only Naomi’s training allowed her to pick up on the minuscule hesitation. “And when was that?”

Gunn unfolded his lanky frame again and walked over to his desk. “Can I get you anything to drink?”

“Thanks, no.”

“We have our own barista.”

She laughed. “A double macchiato, then.”

“That’s the spirit!” Using the intercom, he ordered a double macchiato and triple espresso, then returned to the sitting area.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Naomi said.

“I’d rather not, Ms. Wilde.”

“And I’d rather not get a federal order, but I will,” she said. “I take this investigation very seriously.”

Gunn nodded in that grave way presidents of corporations sometimes do. Naomi often wondered whether they taught that at Wharton. The young man who had escorted her opened the door and, crossing the room, set down a tray with two small cups, and bowls of two different sugars and packets of Splenda.

“I appreciate your grit, Ms. Wilde.” Leaning over, he handed her a cup and saucer, then took a sip of his espresso.

Suddenly impatient, Naomi said, “Your friend Mr. Carson has pulled one of his many strings. I now report to him.”

“Ah. Well then.” Gunn sighed and, leaning back, stared up at the ceiling. “Hank called me about six years ago, maybe seven. He was unhappy with his then wife’s behavior.”

“She was cheating on him.”

“Sadly for her, as it turned out.”

Naomi put aside her macchiato and scribbled on her pad. “I didn’t think Fortress did PI work.”

“We don’t,” Gunn said. “Normally.”

“But Mr. Carson wanted a level of discretion only you could provide.”

He clapped his hands. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“And nothing after that incident until he hired you to guard Alli Carson.”

He took another sip, a deeper one this time, savoring the espresso in his mouth before swallowing. “That’s right.”

Naomi glanced up again. “Did Mr. Carson request specific personnel?”

Gunn lowered his cup and stared fixedly at her. “Hank doesn’t know my personnel.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Gunn, but I hardly think Mr. Carson would allow men to guard his niece without personally signing off on their dossiers.”

“Hank trusts me.”

The phone rang again, more insistently this time. Then the intercom buzzed.

“Excuse me a moment,” Gunn said.

He rose, went behind his desk, and picked up the phone. He spoke for several minutes in a tone so low Naomi could not hear a word. While he was occupied, she took a look around the office. It was spacious, but not the vast, palatial room she had been expecting. But then nothing about Andrew Gunn was what she had expected. He didn’t have the typical chip-on-the-shoulder attitude of his compatriots, the burning desire to bilk the federal government out of every possible dollar. Why not? After all, the Mint just printed up more greenbacks to pay the security firms’ exorbitant fees. No, Gunn was erudite, urbane, and charming, even while being secretive as hell. Though she had been expecting to dislike him, she found it impossible to do so. Still, while she had a moment she continued the deep drilling on the Web investigation she had begun while at the crime scene behind Henry Carson’s house.

When Gunn returned, sitting in precisely the same spot he had vacated, he smiled at her benignly. “Where were we?”

“I wonder,” Naomi said, putting aside her phone and taking up her cup, “whether Mr. Carson’s trust in you stems from the fact that you’re a major investor in his primary company, InterPublic Bancorp?”

*   *   *

McKinsey followed Naomi all the way into the building housing Fortress Securities. He watched her step into the elevator, watched the numbers flicker until they stopped at Fortress’s floor. Then he entered the next car and took it up to the fourth floor. Turning left, he walked down the hallway, knocked on the fifth door on his right, even though there was a clearly marked button. Then he walked to the next door down, arriving just as a buzzer opened the door.

He entered a small, grubby anteroom stacked with cartons, some opened, some not. A cheap desk stood to the left. On it was a multiline corded telephone, a Rolodex, and a cup full of pencils. No one sat in the chair behind the desk, and, McKinsey knew, no one ever had.

Passing the desk, he went down a bare, narrow corridor that stank of wet shoes, burnt coffee, and stale sweat. There were all of three rooms, including a windowless kitchenette, where the burnt coffee stink was so palpable it became an entity unto itself. Crossing the threshold of the cubicle opposite, he came upon Willowicz sitting behind a green metal desk that looked like a castoff, and probably was. He was leaning back in an adjustable office chair, his brogue-shod feet, crossed at the ankles, up on the desk. Both shoes were severely run-down at the heel. Willowicz was talking on his cell phone.

“I don’t care what it takes,” he said. “Get it done and get it done now.”

He grinned at McKinsey, beckoning him in. “Laws? What laws?” he said into the phone. “I don’t give a shit about laws. If you do, you’re in the wrong business. If you like, I’ll bring in … No, I thought not.”

He severed the connection, said, “It’s the same all over, good help is scarcer than a toad with balls.” His grin widened. “How goes it on the inside?”

“Fine and dandy,” McKinsey said.

There was nothing at all on the dented metal of the desktop, save a small plaque in the center of which was a bronze bas relief of a Greek warrior’s helmet.

11

Gunn regarded Naomi with a vaguely ironic smile. “It’s public knowledge that I’m an investor in InterPublic.”

Naomi didn’t like that smile. “A major investor.”

“What can I say? I have a facility for making money.”

“Uh-huh. And what other things have you and Mr. Carson cooked up?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Naomi shrugged. “Maybe InterPublic isn’t the extent of your dealings together. Maybe there are deals that aren’t public knowledge.”

Gunn sat looking at her for a moment. “I do believe you’re trying to piss me off.”

“Not at all.”

“For what reason I cannot imagine.”

Now that they were talking at cross-purposes, it was time for Naomi to go. But before she did, there was one item left remaining on her agenda. She rose and headed for the door, before turning back.

“I’d appreciate the dossiers on the three men who were assigned to guard Alli Carter.”

Gunn appeared unfazed. “Bennett will hand them to you on the way out.”

She smiled. “A pleasure, Mr. Gunn.” Her smile widened. “That macchiato was so good I promise I’ll be back.”

*   *   *

“The Izmaylovskaya recruit,” Thatë said when Jack had finished explaining his storied past. “Their representatives go far afield—Albania, Romania, all of Eastern Europe, so I’m told.” He looked down at his hands, their long fingers laced together. “That’s how they found me.” He looked up. “Why should I say no? They offered me a home, training, a steady job, security—none of the things I had. It was everything I wanted—and needed.”

“I thought the grupperovka were all Russian nationals.”

“Once, maybe.” Thatë rose, got them two more beers, and sat back down. “But these days the families are under a shitload of pressure from the Kremlin. They gotta expand beyond Russia in order to survive.” He shrugged as he snapped off the bottle cap. “They don’t like it, but what the fuck else can they do. The fucking writing’s on the wall.”

The day had wasted itself in gray rain and intermittent spurts of sleet that rattled on the concrete sidewalks. Now, exhausted, day had given way to night, a darkness muffled in low clouds and swirls of icy rain. Far above, the sky was dully phosphorescent with the lights of the far-off prosperous sections of the city, but the glow did little here. Streetlights worked only intermittently; illumination was at a premium, which was just how the roving gangs liked it.

Jack checked his watch. “It’s almost showtime.”

“Time to go, no?” Thatë glanced over his shoulder. “The girl’s awake.”

Jack turned. Alli was standing in the doorway, dried blood all over her. She looked even smaller than usual, almost like a child.

“Jack…” All at once, tears rolled down her cheeks.

He rose and went to her, held her while she shook and sobbed. “It’s always worst the first time.”

He felt her freeze, almost as if her breathing had come to a halt. “He’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“I … I didn’t mean to, but he wouldn’t stop coming after me.”

“What happened?” Jack said gently.

After a shuddering breath, Alli described everything that had happened in her uncle’s study. How Rudy had waited until Uncle Hank and Harrison Jenkins had driven away before coming in and threatening her with the fire poker, how she had managed to get away and what had happened when she encountered the other two guards, how in her flight she had come across the cook lying on the floor of the kitchen, and how Rudy had followed her out of the house.

“There’s no doubt in your mind that his intent was to kill you?”

She shook her head. “When he came for me, he said, ‘There’s a fine spot for them to find you, curled in the fireplace with the soot and the ash.’”

“Was it just him, do you think, or were they all in on it?”

Alli, thinking back to how Conlon and the third guard had acted, said, “They were all in it together. I just think Rudy was the crew chief.”

The tears had dried on her cheeks, making tracks in the dirt. He could see that she had regained a good deal of her self-control. Just the fact that she could make these observations about her attackers was proof that she was heading for the right line of work at Fearington.

“It’s okay. You’ve done remarkably well.” He hugged her and gave her a gentle shove in the direction of the bathroom. “Now go wash up.”

He turned to see Thatë staring intently at him. “What?”

The kid lowered his head, stared at the floor between his feet. “Nothing.”

Jack sat down across from him and took a swig of his beer, which was now close to room temperature. “Spill it.”

Thatë gave a little laugh. He sounded like a hyena nervously cackling in the bush.

“How d’you get her to listen to you?” the kid asked. “You threaten her, or what?”

Jack considered the source of these questions. “I didn’t get her to do anything. Alli takes my advice.”

“So how you make her respectful?”

Jack tried not to show the alarm that sprang up inside him. “Thatë, she trusts me.”

“She trusts you?”

Behind the closed bathroom door, the water had begun to run in the shower.

Thatë frowned. “I don’t get it.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

As the kid jumped up, Jack, laughing, reached over and pulled him back down.

“Not now.”

“Why not now?”

“Because she’d find a way to obliterate your nuts.”

Thatë looked at him askance. “You’re fucking with me, right?”

Jack shook his head. “She killed a man today—a professional bodyguard—and maimed two others.” He let the kid go. “You still want to try?”

Thatë shook his head. “Man, I still don’t know about you.”

At that moment, the bathroom door opened a crack, and, through a small cloud of steam, Alli said, “I need clean clothes.”

Jack looked at the kid, who inadvertently gave a classic double-take before making for the bedroom. Jack heard some drawers being pulled out. He and Alli exchanged looks, but he was uncertain of either her mood or what she was thinking until she breathed: “Emma…”

“What is it?” he whispered back.

Alli gave a tiny, violent shiver. “I feel her.”

Thatë reappeared with a stack of clothes: a pair of black stovepipe jeans, a black-and-white T-shirt with WIG-OUT emblazoned across the chest, a hoodie, and a pair of sweat socks.

Alli sniffed at them.

“They’re just washed,” the kid said. “I know how to take care of myself.” He led with his chin. “Couldn’t do anything ’bout underwear.”

“No problem,” Alli said, taking the pile from him. “I’ll go commando.”

*   *   *

Naomi stood just to one side of the entrance to the Fortress Securities building, between two columns, hidden from anyone who came and went. She was scanning the dossiers of the three guards, hoping to find some link, some anomaly that might make something click. It was chilly, the evening clanking onto the city streets like a spent shell. Lights sent smears of illumination across the sidewalk. Headlights rolled toward her, then away slowly in the mounting rush hour traffic.

She had done her best to rattle Gunn’s cage. If there was something to what she had intimated she wanted to know about it. She’d made a shot in the dark, to be sure, but she was waiting for Gunn to emerge. If he had become alarmed by what she had said he would go see Henry Holt Carson in person; he was too good at his job to risk a phone conversation.

But it had been over an hour since she had left the Fortress offices and still no sign of him. She went back to the dossiers, her eyes anxiously scanning the text while part of her attention was secured in the periphery of her vision, waiting for Gunn. There was nothing, nothing, nothing, so she returned to the beginning and started all over again.

Halfway through she caught herself wondering how Pete was faring. Digging out her phone, she punched in his speed-dial number. He answered at once. Nothing to report.

“I got the Fortress dossiers,” she said. “If you’re free, we ought to go over them together.”

“Right. Two pairs of eyes are better than one,” he said. “Meet you in twenty at the office.”

She severed the connection, read a little more, continuing to spin her wheels, and sighed. Still no sign of Gunn. She checked her watch. Shit, maybe she had been wrong about him. All at once, her attention shifted. She looked forward to meeting with Pete, hopeful he’d spot something she had missed. Besides, she hadn’t eaten a thing all day.

She was about to pack up the dossiers in preparation for heading back to the office when a familiar figure pushed through the doors of the building and came briskly down the stairs.

Pete McKinsey passed not ten feet from where she stood, frozen in dismay.

*   *   *

Thatë pointed with his chin. “What else is on your iPod?”

He held the iPod out and the kid took it, plugged Jack’s Monster earbuds in, and scrolled down.

“Don’t know any of this shit,” he said a little too loudly, as people will when they’re listening to music in their ears. Then, apparently finding a song he liked, he turned up the volume. His head began to nod rhythmically.

Jack watched him for a moment. He had to remind himself that the kid was only seventeen. He spoke American street slang almost perfectly; a first-rate mimic. He turned from this thought as Alli came out of the bathroom. She looked fairly comical with the bottoms of Thatë’s jeans turned up in oversized cuffs. The hoodie came down almost to her knees.

“Don’t laugh,” she warned.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Jack said.

She came and brought a chair over to sit beside him. Thatë’s eyes tracked her but he was too deep in the music to pay much attention.

“What’s with the Lost Boy?” she said.

“We’re in trouble, Alli. The Virginia State Police have a warrant out for your arrest and I have no doubt your uncle wants to get his hands on us as well. Thatë provided a safe haven where no one would think to look for us.”

“Any port in a storm.”

“This is more than a storm,” Jack said seriously.

Alli hitched her chair closer to him and lowered her voice even though it was impossible for Thatë to overhear them. “I don’t understand. Uncle Hank hired those men to guard me. Instead, they tried to kill me. I mean, what the fuck?”

“My thought exactly. That’s why I spirited you away, that’s why I don’t want you to turn yourself in. Nothing about this situation rings true and until I can understand what’s happening I don’t trust anyone, and that includes your Uncle Hank.”

“You don’t think he would—”

“At this point, I don’t know what to think. But the fact is I trust this young criminal-in-waiting more than I do anyone else.”

“Then we really are in trouble.”

Jack nodded.

“On the other hand, we can’t stay here forever.”

“I don’t plan to,” Jack said. He brought her up to date. He told her about the killings at Twilight, how he’d found physical evidence linking them to Billy Warren’s death. He showed her the octagonal badge and Thatë’s identical pendant.

“The writing on them is Albanian, the icon of an underground club whose business makes even Thatë nervous,” he concluded. “That’s where I’m hoping we’ll find some answers about who really killed Billy, and why.”

Thatë chose that moment to come out of his music-induced trance. “Very cool shit,” he said as he pulled out the earbuds. “Old-school roots, man. People put ’em down, but not me. The blues is where hip-hop came from, you know?” Then he grinned at Alli. “So, vajzë e bukur, how you doin’?”

Alli glanced at Jack, who said, “He thinks you’re beautiful.”

She bared her teeth at the kid.

*   *   *

According to Thatë, the Stem was located in Chinatown.

“Best cover in the city,” he said when he saw the look on his companions’ faces. “Tons of tourists, no one looks out of place, hey?”

The moment they turned onto H Street NW, Alli felt an odd thrill of déjà vu. As they passed Fifth Street, heading toward Fourth, she saw the big square sign of the restaurant toward which Thatë was leading them, and she gasped.

“What is it?” Jack said, bringing the three of them up short.

Alli shook her head. “I saw a take-out menu from this restaurant, First Won Ton, in Uncle Hank’s study.”

“His house is a long way from Chinatown,” Jack said.

Alli nodded. “I thought it curious myself.”

Jack turned to the kid. “The Stem?”

“In the basement, below the restaurant.”

Turning back to Alli, Jack said, “How well do you remember the menu? Was there anything written on it, anything circled, the way people do when they order?”

Alli concentrated. One of the things she’d been training toward at Fearington was full-memory recall of conversations and crime scenes. Clearly, her uncle’s study fit into neither category, but the item was so odd, so out of place that she had spent a moment staring at it. In fact, there was something that was circled.

“Spicy fragrant duck with cherries.”

Jack looked at the kid. “Mean anything to you?”

Thatë shook his head.

“Okay,” Jack said, “let’s move in.”

The restaurant, like many in Chinatown, was below street level. A flight of crumbling concrete stairs, dark with grease and city grime, led down to a glass door. A window to the right was filled with roasted ducks hanging by their necks on a series of metal hooks, mahogany-colored and glistening with fat. Below, metal trays held slabs of red-skinned spare ribs, ready for the fire.

Jack had thought about this foray long and hard; mainly whether or not he should take Alli. However, several factors were at play, all of them limiting his options. For one thing, he was reluctant to leave her behind in a strange house in a very bad neighborhood. Thatë was dealing in drugs. People like that were always targets of rivals or enemies. For another, he didn’t believe that Alli would allow him to leave her behind. Besides, she had proved herself in combat. He had to stop thinking of her as the introverted little girl he’d first met, incapable of taking care of herself. In the last year alone, she had grown by leaps and bounds. She needed to be taken seriously.

None of this, whether fact or rationalization, or some combination of the two, caused him to be any less concerned about her safety, but, for better or for worse, this was how it had to play out.

Inside, the restaurant was long and narrow, its Formica tables filled with Chinese families and a smattering of tourists busily consulting their travel guides for tips on what to order. No one paid them any attention, including the slim Chinese woman behind the cash register, who was drinking tea and sucking at her teeth. Waiters, exuding a cold frenzy, came and went between tables, laden with huge trays mounded with enormous dishes or piled high with platters of the dregs of murky, gelatinous substances.

“This way.” Thatë led them through the restaurant, into a narrow corridor that ended at the door to the toilet. Just before it, on the right, was a steep stairway that descended into the dank gloom of a subbasement.

The kid held out his hand and Jack gave him back his octagonal pendant, which he hung around his neck.

“You have the pin?” he said when Jack reached the head of the stairs.

Jack opened his hand. The pin he’d taken from Mathis, Twilight’s dead manager, gleamed dully in the center of his palm.

Thatë nodded. “You’ll have to show it.” As he began to descend, Jack reached forward and spun him around. “Don’t fuck with me, you understand?”

Thatë stared unblinkingly at him for a long, tense moment. Then he nodded curtly and continued his descent. His voice floated up from the semidarkness. “Keep the girl close to you at all times.”

“What the hell does he mean by that?” Alli said in a stage whisper.

They went down the stairs. Thatë was already at the bottom. He knocked on the door and, when it creaked open a crack, a gruff male voice said, “Hey, Flyboy.”

The kid had to show his pendant before the door opened wide enough to let him inside. The door had begun to close when Jack put his foot in the gap.

“Yeah? Whatta you want?” the voice said. It belonged to someone with a suspicious eye that looked him up and down.

Jack held up the pin with one hand, while with the other he held tight to Alli.

“I don’t know you.”

“Mathis sent me. He’s down with the flu,” Jack said.

“Fuckin’ flu.” He stared hard at Jack, then looked him up and down. “Mathis was going to bring Mbreti’s money. You got it?”

Mbreti meant “king” in Albanian. Jack tapped his breast pocket to indicate this was where he kept the cash.

“Then get your ass in here.” As with Thatë, the door opened just enough for Jack to slip in, Alli right on his heels.

The guard was a massive, dark-skinned man, Albanian or Macedonian, Jack suspected. His eyes opened wide the moment he saw Alli, and a huge smile played across his face.

“I approve of the form Mbreti’s money is in.” He waved them through with a hairy paw. His arms seemed as long as an ape’s. His low brow looked like an anvil.

Behind him, there was nothing and no one. Jack had been expecting a large ballroom teeming with people, but the space they traversed was as small and ill-lit as a dungeon. One bare bulb dangling from the end of a length of wire descended from the ceiling like a dripping stalactite. They passed beneath it, then came upon a shabby-looking door to what might be a broom closet. Instead, it opened onto a cavernous space that looked hewn out of the bedrock beneath the city. Gritty concrete steps led down to this space, which was loud with the shouting of male voices, blue-tinted with cigarette and cigar smoke, thick with the musk of human bodies. But gone were the crowds of people, the monster sound system blaring techno and trance. There were no outrageously dressed bodies slithering together. For that matter, where was the dance floor, the bar, the drugs?

Thatë had already gone down the short flight of steps, but Jack and Alli stood transfixed. In the center of the room, surrounded by perhaps a dozen men in shiny silk suits, a boxing ring had been erected. In the center of this, a mike descended from the ceiling. It was held by a young man, slim, well dressed, with slicked-back hair and the air of an entrepreneur. There were no boxers in the ring, no corner men handling their styptic pencils, buckets of ice water, and low stools.

Instead the atmosphere in the ring was woozy with sex, or, more accurately, bare female flesh. Lined up in front of the emcee were six girls—slim-hipped, small-breasted, blonde and brunette. All were naked. At least half of them, Jack estimated, were underage. They had their heads down, staring at the canvas between their feet. The slim young man started to speak in the rapid-fire jargon of all auctioneers, and that was when the actual business of the Stem sank in to Jack’s mind.

“Now, for our first cherry, we have a tender morsel indeed, fresh from the shores of Odessa.” The auctioneer stepped closer to the first girl on his right. “Only twelve years of age and guaranteed a virgin, good gentlemen, so with that premium in mind we’ll start the bidding at fifty thousand dollars.” He cupped the girl’s chin, lifting her head. “Just look at this cherry! Look into those blue eyes, regard that golden hair, the creamy skin. And, gentlemen, this cherry is guaranteed completely free of lice!” He continued on in this abominable and dehumanizing vein, as if he were selling Texas steers or Arabian horses.

In a trance, Jack descended the stairs, holding tight to Alli’s hand. Part of him wanted to get her out of here now, but another part knew that that choice was long past. Turning around now would only call unwanted attention to themselves. He reminded himself that they were here as part of a triple homicide investigation in which Alli was the prime suspect. They had to go forward.

At that moment, Alli whispered in his ear. Now that they were nearer to the action, he could see what had drawn her attention. All the girls had burns or welts marring their flesh. Some were clearly old, but others appeared quite new. The sight was almost too much to take in and, in fact, it was Alli’s presence that calmed him down.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said.

At that moment, the auctioneer yelled, “The bid is against you, Sergei. No? One hundred twenty, then, going once, twice. Sold!” and pointed to a man in sunglasses lounging in one corner, arms folded across his chest.

A man appeared, climbed into the ring, and led the girl out. The auctioneer was about to move to the next girl, when his eyes caught sight of Alli.

“And what have we here?”

Heads turned as he pointed. “Mathis’s sub is here with something fresh, and by the look of her, what a load of fresh she is.” He beckoned to Jack and raised his voice to fever pitch. “Come on, bring that next cherry up here! I have no doubt she’ll fetch a pretty penny, sir, a pretty penny, indeed!” He moved to the front of the ring, taking his mike with him.

Alli clung to Jack, but the man who had escorted the first cherry out of the ring now reappeared and gripped Alli’s free arm so hard she cried out. At once, Jack whirled and slammed an elbow into the man’s nose. Blood gushed as he went down. The auctioneer made a hand signal and two large men detached themselves from the shadows. One had drawn a Glock, the other was content with displaying his fists.

“She’s not going into the ring,” Jack said.

“The fuck she isn’t,” the gunman said.

Jack backed into him, trod on his instep with his heel, and, at the same time, brought the edge of his hand down on the gunman’s wrist. The Glock fell to the floor as the gunman grunted in pain, but almost immediately, the second man wrapped his arm around Jack’s throat.

“Make a move and I’ll snap your neck.”

Alli bent down, but the gunman stopped her from reaching the Glock by grabbing the back of her hoodie and dragging her back to her feet. While Jack watched helplessly, the gunman pushed and shoved her toward the ring. The girls stared down at her, shivering and glassy-eyed. But as the gunman began to manhandle Alli up the wooden steps, she tripped. As he reached down to pull her up, she delivered a backward kick to the pit of his stomach. He fell toward her and she twisted, taking the brunt of his weight on her right shoulder, which she twisted away and down, so that he fell against the metal rim of the canvas floor. She took his head and slammed the side of it down, then reached for his gun.

Turning, she aimed the Glock. The man tightened his arm around Jack’s throat.

“Let him go,” Alli said, “or so help me I’ll put a bullet into your brain.”

“By the time you do,” the man said, jerking Jack’s head around, “he’ll be dead.”

A deathly silence stole over the room. Even the glib auctioneer seemed struck dumb. Alli and the man continued to glare at one another. No one else so much as breathed. Jack had cause to wonder where Thatë was. The shock of being in the middle of a white slave trade ring had driven thoughts of the kid right out of his head. He could use him now.

Then, abruptly, a door in the rear of the room swung open and a voice said, “A Mexican standoff is to no one’s benefit.” A shadow filled the doorway. “Put up your gun and we’ll talk. No one’s going to get hurt, right, Evan?”

The big man nodded. “Whatever you say.”

“Ease off, Evan, and the girl will put down the gun, are we clear?”

“I’m not putting down anything,” Alli said.

The shadow in the doorway sighed. “Thatë.”

The kid stepped to Alli’s side. “You don’t want to shoot anyone,” he said. “That’ll just get both of you dead.”

“Tell him to let Jack go and step away more than an arm’s length.”

Thatë turned to the shadow in the doorway.

“Do as she asks,” the shadow said.

Evan slid his arm away and Jack took a long, gasping breath, then began to cough.

“Go on,” Alli said, waggling the barrel of the Glock.

She tracked Evan with the gun as he backed up. When he was a sufficient distance from Jack, she turned the Glock on the shadow in the doorway. “Now we—”

The word froze in her throat as Thatë pressed the muzzle of a .25 to her temple. “Put it down.” When she didn’t move, he said, “It may be a little gun but it’s loaded with Tokarev brass-cased bullets, corrosive, Berdan-primed, 87-grain lead core. In other words, full metal jacket ammo that, at point-blank range, will blow half your head off.”

Alli sighed and, at the same time, glared at Jack, as if to say, Another betrayal. I told you so. She lowered the Glock until it was pointing at the floor. The kid took it from her.

“Thatë,” the voice said, “now bring them to me.”

*   *   *

“I must say I’m intrigued by you, yes, I am.”

The man who was now their host in the small, closeted room off the auction site was speaking directly to Alli in heavily accented English. He ignored Jack entirely, even though Jack and Alli were standing side by side. Thatë, the .25 handgun still in his hand, stood with his back pressed against the closed door.

The room, which seemed claustrophobic, held a heavy antique desk, a single chair, a task lamp. No telephone, nothing so much as a paper clip on the surface of the desk. On one wall hung a horizontal painting, far too large for the space, titled Korab, depicting in exacting detail the spine of ice- and snow-capped mountains beneath a piercing blue sky.

The man tapped an exceedingly long forefinger against his lips. “You’re a tiny slip of a thing, but you burn oh so brightly.”

He was tall, with square shoulders and the slim hips of a dancer. He leaned back against his desk, hands in the pockets of his striped trousers, but his torso was bent forward, his head at the end of its stalklike neck thrust forward. His eyes were huge, slow, and cunning, in the particular way of evil. Like a reptile’s eyes, they seemed to drink in everything with a single glance. He had a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once, and ruddy skin like badly tanned leather. His priestly fringe of prematurely white hair was so out of place it was difficult to reconcile with the rest of his face.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Alli.”

“Ah, well, I know that name.”

Alli shook her head. “How could you possibly?”

“A reasonable question.” He considered for a moment. “I believe you’ve earned the right to know. My name is Dardan.”

Alli gave a small, involuntary gasp.

“That’s right.” A smile like a scimitar curved his lips. “You’ve heard my name, as well.”

He walked to the wall with the painting and, taking it off its hooks, set it onto the floor. There was, incongruously, a window, which the painting had hidden. Dardan flipped a switch and hard light flooded the room on the other side of the window.

Alli cried out and put her hands against the glass. “Oh, my God!”

Through the window, Jack saw a young girl, blond and exquisite, her porcelain skin perfect and bloodless, laid out on a black bier. Her skin was pearl white, her bloodless lips bluish in the harsh illumination. Flecks of blood were strewn through her hair.

“Alli, you know this girl?” Jack said.

“Arjeta!” Alli cried.

“Arjeta Kraja?” The mystery girl who had been with Billy Warren at Twilight, the one everyone was searching for.

“I see you know her,” Dardan said. “She had been my plaything for some months, but then…” His voice trailed off and he shrugged.

Jack rounded on him. “Then what?”

At last, Dardan looked at Jack. “It was a bad idea to bring her.”

“Bad particularly for your men outside,” Jack said. He produced his ID. “This doesn’t look good for you.”

Dardan shrugged. “Thatë will not hesitate to shoot you in the back.” He craned his neck. “Isn’t that right, Thatë?”

“It certainly is,” the kid said, brandishing both the Glock and the .25.

Alli turned away from the window, and again her eyes cut to Jack to show her displeasure. They were red-rimmed, but she had not shed a tear.

“You wouldn’t harm a federal agent,” Jack said. “The glare of that spotlight would wrap up your dirty trade and put you permanently out of business.”

“But, no, I think not.” Dardan wagged his forefinger. “Because, you see, I’m protected, Mr. McClure. Even the death of a federal agent cannot harm me. The resulting investigation will be deflected … elsewhere.” He shrugged. “So you see, I can do with you whatever I wish. However”—he pushed off the edge of the desk—“it’s this little hellion—that’s the right word isn’t it?—that interests me.”

As he approached Alli, his hands came out of his pockets. He ran a finger down her cheek, tracing the jawline, then plunging the tip between her lips. She made a sound in the back of her throat and pulled away.

“Don’t.” Dardan held a switchblade, which now swung open, its long blade gleaming. The edge approached Alli’s throat. “I propose to entertain myself with her, Mr. McClure, while you watch. Sounds like fun, no?”

Jack touched Alli on the right hip and she swung away from Dardan. Jack launched himself forward. Instinctively, Dardan swung the knife, aiming for Jack’s face. Jack came in under the blade, struck Dardan a powerful blow that rocked him back against the desk.

At once, Jack was on him, pinioning the wrist of his knife hand, bringing his knee up into Dardan’s groin.

Alli whirled around to confront Thatë, but to her astonishment, he hadn’t pulled the .25.

Still, she was compelled to say, “Don’t.”

Thatë held his empty hands up. He grinned at her.

Behind her, Dardan had managed to free the knife, which slashed through Jack’s jacket and shirt, questing to slide between his ribs. Jack felt the blood running hot down his side as he struck the inside of Dardan’s left knee. The knife blade missed its mark, but Dardan slammed his fist into Jack’s solar plexus, doubling him over.

Dardan slammed him against the edge of the desk and Jack, dazed, slid to his knees. Dardan reached down and began to draw the blade across Jack’s throat. The pain cut through Jack’s wooziness and he jammed the heel of his right hand against Dardan’s wrist as he tilted his head back. The knife passed directly in front of his face. Jack, struggling for purchase, slipped and, in desperation, and grabbed the base of the blade. As the edge sliced into the meat of his palm, he shoved the point back and up. It passed just above Dardan’s cheek and punctured his eye. He screamed. Jack pushed the blade deeper, burying it in his head. Then he slumped down, his heart hammering in his throat, the adrenaline surging so strongly he thought he would retch.

Then Alli was prying the body off him, pulling him to his feet, drawing him away.

“Fuck me.” Thatë was staring at Dardan’s corpse.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Alli said without knowing who she was addressing.

A sudden hammering at the door brought the kid out of his trancelike state. “I know a way.” He came away from the door. “But you must promise to take me with you.”

His eyes were big around. Jack, regaining a semblance of composure, could tell that he was terrified. “What is it?” he said, as the hammering continued on the other side of the door.

They could hear shouts now—curses, imprecations.

“What’s happened?”

“There’s no time.” The hammering was louder. “Without me you’re trapped. Will you take me with you?”

A gunshot splintered through the door. The angry shouts grew louder, more frenzied. The pounding increased in intensity until the door shuddered.

“Yes,” Jack said. “All right.”

Thatë nodded and, putting his shoulder to the desk, shoved it all the way to the door. In the area of the floor that was under where it had been was a trapdoor. Bending, he pulled an iron ring and the trapdoor swung up.

“Quickly,” he said. “Quickly, or we’ll die here!”

There was an iron ladder leading down into absolute blackness. Alli went first, then Jack. Thatë came last, pausing to lock the trapdoor from underneath. There was no light at all.

“Keep going.” Thatë’s voice floated through the void.

They were enmeshed in damp, in sharp mineral smells, and in the stench of dying things.

“Thatë,” Jack said when he reached the ground, “what happened back there?”

He could hear Thatë breathing. At last, the kid said, “Have you heard of a man by the name of Arian Xhafa?”

Jack felt a chill go through him.

Thatë took a breath. Jack could feel it on his cheek.

“Dardan, the man you killed? He was Arian Xhafa’s brother.”

Part 2

Blood Ties

Five Days Ago

The worst thing about dying alone, he used to say, is not being able to say good-bye.

—The Skating Rink, ROBERTO BOLAÑO

12

“You’re a dead man, Jack, you know that.” Dennis Paull shook his head. “All of you. You and Alli and this kid.”

Jack tried to find a comfortable position, keeping the pain in his side to a minimum. He’d gone to a surgeon. The slash was superficial. His hand needed a number of stitches, and he was on antibiotics.

“Why state the obvious?”

“Because now it’s a race against time,” Paull said. “We’ve got to terminate Arian Xhafa before one of his people puts a couple of sniper’s rounds into the three of you.”

Thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, Jack and Paull sat side by side in the front section of the 757’s luxuriously reconfigured interior. In the cargo hold below them, packed and ready, was the arsenal of DARPA weaponry Paull had handpicked for Chimera’s first assignment.

Alli and Thatë sat in the lounge area near the rear, eating pizza and drinking Cokes. The sight was incongruous and, for Jack, slightly eerie. They were just like two kids at a ’50s malt shop. Looking at them, the terrible events of the last twenty-four hours might never have happened.

Paull glanced at Thatë. “This fucking kid. I don’t like that you dragged him along.”

“I promised him. I had no choice.”

“Sure you had a choice.” Paull’s voice was like granite. “You could’ve ditched him the first chance you got.”

“And leave him to be picked off by Dardan’s men?”

“He carried that Stem pendant.”

“He didn’t lift a hand to protect Dardan.” Jack shook his head. “No, he’s straight, so far as that goes.”

“Still.”

“One day that cynicism will kill you,” Jack said.

Paull grunted. “In our business, there is no sharper blade than trust.”

Jack gave him an ironic smile. “I’ll try to remember that in the days ahead.”

“Still.” There was an insistence in Paull’s voice. “Why do you keep putting Alli in such danger?”

“I don’t do anything,” Jack said. “She does it herself.”

“How big is her death wish?”

“She was a holy terror in the Ukraine.”

Paull shifted, returning to the topic on his mind. “If I’d been kidnapped and held captive for a week, my death wish might be the size of New Jersey.”

So that was it. “She’s fine now, Dennis.”

“So you’ve got enough evidence to clear her on Billy Warren. What about her uncle’s security team?”

“Trust me.”

“Remember what I said about trust, Jack. But of all the people I know, you’re the one I do trust, so I got the fugitive warrant on her frozen—until we get back. I burned significant political capital with the president.”

“I appreciate it, Dennis.”

“Bullshit. You had me over a barrel. Tell me, would you really have refused to come?”

“I said it,” Jack nodded, “and I meant it.”

“You must love that girl more than life.” Paull shook his head. “You really are a fucking piece of work.”

“I appreciate the compliment.”

Paull still had a sour look on his face. “Did it ever occur to you that this kid might have killed Warren and strung him up?”

“It crossed my mind,” Jack said.

“Then why are you letting her sit with him?”

“She can take care of herself. Besides—” He sensed Alli coming toward them.

“Am I interrupting?” she said, plopping down in one of the empty seats facing them.

“We were just talking about you,” Jack said. “What’s the verdict?”

Alli shot Paull a wicked look before she addressed Jack’s question. “The jury’s still out.”

“Meaning?”

“He hasn’t lied to my face, but there’s something he’s holding back. He’s clearly frightened. Dardan’s death has unhinged him in some way I can’t fathom.”

“Do you think he killed Billy?”

“Too soon to tell.”

Jack, responding to the expression on her face, said, “What’s the matter?”

“He doesn’t trust us—not really, anyway.”

“Smart boy. He has no reason to keep trusting us.”

Alli risked a quick glance over her shoulder. “I’m doing my best to change that.”

“Go slow,” Jack said. “The kid’s skittish.”

Alli nodded and stood up. Jack reached out and took hold of her hand.

“I’m okay.” She touched his bandaged hand, and Jack nodded.

She smiled, and went back to rejoin Thatë.

Paull appeared stunned. “What are you two, a team?”

Jack smiled. “Let’s say we have an understanding.”

“Jesus, I wish my daughter and I understood each other like that.”

“Every relationship has its own difficulties.”

“Nevertheless.” Paull glanced after Alli. “What’s the secret?”

The secret, Jack thought, is Emma, reaching out to both of us from her unquiet existence beyond the grave. But that explanation would mean nothing to Paull.

“There is no secret.”

“Sure. It’s personal. I get it.” Paull nodded absently and took a swallow of single malt from a glass that sat by his right elbow. “Do you know why the Warren boy was murdered?”

“I now know that Dardan gave the order.”

“Why?”

“Billy Warren had something going with Arjeta Kraja, even though Arjeta belonged to Dardan. That’s more than enough cause for a man like him.”

“So Dardan had him whacked.”

“Wouldn’t that tie everything up in a nice, neat package.”

Paull stared at him. “You think not?”

“You bet I think not. Dardan had Billy Warren tortured. Why? To teach him a lesson before he died? I doubt it. No, Billy was tortured for the usual reason: information. Either he had discovered something about Dardan or he was in possession of something Dardan wanted. I think Arjeta knew it, too, because Billy told her the night he was murdered. Remember that Alli got a panicky call from Billy, but when she went to Twilight, she saw them disappearing together into the shadows.”

Paull flexed his shoulders. “So what’s the information?”

“That,” Jack said, “is the ten-billion-dollar question.”

*   *   *

Naomi and McKinsey stayed late at the office, fact-checking the backgrounds of the three Fortress employees, plus pulling together a timeline of the murders from whatever other notes and intel they had gathered so far.

“There’s nothing from the forensic report on Alli’s room at Fearington,” McKinsey said.

Naomi picked up a plastic evidence bag. “Except this damn vial the roofies were in.”

“With her fingerprints on it.”

“And no one else’s.” Naomi shook the bag and hard light glinted off the yellowish plastic. “Jack thought that was odd and so do I.”

“Setup?”

Naomi nodded. “But who? And why?”

McKinsey looked at the whiteboard, where various possible motives were written out, and shook his head.

“How’s your look-see into our friends, the bogus O’Banion and Willowicz, coming?” she asked.

“It isn’t. The Metro police who interviewed us today took me off that. They say since the real Willowicz and O’Banion are on leave it’s an internal matter.”

“Do you believe them?”

“Metro police does not harbor spooks, Naomi.” He shrugged. “They’re two men without names.”

She glanced up. “Meaning?”

He shrugged. “For all intents and purposes they don’t exist.”

She looked vexed. “They must exist, just not under the names Willowicz and O’Banion.”

“Not our job now,” he said.

“It pisses me off,” she said, “those two running around, doing whatever the hell they please.”

“Leave it, Naomi. We have bigger rats to run down.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. The air system rattled and hummed, a cleaning cart rumbled down a hallway outside their office. A tuneless whistle approached, then was gone. The place stank of hamburgers, stale sweat, and anxiety. Silently, they got back to work. The hands of the wall clock ground slowly forward.

Around midnight, McKinsey said, “We’re never going to find Arjeta Kraja.” He threw a cup of cold coffee in the trash. “You know that, don’t you?”

She sighed, suspecting that he was right. “She’s probably buried deep.”

“More likely chopped into pieces.”

Naomi sat back, surveying the mess of papers, reports, and crime-scene photos, which now seemed to whirl before her eyes like a pinwheel at a carnival. “One person killed Billy Warren and both the guys at Twilight. The MO Jack found proves that, and yet we have not one solid lead.”

“We don’t have even a ghost of one. We don’t even have a motive. I mean why were these people murdered? What did they know? Carson’s going to be asking us questions and we’re not going to have any answers.”

“Fuck him.”

“You say that now.” McKinsey stretched. “Fuck this, I gotta get outta here.”

Naomi realized that she was fried, too. Besides, she had another agenda to tend to. “I’m starved. Let’s go get something to eat.”

“Really? You want to hang out?”

“I want to eat.” She rose, grabbing her coat. “You coming or not?”

He got to his feet. “Sure thing. I wouldn’t miss a date with you for all the porn on the Internet.”

She smiled inwardly. She couldn’t wait to get him hammered.

They went to Marco’s, a red-sauce Italian joint straight out of The Godfather, except the food was indifferent. It did, however, have the advantage of being close to the office, not to mention cheap. Plus, it had a first-class bar.

The kitchen could have used a lesson or two from Pete Clemenza, Naomi thought sourly as they took their seats around a table with a red-and-white-checked cloth. She was something of a foodie, a frustrating trait for someone on her salary. How many restaurants had she been forced to pass by because she knew she couldn’t afford even a Caesar salad or a crudo appetizer?

They started out with whiskey shots. Then, typical of him, McKinsey opted for a cheap wine, which Naomi immediately countermanded, choosing a bottle of Chianti, which at least would not take off the roof of her mouth. When it came, McKinsey attacked it like a roast turkey, downing a third of the bottle before she had finished her second glass. They discussed the case, the fact that all three Fortress employees seemed to check out. Naomi asked him what he thought of the information in the dossiers and he shrugged, as if to say, You’ve seen one dossier, you’ve seen them all.

“I must say you’re taking this case very personally,” he said.

“And that surprises you?”

He shrugged again. “A bit. On the Ranch, you’re known as the Ice Doll.” The Ranch was the Secret Service “clubhouse,” a male-chosen name that set her teeth on edge. It only proved her male compatriots’ arrested adolescence.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s face it, Naomi, you don’t get involved—in anything.”

“Shit, Pete, I know code words when I hear them. What your young boys’ club means is that I won’t go down on any of them.”

He stared at her for a moment, then burst into laughter. “You know, you’re probably right. They ride me about that all the time, which I guess is a compliment.”

“A shit-handed compliment if I ever heard one.”

He shook his head. “I can’t figure out why you ignore the fact that you’re beautiful—and smokin’ hot.”

“That’s because you’re not a woman,” she said tartly. “You go through life thinking you’re hot, and that’s exactly how men treat you. Boobs, butt, legs, beyond that they won’t see an inch. Do you have any idea how hard I have to work to get men to take me seriously?”

“Not really,” he said dryly. “All I see when I look at you are boobs, butt, and legs.”

“Bastard,” she said, and they both laughed.

New glasses and a second bottle of wine appeared, a Lambrusco this time. The waiter poured a little into her glass to taste. She swirled it around, smelled it, then took a sip. It was fine, and she nodded her approval.

McKinsey made a face. “But, see, this is what I mean. You can be such a fucking snob.” He swigged down some of the wine. His eyes had a semiglazed look and his hair seemed unkempt. “Honestly, I don’t know why I put up with you.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

He began to scan the menu. “Well, I could request a new partner, but no one else would have you.”

Naomi buried her face in the menu and decided not to show how deeply he had stung her.

He set aside the menu. “Besides, no one else would come up to your standards.”

She raised her eyes to see his tight grin. Everything about Pete was tight. He was one of those people who worked out at the gym three nights a week. If he wasn’t in the Secret Service he’d have been a professional gym rat without any socially redeeming value whatsoever.

They gave their orders to the waiter, who gathered up their menus and departed. That left the two of them staring at each other. The bustle all around them seemed not to exist, or to be muted out of all proportion. Though it was far too late for a normal dinner crowd, this crew was anything but normal. They all worked for the federal government; three-quarters of them—maybe more—were spooks of one sort or another. They were a clannish lot: the field agents over there, the intel parsers over here, the code breakers huddled in back like a bunch of old ladies. A table of four bosses—who knew their real ranks?—was in the center of the crowd, anxiously being observed by everyone out of the corner of their eyes.

“The Bishops are in the process of rearranging the board,” McKinsey said. Bishop was the internal name for the bosses, from departmental chairs to ministry honchos to the secretaries in their lofty nests high above the fray at the president’s side.

“They’re always rearranging something,” Naomi said. “It gives them something to do.”

McKinsey nodded. “Stratagems within stratagems.”

Speaking of which, Naomi thought, what stratagem are you involved with? She put a smile on her face. “Pete, we’ve been partners for a couple of years. What do we know about each other?”

He shrugged. “We always have each other’s back. What else do we need to know?”

The food came and she sat back until the waiter had left. She glanced down at her food and knew that she’d made a mistake. The red sauce looked too much like blood and the meatballs—well, she’d rather not even go there.

McKinsey was already forking up his veal parm. “What’s the matter?”

Naomi sighed and put her fork down. “I just lost my appetite.”

He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “This isn’t like you, Naomi. What’s gotten under your skin?”

“Just about everything,” she said, “from what was done to Billy Warren, to four dead bodies in the space of twelve hours, to Alli being the prime suspect in Billy’s torture-death.”

He looked at her steadily. “You have a soft spot for that girl, don’t you?”

She returned his gaze, part of her looking inside herself. “I was with her when she lost her father, when they brought her mother aboard Air Force One. Losing both parents in the space of a year. I feel for that girl. Her world’s been turned inside out. And now this mess.”

“We’ve all been through shitty times, Naomi.” He popped a wedge of veal into his mouth. “She’s no different than the rest of us poor fools.”

Naomi clamped down on the urge to say, There’s nothing the same between us and Alli, but, instead, sticking to her agenda, she said, “You’ve been through tough times, Pete?”

“Sure.” He rolled his shoulders, the way all gym rats did. “One time, when I was eight, or maybe nine, I got lost. I mean really lost. My parents had rented a cabin in the Smoky Mountains. This was before the blood and guts of the divorce started flying, but already they weren’t getting along. I guess they thought the vacation would do their relationship good. Instead, the isolation just brought home to them how unhappy they were. They fought—every night they fought, worse and worse. I couldn’t stand it, so I left.”

He speared another chunk of veal and cheese. “It’s not like I was running away from home or anything, but I had to get out of there. I was so upset, I didn’t think, didn’t take a flashlight or even a jacket. I ran into the forest the way you run in a nightmare, without sound, with your heart pounding so heavily you’re sure it’s going to explode and rip you wide open.

“I remember the moon, that cold light breaking through the pine branches, making little pools of light that winked out too fast. Otherwise, Jesus, it was as dark as a pit. After a while, I ran out of breath, so I stopped, bent over, hands on my knees, panting like a sonuvabitch.

“Sometime later, I stood up and looked around. I had no idea where I was. Worse, I had no idea from which direction I had come. I had no one, nothing to guide me home. Hell, right then, I didn’t have a home.”

He held the forkful of food but it hung in the air, suspended, not going anywhere. McKinsey was lost again.

“What to do? Naomi, I tell you, I’ve never been so scared in my life. I was flooded with adrenaline. I heard all these strange sounds, amplified to an almost unbearable level, I saw leaves tremble as unseen animals moved through.”

He put down his fork and looked at her. “Have you ever seen a bear in the wild?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It’s a pretty fucking amazing thing. That’s what came out of the underbrush, Naomi, a bear. A black bear. A man-eater.”

“What happened?”

McKinsey put his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together. “Here’s the thing: you never know what a bear is going to do next. There are no signals you can read. Its behavior is totally unpredictable. And that pretty much sums up life in general: It’s so fucking unpredictable you’ve got to do everything in your power to protect yourself from being eaten alive.”

Naomi stared at him, and it was some time before she realized that he had given her his motivation for having some kind of arrangement with Fortress Securities. You’ve got to do everything in your power to protect yourself from being eaten alive. This told her why, but not what. What was Pete doing with Fortress, and was it a coincidence that this was the company whose head was in bed with Henry Holt Carson? Naomi didn’t believe in coincidences. In her world, a belief in coincidence got you killed.

“How did it end?”

McKinsey finished off the bottle. “It didn’t end, but I see what you mean.” He laughed, showing her his teeth, ivory-colored and even. “The moment it saw me the bear reared up on its hind legs. He and I, perfectly still, stood looking at each other. I was aware of something breathing just below me. Later, I realized it was my body. Abject terror had taken my mind away from the danger. How long we stayed like that I can’t even guess. Eventually, though, the bear went down on all fours, turned, and crashed back through the thick undergrowth.”

McKinsey licked his lips. Naomi was pleased to see that he’d had more than enough.

“Go on, Pete.”

“That fucking bear.” He shook his head. “I never saw the bear again.” His voice had lowered, causing Naomi to lean across the table. “But, late at night or early in the morning or just as the sun is going down, I can hear it breathing close beside me, I can smell its foul breath, feel its huge presence, like an eclipse, like death.” He looked at her bleakly, his eyes red-rimmed. “There’s no way to escape it, you know. None at all.”

*   *   *

Jack and Alli sat together talking softly. All around them was the stillness of movement found only in an airplane.

“Tell me about Billy Warren,” Jack said.

Alli shrugged.

“What attracted you to him?”

“He was nice—honest. He wasn’t grabby, like the other guys around me. And there was something old-fashioned about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for instance, he liked ice-cream sodas, not Jell-O shots. And, despite what he did for a living, he was a kind of neo-Luddite. He hated computers, hated how easily data could be hijacked, substituted, even faked. Give me a pen and a sheet of paper any day, he used to say.” Her expression turned pensive. “It was horrible what happened to him. I mean, he was a good guy, Jack. He just wasn’t for me.”

“There are lots more guys out there, Alli. And you have plenty of time.”

She looked away, abruptly uncomfortable.

*   *   *

Emma came to Jack in the darkness of the plane, while everyone around him slept and he was staring out the Perspex window at the unending darkness. Far below him, great ships plowed through the waves with their cargos of oil, electronics, washer/dryers, and cars. Men smoked and ate, slept and joked and played cards, or watched porn on their portable DVD players. That was another world, one he’d never been a part of, even when he was younger. He’d been born an outsider and an outsider he remained.

He felt his daughter first as a waft of chill air, then as a stirring of the hairs on his forearms, and then she was beside him, while, three rows back, Paull sucked in deep drafts of sleep.

“You were there, weren’t you,” Jack whispered, “in that underground house of death?”

“Yes.”

—Why?

“I have no choice in these matters. I’m tied to death, recent death, when it involves you or Alli.”

Jack ran a hand across his face, as if he could scrub away this hallucination or manifestation of his mind, or whatever it was.

—I don’t want this. I want you safe.

Emma laughed.

“If there’s a safer place than this, I don’t know about it.”

I want to hold her, Jack thought. I want her back. He spoke to her instead.

—These murders are linked. I can see a pattern forming, Emma, but there aren’t enough pieces yet to put in place. Like who tortured and killed Billy Warren. Like who killed those two men at Twilight. I’m sure Dardan could have answered those questions.

“Dad, I thought you’d have gotten it by now. I’m not a seer.”

—You can see certain things. You knew about your mother and me.

“I’m connected to both of you. How could I not know you were splitting up?”

Jack didn’t understand a thing about this arrangement. How could he; it was beyond human ken.

“You don’t miss her, Dad, do you?”

—I don’t, no.

“But you do miss Annika.”

—You’re wrong, Emma.

“I’d like to say I don’t mind that you can’t admit it to me, but the fact is I do.”

—She’s evil.

“You know that’s not true.”

—She murdered Senator Berns.

“How many people has your friend Dennis Paull murdered, I wonder?”

—Self-defense or mission-specific. All understandable, all within protocol.

“Oh, Dad, protocol? Really? Okay, if you want to go that route. Annika’s murder was protocol: mission-specific—for her grandfather.”

—Now that man—Dyadya Gourdjiev—is the devil.

“As opposed to her father?”

Jack sighed. The late, unlamented Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, who had stolen her away from her mother and kept Annika locked up, committing unspeakable acts of sexual violence on her body.

—It’s all in the past, so what’s the point?

“From where I stand, there is no past, no future, no present. It’s all the same. Time is just something human beings made up to keep themselves from going crazy.”

He smiled.

—Were you always like this? So damn philosophical?

She laughed.

—Yet another aspect of you I missed, Emma.

“Everybody missed it, Dad, except for Alli.”

He was suddenly very tired.

—I want to sleep, but I don’t know whether I’ll be able to.

His daughter smiled her translucent smile.

“That I can help you with.”

She spread her arms. His eyes closed.

“Rest now, Dad.”

13

Martial drumming sounded in Andrew Gunn’s dream. A long gray line of skeletal people with fire-bombed faces was marching toward him along the banks of a snaking river. The river was on fire, bright flames and crackling sparks shooting upward. The clouds of heat were palpable. Blackhawks whirred and banked precipitously, bristling with weaponry in the brassy sunlight, but not a single helmet was visible. The trees overhanging the river were full of flame, the skin of the skeletal people curled and blackened and fell off. Oblivious, the long gray line advanced to the beat of the invisible drum, which became more and more insistent, until …

Gunn started awake to the pounding on his front door. For a moment, still enmeshed in the dream, he sat still in a rumple of bedclothes. The pounding became more than insistent—it seemed frantic.

Rolling out of bed, he pulled on a pair of paint-smeared jeans and a cotton shirt, not bothering to button it as he passed through the living room, into the short entryway, where he pulled open the door.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “didn’t I tell you never to come here?”

“Fuck you, too.”

Vera Bard pushed past him. She wore a wide-belted iridescent black trench coat that came down so far the hem almost concealed her black high-heel shoes. She didn’t look like any FBI recruit he’d ever seen.

Sighing, he closed the door and walked after her into the living room where early morning sunlight poured in through the south-facing windows. Far below, Washington and the Potomac glimmered in a flat, hazy light patterned in grays and faded browns.

“What are you doing here, Vera? How did you get out of Fearington?”

Alli’s roommate looked a good deal better than she had when Jack had visited her in the Fearington infirmary yesterday. Her long, dark hair had regained its extraordinary luster and her upswept chocolate eyes were again bright with a fierce intelligence.

“I’m on a week’s medical furlough.” Her nostrils flared. “I got a visit from a guy named Jack McClure. You know him?”

“By reputation only.” Gunn shrugged. “What of it?”

“I think he suspects something.”

Gunn laughed. “How could he suspect anything?”

“How the fuck should I know? You’re the brainiac of this little venture.” Vera Bard’s cherry mouth turned sullen. “I don’t like him. I don’t want him anywhere near me. It feels like he’s crawling around inside my head.”

“That must be painful.”

“Joke all you want,” she said hotly. “Just make sure he stays the hell away from me.”

Gunn sighed. “You could’ve told me this using the encrypted cell phone I gave you.”

“True enough.” Her hands were at the trench coat’s belt. “But then I wouldn’t be able to show you this.”

The belt fell away, the trench coat gaped wide open, and Vera Bard’s gleaming naked body stood revealed it all its peach-skinned glory.

“Well, now,” Gunn said as he came toward her, “there’s an offer I can’t refuse.”

*   *   *

“You’re not getting cold feet, are you?” Gunn said to her some time later.

“I’m not capable of getting cold feet. You know that.”

She lay on top of him, tangled in the sheets, perfumed by the musky scents of sex and sweat. Her nipples were still hard; the feel of them against his skin sent quivers through the muscles of his thighs.

“McClure sure spooked you,” he said quietly.

“One man, one spook, under God.”

Vera laughed in that way of hers that sent his pulse racing. Actually, almost everything about her set his pulse racing, especially her smell, which drew him as if he was magnetized. The moment he had first set eyes on her, he knew he had to have her. He knew he’d move heaven and earth to make it happen.

As it turned out, nothing so drastic was required of him. They had met some years ago—three, four, in the heat haze after sex he couldn’t recall—at a fancy D.C. ball given by the ambassador of Kenya. He had been invited because he had done important work there; she had been someone’s date—a fairly ordinary-looking DoD functionary. What she had been doing with him, he never discovered. Frankly, he hadn’t cared. Nor had he cared when he’d cut the functionary out of his own territory. Suffice it to say, hours later, he had taken her back to his place. Long before that, the DoD dud had faded into the scenery, the swirl of people, the babble of multi-culti voices, the endless layers of stiff Washingtonian protocol that was the hallmark of such affairs. She had been twenty-two, then, and twelve years his junior, a rose on the cusp of opening. He saw the potential in her and, to her credit, she saw it, too. They needed each other, like flowers need the rain.

Gunn threaded her thick, lustrous hair through his fingers. The weight of it thrilled him, and the vulnerable heat at the nape of her neck set his groin to throbbing. “It’s absolutely essential to know I can trust you.”

Vera snaked her arm down, her fingers reaching between his thighs. “When have I ever let you down?” She smiled. “When have you ever let me down?”

He grabbed her wrist before her fingers brought him past the edge of coherent thought. “No joke now, Vera. Don’t fuck with me.”

“I would be insane to jeopardize what you’ve taught me, what we have.” Her chocolate eyes probed his like searchlights. “I’ll never find anyone like you.” It was she, now, who guided his hand between her legs. “No one else has ever done this to me, no one else ever will.”

Feeling her wetness set Gunn’s heart to raging in his chest. He felt like he was on fire, like he couldn’t catch his breath.

“I’ll keep Jack McClure away from you.” His tongue was thick in his mouth. He rolled over on top of her. “But remember the most difficult part is just beginning.”

“How could I forget?” Vera said. “Your instructions are drilled into my brain.”

“Now all that remains is for both of us to do our jobs.”

Their lips met, tongues probing just as the doorbell rang. Gunn wasn’t thinking straight and he ignored it, until the bell became one long, uninterrupted burr in his side.

“Godammit to hell!”

Pushing off her moist heat, he rolled out of bed, jammed on his jeans, and padded out through the living room and into the foyer.

“I’m coming!” he yelled, so at least the noise would cease reverberating through the apartment. Putting his eye to the view hole, he immediately drew back. Is it that time already? he asked himself. Well, it must be.

He unlatched the door, pulled it open, and let Henry Holt Carson into his residence. Carson looked around, taking everything in. Then he sniffed twice and said, “Go wash that stink off you, Andrew.”

Gunn nodded mutely, padded into the bathroom, and shut the door. As soon as he heard the shower start to run, Carson stole silently across the living room. At the threshold to the master bedroom he paused, peering in.

“I thought it might be you.” He stepped into the darkened room, heading for the figure in the rumpled bed. “Jack McClure threw the fear of God into you, didn’t he?”

Vera raised her sullen, sex-swollen face. “How did you know?”

“He has that effect on people.” His eyes never left her face. “For God’s sake, put some clothes on.”

“I didn’t bring any clothes.” She sat on the edge of the bed, legs dangling, toes playing with the cuffs of his trousers. She made no attempt to hide the dark patch between her thighs.

Carson studiously kept his eyes on her face.

Vera laughed. “Look at you.” She stood up, brushing against him, and watched him take a staggering step back.

By now, Carson was red-faced and shaking. Each time he saw her he promised himself that he wouldn’t allow her to get under his skin, and yet somehow she always did.

She parted her thighs. “Don’t you want a better glimpse of the honey pot?”

“You have a foul mouth and a vulgar mind.”

She swung her hair away from her face. “Don’t we all.”

He looked away. “Not all.”

“Don’t play the hypocrite with me. I know you too well.”

Carson took an involuntary step toward her. “Where is she, Vera? Where’s my daughter?”

“I have no idea.”

“Someone has to know.”

“Yes, but who? It wasn’t Alli Carson.”

“Maybe you fucked up with her.”

“Impossible.” Her eyes locked onto his and wouldn’t let go. “I had the best teachers.”

His gaze broke away from hers. “You mistake me.”

She searched through the rumpled sheets for her thong, then remembered she hadn’t worn one. “The cruelest people are the deniers, HH. Delusion is a major component of cruelty: You convince yourself that the situation calls for certain measures. And self-delusion, well, the cruelty becomes extreme because you’re certain you’re doing what’s best.”

“And you think that applies to me?”

“No, HH. I know it applies to you. Our history is just chock-full of examples.”

He wanted to turn away, to dismiss every word she said, but he couldn’t. She had for him the dreadful fascination a serpent holds for a rodent. There was a strange strength inside her that made him want to weep.

“Keep your mouth shut,” he said with the dangerous feeling, a shortness of breath he knew too well.

“Hit me.” She leaned toward him, thrusting out her chin. “That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?” Her smile was knife-sharp and shadowed. “All that power, HH, and you can’t do anything with it. How does it feel to be hog-tied and helpless?”

Carson’s eyes looked wounded. “Why do you need to taunt me so?”

Vera’s laugh was deliberately cruel. “Who knows better than you?”

Carson gave a quick look over his shoulder. Gunn was nowhere in sight. “What have you found out?”

She contemplated him for a moment. “You’re a man who’s never satisfied with what he’s given—you have to take it all. You always want to know more, and more, and more. It never ends.” Her smile grew tiny white teeth.

“Answer me, please.”

Her bantering tone evaporated. “There’s someone, I’m certain of it.”

“I was right, then.”

“You’re always right, you know that.”

He frowned. “You’re referring to something, but I don’t know what.”

“Yes, I know. With your powers of perception you’ve blotted it all out. It’s like it never happened.”

He stared at her until she said, “Andy’s very secretive.”

“His life, it seems, is one huge secret.”

“As you said.”

“Who is running him?”

“To be determined.”

“Still.”

She turned to him. “So you want to do this yourself? No? I thought not.” She shook her head. “People are complicated, an affair is complicated.”

“We don’t have time for this, Vera. I need to know—”

“You always need to know. Where is Caroline? Who is Gunn working for behind your back? Where will it stop?”

“It can’t stop, Vera. This is my life.”

“Sadly.” She walked past him into the living room.

“We’re not finished. Come back here.”

When she ignored him, he strode after her.

“Be careful, Vera,” he said.

She seemed incredulous. “You’re worried about my safety? Now?”

His eyes searched hers. He seemed to want to say something, then changed his mind. “You’ll never hear it coming.”

“Who ever does?”

“Who ever does what?” Gunn said. He had a bath sheet wrapped around his middle and was rubbing his hair dry with a matching towel. He looked from Vera’s expression to Carson’s half-shadowed face, and nodded. “You two are at it again.”

“He can’t help himself.” Vera moved aside as Gunn went into the bedroom to dress. She plucked at the puddle of her trench coat. While she was at it, she gave Carson a good view of everything. Hearing him expel a breath, she smiled to herself.

“I’ve showered you with gifts and favors.”

“And what do I have to show for it?”

“What is it you want?”

“A family,” she snapped as she whirled on him. “But all I have is you and Andy.”

“Poor you.”

She bared her teeth as she slid on the trench coat and belted it up.

“Aren’t you going to shower?” Carson said.

“Why should I?” She stepped into her shoes. “I love the smell of sex in the morning.”

She left without turning around or saying another word. It was as if the world she had just inhabited had vanished in a puff of smoke.

By this time, Gunn had dressed himself in midnight blue trousers and a crisp pin-striped shirt. A pair of shiny, expensive loafers were on his feet.

“Jesus, Andrew, she’s young enough to be—”

“Not quite.” Gunn guided an alligator-skin belt through the loops of his trousers and buckled up.

“You’re taking quite a risk.”

“Ah, now we come to the crux of your displeasure.” Gunn went through the living room, into the kitchen, and took a bag of coffee beans out of the freezer.

Carson followed him into the bright lights of the kitchen. “She didn’t even stay long enough to make coffee.”

“And you wonder why she hates your guts.” For the next few minutes he busied himself with grinding the beans, heating the water, then combining them in a Pyrex presspot. He took out a pair of cups from an overhead cabinet.

“I want to kill her.”

Gunn arranged a container of half-and-half and a canister of raw sugar. “No, you don’t. You want what she won’t give you.”

Carson reached out and swung Gunn around. “Listen, you, it’s fucking dangerous to go exploring in here.” He tapped the end of a forefinger against his temple. “More dangerous than you can imagine.”

For a long moment, the two men stared at each other. Then, without a word, Gunn turned back to the coffee and depressed the plunger all the way to the bottom.

“Cream and sugar,” Carson said.

Gunn stared down at the two empty cups. “You don’t have to tell me a second time.”

*   *   *

“There’s nothing here,” McKinsey said.

Naomi wrinkled her nose. “Nothing but the ammonia stink of an industrial-strength cleaner.”

“The manager of First Won Ton upstairs said they had a vermin problem.”

Naomi, playing the beam of her flashlight over the bare concrete floor and walls, said, “I heard him, Pete.”

“But you don’t believe him.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

His own beam swung back and forth. “Maybe McClure was mistaken.”

Naomi glanced at him. “Are you kidding me? Mistaken about a white slave trade clearinghouse, mistaken about the body of Arjeta Kraja?”

“Do you see any evidence of those things?” McKinsey squinted. “He said he was calling from where?”

“He didn’t say.” Naomi walked into the back room, which was no bigger than a good-sized closet. “He was with Dennis Paull and Alli.”

“GPS?”

“He disabled it on his cell and his signal is being bounced, so he can’t be traced. But he must have been on the move because the signal kept cutting out.” She was staring at the painting of blue and gray mountains, whose ragged tops seemed to shred the blue sky. “What the hell is this doing here?” She glanced around. “No other paintings, wall hangings, calendars, zippo. But Jack said there was another room with Arjeta Kraja laid out in it, dead as a doorpost.”

“I don’t see anything of the sort,” McKinsey said. “Ever occur to you he was full of shit?”

When she gave him a dirty look, he added, “Between the two of you, Alli Carson could be a serial killer and she’d never get arrested.”

“Don’t be a dick.” She went over to the painting and felt behind it. “There’s something here.”

McKinsey came over and unhooked the painting, setting it down. They both stared at the one-way glass, then, cupping their hands, tried to peer into the other side.

“What the fuck?” McKinsey said.

Naomi flipped the wall switch, but nothing happened. “Go get the manager,” she said.

While he was gone, she checked around the tiny room, trying to find a way into the space beyond the one-way glass. She found nothing, which puzzled her so much that it was the first question to put to the restaurant manager.

He was a slender Chinese man in his midfifties, with a flat face and eyes that darted about like a pair of frightened mice. He licked his lips continually and his clasped hands made washing motions.

“I don’t know,” he said nervously. He frowned, clearly puzzled. “I didn’t even know the room existed.”

“But you own this space,” she said.

He nodded. “But it’s not used by the restaurant. I rent it out.” He looked around. “At least I did.”

“Who rented it?” McKinsey said.

“A company. Qershi Holdings.”

“Who the hell’re they?”

The manager spread his hands. “I have no idea.”

“Who is Qershi Holdings’ representative?”

“I only dealt with a voice over the phone.”

“And that was enough for you?” Naomi said skeptically.

“He sent cash over as a binder. Two months’ worth.” The manager shrugged his negligible shoulders. “Before that, this space just gathered dust. Though I advertised heavily, I couldn’t give it away. In my business when cash speaks, I listen.”

McKinsey looked around the space. “So what was going on down here?”

The manager shrugged.

McKinsey stared at him. “You’re a real font of knowledge, aren’t you?”

“You never got curious?” Naomi said.

“I was paid a lot of money not to be curious. A stipulation from my tenant.”

Naomi tapped a pen against the side of her smartphone. “So, basically, they could have been auctioning off little girls down here and you wouldn’t know about it.”

The manager gave no indication that he knew anything.

“We came down here through the restaurant,” McKinsey said.

“There’s a back entrance,” the manager replied. “I was told to keep the lights off in that area.”

“So where is everyone?” Naomi said.

“They must have moved out late last night. I was here until closing—around midnight—and I didn’t see anything.”

“Of course you didn’t,” McKinsey muttered.

The manager leaned forward. “Pardon?”

“How do we get into this space behind the glass?” Naomi said.

“Like I said—”

A little yelp exploded from the manager’s mouth when McKinsey smashed the glass with his elbow, then began to pick out the remaining shards from the frame. Naomi trained her flashlight on the interior. It was a perfect square, small, airless. A faint but unmistakable sickly sweet scent came to her.

“It smells like death in there,” she said.

The manager whimpered. He held up his hands. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Too late for that,” McKinsey said as he watched Naomi carefully climb through the shattered window. “What have we got?” he asked her.

“A whole lot of nothing.” The beam of her flashlight lit up the corners of the space. “Odd, though, the floor in here is wooden planks.”

“An older part of the subbasement,” McKinsey offered.

“Right.” Then the beam came to rest. “Hold on a minute.” Crouched down, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves.

McKinsey leaned in. “Whatcha got?”

“One of these boards has something on it.” She played the beam directly on it. “I think it’s blood, Pete.”

Lifting an adjacent board, she played the beam of light into the space beneath. She bent her head down for a better look, and coughed heavily. “Fresh blood.”

14

The sword hung in the sky, glittering, remote. It revealed itself through a rent in the thick cloud cover, a sword full of blue-white stars. Jack took a deep breath of the humid air. It was filled with strange scents, just as the night was filled with strange sounds.

Behind him, the jet crouched, having landed on a runway Jack had no doubt was not on any map or near any inhabited area. It was silent, dark. Just beyond was the verge of a thick evergreen forest, its canopy, like groping fingers, mimicking the rough-hewn tors of the Korab mountain range that rose ahead of them. Somewhere up there was Tetovo, impregnable, teeming with Xhafa’s men, bristling with high-tech weaponry.

They were in western Macedonia, behind enemy lines. Their world had contracted into a red zone, a potential killing field. It was essential, Paull had told them just before landing, that they keep this in mind every minute of the day and night until such time as they made it back here and the plane took off.

While Paull broke out their weaponry and outerwear for the trek, Jack took Alli aside.

“I really need you to keep an eye on the kid.”

She looked at him with her clear eyes. “You don’t think I killed Billy, do you?”

“Don’t be absurd.” He took a breath. “But what I can’t figure out is why you lied about Arjeta Kraja. You obviously did know her.”

“Billy introduced her to me.”

“Did you think you were protecting her?”

“After they showed me what had happened to Billy I knew her life was in danger. I thought if no one knew about her involvement then maybe she had a chance to stay alive, but if all of a sudden cops and Feds came after her I knew she wouldn’t survive the next twenty-four hours.”

“So you knew about Dardan.”

She shook her head. “Neither Billy nor Arjeta mentioned him or the sex slave auction. I had no idea about that place.”

“Why would your uncle have a take-out menu from First Won Ton? And why was spicy fragrant duck with cherries circled in pencil? Cherries. It’s possible he knew about the Stem.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what to think.”

“You know him better than I do, better than almost anyone.”

“Actually, no.” Alli looked pained. “My parents would take me to his house, but he rarely spoke to me. I got the impression he didn’t like kids, including his own daughter.”

“He had a daughter?”

“Caroline.” Alli’s eyes lost focus as she allowed memories to surface. “Caro was a strange girl.”

“Strange how?”

For a moment, Alli seemed lost in thought. “For one thing, she wasn’t interested in normal sorts of things—you know, music, movies, talking on the phone, clothes shopping, boys.”

“So what was she into?”

Alli shrugged. “Who knows. Secrets?”

“Secrets?”

“Yeah, she was always disappearing—no one knew where she went, not Uncle Hank or her mom, Heidi. It would drive them crazy, especially Uncle Hank, who likes everything done his way. I’m guessing that’s why Heidi left.”

Jack considered for a moment. “Do you have any idea what happened to Caroline?”

“No. It was like she disappeared off the face of the earth. One night she walked out of the house and never came back.”

“How old was she?”

Alli bit her lip. “Thirteen, maybe. That was nine, ten years ago.”

“So she’d be twenty-two, twenty-three now. And nothing since then?”

Alli shook her head. “She could be alive or dead, no one knows.”

“Someone must know,” Jack said.

“Do you think her disappearance is relevant to Billy’s murder?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “But I keep coming back to that take-out menu you found in your uncle’s study.”

“It seems both irrelevant and somehow important. I mean, he wouldn’t be caught dead eating Chinese take-out.”

“Which is why it’s sticking in my mind,” Jack said. “Anomalies are always important.”

Alli stared at him for a minute. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering if there’s a link between the Stem, that take-out menu, and Caroline.”

“You think Caro was kidnapped and auctioned off?”

“I’m wondering if that’s the direction your uncle is going in.”

“But if he knows about what was going on at the Stem, why didn’t he have it shut down?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Jack said.

Alli dug in her pocket. “Maybe this will be of some help.” She handed over the cell phone. “I also found this in Uncle Hank’s study.”

Jack was about to open it when Paull came up to them.

“Okay, we’re all set. You need to get into your mountain gear.”

Jack pocketed the cell as he took a look at the forbidding mountains. “How are we getting up to Tetovo?”

Paull drew out a map covered in clear waterproof plastic and opened it. He clicked a pen flash and pointed. “This is the best route, according to our geotech boys.”

Jack nodded. He didn’t bother studying the map because he wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. “What about the kid?”

Paull’s eyes were dark and hooded. “We can’t trust him to go any farther.”

“You can’t just cut him loose out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“He stays with the plane until we get back,” Paull said curtly.

“That would be a mistake.”

They all turned to see Thatë standing behind Paull.

“Get back,” Paull flared.

Alli held up a hand. “Hold on a minute, you two.”

Paull’s head swiveled around and he glared at her. “Listen, missy, Jack may cut you an unreasonable amount of slack, but as far as decisions here are concerned—”

“Thatë’s been here before,” she said. “He knows the mountains, he knows this area of Macedonia.”

Jack turned to the kid. “Is that true?”

Thatë nodded. “I lived in the mountains for eighteen months before I came to Washington.”

Jack beckoned him with a finger and the kid joined their circle.

“Show him the route we’re taking, Dennis.”

When Paull made no move, Alli traced the route on the map.

Thatë shook his head. “There are at least two good reasons why this route will get you into trouble. The first is here.” His forefinger stabbed out. “This village, Dolna Zhelino, belongs to Xhafa. If we go anywhere near it, he’ll know within an hour that you’re coming.”

Paull rolled his eyes.

Jack said, “What else?”

“The route takes you along this ridge above the Vardar River.” His fingertip traced a line. “Here.”

“It’s the most direct route,” Paull said. “Otherwise, we’ll waste time going miles out of our way.”

“It will be a waste of time,” Thatë said, “once you’re buried in a rockslide.”

Paull made a noise in the back of his throat. “Alli, take the kid back inside the plane.”

When the two had mounted the folding stairs and vanished into the jet’s interior, Jack said, “What’s your problem, Dennis?”

“My problem is this kid.”

“Really? He’s already proven useful.”

“Why the fuck should I believe anything he says?” Paull’s eyes engaged Jack’s. They had dark circles under them. Lines of tension scored his face. “My sense is he’s working for Xhafa, and if he is, he’ll lead us right into a mortal trap.”

“What if he’s telling the truth?”

“Jack, he has no incentive to tell the truth and every reason to make sure we wind up dead.”

*   *   *

Inside the plane, Alli sat down in the seat nearest the door. After a moment’s hesitation, Thatë sat beside her.

“Dennis Paull.” She shook her head. “What a dickwad.”

He laughed. “You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”

“Shit,” she said. “I’m afraid of everything.”

“You’re lying.”

She laughed softly, mocking him.

“Then you hide your terror well.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice, believe me.” As if realizing she had possibly revealed too much, she launched into another topic before he could respond. “What were you doing up in the Tetovo area?”

Thatë stared straight ahead. “I was sent by the people who trained me. Russians. Grupperovka.” His eyes cut to her briefly. When she gave no visible reaction, he said, “You know that word?”

Alli nodded. “Yeah. Mobsters, whole families of ’em.”

He appeared somewhat surprised. His eyes reflected the dim lighting of the jet’s interior, turning them as glassy as marbles.

“I’ve been to Moscow,” she said. “Why did the grupperovka send you here?”

“To train with Xhafa’s freedom fighters.”

Alli was aware of the slight hesitation; she didn’t need to see his face to know that he was lying.

*   *   *

Paull shook his head. “What gives me pause is why you and I aren’t on the same page.”

“I have a feeling about him, Dennis.”

“Jack, he’s the fucking enemy.”

“If you believe that, then kill him. Right here. Shoot him in the back of the head like the Russians do. If he’s the enemy surely he deserves nothing less.”

The two men stood toe to toe, their eyes locked, their wills silently battling. The spangled sword was gone. In its place was a sky compressed into layers of low cloud. A chill wind whipped through the trees, causing a great rustling, as if an armada of insects was moving through them. Paull had flicked off the pen flash. There was almost no light. The thick air made it seem as if they were on the ocean floor. Somewhere, not far off, an owl hooted.

“I’m not giving in, Jack. And I’m not going to kill him,” Paull said. “We’ll let him go when we get back here. Until then, the pilot and crew are more than qualified to keep him under wraps.”

Jack took a step closer, his voice lowered. “You said you trust me. Well, I have a feeling about him, Dennis. I think he can help us get to Xhafa.”

“That’s why we have a geotech department.”

“Has any one of them been to Macedonia, let alone anywhere near Tetovo?”

“Not necessary,” Paull snapped. “They have computers—”

Jack leaned in. “Dennis, don’t you get it? Computers don’t mean shit out here. This is the wilderness, this is a zone that’s redder than red. Don’t you think the SKOPES unit relied on computer-compiled data?”

Paull’s mouth was a stubborn line. “I can’t hear you.”

“You haven’t been in the field for years, so don’t be a fool, Dennis. Fate has given us an edge the SKOPES unit never even dreamed of, and you want to ignore it?”

Paull’s mouth opened to reply, then he shut it with a snap. He let out his breath slowly and deliberately, as if he were mentally counting to ten to calm himself down.

“This is so fucked, Jack.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”

Paull looked as if he wanted to hit Jack. “We follow my route. Period.”

“You’re not thinking straight, Dennis.”

“He stays right here with the plane.”

Jack read the stubbornness on Paull’s face and understood that his boss needed to feel in charge. This was his first field mission in a number of years; he was understandably nervous. He’d worked hard on the details of his chosen plan; deviating from it now would seem rash and dangerous to him. He couldn’t win this fight. Pushing Paull further now would only damage their relationship.

“Whatever you say.”

Paull’s finger pressed against Jack’s chest. “This is on you. If he steps out of line, my men have orders to subdue him but not to harm him, because you’re the one who’s going to put a bullet in the back of his head.” He glared into Jack’s face. “Are we clear?”

“Absolutely, but Alli is coming with us.”

Paull hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “Do you really think I’d risk the life of my friend’s daughter?”

“She’ll be a help to us,” Jack said. “She brings unique—”

“No.”

“She can take care of herself.”

“So we’ve seen.”

Jack thought a moment. “How about this. If she can take you off your feet, she comes with us. If you put her down, she stays.”

Paull snorted. “You can’t be serious. She’s only a wisp of a thing.”

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Fuck, no. But—”

“But nothing.”

Jack went to the foot of the stairs and called to her. A moment later, Alli came down to them. He told her what he had proposed.

She stared up at him. “Are you insane?” she whispered.

“Do you want to come with us or don’t you?”

He took her over to where Paull stood. She didn’t waste a second, but strode inside Paull’s defenses, extended her left leg, hooked her boot behind his ankle, and yanked him off his feet.

He sprang up and went after her. Alli calmly stood her ground and, when he reached out for her, grabbed his arm with her left hand and drew him forward. Using his own momentum against him, she drew him around and, as he stumbled, she kicked out. He went down on his face.

He lay there for a moment, one hand beneath him. When he rolled over, he had a Sig Sauer pointed at her.

Alli kicked to the side, the sole of her boot pinioning his gun wrist to the ground.

From his position flat on his back, Paull stared up at Jack. “You fucker,” he said.

*   *   *

Stakeouts were the worst, Naomi thought, as she shifted her position behind the wheel of her car. First, your filled bladder caused your head to throb, then the cramps started behind your knees, then your ankles started to swell from a combination of the inactivity and the salty snacks you consumed out of sheer boredom.

Sitting several car lengths down the block from the entrance to McKinsey’s building, she had cause to think of the blood spatter she’d found at the Stem. Was it Arjeta Kraja’s blood? Was Jack right, was she dead?

She was Secret Service, not a homicide detective. She’d had no experience with murder investigations—with murder at all, for that matter. She’d been trained to preserve life, to forfeit her own in order to protect the POTUS and the FLOTUS. Heinous crimes were beyond her ken, and as she sat shivering in the night, waiting for something—anything!—to happen, she was haunted not only by the murders of Arjeta Kraja, Billy Warren, and the two men in Twilight, but by the specter of the person or persons capable of such extreme cruelty, such contempt for life. Who were these people and what were they doing infecting her country? She was gripped by both fear and a sense of outrage. She harbored fantasies of doing to them what they had done to their victims. Christ, she thought, the world is a terrible place. And she was in a position where it chose to reveal that side of itself over and over. Not so for her sister, Rachel, happily married to a divorce attorney who made seven figures a year. She lived in a huge house in Maryland, had two beautiful children, an Airedale named Digger, and a seven-series BMW. For Rachel, the world was a dream come true, filled with roses and candy canes. Naomi might be jealous, except for the fact that she’d suffocate in the banality of that life. She was quite certain she was not cut out to be a wife with two children. When she’d been younger, she had envied Rachel, but now her sister’s life terrified her.

Shifting in her seat again, she stifled a moan. Her butt was killing her and she was dying to get out of the car and stretch her legs, but she couldn’t take the chance of being spotted. So here she sat like a spider in the center of her web, waiting for a fly to entangle itself in the sticky strands.

Her thoughts returned to the Stem and its slavery auctions. Dardan had been part of it, certainly, but in his phone call Jack had mentioned someone named Mbreti, Albanian for “king.” Who the hell was Mbreti? She had so little to go on—just the name—it was like trying to find a needle in a warehouse full of haystacks.

And then there was McKinsey. It was no coincidence that she had seen Pete coming out of the Fortress Securities building. Connected with Fortress, he had to know more about the three guards than she did, yet he’d failed to mention it over dinner. He was hiding something from her, maybe a great many things. The thought chilled her to the bone. The one person she needed to trust now seemed to be entirely untrustworthy. Minute by minute, she felt the ground slipping out from beneath her.

Several times she had tried calling Jack back, but either he wasn’t answering or he wasn’t in range of a cell tower. He hadn’t said what he was doing with Dennis Paull and she knew better than to ask. Still, she wished she could talk with him, wished even harder that he was here with her, because she knew that he was the one person who could unravel the mysteries that confronted her. In order not to think about Jack—about how she really felt about him—she flooded her mind with anger toward Pete McKinsey. Armored in her anger, she felt safe from emotions that would otherwise swamp her, emotions she’d rather not examine too closely.

But then she heard Rachel’s voice in her head: “You make a fetish of not feeling anything for anyone. You think you’re incapable of feeling deeply, but it’s not true. You’re just terrified; you think you’ll be crushed.” She had shaken her head. “You’re too strong for that, Nomi. You’re a tank.”

To her horror, Naomi discovered that she had begun to weep. Oh, God, no, she thought. But she knew that the heart wanted what the heart wanted. It was simply that what her heart wanted was unattainable.

Wiping her eyes, she shook her head. Grow up, she berated herself. Just grow the fuck up.

Was that her voice, or her brother’s? The oldest of the three siblings, Damon had had an iron personality, a volatile temper, and a great love for his sisters. But his idea of love was to be even tougher on them than he knew the world would be.

“Girls get shafted,” he’d tell them, “and here’s why: Girls are weak, they knuckle under to men all the time, they can’t take the hard knocks of life. Bottom line: They’re not tough enough.” Rachel had told him to go to hell, but, entirely without knowing it, Naomi had swallowed his philosophy whole.

“That’s why you get into trouble,” Rachel had told her once. “That’s why you’re alone.”

By that time, Damon was dead, the body shipped home from Afghanistan. Their mother had collapsed in grief and had never recovered, dying thirteen months later. The doctor said it was a stroke, but Naomi knew it was a broken heart.

Naomi thought of her brother often, and when she did, he increased in stature, until he was larger than life. Every month she went to Arlington Cemetery to lay a wreath at his grave and to talk to him. She missed him in the way a child misses her father. Her sorrow was bitter and unending.

The night was growing thin. The gray sky, as fragile-looking as an eggshell, wavered as it tilted toward dawn. Cathedral Avenue, where McKinsey’s huge Art Deco apartment building rose like the prow of the Titanic, was coming alive with traffic. A light rain fell and then, as abruptly as it started, ceased, leaving the road and sidewalks as slick as the surface of a skating rink. McKinsey’s Ford was still parked down the block, cold and deserted, mocking her.

A gust of wind swept trash up into the air, sudden movement on a lonely, deserted street, and she shivered again. She was deathly tired; even her bones ached with exhaustion. She had been working nonstop for the last two days without even an hour of sleep. Unconsciously, her head tilted back, her eyelids closed, and she slid from awareness, only to snap herself awake. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror, which reflected a face as pale and sunken as a corpse’s.

Damn, she thought, I need a vacation.

At that precise moment, her gaze was drawn to a metallic flash as the door to McKinsey’s building opened. A young woman in a broad-brimmed hat, stiletto-heeled boots, and stylish reflective raincoat stepped out. In one arm, she cradled one of those tiny teacup poodles with a rhinestone-studded collar. She put the dog down on the sidewalk and attached the leash. As she and the poodle trotted down the broad stone steps, McKinsey emerged and scanned the immediate vicinity. Naomi froze, scarcely daring to breathe.

Apparently satisfied, he went down the steps and headed for his car. She leaned forward, her hand on the ignition key, her right foot on the brake. The idea was to start her car when he did, so he wouldn’t hear it. Her eyes followed McKinsey as he got into his car and slid behind the wheel. The instant he leaned forward to slot the key, she fired her ignition. A moment later, he pulled out. She counted silently to ten, then followed him into the traffic of Cathedral Avenue.

He took her south and then west into Georgetown. Turning left off M Street, he drove down to the water and parked. For some time, he sat in the car with the driver’s side window down, smoking. In no hurry, he appeared to be staring out at the water.

At precisely 6:14, he got out of the Ford and strolled down to the water. Elbows on the railing, he leaned out over the water and stared down. Naomi stepped out onto the sidewalk and followed his path to the east side of the Sequoia Center. As she did so, McKinsey did a strange thing. He straddled the railing, then dropped over the water side.

Naomi broke into a run. A motor coughed to life. She arrived at the railing just in time to see McKinsey standing beside a man driving a small motorboat. They were heading out to Theodore Roosevelt Island. Naomi caught a glimpse of the man McKinsey had gone to meet. He was in his mid to late thirties, athletic in build, with thick, dark hair, curling at his neck. He sported a full beard. There was a flash of dark predator’s eyes, set deep in his skull, before the boat swept away in a white spray of wake.

Naomi slammed her fists into the top rail and wondered what the hell her partner was up to.

*   *   *

They were already high in the foothills of the Korab mountains by the time the talons of dawn scraped the eastern horizon. At first, there was just a thin line of red, then, in the space of a heartbeat, the terrain was flooded with a golden light so dazzling they were forced to don sunglasses.

Alli walked between Paull on point and Jack at the rear. The trio wore climbing boots, jeans, and camouflage microfiber windbreakers. They carried ArmaLite AR 25 assault rifles, featherweight backpacks stuffed with food, water, and the DARPA weapons Paull had procured.

The ground’s pitch steepened, the dips more shallow and, at the same time, the way became more rugged. The switchback path was strewn with larger and larger rocks, and clots of loose earth that skittered and slid out from under their boot soles, tumbling backward down the slope. Trees were bent as old men, twisted by the high winds of storms, and the scrub took on the lackluster color of clay, looking more dead than alive. High above them, hawks circled and dipped on the thermals, searching for prey.

With daylight full blown, Paull called a halt and they made temporary camp in the shadow of an enormous boulder, leaning like a giant’s tooth knocked off true. They drank and ate a little, then took turns at lookout while the others dozed. When it was Alli’s turn to stand guard, Jack rose and picked his way to stand beside her.

“Did you find anything interesting on Uncle Hank’s cell?”

Her voice was soft and hushed, her eyes moving across the terrain, searching for any movement, anything out of place.

“Yes and no,” Jack said. “There are only two numbers on that phone, odd enough in and of itself, but to make matters more mysterious both are assigned a single letter—A and D—rather than a name. The designations could be the first letter of names, or some code of your uncle’s devising.” He gestured. “Out here, there’s no way of connecting with these numbers, so I’ll have to wait to check them out.”

Alli gave him a swift glance. “You think this means he knows about the Stem? About Dardan?”

“This cell, these coded numbers, may concern something altogether different, Alli. It’s too soon to tell.” Discussing Henry Holt Carson brought home to Jack a duty he had been reluctant to perform. There was no time like the present, he thought. Still, the trauma Alli had so recently sustained made this difficult task even more so.

“Alli, there’s something I need to tell you. I know your uncle neglected to tell you.” He took a breath, let it out. “The night Billy was murdered … your mother passed away.”

Alli said nothing. She stared out at the unfamiliar terrain, blindingly outlined against a sky so blue that without sunglasses it made your eyes hurt. Hardwood, pines, miles of granite, split and jagged. Not a hint of human habitation anywhere.

Jack could hear her breathing. “I’m so sorry. I’ll miss her.”

“Uncle Hank knew?”

“Of course. He was called to the hospital, as were Dennis and I. They tried to contact you, but by then Fearington was in lockdown.”

Alli’s breathing seemed to shorten, to quicken. “Why didn’t he tell me?” She turned to Jack, tears glittering in the corners of her eyes. “When I was at his house, when he locked me into his study, why didn’t Uncle Hank tell me?”

“I can’t answer that,” Jack said softly. “But it’s possible that being angry at him isn’t the way to go at this moment.”

She didn’t respond.

“Alli?”

She shook her head fiercely. “I can’t think about them—either of them.”

“You will, sometime.” His voice was both soft and gentle. “The longer you wait—”

“Shit,” she said, and walked away.

Jack watched her for a time, a tiny, lone sentinel. Her back was ramrod straight, her stance as fiercely battle-ready as any soldier.

A stirring at his side alerted him.

“She’s an enigma, isn’t she, Dad?”

“That she is, Emma.”

“Even to herself.”

*   *   *

Naomi spent a very frustrating day with Pete, collating all the information they had amassed, including the forensics on the knife found behind Alli’s room in Fearington, which indicated that it was, indeed, Billy’s blood on the blade. However, the handle had been wiped clean, which was consistent with both a premeditated murder and a conspiracy to set up Alli.

“The bloody knife is such a clumsy attempt to frame Alli,” she said. They sat at facing desks, close enough for easy conversation. “I don’t get it.”

He picked his head up from his paperwork. He looked neat and tidy. He was freshly shaved. It looked as if his nails had been waxed. “What do you mean?”

“First the vial of roofies with Alli’s fingerprints is found under her bed. Pretty damning, no? But then this bloody knife. Who in their right mind would dump a murder weapon behind where they live?”

“You forget, Naomi. She’s not in her right mind. Hasn’t been, apparently, since she was abducted.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “You’re missing the point.”

“Which is?”

He seemed peculiarly disinterested, she thought, or unusually distracted. Maybe that amounted to the same thing.

“It’s as if she was set up, then given this loophole.”

“I don’t agree.” He shook out a cigarette, then, remembering he couldn’t smoke in the office, shoved it back into the pack. “Why should she care about us finding the murder weapon if her prints aren’t on it?”

She ran a hand distractedly through her hair. She was suddenly sick of him.

“What have you found out about Qershi Holdings, the company that rented out the space where the Stem was transacting their business?”

“Exactly zippo.” Naomi was aware of how flat her voice sounded. She bitterly hated failure. Whoever said that you can’t handle success until you’ve failed was full of shit. “It’s a shell corporation, doing business out of the Cayman Islands.”

“Which local bank does it use? The Cayman banks are more helpful to us nowadays.”

Naomi sighed. “If only. No, all I could pick up was a PO box.”

“So,” he said, “another dead end.”

She nodded. “For the moment, at least.”

They burned the rest of the afternoon writing their first report for Henry Holt Carson, not an easy assignment, considering both the lack of hard information and the one bit of news sure to bring out their ad hoc employer’s ire.

The more they worked on the draft, the more anxious Naomi became. “Let’s emphasize the increasingly cloudy picture the evidence is providing,” she said. “That’s sure to please him.” After a grunt from McKinsey, she plowed on. “And maybe we should omit the part about Alli being with Jack.”

“What?” McKinsey’s head snapped up. “Are you nuts? That’s about the only solid news we have for him. She isn’t lost and she isn’t on her own.”

“She’s with Jack; just what he doesn’t want. He’ll have a shit fit.”

McKinsey brushed away her words. “Not our concern. It goes in the report. End of story.”

Naomi brought her eyes back down to the draft. He was right—of course he was. But she couldn’t help thinking that the news would put Jack at the top of Henry Holt Carson’s enemy list. She tried to continue typing on her computer keyboard, but found that her fingers wouldn’t work. She sat brooding for a moment, aware that McKinsey was eyeing her. Then she pushed her chair back and went and got some coffee from the office machine. Its bitterness matched her mood. She said to hell with it, dumped in some half-and-half instead of two-percent milk, added three teaspoons of real sugar instead of Splenda, and knocked back half a cup before she got back to her desk. God forbid it should be hot, rather than lukewarm.

After she sat down, she stared morosely at the text on her screen. She realized that she hated working for Carson. Hell, she hated Carson himself. He was so unlike his brother, whose sudden and shocking death still haunted her.

McKinsey looked up suddenly. “You’re still thinking about him, aren’t you?”

She said nothing, but could not meet his gaze.

“You’re getting yourself into trouble, you know that.”

Her eyes flicked up. “What the hell does that mean?”

He leaned forward, elbow on his desk. “Naomi, your feelings for McClure are one thing, but when they start to cloud your professional judgment—”

“Message received,” she said shortly. “Let’s just drop it, okay?”

He kept his eyes on her for a moment, then got back to work.

Naomi forced her fingers to start typing again. Inwardly, she was seething. What right had Pete to admonish her when he was working his own private agenda? But she could say nothing. She needed to find out what he was involved in, and why, before she confronted him.

After a cheap, heartburn dinner, they drove over to Twilight. There was no talk between them. Naomi’s mood had continued to sour during the long, tedious day.

At the club, they interviewed patrons until after midnight. Many of them remembered Arjeta Kraja, but no one claimed to be her friend or to know any of her friends. As to her family, no one had a clue. It looked as if Schiltz had been right about her: an illegal immigrant, and, judging by her lack of friends, not very long in the U.S., either. Just after midnight, they called it quits, and Naomi had gone home, feeling frustrated and helpless.

After failing to sleep, she dressed, got back in her car, and drove to Cathedral Avenue. Parking across from Pete’s apartment building, she sat with her arms folded, her mind full of anger and tangled emotions.

After what seemed like an endless time, sleepy gray light stole into the street. The facade of the massive building was sheened, as if it were weeping. Naomi stared at the entrance. The glass in the door shimmered with reflections from the occasional passing car or truck.

Then, as she watched, there was a brief flare of light, as if from a match or a lighter, and Naomi sat up straighter in her seat. She thought she caught a glimpse of Pete standing just behind the door, smoking. Had he made her? A film of sweat broke out on her upper lip.

A moment later, the door swung open and the young woman, led by her toy poodle, came down the steps. They walked several feet, until the poodle pulled her to the curb. She waited patiently, smoking while the dog peed in the gutter. She wore the same reflective raincoat and stiletto-heeled boots, but this morning she was without a hat. Her blond hair looked like liquid gold. Naomi frowned. There was something decidedly familiar about the face, the eyes especially, which were neither hazel nor gray, but some color she could not define. Then her heart started to beat so fast and hard she felt as if it was in her throat. The woman looked in her direction. The poodle had finished its business. She stepped off the curb and walked diagonally across the avenue, heading directly toward where Naomi sat, trapped behind the wheel of her car.

Her strides were long, almost like a man’s, her strong thighs working like pistons. Her high-heeled boots left imprints on the wet macadam. Naomi could not help envying the perfection of her legs. Then she was on the sidewalk, abreast of Naomi’s car. Naomi engaged the automatic door locks. Leaning down, the young woman tapped with a fingernail on the window.

“Open the door,” she mouthed. “Let me in.”

Naomi stared at her, unmoving. A moment later, a silver-plated .25 appeared in the woman’s hand. When she tapped on the glass again it was with the muzzle of the handgun.

Naomi calculated the time it would take to draw her gun, or start the car and peel out. The odds were stacked heavily against her. She opened the car doors and the woman slid inside. She gave a little tug on the leash and the toy poodle leaped into her lap. She had square-cut nails, like a man; she wore no jewelry of any kind.

“Are you going to tell McKinsey?” Naomi said.

“Why would I do that?”

She had a voice that hinted at exotic places. Naomi suspected that English was not her native language. Up close, her eyes were an astonishing mineral color, carnelian maybe. She had the kind of wide, sensual mouth Naomi would have killed for. There was a strength about her that caused a warning bell inside Naomi to sound.

“You two work together.”

The woman cocked her head. “Where did you get that idea?”

“Yesterday, you came out of Pete’s building at almost the same moment as him, at a very early hour.”

“Well, it seems as if we’re all up early.”

Naomi stared at her. She tried to ignore the muzzle of the .25 that was pointed at her chest. “Are you claiming you and McKinsey don’t know each other?”

“No, not at all,” the woman said. “But we don’t work together.”

Naomi tipped her head slightly. “How did you know I was here?”

“Peter was foolish to let himself be seen leaving Fortress.”

“So you’ve been following me? Who are you?”

A small smile curved the woman’s lips. “You mean you don’t recognize me?”

“I admit you look familiar.”

“But you don’t know from where.”

Naomi nodded uncertainly. The answer seemed tantalizingly close. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“No.” The poodle made a small sound and the woman rubbed it behind its ears. Its tiny pink tongue came out and licked her fingers. “We haven’t.”

“Then where—?”

“But you have seen me before, Naomi.” The smile spread. “Where, where, where, you’re wondering? I can see it in your face.” She took a moment to slide the window down and toss her butt into the gutter. “In Moscow. Fourteen months ago. Just before the last snow of winter.”

“Good God!” Memories shifted in Naomi’s head, gears clicked, and all at once her brain seemed to implode. She had been standing behind and just to the left of the FLOTUS in the enormous hall of the Kremlin during the reception that followed the signing of the security pact between the United States and Russia. The atmosphere had been festive, the air thick with hard, cryptic Russian. Jack had walked in with her, and later, after the POTUS was dead and the FLOTUS was in a coma, after they had returned home aboard Air Force One, demoralized and in mourning, Jack had told her … “It can’t be.”

The woman seemed delighted. “But it is.”

“You’re Annika Dementieva.”

15

He stands in the darkness. Alli can’t see him, but she can feel him, which is much worse. He is like a nightmare given life; she has a sense that her life is over. And even though she’s smart enough to know this is precisely what he wants her to feel, she cannot help herself. The situation is beyond her control.

As she feels him approaching, she struggles against the restraints, but she’s held fast by wrists and ankles to the metal chair bolted to the floor. She wears what she had on when he abducted her out of her bed at school—panties and a men’s T-shirt. Whatever semblance of dignity she had when he brought her here is now gone. He has seen every square inch of her body—not merely seen, but observed, as a surgeon will examine his patient, as a thing to be slit open. But this man has no intention of healing her—though that is, of course, his claim. This is early in her incarceration. Later on, she will agree with him. She will renounce her parents, her life up until this moment. She will be eager to do as he says.

She feels the burst of frigid Moscow air as she sees the limo her father is in skid off the airport highway and slam into the electrical pole. She sees her mother gasping for air, her father white and dead, laid out on a makeshift bier inside Air Force One as they take off on their way back to D.C. She hears the frantic calls of the physicians who are trying to save her mother’s life, and in the cracks between the soft sobbing of someone crying. Jack is with her, as is Naomi. But she feels nothing. She’s withdrawn into the familiar icy shell. There are too many things she feels about her parents, conflicting currents that buffet her as if she’s a sailboat in an Atlantic storm. At every moment, she’s in danger of capsizing, and then there’s nowhere to go but down into darkness.

She knows her parents love her, but it’s the way they love her that hurts and disappoints her. Hell-bent on micromanaging her childhood and adolescence, they have lost sight of her individuality. Instead, she has become an extension of the Edward Carson brand.

She resigns herself to being raped; had, in fact, prepared herself for whatever forms of sexual perversions he undoubtedly harbored. The thought of what is surely coming terrifies her, but she knows she can lock at least part of her mind away, keep it safe from whatever he might do to her. Emma had taught her how to do that; Emma was a master at locking herself away.

But she is wholly unprepared for how deeply and intimately he has invaded her life. And from the outset, he uses his knowledge to worm his way inside her brain and take up residence there.

His heat permeates the air and she smells him as he leans over her, his rough, scaly hands covering hers, his lips in the fringe of hair over her forehead.

“I’ve seen you walking across campus with Emma McClure,” he says. “I know you two were roommates.” He laughs softly, unpleasantly, and a sudden whiff of rotting meat comes to her, almost makes her gag. “Well, but everyone at Langley Fields knows that you two were roommates, that you were best friends. But I know something more.”

She closes her eyes against the assault of his voice, but it pushes farther inside her. She has no defenses against what he says next.

“I know that you and Emma were lovers. How do I know this? I’ve heard your squeals and moans of delight. I’ve heard you call her name just before it ends, I’ve heard her cursing softly when you did those things to her she liked best.”

She doesn’t want to respond, but she can’t help herself—the first time of many during that week of darkness and disorientation. And the words are wrenched out of her throat, almost as a sob. “How? How?”

He breathes on her again, almost as a sigh of pleasure, but it might only be satisfaction. “She was a good teacher, wasn’t she, Alli? A gentle and loving teacher, yes?”

Alli starts to sob, hot tears sliding down her cheeks, and she thinks, Oh, my God, Emma. Emma!

“Just as I am a gentle and loving teacher, Alli. In the coming days, I propose to show you what a lie your previous life has been, how you have been betrayed by those who profess to love you the most. Your parents don’t love you, Alli—they never did. They used you to further their ambitions, their political agenda. You’ve always hated them, you simply need to be made aware of it. They have debased you, stolen your identity, your very humanity. I will return these precious things to you. I’m the only one who can. You may not understand that now, but in time you will, I promise you. And the first step is to renounce them. This is the only way to gain back what they have taken from you. You will do this, I know you will. I have absolute confidence in you, Alli.

“A new day has dawned. From this moment forward, your life has changed. Isn’t that what Emma told you that night she held you in her arms, one warm thigh slipped between yours, and rocked you to sleep?”

*   *   *

Alli, surrounded by the high crags of the Korab mountains, the wheeling hawks and black kites, her cheeks scrubbed by the harsh wind and grit of the increasingly steep trail, felt that week rush back at her like a tidal wave of rot. She began to retch, and almost vomited up whatever was in her stomach. But all she could expel was acid and bile. She felt abruptly dizzy and so ill she wanted nothing more than to lie down on her side with her knees drawn up to her chest. She wanted to go back in time. She wanted to take a pair of pliers and pull her destroyer’s tongue out by its roots; she wanted to press her thumbs into his eyes until they turned to bloody jelly; she wanted to willfully ignore his pitiful pleas for mercy.

She wanted to go back to her parents seeing them as she does now, in the fullness of time. Did she ever tell them she loved them? She couldn’t remember, and this, in itself, frightened her. She missed them now, but in a way that was unfamiliar and inexplicable to her. Can you love people only after they’re gone? she asked herself. The possibility sickened her and she doubled over again on a boulder, though there was nothing left to vomit up.

She cried now for them, for herself, for the normal childhood she desperately wanted and never had. She hated them, forgave them, and loved them all at the same time. Dizzy and confused, she labored on, out of sight of the others. She couldn’t bear anyone to see her like this, even Jack. She wished she could talk to Annika, because Annika could understand how you could love and hate a parent at the same time. And if she could understand it, maybe she could explain it to her.

So she wept for the loss of her parents, for herself, but also for Emma. Because, most of all, she wanted to change the moment Emma had asked her for help—asked Alli to come with her in the car that crashed, a crash that had taken her life. She wanted Emma back. Billy had been an experiment. It had been nice—he’d really cared for her, and he was gentle. But the relationship had only underscored how much she missed Emma.

She wanted Emma back. My best friend, my only love.

Then Jack was there.

“I’m fine,” she managed to get out. “Please…”

But his strong arm holding her close undid her, and, sobbing, she buried her face in his chest.

“I don’t…”

Her words were muffled; Jack felt them more than he heard them.

“Alli.” He bent his head. “It’s all right.”

Her tears were bitter in her mouth.

“I don’t deserve to live.”

*   *   *

“I didn’t think you’d ever come back here,” Naomi said.

Annika gave her a sharp look.

“I saw the e-mail you sent Jack. I know you killed Senator Berns.”

A shadow passed across Annika’s face and vanished.

They were still in Naomi’s car. Across Cathedral Avenue, the entrance to McKinsey’s apartment building had come alive with residents on their way to work. The dampness was all but gone from the concrete and macadam.

Annika laughed. “Someone sent an e-mail accusing me of murdering this senator—what did you say his name was?”

“Amusing,” Naomi said, though she thought it anything but.

“You have no proof.” Annika stroked the poodle’s fragile back. “That e-mail can’t be traced.”

That seemed like an opening, and Naomi jumped on it. “How do you know that?”

Annika shrugged. “Only an idiot would make herself vulnerable to an electronic trace.”

At last Naomi dropped her gaze to the muzzle of the .25. “What do you want, Annika?”

“Where’s Jack?”

For an instant, Naomi’s mind went numb. When her vision cleared, she said, “Jack doesn’t want to see you.”

“What are you, his mommy?”

In an instant, the flash of anger was gone, but it had existed long enough for Naomi to realize that there was something powerful enough to crack Annika’s armor.

“I know where he is.” Though she suspected it was both foolish and dangerous to lie to this woman, she’d had enough of feeling helpless.

“Then you’d better tell me.”

“What is that, a threat?”

“Listen, Naomi, it’s already out that Jack killed Arian Xhafa’s brother.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, Naomi, I lie for a living. Jack’s in serious trouble.”

Naomi’s heart began a trip-hammer beat. “I’m telling you I don’t know who Arian Xhafa is.”

Annika stared at her for a long time, apparently trying to make up her mind. At last, she sighed. “I can only assume that he chose to keep you in the dark in order to protect you.”

Naomi could hear the blood rushing in her ears. Her chest hurt with the desire for Annika to continue. The irony of her source being a professional liar wasn’t lost on her. In fact, it pained her.

“Did he tell you he killed a man at the Stem?”

How do you know all this? Naomi asked herself, but she was canny enough to intuit that Annika would never tell her. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised, given what Jack had told her about Annika Dementieva, but she couldn’t help herself. This woman had a preternatural intelligence. A shiver of foreboding passed through her. She had the distinct sense Annika was three steps ahead of everyone else on the game board.

She nodded. “A man named Dardan.”

“Dardan is—was—Arian Xhafa’s brother.” Annika took out another cigarette, stared at its unlit tip. “Arian Xhafa is one of the most feared warlords in Eastern Europe. His power and influence are growing exponentially every day.”

“Is he the head of the sex slave trade ring that ran its auction at the Stem?”

“Ah, at least you know something.” Annika cut her eyes sideways. “Yes, Arian Xhafa is running young girls from Russia, the Baltics, Macedonia, Albania, all over Eastern Europe, in fact. He imports them into Italy, Scandinavia, and, of course, here in America. It’s a multimillion-dollar business, one that’s made easy by international law enforcement’s indifference. The girls are runaways, whores, girls sold into slavery to buy their family food and shelter. Whether they live in slavery or die of beatings, multiple rapes, AIDS, or a drug overdose, it’s of no concern to the police of any nation.”

“But there are laws, some very new, specifically put in place to—”

“Laws are only legislative pieces of paper, Naomi. They aren’t effective if they’re not enforced. These laws are not. In poor countries, they’re often ignored, even in the larger cities and particularly outside urban centers. In the more developed countries, there is a network of corruption among officials in law enforcement and government, fed by both greed and blackmail, that ensures the sex trade continues to flourish across borders.”

Naomi sat back. She had read articles about the widening international traffic in girls and the growing worldwide alarm it was causing. But she’d also assumed—idealistically, perhaps—that the new laws enacted in many countries were having an effect. Frankly, it came as a shock to her that they might be largely ignored.

“But this sex trafficking—”

“Both those terms are misnomers,” Annika said. “What we’re talking about is slavery.” She slipped the cigarette back into its pack and her amber eyes lifted to engage Naomi’s. “Let me ask you a question. Have you any idea of the worldwide number of enslaved girls and women at this moment?”

Naomi considered. “Hundreds of thousands, I would guess. Maybe a million?”

“Twenty-seven million.”

“My God!” The sheer size of the figure took Naomi’s breath away and made her feel sick to her stomach.

“To put the figure in perspective, that’s the population of New York City and Los Angeles with nine million people to spare.”

“That figure has to be an exaggeration.”

“Really? One million children are forced into prostitution every year,” Annika went on. “And that’s only prostitution. To be enslaved can mean many things, not only in a sexual sense.” She flicked her lighter open, the reflection of the flame burning in her eyes. “But in all cases enslavement entails the breaking down of the individual through humiliation, deprivation, torture, and, yes, many times, multiple rapes. It relies, in any event, on the total dependence on the enslaver. This can only come about through the annihilation of hope.”

Naomi realized that she had been holding her breath. Letting it out now seemed like only a temporary relief. “And this is Arian Xhafa’s business.”

“Yes.”

“What’s your interest in this?”

“I’m a woman.”

Naomi shook her head. “Please don’t mistake me for an idiot.”

Annika smiled coolly. “My interest is in Jack.”

“You betrayed him.”

“Whether I did or not is no concern of yours.”

“Jack is my friend.”

Annika’s smile turned icy. “Oh, I can see that quite clearly.”

Naomi looked away, stared at her hands on the steering wheel. “I don’t see how I can trust you.”

Annika wiped the corners of the poodle’s eyes. “I imagine that depends on how badly you want to find Mbreti.”

Naomi tried to make sense of the buzzing in her mind. “I want Mbreti.” She lifted her gaze, but found it difficult to stare into those extraordinary eyes without feeling intimidated, worse, somehow diminished. “What do you know about him?”

Annika appeared to consider this for some time. Then she nodded. She waggled the barrel of the .25. “I’ll tell you as you drive.”

Naomi fired the ignition and turned the wheel, checking traffic. When she pulled out onto the avenue, she said, “I drive better without a gun in my face.”

Annika smiled and put the gun down beside the poodle. “What did Jack tell you about me?”

“Enough to know that you can’t be trusted.”

“No one can be trusted, Naomi. Not in our world.” She kept the enigmatic smile on her face. “Turn right here, then make the next left, then left again.”

“The directions make no sense.”

“I want to make certain we’re not being followed.”

Naomi glanced in the rearview mirror. “Who would be following us?”

“Peter McKinsey, for one.”

Naomi took some time digesting this comment. Ever since she had recognized Annika Dementieva she had felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. “And if you go chasing rabbits, And you know you’re going to fall…” Grace Slick sang in her mind. And then the dormouse’s final warning, like the ominous tolling of a bell: Keep your head.

Without missing a beat, Annika said, “How is Alli?”

“You know Alli?” Stupid. Of course, Annika had met Jack in Moscow, had traveled with him and Alli to the Ukraine.

Annika’s smile spread like melting butter. “Better than you do, my dear.”

A shiver went through the pit of Naomi’s stomach. Annika might be lying—in fact, she probably was—but the thought that she might, indeed, know Alli so well gave Naomi the willies. That poor girl, she thought. All she has is Jack now, and that overbearing and thoroughly repugnant uncle. How awful if this lying murderer gets added to the mix.

“Alli is with Jack,” Naomi said, more defensively than she had intended, “where she belongs.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Annika was staring straight ahead. “And where would that be?”

Naomi made no response.

“Now that we’re in Georgetown,” Annika said, “you should know where to go.”

Naomi glanced at her for a moment, then headed down toward the water.

“You saw me follow Pete yesterday.”

“I’m sure you saw him get into the boat.”

“Roosevelt Island?”

“It’s wilderness out there.” Annika pointed to the parking area of a building beside Tidewater Lock. “An excellent place for a rendezvous.” That smile again as Naomi pulled into a slot. “And secrets.”

*   *   *

For some time, Thatë watched the crew members playing poker in the rear lounge, but his mind was elsewhere. He was remembering in perfect detail Alli defeating Dennis Paull not once, but three times. He liked the way she moved, like a ghost or a drift of smoke. He’d never seen anyone fight like that—the sudden whirlwind moves fascinated him. Or maybe it was Alli herself who fascinated him.

He cleared his throat, got up, and asked for a pillow and a blanket. One of the crew members put down his cards and opened an overhead compartment. The entire crew watched him while he pulled down what he wanted. He lay down across a row of seats some distance from them, pulled the blanket over him, and set his head on the pillow.

He drifted on and off for perhaps an hour or so. When he opened his eyes, he saw a crewman sitting across the aisle, watching him. A handgun lay in his lap. He gripped it as Thatë sat up.

“I need to pee.”

“Go ahead,” the crewman said.

Wrapping himself in the blanket, Thatë went forward up the aisle, the crewman following in his wake.

So that’s how it is, he thought.

The forward toilet was located almost directly across from the stairs leading down to the ground. He pulled open the toilet door. As the crewman stepped forward, Thatë threw the blanket over him, slammed his forehead into the crewman’s nose, and dragged him into the toilet. The entire maneuver had taken no more than a second or two. Thatë risked a glance to the back. The rest of the crew kept up their game of poker, oblivious to what had just happened.

Ducking back into the toilet, he took the unconscious crewman’s handgun, set him on the toilet, and emerged into the aisle, closing the door behind him. He stepped across the aisle, went down the stairs, and was free.

*   *   *

Annika bolted out of the car, and, cursing under her breath, Naomi hurried after her. Annika carried the poodle in one arm. There was no sign of the .25, but Naomi was certain she had it on her somewhere. Oddly, and rather terrifyingly, she seemed oblivious to the fact that Naomi was armed. Her absolute confidence exploded a depth charge into Naomi’s psyche.

Striding out onto the dock, Annika set the poodle free. It immediately scampered to a section of the dock and jumped. Unconcerned, Annika walked after it. At the edge, she unzipped her boots and tossed them after the dog. Then she stepped down into a sleek, blue-and-white powerboat. Pulling out a key on a float ring, she started the engine, then cast off the bow line.

“Cast off the stern line when I give the signal,” she said without looking at Naomi.

Naomi stood at the stern of the boat. There was no point, at least at this stage, in pitting herself against the other woman, she told herself. Better to go along with whatever she had in mind, always remembering her service weapon, a 9mm Glock that, at this distance, could put a sizable hole in Annika’s head. She decided that would be a most satisfying outcome.

“Now,” Annika said.

Naomi slipped the nylon line from the metal cleat, then stepped on board. The moment she did so, Annika pushed the throttle and the boat nosed its way out of the slip, angling toward the thick greenery of the island. Naomi picked her way forward and stood beside Annika, in much the same position Peter had stood beside the unknown man yesterday morning.

The trip took no more than five minutes. The sun was a hazy ellipse, partially obscured by a low-lying cloudbank. As was the case the morning before, there was no other boat traffic. The water lay serenely blank, an opaque sheet intent on keeping its secrets safe.

Annika tied up the poodle, who obediently lay down, sighed, and went to sleep. They disembarked onto the island, Naomi in her sensible shoes, Annika in bare feet. The sun was fully up now and the day was growing warmer. Naomi noticed that Annika did not take off her raincoat. Possibly this was where she’d stashed her .25.

Annika struck out to their left and Naomi followed. They skirted the shoreline, heading toward the eastern point of the island, but, almost immediately, Annika turned inland. Naomi tried to focus her mind on the island’s shape. There were no buildings, only a memorial to Teddy Roosevelt near the opposite shore. Otherwise, all was wilderness. They picked their way through the underbrush, beneath heavy branches. The smell of damp earth and decaying leaves was everywhere. The sky vanished; they were enclosed in deep, cool shade, as if in the shadow of a monstrous edifice.

At length, they broke out onto a boardwalk of whitish planks, walking due south until Annika turned onto a right-hand branch. This took them on a short walk to a platform that overlooked a finger of muddy water and, beyond, a thick swath of uninterrupted forest that composed the bulk of the island. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere, no movement save for the twittering birds flitting from tree to tree.

Looking around, Naomi could see nothing she would not expect to find on such an expedition. “This is where Pete went yesterday?”

“Possibly.” Annika stared off to their right.

Naomi followed her gaze, but could find no anomaly. “Who took him here, Annika? Who was driving that boat?”

“I hope you’re not averse to getting your feet wet,” Annika said as she stepped off the platform onto a protruding root, and from there down into the water. The hem of her raincoat caused ripples to expand out from where she stood, knee-deep.

Kicking off her shoes, Naomi grabbed on to the bole of the tree and swung down from the root, which was slippery, skinned now from Annika’s weight, to the water herself. As soon as she was down, Annika picked her way north, up the narrow channel. The bottom was soft and mucky, and mud squelched between Naomi’s toes. The water was surprisingly warm, thick as chowder. What was she stirring up with each footfall? she wondered. Tiny whirlpools of little fish and decayed leaves wove around her ankles, turning the brackish water ruddy. A sudden shadow overhead caused her to duck, and she heard a bird call, as if mocking her.

“Come on!” Annika called from up ahead. “Don’t get lost!” Her voice was oddly flat, echoless, as if they had entered a strange and unknowable place where the natural laws of science didn’t apply.

Naomi moved on, picking up her pace as best she could, but the footing had become unstable, the muck under her feet shifting and sliding as it deepened. Several times she stumbled and had to grab an overhanging branch to keep herself from pitching headlong into the water. She realized that the water was neither cold nor warm, but seemed to be the same temperature as her body.

Up ahead, she could see a flicker of Annika’s raincoat, like the scales of a reptile moving slowly and inexorably toward its goal. Now she used the branches to drag herself forward, relying on her arms rather than her legs for locomotion, as if she were a chimpanzee.

Maneuvering around a small bend to the right, she stopped. Annika was standing with one foot on the low bank. One leg was raised. The raincoat had parted, sliding off the knee, revealing a section of naked thigh. What did or didn’t Annika have under that raincoat? Naomi wondered briefly.

“Closer,” Annika said, beckoning Naomi forward.

When Naomi came up behind her, she saw that Annika had been digging in the muck. She had uncovered something. Stooping down, she cupped her hands and threw water on it. A pale and shining patch shone through as the mud and leaf detritus slid off.

It was part of a hand.

Heart in her throat, Naomi saw again the splatter of blood on the old wooden boards deep beneath the streets of Chinatown, and tears shattered on her cheeks. Annika moved out of the way as she crouched down, unmindful of the water and the mud. Using her bare hands she swept away more of the earth. The body had been buried in the V-shaped gap between two massive tree roots, a hammocky space.

The hand was small, the fingers delicate, so Naomi knew this was a young girl. She dug almost frantically now, tearing a nail, then another, not caring. All she could think of was uncovering the girl’s face, as if she were still alive and, unburied, could be made to breathe again, to live, instead of being yet another victim of these slave traders.

A brow came first, then the heartbreakingly beautiful swell of a cheekbone. She gasped to see the nose fractured, bruised and swollen to almost twice its size. At this point, the lack of decomposition brought home to her that the girl had been killed very recently, possibly within the last forty-eight hours, though only a coroner could tell for certain.

This was all on the right side of the face. As she brushed clean the left side, her fingertips felt for the telltale fracture, this one of the left eye socket. And there it was, just as it had been with Billy and the two men in Twilight.

“Same MO, same perp,” she murmured to herself.

“That’s right,” Annika said from right behind her.

Then an arm encircled her throat, the pad of a thumb pressed against the bone just below her left eye.

And she heard Annika’s voice so intimate in her ear as the pressure increased.

“This is how it’s done.”

16

“Someone is feeding her information,” McKinsey said in a hushed voice.

“Naomi is a smart girl,” Henry Carson said. “I told you that from the get-go.”

“Shit, she’s not that smart.”

“It’s a mistake to underestimate her.”

They fell silent as the huge door to the National Cathedral opened and someone entered. An older woman walked down the central aisle, crossed herself before sliding into a pew halfway down. Her hands clasped and she bowed her head.

“Don’t be an idiot.” Carson’s whisper was nevertheless a harsh rebuke. “Find out what she knows.”

“That won’t be easy,” McKinsey said.

“If your assignment was easy,” Carson replied, “I’d have given it to a monkey.”

They kept still now as a priest appeared, crossed himself, then mounted the small dais to prepare the altar for the coming mass. They were seated on a pew in the last row; soon they would have to leave, but for the moment they were safe from prying eyes and ears.

“Listen, Peter, there’s another player in the field.”

McKinsey glanced at Carson for the first time. “Who?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t need you. Go forth and find out who it is.”

“And when I do?”

“Neutralize it,” Carson said.

The door behind them opened and they bowed their heads as another penitent made his way down the aisle. When he had found a pew, McKinsey said, “I’m sorry about your niece.”

Carson stared at the priest, arranging his fetishistic symbols on the altar. “There will be consequences.”

McKinsey bit his lip. He was dying for a cigarette. “It doesn’t alter our plans?”

“Not in the least.” Carson took a breath and let it out. “Time for you to go, Peter.”

“Yessir.”

Carson stayed some time after McKinsey left. He stared at the symbols of privilege and power affixed to the walls. The Catholic Church was on a slow and painful march to irrelevance, strangling on its own misdeeds. Before he left, he determined not to follow that path.

*   *   *

“You see how it works?” Annika said. “You see how easy it is from this position to fracture the occipital bone?” She kept up the pressure just beneath Naomi’s left eye. “Both the zygomatic bone and, here, the foramen—the hole in the bone through which nerves and blood vessels pass—are vulnerable. Two deaths in one, one might say.”

She removed her arm and thumb, but Naomi’s heart could not stop racing. She had to hold down the reactive nausea that had risen up through her gut into her throat when Annika had come up behind her and locked her in the death grip the murderer had employed four times in the last thirty-six hours. An insane thought was still ricocheting like a pinball around her brain: Was Annika the murderer? She had killed Senator Berns; how many before him had she murdered?

Naomi swallowed heavily. Her eyes were tearing and her nose was running. Ignoring her own distress, she stared down at the head and hand of the young girl buried between the roots of the massive tree.

“Who is this?” Her voice was thick and her tongue seemed too large for her mouth. “Do you know her name?”

“Does it matter?”

Naomi whipped around. “Damn straight it matters.”

“Arjeta.” Annika was looking at Naomi, not the dead girl. “In Albanian, it means ‘golden life.’”

Naomi stood up. She felt light-headed. Her heart would not slow down. She tried to take deep breaths.

“You look pale,” Annika said. “Are you all right?”

What the hell do you care? Naomi wanted to say, but she just nodded.

“Did you kill her?”

Now Annika’s eyes sought the corpse. “It’s so sad, isn’t it? Such a waste of life.”

Naomi’s hands curled into fists. “I asked you a question.”

“I have been trying to protect Arjeta.” Her gaze swung back to Naomi’s face. “I know her two sisters, Edon and Liridona. They’re younger than Arjeta. Edon has been taken, but so far Liridona, the youngest, has been spared.”

“Spared what?”

“Arjeta’s parents sold her to Xhafa’s people. All three sisters are both beautiful and desirable. Unless something drastic is done, I fear Liridona and Edon will suffer the same fate as their older sister.”

“The fate of so many,” Naomi said sadly.

“Yes, but these girls are special. Their beauty makes them tremendously valuable to people like the Xhafa brothers. But their value is now exponentially greater. They possess important knowledge regarding, I’m assuming, Arian Xhafa. But that’s just a stab in the dark. Liridona was interrupted in her last call to me and I haven’t been able to reach her since.”

“Where are they now?” Naomi asked.

“Liridona called me from Albania. Vlorë, where the family lives. She doesn’t know where Edon was taken, though I strongly suspect that it’s out of the country.”

Naomi pressed her hand against the bole of the tree to steady herself. “It’s a sickness, a disease.”

“What is?”

“Greed.”

“Greed and despair,” Annika said. “They’re epidemic.”

Naomi pulled out her cell phone.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you think? I’m calling this in.”

“Don’t.”

“Excuse me?” Naomi shook her head. “That sounded like an order.”

“Just a suggestion,” Annika said. “If you call it in, it will become public, and Mbreti will vanish into the shadows.”

Naomi put the cell up to her ear. “I have to do what I have to do.”

“Then you’ll never find him. This I can guarantee.”

Naomi looked off into the distance. The odor of Arjeta’s death clotted in her nostrils. Her pale, bony face haunted her. The line connected and she heard a querying voice in her ear, thin and electronic.

“These deaths will go on and on,” Annika said softly. “Is this what you want?”

Duty and desire, the two weights the cosmic scale held in balance, if not equilibrium, vied with each other for dominance.

At last, she took the phone away from her ear and killed the connection.

“All right,” she said to Annika. “Was it Mbreti who killed Arjeta? Was it Mbreti who tortured and killed Billy Warren, and the two men at Twilight?”

“No, not him, though he may have ordered it,” Annika said.

“Do you know the perp’s name?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The murderer.”

“Yes. A man named Blunt. I believe you’ve met him under the legend name of Willowicz.”

*   *   *

Dolna Zhelino was a tiny mountain village nestled in a finger of a valley dipping between two wooded hillsides high in the Korab mountains. At one end was a small watercourse, fed by the Vardar River; at the other was a wide, undulating, mostly cultivated valley, the gateway to Tetovo, Arian Xhafa’s stronghold fifteen miles to the northwest.

About an hour ago, they had forded the river at a fairly shallow spot. But the rocks on the riverbed were slippery and Alli had stumbled, hitting the water with a splash. Before Jack could get to her, her head was under the water. An instant later, she surfaced, drenched from head to toe, but otherwise unharmed.

Now, hunkered down in the midst of a dense forest, Dennis Paull checked his folding map against his GPS coordinates. Jack looked over his shoulder. From their elevation, they had an excellent view down the length of the finger. The red-tile roofs of the whitewashed houses looked like a jumble of dice, except for the soaring minarets of the mosque. This area of the country was predominantly Muslim, so a mosque in every town or village was to be expected.

Twilight was still at least an hour away. Alli leaned against a tree and gazed out at the town. She seemed lost in thought, and Jack wondered what was on her mind.

“We’re right on track,” Paull said.

Assuming this is the right track, Jack thought, but he kept his opinion to himself. Paull already knew where he stood on the subject.

Paull checked his watch. “The best time to make it through the valley without being spotted is at twilight. We’ll be able to see our way without lights, but for everyone else visibility will be poor. Looking at us will be like looking at clouds.”

He glanced around. “We have time to grab something to eat.” He jutted his chin. “Go tell Alli.”

Jack rose and went over to Alli. “Eat while we have the time,” he said.

She made no move.

“Alli, it’s liable to be a long night.”

She nodded, shrugged off her pack, and, squatting down, rummaged through it. Jack knelt beside her. When she offered him a protein bar, he took it. They ate in silence. Jack leaned back, then closed his eyes. He saw his Rubik’s Cube, the icon of puzzle solving. Then came a flood of images from the past couple of days, which he sorted, intuitively placing some on the cube, while discarding others. This mental task might have taken most people the better part of an hour, but Jack’s dyslexic brain accomplished it in a matter of minutes—as fast as he had solved the vexing riddle of the Rubik’s Cube when he was young.

What stood out for him was a kind of equation his mind had etched into the cube:

GRASI = THATË MBRETI = ?

He considered the equation, which was no real equation at all, and wondered what it meant. His subconscious knew, or was working on it, otherwise it would not have presented itself to him. Mbreti—king, in Albanian—was either a code name or a position rank of a major player in Arian Xhafa’s American operation. Mathis, the manager of Twilight, was bringing Mbreti’s money to the Stem. It must have been to deliver it to Dardan, which meant Mbreti was one of Arian Xhafa’s crew, perhaps Dardan himself. In any event, Mathis worked for Mbreti—the king.

Jack realized that if he solved that riddle, it still wouldn’t help him solve the riddle of the equation. Thatë’s nickname was Grasi—fat. But his real name—Thatë—meant skinny. The kid was neither fat nor skinny, so how did he come by the nickname? When things calmed down, Jack determined to ask him.

He opened his eyes. “How are you doing?” he said to Alli.

She looked at him and smiled thinly. “Better.”

The silence stretched on. He knew better than to start probing; she was sure to take it as an interrogation and he knew how negatively she’d react to that, even if it was only her perception.

“I miss music,” she said around a bite of food.

He took out Emma’s iPod and his earphones. “Can we listen to something together?”

“How about My Bloody Valentine’s ‘When You Sleep’?”

Jack scrolled through the listings. “One of Emma’s favorites. So it’s one of yours, as well.”

Alli swallowed and looked away for the moment.

Jack offered the iPod. “Do you want to do this yourself?”

She shook her head, and he plugged in the earbuds, then handed her one end. He pressed Play and they both listened to half the music. Jack disliked this form of listening so beloved of teenagers. He found it both ridiculous and useless, like listening to music on a cell phone at sixty-four kbps, so compressed the music might as well be spoken word. But, now, with MBV’s iconic wall of fuzzed-out electronics and buried vocals in his ear, knowing that Alli was enjoying the other half, he felt peculiarly close to her. Or perhaps it was because they were both sharing a vital part of Emma—sharing it and loving it.

He was interrupted by a tap on his shoulder.

“Time to saddle up,” Paull said.

The light was falling out of the sky like a sudden downpour. What was left of the sun was obscured by clouds. A few first-magnitude stars were just becoming visible, their remote glimmering foretelling a misty night.

Jack removed his earbud and Alli did the same. He rose, tucking the electronics securely away. Then he took out a pair of field glasses and went to a gap in the trees. After a moment, he sensed Paull approach.

“See anything?”

Jack shook his head. “But according to Thatë, Xhafa’s men are out there.”

Paull grunted.

“What’s our route through the valley?”

When Paull told him, Jack said, “I hope the geotechs know what they’re doing, because it seems to me that there’s no good way across.” He pointed through a gap in the trees. “See how the valley narrows down toward the far end? It’s like a huge funnel. I can see why Xhafa would position his men here and why Thatë didn’t want us to come this way.”

“I didn’t fall for one word that lying kid said.” Paull settled his backpack. “C’mon. We’re moving out.”

*   *   *

“It’s just like threading a needle,” Paull whispered as they made their way to the edge of the forest. “The geotechs have plotted the path that gives us the lowest chance of being seen.”

“I feel better already,” Jack said.

Paull forged on, ignoring Jack’s remark. Farther ahead and below them lay the soft lights of Dolna Zhelino, nestled in its funnel, so inviting to its residents, so dangerous for their little group.

At the very edge of the trees, Paull stopped them for a moment. He pointed at two spots. “There and there are the two high points, the best place to station lookouts. The geotech boys saw that in their three-D renderings so they plotted our course accordingly.”

“Better and better,” Jack said.

“Button it,” Paull snapped. “We have superior resources and capabilities, and I plan on using all of them to get us inside Tetovo’s perimeter and blow Xhafa’s tin-pot empire to smithereens before he knows what hit him.”

They took up their ArmaLite assault rifles and struck out single file. Paull took the lead with Alli just behind him. Jack, as ever, was on rear guard.

The wastrel light had taken on the element peculiar to the dwindling of the day, when the sun has slipped below the horizon but night has not yet risen from its grave. There were no shadows; instead, there were, as Paull had pointed out, layers of illusion, within which they could safely make their way into the hammock and through it to the far end, where the watercourse tumbled down between enormous boulders.

They moved through the dense foliage of the western slope in a winding path that several times seemed to fold back on itself, though that couldn’t possibly be right. As they progressed, Jack had to admit to himself that the course was a good one, complicated enough to keep potential sight lines to them constantly changing.

They trekked up a steep rise, then down into a shallow dell dotted with saplings and vigorous understory growth, as if a fire had torn through here in years past, burning off the older, established trees. Paull used hand signals to keep them crouched low to the ground as they passed through this relatively open patch.

Jack breathed a sigh of relief when they reached the far side and slipped in among the tall trees again. Shadows moved with them through the forest. For a time, they lost sight of both the valley and the village as the path took them higher onto the western slope, into denser, first-growth trees, which towered over them like titans.

Keeping one eye out for movement behind them and the other on Alli, Jack felt Paull step up the pace. It was at that moment that they began to take fire from the left. As one, they dropped to their bellies and, following Paull’s hand signals, began to creep down the slope where it fell off on their right. Then more firing targeted them from the right. Jack crabbed his way over to Alli but she had already sought shelter in a thicket of underbrush. He stuck his head up, searching for Paull, but the withering fire almost took off the top of his skull.

They were trapped in a merciless cross fire.

17

The president met with Carson in the Rose Garden. It was well known that they were friends. Friends met in open, pleasant places, not behind closed doors, places where tongues could wag and create problems for both of them.

“I don’t think giving Dennis Paull permission to take Alli away was a smart move,” Carson said.

“That remains to be seen.” The president, walking without an overcoat, hunched his shoulders against the wind. “But I had no choice. I couldn’t give him any reason to think I was micromanaging his assignment or undermining his authority.”

“I understand that, but—”

“No buts, Hank, we can’t have him looking our way.”

“You mean McClure.”

“Of course I mean McClure,” the president said. “But it would be the height of folly to underestimate Dennis.”

They came to the end of a row and turned into the adjacent one. Across the lawn, the daffodils were up, and tulips had already opened their colored bells.

Carson sniffed the warmth of spring in the air. “I can take care of him, if it comes to that.”

Crawford glanced at his security detail. “Damnit, what have I told you about that kind of talk?”

“My arrogance has gotten me where I am today.”

The POTUS shook his head. “Can’t dispute that.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “I am concerned about Gunn.”

“He’s the best in the private security business, Arlen. The Pentagon uses him all the time.”

“In Iraq,” Crawford pointed out. “Gunn is the kind of guy who thinks the whole world is Iraq and acts accordingly.”

“I can’t get any clarity on what happened at my house,” Carson said. “Gunn claims that Alli became increasingly agitated and then attacked one of his men when he went into the study to check up on her.”

“She looks like she’s sixteen years old, for the love of Mike!”

Carson nodded. “Her physical expertise was a surprise, I must admit.”

“But not her emotional state. Hank, it must have occurred to you that Gunn might be right, that after her incarceration and brainwashing that she … that she’ll never be the same.”

Carson looked like he’d bitten into a rancid peanut. “I don’t want to hear that.”

“Still, Gunn might be right about what happened.”

“And if he’s not?”

The president turned toward his companion and leaned in. “Am I hearing you right?” When Carson made no reply, he said, “Jesus, Hank, you’re as much of a cowboy as Gunn is. Forget him. Keep the plan in sight, would you? Forget about personal vendettas and concentrate. We’re on schedule. I did my part. I sailed your takeover of Middle Bay Bancorp through the SEC and antitrust briar patch without a hitch. Now focus on the integration. Without Middle Bay we’re dead in the water.”

Carson kept his mouth shut. He despised being spoken to like that by anyone, including the president of the United States. Carson was from Texas, he was a self-made man, and now, with immense wealth and power, he considered himself a force of nature, an island-state unto himself. Not for him the laws of the common man—he was beyond all that.

“Don’t worry about Middle Bay,” he said, when he’d regained control over his emotions. “I’ve hired the best forensic accountants in the business. That work is getting done. But, understand, it’s extremely delicate in nature. It can’t be rushed.”

“Agreed.” The president sighed and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Hank, I sometimes worry about you.”

Carson forced a smile. “I’m fine, Arlen. Just a little unnerved by my niece’s recent activity.”

Crawford nodded judicially. “I understand.” He loved playing the father figure. “Completely.” His hand squeezed his friend’s shoulder.

You understand nothing, Carson thought as he took his leave of the president and the Rose Garden. It was Caroline, pure and simple—if anything in life could be deemed pure or simple. This difficult-to-control rage—the urge to personal vendetta—hadn’t always been with him. It had manifested itself directly after Caroline’s disappearance. Sometimes he felt possessed by the rage, as if he’d turned into some mysterious person with whom he had only a passing acquaintance. At those times, he went down to the soundproof basement of his town house and spent an hour with his handguns—a Glock .38, a Mauser 9mm, and a .357 Magnum—squeezing off round after round, blowing holes in the center of the target. The growing stench of cordite helped, but not as much as the shooting, which cooled the boiling of his blood, but not his need to know.

If he squeezed his eyes shut he could see Caro, as if she were the subject of a photo from some lost time he’d found in a dusty trunk in his attic. Over the years, she had ceased to be a real person. Rather, she had become an icon, a symbol of his rage and frustration, because in this one instance all his power and all his money had availed him nothing. She was as lost to him as if he were a beggar on the street who had turned his back to scrounge a bite to eat, only to find his daughter had walked off or been taken from him.

In the dead of night, when he screamed in his sleep, it was because in his dream he knew that she had simply walked away, evidence of her rejection of him, a possibility he could neither condone nor tolerate. So, a man drowning in his own guilt, he clung to the theory that she had been taken, because then he could find her, he could bring her home. She would want to come home.

*   *   *

In the face of the constant peppering fire, Jack calmed himself, closed his eyes, and imagined the terrain as a three-dimensional puzzle. The steep falloff to the right meant that Xhafa’s soldiers must be up in the trees in order to fire on them. They had the advantage of elevation, but it also meant that they were essentially immobile, unlike the men on the left, who seemed to be moving closer.

Then he understood: The trap wasn’t a classic pincers maneuver, but a herd-and-kill mission. The object for the contingent on their left was to force the enemy to retreat down the slope where they could be picked off by the snipers in the trees.

The firing from the left was louder now, proof that his theory was correct. Jack knew he had little time to act. But before he could do anything, he heard an infernal whooshing and, to his right, the shock wave from an explosion rolling him across the ground away from where Alli was hiding. A fireball rose into the night sky as the fired rocket detonated, and Jack, cursing under his breath, thought, Dennis has given Xhafa advance warning of the weaponry we’re carrying.

Then the night was lit up by another explosion, this one smaller, but much closer. Xhafa’s men must have tossed a grenade in counterattack.

Crawling on his stomach, Jack snaked his way to the clump of underbrush and told Alli to hold her ground.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

He read her lips because the ringing in his ears made voice communication impossible.

He gestured and pointed emphatically. “Stay put. I’m going to find Paull,” he mouthed.

Alli began to crawl out. “I’m going with you.” When he began to protest, she put her lips against his ear. “What if you get lost or, worse, pinned down and can’t get back here?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he gestured, and together they eeled their way along the rocky ground. The volleying gunfire assaulted them as their hearing came back. Xhafa’s men were trying their best to mow down the man who had fired the rocket at them.

Jack stopped them in the lee of a large boulder. He had caught a glimpse of movement just ahead and suspected they were near Paull’s position.

“Dennis is less than ten yards from here,” he said into Alli’s ear. “Stay put and I’ll be right back with him.” He gave her a tight smile. “From this distance I can’t get lost.” He handed her his assault rifle and took out a Sig Sauer. “Whatever you do, don’t fire your weapon. I don’t want them to know we’re here.”

She nodded, and, rounding the boulder, he slithered off. He found himself on a slight incline, which made the going tougher. On the other hand, there was plenty of cover to conceal his movement. Halfway there, a break in the firing caused him to freeze. For a moment, he wondered whether Paull had been killed. Then the firing began again and he pressed on.

Just ahead of him was the ridge beyond which, from his previous vantage point, he’d spotted Paull. Now, however, he could not see over the ridge; he was effectively blind to what was happening, a particularly dangerous position to be in. He scrambled up to the lip of the ridge and cautiously peered over. This was met with a volley of fire that almost took the top of his head off.

Ducking back down, he took a look around. To his left, the topography rose steeply, to his right, it fell off. He needed to go left in order to surmount the ridge, but a problem presented itself. There was far less cover in that direction. In fact, there were several spots made bald by small rock slides. They weren’t large. Nevertheless, they presented danger zones; crossing them would leave him totally unprotected.

Moving off to his left, he picked up a couple of rocks the size of his fist. As he came upon the first rockfall, he launched the first rock at a boulder off to his right. As it struck, he dived across the rocky ground, hearing a short volley of semiautomatic fire spang off the boulder.

He continued his climb past the far side of the rockfall. He could see the second. It was larger than the first, and flatter, which made it more dangerous still, like traversing a frozen lake with snipers in the surrounding trees.

This time, he threw the rock to his left, into the tops of the trees. As they shook and swayed, and more fire sprayed in that direction, he dashed across the open space. Just as he dived into the underbrush at the far side, a shot whizzed over his back. He rolled up onto the ridge and slid down the other side, all in one motion.

Silence now. Xhafa’s men knew where he had been a moment ago; it would not take them long to vector in new coordinates. His best option now was to move and keep moving. On elbows and knees, he snaked through the understory, grateful for the web of tree branches over his head. Once he got to Paull, he’d have to find another way back to where Alli waited; he’d been lucky, but the two of them couldn’t afford to expose themselves via the same path.

It was very quiet. No firing from either side, but there were also no bird sounds, which meant that Xhafa’s men were on the move, presumably heading toward where he had last been spotted; to assume otherwise was foolhardy. The silence made any movement more perilous. All he needed to do was crack a branch underfoot to bring the guerillas on the run.

A fitful breeze stirred the treetops, but the sky was entirely occluded by the branches. Darkness hung in the air like eternal twilight. There were no shadows. Jack brought his head up to get his bearings. From where he lay he could see where he’d spotted Dennis. It was possible that Paull had moved from there, but it was just as likely he’d hunkered down, waiting to make his break. Jack strongly suspected this was what Xhafa’s men were waiting for—the moment he showed himself their gunfire would tear him to ribbons. He had to get to his friend first.

Rolling across the ground in deep shade, he inched his way forward until he could get a better look at where Paull might be holed up. Just ahead was a trio of huge trees.

Jack moved slightly, and now he saw Paull, crouched in the center of the space between the trees. He’d hacked down some of the surrounding underbrush, building himself a makeshift camouflaged hidey-hole. Jack could see him because of his angle and ground-level perspective.

As he stole closer, Paull stirred.

“Dennis, it’s me,” Jack whispered.

Paull froze. “Jack?”

“I’ve come to get you out of here.”

There was a small silence. “I fucked up, Jack.”

“Don’t expect me to say I told you so.”

“Ha-ha,” Paull said without a hint of mirth.

Jack extended his left arm. “Let’s go. On your belly. I’ll cover you.”

As Paull began to creep out from his rough, trembling shelter Jack gave him a smile. “We’ll get out of this.”

At that moment, a hail of semiautomatic fire ripped through the silence. Paull shoved his face into the ground, but it wasn’t aimed at them. The firing was coming from behind them, where Alli was hidden.

*   *   *

Gunn exited his apartment building dressed in a navy blue chalk stripe high-end bespoke suit, John Lobb shoes, blue chambray shirt, and scarlet tie. He unlocked his BMW 5-series with the wireless opener, slid behind the wheel, and, after waiting for a break in the traffic, pulled out into the street. The break wasn’t quite large enough and he had to peel out with a squeal of tire rubber and an angry blast of the horn from a car behind him.

Several moments later, a tan Chevy sedan pulled out, tailing him. Gunn stopped at a gas station, fueled up, then drove until pulling into a 7-Eleven. He walked briskly inside as the tan Chevy pulled up across the street, its motor running.

Five or so minutes later, the Chevy’s driver noted him coming out, ducking into the car, and taking off. The driver put the Chevy in gear and dutifully followed.

Gunn stood at the back of the 7-Eleven in a spot out of sight of the rear wall-mounted convex security mirrors. After checking that his double’s identical scarlet tie was tied with a Windsor knot like his own and assuring himself that every other detail of the man’s haberdashery conformed to his profile, he had placed the keys to the BMW in the man’s hand.

“You know what to do.”

The man had nodded and, mimicking Gunn’s stride, departed.

Now Gunn looked at his watch and started counting off the seconds to himself. By the time he had reached thirty, a man emerged from the toilets and came and stood beside him.

“It’s a fuckup,” Gunn said. “A total cluster-fuck.”

“Calm down,” his companion said. “We’ve gone through shit before, we’ll get through this, too.”

“I have been calm,” Gunn said, “through all of this.” He threw up his arms. “I sat back and let you do the planning. And guess what? One of my men is dead, and the two others wish they were.”

“I’ll take care of their rehab,” his companion said. “Put the money out of your mind.”

Gunn took a deep breath and leaned back against the cold-drink case. As always, it was impossible to get a read on John Pawnhill. He was in his late thirties, good-looking in an anonymous kind of way. He had thick, dark hair that covered the top half of his ears. His eyes were hooded and inscrutable. Gunn was acutely uncomfortable around him. It was as if Pawnhill generated a current that made those who stood near him jittery.

“It’s not just the money.”

“Oh?” Pawnhill said. “What, then?”

“It’s the way this came apart.”

Pawnhill seemed as relaxed as ever. “How did it come apart?”

“All at once and all over the place—like a terrier with a rag doll.” Gunn felt his anger building—anger at events that were out of his control, anger that he had been put squarely in Henry Holt Carson’s gun sight, just where he didn’t want to be. “I made a mistake by ignoring my own dictum: If you want it done right, do it yourself.”

Pawnhill nodded, as if agreeing. An instant later, Gunn felt the tip of a switchblade at his throat. Pawnhill had stepped in front of him, pinning him back against the glass and stainless-steel case.

“Listen, motherfucker, you came to me, remember? And do you remember that I lost a half million when the Stem was infiltrated last night? Was I to blame for that? Was I to blame for Arjeta Kraja opening her big mouth to that little shitbird Billy Warren? And, by the way, how the fuck did she find out about Middle Bay in the first place? Think it was from me?”

“Not you, no, that’s absurd.” Gunn tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry, and, anyway, his heart seemed to be beating at the back of his throat. “It must’ve been Dardan. He’s the only other person who knew about the bank.”

Pawnhill drew the blade lightly across Gunn’s throat, inking a line of red. “Dardan liked to fuck, not talk.”

“Fuck and kill.” Gunn stared into the other’s pitiless eyes. “Listen, I have no doubt if you’d done the job Alli Carson would be dead now.”

“Too dangerous. It wasn’t possible.” Pawnhill’s black ardor appeared to have cooled somewhat. “We both needed an extra layer of protection. Your men provided that.”

“The Secret Service agent—the girl—came snooping around.”

“And what will she find out about those three?”

“Nothing,” Gunn said. “They’re squeaky clean. I told you that.”

Pawnhill removed the knife and, after cleaning the blade on Gunn’s crimson tie, folded it away. “You made a big fucking mistake accusing me—”

“I didn’t accuse you.”

“Don’t fucking say you didn’t do something when you fucking well did.” Pawnhill held up an admonishing finger. “And neither Willowicz nor O’Banion are squeaky clean.”

“Those two are professional ghosts. No one can connect them with Fortress or me personally.”

“They’re loose ends,” Pawnhill said. “Tie them up and throw them away.”

“Jesus, these guys are valuable.”

Pawnhill leaned in. “Their liability outweighs whatever value you put on them. I want it done and done now. Understood?”

Gunn would just as soon kill this fucker where he stood, but he knew that would be disastrous for business, not to mention for himself. He had too many black deals going to risk the spotlight being turned on him more than it already was. Naomi Wilde was a smart and tenacious agent—McKinsey had told him so. He also knew that the three men she was investigating were a dead end; he’d seen to that himself. Soon enough, she’d have no other recourse but to turn her investigative spotlight elsewhere.

On the other hand, Pawnhill was daily becoming more of a danger. This incident was merely the last straw. Gunn knew now that sooner rather than later he’d have to do something about Pawnhill, because everyone else involved lacked the guts to go after him. He wasn’t afraid of the man’s physical prowess or his connections, but he had to find a way to take him out without being hit by the inevitable shitstorm.

He felt a trickle of blood run down inside his collar and he smiled. He wouldn’t forget Pawnhill’s assault on his person. On the contrary, it would color the method of his demise.

“I apologize if I’ve offended you in any way, John. That was not my intention.” He shrugged. “I don’t like failure, that’s all.”

“Neither of us does.” Pawnhill reached around Gunn and, opening the glass door, took out a couple of Coca-Colas. He handed one to Gunn and they popped the tops, clinked bottles, and took good, long swigs. “Who murdered our people at Twilight? Have you gotten anywhere with that?”

“It’s too soon to—”

“It’s clear they were killed for the badge that got Dardan’s murderer into the Stem. That never should have happened, Gunn. You were in charge.”

“I can’t have my people everywhere, John. That kind of visibility in the midst of Billy Warren’s murder would have been lethal.”

“That fucking murder,” Pawnhill said. “That fucking murder started it all.” He tapped the neck of the bottle against his forehead. “Who’s mucking around in our patch?” He downed more Coke. “Shit, we’ll all suffer for Dardan’s death.”

Now Gunn understood the real reason why Pawnhill was on edge. “What will the reaction be?”

Pawnhill grunted. “One thing I know, the man who murdered Dardan is a dead man. No matter where he is or where he goes, Arian will hunt him down and kill him like a rabid dog.”

“And what of us?”

“What, indeed?” Pawnhill took another swig of Coke and swallowed noisily. “Someone will be coming, Gunn.” He glanced around the store as if the individual might already be there. “Someone who won’t be as easy to handle as Dardan was. Someone who will make us all pay the price for Dardan’s death.”

18

Naomi and McKinsey were out canvassing the area around Twilight, still trying to find someone—anyone—who knew Arjeta Kraja. It seemed increasingly odd to them that she could be living in the neighborhood without anyone knowing her or even seeing her, save at the club.

In addition to this frustration, Naomi felt increasingly uncomfortable in McKinsey’s presence. How much he was keeping from her she had no idea, but the fact that he was keeping anything creeped her out.

And there was the matter of Willowicz. If she could believe Annika Dementieva—and having crossed paths with him she was inclined to believe her—he was responsible for the torture and murder of Billy Warren, plus the murders of the two Twilight employees. In the normal course of things, she would have told Pete immediately. But this was definitely not the normal course of things and she felt the need to keep her own counsel. Still, how could she be effective on this case if she couldn’t rely on her partner?

Briefly, she had contemplated going to their superior at the Secret Service, but she had no real proof of any wrongdoing on his part. Plus, she couldn’t mention Roosevelt Island without spooking the mysterious Mbreti. And the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that “the King” was the key to Arian Xhafa’s operations in Washington—for all she knew, the entire United States.

They were about to knock on yet another door when her cell buzzed. Having called Jack several times, leaving voice mails as detailed as she dared, she hoped it was him as she checked the caller ID. It was Rachel’s home number. It was an odd occurrence for her sister to call during working hours. Signaling to McKinsey to continue, she stepped several paces away and answered the phone.

“Nomi?”

Her heart skipped a beat. She wondered how one word could carry such pain and heartache.

“Rachel, what is it?”

“It’s Larry.” Her husband.

“Is he okay? Has he been in an accident?”

“You could say that.” Rachel gave a shuddering laugh that collapsed into a fit of sobbing.

“Rachey, for God’s sake, is he okay?”

“You know, for once in my life I don’t give a shit.”

Uh-oh.

“Hang on. I’ll be right over.”

Closing the phone, she beckoned to McKinsey, who was already coming away from the door, shaking his head.

“What’s up?”

“It’s Rachel. There’s an emergency.”

“Is she hurt?”

“Yes, but not in the way you mean. I’ve got to get to her house.”

McKinsey took one look at her pinched, white face and said, “I’ll drive you.”

“I can—”

“The fuck you can,” he said. “I haven’t seen your hands shake like that since the night we spent doing Jell-O shots.”

*   *   *

Jack reached out, grabbed Paull, and hauled him to his hands and knees.

“Those shots came from where Alli’s hiding,” he said as they crabbed their way toward the brow of the ridge.

But Paull pulled at him. “This way,” he said, moving off to their left.

In this direction, the ridge was high, wilder, rockier. From the moment they slid over the top they were exposed, but they tumbled over without having their heads blown off, scrambled down the other side, a steep drop off that pitched them off their feet. It was impossible to keep their equilibrium as they tumbled head over heels. Jack tried to roll, but they had gained too much momentum. All he could do was relax his body in order to decrease the risk of breaking an elbow or a rib.

The bottom was even rockier than the ridgeback itself, and for a moment the two men lay stunned, their breathing ragged and irregular. Then Jack coughed heavily and rolled over. Paull was on his knees, head wagging slowly back and forth while he tried to focus his eyes.

“Come on!” Jack said.

Paull whipped his semiautomatic off his back and fingered the trigger. He nodded and they struck out through the dense brush and stands of trees to where the boulder marked the spot where Alli was hiding. Jack signaled and they split up, approaching the boulder from either side. Jack wondered why all the firing had stopped and was now acutely wary of a trap. But the thought of Alli spurred him on.

Both men came around the boulder’s blocky sides at once. Alli stood up when they appeared. She wasn’t alone. Beside her was Thatë, grinning like a lunatic. He was armed with a handgun and an AK-47.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” he said with a jocularity Jack found eerie. “It took you long enough to get here.”

“Alli, are you okay?” Jack said.

“She’s fine, Jack.” Thatë raised an arm and six heavily armed men appeared from out of the forest.

Paull was apoplectic. “I told you. Godammit to hell, I told you.”

*   *   *

“He’s left me, Nomi. Left me and the kids.”

“What? Just like that?”

“He’s got a girl—a girl, Nomi! Maybe twenty-two or -three. Jesus!” Rachel ran a hand through her hair. She was, as usual, dressed impeccably, in a Michael Kors black-and-white polka-dot dress. Gold rings on her fingers, diamond studs in her ears, and a string of black pearls around her neck. She wore a pair of suede Christian Louboutin high heels. “You read about these things happening all the time—even to women you know—but, God, you never think it’ll happen to you.” Tears squeezed out of her eyes. “It’s like getting a terminal diagnosis.”

Naomi led Rachel into the living room and sat her down on one of the severe Italian sofas. McKinsey was outside, waiting in the car.

“No, it’s not, Rachey.” She put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. “And how do you know how old she is?”

“Because the fucker showed me photos of her! Can you fucking believe it? He’s proud of her, wanted to show her off.”

“A twinkie? I wouldn’t have thought it of Larry.”

Rachel groaned. “If only! She’s in her twenties and has a law degree from Harvard, which means she’s both younger and smarter than me.” She buried her face in her hands.

Naomi looked around the huge living room, filled with everything money could buy—carved Lalique crystal, a Calder sculpture, paintings by De Kooning, Basquiat, and Richter that would grace the walls of any museum of contemporary art. And then there was the explosion of photos of the family at graduations, parties, parasailing in Cancun, hiking in the Himalayas, snorkeling off the coast of the Maldives. And, finally, set aside in a space all its own, was a gleaming Steinway baby grand piano Rachel had unsuccessfully pushed both children to play.

“What about the kids?”

“What about them?” Rachel’s words were muffled by her fingers.

Naomi tossed her head. “Where are they?”

“Out. Anywhere. I don’t know. I tried their cells, but they’re not answering.”

“We should find them.”

“Good luck with that.”

Naomi touched the point of her sister’s reconstructed chin. “Rachey, look at me.”

Reluctantly, Rachel lifted her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but the Botox protected her forehead from the folds of extreme emotion.

“I’m so sorry. I know how close the family is.”

Rachel made no response. Instead, she took in the grand room.

“He’s going to screw me.”

“What?” For a moment, Naomi thought she hadn’t heard right. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll ask around, we’ll get you the best divorce lawyer on the East Coast.”

“Are you shitting me?” There was fire in her sister’s eyes. Apparently, the period of mourning was over. “My soon-to-be ex-husband is the best divorce lawyer on the East Coast.” She wrung her hands. “Dear God, what d’you suppose my future is going to look like?”

Naomi was taken aback. “Rach, aren’t you the least bit—”

“What? The least bit what?”

“Isn’t there any chance to reconcile?”

“Don’t be dense. Larry’s been cheating on me for months—maybe years. This”—and here she used a four-letter expletive that made Naomi shudder—“is probably one of a long line of heifers.”

“I know he’s hurt you, but—”

Rachel shook her head. “Don’t you get it, Nomi? He’s made up his mind, and now he’s going to rape me. No decent attorney will stand up to him and he’s tight with every judge on the bench.”

“Surely you’ll get the kids. And he’ll have to pay child support as well as alimony.”

“What he’ll give me is a pittance.” Her fingers balled into fists. “I want my money, my home, my security. I won’t have shit when he’s done with me.” She began to sob again, and then she wailed, “I want my life back.”

Naomi sat back, feeling lost and helpless. Is this what life came down to, money? Is that all there was after the golden glow was gone? For the first time since they had been adults, she looked clear-eyed at her sister. For years she had bought into Rachel’s fairy-tale existence. But who was Rachel, except an adjunct of Larry, a possession not very different from the De Kooning or the Basquiat? She was cast off, like the Steinway, a presentation piece that had outlived its usefulness.

She sighed and took Rachel’s hands in hers. They were as cold as ice. “What can I do to help?”

The calculating look she knew so well had once again taken up residence in her sister’s eyes. “There’s this bank account Larry uses. I’m not supposed to know about it, but I do. God knows what he uses it for, but huge sums of money go in and out pretty regularly.” Rachel’s eyes sought hers. “Use your contacts at Treasury to have the funds frozen, maybe you can get them to start an investigation.”

On what grounds? Naomi was about to say, but a warning bell had gone off in the back of her mind. She knew herself well enough to pay attention when that bell rang. “… there’s this bank account … huge sums of money go in and out regularly.”

“Nomi, this is life and death. Are you listening to me?”

Life and death, yes. And then it hit her like a thunderbolt. Jesus Christ, I’ve been looking for a break in this case in all the wrong places.

*   *   *

Paull brought his assault rifle to bear on Thatë. “You may have had Jack and the girl fooled, but not me. It was obvious you were Xhafa’s man all along.”

“Lower your weapon,” Thatë said softly.

Jack noted the change in his demeanor. Out here in the wild he was more confident, if not more aggressive. The kid’s appearance could explain the cease-fire, but something in this encounter didn’t feel right.

“Fuck you, sonny,” Paull said.

Jack put his hand on the barrel of the ArmaLite and pushed it down. “Do as he says, Dennis. Confrontation isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

When Paull had reluctantly lowered his weapon, Thatë said, “Follow me.”

His men parted and he took them through the underbrush toward the area where they’d been fired upon en masse. There, they found seven men sprawled on the ground. Some had been shot, others had had their throats slit.

Thatë pointed. “Here are Arian Xhafa’s men. The snipers in the trees are also dead.”

Paull gaped. “I don’t believe it.”

“Examine for yourself,” the kid said. “Xhafa’s men are Muslim, my men are Russian.”

Paull put up his weapon and, crouching, went from corpse to corpse. Even he could deduce the truth from the full, curling beards, the fanatics’ eyes.

“Grupperovka,” Alli said.

Thatë smiled at her. “Kazanskaya, yes.” He turned to Jack. “This was why I was sent here: To find out who was backing Xhafa with money and arms.”

Jack gave him a hard look. “And did you?”

“I was forced to escape before my assignment was complete.” His grin returned. “But now, thanks to you, I have returned to finish what I started, and to wreak my revenge on Arian Xhafa.”

19

“How is she?” McKinsey said when Naomi slid into the passenger’s seat. She was just finishing a call.

Through the windshield, she could see the Mercedes, BMWs, and Porsches, arrayed like trophies on the street. “When you lie down with a scorpion, you’re bound to get stung.”

“She’s your sister. That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

“Rachel didn’t love Larry or her kids, she loved his money.”

“Yeah, but still. Don’t you want to stay with her?”

“I told her I couldn’t stay.”

McKinsey cleared his throat, then started the car. “I’ll drive you home.”

“We’re going to the main branch of Middle Bay Bancorp on K and Twentieth.”

“It’s almost three,” he observed.

“I called the president of Middle Bay. He’s expecting us.”

McKinsey wrapped his fingers around the wheel, but he didn’t put the car in gear. “My opinion? I think you ought to be with Rachel. She needs you now. I mean, who else does she have?”

“Rachel is more self-sufficient than I am.” Naomi gestured with her chin. “Drive.”

McKinsey sighed, then turned off the engine. “Why the hell are we going to Middle Bay Bancorp?”

“Because that’s where Billy Warren worked.”

“So?”

“He was a loan analyst.”

McKinsey shook his head. “I don’t follow.”

“What if Billy discovered something unusual was going on inside the bank?”

There was a skeptical look on McKinsey’s face. “Like what?”

“Like large sums of money going in and out that weren’t being reported.”

“Naomi, Billy Warren was shtupping Dardan’s main squeeze. This has already been established. He was killed by Dardan’s people.”

“But why was he tortured? The question has been bothering me from the beginning. No, Billy had discovered something someone badly didn’t want uncovered. Now drive.”

“Naomi, this isn’t a good idea.”

She looked at him, finally. “What isn’t?”

“Middle Bay is the wrong direction for this investigation to go in.”

“Is that a warning?”

“I’m just trying to protect you.”

“Pete, I’ve been to Roosevelt Island.”

“Come again?”

“I’ve seen the girl—Arjeta Kraja.”

“Would you please start making sense?”

She had to give him this, there was not a flicker in his eye.

“I followed you yesterday morning. I saw you going out to the island on a motorboat. Who were you with and what were you doing there, Pete?”

“Naomi, trust me, you don’t want to pursue this.”

“No, actually I do.”

He stared out the window; his fingers drummed anxiously on the wheel.

“Pete, either you take me to Middle Bay, or I’ll call a cab.”

“It’s just that…” He turned to her. “Do you remember our first day on the job together? We were sent to pick up the FLOTUS. On the way there, we got sideswiped by a van driven by a drunken driver. Anyway, you were trapped on your side of the car. We couldn’t use the Jaws of Life because you were jammed up against the door. It took me over an hour to get you out.”

“I remember.” Naomi was acutely aware of the wariness in her voice.

“I don’t want to have to do that again, Naomi. Because this time I might fail.”

She gave him a wan smile. “Forget it, Pete, it’s D.C.”

He didn’t laugh.

“Pete, we’re partners; I shouldn’t have to ask this. Do you have my back?”

“Isn’t that what partners are for?”

She nodded. “Now are you going to drive or am I going to leave you here?”

*   *   *

“Dennis, are you okay with this?” Jack asked, as Thatë, at the head of his dirty half dozen, led them along the roundabout route he had first suggested, east, then north, then northwest toward Tetovo.

“Do I have a choice?” Paull grumbled. “I fucked up, Jack. I don’t know what got into me. I should’ve listened to your instincts.” He shook his head. “But to be led to Arian Xhafa by this kid.” Paull glared at Thatë trekking easily and confidently up ahead. “I mean, this kid should still be sucking up his mother’s milk, for Christ’s sake.”

“He didn’t have a mother,” Alli said.

They both looked at her.

“At least,” she continued, “a mother he remembers.”

“Boo hoo!” Paull parodied crying.

“You never even gave him a chance,” Alli said hotly.

“And you gave him too much of one.” Paull jerked his head. “Let’s just hope he didn’t kill any of my men when he escaped from the plane.”

“He didn’t,” Alli said.

“He told you that, did he?”

“Bite me.” She extended her middle finger at him and, picking up the pace, wound her way through the Russians to walk beside Thatë.

“Thanks for that,” Jack said.

“A word of warning,” Paull shot back. “The next thing you know they’ll be making the two-backed beast and then you’ll never be able to pry them apart.”

Jack considered for a time as the forest slid past them. Off to their left, they could hear the watercourse that marked the far end of the valley. Over the ridge beyond lay Tetovo.

“I remember hearing about a man who turned so sour on life he wouldn’t believe a boy who rang his doorbell was his long-lost son.”

Paull scoffed. “I know how this ends: he turns the boy away only to find out later that he was, in fact, his son.”

“No,” Jack said. “Against his better judgment, he takes the boy in, feeds him, clothes him, gives him a soft bed to sleep in. The two spend a week together, then another and another. Gradually, the man’s guard lowers as he comes to appreciate the boy, then to mentor him. He realizes that, in the end, it doesn’t matter whether this boy is his blood son or not.

“One night, he’s awakened by unfamiliar sounds. He goes down the hall to his son’s room. The door is open, his son’s clothes are laid out, the bed is made just as it had been before he arrived. Grabbing a gun, the man goes down to the first floor and turns on the lights.

“Someone is sitting in his easy chair. This shadowy figure calls the man by his Christian name, even though the man is certain he’s never seen the stranger before in his life.

“‘Don’t you recognize me?’ the stranger says. As he stands up, a pair of enormous black wings unfold from points on either shoulder.

“‘Where’s my son?’ the man shouts. ‘What have you done with him?’

“‘I?’ the devil says. ‘I have done nothing with your son. He’s dead—dead and buried years ago.’

“‘You’re lying,’ the man says. He’s shaking with anger.

“‘You may think so,’ the devil says. ‘But the fact remains he’s not here. He never was.’

“All at once, the man breaks, falling to his knees. ‘Why? Why?’ he cries out.

“‘Because,’ the devil says, ‘life is hell.’”

Paull moved his assault rifle from one arm to another. “Does this piece of crap have a moral?”

“You know the moral, Dennis,” Jack said. “Why do you think that life is hell?”

Paull made a sour face. “What, have you suddenly found God?”

“My only compact,” Jack said, “is with my daughter.”

Paull came up short and turned. “What are you talking about? Your daughter is dead.”

“The dead never leave us, Dennis. At least, their spirits don’t.” Jack looked him in the eye. “I suspect that’s what you’re struggling against.”

*   *   *

Annika Dementieva sat in the first-class departure lounge drinking a vodka martini. Her flight was scheduled to depart in just over an hour. She could have left the city later, but she had decided that the airport was the safest place for her now. She didn’t want Naomi Wilde coming to look for her.

The preliminary phase of the plan had been successfully concluded. She was pleased to know that Naomi had no idea where Jack was. That meant virtually no one else did, either. A good thing because his destination was one of the most dangerous places on earth. She had witnessed the American SKOPES unit annihilated by Arian Xhafa’s battle-hardened guerillas. She had had no interest in the guerillas themselves, but in the weaponry they employed. Watching the massacre had proved the wisdom of her being sent to Tetovo. The array of Xhafa’s cutting-edge war materiel was astonishing. No wonder warning alarms had been set off in her part of the world. The Macedonian situation was already on the verge of being out of control.

If the problem was simply Xhafa she could have handled it herself, but it stretched across borders, spanned oceans, was infused with incalculable amounts of money, fueled by a hatred and fanaticism beyond even Xhafa himself. She knew she needed help, she knew who she needed to help her. And he was the one person guaranteed not to comply.

She drank her vodka martini as if it were a beer, and ordered another, chewing thoughtfully on the liquor-soaked olive until the refill arrived. Through the thick, shatterproof glass, the world looked unnaturally dark, drained of color, unreal. She listened to the muted clatter of laptop keyboards, the clink of glasses, snatches of cell phone conversations. Within thirty seconds of entering, she had observed and catalogued every person in the lounge. She was like a jungle cat, interested only in danger and prey—everything else fell to gray ash.

But then gray was the color of her life; everything in it had turned to ash. The kidnapping and extended sexual and physical abuse by her father, Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, had set fire to her heart, reduced it to a blackened cinder of antimatter. In its place a void had opened up inside her that could never be filled. She had thought that her revenge on her father in the Ukraine last year would save her, or at least stop the void from widening, but the reverse had happened—she had fallen farther into the void, and now she suspected nothing could get her out.

This had not always been so. There was a time when she had childishly believed that Jack and Alli would be her saviors. But at the time she had met them, she had already betrayed Jack, and so their relationship was doomed before it began. As for Alli, she had been the one surprise in Annika’s life. The short time she had spent with Alli and Jack had given her a false sense of security—for those weeks she had deluded herself into thinking that the three of them were a family. How could she not? It had felt so good, so right. And she was so certain that the void inside her had started to shrink back to a manageable level. But then she’d been forced to choose between Jack and Dyadya Gourdjiev. It had been her grandfather who had finally saved her from her father, so it was no choice at all. After he’d told her she could have no more contact with Jack, she had wept bitter tears through a long and lonely night. And then, defying her grandfather, she had broken protocol and contacted Jack, confessing her sin. Why she had omitted the real reason she had murdered Senator Berns she’d never be fully able to understand. Perhaps she needed to put herself on the rack, to flay herself open for Jack to see, as no one else—not even Dyadya Gourdjiev—had before or ever would again.

The truth was she loved him, but now she had ensured that he would never love her. Agonizing as that was, it was preferable to continuing to lie to him. Enmeshed as she was in concentric webs of lies, it nevertheless felt intolerable to lie to him.

Now Dyadya Gourdjiev was in the hospital following a serious heart attack. He faded in and out of consciousness. None of the doctors she had spoken to would venture a definitive prognosis. Instead, they spoke in the kind of circular logic peculiar to their profession. After such a long time, she was completely on her own.

She crossed her long, beautiful legs and stared at herself in the mirror. Everything about her was beautiful, and it was that incandescent beauty that from an early age had been a terrible curse. It was her beauty that had impaled her father with jealousy, rage, and, finally, unstoppable lust. It was her beauty that had allowed her to slip through her adolescence with a minimum of fuss so that she could use her brain for what she wanted most: revenge. With her grandfather’s help, she had trained herself in all forms of weaponry and espionage. From one of his closest friends she had learned the intricate byways of the con game. Lying came naturally to her; she had lied to her father from the time she was four years old. Lies had been her only protection against him, therefore she had become expert at it. As an adult, she had come to view lying in the same way actors viewed a role: It allowed her to be someone she was not, allowed her to express opinions that were not hers. It allowed her, in other words, to hide in plain sight.

Her flight was being called, but it was not yet time for her to board. She had one more task to perform. While she took out her cell phone, she thought about Alli, about how the girl had touched her so unexpectedly and deeply. The two of them shared similar histories of kidnap, imprisonment, and abuse. From the few intimate stories Alli had shared, it was clear that she and Annika were kindred spirits. And, despite Annika’s steely reserve, her fierce armor, she had fallen in love with Alli, the way, Dyadya Gourdjiev had told her, her mother had fallen in love with her the first time she had rested her tiny head on her mother’s breast.

Now both Jack and Alli were lost to her. Christ, emotion tears your guts out, she thought, as she stared at the blank face of her phone. For the first time in her life she was aware of two forces battling for possession of her soul. The knowledge set her mind to thrumming.

Then she thought, Fuck it! and dialed a local number.

“Henry,” she said, when Carson answered, “I’m leaving.”

“Everything is in place on this end.”

She could hear the relief in his voice. “This is far from over,” she warned. “You still need to exercise caution.”

“I’m covered.”

She rose and, grabbing the handle of her rolling carry-on, said, “Naomi Wilde is on a collision course with Mbreti.”

“Do you think that wise?”

“We’ll find out shortly.” She walked out of the lounge, riding the escalator down to the gates. “Henry, remember what I told you at the very beginning.”

“‘Trust eats its own children.’” His laugh was metallic. “Jesus, Annika, how could I forget such a dire fucking warning?”

20

Night had passed its zenith. More stars appeared as the highest peaks of the Korab mountains shredded the clouds to ribbons. Dolna Zhelino was far behind. So were Arian Xhafa’s dead guerillas. Thatë’s men had found a satellite phone on one of the corpses, but it was unclear whether the man had communicated with his headquarters during the firefight.

“We have to make the assumption that Xhafa knows a force is on its way to attack him,” Thatë said.

They all agreed. They were camped on the narrow rolling plateau of the final ridge beyond which lay the outskirts of Tetovo, its lights flickering indistinctly through the black mesh of trees.

Paull looked at the kid. “Do you know what happened to the American unit sent to eliminate Arian Xhafa?”

“They were annihilated,” Thatë said. “I was in D.C. at the time, but these men told me. The American soldiers were killed within minutes. They didn’t get within ten miles of Xhafa’s headquarters.”

“Fuck me. So they’re dead, every one of them.” Paull gave Jack a sharp look. “How the hell could these guerillas destroy a heavily armed SKOPES unit in a matter of minutes? Christ, this situation gets worse by the second.”

Jack felt it imperative to move on. “Have you been to Xhafa’s stronghold?”

Thatë nodded. “All too briefly. I was made. I had to get the fuck out of there.”

“Tail between your legs.” Paull nodded. “No wonder you’re so hot to go back there.”

“How many men?” Jack asked, to ease the tension.

“Twenty to twenty-five.” Thatë shrugged. “His is a decentralized system, like the Muslim terrorists. The bulk of his men are deployed, some in other countries arranging deals, receiving payments, or overseeing smuggling shipments. The cadre in and around the stronghold are personal bodyguards, the fiercest fighters.”

“The Praetorian Guard,” Paull muttered.

An owl hooted and there was a flurry of wings overhead, a soft cry, and then a small spray of blood as the owl carried off its prey.

“A fantastic hunter, the owl,” Thatë said. “Its wings make no sound. That’s how we will be.” He indicated Paull with his chin. “Did your people give you a way in?”

Paull nodded, spread out the plastic-covered map, and lit it up with a penlight. The beam was powerful but didn’t spread. He traced the path with his finger. Xhafa’s stronghold was in the northeastern section of Tetovo, at the summit of a small rise.

“Do you have a problem with this section of the route?” Paull’s voice was a challenge.

Thatë shook his head.

“The stronghold itself,” Jack began.

“It’s a stone structure of approximately fifty-two-hundred square feet,” Paull said before the kid could answer. Once again, he was showing off the expertise of the American clandestine services. “No basement because in that area the bedrock is so hard it’s apparently not worth the effort. There are two entrances, front and rear, and, here, on the west side, is what appears to be a soccer field, presumably to help keep the men in shape when they aren’t on a killing spree.”

“The intel comes from satellite imaging.” Jack looked at Thatë. “Accurate?”

“Oh, it’s accurate,” the kid said, and Paull looked smug. “As far as it goes.”

Paull scowled. “Meaning?”

“Xhafa’s stronghold is actually a school. The soccer field is for the students.”

“Sonuvabitch.”

“It gets worse,” Thatë said. “The students are orphans. They live there.”

Another silence settled over the group. They stared through the trees at the lights of Tetovo. Somewhere out there Xhafa and his men were waiting for them.

“Well, that neutralizes our rockets and other middle-range weaponry,” Paull said sourly.

“Not necessarily,” Alli interjected.

They all turned to stare at her.

“We’ve got to get the children out of the school,” she said.

“One of us needs to come up with a real plan,” Paull said, pointedly ignoring her.

Jack held up a hand. “Wait a minute, Alli may be on to something.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

Jack busied himself clearing away debris and drawing a map for himself in the dirt. Because he himself was drawing it, he could better visualize the terrain and how to navigate it. He stared at what he had created for some minutes.

“What if we split up into two groups? Dennis, you and I and Alli will form a traditional frontal assault.”

“But Xhafa will be expecting that,” Thatë said.

“Precisely,” Jack said. “But what we’ll put up won’t be an assault at all. It will be a diversion under cover of which, Thatë, you and your men will silently take out the rear guard, infiltrate the schoolhouse, round up the kids, and herd them out of there. Once the building’s clear, we can move in on both fronts.”

Paull rubbed his chin. “It sounds good.”

“Yeah, except it won’t work.” Thatë looked at them. “The kids are taught to be scared shitless of anyone who isn’t in Xhafa’s cadre. They’ll never willingly come with us.”

“They might,” Alli said, “if they see me.”

Jack reacted immediately. “Now just a minute—!”

“No.” Thatë was nodding vigorously. “Alli’s got it locked in. She doesn’t look all that much older than the students, who range more or less from eight to seventeen. When they see her with us, they’re likely not to bolt, especially if she talks to them.”

“I don’t speak Macedonian,” Alli said.

“No problem. The older students speak English. They’ll translate for the younger ones.” Thatë saw the look on Jack’s face. “This is by far our best shot to get Xhafa, trust me.”

Jack glared at him. “I’m not exposing Alli to such a risk.”

Thatë shrugged. “Then there will be collateral damage.”

“There will be no collateral damage,” Jack said slowly and deliberately.

“Then Xhafa’s cleverness has stymied us,” Paull said. “Our mission—”

“I know what our mission is,” Jack said tightly, “and it doesn’t include subjecting Alli to this level of extreme risk. She needs to be where I can keep an eye on her.”

“Fine,” Thatë said. “But with you or without you I’m leading my men in.”

“Not if I kill you first.”

It seemed, then, that all the weapons came to bear at once.

“Men,” Alli said disgustedly. She stood up. “Did any of you testosterone machines think about asking me? It was my idea, I like it.” She turned to Jack. “It’s a good plan, or as good as we’re going to get. I’m going in with Thatë.” She held out a hand. “Now give me the iPod and earphones.”

The kid looked into Jack’s surprised face and laughed. “Fucking piece of work, ain’t she?”

*   *   *

The two groups decided to take different routes, so Thatë and his men, with Alli in tow, headed out before Jack and Paull, who would take the route outlined by the satellite intel. Each group had a sat phone for coordinating their assault—one Thatë’s men had, the other that had been confiscated in the firefight at Dolna Zhelino.

Before he left, Thatë went over the topography Jack and Paull would encounter, seemingly leaving out no detail. Jack was grateful to him, but he was also terribly apprehensive as he watched Alli, amid Thatë’s band of Kazanskaya thugs, vanish all too quickly into the dark.

“Another insane scheme that’s dependent on whether or not we can trust that kid,” Paull said as he hefted his assault rifle. He checked to make sure the magazine was fully loaded. “Talk about a delicate balance.”

Jack stood brooding. Then they set off, following the path laid out for them by the geotechs at the DoD.

*   *   *

Alli was aware of the tension in the men as one is aware of the electricity in the air during a lightning storm. The stars were very clear above them, winking in and out as gaps in the trees presented themselves and then closed. No one spoke, for which she was grateful. After last year, one of the things she had done to help her overcome her grief was to learn Russian from the Rosetta Stone program. She was astonished at how effortlessly she picked up the language, and she suspected that she’d be able to learn most any language with similar ease. She recognized root words almost instantly, and making sense of the grammar allowed large chunks of phrases to slot into her rapidly expanding understanding.

Oddly, she felt comfortable among these thugs. They didn’t resent her or think she was a freak. On the contrary, they understood her function in the plan—a function none of them could fill, and which might very well lead to victory. She felt like their little sister; she felt as if she belonged, as if she had been born to the wrong parents in the wrong country. Now and again, her nostrils flared. She smelled Russia on them; she liked that smell.

For one hundred minutes, they moved silently without incident. By that time, the forest had given way to plowed fields with the occasional stone barn, then the farms were stamped out by a jumble of houses. Then the paved streets began and, along with them, the gridlike order imposed by all gatherings of human habitation, whether they be villages, towns, or cities.

The men grew more cautious and, for a time, their progress was slowed as they took more and more frequent detours to avoid the citizens of Tetovo. Skirting the town proper, they moved northwest with the intention of looping around and coming upon the stronghold from the north.

Of course, there were obstacles to that route—knots of Xhafa’s guerillas strategically placed along the perimeter of Tetovo. But guard duty was inherently boring. Night after night, peering into the flickering darkness could cause the attention of even the staunchest fanatic to occasionally waver. There was no antidote for this boredom, Thatë had explained to her when they had begun their trek, and it was this inattention he proposed to exploit.

The first to present themselves to Thatë’s men were three guerillas. He kept Alli beside him as he used hand signals. Three of his men nodded and melted into the darkness. They returned soon enough with trophies: AK-47s, daggers, and a satellite phone. Not a sound had been uttered. The band moved on. Alli saw the three guerillas sprawled on the ground, their throats slit. Their blood glittered black in the starlight.

*   *   *

“There he is.”

Paull’s whisper came to Jack along with the other night noises.

“We could go around him,” Jack pointed out.

“We can’t go around them all.”

They were crouched in the protection of a clump of underbrush. The guerilla was outlined against the starlight. To his right was a ridge, black as a pit. To his left were lights at the outskirts of Tetovo.

Paull scrambled off and Jack put down his assault rifle, shrugged off his backpack and camouflage jacket. Then he ducked out into the starlight, came around a bend and, seeing the guerilla, continued on.

The guerilla, for his part, came immediately alert and brought his AK-47 down to the ready position.

Jack stopped several feet in front of the guerilla and said, “Më falni, unë jam I humbur.” Excuse me, I’m lost.

“Ju jeni shqiptare?” the guerilla asked with a good deal of suspicion. You’re Albanian?

“Lindur dhe rritur atje, por e biznesit tim është këtu.” Born and raised there, but my business is here.

The guerilla nodded. “Ku jeni drejtuar?” Where are you headed?

“Ozomiste.”

The guerilla laughed. “Ju mori një kthesë shumë të gabuar, shoku im.” You took a very wrong turn, my friend.

He pointed to the east, a direction behind Jack. As he did so, Paull, stealing up behind him, jerked his chin up, exposing the neck, which he slit. The guerilla’s eyes rolled up in his head and he slid to the ground.

Ten minutes later, after spotting and skirting two groups of guerillas, they came within sight of the schoolhouse and began to set up shop.

“You’ll have to watch out for those groups,” Paull said. “Once we start firing, they’re bound to be drawn to this spot.”

“I’ll be ready.” Jack pulled out the shoulder rocket launcher and loaded it.

When Paull was set up, he called Thatë to give him the signal to go ahead. Then he manned the machine gun he’d set on its tripod and waited for Thatë’s call.

*   *   *

The moment Thatë got off the sat phone, he signaled his men forward. They spread out in a rough semicircle as they slipped through the trees. Keeping to the shadows, they approached the rear of the schoolhouse. Along the way, five of Xhafa’s men were overpowered and killed without them opening their mouths. There were more in the woods, of this Thatë had no doubt, which was why he now widened the cordon of his men. He had only six men, plus Alli, but he was ready to pit any one of them against two or even three of the guerillas.

There was another knot of guerillas lounging around the back door, talking and telling jokes. Two of them were dozing. Thatë signaled his men, then unhooked Alli’s backpack and took her assault rifle from her. She unbuttoned her shirt and pushed the waistband of her trousers lower around her narrow hips, exposing her midriff.

“How’s this?”

He fluttered his hand back and forth. “It will have to do.” Then, in response to her scowl, he gave her a big grin.

“You’ll do fine. Don’t worry, okay?” he whispered. “We have your back.”

She nodded.

“Are you frightened?”

“I think so.” In fact, her heart seemed about to explode through her chest.

He laughed soundlessly. “That’s the right answer. So am I.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Time.”

Alli appeared in the light, weaving slightly. The guerillas saw her and she began to sing “Gimme Shelter.” She was close to them, under their scrutiny and their guns when she got to the chorus.

“‘War, children, it’s just a shot away, shot away…’”

Just as Thatë predicted, their eyes were on her opened blouse, not her face, and certainly not on the grupperovka soldiers creeping up on either side of them. Alli was completely terrified, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth so that the sound broke off abruptly. Not that the guerillas cared. Young girls were their thing and she fit the bill of fare to a T.

Alli knew what she had to do; she and Thatë had gone over it during a short break in the trek while his men had surveilled the area just ahead. She now had to do it. She recalled with perfect clarity the Ukranian mistress Milla Tamirova and her dungeon with its restraint chair that had brought back with a sickening rush her week at the mercy of Morgan Herr. Something inside her quailed and tried to shrivel up. But she wouldn’t let it; she was stronger than that now. The guerillas’ eyes burned into her pale flesh. The inner halves of her breasts were exposed, moving as she approached them. She walked as Milla Tamirova walked, putting one boot directly in front of the other so that her hips and buttocks swayed gently back and forth.

She was close enough to them now to smile, her white, even teeth shining in the light of the bare bulb above the door. She kept her lips slightly open. She had moistened them just before she had stepped into the light.

And then something odd—and thrilling—happened. Their very stares, which had terrified her a moment before, buoyed her. Their eyes caressed her, moving over one body part after another. They weren’t repulsed; on the contrary, naked lust suffused their faces, warming her, fueling her. Emma had made her feel beautiful. But now, for the first time, she realized that her childlike body was not connected to the womanly power inside her. This was the moment of her final flowering into womanhood, the moment when all childhood things were left behind, when she saw who and what she could become.

Finding her voice, she began to sing again. The guerillas licked their lips seconds before they died. She watched them with a curious dispassion as the light went out of their eyes, and she shivered, suddenly cold.

“Fucking beautiful,” Thatë said. He called Paull and gave him the all clear.

As soon as the chatter of machine-gun fire bit into the night, he led his men into the school.

Alli followed him, feeling like a shell sucked up in a powerful undertow.

*   *   *

Three of Thatë’s men had been killed by the time the kid brought her face-to-face with the orphans. Until that moment, he had kept her safe in the rear guard, guarded by two of his grupperovka foot soldiers. But she had heard the sounds of fierce fighting, cries, and grunts as the forces met head on. She recognized all three of the dead men as she was led past them, and felt a slight tugging at her heart, shocked by how young they were.

The orphans were huddled in one darkened classroom. Before she stepped into the doorway, she handed Thatë her assault rifle.

He offered a handgun. “Don’t go in there unarmed.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “They need to trust me.”

As she stepped into the room, she sensed the orphans shrinking back, and knew she had been right to come in without a weapon. Then, as they saw her, expressions of surprise and perhaps curiosity bloomed on their faces.

“I don’t speak Macedonian,” she said. “Which of you speak English?”

There was a rustling of bodies. Then a voice from the rear said, “English?”

A young girl pushed her way to the front of the group. She was delicate, her porcelain beauty all the more potent for it. But there was a tigerish look to her eyes and this made Alli wary.

“You are English?”

“American,” Alli said. And then, because there was no time and, really, no other way to state it: “There is danger here. These people are bad.”

“I know,” the porcelain girl said.

One of the other girls behind her said, “They are our teachers.”

Alli, hearing the fear in the girl’s voice, thought about Morgan Herr, who had claimed to be her teacher. “Yes, but they’re teaching you only what they want you to know. They’re making sure that when you grow up you’ll be just like them—terrorists, smugglers, and murderers. I’ll take you to a better place, where you’ll be free to make up your own minds about what you want and don’t want.”

There was a brief silence, and Alli decided to concentrate on the porcelain girl.

“My name is Alli Carson.”

“Edon.” The porcelain girl looked into her eyes. “Edon Kraja.”

Arieta’s sister! A thrill of elation and foreboding ran down Alli’s spine.

The rest of the children remained stone-faced. Assessing their continuing hesitation, Alli held up Emma’s iPod. “Michael Jackson. ‘Thriller.’”

A smile split Edon’s face. “Michael Jackson. Really?”

Alli nodded.

“We’re not allowed to listen to Michael Jackson,” Edon said. “No American music.”

“Where I’m going to take you, you can listen to any kind of music you want.”

Fitting the earbuds to the iPod, Alli scrolled down to the track she wanted and pressed Play. She offered the earbuds to the girl, who cringed back until Alli put one of the earbuds in her own ear. When she offered the other one, the girl took it and hesitantly put it into her ear.

Her grin returned. “Michael Jackson,” she said. “‘Thriller.’”

Alli began to mimic the dance in Jackson’s video and, as Edon hesitantly joined her, the other orphans crowded around. Alli passed the earbuds to a couple of the closest kids.

“Okay, Edon, we have to go. Now. You must tell everyone.”

She did as Alli asked. Alli took back the iPod and earbuds as, like an inverted version of the Pied Piper, she led the orphans out of their personal rat-infested Hamelin.

When they were safely away, hidden in shadows of the trees, Edon turned to Alli.

“Thank you,” she said, “from all of us, even the ones too young to yet understand.” She burst into tears.

Alli put her arm around Edon’s shoulders. “That’s all right. You’re free now.”

“Yes, I,” Edon said through her tears. “But my sister Liridona is not.”

*   *   *

Jack was forced to begin his rear-guard action sooner than he had expected. No matter, he had plenty of ammo and convenient cover. He took out three of Xhafa’s guerillas before they fell back, regrouped, and came at him from both sides. Behind him, he could hear the continuous roar of the machine gun. The sound calmed him. Paull had his back.

As the two groups of guerillas began to converge on him, guided by his shots, he crab-walked straight ahead, into a dense copse of trees. Turning around, he fired into their flank, mowing down half of them before they could adjust and return fire. By that time, he had climbed up into one of the trees. Lying out on a thick branch, he brought them into his gun sight, picking them off as they scrambled futilely for cover.

Dropping down, he went from man to man, checking them for breath or pulse. Finding none, he turned back to where Paull was continuing his fusillade. It was then that he felt the cool breath on his cheek.

“Dad.”

He felt death coming from behind him and darted to his right. The knife blade slashed through cloth and skin just above his hip bone. If he hadn’t moved, the thrust would have punctured his liver. Stepping into the attack, he whirled and, cocking his elbow, slammed it into his assailant’s throat. The guerilla staggered back, gasping, and Jack drove the butt of his assault rifle into the man’s nose. Blood and cartilage whipped through the air, and the butt whacked the side of the guerilla’s head so hard his neck snapped.

Leaping over the corpse, he joined Paull just in time to pick up the phone. He listened to Thatë’s voice, cut the connection, and said, “The kids are out.”

Paull did not let up the volleying for even an instant. “You know what to do,” he said.

Jack picked up the shoulder rocket launcher he had previously loaded, took aim at the school through the launcher’s telescopic sight, and yelled, “Fire in the hole!” just before he pressed the trigger.

The night exploded into white light and a tremendous thunderclap that resounded throughout all of Tetovo.

21

Middle Bay Bancorp was one of those newly minted powerhouse regional banks that came through the recent CDO and mortgage-backed securities meltdown relatively unscathed. In fact, at the depths of the recession, its prescient CEO, M. Bob Evrette, snapped up three failing regionals for ten cents on the dollar, more or less, in the process making himself both rich and a local hero for saving so many jobs.

There was a price to pay, as there always was: Like many great leaders, M. Bob Evrette was afflicted with hubris. In short, within the space of twenty months, Middle Bay became a victim of its own success. It grew too fast, outstripping not its resources but the expertise of its managers. Evrette had thrust it into the heady arena where the really big boys played, and even he wasn’t up to navigating it.

At that point, perhaps six months ago, Henry Holt Carson had stepped in and made Evrette an offer he couldn’t in all conscience refuse. For one reason or another, Middle Bay had been on Carson’s radar screen for some time. Carson had built his fortune on knowing the right time to make an acquisition and when to sell it. Six months ago Middle Bay was ripe for the plucking. He set up one meeting with Evrette, where the merger with InterPublic Bancorp was proposed, then a dinner, where the deal was struck, and, finally, a weekend at the hunting lodge, where, over a brace of buckshot-riddled ducks, the deal was finalized.

Middle Bay boasted over twenty branches in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland, but its main branch resided at Twentieth and K Streets NW, in a florid building of white granite blocks so massive they’d give even Hercules palpitations.

“I spoke to M. Bob Evrette himself,” Naomi said as they got out of the car and trotted up the steps that rose between two rows of immense Corinthian columns.

“What do you call him, Pete? He’s a friend of yours, right?”

McKinsey laughed and shook his head. “Jesus, give it a rest, would you?”

Beyond the high revolving doors was a massive space clad in marble with wood and brass accents. The ceiling rose to a height of a cathedral’s, and, at this late hour, there was a hush unnatural even for a bank. A bank of tellers’ stations lined the right wall; a phalanx of gleaming ATMs was to their left.

A young man bustled out from behind a waist-high wooden partition. He wore a wasp-waisted suit, a solid-color tie, and a tight smile. His gleaming hair had an old-fashioned part in it. He looked as if he’d just come from the barber’s.

He held out his hand, which was firm and dry. They introduced themselves and he led them back through the gate, past the cubicles where the investment and customer-relations officers normally plied their trade. Pausing at a door just long enough to punch in a six-digit code, he opened it and ushered them down a cool, low-lit hallway, its gleaming mahogany panels speaking of both money and discretion.

“Mr. Evrette is expecting you,” the flunky said unnecessarily.

At the end of the hallway was a wide wooden door upon which the flunky rapped his knuckles.

“Come,” a muffled voice said from within.

M. Bob Evrette was a hefty, florid-faced man in his midfifties, balding and running to fat, but there was no mistaking the youthful fire in his eyes.

“Come on in,” he said with a friendly wave as he stood up behind his desk. “No good will come of standing on ceremony with me.”

He had a good ol’ boy accent and an aw-shucks attitude that belied his business acumen. Naomi disliked him on sight. She distrusted friendliness before there was a reason for it. He bounced out from behind his desk and indicated a grouping of chairs near the window a stone’s throw from the Exxon Mobil Corporation offices.

“So,” he said, as they took their seats, “how can I be of service?”

Naomi looked at him with gimlet eyes. He reminded her of a department store Santa who got his secret jollies snuggling little kids on his lap.

There was a small silence. She became aware that McKinsey was watching her with the wariness of a hawk.

“We’re investigating a triple homicide,” she began.

“Excuse me, Agent Wilde, but I’m curious why the Secret Service—”

“It’s a matter of national security,” she said stiffly.

“Of course.” He nodded. “I understand.” His tone indicated that the matter was as clear as mud. He spread his hands. “Please continue.”

“One of the victims in this case is William Warren.”

An expression of sorrow dampened Evrette’s face. “One of my best analysts.” He shook his head. “Shocking, truly shocking. And, of course, sad. Incomprehensible.”

“We’re trying to make sense of it.” Naomi cleared her throat. “Toward that end, we’d like to take a look at Mr. Warren’s computer. Have the Metro police been here?”

“Not yet,” Evrette said. “But a Detective Heroe will be over first thing tomorrow morning. She said not to let anyone in Mr. Warren’s office.”

“We’ve taken over the case; Detective Heroe simply hasn’t gotten the memo yet,” McKinsey said.

Naomi added: “We’d also like to examine the files on the loans Billy Warren was working on.”

“Of course.” He rose and, returning to his desk, punched a button on his intercom. “We have visitors from the federal government. After they’re through in Mr. Warren’s office, I’ll bring them directly to you.”

He rubbed his hands together as he returned to where Naomi and McKinsey sat. Naomi watched him and, when she could, McKinsey, to see if there was any hint of a prior meeting or relationship, but neither seemed particularly interested in the other. Evrette seemed entirely focused on her.

“As you may or may not know,” he said, “we’re in the midst of being engulfed and devoured by InterPublic.”

He laughed good-naturedly, and again Naomi was reminded of that dirty-minded department store Santa.

“As part of the transition, InterPublic hired a forensic accounting team to examine our books for the past five years.” He waved them toward the door with a little puff of breath. “You wouldn’t be wrong in counting that a damned daunting job. In fact, that’s precisely what went through my mind. But then this gentleman showed up and started directing his team, and, let me tell you, he’s something of a genius.”

He led them down another corridor to an office appropriate in size and furnishings to a midlevel executive. Blinds were down over the window. Peeking through them, Naomi saw the window grid of the building across K Street.

“Okay,” she said.

Looking at Billy’s workspace, she said, “I think we’d better get Forensics over here.”

“Consider it done.” McKinsey drew out his cell phone and made a call. As he began to speak, he walked out of the room. A moment later, he returned. “All set.”

Naomi nodded. Snapping on latex gloves, she first went through all the desk drawers. Then she fired up the computer.

“Has anyone been in here since Billy’s death?”

“Not since I got the call from Detective Heroe.” Evrette shrugged. “Before that, I suppose the cleaning people the night he was … killed. If anyone else was, I’m afraid I can’t say.”

“Please find out who among the cleaning staff was in here,” she said, fingers flying over the keyboard. “I’d like to interview them.”

Evrette nodded. “Just give me a moment,” he said, and went out.

Out of the corner of her eye, Naomi saw McKinsey standing with his arms crossed. He seemed to want to look everywhere at once.

She spoke to him while she checked the folder tree of Billy’s hard drive. “Peter, are you nervous?”

“I told you I’d have your back.”

“You also told me not to come here. How well do you know Evrette?”

“I’ve never met him before today.”

She glanced up and sensed that he was telling the truth. “Did you tell anyone we were coming here?”

“No.”

For a long moment, they held each other’s gaze. Then Naomi nodded and went back to her work. When she found the folders she wanted, she went through the desk drawers until she found a package of blank DVDs. Placing one in the plastic tray, she copied all the folders and files that looked relevant.

“If there was anything untoward going on,” McKinsey said, “I very much doubt Warren would be stupid enough to keep the files on his hard drive.”

“Sadly, I agree.” She pulled out the loaded DVD and pocketed it. “But it would be foolish to assume anything.”

She methodically went through the drawers, looking for locked sections or false backs, but found nothing of interest. At that point, Evrette returned and handed her a slip of paper with the name, address, and contact number of the cleaning person who was on duty the night Billy was murdered. Naomi thanked him and pocketed the paper.

“Okay,” she said, standing up.

As she headed toward the bank of filing cabinets, Evrette said, “They’re all empty. The files were taken to the vault by the forensic accounting team.”

“Then lead the way,” she said. “But first I need to make a pit stop at the ladies’.”

“Certainly.” Evrette gave her directions.

She wanted to try one more time to speak to Jack. Failing that, she wanted to update him again. But once she got into a stall and rummaged around in her handbag for her cell, she recalled that it was still in its charger in the center console of her car. She’d run it down to zero. Cursing her own stupidity, she returned to Billy Warren’s office and Evrette led them down the hall.

“The forensic team insisted on working on-site. We chose the vault because it’s quiet and out of the way of both our staff and our clients,” Evrette explained as they proceeded down one hallway, then another.

The vault was at the end of a long corridor, the last third of which offered blank walls rather than the usual office doors. The huge round opening beckoned. With its massive hinges and seven-foot-thick hardened steel-and-titanium door opened inward, the entrance looked like a modern-day equivalent to Aladdin’s cave.

As they stepped inside, a cool breeze from the internal air venting system stroked their faces. A table and chairs had been set up in the middle of the vault, but at the moment only one man sat, poring over masses of files and folders.

As Evrette announced them, he put down his pen, stood up, and turned around to face them. A good-looking man in his late thirties, he was impeccably dressed in an expensive, European-cut suit of midnight blue silk, a starched white shirt, and a modish paisley tie. He had thick, dark hair left longer than most people in his trade. His eyes were hooded, dark, and intelligent. He smiled and Naomi felt a curious sensation along her skin when he approached, as if he were giving off some kind of powerful energy.

M. Bob Evrette made the introductions. “Agents Wilde and McKinsey, this is John Pawnhill, the head of the forensic accounting team InterPublic hired.”

*   *   *

“So what do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?” the man sitting next to Annika said. When she hesitated, he said hastily, “That’s all right. If you’d rather read, I understand completely.”

She laughed softly. “No, I was getting bored anyway.”

They were wearing their seat belts. The plane, slicing through the night on its way to Rome, had encountered a powerful storm, and they had experienced some unpleasant turbulence before the pilot had taken them up to 43,000 feet. Below them, vicious streaks of lightning flashed in the remote blackness of their time-annihilating flight.

“May I see what you’re reading?”

She handed him the book. He had the face of a Roman senator, aggressive without being arrogant. His tan almost camouflaged the pockmarks on his cheek. The backs of his hands were scarred; they were work hands, which she liked. His gray eyes scanned the book jacket.

“The Copenhagen Interpretation: the Orthodoxy of Quantum Mechanics, or The Wavefunction Collapse.” He glanced at her as he handed back the book. “That’s quite a title. Are you a scientist?”

“A detective, of sorts,” she said with a mischievous smile. “A very specific sort. I’m looking for the Higgs boson.”

“The what?”

“A particle so small it’s virtually beyond human comprehension.” She waved a hand. “It’s complicated and, for a layperson, probably boring.”

“Not to me.” He settled in, apparently content to listen to her as long as she wanted to talk.

“I work for CERN at the LHC,” she said. “Also known as the Large Hadron Collider.”

He tapped a finger against his lip. “I’ve heard about … didn’t your team just break a record once held by Fermilabs?”

“That’s right.” She appeared delighted. “The LHC is in a massive tunnel on the border between France and Switzerland, in a space that’s the coldest in the known universe.”

In time, she could see him becoming infatuated. Not with her, precisely. He was in love with the lie she had spun, the image she had projected on the screen of his mind. It was an art, really, this ability to understand the power of lies, the way a lie—even a small one—had the power to bore its way through anyone’s defenses. Her genius was in making this lie, no matter how small, into a truth that someone could believe in, because believing was the same as falling in love. Someone in the throes of infatuation had no defenses.

This is what she had done with Jack because it was the only way she knew how to live life. But then somewhere in the midst of the Ukraine something had changed. That lie had become a bitter pill, poisoning their relationship. She began to hate herself, and then to hate him for believing her lie. She had wanted, more than anything, for him to pull aside the curtain of her lies, to reveal her as Dorothy revealed the Wizard of Oz.

It was only afterward that she understood why she had defied her grandfather and confessed to Jack. She wanted him to hate her, she wanted to push him as far away from her as possible, and then to see if he would come back. Because if he did she would know that for the first time in her life she had met a man for whom the lies didn’t matter. She would know that he loved her, not the persona she had presented.

The man in the seat beside her—Tim or Tom or Phil—was laughing at something she said. She could read his lust for her in every expression, every gesture he made. He was a wealthy businessman. He owned his own firm, which he was about to take public. The IPO would net him over a billion dollars. He was under the mistaken impression that she would be impressed, but her current persona had no interest in wealth or status. He readily admitted that he’d never met anyone like her.

“If you’ll excuse me.” She unbuckled her seat belt.

A tentative smile played across his lips. “Would you find it offensive if I accompanied you?”

As a gift, she presented him with her softest laugh. “Not at all. What a perfect gentleman you are.”

He unbuckled his seat belt and followed her up the aisle to the toilet. It was nearly 5 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time and everyone in first class was either asleep or absorbed by the electronic flicker of their personal video screens. One of the attendants appeared from the galley and asked if they’d like some fresh-baked sugar cookies. They declined and she vanished the way she had come.

Opening the toilet door, Annika was aware that she didn’t really want to do this, but her body was so conditioned that it was working on its own momentum. She did not stop Tim or Tom or Phil when he stepped into the toilet after her and awkwardly closed the door. Nor did she stop him when his hand groped beneath her skirt, the hem rising up his forearm as he found what he was grasping for.

Through it all, she clung to him. She felt unmoored, as if she weren’t here on this plane, or over dark and troubled water, deeper even than the void in her chest. She was wherever Jack was at this moment. Her mind was filled with him.

She was oblivious to Tim or Tom or Phil’s grunts, his bull-like lunges, the pain cutting across her buttocks as they rhythmically struck the sink edge.

She barely heard herself moaning she was weeping so copiously.

*   *   *

“He’s not here. The fucker’s not here!”

Thatë was in a state. They were inside what was left of Xhafa’s stronghold. Burned bodies lay everywhere. The stench of roasted flesh was nauseating. Here and there in the corners of what had once been rooms, flames still flickered and danced. Otherwise, all was black ash, but that didn’t stop the kid from kicking every corpse he came across, turning the ones on their stomachs over so he could examine the faces.

“What the fuck? What the fuck?” His equilibrium had shattered at the bitter taste of Pyrrhic victory. They had won everything, but had lost the only prize any of them cared about: Arian Xhafa.

Jack and Alli were examining a laptop computer, twisted out of shape by the explosion and resultant fire, when Thatë began screaming.

“Tell me! Tell me!”

Jack ran over and pulled him away from a badly wounded guerilla. There was spittle on Thatë’s face; he was virtually frothing at the mouth. For his part, the guerilla slid to the floor. His body was a mass of deep burns and his face was bloody and distorted out of all proportion.

Paull tried to hold the kid back, but he just shook the older man away. Jack looked at Alli and she went over and took Thatë by the arm. It was a restraint, the only one he would tolerate at the moment. He gave the guerilla a venomous glare over her shoulder.

Jack squatted beside the guerilla. He could see at a glance that his wounds were mortal. “What’s your name?”

One bloodshot eye stared back at him. “Bek … Bekir.” The other eye was swollen closed, so heavily bruised it looked like a fist.

“Where is Arian Xhafa?”

“He isn’t here.”

Jack sat back on his haunches. He gave Thatë a querying look, but the kid was still livid with rage.

“Give me five minutes with him,” Thatë said.

“The poor bastard doesn’t have five minutes,” Jack told him. “Besides, what can you do to him that hasn’t already been done?” Turning back to Bekir, he said, “Where is Xhafa? Where did he go?”

“In … into the wind.” Bekir’s mouth was red and black, the lips so distorted it was unclear whether even his mother would recognize him. “He left a little while ago.”

“How little?” Jack pressed.

“Twenty minutes, maybe fifteen.”

“Christ, we just missed the fuck,” Paull said.

Bekir started coughing. His condition was clearly declining rapidly.

With time running out, Jack tried another tack. If Bekir couldn’t solve the mystery of where Arian Xhafa went, maybe he could solve another mystery. “Bekir, were you here when the American unit tried its assault?”

Bekir nodded. His eye could not stop rolling in its socket. He must be in terrible pain, Jack thought. But it was too late to do anything to save him.

“For God’s sake help him,” Alli said from over Jack’s shoulder. “Give him water, at least.”

“His lungs are filling,” Jack told her. “He’ll drown in even a tablespoon of water.”

He returned his attention to Bekir. “How did Xhafa defeat the American unit?”

“Fast.” Bekir’s voice was thick with phlegm and blood. “Very fast.”

“Not like with us.”

The one eye stared at him.

“See, this is what I don’t understand.” Jack edged closer. “I know you had sophisticated weaponry, but so did the American unit.”

Bekir’s eye stared at Jack for what seemed a long time. Then his lips moved, as if of their own volition, and the voice came out, hollow as a drum. “The weaponry helped. How could it not? But Xhafa had an edge that meant the Americans’ certain death.”

Jack’s insides went cold. Then he felt Paull leaning closely in.

“And what was that?” Paull said.

Bekir’s lips curled up into a smile, which began another coughing fit that produced a prodigious flow of blood from his mouth. When he calmed somewhat, he spoke. “He knew they were coming. He’s got an American informant.”

“That’s a fucking lie,” Paull said dismissively.

Jack rocked back on his heels. “Bekir, my friend, here’s my problem with what you claim. Even with his newfound money and links to international arms dealers, Xhafa is unlikely to have that kind of political or military connection. Very, very few people do.”

There was a peculiar light in Bekir’s good eye, and Jack knew he was preparing himself to die. During the interview, his breathing had become shallow. Now it was irregular. Blood drooled out of one ruined ear. And yet he was determined to persevere for at least one more moment, at least long enough for him to deliver his farewell message.

“Then whoever is funneling money and arms his way is one of those elite people.”

*   *   *

John Pawnhill smiled a magnetic smile that momentarily caused Naomi’s knees to feel as if they’d turned to jelly.

“How may I be of assistance?”

“Agent McKinsey and I are investigating the murder of Billy Warren, a loan analyst at the bank.” For any number of reasons, the torture aspect of Billy’s murder had not yet been made public.

“Yes, I’ve been through some of his work.” Pawnhill gestured. “Very talented young man. Pity he’s no longer with us.”

“We need to see the files that were taken from his office.”

“By all means.” Pawnhill went to the table and, counting out stacks, slid one to a spot in front of an empty chair. “Knock yourself out, Agent Wilde.” He nodded as she sat down. “If you need any deciphering, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Believe me, I won’t.” She pulled the first folder off the top of the pile and opened it. “Are these in alphabetical order?”

“No,” Pawnhill said. “They’re in chronological order with the latest loan on top.”

The others hung back, but there was no conversation from behind her. She scanned the documents inside the folder, then set it aside and picked up the next on the pile. This process went on for perhaps forty minutes.

Pawnhill pointed. “That particular loan was never consummated. Mr. Warren discovered a problem with the applicant’s financials.”

Naomi ran her finger down the sheet. “Did he often find such problems?”

“No, he didn’t.” This from Evrette. “When it comes to its loan applicants, the bank employs a rigorous vetting process.”

Naomi turned a page. “But sometimes—like here—something slips through the cracks.”

“Well, no system is foolproof,” Evrette admitted. “That’s one of the talents that made Mr. Warren so valuable. He could sniff out even the faintest whiff of an applicant’s shaky finances.”

“What about off-the-books loans?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Evrette came around into her line of vision and she could feel McKinsey take a protective step close behind her.

Naomi gave him a steady look. “I think you heard me, Mr. Evrette. Did Billy Warren discover any off-the-books loans that hadn’t been reported?”

“This is preposterous. Of course he didn’t.”

Pawnhill intervened. “Agent Wilde, if I may, had there been any such machinations I and my team would have found them.”

“But—and correct me if I’m wrong—you’re not finished with your forensic audit.”

“Almost,” he said. “But not quite.”

“Hmmm.” She tapped her fingertip against a line on the page. “Then perhaps you can explain to me why this company—Gemini Holdings—showed up in one of Mr. Warren’s case files on his computer.”

“That’s hardly surprising,” Evrette said. “He was just doing his due diligence. The loan was denied.”

“I see.” Naomi nodded. “But what’s curious was that Mr. Warren continued to follow the activities of Gemini Holdings after he recommended that their loan application be turned down.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Evrette said.

Naomi’s finger swept down the page. “According to the information in Mr. Warren’s electronic file, Gemini never went to another bank.” Her eyes were fixed on Evrette. Sensing that she had struck a nerve, she pressed on. “Not only that, but it seems that Gemini Holdings got their loan money not ten days after they were turned down here.”

Evrette shrugged. “That’s none of my concern.”

“Really?” Her lips pursed in admonishment. “I think Billy Warren discovered that it was very much your concern. I think that’s why he was keeping an eye on Gemini long after their loan was turned down.”

That was when she heard the soft metallic click. As she began to rise from her chair, McKinsey’s firm hand pushed her back down hard. Then the cold metallic press of a gun at the base of her neck.

Behind her, McKinsey pulled the trigger, and she was slammed forward. Immediately, blood spurted, warm and cherry red.

Part 3

Cherry Bomb

Two Days Ago

Don’t fall in love, don’t fall in love, she seemed to be trying to say to me.

—The Skating Rink, ROBERTO BOLAÑO

22

Arian Xhafa stepped off the military air transport at Vlorë Air Base in southwest Albania into a driving rain. The dark, fulminating sky seemed as low as the treetops, and a filthy wind battered him.

An armored car pulled up and he got in. He was carrying no luggage; none had been needed. At once, the armored car pulled away, exiting the base without going through either immigration or customs.

“Good to be home?” the Syrian said.

Arian Xhafa nodded. “Always.” He was a man of swarthy skin, dark curling hair, which merged with his full beard. His face seemed chiseled by wind and sun, the deep-set eyes, the high cheekbones, the hawk’s-bill nose. He might be Albanian by birth, but his aggressively Middle Eastern blood had forged his physiognomy.

The Syrian sighed. “I have no home.”

“A long-held dream, soon to be realized, my friend.”

Even next to Xhafa, the Syrian was a big man, tall, his shoulders and arms knotted with muscle, as if he had been a hod carrier or a bricklayer all his life. His hands were big and square, calloused, their backs ropy, dark as coffee. But his eyes had in them the talent of a sculptor. It was, of course, his eyes that were most remarked upon. One green, the other blue, each seemed to be buried in a different head or, more accurately, connected to a different brain.

People were terrified of the Syrian, and with good reason. You never knew what he was thinking or how he would react. He had a real name, of course, the one his parents had given him, but it had been so long since he had used it that it had been all but forgotten. Xhafa, for instance, had never known it.

“So,” the Syrian said now, “how was Washington?”

“I despise that city,” Xhafa said, “and it despises me. Dardan has been killed.”

“Is that such a tragedy?” The Syrian was not one to mince words or care who he defamed. “I warned you about him. He was weak.”

“He was family,” Xhafa said stiffly.

The Syrian grunted. “Sentiment is itself a weakness.”

Xhafa fought to swallow the rebuke. He feared the Syrian as much as everyone else, he simply refused to show it. It would do no good, he knew, to remind his companion that he had lost all his family to war. The Syrian never invoked their names; it was as if they had never existed. While in Washington, Xhafa had read of a recent DNA study that proved, genetically, at least, there wasn’t much difference between the Arabs and the Jews. Something else he dare not mention to his dour companion. On the other hand, losses were much on his mind.

“It’s not only Dardan,” he said now, “but my men in Tetovo. The entire fortress was destroyed.”

“That was, of course, always a possibility,” the Syrian’s face darkened, “but I cannot understand how the enemy escaped the ambush you laid for them in Dolna Zhelino.” His tone made it sound like the error was somehow Xhafa’s.

“They killed all my men.”

“Yes, but how?”

“My men—”

“Were no doubt happy to die for the cause,” the Syrian said with a dismissive sweep of his hand.

“My men are not yours,” Xhafa said. “They’re not ignorant mountain fanatics who die without a thought.”

The Syrian was not offended. In fact, he laughed. “This is true, Xhafa. The men of the mountains of Afghanistan and Western Pakistan are the defeated, the disenfranchised who were chased into their mountain lairs by stronger tribal forces. The mountains’ lawless state attracts the fanatics, the extremists, the outcasts of society. But, listen to me, Xhafa, they are my most valuable resource. Their ignorance breeds fanaticism and that is my stock in trade. They are my creatures because I tell them what they want to hear. In return, they do what I tell them to do.”

He puffed out his cheeks, his eyes alight. His ideas made him restless. “What they want is simple: They want to blow up the society that cast them out. This is the opportunity I give them and they are grateful.”

“They have proved to be the best weapon we have against the West,” Xhafa said.

The Syrian snorted. “The West believes that it is their fanaticism that makes them cruel, but, no, this is incorrect. What makes them cruel is their monumental ignorance. They have no conception of the world. Good for me. Even better, they don’t care, so I don’t even need to lie to them. They’ll never get what they want, of course, but in the meantime they are useful as agents of chaos. And because they wish to martyr themselves for their doomed cause, they keep coming. They die and they rise endlessly.”

The Syrian stroked his beard. “But never mistake me for one of them, Xhafa. As you know, I come from the lowlands, from a wealthy family. I’m well educated, a graduate of universities in both the East and the West—under different names, of course. You might say that I’m a man of the world. A prerequisite to understanding the enemy.”

A certain tension informed his body. “What must be understood is the cause of the enemy’s success.” Being a master tactician, he was understandably focused on battlefield failures. In contrast, the loss of human life was of importance to him only inasmuch as it affected his plans. “The failure in Dolna Zhelino might be explained away by happenstance, but not the complete destruction of your fortress in Tetovo.” He tapped his forefinger on his knee. “No, there is another factor here of which we’re ignorant.”

Xhafa shook his head. “I still don’t understand the need for such complexity.”

“That’s because you haven’t studied this Jack McClure. His mind works best within complicated situations. To him, that’s the way the world works, and he’s not far off the mark. Give him something simple to solve and he’ll become immediately suspicious. Frankly, he’s a con artist’s worst nightmare. To my knowledge only one person was able to con him, and then not for long.”

“Annika Dementieva.”

“Correct.” The Syrian sighed. “You know, Xhafa, I tried to do this the simple way, but, try as I might, I couldn’t get to Gourdjiev. I lost half a dozen of my best men in the process. Even at his age, that wily old fucker is still formidable.”

The Syrian stretched in his seat and cracked his knuckles. “So I had to tackle the problem from another angle entirely. I decided to go after Annika. But I knew I couldn’t do it directly. I had to move softly and take a roundabout route.”

“Which is where McClure comes in.”

“There is something between Annika and McClure, of that there can be no doubt.” The Syrian smiled his crooked smile. “As I said, sentiment is itself a weakness.”

“Maybe she’s continuing to play him.”

The Syrian scratched at the thicket of his beard, which was shot through with white. “That possibility has occurred to me.” His smile widened. “But the beauty of my plan is that it doesn’t matter. She is so heavily defended and almost as wily as her grandfather that McClure is the best way—probably the only way—to get to her. And she, my dear Xhafa, is the only way to get to Gourdjiev and all the secrets locked up in that brilliant mind of his.”

He sighed again. “The truth is, I cannot go forward without those secrets.”

Xhafa pricked up his ears. This was the first time the Syrian had come close to defining the goal of his plan—a plan he had been forced to go along with if he wanted to continue the very profitable arrangement he had with the Syrian. A powerful incentive, since this arrangement had provided him with capital and influence in exchange for a third of his smuggling operation. Now Xhafa’s small fleet of new and larger planes were filled with the Syrian’s mysterious cargo as well as Xhafa’s stolen girls.

“Just what are those secrets?”

“Enough criminal dirt and serious indiscretions to take control of his worldwide constellation of politicians and security officers.”

Xhafa would have staked his life on the fact that the Syrian was not telling the truth or, at least, not the whole truth, but he let it go because, humiliatingly, there was nothing he could do. The hard truth was that he felt like a child beside this man, this monument to power.

The rain beat down hard against the reinforced metal top and the landscape outside was gray and hazy, like a painting whose colors had run together. They had been joined by a phalanx of motorcycle police fore and aft, the caravan cutting a swath through the streets with the seething din of war.

The Syrian shifted again, the aura of his power rippling outward, filling the entire vehicle so completely that Xhafa could scarcely draw breath.

“And as to the other part of your mission…?” The Syrian let his last words hang between them like an implied threat.

“Arjeta Kraja is dead,” Xhafa said. “I killed her with my own hands.”

*   *   *

“The last time I saw Naomi Wilde?”

“That’s what I asked.”

Peter McKinsey shifted in his chair. It was a stiff chair with one of those minimalist backs guaranteed to make you more uncomfortable the longer you sat in it. He was downtown at Metro Police HQ, in a separate suite of offices reserved for the Violent Crimes Unit.

“Yesterday, at about a quarter to five in the afternoon. We’d been using my car. I dropped her back at the office. She got into her car and drove off.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

McKinsey nodded. “She told me she was going home.”

“Directly home?”

“‘I’m going home, Pete. I’ve had it.’ This is word for word what she said to me.” He spoke neither quickly nor slowly, but his voice was appropriately tight. After all, his partner of six years was missing.

Chief Detective Nona Heroe’s head came up. She had been scribbling in a small spiral-bound pad. “Agent Wilde said, ‘I’ve had it’?”

McKinsey nodded. “Yes.”

Heroe tapped her pen on her notebook. “What did you take that to mean?”

He shrugged. “That she was beat. We both were. We’d been up and working for more than two days.”

“In that time you two never went home?”

“Just to shower and change clothes.”

Heroe marked this down as if it would someday be used as evidence against him. He hated her even more.

She looked up. “Where were you before you arrived at the office?”

“We were following up several leads concerning the trafficking network that brought Arjeta Kraja into the States illegally.”

“And?”

“Unfortunately, they led nowhere.”

“Why were you so interested in Ms. Kraja?”

“That was Naomi’s idea. According to Alli Carson, the Kraja girl was seen with Billy Warren the night he was tortured and killed.”

Heroe processed his tone. “And you didn’t believe Ms. Carson.”

“Let’s put it this way. I’d have liked the opportunity to question the Carson girl more closely.”

“What stopped you?”

McKinsey shrugged. “You know as well as I do. She’s a protected entity.”

Heroe made more notes. “And you never found Ms. Kraja’s body.”

McKinsey sighed heavily and pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. “She vanished into thin air.”

“Just like Agent Wilde.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I suppose you could say so, yes.”

Heroe scribbled industriously. She was good at it. Engaging his eyes again, she said, “Agent McKinsey, I’m afraid I have some bad news. We found Agent Wilde’s car. It had gone off the road in rural Maryland. We had the devil’s own time pulling it out of a concrete abutment at the base of the embankment.”

“Did you find her?” Suitably anxious tone. “Did you find Naomi?”

“No.”

He frowned. He was good at it. “What about her handbag, her cell? I’ve been trying to call her for hours.”

“There was nothing in the car,” Heroe said. “The driver’s side door was open and the seat belt hadn’t been engaged when the airbags deployed.”

McKinsey shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“That makes two of us, Agent McKinsey.”

Heroe flipped closed her notebook and stood. McKinsey admired her while she stretched. She was an imposing woman, with a good figure, fine features, and skin the color of bitter sweet chocolate. She seemed to be on the good side of forty, young to be the head of Violent Crimes. Either she had offered herself to all the right people, he thought, or she was very, very smart.

“Why don’t we take a break.” It was not a question. She gestured to a sideboard on which stood some kind of stainless-steel-and-glass apparatus that looked like it belonged in a Starbucks. “Would you like some coffee?”

“As long as it’s not swill.”

Her laugh seemed to him corrosive.

“I make my own. Stumptown.”

That meant nothing to him. While she busied herself, he looked at his hands. Steady as a rock. But he sorely wanted to get the hell out of there. He wasn’t used to being interrogated, and now he regretted his rash action at the bank. But he had had no choice. Naomi had discovered the connection between Middle Bay and Gemini Holdings. He was now in the middle of a shitstorm and he knew that bastard Pawnhill blamed him. He’d tried to warn Naomi away from Middle Bay but, as always, she had been like a dog with a bone. He’d admired that in her. Truth be told, shooting her dead had frazzled his nerves. That was a surprise. Before coming to the Secret Service he’d killed before, more times than he’d like to count, but this kill was different. It was Naomi. Christ, it was like a marriage—in many ways, more intimate. They’d had each other’s back. Until yesterday. Truth be told, he was still in shock. He continued to stare at his hands, wondering when they would begin to shake.

He looked up as Heroe returned with two tiny cups, setting one down in front of him.

“What the hell is this?”

She resumed her seat opposite him. “Haven’t you ever had an espresso?”

“I drink coffee,” he said.

“Espresso is coffee.” She took a sip. “Only better.”

He downed his in one gulp.

“About Agent Wilde’s car,” Heroe said. “I don’t think she was in it when it crashed.”

McKinsey almost choked. “I don’t … I don’t follow.”

“Forensics. No blood, bits of skin, the kind of evidence you’d expect to find somewhere in the interior—the front seat, the headrest, the steering wheel. There was nothing at all.”

Shit, he thought, I was so freaked out I forgot to plant the forensics.

At that moment, when he needed a reprieve the most, he got it. The door opened and Heroe’s boss, Alan Fraine, stuck his head in and signaled. Excusing herself, Heroe rose and went out of the room with him. He had counted off a hundred seconds when she returned, a scowl on her face.

She put her back against the open door. “You’re free to go.”

McKinsey grinned at her as he went out, and couldn’t help saying, “See you around the block.”

*   *   *

After McKinsey had left the building, Heroe and Alan Fraine had a sit-down in his office. Unlike most offices, it was fanatically, almost obsessively, neat. Fraine himself was the same way. A man on the downward slope of middle age, balding, with a high, freckled forehead, he had small hands and feet, delicate fingers. His usual outfit was a neatly pressed long-sleeved shirt and suspenders, rather than a belt to keep his pants up over his narrow hips. He sat behind his desk while Heroe pulled over an armchair.

“I still wonder whether my leaking McKinsey’s whereabouts was a good idea,” Fraine said. “I was listening and it seemed to me that you were actually getting somewhere with him.”

Heroe sighed. “It was more important to find out who his rabbi is. So give.”

“You were right, it wasn’t his boss at the Secret Service,” Fraine said. “It was Andrew Gunn of Fortress.”

“Damn, isn’t that something!” Heroe punched the air. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.”

“You think McKinsey’s dirty?”

“I know it,” Heroe said. “Furthermore, I think Naomi Wilde is dead—not missing, not abducted. I think she was killed because of what she knew or maybe discovered. And Peter McKinsey’s my prime suspect.”

“One federal agent murdering another? Jesus, Heroe, even for you that’s a lot to swallow in one gulp, especially with nothing tangible to back it up.”

“Take as many gulps as you want. The fact is Naomi Wilde’s car went off the road without her in it. Someone else dead-manned it to go off the road precisely where it did. I’m going to go over his alibi with a fine-tooth comb.”

Fraine swung his chair around and looked out the window with his thousand-mile stare. “If she’s dead why wasn’t she in the car?”

“My best guess? Her murder was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and it was messy. Also, if I had to go further, it’s possible that the manner of her death might have led us to suspect McKinsey.”

Fraine was used to Heroe’s speculations. The reason he didn’t shoot them down was that more often than not they proved correct. He spread his hands. “Okay, say you’re right on all counts—”

“I know I am.” She produced a cell phone and placed it on the desk between them.

Fraine glanced at it. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“This is Naomi Wilde’s cell. We found it in the center console of her car, where it was protected during the crash.”

“So?”

“Don’t you think if she were heading off to a dangerous place she’d have it with her?” She shook her head emphatically. “No, she was with someone she trusted when she was killed.”

“Someone like Peter McKinsey.” Fraine rubbed his forehead. “If you’re right—and that’s a big if—this isn’t going to go down well with the brass, not well at all.”

“Not my problem.”

“It will be if you can’t find the body. Not a word of this can be breathed to anyone until it’s found.”

“And if it’s not?”

“Then your theory never leaves this office.”

“I can’t let that happen.”

“Where is she, Nona? Where is Naomi Wilde?”

“Fuck if I know.” She made her voice into a hoarse rasp. “But wherever she is, she’s sleeping with the fishes, just like Luca Brasi. And like a Corleone I’m going to track down whoever murdered her and get my revenge.”

Fraine turned back and leaned forward with his elbows on his desk. “Revenge is a mighty disturbing word coming from a law enforcement officer.”

Heroe rose. She was like a Valkyrie—fierce, dark, determined. “Yeah, well, murdering a Secret Service agent is a mighty disturbing business.”

*   *   *

“What did she say just before she died?”

Arian Xhafa turned, but the Syrian appeared quite serious.

“She said, ‘Why?’”

The Syrian’s eyes went briefly out of focus. They were like pits, merciless and brutal. “That’s what they all say. You’d think someone would be more creative.”

Perhaps you will be, when you die, Xhafa thought.

“Arjeta Kraja possessed knowledge, Xhafa, and knowledge is like a virus—it can so easily spread exponentially.” The Syrian raked his fingers through his beard, a sign that he was lost in thought. “Did she say anything else?”

“Yes.” Xhafa shivered. He had hoped the Syrian wouldn’t ask. “She said, ‘Where I’m going, there are no more secrets.’”

The Syrian started as if he’d been stuck with a hypodermic. “I knew the moment she ran,” he said, “and now here’s the proof of it. You see, you fool. She did know.”

Once again Xhafa felt like a child being reprimanded for his ignorance. Suddenly, he was possessed by a murderous rage, and he spent the next thirty seconds consciously uncurling his fingers, keeping them from becoming fists. Ever since the Syrian had brought up Arjeta Kraja, Xhafa had felt a cold lump forming in the pit of his stomach. The orphan student body at the Tetovo school was larded with girls—recruits to slavery his agents had stolen or bought from their desperate or unscrupulous families. One of those was Arjeta’s sister, Edon. Did she know what her sister knew, had her sister spoken to her before Xhafa had had a chance to silence Arjeta? He didn’t know. Come to that, he didn’t know whether Edon Kraja had survived the attack on the school. He prayed to Allah that she hadn’t. In either case, he dared not say a word about Edon to the Syrian. If he did, he knew it would be the end for him.

Oblivious to Xhafa’s mounting tension, the Syrian gazed out the smoked window, deeply immersed in his own thoughts. The caravan pulled into a huge estate, passed through an electronically controlled gate in a high fence topped with rolls of electrified razor wire, and now rolled along a drive of crushed marble so white that even in the gloom it sparkled. Men holding huge attack dogs on leashes appeared on either side of the house. The dogs strained at their leashes, their eyes golden and greedy.

The Syrian ignored them. “She saw and she must have heard someone mention the name.”

“But who would mention the name?” Xhafa said.

The armored vehicle came to rest precisely in front of an immense oak door, snatched from a looted medieval cathedral, that rose, as if on a plinth, at the top of six wide white stone steps.

The two men emerged from the vehicle. The attack dogs’ flanks quivered but they remained stationary; the scents of the two men were known to them.

The door was opened by Taroq, the compound’s chief guard. They exchanged greetings as he ushered them into a space as large as a football field and as spare as a monk’s cell. There was no furniture to speak of, only a number of silk prayer rugs, large cushions, and one low wooden table on which sat a tall teapot with a long S-shaped spout, six small glasses in brass frames, and an antique hookah. The two men removed their shoes on the doorstep and stepped into soft leather slippers with turned-up toes.

Light flooded the space from a series of windows on either side wall. Against the rear wall, a good distance away, was a simple desk and chair. On the desk were three computers—two desktops and a powerful but thin laptop. All were hooked into a high-speed modem with which the house had been specially provided, according to the specifications of the person sitting at the desk, peering from one screen to another.

“Hello, boys,” the figure said in a darkly sweet contralto. She spoke in English. “Back already?”

The chair swiveled around as the whisper of the men’s slippers approached. A young woman sat in the chair. She was thin as a reed with a pale, ascetic face whose main feature was a broad, high forehead. Her blond hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail that came to rest between her knife-thin shoulder blades. She wore a pair of black jeans and a man-tailored shirt of the same color with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, revealing silken hair that was almost white. She wore no makeup or jewelry, but her deep-set emerald eyes glittered with a fierce and almost feral intelligence.

Then she stood and came toward them in long, athletic strides. She was tall, but not nearly as tall as the Syrian. She had to arch upward, standing on tiptoe, to kiss him on the lips, a long, lingering kiss whose naked passion forced Xhafa to look away.

The Syrian’s face broke into a smile of what might, for him, be termed bliss.

“Caroline, my habibi,” he said. “What terrible mischief have you been up to while I’ve been absent?”

23

Three significant things happened in the aftermath of the destruction of Arian Xhafa’s stronghold in Tetovo. First, Alli discovered that not all the students were orphans. Most of the young girls, in fact, either had been kidnapped or sold into slavery. Second, there was cell phone service in the area. As Jack’s cell buzzed to life, locking onto the signal, he saw Paull listening intently as Alli spoke with the children’s spokesperson, a beautiful girl with the most perfect skin he’d ever seen, whom Alli seemed to have bonded with immediately.

There were three messages from Naomi Wilde. Figuring that she had been trying to get in touch with him in order to update him on her progress, he listened with a sense of both shock and mounting alarm to the brief but succinct reports on her theories.

In the first, she spoke of her mounting suspicions concerning her partner, Peter McKinsey, and his possible connection with Fortress Securities. She also told him about the conflicting evidence against Alli, as if two opposing forces were at work countering each other, an occurrence that, frankly, had her baffled.

In the second message, she described her tailing McKinsey into Georgetown and the marina there along the Sequoia boardwalk. McKinsey had met an unknown man who, by Naomi’s detailed description, seemed most certainly an Arab of some sort. The Arab had driven McKinsey out to Theodore Roosevelt Island, where they had disembarked and vanished into the foliage. Naomi didn’t say how long they were on the island. Possibly, she hadn’t stuck around to find out.

The third and final message was a total bombshell that rattled Jack to his core. Naomi detailed her meeting with a woman who had taken her out to Roosevelt Island. There, the woman had shown Naomi the newly buried corpse of Arjeta Kraja. The implication was that the two men had buried her. Had the Arab killed her or had McKinsey? Impossible to tell. Naomi said the woman had mentioned Arjeta’s sisters, Edon and Liridona, both of whom, it appeared, she knew, and who seemed somehow important. The sisters knew a secret, most probably concerning Arian Xhafa or his network. The woman said the Krajas lived in the Albanian coastal city of Vlorë. Liridona was presumably still there, but Edon had run away, probably from Xhafa’s men.

Possibly to better allow him to absorb her news, Naomi left the identity of her mysterious benefactor until the end, but when Jack heard Annika’s name his blood ran cold. He sat down on a tree stump. His heart was racing; he felt icy hot, a sensation that threatened to annihilate his thought processes.

Annika had resurfaced, and, of all places, in Washington. Then he heard Naomi in her last line: “I think she’s behind everything, and she knows where you are.”

Jack, realizing that he’d been holding his breath, struggled to get oxygen into his lungs. He felt as if he were trapped underwater. He tried to calm himself, to figure out what the hell was going on, but it was as if his brain had shut down. Annika, the rogue Russian FSB agent whose life he had saved, only to find out that she was not FSB and the man he thought he’d saved her from was a confederate of hers. She had been working for her grandfather, Dyadya Gourdjiev, all along. He’d accepted that because for a brief time, at least, he and Gourdjiev were on the same side. He’d been powerfully attracted to Annika from the moment they’d first met in the bar of his Moscow hotel last year. And that attraction had turned into a love he’d believed was mutual until on his last day in Moscow he’d received an e-mail from her telling him that she had killed Senator Berns, a murder that had created a political firestorm and had been the starting point of Jack’s investigation into political corruption at the highest level in both the American and the Russian governments.

I neither regret what I did nor feel pride in it, she had written. In peace as in war sacrifices must be made, soldiers must fall in order for battles to be won—even, or perhaps especially, those that are waged sub rosa, in the shadows of a daylight only people like us notice.

So you hate me now, which is understandable and inevitable, but you know me, what I can’t stand is indifference, and now, no matter what, you’ll never be indifferent to me.

God damn her, he thought now. He put his head in his hands. Over the intervening months he had tried to put her out of his mind.

My grandfather warned me not to tell you, but I’m breaking protocol because there’s something you have to know; it’s the reason I haven’t come, why I won’t come no matter how long you wait, why I’m not being melodramatic when I say that we must never see each other again.

Her involvement all but paralyzed him. It threw the entire scenario into another arena entirely, and all at once, pieces, tiny and disparate, began to fall into place. Another murder that set an entire group of people into motion, most notably him—and Alli. Could this be another elaborately staged setup choreographed by Annika? It had her hallmarks, certainly, but there were marked differences, not the least of which was the brutal torture of Billy Warren. That wasn’t Annika at all. Her rage at her father had exploded quickly and definitively. Annika had been the victim of physical abuse; there was no circumstance under which Jack could imagine her torturing someone, unless the person had done grievous bodily harm to her or to someone she loved. This was not Billy Warren’s profile.

All at once, he became aware that Paull had broken away from Alli and the girl, and was standing beside him.

“Everything all right?”

“Fine,” Jack muttered.

“You look as if someone just walked over your grave.”

All Jack could manage was a wan smile.

Paull cleared his throat. “Listen, I’m useless here,” he said. “If I’m being perfectly honest with myself, worse than useless. I almost got us all killed.”

“Could have happened to anyone,” Jack said.

Paull smiled and clapped Jack on the shoulder. “You’re a good friend. I appreciate the support, but you’ll have to continue on without me.” His eyes cut away for a moment. “The truth is my field days are behind me. I’ve lost the feel. Wet work takes a different kind of person than I’ve become. My years behind a desk have changed me, Jack. Like it or not, my expertise is now in lending my people tactical support and protecting the missions against political meddling. Believe me when I tell you that I can be of more help to you in D.C.”

Jack nodded. It was difficult to argue against his friend’s assessment.

Paull indicated the girl with the porcelain skin. “I think you’d best take a listen to what Edon has to say.”

Instantly, Jack pricked up his ears. “What did you say her name was?”

“Edon.” Paull looked perplexed. “Edon Kraja.”

*   *   *

The best way to lead a man unwittingly to his death is with a beautiful girl. This was a motto Gunn had lived by during the time he’d toiled in the spook shadows. It was a method old as time, but that was what made it virtually infallible. Occasionally, he’d had to substitute a beautiful boy for a beautiful girl, but the mechanism remained the same.

Vera Bard was still a day away from returning to Fearington from her weeklong medical leave, and he called her. Of course she said yes, this venture was right up Vera’s twisted little alley. He gave her her instructions.

“How long will it take you?” he said.

“I’m not far away,” Vera said. “Forty minutes max.”

Forty minutes later, he took the stairs down from the official Fortress offices to the auxiliary office used by Blunt between assignments. Try as he might, he could never get used to Blunt’s new legend name, Willowicz.

Blunt was making coffee, or what passed for it in this stinking hole.

“I’ve got a job for you and O’Banion.”

“It had better pay well,” Blunt said, “I’ve got gambling debts up the wazoo.”

“As a matter of fact, it does,” Gunn said. “It’s a rush job—gotta be done today.”

“I don’t like rush jobs—they have a nasty habit of turning out messy.”

Gunn was anticipating his answer. “How’s triple your fee grab you?”

“Right in the nuts. Who, where, and when?”

Gunn gave him the particulars and left. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough, but he didn’t go back to his office. He had another destination. He had pondered his plan in agonizing detail ever since his thoroughly unpleasant meeting with Pawnhill. He was dealing with ghosts—very dangerous ghosts who between them had been responsible for twenty kills, possibly more. He wondered fleetingly whether Pawnhill had any idea of what a difficult assignment he’d given him. Knowing the bastard, he didn’t give a shit. Pawnhill wanted what he wanted; Pawnhill knew he was in no position to defy him.

Someday, he thought, he was going to get out from under Pawnhill’s thumb. But, sadly, that day was not today.

*   *   *

“The school was nothing more than a front,” Edon said. “There are six orphans here—enough to keep the illusion going. The rest of us are like me—girls sold into slavery by their parents, or snatched off the streets. Either way, no one is looking for us.”

They had taken the children down from the burning, ruined school, out of Tetovo, and into the deepest part of the first-growth woods to the northwest, where, safely far enough from civilization, they made temporary camp in a small clearing. Thatë sent his remaining men out to gather wood for a fire. Restless, he put himself on guard duty, walking the perimeter.

Edon’s eyes searched Jack’s. “This is how it is, no danger to Xhafa or his people.”

“How about when he moves the girls around?”

Edon gave a bitter laugh. “He uses bribes and payoffs to local officials. You have to admire the machine Xhafa has put together. And he’s got something on everyone. The officials are taped taking their bribes—money, or sex from the little girls. I’ve seen some of the tapes because Xhafa would play them for his men while they drank and laughed. They were awful, disgusting—impossible to describe. Animals behave better. Afterward, Xhafa’s men would rape us, over and over.

“For the girls, this was nothing new. The idea is to break their spirit. They’re treated like trash, used and beaten. They’re starved if they resist, and God help them if they rebel. They’re tied up in a lightless room, beaten, drugged, and gang-raped. The real hard cases are shot up with heroin. Once hooked, they become instantly compliant; they’ll do anything for their next fix.”

She recited this litany of horror with an eerily detached voice, as if she were talking about a movie she had seen. But Alli was white-faced with rage. Jack could feel her trembling beside him.

“This happened to you?” Alli said in a hoarse voice.

“I was smarter than them,” Edon said. “I did what was asked of me, I ingratiated myself with them, just as Arjeta had done. I became a favorite, they fell in love with my face instead of my body. Oh, occasionally one of them would try to rape me, but Arian always stopped them. Once, he beat his own man to a bloody pulp and no one came near me again.”

Alli let out a long-held breath, but her fists were still tightly clenched and her eyes seemed to throw out sparks.

“Speaking of Xhafa,” Jack said, “when did you last see him?”

“Days ago,” Edon replied, “a week or more.”

“But one of his men said he’d left the school only a half hour or so before the attack.”

“He’s lying,” Edon said. “I saw him leave.”

There was no mistaking her certainty. Jack admired her core of inner strength. He wondered whether that was a trait all three sisters possessed. And that thought brought him to the question of whether or not this was the right moment to tell Edon that one of her sisters had been murdered. Deciding that there was no good time for that kind of news, he determined to tell her. But first he needed to ask her a question.

“Alli and I are friends of Annika’s.” He sensed Alli’s instant consternation, but she had the good sense to keep her mouth shut. “She’s mentioned your name.”

Edon’s face lit up. “You know Annika? That’s fantastic. My sisters and I love her.”

“How do you know her?”

Edon frowned. “Arjeta met her first, I think. Father has a terrible sickness—he can’t stop gambling. We were always in debt, sometimes horribly so. One time a representative of Xhafa’s came to him. He paid off his debt by selling Arjeta. Then it was my turn. By that time, Arjeta had become Dardan Xhafa’s favorite, and when Dardan was sent to America, Arjeta went with him.”

That explained a lot, Jack thought. More pieces of the puzzle falling into place, bringing with them a new and expanded view of the picture. Annika had been in Washington recently. A coincidence? He didn’t think so.

“Why did Annika contact Arjeta?”

“She wanted her to spy on Xhafa. If she did, Annika said, she’d make sure Arjeta would be free of Xhafa forever.”

And now Arjeta was, Jack thought, though not in the way Annika must have meant. And all at once, another possible piece slipped into place and he excused himself, went off alone, took out the cell phone Alli had taken from the locked drawer in Henry Holt Carson’s desk, and fired it up. Only two numbers in the directory, one marked A, the other D. Neither were U.S. numbers.

Could it be? he wondered. He pressed the key to dial the number attributed to A. After what seemed like an eternity, the connection went through and he heard it ring three, four, five times. No voice mail was engaged.

He was about to hang up when he heard her voice, and with his heart in his throat, said, “Hello, Annika.”

*   *   *

The moment Gunn left, Willowicz contacted O’Banion. He had finished brewing the coffee. It looked like sludge, but with six teaspoons of sugar, it tasted fine.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting laid,” O’Banion barked. “What the fuck d’you want?”

“Gunn.” He gulped down the coffee, savoring the intense sweetness along with the acid bite. “We have a job.”

“I told you.” O’Banion let out a series of rhythmic grunts. “I’m busy.”

Willowicz put the mug in the stainless-steel sink. The incriminating substances that had gone down its drain, he thought. “Triple our usual fee.”

“That should’ve been your lead.” O’Banion was breathing hard. “I’m in.”

“And now you need to get out.”

O’Banion wheezed a laugh, then let out a long, drawn-out groan. Willowicz heard a loud noise, then nothing.

“O’Banion?”

After a moment: “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I dropped the fucking phone.”

“That good, huh?”

“Meet?”

Willowicz gave him his instructions. “One hour,” he concluded. “Don’t be late.”

“When am I ever?”

Willowicz cut the connection, grabbed the paraphernalia he’d need, jammed it into the voluminous inside pockets of his custom-made overcoat, and went out into the hallway. As he pressed the call button for the elevator he thought about his partnership with O’Banion. It went back many years. Sometimes it seemed as if they had plowed through every shithole backwater of the Middle East, had climbed every dust-strewn mountain, stuck their necks out in every cave, and blown up half the Taliban. And still they came, like cockroaches overrunning an open box of sugar. He and O’Banion shared everything, there were no secrets in the mountains of Afghanistan and Western Pakistan where they had plied their bloody trade. They were closer than brothers; there wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do for each other.

But all bloody things come to an abrupt end. At some point, he and O’Banion had said fuck it. They had salted away enough money and they were tired of offing ignorant fanatics. Time for a change of scene. Which was when they’d come home, and almost immediately had hooked up with Gunn. He had shit for brains, just like all the ex-Marines who were now milking the government for millions. What they were doing wasn’t exactly rocket science. All you needed to do was produce torture and death, no questions asked, and the money showered down like manna. Oh, yeah, you needed the one thing he and O’Banion didn’t have—political connections. Gunn had them in spades, example in point: Henry Holt Carson’s patronage. On the other hand, as shit-for-brains bosses went, they could’ve done a lot worse than Gunn. At least he paid them top dollar, and he’d always been straight with them.

The elevator was still on the top floor. Cursing under his breath, he turned to the stairs door, pulled it open, and started down. Swinging around the landing, he saw a woman on the floor below. She was bending over, after having cracked off a heel of her lace-up boots. She was wearing a breathtakingly short skirt under which he could see that she was wearing nothing at all. Immediately, his second brain—the tiny, reptilian thing low down in his body—was activated. He felt a stirring in his trousers and, licking his lips, he strolled down the stairs.

She heard him coming and whipped upright. As she turned around to face him, he saw that her cheeks were flaming. She was hot—dark and exotic-looking. He thought she might be Eurasian.

“Good Lord,” she said, “how long have you been there?”

“Don’t worry.” He grinned. “Your secrets are safe with me.”

At which her cheeks continued to redden, which inflamed him all the more.

“Can I help you?” he asked before she could reply.

“Damn five-inch heels.” She held out the one that had broken off.

“I think you’d better take off your boots,” he said. And then with a wry smile, “Or I could carry you down.”

“That’s all right,” she said hastily. And, unlacing the boots, she handed them to him. “Would you be a gentleman?”

The moment he took them from her, the door to the hallway opened, Gunn came silently through, armed with a handgun fitted with a noise suppressor. Maybe Willowicz saw something in Vera’s eyes, but he was too besotted with her, and his reflexes failed him. He was in the process of turning when Gunn shot him twice; once in the back, once in the head.

Vera’s fuck-me boots clattered to the raw concrete. Stepping over the corpse, she picked them up. As she brushed past Gunn, she said, “You owe me a new pair of Louboutins.”

*   *   *

Something, perhaps his reptilian brain, remained alive after the girl and his murderer had left. His heart was barely beating and he lacked any sense of where he was. Nevertheless, the organism knew it was dying. This is, in the end, what separates man from beast. The foreknowledge of death.

Blunt or Willowicz or whatever his name really was became dimly aware of his cell phone lying against his cheek. It must have dropped out of his pocket when he fell. The shot to his back had severed major nerves. His legs felt paralyzed. He could scarcely move a muscle, yet he had just enough life left in him to move one finger. Trembling, it struck the side of the phone. As if on its own, it moved a fraction to the left and hit the autodial key.

The call went through and O’Banion’s voice echoed in the staircase.

“Willowicz? Hello? Willowicz?”

Blunt’s lips moved, forming pink bubbles that looked like membranes. Three times he tried to speak and failed. Then, at last, as the light began to fade, as even he lost his desperate hold on life, he managed two agonized words.

“He’s coming.”

24

“What are you doing with this phone, Jack?”

“Calling you, apparently. I assume the other number on it will connect me with Dyadya Gourdjiev.”

Annika sighed in his ear. “It would have, yes. Unfortunately, my grandfather is in the hospital.”

“Don’t worry,” Jack said, “the old boy’s too tough to die.”

There was a small silence, during which Jack saw Alli watching him like a hawk. He tried to smile, but it came out a grimace, which only amped her obvious anxiety.

As if divining the direction of his thoughts, Annika said, “How is Alli?”

“I think you know as well as I do.”

“I miss her.”

“I doubt that.”

“Now you’re being peevish. I’ve never made a secret how I feel about her.”

“Annika, you’re keeping one secret after another.”

Her laugh sounded forced, a small explosion of mixed emotions. “It’s true.”

Jack felt tongue-tied. He had been certain he’d never see or speak to Annika again, and here he was on the phone with her.

“Don’t come after me, you wrote me,” he said, “don’t try to find me.”

“And now I’ve found you. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Jack?”

He wasn’t able to reply.

“Did Emma warn you I would come back into your life?”

Jack’s heart turned over. He recalled his conversation with Emma, her telling him that she wasn’t a seer. And yet, she had spoken of his continuing connection with Annika.

“Something like that.”

“She’s a smart girl.”

He was gripped by a sudden selfish impulse to sever the connection, but instead squeezed his eyes shut.

“What do you want, Annika?”

“What I’ve always wanted, Jack. To win.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh, but you do. I need you, Jack. I need you and Alli.”

His eyes snapped open and he looked at Alli, who was standing not twenty feet away. She was staring at him, her head cocked to one side. At that moment, she looked so small, infinitely fragile. Damaged. Just like Annika was damaged. And for the first time, the thought hit him: Was Alli on her way to becoming another Annika? God forgive him, if that were true.

“Jack, I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating now. We’re all soldiers in the night, and because of this, like it or not, we’re pawns. No matter how strong we are, no matter how powerful our mentors and friends, there are always forces that wield more power. The more powerful they are, the deeper their cover. So on the surface this shadow war we wage seems impossible to win. We’ll always be defeated by those deeply hidden forces, no? But you and I know there is a path to beating them, because we know that the deeper these forces are buried the more secrets they hold. We only need one of those secrets to defeat them, yes?”

Jack, still staring at Alli, said, “That’s right, Annika.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said at length.

“What question?”

“How did you get this phone?”

“You mean Henry Holt Carson’s phone?”

Silence.

“What do you and Carson have going?” Jack said.

“It seems we both have questions that need answers.”

“Yes, we do.”

“So, then, we are agreed,” Annika said. “It’s time we met.”

*   *   *

“How can you rely on a…”

“On a woman?” the Syrian said to Arian Xhafa.

“And look at how she’s dressed!”

The Syrian chuckled. “Indecent, isn’t it?”

They were sitting in the garden at the rear of the walled compound. It was large, planted with citrus and fig trees that were burlaped in the winter in order to protect them from frost. There was also an enormous oak whose sturdy branches spread cooling shade. Benches were strewn around at strategic locations to capture the sunlight and shade, depending on the season. The two men sat on one, a bowl of fresh fruit between them. The rain had ceased and one of the guards had dutifully wiped down the bench, making it ready for them. Other guards armed with AK-47s were stationed at each corner, backs against the concrete walls, but they were too far away to overhear the conversation, which was, in any event, conducted in hushed tones.

“You are a good Muslim, I myself have seen examples of this more than once,” Xhafa said. “And yet you allow a woman—a Western infidel at that!—such license and power. It is, frankly, a mystery I cannot comprehend.”

Overhead, the low clouds were being stripped away by a westerly wind, revealing tatters of pearlescent blue sky.

“Caroline is a closely held secret, that much is true.” The Syrian picked out a fig, popped it into his mouth, and chewed reflectively. “Listen to me, Xhafa, because I will only say this once. At first blush, it may sound like heresy, so if you repeat it to anyone I’ll deny it.” He paused, allowing the small silence to indicate the other consequence for Xhafa. “There is a fundamental flaw in Islam and it is this: Unlike the other major religions of the world, Islam can find no place for itself in the modern world. It is hidebound, Xhafa, bent on turning back a clock that cannot be tampered with. No matter how many infidels we kill, no matter how many terrorist attacks we launch, we cannot return the world to the way it was centuries ago. We cannot destroy modern culture any more than we can destroy time. To continue to do so is to become Don Quixote, tilting at Western windmills. Defeat and madness are the only possible results.”

Xhafa was silent. Not daring to meet the Syrian’s eyes, he stared fixedly at the bowl of fruit, which now seemed to him to be seeping a dark, viscous poison. He watched, almost paralyzed, as the Syrian’s hand dipped into the bowl.

“Here is a blood orange,” the Syrian said, holding the fruit on his fingertips. “Shall we bite into it now? Of course not. The bitter skin will spoil the sweet meat inside. However—” Here he began to peel the skin off. “—if we are insightful enough to pare away the bitter coat, see what delight awaits us.” He broke off two sections, offered one to Xhafa, then took the other between his lips, chewed, and swallowed.

“Now think of Caroline Carson as this blood orange. If I had insisted she cover herself up in the strict Islamic tradition, I would never have found the delightful skills awaiting me.” He peeled off another segment and ate it. “And just as this orange is a metaphor for Caro, so, too, is Caro a metaphor for modern Western culture. It isn’t evil, it does not want to destroy us. This is the argument used by the fanatics among us—and believe me, Xhafa, when I tell you that fanatics are the same the world over. They cannot cope with reality, so they retreat to their mountain lairs and strike out at everyone and everything that had cast them out.”

Another segment disappeared into his mouth, while Xhafa still held his as if it might come alive and bite him.

“But there is evil in the world—plenty of it. Correctly identifying it is the real trick. There are individuals who are evil, individuals who want to destroy us, and it is here that we can make our mark, it is here where we can do some good, it is here we will find success.”

His eyes lowered to the piece of blood orange Xhafa still held. “So here’s what I say to you, Xhafa. Either you believe me, or you don’t. Either you eat that, or I will.”

Xhafa did not move, did not utter a sound. But when the Syrian tried to pluck the blood orange from his fingers, he resisted.

The Syrian’s frightening gaze was insistent, pitiless. “Now is the time, Xhafa. There will be no other.”

*   *   *

Before Major General Peter Conover Hains designed the Tidal Basin, and it was installed, Washington’s drainage problems were so monumental that on certain dog days, when the air was still and leaden, the stench from the marshes on which the city was built was overwhelming. The major general died in 1921, but his name lives on in Hains Point, a spit of land at the confluence of the Potomac River and the Washington Channel. The point is actually at the southern tip of East Potomac Park. Quite fittingly, it overlooks both Fort McNair and the National War College, which are across the channel on the eastern shore.

It was to Hains Point that Gunn had directed Willowicz and O’Banion.

Who has more fun than I do? Vera Bard thought as she drove into East Potomac Park. Gunn was curled inside the trunk of the Saab. He’d very cleverly rigged a cord that would keep the trunk from popping open yet afford him enough fresh air.

She drove slowly and carefully while her mind turned over the sequence of events and her part in them as Gunn had outlined them to her. She only had to be told once; she was an instant study. This ability would have vaulted her to the top of her class at Fearington were it not for Alli Carson. No matter what she tried her hand at, Alli always did her one better. Though they were roommates and Vera made certain that they became friends, she deeply and irrevocably envied Alli. And, with Vera’s psyche, it didn’t take long for envy to curdle into hate. Of course, she told all this to Gunn, and, at some point—she could not now recall precisely when—he had taken more than a passing interest in her roommate. Then, a week ago, he’d asked her if she’d like an assignment. Intrigued, she’d said yes. That was how Alli’s fingerprints had gotten onto the vial of roofies, the contents of which Vera had taken herself.

Not a problem. She was used to self-abuse, having spent her prepubescent years cutting herself on her inner thighs so as not to be caught. She had had constant weight problems, and self-image discrepancies. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw a fat clown, or worse, a misshapen reflection in a funhouse mirror. She used to have nightmares about the awkwardness of her physicality. Her sleeping mind constructed a haunted house so vast it became an entire world. It was festooned with staircases that went sideways as well as up and down, contained rooms that changed shape and content each time she entered them, foiled her at every turn. She came back time after time. Sometimes it was a school, at other times a hotel, an office, or apartment building, though from the outside it always looked like Norman Bates’s Victorian house in Psycho.

When she was seven, she had spied on her father fucking his protégé in the master bedroom, though neither of them ever knew. All she could think of that night was the woman leaving her intimate spoor on the sheets for Vera’s mother to lie in. She got sick twice. Once she made it to the toilet in time, once she didn’t.

Understandably, then, she cleaved to her mother. When her father complained to his wife of his daughter’s coldness, she replied that it was only natural for daughters to bond with their mothers. To which he’d replied, I wish we’d had a son.

Time passed, but Vera’s nausea at life did not. On the contrary, it grew like an infestation, infecting her with its poison until she had only her mother in whom she could find comfort. Understandably, she hated boys, and she found the girls at school shallow. Friendships with them were, in her opinion, senseless.

Inevitably, she got into trouble, mostly fistfights with girls in her class who teased her, but occasionally boys, too. After her first bloody nose, she befriended a Thai girl who was a kickboxer. Her mother was surprised when Vera brought home the Thai girl, even more so when her daughter asked to take kickboxing lessons. She happily gave her money and her blessing. Six months later, Vera sought out the boy who’d bloodied her nose. She let him pick a fight with her, then nearly stove in the side of his head with her first kick.

That little stunt got her suspended for thirty days and a visit to the school shrink, but it was worth it. No one ever bothered her again. Better still, she got an insight into how to turn her loathing of males to her advantage. She now evoked in them fear and awe, vulnerabilities she quickly learned to exploit. As she began to manipulate the boys in her class—and, increasingly, older ones—her self-image reversed itself. Now she could look at herself in the mirror and instead of cringing see what she was really made of. She was a beautiful girl, but not in that icky girl-next-door way. She exuded sex appeal; it oozed through her pores like attar. And the boys were drawn to her like bees to a just-opened flower.

And then, one day, the ultimate betrayal: Her mother suffered an aneurism and died instantly. She had been making breakfast for Vera, had just set down a plate of blueberry pancakes. She kissed her daughter on the top of her head, said, Eat up or you’ll be late for school, turned around, and simply collapsed onto the kitchen floor. No blood, no pulse. Emptiness.

Vera went into shock and was still sedated in the hospital when her mother was buried. Afterward, she was so infuriated that she never went to her mother’s grave. She never spoke about her again to her father, or to anyone. Outwardly, it was as if she had never existed, but inside, the grieving never ceased, the wound festered, never healed; it continued to bleed into her own life, altering it forever.

All this flashed through her mind as she drove through East Potomac Park, where her mother had often taken her on sunny Saturdays and Sundays, while her father worked or was out of town. It had always been a special place to her, the place where her dream house was situated, where it still abided somewhere in the recesses of her subconscious.

She passed the place where her hands had become sticky while slurping down a chocolate ice-cream cone, and there was the spot she had fallen while running and skinned her right knee and elbow, and over there, where the weird sculpture of The Awakening used to be coming out of the ground was where she had been stung by a wasp. The pain had been intense but she hadn’t cried. She never cried. Crying was for people without backbones, people who hadn’t screwed up their courage and found their way through her Norman Bates haunted house.

Seeing the man who fit Gunn’s description of O’Banion, she slowed. He turned as he became aware of the car approaching.

“He’s expecting his partner, so he’ll be surprised to see you,” Gunn had told her. “He’s sure to be on edge. In order to allay any suspicion, make sure you stop well before you get close to him. At that point, you can go to work.”

Under O’Banion’s stern and unflinching gaze, she stopped the car, turned off the ignition, and got out. As she did so, he produced a Glock 17, fitted with a AAC Evolution 9mm suppressor.

Vera held up her hands, palms outward. “Gunn sent me.”

“Wrong answer.” O’Banion gestured with the Glock. “Get your ass over here.”

She did as he ordered; her heart rate accelerated. Something’s wrong here, she thought. He’s reacting negatively to Gunn’s name. That can’t be good.

When she was close enough, O’Banion grabbed her and pressed the working end of the suppressor against her temple. Then he expertly patted her down with his free hand. He spent an inordinate time checking between her thighs.

“I’m not carrying.” She was thinking as fast as she could. “I’m Andy’s girlfriend, that’s all.” When playing for time, tell the truth.

“So why are you here?”

“Your friend, Willowicz”—she looked at him with a doe’s expression—“that’s his name, right?”

“What about him?”

“He’s had an accident. Andy’s with him in the ER at George Washington. He sent me to get you.”

A crack had appeared in O’Banion’s suspicion. “What the hell happened?”

“Apparently, the elevator was out. He took the stairs and fell. I don’t know, maybe he tripped or something.”

“But our assignment.”

“Canceled or postponed or something.”

“Why didn’t Gunn call me?”

“No cells allowed in the ER.”

O’Banion watched her, clouds of indecision forming on his brow.

Vera put all the urgency at her disposal into her voice. “I think your friend is hurt bad. Andy said you should come right now.”

O’Banion studied her face for several more seconds. Then he put away the Glock. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Vera turned and walked as steadily as she could back to the car where Gunn waited, curled like a serpent in the trunk.

“What happened to your shoes?” O’Banion said.

“When I was a kid, my mother took me here on weekends. The first thing I did when I got here was to take off my shoes.”

O’Banion shook his head. “Fucking women.”

*   *   *

Caroline took a tiny gold key from around her neck, inserted it into the lock on the bottom left-hand drawer of her desk. Inside was a large book with a moss-green cover on which was affixed an illustration of a tumbledown shop on a tumbledown block. It was an old book, much worn, thumbed-through, and read. Its title was The Little Curiosity Shop, a heavily illustrated children’s book, full of stories of fayries and magick. Caroline pressed her palm against the cover, caressing it, as she often did when she was absolutely certain that she was alone. She had read it so often she could still recite whole sections from memory.

Locking the book away, she got up from her computer workstation and stretched. Ever since the Syrian had returned with Arian Xhafa in tow she’d found it difficult to concentrate. Walking into the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. She was the only one in the compound allowed to drink; she was the only one who wasn’t Muslim. She enjoyed drinking in front of them, just as she got a kick out of dressing as she wanted. The Syrian was lenient, even Western in his views, but she knew not to push him past a certain point. She was valuable to him—more valuable than a platoon of suicide bombers—but that didn’t mean she could do whatever she pleased. Everyone had boundaries here, even him.

Popping the top of her beer she went and leaned against the sink, her ankles crossed as she stared out the window at the two men sitting side by side in the garden. She did not need to hear their conversation to know its subject. Xhafa, like all his kind, hated women. He disguised the hatred by wrapping it in religious text, but his prejudice was plain to her all the same. She’d had a great deal of experience with men’s hatred of women—their abuse, both psychological and physical, their contempt, their complete and utter dismissal. To Xhafa and men like him women were an inferior form of human being, a second-class citizen meant for breeding or, far worse, receptacles for the release of men’s pleasure.

She watched the pantomime for a while, providing the words she could not hear. When Arian Xhafa placed the segment of blood orange in his mouth, she laughed silently.

*   *   *

In the firelight, the blood looked black. Jack ached all over, but otherwise he felt okay. He sat on a tree stump near the fire Thatë’s men had started. The heat felt good on his back. Alli, kneeling beside him, rummaged in her backpack for the first-aid kit.

When she opened it, she said, “Shit, the gauze is sopping wet.”

“Those kits are supposed to be waterproof,” Paull said, peering over her shoulder.

Her fingers ran around the rim. “One of the hinges is broken,” she said. “That’s how the water seeped in when I slipped in the river.” She plucked out a small tube. “The Krazy Glue’s fine, but we still need something to bind Jack’s wound.”

The bullet had torn a more or less horizontal strip out of Jack’s side. The wound wasn’t deep, but if it wasn’t treated there was the danger of infection. Alli cleaned the wound with alcohol and waited for it to dry. Then she handed the tube to Jack.

Jack looked at Paul. “We have to get these children to a place of safety.”

“There isn’t one anywhere near here,” Alli said.

Paull nodded. “We’ll take them on the plane.”

Jack’s face clouded. “If you take them back to the States they’re going to run afoul of INS, which, these days, is nothing more than a pack of jackals on the hunt for aliens they can imprison or deport so it can look good with Homeland Security.”

Paull grinned. “Then I’ll just have to circumvent INS, won’t I?”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“These days INS has its nose stuck up Homeland Security’s ass,” Paull said. “I put up Hank Dickerson to replace me. He’ll do what I ask him to do.”

Alli called Jack’s attention back to the wound. While she held the two sides of the wound together, Jack applied a thin line of glue. She kept the pressure on while Jack capped the tube.

“Hurt much?” she said.

Jack smiled at her.

“We still need to protect it or it might open and start bleeding all over again.”

“I can help with that.” Edon turned her back to them, slipped her shirt over her head, and, using her teeth, began to tear it into long strips.

Jack’s head came up, his eyes fixed on the burnished skin of her back. “Wait a minute.” He stood up and went over to her. Covering her breasts, she began to turn around, but he said, “No, stay right where you are.”

He turned her slightly so that her back was more in the light cast by the flames. He touched her tenderly.

“Where did you get these scars?”

“I was punished. Once.”

“Who did this?” Though the scars were fresh, their length, the pattern was identical to those on Annika’s back. “Who punished you?”

“Arian Xhafa himself,” Edon said. “This is his mark, his punishment.”

Jack felt all the breath go out of him as everything fell into place. No wonder Annika was so interested in coming after Arian Xhafa—it was he who had marked her, just as he had marked this girl. Jack put his hand to his head. Every time he thought he had come to the core of Annika, another layer of secrets and lies was revealed.

God help Arian Xhafa, he thought.

25

The Syrian tilted his face up toward the sun. “Pity about Oriel Jovovich Batchuk,” he said. “We had a lucrative deal with him, and once he became Russia’s deputy prime minister he was our best single customer.”

Xhafa shot him a glance. “That was months ago. We’ve replaced him ten times over.”

“Ah, but Batchuk was also the father of Annika Dementieva, and she is so very special.”

Xhafa shifted uncomfortably on the hardwood bench.

The Syrian knew better than anyone the relationship between Dementieva and Xhafa, though “relationship” was an inadequate term to describe what had happened between them. The knowledge sickened him; it was no surprise that their hatred for one another knew no bounds; Xhafa was obsessed with her. This enmity would prove dangerous for him if he allowed Xhafa to go after her. Xhafa wasn’t exactly rational when it came to the subject of Annika Dementieva. He and Xhafa were tied together through Gemini Holdings, the shell corporation that Caroline, in her genius, had set up for them to make their international deals legitimate. He was at risk as long as Annika remained alive. Though Caro had assured him that no one could trace either of them back to Gemini, he was not at all certain that included Annika and her devil of a grandfather.

Caro was incredibly smart and incredibly proficient at whatever she set her hand to; he had seen that for himself many times over. She was an autodidact—she had taught herself pretty much everything she knew about business, computer programming, and the Internet. He was stunned at what she could accomplish at her workstation.

“You must let it go, Arian. This is business. You must leave Dementieva to me,” the Syrian said now. “You need to keep your eyes on the prize—and on Jack McClure. The magnitude of his interference is an unexpected complication.”

Xhafa sighed. “I suppose I needn’t remind you it was through McClure that you lured Dementieva out of hiding.”

For a moment, the Syrian went dead still, and was aware of the blood draining from Xhafa’s face. Yet that wasn’t enough for him.

“When I need reminding, I’ll ask Caro.” His words were delivered with an acid bite. He realized, belatedly, that he had confided too much of his plan to his man. He bit his tongue at the mistake; he’d not make it again. No one understood his mind, save perhaps Caro. This was her true value to him, one he’d rather die with than divulge to anyone.

“Apologies,” Xhafa managed to get out, after an oppressive silence.

These were two proud men, preeminent within their own spheres. But both were acutely aware that the Syrian’s sphere was vastly larger than Xhafa’s, and sometimes this discrepancy caused friction. But managing friction was one of Xhafa’s strong suits, even if, in this case, it meant putting his tail between his legs.

“Apologies,” Xhafa said again. “The loss of my longtime base was something I never imagined.”

The sun was gone now, the shadows lengthening, the air growing cooler.

The Syrian sighed. “Sometimes it seems to me that life is constructed only of unexpected losses.” This was as far as he was prepared to go to mollify Xhafa.

*   *   *

“Habibi.”

The whispered voice from behind Caroline stopped her from returning to her work. She turned slowly, her lips turned up in a mysterious smile.

Taroq was standing in shadow, in a place where he couldn’t be seen by the two men in the garden. Like his master, he was Syrian, a distant nephew, in fact. Tall and bronzed with wide shoulders and a slender waist, he exuded a certain solidity. His full beard was light brown, almost copper-colored in sunlight, and his long eyes were gray. Still as rock, he watched her with an avidity she could feel though twelve feet separated them.

Caroline hated men, but she didn’t hate Taroq. She had cultivated him almost from the moment the Syrian had brought her to the compound. Caroline was one of those people who felt no remorse, no guilt, no sense of loyalty. She defined herself as amoral; a psychiatrist would no doubt render a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, because her major traits fit like a glove: patterns of deceitfulness, a failure to conform to societal norms, blatant disregard for the rights and safety of others. An ignorant person might call her a psycho, but that would be a misnomer; Caroline’s disorder was far more complex.

The best thing about Taroq—besides his strength, that is—was that he was drawn to her, rather than being repulsed as the other guards clearly were. Taroq was smart enough, and close enough to his master to be curious about Western civilization—not the TV shows or films or designer clothes, but the concept of having choices. For him, Caroline presented a doorway into a new world, in more ways than one.

“We’re quite alone.” His voice was already thick with lust. He held out a hand, his need shining like a beacon in a storm. “Let’s go—”

“No.” She beckoned. “I want to look at him while we do it.”

This was apparently too much for Taroq. He stood very still and shook his head.

Caroline stared into his eyes as she began to slowly unbutton her shirt. She was wearing nothing underneath and by the fourth button the inner halves of her breasts were visible. She kept opening buttons without parting the shirt. When she was finished, she unbuttoned her jeans and slowly pulled down the zipper.

Taroq’s eyes grew wide; she was naked underneath.

Her arms hung at her sides. Some mysterious inner working rolled the tiny swell of her belly.

“Come,” she said, and Taroq was compelled to do as she commanded.

*   *   *

Gunn, curled in the trunk of Vera’s car, heard the doors open, then felt the weight of two people getting into the car. This indicated that Vera had been successful in luring O’Banion. He turned and, pulling open the Saab’s pass-through from the trunk to the backseat, he crawled through, only to find O’Banion on the backseat, pointing a suppressed Glock at his face.

“Howdy-do, Gunn.” O’Banion’s grin was chilling. “You proved yourself to be a snake just like all the rest of your kind. I don’t think snakes live very long, but in any case longer than you.”

Gunn wanted to say something—anything—but, frankly, he was speechless. How had the bastard known? Willowicz was dead, so that left Vera. Where the hell was she? Probably cut and run. That fucking bitch!

O’Banion took possession of Gunn’s Sig Sauer and stuck it in his waistband without taking his eyes off his adversary. “Believe me, it’s going to be a pleasure watching your head fly apart.”

At that moment, Vera’s head popped up above the front seat back. She had something stretched between her hands—the long lace from one of her boots. Before O’Banion could pull the trigger, she whipped the lace over his head and across his throat. Then she pulled mightily.

O’Banion’s body lurched up with his head and the shot he squeezed off reflexively buried itself in the seat back ten inches from Gunn’s left shoulder. Gunn grabbed the suppressor despite how hot it was in an attempt to wrest it from O’Banion’s grip.

In the front seat, Vera had her feet braced against the seat back and was pulling with all her strength. O’Banion’s face was dangerously engorged as blood pooled with nowhere to go. His free hand was clawing at the lace, but it was one of those new ones that were round and waxed, so his fingers couldn’t get a decent purchase.

Gunn pried one of O’Banion’s fingers off the grip, then bent it backward until it cracked like a rifle shot. O’Banion grunted, but would not cede control of the 9mm.

“Fuck you, Gunn,” he said in a strangled voice. “Fuck you and your little bitch.”

Abandoning his futile attempt to free himself, he chopped down onto Gunn’s wrist with the edge of his free hand, and Gunn’s arm went numb. From behind him, Vera uttered a guttural noise in the back of her throat. Lunging forward, she bit off the top half of O’Banion’s right ear. He howled in shock and pain, and in that instant, Gunn was able to gain control of the 9mm. He turned it and shot without bothering to aim.

The bullet slammed into O’Banion’s left shoulder. Blood was now streaming down the side of his face and along his arm.

“That all you got, shithole?” O’Banion could scarcely speak, but his eyes seemed alight with an unearthly glow. “You and the bitch’ll have to do better than that.”

The next shot took off the side of his head. He jerked backward, and Gunn shot him again, this time through the right eye. Blood spurted in torrents, covering him from head to toe. Bits of pink tissue and brain matter littered Vera’s cheeks.

“Jesus,” she said, as what was left of O’Banion’s head arched back at her. “Jesus Christ.”

*   *   *

Taroq’s heat threatened to scald her, or so it seemed to Caroline. He took her at the sink. As she turned her back on him, he pulled down her jeans. Bracing her elbows on the sink top, she wrapped her long fingers around the spigot. He entered her, roughly and without prelude. The first time, when he had begun to caress and fondle her, she told him to stop. Now she lifted her head to stare at the Syrian.

The rhythmic battering commenced. As usual, she felt neither pleasure nor pain. Sex was for manipulation, not ecstasy. Besides, from an early age she had been unable to lose herself in sex. She had never experienced a climax, or even anything approaching it. Sex for her was like fixing a car’s engine. Satisfaction came when the engine started up and the car began to move in the direction she desired.

Men, women, she had experimented with both—and multiple combinations—but the result was always the same. How ironic to possess a body made for sex and to feel nothing from it. That was just one of the tricks life had played on her. No remorse or guilt. For her, “cruelty” was a word without meaning. When she was a child, she had read the definitions of these words in a dictionary, but she could not get her mind around the concepts. She might as well have been reading Martian.

When she grew older, trolling through the libraries in D.C., she had read through various psychiatric texts and learned about herself, or, more accurately, learned how the world would view her if it ever got to know her. She knew then and there that job number one was to ensure that it never did. This work began with her parents. No biggie there. Her father was so preoccupied with his Machiavellian designs, not to mention his serial mistresses, he paid her scant attention. As for her mother, she was addicted to all manner of psychotropic pills, which she compounded with the precision of a bartender mixing cocktails. Each one of her powdered elixirs was dependent on the time of day and where she was in her menstrual cycle. As a result, she was uninterested in anything other than herself, though when the occasion called for it she could give a convincing performance as a good wife and mother. She had a personality as fragile as porcelain. Her father—a force of nature—had married her because of her family’s Philadelphia Main Line pedigree and connections inside the Beltway, which, in the early days, he used to brilliant advantage. That he soon crushed her with the brute force of his personality was of little matter to him. He’d gotten what he needed from her and, in all but name, had moved on.

Caroline’s teachers were more difficult to hide from. They sent her to psychologists who wanted to probe the inner workings of her mind. She spit in their faces and left school. There was no scandal, no possibility of consequence, her father saw to that. Not out of love or concern; it was a knee-jerk response.

Finally, her parents, or what passed for them, woke from their self-inflicted torpor and insisted that she “get help.” After six months of planning, while remaining unresponsive to the shrinks’ various techniques, she vanished—completely, utterly, irrevocably. It had taken her that long to ensure that when her father sent his hired minions after her, they’d never be able to find her. She used computers to help her, erasing not only her tracks, but all trace of Caroline Lynette Carson.

Taroq had the endurance of a Tantric practitioner, but she knew how to bring him to his limit. The pounding was now so intense tears rolled down her cheeks. She’d had enough of this particular scenario, so she squeezed her inner muscles with such force that Taroq emitted a deep groan, despite his innate caution. She smiled at her pale reflection in the window, superimposed over the Syrian, all unknowing, as he sat, deep in the discussion of men, to which she was excluded.

She was still a teenager when she had found the Syrian. Or perhaps he had found her, it was difficult to say. The point was that they had discovered a common ground, a place where the chaos of life made sense to both of them. On the same wavelength, they began to work together—tentatively at first, each wary of the other. But, at length, there sprang up between them a working relationship of sorts. It was, by necessity, clandestine. Each for their own reasons, neither of them wanted the relationship known, and so it became their most closely guarded secret.

Then, either by accident or by design, someone found out about it and all hell had broken loose.

Behind her, Taroq spent himself, and with a flick of her hips and shoulders she shook him off her. His legs folded up beneath him and he slid down onto his haunches, leaning against her legs. Without either thought or emotion, she ran her fingers through the moist warmth of his thick hair.

“Habibi,” he said, still panting, “one of these days you will surely be the death of me.”

*   *   *

Chief Detective Heroe sat in her office, for the fifteenth time poring over report after report on the three murders and the disappearance of Agent Naomi Wilde, which she believed to be the fourth murder. Her gut told her that all four were connected, and yet, she could find no tangible evidence to link them. She’d sent her people out to interview all of Warren’s friends and associates. She herself had run down his public history on government databases and had scrutinized every file on his hard drive at work. A more squeaky-clean individual would be hard to find.

This same crew was now in the process of running down all of Naomi Wilde’s friends and associates. Grabbing her coat and pocketbook, Heroe left the office, went down to her car, and took off. She was due to interview Wilde’s sister in less than an hour from now, but she doubted that would lead anywhere. The woman’s husband had just left her and she was a basket case.

She weighed the merits of making another unannounced visit to M. Bob Evrette at Middle Bay Bancorp before or after she hauled Andrew Gunn’s ass in for questioning. The forensics detail she had sent over to Middle Bay had spent hours spraying, powdering, irradiating every last goddamn thing in Billy Warren’s office. They’d found nothing, except what you’d expect to find: Warren’s own fingerprints. She looked over the list of bank personnel one more time, though what she expected to find there she couldn’t say.

This was the most damnable case she’d ever run across in her decade in the department. Heroe was something of a wunderkind at Metro. She was the youngest detective to make highest grade in the department’s history. She was such a legend that headhunters from virtually every branch of the federal clandestine services had made a play for her. She’d turned them all down, not because she wasn’t intrigued, but because she was incredibly loyal. As a female in a male-dominated universe it was of paramount importance to her to have a boss who both understood her and wasn’t intimidated by her. Alan Fraine had plucked her as a new recruit, mentored her, made sure she took all the right exams, and had protected her from the good-old-boy cabal at work in every police department that had, at first, sought to impede her progress.

She was smart enough to understand that no matter her talent and expertise, she never would have risen so high so fast were it not for Fraine’s efforts. In fact, without him, she might not have risen at all. She was what might be called a three-strike woman. Besides her gender and her mixed race, she had her physical appearance going against her. She was beautiful and built like a brick shithouse, as her granny used to say. She was part African-American, part Cherokee. She’d been born and raised in New Orleans, mostly by her granny. When she was six, her father had died in an oil rig accident—a fire on an offshore station that had left no trace of him. Her mother had tried to carry on, but Heroe’s father had been the love of her life, and she’d never recovered, spiraling down into a drunkard’s purgatory, despite her mother-in-law’s efforts. Granny, a full-blooded Cherokee, was not someone to be trifled with. She was revered in New Orleans, had often, in her younger days, been Queen of the Mardi Gras. At ninety, she still turned heads when she walked down the streets of Tremé, where she had lived all her life. Heroe got most of her looks from her granny.

When she was a kid, Granny used to tell her stories before she went to bed. Tales of Cherokee warriors and maidens, of course. But the stories Heroe loved best were the ones concerning Aladdin. She was sure Granny had made up most of them, because she was an inveterate storyteller. The story Heroe liked best concerned the genie who lights the way. This was not the famous genie in the lamp, but another one, who taught Aladdin how to see in the dark when everyone else was blind.

Fraine was her genie who lights the way.

She was no more than five minutes from Rachel Cowan’s house when her cell phone emitted a peculiar ring. She unclipped it, then saw her phone was unengaged. The ringtone continued. Rummaging in her handbag, she drew out Naomi Wilde’s cell. For a moment she stared at it, as if it had grown a head. The screen read UNIDENTIFIED CALLER. She pressed the green button and heard a man’s voice.

“Naomi?”

“No. This is Chief Detective Nona Heroe, head of the Violent Crimes Unit at Metro. Who’s calling, please?”

There was silence for so long, Heroe felt compelled to say, “Hello. Are you there?”

“This is Jack McClure. Where is Naomi and why are you answering her cell?”

*   *   *

Jack, sitting in the 737 waiting for all the children to get settled, felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. A chief detective answering Naomi’s phone could not be good news.

“… why are you answering her cell?”

“Mr. McClure, I’ve heard of you.”

“You didn’t answer my questions.” His anxiety lent him impatience.

“Agent Wilde is missing.”

“Missing?” Given her communiques while he was out of touch, that was ominous.

“We found her car. It had gone off the road, down an embankment in rural Maryland. But we didn’t find her body, nor did we find any trace that she’d been in the car when it went off the road.”

Now Jack was truly worried. “What does her partner say?”

“Frankly, Agent McKinsey hasn’t been much help, and now, thanks to the intervention of Andrew Gunn, I can’t talk to him.”

“Fortress Securities,” Jack said, “that Andrew Gunn?”

“None other.”

Gunn had ties to Henry Holt Carson. “Why wasn’t it McKinsey’s boss who extracted him?”

“A question that needs to be answered.” There was a small pause. “Listen, Mr. McClure—”

“Jack. Please.”

“Fine. I know from talking to Naomi’s associates that you and she were friends, so I’m thinking maybe I can trust you.”

“You can, Chief.”

“Cut that out. It’s Nona.”

Jack laughed. He liked this woman.

“I’m very sorry to say this, but my gut is telling me that Naomi is dead.”

Jack struggled to accept this. “What gives you that feeling?”

Heroe told him about her suspicions concerning Peter McKinsey.

“It might very well be that you’re right,” Jack said. “I’m in Macedonia. While I was out of cell range, Naomi left three voice mails and now I’m very sorry I didn’t get them until a short time ago.”

Then he told Heroe about Naomi’s suspicions regarding her partner, following him out to Teddy Roosevelt Island. He did not tell her about Annika’s possible involvement, telling himself that bringing her into it would muddy the investigation unnecessarily. Not that that wasn’t true, but for his own reasons he was determined to protect Annika until he could determine exactly what her part in all this was.

“Christ,” Heroe said, “I think I’d better haul my ass out to the island tout de suite and have a look-see.” There was a short pause. “The man who was with McKinsey, could he be this Mbreti you told me about?”

“It’s possible, but I have a feeling not. Judging from Naomi’s description this man is an Arab of some sort. The way these people work, it makes more sense that Mbreti is a Caucasian American.”

The moment the words were out of his mouth, Jack knew he’d hit upon something important, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what.

He was silent so long that Heroe said, “What is it? Have you thought of something else?”

“I’m not sure. But, listen, since it seems clear that neither Naomi nor you trust McKinsey, is there any way to track her movements in the hours before she went missing?”

Heroe sighed heavily. “Without trusting him, I don’t know how. He claimed they were following leads on how Arjeta Kraja was brought into the country. He also said the leads were dead ends. According to his account, they then went back to the office. They were exhausted, which I can believe. He said Agent Wilde said she was going home. That, I’m afraid, is the sum and substance of his account.”

“Doesn’t sound like much.”

“No,” she said, “indeed it doesn’t.”

Jack considered. “So you can’t get to him.”

“He’s become a protected entity,” she said. “Just like your friend, Alli Carson.”

Jack heard the slight rebuke in her voice. “Alli was framed. Believe me, she’s got nothing to do with this.”

“You can’t deny that her frame was the trigger for three, maybe four homicides.”

Now they were skirting too close to Annika for his comfort. “All I’m saying is that pursuing her is going in the wrong direction.”

“Agent McKinsey doesn’t think so,” Heroe said.

“Can you think of a better reason to look elsewhere?”

*   *   *

Three minutes after exchanging cell numbers with McClure, Heroe pulled up outside Rachel Cowan’s house. She figured she’d have to work ten lifetimes to afford that kind of mansion. Plus, the only black people around here were probably housekeepers and gardeners. The nannies were all young girls from Ireland or the Baltics.

She opened Naomi Wilde’s file, which she had obtained from Naomi’s superior, and read it again. Thirty-six years old, born in Wheeling, West Virginia, moved to D.C. when she was four. One living sibling, Rachel, two years her senior. Graduated with honors from Georgetown University, majoring in criminology, minoring in psychology. Tried her hand at forensic pathology before applying to the Secret Service. Partnered with Peter McKinsey for six years. Assigned to protect the FLOTUS following the election of Edward Carson a year and a half ago. Commendations, highest marks, et cetera, et cetera. Heroe decided that she was looking at the jacket of an exemplary agent, and she felt a particular pang of sorrow, of loss, as if Naomi Wilde were her own sister.

She got out of the car and, checking out the sprinkling of A-list cars, went up the steps and rang the bell. She had a flash of a uniformed maid opening the door, but it was Rachel Cowan, ragged as a battlefield pennant, who greeted her and ushered her inside.

The interior did not disappoint. It was a breathtaking display of egregious consumerism run rampant. They stood in the vast living room. Rachel was either too aggrieved or too rude to ask her to sit down. Glancing around, Heroe didn’t know whether she would want to. This level of consumerism gave her hives.

“I apologize for disturbing you at what must be a difficult time,” Heroe said.

“And yet you did.”

Not a promising beginning.

Rachel, perhaps appropriately dressed in the color of dried blood, stood with her hands clasped in front of her. There were deep circles under her eyes, which were red and raw-looking. She looked exhausted, as if she hadn’t slept in days, and her eyes kept darting here and there. Heroe wondered whether she was on some medication, or ought to be.

“No matter,” Rachel continued as if there had been no pause. “What is it you want?”

Heroe took out her pad, giving her a bit more time to assess her subject. She strongly suspected that she needed to strike the right tone to get Rachel to open up.

“I understand your sister was here to see you yesterday.”

“That’s right.” There was a wary note in her voice.

“Can you tell me about it?” Heroe said as casually as she could.

Rachel turned gimlet-eyed and she crossed her arms over her breasts. “Why? Are you investigating her or something?”

Heroe gestured. “It’s nothing like that, I assure you.”

“Because if you are, there isn’t a better or more dedicated agent in the Secret Service.”

“Your loyalty is admirable, Mrs. Cowan, and I appreciate your opinion. But not to worry, we’re interested in Naomi’s partner.”

Rachel seemed to relax somewhat. “I doubt I can help you, then. Peter stayed in the car while Naomi and I were together.”

Heroe made a notation. “You mean he drove her here?”

Rachel nodded. “That’s right.”

“So you didn’t see her car?”

“They came in one car, that much I saw, and it wasn’t hers.”

Interesting, Heroe thought. So it stands to reason that Wilde and McKinsey went from here directly to the place where she was killed, otherwise she would have retrieved her cell from her car.

“Do you know McKinsey well?”

Rachel made a sound, as if releasing a puff of air. “I don’t know him at all, beyond meeting him a couple of times.”

“Your sister never spoke to you about him?”

“Naomi never spoke to me—or anyone, for that matter—about anything pertaining to her work. She made that clear to every person she knew, including me.”

Heroe wrote that down, but she needed to be certain, so she said, “Did your sister mention Peter McKinsey yesterday in any context whatsoever?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Okay, I guess that’s it, then.” Heroe thought a minute. “By the way, Mrs. Cowan, did Naomi mention where she was going after she left you?”

“Work, she said.” Rachel shrugged. “That’s typical of her; work is where her head always is.” She said this without rancor.

Heroe looked up, her inner radar suddenly on high alert. “So she wasn’t going home.”

“No, I told you. Work, work, work.” Rachel bit her thumbnail, her eyes turned inward. “Something I’m quite certain I’m going to have to look into now.”

Heroe nodded and moved toward the entryway. “Okay, thank you, Mrs. Cowan. You’ve been very helpful.”

The compliment appeared to stir Rachel out of her dark ruminations, and she turned toward the chief detective. “Really?”

Heroe knew when to turn on her smile, whose wattage was considerable. “Really.” She paused. “By the way, did Naomi by any chance tell you where she was going, specifically?”

Rachel wrinkled her brow. “She did, actually. Now what was it?”

“You mean where she was going, specifically.”

“I said what and I meant what.” Rachel clicked her fingernails on the crown of her diamond-studded gold watch. “Let me see. What were she and I discussing? Oh, yes. The secret bank account my husband keeps. The moment I mentioned that her face lit up.” She laughed, and for a moment the years, and with them the care and worry, seemed to slip off her face. “I knew that look. I knew it would be useless to ask her to stick around.” Then she pointed. “Now you’re doing it.”

“What?”

“Lighting up like a beacon.”

With good reason.

“A bank, you say.” And Heroe thought, Middle Bay Bancorp. Bingo!

26

“Jack, I need to talk to you.”

Alli came and sat next to him. The 737 had been in the air for forty minutes. It would be less than twenty until they set down at a secured airstrip outside Vlorë. Since speaking with Chief Detective Heroe he had been sunk deep in thought. His mind wanted to go to his upcoming reunion with Annika, but it kept slipping back to Naomi. He felt her loss acutely. She had been of great help to both the FLOTUS and Alli after the accident in Moscow that had killed Edward Carson, proving herself quick-witted and unflustered by even the most grievous of events. Afterward, she had kept in touch with him. She always asked about Alli’s emotional state. He could still remember how genuinely happy she’d been by the news that Alli had decided to go to Fearington. “Finally,” she’d said, “she’s on a path that will serve her well.”

In addition, he was concerned by the widening gyre of the conspiracy he found himself investigating. The mission given Dennis Paull and, by extension, him, was on the surface a simple one: Track down and terminate Arian Xhafa. And yet, now, only days later, it wasn’t simple at all. If Naomi was dead, it was at the hands of her partner. McKinsey had been extracted from the Metro police by Andrew Gunn, not McKinsey’s boss, who had somehow been neutralized. McKinsey and Naomi had been pulled out of Secret Service and seconded to Henry Holt Carson. Why them? Was McKinsey secretly working for Carson, as Gunn seemed to be? The odds seemed to favor that theory. But how did these people tie in to Arian Xhafa and his American representative Mbreti? And then there was Annika’s involvement.

Every investigation had a trajectory, but Jack’s mind worked in three dimensions. He saw the layers at work here: Carson, Xhafa, Annika. He now knew Annika’s connection with Xhafa, but not what she had been doing in D.C. For the life of him he couldn’t see the connection between Carson, Gunn, McKinsey, and Xhafa. Was it the Stem? The sex trade? And who the hell set out to frame Alli? The puzzle, complex as it seemed, had nevertheless taken on dimension and feel. It was the context that was missing. He was too close to the trees to see the forest. He needed to pull his perspective back and look at the disparate pieces as a whole.

At the same time, another part of his mind was busy working on the name equation he suspected would lead to Mbreti’s real name. Grasi = Thatë; Mbreti = X. Despite his best efforts, it remained unsolved. And yet, he couldn’t help believing that the solution was right in front of his face. If only he could see it.

Turning his mind away from these conundrums, he smiled at Alli, grateful for the distraction. Let another part of his brain unravel them, he thought, while she engaged him in conversation.

“You’ve done extremely well with Edon,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

She seemed stunned, and sat back in the seat. “Huh! No one’s ever said that to me before.”

“I’m sorry I’m the first,” he said with a wry smile, “but I’ll have to do.”

Impulsively, she left her seat to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for believing in me.”

“Always.”

Alli returned his smile, but almost immediately she became serious. “Are you going to tell me about Annika?”

“She’s in Albania, that’s where we’re going now. The plane will drop us off, refuel, then take Paull and the children back to the States.”

“You said you’d never see her again.”

“No, honey, she said that.” He made a vague gesture. “She says she’s involved in this situation with Xhafa.”

Alli’s eyes rose to engage his. “Do you believe her?”

“I wasn’t sure—until I saw the scars on Edon’s back.”

“Yeah, they’re just like the ones on Annika’s back.” Alli licked her lips. “She’s after Arian Xhafa, isn’t she?”

He nodded. “I wouldn’t bet against it.”

“But you weren’t thinking about her when I sat down here.”

Jack sighed. “Alli, Naomi Wilde is missing. I spoke to a chief detective who thinks she’s been murdered.”

Alli’s gaze dropped to her hands, which fidgeted in her lap. “I liked Naomi,” she said after a time.

“Me, too.”

“D’you really think she’s dead?”

“No way to say at this point.”

She picked at her nails, which were already bitten short. “What’s gonna happen to Thatë?”

Jack shrugged. “That will be largely up to him.”

“You don’t have a plan for him? You have a plan for everyone.”

“I think you’re giving me too much credit.”

“Do you have a plan for Annika?”

He remained silent for some time. “It’s not just me who has a connection with her.”

When she gave him a startled look, he said, “What, did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

Alli was back to staring at her hands.

“Alli, talk to me.”

She heaved a sigh and shook her head as if to clear it. “Last year, when we were in the Ukraine, it was almost like…” Her words grew fainter and fainter until they faded out altogether.

Jack waited a moment, then leaned forward. “Like what?”

Tears grew in Alli’s eyes, glittering and fragile-seeming. “There were moments—at that awful restaurant, at the apartment—when we were like … like a family.” She almost winced when she said the last word. “Is that a horrible thing to say?”

He took her slim hands in his. “Why would it be horrible?”

She gave a tiny sound that was as much a sob as a bitter laugh. “Because, Jack. Because of so many things.” Her voice was a whisper. “Because she lied to both of us, because she murdered an American senator, because…” Her nails dug into his palms. “… oh, Christ, don’t make me go on.”

“Alli, look at me, we’re all of us angels and demons. We choose our paths, but there are forces, vast and hidden, that compel us into situations, sometimes against our will—”

“Are you excusing what she did?” It was less accusation than plea.

“I’m saying that when it comes to Annika the truth is always hidden, and when it does come to light—if it ever does—it’s far more complex, and conflicted, than we can imagine.”

She nodded. “That I can understand.”

He smiled. “I know.”

She withdrew her hands from his. He knew from experience that there was only a certain amount of physical contact she could tolerate.

“Where are we meeting her?” she asked.

“In Vlorë.”

Alli risked a glance over her shoulder. “There’s something I want to ask you. It’s about Edon. Her sister, Liridona, is in Vlorë. Edon doesn’t know what’s happened to her, but she’s deathly afraid that Xhafa’s people will get ahold of her; maybe they already have.”

“Alli, much as I feel for Edon and her sister, we can’t spare the time to—”

“You can’t,” Alli said. “But I can.”

*   *   *

There was a police boat waiting to take Heroe to Roosevelt Island when she pulled up at the dock in Georgetown. During the short trip over, she thought about Naomi Wilde and her sister Rachel. She herself had three brothers, scattered all over the world. One was a trauma surgeon in Oregon, another a lawyer at The Hague, the third an intel officer in Afghanistan. She had always wanted a sister, someone to help counter the testosterone barrage. She wondered how Rachel would take the loss of her sister. Coming after the betrayal of her husband it wouldn’t be good—by the looks of her she was already unraveling. She made a mental note to keep an eye on her in the coming weeks.

The patrol boat nosed into the island and Heroe hopped off. She turned on the GPS function of her phone.

“Give me a half hour,” she said, “before you come looking for me.”

The officer adjusted the boat’s GPS to home in on her signal. “What are you expecting?”

Heroe grimaced. “I wish I knew.”

“Good luck, Chief.”

Nodding, she pushed into the dense greenery until she found the boardwalk. She walked to her right. Finding nothing, she retraced her steps and continued on. Not long after, she discovered a branching to her right, and took it.

This boardwalk was shorter, ending at a small inlet that meandered off to her right. She took a look around and saw nothing but trees and underbrush. A bird sang in a branch above her head and water spiders skimmed across the surface of the shallow finger of water.

She was about to turn around and go back to the boat when something stuck in the periphery of her vision. Squatting down, she looked more closely. Off to her right there appeared to be a footprint in the black mud beside the water. It was a partial, but still. Slipping off her shoes, she stepped cautiously into the opaque water. It came up to her calves, but the mud was so thick she sunk in another couple of inches. Drawing her service revolver, she headed straight up the inlet. She was surprised that the water wasn’t cold. It was, instead, the temperature of blood. This thought sent a shiver down her spine.

Heroe was not prone to superstition, but from the time of puberty she had been visited by premonitions. They did not come often, but when they did they always proved correct. At first, she hadn’t told anyone about her visitations for fear of being ostracized, but a year after they manifested she could bear the burden no longer and, one night, she confessed to Granny. For a long time after she was finished speaking, Granny said nothing. Her eyes had gone opaque as they sometimes did when she sat in her rocking chair in the evenings or on dark afternoons when rain clouds burst open and lightning forked through the sky.

“You have inherited the gift from me,” Granny said after a time. “I inherited it from my grandmother. That’s how the gift works; it skips generations.” Granny’s eyes cleared and she smiled as she touched Heroe’s cheek. “Don’t be frightened, child.”

“I’m not,” Heroe had said, sounding braver than she felt. “But I don’t understand.”

Granny’s smile broadened. “The world we experience with our five senses is only a sliver of what exists. Remember this, child, as you go through life. You and I have glimmers of what really exists beyond the limits. We are the fortunate ones.”

“But the premonitions—”

“Whispers from the other side of things, whispers from souls whose bodies have already turned to dust. Where they are, time doesn’t exist. Time is, after all, constructed by humans to make sense out of chaos. But in the vastness, past, present, and future coexist, as they must. It’s only that we lack the … tools to experience it the way it really is.”

Now, wading through the swampy water, Heroe was visited by a premonition. She “saw” the water as blood and knew that somewhere up ahead death awaited. And then into her mind swam Naomi Wilde’s face. It was covered in mud, distorted by caked blood. So vivid was the image that Heroe was forced to stop in her tracks. She held on to the branch of a tree, much as Naomi had done days before when Annika had led her to the buried body of Arjeta Kraja. For a moment the world seemed to spin wildly around her and she heard the familiar roaring in her ears. “Someone else’s blood,” Granny had said when she had described the sensation.

“Who are you?” Heroe whispered. “What are you trying to tell me?”

Slowly, she regained her sense of equilibrium. The world, and, with it, her breathing, returned to normal. She stared at her fist, the knuckles white where she held on to the branch as if for dear life. Letting go, she pushed forward through the muck until she came to a large tree with spreading roots. More footprints here—fresh footprints, in fact. And between two of the largest roots the earth had been recently turned over.

The footprints went off into the foliage. She was looking in that direction when a powerful arm snaked around her throat and she felt a terrible pressure on the delicate bone just below her left eye.

*   *   *

“No,” Jack said. “I forbid it. For you to go after Liridona alone would be the height of madness.”

“I suspected you would say that,” Alli replied. “That’s why I’ve asked Thatë to go with me.”

At once, he saw the trap she had sprung on him, and while he admired her cleverness, he also knew that what she proposed was out of the question.

“I’m sorry, Alli. Your heart is in the right place, but under no circumstances are you going off on this wild-goose chase.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he recognized them as what Edward Carson had told him when he assigned Jack to investigate Senator Berns’s death.

Alli’s eyes were blazing. “You have no right to order me—”

“This isn’t a democracy, young lady. In case you have conveniently forgotten, the moment we step off the plane we’re back in enemy territory. An enemy, I might remind you, whose principal business is the enslavement and trafficking of girls and young women.”

She lifted her head. “I’m not frightened of Arian Xhafa.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid of, Alli, because you should be.”

“Well, shit, of course I am, Jack. I’d be an idiot not to be frightened of him. On the other hand, I’m not going to let that fright paralyze me. I mean, who does Edon have except us? Who can save her and Liridona from Xhafa, if not us? Her parents? Her father is the one who sold her and Arjeta to Xhafa’s people to pay off his gambling debts. Do you think he’s going to stop gambling and losing?”

Now it was she who took his hands. “Jack, Edon’s already lost one sister. I can’t stand by and watch her lose another.”

*   *   *

The pressure in Heroe’s head exploded behind her eyes like a mortar blast. She gasped as the shock wave drove through her, but her brain was far from paralyzed. She raised her service revolver until the muzzle pointed directly behind her. She pulled the trigger.

The percussion effectively deafened her in her right ear, but the agonizing pressure beneath her left eye vanished. She was released, and she staggered to her knees.

She was staring down, half-dazed by shock, the point-blank percussion, and the violent surge of adrenaline that had surely saved her life. Her knees had not sunk into the muck. They were resting on something hard. Dropping the service revolver, she dug her fingers in the muddy earth, scraped it away, and saw two faces appearing. One was of a young girl, very beautiful despite the disfigurement of her nose. Heroe had never seen her before. Feverish with dread, she uncovered more of the second girl and saw that it was Naomi Wilde’s face precisely as she had experienced it in her visitation.

She began to cry. But that release of emotion and tension brought her back to herself, and, bracing herself against the tree, she rose to her feet.

Turning, she saw Peter McKinsey sitting against the bole of a tree. The left side of his head was running red. Where the ear had been was a scorch mark, ragged and bloody.

He looked up at her and snapped his teeth together. In utter shock, she watched him lurch to his feet and come after her. She wanted to run, she wanted to defend herself, but her service revolver was at her feet.

And then he was upon her, and her nostrils dilated with the stench of death. His fists beat her down to the muck, until she was lying with Naomi Wilde and the unknown victim. And in that moment, she understood the nature of her visitation. The water turned to blood—her blood, her death. Nothing to be done, then. The future was already written. Today she would die.

McKinsey was on top of her, pounding her, and then he had her service revolver. He pointed it at her, grinning now, victory in sight. And then the world turned inside out, colors coalesced and collided. She no longer felt pain. There was no sound save the rushing of blood in her ears. Someone else’s blood.

And at that precise instant, she saw the specter of Naomi Wilde rising up behind McKinsey like a twist of smoke, drawing her gaze to the ruined side of his head. No time to weigh a decision, or even for thought.

Lashing out with her left hand, she struck squarely on the gunshot wound. McKinsey howled in pain, rearing up, hands to his head. She struck him a two-handed blow that knocked him sideways. His cheek struck Naomi’s face and he howled again.

Struggling out from under him, she smashed her fist into his right eye. The blow drove the left side of his head into the ground and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. She grabbed her service revolver out of his hand and aimed it at him as she staggered to her feet.

“Get up,” she ordered. “Get up now!”

Instead, he lunged at her. She pulled the trigger.

*   *   *

Immediately following his speech to the NAACP at the Kennedy Center, President Crawford headed for the men’s room. This had already been vetted by a member of his Secret Service detail, and was staked out, ensuring no one could enter while the POTUS was doing whatever it was he needed to do in there.

Everyone, that is, except Henry Holt Carson. The president was not happy when Carson strode into the men’s room.

Crawford gave him a jaundiced look. “A Secret Service agent. Hank, for the love of God!”

“Calm down, sir.”

The president stared at him in the mirror that ran along the wall above the sinks. “I will not fucking calm down. Where in all our planning did we ever contemplate murdering a Secret Service agent?”

It was a rhetorical question. Carson was quite certain it required no answer, so he kept his mouth shut.

“And Naomi Wilde, of all people. Damn it, Hank, she was one of our best and brightest. I read the reports of how she handled the crisis in Moscow, how she took charge of your sister-in-law. I’ve spoken with her several times—I knew her.”

Time for rebuttal, Carson thought. “You and I both know it never would have come up, let alone been on the table. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Wilde had gotten too close. If McKinsey hadn’t acted, she would have blown us out of the water—”

“Murder of a federal agent. That’s a capital offense.”

“—and then where would we be?”

Crawford ran his hand distractedly through his hair. He seemed incapable of looking directly at Carson, but continued to engage his image in the mirror.

“This has gotten out of hand, Hank.”

“As far as anyone is concerned, Naomi Wilde is missing. We’ve neutralized her boss, there is no body. Calm down. We’re almost there.”

“The hell we are!” The president stopped, suddenly aware that he had raised his voice. “This has got to stop, right here, right now.”

“You know that’s impossible. We’ve come too far; we’ve crossed the line of no return.”

“I’m telling you, Hank—”

“Cheer up, Arlen, the Middle Bay audit is almost complete. When it is, we’ll have what we want.”

For the moment, the president’s eyes had turned inward, and when he spoke it was as if he was addressing himself. “There’s a line you promise yourself you’ll never cross, because once you do, all is lost.”

For the first time, Carson spoke sharply. “It pains me to have to remind you that we’re both implicated in the Middle Bay merger. If we don’t complete what we started—if we fail—well, it will be a pretty bleak future for both of us.”

Crawford’s eyes refocused. Leaning forward, he put his hands on either side of the sink. The skin on his face was pale and slack. Suddenly he looked ten years older. “God in heaven, what this job takes out of you.”

“There are a lot of people who wonder why anyone would want the burden.”

“Well, right now, Hank, I’m beginning to think they’re right.” The president sighed. “Okay, so what do we do now?”

“Clean up the mess McKinsey made.”

“Don’t speak that name to me ever again!”

Carson nodded. “As you wish, of course.”

“When you lie down with fuckers, you’re sure to get fucked,” Crawford said bleakly.

Carson offered a thin smile. “Leave it to me.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You don’t want to know, sir.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Carson crossed behind the POTUS to the line of urinals, unzipped, and began to pee. “I’m going to cauterize the wound.”

Crawford opened his mouth, possibly to ask what that specifically meant, then changed his mind. Instead, he turned on the taps, pumped foaming soap from the dispenser, and commenced to wash his hands.

Carson watched him. Like Lady Macbeth, he thought. But the stink of guilt will never wash off, trust me on that. Finished, he zipped up and joined the POTUS at the sinks, washing and drying his hands.

“She’s going to be buried with full military honors.”

Carson coughed. “May I remind you, sir. There is no body.”

“And you better make sure there won’t be one.” The POTUS shook his head. “Damnit to hell, Hank, what’s gone right today?”

Patting the POTUS on the back, Carson said, “Buck up, Arlen, you just delivered one helluva speech that’ll put the African-American vote in the bag.”

27

“Is he dead?”

“As a doorpost.”

Heroe closed her eyes. “Shit, shit, shit!”

“He got a name?”

“Agent Peter McKinsey, United States Secret Service.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Heroe looked up at him. The pain in her head was distracting her from what she needed to do. “Do I fucking look like I’m kidding?”

“Okay, okay. But forget about him, Chief, and just lie back,” the officer said. “I’ve called for an EMS evac chopper. I don’t want to chance taking you back to the mainland in the boat.”

“Officer, I’m on a grave with two bodies. One of them is McKinsey’s partner. I’m not lying back.”

“My God,” the officer said, “what the hell is this place?”

*   *   *

The moment the 737 hit the tarmac and taxied to a stop, Edon Kraja come up to Jack and said, “I want to get off here with you. I need to find my sister. I’m afraid something terrible has happened to her.”

“I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” Jack said as gently as he could.

Edon’s eyes welled up with tears. “You don’t understand. The chances are my father is going to sell her to Arian Xhafa.” The girl looked desperate. “Liridona is not like Arjeta and me, she’s the youngest, she doesn’t have the toughness. She’s vulnerable. She’ll crack wide open.”

“Come with me,” Jack said. He led her to the front of the plane, where they could be alone, and sat her down facing him. “Edon, I have something difficult to tell you.”

Right away she started to tremble.

“Arjeta has been found. She’s dead.”

“Oh, my God, oh, my God…” She was shaking, and her head started to whip back and forth, as if she could somehow negate what had happened.

Jack took her by the shoulders. “Look at me. Edon, look right here, into my eyes.”

Slowly, the girl did as he asked.

“It’s all right,” he said softly. “It’s going to be all right.”

“How?” she wailed. “How can it possibly be all right?”

The commotion brought Alli at the run. Jack looked up at her. “I told her.”

Alli sat down next to Edon and put her arms around her. At once, Edon buried her face in the crook of Alli’s shoulder. She was sobbing inconsolably. Alli stared at Jack.

“Don’t do this,” she whispered. “You have to let me go.”

“Alli, I have you to think about.”

“And I have Liridona.” She stroked Edon’s head. “Okay, I have a solution. Let’s let Annika decide.”

“What?” Jack was truly alarmed. “No.”

“Why not?

“Because it’s nuts to trust her judgment.”

“You’ve done it before,” Alli rightly pointed out. “Besides, when has she ever, ever tried to hurt us?”

He said nothing.

“You know she’d never let anything happen to either of us.”

In peace as in war sacrifices must be made, soldiers must fall in order for battles to be won. “In fact, I don’t know that.”

She cocked her head. “I don’t believe you.”

“That’s unfair. I’ve never lied to you.”

“Let’s not talk about unfair, okay? I’ll have Thatë to protect me.” She looked at him steadily, and all of a sudden she seemed terribly grown-up. “Jack, you can’t protect me every second of my life.”

“I know that, but I can still make decisions—”

“From now on I’ll make my own decisions.”

*   *   *

Heroe resisted going to the ER, but she’d had no choice. They strapped her to a gurney and choppered her to Walter Reed, but not before she called the ME and gave him orders to get out to Roosevelt Island stat.

At some point, she must have passed out, because the next thing she knew she was in a hospital bed and Alan Fraine was sitting in a chair beside her. He smiled when he saw she was awake.

“You took quite a beating.”

“I gave as good as I got.”

“Better, I’d say. Much better. You’ll be ready to roll in a couple of hours. Just a few more tests—”

“Fuck the tests, I don’t need tests. How long have I been out?”

“A couple of hours, more or less.”

“Jesus. Any word yet on the cause of Naomi Wilde’s death?”

His smile quickly faded. “On that score, I’m afraid I have some bad news. The bodies of Wilde, McKinsey, and the unknown vic have been taken from us.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Fraine sighed. “Nona, I think you know.”

“The Feds.”

He nodded. “A whole platoon of them appeared at the island and commandeered the crime scene. Our people were summarily dismissed.”

“So we have nothing?”

“Less than nothing.” Fraine couldn’t meet her fiery gaze. “I’ve been given orders to forget the incident ever happened.”

“Forget? How can I forget—?”

“Nona, I’m very sorry.” Fraine shook his head. “As of now, you’re on leave.”

“What? You mean I’m relieved of duty?”

“I mean you haven’t taken a vacation in, what?”

“How about never.”

“Okay, then.” He brightened. “No time like the present.”

“This is total bullshit,” she said.

“This is my decision, and it stands.”

She sat up straighter. “How could you?”

“Nona, I want you out of harm’s way. Now. Before something really bad happens.” His eyes met hers at last. “I chose column A. Was I wrong?”

She was so angry sparks should have been shooting out of her eyes. “Alan, this blows.”

“I hear you.”

“Scylla and Charybdis.”

He cocked his head. “This is what comes of being so well read in a dumbed-down world.”

“Trapped between two monsters. There is no good choice.”

He shrugged. “Life works that way sometimes.”

“Tell that to Naomi Wilde.” Her voice had turned savage. “Who’s going to be her advocate? Who’s going to speak up for what was done to her now that it’s going to be swept under the carpet?”

Fraine leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Nona, listen to me. I understand what you’re feeling—”

“How can you?” She looked away for a moment. “Sorry. It’s unfair to snap at you.”

“Nothing about this situation is fair.” He lowered his voice. “There are some very big fish involved in this mess. The best thing for you now is to disappear, at least until it blows over.”

“Yeah, I could go to Sicily like Michael Corleone.”

“I’m deadly serious. Nona, you’ve got to forget about Naomi Wilde. You got the guy that killed her. Leave it at that.”

She looked at him for a long time. She hated the sickly sweet medicinal smell of hospitals. She couldn’t wait to get out of here. At last, she nodded. “Okay, okay. You’ve gotten through to me. I’ll take that long-delayed vacation.”

“Thank God.”

She lay back and closed her eyes. “Maybe I’ll head down to New Orleans, see some old friends.”

“Sounds good.”

At that moment, two federal suits entered the room. One was Midwestern blond, the other dark-haired, old-school Ivy League.

“Chief Detective Nona Heroe?” Ivy League said.

She opened her eyes. “Who wants to know?”

They both revealed their IDs. They were DoD, not to be trifled with. Fraine rose and immediately realized the gravity of the situation.

“This can wait until Chief Heroe has fully recovered.”

Blondie nailed him with a glare. “For our purposes, Chief Heroe is fully recovered.”

Ivy League brushed past Fraine. “Chief Detective Heroe, you are formally charged with the capital offense of the willful murder of a federal agent. You are hereby directed to come with us immediately.”

“But—” Fraine began.

Blondie swung on him. “One more word and you go, too.”

“No buts,” Ivy League said to Heroe. “No ifs, no ands. Get up now or I do it for you.”

Heroe rolled out of the bed, gathered up her clothes, and went into the bathroom. As she dressed, she fished out her cell and sent the following text message to Jack: MIDDLE BAY BANCORP. Hurriedly, she continued drawing on her clothes. She was just about to step into her shoes when a rude knocking rattled the door.

“Let’s go.” She heard Ivy League’s voice. He sounded irritated.

She opened the door and stepped out. As she brushed past Fraine, she handed off her cell. He gave her a quick look and she gave him a tentative smile back.

“Don’t worry, Nona,” he said.

Blondie smirked as he took her into custody. “Those are the last words the condemned always hears.”

*   *   *

“Not tonight.” Vera wrapped her raincoat around herself.

Gunn stirred on the bed. “Why is tonight different from any other night?”

“My medical leave is over.” Vera stepped into the new Louboutins he had bought her. Actually, he’d bought her two pairs. He could be generous like that. “I have to get back onto campus before midnight.”

Rolling over, Gunn checked the alarm clock on the bedside table. “There’s still an hour and a half.” He wore underpants and nothing else. That’s how he slept.

“Andy, I don’t want to get into trouble my first night back.” She picked up the shopping bag with the second pair of Louboutins. “Besides, I’m dead tired. Even you’ve got to admit it’s been a long fucking day.”

He took her hand and began kissing it, rising up her arm. “Tish,” he said with a fake Spanish accent, “you know how your words inflame me.”

“Poor Gomez,” she said with Morticia’s cool, regal voice. “You’ll just have to take care of yourself tonight.”

*   *   *

Outside, the night air refreshed her and she began to walk. The stink of blood and brains remained in her nose, and she snorted like a bridling horse. At a brisk pace, she walked three blocks west, then one block south, where she paused to look around, as if getting her bearings. As she did so, a black Lincoln Town Car appeared around a corner and cruised slowly toward her. She ignored it until it began to slow, then watched as it stopped abreast of her. It had smoked windows, so it was impossible to see inside. The front passenger’s window slid down and the driver, leaning her way, said, “Would a hundred dollars do it, doll?”

She leaned down. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

The driver shrugged. “Five, then. How about that?”

“Yeah, how the fuck about it?”

She pulled on the handle of the rear door, it swung open, and she climbed in. The moment she plunked herself down on the backseat, the Lincoln took off. She noticed that the partition between the front and back was up. It, too, was opaque.

“How’d it go today?” Henry Holt Carson said from the other side of the seat.

Vera gave him a vulpine smile. “You know, Daddy, you really are a sonuvabitch.”

*   *   *

Jack was briefing Paull on the situation back in D.C.—minus Annika’s involvement—when he received the text message from Heroe. Reading it, the hairs on his forearms stirred. Middle Bay Bancorp. Could this be the nexus point that linked all the disparate elements together?

Wondering why Heroe had texted him instead of calling and explaining herself, he punched in her number. The phone rang four or five times before a man’s voice answered.

“Who’s this?” Jack said.

“I’d ask the same of you,” the voice said.

Something was very wrong. “Jack McClure. Where’s Chief Heroe?”

“This is Alan Fraine, Chief of Police. I’m Chief Heroe’s boss. Unfortunately, Nona has been taken into custody by the Feds. She’s been charged with the murder of Secret Service Agent Peter McKinsey.”

“What the hell happened?”

Fraine told him about Heroe’s trip to Roosevelt Island and the discovery of two bodies, one being that of Agent Naomi Wilde.

Jack’s heart sank. He took a deep breath, steadying himself. “That second body is without doubt Arjeta Kraja, an illegal alien and part of the white slave trade business that Heroe and I and Naomi were investigating. McKinsey was involved in the ring in some way none of us yet understand. But it’s clear that he murdered Naomi Wilde because she got too close to identifying certain individuals connected with the ring.”

“Your enemies are exceptionally powerful and well connected, Mr. McClure. Nona’s in serious trouble. When it comes to the Feds these days … well, I don’t have to tell you how difficult it will be even getting to talk to her let alone finding her top-flight representation.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that. My boss, Dennis Paull, is on his way back to D.C. I want you to hook up with him the moment he steps off the plane and brief him completely. Then I’d like you to compile a list of Middle Bay Bancorp personnel—”

“Funny you should say that,” Fraine said, “Nona had compiled just such a list. Hold on a moment. Ah, yes, here it is.”

“Would you read off the names, please?”

Fraine did. Seventeen names, but none of them rang a bell. Jack wondered what he was missing. “Is there anyone else?”

“Well, you said bank personnel. As you may know, Middle Bay is in the process of being acquired by InterPublic Bancorp.”

Henry Holt Carson’s bank. Jack stood still as a statue while his brain, working at the speed of light, placed Carson and InterPublic alongside Middle Bay at the nexus of the conspiracy universe and began to follow the tentacles reaching outward. He was riding this wave of thought so completely that he almost missed what Fraine said next.

“So, of course, Nona had added the members of the forensic accounting team auditing Middle Bay’s books to the list of the bank’s personnel.”

Jack was dizzy with the sudden swirl of calculations. “Let’s have them all, Chief Fraine.”

“There are five individuals on the team.” He named them. Nothing. “And then there’s the team leader. His name is, let me see, ah yes, John Pawnhill.”

Annika had said, “We’re all soldiers in the night, and because of this, like it or not, we’re pawns.” And at that moment, two disparate things collided in Jack’s head, and the unknown part of the name equation he’d been trying to solve at last swam into focus. Thatë’s nickname was Grasi—fat. But his real name—Thatë—meant skinny. The kid was neither fat nor skinny, so how was he given the nickname? Jack had been looking at the equation through the wrong end of a telescope. Mbreti wasn’t the unknown in the equation, it was the key. Mbreti meant king. And what was the opposite of king on a chessboard? Pawn.

John Pawnhill was Mbreti!

28

“Vera, you’re a chip off the old block.”

“A heart like black ice.” Vera crossed one leg over the other. “Like my new shoes?”

Carson didn’t bother looking; he knew his daughter’s tastes all too well. “Tell me about today.”

Vera’s smirk widened. “Let’s see, what happened? Oh, yes, my lover, Andy Gunn, recruited me to help him terminate two lowlifes.”

“Names, Vera, names.”

“Willowicz—though Gunn referred to him as Blunt—and O’Banion.”

Carson wet his lips. “They’re both dead? You’re sure?”

“Could not be deader.” Vera watched his profile, which was vexingly noncommittal. “Why?”

“I’m wondering why he killed them and why now.”

“He was very focused, I can tell you that. Like he’d been given a deadline.”

“Odds are he had been. He’s taking orders from someone other than me.”

“But you knew that already.”

“Yes, but not who he’s playing both sides with.” Carson seemed to be staring at nothing and everything at once. “I had him followed, but he slipped the tail. He must have gone to meet with the person who gave him today’s marching orders.”

“Any ideas who it might be?”

“That’s something you’re going to find out for me.”

Vera closed her eyes for a moment. “Listen, you fixed me up at Fearington so I’d become Alli Carson’s roommate. Alli knew Caroline. You thought Alli might know where she is; she doesn’t. No one knows where that bitch has got to.”

“Don’t call your half sister that,” Carson said sharply. “You haven’t earned the right.”

“She left, just like that. We shared so many things, and then poof she was gone. And after that she never contacted me.”

“She never contacted anyone.”

Vera clenched her fists. “This is all your fault, you shithead.”

“Down, girl. You should see a doctor about that overabundance of testosterone.”

“Ha ha.” There was little mirth in Vera’s voice. “Only if you come with me to see about your satyriasis.”

“Now who’s the bitch.”

“Neither of us can help it, that’s the way you made us.”

Carson made a derisive sound. “Oh, yes, blame it all on Daddy.”

She turned to him, draped one leg over his lap, snuggled up to him, and said in a little-girl-porn voice, “Oh, Daddy, I’m just worried about you, is all. I don’t want you to go into cardiac arrest while you’re plowing away.”

“Vera.” His tone held an unmistakable note of warning.

“So many furrows, so little time.” Her fingers traced the whorls of his ear. “I know, Daddy, time is running out, soon enough you won’t be able to get it up at all.”

“Godammit, Vera!” He pushed her roughly away from him. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Nothing a little parental love wouldn’t cure.” She gave him a mock-pout from her corner of the seat.

“Bullshit. You wouldn’t know what to do with parental love.”

“Good thing,” she said, “because you don’t know how to show it.”

This exchange was followed by an oppressive silence.

Finally, she said, “You asked me to get close to Andy. We both knew what that meant, so when you think about it, you’ve been pimping me out.”

“I’m doing what any good spymaster would do, keeping an eye on my people.”

“If you give yourself any more credit I’ll throw up.”

“Don’t get superior. I’m not the whore in this scenario.”

“That’s really how you see me, isn’t it?”

He turned away, but remained silent.

Vera spent several minutes fantasizing about punching him in the face. “Why are you expending so much energy on trying to find Caro, anyway?”

“Why do you think? She’s my daughter.”

“Now who’s bullshitting, Daddy? Caro’s a thing. She ran away from you, so you couldn’t have her.”

“Oh, please!”

“As opposed to me, who ran right back into your arms.” The vulpine smirk returned to Vera’s face. “Caro is someone neither your wealth nor your influence can affect. That’s something you simply can’t tolerate, Daddy.”

“Not true.”

“Of course it’s true. You think I don’t know you. You’re so fucking defended a fucking termite couldn’t get in, that’s what you think, isn’t it? You don’t fool me, you old bastard. You stand naked in front of me, I see you for what you are.”

He continued to stare ahead. “I made myself what I am today; I didn’t have anyone’s help. Not that I didn’t take favors when they were offered or exchanged for others. Only an idiot would have refused. But I’m my own man, Vera, always have been. That’s the one thing I’m most proud of. So when you … I’m not interested in anyone’s opinions of me—especially yours.”

“Why would you? You’re the center of the world.”

“That’s the spirit, honey!”

She chuckled. “Oh, Daddy, you’re so transparent, and d’you know why? Because you’re such a shitty parent. Having kids was never your thing. Your wanting Caro back has nothing whatsoever to do with her being your daughter.”

“Your attempts at psychoanalyzing me are laughable.”

She ignored his jibe. “It’s about you, Daddy. Everything’s all about you. Caro ran away from you and that’s what you can’t tolerate.”

“That’s nonsense and you know it.”

She shook her head, moving out from her corner to close with him again. “You keep trying to undercut me, but I’m the only one whose opinion matters to you.”

Carson stared out the window at the blur of the passing cityscape. “Eddy’s opinion mattered to me.”

“But your brother is dead, Daddy.” She slid farther toward him. “And that’s the crux of it. You never got over your brother. He was younger than you and yet he was elected president of the United States.”

“Not without my help!”

In the small silence, Vera said, “You see? It’s all laid out like the grid of a landing strip. If only you could see it.”

Carson’s voice was bleak. He seemed suddenly lost in time. “See what?”

“How much Edward meant to you, how much you loved him.” She stared at her father for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had softened considerably. “Did he love you back, Daddy?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Sure you know. You must know.”

“He accepted my help. He was grateful. He—”

“Fuck it, Daddy! Would you for once tell the truth?”

“It would be easier if he hadn’t thanked me.”

“But he did.”

“Oh, yes. Thanking people was always one of Eddy’s strong suits.”

“You say that like it’s a congenital defect.”

“It made him less sincere,” Carson said, “in my opinion.”

“Uh-huh, too nice for you, was he?” She nodded. “I can see how you’d view that as a defect.”

Carson’s lips moved without him saying a word out loud. Then he pinched the bridge of his patrician nose. “The trouble was, I never knew where I stood with Eddy.”

Vera threw back her head and laughed, causing him to whip around as he glared at her.

“What’s so damn funny?”

“Your brother made you insecure. God, I didn’t think anyone could do that to you.”

“You never knew Eddy.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Well…” Carson stared at his hands. “There was no way I could let you meet him. You understand that.”

“I understand that you had to keep your Main Line connections intact until you acquired enough power on your own.”

He shot her a sharp look. “That’s a pretty cynical way of looking at it.”

“Ours is a cynical world, Daddy.”

He nodded, almost, she thought, ruefully.

“Damn if it isn’t.”

*   *   *

They met Annika in an open field near the airstrip. The wind was blowing, dragging her hair sideways across her face. Her hands were dug deep in the pockets of her trench coat, a stance like Humphrey Bogart’s in Casablanca.

Jack came halfway toward her, then abruptly stopped. Alli, at his side, broke away and ran pell-mell toward her. Just before she reached her, Annika took her hands out of her pockets. Jack automatically tensed. This was a weird moment. He was half expecting her to have a Sig Sauer in one hand.

Instead, Annika threw her arms wide and enfolded Alli, hugging her tight.

“I can’t believe it,” Alli said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

Annika kissed the top of her head. “Honey, honey, honey,” she crooned.

Then she looked past Alli to where Jack stood. The most peculiar smile broke out across her face, part solemn, part impish, but altogether tentative.

All this time, Thatë, present under Jack’s sufferance, stayed back at the periphery of the field. It was difficult to know what he was looking at, impossible to know what he was thinking.

Alli, though reluctant, knew it was time to walk away. That left Jack and Annika. They were standing twenty feet from each other.

“I was too late with Arjeta and with Billy.” With one hand, she drew her hair off her face. “I found him before the cops did, but there was nothing I could do.”

“You could have called me.”

Her smile changed shape slightly. “And how far would that have gotten me?”

She was right, of course. At that point, he never would have listened to her. He came toward her, aware that his heart was beating painfully hard. He felt a roaring in his ears.

“I’ve seen Edon’s back.”

“Yes, well, where you were, I imagined that might happen. Thank you for saving her and all the rest of them.”

“Why are these three girls so important?”

“They know a secret.”

“Edon doesn’t.”

“No. But Arjeta told Liridona. I went to Washington to find Arjeta, to save her, but I was too late.”

“You want to know the secret.”

“I care about these girls. Deeply.”

“But the secret—”

“Jack, please recall what I told you. Secrets are our only weapon against the forces that seek to manipulate us.”

Jack believed her. No matter that he wanted to believe her, that, like Alli, he needed to believe her. He kept walking until he was just a handsbreadth away from her. He could smell her then, and his heart melted a little bit more.

“Before we go any further…”

“Yes, Jack?”

“I need to know about Senator Berns. I need the whole truth.”

“And nothing but the truth, so help me God?” Her tone was mocking.

He didn’t laugh. “You don’t believe in God.”

“Not after what’s happened to me.”

The sun was shining in her eyes, and he knew that he had dreamed about them. He’d only known that he’d woken in the morning drenched in sweat, sad beyond bearing. He’d put every emotion he possessed on hold, throwing himself into tending to Alli and to his job, which kept changing shape like a chimera. Now he understood his sorrow, and his paralysis. Somewhere inside him, he’d been waiting for this moment; somewhere inside him, he knew it would happen.

“Senator Berns wasn’t one of the good guys, Jack.”

“Meaning?”

“He was dealing with a very nasty element here in Eastern Europe.”

“Enemies of your grandfather.”

“Enemies of mine,” she said. “And now enemies of yours.”

Jack was shocked. “Arian Xhafa?”

“Berns was facilitating the arms deals with Xhafa. Cutting-edge stuff, just off the DARPA assembly line.” She cocked her head. “Evil comes in all flavors and guises, Jack. It’s a sad fact of life.” Her smile turned rueful. “You don’t believe me. Berns was chairman of the Senate Military Appropriations Committee, which includes DARPA. Check for yourself.”

Jack didn’t have to; he’d already discovered this fact for himself. And now he was angry. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this last year?”

“You weren’t ready to hear it.”

“Damnit, Annika, how could you know that?”

“I made a reasonable assumption. Was I wrong?”

“Stop, for pity’s sake, making decisions for me!”

Her extraordinary eyes watched him closely. “This is what you do with Alli, no?”

Yes, it certainly was, but he wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of admitting it. “That’s different.”

“I disagree. You and Alli are both adults.”

“The analogy is spurious. I have far more experience.”

“And that means you know what’s best for her.”

“Yes.”

“At all times.”

He clamped his mouth shut.

“Jack, consider how you bridled when I told you you weren’t ready to hear the whole truth about Senator Berns.”

She was as maddening as ever. Somewhere inside him was a burst of laughter because this maddening trait was one of the things that caused him to fall in love with her with a passion that turned him inside out.

Taking a deep breath to center himself, he said, “What happened after you killed Berns? Xhafa’s still getting armaments—even faster and in more bulk.”

“It’s the devil-you-know theory. The person who stepped into the vacuum is worse than Berns. Far worse.”

“Who is it?”

In the last failing glimmers of sunlight, Annika’s carnelian eyes seemed so lucid it was possible to believe he could see clear through them into her soul. This was one of the unique assets with which God and her mother had blessed her.

“Tell me, Jack, have you ever heard of the Syrian?”

*   *   *

“Annika Dementieva has entered Albania.”

The Syrian, listening to this news, found that his knuckles had gone white where they gripped his satellite phone. Involuntarily, he moved farther away from Arian Xhafa, who was embroiled with Caroline in another of their religio-political-postfeminist debates. The Syrian found them amusing, but Xhafa, true to his nature, took them as deadly serious.

“Where in Albania?” he said, when he’d gone outside.

“Vlorë.”

Then she must know, the Syrian said to himself. He heard the snuffling of the dogs as they scented him, saw the deep bowl of the sky, indigo at its apex. A gaudy sunset began to show itself. Tree frogs and crickets started up.

To the man on the other end of the line, he said, “Do you have a specific fix on her?”

“She’s been shadowed from the moment she flew in.”

The Syrian made an instant decision. “Then take care of the situation at once. I don’t want Xhafa getting wind that she’s nearby. Take her to the safehouse. You know which one.”

There was an instant’s hesitation. “She isn’t alone.”

The Syrian closed his eyes. “How many?”

“Three. A man, a girl, and a boy.”

Not so many, he thought. “I want her alive. Terminate the rest of them.”

“Your will, my hand.”

The Syrian put away the sat phone. He spent about fifteen seconds wondering what Annika was doing with a girl and a boy, but soon a landslide of business matters dismissed the thought from his mind, and it did not resurface until much later.

*   *   *

“I think we ought to move to a more secure location,” Annika said. She gestured. “I have a car waiting.”

“I promised Alli I’d let her talk to you about Liridona.”

Annika looked around. “In the car.”

“Why did you want to meet in such an open space?”

“Trust,” Annika said. “I wanted you to feel perfectly comfortable.”

He nodded, but said nothing. Gesturing to Alli and Thatë, he walked with Annika into the deep shadow of a thin line of trees within which an enormous car was waiting, its engine thrumming in a deep register.

“I should introduce the kid,” he said, as Alli and Thatë came up to them.

“No need.” Annika grinned at Thatë. “He works for me.”

Thatë and Alli got in the front seat with the driver, leaving Jack and Annika standing beside the open rear door.

“One of these days,” Jack said, “you’re going to give me a heart attack with your surprises.”

“God forbid!”

She placed a hand on his arm. It was a spontaneous gesture and yet it set off a fireworks display inside him. She must have somehow felt the ripple because she smiled.

“Oh, Jack, I never want to hurt you again.”

“But you will.”

“Not deliberately, this I swear to you.”

She leaned in and the kiss she gave him was as tentative as that first enigmatic smile. She drew back, but he caught her behind her neck, pulled her to him, and kissed her as he’d dreamed of kissing her in a reality he’d never thought could exist again.

He felt the world drop away from him. All that existed was the two of them, locked together, falling through space and time, back to when they had been together in the Ukraine last year, before the betrayal that was still a betrayal, but on another, slighter order of magnitude. A betrayal that could be forgiven without damages being assessed.

The pines above them shook and shivered, clouds passed by overhead, and the velvet evening seemed to wrap them in its cool embrace.

How quickly hate returns to love, he thought.

As they were about to get into the car, he said, “Annika, about you and Xhafa.”

“Later, my love. I’ll tell you everything.”

*   *   *

Baltasar closed his phone and went back to his surveillance of the Dementieva woman.

“Everything all right?” he said to Asu.

“They went into the line of pines.” Asu, the driver, put his field glasses down and pointed.

They were in an armored vehicle similar to the one that had brought Arian Xhafa and the Syrian from the air base to the compound. It was still light enough to see the stand of trees. The pines looked delicate in the gathering twilight, like a Japanese watercolor.

“What are our orders?” Yassin said from behind them.

“The woman is to be taken to the safehouse in the western district of Vlorë. The other three are to be killed.”

Baltasar could feel Yassin’s excitement coming off him in waves.

“Now,” he said. “As soon as we determine—”

At that moment, the huge car slid out from behind the trees and headed off to the east.

“Go,” Baltasar said. “Go!”

Asu started up the vehicle and put it into gear. The advantages of the vehicle were many, including its inch-and-a-half-thick armor plate and its two .30 caliber machine guns, mounted fore and aft, its maneuverability over any sort of terrain, and its storehouse of other weaponry, including tear-gas grenades, a handheld rocket launcher, and a flamethrower. On the other hand, it was noisy, relatively slow, and not as maneuverable as a car on normal surfaces. Even so, Baltasar favored it over the other forms of ground transport at the Syrian’s disposal.

The large car ahead had its head- and taillights on, but Baltasar instructed Asu to keep theirs off. They were phenomenally lucky that the 737 had landed at sunset. Now, in the twilight’s uncertain illumination, they could follow without fear of being detected.

The car bumped down country lanes into larger streets and then took the ramp onto the ring road that circumnavigated Vlorë. There was no telling where it was headed, and Baltasar was anxious not to lose sight of it.

Yassin leaned forward, body as tense as a drawn bow. “We should drive them off the road,” he said.

“Wait,” Baltasar said without turning around.

“And then, as they come out of the car, use the flamethrower to incinerate them one by one.”

Now Baltasar turned to him. “And what do you think the others will do while the first one is roasting, sit on their thumbs and wait to be set afire?”

Yassin grinned. “There’s always the thirty caliber. Poum, poum, poum!”

“All good things come to those who wait, Yassin.” He handed Yassin the specially reconfigured U.S. Army M24 SWS sniper rifle. “Check the magazine and get ready.”

*   *   *

For the first forty-five minutes after the 737 took off from Vlorë, Dennis Paull reviewed what he himself knew about the multiple murders in D.C., beginning with the torture-killing of Billy Warren. He married that with the new information Jack had given him, including the damning evidence against Peter McKinsey from testimony from both Naomi and Chief Detective Heroe. The news that Naomi had been murdered by her partner had shaken him to the core. The very idea of such a thing was so alien he’d had to spend several minutes trying to get his mind around it. He’d been in the intelligence services long enough to have experienced or heard about various kinds of betrayals. All were heinous by their very nature, but this was in a category by itself. If there were, indeed, levels of hell, he hoped to God that McKinsey was inhabiting the lowest.

He took out a pad and pen and began jotting down notes. He also tried to make a perp tree, as they called it at Metro, of all the principals involved in the multiple-murder case. After some long and hard contemplation, plus some overseas calls, he had to admit that Jack’s instinct was right. Middle Bay Bancorp was the nexus point for everything. Henry Holt Carson’s bank, InterPublic, was in the process of buying Middle Bay—its books were even now being vetted by a team of forensic accountants led by John Pawnhill. If Jack was correct, Pawnhill was Mbreti, the American kingpin of Arian Xhafa’s sex trade empire. He thought a moment, then jotted down the name “Dardan Xhafa” with a question mark after it. If Pawnhill was the kingpin, what had Arian’s brother been? Or had he been there to keep an eye on Mbreti? Blood was thicker than water to these people, he knew.

But how did Middle Bay figure into the equation and what was Carson’s involvement? Alli’s discovery of the take-out menu from First Won Ton, the restaurant below which Xhafa’s slave market auctioned off its cherries, as they were called in slang, meant that her uncle was somehow involved in all this. But how? And, most baffling and frightening of all, why had President Crawford himself fast-tracked the buyout through the federal regulatory process?

Thinking of Alli put him in a depressed mood. He rose and went into the toilet to splash water on his face. He’d acted abysmally toward her all during the mission. He’d made himself believe that it was because her presence on a clandestine wet-work mission was highly inappropriate. He’d made himself believe that he was pissed that a tiny slip of a girl could best him in hand-to-hand combat. And those reasons might have been legit until he’d seen her in action. Both her courage and her prowess under extreme conditions were exemplary. He’d actually been proud of her, but he’d quickly tamped down on the feeling, preferring instead to keep needling her.

Now, staring at himself in the mirror, he was forced to admit his intense jealousy. The close relationship Jack had with her was what he’d always dreamed he’d have with his own daughter. Instead, he had driven her away and the fact that she’d returned, his grandson in tow, only underscored what he hadn’t had with her.

The truth was, Paull didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. He had come to a point in his life when, inevitably, he had begun to look back and rue his mistakes, failings, and failures. It was a bitter time for him, made all the worse by his inability to readapt to field work. The only saving grace was that he’d yanked himself out of the field before Jack could suggest it.

Back in his seat, he lost himself in work and, an hour later, he had the skeleton of a plan he thought would work. He called Chief of Police Alan Fraine, and together they went over iterations of the plan until both of them were satisfied that, though far from perfect, it had the best chance of success. Both of them knew that they were up against powerful enemies bent on keeping the reasons for the murders secret. The murder of Naomi Wilde and subsequent arrest of Chief Heroe was proof of their enemies’ utter ruthlessness.

When at last all his work was, for the moment, done, Paull closed his eyes and slept for an hour. When he awoke, he was ravenously hungry. He rose and went directly to the galley to fix himself a sandwich. On the way, he took the time to confirm that the children were okay.

That was when he realized that Edon Kraja was missing.

*   *   *

Edon had chosen her moment carefully. She had slipped out of the 737 while Paull was deep in conversation with Jack, while Alli was talking with Thatë. With everyone engaged in their own private dramas, she had grabbed her opportunity to slither away, unnoticed.

Turning her back on the plane, she had jogged through the woods. She knew precisely where she was, knew intimately the cluster of small houses a half mile away. From the backyard of one of them she stole a bicycle, and, bending low over the handlebars, began her journey into Vlorë, to search for her sister Liridona.

Her first stop would be her parents’ house. She had no way of knowing whether Liridona was still at home or whether she had also been sold to feed their father’s insatiable gambling lust. Cycling as fast as she could, she prayed to Jesus and the Madonna that her sister was still free, that she’d be able to extricate her from home and take her far away from both their father and Arian Xhafa’s people.

The thought of what had happened to her happening to Liridona was a goad that drove her to pedal faster and faster. Xhafa was a brilliant organizer, she had learned. But he was also a ruthless killer and, even worse in her experience, a world-class sadist. For him, pain and suffering were the aphrodisiacs he needed to satisfy his sexual needs; without them, he was impotent.

From the moment he’d become aware of her, he’d taken an unhealthy interest in her. Weeding her out of the latest bowl of cherries, he had begun her “training,” as he called it. She called it torture. It wasn’t on the order of what the other cherries who’d come in with her suffered through—the gang rapes, the beatings, starvings, and then more gang rapes. He hadn’t wanted to strip her of her individuality, her humanity, as was being done in a coldly methodical way to the other cherries all around her. Culled out of the herd, she had been isolated. She had seen only him. He’d trained her to crawl on her knees to him, to lick his dirty feet clean, to grovel when she wanted food. Oddly enough, it was he who washed her every day, as tenderly as a parent bathes his infant, caressing her as he cleaned every gentle mound and shadowed dell of her body.

When she had completed the first stage of her training, he had begun to hurt her, first in small, subtle ways. Then the bruising began. He seemed to love looking at the bruises even more than causing them, as if she were a canvas and he, the artist, periodically standing back to admire—or, sometimes, adjust—his art. Pain as art, that defined the Arian Xhafa she knew. He had spent hours on end with her, as if she were to be his masterpiece.

And then he had marked her—branded her, more like it. He used a stiletto reserved for the occasion, whose tip he heated in the flame from a bronze brazier surmounted with strange bas-relief sculptures until it glowed cherry red. He had her lie flat on her stomach on the thin pallet he provided for her to sleep on. She wasn’t strapped down or bound in any way; he had trained her too well. Straddling her, he’d applied the glowing tip of the blade. One long wound a night for five nights. Five parallel lines, running red, to prove that she belonged to him.

Very few girls received this privilege, he’d told her. Less than a handful. She was among the elite of his empire, a concubine. She would never be sold; she was his forever.

“Count yourself lucky, Edon,” he had said the night it was over. “You’re one of the few. You’re my special little cherry.”

29

“Behind us,” Annika’s driver said. “And the exit’s coming up.”

“Right.” Annika smiled. “Let’s go.”

Jack turned around and stared out the blacked-out rear window, but he could see nothing. “Who’s following us?”

“Xhafa’s death squad.”

The car veered into the right lane and, a quarter mile later, took the exit ramp off the highway. The driver turned left, went beneath the highway’s overpass, and a half mile later turned right. Almost immediately, they were in a densely forested area.

“One mile to the bend,” the driver said.

“Slow down,” Annika said. “We don’t want them to lose us.”

Alli shivered. “And you want them to follow us?”

Annika turned to her, her expression wolfish. “How d’you think we’re going to find Xhafa?”

*   *   *

“Where the hell are they going?” Asu said to no one in particular. “This is dead vacant wilderness.”

“Don’t be dense,” Yassin said. “Where better to have a safehouse?”

Baltasar fitted a tear-gas grenade to the adapter at the end of his rifle. “It doesn’t matter; we’re thirty seconds from taking them.”

Asu was using the car’s headlights to see where they were headed. “There’s a bend in the road coming up,” he announced. “The road dips down and then it’s straight as an arrow.”

“Perfect.” Baltasar popped the hatch over his head. “As soon as it straightens out come up behind the car to within fifteen feet. Keep a steady pace while I deliver the payload. Yassin, you’ll pick them off as they exit the car. The darts will put them to sleep so get all of them, including Annika Dementieva. Then, when they’re down, you can put a bullet in the back of the heads of the other three.”

The car ahead entered the bend in the road. As it dipped into the swale, Asu momentarily lost sight of it. Baltasar stood up so that his head and upper torso were above the vehicle’s roofline. Fitting night goggles over his eyes, he looked out at the landscape ahead. He saw no sign of lights, front or rear, and he adjusted the goggles. Several moments later, he saw the headlights, then the car. Immediately thereafter, Asu accelerated, and the vehicle shot ahead.

Baltasar counted the seconds as Asu closed the gap. He was an excellent driver; Baltasar had absolute confidence in his abilities. Nevertheless, something was bothering him. From his elevated position, he should have been able to pick up the headlights even while the car was at the bottom of the swale.

Now they were on the straightaway. The acceleration leveled out, steadied, and, bracing his elbows against the rooftop, he took aim at the rear window of the car. He counted slowly to three, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger.

The tear-gas grenade smashed through the glass and detonated. Now it was only a matter of waiting until the driver lost consciousness. The car would begin to weave, then veer off the road as the driver lost control. Perhaps it would come to rest in a ditch or sideswipe a tree. In any event, Yassin’s turn would come. It was a beautiful thing, Baltasar thought, when everything proceeded according to plan.

He waited, but the car did not weave. It slowed. Asu put on the brakes and the military vehicle paced the car. Baltasar frowned. He wondered whether the driver, in his semiconscious state, had the presence of mind to step on the brake. But the moments of losing the headlights still bothered him, and he couldn’t rid himself of the nagging notion that something was wrong.

The next moment, the car stopped. Baltasar unscrewed the grenade launcher and changed magazines to regular rounds. All the time he kept his eyes glued to the car.

“Let’s go! What are we waiting for?”

He heard Yassin’s whisper from just inside the hatch. Yassin was right; they should be on the ground now, approaching the car. But something stayed Baltasar’s hand.

He ducked back down and said to Yassin, “Change in plan. Take one of the AK-50s and go over to the car. Asu will cover you with the thirty caliber.”

Asu popped his head out of the open hatch. He flipped the safety off the forward machine gun, then signaled that he was ready.

Yassin climbed out of the hatch and dropped to the ground. He circled the car warily, crouched down, the AK-50 at the ready. It was loaded with heavy, maximum-grain ammunition. Except for the chirrupping of insects, there was absolute silence. No traffic, and whatever wind there had been had died.

Yassin had made half a circuit around the car without seeing any sign of life. Then, a single shot caused him to spin around. Asu lay sprawled across the roof, his head a bloody pulp.

Yassin, instantly calculating the direction of the shot from the way Asu’s body lay, opened fire with the assault rifle while darting behind the protection of the car.

A second shot, coming from directly behind him, pitched him forward. He struck the rear fender of the car, then slid off onto the ground. He did not move. His blood became a black pool around him.

At once, the military vehicle rumbled into life, swinging around to face the spot where the second shot had come from. A thin whine was followed by a long gout of flame that penetrated the first line of pine trees with a blast of searing heat. First, the flames set the carpet of fallen needles alight, but soon enough the trees themselves were engulfed in flame and dense, black, chemical smoke.

*   *   *

For what seemed like several moments after that, nothing happened. Then a figure, black and peeling beneath a hellish coat of flames, rushed from the smoking trees. Halfway to the military vehicle, it jerked upright, as if on a leash. Then it collapsed onto its knees, slowly folding over onto itself, forming at length a pyramid of crisped flesh and cracking bones.

The vehicle came to a halt, the rear battle slits snapped open, and a hail of machine gun fire bit into the trees on the other side of the road. In that moment, Annika ran from cover near the smoldering trees, primed a grenade, and slammed it between the front wheels. She was almost back inside the tree line when the blast blew the near-side wheels off and a hole appeared in the vehicle’s armor plate, into which the stinking smoke from the blast was drawn as if down an open flue.

Seeing this, Jack broke cover, sprinted across the road, and leapt into the back of the vehicle, which was stalled and hotter than an oven. As the top hatch popped open and Baltasar emerged, eyes streaming, Jack grabbed him and hauled him bodily out of the vehicle, throwing him down onto the road, where Annika was standing.

Baltasar grunted as he hit the pavement on his left shoulder. Annika kicked him in the stomach, and he flopped over. By this time, Jack had checked to make sure the vehicle was empty. Now he dropped down beside Baltasar. Together, they dragged him over to the pile of bones within which tiny flames still flickered and danced. Mostly, though, the superheated chemical fire had turned everything to brittle ash. But the nauseating stench of roasted meat was still in the air.

“Vasily!” Annika called.

Jack looked up to see Vasily, the remaining grupperovka member, striding over. Right behind him were Thatë and Alli. Jack could see how protective of Alli the kid was, and he was grateful.

Annika signed to Vasily.

The big Russian gripped Baltasar by the back of his head and slammed it down and ground it into the smoking pile of bones. Flames leaped into Baltasar’s beard and thick, curling sideburns and he began to yell. No one paid him the slightest attention. Then Annika delivered a vicious kick to his kidney and he fell onto his side. She rolled him onto his back so that he was looking directly up at her.

“Where is Arian Xhafa?”

He stared at her, his lips clamped firmly together.

“You will tell me what I want to know.”

He smiled up at her. His beard continued to smolder.

“Vasily, please stay with our friends,” Annika said.

She signaled to Thatë, who left Alli’s side. He grabbed Baltasar by the back of his collar, and together they dragged him into the woods.

Jack and Alli stood together, with Vasily’s tattooed hulk.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Jack said in Russian.

Vasily grunted, but Jack could see that he was grateful. The big man turned and went to scavenge weapons from inside the military vehicle.

As soon as the car had entered the swale, the driver had doused the lights and, at Annika’s direction, they had exited, sprinting for the safety of the first line of pines. All except the driver, who had switched the lights back on and had set the car in motion with a homemade mechanism that had gradually released the gas pedal, so that the car would slow several thousand yards farther down the straightaway.

“What will Thatë do to him?” Alli said.

As if in answer, an unearthly howl pierced the night. It came again. There was nothing human about it, nothing familiar. The third howl made Alli shiver. It was impossible to imagine what kind of creature could make that sound, or what could be causing it.

Alli made a motion to go into the woods after Annika and Thatë, but Jack put a gentle hand on her forearm.

“I wouldn’t,” he said.

She looked at him. “She’ll get what she wants, won’t she?”

“I believe she always gets what she wants.”

Alli nodded. “Did you suspect that Thatë was hers?”

Jack sighed. “I should have.”

“In retrospect, it all makes so much sense: his position inside Xhafa’s network, his being sent to Tetovo to spy on Xhafa, his commanding an elite group of Russians in Western Macedonia.”

They saw Annika walking toward them. Thatë appeared out of the pine shadows a moment later. He was cleaning something on a wad of fallen pine needles; they couldn’t see what and Jack refused to speculate on what it might be.

“I know where Xhafa is,” she told them when she came abreast of them. “I also know where he’s holding Liridona. Unfortunately they’re on opposite sides of the city.”

Thatë now joined them. There was no sign of whatever he’d been cleaning off, no sign on either of them that they had been interrogating a member of the enemy.

“These were not Xhafa’s people,” she said to Jack. “They were the Syrian’s.”

“I don’t understand,” Jack said.

“I didn’t, either, until Thatë and I convinced this man—Baltasar—to confess. As I told you, the Syrian has stepped into Berns’s shoes and become Xhafa’s arms connection. This has been beneficial for Xhafa because, believe it or not, the Syrian’s access to cutting-edge weaponry is better than Senator Berns’s was. But the situation is now far more explosive. In return for the weapons, Xhafa allows the Syrian to export his particular brand of terrorism all over the world via Xhafa’s private fleet of planes. The Syrian has connections with the Colombian and Mexican cartels, who are moving massive amounts of drugs from Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia for perhaps a half-dozen Muslim extremist organizations who are using the drug money to pay the Syrian for arms. It’s a toxic global network with the Syrian at the center.”

Jack had to stop himself from calling Paull immediately to tell him how much more dire the situation had become. Arian Xhafa was merely a symptom; the Syrian was the disease. He needed some answers first.

“What does all this have to do with the Syrian sending a death squad after us?”

“Let’s get back in the car,” Annika said.

When they were on their way back to the highway, she said, “For the past four months, the Syrian has been trying to get to my grandfather. Having failed in those attempts, I fear he’s now coming after me as the only other way he can think of to get to Dyadya Gourdjiev.”

“What does he want with your grandfather?” Alli asked.

“Dyadya Gourdjiev’s brain. It’s a storehouse of secrets,” Annika said.

“That sounds pretty vague,” Jack interjected.

All he got in response was one of Annika’s enigmatic smiles. “Here’s our problem. We need to get to Xhafa and the Syrian as quickly as possible, but the same holds true for Liridona. She’s being held in a safehouse in the western part of Vlorë. The Syrian’s compound is in the northeast.”

“Which means we need to split up,” Alli said. “Thatë and I will get Liridona.”

“And I said no.”

“You haven’t,” Alli said hotly. “Not explicitly.”

He was about to once again expound on the subject of letting her loose in hostile territory when he caught Annika’s expression, and he remembered their discussion about knowing what was best for Alli. He recalled how he’d bridled when she’d told him that she’d made the decision about what was best for him to know. He tried to tell himself that this was different, but the argument wasn’t holding water.

He steeled himself for one of the most difficult things he had to say. Difficult because he suspected he knew what Annika’s answer would be. “I promised Alli that she could ask you your opinion.”

“I think she’s right, Jack. We have two objectives that need to be addressed immediately.” She searched his face. “If you agree with me, I’ll send Vasily with her and Thatë, while you and I go on to the Syrian’s compound.”

Jack looked from her face to Alli’s. This was an important moment for all of them, there was no question of it. But beyond the operational imperatives, he recognized this as an emotional crossroads in Alli’s development. Despite her defiance and Annika’s arguments, he knew the decision was on his shoulders. No matter her own feelings. Alli wouldn’t go unless he gave her his blessing. In an odd way, he recognized this as the moment when a father gives his daughter to the man she is about to marry. In a very real way, she was passing out of his protection into a world filled with peril, heartache, and exultation. He also knew that she would never forgive him if he forbade her this mission. The intimate bond that had been forged between them would be ruptured and nothing he would ever do or say would restore it.

He thought of all the mistakes he’d made with Emma and, perhaps inevitably, he felt the cool wind as she settled in beside him.

—Emma?

“This is what must happen, Dad.”

—Do you know? he said. Do you know if she’ll be all right?

“I’m not a seer, Dad.”

She had told him that already.

“But I’ll be with her. I promise.”

Jack took a deep breath. His gaze on both the women, he said, “What are we waiting for? Let’s roll.”

*   *   *

Morning in Washington found John Pawnhill eating eggs Benny at an old-school dive west of Dupont Circle. It was the kind of place where the same people came to have breakfast or lunch every day of the week, the kind of place tourists never heard about.

In the booth with him was his laptop, which he had hooked into the Middle Bay Bancorp secure server. It amused him no end that InterPublic Bancorp had hired his firm to perform the due diligence on Middle Bay’s books. Of course, he had envisioned an endgame when, following Caroline Carson’s detailed plan, he had set up the Syrian’s cash flow business, via Gemini Holdings and a host of subsidiaries, through Middle Bay. It was just the kind of bank the Syrian needed in order to keep from being a PEP (a Politically Exposed Person) like Liberia’s Charles Taylor, high-profile targets like deposed heads of states, paramilitary leaders, heads of drug cartels, and arms dealers like Viktor Bout, all powerful and clever individuals who, nevertheless, had eventually been caught. Caroline deemed Middle Bay a perfect target: large enough to have international connections, but small enough to pass under the radar of the various federal task forces involved in ferreting out terrorist and money laundering operations.

Pawnhill, Caroline Carson’s eyes and hands on the ground, hadn’t found the actual work all that difficult—she was the genie who lit his way. The American government’s fractured intelligence structure allowed so much illicit international activity to fall between the cracks that you had to make an egregious mistake to come to its attention.

It was the private sector that gave him the most fits, primarily Safe Banking Systems, a small Long Island company with proprietary software that was incredibly efficient at weeding out international banking transactions like the ones that provided the lifeblood of the Syrian’s organization. God forbid the Feds should start using Safe Banking’s software—he and the Syrian would have to fold their tents and find some other sucker nation through which to siphon illicit transactions.

Popping a bite of eggs Benny into his mouth, he pressed a key on his laptop and the last of the incriminating data on Middle Bay’s servers was deleted. Next, he remotely ran a program Caroline had created that electronically shredded the deleted files, scrambled them, then overwrote the data again and again until there was, literally, nothing left. Finally, returning to the files from the last five years, he satisfied himself that it was as if the accounts he had opened and used had never existed. There was no gap, no scrap of data, not even a single kilobyte out of place. Satisfied at last, he closed all his programs, put the laptop in sleep mode, and slipped it into its case. He snagged the waitress and ordered fresh coffee, then settled himself to finish his breakfast.

His mind was hardly relaxed, however. He was haunted by the possibility that Billy Warren, having discovered the Gemini Holdings accounts, might have hit upon their significance. If he had, Pawnhill thought, surely he’d be smart enough to make electronic copies of the files. And he wouldn’t keep them in his office at Middle Bay. The cops, and then Warren’s family, had all been sifting through his apartment. Nothing had been found, which was a tremendous relief, because with all the activity, Pawnhill had been unable to send a team in to do his own snooping.

He hated loose ends. He also feared them. It was loose ends that invariably tripped you up. He couldn’t afford to be tripped up. He couldn’t afford to allow the Syrian’s dealings to be exposed.

Ever since the Syrian had started preparations for the assassination of President Edward Carson, Pawnhill had been making contingency plans for the day when they might need to pull up stakes and disappear off the American intelligence radar. When the Syrian had seen which way the last U.S. election was going, he had vowed to have the incoming president killed. The last thing he wanted was a moderate president in power. The previous incumbent, surrounded by his bunkered neocons, had exported American aggression into the Islamic world with such a high degree of religious zealousness that his administration had done much of the Syrian’s work for him. He had never had so many recruits clamoring to strap on packets of C4 and blow themselves up in the name of Islam. “A hated America is a weakened America” was a mantra the Syrian often used in his speeches to the new inductees.

It had been a dark day when Edward Carson had been killed in a car accident in Moscow. A random event for which the Syrian’s people could not credibly claim authorship without coming into conflict with the Russian government. So, though the Syrian got what he wanted, he didn’t get it in the way he wanted. There could be no propaganda value attached to President Carson’s death, no righteous revenge that could be claimed, and so a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had slipped through his fingers. Not one to dwell on missed chances, the Syrian had set his sights on other ways of bringing misfortune and disaster to the United States. He had sifted through many schemes, finally selecting one that had a particular appeal to him.

Pawnhill had received an MBA in international accounting from a major American university and then had gained an advanced international finance degree from Oxford. It was at Oxford that he had met the Syrian. Both had been using different names. They had had a brief but intense weeklong affair, after which they had amused themselves by exchanging girlfriends, much as, long ago, kids traded baseball cards.

Through a series of Gemini Holdings’ subsidiaries set up by Caro, Pawnhill had begun to buy up residential mortgages, package them, and sell them to brokerages and other banks, with the promise of ultrahigh yields. The Syrian had directed Pawnhill to accomplish this utilizing the accounts he had set up in Middle Bay Bancorp. The banks and brokerages, in turn, sold these collateralized debt obligations to their clients.

It was astonishing to Pawnhill how quickly these CDOs got snapped up. Everyone involved was so busy making obscene amounts of money that virtually none of the institutions bothered to look inside the CDOs to see that many of the individual mortgages had been obtained from first-time homeowners without even a down payment or a check on whether they would be able to afford the balloon payments five years down the road. The few that did bother to look told their clients that they were buying a basket of mortgages so that if one or two failed it wouldn’t matter. The problem was, when the reckoning came, all the mortgages failed.

By that time, the Syrian and Pawnhill had long since banked their profits, laundering them through the accounts at Middle Bay, and moving them so many times, through Caroline’s maze of offshore accounts and shell companies in various quarters of the world, that they were untraceable.

Even Pawnhill had had no idea of the scope of the calamity the CDO frenzy would cause. In the aftermath, when the American financial system was on the brink of collapse, when the knives had come out and culprits were being hunted, it had been Pawnhill’s job to keep Gemini Holdings and its now nonexistent subsidiaries from being discovered by Safe Banking Systems, a task far more difficult than dealing with the inept probing of the federal authorities. This was where Pawnhill had earned his money. He’d kept the Syrian off the PEP lists and he’d provided Gemini with an impregnable safe harbor. He was just beginning to accept the Syrian’s congratulations on a job well done when he’d become aware of Annika Dementieva.

She was the joker in the deck, an element he could not have accounted for because he had known nothing about her toxic relationship with Xhafa. The partnership had troubled him from the first—adding another personality to the mix was always a risk, and especially one as volatile as Xhafa’s—but the Syrian had brushed aside his objections. “I need this man,” the Syrian had told him. “His ambition has made him into the visible one, the leader of a new international organization. And he’s perfect because his terrorists are also revolutionaries fighting for the freedom of Albanians inside Macedonia. It’s a beautiful setup. He’s seen as a hero to others outside Islam, which makes him invaluable. And, if anything should go wrong, he’ll take the heat, while you and I melt away into the shadows.”

Pawnhill was certain that Dementieva had become aware of the Syrian’s activities through her investigation of Arian Xhafa. But it was only in the last week that he had come upon an ambiguous and seemingly innocuous bit of data. Following it had proved immensely difficult and it had taken him three days to crack. What he discovered had floored him. In some way he could not fathom, Dementieva and Henry Holt Carson were communicating with one another. Curious enough, but what had put the fear of God in him was that the substance of their communication was Middle Bay Bancorp. This intel was so new that he’d not yet had a chance to bring it to the Syrian’s attention. He knew he needed to do so as quickly as possible, but he also knew his boss wouldn’t take it well at all. Therefore, he needed a piece of good news to offset the bad.

He thought for a time while he sipped his coffee, which was black and strong, the way he liked it. The recovery of a copy of the account data from Billy Warren would both appease and please the Syrian. Pawnhill’s discovery of Carson and Dementieva discussing Middle Bay was an extraordinary stroke of luck. But just the fact that they were discussing Middle Bay at all had set off deep-level warning bells inside his head. Though he had long ago used a number of tried-and-true methods to put M. Bob Evrette in his hip pocket, there were always forces outside the bank he might have to contend with one day. For this and many other reasons he had aggressively pursued the forensic accounting assignment with InterPublic. He had done business with them before—another one of his fail-safe measures should he have felt the need to move accounts to a larger bank.

When the waitress passed by, he asked for a slice of devil’s food cake. It was now possible to take a step back and see the InterPublic buyout of Middle Bay in a different light. The possibility that Carson suspected both the existence of the accounts and their connection with the Syrian and Arian Xhafa sent chills down his spine. By nature, Pawnhill was not prone to panic, but this development had disaster written all over it. This was why he had attacked Middle Bay’s books with such thoroughness, wiping clean not only the accounts themselves, but any electronic footprint their deletion might leave behind.

Pawnhill finished his cake. Asking for the check, he threw some bills down on the table, leaving his customary large tip, and went out. It was late morning, humid, the clouds yellowish with the threat of a storm coming up from the south. He walked for a couple of blocks until he spotted a cruising taxi and took it to within three blocks of Billy Warren’s apartment. After the crime scene investigators were done with it, Billy’s father had slept there for a couple of nights, further impeding Pawnhill’s access. But now the people Pawnhill had surveilling the building reported that the father was gone. The apartment was empty; it hadn’t been visited in more than forty-eight hours.

Time, Pawnhill thought, to go in.

*   *   *

When the Syrian didn’t hear from Baltasar at the appointed time, he spent a fruitless thirty seconds trying to raise him on his sat phone. Then, with a grim expression, he went to where Caro sat hunched over her computer and whispered in her ear.

Her fleeting startled expression was quickly replaced by one of resignation. All her work was either on her laptop or on remote servers in Holland. Nothing was ever saved on the desktop here. Still, she shut it down, removed the hard drive, and destroyed it. Then she packed up her laptop. The Syrian had gone to talk to Xhafa. She unlocked the drawer, removed The Little Curiosity Shop, and lovingly nestled it into the case beside the laptop.

As she was walking to where her shoes sat beside the front door, Taroq appeared.

He eyed her laptop case. She hardly left the compound, and never at night. “Where are you going?”

“The Syrian and I have a meeting outside the compound.”

“At this hour?” Taroq frowned. “I was told nothing about a meeting.”

Her expression hardened. She had no time for Taroq’s jealousy. “You’re told what you need to know, nothing more.”

He stood looking at her for a moment. He was hurt, of course, but something had stirred his inner alarm. The Syrian was exceedingly deliberate in all his appointments and meetings. The word “spontaneous” did not exist in the Syrian’s world, therefore anything that smacked of it was suspect.

She was spared further discourse on the subject as the Syrian returned and joined her at the door.

“Taroq, we’ll be gone for several hours,” he said without a hint that anything might be wrong. “In the interim, keep Xhafa here.”

Taroq blinked. “Here?”

The Syrian offered an encouraging smile. “He’ll be safer inside the compound.”

They took the big black Lincoln Navigator that had been imported as a gift by one of the entities he supplied. He had many cars; he’d paid for none of them.

“You didn’t want to take Taroq or a driver with us?” Caroline asked.

“In this situation,” he said tersely, “it’s best to travel light, the better to ensure that we arrive at our destination.”

He drove very fast and with the lights off. He knew these back roads well.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“The enemy has arrived.” He made a sweeping turn, then stepped heavily on the accelerator. “The enemy is coming.”

She sat cradling her laptop case as if it were an infant. She supposed she should feel concerned, but, as usual, she felt nothing at all. “And just where is our destination?”

The Syrian stared straight ahead and smiled.

*   *   *

Pawnhill made three circuits of Billy Warren’s building without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Via his Bluetooth earpiece, he was in constant cell contact with his surveillance team, who reported no police activity anywhere in the vicinity. It appeared as if the neighborhood had returned to the sleepy state it had been in before Warren’s torture-murder caused a media frenzy. Since no photos of the crime scene had been leaked, even the tabloids, both print and online, had moved on to fresh fodder. And in America in this day and age there were more than enough scandals in Hollywood and inside the Beltway to feed even their insatiable appetites.

Pawnhill set a slim attaché case on the ground and opened it. The case was considerably smaller inside than out, but there was still room for a number of items, including a one-inch-thick laptop, a small zipped leather case, and latex gloves, hood, and booties. These he put on, then he took out the leather case, and snapped the lid shut.

He possessed an aptitude for vocations other than finance. These had been taught to him by the Syrian during the crazy time they’d enjoyed at Oxford. Unzipping the leather case, he selected several professional picks from a set. In no time, he was through the rear door. Warren’s apartment was on the third floor. Pawnhill took the stairs; since childhood he’d had a fear of being trapped in an elevator. The same could be said for revolving doors.

The building was old, the stairs bare wood. He removed his loafers, climbing in absolute silence. Reaching the third floor, he went along the hall. He could hear a radio playing, also a baby crying briefly. Then only the music, muffled to almost all percussion, rose up the stairwell. No one was in the hall.

For some time he stood in front of Billy Warren’s door, simply breathing. The yellow crime-scene tape had been taken down; everything appeared normal. Then, leaning forward, he put his ear to the wood. When he was certain no one was moving inside, he picked the lock. Then slowly he turned the doorknob and pushed the door inward.

He let the door swing all the way open. Standing on the threshold, he stepped back into his loafers. From the attaché case, he produced a plastic hood with elastic around the opening for his face. He slipped it over his head and adjusted it. Now he was protected from inadvertently leaving a hair in the apartment. Then, softly and silently, he entered, closing the door behind him.

He found himself in a small three-room apartment, bright and relatively neat, considering all the recent activity. It was furnished in fairly upscale style, tasteful in a modern way, but without much flair. Placing his attaché case on the carpet beside the coffee table, he stood in the center of the room, turning slowly in a circle in order to take in everything that came in sight. He went methodically through the bedroom and bathroom without finding anything. Returning to the living room, he let his eye fall on one piece of furniture after another—the sofa, the pair of easy chairs, the rug, a Travertine marble–topped coffee table on which was a ceramic decorative vase, a green crystal sculpture of a frog, a stack of coasters, along with a single coaster marred by a water stain. Pawnhill looked more closely. It was logical to assume that the glass that had recently sat on the coaster had been taken by the forensic team, along with Warren’s personal computer and cable modem.

Against one wall was a modern lacquer sideboard above which was a cabinet that held a bookshelf stereo, stacks of CDs, a flat-screen TV, a cable box, Blu-Ray DVD player, and a couple of popular commercial DVDs. The rest of the space was taken up by books—mostly texts, but also a handful of contemporary thrillers—and a couple of photo albums. Pawnhill leafed through one without interest. He wasn’t interested in a visual chronicle of Billy Warren’s early life. The second held Warren’s doctorate paper, according to the title page. Pawnhill slid it back beside its twin. Then he opened every CD jewel case and DVD package. In this case, he was looking for a DVD onto which Warren might have burned the incriminating data. He’d already tried to hunt down a USB thumb drive that Warren might have used for the purpose.

The result was that after spending almost an hour carefully ransacking the apartment, he had found nothing. He was on his way out when his gaze happened to fall on the stack of coasters, which were discs that seemed to him larger than normal. He went through each one in the stack, but they were precisely what they purported to be.

Then he picked up the coaster with the water stain and turned it over. There, winking up at him with its rainbow glimmers, was the slick surface of a DVD.

30

The safehouse was a three-story building on the corner of a quiet residential street. An alley along one side revealed a wall almost completely covered with mature ivy vines. There was a streetlight at the rear, but it wasn’t on. The other side of the house overlooked a narrow, heavily shaded street. The windows had been boarded up. At the rear was what looked and smelled like an open sewer. As they had crossed the city, they had observed periodic blackouts; many of the intersections were in chaos. Homemade banners announced student protests starting at dawn.

“There’s only one way to do this,” Alli said when she, Thatë, and Vasily had completed their surveillance circuit of Xhafa’s safehouse. “You take me in.”

“Impossible,” Thatë said at once.

Vasily watched the two of them with complete impassivity.

“The place is a virtual fortress,” Alli said. “There’s only one way in or out. What’s our other alternative, to let Vasily bull his way in?”

Thatë licked his lips nervously.

“As far as these people know you’re part of Xhafa’s American operation. You have the medallion, you know the code words. You’ll bring me in as a new cherry.”

Thatë grinned suddenly. “More like a cherry bomb.”

Alli turned to Vasily. “Do you have a better idea?”

“Once you’re inside, I can’t help you,” he said.

“But you can,” Alli said. “Give us—what, Thatë?—fifteen minutes, then create a diversion.”

“A big one,” Thatë added.

Vasily flexed his muscles and hefted the flamethrower he’d salvaged from the military vehicle. “No fucking problem.”

“Okay, then.” Thatë glanced from one to the other. “Let’s synchronize watches.”

*   *   *

When Alan Fraine was a decade younger, he was a successful hostage negotiator. Before that, he was the best sharpshooter Metro had seen for more than twenty years. People inside the department still talked about him and the string of astonishing hits he’d made without ever harming a civilian even though some of them were standing right next to or right in front of his target.

Stepping up off the street had been a mixed blessing. It had brought with it a higher salary, an entrée into the inner circle of Metro police, as well as an opportunity to come to the mayor’s attention, never a bad thing in the highly politicized atmosphere of D.C. Occasionally, though, when he played poker with the mayor, or with his belly full with rich food, he felt a shadow of sadness pass through him, as memories of his salad days surfaced, and he turned briefly melancholy.

Following his electrifying phone conversation with Dennis Paull, he’d got to work, pulling together a team of experts from all divisions of Metro—a half-dozen men he knew personally and trusted implicitly.

They had no difficulty locating John Pawnhill. Almost immediately, they reported that he was traveling with a crew of three—an antisurveillance team. So he ordered his men up onto the rooftops. He himself and one of his team rode Harleys, dressed in Hell’s Angels leathers they had borrowed from the impound room at HQ.

The moment Pawnhill pick-locked his way into Billy Warren’s building, Fraine gave the order for his men to go to work. In short order, they had picked up all three of Pawnhill’s men. He spent a fruitless thirty minutes interrogating them.

“This is useless, they won’t give me anything,” he said when he’d turned away from the third of the men. “Tony, take them down to HQ for arraignment.”

“On what charge?” Tony said.

“Suspicion of terrorism,” Fraine said. “A matter of national security, so no calls whatsoever.”

“Got it.” Tony passed them off to the patrol officers they’d called in.

“Go with them,” Fraine said. “I don’t want any fuckups.”

“Yessir.”

Fraine returned his attention to the rear of Billy Warren’s building. Then a thought struck him and he turned back. “Tony, on second thought keep them here. I want them in a lineup.”

Tony laughed.

*   *   *

Thatë’s absolute calmness served to keep Alli’s mind clear as they approached the front of the safehouse. Apart from the two men lounging on the steps, it didn’t look much different than the other residences on this fringe of the city.

The guards rose, their bodies tensing, as Thatë approached with Alli in tow. She was squirming, trying to get away from him. Her fear and anxiety, expertly feigned, had the expected effect on the guards. They smiled and engaged Thatë in a short exchange, during which Thatë produced his pendant. Another even terser conversation ensued, which Alli assumed was an exchange of code phrases.

She must have been right because one of the guards nodded and went up the stairs while Thatë dragged her along. The guard unlocked the door. As she passed alongside him, he gave her a hard pinch. Snarling, she lunged at him, and bit off the lobe of his ear.

He yelped, the other guard came running, and Thatë kicked him hard in the groin. He went to his knees without a sound, and Thatë drove the heel of his shoe into the side of his head. At the same time, Alli slammed the heel of her hand into the bleeding guard’s mouth, then drove her knee into his solar plexus. As he went down, she took his head in her hands and smacked it against the side of the door frame.

They went inside, closing the door behind them.

*   *   *

Pawnhill opened the attaché case and thumbed the laptop out of sleep mode, inserted the DVD, and had a look. Sure enough, the Gemini Holdings account data was there. Enormously relieved, he closed the attaché case and pressed the metal tabs home one at a time.

Exiting the apartment, he made sure the front door was locked before he closed it. In the stairwell, he took off his hood and booties, but kept the gloves on. The same radio was playing, the music louder now. The baby had returned to squalling. The stairwell smelled of cold pizza and the grease that’s left in a bucket of KFC when the chicken is eaten.

Down on the first floor, he stood very still, listening for any anomalous noise. Hearing none, he pulled the locking lever down, opened the rear door, and stepped out. The moment he did so, a thin man in Hell’s Angels leathers appeared.

“Mr. Pawnhill.” He gestured. “Walk with me.”

Pawnhill said, “Do I know you?”

“You will,” Fraine said.

Pawnhill shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Fraine pulled back the flap of leather jacket to show his service revolver.

Smiling with his teeth, Pawnhill revealed the Sig Sauer in its shoulder holster.

“You don’t want a shoot-out,” Fraine said.

Pawnhill moved his hand toward the butt of the Sig Sauer. “You ever see Reservoir Dogs?”

“Actually, it’s a favorite of mine. But that won’t happen today.” Fraine called and two Metro officers paraded Pawnhill’s team, hands behind their heads, into view.

“You’re out of uniform,” Pawnhill said.

“Surveillance work.” Fraine grinned, then motioned with his chin. “Whatcha got in there? Something you picked up while you were ransacking Billy Warren’s apartment?”

“Your people did too good a job. I didn’t find anything.”

“Uh-huh. Walk the attaché case halfway to where I’m standing, set it down on its side, lay your weapon next to it, then back up.”

“I told you I didn’t find—”

“I have men on the rooftops,” Fraine said. “If you don’t comply, you’ll be dead inside of thirty seconds.”

Pawnhill shrugged and followed Fraine’s instructions. When he had backed up sufficiently, Fraine said, “Now raise your hands and don’t move.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.”

While his men kept a bead on Pawnhill, Fraine walked over to the attaché case. He pocketed the Sig Sauer, then put his hands on the snaps.

“Go ahead,” Pawnhill said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

The snaps popped open and Fraine lifted the lid. Instantly, there was a loud hiss, and a thick black cloud billowed into the air. Fraine leaped back, his eyes already on fire. The pop-pop-pop of rifle shots were heard, but when the smoke cleared Pawnhill was nowhere to be seen.

Fraine did not have to order his team to spread out in a dragnet; they were already sprinting in every direction.

One of the officers came up to him, slipped an oxygen mask over his head, and made sure he was breathing okay. “Shifty fucking bastard,” he said. “Cheer up, sir. At least we have the evidence.”

Fraine’s throat and nostrils felt as if they had been scrubbed raw with sandpaper. Coughing still, he returned to the open attaché case and crouched down. Then he tore off his oxygen mask. The acrid stink of acid stung his eyes.

“Godammit!”

Everything inside the case was melted. He could see the vague outline of a laptop computer and a curled section of what once must have been a DVD. All useless now.

*   *   *

Jack and Annika were crouched in the darkness of the trees surrounding Arian Xhafa’s compound. They both wore lightweight backpacks into which Annika had placed various paraphernalia.

“According to Baltasar, there are seven guards and two attack dogs protecting the compound,” she said.

“Do you believe him?”

She glanced at him. “Do you have a better idea?”

Jack pointed. “One thing your victim failed to mention is the electrified razor wire on top of the wall.”

Annika rose. “Let’s take a walk.”

They picked their way slowly around the compound until they came to the rear. Then she pointed upward to the branches of an ancient oak tree, two of which arched over the wall and its lethal top.

“How are you at climbing?” she asked.

They moved as close to the wall as they dared. Jack wove his fingers together, Annika stepped onto them, and he launched her up toward the lowest branch. By stretching to her limit, she was just able to grab hold of it with one hand. Jack pushed her upward several inches and she swung one leg over the branch, rolling her torso until she lay horizontally on it. From her backpack, she uncoiled a length of rope, tied one end around the branch, and threw the other end to him.

A moment later, Jack had joined her on the branch. With his weight, it dipped down perilously close to the razor wire, and they began to wriggle their way toward the trunk, over the wire and wall.

They found themselves hanging above a courtyard garden that smelled strongly of citrus.

“Just a matter of time before the dogs scent us,” Jack whispered. He looked around. “Get me a rock about fist size.”

While Annika crawled across the branch and shimmied down the rope, Jack slipped off his backpack and jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, and, using a knife, slit out the entire back. Then he put it back on, and the jacket over it. As Annika was climbing up the rope, he unzipped his pants and relieved his bladder into the square of cloth until it was thoroughly saturated.

By this time, Annika had regained the branch, but now a wind had sprung up, one that bobbed the branch up and down. Again and again, it dipped dangerously close to the electrified wire. Annika froze, waiting for the wind to subside, but it didn’t. In fact, it started to blow harder. Closer and closer she came, until Jack stretched out on the limb and slowly pulled her toward him and off the far end of the branch.

He took the rock from her, wrapped it in the soaked square of shirt, then tied it off with a piece of plastic cord ripped from one of the outside pockets of his backpack.

“Ready?” he whispered.

Annika nodded, and he threw the makeshift bundle into the far left corner of the garden. Almost at once, a howling commenced and two huge dogs came racing and skidding around the corner of the house, heading directly toward the unfamiliar spoor invading their territory. Jack and Annika shinnied down, keeping the tree trunk between themselves and the dogs. They reached the opposite corner of the villa and pressed themselves against the cool stucco wall as a pair of guards, AK-50s at the ready, sprinted into the garden to see what was driving the dogs into a frenzy.

They had very little time before the dogs scented them. Jack opened a side window and Annika climbed through. He was about to follow her when he heard a stirring in the shadows and another guard appeared. The moment he saw Jack he swung his assault rifle toward Jack’s midsection. Stepping toward him, Jack shoved the barrel of the AK-50 to one side and delivered a sharp blow to the guard’s throat. Then he grabbed the assault rifle out of the staggering man’s hands and drove the butt into the bridge of his nose. The guard went down and stayed down. Slinging the AK-50 over his shoulder, Jack dragged the unconscious guard to the windowsill and tipped him inside. Then he followed him in.

He was in a darkened bedroom. Closing the window behind him, he looked around for Annika, but she was nowhere to be seen. Cursing under his breath, he stepped out into the hallway, looked both ways, then went to his right. He soon found himself in the large kitchen with its line of windows overlooking the garden. Two guards lay sprawled on the floor. Three down. Two were outside with the dogs. That meant one last guard left. He had to find Xhafa and the Syrian before the other two guards grew suspicious and decided to check the interior of the house. He unslung the AK-50.

Moving stealthily, he came upon the vast living room with its prayer rugs, modern task chair, and desk. He soon discovered that the computer was without its hard drive. He saw a connection for a high-speed modem but the modem itself was missing. He turned. Had Xhafa somehow known they were coming? Had he and the Syrian abandoned the house, leaving the guards as bait?

Then he heard the gunshot and he broke into a run.

*   *   *

Thatë, his hand around Alli’s arm, was met almost immediately by an Albanian thug who was clearly higher up the crooked ladder than the guards outside.

“A new cherry,” Thatë said. “And a feisty one.”

The thug grinned. “We have a cure for that.” He ogled her openly. “We’ll break her spirit soon enough.” Laughing at her expression, he grabbed at one of her breasts.

Thatë pulled her away before she could receive more of a mauling. “Absolutely not. Now that Edon is gone, Arian wants this one for himself. Where are the special cherries housed?”

“Third floor in the rear.” The Albanian frowned. “But I didn’t hear anything about another special.”

“What d’you mean?”

“We have Edon’s sister up there. She belongs to Xhafa.”

Thatë sighed. “I only do what he tells me. Call him, if you need to.”

“That’s just what I intend to do.”

The Albanian pulled out his cell and Alli jammed her elbow into his kidney. Thatë used the barrel of his handgun on the Albanian’s neck, cracking several vertebrae. The Albanian crumpled to the floor. Thatë nodded at Alli and, together, they raced down the corridor and up the central staircase.

Behind them, the Albanian’s cell activated with an incoming call.

“Ilir, are you there? Ilir, check in.”

*   *   *

Annika found Xhafa in a small room, perhaps a study, because there were piles of books on the floor. He was sitting in a chair, a Sig Sauer in one hand.

“I knew you’d come,” he said. “Like a dog to its own stink.” He lifted the handgun and pulled the trigger.

Annika, in shadow, was already moving. The bullet whizzed by her ear. Then she kicked out with her right boot, connecting with the point of Xhafa’s chin. The chair tumbled over backward. Reaching out, she plucked the Sig Sauer from him and pulled the chair back onto its feet. Xhafa sat dazed, blood drooling from a corner of his mouth.

“Sure I came back,” she said. “You’re the dog, you’re the stink.”

That’s when the barking of the dogs rang through the house.

Xhafa smiled through his pain. “Bang, bang,” he said. “You’re dead.”

31

They were pounding up the safehouse stairs when Alli felt a breeze on her cheek, cold enough to make her shiver.

“They’re coming.”

It was Emma. Alli fought down a certain terror. Emma spoke to Jack only when he was near death or in dire straits. Was it the same with her?

“Prepare yourself, Alli.”

“Company,” Alli said to Thatë.

—Emma, stay with me.

Two men appeared on the second-floor landing. The moment they saw Alli and Thatë, they opened fire with AK-50s.

“I guess our cover’s blown,” Alli said as she scrambled out of the way.

Thatë opened fire with his assault rifle and the two men scattered. He advanced upward, Alli in his wake. She saw one of the men above them prone on the landing, aiming his weapon at Thatë, and she shot him. Her hands were firm, her mind unclouded. These were the lessons Jack had taught her, even before he’d brought her to the firing range for the first time. A firecracker could have gone off next to her and her concentration wouldn’t have wavered. Jack was a zen master when it came to concentration. For him, it was a necessity. In order to function more or less normally in the world took enormous amounts of concentration on his part. Anything flat with letters on it looked like a pinwheel or the inside of a lava lamp.

They were almost at the landing. Where was the other Albanian? As they reached the second floor, Thatë indicated that she go left while he went right. To the left, the banister ran along the second floor for about fifteen feet before arching upward on the flight to the third floor. Just before she reached the landing, Alli swung onto the banister. Here her smallness and light weight were a distinct advantage. Hooking her ankles through the uprights, she inched her way along. Behind her, she heard a spray of bullets and, turning, saw Thatë coming toward her. He was pointing upward; he had nailed the other Albanian.

They launched themselves up the staircase. Alli checked her watch. Less than four minutes until Vasily started his diversion.

They were only partway up, when a commanding voice called from behind them. “Stop where you are! Lay down your weapons and kneel with your hands behind your head!”

*   *   *

Jack could see Annika in the shadows, heard her speaking, presumably to Xhafa, when the barking of the attack dogs announced their entry into the house. He turned and, in a half-crouch, prepared to defend their position.

The first of the dogs appeared, its claws skittering on the wooden floor. Jack got off a shot just after it saw him. He hit a flank, but that hardly stopped the animal. It merely bared its teeth and came on. He shot it in the chest, but he was distracted by the sight in his peripheral vision of the second dog. The first dog was hardly slowed down by the two bullets and was barely two feet from Jack when he shot it in the head. It dropped in front of him, but now the second dog was upon him, its long claws extended, its jaws snapping as if it were rabid.

The sheer weight of it bowled him over. He jammed the barrel of the AK-50 between its jaws to keep it at bay, but its claws were tearing through his jacket as it if were made of tissue. He cracked his elbow into the side of the dog’s head, but that only made it angrier. The dog had hold of the AK-50 and wasn’t going to let go. He twisted it so hard, he heard the animal’s neck vertebrae click. In that moment, he let go of the weapon and used his crooked arms to jerk the dog’s neck even farther. The vertebrae cracked like a gunshot, the light went out of the animal’s eyes, and its weight slumped on top of him.

He took a deep breath and was about to retrieve the assault rifle from the dog’s clamped jaws when a voice said, “I’ll take that.”

He found himself staring up into the face of one of the guards.

*   *   *

Alli turned to see the man with one green eye, the other blue; monstrous eyes, revealing a pitiless and relentless soul. She shivered and even Emma, beside her, seemed to quail.

“He’ll kill you, Alli. Give him the chance and he’ll kill you.”

Thatë made the mistake of trying to reason with him. “I work for Arian Xhafa. We’re here for Liridona. We have no quarrel with you.”

“The blood you’ve spilled is quarrel enough.” One eye seemed to speak while the other was deep in scheming. He was addressing Thatë but seemed to impale Alli with his implacable gaze. “No one leaves my safehouse.”

“Yours?” Thatë shook his head. “This safehouse belongs to Arian Xhafa.”

“Arian Xhafa belongs to me.”

The Syrian lifted a pearl-handled M1911 but before anyone could react, a ferociously hot fireball raced up the stairs with a massive lightning crack. The Syrian turned. Thatë shot him in the shoulder, but the Syrian, seemingly unperturbed, fired the .45. The full-metal-jacket bullet buried itself in Thatë’s chest, throwing him back against the stairs. From that semiprone position, he fired again and again, forcing the Syrian back into a room on the second floor.

“Thatë!” Alli cried, bending down to see to his wound.

But he thrust her roughly away. “Upstairs. Find Liridona and get out of here. I’ll keep this fucker out of your way.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Don’t be stupid.” He glanced up at her. “This is what I’ve trained for, this is my life. Now leave me to it.”

He began to fire again.

“Thatë—”

He shoved her hard. “Go!”

“Run, Alli.”

Tears running down her face, she turned and bolted up the stairs.

*   *   *

Annika ignored the shots and the animal growling that came from the room behind her. This appeared to surprise Xhafa, until he said, “You’re not alone.”

Without a word, she hauled him out of the chair and, spinning him around, slammed him down on the floor.

“You’ll always be mine, you know,” he said. “Whatever you do, until the day you die.”

Annika straddled him. Taking a huge bowie knife out of her backpack, she proceeded to strip off his clothes, baring his back. The muscles rippled in anticipation.

Pressing the blade point to his skin, Annika proceeded to score seven concentric circles into his back, carving each circle deep into the muscles. Blood flowed, Xhafa screamed and kept on screaming.

*   *   *

Caroline was sitting in the passenger seat of the Syrian’s car, cradling her laptop, when she heard the volleys of gunshots. The car was parked a block away from the safehouse but the cracks sounded much closer. She turned to look out the side window just as Taroq pulled the door open.

She got out and Taroq embraced her. For all the emotion inside her, she might have been embraced by a boxcar.

“You had no trouble following us?”

He shook his head. “None at all.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

He pointed off to their left. “My car is this way.”

At his side, she walked quickly away from the Syrian’s car and never looked back.

*   *   *

The first screams caused the guard to look beyond where Jack lay, buried beneath the attack dog. In that moment, Jack located his Glock, brought it out, and shot the guard in the head. He was taking no chances. Grunting, he began to shrug off the dog’s corpse, when it juddered back into him, struck by two bullets fired from the second guard’s gun. He slumped to the floor as if shot.

Through slitted eyes, he saw the boots of the second guard coming hesitantly toward him. He was taking a calculated risk, he knew, but the dog was so big that it covered all of his torso and head. His hand with the Glock in it was beneath the attack dog’s neck and so able to move.

When he saw the boots close enough, he edged the muzzle of the pistol forward, tilting it up. It was then that the left boot slammed down on the Glock, trapping it.

At once, Jack let it go and, slithering out from under the animal, fired at the guard with the handgun in his left hand. He missed, and the guard slammed the barrel of his pistol into Jack’s cheek. Even as the pain jolted him, Jack stepped forward, inside the guard’s defense, delivering a flurry of vicious blows to his adversary’s head and neck.

Undeterred, the guard drove his fist into Jack’s wounded side, and Jack crumpled in agony. Grinning, the guard stood over him, pointing his pistol at Jack’s head. One instant his finger was about to pull the trigger, the next the blade of a bowie knife was buried hilt-deep in the left side of his chest.

He looked up, past Jack, but he was already arching backward and all his glazing eyes saw was the ceiling before his heart, sliced in two, ceased to beat.

Jack looked back over his shoulder and saw Annika standing in the doorway.

*   *   *

Alli had just reached the third floor when she heard the pounding of boots. She had just enough time to duck into a room before six or seven armed men came charging down the hall, drawn by the gunfire and the smoke and flames from the ground floor. When they had passed, she darted out, running full-tilt down the hall. She flew by rooms with young girls in them, lying on mean pallets, or, more likely, deep in drug-induced slumber. She wanted to free them all but in their current state and under the circumstances that was impossible. She was here to find Liridona.

Liridona was in the back room, caged like an animal, on her hands and knees because there was no room to stand. Alli rattled the door, but it was padlocked.

“Edon sent me,” she said to the terrified girl. “Where’s the key?”

When Liridona failed to answer, Alli shouted, “Stand back!” Then she shot off the padlock, opened the door, and brought Liridona out.

“Do you speak English?”

When Liridona nodded, she said, “My name is Alli. Edon sent me.”

“Edon is alive?”

“Alive and well,” Alli assured her. “Now it’s time to get you out of here.”

“But how?”

A good question. Thatë said there was only one entrance. But Vasily was there and the guards would be clogging the entrance, putting out the fire. What to do?

“Where do the guards sleep?”

“We’re not allowed to go—”

“Quickly, now!” Alli commanded her out of her terror-induced stupor. “Show me the way!”

Liridona stumbled down the hall, Alli at her back, guarding her like a lion with its cub.

*   *   *

Jack, covered in blood, heaved the attack dog’s corpse off him and rose shakily to his feet.

“Are you all right?” Annika said.

“I should be asking you that.” He brushed by her into the room. “Good God.”

Arian Xhafa was on the floor, his naked back a mass of bleeding wounds. His fingers were curling and uncurling spastically and he was trying to get up on his hands and knees.

Jack walked toward him. “What the hell did you do to him?”

“What he did to me.” Annika was right beside him.

He watched Xhafa crawling his way toward the chair.

“Only worse.”

“Only worse,” she affirmed.

Jack glanced at her. “Is it over now?”

Her carnelian eyes were hard and, also, he thought, a bit sad.

“You know better than that.”

Behind her, Xhafa, hands on the chair’s arms, pulled himself up.

“I only counted five guards,” he said. “And where is the Syrian?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Xhafa’s right hand slide beneath the chair’s cushion. In an instant, he had whipped around, a 9mm in his hand. Pushing Annika, Jack squeezed off two shots. One passed through Xhafa’s neck, the second took off the back of his head.

Annika did not turn around. Instead, she stared into Jack’s eyes. “All that work,” she said, “for nothing.”

Was she serious or being facetious? That was the thing about Annika. You could never be sure.

*   *   *

Liridona led Alli into a warren of well-furnished, almost opulent rooms. She crossed the floor and opened one of the windows. This was the side where the ivy grew thick against the wall.

Liridona, at her shoulder, looked wide-eyed. “What are you doing?”

“Getting out of here.”

“I can’t.” Liridona shook her head wildly. “I’m afraid of heights.”

“We have no choice. This is the only way out.”

Liridona shrank back. “No.”

“Look.” Alli pointed to the streetlight that rose up at the rear corner of the house. “All we have to do is get over there and it will give us an easy way down.”

“I can’t. Please.”

“I won’t let you die here.” Alli grabbed her. “Put your arms around me.” She felt the girl’s rail-thin body as she climbed onto her back. “Now when I swing out, wrap your legs around me, too.”

Holding on to the window sash, Alli put one leg over the sill, and grabbed for the nearest vine before realizing that their combined weight was too much for her.

Then she felt Emma close beside her.

“Use your fingers and your toes.”

Alli nodded. Quickly, she untied her boots, kicked them off, and dropped them out the window. Then she swung her leg out again, this time using her toes as well as her fingers to hold on to the ivy where the vines were thickest.

Behind her, Liridona sounded like she was praying. Across they went, moving laterally, hand over hand toward the streetlight. After three handholds, Alli could feel the weight trying to drag them off the vine. Then she heard a brief ripping, as one part of the vine pulled away from the wall, and her heart beat like a triphammer.

Liridona, her eyes squeezed shut, interrupted her prayers to whisper, “What was that?”

Alli was too busy to answer her, and Liridona did not ask again. A fist of ice had formed in the pit of her stomach and she fought down a wave of panic. She thought of Jack and took deep breaths to calm herself, but the streetlight still looked as if it was a football field away. For a long, gut-wrenching moment, they swung above the narrow concrete walkway between buildings. If they fell, there was nothing soft to break their landing. Gritting her teeth, she returned to crabbing her way across the network of vines. One step at a time, she told herself. One step at a time.

They were still several arms’ lengths from the streetlamp when the vine gave way. Liridona shrieked as they began to fall.

Kicking out against the wall, Alli swung them back and forth like a pendulum. At the apex of the arc nearest the streetlight, she let go with fingers and toes. For a moment they flew through the air. Then the streetlight smacked her in the stomach and they slid down until she could get her arms and legs around it. She hung there for a moment with Liridona shivering on her back. Then she inched them down. When they reached the cement, Liridona continued to cling to Alli, sobbing with relief and shock. Alli rocked her for a moment, then pushed her gently against the side of the house.

“Stay here,” she whispered.

Liridona’s eyes went wide. “Where are you going?”

“I can’t leave Thatë and Vasily behind.”

She went quickly along the side of the safehouse until she reached the front corner. Peeking around, she saw Xhafa’s men drag Thatë’s body out the front door and pile it on Vasily’s corpse.

Part 4

Blood Trust

The Present

And so time turns a corner, or flows down a well, only to return to the place where it began.

32

Alli was in the middle of the student riot in the city plaza. The fog, a metallic brown from gunpowder, garbage, and the grit of the streets, thrust itself like a living thing against her. She was buffeted by the currents of running people. Screams found her, as insistent as the tolling of bells from the cathedral, which seemed to watch indifferently with its elongated El Greco face.

In the melee, Alli lost sight of Liridona altogether, and her heart beat even faster in her chest as she plowed her way through the mob, nearer now to the mass of truncheons lifting and falling, to the sprays of blood and bone, to the tilted bodies, to the cries of pain and terror.

Then she spotted one of Arian Xhafa’s men, his tall frame sinister as a bat, rising for a moment above the heads of the students. Her way lay directly in the path of the militia. She calculated that there was no time to circle around, so she plunged ahead until she was close to the line of truncheons, advancing en masse like a phalanx of Roman soldiers. On hands and knees, she made herself inconspicuous, crawling through the churning legs of the militia until she eeled her way to the other side.

Scrambling to her feet, she looked around and spotted the men pushing Liridona around a corner. On the fringe of the mob at last, she ran toward the corner. Running with her heart in her mouth, running toward the sudden roar of gunshots that spurted at her from around the corner.

“No!” she cried. “No!”

Hurtling around the corner, she was jerked off her feet. She stared into the monstrous eyes of the Syrian. The blue eye, the green eye. They regarded her as if each had a separate intelligence, both cold as permafrost.

From somewhere out of her sight, she heard Liridona weeping, and, like glass shattering against stone, she began to struggle free. But the Syrian shoved the barrel of his pearl-gripped .45 into her mouth.

“Once again, quiet.” His voice a constricting iron band. “Before the end.”

The air shivered as Edon, appearing out of nowhere, swung a tire iron into the Syrian’s back. His body arched forward and he let go of the .45 as he fell. Darting down, Alli picked it up.

“How—?” She aimed the pistol at the Syrian, but she heard Liridona’s scream.

“There’s no time!” Edon shouted, turning and running down a dank back alley.

Alli sprinted after her. “Stay back!” she called. “Stay back, Edon!”

Catching up with the girl, Alli ran past her. She could see Liridona between the two men. On the run, she shot one of them in the shoulder. The other turned his handgun on her and she shot him dead. The first man grabbed his wounded shoulder, then, shaking himself like a dog coming in from the rain, ran straight at her. Liridona leaped, barreled into the back of his knees, and he stumbled down onto the filthy concrete. Liridona scooped up his handgun and, as he twisted his torso up and took a swing at her, shot him point-blank in the face.

33

“She’s remarkable, you know.”

Annika, sitting next to Jack on the ferry from Vlorë to Brindisi, on the eastern coast of Italy, looked over to where Alli was talking animatedly with Edon and Liridona. The first thing they needed to do when they reached Italy was to go clothes shopping.

Jack was dog-tired, and he ached all over. He wondered whether he had a fever. He’d lost his antibiotics somewhere during their strange and bloody odyssey. It would be good to get home.

“Is that what you meant to say?” His voice was soft.

Annika glanced at him for a moment. “I feel … I don’t know, I feel close to her.”

“She feels the same way toward you.”

This brought the ghost of a smile to Annika’s face. “I must get back to my grandfather.”

“Surely he has people taking care of him.”

She nodded. “Very good people.”

“Then come back to D.C. with us.”

Her eyes looked inward. “Maybe,” she murmured, as if to herself, “if only for a little while.”

Now it was Jack’s turn to look at the three girls across the companionway. “I saw you talking with Liridona.”

Annika was silent for a moment. The ferry rocked slightly from side to side. The great diesel engines vibrated through the decks.

“She told me the secret that cost Arjeta her life, and almost cost her hers. Arjeta had been in the compound in Vlorë. Apparently, it wasn’t Arian Xhafa’s compound. It belonged to the Syrian.”

“The man Alli encountered at the safehouse and then again in the street.”

Annika nodded. “The Syrian had a woman with him in the compound.”

“A mistress?”

“Possibly, but from what I’ve heard about the Syrian I doubt it. No, this woman is a computer prodigy. She handles all of the Syrian’s international transactions.”

“A computer whiz.”

“A first-class hacker.”

Jack shook his head. “Okay, but why would the Syrian consider her a secret worth killing for?”

“Because,” Annika said, “her name is Caroline Carson.”

*   *   *

Gunn sat in his car, smoking a cigarette. He was parked in the lot of a sleazy motel off a highway in suburban Maryland. From what he could see during the forty minutes he’d been parked, the motel was a trysting place for traveling salesmen and account executives getting their rocks off with someone else’s secretary. Every once in a while a delivery would be made to one of the rooms. When that happened Gunn got out of the car and followed the delivery boy to see if he’d been summoned to room 261.

Gunn, following John Pawnhill like a bloodhound, had seen him make his escape and was briefly impressed. He’d seen him get picked up by a man Gunn didn’t recognize. He had followed them out here to this motel with its blinking neon sign, buzzing fluorescent lights, and a soda machine that didn’t work. The sound of passing traffic was a roar as relentless as the surf.

At 10:52, a white car with the logo of a nearby Chinese restaurant pulled into the parking lot. Once again, Gunn removed himself from his car and, stretching, strode after the young man. He delivered two large paper bags to room 261. Gunn saw a glimpse of Pawnhill’s driver as he took possession of the food and handed over some money. He screwed the suppressor back onto his Glock. The delivery man went down the stairs, got into his car, and drove away.

Gunn walked up to the door of room 261 and knocked.

“Who is it?” a voice came from the other side of the door.

“You didn’t give me enough money,” Gunn said in a passable simulation of the delivery man’s voice.

The door opened a crack, Gunn shoved his Glock through it, and shot the driver squarely in the forehead. As the driver’s body arched backward, Gunn kicked in the door and strode inside. Pawnhill threw a white cardboard container of food at Gunn. Gunn dodged away, aimed, and shot Pawnhill twice in the chest. Pawnhill crumpled. Gunn walked up to him and, for good measure, put two more bullets into him. Then he turned and left.

*   *   *

The night is a time for memories, Vera thought as she lay on her bed in Fearington. She remembered her childhood, when she and Caro shared a room. Of course, they each had sumptuously decorated bedrooms, but she and Caro had insisted on being together at night. She remembered how Caro used to read to her from her favorite book, The Little Curiosity Shop, stories about a fabulous old store in London’s World’s End, crammed to the rafters with magical wonders. She sat up suddenly and, swinging her legs over the side, stared at the bed across from her. Alli Carson’s bed. It was empty now, of course. Who knew where Alli was, or if she was still alive? Vera glanced over at the foot of the bed, and then, because she couldn’t help herself, she stared at the neatly tucked-in sheet, she stared at the pillow with its black case imprinted with white skulls. Strange fucking girl, but, oddly, she missed her. Maybe she missed hating her.

She lay back down, but knew right away that sleep was on some other continent. So she did what she always did when she couldn’t sleep—went to her desk, turned on the task lamp, and fired up her laptop. She was going to open her Web browser when she noticed a new folder on her desktop. It was titled “curio_cabinet.”

She felt a little thrill go through her. There had been a curio cabinet in The Little Curiosity Shop where all the most magical items were kept under lock and key. She scanned the folder with her security software, but it was clean. Also, it was encrypted. Every time she tried to open it, she was asked for a password. She thought for a moment, then typed in “TLCS.” That didn’t work. Then she thought of the curio cabinet itself. Of all the special items in it, the most magical to her was the book that opened a doorway to the Land of the Fayries. What was the name of that book? She screwed up her face in concentration. Ah, yes.

She typed in “Maeve’s World.”

Wham, she was inside the folder. Her heart beat faster. Could this mean what it seemed to mean? Then her heart sank. The folder contained only one minuscule file. But still … She opened the file and read:

HEY THERE, SIS. HOWZ TRICKS?

*   *   *

Jack could see the stars. They looked close enough to reach out and touch. The military jet Paull had had waiting for them in Brindisi was taking them all home.

Alli came and sat next to him. “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a train.” He laughed softly. “Several trains, actually.”

She hesitated only a moment. “I wanted to thank you.”

He turned to her.

“You believed in me.”

“Annika believed in you.”

“You had faith in me, Jack. I never got that from my parents.” She frowned. “I suppose you think there’s something wrong with me because I haven’t grieved for them.”

“You grieved plenty for your father.”

She looked thoughtful. “Maybe I did.”

“And as for your mother.” He shrugged. “Perhaps that will come in time.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then it doesn’t.”

She was silent for some time. Then she took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Every doctor who examines me tells me there’s something wrong with me.” Her eyes cut to his. “You know exactly what I mean.”

Of course he did. He’d been told the same thing when he was young.

“But sometimes I feel…” She turned her head away. “I feel as if I’m numb inside, as if I’ll never feel anything deeply again.”

Jack took her hand. “You know that’s not true.”

Tears trembled at the corners of her eyes. “I wish to God I did.”

Jack desperately wanted to help her, but in this instance he knew he needed to be patient, especially because right now she couldn’t be.

At that moment, Annika came by.

“Am I interrupting anything?”

Jack glanced at Alli and shook his head.

Alli leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “See you later.” Then she stood up and walked with Annika to another set of seats, where they sat down together.

For a time, Jack tried to think about nothing at all, but his brain, working out the last of the conspiracy, wouldn’t rest. Then his cell phone buzzed and he caught the call from Alan Fraine, the D.C. Metro Police chief.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news.” Fraine’s voice sounded thin and far away. “Pawnhill got away.”

Jack stared into the blackness of the night. “What happened?”

“We tracked him to Billy Warren’s apartment. He apparently found a DVD, but it was in a booby-trapped attaché case. The DVD was almost entirely dissolved by acid. Nothing usable was left.”

Jack thought a moment. “Billy must have stashed the incriminating data he’d found on Middle Bay’s servers. That’s why he was tortured and then killed.”

“So it was Pawnhill, not Dardan Xhafa, who did it.”

“Pawnhill hired McKinsey, who was nursing a grudge against Billy,” Jack said.

“Your boss, Dennis Paull, ordered all of Middle Bay’s files, records, and computer data confiscated even before he landed, but so far he tells me there’s no sign of incriminating evidence.”

“And there won’t be,” Jack said. “Pawnhill has had unlimited access to the bank’s data for the past week. He’s sure to have deleted it all.”

Fraine sighed. “Probably. But Paull claims he’s got some first-rate techs in data recovery. They may find something Pawnhill overlooked.”

Jack saw no reason to say what was on his mind. He didn’t think Mbreti had left even a single kilobyte to find.

“Well, one good thing,” Jack said. “You can get Heroe out of custody.”

“Really? How’s that?”

“Now that the data’s gone, there’s no longer a need for a cover-up.”

“I’m not so sure it will be that easy.”

“Chief, she’ll be sprung the moment you make the request, trust me.”

There was a slight pause, then Fraine said, “Do you know who’s behind the cover-up?”

“I have a good idea.”

“Then you’re going to need some help when you get home. These people play at the highest level.”

“I appreciate the offer, Chief. But go take care of your own. I’m better off handling this myself.”

“I owe you one, Jack. If ever you need me…”

“Yeah.” Jack laughed. “I know where to find you.”

*   *   *

“Breathe,” Annika said. “Breathe, darling.”

Alli shivered. “I … I don’t know how I’m going to live like this.”

“Like what?”

“Not feeling.”

Annika shook her head. “I’m not at all sure I follow. If you don’t feel anything why did you risk your life to save Liridona?”

“That’s not the same.”

“Why isn’t it the same?”

Alli was trembling uncontrollably now, tears running down her cheeks. And then she sobbed. “I miss Emma so much.”

Annika enfolded her, kissed both her cheeks. “I know.”

“No, you don’t know. I—”

“But I do know, Alli. If I were to lose Jack…”

She let her words trail off and Alli stiffened in her arms.

“You love him,” Alli whispered.

“Yes.”

Alli collapsed against her. “Then you do know.”

“I know your heart is broken.”

Alli buried her face in the crook of Annika’s shoulder. “You won’t tell Jack.”

“Of course not, darling. You will.”

Alli pulled away from her. “But I can’t.”

Annika smiled. “But you must. Don’t you see that the secret is a barrier between you. Telling him will bring the two of you closer. Besides, this is your authentic self. Embrace it.”

Alli wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “What if he doesn’t understand?”

“Jack?” Annika appeared deeply amused. “Dear God, girl, you must be joking.”

*   *   *

Dennis Paull met them when they landed in D.C. just shy of six hours later. While he was arranging for Edon and Liridona to enter the States, Henry Holt Carson showed up. That was a surprise, but one that Jack welcomed. Carson was at the heart of the conspiracy, Jack knew that much. It was the why that needed confirmation.

He approached Alli, but when he tried to put his arm around her, she shrugged it off her.

He was looking at his niece, but he addressed Jack. “You kept her safe from harm, I see.”

“She kept herself safe from harm.”

Now Carson did look at Jack. “I’ll never forgive you.”

“For taking Alli away,” Jack said.

“He didn’t take me away.” Alli’s tone was indignant. “He saved me from being arrested.”

“You wouldn’t have been arrested,” Carson said. “I would have seen to that.”

“I’m not in your control,” Alli said. “I’m an adult. I make my own decisions.”

Carson shook his head. “This is what you did to her.”

“Mr. Carson,” Jack said slowly and deliberately, “you’re hardly in a position to lecture anyone on parenting skills.”

All the blood drained from Carson’s face and his hands curled into fists. “You’ll regret saying that, McClure.”

Jack took a step toward him. “I’ve had it with your threats and your bullying. I know you’re behind all of this.”

“All of what?”

“Everything that’s happened.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“On the contrary,” Annika said, appearing as if out of nowhere, “he knows precisely what he’s talking about.”

“You!” Carson goggled at her. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You don’t give a shit about your niece,” Annika said. “What you can’t forgive Jack for is meddling in your little scheme.”

“And I would’ve gotten away with it,” Carson snapped. He turned to Jack. “Your meddling cost me everything.”

“You’re the one who hired John Pawnhill,” Jack pointed out. “And Pawnhill was working with the Syrian, bringing over Xhafa’s girls and selling them at the Stem.”

This seemed to surprise Carson. He was silent for some time. He looked deflated. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, all the belligerence drained from it. “I was just trying to do the right thing.” He glanced away for a moment. “Just after Eddy was elected, I learned of a plot to assassinate him. The man behind the plot was the Syrian.

“In the absence of more information on the attempt itself, I decided that the best course of action was to go after the Syrian’s infrastructure. Someone at my bank suggested we look at other, smaller banks, to see if the Syrian was using them to move money around. I knew that if we could intervene there, we could shut down his financial system.

“I was directed to a company called Safe Banking Systems, because their antiterrorist software is the best in the business. They identified Middle Bay, but couldn’t get any farther because no one knows the Syrian’s real name or his aliases, so he isn’t on any PEP list. Then Eddy was killed and I was devastated. Directly after Arlen was sworn in, I went to him and told him about the plot. Together, we decided to go after the Syrian. I decided to buy Middle Bay. This way, I could find out just how the Syrian was using the bank, and once I knew that, I could control him.”

“So Crawford intervened and fast-tracked the buyout through the regulatory process.”

Carson nodded. “Time was of the essence.” His shoulders slumped. “But somehow the Syrian got wind of what I was doing. Pawnhill has a rep for being the best international forensic accountant in the business, but he must be working for the Syrian. Pawnhill destroyed all the records of the Syrian’s accounts and transactions.”

“Maybe not all. Billy Warren stumbled across the transactions and made copies.”

Paull frowned. “Pawnhill found his copy and destroyed it.”

“I think our clever little Billy made more than one copy.” Jack turned to Alli. “Remember when I asked you about Billy you said he was a closet neo-Luddite?”

Alli nodded. “Sure. He thought computer data was too insecure. He said, ‘Give me a pen and a sheet of paper any day.’”

Jack nodded. “That’s why I think he stashed a hard copy of the Syrian’s account data.”

*   *   *

Jack went through Billy Warren’s apartment more or less as John Pawnhill had done earlier, except he knew what he was looking for. Alli, Annika, Carson, and Paull watched him, Carson still with a fair degree of skepticism.

At length, Jack returned to the living room and looked more closely at everything. Then he went to the lacquer cabinet that held the books, stereo, CDs, and the like, and took down the first of the two large albums. This one held photos of Billy’s life. After paging through it to the end, Jack put it back and took out the second. Writing on a page.

Jack calmed his mind, gradually stopped the spinning of the whirlpool, reducing it to lines of text. Haltingly at first, then more easily, he read the title page of Billy’s graduate school thesis. The first ten pages were more difficult because there were twenty-two lines of type filling each page. Jack skimmed, struggling.

Then he turned to the eleventh page. It was totally different, and so were the next fifty pages. Pages and pages of numbers, six columns to a page. These were the Syrian’s account transactions from Middle Bay Bancorp.

Jack looked up and handed the album to Carson. “I believe this belongs to you.”

Epilogue

Alli returned to Fearington Academy after dinnertime. She had spent the afternoon and early evening being debriefed by Paull, Alan Fraine, and Nona Heroe. Then she had dinner with Jack and Annika at her favorite restaurant in D.C. Liridona and Edon were still with Dennis Paull, recounting in incriminating detail all they knew about Arian Xhafa’s business. Paull had promised Alli that he would set the sisters up in an apartment and see they got jobs. Alli was determined to see them as often as she could.

She was sitting on her bed listening to Inbar Bakal’s gorgeous, ululating vocals when Vera walked in. The moment Vera saw her, she stood stock still. Alli took her earbuds out.

“No one told me you were back.”

Alli stared at her. “I know what you did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you dosed yourself with the roofies.”

Vera looked over her shoulder as if she expected the police to be coming out of the shadows in the hallway. Then she stepped into the room.

“I should report you.”

Vera seemed mesmerized by her as she sat down on her own bed. “Why haven’t you?”

Alli shrugged, put her earbuds in, and lay down on her bed, her iPod between her breasts.

Vera stayed that way for a very long time. Then she came and sat on the edge of Alli’s bed. After a moment, Alli stopped the music and freed her ears.

“I hated you from the moment we became roommates.”

“You didn’t hate me,” Alli said, “you envied me.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

Alli laughed softly. “Maybe for you it is.”

It seemed to Alli that Vera’s ultrahard shell had begun to crack. She watched curiously as Vera stared down at her hands.

“The truth is…”

Vera wiped her palms down her thighs. Could she be nervous? Alli wondered. That would be a first. She concentrated all her energy on this woman.

“The truth is,” Vera began again, “except for hate, or maybe, like you said, envy, I don’t feel much of anything.”

“Join the club.”

Vera’s head snapped up and she scrutinized Alli’s face, possibly to see if Alli was making fun of her. But quite quickly she saw that Alli was serious.

Vera gave a little cry that was a half sob. “How I hate being numb!”

“Yeah, it sucks.”

“But what can we do about it?”

Alli sat up. “The only thing we can do, I guess. Talk about it.”

*   *   *

Annika, naked, her long, heart-stopping legs dangling over the side, sat on the bed in Jack’s old, rambling house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue. She was bent over while he traced his fingertips gently down the vertical scars on her back.

Jack thought about Edon’s ordeal at Arian Xhafa’s hands, and then immediately turned his mind away from gruesome matters.

“That’s important only to you.”

She sighed deeply and, turning around, slipped into his arms. “Do you think it will ever be possible for us to be a real family?”

“If we want it, Annika, then we’ll have it.”

The question he left unsaid was: Do both of us really want it?

“Until I met Alli, I never thought about having children,” Annika said.

“You wish Alli was your daughter.”

She pulled back a little to peer into his eyes. “Is that so terrible a desire?”

“Not at all.” He ran a hand down her cheek. “On the other hand, I don’t see you changing diapers.”

She put her head down, resting her forehead on his shoulder. “That’s not so terrible, either.”

“What’s wonderful is the love Alli has awakened in you.”

“My mother loved very deeply—and you know what happened to her.”

Jack did. She had taken her life after Annika’s exceedingly powerful father had kidnapped Annika at the age of four.

“You’re not your mother, Annika. She was weak; you are anything but.”

She was silent for some time. He could feel her heart beating in her chest, could imagine her blood coursing through her veins and arteries.

“Annika,” he said softly, “this isn’t what you want to be talking about.”

She remained silent, but connected to him in the most intimate, visceral way.

“What is it you want to ask me?”

She stirred at last, as if from a dream. “Nothing.” She kissed him warmly on the lips. “Nothing at all.”

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Preview

Read on for the first chapter of

A new president. A new life. Orphan Alli Carson has taken up a post at Fearington, the elite covert training school. Now she fears that the people who worked relentlessly to undermine her father – and ultimately cause his death – are targeting her too.

Meanwhile, Washington’s top agent, Jack McClure, is being threatened by one of Russia’s most fearsome assassins. But is this attempt the action of his lover’s criminal family, or a move to remove him before the American government can call upon him for aid?

Prologue

December 4

Moonlight, and what comes after. The Moskva River shimmered in moonlight. Jack McClure and Annika Dementieva stood on her balcony looking out at snow-covered Red Square. The onion domes gleamed in floodlit splendor. The French doors of Annika’s second-floor apartment were thrown open, despite the icy chill. Somewhere beyond Moscow, the stars were out. A crescent moon rode high overhead.

The night sounds of the city were drowned out by Annika’s laptop, in split-screen mode, tuned in to both CNN and Al Jazeera. Competing talking heads, one in English, the other in Arabic, were proclaiming the continued rise and spread of what had quickly been dubbed the “Arab Spring,” started when the corrupt Mubarak regime in Egypt was ousted by a coalition made up of shopkeepers, teachers, students, doctors, mechanics, bus and taxi drivers, and housewives—everyone, in fact, clamoring, it seemed, for an end to dictatorship and a start to democracy.

“It won’t last. A new beginning, indeed,” Annika scoffed as she went inside to stare at her laptop screen. “It all sounds so rosy now, everyone, Christian and Muslim, getting along, but it won’t last.”

“How cynical you are.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Merely realistic. Every regime in the Middle East is corrupt, it’s simply a matter of degree.”

Jack tried to get her back outside, but she was too wrapped in her feelings.

She pointed. “Look at them. No one knows what they’re talking about. Now that the Muslim Brotherhood has won the election, how long do you think it will take until the army starts muscling in, trying to regain the traditional power it’s lost? The Brotherhood knows what I know. Those other factions could never get along; they’ll continue to fight and tear each other apart. The Brotherhood was quick to move into the power vacuum.”

She turned to look at Jack. “I despised Mubarak, but one thing you could say in his favor, he kept the Brotherhood from insinuating themselves into the fabric of Egypt’s government.”

“The price was high,” Jack said. “Instead of the Brotherhood, the Egyptian military insinuated itself into the fabric of not only Egypt’s government, but its economy as well.”

“There’s no good answer here.” Annika shook her head. “When it comes to the Middle East, there never will be. Mark my words, a feeding frenzy for power is going to erupt not only in Egypt, but throughout the Middle East.”

Jack closed the browser and shut down the computer. “That’s enough of feeling helpless for tonight.”

Annika smiled, first slyly, then more broadly. “Who says I feel helpless?”

As he slid his arms around her waist, she said, “There is no good answer, you know.”

He kissed her. “That’s why...” He kissed her again. “We’re tabling this discussion...” And again. “For the rest of the night.”

“There is an answer, you know,” she murmured into his mouth, “but it isn’t good.”

A high-low siren wailed like a muezzin, approaching along the embankment, before slowly fading away. They heard the hiss of car tires on the road below, and, once, the sharp, demented shout of a drunk, terrified of the demons in his head.

Jack backed her up against the wall. The prints on both sides of them trembled, then rattled. He kissed her hard, and she responded in kind. One of her legs drew up, her bare calf running up the outside of his leg. He rocked her like the sea.

“You should not even be here.”

When she spoke, her scent wafted over him, cloves and orange and a peculiar spice all her own.

“You should be with your American friends.” Her lips parted and her tongue flicked out. “With your American boss.”

“And yet I’m here with you.”

“Why? Why are you with me?” The tip of her tongue traced the outer whorls of his ear. “I am a Russian, and a murderer.”

“We’re all murderers.” His voice was thick with desire.

Her palms pressed against his shoulders as he pinned her to the wall. “You know that’s not true.”

“But it is. For us, killing is as much a part of life as eating or breathing.”

“Or making love.” Hips insinuating themselves.

“No. Making love is entirely different.”

“How?” Her lips slid down the side of his neck. “How is it different? Tell me.”

“When we’re together, making love, we’re different. We’re better people.”

“Only for a time—the space of a breath.” She took his hands, placed them on her buttocks. “Or a sigh.” She sighed deeply, an ecstatic explosive.

“Even that is enough.” He pulled the fullness of her hips into him. “My fear is that we will become like those before us. Living in the shadows, at the edges of society, gives us certain privileges, privileges that feed our egos, inflate them, until we believe that we are beyond the law.”

She unbuckled his belt. “But, darling, we are beyond the law.”

He unbuttoned her Shantung silk blouse. “Humans, unconstrained, are prone to develop criminal tendencies.”

Her fingertips traced a line from just below his navel down to his groin. “Those tendencies were there all the time.”

He smiled into the hollow of her throat, dizzy with her scent. “A fundamental illness in the human spirit, a cruelty, a capacity for killing without remorse.”

She moved against him, slithering her thighs open farther, pressing the center of herself against him with little grunts of lust. “This isn’t the time.”

“It’s the only time.” Cupping the back of her head, Jack tilted her up, pressing his lips against hers, feeling them soft beneath his, opening, their tongues twining. He drew back, slowly, reluctantly, because what he had to tell her was an urgency in the pit of his stomach, and needed to be said before their combined desire overwhelmed it and everything else.

“These moments together, no matter how brief, have to be enough to prove to us that we can go on with this life we’ve chosen.” He stared at her bare breasts, his hands seeking them out. “Without them, there’s only a descent into a perpetual dark from which we’ll never return.”

She looked up at him. “Do you think we kill without remorse?”

“I hope not.”

“But you don’t know.” She put her fingers across his lips. “We do what we have to do. There is no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

She started to run her hand up and down the length of him. “What? Walking away?” Her voice held an unmistakable mocking note.

“No,” he said. “That’s not an option.”

“Then let’s make the most of these moments.”

“Let’s make the world around us melt away. Let’s protect each other.”

He rammed her against the wall so hard her body shivered and shook all over. Her legs came off the floor, wound around him, heels drumming against his bare flesh. The wall was their bed; they did not notice how hard it was—they were only aware of each other’s bodies as more and more skin appeared. Shadows played over them as they moved in ragged rhythm, their breath mingling, sweat springing out on their flesh, warmed by their mutual heat. Desire and need commingled, fueling their mutual lust. Every moment was breathless, each one another ecstasy, until the frenzy of the end.

The rapturous cries died slowly, the well-oiled bodies sliding against each other in long, languid caresses. Breathing slowed, along with heart rates. Jack watched the endless curves of her body, the mounds, the dells hidden in soft-edged shadow. He thought he had never seen anything more exquisite. His love for her rose like the sun, heating him, the entire room, filling him with a sure sense of iron purpose. Into the silence, he murmured her name.

And that was when he heard it.

He turned his head, saw the knob on the front door turning minutely. Annika’s eyes were closed. He kissed her eyelids, each in turn. She murmured, rising up out of the fluttering drowse into which she had descended. When her eyes opened, she smiled. Then, at Jack’s silent urging, her gaze followed the direction in which he was pointing.

Then she heard it, too, the slight sound of metal on metal, as someone just outside attempted to pick the lock.

They rolled away from each other, their sticky love now all but forgotten. Jack grabbed a shoe just as the door flew open. He threw the shoe, heel-first. It hit the intruder square in the face. The man’s handgun went off, the bullet just missing Annika’s bare shoulder. Where it impacted in the corner of the wood dresser, needle-sharp shards sprayed outward. Annika cried out, one hand up to protect her eyes.

The intruder’s gun swung around, the muzzle aimed straight at Jack. He leapt directly at the figure, the barrel of the gun slamming into the side of his head as his momentum took them both down across the apartment’s threshold. The intruder struck Jack another blow, and Jack reeled. The figure grabbed Jack’s throat in a death grip, seeking to crush his larynx, while he brought the gun to bear on Jack’s face.

Before the man could pull the trigger, Jack jabbed him in the kidneys, repeatedly smashed his gun hand against the doorframe until the weapon fell to the floor. With the intruder’s hand constricting his throat, Jack was losing oxygen at an appalling rate. He jabbed out, his knuckles connecting with the intruder’s throat. The man choked, his grip relaxing enough for Jack to sweep his hand away. Then he bore down with both hands in a stranglehold the intruder tried to break. Increasingly desperate, the man’s fingers tried to pry Jack’s hands away, then scrabbled on the floor for the handgun. But Annika, stepping over them both, picked up the weapon before he could find it.

“Jack,” she said. “Jack, stop. That’s enough.”

But it wasn’t, not for Jack. This man had violated their private space at the most intimate of moments. He had fired on Annika and almost hit her. No, it wasn’t nearly enough. He pressed in and down, putting his entire body into it, until the intruder’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and his breathing stopped.

It was long moments before Annika got through to him, could pull him to his feet. He stood panting over the body.

“Where did our better natures go, Jack?” she said softly. “They were imprisoned and starved to death by our overdeveloped sense of purpose.” She looked at him. “Do you understand me?”

He nodded. His chest was still heaving.

“This hit man,” she said softly, “I know him.” She took Jack’s hand in hers. “He works for one of my brothers, Grigori Batchuk.”

This name sent a splinter of shock through Jack’s brain. “Brothers?”

She nodded. “My father had two children with another woman. Grigori and Radomil.”

“Are you telling me that one of your brothers wants you dead?”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying. Grigori is determined to kill both me and my grandfather.”

“But why?”

“My father—” Her mobile sounded, interrupting her. She padded across the room, picked it up, and listened for a moment.

“Annika,” Jack said, coming toward her, “what is it? What’s happened?”

Her face looked stricken, and when she spoke her voice was as thin and strained as a wire. “It’s Dyadya Gourdjiev. They’ve just taken him to the hospital.”

1

Alli Carson’s back slammed against the mat.

“I missed my opportunity.”

“Patience is opportunity.”

She stared up at the broad face with almond eyes and thick black eyebrows.

“I don’t understand,” she said, regaining her feet. “I missed my chance.”

Sensei smiled his enigmatic Ent-like smile. “You mistake chance with advantage.”

He squared to her, his bare feet set at shoulder-width. He was small and wiry, yet more powerful than a six-foot-six linebacker. “In hand-to-hand combat you must always seek the advantage. Advantage comes with patience.” He cocked his head. “Please explain.”

“I can’t,” Alli said.

“Yes,” Sensei insisted, “you can.”

Alli screwed up her face, but let her mind wander freely. “Everyone has a weakness.”

Sensei’s smile widened. “Everyone.”

“Even you, Sensei?”

“Together, we shall find out.” He lunged at her and she backed away. “Stand your ground. Parry, move not an inch, cede nothing.”

For the next five minutes she did as he ordered. She neither retreated nor advanced, no matter the method of his attack, and at the end of that time she saw the opening on his left side every time he advanced. She waited, patient, for his next attack, and when it came, she was ready, feinting left, then right, under his attack. She was just about to land her blow when his right arm whipped around, his hand gripped her shoulder, and he spun her off her feet.

He stood over her for a moment, a big grin on his face. As he leaned over her, he said, “One half learned, one half only.” He held out his hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, she took it. “You must make certain your opponent is not gulling you into a mistake.”

As he pulled her up, she whipped her left leg up, planted her foot on his chest, and pushed from her lower abdomen, the force traveling through her thigh, snapping her bent knee straight, extending through the sole of her foot.

Sensei stumbled backward, but did not let go of her hand. She was yanked forward, a sharp pain in her extended leg. He sought to take advantage of the momentary weakness the pain caused her, wrapping his right arm around her neck as she was falling against him. But she used his own momentum against him, rolling onto her left shoulder, dragging his body up and over her, slamming his shoulder blades against the mat.

Up on one knee, she rested a moment, breathing deeply to allow the pain to flow through her and dissipate. She found that her heartbeat was accelerated; she could hear her pulse in her ears.

Sensei rose to his feet, bowed, and, turning, walked out of the practice room without so much as a backward glance. He said not a word; none was expected. Praise was something Sensei never extended, feeling it gave rise to ego, which had no place in his dojo.

She remained where she was and wiped her damp forehead on her sleeve. Then she collapsed, sitting on the mat in the center of the room, knees drawn up, arms locked around her shins, as she replayed the last two minutes with breathless wonder.

Some moments later, her roommate, Vera Bard, poked her head into the dojo. “Ah, you’re finished. Good.” Her expression troubled, she stepped into the room and tapped her iPad. “I’ve got to show you something. It’s pretty weird.”

As she was about to step onto the mats, Alli waved her back, rose, and came across to her. Plucking her coat off a wooden peg, she slipped into it, and they went outside into the chill December weather. A brilliant blue sky sparkled overhead and frost danced on their exhalations. The campus of Fearington, one of the prime secret services training centers in the D.C. area, surrounded them, the Federal-style buildings interspersed with stands of tall pines and chestnut trees. Farther away, hidden in a series of natural swales, were the Pits: obstacle courses, firing ranges, and the like.

Alli breathed in the fresh air. Her body felt limitless, her mind drunk on her victory over Sensei. She took Vera’s iPad and checked out the screen. Vera took it from her and brought up an Internet site titled allicarsonbitch-slave.com.

Alli gave a little gasp. “What the hell?”

“The link to the site was e-mailed to me and to everyone else at Fearington.”

“Who sent the e-mails?” Alli asked.

“They were sent by you.”

“What? But I didn’t—”

“Of course you didn’t,” Vera said.

There were a series of photos of nude girls bound and tied, arms extended over their heads or out to the sides as they sat in a heavy wooden chair. All had Alli’s head or face Photoshopped onto them. Below each there was a price for photo sets and short films that could be ordered. Farther down were comments: filthy whore, pervert, hot bitch, and the like, but all of them ended with either a smiley face or LOL, cyber-shorthand for “laugh out loud.”

“The good news is that this cyber–smear attack is being viewed as a practical joke inside Fearington. It’s likely someone here is the culprit.”

“Well, it’s not funny.” Alli kept reading. “Look here... here at the end, a date for my supposed death—December twentieth.” She looked up at Vera, appalled. “That’s two weeks from now.”

“Hey, come on, you can’t believe this death threat is real. I mean, someone’s gaming you, sure, and we have to stop it, but...”

“After what I’ve been through I take everything seriously,” Alli said.

“Okay, but... I mean, no one in their right mind would think that’s really you in those photos. Look, here and here again, the lighting’s off.”

But Alli, who had felt a chill run down her spine the moment she saw the images of girls bound into that nightmarish heavy wooden chair, felt plowed under by the intimate eeriness of the photos. And her fear only increased when she saw the date of her supposed death.

“Come on,” Vera said. “We’ll take this to the authorities. They’ll find out who’s behind this shit, put him away, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Alli began to shiver uncontrollably.

At once, Vera put her arm around her roommate’s shoulders, pulling her close. “You’re cold as ice. What is it?”

Alli remained mute, but her mind was churning with terror. December twentieth was the fifth anniversary of the day she had been kidnapped by Morgan Herr.

Alan Fraine, captain of detectives of the Metro Police, was halfway through his strenuous thrice-weekly workout when he saw a man enter the cavernous second floor of Muscle Builders Unlimited, wrap a towel around his neck, and check out the rows of StairMasters. Something familiar about the man made the short hairs at the back of Fraine’s neck stir. He continued with his second set of biceps reps, but his mind was no longer in it, and he set the dumbbells aside before he injured himself.

He watched with curiosity as the man strode over to his section. It was then that he recognized Dennis Paull, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Paull straddled the bench next to Fraine and said, “Alan, how’s it going?”

Fraine had had occasion to work with Paull and Jack McClure several months ago in connection with Henry Holt Carson and Middle Bay Bancorp. Carson had been part of a conspiracy to frame Fraine’s best detective, Nona Heroe. Paull had gotten her out from the Feds’ custody.

“Sorry.” Fraine tried to hide the depth of his surprise. “I didn’t recognize you out of your suit, Mr. Secretary.”

“Hardly anyone does,” Paull said. “That’s a gift sometimes.”

“So I imagine,” Fraine said. “I had no idea you were a member.”

Paull produced a complicit grin. “I joined this morning.”

Fraine waited for the shoe to drop. The secretary wasn’t here to break a sweat or to exchange pleasantries.

“Alan, I have a proposition for you.”

Fraine’s ears perked up. “I’m listening.”

“I’m putting together a special group.”

“What kind of group?”

Paull leaned forward. “A SITSPEC—”

“A what?”

Paull waited while a couple of gym rats passed by, talking reps and sets and punitive diets. “A black-ops group. Situation-specific, hence the acronym.”

“Fed-speak.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

Paull nodded, lowering his voice, forcing Fraine to lean toward him. “This one is very special. I’d like you and Nona to be part of it.”

“Mr. Secretary, I appreciate the offer, but Nona and I are local and I’m sure your SITSPEC is not. It’s probably not even domestic.”

“There you’re wrong. It is domestic and, as of this moment, it’s local to the D.C. area.”

Fraine considered this possibility. “Why us?”

“I know I can trust you. You and Nona owe me; at the end of the day, I know you won’t turn me down.” He smiled. “Besides, before it’s over, there’s a good chance we’ll be intersecting with Henry Holt Carson’s interests.” His smile turned sly. “I know you can’t pass up that opportunity.”

“There’s a time and a place for everything,” the General said.

“Even peace?”

“No.” The General lit a cigar with a wooden match. He had a head like a helmet, with a fringe of prematurely white hair like a priest’s tonsure. “Of course not peace.”

The other man, small-boned, sharp-nosed, and gray as a rodent, shifted in his wing chair. He wore a pale-colored suit and a black tie. By his side was a carved hickory walking stick. His name was Werner Waxman, though he also might be known as Smith or Jones, Reilly or Coen, depending on what country and what year he was in. In any case, Waxman was not his real name. “But you said—”

“For me, peace doesn’t exist.”

The two men were sunk into the dim, woody interior of a hunting lodge deep in the forests of Virginia. Far from the media spotlight glare inside the Beltway, they sat on either side of an enormous fireplace composed of stones as large as their heads. It was late, only a few scattered lamps left on, their pools of lights burnishing the wide polished floorboards. A tray with the remains of coffee and dessert sat unnoticed on a low table nearby.

The General lifted his cleft chin, blew smoke at the coffered ceiling. “I, personally, don’t know what peace is, and, frankly, I don’t want to know.”

Waxman leaned forward, his muscles tense. A blue vein beat at the corner of his left eye. “Peace is death.”

The General’s gaze came down, fixed Waxman with the accuracy of a lawn dart. “Yes.” He seemed as much impressed as he was surprised. “You’ve caught the essence precisely.”

“Well.” Waxman inclined his head, a formal Middle European gesture. “That’s my job, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t want that.” The General rounded the ash crown of his cigar on the lip of his plate. “I wouldn’t want the responsibility of making sense of it all.”

“We all have our roles to play.” Waxman’s eyes glinted as he turned his head. “You, General, are a man of action. You carry out a plan to perfection.”

The General stirred, wondering now what Waxman wanted. “This enterprise of yours—it had better work.”

“Trust me, General.”

“The last individual who said that to me is six feet under.”

Like a conjuror, Waxman produced a thin smile as if from nowhere. “As to that, I have no worries.”

The General sucked on his cigar. “The stakes are astronomical.”

“Such melodrama! This isn’t Hollywood.”

“You can’t afford to be wrong.” The General stared at the ash at the end of his cigar. “About anything.” He glanced up. “Or anyone.”

Waxman’s thin smile seemed set in cement.

The General regarded Waxman with carefully concealed distaste. He seemed pale and weak, unfit for anything outside a well-ventilated room, but, as he had said, they all had their roles to play, all of them. Each brought a different expertise to the enterprise. They were bound not by friendship, but by need. Better by far than friendship, the General judged. It was unthinkable to betray someone you needed. And betrayal was the one thing they all feared. He knew that, because it was what he feared, the fear muscled way down in the depths of him, but always keeping a wary antenna out for red flags.

The members had made a covenant with each other a long time ago on a dark and turbulent night filled with blood, death, and terror. They were determined to fill the power vacuum Waxman had foretold would come to pass in the Middle East. And, despite Acacia’s first failure, he had been right, damnit, all the way down the line, right.

“I know you,” Waxman said. “You like to give the people around you a hard time.”

“That’s my job.”

Waxman nodded. “The reins of power. I understand.”

“What reins? We’re all in this together.”

Waxman’s eyes grew diamond-hard as he sat forward on the edge of his chair. Had it been anyone else, the General might have been alarmed. But Waxman was Waxman; he lived in his own head.

“There’s bullshit and then there’s bullshit, General. You may have fooled the others, but never for a minute believe that you’ve fooled me.” Waxman inclined his narrow torso like an arrow aimed at the General. “History informs us that while rule by consensus may work for a short time, it breaks down.” He spread his white hands. “We’re all human, General, we all want what we want—and it’s never the common good. You want what you want, General. I know it and you know it.”

And what is it exactly that you want, Waxman? the General wondered.

He set aside the remains of his cigar. “You’re really in love with that mind of yours, aren’t you?”

“Mind games.” One corner of Waxman’s lips twitched. “You don’t want to start with me.”

“Is that a threat?” The General’s voice was languid as he rose.

Waxman had no choice but to get to his feet. One shoulder was noticeably lower than the other, as if he were poised to make a fast getaway. The General towered over him; nevertheless, he appeared anything but intimidated.

“Sun Tzu wrote, ‘All war is deception,’ General,” Waxman said as, leaning on his stick, he brushed past. “You would do well to keep that in the forefront of your mind.”

The tick-tock of the walking stick was like the beating heart of a clock. The General watched Waxman disappear into the innards of the hunting lodge. At length, he turned and picked up his cigar, but it was already cold. The taste he loved was gone.

2

The sunlight in Moscow was white. It fell from a featureless sky cold and hard like sleet. Somewhere there were clouds, Jack McClure thought as he peered through the hospital window, and beyond, hard as it was to believe, a pale blue sky.

Workmen were busy stripping off the gaily colored billboard sheets for the Red Square Circus. Just beyond loomed the blank, brutal faces of the squat Soviet buildings across the street, a reminder of the old guard, as well as the repression and corruption that endured through every regime change. The Russian personality was stronger than communism, socialism, glasnost, and latter-day imperial fiat.

Hearing Annika call his name, he turned to see her across the corridor. She had just emerged from the room where Dyadya Gourdjiev lay beneath rough muslin sheets. Dyadya. Everyone called him Uncle—even Annika—but he was actually her grandfather.

“How is he?” Jack said, stepping across to her.

“The doctors say he’s dying, but I don’t believe it.” She gave him a wan smile. “Neither does he.”

He took her in his arms. She had her thick blond hair tied back in a ponytail, as she had the first time he’d seen her two years ago in the bar of a hotel across town. The buzzing fluorescent lights turned her carnelian eyes dark as dried blood.

“But if the doctors—”

“The doctors are fools,” she said. “They’ve been saying he’s dying for the better part of a year.” Her wide mouth was warm against his cheek. “He’s been asking for you.”

“Me?” Jack pulled away to see her expression. “You’re joking.” But he could see that she wasn’t. “Why would he want to see me?”

She laughed softly. “Don’t be an idiot. He liked you even before he knew you loved me.” She tapped his temple with a long forefinger. “He likes what’s inside there, the way you think. He says you remind him of himself.”

Jack stood looking at her, dumbfounded. “He used me just like he uses everyone else.”

“No, not in the same way.” She gave him a little push. “Go on, now. If you wait much longer he’ll be asleep.”

Jack nodded and, like a sleepwalker, pushed open the blond-wood door and stepped inside. The first thing he saw was the extremely handsome woman sitting in a chair near the far side of the bed. She turned as he entered. She wore an oxblood wool suit over a cream-colored silk blouse, caught at the neck by a magnificent cameo. Vitality usually reserved only for the young blazed through her as if she manufactured sunlight.

With a slight rustle of fabric, she rose. “You must be the Jack McClure I’ve heard so much about.” She extended a slender hand, white as snow, and he took it.

“You have me at a disadvantage, madam.”

“You have the honor to meet Katya Tanova,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said from his position propped up in the bed.

Katya Tanova’s eyes sparkled like diamonds. As she came around the end of the bed, Jack saw that she still had magnificent legs. Her figure was slim and elegant. She seemed ageless.

“So you are Annika’s lover.”

“Katya, please!” Dyadya Gourdjiev protested. “A little decorum.”

“At my age, decorum is a useless trait.”

Her smile was of the megawatt variety; Jack basked in its warmth. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, ma’am, not if you call me Jack.”

She gave him a formal little nod. “And you must call me Katya. All the family does.”

“Katya.” There was a warning note in Dyadya Gourdjiev’s voice, though it was tempered by an affection he chose not to hide.

“Yes, yes, I know. You men must talk about cabbages and kings.” She said this with a mocking tone, waving one hand at the space between Jack and Gourdjiev, then gathered up her things. As she went toward the door, she paused beside Jack. “Try not to tire him out. If you let him, he’ll talk all day and all of the night.”

“It’s a promise,” Jack said.

She smiled. “And you’re a man who keeps his promises.” She put a finger beside her nose and tapped it. “I have a sense about these things.”

“She does, you know,” Gourdjiev said when she had left. “A sorceress of sorts.”

The two men studied each other, the air between them a swirl of difficult memories and bittersweet emotions.

“It’s been some time,” the old man said.

“Seems like a lifetime.”

“And you’ve been busy, Annika tells me. The Albanians are a ruthless bunch of thugs. Disgusting habits. Thoroughly reprehensible.”

Jack said nothing, and the silence deepened. Apart from the beeps and blips of the monitors to which the old man was hooked up, there was no sound at all in the room.

“The way you look at me,” Gourdjiev said, “you think I look old.”

“You are old,” Jack said.

The old man gave a wry smile. “It’s an act I put on for the doctors. Otherwise, they feel neglected.”

Jack laughed and, as was Gourdjiev’s intent, the tension was broken. Even so, the levity was short-lived.

The old man nodded. “You’d better say it, get it over with.”

“You used me to get to Oriel Batchuk.”

Gourdjiev nodded. “In a roundabout way.”

“So Annika could kill him.”

“Who had a better right?”

“He was her father!”

“A father who kidnapped her when she was just a child, a father who tortured her, who forced her to do unspeakable things, over and over again.” His eyes snapped with an inner force. “Do you believe that Annika regrets what she did?”

The old man’s monitors revealed his distress.

“Calm down,” Jack said, alarmed. He came across and sat on the edge of the bed.

The door opened and a nurse peered in.

“I’m fine,” Gourdjiev croaked. “Get out!”

The door sighed shut behind her.

“So?” It was a challenge.

“I believe...,” Jack began, “it brought her a kind of peace.”

The old man gave a little sigh. “To me, as well.”

“Annika said you wanted to see me,” Jack said softly, the better to bring Gourdjiev back from the past.

The old man looked him straight in the eye. Unlike most old people, his eyes were as clear as a young man’s, they weren’t rheumy or watery or lacking in color. On the contrary, Jack could see the lamp of extraordinary intelligence still burning brightly.

“Jack, do you trust me?”

“I think the question is, do you trust me?”

Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled. “You wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t. Now, come, answer me.”

“Trust. That depends on what you mean,” Jack said truthfully. “You’ve lied to me in the past.”

“Did things turn out badly?”

“No.”

“And it’s always turned out for the best, no?”

“That doesn’t stop me from feeling used.”

The old man took a moment to digest this. “Do you trust me to do no harm?” Like a doctor, the analogy apt, considering their surroundings.

Jack nodded. “It depends on your point of view. I’m never certain whose side you’re on.”

“Do you trust me to protect Annika, whatever the cost?”

Now Jack’s alarm escalated. “Protect her from whom?”

Gourdjiev closed his eyes for a moment, his lids thin as parchment. “Please.”

Jack let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Of course I do.”

The old man’s eyes opened, his gaze steady on Jack. “Then we may proceed.” He drew a deep breath, as if preparing for an arduous task. “Listen to me closely. I’m not dying, but it may be that my life is growing short. Who can know, we’re all human, yes? The clock keeps ticking.” He shrugged. “In any event, the time has arrived for me to plan for a future when I am no longer present.”

Jack waited patiently.

“So now I must ask you for a favor.”

“Anything.”

Gourdjiev slapped him lightly on the forearm. “You agree to such a thing so quickly, without a second thought.”

“My second thought would be the same as my first,” Jack said seriously.

“Without knowing what this favor might entail.”

Jack remained silent, but his gaze remained level on Gourdjiev’s face.

“So.”

The old man pursed his lips, but Jack sensed that he was pleased.

“Well, all right, then. I need you to get me out of here.”

“What, the hospital?”

“The hospital, Moscow, Russia.”

Jack was puzzled. “But you have so many friends, so much power.”

The old man smiled. “The jackals are circling, the hyenas, and now the lions. They’re all watching. They all smell blood.” He folded his hands on his lap, staring at the tracery of raised blue veins. “Times have changed, Jack. Now money is the only thing that matters. If you have enough money, you buy your way into power. It’s easier, you see, than fighting for it yourself. And so much quicker. Shortcuts. These people today, they’re lazy, they want everything immediately. Money is the speedway, the rocket to the moon, so to speak.”

He shifted slightly, rearranging the sheet over him. “So the old ways are dying, if not already dead, all right, fine, I’m not one to hold on to the past, wringing my hands, mourning for the old days. I think about the future, always, which is why I must make my escape before I get dragged down by what is happening now.”

“Which is?”

“A present for which I am unprepared.” He shook his head. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m neither senile nor paranoid.”

“Although in our business,” Jack said, “a little paranoia is a good thing.”

A small smile played around the corners of Gourdjiev’s mouth, but was quickly extinguished. “This escape has to be done now—today.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re out of Russia, not before.”

“Annika told me that you want to get to a cache of information you’ve amassed over the years.”

“Evidence of wrongdoing, malfeasance, extortion, embezzlement, murder. Documents and photos, taped conversations, videos, that sort of thing.” The old man smiled. “There’s no such cache.”

“Then why did you tell Annik—”

“For her own protection. If she knew everything is inside my head, she’d be paralyzed with fear for me. You understand I can’t have that.”

Jack did. Again, he thought, who wants her dead? The same jackals, hyenas, and lions that are watching, circling the old man, waiting for an opening; it stands to reason. But who are they?

Dyadya Gourdjiev tapped the back of Jack’s hand with a papery finger. “I wanted you to meet Katya. I love her and she loves me. Now, in my twilight, that’s all that’s important to me—love. I have no more need of either money or power—they’re for younger people, like you and Annika.”

With a sudden lunge, he clutched Jack’s hand. “You love my granddaughter, yes?”

“Yes,” Jack said.

“Because she loves you. This is my beacon in the dark, the only thing I pay attention to now. This is the depth of my trust in you, Jack. Words—words mean nothing, an actor’s lines. I want you to remember that. No matter what may occur, you must remember that you love each other, that that love will never change, that it is your true strength, your only salvation.”

The old man looked deep into Jack’s eyes. “You don’t understand this now, but I have faith that one day you will.”

Jack sat for a long time, turning over everything Gourdjiev had said. At last, he roused himself. He had a fistful of questions, but he knew the old man well enough not to ask them now. “As to our escape,” he said, “I suppose you have a plan.”

“When do I not?” That smile again, sharp as a scimitar’s blade. “I’m going to have to die.”

Henry Holt Carson received a call from the president after hours, though, when it came to both men, that phrase hardly existed. Carson was as apt to be up and working at three in the morning as he was at three in the afternoon. His sprawling empire, anchored by his InterPublic Bancorp, made it imperative that he often transact business in Asia and the Middle East. He was not a man to delegate tasks both difficult and delicate to others just because it might gain him some sack time. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” was Carson’s most beloved phrase.

The two men met in the parking lot in back of an enormous Walmart inhabited only by dead-looking trailer trucks unhooked from their cabs and the president’s Secret Service detail, which had immediately established a watchful perimeter of granite-faced men linked by a wireless network. Crawford and Carson looked a lot alike. Hands plunged deep in cashmere overcoats, they smiled at each other in a chilly, feral manner, because more often than not the reason for their meetings wasn’t pleasant. For both men, business was everything, pleasure a distant memory enjoyed by their younger selves in another, dimly recalled lifetime.

“Making money?” Arlen Crawford said with his just-us-folks Texan heartiness.

“Every minute of every hour of every day,” Carson said. “But since you’re regularly kept abreast of our mutual holdings I very much doubt that’s why we’re here in this godforsaken place.”

“It suits our purpose.” Crawford, tall and rangy, with a cowpoke’s rough, wind-reddened skin, indicated that the two should walk. Crawford was not a man who enjoyed being sedentary. Briefings saw him walking back and forth behind the facing sofas in the Oval Office, a habit that still disconcerted some members of his cabinet. This was the very reaction Crawford sought. The president liked everyone off balance, even his closest advisors. “Absent a real live battle,” he would say, “it keeps ’em sharp.”

The president extracted a pair of Cuban Cohibas from his inside breast pocket, handed one to Carson, then stuck the other between his teeth. The two men paused, bent their heads together as Carson, protected by hunched shoulders and a cupped hand from the wind, lit the cigars. He used one of his prized possessions, a massive silver Ronson lighter, given to him by the premier of China during a pilgrimage Carson had made to Beijing six years ago to clear the way for his brother Edward, then a senator. Also, to consummate a highly lucrative deal with a Chinese high-tech firm headquartered in Shanghai.

The two men continued their leisurely amble around the deserted parking lot, chatting about an upcoming Senate vote, personal golf scores, and Crawford’s new press secretary. Nothing important. Carson, walking on the balls of his feet, waited patiently for the current scenario to unfold. The Secret Service perimeter shifted with the location of the POTUS. The men’s electronic whispering to each other possessed the hard, dry rustle of an autumn wind.

At last Crawford cleared his throat and said, “I’m growing concerned with Three-thirteen.”

The mere mention of the name sent chills through the usually imperturbable Carson. “You’re always concerned about Three-thirteen,” he said, easily projecting a tone of nonchalance, “though for the life of me I cannot understand why.”

The president stopped and turned toward his friend. “Because, Henry, I am growing tired of its monomaniacal focus on Iran.”

“I should be the last person on earth to have to remind you of Iran’s growing threat in destabilizing the entire Middle East.”

“All that is true enough, Henry. But the fact is you neglected to talk to your brother about Three-thirteen.”

“Edward was rightly preoccupied with the Russia treaty. Besides, he was hardly in office long enough—”

“I know very well why you didn’t tell Edward.” The president sucked on his Cohiba, as if to bolster his courage. “He wouldn’t have understood. Edward had a highly elevated sense of morality.”

“Which we do not.”

“We’re realists,” the president said, “not idealists.”

“My brother would never have understood our motivations.”

The president regarded the glowing tip of his cigar. “On the contrary, I think Edward would have understood all too well.”

Carson turned on the president, his eyes blazing. “What have I told you, Arlen? I do not want to talk about Edward.”

“The Good Brother.”

Carson, eyes narrowed, took a step closer. “What is it with you tonight, Arlen? Do you have a death wish?”

“Jesus, Henry.” Crawford, rearing back, turned pale.

“I made you, Arlen, and I can destroy you. Without my influence, you’re a leaky boat dead in the water. If perchance you have forgotten, then consider this your wake-up call. Your last warning. Clear?”

The president continued to suck on his cigar. His hand was trembling.

“I was just... I’m voicing a concern... for both of us.”

“Meaning?”

“Of late, there has been talk among cabinet members,” Crawford said. “They’re growing uneasy with Three-thirteen’s power. They say it should have been shut down long ago. So I want... I think for both our sakes it should be dismantled before it takes on a life of its own.”

Carson stared at the president with poisonous eyes. He rolled his cigar within the O of his pursed lips. “What you suggest... can, of course, be accomplished.”

“Good.” Crawford looked relieved. “I don’t want any more questions raised.”

Carson felt his heart grow heavy, but he revealed none of his true feelings to the president.

“And, while you’re at it, please make sure every trace of the Incident is expunged.”

“Let’s not start that again.”

“The Incident started events spinning out of control.”

“The Incident is ancient history. The inquiry following it—”

“Was a sham. We both know it.” The ash on Crawford’s cigar burned bright for a moment, before falling like snow at his feet. “The inquiry was meant to do one thing only: absolve those involved of any guilt or responsibility.”

“Which, at the time, included you and me.”

“No, not me.” Crawford stared at lights blinking far in the distance as if they had a message for him. “I was on the periphery.”

“At the last minute you backed away.”

The president winced. “I had other obligations. Important ones.” His gray eyes flashed. “That’s why I relied on you. The plan was agreed upon. Three-thirteen deployed Acacia to the Horn of Africa, along with a battalion of Marines, for cover. From there, it completely vanished off every grid known to military and man. Twenty-seven hours later, the Incident occurred, causing a cluster-fuck the likes of which I have never seen before or since.”

“Which is precisely why it needs to remain buried.”

“Ancient history has a way of biting even the most vigilant in the ass. If word of the Incident ever got out, I’d be ruined.” The president cleared his throat. “I am thinking more along the lines of incinerated.”

Carson waited a moment, marshaling his thoughts. “I think that can be arranged.”

“Whatever is done,” the president said, “I don’t want to know about it.”

Of course you don’t, Carson thought. This will happen when and if I give the order, not you. “Arlen, I want to be clear. There are risks to taking any action whatsoever.”

“Deal with them, Henry. Use whatever means. Above all, I want plausible deniability.”

Carson nodded, disgusted by the other man’s cowardice. On the other hand, if Crawford weren’t such a coward, Carson wouldn’t be able to exploit him as he did. “I’ll take care of it.”

They had made a full circle and were now back at where the cars were parked.

President Crawford stuck out his hand. “Henry, good to see you.”

Carson grasped it briefly. “As always, Arlen.”

The president nodded to his Secret Service detail, letting them know he was ready to leave. “This conversation never happened.”

Carson produced a lupine smile. “What conversation?”

Nona Heroe had just come in from the field, where she had been involved in a hostage situation at a stationery store. Before it could get out of hand, she had taken control by entering through the cellar and, coming up behind the perp, disarming him, and taking him into custody. Marching him out the front door, she had announced herself and shoved him over to the uniforms clogging the street. Now, as she strode across the office, she was looking forward to her lunch break so she could visit her brother in the Bethesda Naval Hospital. As often as she went, it never seemed enough.

“Chief of detectives wants to see you,” one of her Violent Crimes detectives said when he saw her come in. And then he added, as he watched her make her way to her cubicle, “Now, boss.”

“Uh-huh.” She turned on her heel and went back down outside, crossed the street to the building opposite the one she worked out of, passed through the marble lobby and into a stainless-steel elevator. She punched nine, then had nothing but her reflection to stare at on the ride up. She saw an imposing woman, with a good figure, the fine, slightly exotic features of her paternal grandmother, and skin the color of bittersweet chocolate. She was still on the good side of forty, but looked more like thirty. Then she turned away, snorting in self-derision.

Exiting, she took a hallway to the end, turned left along another, shorter corridor, and stopped in front of a wood-paneled door. On the wall to the right was a plaque that read: leonard bishop, chief of detectives.

She rapped once with her knuckles, opened the door, and walked in just as Bishop said, “Enter.”

He stood up when he saw her, but did not come around from behind his massive oak desk. The walls were hung with decorations, commendations, and photos of Bishop with various politicos from both parties, past and present, including President Arlen Crawford, looking red-cheeked, windblown, and every bit the rangy Texan. There was no picture with his predecessor, however. Edward Carson must have been killed too soon after taking office for Bishop to have arranged a photo op.

The CoD’s pride in his connections was somewhat justified by his years getting bloodied on the streets of D.C., though Nona found pride a repellent trait.

“Take a pew, Detective,” Bishop said with a sweeping gesture. “Congratulations. Your quick thinking averted a potential crisis and, quite possibly, loss of life.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Bishop seated himself, shuffling some papers aside, bringing others under his gaze. “I’m putting you in for a commendation.”

“That’s not necessary, sir.” When he glanced up sharply, she altered her tone. “But much appreciated, sir.”

He nodded and dropped his gaze again to the documents in front of him. “And cut out the ‘sir.’ ” Glancing up briefly again, he added, “When you’re in this office.”

He cleared his throat, then looked up and smiled. He was a rather handsome man, slim, with angular cheekbones, an aggressive nose, wavy silver hair, and brilliant blue eyes, which looked even better when viewed through a camera lens.

“Today’s heroics only underscore a decision I made this morning,” he said. “As of next week, you’ll be the new coordinator of detectives.”

“Sir? Uh, Chief Bishop, I’m not sure I understand.”

The CoD spread his hands. “It’s a promotion, Nona. Two pay grades higher and, six months from now, if all goes well, you’ll achieve the rank of deputy chief of detectives.” His brow wrinkled. “I must say, you don’t look pleased.”

“Chief Bishop, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t coordinator of detectives admin, a desk job?”

“Right as rain.” Bishop’s smile broadened. “You’re being kicked upstairs, Nona. No more looking over your shoulder, waiting for the bullet you never hear. And at your age. I had to pull some strings because of that. Some of my colleagues thought you weren’t ready, but I maintained that you are. You don’t want to prove me wrong, do you?”

“Of course not.” She sat forward, perched on the edge of her chair. “And I don’t want to seem ungrateful—”

The CoD’s smiled slipped. “Then accept the promotion, and do it graciously.”

Nona took a deep breath and let it out. “Look, Chief, I’m a street detective, that’s what I’ve been trained for, that’s what I love. It’s my life.”

“I understand that completely, who better than I? I came up through the ranks just like you.”

“I run Violent Crimes; I do it a damn sight better than anyone you might get to replace me.”

The CoD nodded sympathetically. “I hear you, but times change, and so must we all. You’ll be moving over here.”

Away from Alan Fraine and all her friends at Violent Crimes. Nona took a moment to settle the disharmony inside her, to calm down, to find a way to walk the fine line it would take to get what she wanted without terminally pissing off her superior. Bishop was one of a handful of powerful men inside the Metro Police. If he had a mind to, he could ruin her career.

“This is an amazing opportunity, no question about it,” she began.

Bishop smiled. “That’s more like it.”

“But I must respectfully decline.”

“You can’t decline, Nona, respectfully or otherwise.”

“But the street is where I belong, Chief. It’s where I do my best work. I am skilled—”

“The time has come to learn new skills.”

She stood up. “It seems we’re at an impasse.”

He pursed his lips. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s an impasse.”

She said nothing, stood primly as a schoolgirl with her hands clasped in front of her.

He leaned back, his fingers steepled, studying her intently. “Have you done something to your hair? A new style?”

The silence stretched and yawned, gaping open to a future she could not abide.

At length, the CoD sighed. “Okay, there is one way to keep the status quo, so to speak, for you to keep your beloved street,” he said slowly, as if working it out as he went.

“What?” The eagerness in her voice was unmistakable. “Just tell me.”

“It involves me,” he said, his words coming ever more slowly as he put emphasis on each one. “And it involves you.”

She saw how he undressed her with his eyes, and the revelation hit home. She had been set up. Bishop never expected her to take the coordinator job; he knew her too well and he was too smart to take her off the streets, where, like today, she made him look good. He had wanted this all along, this bending of her to his will, to lord it over her with both power and sex. Under his thumb.

“I could file a report.”

“You could,” he acknowledged, “but who would see it other than me?”

“Alan.”

He cocked his head. “You and Fraine are close, I know. D’you really want to drag your friend into this?”

He was right, she didn’t. Hiring a lawyer would get her nowhere except in a career spiral into the toilet. There was nothing else for her to do.

“Well,” he said softly, gently. “I’m waiting.”

“I want to remain on the street,” she said, numb with the ease with which he had turned her world upside down.

“Of course you do.” Now he rose and came around from behind his desk. He stood so close to her she could feel the heat coming off him. “And things will be as you wish, Nona. Just as you and I wish.”

“Please tell Annika that it’s time,” Dr. Zurov, Dyadya Gourdjiev’s personal physician, said. He had shown up at the hospital twenty minutes ago and since then had been huddling with his patient. He was a tall, thin individual with a spade beard and a patrician’s air.

Jack nodded, rose, and, opening the door, peered out into the corridor, where Annika and Katya were speaking in low tones. At once, Annika broke off the conversation to look at Jack. He nodded to her and she came inside the hospital room and gave Dr. Zurov a meaningful look. Opening her handbag, she took out a plastic device the size and shape of a woman’s compact. This she affixed to the underside of the bed. Then she poured her grandfather some water from a plastic pitcher on a rolling tray beside the bed. From his black bag, Dr. Zurov produced a tiny red-coated pill.

“What the hell is that?” Jack said.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. He put the pill between his lips and knocked it back with a swallow of water.

Annika reached under the bed to the plastic compact.

“Ten seconds,” Dr. Zurov said to his patient. His face looked lined, concentrated, intent.

Dyadya Gourdjiev’s eyes rolled up in his head. When he stopped breathing Jack lunged toward him, but Dr. Zurov held him back.

“It’s all right,” Annika whispered at his side.

A moment later, the steady beeping of the electronic monitors was replaced by a constant shrill sound as all of the old man’s vital signs flatlined. A nurse rushed in, took one look at the monitors, and called for a crash cart. Outside in the corridor, they could hear a doctor being urgently paged.

“What happened?” the nurse said as she put a stethoscope over Gourdjiev’s heart.

“He had a seizure,” Dr. Zurov said. “One minute he was talking, the next he had stopped breathing.”

“He’s still not breathing,” the nurse said as the crash cart was wheeled in.

“I’ve already pronounced him dead.”

The doctor on call rushed in. He asked the same question, to which Dr. Zurov gave the same answer.

“If he’s gone, he’s gone. He did not want to be resuscitated, he was quite clear on that score.” Dr. Zurov produced a signed DNR document, which he handed to the doctor. “Signed and sealed.”

Katya, coming into the room, said, “Please leave and let the family grieve in peace.”

The doctor, looking bewildered, studied the document, then handed it back with a curt nod. “As you wish.” Turning on his heel, he and the nurse left.

Annika was stretched over her grandfather, weeping openly. Katya went to her side and held her around her waist while she stroked her hair.

Dr. Zurov switched off all the monitors. Annika reached beneath the bed and detached the compact, whose electronics had jammed the monitors’ signals, and pocketed it.

“He’s in the deepest meditative state,” Dr. Zurov said. “The drug will last forty minutes.”

Katya was already on her cell phone, speaking softly. “The car from the funeral home will be here in ten minutes,” she said after she broke the connection.

Jack, astonished at the level of advance planning, said, “I can’t see what you need me for.”

Annika, who had just placed a kiss in the center of her grandfather’s forehead, looked up at him. “You’ve got the plane standing by at Sheremetyevo, and it’s got diplomatic immunity. Once he’s inside and we’re airborne, he’s as safe as if he were in a bank vault.”

Just after noon, Alli was summoned to the commander’s office. The order was something she had been both expecting and fearing. Bryce Fellows was standing by the window, his hands clasped behind his back. Fellows maintained a stiff military demeanor even during the most informal of Fearington’s functions, which, admittedly, were few and far between. His stern countenance was the facade of a man who was both thoughtful and fair-minded.

“I’ve seen this Web site, Ms. Carson,” he said as soon as she entered his office. “It’s an abomination, and it has been taken down.”

“Thank you, sir.” Alli’s heart was beating fast.

“That’s the good news.” Fellows turned from his contemplation of the view outside his office. “The bad news is we have no idea who engineered this attack on you. That being the case, the site, or one very much like it, could pop up on another server at any time.”

Alli felt another shiver of dread run through her. She knew Morgan Herr was dead; what was chilling her bones?

“I have no choice but to consider this a direct attack on your person.”

“Which is where I come in.”

Alli turned to see a familiar face.

“I’ve been assigned to you,” Dick Bridges said.

Bridges had been the head of her father’s presidential Secret Service detail. He had been so shaken by his charge’s violent death in Moscow that he had disappeared. She had assumed he had retired. Now here he was, as big and robust as ever.

“It’s good to see you, Dick,” she said.

“You’ve grown into a fine young woman.” He gave her a grim smile. “Sorry this reunion comes under these circumstances.”

She shook her head as she turned back to Fellows. “I appreciate your concern, sir, but I’m not going to allow Agent Bridges to follow me around campus. I’m finished being a dog on a leash.”

“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice, Ms. Carson. Next month, you will graduate Fearington with top honors—in fact, the highest recommendations of any candidate I can recall. I’m not going to allow anyone to harm you.”

“I understand your point of view,” Alli said. “But please try to understand mine. The moment anyone sees Agent Bridges, they’re going to know why he’s here.”

Fellows nodded. “That’s precisely the idea I mean to—”

“With all due respect, sir, everyone will know this person got to me, everyone will know I’m frightened. Especially the person who engineered the attack. That’s the wrong message to send.”

Fellows opened his mouth, no doubt to refute her, but apparently he thought better of it. He turned to Bridges. “Agent?”

“Unfortunately, Alli’s right, Commander.”

Fellows shook his head, then addressed Alli. “I’m not prepared to dismiss Agent Bridges, so unless you have an alternative, my order stands.”

“I do.” Alli came across to where Bridges stood. “Dick stays on campus, but remains in the shadows. Bring him on as part of your visiting instructor program, maybe, that should be easy enough to do.”

“He keeps watch over you, but from a distance.” Fellows tapped his forefinger against his lips. “Yes, I can see how that would work.” He nodded decisively. “It’s an excellent compromise, Ms. Carson. Well done.”

“It’s only well done if it works.” Dick Bridges crossed his arms over his chest. “Frankly, Commander, nothing about this assignment satisfies me. It’s deeply disturbing that we have not been able to track down the person responsible for the rogue site. Our failure goes against our history in this area. Everyone leaves some form of electronic fingerprint; but his IP address has led us through more than half a dozen countries without gaining a glimpse of his identity. All we get are echoes, never an end address.”

“But eventually, you’ll find him,” Alli said.

Bridges shrugged. “ ‘Eventually’ isn’t a word you want to hear in this area. I’ll be honest, we don’t trace him in the first forty-eight hours, it means he’s a pro. It’ll take a helluva lot of time and manpower to track him down.”

It wasn’t taking off Jack was worried about, it was getting to the airport. Two men from the funeral home, a driver and his assistant, had arrived and had taken Dyadya Gourdjiev out of the hospital on a gurney.

Jack was especially watchful as they accompanied the men from the funeral home into the long ambulancelike van. A frigid wind swept through Moscow. There was snow on the sidewalks and there were icy patches on the roadway, to which the rumbling traffic paid not the slightest attention. Jack was looking for men in parked cars or staring into shop plate-glass windows, which they could use as a reflecting surface to keep an eye on the hospital’s entrance.

He was unhappy about being kept out of the loop. Without direct knowledge of Gourdjiev’s plan, he felt as if he were in the dark, or at least in a twilight world where he glimpsed shapes and the outlines of things without being able to interpret their meaning.

The interior of the van was cramped. The assistant from the funeral home sat next to the body. He had clamped the gurney down to keep it stationary during the drive to Sheremetyevo. Jack, Annika, Katya, and Boris, the bodyguard who had staked out the hospital lobby, sat on the narrow metal bench that ran along the other side, which was as uncomfortable as it looked.

No one said a word as the van started up and drove away from the reserved space outside the hospital’s ER. Jack, hunched to one side, peered out the window of the rear door. The funeral home attendant watched him briefly but said nothing.

Traffic in Moscow was nightmarish, moving either at a glacial pace or at heart-stopping speed, often within the space of the same block. The local taxis—bombila—were the most egregious offenders, circling slowly like vultures until they spotted a fare, then accelerating with spine-compressing speed toward their next destination.

There were a number of these bombila swerving in and out of the lanes, dodging trucks and ZiL limousines alike. Jack watched them as if he were a spectator at a bumper-car ride. Often, they missed smashing the bumpers or grilles on other vehicles around them by no more than a hairsbreadth.

“Anything?” Annika said.

He shook his head. It seemed inevitable that Gourdjiev’s enemies, whose multitude of eyes and ears had by now informed them of the old man’s death, would try to get at Annika, now that the old man’s protection had ceased to exist. His enemies would consider her an enemy.

The car reached the ring road that circled the inner city. Beyond stretched the highway to the airport. Many of the bombila peeled away, using the ring road to race to other parts of the city, but the intercity trucks remained. Also, a couple of ZiLs, the big cars looking like sharks among the whales. Jack concentrated on these limousines. With their smoked windows and armor plating, they made perfect vehicles from which to stage an ambush or an interception.

He had been following the progress of one of the ZiLs, which, to his mind, had been acting suspiciously. It was now directly behind, and pulling closer. When he turned briefly from his observation post to update Annika, he saw her mouth, We’re going in the wrong direction. He was about to say something, but her eyes cut to the attendant and she placed her forefinger across her lips.

Boris must have become aware of the wrong route. He drew his handgun.

But the attendant already had his own gun out—a Desert Eagle .357 Magnum. He shook his head, said, “Easy, now,” as Boris’s gun hand twitched. His teeth showed, sharp as needles. “You’re ours now.”

Available now

Author’s Note

Safe Banking Systems does, in fact, exist. Located in Mineola, New York, SBS provides the financial services industry with software solutions that combat money laundering, fraud, terrorist financing, and other criminal activity. SBS has the unique capability to find the “bad guys” by uncovering hidden risk and identifying the “six degrees of separation” between disparate individuals and entities.

SBS’s public service report, issued in June 2009, identified terrorists and drug kingpins with valid FAA licenses, including the infamous PanAm Lockerbie bombers. When this story broke in The New York Times, six FAA licenses were revoked within twenty-four hours, but not without some embarrassment in Washington, D.C. The story resonated in the halls of Congress and received national media attention. How this relatively small, privately owned company could find a serious threat to U.S. national security that went undetected by the government agencies mandated to do so generated much interest. David and Mark Schiffer, the principals of SBS, were invited to meet with the chief counsels and their investigative teams at both the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee and U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. As a result, there was an official mandate for improvements to the vetting process and interagency cooperation between the FAA and TSA. The inspector general’s office also contacted SBS during its investigation of the vetting process. The IG’s report has not been made public yet.

In October 2010, The Enterprise Report published a three-part exclusive article on Viktor Bout, the alleged notorious worldwide arms dealer currently under arrest in Thailand. SBS’s data mining and analysis determined that Bout may hold a private pilot’s license issued to him by the FAA in 1993. SBS also identified seven key associates and participants in Bout’s aviation cargo transportation businesses.

First published in the United States of America in 2011 by Forge.

This edition first published in the UK in 2013 by Head of Zeus Ltd.

Copyright © Eric van Lustbader, 2011

The moral right of Eric van Lustbader to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB) 9781781851074

ISBN (TPB) 9781781851081

ISBN (PB) 9781908800350

ISBN (E) 9781781853023

Head of Zeus Ltd

Clerkenwell House

45-47 Clerkenwell Green

London EC1R 0HT

www.headofzeus.com

Contents

Cover

Welcome Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part 1: Blood Sport

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part 2: Blood Ties

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part 3: Cherry Bomb

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Part 4: Blood Trust

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Epilogue

Preview

Author’s Note

Copyright

About this Book

The author The Bourne Legacy, The Bourne Betrayal and The Bourne Retribution introduces a thrilling new series featuring maverick ATF agent Jack McClure.

FIRST DAUGHTER: Edward Carson is just days away from being sworn in as President of the United States when his daughter is kidnapped. McClure is the one man he can trust to go to any lengths to find his daughter and bring her home safely.

LAST SNOW: McClure must investigate the final days of a US senator killed in a hit-and-run incident. The trail leads him deep into Eastern Europe, attracting the unwelcome attention of the Ukrainian police, the FSB, and the Russian mafia.

BLOOD TRUST: Alli Carson, once the president’s daughter, now a trainee FBI agent is the number one suspect in the murder of her boyfriend. Suspended from her work, bewildered and alone, Alli must find a way to contact the one person she can trust: Jack McClure.

About this Series

JACK MCCLURE

Jack McClure is an ATF agent who has lost everything but his job. His daughter was killed in a terrible accident and his marriage disintegrated shortly after. And even in the ATF he is an anomaly: as a guy who grew up on the streets, he always has one foot on each side of the law. But he’s also a very gifted agent, with analytical talents that are unsurpassed in the service.

1. First Daughter

When a terrible accident takes the life of his only daughter and his marriage falls apart, Jack McClure blames himself, numbing the pain by submerging himself in work. Then he receives a call from his old friend Edward Carson – a man who is only weeks from becoming President of the United States.

Carson’s daughter Alli has been kidnapped and Jack is the one man he can trust to go to any lengths to find his daughter and bring her home safely.

For Jack, this is a chance to lay his past to rest… but at what price? His search for Alli puts him in the path of a dangerous and calculating man. Someone whose actions are as cold as they are brilliant. Whose power and reach are seemingly infinite. And who would do anything to the future first daughter to attain his ends…

To read First Daughter, click here.

2. Last Snow

“This is a copy of Berns’s official itinerary. Kiev was his last stop. Remember this name: K. Rochev. As far as we know, Rochev was the last man he saw before he left Ukraine.”

Four days ago, US Senator Lloyd Berns was killed in a hit-and-run on the island of Capri off the Italian coast. His death deals a serious blow to President Carson’s precarious new administration. But more worrying is that Berns was never officially on Capri. According to the White House, Berns was on a tour of the Ukraine.

Agent Jack McClure is babysitting Carson’s troubled daughter in Moscow. Alli is still traumatised by her abduction last year, and the only person she trusts is Jack, the man who rescued her. But the President needs Jack to investigate the Senator’s final days in the Ukraine, and since Alli won’t be parted from her protector, he’ll have to take her along.

Their starting point is the senator’s last known contact: K. Rochev. But all they find at Rochev’s address is the body of a young woman, brutally executed. And now Jack and Alli have attracted dangerous attention from the Ukrainian police, the FSB, and the Russian mafia...

To read Last Snow, click here.

3. Blood Trust

Alli Carson used to be the daughter of the President of the United States. She wanted for nothing. But now, after a terrible car crash killed her father and left her mother in a coma, Alli’s only solace is her work. She is determined to become the best FBI agent at the Fearington Institute, and prove herself to the one man who makes life worth living: National Security Adviser, Jack McClure.

But when Alli becomes the prime suspect in a murder at Fearington, it seems even her job is to be snatched from her. Jack knows she is innocent. But to prove it, he must unravel a complex web of lies that stretches from the secret service to a vast global enterprise that lurks in the shadows of power…

To read Blood Trust, click here.

4. Father Night

A new president. A new life. Orphan Alli Carson has taken up a post at Fearington, the elite covert training school. Now she fears that the people who worked relentlessly to undermine her father – and ultimately cause his death – are targeting her too.

Meanwhile, Washington’s top agent, Jack McClure, is being threatened by one of Russia’s most fearsome assassins. But is this attempt the action of his lover’s criminal family, or a move to remove him before the American government can call upon him for aid?

With the two people who might be able to save his reputation out of the picture, President Arlen Crawford is struggling to preserve the pretence of power in the corridors of the White House.

All paths collide at the feet of one man, an old legend adapting to an ever-changing landscape. A man who was lost in the annals of Nazism’s worst atrocities, but whose heinous cause is still very much alive. A man code-named Father Night...

Father Night is available here.

To read a preview of Father Night, click here.

5. Beloved Enemy

Jack McClure must outrun the CIA to complete his most dangerous mission yet...

Dennis Paull, Secretary of Homeland Security, has been shot dead – and Special Agent Jack McClure has been accused of his murder.

Someone must have framed him, someone who would do anything to forestall his next move. For before Paull died, he had tasked McClure with a mission as secret as it is deadly. Find the mole in the FBI, and track down their spymaster, the Syrian.

If McClure is to complete his mission now, he must evade the CIA officers on his tail. And to do that, he must find Annika Dementieva, the woman he once loved and lost...

Beloved Enemy will be available here in 2014.

About the Author

ERIC VAN LUSTBADER is the author of 25 international bestsellers, including the three most recent Jason Bourne novels: The Bourne Legacy, The Bourne Betrayal and The Bourne Sanction. His books have been translated into over 20 languages. He lives with his wife in New York City and Long Island.

Reviews

“Rarely have I read a book that grabs you so fast in the opening scene, then keeps up the pace until the very last page. Goodbye sleep. Hello First Daughter.”

Jeffery Deaver

“Last Snow catapults high above the bar of great thrillers.”

Nelson Demille

“A seductive, sophisticated, authentic thriller. Finely conceived, brilliantly executed. Terrific.”

Steve Berry

“I’ve long been a fan of Eric Van Lustbader, and he’s at his heart-pounding best with First Daughter. Here are the chills you’ve been looking for.”

Tess Gerritsen

“Action, suspense and politics blended to perfection by a master. An automatic buy-today-read-tonight author.”

Lee Child

“One of the great thriller authors. His many fans will rejoice to see that Lustbader is back and at the top of his form.”

Joseph Finder

“Lustbader at his best. A twisted web of intrigue, violence, and double cross. A master storyteller.”

Publishers Weekly

A Letter from the Publisher

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HeadofZeusBooks

The story starts here.

This box set first published in the UK in 2013 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Eric Van Lustbader, 2008, 2010, 2011

The moral right of Eric Van Lustbader to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (E) 9781781859131

Head of Zeus Ltd

Clerkenwell House

45-47 Clerkenwell Green

London EC1R 0HT

www.headofzeus.com