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.
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.
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."
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."
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 non ex is tent 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."
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 Zafon'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.
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.
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."
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, cartoon-style. "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 finger-tips 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.