THE EARLY January sunset was painting narrow bands of gold and crimson across the low western sky when Jack met with Dr. Irene Saunderson on the wide, Southern-style veranda of Emily House.
"I've tried every way I can think of-and any number of new ones-to get through to Alli," Dr. Saunderson said. She was a tall, stick-thin woman with dark hair pulled severely back into a ponytail, accentuating a high forehead and cheekbones, bright, intelligent eyes. She looked like a failed model. "She either can't or won't tell us what happened to her."
"Which is it?" Jack said. "Can't you at least tell that much?"
Dr. Saunderson shook her head. "That's part of what's so frustrating about the human mind. I have little doubt that she's suffering from a form of posttraumatic stress syndrome, but at the end of the day, that tells us next to nothing. What's indisputable is that she suffered a traumatic episode. But what form the trauma took or what the actual effect on her is, we can't determine."
She sighed deeply. "Frankly, I'm at a dead end."
"You're the third shrink to say that." Jack unbuttoned his coat. A thaw had set in with a vengeance. "What about physical damage?"
"The exhaustive medical workup shows that she wasn't raped or physically harmed in any way. There wasn't even a superficial scratch on her."
"Is there a possibility of Stockholm syndrome?"
"You're thinking of Patty Hearst, of course, among many others." Dr. Saunderson shrugged. "Of course it's possible that she's come to identify with her captor, but she's shown no indication of hostility toward us, and given the relatively short amount of time she was with her abductor, it seems unlikely. Unless, of course, he used drugs to accelerate the process, but there was no sign of chemical markers in her blood workup. As you know, the president's own medical team at Bethesda took charge of her when you brought her in."
"It's been three days since I asked to see her," Jack said.
"You can see her right now, if you like," Dr. Saunderson said, brushing aside his complaint with a shrink's easy aplomb.
They always know what to say, Jack thought, even when they're wrong.
"Shall I take you to her room?"
"Actually, I'd rather see her out here."
Dr. Saunderson frowned. "I'm not so sure that's such a good idea."
"Why not? She's been cooped up for the better part of ten days. This is a pretty place, but it's still a prison." Jack smiled his most charming smile. "C'mon, Doc. You and I both know the fresh air will do her good."
"All right. I'll be right back." She was about to turn away when she hesitated. "Don't be surprised if Alli exhibits some erratic behavior, extreme mood swings, things like that."
Jack nodded.
Alone on the veranda, he had a chance to take in the antebellum atmosphere of Emily House, a large, rather overornate confection whose exterior might easily have been used for a remake of Gone with the Wind. Save for knowing its true purpose, Jack would not have been surprised to find himself mingling with couples drinking mint juleps and speaking in deep Southern drawls.
Emily House, named after a former president's dog, of all things, was a government safe house in the midst of fifty acres of Virginia countryside as heavily guarded as it was forested. Over the years, a good many heads of state, defectors, double agents, and the like had called it home, at least temporarily. It was painted white, with dove-gray shutters and a blue-gray slate roof. A bit of fluff on the outside, belying the armor-plated walls and doors, the bullet- and bombproof windows, and more cutting-edge security paraphernalia than Q's lab. For instance, there was a little number called ADS. ADS stood for active denial system, which sounded like something Dr. Saunderson might claim Alli was suffering from. However, there was nothing nonsensical about the ADS, which was to all intents and purposes a ray gun that shot out a beam of invisible energy that made its victims feel as if their skin were burning off. It wasn't handheld; it wasn't even small. In fact, it looked rather like a TV satellite dish perched on a flatbed truck or a Humvee. But it worked, which was all that mattered.
Jack, hearing a door open, turned to see Alli with Dr. Saunderson right behind her. It had been only three days since he'd last seen her, but she seemed to have aged a year. There was something in her face, a change he couldn't quite figure. It was another visual puzzle he needed to decipher.
"Hey," he said, smiling.
"Hey."
She ran into his arms. Jack kissed the top of her head, saw Dr. Saunderson nod to him, then withdraw into Emily House.
Alli was wearing a short wool jacket, jeans, an orange Buffalo Brand shirt, a screaming eagle with a skull in its talons silkscreened on the front.
"You feel up to a walk?" he asked her.
When she nodded, he took her down the steps, along the crushed gravel. There were a number of formal gardens around Emily House. This time of year, the low boxwood maze was the only one still green.
Alli ducked her head. "We can't go too far, you know, without catching the attention of the guards."
Jack listened closely not only to her words but also to her tone of voice. There was something sad there that touched the sad place inside him. This young woman had spent all her life at the end of a leash, watched over by stern men to whom she could never relate. He resolved to talk with her father about the new Secret Service detail that would be assigned to her when she came home. She deserved better than two more anonymous agents.
"How are they treating you?" he asked as they moved between the low hedges.
"With kid gloves." She gave a thin laugh. "Sometimes I feel like I'm made of glass."
"They're making you feel that way?"
Alli shrugged. It was clear she wasn't yet ready to talk about what happened, even with him. Jack knew he needed to take another tack altogether.
"Alli, there's something only you can help me with. It's about Emma."
"Okay."
Was he mistaken, or did her eyes light up?
"Don't laugh, but there have been moments during the past few weeks when I could swear I've seen Emma. Once at Langley Fields, then in the backseat of my car. Other times, too. And once I felt a cool breath on the back of my neck."
Alli, walking silently, stared at her feet. Jack, sensing that she'd had enough urging recently, chose to let her be. He listened, instead, to the wind through the bare branches, the distant complaints of a murder of crows, crowded onto the treetops like a bunch of old ladies at a funeral.
At length, Alli lifted her head, regarded him curiously. "I felt the same thing. When you were holding me, when that snake-"
"You saw the snake?"
"I heard it."
"I didn't realize."
"You were busy."
The words stung him, though that was hardly her intent. The wound his inattention had inflicted was still as raw as on the day he'd held Emma's lifeless body in his arms. There wasn't anything that could prepare you for the death of your child. It was unnatural, and therefore incomprehensible. There was no solace. In that light, perhaps Sharon's turning to the Church was understandable. There came a time when the pain you carried inside you was insupportable. One way or another you needed to grope your way toward help.
They had reached the heart of the maze, a small square space with a stone bench. They sat in silence. Jack watched the shadows creeping over the lawns and gardens. The treetops seemed to be on fire.
"I felt her," Alli said at last. "Emma was there with us in that horrible house."
And it was at that moment, with the utterance of those words, that Jack felt them both brushed by the feathers of a mystery of infinite proportions. He felt in that moment that in entering the boxwood maze, in finding their way to its center, they had both touched a wisdom beyond human understanding, and in so doing were bound together in the same mysterious way, for the rest of their lives.
"But how is that possible?" He spoke as much to himself as he did to her.
She shrugged. "Why do I like Coke and not root beer?" she said. "Why do I like blue more than red?"
"Some things just are."
She nodded. "There you go."
"But this is different."
"Why is it different?" Alli said.
"Because Emma's dead."
"Honestly, I don't know what that means."
Jack pondered this a moment, then shook his head. "I don't either."
"Then there's no reason why we shouldn't feel Emma's presence," she said.
"When you put it that way…"
With the absolute surety of youth, she said, "How else can it be put?"
Jack could think of any number of alternatives, but they all fell within the strict beliefs of the skeptics, scientific and religious alike.
And because he felt the wingtips of mystery still fluttering about them, he told her what he'd never been able to tell anyone else. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, his fingers knit together, he said, "After Sharon and I broke up, I started to wonder: Is this all there is? I mean life, the world that we can see, hear, smell, touch."
"Why did it come up then?" Alli asked.
Jack groped for an answer. "Because without her, I became-I don't know-unmoored."
"I've been unmoored all my life." Alli sat forward herself. "Sometimes I think I was born asking, Is this all there is? But for me the answer was always, No, the world is out there beyond the bars of your cage."
Jack turned to her. "Do you really think of your world as a cage?"
She nodded. "It's small enough, Jack. You've been in it, you ought to know."
"Then I'm glad Emma came into it."
"For such a short time!"
The genuine lamentation broke Jack's heart all over again. "And she had you, Alli, though it was only for a short time."
It was growing cooler as the shadows extended their reach across the vast lawns, hedges, and flower beds. Alli shivered, but when Jack asked her whether she wanted to go back inside, she shook her head.
"I don't want to go back there," she whispered. "I couldn't bear it."
Without thinking, Jack put a protective arm around her, and to his slight surprise, she moved closer to him.
"I want to tell you about Emma," she said at last.
Jack, stunned, said nothing.
Alli turned her face to him. "I think that's why she's still here. I think she wants me to tell you now. She wants you to know all about her."
IT TOOK the better part of an hour for Jack to convince Dr. Saunderson and the powers that be at Emily House that Alli wasn't joking when she said she couldn't spend another night there. In the end, though, he was obliged to call in the big gun.
"She'll be with me, sir," Jack said to the president-elect.
"That's what she wants, Jack?"
"It is, sir." Jack moved away from where Dr. Sanderson sat in a pool of lamplight behind her enormous ornate desk. "Frankly, I don't see any other way to get through to her. Every other avenue has been exhausted."
"So I understand," Edward Carson said gloomily. "All right, then. You have until noon tomorrow."
"But, sir, that's hardly any time at all."
"Jack, the inauguration is the day after tomorrow. No less than three top shrinks have evaluated her without coming to any conclusion except that she hasn't been harmed. Thank God for that."
"Sir, it's imperative we find who abducted her."
"I applaud your impulse as a lawman, Jack, but this is nonnegotiable. Alli has a duty to be at my and my wife's side at the ceremony. We didn't go through all this secrecy only for her to miss the most important photo op of her life. And after all, what's important is that Alli's safe and sound. I don't care to know about what happened to her, and frankly I'm not surprised she doesn't want to relive it. I sure as hell wouldn't."
It must be single-mindedness, Jack thought, that put such a hard, shiny shell around all politicians, conservative, liberal, or independent. He knew the president-elect's mind was set. No argument would sway him. "All right, sir. I'll deliver Alli tomorrow at noon."
"Good," Carson said. "One more thing. I must insist on a Secret Service detail."
"I understand how you feel, sir," Jack said, thinking their presence might not be a big problem, but it would have to be dealt with. "Just so you know, right now seeing a detail isn't going to be good for Alli. I need her to open up about what happened while she was in captivity. Feeling hemmed in is going to make that job more difficult than it already is."
There was silence on the other end of the line while Carson mulled this over. "All right, a compromise, then. I want them on the roads with you. They'll exit their vehicle only in case of an emergency."
"And then, sir, I'd like to pick her permanent detail. I've a couple of people in mind. I don't want a repeat of what happened at Langley Fields."
"You've got it, Jack, we're on the same page there," Carson said. "Now let me settle matters with Dr. Saunderson."
ALLI TURNED when Jack emerged from Emily House. She'd been standing on the veranda, watching the guards crisscross the lawns at random intervals. He saw the anticipation in her face, but also the fear.
"Well?"
Jack nodded, and immediately relief flooded her face.
On the way to his car, she said, "I want to sit in the backseat."
Jack understood immediately. On the way back to Washington, he kept one eye on the road, one on the rearview mirror, checking on the vehicle carrying the two-man Secret Service detail, and on Alli.
"Tell me where she was sitting," Alli said.
He knew she meant Emma. "To your right, just a little more. Okay, right there."
Alli spent the rest of the drive in that position, her eyes closed. A certain peacefulness settled over her, as if she had been transported out of time and place. Then, with a jolt, he realized that her near trance-like state reminded him of what had stolen over him after he'd killed Andre in the library. And he wondered whether he and Alli were two tigers, whether it was now his turn to lead her into the forest.
THE OLD wood-frame house stood as it always had at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the border in Maryland. The house and its attendant property had resisted the advances of time and civilization. The huge oak tree still rose to a height above the roof; there was still a bird's nest in its branches outside Jack's bedroom. The forested area was, if anything, thicker, more tangled.
It was to Gus's house he took Alli. His home, the place Sharon had refused to move into, rejecting his past. In fact, she couldn't understand why he didn't sell it, use the proceeds to pay for Emma's tuition at Langley Fields rather than taking out a second mortgage on their house. "You own that horrid old thing free and clear," she'd said. "Why not just get rid of it and be done with it?" She hadn't understood that he didn't want to be done with it. Just as she hadn't understood that the house and property had been a place he'd taken Emma and, quite often, Molly Schiltz, when the girls were younger. They adored climbing the oak tree, where they lolled in the crotches of its huge trunk; they loved playing hide-and-seek in the wild, tangled woodland behind the house. They'd spread out like sea stars on the huge living room sofas, listen to Gus's old LPs-Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, James Brown, whose over-the-top stage antics they imitated so well after Jack showed them the electrifying concert video of him performing at the Apollo in Harlem.
On his way up the front steps, Jack noticed the Secret Service vehicle parked down the block, in front of the neighboring house. From that vantage point, the detail had an ideal view of the front and side of the house.
Jack padded into the kitchen, put the Chinese takeout on the counter. When he returned to the living room, he went over to the old stereo, selected a vinyl disc, put it on the turntable. A moment later, Muddy Waters began to sing "Long Distance Call."
Alli began a slow circuit, stopping here and there to peer at a photo, a book, a row of album covers. She ran her fingertips over an old guitar of Gus's, a stack of Jack's individually cased Silver Age comics of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Dr. Strange. His stacks of videocassettes of old TV shows.
"Wow! This place is exactly the way Emma described it."
"She seemed to like it here."
"Oh, she did." Alli looked through the cassettes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Sea Hunt, Have Gun-Will Travel, The Bob Newhart Show. "She liked to come here when you weren't here. To be alone."
"What did she do here?"
Alli shrugged. "Dunno. Maybe she listened to music; she was nuts about the iPod you gave her. She took it with her everywhere. She made playlists and listened to them all the time." She put the cassettes aside. "She never told me what she did here. See, she had secrets from everyone, even me."
Jack, watching her, experienced a piercingly bittersweet moment, because as happy as he was to have her here, her presence-in a way that was most immediate, most painful-served to remind him of what he could have had with Emma. At the same time, he was overcome with a feeling of protectiveness toward her.
It had taken him some time after Emma's death to realize that the world had changed: it would never again feel safe, never have the comfort it had held when Emma was alive. Its color had changed, as if cloaked in mourning.
And there was something else. Through Alli, he was coming closer to Emma, he was beginning to understand that he and his daughter were not so very different. It seemed that Emma knew how similar they were, but Emma being Emma, she needed to go her own way, just as he had when he was her age. All at once, he experienced a jolt of pure joy. It seemed to him that he and Emma would have come together again, that they would have reunited, perhaps as soon as the day she had called him. She was coming to see him, after all. What had she wanted to tell him?
"Abbott and Costello." Alli was holding a cassette aloft. "Can we watch this? Emma talked about them, but I've never seen them."
Shaking himself out of his reverie, Jack turned on the TV, slid the cassette in the slot. They watched "The Susquehanna Hat Company" bit until Alli laughed so hard, she was crying. But then she didn't stop crying, not when the bit was over or when Jack popped out the tape. She just cried and cried, but when Jack tried to hold her, she shied away. He left her alone for a bit, going upstairs, sitting in Gus's old room, which, now that the bed was gone, he could bear to be in. He spent time thinking of Ronnie Kray, trying to imagine him, trying to imagine what a serial killer could want with Alli. Had he meant to kill her? If so, he'd had plenty of time to slip his filed-down paletta into her back. Had he meant to torture her before he killed her? If so, there was no sign that he'd begun. Besides, torture wasn't part of Kray's MO. And if there was one thing Jack had learned in dealing with criminals-even the cleverest ones-it was that once established, an MO never changed. The same aberrant impulse that drove a person to kill another human being also ensured it be done the same way every time, as if it were a kind of ritual of expiation.
So, to sum up, at great jeopardy to himself, Kray had abducted Alli Carson from the grounds of Langley Fields. If it wasn't to kill her or to torture her, then what was his motive? And why had he abandoned her? Had they been lucky, had he simply been shopping for supplies when he and Nina raided the house? Could he have been tipped off? But how, and by whom? The more Jack worked the puzzle over, the more convinced he was that Alli was the key. He had to get her to talk.
When he came downstairs, she was sitting on the sofa.
"Sorry I freaked out," she said.
"Forget it," Jack said. "You hungry?"
"Not really."
"Let's have something anyway." Jack padded into the kitchen. Alli was right behind him. She helped him open the cartons, spoon out the food onto plates. Jack showed her where the silverware was, and she laid out neat place settings.
Alli was a carnivore, so Jack had ordered spare ribs, lacquered a deep-red, beef chow fun, roast pork fried rice, gai lan in garlic sauce.
Apart from the sticky ribs, they both used the wooden chopsticks that came packaged with the meal. Alli looked as if she'd been born with them between her fingers. Jack had been taught by Emma.
"I used to be a vegetarian, but that was before I met Emma." She managed a wistful smile. "She could eat more pork than anyone I ever met." She swirled the glistening noodles around with her chopsticks. "I made fun of her, you know? And she asked me why I was a vegetarian. So I told her about how animals are treated, and then slaughtered, all of that. She laughed and said if that was my reason for not eating meat, I was a hypocrite. 'Can I borrow your suede jacket? How about your leather skirt, or one of your belts? And how many pairs of plastic shoes do you own?' She told me about how small farms are breeding cows, pigs, sheep, chickens in humane ways. She told me about slow farming, sustainable methodology, hormone-free raising. She said if I wanted to be a vegetarian that was my business, but that I ought to do it for the right reason. She was so damn smart. She'd done her research, instead of just spouting talking points like me. What really amazed me about her was that she never made a choice just for the hell of it. There was always a reason behind what she did."
Who was this girl he was hearing about? "It never seemed like that to Sharon and me. All we saw was chaos and rebellion."
"Yeah, well, there was that, too."
"I wish I'd taken the time to see more."
"Well, it might not have mattered."
"What d'you mean?"
"Emma was a master in letting you see what she wanted you to see, and nothing more." Alli pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them. "I'll tell you how it started with me. Emma didn't have a lot of friends. It wasn't because other girls didn't try. They did. Everyone wanted to hang with her, but Emma didn't want any part of a pack, even though it would've been so easy for her to be a leader. See, she saw herself in a totally different light. We both saw ourselves as being different, Outsiders, you know, with a capital O."
The fact that his daughter had lived with the same sense of being an Outsider that Jack had lived with all his life shocked him to his core. Or maybe, if he was honest with himself, what shocked him was that he hadn't recognized her as being an Outsider.
"The thing for me was that I always thought my being an Outsider was because of my father's political ambitions," Alli went on. "From as far back as I can remember, all he talked about, all he planned for was being president. There were times I actually thought he'd started making plans to become president when he was in grade school.
"Anyway, it was Emma who made me realize that being an Outsider had nothing to do with my father; it came from inside myself."
Old Muddy had segued into the slow, rueful "My Home Is in the Delta," one of Gus's favorite tracks.
He said, "So Emma thought of herself as an Outsider."
"She didn't just think it," Alli said at once. "She was an Outsider."
Jack shook his head. "I'm not sure I understand."
"At first, I didn't understand it either." Alli gathered up Jack's plate and cutlery, put it on top of hers, took the small stack to the sink.
"Leave those," Jack said, "I'll take care of the washing later."
"That's all right." Alli turned on the water. "I like doing this because no one's told me to, no one's even expecting me to."
She squeezed some dishwashing liquid onto a Dobie, set about her job with some concentration. "I didn't understand it," she said, "until I took the time to get to know her. Then it hit me: Unlike most girls our age, Alli didn't define or judge herself in terms of other girls her age. She knew who she was from the inside out. And because of that, she had a kind of-I don't know-a savage energy."
Finished, Alli dried her hands, returned to the table, and sat back down. "It was Emma who introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson, a modern-day Outsider if ever there was one. But she also suggested I read Blake." She cocked her head. "You know William Blake?"
Jack felt a little thrill travel through him at Blake's name. He had read and enjoyed Blake during his time in the District's public libraries, which continued long after he was once again left on his own. But he couldn't forget the telling excerpt Chris Armitage had quoted to him and Nina the other day. "I do."
"Emma adored Blake. She identified with him intensely. And when I read him, I got her fully, because her favorite quote was this." She closed her eyes, her brow furrowed in concentration. " 'I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's. My business is not to reason and compare; my business is to create.'»
"Emma wanted to create something."
Alli nodded. "Something important, something lasting."
"What, exactly?"
The tears came again, leaking out of the corners of her eyes.
A sudden awful premonition gripped Jack's heart. "What is it?"
Alli rose, paced around the room. Muddy was in the middle of "You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had."
She bit her lower lip, said, "Honestly, I don't know whether I should tell you."
"Alli, you've come this far," Jack said. "Emma doesn't need to be protected anymore."
"Yeah, I know, but…" She exhaled slowly, said, "She was going to quit school."
Jack was flooded with relief. "You mean she didn't like it at Langley Fields."
"No, I mean school-any school."
Now Jack felt bewildered. "But what was she going to do?"
"Oh God, I don't want to break a trust."
"But you said Emma wanted you to tell me," Jack said. He found that he was perfectly serious.
Alli nodded, but her expression was bleak. She came and sat down close to him. "She was going to do what she felt she had to do." There were tears in her eyes. "She was making plans to join E-Two."
THE IMAGE of Calla Myers hung in the air, the projector enlarging her face to Hollywood size. No one in the room, least of all Secretary Dennis Paull, failed to notice the resemblance to Alli Carson.
"Gentlemen," he heard the noxious Hugh Garner say in his most authoritative voice as he held up a bagged-and-tagged item. "We now have our smoking gun."
Paull was part of a very select audience seated in Sit Room W in the Pentagon. With him were the president, the Secretary of State, and the president's National Security Advisor. They sat around a polished ebony table. In front of each man was a pad, a clutch of pencils, glasses, and bottles of chilled water. After the meeting, all the writing materials would be gathered up and burned.
"This cell phone belonged to one of the murdered members of the Secret Service detail guarding Alli Carson," Garner continued. "It was found near Calla Myers's body. At the time of her death, the victim was employed by the First American Secular Revivalists. While it's a sure bet that the late Ms. Myers didn't kidnap Alli Carson, her implication is now all but assured.
"My guess is that she was getting ready to defect. She was going to the police with the cell phone. One of her compatriots found out about her act of heroism and killed her. She must've heard her attacker coming because she managed to toss away the phone. It was found in our initial search of the crime scene on the west side of the Spanish Steps, clear evidence that the FASR or E-Two is behind the abduction of the Alli Carson."
"Well done, Hugh," the president said. "Now if you'll excuse us."
"Yes, sir."
Garner marched out of the room like a good soldier, but not before Paull caught the sullen look on his face.
The president cleared his throat. "This little item combined with the documentation President Yukin has provided will spell the end of the missionary secularists in America."
He turned to Paull. "Dennis, I'm ordering you to begin taking members of the First American Secular Revivalists into custody. Since you have been unable to make any headway in identifying anyone in this underground E-Two, I want each one of the prisoners interrogated on the subject." He raised a finger. "I needn't remind you that my term of office is just about over. I personally won't feel as if our job was finished unless we bring these homegrown terrorists to justice. I certainly don't trust the incoming president to get the job done, so it's entirely up to us."
Paull, secretly fuming under the president's veiled rebuke, nodded, said enthusiastically, "Consider it done, sir. Now that we have the weight of evidence, we can attack in a more public way that was closed to us before."
"Good." The president, appearing immune to Paull's cleverly worded response, rubbed his hands together. "Now, to the business of what comes after January twentieth."
The Pentagon was built on secrets, but Paull observed that today there was about this room the deathly hush of secrets held close to the chest. On his desk, Paull had a rosewood plaque given to him by his mentor. On it was engraved in gold leaf the famed Benjamin Franklin quotation: THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET IF TWO OF THEM ARE DEAD. Paull was never more aware of the wisdom of that saying than he was now. As he looked around the room, it seemed to him that the atmosphere was rife with secrets. Perhaps this is what happens when the skein runs out, he thought, when after eight years of hard decisions, close calls, and the need for frantic spin control, the trust among even the closest of colleagues turns rancid. He'd been warned by his mentor that the last days of an Administration are gripped either by ennui or by desperation. Neither was healthy. Both revealed the corrosive workings of corruption. Each man had to face his moment of realization: Either the power had worn him down to a nub or he couldn't live without it. Over time, his mentor told him, all that's left to flush away is sewage, the entropy of power slipping through your fingers.
"Gentlemen," the president continued, "how goes our sub rosa campaign to ensure the continuance of our influence on Congress and the media when Edward Carson becomes president?"
Here, now, Paull faced the truth of his mentor's words. He was disgusted with the tenor of this meeting, the scrounging of Caesar facing the blade of the ides of March, railing against time and history. But he knew he couldn't allow the underlying wretchedness to blind him to the extreme danger of these last few orders. The desperate animal was the most dangerous animal. The question he had to answer, and soon, was which one of these three men was the most desperate and, therefore, the most dangerous.
It fell to Paull to discover for himself what form of damage eight years of power had worked on these three men. Which one was a nub, which one a junkie?
The Secretary of State, a large man with the flushed face of an inveterate drinker and the twinkling eyes of Santa Claus, was the first to take the president's challenge by the horns.
"If we stay the course, we have nothing to fear. The evangelicals are still our broadest base, though admittedly the NRA is less fickle."
"There's a growing problem with the NRA's power," the National Security Advisor said. He was a Texan, with a leathery face, a raspy voice, and the no-nonsense, faintly intimidating demeanor of a federal marshal in the 1880s. "Latest figures find an alarming decline in the number of hunters nationwide. Our concern has been given an environmental spin by our media outlets. We're worried because hunters keep the deer population in check, hunters are pro-environment, that sort of thing. Of course, the real worry for us is that faced with declining membership, the NRA is going to lose its clout on Capitol Hill."
"Now that would be a real shame," the Secretary of State said. "Can we find some way to funnel money in their direction to make up for the shortfall? By God, we don't want them running out of money to pay their lobbyists."
"I think we can twist some well-heeled arms in that direction," the National Security Advisor replied.
The president turned to his Secretary of Homeland Security. "Dennis, we haven't heard from you yet."
Paull tapped a pencil on the table. "I've been thinking on the evangelical issue. We have all the usual suspects tied up, but the growing influence of the Renaissance Mission Congress is a real concern. I've gone over the post-election breakdown a number of times, and each time I'm more impressed. There's no doubt its influence swung the election in Carson's favor. It got out the black votes in every state with appalling efficiency."
"What's your point?" the Secretary of State said. "Surely you're not advocating we turn Reverend Myron Taske into another Martin Luther King, Jr."
"God no." Paull poured himself some water to cover the wave of revulsion that washed over him. With all his heart, he prayed for God to protect him from people like the Secretary of State. "It happens that Carson's own man, Jack McClure, has a relationship with Reverend Taske. With that in mind, I've been running a Secret Service special operative, Nina Miller, who I made sure joined Hugh Garner's joint-operations task force."
Once again, Paull paused to take a drink of water. As he did so, his gaze caressed the room like a lover, absorbing every texture, gesture, shift of body or head without seeming to do so. All these men were suspect; all of them, in one way or another, could have infiltrated his security measures. He was hoping one of them would betray himself-even by as little as the flicker of an eyelid-as he revealed the nature of the very operation his enemy had discovered.
"Now that McClure has found Alli Carson," Paull continued, "the task force is disbanding. However, following my orders, Agent Miller has formed a bond with McClure. She now has his trust." He turned directly to the president. "Here's what I meant to do from the beginning and now propose to you: Agent Miller will get McClure to use his influence on Reverend Taske to take our side."
"I've met with Reverend Taske several times," the president said. "He's as honest as he is black."
The National Security Advisor nodded. "We've vetted Taske thoroughly. He won't abandon Carson."
"He will if we convince McClure that Carson's values are not what they seem to be," Paull said. This was a total fabrication, one that his enemy in this room would discover when Jack didn't denounce the president-elect. But by that time it would be too late. All he wanted now was to buy enough time to get them all through the next couple of days. "What I've learned from my agent is McClure's an odd duck-loyal in the extreme, but quick to turn on a dime if he thinks he's been betrayed. I can use that to my advantage."
"He sounds unstable," the Secretary of State said. "I don't like it."
"Unstable or not," the National Security Advisor said, "I like the shot. Dennis is right on target as far as the Renaissance Mission Congress is concerned. It's powerful and getting more so every day. Of course, it would be ideal if we could wrap up the RMC and the Hispanic vote in one tidy ball, but I'm as much a realist as the next man. I know a goddamn pipe dream when I see one."
"I concur." The president nodded. "We'll give Dennis his head with the McClure mission."
"Dennis," the National Security Advisor said, "if there's any assistance I can provide, I'm only a call away."
"I appreciate that," Paull said. "That might be just the boost I need." When there are ice cubes in hell, he thought.
The president held up a hand. "Please, all of you, keep our accelerated timetable in the forefront of your plans. Dennis, McClure has to be wrapped up and delivered before the twentieth."
WHEN DENNIS Paull exited the Pentagon, he pulled out his cell phone, punched in a speed-dial number, said, "Latent," and rang off. A moment later, he ducked into his limo, which took him to the nearby Nordstrom department store. Paull strode inside, went immediately to the men's store. There, he spotted two of his men. While the first one covered his back, checking for tails, Paull went up to the second agent, took the large shopping bag out of his hand, proceeded to the entrance to the dressing rooms, outside of which another of his agents stood guard.
Inside, only one booth was occupied. Paull chose an adjacent booth, spent the next four minutes stripping off his fedora, midnight-blue cashmere overcoat, Brooks Brothers suit, Paul Stuart shirt and tie. He put his black brogues aside. From the shopping bag, he donned a pair of stovepipe-leg jeans, a blue chambray shirt, a pair of brown Lucchese cowboy boots.
Thus dressed, gripping a dossier he'd extracted from inside his overcoat, he knocked on the dividing wall between his booth and the other occupied booth. The fourth of his agents appeared with a brown shearling coat and a dun-colored Stetson for Paull. As the secretary vacated his booth, his agent, who was the same weight and height as Paull, entered, dressed himself in his boss's clothes. He was the one who exited Nordstrom by the same doors Paull had used to enter. He climbed into Paull's limo, which whisked him away. At the same time, Paull took a side door out to the mall, where an Empire taxi idled, waiting for him, its driver one of Paull's agents.
The taxi took off as soon as Paull climbed in, swinging onto Washington Boulevard, heading toward Arlington. On the corner of Fourteenth and North Wayne, Paull got out, walked around the block to make sure he was clear, then went up North Adams Street. Just past where it crossed Fifteenth, a Metro Police car sat waiting. Paull opened the rear door, got in.
"All clear," Paull said. "Do you have any news?"
"Yes, sir." The agent dressed as a cop nodded. "The captain of your boat reads lips."
"Damn it to hell!" Paull's fist struck the armrest. "Who's he reporting to?"
"It's a mobile number we can't get a handle on."
"That figures." He thought a moment. "How about a date and time the call was made?"
"That I can do," his agent said, then gave the information to him.
Paull stared out the window at the civilians hurrying past him on errands to buy fish or pick up flowers. Little People, the National Security Advisor called them, with an arrogance typical of this president's Administration. Of course, Paull himself was a member of the Administration, but right now he felt like a rat in the woodwork who suspected a slew of tomcats were waiting to snap off his head the moment he poked it into the open. "This is beautiful. Just beautiful."
He nodded. "Okay, let's get going." And he opened the thin dossier, reading it one more time and wondering at the paucity of genuine information on Ian Brady, the government's own crown jewel asset. But even in these few paragraphs, there was something for him, he was certain of it-trouble was, he was damned if he knew what it was.
HOWDY, COWBOY," Nina Miller said when he picked her up in the shadows of North Taft Street.
Paull shifted over. "I do look a sight, don't I?"
She tossed his Stetson onto the front seat. As she settled herself beside him, he said, "We've got a problem."
"Another one," she inquired, "or the same one?"
That made him laugh, despite his foul mood. "I think all our problems devolve back to one person."
"I only wish it was Hugh Garner," Nina said. "Him I can handle."
"He needs decommissioning, that's for certain," Paull acknowledged. "Any ideas on that score?"
"Jack told me he practically drowned Peter Link, one of the heads of the FASR. He would've done the same to Chris Armitage if Jack hadn't stepped in."
"Forget it. The president just ordered the arrest and interrogation of all FASR members."
"Then it's begun."
Paull nodded grimly. "Despite all our efforts."
"Jack's, too. He intervened, stood up to Garner to stop the torture by threatening to call the president-elect. It was no idle threat, and Hugh knew it, so he backed down. But now he hates Jack's guts."
"All useful bona fides," Paull said thoughtfully. "Is Jack one of us?"
Nina made a waffling gesture with one hand. "I don't yet know whether he has a side. He seems to be the most apolitical person I've ever met. Systems-any system-are abhorrent to him."
"So what is he, then?" Paull asked.
"Actually," Nina said, "from all the evidence, I'd say he's a humanist."
Paull seemed lost in contemplation.
The police car had taken the Curtis Memorial Parkway and was now on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, heading into Georgetown. The early morning fog had lifted, revealing a high sky filled with sunlight. There was only a light breeze. Paull, who hated overheated vehicles, had rolled down his window partway. He enjoyed the crisp air on his face and neck.
"The problem," Paull said, his eyes half-closed against the wind, "is that despite all my high-tech efforts at security, I've been undone by a very low-tech methodology: lip-reading."
"Someone on your yacht?"
He nodded. "The fucking captain, of all people."
"Wasn't he properly vetted?"
Paull shot her a pitying look. "We're talking someone inside the White House, very high up. All the vetting in the world is useless against being turned by someone of that stature."
The car took M Street, then turned north on Rock Creek Parkway.
"Surely you don't believe that the president recruited him directly?"
"I do not," Paull said. The car pulled to the side of the road within Rock Creek Park. "Walk with me. The driver will pick us up at the food shack two miles on."
They climbed out of the car and began to walk. The police car was soon gone. Paull had left his ridiculous Stetson in the front seat. The sun was but a sheen behind the tissue of white clouds. Nina pulled the collar of her peacoat up around her neck; Paull jammed his hands in his pockets as they set off together, surrounded by trees and brush.
"I've been thinking hard about your question," Paull said. "No, the president is too wily to initiate anything against me on his own. I'm not even certain that he's aware of the death of those two men who were following Jack to protect him. Therefore, he has to have a middle man."
"You mean a hatchet man."
"Call him what you will, Nina, we have a very potent enemy in the Administration."
"It's imperative we know his identity, don't you think?"
Paull nodded. "I most certainly do. Because the president is involved, even if it's on a nontactical level, our man has to be either the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor."
Nina shuddered. "I wouldn't want either of them as an enemy."
"I hear you," Paull acknowledged, "but that's the hand we've been dealt."
They were nearing a fork in the road, and he directed them to the right, along a high embankment. A stream glimmered dully below. Apart from a smattering of passing cars, there was no one about.
"The good news is that I've worked out which one it is," Paull continued. "The message the captain sent was on the same day you and I met on the yacht. The time was a few minutes after you left. At that time, the president was on his way to Moscow to meet with President Yukin. He could have taken the call himself, of course, but that seems unlikely. The president maintains a high level of plausible deniability by using selected intermediaries he deems expendable."
"Both the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor were with him on Air Force One," Nina said.
"So they were, but only one of them has knowledge of-and therefore access to-a specific high-level asset. I'm this asset's handler, that's how important he is. He's abruptly dropped off the grid, he hasn't made his dead drops in months. However, I have reason to believe that as recently as last week, this particular asset has been in touch with someone else in the Administration. I am very much afraid this high-ranking official is using this asset-a murderer without a speck of conscience-for his own purposes."
"What purposes?"
"That I'm not at liberty to disclose." How about kidnapping Edward Carson's daughter so the crime can be labeled an act of terrorism and laid at the missionary secularists' door, Paull thought. "At first, I suspected it might be the president himself, but now I think it might be the only other person who knows of the asset's existence: the National Security Advisor."
"So the National Security Advisor has been working, at the president's behest, against us."
Paull nodded. "It seems most likely. But I've bought us some time. I told him that I've been running you with an eye to getting closer to Jack McClure."
"That's too close to the truth."
Paull smiled thinly. "Have faith; that's as far as the truth goes. I sold them the story that I'm going to find a way to poison Jack against Edward Carson. Jack then goes to Reverend Taske, gets him to turn the power of the RMC against Carson."
Nina shook her head. "What I wouldn't give for fifteen minutes inside that brain of yours."
"Now that we know who we're fighting," Paull said, "we'd better rally the troops and man the ramparts."
"Good God, you're not talking about an all-out war, are you?"
"Not out in the open. But we've already felt the first shot across our bows-the turning of two of my men, plus my captain. Our first order of business is to root out any others. We can't mount a reasonable response if the opposite side knows every move we make."
"I'll get right on it," Nina said.
"Use the Secret Service facilities, not Homeland Security's."
"Gotcha."
They walked a bit farther, lost in their own thoughts.
"Now tell me what's new with our boy, Jack," Paull said.
"Sir, do you recall a double murder at McMillan Reservoir about twenty-five years ago?"
"That would be Metro Police territory, wouldn't it?"
"Apparently not this one. I checked Metro's records of the incident. There aren't any. According to Jack, there was very little in the papers. I checked out his story, and he's right. For that kind of crime, there was precious little ink spilled-not even the names of the victims. Everything was hushed up, so it must have been at a high government level."
"What's McClure's interest in the double murder?"
"I don't know, we haven't had time to talk about it at length," Nina said. "But he also has an intense interest in a local drug supplier working at the same time. Jack said no one knew who he was or where he came from, but that he had a tremendous amount of juice. No one could ever lay a hand on him, a man named Ian Brady."
For a moment, Paull thought that he'd been struck by a car that had jumped the curb. For certain he was having an out-of-body experience. When he was able to gather his scattered senses, he said, "Come again?"
"Did I say something-?"
"That name." Paull snapped his fingers impatiently. "Give me that name again."
"What? Ian Brady?"
"That's the fucking one."
Beside her, Paull stared off into the distance, his eyes seeing nothing. Brady was the key, the lynchpin to events unfolding all too rapidly. A serial murderer, a schemer, most probably a psychopath-this was the asset Paull had inherited. The most important intelligence asset stretching back twenty-five years. This was the monster he was forced to protect, whose whereabouts he no longer knew. Who did, then? His mind snapped into perfect focus. "Get Jack McClure," he said to Nina. "Bring him to me ASAP."
Nina took out her cell phone. "I'll call him right now."
"No," Paull said. "It's all too likely that our cell conversations are being monitored. I don't even want to use mine without prearranged coded signals."
"I'll find another way," Nina said.
Paull nodded gravely. "I know you will."
GET IT into your head, Jack," Sharon had said in the ER. "We all have a secret life, not just you." Now Jack knew the real truth of her words. His daughter was living a secret life right under his nose. It was as if he'd never known her at all-which was, of course, a deficiency that Sharon had accused him of repeatedly. But, given what she'd said to him, he determined that he had to know whether or not she knew about Emma's radicalization, her secret life.
"If she felt so strongly about the blurring of religion and government," Jack said, "why didn't she join a peaceful organization like the First American Secular Revivalists?"
"Because she was Emma," Alli said. "Because she never did things halfway, because she was strong and sure of herself. Above all, because she felt that the pack of evangelicals who had invaded the federal government were warmongers, that the only way to get their attention, to attack them, to expose them was with a radical response."
"She hated the warmongers so she became one herself?" Jack shook his head. "Isn't that counterintuitive?"
"The philosophers say fighting fire with fire is a legitimate response as old as time."
They were walking in the tangle of trees and underbrush behind the house. The sky was turning black, as if with soot, and a cold wind shivered the tallest branches. Jack was turning over what Alli had said because there was something about it that stuck in his mind, that seemed to loom large on the playing field he'd been thrust onto.
He stopped them at the bole of a gigantic oak. "Let's back this up a minute. Emma knew that your father would win the election, or at least that this current administration was on its last legs. Why not simply wait until the new regime came in?"
Alli shook her head. "I don't know, but there was an urgency in what she had to do."
"All right, let's put that aside for the moment. You said that she wanted to expose the Administration with a radical response."
"That's right."
"Did she tell you what she meant by that?"
"Sure. E-Two wants to provoke an extreme response from the Administration."
"But there's sure to be bloodshed."
"That's the whole point." Alli licked her lips. "See, the bloodier, the more militant, the more brutal the response, the better. Because E-Two is out to show the entire country what this Administration really is. They won't be able to round up the E-Two members easily. From what Emma said, they're all young people our age-no one over thirty. When there's blood on the streets, when America sees their own sons and daughters slaughtered, they'll finally understand the nature of the people who are exporting war and death to the world."
Jack was rocked to his core. "They're planning to be martyrs."
"They're soldiers," Alli said. "They're laying down their lives for what they believe in."
"But what they're planning is monstrous, insane."
"As our foreign policy has been for eight years."
"But this isn't the way."
"Why not? Sitting on their hands hasn't worked so well, has it? Anyone who has said or tried to do anything to protest faith-based initiatives has been ridiculed or, worse, branded a traitor by the talking heads controlled by the Administration. God, look at what wimps members of the opposite party have been through an illegal war, scandals, evidence that the government muzzles its scientists and specialists on the topics of WMDs and global warming. If the parties were reversed, you can bet this president would've been impeached by now."
Why was it, Jack thought, that he felt as if he were listening to Emma and not Alli? A strange thing was happening to him. It had begun when he and Alli entered the house and now had continued as they moved out into woods. There was the very curious sensation of the world finally starting to make sense to him-well, if not the whole world, then his world, the one he'd kept hidden from others and which kept him apart from them. Like his ability to sense Emma, though she was no longer in this world, at least by the limited understanding of man-made science, he felt as if his world and the one that had always been closed to him were beginning to overlap. Hope rose, completely unfamiliar to him, that one day he might even be able to straddle both, that he might live in one without giving up the other.
This gift he very badly wanted to bestow on Alli. To this end, he said, "There's someone I'd like you to meet."
Alli regarded him with skepticism. "Not another shrink. I've had my fill of probing and prodding."
"Not another shrink," Jack promised.
Rather than return to the front of the house where he'd parked, he took her through the underbrush. On the other side was parked Gus's white Continental, which Jack kept in pristine condition.
Alli laughed in delight as she climbed into it. Behind the wheel, Jack turned the key in the ignition, and the huge engine purred to life. With the lights extinguished, he rolled away without the Secret Service detail parked on Westmoreland being any the wiser.
He turned on the tape player, and James Brown took up "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" in midsong.
"Wow!" Alli said.
Yeah, thought Jack. Wow.
Ten minutes later, when they arrived at Kansas Avenue NE, they couldn't get near the old Renaissance Mission Church building. Barriers had been erected on the street and sidewalks on either side of it. There must have been more than a dozen unmarked cars and anti-terrorist vans drawn up on the street within the barriers.
Jack's heart seemed to plummet in his chest. Telling Alli to wait in the car, he got out, flashed his credentials to one of the twenty or so suits milling around. Then he saw Hugh Garner, who was spearheading the operation, and put away his ID.
"Hello, McClure," Garner said. "What brings you here?"
"I have an appointment with Chris Armitage of FASR," Jack lied.
Garner pulled a face. "So do we, McClure. Trouble is, we can't find him, or his pal Peter Link." Garner inclined his head. "You wouldn't know where they've got to?"
"If I did, I wouldn't be here talking to you," Jack said. "I'd like to speak to someone else in the FASR offices."
"I'm afraid that's impossible." Garner looked smug. Hailed by one of his detail, he turned, gave a couple of orders, turned back to Jack. "No one's here. This office has been shut down."
Jack thought of all the busy, dedicated men and women he'd seen on his way into Armitage's office. "Where is everyone else?"
"In federal custody." Garner grinned. "They've forfeited their rights to due process. They'll be held as long as necessary. Neither you nor anyone else can see them without a written order signed by the National Security Advisor himself."
Jack rocked back on his heels as if struck a blow. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"The president went on the air an hour ago with evidence supplied by the Russian president himself that the FASR and E-Two are being funded by Beijing." Garner's grin widened. "Under the Anti-Terrorism Act of December 2001, they've all been charged with treason."
JUST SOUTH of where the sawhorses blocked off the avenue was an alleyway. Jack drove the car around to Chillum Place, parked in a deserted lot. Alli said nothing; he knew she understood perfectly well what had happened.
"Why are we here?" Alli said at last. "Sitting in the dark with the lights out and the engine off?"
"We're moving to the edge of the world," Jack said quite seriously. "We're heading off the grid."
"What'll happen when we get there?"
"Tell me more about Emma."
Alli felt a familiar terror clutch her heart. Ever since Jack and Nina had rescued her, she had felt as if she had a fever, racked by bouts of anxiety, cold sweats, dreams of menacing shadows whispering horrible things to her. She saw Kray everywhere, as if he were stalking her, monitoring her every move, every word she said, every breath she took. Often, alone, she shook, chilled to her bones. Kray had become the sun, the moon, the clouds in the sky, moving as she moved, the wind rattling through the trees. He was always with her, his threats mingling with his ideas, the strange and powerful openness and freedom she had felt with him. These contradictory feelings confused and terrified her all the more. She no longer knew who she was, or more accurately, she no longer felt in control of herself. Something eerie and horribly frightening had happened to her in that room with him. Truth to tell, there were moments she couldn't recall, which was a relief. She so didn't want to probe beneath the unfamiliar surface of that vague unease at not remembering. Something had slipped away from her, she felt, and something else had been slipped into its place. She no longer was the Alli Carson who had lain sleeping in her dormitory room.
On the other hand, there was now, there was Jack. She liked him immensely, and this led to a certain sense of trust. He made her feel safe as no other human being-armed or otherwise-ever had. She envied Emma now, having this man for a father and then, realizing all over again that Emma was dead, shook a little, felt ill with shame for even having the thought. Even so, the thought of talking to him about Kray, about what had happened, set off a panicky feeling she was unable to understand, never mind try to control.
"Emma once said to me that we never really see ourselves," she said in an attempt to calm herself as well as to answer him. She felt that as long as she continued to speak about Emma, her friend wasn't truly dead, that a part of her-the part of Emma they saw and heard-would remain. "She said all we ever see of ourselves is our reflection-in mirrors, in water. But that isn't how we appear at all. So we had this game we played at night. We'd sit on the bed facing each other and we'd take turns describing each other's faces in the most minute detail-first the forehead and brow, then the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the mouth. And Emma was right. We got to know ourselves in a different way."
"And each other," Jack said.
Alli stared out the windshield into the emptiness of the lot. "We already knew each other better than if we'd been sisters. We'd found each other; we loved each other. We shared the night with all its loneliness, its subversiveness, its secrets."
All at once, it was as if Emma were sitting there beside her, and with a sob, she began to cry. She should be here, Alli thought. She'd understand what happened to me, she'd be able to tell me why I'm feeling so strange, why everything feels threatening. Everything except Jack.
"Secrets like who Emma met under the oak trees outside Langley Fields?"
There was a silence for a moment as Alli squirmed in her seat. Inside her mind, a pitched battle was in progress between what she wanted to say and what she felt compelled to hold back. "Okay, I lied to you about that, but it was only to protect Emma, the part of her life she'd entrusted to me."
"So you know who she met?"
Alli bit her lip. As a cloud skims across the moon, a shadow came over her, her eyes lost their focus, her gaze seeming fixed on a distant shore. Her stomach was tied in knots; she could feel the cold sweat breaking out under her arms, at the small of her back. She couldn't backtrack now, and yet she knew she mustn't tell Jack Kray's name. If she kept to what Emma had told her, she thought she'd be all right. Talking about her friend, feeling closer to her was just about the only thing that calmed her. So she continued the process already begun by Kray himself of cleaving her thoughts in two: talking about the acceptable, pushing down the forbidden.
"Emma said his name was Ronnie Kray."
Until this moment Jack had thought the phrase "made his blood run cold" was merely a literary one. Now he experienced it literally. Emma had met with a serial killer, the man who had abducted Alli. Did Alli know that? He judged that now, as she was just beginning to open up, was not the time to tell her.
"But she suspected from the get-go Ronnie Kray might not be his real name," Alli said.
Every strangely wired synapse in Jack's brain was singing now. "Why would she question that?"
"Emma had done a lot of reading on the pathology of being an Outsider. In fact, she'd practically memorized a book called The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. That's where she got the term, that's how she knew she was one. She also read another book of Wilson's called A Criminal History of Mankind, I think. Anyway, she'd heard that name Ronnie Kray and looked it up. He was one of a pair of murderous twins in the East End of London. Their pathology fascinated her, and I think that was one of the reasons she even listened to this guy in the first place."
"They shared E-Two's point of view."
She nodded.
Jack felt the tug of his daughter. This important history had happened while he was obliviously going about his job. His daughter's life had slipped through his fingers like grains of sand. "Didn't she understand the potential for danger?"
"Of course she did," Alli said. "That was the lure, that was why she wouldn't back off. Then she began to suspect that Ronnie Kray was keeping secrets, so she set out to discover what they were."
"I can't believe this," Jack said, because he truly couldn't.
"Why not?" Alli said. "It sounds just like what you'd do."
There was no point mentioning that he was an adult with years of training. "I knew she didn't follow Kray blindly."
"Emma never did anything blindly."
"Not even drugs?"
"Especially not drugs. For Emma, taking them was a kind of, I don't know, social experiment."
"How d'you mean?"
"She wondered whether being stoned would allow her to approach another level of being an Outsider. To touch-I don't know-the infinite."
"And did it?"
"Uh-uh. It disappointed her. She was so sure there was something just out of reach, but so far out there, it was beyond our comprehension."
"I've had the exact same feeling," Jack said.
Alli nodded. "So have I."
He had a thought. "So did she really want to join E-Two or did she want to find out more about Ronnie Kray?"
Alli shrugged. "Emma's motives were never simple. One thing I do know: She was far too smart simply to follow the pied piper. Her bullshit alarm was totally scary."
Jack thought of the times she'd busted him on his screaming matches with Sharon, how he'd let her words go in one ear and out the other. Why had he done that? Why had he devalued her opinion? Or was the truth of what she was saying too difficult to face?
"There's something else," Alli said. "I got the feeling that because she knew how dangerous her being with Kray was, she kept a journal."
This interested Jack immensely. "I searched everything after her accident," he said. "I couldn't find anything."
Alli's fear returned full force. "Maybe I'm wrong. It's only a hunch. I mean she never said anything to me directly."
Still, it was something to ponder, Jack thought. Maybe he'd overlooked something.
"C'mon, let's go," he said, getting out of the car. When she'd joined him, he took her down the alleyway and around behind the buildings on Kansas Avenue. They had to be careful as they approached the rear of the FASR building, as it was lit up like an airport runway, crisscrossed by federal agents in flak jackets, riot helmets, and assault rifles loaded with rubber bullets.
Jack moved them back into the shadows of the hulking warehouses on their right, crouched down, making their way past the activity. As they moved farther down, the light continued to fade until they were once again engulfed in deepest shadow. At the back of the building that used to house the Hi-Line, they crept along until they reached what looked like a windowless wall. Jack moved his fingertips along the wall until he found the join he was looking for, the outline of the door Gus's detective clients used to come and go without being seen.
Slipping a credit card out of his wallet, he slid it into the join on the left side. A moment later, though Alli heard no sound at all, he gripped the join with the tips of his fingers and the door opened outward.
They slipped in together and Jack immediately closed the door behind them. They were in almost complete darkness. Ahead of them was a thin line of warm light coming through the crack between an inner door and the floor.
Stepping up to the door, Jack turned the knob and, opening it, crossed the threshold. Chris Armitage whirled around, grabbing for a length of pipe.
Jack said, "Down, boy. You could get yourself killed that way."
Armitage had the look and posture of a hunted animal. "How the hell did you find us?"
As he said this, Jack looked behind him at Peter Link, asleep on the sofa. "Let's just say that I know these buildings were the haunts of bootleggers in the thirties, complete with escape routes to outwit the police."
Armitage's mouth twitched sardonically. "Seems nothing much has changed since then." He sighed, put aside the pipe. "I suppose they enlisted you to take us in."
"I had to dodge a Secret Service detail to get in here unnoticed," Jack said. Then he turned and beckoned.
Armitage's eyes opened wide. "Good God."
"Chris Armitage, this is Alli Carson, the soon-to-be First Daughter. Alli, Chris is the co-head of the First American Secular Revivalists."
"What's left of it," Armitage said. "Hey, Alli." Then, to Jack: "Why on earth did you bring her here?"
Jack smiled. "I thought you and she ought to meet."
"My organization has just been smeared by the President of the United States with the help of the Russian president." Armitage let go a bitter laugh. "This is hardly the time for a get-together."
"I don't see that you have anything better to do," Jack said.
Armitage nodded. "I can't argue there." He lifted an arm. "Sorry I don't have much in the way of conveniences to offer you." He pointed at a half fridge. "There're Cokes in there, a couple of cartons of juice. And frozen food."
Jack and Alli shook their heads as they sat on facing chairs. Armitage perched on the edge of the sofa.
"How's Link?" Jack asked.
"Out like a light, as you can see." Armitage ran a hand through his hair. "He'll be okay. Thanks for asking. Thanks for everything."
Jack waved away his words. "I'd like to ask you about a former member of FASR. A man you know as Ronnie Kray."
"Oh, him." Armitage rubbed his chin. "Interesting guy, actually. Very smart, very intense. And he'd done his homework-he knew all the ins and outs of every argument we're propounding. He was so well versed, in fact, that Peter and I wanted him to make some personal appearances with us, you know, to get the word out."
Armitage opened the half refrigerator. After offering them a drink, he took out a can of Coke, popped the top. "Above all, Kray had a quality about him-he was quite charismatic. That was another reason we wanted him to take a more active role. But he turned us down." He gulped down some soda. "He told us he could only spare us a couple of days a week. Plus, he said he was strictly a behind-the-scenes type of guy."
"Did you believe him?" Jack said.
"Interesting question. In a funny way, I did. He had trouble interacting with the other FASR members. He lacked-what? — for want of a better phrase, social graces."
"In what way?"
Armitage rolled the soda can between his palms. "He had no tolerance for people who didn't do things his way-and at the speed of light. He pissed off more than his share of coworkers because he didn't seem to have an inhibitor switch. Whatever was on his mind, no matter how harsh, he'd just say it. I recall one time, I brought him into the office to talk to him about the effect he was having on the people he had to interact with. 'Good,' he said. 'Maybe they'll get their act together.'»
"I'd like to fill out my mental picture of him," Jack said. "Would you mind describing him to me?"
"Not at all." Armitage thought a moment. "To begin with, he was a good-looking guy, but in an interesting way. Dark, smoldering-and charismatic, as I said. He was tall and slim. He was in good shape. He looked like he was in his late forties, but I got the feeling he was older than that, certainly in his mid-fifties."
Jack's mind was engaged on two levels. While he was using Armitage's description to build a mental picture of Kray, he was watching Alli for signs of anxiety or nervousness. After all, the man Armitage was describing had abducted her and held her captive for a week. But she seemed oddly detached, as if her mind was far away.
Armitage swallowed the last of the Coke, set the can aside. "I think he was actually popular with the women. The men felt they had to defend themselves against him."
"Did you know," Jack said, "that Ronnie Kray also goes by the name of Charles Whitman?"
"What? No. Of course not." Armitage looked and sounded genuinely shocked.
"Do you vet people-do background checks?"
"Sure. We don't want anyone with a record to be on our rolls. But frankly, it's rudimentary at best; we're all chronically overworked."
Jack nodded in sympathy. "I imagine he was counting on that. I doubt those two names are the end of Kray's deception." He turned to Alli. "What d'you think?"
"Alli," Armitage said, "you know this man?"
Panic gripped her with such force that for a moment she could scarcely catch her breath. "A friend of mine did," she squeaked. "Jack's daughter, Emma."
"I wonder," Jack said in a perfectly neutral voice, "whether you don't know him, as well."
Alli's panic escalated to an almost intolerable pitch. It was all she could do not to jump up and run out of the room. "Me?" He knows, she thought. He knows Kray took me. "I never met him."
"Haven't you recently been with someone who fits Chris's description of Ronnie Kray?"
Alli said nothing, but Jack observed a certain tension take hold of her like an invisible hand.
Jack shrugged. "Perhaps I'm mistaken." He turned his attention to Armitage, who had been following that byplay with a certain confused interest. "We'd best decide what to do with you and Peter. You two can't stay holed up here forever."
Alli was thrust back into the midst of her mental battlefield. On one side was Ronnie Kray, terrifying in his omniscience; on the other was Jack, her savior, who understood her in the same way Emma had. And thinking of Emma, she felt her friend's great strength and courage flow into her. Would Emma lie to Jack? Alli knew she wouldn't, so how could she herself do it?
"I was," she said faintly.
"Have you thought about how to get yourself out of this prison?" Jack said to Armitage.
Alli's guts were churning. "That was the man who took me from Langley Fields," she persisted.
Jack turned to her. "You don't say?"
Alli's expression was stricken. "I… I'm sorry. I know I should've told you sooner."
"I'm curious why you didn't." Jack knew it was crucial to keep any admonition out of his voice. He could see the terror shimmering in the faint sweat on her face.
Alli put her head down. "I was keeping Emma's secret. I thought if I said one thing, it would lead to the rest."
"But then you told me about Emma wanting to join E-Two. You could've told me about Ronnie Kray any time after that."
Alli wedged her hands beneath her thighs, her arms as straight as boards. "He said if I told anyone about him, he'd come after me and kill me."
"How would he know?"
Alli was crying again; she simply couldn't stop. "I don't know, but he knew everything about me, right down to what I did with a boyfriend, my doctors, what hospital I was born in."
Jack wanted to take her in his arms, but he intuited this was the wrong time, the wrong place. He'd read that victims of abduction or rape often react negatively to being touched, even when that's what they really want.
Alli panted as if she'd just finished a hundred-meter sprint. Emma, she thought wildly, please help me be strong. Then, with a start, she realized that she had Jack. In many of the important ways, Jack and Emma were alike, which was why she trusted him as much as she did, why she could talk to him on some level about her very private dread. "He's in my dreams. He's always there."
Jack felt his stomach contract. "What does he say? What does he want?"
She sobbed. "I can't remember." A tremor went through her like an earthquake. "Whatever he wanted, you got to me first-you saved me."
He could see how terrified Alli was of this man. How could she not be? He had held her entire life in his hands. Suddenly, he had a vivid mental image of the photos taken of her with a telephoto lens that had hung in the Marmoset's house, especially the one of her and Emma walking across the Langley Fields campus.
How, he asked himself, had Ronnie Kray-or whoever the hell he was-come to have all that info? Some of it, like the hospitals and doctors, was a matter of public record, but other things, like intimate details of her personal relationships, certainly weren't. If this guy was a spook, Jack could see it. But a civilian? He'd have to be psychic.
In the back of Jack's mind, his oddly aligned synapses had been playing with the 3-D puzzle he was assembling in his head. Now the puzzle turned in a different direction, and he saw the shape of a missing piece.
"Alli," he said with his heart pounding in his chest, "do you recognize the name Ian Brady?"
"Sure." She nodded. "He and his partner, Myra Hindley, were responsible for what were known as the Moors murders. They went on a two-year killing spree from, I think, sixty-three to sixty-five."
Ka-thunk! Jack could hear the missing piece fall into place. Proof that the man who abducted Alli, who killed her Secret Service detail, was the same man who, twenty-five years ago, had murdered the two unnamed men at McMillan Reservoir and, shortly thereafter, the Marmoset and Gus.
Jack had gone after the wrong man; Cyril Tolkan had been responsible for many crimes, but murdering Gus wasn't one of them. So how clever was Kray/Whitman/Brady to have used a hand-honed paletta to kill, knowing full well that it would lead investigators to the wrong man?
Come to think of it, didn't this serial killer use the same MO now, twenty-five years later? He'd left clues to lead investigators to FASR and E-2 and away from himself. Everyone had taken the bait-except Jack, whose mind was already hard at work fitting pieces of the puzzle together. At first, it simply hadn't felt right, and then, little by little, as more pieces of the puzzle appeared for him to manipulate like a Rubik's Cube, he had started to gain an inkling of his quarry.
Now he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt: This man was his personal nemesis. Kray had played him for a fool once; Jack would track him down this time, or die trying.
At that moment, his cell phone buzzed. He'd set it on vibrate before they'd left the house. He was getting a text message, just three letters: WRU. It was from Nina, but what the hell? Jack never texted, had no idea of shortcuts.
He showed the phone's screen to Alli. "What does this mean?"
" 'Where are you?' " Alli looked at him. "She needs to see you."
Jack thought a minute. Having slipped the Secret Service detail, it wouldn't do to show up at a meet with Nina with Alli in tow, and he certainly wasn't going to drop her off at the house, SS detail or no SS detail. They'd blown their coverage once; he couldn't afford to take the chance they'd do it again.
What location could he give Nina that wouldn't seem suspicious? He was about to ask Alli to text Nina back, but then reconsidered. It was odd for Nina to be texting him, rather than phoning. Given the specter of the Dark Car, Jack wasn't in any frame of mind to take a chance. He logged on to the Web, called up Google Maps. He already had several saved. Choosing the one he wanted, he sent it to Nina. It wouldn't show up as anything useful to potential eavesdroppers.
"Okay, we gotta go." He and Alli rose. "For the time being, sit tight. You have enough food for a week?"
"I think so, yeah." Armitage crouched down, opened the half fridge. "Plus, when the Coke and juice run out, we've got plenty of water." He glanced up. "But that's really all academic, isn't it? The minute the people who run this place return in the morning, we'll be screwed."
"No, you won't. I know them." Jack still owned the building; because he charged his tenants way under the going rate, they'd do anything for him. "Trust me, they won't bother you." Jack shook Armitage's hand. "I'll get you out of this, Chris."
Armitage nodded, but he looked less than sure.
JACK'S FIRST choice would have been Egon, but who knew where he was at this hour. Jack wasn't about to call the house to find out. That left him but one other option, so he took Alli to Sharon's.
He wanted to call her to warn her, but at this point, he was afraid to use his cell phone. Instead, he stopped at a drug superstore, bought a burner-a cheap cell phone with a pay-as-you-go plan. After setting it up, he dialed Sharon's number.
As soon as he heard her voice, he said, "I need to come over. Is it okay?"
"After what happened the last time?"
"It was just an argument. Don't make a big deal over it."
"Big deal? Jack, don't you understand? Emma was the central argument of our life together."
She was right, of course, but he didn't have time to get into it with her. "Listen to what I'm saying, Shar. I need your help. Now."
There was a slight hesitation. "Is everything all right?"
"Not quite."
"What's going on?" A different quality in her voice. The saber had been sheathed, the charger's hooves stilled. "You're scaring me."
"We'll be there in fifteen."
"We? Jack, who are you with?"
"Not on the phone," he said, and disconnected.
He got into the Continental and took off.
PARANOIA RUNNING at peak level, Jack checked out Sharon's neighborhood within an eight-block radius. That seemed excessive, even to him, especially since he could think of no reason why Sharon should be under surveillance. But since he still didn't know who had sicced the Dark Car on him-or even why-the more thorough he was in his security check, the better he'd feel.
Having ascertained there was no surveillance in the area, he pulled into Sharon's driveway. Alli hadn't said a word since she'd translated the text message from Nina for him.
With the engine still running, Jack turned to her. "You okay?"
"I guess." She put a hand to her temple. "My head hurts."
"Sharon'll get you some Tylenol as soon as we get inside."
"You guys broke up, didn't you?"
Jack nodded.
"Are you going to get back together?" Alli asked.
Jack sighed. "I'd be lying if I said I knew."
"Yeah, I know."
"What d'you mean?"
"Emma talked about you guys a lot because what upset her the most was the fighting. She couldn't bear it."
Jack opened the window a crack. The heated canned air was getting to him.
"Plus, she thought it was all her fault."
"That's not true!"
"That's funny, because she said you were always fighting about her."
Jack shut up then. There was a peculiar feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he'd just overeaten and now had to get rid of the food at any cost. He opened the car door, got out. Leaning against the car, he realized that he was having trouble breathing.
Alli slid out, came around the front of the Continental to stand beside him. "I'm sorry if I upset you."
"Don't give it a second thought."
There had come a moment when, looking back, he saw that their fighting had been incessant. And about what? Nothing. They fought because it had become a habit, because they were locked in combat, like ancient enemies who no longer knew how their enmity began. He was sick of it. There had to be a better way to deal with each other than through the armor of anger.
He nodded. "You're just telling me something both Sharon and I should've realized long before now."
SHARON LOOKED scared out of her wits when she opened the door.
"Alli!"
"Hello, Mrs. McClure."
"Come on in." Sharon took a look over their shoulders before closing and locking the door behind them. "Now what's this all about, Jack?"
They went into the living room, sat down on the L-shaped sofa.
"I'll get you something for your headache," Jack said.
"No," Alli said. "It's gone now."
Jack regarded her for a moment before turning to Sharon. "I need a safe haven for Alli," he said. "Just for a short time while I take care of some business."
Sharon looked skeptical. "Alli, why aren't you home with your parents?"
"It's a long story," Jack began.
"I'm asking Alli, Jack."
"It's not for her to answer that question."
"I think it is," Sharon persisted. "Alli?"
Alli looked down at her hands. "This is what Emma said it was like, being with you."
"What?" Sharon said. "What did you say?"
"You wanted her to answer," Jack said softly. "Hear her out."
Sharon glared at him, but remained silent. Perhaps the rattle of sabers was all she was prepared to deliver. Still, Jack could hear the snorting of her warhorse champing at the bit to head into battle.
Intuiting the silence as a tacit acknowledgment that she should go on, Alli took a deep breath. "There's no use arguing over this," she said softly. "Jack's right. If he can't tell you why I'm not with my parents, I can't either." She lifted her head. "But it's important I stay with you, that he's free to do whatever he has to do."
Sharon sat back, looked at Jack. "Did you put her up to this?" Seeing the expression on Jack's face, she raised her hands defensively. "Sorry. Sorry." She nodded. "Of course you can stay with me, Alli." She smiled. "As long as you want or need to."
Alli ducked her head. "Thank you, Mrs. McClure."
Sharon's smile widened. "But only if you call me Sharon."
JACK FOUND Nina's car idling at the curb outside Sharon's house. Before he could open the door, the passenger's-side window slid smoothly down, and Nina, leaning over from behind the wheel, said, "Backseat, Jack."
Curious, Jack opened the rear door. Sliding onto the seat, he found himself next to a rather short barrel-chested man with a neatly trimmed beard and the calm demeanor of a sage.
"Jack," Nina said, "meet Dennis Paull, Secretary of Homeland Security."
"Jack, it's good to finally meet you," Secretary Paull said as he briefly enclosed Jack's hand in a hearty grip. "Nina has told me a great deal about you."
"Has she?" Jack caught Nina's eyes in the rearview mirror. "Spying on me?"
Paull laughed. "Keeping an eye on you is how I see it. Nina works for me undercover. She's a damn good operative."
"I'm in no position to dispute that," Jack said.
Paull laughed again. "I don't trust people without a sense of humor, Jack. And d'you know why? Because nothing murders a sense of humor faster than keeping secrets."
"Nina's a barrel of laughs, I can vouch for that," Jack said. "She's the only one I ever met who used a chocolate-chip cookie as a missile."
That got an appreciative chuckle out of Nina.
"Okay, now that we're one big, happy family, let's get down to brass tacks," Paull said. "Jack, I think you're looking for some answers, and I have them. I sent out the Dark Car manned by two of my agents in order to keep an eye on you. They had orders to protect you should anyone make a move against you. Unfortunately, the National Security Advisor-perhaps with the blessing of the president-countermanded those orders."
What have I gotten myself into? Jack asked himself. "Why would anyone want to make a move against me?"
"We'll get to the details in a moment," Paull said. "Now, suffice it to say that you're Edward Carson's man. As you might imagine, the president-elect is seen as something of a threat to certain individuals in the Administration. There's an initiative to get certain matters the president deems pressing sewn up before the twentieth."
"Like rounding up the First American Secular Revivalists."
Paull nodded. "Among other suspect groups."
"The FASR's only crime is that their philosophy is in direct opposition with the current Administration's," Jack said.
"As you no doubt understand, Jack, this Administration has serious perception issues. The world-and the players in it-are what it says they are, no matter the reality."
"Don't you understand that the FASR is being made a scapegoat?" Jack said. "You guys can't find E-Two, so you're going after the easy target."
"Please don't confuse this Administration with the truth, Jack." The secretary shifted in his seat. "Now, I think you may have an answer for me. You know a man named Ian Brady."
It wasn't a question, and Jack's eyes sought out Nina's again. "Yes, sir. Twenty-five years ago, he was a major drug supplier in my old neighborhood."
"Which was?"
"Not far from McMillan Reservoir."
Secretary Paull passed a hand across his brow. It was clear Jack had delivered his answer; trouble was, it was the answer Paull had been afraid of because it confirmed his dark analysis of who Ian Brady really was.
"You need to forget McMillan Reservoir, Jack."
"That's a bit hard to do, sir. This man, Ian Brady or Charles Whitman or Ronnie Kray, whatever he's calling himself today, is the one who abducted Alli Carson and murdered her Secret Service detail in cold blood."
"Nevertheless, you must forget him."
Jack would have said, What the hell are you talking about, sir? except he knew exactly what Paull was saying. The last piece of the puzzle he'd been assembling in his head-the most crucial one-had just fallen into place. No wonder the IDs of the vics at McMillan Reservoir were never revealed. It was the same reason that the crash of the Dark Car and the deaths of the two agents in it never made the news.
Jack's mind replayed the moment at McMillan Reservoir when he'd followed Gus and Detective Stanz, when Gus's snitch said, "I guarantee you'll never get the name of the murderer, either from me or anyone else."
"Brady's protected," Jack said to Paull. "You're protecting a serial murderer, a kidnapper."
"Not me, Jack. The government. That's why the order to my Dark Car agents was countermanded at the highest level. There was concern that you were getting too close to Brady."
"A legitimate concern."
The secretary's face looked like you could pass a steamroller over it without making a dent. "This is a matter of national security."
"How many illegal acts have been committed in the last eight years in the name of national security?"
"Jack, please. This is a friendly memo-the most friendly."
"I understand, sir. But I have to do this."
Paull breathed out a long sigh. "Look, I'm trying to protect you, you do understand that?"
"Yes, sir, I do, but that won't change my mind."
Paull looked away. He hadn't for a moment thought he'd change Jack McClure's mind, but he had to be absolutely certain of this man.
"From this moment on, you're on your own." Paull said this very softly, very distinctly.
"I'm prepared for the risk." Jack knew nothing would be settled inside himself until he hunted down Ian Brady and either brought him in or shot him dead.
HOW I wish you and Jack were my parents!"
"Good Lord!" Sharon was standing in the kitchen. So astonished was she by Alli's statement that she dropped the egg she was transferring from its carton to the heated pan. The yellow yolk burst like a water balloon, slowly threading across the stove top, through the clear, glutinous albumin.
She'd gone with her first instinct, which was to make Alli something to eat, so they had repaired to the kitchen, a room that always made her feel secure. If she was being honest with herself, Alli's presence here unnerved her, though her nervousness had nothing to do with the fact that Alli was the president-elect's daughter. It was all down to the fact that Alli had been Emma's best friend. They were the same age, and though one would hardly be taken for the other, it was difficult for Sharon to look at Alli without seeing her own daughter. She was beset by a profound ache she thought she had put aside. The poisonous stone of Emma's death was still inside her.
Mindlessly, she turned off the burner, began to sponge up the mess. "Why on earth would you say such an extraordinary thing?"
"Because it's true."
Sharon wrung the remains of the raw egg into the sink. She held the broken shell in her cupped palm. "But I'm sure your parents are wonderful people."
"Excuse me, but all you know about my mom and dad is what you see on TV or read in magazine articles," Alli said.
She stood with her back against the pass-through into the living room. She appeared to Sharon to be poised beyond her years-certainly more poised than Emma had ever been. What I wouldn't have given for a child like this, a voice inside her wailed. And immediately she put a hand to her mouth, appalled at the thought. God forgive me, she moaned silently. But her quick prayer of penance made her feel no better, just dirty. She panicked for a moment; if prayers no longer worked for her, what would? The truth of it is that prayers are only words, she thought, and of what comfort are words at a time like this? Hollow things like the shell of an egg with the inside drained away.
"You're right, of course," she said, desperately trying to soothe her way back into normalcy. "Please forgive me."
"There's nothing to forgive, Mrs.-Sharon."
Alli came and took the glistening shell out of Sharon's hand. In that moment, their hands touched and Sharon began to weep. It took only an instant for the dam to burst, for all the feelings, methodically and efficiently tamped down and squashed, to reassert their right to life. Father Larrigan's assurances of "It's God's will" and "Emma's death is part of God's plan" crumbled beneath the weight of hypocrisy. Sharon, queen of denial, was quite unprepared for the abyss, so that the dam not only burst but disintegrated entirely.
She rocked back and forth with inconsolable sobs. Knowledge comes through suffering was one of Father Larrigan's favorite bromides. But in a flash of knowledge, she saw that it wasn't a bromide at all; it was yet another way for the Church to maintain control over its increasingly unruly flock. We all must suffer because of Eve's First Sin, we all deserve to suffer in this life so we may be redeemed in Heaven. What better way to keep people yoked to the Church? Surely God didn't mean these con artists to speak in His name. Oh, the insidious cleverness of it!
Now her sorrow was joined by her rage at being duped, her terror at life's random cruelty. All was chaos, uncontrollable, unknowable. With this came the stark realization that Jack was right. Her newfound religion was nothing but a sham, another way to deny her feelings, to convince herself that everything would be all right. But deep down where she was afraid to look, she knew nothing would ever be right again because Emma had been snatched from her and Jack for no good reason. And then she thought, despairingly, what possible reason could justify her daughter's death? None. None on earth or in heaven.
Gradually, she became aware of Alli holding her hand, leading her into the living room, where they sat quietly side by side on the sofa.
"Can I get you something?" Alli asked. "Some tea, a glass of water, even?"
Sharon shook her head. "Thank you, I'm feeling much better now."
But what a bitter lie that was! In her mind's eye, she could see the inside of her church, the gloomy atmosphere, the confessional, where priests heard and absolved your sins if you recited the canned blather of Hail Marys or Our Fathers. But Father Larrigan wasn't full of grace, nor was any priest. The flickering candles mocked those whose prayers they carried in their flaring hearts, the paintings of Christ, bleeding, dying while angels fluttered like so many moths over his head. And the gold! Everywhere you looked were gold crosses tinted rose or moss green by the saints in the stained-glass windows. And old-lady tears, old-lady prayers, old ladies with nowhere else to go, their lives over, clustered in the doorway, complaining about their backs and their bladders. She was not an old woman! Her life wasn't over. It wasn't too late for her to have another child, was it? Was it?
Wrenching herself away from her pain, she smiled through her tears. "Anyway, never mind me." She patted Alli's knee, and there it was again, that astonishing electric sensation that had made her weep. She managed to hold back the tears this time, but it wasn't easy. "It's you we were speaking of. You live a life of such privilege, Alli. You're admired and envied by so many young women, sought after by so many young men."
"So what?" Alli said. "I hate that privilege means the world to my parents. It means nothing to me, but they don't get it, they don't get me at all."
Sharon regarded her sadly. "I never got Emma, you know. All that anger, all that rebellion." She shook her head. "There were times when I thought she'd surely burst from keeping so much from us."
"The secrets we keep."
Sharon clasped her hands together. "I think secrets deaden us in the end. It's like having gangrene. If you keep them long enough, they begin to kill parts of you, starting with your heart."
"Your heart is still beating," Alli said.
Sharon looked away, at the photo of Emma on a horse. She could ride, that girl. "Only in a medical sense, I'm afraid."
Alli moved closer to her. "You still have Jack."
"Seeing you here…" Sharon bit her lip. "Oh, I want my daughter back!"
Alli took her hand again. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
Sharon looked into Alli's eyes. How young she looks, she thought. How vulnerable, how angelic. She felt all of a sudden a great, an overwhelming desire for solace, for a peace inside her churning self. She wondered whether she possessed the strength to find it. The Church couldn't provide it, nor all the prayers spoken by all the faithful in the universe. In the end, there was only what she could summon up from inside herself.
"Yes, please," she said. "Tell me about Emma."
SHARON CONFOUNDED Jack utterly when he returned to the house.
"I have an idea," she said brightly, "why don't you and Alli spend the night here? Alli can have the spare bedroom, and this sofa is very comfortable. I can't tell you how many nights I've fallen asleep on it."
Jack, mindful of the Secret Service detail he'd left behind, his brain turning over the problem of how once and for all to track down Ronnie Kray, heedlessly said, "I don't think that would be a good idea."
Sharon's face fell. "But why not?"
Seeing her stricken face gave him pause. He saw her on the sofa next to Alli, both women, torsos twisted, turned toward him. It was their proximity to each other, as if they were intimates, as if they had been talking of intimate things when he walked in. There was something about Sharon's face, an expression he felt certain he'd never see again.
"It would be so nice," Sharon said, "all of us together."
Jack, his mind changing gears, thought she might be right. "Why don't we all go to my house? It's larger and-"
Seeing the change come over Sharon's face, he stopped in midsentence.
"Jack, come on. You know that house gives me the creeps."
What was the use? he thought. No matter what he said, she'd never agree to go there, let alone spend the night.
"Alli and I have to go," he said.
Sharon stood up. "Why, Jack? I know you're not comfortable here, but just this once, stay here with me."
Jack shook his head. "It's impossible, Shar. Alli's Secret Service detail is expecting her to be at the house."
"You mean you deliberately ditched them to bring her here?" The sabers were rattling again, the warhorse stamping its huge hooves.
"It was necessary," Jack said.
"As far as you're concerned, it's always necessary to break the rules."
"Not always." How easy it was to fall back into the old patterns. "Sometimes I bend them."
"Stop, please!" Alli cried.
They both turned in her direction.
"This isn't anything to fight about," she said. "You're just fighting for the sake of fighting."
"Alli's right," Sharon said. "Half the time I don't even remember what we're fighting about."
"Then come with us," Jack said. "Spend the night."
"I'd like to," Sharon said. "Really I would." She shook her head. "But I'm not ready, Jack. Can you understand that?"
"Sure," he said, though he didn't, not really. If it wasn't for the Secret Service detail, he would have consented to stay here tonight. What was it about Gus's house she despised so? He couldn't work it out. He'd asked her so many times without getting a satisfactory answer, he had no desire to go over that old turf again. Besides, like her, he was sick to death of fighting.
"I guess it's time for you to go, then." Sharon embraced Alli, and they kissed. She stood in the lighted doorway, watching them as they went down the walk to Jack's car, and she shivered, as if with a premonition, or a feeling of deja vu, as if she'd experienced this helpless moment of sadness and loss before.
THERE WAS, no question, a certain gloom about Jack's house, a fustiness manifested by huge odd-shaped rooms, old gas lamps gutted and wired for electricity, massive furniture, not a stick of it built after 1950. Perhaps it was all this Sharon objected to, why she had opted for predictable square rooms, low ceilings, modern furniture-a house gaily lighted but without charm.
But there was also history here-chaotic, warty, fascinating. It was, as Alli had recognized, the residence of an Outsider, past and present. Could that be why Emma liked it here and Sharon didn't? Jack asked himself as he climbed up the stairs with Alli. Sharon wasn't an Outsider-that kind of life, often in conflict with rules, regulations, even, sometimes, the law, both baffled and frightened her. She was comfortable only within the well-defined bounds of society. That was why she'd been so hell-bent on Emma going to Langley Fields, which was so Establishment. And it was why Emma had gotten into continuous difficulty there. A round peg in a square hole. Outsiders never fit in; you could never change them. But until the day Emma died Sharon hadn't given up hope.
Jack showed Alli into the guest room, which was next to his. In all these years, he'd never been able to sleep in Gus's bedroom. Years ago, he'd hauled the bed Gus had been murdered in out back and burned it. More recently, he'd turned the bedroom into a media room with an enormous flat-screen TV on which he watched James Brown concerts as well as baseball and films he bought on DVD. He felt certain Gus would've liked that.
"The bathroom's fully stocked," he said. "But if there's anything else you need, it'll be in this closet here."
After they said good night, he watched her go into her room, close the door behind her. He thought about what might be going on in her head, all the things she had told him, all the things she hadn't. In his room, he called Carson, told him all was well and that he was slowly making progress.
Jack turned off the light, lay on the bed with his clothes on. He felt bone-weary, sad unto death. The experience of learning about Emma's secret life was a two-edged sword. Gratitude and remorse flooded him in equal measure. Tonight he felt an outsider even from himself.
He must have fallen asleep because suddenly he opened his eyes and knew time had passed. It was the middle of the night. Traffic sounds were as scarce as clouds in the horse latitudes. He felt that he lay on the bosom of the ocean, rocked gently by wave after wave. He was aware of an abyss beneath him, vast, lightless. Light filtering in through the window seemed like the cool pinpoints of ten million stars. He was as far from civilization as he had ever been. Unmoored, he had said. And Alli had said, I'm unmoored, too.
It was then that he heard a sound, like the wind sighing through branches, like moonlight singing in the trees. Rain pattered on the roof, and a voice whispered, "There's someone in the house."
Sitting up, Jack saw a slim figure silhouetted in the open doorway.
"Alli, what is it? What did you hear?"
"There's someone in the house," she whispered.
He rose, took his Glock and went toward her. She turned, retreated into the hall, as if to show the way. Shadows lay against the wall like wounded soldiers. The silence was palpable, even the house's normal creaks and groans were for the moment stilled.
"Alli, where are you going?" he whispered at the receding figure. "I want you to go back to your room, lock the door till I come for you."
But either she was too far away or chose to ignore his warning, because she went down the stairs. Cursing under his breath, he hurried after her. A strange form of peacefulness came over him as he followed the slip of a shadow down the hallway, through the dining room and kitchen. Off the kitchen was a pantry that Gus had used for a storeroom and a half bath situated between the kitchen and the mudroom.
The mudroom was a space that was never used, either by Gus or by Jack. It seemed the oldest part of the house mostly because of its chronic disuse. It hadn't been painted for years. There were cobwebs in the corners with the desiccated corpses of unidentifiable insects who'd met their end in their sticky strands. An old chair rail hung half off the wall, and an old-fashioned wooden hat rack leaned drowsily in one corner. The floor was constructed of ancient slate tiles, eighteen inches on a side. Many were cracked, some fractured entirely. One or two were missing.
As Jack crossed the kitchen, he could see Alli unlock the back door, disappear outside. Jack followed her. At once, he was engulfed by the odors of rotting wood, roots, and the mineral tang of damp stone. He pushed through into a deeper darkness as he moved into a patch of the forested area behind the house.
"Alli," he said softly. "Alli, enough. Where are you?"
The tangle of branches, dense even in the dead of winter, kept the city at bay. The sky, grayish pink like old skin, was intermittently swept away by the wind. Rain seeped down, bouncing off twigs and vines, taking erratic pinball paths. Save for this, all was still. And yet there was the sense of something stirring, as if the wild area itself were alive with a single will, had turned that will to a specific intent.
Jack, his anxiety rising, peered through the rain, through the Medusa's hair of the thicket. It was impossible to know which way she'd gone, or even why she would lead him here. In and out of faint lozenges of city light he went, turning this way and that, searching, until he seemed to be in a maze of mirrors, where he kept coming upon his own reflection.
He was certain he hadn't dreamt that whisper, certain that Alli had been standing in his doorway. After all, who else could it have been? Then, the fine hairs on his forearms stirred, because he heard the voice again.
"Dad…"
DENNIS PAULL, climbing the open stairs of the Starlight Motel in Maryland, was nearing the end of another grueling day. Part of it had been taken up by a meeting with Calla Myers's parents. He could, of course, have had one of his assistants meet them, but he was not one for delegating difficult assignments. Calla Myers had been killed on his watch. There was no excuse for her death; its dark stain would be etched on his soul forever, to take its place alongside many other similar tattoos. But somehow this one seemed darker, deeper, more shameful, because she was a civilian. She hadn't put herself in harm's way as the two Secret Service agents had. That she'd been murdered in precisely the same way as the agents was no longer a mystery to him.
Paull had no illusions about going to heaven, but since he believed in neither heaven nor hell, it didn't really matter. What concerned him was the here and now. He had conjured up all the right phrases of sympathy for the Myerses. He had even sat with them afterwards, while the mother wept and the father held her blindly, even after he'd run out of words of brittle solace. He tried not to think about his own wife, his two sons, tried not to wonder how he would react if someone came to him with unthinkable news. He'd had a brother who'd died in the Horn of Africa in the service of his country. Even Paull hadn't known the details of his mission. Nor had he cared to know the details of his death. He'd simply buried him with full honors and gone on with his work.
Having checked three times for surveillance, Paull walked along the open gangway on the second floor of the motel, inserted a key in the lock of a room at the far end, opened the door, and went in.
Nina Miller was sitting on the bed, her long legs stretched out, crossed at the bare ankles. She'd kicked off her sensible shoes and now looked fetching in a pearl-white silk shirt. Her dove gray wool skirt had ridden partway up her muscular thighs. She was a fine tennis player, as was Paull. It was how they'd met, in fact. Now they played mixed doubles whenever they had a chance, which, admittedly, wasn't often.
Nina put down the book she was reading-Summer Rain, by Marguerite Duras-a first edition Paull had given her last year for her birthday. It was her favorite novel.
"You're looking luscious."
She smiled. "I could have your job for workplace sexual harassment."
"This isn't the workplace." Paull bent, kissed her on the lips. "This isn't harassment."
"Flatterer."
Paull pulled over the desk chair, sat down beside her. "What have you got for me?"
She handed him a thick manila folder. "I back-checked the dossiers of every member of the D.C. Homeland Security office. Everyone's clean, so far as I can tell, except for Garner."
"Hugh's my deputy." Paull shook his head. "No. He's too obvious a choice."
"That's precisely why the National Security Advisor recruited him." She pointed at the open file she'd compiled. "Over the past eight months, Hugh has met five times with a man named Smith." She laughed. "Can you believe it? Anyway, Mr. Smith is Hugh's acupuncturist. He also happens to be in the office adjacent to the National Security Advisor's chiropractor."
Paull, paging through the file, said, "I see their appointments overlapped on those five occasions."
Nina folded her hands in her lap. "What d'you want to do?"
Putting the folder aside, Paull leaned over her. "I know what I want to do."
Nina giggled, took his head between her hands. "I'm serious."
"I couldn't be more serious." His lips brushed the hollow of her throat. "How's your friend Jack McClure?"
"Mmmm."
Paull raised his head. "What does that mean?"
She made a moue. "You're not jealous, are you, Denny?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
She pushed him away. "Sometimes you can be so starchy."
"I only meant that considering Hugh Garner hates McClure's guts, perhaps between us we can work out a way for him to take care of Hugh for us."
Her mouth twitched. "What a Machiavellian mind you have."
Paull laughed appreciatively as he manipulated the tiny pearl buttons down the front of her shirt.
Tossing the file on the floor beside the bed, she said, "I've gotten as close as I can to Jack. He's carrying a Statue of Liberty-size torch for his ex."
"Poor bastard."
"Nothing you'll have to worry about," she said. "You don't have a heart."
"Birds of a feather." He made a lascivious grab for her. "Anyway, what could be better than an affair with no strings attached?"
"I can't imagine." She gripped his tie, pulled him down to her.
JACK TURNED and saw her, framed between two trees, her skin pale in the ghostly light.
"Dad…"
"Emma?" He took a step toward her. "Is that you?"
The rain, gaining strength, beat down on him, water rolling into his eyes, mixing with his tears. Could Emma have come back to him? Was it possible? Or was he losing his mind?
He moved closer. The image wavered, seemed to break up into a million parts, each reflected in a raindrop spattering black branches, glistening brown bark, pale gold of dead leaves. She was all around him.
Jack stood in wonder as he heard her voice, "Dad, I'm here…"
It wasn't the voice of a person or a ghost. It was the sough of the wind, the scrape of the branches, the rustle of the brittle leaves, even the distant intermittent hiss of traffic on faraway streets, avenues, and parkways.
"I'm here…"
Her voice emanated from everything. Every atom held a part of her, was infused by her spirit, her soul, the electrical spark that had animated her brain, that made her unique, that made her Emma.
"My Emma." He listened for her, to her, heard the wind, the trees, the sky, even the dead leaves call his name, felt her close all around him, as if he were immersed in warm water. "Emma, I'm sorry. I'm sorry…"
"I'm here, Dad… I'm here."
And she was. Though he couldn't hold her, couldn't see her, she was there with him, not a figment of his imagination, but something beyond his ken, beyond a human's ability to comprehend. A physicist might call her a quark. Werner Heisenberg, architect of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, would understand her being here and not here at the same time.
JACK RETURNED to the house dripping wet, feeling at once exceptionally calm and subtly agitated. He couldn't explain the feeling any more than he could the last half hour, nor did he want to. Heavy-limbed, he wanted only to return to his bed and sleep for as many hours as he could until sunlight splintered the oak tree outside his window and roused him with warm and tender fingers.
Before he did so, however, he peeked into Alli's room, saw her sleeping peacefully on her side. Silently closing the door, he tiptoed back to the bathroom to dry off. Then he stumbled into bed and, after pulling the covers up to his chin, passed into a deep and untroubled sleep.
JACK FELT as if he were walking a tightrope. On the one hand, he had promised Edward Carson to deliver Alli at noon today; on the other, he needed to find some way to get Alli to open up about Ian Brady because she was his only link to him. She'd been with him long enough; it was possible she had seen or heard something that could lead him to the murderer.
"Alli, I know how hard this must be for you," he said as she came down to the kitchen, "I know this man is scary."
Instantly, she turned away. "I don't want to talk about it."
He ignored the deer-caught-in-the-headlights glassiness of her eyes, plowed relentlessly on. This might be his last chance to get her to talk about her ordeal. "Alli, listen to me, we need to know why Kray abducted you. He didn't do it for a lark, he had a plan in mind. Only you and he know what that is. You're the key to what happened."
"I'm telling you I don't know. I can't remember."
"But have you tried?" Jack said. "Really tried?"
"Please, Jack." She began to tremble all over, absolutely certain that she was close to something terrible, that she was approaching a pit of fire into which she could not help but walk and be consumed. Even Jack couldn't save her now. "Please stop."
"Alli, I'm sure Emma would want you to-"
"Don't!" She spun around, her face flushed. "Don't use Emma that way."
"All right." Jack held up his hands. He knew he'd gone too far. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you." The more he pushed her, the more agitated she became. He wasn't going to get anything more out of her this way or any other way he could think of. Like it or not, he had to back off.
He smiled at her. "Are we good?"
Alli tried to smile back, but all she could do was nod numbly.
THEY WERE just sitting down to breakfast when Jack heard a car pull up outside. Assuming it was the Secret Service detail, he crossed to the front door, stepped outside to tell them not to come into the house. Instead, he saw Egon Schiltz's maroon classic station wagon, a superlative 1950 Buick Super Model 59 Estate Woodie Wagon, with its unique Niagara Falls bumper, real birchwood side panels, the original straight-eight-cylinder engine with 124 horsepower and GM's then-innovative Dyna-flow automatic transmission. In truth, it should have been in a showroom or bombing down Victory Boulevard in L.A., but it was Egon's second child, and he drove it everywhere.
He raised an arm as he got out of the woodie. "Finally. I tried all yesterday to reach you, but you weren't answering your cell phone, and Chief Bennett gave me a number for the task force that's no longer in service."
Jack came down off the porch. The mild air was still in place; there was only the hint of a chill in the air, low sunlight already melting silver hoarfrost.
"How are you, Egon?"
"Ask me in a month." Schiltz gave a wry smile. "I came clean with Candy. I think she would've moved out, except for Molly. Molly must never know, that's something the two of us absolutely agreed on."
"If you agree on one thing, more will follow. You two should see someone."
Egon nodded. "I want to. I'm sure Candy does, too. She just needs some time." He scratched the back of his head. "You're a good friend, Jack, thank you. I feel…" He sighed heavily. "It turns out you know me better than I know myself. Living a lie isn't for me, which is why I've stopped going to church for the time being." He leaned back against the mottled trunk of a tree. "It's not so bad. Truthfully, I don't think Molly misses it at all. I tried to make her see the light, but it's no good, you see. It doesn't work. You want for your child everything you yourself didn't have, only to discover she wants only what she wants. And in the end, you're meaningless, really. It's her life." He rubbed his hands briskly. "She never really got God. Either you believe or you don't. There's no point going through the motions."
"I hope you haven't stopped believing, Egon."
The ME produced a rueful smile. "That would make my entire life a mockery. No, no, I still believe in God, but what you made me realize is that there are many paths to redemption. I've got to find mine. The Church can't help me."
Jack clapped his friend on the shoulder. "Everyone needs the freedom to make up their own mind." He gestured with his head. "D'you want to come in? I can fix you some breakfast."
Egon glanced around. "Not if you have guests."
"In that case," Jack said, "let's take a walk."
They went around the north side of the house. It was colder here; the green Bilco doors were still rimed with a thin layer of ice, the fallen leaves stuck together with the glue of winter.
"Something mighty queer is going on," Egon said.
Jack was automatically on alert. "In what way?"
"You heard about that girl, Calla Myers, being stabbed to death on the Spanish Steps the other day. The District ME is an old bridge buddy of mine. He called yesterday morning, and I met with him. He told me that the stab wound was in the same place as the ones on the two agents guarding Alli Carson. I showed him the photos of the wounds, and he confirmed the one that killed Calla Myers was identical."
"Did you confirm it on her body?"
"Well, that's the thing," Egon said. "The body wasn't in his morgue. The feds whisked it out of there along with his preliminary findings."
Jack was hardly surprised, since it was clear that Calla Myers was Ian Brady's latest victim. But the very fact that he'd targeted her set Jack's synapses to firing overtime. Another Rubik's Cube was forming in his head, and he didn't like the shape of it one bit. He'd heard the president's address. Direct evidence linked Calla Myers, a member of the FASR, to the murders of the SS agents. That was part of the rationale used to close down the Kansas Avenue office and take its members into custody. What did it mean that Brady-a federally protected person-had murdered Calla Myers? Brady had killed the Secret Service detail. In the initial briefing, Hugh Garner had told him that the detail's cell phones hadn't been found. In an instant, the Rubik's Cube in Jack's mind slid into focus. Of course the phones hadn't been found; Brady had taken them. And now he'd planted one with Calla Myers to implicate her and, by extension, the FASR.
Egon broke into his thoughts. "Jack, are you still with me?"
Jack nodded. "I was just thinking about Calla Myers's murderer. I think I know who it is, but I have no idea what his real name is or where to find him."
"I just might be able to help you there." Egon took out a small pad, flipped it open. "As I said, my friend hadn't finished his autopsy on Calla Myers when the feds took her away, but he did note something interesting. He hadn't yet put it in his prelim, because he needed to check it out, so the feds don't have it."
Schiltz consulted his pad. "As per the MO, there were no fingerprints whatsoever except for the vic's, which leads us to the inescapable conclusion that the perp wore gloves of some sort. My friend found traces of a superfine powder on Calla Myers's coat, in the place under her left arm consistent with where someone who had his arm around her would place his hand.
"It took him some time to figure out what this powder actually was." Egon glanced up. "You'll like this, Jack. What was on Calla Myers's coat was logwood powder. Logwood is a heartwood extract from Haematoxylon campechianum, found in Central America and the West Indies. When mixed with a carrier, such as ethyl alcohol, glycerine, or Listerine, it becomes a black pigment used for tattooing." He snapped the pad closed. "And, by the way, Calla Myers had no tattoos."
Jack's heart leapt. "So the logwood powder came from the perp."
Schiltz nodded. "Whatever else this sonovabitch is, he's also a tattoo artist. But here's the best part. Almost all tattoo artists buy pre-mixed pigments. None of those use logwood as an ingredient. Your man mixes his pigments by hand."
I LIKED the white Continental better," Alli said as she slid into Jack's car.
He laughed as he put the car in gear. A moment later, he picked up the Secret Service detail in his rearview mirror. It was 11:20. The minutes were counting down to when he'd lose his access to her. It was now or never.
"Alli, there's something I've been wondering," he said. "Did the man who abducted you have a tattoo?"
Alli went rigid. She stared straight ahead.
"Alli, honey, it's all right for you to tell me."
"I only saw his arms." Alli slowly shook her head from side to side. "He didn't have any tattoos."
Jack, heading for the Carsons' house in Chevy Chase, did his best to keep to the minimum speed. He didn't want this drive to end yet.
"Alli, I know Ronnie Kray frightened you terribly, but it would be helpful if you could tell me something more about what you saw. Anything at all."
Alli, still sitting rigidly, said nothing.
"I want to catch him, Alli. You want that, don't you?"
She bit her lip, nodded.
"You're the only one who can help me."
Tears began to run down her cheeks. "I wish Emma was here. She could tell you what you want to know."
"You can, too."
Her eyes squeezed shut. "I'm not brave like she was."
Despite his best efforts, they'd entered Chevy Chase. This was it, then. The end. Jack relented. "Alli, your father has agreed to let me pick the detail guarding you."
"I want you," she said at once.
He nodded. "I'll be there, just not the whole time. But you can absolutely trust Nina and Sam. I know them, I've worked with them. They won't let you down."
He turned onto the Carsons' street, a cul-de-sac, saw more Secret Service agents in cars and on the sidewalk. They all watched him as he drove toward the large federal-style brick house at the end of the cul-de-sac.
"Home," he said.
"It doesn't feel like it." Alli shifted in her seat. "Nothing feels right."
"As soon as you get back to your routine, it'll all feel as familiar as it did before."
"But I don't want to get back to my old routine!" She sounded like a spoiled child.
Jack pulled into the driveway where Edward and Lyn Carson were waiting. He shut off the engine, opened his door, but Alli made no move to open hers.
"Alli…"
She turned to him. There was desperation in her eyes. "I don't want to leave you!"
"You have a responsibility to your parents. Tomorrow you'll be the First Daughter. From now on, you have to act like the First Daughter. The whole country will be watching."
"Please don't make me."
"Honey, it's what has to happen."
"But I'm afraid."
Jack frowned. "Afraid of what?"
"To leave you, to be here, I don't know."
By this time, the Carsons, concerned, had come up to the car. Lyn Carson opened the passenger's-side door, leaned in.
"Alli? Baby?"
Alli, still turned toward Jack, silently mouthed, Please help me.
Jack felt torn into a thousand shreds. He had failed Emma, he didn't want to fail Alli as well. But what could he do? The president-elect had given him an order that he was powerless to ignore. Alli wasn't his child. So he did the only thing he could do. He leaned over, whispered in her ear, "I'll see you later, I promise. Okay?"
As he pulled back, he saw her nod. Then she turned, got out of the car and into her mother's arms.
"Jack."
Edward Carson was at his side as he got out of the car. The president-elect pumped his hand then impulsively embraced him.
"There are no words." His voice was clotted with emotion. "You've brought our girl back to us safe and sound, just as you promised."
Jack watched Alli. Her mother, arm around her waist, walked her up the brick steps to the open front door.
"That's right," Lyn Carson said. "Random House wants you to write a memoir about growing up to be the First Daughter."
"She's a special young woman," Jack said. "I want Nina Miller and Sam Scott assigned to her permanent detail. Nina and I were partners in finding Alli. I worked with Sam at ATF until he transferred to the Secret Service three years ago."
Carson nodded. "I'll make the necessary calls right away." He looked at his wife and daughter for a moment, before turning back. "Jack, Lyn and I would like you at the inauguration, up on the dais with us. You're like a member of our family now."
"It would be an honor, sir."
In the doorway, Alli turned, gave him a tentative smile, and with a sweep of her mother's arm, vanished into her world of privilege and power.
WHO WAS Ian Brady? In other, more normal circumstances, Jack would have been preoccupied with finding that out. However, this case was anything but normal. What concerned him now was not who Ian Brady was but why he had chosen that name. Clearly, his other aliases-Ronnie Kray and Charles Whitman-followed on in a straight line from the first.
It was Jack's experience-the experience of any knowledgeable lawman-that criminals, even the highly intelligent ones, chose their aliases for a reason. An FBI profiler who had been brought into the ATF office on a case some years ago had said that giving meaning to an alias was a subconscious urge criminals found irresistible. In other words, they couldn't help themselves. Of one thing Jack was certain: The name Ian Brady held special meaning for this man. The trick was to find out what that meaning was.
With his paranoia at full mast, Jack bypassed the computers hooked up to the federal network, which included his own at the ATF office in Falls Church. What was required, he thought now as he made his way out of Chevy Chase, was a public cybercafe. Twenty minutes of hunting from behind the wheel of his car unearthed one on Chase Avenue, in Bethesda. He sat down at a terminal, typed the name Ian Brady, but all he got was a bare-bones recap from Wikipedia and About.com. On the other hand, after some false leads, he found a distributor of logwood, the substance Brady had inadvertently left on Calla Myers's coat. Taking down the address and phone number, he walked outside, checked the environment for tags. In the shadow of a storefront, he got out his cell burner, punched in the number of the distributor. He got nothing, no automated message, no voice mail. He wasn't all that surprised. The distributor was so small and obscure, it had a rudimentary Web site. Customers could order its product online, but other than that, the site looked as if it hadn't been updated in months.
S&W DISTRIBUTION was on the outskirts of the curiously named Mexico, Pennsylvania, 160 miles north of Chevy Chase Village. It took Jack just under three hours bombing down I-83N and US-22W to get there. By the time he exited PA-75S, it was already late in the afternoon. The sun, low in the sky, was bedded on thick clouds into which it expanded and slowly sank. Shadows lengthened with the beginning of winter's long twilight.
S&W occupied a ramshackle building a stone's throw from the railroad tracks that brought Mexico all the business it was going to get. It was impossible to tell what color the structure had originally been painted or even what color it was now. Jack's heart sank because at first sight, the place looked abandoned, but then he saw a young woman come out the front door. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket over a ribbed turtleneck sweater. As he pulled up, she settled herself on the clapboard steps, shook out a cigarette, lit up. She watched him with gimlet eyes as he got out of his car, walked toward her. She had an interesting, angular face. Its slight asymmetry made her appear beautiful. She was slim and small. She appeared to be in her late twenties.
As he approached, he heard a train whistle. The tremor in the tracks built as the train thundered toward them. The unsettled air of its bow wave crashed over them like a hail of gunshots. The young woman, her long hair flying across her face, sat as calmly as if the only sound to be heard was the crunch of Jack's shoes on the pebbly blacktop. Smoke dribbled from the corner of her mouth, and now that he was closer, he could see the tattoos on the backs of her hands, either side of her neck: the four main phases of the moon. She must have dyed her hair black to match her eyes, but the tips were golden. She wore a silver skull ring on the third finger of her right hand. The skull seemed to be laughing.
In the aftermath of the cinder swirl, Jack flashed his ID, watched as her eyes tracked uninterestedly to the information. He began to wonder whether it was tobacco she was smoking.
"Do you work at S-and-W?" he asked.
"Used to."
"They fired you?"
"The world fired them. S-and-W is history." She jerked a thumb. "I'm just cleaning out the place."
Jack sat down beside her. "What's your name?"
"Hayley. Can you believe it? Ugh! Everyone calls me Leelee."
"How long did you work here?"
"Seven to life." She took a drag on her cigarette. "A fucking jail term."
Jack laughed. "You're a hard piece of work."
"It's self-preservation, so you can be sure I try my damnedest." She watched him out of the corners of her black eyes. "You don't look like a cop."
"Thank you."
It was her turn to laugh.
"How far along are you with the-" He jerked his thumb. "-you know?"
She sighed. "Not nearly far enough."
"I'm trying to track down a customer of S-and-W's," Jack said. "He's a tattoo artist who mixes his own pigments. I'm hoping he ordered logwood from you."
"Not too many of those," Leelee observed. "It's why S-and-W was overtaken by history. That and the fact that the owner never came around. The fucker stopped paying his bills altogether-including my salary. If I wasn't hired by the mail-order company taking over the building, I wouldn't even be here now." She shrugged. "But who cares? Odds are the new company'll go belly-up, too."
"Do you know something your new bosses don't?"
"That's the way the world works, isn't it?" She stared at the glowing tip of her cigarette. "I mean, we're all sheep, aren't we, persuading ourselves that we're different, that we're beautiful or smart or cool. But we all end up the same way-as a little pile of ashes."
"That's a pretty bleak outlook."
She shrugged. "Par for the course for a nihilist."
"You need a boyfriend," Jack said.
"Someone to tell me what to do and how to do it, someone to leave me at night to go out with the guys, someone to roll over in bed and snore his way to morning? You're right. I need that."
"How about someone to love you, protect you, take care of you?"
She tossed her head. "I do that myself."
"I see how that's working out for you."
Through her armor, she gave him a wry smile.
"Come on, Leelee, you need to believe in something," Jack said.
"Oh, I do. I believe in courage and discipline."
"Admirable." Jack nodded. "But I mean something outside of yourself. We're all connected to a universe more mysterious than what we see around us."
"Think so? Here's the truest thing I know: Don't for a moment let religion or art or patriotism persuade you that you mean more than you do." She took another deep drag, gave him a challenging, alpha-dog look. "That comes from a play called Secret Life. I bet you never heard of it."
"It was written by Harley Granville-Barker."
Leelee's eyes opened wide. "Shit, yeah. Now I'm impressed."
"Then give me a hand here."
"I could bust your hump, but you've taken all the fun out of that." She swept her hair behind one ear. "Does your tattoo artist have a name?"
"Ian Brady," Jack said. "Or Ronnie Kray. Or Charles Whitman."
Leelee took the butt from between her lips. "You're shitting me."
"He was a customer, right?"
"More than." She didn't look as if she was interested in smoking anymore. "Charles Whitman owns S-and-W."
THE EVENING was furry with sleet, but as Jack worked his way south toward the District, it became an icy rain his wipers cast off either side of his windshield. The roads were slick and treacherous, peppered with spin-outs and fender benders, which slowed him down considerably. He returned from Mexico with an address for Charles Whitman. He had no way of knowing whether this was Brady's current residence, but he wasn't going to take any chances. The approach had to be thought out in detail.
As soon as he entered the house, he turned on the stereo, along with the lights and his stove top. But the only meat he had-a steak-was frozen solid, so he turned off the burner, sat down at the kitchen table with a jar of peanut butter and one of orange marmalade. Using a teaspoon, he scooped out mouthfuls from one jar then the other.
Afterwards, he went through his LP collection without finding anything he wanted to listen to. That's when he came upon Emma's iPod. He'd stuck it on top of a Big Bill Broonzy album that contained two of his favorite songs, "Baby, Please Don't Go" and "C C Rider." Tonight, he didn't want to hear either of them.
He took up the iPod, plugged it in because the battery was low. Using the thumb wheel, he browsed through Emma's collection of MP3s. There were the usual suspects: Justin Timberlake, R.E.M., U2, and Kanye West, but he was startled to see tracks by artists he loved and had played for her: Carla Thomas, Jackie Taylor, the Bar-Kays.
Searching through the shelves that housed his records and video-cassettes, he found the box containing the iPod dock he'd bought but never used. He took it out, plugged it into the aux receptacle in the back of the stereo receiver. Then he put the iPod into the dock.
He decided to listen to something of Emma's at random. This turned out to be an album for some reason called Boxer, by a band called The National. He thought of Emma, imagined her listening to these muscular songs-he particularly liked "Fake Empire"-wondered what would have been going through her mind.
As the music played, he fired up his computer, went online. According to Leelee's records, the address where Brady had his logwood delivered was on Shepherd Street, in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He pulled up Google Maps, punched in the address, and clicked the HYBRID Button, which gave him both the map and the satellite photo of the area. The address was only five or six miles southeast of where he was born. The thought gave him the shivers.
Forty minutes later, he got up, rummaged around the house for several items he thought he might need, stuffed them into a lightweight gym bag. He checked his Glock, shoved extra ammunition in his pocket, grabbed his coat. On the way out the door, he called Sharon. There was no answer. He disconnected before her voice mail picked up. With a sharp stab of jealousy, he wondered where she was. What if she was out with another man? That was her right, wasn't it? Yes, but he didn't want to think about it. He climbed into his car, his heart hammering in his chest. Driving to Shepherd Street, he thought, this could be it, the end of a road twenty-five years long.
WHAT WERE the odds that Ian Brady lived in a hotel just four miles from Jack's house? Yet this was what Jack saw as he cruised by the address Leelee had given him. RAINIER RESIDENCE HOTEL. SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM CORPORATE LEASES AVAILABLE the sign out front read. He didn't stop, didn't even slow down until he turned the corner onto Thirty-first Street, where he pulled into the curb and parked. The first thing he did was to check out the rear, which was flat, save for a zigzag of tiered black iron fire escapes. It gave out onto a concrete apron and, just beyond, a modestly sized blacktop parking lot, lit by sodium lights, from whose hard glare he kept his careful distance. But there was no rear entrance, most likely because of the same security concerns that had led to the installation of the parking lot lights.
Walking back to Shepherd Street, he found himself across the street from an ugly U-shaped structure hugging a courtyard with four withered trees, a Maginot Line of evergreen shrubs, fully a third of which were as brown and useless as sun-scorched newspapers. The hotel itself was three stories of pale yellow brick. Access to the apartments was via metal staircases at the center and either end of the U, along raw concrete catwalks that ran the length of the building. There was a coarseness about it, a glittery shabbiness, like a Christmas present wrapped in used paper. Had it been painted turquoise or flamingo, it could have passed as a down-at-the-heels Florida condo.
Jack kept away from the occasional dazzle as passing cars lit up sections of the sidewalk. He crossed the street, found his way to the manager's apartment. Even through the door he could hear the blare of the TV. Waiting for a seconds-long silence, he rapped hard on the door. The blare started up again, louder this time, which meant a commercial had come on. A moment later, the door was yanked open the length of a brass chain.
Dark eyes in a square, heavy-jawed face looked him up and down. "Not interested."
Jack put his foot across the doorjamb, flashed his ID even as the door began to swing shut. "I need some information," he said.
"What kind of information?" the manager said in a voice like a pit bull's growl.
"The kind you don't want to give me while I'm standing out here."
The dark eyes got small and piggy. "You're not from INS? All my workers are legit."
"Sure they are, but I don't care. I'm not from Immigration."
The manager nodded, Jack took his foot away, and the door closed enough for Pig-Eyes to unlatch the chain. Jack walked into a low-ceilinged apartment with small rooms made even smaller by enough sofas, chairs-upholstered and otherwise-and tables of all sizes and shapes to furnish the Carson's Chevy Chase mansion. The manager muted the TV. Images of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble chased themselves across the screen.
"You have a tenant here by the name of Charles Whitman?"
"No."
"How about checking your records?"
"No need," Pig-Eyes said. "I know everyone who lives here."
"How about Ron Kray?"
"No Kray here."
"Ian Brady."
Pig-Eyes shook his head. "Uh-uh."
Jack considered Brady's propensity for misdirection. Alli had told him that the real Ian Brady had a female accomplice. "How about a Myra Hindley?"
"No," Pig-Eyes said, "but we got a Myron Hindley. You think he's the one you're looking for?"
"Do the apartment doors have peepholes?" Jack said.
Pig-Eyes seemed confused. "Yeah, why?"
"Are all the door locks the same as yours?"
"You bet. House rules. I gotta be able to have access to all the apartments."
"I need a broom, a wire hanger, and the key to Myron Hindley's apartment," Jack said. As the manager went to fetch the items, Jack added, "If you hear any loud noises, it's just a truck backfiring."
MYRON HINDLEY's apartment was on the third floor, at the far end of the building. Hardly a surprise, since that's precisely where Jack would have situated himself if he were in Brady's place. He had two choices: The first was to go in the front door. The second was to climb up the fire escape to the apartment's two rear windows. Since it would be far easier for Brady to flee out the front door than climb out the window, he decided to make a frontal assault. He wished Nina were here to take the back of the building, but she was with Alli. Besides, ever since the explicit warning he'd received from Secretary Paull, he'd decided to continue after Brady alone. This was his fight, not hers.
Every six feet, bare bulbs were screwed into porcelain fixtures in the ceiling of the catwalk. On the third floor, Jack took off his shoes, covered his right hand with both socks. Reaching up, he unscrewed each lightbulb as he progressed down the catwalk. The circles of illumination winked out one by one. After he'd disabled the last bulb, he put on his socks and shoes. His feet were freezing, and he had to wait several minutes for the warmth to come back so that he had full maneuverability.
With only the ambient wash from streetlights and the odd passing vehicle to illuminate the catwalk, Jack set the gym bag down on the concrete, opened the zip, took out a small can of WD-40 and a pair of bolt cutters. Then he took off his coat, hung it on the wire hanger, buttoned it, put the collar up. Then he twisted the top of the hanger so it wound around the butt of the broom handle. He stood this makeshift scarecrow against the railing of the catwalk directly opposite the door to Myron Hindley's apartment.
Standing to one side of the door, he sprayed the key Pig-Eyes had given him with WD-40. It slid right in as he inserted it into the lock. But he didn't turn it over. Instead, he picked up the bolt cutter. He rapped on the door, very loudly. Just as he pulled his fist away, three bullets exploded through the door, ripping holes in Jack's overcoat. The broom crashed over onto the catwalk.
Jack turned the key, opened the door. As at the manager's apartment, the door opened only to the length of the chain, which Jack promptly snipped in two with the bolt cutter. Drawing his Glock, he kicked open the door. Expecting another salvo of shots, he held his ground. When none came, he pitched himself across the threshold curled in a ball, came out of it with his Glock aimed into the room.
"Relax," a voice said. "I've been expecting you."
Jack found himself confronting a figure sitting at his ease in an upholstered chair that had been pulled so that it faced the front door. Only one lamp was on, so that he was cast in half light, enough so that Jack could see the handgun gripped in one hand. It was lying on his right thigh, the barrel aimed casually at Jack.
"Sit down, Jack," the figure said. "It's been a long run. You must be tired."
Jack could feel the power of the man as a fish is drawn to the baited hook. "I don't know whether to call you Myron, Charlie, Ronnie, or Ian."
The figure shrugged. "What's in a name?"
"Who are you?" Jack said. He was struggling against an unnamed fear that had spread its black wings inside him. "What's your real name?"
"I didn't invite you here to answer questions," the figure said.
Jack felt a laugh forced out of him, but it sounded brittle and shaky. "You invited me?"
Brady shrugged. "Leelee told me you were on your way."
Now the fear took flight; he was in its shadow. As if he'd received a blow, he took an involuntary step backwards.
Brady bared his teeth. "Where d'you think she got all her ideas?"
Feeling a chair behind his knees, Jack sat down dazedly.
"Truth to tell, I've run you like a rat in a maze." In a trick of the light, Brady seemed to have inflated, to be larger than life. "Every time you got to another point in the maze, I moved your cheese." He waved the hand with the gun. "For instance, Calla Myers called me the moment you left the FASR office. I knew it was only a matter of time before you followed the clues I left to the Marmoset's house. Oh yes, I'm familiar with Gus's nickname for him."
Jack felt poleaxed. All the hard work he'd done to get here, the arduous path he'd followed, had been created by this monster. "It was all to get me here?" he said like a pupil to his professor. "Why?"
"That question I'll answer. I'm as tired as you are, Jack. I've had a good run, but now, like the president, my term has come to an end. And like the president, it's time for me to look to my lasting legacy."
He shifted slightly, and Jack could see him better now. Chris Armitage had described him well. He was handsome, distinguished even, with the kind of sexual magnetism he imagined Leelee would go for. Jack found him as sinister-looking as his horned viper and twice as terrifying.
"Your term stretches back far longer than eight years."
"All the more reason for it to come to an end." Brady leaned over, reached for the neck of a bottle of liquor, which he lifted into the light so Jack would be reassured. "Polish vodka. The real thing, not the watered-down crap you get here. Care to join me?"
Jack shook his head.
Brady shrugged. "Your loss." Hoisting the bottle, he took a long swig, then smacked his lips.
"Okay." Jack rose, gestured with the Glock. "Time to go."
"And where would you be taking me? Not to the police and certainly not to the feds." He possessed a crooked grin that gave him the aspect of a crocodile. There was something primeval about him, immutable, like a force of nature. This elemental quality was the source of his power. "You're the one they'll lock up, Jack, not me."
Jack stood, the Glock pointing at the floor. "Why did you kill Gus?"
"No questions, remember? Not that it matters-you already know the answer to that one. Gus wasn't going to give up looking for me. That idiot detective, Stanz, would have finally let it go, but not Gus." Brady lazily tilted his head to one side. "But that isn't the question you really want to ask, is it?"
An icy ball formed in the pit of Jack's stomach. "What d'you mean?"
"C'mon, Jack. I killed Gus inside his house. You were asleep down the hall. You want to know why I left you alive."
Jack, realizing he was right, said nothing.
"It's a mystery, Jack, like many others in this life destined to remain unsolved."
Jack aimed the Glock at him. "You will tell me."
"Are you going to shoot me? That would be a blessing. My term would end in a blaze of glory because my bosses would lock you up and throw away the key. Lawyer, what lawyer? You wouldn't even get a phone call. No, they'll stick you in solitary in a federal high-security penitentiary." He gestured with his gun, careful not to point it at Jack. "So sit back down, have a drink."
Jack stood where he was.
"Suit yourself." Brady sighed deeply. "We're both orphans, in our own ways. I murdered my parents, as you should have."
"If you're trying to say we're alike-"
"I must say you made up for it, though, when you killed that street thug, Andre." Brady chuckled. "In a library yet. Brilliant." He took another hit of the Polish vodka. "I'm going to tell you a secret, Jack. I have not one grain of faith in me. Early in life I wanted to get past all of life's tricks, small and large, to get to the heart of things." His eyes lit up. They were the eyes of Ron Kray, Charles Whitman, Ian Brady. "Sounds familiar, doesn't it, Jack? That's your search, too." He nodded. "Instead, what have I become? Life's ultimate trickster. You see, there's nothing left of me but tricks. That's because I discovered that there is no heart of things. I think there used to be, but that was a long time ago. Life's hollow, like a tree full of burrowing insects. That's what humans are, Jack. They've burrowed into life with their frenzied civilization, their running after wealth and fame, their attempts to deny the body's decay. They're all insane. What else could they be, making such an unholy mess of things? They've hollowed life out, Jack, till there's nothing left but the shell, the illusion of happiness."
"I don't believe you."
"Ah, but it's true, and your daughter knew it. Emma heard what I had to say, and it drew her like a moth to a flame. Too bad she died so young-I had big plans for her. Aside from killing, mentoring's what I do best. Emma had real potential, Jack. She could have become my most ardent pupil."
With a savage cry, Jack launched himself at Brady, crashed into him with his leading shoulder. The chair tipped backwards, and they both tumbled head over heels in a tangle of arms and legs, fetched up against the wall under the rear window. Jack punched Brady in the nose, heard with satisfaction the cartilage fracture. Blood spouted out, covering them both. At almost the same time, Jack felt the Glock being ripped from his hand. He felt around blindly for the other gun, saw Brady raise the Glock. A moment more, he'd shoot Jack. But then Jack saw where the Glock was pointed and, in a flash of insight, knew that Brady meant to shoot himself in the head with Jack's gun. He meant what he said about going out in a blaze of glory. He was going to end his reign by ensuring that Jack would spend the rest of his life in prison.
With a desperate swing, Jack knocked the Glock from Brady's hand. It went skittering across the floor. He hauled Brady to his feet, but one foot trod on Brady's gun. It was, like everything else in the area, slippery with blood. Jack lurched forward, taking Brady with him as they pitched through the window in a blizzard of shattered glass. Brady teetered for a moment with Jack over him, the two of them in stunned equilibrium. Jack tried to pull back, to right himself, but Brady was too far. Without Jack's weight to hold him in place, he began to slide headfirst out the window. Jack made a grab for him, but Brady slapped his hands away.
Brady stared up into Jack's face without expression of any kind. "Makes no difference. You'll never stop it."
The next instant he plummeted down three stories to the concrete apron. Jack, covered in blood and shards of glass, scooped up his Glock, ran out of the apartment, along the catwalk. He clattered down the stairs three at a time, around the side of the building.
Brady lay in a grotesque heap. He might have survived the fall, but the impact had broken his neck. His handsome face, under the harsh sodium glare of the parking lot lights, was a patchwork of seams, as if over time it had been stitched together. The eyes, devoid of their animating spark, were only buttons now. Stripped of charisma, he was nothing remarkable to look at. He was dead, Jack was dripping blood, and twenty-five years of rage, sorrow, and feeling abandoned drained away like grains of sand.
WALKING INTO the vast hushed public library on G Street NW put Jack immediately at peace. The dry, slightly dusty scent of books came to him like a breath of fresh air, bringing back memories of so many hours happily poring through books to his heart's content. There was a certain kind of quiet here that calmed and stirred him at the same time. It was like being in the ocean, feeling your body light and buoyant and, at the same time, attuning yourself to the galaxy of unknown life that seethed beneath the surface. The knowledge of the world lay before him, the wisdom of history. This was his cathedral. Here was God.
IT WAS the morning of January 20. Inauguration Day. For a few hours, Jack had slept in his car before waking up just before dawn stiff and tired, his eyes full of grit. He went home, stripped off his bloody clothes, climbed into a hot shower, and putting all thoughts aside, stood under the cascade for fifteen blissful minutes. Then he scrubbed himself with soap, rinsed, dried off.
Fighting the urge to call Sharon, he dialed Alli's cell.
"I'm sorry I wasn't able to come by last night."
"That's okay." Her voice sounded furred with the remnants of sleep. "I missed you." There was a slight hesitation. "I had another dream last night." She meant about Ian Brady.
"Can you remember it?"
"He was talking to me, but his voice was all gauzy. It-I don't know-I had pictures in my head, like a movie. I was walking through a crowd of people."
"Were you trying to get away from him?"
"I don't know. I guess."
"Alli, you don't have to worry about him anymore."
"What d'you mean?"
He heard in her voice that she'd come fully awake.
"This is just between the two of us, right?"
"Right."
"That's why I couldn't come see you," Jack said. "I was with him. And now he'll never hurt you again."
He heard her sharply indrawn breath. "Really?"
"Really. I'll see you at the inauguration, okay? Now let me speak with Nina."
After a short pause, Nina came on the line.
"Good idea not contacting me on my cell. Are you calling from a pay phone?"
"A burner I bought a couple of days ago." He paused to stare out his bedroom window, where the branches of the oak tree reached toward the sky. "Listen, Ian Brady's history."
"What?"
"I tracked him down last night to a residence hotel in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He's dead."
"What a relief."
"Brady wanted to die, Nina. I'll give you the details after the inauguration, okay?"
"It's a date," she said. "Now I've got to get back to work."
Downstairs, he pulled the suit Chief Bennett had waiting for him those long weeks ago when he was being prepped for his assignment to Hugh Garner's joint task force. He stripped off the dry cleaning bag. He turned on Emma's iPod. He wanted to hear more of her music while he dressed. Alli had said that she was always making playlists. Seeing a playlist category in the iPod screen, he clicked on it. Oddly, there was only one, called Outside. He set it to play. Immediately, "Life on Mars?" — David Bowie's famous song about alienation-started up.
As Jack listened, he put on a freshly laundered white shirt, buttoned it up. "Life on Mars?" segued into the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." As he knotted his tie, on came Screamin' Jay Hawkins singing "I Put a Spell on You," a good deal more raw and powerful than subsequent versions.
After reknotting his tie three times, he got it right. He slipped on his jacket and was about to turn off the iPod when he heard Emma's voice coming out of the speakers. He stood, transfixed, listening to the aural diary of her three meetings with Ian Brady. This was how the entry ended:
"Finally, I said to him that if he saw me as his Myra Hindley, he was sorely mistaken because I had no intention of either fucking him or falling under his spell. This was the one time he surprised me. He laughed. I had nothing to fear. He said that he already had his Myra Hindley."
YOU'LL NEVER stop it.
Stop what? What had Brady planned?
Jack walked through the library's stacks. With each book he touched, he sensed a new door open to him. This was the place where his disability vanished, where he could read without the tension and frustration his dyslexia usually caused him. In the shadowed aisles he recognized Andre, Gus, Ian Brady, Emma. Each of their lives had meaning, a certain force that would remain with him even after death; of this, he was absolutely certain. Though they were beyond him now, still he sensed them, as an animal scents spoor and in its mind forms an image of what had once been there and has since moved on.
The truth was, Jack still felt the spoor of Ian Brady's mesmeric power, even though he was quite certain Brady had lied about his connection with Emma, had in fact been baiting him. Of course, this was precisely what Brady had meant to plant inside him, but Jack was only human, prey to human doubts and fears, just like anyone-anyone save Ian Brady perhaps.
Without quite knowing how it happened, Jack found himself at the section of the library that held the books of Colin Wilson. He ran his finger along the spines of the books until he found the intimidatingly thick A Criminal History of Mankind. Taking it down, he went over to a trestle table, sat down, and opened it up.
He was astonished to discover that the introduction was all about the real Ian Brady. Wilson had had a ten-year correspondence with Brady in prison. Wilson's conclusion was "that even an intelligent criminal remains trapped in the vicious circle of his criminality, and cannot escape."
Brady was involved in what Wilson termed a "dominance syndrome" with Myra Hindley, a young woman he seduced, deflowered, and somehow coerced into being his accomplice for a horrifying string of rape/murders over a two-year period. It was Myra who lured the teenage victims into her car so Brady could perform his acts of extreme cruelty and degradation. The real mystery was how he converted a young innocent like Myra Hindley into a criminal.
Jack paused. He could not help thinking of his Brady and Emma. Emma heard what I had to say, and it drew her like a moth to a flame. Too bad she died so young-I had big plans for her. Aside from killing, mentoring's what I do best. Emma had real potential, Jack. She could have become my most ardent pupil. What had he wanted with a Myra Hindley? So far as Jack could tell, Brady was a loner-whatever missions he performed for the government were strictly on his own. Anyone with him would have been a liability. So what, then, was he up to?
Jack went back to reading. On page twenty-nine, he came across the most heinous of Brady's crimes. He and Hindley picked up a ten-year-old girl. They took pictures of her (Jack couldn't help but think of the photos of Alli and Emma on the wall at the Marmoset's house), recorded her pleas for mercy, then killed her and buried her on the moor, where another of their young victims was buried. "Later," Wilson wrote, "they took blankets and slept on the graves. It was part of the fantasy of being Enemies of Society, dangerous revolutionaries."
Sickened by what these two people had done, Jack looked up. Into his head now came something else that his Brady had said to him last night: I've had a good run, but now, like the president, my term has come to an end. And like the president, it's time for me to look to my lasting legacy.
Jack understood that Brady had wanted to die last night: he'd tried to shoot himself with Jack's Glock, he'd brushed Jack's hands away when Jack tried to save him from his fall. Might it be that this was why Brady had kept Jack alive that night, because he suspected this moment in his future would come, that he wanted someone worthy to finish him off? Truth to tell, I've run you like a rat in a maze. Every time you got to another point in the maze, I moved your cheese. Jack had not only successfully negotiated the maze, but he'd also survived the horned viper's attack, the fusillade of bullets coming through the apartment door.
So Brady knew he was going to die last night, and yet he was looking to his lasting legacy. What might that be? Not his clandestine work for the government. A lasting legacy involves notoriety-a very public display. And he had very deliberately invoked the president. Why had he done that?
Another three-dimensional puzzle was forming in Jack's head as his brain made connections with the speed of light. Brady's MO was misdirection; he'd used it time and again. What if there was a second reason for him talking about Emma being his disciple, besides wanting to enrage Jack? Emma was never meant to be his Myra Hindley. What if-?
You'll never stop it.
Jack stood up so fast, he nearly overturned the table. The sound of its legs banging back on the floor was like a thunderclap in his mind. As he ran out of the library, he checked his watch. As usual, he'd lost himself in thought and reading. It was far later than he'd realized. The inauguration was about to begin and, with it, Ian Brady's lasting legacy.
ALLI, IT'S time to go," Nina said gently.
Sam opened the door, stepped out into the wan January sunshine. Alli could hear him whispering into his mike, listening intently to security updates. When Sam nodded, Nina urged her charge forward, and Alli emerged from the plush cocoon of the limo into the seething crowd of politicians, foreign dignitaries, celebrities, the talking heads of worldwide media outlets, religious leaders, including Reverend Taske, head of the Renaissance Mission Congress, her father's special guest, military personnel in full-dress uniforms, Secret Service details crisscrossing the area with the concentration of marines landing in enemy territory.
Alli took all this in as if she were watching a film. Ever since she'd heard the first bars of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," she'd felt as if she were back in her dream with Ronnie Kray whispering in her ear. She felt detached and at the same time marvelously clearheaded. She had one mission to accomplish; everything else fell away as if off a steep cliff, vanishing from view. Her life was simple; all that was required of her was to remove the vial she somehow knew was basted into the lining of her coat and, at the proper moment, open it. What could be simpler? Her mind hummed along on the track Kray had set for it, using a combination of persuasion, fear, and a drug cocktail that included an efficacious dose of the horned viper's venom to metabolize the chemicals out of her system so quickly, it would be undetectable.
She was nearing her parents now. Her mother kissed her; her father smiled through her. The fanfare was playing, the Speaker of the House was preparing to take the podium for the Call to Order. Among the columns of the Capitol building hung three huge American flags. Above them, the dome glittered in sunlight.
Jack, snaking his way through the crowd, used his credentials at various Secret Service checkpoints. Approaching the dais was like negotiating the nine circles of hell-the closer he got, the slower his progress. The last bars of the fanfare faded, and the Speaker of the House took the podium for the Call to Order. Jack passed the final checkpoint and was admitted to the short flight of folding stairs up to the dais. He saw Reverend Taske, Secretary Paull, the National Security Advisor, the outgoing president. He looked past them for Alli, saw her between her mother and her father. She had a kind of faraway look on her face he'd seen a number of times before, and now all the tiny bits of strange behavior that he had observed, that had taken up residence in his brain, fell into place: her behavior when he'd taken her to see Chris Armitage, her dream. And afterwards: Nothing feels right, she'd said to him. I'm afraid… Please help me. What had Brady done to her? Had he hypnotized her, drugged her? Perhaps both. In any event, he'd turned her into a time bomb. The fuse had been lit, and now, as he saw her reach into the lining of her coat, he made a beeline for her.
He saw Sam, who turned at the movement Jack made across the dais. Sam's eyes met Jack's, and he smiled until he saw Jack pointing. The vial was out, Alli's hand was curled around it. Sam saw it at the same moment Jack did. With a practiced move so smooth as to be virtually undetectable, he wrested the vial out of her hand, put his free arm around her, held her firmly against his chest.
And that was it, Jack thought, as he moved at a more leisurely pace toward them. Ian Brady's legacy had turned to ashes. Whatever substance he'd instructed Alli to release remained safely in its vial. The Speaker of the House finished the Call to Order, and the Reverend Dr. Fred Grimes began his fervent invocation and benediction.
"Let us pray. Blessed are you, O Lord, our God. Yours, O God, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor; for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all."
A stir began behind him. He turned in time to see Hugh Garner and three of his minions mounting the dais, heading directly for him. Clearly, Brady's body had been found. No doubt the pig-eyed manager of Brady's apartment complex had ID'd Jack.
"Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and to give strength to all."
Jack, zigzagging farther into the crowd on the dais, kept his eye out for Nina. She'd give him some help, provide cover for him while he slipped away. She should have been on the other side of Alli. There was still part of the last Rubik's Cube missing.
"As President Lincoln once said, 'We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.'»
At last, he caught a glimpse of Nina, moved toward her. She was standing on the other side of Edward Carson. He risked a glance behind him. Garner, in a classic pincer move, had ordered his two agents to the other side of the dais in order to intercept Jack while he closed from behind.
"O Lord, as we come together on this historic and solemn occasion to inaugurate once again a president and vice president, teach us afresh that power, wisdom, and salvation come only from your hand."
As Brady himself would understand better than most, what Jack needed now was a bit of misdirection. He tried to get Nina's attention, but her gaze seemed fixed on Edward Carson. Beneath the reverend's words, he could hear the commotion closing in behind him as Garner pushed through the dignitaries packing the dais. The missing piece of the last Rubik's Cube was this: Why had it been so easy to stop Alli? No one's lasting legacy-let alone Ian Brady's-would hinge on the actions of a coerced twenty-year-old.
Then, in his head, he heard Emma's voice as clearly as if she'd been alive and standing beside him. He said that he already had his Myra Hindley. That was before Brady had abducted Alli. So if he wasn't grooming Emma to be Myra Hindley and she wasn't to be Alli, who was his accomplice, whom would he trust to carry out his legacy after his death?
"We pray, oh Lord, for President-elect Edward Harrison Carson and Vice President-elect Richard Thomas Baer, to whom you have entrusted the leadership of this nation at this moment in history. We pray that you will help them bring our country together, so that we may rise above partisan politics and seek the larger vision of your will for our nation."
Jack felt Garner's grip on his shoulder, trying to turn him around. He saw Nina leaning in toward the president-elect. But her mouth was closed, her jaw set. She reached into an inner pocket of her coat, and at that moment Jack knew. The last piece of the Rubik's Cube fell into place. The real Ian Brady had used a woman younger than he for his accomplice, but not so young as his victims, not so young as to be unreliable. Someone just like Nina Miller.
Jack drew his Glock, fired one shot into Nina's heart. He saw her mouth open in shock, saw her body spin around; then Garner slammed him to the floor of the dais. Someone kicked the Glock away; Garner struck him a blow to the back of his head.
"Use them to bring reconciliation among the races and healing to political wounds, that we may truly become 'one nation under God,' " the Reverend Dr. Fred Grimes intoned just before the screaming began and all hell broke loose.
SOMETIMES WE all need luck in addition to skill," Secretary Dennis Paull said. "And you, Jack, had both today."
Jack was sitting in a small cubicle inside the offices of Homeland Security. Across the table from him were Secretary Paull and Edward Carson, the new President of the United States. It was eight hours after the incident. Since then, Jack had been under arrest, in isolation, just as Brady had predicted.
"That was quite a heroic thing you did today, Jack." Carson waved Paull's protest to silence. "You saved not only my life but the lives of hundreds of people, all vital to the running of this country. That was a vial of anthrax Nina Miller was about to open."
Jack moved his head from side to side with some difficulty. His body still throbbed and ached from the beating Hugh Garner and his cohorts had delivered in the aftermath of the shooting. "And the vial Alli was carrying?"
"Confectioner's sugar," Paull said. "Thank God."
Personally, Jack didn't believe God had anything to do with it, but this was neither the time nor the place to say it. "Is she all right?"
"In light of what's happened, she's being evaluated more carefully this time," the president said.
Paull opened a slim file. "The doctors found a small bit of matter encrusted in the fold behind one ear."
"So Brady did drug her."
Paull nodded. "So far, the lab has identified Sodium Pentothal and curare. There's another, more complex substance the techs are still trying to analyze, but they figure it must be something that caused her to metabolize the other substances with unusual rapidity."
"Jack," Carson said, "do you know how he got to Nina Miller?"
"No, but I can make an educated guess," Jack said. "Nina was traumatized early in life. Her brother molested her."
"We know all about that," Paull cut in. "It's in her file. Her psychological profile was perfectly normal."
"Profiles, like Alli's medical exam, can be faulty," Jack pointed out. "Even more so with psych tests. Nina couldn't bear the fact that her brother was a successful married man."
"Wait a minute." Paull held up a hand. "Nina's brother was killed twelve years ago in a drive-by in Richmond, Virginia. One shot through the head."
"Why would she lie to me about that?" Jack's synapses began firing again. "Did the cops ever find out who the killer was?"
Paull shook his head. "Apart from the bullet, there was no evidence-no motivation either. They gave up, said it was a case of mistaken identity."
"What if it wasn't?" Jack said. "What if Nina met Brady twelve years ago? What if he proposed a plan: He murders her brother, and in return, she becomes his accomplice."
Paull began to sweat at the thought of the terrible mistakes he'd made professionally and personally.
"Brady was like a chess master-he planned his moves far ahead of time," Jack continued. "The night he went out the window, he told me he'd killed his parents. At the time, I thought he was simply goading me, but now I can see a pattern. He felt he was justified in killing his parents, for whatever reason. Taking a look at Nina's file gave him his opportunity. My guess is he sought her out. Nina felt that there was a privilege in loneliness. She said it made her feel alive, introduced her to herself. People like her are split off from themselves. They'll pass even the most stringent psychological testing because at the moment, they believe what they say."
Paull winced. He could feel Nina's sweat-slicked body moving against him, her breath in his ear, her deep groans. He felt quite faint.
Jack shifted to rid himself of a stab of pain. "In the course of my investigation, I met a young woman, tough and smart-in many ways a younger version of Nina. Brady got to her. She was a nihilist just like him. I'm betting he found the darkness in Nina and pried her open. He was a master at mentoring."
In his mind's eye, Paull saw an image of himself walking into the bookshop where he'd ordered Summer Rain, Nina's favorite novel. The dealer insisted he examine it before he bought it. It chronicled the struggle of an immigrant family, rootless and uneducated, marginalized by an indifferent society. He'd thought nothing of it then, but in light of what had happened since, he agreed with Jack. Nina's love of the book was a reflection of her inner darkness. Why hadn't he recognized it? But of course he knew. He'd blinded himself to the signs because her detachment, her rootlessness, her lack of desire for commitment or a family made her the perfect mistress.
"Good God." President Carson ran a hand through his hair. "This entire episode is monstrous." He turned his telegenic eyes on Paull. "My Administration will have zero tolerance for psychopathic agents, Dennis. You and your brethren are going to have to devise an entirely different yardstick to measure your candidates." He stood. "Excuse me, I'm going to deliver the same message to the new director of national security."
He leaned over the table, gave Jack's hand a hearty shake. "Thank you, Jack. From the bottom of my heart."
After he'd gone, Jack and Paull sat across from each other in an uncomfortable silence.
Jack leaned forward. "I'm only going to say this once: For the record, despite his best efforts, I didn't kill him, he killed himself."
"I believe you." Paull's voice was weary. "What went wrong, Jack?"
Jack rubbed the back of his head. "Brady-or whatever his name is-was no good to you anymore, sir. All he wanted was to impose a lasting legacy. He wanted to make a statement of the greatest magnitude. I imagine you'll agree that obliterating virtually the entire U.S. government at a time when the reins of power were being exchanged, when the country was most vulnerable, more than qualifies."
"Are you saying he was making a political statement?"
"I doubt it. Brady had moved beyond such considerations. He despised humankind, hated what he felt civilization had done to the world. He felt we were heading toward a dead end."
"You have my personal thanks." Secretary Paull stared at Jack for a long time. At length, he cleared his throat. "On another note, you'll be pleased to know that there's no sign of the organization known as E-Two. Frankly, I suspect it never existed. The former Administration required a domestic bogeyman to go after its main objective-the missionary secularists. Maybe E-Two was fabricated by the former National Security Advisor."
"Or maybe Brady came up with the idea," Jack said. "After all, misdirection was his forte, and those FASR defectors had to go somewhere."
"A bogus revolutionary cell? Could be." The secretary shrugged. "Either way, I've ordered the members of the First American Secular Revivalists released and reinstated. And, by the way, I protected them while they were in custody. No one interrogated them or harmed them in any way."
"I know you did what you could."
Paull rose, walked to the door.
"What was his name?" Jack said. "His real name?"
Paull hesitated only a moment. "Morgan Herr," he said. "Truth be told, I know precious little about him. I'd like to know more, but for that I'd require you and your particular expertise. If you're interested, come see me."