Contents

1. The Babylon Gene – Alex Churton

2. Lethal People – John Locke

3. First Daughter – Eric Van Lustbader

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I dedicate this work to the cherished memory of my late friend, Michael Embleton, who stood by the book, and me, through thick and thin.

No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

Jim Morrison, ‘THE WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)’; The Doors, 1971

1

The seven hills of Istanbul were awash with rain. Mahmut Aslan shook his blue nylon jacket and handed it to his male secretary.

‘So, Ali, what’s new?’

Ali gripped the jacket tightly; rain splashed over his shiny shoes. ‘Did sir enjoy his holiday?’

‘Yes, sir enjoyed his holiday and is thrilled to be back. The very sight of you, Corporal Ali, fills me with optimism.’

‘Optimism, sir?’

‘My next holiday cannot be far away.’

Ali winced. First goal to the Colonel.

The district of Ümraniye, where Colonel Aslan had his office, was nothing to write home about, but Ali Wilmaz liked his desk job. It was a lot better than clean-up ops on the Iraqi border.

In May ’93, Ali had seen thirty unarmed colleagues executed by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Diyarbakir province, southeast Turkey. Now, in spite of more than a decade of elimination tactics – and the odd political concession – the PKK was back at war. Nobody relished a posting to the southeast; it was a dirty war.

‘Coffee, Colonel?’

‘Later, Ali.’ Aslan looked up from the pile of reports on his desk. ‘Why wasn’t my coffee here when I arrived?’

‘You were late, sir.’

‘Then why isn’t it cold on my desk?’

Ali coughed. ‘You’re often late, Colonel.’

‘Of course I’m late! Half of Istanbul is late when it rains!’

‘Of course, sir. The rain.’

‘Of course, Ali. And Ali…’

‘Sir!’

‘Clean your shoes. You’re not a seagull!’

Ali retreated to the makeshift reception.

Aslan slumped back in his moulded plastic chair, lifted his feet onto the desk, lit his pipe and contemplated the ghostly ripple of reflected rainfall that hovered over the portrait of the great Mustapha Kemal Atatürk opposite.

Everything Aslan did came under Atatürk’s keen eye; dead for sixty-six years, the giant still watched over Turkey. Atatürk, father of the Turks – a man with a dream.

Aslan ground his teeth around the pipe stem. Should he turn on the desk light. The dim room suited his melancholy. Adding the tedious half-light of a 60 watt bulb would be sacrilegious. His lair was a temple of gloom.

What had he done to deserve this fifth-floor excuse for an office in the National Security Council’s Police Liaison Department, perched high – but not high enough – above one of the dreariest quarters of Istanbul?

What had he done? Aslan had done everything: exemplary field operations, intelligence gathering, and the grin-and-bear-it arse-licking that goes with any elevation through the poisoned gateau of bureaucracy. As the interface between the government’s security operations and the military-dominated National Security Council, he tried to avoid making enemies, but sometimes standing tall meant standing in someone’s way. His loyalty was simple: Turkey. No party; no philosophy. Turkey was the only cause Aslan took as sacred.

At least his holidays had improved. Thailand had been a lot more entertaining for a widower than sunny, divided Cyprus.

Aslan tore off the precious few vacation days from his roll calendar to reveal the date: Wednesday 10 March 2004.

*

The red bulb on his nicotine-greased phone flickered into half-life with a strangled whine.

‘Celalettin Celik for you, sir.’

‘Put him through, Ali.’

‘Colonel Aslan?’

‘Yes, Celik, what is it?’

‘I have a press conference in half an hour, Colonel. Any comments before I request a news blackout?’

Aslan squinted, looked up at General Atatürk for inspiration, found none, and took a sharp intake of pipe smoke. What the hell was Istanbul’s police chief talking about?

‘I pride myself, Celik, on knowing most of what’s happening in this city, but mind-reading is not my strong suit.’

‘Terrorism, Colonel. You’ve heard, surely?’

Aslan drank deeply from the coffee his secretary had just handed him. ‘Thank you, Ali. You can go.’

‘Sir, there’s just—’

‘Later, Ali.’ Aslan returned his attention to the police chief as Ali lingered in the doorway. ‘Terrorism? More than heard of it, Celik.’

‘Pardon me, Colonel. I meant have you heard about last night?’

‘I’ve just come off a late plane from Bangkok. I haven’t even had time to wash.’

‘Welcome home, Colonel. I’m surprised your secretary has not already acquainted you with the facts.’

‘My secretary, Celik, can hardly make a decent cup of coffee.’ Aslan emptied the cup and winked at the anxious Ali, indicating with his left hand that he’d best stay. ‘So, what is it?’

‘Bomb. Masonic Lodge in Kartal District.’

‘Freemasons?’ Aslan licked his forefinger and smoothed his thin, fair eyebrows.

‘There are fatalities. Our boys have sealed the place off, naturally.’

Aslan thought for a second, then clenched his fist. ‘Tell the press as little as possible. Don’t speculate. Just the usual things: “Highly experienced teams of experts are covering all leads.” The voice of calm and reason. You do it so well.’

Aslan winked at Ali again. ‘Now, Celik, you’ve spoken to the governor, haven’t you?’

‘Of course, Colonel. Late last night. He’s already made a statement. Announced a full press briefing for Monday morning.’

‘Man’s a lunatic.’ Aslan swept back his long, blonde hair and took a deep breath. ‘I’ll meet you at the scene in an hour.’ He looked at the sheets of rain belting against the stained windows. ‘Better make that an hour and a half.’

Aslan slammed the receiver into its cradle. ‘Ali!’

‘Sir!’

‘Soap.’

2

Hemmed in by rusting Dogans and Sahins, Ali deftly manoeuvred his boss’s olive BMW up the steep slipperiness of Suleiman Caddesi. The snail’s pace soon slowed to a mechanical rigor mortis.

Aslan pondered the scene. A traffic jam is a perfectly democratic phenomenon, he thought. When the wheels stop moving, everyone’s equal.

He cleared some condensation from the rear window. If Ümraniye was soulless, Kartal was pure carrion: grey commercial blocks stripped to the bone. The occasional swathe of faded pink-and-yellow tiling, intended to subdue the monotony, became itself monotonous: lined up above the drab shop fronts like so many rotten teeth.

Down came the rain, blurring everything.

‘It’s the wipers, sir.’

Aslan looked up from Ali’s briefing document on the previous night’s events, spread across his knees. ‘Wipers, Ali? Is that what they’re calling terrorists these days?’

‘No, sir. These old cars. Their wipers can’t deal with the rain. That’s why people are always late in Istanbul.’

Aslan shook his head at Ali’s perennial genius for stating the obvious.

‘Was it raining last night, Ali?’

‘Belting down, sir.’

‘Deduction?’

‘Sir?’

‘Well, Corporal Ali, those guys who hit the Association of the Grand Temple of Free and Accepted Masons of Turkey must have arrived late.’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

‘Most of the Freemasons had left by the time the shooting started.’

‘Amateurs, sir. Hitching a ride on the al-Qaeda bandwagon.’

‘Paid to think, are you, Corporal?’

‘Forgive me, Colonel.’

‘Not at all. You think away. Many a fool taught his teacher a lesson.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘Don’t you read your Rumi?’

‘Sir?’

‘Our great mystic poet, Jalaluddin Rumi.’

‘Not since he gave up football, sir.’

Aslan laughed. ‘Your first goal of the day, Ali. Well done.’

‘We’re nearly there, Colonel.’

Through the rain engulfing the BMW’s big windscreen, Aslan could just see lines of policemen in their soaked blue jackets directing traffic away from the site of the atrocity. A CNN Turkey News transit van was obscured behind a pack of foreign photographers, TV cameramen, producers and journalists, many of them pleading with the young policemen. The policemen nervously fingered their pistol holsters.

Behind the excited throng, exhibiting their customary patience in the face of officialdom, waited the more familiar faces of news-hacks from Hürriyet, Milliyet and Sabah – Turkey’s mass circulation dailies.

Ali slammed on the brakes and Aslan lurched forwards, his broad forehead hitting the back of the driver’s seat.

‘Arsehole!’ Ali tore into the driver who’d skidded close to the BMW, trying to avoid a gas cylinder truck.

‘Easy, easy,’ counselled Aslan to his unnerved driver. ‘It’s only a gas truck. You can’t go thirty metres in this city without one of these crawlers climbing up your arse.’

A fist banged on the nearside window of the BMW. Aslan instinctively reached for his Beretta, holstered to his left shin, then recognised the anxious face of Celik leaning out of the adjacent Merc. ‘Celik! How many atrocities do you want in twenty-four hours?’ Aslan lowered his window.

‘Join us in my car, Colonel. I don’t want any more reporters on my back. Ever since we discussed joining the EU they think they can do what they like. We can enter from the side.’

‘The EU?’

‘Very amusing, Colonel.’ Ali stifled a laugh as he made eye contact with Aslan in the rear-view mirror.

‘Thank you, Ali. Now see to the car. And Ali—’

‘Sir?’

‘Stay with it till I call you.’

Ali began reversing the BMW.

‘Not now, Ali! Let me get out first!’

‘Can I help with the door, sir?’

‘Bugger the door, Ali! I’ll do it myself. Like everything else round here.’ Aslan heaved his big frame out of the BMW and squeezed into the back seat of Celik’s Merc.

Celik was chewing an outsize thumbnail; his bloodshot eyes avoided Aslan’s stare. ‘Thank you, Colonel. Make yourself comfortable.’

‘You were right to call me.’

‘You know I’d never do anything without informing the NSC.’

‘I’m not the National Security Council, Celik. Just the liaison department. And where would you be without us, eh?’

Celik gave a half smile. It was a good job he was a flexible thinker, as the complexities of the Turkish justice system were mind-boggling. His loyalties were split between the city governor, Muammar Güler; the head of the moderately Islamic Justice and Development Party – the AKP – Recep Tayip Erdogan; and the vehemently secular army. And of course there was always the chaotic court of public opinion to answer to as well. It was a lot of pressure to bear, even for Celik’s broad shoulders.

Celik buttoned up his grey British Gannex raincoat and ushered Aslan out of his car and into a side alley, away from the klaxons and the rain. He tried to think of something ingratiating to say to the roughly dressed colonel. He wanted to say how much like Turkish movie heartthrob Cüneyt Arkin Aslan looked, with his slicked-back mane and tanned, ready-for-action features, but Celik doubted the compliment would have much effect. There was something annoying about Aslan. Whatever it was, it marked him out from the usual egotists, place-men and slippery smilers who populated the government. Aslan was neither easily flattered nor easily impressed. But was it modesty – or conceit?

Celik pushed the stainless-steel bar of a fire-exit door.

‘Where’s the light, Chief?’

Celik fumbled for the switch. Aslan heard it click, but no light appeared. The men edged forward, touching the cold concrete walls of the service corridor. Aslan felt glass crunch beneath his shoes. ‘So much for the bulb.’

‘The blast, Colonel.’

‘Possibly.’

As they rounded a corner, the men’s breathing eased. In the darkness, they could just make out a dull, door-shaped halo. Aslan gave it a hard kick. Swinging wide, the exit bar rattling in its own echo, the steel proscenium revealed a horrible scene.

3

In the grimy light of the washed-out morning, the men’s eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom. The once-tidy meyhane was now a mangled web of steel and Formica tables, wooden chairs, broken olive oil bottles and mineral water tumblers strewn across a swamp of stale melons, cheese, pools of raki, red wine, bottled beer, bread rolls and cutlery. About the many gaping craters in the plaster, faded photographs of Alpine scenery, portraits of Atatürk, and kitsch Kaiser Wilhelms now dangled awkwardly, their glass shelters shattered. Blood congealed on table tops beneath electric wiring weirdly suspended from cracks in the false ceiling.

‘Another triumph for a cause,’ muttered Aslan.

‘But which cause, Colonel?’

‘Not Turkey’s, Celik. Not ours.’

The broken glass doors of the restaurant scraped open. Three men in white chemical-resistant suits entered the dusty dining area.

‘Bomb disposal, Colonel. It’s a formality. Gives the TV people something to show anxious viewers.’

‘Right.’ Aslan pointed to a large double door to the left of the toilets. ‘And through there is the Lodge itself?’

‘Yes, my respected friend. Through there is the Lodge of the Association of the Grand Temple of Free and Accepted Masons of Turkey.’

Aslan’s eyebrows arched as his eyes widened. ‘All part of Istanbul’s rich cultural heritage, no doubt. Must we be blindfolded before entering?’ Aslan tried the door handle.

‘Locked, Colonel. I’ve spoken to the Worshipful Master—’

‘The who?’

‘It’s what we – pardon me, they call the president of a Lodge. “Worshipful” just means respected. It comes from England originally.’

‘And “Master” just means Master?’

‘A traditional honorific, Colonel. Master of the Craft. “Craft” being their word for the brotherhood of Freemasons. Anyhow, he was anxious we would not violate the Lodge.’

‘Violate it? It’s not sacred, is it?’

‘I suppose they would like a member to be present. A formality, nothing more.’

Aslan reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a small steel contraption, like a penknife. He plunged it quickly into the lock and played with the mechanism.

‘But Colonel…’

‘Relax, Celik.’ Aslan pushed the doors open.

An oil generator pumped a weak current into a globe-like pearl bulb in the centre of the ceiling: a precaution against Istanbul’s occasional power cuts.

Below the light, a chequered floor was arranged with richly upholstered seats, set to the left and the right like choir stalls before an altar.

‘So this is Freemasonry!’ exclaimed Aslan as he took in the precise arrangement of the furniture – the tall, mahogany throne positioned where you might expect to find the altar, the row of high-backed chairs behind it, and the tattered pre-war Turkish flag that hung over them.

‘You’ve never visited a Lodge before, Colonel?’

‘I confess, never. I’ve seen pictures of course.’ Aslan strode across the chequered floor. ‘Clever of them to see life as a chess game.’ He sat down on the leather-cushioned throne, its gold-leaf wearing thin. ‘And this is?’

‘The throne of Suleiman,’ replied the police chief, ‘where the Worshipful Master sits. And those special seats behind you are for the Past Masters – retired Worshipful Masters.’

Aslan felt a frisson of power as he spread his palms along the elegant leather armrests of King Solomon’s throne. ‘Feels good, Chief. But I think I need to do some reading. So, the terrorists missed their target.’

‘We can’t be sure of that, Colonel.’

Celik sat himself down behind a low lectern halfway down the front row of seats. On it rested a leather-bound copy of the Koran in Turkish. ‘There’s something odd about last night’s events.’

Aslan sat up in his throne. ‘No doubt of that, Celik.’

‘This was nothing like the November attacks on the British Consulate, that British-owned bank and the synagogues. They were well planned, well financed – a big operation. Trucks filled with bombs. Dozens of dead. Hundreds of wounded. Big publicity for the fundamentalist cause. It made al-Qaeda look bold and powerful. And the message was obvious to anyone who watched the news.’

Aslan sighed. ‘Let’s stick to last night. What happened?’

Celik spread his fingers around the volume of the Koran. ‘Two men carrying automatics burst into the meyhane at 10.59 p.m. One set off explosives strapped to his body.’

‘So we won’t be interviewing him.’

‘Destiny decreed only two victims.’

‘The other being the waiter, right? I read that in Ali’s brief.’

‘Forty-seven years old. Before the bomb went off, grenades were thrown and shots were fired at the diners – about forty of them. Four were wounded. The second bomber’s explosives failed to detonate properly. He lost a hand and is on the critical list with stomach wounds.’

‘My heart bleeds. What kind of bombs were they carrying?’

‘Pipe bombs. Fourteen of them, stuffed into hunting jackets, packed with nails and wired by batteries. Another twist—’

Aslan stood up abruptly. ‘Yes?’

‘They brought bottles of petrol. The survivor was carried to an ambulance screaming “Damn Israel!” Said he wanted to burn the Freemasons alive.’

‘If only we had a time machine, we could send these dupes back to the Middle Ages where they’d be happy.’

‘It’s the paperback culture, Colonel. A kind of nostalgia.’

‘Romantics with pipe bombs. Potent blend. Not my idea of a night out.’

‘Love and suicide have always been close, Colonel.’

‘Among young fools, perhaps. If I’d mentioned suicide to my late beloved, she’d have killed me.’

The banter quickly evaporated into silence. Aslan’s eyes rose to the bulb in the ceiling. It had begun to flicker. ‘Jews… Freemasons… That broadens the palette. Anyone admitted responsibility?’

‘Not yet, Colonel. Not even IBDA-C.’

‘IBDA-C, the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front… Weren’t they first to claim responsibility for the November bombings?’

Celik nodded.

‘And did not our dear IBDA-C use pipe bombs in the mid-nineties?’

‘That was against churches and nightclubs, Colonel.’ Celik shook his head. ‘IBDA-C weren’t up to the November bombings. Not on their own, anyway. But something like this maybe?’

Aslan stared at the throne of King Solomon. ‘This is no chair for me, Celik. Suleiman had wisdom and was beloved of God.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘So, what do we have?’

Celik shrugged. ‘The usual suspects.’

‘Is this usual?’

4

The sinuous strings of the first movement of Debussy’s La Mer washed about the apartment. A storm was brewing. Toby Ashe looked up from his laptop to see the gorgeous figure of a golden-tanned blonde entering with a goblet of red wine, wearing one of his own white shirts and little else. Ashe turned back to his emails.

‘Can I drink this?’ asked the girl in a pleasant, county accent.

‘Didn’t you have enough last night?’

The girl knocked it back in one. ‘Ugh!’

‘That would be your last cigarette.’

‘I’m giving up.’

‘Self-denial, Amanda? Hadn’t thought of you as an ascetic.’

‘A what?’

‘Kind of nun.’

The girl approached and ran her fingers through the long strands of Ashe’s tousled, copper-brown hair. ‘A very horny nun.’

‘Weren’t you going?’

‘Is that what you want, Toby Ashe?’

He thought for a second. ‘Right now, yes.’

‘Well fuck you then!’ Amanda turned to the bedroom door, paused for a second, then launched the goblet at Ashe. The glass shattered on the back of his chair and fell into the sheepskin rug.

Unruffled, Ashe turned from his Mac and looked sympathetically towards Amanda.

‘If you really want to throw the book at me, Amanda, why not try one of mine?’

Amanda’s lively blue eyes focused on a small pile of paperbacks on the windowsill. Grabbing the first that came to hand, she hurled it hard at Ashe’s head.

Ashe ducked and returned to his laptop. ‘Judging from the weight and texture of your chosen missile, Amanda, I should say I’ve been struck by my most popular work to date, The Generous Gene. Pity you didn’t read it first.’

Slamming the bedroom door behind her, a muffled voice emerged from within. ‘I didn’t come for your books!’

‘Blast!’ Ashe’s eye alighted on a familiar email address. ‘Now what do they want?’ Faced with a choice of two possible worlds, his index finger hovered on the mouse: to open or not to open. He bit his lip. There was work to be done, but there was something about Amanda’s rage which turned him on.

Ashe entered the bedroom calmly, half expecting to be hit by another book. Amanda had stripped off his shirt and now lay sprawled on the crumpled bed.

‘Just because your real parents didn’t want you, Toby, it’s no excuse to be so bloody difficult.’

‘Vicious, Amanda? What I didn’t tell you last night was that my dear adopted parents regularly informed me that I was nothing less than a miracle. A gift from above.’

‘A git from above, more like. Typical of you to suggest you adopted them, rather than the other way round.’

‘Which way round would you like it?’

‘You know what I like.’

‘You can keep those on.’

‘Which? Knickers or stilettos?’

‘Both. It’s always interesting with the knickers.’

‘Heightens pleasure, does it?’

‘You were made for fucking, Amanda.’

‘Who isn’t?’

*

Post coitum, triste. Sex with Amanda had been exciting and Ashe wondered if dismissing her as a one-night stand had really been a good idea. But something was wrong in his life: lengthening shadows were threatening to envelop him, and poor Amanda had turned up at just the wrong moment.

For the last seven of his thirty-three years, Ashe had made the cathedral city of Lichfield, Staffordshire, his base. The first time he had set foot in this ancient market town, whose grand cathedral gave it city status, he had felt at once a kind of peace, almost a homecoming. He was not surprised to discover later that writers throughout history had described Lichfield as England’s ‘omphalos’: a kind of primordial navel, a centre and fount for the country’s soul.

Ashe’s decision to quit London in May ’97 had served him well, despite the scepticism of his many friends who had moved to the capital straight after graduating from Oxford and stayed there. Having left behind a successful career in TV documentaries to focus on his writing, Ashe found Lichfield’s relaxed pleasures and jewel-box of characters less distracting. He devoted his prodigious energies to producing a series of books – works that combined popular science with what Ashe called ‘experimental spirituality’. Thanks to two non-fiction international bestsellers, he could enjoy a pleasant lifestyle, so long as he kept his head.

The Generous Gene, his most widely appreciated book, was both a humorous refutation of popular atheism and a vindication of spiritual knowledge in a sane mind. Every age has its prophets of atheism and every age has its defenders of the spiritual life, though Ashe disdained to appear as a prophet of anything. Resolutely refusing all requests for media appearances and interviews, the man behind the bestsellers remained invisible to the general public. Ashe could have gathered a devoted following if he had wanted one; such behaviour would have attracted greater sales, but not contentment.

Ashe’s problem was his other job. It made him feel a kind of fraud, or ghost: someone removed from life. Strolling about the cold Cathedral Close in search of clarity, Ashe passed by the sandstone tombs of forgotten medieval dignitaries, clinging for salvation to the walls of the three-spired cathedral. He knew that even if he decided to see Amanda again, an invisible wall would always separate them, like the wall that kept the lesser servants of the Church outside the warm Lady Chapel within.

For he could tell neither Amanda nor anybody else that he had been recruited for the Secret Intelligence Service while studying psychology and behavioural sciences at Oxford. A tutor’s recommendation, a useful bout of ‘playing soldiers’ with the Oxford Training Corps, and a rugged talent for mountaineering, as well as impressive intellectual skills, had led to a secret rendezvous and subsequent invitation to join the Service shortly after graduation. Ashe liked to think it was chiefly loyalty to his country that had made him accept the burden of working for the Service, but in truth he was attracted to the idea of unknown agencies being determinative not only in science but in global power-politics as well. His superiors, nevertheless, had detected a maverick quality in Ashe which had, to date, kept him confined largely to research, presentational and advisory roles. Ashe had to slake his thirst for active adventure in foreign expeditions that served none but his own need to be relieved of discipline.

Surely now was the time to seize that holiday and head for France’s Languedoc region. Caught between Amanda’s attention seeking and a communication (unopened) from that Other Job, why not take this chance to accomplish the hike he had long dreamed of doing, from the medieval Cathar castles of the Corbières across the Pyrenees to Catalonia and the medieval churches of Lérida; lush vineyards, romance and no responsibilities.

Fired up with this new decisiveness, Ashe dashed back to his apartment, located in what had been the old Swan Hotel, across from the pool that had once been the cathedral’s moat. A quick scout of the net would secure him a first-class ticket to a better state of mind.

The apartment door was open. Ashe found a note lying on his old Bang & Olufsen record deck: eloquence, scrawled with a black mascara brush.

I only seem to go for bastards, Toby Ashe, and I’m not sure about you.

The inevitable phone number. The open door was symbolic; the note, he surmised, desperate. Ashe screwed it up. He opened the CD player in his black hi-fi stack. Out with the melancholy waves of Debussy, in with the boundless, star-bound freedom of Jimi Hendrix.

Soon the flat was vibrating with the magma-swamp, earth-core bass of ‘Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)’. Hendrix’s angel extended her mysterious invitation to step into her world ‘a while’. Long enough, presumably, to realise that she was The One: the angel of love, liberty and an elusive wisdom lost on the timid and the earth-chained.

Ashe poured himself an early tumbler of Talisker and typed his password into his Mac. Still flashing in a corner of the screen was that familiar greeting code:

OB_B5pearl.

He toyed with the mouse. What if he had already left for France when the message had arrived? He could be out of Lichfield in minutes. They’d probably never know.

OB_B5pearl.

He knew what it meant. A call from on high. An obligation. Tired of being at the beck and call of… someone, this was the fate of the man who knew something; he would never be left alone. To know is to be a marked man.

Ashe stared at the delete button. It grew and grew until it filled his mind’s eye. Delete and go! Delete and freedom. The angel was calling him.

‘Fuck it!’ said Ashe, out loud.

OB_B5pearl.

He double-clicked. The message was stark, boringly simple:

Saturday, noon.

Ashe sat back in his upright chair. Caught again. England expects… He sent a blank reply, deleted the message, swigged back the malt, looked at his watch and turned off the New Rising Sun.

5

What the hell was that?

Ashe’s Saab 9-3 convertible tore into a screeching skid and spun round 45 degrees. The figure in the lane didn’t budge. Pulling himself together, Ashe lowered the window, trying to discern the ghostlike figure standing bolt upright in the lane. Wrapped head to toe in green camouflage, the figure – apparently male – stared into space, his dark eyes framed by a veil like a Tuareg warrior.

‘You getting out of the road, or d’you want to commit suicide?’ Ashe’s voice failed on the word ‘suicide’. ‘Suicide’ now sounded more like murder, a refusal to die alone, a willingness to kill.

A hollow voice emerged from the creased camouflage. ‘The prophet has spoken.’

‘Oh fuck!’ A shiver shot up Ashe’s spine. The man approached him. Before Ashe could depress the clutch, a mud-stained hand reached into the Saab and stuffed a crumpled piece of paper into Ashe’s jacket. Then, as fast as the hand had appeared, the man was gone, dissolving into the bushes and trees that clawed at the lane’s edge. Ashe spread the paper over his steering wheel. Rough letters in black charcoal conveyed the word of the green prophet:

THE TOWER OF BABEL IS REBUILT AND MUST BE DESTROYED

Obviously a religious nut; Ashe knew all about them. Did this one merit attention? Maybe. The weird encounter had occurred uncomfortably close to his destination.

The committee of SIS Dept B5(b), known affectionately as ODDBALLS, met six times a year at a fine converted farmhouse in Broxbourne Woods, near Little Brickenden, Hertfordshire, close to the M10–M25 link between London and Cambridge. The house belonged to Admiral Lord Gabriel Whitmore.

Crunching gravel, Ashe approached the polished green door, framed by Doric columns. The admiral’s butler opened it.

‘Good morning, Dr Ashe.’

Ashe heard the grandfather clock in the hall chime midday. ‘Afternoon, Reynolds. Admiral aboard?’

‘No, not today sir, but the department is. May I show you to the Tower, sir?’

Reynolds, Whitmore’s one-time ADC and now fiercely loyal butler, was a stocky man in his early forties with a vividly veined, ocean-washed face. He shared his employer’s conceit that the house was a ship, albeit in dry dock.

Reynolds led Ashe through the echoing library to a parlour smelling of Brasso.

‘You haven’t seen a guy lurking round here in camouflage gear, handing out “end of the world” leaflets, have you Reynolds?’

Reynolds seemed shocked. ‘We do get some strange ones, sir. Couldn’t have been security staff, could it, sir? Training exercise, I mean.’

‘You never see the security round here.’

Reynolds thought for a second. ‘We’re not all that far from the psychiatric hospital outside Hatfield. You do get the occasional, er… waif and stray.’

‘Care in the community, Reynolds?’

‘I’m afraid so, sir.’

‘Might explain it.’

Reynolds smiled awkwardly and checked his waistcoat pocket watch. ‘I’m afraid they’re waiting for you, sir.’ He marched Ashe out across the neat rear garden towards the Tower.

Constructed as an observatory in simple but elegant red-brick in 1824, the Tower was King George IVs retirement gift to a favourite admiral of the fleet. Its past was colourful. Rumours persisted of house parties assembled within its cool curvature to practise white magic, and other things, in Edwardian times. An oriental dancer accompanied by a beautiful female violinist from New Zealand had performed a turn that scandalised the usually broadminded wives of the intelligence elite. It was even said that a spirit, manifesting itself before a select coterie, had accurately predicted the First World War two years before it happened. But the days when British intelligence entertained supernatural intelligences were long gone.

The genius behind ODDBALLS was Major General Maxwell Fuller-Knight KCVO. During the darkest days of the Second World War, Fuller-Knight realised that interest in ersatz occultism was a significant characteristic of both present and incipient dictators and terrorists. Not infrequently, the Oddball-type would inject cod mysticism and subjective ecstasies into their extreme political or religious views. Some Oddballs were cleverer than others. Very cunning Oddballs were not always so obviously odd. Bad magicians had always been as attractive as good ones – especially when their followers did not realise it was a form of magic they were being attracted to. Charismatic types used images and words, usually with the ‘Holy Book’ flavour – the ancient stock-in-trade of the magician. After the images and words came the bombs and the guns. Whatever degree of threat the Oddball’s appearance posed to the peace of the world, their appearance was likely to be as regular as a winter cold, and as difficult to predict.

Fuller-Knight’s insight was, like all insights of genius, so obvious that the idea of forming a group to consolidate the idea would have appeared sensible to anyone but a politician – or a potential Oddball. Fortunately for Fuller-Knight, the scheme was mooted to Winston Churchill who, initially amused, was subsequently captivated by the idea. But all that had been in the curiously enlightened days – and nights – of the Second World War. After the war, men’s minds were moved strangely. ODDBALLS itself began to appear decidedly odd; the world was surely getting better.

ODDBALLS was put in mothballs.

Then, just in time for the millennium, came the smiling, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth image of Osama bin Laden. You could have read about him in a Fuller-Knight profile of 1946 – not by name of course, but by type. Fuller-Knight had foreseen the apostle with the machine gun, the rich but humble servant who looked like a prophet and dressed with the cameras in mind.

It had been hard to relaunch B5(b). However, once it was realised the Americans were considering a similar idea, SIS chiefs finally approved the department’s revival, under scrutiny. Resurrected in 2000, ODDBALLS extended the anti-fifth-columnist brief of its wartime predecessor to concentrate on locating, investigating and assessing charismatic movements and individuals whose commitments, propaganda or general direction indicated a stance of superior insight, knowledge or destiny to the rest of humankind. The method was first to assess potential security risks, and second to grade risks in order of seriousness, with recommendations for investigation or action. ODDBALLS’ remit was global.

Psychological profiles were important. Did the subject assume a superior morality or consider him or herself beyond good and evil? Did the subject believe he or she was specially chosen, called or otherwise marked out by God or some other remarkable authority?

There were many Oddballs and they came in many shapes, sizes and colours.

*

Sobering shafts of clean light beamed through the six portholes that pierced the whitewashed brickwork, illuminating the ODDBALLS committee as they sat at the round, varnished walnut table, set on the Tower’s chequered floor. It was appropriate that such a gathering of minds took place in a room whose atmosphere was reminiscent of a nursery.

Each member’s area of expertise was like a prized toy, be it psychology, esotericism, theology, politics and economics, code-breaking, field operations, history, science or technology. Among the dozen regular participants, Ashe alone lacked extensive service experience (undergraduate OTC activities were not taken seriously). As such, he could be regarded as somewhat suspect. His hair was a little too long; his Chelsea boots betokened a lack of discipline. His manner was at times too personal, even emotional. But Ashe carried lightly about him a natural, old-world charm that covered many a sin. Only one member found Ashe’s charm as suspect as the rest of him. Under the hard eyes and stentorian tones of the committee chair, Commodore Adrian Marston, Ashe could never do right.

Marston sniffed as Ashe took his seat. ‘Well, now we are all here, at last – don’t trouble to apologise, Ashe – we may give our undivided attention to the archdeacon’s summary.’

Archdeacon Aleric Loveday-Rose MC looked across to Ashe. ‘Dr Ashe?’

Ashe withdrew a slim blue card file from a battered briefcase and handed it to the archdeacon with a smile. Years of army, university and missionary service in the world’s most inhospitable climes had diminished neither the archdeacon’s inner fire and good humour, nor his essential seriousness. He addressed the committee.

‘As you are all aware, this meeting was initially scheduled for March 20th to assess progress in investigations into the November 2003 bombings targeted against British and Jewish persons, property and security in Istanbul. I regret to say, however, that on the 9th of this month, another atrocity took place, this time in Istanbul’s Kartal District. In view of this, it was decided to bring the meeting forward as a matter of urgency.’

Impatient, Marston interjected. ‘Urgency is right. But do we have hard evidence, Archdeacon, for links between the November bombings and this week’s attack on the Istanbul Masonic Lodge?’

‘Too early for definite conclusions, Commodore. Nevertheless, there appear to be links between these separate events, with national security implications.’

Marston was not satisfied. ‘Can you define that interest in this instance, Archdeacon?’ Marston glanced about the committee, expecting approval for his acuity.

The archdeacon patted his file. ‘Certainly, Commodore. It will become obvious as I read you my updated summary on the November 2003 bombings.’

Ashe coughed.

‘Excuse me, Dr Ashe. I ought to have said “our summary”.’

‘Why?’ Marston was annoyed.

‘Dr Ashe assisted with the draft, Commodore.’

‘This isn’t an awards ceremony,’ huffed Marston. ‘It’s your job, Ashe. We’re all doing our bit – and time is short.’

‘Quite so, Commodore.’ The archdeacon gave Marston a stern look, then winked discreetly at Ashe. ‘The summary is as follows: On 20 November 2003, five days after the truck-bombing of two synagogues in Istanbul, suicide bombers detonated explosives-packed trucks at the British Consulate and at the HSBC bank, also in Istanbul, killing thirty and wounding four hundred. Our esteemed Consul General, Roger Short, was among the victims, I regret to say, together with a number of his consulate staff. Most of the casualties, as was the case in the earlier synagogue attacks, were Turkish Muslims. While the extreme fundamentalist group IBDA-C, also known as the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front, claimed responsibility, it now appears the operation was beyond their capacity. We now understand that although executed independently, the attacks received Osama bin Laden’s blessing. The 20 November attack was probably timed to coincide with the meeting in London of US President George Bush and British PM Tony Blair. It was aimed at Western – and particularly British – financial interests while securing propaganda value in Europe, America, the Middle East, and Turkey itself.’

‘And the culprits?’ Marston jumped the gun.

‘Turkish security forces have arrested seventy-four suspects. According to the MIT – Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation – the chief perpetrators formed an al-Qaeda-backed cell of Turkish militants, aided and abetted by a small number of Syrian jihadists. Regrettably, Syrian nationals involved in the attacks evaded arrest. They are now, we understand, operating secretly in Iraq, together with at least three Turkish-born “al-Qaeda warriors”, as they call themselves, who were trained at camps at Kandahar and Kabul, Afghanistan. They also fled Turkey. MIT reports that the fugitives include the Syrian Hafiz Razak, a skilled forger and bomb-maker. Razak is probably associated with a new al-Qaeda cell, active in Fallujah and linked to the Ansar al-Islam network in Iraq. The presence, or alleged presence, in Iraq of men responsible for the Istanbul bombings reinforces the British and American security interest in the bombings and the pressing need to bring the perpetrators and their supporters to justice.’

Marston nodded vigorously. ‘That’s clear.’

‘We also possess independent information concerning several other conspirators. This gives us additional opportunities to cooperate with the MIT, and with the CIA. The CIA is naturally as concerned as we are with terrorists crossing into Iraq at this time. Mutual assistance should benefit new investigations.’

Marston butted in. ‘Mutual may be right, but we must not expect cordiality.’

‘That is not my experience, Commodore.’

Marston quickly looked Ashe up and down. ‘Really, Ashe? And how does your experience touch this matter?’

The archdeacon came to Ashe’s rescue. ‘Dr Ashe will now demonstrate how November’s atrocities in Istanbul relate to this week’s Masonic Lodge bombing.’

The archdeacon’s tone could not disguise his pride in Toby Ashe, a pride that had taken root during the archdeacon’s residency at All Souls College, Oxford. Ashe was the archdeacon’s favourite secret service recruit.

‘Please explain to the committee, Dr Ashe, why you think an attack on a Masonic Lodge in Turkey could be al-Qaeda-inspired?’

Ashe smoothed his hair back behind his ears and took a deep breath. ‘Your expression “al-Qaeda-inspired” is a good one, Archdeacon. But I don’t think we should look at this event entirely within that frame.’

‘Why not?’ Marston was hot for controversy.

‘I’ll come to that, Commodore. But first I want to focus on why a certain kind of fundamentalist would focus on Freemasonry.’

Ashe was interrupted by a commotion at the door. A tall man with gaunt, ruddy features framed by a green polo neck was shown in by an unusually respectful Reynolds.

‘Ashe, I don’t think you know Brigadier Charles Radclyffe.’

Ashe stood up and reached across the table to shake the wiry Brigadier’s hand. To have the Director of Special Forces at an ODDBALLS meeting was unusual.

Something big was brewing.

6

Ankara, Turkey, 12.30 p.m.

Aslan squatted uncomfortably in a Bauhaus steel-framed chair. He was unimpressed by the state-of-the-art reception area and its portraits of the Turkish army’s high command, interspersed with colour prints of oil refineries, vehicle assembly lines and telecommunications facilities, terrestrial and orbital.

Aslan always dreaded the regular summonses to the Foundation for the Strengthening of the Turkish Security Forces. Ankara was another world, and the Foundation was a world within a world. Aslan accepted Turkey’s status quo for its broad social and political advantages, and preferred to overlook the details; it was none of his business how the army funded its activities – so long as the cheques kept coming. That the Foundation was exempt from taxes, or any democratic financial control, and that it owned considerable shares in Turkish Telecom, Goodyear, Shell and Renault, might look strange to an outsider, but it was simply logical given the overall shape of modern Turkey. The army must survive and flourish, and this he understood: that you get nothing for free in this world.

In spite of a civilian ministerial presence, Turkey’s National Security Council was still dominated by the army. While a rebalancing had recently been initiated in favour of the government, the army had a great deal of Turkey under exclusive control. The Foundation for the Strengthening of the Turkish Security Forces (TSKGV) was army owned and army run. General Ahmet Koglu, Chief of Staff of the General Secretariat of the National Security Council, had his agile fingers in this business, as he had in every politically and economically significant pie in Turkey.

Koglu had summoned Aslan to Turkey’s capital, Ankara, for a briefing. This was Koglu’s favourite office – far from Istanbul, the way he liked it.

The once handsome general, his chest emblazoned with medals, thrust open the large oak door. Aslan was hit by the chill of air-conditioning.

‘I hope you like medals, Colonel.’ Koglu smoothed the creases from his dark-blue uniform. ‘I have a meeting with the American Secretary of Defence this afternoon. Unofficial visit, but appearances…’ Koglu looked derisively at Aslan’s nylon zip-up jacket and open-necked shirt, ‘must be maintained. When did you cease wearing uniform in the Liaison Department, Colonel?’

‘We’ve never worn it, General. We interact with civilian personnel. That’s the point of the department, sir. Not to frighten the democrats!’

Koglu’s eyebrows rose in a slightly bored kind of way. ‘Yes… still, there’s always the danger of fraternising with them.’

The general showed Aslan into a vast, beautifully carpeted office, filled with antique furniture and Ottoman Caliphate porcelain. Exquisitely framed medieval manuscripts adorned the walls.

Koglu retired behind his white marble desk, grandly constructed in a crescent-moon shape, like the crescent of the Turkish flag. Aslan sank back into a modern red sofa while Koglu rubbed his second chin and tickled his finely trimmed black moustache. He reached for a small paperback in Arabic.

‘Ever read this, Colonel?’ Koglu tossed it over.

Aslan caught the book in mid-air, then flicked through the book with disdain. ‘Yes, sir, a long time ago. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But… don’t you have a copy in Turkish?’

Koglu smiled weakly. ‘I believe, Colonel, that this book has been made into a TV drama series in Cairo. And the title, by the way, is The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion.’

Aslan threw it back onto the general’s desk. ‘Hardly material for a daytime soap.’

‘Nevertheless, let us take a page at random. Ah! This looks interesting:

Who and what is in a position to overthrow an invisible force? And this is precisely what our force is. Gentile Masonry blindly serves as a screen for us and our objects, but the plan of action of our force, even its very abiding-place, remains for the whole people an unknown mystery.

‘This comes from Protocol No. 4. I can’t help thinking, Colonel, that this little book could be central to your investigations.’

‘It’s bullshit, sir.’

The general tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘It states here, Colonel, that these are the secret minutes of the first Zionist Congress, held in Basle in 1897. This is nothing less than a blueprint for the long-term project of Jewish world domination.’

‘Very long term, I should say, sir. Israel seems to be having a job defending a territory smaller than some of our lesser-known provinces.’

The general smiled again. ‘Quite so, Colonel. But I cannot help observing that the Jewish people have come a long way since 1897. In those days, Istanbul was the centre of the Ottoman Caliphate with an empire extending west and east from Bosnia to Medina. And the Jews were dhimmis: tolerated, but in their place; hardly even to be considered, other than for the demands of courtesy and good manners.’

Aslan couldn’t help raising his eyebrows. ‘Sir, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a piece of shit concocted by some clever bastards in the Tsarist secret police – the Okhrana.’

‘Why would they do such a thing?’

‘Many Jewish intellectuals in Russia were communists, sir. They were perceived as threats to the Tsarist religious and social order. The Protocols were a clear attempt to play on the fears of invisible enemies – a concept familiar to you, surely, sir.’

‘I wonder what you might mean by that, Colonel.’

‘This was how the Tsarist order was governed, with the full backing of the Russian Orthodox Church. The leaders of the Orthodox Church have always hated Freemasonry. For them, it’s a rival spiritual power. So the Russian secret police put Jews and Freemasons together and… abracadabra! Conspiracy!’

Koglu sat back in his chair. ‘You seem very well informed in these matters, Colonel. Especially for one who, if you don’t mind me saying, told my – I mean our – chief of police, that he had never entered a Masonic Lodge before last week.’

Aslan coughed as he tried to think of an answer. ‘I can read, sir. I’ve been consulting the latest and the best research on the subject.’ That sounded a bit weak.

‘Good. Very good, Colonel. Then you will also agree with us, I hope, that where there is smoke, there is fire, and that all non-Turkish forces, are a threat—’

‘Potential threat, General.’

‘Potential threat, yes.’ The general looked to the ceiling for inspiration. ‘Tell me, Colonel. Was the bombing in Kartal a potential threat?’

Aslan also looked up to the plain ceiling. He felt Koglu’s eyes boring into him.

‘I’m sorry, was that a rhetorical question, or did the general want an answer?’

‘Answer.’

‘Could you repeat the question, sir?’

‘Was the bombing in Kartal a potential threat?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Good!’ Koglu smiled. He felt on top, at last. He took a deep breath, but Aslan got in first.

‘I mean, yes and no, sir. The bombing was not necessarily itself a threat. It could be seen as the execution of a threat already made, or it may have been a kind of opening salvo – a threat of worse to come. Perhaps the first stage in a demand. But that was not your original question, was it, sir? You were saying that all non-Turkish forces were a threat.’

‘Covert forces, Colonel! I said covert forces!’

‘Ah! I didn’t catch that.’

Koglu started sorting through papers on his desk in an effort to regain his composure.

‘Colonel Aslan, we are concerned – as you must be – that there may be more than meets the eye to this business.’

7

Koglu picked up a thin file, then dropped it unceremoniously onto a pile of black-and-white photographs. ‘I have read the chief of police’s interim report and I am far from satisfied. Perhaps you can enlighten me?’

Aslan paused. ‘First of all, sir, one of the perpetrators – the survivor – has confessed to murdering a Jewish dentist in Istanbul in 2003. This does suggest that the main target of the attack was Israel, rather than Freemasonry in particular.’

Koglu looked doubtful. ‘I cannot see the Israelis being hurt by an attack on a Turkish Lodge. But go on.’

‘Many Jewish businessmen and intellectuals belong to Turkey’s five Masonic organisations – which have, I believe, some 14,000 members.’

‘14,000? A significant number.’

‘That depends on the significance you wish to attach to the fact… sir.’

‘The bombing is significant.’

‘Regarding which, General, I think we should consider the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front.’

‘I thought we had IBDA-C either locked up or under close observation after the November bombing? Sixty-nine indictments only a fortnight ago.’

‘And a lawsuit is to be filed against another twelve suspects.’

‘Good! That’s something to tell the press!’

‘Indeed, sir. The point is that after the November bombings against British interests in Istanbul, the news agency Anadolu Ajansi received a call from a man who said those attacks were the joint work of IBDA-C and al-Qaeda.’

‘We already know this, Colonel.’

‘The man also said something that… well, it passed us by at the time.’

‘Yes?’

‘He said, “Our attacks on the centres of international Freemasonry will continue.”’

‘Is the Kartal Lodge a “centre of international Freemasonry”?’

‘Not exactly, sir. But from the point of view of the fundamentalist conspiracy theorist, any big British or US financial or political centre could be described as a centre of international Freemasonry, because they see Freemasonry and Zionism everywhere. That’s thanks to your anti-Semitic Protocols propaganda. According to the allegedly invisible “Elders of Zion”, the conspiracy is so vast that virtually any target is legitimate.’

General Koglu started rubbing his boot heels together.

‘Sir, we must work on science, not prejudice. After the bombing, the official statement of the Lodge read as follows…’ Aslan extracted a small card from his wallet. ‘“The bombing was an attack on modern and secular Turkish society.”’

‘Yes, Colonel. Celik wrote that at my dictation, then gave it to the Lodge Master to use.’

‘Then you agree with it?’

‘It was the right thing to say at the time.’

Koglu got up, folded his arms and turned towards the large plate-glass window. He gazed out at Ankara’s vast, monotonous panorama of grey, dusky blocks and conurbation. ‘I wonder, Aslan, what they out there would think of this discussion.’

‘Why don’t you ask them?’

‘Don’t be impertinent, Colonel.’

He turned to face Aslan. ‘If, as the Arabs have suggested, Jews and Freemasons contributed to the end of the caliphate, how can we be sure they don’t now oppose the regime that succeeded it?’

‘Jews and Freemasons are the victims of this bombing, sir, not its perpetrators! Nothing would please the extremists more than to hear this kind of conspiracy theory become a basis for policy. If we attack ourselves, we do their work for them.’

Koglu put his hands behind his back and locked his thumbs.

‘Nevertheless, Turkey must be prepared. The army must be alert to all interests that affect national security. One must cover all possibilities, without, as you say, prejudice.’

Aslan began to object but Koglu raised his right hand abruptly. ‘That is why, Colonel Aslan, I am requesting your department to ask all relevant local authorities – and you can get an article into Hürriyet while you’re about it – to assemble information on these individuals and groups.’

Koglu reached under the pile of photographs and pulled out a printed sheet. ‘It’s all here. Please phrase it in appropriate language. Thank you, Colonel. If there’s anything I can do to make your stay in Turkey’s capital a pleasant one…’

‘I’m expected back in Istanbul this afternoon, General.’

‘As you will.’ Koglu patted Aslan on the back and led him out of his office to the reception elevator. ‘We admire your loyalty to the state. You have friends here, Colonel. Don’t forget that.’

Aslan entered the brushed-steel lift and pulled the sheet out of his pocket:

In view of recent events, military staff request the authorities to gather intelligence that will enable us to take effective measures against incidents that could arise. Information is required concerning ethnic minorities, including Circassians, Gypsies, Albanians, Bosnians.

Information is sought on magicians, people who practise meditation, supporters of the EU and the USA, the socially elite, members of artistic groups, children of wealthy families, foreigners living in Turkey, Satanists, Freemasons, sympathisers with white supremacists in the Ku Klux Klan, and groups that congregate on the internet.

Aslan shook his head. More ‘usual suspects’? This was ridiculous.

Or was it?

8

Reynolds hovered over the table, dispensing Parma ham onto porcelain plates heaped with salad.

‘Thank you, Reynolds.’

‘Ma’am.’

Karla Lindars, a strikingly attractive fifty-year-old, ultra-smart in a purple corduroy miniskirt and matching jacket, glanced admiringly at Ashe. ‘You know, Toby, I found your exposition fascinating, but I want to know what the mythology is that inspires all this hatred and mayhem. We all know that politics is about manipulating dreams.’

Ashe sipped his glass of fine Florentine white and pondered the question. ‘The anti-Masonic myth is a contributory factor, Karla. But I wouldn’t say it was a mainspring of terrorist motivation.’

‘But if you’re going to attack a Masonic Lodge specifically, it must be pretty important.’

Ashe thought for a few seconds. ‘Yes, it’s funny, isn’t it?’

Marston caught the edge of the conversation. ‘I don’t find it at all amusing, Ashe.’

‘Not funny in that way, Commodore. But sort of uncanny the way these things can come together.’

‘What blasted things, Ashe?’

‘Esoteric things. Let me explain. I was asked to examine a CD not so long ago. The CD was produced at a studio in London and sold from a market-stall in Brixton. Professionally produced, using English and Asian actors’ voices – very much in the style of a slick documentary. The cover announced it contained a sensational revelation of how the Knights Templar secretly control world events.’

‘Come on, Ashe! We’ve all heard this story over and over. Balls, all of it.’

‘I know, Commodore. But this wasn’t just Holy Blood, Holy Grail kind of stuff. It was fundamentalist propaganda. Sophisticated. Even sinister.’

‘Sinister?’

‘A sinister conspiracy, Commodore, is what it describes. And it starts, according to the propaganda on the CD, with the Crusades. According to the myth, the Crusades were not an attempt to liberate Christian holy sites following the Turkish capture of Jerusalem in 1099.’

‘Really, Ashe? What were they then?’

‘The Crusades were a deliberate attempt to destroy Islam itself.’

‘Preposterous!’

‘Yes, Commodore. You know that – but people hearing this story for the first time are probably hearing about the Crusades for the first time as well. According to the myth, or propaganda, the Crusaders failed, ultimately, because God was against them. It’s a small step then to say that the Crusaders were… against God.’

‘I presume then we can extend the Almighty’s disapproval to any troops on Islamic territory.’

‘Precisely, Brigadier. That’s the inference. As the narrative goes, the Pope’s own shock troops – the Knights Templar – were kicked out of Jerusalem in 1187. By 1312, even the Pope was wondering whether or not the Templars had been corrupted and so earned God’s condemnation – hence their military failure. The Templars’ secrecy didn’t help matters. The question was, and remains: had the Templars succumbed to Satan?’

The Brigadier interjected. ‘I get it. In case Westerners say that all that “Great Satan” stuff about the US is just Iranian propaganda, the militants can argue it was the Christian Church’s own view that the Crusaders were dupes of the Devil.’

‘Spot on, Brigadier. As we all know, the Templars were condemned, despite quite justified claims of innocence. As the story goes, in spite of being tried for diabolical practices, some Templars escaped to the Western Isles of Scotland. Driven underground, the Templars – according to the story – metamorphosed into yet another secret organisation.’

‘I wonder who?’ asked the archdeacon, with a twinkle.

‘The bloody Freemasons, of course,’ chipped in the Commodore.

‘Not the Priory of Sion? We’ve all read The Da Vinci Code, you know!’

‘Not quite, Karla! Another trump card up the militants’ sleeve is that if anyone says this is just propaganda, they can point to the fact that the story of Freemasonry’s Templar origins has been repeated by Freemasons themselves for over two hundred years.’

‘But all that’s just a load of old myth, isn’t it, Toby?’

‘Myths can be very powerful, Archdeacon. This one certainly is.’

‘Dr Ashe is right, Commander,’ agreed Brigadier Radclyffe. ‘You hear this kind of thing all over the Middle East: medieval Templars fought the armies of Islam, therefore Templars were evil. Templars became Freemasons, therefore Freemasons must be evil. Modern armies are also fighting Muslims, therefore those armies must be led by Templar-Freemasons, ancient masters of secret evil. The response? Jihad. The enemy has to be an enemy of God to inspire the real jihad.’

Ashe took up from Radclyffe. ‘And it gets worse. The fact that the Templars secured the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as their headquarters immediately connects them to the Palestinian–Jewish situation. A big part of the myth is the idea that the Freemasons are somehow in league with Jewish interests to establish a Masonic–Jewish temple in Jerusalem: a temple, they say, to the “false God”.’

Karla Lindars shook her head. ‘This is all very sad. Is there any truth at all in this myth, Toby?’

‘None. But there’s a problem. Freemasons have been constructing myths around their rituals for centuries. Harmless, really. They call them “traditional histories”. They were meant as moral teaching lessons, not political history. They use myths and legends. Masonic descriptions of Templars, for example, emphasise chivalry, courtesy and the idea of life as a spiritual pilgrimage, not fighting specific religious conflicts! Religious conflict is something Freemasonry is expressly against. It’s a nasty trick of history that the Middle Eastern situation has become so hot at precisely the same time that old Masonic myths have found their way into post-sixties sensationalist books.’

‘As you say, Toby, a nasty trick.’

‘I’m sorry, Karla, but history is often a legacy we’d prefer not to inherit. Take our own role in the redrawing of the Middle Eastern political map.’

‘What do you mean, Toby?’

‘After the withdrawal of the Turks from the region in 1918, the dividing up of newly liberated lands between British and French influence was, for many Arabs, a betrayal.’

‘And the myth explains how this so-called betrayal came about?’

‘Right, Archdeacon. The alleged betrayal of Arab hopes at the end of the First World War is, according to the myth, simply a prelude to the re-establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Israel’s existence is then seen as the fulfilment of a pre-arranged, anti-Islamic plan going back centuries.’

‘What bloody plan?’

‘Come on, Adrian! If I follow Dr Ashe correctly, the myth suggests a secret plan that required the destruction of the Ottoman Caliphate in Istanbul.’

Ashe was impressed. ‘Thank you, Brigadier. The alleged plan required the break-up of the Turkish Empire so that the Jews could take back their ancient homeland without serious opposition.’

Ashe paused for effect. ‘In short, the Devil runs Freemasonry and the Jews used Freemasonry for their own purposes. Britain, France and America have been manipulated by Satanic powers. Only militant Islam – al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbollah – stand up against Zionists and the US. The US, Israel, and also, apparently, the UK, allegedly want to neutralise Islam and conquer the world by supplanting Allah’s rule with that of the Dajjal.’

‘Dajjal?’

‘The Islamic false Messiah or anti-God, Commodore. Militants learn that there’s a secret god in Masonry, and this secret god is Shaitan, Arabic for Satan.’

The table went quiet.

‘All right, Ashe. We get the idea. Fundamentalist militants bombed the Masonic Lodge in Istanbul because by doing so they thought they were striking a blow against Turkey’s involvement with the Unites States’ pro-Israeli foreign policy.’

‘That’s basically it, I think, Commodore. The myth provides motivation and, in this case, the target. And the justification for the cause is secret, hidden.’

‘And the cause provides the terrorist with the satisfying feeling of doing it all for God.’

‘Yes, Commodore.’

Marston put his hands together beneath his nose, as if in prayer. He then arched his knuckles and, somewhat out of character, bit his lip before speaking. In spite of himself, he had been gripped by Ashe’s exposition. He addressed the committee. ‘Well, we have our Oddball myth. But do we have our actual Oddball?’

Ashe withdrew an old file from his briefcase, its cover marked in red: ‘RESTRICTED’.

9

Paradise, California

Sami al-Qasr stared at the rows and rows of black chromosomes flickering on the computer screen. These bar codes of silent soldiers spoke a language al-Qasr understood. The Iraqi doctor had devoted practically the whole of his mind to the strange inner life of the cellular nucleus. Was it any wonder, he asked himself, that he was now, perhaps, a little mad?

Tired of waiting, he smacked his large hand on the white Formica desk and looked out of the plate-glass laboratory window into the car park below. His crimson Jaguar was attracting the usual admiring comments from staff enjoying a cigarette break in the sunshine. Otherwise, RIBOTech’s steel-and-glass precincts were silent.

A knock at the door.

Al-Qasr breathed deeply, then twisted his thick black moustache.

‘Come!’

‘Excuse me, Dr al-Qasr, Nancy left instructions—’

‘Instructions?’

‘You like a good strong cup of coffee around this time.’

Al-Qasr looked at the clock. ‘Ah! Elevenses. Very good. And you are?’

‘Ms Normanton, sir. Temporary intern. What’s “elevenses”, Dr al-Qasr?’

‘Old habit I picked up in Cambridge.’

‘You’re from Massachusetts, Doctor?’

‘No, no, no, my dear. Cambridge in England.’

The pretty girl put the coffee down by his computer. ‘Gee, you’ve come a long way!’

‘Yes… in forty years. All the way to Paradise, California. Quite a journey. Full of the unexpected.’ He eyed her slender hips and long, bronzed legs. ‘And please, call me Sami.’

The girl giggled, caught in al-Qasr’s charming smile.

‘See you soon, Ms Normanton.’

‘Oh. Call me Fiona. I’ll be here for a while.’

‘Good.’

Fiona giggled again and closed the lab door.

Al-Qasr gulped his coffee. The chromosomes were staring at him again. They didn’t carry flags; they weren’t fighting each other; they didn’t speak different languages. They spoke the same language. They spoke the language of science. They spoke the language of nature. Maybe they spoke the language of God. No, not God. Not God.

Al-Qasr was fed up with talk of God, especially in connection with science.

Who made the DNA? That was always the question. There was only one rational answer. It was a mystery. The mystery of evolution, of biological change. Why was it a mystery? Because it was there and no one knew why. In the absence of scientific explanation, mysteries seemed irrational.

Talk of God didn’t help science; it only made religious people feel better.

Al-Qasr thought about the billions of ‘bases’ in the genome – billions in number but still only four varieties. It was beautiful, logical, but not moral.

Every kid doing science had heard of the bases: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. A, T, G and C had become the sugary apostles at the cornerstones of life. But they didn’t make anyone feel better, or behave any better. There was nothing to believe in, only to accept. What had once seemed a revelation had soon settled down to become common knowledge.

And what had all these molecules of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen made? They had made men and women. And what did men and women want? What came naturally: power. Power over their lives, power over other lives. The will to go on, to multiply: nature’s neutral imperative.

You had to have power, but you had to have limits. You had to have a State. You had to have limits. That was always the problem. You had to belong to something. Something you could see. Something you could touch. Something that had real power.

Real power for real Arabs. Trust your own people – that’s what his father had taught him. That’s why he’d joined the Ba’ath Socialist Party in Iraq all those years ago.

For thousands of years before the Prophet, the desert Arabs had been despised as nomads, outsiders. Then the Prophet Muhammad had given them a lead role in history: all they had to do was bond together, submit to the Anvil and be new-forged into a mighty sword of destiny. The world had quaked before; it would quake again. Rebirth… The genes from the past reborn in the present. It was a mystery. It had been a mystery ever since God’s wrath at the Tower of Babel had led Him to divide the children of Noah into the many races of the world, unable to communicate, anxious to fight. It was still a mystery.

Al-Qasr reached for the worn old paperback he kept stuffed in the bottom drawer of his desk. For years, whenever he experienced doubts, he’d looked at it for inspiration: The Ba’ath Revolution – An Unfolding Future, printed in Baghdad in 1968. His fingers touched the grainy black-and-white image of its author, Jalal al-Qasr, a proud man: his father.

He turned to page 78 and to a quotation underlined heavily in pencil:

While the State of the future will harmonise the morality of all religions in an Arab unity, Arabs will always draw inspiration from He who came to them as the Seal of the Prophets. Even in a secular Arab State, the voice of the Prophet will be on the lips of those who no longer hunger. The Party will hold the allegiance of the heart because the Ba’athist State is good for all Arabs, but the heart of many citizens will ultimately belong to Allah. The State will not compel it; it is simply natural.

Al-Qasr had added a note to the side of the passage: ‘Is science the search for His will in nature?’

Jalal had wanted Sami to follow him into politics. Sami had wanted to be a scientist, above politics, pursuing reality at its core. Now it seemed the promise of the Ba’ath movement had faded, for the time being at least. What future for the Arabs now? What future for Iraq?

Shit! He would be too late! Al-Qasr pulled out the laptop from under his desk; he was sweating. His fingers flew over the keys as he followed the links to the encrypted websites that were buried in messages from his distant family in Jordan. An image exploded onto the screen: a US Humvee blown off a distant road by a mine, shot in digital video and cut into four segments, each showing the blast from a different angle.

Then, from out of the flames, in golden Arabic script, burst the slogan:

DAGGERS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, BROTHERS OF AL-QAEDA

10

The Tower, Little Brickenden, Hertfordshire

‘The point, my dear Ashe, is that if we’re to take your line any further we need… well, more than inspired guesswork. How does all this anti-Masonic activity give us a departmental programme? We can’t simply take on a global or semi-global prejudice, however ill informed or perverted. Our official task is to isolate the Oddball, not to redeem the world from darkness, propaganda and superstition. We leave that job to politicians.’

The archdeacon nearly coughed up his wine.

Ashe slammed his glass hard on the table. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Commodore, not to have been able to name the perpetrators of the Kartal Lodge bombing today, or reveal who funded them and why.’

‘Steady on, Ashe! Please, please don’t get me wrong! This old file you’ve dug up may be important; it may not. Perhaps if you could just summarise for us what you think is significant about it, and more importantly, what you propose we should do about it?’

Ashe flicked through the pages of the old file. ‘It is a very old file, I admit. In fact it’s two files combined. One from the late sixties and one from the early nineties. And I’d like to thank Karla for tracing it for me at such very short notice.’

‘I second that.’

‘Thank you, Archdeacon. Now, the subject of the first file is one Jalal al-Qasr.’

‘Never heard of him!’

‘Jalal al-Qasr, Commodore, was a fanatical supporter of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party. The Party gained control of Iraq in the 1968 coup. Even fellow Ba’athists considered Jalal al-Qasr extreme on two issues. He was rabidly anti-Masonic and irrationally hostile to Israel. Not that these were issues on which he would find much essential disagreement among his associates in the Party, but it was a question of the degrees to which he was prepared to go in furthering his hostility. Jalal was instrumental in securing the death penalty for Freemasons that became statute law under Saddam until the Coalition invasion – and Jalal linked Freemasonry to Zionism at every opportunity. Even though Jalal was an unreconstructed Stalinist socialist with no fundamentalist religious convictions, he was one of the few Ba’athists to make an impression on Egyptian radical circles, out of which al-Qaeda would eventually emerge. Though secular, Jalal’s politics were drenched with a quasi-mystical flavour. His political statements could be read like prayers, his rants against enemies like incantations.’

‘Sounds like an Oddball, Ashe.’

The committee nodded and murmured their agreement.

‘Indeed, Commodore. And someone else thought so too. Jalal al-Qasr disappeared in 1982. Israeli Mossad agents were suspected. Jalal’s body has never been found. His beliefs, however, were transmitted to a cadre of followers. They’ve spread far and wide. Followers include his son, Sami, a remarkable scientist. This Sami al-Qasr, the subject of the second file, worked at Cambridge with Sir Moses Beerbohm until quitting Britain abruptly, and mysteriously, in 1983.’

There was a knock at the door. Marston looked at his watch. ‘That’ll be Reynolds. Excuse me, Ashe, some members have taxis and trains to catch. Enter, Reynolds.’

‘Taxis, sir. I’ll fetch hats and coats.’

Ashe’s mobile rang. Someone tutted; mobile phones were absolutely forbidden at ODDBALLS meetings.

‘Dr Ashe!’

Ashe blushed and quickly exited the Tower, relieved to be in the open air again.

A voice crackled on his mobile. Ashe pressed it closer to his ear. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.’ The crackling got worse. ‘Who is speaking? Who? Who?’

Ashe walked away from the Tower onto the freshly cut lawn, hoping to improve the signal.

11

He raised his pounding, aching head from the wet lawn. The dampness was blood: his own, dripping down the blades of grass. Ashe’s head was heavy, echoing with a strange wind, like waking in the blank afternoon after a bad dream. There was a stabbing in his eyes and a wall of noise in his ears. He was shaking, unable to focus, like a child in pain, whimpering, sick. He started to vomit onto the lawn.

Smoke and dust filled the air. In the distance: the screech of an alarm system. An old brick fell from Ashe’s back as he tried to get up, still vomiting, coughing, bleeding. He fell backwards, closing his eyes again, nauseous, dizzy. He rolled over and coughed up rancid remains of lunch mixed with bile and wine; his throat stung. He opened his leaden eyes and caught a beam of sunlight as it stole through the brick dust and billowing fragments of cement.

There was something in his hand. A mobile. The line was dead. Ashe passed out – somewhere to forget the pain and the sickness. It wasn’t happening. It wasn’t him. It must be something else… someone else. The sun again. Gone.

S

Remember the Snake

And know

The Serpent has the power

From the root of the tree

To the Tower

From the scorpion to the flower

Thousands of miles away, in a mountainous valley in northern Iraq, a man the local Kurds called ‘the Kochek’ awoke from a dream.

Seated on the pale, dusty grass in the shade of an olive grove, the wise old man scratched his long, grey, matted beard, gently wiped his folded eyes, adjusted his large turban and carefully rose to his feet. As he brushed some fallen leaves from the white woollen meyzar pulled tight around his shoulders, his sharp eye caught the sun, beginning to set over the mountain to the north. He kissed the fingertips of his right hand and drew them to his forehead. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and bowed to the sun three times.

The Kochek removed his shoes, then bent to kiss the threshold of the mazar in front of him. The mazar had no door; it did not need one. He entered the shrine, poured olive oil from an old petrol tin into a brass standard lamp, and placed four wicks into the grooves around the top of the lamp.

A tiny flame floated above a pool of oil in a window recess. Taking a taper from beside the flame, the Kochek ignited it and brought its light to the standard lamp. Concentrating, he brought the fragile flame to the dry wicks. A beautiful golden glow lit the heart of the little shrine. A soft wind chanted quietly down the blessed valley.

The elderly Kochek touched his fingertips to his lips and his forehead once more, then stepped gingerly back over the threshold. In the distance he heard the echo of a rifle shot bouncing from rock to rock in the south. The Kochek smiled. He was thinking of Sarsaleh, the imminent Spring Festival, wondering how many would come to him this year with their dreams. The past years had been hard, but they had been harder in the greater past. He was alive; that was good. But martyrdom put you in good company: alongside the ancestors, buried under stones, watching.

His loving eye surveyed the yellow rock-roses, the gladioli, the buttercups, the red and yellow Adonis, the hyacinths, all crying for life and straining to break through the gleaming pebbles and grass of the mountains. His eyes penetrated the greening hills to the north, south, east and west, now touched with a fiery light. And he thought of the four wicks, the cross, the flames of the sun, bringing new light and life to good and bad alike and blessings for those who knew.

He had been with the angel and the angel had warned him, as he had warned his ancestors.

12

Mati Fless drew the hired BMW Cabriolet to a halt on the hard shoulder’s crisp new tarmac. It was good to see California again. Fless turned the radio off and breathed in the creamy, fresh air wafting in from the snow-capped Sierra Nevada to the east. He cast his eye across Lake Oroville. The clear blue waters glittered like a tray of gems.

When he’d received instructions to fly to San Francisco, Fless had expected some squalid assignment in a back-lot in Haight-Ashbury or the dank corridors of a government housing project in Daly City. That was the usual environment for his kind of work. But Fless was headed for Paradise, 100 miles north of Sacramento.

Fless caught his image in the side mirror. He hated mirrors. He hated to see himself. Without an image he was invisible, just an idea, the point of somebody’s will. His olive eyes seemed darker than usual, his face longer than usual, his short black hair less plenteous. He was thirty-four and he’d started thinking. Not just asking questions and settling for attractive answers, but really thinking. Deep stuff. He wouldn’t last much longer in the job.

It had taken three years to get a transfer from Shin Bet’s anti-subversion department to the Israeli Mossad’s foreign operations branch. God, how Fless hated spying on his own people. Yes, some of the guys in the ultra-nationalist Kach were nutters – but spending days staking out student families in the hills of Samaria in the West Bank had got him right down.

Fless hadn’t joined the security service to watch organic farmers, ceramicists, sculptors, theatrical types, musicians, embroiderers, stained-glass artists and candle-makers. Of course, the idealistic self-help groups were a nursery for the Bat Ayin underground, a West Bank settler group. There’d been some bad things. Fless himself had foiled a plan to detonate a cart filled with explosives next to a school in the Arab neighbourhood of At-Tur in Jerusalem. The zealot Israeli militant mentality left him cold.

The final straw for Fless had been the uncovering of a secret Kach plan to blow up the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount and replace it with an altar to be used for animal sacrifices. The whole thing gave him crazy dreams. It wasn’t even something he could talk about. He couldn’t drink it off his mind either. As far as Fless was concerned, the problem in the East was too much religion and not enough reality. It always had been.

But California: wow! Every kind of nutcase – but not a bomb in sight. The sun, the fir trees, the dazzle of sky on the windscreen, the roar of the engine. Fless felt intoxicated as he wound his way round the lakeside and up into the mountains towards Paradise.

The car sped up the hairpin track, higher and higher. Then Fless slammed on the brakes and reversed the car. To his left, a small sign: ‘KISMET’, the professor’s house.

Fless continued up the track until he reached a lay-by shadowed by great pines. Taking a case from the boot, he darted into the forest. He caught his black jeans on a barbed-wire fence concealed by ferns. Maybe the fence was wired to an alarm. Listening hard, Fless backed off, following the fence down the hillside.

Ten miles away in Chico, Fless’s team waited on his call.

Through a clearing, he caught his first sight of the house, an early seventies split-level job. Fless crouched on the ground for an hour. He checked the contents of his case: a hypodermic gun and a phial of something the doctor didn’t order – humanely brief and fast dispersing.

Fless heard a crack behind him.

An Alsatian leapt at his neck, biting and tearing through his jersey. A blur of teeth strained for the jugular. Pulled to the ground, hard against the barbed wire, Fless rolled over with the animal as it gnawed and salivated as the scuffle intensified. Fless kept his chin down and forced his right hand against the Alsatian’s beating chest, down towards his waist. Once he’d got leverage, the job was soon done.

The blade severed the dog’s neck. A high-pitched bark was abruptly silenced by Fless’s adept twist of the knife. The dog’s legs beat helplessly in the undergrowth as its lifeblood seeped into the scattered sunlight.

‘Fucking dogs!’

Fless heard a car in the distance and then a click. He felt sick. A gun barrel pushed hard into the nape of his neck.

‘One move, son, and you’re as dead as that dog.’

13

Istanbul, 8.10 a.m.

Aslan stormed into his office and slapped down a wet copy of Hürriyet in front of Ali.

‘See that?’

‘The official communiqué is on your desk, sir.’

‘Why bother when it’s all over the newspapers?’

‘Might be different, sir.’

‘Is it different, Ali? I presume you’ve read it.’

‘Not really, sir.’

‘Not really you haven’t read it, or not really it might be different?’

‘The odd word; nothing of substance.’

‘See what it says here in Hürriyet? Did you read it?’

‘I read the story in Sabah, sir. It all comes from the same place.’

‘Well, Ali, in case there is any difference, let me read this to you.’

Ali’s tired eyes looked heavenwards and blinked. Aslan carried on regardless.

‘“Istanbul’s governor, Muammar Güler, said that a new group with plans for further atrocities was behind the attack on the Masonic Lodge in Kartal District. He assured the public that eighteen suspects are currently in custody and have confessed to planning and preparing…” Get that, Ali? “Planning and preparing”, what the hell’s the difference? Suggests they’re trying to pile up charges. Ah, look… it gets better. “We know they received political and military training in camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but police have so far found no links between them and al-Qaeda. The governor added that ‘It does not have links to currently known organisations. We are investigating whether it has links to al-Qaeda.’” Are we currently investigating links with al-Qaeda, Ali?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Are we?’

‘If the governor says we are, Ali.’

‘Then of course we are, sir. There was a bit more in Sabah, sir.’

‘A bit more what?’

‘A few more details that do not appear in the official communiqué on your desk, sir.’

‘What is it?’

‘Not much.’

‘Not much is all we’ve got. Let’s hear it.’

‘Only, sir, that Celalettin Celik considered the attack to be the work of amateurs.’

‘Since it’s difficult to make a profession out of suicide bombing, he’s on safe ground there. Is he suggesting blowing oneself to smithereens is a kind of hobby?’

Ali swallowed a laugh.

‘And why the hell didn’t Celik tell me he’d ended his so-called news blackout?’

‘There’s something else, sir.’

‘Well?’

‘The London-based Arabic newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi reported receiving a statement from the al-Qaeda linked group Jund al-Quds, Soldiers of Jerusalem, claiming responsibility.’

Aslan paused, weighing up the value of the statement. ‘London, you say?’

‘Yes, sir. According to Sabah.’

‘Why’s there always someone in London who knows more than we do?’

‘It’s been called the terrorists’ international café, sir.’

‘Really? More like a review bar, Ali. In the interests of what the British call fairness, every arsehole gets a hearing in London. Which reminds me…’

Aslan pulled up his plastic chair and grabbed the communiqué.

‘What’s this?’

‘I think it’s a codicil, sir.’

‘Have you read it?’

Ali bit his lip.

‘All right, Ali. You may now retire to your Mac and begin composing your resignation.’

‘Sir! Please!’

‘Only joking, Ali. It’s only right my secretary should be better informed than I am. I might have to lose my memory one of these days.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Ali saluted and turned on his heels.

Aslan speed-read the communiqué, then turned to the codicil. He squinted as a shock blast of sunlight punched its way from behind a cloud and burst through the wet air into the office. Aslan shielded his eyes and struggled to come to terms with what he was reading.

‘Sons of bitches! Two-faced bastards! Ali! Come back in here, now!’

14

‘I don’t like torture, son. So be kind to me. Don’t make me do it.’

‘That’s not torture. That’s execution.’

‘I don’t think so, son. 110 volts won’t kill you. Of course, if I pour this here jug of water over y’all, that could be real bad. But keep talkin’, son.’

The American had tied Fless’s hands with exposed live flex and plugged the end into a mains socket beneath a shelf of garden tools. Behind the American, aluminium steps led up to the three-car garage at the side of al-Qasr’s house.

Fless looked around the utility basement – anything to give him an edge or an idea.

‘So wha’d’ya think, son? Feel like talkin’?’

Fless shook his head.

‘Sorry to hear that, ’cause the way I see it, either a) you came to spy on Professor al-Qasr, b) you came to abduct Professor al-Qasr, or c) you came to kill Professor al-Qasr.’

The American agent hauled his meaty thighs off the toolbox he was squatting on.

‘Nice here, ain’t it, son? Bet you wished you lived here. Swell place. Swell view. Folks real friendly round here too. Not like Israel, huh?’

The agent reached into his suit pocket and pulled out Fless’s passport. ‘I see here you’re in your early thirties. Good time to be alive. Shame to die here for something no one will ever know about.’

Fless shrugged his shoulders. ‘We all have a job to do.’

‘What are you, Suicide? I’ll never understand why you fellas don’t keep us informed of your fun and games. I guess y’all think we’re dumb. Come on, son, give me something!’

‘You’re not gonna hurt me. Your boss will want to speak to me first.’

‘Just you keep those knees tight like a belle at the ball. Good boy!’

The American, agitated, looked up to the ground floor of the garage.

Fless stared quizzically at the tuber-faced American agent. The guy wasn’t for real.

‘Do it, officer. Give yourself a guilt trip.’

Agent Buckley looked at his watch. ‘Excuse me a second, son… Don’t you go changin’ now.’

He laughed to himself and dialled a number on his cellphone. The signal was weak. Buckley stepped backwards up the metal stairs.

15

Ashe had come out of his coma during the early hours. As his mind finally merged with his surroundings, the strange dream about a blonde girl dancing naked with a man covered in green leaves faded. The bare room now had the unpleasant edge of reality about it. Outside it was grey.

Two SIS officers in smart blue suits entered the dim ward of Aldershot Military Hospital. They whispered to each other, then approached his bed.

‘Dr Ashe, can you talk?’

‘Depends on the subject.’

‘I’m Giles Bagot. This is Tony Colquitt.’

‘Weren’t you Major Bagot the last time we met? And you were—’

‘A lieutenant, yes, Toby. It’s all civil-service style now.’

‘Even for you… Giles?’

‘We’ve been asked to supervise in Commodore Marston’s absence.’

‘Absence?’

‘Lost a leg. Above the knee. Intensive care, not far from here.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

Bagot smiled weakly. ‘I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for a shock.’

‘Shocks are for the unprepared.’

‘Mrs Lindars is a friend of yours?’

Ashe’s heart sank. ‘Is she…?’

‘Oh no! She’s OK.’

‘Thank God for that!’

Bagot smiled. ‘Shaken, of course. Surgery on her right ear. Residual neck and back pain. Otherwise, fine.’

‘And the archdeacon? He’s an old friend too.’

Bagot looked down at the polished floor. ‘The er… I’m sorry to say, the old boy didn’t make it. Dreadfully sorry.’

Tears welled up in Ashe’s throbbing eyes.

‘You OK, Ashe?’

‘It’s this pain in my eyes – one in particular.’

‘It’s concussion. How’s your memory?’

‘A bit peculiar. I remember being at the meeting… vaguely. And I remember going outside, until… But nothing else about the day at all. How I got there, the previous day… nothing.’ Ashe shook his head. ‘I remember Brigadier Radclyffe turning up. That was a surprise. Is he all right?’

‘Not a scratch. When the Tower blew up, he was in the house bog. Just in time.’

‘Merciful relief.’

Stone-faced, Colquitt withdrew a checklist from his briefcase. ‘We have some questions.’

Ashe nodded.

‘Have you any ideas at all about the explosion? Special recollections? Who might be responsible?’

‘God knows. Presumably a bomb.’

‘Forensics are still combing the site. We’re investigating the security aspect. If the location was known to our enemies, then what else did they know? Who’s the leak?’

‘I presume the taxi drivers are vetted.’

‘Of course.’

Ashe was desperate to lighten the atmosphere. ‘You don’t think the butler did it, do you, Tony?’

‘Reynolds? Well, it’s funny you say that, isn’t it, Giles?’

‘Not really, Tony. The er… butler’s whereabouts are a mystery.’

Ashe’s sore face cracked into a pained laugh. ‘The butler!’

‘May have been involved, yes. Not that it adds up. According to survivors, without Reynolds, they’d have burned to death.’

‘Survivors, Giles? How many?’

‘That’s what’s puzzling. Thanks to Reynolds, we’ve only one funeral. He’d have been up for a medal if he hadn’t scarpered. Now he’s a suspect. But then… you yourself were not in the Tower at the time of the explosion…’

‘I got a call. Remember that vividly. Very embarrassing.’

‘Contrary to committee rules, I believe. Who spoke to you?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘The sound was breaking up.’

‘Breaking up?’

‘Yes, Giles, breaking up. Could’ve been anyone, couldn’t it? Except I presume you’ve already swiped my mobile?’

Colquitt withdrew it from his briefcase and handed it to Bagot. Bagot handed the mobile to Ashe.

‘Appears your last call came from someone based in Staffordshire. A woman, name of… Amanda Dyott.’

Ashe laughed, painfully. ‘So dear Amanda saved the bastard’s life!’ He shook his head. ‘And I thought she wanted to kill me!’

Colquitt and Bagot looked confused. ‘Are you related to this woman, Ashe?’

‘Not if I can help it, Giles. She’s a girl I know.’

‘Know?’

‘Bit of a limpet.’

Colquitt whispered something to Bagot, then turned to Ashe.

‘Evidently, Toby, somebody wanted you alive.’

‘I hope my wanting to be alive is not held against me.’

‘But that’s a problem, isn’t it? Your uncanny survival.’

‘Not exactly unharmed though, Giles, am I? The question, surely, is why anybody would want me – and everybody else – dead?’

‘Apart from your Ms Dyott, you mean. There’s the question of motive. Your phone call was certainly a lucky coincidence.’

Ashe felt the pressure beneath Bagot and Colquitt’s emollient tones. ‘Are you suggesting I pre-arranged the call so I could get out of harm’s way?’

‘We’d be foolish not to consider it. However, at this moment, you definitely look more the victim than the perpetrator.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘By the way, Ashe, it’s been decided that B5(b) will no longer concern itself with investigations into the Kartal Lodge bombing.’

Ashe couldn’t believe his ears.

‘No official encouragement for such activities, is there Tony?’

‘No, Giles. Not in the light of reassurances from the Turkish Embassy. The ambassador has personally assured the PM that there is no British security interest to consider; they have the guilty people. It’s an internal matter. We must focus our attention on this new atrocity here at home in the light of current evidence.’

‘What “evidence”?’

‘We’re simply conveying to you the official position.’

‘Am I to draw my own conclusions?’

‘You are to act in conformity with official expectation. The PM is most concerned, above all, that we focus our intelligence efforts on Iraq, where it’s most needed.’

‘Still, Toby, every cloud, eh?’

‘I see no silver lining, Giles.’

‘We’ve been authorised to inform you of your appointment as acting chair of the B5(b) Advisory Committee.’

‘Shouldn’t that be “acting bed”? Anyhow, aren’t I on your suspect list?’

‘Yes, that surprised us too. But then, we don’t make the policies. Just cogs in the great wheel. Like you. Now, there are a number of new security clearances to settle, and we shall need your signature on declarations in conformity with the Official Secrets Act and subsequent amendments, codicils, internal arrangements and so on.’

‘I’m not even a serving officer.’

‘It’s the direction things are going in, as you know. We’re all civil servants now.’

‘Expenses?’

‘There are additional expense allowances. Travel; secretarial; research.’

‘As chair, I can choose areas for investigation, can I not?’

‘Subject to general agreement.’

‘And which general would that be?’

Colquitt rose to his feet and fumbled inside his briefcase. He handed Ashe a file. ‘You don’t have to sign at once. Forty-eight hours would be acceptable.’

As Ashe began to read the secrets priority status on the brown cover, his mobile rang. Bagot immediately grabbed it off the bed covers.

‘Yes? No, this is not Dr Ashe. Who is speaking please?’

Ashe lurched forwards and snatched the phone. ‘Ashe speaking. Who is that? Right. Call back in ten minutes.’

‘That was a foreign voice, Ashe. I must ask you—’

‘Until I know more about the caller, Tony, that information is reserved for the acting chair.’

‘Not exactly, Ashe. In fact, not at all. Your activities are subject to scrutiny, until we get to the bottom of the Tower bombing. May we expect your unreserved cooperation?’

Ashe looked Bagot and Colquitt hard in the eyes. ‘Be assured, I shall devote all my resources to getting hold of whoever killed my dear friend – and who very nearly killed me.’

16

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Agent Beck studied the coffee machine outside the deputy director’s office. It wasn’t a hot drink that interested him. He’d drunk plenty at the five o’clock briefing with the CIA director and the thirty-nine other senior officers from the Intelligence and Operations directorates. Beck knew that the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center was still grappling with the intelligence adjustments that followed 9/11, but surely this was an over-correction: there were more directors at Langley than on Gone with the Wind, and Beck was just one of fifteen FBI agents who’d been transferred to headquarters to aid communication between home and abroad.

Beck eyed the coloured lights on the coffee machine; they looked suspicious. What were they wired up to? Who had made the machine? Who serviced it? How often were the contents checked for contamination? Where were the suppliers based? Who was responsible for transporting the contents? What level of clearance was required for coffee machine technicians? Who checked their movements on entering DST?

Asking questions about the obvious came naturally to the mind of a CTC agent. But maybe he needed a break. The stress was getting to him. Or was it just the constant policy changes?

A female voice with a classy southern drawl suddenly filled the dark anteroom. ‘Agent Beck. Please enter my office now.’

A light whine was emitted from the steel door to his right. Beck pressed the green safety button. The door slid smoothly across. He entered a spacious, sunlit office, filled with fragrant flowers. A formal-looking lady looked over her horn-rimmed specs at the handsome man entering her office.

‘Do sit down, Sherman, please.’

Leanne Gresham, deputy director of the Directorate of Science and Technology, finished signing some papers, sipped some coffee from a porcelain teacup, cleared some space in front of her, then brought her hands together over the altar of rectitude that was her desk.

‘Well, Sherman?’

‘Ma’am, we have information of use to you and your department.’

Gresham nodded.

‘Ma’am, CTC is in receipt of a communication concerning one of your colleagues.’

‘The origin of the communication, Agent Beck?’

‘Classified, Deputy Director.’

Leanne Gresham removed her specs and stood up. Beck was impressed by her size: nearly six feet, with an athletic frame. ‘I had thought, Sherman, that we had all entered a new era of communication. If you want help from us, then I—’

‘Forgive me, Deputy Director, but this information is to help you. The source is classified because I’ve not been empowered to divulge it. However, if you want to contact my department and—’

‘I know how to contact your department.’ Gresham looked at her watch. ‘I was hoping to enjoy supper with my husband.’

‘Lucky man.’

‘Oh! Do you think so?’

Beck smiled. Gresham glimpsed the crack in the facade.

‘Now, never mind all that. What’s your information, Sherman?’

‘Ma’am, you have a colleague employed on government work at RIBOTech’s facility at Paradise, California. An internationally renowned biochemist.’

‘Several names spring to mind.’ Gresham put her fountain pen to her lips and licked the top. ‘Do you know anything about Paradise, Sherman? Ultra secret. But there are several men and women there who match your description.’

‘This man is an Iraqi by birth.’

‘Professor Sami al-Qasr has been working for the Good Guys since—’

‘1992.’

‘Quite so. What could our Sami have done to interest the CTC?’

‘SIGINT has received a message. Concerning your professor.’

‘Signals Intelligence receives some 2,500 cables a day. What makes this one stand out?’ She looked at her watch again.

‘It’s all in this file.’ Beck pulled out a slim dossier and placed it gently on Gresham’s desk. ‘But if I may summarise, the communication came from Baghdad.’

‘Which tells us nothing.’

‘The communication refers to a British air raid on one of Saddam Hussein’s high-security facilities near Basra in 1992. He gives some details. They suggest insider knowledge.’

‘Why do you keep saying “he”?’

Beck laughed but clipped it short. ‘You have a point, Deputy Director. To be frank, we do not know the gender of the sender.’

Gresham stifled a giggle.

Beck smiled. ‘The message says that the raid explains why al-Qasr’s usefulness to the US has been…’

‘Has been…?

‘Has been less than we might have expected before his defection from Saddam’s regime.’

Gresham’s eyes widened. ‘OK.’

‘Has his work been disappointing, ma’am?’

‘Complex question. His theoretical work has been first class. What else does the message say?’

‘The message is emphatic that al-Qasr has relations with Ansar al-Sunna.’

‘That’s no joke.’

‘Ansar al-Sunna has been getting stronger over recent months. We thought we had them on the run.’

‘And you haven’t?’

‘Events move fast in Iraq, ma’am.’

‘Anything else?’

‘The message ends with a plea for the US and the world to protect the Yezidi people of northern Iraq and the Transcaucasus. Apparently, they have much to fear from Professor Sami al-Qasr.’

‘The who?’

‘The Yezidi people, ma’am. Natives of Kurdistan. Most live in the Kurdish Autonomous Region, near northern Iraq’s border with Turkey. There’s a note on the subject in the file. Frankly, it makes little sense to us.’

‘Desperate lobbying, maybe. Maybe connected with the status of the Kurds of northern Iraq. A plea for attention.’

‘Maybe. It’s the reference to Ansar al-Sunna that makes further investigation imperative. They’re the guys fuelling the insurgency.’

Gresham folded her arms and walked over to the window overlooking the complex of concrete and glass. ‘I gotta say, I am surprised.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘We have two security programmes in place around Professor al-Qasr already.’

‘Two?’

‘Yeah, and both seem pretty contradictory.’

Beck sat back in his chair.

‘You see, Sherman, when Sami first came over from Iraq, after debriefing, security checks and so on, it was decided his work would be permanently shadowed by one of our experts in the microbiology field. He’s kind of an understudy, except that Sami doesn’t know he exists – as such. The shadow used to operate out of the Office of Research and Development. He’s now based in our Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs.’

‘Opened in 2001.’

‘Good. You’ve done your homework. I hope it leaves time for fun.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

‘It was necessary for security reasons, but also because these genius researchers tend to sit on some of their discoveries longer than needs be.’

‘You’re spying on him.’

‘On his work; not on him personally.’

‘OK.’

‘Secondly, he comes under our personal security cover program.’

‘Personal security cover? Is he in danger?’

‘Well, Sherman. Some guys are in danger. And some guys are in love. What’s your problem?’

17

Dawn was just breaking, and the misty Sacramento Valley still shimmered with the streaks and splashes of last night’s neon.

Al-Qasr pulled his black Toyota pickup into the dusty drive of Kismet to see the three-car garage door wide open. There were skid-traces by the house. Where was Buckley? Where was the dog? His sixth sense in overdrive, al-Qasr wrenched the pickup into reverse, skidded backwards into a wooden out-house – smashing its sides – and sped back up his drive towards the mountain road to Paradise.

At the shaded entrance, a Cadillac screeched out in front of him. An arm shot through the open window and took aim. Al-Qasr reversed again. A bullet grazed his windscreen, ricocheting into the darkness. The pickup hit a big BMW.

Figures ran towards him, waving handguns. Al-Qasr shoved the pickup into first, ducked below the windscreen, rammed his foot down and hurtled straight for the Cadillac blocking the drive entrance. One of the men, hit by the steel bumper, tumbled awkwardly into the bushes; the other dived out of the way.

Al-Qasr smashed into the BMW, sweeping it to the other side of the track. Inside, Mati Fless gripped the wheel, trying to keep control of the vehicle. Turning on an angle, it slipped into a ditch by the entrance.

Al-Qasr turned down the hill. A shot rang out behind him, pierced the rear window and thumped into the passenger seat headrest. Al-Qasr slammed his foot down and roared off down the hairpin bends.

Fless wanted to give chase, but was called over to his wounded comrade.

‘That bastard’s got nine lives, I swear it.’

At the bottom of the hill, al-Qasr pulled into a side-track and sped a hundred metres towards an old barn he’d bought for the day he knew would come. The Toyota rolled into position. Extinguishing the headlights, al-Qasr jumped out. Breathing heavily, he reached for a switch; a dim bulb flickered into life. He then pulled a tarpaulin over the pickup, turned the light off and crawled under the chassis. Feeling for a rope latch, he raised a wooden hatch. Sami al-Qasr slipped from sight like a desert hare.

18

London’s little-known Hemlock Club could be addictive. Tucked away in Masons’ Yard, off Duke Street, St James’s, members were expected to distinguish themselves through activities the club’s famous ‘Rule 49’ described as ‘notorious and heretical’. The Rule had provided mirth for many generations of Hemlockians.

Members took wry delight in listening to archbishops publicly questioning key tenets of their faith, lawyers probing the validity of the Law, scientists suggesting Newton might be in error, and politicians declaring that democracy might not have been the sole destiny of the species. The risk of public disapprobation, condemnation or even a brief hiatus in an otherwise stainless career was regarded as a small price to pay for admission.

The doorman, dressed entirely in moleskin, nodded to Ashe then coolly appraised the stranger. Like a hangman assessing his latest client, he approached the towering Turk and inspected his neck. He then reached beneath his desk and brought out a mahogany tray bearing a selection of fine ties that had once been the property of late members. ‘Perhaps sir would favour a more modern tie, to match his coat?’

Aslan assented, taking a black leather Slim Jim. It went well with his blue shirt and black Italian leather jacket. Ashe nodded his approval.

‘The name “Hemlock”, Dr Ashe – is it from the legend of Socrates’ death? The great philosopher forced to take the poison for telling the truth?’

‘Socrates has always been regarded as the true founder of the club, although the deeds of foundation – like so much that is true – lie buried beneath the rubble of time.’

‘Ah! The “rubble of time”. I fear we shall be seeing more of that.’

‘Do you place your faith in forensics, Colonel?’

‘I place faith in this.’ Aslan touched his nose.

Ashe laughed politely and guided the Turkish colonel through dark corridors to the walnut-panelled restaurant. A bottle of 1998 vintage Pommery stood erect at the centre of their table. Klimt, the waiter, darted forwards to open it, his grey, greasy locks swaying over his bony shoulders.

‘Why did you ring me, Colonel? How did you get my number?’

‘Hardly a challenge, Dr Ashe. A NATO contact told me about the attack on your meeting. I had a hunch. The two events could be linked.’

‘Two events?’

‘The Lodge bombing in Istanbul.’

‘Long way from Hertfordshire, Colonel.’

‘Our enemies have long arms. And I confess, my assistant, Ali, in addition to being a semi-competent secretary is also a computer specialist. Generously he sacrificed his free weekend to penetrate your security wall. Ali isolated your personal interest in the Kartal Masonic attack. It gave him an opportunity to show off his English.’

While miffed, Ashe could see the funny side of the impertinence. He instinctively liked Aslan. ‘I shall look forward to returning the favour.’

As the rich red Cabardès flowed and the French onion soup gave way to rack of lamb followed by coffee ice cream, Ashe discussed with Aslan the mythology of Jewish–Masonic conspiracy and its place in Islamic extremism. Aslan’s views were enlightening.

By the time brandy was served, the colonel was ready to show his cards.

‘Frankly, Dr Ashe, I don’t enjoy your freedom of investigation. I’ve been told investigations into the Lodge bombing must cease. I’ve been informed that the case is closed.’

‘And is it?’

Aslan sighed deeply. ‘It is always possible my superiors did not like the direction I was taking.’

‘Which was?’

‘An independent direction.’

‘I see.’ Ashe felt kinship with the colonel’s predicament, but could say nothing.

‘You see, Dr Ashe, in Istanbul, one cannot always see eye to eye with the revered chief of police.’

‘May his name be blessed.’

Aslan smiled. ‘And there are other voices… from on high.’

Ashe summoned Klimt to refill the colonel’s glass. ‘Thank you, Klimt.’ He turned to Aslan. ‘Other voices, you say?’

The colonel nodded.

‘And your hands are tied.’

Aslan grunted. ‘But not my feet! Perhaps you can be my hands for a while.’

‘I, Colonel?’

‘How could I not think of you, Tobbi Ashe, after all you did when your consulate was hit in my city. You made quite an impression.’

‘Thank you, Colonel. It was an interesting experience. But I don’t see how we can help this time. The Kartal Lodge bombing is not a priority.’

‘Officially?’ Aslan gulped his brandy. Ashe said nothing.

Aslan thought deeply, burying his teeth into his fist. ‘Would you consider pursuing a line without official encouragement, Dr Ashe?’

Ashe savoured the idea as Aslan narrowed his eyes and pointed a finger at him. ‘I could offer … guidance.’

‘I’d need something more concrete. Evidence of a link between the Lodge bombing and the attack on our department, for example.’

‘I see.’

‘By the way, who is your “friend” in NATO?’

Aslan laughed. ‘I prefer to keep my friends…’ He looked at Ashe directly. ‘And to protect them.’

The table was silent. Aslan realised the Englishman needed more.

‘Dr Ashe, as you know, Turkey today is a most complex phenomenon. What if I said to you that the Lodge bombing was not necessarily the work of extreme Islamists? Or shall we say, not the work of extremists alone.’

Aslan felt a tug on his line; Ashe had taken the hook. ‘You see, Tobbi, Freemasonry is viewed with great suspicion by a faction of ultra-nationalists in my country. There are those who find The Protocols of the Elders of Zion stimulating. They see Jewish conspiracies everywhere. Freemasons, Jews – it’s all the same to them. They see…’ Aslan sighed, ‘… problems.’

Ashe thought hard. ‘OK. What I need is the guest list. It should be on the summons to the meeting the night the Lodge was bombed. And there may have been guests not mentioned on the summons.’

‘I’ll see what can be done, Tobbi. No guarantees.’

‘I don’t need them. Your word is—’

‘Best left unsaid, Dr Ashe.’

19

Giessen, Germany

It was a filthy day. Black clouds had swept down from northern Germany and plastered the Hessen region. Giessen under a cloud is a very flat place.

The elderly man patted his brown mac dry as the taxi from Marburg disappeared round a corner in a yellow streak of drizzle. The younger, taller man shook his suit trousers and wiped the mud from his conservative black shoes. He smiled at the older man. The glint in his eye suggested things could be worse. The old man’s blue eyes shone back. The young man gathered up a small suitcase. It clanked as he raised it; the old man frowned.

‘I know. I shall wrap it up again as soon as I can.’

‘It’s never good to rush.’

‘It’s never good to have to rush.’

The old man looked sad for a moment.

They turned into a wide, wet boulevard. On the left was a grey sports centre with an outdoor basketball park, pocked with puddles. To the right, lines of flat, uniform barracks: a NATO army base. The men hurried across the boulevard. Rain splashed over their green canvas fishing hats.

At the corner, opposite the base entrance to the base, a policeman sat in his green-and-white BMW, reporting in to his station. Through a side mirror, he observed two foreigners approaching.

The old man’s long, unkempt beard reminded him of a picture he’d seen of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the late sharp-eyed guru with the limousine collection. The Bhagwan had been banned from entering Germany lest he influence youthful minds with his orange robes and cultish philosophy, so the policeman never knew whether the guru was a good thing or a bad thing. But he knew he was foreign.

He rubbed his forefinger and thumb, eyeing the men as they approached. No, the man was not Indian. Perhaps Italian… Spanish? Maybe an Arab.

The younger man discreetly tapped his elder’s arm, alerting him to the police car. Seizing the moment, he hurried to the car and rapped on the window. People did not normally approach German policemen for directions.

He cleared the raindrops from his little moustache and in flawless German asked the policeman the way to the hospital, explaining he was a specialist and that his brother worked at Giessen’s Krankenhaus.

‘Looking for a job?’

‘There is a great need for specialists.’

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘My father. Visiting from Turkey.’

Ah! That was it! The man at the window was a Gastarbeiter, an immigrant worker, from Turkey. The policeman was not used to seeing Turks in suits, but now Turkey was negotiating to join the EU, he knew he’d have to get used to it. In the back of his mind was a recent pep talk on how policemen should deal with Turks experiencing racist abuse.

‘I would take you to the hospital, Herr Doktor, but my orders are to stay here. Security.’

‘I understand, Officer.’

‘You’re very close to the hospital. Turn left down Lessingstrasse at the end of the boulevard, then left again into Am Dünkelsloh. Hospital’s behind the sports hall.’

‘Thank you, Officer. Good day.’

‘Good day, Herr Doctor.’

The policeman watched the two men walk stoically on through the downpour. He squinted, wriggled his nose, and thought for a few seconds. ‘Hey, you! Hold it!’

Seizing his companion’s thin arm, the young man turned. ‘Sir?’

‘Come back here!’

The man splashed his way back through the puddles as the policeman got out of the car and opened the rear door. The young man caught sight of the pistol by the policeman’s side, then stared into the hollow of the back seat as if it were the mouth of hell. The policeman bent inside, his back vulnerable. The young man looked to his friend. The old man shook his head.

The policeman lifted an umbrella off the floor and handed it over with a smile. ‘My wife’s spare. She won’t miss it.’

Grappling with the tartan umbrella, the men hurried on, soon lost in the greyness.

20

Mosul, northern Iraq

‘What do you think, Saddiq – buttercups around the door?’

‘In Bashiqa: all right. But not here in Mosul, Qoteh. Time’s not right.’

Disappointed but accepting, Qoteh gathered the flowers off the kitchen table and patted them into a wicker basket. She looked around their little shop, at the piles of Turkish and British beer cans, bottles of Greek wine and cases of American cigarettes. Her husband was right. Mosul was a war zone, a powder keg, a city of hope and a den of despair.

‘If we cannot have the flowers, Saddiq, it can’t be safe for Rozeh to stay here any longer.’

‘She likes the school, Qoteh. She’s doing well. The Americans have been kind – with books and tapes. It’s a blessing.’

Qoteh took off her green silk scarf and wiped her hands and brow. She looked at herself in the little mirror below the battery-powered clock: a Marlboro promotion. The lines were pronounced about her bright blue eyes: trenches of experience. Her hardened lips were not as full as they had once been, but her daughter made her proud. She was twice as beautiful.

It had been a blessed marriage, even though they hadn’t been able to have children of their own. Saddiq was a hard worker, a good learner and a pious man – despite his gambling. At least he won more than he lost, and would never bet more than he could afford. Rozeh never wanted for anything. Except, of course, what they all wanted: peace.

‘I couldn’t sleep last night, Saddiq.’

Saddiq had gone upstairs and was trying to shave. ‘What was that?’

‘I need some sleep.’

‘We all do.’ He cut himself.

Saddiq thought of the previous night’s bloodshed. American planes attacked the south of the city after a suicide bomber exploded a petrol truck near a new US base, close to the airport. Saddiq hoped the bombs had hit their targets. He hoped that Khuda, the Almighty, had saved the good and brought the bad men to their end.

Over the past week, the city seemed to have been falling apart. Insurgents from the south had joined up with the radical Sunni militia Ansar al-Sunna, looting police stations of weapons and equipment. Both the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan seemed powerless to halt the mayhem. Without the Americans, things would probably be worse – but they never seemed to be there when the danger came.

It was a bad time, but Saddiq knew in his heart that the wicked would not prosper forever. Things had to improve some day; they just had to, so long as the Alliance did not turn their backs on the northern zone. But there was no denying it: the safe area had been safer before the invasion.

Saddiq put on his spotless white shirt and pulled up his brown cotton trousers. The question was whether to open the shop. The family needed the money; they hoped to get out – perhaps to relatives in Germany, or even to Britain, where life was good.

He looked out of the upstairs bedroom window across the bridge to the suburb of Faisaliya on the other side of the River Tigris. The state school there had both Christian and Muslim teachers, so Rozeh might get to see different sides of the truth – or she might just end up being confused. He would have preferred that she’d stayed in the country with her own people, but there was no future there. She wanted to be a doctor – something his mother could have hardly even dreamt of. Imagine, his only daughter a doctor! The world was changing. Rozeh knew English and could make a living in the world.

He looked at his watch. Four o’clock. She should be crossing the bridge soon, with her friend Fatima, whose father ran the old officers’ club next door. And the boys whose parents worked at the law courts a couple of blocks away would protect them.

Qoteh entered the bedroom. ‘Can you see her?’

‘She will be home soon.’

‘I know. But can you see her?’

‘Please, Qoteh, we must trust in God.’

‘Are there troops on the bridge?’

‘Yes. They are there.’

‘I never went to school, Saddiq. It was forbidden. Why did we let Rozeh go to school with the outsiders?’

‘We listened to the Kochek.’

‘Tell me again what he said.’

Saddiq put his warm arms around his wife. ‘He said he had a vision of Rozeh. She was helping the sick. Many were dying. The world was black, but Rozeh was light. People did as she told them, men and women. She was smiling; happy in her work.’

‘Are you sure your brother wasn’t just trying to be nice to her?’

‘Ask him.’

‘He’s not here. I’m asking you.’

‘My old brother has never told a lie. If he says he saw Rozeh; then that is what he saw. He says she came from a special place.’

‘But maybe that was in a different life; maybe her next life.’

‘Maybe. Who knows these things? We must trust in God.’

‘Your brother, he is a Kochek; he’s supposed to know.’

Saddiq laughed. ‘If he knew all that, we could take him to the airbase in the south and get the Americans to pay him 100 dollars for every piece of information. God reveals to him what we need to know; not what we want to know.’

‘He’s a good man. I believe him, Saddiq. He is good.’

Saddiq kissed his wife. ‘God is good. Let’s go downstairs. Let’s open the shop for a few hours. Somebody out there needs drink and cigarettes.’

No sooner had Saddiq unbolted the front door and pulled up the shutters than a small crowd of Kurds and Assyrians gathered at the door, clutching orders from the battered clubs and bars that lined the street between the bridge and the pumping station in the west. Those who did not drink craved cigarettes – Turkish, American, British, anything.

Saddiq smiled at Qoteh through his thick black moustache and opened the cash register. Below the register was a 9 mm Browning pistol. It had cost him a lot, but that was two years ago. Now he could pick one up in the suq for next to nothing.

By 5.45, there was still no sign of Rozeh. Qoteh was anxious, finding it hard to concentrate on the currency transactions presented to her by eager buyers: dollars, dinars, Turkish lira.

She kept looking over to Saddiq, who was busy piling up cans of beer, cases of wine and cartons of cigarettes. Saddiq smiled and nodded gracefully. Qoteh put the radio on. They liked to listen to the US Forces network, even though they understood little of the language. But they knew their daughter would understand it, and, somehow, they were listening for her too.

Qoteh kept thinking of the joy that would be Rozeh’s, so soon, at the Sarsaleh, on Wednesday in Bashiqa. Bashiqa: the best Spring Festival of them all! Qoteh would pull out her mother’s old trunk so that Rozeh could appear on Thursday in the debka, the dance that brought souls alive in the eyes of all who danced and all who watched. The musicians would beat the huge tambourines that shook the earth and ruffled the feathers of the highest birds, and the hills would ring to the melodious cries of the flute.

Just thinking about the debka and her beautiful, sweet daughter, Qoteh could feel in her fingers, not the dry dullness of hard currency, but the soft, purple cotton of Rozeh’s long chemise; she could picture the rainbow colours of her red baggy trousers, yellow waistcoat and orange jacket, with the woollen meyzar knotted over her right shoulder.

Qoteh would open her box of gold filigree earrings with their precious stones, the bracelets that her great-great-great-great-grandmother had worn when the English archaeologist Layard had come to excavate Nineveh across the river. Then, to set it off, the great wide belt with its huge silver buckle and silver pin – the belt she had worn on her wedding day.

A shot. An American M16. Qoteh looked to Saddiq. It came from the bridge. An explosion. Machine-gun fire.

21

‘The shop is closing! The shop is closing!’ Qoteh handed a journalist back his cash. ‘I’m sorry, we must close.’

The US Humvee outside the shop was revving impatiently as Saddiq loaded the last crate of wine onto its trailer. As it pulled sharply away towards the bridge, several crates tumbled off the back and smashed to the ground. Loitering children picked up the broken bottles and, laughing, poured what was left of the wine into tins and buckets.

Qoteh pulled down the shutters and a bullet ricocheted off the metal. Saddiq rushed inside. He reached for the padlock by the cash register. More bullets thudded into the plasterwork outside. A child screamed.

‘Don’t lock the front, Saddiq! Rozeh may need to—’

‘We must, Qoteh! If we see her, I will open it. I have a gun.’

Qoteh began reciting a prayer she’d heard from the midwife when her cousin’s child was born. The midwife had repeated it over and over again as the birth reached its crisis point.

O Khatun Fakhra, help her!

O Khidr Elias, help her!

O Sheykh Matti, help her!

Another explosion; more shots. Qoteh screamed. A hole had appeared at the side of the bridge; twisted steel bled from the concrete.

Qoteh looked to Saddiq. ‘Tell me, husband, tell me they won’t let the children cross the bridge. They will keep them at the school. Tell me, that is why she is late! They are keeping them safe at the school.’

‘Yes, Qoteh. I know she is safe.’

‘Tell me the angel is with her!’

‘He is with us, Qoteh. He is with us.’

The street between the shop and the once great River Tigris was empty now; the children had fled with their spoils.

A gun battle on the bridge. Shouts. Bullets. Cries.

‘That’s her! She’s come round the back.’

‘But… you have not seen her cross the bridge. Saddiq! Your gun, help her!’

More banging on the back door.

‘Rozeh, is that you? Is that you?’

The kicking on the door stopped. Saddiq stopped still in the shop, paralysed. More bullets outside. He was sweating; the air was angry. He reached for the gun beneath the cash register. It was there. Good. It was loaded.

‘Get out of here! Go! Go! I will call the police!’

‘They won’t come! They won’t help you! They’re on the bridge! Devil worshippers! Devil worshippers! Evil! Evil! Devils! Devils! Satans! Satans! We kill you! We kill you! We kill you all! Death to the infidel!’

Qoteh was standing at the foot of the stairs, steeling herself.

‘We can go, Qoteh! We have time.’

‘We cannot. Rozeh!’

‘Evil! Evil! Drinkers! Drunks! Corrupters of the faithful! Collaborators! Transgressors! Dogs! Devils! Devils! Devils!’

The chanting increased. The kicking on the steel door increased, echoing coldly around the shop.

‘We must wait for Rozeh. This is her home. We must be here for her. What if she comes back and we are gone?’

Qoteh started screaming at the mob. ‘Who are you? We know you! Yes, we know you. We know your fathers and mothers and grandmothers. They know us. You know we are not evil. You know we love God. We love God.’

‘Blasphemers! You Yezidis are Blasphemers! Kill the liars! Kill the devils! You bring temptation to the faithful! You ignore the Law! God smiles on the killers of the pagan Yezidi!’

‘We are not pagans! We love God! We are all human beings! Like you! Leave us! Go in peace! Do God’s will!’

The shop went quiet.

‘Unlock the shutters, Saddiq.’

‘And let them in at the front?’

‘If they get in, we can at least—’

‘No, we stay. We fight. If God wills, we will win.’

More explosions on the bridge; rapid fire; police alarms; the heat.

The couple heard an object roll against the metal door. A stone? Pray it be a stone.

‘Get down!’

The door flew into the shop smashing through a stack of beer cans. In rushed a gang of desert Arabs, teenagers, some in black headbands emblazoned with lines from the Koran, carrying knives and machetes.

O Khatun Fakhra, help us!

O Khidr Elias, help us!

O Sheykh Matti, help us!

Saddiq stood up. ‘In the Name of God, leave this house!’

A Fedayeen, his face hidden under the trademark black woollen turban of the paramilitaries loyal to Saddam Hussein, emerged from the group. ‘Polluters of the Sacred City! In the name of all the Fedayeen martyrs and all who defend the faith from the Crusaders, servants of Satan and the power of evil, you are condemned to die!’

The man gestured for the others to back off. He then took out a grenade from beneath his shirt and pulled the pin. Without a thought, Saddiq shot him between the eyes. The grenade dropped and the Fedayeen fell quickly on top of it.

‘Get out! Get out!’ cried one of the intruders.

The blast hurled Saddiq into the shutters as the shop’s ceiling collapsed.

By seven o’clock, the bridge was quiet. American reinforcements had arrived from the south and re-established the roadblock. The skirmish did not make the news – because it wasn’t news. Things like this happened all the time. At eight o’clock, teachers led a group of schoolchildren over the bridge. The boys played war games and the girls played pop music on their Walkmans.

As the line got closer to the other side, as the teachers were body-searched by the soldiers, as the moon vanished behind a huge cloud of burnt oil, as the dogs barked and life in Mosul went on, Rozeh saw her home. Only, it was not home any more.

Outside the battered shutters, buckled as if blasted by a huge fist and pulled up a few feet above a pool of deep, dark blood, was a row of bodies and body parts. These were not parts like you would buy to mend a car. These were parts that could never make a whole. They weren’t people and the people were no longer in the parts. Mute, cold, pale, signifying nothing but an absence of something that had woken up that morning, dreamed of better times to come, had lunch, had… life.

Rozeh, her thick black hair framing a face wet with tears, was suddenly an orphan, a daughter of the war. The boys who a few hours earlier had scraped as much booty as they could off the road were back to see what might be left in the shop. One of them came up to Rozeh, who was staring at the blankets, wondering which of the shapes beneath was her mother or father.

‘Can I give you a drink, lady?’

‘No.’

‘Is that your mother?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe she’ll wake up, or come out of Paradise to see you.’

Rozeh cried. The police took her away.

At the shelled-out station near the old imperial post office, the police asked her a few questions, but she had no answers. She only had a question:

‘Why won’t they leave us alone?’

22

Outskirts of Hamburg, Germany

Inside the Audi, the atmosphere was tense. The old man couldn’t sleep; the younger man was shaken. The driver, eyes darting from catseye to headlight, was nervous. He’d taken several wrong turnings before getting on to the E22 autobahn at Lübeck, northeast of the port of Hamburg. Soon the bleak city lights and industrial outskirts of Hamburg itself filled the windscreen: not a welcoming sight.

Turning sharply off the ring-road in Wandsbek, they headed uncertainly down the wide Wandsbeker Marktstrasse towards the Altstadt and the city centre. The road was clear and the pavements were empty. As they passed the old Lutheran church in the Jacobs-Park, dimly lit by an orange spotlight, the driver looked nervously to the rear-view mirror.

‘Polizei.’

‘Continue.’

The younger man turned to look back. The green-and-white BMW was gaining ground fast. By the time they’d reached the junction at the Mühlendamm, it was tailgating the Audi. Hands sweating, the driver saw two policemen, one taking their registration number, the other making a radio call. He rubbed the back of his neck. His knees felt stiff. He bit his lip and gripped the steering wheel as if it were the last link with life.

His nerve broke. The car squealed to a stop outside the Marienkrankenhaus hospital. Unable to brake in time, the police skidded into the Audi’s rear. The passengers lurched forwards, the old man’s nose smashing into the driver’s seat, spurting blood over his grey moustache.

‘What are you doing, you fool!’ The younger man gripped the driver’s shoulder.

While the policemen were recovering from the shock, the Audi driver hammered into reverse and ground the police car into a lamp-post. Its right bumper wrenched into the wheel cavity; the car was crippled.

The Audi driver cut his lights, revved the engine and stormed into first. He U-turned up the one-way Mühlendamm and headed north, dodging startled traffic up Schürbeker Strasse to the busy junction with Mundsburger Damm.

‘Stop! This is insane! What are you doing?’ The younger man pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and thrust it under the nose of the old man. The old man said nothing.

Deaf to all entreaties, the driver slammed his foot down; he had no work permit. Deportation was unthinkable.

Racing south down Mundsburger Damm, they were soon in sight of the glittering Aussenalster Lake. Ignoring a red light, the driver screeched into Buchtstrasse’s narrow funnel and skidded to a halt outside a department store.

‘I get new plates.’

Hurling himself out amid the howling of sirens, he dashed round to the boot of the car.

The old man looked at his friend. While the driver tried frantically to screw the plates to the back of the Audi, the men flung open the back doors and disappeared into the shadows. The younger man pointed. ‘This way! Do you have the case?’

The old man nodded.

The driver shot up from behind the open boot. ‘Hey! What about my money? It’s a long way from Giessen!’

The men were nearly at the end of the street. ‘You’ll get your reward! God be with you!’

They rounded the corner into Sechslingspforte.

‘Just keep walking. How’s your nose?’

‘Not broken, but I…’ The old man started coughing. ‘No… no… It’s all right. I’m not sick. It’s just that… Do you know the saying from the Christian Bible?’ He stopped, inviting the younger man to look around at the display lights in the shop windows; the neon glitter high above the hotels and fashionable stores; the fairy-lit floating restaurants on the lake; the yellow street lights, and the beams of passing cars. ‘See! There is light everywhere, but we walk in the cold shadows.’

‘Is that it?’

‘No! It says: “The birds have their nests; the fox has his lair. But the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”’

23

The 2.8 roaring litres of turbocharged V6 Saab 9-3 churned up the gravel outside Peover Hall, a handsome Tudor brick stately home in mid-Cheshire. Ashe stepped out of the Rosso Bologna open convertible to admiring glances from women in black miniskirts, large hats and veils. Admiral Lord Whitmore was not so impressed. Recently returned from France with Lady Nancy, he was not yet re-accustomed to the throb and tension of British life.

Lady Nancy, a radiant seventy-five, stepped nimbly over the gravel to greet Ashe. ‘So nice to see you, Toby. Such a pity about the circumstances.’

‘Yes. A terrible thing.’

‘Save the jaw-jaw, Ashe, we’re walking in procession. Get in line, man.’

Ignoring her husband, Lady Nancy took Ashe’s arm as over a hundred mourners formed themselves into a quiet line that edged its way towards St Lawrence’s Church, Over Peover, one of Cheshire’s fine old chapels, set peacefully in the wooded grounds around Peover Hall.

Soon Ashe found himself nudging a marble sarcophagus. Sir Philip Mainwaring lay recumbent, his armoured hands raised in prayer as they had been since his entombment in 1652.

It had been Loveday-Rose’s special wish to be buried at Peover. One of the late archdeacon’s hobbies had been Cheshire history. The chapel of St Lawrence had always seemed to concentrate that interest in his rich imagination. Loveday-Rose cared about England’s future because he had loved its past. Ashe had imbibed much of the same philosophy; it had been a powerful bond between them.

The service began with a platitudinous address from a Bunter-faced ‘team’ vicar. Ashe started to yawn. A nudge in the ribs from Lady Nancy returned him to the end of the vicar’s vacuous valediction. ‘And now Toby is going to say a few words about his old friend.’

Relief flowed like a wave over the congregation as Ashe got up and made his way past the unctuous vicar to the Jacobean wooden pulpit.

He steadied himself. ‘A great man has passed from us.’ Ashe paused, staring into the lake of distinguished faces melting before his eyes. Emotion was getting the better of him.

‘The silver chain has snapped; the golden bowl is broken. Archdeacon Aleric Loveday-Rose, Military Cross, was the kind of man the Church of England cannot replace. The vitality of the Victorian age provided the mettle of his upbringing, and the fire and fury of wars and revolutions informed his adulthood. Aleric was truly a match for his times.

‘How was it possible for this man, who had witnessed the twentieth century’s carnage at first hand, to say to me that, at the end of this terrible century, Truth, Beauty and Love had survived intact?

‘He could say it because he had survived intact; his integrity still shining.

‘Aleric, my dear friend, you have crossed the bridge – and you are home. And I do not think its light and its furnishings will be strange to you.

‘Farewell, my friend.’

A few members of the congregation began spontaneously to clap, gently and tentatively. But as Ashe’s final words echoed from the stone floor to the vaulted roof, and as the stained glass cast beams of many colours across the nave, the applause became a swell.

Ashe left the pulpit and returned briskly to his seat. Admiral Whitmore nodded in sage approval; Lady Nancy gripped Ashe’s hand while clearing tears from her rouged cheeks. ‘Thank you, Toby.’

The reception on the neat lawns of Peover Hall was a stylish upper-class affair.

Admiral Lord Whitmore, his weathered jowls deeply tanned, approached Ashe. ‘That was a damn fine address, Ashe. Though I’m never quite sure if you’re serious – and, dammit, I never see you shooting! You don’t hunt, and whenever the subject of sport comes up, you disappear.’

‘It’s a dull boy that doesn’t like sport, Lord Whitmore.’

‘There you go again! Are you trying to tell me you’re dull?’

‘That’s enough, Gabriel,’ interjected Lady Nancy. ‘Toby has all the right values – that’s what counts, isn’t it, Toby?’

‘I hope so.’

‘You see, Gabriel, you just have to face the fact that there are different kinds of clever people – and some are a bit cleverer than you.’

‘Tosh! Clever is one thing; useful is another. Ideas need to be applied. I bloody well hope you find who smashed up my Tower! And bring that damned butler of mine to the bar of justice!’

Ashe’s mobile emitted a gentle tone. He made a swift apology and took refuge beneath the boughs of an ancient cedar.

‘Colonel! Where are you?’

‘Hamburg. Visiting relatives in St Pauli. Listen… Is this a secure line?’

‘Yes, but I haven’t much time.’

‘I have that list for you. I’m posting it from here. There will be no cover note and no source references.’

‘Understood.’

‘This call never happened. I can do no more for you. Good luck!’

The line went dead.

Ashe felt a tap on his shoulder.

‘Hello!’

‘Hello. You must be…’

‘I’m the archdeacon’s niece.’

‘Melissa!’

‘You remember!’

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Publishing.’

‘Lucky publishing.’

‘Lucky me.’

Melissa was attractive. A fountain of deep brown wavy hair cascaded around her rosy face, framing her bright eyes and aquiline nose. She was wearing Ashe’s favourite kind of dress: cotton, with a plunging neckline, buttoned at the front.

‘You know, Uncle was a very good judge of character. He liked you a lot.’

From the corner of his eye, Ashe saw two men in dark suits and black ties. Surely not…? Giles Bagot and Tony Colquitt approached like beagles on a scent.

Ashe put his arm around Melissa and began to walk round the back of the cedar towards a nest of rhododendrons.

‘I say, Ashe! Ashe!’

Ashe tried to ignore them. Melissa looked at him with compassionate eyes. ‘Go on, you’d better talk to them. We can catch up later.’ She squeezed Ashe’s hand and headed off, her full bottom swaying sexily in her breezy dress.

‘Glad to see you’ve recovered, Dr Ashe. Perhaps you’ll feel more communicative today.’

‘Small talk over, Giles?’

‘That’s bloody charming, Ashe.’

‘You want to know who phoned me. And I can’t tell you.’

‘What are you up to, Ashe?’

‘I can’t tell you the name. It was a Turkish journalist. Anonymous source. Said he had a contact in NATO. Said he’d heard about the explosion at the Tower and believed it was linked to something in Istanbul.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Zero.’

Bagot sighed. ‘Why didn’t you get more out of him?’

‘Told him I couldn’t go further without proof of ID.’

‘Good. Proper procedure.’

‘That’s it. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

Ashe headed back to the reception. The wine was beginning to flow. He caught Melissa’s eye. ‘Are you staying with your family tonight, Melissa?’

24

Sherman Beck hurried through the angular maze of the CTC’s operations coordinating area. He had just three minutes to make a meeting with his director on the seventh floor. If he didn’t make it, Beck risked his work being buried beneath piles of new leads. Take a week off for a bad cold and you might come back to a different war.

Computers peeped, phones bleeped, and every wall seemed steeped in TV sets: al-Jazeera, CNN, military command centres. It made the Fox newsroom look parochial.

Beck jumped into the elevator. His director shared the seventh floor with the Director of Central Intelligence. This was politically useful for Lee Kellner, who made the most of it. A former sub-editor for the Washington Post, fifty-five-year-old Kellner regarded his ability to sift relevant from irrelevant stories as second to none. ‘Proven in Commerce’ was his motto, and it was stuck to his door – as were the entrails of those who crossed him, or so he bragged.

‘You got five minutes max.’

‘Just five?’

‘Give or take your balls. D’ya wanna make the President’s Threat Matrix Report?’

‘Dr Sami al-Qasr, sir. Having met with Leanne Gresham, I feel—’

‘Feel, Beck?’

‘Think, sir.’

Kellner nodded.

‘I think the communication regarding Professor al-Qasr at Paradise, California, sir, requires immediate action.’

‘Reason?’

‘D’you recall the Gitana, Daley, Rikanik and Kelly investigations?’

‘David Kelly? The British guy. Worked for the Rockingham Cell and UNSCOM.’

‘Yes, sir. Biological weapons specialist. Committed suicide July 2003.’

‘Alleged suicide. Big scandal in Britain. Remind me about the other guys.’

‘Your investigation explored relations between Kelly and the US bio-defence industry. Looked for a link with the mysterious deaths of Francisco Gitana, Greg Daley and Boris Rikanik.’

‘And there wasn’t one, was there?’

‘File’s still open, sir. Regarding Gitana, Daley and Rikanik. Gitana and Daley were both involved in DNA sequencing.’

‘Refresh.’

‘Weaponised pathogens, sir. In theory, it’s possible to create a weapon that targets only certain races.’

‘You got me. Keep talking.’

‘In November 2001, Gitana was found unconscious in a Miami parking lot, after receiving a late call. Inquest said natural causes, but his family claimed four men attacked him. A few weeks later, Daley washed up 300 miles downstream from a Mississippi bridge on which his car was found with the lights on and the keys in the ignition. He’d just left a Memphis banquet for fellow researchers.’

‘Mississippi. It’s coming back now. And Rikanik?’

‘Found dead, 16 November 2001, in his bed. Only ten days after meeting Daley in Boston to discuss DNA sequencing. Colleagues said he was in good health. Rikanik is the Russian who fled to Britain from the Soviet Union in 1989. He brought us Russian plans to use cruise missiles to spread smallpox and plague.’

‘Such charm!’

‘Said they got the idea from us, sir.’

‘Of course. What didn’t they steal from us? Fucking plague, that’s what!’

‘The Russian plans ended with the fall of the old regime. Rikanik warned MI6 debriefers the weapons could be used by terror groups, with missiles from China or North Korea. I personally believe Kelly was one of the debriefers, sir, and that he also helped Rikanik establish a laboratory for his company, Omicron Biotech, at the UK’s defence research establishment at Porton Down. Among other things, they were working on the diagnostic and therapeutic treatment of anthrax.’

‘Useful. Go on.’

‘Rikanik was a senior advisor in the establishment of RIBOTech at Paradise, California.’

‘Interesting. Suspicious death?’

‘Rikanik’s death was only announced a month after the event by Timothy Randall, an ex-MI6 officer – Randall is also a specialist in DNA sequencing – currently living in Virginia. The autopsy was apparently undertaken by MI6. Details were not given at the inquest.’

‘No surprises, Beck. What’s all this got to do with Sami al-Qasr?’ Kellner looked at his watch. ‘And your time is running out.’

‘He works at RIBOTech, sir. In January 2002, Professor al-Qasr contacted Leanne Gresham at the Directorate of Science and Technology. He demanded special protection.’

‘From whom?’

‘From the Israelis, sir.’

25

Ashe lay in bed, watching the rain beat the ivy against his bedroom window. He’d woken feeling guilty. Somehow, his casual relations with Amanda and the explosion in Hertfordshire had become fused. Had the blow to his head been some kind of punishment? The idea was absurd, but he couldn’t quite get rid of it.

Was his memory playing tricks? He could remember the row with Amanda but little else until the meeting at the Tower. Something had happened in between; he was sure of it.

Now there was Melissa. What was her part in all of this? They’d kissed; they’d watched the sun set over the Cheshire Plain. She’d wanted more. He’d wanted more, but something held him back. Was it guilt, or something else?

A parcel tumbled onto the hall carpet.

Ashe tore open the jiffy bag to find a bundle of printed papers: a list with some explanatory notes.

Aslan had been true to his word: a list of names. Two columns:

1: Lodge Members.

2: Guests.

Ashe sat, naked and cross-legged on his sheepskin rug, sipping a glass of champagne as he worked his way carefully down the list.

There had been many guests at the Kartal Lodge on that fateful March night in Istanbul: several Jewish businessmen, some police officials, a few visitors from Sweden and Germany, a Turkish Buddhist, someone called Baba Sheykh, and, most interestingly to Ashe, a number of Kurdish politicians based in Istanbul. These Aslan had underlined in red, adding some supplementary printed notes on an appended sheet. The names were:

Hatip Semdin

Sabri Gunay

Resit Yazar

Ali Yildiz

The supplementary notes, evidently compiled by someone in Aslan’s team who wrote excellent English, were instructive. Colonel Aslan had decided to give Ashe a basic lesson in Turkish politics.

In the early 1980s, a minority of Turkish Kurds, mostly in southeastern Turkey, began campaigning for recognition as a distinct culture, demanding the right to use their own language and enjoy their own literature and traditions. The Turkish Constitution did not recognise anything but Turkish identity within its boundaries. Even the use of the Kurdish language – Kurmanji – was forbidden.

A small minority of Kurds agitated for self-government. These agitators, and persons sympathetic to them, were accused of imperilling national unity and Turkish identity. Acts of terrorism began. Atrocities on both sides escalated quickly; many innocent people suffered.

By the mid-nineties over 30,000 people had died in the conflict; hundreds of villages had been forcibly evacuated. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds had been resettled to other parts of Turkey. Many suffered hard times.

Until 1991, Kurds operated within the national parties, particularly the Social Democratic People’s Party, the SHP. The SHP was sympathetic to full Kurdish equality. After the ’91 elections, a number of Kurdish deputies formed their own party, the Labour Party (HEP).

Ashe checked the guest-list names and saw that two of those deputies – Resit Yazar and Ali Yildiz – had been invited to the Masonic Lodge that night.

In April ’93 the HEP was declared illegal, but by then the deputies had already formed a new pro-Kurdish party: the Demokrasi Partisi. The Democracy Party was also banned in 1994. It was succeeded by the Halkin Demokrasi Partisi, or HADEP.

HADEP is widely recognised as the moderate voice of Kurdish aspirations in Turkey, in contrast to the illegal pro-Kurdish party that supports armed resistance and acts of terror. That illegal party is the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK.

The PKK revoked a ceasefire declaration in 2003. The Turkish government estimates that there are currently between 4,500 and 5,000 PKK guerrillas across the Turkish border in the ‘safe zone’ or autonomous Kurdish Region of northern Iraq. In effect, they have been protected both by the UN and by US firepower since the first Gulf War.

Iraqi Kurds do not favour the PKK’s methods, because the PKK threaten the Iraqi Kurds’ own position, compromising their own desires for independence. As a result of the PKK’s presence, Turkish troops crossed the border into Iraq with very different objectives to those of American troops in the region.

The Americans wish to secure broad Iraqi Kurdish support for a democratic settlement in Iraq. The Turkish premier, Erdogan, has accused the United States of double standards in its definition of its war against terror, because the USA gave no encouragement to the annihilation of PKK guerrillas in northern Iraq. The Turkish government perceives little effective difference between the PKK and al-Qaeda, since al-Qaeda is prepared to exploit the PKK cause as a means of destabilising Turkey’s secular Constitution.

Aslan had added another note, but already Ashe felt like he was poking about in a hornets’ nest.

Last week, Turkish police raided the office of the legal Kurdish nationalist party, HADEP, in Istanbul. Twenty-four arrests were made – some as a result of the raid, others after protest marches for Kurdish rights. Among those arrested were Hatip Semdin and Sabri Gunay – both of them visitors to the Lodge on the night of the bombing.

What could Ashe conclude from this information? Who had most to gain from the deaths of Semdin, Gunay, Yazar and Yildiz? Islamic radical terrorists, or Turkey’s military and security interests? It was unkind of Aslan to leave his new friend with this dilemma. The issue was complicated even further by the new question. Who had most to gain from blowing up a British intelligence advisory committee investigating threats to British interests in Istanbul?

There were other questions: what were four Kurdish politicians doing at a Masonic Lodge in Istanbul in the first place? However much the Lodge prided itself on representing a modern, secular, even progressive Turkey, a country open to the world, it was absurd to think a Turkish Lodge would promote Kurdish rights, even indirectly. Urban, secular-minded Turks frequently associated Kurdish rights with a reactionary, rural, fundamentalist Muslim culture. For many ‘Westernised’ Turks, the Muslim traditionalist demand that Islamic girls wear the headscarf epitomised the issue of encroaching backwardness.

Aslan’s last note – almost valedictory in its plainness – was a simple fact, but ambiguous in its implications:

Resit Yazar and Ali Yildiz are currently in Iraq, sought by Turkish agents for observational purposes.

No further information is available.

Aslan was clearly urging Ashe to see a link between the Kartal Lodge bombing and the atrocity at the Tower. But where was the link? Aslan pointed to Iraq; the clue rested with Yildiz and Yazar.

The conclusion seemed inescapable. Ashe should go to Iraq. Find them. See what they were doing – and what they knew. Had not even the PM recommended that ODDBALLS concentrate its energies on Iraq? Nothing could be simpler.

Nothing could be more dangerous.

Go to Iraq? The whole wide world was aware of the perils in Iraq: a country split open like the belly of a stricken dragon, fought over by any number of interests.

Ashe knew whom he should contact. His hand stopped by the phone. Just hold on, Ashe. Think. Think. What would Loveday-Rose have advised? Thinking of the archdeacon made him think of Melissa.

Melissa. Another life; another promise. Melissa… The good life; friends, family, invitations above the fireplace, the bosom of society; cosiness, children, holidays, breezing into country pubs, gazing into each other’s eyes, growing old comfortably.

Bollocks.

The voice of the archdeacon came into his head. ‘You must face what you fear.’

Faith. It was a risk.

Ashe found himself dialling an old number.

26

Dogs were barking; the old cobblestones were wet with urine and early morning drizzle.

‘Shit!’

‘Dog shit. It’s everywhere round here.’

The old man wiped his shoe against the kerb. The bar opposite was still open. It was called ‘Babylon’.

‘Want to go in?’

The younger man looked around Hein-Köllisch-Platz. They had entered the heart of St Pauli, close to Hamburg’s red-light district and the famous haunts of the early, so-called ‘savage’, Beatles. The Beatles had been tamed, but Hamburg, thankfully, still had a few rough edges.

The old man spotted a bench beneath a tree and sat down. The younger man felt his friend’s need for a hot drink and a bed. There was another corner bar opposite. Within its cosy shadows, two young Kurds drank coffee, smoked and discussed football.

‘I’m looking for the Kurdish Centre.’

The youths stubbed their cigarettes out. ‘You alone?’

‘I’ve a friend outside. He’s not well.’

They nodded to the barman. The barman whisked up a cappuccino and grabbed a chocolate croissant.

The old man had passed out. The Kurds tried to wake him. A ship’s horn echoed up from the docks at the bottom of the steep cobblestoned hill.

The old man was coughing.

‘Drink this. Speak Kurmanji. Where you from? Turkey? Iraq?’

‘My case. Where is it?’

‘By your feet.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Need a doctor?’

‘Coffee’s good.’

The old man nibbled at the croissant while the Kurds addressed his friend. ‘The Community Centre’s round the corner in Silbersackstrasse. If nobody’s up, we’ll find a way in.’

‘Have you a blanket?’

The barman nodded. ‘Anyone after you?’

‘It’s been… pretty bad.’

The old man gripped his friend’s hand. ‘No… It’s been interesting.’

Half an hour later, Hamburg’s streets were washed in dismal dawn light. As the men shuffled into Silbersackstrasse, they passed a newsagent’s window covered with posters in German, Turkish and Kurdish. Next door, a handpainted sign in rainbow-coloured letters announced that they had reached the St Pauli Kurdish Community Centre. Its spartan café served as an informal advice centre for newly arrived immigrants and asylum seekers. An emergency dormitory occupied the top floor. The light was on inside.

The younger man tried the reinforced metal door. Three youths in leather jackets were seated round a table in the grim reception; they did not look Kurdish. As the new arrivals entered, the youths disappeared round the back.

‘Hey!’ cried the younger man. ‘I thought they told you we were coming!’

No answer.

‘Please! A bed for my friend! What’s the matter with you? Please!’

There was scuffling round the front. The youths who’d rushed to the back emerged on the front pavement. Shadows darkened the front door. A car drew up outside. A door slammed. Some words in Turkish.

The front door was kicked open. The younger man looked up. ‘You!’

27

It was raining hard. Ali entered the Community Centre and slammed the front door. He slung his black mac over a worn Formica-topped table and looked at the two men sitting on chairs in the corner. The old one was wrapped in a blanket, apparently asleep; the other, dressed in a suit, was sitting back, relaxed, one ankle resting on his knee.

‘Recognise these characters, Ali?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Got the file?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Ali handed Aslan an oversized ring-file with a blue plastic cover.

‘Don’t give it to me! See if you can identify these men.’

Ali sat down at the table and began leafing through the inch-square photos of all politicians and their aides closely connected with Kurdish rights.

‘Ali!’

‘Sir?’

‘This man here thinks he knows me.’

‘Forgive me sir, why don’t you just ask them who they are?’

‘Brilliant, Ali, as ever. And you think I haven’t done so already?’

‘Their reply?’

‘No reply. But fear not, soldier, there will be.’

Aslan addressed the man at the table. ‘I’ve been misinformed. You are not Yildiz and Yazar.’ He waited to see if they reacted. ‘Yildiz and Yazar, I presume, are still in Iraq.’

The two men still did not react.

‘So, I suppose you’ve never heard of them.’

Aslan looked closely at the men. There was something familiar about their faces.

‘You have no residence permits.’

‘Forgive me, sir,’ said the younger man. ‘I wonder what the German authorities would make of your own unofficial visit. Or is this typical of Turkish security methods?’

Aslan nodded to the guard. The guard slapped the man about the face.

‘Wish to repeat the question?’

The younger man said nothing.

‘Please don’t give up talking to us. I really am interested in all that you have to say. What do you think I want to hear? Speak.’

The younger man said nothing. Aslan nodded. Another slap in the face.

‘I didn’t think you were the complaining type. In any case, who would listen? You could be Turkish citizens; you could be from Iraq. Our friend who works here doesn’t know. He did tell us two mystery guests were expected last night, and you’re about as mysterious as any I’ve seen for a while. Frankly, my friends, I’ve no interest in your lives. But you…’ He pointed to the younger man. ‘You know who I am.’

The man shook his head.

‘Yes, I think you do. Here we both are in a strange city – presuming it is strange to you – and yet here we are in this one rotten little room, and you indicate you know me. In fact, you couldn’t stop yourself from telling me you knew me! And now, all of a sudden, you’re bashful. Why would you know who I am? Are you a drug dealer? Many pushers wear smart suits. A bomber?’

‘I… think I was mistaken, sir. You looked like someone. The man I was thinking about. He would have recognised me too.’

‘You should have been an actor, my friend. Except actors try to make their performance credible. And I don’t believe a word you’re saying. Why? Because I look into your intelligent eyes, and I can see that you don’t believe a word you’re saying. I don’t think you’re a man who likes playing parts. I don’t even think you lie habitually. Unlike my colleagues behind you. Look at their eyes. They betray nothing. They could lie through their teeth on an order from me. You’d never know. But you… tell me now, who did you think I was?’

‘I think there are many Kurds who would mistake you for another man.’

‘Which man?’

‘You can’t be him.’

‘Who can’t I be? Tell me! Who can’t I be? Tell me, my friend, who am I not? In your opinion. In the bad light. In Hamburg. This morning. Who am I like?’

‘I… thought you resembled a colonel in the Turkish Special Forces.’

‘A colonel?’

‘Yes… Aslan. Mahmut Aslan.’

Aslan bit his lip, hard.

‘Hear that, Ali? My fame has preceded me.’

‘Interesting, sir.’

‘Ali, the old man has a suitcase between his legs. Care to open it?’

The old man awoke, with a start.

‘You, old man! Who are you?’

‘I’m… I’m…’

‘Go on, man! Ali, take the case.’

‘Sir.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am a Kurd.’

‘It’s heavy, sir.’

‘Just put it on the table. I know you’re a Kurd – or, at least, you might be. You might be from Afghanistan, for all I know. Perhaps the Americans are looking—’

The old man tried to seize the case from Ali’s grip.

‘Important to you, old man, is it? The case? Is it important? What’s your name?’

‘Don’t tell him!’

Aslan nodded to the guard, who slapped the younger man hard.

‘It’s rattling, sir. Some kind of mechanism inside.’

‘Özdagan! Take the case to the car. Give it the onceover for booby traps.’

‘Sir.’

There was a knock on the door to the back room. ‘What is it?’

‘How long you going to be in there? Why have you locked the door? We have a family coming in soon. Please!’

‘Patience. This is a security issue. Nobody leaves and nobody comes in without my order. Now return to your TV. Unless you want trouble.’

The man behind the door disappeared.

‘What is in the case, old man?’

‘Say nothing.’

The guard slapped the younger man again.

‘Did I tell you to do that, Bas?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Don’t say sorry to me, Bas. Apologise to the gentleman here.’

‘Sir?’

‘Never mind. Forgive my enthusiastic colleague. He wants to get on in the service. He’s just learning to follow orders without thought or conscience.’

The old man looked desperate. He turned to his younger friend. ‘They will see!’

‘Oh yes, old man. We shall see. We shall see everything. Now you. You know who I am. How do you know?’

The younger man’s bright eyes surveyed the hunk of man standing before him. He looked into his eyes without fear. ‘Aslan. Turkish for “lion”. Lions have teeth, claws…’

‘Cut the bullshit. You didn’t meet me in a zoo. Where was it?’

‘Do you remember these places, Colonel: Diyarbakir, Bitlis, Silvan, Batman, Hoshap? You were well known in those places. Redwan, Midyat, Van, Zakho—’

‘Enough! That was fifteen years ago.’

‘What’s he saying, sir?’

‘I think he’s trying to incriminate himself, Ali. All areas where the PKK operated in the nineties. We may have found ourselves a terrorist. Stroke of luck perhaps.’

‘I’m not PKK.’

‘He says he’s not, sir.’

‘Yes, I heard.’ Aslan noted the sincerity on the man’s face. He also recognised that no terrorist suspect would have been so open about knowing him, or about revealing where he had encountered him. But the suspect did not have to know that.

‘I’m sorry. You turn up in Hamburg – a known hangout for terrorists – with no papers, and no ID. You say you know me, a security officer. That must be a million to one chance! You demonstrate familiarity with some of the trouble spots of our southeastern provinces. And you ask me to take your word that you’re not a dangerous terrorist setting up a new cell in Germany. My friend, you’re either extraordinarily bold, or absurdly stupid. Or perhaps you are a suicidal maniac utterly careless for your personal safety. A fanatic! Why are you in Hamburg?’

‘You would not understand.’

‘Try me.’

‘You ask how I know you in those places. That is easy to answer. I am a doctor.’

‘Doctor?’

‘Medical doctor. Some of your Special Police victims were my patients.’

‘Bas, leave the room!’

‘Sir?’

‘Leave the room! Help Özdogan with the case. Go on! Get out!’

‘Sir!’

28

Aslan sat down at the table. ‘Can you prove to me you’re a doctor?’

‘Why don’t you break your leg? I could set it for you. Or even your neck.’

‘So you don’t like me. So what?’

‘Do you want to be liked?’

‘Lions are proud. Tread carefully.’

‘Have you been treading carefully, Colonel? Where your men went, they rounded up suspects. And being a suspect means you live in a village where someone says a terrorist has visited. And what is a collaborator? Someone who speaks Kurdish. You tortured people for information. You murdered innocent people. I soaked up their blood and heard their last words. I often heard your name – Aslan. Aslan was an authority, an order – an excuse.’

‘Many stories were told about me. Propaganda, most of it. PKK lies.’

‘Most of it?’

‘I’m not proud of everything I had to do. I did my duty. You did yours. Sometimes innocent people and guilty people look the same. Look at you two! One looks like a tramp, the other, an accountant. What am I to make of that? Are you innocent illegals, or guilty illegals? Guilty or innocent, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why? Because I’m here, and you won’t say anything. That was always the problem!’

‘Problem, Colonel?’

‘They never speak!’

‘They’re frightened, Colonel.’

‘Yes, yes! They’re always fucking frightened! If people stood up to the terrorists, we could finish the job quickly, without all the mess.’

‘Is that what you call it?’

‘Every combat zone is a mess, Doctor. Chechnya, Kosovo… Their problems have been bleeding the countries white for years. We didn’t want that in Turkey. We wanted to sort it out quickly and get on with the future. Better than a long, slow drip of perpetual misery. We wanted to sort it out!’

‘The old way.’

‘If you like. The way we know best. It worked before.’

‘And is it sorted out?’

‘Mistakes were made. Mistakes were made… in the past. It’s over.’

Aslan got up and started pacing the narrow room. ‘There’s something about you, Doctor. Something strange. Why don’t you tell me about yourself, then all this trouble can go away. Give me something.’

‘Give something to Colonel Aslan, who took everything from my—’

‘Your what?’

‘My patients, Colonel.’

‘Your Turkish is good. Better than my Kurdish. Not born in Turkey, were you?’

The doctor said nothing.

Özdogan opened the front door.

‘Who gave you permission to enter? Get out!’

Özdogan slammed the door and stood outside with Bas in the rain.

Ali looked up at Aslan. Suddenly, he did not recognise his boss. ‘Sir?’

‘Ali?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Memories hard, are they Colonel?’

Aslan slapped the doctor hard across his face. Blood poured from his nose, but his eyes did not leave those of his attacker.

‘Damn it! I need some fresh air.’ Aslan nearly wrenched the door off its hinges, then took a deep breath. The two security men were soaked to the skin.

‘Why aren’t you in the car?’

‘Waiting for your orders, sir.’

‘My… why is everyone always waiting for orders? Why not just do them?’

‘You told us to—’

‘I know what I said! Come in! What’s in the case? Is it safe?’

‘Nothing came up on the screen, sir. I’d say it’s clean.’

‘Of course it’s safe.’ Aslan snatched it from Özdogan and threw it onto the table.

The old man was startled. ‘Please! Please! It’s sacred!’

‘Sacred? What’s the old man talking about?’

‘Some old junk, sir.’

‘Let’s have a look at it then!’

Özdogan opened the suitcase wide above the table and let the contents fall clanging onto the surface. Aslan’s eyebrows rose as he surveyed the scattered contents.

There were three bronze pieces. One had a large circular base with two spheres above it, and a screw thread. The second had a smaller base and was crowned with three spheres of decreasing size. Aslan picked up the third piece. Its graceful, sinuous shape resembled a cock or a dove. Its tail curved round flamboyantly at the back; its beak was long and arched downwards.

Its meaning suddenly dawned on Aslan. He dropped the piece on the table as if it were red hot.

‘Close your book, Ali.’

‘Why, sir?’

‘Don’t ask why! I’m sick of people forever asking why. Ask them!’ He pointed to the two men. ‘Ask them why!’ The two men shrugged their shoulders.

‘Ali! Photograph them for the records. Özdogan! Bas! Back to the car. These men have nothing to do with our mission. The old man is an antiques dealer and the young man is clearly his son, protecting him. It’s a matter for German immigration.

‘Our apologies, gentlemen. A case of mistaken identity.’

29

Standing at the front hatch of the RAF Hercules, fingers shaking, Ashe gripped his blue canvas bag. Baghdad International Airport felt like a vast oven. A blanket of heat penetrated his beige cotton clothes, welding them damply to his skin.

‘Come on, mate. Only ten minutes left to unload!’

Ashe was hurried down the ladder to the scorching tarmac. The muscular corporal jogged to the rear of the aircraft to supervise the scheduled roll-off of replacement vehicles and parts.

Ashe wiped his brow and dropped his bag, half expecting it to fry like an egg on the shimmering runway. If the Pope had kissed this turf, he’d have left his lips behind.

From the direction of the distant control tower and its nearby lookout posts, a Land Rover Defender 110 sped towards him. Ashe thought longingly of the green fields of RAF Brize Norton. He could be back there just in time for pub-closing. All he had to do was turn round and climb back up.

Too late. The Land Rover drew up smartly to the side of the cockpit. Out stepped a good-looking, enthusiastic young officer. Smiling, he extended a huge right hand.

‘Welcome to Baghdad International! How do you feel?’

‘Good to see you again, Simon. Bloody good.’

‘Toby, I’m afraid you’ll have to sit in the back of the Snatch.’

‘Snatch?’

‘This is an in-and-out vehicle.’

‘What?’ The noise from the Hercules was deafening.

‘IN AND OUT! Snatch!’

‘Check!’

Ashe climbed into the rear seat. In front of him was an American private, face obscured by helmet and shades, gripping an M4 carbine: small but lethal enough to incapacitate anyone within 600 metres.

‘You’re not in uniform, Simon.’

‘Officially, I’m off duty. But pass me my helmet will you? There’s one for passengers on the right. Put the body armour on as well. Straps are self-explanatory.’

As he buckled the helmet strapping around his face, the reality of the situation struck Ashe. ‘Are we likely to make it through the international zone in one piece?’

Major Richmond put the Snatch into first and sped off towards the roadblock at the airport perimeter. ‘Look in the back!’

‘What?’

‘Rear of the vehicle. Take a look.’

Through the narrow window behind the back seat sat two US marines. One of them cuddled the hard butt of a massive Browning .50 calibre heavy machine gun, mounted to the rear. The other clutched an M16A2. They both kept a keen eye on everything around them.

‘Quite a deterrent!’

‘Unfortunately, Toby, deterrents attract the mad.’

‘You’re sure putting me at my ease, Simon.’

‘You’ll be all right. But this is Baghdad, Toby, and no one forced you to come. Keep your eyes peeled and learn from what you see – and what you don’t. We were lucky to get support this morning. Incident at the UN Food Programme.’

‘Incident?’

‘Suicide bomber. Seems to be a never-ending supply of them.’

‘Home grown?’

‘Some. Many slip over the Syrian border. It’s an open wound.’

Ashe had already been briefed on Major Simon Richmond’s position in Baghdad. At the request of US military intelligence, he had been seconded to Baghdad from his Basra posting with the 1st Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. Having made an impression on senior American staff, Richmond was clearly a rising star.

As the Snatch sped along the corridor between the leafy suburbs of Baghdad and the Green Zone at the city’s centre, Ashe studied Richmond, noting the confident tilt of his jaw, and his steady blue-eyed gaze. Ashe had known him since Richmond was a shy teenager – a likeable, open-faced youth eager to follow his father into the army. Judging by the speed and authority with which he now received and relayed messages via the radio mike attached to his helmet, he had taken to officer training like a duck to water. Seeing him in his element like this, Ashe experienced a pride normally reserved for fathers.

Ashe studied the rows of shell-damaged but still attractive sandy-coloured hotels, offices, residences and shops that lined the four-lane motorway into the historic metropolis. Many of the newer structures had been the work of British construction teams, most of whom had enjoyed a decent life in Baghdad before the first Gulf War.

By and large, the Brits were not unpopular in Iraq – out of uniform, anyhow. Iraqi hospitality was legendary, and Ashe recalled a saying that some attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: ‘When you entertain a stranger, you are entertaining God.’

‘OK, Toby, you see over there? That’s the al-Kindi Gate – one of the three entrances to the secure area.’

‘The Green Zone.’

‘You’ve got the River Tigris on either side, and the US, UK and Australian embassies inside it.’

Ashe looked out of the bulletproof windows. Blackhawk helicopters buzzed about the perimeter. ‘Are those snipers on the walls?’

‘Yeah, they’re watching every possible point of entry. It’s like a sleep session for them, before they head back out there themselves.’

M1 Abrams tanks were as common as taxis in Trafalgar Square. Humvees and Bradley combat vehicles filled the gaps and lined the road to the entrance. Queues of Iraqi civilian workers shuffled up to the checkpoint, one by one, towards the body searches. Any one of them could bring instant death to dozens of men, women and children.

‘Ten thousand work there every day, Toby.’

‘That’s a lot of body searches.’

‘We’ve trained the Iraqis to do the job.’

‘What are they like to work with?’

‘They do the job, but there are problems.’

‘Yeah? Like what?’

‘They’re cowed by authority. I’ll give you an example. An Iraqi guard is approached by someone looking like an officer. The guard asks for ID, which he is obliged to do. The officer screams at the guard, “I’m your superior!”, or something like that. The guard lets the man through. When we ask later, “Did you let a man dressed as an officer through without showing ID?”, he says “No”. We ask again. He says, “I always ask for ID. Those are my orders.” Different way of life.

‘People lie as a matter of course, because pride, for men, is more important than telling the truth. Truth is for religion. Truth comes with authority: something you must do or must believe. In ordinary life, truth costs money; it could cost you your livelihood, or your life – or the lives of your family, which is everything.

‘In Iraq, the truth is always veiled. They never believe official pronouncements. They want to see the body. If you ask a question, people will tend to give the answer they think you want to hear. Telling lies is almost a way of being polite – preserving your pride as well as theirs. If you ask the way to somewhere and they don’t know the answer, they’ll give you the wrong route just to appear helpful and so they don’t lose face. You get used to it.’

‘Tricky.’

‘No one asked us to come!’

Ashe took in the barricades and concrete blast walls ringing the priority offices.

‘You’ll be wanting the UK Embassy.’

‘Check. And a drink. I’m parched.’

‘Toby, I’m sorry. Here!’

Richmond handed Ashe a large bottle of Vittel mineral water from under his seat. ‘It’s a bit warm – I meant to give it to you at the airport.’

Ashe took as big a swig as he could and passed the bottle to the American private.

‘Thank you, sir.’

The Snatch drew up at the embassy checkpoint. The American soldiers smiled but still looked distinctly stiff and nervous. The Snatch was waved through.

‘Right, Toby. If you still want that bed at the Coalition HQ, I’ll pick you up if you can call me before five. Give me your mobile. I’ll type my number in… That’s it. You can keep the body armour, but I need the helmet back in the car. I’ll do what I can, but I should tell you, I’m under orders most of the time.’

Ashe removed the helmet and shook hands with Richmond. The major waved the marines off to rejoin their unit. ‘See you ’round, fellas. Keep your heads down.’

‘We will, sir.’

Ashe entered the reception of the pockmarked embassy. To the right of the reception desk, a gunner from the 1st Battalion, the Irish Guards, adjusted the optical sight of his formidable FN Minimi light machine gun. Concrete and sandbags provided cover.

‘I have an appointment with the ambassador.’

‘Papers please, Mr…?’

‘Ashe, Toby Ashe. Schedule B operation.’

The British staff receptionist, a Hindu with a Derbyshire accent, carefully perused Ashe’s papers and checked them on his computer. He then telephoned the ambassador’s office. The receptionist appeared somewhat doubtful as he looked Ashe up and down. He nodded at his interlocutor, then put the phone down abruptly.

‘I’m afraid, Mr Ashe, the ambassador is on a shopping expedition.’

‘Shopping expedition?’

‘If you would like to wait, there’s also a compound cafeteria, sir. Here’s your pass. Please wear it at all times. No exceptions, sir.’

‘How long?’

‘Maybe one hour. Maybe two.’

‘I’ll try the cafeteria.’

‘It’s very nice, sir.’

It was heartening to know there was something nice in Baghdad. After having his bag scoured by security, Ashe was directed towards a small quadrangle at the centre of the compound. Olive trees and date palms offered a luscious shade to the few dozen staff enjoying an early lunch and a beer. An Iraqi barman in a bright white shirt and black tie stood proudly behind the rolled stainless-steel bar. Ashe bought a bottle of Löwenbräu in pounds sterling and began to relax a little, despite the leaden weight of body armour suspended over his breastbone, back and crotch. He did not feel like taking it off.

He took a seat by a small enamelled fountain. What had once been a refreshing torrent was now a thirst-inducing trickle, but the wetness caught the sun, and the splashing sounds were welcome enough.

My God, Ashe thought to himself, what have I done? He reached inside his canvas bag for a notebook and began confiding his thoughts to paper. The important thing is—

‘Toby Ashe! What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Mick! I was just asking myself that very question.’

30

Michael Curzon QC was an unusual choice for UK ambassador to Iraq. He was not a career diplomat but a barrister destined to sit in judgement at the High Court. Widely known for his intense intellectual skills – and extraordinary cynicism – he was also politically conservative. This made him an unlikely candidate for such a key position in the British government’s Iraqi operational equations. Nevertheless, he spoke fluent Arabic, got on well with senior civil service personnel, and had made a great impression on certain notable US industrialists in his capacity as a commercial barrister.

A commercial background was considered a significant component for one who, it was supposed, would have to wrestle with major issues of contract and tender. ‘A tall, cool customer with his finger on the pulse’ was how the US ambassador to the Court of St James described him.

Curzon had a great knowledge of US mores and sensitivities and had, much to his surprise, impressed the PM. Perhaps it had something to do with the case he had assisted Cherie Blair with during the previous year. Curzon was also popular with a number of senior British military personnel, having been called upon to assist in various procurement debacles that had reached the High Court over the past years.

All in all, his was the kind of appointment that could only have been made when the government felt itself under extreme pressure, even crisis, when pure competence and fresh thinking were deemed more important than political positioning. War would always erect an invisible barrier between the PM and his party; the man at the top had entered the real world – and there was no way back.

Ashe himself was not surprised. He’d known Curzon as a postgraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford. Each had eyed the other’s career and lifestyle choices with interest and, on occasion, a little envy. Their friendship was strong, though distant, and not a little mysterious to the friends of both.

‘Congratulations, Mick.’

‘Sshh! No one calls me Mick around here.’

Curzon took a seat and smiled at his old pal. ‘Toby, I’d love to socialise, but you couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’ll be back in London, hopefully, for a week’s leave some time in the summer. We can meet up then.’

‘Bloomsbury seems a long way from here.’

‘Don’t remind me. I’d far rather be downing a few pints with you in the Plough in Museum Street.’

‘I understand, Michael. I wasn’t expecting a reception party. But just tell me briefly, what’s it like?’

Curzon whispered, ‘Fucking awful. Let me give you an example of the insanity here. This morning, I had arrangements to meet the Australian ambassador. So, the tosspot decides, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go on a shopping expedition?” So I say, “Maybe when things are a bit quieter”. “No,” he says, he’d told colleagues that Baghdad was not as bad as the newspapers made out. Wanted a taste of life outside the Green Zone.’

‘Or death, presumably.’

‘You get the picture. Anyhow, imagine this. We’re walking round the suq wearing suits and body armour – looking like pricks – surrounded by bodyguards and Special Forces and he’s putting his fucking shopping into three LAVs.’

‘LAVs?’

‘Armoured cars. Meanwhile, he’s got a photographer – I don’t know if it was his idea or not – taking snapshots and video for the evening news in Sydney or something. Or maybe for when he decides he wants to be premier of Australia. So I’m looking round nervously trying to appear in control – he’s carrying on like he hasn’t a fucking care in the world – and there’s this bloody great explosion. Everyone stops dead still – and he’s still negotiating over a bunch of flowers.

‘The guy from US special forces tells me his presence is urgently required elsewhere, and could I inform the Aussie ambassador he’s got better things to do than fill the ambassador’s grandchildren’s Christmas stocking? So I have to bundle the tosspot into the armoured car and all the while he’s complaining he hasn’t finished his shopping, and what will his daughter say, and why is everyone panicking, and—’

‘The explosion?’

‘I’m getting to that. I’ve just had a report. Two insurgents were doing their duty for the sake of whatever the fuck they think they’re doing it for. They’d dropped off a suicide bomber near the UN Food Programme.’

‘My escort told me about that one.’

‘Yeah, well, what he didn’t tell you was that these two charlies in the Toyota pickup then made their way round to the al-Rashid.’

‘Al…?’

‘Used to be a big tourist hotel. It’s Coalition now. Anyway, they’ve got a rocket launcher welded to the back of the pickup truck. And what do they do? They stand right behind the bloody rockets to video themselves and the rockets doing this great service. I ask you Toby – stand directly behind the rocket launcher! Anyhow, we’ve got the video of their jolly japes. They’re not looking too pleased with themselves now. We’d show it on the evening news but a) it would probably only encourage others, and b) it’s probably against their fucking human rights!’

Curzon looked at his watch. ‘Right, you’ll be wanting to see the SIS desk head.’

‘Crayke.’

‘Yes, Crayke. Strange fellow, but impressive in his way. Oh, and by the way, welcome to Baghdad!’

Curzon led Ashe back into the compound’s main building and down a long, cool, busy corridor. At its end was a door marked ‘Authorised Personnel Only’, in English and Arabic. Curzon took out a bunch of passkeys, punched a number onto a keypad, pressed his thumb onto a small screen and played with the lock.

The door opened onto a rough set of concrete steps. As everywhere in the embassy, CCTV cameras tracked every move.

‘Watch your step, Toby. No compensation allowed. The insurance people regard everything that happens here as an act of God. Very convenient. It gets narrower at the top.’

Three flights up, the men came to another exterior door.

‘Ambassador’s Department. Please pronounce your name clearly.’

‘Curzon here. One guest.’

‘Please insert your five-digit code.’

Curzon typed in three digits.

‘What happened to the other two, Mick?’

‘There are no other two. It’s a security trip.’

The door opened onto a red-carpeted corridor.

‘You never know who’s going to turn up. Actually, it’s so the blood doesn’t show. Only kidding. My suite is next to Crayke’s current office. Follow me.’

At the end of the corridor was a thick metal door; to its right, an open-plan office. Sitting outside the suite were two plain-clothes security men of distinctly Anglo-Saxon appearance, carrying Uzi machine guns.

‘Papers please, sir.’

Ah, Essex, thought Ashe. The Thames estuary blends uneasily with the Tigris.

‘Recommendation of the ambassador insufficient, eh?’

The security men had heard it all before. ‘Papers, sir.’ One of them scanned Ashe’s papers with a small magnifying glass he placed over his eye, while the second man frisked him. ‘Leave your bag here, sir, unless you require a particular item.’

Curzon put his hand on Ashe’s shoulder. ‘Gotta go, Toby. Maybe see you later – if not, the Plough. Don’t let the goons get you down.’

‘How about the Hemlock?’

‘You must be joking. Bunch of nutters.’

31

The dour-faced security staff completed their check and radioed in. ‘A Dr Ashe for Desk. Right. Wait a second, Dr Ashe.’

The blast-proof door eased open. Behind it stood a sharp-eyed Iraqi woman.

‘I am Mrs Aziz, Mr Crayke’s assistant. Do come in.’

Crayke’s windowless office was divided into two. Electric fans operated from the ceiling and from every corner, but failed to dissipate the body odour.

Ashe heard a voice from behind the door into the inner sanctum of the SIS desk head, Baghdad.

‘Enter now, Dr Ashe.’ Mrs Aziz smiled and opened the connecting door.

Attired in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and khaki shorts, Crayke sat in a wicker armchair in a corner behind the door. His grey hair, what remained of it, was cut regimentally short about the exaggerated, bony dome of his head. His voice was deep, but slightly thin and gravelly – a result of throat-cancer surgery and a continued penchant for the occasional cheroot or pipe.

‘Good, Ashe. Come in. Welcome to the Armpit. Nice to meet you at last.’

‘At last?’

‘I’ve had my eye on you for quite some time.’ As if reading his mind, Crayke added. ‘And I am not referring to our friends Colquitt and Bagot.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘And that is the sole relief you are likely to get here. No matter. You write interesting books, Ashe. Not all of them, of course. But one in particular struck me some years ago. It was about magical signs, cryptography and the origins of modern science. Some of it very good indeed.’

‘The Golden Thread. It didn’t sell.’

‘Too deep for the herd, I dare say. Such books may not sell, but we should be poorer without them. Nevertheless, I was not altogether convinced by some of your arguments. You’ll find understanding the esoteric a great deal easier if you first banish from your mind the concepts of God and spirits.’

‘Rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?’

‘Better, I think, than being defeated by the object.’

Ashe was in the presence of a mind: one with voltage. Baghdad suddenly looked a brighter place. Crayke pulled himself out of the creaking wicker chair and offered his long, leathery hand. ‘Ranald Crayke. But do call me “sir”. I don’t want you to get into the habit of using my name.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ll call you Ashe, because I can’t get used to all this first name nonsense. God knows, even my wife calls me Crayke. Right. Sit down.’

Crayke seated himself behind his packed desk and spread his bat-like hands across its red leather top. ‘Seeing as I’m known to the security staff here as “Desk”, I thought I’d better have a pretty good one. Comes from Saddam’s palace, not far from here. Used to belong to the Ottoman governor of Baghdad back in the old days. Good to be in touch with history. Gives a man perspective.’

‘I feel the same, sir.’

‘I know you do. I knew your friend, the late archdeacon, very well. I am so sorry we have lost him. Gives me a certain personal interest in your current activities.’

‘Revenge, sir?’

‘Justice. It’s a politer word. Richmond tells me you need a source handler.’ Crayke lit a fat Burmese cheroot. ‘Smoke?’

‘No thanks, sir. Gave up years ago.’

Crayke puffed a deep brown-and-grey cloud into the room.

‘Good man, Major Richmond. Still, the DIA have got him for the time being.’

He inhaled his cheroot. ‘You want to find out what’s happened to these Turkish chaps.’

‘Kurdish actually.’

‘Citizens of Turkey. Resit Yazar and Ali Yildiz.’

‘Yes, sir. Find them. Talk to them. If necessary, bring them in.’

‘You’re not a cowboy, Ashe! You sound like President Bush!’

‘Excuse me, sir.’

‘Look, I have studied your preliminary request for official assistance. As far as I can see, your sole basis for linking terrorism in Istanbul to the Tower atrocity is a contact you enjoy with Turkish security forces – which you won’t name, for “operational reasons”.’

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘I can tell you, Ashe, that it was only my personal intervention that secured approval of your request for resources. Predictably, objections were raised that your plans were an indulgence, a private holiday.’

‘I can think of better destinations, sir.’

Crayke laughed amid a geyser of rising phlegm. ‘Care to let me in on your little secret? Who is your Turkish contact?’

‘Colonel Mahmut Aslan, sir.’

Crayke stubbed out his cheroot. A smile emerged on his face and his eyes widened, as if gaining inspiration from a higher sphere. ‘Right. Zappa’s your man. Of course, he’s also the US Defense Intelligence Agency’s man. You’ll have to tolerate some interference from them. I can’t spare you one of my own.’

‘I’m not sure I’d like to share this with the Americans at this stage, sir.’

‘This is Baghdad, Ashe. Here we share everything – even our underwear if needs be. Mutual trust is vital in conflict zones. Do you have any objective reason why DIA involvement might prejudice your investigation? Think carefully, Ashe.’

‘Not at the moment, sir.’

‘Do you expect to?’

‘Too early to say, sir.’

‘I’m afraid that’s insufficient. If you want a source handler, Zappa’s the only available man with the requisite knowledge. The DIA will be prepared to keep this from the Turks, if I request it.’

‘Can you trust them to keep it from the Turks, sir? It’s most important to this operation that they know nothing. Nothing at all.’

‘I shall make that clear. By the way, Ashe, forgive me for asking, but is there an esoteric angle to your enquiries?’

‘Not that I’m aware of, sir.’

‘Hmm…’ Crayke lit another cheroot, inhaled deeply and exhaled a pillar of foul-smelling smoke.

‘When we are deeply engaged in something, Ashe, the cloud we create about us bears all the signs of the inner man. There must be something in this investigation that has made you willing to risk your life here in Iraq.’

‘I was nearly killed in England, sir.’

‘I doubt if that’s your reason. Esoteric concepts are an eternal key to thought, a persistent dimension. But they bear the imprint of the knowledge of the times in which they are expressed.’

‘Could that be, sir, why genuine traditions were not meant to be written down?’

‘All writing is, in a sense, a betrayal, Ashe. Try and remember this as you proceed.’

The door opened abruptly. Mrs Aziz stood in the doorway with a cup of strong coffee for Crayke.

‘Thank you, Mrs Aziz. Do call Major Richmond. If you can reach him before five, Mr Ashe will have a bed for the night. I’m sure he needs one. Right, Mr Ashe?’

32

‘Seems you were right about the Israelis, Beck.’

Beck nodded slowly; he didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

Lee Kellner had met Beck off the plane at Chicago O’Hare Airport and driven him to an old FBI detention and interrogation centre on the city’s outskirts, now shared with the CIA.

Constructed to cool off some of Chicago’s most notorious gangsters in the twenties, the second-rate Art Deco block had seen through every colourful and colourless phase of America’s extraordinary history of crime. Now surrounded by derelict land, its old pink walls had recently been whitewashed in a sprucing-up initiative funded by the Department for Homeland Security.

Homeland Security was muscling in on many aspects of cherished Bureau and Agency autonomy, causing the security services some discomfort. The threat of terrorism diminished the good humour that might have greased the inevitable changes. The media had them all in the dock.

Was Mati Fless a Homeland Security case, an internal criminal matter for the Bureau, or an aspect of Agency overseas ops? The answer was to bang him up in the Wrigley-St Francis facility and see whether the suspect himself offered any clues.

Kellner pushed open the steel door of Interrogation Chamber No. 1. Two agents stood to attention.

Beck was surprised to see Fless dressed in an orange prison boiler suit, shackled at the feet. Having read a detailed report on Fless’s capture, such precautions seemed excessive.

‘You guys wanna get some air.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘You deserve it.’ Kellner stared at Fless. ‘Don’t get up, Mr Fless.’

‘I wasn’t going to.’

‘I’d like you to meet Agent Beck. I think you two have a lot in common. Had Beck been faster off the mark, it might have been him you killed, and not Agent Buckley.’

‘I did not kill your Agent Buckley.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘No. He killed himself.’

Kellner looked at Beck and raised his eyebrows.

Beck looked back at Kellner. ‘Anything yet from the Israeli Embassy, sir, on Agent Matthias Fless?’

Fless perked up.

‘Embassy denies all knowledge of the operation, but admits Fless has on occasion been employed in a freelance capacity by the security services. The usual bullshit.’

‘What about our own internal Mossad contacts, sir?’

‘They say they’re investigating the matter and ask us to keep them informed.’

‘Fairly safe to conclude this was a Mossad operation, sir.’

Kellner looked to Fless, who was smiling. ‘Used to be in Shin Bet, didn’t you, Mati?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Interesting work?’

‘Mr Kellner, I did not kill your man. You know as well as I do that surveillance operations often go wrong. I had no idea al-Qasr was protected by an agent.’

‘What happened to Buckley?’

‘He was torturing me.’

‘Torturing?’

‘Tied me up to the mains.’

‘Unorthodox, wouldn’t you say, Agent Beck?’

‘Fless’s story’s been confirmed, sir. Exposed mains wires located at the scene.’

Kellner’s eyes did not shift from Fless’s. He continued speaking to Beck. ‘Could’ve been planted.’

‘It’s a bit baroque, sir.’

‘What?’

‘Baroque. A bit intricate.’

‘These Mossad boys can be very smart, Beck. So, Fless, who did kill Buckley?’

‘He shot himself.’

‘Oh please!’

‘Stupid, I know. My team—’

‘His team, as he puts it… I’d say four henchmen – where do you find these guys, Fless? His team, Agent Beck, is sitting next door.’

‘Doing what, sir?’

‘Awaiting deportation.’

Beck looked surprised.

‘Executive orders, before you ask.’

‘My team arrived, Mr Kellner. They saw your agent. Buckley was on the metal stairs trying to phone his team – or should I say henchmen? Buckley turned to see my men, tried to reach for his automatic while putting the cellphone down. He dropped the phone. My men saw me – saw what he’d done to me. He fumbled with his gun in his shoulder holster and shot himself. I can only presume it was not deliberate.’

‘Very amusing, Fless.’

‘I gotta say, Mr Buckley did not seem quite “all there” that afternoon. I think he’d been drinking. I think your forensic people will bear this out.’

Kellner whispered to Beck, ‘They do.’ He turned again to Fless. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Fless, a court of law may see things differently.’

‘Sure. I understand. You want me to cooperate. What do you want to know?’

‘Agent Beck, I believe you have some questions for Mr Fless.’

‘Mr Fless, what do you know concerning the deaths of Gitana, Daley, Rikanik – and the British man, Kelly?’

‘The last one I’ve heard of. Who are the others?’

‘You’ve never heard of Gitana, Daley or Rikanik?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Will you take a lie detector on that?’

‘Sure.’

Beck consulted his file. He pulled out a large black-and-white photograph and placed it on the table in front of Fless. ‘Do you recognise this man, Mr Fless?’

Fless laughed.

‘Do you recognise this man?’

‘My double! At last! Do you know the story about the man who killed his double – only to find he had killed himself?’

Lee Kellner stifled a laugh. He was privately concerned that Fless might run rings around the Bureau man with a foot in the Agency door. ‘This man, Fless, is you.’

‘There’s a resemblance.’

Kellner was annoyed. ‘It’s not a fucking resemblance, Fless. This is you. And you know we know it is.’

‘If I knew what you knew, would you know what I know?’

Kellner sighed. ‘Just tell him, Sherman. Jeez! We’re s’posed to be on the same fuckin’ side!’ Kellner shook his head.

Fless addressed Beck. ‘So you think it’s me.’

‘What do you know of the deaths of five Russian microbiologists. October 2001?’

‘Refresh my overworked memory, Agent Beck.’

‘October 2001. A commercial flight from Israel to Novosibirsk in Siberia. Blown up over the Black Sea by a Ukrainian surface-to air-missile.’

‘Yes. It was all over the news. Everyone was killed.’

‘Novosibirsk, Mr Fless. Home to a research institute; the scientific capital of Siberia.’

‘That a fact?’

‘It has fifty facilities and thirteen universities.’

‘Even so, I’d prefer to study elsewhere. Are you suggesting I killed these five microbiologists? What do you think? I just ring up the Ukrainian military and “Hey! I’d like you to blow up a civilian plane”?’

‘A Mossad team was sent to investigate.’

‘Naturally.’

‘The report has never been published.’

‘Of course not. And who says there was a report?’

‘This photograph, Mr Fless, has a date on the back.’

Fless turned it over. ‘What do you know! October 2001. You’re a magician!’

‘It’s not only the date, Mr Fless. It’s the place. Do you recognise it?’

Fless gave Beck a doe-eyed look.

‘Let me refresh your memory. This photograph was taken at the Institute for Biological Research. One of the most secret places in Israel.’

‘Not any more, apparently. But do tell me more.’

‘The visible parts of the facility are in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ness Ziona.’

Kellner studied Fless’s eyes; they gave nothing away.

‘Most of the institute’s twelve acres of facilities, Mr Fless, are underground. Laboratories are reached only via airlocks.’

‘Are you sure you should be telling me all this? As an Israeli citizen, I should be innocent of such knowledge.’

‘David Kelly was connected to the Institute.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘About the time you were photographed there.’

‘Was I photographed there?’

Beck sat back in his chair and drew breath. ‘Does the name Dedi Zucker mean anything to you?’

‘Of course, Agent Beck. Anyone with an interest in politics in Israel – which I suppose is everyone – has heard of Dedi Zucker.’

‘Zucker caused a storm in the Knesset. Claimed the Institute was trying to create an ethnic bioweapon.’

‘A what?’

‘A weapon that could specifically target Arabs by the manipulation of DNA sequencing.’

Fless laughed. ‘Beware of the Israeli lunatic fringe, Agent Beck. Many of my compatriots have a kind of epic, biblical, even apocalyptic feeling for current affairs. They would not be surprised if scientists could make the Red Sea part again for Moses and the children! These kinds of conspiracy claims get made all the time. I know plenty of people who think God Himself is going to acquire real estate on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and rule the world like a sultan! It’s all bullshit.’

Beck looked to his notes again as Kellner mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

‘Why were you involved in the surveillance, as you put it, of Professor al-Qasr, one of this nation’s most respected scientists?’

‘At last! At last, a realistic question. You say, “one of this nation’s most respected scientists”. Is that an honorary citation? Or is that a fact?’

Beck turned to Kellner. Kellner’s eyes motioned to the door. He stood up. ‘OK, Mati, we’re going outside to consult for a few minutes. You take a break and clear your thoughts.’

‘Sure. Take your time.’

33

Fiona Normanton unbuttoned al-Qasr’s denim shirt. She rubbed her soft fingertips over the rough hairs of his chest, kissed his neck and lay back on the cream duvet. ‘Do you like me?’

Al-Qasr smiled, admiring the rich blue woollen beach top she was wearing with its bright orange stars and yellow moons. ‘I’ve always loved brunettes.’

‘I got highlights!’

‘So I see.’ Al-Qasr picked at the deep blue wool that rested on her tiny navel. ‘Did you make this?’ Fiona laughed. ‘No, silly. I got it in Reno. There’s a great wool shop there.’

‘Hard to believe. Expensive?’

‘Do you like expensive things?’

‘Yeah. I think I’d miss them if they were taken away.’ He looked out to the lake through the glass doors.

All morning al-Qasr had been at Fiona’s apartment at Oroville while the FBI engaged in a second forensic sweep of his house up at Paradise. While Bureau agents took the place apart, the couple had swum in Fiona’s little pool overlooking the lake and talked a lot about life in California.

Fiona took al-Qasr’s large warm hand and placed it on her thigh. He fingered the edge of her sky-blue cotton panties and tickled her gently.

‘Mmm… Don’t stop.’

He slid his hand round under the cotton and stroked her smooth round hips and bottom. She pulled him closer, nudging his moustache with her little nose. She opened her lips and they kissed. His hand moved over the soft, round mound of Fiona’s stomach.

‘Shall I take this off?’

‘No, I like it. It suits you.’

‘OK.’

Al-Qasr lifted the cosy wool over her breasts.

‘Hey! Do you know what?’

‘Yeah. I’m boring, I’m middle-aged and I’m… just a little crazy about you.’

‘Oh, you don’t have to say that! Hey, Sami. If you lick my tits, I’m told the nipples come up like sombreros!’

Al-Qasr laughed again. Fiona Normanton was a lot of fun.

‘Go on! Try it.’

‘OK.’

‘See what I mean?’

‘Fuck! You’re right, Fiona! They do.’

‘Don’t stop, Sami. I feel the flame of fornication rising through my body.’

Fiona suddenly sat up and pulled her panties down. ‘Go on!’

‘What?’

‘You know! Lick me, silly! Now.’

Soon Fiona was breathing heavily; she moaned his name.

‘Hey, hey!’

‘What’s the matter, Sami? Don’t I turn you on?’

‘No, no. It’s just…’

‘Are you having a problem… you know, getting it—’

‘No, it’s not that. I guess I don’t feel like rushing.’

‘Oh! Oh, I see. Sorry, Sami.’

‘No, it’s my fault.’

‘I got an idea. You just lie back a second.’

Fiona slipped his buff-coloured chinos down his long, olive legs.

‘God, Sami! You look ready enough for me!’

‘OK, but…’

‘Look, I’ll lie here for a minute and you just lie back and think about whatever you want to think about. OK?’

Fiona positioned herself on the duvet and slid her right hand down as she spread her long legs. Al-Qasr moved on to his side and kissed her shoulder.

‘Fiona?’

‘Mmm?’

‘What’s it been like in the office the past few days?’

‘Mmm… Hot.’

‘Apart from that.’

‘I guess we missed you.’

‘I had things to do.’

‘Really, like what?’

‘Oh just things… You know.’

Fiona let out a deep groan. ‘Kiss me, Sami.’

‘Did… did anyone come into my laboratory?’

‘’Course not. God! No one gets past me!’

‘You sure? No one’s been messing with my computer? My files?’

‘Oh Sami!’ Fiona started to shiver. ‘No, baby. All your secrets are safe.’

34

‘OK, Fless, you got something on al-Qasr? Let’s hear it.’

Fless took a deep breath. ‘Your CTC received a communication from a doctor in Iraq. About al-Qasr.’

Beck whispered in Kellner’s ear. ‘How the hell does he know?’

‘Which communication would this be?’

‘The same one you received, Mr Kellner. We intercepted it.’

‘Fucking Mossad again! Won’t you ever trust us?’

‘Of course we trust you. We trust you to screw up.’

‘Time will tell, Fless.’ Kellner looked at the shackles round Fless’s feet. ‘Looks to me like everyone’s screwing up. So, let’s concentrate on the enemy. And Fless…’

‘Yes?’

‘Just can the adolescent, jerk-off shit!’

That stung. It wasn’t the first time Fless had been accused of being an arsehole.

‘How do we know you didn’t concoct the whole damn thing in the first place? For all we know, this began as an Israeli plot to make us suspect al-Qasr.’

‘You didn’t reply to the message. That gave my mission its urgency. Then you interrupted us.’

‘An action for which I offer no apologies. Tell me, Mr Fless, did you understand the reference to the British air raid of 1992, and why al-Qasr might have been less useful to our scientific effort than he first appeared?’

‘Yeah, well, we hoped you might reveal something, something to throw light on this question. All we observed was that al-Qasr defected to the USA shortly after the British raid. One thing I can tell you…’

‘Shoot.’

‘The message accused al-Qasr of links with Ansar al-Sunna. I can positively confirm this.’

‘Positively?’

‘Absolute certainty. Absolute certainty, Mr Kellner. No question. But you will have your own methods. No doubt your people are going through al-Qasr’s things right now, so confirmation will come soon enough. Let me repeat: under your very noses, your famous scientist has been in regular two-way communication with the forces of Ansar al-Sunna in northern Iraq. And not only in Iraq.’

‘Where else?’

‘Europe.’

Kellner looked at Beck. Beck sucked in his lower lip.

‘Surely, gentlemen, that information is worth my freedom?’

Kellner got out of his chair. ‘Excuse us a minute, Mati.’

Fless smiled indulgently and looked at the stationary fan blades above. ‘I need some air.’

‘Sorry, sir. Security. Had a suicide try to cut his—’

‘OK, Beck, spare us the details. Hear that, Fless? It’s for your own good.’ Kellner drew his finger across his throat.

In the corridor outside, Beck and Kellner whispered frantically to one another.

‘OK, Sherman, don’t shove it down my neck. I know we’ve lost valuable time. It’s true. But it’s not too late.’

‘Do we bring al-Qasr in, sir?’

Kellner looked at the tranquil Fless through the one-way plate set in the door.

‘Fless could be useful to us.’

‘But shall I bring al-Qasr in, sir?’

‘No, Beck. You sit tight. I got our Iraqi scientist very closely covered.’

‘But Buckley’s dead!’

‘Buckley was working for al-Qasr. That’s how it was set up. His own little protector. But when I first heard about this business, I put an undercover agent right inside the hornet’s nest.’

‘You didn’t tell me, sir.’

‘And you know what?’

‘Sir?’

‘This agent ain’t workin’ for Leanne Gresham. This agent’s workin’ for me.’

35

Constructed for emergencies only, al-Qasr’s underground hideaway was hellishly cramped. Below the battery-powered lamp bracketed to the hardboard panel, al-Qasr squinted at his laptop, sweat dripping onto his keyboard.

Fiona hadn’t fooled him. He’d suspected an Agency honey-trap from the start. It had taken him all morning, and all of his wiles, to distract her long enough to link his laptop to her hard drive: a state-of-the-art metaphor from which al-Qasr derived private satisfaction. He’d long realised his so-called colleague Bob Lowenfeld’s interest wasn’t simply academic. Experience of Lowenfeld’s duplicity had given al-Qasr the scent. Having accessed Bob’s computer data and codes, Fiona’s system would be a breeze to crack. Al-Qasr smiled at the prospect of ‘listening in’ to internal CIA traffic and observing their inevitable pursuit of him. It would not be long now; his hour was almost upon him.

Al-Qasr stopped dead. A CCTV system monitoring his lab flickered into life. Al-Qasr slammed the laptop closed and focused on the monitor. Bob Lowenfeld! Lowenfeld was extracting additional drives from al-Qasr’s computer and imaging system.

‘Motherfucker!’

Al-Qasr skidded his Jag by the entrance to RIBOTech’s car park. He didn’t want to be seen from his lab window. He reversed, parked beneath a cluster of tall pines, and walked round in the dappled light to the rear trade entrance. He knocked on the cafeteria’s kitchen window.

‘Sorry, Jolene, think I left something in the cafeteria over lunch.’

‘Oh, I didn’t see you.’

‘I’m the invisible man.’

‘You look all right to me, honey!’

Smiling, the cook returned to her washing up, while al-Qasr strode through the dining hall to the back stairs. The first-floor reception was empty: normal for a Saturday afternoon. The only thing that mattered was to extract his latest files before Lowenfeld found them. Distracted by Fiona, he’d been stupid.

His office door was open.

Fiona.

She turned in shock. ‘Professor! I er…’

Al-Qasr smiled. ‘What a nice surprise. Can’t you get enough of old Sami?’

36

After two nights in Coalition Camp Montezuma with the 82nd Airborne, Ashe was transported back south, to Baghdad’s Green Zone. Richmond had swung Ashe basic quarters in the Defense Intelligence Agency HQ, close to the Assassins’ Gate entrance to the Green Zone. The drawback was that the HQ was mostly underground. While relatively cool compared to the stifling streets outside, being so close to bomb-damaged sewerage pipes, it could also get mighty smelly.

Ashe observed Richmond’s daily operations, mostly high-risk sorties against suspected insurgents and hunts for arms caches. Street-by-street battles, interrogations, area reconnaissance, rescue missions – these were the order of the day, and they all took their toll on the nerves. Ashe was learning to adjust to the cruder conversation of those around him, and to their much coarser humour.

Alongside the thrill of action and reaction ran the perennial downside of casualties, treachery, false leads, frustration with equipment and with the number – as well as quality – of men available, not to mention the often depressing news from home.

The war had become a political football to competing parties in Britain, the US and elsewhere. Supercilious opposition was widespread throughout Europe. Morale was on a knife’s edge, but the desire to fulfil the mission and install a democratic government in Iraq in less than a year kept the forces going. This was a worthy objective for those wishing to be seen as fighting the good fight. As a visiting colonel put it to Ashe one night over a game of poker, ‘Hell, son! If some bastard tried to steal our democracy back home, wouldn’t y’all expect a bloody battle?’

This was the sort of question that did not invite a response, and Ashe chose to listen rather than assert his own observations of the situation. Buttoning his lip, however, made his secretion in the bowels of Baghdad a kind of prison, but he would just have to wait; experienced source handlers could not be summoned from the air at will.

Ashe was sitting in the DIA canteen reading the New York Times one afternoon when a sweating Richmond marched in. Smiling, he tossed his helmet onto Ashe’s table.

Ashe studied Richmond’s bloodshot eyes. ‘How’d it go, Major?’

‘Tough one, Toby. Can I get you a fresh beer?’

Richmond showed his chit card to the Kuwaiti steward; he didn’t carry loose change into combat. The major turned to Ashe. ‘Someone I want you to meet.’

Through the double doors burst a big man in an Hawaiian shirt, with a gut that tumbled over his shorts like a snowdrift over a precipice. His broad forehead was dripping wet.

Ashe got up from the steel table. ‘Vincent Zappa, I presume.’

‘Vinny. It’s Vinny.’

‘Vinny, hi – I’m Toby Ashe.’

‘Very pleased to meet you at last, Toby. Simon here’s told me a lot about you.’

‘Beer, Vinny?’

‘Sure, Major. Large one. And a bourbon chaser. Christ, Toby! Hell of a day out!’

‘Tell me about it?’

‘Sure, I’ll tell ya. Yours truly was escorting a subject back to the Green Zone, OK? Major was out in front. I had two guys in a Humvee behind. I got the suspect cuffed next to me. Terrified. Next thing, a landmine’s detonated under the wheels of the guys in front. The suspect leans back, kicks the driver in the back of the neck, head butts ol’ Zappa here, somehow gets out the car while it’s skidding up the sidewalk and rolls to the side of the street. Our car rams into the side of a house. The guy gets picked up by insurgents. There’s AK-47 fire from all sides. The driver’s hit. I’m down on the floor of the car. The Humvee team’s under heavy fire. Major’s outta the Snatch in no time, throws a grenade – hits some bastards on the roof. Our team strafes the windows – there’s more fire coming straight outta there. Air’s filled with stone and concrete and Lord knows what else. The guys inside the house start chanting some Arabic stuff. Then the damn house blows up. Booby-trapped. Our guys behind are showered in shit – and then, before you could say “the Alamo”, the street’s empty. We got one dead, one severely wounded and we lost our suspect. But hear this, Toby, your guy Richmond. Jeez! What a fuckin’ hero.’

Zappa sank the bourbon in one, then demolished the beer. ‘My shout, Major.’

Ashe noticed Richmond looking pensive, his face taut, his eyes red. ‘Did you get that, Simon? You’re the hero of the hour.’

‘Mission was a failure, Toby. And the casualties… The driver was a lovely guy.’

‘Sure, I’ll drink to that.’ Zappa was ready for another trip to the bar. ‘Don’t take it so bad, Major. You did all a man could.’

‘Give me five minutes, Vinny. I’ll think of something.’

‘But we don’t get that extra five damn minutes, do we, Major? That’s the whole damn thing. You can’t be ready for everything. Progress is treading in dog shit and avoiding it in future. Now drink that fuckin’ beer, Richmond; that’s an order!’

Richmond raised his eyes from the floor and gave a rueful smile.

‘Come on, my man! We’ll make the motherfuckers pay, next time round. Just thank the Lord we got a next time. And by the way, Limey…’

‘Yes?’

‘Thanks for saving my life.’

‘It was nothing.’

‘Maybe to you, boy. But to me – hell! – it’s all I got!’

Richmond smiled again, nodded and drank deep. ‘All right, chaps. You get to know one another. I’d better go and write the report – and the letters home.’

Zappa got up and shook Richmond’s hand firmly. ‘Thanks again, buddy.’

‘You just look after my friend here.’

‘You bet, Major.’

Richmond grinned unconvincingly and sloped off.

‘Sometimes you Brits can be so damn cool. And other times, so fuckin’ sensitive.’

‘We feel the same about you.’

‘You do?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, how about that! I gotta tell ya, Toby. I didn’t have all that much respect for you English guys before this war began, but I sure as hell do now. Goddamn! Between us, we’re gonna have to save this whole chicken-shit world!’

‘Do you think the world’s ready for that, Vinny?’

‘There ya go again, asking questions. You think too much, my man! If you’d been out there today, you’d soon see, Toby, that in this life you got two squares to stand on. Black or white. And if you get caught jumping from one to the other in an unbalanced way, you’ll get your balls blown off!’

‘Very Masonic way of looking at it.’

‘Sure, I’m a Freemason. You?’

‘Lapsed.’

‘Don’t give Uncle Vinny that “lapsed” shit! Once a Brother, always a Brother!’

‘Have you read the request from Desk, Vinny?’

‘Wha’d’ya mean “read”? Desk don’t do paper, Toby.’

‘Right.’

‘Hell, son. You should know better, after all I heard about you. Damn hell, I heard you were some kind of a magician or something.’

‘Not quite.’

‘Not quite. You Brits! Here’s to ya!’

Zappa had located another bourbon. ‘Right, Toby, shoot!’

‘The issue is whether or not you have a source, or may obtain a source who can put me in touch with—’

‘Yeah, yeah. Those Kurdish guys. OK. I’ve just come back from Kirkuk in the north. And neither the Kurdistan Democratic Party, nor the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is a hundred per cent sympathetic to Kurdish agitators within Turkey. I refer to the PKK.’

‘As far as I know, neither of the guys I’m looking for are extremists. They might even be Freemasons – in Istanbul.’

Zappa raised his eyebrows and paused for a few seconds.

‘Be that as it may, my man. I don’t know what they expect to achieve by speaking to Massoud Barzani or Jalal Talabani. You say Turkish agents are tracking your guys in Iraq. If Barzani or Talabani got wind of that, they’d stay outta sight.’

‘Officially, perhaps. But as I said, these deputies are probably moderates. Or appear to be.’

‘OK, Toby. But you can be sure Turkish intelligence suspects they’ve got some relationship with the PKK. Why else would two Turkish Kurds come to northern Iraq?’

‘Maybe they’ve come for protection, simply to avoid arrest. The point is, we don’t know. I need to know.’

‘Desk informed me there was a terrorist attack on your department in England.’

‘Suspected.’

‘Makes no sense at all to me, Toby. No fuckin’ sense at all.’ Zappa shook his head.

‘Can you get me to these guys, Vinny?’

Zappa looked Ashe right in the eye. ‘Look hard at these eyes, Mr Ashe, sir. In North Carolina, my family they hunt foxes. Ain’t no pussy face gonna stop us neither! Unlike you guys, we don’t think it sport to let the critters go. I’ll find your source, old chap. And all you gotta do is sit right down there and rehydrate!’

37

Beck was panting when he entered Kellner’s office at CIA Langley.

‘Si’down, Beck.’

‘Got here as soon as I could, sir.’

‘CTC SIGINT has picked up another epistle from our “doctor” friend.’

‘Trace, sir?’

‘They’re workin’ on it now. Told they got a new female in there. Began work as an amateur in Wisconsin, tracing al-Qaeda internet links. Quite an operator.’

‘Would she have gotten a job before 9/11?’

‘One thing about a crisis, Beck. Brings out the talent!’

‘And shows up the deadwood, sir.’

‘Ain’t no deadwood here, Sherman.’

‘No, sir. God forbid, sir.’

‘In God we trust, Agent Beck.’

‘So does the enemy, sir.’

‘We can’t both be wrong, Beck.’

Kellner stood up and put his hands on his hips. ‘I’m short of time so I’m not gonna tell ya everything right now. I’ll leave that to Leanne Gresham. She’s had to cope with a few surprises concerning her dear Sami al-Qasr. I’ll give you a summary, ’cause I want your reaction here and now. The “doctor” claims to have been at Baghdad University with al-Qasr. Late sixties and early seventies. Friends even.’

‘Could be personal, sir.’

‘Yeah. But it’s motivation we’re lookin’ for. They disagreed about politics. Student stuff. Al-Qasr joined the Ba’ath Party. Pan-Arab socialism. Party-knows-best kinda thing. He studied physics, biology, chemistry.’

‘All that’s in our al-Qasr file, sir.’

‘Just bear with me, Beck. There’s bound to be overlap. In 1974, his biology thesis got him the attention of Sir Moses Beerbohm in Cambridge, England. He’s a world authority – I guess you know that.’

‘Al-Qasr joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology on a Wellcome Trust research fellowship, sir. He assisted Sir Moses Beerbohm in Cambridge.’

‘On what, Beck?’

‘Research on the interactions of proteins with nucleic acids, the molecular structures of viruses. Al-Qasr assisted in the method of 3-D image reconstruction in electron microscopy from a series of 2-D tilted images. This work later formed the basis of the X-ray CT scanner. But Sir Moses’s biggest hit was the discovery of the zinc finger family of transcription factors. These are used to regulate genes. Latest research – and al-Qasr is at the forefront of this – is in using the zinc finger design to engineer artificial factors to switch genes on and off.’

‘Switching genes on or off. I’m impressed, Sherman Beck. And wondering if you’re in the right line of business.’

‘Thank you, sir. If that was a compliment.’

‘Now, Beck, you can rampage through all the technical stuff when you see Leanne Gresham. I thought I was going to tell you something you didn’t know.’

‘Absolutely, sir. That’s why I’m here.’

‘OK. Now cast your mind back to Great Britain in the late seventies and early eighties. Al-Qasr is a wizzo in genes. But he’s getting frustrated with his own research. Beerbohm’s got him workin’ on a long-term project. Highly statistical stuff. He’s relating genes to specific diseases in specific areas. Lots of fieldwork in the flatlands of East Anglia, England. Ever spent a week in North Dakota, Beck?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Not every young man’s dream. Al-Qasr was more interested in what Beerbohm was doing. Beerbohm was flattered. Maybe he was thinking of an heir to his intellectual fortune.’

‘Maybe he fancied him.’

‘Think there’s a sex angle here, Beck?’

‘I thought we were looking for motivation, sir.’

‘Don’t be a smart-ass. Beerbohm started using al-Qasr as a kind of sounding board. Seems al-Qasr is turned on by the idea of rewriting genes. Then Sir Moses gets the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. That was 1982. Al-Qasr observes fame close up. Smells good. You could say the boy’s straining at the limits of ambition. But he’s in the old man’s shadow.’

‘So?’

‘So the fuckin’ Iran–Iraq war enters the scene. In 1983, al-Qasr gets offered a golden cheque as an inducement to go back to his homeland in its hour of need. The war is going badly for Iraq after early gains. Saddam’s getting desperate. He’s putting a lot of effort into unconventional weapons to give him the edge. It’s December ’83. Al-Qasr has just got back to Iraq from England. Don Rumsfeld meets Saddam. Normal diplomatic ties ensue between the US and Iraq. Trade benefits for Saddam include sales of chemical and biological agents.’

‘Biological agents?’

‘Yeah. Including anthrax. Don’t they tell you these things in the Bureau? We don’t live on Sesame Street, Beck.’

‘No, sir.’

‘March 1984. The UN reports Iraq used mustard gas and tabun nerve gas against the Iranians. As I said, Saddam was on his back foot. Now this is where it gets interesting, Beck. So pay attention, d’ya hear?’

‘Sir.’

‘Al-Qasr’s workin’ on… Well, from what we can gather from our guy in Iraq here, al-Qasr’s workin’ on fuckin’ everything. How to treat Iraqi troops if caught downwind of mustard gas. How to deal with anthrax. Perfection of gases for controlled use.’

‘Controlled use?’

‘You heard of Halabja, Beck?’

‘Civilians?’

‘Yes, Beck, five thousand of them, at least. Kurdish civilians, poisoned. Dictators don’t distinguish. Al-Qasr is also engaging in DNA research. This is ultra, ultra secret and has never entered the public domain.’

‘Why not, sir?’

‘Think about it, Beck.’

Beck gripped his chin, unable to follow Kellner’s drift.

‘Let’s just say for now, Beck, that it’s been difficult to prove. Are you following me? Now, while all this is goin’ on, Iran is busy on Operation Dawn V. It’s early ’84, like I say. Iran wants to split the Iraqi 3rd and 4th Army Corps near Basra. Iran pipes in about half a million men. The two armies clash. 25,000 killed in less than a week. This happened while the great American public was getting excited over Madonna’s marriage to Sean Penn.’

‘Phew!’

‘Yeah. Now, all this time, our source in Iraq is still meeting al-Qasr socially. They’re still intense young people, keen to convince the other they’re doing the right thing. This would be consistent with what Fless was saying about our informant being a doctor.’

‘Or in the same field as al-Qasr?’

‘Can’t be ruled out. Anyhow, this guy has a conscience. What’s more, another friend of – let’s call him “the doctor” – another friend of the doctor is captured as a deserter. According to the doctor, this man’s the son of a religious figure.’

‘An Imam? A Shia Muslim?’

Kellner shook his head.

‘Sunni?’

‘Nope. A Yezidi.’

‘Sorry, sir. I haven’t had time to go into that.’

‘Start now. This guy deserts from the Iraqi army. He was a forced conscript anyhow. Traditionally, the Yezidis didn’t fight alongside Muslims, for religious reasons. The Yezidi says he deserted in protest at the use of illegal weapons against the Iranians – as if anyone gives a damn. He’s given a choice. He can either be shot on the spot, or offer himself to help the Iraqi medical corps.’

‘Hospital orderly?’

‘He thinks that’s the game. Poor sap’s sent to al-Tuwaitha.’

‘Why haven’t I heard of that?’

‘How the fuck should I know? Al-Tuwaitha is Iraq’s biggest multi-purpose scientific facility. Six kilometres across. Massive earthworks, bunkers and lookout towers protect it. And there’s underground stuff. Nuclear, biological, chemical – you name it. The Iraq Survey Group have had more fun looking through that place than Saddam’s private movie collection.’

‘No way out, presumably, for the doctor’s friend.’

‘By a nasty twist, the Yezidi deserter is sent to the personal laboratory of Dr Sami al-Qasr, Iraq’s scientific superstar, the genetic specialist whose word is law.’

‘I presume the power he’s been given is making up for the lack of a Nobel Prize.’

‘He’s got power over life and death. Something they never thought to give Sir Moses Beerbohm in Cambridge.’

‘And the deserter?’

‘Poor guy’s subjected to dosages of chemicals, biological agents, even radiation. That is, according to our good doctor. Turns out the boy’s got a curious resistance to an unnamed bacillus. Maybe anthrax. Al-Qasr subjects his guinea pig to every kind of test and DNA-mapping procedure. And that doesn’t tell us much, because we don’t know for sure what al-Qasr was capable of in Iraq.’

‘How did the doctor know all this?’

‘Seems in some unguarded moments, al-Qasr boasted to his old friend of breakthroughs that would make Iraq the global centre of microbiological research. Seems the doctor found out his friend was in al-Qasr’s grip, because al-Qasr had started making enquiries about the boy’s background. Drawing up comparative DNA profiles. Yezidi society being fairly tight-knit, this all got back to the doctor.’

‘Our informant is a Yezidi?’

‘That not obvious to you, Agent Beck? You surprise me.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll take that as a compliment too.’

Kellner looked at his watch. ‘Oh shit, Beck! I’ve got to chair a Threat Matrix Report meeting with the President in ten. Look, I’ll try to wrap this up, but you’ll have to get on to Leanne Gresham. Now, how can I put it?’

‘Sir, why not just call me tonight?’

‘This ain’t something I’ll put over any phone, Beck. No matter how damn secure.’

‘Any phone, sir?’

Kellner leant forward, face rigid, and looked Beck very hard in the eye. ‘Any fucking phone.’

38

‘You’ll need this, Toby. Just sign here.’

Major Richmond handed Ashe a SIG Sauer 9 mm pistol, small enough for the shoulder holster secreted beneath his jacket.

‘And Toby…’

‘Simon?’

‘Body armour.’

‘Check.’

Richmond sat on his plastic chair and surveyed his tiny, windowless office, covered from floor to ceiling in specialised maps of Iraq. ‘Ready for this, Toby?’

‘I feel a hell of a lot better knowing you’re the driver.’

‘You were lucky to get me. Thank Desk: his word reaches far.’

‘What in hell’s happened to Zappa?’

‘What time did he tell you?’

‘4.40.’

‘And what time is it?’

‘4.39.’

‘Relax, Toby. Zap’s a good man. Besides, he’s had to pick up the interpreter. And that’s not always as simple as it sounds.’

‘Regular interpreter?’

‘We’ve done pre-tests and Zap’s fully checked the source background. We do it all the time – standard procedure and usually reliable.’

‘Usually?’

‘Nothing’s perfect.’

There was a knock on the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Vinny.’

Richmond turned to Ashe. ‘Time?’

‘4.40.’

The major grinned as he opened the door. ‘Vincent!’

‘Major Richmond, let me take your hand. Allow me to introduce Dr Zaqqarah.’

‘Hello, Safi! Good to see you again.’

The slightly nervous, rotund academic gripped Richmond’s hand. ‘Peace be upon you, Major.’

‘One of these days. May I introduce to you a friend from England?’ Ashe was not to be introduced by name. Zaqqarah smiled sweetly and shook hands with Ashe.

As they emerged from the stairwell hatch into the light, Ashe struggled with the glare of the afternoon sun; the heat came hard.

An American sergeant saluted Richmond. ‘We’ve gotten you a BMW, sir.’

‘Class 5 or 7, Sergeant?’

‘Class 5, sir.’

‘I asked for Class 7.’

‘The last one left the compound with Major Rudetsky, an hour ago, sir.’

‘What’s wrong with the Merc?’

‘Fuel pump, sir. It’ll be ready tonight.’

Richmond turned to Zappa. ‘Class 5 today, Zap.’

‘The Lord giveth, Major.’

Ashe looked quizzical.

‘It’s about adapted security features, Ashe. Additional batteries, secondary air-con systems, armoured chassis, bulletproofing, tracking features, weaponry. I’d hoped for the Merc Class 7. Apparently, we’re not important enough. Or you aren’t!’

The two men laughed.

‘I suppose some are more indispensable than others.’ Dr Zaqqarah’s nervous laugh cracked audibly.

The sergeant opened the door for the three men and saluted. ‘Good luck, sir.’

‘Thank you, Sergeant.’

Ashe got into the back of the BMW with the interpreter. The doors slammed shut. This was it: Ashe’s first operation in the field.

39

The grey BMW passed through the al-Kindi gate into the heart of Baghdad. A busy late afternoon and the streets were pullulating with hot, dusty activity. Most Baghdadis understood the ‘live and let live’ principle, Ashe was coming to realise, but that didn’t mean someone was going to let them live.

Heading towards the Tigris along al-Mamoun Boulevard, the car turned sharp right, following signs for the Main Supply Route – or MSR as Richmond referred to the Basra–Baghdad highway.

Ashe enjoyed talking to Dr Zaqqarah. It turned out he had a cousin working as a surgeon in Burton-on-Trent, ten miles from Ashe’s home. Ashe wondered if Zaqqarah’s cousin might find better employment in Iraq.

‘This is what I tell him, sir. And he says, “Come home? Is it safe?” What can I tell him? Here, criminals kidnap doctors and hold them to ransom every week. The rebellion must stop; we want normal lives.’

The car pulled up outside a café at a huge crossroads. The single-storey establishment stood out starkly against the barren site. The surrounding structures had been bombed and the debris bulldozed to make way for yet another car park. The positive point was that there was little cover for anyone contemplating an ambush, and ample means of escape should such a thing occur.

The air was still; Richmond checked his watch. Zappa muttered under his breath, ‘Eyes peeled, TA.’

The American stretched his left arm down to an M4 carbine secured in a special pocket to the side of his seat. Richmond had his hand close to his jacket’s inside pocket; he checked his watch again.

‘Twenty seconds.’

‘What’s that?’

A red Toyota pickup skidded into the bay at the side of the café. A teenager emerged from the back of the building, spoke to the driver and went back inside.

‘That’s it, guys, we’re off.’

Richmond put the car in gear.

‘Hold it, Major. Look!’ Zappa pointed to the café entrance. A big man in a dark-pink shirt and holding a newspaper came out of the café. He pulled a rag from his back pocket and blew his nose. At the same moment, the teenager returned to the Toyota at the side, carrying a huge plastic petrol container.

‘It’s OK. Black market.’

‘Free market,’ added Zaqqarah.

The man with the newspaper thrust a fat cigarette through the bush of his moustache. A match failed; he reached into his back pocket for a lighter.

‘That’s the signal.’

Richmond revved the car twice. The man walked slowly towards the BMW.

Ashe held his breath. It could be a set-up. He fingered the SIG, trying to recall a wet weekend’s weapons-handling course at British Army Kineton. A dismally damp Warwickshire suddenly seemed a very attractive alternative to a car park in Iraq.

Zaqqarah depressed the rear-window control and spoke to the man in Arabic.

Before Ashe had a moment to grasp the exchange, the car had a new passenger and was speeding off south. Hurried, nervous conversation passed between the man and the interpreter.

‘What’s going on, Simon?’

‘Confirmation of the price. Agreement of terms.’

‘Price?’

‘Replacement car parts mostly. Handy equipment, difficult to obtain. A car service. Nothing conspicuous. Maybe a little money. Petrol. That sort of stuff. Common things but bloody useful.’

The car sped on beyond the outskirts of Baghdad. In the distance, Ashe caught sight of a row of massive guard towers, spaced out some fifty meters from one to another. It looked like the outer limits of hell. As the car got closer and the towers loomed larger, gargantuan soil embankments 100 metres high blocked the eye line, leaving the perimeter road in heavy shadow.

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘That is the al-Tuwaitha Research Facility.’

‘And those mounds? Looks like archaeology.’

‘Maybe in the future. This is just part of Saddam’s protection investment.’

The car screeched to a standstill.

‘Shit!’

Thirty metres down the road, a great plume of black smoke billowed from a cauldron of twisted metal and orange fire: a Humvee had hit a mine. A makeshift roadblock had been erected.

The source began to fidget awkwardly in his seat.

‘Everybody, stay calm. Translate that, please Dr Zaqqarah.’

The source was sweating uncontrollably. Ashe’s shoulder was feeling the damp.

An M16 was levelled at the car. An American private indicated for an interpreter to move forwards between himself and the vehicle. As the interpreter raised a battery-powered megaphone, he tripped over a corpse by his feet.

‘Get down everyone!’ bellowed Richmond.

The private looked startled, and released a three-round burst towards the car. Tiny shards of windscreen scattered as the car shook, echoing with the deafening shots.

‘Christ!’

The private’s interpreter screamed. ‘No shoot! It’s all right. I trip on body.’

The soldier, young, nervous, distracted, fired harsh words at the interpreter. The interpreter begged the driver and passengers of the BMW to get out, one by one, and lie on the ground with hands and legs stretched out in a cross pattern.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He says everyone out of the car, one at a time. Only one at a time, or they shoot. No questions.’

Richmond spoke under his breath. ‘Thank God it’s a Class 5 windscreen. OK, you first Vinny.’

‘Why the fuck is it always me?’

‘Yanks like to be first, don’t they?’

The source lost control. Panicking, he flailed his arms about, kicking the backs of the seats.

‘For God’s sake, TA, calm him down!’

‘Why not show him your pistol?’

‘If they see me do that, you can kiss your life goodbye.’

‘I not want to die! I not want to die!’

‘Not you! Zaqqarah, tell the man we’ll all be bloody dead if he carries on like this!’

The interpreter reached for his megaphone. ‘One by one. Now!’

‘Shit, Simon! If the source gets out on his own, he could blow the whole thing.’

Zappa turned to the source. ‘Listen, man! You know some English, right?’

‘Yes, sir. But I don’t want—’

‘Can it! If you’re a good boy, brave lion, big man… your father’s son, pride of your family, then we all live, OK?’

Zaqqarah translated for good measure. The man nodded and wiped his nose.

The interpreter with the megaphone repeated the orders in Arabic. Richmond put his hand on Zappa’s shoulder. ‘Come on, old friend.’

Zappa calmly got out of the car, his hands in the air. The private indicated with his rifle barrel that he should hit the deck.

‘Next man out!’

Ashe was next. Gingerly, he opened the back door to see, in the distance, the private calling up a ground-mounted machine gun: a bright new M240B. The crew loaded it, itching to give the lethal weapon a road test.

Ashe held his breath, tried to smile, and lay down near to Zappa. Zappa whispered to Ashe. ‘Why the fuck doesn’t the soldier use his sight?’

Ashe whispered back. ‘None as blind as them that won’t see.’

Zappa closed his eyes and began running Beatles songs through his mind, trying to get the singles in order of release – an old trick he’d been using at the dentist ever since he was a boy. With any luck, by the time he’d got to ‘The Long and Winding Road’ the pain would be over.

The source had begun to shake again, and had developed a curious tick in his neck. Richmond implored the interpreter inside the car to do something. ‘Tell him he’ll be fine. I’ll leave the car last.

‘OK, now you, Dr Zaqqarah. Give ’em a big smile and raise your hands. Everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine.’

‘I’m afraid… I’m afraid I have…’ Zaqqarah tried to edge his way out of the car; his trousers were stuck to the seat. He gave an awful look to Richmond and shook his head. A stomach-turning stench filled the car’s interior.

Ashe, his body roasting on the tarmac, tried to move to spread the heat. He heard Zaqqarah’s feet crunch on the loose gravel chippings. In the distance: two choppers, like spiders descending from a celestial web, buzzed through the smoke-filled sky to the burning Humvee.

Ashe could hear the machine-gun crew addressing the private. ‘Christ!’ he thought, ‘a group of five men in an expensive car. US casualties on the ground. What was the crew thinking? Revenge? Something to release the tension?’

Ashe saw the machine-gun crew taking aim.

The source emerged from the car and stared into the barrel of the M240B, like a rabbit in headlights; he was paralysed.

‘One at a time,’ whispered Zappa from somewhere between ‘She loves you’ and ‘I want to hold your hand’. ‘Come on, boy!’

Ashe thought he heard something on the machine gun. The helicopters were now directly overhead, whipping up the gravel that danced along the road like demented locusts. The private and the gun crew started shouting at each other above the increased whirl and roar of ’copter blades. The crew pointed at the source, shaking by the back door. The man dropped to his knees. The private levelled his M16 downwards.

‘Move away from the car!’ pleaded Zaqqarah to the source.

‘Shut up!’ shouted the private’s interpreter.

‘Move away!’

The man would not move.

Richmond started audibly praying. The helicopter hovered overhead. Nothing he could say would be heard. The source would not move.

40

Richmond raised his arms in surrender to the car roof, his fists clenched; his nails dug into his hands.

The machine-gunners caught the movement inside the car and pulled the gun towards the windscreen.

‘Oh, Jesus!’

The machine-gun crew screamed at the private. The crew sergeant got to his feet. ‘Lower your weapon, Soldier! That goddamn guy out there is one of us! Why don’t you use the fuckin’ sight?’

‘It’s my shades, Sarge. Covered in blood. I was assisting wounded and this car’s suddenly there, Sergeant. I couldn’t see good.’

The sergeant told the interpreter he could use English. The interpreter was confused. The sergeant grabbed the megaphone and walked towards the car. ‘OK you guys! There’s been a misunderstanding over here. Stand up and approach the roadblock!’

Zappa, whistling ‘A Ticket to Ride’, hauled his weight off the tarmac and went round to the source, who was still kneeling, crippled with fear.

‘Come on, pal, you’re safe. You tell him, Doctor.’

Ashe, still apprehensive, rolled over onto his back and snapped to his feet. Feeling dizzy, he tried to stop holding his breath.

Medics were pouring from the ’copter and racing across to the wounded soldiers. Richmond approached the sergeant, showed his ID and shared a joke – both trying to ignore the cries of the men being strapped onto stretchers.

‘You’re damned lucky, sir. My crew here had you marked out as fuckin’ terrorists. Excuse my language, sir; they’re in no mood to be delicate about it. If you take my advice, sir, you’ll be outta here as soon as possible. Lord knows what else is gonna come this way now. Those ’copters make mighty fine targets for rocket grenades. This whole damn country’s a weapon of mass destruction!’

‘That’s what they’d like you to believe, Sergeant. Good luck.’

Richmond thanked the apologetic machine-gun crew for not opening fire. Zappa went back to the BMW and manoeuvred it slowly through the smoke.

Dr Zaqqarah removed his trousers and used Richmond’s mineral water to wash his backside, drying it with the discarded garments.

And the source sat cross-legged by the car, praying out loud to Allah to deliver him and everybody else from the checkpoint inferno.

That night, Ashe drank himself sober. He lay still, gazing at the rough wool of the blanket in the bunk above his head.

Had he been frightened? Yes. Had he ever been as scared as that? No, he didn’t think so. But had he ever been more alive? That he couldn’t answer; he’d had some incredible experiences in the past, things so special that memory itself was inadequate to replay them. This was different – and what a bond had been forged in just a few hours between himself, Zappa and Richmond. He could see why many men found life outside the services difficult. Then he thought of poor Dr Zaqqarah going home to his wife that night: a pious Muslim, unable to drink, unable to speak, and with a new pair of ill-fitting trousers – and no explanation.

And what of the poor source? He seemed to have aged five years in an afternoon.

But, for all that, it had worked well. They’d taken the softened-up source to the edge of a stone quarry near the al-Tuwaitha installation, close to a Hungarian field hospital. Desperate to get back to his own world, the source had spilled everything he had on Kurdish political activity in Baghdad. Zappa even picked up some useful information on unrelated investigations. The source had gabbed and gabbed, and Zappa had been happy. They threw in a microwave and a spare set of tyres for his trouble. He said ‘Any time,’ but ‘could they meet in Baghdad next time?’

Zappa and Richmond doubted if they’d see him again – at least until his car broke down again for want of parts.

Both Yazar and Yildiz had been in Baghdad, ostensibly for discussions on the composition of the new Iraqi constitutional assembly, due to take control in the spring of ’05. Their presence there could be seen as innocent enough. They could just have been getting the low-down on Kurdish chances for autonomy, federation or even independence from central Iraqi power in the new Iraq so many dreamed of.

There were hundreds of issues of importance to Kurdish politicians and the people they represented. For example, would the Kurdish militia be expected to amalgamate with a new Iraqi army? The Kurds, allied to US Forces, had been partially independent since the safe zone had been established in northern Iraq in 1991. Who would control an Iraqi army? How could a future military coup be prevented?

These issues also exercised the minds of Turkish security forces. Yazar and Yildiz were operating under assumed names; the source had only recognised them from photographs in Zappa’s file. According to the source, Yazar and Yildiz had left Baghdad in a hurry. They’d gone north to Mosul.

Mosul was Zappa’s territory; he liked the north of Iraq. For a start, the area had more supporters of the US effort than any other part of the Middle and Near East. Zappa got on well with the Kurds and enjoyed the complex politicking that happened in every corner of the region. But, frankly, as he put it to Ashe before nesting down with a bottle of JD, Harlem at its worst was better than Kirkuk at its best.

Ashe himself longed to get out of the DIA HQ. It felt like a bunker. This was doubtless due to the fact that it had once been a bunker. An Oddball’s bunker, no less – one of Saddam’s many lairs. It had been no surprise to learn that Richmond’s ‘office’, in dull, lavatorial green, once was an interrogation chamber.

Ashe was beginning to think about getting back home; everyone was – except, perhaps, Zappa. Anyhow, no one voiced such thoughts too eagerly; the task lay before them, undone.

Ashe had, somewhat to his surprise, become a component in what Major Richmond called ‘the intelligence cycle’. The idea worked like this: a certain number of objectives would be established. These would lead to a series of source interviews. The interviews would be assessed, checked, crosschecked, analysed and compared. New information would coalesce into a new set of priorities and a fresh intelligence cycle could begin.

There was no jumping the gun, no place for undisciplined mavericks or loose cannons. In theory, original minds were welcome, but one man’s lateral thinker could be another man’s nut. There were no freewheeling agents acting on intuition, going from one gun-toting adventure to another. This was not acting, and James Bond could only be found on the Coalition Camp DVD screens.

Intelligence-gathering was many things, but one thing it could not be described as was ‘entertaining’ – though it might contain the odd glimmer of light relief. The story of Zaqqarah’s trousers would do the rounds for some time – as would a certain black humour associated with the private’s shades, covered with blood.

There was even some lightness to be gained from full exposure to Zappa’s extraordinary range of shirts. Like his shirts, Vinny’s turn of phrase was rarely anything less than florid. Vinny was an acquired taste; Ashe had acquired it.

41

The morning hit Ashe like a wet flannel. Every limb in his body ached, his head an unholy hole of regret and pain.

Richmond burst into his room like a hammer to the temples. ‘Hands off cocks, on with socks!’

The intelligence cycle had turned another crucial notch. A cog had slipped into place and while Ashe had slept the sleep of the just, an operation had been planned to get him up into Kurdistan.

‘Shit, shower and shave, Toby!’

Ashe squinted at the naked strip light.

‘Come on! You can try these.’ Richmond withdrew a packet of hangover Eazers from the breast pocket of his US uniform shirt. ‘They’re pretty good if you have a big breakfast – give all that acid something to work on.’

‘Do I have to get up?’

‘We’ve got two armoured cars and four US guardsmen out there waiting to escort you to the wedding. Don’t they deserve a little enthusiasm?’

Ashe struggled out of his bunk and tried to get his right foot into his shorts. He looked up at Richmond – dressed, for the first time in a fortnight, in combat uniform. It was a fine sight, set off by Simon Richmond’s perennially encouraging smile.

‘If you enjoyed our minor incident at the roadblock, you’re going to love this little outing.’

‘More friendly fire, Simon?’

‘You’ll be lucky!’

Richmond tossed Ashe a helmet, freshly camouflaged. As Ashe caught it, his shorts fell down. Richmond tutted. ‘Limp cock. Bad sign.’

While Zappa, Richmond and Ashe were making their way quickly through the DIA forward-planning area, Richmond handed Ashe a Browning 9 mm with its canvas holster and belt.

‘I forgot this, Toby. I hope you won’t.’

‘Trust me.’

The shadowy room flickered with dozens of LCD monitors. There was a positive babel of voices on phones and in radio communication with contacts throughout the Middle East.

‘Say goodbye to civilisation, Toby!’

‘You’re kidding, Zap old boy! Civilisation is where we’re heading. We’re going to the land of Abraham!’

‘I think you’ll find Abraham’s moved out, bud.’

‘Must have seen you coming.’

‘Fuck off, Toby!’

The trio mounted a series of cast-iron steps that led through the dark and up to the surface. An unfamiliar sound was tap-dancing its way over the closed steel hatch.

‘Umbrellas, anyone?’ quipped Richmond, as the three emerged into a torrential grey-and-brown downpour. An unpleasant green colour seemed to flash on and off as the banks of angry black clouds battled with each other for supremacy. The bullets of rain fell so heavily that soon every nose was dripping and every garment had turned into a soaking flannel. Ashe’s head felt oddly cocooned in his helmet as the rain echoed about and within his head like a Walkman.

Richmond patted Ashe on the shoulder and shouted under his helmet rim. ‘Like I said, Toby. Limp cock. Bad sign!’

‘Hey! It’s size that matters.’

‘Then we’re sunk!’

Through the barrage of rain and explosions of thunder, Ashe could hear the vehicles revving up for the 150-mile journey ahead: a caravan of steel.

In front of him, reversing with great skill considering the conditions, were two US four-wheeled, four-door Humvees. The rear plating on one had been removed to accommodate two mounted machine guns, both wrapped in tarpaulin. The second vehicle had an enclosed rear with a winch attached at the back. Two privates, dressed in light-brown waterproof capes, directed the Humvees into position.

Ashe called over to Richmond. ‘Are we going to get waterproofs, Simon?’

‘Afraid not. I’ve not been issued with one and there’s none left for you!’

‘That’s a— Hey! What’s that?’

‘You’re a lucky man, Toby. That’s our Merc. Class 7. Somebody’s decided you’re an important person.’

Ashe looked at Zappa.

‘Don’t look at me, bud. Class 5’s always been good ’nough for me.’

‘Anyhow, Toby, if you still want protection from this rain, may I suggest…?’

Richmond opened the front door.

‘Front this time?’

‘Hop in! Vinny – the back! What’s that? Yeah, gear’s loaded already.’

Richmond settled into the driving seat. Ashe stared at the unfamiliar dashboard and complexity of additional features. ‘Very hi-tech, Simon.’

‘Yes, a CD player. Anyone fancy Dolly Parton?’

‘Must we?’

‘How about Wagner for Soldiers – US Defense Special Issue?’

‘You’re fuckin’ joking!’

‘I jest not, Vinny. It’s a psy-ops production. Look!’

‘Fuck! Who’s been in this wagon?’

‘Francis Ford Coppola by the sound of things.’

Richmond tried out the high-speed wipers. ‘We have vision, gentlemen. Now, here’s something. Rolling Stones, anybody?’

‘Just play “Start me Up”, Major, and cut the crap!’

‘I’m with Vinny. I want the Human Riff.’

‘Coming up.’

‘By the way, Simon, where’s our interpreter?’

‘Dr Zaqqarah was not available for duty. We’ve got Ibrahim on this trip. He’s behind us in the Humvee.’

‘Remind me again why they’re called “Humvees”?’

‘D’ya hear that? There’s something this boy doesn’t know. You explain it, Major.’

‘Humvee, Toby, is a… what’s that word? Diminutive?’

‘Don’t look at me, Major. Abbreviation?’

‘Yeah, well, it’s like that. Officially they’re called an HMMWV, which, if you say it fast with a mouth full of cornflakes, sounds a bit like “Humvee”.’

‘And what is an HMMWV?’

‘It’s an acronym!’

‘Now he tells us!’

‘Thank you, Toby. It’s an acronym for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.’

‘Right.’

‘OK, fasten your fears and lock up your doubts. Gentlemen, we’re go, go, go!’

The Humvee in front led the way as a squad lifted a series of double razor-wire barriers. Ashe looked out of the window to see whether the Humvee behind was in step with the rest of the convoy. His spirits sank. Two familiar faces in British combat gear were approaching the stairwell hatch. The men stopped, looked over at the vehicles, and stared hard through the driving rain. Ashe pulled his head back in.

Bagot and Colquitt. Like some awful old firm of debt collectors. What the fuck were the beagles doing in Baghdad? What was more, had they sniffed him? Ashe dared not stick his head out again. No one could screw up his operation quicker than Major Giles Bagot and Lieutenant Tony Colquitt. He prayed he would not hear the splash of running feet and a frantic knocking on the car door.

‘Come on, Simon, let’s get out of here.’

‘Are you all right, Toby? Why the haste?’

‘Let’s just move.’

‘Right.’ Richmond put his foot down and rushed through the barriers as fast as he could, almost hitting the Humvee in front.

‘Steady on, Major. We’ve a way to go yet.’

If anything, the weather was getting worse. Forks of lightning between the thunder claps made a dramatic if disturbing show over the ancient city.

Ashe jumped as a tortured-sounding voice echoed from a minaret overhead.

‘You must be on edge if a muezzin startles you,’ said Richmond.

‘I’m fine,’ Ashe said. ‘It’s just this filthy weather. There’s something uncanny about the mix of Islamic pieties and the raging storm.’

‘Good job the call to prayer comes from a pre-recorded tape these days, then, eh? You wouldn’t want to be a live muezzin climbing up a minaret in lightning like this.’

Ashe nodded, and the pair fell into a companionable silence as Richmond drove the Merc out of the confines of the city, happy to leave the stress of Baghdad behind.

‘So, Toby, you were asking me about the Humvees?’

‘Was I? Oh yes. Those would be the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, would they not? Sometimes these acronyms go a bit far, don’t you think? I mean, are there any High Mobility Multipurpose Unwheeled Vehicles?’

‘Not on the road, bud.’

‘I suppose they’re trying to distinguish them from tanks.’

‘Even so, but imagine if the Pentagon had to define a woman in similar terms. A High Mobility, Multipurpose Long-legged—’

‘Thank the Lord they ain’t on to that yet, Toby!’

The major quietly hummed the tune to ‘There is Nothing Like a Dame’.

‘That ain’t how they see things at the Pentagon these days, Major. The way things are goin’, the army would prefer to make no explicit distinction between males and females wherever humanly possible. They’d prefer some kind of hi-tech military-oriented hermaphrodite.’

‘Really?’

‘We got machines – robots – comin’ in to man roadblocks.’

‘If indeed “man” is the correct word.’

‘The word is appropriate, not correct.’

‘Are you saying it’s not appropriate to be correct?’

‘No, it’s only appropriate when it is correct.’

‘But I thought—’

‘Listen, all I’m saying is, how long will it be before—’

‘OK, Vinny, we’ve all seen Terminator! But it’s a few years to go before robots do all the fighting.’

‘But maybe it’s only tomorrow when the robots do the planning.’

‘Thank you, Toby. What you don’t realise is that our friend Vincent Zappa here is, by and large, a very balanced, reasonable fellow.’

‘I’m a regular guy!’

‘See what I mean? But he does have his sensitive areas. He’s scared of any technology that might make him redundant.’

‘I’m just fightin’ for my right to work, Major!’

‘You have my full support. Now, Toby, to answer your question. The Humvee up front is the M1043 Humvee armament carrier.’

‘Tell him what it weighs.’

‘About four tons.’

‘You won’t be pullin’ that with your teeth!’

‘Behind us – or, as we jocularly say, “up our rear” – is the M1038 cargo and troop carrier with winch.’

‘They throw the winch in extra!’

‘Who do?’

‘O’Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt of Fairfield, Ohio, if you must know.’

‘And let us not forget, O smartass Limey, several models derive from AM General, of South Bend, Indiana.’

Ashe nodded with mock satisfaction. ‘Well, gentlemen, I feel suitably enlightened. Is all the conversation on this journey to be of such sparkling and informative character?’

‘Not if you leave it to us, Dr Toby Ashe. We’ll leave the really smart remarks to you.’

‘In that case, Simon, would you care to turn the music up?’

The convoy sped north out of Baghdad to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Tumbling Dice’. But as he tapped his boot to the old chestnut, the question uppermost in Ashe’s mind was, on whose side were the dice loaded?

42

‘This was a nice idea, Ms Gresham.’

‘For heaven’s sakes, Sherman, call me Leanne. My father did, and he never fell off his perch.’

Beck had taken a taxi ten miles south of Langley, McLean, through Fairfax County, to meet Leanne Gresham at a little Italian restaurant on the green outskirts of Annandale. The glare of the sun reflected off the plastic gingham tablecloth. Through the fine old windowpanes of the colonial-style establishment, they could see a quiet road and a tranquil pony ranch.

‘That’s where I used to take my daughter for riding lessons.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Princeton.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘Don’t be. She’s studying theology.’

‘Could be useful today.’

‘She thinks it will be even more useful tomorrow. Lord! How things change! I mean what use is theology in a laboratory? When I was growing up, theology was like studying antiquarian bookselling. Fascinating, but strictly for enthusiasts.’

‘As you say, things change.’

‘A law of the universe. And we in the Directorate of Science and Technology have as much trouble with it as anyone else. Take your boss. A fortnight ago, Lee Kellner could hardly bring himself to notice me in the corridor. Now he’s all grace and charm. Makes quite a difference.’

‘I guess he’s suddenly realised your importance.’

‘Well there is a change. And it isn’t just smiles and courtesies. He’s let me in on your story. Even asked me to finish briefing you before we – did you get that? we – go to California.’

‘Is that an order, ma’am?’

‘Objections?’

The question struck Beck as slightly compromising, especially as uttered by Gresham. There was just a hint of seductiveness, a tiny silver sparkle in the air between them.

‘Not at all, ma’am. When duty calls, I follow.’

Gresham smiled. ‘I do believe, Sherman, there’s gallantry in your soul. Don’t blush, honey. Paleness suits you.’

A large Italian lady, singing a Puccini aria to herself, carried two steaming earthenware dishes over to their table, balancing them like the scales of justice.

‘Lasagne!’

‘Thank you.’

‘Grazie, madam. You both order salad.’

‘Yeah. Caesar salad.’

‘Now, if you’ll take your eyes off that woman’s derrière, Sherman, what did you want to know about al-Qasr? He’s quite a looker, you know.’

‘Kellner explained how al-Qasr used a Yezidi deserter for medical experiments at al-Tuwaitha.’

‘Scientists often turn a blind eye to the human dimensions of what they do. I’m not saying this to excuse Dr al-Qasr. I mean, I was as shocked about that as you were. But sometimes the pursuit of knowledge seems to outweigh every other consideration. Did you know that Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren—’

‘Who?’

‘Boyle and Wren. Two English scientists who were around just before Lord Fairfax bought what is now Virginia. Late seventeenth century. Fairfax’s house was where CIA Langley now stands.’

‘So what did Boyle and Wren do?’

‘They were interested in the way blood flows round the body. They understood that the condition of the blood is the clue to identifying illness. You could say these guys were at the root of what became genetic science.’

‘It’s all in the blood.’

‘It’s all in the blood. Anyhow, they drained a dog of all of its blood. Then they took a poor man, got him drunk, bled him, and transfused the dog’s blood into him.’

Beck tried to take the idea in. It didn’t go well with lasagne and salad. ‘Yup. Sounds like science to me.’

‘You get the picture. Well, like the poor sap used by the old scientists in my story, the Yezidi man at the mercy of al-Qasr eventually succumbed.’

‘He murdered him.’

Gresham sighed. ‘I guess so. The next thing is that the Yezidi man’s family petition Saddam as to their relative’s whereabouts. Eventually they’re told he volunteered for the front but was now missing – the usual story given to Iraqi families to explain why sons didn’t come home. Saddam didn’t want anyone to know the full extent of the carnage. Men killed by Iranian bullets and shells were routinely listed as having been transferred to another front. Desperate people will believe anything. Saddam needed new fronts. This partly explains the attack on Kuwait. Also, Saddam owed Kuwait the fifteen billion dollars borrowed to wage war on Iran.’

‘You’re very well informed, Leanne.’

‘Thank your nice Mr Kellner for that.’

‘No one ever called Lee “nice”.’

‘Well, apart from Lee, no one at Langley ever called me “beautiful” either!’

‘Was that appropriate?’

‘Spare me the PC bullshit, Sherman. I’d call it courteous!’

‘Forgive me.’

‘Not at all. I mean, he didn’t pinch my ass or anything!’

Beck laughed. ‘OK. So what about al-Qasr?’

‘Lee’s informant knew – we don’t know how – that al-Qasr’s experimental victim had not returned to the guns and the fury. Apparently, the poor man was just as useful to al-Qasr dead as he had been alive. Al-Qasr had the body stored in a special freezing facility just north of Basra, protected by a missile bunker.’

‘I get it. That’s the place the British hit in 1992. The place mentioned in the informant’s first communication. Makes you wonder what the British knew about it.’

‘Right. All we know is the British Royal Air Force hit the facility in June 1992 as part of its holding operation in the no-fly zone after the end of the Gulf War. And that is when my department first heard of the great Dr Sami al-Qasr’s desire to defect from Saddam. Naturally, we welcomed al-Qasr with open arms.’

‘Why “naturally”?’

‘That’s a very good question, Sherman.’

‘And?’

‘And I’d need clearance from your Mr Kellner to answer that.’

‘Touché.’

43

A black Mercedes limo drew up smoothly below the restaurant window.

‘Looks like our taxi, Sherman.’

‘That doesn’t look anything like our taxi!’

‘Wanna bet?’

Leanne Gresham and Sherman Beck slipped their jackets on, paid the waitress and made their way outside.

Gresham opened the rear door for Beck.

‘Pleasant lunch, Agent Beck?’ Kellner looked up from a report he was perusing, took off his reading glasses and smiled. ‘Glad to have you aboard. And especially you, Mrs Gresham.’

Leanne Gresham slipped into the front seat and arranged her skirt. ‘Thanks for the lift, Mr Kellner.’

‘Call me Lee.’

‘Lee and Sherman? I must say I would never have expected to be sharing a limo with two opposing Civil War generals!’

Beck grinned.

‘Now, Lee. Agent Beck here was interested to know why my old department took such a keen interest in al-Qasr’s offer to defect to the States in 1992.’

Kellner nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. Right. OK… But before I go into that I’d like to tell y’all that—’

‘Sir?’ The driver interrupted them.

‘What is it, Agent Keane?’

‘Shall I drive to Langley, sir?’

‘Yeah, but take it easy. Enjoy the ride.’

‘Yessir.’

‘Leanne, Sherman, I’m proud to tell you that we’ve traced our informant. The message about our friend in California came from Germany. Hamburg to be exact.

‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, Mrs Gresham, I’m going to put up the dividing screen.’ Kellner pointed playfully at the driver and pressed a button. In a few seconds, Beck and Kellner were in a sealed environment.

‘Now, Beck, consider this space a confessional.’

‘Sir?’

‘I’m not sayin’ I’m guilty or anything, but you know a priest would rather die than reveal a confession.’

‘In theory, sir.’

‘Yeah. Well here is no theory. You get my meaning?’

Beck nodded.

‘Good. Now take your eyes off the brown dirt and green leaves of north Virginia and look closely at my lips. You are going to hear some facts. Of a very secret nature.’

Beck took a deep breath and nodded.

‘Good, Beck. I can tell you’re taking this seriously. Now, many people have asked this question: why was it, when the Coalition had the Iraqi army on the run from Kuwait in the first Gulf War, that we did not finish Saddam off once and for all?’

‘Are you asking me the question, sir?’

‘Can you answer it?’

‘A number of factors, sir. I mean, first and foremost, the Iraqi army was willing to surrender. Also, the terms of the UN Resolutions. They covered ejecting Iraq from Kuwait, but not toppling the regime. We had a famous victory with minimal loss of life. Invasion of Iraq had presumably not been planned for in any detail, and casualties might have been politically difficult to sustain. Then there’s world opinion and the issue of the balance of power in the Mid-East, sir. Unpredictable consequences. Relations with the Saudis. In short, sir, while the opportunity was ripe, there may have been too many unpredictable factors. There was of course the hope of an Iraqi uprising against their dictator. I guess there was talk of generals mutinying against Saddam and stuff like that. Restraint seemed appropriate. Colin Powell’s style, sir.’

‘I’m impressed, Beck. Again. Do tell me when you’re applying for my job. I’d like to know in advance.’

Beck laughed modestly.

‘All right, Sherman. That’s a pretty good summary of what we might call the external position.’

‘External position, sir?’

‘There was another factor. Back in 1990, the CIA had intelligence – mainly from the Israelis – that Saddam was working on a new weapon.’

‘The super gun, sir?’

‘That’s the one you could talk about, Beck. The Agency began to hear about an amazing dude workin’ on the Iraqi chemical and biological programme.’

‘Dr Sami al-Qasr?’

‘You got it. Do you get the rest?’

Beck closed his eyes and thought hard for a few seconds. ‘A DNA weapon.’

‘A DNA selective weapon. Details varied. But Saddam was very clever. He could be, you know. He didn’t threaten the United States directly. He didn’t say, “March on Baghdad and I’ll hit you with something you never even heard of.” What he did was this. He knew the Israelis had a spy at al-Tuwaitha. So he seeded just sufficient information to get the Mossad on the hotline and give Uncle Sam the willies.’

‘And did it?’

‘You betcha. This was something we just hadn’t bargained for. You could say this was the moment when the term “Weapons of Mass Destruction” came into its own. For the handful of us who knew about the situation, WMD was mainly a euphemism—’

‘For Sami al-Qasr.’

‘Right. You got it. Now, we couldn’t go on air and tell the world about this thing. Why do you think that was, Beck?’

‘Because we wanted it ourselves.’

‘Right. We wanted it ourselves. And we didn’t want anyone to know we wanted it. You may recall how much power having the atomic bomb gave us when nobody knew we had it. Well, we lost that advantage soon enough after we dropped the bomb, though for a while we were still ahead, because no one else had it. Then, thanks to the KGB, we lost that as well. Before al-Qasr, we hadn’t experienced that kind of power for a long, long time. And what we wanted, it looked like Iraq had. But we couldn’t just ask them, “Hey, do you have a terrifying DNA-altering weapon?” All we could do was try to find out if it was possible that they were so far ahead of us on that. Need I say that when information on al-Qasr started coming in, there were a lot of butts fidgeting around when it came to deciding: Do we go for Baghdad this year?’

‘Jeez!’ Beck shook his head in disbelief. ‘You telling me that because of this guy…?’

Kellner nodded. ‘I guess I am.’

Beck took time absorbing the information. ‘But that means…’

‘Go on, Beck. Do my thinking for me.’

‘But when al-Qasr came over to the US in 1992, why didn’t we invade?’

‘You’re on the right lines. Keep thinking.’

‘OK. So al-Qasr comes over; he’s debriefed. And he tells our people that he’s left in a hurry and a lot of his work is still in Saddam’s hands, and they’re still workin’ on it, and without him the US will never catch up.’

‘Getting warmer.’

‘And he says that in 1990 the threat was exaggerated, but the potential for development was there.’

‘Boy, you’re getting warm.’

‘But the US would need to develop the counter weapon – and there’s no need to invade immediately because they’re still a few years away from battlefield deployment. The heat’s off. Anyhow, the UN has gone in. And guys like the Brit David Kelly are on the case.’

‘You are hot, Beck. I’m thinking of promoting you right now.’

‘But Saddam starts pissing with the UN inspection team. And we start wondering if he’s got something up his sleeve. The Israelis are getting anxious. And – 9/11…’

‘9/11. The issue of WMD shoots right up into the stratosphere. So the plan to invade is hatched. The ostensible purpose – well, you know all about that.’

‘And the government has to allow the Iraq Survey Group to throw egg on its face.’

‘Right, Beck. Because the US does not want it to be known that the weapon they were searching for really does exist.’

Beck’s jaw dropped. ‘So all that stuff about going to war on a false prospectus – and the Michael Moore film and all that stuff that suggested incompetence…’

‘Just had to be taken on the chin, son. I guess it always will. Why d’ya think Colin Powell – in spite of everything – still supported the war?

‘That’s the thing you gotta understand about a secret weapon, Beck. It’s only powerful when it’s secret. Get it?’

‘Just one question, sir?’

‘Shoot.’

‘Did the Iraqis have the weapon?’

Kellner smiled. ‘What d’ya think?’

44

Highway 2, Iraq

‘Saddam certainly liked his highways, Vinny.’

‘Yeah, Major. Like Hitler liked his autobahns.’ Vinny gazed into the featureless desert as they raced along Highway 2 towards Mosul. He had a thought. ‘Stalin was Saddam’s hero, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So, Major, why didn’t Stalin make a name for himself with highways across the Soviet Bloc?’

‘Yeah… Interesting question, Vinny. Dr Ashe, why didn’t Stalin make a name for himself in road transport?’

Ashe snapped out of the reverie induced by the dull hum of speeding along the well-metalled road. ‘Two reasons immediately spring to mind.’

‘Don’tcha just love this guy? Always something springing to mind! Jeez! You’ve got some fuckin’ spring in there, bud!’

‘I suppose the first requirement for a motorway is a car.’

Richmond stifled a laugh.

Vinny was agog. ‘Boy’s a genius!’

Ashe continued. ‘I just don’t think Hitler and Saddam were intimidated by private car ownership.’

Vinny cracked up.

‘Quiet a second, Vinny!’ Richmond’s face froze. ‘Something’s happened.’ The major tapped the side of his helmet. ‘Come on! Fucking thing!’ The transmission was faulty. ‘It’s… MND North. Blue Force in the vicinity. Call’s gone out for Brigade Combat Teams. I’m getting a coordinate.’ Richmond magnified the scale of his electronic route plan, then hit the Merc’s horn four times. The Humvee in front slowed down.

Zappa switched the CD player off.

Silence… as if the planet’s loudspeakers had been suddenly cut. A violent peace. The desert was full of silence; nothingness.

A US soldier unwrapped the tarpaulin sheets from the mounted guns on the Humvee in front, then unclipped the leather case off the M249 squad automatic weapon. He unhooked an ammo box and started threading the magazine into the firing chamber.

Richmond opened the driver’s door and called up to the driver in front. ‘I’m getting out. Bring your Operation Map with you!’

A soldier from the Humvee behind ran up to the tail area of the Humvee in front and started preparing the larger-calibre M240B machine gun.

‘See that, Toby?’

‘I seem to recall seeing something like that at the roadblock yesterday.’

‘Latest issue. It’s got a range of about 1.6 kilometres.’

‘Accuracy?’

‘About 800 metres pinpoint lethal – with an experienced crew.’

‘Rate of fire?’

‘He’ll get 600 rounds a minute. That’s what Bob Dylan calls “a hard rain”, Dr Toby.’

‘Let’s hope it’s not going to fall. What about the other gun?’

‘That’s an M249, a one-man operated weapon. Good to 600 metres – but the firepower’s more intense.’

‘How much more intense?’

‘750 rounds a minute. So you just relax there.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Before you do, try feeling under your seat… Yeah, that’s it. You got it. Can you feel the clip?’

‘I think so.’

‘You’ve gotten yourself there an M4 carbine, Dr Toby. Know how to use it?’

‘Did the course, Vinny.’

‘Feel ready?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Major Richmond will explain everything.’

‘May I relax now?’

‘Just keep your seat dry.’

Zappa unclipped his own M4.

‘Vinny?’

‘Toby?’

‘What was all that about Blue Force?’

‘They didn’t tell you that?’

‘I took the economy course.’

‘OK, it’s like this. Blue Force: good. Red Force…’ Vinny shook his head. ‘Red Force: bad.’

‘I see.’

‘See that box on the dash, just below the wheel?’

‘Check.’

‘That’s a Blue Force tracker. Major Richmond has one attached to his epaulette.’

‘Ah… That’s what that was. I suppose it’s replaced the customary parrot.’

‘It’s a global positioning system. It means someone knows where we are. It means we know when the bad guys are close. And it means we can call on the—’

‘Blue Force.’

‘Right. Blue Force – if we need assistance.’

‘What’s the method?’

‘See those buttons there. Nice and finger-shaped. You press all four buttons, three times. Four and three. You got that?’

‘Do I need to know?’

Zappa looked at him seriously. ‘You may need to know, Toby.’

‘Four buttons, three times. Right.’

‘Now, what the good major is doing with the corporal in front there, is checking coordinates for the presence of Blue Force in the vicinity. On the basis that this probably means there’s also something not good going on.’

‘I get the idea, Vinny. We’re in the shit.’

‘If you mean we should prepare for all eventualities, you are correct.’

Ashe sat back in his seat. To the left of him: nothing. Sand, sand and more sand. And to the right? There might as well have been a mirror on the side of the road.

Sweating like a wet peach, Richmond climbed back inside the air-conditioned Merc.

‘It would appear, gentlemen—’

‘Here it comes.’

‘That a British troop transporter, carrying mainly US troops, has gone down some miles west of here. There’s a turn-off to the right in about fifteen kilometres – a turning for Irbil – which right now is a highly sensitive area. That’s where the plane was heading. We’ve been requested to investigate the area where the aircraft lost contact with base.’

‘By ourselves, Major?’

‘No, there’s a Blue Force presence already in the vicinity. Composition unknown.’

‘That’s strange.’

‘Not necessarily. Anyhow, I could get no further details.’

Ashe closed his eyes. This was just the kind of open-ended scenario he’d been dreading. Then again, no one else was jumping for joy either.

‘Just what is the mission here, Major?’

‘Investigate the crash site – if there is a crash site; recover any survivors – if there are any survivors; submit a report on completion of task, and carry on to Mosul, pending further developments.’

‘Like we get to play heroes, right?’

‘We get to be soldiers, Vinny. Or, what is even more likely, nothing happens.’

‘You wanna bet?’

‘Corporal Pinsker’s leading the way. Sergeant Bolton’s following up behind. What could be nicer?’

The word ‘nicer’ rang in Ashe’s ears. He thought of Melissa, then dismissed the thought.

‘Major, you need two guys on the M240. Toby, are you listening?’

‘What?’

‘Are you listening?’

‘Er… yeah, two guys on the M240.’

‘Right. You need two guys on the M240. We’ve got four guys, plus ourselves and the interpreter. Basic math tells me that if we’re gonna need the M249 as well, one of us should go up ahead.’

‘Do I hear the voice of a volunteer, Vinny?’

‘Me and my big mouth! I must be nuts!’

‘No, Zap. We’re all nuts. But your nuts are bigger than ours, that’s all.’

45

Ashe stared at the flat horizon. That overused word ‘infinity’ dropped into his head; he recoiled from it. That which was welcome at death was no friend to the living. The word ‘desert’ was too close to the word ‘lost’ for comfort. Ashe became aware his teeth were grinding as he tried to get a sense of himself and where he was. What had appeared from the highway as sand was mostly hard-baked earth littered with loose stones and rocks. Sand was scattered over the surface like pepper on a pizza. It made for a bumpy ride and a nagging heckle of irritating gear changes.

The rocking and rolling made loading the M4 difficult; Ashe’s fingers were shaking. Richmond told him there was a spare combat jacket stuffed into the corner under his seat: useful for additional magazines. Ashe looked for a quip to lighten the atmosphere, but nothing came.

The truth was dawning: Richmond was less than optimistic about returning to the main road without incident. The tension inside the vehicle rose; the CD was left switched off without comment.

Mile after mile, they advanced northwest to the coordinates of the supposed troop-plane crash site – or, hopefully, the site of a crash landing – halfway between the main road to Mosul and Tel Afar, sixty miles away.

Richmond, observing Ashe through the rear-view mirror, could see he was nervous. Richmond was an experienced morale-builder, but his techniques were normally used on trained soldiers. Soldiers could be reminded of shared training experiences, encouraged to remember that they were more than ready for action; they could depend on one another. Ashe had not imbibed the ethos of regimental solidarity, tradition and discipline.

‘I’m going to stop the convoy in a second, Toby.’

‘Why’s that?’ shot back Ashe, nervously.

Richmond surmised that Ashe was moving fast towards a knife’s edge of anxiety, without the training to control it. The experience was entirely new to him.

‘Tell me how you feel, Toby.’

‘Sorry, Simon. It’s a bit… I’m a bit hot in here, that’s all.’

The air-con was on full blast.

‘Vinny’s a one, isn’t he Toby? Always makes everything sound so easy. Look at him out there on that gun. He’s loving every living minute of it. But, I tell you, he’s as afraid as you are.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s natural. He just knows a few tricks to keep it under control. Try something?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Take some deep breaths. As you do, make a picture of something here you’re afraid of. Now let it come over you. It won’t hurt you. Let it pass through you; don’t resist it. It’s a picture, a fear. How’s the breathing going?’

‘Difficult.’

‘Gets easier. Don’t bother resisting what you fear. Face it, but don’t oppose it.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Yeah, fuck.’

Ashe tried to breathe deeply. He hadn’t realised how short his breaths had become.

‘You’re doing fine. Give your brain some of that oxygen. Now hold it in. A few seconds. Now let it out very slowly. Slowly… Good. Trust me. Anyone can see you’ve got what it takes.’

‘Are you sure, Simon?’

‘As sure as you’re gonna be.’

‘I’ve never killed anyone.’

‘Just breathe deeply. Let the air out slowly. That’s it. The fear is washing over you. But you are a rock. You didn’t know it before. But you’re a rock.’

‘And this… is a hard place.’

‘Doesn’t have to be. Make it your own.’

Richmond knew to let Ashe’s own system take over the process of regaining control. He let the convoy roll on another half mile.

It was now two o’clock. Richmond suppressed a twinge of anxiety. Twilight descended so early in Iraq’s spring, and he would rather not be returning from the target site in the dark. The men would be tired; vision poor. Experience told him that most accidents happened on the way down from the summit.

‘Now, Toby, you need to consider the mission.’

‘Become the mission: target-centred.’

‘You’ve got it!’

‘At the centre of the circle, the Master Mason cannot err.’ Ashe remembered the great old line from the Masonic Third Degree lecture. Suddenly it seemed spot on.

‘Yeah, we’re at the centre of the circle, as you masons say. We’re instruments of the mission. The mission will take us through. We have each other and, in case you thought we were alone out here, we’re ringed by US airstrips, minutes of flight time away from here. It’s not like the old days with legions disappearing in the desert!’

Ashe laughed. Richmond joined in. ‘Poor buggers! I presume Vinny told you about the Blue Force trackers.’

‘Yeah. Four buttons; three times.’

‘You’ll make a soldier yet. See the route map here on the right of the dash?’

‘Yes.’

‘That little dot on the screen there is us. See to the south?’ Richmond adjusted the monitor. ‘That’s Qayyarah West airstrip. Near the oil well, there at Tall ’Azbah. West of there: another one at Sahl Sinjar. North of there: Tel Afar. That’s recently been reinforced. And thirty-odd miles away you’ve got the air base at Mosul.’

‘Bloody busy the desert, these days! Can’t you get any peace?’

Richmond laughed. ‘Big Brother’s everywhere. So long as that dot keeps flashing, they all know where we are. If I press this thing, choppers’ll be here in minutes.’

‘Shit! And I was thinking we were having a real adventure.’

‘It’s real, all right, Toby.’

‘Just one thing, Simon old boy.’

‘Yeah?’

‘If those choppers can be here in the time you suggest, what the hell are we doing making the reconnaissance?’

‘Standard procedure.’

‘Standard procedure?’

‘Yeah. Standard procedure to call in unengaged Blue Force in the vicinity.’

‘But where are the choppers?’

‘Glad you asked. Didn’t I mention the action northwest of here?’

‘Action?’

‘There’s been an attack on a village. I don’t know anything else about it, but the position has drawn in the available local air power, short of base defence.’

‘So what’s all that stuff about pressing buttons and the air cavalry turns up?’

‘If we encounter Red Force, Toby, they will send a detachment. You can take my word for that. Believe me, we’ll get air support if we need it. Standard procedure. Now I’m going to switch the convoy round a bit.’

46

Richmond accelerated ahead of the lead Humvee and waved it down. There was no sense using horns out in a high-risk zone.

Concerned the convoy had no active firepower in the rear, Richmond ordered the tail Humvee into the middle. Now he and Ashe would bring up the rear. Ashe would be able to concentrate on lookout duty.

In front of them: Sergeant Bolton and Ibrahim the interpreter – a weak link in the chain. In the lead vehicle: Corporal Pinsker driving, Zappa and Private Laski on the big gun, and Private Dykins behind the M249 squad automatic.

If Richmond entertained doubts about the suitability of the firepower for the mission at hand, he kept them to himself, telling Ashe that convoys like this were known ‘in the trade’ as porcupines: too prickly to be messed with. He’d made that up on the spot.

Ashe eyed the shimmering thread that hovered between earth and sky: nothing. Then he noticed a speck – a black speck in the distance. Mangled by heat-haze, the speck grew in size. Behind it, distantly, he could see what looked like a grey band on the horizon – maybe a distant mountain, or an in-coming storm.

‘What’s that speck?’

‘I can’t see it, Toby. I’ll drop back a bit.’

‘It looks like… maybe a distant mountain.’

‘How far?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe sixty or seventy miles.’

‘You’ve got remarkable eyesight, Toby. But it can’t be that far. It’s probably the Jebel Sinjar.’

‘Sinjar? As in Shinar?’

‘What’s Shinar?’

‘It’s the land where Noah and his lot came down to after the Great Flood. It’s where Nimrod built the Tower of Babel.’

‘Where all the races were divided?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Interesting. Come to think of it, from a distance, Sinjar does look a bit like the base of a massive ancient tower. It’s an amazing place. A bit like Ayers Rock in Australia. Only far bigger. A little mountain range popping up out of nowhere. You got flatland, flatland… nothing; then: Bang! Jebel Sinjar.’

‘Easy on the bangs, Simon!’

‘Still a bit jumpy? That village I mentioned – the one under attack – that would be up in the Sinjar. That’s where you’ll find our choppers.’

‘Comforting.’

‘As for the speck, I’ll bet it’s an oil derrick. There’s a drilling outpost at Tel Afar. Very close to the underground pipeline that runs south from Silopi, just over the Turkish border.’

‘Turkey? We’re that close?’

‘The pipeline runs south through Qayyarah West, just south of here.’

‘Wasn’t there a car bomb attack on the US facility at Tel Afar in December?’

‘Right. About thirty wounded. Could have been much worse. The guards did their job: approached the bombers and alerted the base. Even so, the suicide bomber detonated himself.’

‘And the bomber? Local insurgent or Ansar al-Islam?’

‘Tricky question, Toby. Last September, there was a new group announced.’

‘Yeah, I remember. Ansar al-Sunna. Defenders of the Tradition.’

‘Right. These guys are the main problem at the moment – at least in my sphere.’

‘What happened to the old group, Ansar al-Islam?’

‘Not entirely clear. Ansar al-Islam were mainly up in the Kurdish mountains northeast of here. Around Khurmal near the Iranian border. They threatened the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan forces, who are pro-democracy and modernisation, so they’re aligned with the Coalition. In March ’03, PUK peshmerga and US special forces mounted a joint op. You know how peshmerga vow to fight to the death? Well they pretty much took the Ansar al-Islam fighters apart. We thought we could rest a bit while the PUK exploited the gains.’

‘And now?’

‘To be honest, situation’s much worse. Ansar al-Sunna forces have been creeping back across the Iranian border in the hundreds. Corrupt Kurdish guards have been taking bribes. And they’ve been moving into Mosul, merging with the population, and working as fixers for al-Qaeda-backed operatives coming in from the western border with Syria.’

‘So you’ve got Ansar al-Sunna to the east of us, and al-Qaeda volunteers to the west of us. You could say we were—’

‘In the middle of things, yes.’

‘Shit.’

‘Hmm… And then there’s the problem with the reconciliation policy.’

‘The what?’

‘A nice idea. Major General Peter Atraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne, thought it might be wise to reintegrate some old Ba’athist Iraqi commanders – get them to work with the Kurds for the common good.’

‘As you say, a nice idea. Bad in detail?’

‘Maybe. The major general gave Syrian border security to General Muhammad al-Shiwah. He’s a member of the al-Shammari tribe. The tribe spans the frontier with Syria. It’s generally seen as being sympathetic to Saddam.’

Ashe observed how the speck seemed to be changing, like it was being smudged out, enveloped, yet somehow getting taller and taller.

‘Whatever the reason, Toby, we’ve now got a fairly porous border, with al-Qaeda-stimulated volunteers coming in from both sides and Ansar al-Sunna as the welcoming committee.’

‘That speck’s getting bigger. There’s a… what is it?’

Richmond reached into the glove compartment to his right and pulled out a telescopic sight. ‘Don’t bother mounting it on the M4, just tell me what you see.’

Ashe adjusted the focus. ‘It’s a… pillar of smoke.’

‘Must be a mistake.’

‘No, it’s on fire.’

Thoughts raced through Richmond’s head and they all crashed into one simple conclusion. ‘They’ve hit the pipeline.’

47

Richmond stamped hard on the accelerator and sped out to wave down the Humvees in front. As the Merc skidded to block Corporal Pinsker, a sudden flash and grinding thud hurled Ashe to the left as the landmine explosion shot the front right wheel spinning into the sky.

A second blast. A Katyusha rocket tore up the earth next to the Merc. Rocket shrapnel smashed through the bulletproof windows, tearing off what to Ashe’s shocked eyes looked like a piece of Richmond’s shoulder. The casing embedded itself in Ashe’s seat, inches from his head; Richmond’s shoulder bled.

Pinsker’s Humvee drew up at a 45-degree angle to the Merc’s left, to provide cover so Ashe and Richmond could get out. Bullets strafed the Merc’s side panels. With no one to protect it, grenades flew towards Sergeant Bolton’s Humvee.

Ashe clambered into the front of the Merc as bullets ricocheted off the bonnet. He dragged Richmond down and opened the driver’s door.

‘The tracker!’ screamed Richmond.

Ashe had a split second to think: three buttons, four times. No! Four buttons three times. Richmond’s shoulder tracker had been smashed in the blast; the other tracker box had been propelled off the dash. Ashe pulled Richmond out, then reached for the underside of the dashboard. Bullets shattered the glass and thudded and whistled into the interior.

Ashe strained for the tracker box with everything he’d got.

‘Don’t!’ screamed Richmond. ‘Leave it! It’s too dangerous!’

Ashe made contact with the box as bullets tore away the back seat. His fingers touched the four buttons; one was stuck.

‘Stuck!’

‘Hit it hard!’

Ashe pushed and pushed.

‘Get out of there!’

A second rocket blast lifted the front of the stricken Merc up four feet, nearly ripping Ashe’s arm out of its socket. Ashe was thrown over Richmond. Richmond screamed from the gash in his neck and shoulder.

At the rear of Pinsker’s Humvee, Dykins, Laski and Zappa were giving the machine guns everything they’d got. There was a problem: the angle. The wrecked Merc was obscuring the main target area. If it pulled away, they would lose cover, and Ashe and Richmond would be exposed on the ground.

Ashe pulled Richmond’s Browning out of the holster on his thigh and placed it in the major’s left hand. He then rolled over and levelled his M4 under the Merc’s chassis in the direction of the firing.

The firing ceased. There was no target: only rocks and stones and sand.

Richmond’s wavering voice broke the sudden silence. ‘Tell Bolton to come up to form a triangle.’

‘Does he need to be told?’

Richmond’s eyes pleaded for immediate action. Ashe nodded. ‘Bolton!’

‘I’m… dead, sir.’

‘What?’

Nothing.

‘Sergeant Bolton! Can you hear me!’

Silence again.

‘Oh Christ!’

Richmond was starting to feel the pain. ‘Get me some morphine, will you… Toby.’

Richmond passed out.

Ibrahim, alone in the cargo carrier, started singing out in Arabic. ‘There is no God but Allah! Muhammad is his Prophet!’

‘Dr Toby! You there?’

‘Zappa!’

‘Pipe down! Hey, Ibrahim! Cut it! They ain’t listenin’!’

‘What’s going on, Vinny?’

‘I guess they’re waiting till nightfall. They know they’ve got the advantage. Did you get a chance to signal Red Force presence?’

‘Sorry.’

‘No tracker?’

‘Chance in a million. Losing both.’

‘There go the reinforcements. You’re closer to the interpreter. Call for him to join you. He’s no good on his own out there with no weapon.’

‘Think he knows that, Vinny.’ Ashe called to Ibrahim; he wouldn’t budge.

‘Ibrahim, try and make a dash for it. They could open up again any second!’

‘I don’t reckon that invitation would get me out of a hole, Toby! Hey, Ibrahim, move your goddamn ass out of that truck! Guy’s frozen, I guess. What I can’t see is, why don’t they use another rocket?’

‘Maybe they only had the two left, Vinny. Look to the left a second. That’s what they must’ve done with the others.’

A hefty slab of RAF Hercules fuselage glistened as the sun kissed the horizon.

‘How’s the major?’

‘Passed out. His neck’s in a mess.’

Vinny said nothing.

‘What’s the tactic, Vinny? What are they going to do?’

‘I guess they’re gonna try and kill us, Toby.’

‘The burning pipeline. That’s going to attract Blue Force.’

‘Three miles away – through the black smoke. You better start praying, Toby.’

‘Praying?’

‘You pray, son. Pray with all your heart.’

Ashe prayed. He prayed for Simon Richmond. He prayed for Sergeant Bolton. He prayed for everyone but himself.

Vinny broke the awful silence. ‘You know, we got one secret weapon here.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The accelerator. We got speed. I reckon that’s our best hope. First you gotta get yourself and Major Richmond – and Ibrahim, if only the poor bastard will move his ass – into this truck. Without getting yourselves killed. And you better do it soon. Because it’s gonna be awful dark in ten minutes.’

Ashe looked at Richmond, unable to staunch the blood that soaked his ripped shirt.

Not a medic in sight. Ashe called to the second Humvee. ‘Ibrahim! Try and get over to me. We’ve got one chance. Ibrahim, save yourself… I don’t think he’s moving, Vinny.’

‘Can you drag the major over here?’

‘I think so, but if they’re looking closely, they’ll see us.’

‘I’ll cover you boys.’

A voice came from the gloom. ‘Doctor Ashe! Doctor Ashe!’

‘Ibrahim?’

‘I try to come.’

As the Iraqi started to squeak open the Humvee’s rear door, Ashe heard the sound of scurrying feet emerging from the shadows. He strained for a target. He couldn’t see a thing. Smashed glass. Someone had climbed into the rear of the truck.

‘Doctor Ashe! They’re—’

Ibrahim screamed. Ashe, helpless, heard the sickening sounds of a desperate struggle – then the sound of running feet. Something was being dragged away.

Ashe was forced backwards by the power of the blast. The Humvee exploded – a parting grenade tore into the twilight, scattering debris and human limbs around the desert.

Zappa felt a sinking feeling.

‘For Christ’s sake, Ashe, get yer ass over here now!’

Ashe’s eyes were suddenly blinded. Two huge searchlights shot across the site as two Toyota pickups drove up the sides of a depression. The lights scattered disorienting beams over the startled survivors. Now Ashe could see what had happened to the convoy.

The three vehicles had driven into a shallow dried-up riverbed. The late-afternoon light had obscured the true dimensions of the depression: perfect for an ambush.

An Arab voice boomed hysterically through a megaphone. ‘Christians! Christian Crusaders in the land of Islam! You are prisoners of the holy jihad of the army of Ansar al-Sunna! There is no escape. The whole world will see! We have man with camera. Everything we do will be shown on your television screen. On the internet in the homes of your families. We film you even now! Surrender for the camera and for your lives! Allah is merciful to Crusaders who desert the armies of the Devil! No mercy for traitors who serve Jews and Christians!

‘Christians say they love everyone. We have your servant here. Here is traitor Muslim who serves infidel! We cut his head off. No true Muslim will serve Jews and Christians! If you love this man like you say, save him. You show your mercy. Want to see this man with head hacked off? Leave your weapons now. Surrender to mercy of Allah now! Save him and yourself! One minute, Christian devils! One minute!’

48

Vinny’s stomach was churning. A thought flashed into his mind. A US officer had recently been kidnapped. He’d been released after having promised to desert the army; he’d deserted and walked into Syria – which was more than he would have done had he defied his kidnappers.

‘What the hell do we do, Toby? They mean what they say. Major come round?’

‘Negative, Vinny.’

Ashe’s will was pinched in a bottleneck. His mind began to fog over as if his life was suddenly crammed into a few seconds. Anger rose like a dragon in his soul. How dare these bastards use God’s name for rank murder? What low, twisted, cynical, criminal barbarity – what kind of scum were these, to drag the name of the Almighty God into their vile, blood-drenched banalities? A poor young man, with his own life to live – the life God gave him to live – how dare they hold him with a butcher’s knife to his throat, as if his existence were theirs to play with? Every fibre of Ashe’s body shivered and shook with indignation and righteous anger. Where this energy came from, Ashe knew not, nor was he thinking.

Suddenly, Ashe was pulling himself forwards under the twisted chassis of the Merc. He wrenched himself out from beneath it and screamed at the black-masked faces hovering round the searchlights. ‘How dare you? How dare you? How dare you call this God’s work? What do you know of God? What do you know of God’s love? Nothing! What you do is not the will of God! This is NOT—’

To the utter shock of the terrorists, he opened fire at the searchlights. He saw Ibrahim slump forwards. A bullet ricocheted off a lamp into the neck of the terrorist with the butcher’s knife. He recoiled as Ibrahim’s apparently lifeless body slid down the bonnet of the Toyota and fell down the stony slope. Ashe kept firing.

‘Give ’em hell, Toby! Just give the fuckers hell!’ Zappa turned to his driver. ‘Pinsker! Pull out! Give us a look at these bastards!’

Ashe ran back around the wrecked Merc as bullets from the Toyotas flew into the darkness. Ibrahim – incredibly not dead after all – crawled for all he was worth towards the back of the Humvee.

Pinsker reversed the vehicle. As Ibrahim heaved himself up, Zappa and Private Laski opened fire with the M240. In five seconds, fifty rounds of 7.62 mm bullets tore up the windows, roofs and passengers of the Toyotas; Dykins on the 249 sprayed the surrounding area, blasting at the hooded killers with 750 lethal rounds a minute.

Zappa was screaming at the enemy: he was part of the gun, part of the fire. ‘Ashe! Get Richmond into the vehicle! We’ll cover you! Go!’

Ashe slung the M4 over his shoulder, took hold of Richmond’s boots and dragged him across the open ground towards the throbbing Humvee. A grenade came over the brow of the dune right into the wrecked Merc. The explosion shot shrapnel and debris in all directions. Laski was hit in the face by razor-sharp torn bodywork.

‘For Christ’s sake, Ashe! Get up here! Feed me some ammo!’

‘Need help, Vinny! With the major!’

‘Private Dykins! Cover!’

‘Sir!’

Dykins turned the 249 towards the brow and kept up the barrage. Zappa jumped down, pulled Richmond over his shoulder and dumped him in the armament bay of the Humvee. ‘Feed me, Ashe! Get that fuckin’ ammo in this thing! Pinsker!’

‘Sir!’

‘Head back east – full speed!’

Another grenade was launched at the Humvee, exploding by its rear. The back wheels leapt up like a stallion, sending Dykins flying out of the vehicle.

‘Pinsker! Stop! It’s Dykins!’

Dykins got up off the ground, dizzy, and ran, groping, towards the Humvee.

‘Turn the fuckin’ lights off!’

A bevy of terrorists, all in black uniforms, stormed over the hill, screaming and firing their AK-47s into the darkness.

‘Shit! The bastards’ve got night vision!’

‘Here, Ashe! Just pull the trigger! The trigger, Ashe! Squeeze it!’ Zappa reached over the side. Bullets whizzed past and bounced off the armour plating. His hand caught Dykins’. ‘Go, Pinsker! Dykins, hold on! Hold on!’ Dykins ran alongside the escaping Humvee, grabbing desperately onto Zappa’s arm. ‘Jump, man! Jump! Now!’

Zappa had Dykins by the waist, his legs dangling over the side. A line of bullets riddled the side of the Humvee, thudding into Dykins’ body armour, rocking his torso. As Zappa hauled him aboard, one of the bullets thudded through Dykins’ armpit.

‘Dykins!’

Dykins gurgled, blood in his mouth. Zappa pulled the limp Dykins onto the floor, next to Laski’s by now unconscious body. Zappa then pushed Ashe back to the ammo feed.

‘Open another box. Right hand! Yeah, you got it! Good! Now give it to me!’

Ashe struggled with the mechanism.

‘For Christ’s sake, Ashe!’

The 240 jammed. Zappa reached for the 249 and began firing wildly as the Humvee sped away east. Dykins was moaning, his lung punctured.

Ashe reloaded his M4 and sent bursts of bullets into the blackness beyond. ‘Hit ’em! Hit ’em hard!’ screamed Zappa like a madman.

Another Toyota pickup revved up and started in pursuit.

‘Put your fuckin’ foot down, Pinsker!’

Ashe, in a frenzy of fire, hit the Toyota’s lights. The vehicle braked and skidded in a cloud of dirt and dust.

‘That’s fucked him, Vinny!’

Vinny was on his gun. Out of the darkness came an almighty smash. The Toyota had crashed into wrecked Hercules fuselage. The shouting and the bullets stopped.

In the far distance, US choppers were circling the Tel Afar oil outpost, searchlights sending weird, apocalyptic beams about the distant derricks, like the legs of some hideous creature from hell’s U-bend.

Ashe was shaking, vibrating with elation; elated to be alive, to have faced the evil and channelled the evil in himself. No, it wasn’t that. Something had come alive in him as if a stranger was in the driving seat of his mind and mindlessness.

In the starlight, Ashe looked into Vinny’s flaming eyes, and saw himself. And the quietness of the night seemed to take over, as the groans from Dykins grew softer.

‘We gotta get to Mosul!’

Richmond came to; the blood in his neck and shoulder had begun to clot.

‘How ya feelin’, Major?’

‘What’s happening? I thought I was dead. God, I feel sick.’

‘You’re OK.’

‘Where are we?’

Ashe stared at him. ‘We’re here, Simon. We’re here.’

Zappa turned to the interpreter. ‘Ibrahim! Take off your shirt!’

‘Yes, Mr Zappa.’

‘Thank you, Ibrahim. Wrap it round the major’s wound. Know first-aid?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Neither do I. Try and go easy.’

‘It’s OK, Vinny. I think the bleeding’s stopped. I guess it looks pretty awful.’

‘The red badge of courage, Major.’

‘Courage?’ Richmond laughed. ‘I slept through the whole thing.’

Ashe looked to the ailing Private Dykins. Dykins screamed for his mother with every cruel vibration of the Humvee on the desert rocks.

Ashe held him in his arms. ‘You’ll be all right, Private. We’ll be home soon.’

Ashe put his ear to Dykins’ trembling lips. ‘Where are we, sir?’

‘See those stars, Private?’

‘Sir?’

‘Look up, they’re showing us the way. We’re all together, Private. You and us.’

Dykins seized Ashe’s hand. ‘Sir, did I do OK?’

‘You did great, didn’t he, Vinny?’

‘Private Dykins, you’ve served man and God. Try to be peaceful till we’re home.’

Ashe held the dying soldier. Ibrahim gave him mineral water and prayed to Allah.

Dykins pulled once more on Ashe’s arm. ‘Sir, I don’t think I’m going to…’

‘That’s all right. You sleep now. We’re safe.’

‘Sir, is God…?’

The grip became a spasm, left behind as Private Abraham Lincoln Dykins died.

‘You see that, Ibrahim?’

‘Mr Ashe?’

Ashe showed the Iraqi a letter from Dykins’ blood-soaked breast pocket. ‘He’s got the same name as you, Ibrahim. Abraham. Father of nations.’

Ibrahim handed the water to Zappa who gave it to the thirsty Richmond.

Ashe looked to the stars and thought of the ladder that links man to his destiny.

‘Vinny, my friend. I was just thinking. Maybe the headlights?’

Zappa unclipped the rear window behind Pinsker’s driving seat.

‘Pinsker, how d’ya feel about front lamps, dipped? Doctor’s getting jumpy.’

‘Front lights only: dipped, sir.’

Pinsker hit the brakes.

‘Oh Jesus! What in fuck’s name is THAT?’

49

‘Hey, Pinsker, where d’ya keep the night goggles?’

‘Box in the rear, sir.’

‘What fuckin’ box?’

‘Dykins knows, sir. He packed ’em.’

‘Ibrahim, what you sitting on? Move your ass. That’s government property, bud.’

‘Pardon! Pardon!’

‘Only kiddin’, man. Yup, this is it.’

Zappa unclipped the box and withdrew a set of night goggles with adjustable sights. ‘Holy Shit! Here, Ashe, take a look!’

About fifty metres ahead were two trucks packed with a crowd of Arabs standing up in the back, waving and chanting.

‘Can you hear that, Ashe? What they sayin’?’

‘It’s a welcome party, Vinny.’

Ibrahim interjected. ‘Welcome party, yes, sir. But welcome for Ansar al-Sunna – not US army.’

Richmond pulled himself up. ‘Give me a look.’

‘You sure you’re up to this, Major?’

‘Don’t be an arse. Give me the goggles.’ He focused his attention on the trucks. ‘OK, chaps. What you have here is a very mixed bunch of illegal immigrants. I’ll bet it’s the usual collection of Moroccans, Yemenis, Saudis, Syrians. They’ll have been brought over the Syrian border on al-Qaeda one-way tickets. I presume the guys we encountered back there were their welcoming committee, ready to tuck them into warm beds in Mosul, before a trip to suicide’s paradise.’

‘Suicide volunteers?’

‘Yes, Toby. Though they might not all be aware of that yet. You can tell from that unreal, happy look.’

‘Every insurance salesman’s dream client.’

‘Shit!’

‘Shit it is. I reckon they think we’re the welcoming committee.’

Zappa clicked shut the trigger chamber of the 240. ‘They’ll get some fuckin’ welcome, man!’

‘How many do you see, Simon?’

‘Two trucks. About twenty in each.’

‘Armed?’

Richmond strained to see the greenish images through the goggles. ‘Not yet.’

‘Four against forty?’

‘Element of surprise?’

‘Simon, what if we shut lights down, vanish into the night, no questions asked?’

Richmond sounded personally affronted. ‘And leave forty suicide bombers, Toby? What d’you think we’re here for? Just one of these guys can kill a hundred innocent civilians – women and children.’

‘Cool it, Major. Dr Toby ain’t chicken. You owe your fuckin’ life to this guy, and so do I. So I say we leave it to him to decide what we do next.’

Ashe didn’t need to think. ‘I don’t like suicide bombers, Vinny. Against my religion.’

Corporal Pinsker butted in. ‘Trucks have started up, sir. Coming our way.’

‘OK. I say we come real close, Major, duck down fast, and then let ’em have it!’

‘I second that, Vinny.’

‘Why, thank you, Major. You get the M249. Can you handle it?’

‘Fuck off, Zap. I’m OK with my left.’

‘Toby, you feed me the ammo. Keep it up and steady, right? When we’re within fifty feet, I’ll signal to Pinsker to—’

‘Sir!’

‘Corporal Pinsker?’

‘I got this viewfinder thing here, sir. And I’d say they’re wavin’ AK-47s. And… they’re heading straight for us, sir.’

‘Right, Pinsker. Lights out. We’ll race it. If they don’t know who we are, they’ll—’

‘And if they do?’

‘We do our duty, Corporal!’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘Skirting operation. Sweep round in a crescent. Give us a good view. Carry on.’

‘Yes, sir!’

The Humvee revved up towards the advancing trucks. Suddenly, the trucks switched their headlights off and skidded to a halt. Amid a flurry of shouting, the men jumped off the trucks.

‘Pull right! Pinsker! Right!’

The guns of the wannabe martyrs opened up on the Humvee. Zappa hit back, straight into the gunsmoke. Unable to load efficiently, the 249 jammed. Richmond grabbed the M4 and manoeuvred a fresh mag into position. As the Humvee skidded round the trucks, Richmond added wide bursts to the power of the 240.

‘That’s it, Pinsker! Round we go!’

A stray bullet hit a rear tyre. Collapsing instantly, the Humvee dived into an angled skid that tore a gash in the earth. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn! We lost a goddamn wheel!’

‘Engine off, Pinsker!’

Distant cries grew louder through the earth and billowing sand. Zappa spread some warning rounds in the direction of the voices.

‘You there, Ashe?’

‘I want to do some shooting, Vinny.’

‘Fix the belt on the 249. Major, can you help me with the ammo – left-handed? Just remember, Ashe, these fuckers are suicides.’

‘Just remember, Vinny, they’re deluded. Truth will prevail!’

‘You better believe it!’

Ashe unclipped the firing chamber and reset the magazine of the M249. ‘That’s done it. I’m ready.’

‘Then fire the bastard!’

‘Ibrahim! You take the major’s rifle. Only fire at the enemy!’

‘I never use gun.’

‘First time for everything, Ibrahim. It might save your life!’

Bullets thudded into the earth in front of the stricken Humvee.

‘That was close.’

‘We must have hit a dozen.’

‘Sure?’

‘Why not?’

‘Sir!’

‘Pinsker!’

‘OK if I get my weapon, sir?’

‘Permission granted.’

‘Join the party, Corporal. We ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

‘What’s that?’

‘What?’

‘Those lights?’

‘Not…’

‘It’s those fuckers from Tel Afar. There’s more of ’em. How we doin’ for ammo?’

‘Enough, but…’

Ashe looked at Zappa; Zappa looked at Richmond. Richmond smiled. A shared moment of cold reality: they knew. This was it; their luck had just run out.

The headlights got closer and closer as AK-47 fire spat out of the blackness.

‘What’s that sound?’

‘What fuckin’ sound?’

‘That sound. Listen!’

‘What the…? Is that a storm?’

A whirlwind roar whipped its way around the Humvee – an ancient sound, elemental, pounding. A voice from history on the heels of memory.

‘Weird fuckin’ noise, man.’

‘Sounds like—’

‘Guns. Thunder.’

Richmond coughed. ‘Haven’t you ever heard horses before? I think our luck’s in.’

In the distance, the jihadists started screaming out. They’d heard nothing about this in the madrasahs or on the videos. Ashe stared along the horizon. The black silhouettes of dozens of horsemen bobbed across the landline like demented shadow-puppets. The roaring force broke into two arcs: one hundred warriors on each flank.

‘I don’t fuckin’ believe it! It’s the Light Brigade.’

‘No, Vinny. It’s the Brigade of Light!’

Ashe’s eyes stretched wider and wider. He had never seen anything like it. In seconds, the horsemen had overwhelmed the jihadists with snorting, fiery horsepower – a vision from history, terrifying the enemy with memories long forgotten, buried in the mythic subconscious of their parents and grandparents.

Horseman after horseman swung their British SA80 semiautomatics like scythes before alien corn, letting loose a tornado of firepower that shattered and scattered the screaming forces of the killer fanatics.

50

‘Toby, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

‘You, Simon, are in no condition to introduce anyone.’

The silhouette of a man on horseback advanced towards them. Ashe jumped from the Humvee. Gracefully, the man dismounted. In the headlights’ glow, Ashe could just make out a long-haired man with a long, thin face. Above high cheekbones shone large, dark eyes. He wore the baggy trousers common among Kurdish men and women, but sported what looked like English hunting boots. Over an American special forces combat jacket hung a silk cape, embroidered in gold and silver. Beneath the jacket he wore a white shirt, loose at the front, with a wide collar, and fastened at the back. He had a shaven chin and a young man’s thin moustache lining his upper lip.

The man smiled warmly at Richmond, leaning over the Humvee’s side panel.

‘I am deeply honoured, Major Richmond. How may I serve you?’

‘Done enough for one night, Captain. Permit me to introduce my friend, Toby Ashe.’

‘Tobbiash! A friend of the Major Richmond is a friend of my heart and my people. I am at your service.’

Ashe clasped the man’s hot, smooth hand.

‘Toby, this is Jolo. Jolo Kheyri. I call him the Lord of the Mountain.’

‘No, no, no! Please, Major Richmond! This honour belongs to my kinsman, who is in Paradise. Hamo Shero. He is Chief of the Mountain!’

‘The mountain being the Jebel Sinjar, Toby.’

‘Hamo Shero fought with the British against the Turks in your first war with Germany. What your Lawrence of Arabia is to you, Hamo Shero is to us.’

‘Jolo lives in Shero’s image. We are blessed in… Agh!’

‘What’s the matter?’

Richmond clutched his shoulder: bleeding again.

‘Major Richmond, you need the field hospital in Mosul. Hasil! Hasil!’

Jolo’s deputy rode up to the Humvee. ‘Hasil! Call special forces in Kursi! Medical helicopter for Major Richmond. Inform them of this action.’

‘It is done, Captain.’

Jolo studied Ashe’s eyes. ‘I am from Kursi, Tobbiash, yes. Yesterday, as the sun rose, Kursi was a fine village. It sits on slopes of Sinjar mountains. We grew good tobacco on the terraces. Then, Ansar al-Sunna. Grenade launchers, guns, knives. They come to find me. I am not there. So the men defend women and children, you understand?’

‘That’s the attack on the village I told you about, Toby. Damn it! Pinsker’s morphine’s wearing off. OK, Jolo Kheyri is a relative of Sheykh el-Wezîr, the grandson of Hamo Shero, Chief of the Mountain.’

Jolo beamed. ‘A great man, Tobbiash! Pious and brave!’

‘A great man. We’ve been doing a bit of work round here setting up an irregular auxiliary force. In the past, we made the mistake of trying to fit Jolo’s people into our ways of fighting.’

‘Not good, Major.’

‘Now we complement one another. Jolo plays on his strengths; we support him. They’re very good at night, as you’ve seen. They’ve been doing great tidying up and reconnaissance work, and they know what’s going on. They know who’s new in the district.’

Jolo interjected. ‘It is sinful, Tobbiash. Under Americans, safe haven very, very good for our people. British and Americans fight evil people. Saddam cannot kill more of us. Muslims cannot kill us. Then are coming all these foreigners – from Iran, from Syria. And Turks, these are spying on us.

‘None of these outsiders care for Iraq or people of Iraq. They do not care for Kurds! And they do not care for us! They hate us and call us Devil worshippers! We do not worship Devil! They claim God is their master, but they do not understand things about God. They are given evil teaching. They kill women and children and will not fight face to face. They are like criminals. They use human beings as bombs and hide their face in black mask. They love guns and death and beg for money even when they are not poor. They have lost sight of God. They blame everyone but themselves. Their Devil lives inside their own hearts, for they are blind.

‘We, not they, are the Defenders of the Tradition!’

Ashe was transfixed. Beneath the starry canopy of a northern Iraqi sky, not far from the ruined Assyrian cities and lost palaces of Nineveh and Khorsabad, Ashe was listening to an ancient voice. This was a voice whose strange, majestic, poetic beauty seemed to come if not from another world, then from the pages of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom or the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

It was not what Jolo was saying, so much as the hidden music and mind within and between his words. But why, Ashe wondered, did this Iraqi man refer to the Muslims as though referring to something almost alien? Was he a Christian? There were many Christians in Iraq, and their churches were as old as any in the world, though their voices were seldom heard.

Could he be a Mandaean, one of those who claimed John the Baptist as the last prophet and who lived in the marshlands south of Baghdad? At least, that is, until Saddam wrecked the ecology of the marshes and persecuted the people there.

‘Tell me, Jolo—’

Ashe suddenly stopped himself. Behind Jolo, the horsemen were rounding up the surviving Arabs, tying their hands behind their backs, treating their wounds. What with the horses, the men, the heightened atmosphere, the burning fire of the wrecked oil derricks in the distance – it was as if he was standing in the midst of some vast epic. Then he realised: he was.

Ashe had strayed into history, the kind of history that makes legends. To meet a man like Jolo – a man living in extremis, beyond natural limits – was to encounter a life in which something other is generated: something pertaining to the soul. Ashe could see how, when this quality collides with memory, legend is produced: naturally and poetically coalescing in the ancient forms of myth.

Hamo Shero was as real and present to Jolo as Major Richmond and himself.

‘Tell me about the horses, Jolo.’

‘Very good for night-time work. Very good for all work. Ezidis are great horsemen. We have fought on horse for hundreds of years, against Egyptians, Turks, Iranians, Arabs. We have fought in Russian cavalry! When Berlin falls and Adolf Hitler kills himself, two Ezidis there also – the first in Berlin since a hundred years. Before Jesus and Moses, we were there.’

Ashe enjoyed the heroic exaggerations but wished to get the conversations back down to earth. ‘Where did the horses come from?’

‘From Khuda.’

Richmond butted in. ‘He’s saying the horses are a gift of God. But in reality they were brought from the hills of the Transcaucasus – from Georgian Armenia – at very great risk to his people.’

‘We are used to risk, Major Richmond.’

That word was ringing in Ashe’s ears… Ezidi. Did he mean Yezidi? Ashe had read about these people before – an ancient tribe with mysterious customs and traditions.

‘Is Jolo a… Yezidi, Simon?’

‘Didn’t I make that clear?’

51

Zappa returned from the group of captured jihadists carrying a large backpack full of passports and border permits.

‘Yup, we got the usual shit here. We got Yemenis, Saudis, Jordanians, Syrians – just like you said, Major. We got some Iraqis from Tikrit. We even got us an Algerian. We may even have us a leader of Ansar al-Sunna. Won’t that look nice in the report?’

He threw the bag up into the air; it landed with an empty thump on the ground. Jolo’s horse began chewing at it.

‘No, Bucephalus! Later!’

‘Bucephalus?’

‘Captain Jolo, this is Vincent Zappa, DIA, Mosul.’

‘Honoured, sir!’

‘Wasn’t Bucephalus…?’

‘Alexander the Great’s horse, yes Mr Dappa. His spirit returns to us.’

‘It’s Zappa, Captain.’

‘Yes, Dappa.’

‘OK, it’s Dappa! Pleased to meet you. And you must be the Scourge of the East!’

Jolo laughed.

‘Like I said, Major. We got us a fine bag. Medals all round.’

‘Medal?’ Jolo’s eyes lit up. ‘I like a medal. I put it on my sash.’

Richmond started coughing, feverishly, then passed out.

‘Hasil! Hasil! How long for helicopters to come for Major?’

Hasil shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Then call again! Emergency!’

Ashe got on to the Humvee and found a blanket for Richmond. Hasil nodded to the contact on the other end of the mobile. ‘They come soon! They come for Major!’

‘Don’t forget poor Laski here!’

‘No one is forgotten. Come with me, Tobbiash, to friends in Bashiqa.’

‘Bashiqa… That’s in the Sheikhan, isn’t it?’

‘Not very far from Mosul. East. Good country. The Sheikhan is good country. Our country.’

‘What about Vinny and the major?’ Ashe was thinking of his task.

‘Mr Dappa, will you join us?’

‘Captain Jolo, I’d just love to join you and Toby and all the Yezidis at Bashiqa. Really I would. But I got work to do in Mosul. There ain’t much time.’

‘Oh yeah? Nice try, Vinny. I know you’re fed up of me hanging round your neck. But I don’t think my superiors are gonna be happy with my taking a paid sabbatical.’

‘Hey, bud, don’t get me wrong. You’ve done your share. And I love your company. But how about giving Vinny some arm- and leg-room here? I’m workin’ best on my own.’

‘But—’

‘Listen, my clever friend, the second I got beans on our Turkish friends Yildiz and Yazar, you’ll hear from me. Might even bring ’em to you direct! Express service, how about that? Now give Vinny a break. You head off with Jolo. Hell! You’ll be a lot safer with him in Bashiqa than with me in Mosul. I don’t want you slowin’ me down.’

Jolo looked upset. ‘Turks, Mr Dappa?’

‘Not friends necessarily, Captain. But I’d know better if I could just locate ’em.’

‘We help you. My people help you.’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

For all his curiosity about the Yezidis, Ashe wasn’t ready to part from Vinny and Richmond. ‘Really, Vin, it’s Mosul for me, come what may. I’ve got to see the major’s all right and stay close to things.’

‘Now, Toby—’

Jolo pointed to the skies. ‘Look! Choppers!’

Three Chinooks from Tel Afar swooped down towards them. Seeking landing space, they hovered overhead, their lights darting beams across the desert floor.

Zappa waved at the chopper crews. ‘Hey, taxi! Over here!’

The Chinooks landed and three US medics leapt out and raced over to Richmond. Zappa rushed to greet them. Pointing at Ashe, Zappa tried to say something to one of the medics, but couldn’t be heard against the roar of the choppers. He steered the medic towards Ashe, then returned to help with Richmond.

‘Dr Ashe?’

‘Yeah. Hadn’t you better help with the major?’

‘He’s gonna be just fine. My colleagues can handle him, sir. Hear you’ve had some trouble here. How ya feelin’?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Breathing, sir. Are you feeling breathless, Dr Ashe?’

Ashe was taken aback. ‘Breathless? Well, since you ask, it’s been a bit tight since the battle. I hadn’t really noticed.’

‘Yeah, I can see y’all been busy here. Wait there please.’

The medic ran over to consult his colleagues as they strapped the major’s stretcher to one of the Chinooks. Returning with a stethoscope, the medic smiled. ‘Shirt up, Dr Ashe! Now breathe in and out slowly.’

The Chinook carrying Richmond rose into the sky, whipping up the sand. The medic started coughing. Ashe was anxious to get away, but the medic held his shoulder, pressing the stethoscope diaphragm firmly to Ashe’s chest and back. ‘Now cough, sir. And again. Once more. Now breathe in slowly, sir. And out again.’ He took the stethoscope from his ears. ‘OK, Dr Ashe. If you’re a medical doctor, I won’t have to explain pneumothorax to you.’

‘I’m a doctor of philosophy, Doctor.’

‘OK. You’ve had quite a shock. Been knocked about? Heavy weight on your body?’

‘You could say that.’

‘OK, you’ve had more than the usual amount of air in your lungs. Abnormal breathing. I don’t want you in the chopper, sir.’

‘Not you as well!’

‘I can’t be sure right here, but I think you might have excess air in your pleural space – between your chest wall and lungs. The atmospherics up there could exacerbate a pneumothorax. I am not joking, Dr Ashe. You better stay on dry land, sir, and try to take it easy. Can you do that?’

Ashe nodded.

‘If breathing is not completely normal tomorrow, or if you feel at all uncomfortable with it, or if you have a dry cough you can’t explain, you get your friends to take you to an army hospital, d’ya hear? And, Dr Ashe, I recommend you keep far away from stressful situations. At least for a few days.’

‘I’ll try.’

Zappa returned to Ashe. ‘What was that about stress?’

‘Very clever, Vinny.’

‘I was concerned for you, Toby. I knew you wouldn’t take it from me. I’ve seen these things before.’

Ashe looked over to Hasil and his fellow horsemen as they lined up the Arab prisoners for the long walk back to the US base at Mosul. ‘Couldn’t I go with them?’

‘Stress-free, Toby. Guarding terrorist prisoners is not what I’d call stress-free. Now I don’t want to hear any more about it. And I gotta run. May the good Lord bless and keep you, Toby. You’re in good hands.’

Ashe smiled. ‘I’ll miss you, Vin.’

‘And d’you know somethin’, you Limey bastard?’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’ll cope.’

As Zappa disappeared into the third Chinook, Ashe looked up to see Jolo waiting on horseback.

‘Is destiny, Tobbiash. Come!’

With a final burst of energy, an exhausted Ashe climbed onto Bucephalus and he, Jolo and a detachment of thirty Yezidis rode eastwards beneath the stars to Bashiqa.

52

Long before the detachment of Yezidi irregulars crossed the waters near the point where the Great Zab River disgorged her bulging foam into the long-drifting Tigris, Ashe had fallen asleep. Some silent will kept his arm around Jolo’s waist, his head resting on Jolo’s tireless back.

Ashe woke as Jolo brought the horse to a standstill. The anvil-hot sun, glowing rich and red, rose from the horizon. Jolo dismounted and raced forwards to kiss the ground where the sun’s rays touched the earth. He crossed his arms before his chest and bowed three times. He kissed his forefingers and brought them to his forehead. Then he pulled up the collar of his shirt and kissed that.

Ashe glimpsed this curious ritual between half-closed eyes. Was he dreaming?

Jolo rejoined his horse and apologised to Ashe. ‘It was not I who woke you, Tobbiash, but Sheykh Shems. He brings you light.’

The words meant nothing to Ashe, but he had a vague sense of déjà vu. ‘You know, Jolo, where I live in England, there was once a saint.’

Jolo listened eagerly. ‘Yes? Who was this holy man? Was he Ezidi?’

‘His name was Chad, or Caedda.’

‘Caedda. This word is like Kurmanji name, Khidr. Like our word for God: Khuda.’

‘I suppose it is. Chad, it is said, awoke at dawn and went outside to stand by a well. There he greeted the rising sun with hymns.’

Jolo’s eyes lit up. ‘Your saint in England. He is friend of Sheykh Shems. The sun is for everyone on earth. From here in the Sheikhan to you in England. When you visit shrine of Sheykh Shems, you may pray to your… Caedda. You may speak to him, and he will speak to you. Yes!’

‘That would be something.’

‘Your saint with Khuda in Paradise, Tobbiash. To him, years are nothing. Your Caedda is one of the living ones. He speak to you.’

Rain began to fall, heavily and sharply. Jolo led Bucephalus by the reins and his men followed in the blue dawn light. The detachment joined the old track west of Mosul, avoiding the new road that had brought so much harm. The track took them through wet cornfields and beanfields, their booted feet cushioned by the sweet-smelling clover called nofil that grew everywhere.

As the sun rose higher and ruddy continents of clouds streaked the sky, Ashe realised the desert was far behind – on the other side of the night; the blood and killing on another side of himself.

For the irregulars, the night had brought a small victory – amply justifying their recruitment and payment. The extremism of the jihadist – no stranger to the ways and history of the region – left Yezidi families with little choice but to resist where possible. Not being ‘people of the Book’, as Muslims are defined by the Koran, nor being Christians or Jews, Yezidis were continually exposed to ancient hatreds in Iraq, Turkey, Georgian Armenia, and Iran.

Ansar al-Sunna demanded an all-Islamic, fundamentalist state in Iraq. Christians might be subjected to dhimmitude – humiliating second- or third-class status – while Jews would barely be tolerated. For Yezidis there was no place at all: in the event of Ansar al-Sunna’s fulfilling its dreams, the only options for Yezidis who wished to stay in their homeland, would be to convert to Islam or be butchered. Yezidis had never willingly converted, and their enthusiasm for life and their faith had kept them alive.

The men now resembled a posse of pilgrims come to some sacred place, quite different from the furious force of the previous evening.

As they approached Bashiqa, Ashe was struck by the peculiar whitewashed cones, like little steeples, that adorned the shrines around the town. They rose out of the olive groves as if they too were paying homage to the sun.

Ashe felt a gentle hand touching his shoulder.

‘Tobbiash! Come!’

A golden light cast dappled shadows across the tiny stone room in which his camp bed had been placed. Squatting on a Persian carpet was an old lady, wide-eyed and grinning. Her face was like an old stone, cut with gorges and fissures, her eyes like suns.

She removed the silk scarf from around her greying hair, dipped it in a bronze bowl of water and wiped Ashe’s face as he perched on a low stool.

‘Welcome to Bashiqa, English gentleman. English gentleman very welcome here in home of my son. My son, Jolo’s cousin. He is with Khuda now. He waits for the Resurrection. He sit then in judgement on Saddam’s soul. Saddam kill my son. Yes.’

Tears came to the woman’s eyes. ‘I am Gulé, Englishman. I wash your clothes.’

Ashe sat up. ‘Gulé. You must forgive me. If I’d known, I would not have brought my dirty clothes into your good house.’

‘It is God’s will you come here. The Kochek tell us so.’

‘Kochek?’

‘He sees through this world. You have two eyes. He has other eyes, like peacock. Kochek know about you, Tobbiash! You come from bad happening in England. You are hurt, Tobbiash. You come to Sheikhan to find answer.’

The lady dipped her headscarf again in the bronze dish and wrung it out thoroughly before retying it about her hair. Gulé had once been a beauty. Now the beauty shone inside.

53

A growl of thunder shot across the dull green mountain to the north. Ashe looked at his reflection in the big muddy puddle in the centre of the street. It was dotted with dying buttercups, like poppies around a wreath, and Ashe thought he looked different. Large droplets of rain splashed in the puddle. The image was distorted.

Ashe hurried back to Gulé’s house. Gulé was sitting beneath a stone archway decorated with olive branches that led to the courtyard, mending a white woollen shawl.

‘Jolo waiting for you.’

‘I like your cap, Gulé.’

She pointed to her little turban, ringed with bright silver coins. Ashe nodded. Gulé giggled. ‘I have it when young girl. It is called cumédravé, Tobbiash.’

Jolo emerged from the courtyard carrying two glasses of tea. ‘You don’t see these things now. All girls used to wear them. Gulé has it for the Sarsaleh – our Spring Festival. You miss it. Every Nisan – that is, your April. You have April Fool; we have Sarsaleh!’

‘And is foolishness permitted?’

Jolo laughed. ‘Do you like dancing?’

‘The English have forgotten how to dance.’

‘Very sad, Tobbiash. We could teach them again! Bashiqa best dancing in the Sheikhan. Everybody used to come for Sarsaleh at Bashiqa! People come from Kirkuk and Mosul! Dancing here is best.’

Gulé nodded. ‘Tell him more, Jolo.’

‘There are buttercups round the doors and all the women wear red flowers in their hair. And the girls… they dance the debka.’

‘Debka?’

‘A mountain dance. In a circle. The arms are raised. Like this!’ Jolo demonstrated. ‘Everyone loves this dance! And the boys join in, and a lamb or a chicken is sacrificed. We put the sacrifice blood on our houses to remember. And the meat is cut and shared for the poor. See the graves! The women are at the graves, giving food to passers-by. And the qewwals play… Oh, Tobbiash! The daff and the shebab – music like you never hear anywhere else in the world.’

‘Daff and shebab, what are they?’

‘Our qewwals – they are sacred musicians. They play daff. Daff is huge, round, like drum, but in hand.’

‘Tambourine?’

‘Tambour, yes.’

‘And the shebab – a flute?’

‘Flute. Yes! Good! This is our happiness.’

‘And I missed it.’

Jolo shook his head. ‘This year, not very good year. There is sadness. Danger.’

Gulé coughed. ‘Even in a war, there is time for joy.’ She disappeared inside, leaving the men sheltering from the rain beneath the stone archway at the entrance to the house.

Ashe was about to compliment Jolo on the sweet-tasting brown tea when a man poked his turbaned head through the doorway. He looked at Ashe with solemn interest and scratched his beard. ‘Tobbiash. My father used to serve Ismail Beg. You know him?’

Ashe shook his head.

‘Ismail Beg great man. Ismail Beg believe in schools. He make friends with Christians in Armenia. He try to help his people. He is liking English soldiers – and he love English aeroplanes. The English are often friends with Yezidis.’

Jolo got up. ‘Now you meet Jiddan. He is Kochek.’

‘Ah! The dream genie.’

The Kochek was shocked. ‘Me? Jinn? No! No! I Jiddan, yes. Jiddan.’ He gripped a bundle of rope attached to the black sash about his waist. ‘Jiddan – Kochek, not jinn.’

The three men sat themselves down on a low wooden bench.

‘Why call Jiddan jinn, Tobbiash?’

‘A dream genie is a—’

‘A jinn who appears in a dream?’ The idea seemed perfectly natural to the Kochek.

‘Yes, yes, that would be it.’

‘Then you see me in your dream? I see you, Tobbiash, sir…’

‘Will you explain “Kochek” to me?’

‘Excuse…’ The Kochek went abruptly back inside.

‘What is Kochek?’ Jolo rubbed the soft black hairs on his chin. ‘Is very difficult, Tobbiash. There are many things you must live with Yezidis many years to understand. Even after many years, you do not understand all. I tell you, Tobbiash, I do not understand. We ask pirs: they are our holy men. Sometimes they explain. We have… oh, many ways, different men can explain things. These things are learnt in the heart. No books.’

‘I think you’ve put that beautifully, Jolo.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But what is a Kochek?’

Ashe’s mind turned to Sarsaleh and to April Fools’. The fool is sacrificed – made a lord for the day, fooled into thinking himself important. The fool is the animal who is fed well, separated from the herd or flock, treated with care – until the day comes when his blood will decorate the doorway. The fool is like a blade of corn, before the scythe whips its arrogant crown off.

These were the origins of the April Fool. Spring and harvest were directly linked – underground. First the gilded crown of corn, then the cutting. For a few blissful minutes Ashe forgot that he was a government agent close to a war zone.

Jiddan returned, carrying a huge plate filled with food.

‘Look! He is like Gabriel!’ said Jolo.

‘The angel?’

‘When man die, Angel Gabriel carry ruh.’

‘Ruh?’

‘Spirit. When man die, angel carry spirit of good person to Paradise on tray.’

‘Or to hell, presumably.’

The Yezidis looked shocked. ‘No hell.’

‘No hell?’

‘Fires all gone!’ asserted the Kochek. ‘Little child empty jar of tears – fires all gone!’

‘Now see, Englishman, we have kleycha! Dolma! Nan! Kaub! Khubbaz!’

Ashe tried the dolma, popping the vine-leaf rissole into his mouth in one go, the better to savour its delicately spiced rice-and-meat stuffing.

‘Good!’

The Yezidis smiled. ‘Try kleycha!’

Ashe picked up what looked like a mince pie. ‘We eat these at Christmas!’

‘Yes, birth of Angel Jesus from Holy Mary.’

‘You…?’

‘Like Jesus? Of course! There is Syrian Orthodox church in village. There are Roman Christians in the Sheikhan, and American Baptist missionaries in Armenia. All kinds of Christians telling different stories. We say: we hear it all before. Disciples of Jesus know our country when no one knows England or America! Jesus was good angel, very beloved of God. He come to earth to tell people what is good life and about day of resurrection.’

‘You mean he’s a prophet?’

‘Many, many holy men are coming to Hakkari Mountains and to Sheikhan. Many holy men. But Jesus not buried like prophet, Tobbiash. If Jesus buried, every good person come to his mazar. No. Jesus angel. He fly, like bird, back to Khuda when Khuda tell him.

‘Jesus must do as he’s told.’

54

Sami al-Qasr stared at himself in Fiona Normanton’s bathroom mirror. Did he look like an evil man?

He carefully applied the grey hairs to his face with theatrical glue; then the false irises, the thickened eyebrows, the silver earrings. He tried a selection of spectacles.

It was a perfect day: a gentle breeze was blowing eastwards from Bodega Bay, all the way to the clear, bright contours of the Sierra Nevada.

Leanne Gresham had turned the crimson Mercedes coupé off Highway 80 at Sacramento and was now speeding north in the direction of Yuba City, halfway to Paradise.

Sherman Beck’s eyes lingered on Leanne’s copper-tone nails resting lightly on the steering wheel. They followed the line of her browny-green worsted jacket to her shoulders, where her hair danced like a young Jackie Kennedy’s. Beck admired her mature, sexy look. He admired the Egyptian-style gold necklace circling her graceful neck, the impeccable match of her copper-coloured blouse, open to the third intriguing button.

She turned and smiled at him. He looked at her brown eyes, the finely plucked eyebrows and the pale-lilac eye shadow.

‘You ain’t so bad lookin’ yourself, Agent Beck.’

‘I’m sorry I was just…’

‘California dreamin’?’

‘Is it OK?’

Leanne looked hard into his eyes, found something she trusted and smiled again. ‘Yeah. It’s OK.’

Beck placed his hand just above her knee and gently squeezed.

‘You know, Sherman, I’m not sure this interview thing with al-Qasr has been properly thought through.’

‘I guess Kellner places a lot of faith in your intuition, Leanne. Anyhow, while you’re having your appointment with the evil doctor, our internal security people are gonna give his place a last sweep. Kellner’s agent reckoned he was still hiding stuff.’

‘D’you think al-Qasr suspects?’

‘I’d be surprised if he didn’t suspect something. But we’ve made it very clear to him that if he wants Israeli assassins kept from his door he’s got to accept the downside.’

‘Hmm… Maybe he doubts how long his protection’s gonna last.’

‘Yeah. We better move fast.’

‘You’re right.’ Leanne moved her right hand off the steering wheel and placed it gently on Beck’s. Beck felt something he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

She drew her slender fingers though her hair. ‘But I don’t see why he’s left the decision to me as to when or whether to bring al-Qasr in. It seems he can’t make up his own mind. That’s not good, Sherman.’

Beck took a deep breath. ‘I guess he kinda wants affirmation. I guess he wants your support. He’s afraid if we bring him in too soon, we’ll lose good leads. But if we leave it too late… We gotta know who he’s been talkin’ to, and what he’s been saying. Personally, I gotta say I admire Kellner’s choice.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘It’s a tough one. But I don’t feel like seeing al-Qasr today.’

‘What do you feel like?’

She looked at her watch.

The car skidded into a lay-by, next to an empty picnic site. She pulled the handbrake and turned, wide-eyed, to Beck. ‘Make a move.’

His hand glided up her leg onto the silk of her blouse, over her breasts to cup her neck and bring it towards him. They kissed, excitedly, as nervous as first-timers. His heart beat faster, his hand touched her chest, unbuttoned her blouse clumsily, determinedly. He slid the blouse over her shoulder, revealing a classy black bra. He kissed her breastbone. Her skin reddened. She pulled her jacket off and grabbed Beck’s face, covering him with kisses.

Beck’s hand followed the line of her hip and soon found itself beneath her skirt. Leanne’s breathing became passionate, heavy, free. Beck felt her leg, the fine silk stocking. His finger caught beneath the lacy suspender.

A voice came over the short-wave radio. ‘ISF time check. Over.’

Beck’s body fell back into his seat. ‘Take it, Leanne.’

‘That’s OK, honey, it’s over.’

Beck laughed, resignedly. ‘Before it even began.’

She grabbed the mike. ‘Beck and Leanne. Over.’

55

The Toyota pickup rumbled south down the Sacramento Valley. Al-Qasr looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. Who the hell was that? The shock and suppressed excitement made him laugh out loud. This was a damn sight better than staring at chromosomes and base sequences from one end of the day to the other, wondering all the time when he would be released. It had been hell. He hadn’t even realised how bad it had been. He felt like a slave whose shackles had been smashed.

Al-Qasr put his foot down and giggled, exhilarated at his newfound liberty, careless of his life and everything else. He felt great. He didn’t notice the red light and ringing bells where the road crossed the Sacramento to Redding railroad at Marysville, north of Yuba City. He didn’t notice the railroad crossing barrier coming down in front of him.

The pickup screamed as tyre rubber burned into the tarmac. The barrier hit the windscreen. Al-Qasr cried out as a great crack appeared in front of him. Shaken, he reversed the pickup into a long-distance truck that had edged up behind him. The incensed driver jumped from the cab to inspect the damage.

Al-Qasr bit his lip and closed his eyes. Opening them he glimpsed a couple waiting on the other side of the tracks. Was the woman pointing at him? Who was that man staring? He knew that face. She was staring too. Leanne Gresham.

The truck driver banged on al-Qasr’s nearside window, mouthing something al-Qasr couldn’t hear. A silver Amtrak passenger train rattled up the line. He wound his window down.

‘You’re sure as hell lucky this time, bud. What are you, some kinda religious nut?’

‘You’re confusing me with someone else.’ Al-Qasr looked to his glove compartment. One shot and… the police would be all over him.

‘Hey, fuckhead! I ain’t confusin’ you with nobody! I thought you’d wanna know this ain’t gonna cost you nuthin’.’

‘Delighted to hear it, sir. Is it money you want?’ Al-Qasr didn’t know what he was saying. The bells had stopped ringing. The barrier was opening, and she was still staring at him.

‘I don’t want yer fuckin’ money, man!’

‘OK, OK. I got the message. Now I’m in a hurry.’

‘So take your time at a fuckin’ crossing! Think of the next guy!’

Al-Qasr slammed his foot on the clutch and rammed the pickup into first, trying not to look at the car coming towards him. He looked to the right to obscure his face.

‘I dunno what you mean, Leanne. I always thought those Hasidic Jews looked the same. I thought that was the idea. No vanity. You know, like a uniform. The homburg hat, the ringlets, the steel-rimmed glasses, overcoats. Still, I gotta say I never saw one in a Toyota pickup tryin’ to smash his way into a railroad crossing before.’

‘Well, there was something about him. I got the feeling he recognised me. I’m sure I’ve seen him before somewhere.’

‘Intuition?’

‘Yeah. Isn’t that why you said Lee Kellner wanted me to interview al-Qasr?’

‘Sure. And it’s an Arab suspect we’re lookin’ into, not a… Unless…’

‘Unless what?’

‘How did al-Qasr react when you spoke to him about today’s meeting?’

‘Charming as ever. Said it had been a long time and he had a lot to talk about.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I said we were going to improve security around him, and could he bear having two agents around for a while. He was enthusiastic. Maybe too enthusiastic.’

‘We could get the FBI onto the guy in the pickup.’

‘Lee was emphatic, Sherman. Keep it internal.’

The Mercedes rested in a large puddle beneath a dripping pine tree. The air was steamy, hot. Beck looked at Leanne. They kissed warmly.

‘Later, cowboy.’

‘So at last I get to meet the bio-wizard himself.’

Beck helped Leanne avoid the puddle as she stepped out of the Merc. RIBOTech was almost deserted. Beck shook his head.

‘It’s Saturday, Sherman. Everyone’s gone to the game.’

Gresham and Beck stepped towards the small reception area and pressed the buzzer. An old man in a light-blue uniform appeared behind the plate-glass windows. One hand gripped his reading glasses, the other gripped his side holster.

‘I see they put their best man on the job.’ Gresham nudged Beck, smiled at the man and showed her ID through the glass.

He looked carefully at it, scratched his bald head, then went back to his desk and picked up a microphone. The croaky voice echoed about the entrance.

‘What’s your business, ma’am?’

Beck looked to the grille below the buzzer. ‘CTC, officer. Check your book.’

The old man fumbled with his daybook. ‘Your name, sir?’

‘Beck.’

‘Christian name?’

‘Sherman.’

The guard pressed the entry button and the front door clicked.

‘Name’s Starbuck. Everyone calls me Cliff.’

‘How ya doin’, Cliff?’

‘OK. It’s customary to search visitors, Mr Beck. But in your case, I guess I’d be surprised if you weren’t carrying a piece. Frankly, I can’t see why you’ve come. There’s no one here except Mr Lowenfeld.’

‘What about Professor al-Qasr?’

‘I ain’t seen him since yesterday, sir.’

Beck looked at Gresham. ‘Don’t tell me—’

‘The pickup?’

Gresham checked the daybook. ‘Look here, Officer. Al-Qasr came in this morning at six-thirty.’

‘Ah right. Yeah, well I didn’t get here till seven. You’d have to ask the night-man. I let Mr Lowenfeld into Professor al-Qasr’s office at 7.30. He wasn’t there then.’

‘We’ll check, Officer.’

‘You know the way, ma’am?’

Leanne nodded. ‘You keep an eye out, Mr Starbuck. Anyone arrive or leave while we’re upstairs, just give us the word.’

‘You betcha!’ Starbuck saluted.

Beck hurried to join Leanne on the oak stairs to the first floor. ‘Needn’t panic yet, Leanne. We’re still ten minutes early.’

Leanne Gresham did not look convinced. She knocked on the outer door of al-Qasr’s office. She tried the handle; it was open. They walked in.

‘Dr Lowenfeld! You there? Dr Lowenfeld!’ She turned to Beck. ‘You check the men’s room. And don’t be too long in there.’

Gresham knocked on the laboratory doors, then ran her omni-pass through the security lock. The doors clicked open. ‘Dr Lowenfeld! Professor al-Qasr! Leanne Gresham here!’

A shiver shot up her spine: a smell around al-Qasr’s desk.

Behind it was a row of long cupboards around two feet high. She bent down under the desk; the smell seemed stronger. A hint of almonds.

Gresham heard footsteps echoing loudly in the corridor.

‘That you, Sherman?’ She started pulling at the cupboard door. ‘That you?’

The cupboard door scuffed open. God, that was bad! Must be the pipes.

The lab doors burst open. Gresham pulled at the cupboard.

‘Hold it there, Leanne! Don’t move!’

Gresham let go of the cupboard door.

‘Get right away from there, Leanne!’

‘All right. All right. I seen a corpse before, Sherman.’

‘I’m talking about the wire.’

‘Wire?’

‘Booby-trapped.’

‘I didn’t see. I…’

‘Trick of the light, Leanne. I’ll call the disposal guys down at al-Qasr’s house.’

‘And I’ll get on to Kellner.’

‘Why?’

‘Authority to detain Hasidic Jews leaving San Francisco airport today.’

‘Still think it was him?’

‘Would we be forgiven if we did nothing?’

56

Gulé stood solemnly by the archway and waved the men off. The Snatch sped northwards out of the village. Everything felt good. The road was good, the fields were full of wet, wild flowers and the weather was glorious: not too hot, with a sweet, cooling breeze rolling down from the Hakkari Mountains.

Major Richmond gave Ashe a sly smile. ‘Mystery tour, Toby. Do you mind changing gear for me?’

‘Amazing you can drive at all. It looked like your shoulder’d been torn off.’

‘Thank God for the Blue tracker. Took the main force.’

‘Who put you right?’

‘Czech field hospital. Fantastic people. Tore a patch off my backside. How’s your pneumothorax? Jolo told me the story.’

‘Pneumobollocks! My breathing’s fine. Never better. Vinny was talking out his arse, I reckon.’ Ashe suddenly became aware of Zappa’s absence. ‘Where is Vinny?’

‘That’s the bad news. Maybe he was protecting you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Vinny failed to report. No codes received on any channel. Vanished. We’re half expecting to see his face on some bloody video with an execution threat.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing, so far. The kidnappers like to time their broadcasts for maximum impact. Even so, something usually leaks out.’

‘I can see him bending a few rules – if he was on to something.’

‘Some rules you don’t bend. He knows that as well as anyone.’ Richmond cleared his throat. ‘Unfortunately, Toby, this makes things difficult for you. Without your source handler, you’re wasting your time here.’ Richmond paused. ‘And ours.’

Ashe sighed. ‘Just as things were getting interesting.’

Richmond scratched the back of his neck. ‘Desk has taken a remarkable interest in your welfare, Toby. Not that you heard that from me, you understand.’

‘Crayke or no Crayke, I take it the mystery tour leads straight to the airport.’

‘Not quite.’ Richmond turned to the Kochek, who was sitting next to Jolo on the back seat. ‘Tell him, Jiddan.’

Jiddan’s face lit up. ‘It leads to Lalish! The pilgrimage site all Yezidi must visit once in their lifetime.’

Ashe liked the sound of that. ‘And the occasion?’

‘A little ceremony. Jolo’s horsemen are handling security. Watching the passes. I’m Crayke’s representative. All part of my liaison work with the Yezidi community. Respect breeds security. You can often accomplish a lot more by showing up at a family event – provided you’re invited of course – than with a squadron of tanks.’

Ashe pondered the situation. There was no way the British and American security effort in Baghdad could afford to part with one of its best officers for a community liaison exercise. There was obviously more to it.

‘You sure that’s the only reason for this journey, Simon?’

Richmond turned to Ashe and smiled a smile that felt like a wink. ‘Need-to-know basis, Toby.’

The Snatch stopped at a T-junction. The metalled road continued to the left, signposted to Tel Kef. To the right, the road became a track: red earth, muddy, full of potholes. This route was signposted in Arabic, but an English translation had been painted beneath it: ‘Esiyan’.

‘Guess which way, Toby?’

‘By the steep and rugged pathway must we tread rejoicingly!’

‘Where would we be without Hymns Ancient & Modern?’

‘Modern Britain, dear boy.’

Richmond laughed. ‘That path leads to your pot of gold, says the little one.’

‘Little one?’

‘That’s what “Kochek” means.’

‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’

‘That’s not believing at all.’

Richmond turned the Land Rover to the right.

‘Did you know the Yezidis invented the Ark?’

Jiddan chipped in. ‘Noah, he true son of the tradition.’

‘The Yezidis have a story there was another Flood.’

‘Like the one in the Bible?’

‘They say there were two. They say the great ship started at a village called Ain Sifni. That’s a few miles northwest of here.’

Ashe had the distinct feeling that they were driving across some vast, cuneiform-inscribed tablet; the tracks were like the ancient Babylonian letters. But what was its message?

‘The water rose and the ship sailed off.’

‘Any particular direction?’

‘Who can say? Anyhow, it sort of ran aground on the peaks of Mount Sinjar, where a rock pierced the hull.’

Jiddan, who was trying hard to follow Richmond’s telling of the story, interjected. ‘Snake! Snake!’

‘As Jiddan says, there was this great serpent in the ship. And the snake curled itself up into a cake. And that plugged the ship. Then the ship floated off again until it rested on Mount Judi, ninety miles northeast of here. Used to be pilgrimages to see the remains.’

The Defender ground its way northwards, passing groups of armed Kurdish fighters on the way. Some of the Kurds cheered at the sight of a Coalition vehicle; some just nodded. They all looked dog-tired.

After long miles of trundling northeast, the Snatch took a left at the crossroads. Direction: Atrush. Ahead, Ashe could see a cluster of gentle, green mountains.

‘Why approach from the east? Lalish is north of Bashiqa.’

‘If we’d come from the south, we’d have had to take the footpath from Ba’dre – through the mountains. Bit of a hike.’

In the distance, Ashe could see the shell of an ancient building.

‘Khana Êzî,’ said Jolo.

‘Khana Êzî?’

‘House of Ezîd. “Ezîd” is other name for God.’

‘Sultan Ezîd,’ added Jiddan.

‘Yes. This was Yezidi caravanserai. Many pilgrims come to Lalish in old times.’

Ashe got the feeling Jolo could actually envision lines of camels and horses and pilgrims: richly dressed, poorly dressed, brightly dressed, happily approaching… But wait! thought Ashe, that is what I’m seeing – in my mind’s eye. He looked round at the Kochek. The Kochek was staring at him, his face glowing.

‘There!’ Jolo pointed right, to the mountain rising in the north. ‘There!’

‘Mount Erefat,’ added Richmond coolly.

‘Yes, Erefat, Tobbiash. High on Mount Erefat is holy spring.’

‘Kanî Baykî.’ Jiddan nodded knowingly.

‘This, Tobbiash, is where Sheykh Adi beat rock with his gopal.’

‘Gopal?’

‘Like stick for guiding sheep. He beat rock with stick. Water flow from rock. Living water. Holy water. Spring still there. Kanî Baykî.’

‘And who was Sheykh Adi?’

The two Yezidis were astounded Ashe had never heard of Sheykh Adi. To them, Adi was clearly the most important being who had ever lived.

Jiddan put his large hand gently on Richmond’s shoulder. ‘Here, Major, we stop.’

The Snatch came to a quiet rest near a burbling mountain stream. Jolo pointed to a small, white, stone bridge. ‘Pira Silat.’

Jolo and Jiddan took their shoes off and stepped to the edge of the sparkling water. They washed their hands, faces and necks. Ashe followed them.

Richmond gripped his Browning, holstered onto his thigh. His cotton trousers stuck uncomfortably to his leg. The holster had been rubbing it all day long. He looked about him, then reached for a pair of field glasses to study the dense woodland.

Rising from the water, Jolo shook his head dry, then pointed to the major. The Yezidis laughed. Jolo made an ear-piercing whistle. From out of the woods, on both sides of the road, emerged a dozen of Jolo’s irregular cavalry. Forming a sixty-metre ring around the Land Rover, they dismounted, withdrew their M16s from their saddles, and vanished into the bushes and grasses.

Jolo and Jiddan then crossed the bridge three times, clapping. As they made their way back and forth, they solemnly intoned the words:

Pira Silat, aliyek doje, êk cennete

‘We’re leaving the car and travelling on foot, so I should stick your boots back on, Toby. Those guys will walk barefoot the rest of the way, but they’re used to it. We don’t want to have to carry you back.’

‘Just getting in the spirit of things.’

‘Think of yourself as an official observer, OK?’

‘And this?’ Ashe patted his sidearm.

‘There may not be much verbal objection to your having it, under current circumstances, but keep it covered.’

Ashe looked over to the two pilgrims on the other side of the bridge. ‘What did those words mean?’

Jiddan gestured permission for Jolo to answer. ‘Being interpreted, Tobbiash, the words are saying: “On the one side is hell; on the other Paradise”.’

Richmond nudged Ashe across the bridge. ‘D’you hear that, Toby? Paradise.’

57

‘This is Mrs Valdès, Agent Beck.’

Clay from Homeland Security pointed to al-Qasr’s chubby housekeeper. ‘Now she’s out of a job, her memory’s improved. Says she reckons al-Qasr had a little drive-in joint about a mile down the road, off track. That right, Mrs Valdès?’

‘I’m not sure, sir. I think I see him drive into trees once maybe.’

‘I’ve sent people down there. They’re checkin’ out Mrs Valdès’ story.’

Gresham and Beck explored al-Qasr’s house. It was neat, well furnished, a little austere perhaps. There was the odd enlargement of NASA’s more colourful galactic adventures, and scattered sepia prints showing scenes from pre-Saddam Iraq.

‘Seems our doctor was a bit on the dull side, wouldn’t you say, Sherman?’

‘The “banality of evil”, you mean? Does that cover forcing cyanide down Fiona Normanton’s throat?’

‘Sorry, I mean there’s nothing to suggest he was a fanatical type. No diaries with prayerful confessions. Not even a copy of the Koran.’

‘Maybe taken it with him.’

They heard a shout from downstairs. It was Clay. ‘Just got a call from your explosives people. Seems they got something. Can you take a look?’

Gresham looked to Beck. ‘You coming?’

‘I’ll come down soon. I want to speak with this Mrs Valdès while the heat’s on and the memory’s warm.’

Leanne stifled the urge to kiss him. ‘I’ll check it out and call. Oh damn it, Beck! I left my cellphone in my bag up at RIBOTech.’

‘Use mine. Maybe I’ll call you first.’ Beck winked.

Bob Lowenfeld had been found in al-Qasr’s bunker. The investigators had lowered a brace into the bunker to lift out the body, in case of further booby traps. Lowenfeld was still lying on the ground, uncovered. Gresham noted Lowenfeld’s swollen lips. Cyanide again.

The young explosives expert wiped the sweat off his hot brow and rubbed his eyes. ‘Mrs Gresham, I’m sorry I didn’t call you earlier. When we finally found the hatch to this thing, we thought of what happened to you up at RIBOTech. Lucky we did. Al-Qasr had booby-trapped the hatch. After we cleared that, we then found he’d fixed a vibration mechanism to Mr Lowenfeld’s body.’

‘How did you…?’

‘We got all the al-Qaeda training stuff. Booby trap was standard.’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘We’ve swept the place. Take a look. If you really want to.’

Leanne hitched her skirt up around her hips. The young man looked away. She eased her way down into the tiny bunker and sat on al-Qasr’s stool. She checked out the CCTV monitor linked up to the RIBOTech lab in the corner. She examined his table and noticed the staining around what might have been a laptop. She checked for a phone link.

‘Looks like he had a secure link down here. That’s why we never got anything from his office or home computers.’

The cellphone on the table rang. ‘I guess that’s Sherman.’

Gresham picked it up.

Up at al-Qasr’s house, Beck heard the muffled explosion.

Leanne Gresham was dead.

58

As Ashe followed the group down from the sacred bridge at Pira Silat towards the Lalish valley, he wondered what had happened to the Kochek.

‘Jiddan cuts wood for the sanctuary.’

Ashe stopped dead. Gunshots. He reached for his Browning.

Jolo laughed. ‘Pilgrims at Silavgeh.’

‘What?’

‘Place of Greeting. On Mount Meshet. South of the valley. Pilgrims at festivals fire rifles when they come to stone. This is when they see Lalish first time. They kiss special stone on the path.’

Ashe climbed a hillock and the fabulous valley of Lalish opened out before him. Two miles of winding paths, woodland, olive groves, vines, and the most extraordinary collection of buildings he had ever seen in his life. To the south, Mount Meshet rose like a host at a festive table.

‘Our songs teach us this holy valley of Lalish came down from heaven. It is called the Site of Truth,’ said Jolo. ‘Tomorrow is Wednesday, our holy day, so the pilgrims make special fires tonight.’

The valley looked magical, aglow with little fires. Jolo pointed out the shrine they were headed for and explained that, like all Sheykhs, Sheykh Adi was a historical figure who trod a spiritual path, and was understood by the Yezidis as a kind of angel – a reflection of the divine. Before Ashe could ask him to elaborate, Jolo was eagerly pointing out the shrines of Sheykh Obekr, Sheykh Hesen, Pîr Êsîbiya, Sheykh Babik, Sheykh Tokel, Pîr Jerwan, Sheykh Sheref el-Dîn, and Sultan Êzîd, each one lit by hundreds of tiny flames burning gently in bowls of olive oil set in the stonework. Ashe was enchanted. It was as though the valley was filled with falling snowflakes, ignited from within, flickering peacefully down.

The air was sweet and pure; Lalish was clean.

As the men walked down into the valley, Ashe’s attention was caught by three conical spires resembling upturned ice-cream cones, topped by golden globes.

‘What’s that?’

‘Ah! Those are the qubbe, the spires, of the mazar of Sheykh Shems, Tobbiash.’

‘That’s where you said I could speak to the English saint.’

‘Yes. Wait! I go see if you allow in. Not much time before we must be at big ceremony at Sheykh Adi, Tobbiash.’

Jolo walked quickly on ahead, leaving Ashe and Richmond to make their way down towards the Shrine of Sheykh Adi.

‘Know anything about this Sheykh Adi, Simon?’

‘You’ll have to look this up – not that there’s much in English. As far as I know, he was a… What’s that word in Islam? Oh, you know, whirling dervishes – the mystical thing.’

‘Sufis.’

‘Right. Adi was a Sufi. He came here in the 1200s. From the Bekaa Valley in Syria.’

‘No border in those days, Simon.’

‘What is a Sufi, Toby?’

‘Comes from the Arabic word for wool. They wore white woollen robes – like Jiddan. Simple life, given to ecstatic communion with the spirit of God. The Sufis follow what they call a “path”, a spiritual path, sometimes named after the teacher of that path. Adi started a path. People are still following it. Sufism has been called the gnosis of Islam.’

‘Ger-nosis?’

‘Yeah, well, the “g” is usually silent – like the “k” in knowledge. It means knowledge, actually.’

‘Mystic knowledge.’

‘The knowledge of how to extricate oneself from this world.’

‘Say that again.’

‘The knowledge of how to extricate oneself from this world: in Gnostic thinking, the one who is truly alive is the one who has died to the world.’

‘You could argue that suicide bombing is a kind of perversion of that idea.’

‘It’s certainly a perversion.’

Simon laughed. ‘You should be in the propaganda unit.’

‘What’s that sound?’

Ashe and Richmond listened hard. They heard water rushing beneath their feet. Beneath the path were tunnels that fed streams through the valley. The waters were collected in cisterns. They were used for baptising children, and for the initiation of pirs or holy men into the mysteries of the tradition.

Soon their feet were echoing on great, smooth flagstones that paved a large square. The walls were made of huge stones – older than the crusades, Ashe surmised.

Jolo came running into the forecourt. ‘You are blessed, Tobbiash. Tonight, the guardian of Sheykh Shems Sanctuary is here. Remember we speak of Hamo Shero?’

‘Chief of the Mountain?’

‘The grandson of Hamo Shero is here. He is Khidr, son of Khudêda, son of Hamo Shero. He is representative of the Mir in Sinjar.’

‘The who?’

‘The Mir. Prince of the Yezidi people. Tehsin Beg. Major Richmond, he explain.’

‘The man Jolo is talking about is Sheykh el-Wezîr, the Mir’s deputy in the Sinjar. Fine man.’

‘Tobbiash, Khidr say you come to him at Sheykh Shems after the ceremony at Sanctuary of Sheykh Adi – and you speak to English saint in circle. I have arranged this for you.’

‘Why?’

‘Gulé and Kochek say you are in need of God.’

‘Who isn’t, Jolo?’

‘You need faith.’

Within the precincts of Lalish, the offer seemed perfectly natural.

‘Who are those women?’

‘Fiqreyyat.’

Ashe studied the aged women in all-white, toga-like woollen garments, with great turbans wrapped around their hair and under their chins.

‘Nuns?’

‘They serve at the sanctuary. Pure women. They spend their lives at Lalish.’

Ashe’s eyes moved from the fiqreyyat to a striking image by the entrance to the Sanctuary of Sheykh Adi. A huge, coal-black serpent, tall as a man, slithered upwards in stone relief.

‘Our serpent at Lalish! Every day, serpent is made black again. Dye is from zirgûz trees – and ash from fires of Lalish.’

There were other carvings by the door. Ashe stared at the combs and the images of the sun. The hexagrams – interlaced triangles – were like stars of David or seals of Solomon, he thought. There were also birds, a hatchet, what looked like shepherds’ crooks, six-petalled flowers in circles, and the sun, moon and stars in circles.

Jolo shook his head. ‘Many more carvings long ago. Before your year of 1892.’

‘What happened?’

‘Turks burn Lalish. They kill many Yezidis. Many in prison. They steal our holy things. Yezidis always attacked by neighbours. Muslims had no mercy. We are not in their Book. When Turkish army want to be paid, government send them here to steal what they want. Now Sunnis murder us.’

Richmond interjected. ‘We’re doing our best, Jolo.’

‘Yes. Our best.’

A group of men stepped lithely through the sanctuary entrance, looking like Arab sheykhs in the familiar headdress and long, woollen surcoats. Each carried something in a brown, cotton bag.

‘Qewwals!’ cried Jolo. ‘You see? Daff and shebab!’

‘Is this courtyard part of the sanctuary, Jolo?’

‘Sometimes this is called sûq me’rifetê – the Market of Mystical Knowledge.’

Startled by the name, Ashe mumbled to himself. ‘Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.’

‘What you say, Tobbiash?’

‘A poem by William Blake – an English Kochek.’

‘Is very good. But here also are shops by the walls at festivals where you can buy olive oil and sweets for children. And this market is not in desert – but in Paradise!’

A contented-looking Jiddan appeared in the courtyard. Jolo patted Ashe’s back. ‘Now we enter Qapiya Sheykh Adi.’

As they opened the sanctuary door beneath a Roman arch, Jiddan and Jolo kissed the threshold. Having crossed it, they gave their payment to a nun.

The sanctuary hall was dark and cool. Five ancient pillars supported its centre. Above them hung chandeliers. A few candles were lit.

Jolo whispered to Ashe. ‘See here! Hewdê Nasir el-Dîn.’ He pointed to a cistern. ‘Here Angel of Death come to clean his knife, when person dies in the world.’

‘He must be here now then.’

Jolo shuddered. ‘Do you see him?’

Ashe shook his head.

‘He does not want you to see him. So you are safe, Tobbiash. See! Behind that curtain: senjaq.’

‘Senjaq?’

‘Holy image.’

‘Can we see it?’

Jiddan interjected. ‘Must be special person. Qewwals take care of senjaq on its journey. They show to faithful Yezidis. You not Yezidis.’ The Kochek hurried to the end of the hall, then turned left into another chamber. ‘There is tomb of Sheykh Adi.’

Jiddan and Jolo circled the long stone slab three times and each tied a knot in one of the many colourful pieces of silk and cloth draped over the tomb. Jiddan spoke to a nun standing by a door on the left. ‘It is permitted.’

The door creaked open.

But for two rows of large earthenware jars, the chamber was empty. Ashe thought of the wedding at Cana.

‘Olive oil from sacred groves. For holy fires.’

Jiddan and Jolo tiptoed to the bare rock that formed the sanctuary’s north wall. They plunged their wrists down into two holes in the rock, saying ‘behisht, dozhe’ three times.

‘What are you saying?’

‘Behisht, dozhe?’ Jolo looked to Jiddan. The Kochek nodded. ‘It means “heaven, hell”.’

‘Like when you crossed the bridge earlier?’

‘A crossing, yes.’

‘Why do you do this?’

‘We always do this. It is right to do it. God knows the reason. What do we know of these things?’

Back in the tomb chamber of Sheykh Adi, they were shown another door. Jiddan looked through it, then called to his party. ‘Tomb of Sheykh Hesen. Now you have seen.’

Ashe was intrigued. ‘Not properly. May I look?’

‘Nothing to see,’ said the Kochek awkwardly. ‘We must hurry.’

Ashe entered the small tomb chamber. Sheykh Hesen’s tomb did not have the appeal of Sheykh Adi’s, judging by the amount of cloth laid upon it.

There was a small, modest door to the right.

‘What’s through there?’

‘Nothing.’

‘May I open it?’

‘Not allow,’ said Jiddan, trying hard to sound friendly.

Ashe showed no sign of moving. He remembered Gulé’s words about how coming to the Sheikhan was his destiny. ‘Can you tell me about it?’

‘We have not seen tomb of Sheykh Obekr.’

‘Can you tell me about this door?’

‘Please, Tobbiash. Outsiders not allowed.’

Richmond called Ashe. ‘Come on, Toby! Can’t you see the man’s upset?’

Ashe felt a powerful impulse to go through the plain door.

‘Come on, Ashe! Or we’ll leave you behind!’

‘Please, Tobbiash. I must go.’

Ashe turned back. The Kochek looked relieved. ‘We go back to suq.’

As they hurried over the cool steps, Ashe confided in Richmond. ‘Any idea what’s through that door, Simon?’

‘Something to do with a cave, I think. But I never pursue the matter. It annoys them.’

‘I wasn’t trying to interfere.’

‘Try and remember, Toby, these people have had to fight for access to this place. It’s incredibly important to them.’

‘It could be incredibly important to me too.’

‘Curiosity, Toby, killed the cat.’

59

Beaming with pride, Jiddan pointed to two small braziers that lit the path across the stone forecourt. As Kochek, his job was to cut the wood. Around the braziers, the qewwals’ faces, framed by grey hair and matted beards, flickered in the firelight. While the musicians tightened their instruments’ skins over the flames, Ashe’s attention was caught by a stone building behind them. He asked Jolo if it was another sanctuary dedicated to a sheykh.

‘Here we have ceremony. Holy waters.’

‘Where does the water come from?’

‘Kaniya Sipi. White Spring.’

The Kochek nudged Jolo again, lest he say too much, then turned to Ashe. ‘Zemzem Spring is miracle of Sheykh Adi. Listen to qewwals, Tobbiash.’

The musicians’ leader raised his tambour, then began a low-pitched chant in a major key. The rhythm changed abruptly into a melody as wild as any jazz improvisation. The tambours were thrust upwards and outwards in unison and the bodies of the qewwals swayed in time with the words, rhymes, cries and melismas of the piercing pipes. The valley answered in echoed chorus. Ashe was captivated, his body strangely stirred as if from a long sleep. Richmond tapped his foot.

After the first chant, one of the seven qewwals began a prayer; others joined in.

A syncopated beat. The music climaxed. Jiddan disappeared into the shadows. Ashe noticed dozens of seated Yezidis; they seemed to have come from nowhere.

‘What’s the song about, Jolo?’

‘Sheykh Adi established his path. When the path was made, on that day, the water of White Spring was made a… cure for all…’

‘Sickness?’

Jolo nodded and passed glasses of dark coffee to Ashe and Richmond.

Again the music reached a pulsing, wild crescendo. Its sense of soulful abandon suggested a depth to this religion not easy to grasp. Yes, there was pious mysticism, thought Ashe, but there was also something more elemental and physical too: a marriage of ‘heaven and hell’.

Richmond gave Ashe a nudge and pointed to a party entering the forecourt. Leading the procession and carrying a bronze candelabra was Jiddan, with his rope and his hatchet tucked into a white woollen cummerbund. Behind him walked an extremely tall old man wearing a loose white turban that fell over his eyes. His white robe, white gaiters and red sash, which was wrapped round his waist and diagonally across his chest, reminded Ashe of the magi.

Richmond whispered in Ashe’s ear. ‘Sheykh el-Wezîr – he’s the Mir’s deputy, what they call the mendûb, in Sinjar.’

Ashe stared at him. The sheykh looked straight back into Ashe’s eyes: a clear, diamond stare. Ashe looked away.

Behind the sheykh walked a teenage girl, wearing clothes that might have come from any high-street store: flared black cotton trousers, black sandals, and a loose orange-and-black paisley-patterned blouse. The V-neck was open, revealing a pearl necklace. Her hair was long, thick and black, made even longer by dyed sheep’s hair that had been tied in so that it flowed down her back almost to her ankles. Around her forehead the girl wore a bandana decorated with coins and red flowers.

Her eyes were large and bright, like many Yezidis Ashe had encountered. Burning within those eyes, however, Ashe sensed a terrible grief – pain too great for one so young.

As the little procession moved towards the stone building behind the qewwals, another figure came into view. Jolo grabbed Ashe’s wrist. ‘Laila! It is the princess!’

Attired in a sleeveless abaya embroidered with silver and gold wave patterns, moons and dolphins, Laila was regal in bearing and captivating in appearance. First to fall under the spell of her high cheekbones, pharaonic eyes and long black tresses was Richmond. He turned to Ashe. ‘She’s a cousin of the Mir.’

‘Laila means “Morning Star”,’ added Jolo.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, Tobbiash. Laila is also name for Christian saint.’

‘Which one?’

‘You call her … Mary Magdalene.’

The door of the stone building opened. Jiddan’s face appeared; his eyes flew from left to right. Somebody pushed him outside. Spotting the major, Jiddan hurried towards Ashe’s party.

‘Tobbiash! You come. Princess Laila wills it.’

Ashe turned to Richmond. ‘Why me?’

‘Blame Jolo. He’s told her something about you.’

‘What?’

‘Wouldn’t tell me. Go on!’

Jiddan grabbed Ashe’s wrist and pulled him away from the crowd. The assembly gasped. An outsider brought inside the mysterious building was unheard of.

Inside, the sheykh stood in a cramped space at the back, his hands crossed over his red sash, his eyes closed in communication with a higher power. Jiddan raised the candelabra above the heads of the assembly.

Standing in front of a raised basin area was Princess Laila, her dark eyes fixed on Ashe. ‘Please do us the honour of witnessing our ceremony, Dr Ashe.’

Ashe was attracted to her superior smile and subterranean voice; the kind that could reach far into a man’s soul. ‘Delighted, Your Highness.’

‘Dr Ashe, it is our wish that you understand that it is one of the five obligations on a Yezidi to choose what we call a Brother – or Sister – of the Hereafter. The sister must be from the family of a sheykh. I am of such a family, Dr Ashe. I am to be Rozeh’s Sister of the Hereafter.’

‘Rozeh?’

‘The girl you have seen with us. The tie between us has existed before this life, and it will exist after this life. I will serve my Sister, Rozeh, and she will make offerings as she may and as custom dictates. I will care for Rozeh and she will seek guidance from me as she may and as God wills.

‘I shall be present at her marriage and should she die before me, I shall be with her then. I shall know her after my death as I knew her before she was born.’

Laila then stepped back, revealing a stone basin surrounded by large slabs. At its centre, a small fountain of water bubbled up from below. Jiddan, steering Rozeh by the shoulders, brought her to Laila. Shy and respectful, Rozeh looked downwards, but Laila gently took her chin and raised her head. Their eyes met. Rozeh’s sad face broke. Tears welled in her eyes as Laila said a few words, softly, in Kurmanji.

Laila reached her right hand into the basin, filling her palm with water from the White Spring. Rozeh stooped to drink the water from the palm of the princess. The door to the building opened and Rozeh left with Laila by her side.

Ashe went back to Richmond’s side, in the forecourt. He turned to see Laila’s gold-sandalled feet approaching him. Her face wore a look of concentrated interest that singled Toby Ashe out from every man in the world.

‘Your Highness.’

‘Please don’t call me that, Tobbi. Call me Laila. I’m a modern girl.’

Laila tossed off her sandals, turned to the assembly, then called out a half dozen girls from the crowd, pointing wilfully. The crowd drew back to create space for dancing. Richmond’s eyes could not leave the princess. Ashe whispered into his ear. ‘I’m off to the Shrine of Sheykh Shems. It may be my last chance.’

Richmond nodded, his gaze fixed on the princess’s nimble feet. Then he looked at Ashe. ‘Toby, you don’t believe that stuff about talking to long-dead saints do you?’

‘I don’t know.’

Richmond was mesmerised by the princess. Her arms were raised and she was slapping a small tambourine as her body entwined those of the other girls. So distracted was he that he failed to notice the small group of Yezidi auxiliaries who were pushing their way through the crowd towards himself and Jolo. Jolo greeted them warmly. Hearing their news, a huge grin lit up his face in the firelight. He turned to Richmond and began whispering. Richmond’s face broadened into a smile of deep satisfaction.

‘What is it, Simon?’

‘Jackpot, Toby. But it can wait.’ Richmond pointed at his watch. ‘Exit in one hour.’

60

His mind racing, Ashe made his way through the flame-speckled valley towards Mount Meshet in the south. Aware of a presence, he looked behind him. Nothing.

The rising earth gave way to a series of stone steps. Stubbing his toe, he let out a suppressed screech. He felt a warm hand on his left shoulder.

‘I think you need a guide. The steps up to Sheykh Shems are very steep. It is a holy walk. Pilgrims must suffer a little before the blessing.’ She took his hand. ‘You can’t go through life as if you were afraid of its fire.’

‘Think I haven’t been burned already?’

‘Little scars.’

‘Probably.’ She let go of his hand.

Ashe looked into Laila’s eyes. She came down onto the step he was balancing on. The step was tiny, the slope severe.

Ashe could feel her breathing; he could feel her heart pounding. He could feel the heaving of her body. She touched his chest, and whispered, ‘Will you hold me, if I fall?’

‘Probably not.’

She raised her arms around his neck and pulled his face toward hers. ‘I’m falling, Tobbi.’ She kissed him on the cheek.

‘There. I want to thank you, Tobbi.’

‘For what? I don’t know you.’

‘I want to thank you. For something you’re going to do for me.’

‘Ah…’

‘You have seen Rozeh?’

‘She seems sad.’

‘Her father, Saddiq, he was Jiddan’s younger brother. Jiddan’s brother was murdered last month, in Mosul. Rozeh’s mother too. Her name was Qoteh. They were slaughtered, Tobbi, like beasts. Slaughtered by butchers.’

‘Because they were Yezidis?’

‘Because they were Yezidis.’

Ashe knew no words of comfort equal to such a loss.

‘You don’t have to say anything. I have seen into your eyes. I believe you can help. Help me do what is best for her. Rozeh is talented. She wants to serve people, to be a doctor. I want her to be a doctor, Tobbi. Please help me!’

Ashe sighed. ‘I don’t know, Laila. Honestly, I don’t know how I can help. If it’s money, I can—’

‘Of course it’s not money! Tobbi, take her to England with you! She can get her education. I will watch over her, through you.’

Ashe thought for a moment. ‘I could speak to the ambassador, I suppose. If you wrote to him.’

‘I will write to him. I will write to Prince Charles. I will write—’

‘It’s difficult. You know what happens with official channels. Anyhow, we’re leaving for Mosul soon.’

‘Mosul? I had hoped…’ She clasped his hand to her breast. ‘You do this service for me and for Rozeh and for your soul. The angel will smile on you. Now, go! Go to the mazar of Sheykh Shems. The guardian is waiting for you. Go! I will wait.’

The mazar door creaked open. Ashe closed it carefully behind him. The candlelit chamber was immediately filled with a great gong-like voice as the guardian’s mighty grip enveloped Ashe’s hands.

‘I greet thee well, Dr Ashe. I am Khidr, son of Khudêda, Sheykh el-Wezîr. Greetings in the name of Sheykh Shems. A great pleasure for me to show you a treasure of my people.’

‘Where my heart is, there my treasure is also.’

The sheykh smiled and bowed his head. ‘Quite so. You think it is because of Jolo Kheyri that I agree to meet you here?’

‘That is my information.’

‘It is not entirely correct. You see, I know an Englishman who is in Baghdad. For many years he has been a friend. He is much interested in my people. I think you have met him recently.’

‘Cray—’

‘Please! Names can be dangerous, Dr Ashe. Security is important – even here in Lalish. You heard the gunfire in the valley?’

‘Earlier this evening?’

The sheykh nodded.

‘I thought—’

‘Security. That is why the major has joined us this evening. That is one reason for your visit to us. Now, the Englishman in Baghdad knows you are here. It was he who first suggested we meet. He said that you would appreciate the life we lead.’

‘True. I’m fascinated.’

‘And in that fascination lies a deeper reason for your visit.’

‘Maybe. But tell me, how did… “the Englishman” tell you I was here?’

‘Really, Dr Ashe!’ The sheykh patted his hip. ‘We know what a mobile phone is for – even if we must communicate in code!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Forget it. It’s easy to forget the modern world in Lalish.’

Ashe laughed. ‘It’s easy to forget everything in Lalish!’

‘Quite. We come to Lalish to remember, to bring something special to mind we have forgotten. Now, when the Englishman tells me your name, it is not new to me. I remembered it.’

‘How is that?’

‘My people value knowledge. You write books, Dr Ashe. Our Mir, Tehsin Beg, is very educated, a university man. He has knowledge of the things you write: things of science and the spirit. I for myself follow the tradition of my forefathers. I do not rely on books.’

‘We think that by writing we make things real and permanent.’

‘Yes. But our words are in our eyes and our hearts. We learn from mind to mind, from lip to ear. When we speak of holy things, this comes not from paper but from the heart of the tradition.’

‘When I write, I try to get at the facts beyond the legend.’

The sheykh laughed. ‘In these parts, Dr Ashe, fact becomes legend very quickly! Your people are concerned with what can be seen; we are interested in what cannot be seen. When a man dies, he disappears from here. We see only a very, very small part of a life. Legend makes up for deficiency of fact. Men have ceased to believe in the beauty of the impossible. They try to work miracles with explosives.’

The flame ate gradually into the taper, crackling about the bronze candelabra.

‘I am the leader of the Shemsani sheykhs, Dr Ashe. Without Sheykh Shems, I am nothing. Sheykh Shems was also wezîr of Sheykh Hesen, whose tomb you have seen. He is also Sheykh Shemsê Tebrizî. Do you know the works of Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi?’

Ashe smiled with an ironic twinkle. ‘The Sufi poet and mystic? Doesn’t everybody?’

‘Rumi’s inspiration came through his knowledge of Shemsê Tebrizî. He was in the holy tradition of Sheykh Adi. How can the sun’s divinity be also seen as a man?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘One can only wonder at the beauty of the impossible. Jolo has told you that you may hear the voice of an English sheykh here at this shrine.’

‘Saint Chad, yes. There is a shrine to him in England.’

‘Yes, at the centre of England. It has three qubbe—’

‘Spires.’

‘Yes, spire. Like Sheykh Adi. And it has bronze hilêl at the top of spire. Like Shrine of Sheykh Shems. And your Sheykh Chad used to go to a sacred spring, at dawn. And he used to sing a hymn to Sheykh Shems.’

‘That’s the legend.’

‘You English should look again at your legends.’

The sheykh rotated a ring he was wearing on one of his fingers and began scratching a circle in the dust of the shrine’s floor. He then gathered the dust collected at the end of the tracing in his hand. He took a cup from a niche and sprinkled water into the dust.

‘Water from Zemzem Spring, Dr Ashe.’

He rolled the dust in his hands into a kind of muddy ball, and smoothed it with his palms. Then he took a small piece of cloth from the niche and wrapped it around the globe of dust.

‘We call this berat.’

‘Berat.’

The sheykh then thrust the tiny parcel into Ashe’s hand. ‘A remedy for all ills, Dr Ashe. Keep it.’

Ashe held it for a moment, then pushed it deep into his trouser pocket.

‘Thank you.’ English always seemed a stingy language in which to express gratitude.

‘Now, please sit in the circle.’

The reality of the situation struck Ashe with force. Was this a magic ritual, a prayer, a set-up – or what? What would happen? What could happen? Would it happen only if he believed? But he had forgotten how to believe; he was not a child any more.

Sheykh el-Wezîr began intoning the Hymn of Sheykh Shems of Tabriz. Ashe sat cross-legged in the circle. Above him, the figure of the sheykh loomed like an ancient statue come alive, his hands crossed over his chest, his eyes closed, his mind and soul inside the words of the hymn.

The words no longer seemed to come from his mouth but from the air around him, from the walls, from the circle, from Ashe himself; Ashe, Ashe, Toby, Toby Ashe was feeling extraordinarily hot; his body shuddered…

Oh Sheykh Shems, you have called us to this work of service,

Open for us a door of mercy,

Grant a light to us, and the people of the tradition everywhere

The sun at midnight… As Ashe’s eyes closed, his inner eye opened. A blazing light. Ashe felt himself pulled towards it, like a meteor heading for the sun. There was no sense of fear, no will to resist: only to go.

The image of the ankh, the Egyptian sandal-strap meaning ‘life’, appeared to his inner vision: the sandal – to go! Only to go!

Something was pulling him back. He heard the sheykh’s voice again: the echo in the chamber. To go… To go…

‘We gotta go! Hey, buddy! Planet Earth calling! We gotta go!’

Ashe’s eye opened slowly.

‘What?’

‘You ready for the human race? We’re all packed up and ready to ride.’

‘But… Vinny! VINNY!’

‘It’s me, baby! Back from the dead. Jeez! Some climb up here!’

‘Did you see him?’

‘Who?’

‘The sheykh.’

‘No, Dr Toby. No sheykh. And no rattle and roll neither. But I did see something… Wow! What a dame!’

‘The princess.’

‘Whoever she was, man, she was just sitting. Still, like somewhere else. She told me you were here. Then I find you’re still as well. Like dead.’

‘But… the Sheykh el-Wezîr. He was here a few seconds ago.’

‘Look outside, Dr Toby.’

Ashe hauled himself off the floor of the shrine and poked his head through the doorway. Above him, the red disc of dawn had just arisen over Mount Meshet. He stepped outside and stared at the hilêl, the golden orb crowning the qubbe.

‘Sheykh Shems!’

‘No, Toby. He’s gone.’

‘No, Vinny.’ Ashe pointed to his right temple. ‘He’s here!’

61

‘Care to do the honours again, Toby?’

Ashe put the Land Rover into gear. The major eased off the clutch and the convoy set off from Pira Silat in the dawn light.

‘What’s with the two extra trucks, Simon?’

Richmond grinned. ‘Remember last night I said we’d hit the jackpot?’

‘Er… it’s coming back to me. Yeah, just before I left the party. You said it could wait.’

‘You got to hand it to Jolo’s men. When they pull together, what a unit!’

‘The shooting in the valley?’

‘Yeah. Bit of a shooting match. Then some preliminary interrogation.’

‘The prize?’

‘Hafiz Razak.’

The name hit Ashe right between the eyes. He was in the Tower again – just before the explosion. The archdeacon was reading the summary of the November bombings in Istanbul. Hafiz Razak: the Syrian in the al-Qaeda cell. Hafiz Razak: one that got away. Dangerous man. Thought to be tied in with a new al-Qaeda cell in Fallujah.

‘That’s a hell of a coup, Simon. Many congratulations!’

‘Thank you.’

‘Razak’s the forger and bomb-maker.’

‘You’re very well informed, Dr Ashe.’

‘What do you think I do all day? Hafiz Razak’s a prime catch. And fresh from Istanbul too! This could be very exciting. What was he doing in the Sheikhan? His type tend to keep to the Sunni areas.’

Simon looked at Ashe, surprised by his naivety. ‘You been reading newspapers again, Toby? Think these guys lack ambition?’

‘Sorry, Simon. But aren’t al-Qaeda concentrating on the south? Fallujah.’

‘Come out of the dream, Toby. They’re seeking support everywhere. Razak’s been casing Kurdistan. Maybe even trying to establish a link with PKK units across the Turkish border. There are opportunities with Ansar al-Sunna crossing the Iranian border up here. Maybe, God forbid, Hafiz Razak had something atrocious in mind for Lalish. We’ll have to see what further interrogation gets out of him. The Yanks want him of course. There’s gonna be a lot of interest in Razak. One thing I can tell you already, if it’s any help. Remember last week you were using me as a sounding board for some of your ideas on the Masonic Lodge bombing?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You mentioned a guy called al-Qasr, son of an anti-Masonic, anti-Semitic fanatic.’

‘Yes. They showed up in some old files. Just a hunch really.’

‘You may have got lucky. We had Razak over a barrel all night and of course he denies having anything to do with either Istanbul or al-Qaeda. The only thing he burbles on about is straightforward criminal activity. Seems he’s been specialising in passports and identity documents of all kinds. Claims he’s in on immigration rackets. After a little pressure, he claimed he had customers in America. Said he’d been assisting a guy he called a “famous American professor” with passport requirements. When pressed as to the professor’s name, he mumbled something about “al-Qasr”. Said he had immigration problems. Any use?’

‘Maybe I’m not wasting my time after all. Can you get me in on the interrogation?’

‘As I say, the Yanks have first call on this one.’

‘But I’m an interested party.’

‘Yeah, well.’

‘I’ll sort it out when we get to Mosul.’

Richmond looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Maybe time to bring Vinny in.’

The major waved the convoy down on a precipitous ledge above a small gorge. Ashe heard a ramp come down from one of the trucks behind and Vinny’s familiar voice.

‘What is this? Men’s-room break?’

Richmond called Vinny up to the Land Rover. ‘Time for explanations, Mr Zappa. Hop in!’

‘Delighted, Major. Those trucks are nut-crunching.’

The convoy set off once more.

‘Do you want to tell him, Vinny? Explain what’s happened and what it means for Toby’s mission?’

‘If there’s shit, bud, I’m the fan.’

Ashe could feel it coming his way fast.

‘What are you two on about? And what’s happened to Jolo?’

‘Tomorrow. After you’ve gone.’

‘What do you mean “gone”? Vinny’s back! Now we find Yildiz and Yazar!’

The major suddenly seemed to have developed a short temper. ‘Look, Toby, after I hand Razak over to our American colleagues for interrogation, I’ve some rather pressing calls on my time. Like insurgency trouble right down the Syrian border – from al-Karabilah to Abu Kamal; from al-Qa’im to al-Ubaydi. Shitloads of trouble. There’s 137 Egyptians crossing from Syria some time in the next thirty-six hours. Tunisians, Sudanese, Algerians, Saudis and even two blokes from Manchester training on the Syrian side. The Syrian government claims to be in the dark about all this.’

‘Nothing unusual about that, Major.’

‘Just tell him, Zappa, for fuck’s sake!’

‘OK. Well, ya see, Dr Toby, I guess there’s been an… international incident.’

‘Is he exaggerating again, Simon?’

‘No.’ Richmond turned the Snatch onto the main road west of Mosul.

‘Your source handler here was in Mosul making best use of available sources – putting it discreetly about that I’m interested in the whereabouts of Resit Yazar and Ali Yildiz. All leads gratefully received plus modest remuneration package. So I start to get somewhere. And the trail is leading out of Mosul – which is a mercy ’cause it’s getting awful cramped in there. There’s over a million Kurds and Arabs in Mosul. And increasing numbers of uninvited immigrants are harbouring distinctly unfriendly intentions toward Uncle Sam.’

Richmond sighed.

‘The downside is that the trail in question is leading south to Kirkuk. Kirkuk is not a friendly town. So, Dr Toby, I head there anyway, to the oil capital of Iraq – a truly sacred place, you understand – and one of the most bitterly contested little hot-spots in the north. Naturally, I’m cautious. Then, would’ya believe it, I run into some cross-lines.’

‘Crossed lines?’

‘Yeah, Toby. Crossed and double-crossed. Seems I’m following a line well-trodden by Turkish military intelligence. And to be frank, there ain’t quite as much dialogue going on between Turkey and Uncle Sam as one might hope to expect. I get the impression my presence in Kirkuk was not their idea of friendly collaboration. The trail hots up. I locate a source. We meet. Turns out he’s working with the Turks. That’s the motherfucker’s day job. Takes me on a little ride.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The doors are locked. And I’m heading – against my will – 100 kilometres southeast to Suleymaniya. And you know what? They ain’t got spare shades, so they give Vinny a big black blindfold to protect my eyes from the sun. Thoughtful motherfuckers. Turns out Vinny’s destination is a basement interrogation room in one of the less fashionable suburbs of Suleymaniya. Your friendly neighbourhood source handler has become a “guest” of Turkish intelligence. All for my own safety, of course.’

Ashe looked nonplussed.

‘Seems they’ve got wind of some nasty killings that might be taking place in Kirkuk in the near future. “Mr Zappa,” they say politely, “we wish to save you from the line of fire – and our national security requires you to be our guest for the short term.” They also say they must check my ID. I might be a double agent for Ansar al-Sunna or the PKK or Vladimir Putin or Donald Duck. Any fuckin’ excuse.’

‘What Vincent is trying to say, Toby, is that he was kidnapped by a detachment of Turkish special forces.’

‘I ain’t tryin’ to say nuthin’. I was fuckin’ kidnapped!’

‘But it was for your own safety.’

‘Yeah, check. And don’t it get messy out there in the field? And when denial time arrives, they can always say the detachment was truly detached – a rogue element now brought under control. So you can see why nothing came through to the US Defense Intelligence Agency in Mosul. As far as MND and the DIA were concerned, Vincent Zappa did not exist.’

‘Ah! So, if your friendly captors realised you were missing, presumed dead…’

‘You’re getting the picture. Maybe a safe return to civilisation was also not in their national security interest. Vinny is beginning to get just a bit nervous. I might be in line for a “very regrettable” accidental accident that couldn’t be avoided.’

‘We should not have been surprised.’

‘Can you imagine, guys, what it feels like, knowing your friends have not only given up hope but would be actually relieved if your body – headless or otherwise – were recovered?’

‘We hadn’t given up hope.’

‘OK, Toby. But you’d’ve been relieved to find out what’d happened.’

‘Frankly, yes. Disappearance is unbearable.’

‘Especially for the one who’s disappeared. But thanks for being frank. I’ll do the same for you one day.’

‘Well, Vinny, you obviously weren’t erased from history. So what did happen?’

‘It’s always nice to know that you don’t know everything. Seems DIA Mosul had independent investigations going on regarding some of our Turkish friends. Uncle Sam does not regard all Kurdish freedom fighters in the same light as the Turkish government. That is to say, friends, the war cannot be brought to a conclusion without Kurdish military support. The Turks thought that if they confined their obvious anti-Kurdish activities to their own side of the border, they might get away with some discreet tidying-up exercises on the other side, under Uncle Sam’s nose. In this particular instance, this was, I’m happy – and alive – to say, a severe miscalculation.’

‘Explain.’

‘Seems Johnny Turk had it in mind to take out a high-up Kurdish representative in Kirkuk. The man in question had friends in high places, and the Kurdish authorities did not take kindly to Turks cherry-picking assassination targets from among their race on Iraqi soil. Especially when those very authorities had already declared their hostility to Kurdish terrorism in Turkey – plus they assisted in the defeat of PKK forces in northern Iraq in the nineties.

‘So, one beautiful morning – yesterday to be exact – I was awoken by a disturbance upstairs in the free world. Special forces occupied what was described in the report as “an office of the Turkish army”. They freed Vincent Zappa – humble operative of Uncle Sam – and arrested eleven Turkish officers and domestic personnel. The charge was plotting the assassination of a senior Kurdish politician. I think, Dr Toby, we can take it as read your friends Yazar and Yildiz were also in the firing line.’

Ashe raised his eyebrows.

‘Which happy tale brings me to two significant revelations regarding Dr Toby Ashe’s status in this part of the world. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Dr Toby, but there is now no question whatever that your Kurdish politicians have fled Iraq – pursued, I don’t doubt, by Turkish intelligence. Anyhow, they’re now way out of my remit. Sorry, bud! The buck just stopped.’

Ashe’s heart sank. ‘And the other significant revelation?’

‘Now this is truly unfair, I grant you. But this is war, baby. Seems Ankara did not jump for joy when the US busted their butt in Suleymaniya. Apparently, Uncle Sam got it all wrong and well… pride is pride and national pride is something else. They’ve closed the border-crossing at Harbur.’

‘Shit.’

‘Just hit the fan. A little undiplomatic incident. Fuel and equipment supplies to the US up here are not getting through. This is inconvenient. And expensive. And it works. Turkey’s little signal. They’re pissed off. A line has been crossed and they’re gonna want soothing. Seems a lot of Turkish voters don’t trust Uncle Sam. According to Turkey, the US is soft on terrorism – except where its own interests are concerned. Can you believe that? And whose fucking interest is Turkey pursuing here – the international interest? Fuck! Do I hate politicians!’

‘Our paymasters, Vinny.’

‘Yeah. And aren’t they supposed to be the servants of the people? Since when do the servants tell the lord what to do with his castle?’

‘When they’ve taken it over?’

‘You got it, Toby.’

‘OK. Back to the point. You said the Turks have closed the border crossing at Harbur?’

‘Right.’

‘I can see this is an embarrassment all round.’

‘Yeah! But look! There’s some in the White House wonderin’ why little Vinny Zappa was in the fuckin’ hot house in the first place. “What’s that?” they say, “A British intelligence operation? What’s all that about?” Well, obviously Our Guy Vinny was just doin’ his job – but who’s this English guy chasing round northern Iraq with Lawrence of Arabia here? Pardon your presence, Major. But they smell a rat.’

‘Thanks a lot, Vinny. After all the tears we shed for you.’

‘Sorry, Simon. You know I love ya – but these political guys never understand field priorities. It’s one of those fuckin’ tennis matches between Langley, the Pentagon, the White House, British SIS – and whichever national intelligence agency we’ve just rubbed up the wrong way.’

Vinny looked at Ashe. ‘Anyhow, bud, seems you’re the fall guy. Welcome to Shit City. Don’t have to tell me it stinks.’

Ashe looked out of the window, watching Iraq float past him forever. Then he looked ahead, to the great city of Mosul, with its mosques, its murders and its magnificences – and saw it was for him the last station before an ignominious exit.

There would be no tearful Celia Johnson on the platform, no Rachmaninoff, just the bum’s rush back to Blighty double quick.

Vinny patted him on the back. ‘Sorry, Dr Toby. It’s been great workin’ with ya – keep in touch.’

‘Never say goodbye, Vinny.’

All too soon the convoy was crossing the debris-strewn concrete bridge over the Tigris at Faisaliya, a few hundred metres from where Rozeh’s parents had been murdered. Ashe pondered on what he could do now for Laila’s ‘Sister of the Hereafter’. This was war. Hearts got broken; things ended before their time; events ceased to make sense. People might claim innocence, but states sinned with impunity.

The convoy headed south through scenes of carnage. A suicide bomber had hit the police headquarters: there were roadblocks at the end of every street.

Passing slowly through lines of blast-proof concrete and hedgerows of razor wire, overlooked by snipers and lookout towers, the convoy rolled into the busy barracks.

As the Snatch drew to a halt in the parade ground, beneath the flagpole and its Stars and Stripes snapping against the clear blue sky, a pair of familiar faces strode out of the whitewashed admin office to greet the two Englishmen and their exhausted American source handler.

The men’s welcome of Vincent Zappa was perfunctory. Zappa wrote them off as a couple of jerks and made his way to the canteen for a much needed beer.

‘Bagot and Colquitt, I presume.’

‘Dr Ashe. Back from his adventure.’

‘What can I do for you?’

62

Bagot took the lead. ‘Tony and I are most anxious you cease wasting department funds and join us in our vehicle for the short trip to Mosul aerodrome. Tony, get Dr Ashe’s bags please.’

Richmond joined the men. ‘Friends of yours, Toby?’

‘They’re from an escort agency called SIS.’

‘Afternoon, chaps.’

‘Major Richmond, isn’t it?’

Richmond gripped Colquitt’s hand like a vice; Colquitt winced. ‘Now listen, you’re to give Dr Ashe the very best treatment. He is a British hero. Get that? H. E. R. O.’

‘I can spell.’

Richmond turned to Ashe. He blinked with a moist twinkle of fellow feeling. ‘Cheer up, old friend. Things have a habit of—’

‘Going pear-shaped?’

‘Keep the faith.’

Colquitt butted in. ‘Come on, Ashe. No time for niceties.’

‘What about Vinny?’

‘Never mind him. Zappa’s in enough trouble as it is.’

Ashe was manoeuvred into the back of a Humvee troop carrier. It pulled out of the barracks and headed for the old aerodrome in the south of the city. Ashe stared at the metal floor, then looked up and faced Colquitt and Bagot. ‘What’s the charge?’

‘Seems your interference with Turkish national security operations is not only an embarrassment to Her Majesty’s Government, but was occasioned by no operational necessity we can possibly fathom.’

Colquitt chipped in. ‘Heads will have to roll.’

The group got down from the Humvee and made their way to the control tower. There was a brief delay: an SAS detachment from Anbar Province was expected to arrive any minute for well-earned leave.

Colquitt and Bagot strode off to make calls and complete paperwork. Ashe squatted down and slumped back against a Coca Cola machine. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘I hear you’re leaving us, Tobbi. So I come here with Major Richmond and bring Rozeh to you.’

Behind Richmond stood Laila in smart jeans and a clean tee-shirt, her magnificent hair gathered up with a silver comb. Her eyes gazed at him through large, expensive glasses.

‘One short flight to a British forces airport and Rozeh can claim asylum. Then you write to the ambassador and organise everything. This is her chance, Tobbi.’

Laila turned to the shy girl standing behind her. ‘Here, Rozeh, this is Tobbi Ashe. He is a very good man from England. He makes sure you get your education.’

Rozeh nervously approached Ashe, who stood up. She extended her hand. He shook it. She slowly raised her sad eyes from the ground and met his own.

Ashe turned to his friend. ‘What do you think?’

Richmond shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not up to me. But since you want my opinion…’

Ashe read his face. It was a no-no. Anyhow, Ashe not only knew it was hopeless trying to appeal to the system, he also doubted the wisdom of the exercise in the first place. He hadn’t promised Laila anything. She had presumed too much in all the excitement and heightened atmosphere of Lalish. ‘It would’ve been better if the major here had stowed Rozeh aboard the plane.’

Colquitt came into the waiting area. ‘What’s all this then? Farewell party? Hard to believe you’ve made so many friends, Ashe.’

Ashe decided to push Bagot and Colquitt as far as he could, regardless.

‘I want to take this girl back with me.’

‘Really?’

Colquitt dashed off to find Bagot.

Richmond looked apologetically at Laila. ‘I feared this might happen, Your Highness. These two goons, Colquitt and Bagot, are actually here to escort Ashe out of the country.’

‘Tobbi’s a prisoner?’

‘Not exactly a free agent.’

‘Is this true, Tobbi?’

‘Afraid so.’

‘I speak to them.’

Bagot came huffing and puffing through the door.

‘So, now you wish to compound your folly with a spot of illegal immigration.’

‘It’s important, Giles. This young girl, Rozeh. Her parents have been…’ He looked at Rozeh. ‘How’s her English, Laila?’

‘Very good.’

Ashe whispered into Bagot’s ear. ‘Murdered by terrorists in Mosul.’

‘Dear oh dear. That’s very sad. Do you have any more victims of the insurgency waiting to take the plane? We could fill it several times over with deserving cases. You really have left this a little on the late side.’

‘Excuse me, sir.’ Laila took Bagot’s arm.

Bagot looked to Richmond. ‘Who is this woman?’

Richmond cleared his throat. ‘You’re addressing Princess Laila of the Yezidi people.’

‘This is outside of your professional remit, isn’t it? Our orders are quite definite. Nothing here about illegal immigrants.’ Bagot pointed to his departure authorisation papers.

‘I’ll take responsibility.’

Bagot laughed. ‘You, Dr Ashe! You. I’m not sure responsibility and you travel in the same plane.’

‘Now look here!’ Richmond was getting annoyed. ‘We’re not asking you to do anything. Just turn a blind eye. This won’t be the first time we’ve managed to save some very deserving cases! For goodness’ sake, Bagot. Come off your high horse and do something worthwhile with your bloody life!’

‘Listen, Major. You may think I’m deficient in humanity. But this sort of thing’s got to stop. Last month we had some reporter from ITN bringing another deserving case with him back to Britain. And did he keep quiet about it? The thing got on the news. The prime minister’s under a great deal of flak from the media about asylum seekers. He’s promised a clampdown and a review. He’s got to be very careful.’

‘Look, Bagot, for Christ’s sake, let Tony Blair look after his own interests – I’m sure he doesn’t need your help.’

‘You forget, Toby, that Tony and I serve the government of the day.’

Laila took his arms again, imploring him with tears. ‘Please, sir. Let Tobbi take Rozeh on the plane. I’ve told her she’s going to a great country where they care about real people. That is why you are in Iraq, is it not?’

Bagot looked to Colquitt. ‘Is that why we’re here, Tony?’

‘Difficult to say, sir. Official policy was to rid the country of a dictator.’

‘We deliver policy, Princess Laila, not invent it. I’m sorry. You’ll have to try somewhere else. If Dr Ashe insists on letting this girl on the plane, we shall have to arrest him. Tony, get the bags. I think I see our jeep.’

Ashe exploded. ‘You fucking bastard, Bagot! You little shit! Deliver policy, my arse! You just love the fucking power of it all!’

‘And I love you too, Toby. You can calm down on the plane. Tony, the bags!’

Ashe looked helplessly at the princess and Rozeh and shook his head.

‘Look, when I get back, I’ll contact the ambassador. That is a promise. You can take it up with him while I try to bend his ear.’

‘I’ll second that, Your Highness. Don’t give up hope.’

‘I never give up hope, Major.’ She looked at Ashe. ‘There is something else you can do. I know you have the resources.’

‘Go on.’

‘Please, Tobbi, please find my brother Sinàn.’

‘Your brother? Look, Laila, I’m not Father Christmas!’

‘I know your heart, Tobbi.’

‘My heart?’

‘Please!’

‘All right. Where do you think he might be?’

‘He is in Europe. With the Baba Sheykh.’

‘The who?’

‘Baba Sheykh. We need them, Tobbi.’

‘Ashe!’ Colquitt bellowed from the door. ‘Get a bloody move on!’

63

The flight from Las Vegas to New York had been hell.

It had been obvious to al-Qasr which of the other seven passengers was riding shotgun. Homeland Security insisted an armed man be present on all internal flights. This one had clearly been on one flight too many, like the Marlboro Man gone to seed. He kept fidgeting in his seat, tucking his nylon shirt beneath his fat stomach, getting up abruptly and walking around like a man caught short in a men’s-room-free zone. What was more, he’d opted to sit across the aisle from al-Qasr. You’d have thought the guy had never seen an Hasidic Jew before.

Used to spying on others, al-Qasr felt acute distaste at being the object of another’s interest. Whenever he’d looked across the aisle, the supposedly invisible guard had simply winked reassuringly, as if to say, ‘That’s all right son, Jews are safe on this flight.’

Al-Qasr’s head was dizzy with nerves. He had no reserves of religious faith to draw on and nothing to calm him. Alcohol was restricted on Las Vegas–New York flights, it being reasoned that visitors departing Vegas had already had enough of everything. Why else would they go there?

At one point, the guard had leant over, slipped and grabbed al-Qasr’s theatrical beard. The guard, sweating, had been profusely apologetic, then uttered the immortal question, ‘Don’t you guys like to get up and pray on these flights? You carry those… what are they called? Prophylactics?’

‘Phylacteries?’

‘Yeah. You like kiss them in the middle of the aisle. Seen it hundreds of times. You feel the need, sir, you just get right on up there and pray. Ain’t no one’s gonna stop you here, sir.’

‘I prayed at the airport.’

‘Sure is a good place to pray, sir. That’s right. You’ll be prayin’ again at Kennedy?’

‘God willing.’

The guard squinted. Something didn’t sound quite right about that.

Now al-Qasr was standing in the departure lounge of New York Kennedy Airport, he would like to have prayed. But prayer had never made any sense to him. He could see it helped people, soothed them. But belief was the precipitate that made the chemistry work, and he had none.

If he believed in something, he’d be feeling guilty. Guilty for Fiona Normanton, guilty for that old bastard Lowenfeld – and for whoever else had turned up. He was proud of the booby-trapped body. It was mean, sure, but it showed creative flourish. It would give him credibility with his contacts. Soon he would be far from Judaeo-Christian sentimentality and back in a man’s world. A few dead infidels would give him street cred.

But if he got caught – and, no question, he was aware of the risks – he knew it would be a lifetime in prison, hated by every inmate. He wouldn’t last five minutes. There would be no flush of martyrdom for him.

He consoled himself with the thought that his sacrifice would be the greater one: greater than the average dumb martyr, tricked by false promises, manipulated by those who kept out of the firing line as long as possible.

Al-Qasr knew there would be no paradisal feast or maidens waiting for him. His only hope was that, some day, his people would understand what he’d done – maybe even why he’d done it. If they would not honour him, maybe they would remember his father. How could they have forgotten so quickly?

Standing in the packed lounge, surrounded by bright, stark lights and the strange, constant murmur he associated with being deep underwater, al-Qasr had never felt so alone.

And yet there was also excitement: a gathering rush of realisation that soon, very soon, his life’s work would bear fruit. He took the thick-lensed glasses off, and squinted to focus on the departure board: Berlin Tegel, Lufthansa Flight 471 – twenty-two minutes to boarding.

He rubbed his moist fingers and looked up to the stainless-steel balcony above. Who was that man with binoculars? He was nudging his colleague. He was pointing down at al-Qasr. Something about the colleague looked familiar. Al-Qasr couldn’t tell; he looked away. Al-Qasr prayed for a prayer: Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, English – any damn thing. But nothing came – and they were still looking.

64

‘Call through from Federal Agent Rice at New York Kennedy, sir.’

Beck took a deep swig of black coffee and picked up the phone in his darkened office at CIA Headquarters. ‘Beck.’

‘Sir, got a guy here dressed as a Jewish scholar.’

‘Wha’d’ya mean, “got a guy”? You arrested him?’

‘Sir, we read the notice you posted: “Suspicious looking Hasidic or Ashkenazi Jew”. Raised quite a few eyebrows. It said “apprehend only on higher authority”. That’s why I’m calling, sir. The plane is sitting on the tarmac waiting for final clearance.’

‘Destination?’

‘Berlin. We’ve been trying to contact you for twenty-five minutes, sir.’

Beck bit his lip. Depressed at Leanne Gresham’s murder, he’d had the phone off the hook, and had his cellphone off for an hour.

‘What grounds have you got, Rice? Make it quick.’

‘Guard on internal flight from Vegas reckoned suspect’s conversation indicated Islam, not Jewish faith, sir.’

‘Specifically?’

Rice paused, then coughed; it was a long shot. ‘He said: “God willing”.’

‘In Arabic?’

‘English, sir.’

As long shots went, this was stretching things. ‘Checked the manifest?’

‘Difficult, sir.’

‘Why?’

‘Happens there’s a group of Talmudic scholars attending an academic conference in Berlin. Several members have similar names. Could be any one of them. Should we detain them all? Sir, we got less than a minute to put an agent on the plane.’

‘Where’d the scholars come from?’

‘Just a second, sir… Yuba City. California.’

‘Yuba City? That’s damn near Paradise!’

‘That’s not what I heard, sir.’

‘One clever bastard… OK. Get a man on the plane. Do not apprehend. Repeat—’

‘No need to repeat, sir.’

‘We gotta know who he’s meeting in Germany. Put a good man on the case.’

‘All our men are good, sir.’

‘Sure. Call me when the plane leaves – and don’t let it go without our man!’

Al-Qasr shifted uncomfortably in his double-booked seat. He’d observed the commotion at the far end of the jumbo when the plane had reached the take-off runway. A late passenger? Unlikely to stop a plane at this point on an international flight, even for half a minute. Something was up.

Behind him, fifteen Talmudic scholars jabbered and joked with excitement and foreboding at the prospect of returning to the German part of Europe. Several had smiled warmly at al-Qasr, taking him for an associate. Al-Qasr had smiled in return.

This part of al-Qasr’s plan was going perfectly. Having overheard the scholars’ plans during a trip to Yuba City’s public library, he had arranged to surreptitiously blend in with the group at Kennedy Airport. Hafiz had done a great job with the passport – like he always did. Practical problem? Contact Hafiz Razak. Man was a genius.

Al-Qasr peered over the edge of his Washington Post at the latecomer: a handsome young man in a dark business suit. Did he look just a little too fit for a man of the boardroom? Al-Qasr watched the man’s eyes as he was directed to a seat at the front of the plane. The man carefully clocked the lines of passengers. Was he looking for his correct seat? The stewardess was offering him advice.

The red light went on, passengers fastened their seatbelts and said their prayers – some audibly. Al-Qasr had lost his interest in prayer. He glimpsed the newcomer at the front, casting his eyes around before he sat down. That man had a task – he was too calm by far for a man who, being late, would almost certainly have run through the terminal, held his breath through customs and should by now have been sweating with anxiety or at least sighing with relief.

The plane taxied into position. Then the engines’ roar, the G-force and the shooting sensation of gravity-defying lift. The landing gear cranked into place, al-Qasr closed his eyes and thanked God he was leaving America, alive. If he wasn’t arrested now, he figured he’d be safe until Germany.

Half an hour in and the plane was high above the eastern seaboard, heading towards Newfoundland. The passengers were settling down into movie watching, people watching, sleep, magazine reading, and music listening. The latecomer got up. He went to talk to the stewardess, then returned to his seat. What was that all about? Passenger manifest?

Al-Qasr looked around for the nearest bathroom. Occupied. He glanced down at the in-flight magazine. Small wisps of beard flecked the paper. Gingerly, he fingered his face. It was soaking with sweat.

The minutely applied beard, designed to look scruffy, was – like his plan – coming unstuck. The latecomer stood up again; he seemed to be counting.

Al-Qasr looked to the bathroom at the rear. Still occupied.

65

Unwilling to get up and walk about, al-Qasr pondered the agent’s dilemma – if, that is, he was an agent. Best take it that he was. And the question for the agent was simple: which one of the Hasidic scholars was the odd man out?

Was the plan to arrest him on the plane, or wait till he got off? Had they not considered the possibility that he might have a bomb on the plane? If they approached him, he might set it off. What were they thinking?

The jumbo had become a prison. After an hour gazing out of the window at the clouds below, al-Qasr slipped to the bathroom to tidy up his beard. He had a terrifying thought: what if one of the Jews behind him tried to strike up conversation in Yiddish or Hebrew? Then he’d be sunk. He hurried back to his seat, gobbled down his in-flight meal, then pretended to go to sleep. Before long, al-Qasr was unconscious.

While al-Qasr slept, Agent Rice tried to figure out a way of finding which one of the Jews was the suspect. The flight manifest gave no obvious clues.

He couldn’t simply go up to them and ask them who was a stranger. His orders had been straightforward: the suspect should be identified on board, if possible, but the suspect should not know he’d been targeted. Rice’s best idea so far had been to brief the stewardess and ask her to tell him if anyone stood out. Long experience on transatlantic flights should have given her an intuitive edge – if she had any intuition to begin with. It was not as common a gift as many people assumed.

Before she did her inspection, Rice had asked her to first transmit the names of the group back to a number at Langley. By the time she was able to check on the men, half of them were asleep, hats over their eyes; she promised she’d return after a few hours. Meanwhile, Rice observed the group as best he could.

After two hours, the CIA had traced every name on the conference list and attempted to telephone friends, family and colleagues to check they were all expected to participate. The stewardess handed a note to Rice. ‘Everyone kosher’ read the message. Very funny, thought Rice. He was beginning to worry about his promotion prospects. She then whispered in his ear. ‘That is, as far as they could tell. They couldn’t get substantial traces on everyone.’

‘Please underline the names with no absolute confirmation.’

The stewardess took the manifest and went back to the cockpit.

The jumbo was flying over the British Isles when al-Qasr awoke. He checked about him. The plane was relatively quiet. The seat next to him was still empty. Behind him, several members of the Talmudic party were still sleeping. The rest were reading copies of the Torah and various paperback versions of midrashim Bible commentaries. Al-Qasr wished he’d had the presence of mind to bring some Hebrew literature. It was an oversight: a bad one. He inadvertently caught the eye of the tired stewardess. He’d not meant to. The girl came towards him. At that moment, the agent turned round to see where she was going.

‘Is everything all right, Mr…?’

‘Huh?’

‘Is everything all right? You’re Mr…?’

‘Weintraub. Mr Weintraub. Everything’s fine, Miss. Really.’

‘Sorry, sir, I thought you were trying to attract my attention.’

‘No, no. I’ve just been asleep.’

‘What are you doing in Berlin, Mr Weintraub?’

‘Conference. On the Talmud. Scholarship.’

‘That’s fascinating. I always wanted to be a scholar.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yeah. But I wanted to get out of my folks’ place and travel. Didn’t like the homework, I guess.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, you have yourself a nice time.’

The stewardess looked over at the man sitting behind al-Qasr. ‘Look after your friend here, sir. He’s obviously very intelligent.’

‘Oh, he’s not my friend.’

‘Really? Oh, excuse me, sir. I thought—’

Al-Qasr butted in. ‘He means we don’t know each other very well. But we have much in common, don’t we?’

The man behind nodded in a serious fashion, and pointed to his Holy Book.

‘Well, maybe you guys can become friends at the conference.’

Al-Qasr’s eyes closed. That was all he needed: an invitation to talk.

The stewardess went back to the front of the plane. Several men behind al-Qasr started to look at him, curious to know who the extra man among them was.

Al-Qasr smiled weakly, excused himself and made his way quickly to the bathroom and locked the door. He reckoned there were maybe ninety minutes left before they landed.

The stewardess went straight back to Agent Rice. She squatted down out of sight in front of him. ‘I don’t know for definite, but there’s something curious about the Hasidic gentleman who’s currently in the bathroom on the right at the back of the compartment.’

‘OK, good work. Did you catch his name?’

‘Mr Weintraub.’

‘Weintraub, you say? You’ve underlined his name – one of four unconfirmed. Can you get that name back to the number I gave you? Ask them to check again.’

‘OK.’

Rice’s promotion prospects went up again. His plan was working.

Al-Qasr felt the noose tightening. They were on to him. The guy at the front – he knew. And who else? If they didn’t take him on the plane, it was because they did not want to. But would they take him in Berlin? Al-Qasr half-convinced himself they would. Once they could get him away from the other passengers. There’d be a welcoming committee at Berlin all right.

Damn! If only he could get onto his laptop and tune in to Agency e-traffic. But computer use had been expressly prohibited on this flight. He was still free, at least – whatever that meant. Or rather, he was alive. That’s what mattered. That was as much freedom as most people ever got – himself included. If he could shake them at Tegel… It was a big if. So what! Genetics had taught him that ‘if’ meant everything. ‘If’ was change, and change… was hope.

Al-Qasr cursed his luck. Had everything gone to plan, he’d have been a different man by now – not a Jew skulking in a shit-house. Maybe there was still time. It all depended on one fact of nature – as true for Jews as it was for Christians, Muslims, pagans, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, or atheists like him.

‘Ten minutes to landing. Return to your seats.’

Al-Qasr pulled his trousers up and vacated the WC. The stewardess tried to look disinterested.

As he fell heavily into his seat, Al-Qasr felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘You OK? You been away a long time. Luckily there’s more than one men’s room on this plane or we’d all be in the shit!’

Al-Qasr turned to the scholar and made the gesture of putting his fingers down his throat. The man behind thrust a sick-bag between the headrests.

Al-Qasr certainly looked pale enough to be airsick. What wouldn’t he do for a comforting female arm around him? The sick-bag was a godsend. He buried his face in it.

The man behind patted him on the back. ‘You hang with us when we get to the airport.’

Making a passable imitation of retching, al-Qasr nodded and put his thumb up. Maybe his luck had changed.

After what seemed an eternity with his mouth stuck in the bag, al-Qasr jerked forwards, crushing his hat into the folded table in front of him as the tyres gripped European tarmac. He sat up, leant backwards, and closed his eyes, dreaming of the days when he could have smoked his worries away.

Soon the passengers up front began filing off the plane, while the others congregated in the aisles as anxious travellers stalled over assembling their bags and cases.

Al-Qasr waited for the group behind him to move in front. Then he eased his way to his feet, reached for his blue canvas holdall in the overhead compartment and nudged his way up to the rear of the party. His new friend asked him if he felt any better; al-Qasr shook his head.

Step by leaden step, the passengers shuffled their way forwards. Al-Qasr felt the weight of the stewardess’s eyes upon him. Where the hell was the agent? Maybe he hadn’t been an agent after all! Maybe it was just paranoia and lack of sleep. Of course not. The agent was waiting for him, off the plane – waiting with his colleagues. It would be quick. Was it a trap? Maybe he could cut and run now.

No. Running would be pointless. He must hold his nerve. What would his father have done? Pointless to think about it. His father would never have been so stupid as to land himself in this mess. That’s it: deal with it. Just fucking deal with it.

Have faith. Faith? Faith in what? Faith in the plan! Faith in science. Faith in Sami al-Qasr. Destiny. No point having faith in destiny. Destiny was destiny. You couldn’t change it. Al-Qasr shrugged his shoulders. Accept. Submit.

Then he heard the stewardess. She called someone. ‘Sir! Mr Rice!’

So that was the bastard’s name. Rice.

Rice sprang out of the seat he’d been curled in; al-Qasr looked away.

‘Message for you, sir. Urgent.’

Rice made his way to the cockpit.

Shit! This was it.

66

Al-Qasr stepped out of the jumbo onto the comforting rubber floor of the internal ramp. The air felt cool and fresh. No welcoming party. No guns. No shit. So what was Rice doing? Arranging something for immigration?

Rice emerged from the cockpit. He whispered to the stewardess, ‘That’s our man all right.’

Rice had just heard there were two Sol Weintraubs and one of them was dead: cold as stone in a San Francisco apartment. Rice ran off the plane, heading for baggage collection and the final immigration checkpoint. He wasn’t alone. Beck had organised agents and soldiers at passport control and customs. All exits were being watched, and marksmen were in position around the airport. It was just a question of putting a tracer into his luggage and inside the binding of his passport.

Al-Qasr kept tight with the delegation, dazzled by the glare from the bright yellow-and-white signs that streamed around the terminal. The group passed the first men’s room. Nobody stopped to go in. Al-Qasr’s teeth began to grind. What’s wrong with these fuckers? Don’t they use the john?

Rice ran to the end of the long arrivals corridor. He could see the unmistakable posse of black-coated men. Where was the suspect? Was that him at the back? It was him all right. Rice hung back.

Al-Qasr saw the sign to the first security passport check. Security demanded an extra check before baggage collection. Staggering the influx gave the authorities more time; too much rush compromised judgement. The group passed a second men’s room. Shit! He was going to have to show his passport.

‘Hey! We’re a group! I can collect all the passports.’

‘Wait!’ The green-uniformed official was not going to be rushed by the enthusiastic leader of the group. ‘Wait in single file behind the yellow line, sir. You will be called forward one by one.’

Al-Qasr’s blood turned to acid. His body was burning; his head was exploding in hideous slow motion.

‘After you are called forward, present your passports. Don’t speak unless I ask a question. When forward, stand behind the white line. Don’t move until instructed.’

Al-Qasr waited. One scholar after another went forwards. Having to line up before German officials was fostering a dark – even angry – vibe. The hard-nosed official tried to look unconcerned, but he could sense the tension. Say something dumb like ‘I’m only following orders’, and there would be a bloody riot. He took his time. This allowed time for Rice’s colleagues, watching from behind one-way glass, to pick out and photograph the suspect.

The official studied the contours of the faces, asked several to remove their glasses. Al-Qasr could now feel the presence of Rice behind him. Right behind him. Sami felt Rice’s breath on his neck. Rice, suspecting he was too close, edged back.

‘You! Next! Passport please. Name?’

‘Weintraub.’

The controller looked hard at him.

‘Enjoy your stay in Berlin, Herr Weintraub.’

Al-Qasr found himself walking forwards. The rest of the Jewish group had hurried down an escalator to the baggage reclaim area. He followed them. Behind him: Rice. All six-feet-four of him. The college hunk.

Lady Luck smiled again. The baggage transfer was subject to the usual delay. This gave an opportunity for the men from Yuba City to finally take a leak in the men’s room.

Rice watched carefully as the bustling, talkative group hunched into the WC. He followed them. He in turn was followed by another crowd from another plane. The men’s room was packed.

A chance. Al-Qasr made straight for a toilet cubicle, opened his bag, pulled off his overcoat, crushed his hat, ripped off his tie, unclipped the wig, stuffed the specs into the bag, and reached for the theatrical hair-removing lotion. While he slapped it on, he kicked off his shoes with his heels. These too were stuffed in his bag, next to his laptop. The lotion was stinging his face. He could hear the voices of the Jewish group congregating outside, waiting for their friends. Someone shouted round the men’s room door. ‘Baggage is coming through!’

Al-Qasr dipped his hands in the toilet bowl and applied the water to his face. He wiped it off quickly with toilet paper and ran a comb through his hair. He then pulled out a light cotton zip-up jacket, with a fresh passport in its inner pocket, slipped on a pair of sneakers, grabbed the bag, flushed the toilet and walked out of the men’s room, leaving Rice still standing at the urinal.

Al-Qasr congratulated himself as he approached the customs passage. Double-booking as a Turkish businessman visiting family in Berlin was a master-stroke, thanks to Hafiz Razak’s forgery and delivery skills. Al-Qasr’s new name would almost certainly be on the passenger manifest sent through to Berlin, even though Rizgo Keser, a Kurd from Turkey’s Batman Province, had ‘missed’ the flight.

He walked briskly through customs. All the staff had been told to keep a close eye on the Hasidic Jews from the New York flight. Lucky again.

Rice, meanwhile, was still waiting for his suspect to come out of the toilet cubicles. He had not seen which one al-Qasr had gone into, and the men’s room had been packed ever since. His stomach started to churn. Maybe he’d missed him. Fuck it! The bastard had somehow hidden himself among the group. Rice dashed into the baggage hall. Most of the Jews had picked up their luggage and were approaching the customs area. He would have to delay them as a group.

Rice ran to the customs office and gestured they would have to detain the group as a whole, at least until he and his men had got a fix on al-Qasr.

Meanwhile, al-Qasr retrieved his passport from a pleasant immigration officer and headed for the airport exit. As Rizgo Keser, al-Qasr had achieved the impossible: he had flown invisibly across the Atlantic.

Al-Qasr hailed a taxi.

‘Hamburg.’

The elderly taxi driver turned round. ‘Sir, that’s a four-hour drive.’

‘And that’s 200 euros.’ Al-Qasr stuffed the cash into the driver’s hand. ‘I’m late for a meeting.’

The driver didn’t argue: it was his lucky day too.

Al-Qasr smiled to himself. It would be at least eight hours before the taxi returned to Berlin. The security men would have a long wait.

He’d done it.

67

Ashe rolled noisily into the tidy village of Cudbury after a speedy drive through Berkshire’s Lambourn Valley. Karla Lindars stood outside her home, The Old Forge, with a sponge in her hand.

‘Do turn that engine off, Toby! Goodness, what a sound! You’ll frighten the ducks!’

‘Karla!’

‘You may kiss me, darling, but I’m covered in muck.’

Karla’s legs were encased in blue jeans, her slim torso barely covered by a short black woollen top, with black bra straps wrapping her shoulder blades. Her perfume was exquisite and her blue eyes glittered like a sun-kissed fjord. Even in household fatigues, Karla Lindars looked stunning.

She eyed Ashe’s car. ‘Haven’t I seen this somewhere before?’

‘Archdeacon’s funeral. Saab 9-3.’

‘Convertible too. Hmm… Rosso Bologna.’

‘Painted specially.’

‘Nice. Engine?’

‘2.8. V6 Turbo.’

‘I prefer it to the Maserati. Come inside.’

Karla placed a pot of coffee on the conservatory table. Ashe pulled out a letter from his jacket and passed it to her. Her sharp eyes took it in with gathering enthusiasm.

‘Happy now, young man?’

‘Hard to take in, isn’t it? They’ve given me the whole department!’

‘I suppose you won’t talk to me now you’re my boss.’

‘You’re my right arm, Karla. Now I can rid myself of impedimenta.’

‘If you mean Messrs Colquitt and Bagot, Toby, I believe they’ve been transferred.’

‘My God, things move fast! I wonder… You don’t know a man called Crayke, do you?’

‘My dear, nobody knows Crayke.’

Within the hour, Ashe had his foot down and was heading for Cranfield University’s campus at Shrivenham, near Swindon, on the Wiltshire–Oxfordshire border.

Cranfield University introduced academic experts to officers of the armed forces. The Shrivenham campus served as the Royal Military College of Science, a leading world centre for research into disaster management, military vehicles, guns, ammunition systems, explosives, chemistry, communications, missile-control systems, solar energy and robotics.

Toby Ashe was given a small office in the elegant brick lecture-room wing of the establishment. He had already appointed Karla as his personal secretary, on the condition he could stay at her place when in the vicinity. Karla accepted, on condition he provide champagne and flowers on every occasion.

A lecture was in progress in Room 7. Lieutenant Commander Adrian Parsons was giving a talk on defending London from terror cells when Ashe gingerly eased the door open. Ashe caught Parsons’ eagle eye as he tiptoed along the back of the lecture hall to the exit. Parsons nodded slightly at the rather Bohemian-looking figure at the back, without interrupting the flow of his troubling presentation.

Once through the exit, Ashe came to a plain white corridor, at the end of which was a double set of fireproof oak doors. A new card-swipe mechanism and a small pinewood plaque were fixed to the wall alongside. On the plaque was written ‘B5(b)’.

Ashe swiped his security card and the doors clicked open.

The office was bare but for a plush black leather seat and a fit-for-purpose desk. Ashe picked up the phone. There was a dial tone. There were also three buttons for different lines: internal, domestic, and security (red of course). The walls were white; there was no window. An adjoining area, suitable for a secretary, enjoyed one high window: fine for ventilation, but poor for daydreaming.

68

A tape-recorded muezzin echoed about the centre of Istanbul, summoning the faithful to evening prayers. Aslan released his rear-window button and called out a greeting to the corner street seller. ‘Merhaba!’

The green-shirted surly young street seller noticed Aslan’s suit and powerful car, and addressed him with the respectful honorific. ‘Bey Effendi?’

‘Simit!’

‘Ayran?’

‘Ali!’

Ali nodded and Aslan put up two fingers. The seller poured the drinks from a large aluminium jug. Behind him, a lady leant out of her third-floor apartment window and let down a basket on the end of a rope to be filled by a girl from the corner bakery.

‘Iyigünler!’

‘Salam Alukim!’

Aslan passed a sesame-seeded bread roll and a yoghurt drink to Ali in the front.

‘Hear what he said, Ali?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The street seller. When I said “Goodbye”, he said “Salam Alukim”. You can’t move for fundies these days!’

‘May not be fundamentalist, sir. Just old-fashioned.’

‘Sure, Ali. He’s very careful to say “Bey Effendi” when he sees the car, but the look in his eye tells you everything.’

‘What does it tell you, sir?’

‘It shows, young corporal, this arsehole wants God to avenge his poverty.’

‘And give him your car.’

‘My car, Ali? Goes with the job. Maybe one day it’ll be me selling simit on street corners! No, my friend, it’s not the car he wants. It’s the country.’

Aslan’s personal mobile rang. ‘Aslan here… Didn’t I make it clear? Never call me on this line without notice.’

Ashe, taken aback, stared at the white walls of the Shrivenham office. ‘Forgive me, Mahmut. But I expect your people know by now I’ve been on the trail of Yazar and Yildiz.’

‘What can I do for you, Dr Ashe? NATO, wasn’t it?’

‘Are you not free to talk?’

‘Oh yes, I’m free.’

‘Yildiz and Yazar got away. We were too late.’

‘Of course, Dr Ashe.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘Because I’m on my way to arrest them right now. Goodbye.’

69

Karla was lying on her back in the small pool. Ashe’s trousers were rolled up to the knee and his tired feet dangled in the moon-kissed water.

‘It’s still bothering me, Karla.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘My call to Aslan. He was so… so completely different to the man I met at the Hemlock.’

‘I expect he wanted something from you then. Besides, you caught him while he was busy. You don’t know who was with him. He was probably annoyed about something.’

‘Me, probably. I forgot about his phone protocol.’

‘Might not have been you.’

‘He was so dismissive, Karla. You’d think… well you’d think that if he was about to arrest Yildiz and Yazar, he’d want to hear anything I had on them. I don’t understand his attitude at all. Makes a complete nonsense of my time in Iraq.’

‘Crayke obviously didn’t think so.’

‘If it was Crayke who arranged my promotion… You don’t think that Tower bombing has really messed my head up, do you?’

‘No, but it’s been a shock for everyone. We can’t even assemble ODDBALLS again until we know how the bomber discovered our meeting place.’

‘Maybe my memory’s been affected. Something’s been bothering me.’

‘So you said.’

‘And I can’t quite put it together.’

‘Keep trying.’

‘By the way, did you send that dispatch off to Mick Curzon today?’

‘Your erudite plea for Rozeh will be on the ambassador’s desk in Baghdad very soon, Toby.’

‘I suppose that’s something… But what I can do about the princess’s other requests, I’ve no idea. She must think I’ve got spies everywhere!’

‘Haven’t you?’

Ashe laughed, then gazed up into the night sky. He thought of spy satellites looking down over Europe. Could they pick out Laila’s brother? And the other fellow, the one her brother was supposed to be with… What was his name? Baba something… Baba… ‘Oh! What was his name? Baba…’

‘… the elephant?’

‘BABA SHEYKH! Baba bloody Sheykh!’

Karla screamed as Ashe’s legs splashed excitedly, kicking water into her eyes. ‘Thank you very much!’

‘Baba Sheykh! I knew I’d seen it before!’

Ashe padded his wet feet into Karla’s house and dashed upstairs to the spare bedroom. Pulling open his briefcase, he dived into the Aslan file. There was Aslan’s account of Turco-Kurdish politics, and there – his fingers gripped the sheets – was what he was looking for: the list of visitors to the Kartal Masonic Lodge the night of the bombing.

Yildiz and Yazar were on the list, their names heavily underlined by Aslan. And, further down the list, obscured among obscure names: ‘Baba Sheykh’. Before, the name had just looked like another New Age guru or whirling dervish on the Istanbul alternative philosophy scene. Guided by Aslan’s emphases, Ashe had had no reason to pay the name particular attention. But there it was. It had something to do with Laila and her brother. And this Baba Sheykh was connected to the Kartal Lodge bombing. For was it not Aslan who had insisted the Lodge bombing was linked to the Tower bombing?

Aslan…

Ashe’s mind was in turmoil.

A voice was calling him from downstairs. ‘Toby! Call for you!’

Head buzzing, Ashe raced down and seized the mobile from the dripping Karla. She gave him a filthy look.

‘Ashe speaking.’

‘Pardon me for my rudeness today, Tobbi.’

‘My… my fault entirely, Mahmut. Is this a secure line?’

‘Of course. And you are taking me down a very thin line, Tobbi. What’s your problem?’

‘Did you arrest Yildiz and Yazar?’

‘Internal Turkish matter, you understand. I’m under constraint of course. Should anything emerge of interest to your government, it’s possible we can discuss the matter further.’

‘Colonel, do you remember the list?’

‘List, Dr Ashe?’

‘The list you sent me. Yildiz and Yazar were invited to the Lodge. You underlined their names.’

‘Did I?’

‘There was another figure. One I never noticed.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Baba Sheykh.’

The phone crackled. ‘Well… nothing in our game is obvious, Dr Ashe. I cannot recall that name.’

Aslan’s manner seemed cold again. ‘Is everything all right, Colonel?’

‘Oh yes. Everything’s fine. So what is your request? Interrogation of the Kurdish politicians has hardly begun.’

‘Can you speak to the Lodge secretary in Kartal again? I’d like to know what this Baba Sheykh was doing at the Lodge the night of the bombing.’

‘I see. I see… Don’t make an official request, Tobbi. Leave it with me. I’m sure it’s all perfectly innocent. I must go now. I’m a busy man. Goodbye, Dr Ashe.’

70

Dear Dr Ashe,

With respect to your enquiry concerning the incident at the Masonic Lodge, Kartal District. Further enquiries with the secretary of the Lodge show that the person you referred to did not attend the Lodge as a guest on the evening concerned, and is therefore irrelevant to enquiries.

For your further information, the invitation from the Lodge was issued in response to an enquiry from a man described as ‘a Kurdish doctor of medicine’ and known to a member of the Masonic Lodge. It was the belief of this doctor that the person who did not attend possessed knowledge concerning the origins of Freemasonry in the East. The Lodge was looking forward to an historical talk from the guest, a normal occurrence at Lodge meetings in Turkey. However, the talk did not take place, on account of the reason given above. Turkish authorities find no reason to investigate this matter further and are not authorised to provide additional assistance regarding internal Turkish affairs.

The letter was not signed, but the postmark was Ankara – the seat of the Turkish government. Since his journey with Jolo, Toby knew that a Sheykh was a Yezidi spiritual leader – and ‘Baba’ meant ‘father’, so he guessed this Baba Sheykh must be important. But that didn’t explain why he was invited to the Lodge in the first place – or why he had then not turned up. And who was the Kurdish doctor?

*

‘Call for you on red, Toby.’

‘Who is it, Karla?’

‘It’s me, Dr Ashe.’ The deep, burnished timbre and tobacco-rasped tones could belong to only one man: Ranald Crayke. ‘Settling in all right, Ashe? I hear you don’t care too much for your new facility.’

‘A few pictures on the wall and it’ll be like home.’

‘Not meant to be like home, Ashe. I read a most illuminating report from Major Richmond. You did the service credit. And paid your office dues. Value it.’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’

‘No, Ashe. Thank you. Men of your calibre make my job not only possible, but infinitely worthwhile. How did you like the princess?’

‘Laila, sir?’

‘I dare say you will be on first-name terms with her. I should never have dared.’

‘You know her, sir?’

‘A most remarkable family, Ashe. The Yezidis are a remarkable people. I’ve been studying the Yezidi religion for many years. Did you know Lady Drower?’

‘Afraid not, sir.’

‘Very special lady, Lady Drower. You were following in her footsteps. Ethel Stefana Drower went to Lalish with a British officer in 1940. Dark times for civilisation. She came back to London and wrote a book about her experience. The British officer happened to be my father. I was a very young man when Lady Drower’s book first appeared on my desk. Soon it will be landing on yours. I’m also sending you some of my own personal papers – the product of many years’ research in the Near East. You will see soon enough how they chime with your investigations. Show them to nobody. Discuss them with nobody.’

‘Nobody, sir.’

‘Nobody, Ashe. Not even me. At least for the time being. But cheer up! It’s not going to be all reading. There are people you are going to meet. Old friends of mine.’

‘Right, sir.’

‘I have waited a long time for one such as you, Ashe. I don’t intend to let you waste yourself on futile investigations. Or, for that matter, futile board meetings or so-called team-work, which all too often means less-work. Mrs Lindars may deputise for you. And by the way, Ashe, you will be interested to know that Hafiz Razak is once more on the run.’

‘What happ—’

‘Another suicide attack. With extras. They hit the US interrogation centre in Mosul. Messy business. Security’s busted. Razak must be extremely valuable to our enemies for them to save him from interrogation like that. At least the Americans can’t blame Major Richmond.’

‘And all that work!’

‘Not entirely wasted, Ashe. I believe Razak was able to impart something to Richmond and yourself that is unknown to our American friends. I trust you may find it useful in a friendly exchange with our cousins Stateside, for they surely know things that we do not. And we should not deny one another the things we need, should we? Good luck!’

Ashe stared at the blank notepaper in front of him. His pencil was sharp, but he had written nothing. When Ranald Crayke was speaking, you listened.

71

Thanks to Hafiz Razak’s forgery skills, Sami al-Qasr was now Serif Okse, a Kurdish migrant worker from southeastern Turkey. He had shaved his head completely, wore thick plastic glasses and displayed a gold wedding ring. His base was an apartment in Antonistrasse, a steep hill that ran from the port and fish market right up to the Hein-Köllisch-Platz in the St Pauli district of Hamburg.

Al-Qasr sat down on a bench opposite the Babylon bar and lit a cigarette. He had a hunch that chance visits to the square, repeated randomly, might secure him a first glimpse of his prey. This time it had been a washout. He got up, shook his legs, and walked briskly round the sunlit square to a corner newsagent. He fumbled in his blue zip-up cotton jacket for the requisite money, bought a packet of Marlboro and a Turkish newspaper, then slipped into the Teufel Café for breakfast. He had just enough German and more than adequate English to make himself comfortable in the trendy bar; his escape from the Americans on the transatlantic flight had made him feel big again.

Al-Qasr had no doubt that the Baba Sheykh was somewhere in the city; he had a spy.

Cemal Goksel was a thirty-two-year-old Kurd who had worked as a border guard on Iraq’s northeastern border with Iran. Unfortunately for Goksel, a large part of his family lived on the Iranian side of the border. It was short work for members of Ansar al-Sunna operating in the hills to find his family and threaten Goksel into cooperating with the insurgency. The terrorist network had arranged for Goksel to be brought to Germany via Chechnya, and Goksel had got himself a job at the Babylon after the regular cook had disappeared. He consoled himself knowing his family was better off with the extra money he received, but he missed his life at home. Here in Europe, the Yezidis were suspicious of the Muslim Kurds. That wasn’t so surprising considering that, in the homelands of the old days, Yezidis would be threatened with death if they didn’t convert to Islam, and their children would be indoctrinated in Muslim schools to reject what their teachers called ‘Devil worship’. But the reality nowadays was very different. In Goksel’s experience, generations of living in close proximity had created acceptance and tolerance – just last month he had attended a Yezidi rite of circumcision where a Muslim had held the baby boy.

The Babylon was popular with Kurdish Turks, and Goksel had already established contacts within the Yezidi community, which was based in a converted aircraft hangar and disused government supply centre near Giessen in the state of Hessen. There was currently great excitement in the community as two men had recently arrived from Istanbul, bearing the ancient bronze image of the Peacock Angel: the symbolic representation of Tawusi Melek, the Supreme Angel, whom Yezidis believed governed this world. These two men were named Sinàn and the Baba Sheykh.

Al-Qasr watched as Goksel crossed the cobbles towards the Teufel Café. Goksel entered, swept back his greasy black hair and surveyed the bar. The manager poured him an espresso. Goksel took the cup and ambled over to the narrow wooden table where al-Qasr was sitting.

Goksel took out some cigarette papers and rolling tobacco. He laid a cigarette paper out on the table. Al-Qasr looked over his newspaper at the rolling paper. On it was written a message in pencil:

Doktor. Freitag. 18.00

Goksel tipped out a finger-full of halfzware shag into the paper and rolled it up. As he lit it, al-Qasr turned two pages of his newspaper: an agreed code; they would meet at the same time in two days.

72

Lichfield

It was raining; autumn was in the air, crisp and moist by turns. The elegiac sweetness of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs filled Toby Ashe’s warm sitting room.

Scattered around the floor were sheets of paper covered in large felt-penned words:

SETH

THOTH/HERMES

ABRAHAM

BRAHMIN

RA

BRAHMA

SHIVA

ARYAN

SERPENT

PILLARS

TOWER OF BABEL

MITHANNI

CHALDAEANS

KURDS

URARTU

UR

YEZIDIS

The results of a lifetime’s research lay before Ashe’s eyes: piles of Crayke’s now yellow-edged papers occupied the floor. Some of the typed and handwritten notes dated back to the Second World War. The most recent additions had been written in the last few years. For Ashe, every page was a source of fascination.

Crayke’s neat hand had embraced the most obscure textual resources, from the manuscripts of Arabic libraries in Istanbul and the Yemen to the private collections of maharajahs. The academic and private libraries of Europe and America had been thoroughly raked for anything that might sate Crayke’s infinitely patient curiosity.

For the last few hours Ashe had been ploughing through acres of notes made by Crayke during a trip to Sri Lanka in the fifties. As far as Ashe could tell, Crayke had gone there to visit the island’s many shrines dedicated to Shiva and the Shiva-lingam, the god’s phallic symbol. As in India, it seemed that in Sri Lanka the Shiva-lingam was particularly important to Hindu women who were either praying for fertility or giving thanks for it.

Ashe already knew that Shiva, the Destroyer, was one of the Hindu Trinity, alongside Brahma, the Creator, and Vishnu, the Preserver. He was aware that Shiva had three eyes – the moon, the earth, and the sun, and that his third eye was always open. But Ashe was intrigued to learn that Shiva had close correlations with the Canaanite and Syrian god Ba’al, as well as to the Roman Saturn, the Phoenician El, the Greek Typhon, and the Egyptian Seth.

‘Seth’, it transpired, was Sanskrit for ‘white’, and Shiva rode a white bull. The white seemed related to the ‘sour milk sea’ from which, according to the Hindu Vedas, Creation emerged. The Yezidis called Creation’s first beginning ‘the pearl’.

Sometimes Shiva was depicted covered entirely in serpents. The word ‘semen’ came readily to Ashe’s mind – the elixir of life scattered the world over. And he was often represented by a phallus: the Shiva-lingam. He was the father of the nations, and his colours were white, black, red and yellow. He was the patron deity of esotericists, occultists, the creator and saviour of spiritual man.

Where did all this fit into his investigation? Or was the investigation supposed to fit into all of this? Ashe stared at the words surrounding him. If Crayke already knew how all this tied together, why was he wasting Ashe’s time?

The phone rang.

‘I want to speak to—’

‘Laila!’

‘Of course it’s Laila, Tobbi. I’m in Cairo, with relatives. What of the Baba Sheykh – and my brother?’

‘Your Baba Sheykh was probably in Istanbul in March. Perhaps with a doctor.’

‘Sinàn is a doctor.’

‘That helps. Any idea why they were in Istanbul?’

A pause. Laila seemed uncomfortable with the question.

‘Laila, are you there?’

‘I think I know. It was about Freemasonry and our faith. Baba wanted the world to know about us. But they cannot be in Istanbul now.’

‘Why?’

‘There is a Yezidi community in Germany. Near Giessen. Baba and my brother have visited recently. I think they are in Germany still, Tobbi. And in great danger.’

‘Was anyone trying to hurt your brother and Baba Sheykh in Istanbul?’

‘I cannot say. Please look after yourself. Please find them!’

‘Laila, you know I’ll do everything I can. But you need to tell me more about the Baba Sheykh so I can understand what danger he might face.’

The line crackled for a few seconds and Laila’s voice emerged once more.

‘The Baba Sheykh is like one of your saints. Like them, he is sworn to follow a path. He is Ekhityare Mergehe.’

‘Which means?’

‘It means “Old Man of the Sanctuary”. “Baba” means “Father”, Toby. He is father of the sheykhs. He must belong to the Fekhr el-Dîn branch of the Shemsani – the oldest clan of Yezidi sheykhs. The Baba Shekyh may not marry anyone except a member of this clan – and his son follows him. This is always the tradition. God be with you, Tobbi.’

Into the void of incomprehension crept a single word. Rising from within Ashe’s brain, it spread itself over his consciousness like the tail of a glorious mythical bird.

The word was ENDOGAMY.

Endogamy. The Shemsani sheykhs were endogamous. That was the key Ashe had been waiting for: the key to understanding Crayke’s long quest.

73

Oxford

Having temporarily swapped his desert fatigues for dark, worn tweeds and a moss-green tie, Crayke puffed on his glowing pipe. Beneath a halo of brown-grey cloud, his taut face and gnarled throat blended with the grained panels behind them. Even the hairless dome of his head had an oaken feel, like a barrel of mysterious rum or the rounded knob of a curious, graven wand.

With Crayke occupying one of its nooks, The Eagle and Child pub on St Giles had the air of its pre-war glory days, when C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams would convene there for beer and talk of the fictional and the mystical.

‘Endogamy, sir.’

‘Marriage restricted to within a family or clan. A formal means of genetic reincarnation. Find the subject especially interesting, Ashe?’

‘I do, sir.’

Crayke closed his eyes. His mind seemed to be ascending to the smoke-cloud above.

‘I’m not asleep, Ashe. I am visualising what you are going to say to me. You are going to refer to the pharaohs, how they preferred to marry inside their family, notwithstanding some attendant misfortunes in the form of simpletons. You are going to say something about the protection of a certain race. A certain race of human beings.’

Ashe shook his head. ‘How the hell do you do that?’

‘It’s a gift, in the first instance. Then one can work on it – train it, if you will. Please continue the discourse – and do stop to drink occasionally. There’s nothing worse than coming to the end of a point, only to find one’s glass is still full. A pint per point is a sound rule of thumb.’

‘Have you ever read The Three Steles of Seth?’

Crayke’s eyes cracked open. ‘Promising title.’

‘It’s a book that was discovered in Upper Egypt.’

‘Ah yes. The so-called Nag Hammadi Library. Christian and non-Christian Gnostic writings. Most of them previously unknown before their discovery in 1945.’

‘The book was written by a group who called themselves “Sethians”.’

‘They might not have called themselves that, Ashe! Were they not known by their enemies as “Ophites”, or serpent worshippers? Fascinating things, snakes.’

‘They called themselves the “immoveable race”.’

‘Why was that, Ashe?’

‘Well, sir, they reckoned that an original divine knowledge was entrusted to Seth, Adam’s new son, born after Cain murdered Abel. Seth’s genetic line went on. It was preserved in Noah’s family – particularly in the case of Abraham. He had the secret knowledge of God.’

‘A fine tale. The Ark could be a kind of womb, couldn’t it? The preserver of a secret. Didn’t the Yezidis have a story about a leak in the Ark being blocked by the appearance of a serpent, coiling itself into the hole, and allowing the Ark to roll on to new heights? Mount Judi wasn’t it? In the kingdom of Ararat – or, more properly, Urartu.’

‘Are you sure you need me to—’

‘Don’t be so egotistical, man! We need one another’s minds! Go on!’

Ashe drank deeply from his pint. ‘So the Sethians decided that Jesus was an incarnation of the original Seth. Seth was the progenitor of divine knowledge.’

‘Was not Seth also credited with knowledge of science?’

‘He was, sir, as were several other persons, gods or groups. They all seem to have had something to do with a special aristocratic tradition, which was later called “Aryan”.’

‘“Aryan” is Sanskrit for “high-born”, an aristocratic people. That’s all it means.’

‘Not to everyone, sir. Wasn’t Abraham an Aryan?’

‘You’ve been reading my notes, Ashe. Good. What did you learn?’

‘Abraham came from “Ur of the Chaldees”. That is, “Urartu”, the biblical Ararat, where Noah’s Ark rested in the Bible story.’

‘And what people did Abraham come from?’

‘Well, according to your work, sir, all that stuff about Abraham being a wandering shepherd is romantic rubbish.’

‘Certainly. Abraham was a Mithanni prince, around 1450 BC. I presume you read Flavio Barbiero’s paper on the subject? I included it with my notes.’

‘It’s a brilliant paper, sir. Barbiero shows that the Mithannis were “Aryans”. Abraham’s father, Tareh, had been at war with Pharaoh Thutmosis IV, and lost. So, as the royal son, Abraham was obliged to settle close to the Egyptian border in the south, the so-called “promised land”, as insurance against further rebellion. That explains Abraham having a private army, and why he – and especially his wife Sarai – had close relations with the pharaoh’s court. It explains how his descendants came to see themselves as being in captivity in Egypt – and why their faith was different.’

‘Right. They had a tradition that they came from special stock.’

‘And the family carried the old Mesopotamian stories with them. They took the stories into Egypt and out again. And Abraham probably worshipped a god whose equivalent in Egypt was Seth, the old god of sun and moon, of night and day, whose image was the extraordinary desert hare. This mighty Seth was later demoted by the Egyptians into a kind of wicked uncle, a usurping Richard III-type, because he’d been worshipped by hated foreigners. Later, Seth becomes a model for the Devil, and the desert hare’s ears were turned into horns.’

‘Good, Ashe. Go on.’

‘Well, you then get all these traditions where the Egyptian god of science, Thoth, the Graeco-Egyptian mastermind, Hermes, and the Hebrew Seth are all identified. Stories like the pillars of Seth preserving all the wisdom of the arts and sciences. You get that in old Freemasonry.’

‘And?’

‘And I suppose it’s got something to do with the ancestors of the Yezidis.’

‘Only suppose, Ashe?’

‘Well, the Yezidis come from the same part of the world as Abraham and the later Chaldaeans who conquered Babylon from the north. From the Transcaucasus, around Lake Van and the borders of what is now Turkey, Iran and Georgian Armenia. And then there’s the fantastic snake at Lalish. The Sethian Gnostics called Jesus “the Great Seth”, and depicted him as a serpent.’

‘Why not? Jesus depicted himself that way. Gospel of John, Chapter 3: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so must the Son of Man be lifted up, That whosoever believes in him may have eternal life.”’

‘Eternal life, yes. Remind me of the background, sir.’

‘The Great Seth was doubtless quoting the Book of Numbers, Chapter 21, verses six to nine, at the time. God sent serpents to bite the children of Israel as punishment for blasphemy. The cure, following repentance, was for Moses to make a bronze serpent. The brazen serpent was raised high on a staff. It cured the sick that gazed upon it. Clearly a story with a story behind it.’

‘Which appears to have been lost.’

‘I wonder, Ashe. Does not the serpent represent wisdom? Think of the Garden of Eden. There is the story of the serpent who is wrapped round the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit Eve mischievously did eat.’

‘With catastrophic consequences. In the Gnostic myths, the fruit offered by the serpent is gnosis, knowledge of the person’s divine identity: high or highest consciousness.’

‘Indeed, Ashe. And for this the serpent is condemned.’ Crayke inhaled pipe smoke, then blew his nose onto a red silk handkerchief. ‘Funny thing, the Bible. One minute the snake is condemned, the next he’s raised up as the source of a divine cure. The snake is ambivalent.’

‘Like the Egyptian Seth, sir. He’s ambivalent too. There’s a duality. Sun and moon – good and bad. He’s got a seriously dark side.’

‘Have you read the story of Adam in the Yezidi text, the Meshef Resh?’

‘Thought they had no written tradition, sir.’

‘Only two short texts have emerged, so far, Ashe. Read them as soon as possible. You’ll find transcripts in among my notes. According to the writer of the Meshef Resh, the “Black Book”, the Yezidis come from Adam through the line of Seth.’

‘Bloody hell!’

‘No, it’s a quite straightforward fact of their beliefs.’

‘But the implications—’

‘Are interesting, yes. In the Meshef Resh, the Yezidis’ god, or rather their angel, called Melek Tawus – sometimes called the Peacock Angel – visits Adam in Paradise. Lord Tawus teaches Adam he will have to learn to fend for himself. He will have to make his way in the world from his own ingenuity.’

‘Sounds up-to-date. Reminds me of the story of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel – an ancient Mesopotamian story, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘How so, Ashe?’

‘You remember the story: Nimrod tells Abraham’s ancestors they needn’t give thanks to God now they’re capable of doing mighty things for themselves. So they start building the Tower, the Tower of Babel. But the way the Bible tells it, Nimrod’s attitude is condemned.’

‘Interesting. Perhaps the Yezidi story has more to say to our times. Are they telling us why we need genius? Lord Tawus gives Adam a helpful kick up the backside. Not to punish him, but to encourage him to get out and learn what he can do. And should the sons of Adam just keep at it, they’ll come to work miracles.’

‘The beautiful big black serpent at Lalish! I’ve seen it. It must be—’

Crayke put his finger to his lips. ‘Please! Don’t say too much – at least, that is, until I’ve brought you another pint of this happy intoxicant.’

Outside, heavy rain flushed away summer’s accumulated grime. Ashe recalled distant student days; they had never been as good as this.

‘There! Drink deep, man. Deep.’

Ashe drank; no better advice could he recall from a man of learning!

‘I sense you have an urge to speculate.’

‘Sir, could it be possible that once upon a time, as it were, there was a man… let’s call him Seth or Shiva, for the sake of argument.’

‘Which?’

‘OK. We’ll call him ProtoSeth. And ProtoSeth lived before there was recorded history. Because he, ProtoSeth, was the first to have the idea of recording it.’

‘A master spirit.’

‘Yes, a master spirit. And then he had an insight into nature. A marvellous image from his subconscious appeared to his mind’s eye.’

‘You are describing what is loosely called a vision.’

‘Let’s say this vision was the image long associated with Hermes or Mercury, and which, I suspect, is a true Sethian image. I refer of course to the caduceus.’

‘Two serpents entwined about a “tau” staff. Yes.’

‘I’m sure I’m not the first to detect a similarity between the caduceus of Hermes and the DNA double helix. The reconciliation of opposites into a higher unity.’

‘Are you saying ProtoSeth saw the double helix we associate with DNA?’

‘Well…’

‘This is not the kind of thing, Ashe, you should be heard muttering at High Table. You might be considered eccentric.’

‘Then it’s lucky we’re not at High Table.’

‘But we shall be presently. There’s someone I want you to meet. And I shall be your guest as well. Is not Toby Ashe a member of Brasenose College? And is not today the day when Sir Moses Beerbohm becomes an honorary fellow of that establishment? A grand ceremony at the Sheldonian Theatre on Broad Street – winding up even as we speak – swiftly followed by lunch in hall at Brasenose. Drink up!’

74

Crayke and Ashe reached for their coats and hurried out into St Giles. The rain had stopped and as they crossed into Broad Street, the stone glowed like amber in the sun.

Crayke paused to relight his pipe. ‘It’s good to be a peripatetic philosopher again. You’ve no idea how being stuck behind a desk can stunt your growth! So, what’s next, Ashe, eh?’

‘OK. Now let’s imagine our original Aryan, our ProtoSeth. He’s woken up to something no one else has ever seen. What he’s got is an image for the origin of life and the universe. He’s got some kind of intuitive knowledge of what we now call DNA. He doesn’t understand it from the outside – the chemistry of it – as we now do. He understands the “sour milk sea” of Creation from the inside – as an expression of a mind.’

‘He sees a pearl: the mind expressing itself in matter through chemistry.’

‘Right. ProtoSeth has entered into one of the mysteries of life, maybe the mystery of life. He sees that creation and destruction are one complementary process; they belong together like day and night. The contradictory world of Creation points to a higher, invisible level. And it’s the beginning of architecture!’

Crayke marvelled at Ashe’s intuitive leaps. ‘Architecture?’

‘Yes. This power comes from beyond the stars. So the first proper architectural works are the columns and towers, the geometry of elevation, the high erections that link the whole life of mankind to the higher universe. These weren’t just buildings, they were rockets! And what does the Bible suggest? Tall buildings are an affront to God! After Babel is destroyed, different languages come into being, different races emerge and divide – as a punishment for building with excessive pride, or too much high consciousness!’

‘Hmm… Hubris is rarely the intelligent option.’

‘Well, that’s the moral applied to the story, sir, that the builders tempted God’s wrath because they were building under their own initiative. Anyhow, if we use the Babel story as an image, rather than a morality play, we can see it’s saying that the seed has been dispersed. Isn’t it interesting, sir, that Babel – Babylon – was linked in the minds of the writers of Genesis to the Chaldaeans, the people who ruled Babylon when the Judaean aristocracy were imprisoned there? Maybe the Jewish exiles didn’t realise the Chaldaeans, with their magical astrology, were their own long-lost cousins, the remains of the Mithanni aristocracy.’

‘Fascinating, Ashe.’

‘When unenlightened minds see great buildings, they have two impulses. One: worship the totem. Two—’

‘Fly aeroplanes into them. I get it, Ashe. You’re talking about the fear of Seth.’

‘Great phrase, sir. “Fear of Seth”. The “Fear of Seth” has dominated our culture. It dominates all of us.’

‘Very true. Very true.’ For a few seconds, Crayke’s mind tripped into the ether. Then he smiled and turned to Ashe: ‘So what about our man? Where’s old ProtoSeth?’

‘ProtoSeth believes the genetic line that has preserved the divine knowledge, or high consciousness, must be kept inviolate, so that the Aryan, or high-born consciousness, might serve as a leaven to raise the world.’

‘Or subdue it, Ashe. ProtoSeth may have been less idealistic than you imagine! Maybe he, or his descendants, didn’t want to “turn us on”.’

‘Benevolent or not, he or his followers form a tight aristocracy, a militia.’

‘To what end?’

‘As I say, they believe they must raise the original race, which has been scattered in the world.’

‘You’re doing it again. Most people hearing you now, Toby, would think this was some kind of Nazi race theory.’

‘Well, the Nazis twisted the whole Aryan thing. Completely perverted the idea. Sick minds make sick ideas. Even if we imagine Aryans as some kind of super tribe, “the Germans” certainly weren’t their representatives! Anyhow, Hitler’s so-called Aryan gods were treated like sheep, not men.’

‘And of course, Ashe, let us not forget that if Abraham was Mithanni, and the Mithannis were Aryans – as they have been called – then, my dear boy, the children of Abraham are the descendants of an Aryan aristocracy! So Hitler’s mob murdered the true Aryans. Ironic, is it not?’

Ashe paused, the profundity dawning on him. ‘My God! What would people think of that? The Jews – as Aryan as the ancient Iranians and Brahmins! From this standpoint, the Nazis had to fabricate the whole Atlantis-Nordic legend to make up for the fact they weren’t real Aryans! They must subconsciously have felt inferior to the Jews.’

‘The inferiority complex can be a very dangerous and very powerful thing. It has turned many a man into a raving lunatic. God help us when the lunatics seize the reins of power! That’s what ODDBALLS is all about, Ashe: catch ’em while you can!’

The two men were halfway down the dark, narrow passage of Brasenose Lane. Glorious Radcliffe Square, with its great domed library chamber, the Radcliffe Camera, opened before them. But as he entered the porter’s lodge of Brasenose College, Ashe was oblivious to his environment. His thoughts were at last becoming clear. He had to go on.

‘The thing is, sir, what your work adds up to is this. What the world has been taught to accept as true is a pack of lies. And these Yezidis, they’re really onto something.’

‘Is that why they have been persecuted, Ashe?’

75

The college scouts were already delivering the prawn cocktail starters to the guests seated at High Table. Crayke stood at ease, surveying Brasenose’s 500-year-old hall until he caught Sir Moses Beerbohm’s restless eye. Smiling broadly, the rotund Nobel Prize-winner summoned Crayke to sit beside him.

‘Ran! Ranald Crayke! My dear chap, how marvellous to see you! Glad to know that Baghdad does let you get away on occasion.’

‘There’s life beyond, dear friend. Do you know Dr Toby Ashe?’

‘Delighted. Didn’t you write a book, Dr Ashe? The Generous…?’

‘Gene. Yes, Sir Moses. All my fault.’

‘Come, come! It wasn’t strictly science, but it wasn’t rubbish either. What is your current field?’

Crayke interjected. ‘For the moment, let’s call it “aspects of Mesopotamian civilisation”. Ancient, mostly. Toby has a question for you.’

Ashe winced at being put on the spot.

‘Don’t let old Crayke take liberties, Ashe. What’s the question?’

Ashe looked at Crayke. Crayke’s eyes widened. ‘What was that extraordinary story you told me? The one about Adam and Eve.’

‘Sounds like Genesis, not genetics, Ran, old boy!’

‘Same concept, surely, Moshe!’

‘Come, come! Must keep science and religion apart.’

Crayke nudged Ashe in the ribs, discreetly.

‘Well, Sir Moses, it’s… it’s about people… a people I’ve been studying. They have this legend about Adam arguing with Eve.’

‘How very true to life!’

‘Eve insists she can have children by herself; she doesn’t need Adam.’

‘Eve – the original feminist!’

‘And Adam says she’s wrong. She needs him.’

‘The original fantasist!’ Beerbohm’s massive frame bobbed with laughter.

‘So, Sir Moses, Adam and Eve decide to test the merits of their convictions by conducting experiments.’

‘I don’t know who these people are, Dr Ashe, but they sound like proper scientists.’

‘So Adam and Eve both place their respective reproductive—’

‘Not over lunch, surely!’

‘Pardon me. They put the product of their fertilities into separate jars and leave them for the prescribed period. After the gestation season, the jars are opened.’

‘Is that the question, Dr Ashe – what was in each jar?’

‘No. That’s been answered. Eve’s jar was opened. Inside they found a putrid mess.’

‘How disappointing for her. And in Adam’s jar?’

‘Two healthy, bouncy children. A boy and a girl.’

‘The question?’

‘What do you think was the story’s original meaning?’

‘Goodness! Well, my dear boy, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say this old tale constituted an ancient insight into the relative significance of X and Y chromosomes. An intuitive realisation that a sperm bearing a Y chromosome makes an embryo into a male. A gene on that chromosome leads the growing embryo on the road to masculinity, regardless of the number of X chromosomes. It’s something in the male’s sperm that does the job.’

Ashe stared at Crayke; Crayke smiled, raising his eyebrows.

‘May I enquire, Dr Ashe, as to the provenance of this mythological titbit?’ Beerbohm picked up a loose prawn, and swallowed it.

‘It’s a Yezidi story, Sir Moses.’

‘Yezidi? Where have I heard that?’

‘From me, you old duffer!’

‘Of course, Ran. Kurds! Northern Iraq. Armenia. Now I remember. Was a time you talked of little else.’

Beerbohm went quiet for a while. Goblets of wine were filled and Dover sole was served.

Ashe could hardly believe his direct hit. He was about to get another.

‘Ran, old boy! Perhaps your friend Ashe here would be interested in some of the latest research concerning the Kurds.’

‘Research?’

‘Their genes, man! Not really my field, but there’s an interesting link between some Jews, and some Kurds and Armenians.’

Ashe slapped his silver cutlery on the polished table.

‘Please, Ashe!’

‘Sorry, sir. Please, Sir Moses. I’d like to know more.’

‘We all would, my dear fellow. That’s why we’re still here. Well, as I recall – and that’s not much – the work in question is being carried out by Michael Hammer, who’s a fine geneticist, and a nephrologist, Karl Skorecki. The team’s been building on a study by Ariella Oppenheim, carried out at the National Academy of Sciences in the USA. Can’t be sure, but I think there was a contribution from my old protégé and plagiarist, Sami al-Qasr.’

The name ‘al-Qasr’ stuck out like a sore thumb. Al-Qasr, the son of the fanatical anti-Semite and anti-Mason; al-Qasr, the beneficiary of Istanbul bomber Razak’s forgery skills. Now, al-Qasr the geneticist, whom Sir Moses accused of stealing ideas! Ashe began to wonder if he had been chasing the wrong fox altogether.

‘Are you there, Dr Ashe?’

‘I’m sorry, Sir Moses. I was just taking in what you were saying about the genetic link.’

‘Between some Jews and Kurds, yes. Well, the team discovered a haplotype.’

‘Haplo…?’

‘Haplotype. Surely you remember? Genetic mutation in the chromosome, or what we call a “marker”. The team called their new one the Cohen Modal Haplotype.’

‘Sounds like a sixties psychedelic band, Sir Moses.’

‘Well, you’ll know more about that sort of thing than I do.’

‘Why the “Cohen” bit?’

‘The Cohen bit, Dr Ashe, comes from a Jewish word for “priest”. It was a fairly common Jewish surname, indicating descendants of Judaean priests of two thousand years ago, when the Jews had their priesthood and temple in Jerusalem. Something like 56 per cent of Sephardic Cohens have the haplotype. Sephardic Jews have ancestors that can be traced to southwest Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Anyhow, a lot of geneticists got quite excited about it. There’s a chap here in Oxford, David Goldstein. He reckoned the chromosomal type was a constituent of the ancestral Hebrew population.’

‘Amazing.’

‘Interesting, certainly. Anyhow, it turns out the Cohen Modal Haplotype was not specific to the descendants of Jews.

‘Dr Levon Yepiskoposyan at Armenia’s Institute of Man in Yerevan found the haplotype in some Armenians. Looking further into the Transcaucasus region, Dr Brinkmann found the haplotype was actually common among Iraqi Kurds. And Ariella Oppenheim found the dominant haplotype of the Iraqi Kurds was only one microsatellite-mutation step away from the Cohen Modal Haplotype. Pretty significant. So, to sum up, the haplotype evidence supports the view that Kurds and Armenians are close relatives of today’s Jews. That probably means the majority of Jews today have paternal ancestry from the northeastern Mediterranean region.’

Ashe could hardly contain his excitement: solid scientific support for his hypothesis. ‘Let me get this right, Sir Moses. You’re saying, in effect, that the Jews and the Kurds are related.’

‘Going on the haplotype evidence, absolutely. A lot of Jews and Kurds are related – distantly anyway.’

‘Could Abraham have come from what is now Kurdistan?’

Sir Moses thought for a moment. A twinkle appeared in his eye. ‘Yes, I suppose he could. And from what I remember of the Bible, that would make sense of a lot of his movements. I don’t know what difference it would make to anyone, but yes, it’s more than possible that ancestors of Jewish people began their existence in an area within or near to Kurdistan. Is that useful at all, gentlemen?’

Two hours later, Ashe and Crayke stood on the step outside the Brasenose gatehouse. Eyes red from drink, their hearts were euphoric.

‘Must be the wine, Ashe. Let’s pull ourselves together. Do you know Lee Kellner?’

‘Director of the Counter Terrorism Centre, CIA.’

‘Right.’

‘Never met him, sir.’

‘Time you did. Zappa’s been trying to wheedle intel from me about Sami al-Qasr. Seems al-Qasr’s disgraced himself again and quit the US. The CTC must be desperate if they’re nudging Zappa in my direction.’ He seized Ashe’s shoulder and whispered, ‘Time’s come to nudge you in theirs.’

76

Only a few minutes’ drive from the centre of Washington DC, the Morrison House Hotel in South Alfred Street, Alexandria Old Town, was the perfect place for Ashe to collect his thoughts. A fine Federal-style red-brick house with arched sash windows, the hotel resembled nothing so much as a grand survivor of the 1864 Atlanta burning immortalised in Gone with the Wind. It was General Sherman who ordered the Atlanta conflagration and Ashe enjoyed the irony that it was another Sherman who introduced him to the warm Southern hospitality of the 4-star Virginian hotel 140 years later.

Having fixed a meeting with Kellner for later that afternoon, Beck left Ashe sitting quietly in the warm sunlight of an early eighteenth-century-style parlour ‘Grille’. A genial black pianist played not ‘As Time Goes By’, but Debussy’s ‘Danse Bohémienne’. Even so, Ashe could not but dream that from among the immaculately dressed, refreshingly discreet ladies who sipped champagne on polished antique Windsor chairs, a latter-day Ingrid Bergman might yet appear with a story and an ache for meaningful adventure. Finding little inspiration in the large splashes of colour framed like Picassos to encourage enthusiasm for cocktails, Ashe looked to the pianist’s fingers that acrobatically surmounted the tones and semitones, sharps and flats of the shiny keyboard.

While Ashe had felt hot on the trail where Crayke’s researches were concerned, it was by no means obvious how to apply his new knowledge to the key questions.

Who was responsible for the Kartal Lodge bombing?

How was Kartal linked to the attack on the Tower?

The picture was a tangle and the clarity of his surroundings mocked his attempts at untangling it.

There had been disappointments. Trust in Colonel Aslan might be misplaced; Aslan had his own concerns, lodged, it seemed, within Turkish security priorities. Though he had grounds to suspect Aslan had used him to locate Yildiz and Yazar for internal Turkish purposes, he could not prove it. Had Aslan misled him? That might be going too far, but there was something suspicious about Aslan’s reticence where the Baba Sheykh’s presence on the Lodge guest list was concerned; Aslan’s changed attitude struck Ashe as significant – but what did it signify?

If Aslan was not to be trusted, what of Aslan’s belief that the Kartal Lodge atrocity was connected to the Tower bombing? Was this a blind? Maybe, but a new concern had emerged: Sami al-Qasr.

There was certainly a British angle to al-Qasr. He was a contact of Hafiz Razak’s, the pro-al-Qaeda terrorist linked directly to attacks on British interests in Istanbul. Al-Qasr had significant British experience, including acquaintance with high-level scientific figures with intelligence contacts, such as Moses Beerbohm. Al-Qasr had quit Britain in the eighties to undertake secret work for Saddam and subsequently for the US. The British had tried to frustrate al-Qasr’s military-scientific work in 1992, when the RAF had bombed a facility he used north of Basra. That much was clear from al-Qasr’s old file. If al-Qasr followed his father’s beliefs, hatred for a so-called ‘Jewish-Masonic conspiracy’ could have been a motivator, as well as a grudge against Britain whose air force might have wrecked his plans.

Ashe looked at his watch. The meeting at Gadsby’s Tavern with Kellner and Beck was scheduled for 3 p.m. With only a quarter of an hour in hand, Ashe declined the hotel’s generous offer of a car and chauffeur, stepped down from the hotel’s pillared portico, and headed east along King Street, past the village-like colonial houses and overgrown grass verges towards the centre of Old Town Alexandria. Only the parked cars spoilt the near-illusion of a vanished America.

Ashe’s thoughts were racing. As Sami al-Qasr loomed larger in his investigations, he also had to contend with the emergence of another mystery figure. How had the Baba Sheykh entered the scene, and what did that mean?

It had been Laila who had mentioned him first. In her anxiety to find her brother, she had brought the sheykh to Ashe’s attention. Now the sheykh and Laila’s brother were in Germany, or so Laila believed. Meanwhile, Crayke’s work pointed to endogamy in the sheykh’s family, a fact of genetic importance still obscure to the overall picture.

Then there was Aslan.

Aslan either regarded the sheykh as insignificant, or else wished to deflect Ashe’s attention from the sheykh’s place on the Lodge guest list. But there was another possibility. Any link between the sheykh and the Lodge bombing might have been coincidental. After all, had it not been for Laila, Ashe would never have heard of him. Perhaps the Baba Sheykh was a red herring. But then there was the genetic side of the picture: an ancient link between Jews and Kurds. And genetics was al-Qasr’s territory.

An odd connection with Freemasonry ran through the picture. While al-Qasr may have been motivated to attack Freemasonry, Laila believed the Baba Sheykh wanted to harness Freemasonry in support of the Yezidi cause.

More confused than ever, Ashe turned into North Royal Street, opposite Alexandria’s Market Square. Feeling nervous, he approached the multi-storey Gadsby’s Tavern, opposite Alexandria’s City Hall with its splendid clock-tower. Ashe could only hope Kellner would shed light on the conundrum. If Kellner could not, Ashe had better keep his expenses to the minimum.

77

Dubbed the ‘finest old tavern in America’, Gadsby’s was a fabulous survivor from pre-industrial times. It had been a tavern since at least 1785, and by the end of the eighteenth century had been developed into a successful hotel by English entrepreneur John Gadsby. During a colourful history, it had played host to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. It had also played host to Toby Ashe. Ashe had been invited by Washington’s Alexandria Masonic Lodge No. 22 to address their annual St John the Baptist Festival some years previously. Happy memories of that occasion encouraged Ashe to suggest it as a suitable venue for his first meeting with Lee Kellner. A Mason himself, Kellner agreed to the location with alacrity.

The sight of two conspicuous limousines and a pair of obvious secret service operatives outside the tavern brought a smile to Ashe’s face. In America, it seemed, even the secret service relied on advertising. Recognising Ashe, the agents checked his ID and led him inside, across the polished white-oak floor of the old-time downstairs bar and restaurant to a private conference room upstairs. The candlelit dining room had hardly altered since 1814, when, across town, a British army had burned down Washington’s White House and Capitol in retaliation for US support of Bonaparte and a planned invasion of Canada. How times had changed!

Kellner and Beck rose, smiling, from their seats round the antique table as a well-frisked Ashe was shown in by the two alert agents guarding the room and corridor.

‘Welcome to Washington, Dr Ashe! I must say I admire your taste. Good of you to get me and Agent Beck here out of Langley. Care for a snack? Beck and I just ordered a Chesapeake Bay crab-cake sandwich.’

Ashe observed the bottle of Rapidan River Merlot on the table.

‘A glass of the local vino will do very nicely, thank you.’

‘Not eating?’

‘Prefer to eat after the meeting. I was hoping you’d join me at the hotel.’

Kellner looked at Beck. ‘Cancel the sandwiches.’

In spite of the rumble in Beck’s stomach, the meeting got off to a good start. There was an instant spark between Kellner and Ashe. Beck, on the other hand, was wary and a mite suspicious of Ashe’s charm; it eclipsed his own. Beck couldn’t help feeling that Ashe would have preferred to speak to Kellner alone. In this he was correct; Ashe had requested a head-to-head, but Kellner wanted the factual backup and didn’t want to have to repeat whatever might pass between himself and the Englishman. Unlike Beck, who was fond of admonishing others to ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’, Kellner was not unduly suspicious of Englishmen. If the Brits were the new Greeks and the Americans the new Romans, that was fine; roots mattered.

Kellner had intended to get the ball rolling by explaining the concerns the US had about sharing intelligence with the British. Doubts about British security went at least as far back as the catastrophic disclosures of Burgess, Philby and co. Furthermore, there were voluble US critics who saw Great Britain as hampered by human-rights legislation, a soft-option hang-out for jihadists and anti-Americanism. However, one look at Ashe’s smile and knowing eyes, together with the thought of his old friend Ran Crayke, told Kellner that Ashe knew all this anyway and they might as well put at least some of their cards on the table and cut to the chase.

Ashe very quickly realised the CIA was up a gum tree regarding al-Qasr. Not only had they physically lost him, but on weighing up the expense of all those years in California, they had to accept they had not got a great deal out of him, perhaps because never having grasped fully what he was capable of, they never had a straight deal in the first place.

It was soon clear that the British and Americans had been coming at the al-Qasr problem from opposite directions. In view of this, it made sense to complement each other’s work, if possible. Ashe produced his expurgated copies of files on both al-Qasrs, father and son, while Beck produced the late Leanne Gresham’s expurgated file on al-Qasr’s work at RIBOTech. As Ashe began to grasp the dimensions of al-Qasr’s role in advanced weapons research, the conversation hotted up considerably.

Kellner was fascinated by the idea of a link between the Kartal Lodge bombing and the Tower attack, but couldn’t help feeling it was a red herring as far as capturing al-Qasr was concerned. However, when Ashe finally let Kellner in on intel regarding al-Qasr’s connection with Syrian terrorist Hafiz Razak, his eyes lit up. He and Beck could now see perfectly how al-Qasr had eluded their grip. Taken together with their own file on Razak, they could confirm Mati Fless’s warnings about al-Qasr’s links with Ansar al-Sunna. Even more significantly, they could now confirm the so-called ‘doctor’ messages they had been receiving through SIGINT on al-Qasr.

The bombshell for Beck and Kellner was when Ashe explained about Princess Laila’s desire to find her brother, the Yezidi doctor, and his companion, the Baba Sheykh, who for some reason were in danger, probably hiding in Germany. That set the bells a-ringing. Now al-Qasr’s appearance in Berlin just might add up. The CTC could get onto Germany’s secret service with some real meat.

Two bottles of Virginian Merlot later, Kellner was beginning to wonder how he was going to deal with Ashe. He would dearly have loved to sign him up on a full-time basis. That was not going to happen. He decided to put it directly.

‘Dr Ashe. What do you want from us?’

‘Apart from another glass of your excellent wine, I should like to come along as something like an observer on field operations in Europe connected with al-Qasr, Laila’s brother and the sheykh. I would assist you all I could, subject to my superior’s approval.’

‘An “observer” you say?’

‘Means I’ll pay my own fare.’

Kellner laughed and turned to Beck. ‘D’you think we can handle a deal like that, Beck?’

‘I’d say, sir, that it’s probably an offer we should not refuse. Dr Ashe clearly comes with the confidence of involved persons who could be of great use to us. This doctor guy, for one. Ashe can use familiarity with his sister as bait. I’d like to speak to him as soon as possible.’

‘Just a minute, Sherman. I don’t like the sound of that word “bait”. I couldn’t cooperate with Laila’s brother being led into an “extraordinary rendition” scenario. I want his safety guaranteed.’

‘I said I’d like to speak to the doctor, Toby, not torture him.’

‘So long as that’s understood.’

Kellner saw the need for a little mollification. ‘OK, guys. I think we all understand one another. Subject to conversation with our mutual friend in Baghdad, Dr Ashe, I think we can join hands in amity on this one.’

‘So mote it be, Lee!’

‘So mote it be, Toby! Welcome to the United States!’

Kellner, Ashe and Beck shook hands.

Kellner turned to Beck. ‘And now, Sherman, I hope you don’t mind if I accept Dr Ashe’s very kind offer of dinner at his place – to toast the Queen you understand.’

78

Sinàn tapped his fingers on the sunlit windowsill. From his third-floor vantage point he watched mothers lifting toddlers out of pushchairs to enjoy the late-summer morning’s play in the August Lütgens Park.

One of Hamburg’s smarter districts, Altona lay a few kilometres west of St Pauli. The Chemnitzstrasse apartment was a vast improvement on the discomforts of the past six months. The Baba Sheykh, whose health had improved, was enjoying a cup of strong coffee while watching Mr Bean on daytime television. He laughed repeatedly.

‘Just like you see in Bashiqa! Only here you don’t need a satellite dish.’

‘Maybe we need a Yezidi channel, Baba.’

‘But would the children want to watch it? They’d rather watch Bean than listen to me. I don’t blame them. How can the old stories compete with this?’

Sinàn tapped his fingers on the windowsill again. ‘I have to go out this afternoon.’

The sheykh looked up, anxiously.

‘A message from the Kurdish centre in St Pauli. A sick woman. New arrival from Iraq. She has problems.’ Sinàn pointed to his stomach.

‘Why don’t they use their regular doctor?’

‘Immigration irregularities. They said, so long as I’m here, maybe I could help. Better than doing nothing. I’m getting tired of doing nothing.’

‘You could get into trouble.’

Sinàn laughed. ‘Trouble?’ He shook his head, smiled, and laughed to himself. He couldn’t remember a time when he was not in some kind of trouble.

‘Let me come with you, Sinàn.’

Sinàn looked into the Baba Sheykh’s imploring eyes, then back to the park.

Everything seemed so normal.

A white Mercedes van trundled up the cobbled Antonistrasse from the docks, coming to a halt outside al-Qasr’s apartment block. From an upstairs window, al-Qasr counted the new arrivals. Two men got out of the front, and two more emerged from the rear of the van, all wearing clean blue overalls.

Al-Qasr’s apartment bell rang. Donning thick-rimmed spectacles, he hurried down two flights of cool, stone steps to the dark vestibule. An elderly resident, owner of a gruff terrier, poked his head out of his ground-floor flat.

‘Guten Tag!’

Al-Qasr shuddered, then turned to pacify the nosy neighbour. ‘They’ve come to do my kitchen and bathroom. Best grab them while you can, eh?’

The old man nodded. The dog barked. Al-Qasr unlatched the door and two clean-shaven Iranian heads peered inside, watched closely by the old man.

‘Okse?’

The old man let the terrier run towards the group at the door. It sniffed at the men’s heels. The old man babbled anxiously. ‘You can’t leave the van here. Tell them, Herr Okse! Tell them they can’t leave the van on the street! It’s against the law!’

Al-Qasr nodded. ‘I’ll tell them.’ He turned back to the tall driver. ‘There’s an underground car park on Lincolnstrasse. It’s off the Reeperbahn.’ Al-Qasr pointed. ‘Round the corner. Up there. Can you see? But it’s pedestrianised. You’ll have to drive back down to the docks and round the long way. Got a map?’

‘I find it.’

The old man persisted in being a nuisance. ‘Lincolnstrasse! Herr Okse. Tell them! Car park!’

‘They’re just parking the van.’

The old man nodded again. Bugged, al-Qasr wondered when he’d have to fix him.

‘What about tools, Herr Okse? They must have tools.’

‘Yes, yes. Tools. Good point. Hey! Better leave your tools here!’

‘What?’

‘Your tools. No point carrying them all the way from the car park.’

The old man noticed the pause and saw heads shaking behind the dimpled glass. Generally suspicious of people who looked like Muslims, he moved out from his doorway and approached the entrance. He pulled open the door to take a better look at the four men. ‘Don’t look like plumbers, Herr Okse.’

‘Students. Pocket money. For the extras, you know.’

‘Extras? On the Reeperbahn?’

‘Yeah. Holidays and luxuries. I got them cheap through the university.’

‘University!’ The old man shook his head. ‘So now you need a degree to be a plumber! What’s happening to Germany? Here! Let me help you with your tools!’

‘No, no. It’s all right.’

‘No trouble. I know what it is to work.’

‘Please! Please let me deal with this, sir.’

The old man looked hurt. The Iranians shuffled around on the step.

‘Please yourself!’ The old man sloped back to his door, muttering, and returned to his daytime TV.

The vestibule echoed as the old man slammed his wooden door shut, leaving fresh dog-shit on the cold floor. Barking could still be heard from inside. One of the Iranians looked at al-Qasr and motioned his finger across his neck.

79

The four men shuffled awkwardly around al-Qasr’s sitting-room coffee table. Al-Qasr checked their names off a list on his laptop: Abu Ja’far Suyuti, Muhammad ibn Abu Talib, Ahmad al-Din bin Ali, and Hashim Bukhari. Suyuti was the tallest and clearly the leader of the group.

‘OK to smoke?’

‘Please. Sit down. I’ll bring the tea.’ Al-Qasr served tea in crimson glasses.

‘Good tea!’ offered Suyuti.

‘British.’

‘Great.’

Al-Qasr laughed. ‘Tell me, how did you get here?’

Suyuti turned to Muhammad ibn Abu Talib, the youngest of the group. ‘You tell him. You’re the talker.’

Muhammad’s eyes had a tired, glazed air. Just twenty-one, he had seen his share of fighting. ‘We’re all Arabs from the Iranian side of the northern border. We were about to leave Chechnya for northern Iraq. So we were looking forward to seeing our families again. Then we got the order to join an Iranian-Russian educational exchange. They said we looked like students. One day we’re killing Russians, the next we’re taking lessons from them! We were in St Petersburg a bit, then we got the order to head for Estonia. We had internal passes and stuff. I speak Russian.’

‘Weren’t you missed in St Petersburg?’

‘Summer holidays!’

The other three men laughed. ‘Travel broadens the mind!’ Suyuti chipped in. ‘We got a ship from the Baltic to Hamburg. No problems.’

‘Customs?’

Suyuti shrugged his shoulders. ‘When do we start?’

Al-Qasr sat back in his armchair. ‘Today. Soon you will meet my friend. Cemal Goksel. Trust him.’

‘A Kurd!’

‘He’s a Kurd. So am I – for the moment. You’d better like Kurds round here, Hashim! They’re everywhere.’

The other three laughed. Suyuti chided Hashim. ‘You’re smallminded, Hashim. Most Kurds are believers.’

‘Shia!’ snorted Hashim.

‘Not all of them.’

‘Kurds kill our brothers in Ansar al-Sunna.’

‘And Kurds let us into Iraq to get revenge.’

Al-Qasr was dismayed to hear the old hatreds and rivalries. It had been a long time since he’d shared tea with fellow Arabs. ‘Come on, brothers! I thought we were united in our cause! Allah is one. The Arabs are one.’

The men looked unconvinced. ‘So, what do we do?’

‘Goksel has made contact with a Kurdish doctor. He is coming to the Kurdish Centre close to here at six.’

‘Then we take him!’

‘Hold on, Muhammad! Not so fast. He’s not the one we want. One of you will follow him home, with Goksel.’

‘What do the rest of us do?’

‘You, Ahmad? You can fix up my kitchen.’

80

‘Mmm… That’s nice. I think I like that one better.’

Ashe gently ran the black leather glove down the curve of Melissa’s pale back.

‘Yeah, that’s definitely better.’

He smiled as his fingers clipped under the elastic of Melissa’s black knickers.

‘Don’t stop.’ Melissa lifted her face out of the sofa cushion and looked directly at Ashe. Her eyes widened. Ashe averted his gaze and took in the tidy flat Melissa was sharing with a friend in Paultons Square, London SW3.

‘So you’re a Chelsea girl now.’

‘What does that mean? Think I’m a party tart? Smack addict?’

‘It means I like your new hair, and I like the way you look at me.’

Melissa smiled. ‘Amazing the effect a dab of black hair dye has on a man.’

Ashe laughed. It was true. Melissa had never looked so desirable. She turned onto her side, her hip luxuriating in the soft cushion.

‘You know there’s something really intense about your breasts.’

‘Intense?’ Melissa’s bright eyes narrowed.

‘Yeah. Try this.’

‘Oh Christ!’

‘Thought so.’

‘Kiss me.’

‘Where?’

Ashe kissed her passionately on the lips, running his hand down her warm body. What a fantastic wife Melissa would make, Ashe thought to himself. There was something voluptuous, even Italian, about this Cheshire rose. Large family… passionate nights… big fights… fierce loyalty… full-blooded – quite a future. They could move to the sun together, bask by the sea – were it not for the world.

‘I was thinking about the Iraq situation, Melissa. Have you realised how close it’s getting to the Bible?’

Melissa shook her head. ‘Oh God, Toby! Is now the time?’ She pulled his head towards her large eyes and full lips. Ashe resisted.

‘No, no. Just wait a second. I put this down to you. You’ve turned me on.’

‘And this is the result? A lecture?’

‘In the head. Thoughts. Inspirations.’

‘Screw that, Toby. Let’s see how well you think now.’

Melissa rolled off the sofa onto the thick carpet and began playing with the fly on Ashe’s black jeans.

‘Yeah, I mean if you change the characters around a bit. You’ve virtually got the Christmas story.’

‘You’ve got a gorgeous cock.’

‘The Roman eagle marching up and down Palestine – that’s the US army, taking the census. Getting control of the bureaucracy. Herod is, if you like, the Iraqi government – currently in waiting. The government favoured by Rome (the US) but hated by a lot of the population – the Zealots, so to speak. Herod was an Idumaean Arab. An outsider from mainstream society, just like the Kurds. Rumour has it the first Iraqi prime minister next year might be a… a Kurd.’

Ashe was having some trouble keeping to his train of thought. Melissa looked up at him. ‘Like that?’

Another side to Melissa; he liked it.

‘Mmm… Yeah, like I was saying. You’ve got the eagle bringing what it considers civilisation – the Pax Romana – to a troubled part of the empire. God, Melissa! Now, it’s called freedom and democracy. Pax Americana. Point being that the Romans were utterly convinced they were doing the Right Thing. Couldn’t understand the suicidal determination of the Zealots. Anyhow. Then you’ve got the massacre of the innocents in the Christmas story. A lot of children are dying in this thing. You’ve got people expecting the end of the world.’

Melissa reached her hand up under Ashe’s shirt and tickled his chest.

‘Melissa!’

‘Still thinking?’

‘Then there’s… there’s… a… Well, the only thing you need now is the totally unseen element. Totally unseen. Unexpected. A sort of Joseph and Mary dodging the violence. Two little people carrying destiny in their… Maybe taking refuge in Egypt. Interesting place.’

‘Yes, Toby. So when are you taking me?’

‘Why’ve you stopped?’

Melissa slipped off her knickers and wrapped her legs around Ashe. She took him in her arms and kissed him. ‘So, Toby, you reckon the Second Coming is imminent do you?’

Ashe cracked up. ‘All right, you win.’

‘At last!’

Ashe’s mobile rang. He reached behind the sofa to his jacket.

‘No! Don’t answer it!’

‘I’m expecting something.’

‘So am I, Toby Ashe!’

Melissa jumped off Ashe and tried to get to the phone first. Both their hands seized the mobile as it continued to bleep. Ashe pushed Melissa away.

‘Right, you bastard! You take your bloody call. I’m going out. Make sure you’re gone when I come back!’

Melissa gathered her clothes and stormed into her bedroom, slamming the door. Ashe could hear her sobbing. He clicked on the phone. ‘Here we go again…’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘No, no, not you. Who is it?’

‘Beck.’

‘Ah, yes. Kellner said I’d be hearing from you.’

‘Can you get over to Hamburg, Dr Ashe?’

‘Now?’

‘If you wanna find your man. Pull some strings – and be here by 1800 hours, OK?’

Ashe looked at his watch. ‘That’s…’

‘Call me. The minute you got an ETA, I’ll give you a location. Adios, friend.’

81

Ashe slammed the taxi door, pulled his jacket lapels up round his earlobes and cast a cautious eye around the chilly Hein-Köllisch-Platz. It was one of those sudden autumn afternoons that felt more like February: empty and disorientating. His watch said 17.37.

Gazing around the little square, Ashe spotted a grey Ford Mondeo parked opposite the Babylon bar. He approached it and looked casually into the driving seat. Empty. A tap on the shoulder.

‘Don’t look now, Dr Ashe.’

It was Beck.

‘Just walk to your left in the direction of the café – not the Babylon, the Teufel Café.’

Ashe soon found himself in the warm, orange-coloured confines of the ‘Devil’s Café’. A few students and a couple of solemn salesmen occupied comfortable sofas by the toilets. The harder window seats were all empty. Ashe moved to the window. Beck ordered coffee from the tired-looking ex-punk behind the counter.

‘Sherman Beck at your service, Doctor—’

‘Toby.’

‘Toby. How d’ya get here so fast?’

‘Strings.’

‘RAF?’

Ashe nodded.

‘Great. I gotta say that stuff on al-Qasr just blew our minds.’

Ashe gestured to Beck to keep the volume down. ‘Expecting a party, Sherman?’

‘I got men at every exit. Snipers on the roofs.’

‘Snipers? Grenzschutzgruppe 9 in on this?’

‘German security’s holding back. Our people have strict instructions, Toby.’

‘I bloody hope so.’

Ashe was struck by the apparent recklessness of Beck’s operation. The area was full of civilians; children were playing all over the streets. One stray bullet…

‘They ain’t shootin’, Toby. We need their eyes. This Baba Sheykh guy – always accompanied by the doctor, right?’

‘Sinàn.’

‘Right. Sinàn. Knows a lot about this al-Qasr fuck.’

Ashe could sense the bitterness in Beck’s eyes. ‘This isn’t personal is it, Beck?’

Beck bit the inside of his cheek. ‘Yes and no. This guy’s cold, man. Psycho.’

‘Pity you didn’t know that before you set him up in California.’

‘I had nuthin’ to do with that. Al-Qasr’s bad. Bad seed. Bad every-fucking-thing.’

‘Maybe a little black and white there, Sherman.’

‘Guy’s a cold-blooded killer.’

‘Certainly that. As for whether the doctor’s always with the sheykh, I can’t vouch for every move. Why are you so sure we’re going to see them?’

‘We suspect a set-up. The doctor’s been called to treat a woman at the Kurdish Centre near here. As the doctor protects the sheykh, we expect the pair of them.’

‘Why the set-up?’

‘Al-Qasr’s sidekick. Nervous guy. Cemal Goksel. Been seen with a stranger. Might be al-Qasr.’

‘Might be?’

‘In disguise. Sitting in these here seats.’

‘Did you get a picture of al-Qasr?’

‘Not enough for a positive ID. He’s so fucking devious, man.’

‘Shame. Don’t you think we’re taking a risk, sitting here?’

‘Al-Qasr doesn’t know either of us.’

‘He’s probably better connected than you think.’

82

Two minutes later, Ashe and Beck were sitting in Beck’s Ford close to the Kurdish Community Centre in Silbersackstrasse.

‘How the hell did you track the sheykh down?’

‘Guess we owe you there, Toby. Your information on Sinàn matched up with our checks on his background. Then the messages he’s been sending the Agency about al-Qasr and the Yezidis. Clearly this sheykh guy ties in somewhere with al-Qasr’s interest in Yezidi genetics. That guy’s in danger. We also pulled favours from Yezidis in the Kurdistan National Assembly. They did what they could to track down the sheykh.’

‘Who handled the negotiation, Sherman?’

Beck was reluctant to reveal sources.

‘Wouldn’t have been a certain Vincent Zappa, would it?’

‘Well…’

‘Please give him my best wishes. How did you pin all this down to Hamburg?’

‘Hamburg police picked up an illegal taxi driver. He’d been racing round like a crazy guy. Turned out he’d carried two Yezidis from Giessen to Hamburg. Then we located a Berlin taxi driver who’d carried what he thought was a Turkish businessman to Hamburg. The timing matched al-Qasr’s arrival in Berlin. This gave us a match with an invisible guy who never boarded al-Qasr’s plane.’

‘Impressive work, Sherman.’

‘We got a lotta help. Since 9/11, Hamburg’s been a German intelligence hot spot. We got good relations. They got an agent in the Kurdish community here. That led us to St Pauli. That’s how we heard about the—’ Beck stopped in his tracks.

‘What is it?’

‘See that guy?’

‘Goksel?’

Beck nodded. ‘You got a piece?’

‘Will I need one?’

‘Keep your head down, Toby. Could get unfriendly.’

Ashe felt hemmed in. ‘We staying in the car?’

‘Got a better idea? Watch Goksel,’ Beck whispered. ‘Guy on the corner. Briefcase.’

‘Doctor?’

Beck’s eyes followed the man approaching Silbersackstrasse from Hein-Köllisch-Platz. Ashe registered the man’s fine, olive features: educated Yezidi; must be Sinàn. Where was the Baba Sheykh?

The man approached Goksel. The Kurd pointed to the Centre’s side entrance. More discussion. The man looked cautiously behind, then followed Goksel into the alleyway at the side of the Kurdish Centre.

Beck licked his lips. ‘I smell al-Qasr.’

‘I smell a rat, Sherman.’

‘Yeah. A rat.’

‘It’s a trap.’ Ashe was out of the car in a split second, pulling away from Beck’s restraining arm. ‘Cover me.’

‘Shit, Ashe!’

He ran into the alley. In the darkness stood the Yezidi.

‘Doctor?’

The man turned to see Ashe’s silhouette against the dull light.

‘Laila wants you.’

The man said a few hurried words to Goksel and walked towards the figure in the light. Ashe whispered, ‘Sinàn?’

The man nodded slowly. ‘And you?’

‘British intelligence. You know a man called al-Qasr?’

Sinàn shuddered.

‘Your man in there works for al-Qasr.’

Sinàn went pale. He turned to Goksel, still waiting by the side door. ‘Go in. Tell the woman I’m coming. Be kind to her.’

Goksel protested.

‘Go in, or forget it!’

Goksel shuffled his feet, then, reluctantly, pushed the Centre’s side door. The thick odour of over-spiced cooking swept into the alleyway.

‘Where’s the Baba Sheykh?’

Sinàn said nothing.

‘I know you’re protecting him. Al-Qasr’s in Hamburg. This is a set-up.’

‘Set-up? That’s why he’s… not here.’

‘You left him alone?’

The truth dawned.

‘Please get in the car. You direct us. Take us to him, Sinàn, please!’

‘Us?’

‘Before it’s too late.’

‘Why should I believe…?’

‘Don’t believe. Work it out for yourself.’

‘Where is Laila?’

‘Cairo. At least… she was last week.’

Sinàn’s eyes brightened. Ashe grabbed his arm and pulled him towards Beck’s car.

‘Ashe, you asshole!’ bellowed Beck. ‘You’ve fucked up the whole scene!’

Ashe prodded the doctor gently into the back seat, then got in himself.

Goksel appeared at the Centre’s front door, a picture of malice and confusion as he helplessly watched the Ford reverse and screech out of the side street into Hein-Köllisch-Platz.

Desperate, Goksel looked to a man in blue overalls loitering across the street. The Iranian trailed the car, his pace increasing into a jog. Where were his friends?

Inside the Ford, Sinàn pointed to the Iranian in the rear-view mirror. Seizing his radio, Beck alerted the men on the roofs to the man hurrying after their car.

‘Do we apprehend suspect, sir?’

Beck bit his lip.

Ashe interjected. ‘Apprehend! You need a lead.’

‘Who’s running this operation, Dr Ashe?’

‘Right now, I’d say Sami al-Qasr.’ Ashe ignored Beck’s anger. ‘Look, Sherman, just follow doctor’s orders. Where the Baba Sheykh is, al-Qasr will be close.’

Beck grunted and reversed the car over the cobbles of Hein-Köllisch-Platz. He then headed back into the one-way system on Silbersackstrasse, just as the Iranian was cornered by two plain-clothes agents. They bundled him into a Nissan 4x4.

‘You better be right, Ashe!’

83

Followed closely by Ashe, Sinàn raced up to the Altona apartment. Beck inspected the smashed lock. In agony of frustration, Sinàn poked under every visible item of furniture. Ashe pulled a suitcase out from behind the TV. He rattled it. ‘Sounds interesting.’

Sinàn froze. ‘Too late. The Baba Sheykh is gone.’ He took the suitcase from Ashe and clutched it to his heart. ‘Nothing could have separated the Baba Sheykh from this.’

‘Al-Qasr did. What is it? Senjaq?’

Sinàn was surprised.

‘I was at Lalish, Sinàn.’

‘Then you are thrice blessed.’ Sinàn studied Ashe’s face. ‘Who do you really work for, Mr Ashe?’

Beck frowned. ‘Goddammit, Ashe! You’re supposed to be an observer!’

‘As every student of popular quantum theory knows, observers can exert a major influence on what is observed. Anyhow, we’ve lost al-Qasr, and we’ve lost the Baba Sheykh. I’ve observed that much.’

Sinàn put his head in his hands. ‘My fault! It was all my fault. He begged me to take him. I left him.’

As Beck’s forensic contingent arrived to scour the apartment, Beck made interminable phone calls. Delighted to have bagged at least half the intended brace, Ashe listened to Sinàn’s story.

Beck was in despair. Ashe patted him on the back. ‘Come on, Sherman, I know you’re fearing a rocket from Lee, but, truth is, al-Qasr has foxed us because he’s fucking clever. And being the guilty party – and being clever – always gives the bastards a temporal advantage. Nil desperandum.’

Ashe finally won Beck’s attention. ‘Two questions bug me, Sherman.’

‘Shoot.’

‘One. How did al-Qasr know the Baba Sheykh was here? Two: who arranged this apartment for Sinàn and the holy man?’

‘You better ask Sinàn here.’

‘I have.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Guess.’

Beck rubbed his eyes. He wondered who had turned the lights out in his mind; nothing always felt like nothing.

84

‘Must you use Blu-tack, Toby?’

Ashe had just fixed a blow-up of an old sepia photograph to the plain white wall in front of his desk in his Shrivenham office: a sixty-five-year-old image of a group of Yezidi girls dancing the debka in their velvet caps.

‘Very striking. Still dreaming of the princess you left behind, Toby?’

‘No, Karla. It’s the dance. Round in circles to ecstasy. Rather sums up the investigation so far.’

‘Ever-decreasing circles?’

‘Promising circles.’

‘And ecstasy?’

Ashe looked cheekily at Karla’s crimson velvet miniskirt and matching tights. ‘Hmm…’

‘Flirt.’

‘Have you tracked down Sir Moses?’

‘Nearly, maestro. Expected at his club shortly – the Savile.’

‘Sounds about right. Old-style liberal with a hint of the raffish.’

‘Just like me.’

While Ashe studied the bulky Beerbohm file, he was also thinking about Hamburg and Sherman Beck. Clearly, the CTC’s primary objective was getting al-Qasr back; the Baba Sheykh was incidental to that.

Who was al-Qasr working for? He’d worked for the Americans. He’d worked for Sir Moses Beerbohm. Now it seemed he was wrapped up with Ansar al-Sunna. Over dinner in Alexandria, Lee Kellner had let it slip that there was an Israeli angle to the story: still a jigsaw – or a jig. Ashe looked up at the image of the young Yezidi girls dancing, then back down at Beerbohm’s career summary.

Sir Moses Beerbohm. Born 15 April 1927, Lithuania. Raised and educated in Australia. Left University of Melbourne on overseas scholarship, 1951. PhD in Physics, University of Cambridge, UK. Joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge, 1963. Director of MRC Laboratory, 1985–7. President of the Royal Society, 1997– 2001. Member, Order of Merit. Foreign Associate, US National Academy of Sciences; Foreign Associate, French Academy of Sciences. Honorary Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.

In the fifties, Beerbohm began to study viruses. In the seventies he used electron microscopy and structural modelling to study the three-dimensional nature of polio and other viruses. The more Ashe read about Beerbohm’s groundbreaking research into the interactions of proteins and nucleic acids, leading to his discovery of the transcription factors used to regulate the expression of genes, the more Ashe realised what a unique research guinea pig the Baba Sheykh represented to someone like Al-Qasr.

‘Your call to Sir Moses Beerbohm, Toby, on red.’

‘Sir Moses?’

‘Is that the young Dr Ashe who made such an impression over a college lunch? Ran Crayke intimated you might be in touch. Cloak-and-dagger stuff, eh? What can I do for you, my dear fellow?’

‘I wonder, Sir Moses, if you recall referring to Sami al-Qasr in the course of our conversation?’

‘Oh, him: the Thief from Baghdad. I’m sorry if I sound disappointed, but Sami al-Qasr can have that effect on people. Works at RIBOTech, California. Very hush-hush. He was after the family jewels, Ashe. In more ways than one.’

‘Sounds quite something.’

‘Oh yes. He could impress. That talent was obvious from the start.’

‘What was he doing when you met him?’

‘Linking genes to diseases. I presume you already know that one of the common differences between the DNA of one person and another comes in the form of a single nucleotide polymorphism, known as a “snip”.’

‘Sounds familiar, Sir Moses. What exactly do you mean by a “snip”?’

‘Wasn’t it in that book of yours… Generous Gene?’

‘You flatter me, Sir Moses. But that was a while back. More philosophy than fact.’

‘All right, let’s put it this way: why is Person A going to get Huntingdon’s Disease but not Person B? Can it be predicted? Seems pretty old hat now in some respects, but in the sixties and seventies it was foundation work. Al-Qasr was good, no mistake. But the little bum seemed to get bored easily. And I always had the impression he was looking over my shoulder. Curious. Always wanted to cut corners. He was, I suppose, as unstable as many young gifted people. That’s why I wouldn’t let him marry my daughter.’

‘Your daughter?’

‘Esther. Al-Qasr said it was because she was Jewish and he was an Arab. Race prejudice. And God, don’t I know about that! I told him I was only half Jewish – on my mother’s side. My father was East Prussian. He said, “Oh, it all comes through the mother” – which is racial tradition, not first-class genetics. I mean this Jewish thing was one of the reasons my parents left for Australia in the twenties. I wouldn’t have thrown it at al-Qasr. But he never believed me. I tried to tell him he just wasn’t ready for marriage. But he felt I was trying to keep him down. For heaven’s sake, he was my student! He could hardly be my equal.’

‘Chip on the shoulder?’

‘Or “snip” on the shoulder. Who knows? More of a mountain. As big as his ego – which was big enough, Dr Ashe, believe me. Al-Qasr wanted to be the star. The number one star. Then, when he couldn’t have Esther to himself, he wanted to prove he was bigger than me. And, like a fool, I suppose, I encouraged him. Maybe to compensate for the heartache he seemed to be suffering. Don’t get me wrong. Al-Qasr was not as horrible as he may sound. We all liked him. But you never felt entirely comfortable with his…’

‘Ambition?’

‘Yes, ambition. I mean, he joined us at MRC in 1974, just after the Yom Kippur War, and we all knew he had a thing against Israel.’

‘Did he include you in that, Sir Moses?’

‘Didn’t seem to. He recognised a difference between politics and personal matters. After all, he was happy enough to ask a Jewess to be his bride.’

‘But not happy to be refused. What did he take from you, if not your daughter?’

‘Amusing way of putting it, Dr Ashe. I suppose you could say he ran with the whole ZFP research – you know, the zinc finger protein stuff I was working on. He was close to all the research prior to the big discovery in 1982. He had a hell of an apprenticeship. I should have been so lucky! Then, the following year, he runs back to Iraq. He’d always told me science was bigger to him than any nation, but, when I think about it, Sami al-Qasr probably meant more to him than science.’

‘He was an egomaniac?’

‘In Iraq, he could be the star.’

85

Beerbohm cleared his throat. ‘I never thought Sami al-Qasr was a nut. He’s not that different to many other ambitious people in the profession. He’s not unreasonable.’

Ashe kept thoughts of the great man’s evident naivety to himself. ‘Tell me about this zinc finger stuff, Sir Moses.’

‘All right, Dr Ashe. But not too long, eh? I’m expecting a friend.’

‘A pencil sketch would be helpful.’

‘A zinc finger protein, Dr Ashe, is pretty much what it sounds like. They look like fingers. They’re projections of protein. They’re held in shape by a zinc atom. You find them in all cells. The… well, we call them “fingertips” are configured to match a particular gene sequence. I suppose we could have called them something else. “Gene monitors”, or something. Amazing things. When you think there are some 30,000 genes in our DNA! But they don’t all work at the same time. If you imagine a kind of “shift” pattern you’d be close to the mark.’

‘Like clocking in and clocking out?’

‘There is a rotation of sorts. ZFPs pick out the genes that need activating, or the ones that need turning off. For example, we don’t all eat at regular times. So in stomach cells, the genes in charge of enzyme production – for digestion – get switched on only when food is on the way.’

‘Ingenious.’

‘Yes, it is. And yet it’s just like everything we experience in the visible world. That’s the great thing about science. The rules that control stars also control our fingernails.’

‘As above, so below. That’s what the alchemists and magicians used to say.’

‘And they’re right, of course. There’s a whole system of natural attractions and correspondences. We can learn about things on Mars by looking at things on Earth. There’s a principle that operates in all systems. Science deals with the systems. The principle may just be philosophy.’

‘Just philosophy?’

‘Well, in science we try to deal with what is actually happening. Effects are easier to see than causes, as you know. For example, when zinc finger proteins find a gene sequence that matches their fingertips, they lock on. That’s what they do. They lock on! I can’t say I really know why. They just do. But I suppose there’s a principle at work in there somewhere! Anyhow, as the fingers go into this lock-on mode, what we call a switch molecule gets activated. The switch molecule has been trailing behind the ZFP. This molecule switches the gene on or off.’

‘Brilliant stuff, Sir Moses. But how does all this relate to viruses and diseases?’

‘You ask all the right questions, Dr Ashe. You’d have made a good pupil.’

‘Did al-Qasr ask the right questions?’

‘Al-Qasr grew frustrated with the idea of relating genes to disease. But he did cotton on to the implications of zinc finger proteins. It was his eureka moment. As it was mine, in a sense. So, yes, he asked some good questions. These questions led him into a specialised sphere.’

‘I’m intrigued. What is this sphere, Sir Moses?’

‘Rewriting genes. Actually rewriting genes. Altering the building blocks – to some extent anyway. I mean, this is what we’re about, here! We want to get right in there and see if we can use this knowledge to help the human race.’

‘Did Sami al-Qasr share that ideal?’

‘Difficult to say. There’s always some self-interest. In Sami’s case, I suppose there was more. But he was still making a contribution. We were laying the stones for what would become known as gene therapy. This reached a stable state, more or less, by the mid-eighties, but by then al-Qasr was in Iraq. And I don’t honestly know where he took the fairly limited technologies we then had at our disposal.’

‘It might help if you could tell me where you had got to?’

‘Look, Ashe, could we do all this on another occasion?’

‘Forgive me, Sir Moses. I understand, but this enquiry is a matter of some urgency. Lives could be at stake.’

‘Lives, you say? All right, Dr Ashe. Where were we?’

‘Gene therapy.’

‘Right. Conventional gene therapy compensates for a genetic fault rather than corrects it. It adds working copies of genes to cells. Viruses have ways of kidding cells to let them in. Once they’re in – well, they’re in! And there’s nothing much you can do about it. Gene therapy took the road of exploiting this cunning.’

‘Imitating it?’

‘If you like. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! You can’t really beat nature. The aim was to get genetic material incorporated into that of the host. You’ve got to establish a virus delivery system. New genes have to be smuggled into cells. The human body is a world of covert operations – just up your street, my dear fellow!’

‘Thank you.’

‘When trying to cure diseases, you want to smuggle in a retrovirus engineered so its genetic material contains the correct version of a faulty gene.’

‘Does it work?’

‘Limited successes. It was a bit of a scattergun approach. The idea is not unlike the original principle of Jenner’s bacteriology. Set a thief to catch a thief. You immunise by getting the system geared up to accept the enemy – in small doses. The body can be deceived. Nature is the great deceiver – and the great deceived.’

‘Sounds like philosophy, Sir Moses. I’m not sure I understand yet.’

‘Let’s put it like this. Patients have their cells “infected”, as it were, with these manipulated viruses.’

‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

‘Yes. It’s not been a complete success. Far from it, really. Scientifically, it’s been very useful, but the process is not very efficient. Only a small number of cells actually take up the new genes. The process can be unstable and you can’t be sure the right cells have been targeted. Worryingly, the new gene can insert itself anywhere in the person’s DNA. The worst case, I suppose, occurred among a group of French children undergoing gene therapy. Some scientists think the genes inserted too close to those regulating the cancer might have caused leukaemia. There was a delay in trials. But now the technique has been taken further.’

‘Did al-Qasr have anything to do with new developments?’

‘He probably has some involvement with the new technique.’

‘Do you think he may have developed his own techniques?’

‘One hears rumours. Science never sleeps. I know he’s been involved in gene editing. And this is where ZFPs come into their own: the result, I’m proud to say, of my discovery.’

While Ashe scribbled notes, Karla leant over his desk with a memo:

Melissa telephoned. A misunderstanding.

Are you available today?

Ashe smiled and scrawled ‘NO’ over it. Karla whispered in his ear, ‘On your head be it, maestro!’

Sir Moses picked up on the interruption. ‘You got yourself a girlie in there, Dr Ashe?’

‘Er, no, Sir Moses. My secretary. You were explaining about gene editing.’

‘Can’t we discuss your secretary instead?’

‘I’m just trying to grasp what direction al-Qasr might be heading in.’

‘Speak to RIBOTech, California, though they probably don’t want to talk. To be honest, the only person who knows where al-Qasr is right now, is al-Qasr.’

‘In more ways than one, Sir Moses.’

‘I shan’t ask what you mean by that. Off the record, I’d say Sami’s involved with advanced gene editing. Hot stuff. Gene editing gets to grips with the DNA’s own repair system to correct a faulty gene. It’s like hijacking a natural function.

‘DNA, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the chemical instruction manual for our bodies. One unit in that system is a gene. One small fault in a gene alters the sense of an instruction. These faults or errors are called “single gene defects”. They may result in anything from sickle-cell anaemia to Huntingdon’s Disease. Some genes control how cells divide. Single gene defects here – especially in later life – cause a range of cancers.

‘As I said, in gene editing, zinc finger proteins really come into their own. Now I don’t know what al-Qasr’s been up to but I can tell you something about the scientists at Sangamo BioSciences, another gene research lab in California. They’ve had the decency to put their discoveries in the public domain. I can only suspect your man’s on strictly government work.’

‘I suspect so. Possibly military applications.’

‘Hmm… We have people on this sort of thing too. You might find someone to ask about it at one of the government institutions. Talk to Ran. He’s your best bet there.’

‘What’s happened at Sangamo, Sir Moses? I just want to grasp the principle.’

‘Ah, yes. As far as I can tell, the scientists there have attached a specially made ZFP to a molecule. This molecule can cut – or edit – DNA. Getting into the cell in the manner of a virus, the zinc fingers locate “their” gene. Then they splice themselves into the genetic movie, as it were. The DNA editor cuts the defective gene. The act of cutting the DNA triggers the cell to repair the damage. Because the cell needs the right bit of DNA to make a repair, fresh copies of the right gene are sent in with the zinc fingers.

‘And then, dear friend, by the magic of nature, the cell takes the good genes and uses them as templates for the repair operation. The faulty parts are exchanged for fresh parts. And once repaired, the cell divides normally with all the new cells carrying the correct gene. Quite something, isn’t it?’

‘Sounds like a cross between a film editor’s suite and a commercial garage.’

Sir Moses laughed. ‘I suppose it is. It always sounds easy after some poor slave to science has spent years sweating to make it happen! Having said that, Dr Ashe, as far as I know they haven’t reached the level of statistically verifiable certainty.’

‘Not fully tested yet?’

‘No. But they’re very close.’

‘How close?’

‘Six months. But even if they can test it, I’d reckon it will be only a portion of cells – maybe 15 to 20 per cent – that can have faulty genes corrected. Still, what a start!’

‘Would you be surprised if I suggested al-Qasr might have made a breakthrough?’

‘Of course it’s possible, but where’s your evidence? You’ll need to be sure of your facts. People claim extraordinary things in this field all the time. I’m sure al-Qasr will have seen some of the problems with the earlier gene therapy. He was on to my discoveries pretty damn quickly. But, like I said, he went to Iraq – out of sight, out of mind. And then, the question of motivation comes in.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Well, if you follow my line about him wanting to be the star. You’d expect him to publish his discoveries and make a great name for himself. You’d be hard pressed to keep him quiet about it – even if he was under a no-disclosure contract with the government. I mean, this kind of discovery could save millions of lives. Imagine the publicity: “Brilliant Arab Saves the World!”’

‘Unless…’

‘Unless what, Dr Ashe?’

‘Well, unless he had even bigger fish to fry.’

‘I’m not sure I can help you there. It starts to get science fiction. I mean, what happens when you fall off the cutting edge?’

‘Quite.’

Ashe thought hard, trying with all his will to get into the mind of al-Qasr, trying to understand what might be driving him, pushing him, leading him. The information he’d received from Beck was painfully inadequate. What was worse, it seemed well at odds with the picture he was receiving from Sir Moses Beerbohm.

‘Are you there, Dr Ashe?’

‘Yes, there’s just…’

‘I think I see my friend. Yes, that’s him. I really have to go now. I’m—’

‘Sir Moses. A quick question.’

‘Is there really such a thing?’

‘It’s most urgent. I can’t put it more strongly than that.’

‘Hold on a second.’

86

Sir Moses left the phone to ask his friend to wait for the call to end, but returned swiftly.

‘Dr Ashe?’

‘Sir Moses, it seems you’ve something here with this retroviral penetration concept that could be turned into a weapon.’

There was a pause. ‘Anything can be turned into a weapon, Toby. That’s true. And very frustrating it is for we scientists who prefer to remain moral virgins.’

Ashe laughed.

‘I wish it were so funny, Dr Ashe. So many of our revelations turn into nightmares. But as regards your question, well, I suppose the problem here would be delivery. How do you get the virus to the target? Still… if that wasn’t a factor… I mean, yes, if you can change genetic factors for health, then you can change them for… But it’s so hit and miss.’

‘Like many weapons, Sir Moses. But what… what if you, for the sake of argument, wished to annihilate a race?’

‘Use a bomb! Much quicker!’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘Of course. Have you heard that old chestnut that some Israeli politician was harping on about some time ago? A race-targeted weapon.’

‘Is that… is that really possible?’

‘Well Ashe, if you do more homework on the subject, you’ll soon find that race is a very complex thing and not really a question of say, a single genetic pattern. Certain races have things in common, like certain families or individuals. But there’s no common racial genetic pattern that defines a person genetically as being a member of an ethnic or racial group. We’ve pretty well all got a bit of each other in us, if you go back far enough. What’s that line of John Lennon’s? Remember him? Mad but brilliant too. Can’t recall exactly but it went something like: “I am he and you are we and you are me and we are all together.” Wasn’t he saying that from a cosmic perspective or something, he could have been a walrus? Who knows? But it kind of sums it up in a surrealist way. I mean, the idea’s preposterous really. Not just the walrus, I mean, but this whole idea of targeting a race from the inside, so to speak. And quite devilish too.

‘But whichever way you look at it, Ashe, it’s totally impracticable. Many Jews have some genetic components shared, as it were, with Arabs; many Arabs have Jewish or other characteristics. I mean, you might be waving different flags on the outside, but wrapping yourself up with the same one on the inside – and that flag is probably nothing like the one you’re waving! I mean, genetics does have something to say about all divisions in the world.’

‘A mixed message, I think.’

Sir Moses laughed. ‘Yes, of course. But, seriously, a race-based weapon would be no weapon at all, really. I mean, why use genetics? Hitler used gas.’

‘But in principle—’

‘Well, now you’re talking principles again. Philosophy. All right, just for you. A second of speculation. Don’t quote me! You’d need… oh I don’t know, some kind of control – control specimen – or template. An original genetic map: a primary pattern from which the diversity proceeded. Then I suppose you could track the fundamental mutations. That would, in theory, be like having the key to a safe. But after the Tower of Babel, as the Bible story pictures it, all the races got mixed up.’

‘Don’t you mean separated, Sir Moses? Whereas before they’d been more or less a single entity, the story says after Babel – or Babylon – the peoples could no longer speak the same language.’

‘My dear fellow, are we discussing theology here, or science? My point is that since some unknown primordial time, gene pools have been shared around. Everyone’s been swimming in everyone else’s pool. Gets a bit murky. Our current ideas of race came very late in the day. I mean the Jews weren’t even a race before… what is it? Moses? Abraham? It was a belief that separated them, not a skin type. Now I’m only prepared to say another word if the question is strictly scientific and not speculative. My friend is in his eighties – seconds are precious.’

‘As they are to me, Sir Moses, believe me. If you had the template – a kind of original genetic template – of a major gene system that is fundamental to a number of races that have stemmed from it, would you be able to learn from it what constitutes the deviation from the original?’

‘If you had the template… it’s feasible.’ Beerbohm paused again. ‘Big question… I mean, you might then be able to target families, clans, micro-groups. But, my dear fellow, I suspect it’s quite impossible. Where could you get such a template from? It was all too long ago.’

‘Thank you, Sir Moses. You’ve been tremendously helpful.’

‘Well, I can’t see how, but good luck!’

Ashe replaced the receiver gently, a swell of pride welling up inside him.

‘Karla!’

‘Yes, maestro.’

‘Tell Melissa I’m available. I suddenly feel better about life.’

‘Too late. Told her you couldn’t speak to her. Said she was going to Dublin with friends and had no idea when she’d be back – as far as you’re concerned, that is.’

‘Me and my big mouth.’

‘Depends where you put it. I told you not to play around with that particular young lady. You may have lost her forever.’

‘Lost her? I never really found her.’

‘Too bad.’

87

Autonomous Kurdish Region, Northern Iraq

Massoud’s little house in Shariya was surrounded by villagers, all clamouring to see the relative of the Mir.

Sinàn, a junior member of the Chols – the Yezidi royal family – was nervous. From out of the much-travelled suitcase he carefully took the three components of the senjaq and assembled the bronze pieces. A sheykh of the Qatani clan watched closely as Sinàn screwed together the large circular base, the smaller middle disc and then the bulbous, bold-breasted bronze peacock with its stunning fan-like plumage. At the end of each feather was an eye, symbolising the all-seeing lordship of Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel.

The Qatani sheykh smiled and kissed the base of the senjaq. Women outside the house in long velvet skirts and round linen turbans trilled with excitement. The senjaq, or standard, was the sacred image of the Lord of the Earth’s destiny, the invisible patron of the Yezidis, the world’s secret governor, the greatest angel of them all, given control of the universe by the highest god, whose spirit dwelled in everything. Several villagers shook with emotion to see the sacred peacock, the focus of devotion, a signifier of the divine presence, his all-seeing will. It was a symbol of continuity and of the future blessings guaranteed to faithful Yezidis, God’s special people – born to suffer, in a unique way, the miseries and trials of the centuries.

It had been a long time since these people had witnessed the parade of the peacock through their village. Their village – as most people would understand the term – was gone.

The inhabitants of seven villages from the surrounding mountains had been forcibly relocated to Shariya by Saddam Hussein during the seventies, obliged to start again in a unified cluster of spare, concrete nests constructed by the government on a cruelly arid plain. Yet the identities of each of the seven villages had remained intact. So much so that during this, the annual visit of the Baba Sheykh to the Yezidi villages, the spiritual guest had to stay for seven nights, with a host from each of the original seven villages.

A Yezidi village, like the sheykh, was a spiritual as well as a physical entity. The official map said ‘Shariya’, but in their hearts the Yezidis were still linked to their own mountain pastures, with their crops and goats.

But where was the Baba Sheykh? The villagers expected him. This was tradition and Tawusi Melek willed such things to be.

A meeting with the Mir in Baghdad had decided the issue. News of the Baba Sheykh’s kidnap was to be withheld from the murids, or followers of the sheykhs, as long as possible. Such news could only dampen morale, already at a low ebb. Worse, the news would surely lead to rumours and then to vivid but fictional accounts; there would be cries for revenge. Someone would be blamed.

The sheykhs, in the absence of their leader, were particularly concerned. Rather than have one of them deputise for the absent Baba – which might give rise to speculation that the Baba had been replaced high-handedly by a rival – it had been decided to dispatch Sinàn, a much respected close friend of the Baba Sheykh.

As a doctor, he could provide immediate and much-appreciated assistance. And, as extra compensation for the absence of the Baba Sheykh himself, it had been agreed that the Sheikhani senjaq would be ‘walked’ through each ‘village’ of Shariya – a special privilege, much envied by surrounding Yezidi communities.

The story put out was that the Baba Sheykh had remained behind to offer special spiritual service to the absent Yezidi brethren who were undergoing difficulties in Germany. The Baba Sheykh’s presence in that country could be confirmed, at least for the time being, by relatives of German-based Yezidis still living in Kurdistan.

This was the reason Sinàn had driven fifty kilometres northwest from his much-neglected apartment in Mosul to this dry and dusty satellite of the big, bustling city of Dohuk. There were added responsibilities, and these too made Sinàn nervous.

It was the custom for the Baba Sheykh, while staying in the houses of the village hosts, to try to solve disputes and feuds. Since 2002 there had been a particularly painful feud going on which had already claimed several lives and threatened more. Lacking the spiritual authority of the Baba Sheykh, with his conduit to the will of Tawusi Melek and the judgement of the ancestors, Sinàn was thrown back on variations of the ‘you must look at the bigger picture’ argument. This authoritative strategy was artfully combined with moral injunctions carried, it was believed, from the mouth of the absent religious leader.

The previous night, Sinàn had told visitors to Massoud’s house that just as they were now watching the bigger world, through their antennae and prized satellite dishes, the bigger world would be watching them also. They had entered a new era, an era that demanded exemplary behaviour. The reputation of the Yezidis was at stake. They were a special people, called to a higher destiny. The spiritual integrity of all Yezidis would suffer from the follies of the few.

Sinàn was not at all sure that his words – coming from one in a smart Western suit with a silvery silk tie – carried much weight with people who were suffering great anxieties and hardship, as well as the peculiar pressure that comes with great hope. If only he knew what had happened to the Baba Sheykh.

Amid the chatter of the excited women, Sinàn could hear the gathering beat of the massive tambours held by the qewwals. Then the flutes began their transcendent melismas. The qewwals began to sing. Sinàn raised the standard aloft. As he emerged through the front door into the dusty street, the qewwals began singing ‘The Morning Prayer’:

Amen, amen,

The blessing of the faith.

God is the best of Creators.

Through the miraculous power of Shem el-Din,

Fekhr el-Din, Sejadin,

Nasir el-Din and Babadin,

Sheykh Shems is the strength of the faith,

Sultan Sheykh Adi is the crown, from first to last.

Truth, Praise be to God. Oh Lord of the Worlds,

Give good things, avert evil.

We long for a moment of the Presence.

Light comes from the light of dawn,

Praise to you, my Creator.

The Angel is facing us.

From house to house,

Sheykh Shems is the lord of lustre…

Past the cream-coloured houses, the procession continued. Ahead of Sinàn marched a flautist dressed in a long black embroidered waistcoat and baggy black trousers. Children gathered, running cheerfully alongside the growing procession. White-bearded old men joined in too, wearing Arab-style red-chequered headdresses bound with black rope. Fathers in white linen robes had wrapped checked turbans about their skull caps; some sported pointed black beards. A few visitors from the Jebel Sinjar still wore the long black ringlets of days long gone, framing their handsome faces. Old men with huge moustaches – a sign of religious devotion – waved on the procession with their walking sticks. Teenage girls in Western-style blouses and sandy-coloured cotton trousers cheered along the senjaq’s ‘walk’ as Sinjari matriarchs in massive white headdresses bound at the chin by great swathes of cotton clapped their hands and trilled along with the pulsing prayer.

On every side and surface of the uniform concrete houses the flash of the morning light added to the colour.

Sinàn began to relax; things seemed to be going well. He joined in with the prayer he had heard so many times in this life.

From pillar to pillar,

Sheykh Shems is the lord of mystical knowledge, of the pillars of the faith,

And of discernment.

From eye to mouth,

The baptism of Sheykh Shems falls on one,

The Great Ones are busy; they do not allow you to sleep.

From head to feet,

Oh Sheykh Shems, you designed us and set us on our paths…

88

The procession turned a corner into an identical street and there in its sun-drenched centre, shimmering gloriously, stood Sinàn’s only sister: the Morning Star – Laila. The princess was accompanied by a group of smiling, bearded sheykhs, impossible to miss in their distinctive turbans that looked like miniature white millstones. Red sashes hung diagonally, right to left, across their chests and they wore white woollen capes that reached down to their knees.

Laila’s heart leapt as she saw the princely figure of her brother approaching. Sinàn wanted to thrust the senjaq into someone else’s hands and run to embrace his sister, but he could not. He had to go on to the next village host.

Laila stepped aside as the sheykhs joined the procession one by one. As Sinàn passed Laila, his eye was caught by a girl standing in her shadow. After the last sheykh had joined the procession’s serpentine path, Laila grabbed the girl’s hand and led her to the back.

The festivities continued throughout the day and into the evening. The new host slaughtered a goat to feed the many men and women from his village who came to converse with the unexpected guest and to kiss the base of the Peacock Angel. They all left money, as was customary, for the Baba Sheykh, and for the absent Mir.

Late in the evening, when the men of the village had left the host’s rug-filled living room, the princess entered and introduced Rozeh to her brother.

‘My Sister of the Hereafter. She wants to be a doctor.’

‘I know.’

‘Will it happen?’

‘She’s the niece of the Kochek of Bashiqa.’

This was considered a sufficient answer to the question. He looked at her intently; the girl covered her face with her long black hair and blushed. ‘Please don’t be shy. I’m so sorry to hear what happened to your mother and father. Another tragedy.’

‘Did you know them, Sinàn?’

‘The Baba Sheykh told me about them. We had so much time to talk. We discussed many things. Important things. Little things. They were good people. True Yezidis. Faithful to the tradition. I do not think Baba knows yet what evil befell them on that day. He will be very sorry.’

He looked again into Rozeh’s wide, moist eyes. ‘Please don’t cry. You want to be a doctor, don’t you? You will see many terrible things. Many terrible things. Things you would never believe. You will hear the cries of the lost and the cries of those who fear losing. You will look into the eyes of death and find life. You will look into lively eyes and see things, things you wish you’d never seen. You cannot cry every day, or you will see nothing.’

‘I want to serve the people, like you have done, sir.’

‘Very well, young lady. I’ll see what can be done.’

Rozeh smiled. ‘I thank you, sir. May I go now?’

‘Of course, Rozeh! You run along and enjoy yourself.’ Laila patted her spiritual sister on the back. ‘Yes, it is time to go and gossip with your new friends in Shariya.’

‘Have you got the tape, Highness?’

Laila looked into her handbag and brought out the cassette of Madonna’s Ray of Light album she had bought in Cairo.

‘Do you like her, Sinàn?’

‘I’ve only just met her.’

‘You seem to know a lot about her.’

‘The Baba Sheykh knew her parents well. He spoke of her. Not very much. I knew she wanted to study medicine. Her family had very high hopes.’

Mamo, the host, brought coffee to his guests in tall glass goblets.

‘Is there anything I can do for you, Highness?’

‘May my sister and I be left alone for a while, Mamo?’

‘Of course.’

Mamo, a serious-looking man of about thirty with a short wispy moustache, tightened the thick cotton sash around his robed waist, backed away to the door of his house, then slipped into the darkness. The day had been long, and had cost him much – even more than his satellite dish. Now he might have to sell it. But to have given shelter to the senjaq! This was ample recompense.

‘I thought I might never see you again, Sinàn.’

‘I don’t understand how you found me here so quickly. I’ve only been in Kurdistan a few days. Toby Ashe told me he thought you were in Cairo.’

‘What did you think of him?’

‘I cannot say, Laila. It was very strange in Germany. He has a good mind. I think I like him. He knows a lot about us. Perhaps he has saved my life. But it is all so complicated. There are Americans involved and strange things happened in Istanbul. But, yes, I think somehow Toby Ashe may have saved my life.’

‘We owe him much.’

‘The Baba…?’

‘I’m sure he will help find him. He found you.’

‘But I’m lost, Laila. I’m being asked questions all the time. What can I say?’

Laila put her arm round her brother. ‘You’re tired.’

‘I’ve been tired for a long, long time. And I failed. I was supposed to protect the Baba Sheykh. With my life. My hands. And I allowed myself to be tricked.’

‘Stop it! Stop it, Sinàn! This will get us nowhere. Here, drink this!’

‘Forgive me!’

‘Nonsense. I thank you. We all thank you.’

Sinàn shook his head and looked around the simple house. ‘It’s another world here. They will not understand. The Autumn Festival’s coming – the Great Assembly at Lalish! What can we say? Only a few weeks. And no Baba Sheykh! We have never held the Assembly without the Baba Sheykh! It is unheard of! People will think the world is falling apart! Everyone knows he would never stay in Germany while the lights of Lalish are lit for the Assembly!’

‘Don’t worry! What were we singing this morning? Amen, amen, The blessing of the faith. The angel wills it; good will prevail for our people. This is a test! Every generation is tested somehow. I tell you, brother, I believe in this Tobbi Ashe.’

‘Ridiculous woman! He is not one of us.’

‘No, but…’

‘But nothing.’

‘Whatever you think of him, you must speak to him. He says he must speak to you.’

‘Why didn’t he ask me his questions in Hamburg?’

‘He says you were whisked away by the American—’

‘The amiable Mr Beck!’

‘And before Tobbi knew it, you’d been flown back here in a US plane.’

‘And interrogated for days.’

‘Did they hurt you?’

‘No, but I would have preferred to be somewhere else.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘That it was not me they should be interrogating, but another.’

89

Did Ashe believe in coincidences? Coincidences happened, but had no essential meaning. If you could see the meaning, then it would no longer be a coincidence. Why was he back in Iraq? Coincidence? Of course not.

Major Richmond turned to Ashe. ‘You’ve been quiet for the last two hours. Silent. We’ve enough graves in Iraq, right now. This road’s pretty boring, y’know.’

Ashe looked about him. The route north from Baghdad through the Sunni heartlands and on to the Kurdish Autonomous Region looked the same as it had on his last visit, but the whole thing felt entirely different. It was as though he had been dreaming on his last visit. Was he a different man?

‘You’re losing your romanticism, Ashe. Happens to all of us.’

‘Temporary, I’m sure, Simon. Just a bit more focused, I think. Keen to get to the point. I’ve just been philosophising. To be honest, you don’t seem the same either.’

‘Tired, Toby. Just fucking tired. It’s been getting worse while you’ve been away. Remember we were trying to plug holes in the western border with Syria? It’s like an open wound now. Not enough men really.’

‘Morale, OK?’

‘Pretty good, Toby. Good things have been happening. But it’s the carnage. I don’t think we expected this kind of civilian death toll. The retribution killings. The strength of the opposition. The bloodlust. Continual murders. It’s unnatural. It’s like a plague’s hit the land. Don’t get me wrong. We’ll win out here. There are elections coming up in the new year. That’s our focus. As long as you’ve got focus, the random events have meaning. When you’ve got meaning, you’ve got purpose.’

‘Funny you should say that, Simon. I was thinking the very same thing.’

Richmond smiled, his taut features softening for a few seconds. He did look that bit thinner, that bit more worn, that bit older. His steely nerve seemed a little frayed.

The Mercedes sped north at 70 to 80 mph. Having passed through the Kurdish checkpoints with little difficulty, Ashe noticed that Richmond reduced his speed. Iraqi Kurdistan had a far better security record than further south. There were even tentative plans to get Kurds to come back to their homeland from Europe. The Kurdish Democratic Party was setting up a website. That sounded hopeful. All the same, Ashe instinctively felt for the loaded SIG pistol beneath his bulletproof vest.

As they headed north, past the spreading city of Mosul, Ashe’s heart warmed.

He looked east, to the Sheikhan, home of the Yezidis.

At the busy T-junction fifty kilometres north of Mosul, Ashe studied the new Kurdish sign: ‘Duhok, 10 km’. He was due to meet Sinàn at a new bar in the centre of the flourishing city. Time was running out.

‘I’ll pick you up in five hours, so you’d better get a move on. I’ve an arrangement to meet an old friend of ours at Shariya, not far from here.’

‘Old friend?’

‘Jolo Kheyri.’

‘Give him my warmest regards.’

‘And er… I believe a certain Princess Laila will be there. Now isn’t that a coincidence?’

‘No, Simon. That is fate.’

90

The name was clever. ‘Welcome to The Future’, ‘We have seen The Future – and we love it’ read the advertisements, in Kurmanji and in English. Against all the odds, there was a hopeful spirit in the air.

The moment Ashe sat down at the bar, Sinàn appeared, looking worried. He ordered two Carlsbergs and suggested they move to a table at the rear next to the kitchen door and the lavatories. ‘It’s cooler.’

‘You mean safer.’

‘Nobody comes here until late, I think, Mr Ashe.’

‘Please call me Toby.’

‘If it pleases you. My sister is already on familiar terms with you, I believe.’

A pretty waitress in a light silk scarf, jeans and white sweatshirt brought the drinks to their table. Sinàn smiled at her. It was clear she didn’t recognise him from Adam. They were all Kurds now and the status, or lack of it, of the Yezidi royal family had little meaning in Kurdish politics. Ashe couldn’t quite stop himself from seeing this handsome scion of the Chol family as something of a spiritual exile in the fast-reshaping Kurdistan.

‘My sister wants me to trust you, Toby. I don’t know why I should. But I trust her.’

Ashe noticed the pain in Sinàn’s face. ‘Whatever you tell me, Sinàn, has one objective: to recover a certain person from the hands of a very wicked man. What do you know about the man who has taken that certain person from us?’

‘I don’t know much. There were men I met in Turkey. Guinea pigs from Saddam’s laboratories. They saw the wickedness. It’s hard to believe. I remember hearing about that bright young man at Baghdad University when I studied medicine. Many admired him. They were admiring a monster, but they did not know it. An enemy of God and our people.’

Ashe signalled to Sinàn to lower the volume of the conversation. Sinàn got up, went to the bar, and whispered something to the girl. She nodded and turned to the CD player below a shelf of glasses. The latest Coldplay anthem was soon pounding through the room. To Ashe’s ears, this future sounded like the past.

Sinàn resumed his seat. ‘I asked for British music. She seemed pleased to provide it.’

‘It’s OK. Your visit to Istanbul, Sinàn. What was that all about?’

Sinàn laughed at the thought. ‘Istanbul!’ For a moment, the melancholy in his face vanished. ‘Before all this business started, you’d be surprised how lively the Baba Sheykh was. Always bubbling with ideas. A very special mind, Mr Ashe. But like so many men with a well-defined social role, he could not always show it. I’ve known him since I was a boy. Even then he told me his ideas. He could be very funny. Always saw things from a higher perspective, like he was on a mountain. I think if the Yezidi people were better known, he could have been a world figure. Like the Pope maybe. But more surprising. His spirit was very free. But always, always his feet are on the ground. I miss him so much.’

‘But why go to Istanbul?’

‘He had an idea. Subtle. Maybe too subtle! Show the world the terrible plight of my people. But he would not beg. He did not want to say, “Look, we can’t help ourselves. We need the UN or something.” We can help ourselves, but we need some help too. What God has sent us, we accept. We must use our brains. We must be clever. If we have a problem, maybe it is sent by God to test us. This is the sort of thing the Baba Sheykh would say to us. So the question was, how to show the truth to the world without it being just another cry from an oppressed people with a begging bowl. He believed the strong attract the strong.’

‘Strong in spirit?’

‘If the spirit is gone, the rest follows. Now, Baba knows that most people are like children. Even leaders of the world talk like children. They even have tantrums and throw things about. But like children, they love stories and mysteries. The Baba Sheykh wanted, as it were, to put a mystery into the pot – then let the way of the world stir it up a bit. The Baba Sheykh knows that there has always been a great fascination with Freemasonry. There is a mystery there. There is secrecy and the hint of something…’

‘Supernatural?’

‘Perhaps. The penalty for being a Freemason under Saddam, of course, was death. Why? Many of our Arab neighbours have condemned Freemasonry in the last fifty years. I think the Palestine–Israel conflict has a lot to do with this change in attitude. Crazy talk of Zionist-Masonic conspiracies.’

‘I think you’re right.’

‘We know that extremists who are dictating to people in our country and now dictating to people around the world insist Freemasonry is a Western creation, an evil creation. That it is somehow against the true God and people of faith.’

‘So what did the Baba Sheykh have to say?’

‘A different point of view.’

Ashe looked out through the open doors of the bar to the Duhok rush hour, chugging past the new bar like the passage of history.

‘A different point of view, Sinàn?’

‘His view. Baba’s view. He said it was consistent with the tradition he embodies.’

‘Tradition?’

‘That is how we refer to our beliefs.’

‘What was the Baba Sheykh’s point of view?’

‘You must read the text, because it is the way he expresses it that is so special. His mind was in his words. If I try to say it, you will only see the outside.’

‘Can you give me a clue?’

‘The Baba Sheykh intended to prove that Freemasonry is not a Western creation, but is older than Islam, older than Jesus. He wanted to show that when people understand it properly, it holds a promise, not a threat, for the world.’

Ashe was disappointed. The idea that Freemasonry came from the ancient world was hardly new. ‘But why did the Baba Sheykh want to make his statement in Turkey?’

‘Baba understood that interest in the mystique surrounding Freemasonry could make Westerners curious about the Yezidis. In Turkey, Islam is the religion, but Freemasonry is not forbidden. Turkish governments have not always been as just to Yezidis as they have to Freemasonry, so there would be a little controversy. Baba thought choosing a Turkish Lodge would help the message get into the public sphere. He was excited about the internet because it carries truth as well as lies. If a story is good, news travels fast.’

Ashe felt tempted to say that bad news travels faster, but knew he would have to keep Sinàn on a positive note. He feared Sinàn might withdraw into himself at any moment. Ashe thought about his next question carefully.

‘Was there a … political aspect to what the Baba Sheykh had to say?’

‘The Baba Sheykh would not have made the speech unless he believed it to be true. That was its secret power.’

‘But he never made the speech.’

‘He wrote it, Toby Ashe. And friends of mine in Istanbul ensured that he would be invited to give this speech.’

‘Can you tell me the names of these friends?’

‘I would not do them such a disservice.’

‘Are the names Yildiz and Yazar familiar to you?’

‘No.’

Ashe could see from Sinàn’s eyes that the names were indeed familiar to him. Ashe knew that if the Americans knew Sinàn was friendly with Kurdish separatist politicians suspected by Turkish authorities of sympathy, or more, with the PKK, Sinàn would be interrogated once more, and not quite so humanely. Satisfied Sinàn was no stranger to Kurdish politics in Turkey, Ashe knew better than to poke further into an issue that would probably terminate the conversation.

‘So tell me, Sinàn, why didn’t the speech actually take place in Istanbul?’

‘The Lodge Master in Istanbul requested a copy of the speech in advance. You can’t just say anything in a Lodge meeting. I was told it was sent to the Grand Secretary of the English Grand Lodge because Britain is the home of Freemasonry. That is where the leading scholars and historians of Masonry live. The Turkish Lodge wanted the approval of English Freemasons.’

‘Presumably because the United Grand Lodge of England dispenses Masonic authority in many parts of the world.’

‘That is true. The largest Masonic jurisdiction in Turkey is in fellowship with the English Grand Lodge. That is to say, Toby Ashe, that the United Grand Lodge of England recognises Turkey’s largest Grand Lodge.’

‘You seem to know a lot about it, Sinàn.’

Sinàn cleared his throat. ‘My friends in Istanbul explained this to me. They said that a Lodge that is not “recognised” by the English Grand Lodge is not accepted as pure Freemasonry. They told me that in France there is a “Grand Orient” Lodge that does not require people to believe in God. Because of this, the Grand Orient is not “recognised”, as they call it, by the English Grand Lodge. Are you a Mason, Toby Ashe?’

‘I haven’t visited for many years. Was the Baba Sheykh a Brother?’

‘You asked me about the speech. It was sent to London. We heard nothing. Nothing. Not approval. Not disapproval. All was still set for the meeting in March but then—’

‘Yes?’

‘We received a warning. Definite warning, Toby Ashe. Very convincing. Baba was informed someone wanted to kill him. He must leave Turkey. He was also warned he would not be safe in Iraq. Germany was better for him. We have friends there.’

‘Who gave you the warning?’

‘People I trusted. Well-informed people.’

‘Did you inform the Lodge you would not attend?’

‘We were told not to do so. We went west, Toby Ashe. And there you found me.’

91

‘Tobbi!’ It was Laila in the doorway, a star in the afternoon sun.

Ashe was taken aback by the sight of the princess in a khaki military blouse tucked into desert slacks, her black hair tied right back and covered by a red polka-dot scarf.

Laila kissed Ashe on the cheek; Sinàn looked on jealously.

‘Excuse me, gentlemen. I am your chauffeur for Shariya!’

‘I was expecting Major Richmond.’

‘He sent me, Tobbi.’

‘Not alone, I hope.’

‘No, Tobbi, I have two bodyguards. The major is with Jolo. New developments. He wants you to know about it, Tobbi. I will wait outside for you.’

The two men sat down again as Laila left the bar; it seemed darker without her.

‘She likes you a lot, Toby Ashe.’

Ashe feigned indifference and said nothing.

‘You know we do not permit marriage outside our tradition.’

‘It’s one of the many remarkable things about your people.’

‘You do not wish to marry my sister?’

‘Your sister, Sinàn, is a person of dignity whom I respect as a friend.’

‘If you respect me, you will respect my sister as a Yezidi.’

‘Of course. Now there is something I’d like to hear from your lips, Sinàn. When did the wicked man first become a threat to your people, and to the Baba Sheykh?’

‘Like I told the Americans at the interrogation, it was more than ten years ago. There was a rumour around the Yezidi villages.’

‘Rumour?’

‘That this wicked man killed the Baba Sheykh’s son.’

‘His son?’

‘Yes, his only son. His only son… was used, the rumour said, to test the effects of diseases, or poison gas. Wickedness. So, it was decided by some people to kill the wicked man.’

‘On a rumour?’

‘I mean stop the wicked man. When we had him, then we would know. But we could never get close to him. It was after the first Gulf War. There was an uprising. An uprising in the south and an uprising in the north. We believed the Americans would help us. In the confusion, some people tried to find the wicked man in Baghdad. Then we heard he was gone. He ran away. Now he has come back. And now I ask a question of you, Toby Ashe. I am thinking that this wicked man wants revenge because of the plan to take him that made him escape from Baghdad. But now I am thinking… Why should the Americans and the British want him so much? What has he done to them? And how do you know that this man wants to… I think he wanted to kill me in Hamburg, and you saved me. But then why did he not kill the Baba Sheykh when he found him? Why, Toby Ashe, why do you think this wicked man has taken our holy man? What does he want with him?’

‘You really have no idea at all?’

‘Please! Please, Toby Ashe! What does he want? If it is money, we will find money!’

Ashe squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. In a sense, the Yezidi leaders had a right to know. But Sinàn was not obliged to keep secrets. Promises would be worthless.

‘OK, Sinàn. Let’s get this straight. I understood from Mr Beck that you were making contact with his department in the USA during your trek with the sheykh. You seemed to know a lot about the wicked man’s work when he was employed by Saddam.’

‘Contact, Toby Ashe? What contact? I never make contact! How would I know how to make contact with American secret services? That’s what I kept telling them at the interrogation! Why would they not believe me?’

‘Did they…? They didn’t…?’

‘Torture me? No, not torture. Just hours and hours of the same questions. And always I gave the same answers. The same things I am repeating to you today. They’re probably watching me now. They want to know who I will contact, I suppose. Surely, Toby Ashe, you are working with them? So tell them, Toby Ashe, tell them I would never think of sending messages to the CIA! That is why I agreed to see you. My sister says you are a good man, and you tell your American friends that what I have said to them is the truth.’

‘I can tell them. But if they don’t believe you, why should they believe me?’

‘They kept saying their messages came from a man who called himself “the doctor”. And that that was me, because I was in Hamburg and they had traced a message to Germany. I had nothing to tell them. I have nothing to tell you, except please, please find my friend! Tell us where he is!’

Ashe sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Sinàn. I only wish I knew.’

92

Beneath vast skies, Princess Laila continued to cast Ashe appreciative glances. Ashe was conscious that Sinàn, sitting moodily in the back seat with two of Jolo’s militia, was catching every look with ill-disguised contempt. Was it sibling jealousy? Seemed unlikely. Perhaps he was just the moody type. Sinàn showed no interest in talking to the militiamen either. The taciturn Yezidis respected Sinàn’s silence and instead concentrated on closely observing every house roof, alleyway, passing car and cart.

It seemed most likely to Ashe that Laila’s brother was suffering from depressive anxiety since losing contact with the Baba Sheykh. Nevertheless, he could not entirely shake the conviction that Sinàn somehow held him, Ashe, personally responsible for the Baba Sheykh’s predicament – both before the kidnap, and since. He knew Ashe and the Americans were hiding something.

The open Land Rover 110 approached Shariya. The collective village was low-lying, situated beneath rolling terracotta slopes. Laila’s long fingers squeezed Ashe’s knee. Uncomfortable, Ashe felt himself itching to get back to Europe. He had an old friend who worked at Freemasons’ Hall. What the hell had the Baba Sheykh been going to say to the Turkish Lodge that necessitated English Masonic approval? Furthermore, the time had come to use Aslan’s arrest of Yildiz and Yazar to help the investigation. If it was Yildiz and Yazar who had warned the Baba Sheykh in Istanbul, how did they know about al-Qasr’s intentions against him? Was it certain al-Qasr was behind the threat to the Baba Sheykh’s life in Istanbul? And if it was, who told him the Baba Sheykh was on the Lodge guest list that night?

The sight of Shariya did nothing to encourage Ashe to linger in Iraq. The whitewashed warren of single-storey concrete boxes was clearly Saddam’s idea of a village for people he did not trust. But the Yezidis had made a home of it. Vital electricity buzzed through a network of crooked wooden pylons that criss-crossed the village like a cat’s cradle. Ashe couldn’t help noticing the satellite dishes bent back to receive the media vision, like mini Easter Island gods squatting on the roofs.

Children cheered the returning militia as the Land Rover dodged the occasional pickup truck. Richmond’s armour-plated Mercedes was unmistakable. Inside, Richmond, Jolo and an excitable interpreter huddled over a series of maps, enjoying the air-conditioning and the tension of fresh intelligence.

Inside the house opposite, a small line of villagers queued up quietly to kiss the sacred base of the senjaq, watched by a stone-faced sheykh who collected the devotees’ money.

‘I’m afraid I must leave you, Dr Ashe. I have disputes to settle before I leave. Are you coming with me, Laila?’

‘You promised to take Rozeh into Duhok this evening, Sinàn.’

‘I’ve not forgotten. I shall… leave you here then. Goodbye, Toby Ashe.’

Ashe gave him a firm shake of the hand and looked deep into the Yezidi’s eyes. ‘We will find the sheykh, Sinàn. Believe me.’

The doctor nodded with a faint smile. ‘That is more than we have a right to expect.’

Inside the Merc, Richmond continually congratulated Jolo on his achievements. Having an interpreter meant that Jolo heard each congratulatory utterance twice, and this made his youthful face twice as proud. Jolo was also delighted at the latest provision of new armour, ammunition and transmission equipment. Major Richmond had been as good as his word.

There was a good deal of shaking of hands and very soon Jolo, who hugged Ashe warmly, was out of the vehicle and on his way. Richmond turned to the young interpreter. ‘Take a walk. If people want to talk to you, make yourself available. Could be useful.’

Ashe looked down at the map spread over the dashboard, covered with large felt-pen detail of divisional movements and coded military dispositions.

‘OK, Toby. There’s something come up might interest you. As you know, most security work done in this sector is US-controlled. And done pretty well too, by and large.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘Still, we have our uses. Jolo’s detachment has been invaluable out in the western desert between the Jebel Sinjar and the north Syrian border. Recently though, I thought he needed a change of air and space, so I organised some reconnaissance missions for his detachment here.’

Richmond pointed to the far northeast, close to the Iraqi border with Turkey’s Hakkari Province. ‘You see here, Toby, the Hakkari Mountains respect no border. This seems to have inspired our Turkish friends.

‘We expect Turkish special forces activity in this area. Their argument is strong enough to satisfy themselves: if the US won’t come down on the PKK – though they are known terrorists – then it’s Turkey’s responsibility to pursue the “war on terrorism” beyond its borders, as the US and Britain have done.’

‘Yeah. I can’t see it making headlines anywhere.’

‘Now, have a look round here.’ Richmond waved his finger over a seriously mountainous area some seventy kilometres to the northeast of Duhok. ‘Jolo started a series of observation sorties from this point.’

‘Al-Amadiyah?’

‘The Kurds call it Amadiyye. Now, see this fan from Amadiyye north to the Turkish border post at Üzümlü, then follow the line of the border about twenty-five kilometres east to the next Turkish border point at Khwari, then back down to Amadiyye.’

‘Looks like tough terrain.’

‘It is. We need Jolo. His eyes see things differently to the rest of us. Extraordinary. I reckon he could give the Gurkhas a run for their money – in their own country! Now, you see these little Kurdish villages and townships?’

‘I can just make out Betfa, Kara, Rashi, Baytka, Nerva Zheri—’

‘That last one, Nerva Zheri. You need the satellite map to see this properly, but within a five-kilometre radius of the place, Jolo’s seen some unusual activity.’

‘Unusual?’

‘Turkish special forces. Carrying supplies mostly. Not much surprising in that, though it seems more intense than what we’ve seen before.’

‘Something else going on there?’

‘It’s odd. In the same territory, they’ve observed small detachments of Ansar al-Sunna forces training there. Now it’s been all I can do to persuade Jolo and his men not to blow these guys into the next world.’

‘So what’s your point?’

‘The point, Toby, is that given the proximity of their respective operations, the Turkish special forces and the foreign insurgents are literally moving in each others’ footsteps!’

‘They could be tracking one another. But why are you telling me this? I mean, if you’re asking my opinion, I’d say at the worst what you’ve got here is Turkish special forces co-opting Ansar al-Sunna terrorists into their war on renegade PKK forces over the Iraqi border.’

Richmond was surprised how comfortable Ashe was with this thought. ‘Well, that would be a startling new development wouldn’t it, Toby? I mean, mighty embarrassing for the Turkish government, to say the least, if that’s what we’re looking at here! Can you see the headline? “Turkey uses al-Qaeda allies to kill Kurds.” That would do nothing for their hopes of joining the EU. The US might reasonably regard them as a legitimate target.’

‘I don’t suppose the world at large would hear about it. Stakes are too high.’

‘You have a point. Anyhow, let’s not jump to conclusions. We need to keep a very close eye on this.’

‘It’s nice to be kept informed, Simon, but why tell me?’

‘Crayke said I should.’

‘What?’

‘Keep you informed of developments. On the Turkish border.’

93

Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, Wiltshire

Ashe slapped a large black-and-white photograph of Colonel Mahmut Aslan onto his secretary’s desk, then grabbed his blue overcoat and opened the door of his office. ‘Get this faxed off to Hamburg, will you please, Karla? I’ve spoken to the Hamburg letting agent.’

‘Who he?’

‘One Gerhard Fitzthum, of Fitzthum & Nietzsche. They deal in property and antiques. Question is: can he positively identify the image of this person? Was the person depicted involved in the letting transaction for the Altona apartment? Need an answer today, Karla. Details in the covering note. Call you from London. Adios!’

Ashe stepped over the large brass pentagram embedded into the polished-stone threshold and entered the marble reception of Freemasons’ Hall, 60 Great Queen Street, London WC2.

The reception was vast and dim. Ahead: a grand staircase, carpeted in the distant past. Ashe approached the reception desk. A uniformed man with a passionless demeanour looked him up and down for signs of Masonic engagement. Ashe was not wearing a black tie. His trousers were black, his shirt was black, his jacket was an encouragingly blue cashmere, but his hair was rather long and unruly.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ve an appointment with Julian Travers. Your information officer.’

‘I know what he does, sir.’ The man looked around for his phone and groped about for a printed list of internal numbers. ‘Travers, is it, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Here it is: Travers, J., Information Officer.’ He prodded the internal number. ‘Gentleman here to see you, Julian. Excuse me, what’s your name, sir?’

‘Ashe.’

‘Says ’is name’s Ashe. Right. Mr Travers says to go up to ’is office. First floor.’

Ashe turned and headed for the staircase.

‘Excuse me, sir. I’m s’posed to ask for ID now, sir. Security thing.’

Ashe turned to the man and looked him in the eye with a twinkle. ‘I was taught to be cautious.’

The security guard winked. ‘Right, sir. First floor, sir.’

Ashe tore up the staircase to the floor housing the Library and Museum of Freemasonry and turned right, down a narrow corridor opening off into dozens of separate Lodge rooms. He was amused, as always, to remember that this public building housed the largest collection of lavatories in central London, and he popped into one to check that the unmistakeable smell of damp and cleaning powder had remained unchanged. Like many things in the lodge, the lavatories had an air of faded grandeur; their vast powder-blue basins, magnificent urinals and purpose-built brass ashtrays speaking of an old-fashioned, masculine sensibility.

Rounding a corner, Ashe narrowly avoided crashing into a battalion of old ladies emerging from an ancient-looking cleaning cupboard. He stopped briefly to congratulate them on the high shine on the lapis-lazuli-coloured linoleum flooring, which stretched, seemingly endlessly, down to the shabby grey lift, and took another right towards the library gallery.

As he passed a cleaner’s cupboard decorated with newspaper pictures of the royal family, not updated since the 1980s, Ashe reflected that, like the edifice of English Freemasonry in general, Grand Lodge seemed to be in a state of denial. Instead of mysticism, magic or spirituality, here was a granite ideology of empire and enterprise: a brotherhood of trust, a sober cult of moral rectitude. It was a building that should have been constructed with eternity in mind. Instead, it belonged to the twenties and thirties and seemed to have stayed there.

Change, inertia’s gift, would surely come to Grand Lodge, but what kind of change would it be? Given the character of the times, and the spiritual vacuity of the influential, any change was likely to involve further reduction of spiritual substance, probably to cold-zero. The end of modernisation was likely to be a hierarchical social club with historical frills whose genuine roots had been lost, and, where not lost, ignored by those with the most to lose from their revival.

As Ashe approached the library gallery, Julian Travers came bounding towards him, his polished Oxford shoes squeaking as he moved. Travers was a well-knit package of indefatigable enthusiasm, his gaunt, kindly face set off by thick black ‘Harry Palmer’ specs.

The men shook hands.

‘We’ve been out of touch too long, Julian.’

‘That’s life. Hey, how’s Lichfield? Still writing? Lectures? All that stuff?’

‘Less and less. I’m into travel. Research. Look, are we meeting here, or outside?’

‘Prince of Wales OK?’

‘You can’t get away from Masonry, can you?’

‘They say it’s the best fun you can have with your trousers on!’

‘Or rolled up.’

The two men chatted briskly about old times at Oxford as they made their way out of Grand Lodge and onto the pavement of Great Queen Street in Covent Garden.

‘You know, we Magdalen chaps used to come down to your bar at Brasenose because the beer was always better.’

‘I thought it was the girls.’

‘Yeah! The girls were friendly at Brasenose.’

‘You have a creative memory, Julian. We called our bar “the sewer”.’

In the crowded pub, Ashe and Travers found window seats with a view of Drury Lane. There was an aroma of steak-and-kidney pies mixed with Italianate dishes of indeterminate provenance. Italian customers seemed to prefer the pies.

‘OK. Did you get it?’

‘You know this could cost me my job.’

‘Never. I’ll take a digital photo in the loos and give it straight back.’

‘I took it from the Grand Secretary’s desk.’ Travers reached for the folded wad of typescript, bound by a paper clip, in his inside pocket. ‘This isn’t on file.’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t know. Matters pending? It’s not unknown for documents of historic significance to be destroyed in Grand Lodge.’

‘The sign perhaps of a confident institution.’

Travers caught Ashe’s irony and smiled. ‘Well, I hope it’s what you wanted to see.’

‘Have you read it?’

‘Are you kidding? I’m the information officer.’

‘I thought you ran the publicity.’

Travers laughed. ‘My dear Toby. I’m run by the publicity.’

‘Travers!’

Julian shuddered; it was the booming voice of the Grand Secretary himself, Bob Foulhurst.

‘See who’s here!’ Foulhurst turned to two other men, also wearing black ties, dark suits and waistcoats, and carrying briefcases. ‘Look! It’s Tigger – out for a crafty lunch!’

Ashe folded his hands over the document, covering as much of it as possible.

‘Afternoon, Tigger!’ boomed the balding provincial grand secretaries accompanying the Grand Secretary for a lunchtime drink.

‘Shouldn’t you be on a working lunch today, Tigger?’

Ashe looked up at Foulhurst. ‘Your brilliant information officer is just being brilliant.’

‘Who might you be?’

Ashe showed the Grand Secretary a Cranfield Royal Military College of Science card. Foulhurst perused it, sceptically. His eye caught the document under Ashe’s hand.

‘Not passing information on to outsiders are you, Tigger? Pro-Grand Master won’t like that.’ He pointed to the papers under Ashe’s flattened hand. ‘Not one of ours, is it?’

Ashe interjected. ‘As a matter of fact, Grand Secretary, I’m passing information on to your library and museum. Wonderful stuff about Service Lodges. Means a lot to veterans. I believe it involves the Duke of Kent. Was it his request, Julian?’

‘Er…’

‘Anyhow, the Duke has in the past taken a keen interest.’

The reference to the Duke of Kent settled the Grand Secretary somewhat. The Duke of Kent, being Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England, was entitled, Foulhurst surmised, to do things even he, the Grand Secretary, did not know about.

On the other hand, Foulhurst felt a right to know about everything that passed within the Craft. ‘The Duke, you say? I’ll have to have a chat next time we meet.’

‘Come on, Bob!’ The Provincial Grand Secretary for Lancashire patted Foulhurst on his shoulder. ‘We’d all like a drink before we go into Lodge.’

‘Sorry. Sorry, Peter. Right. Be sure you’re back in the office by two, Tigger. Goodbye, er… whatever your name is. Not one of us, is he, Julian?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I see. Well, keep it brief.’

As the three men moved to the other side of the bar, Ashe noticed sweat beginning to gather on Travers’ forehead.

‘How the fuck can you put up with shit like that, Julian? And you an Oxford man!’

‘That’s the whole trouble, Toby. None of these guys went to a decent university. But Masonry gives them rank. And in their little world, they’re like kings.’

‘That’s sad. You deserve better. No one should have to put up with crap like that in this day and age. And what’s all that “Tigger” stuff?’

‘You know. I run around, always doing something.’

‘And they laugh at you?’

‘Their little joke.’

94

Ashe’s hunch had been right. Herr Gerhard Fitzthum of Fitzthum & Nietzsche recalled the face. He was sure: this was the man who called himself Mustapha Atbash. This was the man who had arranged the lease in Altona, Hamburg.

Colonel Aslan had set up the whole apartment.

All morning Karla Lindars had tried to reach Aslan in his Istanbul office. No one was answering the phone. The switchboard operator in Ümraniye could give no information. Ashe tried Aslan’s mobile: no answer.

And all the time, the contents of the Baba Sheykh’s curious speech raced round Ashe’s mind. Had the Baba Sheykh quit Istanbul because of al-Qasr? Or could it be that the warning was somehow connected to the Baba Sheykh’s speech?

Tired of making Ashe coffee, Karla stood in front of his desk, put her hands on her hips and screamed his name.

‘Good. I’ve got your attention. Toby, I have come to listen. I have come to be mummy.’

‘That’s all I bloody need!’

‘Maybe it is, at this moment. Just tell me what is going on in your head? And see if I can help, just a bit. First, what, if I may ask, is in that document there?’

‘Which one?’

‘The one you’ve been fiddling with since last night. The one you had in the bathroom. The one you had at breakfast. That one. There. What’s it all about?’

‘That, darling Karla, is a very original account of the origins and development of Freemasonry. Freshly swiped from the United Grand Lodge of England.’

‘So, kindly explain its contents. It will make you feel better.’

Ashe took a deep breath. ‘All right. The Grand Lodge of England was the first “Grand Lodge” of Freemasonry anywhere in the world. According to its Constitutions, which were published in 1723, four Lodges got together in a Covent Garden pub in 1716, and decided to join together as a “Grand Lodge” the following year. What does that tell you?’

‘I don’t know. What are you driving at?’

‘There were four Lodges. Then there was a Grand Lodge. When did Freemasonry start?’

‘Oh, I get it! For four Lodges to come together, there must have already been Freemasonry in 1716 – before there was a “Grand Lodge”.’

‘Right. Freemasonry already existed. It was an adjunct to the skilled trade of masonry and architecture. A “freemason” was the English term for one who worked in “freestone”. And freestone was another name for sandstone and limestone that was good for carving. Try carving granite and you’ll see what I mean. These freestone masons, or “freemasons”, belonged to companies. By the time of James I, the London Company of Freemasons had been active for some two centuries. They fixed their own wages, and had their own rituals and traditions.’

‘OK. Did you get this from the Baba Sheykh’s speech?’

‘No. This is just basic history.’

‘Basic!’

‘And the Baba Sheykh, it turns out, knows it much better than I do. Now, some time between that alleged meeting of four London Lodges in 1716, and the year 1723, when the supposedly new organisation published its Constitutions, something odd happened. The so-called “Grand Lodge” removed the old stipulation that an actual working stonemason should be present at the meetings of Lodges of Accepted Masons.’

‘Hold on. Why’s that odd? And what’s an “Accepted Mason”? And why weren’t all the members working masons?’

‘I’m coming to that. Before the new “Grand Lodge”, special meetings were held in the City of London by the leaders of the London Masons’ Company, formerly known as the London Company of Freemasons. Senior master masons, what we would now call “architects”, could attend, as well as gentlemen with an interest in the practical and mystical aspects of building and geometry. They were usually friends of senior members of the Masons’ Company. We know from records that one very special meeting was called an “Acception”.’

‘Is that where “Accepted” Mason comes from?’

‘Right. Scholars think that it was at this meeting – the Acception – that brother masons celebrated something symbolic about their craft: a higher, more esoteric insight, based on very old traditions of masonry. Evidence suggests that the spiritual and intellectual aspects of architecture were more of a focus at these meetings. When you’d been initiated at the meeting, you became “accepted”. That is, you’d accepted something.’

‘What’s this spiritual and intellectual side you speak of, Toby? Weird stuff?’

‘I’ll let the Baba Sheykh enlighten us on this matter in a minute, Karla. But first I want you to understand why it is so significant that the so-called “Grand Lodge” separated itself from the science, art and trade of masonry.’

‘Are you saying that they hijacked the Acception meetings from the old order of craft Masonry?’

‘You’re very quick on the uptake today, Karla. There’s a body of evidence to suggest that yes, something of the sort happened. Because by 1730, English Freemasonry had become a self-contained Order available for export – and it was completely separate from the trade. So something fundamental had obviously occurred.’

‘Fascinating. But if I was organising a new Order, I think I’d want people to know it was very old.’

‘That’s one of the contradictory things about modern British Freemasonry. By the time of Queen Victoria, leading Freemasons were distinguishing between “speculative” and “operative” Freemasonry. Grand Lodge Freemasonry was “speculative”, which seems to have meant “symbolic and philosophical”, whereas the old builders, carvers and architects knew only “operative” masonry. That way, the new Order could have its cake and eat it! True Freemasonry started with the Grand Lodge, but it was also very ancient! Operative equals old; speculative equals new.’

‘Sounds like a class distinction. Tradesmen’s entrance and all that.’

‘Well, the Victorian era saw Masonry in England becoming more and more a bourgeois phenomenon: a badge of acceptability in some quarters.’

‘Yuck!’

‘Quite. Or one could say Freemasonry had become positive social cement with a healthy interest in charity. Anyway, back to the contradictions… It was not discouraged during all that time for Freemasons to think of themselves as belonging to an Order with roots in academically respectable ancient civilisations – Greek, Roman, Egyptian, even Druid, with their links to Stonehenge. That sort of thing came to be tolerated as part of the romantic ethos of “the Craft” – as the brotherhood of Freemasons is known. But by the twentieth century, leading members of Grand Lodge began to disassociate themselves from this picture. They began to stress that there was a very clear line to be drawn between what preceded Grand Lodge Freemasonry, and what came after it. Effectively, real “speculative” Masonry was the intellectual property of the United Grand Lodge of England.’

‘OK. So what does the Baba Sheykh have to say on the subject?’

‘Frankly, Karla, in a strange and subtle way, he throws a massive spanner in the works.’

‘How so?’

‘This sparkling genius – for such I think he is – has gone right back to first principles. What is this spiritual side of Freemasonry? Where did it come from? Where does it come from?’

‘I can’t wait. Just let me get another coffee.’

Ashe looked up at the picture of the Yezidi girls for inspiration. On the sheykh’s lips the speech would have sounded like the words of an old prophet, speaking from far distant times to a lost and confused present.

Karla came up behind him and squeezed his shoulders. ‘I can’t tell you, Toby, how attractive you are when I can actually see you thinking.’

Ashe took her hand and kissed it. ‘You’re a good listener. And you ask sensible questions.’

‘Thank you, Professor. And here’s another one. What’s all this got to do with the Baba Sheykh?’

95

‘The Baba Sheykh says that what became known as Freemasonry came from the Yezidis.’

‘From the Yezidis! That’s some claim, isn’t it? I mean, how could he say that? I’m guessing it’s not written anywhere, is it?’

‘Most Yezidi philosophy is learned as an oral tradition. There are very few writings.’

‘I remember from my granddad that Masons had to learn all their rituals from memory. That’s a sort of oral tradition, isn’t it?’

‘Good point. Anyway, the bulk of Yezidi thought is found in their hymn tradition. The qewwals – their holy musicians – learn it and pass it on. You know, Karla, in the hymns of the Yezidis, Creation begins with a pearl. And from out of the pearl come the cornerstones.’

‘Cornerstones?’

‘Cornerstones.’

‘Sounds a bit Masonic, I suppose, Toby. What other philosophy have you found in these hymns? And how come you’ve been party to it, anyway?’

‘Professor Philip Kreyenbroek of Göttingen University in Germany has teamed up with some Yezidis and written down many of their traditional hymns.’

‘Pity.’

‘Pity or not, Karla, there’s philosophy in them there hymns. Spiritual philosophy. We can learn about the Yezidi tradition from them.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, I think the first aspect of the Yezidi tradition is contemplation. Contemplation and meditation on the act of Creation. In this tradition, there are three architects. There is God, who made the pearl from which all things came. Then there is the eternal word, which is God’s mind in his Creation. This “word” you can call the “inner architect”.’

‘Because it’s in all things?’

‘Right. And the third architect is man.’

‘I’m a bit sick of man. But I like the sound of this “inner architect”.’

‘The inner word is the spirit of things, present but invisible. The word is the secret or hidden principle in Creation, in the smallest atom, in the largest planet, in the sun, and in the eye. It is like the genes on the DNA helix. This “word” or logos is the inner architect, the inner driver, the inner—’

‘Programme?’

‘Yes! Like a computer program. The hidden word. The code that makes the thing work. Not on its own, but in tune with everything else. The smallest part encapsulates the whole. The whole is the union of the parts. But there is “one word ” in all things—’

‘“All things are one” – that’s the basis of all mystic perception, isn’t it, Toby?’

‘Yes. This inner architect that men do not see.’

‘Unless they look for it.’

‘Right, Karla. So that’s the second architect. The third architect is man. Sorry. It means the idea of man, not a male.’

‘Maybe, but “man” sounds to me more like a man’s idea of “man”!’

‘Can’t help that. Anyway, he stands between the Great Architect and the word, or the inner architect – at least, in potential. And man contains the inner architect within his being, because God is in him. This is how man becomes an architect as we know the term. His mind extends through the application of geometry and he becomes a geometrical microcosm.’

‘A what?’

‘Microcosm. Little cosmos. A little universe, reflecting the greater universe.’

‘The kingdom of the heavens is within him? Interesting, Toby.’

‘But man needs to be woken up to it. Opened up to his hidden identity. He needs to look hard inside himself. When he is in tune with this dynamic word—’

‘He is the word made flesh!’

‘Yes! Gospel of John, Chapter 1! That’s partly why Saint John is the patron saint of Masonry. But in us, this “word made flesh” concept is only a possibility. We can’t make the whole journey because we’ve still got one foot stuck in the sleeping, or confused state – the way we ordinarily are: half asleep. Or drunk. Freemasonry teaches that life is a journey towards perfection. There is the rough stone—’

‘And the perfect stone! I think I’m a Mason without knowing it.’

‘Saves on fees! So, darling Karla, the perfect stone is the inner architect. It is the reflection of the Great Architect. This stone can be realised within every person. The Yezidis talk about it as a luminous cornerstone. This may be the true Philosopher’s Stone.’

‘I love it!’

‘Then – as the old Masons did – you can start turning the tools that shape the stone into symbols. The square, the dividers, the plumb line, chisel, maul, rule. The tools are ethical principles: truth, righteousness, goodness, strength, personal integrity, purity, charity, love, and the willingness to be tested.’

‘It’s beautiful, really, but very idealistic.’

‘It doesn’t appeal to everyone. Anyhow, the Baba Sheykh makes all this pristinely clear in his speech. And he demonstrates that these essential principles lie within the traditions of the Yezidis.

‘He makes a number of powerful quotes from Yezidi hymns. For example, one hymn refers to Sheykh Adi, who is an historical figure from the 1200s, a teacher or master of a spiritual path, but also a kind of angel or reflection of the divine for the Yezidis. In the “Angelic Sheykh” he is called “the master builder”. “You are the master builder; I am the building.” I mean, just in this little quote you have the tradition of the temple being within us. The church of the spirit is constructed within the soul, while at the same time, every Mason is also to be a stone in the greater temple. There is a hymn that talks of the four cornerstones that are one. One cornerstone for the holy men. These cornerstones are also angels. Streams of light. And the “Hymn of the Faith” asks: “What is the colour of the faith? It is the pre-eternal word, it is the name of Sheykh Adi.”’

‘But why is Sheykh Adi this pre-eternal word?’

‘Because Sheykh Adi realised in himself his identity with the inner architect. With God. This was the aim of the Sufis – or Gnostics – of Islam: to become a mirror of God. When they do, they start identifying with the holy men and women of all religions. They break the bounds. That’s perhaps why Freemasonry has this tolerance of different spiritual and religious traditions. Freemasonry is rooted in Gnostic traditions but often won’t admit it. That’s why it’s so threatening to people whose concept of God is particular to their own brand, so to speak.

‘Sheykh Adi was called a heretic. It’s the old story. But Sheykh Adi says in the hymn. “For your column, I am a good cornerstone.” This is the language of spiritual Freemasonry. This is the tradition the Yezidis kept alive. They even say Lalish, their holy valley, is a pure cornerstone, “the cornerstone for mankind”. Somehow, human destiny depends upon it.’

‘And you’ve been there?’

‘Bodily and spiritually.’

‘Coffee?’

Ashe nodded, suddenly recalling the magic of his night at Lalish, the night he met Laila and the guardian of the sanctuary: the night he experienced true timelessness.

Ashe’s thoughts drifted back to the archdeacon’s funeral at Peover in Cheshire, the day he’d met Melissa. He remembered how Colquitt and Bagot had showed up, and nearly spoiled everything. Then he remembered the call from Colonel Aslan. The call from Aslan… The call from Aslan… Where had he called from? ‘KARLA!’

‘No need to scream!’ Karla hurried back into Ashe’s office. ‘Not another history lesson, darling. I’m still trying to get through to your friend in Istanbul.’

‘Peover, Cheshire. The archdeacon’s funeral. He called me.’

‘Who did?’

‘Aslan. He called me. He said he was visiting relatives in St Pauli.’

‘So?’

‘St Pauli, Hamburg. It’s where the Kurdish Centre is. That’s when he must have arranged the lease of the apartment for our Yezidi friends!’

Ashe stared at the copy of the Baba Sheykh’s speech. ‘But why?’

‘Obvious, Toby. Aslan must have known al-Qasr wanted to kill or kidnap the Baba Sheykh.’

‘WHAT?’ The idea that Aslan could have known al-Qasr had never occurred to Ashe. He was startled.

‘Karla, do you know what you’ve just said?’

‘Sorry, did I say something wrong? I take it all back.’

‘I mean, did you think about it? Was this Karla lateral thinking?’

‘No, maestro. Just a guess. I’m trying to keep up with you.’

‘And vice versa, darling. Shit! You know, if you’re right, it could’ve been Aslan who gave the tip-off to Sinàn to get out of Istanbul quick. Or… maybe he gave the word to Yildiz and Yazar. That might explain why…’

‘Why?’

‘What if…?’ Ashe seized Karla’s arm. ‘What if it wasn’t al-Qasr who kidnapped the Baba Sheykh? What if…?’

96

‘And how is Baghdad this morning, sir?’

‘Hotting up as usual, Ashe. Now let’s leave small-talk for small people. I’ve recently had the pleasure of a meeting with Lee Kellner at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.’

‘Big talk, sir?’

‘Amusing but irrelevant, Ashe. Time is of the essence. Among other things discussed was my concern that your friend Sherman Beck is not sharing candy. Lee assured me he doesn’t let Beck in on everything, so what I have to say to you…’

‘Understood, sir.’

‘Right. First question. Did the CTC have a lead on al-Qasr’s current whereabouts? Kellner tried fobbing me off with some drivel about four different sightings of a stranger with a bearded kidnap victim.’

‘Bearded? Hardly a distinction in the East!’

‘Quite. I warmed him up after that: possible sighting in south Waziristan; another in Aiwaz, Pakistan; another near Kandahar; and one on the Iraqi–Syrian border. None confirmed, but all being followed up. I thanked Lee politely. We then proceeded to the business of the day: tracking down bin Laden. He’s still top of the list, Ashe. In this matter, British and US cooperation has proved fruitful. You may recall Brigadier Radclyffe from your nasty experience at the Tower. He was on hand to observe US special forces training. Something was being cooked up with Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence. Kellner couldn’t be entirely open with the ISI. In some respects, the ISI is a security liability. So Kellner looked to me for support there.’

‘Anything come out of that, sir?’

‘You’re ahead of me, Ashe. Kellner informed me about mobile phone intercepts linking bin Laden with a certain “al-Qasr”. This revelation should add a fresh dimension to your investigation.’

‘I should say so, sir.’

‘One last thing. It didn’t pass by me what Kellner let slip to you in Washington.’

‘About Israeli intelligence, sir?’

‘Mati Fless. Name mean anything to you?’

‘Matthias Fless of the Mossad? Old acquaintance.’

‘And recently released from CTC custody.’

‘Custody? Where held, sir?’

‘Chicago. Arrested in California while on a mission. The Mossad deny all knowledge of course. And some mission, Ashe! Seems Fless was trying either to kill or kidnap Professor Sami al-Qasr.’

‘Why the hell didn’t Beck tell me?’

‘You didn’t ask. That was the reason Lee gave. And I had to accept it, and so will you. Keep up the good work, Ashe!’

Karla slapped a note down onto Ashe’s desk.

‘Right, I’ll take it.’ Ashe picked up the phone. ‘That you, Julian?’

‘Sorry ’bout the delay, Toby. I found a few things. Could be useful. By the way, if the line goes funny, it’s because I’m walking up Drury Lane. I couldn’t make this call from inside Grand Lodge.’

‘Understood. Julian, I’ve read the copy of the speech.’

‘Nice, isn’t it?’

‘Why do you think the Grand Sec sat on it?’

‘You should see the draft memo I found.’

‘Found?’

‘You could say that. From the Grand Secretary of the United Grand Lodge of England to the current Grand Master of the Grand Temple of Free and Accepted Masons of Turkey. Hold on a second.’

Julian Travers stopped outside the box office for Cats and manoeuvred a packet of Silk Cut towards his mouth.

‘And?’

‘Just a second.’

Travers lit the cigarette. ‘Phew! Now, to cut a long story short, our Grand Secretary concluded, after discussion with the Librarian of UGLE and others, that, first, the history outlined in the Baba Sheykh’s speech was highly spurious—’

‘Spurious? It’s bloody good!’

‘And, second, that it might be bad news for the Masonic status quo in Turkey.’

‘Why?’

‘Masonic politics. Except, Toby, in Turkey, Masonic politics has, in the past, overlapped with state politics.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Freemasonry is controversial in Turkey. There’s a population of 70 million, and only about 14,000 Masons. Nevertheless, Turks know what small numbers of well-organised people can do. In the minds of some people who resent the secular Turkish state, modern Turkey is the product of a kind of Masonic-influenced coup.’

‘You’re just saying that Masons are associated with secularism. But Masons, as Masons, have no political position at all.’

‘We know that, Toby. But try explaining that to the Islamists. Look, before 1909, Turkey was ruled by a sultan, who ran a Muslim caliphate. Then the so-called “Young Turks” kicked him out. Twenty years later, Turkey had become a secular state, supported mainly by educated metropolitan people, and by the army. Ideas about liberty, equality, fraternity and all that appealed to the educated as being progressive and European: something to work towards in a national context.’

‘Right.’

‘But these same ideas were also enshrined in Grand Orient Freemasonry as Masonic ideals.’

‘So there is a link between secular ideals, Masonry and Turkish politics!’

‘Tricky one. The Young Turks set up a “Committee of Union and Progress” to achieve a new, progressive Turkey. It was from that committee that Mustapha Kemal – Atatürk, father of the Turks – emerged. As far as I know, Atatürk was a Mason.’

‘Jurisdiction?’

‘Atatürk was associated with Italian Grand Orient Lodges in Thessalonica. And it was from members of these Lodges that political opposition to the old sultan, Abdul Hamid, came. Most of the committee were Freemasons, initiated into Grand Orient Freemasonry, based in France and Italy.’

‘And the United Grand Lodge of England does not recognise Grand Orient Freemasonry, does it?’

‘Right, Toby. Because the Grand Orient has been associated with political movements. Also, the Grand Orient system doesn’t require members to believe in God. So, anti-Masons in the East argue that Freemasonry is atheistic and materialistic. In Turkey’s case, Freemasonry’s opponents insist Masonry is political, driving the split between state and faith. Whereas, as I needn’t tell you, Toby, in British Lodges and recognised Lodges abroad, political and religious argument is forbidden, even though belief in the Supreme Being is required.’

‘So, Grand Orient Freemasonry’s secular tendency makes it a natural target for some Turkish Muslim opponents. And they tend to lump all Masonry in with it.’

‘Right, Toby. They see secularism as a calamity for traditional Islamic Turkey. They’d like to turn the clock back. Now, all this conflict over Turkey’s future was vexing for Atatürk, modern Turkey’s founder-hero. So Atatürk side-stepped the issue of Turkey’s religious past by promoting pre-Islamic Turkish identity. He declared that the ancient Turkic peoples were the original Aryans.’

‘The WHAT?’

‘Yeah. He reckoned the Turks were the original Aryans. He reckoned the ancient Greeks got their culture from ancient Turks. Atatürk had a group of selected scholars write this book—’

‘What book?’

‘A book called History. Taught in all Turkish schools. You can still meet people in Turkey familiar with its basic idea.’

‘Which is?’

‘That the Turks are the heroes of world history. The book insists the Turks grew from the first race of scientists and philosophers in the world. In short, Aryan Turks are the source of civilisation. Atatürk transformed the appellation “Turk” into something glorious, something to be proud of. Turkish identity had been a glorious secret that only needed to be uncovered and revived. Well, Masonic ideas of ancient hidden knowledge, and universal brotherhood, can easily get mixed up in all of this. And the United Grand Lodge of England knows this only too well. It does its best to foster the kind of nice, friendly, charity-giving Freemasonry we’re familiar with.’

‘So what’s all this got to do with the Baba Sheykh’s speech?’

‘Look Toby, I can only give you my opinion. You know how important recognition policy is. It’s the only means the United Grand Lodge of England has to exercise a measure of restraint over quasi-Masonic waywardness or error. Freemasonry’s been through a lot of changes in Turkey since the days of the Young Turks. In 1935 Atatürk himself closed the Masonic Lodges because of widespread fears of foreign interference. But after the Second World War, Masons met in their old buildings, though unofficially. Lodges were officially re-opened in the sixties and operated in a national association.

‘But in 1965 this national association split. Some of its members founded the now larger Grand Temple of Free and Accepted Masons of Turkey. This jurisdiction is recognised here in London. It conforms to the English Masonic pattern, and it supports an openness policy. The Lodge attacked in March, in Kartal District, Istanbul, was under this recognised jurisdiction.’

‘I wonder if that was a factor in the bombing? Any other jurisdictions in Turkey, Julian?’

‘I was coming to that. There’s the Liberal Grand Lodge of the Freemasons of Turkey. The Liberal Grand Lodge is in amity with the Grand Orient of France. It doesn’t require any religious statement from its members. They say such a requirement hinders the universality of the aims of Freemasonry. It’s an interesting argument—’

‘It is. But why did London sit on the Baba Sheykh’s speech?’

‘OK. My opinion is that London believed the Baba Sheykh’s speech could be used to undermine the authority of the recognised Grand Temple of Turkish Freemasons.’

‘And presumably of England, too.’

‘I… I suppose so. Hadn’t thought of that.’

‘The reason being, dear Julian, that the Baba Sheykh regards developments in Freemasonry after the establishment of the Grand Lodge of England as deviations from a more profound tradition that stems from the East.’

‘It’s a view. And I’ve got to say, Toby, I have sympathy with the Grand Secretary’s decision to dissociate regular Masons from the speech. This whole question opens up a vast can of worms. Every unrecognised Grand Lodge in the world would love it to be proved that it had as much right to reform itself according to some ancient principle as any other. While some Grand Lodges appear indifferent to London’s claim of premiership, they would not be indifferent to new evidence suggesting the Grand Lodge of England was illegitimate. It could get very messy – and who, really, would benefit?’

‘Not the Grand Lodge, that’s for sure.’

‘Exactly. At the moment, it all works fairly cosily. The Grand Lodge of England doesn’t claim jurisdiction over any other Grand Lodge. If Grand Lodges abroad balls things up, that’s their problem, and London can always – and often does – remove recognition.

‘Look at Turkey, Toby. There, Freemasonry is problematical. Members of the army are associated with it. What if an internal Masonic conflict in Turkey got out of hand? This would be ammunition for every critic and enemy of Freemasonry in Turkey. Anything which puts Freemasonry into the newspapers makes Masons in the army uncomfortable. On the other hand, there are other members of the army, I believe, who are anti-Masonic, associating Masonry with foreign interference. Do you follow me, Toby?’

‘I am experiencing enlightenment, Julian.’

‘Good. I can do no more. At least, I hope you can see that my employers are not entirely to be condemned.’

‘Check.’ Ashe thought for a second. ‘Just one thing, Julian.’

‘Shoot.’

‘From what you’re saying, if the Grand Lodge of England had been able to have everything its own way from its establishment until now, there would never have been a Grand Orient Freemasonry, French or Italian, and therefore, there would never have been a modern, secular Turkish state.’

‘It’s a thought, Toby.’

97

Ashe sat back in his chair, his head spinning. He looked up at his Yezidi dancing girl poster. Round and round, with no centre in sight. No secular state. No Atatürk. No… Mahmut Aslan.

Aslan.

What about Aslan? In intelligence circles there was often talk of good links between Turkish secret services and Israel’s Mossad. As the thought curled itself into Ashe’s head like a cat before a fire, Karla slipped a memo behind his ear. ‘Busy day, maestro – getting somewhere?’

‘If only I knew where “somewhere” was.’

‘This might help. Overheard your chat with Mr Crayke. I checked past records.’

Ashe examined the memo. ‘Mati Fless’s number!’ Ashe blew Karla a kiss and phoned the number. It rang and rang: no message-taking facility. A click.

‘Matthias Fless?’

‘Who is speaking?’

Ashe immediately recalled the Israeli’s deep, gloomy voice.

‘Toby Ashe. We—’

‘Toby!’

‘You remember?’

‘The Shmuel ben Yackai case. You helped us with that creep who wanted to blow up the al-Aqsa mosque and rebuild Solomon’s Temple. Mad.’

‘Madness is my business.’

‘No shortage of work.’

‘I hear you’ve recently suffered an interruption to your activities.’

‘Really?’

‘In Chicago.’

‘All part of the job, Toby. How much do you know?’

‘I gather that if you had pursued your job without interruption, both the CIA and myself would not be quite so harassed by circumstance as we presently are.’

‘I do like your English understatement. If they had let me do my job, Toby, they wouldn’t be in the shit, and I wouldn’t be in Tel Aviv being roasted alive by my superiors, and you wouldn’t be speaking to me during my toilet break. I presume you’re not calling to reminisce?’

‘Simple question.’

Fless laughed.

‘I understand, Mati, that you intercepted messages from a guy who called himself…’

‘Go on!’

‘Called himself “the doctor”.’

‘You got this from Beck, or from Kellner?’

‘Both.’

‘What else do you know, Toby?’

‘Like to know more.’

‘Look, this is something I need to check up on with higher authority. I’m in enough—’

‘I understand, Mati. But before you check up on me, just remember that although you failed in your mission, and we have not yet succeeded, we all have a common interest here. You really must help me if you can. You do want al-Qasr stopped, don’t you?’

‘Stopped from what, Dr Ashe?’

‘From… murdering people.’

‘That was the intention, Dr Ashe. And I believe, still is.’

It was late afternoon when Karla called Ashe in from a walk around the dull campus.

‘Tel Aviv, Toby.’

Ashe smiled. ‘Thanks, Karla. You never fail.’

Ashe sat on his desk and picked up the phone.

‘Ashe speaking.’

‘Congratulations on your promotion.’

‘Thank you. I deserve it.’

‘Agreed, Dr Ashe. Now ask your question.’

‘Does the name Mahmut Aslan mean anything to you?’

The line crackled. ‘Mati, you there?’

‘I’m thinking. Remarkable man. Do you know him?’

‘Yes, at least I thought I did.’

‘Then you probably know Colonel Aslan is a specialist in Kurdish relations, or, if you like, the lack of them, from the Turkish point of view.’

Ashe laughed.

‘So, he has had a finger in northern Iraq for a considerable time, on account, you understand, of the succour shown the PKK by a minority of Kurds there. And we, of course, have a vital interest in Ansar al-Sunna and all the other anti-Israeli forces operating in the same area.’

‘You’ve shared intelligence.’

‘We have shared intelligence, of course.’

‘I have another question.’

‘Is this one simple too?’

‘I hope so. Has Aslan ever shown any interest in Sami al-Qasr?’

‘Is that what British intelligence wants to know? Interesting.’

‘I hope so. And I hope I’ve come to the right place.’

‘Some years ago, Dr Ashe, Aslan attempted to pressure one of our informants at Baghdad’s al-Tuwaitha facility.’

‘Informants?’

‘You know what I mean. This was in Saddam’s time. And al-Tuwaitha held all Saddam’s secrets. Aslan, a very resourceful man, contacted our informant, which, you can imagine, was for him a great surprise.’

‘I can imagine!’

‘Aslan wanted information on al-Qasr. We told our informant what he could safely disclose to Turkish security. That information gave Aslan negotiating leverage later on.’

‘Negotiation?’

‘I’ll come to that. But I believe the colonel first heard about al-Qasr through Yezidis who had crossed the Iraq–Turkey border one way or the other. That wouldn’t give Aslan many hard facts about al-Qasr but it certainly stimulated his interest. I think Aslan got most of his knowledge about al-Qasr from us. Part of a shared-intelligence arrangement. He was very helpful in other matters. Jihadists in northern Iraq. Insurgents from Iran. Anti-Zionists in Turkey. It all helped to grease the wheels. The interest in al-Qasr was a very small part of what we shared.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Enough. Everything short of a personal introduction, you might say.’

‘Aslan’s angle?’

‘Aslan’s angle was straightforward: counter-insurgency.’

‘Where did he think al-Qasr fitted into that?’

‘Good question. At the time, I was a little surprised by his interest, but then he was curious about our interest in al-Qasr too. There’s always a bit of cat and mouse. You know how it is. He talked about hunches, but nothing concrete. It seemed like professional curiosity. Then we discovered independently that al-Qasr did have terrorist contacts. At which point Aslan’s interest in al-Qasr made sense to us. He was right to be concerned. He was simply keeping his sources secret. And you must remember this, Toby. Aslan is popular with my colleagues. He is useful to us. Colonel Aslan is respected. If it were not for our concern about al-Qasr, you and I would not be having this conversation.’

‘Did Aslan know you knew about al-Qasr’s links to terrorism?’

‘Aslan has his ways. When he realised we knew about it, he congratulated himself on having got there before us! We asked him if he would share what he knew with the Americans. He said talking to America was our business, but insisted that further cooperation from him required that his name be omitted from any communications with the US. He said he was cautious of giving intelligence to Americans unless Turkish national interest was involved. He insisted the Americans were too tolerant of the PKK in northern Iraq. So we stepped lightly. But once we were certain al-Qasr had terrorist contacts, we started concocting the “doctor” scenario.’

‘It was you! Not a question of intercepts then? There is no real “doctor”?’

‘I should not be surprised if Kellner and Beck have realised that by now.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I think you can work that out, Dr Ashe!’

‘OK. Let me get this straight. With al-Qasr protected by US security, you had to find a way of undermining his position. But why didn’t you just pass on your information?’

‘If I might say so, that’s exactly what we have done, in our own way. I told Kellner and Beck what I know to be true. Al-Qasr is working with al-Qaeda. Of course we in Israel want to take al-Qasr out of the picture! We are sensitive to his kind of craziness – or science, if you insist. Do you remember that phrase Churchill used when describing what the doctors were doing in the Nazi camps?’

‘“The lights of perverted science”?’

‘Yeah. That’s al-Qasr. The lights of perverted science. There were discussions over the best way to deal with the problem. We knew the Americans would resist giving up such an important scientist, even if he was in contact with terrorists. They’d just tighten things up. Of course we remembered how America was ready to employ scientists who had worked for Hitler’s war-machine. Would there have been an Apollo programme without Wernher von Braun – the very man who designed the V2 rockets that brought about the deaths of thousands of civilians in London at the end of the Second World War? So we cooked up the “doctor” story, based on someone we had on file who was known to have had a relationship with al-Qasr in their student days and who, as far as we could tell, was on the run in Europe. We had messages sent first from Iraq, then Turkey, Austria and Germany. It was as close to the truth as lies can get.’

‘I get it… I get it. You wanted the CIA and FBI to investigate the matter for themselves. Create enough steam so it couldn’t all be swept under the carpet. Did you hope to force al-Qasr’s hand? Make him panic, or quit?’

‘We didn’t want him to quit like that of course. And the doctor scenario was only one idea. The other idea was mine. It became clear to us that al-Qasr might at any moment flee, especially if the CTC bungled their investigation in any way. We didn’t want al-Qasr to disappear.’

‘And when you failed, the doctor messages became your only hope.’

‘Not our only hope, Toby! Contrary to rumour, we cannot tell the Americans what to do.’

‘Did Aslan know anything about the doctor messages?’

‘We’re not sure. If he didn’t know to begin with, he probably does now. He has his ways, as I said.’

‘Do you know where al-Qasr might be?’

Fless laughed. ‘Afraid not, Dr Ashe! Of course, if we did, we might keep it to ourselves. But we are very interested in your call. I cannot help wondering, now I have heard what you have to say, that the best way to find al-Qasr might be—’

‘To find Aslan.’

‘I didn’t know the colonel was lost.’

‘He isn’t. We are.’

98

‘Call waiting for you, Toby.’

‘I don’t believe it! It’s like hitting the jackpot today. Who is it now? The Sultan of Brunei?’

‘Brigadier Charles Radclyffe. Calling from London.’

‘Shit! The Director of Special Forces!’

Ashe took the call. ‘Good afternoon, Brigadier.’

‘Heard good things about you, Ashe, from Richmond and from Crayke. Pity our last meeting was cut so short.’

‘Indeed, Brigadier.’

‘Oh, call me Charles or DSF for God’s sake. You’re not in uniform are you, Ashe?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, you can tell me to fuck off, if you like.’

‘Rather not. Got a feeling you’ve something important to say.’

‘Bugger your feelings, Ashe. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the way we work in the SAS. Doesn’t matter. Listen. I’m in receipt of information sent by Richmond to our Operational Intelligence cell at Stirling Lines.’

‘Hereford.’

‘Correct.’

‘You call it “the Kremlin”.’

‘Correct again. Then you’ll also know that they disseminate intelligence to their operational planners. If the information calls for an operation, they contact me for my point of view and authority to proceed. If I agree with their assessment, I then task the Kremlin for a feasibility study. Now, Ashe, I have read their report concerning suspicious military activity in Iraq’s Hakkari Mountains. I have consulted with senior authority and have requested the Kremlin go ahead with plans to be submitted to the sortie commander. The sortie commander is Major Richmond.’

‘May I ask who is the relevant authority in this case?’

‘The relevant authority in this case is not unknown to you. He’s requested you be informed and liaise in strictest secrecy with the sortie commander. Am I making myself clear, Ashe?’

‘Very clear. Except for one thing.’

‘And that is?’

‘What’s the information, sir?’

‘Don’t ask me, Ashe! Contact OP/INT and do as they tell you. One more thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘How’s the investigation going?’

‘Investigation?’

‘Admiral Whitmore’s bloody Tower! Any closer to finding out who blew it up?’

‘Nothing certain yet.’

‘Well, I don’t know if this is any use, but I’ve been sent a curious message. Got it here in front of me.’

‘Care to share?’ Ashe was intrigued.

‘It’s a bugger of a thing. Cheap drawing paper. Written in charcoal. Rough capitals. Reads as follows: “THE TOWER OF BABEL IS NOT DESTROYED. AS CAIN SLEW ABEL SO WILL YOU DIE BAD. ABEL DIED SO SETH CAN LIVE. I SETH, THE IMMOVEABLE RACE, JUDGE.” Make anything of that, Ashe? Bloody foxes me.’

Ashe had a strange sense that he’d seen something like it before, but when? ‘I’ll give it some thought, sir.’

‘I’ve had a go. What’s all that stuff about Seth?’

‘It’s in Genesis. The Bible says that after Adam’s son Cain murdered his brother Abel, Adam and Eve had another child. This new child, Seth, was seen as a new hope for the human race after Cain’s crime. Seth had “the knowledge of God” and was a patriarch of science and wisdom.’

‘News to me, Ashe. What’s that “immoveable race” stuff all about? Sounds a bit Nazi.’

‘Some time after Christ, various groups appeared who claimed they were the Children of Seth, that they were the guardians of something pure, which had survived through time to reappear at the end of time. They saw themselves as the unmoveable or “unchangeable” race. A group that had held the true torch burning from the beginning of mankind. The original, undivided, inspired race.’

‘True torch burning? Sounds like some bloody weird cult. I’ll send this crap to you at Shrivenham in the diplomatic bag. Sounds right up your street, Ashe. Good luck. Over and out.’

99

Kurdish Autonomous Region, northern Iraq

Ashe was soaking. It had rained all the way from the airport at Mosul – a steady drizzle, persistent enough to dampen any good feelings.

The Land Rover 110 splashed its way along the winding mountain roads. On the approach to the village of Kurahmark the gradient increased and the earth got browner and browner as the sky got filthier and filthier. Traces of green slowly faded away as they made the last twenty kilometres to the RV, the rendezvous point near the village of Kurku. Just outside the village, the road stopped abruptly. The Land Rover carried on along the rough mountainside for another kilometre, until it became too steep.

‘This’ll be it, chum.’

The driver – a Mancunian – Kev ‘The Blade’ Norton (signals), gave a one-sided grin and jumped out of the Land Rover. He was swiftly followed by Pat Scrabster (linguist and sniper), Derek Hayes (demolition), and Andy Tongue (medicine).

The men had worked as a team for two years in Afghanistan and Iraq. All of them were used to prolonged periods of silence and seemed to know what the others were thinking. Quietly, they started loading equipment onto their backs.

Three Pink Panther – ‘pinkie’ – desert vehicles were waiting for them under camouflage, which also gave some shelter from the rain. Out from under the camouflage, dressed in Kurdish costume, stepped Major Richmond. He shook hands with Ashe.

‘Welcome to the RV. This is where we’ll regroup after the show. I hope you’re ready for a walk, Toby.’

‘How far?’

‘About eight kilometres, as the crow flies.’

‘And we’re not crows.’

‘It’ll seem longer. We need to move out in four minutes, so I’d like you to get some extra kit on. We’re all adopting some aspect of Kurdish style. This will help Jolo and his men identify us. But first I want you to get into this vest and a few other things.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That’s the Kevlar body suit. It can take a bullet, and it’s got ceramic inserts, which really do save lives.’

Ashe pulled off his desert fatigues and hauled himself into the body suit.

‘You’d never think this stuff would stop bullets.’

‘Science doing the soldier a favour for a change. Once it’s on, you don’t have to think about it.’

Richmond threw Ashe a green sleeveless garment. ‘This is the Dowty Armourshield General Purpose Vest 25, Toby.’

‘What’s this one got, apart from an extraordinary name?’

‘It’s got a blunt trauma shield.’

‘Purpose?’

‘The rest might stop a bullet from piercing your body, but you need the shield to lessen the trauma of being hit. Weighs four kilogrammes, which you’ll notice after a while.’

‘Better than being dead.’

Richmond smiled. ‘That’s the idea.’

Ashe slipped on some grey baggy trousers and a buff-coloured light cotton jacket while Richmond helped him with a blue-and-white-striped turban.

‘Important thing is to get its tail to flow backwards, not in your face.’

‘Got it.’

‘Now, in this pack you’ll find a survival kit, some stun grenades, an SF10 respirator, a specialised helmet adapted to it, some plastic bags to put your shit in, a few other things I’ll talk about later – and a map. Important thing. Never mark the map or fold it in such a way as to give anyone finding it a clue about anything that matters.’

‘Over my dead body.’

‘That’s where they’d find it. Right. Weapon. As this sort of trek is new to you, I thought you might like to get to grips with this.’

Ashe admired the factory-fresh submachine gun. ‘Heckler & Koch MP5 SD. Silenced version.’

‘Very good. Don’t want to frighten you with loud noises. If you’d prefer an assault rifle to the submachine gun, just say so.’

‘This is fine.’

‘Here’s the ammo belt. The holster carries a 9 mm Browning High Power pistol. You can keep your boots.’

‘I should think so. Cost a bloody fortune.’

Ashe and Richmond emerged from beneath the camouflage netting to find themselves surrounded by a ring of human steel. This mission clearly had high-priority status.

100

Simon Richmond was in command of sixteen men from 22 SAS Sabre Squadron G, Mountain Troop, and a further sixteen men from D Squadron’s Air Troop: a formidable force.

Each man carried at least 100 kilogrammes of equipment, but the combined muscle did not hang lead-heavy as Ashe might have expected; rather it seemed to shimmer in the rain, bristling like a porcupine and ready to take its cargo of death right into the unsuspecting face of the enemy.

‘Where the fuck did they all come from?’

‘These are the invisible men, Toby.’

‘Quite a sight for invisible men.’

Richmond addressed them. ‘I hope you’re all comfortable. Any outstanding issues or questions about equipment, this is your last chance. Good. Before we go, I want to introduce you to Toby Ashe, whose name you have just forgotten. He’s with intelligence, and the higher-ups want him here to help with identification and interrogation procedures.’

Ashe looked somewhat apologetic, only too aware that he owed his place on the operation more to Crayke’s insistence than strict operational necessity.

‘Toby’s not undergone specialist training, but take my word for it, he has distinguished himself in field operations. Bastard even saved my life.’

Richmond awaited the expected mild amusement; it didn’t come.

‘Right. He doesn’t expect anyone to wait for him, or carry him. He’s aware that if he’s incapacitated, he will have to make his own way to the RV. Needless to say, we’ll take a diamond formation on the open stretches, and single file when we reach the foliage.’

There was a murmur of ‘Needless to say, Major’, and ‘Tell us something we didn’t know’.

‘As we discussed this morning, there is a high risk of anti-personnel mines and booby traps closer to the target, so bear that in mind. OK, we shall depart RV at five-minute intervals. Note there is to be no Morse or any electronic signalling whatsoever within five kilometres of the target area under any circumstances. Before that, high-speed transmissions may be used. It’s likely the enemy has direction-finding equipment installed in their facility. Signalling may resume in the event of engagement. I think that’s it. Good luck.’

There was some good-natured nodding from some of the troops, but most had their minds fixed firmly on the operation objectives. The men, divided into groups of four, would each follow a different route to the target area. Each route had been planned meticulously to offer a consistent strategic arrival pattern. Each group of four had a specific set of objectives to accomplish before the attack on the facility proper began.

Richmond and Ashe set off first, with the four men from Squadron G Mountain Troop who had brought Ashe in from Mosul. Already, Ashe’s shoulders were beginning to ache. Richmond turned round and noticed his discomfort.

‘It’ll improve, Toby. Now, before we spread out, I think I’d better explain what’s been going on.’

‘I’d appreciate that, Simon.’

‘Yes. The planning stage is usually like that. We don’t like to dwell on an operation. Just get on with it.’

‘Feet first, is it?’

‘Deep end.’

‘Right.’

‘I wasn’t going to mention it, Toby. But that submachine gun you have there is not a fashion accessory. I’ve lost four from my allotted force.’

‘Casualties?’

‘You’ve heard of the Ken Bigley kidnap?’

‘Al-Tawhid wal-Jihad group.’

‘Yeah. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He’s threatened to execute the poor chap. All on video. It’s one of those Iraq stories that newspapers really go to town on.’

‘Presumably why the kidnaps keep happening.’

‘Yeah, well. The PM has pulled out as many stops as possible. So I’ve lost a unit trying to find him. Of course, if they get to Bigley in time, they’ll also get the most-wanted terrorist in the region, so it’s worth the effort.’

‘D’you think our effort will make headlines?’

‘Rather doubt it, don’t you? Still, this operation makes sense. Remember last time you and I looked over a map of the region?’

‘In Shariya. You said there was the possibility of joint Turkish special forces and Ansar al-Sunna activity – weird though that sounded.’

‘Jolo’s men picked up one of the Ansar al-Sunna men in the area.’

‘Picked up?’

‘Abducted. Borrowed. Lifted. Took bloody prisoner. Anyhow, they got him talking. And he started gabbing about a bearded Yezidi brought in from Europe. Special hostage. He also identified a photograph of this Sami al-Qasr guy we and everybody else seems to have as a high-priority target. I’ve got to say though, Toby, it’s weird him turning up in these parts, given my briefing about him.’

‘Did the prisoner mention anyone else?’

‘Only a senior Turkish officer.’

Ashe felt a rush of excitement. He tried to sound unmoved. ‘Name?’

‘Didn’t know the name.’

‘Pity.’

‘Seems, Toby, this guy’s been running a special operation of his own.’

‘I’ll bet!’

‘Know this guy?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Well, he’s something special. He’s apparently turned about fifty captured Ansar al-Sunna volunteers into his own private force. They’re targeting PKK rebels operating inside northern Iraq. Some of the rebels are cooperating with American special forces, some are just hiding out in places the Turkish special forces can’t find. The Turkish justification is simple. It’s the war on terrorism.’

‘Of course it is. But Turkish style. Using Ansar al-Sunna volunteers distracts terrorists from killing Americans, while assisting the global war on terror by locating and/or liquidating Turkey’s internal enemies. Clever.’

‘And it keeps to a diplomatic minimum the number of Turkish special forces operating over the border. Now, Toby, you can answer a question of mine. We’ve been told this isn’t a simple blat-and-splat mission. There’s the hostage-release aspect.’

‘That’s just part of it, Simon. I presume you know that if this comes off, your command will have found the only significant WMD in the Iraq conflict.’

‘That aspect’s been rather muted. We can’t be sure what we’re going to find, if anything.’

‘So what’s your question?’

‘Why no US forces? Does Blair want the honours – save his career and trounce his enemies?’

Ashe laughed. ‘I doubt it. Maybe the prospect of US forces going out to hit Turks is embarrassing for all parties. On the other hand, a regular mission against Ansar al-Sunna forces by Kurdish irregulars, albeit with some SAS backup – which also happens to locate some Turkish forces – I suppose that could be dressed up rather differently. But there’ll be diplomatic problems if the Yanks find we’ve gone after al-Qasr without telling them. Success will be our proof.’

Richmond squinted, not entirely convinced. ‘Is that the only reason our allies are in the dark on this one, Toby?’

Ashe thought it best to avoid the question. ‘Of course, there’s the capability factor.’

‘Capability, Toby?’

‘I’m told cave-bashing operations like this normally get US AC-130 Spectre Gunship support with deep-penetration bombs targeting the cave entrances. But in this case, we can’t risk killing either the hostage or those in charge of holding him.’

‘That’s been made clear. Who’s the hostage?’

‘They didn’t tell you?’

‘It was made clear there was no guarantee the hoped-for hostage would be there at all. Crayke suggested you would know.’

‘And this mission was okayed on that basis?’

‘That’s how it is sometimes. Uncertainty complicates things, Toby, but sometimes you just have to go.’

‘I presume hostage release is nothing new to you.’

‘Never done it from inside a bloody cave in the mountains before! It’s the worst of two worlds.’

‘That’s life.’

Ashe found the going easier now the blood was flowing and his mind was active. As the men curved round the brow of the mountain and headed towards a stunning serpentine valley of gentle serrations, streaked by a gushing tributary of the Great Zab River, the autumn sun poked out from behind the clouds. Its cleansing beams flooded the valley.

Richmond turned to Ashe. ‘Know something?’

‘What?’

‘You’ve changed.’

101

The day wore on like a heavy sack. The mountains that had seemed so brown now looked blue in the distance. As he placed one weary foot in front of another, Ashe noticed that the rocks were not brown either, but covered in a rusty-red lichen. The Martian character of the mountain suited the operation, but just as Ashe had got used to the redness, psyching himself up for the unknown that lay ahead, the troops rounded the base of a low mountain and entered a lush gorge.

On either side of its bank grew may bushes, terebinth trees with jade-coloured berries rotting on the boughs, oleanders, poplar trees, rock roses and sturdy little oaks. The stony ground was pocked with thistles and weeds. This route had been traced by tired soldiers since the days of Alexander the Great.

Richmond had told Ashe that four SAS men were already in the target area, establishing OPs. These observation posts were known as bashas – damp, desperately uncomfortable holes that were more suited to ascetic hermits of extreme persuasions, or psychopaths.

The men had been told that in addition to their minimal rations, they might, at night, also pick an edible weed called khubbaz. This could be supplemented by the milky-white kivar thistle, which could be warmed up on their elementary stoves but was best chewed cold since cooking smells were to be avoided so close to the target.

Richmond signalled for Kev Norton to approach with an update from the entrenched advance party. The long Afghani dagger flashing under Norton’s vest explained why his oppos called him The Blade. Norton noticed Ashe’s interest and quickly covered his personal weapon.

Hayes, Tongue and Scrabster darted over rocks into foliage on opposite sides of the stream, gripping their Colt Commandos and covering the distracted major, who was bent over Norton’s PRC 319 radio system. Ashe knelt on one knee, his submachine gun at the ready, ten metres in front of the major.

Two minutes later, Richmond signalled Ashe to join him, then signalled the other three men to climb as far up the banks as possible, making use of the trees and bushes. It was perilous to be so close to the target area in daylight, but the strike had been agreed for dusk, after dinner, when the enemy was likely to be least alert.

A dead-of-night operation had been discussed but was rejected because the enemy also had night-vision equipment provided by Turkish special forces. Furthermore, the entrance to the cave facility was already extremely dark due to rock overhangs and dense forest.

Complete surprise would be their trump card, and the mist that rose off the streams at dusk would also help. It had also been observed that night guards were posted to the facility’s perimeter just after nightfall.

Two of the advance group were sniper specialists, trained to kill at up to 1,000 metres. Geoff Barrow and Tim Blakeley carried Accuracy International L96A1 rifles with Schmidt & Bender telescopic sights. They had already spent thirty-six hours dug into the dampness and cold, monitoring the positioning of facility guards. When the time came, ice-cold nerve and steady hands would ensure success.

Some three kilometres north of Richmond’s position, four groups of four from D Squadron’s Air Troop had advanced to assess the enemy’s likely escape routes and set up a maximum of two ambush sites. The plotting of potential routes had been assisted by Jolo’s men. They had discovered four possible paths. Available troop numbers ensured only the two most likely routes would be covered. Should things go badly at the target site, they could respond to calls for reinforcements.

Jolo’s enthusiastic irregulars covered remaining routes using M16s with attached 40 mm M203 grenade launchers. The D Squadron troop had also carried two 81 mm mortars to the anticipated contact area – an amazing feat of strength, given the weight of operational loads.

The ascent of the gorge had been gruelling, but the last half-kilometre was even worse: the men now had to crawl through the scrub on their stomachs, negotiating the rocks and endless thistles in complete silence.

The plateau ended abruptly at a mossy slope that ran down into a narrow gorge. God knew how Jolo’s men and the advance group had been able to position themselves there without being caught. As the sun hovered over the western horizon, Ashe heard noises.

Below Ashe and Richmond, at the foot of the gorge, some thirty Ansar al-Sunna terrorists had gathered round a large fire and were eating goat, raisins and rice. Some wore black combat suits with full-face balaclavas rolled up over their foreheads. Others wore blue cotton thobes, the male robe common in Arab countries, under green combat jackets. Many sported the Palestinian headscarf, folded on a diagonal, with tassels at the corners. Others wore red Arabic headscarves with the familiar zigzag pattern. All sported bandanas, side pistols and belts laden with AK-47 magazines.

The timing was perfect. Hardly any of them had their hands on their guns. Above the sharp voices of the terrorists, Ashe barely heard the two sniper shots that took out the two tired guards positioned on the sides of the gorge. From further up the lip of the gorge, short bursts of GPMG fire, lethal shots from M16s and Colt Commandos and a sudden barrage of grenades turned the dining party into a mangled, bloody mess. Some more snipers’ shots, a brief strafing of machine-gun fire, and the gorge was quiet, but for the flow of the tiny stream as it flowed red over its stony bed. Smoke rose like a veil over the scene.

Richmond whispered, ‘Fucking good. Stage one done. Wait here.’

As Richmond eased his way gently down into the gorge, there was a brief wait. At the end of the gorge was a dark rocky overhang, with dripping moss and ivy cascading down. That was the entrance to the cave. Whoever was inside would be very confused.

There were groans from the gorge. One of Jolo’s men hurried around the massacred corpses and delivered swift death to the wounded.

The first four seconds of a hostage-release scenario always belong to the SAS.

An explosion at the far end of the gorge. The demolition guys were on the job with PE4 plastic explosives. The outer door to the cave was now twisted metal. Two Remington 870 pump-action shotguns blew the hinges off the inner doors. The SAS entered with stun grenades, CS gas and deadly shots from handguns. Dazed guards came tumbling out of the cave entrance, scraping their eyes and crying, wildly firing rounds from Kalashnikov submachine guns. Hayes was hit in the leg. His body fell onto his bleeding stump, which trailed the shattered limb. Scotsman Andy Tongue ran to Hayes’ aid with his medicine bag and reached for morphine. Hayes had passed out.

Richmond screamed to Norton, ‘Check arrival time for the Chinook! We’ve got wounded.’ Richmond was knocked backwards as two shots bounced off the ceramic plates in his Kevlar suit.

‘You all right, sir?’

‘Just send the message!’

Norton checked the coordination digits with his handheld GPS receiver. Richmond got back on his feet as the last of the main-gate guards fell to sniper fire.

Scrabster, his face encased in a helmet and respirator, emerged from the cave entrance. ‘Ready inside, sir. We got a brace.’

‘Hostage?’

‘Not yet, sir. Looks like the Turkish SF reserve have taken to the tunnels.’

Richmond reached for his Acme Thunderer and blew a piercing whistle that resounded across the gorge. The remaining SAS force and a dozen of Jolo’s irregulars emerged from the undergrowth.

At that moment, heavy machine-gun fire sprayed across the gorge from a ridge in the side of a deep gully.

‘Christ! It’s the suicide squad!’

Richmond blew his whistle again. The firing stopped. There were casualties.

‘Get that bloody position!’

Richmond reached for Norton’s M16. ‘Hayes! Grenade!’

Hayes tossed Richmond a grenade. Richmond loaded it into the launcher on the underside of the M16, pressed the trigger and fired at the flashpoint.

‘Fuck it! Give me another!’

Looking down, Ashe caught the flash of a mighty explosion as a huge cloud of smoke enveloped the cave entrance. ‘Shit! They’ve got a Fagot!’

The 9K111-2 Fagot M-type was a Russian-made rocket launcher of deadly accuracy. As the smoke cleared, it was obvious things at the cave entrance were desperate. Hayes and Norton were dead. Richmond, shielded from the blast by the shattered door of the facility, was pinned down.

Ashe checked the aiming projector sight on his MP5. Now the image intensifier and infra-red feature came into its own. He scoured the area from which the rocket had been fired. He could see it. He could see the emplacement.

A burst of heavy machine-gun fire resounded across the gorge. The enemy quickly retaliated with another rocket. This too was accurate. The machine-gun fire ceased.

Richmond knew that to move was certain death. He could only hope his men inside the cave complex had assessed the situation correctly and would not attempt to emerge from it. The enemy would be waiting for them.

More heavy machine-gun fire spattered across the gorge, keeping Jolo’s men crouching in the undergrowth. Another grenade shot across the gorge, narrowly missing the enemy. Seconds ticked by.

Ashe could see the best means of getting to the enemy was from above. He unstrapped his heavy pack, took out two stun grenades and hooked them to his vest, then got up out of the grass and ran as fast as he could round the edge of the lip until he was above the emplacement.

An SAS sniper, biding his moment on the opposite side, saw what Ashe was trying to do and gave him pin-accurate covering fire.

Ashe lay down, checking the viewfinder as his submachine gun dipped over the edge. Damn! He’d have to go down. Suddenly his legs became jelly, and dizziness swept over him. Bile rose into his throat, but he was already half over the edge, his boot dangling in search of a foothold. God! Please, a ridge! Just a fucking ridge. Anything! His foot found purchase; another foot, a hand. He slid down. He carried on sliding. He couldn’t stop. He’d had it. He couldn’t stop himself. Ashe kept sliding. He tumbled down hard onto the ridge, then rolled over into the gully. Two militants gripped a captured Minimi. In shocked surprise, they turned. The Minimi’s tripod was tangled up in camouflage netting. They panicked. Lying on his back, Ashe delivered fatal rounds into the faces and shoulders of the men.

A great cheer swept across the gorge. Ashe had won his spurs all right. But would he ever have the greater courage to admit his victory had been a complete accident?

102

‘Just getting a signal in from D Squadron, sir.’

‘Yes, Hadley?’

‘Retreating troops all Turkish SF, sir.’

‘How many?’

‘They count twenty-five, sir. Can they ambush?’

‘No, Hadley, arrest and search. I want a video.’

‘Are we returning to RV, sir?’

‘We’re waiting here for the Chinook from Mosul to airlift casualties. Details to follow in forty-five minutes.’

Richmond turned to Ashe, still elated after his narrow brush with death.

‘We’ve got some tidying up to do. Bury the enemy combatants. Clear the site of mines and booby traps. Record the scene. Gather evidence. Perhaps you’d like to interrogate your friends while we wait for the Chinook.’

‘Delighted.’

Two figures emerged from what was left of the cave entrance, blindfolded, coughing and with their hands tied. They were forced to kneel at gunpoint. Ashe pulled off his turban, wiped his sore eyes with it and signalled for a soldier to remove the blindfolds.

Sami al-Qasr, squinting in the dusk light, glimpsed Ashe and the enveloping chaos, then closed his streaming eyes, still coughing. Aslan inhaled and stared at Ashe.

‘Not exactly the Hemlock Club, is it Tobbi?’

The figure kneeling before him in green battle jacket and cargo trousers was a hundred years away from the sensitive character with whom Ashe had shared wine in St James’s. Now he really looked like his name – Aslan: defiant as a lion. Ashe did not know whether to smile or scowl. Behind those bright, hard-soft eyes was a complex character beyond Ashe’s understanding.

‘A few questions, Colonel.’

‘First, Dr Ashe, before you congratulate yourselves on your professional heroics, you should know the full price of your victory.’ Aslan observed Ashe’s narrowing eyes. ‘Yes, Tobbi. Your decision to strike here today has blown to pieces the greatest opportunity the West has ever enjoyed of capturing, and delivering to justice, the fugitive Osama Bin Laden.’

He paused for effect. ‘Is this not true, Sami?’

Al-Qasr nodded.

Ashe’s stomach wound itself into a knot. There was such a conviction in Aslan’s face and eyes that Ashe instinctively knew that this was no face-saving boast, no blind to shake off the shame of defeat.

‘Yes, Dr Ashe, it’s a real British victory for “Cool Britannia”. But it is not Trafalgar, Tobbi, and I am not your Napoleon. The fools have rushed in, yet again. You see, the thing about intelligence is, it has to be employed intelligently.’

‘Where is the Baba Sheykh?’

‘Safe in the cave. No need for alarm.’

Ashe looked at Richmond’s blanched face. Richmond gave a slight nod.

‘Just where might we find Bin Laden, Colonel?’

‘You won’t. He’ll have sent an advance party to assess security. Who knows where he’s coming from. Soon, it’s going to be dark. You’ve missed the chance of a lifetime.’

‘I can alert satellite reconnaissance. Checkpoints. Reinforce border posts. How do we keep this from the Americans now?’

‘You’ll find a way, Major.’

Richmond hurried into the gorge to find a signals operator.

Ashe squatted down. ‘All right, Colonel. Explain.’

‘Would you mind untying my hands? It would help me unburden myself.’

‘Prove your innocence, Colonel.’

‘I will establish my innocence. It has not escaped me that the man who brings Bin Laden to justice will be richly rewarded. He will find a path to the very centre of power. Who would ever have thought that Turkey could – as you might say – bring home the bacon?’

Ashe grimaced.

‘Not only that, Dr Ashe, but our good genius here, Sami al-Qasr, has formulated a weapon of such extraordinary and subtle potency that simply possessing it would mean a vast increase in respect accorded us. Even from those nations who have affected friendliness towards us. America, for example. The president speaks of a war on terrorism but treads softly with Kurdish rebels who’ve brought death and misery to my country.’

Aslan glanced around the scene in the gorge.

‘I see you’ve killed my little private band of terrorist hunters.’

‘Everyone knows, Colonel, that the position of the PKK in Iraq is an anomaly.’

‘An anomaly to you, but an insult to those who believe in Turkey.’

‘What will Turkey’s having a DNA weapon prove?’

‘If nothing else, we should deny it to the Americans. Do something positive for the balance of power in the world. Turkey is the balancing point for peace around the globe. It always was. You see, Dr Ashe, my country has a destiny. It is not a pawn in the international game. We are finding ourselves again.’

‘Get to the point, Colonel. What about Bin Laden?’

‘I dreamt up a plan. In my grubby little office, in a not very inspiring quarter of Istanbul. With only a picture of Atatürk for company. From my work in Hakkari Province, during the war with the PKK.

‘From my good contacts in Israeli intelligence, and from my own operations elsewhere, I knew about Sami al-Qasr: Iraq’s lost genius. And I have also learned a great deal about the Yezidis. Enough to regret many things I did when I was in eastern Turkey. My job was to lure Sami here out of his comfortable role as a CIA lackey in California, and get him to do something I knew burned in his heart. So I created a charming little al-Qaeda recruiting and information website. It was called… What was it called, Sami?’

‘The Daggers of Righteousness.’

‘That’s right. This was my creation – along with my good colleague, Ali, who is very skilled at the computing side of life. Daggers of Righteousness has hooked many into the cause of Bin Laden. Or rather, the cause of Aslan. This gory little website, packed with coded material, is the best counter-terrorism operation in the world today! Why? Because it is the bridge between many groups of al-Qaeda supporters and the leadership of al-Qaeda itself! My troops have been turned without even realising that they are working against their supposed masters!’

‘Brilliant, Mahmut. Worthy of you.’

‘Thank you, Tobbi. You are a good man, but still a beginner in the game. Now, I have played a waiting game, a careful game. To bag your prey you have to take infinite pains. You do not tell people, “I have lost patience with Saddam”, or al-Qaeda, or anyone like that. You never lose patience with your enemy. You must learn to love him in order to defeat him!

‘And so… whilst I covered my own tracks, this one here–’ he gestured to a surprised-looking Sami ‘–was encouraged to believe that Bin Laden was paying for a secret research facility in the Hakkari Mountains, created especially for him! And Osama, meanwhile, was given to believe that he and his colleagues could purchase a weapon here of such force that the mere threat of its use would get him almost whatever he wanted. It might be used, for example, to persuade General Musharraff in Pakistan to change his policies towards the United States. The weapon need never be actually employed. And if it ever was… Well, it’s very psychological. No blood. No scenes of railway station massacres. No grieving families. No burning skyscrapers. No headlines. Just a silent, painless defeat of… how can I put it? Expectation. Targeted precisely at the genetic pool of choice. Clans. Tribes. Musharraff’s family, for example. Or Bush’s. Or Blair’s. The new, subtle way of bringing your enemy to its knees.’

Al-Qasr’s eyes lit up for the first time. Ashe immediately spotted the strange, telltale gleam of the blind idealist who has gone beyond himself, into the bottomless hinterland of egoistic fantasy.

‘This far from charming weapon was enough inducement to persuade Osama to pay us a call.’

‘The caves?’

‘His facility, Tobbi. This very evening! You see, you bloody fool, your timing could not have been more insane. Had you only waited till dawn, history would have been different. Now it is too late. Your actions here will have sent him rushing off at full speed to a fresh hiding place, right out of the country. I had him, Tobbi! Almost in my grip!’

‘Which direction was he coming from?’

Aslan slowly shook his head. ‘You can forget it. You’ve missed your moment. Blown it, you might say. Take my word for it. He’s gone.’

103

Night was closing in. In the firelight, Ashe could see pain in Aslan’s eyes. Ashe knelt behind him and loosened his cords.

‘For God’s sake, Dr Ashe, untie it properly! You have your lost scientist. At least you can brag about that to the Americans. I’m not going anywhere. You’ve seen to that.’

‘I’m sorry, Colonel.’

‘Don’t be sorry. Destiny.’

‘Still a few things I don’t understand.’

Aslan laughed. ‘A few things, Dr Ashe! You want to know about the Baba Sheykh. Let’s not beat about the bush. You know the genetic advantage held in the body of the sheykh.’

‘Took some finding.’

‘This was the key inducement to get al-Qasr to quit California. There was also the pressing fact that US and Israeli agents were closing in on his comfort zone. Al-Qasr had become a security risk. He was getting scared. He was even driven to do some very bad things to individuals who stood in his way. Weren’t you, Sami?’

Al-Qasr shrugged his shoulders.

‘But what does death matter to an ambitious scientist? To turn the screw on Sami here, I lured the Baba Sheykh and his trusting protector to Hamburg. A safe house. I checked up on him, pretending my mission was an attempt to arrest Yildiz and Yazar. Ah! How destiny favours the prepared mind! What a stroke of luck, or fate, it was that Yildiz and Yazar were present at the Lodge the night of the bombing. That pair have been so useful. As my cloak!

‘And then, in the fullness of time, our ever-resourceful scientist “kidnaps” the sheykh. You must have thought you were brilliant, eh, Sami?’

Al-Qasr nodded.

‘Yes, he kidnapped him all right. With agents provided by me! Right from under the noses of you and your American colleagues. And then Sami brings him right into my lap. All in one piece. Safe and sound, as you English say. Of course, it’s taken a short while for Sami to adjust his huge mind to dividing the spoils, but he is sensible enough to see the advantages in sharing his discoveries – not with al-Qaeda, but with a country that has a more golden future.’

‘Clever, Colonel. I’ve got to hand it to you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You obviously get your kicks from humiliating your friends.’

‘On the contrary, Tobbi. Is it humiliating to serve a higher purpose?’

‘And how did this higher purpose include bombing the Kartal Lodge?’

‘The attack on the Lodge at Kartal, Istanbul, was not my accomplishment. In fact, it nearly wrecked my plans!’

‘Who did do it then, Colonel? Who hit the Lodge?’

‘General Koglu, my highly decorated superior.’

‘Why?’

‘It had come to the general’s attention that a problem existed within a Lodge in Istanbul: a little Masonic lecture from the Baba Sheykh promised a lot of trouble. The English Grand Lodge warned of “consequences” if the speech was permitted. While the sheykh appeared all innocence, Koglu suspected devious motives. He naturally feared the speech could be inflammatory in our country. I wonder, Toby Ashe, if you understand just how inflammatory such a speech can be, and how divisive the question of Freemasonry has been in our country!’

‘I do have some idea.’

‘Then I give you another idea. Koglu. Koglu is an idea. He embodies an idea of my country. Koglu and men like him do not want publicity for Freemasonry. Nor do they want the world to know about the Yezidis or any other Kurds. In our country, most people, if they ever think about it at all, think Turkish Kurds who don’t accept they are Turks are, if not necessarily dangerous, a fussy lot. They attract too much attention to themselves, and should accept the facts of life – that being born in Turkey, they are Turks first and foremost. As for the Kurdish Yezidis in Iraq, they have always been seen as a nuisance. They will not conform. It is true that my country has not been kind to the Yezidis. I am not Koglu, Dr Ashe. Koglu hates Freemasonry. He hates Kurds. And he does not have a very high opinion of Jews.’

‘So what did Koglu do?’

‘He arranges a little exercise of his own. To accomplish it, he decides to use my resources. This is how I got to know of his plans.

‘Over the last few years, I have “turned” some of our own, homegrown Islamic militants to serve the state’s purposes. But though I say “turned”, they themselves do not know that their orders come from their enemies. They are still convinced they are fighting for the cause! You see, Ashe, it’s hard to find a traitor when the traitor is unaware that he is a traitor.

‘Koglu ordered me to release some of these agents of mine for his purposes. I was of course suspicious. Koglu planned to get them to kill the Baba Sheykh, and make a nasty, threatening scene at the Masonic Lodge – all of which he could then manipulate as propaganda. This explains the curious nature of the chaos that occurred that night. The terrorists turned up, could not find the Baba Sheykh – I had ensured he and the doctor quit Turkey of course – got confused, fired a few shots, and then, apparently, blew themselves up! Which was fortunate, as I presume that in their anger and frustration at not finding their target, they were about to exceed their original instructions. Koglu had not fully realised he was playing with fire. Not all of my operatives can be described as “stable”. So, after that, it was even easier to say that this was an amateurish attack and of no concern to other countries. That was the story given to the public, more or less.

‘But even without murdering the sheykh, Koglu got pretty much what he wanted. He’s still pushing his secret and not so secret agenda of intensifying the observation of minority groups. He tried to persuade me to fabricate evidence against those he sees as enemies – putting me, I must say, in a very awkward position. Koglu hates a lot of things. And anything he hates is, by virtue of this, a mortal threat to Turkey’s future. And is that not your Chinook I can hear in the distance?’

Ashe looked up into the blackening skies and listened for the Chinook. Feeling an extraordinary relief, he turned to Aslan.

Aslan shuffled about painfully. ‘Would you mind if I got off my knees now, Dr Ashe?’

‘You can. But al-Qasr stays where he is. I’m afraid you’re staying in custody, Colonel. For all I know, everything you’ve just told me is bullshit.’

Richmond returned to the cave entrance. ‘We’ll have the wounded out in no time, Toby. You can take yourself and your friends back to Mosul in the Chinook, if you like. The rest of us are pulling out and heading back to the RV. We still haven’t located your sheykh.’

Aslan shrugged his shoulders.

The Chinook hovered noisily over the gorge, its twin rotors creating storm-like waves among the bushes and trees along the ridges.

‘There’s something else you need to know, Tobbi. Thanks to my work here, I have some papers. When you know what they contain, you’ll see I have the interests of humanity at heart. And you will trust me.’

‘Don’t count on it.’

Aslan reached for his breast pocket. Ashe pulled out his Browning and pointed it at Aslan’s head. ‘Slow down, Colonel.’

Ashe reached forwards with his left arm and patted Aslan’s breast pocket.

‘Don’t be stupid, Tobbi. Your men have frisked me already. These papers come from our enemies!’

‘One can never be too sure.’ Ashe reached into the pocket and brought out a folded bunch of papers. He replaced the Browning.

A flash… Another flash! An explosion! The whole gorge lit up as the Chinook’s fuel tanks ignited.

‘Hit the floor!’ screamed Richmond as the long shoe of the helicopter separated itself mid-air from the twisted, whirling blades, then tumbled out of the night, crashing with an unbearable roar into the narrow sides of the gorge.

Silhouetted against the rippling night sky, a group of Taliban fighters from Bin Laden’s advance party, holding a Katyusha-bearing SAM rocket launcher, shot several rounds into the night air before disappearing into the blackness.

The quivering Chinook creaked with busting rivets as it hung suspended halfway down the gorge sides. Another explosion ripped apart its body. The remains slipped, groaned, then crashed violently into the riverbed, swiftly followed by wild spinning chopper blades and torn tyres.

Ashe and Richmond kept their hands over their heads, their faces sunk into the earth and their eyes closed, as flaming debris shot everywhere. Burning petrol flowed into the stream, lapping against the sides. When the heat became too much to bear, Ashe looked over to Richmond, then to Aslan and al-Qasr.

They’d gone.

Ashe pulled at Richmond’s jacket and screamed at his friend above the noise. ‘Inside the cave! The cave!’ Richmond nodded. The two men crawled on their bellies, the backs of their legs singed by the heat, towards the cave entrance. They made their way under the twisted metal and, finally, into the foul gloom of the now-stinking interior.

A third explosion: this time from inside the cave complex; then another, followed by a rapid series of smaller detonations that rocked the covert labyrinth. The facility had been booby-trapped: a final, bitter adieu from Aslan and al-Qasr.

104

Rain was beating against the high window in Karla Lindars’ office at Shrivenham. The dreary autumn light cast phantom shadows across the pale room. Ashe’s secretary was on the phone.

‘No, Melissa. No news at all. It’s been nearly a week now. Anyway, darling, what do you care? Fucking off to Dublin like that with your girlfriends.’

‘Seemed the right thing to do, Karla. The strain gets to you, you know.’

‘Yes, but it’s how we cope with the strain, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe I’m just not made for this sort of thing, Karla. Anyhow, I’ve met someone.’

‘I don’t want to know. I’ll call you if I have any news. Goodbye Melissa.’

US Field Hospital, Mosul, Iraq

A beautiful face. Jolo Kheyri was looking down at Ashe.

‘I try to grow a moustache like my uncle’s, Tobbiash. But is no good.’

Ashe’s eyes adjusted to the sight. ‘You’re looking… fine, Jolo. Where’s the party?’

Jolo stood up and twirled his sumptuous gold-edged black robe. His spotless linen headscarf, bound by an elaborate pitch-black ogal, caught the hard light of the strip-bulb. Ashe squinted. His head was pounding. ‘Very nice.’

‘The men of the Sinjar always wear best things for the Jema’iyye.’

‘The…?’

‘The pilgrimage.’

Ashe realised Jolo was talking about the all-important Autumn Festival at Lalish, the Great Assembly feast. He knew that thousands normally attended, and that it always took place in the first week of October. ‘Starts today?’

Jolo counted on his fingers. ‘This is five day.’

‘Fifth day?’ Ashe sighed heavily. ‘I’ve been in hospital for over a week?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t feel so well, Jolo. Where’s Simon?’

Jolo sat down again. ‘Very sick.’

Ashe closed his eyes. He thought of his friend’s open, lightly freckled face, the warm smile, the kindly, no-nonsense voice: the man he could trust with his life.

‘Like you, Tobbiash, Major Richmond is caught in… cave. Rock falling on body. We dig you out. Major Richmond very, very sick. You have… operation. You have metal, here.’ Jolo pointed to the back of his skull.

‘Great, Jolo. Now I’m bulletproof.’ Ashe tried to laugh, but it hurt.

‘For Major Richmond,’ Jolo shook his head mournfully, ‘is very serious. American doctors here in Mosul try very much, but he is sent back to Britain.’

‘The other guys?’

Jolo looked very uncomfortable. ‘Yes. It was hard day. Evil things are happening.’

‘How many?’

Jolo smiled. ‘D Squadron. All are safe! Very good!’

‘The others?’

‘Very good for eight men.’

‘Eight killed?’

‘Yes, but many Ansar al-Sunna dead! And Tobbiash! Very, very good! Baba Sheykh is found! Yes! Thanks to you!’

‘Me?’

‘When Major Richmond is attacking. Many explosions. Sheykh is lying down. He has guards but bombs are too much for them. They are scared and don’t know what to do. Sheykh tells them, “Go outside! Help your friends! If you cannot help your friends, now is the time to run away because the soldiers have more guns, and they kill you.” Then they are thinking to kill the sheykh. And the sheykh looks in their eyes and says, “I am dying. I pray to God for you.” And the men leave the sheykh. And the sheykh is not dying. He still has strength. And he follows way through caves. All the time guns, explosions, and men are running. Now Baba Sheykh know these caves near Nerva Zheri in Hakkari Mountains. Our people have hidden in them many centuries. He is not well. But he finds way! And he climbs and he climbs, out into the mountainside. All the time he is thinking of his people and of the pilgrimage. And he sees the stars. And he goes to sleep in love of God. And British soldiers find him. And they bring him here.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He is at Lalish of course! Without Baba Sheykh, no Jema’iyye! Now, is thanks to you, he is with Yezidi people! You are servant of Tawusi Melek, yes! Thank God! Thank God! Tobbiash!’

Jolo’s excitement caught the attention of a passing US air-force flight surgeon.

‘I think you’ll have to leave now, sir.’

Ashe looked over to the doctor in the steel-rimmed pilot’s glasses and glimpsed the name sewn onto his sleeveless, dark-green surgeon’s shirt. ‘Captain Hong.’

‘Yes, Dr Ashe?’

Ashe extended his hand.

‘How do you do, Dr Ashe?’

‘Can I get up now?’

Hong looked surprised. ‘Since CASEVAC brought you in to the field hospital here, you’ve had serious surgery on your skull, sir. The stitches have dissolved now, but you should be taking it easy for a few weeks. You had a hole in your skull the size of my thumbnail. We’ve been very concerned about possible brain injury.’

‘You got the piece out.’

‘Pieces, sir. We got them all out. You should be taking it easy.’

‘On my back?’

‘Well, you’ve come round… May I take your pulse, sir? And your temperature? Here, don’t swallow.’

Hong put a thermometer on Ashe’s tongue. ‘I don’t know if you’re up to it, sir, but there’s been a guy from home seconded to the DIA up here. He’s been in and out. Damn keen, sir, to speak to you.’

‘Name wouldn’t be Beck, would it?’

‘Yes, sir. Sherman Beck. Nice fella. Now, if you can sit up, I’d like to take a look at the scars.’

Hong deftly felt along the lines of the surgical wound. ‘Pretty good. Very good! You shape up well, Dr Ashe.’

‘Did Beck say when he was coming back?’

‘Well, he’s been coming back every four hours or so. So… I guess he’ll be here… pretty soon. He’ll be delighted to see you back in the land of the living.’

‘And the dying.’

‘Well, sir… we do our best. I guess he’s got a lot to say to you, Dr Ashe.’

‘I bet he has.’ Ashe took Jolo’s arm. ‘Jolo, give me a hand! Got my kit, Dr Hong?’

‘I’m not sure I’m authorised to let you outta the hospital, sir.’

‘Listen, Dr Hong. I’m a British citizen, on a very important mission for a very important man in Baghdad.’

‘Covert work, sir?’

‘Would I tell you?’

‘I’ll get your kit, sir. But you better be taking it easy. And I want to see you back here for a check-up and X-ray in twenty-four hours, d’ya hear?’

‘You’re a brilliant man, Dr Hong.’

‘I doubt it, sir. But if I was you, I wouldn’t be getting out of bed like this.’

‘No choice, Doctor. Here, Jolo! Help me on with what’s left of my trousers!’

Ashe reached for his combat vest, still caked in dust and myriad fragments of carbon. He felt a bulge in the breast pocket and withdrew a sheaf of dusty papers: scan-copies of printed Arabic.

‘What on earth are these? I don’t remember seeing them before. How’s your Arabic, Jolo?’

‘No problem.’

Jolo seized the papers. His eyes darted down the sheets. ‘Ansar al-Sunna! Tobbiash, these are plans. Who give this to you?’

Ashe shook his head. ‘No idea.’

As Jolo studied the papers more closely, his body began to shudder. He looked up at Ashe in horror, hands shaking. ‘Tobbiash! We must go! We must go now! I must warn my men!’

‘What the hell is it?’

‘Plans to attack the Yezidi people! At Lalish. You see here! On the fifth day: at the Assembly! Six agents.’

‘Why Lalish?’

‘We always fear it. In our hearts. Many hate us. They say our tradition is not true, that we worship a devil. You know Arab word for “tradition” is “al-Sunna”. By killing us, they claim to be guardians of tradition. Is propaganda for al-Qaeda. We have heard warning before. Who find this?’

‘I can’t remember. My head’s too…’

105

Jolo’s knuckles were white as the pinkie SAS desert Land Rover stormed north to Lalish. The three SAS-trained irregulars carrying M16s with grenade launchers in the back seat were tingling with fear for their people.

‘I am sorry for your head, Tobbiash, but we must do everything to save the people.’

‘You’ve radioed ahead. You’ve got guards at all the entry points. Patrols on the mountaintops. Men in the streets. At the shrines.’

‘You not understand, Tobbiash. There are thousands of Yezidis in the holy valley. Also on the hillsides. At the tomb of Sheykh Adi. At the shrines. At the sacred springs. There is dancing. There is singing. There are people selling. There are Muslims there who come to watch. The Baba Sheykh. Where do we begin? Will they bomb the shrines? Snipers against the prince? People have tried to kill him before.’

Suddenly, Ashe realised that the return of the Baba Sheykh and the presence of the prince – both vital for the Autumn Assembly – would almost certainly bring Princess Laila and Sinàn to the valley. He felt something of the panic that had enveloped Jolo Kheyri.

‘Look, they only have six agents.’

‘Six agents. Six bombs.’

‘I understand that. So, if you had a limited number of agents and you wanted to make the biggest impact, what would you do?’

Jolo looked bereft, shaking his head.

‘Think, man! Think!’

Jolo thought hard. ‘Tobbiash, today is the five day. Today sacrifice of bull.’

‘Perfect. Ansar al-Sunna must know this. Describe it!’

The men in the back pointed to the mountains in the north. ‘Mount Meshet!’

Mount Meshet bounded the holy valley to the south. The men urged Jolo to put his foot down. The pinkie could go no faster.

Jolo shouted to Ashe, ‘On day of sacrifice. Always in afternoon.’

‘What time?’

‘Every year is different. No special time. Head feqir and prince decide on day.’

Ashe looked at his watch. 13.10. His heart raced. He took three of the painkillers given him by Dr Hong. He felt dizzy. Jolo continued the description.

‘You know Market of Mystical Knowledge?’

‘The walled place in front of the Sanctuary of Sheykh Adi?’

Jolo nodded. ‘Men come with guns. They line up round walls. Even the holy men and the nobles in the sanctuary guesthouse. They stand to see.’

‘Who’s in the guesthouse?’

‘The nobles and holy men. They stay there. Sleep on mats on floors. It is fine pillars and good stone floor.’

‘Are they all there?’

‘Most, yes.’

‘That’s where they’ll strike! Alert your guards, Jolo! They must search the guesthouse!’

‘The nobles will not like this!’

‘Can you persuade them?’

106

The road towards the valley from Meshet was packed. Battered old cars from the days before the first Gulf War, held together with string and hope, jostled for every available place. There was no way the pinkie could get through.

Jolo’s men had brought horses. Even so, the hundreds of men, women and children from the Sheikhan, from the Jebel Sinjar, ancient Nineveh, Mosul, and even Syria, made it impossible to get any speed up.

Everywhere Ashe looked he could see qewwals with daff and shebab, playing and singing as the pilgrims hogged the narrow paths towards the Shrine of Sheykh Shems.

Ashe was repeatedly jostled by late-comers carrying the striped tents they would erect at the traditional ojakhs, the campsites where the clans spent their week at the holy valley, cooking, playing and sleeping.

To Ashe’s astonishment, Jolo’s men had already rooted out five terrorists attempting to conceal AK-47s in tents. They’d been dragged outside Lalish, given a beating and tied up, pending interrogation. The method of capture had been simple. Gathering round a group, Jolo’s men would suddenly request the people to crouch, in Kurmanji. Arabic speakers would immediately stand out, literally, from the crowds. Given the conditions, the irregulars’ efficient operation was little short of miraculous. But then, miracles had always happened at Lalish, and none but Ashe was surprised.

Miracle or not, that still left one agent – and one determined agent of Ansar al-Sunna would be more than enough to wreck the entire community forever.

Jolo told Ashe to dismount and remove his boots and socks. They must all walk barefoot in the valley, security or no security.

Down the valley, the call had gone out that the ceremonies culminating in the bull sacrifice were to begin soon. Jolo, Ashe and over a dozen of Jolo’s irregulars ran up the stone paths, dodging dozens of startled pilgrims. From among the trees, young men in Western gear and girls in lace and gold and silver brocade pointed at them, wondering what was going on. One word in the wrong ear, and there would be massive panic, a stampede, and death.

Finally, they arrived at the courtyard outside the sanctuary. The place had been thoroughly searched. Jolo bowed to the prince. There was a tap on Ashe’s shoulder.

‘Laila!’

She kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Oh, Tobbi! What you and Major Richmond have made possible! Look!’ Laila pointed to the Baba Sheykh, who was sitting beneath a wooden gazebo in a corner of the courtyard, deliberating with visiting Yezidi headmen. ‘My brother is overjoyed. He is so sorry. He wants to speak to you.’

‘Please, Laila! Not now! Please, leave the area!’

‘No one leaves now, Tobbi. We have our guards.’

A group of men dressed in baggy trousers and white shirts appeared with sticks, striking people lightly in a well-understood gesture to clear the square before the arrival of the guns.

Ashe strained to see. He looked over to Jolo; Jolo shrugged his shoulders.

There came the echo of fast-moving feet on stone. The crowds began to quieten. Some twenty-five Yezidi men in cream-coloured surcoats over black sweaters and trousers ran into the courtyard and lined the sides, raising their AK-47s above their blue-chequered turbans and into the air. Jolo ran over to Ashe. The crowd gasped.

‘What’s going to happen?’

‘Any time now, guns fire to signal beginning.’

‘That must be the time. That’s why they chose this day. Everyone’s in one place.’

Jolo pulled Ashe into a crouching position. ‘Look at the people’s feet! Follow me!’

Ashe followed Jolo, who pushed through the crowd with his unwelcome M16. Foot after foot. It was maddening. ‘What am I looking for, Jolo?’

‘Anyone who is not naked foot.’

They approached the sanctuary guesthouse. Ashe saw pools of goats’ blood, glistening. This was where the goats gathered to be slaughtered and then fed to the guests.

‘Look! Look!’

‘Where?’

‘Look there! A man with a goat! His feet.’

Ashe saw a pair of feet in thick woollen socks.

107

An urgent wave of expectancy swept through the crowd. Everyone stared at the great coal-black serpent at the sanctuary gate. Suddenly the murmur ceased. Shuffling feet on stone. Jolo whispered quickly to Ashe, ‘Muslims, when asked to remove their shoes, often take only the shoes away. We do not ask them to remove sock.’

The two men stood up to inspect the suspect who’d entered the courtyard in socks. Several Muslim dignitaries had been invited. They wore socks also. But this man was dressed like a Yezidi. He was leading a goat towards the interior of the guesthouse.

‘Look at his eyes, Tobbi. Something is wrong.’

Ashe looked at the cord attached to the goat. Not the usual rope. It was a cable. Ashe grabbed Jolo’s shoulder and pointed to the goat. ‘Look at it!’

Staring intently through the shifting gaps in the wavering crowd, Jolo could see the goat had been shaved. A new coat of goat’s hair had been carefully bound around it.

‘The cable’s the detonator. In his hand.’

Jolo nodded. He stepped gently into the guesthouse.

A great cry went up. Jolo screamed in Kurmanji. ‘To the ground!’

The guns in the courtyard fired a death rattle into the tense air. The goat bleated wildly as it trailed the severed hand of the terrorist behind it, dragging it into a blood-soaked heap of goat’s flesh. With a single stroke from his knife, Jolo had hacked the terrorist’s hand clean off. The terrorist, his right wrist spurting blood like a fountain, ran madly after the goat. The goat turned and raced in panic towards the Baba Sheykh, then into the courtyard.

The terrorist fell to the hot flagstones and grabbed the cable with his left hand, his amputated right hand still swinging from the flex. He stood up, fumbling desperately for the detonator. Behind him, the door of the sanctuary flew open. The sacrificial bull was about to be released for his last run, down to the Shrine of Sheykh Shems. For a second, the terrorist stared into the Baba Sheykh’s eyes, but before he could plunge the detonator pin, the rampant bull charged and impaled him on its horns.

Jolo ran after the fleeing goat as the men in the courtyard fired more shots. The sacrificial bull thundered down the valley towards the shrine of Sheykh Shems, the limp body of the terrorist bobbing from left to right over its head, the crowds parting to let the animal through.

Ashe, breathless with relief, caught Sinàn’s eye. Around them, the holy men and Yezidi nobility cheered.

‘Now you must meet the prince. Please, come.’

‘Sorry, Sinàn. I must see the Baba Sheykh. Urgent.’

‘But the prince!’

‘Tell His Highness we can meet later. I ask one thing. That bull deserves a medal, not to be sacrificed.’

‘There is always a sacrifice today at the shrine of Sheykh Shems!’

‘From where I’m standing, Sinàn, you’ve just had it.’

Ashe broke away. He brushed aside Princess Laila, stunning in her blue-and-gold embroidered abaya, and pushed his way to where the sheykh had been standing. The Baba Sheykh was gone.

Ashe had seen the look in the sheykh’s eyes when he had confronted the terrorist. The sheykh had blamed himself for attracting danger to his people. Ashe saw intuitively that something terrible was happening in the Baba Sheykh’s mind. He must find him, before someone else did.

108

The next few minutes passed in a blur for Ashe, as if the colours of the world had been left in place, but all its substance removed. The world was in the wind, scattered in the sky.

He remembered Laila clutching his arm, pulling him close, calling to him, as the liquid tapestry of people flooded down the valley towards the Shrine of the Sun. He saw her mouth move, her eyes imploring.

He caught sight of a grey head as Baba Sheykh marched forwards, children all about him. He heard a call from behind. He turned. Amongst the bouquet of faces was Sherman Beck’s, out of place, out of time. Laila tugged at Ashe’s arm, pulling him on. Beck was shouting. ‘Ashe! Dr Ashe! I gotta speak to you. You gotta speak to me!’

Ashe stopped. Was he running away? He wouldn’t run away.

‘This Aslan guy, Toby. You shoulda told us! God! All these people!’

‘Take your shoes off, Beck!’

‘What?’

‘Take your fucking shoes off!’

‘Who’s the guy on the bull?’

Laila called to Ashe. ‘You must come!’

Beck grabbed Ashe’s arm. ‘Listen, man, I gotta see this Baba Sheykh guy! I ain’t taking my shoes off until I do. D’ya hear me, Ashe?’

Ashe looked down at Beck’s fist, gripping his arm. He stared Beck in the eye. ‘This valley is holy, Beck.’ He pushed Beck back hard into the crowd.

Ashe ran on, past the crowds, past the bull now surrounded by pilgrims, past the Shrine of Sheykh Shems, into the woods, among the olive trees and tiny oaks. A flash of colour in the distance. The voice of Laila, screaming. ‘Tobbi! Please!’

Ashe came to a ridge. Laila was sobbing on the ground. ‘He ordered me to stay here, Tobbi. He told me, for my own soul, I must wait.’

‘Where is he?’

‘There! Down there!’

‘Well what is it?’

‘There is the last sight of the Zemzem stream. Then it flows underground, into the mountains.’

Behind them, they could hear the singing of the pilgrims, gathered around the bull, building to a crescendo: the drums beating hard, the flutes insistent, the voices ecstatic.

Ashe caught sight of the Baba Sheykh. He stood tall against the sky, his back turned, his arms outstretched, greeting the sun.

In the valley behind them, all was suddenly quiet, as specially selected men from the Mamusi, Qa’idi and Tirk tribes raised their swords before the eyes of the beast. The sun hid behind a cloud.

A cry pierced the calm. ‘From the earthly Lalish to the heavenly Lalish. From the world of men to the abode of the angels!’

The sun’s rays suddenly enveloped the body of the sheykh as he crossed his arms over his heart. Then, greeting the Peacock Angel at the second of sacrifice, he hurled himself into the whiteness of the Zemzem stream to be borne swiftly into the mountains.

‘Hey Toby, I gotta talk to the Baba Sheykh!’

Ashe turned to the sweating Beck, footwear dangling by laces from his raised arms.

‘Look man, I took my fuckin’ shoes off!’

‘Yes, Beck. But you left your socks on.’

109

On 8 November 2004, US troops entered Fallujah in force to flush out and destroy a stronghold of the Iraqi insurgency. Major Richmond, limping slightly but otherwise recovered, was on hand to help identify any rebels who tried to blend in with the civilian exodus from the city. One of the prizes was Hafiz Razak. Thanks to Richmond’s positive identification, the Syrian terrorist had made his last bomb and forged his last passport.

That same day, Ashe was instructed to attend a cursory MIT briefing in a secure room at Ankara Esenboga Airport. Also invited were Matthias Fless and Sherman Beck. The dull meeting turned out to be merely a prelude to a ride in a four-seater jet to the furthest reaches of eastern Turkey.

From the Turkish air-force base at Hakkari, the party was driven by military truck to a barren crossroads near Güzeldere, only ten kilometres from the Turkey–Iraq border. As a private from a platoon of regular Turkish soldiers waved them down, a black Mercedes limousine emerged from behind a covered troop-carrier. The limo’s rear door opened and the party was ushered in.

To the right of the chauffeur sat the rotund figure of General Ahmet Koglu, representing the Foundation for the Strengthening of the Turkish Security Forces (TSKGV), the army’s economic development wing. Koglu signalled the driver to follow the military truck. The convoy soon left the road and headed up a farm track that skirted a dull grey escarpment.

Koglu turned to his guests. ‘Today is an auspicious day, gentlemen. A special day for you and for my country. It gives me very great pleasure to demonstrate three things that bring credit to my country.’

Beck interrupted. ‘And will the press be seeing what we are about to see, General?’

‘Naturally, the press will in due course see what is of most significance to the public. You, however, will be privileged to report to your superiors the essence of three facts. First. The Turkey of today will not tolerate surprising developments that threaten the principle of national progress and democracy. Second. Our great army is fully in accord with this principle. Third. We shall show today that where the United States and Great Britain have failed, my country will succeed.’

‘I only wish Major Richmond were here,’ Ashe muttered to Beck.

‘Didn’t you know? He’s confounded the surgeons and is back in his boots!’

Ashe’s heart rose.

The car stopped at a temporary checkpoint. Ashe had the awful feeling that they had been dragged in to witness some appalling show-trial, the kind of thing Bolshevik Russia used to arrange for compliant foreign journalists.

Koglu spoke animatedly to the checkpoint officer. The officer pointed out the perimeter of a distant facility. Koglu nodded with satisfaction.

The truck continued up a hill. The limousine followed, its suspension tested to its limits. Fless began rubbing his fingers, anxious for his absent firearm. Beck tapped the sides of the windows. The general turned to them with a milk-curdling smile.

‘You are perfectly safe, gentlemen. The limousine is bulletproof.’

Ashe, seated uncomfortably between the two agents, was not reassured.

As the limo approached a breezeblock gatehouse, the party had its first view of the intended destination: a flat-roofed concrete army base, the size of a village school. Covered in cracked grey plaster, the facility extended from a main block to a small barrack block at the rear. A barn-like structure, next to the barrack, was still under construction.

Bursts of submachine-gun fire echoed from behind the main structure.

‘Please be calm, gentlemen.’ Koglu drew his pistol and stepped out of the car. He approached the gatehouse. Two soldiers from the truck in front restrained the terrified guard while the general calmly removed a cellphone from the guard’s trembling hands. Koglu walked back to the car and leant into the window. ‘Formalities, gentlemen. Please forgive the delay. Security, nothing more. Please be comfortable.’

Ashe pointed through the rear window. ‘Look!’ Fless and Beck turned to see lines of Turkish Special Forces in black combat suits emerging from cover to surround the facility. ‘They’ve been waiting for Koglu’s signal!’

‘Sure about that, Ashe?’

Before Ashe had time to answer Beck’s troubling question, the party caught sight of a group of tired-looking troops in green fatigues slinking out from behind the barrack-block, their hands on their heads. Right on cue, Special Forces from the truck in front jumped out to form a cordon for the disarmed men. At the end of the line, each man was body-searched, handcuffed and shackled.

Koglu directed with oily ease, returning again to the limousine.

‘These captured men have abused their position in the Special Forces. They are very extreme. Very extreme views. Fanatical types exploiting the requirements of the state in this troubled area.’

Ashe looked at Fless and raised his eyebrows. The two men knew well enough that, in the past, extreme rightists had proved useful enough to the dirty conflict that had been waged against Kurdish terrorists in the eastern provinces.

Koglu poked his head through the front window again, smiling. ‘I trust you will inform your superiors that Turkey always tidies up its own mess. We do not need to be told. See for yourselves!’

The captured men were herded miserably into the troop-carrier which then manoeuvred round and trundled off as fast as it could down the approach track. Koglu got back in the limousine.

Ashe looked at him pointedly: ‘The purpose of this facility, General?’

‘Yes, this has been an… interrogation centre, a centre for Special Forces. Fortunately, as a result of successfully dealing with PKK activity within our country, it has functioned chiefly as a supply and rest centre.’

‘It hasn’t been used as a spearhead base for sending forces into Iraq then, General?’

Koglu laughed. ‘You know as well as I do, Dr Ashe, that the Turkish army does not undertake such activities. Our government forbade helping the invasion of Iraq from across our borders. This, however, did not deter the invaders.

‘But, as Mr Beck is fully aware, the Turkish state is fully committed to the global war on terror. And to prove the strength of that commitment, we are bringing you here today: a special privilege. Here, gentlemen, you will see for yourselves the very weapons of mass destruction developed under the protection of Saddam Hussein that the Americans, the Israelis and the British failed to find. You are witnesses to the professionalism of Turkey’s military forces that have rendered this prize to the forces of justice without endangering the life of a single civilian.’

Fless looked at Beck and shook his head. If Fless had only been permitted to do his work…

Ashe was intrigued. Turkey would get both the credit and the weapon. Had he not been in such mixed and febrile company, he would have laughed his socks off. Turkey: ever a wild card, not to be underestimated.

Beck was having none of it. Scoring cheap points off the USA’s high-risk anti-terror and pro-democracy agenda was intolerable. ‘With respect, General, just ask the question: who’s providing the greater part of security for the Free World? Is it you?’

Koglu turned and looked Beck in the eye. ‘At this particular moment in your life, Mr Beck, it is. And I trust, on reflection, you’ll thank God for your ally.’

110

The limousine drew to a halt by the entrance. The chauffeur opened the doors, saluted the general and returned to the driver’s seat for a cigarette.

The party was shown through the front door to a comfortable mess-room at the front of the main block, with soft black sofas, a widescreen TV, a bar, fine carpets on the walls, and a large desk. Behind the desk, in a green combat jacket and jeans, sat Colonel Mahmut Aslan. Aslan slowly rose to salute the general.

‘Please come out from behind your desk, Colonel. I regret I must relieve you of your command, as I have relieved your men of their weapons. Your associate is under guard in what looks suspiciously like an unauthorised laboratory. If al-Qasr attempts to move, he will be shot. Before we take you away, I have undertaken to our allies that they will have an opportunity to acquire information for their enquiries. Not something I personally approve of, but I have been overridden in this matter.’

Aslan looked Koglu up and down. ‘You know, General, there is a spiritual purity about this place you can’t quite find anywhere else in Turkey.’

‘You’re a criminal, Aslan! The only question my superiors have is why you should obtain this terrible weapon and keep it to yourself. We presume you’re trying to sell it to the highest bidder.’

Aslan shook his head. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, General. There is no weapon of mass destruction here. Or at least… not quite the kind of destruction you dream of.’

Koglu rubbed his boot heels in frustration. ‘You should have been a novelist, Colonel. Always weaving tales.’

‘I thought you liked fiction, General.’

Koglu sensed a loss of control. ‘You’re bluffing of course.’

‘No.’

Aslan’s ‘honest’ look incensed the general. ‘Are you saying, Colonel, you no longer possess the DNA weapon?’

‘Can Professor al-Qasr join this discussion?’

‘No discussion. You’re under arrest.’

‘But you do want something. You can use the intercom link with the laboratory. It’s here, General, here on my desk.’

The general inspected the intercom speaker housing.

‘Where do I switch it on?’

‘Press “Laboratory”.’

Al-Qasr sat in the dark, wrapped tightly in sealing tape. A hard-faced guard watched him, his Uzi submachine gun trained at the professor’s head.

The buzzer went on the intercom. The guard raised the butt of his weapon. The buzzing continued. The guard warily approached the intercom. As his right finger caressed the Uzi’s trigger-guard, his left hand glided over the possible buttons.

‘Try “Mess-room”.’

The guard pressed the button.

Al-Qasr leant towards the microphone. ‘Let me speak to Aslan.’

In the mess-room, Koglu nodded Aslan to answer.

‘Sami, listen to me. Our only chance is to explain the operation to General Koglu. Tell him straight, Sami. Don’t fuck this up.’

Al-Qasr smiled weakly at the guard, cold as stone by the door, then addressed his audience. ‘I want it to be known that I am, and always have been, a scientist, dedicated to truths that will help the human race in its evolution. I always wanted the world to know what I’ve achieved. This reward I have sacrificed.’

‘Noble bastard,’ muttered Ashe.

Aslan was irritated. ‘Just explain the plan, Sami.’

Koglu pushed Aslan away from the desk. ‘Come to the point, al-Qasr!’

Al-Qasr laughed maniacally. ‘Everyone wanted my weapon. Saddam wanted it. The Pentagon wanted it. Al-Qaeda… Everyone! Now you come to me with insults!’

Koglu interjected. ‘Keep making speeches, and your last chance will become your last words!’

‘Humility befits those standing on the holy threshold of genius, General. I have made the most devastating weapon to the nations of the world—’

Koglu erupted. ‘Bring al-Qasr here! Guard! Drag him to the main block!’

111

The guard shoved al-Qasr into the mess-room on the end of his Uzi. Still bound with tape, the professor shuffled forwards.

‘Well…’ Koglu licked his lips. ‘Al-Qasr is finally under control – something the British, Americans and Israelis failed to achieve. Sit here, Professor, and answer my questions.’

‘Ask yourself some questions, General. What is the nature of deterrence?’

‘You tell me!’

‘I will. And you will thank me.’

‘What is the nature of deterrence, Professor?’

‘One side has a mighty bomb. The other side also has it. In the old days, that was enough. There was some reason, if not honour, among the thieves. But now we see men in charge of nations so inspired by dreamworlds they risk the annihilation of their countrymen.’

Aslan winced at al-Qasr’s rhetoric. ‘Just tell them about the weapon, Sami!’

‘The leaders have bunkers of course, for themselves, their friends and their families. Above all, they have their beliefs. In these they hide. How can we reach them?’

‘Tell us!’

‘With bunker-busting shells? No! I put it to you that the only deterrent that is going to work is the one that hits the beliefs of the enemy where it hurts most.’

Intrigued, Koglu’s eyebrows rose. ‘And how do we do this?’

‘I don’t refer to religious beliefs, General, or political beliefs. These are acquired as people grow up.’

‘What beliefs?’

‘I mean the most basic beliefs we are born with. Instincts. Things so deep that we take them for granted. Beliefs without which no nation or people could ever be shaped.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Are you a patriot, General?’

‘I am ready to fight and die for my country.’

‘I believe you. Patriotism – or nationalism – is not only the last refuge of the scoundrel, as English scoundrels are always saying. It is also the first refuge of the threatened nation. And the nation is based not only on beliefs, but facts. The fact of reproduction. Commonality. The fact of things shared.’

Ashe spoke up. ‘You mean race, Professor. Just say so.’

‘Race, family, culture – deep and vital assumptions about the future. How could a dictator rule a nation where there was no nation?’

‘But there have always been nations, tribes…’

‘Not necessarily, General. Our mythology preserves knowledge that once it was different.’

‘Mythology!’

‘Yes. First there was the myth of ancient Troy. Then Schliemann discovered it – and he discovered it with science! Look at the myth of the Tower of Babel! In that myth, division into races is seen as a punishment, a punishment sent by a jealous God for man’s relying on his own knowledge and building to the skies. But, today, the sky is not the limit. Now we see division into races as genetic mutation, occurring over many thousands of years. Primordial genetic mutation has resulted in the principal races and sub-races of the world. Was this a tragedy? Or an opportunity?’

‘I don’t know, and I doubt if I care, Professor. What have you discovered?’

‘I have discovered a lost truth, General. As a result of the ancient practice of endogamy—’

‘En… what?’

‘Marriage confined strictly to a family or clan, General.’

‘Thank you, Colonel. Go on, Professor.’

‘Thanks to endogamy practised over millennia, I have discovered a genome template that takes us beyond Babel into a totally new era. My scientific manipulation of this genetic material unleashes extraordinary power. I present to you a retroviral weapon to change humanity, permanently!’

Al-Qasr’s speech held nothing new for Ashe. His attention wandered, not out of frustration, but because something was shifting his awareness away from the depressing scenario conjured up by al-Qasr’s apocalyptic, visionary science. As though pulled up magnetically into Ashe’s consciousness, an image was struggling to surface. It was there; then it was gone. Then it was there! The image was clear: the weird man, the camouflaged figure who’d stopped him on the road to ODDBALLS that terrible morning, nearly nine months before. The charcoal-written sheet thrust at him by the green prophet… What had it said? The Tower of Babel is being rebuilt and must be destroyed.

Was there to be a catastrophic new division of the human race?

‘And so, General, we come to the weapon. Imagine, General, imagine all of you, if your son and his wife are expecting a child, and when it is born, it looks nothing like its parents, or brothers, sisters or cousins. Imagine if the child is simply of another race. Mutated beyond any control of the parents.’

Koglu looked nonplussed.

‘A few crazy idealists might think “How nice!” But think again. Imagine if, after the retrovirus takes hold, with every replacement of fresh cells in the individual, personal characteristics begin to change. Not only in the child, but in the parent as well. Think about it! Depending on how the weapon is targeted, the Arab gives birth to the Jew, the Jew to the Arab, the Chinese to the Japanese, the Japanese to the Korean, the Indian to the African. And even these isolated race-types will change beyond recognition – different mentalities, unfamiliar identities. And so on, and on, and on. And on. In less than a generation, there will be no nation to govern. No commonality to appeal to. Brother would not recognise sister. Children would feel divorced from parents, teachers, each other. There will be nothing left to defend! No idea of home!

‘The nation that succumbed to this weapon, General, would be cast into the most profound and permanent identity crisis conceivable. After a short period, the long-term effects would become entirely unpredictable. More than this, I can target this weapon to affect one family, any family I choose, or one individual, at any time.

‘No group of people who knew that something like this existed would ever allow their rulers to risk exposure to its cataclysmic psychological power. And remember, General, this weapon causes no obvious death or destruction. You could even say it is harmless. Indeed, physically speaking, it is the world’s first completely harmless weapon. But when its potential is fully grasped, is this not the most devastating weapon against human culture imaginable, a hair’s breadth short of annihilation of a species? A weapon of destruction of the masses! Think about it!’

Ashe got up. ‘I have thought about it. And what we have here is something incredible, marvellous. Almost beyond imagining.’

Beck was incredulous. ‘The destruction of human culture – marvellous?’

Ashe sensed something strange happening outside of the compound. He walked towards the window, took a closer look into the distance. He turned to al-Qasr. ‘Tell us, Professor, what distinguishes the genetic material on which the weapon is based?’

‘Technical secrets must be reserved. I can only say that the distinction lies in the pre-mutational character of the material.’

‘We get that already. Give an example.’ Ashe was sure there was movement at the compound perimeter.

Al-Qasr thought for a second. ‘Pineal gland function…’

‘Do you refer to the production of dimethyltryptamine?’

‘What?’

Ashe turned to Koglu. ‘DMT for short, General. It’s like the brain’s own spirit-and-vision drug, produced, according to recent research, in the pineal gland. That’s the tiny gland between the brain’s hemispheres. DMT affects perception experience. Isolated, it can induce “spiritual experiences”, infinity beyond reason… maybe even… God.’

Koglu banged the desk. ‘What’s he on about, al-Qasr?’

‘Genetic mutations found in the rest of our species are absent from the test material.’

‘What is this “test material”?’

Ashe answered. ‘The professor extracted DNA from a specific line of Yezidis.’

‘Kurds? Damn Kurds! This is insane! Genius belongs to the Turks! Atatürk was surely right about this!’

‘Well, General. You can believe you are a superior race, but the genes hold the truth.’

‘Truth, Dr Ashe? Truth! This is all theory!’

Al-Qasr shook his head, wriggling under his burden of sealing tape. ‘No, General. Not theory. My weapon is fact!’

‘How can this be fact?’

‘Because our inherited genetic mutations have reduced the pineal gland’s capacity to produce the type, quality and quantity of DMT you find as a potential in my ancient genetic profile.’

‘So the Yezidis are freaks. So what?’

‘General Koglu, you are an ignorant man!’

Koglu gave Ashe a murderous stare. Beck and Fless backed Ashe up. ‘He’s right! Why don’t you listen?’

Ashe addressed al-Qasr. ‘Don’t you see, Professor, if you would only cease thinking in terms of weapons, what you have here is a discovery that could positively transform the whole human race.’

‘Don’t you mean human races, Dr Ashe?’

‘That’s the point, General. How can I put this? What if al-Qasr’s discoveries give us the opportunity to undo the Babel story – the division of the races and loss of spiritual vision? Rather than threatening the end of one nation, could we not envision a return to humankind as one supremely gifted race?’

‘I had no idea British intelligence had become a recruitment ground for New Age fantasists!’

Aslan laughed out loud. ‘General Koglu! You surprise me! I thought you had a commercial brain. Can you not see the potential – for Turkey?’

‘I gotta say, General…’

‘Yes, Mr Beck?’

‘Well, from what I’m hearing here, I reckon the world’s just about ready for some kind of evolutionary leap. I’d be dishonest if I… well… I guess we’d all like to buy into this thing.’

Koglu rubbed his chin. ‘I’m not stupid, Colonel Aslan. I can see that if Mr Beck is interested, there will be more in line behind him. Do I take it now that you wish to be a benefactor, rather than a traitor, to your country?’

‘I have never been a traitor, General. Turkey is my religion! And I want our nation to enjoy all aspects of this discovery. The weapons potential will free Turkey politically. The innovative science and technology – this we can sell. Tell that to your friends in Ankara!’

‘Have I misjudged you, Colonel?’

Fless broke the silence. ‘And just who’s going to be the new Atatürk, General? You? Or the colonel?’

Koglu became agitated. ‘Colonel, it is clear we have the makings of a deal. But what are we to do with our… foreign visitors?’

Koglu stared at the three defenceless agents.

Al-Qasr spoke up. ‘Kill them. And get me out of this! And call your guard off. He gives me the creeps.’

Through the window, silhouetted against the setting sun, Aslan observed a personnel carrier approaching. It skidded into the forecourt. Thinking it one of his own, Koglu drew his pistol and aimed it at Fless, Ashe and Beck.

Ashe spoke up. ‘Aslan’s men have come for you, General. Look!’

Koglu looked out of the window, sniffed, then turned abruptly, pointing his gun at Aslan.

112

Two stun grenades shattered the mess window. Struck in the head, the force blew al-Qasr and his chair into the wall. Massive flashes blinded everyone save Aslan. As Koglu lurched, disoriented, from side to side, gripping his ears in pain, Aslan, who had bided his time, pushed the desk sharply into Koglu’s legs. The general fell moaning to the ground. Seizing the general’s gun, Aslan put it to Koglu’s mouth, and fired.

Outside, the general’s special forces let rip on Aslan’s relief force. Amid desperate shouting, a shower of mortar shells scoured the darkening skies, then scorched the horizon. The barrack house exploded, shooting blast debris in all directions.

Al-Qasr, blinded, wriggled on the floor. With blood pouring out of his head and over his burning eyes, his bound legs kicked the guard. Coming to his senses, the guard panicked. Seeing al-Qasr screaming at him, he flicked the Uzi’s safety-catch and squeezed the trigger. Two bursts of live rounds rent through al-Qasr’s writhing body. As the blasted corpse vibrated and rippled against the wall, the guard turned on Aslan. Aslan stepped back, tripping on Koglu’s body as the guard let rip.

Gambolling out of a line of fire that sent splinters and sparks shooting across the mess, Aslan lost grip on the pistol. Seizing the moment, Ashe leapt forwards, straining for the gun. As the guard tried to refocus, Ashe fired. The guard reeled backwards as the demented Uzi punctured the tattered ceiling with aimless rounds.

Beneath a storm-shower of plaster, al-Qasr came to, desperate to prop his crumbling body against the wall, but his time, and his life, had run out. With blood flooding from his face, al-Qasr slumped, rigid, to the floor.

Aslan leapt onto the dazed guard, grabbed the Uzi and struck the guard hard in the neck, knocking him out cold. Reaching for a spare magazine from the guard’s blood-soaked belt, he reloaded. He stared at Ashe. What did that stare mean? Ashe’s capacity to react stuck like a heavy boot in a dune. Fearing he was next, Ashe tried to raise his gun at the colonel. Aslan smiled. ‘Don’t bother, Tobbi. Save yourself. Under this carpet is a trapdoor. Meant for me. It leads to the hillside. God be with you!’

Though Aslan had suspected Koglu was intent on humiliating him, and had made precise preparations, he hadn’t reckoned on al-Qasr’s death. Standing tall in the scattered chaos, Aslan gazed for one last moment at what was left of Sami al-Qasr: ‘Goodbye, Sami!’ Then he turned quickly to Beck and Fless, gesturing with the gun. ‘Follow him!’ Aslan saluted Ashe, smashed the rest of the glass with the Uzi’s butt, and, gun blazing, launched himself into the crossfire outside. Smoke soon enveloped him.

The battle stormed on until both sides realised there was no one giving orders. By then, the facility was engulfed in flames. Every scrap of authentic DNA material from the Baba Sheykh went up in the conflagration that lit the skies until dawn. Aslan’s body was presumed destroyed in the furnace that overwhelmed the laboratory.

In the morning, it was reported in the press that resistance in Fallujah was stiffening, but futile. Ashe’s experience did not find a place in the annals of history, for are we not told that it is the winners who write history? And in this case, the question remained – and would always remain – who had won and who had lost?

113

Lalish in late November has something of a child’s Advent feel about it: an air of expectation and immanent holiness. All of the buildings are spotless. The paths are spotless. The stones are like leaves of vellum. The shrines are clean, and Lalish, the Yezidis’ reflection of heaven, is pure and peaceful.

Accompanied by Karla Lindars, Ashe arrived in Lalish early. They were to witness the final ceremonies of Rozeh and Sinàn’s week-long wedding. Here at last was an opportunity for Ashe to show his secretary why he was so entranced by the place and the people to whom it was sacred. For Karla, it was a chance to take a fresh look at the man she admired and who never failed to irritate her slightly. It was also an opportunity to acquire a new, oriental wardrobe. Karla looked dazzling in her drifting turquoise and sky-blue abbaya. Ashe was only concerned that with her golden-blond hair, let down for the occasion, she might appear to upstage the princess.

Princess Laila had been attending to Rozeh. Rozeh’s wedding rituals had begun at her new home in Bashiqa over a week before Ashe’s arrival. There, following a hot bath, Rozeh’s friends had adorned her hands with henna. Having donned a red veil, Rozeh had then fastened a belt about her virgin waist with a special, large buckle, brought to her by Princess Laila, her Sister of the Hereafter. Rozeh had then been set on a horse that carried her from Bashiqa to Lalish, to the groom’s temporary apartment above the Sanctuary Guesthouse. The apartment had been lent for the occasion by Sinàn’s relative, the Mir – or Prince – of the Yezidis who was away on urgent business in Germany. Himself pondering whether or not to leave the country, Sinàn had not yet found the right place to set up a household.

Rozeh had arrived on horseback at Lalish’s Sanctuary Guesthouse carrying some berat: earth from a holy shrine, rolled with the spittle of the Sheykh of the Adani clan into a ball. The Adani Sheykh, who presided over the nuptial agreement, had given her this prized token in exchange for gifts to himself and Rozeh’s Pir, or spiritual guide. Having helped Rozeh dismount, Laila had handed Rozeh a jar of sweetmeats, a role normally reserved for the bride’s future mother-in-law. Alas, Sinàn’s mother had not lived to see the happy day. Rozeh had then smashed the sweetmeats against the threshold of her ‘new home’. As Rozeh had entered the house, a sheep was slaughtered. Rozeh had then been led into the aromatic bridal chamber, veiled by an Adani Sheykh and by her Pir.

Later that night, Sinàn had been brought to the bridal chamber by his Brother of the Hereafter. The ‘Brother’ and two friends had guarded the door while the marriage was consummated. Afterwards, the friends had been invited in to share some food. Following the consummation, Rozeh had begun a seven-day period of silent seclusion in the bridal chamber.

Throughout the week that followed, Lalish had joyed in sporadic dancing, as relatives and friends toasted the couple and invited the blessings of God and His Angels upon them. Now on this, the seventh day of the seclusion, the bride would leave the room for a final, simple ceremony. To this ceremony, the English visitors had been invited.

Ashe joined Sinàn for a short walk among the mulberry bushes and oak trees on the slopes of Mount Erefat above the Sanctuary of Sheykh Adi.

‘You look splendid, Sinàn.’

‘Traditional clothes. I borrowed the silk jacket and trousers from the Mir. The jewellery comes from… many years ago. Strange how things turn out, Dr Ashe.’

‘Destiny, Sinàn, that’s all. Kismet.’

‘I was thinking… Had Laila succeeded in getting Rozeh on to your plane at Mosul all those months ago, my bride and I would never have met.’

‘Rozeh wanted to be a doctor. It was important to her.’

‘I will help.’

‘Don’t you want your wife at home, like those who wore your clothes before you?’

‘What Rozeh believes is right, is right for me. I want to thank you again for honouring your word and bringing the Baba Sheykh back to us.’

‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’

‘No! What happened was the unbreakable will of the sheykh. It is a sin against God to stop the true will of another.

‘Also, you should know, the sheykh was very ill. Baba was dying, even when we were in Germany. His heart. He gave too much of it to his people. Tell me, Toby Ashe, will you see his speech is published?’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘You are a friend of the Yezidi people.’ Sinàn bowed to Ashe.

‘A great honour, Sinàn.’

Ashe gazed down to the conical qubbe that dominated the roof of the sanctuary below them. ‘I only wish I’d been born a Yezidi.’

Sinàn laughed. ‘Forgive me, but that is very foolish! I must go now and prepare myself. And, look, here is your beautiful secretary lady! And, Dr Ashe, remember – you are not married!’

Sinàn made his way back down the slopes, pausing to bow before Karla on his way down. Ashe called after him. ‘No, Sinàn, but she is!’

‘What were you shouting down the hill, Toby?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just good luck.’

‘What a charming young man the doctor is! I’m sure you could learn something from him.’

‘Listen to that, Karla! Listen! In the valley. The daff and shebab.’

‘The what?’

‘Tambour and flute. The qewwals are singing again. And they’re lighting the shrines. See, the feqirs use olive oil from the mountains. They slap the oil on the sides of walls. Quite magical.’

Karla and Ashe sat down on the ground, Ashe’s arm round Karla’s shoulders.

‘It’s perfect. Even overcast as it is.’

‘That’s how I like it, Karla. Far away from the world and enclosed like a jewel, lit only by its inner fires.’

‘Still a romantic, aren’t you? Even after all you’ve seen.’

He was quiet for a moment. ‘I wonder what Melissa would think of all this.’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’

Ashe gave Karla a hug, then got up and headed down into the flame-kissed valley. Karla shook her head in mock disgust, got up and patted her damp bottom, wondering if among the trees and the echoing music she might find herself a sheykh of her own.

114

‘Come now, Tobbi. Come before the older guardians arrive. They will not permit outsiders to enter the sacred place.’

Princess Laila led Ashe to the left of the Shrine of Sheykh Hesen. He remembered his last visit: how he had stared at the little door, knowing he should go through it; knowing his life would be different if he did. He remembered how Major Richmond had urged him to leave well alone, not to offend his hosts.

Destiny. This was a special door. And now it was being opened to him. A few steps led down to a small cave, lit by tiny olive-oil flames. Laila and Ashe crouched down, easing their way through a narrow tunnel.

They emerged into a spacious cave.

From the northern, natural wall of the sanctuary, water gushed forth from the rock. This was the Zemzem, the sacred brook of Lalish, another miracle of the Sufi saint, Sheykh Adi. He had tapped the stone with a stick – like Moses in the wilderness. Except this was no wilderness; this was a place of miracles.

Laila, eager, wide-eyed, turned to Ashe. ‘You can wash your hands in the stream and your sins will be forgiven.’

‘Let’s do it together.’

In the waters, each washed the other’s hands. Their fingers found each other’s fingers and they held hands and beheld each other’s faces.

‘Yezidis cannot marry outside of their people, can they, Laila?’

‘Marriages are made in heaven, Tobbi.’ She gripped his hand tightly. ‘And is not Lalish heaven on earth?’

The waters splashed down onto the rock and, after a few metres, disappeared once more under the sanctuary walls, emerging on the other side in a narrow gunnel leading to the guesthouse. A group of Rozeh’s young friends laughed and gossiped as they washed their pans and dishes in the sacred spring water.

Guests were gathering outside the Sanctuary Guesthouse. Ashe and Laila made their way over to Sinàn, waiting apprehensively for Rozeh to emerge from her seven days of silent seclusion.

‘Ah, Toby! There is something I wanted to tell you this morning, but I could not bring myself to say it.’

Sinàn took Ashe’s arm and walked him over to the pergola in the corner of the courtyard where the Baba Sheykh had last conversed with his people.

‘I realised what you meant, when you said you wished you had been born a Yezidi. You meant that you wanted to be able to marry my sister.’

Ashe wished neither to give offence nor to reveal his feelings.

‘Don’t be ashamed, Toby Ashe. But it is the law. And we have special laws telling us whom we can marry. Have you not wondered how I, of the Chol royal family, can marry Rozeh, the daughter of a man and woman who ran a shop in Mosul?’

‘The thought had occurred to me.’

‘Then I tell you a secret that only you and my closest family know. Guard it forever with your life. It means you are the friend of the Yezidis, and the Yezidis are your friend. Do you want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Baba Sheykh told me many things on our travels. Many wonderful stories. Some happy. Some sad. He told me how he lost a son – his only son – in the war with Iran. I could never tell him that this was the work of al-Qasr. It would have destroyed Baba Sheykh completely. But he told me that when he knew his son was gone, he hardly knew himself. In the strange times that enveloped him, he had a little adventure. A romance with a lady. A lady from his clan. And she had a little girl. And the girl was given—’

‘To the childless couple in Mosul!’

‘This is my Rozeh, of the Fekhr el-Dîn branch of the Shemsani sheykhs!’

‘The line goes on!’

‘Let us hope so.’

Sinàn looked to the stairs in the corner of the guesthouse hall. ‘Now she comes!’

Rozeh appeared, radiant and shy, from the shadows. Laila walked forwards out of the sanctuary with a large bowl of porridge made from seven types of grain. The princess led the procession down through the valley, accompanied by music, singing and dancing. The procession passed by the shrine of Sheykh Shems and continued up onto the slopes of Mount Meshet.

They arrived by the banks of the stream where the Baba Sheykh had hurled himself to his immortality. The banks were strewn with flowers. The bride and groom plunged their hands into the great bowl carried by Laila, throwing seven handfuls of the porridge into the waiting stream.

Sinàn and Rozeh then jumped over the stream, and everyone cheered. The bowl was handed over to the bride, who shared the contents with her friends while tambour, flute and song graced the mountainside.

Ashe heard a whisper in his ear: the deep voice of Laila, the Magdalene of his life who opened once more the jar of his heart.

‘They say the stream flows under all of the Middle East, even unto Mecca. It is always there—’

‘Even though men don’t see it.’

115

A familiar figure stood on the other side of the well-wishing stream. A bony, gnarled, barefoot stick: Ranald Crayke was waiting.

‘Will you cross the stream with me, Laila?’

‘This one you must do alone.’

Ashe leapt over the stream and grabbed Crayke’s sinewy arm.

‘Fancy a walk, Ashe?’

Ashe nodded.

‘Sorry I missed the dancing.’

‘There’s plenty to come, sir.’

‘Indeed.’

The men made their way back into the valley.

‘This has been quite an operation, Ashe. I have watched you grow with pride.’

‘Thank you, sir. I only wish I could have brought things to a prettier conclusion.’

‘Goodness me, no! You have served well.’

‘Still something that puzzles me, sir.’

‘Proceed.’

‘The Tower bombing. Who did it?’

‘I am here to enlighten, dear boy. Thanks to your memory returning of that fateful day, we were able to follow up your “green prophet” story.’

‘And?’

‘Prepare for a surprise, Ashe.’

‘I’m prepared.’

‘All done by an Englishman.’

Ashe’s brain froze, then melted. ‘The green prophet—’

‘Operates more prosaically under the name Colin Firman. Currently under psychiatric custody. Turns out Firman had been living rough in Broxbourne Woods for months. Ex-SAS. Had a grudge against the brigadier.’

‘Some grudge!’

‘His story will interest you. An explosives expert, Firman was badly wounded when undercover in Iraq before the first Gulf War. They have a code about getting bodies back wherever possible, but Firman’s comrades never came to help him. What Firman didn’t know was that his comrades were dead, their bodies disposed of… so he thought he had been abandoned. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Firman was captured and subjected to medical experiments by—’

‘Al-Qasr?’

‘Right. Firman escaped during the 1992 bombing raid that destroyed the Baba Sheykh’s son’s remains. Found his way back to Britain and had himself committed into a psychiatric hospital, suffering from partial amnesia and severe psychological disorders. Poor chap’s brain had been tampered with. Anyhow, he claimed to have developed spiritual powers of prophecy, listening to God and so on. Says he had this message from a higher power that the Tower of Babel was being rebuilt.

‘After years of treatment, it finally looked as though Firman was responding positively to new medication. Coming out into what has been euphemistically called “care in the community”, Firman found a home of sorts in Broxbourne Woods. One day he saw the Tower at Admiral Whitmore’s house, and got strange ideas. What clinched the matter for him was seeing the brigadier and other senior military and naval figures there. The Tower became in his mind an affront to God, and Firman became the angel of vengeance.’

‘And Reynolds?’

‘The admiral’s butler – something of a lost soul himself – befriended Firman. Reynolds let Firman into the Tower to share food and drink, domestic supplies, and reminisce about service life. All against the rules, of course. After Firman’s bomb went off, Reynolds immediately connected the explosion to Firman, whom he was fascinated by. Seems they’d discussed explosives and suchlike. Firman had asked him if he’d ever felt like blowing up his superior officers. Reynolds blamed himself for what happened and went to ground in Scotland. Forensics found his fingerprints on the sheets of paper used so threateningly by Firman. Once Special Branch tracked him down, Reynolds led us to Firman’s woodland burrow: a remarkable underground complex.’

‘A reflection of himself perhaps.’

‘Quite.’

Ashe sighed. ‘So the archdeacon was really another of al-Qasr’s victims.’

‘Indirectly, yes. Makes you think, doesn’t it, Ashe?’

Ashe tried to see the funny side. ‘Must have been something about the Tower that attracted Oddballs…’

‘That’s the ticket, Ashe! Cheer up! If you’re sad, it’s because you hoped for too much too soon. Forgive me for saying so, but I’d say you’re still labouring under the impression that our work is about finding the truth.’

‘That’s one of the attractions, sir.’

‘Wrong, Ashe. The greater part of our work is deception.’

‘Deception? That’s one word for it.’

‘Listen, then forget. For quite a while there have been high-level attempts in Europe to counter those elements in the Turkish military that oppose entry into the EU and, where possible, to encourage progressive movements in Turkey. The Koglu and Aslan types are only two extreme aspects of resistance to progress.’

‘Progress? Those men loved their country!’

‘They loved an idea of it. And not a very nice idea when you get to know about it.’

‘And what business is that of ours?’

‘Ours is not to reason why, Ashe. Fortunately, we have the willing help of courageous people like Yildiz and Yazar, who also, if I may say so, love their country.’

‘Yildiz and Yazar – working for you?’

Crayke smiled. ‘Not exactly working for us, no. Common interests. In their hearts they work for Turkey’s future, and their own. They got wind of curious goings-on concerning Colonel Aslan. They knew about his skills and the reputation he’d earned from his career with special forces in the eastern provinces. Aslan, in turn, being nothing less than brilliant, began to look into Yildiz and Yazar, suspecting they knew something about his activities on the Turkey–Iraq border. To Aslan, they were a threat, and as far as he was concerned, that made them a threat to Turkey.

‘You, dear Ashe, served Aslan’s purpose well. He manipulated the intelligence, and got you to pursue the two men through Iraq. This gave Aslan additional clout with the MIT, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation, though Aslan’s colleagues in Turkish security needed little encouragement to see Yildiz and Yazar as threatening to Turkey.

‘Had Zappa located Yildiz and Yazar when you were first in Iraq, he was under instructions to protect them from MIT harassment.’

‘So I was never going to be allowed to meet them?’

‘Of course not. Aslan could have got hold of them through you. Unfortunately, MIT got closer to Yildiz and Yazar than you did. As MIT closed in, Zappa helped Yildiz and Yazar flee to Germany. And MIT in Iraq vented their frustration on poor Vincent Zappa, as you may recall. At this point, you’d used up most of your usefulness to Aslan, but not to me. Aslan eventually tracked Yildiz and Yazar back from Germany to Istanbul, where he had them arrested and interrogated. Now, thanks in part to your activities, they have been released, and in some respects we’re back where we started.’

Ashe sat down outside the Sanctuary Guesthouse and stared at the ancient, human-sized relief of the black serpent that guarded the sanctuary door. Crayke observed Ashe’s fascination. ‘Beautiful isn’t it?’

‘Looks pretty damn black to me. In fact, everything does.’

‘Unenlightened, Ashe! Until you see that black serpent as a radiant angel, you’ve seen nothing.’

‘Then I’ve seen nothing.’

‘Wrong again. Yours is the darkness before the dawn.’

‘Is it always as black as this?’

‘Look, Ashe, there are jobs we’d rather not do. Be in no doubt that your friend Aslan was a better man than those who gave me – and you – your orders.’

Ashe smiled. ‘Yes… Aslan.’ He gathered up some dirt from the courtyard stones, spat on it, and rolled it in his hands. ‘It’s a pity, really’ – he flicked the unholy berat into the courtyard air –‘that he’s an Oddball.’

Crayke caught the ball of dirt and crumbled it between his fingers. ‘Takes one to know one. Ready?’

Ashe nodded, pulled himself together, and left the Market of Mystical Knowledge for a more common market, and home.

Select Bibliography

Drower, E. S., Peacock Angel, Being some Account of Votaries of a Secret Cult and their Sanctuaries (John Murray, London, 1941)

Guest, John S., The Yezidis – A Study in Survival (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987)

Joseph, Isya, Devil Worship: The Sacred Books and Traditions of the Yezidis (Kessinger Reprints, 2005; originally published 1919)

Kreyenbroek, Philip G., Yezidism – Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition, Texts and Studies in Religion, Vol. 62 (The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter, 1995)

Robinson, James M. (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library (E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1984)

Spät, Eszter, The Yezidis (Saqi Books, London, 2005)

Author’s Note

The Babylon Gene is a work of fiction based on real events and situations of recent history. While interpretations of those events and situations are entirely the author’s, the historical, scientific and theological background to the story has been thoroughly researched.

The Yezidis are a real people, the inheritors of an ancient spiritual and historical tradition. All of the Yezidi characters in the novel are fictional. The characters’ involvement in military and intelligence operations is likewise fictional. A select bibliography is included at the end of the novel.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the following for their authoritative assistance in researching the background to this novel: Simon Carpenter, Adrian Cassar, Tuvia Fogel and Flavio Barbiero.

Anthony Cheetham, Laura Palmer, Lucy Ridout and Tom Webber provided greatly appreciated, expert publishing and editorial commitment. My heartfelt thanks to all of you at Head of Zeus.

Details of the mythical Hemlock Club derive from The Scrutinies of Simon Iff by Aleister Crowley (Teitan Press), edited by Martin P. Starr.

I am grateful to Patricia Churton, Michael Embleton, Philip Wilkinson, and to my agent, Fiona Spencer Thomas, for checking the manuscript.

About this book

THE BABYLON GENE

A SECRET WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD AT THE DAWN OF HISTORY…

When a Masonic lodge in Istanbul is destroyed in a blast, maverick British agent Toby Ashe is pitched into a race against the CIA to solve an intelligence puzzle encompassing genetic research, the origins of Freemasonry, a covert SAS mission and the strange disappearance of the leader of an ancient Kurdish tribe.

What if the superpowers of the twenty-first century aren’t fighting over resources, regime change or religion? What if the world’s governments are seeking something far more dangerous? A centuries-old weapon of terrifying power…

About the Author

Alex Churton is a writer and composer. He was the founder editor of Freemasonry Today, and is an acknowledged expert on Western Esotericism. He is the author of ten non-fiction titles on subjects such as alchemy, the Rosicrucians and Judas. This is his first novel.

About Head of Zeus

We hope you enjoyed this book.

We are Head of Zeus, a brand new publishing house dedicated to new authors, great storytelling, and fabulous ideas.

To find your next read – and some tempting special offers – why not visit our website?

Contents

Cover

Welcome Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Chapter 109

Chapter 110

Chapter 111

Chapter 112

Chapter 113

Chapter 114

Chapter 115

Select Bibliography

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About this book

About the Author

About Head of Zeus

Copyright

First published in the UK in 2012 by Head of Zeus Ltd.

Copyright © Alex Churton, 2012

The moral right of Alex Churton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available fromthe British Library.

ISBN (TPB) 9781908800114

ISBN (E) 9781908800848

Printed in Germany.

Head of Zeus Ltd

Clerkenwell House

45-47 Clerkenwell Green

London, EC1R 0HT

www.headofzeus.com

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Prologue

The fire started in Greg and Melanie’s basement just after midnight and crept upward through the stairwell silently, like a predator tracking food.

Greg had never read the stats or he’d have known that home fires can turn deadly in just two minutes and that his odds of waking up were three to one.

Against.

And yet both he and Melanie had managed it. Was it because she’d screamed? He wasn’t sure. But she was screaming now. Groggy, disoriented, coughing, Greg stumbled to the door. Like millions of others, he’d seen the movie Backdraft, and although the proper term for the event depicted in the film was a “flashover” and not a “backdraft,” he’d learned enough to touch the back of his hand to the top of the door, the doorknob, and the crack between the door and door frame before flinging it open.

As he did that, Melanie rolled to the edge of the bed and grabbed her cell phone from the charging cradle on the nightstand. She pressed 911 and cupped her hand around the speaker. Now that Greg was in motion, she felt better, like part of a team instead of an army of one. Only moments ago, Melanie had taken her panic out on Greg’s comatose body by kicking, punching, and screaming him awake. When he finally began to stir, she’d slapped him hard across the face several times.

Now they were working together. They’d silently assessed the situation and assigned each other specific roles in an unspoken plan. He’d get the kids; she’d get the firemen.

Melanie couldn’t hear anything coming from the phone and wondered if she’d misdialed. She terminated the call and started over. A sudden blast of heat told her Greg had gotten the door open. Melanie looked up at him, and their eyes met. She held his gaze a moment and time seemed to stop while something special passed between them. It was just a split second, but they managed to get eight years of marriage into it.

Greg set his jaw and gave her a nod of reassurance, as if to say he’d seen what lay beyond the door and that everything was going to be all right.

Melanie wasn’t buying. She’d known this man since the first week of college, knew all his looks. What she’d seen in his eyes was helplessness. And fear.

Greg turned away from her, shielded his face, and hurled himself into the rising flames. She couldn’t hear the 911 operator over the roaring noise, but she heard Greg barreling up the stairs yelling to the children.

She yelled, “I love you!” but her words were swallowed up in the blaze. The searing heat scorched her blistered throat. Melanie clamped her mouth shut and turned her attention back to the phone. Was someone on the other end? She dropped to her hands and knees, cupped her fingers around the mouthpiece, and shouted her message as clearly as possible to the dispatcher she hoped was listening.

That’s when she heard the crash—the one that sounded like columns falling in the foyer. Melanie figured the staircase would be next.

The kids’ room was right above her. Melanie instinctively looked up to launch a prayer and saw a thick, rolling layer of smoke hugging the ceiling. She let out a long, piercing wail. A terrible thought tried to enter her mind. She forced it away.

Melanie screamed again—screamed for her girls, screamed for Greg, screamed even as hot air filled her mouth and lungs and tried to finish her off.

But Melanie had no intention of dying. Not here in the bedroom. Not without her family. Coughing, choking, she crawled steadily toward the doorway.

The theory that the air was better near the floor apparently didn’t apply to basement fires because thick, gray ropes of smoke were sifting upward through the floorboards. Melanie’s lungs ached in protest as the heat and flames stepped up the demand on her oxygen. Her pulse throbbed heavy in her neck. The hallway, a mere twelve feet away, had been rendered nearly impenetrable in the moments since Greg had left her. During that tiny window of time, the flames had more than doubled in height and intensity, and their all-consuming heat sucked so much oxygen from the air, she could barely maintain consciousness.

As she neared the doorway, a bedroom window imploded with a loud crash. Hot, broken glass slammed into her upper torso like a shotgun blast, pelting her face, neck, and shoulders with crystals of molten shrapnel. The impact knocked Melanie to her side. She shrieked in pain and instinctively started curling her body into a protective ball. The skin that had once covered her delicate face was gone, and the meat that remained broiled in the heat.

That would have done it for Melanie had she been fighting solely for her own life, but she was fighting for Greg and the twins, and she refused to let them down. Melanie shrieked again, this time in anger. She got to her hands and knees, made her way through the doorway, crawled to the base of the stairs, and looked up.

The stairwell was an inferno, and the bottom half of the staircase was virtually gone. Melanie’s heart sank. She screamed for her family, listened for a response. There was none.

Then, as if an angel had whispered it, Melanie had an idea. She got to her feet and made her way to the powder room. She turned on the faucets, soaked the guest towels. She staggered back to the area where the steps used to be. Tapping into her last ounce of strength, she screamed, “Greg!” and flung the towels as hard as she could, upward into the rising flames, in the direction of the kids’ room.

Had he heard her? Had he answered? She couldn’t tell.

Emergency personnel arrived just four minutes after the 911 call was logged. Neighbors, hearing sirens, gathered in the street and watched in horror.

Later, when reconstructing the events at the scene, fire-fighters determined Greg had made it to the children’s room, opened the window, and hung a sheet from it to alert rescuers to the location. He’d had the presence of mind to gather both girls in his arms on the floor beneath him before dying.

Firefighters entering the bedroom through the window were impressed to find wet towels covering the girls’ faces. This is what saved their lives that night, they decided, though one of the twins died later on, in the hospital.

“Son of a bitch,” Augustus Quinn said. “You are one tough son of a bitch, I’ll give you that!” Shakespeare it was not, but Creed should have been dead by now and wasn’t. “Let’s call it a night,” Quinn said.

They were on opposite sides of prison cell bars, sixty feet below the earth’s surface. It took a while, but Donovan Creed staggered to his feet, a vantage point from which he now grinned at the hideous giant manning the torture device. “What was that?” Creed said. “Eight seconds?”

The ugly giant nodded.

“Give me ten this time.”

“You’ll die,” Quinn said. Though the two men had worked together for years, Quinn’s words had been uttered simply and gave no evidence of warmth or concern.

Creed supposed that for Quinn it was all business. Creed had paid his friend to administer the torture, and Quinn was expressing his opinion about continuing. Did he even care if Creed died tonight? Creed thought about that for a minute.

The ADS weapon had been created as a counter measure to the terrorists’ practice of using civilians as human shields during the Iraq War. Effective up to a quarter mile, ADS fires an invisible beam that penetrates the skin and instantly boils all body fluids. The idea was simple: you point the weapon at a crowd, flip the switch, and everyone falls to the ground in excruciating pain. You flip the switch off, collect the weapons, and sort out the terrorists. Moments later, everyone is back to normal. Unfortunately, during the testing phase, word got out about soldiers suffering irreversible heart damage and ruptured spleens. When human rights organizations got involved, the public outcry was so severe the weapon had to be scrapped.

Donovan Creed had been among the first to test the original ADS weapon without receiving permanent organ or tissue damage. From the first exposure, he believed the weapon held enormous potential as a field torture device, provided it could be modified to a handheld size. To that effect, Creed had persuaded the military to allow one of the original prototypes to go missing long enough for his geek squad to turn it into a sort of ham radio project.

The weapon currently aimed at Creed through the prison bars was one of a set of three that had been produced to date. The other two were locked in a hidden closet twenty feet away. These three weapons were second generation, meaning they were much smaller than the original but not as small as they would ultimately need to be for his purposes. Still, each phase required human testing.

“You don’t believe that about me dying,” Creed said. “You’re just hungry.”

Quinn ignored the remark. “Two hundred soldiers tested against the machine,” he recited. “Forty-six with battle-field experience …”

Creed waved the words away with his hand. “Old news,” he said.

Quinn turned to face the video camera. “I want it on record I’m advising you to stop.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Creed said. “If you leave, I’ll just figure out a way to do it alone.”

“My point,” Quinn said. “I leave and you pass out, who’s gonna shut off the beam?”

Creed studied the giant’s dark, dead eyes, searching for the proverbial ounce of humanity. “What,” he said, “you going soft on me?” Quinn didn’t answer, and Creed realized if there was an answer to be had, it wouldn’t come from Quinn’s eyes. Quinn’s eyes were not the gateway to his soul. They were the place mirth went to die.

Look,” Quinn said, by way of clarification. “I keep pushing the switch till you die, and every assassin, every kill squad, and half the country’s armed forces will try to plant me in the ground.”

“Aw hell, Augustus, these guys try to kill me every time they invent a new toy. Don’t forget, they pay me well for this shit.”

“In advance, I hope.”

Speaking to the camera, Creed said, “If I die tonight, hunt this ugly bastard down and kill him like the dog he is.” Creed winked at his monstrous friend and set his feet.

Quinn shrugged. “I can always edit that last part.” He held Creed’s gaze a second and then checked his stopwatch and threw the switch.

Ten seconds later, Donovan Creed was on his back, lifeless, though his screams continued to echo off the prison cell walls.

Augustus Quinn, a man entirely unburdened by sentimentality, left Creed where he dropped and removed the video card from the camera. Tomorrow he’ll send copies to NSA, the CIA, and Department of Homeland Security.

Quinn pocketed the video card but stopped short after hearing a small sound. In the absence of certainty, he preferred not to squeeze his huge frame through the narrow cell door opening, but this was Donovan Creed after all, so Quinn entered reluctantly, knelt on the floor, and tried Creed’s wrist for a pulse. Failing to find one, he cradled the dead man’s head in his giant hand and placed his ear close to Creed’s mouth.

A raspy whisper emerged: “That all you got?”

Startled, Quinn drew back. “Son of a bitch!” he said for the second time that night. Some day he’ll be drinking in a biker bar or hanging on a meat hook somewhere, and some guy will ask him who the toughest man he ever met was.

Quinn will say Donovan Creed, and he’ll give a dozen examples of Creed’s toughness, ending with these most recent events. He’ll tell it just the way it happened tonight, no need to embellish, and he’ll end the story with a recitation of Creed’s final words, “Is that all you’ve got?” The guy hearing the story will smile because, as final words go, Creed’s were gold.

As it turns out, those were not Creed’s last words.

“This time,” he said, “give me twelve seconds.”

Quinn sighed. “I should’ve brought a sandwich,” he said.

Quinn fears no human or beast in the world, save for the man at his feet. Specifically, he fears that thing inside the man on the floor that drives Donovan Creed to sleep in a prison cell every night when he’s here at his headquarters in Virginia—or in the attics and crawl spaces of homes owned by clueless strangers the rest of the time. Nor can Quinn fathom what fuels Creed’s insane desire to build his resistance to torture by scheduling these horrific late night sessions in order to play human guinea pig to the latest military death weapon du jour.

Quinn makes his way back through the cell door opening and places the video card back in the camera. He peers into the aperture, presses the record button.

The lens displays a stark prison cell measuring six feet by nine. A narrow bed with a bare mattress hugs the left wall, separated from the toilet by a stainless steel sink. The reinforced cinderblock walls and concrete floor are painted institutional gray. Two-inch-thick iron bars span the front of the cell. A center section can be slid to one side to accommodate prisoner access. The ceiling is high and holds fluorescent lighting above a grid designed to discourage prisoners from hurling food or clothing upward in an attempt to obtain shards of glass from which to fashion a weapon.

The grid diffuses the light into a greenish glow that slightly distorts the image of the man on the floor in the center of the prison cell … as he struggles, once again, to his feet.

1

I awoke in mid-scream, jerked upright, and jumped off my cot like I’d been set on fire. My brain cells sputtered, overloaded by panic and crippling pain. I staggered three steps and crashed into the bars of my cell. I grabbed them and held on for dear life. It took a minute, but I finally remembered how I’d spent the previous night cozying up to the death ray.

My cell phone rang. I ignored it, made my way to the toilet, and puked up everything inside me, including, possibly, my spleen. The ringing stopped long before I felt like checking the caller ID. Nine people in the world had my number, and this wasn’t one of them. Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, could wait.

From my prison cell in Bedford, Virginia, getting to work was as easy as stepping into the elevator and pressing a button. I did so, and moments later, the row of nozzles in my office steam shower were blasting me full force. After several minutes of that, I knew my body wasn’t going to rejuvenate on its own, so I stepped out and shook a dozen Advil into my hand.

I looked in the mirror. Usually when I felt this bad I required stitches, and lots of them. I leaned my elbows on the sink counter and lowered my head to my forearms.

The ADS weapon was all I’d hoped for and more. I knew in the weeks to come I’d master the damn thing, but for the time being, it was kicking the crap out of me. I wondered if the suits at Homeland would be happy or miserable to learn I had survived the first session.

When the room finally stopped spinning, I swallowed the Advil. Then I shaved, put some clothes on, and buzzed Lou Kelly.

“You got anything on Ken Chapman yet?” I asked.

There was a short pause. Then Lou said, “Got a whole lot of something. You want it now?”

I sighed. “Yeah, bring it,” I said.

I propped my office door open so Lou could enter without having to be buzzed in. Then I dragged myself to the kitchen and tossed a few ice cubes and some water into a blender. I threw in a packet of protein powder and a handful of chocolate-covered almonds, turned the dial to the highest setting, and pressed the start button. By the time Lou arrived, I was pouring the viscous goop into a tall plastic cup.

Lou had a thick manila folder in his hand.

“Local weather for a hundred,” he said. He placed the folder on the counter in front of me.

“What are my choices?”

“Thunderstorm, ice storm, cloudy, or sunny,” Lou Kelly said.

My office apartment was above ground, but windows could get you killed, so I didn’t have any. My office walls were two feet thick and completely soundproof, so I couldn’t automatically rule out a thunderstorm. But it was early February, and I’d been outside yesterday. I drank some of my protein shake. Yesterday had been clear and sunny.

“I’ll take cloudy,” I said.

Lou frowned. “Why do I even bother?” He fished two fifties from his pocket and placed them beside the folder.

“Nothing worse than a degenerate gambler,” I said.

Lou pointed at the folder. “You might want to reserve judgment on that,” he said. He reached down and tapped the folder twice with his index finger for emphasis.

Lou Kelly was my lieutenant, my ultimate go-to guy. We’d been together fifteen years, including our stint in Europe with the CIA. I took another swallow of my protein shake and stared at the manila folder.

“Give me the gist,” I said.

“Your daughter was right not to trust this guy,” Lou said.

I nodded. I’d known the minute I answered the phone last week that something was wrong. Kimberly, generally a good judge of character, particularly when it came to her mother’s boyfriends, had felt the need to tell me about a curious incident. Kimberly had said, “Tonight Ken broke a glass in his hand. One minute he’s holding a drink, the next minute his hand’s full of blood!” She went on to explain that her mom (my ex-wife, Janet) had made a snide remark that should have elicited a withering response from her new fiancé. Instead, Chapman put his hands behind his back, stared off into space, and said nothing. When Janet whirled out of the room in anger, Chapman squeezed the glass so hard that it shattered in his hands. Kimberly had been in the loft watching the scene unfold. “There’s something wrong with this guy, Dad. He’s too …” she searched for a word. “I don’t know. Passive-aggressive? Bipolar? Something’s not right.”

I agreed and told her I’d look into it.

“Don’t tell Mom I said anything, okay?” Kimberly had said.

In front of me, Lou Kelly cleared his throat. “You okay?”

I clapped my hands together. “Wonderful!” I said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

Lou studied me a moment. Then he said, “Ken and Kathleen Chapman have been divorced for two years. Ken is forty-two, lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Kathleen is thirty-six, lives in North Bergen, works in Manhattan.”

I waved my hand in the general direction of his chatter. “The gist,” I reminded him.

Lou Kelly frowned. “The gist is our boy Chapman has serious anger issues.”

“How serious?”

“He was an accomplished wife-beater.”

“Was?” I said.

“There is evidence to suggest he’s reformed.”

“What type of evidence?” I asked. “Empirical or pharmacological?”

Lou looked at me for what seemed a very long time. “How long you been holding those words in your head, hoping to use them?”

I grinned and said, “A generous vocabulary is a sure sign of intellectual superiority.”

“Must be a lot of room in your head now that you’ve let them out,” he deadpanned.

“Let’s continue,” I said. “I’ve got a headache.”

“And why wouldn’t you?” he said. Then he added, “According to the letter his shrink presented to the court, Chapman appears to have overcome his aggression.”

“A chemical imbalance,” I suggested.

“Words to that effect,” Lou said.

I gave Lou his money back and spent a couple minutes flipping through the police photos and domestic violence reports. The pictures of Kathleen Chapman would be considered obscenely brutal by any standard, but violence was my constant companion and I’d seen much worse. Still, I was surprised to find myself growing strangely sympathetic to her injuries. I kept going back to two of the photos. I seemed to be developing a connection to the poor creature who years ago had found the courage to stare blankly into a police camera lens.

“What do you say to a woman with two black eyes?” I said.

Lou shrugged. “I don’t know. What do you say to a woman with two black eyes?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You already told her twice.”

Lou nodded. He and I often used dark humor to detach ourselves from the brutality of our profession. “Looks like he told her a hundred,” he said.

I removed the two photos from the folder and traced Kathleen’s face with my index finger. And then it hit me. I handed the pictures to Lou. “Have our geeks remove the bruises on these and run an age progression to see what she looks like today.”

He eyed me suspiciously but said nothing.

“Then compare her to this lady.” I opened my cell phone and clicked through the photos until I found the one I wanted. I handed Lou my phone. “What do you think?” I said.

He held my cell phone in his right hand and the photos of the younger Kathleen in his left. His eyes went back and forth from the phone to the photos. Then he said, “They could be twins.”

“I agree,” I said. I took the phone back and started entering some commands on the keys.

“So who is she?” he asked. “The one in the picture you’re e-mailing me.”

I shrugged. “Just someone I know. A friend.”

“The geeks might question this project,” he said.

“Just tell them we’re trying to fit a specific girl into a terror cell.”

He studied the photos of Kathleen some more. “A body double?”

“Right,” I said. “And, Lou?”

He looked up. “Yeah?”

“Tell the geeks I need it yesterday!”

He sighed. “What else is new?”

Lou turned to leave.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What if Kathleen was not Ken Chapman’s first victim?”

“You think he slept around during his marriage?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he dated someone after his divorce, before he met Janet. Can you find out for me?”

“I’m on it,” Lou said.

When he left, I turned my attention back to the files. As I read the details in the police reports, the same thought kept running through my head: If I do nothing, a couple of years from now this could be Janet, or even Kimberly.

I could not believe Janet was planning to marry this bozo.

I remembered something Kimberly said a month ago when she told me about her mom’s engagement. She said she didn’t believe her mom was in love with Chapman.

“Why would she marry a guy she doesn’t love?” I’d asked.

“I think Mom would rather be unhappy than lonely.”

2

The state capitol building in Charleston, West Virginia, is composed of buff Indiana limestone. Its dome rises 293 feet high and is gilded in 23.5-karat gold leaf. I was standing directly below it, in the capitol rotunda, staring at the statue of Senator Robert C. Byrd when I heard her high heels clopping across the marble floor.

Alison David.

“Call me Ally,” she said, extending her hand.

I shook her hand and introduced myself.

“So,” she said, “what do you think of our capitol building?”

Ally David had on a navy jacket with three-quarter sleeves and a matching pencil skirt. Her satin tank top featured a scoop neckline that offered the promise of superb cleavage. It took some effort not to drool while admiring the way she put her clothes together.

“Impressive,” I said. “But I’m confused about the statue.”

“How so?”

“Well, I know you can’t toss a cat in West Virginia without hitting a building that has his name on it,” I said. “But I thought you had to be dead at least fifty years before you got a statue.”

She smiled and gave me a wink. “We West Virginians have a pact with Senator Byrd. He sends us the pork, and we let him name the pigs.”

Alison David was the type of career woman who, without saying or doing anything out of the ordinary, gave the impression she was a creature of heightened sexuality. I wondered if this was a natural phenomenon or something she had purposely cultivated.

“Is it just me,” I said, “or does it appear your illustrious senator’s hand is pointing directly at my pocket?”

She forced a half smile, but I could tell I was losing her. Small talk isn’t my strong suit. “So,” I said, “where are you taking us for lunch?”

“Someplace close,” she said.

I waited for her to elaborate, but she chose not to. Unable to think of anything witty to say, I settled for, “Sounds perfect,” which caused her to arch an eyebrow and give me a strange look.

We walked a block together and entered Gyoza, a small Japanese restaurant that proved trendier than its anonymous exterior might suggest. Inside, tasteful Japanese prints hung on bright red walls. The lighting was muted but was bright enough to read the menus. In the center of the restaurant, a bronze-laminate sushi bar separated the sushi chefs from the diners, and glass-fronted coolers atop the bar displayed tidy arrangements of colorful seafood. There were a couple of empty two-top tables with white linen tablecloths. Ally picked one, and we sat down.

“Gyoza?” I said.

Ally lowered her eyes and smiled at me, and the way she did it made me wonder if gyoza meant something dirty.

“Gyoza,” she said, “is a popular dumpling in Japanese cuisine. It’s finger food, like pot stickers, but with different fillings. Most people order meat or seafood, but I like the vegetarian.”

A waitress appeared, and Ally did in fact order the vegetarian gyoza. I asked if the spider roll was authentic.

Our waitress looked confused and said, “This one very hot. Very, very hot! Yes, is spider roll."

“Spider,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Spider. Is very hot.”

I feigned shock. “Do you mean to tell me there’s an actual spider inside?”

Ally David’s eyes skirted the room. She gave the waitress a tight smile, and the two of them exchanged a female look, as if my comment confirmed some sort of conclusion they’d already drawn about me. Ally said, “Perhaps I should translate.”

“Please do,” I said.

“The spider roll is composed of tempura soft-shell crab,” she said.

“Composed,” I said.

“That’s right.”

I may have detected a hint of annoyance in her voice.

Ally wasn’t finished with me. “Spider is the name of the roll,” she said, “and nothing more.” Then, as if she couldn’t stop herself, she added, “Why would you even think such a thing?”

I shrugged. “Eel is eel, right? And tuna is tuna, yes?”

Ally David looked at her watch. “I don’t mean to be brusque, but I’ve got a one o’clock and it’s already twelve fifteen. You wanted to talk to me about Ken Chapman?” she said.

“I did.”

I was not insensitive to the fact that our waitress continued to wait patiently for my order. “I’ll have …” I briefly looked through the menu again.

“Anytime today would be nice,” Ally said.

“I think I’ll try … the spider roll,” I said.

“For the love of God,” Ally said.

“Very, very hot,” our waitress warned. “Not recommend,” she said.

“But it’s on the menu,” I said. “So people must order it.”

“Yes, yes,” she said. She pointed to a large man sitting alone at the sushi bar. “He already order. I bring to him very soon.”

I smiled. “Then I’m sure it will be fine,” I said.

She nodded and sprinted away to place the order.

“Are you always this …”Ally searched for a word, gave up, and tried again. “Could you possibly be this obtuse?”

I shrugged and looked at her but she lowered her eyes and pretended to be intrigued by the place setting. I spoke to fill the silence. “Did you and Chapman date before his divorce became final?”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No. Ken was legally separated when we met.”

There were delicate white china cups in front of us, and black lacquer soup bowls. I picked up my cup and tilted it so I could see if it said “Made in China” on the bottom. It didn’t.

“How long did you guys date?” I asked.

Ally looked up from the place setting to stare at me. “Can you tell me again what my dating Ken has to do with national security?”

“Like I said on the phone, we’re just building a profile,” I said. “Mr. Chapman is currently engaged to a woman whose former husband was a CIA operative.”

Ally made her eyes big and lowered her voice to an exaggerated whisper. “Is that against the law?” she asked. She rolled her big eyes at me the way my daughter Kimberly does. Only instead of being exasperated, Ally was mocking me.

“Against the law? Not in and of itself,” I said, sounding pathetic even to me.

“And yet,” she said, “simply by dating me and becoming engaged to another woman, Ken has managed to become a threat to national security! Perhaps I ought to call Senator Byrd’s office to sound the alert.”

This wasn’t going the way I’d envisioned. She was trying for smug and achieving it. She was also smarter than me, and I hate when that happens. There was but one thing to do: seize the initiative. I played the trump card God provided: I stared directly into her cleavage.

“During the time you dated Ken Chapman,” I said to her boobs, “did he ever beat you?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“But you’re aware of his history, yes?”

She sighed. “I’m up here, perv.”

I reluctantly lifted my focus to her face, and Ally said, “Ken told me about Kathleen’s claims of abuse shortly after we started dating.”

“And?”

“And he explained what happened.”

I waited.

“I suppose you want to hear his version,” she said.

“It’s why I traveled all the way to Charleston,” I said.

“Not the spider roll?”

I smiled and shook my head.

“Not the capitol rotunda?”

“As hard as it must be to fathom, no.”

Our waitress approached carrying a heavy tray, which she perched on a portable stand. She poured scented green tea into our cups and steaming miso soup into our soup bowls. Ally picked up a white ceramic spoon and stirred her soup. I took a sip of my tea and was instantly overcome by the horrific taste. I looked around for something in which to spit the rancid liquid but finally gave up and swallowed it. I made a face to demonstrate how I felt about the tea. Ally rolled her eyes again, reaffirming something I already knew about my charm: though highly infectious to females, it sometimes requires an incubation period.

My cell phone rang. I glanced at the number and put it back in my pocket where it continued to ring.

“You’re an annoying person,” Ally said. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

I reminded her that she was supposed to be telling me her version of the Ken Chapman saga. She rolled her eyes. She sighed. She frowned. But she finally spoke.

“Ken had been married about a year,” Ally said, “when he learned Kathleen was mentally unstable. They had an argument, a shouting match, and he spent the night in a hotel. The next day, when he came home to apologize, he found her bloody and bruised.”

“He claimed not to remember beating her up?”

“She beat herself up.”

“Excuse me?”

“It was her way of punishing herself for making him angry.”

I took some photos out of my suit pocket and spread them on the table. “This look like something a woman might do to herself?” I asked.

Ally’s eyes avoided the photos. “I’m not an expert,” she admitted. “But it seems plausible, and it wasn’t an isolated case. Time and again during the marriage, Ken came home from work to find his wife had beaten herself for various reasons. When he tried to force her into therapy, she went to the police and told them Ken had assaulted her. This became a pattern. By turning him in to the police, or threatening to, she was able to control and manipulate the relationship.”

I sat there in disbelief. My jaw dropped, and I think my mouth may have been open during her entire response.

Ally pursed her lips and tasted her soup in the sexiest manner possible, as though she were French kissing it. It was amazing what she could do with her mouth while nibbling at the liquid on her spoon. You put two women side by side, let them both taste some soup. The other woman can be twice as hot as Ally. Out of a hundred guys, Ally wins ninety times. Guaranteed.

“Are you dating anyone now?” I asked.

“Are you asking on behalf of national security?”

“This is a personal query,” I said, flashing my high-voltage smile for good measure.

“Well in that case, yes, I’m dating someone.”

She was clearly insulting me or at least pretending to. Truth was, I didn’t even like her and certainly didn’t want to date her. I really just wanted to see if I could. What can I say, maybe it’s a guy thing, but she gives great soup.

“Your dating situation,” I persisted, “would you classify it as a serious relationship?”

“Yes, I would,” she said. “But I wasn’t certain about that until just now.”

“Well congratulations,” I said dryly.

“Well thank you,” she said, matching my tone.

Suddenly, the heavy-set customer at the sushi bar yelled, “Fuck!” and jumped off his stool. He grabbed his throat and spun around in a circle as if his left foot had been nailed to the floor. “Holy Mother of God!” he screamed and spit a mouthful of something onto the floor—something I was pretty sure had to be the spider roll. He jumped up and down in a sort of death dance, coughing and shaking his hands profusely. He yelled, “I’ll sue you bastards! I’ll sue you for every cent you have!”

The waitress ran out from the kitchen, took one look at him, and said, “Is hot, yes?”

He gave her a withering look. “Yeah, it hot! It plenty, plenty hot! And I know you not recommend. But here in America, we have laws against serving battery acid. By the time I’m finished with you, you’re all going to wish you’d never left China!”

The waitress and sushi chef looked at each other. She said, “We Japanese. Not Chinese.”

The enraged customer flung his head toward the ceiling and yelled, “Fuck you!” He slapped his face twice, made a barking sound, and stomped off in a huff. Most of the customers laughed. Ally didn’t, so I stopped laughing and changed the subject.

“So the police took Kathleen’s word over Ken’s,” I said. “About the beatings.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I would, in fact,” I said.

I tried a half-spoonful of the soup and wondered if miso might be the Japanese word for week-old sweat socks.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But I had reasons for believing Ken’s story.”

“Such as?”

“He never laid a hand on me. He never abused me verbally.”

“That’s it?”

“I never saw him lose control throughout our relationship. And even though Kathleen continued to accuse him of abuse, Ken never left her.”

I raised my eyebrows and watched to see if her cheeks would flush. They did, just slightly. She’d basically just admitted to dating Kathleen’s husband while they were still married. We both realized it, but I was the only one smiling about it.

“Look, Mr. Creed,” she said, “whether you want to believe it or not, Ken’s a decent guy. He was always there for his wife. He did everything he could to get Kathleen to seek treatment.”

I looked at the photos. “He seems to have been very persuasive in that regard,” I said.

She started to say something, then stopped and had some more soup. She looked at me and shook her head. Ally seemed comfortable with the silence, but I was even more comfortable with it. When she finally spoke, her voice was steady. “You may think I’m stupid, Mr. Creed, or gullible. But it was Kathleen, not Ken. You’d know it if you spent any time with him.”

What I now knew, thanks to Ally, is what Ken Chapman would say to Janet if I confronted her with the photos and police reports. I couldn’t believe this scumbag had invented a back story that made him the victim! I mean, I could believe it, but I couldn’t believe it worked. But he had, and that put me in a quandary. If I couldn’t use the police reports, how could I prevent Janet from marrying this creep?

I could always kill him. But I couldn’t kill him. I mean, I’d love to kill him, but Janet would know I did it, and she’d never forgive me. No, everything in my gut told me that Janet had to be the one to find out about Chapman. She’d have to learn about him in such a way that he wouldn’t be able to con her like he conned Ally David.

The waitress brought our main courses. Ally gave a coy smile and purred, “Dig in, Spider-Man! Show ’em how tough you are!”

I looked at the concoction on my plate. Every part of it was colorful, but the colors seemed wrong for the dish in a way that reminded me of Tammy Faye Bakker’s makeup. I pushed a few items around the plate with my chopsticks and may have seen little puffs of smoke. I decided to concentrate on the soup instead.

When we left the restaurant, Ally said not to bother walking her back to the rotunda. I sat on a nearby bench and watched her walk away. About twenty steps into her departure, she lifted her arm and waved without turning her head. I wondered what gave her the confidence to assume I’d been staring at her ass that whole time.

I sat awhile and thought about my ex-wife, Janet. It was clear I’d have to come up with something novel to help her understand the enormous mistake she was about to make in marrying Ken Chapman. I had an idea playing through my mind, but before I could put it on paper, I’d need to spend some time with Ken Chapman’s ex, Kathleen Gray.

Kathleen was currently living in North Bergen, just outside New York City. Lou Kelly had run a credit check on her and learned she had recently applied for a home loan with her local bank. The loan was still pending, and Lou suggested I pose as a loan officer and use that pretense to set up a meeting with her. Of course, I could simply threaten her, Lou had said. I thanked Lou for the advice and explained that I wouldn’t need to rely on threats or a cheesy cover story. Truth, honesty, and an abundance of natural charm were my allies.

I dialed her number.

“Hello,” Kathleen Gray said.

“Kathleen, my name is Donovan Creed and I’m with Homeland Security in Bedford, Virginia. I’d like to talk to you about your ex-husband, Kenneth Chapman.”

The connection went dead.

Not a problem. I could always fly into LaGuardia tomorrow and sweet talk my way into a dinner date with her. Since I had my phone out anyway, I decided to dial my mystery caller, the persistent person who shouldn’t have had my number.

I punched up the number and watched it connect on the screen with no premonition of the effect this simple act was about to have on my life.

3

“Mister… Creed … thank … you for … re … turning … my … call.”

At first I thought it was a joke. The voice on the other end of the line was metallic, choppy, like a guy on a respirator or maybe a tracheotomy patient who had to force air through a speaking valve in his throat.

“How did you get my number?” I asked.

“Sal … va … tore … Bon … a … dello,” he said.

“How much did he charge you for it?”

“Fif … ty … thou … sand … dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money for a phone number.”

“Sal says … you’re … the … best.”

The tinny, metallic voice revealed no hint of emotion. Each word bite was cloyingly monotonous and annoyed the shit out of me. I found myself wanting to imitate it, but resisted the urge. “What do you want?” I said.

“I want … to em … ploy you … part … time … the way … Sal … does.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” I said.

“You can … torture … me … first … if you … want.”

He offered to write down a name and give it to me and I could torture him until I was satisfied he’d never reveal it. This was supposed to prove he wouldn’t sell me out later if something went wrong in our business arrangement. The man was obviously insane, which meant he was pretty much like everyone else with whom I associated.

“Before we go any further,” I said, “what shall I call you?”

“Vic … tor.”

“There’s a flaw in your plan,” I said. “Torture is only one way to make you talk. What if someone kidnaps your wife or kids or your girlfriend? What if they threaten to blow up the day care center where your sister works? Trust me, Victor. It’s hard to let your loved ones die a horrific death when you could save them by simply revealing a name.”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “I’m … wheelchair … bound. There … is no … one … in … my life. When … you … meet me … you will … under … stand.”

I thought about that for a moment and decided I already understood. “I’d rather limit our relationship to the telephone for now,” I said. “I actually do believe you wouldn’t talk. Something tells me you’d welcome torture and maybe even death.”

“You are … very … percep … tive … Mr. … Creed. So … when … can you … start?”

I wasn’t worried about speaking freely on my cell phone. The few people in the world capable of breaching my cell security already knew what I did for a living. “I have three clients,” I said. “If you want me, you’ll be fourth in line. Each contract is fifty thousand dollars, plus expenses, wired in advance.”

“Can … I … de … cide how … the hits … go … down?”

“Within reason,” I said.

Victor gave me the details for the first target. Then he hit me with a stipulation I’d never encountered: he wanted to speak to the victim minutes before the execution. I told him that would require kidnapping, which would place a major burden on me. It meant a second person, more time, and more exposure. I refused all the way up to the point where Victor offered to double my fee.

Victor proceeded to tell me exactly what he wanted me to do, and why. And as he spoke in that creepy, metallic voice, I realized that even though I thought I’d stared in the face of the deepest, darkest evil the world could possibly produce, I had never encountered anyone as vile. I came away thinking I’d have to scrape the bowels of hell with a fine-tooth comb to uncover a plan as morbidly evil as his.

I told him I’d do it.

4

“Before you meet them, you need to see them,” Kathleen Gray said as she signed me in. “They do this for the children, so they won’t see you cry or recoil in horror,” she added.

The William and Randolph Hearst Burn Center at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell is the largest and busiest burn center in the country, entrusted with treating more than a thousand children each year. I got that and a bunch of other information from a brochure in the lobby while waiting for Ken Chapman’s ex to show up. I had called her at work and explained I needed to meet her in person before I could consider approving her house loan.

“Bullshit!” she had said. “You’re the guy from Homeland Security who called me yesterday. Don’t bother denying it; I recognize your voice.”

Nevertheless, Kathleen agreed to meet me after work at the burn center, where she volunteered two hours of her time every Tuesday. She escorted me through the lobby door and down a long hallway.

“What made you decide to work with burn victims?” I said.

“After my divorce, all I wanted was to get out of Charleston and make new friends, so I moved here and got a job. But I didn’t know anyone. Then one day my company offered tickets for a charity event, and I took one just to have someplace to go, thinking maybe I’d meet someone.”

“And?”

“And here you are!” She burst out laughing. “Well, you’re a liar, of course, but at least you’re good-looking. And everything about you screams ‘single guy!’”

We turned left and headed down another hallway. Several corridors ran off that one, and I tried to keep up with the route we’d taken in case I had to navigate back on my own. Doctors and nurses came and went, walking with purpose. A short, pudgy nurse in a light blue lab coat winked at Kathleen and made kissing sounds as she passed. We walked a few steps, and I cocked my head and said, “I bet there’s a story there!”

“Oh, hush, you!” she said.

I raised my eyebrows, and she started giggling.

“Don’t even,” she said.

I didn’t. “What makes you think I’m single?” I asked.

She laughed. “Oh, please!”

We passed a window. The sky was darkening outside, and the gusting wind made a light buzzing sound as it attacked the weaker portions of the window frame. Kathleen had entered the hospital wearing a heavy cloth overcoat that she now removed and hung on a wooden peg by the outer ward doors. She pushed a silver circle on the wall and the doors flew open.

“I didn’t meet anyone special at the fundraiser,” she said, “but I was touched by the video presentation. That night, I read the brochure from cover to cover and got hooked.”

“So you just showed up and they put you to work?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Until that point, my life had been in a downward spiral. I’d felt sorry for myself, victimized, after the whole Ken thing. Then I met the burn kids and I was humbled by their optimism and their passion to survive.”

“Sounds like you found a home.”

She smiled. “Yes, that’s it exactly. I made an instant decision that changed my life.”

“And now you come here every Tuesday?”

“Yup. Every Tuesday after work for two hours.”

Kathleen picked up a clipboard. While she studied it, I took the opportunity to study her face and figure. I had come here expecting to find a timid, broken woman, but Kathleen’s divorce obviously agreed with her. She was attractive, with large eyes and honey colored hair that stopped an inch above her shoulders. I took her for a natural blond because she wore her hair parted in the middle and I couldn’t detect any dark roots. High on her forehead, just beneath her hairline, I could make out a light dusting of freckles. She had a few more freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose as well. Her body was gym tight, and she had a friendly, easygoing manner that revealed nothing of the difficult past I had witnessed in the police photos. Her voice was unique. You could get caught up in it, especially when she spoke about her volunteer work. We were about to enter the burn center treatment area, and despite my concerns about what might lie beyond the next set of doors, I found myself hanging on her every word.

“The pain these children live with daily is something you and I will never encounter or comprehend,” she said. “And the toddlers, oh my God, you can’t help but burst into tears the first time you see them. It’s best to see them through a one-way mirror before you meet them because the worst thing you can do is let them see your pity. It erodes their self-confidence and reinforces the fear that they’re monsters, unfit for society.”

I admired her character, but the last thing I felt like doing was looking at severely burned children. Kathleen sensed it and said, “If you want to talk to me about Ken, you’ll have to participate.”

“Why is it so important to you that I do this?” I said.

“Because even though you look like a thug, who’s to say you won’t turn out to be the person who winds up making a difference?”

“Let’s assume I’m not that person. Then what?”

“If you really are with Homeland Security, I’m guessing you spend most of your time distrusting people. I can think of worse things than exposing you to some wonderful children who deserve compassion, friendship, and encouragement.”

“Friendship?” I said.

Kathleen smiled. “Could happen,” she said. “And if it does, it will change two lives: theirs and yours.”

“But …”

Just keep an open mind,” she said.

Kathleen escorted me through the double doors and into a viewing room that put me in mind of the ones in police stations—only instead of overlooking an interrogation room, the burn center viewing room overlooked a play area. She asked if I was ready. I took a deep breath and nodded, and she pulled the curtain open.

There were a half-dozen kids in the play area. We watched them interact with toys and each other for several minutes, and at some point, I turned and caught her staring at me. I don’t know what Kathleen Gray saw in my face that evening, but whatever it was, it seemed to delight her.

“Why, Donovan,” she said. “You’re a natural!”

I assumed she was referring to my casual reaction to the kids’ severe disfigurement. Of course, Kathleen had no way of knowing that my profession had a lot to do with it, not to mention my close friendship with Augustus Quinn, a man whose face was singularly horrific and far more frightening than anything going on in the playroom.

Kathleen took me by the wrist and said, “All righty then. Let’s meet them.”

I have a soft spot for children and rarely find it necessary to kill them. That being said, in general I’m uncomfortable around kids and expect I come across rather stiff and imposing.

These kids were different. They were happy to see me. Or maybe they were just happy to see anyone new. They giggled more than I would have expected, and they seemed fascinated by my face, especially the angry scar that runs from the side of my cheek to the middle of my neck. All six of them traced it with their fingers. They were truly amazing, all of them.

But of course, there was one in particular.

Addie was six years old. She was covered in bandages and glossy material the color of lemon rind. She smelled not of Jolly Ranchers or bubblegum but soured hydrocolloid.

I knew what I was seeing.

According to something I’d read in the waiting room, fourth-degree burns affect the tissues beneath the deepest layers of skin, including muscles, tendons, and bones. This, then, was Addie.

Except for the eyes. Her eyes were unharmed, huge and expressive.

Though relatives were told that Addie and her twin sister Maddie would not survive the initial treatment, amazingly they did. They were ordinary kids who should have been running around in a yard somewhere, playing chase or tag, but sometimes life deals you a shit hand. Around noon the second day, while Addie stabilized, Maddie took a turn for the worse. She alternately faltered and rallied all afternoon as a team of heroes worked on her, refusing to let her die. Kathleen wasn’t there but she heard about it, what a special, brave child Maddie was.

In the end, her fragile body failed her. A nurse said it was the first time she’d seen a particular doctor cry, and when he began bawling, it caused the rest of the team to lose it. They were all touched and personally affected by the fight in these little twins, these tiny angels. They said they’d never seen anyone quite like them and didn’t expect to ever again.

“Want to see the picture I drawed?” Addie asked.

I looked at Kathleen. She nodded.

“I’d like that,” I said.

Before showing it to me, Addie wanted to say something. “All the camera pictures of me and Maddie got rooned in the fire, so I drawed a picture of Maddie so all my new friends could see what we looked like before we got burned up.”

She handed me a crayon drawing of a girl’s face.

“That’s Maddie,” she said. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”

I couldn’t trust myself to speak so I just nodded.

When we left the burn unit, Kathleen said, “I love them all, but Addie’s the one who got me praying.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

Kathleen took a deep breath before speaking. “About two weeks ago, Addie’s house caught on fire. Her parents, Greg and Melanie, died in the fire while trying to save the girls’ lives.”

“Addie was able to talk about it?”

Kathleen nodded. “There was also the 911 call Melanie made.

Apparently she got trapped downstairs. Greg made it to the girls’ room and put wet towels over their faces to keep them alive until the firefighters arrived.”

“Smart guy to think about the towels,” I said.

“Addie originally thought the wet towels flew into the room by themselves. When they explained her mom threw them, her face lit up. Until that moment, she thought her mom had run away.”

We were both silent awhile.

“There was a lot of love in that marriage,” I said.

Kathleen said, “I haven’t experienced it personally, but I’ve always believed that during the course of a good marriage, especially when children are involved, husbands and wives often perform random acts of heroism that go largely unnoticed by the general public.”

“And in a great marriage,” I said, “when one spouse goes down, the other takes up the slack.”

Kathleen gave me a look that might have been curiosity, might have been affection.

“You surprise me, Creed.”

5

“These little bombs weigh in at 490 calories,” Kathleen Gray said.

I glanced at the paltry square.

“That number seems high,” I said.

“Trust me,” she said. “I used to work at the one in Charleston.”

It was 7:45 pm and we were in Starbucks on Third and East Sixty-Sixth. Neither of us had much of an appetite, but Kathleen said she always treated herself to a raspberry scone after spending time at the burn center. She took a bite.

“Yum,” she said. “Technically, it’s a raspberry apricot thumbprint scone.” She cocked her head and appraised me.

“You sure you don’t want to try one?”

I didn’t and told her so. “Plus there’s the other thing,” I said.

“What other thing?”

“The acronym for it is RATS,” I said.

She studied me a moment, a faint smile playing about her lips. I saw them move ever-so-slightly as she performed the mental calculation.

“You’re an odd duck,” she said. “You know that, right?”

I sipped my coffee and made a note of the fact that I had now met three of Ken Chapman’s women, and two of them had commented on my strangeness on successive days. The third of Chapman’s women was my ex-wife, Janet, and her opinion of me was beyond repair.

Someone pushed open the front door, and a rush of wind blew some rain in, lowering the temperature by ten degrees. Or so it seemed. Something behind us caught Kathleen’s eye and she giggled.

“The barista was talking to someone and pointing at you,” she said. “I think it has something to do with the venti.”

I frowned and shook my head in disgust. “Barista,” I said.

Kathleen giggled harder. She scrunched her face into a pout.

“You’re such a grump!” she said.

“Well, it’s ridiculous,” I said.

She broke into a bubbly laugh. I continued my rant.

“These trendy restaurants, they’re all so pretentious! Just yesterday I saw a guy nearly die from eating some kind of exotic Japanese dish. And here,” I gestured toward the coffee-making apparatus, “you have to learn a whole new friggin’ language in order to justify spending four bucks for a cup of Joe.”

She laughed harder. “Joe? Oh, my God, did you just say Joe? Tell me you just climbed out of a forties time machine.”

I think she liked saying the word “Joe,” because she said it two more times while laughing uncontrollably.

The other customers glanced at us, but I wasn’t finished yet.

“Grande,” I said. “Solo. Venti. Doppio. What the hell is doppio, anyway—one of the seven dwarfs?”

“No,” she squealed. “But Grumpy is!” Kathleen’s laughter had passed the point of no return. Her cheeks were puffy, and her eyes had become slits.

I frowned again and recited the conversation for her. “All I said was, ‘I’ll have a coffee.’ ‘What size?’ she says. ‘A regular,’ I said. ‘We have grande, venti, solo, doppio, short, and tall,’ she says. ‘Four hundred ninety calories,’ you say. It’s a flippin’ two-inch square!”

Kathleen gripped the sides of the table. “Stop it!” she said. “You’re going to make me pee!”

When her last bubble of laughter died down, she told me it felt good to laugh after two hours with the kids. I understood what she meant. Bad as her life had been with Ken, she still managed to feel guilty that she had it so good by comparison.

I said, “I hate to end the party, but I need to ask you a few questions about Ken Chapman.”

She frowned. “Just when we were having such a good time.”

“I know.”

“I really hate to talk about it,” she said.

“I know.”

She looked at me and sighed. “Okay, Homeland. You put in your time. What would you like to know?”

For the better part of an hour, we talked about her marriage to Ken Chapman. It was hard on her, and by the time she dropped me off at my hotel, I could see she was emotionally drained. I didn’t ask her to join me for a nightcap, and she didn’t offer to, though she asked if I wanted to get together the next day.

“Tomorrow’s Valentine’s, you know,” she said.

I told her I had to meet someone, which was true. In fact, I said, I had to pack my overnight bag and head back to the airport that very night—also true. She nodded in an absentminded way as though this were something she’d heard before, something she expected me to say.

What I didn’t tell her: I had contracted to kill someone the next morning. What I did tell her: “I’m flying back tomorrow after my meeting to take you someplace special for dinner.” When I said that, her face lit up like a kid at Christmas and she gave me a big hug.

Then I said, “I’ll call you at work tomorrow just before noon and we can work out the details.”

An hour and change later, I was settling into my seat on the Citation. Ten minutes after that, I was sleeping soundly. But just before falling asleep, I thought Kathleen Gray had to be the nicest human being I’d ever met.

6

Monica Childers didn’t want to die.

It was just past daybreak, Valentine’s Day, and we were north of Jacksonville, Florida, at the Amelia Island Plantation resort. Callie had positioned herself near the ninth tee box, where the main road intersected the cart path.

Monica was no terrorist or threat to national security, but I had already agreed to kill her, so here we were. These freelance contracts meant money in my pocket. Although it’s noble to pretend my fulltime job is killing suspected terrorists for the government, they pay me with resources, not cash. Of course, the resources are supposed to be used exclusively for monitoring or tracking terrorists. But Darwin, my government facilitator, knows full well how I earn my living. He rarely complains because killing civilians during the down times keeps me focused and sharp. At least that’s what he believes.

Darwin provides me with unparalleled clout. A simple call from him and doors get opened, legal procedures become irrelevant, and no turns magically to yes. While I’m very good with my own crime scenes, there’s always a random element to taking lives. On the rare occasions when something goes wrong, Darwin can be counted on to dispatch a crew to remove a body, clean a crime scene, or cover my tracks. He even controls a secret branch of the government that provides me and my crew with body doubles. Of course, the body doubles don’t know they’re working for us, but they remain safe until we need them. Darwin sees to that. He has a group of people who secretly protect them. I myself protected one of the body doubles the first year after leaving the CIA. I’ll probably do it again if I get bored in my retirement years. Listen to me: retirement years, what a laugh!

About 70 percent of my income had been coming through Sal Bonadello, the crime boss. Most of the rest came from testing weapons for the army. But now Victor Wheelchair had entered my life with what he said would be a lifetime of contracts—contracts so simple to fulfill, a rookie could do them. My typical hit involved high-profile targets and often required days, sometimes weeks, of planning. By contrast, the types of hits Victor needed could be planned and executed in a matter of hours. I’d have to be careful not to over-think them.

Victor said Monica had done nothing wrong and wanted to know if that was a problem for me. I said, “She’s obviously guilty of something or you wouldn’t want her dead. That’s good enough for me.”

Something in my comment struck a chord that resonated with the metal-voiced weasel, and he asked me to “E … la … borate.” I explained, “We who kill people for a living avoid making personal judgments about our targets. In Monica’s case, I’m not her attorney. Not her judge. Not her jury. I’m not being paid to determine her innocence. I’m being paid to render justice. Whether it’s you, Sal, Homeland, or Captain Kangaroo, all I need to know is that someone, somewhere, has found Monica Childers guilty of something and sentenced her to death. My job is to carry out the execution.”

Victor told me where to find Monica and how he wanted her to die. He said she ran at daybreak every morning and would do so even while on vacation at Amelia Island Plantation. So Callie waited for Monica by the ninth tee box, decked out in the latest dri-fit Nike athletic apparel. To complete the ensemble, she wore custom running shoes and a high-tech runner’s watch. When she heard Monica coming her way, she started running and timed her approach to hit the intersection a few seconds after Monica passed. The two ladies noticed each other and nodded. Callie rounded the corner, increased her speed, and fell into step with Monica.

“Mind if I run with you?” Callie asked.

Monica pressed her lips into a tight frown. “As you can see, I’m not very fast.”

“Actually, you are!” Callie said. “I had to sprint like a boiled owl to catch you!”

Monica wrinkled her nose. “Boiled owl? I hope no actual event occurred to inspire such an expression!”

Callie giggled. “Oh my God, I hope so, too!”

Monica smiled in spite of herself.

“In any case,” Callie said, “this is a good pace for me. Plus, I hate running alone, especially when I don’t know the area.”

That was all it took to form a runner’s bond: two very pretty, fashionable ladies who shared a passion for running. I imagined them jogging fluidly over the plantation road, the cadence of their stride adding a human counterpoint to the morning sounds of the island’s bird and insect population.

Monica cast an envious glance at her running mate. “You have perfect legs!” she said.

Callie, caught a bit off guard, responded, “What a nice thing to say!”

Monica flashed a friendly smile and said, “You’re a model, right? I could grow to hate you!” After laughing, she added, “Are you staying at the plantation?”

Callie said, “We—my husband and I—checked in late last night.”

“You always run this early?”

“Not really. But my in-laws are arriving soon and I want to get in a few miles before they do.” The way she drew out the word “in-laws” made Monica smile.

“Oh God,” Monica said. “The in-laws.”

“Exactly!” Callie said. “By the way, I’m Callie Carpenter.”

“Hi, Callie. I’m Monica Childers.”

They exited the resort and turned left onto A1A. Looking down the highway a bit, Monica said, “Let’s avoid the van. It shouldn’t be there.”

Callie agreed.

They were about to head the opposite way when Callie said, “Oh my God! That’s my in-laws!” She sighed. “Oh well, so much for my run!”

Monica slowed. “Let’s try again tomorrow.”

“Come with me!” Callie suddenly blurted out, her eyes twinkling. “I want to introduce you. It’ll just take a sec, and you’ll be speeding down the road again in no time!”

As we planned, Callie ran ahead without giving Monica time to reply. Monica barely knew this girl and certainly wouldn’t want to stop her run to meet the in-laws. But she also wouldn’t want to appear rude, so we counted on her to follow Callie to the van.

And she did.

As the girls approached, I slid the side door of the van open and stepped out, smiling broadly. I’d dressed in what I considered to be coastal casual, a white, spread-collar dress shirt and tan linen slacks with matching Italian loafers. When I picked Callie up that morning, she had pointed at me and laughed a full minute. Even now, I saw her smirking at my choice of attire.

While waiting to be introduced, Monica ran her fingers through her fashionably short black hair. Though I knew her to be forty-one, she looked years younger. She was in excellent shape, with deep, expressive eyes and a willowy frame that boasted a set of Park Avenue’s finest implants. I wouldn’t classify her as stunning, but she was certainly pretty, possibly even striking for her age. She would probably hate to hear a man add the words “for her age” when describing her looks, but things were what they were.

Callie made the introductions, saying, “Donovan’s handsome, isn’t he! Check out that engaging smile and those penetrating, jade green eyes.”

“Oh please,” I said, rolling my penetrating, jade green eyes.

Monica smiled politely. As far as I was concerned, Callie could step back and let me take it from there, but she was on a roll. “And that outfit,” Callie said, winking at me, “very stylish.” Then she said, “Monica, what would you call that look?”

Monica smiled. “Umm … continental?”

“Coastal casual,” I said.

Monica was itching to get back to her run, but she returned my smile. “Hello, Donovan,” she said, extending her hand.

I took her hand in mine and made a slow, exaggerated bow as if intending to kiss it. Callie started to giggle, and Monica glanced at her and blushed. Monica seemed to want to say something, but I increased the pressure on her hand and suddenly everything in her world turned crazy. Monica gasped and tried to pull away, but I shifted my weight and clamped my other hand on her upper arm. Before her mind could process what was happening, I hurled her into the van with such force her body crashed into the far wall and rebounded to the floor.

Wide-eyed, terror-struck, Monica scrambled for the door. But I was already in the van, blocking her escape. Stunned mute by the sudden explosion of violence, Monica tried to scream. My hand was already at her throat, and the pressure was so intense she couldn’t achieve more than a squeak.

Monica’s eyes frantically searched for Callie. What was going on here, she must have wondered. Why wasn’t Callie helping her?

I pushed Monica’s head against the exposed metal floorboard with my left hand and slid the van door shut with my right. She tried to wriggle out of my grasp, so I applied more pressure to hold her in place. I heard something crunch and guessed it was the cartilage in her ear. Cartilage or not, it seemed to take the fight out of her. Monica’s chest heaved, and her breath came in quick bursts, like a child gasping after a hard cry. She let out a low moan like a terrified animal caught in a trap: too frightened to scream, too disoriented to react.

She must have heard the engine turn over, must have felt the van jerk into gear. Somewhere in the part of her brain that was still functioning, a puzzle piece fell into place. I know because I saw it register on Monica’s face: Callie was driving the van, and there would be no escape.

Something worked its way up her throat and triggered her gag reflex. A mixture of drool, nose fluid, and blood collected at her chin and hung like a thick strand of rope. Victor would be proud to see how far Monica had fallen in such a short period of time. As if on cue, her tears began flowing freely. She whimpered in a little girl’s voice, “Please, please stop! You’re hurting me! You’re hurting me! Please! Let me go!”

Callie scanned the highway and checked the rearview mirror before slowing the van. She made a sharp left onto the meager trail we’d cased earlier. As she worked the van into the thicket, scrubby pine boughs and overgrown bushes and vines parted before us and instantly closed behind us, effectively swallowing us up. Callie pushed us in about a hundred yards, then, with great effort, turned the van around, pointed it back toward the highway, and put it in park.

“We’re good,” Callie said. She kept the engine running so the heater could work. Then she turned halfway around in the seat to watch.

“Monica,” I said, “I’m going to let you sit up now if you promise not to scream.”

She nodded as best she could, and I helped her get to a sitting position. She glared at Callie. Callie shrugged and mouthed, “Sorry,” then handed me some tissue to pass to her former friend. We watched Monica dab at her face until she’d got it as presentable as it was going to get under the circumstances. She tentatively touched some tissue to her ear. She winced and lowered her hand to inspect the blood. There wasn’t much on the tissue, but it was enough to cause some more tears to well up in her eyes. When she blinked, most of them got caught up in her eyelashes and only a few wound up tracing down her cheek. I’d been watching her all this time, waiting for her to catch her breath, maybe relax a bit. It seemed to be working. I think she was finding some hope to cling to. After all, why would we bother with tissue if we intended to kill her, right?

I called Victor. “She’s ready to talk,” I said. I handed the phone to Monica, and Callie and I climbed out of the van and closed the doors behind us.

“Did you see the look on her face when you handed her the phone?” Callie said.

I nodded. It was a look I couldn’t easily describe: a mixture of shock, confusion, hope, fear. This whole experience had been a first for me.

“You think she’ll try to lock us out?” Callie said.

“I doubt it. She knows she can’t get to the front seat faster than we can open the door.”

Callie nodded. We watched the poor soul holding the phone to her good ear, straining to understand the clipped, metallic voice at the other end of the line. I knew the feeling.

“How are you coming with the body double?”

“The one for you?” I asked. “I’m still working on it.”

Callie laughed. “I’ll bet you are.”

“Not easy finding a nice, sweet librarian looks like you.”

“Librarian, huh?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Your last ‘librarian’ was Fifi the French whore. Had a tattoo on her pussy that said, ‘Read My Lips!’”

I smiled at the thought. “Fifi’s right, but I don’t remember her calling herself ‘the French whore.’”

Callie frowned. “It’s a librarian expression. But she wasn’t the first hooker librarian with a crotch tat. Do you even remember the name of that other one?”

I did. Constance would have been a perfect body double for Callie … except for the crotch tat that said, “Is it hot in here or is it just me?”

“I think I deserve more credit,” I said. “It’s not easy finding a body double for you. Not to mention the detailed inspections I have to make, you being so fussy about tattoos and such.”

“Yeah, well I agree that when it comes to hookers, you put everything you have into your work.”

Inside the van, tucked against the far corner, Monica had pulled her knees up to her chest. Tears streaked her cheeks, and her mouth formed words I couldn’t hear. She seemed to listen for a while and then she started crying softly.

“What do you think he’s saying to her?” Callie said.

I had no idea and hated myself for caring.

“This next body double,” Callie said. “Does she have a tattoo?”

“Jenine? I don’t know yet.”

“But you’re itching to find out.”

“My devotion to detail is legendary,” I said. “Timeless.”

“So is the clap,” Callie said.

Monica looked up at me through the window and nodded, and I opened the door. I heard her thank Victor and wondered what that meant. She handed the phone back to me. I put it to my ear.

“Creed,” I said.

“You know … what … to do,” Victor said.

7

I did know what to do, but I was curious about a couple of things. I asked Monica if she knew Victor.

“I know of him,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“Through my husband.”

I nodded. So Victor was killing her to punish the husband. At least that made some sense. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, though. Questions lead to answers, and answers lead to doubt, and doubt will ruin a good contract killer. I looked at Callie. She was about to explode, she wanted to know so badly.

“Tell me about Victor,” I said.

“I can’t. If I tell you, you’ll kill me.”

Callie and I exchanged a look. Callie couldn’t hold it back any longer; she had to speak. “This Victor guy, you’re saying he told you we’d let you go if you kept quiet about your conversation with him?”

Monica looked confused. “Is this a trick question?”

Callie looked at me in disbelief. “What a twisted fuck.”

“Hey, watch it,” I said. “You’re talking about our employer.”

We all sat there looking at each other for a minute. I could have forced it out of her, but I didn’t want to torture her. I could have threatened her into telling me, but that would require giving her false hope, and that didn’t feel right to me somehow. I decided to let the motive slide.

“Okay, Monica,” I said. “You didn’t tell us anything about your conversation with Victor or about your connection to him, so you did well. I won’t ask you again. But tell me this: why is his voice so weird?”

“He’s a quadriplegic.”

I nodded. “Still,” I said, “it’s eerier than that. There’s more to it.”

Monica was loosening up now, convinced she was about to be released. She had stopped crying, and her voice was steadier. She seemed encouraged. “It’s probably because he’s so young,” she said, “and a midget.”

Callie and I looked at each other. I said, “Midget?”

Monica gasped. “Little person,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”

Callie asked, “Young? How young?”

Monica looked at me before speaking. “I don’t know,” she said. “Early twenties?”

“Your husband must have done something terrible to make Victor this angry,” I said.

She nodded. “He saved Victor’s life,” she said.

8

I gently lowered Monica’s head back to the floor and held it there. I stroked her hair a couple of times to help calm her. And she was calm … until she caught sight of the syringe in my free hand. At that point, her eyes grew wide with terror. She started thrashing around in the van. Then she lost control of her bladder. Too frightened to care, she peed explosively. I heard it strain against her clothing, burbling hot against her crotch, down her thigh. Because of our close proximity, she managed to drench my pants leg in the process. I looked over at Callie, exasperated.

“Believe me, Donovan,” she said, “that can only improve your ‘coastal casual’ look.”

I frowned and loosened my grip ever so slightly—but just enough—and this time Monica’s scream was loud and piercing. Of course, it had no effect out there in the middle of nowhere. I got her back under control, parted her hair, and pricked the side of her scalp with the tip of the syringe. A few minutes later, I slid open the side door and pushed Monica out. Her body tumbled into a thicket and skidded to a stop. She staggered to her feet and managed to walk a few shaky steps before falling down to stay.

Callie put the van in gear and steered it carefully through the underbrush and back onto the highway. She kept to the speed limit, drove south, and put the crime scene behind us.

“A real fighter, that one,” I said, making my way to the front passenger seat. “She impressed me just now, the way she got to her feet.”

Callie nodded.

The van’s tires thrummed rhythmically over the patchy road tar. We passed a golf course on the right and an ambitious condo development on the left, which appeared to be unfinished and abandoned. The few residential community entrances we passed were camouflaged by foliage so dense and overgrown, even in February, I had to wonder what sort of people would pay these astronomical prices to live a half mile from the beach, among the spiders and mosquitoes, without benefit of an ocean view.

“She had gorgeous hair,” I said.

“Very stylish,” Callie agreed. “And classy.” She paused a minute before asking, “How long you think before someone finds her?”

“This close to the plantation? Probably two days.”

“You think they’ll notice the needle mark on the scalp?”

“What are we, CSI? I doubt the ME will notice it.”

“Because?”

“I put it in one of her head wounds.”

Callie thought about that and said, “She must have hit the wall head first when you threw her in the van.”

“That’d be my guess,” I said.

We rode in silence awhile, content to watch the scenery unfold. We were on A1A, south of Amelia Island, where the two-lane road cuts a straight swath through the undeveloped scrub and marsh for fifteen miles. There was a primal element to this stretch of land that seemed to discourage the rampant commercialization running almost nonstop from Jacksonville to South Beach. A couple miles in, we passed three crosses and a crude, homemade sign that proclaimed “Jesus Died For Your Sins!”

“Monica seemed nice,” Callie said. “A little snooty, but that could be the money. Or the age difference. Still, I liked her. She had great manners.”

I laughed. “Manners?”

“She had a premonition about the van,” Callie said. “But she didn’t want to offend me, so she came anyway.”

I tried the sound of it in my mouth. “She was killed because of her good manners.”

“I liked her,” Callie repeated.

“I liked her, too,” I said, “until she peed on me!”

I placed two bundles of cash in Callie’s lap. She picked one up, felt the weight in her hand.

“I like this even better,” she said.

We dropped the van off behind an abandoned barn a couple miles beyond the ferry boat landing. We removed the explosives from the wheel well in Callie’s rental car and positioned them throughout the van.

“How much you have to pay for this thing?” Callie asked.

“Four grand,” I said. “Not me, though. Victor.” Right on cue, my phone rang.

“Is it …fin … ished?” Victor asked.

“Just a sec,” I said. I climbed in the passenger seat, and Callie drove us a quarter mile before putting the rental car in park.

“Are we far enough away?” I asked.

“If we go too far,” she said, “we’ll miss the fun part.”

She got out of the car and dialed a number on her phone and the van exploded in the distance. Callie remained out of the car until she felt the wind from the explosion wash lightly over her face.

“You’re insane,” I said to Callie.

“It’s done,” I said to Victor.

Victor said, “Good. I … have … two more … jobs … for you.”

“Already?” I retrieved a small notebook and pen from my duffel and wrote down the information. The names, ages, occupations, and addresses were so different, it seemed as though they’d been plucked out of thin air. I asked Victor, “Do you even know these people?”

“All … part … of a … master … plan,” he said. I covered the mouthpiece and said to Callie, “I take back what I said before, about you being insane.” Then I said to Victor, “Are there many more?”

“Many,” Victor said in his weird, metallic voice. “Real … ly … Mr.

… Creed … evil is … every … where … and … must … be pun… ished.”

9

“I must see the Picasso,” Kathleen said.

“Then you shall,” I said.

“And the maître d’,” she said. “They have one, right?”

“They do indeed.”

“Is he stuffy? I hope he’s insufferably stuffy!”

“He will be if I don’t tip him,” I said. We were in the Seagram Building on East Fifty-Second, in the lobby of the Four Seasons restaurant.

She touched my arm. “Donovan, this is really sweet of you, but we don’t have to eat here. I don’t want you to spend this much on me. Let’s just have a drink, see the painting and maybe the marble pool. We can share a pizza at Angelo’s afterward.”

“Relax,” I said. “I’m rich.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

The Four Seasons is famous, timeless, and the only restaurant in New York designated as a landmark.

“Do you mean really, you’re rich,” she said, “or that you’re really rich?”

“I’m rich enough to buy you whatever you’d like to have tonight.”

She laughed. “In that case, I’ll have the Picasso!”

Did I mention I liked this lady?

I gave my name to the maître d’ and led Kathleen to the corridor where the Picasso tapestry had hung since the restaurant opened back in 1959. The twenty-two-foot-high Picasso was in fact the center square of a stage curtain that had been designed for the 1920 Paris production of The Three Cornered Hat. When the theater owner ran out of money, he cut the Picasso portion from the curtain and sold it. Now, with the economy in distress, Kathleen had heard the tapestry was about to be auctioned for an estimated eight million dollars. This might be her only chance to see it.

“Oh my God!” she said, her voice suddenly turning husky. “I love it!”

“Compared to his other work, the colors are muted,” I said. “But yeah, it’s pretty magnificent.”

“Tell me about it,” she said. “Impress me.”

“It’s a distemper on linen,” I said.

“Distemper? Like the disease a dog gets?”

“Exactly like that.”

She gave me a look. “Bullshit!”

“Well, it’s spelled the same way. Actually, it refers to using gum or glue as a binding element.”

She made a snoring sound. “Boring,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, “forget that part. Here’s what you want to know: Picasso laid the canvas on the floor and painted it with a brush attached to a broom handle. He used a toothbrush for the detailed work.”

Kathleen clapped her hands together. “More!” she said.

“It took three weeks to paint.”

She looked at me expectantly.

“He wore carpet slippers so he wouldn’t smudge the paint.”

I struggled to remember what else I’d read about the thing. I shrugged. “That’s all I’ve got,” I said.

Kathleen smiled and nudged up against me. “You did well,” she said.

We had a drink at the bar. Among the small crowd waiting for tables, Kathleen spotted Woody Allen, Barbara Streisand, and Billy Joel. I said, “See those two guys by the palm frond? That’s Millard Fillmore and Jackie Gleason!”

She sniffed. “At least the famous New Yorkers I’m lying about are still alive.”

A number of seasonal trees surrounded the white marble pool in the main dining room, and the head waiter sat us beneath one of them. Spun-metal curtains hung in rows against the walls, undulating softly as the air flow from the vents teased them.

“This is fantastic,” she said, looking around the room. “Everything is so elegant, especially the breathing curtains!”

“Especially those,” I said.

I tossed back a shot of bourbon and watched Kathleen sip her pomegranate martini. The waiter had brought us drinks and given us time to study the menus. Now he returned, ready to take our order.

“Of course I’ve never been here before,” Kathleen said, “so you’ll have to order for me.”

I nodded. “We’ll start with the crispy shrimp,” I said.

“Oops. No shellfish,” Kathleen said.

“Sorry,” I said. “How about the foie gras?”

“Goose liver pate?” she said. “Ugh!”

“Peppered quail?”

“Sorry,” she said. “Meat product.”

“Perhaps you should just pick something,” I said. She may have detected some annoyance in my voice.

Kathleen burst into a hearty laugh. “I’m just messing with you, Donny. I’d love some crispy shrimp.”

The waiter and I exchanged a glance.

“She might very possibly be insane,” I said, and Kathleen laughed some more.

Then she told the waiter, “Watch out for this one. He’s very grumpy in restaurants.”

The waiter left to place our order.

“Donny?” I said. I huffed a bit, and she placed her hand on mine.

“Okay, I won’t call you Donny,” she said. “But if we’re going to start seeing each other, I’m going to want a pet name for you.”

We looked at each other, and I rotated my palm so I could hold her hand. She cocked her head slightly and raised an eyebrow.

I said, “I have to admit there’s something special about you … Pablo!”

“Oh, God,” she said and laughed some more. “Okay then, no nicknames!”

I tried to remember the last time Janet and I shared a laugh.

“Something about me,” Kathleen repeated. Her eyes hinted amusement. She winked at me and sipped her cocktail. “Mmm,” she said. She touched the napkin to her mouth. You could add up all her looks and mannerisms and never total gorgeous, but you’d get to adorable pretty quick, and that was enough for me. Hell, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Ask me.”

“Ask you what?”

“Something’s bothering you. I can see it in your eyes.”

She twitched her mouth to one side and held it there, a sort of half-frown. “I don’t want to ruin the moment,” she said.

“The moment will survive.”

“Okay then, brace yourself.”

I took my hand away from hers and grabbed both sides of the table and pretended to hold on tight. “Let ’er rip!” I said.

She took a deep breath. “Last night at Starbucks, you told me about Janet and Ken dating. You were worried about his temper, what he might do to her if they decide to get married.”

I kept quiet.

“Do you still love her?” she asked.

“No. But I don’t want my daughter’s mother to marry a wife beater.” She made a face, and I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you.”

Kathleen was wearing the same cloth coat she’d worn the night before. She’d been cold and hadn’t wanted to surrender it to the coat check girl downstairs. But now she stood and removed it and folded it over the back of her chair, revealing a white blouse, a tan faux suede skirt, and a wide brown belt with two gold buckles. She wore very little makeup, or maybe it hadn’t been freshened up in a while, since she’d come straight from work. It didn’t seem to make her uncomfortable the way most women would be. She sat back down and surprised me by taking my hand in hers and kissing it.

“I don’t wish him dead or anything,” she said. “But Ken is …” She sighed. “Ken is not a part of my life anymore. I mean, there’s not a day goes by I don’t think about him or the terrible things he did to me. But.” She paused and showed a bittersweet smile as the memories danced across her face. “There were some good times, too. In the beginning.”

I nodded.

Then she said, “I’ve heard he’s gotten treatment, and I’m glad. I hope he’s okay. I hope he finds peace.”

I nodded again.

I had already finalized a plan for handling the Ken and Janet situation, and now I realized I’d been right all along not to involve her in it.

We had a wonderful dinner, and afterward, my driver took us to her place and she invited me in. Home for Kathleen was a modest duplex cottage with faded green siding. Her side of the duplex had three rooms: a kitchen, living room, bedroom—and a bath. A small stack of books sat on one end of a threadbare couch in the living room. She picked up the books and stacked them on the coffee table so we’d have room to sit.

“I’m sorry it’s not nicer,” she said.

“Don’t be silly.”

“It’s just, everything is so expensive here.”

“It’s wonderful,” I said.

And to me it was. When I’m in Virginia, I sleep in a prison cell. When I’m anywhere else for more than a day or two, I generally break into the homes of strangers and sleep in their attics. Sometimes I’ll live in an attic for weeks at a time. By comparison, Kathleen’s duplex was a palace.

“I can offer you a gin and tonic, bottled water, a hot chocolate with skim milk,” she said, “or a diet coke.”

I asked, “Do you have an attic?”

“What a strange question,” she said.

“No, I just meant, there’s not a lot of room for storage.”

“I have half an attic and half a basement,” she said. “Does that win me some kind of prize?”

I placed my hand to her cheek, and we looked at each other. “Don’t ask me to show them to you,” she said. “The attic is totally junked up, and the basement has rats, I think.”

I asked if I could kiss her. She said, “Okay, but just once. And not a movie kiss,” she added.

10

“I’m not sure I appreciate your tone, Mr. Creed.”

“Why should you be the exception?” I said.

It was morning, a few minutes past eight. I was in the hospital coffee shop chatting with Addie’s Aunt Hazel.

“And just how is it you’re connected to Addie?”

“She’s my friend.”

After learning how special Addie was to Kathleen, I’d come to the hospital to check on her. During a discussion with one of the nurses, I learned that Addie’s father, Greg, had won ten million dollars in the New York State Lottery six months ago. I also learned that Hazel and Robert Hughes had originally planned to adopt their niece after her release from the hospital but had changed their minds after learning the money was gone. So when Aunt Hazel showed up, I ambushed her in the coffee shop.

“We’re not wealthy people, Mr. Creed,” Hazel had said. “Addie will require specialized care for the rest of her life, and yes, we were counting on the inheritance to provide it.”

“Perhaps your interest in Addie’s welfare extended only as far as the inheritance,” I’d said, and that’s when Aunt Hazel told me she didn’t appreciate my tone.

“What happened to the lottery money?” I asked.

“Greg used part of it to pay off the house, the cars, and credit cards. The balance, more than nine million, was placed in an annuity.”

I had a sudden revelation and immediately began experiencing a sick feeling in my stomach.

Hazel said, “The annuity was supposed to provide a huge monthly check for the rest of Greg and Melanie’s lives. But the way it was structured, the payments ended with their deaths.”

“Can you recall some of the specific provisions?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But the whole business sounds crooked to me.”

“Who can tell me?” I asked.

She eyed me suspiciously. “I suppose Greg’s attorney can give you details.”

She rummaged through her handbag and gave me the business card of one Garrett Unger, attorney at law. I put some money on the table to cover our coffees.

“I’ll have a talk with Unger and let you know if anything develops.”

“We can’t afford to pay you,” she said.

“Consider it a random act of kindness,” I said. “By the way, can you give me the address of the house? I may want to poke around a bit.”

“Now who are you, exactly?” she asked.

“Someone not to be trifled with,” I said.

Hazel gave me a look of concern, and I smiled. “That’s a line from a movie,” I said.

“Uh huh.”

“The Princess Bride,” I added.

“Well it doesn’t sound like a wedding movie to me,” she said. I pulled out my CIA creds and waited for her to ooh and ah. Instead, she frowned and said, “This looks like something you’d find in a five and dime.”

“What’s a five and dime?”

“Like a Woolworths.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. As I said, I’m a friend of Addie’s. I met her through Kathleen, one of the volunteers here. I want to help.”

“What’s in it for you?”

I sighed. “Fine, don’t tell me.” I took out my cell phone, called Lou. When he answered, I said, “There was a fire two weeks ago at the home of Greg and Melanie Dawes.” I spelled the last name for him. “Both adults died in the fire. Their twin girls were taken to the burn center at New York-Presbyterian. I need the address of the house that burned down. No, I’m not sure of the state. Try New York, first.” I got our waitress’s attention and asked her to bring me a pencil and paper. By the time she fetched them, I had the address. I hung up and smiled at Aunt Hazel.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Inigo Montoya.”

11

Valley road in Montclair, New Jersey, runs south from Garrett Mountain Reservation to Bloomfield Ave. Along the way, it borders the eastern boundary of Montclair State University’s sprawling campus. Coming west from NYC, you’re not supposed to see any of this on your way to the fire station, but if you make the wrong turn off the freeway like I did, you get to see the sights. While I was doing so, my cell phone rang. Salvatore Bonadello, the crime boss, was on the line.

“You still alive?” Sal said.

“You call this living,” I said. It was still morning, not quite ten. I’d left the coffee shop, and Aunt Hazel, less than two hours earlier.

“I been hearing some things,” he said. “You stepped on someone’s toes big time.” He waited for me to respond, playing out the moment.

“Joe DeMeo?” I said.

Sal paused, probably disappointed he hadn’t been the one to break the news. “You didn’t hear it from me,” he said.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of DeMeo,” I said. “Big, tough, hairy guy like you?” I turned left on Bloomfield, heading south east.

“I don’t gotta fear the man to respect the power. And I got—whatcha call—compelling evidence to respect it. Whaddya mean, hairy?”

“Figure of speech,” I said.

I hadn’t been certain that arson was involved in the Dawes’ house fire but figured if it was, DeMeo was responsible. The fact DeMeo knew I was looking into the fire confirmed my suspicions. Still, I was shocked at how quickly he’d gotten the word. “How long you think I have before the hairy knuckle guys show up?”

“You in someone’s attic or what?”

“Rental car.”

“Okay. You prob’ly got a couple hours. But I was you, I’d start checking the rearview anyway.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

“Just protectin’ my—whatcha call—asset.”

“DeMeo called you personally? He doesn’t know we’re doing business?”

Sal paused, weighing his words. “He knows.”

I was stuck in a line of cars at the intersection of Bloomfield and Pine, waiting for the light to change. I had nothing else to think about beyond Sal’s comment or I might have missed the clue. I kicked it around in my head a few seconds before it hit me. “DeMeo offered you a contract on me.”

“Let’s just say your next two jobs are—whatcha call—gratis.”

Two jobs? That meant … “You turned down a hundred grand?”

Sal laughed. “It ain’t love, so don’t get all wet about it. I just don’t have anyone—whatcha call—resourceful enough to take you outta the picture. Plus, where am I gonna get a contract killer good as you? Unless maybe that blond fox you use. You tell her about me yet?”

The light turned green, and I eased along with the traffic until I got to the curb cut. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

Sal said, “Wait! We got a deal on the contracts?”

“I’ll give you one free contract,” I said. “You already made fifty Gs giving my name to that homicidal midget.”

“Which one?”

“You know more than one homicidal midget? Vic … tor,” I said, imitating my newest client.

Sal laughed. “I met the little fuck. He’s got dreadlocks.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Long, nasty dreads, swear to Christ!”

We hung up, and I parked my Avis rental in one of the visitor’s parking slots and asked the guys out front where I could find Chief Blaunert. They directed me to the kitchen area of the station house. I walked in and asked the one guy sitting there if he happened to be the fire chief.

“Until October,” he said. “Then I’ll just be Bob, living on a houseboat in Seattle. You’re the insurance guy, right?”

I nodded. “Donovan Creed, State Farm.”

“Seattle’s cold this time of year,” he said, “but no worse than here. The wife has a brother, owns a marina up in Portage Bay near the university.”

From under the table, he positioned his foot against the seat of the chair across from him. His brown leather shoes were well-worn, but the soles were new. By way of invitation, he gestured toward the chair and used his foot to push it far enough away from the table for me to sit down. “Ever been there?” he asked. “Portage Bay?”

“Haven’t had the honor,” I said. I grabbed a Styrofoam cup from the stack near the sink and helped myself to some coffee from the machine.

“Well, some don’t like the rain, I guess. But to us, it’s as close to paradise as we’re likely to get.” The old Formica table in front of him had probably started out a bright shade of yellow before decades of food and coffee stains took their toll. I sat in the chair he’d slid out for me and tasted my coffee. It was bitter and burnt, which seemed fitting for fire house coffee.

“How’s the java?” he asked.

“Wouldn’t be polite to complain,” I said. “Of course, in seven months, you’ll have great coffee every day.”

He winked and gave me a thumbs-up. “You know it,” he said. “Seattle’s got a lot of nicknames, but Coffee Town’s the one I use.” He savored the thought a moment. “Course they’ve got Starbucks and Seattle’s Best. You probably don’t know Tully’s, but that’s a great coffee.”

We were both quiet a minute, two guys sipping bad coffee.

“You have much fire experience, Mr. Creed? Reason I ask, we weren’t expecting an insurance investigator.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Not ever?”

For the slightest moment, he seemed uneasy, but he adjusted quickly. “Not this soon, I meant.”

Chief Blaunert didn’t look much like a fire marshal. He looked more like the love child of Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus. He had white hair, a full white beard, and thick glasses with large, round frames. He also had an engaging smile and wore a wrinkled brown tweed suit over a white shirt and knit tie. All that was missing was a pipe and the comment, “Elementary, my dear Creed.”

Lou Kelly had set up the impromptu meeting while I picked up the rental car in West Manhattan. Lou had given Chief Blaunert my State Farm cover story, and Blaunert put Lou on hold a long time before agreeing to meet me. He said he was doing a field inspection at the Pine Road Station, but if I hurried, I could speak to him before the meeting. Finding him wearing a suit instead of his uniform, I doubted he was conducting an inspection. At the moment, I noticed he was eyeing me carefully.

“I’m more of a grunt than an arson investigator,” I said. “I interview the firemen, the neighbors, check the site. In the end, I tell the company if I think a fire’s accidental. Of course, even if I think it is, they’ll still want to send a forensic accountant to check the insured’s books, see if there’s any financial motive.”

Chief Blaunert nodded. “I wish I could save you the trouble,” he said, “but I know your company’s going to want a full report. Still, you can take my word for it—this fire was definitely an accident.”

“You checked it out yourself?”

“Had to, the media was all over it. Pitiful tragedy,” he said. “The whole family dead, all but one child, and she was burned beyond recognition.”

“No motive you’re aware of?”

Chief Blaunert’s face reddened. “Motive? You tell me the motive! What, they’re trying to screw your company out of a few hundred grand? They won the whole damned New York Lottery a few months back, ten million dollars!” He seemed genuinely upset by my question. “You think they’re going to torch their own home, kill their own kids?”

“No, sir, I don’t,” I said. “Truth be told, I’m just going through the motions. I’ll need to see the first firefighters on the scene, ask them a couple questions. I assume they’re here, this being the station that took the call.”

He stared at me until his anger subsided. When he finally spoke, his voice was clear and steady. “Yellow flame, gray smoke,” he said. “No suspicious people at the scene. No open windows. No sign of forced entry. No doors locked, no rooms blocked. Single point of origin, basement. No accelerants.”

“You definitely know the drill.”

“Ought to; I been doing it my whole life. You want, I can give you a couple names. You can say you interviewed ’em, take a quick peek at the scene, snap a few shots, and be back in Bloomington by dinner time.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “I’ll have to interview one or two neighbors, though.” He nodded, and I handed him the pen and spiral notebook I’d bought for the occasion. I’d also bought the camera sitting on the front seat of the rental car in case one of the firemen wanted to accompany me to the scene. Chief Blaunert wrote some names in the notebook.

“Three enough?”

“That should do it.”

He tore out a clean sheet from the notebook and wrote down my name. “Got a cell number?”

I gave it to him and thought about Sal’s warning. I could see where this was going.

“Need an escort over there?”

“Naw, it’s only a few blocks,” I said. “I’ll get out of here and let you get on with your inspection.” I stood up, reached over to shake his hand. He hesitated, deciding whether to say something else.

“As to the neighbors,” he said, “my guys were on the scene in four minutes twenty after the call was logged. You can check it out: four twenty.” He stared at me through serious eyes.

“That’s really quick,” I said, just to fill the silence.

“It was after midnight,” he said, “darker than a closet in a coal mine. We set up a perimeter, pushed the neighbors back pretty far. They won’t be able to tell you anything different that’s reliable.”

“Chief, no worries. We’re going to pay this claim. That little girl’s been through enough. Meanwhile, you’ve saved me some time and trouble, and I appreciate it.” I smiled, and this time he shook my hand. “See you in Seattle, chief!”

“That’s where I’ll be,” he said. “Up by Portage Bay.”

“Drinking coffee with the wife,” I said.

He smiled and gave me another thumbs-up. “You got it.”

12

Greg and Melanie’s burnt-out home was one neighborhood removed from the posh Upper Montclair Country Club. These were two-story, upper-middle-class homes with basements, brick exteriors, and asphalt shingle roofs. I’m no expert, but I’d price them around seven fifty, maybe eight hundred thousand.

I got out of the car and locked it with the remote. Before heading to the house and without staring at anything in particular, I scanned the area and didn’t like what I saw out of the corner of my eye: a 2006 Metallic Blue Honda Civic Coupe parked where one hadn’t been parked a few seconds earlier. I suddenly spun around, pretending to have forgotten something in the trunk. This didn’t require an Oscar-winning performance on my part, since I had a small-frame Smith & Wesson 642 hidden in the wheel well.

As I opened the trunk and retrieved the handgun, I noticed the Honda moving toward me. Though the sun was reflecting off the windshield, I was able to see that the driver was a woman.

The Honda came to a stop about ten feet in front of mine, which meant it was positioned where I couldn’t see anything without exposing at least part of my face from behind the raised hood of my trunk. I put the gun in my right hand and waited. Could DeMeo have sent a woman to do the job? I wracked my brain. Were there any women in the business brazen enough to drive right up to me in broad daylight and make an attempt on my life? Callie, maybe, but she was on my team. No one else came to mind.

Suddenly, I heard the car door open, and every synapse in my brain became locked and loaded for deadly confrontation. I waited for footsteps, thinking, yeah, DeMeo could have sent a woman. But while there were dozens of contract killers who might come straight at a guy, Joe DeMeo knows me, knows what I’m capable of. Would DeMeo send just one person to do the hit?

No way.

Which meant there was probably someone else working their way behind me, getting into position to make the kill shot.

Which meant I should turn my head and see what was happening behind me. Unfortunately, just as I was about to do that, I heard her step out of the car, heard her footsteps coming my way. I didn’t dare look behind me and didn’t dare not to. The way things were developing, I didn’t like my chances.

She walked purposefully, coming straight at me, but so far no one had tried to shoot me from behind. A number of thoughts flooded my brain, forcing me to make split-second decisions. I was going to have to rely on skill sets and survival instincts honed over fifteen years of daily application.

She was in the vicinity of my right front bumper, which would normally cause me to move to my left. But no, that’s what they’d expect me to do. It’s what they’d be counting on.

But I’d already looked in that direction and hadn’t seen anything to worry about. What was I missing? What was to the left of me that could possibly pose a threat?

The house.

Someone was probably inside the house, waiting to get a clear shot. She comes from the right, I move to my left, and bang.

White shirt time.

I waited another second until she was nearly on top of me, then ducked down and moved to my right and peered out from behind the rear bumper—then did a double-take.

It was Kathleen Gray.

“Donovan, what the hell are you up to?” she said, giving me just enough time to drop the gun into the trunk without her noticing. It would take a few seconds to gather myself and get my pulse back to normal. I took a deep breath and stood up.

“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into mine,” I said.

She didn’t fall for the misdirection. “Is that a gun in your trunk? Jesus, Donovan! Really, what are you up to?”

“What do you mean?”

“I got a call from my friend at the burn center. Addie’s Aunt told her you were coming to look at the house. By the time I got Hazel on the phone, she was seconds away from calling the police! I told her she must have misunderstood your conversation, yet here you are.”

“Relax. I’m just checking the scene.”

“Excuse me? What are you, some kind of closet detective? What is it you’re looking for?”

“Arson.”

That threw her for a moment, made her pause. I said, “I spoke to Hazel because I wanted to see if anyone had set up a fund for Addie. I wanted to make a contribution.”

“Imagine your surprise when you learned her family won the lottery.”

“Yes, but then I found out the payments ended when her parents died, and now Hazel has changed her mind about adopting Addie.”

“What does all this have to do with arson?”

I lowered my voice and looked around to make sure no one else was lurking about. “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “But I know a guy who buys structured settlements. Then he kills the annuitant and keeps the money.”

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “That sounds like a bad movie script,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

She shook her head. “Look, I know you’re some kind of muckymuck from the State Department or the CIA or Homeland Security or whatever. But this is Montclair, New Jersey, not Gotham City.”

I said nothing.

“You said you know this is happening. How do you know it’s true?”

“A couple of years ago, this same guy tried to hire me to do the killing.”

She looked startled for a moment. Then she burst into laughter. “Fine, so don’t tell me. Jesus, Donovan. You are so full of shit!”

She was wearing a burgundy patent tweed coat that showed her legs from the knees down. She had on textured panty hose that looked hotter than they sound, with burgundy ankle boots.

I said, “You heading back to work now?”

“What, and miss the big caper?”

I scanned the area around us again, knowing my time was running short. It wouldn’t be long before Chief Blaunert called Joe DeMeo, who might very well dispatch some thugs to kill me. I had to get Kathleen out of there, and quickly.

“You got any idea what soot will do to those boots?” I said.

“God, Donovan, you must date the girliest girls! I’ll just find a clean spot in there and watch you poke around, trying to impress me. Then you can take me to lunch.”

“Look,” I said, “I’ll make you a deal. You pick out a busy restaurant and go there now. I’ll get this done in twenty minutes and meet you there.”

She looked at me for what seemed like a long time before glancing at the house.

“Look at all the flowers and stuffed animals by the porch,” she said. “That’s so sad.” She paused a moment, thinking about it. “I know it’s only been a few weeks, but she’s so adorable. If anyone on earth deserves a mother’s love, it’s Addie.”

I nodded. “Pick a booth if they have one, and make sure my seat has a view of the main road.”

“Are you for real?”

“I am. And make sure I can see the restrooms and the kitchen from my side of the booth.”

She hesitated. For a second, I was afraid I’d frightened her. Then she shrugged and said, “You’re a lot of work, you know that?”

“I do.”

“Promise you’ll show?”

I did.

She named a restaurant and told me how to get there. She started to go, then spun back around, smiled a mischievous smile. “Kiss me,” she said.

I felt myself smile. “Okay, but not a movie kiss,” I said.

I watched her drive away and kept watching to make sure no one followed her. Then I inspected the house. Most of the exterior walls were in place, but the interior had been decimated. I couldn’t get down to the basement or up to the second floor, but sections of the second floor had fallen into the master bedroom. It took me less than ten minutes to figure out what had happened and how, but I interviewed one of the neighbors anyway.

13

“Okay, so the attic window was open,” Kathleen said. “What does that prove?”

We were in Nellie’s Diner. Nellie’s was my kind of place, though worlds apart from the Four Seasons. The outside looked like the club car on a passenger train. Inside made you feel like you’d taken a step back into the fifties. I hadn’t been alive in the fifties, but Nellie’s was how I imagined the restaurants of the day: gleaming places filled with chrome. Vinyl booths, easy-to-clean laminate tables and countertops, and smiling, clean-cut waiters dressed in white shirts, black bow ties, and white paper hats. On the tables: plasticized menus propped against mini jukeboxes that showcased rock ’n’ roll music. Menu fare included fried onion rings, baked beans, corn bread, patty melts, club sandwiches, pork chops, pot roast, chicken pot pie, spaghetti with meatballs, and fried chicken. Drinks included cherry and vanilla Cokes, root beer floats, and old-fashioned milk shakes. On the bar counter under glass covers were displayed chocolate fudge brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and cherry, lemon meringue, and coconut pies. Each of the pies had at least one slice missing so the customers could see what was inside. The waiter took our orders, and I told Kathleen, “Wait a sec,” so I could hear him tell the cook. She rolled her eyes.

“One cowboy with spurs, no Tommy; a mayo club, cremated, and hold the grass!” he said.

“What on earth?” Kathleen asked.

I beamed. “It’s authentic diner talk. The ‘cowboy with spurs’ is my Western omelet with fries. ‘No Tommy’ means I don’t want ketchup. ‘Cremated’ means toast the bread. And ‘hold the grass’ means no lettuce on your club sandwich.”

“How do you know this stuff?” she asked. “And why would you want to?”

“Say it,” I said.

“Say what?”

“I’m fun.”

She looked at me until a smile played around the corners of her mouth.

“You are fun,” she said. “Now tell me why the open attic window means something, and tell me what else you think you found.”

“Okay. First of all, a fire requires three things to burn: oxygen, a fuel source, and heat. That’s called the fire triangle. An arsonist has to tamper with one or more of those elements to fake an accidental fire. For example, this fire was set at the end of January and the attic window was open. Who leaves a window open in January?”

“Maybe the firemen opened it after the fact.”

“No. The arsonist opened it to provide an oxygen source.”

On the juke in the booth across from us, Rod Stewart was singing. Maggie May had stolen his soul and that’s a pain he can do without.

“Tell me you’ve got more than the open window,” she said.

“In the basement there were at least two points of origin. Also, in the floorboards in the master bedroom, under the bed, I saw some curved edges. I found some more in the hallway, and I’d bet the stairwell was full of them.”

“So?”

“So I think someone used a circular drill bit to drill holes in all those floorboards. That’s what created the air flow to feed the fire and make it spread much faster than it should.”

“Well duh,” she said. “If a guy was traipsing all over the house, opening windows and drilling holes, especially under the bed, don’t you think Greg and Melanie would have heard him?”

“The prep work was done earlier, before they got home. They wouldn’t have noticed the open attic window or the drill holes under the bed. The steps were carpeted, so those holes were hidden. The arsonist probably broke into the basement before they got home so he wouldn’t have to chance waking them up later. I noticed the attic access doors were open, and that’s something Greg and Melanie would have noticed when they tucked the kids in for the night. So the arsonist must have waited for the family to fall asleep. Then he sneaked up the stairs and opened the attic doors and doused the carpet in the kids’ room with gasoline.”

“What? Excuse me, Columbo, but how do you know he doused the carpet?”

“I pulled some of it up and guess what I saw?”

“A stain that looks like Jesus on a tricycle?”

“No, I found char patterns.”

“Char patterns,” she said.

“When you pour a liquid accelerant on carpet, it soaks into the fibers. When it burns, it makes concentrated char patterns on the sub-floor.”

Kathleen frowned, still unconvinced. “What was all that with the neighbor guy and the color of the smoke?”

“The color of the smoke and flames tells you what’s making it burn. Wood makes a yellow flame, or a red one, with gray or brown smoke.”

“So what’s the problem? The neighbor guy said he saw a yellow flame.”

“Right, but he also said black smoke.”

“So?”

“Black smoke means gasoline.”

The waiter brought our orders and set them on the table. I tore into my omelet, but Kathleen just stared at me. Her face had turned serious.

“Donovan, all these details, this isn’t your first rodeo,” she said. “You obviously know a lot about arson. You said this guy tried to hire you a couple years ago.”

“So?”

“To kill people.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I waited for her to speak. She gave me a look like she wanted to ask me something but wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.

When my daughter Kimberly was eight, she started to ask me about Santa Claus. Before she voiced her question, I looked her in the eye and said, “Don’t ever ask me anything unless you’re ready to hear the truth.” Kimberly decided not to ask. Kathleen, on the other hand, had to know.

“Have you ever done this to someone?” she asked. “Set their house on fire?”

“You should eat,” I said. “That sandwich looks terrific.”

She didn’t respond, so I looked up and saw her eyes burning a hole into my soul. “Have you?” she repeated.

I signaled the waiter and handed him a twenty. “Before you do anything else,” I said to him, “I need a roll of duct tape or sealing tape.” He nodded, took the bill, and moved double-time toward the kitchen. To Kathleen, I said, “I’ve done some terrible things. Things I hope I never have to tell you about, and yes, I’ve been trained to set fires. But no, I’ve never done it.”

“You swear?”

I swore. Happily, it was the truth. Still, I decided not to tell her how close I’d come a few times. And I was well aware that by swearing on the past I hadn’t ruled out the future.

She stared at me awhile before nodding slowly. “I believe you,” she said. “Look, I’m sure you’re a world-class shit heel. It wouldn’t even surprise me if you’d killed people for the CIA years ago, and God help me, I might even be able to live with that, depending on the circumstances. But since I started working with the kids at the burn center … well, you know.”

I did know.

Kathleen’s club sandwich had been cut into four pieces. She picked up a wedge and studied it. “What about the fire chief?” she asked. “If you’re right, that makes him wrong, and he’s the expert.”

I speared a couple of fries and popped them into my mouth. There’s nothing like the taste of diner French fries. “They put hamburger grease in the oil,” I said. “Makes the French fries burst with flavor. You want some?”

“No. What about the fire chief?”

The waiter returned with a thick roll of clear sealing tape and said he’d be right back to refresh our drinks. I nodded and began taping the fingers on my right hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure I don’t splay my metacarpals.”

She showed me her bewildered look and watched me tape my wrist. After doing that, I removed a thin sheet of plastic from my wallet and began fitting it to the bottom part of my palm, from pinky to wrist. “Can you wrap this for me?” I asked.

“You’re insane,” she said, but she wrapped the tape around the palm of my hand, covering the plastic and holding it in place. I flexed my hand to test it and decided it would do. “What about the fire chief?” she repeated.

“He’s in on it.”

“What?”

“They paid him off after the fact. They didn’t want to, but they had to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This arsonist was good. The only reason he appears sloppy is because the fire department got to the scene so quickly. Four minutes and twenty seconds, if you can just imagine. Another five minutes and the fire would have killed all the evidence. The chief knew it was arson, some of his men probably knew. So whoever ordered the torch—I’m guessing Joe DeMeo—had to get to the chief.”

“You said the chief was talking about his retirement.”

“It’s all he talks about.”

“So this Joe DeMeo character, he gave the chief enough money to look the other way?”

“I expect the money was a bonus, like a reward for doing the right thing. DeMeo probably got the chief’s attention by threatening his wife, kids, and grandchildren.”

The composite plastic affixed to the edge of my hand was invented by an engineering team at the University of Michigan in mid-2007. It’s strong as steel and as thin and pliable as a small sheet of paper. Made from clay and nontoxic glue, it mimics the brick and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells. The nanosheets of plastic are layered like bricks and held together with a gluelike polymer that creates cooperative hydrogen bonds between the layers. It takes several hours to build up the three hundred layers needed to make the thin sheet I kept in my wallet at all times.

Kathleen watched me studying my hand. She said, “If Chief Blaunert’s involved in the cover up, why didn’t he destroy the evidence? It’s been two weeks.”

“I’m guessing he hasn’t had a chance, what with all the press coverage, candlelight vigils, and people coming day and night to place shrine items on the lawn.”

“But he must have known the insurance company would send someone to investigate.”

“That’s the thing. He told me he wasn’t expecting anyone this soon, which tells me no one has filed the claim yet. Or if it’s been filed, someone at the insurance company has either submitted a phony report or they’re delaying their investigation.”

“Are you sure this DeMeo guy has that much clout?”

“That much and more.”

Again she looked at the piece of sandwich in her hand but didn’t taste it.

“There’s something bothering you,” I said. “What is it?”

“Are you in danger?” she asked.

“I could be. The chief probably called DeMeo this morning right after my guy set the appointment. DeMeo probably told him to meet me and find out what I was up to.”

“Doesn’t DeMeo know you’re with the government? Doesn’t he know you’ll turn him in?”

I smiled. “These things aren’t as black and white as you might think. Taking Joe DeMeo down won’t be easy. He’s killed enough people to fill a cemetery.”

Kathleen’s eyes began to cloud up. “Are you going to die on me?”

“Not on purpose,” I said. “But nine million dollars is a lot of money, even to Joe DeMeo.”

“What will he do?”

“Send some goons to try to kill me.”

She put her uneaten sandwich wedge back on her plate. “Donovan, I’m scared. What if he really does send some men to kill you?”

“I’ll kill them first.”

“You can do that?”

I smiled. “I can.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “You aren’t even scared?”

“Not even,” I said, trying to sound not even scared. Then I asked her to help me tape the fingers and wrist of my left hand.

“Why are we doing this?” she asked.

“Don’t turn around,” I said, “but DeMeo’s goons are here.”

A look of panic flashed across her face. “What? Where? How many are there?”

“Two in the parking lot, one in the kitchen.”

“Jesus Christ, Donovan! What are we going to do?”

“The right thing.”

“What, call the cops?”

“No. The right thing in this situation is kill the guy in the kitchen first.”

“Kill him?” Her words came out louder than she’d intended. I noticed the couple across from us glancing in our direction. Katherine lowered her voice. “Why would your first thought be to kill him?”

“I don’t want him sneaking up behind me while I’m attacking the others.”

“You’re planning to attack the others? Trained killers? No way,” she said. “I’m calling the cops!”

I put my taped hand on her arm, shook my head. “Don’t make such a fuss. This is what I do.”

She looked … everything at once. Angry. Frightened. Exasperated. The businessman at the table across from us got to his feet. He put a little menace into his voice for my benefit while speaking to Kathleen. “Are you okay? Do you need any help?” She looked at him and back at me, and we locked eyes. She smiled at the man and shook her head no. Then she settled back in her seat, took in a deep breath, let it out slowly. When she spoke, her voice was small but steady. “Okay.”

“Ma’am?” the businessman said.

“I’m fine. Really,” Kathleen said, and the guy eased back into his seat, much to the relief of his wife. He did the right thing, too: stood up for a woman in distress, impressed his wife. If all went well, we’d probably both get laid tonight.

“You okay now?” I asked.

“I trust you.”

I nodded and looked back at my plate. It was harder to finish my greasy fries with my hands taped up, but I managed it. Then I asked, “You going to eat that sandwich?”

14

“Care for any dessert today?” Our waiter looked nervous.

“What’s your name, son?” I asked.

“Jared, sir.”

I passed Jared a Franklin and asked if he’d seen the big guy in the kitchen, the one in the dark suit with the black shirt who kept peeking through the glass every thirty seconds. Jared’s face clouded over. He tried to give me back the hundred. “I really don’t want to get involved in this,” he said.

“Don’t look toward the kitchen,” I said. “Just answer me. Where is he standing in relation to the door?”

“When you go through the door, he’s on your right.”

“The door pushes open to the right,” I said. “So when I first walk through, he’ll be hidden from view, yes?”

“Yes, sir. What are you going to do?”

“Has he caused any trouble yet?”

Jared lowered his voice to a whisper. “He’s got everyone scared. He’s got a gun.”

“Anyone call the cops?”

“They don’t dare. And I don’t blame them.”

“Good,” I said. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.”

“We, sir?”

“That’s right, son. You’re going to be a hero today.”

I told Jared and Kathleen my plan. She asked, “What’s a Glasgow Kiss?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Assuming it works,” she said.

“It’ll work. These aren’t DeMeo’s best people.”

“How do you know?”

“First, I know his best people, and they’re in LA, guarding him. Second, there are three guys here.”

“So?”

“If they were really good, he’d only need two. The one in the kitchen is the least experienced. He’s related to one of the goons in the parking lot, probably his kid brother. I can tell by the resemblance. That bit of knowledge will work in our favor.” I removed my belt and measured a space about twelve inches from the buckle. I pushed the tip of my knife there and worked it enough to create a small hole. Then I draped it loosely around my neck. To Jared I said, “Ready son?”

He looked at my hands. Swallowed. Looked at Kathleen. She shrugged. He looked back at me. I nodded. He said, “Yes, sir.”

I waited until the goon checked the window again. When he ducked back behind the door, I jumped to my feet. Jared began walking straight to the kitchen door, deliberate pace, me right behind him. As he pushed the door open, I spun around and backed into it. Everything else happened in real time, in sequence, and though I didn’t see it all happen, I heard or felt it playing out around me. Jared lowered his head and ran full speed through the kitchen, screaming at the top of his lungs. A waitress shrieked and fell to the floor in a dead faint. The cooks waved their hands and ran in all directions. I ducked under the roundhouse right my grandmother would have seen coming.

Jared’s job was to run into the parking lot screaming, “Oh my God, he’s dead!” That would create a diversion and force the parking lot goons out of their plan. This was important because the fundamental lesson every successful street fighter learns is you do not want to fight your opponents the way they are trying to attack you.

I trusted Jared to do his part and began focusing on mine. While the kitchen goon was off -balance, trying to recover from the haymaker he’d launched in my direction, I straightened to my full height and slammed the top of my forehead down into the bridge of his nose full force, instantly shattering it.

The Glasgow Kiss.

I’d done this in the gym a thousand times, though maybe only twenty in real life. The Glasgow Kiss always works, even against experienced fighters, provided they’re not expecting it. I would never attempt to lead with my head against a real pro, but this guy was easier to hit than the heavy bag in my gym.

The momentum I’d created carried my forehead downward into his cheekbones, which meant his nose fragments had to follow the same path. He crumpled to the floor. I noticed a gun bulge in the small of his back, under his suit jacket. I stuck his gun in my pocket and rolled him over with my foot, glanced at his face. I didn’t recognize the guy, but even his wife or girlfriend would have a hard time recognizing him now. His nose and the blood from it had spread outward from the center of his face like pancake batter poured into a hot skillet.

Breaking the bridge of a man’s nose in this manner creates a surprising amount of pain, dazes him, and blurs his eyes, which gives me time to explore other options. Like removing the belt from my shoulders, wrapping it around his neck, threading it through the belt buckle, and pulling it tight while pushing his head in the opposite direction with my foot. I forced his huge neck to fit into the tiny space created by the hole I’d cut into my belt moments earlier.

The goon was choking. His face sprayed blood like the blow hole of a whale, and I guessed he’d be dead in two minutes. I jerked him to his feet, but he was too heavy to hold with one hand, twitching and kicking as he was. I pulled the door open, got it between us, draped the belt over the top of it, and held him in place by pulling on the belt with my left hand. This way, the door was doing most of the work and the goon was hanging on the front of it, with me behind. I backed us up into the wall, which was a good place to be because the two parking lot goons had just burst through the back door of the kitchen with their guns drawn.

The first thing they saw was their partner hanging from a belt over the door, choking, spewing blood everywhere, grabbing at his neck, kicking and gasping for breath. The second thing they saw was part of my head poking out from behind the guy.

The one who looked like the dying goon’s brother screamed, “Ray!” The other one called me a bad name and threatened to shoot me if I didn’t let Ray go. Everyone else in the kitchen had long since hit the floor and found cover—everyone except the waitress who had fainted. She was starting to regain consciousness. The customers in the front part of the diner were just beginning to realize something very wrong was happening in the kitchen. I heard the sounds a group of strangers make when they’re trying to decide what to do. If they were smart, they’d follow Kathleen’s lead and jump under their tables.

“Here’s how it’s going to happen,” I said to the gunmen. “You’re going to drop your guns and kick them across the floor to me. Or else Ray chokes to death.”

Ray’s friend sneered. “I don’t give up my gun to no one.”

I squinted to get a better look. “That a Monster Magnum?” I asked. “Hell, I don’t blame you. That’s a damn fine gun.”

The guy with the magnum ignored me, kept talking while he took a step away from Ray’s brother, trying to create distance between them and work his way into my blind side. “Broken nose, belt around his neck—he’s not gonna die. That’s total bullshit.”

Ray’s brother wasn’t so sure. “Joe, shut up. He’s dying. Look at him! My brother’s dying.” To me, he said, “Let him go, Creed. Let him go and we’ll walk away, I swear to God.”

But Joe had other plans. He grabbed the fallen waitress and put his gun to her ear. “Let him go, Creed, or I’ll kill her. Don’t think I won’t!”

She screamed. I laughed. “You think I care if you shoot her? Someone must have forgotten to tell you what I do for a living.”

Ray, the goon on the door, was heavy, and my left arm was starting to gimp up from the strain of holding him there. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep him upright much longer. Ray had been packing a small frame .38-caliber revolver, a good choice for a belt gun. I gripped it in my right hand.

Joe said, “Last chance, Creed. You know what this cannon will do to her head. It’ll put you in mind of Gallagher smashing a watermelon.” He pulled the hammer back and cocked it for dramatic effect.

It worked. It made the satisfying, precise clunk I’d come to love in that particular hand gun. I’m sensitive to the unique sounds each gun makes, and my ears were able to isolate this one over the gasping death rattle in Ray’s throat, above the sound of his legs kicking the bottom of the door from which he hung. I heard it above the commotion in the front of the restaurant as customers screamed and ran and knocked over chairs and trampled each other while trying to evacuate. I heard the sound of Joe’s gun and loved it. Though the .500 was too big to use in everyday situations, I couldn’t wait to add it to my collection.

Joe had made his threat and felt compelled to follow through on it. He instinctively leaned his head back, away from the waitress, which told me he was about to pull the trigger and didn’t want some of her brains on his face. I felt the heft of Ray’s gun in my hand. At twenty ounces and less than seven inches in length, its capacity was only five rounds, but I’d only need one to kill Joe. I didn’t know what Ray was using for ammunition, but I put one of them in Joe’s temple and his head jerked when it hit. He fell to the floor, and a thin wisp of smoke escaped from the hole in his head as dark blood started to puddle. I heard the nonstop shriek of the waitress and wondered how many years of therapy this experience might require.

But I didn’t look at her. I was too busy looking at Ray’s brother. He said, “Creed. Please. Let him go.”

“You going to drop your gun?” I asked.

He shook his head no and I could see tears streaming down his cheeks. Ray’s left leg had gone limp, and his right one was barely twitching. “I love you, Ray,” he said.

I saw what was coming and released Ray just as his brother shot him. Then Ray’s brother dove for the floor to my right, angling for position on me where I was most vulnerable. I couldn’t let him get there, so I took a knee and squeezed a round into his left eye and another into the top of his head. I tried to push the door forward, but Ray’s body kept it in place, so I eased my way out from behind it and checked myself to see if I’d been shot through Ray’s body.

I hadn’t.

I walked over Joe’s body and spotted the magnum a few feet away. You don’t just pick up the Monster Magnum; you have to lift it. I did so and took a few seconds to admire it. The .500-caliber Smith & Wesson Magnum was the biggest, heaviest, most powerful factory-production handgun in the world. It makes Dirty Harry’s weapon of choice look like a BB gun. I hadn’t been counting on a gun this size and wondered why Joe hadn’t thought to shoot Ray. The 50-caliber bullet would have gone through him as well as the door, me, and the wall behind us.

I couldn’t wait to tell Kathleen how lucky I’d been. I felt I finally had a woman I could talk to about these things besides Callie. Callie was great, but there was no warmth to her. She was part killer and part smartass. Callie wouldn’t have considered me lucky; she’d have said Joe was stupid. And don’t even get her started on Ray and his brother. She wouldn’t have fallen for the Glasgow Kiss, she wouldn’t have tried to cut a deal with a guy hanging her partner from a door, and she wouldn’t have waited around in the parking lot in the first place. Callie would have marched right in the front door of the diner, put a slug between my eyes, and stolen Kathleen’s sandwich for the ride home.

I told the people in the kitchen they could come out now, told them to take care of the waitress who was no longer hysterical but had turned catatonic with shock. I took my trophy gun, walked into the diner, and found Kathleen hiding under the table where I’d told her to wait for me. I got on one knee to get a better look at her. She was pale, shivering violently. I put the magnum on the floor and reached out to her. She screamed and slapped my hands away. I told her it was over. She was safe; everything was fine. I wanted to tell her what had happened, tell her how shocked I’d been when Ray’s brother killed him to prevent his further suffering—I was even prepared to tell her more about how I earned my livelihood—but she kept screaming and told me she never wanted to see me again. I knew she’d probably be upset, but I’d failed to gauge the extent.

I removed the tape from my hands and wrists and put the plastic back in my wallet.

As I left the diner, walked to my car, and began the relatively short drive back to Manhattan. When I hit the turnpike, I called Lou first, then Darwin, and caught them up to speed. I asked Darwin if he had the power to prevent police from stopping my car.

He said he’d try.

15

It was early afternoon, and I was back in Manhattan, in my hotel room. I’d ordered a glass tumbler and a bottle of Maker’s from room service, which for some reason took them over a half hour to deliver. The tardy delivery guy tried to make conversation to increase the tip I noticed was already added to my order. While money is not an issue for me, the thought of paying one hundred and twenty dollars for a thirty-five dollar bottle of whiskey is enough to discourage an extra tip. I dismissed him curtly, and we exchanged frowns. I went to the sink, turned on the hot water faucet, and waited for it to work.

It had been a hell of a day so far. I’d learned that Addie’s entire family had been murdered in order to cheat them out of their lottery winnings. I’d been attacked by three goons who tried to kill me in a public diner. I’d lost Kathleen, the first woman in years who had offered a glimmer of hope for a possible relationship and normal future. I’d made an enemy of Aunt Hazel, which probably cost me visiting privileges with Addie.

The water from the faucet was steaming. I hoped that in a hotel like this, no one had peed in the glass tumbler, but I rinsed it thoroughly anyway. Then I poured a half-ounce of whiskey in it and swirled it around to flavor the glass and kill any stubborn germs that might be hoping to breach my bloodstream.

I sipped some whiskey.

There’s something special about high-tone Kentucky bourbon. My favorite is the twenty-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, but Maker’s Mark is easier to come by and is plenty sumptuous in its own right. Bourbon is not a pretentious drink, although there’s a movement underfoot to make it so. Experts have started organizing tasting groups to explain the “softness” of the quality bourbons and the elegant flavors you’re likely to encounter when tasting them, including such exotic notes as orange peel, licorice, almonds, and cinnamon.

In my opinion, listing all these flavor and aroma components leads to snobbery. As they might say in Kentucky, “Don’t go around talking metric to decent folk.” All a good Kentucky bourbon needs to show you is a smooth, mild burn on the tongue and the hint of a caramel taste. You drink bourbon straight, without mixers or ice, and if you’ve chosen a good one, it will taste like bourbon and not medicine or rubbing alcohol like most other spirits do.

I sipped some more.

I wanted to call Kathleen, wanted to work things out. I thought about calling her, wondered if humor might be the best approach. I thought about that awhile but decided she wasn’t in the right mood to find any of this amusing. I could apologize, but what sense would that make?

First of all, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d been investigating a crime someone else had committed, a crime that had permanently disfigured a darling little girl and caused the brutal murder of her entire family—a crime that caused the loss of her house and her inheritance, and would certainly have an impact on her future mental stability. And did I mention this was a little girl Kathleen was very fond of? And did I mention I had done all this while putting my own life in danger? And did I mention I had done all this for free?

Hell, she should be apologizing to me!

Second, because I had taken it upon myself to help Addie, three professional killers nearly destroyed a wonderful diner and traumatized an excellent cook and wait staff while attempting to whack me.

Third, Kathleen’s life hadn’t really been in that much danger in the first place. I thought about that and decided I might have to rethink being with a woman who could be so drastically affected by such a minor event. If someone attacked her on the street while we were out for a stroll, would I refuse to see her again?

Of course not.

Then again, if things worked out between us—even if I quit the business—there would always be the random murder attempt to deal with. After all, there were plenty of husbands, wives, parents, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, business associates, and friends whose lives I had impacted by whacking someone close to them. Most of these people would pay to see me dead. Whether they come after me by themselves or in groups, or pay someone else to do it, I’d be a fool to assume they wouldn’t even try.

Fourth, the violence at the diner could have been avoided altogether had Kathleen not driven out to the house, uninvited, to question my motives.

I was running out of whiskey in the glass so I added a couple inches and then dialed the number on the card Aunt Hazel had given me a few hours earlier. I sipped from the glass as Greg and Melanie’s lawyer, Garrett Unger, told me he refused to discuss the details of Greg’s estate with a non-relative.

“Even if you were a relative, I wouldn’t discuss a sensitive topic like this over the phone,” he said.

“I’m a relative by extension,” I said. “I’ve been asked by Melanie’s sister to look into the details regarding the structured settlement.”

“Then you’ll have to set up an appointment through the proper channels,” Unger said, “and that will take some time. You’ll have to file the proper documents as well.”

“What documents would those be?” I asked.

“I’m sure you can appreciate it’s not my job to explain the law to you. If you don’t understand the procedures involved, I suggest you hire your own attorney.”

“You don’t appear to be very supportive of the family,” I said.

“Terrible tragedy,” Unger said, “but there’s nothing anyone can do about the annuity. Believe me, I wish I could, but the language in the contract is quite precise and has stood the test of time.”

“Aunt Hazel said Greg only received one payment before the accident.”

“Not true,” he said. “The family received three payments.” Then he said, “Wait, you pulled that out of your ass just now, didn’t you?”

I admitted it. Then I said, “Let me see if I can save us both the trouble of a visit. I have a theory.”

“I’ll entertain a hypothetical,” Unger said, “provided it’s a short one.”

“Suppose I win ten million dollars in the state lottery.”

“Go on.”

“I get a lump sum payment of ten million and use one million of it to pay off my outstanding loans. I look for a way to invest the balance. My attorney tells me about an annuity he’s found that’s offered by a privately funded group of investors from California.”

Unger had been saying, “Uh huh,” to move me along, but when I said, “California,” he suddenly became silent. I continued, “The lawyer says the return is astronomical, three times what I can get anywhere else. Not only that, but I’ll get this huge monthly payment for the rest of my life! If I die before receiving the first month’s payment, my wife gets the annuity payment for the rest of her life. But somewhere in the fine print, the contract says if my wife and I both die after receiving at least one payment, the entire principal is forfeited to the company. That sound about right?”

We were both silent awhile until I said, “How much did they pay you?”

“I beg your pardon?” Unger asked, working to put on a show of great indignation.

“Joe DeMeo,” I said. “How much commission did he pay you to place the contract, to sell out your own client?”

“I don’t have to listen to this!”

“You signed their death warrant,” I said.

“I’m going to hang up now,” Unger said.

“Before you do, I want you to give DeMeo a message for me.”

“I don’t know any DeMeo,” Unger said.

“Of course you don’t.” I gave Unger my cell phone number and said, “If by some chance you happen to cross paths with DeMeo, have him call me before six tonight. If he fails to do so, I’m going to call the FBI and see what they think about my hypothetical theory.”

16

I hung up and waited to hear from DeMeo.

Joseph DeMeo lived in LA, which got me to thinking about Jenine, the young model and potential body double from Santa Monica I’d told Callie about, the one I’d been sharing e-mails with for a couple of months. Listen to me: model. At best she was a model hopeful, and I was nearly twice her age. We both knew what this was. We’d shared a couple of photos and text messages, she’d invited me to visit her, and I’d said I’d try, next time I was in the area.

I took a catnap and woke up and waited for DeMeo’s call. While waiting, I challenged myself to remember all the plates I was trying to keep spinning in the air. I was testing the ADS weapon for the army. Okay, that’s one. Two, I was trying to keep Janet from marrying the shit bird from West Virginia. Three, I was trying to start a romance with the shit bird’s ex. Okay, well that plate had already fallen and crashed, but I was going to have to deal with the effect it had on me, so maybe that’s four. Maybe the model from LA could help me get over the feelings I had for Kathleen. I’d make that one plate number five.

I spied the empty tumbler by the phone. There was plenty left in the bottle. I poured another shot into the glass and worked it around my tongue, thinking, Now let’s see, where was I? Oh yeah, plates in the air. Number six: I had started accepting murder contracts from an angry, quadriplegic midget with dreadlocks. Seven: I was still taking contracts for Sal Bonadello, the crime boss. Eight: I was trying to set up a face-to-face with Joe DeMeo, a meeting that would almost certainly result in my death. And of course, I still had my day job of killing terrorists for the government. So that made nine plates.

I was as out of control as the Looney Tunes conga line. It was time to wrap up some of these loose ends. I called Lou Kelley.

“You got my information yet?”

“If you’re referring to the age progression on Kathleen, I e-mailed it to you an hour ago.”

“What about the match profile on Lauren?” I asked.

“Well, I didn’t know her name till just now, but you were right. If her picture is current, our guys can get her up to 91 percent.”

“So that’s a powerful resemblance,” I said.

“It is.”

“If I wanted to pass Lauren off as Kathleen, who could I fool?”

Lou thought about that a bit. “You wouldn’t fool her spouse or a close friend or relative. Beyond that, you’re probably okay.”

“Good. That’s what I was hoping to hear.”

I asked Lou about getting me a jet. He put me on hold a few minutes while he made the arrangements. He got back on the line and said, “Got one. It’ll be waiting for you at the FBO in White Plains, at the Westchester County Airport.”

“How far is that from where I am?”

“Depends on where you are,” Lou said.

I told him. He hit a few computer keys and said, “Fastest way is to get you a chopper. The flight is only ten minutes, but it’ll take me about forty to set up. If you’re not in a hurry, you can use a driver, but I’d wait a couple hours before heading there, since it’s rush hour now.”

I looked at my watch. “If I leave the hotel around seven?”

“You’re looking at an hour’s drive to White Plains, maybe more.”

I told him I could live with that. I hung up and started packing my gear. My cell rang.

Joe DeMeo.

“You’ve been busy,” he said.

“Jesus, Joe, where’d you find those guys?”

“Ah, what can I tell you? Short notice and all. Look, sorry about today. Your whole thing caught me off guard, pissed me off. You shoulda called me first instead of poking around out there. I’d have cut you in. Now the whole thing’s turning into a mess.”

“You get my message about setting up a meeting?”

“Our phones are secure. We can work this thing out right now.”

“I’d rather meet face-to-face.”

“You got some balls, my friend. I always said so.” He sighed. “Okay, Creed, we’ll meet. You say when, I’ll say where.”

We worked it out for Saturday morning in LA, which gave me plenty of time to do some other things, including having another Maker’s while waiting for my seven o’clock drive to White Plains.

And flying to Cincinnati to meet my good friend, Lauren.

And making plans to meet a certain young model wannabe at a beachside hotel in Santa Monica on Saturday afternoon—assuming I survived my Saturday morning meeting with Joe DeMeo.

17

Lauren Jeter had been an escort since the early days of the Internet. Over time, she’d built a clientele that included a dozen of Cincinnati’s most prominent public figures, most of whom managed to spend quality time with her several times a year. Add the income from these wealthy regulars to her hourly outcalls and Lauren was pulling down more than a hundred grand a year, all cash.

Not a bad business, but not without risk.

This particular morning, around ten o’clock, she knocked on the door of the upscale hotel room in downtown Cincinnati where I was staying. I handed her a quarter-inch stack of hundreds, and she smiled and said, “You’ve always been way too generous with me.”

Lauren loved her Mimosas with fresh-squeezed orange juice, and she enjoyed several as we caught each other up on our families, our problems, our health, and the books we’d read in the months that had passed since my last visit.

At some point she smiled and asked, “So, you wanna …?”

Instead of answering directly, I told her I had a unique proposition for her: we could spend the next few hours in the traditional manner and afterward go our separate ways happy and richer for the experience, or I could pay her an obscene amount of money to let me beat the shit out of her.

For a split second, Lauren’s smile remained frozen on her face, caught in the moment like a deer in the headlights. Then she made a funny noise and bolted for the door. She fumbled a bit, trying to get it open. When she finally did, she flew out of the room and slammed the door behind her. I watched her do all that, and after a minute or so, I topped off my glass, sipped some more champagne, and moved closer to the phone. A few minutes passed before it rang.

“You didn’t chase me,” she said.

“Why would I do that?”

“I thought maybe you’d snapped or something. No offense.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s just—I don’t know, I guess I’ve always had the feeling you could turn violent on me, though you’ve always been a perfect gentleman in the past. Still, what you said a while ago, well, you sort of threw me for a minute there.”

“And now?”

“Now I feel sort of bad that you paid for an overnight and I bailed.”

“You were scared.”

“I was really scared!” she said.

We were quiet awhile.

“You’ve got a good heart,” I said.

“I’d like to be your friend, Donovan,” she said, “but I might be just a little afraid of you right now.”

“I can’t fault you there.”

“Should I be?”

“What’s that?”

“Afraid of you?”

I paused a moment. “No.”

“Well,” she said, “you didn’t grab me or hit me. You didn’t force me to do anything. When I ran you didn’t chase me. And you’re very generous—the money, the champagne.”

“Does all that add up to let’s try again?”

“I don’t know, Donovan. I’d like to save our relationship …”

“But?”

“But I’d have to feel safe.”

“Well,” I said, “I didn’t chase you.”

She thought about that some more. Then she said, “I’m only about a block away, sitting in my car. If I agree to come back, will you promise I’ll be safe? I mean, I’ll treat you real good and all, but can you promise not to hit me?”

“Yes. If you want, you could bring someone with you.”

“Another girl?”

I laughed. “No, I meant a guy. You can bring a guy with you, for protection.”

She pondered that a minute. “Is there anyone I’m likely to bring who could protect me if you wanted to hurt me? Even if he had a gun?”

“No,” I said, “but, Lauren, you have my word. This choice I mentioned, like anything else we’ve ever done or might do, is completely up to you.”

“And you have my answer to your offer, right?”

I laughed. “You’ve made it abundantly clear. No hitting, no hurting.”

Back in my room a few minutes later, she asked, “Do you get off on beating up women? Again, no offense meant,” she added.

“None taken,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I would never get any pleasure out of hitting a woman, and I don’t understand those who would.”

“Then why?”

I thought about telling her Kathleen Chapman’s story, how she had experienced years of physical abuse at the hands of her ex. I wondered if Lauren could possibly put herself in Kathleen’s place, imagining the heartbreak, the pain and anguish, the humiliation Kathleen had suffered all those years.

My idea did have one major flaw: when you came right down to it, I’d be beating Lauren up now to protect Janet from getting beaten up someday. Of course, Lauren would have made the conscious decision to be beaten up. I wondered if that type of logic would provide sufficient justification for the way I’d feel later.

In the end, I just waved it off. “My mistake,” I said. “Water under the bridge.”

Lauren looked me over carefully. When she spoke, her voice was clear and steady. “You don’t appear to be a freak,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said, “in my experience, most freaks don’t appear to be freaks.”

“I’ve found that to be true in my experience, as well,” I said. She extended her hands in front of her, palms open, as if to say, Help me out here, will ya? Then she said, “But if someone were to ask me for an assessment at this stage of our relationship …” she paused a beat. “Can you understand why I might question your sanity?”

“You’d be crazy not to,” I said.

She nodded slowly.

“Would you like me to take off my clothes now?” she said.

“I’d like that a lot. If it’s your choice.”

“It’s what you’ve paid for,” she said.

“Actually, I don’t look at it that way.”

She flashed me a skeptical look. “You don’t, huh?” There was an edge of sarcasm in her voice.

I said, “Sex isn’t the same as intimacy. Intimacy only works if it’s a choice you’ve made about me.”

She stiffened a bit. “A choice,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Like letting you beat me up?” I saw the anger flash through her eyes. Now that she trusted me not to hurt her, she was fired up.

“It’s nothing personal,” I said, hoping to diffuse the fireworks I could see coming.

“Really? Nothing personal, huh? So your offer had nothing to do with the fact that I’m just a low-life hooker? Tell me, Scarface, how many teachers, nurses, and housewives have you offered to beat up for money?”

I heard her. I don’t mean I listened to her; I mean that what she said and the way she said it made me see it from her point of view. Now what could I say, except that she had a point.

“Lauren, you’re right, of course. That was a big part of it, the fact you do things for money.”

We sat there quietly and looked at each other, neither of us knowing quite what to say.

“There was something else,” I said. “I didn’t give you my reasons, but a big part of it had to do with an uncanny resemblance. But again, I’m sorry I brought it up. I feel terrible for scaring you. I really care about you and always have.”

We were out of orange juice, but she reached for the champagne and poured some into a clean flute. She glanced at her champagne glass and a strange look crossed her face. She picked it up and held it to the light and stared at the amber liquid. What now? I wondered. Maybe there weren’t as many bubbles floating to the surface as she thought there should be. Maybe …

“It’s not drugged,” I said.

“Then you drink it.”

I sighed. “I’ve lost your trust, and for that I apologize.” I took the champagne flute from her hand, put it to my lips, and drained it. Then I refilled the glass, handed it back to her. She nodded slowly and took a sip. Then, to her credit, she winked at me.

“Hookers have feelings, you know.”

I smiled. “It’s not because I think you’re unworthy of being treated well. It was never that. If it makes you feel any better, you’re the only person I’ve ever offered to pay to beat up.”

Lauren had a light, airy laugh. Now, for the first time since she’d run out, she showed it. “Why the hell would that make me feel better?” she asked.

I laughed, too. “I’m sorry, Lauren. You’re right. I prejudged you. Now I’m making it worse trying to talk about it. Big surprise: I’m not very smooth with women.”

“Hey, ya think?” She smiled.

“Now you know why I have to pay for sex.”

“Intimacy,” she said.

“Yes.”

“A choice,” she said.

“It is,” I said. “Or should be.”

She nodded slightly, as if confirming some private thought. Then she took off her clothes and helped me with mine. Then she did the things Janet used to do to me all those years ago, things she was surely doing to Ken Chapman every night for free.

Lauren held me afterward and kissed my cheek.

“Just for the sake of argument,” she said, “how much would you have paid?”

18

“I see you had better luck finding me this time,” Joseph DeMeo said, flashing a grin I knew to be insincere. It was Saturday, and we were in the George Washington section of Hollywood Hills Cemetery near Griffith Park. DeMeo stood on the landing above the sidewalk next to the flagstone wall that shaded Buster Keaton’s grave. He wore a black suit and a lavender silk shirt, buttoned all the way up, with no tie. DeMeo was flanked on either side by two dead-eyed thugs whose ill-fitting suits could barely contain their musculature.

“Your pets look uncomfortable,” I said. “I hope they didn’t squeeze into their prom suits just for me.”

“No need to taunt,” DeMeo said. “We’re all friends here.”

“That right?” I said to the goons. We all looked at each other a minute, trying to decide who could take whom, if it came down to it, and how best to do it. I didn’t know these particular guys but I knew their type. Violence leaked out of them like stink on a wino.

Joseph DeMeo chuckled and walked down the steps toward me. “Walk with me,” he said and passed me without shaking hands. I stood my ground. I wasn’t comfortable walking with him if it meant turning my back on his goons. DeMeo chuckled again and said, “Don’t worry about them. They’ll follow at a respectful distance. Same as your giant,” he added.

His comment rattled me. Quinn was my only backup, which meant he and I were as good as dead. Unless I could convince DeMeo I had another backup. In the meantime I had to display confidence.

“Big as he is,” I said, “not many people can make Quinn. What’d he do, fall asleep?”

“I have the advantage that comes with setting the location,” DeMeo said.

“Speaking of which,” I said, “what’s this fascination you have with cemeteries? Two years ago, it was Inglewood Park, James Jeffries’ grave. This time it’s Hollywood Hills, Buster Keaton.”

“I meet people where it is fitting to do so. If you were an artist, I’d meet you at a gallery or art museum.”

“Where do you meet Garrett Unger? Snake oil conventions?”

Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills is an oasis surrounded by bustling traffic. Though Disney, Universal, and Warner Brothers all have studios located just minutes away, the vast acreage has a self-contained quality that keeps it isolated and tranquil. Uncluttered by mausoleums, it features mountain views, gently rolling hills, fussy landscaping, and bright white statuary.

DeMeo suddenly stopped short and placed his hand on my arm, and I nearly came out of my skin. I spun out of his grasp and jumped into a fighting stance. I swept the area with my eyes to make sure the goons were where they should be. They were, but they had their guns drawn, waiting for any type of twitch or signal from DeMeo. I had no idea where Quinn was, but I believed he was wherever he needed to be to keep me safe. DeMeo seemed not to notice my jumpiness, focused as he was on something in front of us.

“Look at that,” he whispered.

I tried to force myself to relax. I turned my head and followed his gaze and saw nothing, but his eyes were fixed on something. “What, the bird?” It was the only living creature I could detect in front of him.

“Not just any bird,” he whispered. “A Western Tanager.”

When I’m keyed up like that, I’m ready to kill or be killed. I want to kill or be killed. It was hard to focus on the bird. I looked behind us again. The goons’ expressions had never changed, but at least their guns were holstered. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for them, having to guard their nut case of a boss. I got my breathing under control and said, “Western Tanagers: are they rare or something?”

“Not rare,” he said, “but very shy. You almost never see them in such an urban setting. See the bright red face and black wings? That’s the male of the species.”

I couldn’t care less and hoped my expression showed it. DeMeo watched the bird fly off. Then he studied me a moment. “You’ve come a long way for this meeting,” he said. “I should let you conclude your business so you can enjoy our warm climate and friendly atmosphere.” He winked at me.

“Actually, I wanted to talk about your business,” I said.

“To which business are you referring? I have lots of businesses.”

I reminded him that a couple of years ago, he wanted to hire me to kill people who had signed contracts for structured settlements. I asked if he personally okayed each hit.

“This is a very disrespectful question,” he said, “considering I haven’t even patted you down.”

I told him whoever he hired to kill the Dawes family in Montclair had been sloppy. I told him a little girl survived and I wanted him to personally underwrite her medical expenses for a complete facial reconstruction. Further, I wanted him to write a certified cashier’s check to the estate of Greg and Melanie Dawes in the amount of nine million dollars so Addie could try to cope through life with the disability his actions had caused.

DeMeo laughed out loud. “You got some stones,” he said. “I always said that about you.”

“Me and my stones will give you five days to come up with the money.”

DeMeo’s eyes grew hard. “An ultimatum?”

I tried to think about it from his perspective. “Mr. DeMeo, I don’t want to come across as disrespectful. Nine million plus the surgeries, that sounds like a lot of money. But let’s be honest: it’s no more than a bucket of sand off the beach to someone like you. I would consider it a personal favor if you do this thing for this one small girl. In return, I’ll owe you a favor.”

“I can make you stay out my business for all time with a simple hand gesture,” he said.

“And you’ll be dead before I hit the ground.”

“Your giant? We’ve got three people on him.”

“My girl.”

“The blond?”

I nodded.

DeMeo turned to me, made a show of opening his jacket. “I’m just reaching for my phone,” he said. He pressed a key on the touch pad and said, “You have the girl?” Then he said, “Why not?” He turned his attention to me and said, “Nice bluff, but that’s all it is. She’s not here.”

“You believe that, go ahead and give your signal.”

He smiled that Cheshire cat smile again and said, “I don’t think it would have worked out, you working for me.”

Then we parted company.

I took a deep breath. I had faced down Joseph DeMeo and lived. Of course, it didn’t mean much, since Joe had no intention of paying the money.

I made my way to the front of the cemetery and stood a block away from the black sedan and waited for Coop’s signal. Cooper Stewart had been driving limos in the LA area for more than ten years. Before that, he’d been a capable light-heavyweight with a stiff jab. Coop was tall, maybe six five. His rugged face showed extensive scar tissue around the eyes, confirming his status as a journeyman, not a contender. Augustus Quinn knew Coop better than I did, but I’d ridden with him several times and trusted him. Coop gave the signal, and I walked over to the limo and climbed in.

“Your phone rang while you were out there,” Coop said. “About twenty minutes ago.”

I checked the display and found that Janet had called. A large shadow crossed the window, and I looked up and saw Quinn standing a few yards away. Coop flashed him a signal, and Quinn opened the side door and joined me.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Pretty much the way I thought it would. No sale.”

“What’s our next move?”

I motioned for Quinn to raise the privacy glass so we could talk. Though we trusted Coop, we were in DeMeo’s town. No sense forcing him to choose between us.

“DeMeo made you out there,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” Quinn said. “He had nine guys surrounding the place.”

“Still,” I said.

“According to Tony,” Quinn said, “they been there since midnight.”

Midnight! No wonder they saw him. “Who’s Tony?”

“One of DeMeo’s guys. At the end, we talked some. He recommended a restaurant, Miceli’s.”

“He’ll probably be waiting there for you with an Uzi,” I said.

Quinn shrugged. “So DeMeo won’t pay. No surprise there. Got a backup plan?”

“We’re going to rob him,” I said.

“Joe DeMeo.”

“Unless you’re scared.”

“How much you taking?”

“Twenty-five million,” I said, “maybe more. Ten for Addie, two for each of us.”

Quinn cocked his head. “That leaves more than ten million on the table.”

“We’ll need some help.”

Quinn nodded. “I’m in.”

We lowered the partition, and I told Coop where to take us. Quinn said, “Hey, Coop, you know a restaurant called Miceli’s?”

“I do,” Coop said. “Pizza’s good; all the waiters sing to you. They got a pie they call the Meat House: pepperoni, sausage, meatballs, salami. If you decide to go there, get that one.”

We turned the corner and passed a couple of protesters holding global warming signs. “Not much of a turnout,” I said.

Coop chuckled. “There’s usually a bunch of them. They got a chart from the fifties, tells them what the average weather used to be. Every day it’s warmer than that, they gather at that corner to bitch about it. But when the weather’s this nice, most of them sneak off to the beach.”

I hit the voice mail button on my cell phone, and my ex-wife Janet shrieked, “You bastard!” She went off on me with such gusto I had to hold the phone away from my ear. Quinn laughed, and Coop just shook his head. I grinned. I mean, I wasn’t happy she was upset, even less happy she blamed me for it, but what was I going to do, right? She finished her screaming fit with a flourish, and Quinn said, “What the hell did you do to her, anyway?”

“She didn’t go into detail,” I said, “but the bottom line is she’s not getting married.”

Coop said, “So … is that bad news? Or good?”

“Bad for me, good for her,” I said. In my mind, I allowed one of my spinning plates to crash.

19

After her divorce from Donovan Creed three years ago, Janet and Kimberly moved to the sleepy town of Darnell, West Virginia, where Janet’s best friend, Amy, had made a comfortable, happy home after marrying one of Darnell’s native sons.

Amy made it her mission in life to find Janet a husband. Janet gave it a shot, but after two years of dreadful setups, she was about to swear off men completely. Then, suddenly, Amy introduced her to a nice guy from Charleston.

Janet was caught completely off guard by the casually sophisticated Ken Chapman—so much so that a mere eight months of heavy dating led to a wedding announcement.

Kimberly thought her mom was rushing things, but she had to admit, Janet was happy for the first time in years. To her father, Kimberly played down the courtship, saying, “I think what’s happening is Mom is talking herself into being in love, but it doesn’t feel right.”

One sunny morning while Janet was straightening up the living room, she opened the front door to find a thin, pretty girl in a sunhat wearing large, round sunglasses. The lady introduced herself as Kathleen Gray and said, “I don’t want to cause you any problems; I just want to talk to you about Ken Chapman.”

Janet stiffened. “Look Miss … whatever your name is …”

“Gray.”

“Miss Gray. I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about, but I’m rather busy right now, so if you don’t mind …”

“But I do mind. I need to ease my conscience. If you’ll allow me the courtesy of three minutes, I promise to never bother you again.”

Janet looked at the manila folder Kathleen was holding. “Whatever you’ve brought,” she said, “I’m not interested.”

Kathleen held out her hand. “Janet,” she said, “Gray is my maiden name. My married name was Chapman. Mrs. Kenneth Chapman.”

Janet’s face flushed crimson. “Miss Gray, I have no interest in anything you have to say about my fiancé’. I have an ex-husband of my own, but I don’t go around saying disparaging things about him to everyone he dates.”

Kathleen shook her head. “Really, Janet, you don’t need to be upset. I’m not in Ken’s life, and there are no children involved, so you and I don’t have to be friends. I’m just trying to ease my mind, the same way you might do for the next one who comes along. My story’s short and simple. May I come in?”

“Oh, do come in, by all means,” said Janet, making no effort to hide her sarcasm.

Kathleen took a moment to study the photos of Ken and Janet on the fireplace mantle. Then she turned to face Janet Creed. “I hope it’ll be different for you,” she said. “I really do.”

“Well I’m sure it will be. For one thing, I’m not a pushy person.”

Kathleen smiled. “If you’re ever in my situation someday, I hope you do a better job of it than me.”

“I’m sure I will,” said Janet. “Anything else?”

“Just this.” Kathleen removed her hat and sunglasses. The sight of Kathleen’s blood-red eyes surrounded by massive bruises stunned Janet into silence. There was an egg-sized lump on the side of Kathleen’s head and strangulation marks on her neck. Kathleen unbuttoned her blouse and turned her back to Janet, revealing dozens of black and blue welts that covered her back and shoulders, each the approximate size of a man’s fist.

Janet’s pulse began to race. She felt her throat constricting. Her knees buckled, and she had to put her hand on the back of the sofa to steady herself. By the time Kathleen buttoned her blouse and put her hat back on, Janet regained some of her composure.

“I’m sorry for your condition, Miss Gray, but surely you don’t expect me to believe Ken did this to you. I’ve known him, intimately, for eight months.”

Kathleen’s lip trembled slightly. She nodded.

“Have you been sleeping with him?” asked Janet. “Is that what this is about?”

“No. He did this to me yesterday, as a warning.”

Janet’s world started to whirl. “Warning about what?”

“He didn’t want me to tell you he beat me throughout our marriage.”

Janet felt a sudden rush of nausea. “I don’t believe it,” she said.

Kathleen sighed. “I’m not surprised. I wouldn’t have believed it either. Look, I’m not trying to influence you or tell you how to live. I’m not saying Ken hasn’t changed. I hope he’ll be different with you.”

While Janet found Kathleen’s words impossible to believe, there was something in her voice that rang true. Janet said, “I don’t understand. Did you threaten him somehow? Did you tell him you were planning to see me?”

“That’s the crazy part. I had no intention of talking to you. When he told me he was getting married, I was so relieved! I figured he’d finally leave me alone and move on with his life. I would have been glad to keep my mouth shut. But he showed up on my doorstep yesterday, telling me about how your wedding announcement would be in the paper soon. He knew I’d see it and was afraid I’d make trouble. I told him to get the hell out of my life, but he told me he’d always be there, always around the corner or down the street. I laughed at him and turned away, but that’s something you don’t do to Ken Chapman. You don’t laugh at him. He kicked the screen door open, grabbed me by the neck, and, well, this is the result. He said it was a hint of what would happen if I ever told you or anyone else about what happened in our marriage.”

“And yet here you are.”

“Yes.”

Janet surveyed Ken’s ex. “Miss Gray, I appreciate what you’ve said, but I sincerely doubt you’re telling me the truth.”

“I can live with that.”

Janet shook her head. “Either way, I’m only getting one side of things.”

Kathleen said, “Quite so.” She extended her hand. “Janet, I’ve said what I came to say, and I appreciate your seeing me. My conscience is clear, and I wish you all happiness. I did want to leave these for you.” She placed the manila folder on the table next to the front door. Then she carefully placed her sunglasses over her eyes and let herself out.

Janet didn’t want to look at the folder, didn’t want to touch it, didn’t want to open it, didn’t want it in her house. Even as she saw her hand reaching for it, she told herself not to do it, and that worked—she left it lying there a few extra minutes. Yet she knew she’d eventually reach out and take it and open it, and she knew that when she did, her life would change forever.

The folder contained numerous front and side views of Kathleen’s battered face and torso, and several similar shots of her back and buttocks. Something cold and hard began forming in Janet’s heart as she flipped through page after page of police photos chronicling years of brutal physical abuse. Medical records documented dozens of black eyes, split lips, knocked out teeth, a broken jaw, several broken noses, and numerous broken or cracked ribs. She reviewed the restraining orders, the violations of same, the police reports, and the arrest records.

In the end, Janet broke down and cried for two straight hours.

Then she made three phone calls.

Her first call was to her ex-husband, Donovan Creed. He didn’t answer, so she left a message on his voice mail. She was short and to the point. “You bastard!” she said. “I know you told that woman to give me her files. Maybe I screwed up again, and maybe you saved me from a lot more hurt in the future, and maybe someday I’ll even appreciate what you did. But right now my heart is broken and it’s all your fault and I hate your guts! Don’t call me, Donovan. Don’t even think about it. I hate you! I hate you! So don’t say a fucking word to me!”

Her second call was to her fiancé’, the casually sophisticated Kenneth Chapman. “Ken,” she said, “you know my ex-husband is Donovan Creed, and I’ve told you he is one of the top people with the National Security Agency. What you don’t know is that he’s a former assassin for the CIA. You can try checking it out if you don’t believe me.”

Ken paused before answering. “I believe you, Honey, and that’s pretty scary, but why are you telling me this now?”

“Because he’s probably going to kill you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s possible that as a personal favor to me, he might agree not to kill you. But he’s a nut job, and I can’t guarantee your safety.”

“Janet, what’s going on? What are you talking about?”

“Donovan sent me a package today. A package filled with photographs and police documents describing in great detail all the violent things you did to your ex-wife, Kathleen.”

“Look, Janet, that’s bullshit. I can explain.”

“Can you?” Janet said. “That’s great, because I can’t wait to hear your explanation. After all, I’m looking at more than thirty pages of documented police evidence. It’s sitting in my lap right now, evidence spanning more than eight years of abuse.”

The line was silent for awhile. Then, in a very small voice, Chapman said, “I’m not denying it. But that was a long time ago. You’ve got to understand, I was bipolar. I had a chemical imbalance. I had to take medicine for years, but I’m over that now. I swear to God. Look, you can call my ex-wife. She’ll tell you.”

Janet thought, Can you believe this guy?

“Yeah, Kenny, old pal, I’m sure Kathleen will say whatever you tell her to say. Listen, I’ve got to run. The wedding’s off. I’ll put the ring in the mail. Do not call me. Do not come near me, or Kimberly, ever again. If you try to contact me in any way, for any reason, I’ll turn Donovan Creed loose on you. Believe me, you don’t want that. Again, if you don’t believe me, ask around.”

The third call Janet made was to her best friend, Amy. She got into it quickly. “Did you know about Ken?”

“Know what, sweetie?”

“Did you know?”

“Uh, you’re kind of weirding me out here, babe. Did I know what?”

“Did … you … know?”

Amy was silent a moment. “Oh, honey,” she sighed, “that was such a long time ago. And anyway, there are always two sides, you know?”

“I have a daughter! How could you not tell me?”

“Janet, I’m begging you, think it over before you rush to judgment. Please. Don’t screw this up.”

“Too late.”

“Let’s get together and talk about it.”

“Drop dead.”

20

It had been two days since Cincinnati, when I’d made the offer about beating her up and Lauren had asked, “Just for the sake of argument, how much would you have paid?” When I told her, she decided to at least hear me out. So I handed her Kathleen Chapman’s police file and watched as she reviewed it. She took her time, studied all the photos carefully, read a portion of each page of the police reports. When at last she finished, she’d looked into my eyes and said, “If you know all this about her, and understand her pain, why would you want to physically assault me?”

I shrugged. “It’s not about hurting you. It’s about making my ex-wife happy. Happy in the long run, at least.”

She gave me an encouraging smile and said, “Sugar, you really are pitiful when it comes to explaining yourself to women.”

“That bad, huh?”

“World-class bad,” she said.

She took both my hands in hers and looked into my eyes. She seemed to be searching for something better inside me than what I’d shown her so far.

“You’ll have to explain how beating the shit out of me will make your ex-wife happy,” she said. “It frightens me to think there’s a woman out there who would appreciate that type of gesture, and it makes me wonder why you’d be attracted to her in the first place.”

I nodded and told Lauren I cared a great deal about Janet and Kimberly and wanted only the best for them. I told her I wasn’t interested in taking Ken’s place; I just didn’t want a man like him living in the same house with my family. I told her how horrified I’d been to learn that Janet was planning to marry a habitual wife beater.

With that preamble out of the way, I explained my plan: Lauren would pretend to be Chapman’s ex-wife, Kathleen, and pretend Chapman had beaten her as a warning to keep her mouth shut about the abuse. I assured Lauren that I was a professional, meaning I would assault her very carefully, going for the maximum effect with the minimum pain. I reiterated there’d be no enjoyment in it for me and that I didn’t go around beating up women on a regular basis—but that I couldn’t think of any other way to discourage Janet from marrying Ken Chapman.

Then I gave her a handful of pain pills and told her if she decided to go through with it, she should take two now and one every four hours for two days. I told her the pills would make her feel so good she’d probably call to thank me for the beating.

“Whoa, cowboy,” Lauren said. “There you go again!”

I looked at her blankly. Then it registered. “Oh, right. Sorry.” I shook my head. “That was a figure of speech about thanking me for the beating. I just meant that the pills are incredibly effective. I really am an idiot with women.”

“I’ve had pain pills before,” she said.

“Not like these,” I said. “They’re laced with something that gives you a feeling of euphoria.”

Then I got out my duffel bag and handed her two bricks of money held together with rubber bands, each of which contained ten thousand dollars. She stared at the money. “It pains me to say this, but let’s see if I can help you save a few bucks. Why not just call Janet and tell her about Chapman? Or better yet, send her this folder and tell her you did a background check on her fiancé ‘and this is what turned up.”

“She won’t believe me,” I said. “She knows my people can fabricate legal documents in a matter of hours. We can alter it, falsify it, destroy court records or create published testimony overnight. And don’t forget, she loves the bastard, and he’s persuasive. His last girlfriend still believes Kathleen beat herself up all those years to maintain control in the relationship.”

Lauren was running out of ideas. I knew the feeling. “What if you sent the information anonymously?” she asked.

“Janet would know I did it,” I said, “and she wouldn’t believe it anyway. She really hates me.”

“Honestly, sugar, if this is your best idea, I can see why she might feel that way.” Lauren gestured toward the photos on the bed. “I admit there’s a resemblance,” she said, “but we’re not even close to identical. Really, this whole thing is insane. Even if I agreed to do it, when Janet sees the real photographs, she’ll know I’m not Kathleen.”

“I’ll take photos of you before and after the beating, and my people will alter the police photos to match your face and body. They’ll even do an age regression on you to show the beatings over a period of years. Then they’ll superimpose Kathleen’s injuries on your photographs. The updated packet will be delivered to your home address by courier within eight hours.”

“You can’t possibly know where I live,” she said.

To her horror, I recited her address from memory. “So the story and paperwork will be real,” I continued. “Only the police photos will be doctored.”

Lauren said, “How do you know that Janet never met Kathleen?”

“There’s no way Ken would have let them meet. He wouldn’t want Janet to learn about the beatings.”

“Why can’t I just pay her a visit, pretend to be Kathleen, and tell her the truth about Ken?”

“I thought about that, but we have to make Janet want to protect Kathleen.”

“Why?”

“Because if Janet thinks Ken beat Kathleen half to death as a warning, she’d be putting Kathleen’s life in danger by implicating her.”

“You’re talking about later on, when Janet breaks off the wedding,” Lauren said.

“Exactly. If Kathleen just shows up on Janet’s doorstep without any injuries, Janet will tell him, and he’d either say Kathleen was crazy or that it all happened years ago and he’s cured. Remember, he can prove he’s been to anger management courses.”

“Required by the court.”

“Right, and also counseling.”

“Also a provision of his probation.”

“You know the drill.”

She nodded.

“He’ll claim he was bipolar,” I said, “and that he subsequently took drugs to alleviate his chemical imbalance.”

“All of which might be true.”

“It might be, but that’s not the issue. I don’t want this creep in my wife’s life—or my daughter’s.”

“Your ex-wife, you mean.”

“Right.”

“So, if I pretend to be Kathleen, show up all battered and bruised, and tell Janet he did this to me as a warning, you think she’ll buy it?”

“I know she will. He can’t claim to be cured if he did this to you. But you’ve got to play it a certain way. We’ll need to do a lot of rehearsing.”

“I charge a two-hour minimum.”

I smiled. “I thought the twenty grand might be enough.”

She smiled back. “That’ll help take away the sting,” she said, “but you said the twenty was for the beating. Anything else, such as rehearsing, that’s extra.”

She saw me frown.

“Don’t go cheap on me now, Donovan,” she said. “I’m obviously the only game in town, the only escort that matches Kathleen enough for this crazy scheme to work.”

“Fair enough,” I said, noting she’d called herself a hooker earlier. “But if I’m paying for your time I want your full attention.”

“Of course.”

I nodded. “Good. And, Lauren, I’ll make you a promise: if my ex breaks off the wedding, I’ll owe you a favor.”

“A favor,” she said.

I nodded.

“You mean like some kind of Mafia thing?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Like what, you mean you’d kill someone if I asked you to?”

I shrugged. “It’s up to you how you use your favor.”

“Mister, you are some kind of twisted freak, anyone ever tell you that?”

“I hear that a lot, actually.”

She looked at me silently for a moment. “Well I intend to hold you to it,” she said, “cause I’ve got a Ken Chapman in my life, too.” Lauren tried to hand one of the envelopes back to me. She said, “Don’t you want to just give me half now, half later?”

“I trust you,” I said.

She nodded. “I guess if you’re willing to beat me up and kill my ex, you’re not the sort of person who gets double-crossed much, am I right?”

“You think you can pull this off convincingly?” I said.

“Are you kidding me?” She said her experience as a successful escort all these years made her a better actress than Meryl Streep.

The way she put it, “Every week, an eighty-year-old man thinks he gives me a screaming orgasm, okay? So this business with Janet’s a piece of cake.” Then she added, “Still, you need to prepare yourself for something.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s never going back to you.”

“I don’t want her back.”

“Then let me put it another way: she’s never going to forgive you.”

“You don’t think she’ll eventually thank me?”

“Not a chance.”

I thought about that a bit. “Okay,” I said. “It’s still worth it.”

In all, Lauren and I were together six hours. The first hour we rehearsed her lines, over and over. Then I ordered room service. We rehearsed another thirty minutes while waiting for the food. Lunch came and we ate it and chatted about life in general.

I couldn’t get over how much she looked like Kathleen Gray. Lauren didn’t have Kathleen’s spark, of course, or her gift of gab, or her capacity to be adorable. Yet she had something special going for her in a Kathleen sort of way.

After lunch, since I was paying for her time anyway and since she looked so much like Kathleen Gray, we had a little casual sex.

Then I beat the shit out of her.

We rehearsed her lines again while I waited for her bruises to bloom. Then I took pictures and got the information about her ex and asked if she had a preference how she wanted the hit to go down. She said, “Two things. First, I want him to suffer.”

“Of course you do.”

“Wait,” she said. “This is really going to happen, isn’t it?”

I smiled. “What’s the second thing?”

“I want to watch him die.”

I smiled again. “Of course you do.”

She asked, “Am I bad?”

I shrugged. “Hey, he’s got to die sometime, right? Now don’t over-think this. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”

21

One quick glance and I forgot all about Joe DeMeo.

It was Saturday, a couple hours after my meeting with DeMeo at the cemetery. I was staying in a luxury beach hotel in Santa Monica when she knocked on the door.

Jenine.

The first thing she noticed was the envelope fat with cash on the edge of the coffee table. She picked it up and her eyes widened as she riffled through the stack of hundreds. She glanced at me to see if I was serious.

I nodded.

She’d been advertising on Aspiring Actresses, the Internet escort site, and had purchased enough space to display three sultry photographs and a bio listing her vital statistics and limited acting experience.

In the e-mails we exchanged, she admitted being desperate for cash, and I had agreed to share some of mine in return for what might happen when we eventually met.

When she’d called from the lobby, I gave my room number and wondered—having been previously burned in similar encounters—if the girl who showed would bear any resemblance to the photos I’d seen.

I needn’t have worried. If anything, she looked better than advertised—and that was saying a lot. Dressed casually in jeans and a halter top and sporting iridescent ear buds tethered to a surprisingly bulky MP3 player, she looked every bit the college student for whom a distinguished professor might willingly sacrifice his career.

Jenine removed the ear buds and placed the MP3 player on the coffee table before tucking the envelope securely into her handbag. She performed the obligatory small talk in a detached but efficient manner until I let her know it was time to move things along.

Standing before me in the parlor of one of Southern California’s most exclusive boutique hotel rooms, biting her lower lip, she suddenly seemed quite small and vulnerable.

Before she arrived, I had propped open the French doors leading to the balcony. A slight breeze manipulated the sheer curtains into random patterns that caught her eye, causing her to look beyond the small wrought iron seating area. From her vantage point, the Santa Monica Pier was visible, and she smiled wistfully at it or something else that attracted her attention.

On the beach below us, a guy played riffs on a saxophone.

Someone’s stunning twenty-year-old daughter began lifting her halter top for my pleasure, and I thought about what I would do to a guy like me if this had been my daughter, Kimberly. After removing her top, she covered her breasts with her arms and paused.

I asked if there was a problem.

Just that she’d never done anything like this before, she said, and she was only doing it this once in order to make ends meet until her big break came along. I gave her the nod of understanding she expected, and she unbuttoned her jeans, slid them to the floor, and stepped out of them.

Promptly dismissing any misgivings I may have had regarding her age, I appraised her pert body and caught myself saying that what she was doing was no big deal; lots of famous actresses started out this way.

“It shows how committed you are to your craft,” I said, shamelessly.

That wistful smile played about her lips again, and she wriggled out of her panties. “What do you like?” she asked, and something in the tone of her voice suggested she had in fact done this sort of thing many times before.

Demonstrating considerable expertise and a surprising degree of enthusiasm, Jenine did her best to earn the contents of the envelope, and afterward, I told her to lie on her stomach so I could get a better look at the small tattoo on her lower back.

When I aimed my camera phone, she said, “I don’t do photos.”

“Just the tattoo,” I said.

She nodded but said she’d want to check the view screen to make sure I hadn’t included any part of her ass in the shot. “I intend to be a famous actress some day,” she said, “and I don’t want any nude photos turning up.”

I told her I didn’t see any birthmarks on her body and asked if she had any I might have missed. She gave me a strange look and told me about the dime-sized rosy patch on the right side of her head, just above her ear, which would have been impossible to see without parting her hair at that precise spot.

After I snapped a close up of that area, she began collecting her clothes. I noticed her purse on the desk and brought it to her.

“Are we finished here?” she wanted to know.

“We are.”

While she dressed, I moved to the balcony to signal the saxophone player, the monstrous man with severely deformed facial features named Augustus Quinn. I watched my giant pack up his instrument and walk away, knowing he was making his way around the hotel to the waiting sedan. Quinn and Coop would follow Jenine for a couple of hours, find out where she lived, who her friends were. Then they’d come back and pick me up and we’d drive to the airfield for the return flight to Virginia. The only negative was the time difference. By the time we got back, I’d be too tired to test the ADS weapon.

Reentering the parlor, I found Jenine standing in the center of the room, fully dressed, attempting to make eye contact. There’s an art to saying good-bye in these situations, a sort of silent protocol. You don’t kiss, but a hug is nice. There’s the verbal dance you both do when neither of you want her to linger but neither wants to be rude, either.

You don’t want to be too abrupt, so you tell her it was great and you’d love to see her the next time you’re in town. She reiterates she doesn’t really do this sort of thing, but for you she’ll make an exception.

My cell phone performed a dance of its own, vibrating on the desktop. “I need to get that,” I said.

She flashed a shy smile. “Okay … thanks?” It was almost a question. I gave her a slight frown to imply I wished she didn’t have to go. She shrugged and offered a cute little pout to express the same sentiment. Then she blew me a kiss, let herself out, and closed the door behind her.

When she did that, something clicked inside my head. I thought about Kathleen Gray and felt a wave of sadness wash over me.

22

The cell phone call that caused Jenine to leave had been prearranged. It was Quinn calling to let me know he was in position. I donned my jeans, pocketed the camera phone, poured myself a double whisky from the wet bar. I sat on the edge of the bed with my drink and propped my free hand on the sheets we’d rumpled moments earlier.

The scent of Jenine’s youth hung in the air, and I inhaled it fully, savoring her essence. Maybe Kathleen needed four hundred and ninety calories to de-stress, but not me.

I felt a vibration in my pocket, slid the phone open, put it to my ear.

“It’s me,” said Callie.

“You need to get a butterfly tattoo on your ass,” I said.

She paused for a beat. “Donovan, if this is how you normally start conversations, I think I may have isolated your problem with women. No wonder you can’t find a nice girl to marry.”

If Callie Carpenter had been born three inches taller, she wouldn’t have to kill people for a living. With her spectacular looks, she’d be a one-name supermodel by now. I drained my glass and placed it on the end table. I stood and walked back through the parlor to the balcony and chose the chair that angled toward the Santa Monica Pier.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Reach over the naked whore and flip on your TV.”

I sighed. “How little you think of me. Truth is, I’m here all alone on a hotel balcony, enjoying the unseasonably warm February temperature. Which channel?”

“Take your pick.”

I went back to the parlor, found the remote control, and pressed the power button. The words Breaking News flashed below the live feed of an interview in progress. The man being interviewed was telling reporters that the event that had just occurred was unprecedented. The electronic runner at the bottom of the screen flashed the words Homeland Security confirms unauthorized spy satellite breach.

The man identified himself as Edward Culbertson, head of Research Operations for Skywatch Industries. He said Skywatch had a government contract to provide artificial intelligence applications to enhance radar imaging. He said, “This is one of the five so-called Keyhole-class satellites that fly above us every day. The exact specifications are classified beyond top secret, but we know a few things about them.”

“For example?” a reporter said.

“We know they travel one hundred miles above the Earth at a speed of Mach 25,” Culbertson said. “We know they cover every inch of the Earth’s surface twice a day, taking digital photos of specific locations that have been programmed into their tracking mechanism.”

“Is that what happened in this case?” the reporter asked. “Did someone hack into the satellite computer and direct it to take the pictures we just showed on live television?”

“That’s the current speculation.”

Another reporter spoke: “Dr. Culbertson, there’s a lot of argument regarding the accuracy of spy satellite imaging. What’s the truth? For example, can they effectively display a car’s license plate?”

“Under normal conditions, they have a resolution of five inches, meaning they can accurately distinguish a five-inch object on the ground.”

On the phone, I said to Callie, “Did you know that?”

“No, but if I did, I wouldn’t be telling the whole world about it.”

A different reporter asked if the surveillance satellites could be tapped by authorities to help solve other crimes.

“No,” he said. “The odds are probably impossible to one.”

“Why’s that, doctor?”

“Because,” he said, “the crime scenes would have to be programmed into the satellite’s computer at least an hour in advance of the crime.”

“So what you’re saying is, whoever’s responsible for the kidnapping—they’re the ones who breached the satellite’s security?”

“That’s what we believe, yes.”

“To what end, sir?”

“My best guess? Someone wanted to watch the kidnapping from a remote location, someone who knew ultra-secret details about the satellite’s orbit path in advance.”

“Do you suspect terrorists?”

The expert suddenly looked uncomfortable and backed away as an FBI spokesperson took over the mic. “At this time, we are unable to confirm whether the satellite breach or the abduction were terrorist events. I’m afraid we don’t have time for further questions, but we’ll keep you informed as future details develop.”

Now, back at the TV studio, the newswoman said, “For those of you who just tuned in, Homeland Security has confirmed an unauthorized breach of one of their so-called spy satellites. This particular satellite had been tracking over the Southeastern Seaboard this past Tuesday when the following images were viewed remotely by an unknown person or persons.”

On the screen behind the newswoman, they showed about forty photos in rapid sequence. For me, the pictures would have been riveting even if the abduction hadn’t involved Monica Childers, the woman Callie and I killed for Victor four days ago.

Callie said, “Do we get to keep the money for the hit?”

That was Callie, always good for a smile.

The news reporter said, “As most people in the Jacksonville area already know, Monica Childers has been the focus of one of North Florida’s most extensive searches.” Behind her, they displayed a picture of Monica’s husband, Baxter. The newscaster identified him as one of the most prominent and widely respected surgeons in North America.

“Baxter’s a big shot,” I said to Callie.

“Baxter? What channel are you watching?”

“I don’t know, one of the big three.”

“Flip till you find CNN.”

“Why?”

“They’re talking about us.”

23

The station I’d been watching had shown photos that chronicled the entire event, starting with the two women jogging out of the resort entrance and ending with pictures taken from the opposite angle, as the satellite moved out over the Atlantic. The final photo showed the van turning left onto a narrow overgrown path.

But CNN had dug up a computer imaging expert who was displaying close-ups of the three people standing by the van. Baxter Childers was on a split screen with CNN news anchor, Carol Teagess.

“Dr. Childers, good as these photos are,” she said, “we still don’t have quality resolution on the faces, though we’re told Homeland Security is moments away from providing definitive photos. Are you prepared to tell us at this point whether one of these women is your wife, Monica?

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said. “Monica’s the one standing between the other two. The jogging outfit she’s wearing in the photographs is the same one she laid out on the chair the night before she disappeared.”

“And you said she left the hotel room early Tuesday morning while you were sleeping.”

“She always jogs around sunrise, so yes I’m usually sleeping when she gets up.”

“Dr. Childers, if you’re right, this is visual proof that Monica was kidnapped by a man and woman driving a white van.”

A third person appeared on the screen, and Carol said, “We are joined by Duval County Sheriff Allen English, the officer in charge of heading up the search team. Sheriff English, you’ve had fifteen hundred people combing the area for four days. These satellite photos clearly show the kidnappers took Monica Childers a mere six hundred yards from the hotel room the Childers occupied last Tuesday. How is it possible you missed the van or any evidence of Monica?”

The sheriff gave a withering look and said, “Because the van and Monica were gone by the time we learned she’d been missing.”

“We now know the van turned left on a small path,” Carol said. “Any chance your people missed that particular spot?”

“None whatsoever. Our search began from the beach and moved inland to AIA, so we hit that area a few hours into the search.”

“I’m told that since these photos were released, you’ve had a forensic crew working at the site. Any new evidence yet?”

“Nothing I can report at this time,” he said.

“But you’re working on it?”

“We are,” he said.

“Thank you, Sherriff,” Carol said, and I muted the sound.

To Callie, I said, “I gave her a lethal injection. There’s no way she could have survived.”

“What did you use?”

“Botulinum toxin.”

Callie laughed. “Maybe she’s been pumped so full of Botox she’s become immune!”

“Maybe Victor had someone pick her up after we drove off, someone who gave her a dose of Heptavalent.”

“Is that some sort of anti-venom?”

“It’s an antitoxin, but yeah, it works the same way. Botulinum paralyzes the respiratory muscles, but its effects can be reversed with Heptavalent. It’s not a perfect science, and it takes weeks or even months.”

“Thanks, doctor,” Callie said sarcastically. Then she added, “You think Victor’s behind this satellite thing?”

“Has to be.”

“But why take that chance? You think he just wanted to watch the hit go down?”

“Maybe. He doesn’t have much of a life, so maybe that’s how he gets his kicks. It’s also possible he tapped into the satellite so his people could find her.”

“But he knew where she’d be. He even marked the path for us.”

“Yeah, but this was our first job for him. Suppose he wanted her alive? He couldn’t be certain we’d do it exactly the way he told us to. Also, what if someone had a flat on the side of the road near the trail? Or what if someone was camping out in the area and would have seen us make the turn? A dozen things could have gone wrong that would have caused us to kill her somewhere else. If he wanted her alive, he’d want to know exactly where she was.”

“So you think he had Monica kidnapped.”

“I do.”

“Why didn’t he just ask us to kidnap her?”

“Maybe he wanted her for himself and didn’t want us to know.”

“So the midget captures the trophy wife of the doctor who saved his life.”

“It’s just a theory.”

“Why would he want to punish her?” Callie asked.

“There’s probably a lot to the story about Victor and the doctor. A lot we don’t know.”

“Think we ought to have a chat with Victor?”

“Eventually, but I want to put Lou on it first.”

“Research his connection to Baxter?”

“Right. Lou finds the connection, he’ll have Victor’s real name. Then we fast-forward his life, learn his abilities, figure out his motivations.”

“And his friends,” Callie said. “Any guy who can hijack a top-secret spy satellite…”

“Yeah,” I said. “This is no circus midget.”

Suddenly, the television had my full attention. I turned up the sound. “Are you watching this?”

She was.

CNN news anchor Carol Teagess was showing a close up of Monica Childers from one of the satellite photos. “This just in,” she said. “FBI officials working in conjunction with Homeland Security have released the following image taken from one of the spy satellite digital photographs.” The TV screen displayed the new close up on the left, and a recent photograph of Monica on the right.

“It’s official,” she said. “The lady who was abducted at Amelia Island on Valentine’s Day has been positively identified as Monica Childers, wife of the nationally prominent surgeon Dr. Baxter Childers.”

Carol touched her earpiece and paused. “We take you now to the FBI field office in Jacksonville, Florida, where I’m told that FBI Spokesperson Courtney Armbrister is ready to begin her live press conference. Sources familiar with the story expect her to give further updates and reveal the kidnappers’ identities.”

On the phone, Callie said, “Darwin’s gonna shit!”

“Ya think?”

The TV screen showed a bunch of people milling around a large room at the FBI’s Jacksonville field office. It was clear the press conference would be delayed a few minutes, so Carol began a voice-over dialog to keep the viewers from switching channels to watch Hee Haw reruns.

Callie used the time to ask, “What were you saying earlier? About getting a tattoo on my ass?”

“I found an adorable one on the lower hip of your new body double.”

“You found a hooker who looks like me?”

“I resent the implication,” I said. “In any event, she’s close enough facially, and our people can do the rest.”

“A tattoo,” she said.

“And you’re also going to need a small red birthmark on your scalp.”

“No pubic piercings?” she said with great annoyance.

“I wish,” I said. I took a few seconds to conjure a mental image of Callie naked, but she was so far out of my league I couldn’t even fantasize it. “I’ll send you digitals when I get back to HQ,” I said.

Body doubles are disposable people we use to cover our tracks, or, in extreme circumstances, to fake our deaths if our covers get blown. We put a lot of time and effort into these people, monitoring and protecting them, often for years at a time, until something happens that requires us to place them into service.

Of course, our body doubles are totally clueless about their participation in our reindeer games of national security. If they knew about it, most civilians would disapprove of the practice, just as most disapproved of the army’s plan for wide-scale use of the ADS weapon. However, from my side of the fence, collateral damage is a fact of war, and civilian sacrifice a necessary evil. When managed judiciously, body doubles can buy us time to eliminate paper trails or change our appearance so we can get back to the business of killing terrorists.

Callie asked if Jenine was prettier than her—just the sort of crap you’d expect from a gorgeous woman. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Remember, she doesn’t have to look exactly like you. She only needs to be the same age, shape, and height. The fact that she’s beautiful, with high cheekbones, is a plus. The tattoo and birthmark are small and easy to replicate.”

“What sort of butterfly is it?” she asked. “Is it stupid looking? A tattoo is a permanent fixture, Donovan. It sounds creepy.”

“Think of it as a shrine to Jenine’s memory,” I said. “And try to show some respect, will you? She’s putting her life on the line for you.”

“Not knowingly,” Callie said. “Not willingly.”

“A technicality,” I said.

“If we ever terminate her,” Callie said, “I’m going to be stuck with a tattoo and birthmark that my next body double won’t have.”

I let that comment hang in the air unanswered, and soon we were back to exchanging theories about the Monica hit. I wasn’t ready to completely dismiss the terrorist angle, so Callie asked if it were possible Sal Bonadello was involved with terrorists. After all, he’s the one who gave Victor my cell phone number. I told her Sal was many things, all unsavory, but a terrorist sympathizer, no. I told Callie to keep watching the news and let me know if anything interesting developed.

“This isn’t interesting enough for you?” she asked.

24

I was about to turn off the TV and take a shower when I got sidetracked by Courtney Armbrister’s live update on CNN.

FBI Special Agent Courtney Armbrister was a media dream. Playing to full advantage her shoulder-length auburn hair, perpetually pouting lips, and killer body, she managed to appear beguiling despite the seriousness of the occasion. Courtney sported the obligatory dark suit favored by the bureau, though hers was obviously tailored. Her jacket framed a white blouse that appeared more silk than cotton. Her eyes glared fiercely into the camera, and when she spoke, it was with such conviction you knew she had to be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Although in this case, she was lying like hell through those perfect, dazzling teeth.

I knew the cover-up was in full swing when S. A. Armbrister informed the CNN audience that FBI computers had identified the kidnappers as former Soviet agents with confirmed ties to terrorist leaders. On the screen behind her, the bureau displayed phony names and doctored images of Callie and me. In these photos, I was younger, smaller, and had no facial scar. Callie had been aged at least ten years, and they’d done something to her nose and eyes she wasn’t going to like. They also displayed fake profiles obtained through “classified sources” to show they were on top of things. She said the bureau was sharing these photos and documents with the public so we could be part of the process. It was a total load of crap, but as far as the Joe and Mrs. Lunchbox crowd were concerned, any words coming from that face would seem credible.

“Until we have proof to the contrary,” Courtney said, “we have every reason to believe Monica Childers is alive and being held captive. So we’re asking for your help. We want you to be our eyes and ears on this one. If you see anything, if you hear anything, please, call our hotline. There is no clue too small when it comes to saving an innocent life.”

Almost brought a tear to my eye, she did.

Then she talked about the white van and showed her national audience a picture of it. She said police around the country were working on that lead but they could use the public’s help on this, also. Finally, on behalf of FBI agents and law enforcement officers everywhere, Courtney promised to hunt the kidnappers down and bring them to justice. She ended by issuing a special alert: “If anyone has any information regarding these two former Soviet agents, please call the FBI hotline at …”

The phone vibrated again, and I answered it.

“Creed, you son of a jailhouse bitch! What did you do with the body?” The man I knew only as Darwin had only just begun yelling at me. He told me how much trouble they had to go to in order to doctor the photographs and plant the phony Russian suspects. Darwin called me stupid, careless, and a bunch of other names that would have hurt my feelings had I not been keenly aware of his indelicate nature. So he unloaded, and I sipped my bourbon and took my lumps and waited for him to get on topic, which he eventually managed to do.

“I want to know who hired you, because whoever it was, he managed to throw a monkey wrench into our national defense system. And don’t tell me Sal Bonadello, a guy who thinks software means sweaters.”

Darwin fell silent, but only for a moment. Then he said, “I’m waiting.”

“I can’t give you a name,” I said.

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t. But on the bright side, I know how to get it”

“Creed, listen to me. You’ve done a lot of stupid things over the years, things I’ve turned a blind eye to because up to now, you’ve been more valuable than the shit storms you’ve created. But this is too much. We can’t let someone hack into our national defense systems, and we can’t let the government find out that you and your people are running around taking contracts from criminals to kill people,” he said. “They’re funny about shit like that. How the fuck did you let this happen? No, don’t bother telling me. Just tell me this: what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to talk to an angry midget,” I said.

“What? Are you insane? You trying to tell me some midget hired you to kill the doctor’s wife?”

“Little person,” I said. “They prefer the term little people.”

“I prefer Viagra and a nice set of tits, but right now you and Callie are the only boobs in my life.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, I’m saying a midget hired me to kill Monica Childers, but I’m not sure she’s dead.”

“I know how to tell: did you kill her or not?”

“We killed her, but we left her body. Now it’s gone.”

“Wait,” Darwin said. “Maybe I should get some Roman soldiers to move the stone away from the tomb.”

“Look, I gave her a syringe full of BT. I think someone got to her in time to administer an antidote. I think that’s why Victor monitored the satellite, so he could get a chase team to pick her up as soon as we left.”

“Victor? Who’s Victor? The midget?”

“Little person.”

“Let me get this straight.” Darwin paused on the other end of the line. “You took a contract from an angry midget to kill a prominent surgeon’s wife, but she was rescued and then kidnapped by other people working for the very same midget. That what you’re telling me?”

“It sounds stupid when you say it out loud like that.”

Then, in a tight voice, he said, “Kill her again, Creed.”

“Okay.”

“Because otherwise she’ll be able to identify you.”

“Okay.”

“And kill the midget, too.”

“That I can’t do.”

“Why the hell not?”

“First, I don’t know for certain he’s the hacker. Second, if he isn’t the hacker and I kill him, I’ll never be able to find the real hacker. Third, I’ve entered into an agreement with him.”

“You’ll be entering a pine box if you don’t put a stop to this hacking business.”

“I will.”

“And don’t forget to kill Monica Childers.”

“Assuming she’s still alive.”

“Don’t assume anything. Just kill her.”

“Will do.”

“Keep me in the loop. I don’t want to have to keep calling you after the fact.”

“Got it.”

“Oh, shut up.” He hung up on me.

25

I’m a time Saver.

Time Savers are people who commit special moments to memory. A skilled Time Saver can freeze all the components of an event—the date, mood, time, temperature, lighting, sights, sounds, scents, the breeze—everything. Then we park this information in a corner of our brains and relive it whenever we wish. It’s like opening a time capsule years after an event and having all the wonderful memories spill out.

Some guys like baseball, some ballet. Maybe they’re content to grow old with memories of sweeping the Yankees or reliving the Dance of the Cygnets from Swan Lake. But me, I’d rather Time Save the memory of trysts with beautiful young ladies like Jenine.

Fully dressed now, sitting on the balcony again, I closed my eyes and began experiencing all the facets of our encounter, committing them to a permanent file in my mind. Just as I’d indoctrinated my body to survive torture and function at a high level by testing weapons and sleeping in a prison cell, I’d structured my mind to compartmentalize the significant experiences of my life. These I can relive as if they’re happening in the moment—a wonderful skill to be able to call upon the next time I’m stuck in a real prison for any length of time.

Some people plan for their retirement. I plan for my imprisonment, for I am certain to end up dead or in prison, and if it’s to be the latter, I want my body and mind to be prepared.

I began by concentrating on her voice. Then I relived the heightened awareness, the anticipation—the entire range of feelings and emotions that raced through my mental synapses and physical receptors just after she called from the lobby phone. I marked these things in my mind until I knew I could call upon them at will.

Then I re-experienced Jenine’s arrival in the doorway, my first view of her, and the immediate impressions I formed, and how I felt the moment I encountered her beauty, newness, and youth. I smiled, thinking how none of this mattered in the least to Jenine and the other beauties I’d met in my life, although I’m sure they have fond memories of the money I spent.

I focused on the way she entered the room while listening to music, just as you’d expect a college kid to do, with the ear buds, the oversized MP3 player, and …

And suddenly I realized she didn’t have the MP3 player with her when she left the room!

A cold chill rushed through me. Could Jenine have put the MP3 player in her purse while I was on the balcony, signaling Quinn? I didn’t think so. If she ever kept it in her purse, she’d have done so before meeting me. I had to assume the worst. As a trained assassin for many years, I survived the deadliest ambushes, the most terrifying physical encounters imaginable, by always assuming the worst.

I jumped to my feet and dialed the operator. A young lady answered. “Front desk. This is Jodie; how may I help you?”

“Jody,” I said in my most commanding voice, “this is Donovan Creed in room 214. I’m a federal agent. I need you to listen very carefully.”

“Is this a joke?” she asked. “If it is, it’s not funny.”

Maybe I should have told her that after spending twelve years as the CIA’s top international assassin, I ought to know a bomb threat when I saw one. Then again, the word assassin conjures up such diverse feelings. I decided to stick with the federal agent story and gave her another go.

“Jody, I repeat, I’m a federal agent and there’s a bomb in my room. I want you to activate the fire alarm, contact hotel security, and immediately begin evacuating the building.”

“Sir,” she said, “bomb threats are taken very seriously. If I report you, it could mean prison time.”

“Jodie,” I said, “I wrote the manual on bomb threats, okay? Now sound the fire alarm and make an evacuation announcement before I come down there and rip your face off!”

I slammed the phone down and ran to the door, flipped the lock latch outward so the door would stay propped open, and tore down the hall, banging doors, yelling at the top of my lungs, “Emergency! Evacuate the building immediately! Leave your things behind! Get out of the building now!”

By the time I got to the fifth door, the fire alarm started blaring, so I raced back to my room and started a frantic search. The bathroom seemed the likeliest place, so I started there. I checked behind the shower curtain, lifted the toilet bowl tank cover, looked up to see if any ceiling tiles had been dislodged, and checked the floor for debris in case I’d missed something. Then I realized this wasn’t going to work. I simply didn’t have the time to conduct a proper search. Jenine, on the other hand, had the entire length of our visit to decide where to hide it.

If she hid it.

If it was a bomb.

I ran to the balcony, felt my legs climb over the railing, felt myself hurtling through the air. I realized I’d just jumped off the second floor balcony! My legs had made the calculation without me, had hurled me as far out as possible in an effort to clear the sidewalk below.

Now, in midair, with my mind back on the job, I tucked and rolled as I hit and tried to ignore the searing pain that suddenly knifed through my shoulder. I scrambled to my feet, sprinted twenty yards, and dove behind the thick base of a giant palm, scattering twelve-inch sand tsunamis in my wake. I tucked my chin, protected my vital organs as well as possible, and waited for the explosion.

26

And nothing happened.

A handful of hotel guests began filing out the side and back entrances. There weren’t many, but I supposed that during a fire drill, the vast majority would have gone out the front.

A minute passed, and the fire alarm droned on. The speakers must have pointed to the front and sides of the hotel because the alarm was fairly muted from my position.

Some more guests joined the first group. I considered running over to warn them, but no, a discussion was bound to follow, and we’d probably all get killed while they questioned my credentials and the conclusions I’d drawn.

In the end, it didn’t matter, because someone in the group made the decision to walk toward the front of the hotel and the others followed.

More time passed, seconds I’m sure, but it always seems longer while waiting for a bomb to explode. The muffled drone of the alarm gave way to other sounds you’d expect to hear from behind a palm tree fifty yards from the Pacific Ocean: breaking surf behind me and, somewhere, hidden from view, the musical clang of steel drums rising above the traffic noise. A quarter mile to my left, I could hear the distant rumble of the roller coaster on the Santa Monica Pier.

I didn’t know how long I had before the bomb detonated, but if I had any time at all I figured I should use it to find better cover. I slowly uncoiled my body and chanced a high-speed dash to a small concrete wall fifteen yards to my right. I dove behind it face first, like Pete Rose sliding into third base, and waited. I looked up. Twenty yards to my right, on the concrete walkway behind the neighboring hotel, a young man in a bright orange windbreaker had stopped holding his girlfriend’s hand long enough to point at me and laugh.

I looked at the young couple. At what point, I wondered, had I evolved into an object of ridicule? When had I become some sort of cartoon character, a delusional mental case deserving the scorn of teenagers? Was it possible I’d imagined the bomb threat? Was I witnessing a glimpse into my future, where every sudden sound or random thought might cause me to frighten people or threaten to send me jumping out of windows or ducking for cover?

From this angle, I could see a few hotel guests glancing toward the rooftop, probably searching for signs of smoke. I followed their gaze and came to the same conclusion: there was nothing to worry about.

I smiled at the young couple and shrugged, then stood and dusted myself off. The girl smiled back and held her position a moment, as if trying to decide if I’d be safe left to my own devices. Her boyfriend, showing far less concern, gently tugged at her wrist. With her free hand, she tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. He tugged again, and she turned her eyes away—reluctantly, it seemed to me—and they resumed their leisurely stroll along the sidewalk.

Eventually, the alarm stopped. It was quiet now, and things were starting to resume their normal order. I guessed I’d have some explaining to do to hotel security and possibly the local police and bomb squad. Darwin would probably have to get involved again, which he’d hate.

The roller coaster on the Santa Monica Pier must have stopped to reload passengers because its rumble had been temporarily replaced by calliope music and the mechanical sounds of the other amusement rides. A couple of security guys came out the hotel’s back entrance, followed by a bald guy in a gray suit with black lapels—probably the hotel manager. Behind me to my left, two coeds on roller blades glided along the beach walk in my direction. Their arms glistened with sweat, and their matching turquoise spandex leggings were stretched tight over well-defined legs. As they whooshed by, I gave them a nod of approval. One of them frowned. The other one flipped me the finger.

I moved closer and glanced up at the balcony from which I’d jumped. The MP3 player had been bulky. Could it have been a bomb?

Of course.

So why, I asked myself, was I standing out here in harm’s way? The answer was simple: because it didn’t add up. If the MP3 player housed a bomb, why wait so long? I mean, why didn’t Jenine detonate it as soon as she’d gotten out of range? Or wire it with an internal timer and set it to go off five minutes after she left? I wondered if something had gone wrong. Maybe a wire got crossed or disconnected. Maybe the remote didn’t get the proper signal due to interference from the hotel wiring system.

No. In my line of work, you have to assume that everything that can hurt you will always work perfectly. Yet this seemed the rare exception because I could think of no reason for her to wait this long to detonate it.

Unless …

Something nagged at my brain, just beyond my awareness. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something about the timing of the detonation was itching at me, trying to make sense. If I had a few minutes to work it out …

But I didn’t. I’d have to put that thought on hold and come back to it later. At the moment, I had to either wait for the bomb squad or try to disarm the bomb myself. I thought about it and decided it made sense for me to do it since the explosion was well overdue. I was sure the hotel clerk had called the bomb squad, but by the time the call got routed to the right people, by the time the right people got here, it could all be over.

I headed for the back entrance at a fast clip. As I pulled the door open, a childhood memory popped into my mind, a perfect example of how this Time Saver thing works.

I’d been twelve the summer my best friend Eddie tied a dozen cherry bombs together with a single fuse and lit it. We howled with excited laughter and dashed for cover. We waited forever but nothing happened. Eddie finally went back to investigate and when he did, the bombs exploded. Eddie lost several fingers, a section of ear, and most of the skin on the left side of his face.

I can’t explain how, but standing in the hotel doorway just then I could feel the bomb trying to explode. In my mind I pictured an old-time detonator, the kind with the big handle you push down to make contact. In my mind that handle was already in motion. I screamed for the benefit of anyone within the sound of my voice. “There’s a bomb in the hotel! Run for cover!”

I slammed the door shut, reversed my direction, and ran full speed back toward the concrete wall I’d spotted earlier, the one that bordered the courtyard. It was waist-high, and from this direction, I couldn’t just slide behind it like before. I’d have to dive over it like the commando I used to be.

So I did. I managed the dive. Then, laying flat on my chest, I pressed the left side of my body and head against the wall.

At which point, much of the hotel—and the upper third of the wall protecting me—vaporized.

27

The explosion from the hotel left a residue of soot and dust hanging in the air like a mushroom cloud. I coughed what I could out of my lungs. My ears rang. All color had been blasted from my vision. I turned to check behind me and saw white sand and sky, black palm trees and water.

I shook my head a couple of times and blinked the color back into my eyes. I got to my feet, checked for injuries, but other than the nagging pain in my shoulder, I had nothing to complain about. I seemed to be moving in slow motion and wondered if I was in shock. I willed myself to snap out of it so I could focus on the devastation fifty feet before me.

The sidewalls of the hotel remained intact, but most of the back had been scooped out. The roof and outer walls of the penthouse floor were still there but were listing precariously. With the internal support structure weakened, it would only be a matter of time, probably minutes, before the overhang crashed into the rubble below. The balcony I’d jumped from, like the ones above and below it, as well as the adjacent ones, was history. The exterior of the hotel had been cleanly dissected in a half-circle running maybe sixty feet in diameter.

What remained looked like a scene from a war zone, with bodies and body parts everywhere. Leaping flames erupted sporadically, revealing ruptured gas lines. People screamed from within, but the massive wall of sweltering heat would surely hinder rescue efforts.

Locals, tourists, and even vagrants began rushing to the scene to rubberneck. I spotted a homeless guy heading my way wearing a decent pair of boots. I fished a fifty from my jeans and quickly traded for them. As I laced up the bum’s boots, I studied the roof. How long could it possibly hang there, defying gravity?

This was no time for heroes, I thought, and had I not felt directly responsible for the widespread destruction and loss of life, I might have walked away. Instead, I took a deep breath and entered the smoldering ruins. As my eyes adjusted to the soot and heat, I scanned the carnage and decided the far right edge of the blast perimeter offered the highest probability for survivors.

Disregarding the teetering roof structure above me, I picked my way through the mess. Within seconds I spotted the torso of an elderly man covered in soot. I tried for a pulse, but he wasn’t offering any. In these situations, you have to move quickly, put your effort where it can do the most good.

I had to focus on the living.

Working my way deeper into the ruins, I moved beyond the mangled bodies of the obvious dead. Since most surfaces were too hot or sharp to grab, I took a few seconds to search for something I could wrap around my hands. Strips of curtain remnants did the trick, and soon I was tossing broken furniture out of the way and pushing slabs of concrete aside in order to inspect the smoky air pockets below.

I found an unconscious boy with severe burns lying beneath the upturned bed that had saved his life. Next to him I found a girl, probably his older sister, who had not been so fortunate. I carried the boy out of the blast site to a clearing on the sand. Some people rushed to help. A lady said, “Bless you.” I nodded and went back to search for others.

Some who had gathered to view the scene became motivated to help. Better than nothing, I figured, but the devastation was formidable and the rescuers were unskilled and tentative. Some with rubber soles beat a hasty retreat when they felt their shoes melting.

I continued working and managed to uncover several bodies, but no survivors. Quinn appeared out of nowhere, carrying two children, one in each arm, both disfigured with horrific injuries but alive. Someone pointed and screamed when they saw Quinn’s face, mistaking him for a burn victim. We assessed each other with a quick nod and continued our search.

Soon police and firefighters were on the scene, yelling at us to clear the area. Knowing these guys were better equipped to handle things, Quinn and I withdrew and began picking our way through the mass of people converging on the area where one of Southern California’s premier boutique hotels had stood majestically a scant fifteen minutes earlier.

“The whore did this?” asked Quinn.

“She did,” I said.

“On purpose?”

I’d been wondering the same thing while searching the blast site for survivors. She didn’t strike me as the type who would blow up a building on purpose, but she was obviously the type who would hide a bomb in my room.

Quinn’s cell phone rang with a text message. He read it silently, and his lips moved as he did so. “Coop followed her home,” he said.

“Text him and have him send us the address,” I said. “Tell him to stay put till we get there. Tell him to follow her if she moves but keep us informed.”

Quinn gave me a look that offered more attitude than a ghetto crack whore. “You see these fingers?” he said. “You know how long it would take me to text all that?”

We walked. Quinn called Coop and gave him the message. He had Coop order us a sedan from a local limo service and told him where to pick us up. Since no cars were moving, we’d have to walk at least a mile to get beyond the traffic jam.

Around us, news crews were scrambling to set up live cams. Television reporters rehearsed eyewitnesses, prepping them for their big moment on live TV. Sirens blared from all directions. Above us, thwacking blades from a dozen helicopters sliced the sky.

“How’d she detonate it?” Quinn asked. “Cell phone?”

“That’s my guess,” I said. “Or maybe she just placed the bomb and someone else detonated it.”

Hundreds of locals rushed past us, jockeying for the best views from which to observe the unfolding drama. Shell-shocked tourists aimed cameras and video recorders at the human carnage, and I cringed, thinking about how these grizzly images would be played and replayed and plastered all over the news. Talking heads would speculate and argue, and politicians from both parties would point fingers and assign blame to the opposition.

I asked, “Any idea why she waited so long to detonate the charge?”

He thought about it a few seconds before answering. “She might have made me from the balcony,” he said.

I remembered how she made a funny smile when she arrived at the room, standing near the balcony. Could that have been what made her smile? Quinn? Would she have reason to know him? If so, the terrorists had infiltrated our organization much deeper than I’d thought. “She saw you behind the hotel and then made you in the car afterward?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

“No. When she came out the front of the hotel, we got stuck in traffic. I told Coop to just follow the beeps while I jumped out of the car to follow her on foot. She probably saw me getting out of the car ’cause she took off like a poisoned pig!”

“And you couldn’t catch her? Skinny little girl like that?”

“Runs like Callie,” he said.

“No one runs like Callie,” I said. “But I get the picture.”

Quinn said, “Last time I saw her, she was passing a Krispy Kreme Donut shop. Then I heard the blast and ran back.”

“What was that, two blocks? You call that a run?”

“Hey, you’re my size, two blocks is an Olympic event.”

“So Coop the driver followed the beeps, and we’ve got the address where she stopped,” I said, patting myself on the back for placing the tracking device in her purse.

“Might take us a while to get there,” Quinn said.

He was right. In fact, it took an hour to get the car and another twenty minutes to fight the traffic. Finally, after what seemed like forever, we spotted the miniscule split-level ranch with the peeling yellow paint on Vista Creek Drive to which Coop had tracked Jenine. Coop had parked his car a block away from the house, so we had our driver park a block beyond that. Then we signaled Coop and waited for him to return the signal. He didn’t, which meant either he was sleeping or …

He was dead. We knew it the minute we saw the bullet hole in the driver’s window. Coop had been shot from the blind side, just behind his left ear. His head hung down, his chin resting on his sternum. His blood was everywhere. Quinn opened the driver’s side door and lifted Coop’s head.

“What’s that in the bullet hole?” he asked.

I hated putting my face that close to poor Coop’s, but Quinn was right; there was something protruding from the bullet hole. It turned out to be the tracking device I had placed in Jenine’s purse.

Quinn backed out of the car, stretched to his full height, and looked at the house. “Any guess what we’ll find in there?”

“Jenine’s body,” I said.

Quinn gestured toward Coop and said, “Good thing our limo driver didn’t see this. Might have spooked him.”

“Ya think?” I said.

“I think you picked up that expression from the new girl, Kathleen.”

“I think you’re right.”

28

We entered the house and quickly found two bodies wrapped in thick plastic. Both were attractive young women, one being Jenine. The other girl seemed vaguely familiar. She could have been anyone, but with two bedrooms in the house, my money was on her being Jenine’s roommate.

What we couldn’t find in the house was anything else.

No furniture, dishes, pots, pans, or silverware. No mops, brooms, cleaning supplies, paper cups, toilet paper. No computers, printers, phones, photographs, or paper of any kind. It was mindboggling. To rid an entire house of so much evidence in such a short period of time—even a small house like Jenine’s—would require a large, experienced crew. These guys were consummate pros. One or more hit men had killed three people while a full crew of crime scene cleaners waited in the wings.

In the refrigerator, there were two unopened bottles of water.

“For us?” asked Quinn.

“Apparently,” I said.

Quinn started to reach for one. “You think they’re poisoned?”

“I do.”

“What do we do now?” Quinn asked. “Talk to the neighbors?”

I didn’t think so. Surely someone spotted the dead driver before we did. They’d have called the cops. Fortunately for us, most of the police were either at the hotel or heading there. Whoever they could spare to check on our dead driver was probably on their way but likely stuck in traffic. Still, I figured we didn’t have much time.

“You got a laptop in your luggage?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Let’s get out of here and drive somewhere we can get Wi-Fi.”

“What about the water?” Quinn asked. “Should we leave them for the cops?”

“There won’t be any prints on them. On the other hand, some rookie’s liable to get killed drinking one.” We opened them and poured the water down the sink and took the bottles with us to the car.

When we got to Starbucks, Quinn remained with the driver and I took his cell phone and laptop inside. My first objective was to access the Web site where I’d discovered Jenine’s ad. I remembered seeing lots of girls on the site, and hopefully some were local. If so, I intended to contact them and see if they knew Jenine. Best case scenario, someone might give me a lead to follow.

There were two locals on the site, Star and Paige. Star wouldn’t be talking, since I recognized her as the other dead girl in Jenine’s house.

I called Paige and got her answering service. I left a message to return my call as soon as possible. Then I left the coffee shop and climbed into the front seat and waited. I looked at Quinn and tried not to smile. Times like these—his huge form crammed into the back seat, knees bent, head bowed, shoulders hunched—made me realize the effort it took just to be him. He was so large he could barely fit in the back seat of the town car.

“You did a good job at the hotel today,” I said. “Probably saved a half-dozen people.”

Quinn shrugged. “I was on the clock.”

In time, we would learn that local hospital personnel labored for days to service the injured, and many of the bodies they received were charred beyond identification. The initial death toll was one hundred and eleven, but within a week the final count turned north of a buck fifty.

The phone rang, and I answered it.

“This is Paige,” she said.

“You sound gorgeous,” I said.

She laughed. “Maybe we should stick to the phone then, just in case.”

“Not a chance. I’ve already seen your picture.”

“Ah,” she said. “So what did you have in mind?”

“I was hoping we could meet for a cup of coffee, maybe chat awhile, get to know each other. If we’re compatible, we can take it from there.”

“My standard donation is five hundred dollars an hour.”

“I’ll double that if you can get here within the hour.”

“Don’t be offended,” she said, “but are you affiliated in any way with law enforcement?”

“I’m not. Are you?”

She laughed. “No, but I played a sexy meter maid in a high school play a few years back.”

“That might be fun to reenact some time,” I said, trying to guess where she might be heading with the comment. I wondered if her other clients sounded this retarded.

“I still have the costume, so maybe we can talk about it when I get there,” she purred. “You’re fun; I can tell. Where would you like to meet, and how will I recognize you when I get there?”

I told her and hung up. Then I told Quinn that Paige thought I sounded fun. He rolled his eyes.

Paige was plenty cute, but she didn’t look like an aspiring actress. She didn’t look like a hooker, either. What she looked like was a soccer mom, which, as it turned out, she was. I slipped her the envelope, and she palmed it and placed it in her purse. She excused herself and went to the restroom. When she got back, she said, “That’s way more than we agreed on. Did you want to book more time?”

“Not really,” I said. “I just wanted you to know I’m sincere.”

We talked about our kids and our divorces. She talked about how different grade school had become since she was a kid. “When I was in school, if I wanted to do something after school, I had to ride there on my bike,” she said. “Or I didn’t participate. My kids have it easy. They’d never believe it, but I actually used to be somebody. These days I’m a glorified taxi driver.”

“Well, I’ve probably got ten years on you,” I said. “But one thing that was different for me: my schools never had any moms like you!”

She winked. “Maybe they did and you didn’t know.”

I let that interesting thought float around in my head a minute, but the only mom I could remember clearly from grade school was Mrs. Carmodie, Eddie’s mom—Eddie being the kid with the cherry bombs. What I remembered most about Mrs. Carmodie was she had a double-decker butt. While normal butts curve like the letter C, Mrs. Carmodie’s butt got halfway through the C, then extended several inches in a straight line like some sort of shelf before finishing the curve. The shelf on her butt was wide enough to hold two cans of soda. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t envision Eddie’s mom turning tricks during the day while we were in school.

The half hour flew by, and after we finished our coffees, I walked Paige to her car. Her silver Honda Accord had sixteen-inch Michelin tires with bolt-patterned alloy rims. She noticed the limo parked beside her.

“I wonder whose car that is,” she said. “You think it’s someone famous?”

“It’s mine, actually.”

“No way!”

“Want to peek inside?”

She did, and when she did, Quinn grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her onto the seat. I followed her in and pulled the door shut behind me. Paige was breathing rapidly, and her heart was probably beating as fast as a frightened rabbit, but she knew better than to scream.

“Where’s the driver?” I asked.

“When you went in, I told him to take a walk and come back in an hour.”

That left us a half hour to find out what Paige knew. Turns out, we only needed five minutes to learn something that hit me like a left hook to the liver.

29

“All of us had to share details about our customers with a man named Grasso,” Paige said.

“By ‘all of us’ you mean?”

“The local girls, the ones they consider hot.”

“Jenine would obviously qualify.”

“Yes. She’s one of the faves.”

“What can you tell me about Grasso?”

“Not too much. He works for a major gangster. I don’t want to say who.”

I peeled off another grand and placed it in her hand. She looked into my eyes. “You didn’t get this from me.”

“Of course.”

She whispered, “Joseph DeMeo.” Then she said, “Please, mister, keep me out of this. I’ve got kids.”

“I will,” I said, “but you’ve got to find another line of work. You’re not safe doing this. We won’t repeat anything you told us, but DeMeo knows you’re friends with Jenine and Star, and they’re gone now. You’ve got to get your kids and get the hell out of town. DeMeo won’t leave any loose ends. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

I kissed her cheek and let her go.

An hour later, we pulled up to the guard station at Edwards. I flashed my credentials, and one of the guards informed me that all flights had been grounded due to the terrorist attack. I got Darwin on the phone, and within minutes the guard received orders from the base commander to open the gate. Our limo driver took us across the tarmac and parked us next to the company’s jet. Quinn reminded me to pop the trunk so he could retrieve his saxophone.

“That reminds me,” I said, and sang, “You cain’t always get h’what you wa-hant!”

Quinn’s facial deformity prevented him from smiling, but you could sometimes find amusement there if you knew how to interpret it. I was one of the few who did.

“Always figured you for a Stones fan,” he said.

The pilots, who had been glued to the TV in the auxiliary terminal, were now racing across the tarmac to open the cabin door for us.

“It’ll take us fifteen minutes to get her ready for takeoff,” one of them shouted.

Quinn and I climbed into the cabin. While he got situated, I poured us a drink. He said, “Is your cell phone broken? Reason I ask, you’ve checked it half a dozen times since the explosion.”

“I sort of thought Janet might call,” I said.

“Heard about the attack, wondered if you’re okay?” he said.

“Stupid, right?”

Quinn shrugged and held up his glass. “To ex-wives,” he said.

We clinked glasses. “I’m not sure that counts,” I said. “You’ve never been married.”

Quinn drank some of his bourbon. “Never been bitten by a yak, either.”

I held a sip of the bourbon in my mouth a few seconds to enhance the burn. “Yak?” I said.

He grinned.

I swallowed the bourbon and took another sip. “Me, either,” I said. “That strike you as odd?”

Quinn’s eyes started smiling again, or so it seemed to me. He said, “One time Coop told me he got bit by a yak. Said he was in India in a town whose name can’t be pronounced by anyone who’s not from Tibet. Said they made him drink tea made from yak butter.”

“Yak butter,” I said.

“Coop says the average man in Tibet drinks forty to fifty cups of tea every day of his life. The teapot always has a big lump of yak butter in it. You’re supposed to blow the yak butter scum out of the way before you take a sip,” Quinn said.

“That’s disgusting.”

“Same thing I told Coop!”

I nodded. “To Coop,” I said, and we touched glasses again. From the cockpit, I heard the pilots working through their preflight checklist. Quinn silently swallowed the rest of his bourbon. I followed his lead. The co-pilot opened the door and gave us a thumbs-up, and we buckled our seat belts and settled in for the long flight to Virginia. I looked out the window and for the first time it struck me that today had been clear and beautiful, just like New York City on 9/11.

30

The jet made quick work of the runway. Once airborne, I told the pilot to veer toward the hotel so I could witness the scene from above. However, within seconds, an F/A-18 Hornet pulled alongside us and escorted us northeast, out of LA airspace.

The co-pilot opened the cabin door. “Sorry about that, Mr. Creed.”

“You pussy,” I said.

He frowned and went back to work, leaving me to contemplate the smoldering bodies I’d seen just hours ago. I pictured families and loved ones across the country desperately dialing cell phones that would never be answered. I wondered if, when the roof fell, how many rescue personnel had to be added to the death toll.

After we hit cruising altitude, I called Victor. When he answered, I said, “How’d you do it?”

“If … you’re … talk … ing … about the … spy … satel … lite … you can … tell … your … people … I’m … sorry. I … won’t … do it … again.”

“You’re sorry?” I said. “You’re kidding, right? ’Cause they have ways to make you sorry. By the way, where’s Monica?”

I heard a shuffling sound, and a guy with a high-pitched but otherwise normal voice took over. “Mr. Creed,” he said, “My name is Hugo.”

“Hugo,” I said.

“That is correct,” he said.

“Your voice,” I said. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you’re a little person.”

“Also correct,” he said.

“Okay, so I’m supposed to believe your names are Victor and Hugo. Who do you guys hang out with, HG and Wells?”

“I do not know any HG and Wells,” he said. “I am Victor’s spiritual adviser.”

“Spiritual adviser,” I said.

“That is correct.”

In the background, I heard Victor say, “Tell … him … the … rest.” Hugo attempted to cover the mouthpiece with his hand but it was a small hand and I could still hear them talking, plain as day.

Hugo said, “He’ll laugh at me.”

Victor said, in a commanding voice, “Tell … him!”

Hugo removed his hand from the mouthpiece and told me he was something, but his voice was so small I had to ask him to repeat himself.

“You’re the what?” I asked.

“Supreme commander of his army.”

“I’m trying to think of something funny to say,” I said, “but you’ve rendered me speechless.”

Hugo said he and Victor had amassed an army of little people all over the country. “We have soldiers everywhere,” Hugo said. “Hundreds. Some are captains of industry. Others have access to information surpassing all but the highest pay grades. We’ve even got a little person on the White House kitchen staff,” he boasted.

“What is he,” I asked, “a short order cook?”

He covered up the mouthpiece again and I heard him tell Victor, “Say the word and I’ll kill the bastard. Turn me loose on him, that’s all I ask. I’ll cut out his liver and dance on it.” He was shouting now: “I want to dance on his liver!” Victor took charge of the phone.

“Mr. … Creed … you … have up … set my … gen … eral.”

“C’mon, Victor, cut the crap,” I said. “I need to know if Monica’s alive. If so, I need to kill her. Thanks to you, it’s become a matter of national security.”

“We … should … meet,” he said. “There … is much … ground … to … cover.”

We agreed to meet Tuesday morning at Café Napoli in New York City. “You got an address for me?” I asked.

“Hes … ter and Mul … berry,” he said. “In … Little … Italy.”

“Little Italy,” I said.

“You … see I’m … not … without … a sense … of hu … mor, Mr. Creed.”

“You gonna have soldiers at the restaurant?”

“Eight o’ … clock be … fore the … place … opens up,” he said.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

31

After completing my conversation with Victor and Hugo, I placed a call to headquarters and told Lou Kelly that the hotel bomb wasn’t a terrorist strike. “It was a personal attack against me by Joe DeMeo,” I said.

I gave him all the embarrassing details regarding my tryst with Jenine, told him about Coop the driver getting killed and about Jenine and Star and how their house had been sterilized.

“This Jenine, she the one you’d pegged for Callie’s body double?”

“She was, and she’d have been perfect.” I didn’t tell him about the birthmark photos I’d taken. It seemed like an intrusion, somehow.

“What you’re saying,” Lou said, “Jenine and her friends, and most of the prostitutes in LA …”

“The pretty ones,” I said.

“All the pretty prostitutes in LA: working for Joe DeMeo?”

“Not working for him as in being pimped, but yeah, he finances their Web sites, has his people monitor the sites and the girls, and pays them for information.”

“Information he can use to buy influence with politicians, maybe the Hollywood elite?”

“Otherwise, how would he know where and when I was planning to meet Jenine?”

“He’d set this up even before your meeting at the cemetery,” Lou said.

“Otherwise his guys would have shot me there.”

“Not the easiest thing to do with Quinn guarding you.”

“Yeah, but DeMeo had nine guys there the night before. DeMeo told me they spotted Augustus. Still, Quinn would have killed a couple, and I might have done the same, but we were out-manned and on Joe’s turf. He could have killed us both. And should have,” I said.

“Why have a big shootout in the middle of the day? Better to use Jenine to bomb you,” Lou said. “He already knew you planned to visit a hooker in Santa Monica.”

“Make it look like a terrorist attack,” I said. “Kill Jenine, let her take the fall. They’ve got her computer, which ties her to me, and they can make it look like she was working with terrorists.”

“And Joe DeMeo gets away with pinning the hotel bombing on the terrorists.”

“Joe’s a slick one,” I said.

We were silent a moment while Lou’s mind worked it. “You tell Darwin about DeMeo yet?”

“I wanted to bounce it off you first.”

“Uh huh. Well, we better let him be the one to tell the world,” Lou said.

“Or not tell them.”

“You think he’ll try to cover it up?”

“I think he’ll keep the blame focused on the terrorists. He left the possibility open with Monica, and this is a logical extension. It’s easy to believe, and it’s good politically; it justifies his job and budget and brings the country together.”

“He’ll have to tell the Feebs something,” Lou said.

“Whatever he tells them, our focus is Monica. After we confirm her death, we’ll give them the hotel bombing and let them take the credit for solving it.”

“That’s worst case scenario,” Lou said. “We might get lucky, find and rescue Monica. Then we give the Feebs all the glory and get a ton of future favors in return.”

I said nothing.

There was a short pause and then he said, “Oh, right. I got it. There will be no rescue.”

I said, “Just so we’re on the same page.”

Lou sighed. “This business,” he said.

“Don’t get me started.”

I told Lou to get some full-timers working on any connection they could find between Baxter Childers and Victor.

“Tell me about Victor,” he said, and I told him what I knew, except for the part about the spy satellite.

Then I asked, “How long you think it’ll take to find a connection?”

Lou laughed. “Five, maybe ten minutes.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“Donovan, you and I each have our specialties, and for both of us, some jobs are harder than others. When you tell me that on the one hand you’ve got a world-famous surgeon, on the other an angry quadriplegic midget with dreadlocks, and you know there’s a connection and want me to find it—well that’s like asking you how long it would take to kill a hamster with a shotgun.”

“So that’s a yes.”

“It is.”

I told Lou to also contact the LAPD and bomb squad techs and get back to me ASAP. The more we learned about the bomb, the more we’d know about Joe DeMeo and the extent of his power.

“No way the attack on you could have been an inside job?” Lou asked.

“I don’t think so. If our guys, including you, wanted to kill me, it would be a lot easier to just poison me.” I glanced at Quinn and noticed him watching me with amused indifference. “Of course, Quinn knew about both Jenine and the hotel,” I said, “but it’s hard to pin it on him.”

Quinn pricked up his ears.

“Not because he’s my friend,” I said, aiming a smile in his direction, “but because he didn’t know my plans for after the DeMeo meeting. I didn’t tell him about the hotel or Jenine until a few minutes before we got there. And he didn’t know her name or what she looked like until she arrived. None of that really matters, because Augustus could kill me anytime he wants when we’re testing the ADS weapon.”

Quinn nodded and closed his eyes, glad to know he wasn’t a suspect. Now maybe I wouldn’t try to murder him in his sleep.

“One more thing,” Lou said. “They’ve got your cell phone number.”

I hadn’t thought about that, but sure, if Jenine had my number, DeMeo’s team had it.

“If he’s got whores and bombs, he’s probably got connections to a radical fringe element as well,” Lou said.

“So?”

“You might want to shut down your cell phone, just in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case DeMeo’s aiming a Stinger missile at your cell signal right now.”

“Shit!” I said. I hung up and ripped the battery out of my cell phone. The jet had a secure phone, and Quinn had one, too, so I didn’t need mine anyway. I took a deep breath, thinking, Jesus, there’s so much to think about in this business! I let the breath out slowly, kicked off my shoes, and turned my attention to Quinn, hoping for conversation. However, my deadly giant was snoring away. I had to admire anyone who could fall asleep so quickly, especially at a time like this.

I couldn’t sleep; I felt trapped inside the jet’s luxurious cabin. Felt impotent, too. Stuck in this metal cocoon, I couldn’t do anything about Janet or Monica or Kathleen or the hotel bombing. I couldn’t even read the book I’d started on the flight here—it had vaporized in the hotel along with the rest of my personal items. I tapped my fingers on the burl wood table and glanced around the cabin for a newspaper. Started flipping through a People Magazine, hoping Augustus wouldn’t catch me doing so, but I couldn’t get into it. When you’ve survived a bomb blast and more than a hundred people didn’t, it’s hard to focus on rumors of a possible hickey on Paris Hilton’s neck.

I was going stir-crazy. I checked my watch for the third time since Lou’s call and tried to fall asleep, but the monotonous thrum of the turbofans kept mocking me. I tapped my fingers some more and tried to think about what sort of relationship might exist between Joe DeMeo and Victor, if any. Then wondered how to go about stealing twenty-five mil from Joe DeMeo. Then I worked on the problem of how to find and kill Monica Childers, assuming she wasn’t already dead.

I’d never had trouble concentrating on business before, but here, locked in this environment, nothing was working. Listen to me: environment! Hell, who was I kidding? It wasn’t the environment. I knew exactly what it was: whether I was having sex with Lauren or saying good-bye to Jenine or sitting alone bored out of my gourd on a luxury jet, all my thoughts eventually turned to Kathleen. There was something about her infectious laugh and winning personality that touched my heart and made me itch to know what might have been. That was over now and probably couldn’t be salvaged. In dumping me, she’d made the right decision, because in the final analysis, I was no better than Ken Chapman. We’d both managed to hurt her in our own way.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

32

“Daddy, thank God you’re okay! I mean, I knew you would be, but whenever something like this happens, I can’t help but worry.”

We’d been in the air forty-five minutes, long enough to feel comfortable putting the battery back in my cell phone. I’d been thinking about the boy I saved earlier and the girl who might have been his sister, the one who didn’t survive. It made me think about Kimberly, how precious she was to me.

“Daddy? Are you okay?”

And how lucky I was to have her in my life.

“Dad?”

Kimberly doesn’t know the details of my job, but Janet had told her plenty over the years. She had some sketchy knowledge about the killing I’d done for the CIA, and she knew my current position had something to do with counter-terrorism. Still, I never realized until now what I’d been putting her through. I hadn’t realized that every time a bomb detonated or a bridge collapsed, she automatically wondered if I might be injured or dead.

“I love you, Kimberly,” I said. “I’m sorry you were worried.”

“Well, at least you called this time.”

I felt guilty. Up to now, I’d thought Janet would call and I’d reassure her first, then I’d talk to Kimberly. My daughter is so together; I always seem to think of her as the parent and Janet as the child.

“I’m good,” I said. “How’s your mom?”

“Daddy, I’m worried. That hotel bomb, was it a terrorist attack? Are there going to be more?”

I looked at the color monitor on the wall panel. It showed our air speed, altitude, and ETA. We were making good time. If the computer was accurate, Quinn and I should be in Virginia by midnight. “We don’t know much about the hotel yet,” I said, “but I’m sure Homeland Security is doing everything they can to stop any further violence.”

Kimberly groaned. “Jesus, Daddy, you sound just like that FBI bimbo on TV. I’m your daughter, remember? I can’t believe you don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s really happening with all this.”

Kimberly was a sophomore in high school. No way could I give her the type of inside information she wanted. If she told a friend and word spread, the wrong people could trace the story back to her and that would put her and Janet’s lives in danger. Since I couldn’t allow that, I decided to change the subject.

“How come you’re not in school?”

“I knew it!” she said. “You’re on the West Coast! It’s nighttime here. Not that you’d know,” she added, “but it’s also winter break.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought that was in December.”

She sighed. “That’s Christmas break.”

I loved my daughter, but what Janet had accused me of was true. I wasn’t an involved father. Maybe someday I’d have the time to become one—at least that’s what I keep telling myself. I knew Kimberly was experiencing some abandonment issues that were pretty much all my fault, and I’d eventually get around to solving them. But that would mean committing significant blocks of time to her, time I didn’t have at this point in my life. I wasn’t completely absent; I saw her once or twice a year, but in point of fact, where Kimberly was concerned, I was pretty much one and done.

Now I was about to do it to her again, because I knew Janet was hurting and I had to ask about her. Specifically, I wondered if Janet had told Kimberly about the breakup with Chapman. I decided to jump right in. “How are the wedding plans coming?”

She paused a beat. “Okay, I guess.”

“Have the announcements gone out yet?”

“No, they’re not at that stage.”

“Have you picked out a bridesmaid’s dress?”

“That comes later.”

“Are you uncomfortable talking to me about this?”

“What do you think?” she said. “I’d rather she didn’t get married, okay? I’d rather you didn’t ask me about it. I’d rather have you both in my life. If you want to know about her wedding so much, why don’t you talk to her about it?”

I heard teenage voices in the background.

“Where are you?” I asked. “At the mall?”

My daughter made a sad sound, the kind a teenager should never have to make. It was a sound that told me that in her eyes I was not only clueless as a father, but hopeless as well.

“Just call Mom,” she said. Just like that, she was gone.

Janet regarded me as poisonous. Her take on our marriage: the single biggest mistake of her life. Had she the opportunity to do it over again, she’d have lived in sin and walked out on me the day she gave birth.

I’d be the first to admit things weren’t always perfect, but really, whose marriage is? I attribute the bad times to the crazy hours I kept, the high stress component of my job, my anger issues, the void in my chest where a heart would normally be located, the lack of sympathy and tact most people expect to find in a spouse, and the depression I suffered when the opportunity to kill people for the CIA ended so abruptly.

However, these last few years had made me a better person. I’d been far less moody lately and wanted a chance to prove to Janet how much I’d changed since the divorce. Not because (as Lauren had said) I wanted her back—I didn’t—but because of Kimberly, who was hitting the age where having an involved father was more important than ever. I just wanted to get to a place where Janet might be able to find it within her power to have some decent things to say about me to our daughter.

I glanced at the sleeping Quinn and hoped he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of an argument between Janet and me. Talking out loud to Lou about my date with Jenine had been embarrassing enough. I took a chance and dialed Janet’s number.

“What do you want?” she snapped, as if she was hours into a bad mood and suddenly turned to see me standing beside her. I ignored her tone, knowing Janet had to rev herself up in order to deal with me. I didn’t blame her for keeping her guard up. According to her shrink, she may have divorced me, but she had never been able to drain “the reservoir filled with unresolved pain from the relationship.”

Janet’s question had been a good one. What, in fact, did I want? Down deep, I guess I wondered if her breakup with Chapman could somehow provide the catalyst for friendship. Maybe she’d thought about it this afternoon and realized I wasn’t the bad guy in all this, that by making her aware of Ken’s shortcomings, I was the one who’d been looking out for her and Kimberly. If Quinn hadn’t been sitting there, I might have casually mentioned some of the good things I’d done since the marriage, like the way I helped save some lives today. I wondered if she’d develop a greater appreciation of my character if I did so.

“Did you hear about the hotel bomb in LA?” I said.

“Was that your doing?”

Or not. “Jesus, Janet.”

“So that’s a yes?”

Janet wasn’t the most classically beautiful woman I’d ever known, but she was certainly the prettiest who ever professed to love me. While some might not care for her thin, cruel lips or sharp facial features, everything about her appearance used to tantalize me.

“I’ve obviously caught you at a bad time,” I said.

“Are you for real? Any time spent talking to you is a bad time, you son of a bitch!” She screamed, “I’d rather spend ten days strapped to a machine that sucks the life out of me than spend ten seconds talking to you!” Then she hung up on me.

I thought about what she said. The part about the life-sucking machine. I wondered if such a device could be built. If so, how would it work? How large would it be? What would it cost? Would it have much value as a torture device? I couldn’t imagine anything better than the ADS weapon. It was relatively portable now, but the army was already working on a handheld version that could be functional in a matter of months. Also, with ADS, the pain is instant and so is the recovery. Now that I’d compared the two in my head, I’d have to put the ADS weapon way above Janet’s life sucking machine idea. Then again, Janet probably hadn’t heard about the ADS weapon.

I was pretty sure she’d choose talking to me over being exposed to the ADS beam.

I thought some more about Janet and the good times we shared. Then I pressed another number on my speed dial to shake away the image of her tight body and firm, slender legs.

Sal Bonadello answered as he always did: “What.”

It was more a statement than a question.

“Tell me about Victor,” I said.

“Who?”

“It’s me, goddamn it.”

“The friggin’ attic dweller?”

“The same.”

“Where are you?” he asked. I imagined him looking at the ceiling over his head, wondering if I were up there right now. I heard he woke up from a bad dream a few months ago and pumped six rounds into the ceiling above his bedroom while screaming my name.

“Relax,” I said. “I’m in the air, somewhere over Colorado.” I noticed Quinn was beginning to stir. Maybe he’d been awake the whole time and was giving me privacy with Janet and Kimberly. You never knew for certain about Augustus Quinn or what he might be thinking at any given moment.

“I heard what happened in Jersey.”

“You sound almost disappointed.”

“Nah, not really. But hey, it’s hard to find good shooters, you know?”

“Which is why you put up with all my shit,” I said.

“Tell me about it.”

“Listen up,” I said to Sal. “You said you met Victor. Where?”

“You know I can’t—whatcha call—divulge my sources.”

“Cut the crap, will ya?”

“He needed some heavy shit. I gave him a name.”

“What kind of heavy shit?”

“Guns, drugs, explosives—shit like that.”

“And your contact required you to be there?”

“Right. Look, what about that blond of yours, the one on TV driving the van—the real one, not the bullshit picture the FBI showed. You talk to her about me yet?”

“Don’t even,” I said.

“What, I can’t dream? What, I’m not good enough for her? How about you put in a good word for me, ah? I’ll consider it a favor.”

“Do you guys go to school somewhere to learn how to talk like that?”

“Yeah, wise ass. It’s called the friggin’ school of bustin’ heads, and I’m the—whatcha call—headmaster. So, you want my help or what?”

I sighed again and realized I’d been doing a lot of sighing lately. “I’ll mention your interest to the little lady.”

“All I’m askin’.”

“Next chance I get.”

“Ask her nicely.”

“Fine.”

“’Cause you never know.”

“Right.”

“Tell her I’m a man of mystery.”

“For the love of God!” I shouted. A few feet away from me, in the cabin, Quinn did that thing where he sort of smiled. I decided to come at Sal from a different angle.

“Did you happen to catch the hotel bombing in LA?”

“What am I, blind? Everywhere I look that’s all I see on the friggin’ tube. Was that you?”

I sighed again. I should be blowing balloons for a living.

“Sal,” I said, “the hotel bombing, it was DeMeo.”

“What? Joe DeMeo? That’s nuts!”

“I had a meeting with DeMeo this morning. Afterward, I met a hooker. That bomb you saw on TV? She planted it in my room. I found out later she was one of DeMeo’s girls.”

“You sayin’ they blew up that whole goddamn hotel just to kill you? And missed? I’d a used a friggin’ ice pick.”

“That’s a happy thought,” I said.

“Hey, nothin’ personal.”

“Right,” I said. I got us back on track. “Do you think Victor and DeMeo are working together some way?”

“Why?”

“Victor gave me the hit on Monica Childers. Suddenly the pictures are all over the TV. Turns out Victor hijacked a spy satellite and downloaded the photos. Then Monica’s body goes missing. The government pins it on Russians, supposedly working with terrorists. Next thing you know, DeMeo tries to kill me and makes it look like a terrorist attack on a hotel. That sound like a coincidence to you?”

“What do I look like, Perry Mason? Whaddya think, I got a friggin’ crystal ball in my pocket? What, I’m gonna check the horoscope for—whatcha call—worlds colliding?”

I took that as a no. “Can you give me anything at all on Victor?”

“You tryin’ to find Childers’ wife? Make sure she’s gonna stay dead this time?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Might cause a—whatcha call—rift between you and the midget.”

“I’ll try to solve the one without losing the other.”

“Well, nuthin’ from nuthin’, but things go bad between you, I don’t give refunds. Anyway I already donated my share to charity.”

“Spare me.”

“The Mothers of Sicily. You should look into it. They do great work here in the neighborhood.”

I said nothing.

Sal’s voice changed to something resembling sincerity. “Truth is, I got squat,” he said. “But I’ll shake the trees, see what falls out. I hate that friggin’ DeMeo. He’s bad for business.”

“You want to help me take him down?”

He paused. “That’s the sort of question gets people killed if someone’s taping.”

“I’m not taping anything. I want to rob him.”

“You better be planning to kill him, then.”

“I won’t rule it out,” I said. “You want half?”

“How much we talking about?”

“Twenty million.”

He was quiet a moment. “Twenty for me, or all together?”

“All together. Let’s get together soon, work it out.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, then added, “But stay outta my house. I don’t want to come home one night, find you in my friggin’ living room in the dark.”

“I’ll come to your social club.”

“Bring the blond with you.”

“Sal, about the blond. She’s dead inside.”

“You ever do her?”

“She’s like a spider. If she does you, she kills you.”

He thought about that awhile. “Might be worth it,” he said.

I thought about it, too. “Might be,” I said.

We hung up. My shoulder throbbed from hitting the sidewalk a few hours earlier. The engines continued their monotonous whine. I reclined my seat and closed my eyes. I think I might have heard Quinn say, “How can you sleep at a time like this?”

33

A shrill sound jolted me awake. It repeated, and I pulled the air phone from its cradle. I checked my watch. Two hours had passed.

“What have you got for me?” I asked.

“We’re guessing Semtex,” Lou said.

Semtex is the explosive of choice for international terrorist groups. It’s cheap, odorless, readily available, has an indefinite shelf life, and slides through airport security scanners like a pair of silk panties.

Lou said, “You were right; the hotel blast originated in the area of your bedroom.”

“How’d they verify that?”

“Lack of a crater. Ground floor detonation would have left one a meter deep. A charge placed above the second floor would have taken out the roof.”

“What are the Feds working on?”

“Hotel cameras, cross-referencing faces with suspected terrorists and sympathizer lists, checking for connections by address, criminal records, religious and political affiliations. Darwin said to give them Jenine, so they’re working up a profile on her as well.”

I looked across the aisle at Quinn. He appeared to be asleep again, in the exact same position as before. From what I could see he hadn’t moved a muscle since finishing his second drink. I envy any monster that can crash like that.

“I wish he hadn’t given them Jenine,” I said. “They’re going to want to talk to me about it, and we’re liable to cross wires in the field. Better to solve the case for them and let them take the credit afterward.”

“The Feebs have you on the lobby camera checking in. They’ve got your name and credit card on the registration. They’ve got Jenine twice on the lobby cameras. They know about your clearance to fly out of Edwards. Darwin said if we didn’t give them Jenine, the Feds would detain you and Quinn as material witnesses when you land.”

That made sense. Still, I hated having everyone in law enforcement know about my dalliance with a twenty-year-old escort. Every Feeb I deal with from now on will find a way to work that into the conversation.

34

By surviving Joe DeMeo’s attack, I’d put my family in danger, so I asked Callie to keep an eye on Janet and Kimberly until further notice. I’d also tipped my hand by demanding money for Addie, so I put Quinn in the burn center to protect her.

“Victor’s story is a sad one,” Lou said.

It was Sunday afternoon. My shoulder was freshly bandaged, and I’d gotten caught up on my sleep. Lou had gathered a ton of information for me on Victor, but all I wanted to know was the source of his funds and his connection to Monica Childers.

“They’re both related,” Lou said.

“Enlighten me with the short version.”

“Victor was born with serious respiratory problems. About twenty years ago, he was in the hospital for a minor surgery when a nurse gave him an accidental overdose that put him into cardiac arrest. Someone wheeled him into an elevator on the way to emergency surgery and somehow managed to leave him there. Up and down he went from floor to floor in the elevator for more than thirty minutes before someone realized what had happened. They rushed him to the OR, but the surgeon botched the procedure and Victor suffered a stroke. Subsequent attempts to save his life rendered him a quadriplegic.

“Then the hospital made a feeble attempt to cover up the incident. Victor’s attorneys sued both the hospital and the drug company and managed to win the largest settlement ever paid to an individual in the state of Florida. After being released from the hospital, Victor’s parents placed the proceeds from the lawsuit into Berkshire Hathaway stock. By the time he was of legal age, he was worth more than a hundred million dollars. By then, his parents were dead, and he surrounded himself with the best financial people money could buy. He became a venture capitalist, funded several Internet startups that hit the big time.”

“How big?”

“We’re talking close to a billion dollars at this point. Beyond his incredibly sophisticated computer system, state-of-the-art apartment, and cutting-edge electronics that have allowed him to function at the highest possible level, he had nothing else upon which to spend his wealth.”

“The doctor that severed his spinal cord,” I said.

“Baxter Childers,” Lou said.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have motive,” I said.

35

Tourists are often surprised to learn the true size of Little Italy. The entire area runs only three or four blocks along Mulberry Street, between Canal and Houston.

One of the cross streets is Hester, where Café Napoli has been in business more than thirty years. It’s open eighteen hours a day, beginning at 9:00 am. Victor had called in a favor and got us a table an hour before the breakfast crowd.

“Thank … you for … com … ing,” Victor said. He did have the dreadlocks Sal Bonadello told me about, and they grew long and filthy and hung down the sides and back of his body like thick ropes of dust. Were he able to stand erect, at least two of the strands would drag the floor. I wondered if they ever got caught in the spokes of his wheelchair.

Speaking of which, his wheelchair was incredibly high tech. I had no idea what bells and whistles it contained, but it seemed to have enough electronics on board to launch the space shuttle. It looked like something you’d find in the distant future. The back was enclosed and swept in an arc over his head, where it attached to a sort of roll bar that was at least an inch thick.

Victor moved his index finger on a touch pad, and several small computer screens silently retracted from the roll bar and positioned themselves at various angles about a foot in front of his head. Though I couldn’t view any of the screens from my position, one of them must have displayed a digital clock, because Victor glanced up at it and said, “Time … is limi … ted so … we should … get … star … ted.”

He wore a long-sleeved navy warm-up suit with three vertical white stripes on one side of the jacket. It was very expensive looking, probably hand-tailored, which made me realize how hard it must be for little people of limited means to find clothing. It’s one of those things you wouldn’t think about until you find yourself in this type of situation.

We were in the main dining area, where the walls were brick and covered with pictures and other memorabilia from Italy. Our table was larger than the others, but they all had white, floor length tablecloths and small vases with colorful fake flower arrangements.

Hugo had been standing when I arrived, and he continued to stand. I wondered about that until I realized he didn’t have a choice. The table and chairs were too tall to properly accommodate him. So he stood and glared at me.

I nodded at him. “Hugo,” I said.

I saw a flash of dark yellow and realized Hugo had bared his teeth at me. If intense staring could cause a person to explode, I was doomed.

A young man approached us and said, “The kitchen’s not open yet, but I can bring you a pot of coffee and a bagel or pastry if you wish.”

“No liver?” Hugo snarled, without taking his eyes off me. I suddenly realized what made his stare so intimidating: he never blinked. In fact, he hadn’t blinked once since I’d arrived.

The server seemed confused. “I’m not a waiter. I’m just a busboy, so I don’t know the menu very well. I can probably scrounge up some lox or cream cheese.”

No one said anything, so I said, “I think we’ll just talk, but thanks for the offer.” Then I thought of something and added, “Could you remove the flowers?” I didn’t think Victor would put a bug in the flower arrangement, but why take a chance?

The busboy left with the flowers, and I started things off. To Hugo, I said, “You know, for a spiritual adviser, you’re pretty pugnacious.”

“Fuck you!” he screamed.

I shrugged. I was beginning to get used to the unblinking stare. To Victor, I said, “Do you need to frisk me? Make sure I’m not wearing a wire or tape recorder?”

Victor said, “Not … neces … sary. I … scanned … you … already.” He lifted his head slightly to indicate the screens.

I didn’t believe for a minute that he had the ability to scan me or he would have mentioned the gun I’d taped to the small of my back.

Victor said, “Just … don’t … reach for … the gun … behind … you.” Then he said, “Hu … go will … do most … of the … talking … for ob … vious … reasons.”

“That’s fine,” I said, wondering what else his wheelchair could do. “So tell me: how did you hijack the spy satellite?”

“That’s proprietary,” Hugo snapped. “Military experiment. Need-to-know basis only.”

“Yeah, well I need to know,” I said. “I’ve been ordered to find the people who breached the satellite’s computer system, and kill them. I’m asking you nicely here, but this is nonnegotiable.”

Hugo sneered at me as if I were an insect. “Is that a threat?”

I sighed. “I came here hoping to strengthen our relationship, but if it’s not to be, I can always just snap your necks.”

Hugo still hadn’t blinked, but he turned to face Victor. “May I approach?” he asked. Victor nodded. Hugo unzipped Victor’s jacket. Victor’s entire torso was covered with explosives.

I tried to act unaffected, as if this sort of thing happened all the time. But I don’t think I fooled anyone. Still, I pressed on. “Where’s the detonator?”

Hugo looked down at the table. At first I didn’t understand. Then I said, “You’re joking.” I slid my chair back a couple of feet and slowly lifted the tablecloth. There were two midgets under the table. One had a .38 pointed directly into my crotch. The other had a detonator taped to his left hand. His right index finger hovered just above a large red button. I took a deep breath and nodded to the two midgets under the table. “Relax, okay?” I said. Then I put the tablecloth back the way I’d found it.

“Actually,” I said, “I don’t care how you hijacked the satellite. I just want to be able to tell my boss why it won’t happen again.”

“He already knows. They installed a patch to block us.”

“Does it work?”

“It does,” Hugo said. He smiled and added, “For now.”

Victor said, “We … won’t … breach it. I pro … mise.”

I studied my vertically challenged employer a moment. He had a boyish face, made puffy from what I assumed to be years of drug use. I was about to say something when he suddenly flashed a smile. Not just any smile, or a creepy one, but a full, genuine, winning smile. Encountering it this way, in such an unexpected manner, startled me more than seeing the explosives on his body or the midgets under the table. Victor scrunched up his face in a way that reminded me of kids on a playground, him being the last kid hoping to be chosen for a team, the kid no one wants to pick. Then, in a small, vulnerable voice, he said, “Can we … just … be friends?”

It was an amazing moment to witness, an instant transformation from deadly to helpless. At that moment, he seemed sweet, almost adorable. If Kathleen had been there, I’m sure she would have said, “Aw, how cute.” But Kathleen wasn’t there, and she didn’t have a gun aimed at her crotch.

“Good enough,” I said. “I’ll try to keep my people off your backs. So what happened to Monica?”

Hugo said, “You know Fathi, the diplomat?”

“Father or son?”

“Both. But the father, the UAE diplomat, we sold Monica to him.”

Victor and Hugo were full of surprises, so why should I have been shocked? But I was. In fact, I was so stunned, I couldn’t think of a sensible question. So instead I said, “Was she alive at the time?”

Hugo laughed. “He wouldn’t have much use for a dead sex slave.”

I tried to wrap my brain around it. “Is she still in the country?”

“Her body is.”

So she was dead after all. Darwin would be pleased. But something still didn’t compute. “You hired me to kill Monica, and I did. Then you tracked me on spy satellite, grabbed her body, brought her back to life, and sold her as a sex slave. Now she’s dead again, right? Well pardon the pun, but that seems like overkill. Why didn’t you just hire me to kidnap her?”

Hugo said there were two reasons. First, it would have been a conflict of interest, since they planned to sell her to terrorists and I’m a counter-terrorist. Second, they wanted to see if they could bring her back to life after a trained assassin had done his best to kill her.

“So I was what, part of a medical experiment?”

“Yes.”

Hugo reminded me that their army of little people included scientists, microbiologists, and specialists in almost every field of research. One of their people had developed a revolutionary antidote to botulinum toxin, and since they had targeted Monica anyway, she would be their first test. They figured I’d give her the most potent injection possible, which I did. If she survived, they’d sell Monica to Fathi. If not, they’d keep working on the antidote.

“And it worked,” I said.

“That is correct. We intend to make one hundred million dollars selling the antidote to the military.”

“Our military?”

“Ours, theirs, whoever.”

“Back to the conflict of interest,” I said. “I’m not comfortable working with you if you’re also working with terrorists.”

Hugo sneered. “That is absurd. Your government works with terrorists every day. They call it infiltration. We do the same. We infiltrate them for our own purposes, which shall not be revealed to you.”

Though my head was swimming, I managed to ask him about the two other targets they wanted me to kill. Hugo said they were part of a social experiment.

“First a medical experiment, now a social experiment.”

Hugo said, “That is correct.”

“Can you give me the Cliff’s Notes on that?” I asked. Hugo looked at Victor before answering. Victor nodded. Hugo turned back to me and said, “Victor wishes to understand the true nature of evil. Before you injected Monica, we gave her a chance to name two people who caused her pain in her life. You will kill those two people and get two names from each. Victor believes we all have at least two people who have caused irreparable harm in our lives. You will exact vengeance for all the victims.”

“He started with Monica because of her husband, the doctor.”

“Yes. We could not have you kill the doctor. It would be too easy to link Victor to the crime. There is a saying: ‘If you would hurt your enemy, punish the one he loves.’ Since Monica was innocent, we gave her a choice: live in captivity or die in the van.”

“And she chose life.”

Victor and Hugo nodded together.

“But you knew the Fathis planned to kill her.”

Hugo and Victor nodded together. Hugo clarified, “We knew they would not use proper restraint. We knew they would not give her time to recover.”

“So why have you involved me in all of this?” I asked.

“We’ve got big plans for you, Mr. Creed.”

“Such as?”

“You’re going to help us take over the world.”

“Well, why not,” I said. Then, for whatever reason, I thought of Joe DeMeo. I said, “I’d love to help you take over the world and all, but I’m going to be busy robbing and killing a very powerful crime boss.”

Victor said, “Maybe … we can … help.”

I thought about that a minute and said, “You probably could. You hijacked a spy satellite. Do you have access to drones?”

“Killer drones?” Hugo asked. “Loaded? That is impossible.”

I laughed. Maybe they weren’t as crazy as I’d thought. “I was thinking maybe you could divert one of the weather drones off the coast of California or a surveillance one flying between Alaska and Russia.”

“To where?”

“Hills of LA,” I said. “Just for a few minutes.”

Hugo walked to the other end of the room with his cell phone. He was gone a couple of minutes. When he came back, he looked at Victor and nodded. Victor nodded back. “Yeah,” Hugo said, “we can do that.”

“Really?” I asked.

Hugo nodded.

“What will it cost me?”

“What’s … the … take?” Victor said.

“Tens of millions, I think. If we do it right.”

Victor thought a moment before replying. “We … don’t want … the … mon … ey,” he said. “We’d … ra … ther bank … the fa … vor.”

“Works for me,” I said. Then I dialed Joe DeMeo’s number.

“Well, you said you’d call,” DeMeo said. “So it must be Tuesday.”

“You killed a lot of people in that hotel trying to blow me up,” I said.

“Creed, listen to me. If you’re still worrying about that ten million for the burned kid, I got a better idea. I did some checking,” he said. “Turns out she’s got all kinds of life-threatening injuries, so I’m wondering maybe we should see if she survives before you and me ruin a good relationship.”

“She’s well-protected, Joe.”

“Yeah, I heard your giant was there. A face like that, he ought to fit in with the rest of the burn patients.”

We were quiet awhile. Then he said, “Are we done here or is there something else you want to say?”

I said, “I’m coming to get you, Joe.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. Then he laughed. “You and what army?”

I looked at Victor and Hugo, thought about the guys holding the gun and detonator under the table, thought about the mini scientists who could hijack spy satellites and create an antidote for the deadliest poison known to man. I thought about the dwarf who worked on the White House kitchen staff.

I nodded at Victor. He winked at me and nodded back.

“I got a hell of an army,” I told Joe DeMeo.

Hugo’s posture went ramrod straight, and his chest swelled with pride. He saluted me.

I hung up the phone. Hugo said, “Well? What did he say? Did he laugh when you said that part about the army? I bet he laughed. Tell me he laughed. Just say it, just tell me he laughed and I’ll kill the son of a bitch with my bare hands. I’ll rip his ears off his head. I’ll …”

“He laughed,” I said.

Hugo looked at Victor. “They always laugh,” he said. He seemed to instantly deflate.

“Don’t let it get you down,” I said. “They don’t know what they’re up against.”

“Ac … tually … they … don’t,” Victor said.

36

There is no scent of freshly baked bread in Little Italy, no Italians singing love songs or speaking boisterously while flapping their arms in the air. Still, enough charm remains to inspire a walk, if you’ve got the time. I did, so I told my driver to wait while I headed down Mott, and Mulberry, and Elizabeth and Baxter.

The area is gradually being swallowed up by Chinatown, and most of the people who can speak Italian have long since moved to the Bronx. But the streets are still lively and colorful, and the fire hydrants are painted green, white, and red, the colors of the Italian flag.

I didn’t find anything to buy, but I had a decent lunch and managed to clear my head after the meeting with Victor and Hugo. I didn’t think for one minute Victor and Hugo’s army of little people could take over the world, but I was gaining confidence that they could help me take down Joe DeMeo.

A couple hours after lunch, I found my driver and had him push his way through the traffic to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I got a room at the Hotel Plaza Athenee. By five, room service had delivered an incredible Panini sandwich filled with fresh spinach, mozzarella, and roasted red peppers. They also brought me a bottle of Maker’s and a heavy glass tumbler. I ate the sandwich and washed it down with three fingers of bourbon. By six, I’d had a hot shower and was freshly shaved and dressed. I watched the news on Fox for twenty minutes and still had more than enough time to walk the quarter mile east, to Third and Sixty-Sixth.

It was Tuesday, after all.

“For me?” she asked.

There was an empty chair waiting for her at the tiny table I’d staked out at Starbucks, and Kathleen had instantly spied the raspberry scone on the small square of wax paper across from me. To my utter surprise, she rewarded me with a radiant smile, removed her coat, and joined me at the table.

“Who’d a thought it?” she said.

“What’s that?”

“There’s a romantic component at work here,” she said, “one that might even rival your desire to separate me from my panties.”

“The mystery never ends,” I said.

“Do I want to know where you’ve been since Wednesday, what you’ve been up to?”

The angel on my shoulder urged me to tell Kathleen everything and let her run out of my life so she could find true happiness. Of course, the devil on my other shoulder said, “When in doubt, just smile and change the subject.”

“Can I get you a coffee?” I asked.

Kathleen frowned and shook her head. “That bad, eh?”

“I’ve had worse,” I said, and immediately realized I was telling the truth. I thought, What a rotten thing to have to admit, even to myself. I looked at Kathleen across the table. Her eyes were locked onto my mouth, as if she could read my thoughts by watching me speak the words. If that could possibly be true, I wanted to give her something better—a happier thought, one she might enjoy hearing. It would have to be something sincere.

Lucky for me, I had one. “I missed you,” I said. I’d wanted to say more about it, wanted to say it better, but at least I’d said it.

Her eyes remained fixed on my mouth while she processed the validity of my comment. Then she slowly twisted her lips into a smile, and I felt that thing I always felt in her presence.

Hope.

Maybe I still had it in me to be a better person than I’d been. Maybe I hadn’t yet descended so deeply into the pit that I couldn’t experience a woman’s love, capture her heart, have a decent life.

She took a bite of her scone and made a production of licking the sugar from her upper lip. She gave me a sly smile. “You really like me, don’t you!” she said.

I laughed. “Don’t get cocky.”

“Oh, I can get cocky,” she said. “Judging by the way your tongue is hanging out of your mouth, I can get cocky anytime I want!”

“That’s pretty big talk,” I said, letting my tongue hang out of my mouth.

“Pretty big what?” she said, laughing.

“Keep talking like that and you’re never going to get me in bed.”

“Oh, yes, I will!” she said.

37

The arabelle is the Plaza Athenee’s signature restaurant. It was also far too ostentatious, Kathleen felt, for the way she was dressed. “However,” she said, cocking an eyebrow at me, “the Bar Seine was voted ‘Best Spot for Romance’ by the New York Post.”

“Then we’re in the right place,” I said. We strolled across the lobby and entered the Bar Seine. I pointed across the leather floor to an empty couch that was covered with an animal print fabric.

“Wanna cuddle over there in the private alcove?” I said.

“Slow down, Romeo, and get me a sandwich first.”

“You can think of food at a time like this?” I said.

She winked. “I need to build some strength for later, you lucky dog.”

We sat beside each other in overstuffed chairs with ridiculously high armrests. There was a small octagonal coffee table in front of us. “Maybe I’ll order a bottle of courage,” I said.

“They don’t serve bottles here silly,” she said. “This is a high-class joint.”

I looked around. “They’ve got a signature hotel, a signature bar, probably got a signature drink,” I said.

“Here we go again,” she giggled. “Actually, they do have a signature drink!”

“As long as it doesn’t contain the words venti or doppo,” I said.

“If I tell you the name, promise you’ll order it?”

“Is it really pretentious?” I asked.

Her laughter started bubbling up, spilling out into the room.

“More puffed up than the coffees at Starbucks?” I said.

She feigned a snooty look. “Those are bush league by comparison,” she huffed. “Mere pretenders.”

I smiled. “Okay,” I said, “hit me with it.”

Our waitress came, and we ordered a watercress sandwich for Kathleen. “And to drink?” she asked.

“I’ll have a pomegranate martini,” Kathleen said.

The waitress smiled and looked at me. “And for you, sir?”

I looked at Kathleen.

“Say it,” she giggled.

I sighed. “I’ll have a crystal cosmopolitan,” I said, and she howled with laughter.

The drinks came, and I didn’t want to ruin the moment, but I had to know what happened to make her change her mind about seeing me.

“Augustus,” she said.

“Augustus?”

“You sent him to guard Addie.”

“I did.”

“Even though you and I were through at the time.”

“So?”

“So you really cared about Addie and wanted to keep her safe. That warmed my heart, Donovan. It says everything about your character.”

I remembered how I’d ruined the moment with Lauren the week before and was determined not to react or say anything that could turn the tables on what promised to be an epic evening. I thought I’d stick to a safe topic.

“You had a chance to spend some time with Quinn?” I asked.

“I did,” she said. “Augustus is wonderful with the children—so loving and gentle.”

I couldn’t recall ever hearing the words Augustus and loving and gentle in the same sentence before.

“Did you talk to him about me?” I asked.

“Of course!” she said, her eyes sparkling.

“And?”

“And I told him I thought you were seriously flawed.”

I nodded. “And what did he say?”

Kathleen grew serious for a minute and paused to give weight to her words. “He said you were chivalrous. That you’re always on a quest.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. That you’re a good friend to have.”

“Did he mention I liked puppies and butterflies, too?”

“No … thank God!”

An hour later, we entered my suite, and she mugged me with kisses before I got the door shut. Our hands were all over each other, racing to see who could touch the most skin in the shortest period of time. I pinned her against the wall in a full body embrace, and our mouths worked hard to keep pace with our passion.

Then Kathleen broke away and dragged me to the bedroom. She spun me around and pushed me onto the bed. I sat up and reached for her, but she slapped my hands away.

I said, “Damn, those pomegranates are amazing!”

“You mean these?” she said. She ripped off her bra, and my brain circuits spun like tumblers in a slot machine.

“Now, Donovan!” she said.

“Now?”

She stepped out of her clothes. Licked her lips.

“At your cervix,” I said.

We made love like teenagers, wrecking the sheets, rolling all over the place. At one point, she started moaning like a porn star, and I said, “Hey, calm down. We both know I’m not that good!”

38

The wind in Cincinnati whipped and swirled under a gunmetal sky. Bits of paper came to life on currents of air. A bus stopped at the corner of Fifth and Vine, and a young lady stepped off, wearing a short gray sweater dress with pleats. The sudden gusts played havoc with her dress, causing it to flutter and dance about her legs in a way that revealed more than she’d intended. A cellophane wrapper rose from the gutter and became part of a tiny swirling cyclone that covered some twenty yards along Vine Street before coming to rest on the sidewalk in front of the Beck Building.

The Beck was an austere building located a stone’s throw from the Cincinnatian Hotel, where I’d spent the previous night. It was also the building that housed the law firm of Hastings, Unger, and Lovell.

According to the concierge, my corner suite on the second floor of the legendary hotel was tastefully flamboyant. Still, the kitchen and parlor offered a great view of downtown Cincinnati, as well as the Beck Building’s front entrance, so I did my best to ignore the décor while waiting for Augustus Quinn to call me.

Quinn had arrived in town an hour earlier, carrying only a duffel bag. Now he and the duffel were locked in the trunk of Sal Bonadello’s black sedan.

I could only hope he was still alive.

Actually, I was almost certain he was alive, because that was part of the plan.

Every city has a rhythm, and I absorbed what I could of the sights and sounds of downtown Cincinnati from my window, trying to get a feel for it. Half a block away, a homeless person sat on a frozen park bench in what passed for Cincinnati’s town square: a block-sized patch of green with a gazebo and enough open space to accommodate a small gathering for outdoor events. It was practically freezing outside, but he had a couple of pigeons hanging about, hoping for a bread toss. I wondered if he’d had a better life at some point, and hoped so.

I didn’t expect Quinn’s call for at least ten or fifteen minutes and didn’t plan to worry unless a half-hour had passed without hearing from him. As I stood at the window, I was thinking that I had no reason to believe Sal would double cross me, and yet I had just bet Quinn’s life on that assumption.

I was also thinking what a fine target I’d make standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

I shut the blinds, moved to the interior of the room, and—to take my mind off the wallpaper pattern—went through my mental checklist one more time.

We were in battle mode, and I had things wrapped pretty tight. Callie was still in West Virginia keeping an eye on Janet and Kimberly. Quinn had spent the night at the burn center and had been relieved early this morning by two of our guys from Bedford. Kathleen was at her office, and Lou Kelly had put a guy on her just in case. Victor and Hugo were assembling the assault team and working out the final details for hijacking a government surveillance drone.

Sal Bonadello was on the seventh floor of the Beck Building with his bodyguard and two attorneys, hatching a plot to kill me. The attorneys were Chris Unger, whose private suite was located there, and Chris’s younger brother, Garrett, who had formerly represented Addie’s parents, Greg and Melanie Dawes.

Normally attorneys wouldn’t be involved in discussing—much less planning—a criminal activity. But because I am known by the underworld as a counter-terrorist, Joe DeMeo wanted to be extra careful with the hit, wanted everyone to be on the same page. The attorneys were deep into organized crime but they couldn’t afford to be seen meeting with Sal Bonadello and his bodyguard Big Bad—as in Big Bad Wolf—that is why I thought we had a good chance of pulling off the plan I had hatched the night before.

Sal had gotten the call from Joe DeMeo to oversee the hit on me, but Sal claimed my status with the government required a sit-down. DeMeo refused, wanting to lay low until he knew I was dead, but he sent his emissary from New York City, Garrett Unger. Since Sal lived in Cincinnati, and Garret’s older brother, Chris, had his own law practice here, they decided to meet in Chris’s private suite on the seventh floor.

The Beck Building tenants and customers were well aware of the four parking levels attached to the building, but they’d have been shocked to learn that the double-wide garage door labeled “Emergency Exit” actually led to a private parking area for the law partners and their underworld guests. The partners changed the access code before and after every meeting with their criminal clients.

Sal Bonadello was the key to my plan working. He and Big Bad had been met by Chris Unger’s bodyguard and escorted to the private suites moments earlier.

The suites were soundproofed, surrounded by empty offices. No one who worked at the law offices knew of the existence of the private suites, nor could they access them from the occupied offices. The walls of the suites were heavily concreted to provide a high level of safety and privacy.

When a driver dropped off a mob client, the protocol was to stay put, in his car, until the meeting was over. The only other person in the suites during this or any other meeting was Chris’s secretary, whose job was to keep an eye on the private parking area from a monitor at her desk.

The way I’d planned it, Sal would create a diversion and signal his driver, who would pop the trunk. Quinn would get out and call me with the access code. Then I would join him and put the plan into action.

My cell phone rang. I answered it, and the lady on the other end said she’d thought about me all night and wanted to know if I’d been studying how to be a better lover. Then she laughed.

“I confess, I haven’t had time to bone up on the subject yet.”

Kathleen laughed again, and I pictured her eyes crinkling at the edges. “That’s perfect,” she said, “because I can’t wait to teach you!”

“I’m still trying to recover from the exam you gave me last night.”

“Well, be forewarned,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“The next test is oral!”

“Wow! You promise?” I said.

“Mmmm,” she said.

I could have gone on talking like this a bit longer, but not without putting on a dress.

I flipped on the TV, found the headline news channel. They were hitting the hotel bombing four times an hour, so I couldn’t help but see it again. For the millionth time, they dragged out the footage showing rows of body bags lined up on the sand, waiting to be loaded into ambulances that were in no hurry to leave. There were mangled men and women, family members sobbing for loved ones, expressionless children with bloody faces—all the typical crap you’d expect from the nightly news crews that made shock and horror a dinnertime staple.

When they’d sucked every ounce of pathos from that story, they turned to Monica’s husband, Dr. Baxter Childers, surrounded by shouting reporters as he made his way to a car.

Until recently, Baxter had gotten a free pass from the press, but I knew that wouldn’t last long. Murder-for-hire speculation gives fresh legs to stories that have run their course. For this reason, some talk show hosts had begun digging into possible connections between Baxter and the kidnappers. One moron was even trying to make a connection between the names Monica and Santa Monica. Maybe the next victim would be Monica Seles, he speculated. Yeah, I thought, or maybe Santa Claus.

Even more delicious to newsrooms across the nation, rumors were circulating about a possible love triangle involving Monica Childers and a yoga instructor.

I already knew what was coming for Dr. Childers, it had all been prearranged. Abdullah Fathi and his son had gotten their money’s worth from Monica until there was nothing left to enjoy. Then either she died or they killed her, and now Victor’s people would plant enough phony evidence to get Baxter convicted. In the end, Baxter would get a life sentence and Victor would have his revenge.

News crews were standing by in Washington, waiting for Special Agent Courtney Armbrister’s press conference, during which she planned to name persons of interest to both investigations. I suspected Courtney was delaying her press conference in order to build interest for a future career in broadcast journalism.

Mercifully, Quinn sent me the access code, which meant he was in position. I took the stairs to the lobby and crossed the street to the Beck Building’s parking entrance. I walked to the end of the ground-floor parking lot, looked around to make sure I hadn’t been observed, and entered the code. The big garage door opened slowly. Quinn was inside, waiting for me by one of the elevators. I joined him, and up we rode.

39

The elevator doors had barely opened before Chris Unger’s secretary let out a blood-curdling scream and jumped below her desk.

“Poor dear,” said Quinn. “I should comfort her.”

“That work for you in the past?” I asked.

The muscle head who was obviously Chris Unger’s bodyguard suddenly appeared. He looked at Quinn, did a double take, and said, “Jesus H. Christ!” There was something about the guy I couldn’t place. Up close, he looked familiar. Perhaps he came to earth with powers far beyond those of mortal men, at least that’s how he comported himself. In any event, he was a big, heavily muscled guy, built thick like a fireplug. His head was shaved completely smooth and on his forehead, above the bridge of his nose, someone had carved XX.

Quinn sat his duffel on the floor.

“What’s in your purse?” asked Muscle head. “A tampon?” He pursed his lips and smacked a kiss in Quinn’s direction.

Augustus noticed my left leg had buckled. He shot me a look.

“I’m okay,” I said.

He nodded. Nobody moved. The muscle head kept his voice calm. He said, “Miss, come on out and get behind me.”

She scrambled out from the desk well and shielded her eyes as she ran behind Mr. Muscles. From what I could tell, she had a nice enough figure, but I wasn’t a fan of the tight, angry bun she wore in her hair. She was hyperventilating, and her voice made a funny huffing sound as she struggled to get herself under control.

“Your severe reaction toward my associate suggests poor training,” I said, trying to be helpful.

To Augustus, she shrieked, “You keep away from me!”

The muscle head whispered something, and she backed up a few steps and slowly circled around us and disappeared through the elevator doors. I could have stopped her, but I knew Sal’s driver would handle it.

Now that he was alone in the room with us, the body builder let us hear his street voice.

“Who the fuck’re you turds and what do you want?”

“We’d like to see Garrett Unger and his brother Chris,” I said, trying to be polite about it.

“I work for Chris Unger,” he said, “and you don’t talk to Chris Unger without my okay. You got something to say to Chris Unger, you say it to me.”

“Very well,” I said. “Tell Mr. Unger his body guard is a pussy.”

The muscle head kept a watchful eye on my giant and the space between them. Then he said, “Okay, so you know who I am, right?”

I looked at Quinn. He shrugged.

“We don’t know,” I said, “but you look familiar to us.”

“You always speak for the dummy?” he asked.

I noticed that he noticed my limp as I took a step toward him.

“I’m Double X,” he said, as if that explained everything.

Quinn and I exchanged looks again.

“You carve that in your head when you turned twenty?” asked Quinn.

Double X frowned. “It’s my nickname. On the circuit.”

“The circuit,” I said.

Double X sighed. “Hello-o, the UFW circuit? Ultimate Fighting Warriors?”

“Oh, that circuit,” I said.

I took another gimpy step toward him. He shifted his weight into a fighting stance and said, “I’m the former heavyweight world champion.” He said that part with a healthy measure of pride. “How nice for you,” I said. “Maybe we can talk about it after I see Mr. Unger. Would you be a good little warrior and take us to him?” Double X sneered.

I’ve had tough guys sneer at me lots of times, but I was pretty sure not many had sneered at Quinn. I glanced at my monster. He didn’t appear to be offended.

Addressing me, but pointing at Augustus, Double X said, “I don’t know your boyfriend, Mr. Ass Face, but I know who you are. You’re the guy who kidnapped Monica Childers.”

Quinn said, “Ass Face?”

To me, Double X said, “You’re pretty tough when it comes to assaulting skinny, middle-aged women, but in me you’ll find an unbeatable foe.”

I said, “They teach you to talk like that in the UHF?”

“That’s UFW, asshole.” He appraised me as if he were sniffing an onion. “You got some size on you, and you may have kicked some untrained butt in your day, but you can’t fathom the stuff I’ve seen. You wouldn’t last thirty seconds in the quad.”

“Quad?”

“That’s right. They stick you in a cage with a world contender and you don’t walk out until one of you is basically dead.”

He let that comment sit in the air a minute, and then added, “You guys are going to stay right here till I say you can move.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Mr. Unger’s secretary is at this very moment talking to a member of organized crime about you. You guys are already dead; you just don’t know it yet.”

A good martial artist will always attack your weakness, and Double X didn’t disappoint, rushing me the way I knew he would, leading with his right leg to sweep my gimpy leg out from under me.

Unfortunately for Double X, I didn’t have a gimpy leg, and I easily moved inside his kick before it could do any damage. Double X suddenly found himself in a strange position, slightly off -balance, vulnerable, his leg still rising toward a target that wasn’t there.

Before he had a chance to regroup, I punched the former quad cage heavyweight champion of the world in the neck, with full leverage behind the blow. I followed it up with a left hook to the other side of his neck, and his eyes went white. He tried to fall, but I caught his Adam’s apple between my thumb and index knuckle and crushed it until his mouth formed a perfect O shape. When I released my grip, Double X fell in a heap and grabbed his throat. He made an attempt to speak, but the effort proved too great. He rolled onto his side, and his legs began twitching involuntarily, like a sleeping dog dreaming about chasing a rabbit.

I looked at Quinn. “Just before I crushed his larynx, he patted my shoulder several times. Why do you suppose he did that?”

“I think he was tapping out. It’s what they do in the quad cage when they’ve had enough.”

“Oh. He should have said.”

I stepped over him and went through the door from which Double X had appeared a moment earlier.

Quinn found Double X’s gun and put it in his duffel. Then he grabbed Double X by the collar and dragged him and his twitchy legs through the door and down the hall until he saw me enter Chris Unger’s suite.

First thing I noticed going in, Chris Unger was at his desk, his back to the windows. Three client chairs faced him. The first was occupied by Chris’s brother, Garrett. The second chair was empty. Sitting in the third chair was my favorite crime boss, Sal Bonadello.

Sal nodded in my direction and said, “Hey, this is—whatcha call—serendipity. We was just talking about you!”

I recognized Sal’s bodyguard, leaning against the far wall.

“I guess Joe said it’s okay to bring Big Bad.”

Sal nodded. “I was takin’ a leak just before you got here. Takin’ a leak always makes me think of Joe. So I called him.”

Big Bad had his hand inside his jacket.

“You still use the 357?” I asked.

Without changing the expression on his face, Big Bad glanced at Sal through reptilian eyes. Sal said, “It’s okay; they’re with me.”

Both Ungers gave him a look. Then they looked at each other. Garrett seemed more nervous than his older brother.

All eyes suddenly turned to the doorway as Quinn entered, dragging Double X behind him. Double X continued to hold his neck with one hand while pawing the air with the other. Still trying to tap out, I figured. Quinn released his prey, and Double X hit the floor face first. Quinn locked the door behind him.

Sal jumped to his feet, suddenly excited. “Wait a minute!” he said. “I seen this before! At the movies, right? Weekend at Bernie’s, right?” He pointed at Double X. “You’re the guy! You’re Bernie!”

From his post across the office, Big Bad watched with amused ambivalence.

By contrast, Chris Unger was outraged. “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded. Unger stood tall, assuming the defiant stance befitting his status of legal heavyweight. His hair was silver and gelled, and he wore it combed straight back. He had on a navy Armani suit, a crisp white broadcloth shirt, and a bright red silk tie.

Those who fear attorneys would have been shaking in their boots at the sight of him, but this was a different crowd. Unable to get the reaction he’d expected, Unger sat back down at his desk, which probably cost more than the house I grew up in. It wasn’t just the desk that was intimidating—everything in his office exuded power, from the dark cherry paneling to the trophy wall littered with photos of Unger posing with presidents past and present, not to mention the Hollywood elite. Clearly, this was a man willing to pay the extra fee at fundraising events to secure the vanity shot.

“I need to speak with your brother,” I said. “It’ll just take a minute.”

Chris Unger opened his mouth to protest, but saw Double X trying to tap out and changed his mind.

Chris obviously spent a lot of time admiring Double X’s fighting ability on the circuit in the quad cage, because he was visibly shaken to see the former baddest man on the planet reduced to his current state.

Double X must have caught a glimpse of the disappointment in his employer’s face, because he tried to form the words “sucker punch.” It sounded more like “suction pump.”

Chris Unger suddenly found his voice. “Garrett, don’t say a word. I’m calling Joe DeMeo.” He reached for the phone.

“Augustus?” I said.

Quinn picked up the unoccupied chair and used it as a battering ram to smash the window. He put the chair down and picked Chris Unger up like a rag doll and carried him to the window.

Garrett Unger jumped to his feet.

“Put him down!” Garrett yelled.

Chris waved his brother off, tried to keep the calm in his voice. “Let’s all just relax,” he said. “Look, gentlemen, we’ve all seen this a hundred times in the movies. You can threaten me all you want, but in the final analysis, we all know you’re bluffing. You have no intention of throwing me out the window, so let’s just sit down and—”

Quinn threw Chris Unger out the window.

40

Sal raised his eyebrows and said, “Holy shit!”

I addressed Sal while keeping my eyes glued to Big Bad. “Are we going to have a problem with you over this?” I asked.

“Fuck no,” said Sal. “Tell him to toss Bernie, too!”

Double X’s eyes went wide. He stopped gasping and lay perfectly still, trying to make himself as small as possible in the room. I wondered if this type of behavior was acceptable in the quad cage.

Garrett Unger, Greg and Melanie’s former attorney, remained where he stood, ashen-faced, dumbstruck. He grabbed the corner of Chris’s desk for support and stared at the window, his mouth agape. This was a man whose source of power derived from thoughts and words—which might explain why his lips and mouth were moving a hundred miles an hour as he mumbled sentences none of us could understand.

Garrett Unger slowly eased himself down. Though his body quickly conformed to the contours of the chair, I wasn’t convinced his mind was suitably focused.

Quinn turned to face him.

“Wh-wh-what do you want to know?” Garrett asked.

“Think about it,” I said.

“B-But … I c-c-can’t.”

I looked at Quinn. “Augustus?”

Quinn took a photograph out of his pocket and tossed it into Unger’s lap. The picture had yesterday’s date stamped on the lower right-hand corner, along with the time the photo had been taken. It was a simple photograph, depicting a typical family scene: an afternoon lunch at Denny’s, a small boy sitting at the table playing Nintendo DS while his older sister sat beside him, lost in her teenage thoughts, their mother talking to the waitress.

In other words, Garrett Unger’s wife and children.

“Wait!” said Garrett Unger. He’d just lost his older brother, but the photograph helped him understand he was a brother second, a husband and father first. He began collecting himself. He took a couple of deep breaths and said, “This information doesn’t leave the room, okay?”

I don’t know what type of people Unger was used to dealing with, but I hoped to hell they occupied a higher rung on the honesty ladder than Sal, Big Bad, Quinn, and me.

“You have my solemn word.” I said, solemnly.

Big Bad laughed out loud.

Quinn said, “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

Sal said, “Talk or fly.”

Unger nodded. “Okay, okay. I can give you his name.”

That comment surprised me. “Whose name?” I said.

“Arthur Patelli.”

“Who?”

“The guy who set fire to the house. That’s what you’re after, right?”

I shook my head. “You can’t be this stupid, even for a lawyer. But I don’t have the time to straighten you out right now.”

I looked at Sal. He held up his hands and said, “Lawyers, Christ Almighty. What you gonna do, huh?”

I said, “Garrett, look at me.”

He did.

“You want to save Joe DeMeo or your family?”

“What?”

“DeMeo or your family. Which one?”

He looked down at the picture in his lap. “How can you even ask that question?” he said.

“Well, you’re an attorney.”

He nodded. “I’ll do anything to save my family. Please don’t hurt them. Just tell me what you want.”

Sal said, “Guys, I don’t wanna—whatcha call—eat and run, but you just tossed a law partner out the window, and even if no one in this fancy shithole saw it, someone on the street did.”

I looked at him. “Good point. We’ll take Garrett with us and trust you to come up with a cover story for DeMeo.”

Sal asked, “You brought a car?”

I shook my head. “We’ll take Chris’s car.”

Sal said, “If you had his car keys you could.” He laughed. “Who’s gonna jump out the window and get the keys?”

“My guess, they’re in his desk drawer,” I said. “In my experience, a man who wears an Armani suit doesn’t want bulging pockets.”

Big Bad slid the desk drawer open, fished out the car keys, and dangled them from his ham-sized hand.

“Good call,” Sal said. “Don’t forget the cameras. They get us coming and going.”

“Quinn will take care of the cameras,” I said.

Speaking to Quinn, I said, “Augustus, will you do me a favor and clean this mess up while I get Garrett in the car? I’ll send the elevator back up for you in a minute.”

I grabbed the mumbling Unger, and we followed Sal and Big Bad into the private elevator and down to the partners’ parking garage. Big Bad found Chris’s Mercedes by pressing the remote and following the chirp. He opened the trunk and helped me toss Garrett inside. I scanned the garage for external security cameras and found none. I guessed the partners didn’t want video proof of their meetings with criminals or perhaps dalliances with call girls. I didn’t ask what happened to Chris Unger’s secretary, but I had a feeling Sal’s car had plenty of traction in the back.

Augustus joined us a moment later, and we drove out of the garage and into traffic. I called Beck Building security and said there was a bomb in the building set to go off in two minutes.

“Who are you!” the security guard demanded.

“In the quad cage, I’m known as Double X,” I said.

I gave them a few minutes to complete the evacuation of the building. We hit the interstate heading north on 75, and Quinn placed a call to the detonating device.

From the interstate, we had a wonderful view of the top of the building as it exploded and burst into flames.

Big Bad called and said, “Double X gone to that big quad cage in the sky.”

41

“What about my family?” Garrett Unger asked.

We were at headquarters in Bedford, Virginia, in the interrogation room. Lou stood by the door with his arms crossed, wearing a bored look on his face. Quinn was listening to a jazz mix on his iPod. I tossed Unger a disposable cell phone.

I said, “You’re going to stay here as my guest until you get a call from Joe DeMeo. If Joe’s smart, he’ll give you a password to some of his numbered off -shore accounts. Lou already set one up for me. When you get the passwords from DeMeo, you’re going to transfer the funds from DeMeo’s account into mine. When Lou gets confirmation that the money’s where it should be, I’ll remove the threat to Mary and the kids.”

We all waited for him to ask the question we knew was coming. He didn’t disappoint. “What about me?” he asked.

“That’s a toughie,” I said. “On the one hand you were plotting to kill me a couple hours ago, and that displeases me. On the other hand, I need you alive in case someone at the bank requires oral or written confirmation for the transaction. As DeMeo’s attorney, I’m sure you can produce whatever is needed to affect the transfer.”

He was looking at me in a pitiful way.

“I won’t lie to you, Garrett,” I said. “You were a major player in the killing of Greg, Melanie, and Maddie Dawes. Because of your participation, Addie’s life has been shattered.”

“Killing me won’t bring them back,” Unger said. “All I did was allow it to happen. If I hadn’t, DeMeo would have killed my family.”

“You were in a tough spot,” I said, “and you’re still in a tough spot. As you say, killing you won’t bring them back. But money’s the great healer, and enough money will help all of us cope with the loss.”

“I’ll do whatever you ask,” he said.

I thought about that for a minute. “Garrett, we’ll see how it all plays out. If you help me get at least twenty million dollars from Joe DeMeo, I won’t kill you.”

He looked at Quinn. “What about him?”

“Same thing.”

“You’ll let me walk?”

“Hell, I’ll even have someone drive you home.”

“Can I take a cab instead?”

“That’s fine, whatever.”

“Can I call my family?”

“Not until this is over.”

He nodded. “In the meantime,” he said, “where will I sleep?”

I said, “Quinn and I are going out of town in a couple hours. Until I get back, you can sleep in my bed.”

“That’s very generous,” Unger said. “Thank you.”

I waved my hand in a dismissive manner. “Think nothing of it,” I said, wishing I could be there to see his face when Lou escorts him to my subterranean prison cell for the night.

42

Colby, California, was a small town, and it wasn’t unusual to spot Charlie Whiteside coming out of his shrink’s office on Ball Street. It was no secret that Charlie’s depression had gotten him washed out of the Afghanistan war. Used to be, pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, had it easy. Charlie could sit in an air-conditioned room at Edwards Air Force Base and launch remote-controlled killer drones while munching fast food. He’d put in a day’s work studying live surveillance footage, lock onto the occasional target, press the button on a joy stick—and be home in time for dinner with the wife and kid.

In fact, it seemed such an easy way to fight a war that in the early weeks of therapy, it had been difficult for his shrink to understand just what it was Charlie was whining about.

“You’re a guy,” she said, “who’s had to deal with frustration and ridicule your entire life.”

Charlie had closed his eyes as he ran the highlight reel through his mind. “And much worse.”

Charlie wasn’t exaggerating. While his parents had been normal, it had taken Charlie many years to grow to his full height of thirty-two inches. His father, having dreamed of spawning a scholarship athlete, found it impossible to derive joy from any of Charlie’s accomplishments. For her part, Charlie’s mother had accepted his condition from the beginning—but with a stoic detachment and much embarrassment. While neither parent clinically abused him, neither did they embrace or nurture him. They took care of him in a casual way, met his physical needs. But had anyone cared to notice—and none did—it would have been clear that Charlie’s role in the family dynamic had been relegated to that of accessory in his parents’ lives.

It was in public school that Charlie Whiteside first learned true pain and suffering. But that was a different issue, and his shrink, Dr. Carol Doering, had been satisfied early on that Charlie had made peace with his childhood. He’d overcome the neglect, the taunting, the bullying on his own, without therapy, and had somehow managed to put those terrible formative years behind him without carrying any serious emotional scars into his adulthood.

Which is why this whole depression thing about flying killer planes from a comfortable armchair five thousand miles removed from the action seemed out of whack with Charlie’s coping mechanism.

In the early sessions, Dr. Doering had found it difficult to identify with Charlie’s condition because she had an emotional connection to the very subject of his complaint. She tried to keep her personal connection out of the therapy, but one day she let her guard down and it just popped out.

“Charlie,” she said, “let me tell you something. My brother’s an F-16 fighter pilot stationed in Iraq. He dodges enemy fire all day, and at night he sleeps in a tent in blistering heat under constant threat of attack.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Charlie had said. “I’m not meaning to compare my service to his. He’s a true patriot. While I love my country, I’m simply not physically able to serve overseas, so this is the only job I could take where I felt I could make a difference.”

Carol Doering felt her face flush. “I didn’t mean to imply …”

“It’s all right ma’am, I know what you mean. Does your brother have a wife and kids?”

“He does. Let me just apologize for my temporary lack of professionalism and get us back to your situation.”

“It’s connected,” Charlie said.

“How so?”

“I understand that your brother is putting his life on the line every day to help preserve our freedom, and I mean him only honor and no disrespect.”

“But?” Carol said.

“But when your brother approaches a target at six hundred miles per hour, he drops his payload and keeps flying and never sees the result.”

Carol cocked her head while pondering the thought. She still didn’t have a grasp on his point. After all, no one was shooting at Charlie when he fired his missiles from a desk at Edwards Air Base.

“When I fire my missiles,” he’d said, “I watch them from release to impact. They’re quite detailed, ma’am. I see the actual result of what I did.

“I see them all,” he continued, “the bodies of the guilty and the innocent. The terrorists and the elderly. The women and the children.

“Then I drive straight from work to my daughter’s piano recital.”

That had been their breakthrough day, and Charlie punctuated the event by adding, “We all serve in our own way. I’m just having trouble with my way.”

Dr. Doering helped Charlie get reassigned to a civilian job, where his experience could be put to good use. Charlie’s attorney threatened the military into helping with the transition. They installed in Charlie’s guestroom, free of charge, all the computer equipment necessary for him to fly UAVs for the California Coastline Weather Service.

In return, Charlie signed a release. It had been a rare concession on the military’s part, but Charlie’s attorney explained what would happen if Charlie wound up on a witness stand: military records would be opened to public scrutiny, particularly classified photographic evidence depicting the graphic details of Charlie’s armchair service.

Charlie settled into his new career with enthusiasm but quickly found the job excruciatingly boring. While the horror of his military job had taken its toll on his emotional well-being, he now realized that being a significant part of the War on Terror provided a constant adrenalin rush he was not likely to find studying cloud formations.

Which is why when Charlie was offered an interesting proposition by a fellow little person, it wasn’t the financial component that caught his interest so much as the idea of adding excitement to his professional life.

Two hours after accepting Victor’s proposition, Charlie verified his checking account balance and thought, Now that’s what I’m talking about! The next morning, he flipped the switches and fired up one of the company’s weather drones. His drone began the flight in the usual way, following a typical coastal flight pattern, filming video, and capturing raw data for analysis by the weather crew. Charlie had been with the company long enough to know when the ground guys were just going through the motions, when they took their breaks, what they found interesting and what they didn’t.

He knew he could divert the drone ten miles inland, make several passes over the DeMeo estate, and be back chasing clouds before anyone was the wiser. Just to hedge his bet, Charlie had previously videoed thirty minutes of boring coastline that he now transmitted directly to the ground crew while his drone was recording footage of Joe DeMeo’s estate. The DeMeo job would take less than ten minutes, which would give Charlie almost twenty minutes to get the drone back to the area of coastline where the fake footage had been recorded. Then he’d replace the fake footage with live shots from the drone.

43

“It’s a large area to cover,” Charlie Whiteside said, “and there appears to be a lot of activity.”

We were at his place, reviewing the surveillance videos and stills he’d downloaded from the weather drone.

The photos revealed a nice setup for Joe, what I’d call a luxury fortress. His twenty-thousand-square-foot residence was situated on top of a prominent hill. If you were picturing a target, the house would be the bull’s eye. The next ring of the target would be the ten-foot-tall reinforced concrete wall that protected the main house and two guest cottages and enclosed about two acres of land. The target’s next ring was cordoned off by a chain link fence that guarded roughly ten acres. That fence was surrounded by more than two hundred acres of wooded scrub worth tens of millions of dollars.

The land ranged from gently rolling to steep drop offs. The outer acreage was thickly wooded with sparse underbrush, a cleared forest with a carpet of soft grass and pine needles.

According to Lou Kelly, it had once been a top-flight corporate retreat due to its proximity to the old highway, its raw physical beauty, and its isolated, tranquil setting.

Joe’s residential compound was accessed by a dirt and gravel road maintained by the state. The entrance to the property was a scant eight miles south of Ventucopa, fourteen miles northeast of Santa Barbara, near the center of what most people think is part of Los Padres National Forest.

Charlie was right about the level of activity. Joe DeMeo was running scared, and the proof could be found in the number of gunmen guarding his compound. From what I’d heard, Joe’s place had always been well guarded, but this was a ridiculous amount of security. We knew he had about a dozen guns, nine of which had surrounded the cemetery where I’d met him less than a week ago.

The drone showed he had another eight men stationed between the chain link and concrete fences. These eight had guard dogs on leashes, which told me they were on loan from a private security company. Joe was paying the big bucks and taking no chances.

It would have been nice to have someone on the inside, so I had Sal offer Joe some of his shooters. But Joe wasn’t in a trusting mood and felt it wouldn’t be prudent to invite a rival crime family inside his inner walls.

Especially one that had recently survived a bombing.

After the Beck Building went up in smoke, DeMeo voiced concerns about Sal’s loyalty. Sal gave an Oscar-winning performance of indignation, replete with threats. In the end, Joe DeMeo had no good reason to doubt his story, and one reason to believe it.

Sal had told DeMeo that I must have followed Garrett Unger all the way from New York to Cincinnati, because by the time Sal’s driver got him and Big Bad to the Beck Building, the place was in flames and the whole block had been roped off.

Joe DeMeo cursed extensively before saying, “You telling me you weren’t even there? You never made it to the meeting?”

“That’s what I’m sayin’,” Sal said. “You don’t believe me, you can check the tapes. I been there before, and Chris had cameras all over his private suite area. You call security and check the tapes. I ain’t on them.”

“That’s a pretty convenient test,” Joe DeMeo said, “considering the security cameras were destroyed by the explosion.”

“No shit!” said Sal. “What a rotten break.”

DeMeo’s reason for believing Sal’s story: just before the meeting, Sal had called Joe and said he wanted to bring Big Bad to the meeting, since the Ungers had a bodyguard.

“I just want—whatcha call—détente.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Joe had said.

“You need to clear it with the Ungers first?”

“Fuck the Ungers. Just get to the meeting.”

“I’m on my way,” Sal had said.

A few minutes passed, and Sal had called Joe to tell him he was sitting in his car a block away from the Beck Building but the area was roped off because the Beck was on fire.

“I just called Chris Unger,” Sal had said, “and he ain’t answering.”

Joe had tried with the same result.

It was a plausible chain of events. The way Joe figured it, Sal wouldn’t be making demands about bringing his bodyguard if he didn’t intend to show up at the meeting. But that didn’t mean he trusted Sal.

A few hours later, they had had another conversation.

DeMeo said, “According to witnesses, Chris Unger jumped—or was thrown—out of his window.”

“You think he jumped like them people in the World Trade Center?” Sal asked.

“My stooge in the CPD says their witness puts Unger on the sidewalk more than a minute before the bomb goes off.”

Their conversation had gone on like that awhile, according to Sal, but the bottom line was, Joe DeMeo was starting to panic. So he put together a small army and stationed them in and outside the walls of his estate. It would be a formidable challenge, but I was gearing up for it.

My phone rang.

“I’ve got the architect,” Quinn said. “I’m in his house right now.”

“Good. Bring him to the campground.”

Quinn paused.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“What about the wife?”

“I thought she was out for the afternoon.”

“Bad timing. She forgot something and came back to retrieve it.”

“Retrieve,” I said.

“Yup.”

“Bring her, too.”

Quinn paused.

“Jesus,” I said. “What else?”

“He doesn’t have the plans.”

“Why not?”

“It was part of the deal. Joe made him turn over all the blueprints.”

I sighed. “Bring him and the wife, anyway. We’ll tease them both with the ADS beam until he remembers what I want to know.”

“You got the Hummer yet?” Quinn asked.

“I’ll have it by the time you get there.”

44

Darwin bellowed and blustered and raised nine kinds of hell when he heard what I was up to, but I believed he was secretly pleased I was planning to bring down Joe DeMeo. I decided to test the theory.

“I can kill him,” I said, “but I can’t take him alive without your help.”

“Why should I care if he’s dead or not?”

“If I take him alive, you can turn him over to the FBI for the hotel bombing, along with all the evidence we’ll find in his house.”

“There won’t be any evidence. Anyway, when the time comes, I’ll grab the other guy, the one who works the whores.”

“Grasso? He’s one of Joe’s guards. Lives in one of the cottages. Again, without your help, he’s not going to come out of this alive.”

“What about the whore?”

“Paige. Her name is Paige,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“Paige is probably dead by now.”

“Maybe not,” he said.

“I hope not. Even so, her testimony alone won’t be strong enough to put him away for the bombing.”

Darwin thought about it. “What do you want from me—and it better not be much.”

I knew whatever I told him would make him blow his stack, but really all I needed was a Pulsed Energy Projectile System (PEPS) weapon mounted on a Hummer.

“You’re insane!” he shouted.

“You can fly one to Edwards in a cargo plane,” I said. That’s just down the road from me.”

“I know where fucking Edwards is,” he said. “Didn’t you just fly there with three ADS weapons?”

“Yeah, but I need the PEPS.”

“Let me guess: you want it by tomorrow.”

“Actually, I need it by six tonight.”

“You’ve lost your fucking mind.”

“Oh, c’mon, Darwin. There’s nothing you can’t do.”

“Except keep you on a leash.”

“Look, I know it’s not going to be easy and no one else in the country could do it—but you’re Darwin!”

“Fuck you!” he said. “It can’t be done. Period.”

“I’ll be there at six tonight,” I said. “Impress me.”

“Go to hell!” Darwin said.

45

Hugo and his army of little people had made their base camp six miles east of Highway 33, near an ancient forest ranger lookout stand. I brought the Hummer to a stop about thirty yards from their campground and waited for Quinn.

“The fuck is that?” Quinn said as he pulled up alongside the Hummer.

“These are circus people,” I said. “That’s one of their circus wagons.” To be completely honest, it was a bright red Winnebago covered from one end to the other with circus paintings.

“I thought you were kidding about them being a circus act.”

“Nope.”

He looked at me. “We going in or what?”

“Hugo’s a military man,” I said. “He’ll probably want to invite us into the camp.”

“Victor and Hugo and the circus people,” Quinn said.

“And us,” I said.

Some of the little people started milling about in the distance, staring at our strange-looking vehicle. They were wearing colorful shirts and baggy trousers. They were pointing and chattering as others joined them.

“What do you suppose they’re saying?” asked Quinn.

“Follow the yellow brick road,” I said.

Quinn stared in disbelief.

“Are you in fact telling me we’re going up against Joe DeMeo, twenty shooters, and eight dogs with this bunch of clowns?” Quinn asked.

We looked at each other. They were in fact clowns. We burst out laughing. I don’t know, maybe it was the stress, maybe we were just glad to be working together again on a major assignment.

“I can see it now,” Quinn said. “The little people put a big flower on their shirts. When the goons bend over to sniff the flower, it’s really a squirt gun!”

I said, “When they shoot their pop guns, a big sign comes out that says BANG!”

“And Joe says, ‘Who are these clowns?’ and someone says, ‘The fuck do I know? Ringling Brothers?’”

I said, “Joe DeMeo, captured by midget circus clowns! Any chance they’ll make fun of him in prison?”

Hugo approached. “What the fuck is that thing?” he asked.

The PEPS weapon—pulsed energy projectiles—like ADS, was originally developed for crowd control. Accurate up to a mile away, it fires directed bursts of pulsed energy to vaporize solid objects. If fired near a target, it heats the surrounding air until the target explodes. The resulting shock wave will knock down anyone in the vicinity and render them helpless for a minute or more.

After explaining this to Hugo, he said, “If we have that, why do we need the ADS weapons?”

I explained that while PEPS would knock down walls and disorient people, it wouldn’t necessarily disarm them or render them helpless.

“The ADS weapon is different,” I said. “It offers an instant, permanent solution to the problem of resistance.”

Hugo turned his attention to Quinn. “You are one ugly bastard,” he said. “No offense,” he added.

Quinn said, “I got this way from eating shrimps. No offense.”

Looks were exchanged between the two.

“You want a piece of me?” Hugo snarled.

“Looks like that’s all there is.”

“Hey,” I said, “we’re all on the same team here.”

Hugo noticed the architect and his wife tied up in the back seat of Quinn’s car. “Who are they?” he asked.

“They’re going to tell me two things: the layout of Joe’s house and how to breach his panic room.”

46

I’d completed my chat with the architect and his wife and just begun the final run-through with the circus army when Sal Bonadello called.

“Joe’s making a move on your wife and kid.”

I’d expected that. In a normal world, I would have had Callie take Janet and Kimberly to my headquarters for safekeeping, but this wasn’t a normal world; it was Janet’s world. I trusted Callie to protect them, but I feared Joe might firebomb the house from a distance.

So last night I’d placed a call to Kimberly and explained the situation. I told her to find a way to get her mom out of the house until I called. I told her wherever she went, she’d be safe because Callie would follow them.

“You got enough guys to handle the threat?” I asked Sal.

Besides getting me into Chris Unger’s office, this was the part of the plan where I needed Sal’s help. I wanted his men guarding Janet’s house in case anything went wrong.

“DeMeo put a contract on you for a million bucks. Told all the families, then called me, said grab your family and hold them hostage.”

“You think he sent some of his guys anyway?”

“I do. It would be just like that rat bastard not to trust me.”

“You running that charity and all.”

“The Mothers of Sicily,” he said. “So, did you get your family somewhere safe?”

“I hope so.”

“Is your wife pissed at you?”

“Ex-wife. And yeah, she’s pissed. Like always.”

“Ain’t they all,” he said.

I finished briefing the circus performers. Quinn checked their equipment. Hugo and I called Victor and gave him an update.

Next, I called Kathleen.

“How’s it hanging, cowboy?” she asked.

“Boring stuff, these Homeland conferences,” I lied.

“Anyone famous there?”

“Besides me? Not really.”

“You’re probably hanging out with one of those pretty high school girls who couldn’t get into the movies.”

“Like, that’s so totally random,” I said.

She laughed. “Don’t work too hard, lover boy. I’m expecting the full treatment when you come home.”

“And you’ll get it,” I said.

“Speaking of which …”

“Can’t say yet. Sometimes these things last a couple days, sometimes more.”

“Until then,” she said, and we hung up.

And so it was time.

47

There was no getting around the noise. Between the Hummer and the Winnebago, we were screwed if we tried to drive within a mile of the chain link fence.

That’s why I needed the PEPS weapon.

Hugo, Quinn, and I were in the Hummer. The architect and his wife were in the trunk of Quinn’s rental car, and the little people were in the Winnebago. Quinn was a tight squeeze in any car, and tighter than normal in the Hummer.

“Try not to breathe on me,” Hugo said to Quinn.

“Why did you bring a Winnebago?” Quinn asked. “There are only ten of you. I thought you could get at least thirty in one of those little clown cars.”

“We could,” said Hugo, “but where would we fit the net and trampolines?”

“Good point,” Quinn said.

I drove slowly to the highway, the Winnebago close behind me. Then I headed south while the clowns sat tight. I drove past the dirt and gravel road that led to Joe DeMeo’s place, and Quinn caught a glint of something: a belt buckle, gun barrel, or cigarette butt. Whatever it was, there were probably two of them guarding the road.

The highway curved a half mile beyond the DeMeo entrance, and I drove a quarter mile farther, cut my lights, and turned around. I didn’t expect any traffic, since Highway 33 cuts through the national forest and it was well past closing time. Still, I angled the Hummer several yards off the shoulder just to be safe. We eased out of the vehicle. Quinn and I took rifles and camouflage blankets. Hugo stood behind the Hummer to keep an eye out for any oncoming cars or cagey DeMeo soldiers.

Quinn and I moved soundlessly up the road to the area where the curve began. There, we set our rifles down, put on our night vision goggles, and dropped to our bellies. We slid the next few yards quietly and waited.

We spotted the dots of light at the same time.

Cigarettes.

We reversed course, picked up our rifles, and checked to make sure the silencers were tight. These were state-of-the-art CIA silencers, which meant we could shoot the guards and make less noise than a mouse peeing in a cotton ball.

We separated. Quinn began moving silently through the forest, circling behind the men guarding the road, while I made my way slowly through the high ground, opposite DeMeo’s entrance. If everything went according to plan, we’d catch them in a crossfire. But these things never go according to plan, and I didn’t want to take a chance on one of us snapping a twig or rousing an otter or making some other sound that might alert the guards.

When I was in position, I covered my head and shoulders completely with the blanket and texted the signal to Quinn and Hugo and the circus clowns. Then we went dark with the phones but set them to twitch. I placed mine in my shirt pocket.

My night vision goggles made it easy to keep an eye on the guards while they smoked, but I was too far away to trust a shot.

It took two minutes for the Winnebago circus wagon to arrive. As the lights washed over the highway, the guards stubbed out their cigarettes. The Winnebago made a clanking noise and stopped about fifty yards from the entrance. After a moment, two little people climbed out with flashlights and lifted the hood as if to check for trouble. I had hoped at this point that the guards would approach the Winnebago so I could shoot them in the back, but they were well trained. They stayed put.

My plan didn’t require them to approach the little people. The whole circus wagon ruse was designed to create enough noise so Quinn and I could get closer. As the clowns took turns trying to fire up the engine and hollering directions to each other, I inched my way closer and knew Quinn was doing the same. Finally, the hood slammed shut and the clowns climbed back in the wagon and started revving up the engine with gusto. I probably covered twenty yards undetected during that sequence. Then the clowns turned their radio up full volume and started singing circus songs as they rode steadily down the highway, past the entrance, through the curve, and out of sight.

While they did that, I covered another fifty yards, maybe more. Now I was close enough to attempt a kill shot. I lined up my rifle and waited for the cigarettes to light.

And waited.

Two minutes passed. I had expected at least one of the guards to walk out onto the road to make sure the clowns hadn’t stopped, but neither of them moved or made a sound or relit their cigarettes. These were some incredibly well-trained guards, I thought.

Then my cell phone twitched.

I slowly slid my camouflage blanket back over my head, eased my cell phone out of my pocket, and brought it up to my face under the blanket. Making absolutely certain no light would be emitted from the keypad, I held my breath and opened the phone. I didn’t dare speak, not even a whisper.

“You can come out now,” Quinn said. “I killed both of them.”

I let out my breath. “Did you check to see if there were any others?”

“You didn’t just ask me that,” Quinn said.

“Right. What the hell was I thinking?”

We made our way back to the Hummer and congratulated the clowns on their performance.

“And then there were eighteen,” Hugo said.

“So far as we know,” I said.

I started the Hummer’s engine but kept the headlights off. The Winnebago turned around and got behind us and followed us back up the road to the entrance, where we headed down the dirt and gravel road toward Joe DeMeo’s place.

48

There was only one entrance leading to Joe’s house, and you had to pass through the chain link fence to get there. Charlie Whiteside and I had calibrated the distance to the first fence pretty carefully, so I stopped when I got three-quarters of a mile from it. Any closer and I would probably give away my position.

Quinn had both the guards’ walkie-talkies, and so far we’d been lucky. No one had asked for an update. I figured we were due, since most security firms go with a fifteen-minute crew check and we’d used all of that and more.

We all slid out of the Hummer and listened for barking dogs. Hearing none, Quinn took his rifle and headed east of the compound. Hugo took mine and headed west.

I climbed on top of the Hummer and gave my gunners time to get as close as they could before the dogs picked them up. I’d hoped they’d get at least halfway there, but the dogs were very alert and the barking started almost immediately. I fired up the PEPS weapon and signaled the circus wagon to make tracks.

Suddenly, the walkie-talkies crackled and came alive with the sound of frantic voices. We’d caught them off-guard, so score one for us, but we were still a long way from winning.

The circus wagon veered off the road to give me clearance for a shot. I took it and heard screaming and yelping. I set my cell phone to speaker and turned up the volume. Then I jumped back in the Hummer, flipped on the headlights, and started the engine. The clowns kept their headlights off and continued making their way to their position, left of the hole in the fence I’d just created.

I cranked the Hummer to about forty and barreled down the road and came to a stop a quarter mile from the entrance. I climbed back onto the roof and gave my clowns time to get their equipment together.

Quinn told me he was in position. We figured Hugo would take longer. His legs were much shorter, and the gun was pretty heavy for him. Still, he was feisty as a rooster, and I knew he’d do well.

I heard some shots, which meant DeMeo’s security team had oriented themselves enough to make me their target. The dogs, being smaller, would take longer to get to their feet. The shots continued. There was a protective shield of bulletproof plastic surrounding the front of the PEPS weapon, so I wasn’t overly concerned about being hit. Quinn must have squeezed off a couple of silent shots because his voice came over my cell speaker, saying, “Two more down—security guards.”

The clowns were taking more time than I anticipated. I wondered if any had been hit. I aimed my weapon to the right of the circus wagon and fired off another burst. I yelled at the circus people to hurry, though it would have been impossible for them to hear me.

The circus clowns had brought several small trampolines and a giant net used to catch falling trapeze artists. Hugo checked in just as the clowns dragged the net across the road, covering the hole I’d made with the initial blast. They tied the ends to the posts and pulled the center of the net away from the hole to make a large chute. Then they ran back to the Winnebago and grabbed their trampolines and knives, for these were knife-throwing midgets.

I climbed into the Hummer and drove another hundred yards. Then I climbed back onto the roof and waited for the remaining security guards to make their stand and for the dogs to make their charge.

Nothing happened.

“I got one,” said Hugo.

“Two more on my side,” said Quinn.

The dogs charged through the fence and got tangled up in the circus net. I fired a burst near them, which heated the air and knocked them all down again. I didn’t think there would be much fight left in the dogs at this point, but I couldn’t take a chance on being wrong and having them kill some of the clowns. I could have shot them, but why kill the dogs if I didn’t have to? The guards were different. They were here by choice, so they were fair game.

The clowns untied the net, closed it off, and dragged the dogs behind the Winnebago, out of the line of fire.

“There’s one guard missing,” I said into my cell phone. “Anyone got a bead on him?”

They did not.

I climbed into the Hummer and used the walkie-talkie. “Joe, I’m coming to get you and your men. Seven security guards are dead. One remains alive. I’m directing this to the guard: Come out unarmed with your hands up and we’ll not harm you. This is not your fight, and you’re in way over your head. You’ve got thirty seconds to let us know where you are. Then we’re going to kill you.”

The clowns got the main gate open and carried their trampolines in, flanked on both sides of the chain link fence by Quinn and Hugo.

The last guard came out with his hands up. Hugo put a plastic twist-tie on his wrists and looped several more around his hands and a support pole to secure him to the chain link fence.

Then Hugo and two of the clowns went back to the Winnebago, fetched the ADS weapons, and carried them into the area we had captured. They stopped while we regrouped. Our next barrier was the concrete wall. The problem for Joe and his men was that we had effectively made them prisoners within the wall. Our problem was the entrance gate gave Joe and his men opportunities to pot shot us. My biggest concern before getting the drone photos was if Joe had thought to put ledges on the inside of the walls. Had he done so, his men could have manned the walls and shot us as we approached, but the drone confirmed there were no ledges.

I drove the Hummer very slowly through the main entrance and aimed the pulse ray at the entrance gate. Quinn and Hugo flanked me from thirty feet on either side and trained their rifles on the same target. They squeezed off a few rounds to discourage Joe’s men from trying to take advantage of the clowns’ momentary vulnerability. If they tried to drive through the gate, I’d blast them with the PEPS weapon. Otherwise, I meant to keep them bottled up. I wasn’t worried about them using their cell phones because who were they going to call? Not reinforcements. Joe already had all the shooters he could trust. Not the police. If they showed up they’d be able to search his house and no telling what they might find in there.

But on the chance Joe might call the police anyway, Darwin and Lou had notified local dispatchers and 911 operators that Homeland Security was on the premises and any calls requesting aid to Joe’s address should be diverted to Lou Kelly.

I had Hugo turn around and keep an eye out behind us, just in case.

The clowns carried three trampolines and three ADS weapons, keeping the Hummer between them and the entrance gate. On each trampoline were throwing knives and electric drills with extended circular concrete drill bits measuring an inch in diameter.

Here’s what we had: three clowns at each of three stations on the right side of the residential entrance gate. Each station had a drill and a trampoline, a cache of knives, and an ADS weapon. Quinn was guarding the front, Hugo the back. I had the PEPS weapon trained on the front entrance gate.

The clowns started drilling holes in the wall.

My cell phone rang.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Joe DeMeo asked.

“The deadline for my money came and went,” I said.

“All this because of the little kid who lived?”

“That and the hotel,” I said.

“You might want to rethink it,” he said. “I’ve got your wife and kid.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I’ve got their house surrounded. One word from me and they’re dead.”

“What’s the address?”

He told me.

“That’s not my family’s address,” I said.

“They’re at a friend’s house. I’ve got it wired to blow.”

49

“You probably don’t believe me,” Joe said, “so hang on and I’ll conference you with the guy who’s going to kill Janet and Kimberly tonight.”

I listened to the high-pitched whine of the drill bits while waiting for the connection to go through. I didn’t think Janet and Kimberly were in trouble because Callie was with them and she hadn’t called. Sal’s men were guarding Janet’s house, where Joe’s men would have gone first.

On the other hand, it always gives you a sick feeling when someone threatens your child’s life.

Joe came back on the line. “Sal, are you there?”

“I’m here,” said Sal Bonadello.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Then Sal said, “Creed, it’s over. I got your blond trapped inside with your bitchy ex and your bratty kid and the family that owns the house. I got gasoline all over the outside walls and Molotov cocktails ready to throw.”

I didn’t say anything.

Sal said, “You think we got a deal, like I’m—whatcha call—monitoring Janet’s house, but your blond followed your kid to a friend’s house. Then your wife showed up, and now they’re all inside and the blond is so busy trying to keep everyone calm, she don’t even know we’re here. So this is payback time, my friend. For livin’ in my attic and jumpin’ through the fucking ceiling and shooting up my bedroom and scaring the shit outta my wife, you lousy prick.”

“I saved your life.”

“The life you put in danger in the first place.”

I didn’t say anything. Joe DeMeo said, “Creed, you’ve taken a shine to that girl in the burn center. So I’ve decided to burn your kid, too. And if she tries to run out the door or jump out a window, we’re going to shoot her.”

“Unless?” I said.

“Unless you put down your weapons and come to the front gate. All of you.”

Two of the clowns had gotten their drills through the wall. The third drill made a shrieking sound as it hit a steel reinforcing rod. That clown moved the drill a few inches to the left and started over.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Joe.”

“You’d let your wife and kid die?”

“Ex-wife.”

“Still,” he said. “Your kid?”

I sighed. “You’re going to kill them, anyway, Joe. And me, too, if you get the chance.”

“It’s your little girl, for Christ sake!”

“Which will give me that much more incentive to boil your body with the special weapon I’m bringing into your home.”

“Say good-bye to your family, Creed.”

“You tell them for me,” I said. “I’ve got work to do.”

The first two clowns put the nozzle of their ADS weapons into the holes they’d drilled. The third clown was nearly finished with his second attempt. We all waited for him.

Hugo walked over to me while keeping his eyes trained on the area behind us. “I heard that bastard on your speaker phone,” he said, “and I heard what you said to him.”

“And?”

“Are you okay?”

“That’s the question I’ve been asked all my life.”

The last hole was completed, and the last ADS weapon was fitted to it. At each station, a clown attached the power packs and flipped the switches. At the same time, a second clown jumped on each trampoline several times until he could see over the wall. When they felt safe enough, they angled their jumps and landed on top of the wall. Then the remaining clown at each station tossed them six knives, two at a time. The clowns on top of the walls placed the knives in their knife belts and scampered along the wall top until they reached the area where the second-floor roof overhung the wall. They jumped on top of the roof and got into position behind each of the three back gables.

Then I climbed down from my perch, pulled a tear gas gun from the back seat, and tossed it to Quinn. While I covered the entrance with the PEPS weapon, Quinn made his way to the gate. Once there, he started pumping tear gas into each window in the house.

I was surprised by the lack of gunmen in the yard. Once the fighting started, they all must have hidden in the house. The PEPS weapon will do that to people. Even so, why wouldn’t they station themselves at the upstairs windows? Maybe they were all hiding in Joe’s panic room. I hoped so. That would make it much easier for me.

I heard a scream. “Got one,” said one of the rooftop elves. “Trying to climb out the back window onto the roof.”

I heard several blasts of gunfire coming from the front of the house. Quinn ducked behind the wall just in time. Then I heard the types of screams one can only make when exposed to the ADS beam—except there were four of them.

“Got one,” said another rooftop elf. “Same idea, different window,” he added.

We heard an engine start up in the garage.

“Stay at your posts,” I yelled into my cell phone.

Quinn sprinted back to his post where he’d set his rifle down. He picked it up and aimed it at the front gate.

When the gate started to open, I fired up the PEPS weapon. Joe’s car came flying toward the entrance at an angle, and I gave him a full-power blast that melted his tires and caused his car to flip and slam into the corner of the gate. Several men jumped out and started to run, including Joe DeMeo.

They got about two feet before the ADS beam found them.

“Shut off the beams!” I yelled. I drove the Hummer through the gate, slamming Joe’s Mercedes out of the way to clear a path for Quinn and the three clowns who were standing by with the rest of the knives. There were four guys on the ground. We gutted the two who had followed me and Joe at the cemetery the previous Saturday, and twist-tied Joe and Grasso’s wrists behind them.

Joe spit at me and missed. “I should’ve stayed in the panic room,” he said.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” I said. “I’d have taken that machine off the truck and aimed it at the wall. You saw what it did to your car. Imagine what it would have done to your panic room.”

“If you knew where to aim it,” he sneered.

“You got me there, Joe.”

“By the way,” he said, “your family’s dead.”

“So you say.”

The first four that were hit by the ADS ray were dead, which was to be expected, having been exposed for several minutes. My personal best was less than twenty seconds, so I could only imagine their suffering.

We guessed we’d gotten all of them, and if not, I didn’t care. We gathered up all our equipment and headed back to the campground. We’d beaten nearly twenty armed men and eight attack dogs without taking a single hit in return. That’s a hell of a campaign, I thought.

Back at the campground, there was just one thing left to do: humiliate Joe.

It has never been my style to humiliate my vanquished enemies, but Hugo insisted it was a time-honored clown tradition, so I didn’t stand in their way. He grabbed a seltzer and sprayed it in Joe’s pants while the other clowns formed a circle, interlocked arms, and sang, “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants!”

They had so much fun they all took a turn spraying Joe and Grasso. Before long, their pants were a soggy mess.

“You’re fuckin’ nuts!” Joe screamed again and again. “But I got you, Creed. I killed your kid!” he shouted. “I killed your fuckin’ wife!”

“Ex-wife,” I said.

50

Of course, Joe hadn’t killed Kimberly or Janet, and neither had Sal Bonadello. Sal’s conference call with Joe and me had been part of the plan. It gave Joe what he thought was a bargaining chip, gave him a false sense of security. When I kept coming after him in spite of the threat to my daughter, he came to the conclusion I was certifiable. He reasoned, if I didn’t care enough about my own kid to try to save her, what chance did he have with me? Joe, already in a panic, must have felt like a trapped rat. At least I thought he’d feel that way, and I hoped to flush him out.

Because, truth is, I really didn’t know where his panic room was hidden, and he had a hell of a big house. As it turned out, the architect and his wife knew nothing about a panic room. If Joe had one, the architect guessed it had been added by the second architect, the one who revised the original plans and completed the construction effort. That guy had disappeared shortly after completing work on Joe’s house.

Lou had pulled the building permits and gave us the name, but apparently DeMeo had told the second architect not to file the revisions. Quinn and I felt terrible about kidnapping and torturing our architect and his wife with the ADS ray, but they were okay now. Hopefully they’d be able to look back on the experience some day and laugh about it. If not, who would believe their story anyway, right?

Our captured included the architect, his wife, the security guy, Joe DeMeo, and Grasso. That’s a lot of people to deal with, so I did what I always do when I’ve got a mess to clean up.

I called Darwin.

Darwin sent a company cleaning crew to Joe’s house, and the clowns kept an eye on the architect and his wife and the security guy until the cleaning crew could round them up. Meanwhile, Quinn and I tied DeMeo and Grasso to the sides of the Hummer and made them run a few miles with their pants around their ankles to amuse the clowns. When we got tired of that, I pulled over to the side of the road and put a gun to Joe’s head and made him call Garrett Unger at headquarters. Joe claimed he couldn’t remember the passwords, so I made him run a few more miles. Unfortunately for Joe, he kept falling and spent most of the time being dragged. Then I repeated the process again and again until he remembered enough to make me square with Addie and Quinn and Callie and Sal Bonadello.

After Joe came through with the passwords, Quinn tied him and Grasso to the PEPS weapon on the roof. Then I hauled them off to Edwards to meet Jeff Tuck, my eccentric L.A. operative. Jeff couldn’t understand why it took so long to drive thirty miles to the base. I told him we got a late start.

Joe and Grasso had been dragged half to death, and their faces and bodies showed the effects. Jeff took one look at them and said, “Relatives of yours, Augustus?”

To me, he said, “Do I want to know why their pants are sopping wet?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” I said.

“You got any dry clothes they can wear so they don’t ruin the jet seats?”

Quinn and I gave Jeff our camouflage blankets and watched him wrap them around the two waifs. I remembered the two thousand dollar suit and tie Joe wore last week at the cemetery and thought, You never feel the splinters on the ladder of success until you’re sliding back down.

Jeff flew Joe and Grasso to Washington and turned them over to Darwin’s security staff, and Quinn and I took one of the company’s Gulfstream jets back to headquarters.

51

“It was the suit, man. I swear to God, she loved the suit.” This was Eddie Ray, telling his story about the girl he met in sporting goods. “Words can’t describe her.”

“You were probably drunk,” said Rossman, and the others laughed. The old friends were hanging at Daffney Ducks, the neighborhood watering hole. Eddie Ray had grown up and lived his entire life—forty-six years—within five miles of this place.

She’d been shopping for a birthday present for her dad. A fly rod. It couldn’t be just any rod, had to be the best. Eddie Ray was so stunned at her beauty, he’d just stood there without saying a word. She’d said, “That’s a great-looking suit you’re wearing. Is it an Armani?”

“Laugh all you want,” he said to his drinking buddies, “but I’ve got a lunch date with her tomorrow.”

“Tell us where,” said Lucas, “and we’ll all give her a ride.” He made an obscene gesture with his hands and hips.

More laughter.

“She ain’t like that. This is a high-class broad. Seriously.”

The blond beauty had asked about his suit, and he couldn’t just stand there and say nothing. Eddie Ray had choked up the courage to say, “I’m not sure of the label, but I got it at the JC Penney’s.” She’d nodded, impressed. Things were going good, so he tried for a joke. “But it cost a hell of a lot more than a penny!” he’d said, then added, “Pardon my French.” It hadn’t mattered about the profanity. “I like that,” she’d said. “You’re funny.”

Now, back at the bar, buying a round of drinks for his skeptical buddies, Eddie said, “I’ll take a picture, and you can judge for yourself.”

“Make sure you get the front end,” said Rossman. “I’ve always wanted to see lipstick on a pig.”

“I’ll take a picture, all right,” said Eddie Ray, “and when you see it, you’re gonna shit!”

They’d talked a few minutes, and he’d picked out the best rod in the store for her. She’d been impressed by his knowledge of the sport. He’d asked her name, and when she said, “Monica,” he said, “I knew a girl named Monica once, back in high school. Real pretty, she was.” Monica had smiled a sly smile and said, “I bet she was your girlfriend,” and he’d winked and said, “You’d win that bet for sure.” They’d laughed, and she’d said, “You probably had lots of girlfriends in high school if you had that cool mullet back then,” and he’d modestly said, “No more’n my share, I expect.” Then he’d told her about being on the football team and how he blew out his knee that last season, and by then they were checking out and he couldn’t help but give her the employee discount, meaning, he bought the rod and let her reimburse him, which she did with cash. Cash he was now blowing on drinks for his friends.

“Hold up,” he said to his friends. “I can only do the first round. I gotta save my dough for my date tomorrow.”

She’d been so grateful for the discount, she felt she should do something to repay him. “Have dinner with me tonight,” he’d said, wondering how those words had escaped from his mouth. She’d said, “Hmm. I can’t have dinner, but if you feel like driving to the city tomorrow, I can meet you for lunch.”

Eddie left the bar early to get himself together for the big date that promised to change his life.

The guys kept drinking and talking, and Lucas tried to take bets on whether or not Eddie Ray’s lunch date would show up tomorrow. No one was taking. They decided Eddie Ray had been the victim of a great-looking broad who was playing him for the discount.

They were wrong.

When Eddie Ray got to the restaurant and asked for Monica, he was handed a small envelope by the hostess. Eddie’s knees went weak, and he had a sinking feeling in his heart. It was a classy rejection, he thought, but a rejection just the same. Of course, there was always a chance she’d gotten tied up with something at the last minute. If so, she wouldn’t have known how to contact him.

So there was a glimmer of hope, Eddie decided. He took the note, walked to an empty chair, sat down, and tried to fight the feeling of rejection that had permeated his life since the day his knee blew out.

The note said she’d ordered a private lunch for them in suite 316.

Eddie raced to the elevators and pressed the button. He didn’t care if it seemed too good to be true. He’d seen several movies where the gorgeous party girl wants to get away from her life and winds up humping the pool boy or the maintenance man. Eddie wasn’t kidding himself; he knew this wasn’t going to be the start of a lasting relationship.

He also knew that when a girl asks you to her hotel room, you don’t say no. She was practically promising him sex, probably after a nice lunch and some flirty conversation. As he knocked on the door, he thought, in less than two hours, I could be banging the most beautiful girl on the planet Earth.

Callie had other plans, of course.

“Come in,” she said. “The door is unlocked.”

Eddie entered the parlor area of the suite, noticed the flowers on the table, the champagne bucket, the flute glasses, the fresh-squeezed orange juice, the chocolate-covered strawberries. He could hear soft music coming from the bedroom. Callie stood across the parlor, leaning against the wall, dressed to the nines in a yellow sun dress, hands in her pockets, cutting an angle as practiced as any American model.

Eddie let out a low whistle.

“I gotta hand it to you, Monica. You do know how to set the mood.”

“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering lunch. I hope that’s okay.”

Eddie Ray liked to order his own food, but what the hell, this wasn’t about eating. Still, she was probably some kind of model, skinny as she was, and he didn’t care much for chick food. He looked again at the champagne and the orange juice and the flowers. All this, he thought, and not one beer. What were the chances she’d order him a hamburger and fries, he thought. Zero, right?

Eddie Ray said, “Whatever you’ve chosen will be perfect, I’m sure.”

“I take you for a guy who likes his steak and potatoes,” she said.

Eddie’s face lit up, and he said, “Can I pour you a drink?”

“If you’ll join me,” she said.

They had one, and it was a sissy drink, but it wasn’t that bad. He relaxed on the couch, and she made him another. This one tasted stronger, and he was starting to feel the effects of drinking without eating first. He figured he’d leave this part out tonight when he told the guys at the bar about his big date.

She smiled and said, “When you finish your drink, I’ll give you a kiss.”

“I’ll drink the whole damn bottle if you take off your dress,” he said with a wink, then wished he hadn’t.

“Why, Eddie Ray!” she said, but she said it with a laugh, so he guessed they were still okay.

“I was just kidding,” he said. He gulped down the rest of his drink, and she said, “Now, about that kiss.” Eddie couldn’t believe his luck.

Eddie Ray stood to collect his kiss and got about five feet before making a strange face and grabbing his chest. He took a couple of steps sideways and staggered into the wall.

She asked, “Are you okay?”

He looked at her and said, “I don’t know what’s happening.” He sank to his knees and fell on his side, his face contorted in pain at first, then agony.

Callie pulled a chair next to him and sat. “You don’t have much time,” she said, “so pay attention.”

Eddie had lost all feeling in his feet and hands. “What,” he gasped, “have you done?”

“I’ve poisoned you,” she said.

“But why?”

“I did it for Monica. She wasn’t your girlfriend, by the way. She was five years younger than you. Fifteen, the night you raped her.”

“What are you … talking about?” he said. He was having difficulty speaking, but right now it seemed his voice was the only part of his body that was working.

“You were hosting a keg party at your house,” Callie said. “The party had moved to the front yard. Monica was walking home from a dance class at the high school. You knew her from the neighborhood and called her over. You grabbed her and raped her on your front lawn and threatened to kill her if she told anyone.”

“H-how do you know all this?”

“She was a bit snooty,” Callie said, “but she was a friend of mine. She had class. Unlike you.”

“Help me,” he said.

“Fat chance. Here’s my best offer. Give me the names of two people who ruined your life the way you ruined Monica’s. If you want justice, this is your chance. But speak quickly, because you’re about to pay for your sins in a permanent way.”

He named his coach and the kid from Woodhaven, the one who took the cheap shot on the football field a full second after the whistle had blown.

Callie wiped down any and all surfaces she might have touched, including the orange juice lid, the bottle, and the champagne bottle. Then she placed the champagne cork and flutes in her duffel, along with the note she’d written that she fished out of his pocket.

Callie stopped for a moment, inspecting the room. Deciding it was sterile, she headed for the door, pausing only long enough to step over Eddie Ray’s shuddering body. She was done here, was tired of being Monica.

52

Kathy Ellison had nearly finished walking her golden retriever, Wendy, around her neighborhood circle when she saw a hulking man standing beside a parked sedan directly in front of her. It was mid-morning, a beautiful sunny day, and theirs was a gated community in Marietta, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Crime was virtually nonexistent in neighborhoods such as Kathy’s, where all houses were priced in the million-plus range.

Even so, the man standing in her path was so huge and his face and head so grossly disfigured, she stopped in her tracks some twenty feet away. Wendy noticed him, as well, or had picked up on Kathy’s fear as dogs will sometimes do. The hair on Wendy’s back slowly began to stand on end. She let out a long, low growl. Kathy decided the sensible thing to do would be to turn around and go home the way she’d come.

As she spun around, she heard the man call her by name. Kathy froze in her tracks, stunned, frightened. There was no reason for this monstrous man to know her name.

“Please, ma’am, don’t be afraid,” he said as he approached. “I don’t blame you for being upset. I have that affect on everyone at first. I can’t help the way I look. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

Quinn kept talking as he drew closer. “The best thing to do is just not look at me.” By now, he was standing next to her. Wendy, poor thing, was shivering with fear, wetting a puddle into the pavement.

“Kathy, my name is George Purvis, and I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Kathy hadn’t moved from the spot where she froze after hearing him call her name. She also refused to look at the man standing beside her. That way, she wouldn’t be able to identify him, so maybe he wouldn’t have to hurt her.

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Purvis,” she said. “I don’t wish to be rude, but you’re frightening my dog and me. I don’t think I want to hear your bad news. Can I just go home?”

Quinn dropped to one knee, held his hand out for Wendy to sniff. She clamped her jaws on his wrist, growling, tearing his flesh apart. Then she started tugging his hand side to side as if she were trying to break the neck of a large rat.

“Oh my God!” shrieked Kathy. “Wendy, no! Stop it!”

Wendy released his hand. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Purvis. She never behaves this way.”

Quinn just shrugged. “It’s okay, ma’am. I don’t really feel pain the way most people do.” He noticed her staring at his bloody hand. Seeking to remove the distraction, he stuffed it in his pocket.

“Even so,” Kathy said, “I’m so sorry.” She took a deep breath, turned to face him, tried hard not to recoil in horror. She looked into his face, and this time saw more than she expected to find. Her eyes watered thinking of his pain, the emotional scarring. “What’s the bad news you wanted to tell me?”

Quinn looked in both directions before answering. Still on one knee, so as not to tower above her, he said, “It’s about your husband, Brad.”

“What about him?”

“He gave me fifty thousand dollars to kill you.”

Kathy started hyperventilating. She felt light-headed. Her ears began ringing. The only reason she didn’t faint was because she didn’t want the monster to touch her—and he surely would. She moved her eyes about, seeking help, trying to decide how best to get away from him.

“Please don’t run. I’m not going to do it.”

“What?”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve been watching you for the past couple of days, and I’ve been watching your husband. I’ve come to the conclusion he’s the one who deserves to die, not you.”

Kathy looked into his face to see if he was just playing with her. She could tell nothing from his expression, but then, his face didn’t really seem capable of displaying much beyond horror. She felt, at least for the moment, he was not planning to hurt her. “Why on earth would my husband want to kill me?” she asked.

Quinn said, “Did you ever watch Seinfeld?”

“The television show or the comedian?”

“The show.”

“Sure. All the time.”

“Me, too. Did you ever see the show about Opposite George?”

“Where he starts doing the opposite of everything he’s done before?”

“Right. And everything started working for him, remember?”

“Yes,” she said. “He goes up to the girl in the coffee shop, tells her he’s bald, unemployed, and lives with his parents.”

“Uh huh, and she likes him! Then he has the job interview and does everything wrong and winds up working for the Yankees.”

Kathy said, “Yeah, I love those shows. I still watch the reruns sometimes. But what does this have to do with not wanting to kill me?”

“It’s like Opposite George. All my adult life, I’ve taken these kinds of jobs, never asking questions, never wondering about the motives, never thinking about the people who had to die. What’s it ever gotten me? Nothing but misery. I have to work, and this is all I know. Long story short, your husband called a guy who called a guy.”

“And now you’ve come,” Kathy said.

“Right,” said Quinn. “Only this time, I started thinking, what if I take the money and don’t do the hit? What’s the worst that could happen?”

Kathy didn’t know how to answer that.

“I watched you, and I may be wrong, but I think you’re a nice person.”

“Well thank you, Mr. Purvis.”

“Actually, my name is Quinn.”

“Okay …”

“It’s not your fault that Brad is screwing around on you.”

“What?”

“Yeah, he’s sleeping with this young girl who works at Neiman Marcus in Buckhead, at the jewelry counter. Her name is Erica Vargas. I’m thinking that’s why he wants you out of the picture, so he can fuck her all the time instead of just twice a week.”

“Please, Mr. Quinn. Your language. It’s appalling!”

“Oh, sorry. Anyway, I think Brad’s a jerk and you could do better.”

“Thank you for the compliment, Mr. Quinn, if that’s indeed what it was. But I’m afraid there’s been a terrible mistake. I find it inconceivable that Brad would take a lover.”

“Happens all the time.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure it does, but not to passionless men like Brad. As for him being capable of murder? Impossible.”

Quinn’s hand was suddenly a blur as he snatched Wendy and headed for the sedan. Kathy bolted after him.

“Stop!” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m taking Wendy for a little ride. You can join us if you’d like.”

“Please, Mr. Quinn. You don’t want to do this. Look at her. She’s terrified.”

The giant kept moving toward the car.

“Remember what you said about Opposite George!”

Quinn held the passenger door open. “I’ve already explained my position on that,” he said, “but some things must be seen to be believed. Climb in. If we hurry, we can catch them in the act.”

Kathy looked around. “What has happened to our security guard?”

Quinn waved his injured hand dismissively. “He’s, uh, tending to a family emergency.”

Though Quinn had said it casually, he failed to anticipate the terrifying images that suddenly raced through Kathy’s mind. She began shaking so violently, Quinn feared she might slip into shock.

“Kathy, I promise you, everything’s fine. Think about it: if I wanted you dead, you’d already be halfway to heaven.” He patted the seat. “Now climb in and stop worrying. I’ll have you and Wendy back home in no time.”

Kathy didn’t want to go with the giant. In fact, getting in his car would be dead last on her list of things to experience in her lifetime. But she couldn’t bear the thought of losing Wendy. She took a deep breath and reluctantly climbed into the car and hung her hopes on the idea that perhaps one of her neighbors had seen enough to phone the authorities.

Quinn put the car in gear and handed Wendy to her grateful owner. True to his word, Quinn didn’t hurt either of them and was in fact very conversational during the drive to Buckhead. It was not yet noon and traffic was light, and before long, Kathy felt the car stop. She turned her attention away from Wendy and looked out the window.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“We wait.”

Kathy followed Quinn’s gaze to the café across the street, the charming one that offered a view of cozy furniture through the front window—the cozy furniture upon which Brad sat with a young hottie.

Quinn, Kathy, and Wendy settled into their seats for the duration of the lovers’ meal, then watched Brad and Erica stroll hand-in-hand to the nearby hotel. They waited in the car in silence for about an hour. Then Quinn spotted the lovers exiting the hotel. Brad gave Erica one last embrace.

“Can you drive us home now?” Kathy said.

He did. Before getting out of the car, Kathy said, “You know that thing you were telling me about, the whole Opposite George thing? I think this just might work out for you.”

Quinn wondered what Donovan Creed would have said to keep the conversation going. He came up with, “How so?”

“I’m the one with all the money in this relationship, not Brad, but there is a pot full of insurance and a big inheritance coming Brad’s way if something happens to me.”

Quinn knew where this was going.

Kathy continued. “You can keep the fifty thousand dollars from my husband,” she said, “and I’ll add another fifty thousand to it. Do you understand what I’m asking?”

“You want me to kill your husband.”

Kathy laughed. “Heavens no! I’ve got far too much invested in the prick. Plus, I really do love him, and I certainly wouldn’t welcome the close scrutiny the media and police would bring.”

Quinn was wrong. He had no idea where this was going and told her so.

“Don’t you see?” asked Kathy. “I want you to kill Erica.”

Quinn nodded absently. “I know a guy who says we all have at least two people in our lives who we wish had never been born. These two people changed the course of our lives for the worse, and we never got over what they did.”

Kathy said, “Your friend is probably right about that.”

Quinn said, “Apart from Erica, was there anyone else in your life who you wish had never been born?”

“Oh heavens,” said Kathy. “What a horrible question to ask!”

“Just hypothetically.”

“Well, I hate to speak ill of the dead,” she said, “but did you see that media circus about Monica Childers a few weeks ago?”

Quinn nodded. “Did you know her?”

“She was my step-daughter. She made my life a living hell.”

After helping Kathy achieve a peaceful demise, Quinn placed her into a shallow grave in the North Georgia woods, went back to the mall, and waited for Erica to leave her station. The store wasn’t busy, but there were people milling around. Quinn waited until the area around the jewelry counter was vacant. He placed a small package by the cash register and walked out of the store.

Erica finished up in the bathroom, walked back to her station, and checked the area to make sure the fill-in girl hadn’t left any paperwork for her. Satisfied, she turned her attention to the small gift-wrapped package with her name on it. There was a note: “Please accept this with all my love. I’m filing for divorce today. Love, Brad.”

Erica let out a squeal of delight. This was her dream come true, what she’d been working for all these months. Working the jewelry counter at Neiman’s, she was tired of watching other women casually make purchases that eclipsed her annual salary. Her friends chided her for always dating married men. She couldn’t wait to show them the fruits of her labor!

She carefully unwrapped the package, slowly lifted the lid.

And days later, cleanup crews were still finding remnants of her flesh in the strangest places.

53

I woke up first, so I went into the kitchen and set the oven to four hundred. While it preheated, I filled a blender with milk, flour, eggs, butter, salt, and vanilla and almond extract. I let that churn on high a full minute, found Kathleen’s muffin pan, and sprayed it with nonfat cooking spray. I poured the batter into the muffin slots, popped them in the oven, and set the timer for twenty-seven minutes. Then I placed some butter on a plate to soften and headed back to Kathleen’s bedroom, where I belonged.

“What was all that racket?” she asked.

“I’m making us popovers for breakfast.”

“You can’t make popovers at home. They always fall before you take them out,” she said.

“Not mine.”

“Only fancy restaurants can make popovers that stay puffed up.”

“Only fancy restaurants and me,” I said.

“If you’re wrong and I’m right, will you take me somewhere fancy for breakfast sometime?”

“Do you have a place in mind?” I said.

“I’d like to have breakfast at Tiffany’s,” she said.

“Actually, I think Tiffany’s is a jewelry store, not a restaurant.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I’m afraid not.”

“I’ve never seen the movie. I just always assumed …”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “My popovers won’t fall. We won’t have to eat somewhere fancy.”

“Darn,” she said.

Somebody famous once said that you can kiss your friends and family good-bye and put a lot of miles between you, but you’ll always be with them because you’re not just a part of the world; the world is a part of you.

Or something like that.

The point is, I never missed anyone the way I missed Kathleen this last trip. When I found my way back to her modest duplex with the faded green siding, half attic, and half basement, and she jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around me and squealed with joy—well, I knew this must be what all the poets make such a fuss about.

“How long do we have before the popovers fall?” she asked.

“Forever, because they never will. I have it down to a science.”

“So what you’re saying, you’re a chef scientist.”

“We all have a specialty,” I said.

“My specialty is math,” she said.

“Math?”

She gave me a sly smile. “That’s right. As in, how many times can one thing … go into another.” She arched an eyebrow seductively.

“Before a cooking timer goes off?” I asked.

“Hypothetically,” she said.

“I’m not certain, but I’m willing to expend a great deal of effort toward helping you solve that equation.”

And so we did.

The bell interrupted our research, and we agreed to continue the experiment after breakfast. Kathleen took a blanket off the bed, wrapped it around her, followed me into the kitchen, and watched me take a pan of perfectly formed popovers from the oven. We filled them with softened butter.

“Oh … my … God!” she squealed. “I’ve always wanted a man who could cook, and now I’ve got something even better: a man who can bake!”

We each ate two, and afterward, Kathleen looked as though she wanted to say something.

“What?” I said.

“I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to run you off.”

“You won’t run me off. Unless you’ve got another lab partner.”

She took a deep breath and said, “I want to adopt Addie.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “Really.”

“I love her, Donovan, and she loves me. I’ve always wanted a child of my own, but Ken beat that physical possibility out of me years ago. Anyway, it’s like I’d be choosing her over all the other children in the world, you know? And she needs me.”

“What about Aunt Hazel?” I asked.

She lowered her eyes. “That’s the problem,” she said. “Hazel doesn’t want her, but she doesn’t want me to have her.”

“Why not?”

“She thinks I can’t provide for Addie. She thinks Addie should be turned over to an adoption agency where she can be placed with a proper family.”

“You mean like a husband and wife?”

She nodded. “And enough money to adequately care for her needs.”

“What did you say?”

Kathleen took my hand in hers. “I told her the chances of a perfect family adopting Addie were slim and that I might not have a husband or money, but I can give her all the things a little girl needs.”

“Well said.”

“But she still won’t sign off on me, even though Addie begged her to.”

“You want me to have a talk with Aunt Hazel?”

Kathleen said, “Would you mind terribly?”

“I’ll do it today,” I said.

We sat there in silence awhile. Then Kathleen said, “Donovan?”

“Uh huh?”

“Will you still see me if I adopt Addie?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“A lot of men would rather date gorgeous, young, big-boobed women that aren’t single mothers.”

“Yuck,” I said. “Not me!”

On my way to Aunt Hazel’s, I reflected on the enormity of the accounts I’d seized from Joe DeMeo. He was far wealthier than I’d anticipated, and in fact, money was still pouring in at a healthy clip. I supposed the contributors hadn’t yet heard the news of DeMeo’s fall. After paying all costs of the campaign, I had enough left over to give a million dollars each to Lou, Kimberly, and Janet. Janet seemed quite pleased to get a share, I thought, even though she said it was a drop in the bucket compared to what I’d cost her in misery.

I thought about Garrett Unger and how he was scheduled to be arrested this morning. I hadn’t said anything about it to Kathleen, and I hadn’t mentioned the million dollars that would be wired into her personal account by 2:00 pm today, or the trust I was setting up for Addie that would be funded with the initial ten million I’d clipped from DeMeo. These were all surprises that were sure to make breakfast at Tiffany’s seem pale by comparison. Not to mention the biggest surprise of all—when Kathleen finds out I’m not just a baker, but an accomplished cook as well.

Traffic was moving, but slowly. I looked out the window and saw the small piles of black snow, the only visible remnants of a brutal winter. We plodded our way under a bridge, and I noticed several bums huddled together under blankets, trying to sleep. I wondered what had happened in their lives that brought them to this bridge on this day.

I had my driver pull over. I got out of the car and approached the bums. “I’ve got something for you,” I said.

It took a minute, but the three men roused themselves to sitting positions. There was no way to tell how old or young they were, but they were equally filthy. I handed each of them a hundred dollar bill, and they all said “God bless you, sir.”

The first guy held up a small bottle of blackberry brandy. There was maybe a sip left in it. “You want to sit and have a drink?” he asked.

“Another time,” I said, but I didn’t leave.

“That’s mighty generous of you mister,” one of the guys said. “Mighty generous, indeed.”

Another one said, “Know what I’m gonna do with my hunnerd?”

“What’s that?” I said.

“I’m gonna go to a fancy bar and get drunk on the finest whiskey money can buy.”

I nodded.

The second guy said, “I’m gonna get me some pussy. Been a long time since I’ve had pussy.”

I handed all three of them another hundred dollars and said, “Now all three of you can get drunk and get some pussy.”

The third one said, “I’m a woman, you dumb shit.”

One of the others said, “Mm hmm, you right, Agnes. He is a dumb shit.”

I was about to apologize, but my cell phone rang. I waved goodbye to my new friends and climbed back in the car to take the call.

“Mr. Creed … I’ve got … some … good news … and some … bad news.”

“Hi, Victor,” I said. “Bad news first.”

“The social … experi … ment has … run its … course,” he said.

“I’m okay with that,” I said. I’d known it was just a matter of time before we got to a bunch of leads that were already dead. “What’s the good news?”

“I’ve got … another … idea … that is … in … credi … ble and … I want … you to … partici … pate.”

“Is there money in it for me?”

“Lots.”

“Will this interfere with your plans for world conquest?”

“It might … delay … them some … but it … will be … fasci … nating. In fact … it is … the most … amazing … thing … you will … ever hear … in your … life!”

“I’m listening,” I said.

He told me.

And when I heard it, I had to agree.

Preview

Read on for the first chapter of

LETHAL EXPERIMENT

Donovan Creed is a CIA assassin turned killer-for-hire. His new girlfriend thinks it’s time they settled down, but he can’t bear to give up his adrenaline-fuelled life.

Now he’s been offered a role in a bizarre social experiment: Give a man $100,000 on the understanding that a murderer will be killed if he accepts the money. Will anyone accept? What will happen if they do? And why is Donovan Creed playing by totally different rules?

Furious action, gorgeous women and outrageous plot twists: the second novel in John Locke’s bestselling series is a break-neck thriller with a cliffhanger ending that will leave you gasping for more.

Prologue

The small house was old and cramped by furniture that seemed even older. A transaction was taking place at the kitchen table, where the three of them sat. A slightly foul odor seeped in from the living room. Trish didn’t know it yet, but the next few minutes would change her life. She cleared her throat.

“We were hoping to get eighteen thousand dollars,” she said to the loan officer.

The young blond loan officer wore her hair combed back with a part midway above her left eye. “No offense,” she said, “but it took more than eighteen thousand dollars of stress to put those dark circles under your eyes. Not to mention the car in your driveway, the condition of your home, the fact you’ve been turned down by every lender in town…”

Trish swallowed, seemed about to cry.

The loan officer’s face was visually stunning, with flawless skin, impossibly high cheekbones, and sandy blond eyebrows that arched naturally over electric, palegray eyes. Her name was Callie Carpenter, and she was wearing driving gloves.

Trish’s husband Rob wasn’t looking at the gloves. His eyes had found a home in Callie Carpenter’s perfectly-proportioned cleavage.

“You know the vibe I’m getting?” said Callie. “Pain. Frustration. Desperation. There’s love in this home, I can feel it. But it’s being tested. I look at you guys and I see the vultures circling your marriage.”

Trish and Rob exchanged a look that seemed to confirm her words.

Trish said, “This sounds all New Age to me. I’m not sure what this has to do with our loan application.”

Callie looked at the chipped coffee cup in front of her from which she’d declined to drink. She sighed. “Let me put it another way: how much money would it take to remove the stress from your lives, allow you to sleep at night and help you remember that the important thing is not other people and what you owe them, but rather the two of you, and what you mean to each other?”

Trish had been quietly wringing her hands in her lap, and now she looked down at them as though they belonged to a stranger. “I’m afraid we have no collateral.”

Rob said, “The banks got us on one of those adjustable rate mortgages that turned south on us. Then I lost my job. Next thing you know?”

Callie held up a hand. “Stop,” she said. “Would a hundred thousand dollars get you through the bad times?”

“Oh, hell yeah!” said Rob.

Trish eyed Callie suspiciously. “We could never qualify for that type of unsecured credit.”

“This wouldn’t be a conventional loan,” said Callie, getting to her favorite part of the story. “It’s what I call a Rumplestilskin Loan.”

Trish’s voice grew sharp. “You’re mocking us. Look, Ms…”

“Carpenter.”

“…I don’t particularly care for your sense of humor. Or your personal assessment of our marriage.”

“You think I’m playing with you?” Callie opened her briefcase, spun it around to face them.

Rob’s eyes grew wide as saucers. “Holy shit!” he said. “Is that a hundred grand?”

“It is.”

“This is ridiculous,” Trish said. “How could we possibly pay that back?”

“It’s not so much a loan as it is a social experiment,” Callie said. “The millionaire I represent will donate up to one hundred thousand dollars to any person I deem worthy, with one stipulation.”

“What’s that?” Rob said.

Trish’s lips curled into a sneer. She spoke the word with contempt. “Rumplestilskin.”

Callie nodded.

Rob said, “Rumple—whatever you’re saying, what’s it mean?”

Trish said, “The fairy tale. She wants our first born unless we can guess the name of her boss.”

“What?” Rob said. “That’s crazy. We’re not even pregnant.”

Callie laughed. “Trish, you’re right about there being a catch. But it has nothing to do with naming a gnome or giving up future children.”

“Then what, you want us to rob a bank for you? Kill someone?”

Callie shook her head.

“So what’s the catch?” Trish said.

“If you accept the contents of this suitcase,” Callie said, “someone will die.”

Trish said, “All right, that’s enough. This is obviously some type of TV show, but it’s the cruelest way to punk someone I’ve ever seen. Here’s an idea for the next one: get a normal-looking woman instead of a beautiful model. And don’t use all the flowery New Age language. Who’s going to buy that bullshit? Okay, so where’s the camera—in the suitcase?”

The suitcase.

From the moment Callie lifted the lid, Rob had been transfixed. He’d finally found something more compelling to stare at than Callie’s chest. Even now he couldn’t take his eyes off the cash. “Do we get some sort of fee if you put this on TV?”

Callie shook her head. “Sorry, no TV, no hidden cameras.”

“Then it doesn’t make sense.”

“Like I said, it’s a social experiment. My boss is fed up with the criminal justice system in this country. He’s tired of seeing murderers set free due to sloppy police work, slick attorneys, and stupid jurors. So, like a vigilante, he goes after murderers who remain unpunished. He feels he’s doing society a favor. But society loses when any person dies, no matter how evil, so my boss wants to pay something forward for the life he takes.”

“That’s a crock of shit,” Trish said. “If he really believed that, he’d pay the victims’families instead of total strangers.”

“Too risky. The police could establish a pattern. So my boss does the next best thing, he helps anonymous members of society. Each time my boss kills a murderer he pays society up to one hundred thousand dollars. And today you get to be society.”

Trish was about to comment, but Rob got there first. He was definitely getting more intrigued. “Why us?”

“A loan officer forwarded your application to my boss and said you were decent people, about to lose everything.”

Trish said, “You represented yourself as a loan officer.”

“I did.”

“And you’re not.”

“I’m a different type of loan officer.”

“And what type is that?”

“The type that brings cash to the table,” Callie said.

“In a suitcase,” Trish said.

Trish looked at the cash as if seeing the possibilities for the first time. She said, “If what you’re saying is true, and your boss is paying all this money to benefit society, why tell us about the killing at all? Why not just pay us?”

“He thinks it’s only fair that you know where the money comes from and why it’s being paid.”

Rob and Trish digested this information without speaking, but their expressions spoke volumes. Rob, thinking this could be his big chance in life, Trish, dissecting the details, trying to allow herself to believe. This was a family in crisis, Callie knew, and she had just thrown them the mother of all lifelines.

Finally Trish said, “These murderers you speak of. Is your boss going to kill them anyway?”

“Yes. But not until the money is paid.”

“And if we refuse to accept it?”

“No problem. I’ll ask the next family on my list.”

Rob said, “The person your boss is going to kill—is there any possibility it’s someone we know?”

“You know any murderers?”

Callie could practically hear the wheels turning as Rob and Trish stared at the open suitcase. Callie loved this part, the way they always struggled with it at first. But she knew where this would go. They’d turn it every way they could, but in the end, they’d take the money.

“This sounds like one of those specials, like 'What Would You Do?'” Trish said, unable to let go of her feeling this was all an elaborate hoax.

Callie glanced at her watch. “Look, I don’t have all day. You’ve heard the deal, I’ve answered your questions, it’s time to give me your answer.”

Her deadline brought all their emotions to a head.

Trish’s face blanched. She lowered her head and pressed her hands to either side of her temples as though experiencing a migraine. When she looked up her eyes had tears in them. It was clear she was waging a war with her conscience.

Rob was jittery, in a panic. No question what he wanted to do—his eyes were pleading with Trish.

Callie knew she had them.

“I’ll give you ten minutes,” she said briskly.” I’ll put my headphones on so you can talk privately, but you’ll have to remain in my sight at all times.”

“How do you know we won’t contact the police after you leave?” Trish said, wearily.

Callie laughed. “I’d love to hear that conversation.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think the police would believe you? Or let you keep a suitcase full of cash under these circumstances?”

Rob said, “Are we the first, or have you done this before?”

“This is my eighth suitcase.”

Again they looked at each other. Then Rob reached over, as though he wanted to stroke the bills.

Callie smiled and closed the top. “Nuh uh.”

“How many people actually took the money?” he asked. There was a sheen of sweat on his upper lip.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?” Trish asked.

“It could influence your decision and impact the social experiment. Look. Here’s what you need to know: when someone takes the money, my boss feels he’s gotten the blessing of a member of society to end the life of a murderer.”

“This is crazy. This is just crazy,” Trish whispered, as if daring herself to believe.

“People die every day,” Rob said. “And they’re going to die whether we get the money or someone else does.”

Trish looked at him absently, her mind a million miles away.

“They’re giving this money to someone,” Rob explained, “so why not us?”

“It’s too crazy,” Trish repeated. “Isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Callie said, putting on the headphones. “But the money—and the offer—are for real.”

1

“And you, Mr. Creed,” she said.

I looked up from my mixing bowl. “Ma’am?”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Apart from making brownies? I’m with Homeland Security.”

Her name was Patty Feldson and she was conducting a home study as part of the adoption process. My significant other, Kathleen Gray, was hoping to adopt a six-year-old burn victim named Addie Dawes. Addie was the sole survivor of a home fire that claimed the lives of her parents and twin sister. Ms. Feldson had been watching Addie and Kathleen play dolls on the living room floor. Satisfied with the quality of their interaction, she turned her attention to me.

“Do you have a business card?” Patty said.

“I do.” I took my wallet from my hip pocket and removed a card that had been freshly printed for this very occasion. I handed it over.

Patty read aloud: “Donovan Creed, Special Agent, Homeland Security.” She smiled. “Well that doesn’t reveal much. But it certainly sounds mysterious and exciting. Do you travel much, Agent Creed?”

I wondered how well we’d get along if I told her I was a government assassin who occasionally performs freelance hits for the mob and for an angry, homicidal midget named Victor.

“I do travel. But I’m afraid my job falls short of being mysterious or exciting. Mostly, I interview people.”

“Suspected terrorists?”

I layered the batter into Kathleen’s brownie pan with a silicone spatula and swirled Addie’s name on top before placing the pan in the oven.

“Apartment owners, business managers, that sort of thing.” I closed the oven door and set the timer for forty minutes.

“What’s in the brownies?” she said.

I felt like saying marijuana, but Kathleen had warned me not to joke with these people. She was in the home stretch of the adoption process and I intended to do all I could to help her.

“You remember the actress, Katharine Hepburn?” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“This is her recipe. I found it in an old issue of the Saturday Evening Post.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’d love to have it!”

“Then you shall.”

A home study is a series of meetings you have to go through as part of the approval process for adopting a child. Kathleen had provided all her personal documents, passed the criminal background check, made it through all the appointments and provided personal references. But at least one meeting is required to be in your home, and all who live there (Kathleen) or spend nights there (me) had to be in attendance.

Patty Feldson wasn’t here to do a “white glove” interview. She’d already made a positive determination about Kathleen’s ability to parent. All that remained was to see what sort of person the boyfriend was. She knew, for example, that I had a daughter of my own, who lived with my ex in Darnell, West Virginia. If she’d done any digging she also knew that while I’ve always been emotionally and financially supportive, I hadn’t spent as much father-daughter time with Kimberly as I should have.

Patty moved closer and locked her eyes on mine. Lowering her voice, she said, “There’s a big difference between being a father and a dad.”

Right, I thought. She’s done her research.

“I had to learn that lesson the hard way in my own life,” I said. “And this might sound funny, but Addie’s the one who inspired me to build bridges with Kimberly. We’re closer now than ever before.”

Patty nodded. We were both silent a moment, waiting to see who would speak first. In case you’re keeping score, she did.

“Addie has become a special needs child,” Patty said. “She’s been traumatized physically and mentally and she’s going to need a lot of nurturing.”

“I understand.”

“I hope so, Mr. Creed, because it’s going to put a lot of stress on your relationship with Kathleen. Have you thought about your role in all this—I mean, reallythought about it?”

Addie was an amazing kid. Funny, affectionate, brave — over the past few months she’d become special to both of us. Special wasn’t the right word, she was more than that. Addie had become essential to our lives.

“I love Addie,” I said.

She nodded and paused a few seconds. “I felt you must, Mr. Creed. What you’ve done for her and Kathleen speaks volumes.”

Patty knew I’d recently given Kathleen a million dollars and put another ten million into a trust for Addie. What she didn’t know is that I’d stolen all that money and more, from a West Coast crime boss named Joe DeMeo.

After witnessing another hour of unparalleled domestic harmony, Patty Feldson gathered Addie, the recipe, and half a pan of brownies.

“You’re a shooin!” she gushed to Kathleen.

“I’ll see you again tomorrow, darling,” Kathleen said to Addie. Addie swallowed before speaking, to lubricate her throat. We had grown accustomed to the procedure, the result of her vocal chords being permanently damaged by the fire that nearly took her life.

“At the hospital?” Addie finally said in her raspy, whisper of a voice.

“Uh huh.”

Another round of hugs was in order and then they were gone. I looked at the lovely creature that had defied all the odds and fallen for me.

“This might be the last time she’ll have to leave you,” I said.

Kathleen dabbed at the tears on her cheeks. “Thank you, Donovan.” She put her hand in mine and kissed me gently on the mouth. “For everything,” she added.

Life was good.

An hour later Victor called me on my cell phone. A quadriplegic little person on a ventilator, Victor’s metallic voice was singularly creepy.

“Mis … ter Creed … they took … the … money,” he said.

“The couple from Nashville?”

“Yes, Rob and … Trish.”

“Big surprise, right?”

“When you get … a chance I … would like you to … kill the … Peterson…sis … ters.”

I paused a minute, trying to place them. “They’re in Pennsylvania, right?”

“Yes, in … Camp … town.”

I assumed my best minstrel voice and said, “You mean De Camptown Ladies?”

Victor sighed. “Really … Mis … ter Creed.”

“Hey, show some appreciation! In France I’m considered a comedic genius.”

“You and … Jerry Lewis … So, will you … go to … Camptown and … kill the … Petersons?”

“Doo Dah!” I said.

LETHAL EXPERIMENT… Available Now!

About this Book

Every night, Donovan Creed chooses to sleep in a FBI holding cell. Each morning, he makes his friends at the CIA test their torture weapons on him. Donovan Creed – practiced seducer, ruthless assassin – is a very tough guy.

But even tough guys have their weaknesses. When he meets a plucky little orphan whose parents died in an arson attack, Donovan Creed launches a kill-or-be-killed mission to bring an evil crime boss to justice.

Furiously paced, insanely readable, Lethal People is a rollercoaster ride of a thriller, packed with mean men, sexy women, smart dialogue, and angry midgets. What more could you want – except the next book in the Donovan Creed series, of course…

Quotes

DISCOVER THE BOOKS EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT NEXT…

***** Worthy of 6 Stars!

By TRW

I give 5 stars to all John Locke books, I would give 6 stars to this one if I could. Not only is it a page turning thriller – I read the whole thing on the beach in an afternoon – couldn’t put it down.

***** A fun read!

By Kathy

This novel is chock-full of surprising plot twists and turns from beginning to end. It grips you from page one. I read this book in one evening. It’s a fast, fun read for sure.

***** Bingo! Cool. Read this book and you’re hooked on Locke.

By Karin

Locke keeps the story moving and in such an effortless way. I’m passing it on to my husband. It’s been awhile since I’ve read something sexy: this fits the bill.

***** So Entertaining I just went and downloaded another one.

By Patti Roberts

I read this book over a period of 2 days on my kindle and loved it! So I have just downloaded another one. I hereby declare that I am a John Locke fan. Do yourself a favor....

***** I loved this book.

By D Loewe

I don’t write reviews, I just don’t. But after reading this book I enjoyed it so much I felt the author deserved a positive review. I will not go into the plot or such, but I could not put this thing down. Well done Mr. Locke and thank you.

***** 10 stars.

By Ally

A wonderful mystery thriller. I love all of them but I think this is just my favorite.

***** OMG!!

By Kimberly Morris

What a ride...wow. The first jaw falling open moment in a book that I recall ever having experienced.

***** Life equals Experimentation.

By Jean

I just couldn’t put the book down. Must Read!

***** 5 out of 5 stars.

By Mr C. Headle

I thought Lethal People was amazing so I read Lethal Experiment and officially became addicted to the series. A marvel combination of action, drama, and breath-taking excitement. I love how Donovan Creed constantly keeps us wanting more. Do yourself a favor and grab this book!

***** Don’t even bother trying to catch your breath!

By Karin Gambaro

From the moment I started reading this book, I was hooked on Donovan Creed! This was my first Donovan Creed experience, and I can’t wait to dive into the rest of the series. This guy is the hero I’ve been waiting for! Thanks, John Locke!

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About this Series

Donovan Creed is an assassin for an elite branch of Homeland Security. When he isn’t busy killing terrorists, he moonlights as a hit man for the mob. He tests weapons of torture for the Army. He is a very tough guy.

But he’s not a bad guy. Sure, he’s got issues. He makes mistakes. He’s terrible with women. He’s a pretty neglectful father. But his heart is in the right place – and occasionally, just occasionally, he’ll try and do the right thing…

1. LETHAL PEOPLE

Would you let a little girl be murdered if it saved your own family?

2. LETHAL EXPERIMENT

A total stranger offers you $100k, the only condition is that someone else has to die...

3. SAVING RACHEL

You can choose between your wife or your lover, but you can only save one…

4. NOW & THEN

Could you leave behind all you’ve ever known, for the life you’ve always wanted?

5. WISH LIST

Be careful what you wish for…

6. A GIRL LIKE YOU

Would you give up the woman you love if her death could save millions?

7. VEGAS MOON

What crimes would you commit to save your own life?

8. THE LOVE YOU CRAVE

Who would you turn to when you’ve betrayed everyone you love?

About the Author

John Locke is a New York Times bestselling author, the first self-published author in history to hit the number 1 spot on Kindle, and the first to sell a million copies. He is the author of the Donovan Creed and Emmett Love series. He lives in Kentucky, USA.

To learn more about John Locke, visit his website: http://www.DonovanCreed.com

About Head of Zeus

We hope you enjoyed this book.

We are Head of Zeus, a brand new publishing house dedicated to new authors, great storytelling, and fabulous ideas.

To find your next read – and some tempting special offers – why not visit our website?

First published in the UK in 2012 by Head of Zeus, Ltd.

Copyright © John Locke, 2009

The moral right of John Locke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (Paperback): 9781781852309

ISBN (eBook): 9781781852316

Printed in Great Britain.

Head of Zeus, Ltd

Clerkenwell House

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About this Book

Reviews

About the Author

About this Series

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Start Reading

This is for my cousin David.

With great love and affection.

And for my lost child …

January 20

Inauguration Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about it?” Alli said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That may be,” Nina said.

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

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

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

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

Nina sighed, looked at Sam, who nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 1

One Month Ago

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“About Yukin.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The cream of the crop,” Paull acknowledged.

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

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

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

“Sir—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sir, it’s about Alli Carson.”

The president reached for the phone.

2

“Are you all right? Can you move?”

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

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

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

“Bennett?”

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

“I can’t see.”

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

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

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

“Jack, what the hell happened?”

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

Another car crash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dad, Dad? …”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m going to drive over to you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You lost him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Too late,” a husky female voice said.

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

She smiled. “Hi, Roddy.”

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

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

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

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

“What the hell are you doing here?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Neither of us meant it to—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Found someone better already?” Jack snapped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She slapped him then.

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

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

He had no idea how to respond.

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

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

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

He shook his head mutely.

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

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

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

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

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

4

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

He had just finished knotting his tie when Bennett returned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth to tell, so was he.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A week, possibly less.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. I haven’t.”

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

“The criminal—?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nina looked at Garner, who nodded.

“Show him,” he assented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He peered more closely. “What are those?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’d like to see some hard evidence—”

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

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

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

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

“I know the way.”

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

6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that where you sent the two bodies?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There was only one perp,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m telling you—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

“Find anything of interest?” she inquired.

“Possibly,” Jack said.

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

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

“Thanks so very much.”

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

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

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

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

Nina laughed. “So you found it.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“I knew you were having trouble.”

“But how?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

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

“Inside,” she said. “Quickly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir, we have, indeed.”

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

“I was just doing my job, sir.”

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

“Thank you, sir.”

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

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

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

“In all honesty, who better, Jack?”

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

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

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

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

“Why, yes, they do.”

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

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

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

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

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

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

“About E-Two. Yes, sir.”

“What do you think?”

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

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

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

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

“I’m so awfully sorry.”

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

“Bring our daughter back to us.”

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

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“I’ve … had my darkest hours, too.”

Jack, navigating through the rooty trees, said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Except you.”

He nodded. “Except me.”

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

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

“Natural barbed wire,” Jack said.

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

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

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

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

“Who told you about it? Emma?”

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

“Worried? About what?”

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

“Did she go after Emma?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

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

“And what happened?”

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

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

“I followed her through here.”

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

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

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

Jack dived through the hole in the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why d’you say that?”

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

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

“Who knows what goes on here?”

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

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

“What have we here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She bit her lip, said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Something for your father.”

“Let me see.” She rose on tiptoes.

“It’s a surprise.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry about that, Egon.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No time, Egon.”

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

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

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

“Logic is all I have, Egon.”

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

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

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

Jack gripped the table edge with both hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like angels on unicycles, for instance.”

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

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

“Certainly.”

“She’s content then.”

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

“Says who?”

“We have the Word of God.”

“In a book written by men.”

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

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

“Whether or not it belongs to Alli Carson.”

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

“The same.”

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

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

“What is?” Jack prompted.

“The hand was sawn off, expertly.”

“With a chain saw?”

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

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

“Possibly.”

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

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

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

“Uh-huh.”

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

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

“Something pink,” Jack said.

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

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

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

“Ami!” he called.

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

“Got a fingerprint job for you.”

Ami nodded, took a place beside him.

“Left hand,” he said.

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

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

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

“I know it’s not hers,” Jack said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing at all?” Jack said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2

10

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

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

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

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

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

“I’d be safe and warm …”

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

“… if I was in L.A….”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Open it, John.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s issue number four.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack tries to nod, instead groans with the pain.

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t have a home,” Jack says dully.

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

Jack nods.

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

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

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

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

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

“Jack.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hanging,” Jack says sullenly.

“Why weren’t you home and in bed?”

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

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

Jack bites his lip.

“Father or brother?”

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

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

“Everyone here is black?” Jack says.

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

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

“Do you believe in God, Jack?”

“I … I never thought about it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was my fault,” Jack says.

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

“I was standing on the corner over Eastern.”

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

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

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

“I was on his turf.”

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

Taske nods sorrowfully.

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

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

“Apologies, Reverend.” Gus looks abashed.

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

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

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

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

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

“Then I’ll walk you to school.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12

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

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

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

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

“I’m talkin’ God here.”

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

“What do you know ’bout?”

Jack shrugs, dumbfounded.

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

“Don’t want to go home.”

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

“I’m used to being beaten.”

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

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

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

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

“That little muthafucka Andre.”

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

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

Jack feels a paralyzing thrill shoot up his spine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The balding man returns, nods at Gus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kid, what the hell you talkin’?”

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

“There was the smell.”

“Yeast and butter and sugar, yah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How the hell—?”

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

“Huh, you betta believe he is.”

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

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

“But I do.”

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

“No, it’s not.”

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

“What’s an oracle?” Jack says.

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

“I never had grits.”

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

He puts the car in gear.

13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please. I won’t run away, I swear.”

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

She began to cry. “Why won’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There was a reason.”

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

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

“You see the futility of your current predicament?”

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

“That night on the raft?”

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

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

Some inarticulate sound got caught in the back of Alli’s throat, and she almost gagged.

I’m a prisoner, Lyn Carson thought for the first time in her life. She, her support staff, and her bodyguards were in a motorcade, on their way from a luncheon, where she’d spoken to the Washington Ladies’ something-or-other, to a fund-raiser where she was standing in for her husband, who was God knew where, doing God knew what. This morning, she had been on Good Morning, America. She barely remembered what she’d said.

Normally, she loved these functions; they allowed her to feel senatorial—and now presidential—all on her own without feeling like Edward’s elbow. But these days, she was so preoccupied with thoughts of Alli that the luncheons, fund-raisers, photo ops … these days what an effort it was to keep her smile intact, the tasks that usually filled her with joy dragged by like a ragged filmstrip. What a useless process life is, she thought as the armored limo sped her crosstown, traffic peeling away, pedestrians peering briefly, wondering which member of the government was passing by. Without Alli, my life is without purpose.

In desperation, she pulled out her cell phone, dialed an overseas number. Checking her watch, she calculated it would be just after dinnertime in Umbria. Blue shadows would have already fallen over the olive groves, the ancient stone house would be lit by warm light and the smells of tomato sauce and roasted meat would have permeated the thick-walled rooms. Perhaps music would be playing softly.

“Hi, Mom,” she said when the familiar voice answered. “Yes, I’m fine, everything’s fine. Of course, Alli misses you, too.”

She listened for some time to the melodious drone. Not that she was uninterested in what was fresh in the market that day or the old man who pressed their olives into fragrant green oil, the one who was teaching her to speak like an Umbrian. It was simply that her parents’ world seemed so far away, so carefree it was almost criminal. She felt suddenly older than her own mother, who continued rabbiting on about this year’s oil, the cinghiale they’d eaten for dinner, the series of paintings her father was completing.

Suddenly, she realized that this was no respite. As long as Alli was missing, there was no respite for her. She could run herself ragged with daily tasks, mindless work, but it wouldn’t change reality one iota. The nightmare descended on her once again, roosting on her shoulder like a vulture.

“I’ve got to go now, Mom.” She almost choked on her emotions, had to bite back the words that threatened to keep tumbling out: Mom, Alli’s been abducted. We don’t know whether she’s alive or dead. “Our love to you and to Dad.”

She snapped the phone shut, bit down on it until the metal showed the marks of her small white teeth.

“On that note, maybe we should talk about Emma, your best friend,” Ronnie Kray said. “Our mutual acquaintance.” He slipped a photo out of the file, held it up for Alli to see. It was a snapshot, slightly grainy, of two girls walking across the Langley Fields campus. “Recognize the two of you? You and Emma McClure.”

Alli, staring at the photograph, remembered the moment: It was October 1, just after noon. She remembered what they were talking about. How could she forget! Seeing that intimate moment preserved, knowing that she and Emma had been spied upon gave her the willies. Then it hit her like a ton of bricks: The surveillance had been going on a long, long time. Someone—maybe the man facing her—had wormed himself into her bed, under her skin, wrapped himself around her bones, lying out of sight while she, unknowing, went about her life. She had to fight the queasy churning of her stomach. Having read both 1984 and Brave New World, having her own life so tightly controlled, she was under the impression that she knew the meaning of intrusion. But this invasion was monstrous, Big Brother on steroids.

“I told Emma about Bark.” Her mind was racing so fast, she grew dizzy, even more disoriented. “Emma told you?”

“Did she? What do you think?”

“What do I think?” she echoed stupidly. She felt as if she were in an elevator whose cable had been cut, was now in free fall. “I knew her. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t.”

He cocked his head. “May I ask what might seem an impertinent question? What in the world were you doing slumming? Emma McClure wasn’t from your socioeconomic class. She was rough-and-tumble, from the wrong side of the tracks, as we said back in the day. Not your kind at all.”

Alli’s eyes blazed. “That just shows how much you don’t know!”

His face hardened like a fist. “I thought we were friends. I was even thinking of untying you, despite the danger it would put me in. But now …”

“Please untie me. I’m sorry I talked to you that way.” Her cresting fear made her voice quaver like a glass about to shatter. “I’ll never do it again, if only you’ll untie me.”

He shook his head.

The pain congealed with outrage into an intolerable barb inside her. “You can’t treat me like this! My father will move heaven and earth to find me!”

Abruptly, Kray took out surgical pliers. Alli thought she was going to pass out. What was he planning to do to her? She’d seen plenty of films filled with scenes of torture. She tried to remember what happened in those scenes, but her mind was blind with panic. Her terror mounted to unbearable heights.

She watched him stand up. She was shaking now, couldn’t take her eyes off the pliers, which, glowing, swung in a short arc, back and forth. Then, without any warning, Kray disappeared into the blackness.

Alli couldn’t believe it, but she actually began to weep. She tried to stop, but her body wouldn’t obey. Some animal part of her nervous system had been activated. What she was feeling she could neither believe nor abide: She wanted him back. The feeling was so powerful, it was as physical as the pliers.

He was her only connection to the outside world, to life. “Don’t leave me alone!” she wailed. “I don’t care what you do to me, I’ll never tell you about Emma,” she said through her tears.

“Quite the little loyalist, aren’t you?” His voice came from the darkness. “No matter. As it happens, I already know all I need to know about Emma McClure.”

She felt a wave of nausea as her terror ratcheted up.

“No, no! Please!”

She wanted to shrink into the chair, to disappear like him, but she remained in the cone of light. She hung her head, the blood pounding in her temples.

“What is it?” Kray said, his voice suddenly soft. “I’m a reasonable man. Tell me.”

She shook her head. Her fear clouded her eyes.

Kray stepped into the light. “Alli, please speak to me.” His features took on a rueful cast. “It’s not my fault. You forced me to frighten you. I didn’t want to, believe me.”

For a moment, utter stillness held her in its grip; then she began to weep, her breath fluttering like a spent leaf. “I need … I need to go to the bathroom.”

Kray expelled a tender laugh. “Why didn’t you say so?”

He unstrapped her from the chair, and she whimpered.

“There,” he said.

She stared at him, wide-eyed, so stunned, her brain refused to function.

He brought over a bedpan.

“This can’t be happening,” she said more to herself than to him. “I won’t.” She was sobbing and begging all at once. “I can’t.”

He stood in front of her, arms crossed like a corrections officer, detached, observant, his smoke-colored eyes on hers.

“Please!” she begged. “Don’t look. Please, please, please turn away. I’ll be good, I promise.”

Slowly, he turned his back on her.

Stillness overcame her then, as her mind tried to accommodate. But it was so hard. Each time she thought she had a handle on her new reality, it turned upside down: good was evil, kindness was pain, black was white. She felt dizzy, alone, isolated. Terror crept into her bones, freezing the marrow. But, oh, her bladder would burst unless she peed, peed right now! But she couldn’t.

“Emma didn’t tell you a thing.” She was trembling, the muscles in her thighs jumping wildly. “How do you know about me and Bark?”

“I’ll tell you, Alli, because I like you. I want you to trust me. I know because there was a microphone in your dorm room. When you confessed to Emma, you were also confessing to me.”

Alli closed her eyes. At last, head bowed, shivering, she let go, the sound like rain spattering a tin roof.

14

The POTUS and Secretary Paull sat together in the backseat of the president’s heavily armored limo on the way from the White House to where Air Force One was waiting to take the president and his small party to Moscow to meet with the Russian president, Yukin. In the briefcase that straddled the president’s knees was the Black File Paull had provided, proof that Yukin’s handpicked head of the state-owned RussOil was his still-active ex-KGB assassin.

The president could have taken Marine One, his helicopter, to the airfield but with its privacy shield between the passenger compartment and the driver, the limo provided absolute privacy, something with which the president, in the waning weeks of his Administration, had become obsessed.

“This abduction business,” the president said, “how is it progressing?”

“We’re following every lead,” Paull said noncommittally.

“Ach, Dennis, let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?” The president stared out the bulletproof smoked-glass window. “We’ve been blessed with a bit of great good luck. This business, unfortunate as it may be for the Carsons—and God knows every day I pray for that young woman’s safe release—has provided us with the excuse we need to excise the missionary secularists—all of them.” He turned back, his eyes burning with the fire of the devout. “What I want to know is why hasn’t that already happened?”

“The president-elect’s agent—Jack McClure—has been following a very promising lead.”

“Well, you see, Dennis, now you’ve just put your finger on the nub of the problem.”

Paull shook his head. “I don’t understand, sir,” he said, though he was quite certain he was reading the president all too well.

“It appears to me that Jack McClure is gumming up the works.”

“Sir, I believe he’s on to a lead that could bring us Alli Carson’s abductor. I was under the impression that our first priority was her safe return.”

“Have you forgotten our previous discussion, Dennis? Give the order to Hugh Garner, and let’s get on with it. By the time I return from Moscow, I want the First American Secular Revivalists in custody. Then I’ll address the nation with the evidence he’ll have trumped up from his FSB security force.”

“I’ll inform Garner as soon as you board your flight, sir,” Paull said with a heavy heart. He wondered how he was going to finesse this ugly—and quite illegal—situation the president had dropped into his lap. At the moment, he saw no alternative to turning Garner loose on the FASR, but he held out hope that if he insisted that Jack McClure assist in the operation, the president-elect’s man could find a way to mitigate the damage. Of course, that would put McClure squarely in everyone’s line of fire. He’d take the heat if he got in Garner’s face, but that couldn’t be helped. Agents in the field were designed to deal with whatever heat was thrown at them. Besides, McClure was expendable; Paull’s agent in the Secret Service wasn’t.

During the secretary’s ruminations, the limo had arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. Paull, who had been debating all morning whether or not to bring up an extremely delicate subject, finally made his decision as the presidential limo rolled to a stop on the tarmac twelve yards from the near-side wing of Air Force One.

“Sir, before you leave, I have a duty to inform you …”

“Yes?” The president’s bright, freshly scrubbed face seemed blank, his thoughts already thousands of miles away in bleak, snow-driven Moscow. He was, no doubt, licking his chops at the prospect of putting Yukin in his place.

“Nightwing missed his last rendezvous.” Nightwing was the government’s most productive deep-cover asset.

“When was that scheduled for?” the president snapped.

“Ten days ago,” Paull replied just as crisply.

“Dennis, why on earth are you telling me this moments before I leave for Moscow?”

“He missed his backup dates four days ago and yesterday, sir. I felt it prudent not to bother you before this, hoping that Nightwing would surface. He hasn’t.”

“Frankly, Dennis, with your plate so full, I don’t understand why you’re even bothering with this.”

“Assets are a tricky lot, sir. We ask them to do a lot of dodgy things—wet work. There’s a certain psychology to people who kill without remorse. They tend to think of themselves as the center of the universe. This is what makes them successful, it’s what keeps them going. But I’ve seen it happen before—every once in a while some developmental aspect becomes arrested. Their urge to be someone—to be special, to become known—overrides their self-discipline.”

“What is this, psychology one-oh-one?” the president said testily.

“Sir, I want to make my position clear. When an asset’s self-discipline disappears, he becomes nothing more than a serial killer.”

The president’s hand was on the door handle. His expression revealed that he already had one foot on Russian soil. “I’m quite certain that isn’t the case with Nightwing. My goodness, he’s been an invaluable asset for upwards of thirty years now. Nothing’s changed, I assure you. Stop jumping at shadows. I’m quite certain there’s a good reason for his silence.” He smiled reassuringly. “Concentrate on the missionary secularists. Let Nightwing take care of himself.”

“The trouble with the president’s suggestion,” Paull said, “is that no asset—even one as productive and, therefore, sacrosanct as Nightwing—should be allowed to be so independent. In my opinion, that’s a recipe for lawlessness and, ultimately, the corruption of basic moral principles.”

“The president came to see me.” Some wavering spark inside Louise’s mind had roused her from her stupor. “Isn’t that nice?”

“Very nice, darling.”

Paull sat with his wife on the glassed-in porch of the facility where she lived. He could feel the radiant heat coming up through the flagstone floor.

“Daddy,” she said, “where am I?”

“Home, darling.” Paull squeezed her hand. “You’re home.”

At this, Louise smiled blankly, lapsed back into her mysterious inner world. Paull stared at her face. The dementia had not dimmed a beauty that still made his heart ache. But now there was this glass wall between them, this horrifying divide he could not bridge no matter how hard he tried. She was as lost to him as she was to herself. He couldn’t bear the thought, and so as he’d done before, he’d come and talk to her as if she were the close confidante she never could have been when she’d been young and vibrant. He had of necessity shut her out of his work life; now, to fashion his time with her into a memory he could take back with him into the real world, he spoke his mind to her.

“I inherited Nightwing eight years ago, Louise. What troubles me most is that though I’m his handler, I’ve never laid eyes on the man. Can you believe it? The rendezvous are dead letter drops, always in a different District hotel designated by Nightwing himself, a sealed message left for ‘Uncle Dan.’”

He shook his head, becoming more concerned as his thoughts were made concrete by his words. “At first, Nightwing provided us with intel on Russia and mainland China. More recently, he’s widened his field to include priceless datastreams of intelligence regarding decisions being made behind closed doors in key Middle Eastern states, some of which are our purported allies. These datastreams invariably proved reliable, invaluable, so you can see why the president insists on treating him with extreme kid gloves. But Nightwing has been involved in questionable assignments; he’s a law unto himself. Is it any wonder I’m disturbed that I know virtually nothing about him? His file is unusually thin. I have an unshakable suspicion that the information it contains is more legend than real. Who created the legend and why remains a mystery. Nightwing’s previous handler is dead, so there’s no one else to ask, and believe me I’ve spent many fruitless nights poring through the Homeland Security database—it incorporates those of the CIA, FBI, and NSA now—without finding any mention of Nightwing whatsoever. More than once it’s occurred to me that the file was written by Nightwing himself.”

Louise’s hand in his was cool, as if he were addressing a marble statue, marvelously carved but, for all that, still stone. He wondered whether she heard him, whether his voice was familiar to her, like a favorite radio station one listened to when one was young. He liked to think his voice made her feel safe, secure. Loved. Tears welled in his eyes, temporarily blinding him. He plowed on with his discussion, more determined than ever to make of this visit something private and intimate he could savor later, when out in the bustling world, he’d think of her here, entombed in the labyrinth of her own mind.

“In fact, Louise, only two men know more about the asset than me: the president and the National Security Advisor. Given the president’s nonchalant attitude toward the asset suddenly falling off the grid, I’m beginning to suspect that against all protocol, one of those two men has been in touch with Nightwing without my knowing. However, I’m all too aware that trying to confirm that suspicion is a sure way to commit political suicide.”

No, he decided, as he pressed the speed-dial key for Hugh Garner’s cell, he’d have to take the president’s advice and concentrate on Alli Carson’s abduction and the FASR. For the moment, he had no choice but to leave Nightwing—file name Ian Brady—to his own devices. However, if the National Security Advisor now had the inside track with the president, it was time he himself made contact with his own powerful ally, because all at once the political landscape had turned to quicksand. Despite the danger, he had to make a decisive move before it sucked him under.

The call completed, he freed his hand from Louise’s limp grasp. When he leaned over, kissed her pale lips, a tremor of love and yearning passed through him as he thought of her, rosy-cheeked and laughing, her long hair glinting in sunlight, lifted through the air by his strong arms.

15

“Well done, McClure,” Hugh Garner said. “As if we didn’t have enough trouble, you’ve given us another girl—approximately the same age and weight as the First Daughter—who’s also missing. She’s either dead or wishes she was; at the very least, she’s severely maimed.” He slapped three sheets of paper he was holding. “But according to the ME’s report, we have no way of identifying her.” He smirked, looking from Jack to Nina. “Which one of you lovelies is going to volunteer to tell Edward Carson and his wife this bit of inspiring news?”

“I will,” Jack said. “I call him on an hourly basis, anyway.”

“One of these days I trust you’ll surprise me, Jack.” Garner tossed aside Schiltz’s chilling report. “But, no, I need you with me, so, Nina, it’ll be you who provides the Carsons with this morning’s update.”

Nothing on Nina’s face betrayed what she might be feeling. She was dressed today in a smart suit over a blouse with pearl buttons up to her neck, where a tasteful cameo was pinned. How a woman could appear demure and sexy at the same time was beyond Jack.

They were grouped around a desk in the makeshift command center at Langley Fields. The desk was littered with the day’s early dispatches from the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, as well as every regional and municipal law enforcement agency that had been dragooned by Homeland Security into the search for Alli Carson.

The trio was the eye of a carefully controlled storm of activity that raged around them. No less than thirty operatives were crammed into the headmistress’s outer office, working the computers that were hooked into the nation’s deepest surveillance networks. Many were simultaneously on the phone, distributing phoned-in leads that other operatives in the field needed to run down. Bags from McDonald’s, KFC, barbecue joints, along with half-empty boxes of subgum chow mein and moo goo gai pan were strewn about. Garbage cans were piled high with empty soda cans. The greasy odors of stale food, sweat, and fear made a permanent fug impossible to escape.

One of these drones had accessed the national missing persons database for the entire District, Virginia, and Maryland, but the printout was useless. Save for the usual slew of runaways from Omaha to Amarillo who had disappeared into the bowels of the District, there was nothing to help them.

“Let’s get to work,” Garner said to Jack as Nina left them.

He led Jack out via the rear exit that gave out onto a dimly lit corridor, down a short flight of concrete steps to the custodian’s area. Here was a warren of workshops and storerooms containing all the many implements and supplies required to keep an upper-tier college like Langley Fields looking shipshape for the parents who paid tens of thousands for the education of their sons and daughters. No fine school could afford to look shabby, and with a large campus like this one, the maintenance was constant.

Clearly, however, the custodial staff was elsewhere because when Garner led Jack into the largest of the workshops, it was deserted, save for two hooded men and their armed guards. They were sitting on opposite sides of the room, facing away from each other. Between them, along the wall, was an oversized soapstone sink and several workbenches above which hung pegboards thick with handsaws, hammers, awls, levels, metal rulers, and planes. Screwdrivers, chisels, pliers, and wrenches of every imaginable size were clustered in one area. Some of the benches had vises bolted to them. The smells of glue and oiled metal were strong in the air. Between the pegboard sections were windows that afforded a peaceful view out over the rose garden, now an army of thorny miniature stick soldiers on a half-frozen parade ground.

“What is this?” Jack said, alarmed.

Garner pulled him back into the hallway for a moment.

“We’ve brought in the co-leaders of the First American Secular Revivalists,” he said in a low voice. “A number of FASR members have vanished, only to resurface as part of E-Two. At the very least, FASR is a training ground for E-Two terrorists. In our estimation, it’s a legit front for the revolutionary group.”

“Brought in? Are these men criminals?”

Ignoring Jack’s question, Garner concluded: “Keep your mouth shut, bright boy, and you just might learn something.”

Returning inside, Garner signaled to the guards, who jerked the prisoners’ chairs around, pulled off their hoods. The men blinked, disoriented. They stared at each other, then at Garner and Jack, their eyes wide open. They were clearly terrified.

“Who are you?” one of the men asked. “Why are we here?”

Garner strode over to the soapstone sink, inserted a rubber stopper in the drain, turned on the cold-water faucet full-blast. As the water began to fill the sink, he said, “Peter Link, Christopher Armitage, you’re members of E-Two, the missionary secularist terror group.”

“What?” both men said nearly simultaneously. “We’re not!”

Garner stared down at the rising water. “Are you telling me you’re not missionary secularists?”

“We believe that organized religion—all organized religion—is a danger to modern-day society,” Chris Armitage, the man on the right said.

“But we’re not terrorists,” Peter Link said from the opposite side of the room.

“You’re not, huh?” Garner signaled to Link’s guard, who unshackled him, hauled him up by the back of his collar, frog-marched him over to where Garner was standing. Garner turned off the cold-water tap. The sink was filled to the brim.

Link stared from Garner’s face to the gently rippling water. “You can’t be serious…. What do you think this is, a police state?”

Garner slammed his fist into Link’s stomach. As the man doubled over, Garner grabbed both sides of his head, jammed it into the sink. Water fountained up, foaming as Link began to thrash.

“You can’t do this!” Armitage shouted. “This is America—we’re guaranteed the right of free speech!”

Garner hauled the sputtering, choking Link out of the water. The guard grasped his arms as Garner turned to Armitage, dug in his jacket pocket, flipped open his ID for the other man to see. “As far as you and your pal here are concerned, I am America.”

Stowing his ID, he got back to work torturing Peter Link. But as Link went under for the second time, Jack put a hand on Garner’s arm.

“This isn’t the way,” he said softly. “You’re being foolish.”

He sensed that was the wrong thing to say. Garner kept his hands on the back of Link’s submerged head as he glared into Jack’s face.

“Get your fucking hands off me, or I swear to God you’ll be next.”

“You brought me in for my help,” Jack said quietly. “I’m giving you my opinion—”

“I didn’t bring you in, McClure. In fact, I fought to keep you out. But the new president will have his way, even if it’s the wrong way.”

Using the edge of his hand, Jack struck Garner’s elbow at the ulna nerve, breaking his grip on Peter Link. Jack hauled him out of the water. Tears streamed out of Link’s eyes, and he vomited water all over himself.

“Jesus Christ!” Armitage shouted, terrified.

Garner broke away from Jack, stalked over to Armitage, yelled in his face, “You don’t get to use those words!” He was seething, his shoulders bunched, his hands curled into tight fists. A pulse beat spastically in his forehead.

Jack, seeing that Link was semiconscious, laid him down on the floor. He knelt beside him, checked his pulse, which was erratic and weak. Looking up, he said to Garner, “I sure as hell hope you have a doctor on premises.”

Garner opened his mouth to say something, apparently thought better of it, hauled out his cell phone. Not long after, the door swung open and a physician appeared. He hurried over to where Peter Link lay in a puddle of water and his own vomit.

Jack rose and said to Garner, “Let’s take a walk.”

The sky was piled with ugly-looking clouds, ready for a fight. A stiff wind hit their faces with a chill edge, making their noses run, their eyes water.

“I’ll have your career for this,” Garner said as they walked past the dormant rose garden.

“You’d do best to cool down,” Jack said, “before you make threats.”

Garner stalked ahead, then whirled on Jack. “You challenged my authority in there.”

“You exceeded your authority,” Jack said quietly. “We’re not in Iraq.”

“We don’t have to be,” Garner said. “This is a matter of national security. We’re dealing with homeland terrorists, traitors to their own way of life.”

Jack peered into Garner’s face. He was determined to keep his voice calm and steady. Someone had to be rational in this discussion. “Because they don’t think like you or the current Administration?”

“They kidnapped the First Daughter!”

“You don’t know that.”

“Quite right. Thanks to you, I don’t. Not for certain, anyway. On the other hand, we have E-Two’s signature at the scene of the crime.”

“Someone else could have left those,” Jack pointed out.

Garner laughed bitterly. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“To be honest, I don’t know what to believe, because we don’t yet know what’s going on.”

Garner began to walk back the way they had come. “Right. Let’s get back to the interrogation so we can find out.”

Jack turned, blocked his way. “I won’t let you continue torturing these people.”

“You can’t stop me.”

Jack flipped open his cell phone, put it to his ear. “I’m due to call the president-elect anyway.”

Garner put up his hands. “Look, look. I’m here to find the people who snatched the president-elect’s daughter. What’s your excuse?”

“Torture doesn’t work,” Jack said. “Either the subject clams up till he dies or, more likely, he lies. He tells you exactly what you want to hear, but it’s not the truth. Fortunately, there’s a better way to determine if these guys are the perps.”

Garner licked his lips. Jack could see his ire ebbing slightly.

“So what’s your bright idea?”

Jack folded his cell phone, put it away. “I go back in there, talk to Chris Armitage. Then I let him go.”

“Are you insane? I won’t allow it!”

“We release him and, when he’s recovered, Link as well,” Jack said. “We follow them. Put them under twenty-four-seven surveillance. If they’re involved, we’ll know it soon enough.”

After considering a minute, Garner nodded. “This is your idea, you do the surveillance yourself.”

Too late, Jack saw how Garner would make him pay for challenging him. Though Jack wanted more than anything to detach himself from Garner, run down his own lead with regard to Cyril Tolkan, he knew he couldn’t wriggle out of this assignment, so he nodded his assent.

“I’ll need help keeping an eye on the two men.”

“That’s your problem. Take care of it.”

As he was walking away, Garner called after him, “You have forty-eight hours, bright boy. And after you fail, Iwill have your career.”

16

“Why is the light out?”

From out of the absolute darkness, Alli Carson felt the air against her face and she shrank away, certain that he was going to hit her. In the days she’d been here, he’d never struck her, but the threat of violence was always in the air, keeping her immersed in a sea of terror. She was too frightened not to sit in it.

“What have I told you?” Kray’s voice seemed disembodied, the heart of the darkness itself. “No talking except at mealtimes.”

She kept her head up. He didn’t want to hurt her, merely to teach her a lesson not yet learned; she knew this now.

“You need to focus your mind, Alli.”

She could tell by the placement of his voice that he had sat down in front of her. She felt a little thrill of accomplishment at her newfound ability to discern the nuances of movement in sounds. This was Ronnie Kray, the same man Emma had met, whom Emma wanted to know more about. Now it was her turn. She had to keep that thought in the forefront of her mind. Emma had taught her how to be tough, how to go her own way. Emma was also fearless, a trait Alli had never been able to grasp. Perhaps now was her chance. Be brave, she told herself. Fate has put you in the same hands as Emma. You have the chance to finish what she started. You have a chance to understand this enigmatic man.

“You have a keen mind,” Kray continued, “but it’s been dulled by your sheltered life. You’ve been taught to believe that you live a pampered life, but that’s a lie. The truth is you live the life of a prisoner. You’re forbidden to go where you want, you’re forbidden to say what you want. You can’t even make friends without your father’s knowledge, so that their private lives can be invaded by the Secret Service, just as yours is. You don’t own yourself, Alli. You’re a puppet, dancing to your father’s tune.”

A chair creaked, and Alli knew that he had sat back. A whisper of cloth told her that he’d crossed one leg over the other. I can see, she thought, without seeing. She was grateful to him for having kept the light off, grateful for the opportunity he’d given her to sharpen her senses. For the first time since she’d known Emma McClure, she had stepped outside herself—the self, as Kray had so accurately said, that had been created for her.

As if divining her thoughts, Kray said, “You exist at the pleasure of your father. The Alli Carson the country—the world—knows is a confection, a Hershey bar: an all-American girl, with all-American values, all-American ideals. When have you ever been allowed to say what’s really on your mind? When have you been allowed to voice your own opinion? Your lot in life has been to further your father’s political career.”

She heard his voice, and only his voice.

“Isn’t that right, Alli?”

The darkness made it grow in power, until she could see it glowing like a jewel in her mind.

“You have your own opinions, don’t you?”

For a long moment she said nothing, though she felt the answer fizzing in her throat, clamoring to be exposed, to have its own life at last. Still, she bit it back, afraid. She realized just how familiar this fear was, how she had been afraid for years to say what was really on her mind, as opposed to what her father’s handlers had insisted she say publicly. Only Emma had known her real mind, only Emma could have taught her how to be fearless, but Emma was dead. She lowered her head and felt a great sob welling up in her breast, and hot tears leaked out of her eyes, ran down her cheeks, dropped onto the backs of her hands. It was so cruel, so unfair that her one true friend had been taken from her….

“Focus, Alli,” Kray said in the manner of a professor to an inordinately bright student with ADD. “It’s important that you focus your mind, that you shake off the dullness of the old automaton Alli Carson, that you hone your mind to a diamond edge. Now, tell me, do you have your own opinions?”

“I do,” Alli said, her throat unclogging as the words she’d been wanting to say flew out. She felt herself transported back to campus, walking with Emma, who had more or less asked her the same question: Do you have your father’s opinions, or are they your own?

He sighed, it seemed to her with pleasure.

“Then perhaps there’s a chance I can reach the real Alli Carson. There’s a chance I can undo what’s been done to you.”

The creak of the chair. “You wish to speak.”

How did he know that? she wondered. What marvelous power he possesed!

“You have my permission.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Because I have to.”

He said it in a way that shook her. She didn’t know why yet, she was too stunned by her own reaction, but she was beginning to have faith now that she would come to understand what was happening to her, and why.

She felt him lean in to her, felt the aura of his warmth as if she held his beating heart in her hands.

“I want to share something with you, Alli. I have absolute faith in what I’m doing. Beyond that, I’m a patriot. This country has lost its way. There’s a shadow over democracy, Alli, and its name is god—the Christian god in whose name so many ethnic people have been attacked, decimated, or destroyed: the Aztecs, the Inca, the Jews of Spain, the caliphs of Constantinople and Trebizond, the Chinese, blacks, our own American Indians. Sinners all, right?”

She could hear his breathing, like the bellows fanning a fire, expelling a hard emotion with each word. This emotion was familiar to her; she understood it without being able to define it. And she felt Emma close beside her, whispering in the nighttime dorm room in Langley Fields, so far away now, so very far. She began to weep again, silently—for Emma, absolutely, but also for her own fractured self, for the life she had been forced to live, for everything she had missed: friends, laughter, goofing around, being silly. Being herself, whatever that might be. That thought brought yet more tears and a weight in her chest she could scarcely bear.

Through it all, Kray remained silent, holding her hands in the dark, keeping contact. She was unspeakably grateful for the silence, the human contact.

“For more than a decade,” he said when her tears had at last subsided and her breathing returned to normal, “there has been a conspiracy to hijack democracy. It’s only in the last eight years that it’s crawled into the light. Under the guise of knowing what’s best for America, a cabal of right-wing fanatics has made a pact with religious fundamentalists whose fervent wish is for a pure and Christian America. This alliance is a new twist on what Eisenhower ominously called the military-industrial complex. He feared it would take over the running of the country, and those fears were realized. Big Oil runs America, Big Oil determines our foreign policy. If the Middle East wasn’t filled with oil, we wouldn’t care one bit about who kills who there. We wouldn’t even know what a Sunni is, let alone why he wants to kill his Shiite neighbor.

“But now the religious right has forced itself into the mix, now we have a president who believes he’s doing the work of god. But I and millions like me all over the world don’t believe god exists. Then whose work is the president doing?”

Alli listened to him with all her senses. She felt taut as a drumhead, taken out of herself, given the privilege to emerge from her own body, to hover like a ghost above the human proceedings below. And with this sensation came a feeling of energy, and of power.

“You and me, Alli, we’re being trampled by this religious stampede masquerading as a democratic government. How many times does this president have to say that he doesn’t care what the people or the Congress think, he knows what’s best for us, he knows what’s right? He means his god knows, but his god doesn’t exist. His morality is a delusion invented by the so-called righteous to bolster their claim that every decision they make is right, that all criticism directed at them comes from a radical left-wing element. They’ve tried to make an unswerving belief in god synonymous with patriotism, a healthy skepticism in god synonymous with treason. We have to fight this false morality; we have to stop it before its infection goes too far.”

With one last squeeze, he let go of her hands. “Now you know me. I haven’t said any of this to another living human being.”

He stood up; she felt his presence receding. She wanted to cry out for him to stay, but she knew she mustn’t. She’d learned her lesson.

“I want to trust you, Alli. That’s my most fervent wish. But you’ve still got to prove yourself worthy of trust.” His voice was growing fainter. “I believe you can do it. I have faith in you.”

17

Jack never went home again. But he is afraid that his father will try to find him, that he will use the authorities to drag Jack back to the room with the stoplight blinking outside the window, hostage to the creaks and groans of his father’s nighttime footsteps. He knows he needs to disappear.

Where do you go when you disappear off the grid the authorities have constructed? Back in the day, you joined the army; before that, if you had a romantic soul, it was the Foreign Legion. But those gilded days have been long drained to black-and-white. Off the grid for Jack means staying with Gus.

Gus owns the Hi-Line, a pawnshop on Kansas Avenue, where the sidewalk is sticky with spent body fluids, and at any time of the year a dank and gritty wind rattles folding gates on dilapidated storefronts.

Jack shows up outside the gated storefront at 7A.M. the day after the incident at the All Around Town bakery and waits there until Gus arrives.

Gus shows no surprise whatsoever. “Huh, white boy develop a taste for grits.” He unlocks the gate, rolls it up. “I mightta known.”

“I’m not going home.” Jack follows Gus into the Hi-Line, a long, narrow space with glass cases to the right, a wall of mirror to the left. It’s impossible to do anything in the Hi-Line, even pick your nose, without Gus seeing it. “I want to work for you.”

Gus turns on the fluorescent lights, then the air conditioner, which begins to rumble like an arthritic pensioner.

“Well, I mightta said no, despite what Reverend Taske tol’ me.” More lights come on at the rear of the store. “Huh, he thinks he knows everything ’cause he’s got a direct pipeline t’God.” Now the lights in the glass cases flicker once before illuminating the pawned goods. “I made some calls after I dropped you off yesterday. Now I gotta better line on Cyril.”

Gus steps behind the line of counters, checks the till, puts in a stack of bills. He looks up, an expression of mild surprise on his face. “My name’s Augustus Turlington the Third, no lie. My name alone would get me into any country club in America. Until they see my black-ass face, that is.” He grunts. “So what a you doin on the customer’s side a the counter, anyways? You never gonna learn the business from there.”

The Hi-Line is habituated by tattooed bail-bondsmen, furtive pornographers, rough-and-tumble Colombians, burly pimps, sallow-faced pushers, and beat cops on the take preceded into the fluorescent-lit shop by their bellies.

At first, Jack’s job is simply to follow Gus’s orders, or so it seems to his clients. But what Jack is really doing is observing them, in the way only he can, absorbing the nature of the up-front business deals.

“I want you familiar with what I do here,” Gus says that first morning. “I want you familiar with the folks who run in an’ outta here on a reg’lar basis, got me?”

Gus lives in a large house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the Maryland border. Improbably, it’s surrounded by trees and thick shrubs. Jack has his own room on the top floor. When he looks out his windows, he imagines he’s in a tree house, all leafy bower, safely green. There is a bird’s nest dotted with bits of fluff and droppings in the crook of a branch, as empty now as it was full in the spring. In the mornings, the green bower is spangled gold; at night, it’s frosted by a silvery glitter. Except for the birds and, in August, the cicadas, it’s quiet.

Sometimes, though, Jack hears music. There is a part of him that quails deep inside, but it’s the music itself—slow, sad, resigned even in its seething anger that draws him. Gradually, he conquers his inner fear enough to creep downstairs. Now he hears the male voice, deep, richer, more burnished than James Brown’s. He sits down on the bottom riser, arms clasped around his bony knees, rocking slightly to the rhythm. For an hour or more, he is inundated by the river of sorrow, soaking up sounds that seep into his bones, that in their sadness seem to lift him up on a golden chariot, transport him over the gummy rooftops, the blinking traffic lights, the blaring horns, screeching brakes, the drunken shouts, into a realm of pure bliss.

After the last notes die away, Jack climbs back up the stairs, crawls into bed, and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Every night he hears the music, the ritual is the same: the soft creeping down the stairs, sitting alone, but not alone, connected to an invisible world by the music, by the lyrics, by the voices of men who’ve seen things he can’t even imagine.

Weekends Jack is being taught the ways of God by Reverend Taske. His weekdays are spent at the Hi-Line observing, cataloging, and collating the sad parade of used bric-a-brac that down-at-the-heels customers bring in for Gus to evaluate and, if he deems them desirable, shell out meager cash payment. Most never return for their pawned goods, Jack learns soon enough, though they may be dear to them in ways no one else understands. Every month Gus holds an auction to sell what’s been there for a half year, the term of the Hi-Line agreement. Always there are several treasures among the old guitars, Timex watches, cameos, and gold lockets. He makes money on these transactions, to be sure, though after less than a week on the job, Jack is quite certain his living is made in the back room.

During one such auction, Jack comes across a box of comics. Excited, he begins to paw through them, until he realizes that these are his comics. His father must’ve come in one weekend while he was with Reverend Taske, pawned them. At once, Jack knows that his father never had any intention of coming back for them. A terrible sense of freedom overwhelms him, a sorrow and a joy commingled precisely like that curious emotion that draws him to the bluesy music Gus plays at night.

For a moment, he contemplates asking Gus to take the cost of the comics out of his salary. Then he opens one, begins to read it. Almost immediately, he puts it aside, opens another, then another and another. He puts them all aside. Then he takes the box, puts it on the auction counter to be sold.

It’s only when he looks up that he sees that Gus has been watching him all along.

One morning about a week after the auction, there’s a present waiting for him when he comes down for breakfast.

He stands staring at the large package resting on the kitchen table. Gus, in a chef’s apron, his fingers white with flour, says, “Well, go on, kid, open it.”

“It’s not my birthday.”

Gus expertly pours four circles of batter into a smoking cast-iron skillet. “You don’t want me t’have t’give it to someone else, do you?”

Jack feels himself being impelled by Gus’s words. His fingers tremble as they rip open the paper. Inside is a square box with a grille on one side. He opens the top: it’s a record player. Inside are three albums, one by Muddy Waters, one by Howlin’ Wolf, one by Fats Domino.

Gus, flipping corncakes, says, “Life without blues music, now that’s a sin. Blues tells all kinds o’ stories, the history of the people composed it.”

He slides a plate of corncakes onto the table. “Eat yo’ breakfast now. Tonight we’ll listen to these records together. No sense you sittin’ all by yo’self on them hard stairs.”

After six weeks, Gus decides Jack is ready to observe the backroom deals. The back room is a frigid twelve-by-twelve bunker outfitted with a sofa and two La-Z-Boy easy chairs, between which rests a sideboard on which sits an array of liquor bottles, old-fashioned and highball glasses of sparkling cut crystal. A girl comes in once a day to clean, dust, and vacuum. Gus is extremely particular about the environment in which his deals get hammered out.

Jack fears that these deals somehow involve drug-running because that is one of the businesses Cyril Tolkan is into, and it seems clear to him that Cyril and Gus are rivals. He needn’t have worried. The deals are of another nature altogether.

His first day in the back room, Gus tells him, “All my life I was a outcast, someone who wanted t’be happier’n my daddy, but every time I tried, there was a white man standin’ in my way. So finally I gave up, went back here t’my own world where I’m the king of the castle.”

Through the back door of the Hi-Line come a succession of police detectives. Although they all look different physically, they seem the same to Jack’s brain: they’re hard, flinty-eyed, dyspeptic. To a man, they’ve seen enough—often too much—of the streets they are sworn to protect: too much rage, too much bitterness, too much jealousy and envy, too much blood. They inhabit a swamp eyeball-deep in organized prostitution, drug smuggling, murder for hire, turf warfare. They have murder in their sleep-deprived eyes. Jack can see it; he can smell it, taste it like the tang of acrid smoke.

They all want the same thing from Gus: shortcuts to turn their perps into collars. They want to make arrests, no fuss, no muss, arrests that stick, that won’t blow back in their faces like street litter. This Gus can do, because what Gus trades in, what makes him his living, is information. Gus’s castle may be at times too small to suit his taste, but it’s populated by a battalion of corner snitches, gang informants he set in place, embittered turncoats, ambitious politicos—the list seems endless.

Whatever these detectives want, Gus usually has or, if not, can get in a matter of days. All for a price, of course. They pay, with reluctance and a show of crankiness. They know the value of the goods.

One of Gus’s regulars is a detective by the name of Stanz. His face is as crumpled as a used napkin; his shoulders as meaty as a veteran boxer. His nose is a mess, broken in street brawls when he was Jack’s age and never properly fixed. He smokes like a demon, speaks as if his throat is perpetually clogged with tar and nicotine.

Decades on the force haven’t dimmed his clothes sense. He opens the button on his smartly tailored suit jacket, lifts his trouser legs fractionally before he sits down on the sofa. He lights an unfiltered Camel, inhales mightily.

“You did good on the Gonzalez thing.” He hands a thick white envelope to Gus. “That particular sonovabitch won’t be making money off coke or anything else for the foreseeable future.”

“We aim to please.” Gus stuffs the envelope in a pocket without opening it. Obviously, he trusts Stanz.

“Speaking of which.” The detective picks a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “My boss is on my ass like you wouldn’t believe about the deuce murders over McMillan Reservoir.”

Gus frowns. “I tol’ you. I’m workin’ on it.”

“Working’s not good enough.” Stanz hunches forward, perching on the edge of the sofa. “These past three weeks my life’s been a living hell—no sleep, no downtime—I can’t even get my usual tug-and-tickle, for fuck’s sake. You know what that does to a man my age? My prostate feels as big as a goddamn softball.”

The ash trembles precariously at the end of his Camel. “My tit’s in the fire, Gus. Three weeks of interviewing, reinterviewing, poring over old cases, canvassing the neighborhood, scouring every fucking trash can and Dumpster for the knife or whatever the fuck sharp instrument was used to kill the vics. I feel like I’ve run the marathon, and what do I got to put in the report to my loo? What’s he gonna report to the chief of detectives? What’s the chief gonna say to the commish and the mayor? You see the bind I’m in? All that goddamn pressure has more than a trickle-down effect. I’m the guy where the shitstorm’s gonna hit.”

He grinds out his Camel, stands. “Get me the name of the perp.” He points at Gus. “Otherwise I’m pulling my business, and where I go everyone else is gonna follow.”

Gus’s eyes go hooded, and Jack, feeling the dangerous crackle of heat lightning in the room, involuntarily takes a step back.

Gus says in the lazy voice that Jack has already determined means trouble, “You been on the force—what?—thirty years now?”

“Thirty-three, to be exact.”

“No.” Gus shakes his head. “Thirty-three years, eight months, seventeen days.”

Stanz stares, blinking. He has no idea where this is going, the lug. But Jack does, and he can’t help smiling a secret smile.

“That’s a long time,” Gus drawls. “Lotta shit piles up in those years.”

Understanding comes at last to Stanz. “Now, wait a minute.”

“Five years ago, the Ochoa takedown,” Gus continues as if Stanz hasn’t said a word. “Along with the thirty kees of coke, twenty-five mil was found with him, but only twenty-three made it into the police evidence room. Eighteen months ago, a Hispanic down. Forensics found a gun in his hand, but we both know that when you shot him he was unarmed, ’cause you bought the gun from me. And, my goodness, I have the paperwork to prove it.”

Stanz’s face is flushed red. “Hey, you told me—”

“This’s a game you don’t wanna be playin’ with me.” Gus’s inner rage has boiled up into his eyes.

Stanz turns away for a moment, gathering himself. At length, he says, “I’d never threaten you, Gus. You know that, we go back a long way.”

Gus’s bulk fills up the space; his rage seems to have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Stanz is trying his best not to breathe hard. “We good now?” he asks.

It looks like he can’t wait to get the hell out of there.

18

“Is Pete going to be all right?”

“The doctor says he will be,” Jack said. “He’s been taken to Bethesda Medical. He’ll get the best of care.”

Jack had volunteered to drive Chris Armitage home. A fine mesh of sleet slanted down from a pewter sky. The car’s tires made a hissing noise as they slithered along the road.

Armitage shivered. “Until they torture him again.”

“He won’t be tortured again.”

“Damn straight he won’t.” Armitage was huddled against the passenger’s-side window, as far away from Jack as he could get. “I’m filing a complaint with the Attorney General’s office.”

“I’d advise against it.” Jack got on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, heading toward the District. “If you do, Garner will haul you in again. I also guarantee the Attorney General won’t ever see the complaint.”

“Then I’ll take it public—any one of the news outlets would jump at this story.”

“Garner would love that. In the blink of an eye, he and his people will prove you’re a crank, and whatever credibility you’re trying to build for your movement will be shot to hell.”

Armitage regarded him for a moment. “What are you? The good cop?”

“I’m the good guy,” Jack said. “The only one you’re likely to meet in the next few weeks.”

Armitage appeared to chew this over for some time. “If you’re such a good guy, tell me what the hell is going on.”

Jack maneuvered around a lumbering semi. “I can’t do that.”

Armitage’s voice was intensely bitter. “This is a nightmare.”

Every twenty seconds, Jack’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “Tell me about your organization.”

Armitage grunted. “For a start, we’re not E-Two. Nothing like it, in fact.”

A gray BMW 5 Series had taken up station two cars behind theirs.

“But you know about E-Two.” Jack was careful to keep whatever tension he was feeling out of his voice.

“Of course I do.” Armitage pointed. “Can we get some more heat? I’m freezing.”

Jack turned up the heater. “It’s the fear draining out of you.”

“Who says it’s going? I feel like it’ll be a part of me for the rest of my life.”

Jack switched to the center lane. The gray BMW waited several minutes, then followed.

“Every movement has its radical element,” Armitage was saying, “but to tar us with the same brush—well, it’s like saying all Muslims are terrorists.”

There was an exit coming up. Jack switched to the left lane. “You’d be surprised at how many Americans believe that.”

“Fifty years ago, most Americans believed that Jews had horns,” Armitage said. “That’s part of what’s wrong with this country, what we’re fighting against.”

Here came the gray BMW, nosing into the left lane.

“I can imagine Garner and his people still believing that,” Jack said tartly.

“Why do you say ‘Garner and his people’? Aren’t you one of them?”

“I was brought in to keep them honest.” That was one way to look at it, Jack thought. “Their philosophy isn’t mine.”

“Anyway, thank you. You probably saved Peter’s life.”

Jack was aware of Armitage studying his face.

“Unless it was all an act. Was it?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?” Armitage said.

Jack laughed. “You don’t.”

“I don’t see what’s funny,” Armitage said in a wounded voice.

“I was going to say, you have to take it on faith that I’m telling the truth.”

Armitage managed a smile. “Oh, I have faith—faith in mankind, faith in science, faith that reason will win out over the engines of reinforcement built up by religion. Reason doesn’t require a priest or a rabbi or an imam to exist.”

“You sound very sure of yourself.”

“I ought to,” Armitage said. “I used to be a priest.”

This interested Jack almost as much as the gray BMW did. “You fall out of bed?”

“I know what you’re thinking—but, no, it wasn’t a girl. It was more simple than that, really, and that made the revelation ever more profound. I woke up one day and realized that the world of religion was totally out of sync with the world I was living in, the world all around me, the world I was administering to. The bishops and archbishops I knew—my spiritual leaders—didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the real world, and furthermore, they didn’t care.”

Armitage put his head back; his eyes turned inward. “One day, I made the mistake of voicing my concerns to them. They dismissed them out of hand, but from that moment on, I could tell that I was a danger to them. I was shut out of policy decisions even within my own parish.”

They continued to move south on the parkway. “So you left.”

Armitage nodded. “Whatever ties I’d felt with the irrational, faith-based world were severed. I found myself drawn instead to physics, quantum mechanics, organic chemistry—not as a scientist, per se, but as a means of understanding the world. I discovered that all these disciplines are empirical absolutes. They can be defined. Even better, they can be quantified. They’re not subject to interpretation.

“Look, organized religions poison everything. They keep people superstitious, ignorant, and intolerant of anyone who’s not like them. They also falsely bestow power on people who have no business being in power.”

“Speaking of which,” Jack said, “hold on.”

He had been keeping to just under the speed limit, but with the off-ramp just over a hundred yards away, he floored the gas pedal. The car jumped forward. Jack hauled the wheel over, entering the center lane to an angry blare of horns. He slowed abruptly to allow a truck to get in front of him, then wedged the car into the right lane, onto the off-ramp at a frightening rate of speed.

Behind them, he could hear the shriek of rubber being flayed off the BMW’s tires, the scream of horns, squeals of brakes being jammed on.

Armitage twisted around as far as his seat belt would allow. “You didn’t lose them,” he said.

“When I want to lose them,” Jack said, “I will.”

He prepared to turn off Dolley Madison Parkway almost immediately, making a left onto Kirby Road, but up ahead he saw one of those wheeled temporary signs with a grid of tiny lights blinking a message. The problem was, he couldn’t read it. The array of lights swarmed like a hive of bees. He was coming up on it fast, there was no time to find his set point, to command his dyslexic brain to read what it refused to read, so he made the left off the parkway.

“What the hell are you doing?” Armitage shouted, bracing his hands against the dashboard.

Jack could see what he meant. The access to Kirby Road was blocked off. They sliced through a pair of wooden barricades, hit a potholed roadbed partially stripped to the bone. Workmen scattered, shouting and gesticulating wildly. The car dipped into a pothole, then bounced upward, coming down hard on its shocks.

The wheel vibrated under Jack’s hands. “What did the sign say?”

“What d’you mean?” Armitage was bewildered. “You could read it as well as I could.”

“Just tell me what it said!” Jack shouted.

“It said Kirby Road was under construction for the next half mile.”

There was no help for it now. “Hang on,” Jack said grimly.

They jounced over the rutted roadbed, Jack swinging the car back and forth in order to avoid the deepest holes. The bone-jarring half mile seemed to take forever; then the car reared up onto smooth tarmac. Jack could see the gray BMW negotiating the road behind them.

Swiveling back around, Armitage said, “Why is someone following us?”

“Damn good question.”

Jack flicked open his phone, dialed his ATF office, which was not five minutes away. “It’s McClure; get me Bennett,” he said as soon as someone answered. Chief Rodney Bennett came on the line right away.

“How’s it hanging, Jack?”

“I’ll know in a couple of minutes, Chief. I’ve got a high-powered tail on me. Late-model gray BMW Five Series. Three minutes from now I’ll be on Claiborne Drive. I need a stop ’n’ shop.”

“I’m all over it,” Bennett growled.

“Right. Later.” He folded away his phone.

“Open the glove box,” he said to Armitage. “Take out a pad and pen.”

Armitage did as he was told.

Precisely three minutes later, Jack took a left onto Claiborne Drive. This was a high-rent district with large, gracious homes, spacious front lawns, expensive landscaping.

Jack, one eye on the rearview mirror, saw the gray BMW corner after them, its distinctive front end just entering Claiborne.

“Why are you slowing down?” Armitage was truly alarmed now. “They’ll be on top of us before—!”

“Shut up and take down the BMW’s tag number,” Jack snapped.

“Got it,” Armitage said, scribbling hurriedly.

Jack heard sirens on Kirby, heading straight for them.

With the BMW close enough to rear-end him, he suddenly veered to the left. The BMW jumped the curb, plowed over a lawn, through a low hedge of boxwood, veered out of sight around the side of the house just as a pair of ATF cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, tore up Osborne Drive, bracketing Jack’s car.

19

“The man we got t’see, he don’t like people he don’t know,” Gus says. “Plus, he don’t like whitey, so that makes two strikes against you.”

“You want me to stay in the car?” Jack says.

Gus turns the wheel over, rolls slowly down T Street SE. “Huh. You stay in the car, the Marmoset he liable to come over, shoot you through the head. He don’t ask me, should I do sumthin’. It don’t smell kosher to him, he acts.”

“What’s a marmoset?” Jack asks.

“Some kinda monkey, I think, likes the treetops in forests, sumthin’ like that, anyway.”

“You ever see one? I mean a real marmoset.”

“Me, no.”

Gus’s eyes are scanning the street. Jack can feel something in Gus condensing with concentration.

“When you think I got time t’go to the zoo?” Between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Gus pulls into the curb, turns off the engine.

“This here’s Anacostia, no place fo’ you, okay? So jes’ keep close t’ me, don’t say a word, and do yo’ thing, got me?”

“Gotcha,” Jack says.

The Continental’s enormous engine ticks over like a clock winding down. The heat of the early evening seeps in, begins to weigh on the air-conditioned air. Gus grunts, opens the driver’s door.

They’re on a street of narrow row houses sided with peeling wooden slats. Tiny overgrown front yards are divided by cyclone fencing. A huge German shepherd starts to bark, throwing itself against the fence as its jaws snap.

“Hey, Godzilla.” Gus strolls over to the fence, Jack right behind him. “Marmoset’s neighbor keeps Zilla half-starved so he’ll go for anybody gets too close.” Gus digs in his pocket, pulls out a handful of dog biscuits, launches them over the fence. “Can’t stand to see a animal mistreated.”

As Godzilla cracks down on the first biscuit, Gus and Jack approach the next house. “My father, he was a dogcatcher,” Gus says. “Man, he hated his job—dealing with ’em alla time—the rabies, the mistreatment, he come up against it all.”

Gus leads them up the steps of a house painted the color of the evening sky. It has neat white shutters and a roof without the tar paper patches of its neighbors.

“This it here.” He raps on the door.

There’s a short pause, then, “Come on in,” a male voice calls.

The instant Gus opens the door, three gunshots ring out, and Gus throws Jack unceremoniously back out onto the stoop. Jack’s ears ring, he can’t hear a thing, but from his prone position he sees Gus pull a Magnum.357 from his jacket, bang open the door. He shouts something to Jack as he vanishes into the interior, but Jack can’t hear what it is.

Jack pushes himself up and runs inside. As he passes the door, he sees three bullet holes ripped clear through the wood. It’s strange to feel himself moving, but to hear nothing except the ringing in his ears, beneath which is a dead, all-encompassing silence. It’s as if the world has been stuffed solid with cotton balls.

Sprinting after Gus, he finds himself in a dimly lit room, so cluttered with books, records, magazines, strewn clothes, hats, shoes, sneakers that it seems like a maze. The ceiling fixtures have been removed, leaving bare patches like the hide of a mangy dog. Instead, a multitude of lamps on tables, chairs, the floor provide weird colored light. It’s a moment before Jack realizes that all the lampshades are draped with colored bits of fabric, dimming the illumination as well as dyeing it.

Across the room he sees Gus lumber back toward him from a butter-yellow kitchen. The Magnum is pointed at the floor. Gus says something to him, gesturing emphatically with his free hand, but Jack is still deaf from the aftermath of the gunshots, possibly in shock, and keeps on coming.

He sidesteps a precariously stacked pile of books, stumbles clumsily over another, larger mound. It has one red mark on its back, like a chalk mark or a brand. Then it hits him. First, his balance deserts him, then his legs turn watery, and he falls.

On his hands and knees, he finds himself not six inches from a thin, scarred face. The eyes, open wide, stare back at him. Then he becomes aware of the trickle of blood leaking from the corner of the half-open mouth, the horrific stench of offal, and he screams, leaping backwards, tripping over a pair of boots, tumbling onto his backside, his legs in the air. It would be funny if Jack weren’t so terrified. He pushes himself to his feet, smacks blindly into the wall in a desperate attempt to run out of the house. His only thought is to get as far away from the dead man as he can.

He’s crying, and he’s sick, vomiting onto the floor. He can’t get the sight of those staring eyes out of his mind. He wants only to have time run backwards, to be back in Gus’s air-conditioned Continental, safe and secure, before this all began.

Then Gus grabs him by the collar, hauls him off his feet. Jack is hysterical, kicking and screaming, and the fact that he’s still half-deaf makes everything worse, as if he’s living out a nightmare from which he can’t pinch himself awake. Nothing is real, and yet everything is all too real: those eyes, the blood drooling out of the half-open mouth, the stench of excrement and death, of a human body letting go of life. It’s all too much. His fists beat a silent tattoo against Gus’s shoulders; his shoes swing back and forth into Gus’s shins.

Then he’s outside and Gus has let him go and he doubles over, gagging and retching, feeling as if every atom in his body is exploding in pain and terror. He is empty inside. His guts feel as if they have been turned inside out. Every nerve in his body is firing at once, making his limbs jump, his torso twitch.

The night enfolds him, or is it Gus? Gradually, he comes down from the precipice where shock and terror pushed him. Gradually, he becomes aware that Gus has gathered him into his arms and is rocking him like a baby.

Then he hears the sirens start up and knows his hearing is coming back. At first they’re a long way off, but quite rapidly they come nearer and nearer.

“You okay t’go?” Gus asks.

Jack clings to him tightly, his face buried in Gus’s massive chest.

With Jack in his arms, Gus gets to his feet. He takes Jack back to the Continental, fires the ignition. They’re just turning the corner onto Sixth Street NE when the rear window is briefly awash in red and white flashing lights. Sirens scream close at hand, then rapidly diminish as Gus puts on speed.

A dozen gray blocks later, Gus pulls up to a phone booth.

“I gotta make a call,” he says. “On’y be a minute, kid, ’kay?” His eyes study Jack slowly, carefully. “You’ll be able to see me the whole time.”

Jack watches Gus squeeze half his bulk into the phone booth, feed the slot. His teeth start to chatter. Chills run through him, and as he imagines that that horrific stench has invaded the car, he starts crying again.

It’s only when he sees Gus striding back that he wipes his eyes and nose. He hiccups once as Gus slides behind the wheel. They sit in silence for a time. Gus stares straight ahead. Jack tries to piece himself together, but every now and again a half-stifled sob escapes him.

Finally, he manages, “Was that … was that …?”

“The Marmoset?” Gus nods. “Yeah, that was him.”

“What … what …?”

Gus sighs. “Remember that double murder at McMillan Reservoir Stanz wants me t’help him with? The Marmoset was my man onna case.” Gus looks around. “He got close to the bone, seems like.”

“Too close,” Jack says with a shiver.

Gus puts his arm across the seat back. “Anyway, ain’t nuthin’ fo’ you t’worry yo’self ’bout.” His brows converge in worry. “Don’t you believe me?”

“I was thinking of the Marmoset,” Jack says. “I was thinking that he should be buried, not pawed at by people who never knew him.”

For a long time nothing more is said. At last, Gus fires the ignition. After putting the car in gear, he eases out into the street.

Jack doesn’t know where they’re headed; he doesn’t care. He has sunk back into the world he knew through newspapers, TV, and the movies must exist, yet could never have imagined. It has come upon him too soon, its implications too much for him to handle. He wonders at all the tears he’s shed because he can’t remember shedding even one before this. He made it an iron-bound rule never to cry when his father beat him, not even when his father slunk back across the apartment and the strains of “California Dreamin’” winked out like a fearful light. He never cried when Andre and his crew took him into the alley behind the electronics store. Tonight, it seems, he can’t stop.

It takes Gus just eleven minutes to get to 3001 Connecticut Avenue NW, the front entrance to the National Zoo.

Jack turns, peers out the window. “Gus, it’s night. The zoo isn’t open at night.”

Gus opens the door. “Who says it ain’t?”

“Looka how small he is.” Gus stares up through the branches at the tiny black-and-white face staring down at them. There are other marmosets elsewhere in the large cage, but this one, having taken notice of them, has come the closest. The others are busy eating fruit held in their claws or gnawing at the tree with startlingly long lower incisors.

Jack studies the black eyes staring down at him. The face looks so full of intelligence and insight, as if the marmoset sees a world at once smaller and bigger than he does.

“What’s he thinking?” Jack says.

“Who knows?”

“That’s just it.” Jack’s voice is full of wonder. “No one knows.”

Gus puts his arm protectively around Jack’s shoulders. “Don’t get too close now, kid,” he says gruffly. “Mebbe these things bite.”

Jack doesn’t think to ask Gus how he managed to get the zoo open at this hour, because he knows Gus won’t tell him. Anyway, he doesn’t want to spoil the magic of the moment, which has temporarily banished all thoughts of death, thousand-mile stares, the stench of death. There is life here, strange and beautiful, its strangeness making it all the more vibrant. Jack feels his heart beating strongly in his chest, and a kind of warmth suffuses him.

“Hello, marmoset,” he says. “My name is Jack.”

20

Alli Carson, being fed a hamburger, rare, with mustard and slices of crisp Mrs. Fanning’s bread-and-butter pickles, looked into Ronnie Kray’s face, so close to hers. His expression was altogether unthreatening. He might have been a mother bird feeding her chick.

She savored the tastes in her mouth, then, almost reluctantly, she swallowed. In his other hand he held a coffee milk shake with one of those bendy straws stuck into its thick foam. He brought the straw to her lips and she sucked down the sweet drink.

“How do you know my favorite foods?” she asked quietly. She didn’t fear him now. She had learned that she was allowed to speak without permission during mealtimes.

Kray smiled in a way that somehow drew her to him. “I’m like a parent,” he said in a voice as quiet as hers. “I’m the father you always dreamed of having, but never thought you would.”

She made a motion with her head, and he gave her more burger. While she chewed, her eyes never left his face.

“I know what you like,” he continued. “And what you don’t. Why would I want to know that, Alli? Because I value you, because I want to please you.”

Alli sucked down more of the coffee milk shake, swallowed. “Then why am I bound to this chair?”

“I bought that chair in Mexico seven years ago, at the same time I purchased a painted sugar skull, on the Day of the Dead. The chair is my most prized possession; you’re privileged to sit in it. Up until I put you into it, only I have sat in it.”

Intuiting her hunger, he fed her the last of the hamburger. “Do you know about the Day of the Dead, Alli? No? It’s the one day of the year when the door between life and death is open. When those alive may talk to those who are dead. If they believe.” He cocked his head. “Tell me, Alli, what is it you believe in?”

She blinked. “I … I don’t know what you mean.”

He hunched forward, forearms on his knees. “Do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” she said immediately.

“Do you truly believe in God—or are you parroting something your parents believe?”

She looked at him for a moment, her mouth dry. Once again, it was as if he had peered down into the depths of her soul; it was as if he knew her from the inside out.

“I’m … I’m not supposed to say.”

“There you have it, Alli. All your life you’ve been walled away from the rest of the world. You’ve been told what to say and what to think. But I know you better. I know you have your own thoughts, your own beliefs. I won’t judge you the way your parents do. And there’s no one here, except you and me.”

“What about the others?”

“Ah, the others.” Leaning in, Kray wiped the corners of her mouth. “I’ll tell you a secret, Alli, because you’ve earned it. There are no others. There’s only me. Me and my shadow.” He chuckled.

“Why did you lie to me?”

“Lessons need to be learned, Alli. You’re beginning to understand that now. Lessons learned obviate the need for lying. And, here’s another secret I want to share with you: I don’t enjoy lying to you.” He sat back. “You’re special, you see, but not in the way your parents have hammered into your head.”

Loosening the bonds on her wrists, he took her hands in his and said, “You and I, Alli, together need to undo all the senseless hammering, all the disservice that’s been done to you. Welcome to the beginning. In this place, you’re free to speak your heart. You’re freer than you’ve ever been in your life.” He let go of her hands. “Now, will you tell me the truth? Do you believe in God?”

Alli studied him. After the whirl of confusion, doubt, and fear, her mind seemed clearer than it had ever been. How could that be? she asked herself. Looking into Kray’s face, she saw that in time she’d have the answer.

“No,” she said, her voice firm. “The idea that there’s an old bearded man somewhere in heaven who created the world, who listens to our prayers, who forgives us our sins makes no sense to me. That Eve was made from Adam’s rib, how stupid is that?”

Ronnie Kray regarded her with a contemplative air. “And do you believe in your country—in the United States?”

“Of course I do.” She hesitated. “But …”

Kray said nothing, and his absolute calmness soothed her.

Now the dam broke, and out gushed feelings she’d been holding inside ever since Emma, her only confidante, had died. “I hate how the country’s become a fortress. The president and his people have nothing but utter contempt for us. They can do anything, say anything, wriggle out of any wrongdoing, sling every kind of mud, hire people who slander their political enemies, and no one has the guts to stand up and say they’re wrong, they’re killing hundreds of people every day, they’ve trampled all over due process, they’ve blurred the separation of church and state, because anyone who dares oppose them is immediately branded a traitor, a dangerous left-wing lunatic, or both.”

“They’ve done that to your father.”

“Yes.”

“But he’s survived their slings and arrows to become the next president.”

“Yes.”

“Yet he hasn’t spoken out, he hasn’t denounced the alliance between the Christian fundamentalists and the Administration. Does that mean he agrees with the present Administration? Did the Administration’s media attack dogs pull their punches in return for his lack of criticism?”

She could sense him preparing to leave, and she felt a sharp pang of imminent loss.

“What do you think he prays for when he and your mother attend church every Sunday?”

“I …” All at once confusion overwhelmed her again. “I don’t know.”

“Now you have surprised me,” Kray said.

She heard the sharp disapproval in his voice, and her blood ran cold.

“I—”

Kray put a forefinger across his lips. “Mealtime’s over.”

Retying her wrists, he rose, vanishing into the gloom.

21

Nina Miller caught Jack’s call while she was in the middle of the Potomac.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said.

“One moment,” Dennis Paull said. “I need to see the Mermaid.”

Nina squinted into the wind. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

“Just set it up,” Paull said brusquely.

She gave him a curt nod as she walked aft, away from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They were on his 185-foot yacht, big enough to contain an aft upper deck that served as a pad on which the small private helicopter that had brought Nina sat, its rotors quivering and flexing in the wind gusts. The pilot inside the cockpit was ready to lift off at a moment’s notice.

Paull watched Nina out of the corner of his eye as she lit a clove cigarette, her back to him, cell phone to her left ear. He worried about her. He worried whether he could trust her. But then, Dennis Paull worried about every person he spoke to or came in contact with during his grueling twenty-hour days. He was playing a dangerous game, and no one knew it better than he did. Over the years, how many people had he or his people uncovered who were playing their own dangerous games? Of course, he was at the eye of the storm, the calm center from which, like an Olympian god, he could look in all directions at once. But he didn’t fool himself; he didn’t allow his exalted position at the right hand of the president to dull his caution or dim his vigilance.

He’d been living on a knife-edge for almost two years now, the midpoint of the president’s second term in office. His stomach always hurt; his nerves vibrated so badly that he couldn’t recall the last time he had slept soundly. Instead, he’d taught himself the art of catnapping—five minutes here, fifteen there—during the day. In the dead of night, as one of his days bled into the next, he sipped strong black coffee and carried out the spinning of his web. For good or ill, he was in too deep now to have second thoughts, for if he were to succeed, he needed to commit to his plan absolutely. Any waver of intent would be lethal.

He put on the smile he used for intimates—if one could use that word for those in his inner circle, because Secretary Paull had no true intimates. This the job had taught him a long, painful time ago.

His thoughts threaded away on the spume purling from the sleek bow of his yacht as Nina walked back to where he stood just forward of the cabin. It was a blustery day, spitting intermittently. Not a fit day for a boat ride, which was why Paull was here on the water instead of in an office that might very well be bugged or an open space where whatever he said was at the mercy of a parabolic microphone on the top of some innocuous-looking van. His yacht was swept three times a day for bugs, and that included the entire hull. Plus there were sophisticated jamming devices fore and aft installed by a friend of his at DARPA, the Department of Defense’s advanced weapons program.

To the uninitiated, Paull mused, these precautions might seem the product of paranoia, but as William S. Burroughs aptly said, Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.

“That was McClure,” Nina said, folding away her phone. “He wants me to meet him at the headquarters of the First American Secular Revivalists.”

Paull didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s he doing there? FASR is supposed to be Hugh Garner’s responsibility.”

“Garner’s got it in for McClure.”

They were into the wind, no one who wasn’t in spitting distance could hear them, not even the crew, who Paull had made certain were all inside. “What the hell is McClure up to?”

“I don’t know,” Nina confessed, “but it seems clear he doesn’t believe E-Two is behind the kidnapping.”

“Then who the hell is?”

“I don’t know, sir, but I have a feeling McClure is closer to finding out than we are.”

The secretary looked thoughtful. “From now on, I want you to stick close to him.”

Nina took a drag on her clove cigarette. “How close?”

The secretary’s eyes bored into hers. “Do whatever it takes to keep him close. We’re rapidly running out of time and space to maneuver.”

Nina’s gaze was cool and steady. “How does it feel, I wonder, to pimp someone else out?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “You’d better get over there pronto.”

Nina turned, headed aft.

“And Nina,” he called after her.

She turned back, pulled her hair off her face.

“Make sure you start thinking of him as Jack.”

Inside the polished mahogany cabin, the yacht’s captain ignored the helicopter as its rotors started up. A moment later, it had lifted off with the woman passenger aboard. The captain didn’t know her name, didn’t care what it was. His job was simple and he was doing it now, transcribing onto the tiny keypad of his BlackBerry from scribbled notes he’d taken of the conversation Secretary Paull had just had with the visitor. rowing up with a deaf sister had made him proficient in lip-reading. Finished with the transcription, he pressed the SEND key, and the e-mail was instantaneously transmitted directly to wherever the president was at the moment, no doubt eagerly awaiting its arrival.

His job concluded for the time being, the captain set his BlackBerry down beside the pair of powerful binoculars through which he’d viewed the conversation in question. Then he got back to maneuvering the yacht through the wind-tossed afternoon. He’d never had an incident at sea aboard any of the yachts he’d captained, and he wasn’t about to start now.

22

“Every action invites a reaction. No, no.” Kray rocked slightly from one foot to the other. “Every action causes a reaction. The religious right’s infiltration of the federal government finally has had its proper reaction: us, the enemy. The missionary secularists, the Army of Reason.” He laughed. “It seems ironic, doesn’t it, that without them there would be no us. They created us; every extreme gives rise to the opposite extreme.”

He bent down, untied Alli’s wrists. “Hold your arms over your head.”

It was phrased as a suggestion rather than a command. Nevertheless, Alli complied, but after only a few seconds she was obliged to fold them in her lap.

“I … I can’t,” she said. “I don’t have the strength.”

“I have a cure for that.”

Kneeling, Kray unbuckled her ankles and legs. With his arms around her waist, he helped her to her feet. She stood, wobbly as a toddler, her weight against him from her hip to her shoulder.

With his coaxing, she took one tentative step forward, then another, but her legs buckled and Kray had to hold her firmly lest she collapse onto the floor like an invalid.

“I think you might have to teach me to walk all over again,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

“You won’t need me to do that, I promise.” He took her out of the room that had been her home for several days. He helped her shower and dress, and she felt neither embarrassed nor ashamed. Why should she? After all, he had watched her defecate and urinate; possibly he’d watched her sleep. Could there be anything more intimate?

There was not an inch of her he didn’t know. It had taken just over a week for him to become a part of her.

In the kitchen, he pulled out a chair for her. She sat with one arm on the table, where cartons of orange juice and milk, and several water tumblers stood in a precise cluster. He poured her a glass of orange juice with pulp, the kind she liked best.

He waited until she had drained the glass. “After lunch, we’ll go for a walk around the house. You’ll get your strength back in no time, you’ll see,” he said. “Now, what would you like to eat?”

“Eggs and bacon, please.”

“I think I’ll join you.” Kray opened the refrigerator so that the door to the interior was outside of Alli’s field of vision. The other girl sat folded, as if she were performing a contortionist’s trick. He pulled out a carton of eggs and a stick of butter from the shelf on the door. A pound of thick-sliced bacon was on the lower shelf near the girl’s stiff, blue feet. Her skin looked bad now; it was starting to slough off like snakeskin. Very soon now, Kray knew, he’d have to move her, either to the freezer in the basement—though that would necessitate cutting her up into sections—or somewhere else, a landfill or an empty lot, perhaps. But not yet. He was reluctant to let her go. She’d been so useful to him. He’d sedated her while he cut off her hand so as not to cause her pain. She didn’t deserve that; she had a home here now, and he didn’t want to abandon her. It wasn’t her fault that he’d needed her to make sure the authorities knew Alli wasn’t dead and buried. He was on a strict timetable. He required the urgency only a search for a living girl would bring.

Arms full, Kray kicked the refrigerator door closed, lined up the ingredients on the counter next to the stove, placed a cast-iron skillet on the burner, turned on the gas. So as not to expose his fingers to grease, he used one of the gleaming knives on a magnetic wall rack to peel off six slices of bacon, then laid them side by side in the skillet. Turning up the heat made them sizzle. The rich scent permeated the kitchen.

When the bacon was golden brown, he set the slices on a paper towel, drained off the fat from the skillet. Without washing it, he sliced off a thick pat of butter, plopped it in the skillet to melt. Then he put the carton of eggs, a stainless steel bowl, and a whisk on the table.

“How about you scrambling the eggs?”

Once again, it was a suggestion rather than a command. Alli knew she was free to say no. But she didn’t want to say no. She opened the carton, broke six eggs one by one on the rim of the bowl, poured in a dollop of milk, then began to whisk the mixture.

“I don’t know how anyone can eat those Eggbeaters,” she said idly.

“Or an egg-white omelette, for that matter,” he answered.

Quite quickly her arm began to tire. But she rested it briefly, then began again, bringing a pale yellow froth.

“Ready,” she said.

Kray took the bowl from her, added three twists of salt, two of pepper, then tipped the contents into the skillet. He stirred the eggs a bit with a white plastic spatula.

“White bread?”

“Whole-wheat today, I think,” Alli said.

“In the pantry.” He put down the spatula, went into the small room. Immediately he turned around, stood watching her from the shadows. She rose, one hand supporting herself on the tabletop. Then she walked over to the stove. Her hand passed the knives in the wall rack, picked up the spatula. She stirred the eggs in the skillet. She hummed to herself.

Satisfied, Kray found a fresh loaf of whole-wheat bread, tucked it under his arm. Then he reached up, opened the cupboard. Carrie was curled and winding in her dark cave. Her red eyes stared at him enigmatically.

He put a finger across his lips, whispered to her, “Shhh.”

Kray closed the cupboard door, returned to the kitchen.

Alli turned her head. “Almost done,” she said.

Was that the ghost of a smile on her face?

They ate, sitting across from each other.

“I was right about you,” he said at length. “Despite your hothouse upbringing, you’re not a fool. You despise privilege.”

Alli swallowed a mouthful of egg and bread. “Fear and loathing.”

He nodded. “Hunter Thompson.”

She looked up, not for the first time surprised by him. “You’ve read him?”

“Because he’s a favorite of yours.”

A shiver went through her—of pleasure, not fear.

“Tell me what you liked most about Thompson.”

Alli didn’t hesitate. “He was a subversive. He thought civilization was hypocritical, he loved to show how good people were at rationalizing their actions.”

Kray bit off a piece of bacon. “In other words, he was like us—you and me.”

“What do you mean?”

Kray wiped his mouth, sat back. “From my point of view, the civilization Thompson was writing about is inextricably entwined with religion. And what is religion, after all, but totalitarianism? The strictures god presented to Adam and Eve, that both the Old and New Testaments describe, are nothing more than a series of laws so extreme, so prohibitive, they’re impossible to adhere to. In the so-called beginning, in the garden of Eden, god tells Adam and Eve that he’s provided them with everything they could possibly desire or ever will desire. The only thing is, see that tree over there? That’s the Tree of Knowledge. If you want to find out what’s really going on, you need to eat the fruit. But hey, wait a minute, eating the fruit is forbidden, so forget that knowledge thing, who needs it anyway when I’ve given you everything you want. So, in essence, religion insists we live in ignorance—but that’s perfectly okay, because we have our priests and ministers to tell us what to do and what to think.

“Shall I go on? Okay, how about ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ The commandment doesn’t say don’t screw another man’s wife, that would be doable. Instead, it gives you an impossible task: It forbids you even to think about screwing another man’s wife!

“You see what’s happened here? Religion was invented by men in order to create sin. Because without sin there can be no fear, without fear how do you control large numbers of human beings? Add to that an elite theocracy that periodically issues edicts as it sees fit, in order to keep itself in power, and the definition of totalitarianism is complete.”

Alli took a moment to absorb what Kray said before replying: “What about the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin?”

A knowing smile spread across Kray’s face. “The Vatican acquiesced to Hitler. In fact, it rushed to knuckle under in 1933, signing a treaty with Hitler forbidding German Catholics to participate in any form of political activity that criticized the regime. After the war, it provided documents, false passports and the like, enabling Nazis to flee to South America, and no German was ever excommunicated for war crimes. The historical connection of the Christian churches with fascism is undeniable and a matter of public record. Hardly surprising, when you think about it. Totalitarianism attracts totalitarianism. Its members are absolutists—by definition, they cannot apologize for their transgressions. Think about it for a moment. Totalitarianism whether it be religious in nature like the Christian church or political in nature like history’s fascist states is all faith-based. Absolute faith in one’s infallible leaders.

“At least we secularists have the freedom—and the duty—to admit our mistakes, and to correct them.”

Alli, eyes turned inward, was lost in thought. She was absorbing everything, like a sponge. “It’s true. I see things that frighten me,” she said at length. “A group of people with tremendous power and inflexible views, everyone else afraid to speak up, more limits put on personal freedoms.” She pursed her lips. “What does it mean? It’s unthinkable, but could it be that we’re inching away from democracy?”

“The very fact that you’re asking the question is cause for celebration.” Kray pushed his plate to one side. “Now you tell me. Your opinion is as important as mine.”

Her lips curled in an ironic smile. “Even though I’ve lived a life of privilege?”

“Precisely because you’ve lived a life of privilege,” Kray said seriously.

She rose, gathered the plates and cutlery.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I’m stronger now.” Her hands full, Alli walked over to the sink with decidedly less difficulty. Her back to him, she began to wash the dishes.

Kray stood. “Alli?”

“Yes?”

“You’re free to go any time you want.”

Alli scrubbed a plate free of yolk and grease, placed it with great deliberation on the drainboard rack. “If I go home,” she said without turning around, “I’ll stop learning.”

23

“Stop ‘N’ shop,” Armitage said, “what’s that?” He was even more jittery now. His face was as white as the sleet bouncing off the car’s windshield.

Jack turned down Kirby Road about five miles from Claiborne. “It’s when you intercept a perp—a suspect—grill him about where he’s going, why he’s in the area, what he’s got in his vehicle.”

“Where’s your probable cause?”

Jack pulled out his gun. “Here’s my probable cause.”

“You can’t just—”

“What are you, an ex-priest and an ex-lawyer?”

Armitage fell silent. While he tried to gather himself, Jack said, “Give me the BMW’s tag number.”

Armitage showed him the pad, but Jack’s emotions were running too high, he was under too much stress for him to be able to get to the mental place where he could concentrate enough to make sense of what Armitage had jotted down.

“Read it to me.”

Armitage looked at him quizzically.

“I can’t take my eyes off the road,” Jack lied. He’d never get over the shame of his disability.

Armitage read off the license tag.

Jack called Bennett back. “I need a check on a gray late-model Five series BMW, tag number two-four-nine-nine CXE. Right. Thanks.”

Jack closed the connection. They drove awhile in an uneasy silence.

At length, Armitage said, “I didn’t sign on for this.”

“You want out?”

Armitage looked at Jack, seemed abruptly ashamed.

“Tell me more about the FASR.”

Armitage ran a hand through his soaking hair.

“Come on,” Jack urged, “the talking’ll do you good.”

“All right.” Armitage licked his lips nervously. “What we believe, first and foremost, is that an ethical life can be led without religion. In fact, it’s religion of all stripes that most batters the ethical life into submission. The word of the lord God is the best method devised by man to twist ethics, morality, to escape the consequence of your actions. The pious can get away with all manner of heinous crimes—burning people at the stake, quite literally turning their guts inside out—all in the name of God. The so-called laws of religion have been rewritten over and over in order to justify the actions of the religious elders.”

It was at that precise moment that Jack felt a slight prickling at the back of his neck. The hair on his forearms stirred as if magnetized, and his eyes were drawn to the rearview mirror. For a moment, he thought he was losing his mind, for there sat his own beloved Emma looking back at him with her clear eyes, as alive as she had ever been.

“Dad—”

He heard her voice! It was definitely her voice, but when he glanced over at Armitage, it was clear that the other man had heard nothing. Jack scrubbed his face with his hand, glanced again at the rearview mirror, which now showed the road behind, traffic moving in normal locomotion. No one was in the backseat.

He swallowed hard. What was causing these hallucinations? he asked himself. They had to be hallucinations, right? What else could they be?

With an enormous effort, he returned his attention to the man sitting beside him. He had been going to ask him another question entirely, but what came out of his mouth was, “Does that mean you don’t believe in God?”

“God doesn’t enter into it,” Armitage said matter-of-factly. “It’s what religion has done in God’s name that we’re rebelling against.”

“Then you have in common with E-Two their desire for a Second Enlightenment.”

Armitage sighed. “We do. But we strenuously disagree with their methods. They’re extremists, and like all extremists, they’re wholly goal-oriented. They see only the shortest distance, the straight path to victory, and that invariably involves violence. As with all extremists the world over and down through history, the means to their goal is of no interest to them.”

“That much I get.” Jack was watching the side mirror, but nothing suspicious showed itself. His cell buzzed. It was the president-elect. Jack must have missed his hourly check-in. He answered the call, assured Edward Carson that in pursuing his own line of investigation he was making progress. There was nothing more he could say with Armitage sitting right next to him. Carson seemed to understand that Jack wasn’t in a position to speak freely and he rang off.

“What I don’t understand is why Garner and his people think you’re an E-Two training ground,” Jack said.

“That’s a sore point, I admit.” Armitage folded his arms across his chest. “Over the past months—I don’t know how many, but certainly it’s under a year—a number of our younger members have left. In fact, they’ve dropped out of sight. We’ve heard rumors that some of them surfaced in E-Two, but so far as we know, that’s all they are—rumors.”

At least Garner has something right, Jack thought.

“If we’re a training ground,” Armitage went on, “it’s totally inadvertent. This is still a free country—” He looked pointedly at Jack. “—more or less. Neither Pete nor I nor anyone else can control what our members do. Unlike the Church, we’ve no wish to.”

Jack’s phone buzzed. It was Bennett.

“You sure about the number you gave me?”

“Two-four-nine-nine CXE,” Jack said.

“Then you’ve got a problem, my friend.” The voice was tight, whispered.

“How serious?”

“That BMW is a Dark Car.”

“What the hell is that?” Jack said.

“There’s no registration attached to that particular tag, no info in the data bank whatsoever.” There was a slight pause. “Which means it belongs to a government black ops division. They have no official oversight.”

Jack’s mind was racing. “Which means they can do pretty much whatever they want.”

“And here’s why: Only four people are authorized to send out a Dark Car,” Bennett said. “The president, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security.”

“How would you know that?” Jack asked.

“Same way I know that all Dark Cars are foreign because no one would think of U.S. government agents using anything but an American vehicle.” Bennett chuckled. “I guess the time when you thought you knew everything about me is over.”

“Thanks,” Jack said.

“For what?” his contact said before hanging up. “We never spoke about this.”

“What?” Armitage said. “Who can do whatever they want?”

“Whoever was in the car.” Jack paused for a moment, thinking the situation through. “It’s not registered. Officially, it doesn’t exist. Neither do its occupants.”

Armitage moaned. “This really is a nightmare.”

“Not if you keep your head.” Jack turned to Armitage. “I’m going to tell you what this is all about. At this point, I think you deserve some context.”

Armitage’s eyes were wide and staring. Jack wondered whether he’d be able to keep his wits about him.

“A few days ago, two Secret Service agents were murdered. The E-Two logo was found at the scene of the crime. That’s why Garner and his people came down on you. This is the opening they’ve been praying for to discredit the entire missionary secularist movement. I’m afraid this Administration is going to do its best to paint your people as criminals—worse, actually, they’ll say you’re homegrown terrorists. They want to destroy you.” Jack paused. “But there is a way out.”

Armitage’s bitter laugh dissolved into a sob. “You must be seeing something I’m not.”

“Very likely,” Jack said. “If you can marshal your resources to help me find the killer, you’ll have the best weapon you can hope for to fight the media firestorm the Administration is planning to rain down on you.” He watched a speeding car pass by. “The problem, as you can see, is that you don’t have much time. I can hold these people off for a day, maybe three, but that’s it.”

Armitage groaned. “What d’you need from me?”

“For starters, a list of your defectors,” Jack said. “Then you and I are going to have to run them down.”

Armitage stared out the window at the low sky, the driving sleet. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“You tell me.”

Armitage pointed. “We’d better get to my office then, as quickly as possible, so I can access the encrypted database.”

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Kansas Avenue. Just south of the junction of Eastern and New Hampshire,” Armitage answered. “You ever heard of the Renaissance Mission Congress?”

Jack said he had.

“Back in the day, before it moved to larger, more luxurious quarters, it was known as the Renaissance Mission Church. We moved into its original building two years ago. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Armitage didn’t know the half of it, Jack thought.

His phone beeped. It was Chief Bennett.

“How did the stop ’n’ shop go?” he asked with no little apprehension.

“It didn’t,” Bennett said. “I don’t know what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into, Jack, but I got an official reprimand and a strict ‘stay clear’ order from the commander.”

“Sorry, Chief, but you also got them off my tail.”

A blur at the corner of Jack’s eye made him reach for his Glock. There was a loud crack, the car swung on its shocks as the bullet entered the car’s metalwork, and Armitage screamed. A second gunshot shattered the windshield, and Jack used the butt of his gun to punch out the crazed sheet of safety glass. Wind and sleet filled the interior, half-blinding him. But his mind had already formed the three-dimensional picture of his car, the road, the BMW. He could see the angles, feel the shifting vectors even as they formed and re-formed.

Just ahead of them, off the driver’s-side fender, rode the gray BMW. Jack could see that the expert driver was jockeying for the perfect position, to enable the shooter to have a clear line of fire. The professionals were leaving nothing to chance.

The scenario was clear in his mind, the playing field existed in his world, and there was no one better at its mastery.

Jack’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, his mind performing a thousand calculations in the blink of an eye. He braked suddenly. The Toyota behind them screeched to slow down, rear-ended them at a reduced speed, jouncing them sharply against their seat belts, then back against the seats. In the following moment, when most people would be in shock, Jack’s brain figured vectors, speeds, distances. Then he slammed the BMW’s right rear fender.

The BMW spun clockwise; then everything happened very quickly. Jack put on speed. The BMW careened out of control, veering sharply to the left, its rims sparking off the wet tarmac. Jack caught a glimpse of the driver desperately scrambling to regain control, the shooter off-balance, white-faced. Then the BMW struck the left-hand guardrail at speed, its rear end rose up angrily before the car punched through the rail, spun crazily down the slope at the side of the parkway.

A moment later, flames flickered and an explosion of debris geysered up as the gas tank cracked. Jack floored the car, heading for Kansas Avenue NE, smack in the middle of his past.

Part 3

24

Alli Carson lay drowsing in the pantry, on the folding cot Kray had provided for her. The sheets and blanket were tucked up around her chin. Her face was flushed but calm. Kray, standing over her, emptied a syringe into the crease behind her left earlobe, where the puncture would never be noticed. On the counter below Carrie’s lair was a full syringe, capped to keep the needle sterile. Kray dropped the empty syringe in the hazmat waste bin, bent over Alli, began to whisper in her ear.

Alli’s mind was adrift on a cloud that shape-shifted first into her favorite toys as a child: Splash the dolphin, Ted the giraffe, and Honey the teddy bear. They romped and laughed as she played with them, before dissolving into other images. At first, these images were jumbled, smeary, and confusing, but presently they resolved themselves into scenes intimately familiar to her. Specifically the incidents that more or less defined her life up to the moment she was abducted.

Her mind brought her back to just before she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease. At thirteen, she suffered moods so black, her mother took her to a psychologist. She referred Alli to her physician, who in turn referred her to an endocrinologist, who finally made the diagnosis. Her pituitary gland was affected, her eyes bulged slightly, her mood swings were vicious, the bouts of anxiety left her limp and exhausted, drenched in her own sweat. There were times when she was sure she was losing her mind. Lying on her bed, she would stare up at the ceiling, lost in the blackness of the universe, the essential futility of life. Future, what future? And why would you want one, anyway? Her heart galloped faster and faster until it seemed as if it would burst through her chest. Methimazole prevented her thyroid from producing too much hormone, so gradually the anxiety loosened its grip on her, her heart rate returned to a normal trot, her eyes ceased to bulge.

These memories, running one over the next, vanished into a pearly mist, only to be replaced by visions of the summer when she went to camp for the first and only time. She was fifteen. She’d begged her parents to let her go, not only to separate herself from the suffocating atmosphere of a senior senator’s entourage but also in order to get a sense of how she’d do on her own. She needed a venue where she could explore who she was. She met a boy—an unutterably handsome boy from a wealthy family in Hartford. His father owned a huge insurance firm that generated obscene profits. His mother was a former Ford model. All this Alli learned from the boy, whose name was Barkley, though with the particular cruelty of teens, everyone called him Bark. Well, almost everyone; the kids on work programs at the camp in order to pay for the privilege of being there had another name for him, Dorkley.

That a portion of the community—so tight-knit, it was incestuous—reviled Barkley only endeared him to Alli. He was a misfit just like her; she could relate to his being marginalized. After dinner, they took walks in the long cobalt twilight, hanging at the edge of the softball field or on the sloping muddy shoulder of the lake. Often they stared as one at the raft moored in the center of the lake. They sat close together, but they never brushed shoulders, let alone held hands. And yet a certain magnetism, plucked out of the droning summer air, drew them, caused them perhaps to feel the same longing, an ache deep down in a place they could not identify. Once, they spoke about the raft in an argot they understood better than anyone else at camp—as Oz, Neverland, the other end of the White Rabbit’s hole, heavily romanticized worlds that were home to Others, the people so special or different, they didn’t belong in Kansas or London or the English countryside.

That night they spoke while the last smears of color faded under the onslaught of darkness. The air grew chill and damp, and still they did not move. Their talking had come to an end; there seemed nothing left to say. It was difficult for Alli to remember who began to strip first. In any event, there came a time when they stood in their underwear side by side, feet in the cool, still water. They heard a bullfrog out on the lake, saw water spiders skimming the surface. All the lights were behind them, up the hill where the buildings were situated. Here their own world began, and Alli, with a shiver of intent, pushed aside her anxiety about her nude body as she slipped out of undershorts and bra.

Wading into the water, arms held high, they lay down in the deliciously cool water, as if it were a bed. Alli did an excellent crawl out to the raft, arrived there seconds before Barkley. She hauled herself, dripping, from the water; he was right behind her.

At first they lay on their stomachs, out of modesty perhaps or because this was the way most children slept. They were still more children than adults, knew it, clung to its safety.

As a certain fear flooded her mind, Alli said, “I don’t want to do anything. You know that.”

Barkley, head on folded forearms, smiled slowly. “Neither do I. We’re just here, right? Just us. We’ve left all the knuckleheads behind.”

Alli laughed softly at how sweetly he used words that were so, well, dorky. It occurred to her that his very unhipness was another reason she liked him. Preening boys, showing off their cool in the most obvious and ostentatious manner, had a tendency to buzz around her because they wanted something from her father, if only to bask in the penumbra of his celebrity. Proximity to power was a potent aphrodisiac for boys of that age, and would be, until they had gathered their own. Later in life, it would be the women who’d be buzzing around these boys’ moneyed hives.

They lay side by side on their softly rocking island, silent, listening to the slap of rope against the raft’s pontoons, the lap of water, and in the humming night the occasional bellow of the bullfrog, the call of a skimming loon on its way to nest for the night, the eerie hoot of an owl high overhead. Who turned first? Alli couldn’t recall, but all at once they were lying on their backs, their eyes focused on the spangled blackness of the sky, not on the pale flesh beside them, a blobby blur in the corners of their eyes.

“I wish we were up there,” Barkley said, “on a spaceship heading for another planet.”

He was a sci-fi nut, reading Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl. Alli had read them also, saw through them. They were men from the dying pulpmagazine world—men with amazing ideas, granted, but they weren’t writers, not when you compared them with her current favorites, Melville, Hugo, Steinbeck.

“But the planets have no breathable atmosphere,” Alli said. “What would we do when we got there?”

“We’d find a way to survive,” Barkley said in a very grown-up tone of voice. “Humans always do.” He turned his head, looked at her. “Don’t we?”

Alli, mute, felt paralyzed beneath his serious gaze. Trying to put herself in his head, she wondered what he thought of the body stretched out before him. She herself had not looked at his.

He rose up on his side to face her, head propped on the heel of one hand. His hair was golden, his skin glowing. All of him seemed golden. “Don’t you want to fly far, far away, Alli?”

A moment ago, she would have said yes, but now, forced to make a decision, she didn’t know what she wanted. She thought she’d miss her family, no matter how annoying and stifling they sometimes could be. She didn’t want to be without them, and then the revelation hit her: She was a conventional girl, after all. The thought depressed her momentarily.

“I want to go back.”

She sat up, but Barkley put a hand on her forearm. “Hey, it’s early yet. Don’t get spooked, no one can see us, we’re safe.”

Reluctantly, she lay back down, but a subtle shift had occurred inside her, and she was unable to keep her thoughts at rest.

As if sensing her unease, Barkley wriggled up behind her, put one arm gently around her. “I’ll just hold you close, I’ll protect you, then we’ll swim back, okay?”

She said nothing, but her body nestled back against his and she gave an involuntary sigh. Folding one arm beneath her cheek, she closed her eyes. Her thoughts, like fireflies, darted this way and that against the blackness of her lids. Eventually, though, she felt a warmth spread from Barkley to her, the fireflies dimmed, then vanished altogether as she fell into peaceful slumber.

She was awakened slowly, almost druggily, by a repeating rhythmic sound and a persistent sensation. Drawn fully out of sleep, she realized that it was pain she felt, pain and pressure in a localized area, the place between her buttocks. It was then that she realized that the rhythmic sound and the pressure were connected. Barkley, grunting, held her tight against him. Sweat slicked the surface of her back, spooned against his front, and a peculiar musky scent dilated her nostrils, roiled her insides.

“What are you doing?” Her voice was thick, still slurry with sleep.

His grunting became more intense.

All at once, she snapped fully awake. She felt something rubbing against her bare buttock.

“Have you lost your mind?”

For what seemed like an eternity, she struggled silently in the prison of his arms.

It was only later, in the relative safety of her bunk, that she began to realize that she had been the victim of violence. At the moment, she was defeated by shock and terror. Her little body shook and quivered with each masculine thrust. She wanted to curl up into a ball, a crushed and discarded paper bag. She wanted to cry, she wanted to beam herself to another planet like they did in Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty, she thought despairingly. But she remained locked in the sweaty embrace of this monstrous octopus that had risen up from the muck of the lake to entwine her in its tentacles.

Suspended time ticked away like taffy being pulled in slo-mo. She was no longer there, on the bucking raft, pinned to sun-beaten wooden slats. Pine trees on the shore ruffled; a sinister cloud, spreading like mist, masked the bone-white moon. An owl hooted, and a squadron of bats winged low over the water like Darth Vader’s TIE fighters. But she was deaf and blind to the world around her. Her mind fled down pitch-black hallways that smelled of him, of them, of sweat and fear, of wood-rot and despair. But this place wouldn’t do, so she went deeper, to a fortress her mind made impenetrable, and there she pulled up the drawbridge, locked herself away like a princess in a fairy tale, retired to the keep in the still center.

Without knowing how, she wormed her way to the edge of the raft. Perhaps Barkley was done and simply let her go. Rolling into the still, black water, she gasped, wept as she swam back to shore.

She never told her parents what had happened that night. In fact, she scarcely spoke a sentence to them in the aftermath, preferring to grunt or not to respond at all to their probes. In those months when autumn strode confidently after summer, her mother badgered her about dating Barkley, who, she felt certain, was the perfect match for her daughter. In fact, Alli was boxed into going to dinner with Barkley and both their parents. What seemed to her in summer handsome was now in autumn reptilian. She felt her stomach heave at first sight of him, and when forced to sit beside him, all appetite fled her like a mouse at the pounce of a hungry cat. What followed was an excruciatingly awkward, secretly embarrassing evening. Over ashy coffee and cloying flourless chocolate cake, Barkley, his nose firmly up her father’s ass, contrived to tell him a joke. At the same time, hidden beneath the table, he slithered his hand between her thighs. Alli leapt up and fled the restaurant, for which, later, she was severely reprimanded. She’d broken her mother’s strict rules of social engagement, and that was that.

That might have bothered the old, proper Alli, her mother’s clone, but that girl was dead, left at the mercy of the sweaty octopus on the raft. When she’d dropped into the lake, the black water closing over her head, swirling her hair across her face, there had come a breach. Her old self turned to misty cloud that masked the illumination of the moon. She left behind everything she had felt or believed. In the process, she shriveled, closed up like a clam inside its striated shell. But alone with herself she was safe.

In time, even her mother came to dimly realize that something was wrong. Since neither tough love nor punishment worked, she sent Alli to a psychologist, which made Alli retreat even further into her citadel of solitude. She was reduced to weaving lies in order to avoid being sucked into that cold, impersonal office furnished with psychobabble. She never once considered what the solemn man sitting across from her made of those lies; she didn’t care. She had already developed a healthy cynicism about males, and as for trust, forget about it.

Within six weeks, unable to make any headway, the shrink recommended a meds psychiatrist, who met with Alli for twenty minutes. Diagnosing her depression, he handed her a smile along with a prescription for Wellbutrin XL.

“We’ll give the Wellbutrin several weeks. If it doesn’t do the trick there’s a whole galaxy of medications we can try,” he said. “Worry not, we’ll have you right as rain in no time.”

She promptly threw the little cream-colored pills into a trash bin at the pharmacy.

In Alli’s drugged mind, it was now three years later. She heard “Neon Bible” by Arcade Fire as if from a long distance away. Superimposed over it was the drone of a familiar voice, repeating instructions she found so rudimentary, a half-wit could follow them. Still, they were repeated to the cadence of “Neon Bible” until they became as much a part of her as her lungs or her heart.

Presently, on a cloud of memory, she drifted off again, into her past. She had met Emma McClure on her first day at Langley Fields, and from that moment on she knew she wanted Emma to be her roommate. The college had assigned her someone else—a blonde from Texas, whom she loathed on sight; her accent alone set Alli’s teeth on edge, not to mention her obsessions with high-end clothes and imported beauty products. Alli lobbied for a switch, for she and Emma to be together, and finally the administration acceded to her request. It wasn’t that she’d demanded they do as she asked; she didn’t have to go that far, merely point out that she’d mention the “stressful” situation to her father. The headmistress didn’t want Edward Carson on her case; no one would, not even the president.

There were reasons Alli liked Emma. Emma came from the wrong side of the tracks, from a family that had to take on debt to send her to Langley Fields. She was smart, funny, and, best of all, utterly without pretensions. Born into a family with, it seemed to her, nothing but pretensions, Alli lived in fear that this trait lay buried in her DNA, sealing her fate, would at any moment turn itself on like a geyser, humiliate her to tears. And when, at Emma’s insistence, she read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, she understood that Emma was a kind of talisman, her subversive bent a magic charm that could immunize Alli against her screwed-up hereditary disease.

Plus there was an edge, a toughness to Emma, the hardy scuff picked up in the street. She was fearless. Privilege, Alli had reason to understand, made you soft, vulnerable, fearful, as if your body had been turned inside out, pink and pulsing. It was a hateful disfigurement, one she felt powerless to reverse until Emma came into her life.

Then everything changed.

25

“It’s a total blackout,” Chief Bennett said, “as if the Dark Car never crashed.”

“What about the gunshots on Kirby Road?” Jack asked.

Bennett shook his head. “Only a small item about a milk truck that caught fire.”

The two friends sat in Tysons Corner in a small coffee shop with a striped awning out front and bistro tables inside. From where Jack sat, he had a good view through the front window of the leafy side street and the occasional passing car. As soon as he had dropped a thoroughly rattled Armitage off at his office, he called Bennett. Then he ran every red light to get here. The pursuit by the Dark Car, the shooting, and its aftermath had shaken him more than he cared to admit. He felt as if he had entered a new and far more dangerous arena.

Bennett turned his coffee cup around and around as if something about its symmetry made him uncomfortable. “Someone very high up in the government food chain is spinning the news at a furious clip,” Bennett said.

“According to your information, that would be the president, the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, or the National Security Advisor. Why in the world would any one of them want me dead?”

Bennett watched a middle-aged man enter, then slide into a booth where a young woman waited for him. She smiled, took his hand in hers. Bennett lost interest in them.

“I’ve been in this business thirty years,” he said. “I’ve never run up against a brick wall like this. Jack, I’ve made a career of getting around the brick walls of various government agencies, but this one’s different. None of my contacts can help me—or they won’t.”

“Too scared?”

Bennett nodded. “I’m sorry, Jack. I should have followed you, should have protected you.”

“It’s not your job.”

“I agreed to have you seconded to Hugh Garner’s band of merry men.” He gave Jack a lopsided grin. “I knew more or less I was throwing you to the dogs.”

Jack nodded. “You warned me. But it was Edward Carson who asked for me. I don’t see how you could’ve refused.”

There was an unhappy pause while the waitress refilled their cups. Bennett’s eyes strayed out through the side window, across the avenue. Following his gaze, Jack saw the bottles of wine, whiskey, designer vodkas, aged rums artfully displayed in the window of the shop across the street.

“I suppose it doesn’t get any easier.”

Bennett shook his head. “It’s like a siren’s call.”

“As long as you’re securely lashed to the mast like Ulysses.”

Bennett’s gaze swung back to him. “I lost my wife because I was drunk all the time; I’m not about to go off the wagon now.”

“I’m happy to hear it.”

Bennett poured half-and-half into his cup, along with lots of sugar. That was his treat. “Speaking of wives, you ought to get back with Sharon.”

“I was wondering why you insisted she come down to the hospital.”

“To be honest, Jack, she was glad I asked. I think she wanted to come.”

Jack sipped his coffee, said nothing.

“I know you’re still pissed about her and Jeff.”

“You could say that. He was my best friend.”

“Jack, what he did—he was never your friend.”

Jack’s eyes slid away, staring at nothing.

“Sharon did it to get back at you, because she blamed you for Emma’s death. She made a mistake.” Bennett’s voice was low, urgent. “Jack, don’t fuck things up with this girl. She loves you.” He gave a little laugh. “Shit, you’re not the hard-hearted bastard you think you are.”

As Jack turned onto Kansas Avenue NE, he saw Nina waiting for him. He’d called her while walking out of the coffee shop in Tysons Corner. She leaned against her black Ford, smoking one of her clove cigarettes. She looked unaccountably fetching in boots with sensible heels, dark slacks, and a navy peacoat buttoned up to the chin. She seemed oblivious of the sleet.

The Hi-Line had been transformed into the Black Abyssinian Cultural Center. The electronics shop behind which Andre and his crew had beaten the crap out of him was now a ninety-nine-cent store. Otherwise Kansas Avenue looked much the same. It was still filthy and decrepit, no place for the Renaissance Mission Congress. But the old clapboard building, still peeling, still deeply tarnished with mildew, did seem peculiarly appropriate for the First American Secular Revivalists.

Jack got out of the car and led Nina into the building that held so many memories for him.

Where there had once been pews and pulpits was now a large work space divided into cubicles by cheap, movable half walls, each equipped with a desk, cordless phone, computer terminal, and the like. A soft murmur of voices filled the area where once a choir had opened up their throats and their hearts to God.

The cubicles were filled by an eclectic army of men and women whose ages Jack judged to be from their early twenties to their late sixties. They all looked extraordinarily busy. Only a young girl glanced up as they went past.

Armitage—and presumably Peter Link—occupied a separate office, what had once been Reverend Myron Taske’s rectory. Jack, in the center of the room, looked around. The huge armoire was still against one wall, Taske’s battle-scarred desk was opposite, but everything else was different—modern, sleek, gleaming. Maybe it was the new furniture that made the room look so small, Jack thought. Or perhaps it was his memory playing tricks on him. Either way, as in the Langley Fields buildings, Jack felt a dislocation—as if he were both here and not here. He wondered if that was how Emma felt when she appeared in the backseat of his car.

By this time, Armitage was behind his desk. “You said you wanted a list of members who had defected over the last eighteen months.”

Jack cleared his throat. “That’s right.”

Armitage nodded. “I can do that.”

His fingertips flew over his computer keyboard, typing in the algorithm that would decrypt the FASR database. A moment later, he was scrolling down a list, cutting and pasting into a new document. He pressed a key, and the printer began to hum. Then it spit out two sheets of paper. Armitage leaned over, pulled them out of the hopper, handed them to Jack.

Jack was aware of Nina very close beside him, leaning in to read the list so easily, so effortlessly, he felt a stab of envy. For him it was a struggle of the first order. He concentrated in the way Reverend Taske had taught him, remembering the three-dimensional letters Taske had made for him, so Jack could feel them, understand their individual nature in order to recognize them in two dimensions, make sense of their sequences. The letters stopped swimming away from him, began to gather like fish around a coral reef. Jack began to read the names, slowly but accurately.

“See anyone you know?” Armitage asked.

Jack, concentrating fully, shook his head.

Nina looked around, said to Armitage, “Honestly, I don’t get what you’re all about.”

“It’s not so mysterious, despite what the talking heads on Fox News claim,” Armitage said. “I and people like me don’t want to live in a ‘Christian nation,’ we don’t want members of the Administration to be anointing themselves with holy oil. Above all, we don’t want a president who believes he’s doing the will of God. We simply want the freedom to explore the unknown, wherever that might lead.”

“Where d’you stand on the human soul?”

“Several leading scientists around the world who are missionary secularists believe that what we call a soul is in fact electrical energy, that when the body dies, that energy lives on. That’s one of the mysteries they’re trying to solve.”

“And God?”

“God is a personal matter, Ms. Miller. Many of us believe absolutely in God, in whatever form. It’s not God that we’re fighting against. It’s what’s done in God’s name by all the ‘systems of religion.’

“Here, let me give you an example from history.” He rummaged around his desk until he found a hardcover book titled Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “These are the words of William Blake, the eighteenth-century English visionary:

‘All Bibles and sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors:

That man has two really existing principles, viz., a body and a soul.

That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the body, and

Reason, called Good, is alone

from the soul.

But the following contraries to these are true:

Man has no body distinct from the Soul—for what is

called body is that portion of the soul

discerned by the five senses …

Energy is the only life, and is from body, and Reason is

the bound or outward

circumference of energy.’”

Armitage closed the book, set it aside. “What William Blake is saying is that there is no evil inherent in human beings. I believe him. The story of the poisoned apple from the Tree of Knowledge is a fiction created by men who, from the first, sought power over others by keeping them ignorant.”

Nina said, “Still, I don’t understand your preoccupation with finding the meaning of things. What if there is no meaning?”

“Keeping yourself in ignorance is the Church’s idea,” Armitage said calmly. “Knowledge is wisdom, Ms. Miller. Wisdom is power. Power provides individuality.”

“It also feeds the ego,” Nina said. “An excess of ego breeds chaos.”

“Come on.” Jack took Nina by the elbow, moved her toward the rectory door. “This guy can debate you until Gabriel comes calling.” As he hustled her out the door, he said, “Thanks for your help, Armitage.”

“Anytime.” Armitage was already back to work, scanning his e-mails.

“I just may take you up on that.” Jack closed the door softly behind him.

As soon as Jack and Nina left the FASR offices, a young woman in her early twenties got rid of her current call. She was pretty, dark of hair, fair of cheek. In fact, in looks, size, and age she was remarkably similar to the homeless girl Ronnie Kray had picked up off the street for the use of her left hand, the girl who was now moldering in his refrigerator.

The pretty FASR worker dialed a local number. Almost immediately, she heard the familiar male voice on the other end.

“Yes, Calla.”

“He just left,” Calla said into the receiver.

“You’re certain it’s him,” Kray said.

Calla looked down into the open drawer of her desk. Among the pens, pencils, erasers, paper clips, and spare staples was the small photo of Jack McClure Kray had given her. It had the same flat, slightly grainy look as the photos of Alli Carson that hung on the wall of Kray’s house in Anacostia.

“Absolutely,” Calla said.

“Tonight. Same time, same place.” Kray broke the connection.

26

“Goddamnit!”

Secretary Dennis Paull rarely lost his temper, but as those who worked closely with him could attest, when he did fly into a rage, it was best to say, “Yessir!” and get out of his way.

“Goddamnit to hell!” The Secretary of Homeland Security had his cell phone jammed so tightly to his head, circulation was being cut off to his ear. “The occupants were roasted alive, then.”

He listened intently to the harried voice on the other end of the line. The call had come in just as he was about to go into a debriefing with the POTUS, the Secretary of State, and one of the ranking generals—he forgot who, they all looked, spoke, and thought alike—who had just returned from the successful arm-twisting of the Russian president, Yukin. The POTUS was jubilant. He told Paull to get his fanny over to the West Wing, that they were all going to gorge themselves on beluga caviar, a parting gift from Yukin, who had knuckled under to the president’s agenda.

Paull had been on his way to see his wife, not that she would recognize him. But when he failed to see her during the week, his heart broke all over again, and thoughts of their courtship and early years together would flood through him like a riptide, threatening to spin him away on whatever mysterious current had snatched her away from him. For an insane moment, he had contemplated the unthinkable: defying the president, sitting with Louise, holding her hand, willing the puzzlement out of her eyes and mind, willing her back to him. But then his survival instincts, honed by decades inside the Beltway, came to the fore and saved him.

Paull was about to say something but caught himself in time. He was standing on the blue carpet that led to the Oval Office. He was surrounded by polished wood paneling, cream paint, and the hushed sounds of a staff that ran like a well-oiled machine. Like the emanations of magnetic north, he felt the waves of power so close to the Oval Office. He was not fooled, however; the power lay in the office, not in the man who temporarily inhabited it. He strode down the hall, and then ducked into a small room, an extra office that was deserted. His phone was specially designed by the magicians at DARPA, ensuring that his conversations would sound like gibberish to anyone picking up the bandwidth. Nevertheless, he was cautious about his own voice being overheard.

“You’re sure they’re dead,” he said into the phone.

“They had no time to get out,” the man on the other end of the line said. “And believe me, no one short of Superman could have survived that blaze.”

“How the hell did this happen?”

“The best I can tell, McClure pissed them off. He got on to them; he sicced his ATF pals on them. They couldn’t believe it, so they went after him.”

Paull rolled his eyes. Why did he have to suffer these incompetents? But he already knew the answer. Incompetents were who this Administration hired. “And,” he prompted.

“They got a little overzealous.”

Paull had to count to ten before he could say in a low voice, “You call firing handguns on the parkway ‘overzealous’? This wasn’t a termination mission, for the love of Mike.”

Silence on the line.

Paull felt as if his eyes were bugging out of his head. “It sure as hell wasn’t a termination mission.”

“Sir,” the disembodied voice replied, “they sure as hell thought it was.”

“What about your car?” Nina said.

Jack drove south on Kansas Avenue. Considering the gray BMW, he thought it best not to be driving his car the rest of the day. “After we’re done, you can drop me back here.”

“It may be nothing but a burned-out husk by that time,” Nina said.

“Or it might not be there at all and I can requisition a new one.”

“Har-har.” Nina banged down her door lock. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“Take a look at the list.”

Nina took up the two sheets Armitage had given them, her eyes scrolling down the list of names. “What am I looking for?”

“Known criminals.”

“Let’s see.” Nina ran her forefinger down the list on both sheets. “Nope. Nothing shouts out at me.”

Jack made another turn, onto Peabody Street NW. He checked the rearview mirror. He was justifiably paranoid about tails. “Try the second sheet, fourth name from the bottom.”

“Joachim Tolkan? What about him?”

“Twenty-five years ago, his father, Cyril, was a notorious criminal in this section of the District.” Jack put on some speed. “Ran numbers, drugs, and explosives out of the All Around Town bakery.”

Nina laughed. “That’s where I get my croissants and coffee. There are maybe a dozen of them throughout the District.”

“Back in the day,” Jack said, “there was only one.”

Perhaps Nina heard something in his tone. “You knew the father, this Cyril Tolkan.”

“He murdered someone.” Jack slowed as they approached the old tenement, home of the original All Around Town bakery. “Someone close to me.”

Nina frowned as Jack pulled to a stop on Fourth Street NW between Kennedy and Jefferson. “This isn’t some kind of personal vendetta, is it, because we have no time for extracurricular activities of any nature whatsoever.”

Jack was sorely tempted to describe in detail Hugh Garner’s manhandling of Peter Link, but decided against it. Instead, he said, “I have a hunch. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll drop it and we’ll be back to square one.”

He knew he was on edge. Why would any of the four order him tailed and attacked? Was it Armitage they wanted silenced? The state of unknowing was not a pleasant one for him. He resisted the urge to call Bennett; he knew the chief would contact him as soon as he had dug up anything of substance.

A bell sounded as they entered the bakery. The place was much as he remembered, full of the delicious swirl of butter, sugar, yeast, baking bread. He remembered in vivid detail the first time Gus had taken him here. In his mind’s eye, he could see Cyril’s goons standing around, reading the racing forms, waiting for their orders to dispense drugs or weapons, pick up payments, and if the envelope was a little light, to deliver a bloody payment of their own. He remembered the balding man behind the counter who gave him a chocolate-chip cookie. And Cyril himself, with his dark, olive eyes, his Slavic cheekbones, and his sinister air. Today, however, there were only a couple of elderly ladies buying their daily bread. They smiled at him as they walked out with their sweet-smelling purchases.

“Name’s Oscar. Can I help you?”

A short, squat man in a baker’s apron, with a monkish fringe of hair around the circumference of his milk chocolate scalp and a wide flat nose that must once have been broken regarded them with curious eyes and a welcoming smile. The current All Around Town bakery was a couple of light-years from the shop Cyril Tolkan had presided over.

“I’ll take a square of crumb cake.” Jack turned to Nina. “And you, sweetheart?”

Nina, unfazed, shook her head.

Jack grinned at Oscar. “The missus is a bit shy in this neighborhood.”

“I understand completely.” Oscar had a spray of freckles over the flattened bridge of his nose. He placed Jack’s crumb cake in a square of paper on the top of the glass case. Addressing Nina, he said, “How about a chocolate-chip cookie?” He picked one out of the pile, held it out. “No one can resist one of our chocolate-chip cookies.”

Jack remembered. Even stale it was good.

Nina gave a tight smile, took the cookie.

Jack took out his wallet.

“The cookie’s on the house,” Oscar said.

Jack thanked him as he paid. He bit into the crumb cake, said, “Delicious.” As he chewed, he said, “I wonder if Joachim is around.”

Oscar busied himself arranging a tray of linzer tortes. “Friend or business?”

“A little of both.”

Oscar seemed to take this nonanswer in stride. “The boss’ll be back tomorrow. He’s in Miami Beach, for his mother’s funeral.”

Jack looked around the room, munched on his crumb cake. “You know what time he’ll be in?”

“First thing in the morning,” Oscar said. “I just got off the phone with him.” He took a tray of butter cookies from a thin lad who’d appeared from the oven room. “Any message?”

“No.” Jack finished off the crumb cake, brushed his fingertips together. “We’ll be back.”

Oscar held aloft a couple of cookies. “Something for the road?”

Jack took them.

27

The Renaissance Mission Church is more than a place of worship for Jack; it’s his schoolhouse. It doesn’t take long for Reverend Taske to unearth the root of Jack’s reading difficulties. As it happens, he’s studied a bit about dyslexia, but now he studies more. Every evening when Jack arrives after work at the Hi-Line, Taske has another idea he’s found in some book or other pulled from libraries all over the District.

One evening Jack is particularly frustrated by trying to read a book—this one is of poems by Emily Dickinson. He lashes out, breaks a glass on Reverend Taske’s desk. Immediately ashamed, he too-quickly picks up the shards, cuts the edge of his hand. After throwing the glass into the wastepaper basket, he goes over to the armoire, takes out the first aid kit. As he does so, his eye is caught by something on the floor of the armoire. Pushing aside some boxes, he sees what looks like a door.

Just as he’s pushing the boxes back in place, Reverend Taske comes in. Within the blink of an eye, he seems to take in the entire scenario. He holds out his hand, and once Jack gives him the first aid kit, gestures for Jack to sit down. He looks at the cut on Jack’s hand.

“What happened?”

“I was having trouble reading,” Jack said. “I got angry.”

Taske searches to make sure no tiny bit of glass has lodged itself in the wound. “The glass means nothing.” He begins to disinfect the wound. “But your anger needs tending.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says.

“Before you allow your temper to flare, think about why you’re angry.” Taske bandages the cut, then indicates the armoire. “I expect you’re wondering where that trapdoor leads.” He regards Jack sternly. “I can trust you, can’t I?”

Jack sits up straight. “Yes, sir.”

Reverend Taske gives him a wink. “You see, back in the thirties, when liquor was outlawed, these buildings were under the control of bootleggers—people who dealt in illegal liquor. There’s a tunnel under here that leads into Gus’s back room.” He closes up the kit, puts it away. “Now, let’s get back to Emily Dickinson.”

“I’ll never be able to get it,” Jack says in despair.

Taske bids him put down the slim volume. “Listen to me, Jack. Your brain is special. It processes things in a way mine can’t—in three dimensions.” He hands Jack a Rubik’s Cube. “The idea here is to get a solid color on each side of the cube. Go on. Give it a try.”

As Jack turns the cube, understanding comes to him full-blown, and he manipulates the mind-bending puzzle. He hands the cube back to Taske. Each side is a solid color.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” Taske says. “All the current literature claims you wouldn’t have trouble solving Rubik’s puzzle, but four minutes!” He whistles. “No one else I know can solve this, Jack, let alone so quickly.”

“Really?”

Taske smiles. “Really.”

Though it’s in a run-down neighborhood that could charitably be called marginal, the Renaissance Mission Church attracts a high level of media coverage and, therefore, attendance from local politicos. This is due to the benevolent work Reverend Taske does, rehabilitating hardened criminals of thirteen or fourteen, turning them into citizens of the District who make tangible contributions to their neighborhood. Taske’s admirable goal is to rehab the entire area, not by inviting white entrepreneurs to take over failing black businesses, but by creating black entrepreneurs who have the tools to turn these businesses into moneymaking operations. Unfortunately, in his neighborhood, the businesses that make the most money are those that run numbers, deploy prostitutes, deal drugs. Old habits are hard to break, especially those that have proved painlessly lucrative for their bosses. No schooling is needed, no learning to abide by the laws of the Man. No need to become civilized—or even civil, for that matter. All that’s required is muscle, guns, and a pair of brass balls.

That includes Andre. After taking his lumps from his boss, Cyril Tolkan, for beating up on Jack, Andre has moved up Tolkan’s crooked corporate ladder with alarming rapidity. Part of his motivation, of course, was to get out of Tolkan’s doghouse, but far more worrying is the flame of his ambition, which is burning brighter than even Gus had imagined. Andre never comes to the church anymore, and ever since Reverend Taske returned from Andre’s new lair with a black eye and a lacerated cheek, he doesn’t even mention his name. Gus, enraged, wanted to go after Andre himself, but Taske wouldn’t let him. Jack happens to overhear their conversation early one Sunday morning, which takes place in the rectory, where Jack is laboriously working his way through The Great Gatsby. The novel is interesting because, like Jack himself, Gatsby is an outsider. But it becomes downright fascinating when Jack, thumbing through a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald he takes out of the local library, learns that the author was, like Jack himself, dyslexic.

“I’ve had enough standin’ aside while Andre goes off on ev’rybody,” Gus says.

“You just can’t abide him taking business from you,” Reverend Taske responds.

“Huh! Looka whut he did to you!”

“Occupational hazard,” Taske says. “You’re not my daddy, Augustus. I can take care of myself.”

“By turnin’ the other cheek.”

“That’s how I was taught, Augustus. That’s what I believe.”

“Whut you believe ain’t nuthin’ but a jackass’s brayin’.”

Jack sucks in his breath. He is compelled to get up, creep down the hall, put his eye to the crack between door and jamb he makes by pulling with his fingertips. In his limited line of vision, the Reverend Taske is eclipsed by Gus’s planetary shape.

“Because your ire is up, I’m going to ignore your insult to me, Augustus, but I can’t overlook your blasphemy toward God. When we’re done, I want you to make penance.”

“Not today, Reverend. I gots no truck with turnin’ the other cheek. Moment I knuckle to that, I’m shit outta business. You-all gonna tell me that if I don’t do fo’ myself, God will?”

“I am concerned for your immortal soul, Augustus,” Taske says slowly and carefully.

“Huh, you best be concerned with things that matter, like whut you gonna do ’bout expenses round here now that yo’ famous bank vice president got indicted for embezzlement. Reg’lators gone pulled the plug on all his deals, including the one that’s been keeping this place afloat fo’ three years.”

Jack hears the creak of a chair, figures the reverend has sat heavily down. “You do have a point there, Augustus.”

“Now, you know I make a lotta money, Reverend, an’ I’ll give you as much as I can.”

“The church isn’t here to drain you of every penny you make.”

“Still an’ all,” Gus perseveres, “whatever I can muster won’t be enough. You gotta think long-term.”

“If you have a suggestion,” Taske says.

It’s at that point that Jack knocks on the door. There is a short startled silence, at the end of which Taske’s voice bids Jack enter.

Jack stands in the doorway until the reverend beckons him into the room. “What can I do for you, Jack? Having trouble decoding Fitzgerald’s prose?”

“It’s not that.” Jack is for a moment at a loss for words. Taske looks weary, older. Why hasn’t he noticed this before? Jack asks himself.

“Augustus and I are in the middle of a discussion, Jack,” Taske says kindly.

“I know, that’s why I came in.”

“Oh?”

“I couldn’t help overhearing.”

“Huh, you betta close that door good,” Gus says, “so you the on’y one.”

Jack shuts the door firmly, turns around. “I heard about the money crisis.”

“That’s none o’ yo’ business,” Gus says darkly.

“I think I have a way out,” Jack says.

The two men seem to hang suspended between disbelief and raucous laughter. The thought that a fifteen-year-old has seen a way out of the fiscal quicksand the Renaissance Mission Church has unceremoniously found itself in is, on the face of it, ludicrous. Except, as both men know, each in his own way, this is Jack—and Jack is capable of extraordinary leaps of logic that are beyond either of them.

So Taske says, “Go ahead, Jack. We’re listening.”

“I was thinking of Senator Edward Carson.”

Taske frowns. “What about him, son?”

“He was here last week,” Jack says. “I read the papers—you assign me to do that every day, and I do.”

Taske smiles. “I know you do.”

“I noticed that Senator Carson got a lot of great press out of his visit here. He even spent some time with the parishioners before and after the service. He said he used to sing in his choir back home in Nebraska. I heard him accept your invitation to sing with our choir today.”

“All true,” Taske agrees. “What exactly is your point, Jack?”

“There’s an election coming up this fall. Senator Carson’s campaign war chest is big. According to the papers, he’s the party’s great future hope. The bigwigs are rumored to be grooming him to run for president one day. Him being here last week and this, I think the rumor’s true. But to make a successful run, he’s going to need every vote he can get. Last time I looked, there weren’t too many blacks living in Nebraska, which is where the Renaissance Mission Church comes in.”

“Huh. Sounds like the kid’s on to sumthin’,” Gus says. “Yes, indeed.”

Taske’s mouth is half-open. Jack can just about see the gears mesh in his mind, the wheels begin to turn.

“I don’t believe it,” Taske says at length. “You want me to offer him votes for funding.”

Jack nods.

“But we’re one small community church.”

“Today you are,” Jack says. “That’s the beauty of the idea. You’re always talking about expanding beyond the neighborhood. This is your chance. With Senator Carson’s backing, the Renaissance Mission Church could go regional, then national. By the time he’s ready to make his run at the presidency, you’ll be in position to offer him the kind of help he’ll need most.”

Gus laughs. “This here boy thinks as big as the sky.”

“Yes,” Taske says slowly, “but he has a point.”

“Carson’s gotta go for it,” Gus cautions.

“Why won’t he?” Jack says. “He’s a successful politician. His livelihood depends on him making deals, accommodations, alliances. Think about it. There’s no downside for him. Even if you should fail, Reverend, he gets a ton of national press for helping a minority raise itself off its knees.”

“Jack’s right. The idea makes perfect sense,” Taske says. He’s chewing over the idea, looking at it from all angles. “And what’s more, it just might work!” Then he slams his palms down on the desk as he jumps up. “I knew it! The good Lord bringing you to us was a miracle!”

“Here we go,” Gus growls, but Jack can see he’s as proud of Jack as Taske is.

“My boy, who would have thought of this but you?” The Reverend Myron Taske takes Jack’s hand, pumps it enthusiastically. “I think you just might have saved us all.”

28

Lyn Carson stood at the bedroom window of the suite high up in the Omni Shoreham Hotel. Dusk was extinguishing the daylight, like a mother snuffing out candles one by one. Ribbons of lights moved along Massachusetts Avenue, and the skeletal structure of the Connecticut Avenue Bridge was lit by floodlights. She and her husband were here for a few days to escape the depressing reality that each hour of each day pressed more heavily in on them.

Alli was somewhere out there. Lyn tried willing her into being, to stand here, safe beside her.

Hearing Edward moving about in the sitting room, she turned. She knew why he liked this storied hotel above all others in the District. Though its architecture was blunt to the point of being downright ugly, it was downstairs in room 406D that Harry Truman, whom Edward so admired, had often come to play poker with his friends Senator Stewart Symington, Speaker of the House John McCormack, and Doorkeeper of the House Fishbait Miller.

Just then, her husband’s cell phone rang and her heart leapt into her throat. My Alli, my darling, she thought, running through the open doorway. Her thoughts swung wildly: They’ve found her, she’s dead, oh my God in Heaven, let it be good news!

But she stopped short when Edward, seeing the look on her face, gave her a quick shake of his head. No, it wasn’t news of Alli, after all. Churning with disappointment and relief, Lyn turned away, stumbled back to the sitting room, half-blinded by tears. Where are you, darling? What have they done to you?

She stood by the window, watching with a kind of irrational fury the indifferent world. How could people laugh, how could they be driving to dinner, having parties, making love, how could they be out jogging, or meeting under a lamppost. How could they be carefree when the world was so filled with dread? What was wrong with them?

She clasped her palms together in front of her breast. Dear God, she prayed for the ten-thousandth time, please give Alli the strength to survive. Please give Jack McClure the energy and wisdom to find her. God, give my precious daughter back to me, and I’ll sacrifice anything. Whatever you want from me I’ll gladly give, and more. You are the Power and the Glory forever and ever. Amen.

Just then she felt Edward’s strong arms around her, and her shell of toughness—hard but brittle—shattered to pieces. Tears welled out of her eyes and a sob was drawn up from the depths of her. She turned into his chest, weeping uncontrollably as black thoughts rolled through her mind like thunderheads.

Edward Carson held her tight, kissed the top of her head. His own eyes welled with tears of despair and frustration. “That was Jack. No news yet, but he’s making progress.”

Lyn made a little sound—half gasp, half moan—at the back of her throat.

“Alli’s a strong girl, she’ll be all right.” He stroked her back, soothing them both. “Jack will find her.”

“I know he will.”

They stood like that for a long time, above their own Washington, the world at their feet, the taste of ashes in their mouths. And yet their hearts beat strongly together, and where hearts were strong, they knew, there was fight yet left. There was hope. Hope and faith.

A sharp rap on the door to the sitting room caused them both to start.

“It’s okay.” Edward Carson kissed her lightly on the lips. “Rest a little now before dinner.”

She nodded, watched him cross the bedroom, close the connecting door behind him. Rest, she thought. How does one rest with a heart full of dread?

The president-elect pulled the door open, stood aside so Dennis Paull could enter, then shut and locked it behind him.

“Nina delivered your message,” Carson said.

“The Secret Service agents outside?”

“Absolutely secure. You can take that to the bank.” He walked over to a sideboard. “Drink?”

“Nothing better.” Paull sat on a sofa that faced the astonishing view. “What I like most about flying is that you’re so high up, there’s nothing but sky. No woes, no uncertainty, no fears.”

He accepted the single-malt with a nod of thanks. Carson had no need of asking what Paull drank. The two men had known each other for many years, long before the current president had been elected to his first term. Two years into that first term, when Paull had been faced with carrying out yet another semi-legal directive he found personally abhorrent, he was faced with a professional dilemma. He might have tendered his resignation, but instead he’d gone to see Edward Carson. In hindsight, of course, Paull understood that he’d already made his choice, which was far more difficult and dangerous than simply throwing in the towel. He’d decided to stay on, to fight for the America he believed in in every way he could. His plan began with the alliance he and Edward Carson formed.

This was surprisingly easy. The two men held the same vision for America, which included returning the country to a healthy separation of church and state. Though fiscal conservatives, they were moderates in virtually every other area. They both disliked partisan politics and despised political hacks. They wanted to get on with things without being encumbered with pork barrel politics. They wanted to mend fences overseas, to try to undo the image of America as bully and warmonger. They wanted their country to be part of the world, separated from it only by oceans. At heart, each in his own way, had come to the same inescapable conclusion: America was at a critical crossroads. The country had to be healed. To do that, it had to be resurrected from the little death of the current administration’s policies. Otherwise, intimidation, divisiveness, and fear would be the legacy of the last eight years.

Neither of them was a starry-eyed idealist; in fact, over the years, they’d each brokered difficult deals, made compromises, some of them painful, in order to achieve their goals. But both did believe that the country was on the wrong path and needed to be set right. So they had agreed. Whenever he could, Paull would secretly work against the Administration’s weakening of democratic freedoms, and in return, Edward Carson would name him Secretary of Defense.

The two men sat in what under other circumstances would have been a comfortable silence. But between them now was the specter of Alli’s abduction and possible death.

“How are you two holding up?” Paull had noticed the president-elect’s reddened eyes the moment he walked through the door.

“As well as can be expected. Any news from Jack?”

“Jack is doing everything he can, I’ve made certain of that,” Paull said. “And he’s protected.”

“Protected.” Carson’s head swung around. “From who?”

Paull stared down into the amber drink, watching the light play off the surface. Only amateurs drank single-malt with ice. “I’d like to say I knew for certain, but I don’t.”

“Give me the next best thing, then.”

Paull had been told that no bodies had been found in the wreck, which meant that Jack had somehow survived the attack. He thought for a moment. “The knives are out. All signs point to the National Security Advisor.” He lifted his eyes. “Trouble is, I suspect he’s not in it alone.”

Paull, staring into the president-elect’s eyes, knew Carson understood he’d meant the president.

After a moment, Carson said very deliberately, “Can you get proof?”

Paull shook his head. “Not before January twentieth. Given time, I think I’ll be able to find a chink in the National Security Advisor’s armor, but I very much doubt I’ll get further.”

Maintaining plausible deniability was any president’s first priority, his most potent line of defense. Carson nodded, sipped his drink. “Getting one will have to suffice, then. It’ll be your first order of business come January twenty-first.”

“Believe me, it’ll be a pleasure.”

The ship’s clock on the mantel chimed in the new hour. Time lay heavy on Edward Carson’s shoulders.

“Look at them down there, Dennis. It’s that hour when the workday is over, when everyone lets out a sigh of relief on their way home. But for me, does evening bring darkness, or the end of my daughter’s life?”

“Do you believe in God, sir?”

The president-elect nodded. “I do.”

“Then for you everything will be all right, won’t it?”

It was late when Nina dropped Jack off. His car, windshield replaced, was waiting for him at the lot of the repair shop. Jack climbed into it warily as well as wearily. He felt as if he’d been beaten with a nightstick for the past few days. Had he slept in all that time? He couldn’t remember. He opened a bottle of water, drank it all down in one long swallow. Speaking of essential functions, apart from the crumb bun he’d wolfed down, when had he last eaten? He vaguely recalled scarfing down an Egg McMuffin, but whether that was this morning or yesterday, he couldn’t say.

It occurred to him that he was hungry. He held the sugar cookies from the All Around Town bakery in his hand, but he didn’t eat them.

Instead, he methodically checked out the environment. He was looking for another Dark Car. No word yet from Bennett on who had sent out the first one. He didn’t know whether that was good news or bad news. He was almost too tired to care.

Finally, he admitted to himself that what he really wanted to do was look in the backseat to see if Emma had magically appeared once more. A flicker of his eyes told him that he was alone in the car. He set the sugar cookies on the seat beside him. An offering or an enticement?

“Emma,” he heard himself say, “are you ever coming back?”

He was appalled at the sound of his own voice. Frightened, too. What was happening to him? Was he cracking up? Surely he hadn’t seen Emma, surely he hadn’t heard her voice. Then what had he seen, what had he heard? Was it all in his head?

All of a sudden, these questions were too big for him. He felt that if he sat with them any longer, his head would explode. He started the car, headed for Sharon’s. She lived in a modest house, one of many identical in shape and size, in Arlington Heights. It took him thirty-five minutes to get there. During that time, he had ample opportunity to make sure an Audi or a Mercedes hadn’t taken the place of the gray BMW.

The lights were on when he pulled into the driveway, and now that he thought about it, he didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad thing. Before he left the car, he checked to see if the cookies had been eaten. They lay against the crease where the seat met the back. They looked sad, forlorn, as if they knew no one would enjoy them. Jack, halfway out of the car, licked his forefinger, picked up a small constellation of crumbs that had formed around the cookies, let them melt on his tongue. He could feel the tears well hotly, so close did he feel to Emma.

He rang the bell, his heart hammering in his chest. Sharon pulled the door open. The scent of chicken and rice wafted out with her, making his mouth water. She regarded him with an unreadable expression. She wore a skirt that clung to her thighs, a sleeveless blouse that showed off her beautiful golden shoulders. Nina would have appeared pale and wan beside her, anorectic instead of willowy. She said nothing for a moment.

“Jack, are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure, it’s just that I can’t remember the last time I had a decent meal.”

“You were on your own so long, I often wondered why you never learned to cook for yourself.”

“The tyranny of shopping makes me anxious.”

She gave him a tentative smile as she moved aside so he could enter.

Jack closed the door behind him. He took off his overcoat, slung it over the back of the living room sofa. Unlike the old house with its familiar creaking he’d moved into when they split, Sharon preferred a modern place. She had busied herself repainting walls in colors she chose, picking out warm carpets, filling each room not only with furniture but accessories as well—scented candles, a log cabin quilt hanging on the wall, small dishes filled with lacquered shells and gaily striped marbles. No unicorns, thankfully, but a variety of other knickknacks and souvenirs, along with keepsakes and photos of Emma and Sharon as a child in handmade frames. None of this, however, made up for the house’s complete lack of character. Unlike his house, it was a two-story box to live in, nothing more. He found being here disorienting and overwhelming. He’d never get used to Sharon living here, living without him.

What did he have of Emma’s? He thought of her iPod, pushed to the back of his ATF locker. One night he took it home and couldn’t sleep. Then again, he must have because at one point he started up from a horrific dream of standing paralyzed and mute as Emma’s car hurtled into the tree. He could hear the crack of the wood, the explosion of glass, see the twists of metal spiraling inward. The car door snapped open, and a shape already curled in death shot out, struck him full in the chest. Then he was sitting up in bed, screaming and shivering, sweat pouring off him like rain. He spent what was left of the night commiserating with Nick Carraway in the pages of his beloved, tattered copy of The Great Gatsby, and was never so glad to see the first blush of dawn turn the darkness gold.

In Sharon’s new digs, he picked up one of the photos of Emma, but the image seemed flat and empty, a shell of what once had been a vibrant and mysterious girl. As for photos of other people in Sharon’s life, he knew there would be none.

Sharon had no past, and so couldn’t understand what appeal it could possibly hold for Jack. She had parents, but she never saw or spoke to them. A brother, as well, in Rotterdam, where he was an international lawyer. For reasons he’d never been able to fathom, Sharon had cut herself off from her family, her past. When they were dating, she told him that she had no family, but after they were married, he found photos in the trash, spilled out of an old cigar box. Her mother, father, and brother.

“They’re dead to me,” she’d said when he’d confronted her. She’d never allowed the subject to come up again.

Did that mean, he often wondered, that Sharon didn’t dream? Because he dreamed only of his past, iterations of it with intended outcomes, or not, bizarre twists and turns that he often remembered after he awoke, and laughed at or puzzled over. It seemed to him that there was a richness in life that came with the years, that only your past could provide. It was unbearable to him to think, as Schopenhauer had written, that no honest man comes to the end of his life wanting to relive it. But it seemed possible to him that Sharon believed just that, that her erasing of her past was an attempt to relive her life.

He put the photo back, turned away, but his mood didn’t improve. The house’s aggressive homeyness produced a hollowness in the pit of his stomach. As for his heart, it had gone numb the moment she appeared at the door.

Below her short skirt, Sharon wore little pink ballet slippers with teeny bows and paper-thin soles. They made her movements around the house elegant and silent, even on the hard tile of the kitchen floor. No matter which way you looked at them, her legs were magnificent. Jack tried not to stare, but it was like asking a moth to ignore a flame.

Sharon opened a glass-fronted cabinet over the sink, stretched up to reach a pair of stemmed glasses. Her figure was highlighted in such a way that Jack felt the need to sit down.

She uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured. “Fortunately, I made enough food for two.”

“Uh-huh,” was all he could muster because he’d bitten back one of his acerbic replies.

She brought the glasses over, handed him one. “What?”

“What what?”

She pulled a chair out, sat down at a right angle to him. “I know that look.”

“What look?” Why all of a sudden did he feel like a felon?

“The ‘Baby, let’s get it on’ look.”

“I was just admiring your legs.”

She got up, took her wineglass to the stove. She stirred a pot, checked the chicken in the oven. “Why didn’t you say that when we were married?” Her voice was more rueful than angry.

Jack waited until she paused to take a sip of wine before he said, “When we were married, I was embarrassed by how beautiful you are.”

She spun around. “Come again?”

“You know how you see a hot movie star—”

Her face grew dark. “Where do you live, Beverly Hills?”

“I’m talking about a fantasy figure, Shar. Don’t tell me you don’t have fantasies about—”

“Clive Owen, if you must know.” She took the bird out, set it aside to allow the juices to settle. “Go on.”

“Okay, so I’m alone with … Scarlett Johansson.”

Sharon rolled her eyes. “Dream on, buddy.”

“I’m alone with her in my mind,” Jack persevered, “but when I try to—you know—nothing happens.”

She dumped the rice into a serving bowl. “Now that’s just not you.”

“Right, not when I’m with you. But Scarlett, when I think about her—really think about her—well, it’s too much. I’m wondering why the hell a goddess like that would be with me. Then the fantasy goes up in smoke.”

She stared intently at the steaming rice. Her cheeks were flushed. After a time, she seemed to find her voice. “You think I’m as beautiful as Scarlett Johansson?”

If he said yes, what would she do? He didn’t know, so he said nothing, even when she turned her head to look at him. Instead, he got up, rather clumsily, and helped her serve the food.

They sank back down into their respective chairs. Wordlessly, she handed him the carving utensils and wordlessly he took them, parting the breast from the bony carcass, as he always did. Sharon served them both, first slices of the chicken, then heaping spoonfuls of rice, and broccoli with oil and garlic. They ate in a fog of self-conscious silence, sinking deeper and deeper into their own thoughts.

Finally, Sharon said, “You’re feeling okay now?”

Jack nodded. “Fine.”

“I thought …” She put her fork down. She’d hardly eaten anything. “I thought maybe after the hospital you might call.”

“I wanted to,” Jack said, not sure that was the truth. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

Sharon settled in her chair. “All right.”

“It’s about Emma.”

She reacted as if he’d shot her. “I don’t—!”

“Just let me—” He held up his hands. “Please, Shar, just let me say what I have to say.”

“I’ve heard everything you need to say about Emma.”

“Not this you haven’t.” He took a deep breath, let it out. He wanted to tell her, and he didn’t. But this time seemed as good as any—better, in fact, than any of their recent meetings. “The fact is—” He seemed to have lost his voice. He cleared his throat. “—I’ve seen Emma.”

“What!”

“I’ve seen her a number of times in the past week.” Jack rushed on at breakneck speed, lest he lose his nerve. “The last time she was sitting in the backseat of my car. She said, ‘Dad.’”

Sharon’s expression told him that he’d made a terrible mistake.

“Are you insane?” she shouted.

“I tell you I saw her. I heard her—”

She jumped up. “Our daughter’s dead, Jack! She’s dead!”

“I’m not saying—”

“Oh, you’re despicable!” Her brows knit together ominously. “This is your way of trying to weasel out of your responsibility for Emma’s death.”

“This isn’t about responsibility, Shar. It’s about trying to understand—”

“I knew you were desperate to crawl out from under your guilt.”

Her wildly gesticulating hands knocked over her wineglass. Then she deliberately knocked over his. “I just didn’t know how desperate.”

Jack was on his feet. “Shar, would you calm down a minute? You’re not listening to me.”

“Get out of here, Jack!”

“C’mon, don’t do that.”

“I said get out!”

She advanced and he retreated, past the seashells and the colored glass, the postcards Emma had sent to them from school, the photos of her as a child. He scooped up his coat.

“Sharon, you’ve misunderstood everything.”

This, of course, was the worst thing he could have said. She flew at him with raised fists, and he backed out the front door so quickly that he stumbled over the top step. She got to slam the door on him once again. Then all the downstairs lights were extinguished and he knew she was sitting, curled up, fists on thighs, sobbing uncontrollably.

He took a convulsive step up, raised his fist to hammer on the door, but his hand flattened out, palm resting on the door as if by that gesture he could feel her presence. Then he turned, went heavily down the steps, returned to his car.

29

Jack thought he was heading home, but instead he found himself pulling into Egon Schiltz’s driveway right behind Candy Schiltz’s Audi A4 Avant wagon. He got out, walked to the front door, pushed the bell. If Sharon wouldn’t talk to him about Emma, maybe Egon would. Jack checked his watch. It was late enough that he was sure to be home by now.

Schiltz lived in the Olde Sleepy Hollow area of Falls Church. His house was a neat two-story colonial the family had lived in for decades. Schiltz had paid just north of $100,000 for it. Back in the day, that wasn’t exactly cheap, but these days it was worth conservatively fifteen times that.

Molly came to the door, gave an excited shriek as he whirled her up and around.

“Molly Maria Schiltz, what is going on!”

Candy came bursting into the entryway, but as soon as she saw Jack, the look of concern on her face changed to a broad smile.

“Jack McClure, well, it’s been too long!” she said with genuine pleasure.

He kissed her on the cheek as Taffy, their Irish setter, came bounding in, tongue lolling, tail wagging furiously.

“We’ve finished dinner,” Candy said, “but there’s plenty of leftovers.”

“I just ate, thanks,” Jack said.

While he and Candy went into the family room, Molly trooped upstairs to do her homework.

“I have cherry pie,” Candy said with a twinkle in her eye. “Your favorite, if memory serves.”

Jack laughed despite his black mood. “Nothing wrong with your memory.”

Seeing no way out, he allowed her to bustle around the open kitchen, Taffy happily trotting at her heels. She was a statuesque woman with ash-blond hair and a wide, open face. In her youth, she’d been a real beauty. Now, in later middle age, she possessed a different kind of beauty, as well as an enviable serenity. She cut a slice of pie as generous as her figure, took a bowl of homemade whipped cream out of the refrigerator, piled on a huge dollop.

“Milk or coffee?” she said as she plunked the plate and fork down on the pass-through. Taffy came around, sat on her haunches, her long, clever face turned up to Jack.

“Coffee, please.” Jack rubbed Taffy’s forehead with his knuckles, and the dog growled in pleasure. He picked up the fork. “How many people is this portion supposed to feed?”

Candy, pouring his coffee into a mug she herself had made in pottery class, giggled. “I can’t help it if I still consider you a growing boy, Jack.” She padded over with the mug. She remembered he liked his coffee straight. “Anyway, you’re looking far too gaunt to suit me.” She put a hand over his briefly. “Are you getting along all right?”

Jack nodded. “I’m doing fine.”

Candy’s expression indicated she didn’t believe him. “You should come over here more often. Egon misses you.” She indicated with her head. “So does Good Golly Miss Molly.”

“Molly’s grown up. She’s got her own friends now.”

Candy pulled a mock face. “D’you think she’d ever stop loving her uncle Jack? Shame on you. That’s not how this family works.”

Jack felt as if he were dying inside. Here was a picture of his own family life … if only so many things had happened differently. “The pie’s delicious.” He smacked his lips. “Is Egon upstairs? I’d like a minute of his time.”

“Unfortunately, no,” she said. “He called to say he was staying extra late at the morgue, some kind of hush-hush government case. But you should go on over there. He’ll be happy for the company. And you know Egon, he can lend an ear with the best of them.”

Candy flattened down the front of her dress. “I wish you and Sharon would patch things up.”

Jack stared down at the remains of crust. “Well, you know how it is.”

“No, I don’t,” Candy said rather firmly. “You love each other. It’s obvious even to a nonromantic like my Egon.”

Jack sighed. “I don’t know about love, but Sharon doesn’t like me very much right now. Maybe she never will again.”

“That’s just defeatist talk, my dear.” Candy put away the pie and washed the whipped cream bowl. “Everything changes. All marriages survive if both of you want it to.” She dried her hands on a green-and-white-striped dish towel. “You’ve got to work at it.”

Jack looked up. “Do you and Egon work at it?”

“Goodness, yes.” Candy came over, leaned on the pass-through. “We’ve had our ups and downs just like everyone else, I daresay. But the essential thing is that we both want the same thing—to be together.” She looked at him with her wise eyes. “That’s what you want, isn’t it, to be with her?”

Jack nodded mutely.

Candy pushed the plate aside and began to shoo him out of the family room. Taffy barked unhappily. “Go on now.” She kissed him warmly. “Go see my man, and I hope he makes you feel better.”

“Thanks, Candy.”

She stood at the door. “You can thank me by showing up on my doorstep more often.”

Quiet as a morgue, Jack thought as he entered the ME’s office. In times past, that little joke would have put a smile on his face, but not tonight. He walked down the deserted corridors, hearing only the soft draw of the massive air conditioners. There was a mug half-filled with coffee on Schiltz’s desk, but no sign of the man himself. The mug was inscribed with the phrase WORLD’S BEST DAD, a years-ago present from Molly. Jack put his finger into the coffee, found it still warm. His friend was here somewhere.

The autopsy room was similarly still. All the coldly gleaming chrome and stainless steel made it look like Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. All that was needed were a couple of bolts of lightning. A dim glow came from the cold room. Jack stood on the threshold, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He remembered the time he’d taken Emma here. She was writing a paper on forensic medicine during the year the vocation had fired her interest. He’d been here many times, but he found it enlightening to see it through her eager, young eyes. Egon had met them, taken them around, explained everything, answered Emma’s seemingly endless questions. But when she said, “Why does God allow people to be murdered?” Egon shook his head and said, “If I knew that, kiddo, I’d know everything.”

Jack saw that one of the cold slabs had been drawn out of the wall. No doubt holding part of the hush-hush work that chained Egon to the office so late at night. Jack stepped forward, was on the point of calling out Egon’s name when he heard the noises. It sounded as if the entire cold room had come alive and was breathing heavily. Then he saw Egon.

He was on the cold slab, lying facedown on top of Ami, his assistant. He was naked and so was she. Their rhythmic movements acid-etched the true nature of Egon’s hush-hush work onto Jack’s brain.

Jack, his mind in a fog, stood rooted for a moment. He struggled to make sense of what he was seeing, but it was like trying to digest a ten-pound steak. It just wasn’t going to happen.

On stiff legs, he backed out of the cold room, turned, and went back down the corridor to Egon’s office. Plunking himself into Egon’s chair, he stared at the coffee. Well, that wasn’t going to do it. He pawed through the desk drawers until he found Egon’s pint of singlebarrel bourbon, poured three fingers’ worth into the coffee. He put the mug to his lips and drank the brew down without even wincing. Then he sat back.

For Egon Schiltz—family man, churchgoing, God-fearing fundamentalist—to be schtupping a cookie on the side was unthinkable. What would God say, for God’s sake? Another of Jack’s little jokes that tonight failed to bring a smile to his face. Or joy to his heart, which now seemed to be a dead cinder lying at the bottom of some forgotten dust heap.

He thought about leaving before Egon came back and saw that his “hush-hush work” was now an open secret, but he couldn’t get his body to move. He took another slug of the single-barrel, reasoning that it might help, but it only served to root him more firmly in the chair.

And then it was too late. He heard the familiar footsteps coming down the corridor, and then Egon appeared. He stopped short the moment he saw Jack, and unconsciously ran a hand through his tousled hair.

“Jack, this is a surprise!”

I’ll bet it is, Jack thought. “Guess where I just came from, Egon?”

Schiltz spread his hands, shook his head.

“How about a clue, then? I was just treated to the best cherry pie on God’s green earth.” Was that a tremor at the left side of Schiltz’s head? “And speaking of God …”

“You know.”

“I saw.”

Schiltz hid his face in his hands.

“How long?”

“Six months.”

Jack stood up. “I just … what the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I was … tempted.”

“Tempted?” Jack echoed hotly. “Doesn’t the Bible tell us again and again, ad nauseam, how God deals with the tempted? Doesn’t the Bible teach you to be strong morally, to resist temptation?”

“Those … people didn’t have Ami working next to them every day.”

“Wait a minute, if that’s your excuse, you’re nothing but a hypocrite.”

Schiltz was visibly shaken. “I’m not a hypocrite, Jack. You know me better than that.” He sank into a visitor’s chair. “I’m a man, with a man’s foibles.” He glanced up, and for a moment a certain fire burned in his eyes. “I make mistakes just like everyone else, Jack. But my belief in God, in the morals he gave us, hasn’t changed.”

Jack spread his arms wide. “Then how do you explain this?”

“I can’t.” Schiltz hung his head.

Jack shook his head. “You want to cheat on Candy, go right ahead, I’m the last person to stop you. Except I know from personal experience how affairs fuck up marriages, how they poison the love one person has for another, how there’s no hope of going back to the love.”

Schiltz, elbows on knees, looked up at him bleakly. “Don’t say that,” he whispered.

“Another truth you don’t want to hear.” Jack came around the desk. “If you want to risk a broken marriage, who the hell am I to stop you, Egon? That’s not why I’m pissed off. I’m pissed off because you go to church every Sunday with your family, you’re pious and righteous—you denounce so-called sexual degenerates, ridicule politicians—especially Democrats—who’ve had affairs exposed. It’s been easy for you to identify sinners from your high pedestal. But I wonder how easy it’ll be now. You’re not one of God’s chosen, Egon. By your actions—by your own admission—you’re just one of us sinners.”

Egon sighed. “You’re right, of course. I deserve every epithet you hurl at me. But, my God, I love Candy, you have to know that. I’d rather cut off my right arm than hurt her.”

“I feel the same way, so don’t worry. I’m not going to tell her.”

“Well, I’m grateful for that. Thank you, Jack.”

An awkward silence fell over them.

“Weren’t you ever tempted, Jack?”

“What does it matter? This is about you, Egon. You and Candy, when you get right down to it. You can’t have her and Ami, too, because if you do, you’ll never be able to hold your head up in church again. I doubt even God would forgive that sin.”

“Feet of clay.” Schiltz nodded. “I’ve been laid low.”

There was a rustling in the corridor and a moment later Ami entered, a clipboard in one hand, a pen in the other. She froze when she saw Jack. “Oh, I didn’t know you were here, Mr. McClure.”

“You must have been away from your desk.” Jack saw her eyes flicker.

She was about to hand her boss the clipboard when she saw his stricken face. “Is everything all right, Dr. Schiltz?”

“Egon,” Jack said. “You should call him Egon.”

Ami took one look at Jack, then at Schiltz’s face, and fled the room.

“Go on, make jokes at my expense, Jack.” Schiltz shook his head ruefully. “God will forgive me.”

“Is this the same God that was supposed to look after Candy, or Emma?”

“I remember,” Schiltz said. “I remember when everything was different, simpler.”

“Now you sound like an old man,” Jack said.

“Tonight I feel old.” Schiltz sipped his bourbon and made a face. It wasn’t single-barrel or anything close.

They were sitting in a late-night bar off Braddock Avenue, not far from the office. It was attached to a motel. While the interior was not quite so seedy as the motel itself, the clientele was a whole lot seedier. A low ceiling with plastic beams, sixty-watt bulbs further dimmed by dusty green-glass shades, torn vinyl-covered banquettes, a jukebox ringing out Muddy Waters and B. B. King tended to attract a fringe element right at home with the bleak dislocation of midnight with nowhere to go, no one to be with.

“Think of your daughter, then.”

Schiltz shook his head. “I can’t think of Molly without thinking of Emma.”

“Actually, it’s Emma I came to see you about,” Jack said.

Schiltz’s face brightened considerably.

“It’s something … well, something I can’t explain.”

Schiltz leaned forward. “Tell me.”

Jack took a deep breath. “I’m seeing Emma.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I heard her talk to me from the backseat of my car.”

“Jack—”

“She said, ‘Dad.’ I heard her as clearly as I’m hearing you.”

“Listen to me now, Jack. I’ve heard of these manifestations before. Actually, they’re not uncommon. You think you’re seeing Emma because your guilt is too much to bear. You feel you’re complicit in the tragedy, that if you’d been able to pay more attention—” Schiltz held up a hand. “But we’ve been over all that too many times already. I’m genuinely sorry that nothing’s changed for you, Jack.”

“So you don’t believe me, either.”

“I didn’t say that. I fervently believe that you saw Emma, that she spoke to you, but it was all in your head.” Schiltz took a breath. “We die, we go to heaven … or to hell. There are no ghosts, no wandering spirits.”

“How d’you know?”

“I know the Bible, Jack. I know the word of God. Spiritualism is a game for charlatans. They play on the guilt and the desperate desire of the grieving to speak to their loved ones who’ve passed on.”

“It isn’t just life and death, Egon. There’s something more, something we can’t see or feel. Something unknown.”

“Yes, there is,” Schiltz said softly. “His name is God.”

Jack shook his head. “This is beyond God, or the Bible, or even his laws.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“How can you not even accept the possibility that there’s something out there—something unknowable—that isn’t God-based?”

“Because everything is God-based, Jack. You, me, the world, the universe.”

“Except that Emma’s appearance doesn’t fit into your God-based universe.”

“Of course it does, Jack.” Schiltz drained his glass. “As I said, she’s a manifestation of your insupportable grief.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Schiltz presented him with an indulgent smile. “I’m not.”

“See, that’s what I think gets you religious guys in trouble. You’re so damn sure of yourselves about all these issues that can’t be proved.”

“That’s faith, Jack.” Egon ordered them another round. “There’s no more powerful belief system in the world.”

Jack waited while the bourbons were set in front of them, the empty glasses taken away.

“It’s comforting to have faith, to know there’s a plan.”

Schiltz nodded. “Indeed it is.”

“So if something bad happens—like, for instance, your nineteen-year-old daughter running her car into a tree and dying—you don’t have to think. You can just say, well, that’s part of the plan. I don’t know what that plan is, I can’t ever know, but, heck, it’s there, all right. My daughter’s death had meaning because it was part of the plan.”

Schiltz cleared his throat. “That’s putting it a bit baldly, but, yes, that’s essentially correct.”

Jack set aside the raw-tasting bourbon. He’d had more than enough liquor for one night.

“Let me ask you something, Egon. Who in their right mind wants a fucked-up plan like that?”

Schiltz clucked his tongue. “Now you sound like one of those missionary secularists.”

“I’m disappointed but hardly surprised to hear you say that.” Jack made interlocking rings on the table with the bottom of his glass. “Because I’m certainly not a missionary secularist.”

“Okay. Right now because of Emma’s death you’re cut off from God.”

“Oh, I was cut off from that branch of thinking a long time ago,” Jack said. “Now I’m beginning to think there’s another way, a third alternative.”

“Either you believe in God or you don’t,” Schiltz said. “There’s no middle ground.”

Jack looked at his friend. They’d spent so many years dancing around this topic, holding it at bay for the sake of their friendship. But a line had been crossed tonight, he felt, from which there was no turning back. “No room for debate, no movement from beliefs written in stone.”

“The Ten Commandments were written in stone,” Schiltz pointed out, “and for a very good reason.”

“Didn’t Moses break the tablets?”

“Stop it, Jack.” Schiltz called for the check. “This is leading us nowhere.”

Which, Jack thought, was precisely the problem. “So what happens now?” he said.

“Frankly, I don’t know.”

Schiltz stared into the middle distance, where a couple of dateless women who had given up for the night were dancing with each other while Elvis crooned “Don’t Be Cruel.”

His eyes slowly drew into themselves and he focused on Jack. “The truth is, I’m afraid to go home. I’m afraid of what Candy would do if she found out, afraid of the disgrace I’d come under in my church. I can tell you there are friends of mine who’d never talk to me again.”

Jack waited a moment to gather his thoughts. He was mildly surprised to learn that whatever anger he’d felt toward Egon had burned itself out with the bourbon they’d thrown down their throats. The truth was, he felt sad.

“I wish I could help you with all that,” Jack said.

Schiltz put up a hand. “My sin, my burden.”

“What I can offer is another perspective. What’s happened tonight is a living, breathing test of your iron-bound faith. You live within certain religious and moral lines, Egon. They allow for no deviation or justification. But you can’t fall back on any religious fiction. God didn’t tell you to have an affair with Ami, and neither did the devil. It was you, Egon. You made the conscious choice, you crossed a line you’re forbidden to cross.”

Schiltz shook his head wearily. “Would Candy forgive me? I just don’t know.”

“When I saw her earlier tonight, she told me in no uncertain terms just how strong your love is for each other. You’ve been through bad patches before, Egon, and you’ve managed to work through them.”

“This is so big, though.”

“Candy’s got a big heart.”

Schiltz peered at Jack through the low light, the beery haze. “Have you forgiven Sharon?”

“Yes,” Jack said, “I have.” And that was the moment he realized that he was telling the truth, the moment he understood why her unreasoning outburst had cut him so deeply.

Jack cocked his head. “So who are you now, Egon? You see, I can forgive what you’ve done, I can look past the part you play, the lies you’ve maintained, and still love the man beneath, despite your betrayal of Candy and Molly—and of me, for that matter. You’re my friend, Egon. That’s what’s important in life. Friends fuck up, occasionally they do the wrong thing, they’re forgiven. The religious thing—well, in my view, it’s not relevant here. It’s what you do now as a man, Egon, as a human being, that will determine whether you live the rest of your life as a lie, or whether you begin to change. Whether or not that includes telling Candy is entirely up to you.”

The Everly Brothers were singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” The two listless women on the dance floor seemed to have fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

“This is a chance to get to know yourself, Egon, the real you that’s been hidden away for years beneath the Bible. I’ve seen bits of him out in the woods with our daughters, fishing, looking up at the stars, telling ghost stories.”

Schiltz downed the last of his bourbon, stared down at the table with its empty glasses, damp rings, crumpled napkins. “I don’t believe I fully understood you, until tonight.”

He turned away, but not before Jack caught the glimmer of a tear at the corner of his eye.

“I don’t …” Schiltz tried to clear the emotion out of his throat. “I don’t know whether I have the strength to get to know myself, Jack.”

“Well, I don’t know either, Egon.” Jack threw some money on the table. “But I’d lay odds that you’re going to try.”

30

The Spanish Steps, running on Twenty-second Street, between Decatur Place and S Street NW, was part of the luxe, lushly treed Dupont Circle area of Washington. Its formal name was the rather dull Decatur Terrace Steps, but no one, especially the residents of the Circle, called it that. They preferred the infinitely more romantic name that conjured up the real Spanish Steps in Rome. By any name, however, it was a delightful stone-and-concrete staircase guarded on either side by ornamental lampposts and crowned at its summit by a leonine fountain. By day, children could be seen running and squealing around the mouth of the great beast from whose mouth water spewed in a constant stream. At night, it gathered to itself a certain Old World charm that made it a favorite assignation spot of young lovers and adulterers alike.

Calla stood waiting for Ronnie Kray at the top of the steps. She had arrived a few minutes before midnight so that she could drink in the nighttime glow that illuminated the steps in a sepia tint. One of the lamppost lights on the right was out, and the resulting pool of shadows spilled across the stairs in a most pleasing manner. Couples strolled arm in arm, perhaps kissed chastely, then ran across the street laughing or stood on the corner, waiting for their radio-dispatched taxis to arrive.

Though she worked long and hard for the First American Secular Revivalists, and was as rational as the members who sat on either side of her, she was, at heart, a true romantic. Perhaps this was why she was drawn to Ronnie. Though she knew he was in his mid-fifties, he looked a decade younger. Perhaps that was because he was possessed of a romantic streak with which she could identify. Besides, he treated her like a lady, not like a kid, the way many at FASR did, especially Chris and Peter. She hated that they never took her suggestions seriously. Ronnie did. Ronnie got her, and she loved him for that.

She couldn’t help furtively watching a young couple sitting on the steps, perhaps halfway down, necking. Calla imagined herself in the girl’s place, her lover’s hands on her warm flesh, and envied her. She’d come to Washington three years ago from Grand Rapids in search of a husband with a good job and solid family values. But finding that kind of man proved more difficult than she had imagined. She’d dated men who were either windbags or hopeless narcissists. And she’d deflected a number of married men who wanted to bed her, sometimes desperately. Switching to plan B, she’d thrown herself body and soul into FASR, a cause she believed in—fine for her sense of justice, bad for her love life.

As if from an invisible vibration, her head swung around and she saw him coming, stepping off the street onto the rectangular plaza at the top of the stairs where she waited for him.

“Hello, Ronnie,” she said softly as he bent, his lips brushing her cheek.

“You came.”

“Of course I came!” She looked deep into his dark eyes. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You could have changed your mind,” Kray said. “People do, at the last minute.”

“Well, I don’t,” Calla said firmly. He had taught her to stand up for what she believed, even with Chris and Peter. Terrifying and exhilarating all at once, like being on a roller coaster.

She shivered in the gusts of wind swirling around the fountain. The lovers on the steps had left, no doubt for a warm bed somewhere. The steps were clearing of people.

He put his arm around her. “Are you cold?”

“A little.”

“Then let’s get some hot coffee into you. Would you like that?”

Calla nodded, rested her head on his chest. She liked the bulk of him, the heft. She often thought of him as a sheltering cove.

He began to lead her down the steps.

She tugged against him gently, almost playfully. “Don’t you want to go to Cafe Luna?”

“This is a special night.” He continued to steer her down. “I’ve got a special place in mind.”

They entered that area of the Spanish Steps where, because of the burned-out bulb, shadows billowed out across the stone and concrete like ink from an overturned bottle.

“Where are you taking me?” Calla asked. “Have we been there before?”

“It’s a surprise,” was all he said to her. “I promise you’ll like it.”

Huge trees rose far above their heads, the skeletal branches scratching the sky, as if trying to dig the diamond-hard stars out of a setting made milky by the District’s million lights. In among this winter bower Calla shivered again, and Kray held her tighter, one arm around her waist.

All of a sudden, he lurched against her, as if his left ankle had turned over on a stone. She stumbled against the trunk of one of the trees and, as she did so, Kray stabbed her once in the back. So precise was the thrust, so practiced the hand, so unwavering the intent, the wickedly sharpened paletta did the rest.

Kray held her lifeless body and glanced around. Had anyone been looking, they’d have seen a man holding his drunk or ill wife, but as luck would have it, no one was about. Kray slowly laid Calla’s body at the bole of the tree. With quick, practiced movements, he snapped on surgeon’s gloves, pulled out the cell phone he’d taken from one of Alli’s Secret Service guards, put it into her hand, pressed her fingers around it, then threw it into a nearby evergreen bush. Then he picked up the paletta. It was such a superb implement; it had penetrated through cloth, skin, and viscera with such ease, there was hardly any blood on it. He pocketed the weapon and, his mission accomplished, vanished into the shadowy forest of swaying trees.

31

It’s a universal law of teenhood that the bully always returns for more. Maybe he’s drawn to what he perceives as weakness, because other people’s weakness makes him stronger. Maybe he’s a sadist and can’t help himself. Or maybe he just can’t leave well enough alone. In any event, Andre returns to Jack’s life, stronger, meaner, more determined than ever.

It’s as if he’s been biding his time, accumulating power, calculating his return like a general who’s been forced to make a strategic retreat from the field of battle. The source of his newfound power isn’t only his patron, Cyril Tolkan, but a supplier he’s found on his own—a man named Ian Brady.

“One thing fo’ sho,” Gus says with a fair amount of scorn, “Ian Brady ain’t no black man. Shit, Ian Brady ain’t no American name, no way, no how. But, shee-it, he a ghost, that man, ’cause none a my snitches know shit ’bout him. I mean, who the fuck is he? Where he come from? Who’s his contacts? He got so much fuckin’ juice, he could light up alla D.C.”

This tirade occurs one evening when Jack and Gus are at home, listening to James Brown. Jack has made a couple of purchases at the local record store and is eager to both hear them and share them with Gus. In the wake of Gus’s rant, he wonders whether he should keep the LPs under wraps, but having brought up the subject during dinner, he has no choice.

“Huh! I mighta known!” Gus says, holding the cardboard sleeves in his massive hand. “Elvis Presley an’ the Rolling Stones. White boys, jus’ like you. And some of ’em look like they ain’t eaten in weeks!”

“Just listen, will you? You’re such a hard-ass!”

“Well, I heard Elvis, an’ he ain’t half-bad. So play this here other, so’s I can see whut yo’ taste in music’s like.”

Jack carefully slides the James Brown disc back in its sleeve, then rolls out the black vinyl disc of Out of Our Heads, puts the needle down, and out blasts “Mercy, Mercy.” After the last jangling bars of “One More Try” fade into the walls, Gus turns to Jack, says, “Play dat again, son.”

Jack puts the needle back on the first cut, and Mick Jagger starts it up.

Gus shakes his head in wonder. “Shee-it, fo’ skinny little white boys, they sho-nuff do shout.”

Jack now goes regularly to the library on G Street NW. At first, he went because Reverend Taske urged him to, but lately he’s realized that he likes going. Because of Taske’s training, he’s tamed his fright of reading new texts; it’s become more of a challenge, a way out of the strange little world his dyslexia shoved him into.

He loves the dusty air, golden with motes of history. He loves opening books at random, finding himself engrossed, so that he goes back, starts at page one and doesn’t stop until he’s devoured the last word. Unlike movies and TV that show him everything, even if he doesn’t like it, books transport him into the world of his own imagination. As long as he can create pictures from the words he reads—scenes filled with characters, conflict, good and evil—he can build a world that’s in many ways closer to the one other people inhabit. And this makes him feel less like an outsider. He feels he is that much closer to rubbing shoulders with the passersby on the street. This is the atmosphere that draws him day after day into the dusty quietude, calm as a still lake. But in those depths something waits for him, as it does almost every teenager: the fear that recurs, the fear that needs to be faced.

Jack comes face-to-face with his one Monday afternoon. He’s back in the stacks, pulling down massive treatises on his latest passion: criminal psychology. A head in the book precludes vigilance. But who would think to be vigilant in a District public library? That’s how Andre thinks, anyway. He’s been following Jack to G Street every day for a week, until he’s familiar with the schedule. It says something about just how deep his feelings of vengeance run that he’s been on surveillance for five straight days when he could be negotiating his next shipment of smack from Ian Brady.

But some things are more important than H, more important than greenbacks, because they cry out to be resolved. And, frankly, Andre can’t rest easy until this particular matter is resolved to his satisfaction.

Jack doesn’t hear him as Andre creeps up from behind. Andre, in crepe-soled shoes he’s bought for the occasion, approaches slowly, relishing the end to the ache that’s been inside him ever since Cyril Tolkan delivered his punishment.

At the very end, he makes his rush, silent, filled with the power of righteous rage. He grabs Jack by his collar, lifts him bodily into the air, slams him against the rear wall. Shelves tremble; books spill onto the floor. Andre, his eyes alight with bloodlust, jams a forearm across Jack’s windpipe both to silence him and to subdue him as quickly as possible. Though he’s filled with a desire for vengeance, Andre is nothing if not pragmatic. He doesn’t want to get caught in here with a dead or dying body. He has no intention of going into whitey’s slammer, either now or ever.

With a tiny snik! he flicks open his switchblade. His victim seems so stunned, his hands aren’t even up, trying to pry his forearm away. Maybe he doesn’t have enough oxygen to act. Either way, it doesn’t matter to Andre, who jabs the point of the blade in toward Jack’s diaphragm. He’s aiming for the soft spot just below the sternum, to drive the long, slender blade upward into Jack’s heart.

Jack’s hands, down by his sides, have not, however, been idle. His left hand has kept its grip on the thick hardcover book he’s been reading, and now, as he hears the telltale snik! of the switchblade, he reflexively presses the tome to his chest. The point of the knife encounters cotton, pasteboard, and paper instead of flesh. Andre’s eyes widen in surprise, then squeeze shut as Jack’s knee plows hard into his testicles.

As Andre begins to double over, Jack’s windpipe is freed. He sucks in a great lungful of air, brings the book up, jams its edge into Andre’s neck. To maintain the maximum force, he’s obliged to keep both his hands on the spine of the book and so lacks the means to force Andre to drop the switchblade. This weapon now swings back and forth like a pendulum with a razor’s edge, grazing first Jack’s ear, then his shoulder. With each wild pass, Jack feels searing pain, and hot blood begins running down him. The next arc could find his carotid artery.

Gritting his teeth, he jams the book harder into Andre’s throat, hears a crackle like a sheet of paper being crumpled prior to being thrown away. Then Andre’s mouth opens wide, emits a sound like a grandfather clock about to break down.

Jack, staring into Andre’s bloodshot eyes, begins to cry. Part of him knows what’s happening, what the outcome will be, but that part must stand aside while the organism is in danger. Andre, in a last, desperate attempt to kill, brings the edge of the switchblade up to the level of Jack’s ear. He points it inward, aiming for the canal opening. Jack, terrified, shifts his weight. The corner of the book penetrates into the hole made by the fracture of Andre’s cricoid cartilage. All air is cut off.

Andre’s knife hand moves. The point of the switchblade is almost at the canal opening. Jack leans in with all his weight; more of the book pushes inside Andre. Andre’s knife hand begins to tremble; the momentum falters. Tears are streaming down Jack’s cheeks. They fall onto Andre, into his wound. Andre’s eyes stare at him. They are unreadable.

There is now a contest of wills. Andre can no longer breathe, but he holds the knife. All he has to do is summon the strength to jam it point-first into Jack’s ear. There is a moment of stasis, when the power, the wills of both boys are held in balance. Nothing moves. The small sounds of the library, the occasional whisper, the soft pad of footfalls, the tiny, very particular sound of a book being slipped out from between its neighbors, all seem exaggerated, like the sounds of insects deep in the forest. All the trappings of civilization have become irrelevant, useless. All that remains are the tiny symphony of sounds and the beating of your own heart.

Nature abhors stasis; like fame, it’s fleeting, though its seconds may seem like minutes. Jack feels the point of the knife enter his ear canal, and he twists the corner of the book. Andre’s eyes roll up; his lips are drawn back in a rictus. He has nothing left, only a helpless rage that ushers him rudely from life to death.

Jack, panting like a sick dog, lies against Andre’s crumpled form. He feels as if a light has gone out in the depths of his soul, as if he has lost a part of himself. He is in shock, stunned at what has occurred. There are no words, no thoughts in his head adequate to what he’s feeling. Soon enough, he begins to shake with a profound chill. The strong copper taste of blood is on his tongue, but whether it’s his blood or Andre’s or both is impossible to say.

In a dim dead-end of the library where no one comes, he lies in a daze, in a kind of trancelike state, remembering an Indian parable from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna he came across weeks ago. It happened that a tigress, large with an unborn cub, attacked a herd of goats. As it sprang forward to grip in its teeth a terrified goat, the goatherd shot it. The tigress fell, and in that moment before she expired, she gave birth to her cub. The cub grew up with the goats, eating grass and, mimicking its adopted brothers and sisters, bleating. Until the day a male tiger found the herd. It quite naturally attacked the youngster, who did not fight back, but only bleated. The male tiger gripped the adolescent by the scruff of his neck, dragged him to the river.

“Look at our reflections,” the male tiger said. “You and I are as brothers. Why do you bleat like a goat? Why do you live with them instead of feasting on them?”

“I like grass,” the adolescent replied.

“Because grass is all you know.”

Whereupon the male tiger leapt upon a goat, tore out its throat. The adolescent was close enough to the feast to taste the goat’s blood. Then he put his head down and bit into the flesh, which he discovered he liked much more than the taste of grass.

The male tiger lifted his head, watching the adolescent gorge himself on goat meat. With his great muzzle covered in blood, he said, “Now you and I are the same. Now you know your true Self. Follow me into the forest.”

Jack, weeping still, gets to his feet. He dries his eyes and, finding his shirtfront bloodied, grabs his jacket off the back of a chair, puts it on. He finds that if he buttons the jacket up to his neck, the blood is hidden.

On the verge of leaving, he turns to regard Andre. What has happened has affirmed a notion embedded in his subconscious for a number of years: It isn’t simply his dyslexia that’s made him an Outsider. He won’t bleat and run like a goat. He won’t ever rub shoulders with the passersby on the street; he doesn’t want to. Like the tiger, he stands apart. The jungle is his home, not the cultivated field.

32

Once every two weeks or so, Secretary Dennis Paull scheduled a senior staff meeting at dawn, much to the grumbling of those closest to him. There was no obvious reason for doing this except to keep them on their toes, which is what pissed off his senior staff because it cut into their social lives. God forbid they should attend one of Paull’s senior staff meetings with a yawn or, worse, hungover. The secretary would hang them out to dry in front of their colleagues.

The meetings were held at Fort McNair, which was a building that didn’t look like a fort and was in the heart of downtown Washington. No one understood why the meetings were held at an army base and not at Homeland Security HQ, but no one had the intestinal fortitude to query Secretary Paull. Consequently, people thought he was simply eccentric and this behavior, along with numerous other peccadilloes, simply became part of the Beltway lore concerning him.

This was precisely what Dennis Paull had in mind. He never did or said anything without a specific reason, though that reason, like the moves of a chess player, was not always readily apparent. The reason Paull scheduled the meetings at the crack of dawn was because virtually no one was around. The reason he held them at Fort McNair was that it was a place within which even the president couldn’t track him.

This particular morning, at precisely 0617, Secretary Paull called a ten-minute break, pushed his chair back, and strode from the conference room. He walked down a number of halls, went down a flight of stairs, up another just to reassure himself that he was absolutely alone. Then he ducked into the men’s room at the rear of the third floor. No one stood by the row of sinks; no one was using the urinals. He went down the row of stalls, opening each door to ensure no one was in temporary residence.

Then he banged open the door to the last stall in the row and said, “Good morning, sir.”

Edward Carson, the president-elect, who had been reading the Washington Post, stood up, folded the paper under one arm, and said, “No need to call me sir yet, Dennis.”

“Never too early to get started, sir.”

The two men emerged from the stall. “Imagine what the Drudge Report would say about this,” Carson grunted. “We’re all alone?”

“Like Adam before Eve.”

Carson frowned. “What news of Alli? Lyn is beside herself.”

Paull knew it wasn’t presidential for Carson to add that he was also beside himself. Presidents never lost their cool, no matter how dire the straits. “I believe we’re closer to finding her today than we were yesterday.”

“Knock off the media-speak,” Carson said testily. “This is my daughter we’re talking about.”

“Yessir.” Paull rubbed his chin. “The ball is in your man’s court. I’ve given McClure every ounce of freedom I possibly can without showing my hand to the POTUS.”

Carson’s frown deepened. “But is that going to be enough, Dennis?”

“I’d be lying if I said I knew for sure, sir. But you and McClure go back quite a ways, from what you tell me, and you’ve said he’s the best man for the job.”

“And I stand by that,” the president-elect said stiffly.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Paull went on, “my agent agrees with you.”

“The only thing that’s going to make me feel better is the safe return of my daughter.”

There was a sudden noise outside, and both men went completely still. Paull held up a finger, crossed to the door, pulled it open quickly. One of the cleaning personnel was turning a corner. When he was out of sight, Paull ducked back into the men’s room, shook his head in the negative.

“I had to deliver Yukin into the POTUS’s hands,” Paull said. “I had the evidence against Mikilin, and I gave it to the POTUS before he left for Moscow. I attended a celebration of sorts following the POTUS’s return. He’s got the Russian president in his back pocket now, so does he demand exports from RussOil, as I suggested? Does he forge a pact to create a joint strategic uranium reserve, as I also suggested? No, of course not. Instead, he’s spent the ammunition I gave him obtaining Yukin’s promise to back the POTUS when he makes his final national-policy address to the nation. In it, he’s going to charge that the government has direct evidence that Beijing is funding E-Two, and that the First American Secular Revivalists are, in fact, a front for E-Two. And where d’you think that bogus evidence will come from? Moscow, of course. And no one will be able to say it’s false.” Paull crossed to the door once again, put his ear to it. Satisfied, he returned to where Carson waited for him. “The POTUS is going to declare war on the missionary secularists of any and every stripe.”

“I want to help you, Dennis, but until Alli is returned to me safe and sound, my hands are tied. As long as there’s a suspicion that either E-Two or the FASR is behind her abduction, I can’t make a stand against the president.”

“I understand your overriding concern here, sir, but we’ve had a complication.”

Carson’s blue eyes bored into the secretary’s. “What kind of a complication?”

“The men I sent to keep McClure safe were compromised.”

He’d caught the president-elect’s full attention.

“Compromised in what way?”

“The POTUS’s people gave them orders to terminate.”

A deathly silence overtook them. “Jack’s safe?”

“Yessir, he is.”

“I don’t want another incident like that,” Carson said. “Am I being clear?”

Paull stiffened. He knew a rebuke when he heard one, and this one was well deserved. “Absolutely, sir.” Somewhere along the line, his careful security net had been breached. He had to find out where with all possible haste.

Carson stepped away, regarded his pale, lined face in the mirror, then turned around. “Dennis, if the POTUS got on to your men, then he knows. Jack’s not the only one in terrible danger. We are, too.”

“Yessir.” Paull nodded. “That’s the goddamned truth of it.”

33

It had been a long time since Jack woke up with a splitting headache. He clambered out of bed with the unusual care of a mountain climber with vertigo. Crawling into the shower, he turned on the cold water full-blast so that no one would hear him screaming.

Ten minutes later, when Nina called, he had crawled out of the muck of the sea and had grown a spinal cord. He figured by the time she showed up, he had a chance of being halfway human.

Still, he insisted on driving them over to the All Around Town bakery. The day was cool but sunny, which made a welcome change of pace. But according to AccuWeather, there was another front coming in that wasn’t afraid of dumping three inches of rain or something worse on them.

He was in no mood to talk, but soon enough he noticed Nina repeatedly glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.

Finally, she ventured an opinion on his physical state. “You look like crap.”

“That’s what a week without sleep will do to you.” He eyed her speculatively. She was dressed in a gray flannel suit over a cream-colored cashmere sweater. “On the other hand, you look as fresh as a plate of sushi.”

“And just as cool.” Nina laughed. “I’ll bet good money you were thinking that.”

“Actually,” Jack said, “I was thinking about what we’ll do if Joachim Tolkan hasn’t shown up from his sad trip to Miami Beach. Or, even worse, if the story he fed Oscar was a lie.”

“Since when did you become a glass-half-empty guy?”

“Since last night,” Jack said, more to himself than to her.

“What happened?”

“My ex happened,” Jack said bitterly.

“I’m sorry, Jack.” Nina put a hand briefly over his. “I once tried to get back with an old boyfriend. All that did was make me realize why we broke up in the first place.”

Wanting to get off the subject of exes, Jack said, “I grew up around here. A lot of memories, good and bad. Mysteries, too.”

“What kind of mysteries?”

“A double murder up at McMillan Reservoir, for one.”

“It went unsolved?”

Jack nodded. “Not only that, I remember there was no info at all on who was killed.”

“That is odd,” Nina acknowledged.

Jack turned a corner. “Then there was Ian Brady.”

“Who was he?”

“No one knew who he was or where he came from. But he had a huge amount of juice—too much, I’d say, for a local drug dealer. He was supplying heroin, God alone knows what else. Other suppliers were caught or killed, but not Brady. No one could lay a finger on him.”

There was a sporty cabernet-colored Mercedes coupe parked in front of the All Around Town bakery, and Jack took this as a good sign. The bell rang as they walked in, and there was Oscar behind the counter.

“Boss just got here,” he said as soon as he saw them enter. “Wait right there.” He disappeared into the back. A moment later, he returned with a man whose only genetic connection with his father was his olive-gray complexion. He was tall and slim, dapper as his dad, though.

His expression was quizzical, curious, free from his father’s dark guile. “Oscar said you wanted to see me.”

“That’s right.”

Nina produced her Homeland Security ID. Jack made the introductions, gave their condolences for his loss.

Joachim Tolkan held out his hand.

Jack hadn’t expected this. He didn’t want to shake Joachim Tolkan’s hand, the son of a murderer, but he saw no way out. The moment he took Joachim’s hand, he felt an electric shock travel up his arm. It was as if he’d made contact with Cyril Tolkan from beyond the grave.

“Are you all right, Mr. McClure? You went white there for a moment.”

“I’m fine,” Jack lied.

“We just need a couple of moments of your time, Mr. Tolkan,” Nina said in her best neutral voice.

“No problem.” Joachim Tolkan lifted an arm. “Why don’t we continue this discussion in my office? That way we can all sit down and relax.” He turned to Oscar. “How about some coffee for our guests?”

As Nina passed Oscar, he handed her a chocolate-chip cookie, along with a wink.

Tolkan led them back through the oven room, hotter than Hades despite the exhaust fans and air-conditioning. To the right was a door through which he took them.

Jack found himself in a surprisingly large, pleasantly furnished office, complete with an upholstered sofa, coffee table, a pair of lamps. A full bathroom was to the right and beside it a short hallway that led to what appeared to be a bedroom.

“I stay here to all hours,” Joachim Tolkan said, noticing Jack’s scrutiny. He shrugged. “Anyway, no point in going back to the house these days. It’s become the soon-to-be ex’s territory.”

As Tolkan settled himself behind his desk, Oscar arrived with a tray filled with mugs and a carafe of coffee. Oscar slid it onto the low table in front of the sofa and left, closing the door behind him.

“Help yourselves.” When neither Jack nor Nina made a move to the tray, Tolkan said, “I’m curious. What does the Department of Homeland Security want with me?”

“Were you a member of FASR?” Jack said.

“So far as I know that’s not a crime.”

“You dropped out three and a half months ago,” Nina said.

“Again, not a crime.” Tolkan laced his fingers together. “Where, may I ask, is this going?”

Jack walked slowly around the room, studying everything. “E-Two.”

Tolkan blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You can,” Jack said, turning to him, “but it won’t do any good.”

Tolkan spread his hands. “What’s an E-Two?”

“Doesn’t read the paper, apparently.” Nina, perched on the arm of the sofa, took a tiny bite of her chocolate-chip cookie. “My, this is good.”

“Listen.” Jack advanced toward the desk. “We’re not in the mood for lies.”

Tolkan shook his head. “Lies about what?”

Was it Jack’s imagination, or was Joachim Tolkan becoming more and more like his late father, Cyril? He found the thought intolerable. He was just about to lunge at Tolkan when, entirely without warning, Nina skimmed her cookie right at Tolkan’s head. The edge struck him just over the left eye, the impromptu missile shattering on impact.

Tolkan’s hand flew to his face. “What the hell—!” Jack reached over, grabbed Tolkan by his lapels, dragged him up off his comfortable chair so that he was half-hanging over his desk. Cookie crumbs and bits of chocolate were strewn across his Hermès tie.

“You haven’t been listening to us, Joachim.” Jack’s face was flushed; there was a murderous look in his eye. “We don’t have time for your fun and games.” Jack hurled him back into the chair. “Tell us about your involvement in E-Two.”

Now it was Tolkan’s face that was white. He looked visibly shaken. “I was sworn to secrecy.”

“Your allegiance is admirable,” Nina said with a chill Jack could feel, “but misplaced.”

“Spill it, Joachim!” Jack thundered.

Tolkan expelled a little squeak. “All right, but there really isn’t much to tell.” With a trembling hand, he pushed his hair off his forehead. “I heard about E-Two through someone I worked with at FASR. I quit when he did because he said FASR was too slow and poky, too conservative to get anywhere. He said if I was really serious about change, there was another group we could join, one that would get things done. Sounded good to me, so I said okay. Then I come to find out that E-Two’s methods are violent.”

“That didn’t attract you?” Jack said.

“What? No.”

“But your father was a violent man.”

Joachim regarded Jack with the proper amount of fear. “What does my father have to do with it?”

Jack said, “The rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the poisoned tree.”

Tolkan shook his head. “You’ve got it wrong.”

Nina crossed her arms. “So enlighten us.”

Tolkan nodded. “The truth is once I was old enough to understand how my father could afford all the luxuries I enjoyed as a kid, I stayed as far away from him as I could. It sickened me the way he’d take us all to church on Sunday, how he’d kneel, say his prayers to Jesus, quote from the Bible, and then go out and do … the things he did. I wanted no part of him, his contacts, his blood money. I worked my way through college, got an MBA from Georgetown.”

Nina came down off the sofa arm. “So how come you wound up here?”

“I worked for Goldman Sachs for a year and hated every minute of it. When I quit, I decided I wanted to be my own boss. The bakery was still going, more or less. I saw an opportunity. I stepped in, invested in advertising, in a community-outreach program. Gradually I built up the business to the point where I needed to expand.”

“And look at you now,” Nina said.

Jack put his fists on the desk. “So you expect us to believe that you never joined E-Two.”

“I didn’t,” Tolkan said, shying away. “I swear it.”

“What happened?” Nina asked.

“I felt ashamed of myself. I went back to FASR, but they wouldn’t have me. Chris said I could no longer be trusted.”

Jack said, “This friend of yours—”

“He isn’t a friend.”

“Colleague, whatever.” Jack pulled himself up. “Does he have a name?”

“Ron Kray.”

Nina checked the printout Armitage had given them. “He’s here,” she said, and read off his home address.

“That’s a phony. Kray told me. He’s very private.”

Jack wondered why the name seemed familiar to him. He racked his brain, but the answer remained frustratingly out of reach. “So where does Mr. Kray live?” he said.

“He never told me and I never asked,” Tolkan answered. “But he said he works at Sibley Memorial Hospital.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Jack said. “It’s a rehab place for the elderly. Physical and psychiatric.”

Tolkan nodded. “Ron’s a nurse there. A psychiatric nurse.”

The modern layer cake of Sibley Memorial occupied a wide swath of real estate on Sleepy Hollow Road outside of Falls Church. Nina suggested they call to see if Kray was on duty, but Jack disagreed.

“First off, I don’t want to take any chance of him being tipped off we’re coming. Secondly, even if he’s not there, the HR department is bound to have a current photo of him.”

As it turned out, Kray wasn’t on duty. In fact, the head of the psychiatric department told them he hadn’t worked there for over two years.

They were directed to the HR department, where they obtained Kray’s last known address, which matched the one on the list Chris Armitage had given them. Kray’s photo ID, however, had been destroyed.

Kray lived on Tyler Avenue, not more than six minutes away. Nina was silent during most of the drive. At length, she turned to Jack.

“You must think I’m quite the neurotic.”

Jack concentrated on his driving. This was somewhat of a new area for him, and he wanted to make sure he read every road sign.

Nina took his silence for assent. “Yeah, you do.”

“What do you care what I think?”

“For one thing, we’re working together. For another, I like you. Your mind doesn’t work like anyone else’s I’ve ever met.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

She offered a nod of assent. “In a very short time, I’ve come to trust what you call your hunches.”

“Would you call them something else?”

She nodded. “I would, yes, if I had a word to describe them. Whatever they are, they’re far more than hunches, though.” She put her head back. “You know, if I spend any more time with you, I’ll start to doubt everything I thought was true.”

She put a hand over his. “We had a moment there under the old oaks where Emma escaped from school at night.” Her forefinger curled, the nail scratched lightly, erotically along his palm. “Why don’t we take it from there?”

He braked until he could decipher a street sign. Also, to clear the air between them.

“Listen, Nina, I’m flattered. But just so there’s no misunderstanding, I’m not into on-the-job screwing.”

“Too many complications?”

The image of Sharon was beside him, with her long tanned legs, hair swept across her face, that mysterious look in her eyes he loved because he never quite knew what it meant or foretold. “Among other things.”

“What if we weren’t partners? I could arrange—”

“It wouldn’t matter.”

“Well, that’s candor for you.” Nina removed her hand. “Your ex still under your skin?”

He swung onto Tyler, slowed to a crawl.

“Okay, forget it. Privacy’s something I respect. There is, in any case, a kind of privilege in loneliness. It makes you feel alive, introduces you to yourself.”

Jack felt annoyed. “I didn’t mean that.”

“You just didn’t say it.” She took out a clove cigarette, lit up. “I have a question. D’you have any idea who Emma met underneath the oaks?”

“My daughter’s life was a closed book to me. It was as well hidden as a spy’s dead drop.”

“You never followed up on it?”

“With who?” A nerve she had nicked flared up. “My daughter’s dead.”

34

Jack went up the flagstone path, knocked on the door. Immediately, a dog began to bark. He heard a scuffling inside, then the patter of feet. The door opened, revealing a middle-aged woman in a housecoat. A cigarette was dangling from her mouth.

“Yeah?” She looked Jack square in the eye without a trace of apprehension.

Jack cleared his throat. “I’m wondering if Ron Kray is home.” The dog continued barking inside the house. The woman squinted through the smoke trailing up from her cigarette. “Who?”

“Ron Kray, ma’am.” Nina stepped up.

“Oh, him.” The woman expelled a phlegmy cough. “He used to live here. Moved out about, oh, six months ago.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Nah.” The dog’s barking had become hysterical. The woman ducked her head back inside. “For God’s sake, Mickey, shut the fuck up!” She turned back. “Sorry about that. People make him nervous. He’s probably gonna leave a deposit on the kitchen linoleum.” She grunted. “At least the carpet’ll be spared.”

“You wouldn’t happen to still get any of Kray’s mail,” Jack said.

“Not a one.” The woman took a mighty drag on her cigarette, let out a plume of smoke like Mount Saint Helens. “Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

“You did fine,” Jack said. “Can you tell me the address of the local post office?”

“I’ll do better than that.” The woman pointed the way, giving him detailed directions.

Jack thanked her, and they picked their way back down the flagstone walk.

“The post office?” Nina said as they climbed back into the car.

Jack glanced at his watch. “We just have time to get there.” He pulled out, drove down the street. “Tolkan said that Kray was a private man. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone else getting his mail. I’m betting he filed a change-of-address form before he left.”

They headed east on Tyler, while Nina finished her cigarette, turned right onto Graham Road, right again on Arlington Boulevard, then a left onto Chain Bridge Road. The post office occupied a one-story pale brick building. It looked like every other post office Jack had been to, outside and in.

He walked up to the counter, asked to see the postmistress. Ten minutes later, a hefty woman in her mid-fifties appeared, walking none too quickly. It seemed to Jack that all postal employees were constitutionally incapable of moving at anything but a sluggish pace. Then again, maybe they learned it at some secret government academy.

Jack and Nina showed their credentials, asked for a forwarding address for Ron Kray. The postmistress, who had a face like a boxing glove, told them to wait. She disappeared into the mysterious bowels of the building. Time passed, people walked in, got on line, waited, inched forward. Forms were filled out, packages were rubber-stamped, more forms were filled out, letters and more packages were rubber-stamped. People who failed to fill out the proper forms were sent to the corner stand to correct their mistakes. Jack was at the point of risking a federal offense by hurdling the counter to go after the postmistress, when she reappeared, inching snail-like toward them.

“No Ron Kray,” she said in her laconic manner. She spoke like a character straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel.

Jack took a pad and a pen, laboriously wrote down Kray’s last known address, the house they’d just come from. Tearing off the top sheet, he handed it to the postmistress, who looked as if her recent labors had tired her out. “How about a forwarding from this address?”

The postmistress peered down at the slip of paper as if it might possibly do her harm. “I don’t th

ink I can—”

“From six months ago, give or take a week.”

The postmistress looked at him bleakly. “Gonna take some time, this.”

Jack smiled. “We’ll be waiting.”

“I get off work in twelve minutes,” she pointed out.

“Not today, you don’t,” Nina said.

The postmistress glared at her, as if to say, Et tu, Brute? Then, in a huff, she shuffled off.

More time passed. The line gradually dwindled down, the last customer finally dealt with. A collective sigh of relief could be felt as the postal workers totaled up, locked their drawers, and followed their leader into the rear of the building.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she was having a cup of tea back there,” Jack said. “She looks the vindictive type.”

“Jack, about Emma—I was just trying to help.”

He looked away, said nothing.

She bit her lip. “You’re a hard man.”

She waited a moment. They were alone in the front of the post office, the entry doors having been locked.

She peered into his face. “Could we start over?”

Jack returned slowly from the black mood of last night. “Sure. Why not?”

She caught the tone of his voice. “You’re not very trusting, are you?”

“Trust has nothing to do with it,” he said, a wave of leftover anger washing over the wall of his normal reserve. “Life has taught me how not to love.”

At that moment, shuffling footsteps forestalled further discussion. The postmistress had reappeared and was heading straight toward them. She was holding a handful of forms. Nina snatched them out of her hand just as she was saying, “There are six—well, I never!”

Nina was scrutinizing them, for which Jack was grateful. Considering the tense circumstances and the watchful eyes of the postmistress, he’d have had a difficult time focusing.

Nina went through the forms one by one, shook her head. “We’re going to have to run all of these people down.” Suddenly, her eyes lit up. “Wait a minute!” She flipped back to the fifth form. “Charles Whitman. Now that’s odd. Charles Whitman was the name of the sniper who climbed the University of Texas tower in August of 1966 and in an hour and a half killed fourteen people and injured a whole lot more. Someone at the scene, I forget who, said, ‘He was our initiation into a terrible time.’”

“I remember, that was a local shopowner. I saw him interviewed.” Then Jack snapped his fingers.“That’s why Ron Kray sounded familiar to me. Ronnie Kray and his twin brother, Reggie, were a pair of notorious psycho killers in the East End of London during the fifties and sixties.”

“We’ve got him!” Nina said. “Our man’s using both Kray and Whitman as aliases.”

Jack took Kray/Whitman’s change-of-address form from her. Concentrating hard, he began to read the new address. It was in Anacostia; that much he got right away. But the street and the number eluded him, swimming away on a sea of anxiety. Of course, the street name was simplicity itself, and part of his brain had recognized it at once. The problem was, it had shied away from recognition.

“He’s at T Street SE,” Nina said.

Then she read off the number, and Jack’s hand began to shake. Their target, Ron Kray, Charles Whitman, whatever his real name was, the man who might very well have abducted Alli Carson, was living in the Marmoset’s house.

35

Few people know where Gus and Jack live; even fewer come to visit. So when Detective Stanz shows up one evening at the Maryland end of Westmoreland Avenue, Jack has cause for a certain degree of alarm. For a time, Stanz and Gus stand out on the porch, jawing away. Stanz lights a Camel, and smoke comes out his nostrils. He looks like a bull in one of those Warner Bros. cartoons, except there’s nothing funny about him. He seems to carry death around with him under his left armpit, where his service revolver is holstered.

Jack, lurking inside, hears the words “McMillan Reservoir,” so he’s reasonably certain that after the Marmoset’s murder, whoever Gus put on the double murders hasn’t come up with enough to satisfy Stanz. But apparently he’s come up with something, because Jack hears Stanz say, “I say let’s go now. There’re questions I want to ask him.”

Gus nods. He walks into the house, uses the phone out of Jack’s hearing. He returns to tell Jack that he’s going off with Stanz, that he’ll be back in a couple of hours. As he watches the two men step off the porch, Jack hurries to the desk where Gus keeps an extra set of car keys. Slipping out of the house, he just has time enough to start the white Lincoln Continental, put it in gear as he’s seen Gus do, roll out after Stanz’s dark-colored Chevy. Jack deliberately keeps the headlights off until there’s enough traffic so that neither man will pick up the Continental. He’s only ever driven around the near-deserted streets of the house, with Gus beside him talking softly, correcting his errors or overcompensations. The sweat rolls into his eyes, pours from his armpits. His mouth is dry. If a cop stopped him right this moment, he wouldn’t be able to say a word.

With a desperate effort, he finds his equilibrium. Thankfully, he only has to concentrate on the Chevy and the colors of the traffic lights. If he needed to read street signs, he’d be completely lost. He pushes a button on the dashboard, and James Brown starts shouting “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” Singing along, he thinks fleetingly of how far he’s come since “California Dreamin’” sent ugly shivers up his spine.

He notices that the Chevy is heading more or less toward the reservoir area and wonders who it is that Gus recruited to take the Marmoset’s place. It’s an unenviable position, one that almost certainly requires a higher degree of compensation than Gus is used to paying. But then, that expense will no doubt be borne by Stanz and the Metro Police.

They are traveling north on Georgia Avenue NW, overshooting the reservoir. When Stanz’s Chevy turns right on Rock Creek Church Road, Jack switches off his lights, feeling he knows where the rendezvous with Gus’s snitch is going to take place. His hunch is confirmed when he follows the Chevy onto Marshall, and then Pershing Drive. They are now skirting the west side of the flat black expanse of the U.S. Soldiers’ & Airmen’s Golf Course. Bare trees loom up in groups that no doubt vexed the duffers making their slow rounds during daylight hours. Now, however, the trees have the course to themselves.

After flicking its headlights twice, the Chevy rolls to a stop on a section of road hemmed in on both sides by trees. Immediately, Jack sees Stanz and Gus emerge from the Chevy. Stanz has kept the headlights on, and the two men follow the twin beams that cut through eerie shadows, straight down the road. Pale moths flutter, spending themselves in the glare.

Cautiously, Jack emerges from the Continental, making sure the door swings shut noiselessly but doesn’t latch. Keeping to the side of the road, he creeps from tree to tree, stepping from shadow to shadow to make sure he won’t be seen.

He’s close enough now to see that Stanz and Gus have been joined by a male figure. He stands just outside the beams of light, and Jack moves forward to try to get a look at his face. He still isn’t sure why he felt compelled to follow Gus. He knows he’s worried. Someone murdered the Marmoset because he got too close to whoever killed those two men at the McMillan Reservoir. Jack read the news story, was mildly surprised to find that there was no information about who the victims were. The article said that the identities were being withheld pending notification of the respective next of kin. But in the increasingly smaller follow-ups, no mention was ever made of the victims’ names.

As he inches closer, Jack can see that the three men are in animated discussion. Stanz’s hands are hewing the air like axes. His mouth is going a mile a minute.

“—you mean, you can’t get a name? I need a goddamned name!”

“I haven’t got one,” Gus’s snitch replies.

“Then I’ll damn well find someone who—”

“I guarantee you’ll never get the name of the murderer,” the snitch says, “either from me or anyone else.”

Jack starts as he sees Stanz pull his service revolver. If it isn’t for Gus’s intervention, Jack feels certain Stanz would have shot the snitch. As it is, Stanz leaps at him, gets in a roundhouse right before Gus grabs him around the waist, holds him bodily in check.

“Get outta here,” Gus growls. “Go on now!”

“That’s right,” Stanz howls in fury, “run away with your tail between your legs, you good-for-nothing nigger!”

Gus hurls Stanz to the ground, stands over him with the detective’s gun in his huge hand. “I’ll take alotta shit from you, but not this.” He empties Stanz’s service revolver, throws away the bullets. Then he drops the gun. “Don’t come round my place no more, heah?”

As he stalks away, Stanz yells, “Don’t expect to be paid for this!” And then as Gus squeezes behind the wheel of the Chevy and drives off, “Hey, are you leaving me here? What the fuck!”

Gus is waiting for Jack in the side yard under the shadows of the big oak. Jack, rolling in with the lights off, doesn’t see him until he steps out. Jack brakes and Gus looms up to the driver’s window, which Jack rolls down.

“Since you got yo’self used t’drivin’ the boat, you can follow me t’ the precinct so I can drop off this piece-o’-shit Chevy.”

Gus lets Jack drive on the way home, as well. He says, “Whut you ’spect t’do, out there onna golf course?”

His voice isn’t pissed off; it isn’t even querulous. If Jack didn’t know better, he’d think there was a note of tenderness.

“I was worried.”

“Huh, ’bout me?” Gus pulls out his Magnum.357.

Jack says nothing, concentrates on making it home without getting lost. He supposes this to be a lesson, what’s behind Gus’s decision to let him stay behind the wheel.

“You bring a weapon, kid?”

Jack is startled out of his thoughts. “Uh, no.”

“Why the hell not?” Gus puts away the enormous gun. “Whut you think you could do out there if things got ugly?”

“They almost did,” Jack says, happy now to speak up.

“Huh, don’ take no chances like that again, heah?”

Jack nods.

“They’s a key behin’ the kitchen door.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Bottom right-hand drawer of my desk. They’s a snub-nosed .38. Jus’ right for a young feller like you. It’s loaded, but there’s a coupla boxes of ammo inna back.”

“I don’t like guns,” Jack says.

“Huh, who the fuck does?” Gus shifts in his seat. “But sometimes there jes’ ain’t no substitute.”

Jack wants to stay awake. In fact, with all the excitement, he’s certain he will. But Gus turns on the stereo. Music, familiar, earthy, shuffling, comes from his room, wraps Jack in a cocoon of melancholy history, and soon he’s in a deep sleep.

He opens his eyes to see a bird on the branch of the oak outside his window. It’s perched near the empty nest. Its head swivels as it looks in, peers around. It’s morning. A thin, milky light stretches across the bare plank floor. Jack throws the covers off, stumbles to the bathroom to empty his bladder and splash cold water on his face.

He wonders what Gus is going to make for breakfast this morning. He hopes it’s wild-blueberry pancakes. Since he doesn’t smell anything cooking from downstairs, he knows there’s time enough to put in his request with the chef.

Padding out into the hallway in just his underwear, he yawns hugely, scratches his stomach. He knocks on the partly open door of Gus’s bedroom, calls his name, and walks in. The curtains are drawn and it’s dim, still night here.

Gus is lying on the bed, the sheets and blanket rucked beneath his huge frame. He’s facedown, his arms splayed wide. Jack assumes he’s in a drunken stupor, calls his name more loudly. Getting no response, he pulls the curtains. Morning steps into the room, floods the scene.

Jack sees the bedclothes are black and shiny. He sees Gus’s mouth half-open, as if he’s about to yell at someone. He’s staring right at Jack.

“Gus?”

Then Jack sees a knife with an odd-looking hilt jammed into Gus’s back.

Much later, after the police have come and gone, after he’s given his statement, after Reverend Taske has come, prepared food for Jack, after the house empties of light and life, Jack goes to the stereo, puts on Out of Our Heads. As Mick Jagger begins his aural strut, Jack stands fixed, staring at nothing at all. He knows he’ll spend the night down here—maybe many nights to come. He can’t bring himself to go upstairs, either to his room or to Gus’s. But he wonders if that bird is still in the oak. He wonders what he was looking for.

Nearly a month after that, Detective Stanz comes to see him at the Hi-Line, the running of which Jack has taken over. Stanz walks slowly along the length of the glass cases, as if he’s in the market to buy one of the odds and ends displayed there. But Jack knows why he’s here. The only mystery is what took him so long to show up.

At last, he gets to where Jack is standing behind the register. He clears his throat. “You have some, uh, documents that Gus was keeping for me. I’d, uh, I’d like to have them back.”

Jack considers for a moment. “I know what documents you mean. They belonged to Gus; now they belong to me.”

Stanz’s face looks like a fist. “Why, you little—!”

Jack reaches under the counter, pulls out a plain manila envelope. “I have one of them here.”

He opens it, so Stanz can see the photocopies of the paperwork Stanz signed when he got his safe-deposit box at the Riggs National Bank.

Stanz snorts. “So what? Most everybody has a safety deposit box.”

Jack slides a photocopy of another document from under the paperwork. “Not when two million dollars of Luis Arroyo Ochoa’s money goes from the box to this offshore account in the Caymans.”

Stanz goes white. He grips the display case so as not to lose his balance. “But this is impossible! Those accounts are sealed.”

Jack nods. “So I understand, but that tax lawyer you went to who set up the account? He works for Gus.”

Stanz wipes his sweating face. He moves to gather in the damning evidence against him, but Jack is quicker. He spirits the folder away.

“There’s a price for everything,” he says.

Shooting him a bleak stare, Stanz says, “What’s yours?”

“I want to know who murdered Gus.”

Stanz breathes a sigh of relief, and Jack knows why. He was terrified that Jack would demand half of the two million he stole. But Jack wants no part of Ochoa’s blood money, and he’s quite certain neither would Reverend Taske. Besides, Gus provided generously for Renaissance Mission Church in his will, just as he provided for Jack.

The detective licks his lips. “What about the other one?”

“The receipt for the gun you used to kill Manny Echebarra is safe with me, Detective Stanz. No one needs to see it.”

Stanz ponders the unexpected situation he finds himself in. At length, he nods. “As it happens, I can help.”

He holds out his hand. Jack gives him the folder and he stashes it away.

“The knife we took out of Gus’s back is so unusual, it took the ME two weeks to track it down,” Stanz says. “It’s called a paletta. It’s used in bakeries. Gus introduce you to any bakery-store owners? Yeah, I thought so. His calling card, right?” His glittery eyes regard Jack without even the smallest measure of sympathy. This is a business transaction, pure and simple. “The thing of it is, there’s no prints, so we can’t prove anything. The Metro Police’s hands’re tied, know what I mean?”

Jack, his mind already fixed on Cyril Tolkan, knows precisely what he means.

36

Unlike other places in his past Jack had visited recently, the Marmoset’s house looked just as he remembered it, with its deep-blue exterior and white shutters. It must have been repainted recently, he thought.

With the real possibility of a kidnap victim inside, along with her abductor, Jack wasn’t prepared to take any chances of some overeager idiot tipping Kray/Whitman off. He got no argument from Nina. What he didn’t tell her was that, incredible as it seemed, he was now quite certain that Kray/Whitman was the same person who had killed the two nameless men at McMillan Reservoir, the Marmoset, and Gus twenty-five years ago. He was also the man who had abducted Alli Carter, and Jack had little doubt that he would slip his paletta into Alli Carter’s back if he was given the slightest hint his lair had been compromised. What he couldn’t work out as yet was the overarching pattern into which all these terrible offenses fit, because there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that all the crimes were somehow connected. He was drawing close, however, because he could sense its color in his mind: a cold, neon blue, as beautiful as the developing pattern was ugly.

There was something else the developing pattern told him: In gunning down Cyril Tolkan for Gus’s murder, he’d gone after the wrong man. Now, as his mind rolled all the emerging facts around, he had to wonder whether his stalking Tolkan was a case of deliberate misdirection. After all, it was the unique murder weapon that both Stanz and Jack had found most incriminating. The paletta was used in bakeries; Cyril Tolkan owned one: the All Around Town bakery. But though Jack had killed Tolkan twenty-five years ago, the strange filed-down paletta was being used again as a murder weapon. Jack didn’t believe the paletta turning up again was a coincidence, nor did he think it was a copycat killer, simply because twenty-five years ago the murder weapon had never been revealed to the public. That meant Gus’s murderer had been alive all this time. But why surface now, and why abduct Alli Carson?

Jack sat stunned, trying to regain his equilibrium as past and present rushed headlong at each other.

At last, he roused himself. “I know this place,” he said as they sat in the car where they’d parked down the block. “I’ll take the back, you take the front.”

They synchronized their watches. It was dusk, the light grimly fading from the sky as if whisked away by a sooty broom. The air was cold but still. Dampness lay on the ground like trash.

“Give me ninety seconds from the time we split up to get into position,” he continued, “okay?”

Nina nodded and they both got out of the car. Together, they glanced at their watches as they parted company on the pavement. Jack counted to himself as he made his way down the side of the house, past a couple of garbage cans on his right, a chain-link fence on his left. Jack thought of Zilla, the huge German shepherd Gus treated so well.

He arrived at the back door with sixteen seconds to spare. On his way, he’d passed three windows. Two were heavily curtained, making it impossible to see in. The third looked past lacy curtains to a kitchen, yellow as butter. It was deserted.

Inserting a pair of hooked picks into the lock, he manipulated them so that they simulated the turn of the proper key. The door popped open at almost the same time Nina was knocking on the front door. Glock drawn, Jack went from room to room, listened for any human sounds in between Nina’s insistent knocking. It was dim, gloomy, full of bad memories that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards. In the hallway, he paused at the line of photos. His hair stood on end—they were all of Alli Carson. They had the telltale flatness associated with a long telephoto lens. Then his breath caught in his throat, for there in the middle was a photo of Alli and Emma walking together on the Langley Fields campus. As he stared at the two girls, Emma’s image seemed to flicker, grow wavy, and move toward him. He could swear she knew he was here; he thought the smile on her face was for him.

As if from the wrong end of an amplifier, he heard her call to him. He wanted to answer her, but the fear of Kray/Whitman being in the house kept him silent.

Nina’s renewed banging on the front door caused him to jump, but that was hardly the source of his fright. He passed into the foyer, reached out and opened the door to let her in. A quick negative shake of his head let her know he hadn’t found anyone, but he led her silently to the photos in the hallway.

With his left hand, he indicated that she should check the second floor. He went room by room: the cobwebby basement, smelling of raw concrete and damp, the living room with its astounding volcanoes of books, magazines, papers of all kinds. The bathroom was clear, as was the kitchen. It was curious, though. The living room and foyer were just as he remembered them, cluttered and musty, but the kitchen and bathroom were neat and spotless, shining like a scientist’s laboratory. It was as if two completely different people inhabited the same place: the ghost of the Marmoset and Kray/Whitman.

To the left, he found a closed door. Trying the knob, he ascertained that it was locked. His picks were of no help here. The lock was of a kind he hadn’t encountered before. He stood back, aimed, then shielded his eyes as he fired the Glock at it. The resulting percussion brought Nina at a dead run.

He kicked in the door, found a room with only a huge painted wood chair. At one time, probably when the Marmoset had lived here, the room had had a window. Since then it had been bricked up and painted over. It reeked sourly of sweat, fear, and human excrement.

The two of them returned to the hallway, went down it until they found themselves back in the cheerful kitchen.

“Check everything,” Jack said.

They opened closets, drawers, cabinets. All the utensils, bottles, cans, mops, brooms, dustpans were arranged in order of utility and size. The oven was empty inside. Nina pulled open the door to the refrigerator.

“Look here.”

She knelt in front of the open refrigerator. All the shelves had been removed. She pointed to the bottom, where something translucent was wedged between sections.

“I think that’s a piece of skin.”

Jack nodded, his heart thudding in his throat. “Let’s bag it, get it over to Dr. Schiltz. I have a feeling it belongs to our Jane Doe who had her hand amputated.”

Nina donned a pair of latex gloves. “Let’s pray it doesn’t belong to Alli Carson.”

As she produced a plastic bag and tweezers, Jack moved to the pantry door. It was closed but not latched. Gingerly, he pulled it open.

He expelled a long sigh of relief. The First Daughter was wedged into a corner, her back against the far wall where it met a set of cabinets. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her shins. She was rocking gently back and forth, as if to comfort herself.

Jack squatted down to Alli’s level.

“Alli?” He had to call her name three or four times before her head swung around, her eyes focused on him. By this time, Jack could hear Nina speaking to HQ. She was asking for an ambulance, the Carson family doctor, who was standing by at Langley Fields, and an armed escort. She had initially asked for Hugh Garner, but for some reason Jack couldn’t make out, wasn’t able to speak with him.

“No sirens,” Jack said softly, and Nina relayed the message.

Jack edged closer, and Alli shrank back. “Alli, it’s Jack, Jack McClure. Emma’s father. Do you remember me?”

Alli regarded him out of depthless eyes. She hadn’t stopped rocking, and Jack couldn’t help thinking of the room with the monstrous chair, the straps, the smell.

“Don’t be afraid, Alli. Nina and I were sent by your father and mother. We’re here to take you home.”

Something in what he said put the spark of life into her eyes. “Jack?”

“Yes, Alli. Jack McClure.”

Alli suddenly stopped rocking. “Is it really you?”

Jack nodded. He held out one hand until Alli reached out, tentatively took it. He was prepared for her to draw back, but instead she launched herself into his arms, sobbing and shaking, holding on to him with a desperation that plucked at his heart.

He rose with her in his arms. She was trembling all over. Nina moved in beside him. She was opening the drawers in the cabinet, one by one. All were empty, save the top one, which held an assortment of the usual handiwork tools: hammer, level, pliers, wire-cutter, a variety of screwdrivers and wrenches.

Alli began to whimper again, and Jack put one hand at the back of her head in an attempt to calm her. With the other, he fumbled out his cell phone, pressed a button. A moment later, president-elect Edward Carson came on the line.

“Sir, I have your daughter. Alli is safe and sound.”

There was a brief rustle at the other end of the line that could have been anything, even Carson brushing away some tears. “Thank God.” His voice was clotted with emotion. Then Jack heard him relay the news to his wife, heard her shout of relief and joy.

“Jack,” Carson said, “Lyn and I don’t know how to thank you. Can we speak with her?”

“I wouldn’t advise it, sir. We need to extract her fully and assess her health.”

“When can we see her?”

“The ambulance is on its way,” Jack said. “You can meet us at Bethesda.”

“We’re on our way,” the president-elect said. “Jack, you made good on your promise. Neither Lyn nor I will forget it.”

At the same moment Jack put away his cell, Nina opened the cupboard over the small sink. Nina recoiled when she saw the horned viper slither down onto the countertop. The evil-looking wedge-shaped head with its demon’s horns quested upward. The viper was hungry, and she was annoyed. Her tongue flicked out, vibrating, scenting living creatures.

Jack dug the pliers out of the drawer. The head moved forward, far faster than he could follow, but midway toward him a shadow fell across it, slowing it. Jack felt a breath of cool air brush the nape of his neck. With a well-aimed swipe of the pliers, he stunned the snake. Gripping the viper’s head between the ends of the pliers, he squeezed as hard as he could. Though its brain was pulped, the viper’s body continued to thrash, slamming itself this way and that in a random fury for a long time.

Nina struggled to regain her equilibrium. “Jack, are you all right?”

Unable to find his voice, he nodded.

“It was coming straight at you; I was sure it would bite you.”

“It would have,” Jack said, a little dazed himself, “but something slowed it down.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nevertheless, something did. A shadow came between the snake and me.”

Nina looked around. “What shadow, Jack?” She passed her hand through the space Jack indicated. “There’s no shadow here, Jack. None at all.”

Alli twisted in his arms, taking her face out of his shoulder. “What happened?” she whispered.

Jack kicked the snake’s body away. “Nothing, Alli. Everything’s fine.”

“No, it isn’t, something happened,” she insisted.

“I’m taking you out of here, Alli,” he whispered as he took her back out through the kitchen and down the hall. “Your folks are coming to meet us.”

The Marmoset’s house was crawling with the heavily armed detail Nina requested. Along with them came two EMS attendants with a rolling stretcher, a nurse, and the Carson family doctor. But Alli refused to be parted from Jack, so he and Alli, with Nina at their side, strode out of the house with the escort.

Alli put her lips to his ear. “I felt something, Jack, like someone standing beside us.”

“You must have blacked out for a minute,” Jack said.

“No, I felt someone breathe—one cool breath on my cheek.”

Jack felt his heart lurch. Could it be that Alli had felt the shadow, just as he had? His mind lit up with possibilities.

He climbed into the ambulance with her clinging to him. Even when he managed to get her onto the stretcher so that the doctor could examine her, she wouldn’t let him go entirely. She was clearly terrified he’d leave her alone with her living nightmare.

He gripped her hand, talking of the good times when she and Emma were best friends, and gradually she relaxed enough for the doctor to take her vitals and administer a light sedative.

“Jack …” Alli’s lids were heavy, but the abject horror was sliding off her face like a mask. “Jack …”

“I’m here, honey,” he said with tears in his eyes. “I won’t leave you.”

His voice was hoarse, his breathing constricted. He was all too aware that this is what he should have said to Emma a long time ago.

Part 4

37

The early January sunset was painting narrow bands of gold and crimson across the low western sky when Jack met with Dr. Irene Saunderson on the wide, Southern-style veranda of Emily House.

“I’ve tried every way I can think of—and any number of new ones—to get through to Alli,” Dr. Saunderson said. She was a tall, stick-thin woman with dark hair pulled severely back into a ponytail, accentuating a high forehead and cheekbones, bright, intelligent eyes. She looked like a failed model. “She either can’t or won’t tell us what happened to her.”

“Which is it?” Jack said. “Can’t you at least tell that much?”

Dr. Saunderson shook her head. “That’s part of what’s so frustrating about the human mind. I have little doubt that she’s suffering from a form of posttraumatic stress syndrome, but at the end of the day, that tells us next to nothing. What’s indisputable is that she suffered a traumatic episode. But what form the trauma took or what the actual effect on her is, we can’t determine.”

She sighed deeply. “Frankly, I’m at a dead end.”

“You’re the third shrink to say that.” Jack unbuttoned his coat. A thaw had set in with a vengeance. “What about physical damage?”

“The exhaustive medical workup shows that she wasn’t raped or physically harmed in any way. There wasn’t even a superficial scratch on her.”

“Is there a possibility of Stockholm syndrome?”

“You’re thinking of Patty Hearst, of course, among many others.” Dr. Saunderson shrugged. “Of course it’s possible that she’s come to identify with her captor, but she’s shown no indication of hostility toward us, and given the relatively short amount of time she was with her abductor, it seems unlikely. Unless, of course, he used drugs to accelerate the process, but there was no sign of chemical markers in her blood workup. As you know, the president’s own medical team at Bethesda took charge of her when you brought her in.”

“It’s been three days since I asked to see her,” Jack said.

“You can see her right now, if you like,” Dr. Saunderson said, brushing aside his complaint with a shrink’s easy aplomb.

They always know what to say, Jack thought, even when they’re wrong.

“Shall I take you to her room?”

“Actually, I’d rather see her out here.”

Dr. Saunderson frowned. “I’m not so sure that’s such a good idea.”

“Why not? She’s been cooped up for the better part of ten days. This is a pretty place, but it’s still a prison.” Jack smiled his most charming smile. “C’mon, Doc. You and I both know the fresh air will do her good.”

“All right. I’ll be right back.” She was about to turn away when she hesitated. “Don’t be surprised if Alli exhibits some erratic behavior, extreme mood swings, things like that.”

Jack nodded.

Alone on the veranda, he had a chance to take in the antebellum atmosphere of Emily House, a large, rather overornate confection whose exterior might easily have been used for a remake of Gone with the Wind. Save for knowing its true purpose, Jack would not have been surprised to find himself mingling with couples drinking mint juleps and speaking in deep Southern drawls.

Emily House, named after a former president’s dog, of all things, was a government safe house in the midst of fifty acres of Virginia countryside as heavily guarded as it was forested. Over the years, a good many heads of state, defectors, double agents, and the like had called it home, at least temporarily. It was painted white, with dove-gray shutters and a blue-gray slate roof. A bit of fluff on the outside, belying the armor-plated walls and doors, the bullet- and bombproof windows, and more cutting-edge security paraphernalia than Q’s lab. For instance, there was a little number called ADS. ADS stood for active denial system, which sounded like something Dr. Saunderson might claim Alli was suffering from. However, there was nothing nonsensical about the ADS, which was to all intents and purposes a ray gun that shot out a beam of invisible energy that made its victims feel as if their skin were burning off. It wasn’t handheld; it wasn’t even small. In fact, it looked rather like a TV satellite dish perched on a flatbed truck or a Humvee. But it worked, which was all that mattered.

Jack, hearing a door open, turned to see Alli with Dr. Saunderson right behind her. It had been only three days since he’d last seen her, but she seemed to have aged a year. There was something in her face, a change he couldn’t quite figure. It was another visual puzzle he needed to decipher.

“Hey,” he said, smiling.

“Hey.”

She ran into his arms. Jack kissed the top of her head, saw Dr. Saunderson nod to him, then withdraw into Emily House.

Alli was wearing a short wool jacket, jeans, an orange Buffalo Brand shirt, a screaming eagle with a skull in its talons silkscreened on the front.

“You feel up to a walk?” he asked her.

When she nodded, he took her down the steps, along the crushed gravel. There were a number of formal gardens around Emily House. This time of year, the low boxwood maze was the only one still green.

Alli ducked her head. “We can’t go too far, you know, without catching the attention of the guards.”

Jack listened closely not only to her words but also to her tone of voice. There was something sad there that touched the sad place inside him. This young woman had spent all her life at the end of a leash, watched over by stern men to whom she could never relate. He resolved to talk with her father about the new Secret Service detail that would be assigned to her when she came home. She deserved better than two more anonymous agents.

“How are they treating you?” he asked as they moved between the low hedges.

“With kid gloves.” She gave a thin laugh. “Sometimes I feel like I’m made of glass.”

“They’re making you feel that way?”

Alli shrugged. It was clear she wasn’t yet ready to talk about what happened, even with him. Jack knew he needed to take another tack altogether.

“Alli, there’s something only you can help me with. It’s about Emma.”

“Okay.”

Was he mistaken, or did her eyes light up?

“Don’t laugh, but there have been moments during the past few weeks when I could swear I’ve seen Emma. Once at Langley Fields, then in the backseat of my car. Other times, too. And once I felt a cool breath on the back of my neck.”

Alli, walking silently, stared at her feet. Jack, sensing that she’d had enough urging recently, chose to let her be. He listened, instead, to the wind through the bare branches, the distant complaints of a murder of crows, crowded onto the treetops like a bunch of old ladies at a funeral.

At length, Alli lifted her head, regarded him curiously. “I felt the same thing. When you were holding me, when that snake—”

“You saw the snake?”

“I heard it.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“You were busy.”

The words stung him, though that was hardly her intent. The wound his inattention had inflicted was still as raw as on the day he’d held Emma’s lifeless body in his arms. There wasn’t anything that could prepare you for the death of your child. It was unnatural, and therefore incomprehensible. There was no solace. In that light, perhaps Sharon’s turning to the Church was understandable. There came a time when the pain you carried inside you was insupportable. One way or another you needed to grope your way toward help.

They had reached the heart of the maze, a small square space with a stone bench. They sat in silence. Jack watched the shadows creeping over the lawns and gardens. The treetops seemed to be on fire.

“I felt her,” Alli said at last. “Emma was there with us in that horrible house.”

And it was at that moment, with the utterance of those words, that Jack felt them both brushed by the feathers of a mystery of infinite proportions. He felt in that moment that in entering the boxwood maze, in finding their way to its center, they had both touched a wisdom beyond human understanding, and in so doing were bound together in the same mysterious way, for the rest of their lives.

“But how is that possible?” He spoke as much to himself as he did to her.

She shrugged. “Why do I like Coke and not root beer?” she said. “Why do I like blue more than red?”

“Some things just are.”

She nodded. “There you go.”

“But this is different.”

“Why is it different?” Alli said.

“Because Emma’s dead.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what that means.”

Jack pondered this a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t either.”

“Then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t feel Emma’s presence,” she said.

“When you put it that way …”

With the absolute surety of youth, she said, “How else can it be put?”

Jack could think of any number of alternatives, but they all fell within the strict beliefs of the skeptics, scientific and religious alike.

And because he felt the wingtips of mystery still fluttering about them, he told her what he’d never been able to tell anyone else. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, his fingers knit together, he said, “After Sharon and I broke up, I started to wonder: Is this all there is? I mean life, the world that we can see, hear, smell, touch.”

“Why did it come up then?” Alli asked.

Jack groped for an answer. “Because without her, I became—I don’t know—unmoored.”

“I’ve been unmoored all my life.” Alli sat forward herself. “Sometimes I think I was born asking, Is this all there is? But for me the answer was always, No, the world is out there beyond the bars of your cage.”

Jack turned to her. “Do you really think of your world as a cage?”

She nodded. “It’s small enough, Jack. You’ve been in it, you ought to know.”

“Then I’m glad Emma came into it.”

“For such a short time!”

The genuine lamentation broke Jack’s heart all over again. “And she had you, Alli, though it was only for a short time.”

It was growing cooler as the shadows extended their reach across the vast lawns, hedges, and flower beds. Alli shivered, but when Jack asked her whether she wanted to go back inside, she shook her head.

“I don’t want to go back there,” she whispered. “I couldn’t bear it.”

Without thinking, Jack put a protective arm around her, and to his slight surprise, she moved closer to him.

“I want to tell you about Emma,” she said at last.

Jack, stunned, said nothing.

Alli turned her face to him. “I think that’s why she’s still here. I think she wants me to tell you now. She wants you to know all about her.”

38

It took the better part of an hour for Jack to convince Dr. Saunderson and the powers that be at Emily House that Alli wasn’t joking when she said she couldn’t spend another night there. In the end, though, he was obliged to call in the big gun.

“She’ll be with me, sir,” Jack said to the president-elect.

“That’s what she wants, Jack?”

“It is, sir.” Jack moved away from where Dr. Sanderson sat in a pool of lamplight behind her enormous ornate desk. “Frankly, I don’t see any other way to get through to her. Every other avenue has been exhausted.”

“So I understand,” Edward Carson said gloomily. “All right, then. You have until noon tomorrow.”

“But, sir, that’s hardly any time at all.”

“Jack, the inauguration is the day after tomorrow. No less than three top shrinks have evaluated her without coming to any conclusion except that she hasn’t been harmed. Thank God for that.”

“Sir, it’s imperative we find who abducted her.”

“I applaud your impulse as a lawman, Jack, but this is nonnegotiable. Alli has a duty to be at my and my wife’s side at the ceremony. We didn’t go through all this secrecy only for her to miss the most important photo op of her life. And after all, what’s important is that Alli’s safe and sound. I don’t care to know about what happened to her, and frankly I’m not surprised she doesn’t want to relive it. I sure as hell wouldn’t.”

It must be single-mindedness, Jack thought, that put such a hard, shiny shell around all politicians, conservative, liberal, or independent. He knew the president-elect’s mind was set. No argument would sway him. “All right, sir. I’ll deliver Alli tomorrow at noon.”

“Good,” Carson said. “One more thing. I must insist on a Secret Service detail.”

“I understand how you feel, sir,” Jack said, thinking their presence might not be a big problem, but it would have to be dealt with. “Just so you know, right now seeing a detail isn’t going to be good for Alli. I need her to open up about what happened while she was in captivity. Feeling hemmed in is going to make that job more difficult than it already is.”

There was silence on the other end of the line while Carson mulled this over. “All right, a compromise, then. I want them on the roads with you. They’ll exit their vehicle only in case of an emergency.”

“And then, sir, I’d like to pick her permanent detail. I’ve a couple of people in mind. I don’t want a repeat of what happened at Langley Fields.”

“You’ve got it, Jack, we’re on the same page there,” Carson said. “Now let me settle matters with Dr. Saunderson.”

Alli turned when Jack emerged from Emily House. She’d been standing on the veranda, watching the guards crisscross the lawns at random intervals. He saw the anticipation in her face, but also the fear.

“Well?”

Jack nodded, and immediately relief flooded her face.

On the way to his car, she said, “I want to sit in the backseat.”

Jack understood immediately. On the way back to Washington, he kept one eye on the road, one on the rearview mirror, checking on the vehicle carrying the two-man Secret Service detail, and on Alli.

“Tell me where she was sitting,” Alli said.

He knew she meant Emma. “To your right, just a little more. Okay, right there.”

Alli spent the rest of the drive in that position, her eyes closed. A certain peacefulness settled over her, as if she had been transported out of time and place. Then, with a jolt, he realized that her near trancelike state reminded him of what had stolen over him after he’d killed Andre in the library. And he wondered whether he and Alli were two tigers, whether it was now his turn to lead her into the forest.

The old wood-frame house stood as it always had at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the border in Maryland. The house and its attendant property had resisted the advances of time and civilization. The huge oak tree still rose to a height above the roof; there was still a bird’s nest in its branches outside Jack’s bedroom. The forested area was, if anything, thicker, more tangled.

It was to Gus’s house he took Alli. His home, the place Sharon had refused to move into, rejecting his past. In fact, she couldn’t understand why he didn’t sell it, use the proceeds to pay for Emma’s tuition at Langley Fields rather than taking out a second mortgage on their house. “You own that horrid old thing free and clear,” she’d said. “Why not just get rid of it and be done with it?” She hadn’t understood that he didn’t want to be done with it. Just as she hadn’t understood that the house and property had been a place he’d taken Emma and, quite often, Molly Schiltz, when the girls were younger. They adored climbing the oak tree, where they lolled in the crotches of its huge trunk; they loved playing hide-and-seek in the wild, tangled woodland behind the house. They’d spread out like sea stars on the huge living room sofas, listen to Gus’s old LPs—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, whose over-the-top stage antics they imitated so well after Jack showed them the electrifying concert video of him performing at the Apollo in Harlem.

On his way up the front steps, Jack noticed the Secret Service vehicle parked down the block, in front of the neighboring house. From that vantage point, the detail had an ideal view of the front and side of the house.

Jack padded into the kitchen, put the Chinese takeout on the counter. When he returned to the living room, he went over to the old stereo, selected a vinyl disc, put it on the turntable. A moment later, Muddy Waters began to sing “Long Distance Call.”

Alli began a slow circuit, stopping here and there to peer at a photo, a book, a row of album covers. She ran her fingertips over an old guitar of Gus’s, a stack of Jack’s individually cased Silver Age comics of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Dr. Strange. His stacks of videocassettes of old TV shows.

“Wow! This place is exactly the way Emma described it.”

“She seemed to like it here.”

“Oh, she did.” Alli looked through the cassettes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Sea Hunt, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Bob Newhart Show. “She liked to come here when you weren’t here. To be alone.”

“What did she do here?”

Alli shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe she listened to music; she was nuts about the iPod you gave her. She took it with her everywhere. She made playlists and listened to them all the time.” She put the cassettes aside. “She never told me what she did here. See, she had secrets from everyone, even me.”

Jack, watching her, experienced a piercingly bittersweet moment, because as happy as he was to have her here, her presence—in a way that was most immediate, most painful—served to remind him of what he could have had with Emma. At the same time, he was overcome with a feeling of protectiveness toward her.

It had taken him some time after Emma’s death to realize that the world had changed: it would never again feel safe, never have the comfort it had held when Emma was alive. Its color had changed, as if cloaked in mourning.

And there was something else. Through Alli, he was coming closer to Emma, he was beginning to understand that he and his daughter were not so very different. It seemed that Emma knew how similar they were, but Emma being Emma, she needed to go her own way, just as he had when he was her age. All at once, he experienced a jolt of pure joy. It seemed to him that he and Emma would have come together again, that they would have reunited, perhaps as soon as the day she had called him. She was coming to see him, after all. What had she wanted to tell him?

“Abbott and Costello.” Alli was holding a cassette aloft. “Can we watch this? Emma talked about them, but I’ve never seen them.”

Shaking himself out of his reverie, Jack turned on the TV, slid the cassette in the slot. They watched “The Susquehanna Hat Company” bit until Alli laughed so hard, she was crying. But then she didn’t stop crying, not when the bit was over or when Jack popped out the tape. She just cried and cried, but when Jack tried to hold her, she shied away. He left her alone for a bit, going upstairs, sitting in Gus’s old room, which, now that the bed was gone, he could bear to be in. He spent time thinking of Ronnie Kray, trying to imagine him, trying to imagine what a serial killer could want with Alli. Had he meant to kill her? If so, he’d had plenty of time to slip his filed-down paletta into her back. Had he meant to torture her before he killed her? If so, there was no sign that he’d begun. Besides, torture wasn’t part of Kray’s MO. And if there was one thing Jack had learned in dealing with criminals—even the cleverest ones—it was that once established, an MO never changed. The same aberrant impulse that drove a person to kill another human being also ensured it be done the same way every time, as if it were a kind of ritual of expiation.

So, to sum up, at great jeopardy to himself, Kray had abducted Alli Carson from the grounds of Langley Fields. If it wasn’t to kill her or to torture her, then what was his motive? And why had he abandoned her? Had they been lucky, had he simply been shopping for supplies when he and Nina raided the house? Could he have been tipped off? But how, and by whom? The more Jack worked the puzzle over, the more convinced he was that Alli was the key. He had to get her to talk.

When he came downstairs, she was sitting on the sofa.

“Sorry I freaked out,” she said.

“Forget it,” Jack said. “You hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Let’s have something anyway.” Jack padded into the kitchen. Alli was right behind him. She helped him open the cartons, spoon out the food onto plates. Jack showed her where the silverware was, and she laid out neat place settings.

Alli was a carnivore, so Jack had ordered spare ribs, lacquered a deep-red, beef chow fun, roast pork fried rice, gai lan in garlic sauce.

Apart from the sticky ribs, they both used the wooden chopsticks that came packaged with the meal. Alli looked as if she’d been born with them between her fingers. Jack had been taught by Emma.

“I used to be a vegetarian, but that was before I met Emma.” She managed a wistful smile. “She could eat more pork than anyone I ever met.” She swirled the glistening noodles around with her chopsticks. “I made fun of her, you know? And she asked me why I was a vegetarian. So I told her about how animals are treated, and then slaughtered, all of that. She laughed and said if that was my reason for not eating meat, I was a hypocrite. ‘Can I borrow your suede jacket? How about your leather skirt, or one of your belts? And how many pairs of plastic shoes do you own?’ She told me about how small farms are breeding cows, pigs, sheep, chickens in humane ways. She told me about slow farming, sustainable methodology, hormone-free raising. She said if I wanted to be a vegetarian that was my business, but that I ought to do it for the right reason. She was so damn smart. She’d done her research, instead of just spouting talking points like me. What really amazed me about her was that she never made a choice just for the hell of it. There was always a reason behind what she did.”

Who was this girl he was hearing about? “It never seemed like that to Sharon and me. All we saw was chaos and rebellion.”

“Yeah, well, there was that, too.”

“I wish I’d taken the time to see more.”

“Well, it might not have mattered.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Emma was a master in letting you see what she wanted you to see, and nothing more.” Alli pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them. “I’ll tell you how it started with me. Emma didn’t have a lot of friends. It wasn’t because other girls didn’t try. They did. Everyone wanted to hang with her, but Emma didn’t want any part of a pack, even though it would’ve been so easy for her to be a leader. See, she saw herself in a totally different light. We both saw ourselves as being different, Outsiders, you know, with a capital O.”

The fact that his daughter had lived with the same sense of being an Outsider that Jack had lived with all his life shocked him to his core. Or maybe, if he was honest with himself, what shocked him was that he hadn’t recognized her as being an Outsider.

“The thing for me was that I always thought my being an Outsider was because of my father’s political ambitions,” Alli went on. “From as far back as I can remember, all he talked about, all he planned for was being president. There were times I actually thought he’d started making plans to become president when he was in grade school.

“Anyway, it was Emma who made me realize that being an Outsider had nothing to do with my father; it came from inside myself.”

Old Muddy had segued into the slow, rueful “My Home Is in the Delta,” one of Gus’s favorite tracks.

He said, “So Emma thought of herself as an Outsider.”

“She didn’t just think it,” Alli said at once. “She was an Outsider.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“At first, I didn’t understand it either.” Alli gathered up Jack’s plate and cutlery, put it on top of hers, took the small stack to the sink.

“Leave those,” Jack said, “I’ll take care of the washing later.”

“That’s all right.” Alli turned on the water. “I like doing this because no one’s told me to, no one’s even expecting me to.”

She squeezed some dishwashing liquid onto a Dobie, set about her job with some concentration. “I didn’t understand it,” she said, “until I took the time to get to know her. Then it hit me: Unlike most girls our age, Emma didn’t define or judge herself in terms of other girls her age. She knew who she was from the inside out. And because of that, she had a kind of—I don’t know—a savage energy.”

Finished, Alli dried her hands, returned to the table, and sat back down. “It was Emma who introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson, a modern-day Outsider if ever there was one. But she also suggested I read Blake.” She cocked her head. “You know William Blake?”

Jack felt a little thrill travel through him at Blake’s name. He had read and enjoyed Blake during his time in the District’s public libraries, which continued long after he was once again left on his own. But he couldn’t forget the telling excerpt Chris Armitage had quoted to him and Nina the other day. “I do.”

“Emma adored Blake. She identified with him intensely. And when I read him, I got her fully, because her favorite quote was this.” She closed her eyes, her brow furrowed in concentration. “‘I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s. My business is not to reason and compare; my business is to create.’”

“Emma wanted to create something.”

Alli nodded. “Something important, something lasting.”

“What, exactly?”

The tears came again, leaking out of the corners of her eyes.

A sudden awful premonition gripped Jack’s heart. “What is it?”

Alli rose, paced around the room. Muddy was in the middle of “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had.”

She bit her lower lip, said, “Honestly, I don’t know whether I should tell you.”

“Alli, you’ve come this far,” Jack said. “Emma doesn’t need to be protected anymore.”

“Yeah, I know, but …” She exhaled slowly, said, “She was going to quit school.”

Jack was flooded with relief. “You mean she didn’t like it at Langley Fields.”

“No, I mean school—any school.”

Now Jack felt bewildered. “But what was she going to do?”

“Oh God, I don’t want to break a trust.”

“But you said Emma wanted you to tell me,” Jack said. He found that he was perfectly serious.

Alli nodded, but her expression was bleak. She came and sat down close to him. “She was going to do what she felt she had to do.” There were tears in her eyes. “She was making plans to join E-Two.”

39

The image of Calla Myers hung in the air, the projector enlarging her face to Hollywood size. No one in the room, least of all Secretary Dennis Paull, failed to notice the resemblance to Alli Carson.

“Gentlemen,” he heard the noxious Hugh Garner say in his most authoritative voice as he held up a bagged-and-tagged item. “We now have our smoking gun.”

Paull was part of a very select audience seated in Sit Room W in the Pentagon. With him were the president, the Secretary of State, and the president’s National Security Advisor. They sat around a polished ebony table. In front of each man was a pad, a clutch of pencils, glasses, and bottles of chilled water. After the meeting, all the writing materials would be gathered up and burned.

“This cell phone belonged to one of the murdered members of the Secret Service detail guarding Alli Carson,” Garner continued. “It was found near Calla Myers’s body. At the time of her death, the victim was employed by the First American Secular Revivalists. While it’s a sure bet that the late Ms. Myers didn’t kidnap Alli Carson, her implication is now all but assured.

“My guess is that she was getting ready to defect. She was going to the police with the cell phone. One of her compatriots found out about her act of heroism and killed her. She must’ve heard her attacker coming because she managed to toss away the phone. It was found in our initial search of the crime scene on the west side of the Spanish Steps, clear evidence that the FASR or E-Two is behind the abduction of the Alli Carson.”

“Well done, Hugh,” the president said. “Now if you’ll excuse us.”

“Yes, sir.”

Garner marched out of the room like a good soldier, but not before Paull caught the sullen look on his face.

The president cleared his throat. “This little item combined with the documentation President Yukin has provided will spell the end of the missionary secularists in America.”

He turned to Paull. “Dennis, I’m ordering you to begin taking members of the First American Secular Revivalists into custody. Since you have been unable to make any headway in identifying anyone in this underground E-Two, I want each one of the prisoners interrogated on the subject.” He raised a finger. “I needn’t remind you that my term of office is just about over. I personally won’t feel as if our job was finished unless we bring these homegrown terrorists to justice. I certainly don’t trust the incoming president to get the job done, so it’s entirely up to us.”

Paull, secretly fuming under the president’s veiled rebuke, nodded, said enthusiastically, “Consider it done, sir. Now that we have the weight of evidence, we can attack in a more public way that was closed to us before.”

“Good.” The president, appearing immune to Paull’s cleverly worded response, rubbed his hands together. “Now, to the business of what comes after January twentieth.”

The Pentagon was built on secrets, but Paull observed that today there was about this room the deathly hush of secrets held close to the chest. On his desk, Paull had a rosewood plaque given to him by his mentor. On it was engraved in gold leaf the famed Benjamin Franklin quotation: THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET IF TWO OF THEM ARE DEAD. Paull was never more aware of the wisdom of that saying than he was now. As he looked around the room, it seemed to him that the atmosphere was rife with secrets. Perhaps this is what happens when the skein runs out, he thought, when after eight years of hard decisions, close calls, and the need for frantic spin control, the trust among even the closest of colleagues turns rancid. He’d been warned by his mentor that the last days of an Administration are gripped either by ennui or by desperation. Neither was healthy. Both revealed the corrosive workings of corruption. Each man had to face his moment of realization: Either the power had worn him down to a nub or he couldn’t live without it. Over time, his mentor told him, all that’s left to flush away is sewage, the entropy of power slipping through your fingers.

“Gentlemen,” the president continued, “how goes our sub rosa campaign to ensure the continuance of our influence on Congress and the media when Edward Carson becomes president?”

Here, now, Paull faced the truth of his mentor’s words. He was disgusted with the tenor of this meeting, the scrounging of Caesar facing the blade of the ides of March, railing against time and history. But he knew he couldn’t allow the underlying wretchedness to blind him to the extreme danger of these last few orders. The desperate animal was the most dangerous animal. The question he had to answer, and soon, was which one of these three men was the most desperate and, therefore, the most dangerous.

It fell to Paull to discover for himself what form of damage eight years of power had worked on these three men. Which one was a nub, which one a junkie?

The Secretary of State, a large man with the flushed face of an inveterate drinker and the twinkling eyes of Santa Claus, was the first to take the president’s challenge by the horns.

“If we stay the course, we have nothing to fear. The evangelicals are still our broadest base, though admittedly the NRA is less fickle.”

“There’s a growing problem with the NRA’s power,” the National Security Advisor said. He was a Texan, with a leathery face, a raspy voice, and the no-nonsense, faintly intimidating demeanor of a federal marshal in the 1880s. “Latest figures find an alarming decline in the number of hunters nationwide. Our concern has been given an environmental spin by our media outlets. We’re worried because hunters keep the deer population in check, hunters are pro-environment, that sort of thing. Of course, the real worry for us is that faced with declining membership, the NRA is going to lose its clout on Capitol Hill.”

“Now that would be a real shame,” the Secretary of State said. “Can we find some way to funnel money in their direction to make up for the shortfall? By God, we don’t want them running out of money to pay their lobbyists.”

“I think we can twist some well-heeled arms in that direction,” the National Security Advisor replied.

The president turned to his Secretary of Homeland Security. “Dennis, we haven’t heard from you yet.”

Paull tapped a pencil on the table. “I’ve been thinking on the evangelical issue. We have all the usual suspects tied up, but the growing influence of the Renaissance Mission Congress is a real concern. I’ve gone over the post-election breakdown a number of times, and each time I’m more impressed. There’s no doubt its influence swung the election in Carson’s favor. It got out the black votes in every state with appalling efficiency.”

“What’s your point?” the Secretary of State said. “Surely you’re not advocating we turn Reverend Myron Taske into another Martin Luther King, Jr.”

“God no.” Paull poured himself some water to cover the wave of revulsion that washed over him. With all his heart, he prayed for God to protect him from people like the Secretary of State. “It happens that Carson’s own man, Jack McClure, has a relationship with Reverend Taske. With that in mind, I’ve been running a Secret Service special operative, Nina Miller, who I made sure joined Hugh Garner’s joint-operations task force.”

Once again, Paull paused to take a drink of water. As he did so, his gaze caressed the room like a lover, absorbing every texture, gesture, shift of body or head without seeming to do so. All these men were suspect; all of them, in one way or another, could have infiltrated his security measures. He was hoping one of them would betray himself—even by as little as the flicker of an eyelid—as he revealed the nature of the very operation his enemy had discovered.

“Now that McClure has found Alli Carson,” Paull continued, “the task force is disbanding. However, following my orders, Agent Miller has formed a bond with McClure. She now has his trust.” He turned directly to the president. “Here’s what I meant to do from the beginning and now propose to you: Agent Miller will get McClure to use his influence on Reverend Taske to take our side.”

“I’ve met with Reverend Taske several times,” the president said. “He’s as honest as he is black.”

The National Security Advisor nodded. “We’ve vetted Taske thoroughly. He won’t abandon Carson.”

“He will if we convince McClure that Carson’s values are not what they seem to be,” Paull said. This was a total fabrication, one that his enemy in this room would discover when Jack didn’t denounce the president-elect. But by that time it would be too late. All he wanted now was to buy enough time to get them all through the next couple of days. “What I’ve learned from my agent is McClure’s an odd duck—loyal in the extreme, but quick to turn on a dime if he thinks he’s been betrayed. I can use that to my advantage.”

“He sounds unstable,” the Secretary of State said. “I don’t like it.”

“Unstable or not,” the National Security Advisor said, “I like the shot. Dennis is right on target as far as the Renaissance Mission Congress is concerned. It’s powerful and getting more so every day. Of course, it would be ideal if we could wrap up the RMC and the Hispanic vote in one tidy ball, but I’m as much a realist as the next man. I know a goddamn pipe dream when I see one.”

“I concur.” The president nodded. “We’ll give Dennis his head with the McClure mission.”

“Dennis,” the National Security Advisor said, “if there’s any assistance I can provide, I’m only a call away.”

“I appreciate that,” Paull said. “That might be just the boost I need.” When there are ice cubes in hell, he thought.

The president held up a hand. “Please, all of you, keep our accelerated timetable in the forefront of your plans. Dennis, McClure has to be wrapped up and delivered before the twentieth.”

When Dennis Paull exited the Pentagon, he pulled out his cell phone, punched in a speed-dial number, said, “Latent,” and rang off. A moment later, he ducked into his limo, which took him to the nearby Nordstrom department store. Paull strode inside, went immediately to the men’s store. There, he spotted two of his men. While the first one covered his back, checking for tails, Paull went up to the second agent, took the large shopping bag out of his hand, proceeded to the entrance to the dressing rooms, outside of which another of his agents stood guard.

Inside, only one booth was occupied. Paull chose an adjacent booth, spent the next four minutes stripping off his fedora, midnight-blue cashmere overcoat, Brooks Brothers suit, Paul Stuart shirt and tie. He put his black brogues aside. From the shopping bag, he donned a pair of stovepipe-leg jeans, a blue chambray shirt, a pair of brown Lucchese cowboy boots.

Thus dressed, gripping a dossier he’d extracted from inside his overcoat, he knocked on the dividing wall between his booth and the other occupied booth. The fourth of his agents appeared with a brown shearling coat and a dun-colored Stetson for Paull. As the secretary vacated his booth, his agent, who was the same weight and height as Paull, entered, dressed himself in his boss’s clothes. He was the one who exited Nordstrom by the same doors Paull had used to enter. He climbed into Paull’s limo, which whisked him away. At the same time, Paull took a side door out to the mall, where an Empire taxi idled, waiting for him, its driver one of Paull’s agents.

The taxi took off as soon as Paull climbed in, swinging onto Washington Boulevard, heading toward Arlington. On the corner of Fourteenth and North Wayne, Paull got out, walked around the block to make sure he was clear, then went up North Adams Street. Just past where it crossed Fifteenth, a Metro Police car sat waiting. Paull opened the rear door, got in.

“All clear,” Paull said. “Do you have any news?”

“Yes, sir.” The agent dressed as a cop nodded. “The captain of your boat reads lips.”

“Damn it to hell!” Paull’s fist struck the armrest. “Who’s he reporting to?”

“It’s a mobile number we can’t get a handle on.”

“That figures.” He thought a moment. “How about a date and time the call was made?”

“That I can do,” his agent said, then gave the information to him.

Paull stared out the window at the civilians hurrying past him on errands to buy fish or pick up flowers. Little People, the National Security Advisor called them, with an arrogance typical of this president’s Administration. Of course, Paull himself was a member of the Administration, but right now he felt like a rat in the woodwork who suspected a slew of tomcats were waiting to snap off his head the moment he poked it into the open. “This is beautiful. Just beautiful.”

He nodded. “Okay, let’s get going.” And he opened the thin dossier, reading it one more time and wondering at the paucity of genuine information on Ian Brady, the government’s own crown jewel asset. But even in these few paragraphs, there was something for him, he was certain of it—trouble was, he was damned if he knew what it was.

“Howdy, cowboy,” Nina Miller said when he picked her up in the shadows of North Taft Street.

Paull shifted over. “I do look a sight, don’t I?”

She tossed his Stetson onto the front seat. As she settled herself beside him, he said, “We’ve got a problem.”

“Another one,” she inquired, “or the same one?”

That made him laugh, despite his foul mood. “I think all our problems devolve back to one person.”

“I only wish it was Hugh Garner,” Nina said. “Him I can handle.”

“He needs decommissioning, that’s for certain,” Paull acknowledged. “Any ideas on that score?”

“Jack told me he practically drowned Peter Link, one of the heads of the FASR. He would’ve done the same to Chris Armitage if Jack hadn’t stepped in.”

“Forget it. The president just ordered the arrest and interrogation of all FASR members.”

“Then it’s begun.”

Paull nodded grimly. “Despite all our efforts.”

“Jack’s, too. He intervened, stood up to Garner to stop the torture by threatening to call the president-elect. It was no idle threat, and Hugh knew it, so he backed down. But now he hates Jack’s guts.”

“All useful bona fides,” Paull said thoughtfully. “Is Jack one of us?”

Nina made a waffling gesture with one hand. “I don’t yet know whether he has a side. He seems to be the most apolitical person I’ve ever met. Systems—any system—are abhorrent to him.”

“So what is he, then?” Paull asked.

“Actually,” Nina said, “from all the evidence, I’d say he’s a humanist.”

Paull seemed lost in contemplation.

The police car had taken the Curtis Memorial Parkway and was now on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, heading into Georgetown. The early morning fog had lifted, revealing a high sky filled with sunlight. There was only a light breeze. Paull, who hated overheated vehicles, had rolled down his window partway. He enjoyed the crisp air on his face and neck.

“The problem,” Paull said, his eyes half-closed against the wind, “is that despite all my high-tech efforts at security, I’ve been undone by a very low-tech methodology: lip-reading.”

“Someone on your yacht?”

He nodded. “The fucking captain, of all people.”

“Wasn’t he properly vetted?”

Paull shot her a pitying look. “We’re talking someone inside the White House, very high up. All the vetting in the world is useless against being turned by someone of that stature.”

The car took M Street, then turned north on Rock Creek Parkway.

“Surely you don’t believe that the president recruited him directly?”

“I do not,” Paull said. The car pulled to the side of the road within Rock Creek Park. “Walk with me. The driver will pick us up at the food shack two miles on.”

They climbed out of the car and began to walk. The police car was soon gone. Paull had left his ridiculous Stetson in the front seat. The sun was but a sheen behind the tissue of white clouds. Nina pulled the collar of her peacoat up around her neck; Paull jammed his hands in his pockets as they set off together, surrounded by trees and brush.

“I’ve been thinking hard about your question,” Paull said. “No, the president is too wily to initiate anything against me on his own. I’m not even certain that he’s aware of the death of those two men who were following Jack to protect him. Therefore, he has to have a middle man.”

“You mean a hatchet man.”

“Call him what you will, Nina, we have a very potent enemy in the Administration.”

“It’s imperative we know his identity, don’t you think?”

Paull nodded. “I most certainly do. Because the president is involved, even if it’s on a nontactical level, our man has to be either the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor.”

Nina shuddered. “I wouldn’t want either of them as an enemy.”

“I hear you,” Paull acknowledged, “but that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.”

They were nearing a fork in the road, and he directed them to the right, along a high embankment. A stream glimmered dully below. Apart from a smattering of passing cars, there was no one about.

“The good news is that I’ve worked out which one it is,” Paull continued. “The message the captain sent was on the same day you and I met on the yacht. The time was a few minutes after you left. At that time, the president was on his way to Moscow to meet with President Yukin. He could have taken the call himself, of course, but that seems unlikely. The president maintains a high level of plausible deniability by using selected intermediaries he deems expendable.”

“Both the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor were with him on Air Force One,” Nina said.

“So they were, but only one of them has knowledge of—and therefore access to—a specific high-level asset. I’m this asset’s handler, that’s how important he is. He’s abruptly dropped off the grid, he hasn’t made his dead drops in months. However, I have reason to believe that as recently as last week, this particular asset has been in touch with someone else in the Administration. I am very much afraid this high-ranking official is using this asset—a murderer without a speck of conscience—for his own purposes.”

“What purposes?”

“That I’m not at liberty to disclose.” How about kidnapping Edward Carson’s daughter so the crime can be labeled an act of terrorism and laid at the missionary secularists’ door, Paull thought. “At first, I suspected it might be the president himself, but now I think it might be the only other person who knows of the asset’s existence: the National Security Advisor.”

“So the National Security Advisor has been working, at the president’s behest, against us.”

Paull nodded. “It seems most likely. But I’ve bought us some time. I told him that I’ve been running you with an eye to getting closer to Jack McClure.”

“That’s too close to the truth.”

Paull smiled thinly. “Have faith; that’s as far as the truth goes. I sold them the story that I’m going to find a way to poison Jack against Edward Carson. Jack then goes to Reverend Taske, gets him to turn the power of the RMC against Carson.”

Nina shook her head. “What I wouldn’t give for fifteen minutes inside that brain of yours.”

“Now that we know who we’re fighting,” Paull said, “we’d better rally the troops and man the ramparts.”

“Good God, you’re not talking about an all-out war, are you?”

“Not out in the open. But we’ve already felt the first shot across our bows—the turning of two of my men, plus my captain. Our first order of business is to root out any others. We can’t mount a reasonable response if the opposite side knows every move we make.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Nina said.

“Use the Secret Service facilities, not Homeland Security’s.”

“Gotcha.”

They walked a bit farther, lost in their own thoughts.

“Now tell me what’s new with our boy, Jack,” Paull said.

“Sir, do you recall a double murder at McMillan Reservoir about twenty-five years ago?”

“That would be Metro Police territory, wouldn’t it?”

“Apparently not this one. I checked Metro’s records of the incident. There aren’t any. According to Jack, there was very little in the papers. I checked out his story, and he’s right. For that kind of crime, there was precious little ink spilled—not even the names of the victims. Everything was hushed up, so it must have been at a high government level.”

“What’s McClure’s interest in the double murder?”

“I don’t know, we haven’t had time to talk about it at length,” Nina said. “But he also has an intense interest in a local drug supplier working at the same time. Jack said no one knew who he was or where he came from, but that he had a tremendous amount of juice. No one could ever lay a hand on him, a man named Ian Brady.”

For a moment, Paull thought that he’d been struck by a car that had jumped the curb. For certain he was having an out-of-body experience. When he was able to gather his scattered senses, he said, “Come again?”

“Did I say something—?”

“That name.” Paull snapped his fingers impatiently. “Give me that name again.”

“What? Ian Brady?”

“That’s the fucking one.”

Beside her, Paull stared off into the distance, his eyes seeing nothing. Brady was the key, the lynchpin to events unfolding all too rapidly. A serial murderer, a schemer, most probably a psychopath—this was the asset Paull had inherited. The most important intelligence asset stretching back twenty-five years. This was the monster he was forced to protect, whose whereabouts he no longer knew. Who did, then? His mind snapped into perfect focus. “Get Jack McClure,” he said to Nina. “Bring him to me ASAP.”

Nina took out her cell phone. “I’ll call him right now.”

“No,” Paull said. “It’s all too likely that our cell conversations are being monitored. I don’t even want to use mine without prearranged coded signals.”

“I’ll find another way,” Nina said.

Paull nodded gravely. “I know you will.”

40

“Get it into your head, Jack,” Sharon had said in the ER. “We all have a secret life, not just you.” Now Jack knew the real truth of her words. His daughter was living a secret life right under his nose. It was as if he’d never known her at all—which was, of course, a deficiency that Sharon had accused him of repeatedly. But, given what she’d said to him, he determined that he had to know whether or not she knew about Emma’s radicalization, her secret life.

“If she felt so strongly about the blurring of religion and government,” Jack said, “why didn’t she join a peaceful organization like the First American Secular Revivalists?”

“Because she was Emma,” Alli said. “Because she never did things halfway, because she was strong and sure of herself. Above all, because she felt that the pack of evangelicals who had invaded the federal government were warmongers, that the only way to get their attention, to attack them, to expose them was with a radical response.”

“She hated the warmongers so she became one herself?” Jack shook his head. “Isn’t that counterintuitive?”

“The philosophers say fighting fire with fire is a legitimate response as old as time.”

They were walking in the tangle of trees and underbrush behind the house. The sky was turning black, as if with soot, and a cold wind shivered the tallest branches. Jack was turning over what Alli had said because there was something about it that stuck in his mind, that seemed to loom large on the playing field he’d been thrust onto.

He stopped them at the bole of a gigantic oak. “Let’s back this up a minute. Emma knew that your father would win the election, or at least that this current administration was on its last legs. Why not simply wait until the new regime came in?”

Alli shook her head. “I don’t know, but there was an urgency in what she had to do.”

“All right, let’s put that aside for the moment. You said that she wanted to expose the Administration with a radical response.”

“That’s right.”

“Did she tell you what she meant by that?”

“Sure. E-Two wants to provoke an extreme response from the Administration.”

“But there’s sure to be bloodshed.”

“That’s the whole point.” Alli licked her lips. “See, the bloodier, the more militant, the more brutal the response, the better. Because E-Two is out to show the entire country what this Administration really is. They won’t be able to round up the E-Two members easily. From what Emma said, they’re all young people our age—no one over thirty. When there’s blood on the streets, when America sees their own sons and daughters slaughtered, they’ll finally understand the nature of the people who are exporting war and death to the world.”

Jack was rocked to his core. “They’re planning to be martyrs.”

“They’re soldiers,” Alli said. “They’re laying down their lives for what they believe in.”

“But what they’re planning is monstrous, insane.”

“As our foreign policy has been for eight years.”

“But this isn’t the way.”

“Why not? Sitting on their hands hasn’t worked so well, has it? Anyone who has said or tried to do anything to protest faith-based initiatives has been ridiculed or, worse, branded a traitor by the talking heads controlled by the Administration. God, look at what wimps members of the opposite party have been through an illegal war, scandals, evidence that the government muzzles its scientists and specialists on the topics of WMDs and global warming. If the parties were reversed, you can bet this president would’ve been impeached by now.”

Why was it, Jack thought, that he felt as if he were listening to Emma and not Alli? A strange thing was happening to him. It had begun when he and Alli entered the house and now had continued as they moved out into woods. There was the very curious sensation of the world finally starting to make sense to him—well, if not the whole world, then his world, the one he’d kept hidden from others and which kept him apart from them. Like his ability to sense Emma, though she was no longer in this world, at least by the limited understanding of man-made science, he felt as if his world and the one that had always been closed to him were beginning to overlap. Hope rose, completely unfamiliar to him, that one day he might even be able to straddle both, that he might live in one without giving up the other.

This gift he very badly wanted to bestow on Alli. To this end, he said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

Alli regarded him with skepticism. “Not another shrink. I’ve had my fill of probing and prodding.”

“Not another shrink,” Jack promised.

Rather than return to the front of the house where he’d parked, he took her through the underbrush. On the other side was parked Gus’s white Continental, which Jack kept in pristine condition.

Alli laughed in delight as she climbed into it. Behind the wheel, Jack turned the key in the ignition, and the huge engine purred to life. With the lights extinguished, he rolled away without the Secret Service detail parked on Westmoreland being any the wiser.

He turned on the tape player, and James Brown took up “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in midsong.

“Wow!” Alli said.

Yeah, thought Jack. Wow.

Ten minutes later, when they arrived at Kansas Avenue NE, they couldn’t get near the old Renaissance Mission Church building. Barriers had been erected on the street and sidewalks on either side of it. There must have been more than a dozen unmarked cars and anti-terrorist vans drawn up on the street within the barriers.

Jack’s heart seemed to plummet in his chest. Telling Alli to wait in the car, he got out, flashed his credentials to one of the twenty or so suits milling around. Then he saw Hugh Garner, who was spearheading the operation, and put away his ID.

“Hello, McClure,” Garner said. “What brings you here?”

“I have an appointment with Chris Armitage of FASR,” Jack lied.

Garner pulled a face. “So do we, McClure. Trouble is, we can’t find him, or his pal Peter Link.” Garner inclined his head. “You wouldn’t know where they’ve got to?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be here talking to you,” Jack said. “I’d like to speak to someone else in the FASR offices.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible.” Garner looked smug. Hailed by one of his detail, he turned, gave a couple of orders, turned back to Jack. “No one’s here. This office has been shut down.”

Jack thought of all the busy, dedicated men and women he’d seen on his way into Armitage’s office. “Where is everyone else?”

“In federal custody.” Garner grinned. “They’ve forfeited their rights to due process. They’ll be held as long as necessary. Neither you nor anyone else can see them without a written order signed by the National Security Advisor himself.”

Jack rocked back on his heels as if struck a blow. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The president went on the air an hour ago with evidence supplied by the Russian president himself that the FASR and E-Two are being funded by Beijing.” Garner’s grin widened. “Under the Anti-Terrorism Act of December 2001, they’ve all been charged with treason.”

Just south of where the sawhorses blocked off the avenue was an alleyway. Jack drove the car around to Chillum Place, parked in a deserted lot. Alli said nothing; he knew she understood perfectly well what had happened.

“Why are we here?” Alli said at last. “Sitting in the dark with the lights out and the engine off?”

“We’re moving to the edge of the world,” Jack said quite seriously. “We’re heading off the grid.”

“What’ll happen when we get there?”

“Tell me more about Emma.”

Alli felt a familiar terror clutch her heart. Ever since Jack and Nina had rescued her, she had felt as if she had a fever, racked by bouts of anxiety, cold sweats, dreams of menacing shadows whispering horrible things to her. She saw Kray everywhere, as if he were stalking her, monitoring her every move, every word she said, every breath she took. Often, alone, she shook, chilled to her bones. Kray had become the sun, the moon, the clouds in the sky, moving as she moved, the wind rattling through the trees. He was always with her, his threats mingling with his ideas, the strange and powerful openness and freedom she had felt with him. These contradictory feelings confused and terrified her all the more. She no longer knew who she was, or more accurately, she no longer felt in control of herself. Something eerie and horribly frightening had happened to her in that room with him. Truth to tell, there were moments she couldn’t recall, which was a relief. She so didn’t want to probe beneath the unfamiliar surface of that vague unease at not remembering. Something had slipped away from her, she felt, and something else had been slipped into its place. She no longer was the Alli Carson who had lain sleeping in her dormitory room.

On the other hand, there was now, there was Jack. She liked him immensely, and this led to a certain sense of trust. He made her feel safe as no other human being—armed or otherwise—ever had. She envied Emma now, having this man for a father and then, realizing all over again that Emma was dead, shook a little, felt ill with shame for even having the thought. Even so, the thought of talking to him about Kray, about what had happened, set off a panicky feeling she was unable to understand, never mind try to control.

“Emma once said to me that we never really see ourselves,” she said in an attempt to calm herself as well as to answer him. She felt that as long as she continued to speak about Emma, her friend wasn’t truly dead, that a part of her—the part of Emma they saw and heard—would remain. “She said all we ever see of ourselves is our reflection—in mirrors, in water. But that isn’t how we appear at all. So we had this game we played at night. We’d sit on the bed facing each other and we’d take turns describing each other’s faces in the most minute detail—first the forehead and brow, then the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the mouth. And Emma was right. We got to know ourselves in a different way.”

“And each other,” Jack said.

Alli stared out the windshield into the emptiness of the lot. “We already knew each other better than if we’d been sisters. We’d found each other; we loved each other. We shared the night with all its loneliness, its subversiveness, its secrets.”

All at once, it was as if Emma were sitting there beside her, and with a sob, she began to cry. She should be here, Alli thought. She’d understand what happened to me, she’d be able to tell me why I’m feeling so strange, why everything feels threatening. Everything except Jack.

“Secrets like who Emma met under the oak trees outside Langley Fields?”

There was a silence for a moment as Alli squirmed in her seat. Inside her mind, a pitched battle was in progress between what she wanted to say and what she felt compelled to hold back. “Okay, I lied to you about that, but it was only to protect Emma, the part of her life she’d entrusted to me.”

“So you know who she met?”

Alli bit her lip. As a cloud skims across the moon, a shadow came over her, her eyes lost their focus, her gaze seeming fixed on a distant shore. Her stomach was tied in knots; she could feel the cold sweat breaking out under her arms, at the small of her back. She couldn’t backtrack now, and yet she knew she mustn’t tell Jack Kray’s name. If she kept to what Emma had told her, she thought she’d be all right. Talking about her friend, feeling closer to her was just about the only thing that calmed her. So she continued the process already begun by Kray himself of cleaving her thoughts in two: talking about the acceptable, pushing down the forbidden.

“Emma said his name was Ronnie Kray.”

Until this moment Jack had thought the phrase “made his blood run cold” was merely a literary one. Now he experienced it literally. Emma had met with a serial killer, the man who had abducted Alli. Did Alli know that? He judged that now, as she was just beginning to open up, was not the time to tell her.

“But she suspected from the get-go Ronnie Kray might not be his real name,” Alli said.

Every strangely wired synapse in Jack’s brain was singing now. “Why would she question that?”

“Emma had done a lot of reading on the pathology of being an Outsider. In fact, she’d practically memorized a book called The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. That’s where she got the term, that’s how she knew she was one. She also read another book of Wilson’s called A Criminal History of Mankind, I think. Anyway, she’d heard that name Ronnie Kray and looked it up. He was one of a pair of murderous twins in the East End of London. Their pathology fascinated her, and I think that was one of the reasons she even listened to this guy in the first place.”

“They shared E-Two’s point of view.”

She nodded.

Jack felt the tug of his daughter. This important history had happened while he was obliviously going about his job. His daughter’s life had slipped through his fingers like grains of sand. “Didn’t she understand the potential for danger?”

“Of course she did,” Alli said. “That was the lure, that was why she wouldn’t back off. Then she began to suspect that Ronnie Kray was keeping secrets, so she set out to discover what they were.”

“I can’t believe this,” Jack said, because he truly couldn’t.

“Why not?” Alli said. “It sounds just like what you’d do.”

There was no point mentioning that he was an adult with years of training. “I knew she didn’t follow Kray blindly.”

“Emma never did anything blindly.”

“Not even drugs?”

“Especially not drugs. For Emma, taking them was a kind of, I don’t know, social experiment.”

“How d’you mean?”

“She wondered whether being stoned would allow her to approach another level of being an Outsider. To touch—I don’t know—the infinite.”

“And did it?”

“Uh-uh. It disappointed her. She was so sure there was something just out of reach, but so far out there, it was beyond our comprehension.”

“I’ve had the exact same feeling,” Jack said.

Alli nodded. “So have I.”

He had a thought. “So did she really want to join E-Two or did she want to find out more about Ronnie Kray?”

Alli shrugged. “Emma’s motives were never simple. One thing I do know: She was far too smart simply to follow the pied piper. Her bullshit alarm was totally scary.”

Jack thought of the times she’d busted him on his screaming matches with Sharon, how he’d let her words go in one ear and out the other. Why had he done that? Why had he devalued her opinion? Or was the truth of what she was saying too difficult to face?

“There’s something else,” Alli said. “I got the feeling that because she knew how dangerous her being with Kray was, she kept a journal.”

This interested Jack immensely. “I searched everything after her accident,” he said. “I couldn’t find anything.”

Alli’s fear returned full force. “Maybe I’m wrong. It’s only a hunch. I mean she never said anything to me directly.”

Still, it was something to ponder, Jack thought. Maybe he’d overlooked something.

“C’mon, let’s go,” he said, getting out of the car. When she’d joined him, he took her down the alleyway and around behind the buildings on Kansas Avenue. They had to be careful as they approached the rear of the FASR building, as it was lit up like an airport runway, crisscrossed by federal agents in flak jackets, riot helmets, and assault rifles loaded with rubber bullets.

Jack moved them back into the shadows of the hulking warehouses on their right, crouched down, making their way past the activity. As they moved farther down, the light continued to fade until they were once again engulfed in deepest shadow. At the back of the building that used to house the Hi-Line, they crept along until they reached what looked like a windowless wall. Jack moved his fingertips along the wall until he found the join he was looking for, the outline of the door Gus’s detective clients used to come and go without being seen.

Slipping a credit card out of his wallet, he slid it into the join on the left side. A moment later, though Alli heard no sound at all, he gripped the join with the tips of his fingers and the door opened outward.

They slipped in together and Jack immediately closed the door behind them. They were in almost complete darkness. Ahead of them was a thin line of warm light coming through the crack between an inner door and the floor.

Stepping up to the door, Jack turned the knob and, opening it, crossed the threshold. Chris Armitage whirled around, grabbing for a length of pipe.

Jack said, “Down, boy. You could get yourself killed that way.”

Armitage had the look and posture of a hunted animal. “How the hell did you find us?”

As he said this, Jack looked behind him at Peter Link, asleep on the sofa. “Let’s just say that I know these buildings were the haunts of bootleggers in the thirties, complete with escape routes to outwit the police.”

Armitage’s mouth twitched sardonically. “Seems nothing much has changed since then.” He sighed, put aside the pipe. “I suppose they enlisted you to take us in.”

“I had to dodge a Secret Service detail to get in here unnoticed,” Jack said. Then he turned and beckoned.

Armitage’s eyes opened wide. “Good God.”

“Chris Armitage, this is Alli Carson, the soon-to-be First Daughter. Alli, Chris is the co-head of the First American Secular Revivalists.

“What’s left of it,” Armitage said. “Hey, Alli.” Then, to Jack: “Why on earth did you bring her here?”

Jack smiled. “I thought you and she ought to meet.”

“My organization has just been smeared by the President of the United States with the help of the Russian president.” Armitage let go a bitter laugh. “This is hardly the time for a get-together.”

“I don’t see that you have anything better to do,” Jack said.

Armitage nodded. “I can’t argue there.” He lifted an arm. “Sorry I don’t have much in the way of conveniences to offer you.” He pointed at a half fridge. “There’re Cokes in there, a couple of cartons of juice. And frozen food.”

Jack and Alli shook their heads as they sat on facing chairs. Armitage perched on the edge of the sofa.

“How’s Link?” Jack asked.

“Out like a light, as you can see.” Armitage ran a hand through his hair. “He’ll be okay. Thanks for asking. Thanks for everything.”

Jack waved away his words. “I’d like to ask you about a former member of FASR. A man you know as Ronnie Kray.”

“Oh, him.” Armitage rubbed his chin. “Interesting guy, actually. Very smart, very intense. And he’d done his homework—he knew all the ins and outs of every argument we’re propounding. He was so well versed, in fact, that Peter and I wanted him to make some personal appearances with us, you know, to get the word out.”

Armitage opened the half refrigerator. After offering them a drink, he took out a can of Coke, popped the top. “Above all, Kray had a quality about him—he was quite charismatic. That was another reason we wanted him to take a more active role. But he turned us down.” He gulped down some soda. “He told us he could only spare us a couple of days a week. Plus, he said he was strictly a behind-the-scenes type of guy.”

“Did you believe him?” Jack said.

“Interesting question. In a funny way, I did. He had trouble interacting with the other FASR members. He lacked—what?—for want of a better phrase, social graces.”

“In what way?”

Armitage rolled the soda can between his palms. “He had no tolerance for people who didn’t do things his way—and at the speed of light. He pissed off more than his share of coworkers because he didn’t seem to have an inhibitor switch. Whatever was on his mind, no matter how harsh, he’d just say it. I recall one time, I brought him into the office to talk to him about the effect he was having on the people he had to interact with. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll get their act together.’”

“I’d like to fill out my mental picture of him,” Jack said. “Would you mind describing him to me?”

“Not at all.” Armitage thought a moment. “To begin with, he was a good-looking guy, but in an interesting way. Dark, smoldering—and charismatic, as I said. He was tall and slim. He was in good shape. He looked like he was in his late forties, but I got the feeling he was older than that, certainly in his mid-fifties.”

Jack’s mind was engaged on two levels. While he was using Armitage’s description to build a mental picture of Kray, he was watching Alli for signs of anxiety or nervousness. After all, the man Armitage was describing had abducted her and held her captive for a week. But she seemed oddly detached, as if her mind was far away.

Armitage swallowed the last of the Coke, set the can aside. “I think he was actually popular with the women. The men felt they had to defend themselves against him.”

“Did you know,” Jack said, “that Ronnie Kray also goes by the name of Charles Whitman?”

“What? No. Of course not.” Armitage looked and sounded genuinely shocked.

“Do you vet people—do background checks?”

“Sure. We don’t want anyone with a record to be on our rolls. But frankly, it’s rudimentary at best; we’re all chronically overworked.”

Jack nodded in sympathy. “I imagine he was counting on that. I doubt those two names are the end of Kray’s deception.” He turned to Alli. “What d’you think?”

“Alli,” Armitage said, “you know this man?”

Panic gripped her with such force that for a moment she could scarcely catch her breath. “A friend of mine did,” she squeaked. “Jack’s daughter, Emma.”

“I wonder,” Jack said in a perfectly neutral voice, “whether you don’t know him, as well.”

Alli’s panic escalated to an almost intolerable pitch. It was all she could do not to jump up and run out of the room. “Me?” He knows, she thought. He knows Kray took me. “I never met him.”

“Haven’t you recently been with someone who fits Chris’s description of Ronnie Kray?”

Alli said nothing, but Jack observed a certain tension take hold of her like an invisible hand.

Jack shrugged. “Perhaps I’m mistaken.” He turned his attention to Armitage, who had been following that byplay with a certain confused interest. “We’d best decide what to do with you and Peter. You two can’t stay holed up here forever.”

Alli was thrust back into the midst of her mental battlefield. On one side was Ronnie Kray, terrifying in his omniscience; on the other was Jack, her savior, who understood her in the same way Emma had. And thinking of Emma, she felt her friend’s great strength and courage flow into her. Would Emma lie to Jack? Alli knew she wouldn’t, so how could she herself do it?

“I was,” she said faintly.

“Have you thought about how to get yourself out of this prison?” Jack said to Armitage.

Alli’s guts were churning. “That was the man who took me from Langley Fields,” she persisted.

Jack turned to her. “You don’t say?”

Alli’s expression was stricken. “I … I’m sorry. I know I should’ve told you sooner.”

“I’m curious why you didn’t.” Jack knew it was crucial to keep any admonition out of his voice. He could see the terror shimmering in the faint sweat on her face.

Alli put her head down. “I was keeping Emma’s secret. I thought if I said one thing, it would lead to the rest.”

“But then you told me about Emma wanting to join E-Two. You could’ve told me about Ronnie Kray any time after that.”

Alli wedged her hands beneath her thighs, her arms as straight as boards. “He said if I told anyone about him, he’d come after me and kill me.”

“How would he know?”

Alli was crying again; she simply couldn’t stop. “I don’t know, but he knew everything about me, right down to what I did with a boyfriend, my doctors, what hospital I was born in.”

Jack wanted to take her in his arms, but he intuited this was the wrong time, the wrong place. He’d read that victims of abduction or rape often react negatively to being touched, even when that’s what they really want.

Alli panted as if she’d just finished a hundred-meter sprint. Emma, she thought wildly, please help me be strong. Then, with a start, she realized that she had Jack. In many of the important ways, Jack and Emma were alike, which was why she trusted him as much as she did, why she could talk to him on some level about her very private dread. “He’s in my dreams. He’s always there.”

Jack felt his stomach contract. “What does he say? What does he want?”

She sobbed. “I can’t remember.” A tremor went through her like an earthquake. “Whatever he wanted, you got to me first—you saved me.”

He could see how terrified Alli was of this man. How could she not be? He had held her entire life in his hands. Suddenly, he had a vivid mental image of the photos taken of her with a telephoto lens that had hung in the Marmoset’s house, especially the one of her and Emma walking across the Langley Fields campus.

How, he asked himself, had Ronnie Kray—or whoever the hell he was—come to have all that info? Some of it, like the hospitals and doctors, was a matter of public record, but other things, like intimate details of her personal relationships, certainly weren’t. If this guy was a spook, Jack could see it. But a civilian? He’d have to be psychic.

In the back of Jack’s mind, his oddly aligned synapses had been playing with the 3-D puzzle he was assembling in his head. Now the puzzle turned in a different direction, and he saw the shape of a missing piece.

“Alli,” he said with his heart pounding in his chest, “do you recognize the name Ian Brady?”

“Sure.” She nodded. “He and his partner, Myra Hindley, were responsible for what were known as the Moors murders. They went on a two-year killing spree from, I think, sixty-three to sixty-five.”

Ka-thunk! Jack could hear the missing piece fall into place. Proof that the man who abducted Alli, who killed her Secret Service detail, was the same man who, twenty-five years ago, had murdered the two unnamed men at McMillan Reservoir and, shortly thereafter, the Marmoset and Gus.

Jack had gone after the wrong man; Cyril Tolkan had been responsible for many crimes, but murdering Gus wasn’t one of them. So how clever was Kray/Whitman/Brady to have used a hand-honed paletta to kill, knowing full well that it would lead investigators to the wrong man?

Come to think of it, didn’t this serial killer use the same MO now, twenty-five years later? He’d left clues to lead investigators to FASR and E-2 and away from himself. Everyone had taken the bait—except Jack, whose mind was already hard at work fitting pieces of the puzzle together. At first, it simply hadn’t felt right, and then, little by little, as more pieces of the puzzle appeared for him to manipulate like a Rubik’s Cube, he had started to gain an inkling of his quarry.

Now he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt: This man was his personal nemesis. Kray had played him for a fool once; Jack would track him down this time, or die trying.

At that moment, his cell phone buzzed. He’d set it on vibrate before they’d left the house. He was getting a text message, just three letters: WRU. It was from Nina, but what the hell? Jack never texted, had no idea of shortcuts.

He showed the phone’s screen to Alli. “What does this mean?”

“‘Where are you?’” Alli looked at him. “She needs to see you.”

Jack thought a minute. Having slipped the Secret Service detail, it wouldn’t do to show up at a meet with Nina with Alli in tow, and he certainly wasn’t going to drop her off at the house, SS detail or no SS detail. They’d blown their coverage once; he couldn’t afford to take the chance they’d do it again.

What location could he give Nina that wouldn’t seem suspicious? He was about to ask Alli to text Nina back, but then reconsidered. It was odd for Nina to be texting him, rather than phoning. Given the specter of the Dark Car, Jack wasn’t in any frame of mind to take a chance. He logged on to the Web, called up Google Maps. He already had several saved. Choosing the one he wanted, he sent it to Nina. It wouldn’t show up as anything useful to potential eavesdroppers.

“Okay, we gotta go.” He and Alli rose. “For the time being, sit tight. You have enough food for a week?”

“I think so, yeah.” Armitage crouched down, opened the half fridge. “Plus, when the Coke and juice run out, we’ve got plenty of water.” He glanced up. “But that’s really all academic, isn’t it? The minute the people who run this place return in the morning, we’ll be screwed.”

“No, you won’t. I know them.” Jack still owned the building; because he charged his tenants way under the going rate, they’d do anything for him. “Trust me, they won’t bother you.” Jack shook Armitage’s hand. “I’ll get you out of this, Chris.”

Armitage nodded, but he looked less than sure.

41

Jack’s first choice would have been Egon, but who knew where he was at this hour. Jack wasn’t about to call the house to find out. That left him but one other option, so he took Alli to Sharon’s.

He wanted to call her to warn her, but at this point, he was afraid to use his cell phone. Instead, he stopped at a drug superstore, bought a burner—a cheap cell phone with a pay-as-you-go plan. After setting it up, he dialed Sharon’s number.

As soon as he heard her voice, he said, “I need to come over. Is it okay?”

“After what happened the last time?”

“It was just an argument. Don’t make a big deal over it.”

“Big deal? Jack, don’t you understand? Emma was the central argument of our life together.”

She was right, of course, but he didn’t have time to get into it with her. “Listen to what I’m saying, Shar. I need your help. Now.”

There was a slight hesitation. “Is everything all right?”

“Not quite.”

“What’s going on?” A different quality in her voice. The saber had been sheathed, the charger’s hooves stilled. “You’re scaring me.”

“We’ll be there in fifteen.”

“We? Jack, who are you with?”

“Not on the phone,” he said, and disconnected.

He got into the Continental and took off.

Paranoia running at peak level, Jack checked out Sharon’s neighborhood within an eight-block radius. That seemed excessive, even to him, especially since he could think of no reason why Sharon should be under surveillance. But since he still didn’t know who had sicced the Dark Car on him—or even why—the more thorough he was in his security check, the better he’d feel.

Having ascertained there was no surveillance in the area, he pulled into Sharon’s driveway. Alli hadn’t said a word since she’d translated the text message from Nina for him.

With the engine still running, Jack turned to her. “You okay?”

“I guess.” She put a hand to her temple. “My head hurts.”

“Sharon’ll get you some Tylenol as soon as we get inside.”

“You guys broke up, didn’t you?”

Jack nodded.

“Are you going to get back together?” Alli asked.

Jack sighed. “I’d be lying if I said I knew.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Emma talked about you guys a lot because what upset her the most was the fighting. She couldn’t bear it.”

Jack opened the window a crack. The heated canned air was getting to him.

“Plus, she thought it was all her fault.”

“That’s not true!”

“That’s funny, because she said you were always fighting about her.”

Jack shut up then. There was a peculiar feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he’d just overeaten and now had to get rid of the food at any cost. He opened the car door, got out. Leaning against the car, he realized that he was having trouble breathing.

Alli slid out, came around the front of the Continental to stand beside him. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“Don’t give it a second thought.”

There had come a moment when, looking back, he saw that their fighting had been incessant. And about what? Nothing. They fought because it had become a habit, because they were locked in combat, like ancient enemies who no longer knew how their enmity began. He was sick of it. There had to be a better way to deal with each other than through the armor of anger.

He nodded. “You’re just telling me something both Sharon and I should’ve realized long before now.”

Sharon looked scared out of her wits when she opened the door.

“Alli!”

“Hello, Mrs. McClure.”

“Come on in.” Sharon took a look over their shoulders before closing and locking the door behind them. “Now what’s this all about, Jack?”

They went into the living room, sat down on the L-shaped sofa.

“I’ll get you something for your headache,” Jack said.

“No,” Alli said. “It’s gone now.”

Jack regarded her for a moment before turning to Sharon. “I need a safe haven for Alli,” he said. “Just for a short time while I take care of some business.”

Sharon looked skeptical. “Alli, why aren’t you home with your parents?”

“It’s a long story,” Jack began.

“I’m asking Alli, Jack.”

“It’s not for her to answer that question.”

“I think it is,” Sharon persisted. “Alli?”

Alli looked down at her hands. “This is what Emma said it was like, being with you.”

“What?” Sharon said. “What did you say?”

“You wanted her to answer,” Jack said softly. “Hear her out.”

Sharon glared at him, but remained silent. Perhaps the rattle of sabers was all she was prepared to deliver. Still, Jack could hear the snorting of her warhorse champing at the bit to head into battle.

Intuiting the silence as a tacit acknowledgment that she should go on, Alli took a deep breath. “There’s no use arguing over this,” she said softly. “Jack’s right. If he can’t tell you why I’m not with my parents, I can’t either.” She lifted her head. “But it’s important I stay with you, that he’s free to do whatever he has to do.”

Sharon sat back, looked at Jack. “Did you put her up to this?” Seeing the expression on Jack’s face, she raised her hands defensively. “Sorry. Sorry.” She nodded. “Of course you can stay with me, Alli.” She smiled. “As long as you want or need to.”

Alli ducked her head. “Thank you, Mrs. McClure.”

Sharon’s smile widened. “But only if you call me Sharon.”

Jack found Nina’s car idling at the curb outside Sharon’s house. Before he could open the door, the passenger’s-side window slid smoothly down, and Nina, leaning over from behind the wheel, said, “Backseat, jack.”

Curious, Jack opened the rear door. Sliding onto the seat, he found himself next to a rather short barrel-chested man with a neatly trimmed beard and the calm demeanor of a sage.

“Jack,” Nina said, “meet Dennis Paull, Secretary of Homeland Security.”

“Jack, it’s good to finally meet you,” Secretary Paull said as he briefly enclosed Jack’s hand in a hearty grip. “Nina has told me a great deal about you.”

“Has she?” Jack caught Nina’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Spying on me?”

Paull laughed. “Keeping an eye on you is how I see it. Nina works for me undercover. She’s a damn good operative.”

“I’m in no position to dispute that,” Jack said.

Paull laughed again. “I don’t trust people without a sense of humor, Jack. And d’you know why? Because nothing murders a sense of humor faster than keeping secrets.”

“Nina’s a barrel of laughs, I can vouch for that,” Jack said. “She’s the only one I ever met who used a chocolate-chip cookie as a missile.”

That got an appreciative chuckle out of Nina.

“Okay, now that we’re one big, happy family, let’s get down to brass tacks,” Paull said. “Jack, I think you’re looking for some answers, and I have them. I sent out the Dark Car manned by two of my agents in order to keep an eye on you. They had orders to protect you should anyone make a move against you. Unfortunately, the National Security Advisor—perhaps with the blessing of the president—countermanded those orders.”

What have I gotten myself into? Jack asked himself. “Why would anyone want to make a move against me?”

“We’ll get to the details in a moment,” Paull said. “Now, suffice it to say that you’re Edward Carson’s man. As you might imagine, the president-elect is seen as something of a threat to certain individuals in the Administration. There’s an initiative to get certain matters the president deems pressing sewn up before the twentieth.”

“Like rounding up the First American Secular Revivalists.”

Paull nodded. “Among other suspect groups.”

“The FASR’s only crime is that their philosophy is in direct opposition with the current Administration’s,” Jack said.

“As you no doubt understand, Jack, this Administration has serious perception issues. The world—and the players in it—are what it says they are, no matter the reality.”

“Don’t you understand that the FASR is being made a scapegoat?” Jack said. “You guys can’t find E-Two, so you’re going after the easy target.”

“Please don’t confuse this Administration with the truth, Jack.” The secretary shifted in his seat. “Now, I think you may have an answer for me. You know a man named Ian Brady.”

It wasn’t a question, and Jack’s eyes sought out Nina’s again. “Yes, sir. Twenty-five years ago, he was a major drug supplier in my old neighborhood.”

“Which was?”

“Not far from McMillan Reservoir.”

Secretary Paull passed a hand across his brow. It was clear Jack had delivered his answer; trouble was, it was the answer Paull had been afraid of because it confirmed his dark analysis of who Ian Brady really was.

“You need to forget McMillan Reservoir, Jack.”

“That’s a bit hard to do, sir. This man, Ian Brady or Charles Whitman or Ronnie Kray, whatever he’s calling himself today, is the one who abducted Alli Carson and murdered her Secret Service detail in cold blood.”

“Nevertheless, you must forget him.”

Jack would have said, What the hell are you talking about, sir? except he knew exactly what Paull was saying. The last piece of the puzzle he’d been assembling in his head—the most crucial one—had just fallen into place. No wonder the IDs of the vics at McMillan Reservoir were never revealed. It was the same reason that the crash of the Dark Car and the deaths of the two agents in it never made the news.

Jack’s mind replayed the moment at McMillan Reservoir when he’d followed Gus and Detective Stanz, when Gus’s snitch said, “I guarantee you’ll never get the name of the murderer, either from me or anyone else.”

“Brady’s protected,” Jack said to Paull. “You’re protecting a serial murderer, a kidnapper.”

“Not me, Jack. The government. That’s why the order to my Dark Car agents was countermanded at the highest level. There was concern that you were getting too close to Brady.”

“A legitimate concern.”

The secretary’s face looked like you could pass a steamroller over it without making a dent. “This is a matter of national security.”

“How many illegal acts have been committed in the last eight years in the name of national security?”

“Jack, please. This is a friendly memo—the most friendly.”

“I understand, sir. But I have to do this.”

Paull breathed out a long sigh. “Look, I’m trying to protect you, you do understand that?”

“Yes, sir, I do, but that won’t change my mind.”

Paull looked away. He hadn’t for a moment thought he’d change Jack McClure’s mind, but he had to be absolutely certain of this man.

“From this moment on, you’re on your own.” Paull said this very softly, very distinctly.

“I’m prepared for the risk.” Jack knew nothing would be settled inside himself until he hunted down Ian Brady and either brought him in or shot him dead.

42

“How I wish you and Jack were my parents!”

“Good Lord!” Sharon was standing in the kitchen. So astonished was she by Alli’s statement that she dropped the egg she was transferring from its carton to the heated pan. The yellow yolk burst like a water balloon, slowly threading across the stove top, through the clear, glutinous albumin.

She’d gone with her first instinct, which was to make Alli something to eat, so they had repaired to the kitchen, a room that always made her feel secure. If she was being honest with herself, Alli’s presence here unnerved her, though her nervousness had nothing to do with the fact that Alli was the president-elect’s daughter. It was all down to the fact that Alli had been Emma’s best friend. They were the same age, and though one would hardly be taken for the other, it was difficult for Sharon to look at Alli without seeing her own daughter. She was beset by a profound ache she thought she had put aside. The poisonous stone of Emma’s death was still inside her.

Mindlessly, she turned off the burner, began to sponge up the mess. “Why on earth would you say such an extraordinary thing?”

“Because it’s true.”

Sharon wrung the remains of the raw egg into the sink. She held the broken shell in her cupped palm. “But I’m sure your parents are wonderful people.”

“Excuse me, but all you know about my mom and dad is what you see on TV or read in magazine articles,” Alli said.

She stood with her back against the pass-through into the living room. She appeared to Sharon to be poised beyond her years—certainly more poised than Emma had ever been. What I wouldn’t have given for a child like this, a voice inside her wailed. And immediately she put a hand to her mouth, appalled at the thought. God forgive me, she moaned silently. But her quick prayer of penance made her feel no better, just dirty. She panicked for a moment; if prayers no longer worked for her, what would? The truth of it is that prayers are only words, she thought, and of what comfort are words at a time like this? Hollow things like the shell of an egg with the inside drained away.

“You’re right, of course,” she said, desperately trying to soothe her way back into normalcy. “Please forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive, Mrs.—Sharon.”

Alli came and took the glistening shell out of Sharon’s hand. In that moment, their hands touched and Sharon began to weep. It took only an instant for the dam to burst, for all the feelings, methodically and efficiently tamped down and squashed, to reassert their right to life. Father Larrigan’s assurances of “It’s God’s will” and “Emma’s death is part of God’s plan” crumbled beneath the weight of hypocrisy. Sharon, queen of denial, was quite unprepared for the abyss, so that the dam not only burst but disintegrated entirely.

She rocked back and forth with inconsolable sobs. Knowledge comes through suffering was one of Father Larrigan’s favorite bromides. But in a flash of knowledge, she saw that it wasn’t a bromide at all; it was yet another way for the Church to maintain control over its increasingly unruly flock. We all must suffer because of Eve’s First Sin, we all deserve to suffer in this life so we may be redeemed in Heaven. What better way to keep people yoked to the Church? Surely God didn’t mean these con artists to speak in His name. Oh, the insidious cleverness of it!

Now her sorrow was joined by her rage at being duped, her terror at life’s random cruelty. All was chaos, uncontrollable, unknowable. With this came the stark realization that Jack was right. Her newfound religion was nothing but a sham, another way to deny her feelings, to convince herself that everything would be all right. But deep down where she was afraid to look, she knew nothing would ever be right again because Emma had been snatched from her and Jack for no good reason. And then she thought, despairingly, what possible reason could justify her daughter’s death? None. None on earth or in heaven.

Gradually, she became aware of Alli holding her hand, leading her into the living room, where they sat quietly side by side on the sofa.

“Can I get you something?” Alli asked. “Some tea, a glass of water, even?”

Sharon shook her head. “Thank you, I’m feeling much better now.”

But what a bitter lie that was! In her mind’s eye, she could see the inside of her church, the gloomy atmosphere, the confessional, where priests heard and absolved your sins if you recited the canned blather of Hail Marys or Our Fathers. But Father Larrigan wasn’t full of grace, nor was any priest. The flickering candles mocked those whose prayers they carried in their flaring hearts, the paintings of Christ, bleeding, dying while angels fluttered like so many moths over his head. And the gold! Everywhere you looked were gold crosses tinted rose or moss green by the saints in the stained-glass windows. And old-lady tears, old-lady prayers, old ladies with nowhere else to go, their lives over, clustered in the doorway, complaining about their backs and their bladders. She was not an old woman! Her life wasn’t over. It wasn’t too late for her to have another child, was it? Was it?

Wrenching herself away from her pain, she smiled through her tears. “Anyway, never mind me.” She patted Alli’s knee, and there it was again, that astonishing electric sensation that had made her weep. She managed to hold back the tears this time, but it wasn’t easy. “It’s you we were speaking of. You live a life of such privilege, Alli. You’re admired and envied by so many young women, sought after by so many young men.”

“So what?” Alli said. “I hate that privilege means the world to my parents. It means nothing to me, but they don’t get it, they don’t get me at all.”

Sharon regarded her sadly. “I never got Emma, you know. All that anger, all that rebellion.” She shook her head. “There were times when I thought she’d surely burst from keeping so much from us.”

“The secrets we keep.”

Sharon clasped her hands together. “I think secrets deaden us in the end. It’s like having gangrene. If you keep them long enough, they begin to kill parts of you, starting with your heart.”

“Your heart is still beating,” Alli said.

Sharon looked away, at the photo of Emma on a horse. She could ride, that girl. “Only in a medical sense, I’m afraid.”

Alli moved closer to her. “You still have Jack.”

“Seeing you here …” Sharon bit her lip. “Oh, I want my daughter back!”

Alli took her hand again. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Sharon looked into Alli’s eyes. How young she looks, she thought. How vulnerable, how angelic. She felt all of a sudden a great, an overwhelming desire for solace, for a peace inside her churning self. She wondered whether she possessed the strength to find it. The Church couldn’t provide it, nor all the prayers spoken by all the faithful in the universe. In the end, there was only what she could summon up from inside herself.

“Yes, please,” she said. “Tell me about Emma.”

Sharon confounded Jack utterly when he returned to the house.

“I have an idea,” she said brightly, “why don’t you and Alli spend the night here? Alli can have the spare bedroom, and this sofa is very comfortable. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve fallen asleep on it.”

Jack, mindful of the Secret Service detail he’d left behind, his brain turning over the problem of how once and for all to track down Ronnie Kray, heedlessly said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

Sharon’s face fell. “But why not?”

Seeing her stricken face gave him pause. He saw her on the sofa next to Alli, both women, torsos twisted, turned toward him. It was their proximity to each other, as if they were intimates, as if they had been talking of intimate things when he walked in. There was something about Sharon’s face, an expression he felt certain he’d never see again.

“It would be so nice,” Sharon said, “all of us together.”

Jack, his mind changing gears, thought she might be right. “Why don’t we all go to my house? It’s larger and—”

Seeing the change come over Sharon’s face, he stopped in midsentence.

“Jack, come on. You know that house gives me the creeps.”

What was the use? he thought. No matter what he said, she’d never agree to go there, let alone spend the night.

“Alli and I have to go,” he said.

Sharon stood up. “Why, Jack? I know you’re not comfortable here, but just this once, stay here with me.”

Jack shook his head. “It’s impossible, Shar. Alli’s Secret Service detail is expecting her to be at the house.”

“You mean you deliberately ditched them to bring her here?” The sabers were rattling again, the warhorse stamping its huge hooves.

“It was necessary,” Jack said.

“As far as you’re concerned, it’s always necessary to break the rules.”

“Not always.” How easy it was to fall back into the old patterns. “Sometimes I bend them.”

“Stop, please!” Alli cried.

They both turned in her direction.

“This isn’t anything to fight about,” she said. “You’re just fighting for the sake of fighting.”

“Alli’s right,” Sharon said. “Half the time I don’t even remember what we’re fighting about.”

“Then come with us,” Jack said. “Spend the night.”

“I’d like to,” Sharon said. “Really I would.” She shook her head. “But I’m not ready, Jack. Can you understand that?”

“Sure,” he said, though he didn’t, not really. If it wasn’t for the Secret Service detail, he would have consented to stay here tonight. What was it about Gus’s house she despised so? He couldn’t work it out. He’d asked her so many times without getting a satisfactory answer, he had no desire to go over that old turf again. Besides, like her, he was sick to death of fighting.

“I guess it’s time for you to go, then.” Sharon embraced Alli, and they kissed. She stood in the lighted doorway, watching them as they went down the walk to Jack’s car, and she shivered, as if with a premonition, or a feeling of déjà vu, as if she’d experienced this helpless moment of sadness and loss before.

43

There was, no question, a certain gloom about Jack’s house, a fustiness manifested by huge odd-shaped rooms, old gas lamps gutted and wired for electricity, massive furniture, not a stick of it built after 1950. Perhaps it was all this Sharon objected to, why she had opted for predictable square rooms, low ceilings, modern furniture—a house gaily lighted but without charm.

But there was also history here—chaotic, warty, fascinating. It was, as Alli had recognized, the residence of an Outsider, past and present. Could that be why Emma liked it here and Sharon didn’t? Jack asked himself as he climbed up the stairs with Alli. Sharon wasn’t an Outsider—that kind of life, often in conflict with rules, regulations, even, sometimes, the law, both baffled and frightened her. She was comfortable only within the well-defined bounds of society. That was why she’d been so hell-bent on Emma going to Langley Fields, which was so Establishment. And it was why Emma had gotten into continuous difficulty there. A round peg in a square hole. Outsiders never fit in; you could never change them. But until the day Emma died Sharon hadn’t given up hope.

Jack showed Alli into the guest room, which was next to his. In all these years, he’d never been able to sleep in Gus’s bedroom. Years ago, he’d hauled the bed Gus had been murdered in out back and burned it. More recently, he’d turned the bedroom into a media room with an enormous flat-screen TV on which he watched James Brown concerts as well as baseball and films he bought on DVD. He felt certain Gus would’ve liked that.

“The bathroom’s fully stocked,” he said. “But if there’s anything else you need, it’ll be in this closet here.”

After they said good night, he watched her go into her room, close the door behind her. He thought about what might be going on in her head, all the things she had told him, all the things she hadn’t. In his room, he called Carson, told him all was well and that he was slowly making progress.

Jack turned off the light, lay on the bed with his clothes on. He felt bone-weary, sad unto death. The experience of learning about Emma’s secret life was a two-edged sword. Gratitude and remorse flooded him in equal measure. Tonight he felt an outsider even from himself.

He must have fallen asleep because suddenly he opened his eyes and knew time had passed. It was the middle of the night. Traffic sounds were as scarce as clouds in the horse latitudes. He felt that he lay on the bosom of the ocean, rocked gently by wave after wave. He was aware of an abyss beneath him, vast, lightless. Light filtering in through the window seemed like the cool pinpoints of ten million stars. He was as far from civilization as he had ever been. Unmoored, he had said. And Alli had said, I’m unmoored, too.

It was then that he heard a sound, like the wind sighing through branches, like moonlight singing in the trees. Rain pattered on the roof, and a voice whispered, “There’s someone in the house.”

Sitting up, Jack saw a slim figure silhouetted in the open doorway.

“Alli, what is it? What did you hear?”

“There’s someone in the house,” she whispered.

He rose, took his Glock and went toward her. She turned, retreated into the hall, as if to show the way. Shadows lay against the wall like wounded soldiers. The silence was palpable, even the house’s normal creaks and groans were for the moment stilled.

“Alli, where are you going?” he whispered at the receding figure. “I want you to go back to your room, lock the door till I come for you.”

But either she was too far away or chose to ignore his warning, because she went down the stairs. Cursing under his breath, he hurried after her. A strange form of peacefulness came over him as he followed the slip of a shadow down the hallway, through the dining room and kitchen. Off the kitchen was a pantry that Gus had used for a storeroom and a half bath situated between the kitchen and the mudroom.

The mudroom was a space that was never used, either by Gus or by Jack. It seemed the oldest part of the house mostly because of its chronic disuse. It hadn’t been painted for years. There were cobwebs in the corners with the desiccated corpses of unidentifiable insects who’d met their end in their sticky strands. An old chair rail hung half off the wall, and an old-fashioned wooden hat rack leaned drowsily in one corner. The floor was constructed of ancient slate tiles, eighteen inches on a side. Many were cracked, some fractured entirely. One or two were missing.

As Jack crossed the kitchen, he could see Alli unlock the back door, disappear outside. Jack followed her. At once, he was engulfed by the odors of rotting wood, roots, and the mineral tang of damp stone. He pushed through into a deeper darkness as he moved into a patch of the forested area behind the house.

“Alli,” he said softly. “Alli, enough. Where are you?”

The tangle of branches, dense even in the dead of winter, kept the city at bay. The sky, grayish pink like old skin, was intermittently swept away by the wind. Rain seeped down, bouncing off twigs and vines, taking erratic pinball paths. Save for this, all was still. And yet there was the sense of something stirring, as if the wild area itself were alive with a single will, had turned that will to a specific intent.

Jack, his anxiety rising, peered through the rain, through the Medusa’s hair of the thicket. It was impossible to know which way she’d gone, or even why she would lead him here. In and out of faint lozenges of city light he went, turning this way and that, searching, until he seemed to be in a maze of mirrors, where he kept coming upon his own reflection.

He was certain he hadn’t dreamt that whisper, certain that Alli had been standing in his doorway. After all, who else could it have been? Then, the fine hairs on his forearms stirred, because he heard the voice again.

“Dad …”

Dennis Paull, climbing the open stairs of the Starlight Motel in Maryland, was nearing the end of another grueling day. Part of it had been taken up by a meeting with Calla Myers’s parents. He could, of course, have had one of his assistants meet them, but he was not one for delegating difficult assignments. Calla Myers had been killed on his watch. There was no excuse for her death; its dark stain would be etched on his soul forever, to take its place alongside many other similar tattoos. But somehow this one seemed darker, deeper, more shameful, because she was a civilian. She hadn’t put herself in harm’s way as the two Secret Service agents had. That she’d been murdered in precisely the same way as the agents was no longer a mystery to him.

Paull had no illusions about going to heaven, but since he believed in neither heaven nor hell, it didn’t really matter. What concerned him was the here and now. He had conjured up all the right phrases of sympathy for the Myerses. He had even sat with them afterwards, while the mother wept and the father held her blindly, even after he’d run out of words of brittle solace. He tried not to think about his own wife, his two sons, tried not to wonder how he would react if someone came to him with unthinkable news. He’d had a brother who’d died in the Horn of Africa in the service of his country. Even Paull hadn’t known the details of his mission. Nor had he cared to know the details of his death. He’d simply buried him with full honors and gone on with his work.

Having checked three times for surveillance, Paull walked along the open gangway on the second floor of the motel, inserted a key in the lock of a room at the far end, opened the door, and went in.

Nina Miller was sitting on the bed, her long legs stretched out, crossed at the bare ankles. She’d kicked off her sensible shoes and now looked fetching in a pearl-white silk shirt. Her dove gray wool skirt had ridden partway up her muscular thighs. She was a fine tennis player, as was Paull. It was how they’d met, in fact. Now they played mixed doubles whenever they had a chance, which, admittedly, wasn’t often.

Nina put down the book she was reading—Summer Rain, by Marguerite Duras—a first edition Paull had given her last year for her birthday. It was her favorite novel.

“You’re looking luscious.”

She smiled. “I could have your job for workplace sexual harassment.”

“This isn’t the workplace.” Paull bent, kissed her on the lips. “This isn’t harassment.”

“Flatterer.”

Paull pulled over the desk chair, sat down beside her. “What have you got for me?”

She handed him a thick manila folder. “I back-checked the dossiers of every member of the D.C. Homeland Security office. Everyone’s clean, so far as I can tell, except for Garner.”

“Hugh’s my deputy.” Paull shook his head. “No. He’s too obvious a choice.”

“That’s precisely why the National Security Advisor recruited him.” She pointed at the open file she’d compiled. “Over the past eight months, Hugh has met five times with a man named Smith.” She laughed. “Can you believe it? Anyway, Mr. Smith is Hugh’s acupuncturist. He also happens to be in the office adjacent to the National Security Advisor’s chiropractor.”

Paull, paging through the file, said, “I see their appointments overlapped on those five occasions.”

Nina folded her hands in her lap. “What d’you want to do?”

Putting the folder aside, Paull leaned over her. “I know what I want to do.”

Nina giggled, took his head between her hands. “I’m serious.”

“I couldn’t be more serious.” His lips brushed the hollow of her throat. “How’s your friend Jack McClure?”

“Mmmm.”

Paull raised his head. “What does that mean?”

She made a moue. “You’re not jealous, are you, Denny?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She pushed him away. “Sometimes you can be so starchy.”

“I only meant that considering Hugh Garner hates McClure’s guts, perhaps between us we can work out a way for him to take care of Hugh for us.”

Her mouth twitched. “What a Machiavellian mind you have.”

Paull laughed appreciatively as he manipulated the tiny pearl buttons down the front of her shirt.

Tossing the file on the floor beside the bed, she said, “I’ve gotten as close as I can to Jack. He’s carrying a Statue of Liberty-size torch for his ex.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Nothing you’ll have to worry about,” she said. “You don’t have a heart.”

“Birds of a feather.” He made a lascivious grab for her. “Anyway, what could be better than an affair with no strings attached?”

“I can’t imagine.” She gripped his tie, pulled him down to her.

Jack turned and saw her, framed between two trees, her skin pale in the ghostly light.

“Dad …”

“Emma?” He took a step toward her. “Is that you?”

The rain, gaining strength, beat down on him, water rolling into his eyes, mixing with his tears. Could Emma have come back to him? Was it possible? Or was he losing his mind?

He moved closer. The image wavered, seemed to break up into a million parts, each reflected in a raindrop spattering black branches, glistening brown bark, pale gold of dead leaves. She was all around him.

Jack stood in wonder as he heard her voice, “Dad, I’m here….”

It wasn’t the voice of a person or a ghost. It was the sough of the wind, the scrape of the branches, the rustle of the brittle leaves, even the distant intermittent hiss of traffic on faraway streets, avenues, and parkways.

“I’m here….”

Her voice emanated from everything. Every atom held a part of her, was infused by her spirit, her soul, the electrical spark that had animated her brain, that made her unique, that made her Emma.

“My Emma.” He listened for her, to her, heard the wind, the trees, the sky, even the dead leaves call his name, felt her close all around him, as if he were immersed in warm water. “Emma, I’m sorry. I’m sorry….”

“I’m here, Dad…. I’m here.”

And she was. Though he couldn’t hold her, couldn’t see her, she was there with him, not a figment of his imagination, but something beyond his ken, beyond a human’s ability to comprehend. A physicist might call her a quark. Werner Heisenberg, architect of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, would understand her being here and not here at the same time.

Jack returned to the house dripping wet, feeling at once exceptionally calm and subtly agitated. He couldn’t explain the feeling any more than he could the last half hour, nor did he want to. Heavy-limbed, he wanted only to return to his bed and sleep for as many hours as he could until sunlight splintered the oak tree outside his window and roused him with warm and tender fingers.

Before he did so, however, he peeked into Alli’s room, saw her sleeping peacefully on her side. Silently closing the door, he tiptoed back to the bathroom to dry off. Then he stumbled into bed and, after pulling the covers up to his chin, passed into a deep and untroubled sleep.

44

Jack felt as if he were walking a tightrope. On the one hand, he had promised Edward Carson to deliver Alli at noon today; on the other, he needed to find some way to get Alli to open up about Ian Brady because she was his only link to him. She’d been with him long enough; it was possible she had seen or heard something that could lead him to the murderer.

“Alli, I know how hard this must be for you,” he said as she came down to the kitchen, “I know this man is scary.”

Instantly, she turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He ignored the deer-caught-in-the-headlights glassiness of her eyes, plowed relentlessly on. This might be his last chance to get her to talk about her ordeal. “Alli, listen to me, we need to know why Kray abducted you. He didn’t do it for a lark, he had a plan in mind. Only you and he know what that is. You’re the key to what happened.”

“I’m telling you I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“But have you tried?” Jack said. “Really tried?”

“Please, Jack.” She began to tremble all over, absolutely certain that she was close to something terrible, that she was approaching a pit of fire into which she could not help but walk and be consumed. Even Jack couldn’t save her now. “Please stop.”

“Alli, I’m sure Emma would want you to—”

“Don’t!” She spun around, her face flushed. “Don’t use Emma that way.”

“All right.” Jack held up his hands. He knew he’d gone too far. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” The more he pushed her, the more agitated she became. He wasn’t going to get anything more out of her this way or any other way he could think of. Like it or not, he had to back off.

He smiled at her. “Are we good?”

Alli tried to smile back, but all she could do was nod numbly.

They were just sitting down to breakfast when Jack heard a car pull up outside. Assuming it was the Secret Service detail, he crossed to the front door, stepped outside to tell them not to come into the house. Instead, he saw Egon Schiltz’s maroon classic station wagon, a superlative 1950 Buick Super Model 59 Estate Woodie Wagon, with its unique Niagara Falls bumper, real birchwood side panels, the original straight-eight-cylinder engine with 124 horsepower and GM’s then-innovative Dyna-flow automatic transmission. In truth, it should have been in a showroom or bombing down Victory Boulevard in L.A., but it was Egon’s second child, and he drove it everywhere.

He raised an arm as he got out of the woodie. “Finally. I tried all yesterday to reach you, but you weren’t answering your cell phone, and Chief Bennett gave me a number for the task force that’s no longer in service.”

Jack came down off the porch. The mild air was still in place; there was only the hint of a chill in the air, low sunlight already melting silver hoarfrost.

“How are you, Egon?”

“Ask me in a month.” Schiltz gave a wry smile. “I came clean with Candy. I think she would’ve moved out, except for Molly. Molly must never know, that’s something the two of us absolutely agreed on.”

“If you agree on one thing, more will follow. You two should see someone.”

Egon nodded. “I want to. I’m sure Candy does, too. She just needs some time.” He scratched the back of his head. “You’re a good friend, Jack, thank you. I feel …” He sighed heavily. “It turns out you know me better than I know myself. Living a lie isn’t for me, which is why I’ve stopped going to church for the time being.” He leaned back against the mottled trunk of a tree. “It’s not so bad. Truthfully, I don’t think Molly misses it at all. I tried to make her see the light, but it’s no good, you see. It doesn’t work. You want for your child everything you yourself didn’t have, only to discover she wants only what she wants. And in the end, you’re meaningless, really. It’s her life.” He rubbed his hands briskly. “She never really got God. Either you believe or you don’t. There’s no point going through the motions.”

“I hope you haven’t stopped believing, Egon.”

The ME produced a rueful smile. “That would make my entire life a mockery. No, no, I still believe in God, but what you made me realize is that there are many paths to redemption. I’ve got to find mine. The Church can’t help me.”

Jack clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Everyone needs the freedom to make up their own mind.” He gestured with his head. “D’you want to come in? I can fix you some breakfast.”

Egon glanced around. “Not if you have guests.”

“In that case,” Jack said, “let’s take a walk.”

They went around the north side of the house. It was colder here; the green Bilco doors were still rimed with a thin layer of ice, the fallen leaves stuck together with the glue of winter.

“Something mighty queer is going on,” Egon said.

Jack was automatically on alert. “In what way?”

“You heard about that girl, Calla Myers, being stabbed to death on the Spanish Steps the other day. The District ME is an old bridge buddy of mine. He called yesterday morning, and I met with him. He told me that the stab wound was in the same place as the ones on the two agents guarding Alli Carson. I showed him the photos of the wounds, and he confirmed the one that killed Calla Myers was identical.”

“Did you confirm it on her body?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Egon said. “The body wasn’t in his morgue. The feds whisked it out of there along with his preliminary findings.”

Jack was hardly surprised, since it was clear that Calla Myers was Ian Brady’s latest victim. But the very fact that he’d targeted her set Jack’s synapses to firing overtime. Another Rubik’s Cube was forming in his head, and he didn’t like the shape of it one bit. He’d heard the president’s address. Direct evidence linked Calla Myers, a member of the FASR, to the murders of the SS agents. That was part of the rationale used to close down the Kansas Avenue office and take its members into custody. What did it mean that Brady—a federally protected person—had murdered Calla Myers? Brady had killed the Secret Service detail. In the initial briefing, Hugh Garner had told him that the detail’s cell phones hadn’t been found. In an instant, the Rubik’s Cube in Jack’s mind slid into focus. Of course the phones hadn’t been found; Brady had taken them. And now he’d planted one with Calla Myers to implicate her and, by extension, the FASR.

Egon broke into his thoughts. “Jack, are you still with me?”

Jack nodded. “I was just thinking about Calla Myers’s murderer. I think I know who it is, but I have no idea what his real name is or where to find him.”

“I just might be able to help you there.” Egon took out a small pad, flipped it open. “As I said, my friend hadn’t finished his autopsy on Calla Myers when the feds took her away, but he did note something interesting. He hadn’t yet put it in his prelim, because he needed to check it out, so the feds don’t have it.”

Schiltz consulted his pad. “As per the MO, there were no fingerprints whatsoever except for the vic’s, which leads us to the inescapable conclusion that the perp wore gloves of some sort. My friend found traces of a superfine powder on Calla Myers’s coat, in the place under her left arm consistent with where someone who had his arm around her would place his hand.

“It took him some time to figure out what this powder actually was.” Egon glanced up. “You’ll like this, Jack. What was on Calla Myers’s coat was logwood powder. Logwood is a heartwood extract from Haematoxylon campechianum, found in Central America and the West Indies. When mixed with a carrier, such as ethyl alcohol, glycerine, or Listerine, it becomes a black pigment used for tattooing.” He snapped the pad closed. “And, by the way, Calla Myers had no tattoos.”

Jack’s heart leapt. “So the logwood powder came from the perp.”

Schiltz nodded. “Whatever else this sonovabitch is, he’s also a tattoo artist. But here’s the best part. Almost all tattoo artists buy pre-mixed pigments. None of those use logwood as an ingredient. Your man mixes his pigments by hand.”

“I liked the white Continental better,” Alli said as she slid into Jack’s car.

He laughed as he put the car in gear. A moment later, he picked up the Secret Service detail in his rearview mirror. It was 11:20. The minutes were counting down to when he’d lose his access to her. It was now or never.

“Alli, there’s something I’ve been wondering,” he said. “Did the man who abducted you have a tattoo?”

Alli went rigid. She stared straight ahead.

“Alli, honey, it’s all right for you to tell me.”

“I only saw his arms.” Alli slowly shook her head from side to side. “He didn’t have any tattoos.”

Jack, heading for the Carsons’ house in Chevy Chase, did his best to keep to the minimum speed. He didn’t want this drive to end yet.

“Alli, I know Ronnie Kray frightened you terribly, but it would be helpful if you could tell me something more about what you saw. Anything at all.”

Alli, still sitting rigidly, said nothing.

“I want to catch him, Alli. You want that, don’t you?”

She bit her lip, nodded.

“You’re the only one who can help me.”

Tears began to run down her cheeks. “I wish Emma was here. She could tell you what you want to know.”

“You can, too.”

Her eyes squeezed shut. “I’m not brave like she was.”

Despite his best efforts, they’d entered Chevy Chase. This was it, then. The end. Jack relented. “Alli, your father has agreed to let me pick the detail guarding you.”

“I want you,” she said at once.

He nodded. “I’ll be there, just not the whole time. But you can absolutely trust Nina and Sam. I know them, I’ve worked with them. They won’t let you down.”

He turned onto the Carsons’ street, a cul-de-sac, saw more Secret Service agents in cars and on the sidewalk. They all watched him as he drove toward the large federal-style brick house at the end of the cul-de-sac.

“Home,” he said.

“It doesn’t feel like it.” Alli shifted in her seat. “Nothing feels right.”

“As soon as you get back to your routine, it’ll all feel as familiar as it did before.”

“But I don’t want to get back to my old routine!” She sounded like a spoiled child.

Jack pulled into the driveway where Edward and Lyn Carson were waiting. He shut off the engine, opened his door, but Alli made no move to open hers.

“Alli …”

She turned to him. There was desperation in her eyes. “I don’t want to leave you!”

“You have a responsibility to your parents. Tomorrow you’ll be the First Daughter. From now on, you have to act like the First Daughter. The whole country will be watching.”

“Please don’t make me.”

“Honey, it’s what has to happen.”

“But I’m afraid.”

Jack frowned. “Afraid of what?”

“To leave you, to be here, I don’t know.”

By this time, the Carsons, concerned, had come up to the car. Lyn Carson opened the passenger’s-side door, leaned in.

“Alli? Baby?”

Alli, still turned toward Jack, silently mouthed, Please help me.

Jack felt torn into a thousand shreds. He had failed Emma, he didn’t want to fail Alli as well. But what could he do? The president-elect had given him an order that he was powerless to ignore. Alli wasn’t his child. So he did the only thing he could do. He leaned over, whispered in her ear, “I’ll see you later, I promise. Okay?”

As he pulled back, he saw her nod. Then she turned, got out of the car and into her mother’s arms.

“Jack.”

Edward Carson was at his side as he got out of the car. The president-elect pumped his hand then impulsively embraced him.

“There are no words.” His voice was clotted with emotion. “You’ve brought our girl back to us safe and sound, just as you promised.”

Jack watched Alli. Her mother, arm around her waist, walked her up the brick steps to the open front door.

“That’s right,” Lyn Carson said. “Random House wants you to write a memoir about growing up to be the First Daughter.”

“She’s a special young woman,” Jack said. “I want Nina Miller and Sam Scott assigned to her permanent detail. Nina and I were partners in finding Alli. I worked with Sam at ATF until he transferred to the Secret Service three years ago.”

Carson nodded. “I’ll make the necessary calls right away.” He looked at his wife and daughter for a moment, before turning back. “Jack, Lyn and I would like you at the inauguration, up on the dais with us. You’re like a member of our family now.”

“It would be an honor, sir.”

In the doorway, Alli turned, gave him a tentative smile, and with a sweep of her mother’s arm, vanished into her world of privilege and power.

45

Who was Ian Brady? In other, more normal circumstances, Jack would have been preoccupied with finding that out. However, this case was anything but normal. What concerned him now was not who Ian Brady was but why he had chosen that name. Clearly, his other aliases—Ronnie Kray and Charles Whitman—followed on in a straight line from the first.

It was Jack’s experience—the experience of any knowledgeable lawman—that criminals, even the highly intelligent ones, chose their aliases for a reason. An FBI profiler who had been brought into the ATF office on a case some years ago had said that giving meaning to an alias was a subconscious urge criminals found irresistible. In other words, they couldn’t help themselves. Of one thing Jack was certain: The name Ian Brady held special meaning for this man. The trick was to find out what that meaning was.

With his paranoia at full mast, Jack bypassed the computers hooked up to the federal network, which included his own at the ATF office in Falls Church. What was required, he thought now as he made his way out of Chevy Chase, was a public cybercafé. Twenty minutes of hunting from behind the wheel of his car unearthed one on Chase Avenue, in Bethesda. He sat down at a terminal, typed the name Ian Brady, but all he got was a bare-bones recap from Wikipedia and About.com. On the other hand, after some false leads, he found a distributor of logwood, the substance Brady had inadvertently left on Calla Myers’s coat. Taking down the address and phone number, he walked outside, checked the environment for tags. In the shadow of a storefront, he got out his cell burner, punched in the number of the distributor. He got nothing, no automated message, no voice mail. He wasn’t all that surprised. The distributor was so small and obscure, it had a rudimentary Web site. Customers could order its product online, but other than that, the site looked as if it hadn’t been updated in months.

S&W Distribution was on the outskirts of the curiously named Mexico, Pennsylvania, 160 miles north of Chevy Chase Village. It took Jack just under three hours bombing down I-83N and US-22W to get there. By the time he exited PA-75S, it was already late in the afternoon. The sun, low in the sky, was bedded on thick clouds into which it expanded and slowly sank. Shadows lengthened with the beginning of winter’s long twilight.

S&W occupied a ramshackle building a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks that brought Mexico all the business it was going to get. It was impossible to tell what color the structure had originally been painted or even what color it was now. Jack’s heart sank because at first sight, the place looked abandoned, but then he saw a young woman come out the front door. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket over a ribbed turtleneck sweater. As he pulled up, she settled herself on the clapboard steps, shook out a cigarette, lit up. She watched him with gimlet eyes as he got out of his car, walked toward her. She had an interesting, angular face. Its slight asymmetry made her appear beautiful. She was slim and small. She appeared to be in her late twenties.

As he approached, he heard a train whistle. The tremor in the tracks built as the train thundered toward them. The unsettled air of its bow wave crashed over them like a hail of gunshots. The young woman, her long hair flying across her face, sat as calmly as if the only sound to be heard was the crunch of Jack’s shoes on the pebbly blacktop. Smoke dribbled from the corner of her mouth, and now that he was closer, he could see the tattoos on the backs of her hands, either side of her neck: the four main phases of the moon. She must have dyed her hair black to match her eyes, but the tips were golden. She wore a silver skull ring on the third finger of her right hand. The skull seemed to be laughing.

In the aftermath of the cinder swirl, Jack flashed his ID, watched as her eyes tracked uninterestedly to the information. He began to wonder whether it was tobacco she was smoking.

“Do you work at S-and-W?” he asked.

“Used to.”

“They fired you?”

“The world fired them. S-and-W is history.” She jerked a thumb. “I’m just cleaning out the place.”

Jack sat down beside her. “What’s your name?”

“Hayley. Can you believe it? Ugh! Everyone calls me Leelee.”

“How long did you work here?”

“Seven to life.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “A fucking jail term.”

Jack laughed. “You’re a hard piece of work.”

“It’s self-preservation, so you can be sure I try my damnedest.” She watched him out of the corners of her black eyes. “You don’t look like a cop.”

“Thank you.”

It was her turn to laugh.

“How far along are you with the—” He jerked his thumb. “—you know?”

She sighed. “Not nearly far enough.”

“I’m trying to track down a customer of S-and-W’s,” Jack said. “He’s a tattoo artist who mixes his own pigments. I’m hoping he ordered logwood from you.”

“Not too many of those,” Leelee observed. “It’s why S-and-W was overtaken by history. That and the fact that the owner never came around. The fucker stopped paying his bills altogether—including my salary. If I wasn’t hired by the mail-order company taking over the building, I wouldn’t even be here now.” She shrugged. “But who cares? Odds are the new company’ll go belly-up, too.”

“Do you know something your new bosses don’t?”

“That’s the way the world works, isn’t it?” She stared at the glowing tip of her cigarette. “I mean, we’re all sheep, aren’t we, persuading ourselves that we’re different, that we’re beautiful or smart or cool. But we all end up the same way—as a little pile of ashes.”

“That’s a pretty bleak outlook.”

She shrugged. “Par for the course for a nihilist.”

“You need a boyfriend,” Jack said.

“Someone to tell me what to do and how to do it, someone to leave me at night to go out with the guys, someone to roll over in bed and snore his way to morning? You’re right. I need that.”

“How about someone to love you, protect you, take care of you?”

She tossed her head. “I do that myself.”

“I see how that’s working out for you.”

Through her armor, she gave him a wry smile.

“Come on, Leelee, you need to believe in something,” Jack said.

“Oh, I do. I believe in courage and discipline.”

“Admirable.” Jack nodded. “But I mean something outside of yourself. We’re all connected to a universe more mysterious than what we see around us.”

“Think so? Here’s the truest thing I know: Don’t for a moment let religion or art or patriotism persuade you that you mean more than you do.” She took another deep drag, gave him a challenging, alpha-dog look. “That comes from a play called Secret Life. I bet you never heard of it.”

“It was written by Harley Granville-Barker.”

Leelee’s eyes opened wide. “Shit, yeah. Now I’m impressed.”

“Then give me a hand here.”

“I could bust your hump, but you’ve taken all the fun out of that.” She swept her hair behind one ear. “Does your tattoo artist have a name?”

“Ian Brady,” Jack said. “Or Ronnie Kray. Or Charles Whitman.”

Leelee took the butt from between her lips. “You’re shitting me.”

“He was a customer, right?”

“More than.” She didn’t look as if she was interested in smoking anymore. “Charles Whitman owns S-and-W.”

The evening was furry with sleet, but as Jack worked his way south toward the District, it became an icy rain his wipers cast off either side of his windshield. The roads were slick and treacherous, peppered with spin-outs and fender benders, which slowed him down considerably. He returned from Mexico with an address for Charles Whitman. He had no way of knowing whether this was Brady’s current residence, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. The approach had to be thought out in detail.

As soon as he entered the house, he turned on the stereo, along with the lights and his stove top. But the only meat he had—a steak—was frozen solid, so he turned off the burner, sat down at the kitchen table with a jar of peanut butter and one of orange marmalade. Using a teaspoon, he scooped out mouthfuls from one jar then the other.

Afterwards, he went through his LP collection without finding anything he wanted to listen to. That’s when he came upon Emma’s iPod. He’d stuck it on top of a Big Bill Broonzy album that contained two of his favorite songs, “Baby, Please Don’t Go” and “C C Rider.” Tonight, he didn’t want to hear either of them.

He took up the iPod, plugged it in because the battery was low. Using the thumb wheel, he browsed through Emma’s collection of MP3s. There were the usual suspects: Justin Timberlake, R.E.M., U2, and Kanye West, but he was startled to see tracks by artists he loved and had played for her: Carla Thomas, Jackie Taylor, the Bar-Kays.

Searching through the shelves that housed his records and videocassettes, he found the box containing the iPod dock he’d bought but never used. He took it out, plugged it into the aux receptacle in the back of the stereo receiver. Then he put the iPod into the dock.

He decided to listen to something of Emma’s at random. This turned out to be an album for some reason called Boxer, by a band called The National. He thought of Emma, imagined her listening to these muscular songs—he particularly liked “Fake Empire”—wondered what would have been going through her mind.

As the music played, he fired up his computer, went online. According to Leelee’s records, the address where Brady had his logwood delivered was on Shepherd Street, in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He pulled up Google Maps, punched in the address, and clicked the HYBRID button, which gave him both the map and the satellite photo of the area. The address was only five or six miles southeast of where he was born. The thought gave him the shivers.

Forty minutes later, he got up, rummaged around the house for several items he thought he might need, stuffed them into a lightweight gym bag. He checked his Glock, shoved extra ammunition in his pocket, grabbed his coat. On the way out the door, he called Sharon. There was no answer. He disconnected before her voice mail picked up. With a sharp stab of jealousy, he wondered where she was. What if she was out with another man? That was her right, wasn’t it? Yes, but he didn’t want to think about it. He climbed into his car, his heart hammering in his chest. Driving to Shepherd Street, he thought, this could be it, the end of a road twenty-five years long.

46

What were the odds that Ian Brady lived in a hotel just four miles from Jack’s house? Yet this was what Jack saw as he cruised by the address Leelee had given him. RAINIER RESIDENCE HOTEL. SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM CORPORATE LEASES AVAILABLE the sign out front read. He didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down until he turned the corner onto Thirty-first Street, where he pulled into the curb and parked. The first thing he did was to check out the rear, which was flat, save for a zigzag of tiered black iron fire escapes. It gave out onto a concrete apron and, just beyond, a modestly sized blacktop parking lot, lit by sodium lights, from whose hard glare he kept his careful distance. But there was no rear entrance, most likely because of the same security concerns that had led to the installation of the parking lot lights.

Walking back to Shepherd Street, he found himself across the street from an ugly U-shaped structure hugging a courtyard with four withered trees, a Maginot Line of evergreen shrubs, fully a third of which were as brown and useless as sun-scorched newspapers. The hotel itself was three stories of pale yellow brick. Access to the apartments was via metal staircases at the center and either end of the U, along raw concrete catwalks that ran the length of the building. There was a coarseness about it, a glittery shabbiness, like a Christmas present wrapped in used paper. Had it been painted turquoise or flamingo, it could have passed as a down-at-the-heels Florida condo.

Jack kept away from the occasional dazzle as passing cars lit up sections of the sidewalk. He crossed the street, found his way to the manager’s apartment. Even through the door he could hear the blare of the TV. Waiting for a seconds-long silence, he rapped hard on the door. The blare started up again, louder this time, which meant a commercial had come on. A moment later, the door was yanked open the length of a brass chain.

Dark eyes in a square, heavy-jawed face looked him up and down. “Not interested.”

Jack put his foot across the doorjamb, flashed his ID even as the door began to swing shut. “I need some information,” he said.

“What kind of information?” the manager said in a voice like a pit bull’s growl.

“The kind you don’t want to give me while I’m standing out here.”

The dark eyes got small and piggy. “You’re not from INS? All my workers are legit.”

“Sure they are, but I don’t care. I’m not from Immigration.”

The manager nodded, Jack took his foot away, and the door closed enough for Pig-Eyes to unlatch the chain. Jack walked into a low-ceilinged apartment with small rooms made even smaller by enough sofas, chairs—upholstered and otherwise—and tables of all sizes and shapes to furnish the Carson’s Chevy Chase mansion. The manager muted the TV. Images of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble chased themselves across the screen.

“You have a tenant here by the name of Charles Whitman?”

“No.”

“How about checking your records?”

“No need,” Pig-Eyes said. “I know everyone who lives here.”

“How about Ron Kray?”

“No Kray here.”

“Ian Brady.”

Pig-Eyes shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

Jack considered Brady’s propensity for misdirection. Alli had told him that the real Ian Brady had a female accomplice. “How about a Myra Hindley?”

“No,” Pig-Eyes said, “but we got a Myron Hindley. You think he’s the one you’re looking for?”

“Do the apartment doors have peepholes?” Jack said.

Pig-Eyes seemed confused. “Yeah, why?”

“Are all the door locks the same as yours?”

“You bet. House rules. I gotta be able to have access to all the apartments.”

“I need a broom, a wire hanger, and the key to Myron Hindley’s apartment,” Jack said. As the manager went to fetch the items, Jack added, “If you hear any loud noises, it’s just a truck backfiring.”

Myron Hindley’s apartment was on the third floor, at the far end of the building. Hardly a surprise, since that’s precisely where Jack would have situated himself if he were in Brady’s place. He had two choices: The first was to go in the front door. The second was to climb up the fire escape to the apartment’s two rear windows. Since it would be far easier for Brady to flee out the front door than climb out the window, he decided to make a frontal assault. He wished Nina were here to take the back of the building, but she was with Alli. Besides, ever since the explicit warning he’d received from Secretary Paull, he’d decided to continue after Brady alone. This was his fight, not hers.

Every six feet, bare bulbs were screwed into porcelain fixtures in the ceiling of the catwalk. On the third floor, Jack took off his shoes, covered his right hand with both socks. Reaching up, he unscrewed each lightbulb as he progressed down the catwalk. The circles of illumination winked out one by one. After he’d disabled the last bulb, he put on his socks and shoes. His feet were freezing, and he had to wait several minutes for the warmth to come back so that he had full maneuverability.

With only the ambient wash from streetlights and the odd passing vehicle to illuminate the catwalk, Jack set the gym bag down on the concrete, opened the zip, took out a small can of WD-40 and a pair of bolt cutters. Then he took off his coat, hung it on the wire hanger, buttoned it, put the collar up. Then he twisted the top of the hanger so it wound around the butt of the broom handle. He stood this makeshift scarecrow against the railing of the catwalk directly opposite the door to Myron Hindley’s apartment.

Standing to one side of the door, he sprayed the key Pig-Eyes had given him with WD-40. It slid right in as he inserted it into the lock. But he didn’t turn it over. Instead, he picked up the bolt cutter. He rapped on the door, very loudly. Just as he pulled his fist away, three bullets exploded through the door, ripping holes in Jack’s overcoat. The broom crashed over onto the catwalk.

Jack turned the key, opened the door. As at the manager’s apartment, the door opened only to the length of the chain, which Jack promptly snipped in two with the bolt cutter. Drawing his Glock, he kicked open the door. Expecting another salvo of shots, he held his ground. When none came, he pitched himself across the threshold curled in a ball, came out of it with his Glock aimed into the room.

“Relax,” a voice said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Jack found himself confronting a figure sitting at his ease in an upholstered chair that had been pulled so that it faced the front door. Only one lamp was on, so that he was cast in half light, enough so that Jack could see the handgun gripped in one hand. It was lying on his right thigh, the barrel aimed casually at Jack.

“Sit down, Jack,” the figure said. “It’s been a long run. You must be tired.”

Jack could feel the power of the man as a fish is drawn to the baited hook. “I don’t know whether to call you Myron, Charlie, Ronnie, or Ian.”

The figure shrugged. “What’s in a name?”

“Who are you?” Jack said. He was struggling against an unnamed fear that had spread its black wings inside him. “What’s your real name?”

“I didn’t invite you here to answer questions,” the figure said.

Jack felt a laugh forced out of him, but it sounded brittle and shaky. “You invited me?”

Brady shrugged. “Leelee told me you were on your way.”

Now the fear took flight; he was in its shadow. As if he’d received a blow, he took an involuntary step backwards.

Brady bared his teeth. “Where d’you think she got all her ideas?”

Feeling a chair behind his knees, Jack sat down dazedly.

“Truth to tell, I’ve run you like a rat in a maze.” In a trick of the light, Brady seemed to have inflated, to be larger than life. “Every time you got to another point in the maze, I moved your cheese.” He waved the hand with the gun. “For instance, Calla Myers called me the moment you left the FASR office. I knew it was only a matter of time before you followed the clues I left to the Marmoset’s house. Oh yes, I’m familiar with Gus’s nickname for him.”

Jack felt poleaxed. All the hard work he’d done to get here, the arduous path he’d followed, had been created by this monster. “It was all to get me here?” he said like a pupil to his professor. “Why?”

“That question I’ll answer. I’m as tired as you are, Jack. I’ve had a good run, but now, like the president, my term has come to an end. And like the president, it’s time for me to look to my lasting legacy.”

He shifted slightly, and Jack could see him better now. Chris Armitage had described him well. He was handsome, distinguished even, with the kind of sexual magnetism he imagined Leelee would go for. Jack found him as sinister-looking as his horned viper and twice as terrifying.

“Your term stretches back far longer than eight years.”

“All the more reason for it to come to an end.” Brady leaned over, reached for the neck of a bottle of liquor, which he lifted into the light so Jack would be reassured. “Polish vodka. The real thing, not the watered-down crap you get here. Care to join me?”

Jack shook his head.

Brady shrugged. “Your loss.” Hoisting the bottle, he took a long swig, then smacked his lips.

“Okay.” Jack rose, gestured with the Glock. “Time to go.”

“And where would you be taking me? Not to the police and certainly not to the feds.” He possessed a crooked grin that gave him the aspect of a crocodile. There was something primeval about him, immutable, like a force of nature. This elemental quality was the source of his power. “You’re the one they’ll lock up, Jack, not me.”

Jack stood, the Glock pointing at the floor. “Why did you kill Gus?”

“No questions, remember? Not that it matters—you already know the answer to that one. Gus wasn’t going to give up looking for me. That idiot detective, Stanz, would have finally let it go, but not Gus.” Brady lazily tilted his head to one side. “But that isn’t the question you really want to ask, is it?”

An icy ball formed in the pit of Jack’s stomach. “What d’you mean?”

“C’mon, Jack. I killed Gus inside his house. You were asleep down the hall. You want to know why I left you alive.”

Jack, realizing he was right, said nothing.

“It’s a mystery, Jack, like many others in this life destined to remain unsolved.”

Jack aimed the Glock at him. “You will tell me.”

“Are you going to shoot me? That would be a blessing. My term would end in a blaze of glory because my bosses would lock you up and throw away the key. Lawyer, what lawyer? You wouldn’t even get a phone call. No, they’ll stick you in solitary in a federal high-security penitentiary.” He gestured with his gun, careful not to point it at Jack. “So sit back down, have a drink.”

Jack stood where he was.

“Suit yourself.” Brady sighed deeply. “We’re both orphans, in our own ways. I murdered my parents, as you should have.”

“If you’re trying to say we’re alike—”

“I must say you made up for it, though, when you killed that street thug, Andre.” Brady chuckled. “In a library yet. Brilliant.” He took another hit of the Polish vodka. “I’m going to tell you a secret, Jack. I have not one grain of faith in me. Early in life I wanted to get past all of life’s tricks, small and large, to get to the heart of things.” His eyes lit up. They were the eyes of Ron Kray, Charles Whitman, Ian Brady. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Jack? That’s your search, too.” He nodded. “Instead, what have I become? Life’s ultimate trickster. You see, there’s nothing left of me but tricks. That’s because I discovered that there is no heart of things. I think there used to be, but that was a long time ago. Life’s hollow, like a tree full of burrowing insects. That’s what humans are, Jack. They’ve burrowed into life with their frenzied civilization, their running after wealth and fame, their attempts to deny the body’s decay. They’re all insane. What else could they be, making such an unholy mess of things? They’ve hollowed life out, Jack, till there’s nothing left but the shell, the illusion of happiness.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Ah, but it’s true, and your daughter knew it. Emma heard what I had to say, and it drew her like a moth to a flame. Too bad she died so young—I had big plans for her. Aside from killing, mentoring’s what I do best. Emma had real potential, Jack. She could have become my most ardent pupil.”

With a savage cry, Jack launched himself at Brady, crashed into him with his leading shoulder. The chair tipped backwards, and they both tumbled head over heels in a tangle of arms and legs, fetched up against the wall under the rear window. Jack punched Brady in the nose, heard with satisfaction the cartilage fracture. Blood spouted out, covering them both. At almost the same time, Jack felt the Glock being ripped from his hand. He felt around blindly for the other gun, saw Brady raise the Glock. A moment more, he’d shoot Jack. But then Jack saw where the Glock was pointed and, in a flash of insight, knew that Brady meant to shoot himself in the head with Jack’s gun. He meant what he said about going out in a blaze of glory. He was going to end his reign by ensuring that Jack would spend the rest of his life in prison.

With a desperate swing, Jack knocked the Glock from Brady’s hand. It went skittering across the floor. He hauled Brady to his feet, but one foot trod on Brady’s gun. It was, like everything else in the area, slippery with blood. Jack lurched forward, taking Brady with him as they pitched through the window in a blizzard of shattered glass. Brady teetered for a moment with Jack over him, the two of them in stunned equilibrium. Jack tried to pull back, to right himself, but Brady was too far. Without Jack’s weight to hold him in place, he began to slide headfirst out the window. Jack made a grab for him, but Brady slapped his hands away.

Brady stared up into Jack’s face without expression of any kind. “Makes no difference. You’ll never stop it.”

The next instant he plummeted down three stories to the concrete apron. Jack, covered in blood and shards of glass, scooped up his Glock, ran out of the apartment, along the catwalk. He clattered down the stairs three at a time, around the side of the building.

Brady lay in a grotesque heap. He might have survived the fall, but the impact had broken his neck. His handsome face, under the harsh sodium glare of the parking lot lights, was a patchwork of seams, as if over time it had been stitched together. The eyes, devoid of their animating spark, were only buttons now. Stripped of charisma, he was nothing remarkable to look at. He was dead, Jack was dripping blood, and twenty-five years of rage, sorrow, and feeling abandoned drained away like grains of sand.

47

Walking into the vast hushed public library on G Street NW put Jack immediately at peace. The dry, slightly dusty scent of books came to him like a breath of fresh air, bringing back memories of so many hours happily poring through books to his heart’s content. There was a certain kind of quiet here that calmed and stirred him at the same time. It was like being in the ocean, feeling your body light and buoyant and, at the same time, attuning yourself to the galaxy of unknown life that seethed beneath the surface. The knowledge of the world lay before him, the wisdom of history. This was his cathedral. Here was God.

It was the morning of January 20. Inauguration Day. For a few hours, Jack had slept in his car before waking up just before dawn stiff and tired, his eyes full of grit. He went home, stripped off his bloody clothes, climbed into a hot shower, and putting all thoughts aside, stood under the cascade for fifteen blissful minutes. Then he scrubbed himself with soap, rinsed, dried off.

Fighting the urge to call Sharon, he dialed Alli’s cell.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come by last night.”

“That’s okay.” Her voice sounded furred with the remnants of sleep. “I missed you.” There was a slight hesitation. “I had another dream last night.” She meant about Ian Brady.

“Can you remember it?”

“He was talking to me, but his voice was all gauzy. It—I don’t know—I had pictures in my head, like a movie. I was walking through a crowd of people.”

“Were you trying to get away from him?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Alli, you don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

“What d’you mean?”

He heard in her voice that she’d come fully awake.

“This is just between the two of us, right?”

“Right.”

“That’s why I couldn’t come see you,” Jack said. “I was with him. And now he’ll never hurt you again.”

He heard her sharply indrawn breath. “Really?”

“Really. I’ll see you at the inauguration, okay? Now let me speak with Nina.”

After a short pause, Nina came on the line.

“Good idea not contacting me on my cell. Are you calling from a pay phone?”

“A burner I bought a couple of days ago.” He paused to stare out his bedroom window, where the branches of the oak tree reached toward the sky. “Listen, Ian Brady’s history.”

“What?”

“I tracked him down last night to a residence hotel in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He’s dead.”

“What a relief.”

“Brady wanted to die, Nina. I’ll give you the details after the inauguration, okay?”

“It’s a date,” she said. “Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

Downstairs, he pulled the suit Chief Bennett had waiting for him those long weeks ago when he was being prepped for his assignment to Hugh Garner’s joint task force. He stripped off the dry cleaning bag. He turned on Emma’s iPod. He wanted to hear more of her music while he dressed. Alli had said that she was always making playlists. Seeing a playlist category in the iPod screen, he clicked on it. Oddly, there was only one, called Outside. He set it to play. Immediately, “Life on Mars?”—David Bowie’s famous song about alienation—started up.

As Jack listened, he put on a freshly laundered white shirt, buttoned it up. “Life on Mars?” segued into the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” As he knotted his tie, on came Screamin’ Jay Hawkins singing “I Put a Spell on You,” a good deal more raw and powerful than subsequent versions.

After reknotting his tie three times, he got it right. He slipped on his jacket and was about to turn off the iPod when he heard Emma’s voice coming out of the speakers. He stood, transfixed, listening to the aural diary of her three meetings with Ian Brady. This was how the entry ended:

“Finally, I said to him that if he saw me as his Myra Hindley, he was sorely mistaken because I had no intention of either fucking him or falling under his spell. This was the one time he surprised me. He laughed. I had nothing to fear. He said that he already had his Myra Hindley.”

You’ll never stop it.

Stop what? What had Brady planned?

Jack walked through the library’s stacks. With each book he touched, he sensed a new door open to him. This was the place where his disability vanished, where he could read without the tension and frustration his dyslexia usually caused him. In the shadowed aisles he recognized Andre, Gus, Ian Brady, Emma. Each of their lives had meaning, a certain force that would remain with him even after death; of this, he was absolutely certain. Though they were beyond him now, still he sensed them, as an animal scents spoor and in its mind forms an image of what had once been there and has since moved on.

The truth was, Jack still felt the spoor of Ian Brady’s mesmeric power, even though he was quite certain Brady had lied about his connection with Emma, had in fact been baiting him. Of course, this was precisely what Brady had meant to plant inside him, but Jack was only human, prey to human doubts and fears, just like anyone—anyone save Ian Brady perhaps.

Without quite knowing how it happened, Jack found himself at the section of the library that held the books of Colin Wilson. He ran his finger along the spines of the books until he found the intimidatingly thick A Criminal History of Mankind. Taking it down, he went over to a trestle table, sat down, and opened it up.

He was astonished to discover that the introduction was all about the real Ian Brady. Wilson had had a ten-year correspondence with Brady in prison. Wilson’s conclusion was that “even an intelligent criminal remains trapped in the vicious circle of his criminality, and cannot escape.”

Brady was involved in what Wilson termed a “dominance syndrome” with Myra Hindley, a young woman he seduced, deflowered, and somehow coerced into being his accomplice for a horrifying string of rape/murders over a two-year period. It was Myra who lured the teenage victims into her car so Brady could perform his acts of extreme cruelty and degradation. The real mystery was how he converted a young innocent like Myra Hindley into a criminal.

Jack paused. He could not help thinking of his Brady and Emma. Emma heard what I had to say, and it drew her like a moth to a flame. Too bad she died so young—I had big plans for her. Aside from killing, mentoring’s what I do best. Emma had real potential, Jack. She could have become my most ardent pupil. What had he wanted with a Myra Hindley? So far as Jack could tell, Brady was a loner—whatever missions he performed for the government were strictly on his own. Anyone with him would have been a liability. So what, then, was he up to?

Jack went back to reading. On page twenty-nine, he came across the most heinous of Brady’s crimes. He and Hindley picked up a ten-year-old girl. They took pictures of her (Jack couldn’t help but think of the photos of Alli and Emma on the wall at the Marmoset’s house), recorded her pleas for mercy, then killed her and buried her on the moor, where another of their young victims was buried. “Later,” Wilson wrote, “they took blankets and slept on the graves. It was part of the fantasy of being Enemies of Society, dangerous revolutionaries.”

Sickened by what these two people had done, Jack looked up. Into his head now came something else that his Brady had said to him last night: I’ve had a good run, but now, like the president, my term has come to an end. And like the president, it’s time for me to look to my lasting legacy.

Jack understood that Brady had wanted to die last night: he’d tried to shoot himself with Jack’s Glock, he’d brushed Jack’s hands away when Jack tried to save him from his fall. Might it be that this was why Brady had kept Jack alive that night, because he suspected this moment in his future would come, that he wanted someone worthy to finish him off? Truth to tell, I’ve run you like a rat in a maze. Every time you got to another point in the maze, I moved your cheese. Jack had not only successfully negotiated the maze, but he’d also survived the horned viper’s attack, the fusillade of bullets coming through the apartment door.

So Brady knew he was going to die last night, and yet he was looking to his lasting legacy. What might that be? Not his clandestine work for the government. A lasting legacy involves notoriety—a very public display. And he had very deliberately invoked the president. Why had he done that?

Another three-dimensional puzzle was forming in Jack’s head as his brain made connections with the speed of light. Brady’s MO was misdirection; he’d used it time and again. What if there was a second reason for him talking about Emma being his disciple, besides wanting to enrage Jack? Emma was never meant to be his Myra Hindley. What if—?

You’ll never stop it.

Jack stood up so fast, he nearly overturned the table. The sound of its legs banging back on the floor was like a thunderclap in his mind. As he ran out of the library, he checked his watch. As usual, he’d lost himself in thought and reading. It was far later than he’d realized. The inauguration was about to begin and, with it, Ian Brady’s lasting legacy.

48

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

Sam opened the door, stepped out into the wan January sunshine. Alli could hear him whispering into his mike, listening intently to security updates. When Sam nodded, Nina urged her charge forward, and Alli emerged from the plush cocoon of the limo into the seething crowd of politicians, foreign dignitaries, celebrities, the talking heads of worldwide media outlets, religious leaders, including Reverend Taske, head of the Renaissance Mission Congress, her father’s special guest, military personnel in full-dress uniforms, Secret Service details crisscrossing the area with the concentration of marines landing in enemy territory.

Alli took all this in as if she were watching a film. Ever since she’d heard the first bars of Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible,” she’d felt as if she were back in her dream with Ronnie Kray whispering in her ear. She felt detached and at the same time marvelously clearheaded. She had one mission to accomplish; everything else fell away as if off a steep cliff, vanishing from view. Her life was simple; all that was required of her was to remove the vial she somehow knew was basted into the lining of her coat and, at the proper moment, open it. What could be simpler? Her mind hummed along on the track Kray had set for it, using a combination of persuasion, fear, and a drug cocktail that included an efficacious dose of the horned viper’s venom to metabolize the chemicals out of her system so quickly, it would be undetectable.

She was nearing her parents now. Her mother kissed her; her father smiled through her. The fanfare was playing, the Speaker of the House was preparing to take the podium for the Call to Order. Among the columns of the Capitol building hung three huge American flags. Above them, the dome glittered in sunlight.

Jack, snaking his way through the crowd, used his credentials at various Secret Service checkpoints. Approaching the dais was like negotiating the nine circles of hell—the closer he got, the slower his progress. The last bars of the fanfare faded, and the Speaker of the House took the podium for the Call to Order. Jack passed the final checkpoint and was admitted to the short flight of folding stairs up to the dais. He saw Reverend Taske, Secretary Paull, the National Security Advisor, the outgoing president. He looked past them for Alli, saw her between her mother and her father. She had a kind of faraway look on her face he’d seen a number of times before, and now all the tiny bits of strange behavior that he had observed, that had taken up residence in his brain, fell into place: her behavior when he’d taken her to see Chris Armitage, her dream. And afterwards: Nothing feels right, she’d said to him. I’m afraid…. Please help me. What had Brady done to her? Had he hypnotized her, drugged her? Perhaps both. In any event, he’d turned her into a time bomb. The fuse had been lit, and now, as he saw her reach into the lining of her coat, he made a beeline for her.

He saw Sam, who turned at the movement Jack made across the dais. Sam’s eyes met Jack’s, and he smiled until he saw Jack pointing. The vial was out, Alli’s hand was curled around it. Sam saw it at the same moment Jack did. With a practiced move so smooth as to be virtually undetectable, he wrested the vial out of her hand, put his free arm around her, held her firmly against his chest.

And that was it, Jack thought, as he moved at a more leisurely pace toward them. Ian Brady’s legacy had turned to ashes. Whatever substance he’d instructed Alli to release remained safely in its vial. The Speaker of the House finished the Call to Order, and the Reverend Dr. Fred Grimes began his fervent invocation and benediction.

“Let us pray. Blessed are you, O Lord, our God. Yours, O God, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor; for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.”

A stir began behind him. He turned in time to see Hugh Garner and three of his minions mounting the dais, heading directly for him. Clearly, Brady’s body had been found. No doubt the pig-eyed manager of Brady’s apartment complex had ID’d Jack.

“Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and to give strength to all.”

Jack, zigzagging farther into the crowd on the dais, kept his eye out for Nina. She’d give him some help, provide cover for him while he slipped away. She should have been on the other side of Alli. There was still part of the last Rubik’s Cube missing.

“As President Lincoln once said, ‘We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.’”

At last, he caught a glimpse of Nina, moved toward her. She was standing on the other side of Edward Carson. He risked a glance behind him. Garner, in a classic pincer move, had ordered his two agents to the other side of the dais in order to intercept Jack while he closed from behind.

“O Lord, as we come together on this historic and solemn occasion to inaugurate once again a president and vice president, teach us afresh that power, wisdom, and salvation come only from your hand.”

As Brady himself would understand better than most, what Jack needed now was a bit of misdirection. He tried to get Nina’s attention, but her gaze seemed fixed on Edward Carson. Beneath the reverend’s words, he could hear the commotion closing in behind him as Garner pushed through the dignitaries packing the dais. The missing piece of the last Rubik’s Cube was this: Why had it been so easy to stop Alli? No one’s lasting legacy—let alone Ian Brady’s—would hinge on the actions of a coerced twenty-year-old.

Then, in his head, he heard Emma’s voice as clearly as if she’d been alive and standing beside him. He said that he already had his Myra Hindley. That was before Brady had abducted Alli. So if he wasn’t grooming Emma to be Myra Hindley and she wasn’t to be Alli, who was his accomplice, whom would he trust to carry out his legacy after his death?

“We pray, oh Lord, for President-elect Edward Harrison Carson and Vice President-elect Richard Thomas Baer, to whom you have entrusted the leadership of this nation at this moment in history. We pray that you will help them bring our country together, so that we may rise above partisan politics and seek the larger vision of your will for our nation.”

Jack felt Garner’s grip on his shoulder, trying to turn him around. He saw Nina leaning in toward the president-elect. But her mouth was closed, her jaw set. She reached into an inner pocket of her coat, and at that moment Jack knew. The last piece of the Rubik’s Cube fell into place. The real Ian Brady had used a woman younger than he for his accomplice, but not so young as his victims, not so young as to be unreliable. Someone just like Nina Miller.

Jack drew his Glock, fired one shot into Nina’s heart. He saw her mouth open in shock, saw her body spin around; then Garner slammed him to the floor of the dais. Someone kicked the Glock away; Garner struck him a blow to the back of his head.

“Use them to bring reconciliation among the races and healing to political wounds, that we may truly become ‘one nation under God,’” the Reverend Dr. Fred Grimes intoned just before the screaming began and all hell broke loose.

49

“Sometimes we all need luck in addition to skill,” Secretary Dennis Paull said. “And you, Jack, had both today.”

Jack was sitting in a small cubicle inside the offices of Homeland Security. Across the table from him were Secretary Paull and Edward Carson, the new President of the United States. It was eight hours after the incident. Since then, Jack had been under arrest, in isolation, just as Brady had predicted.

“That was quite a heroic thing you did today, Jack.” Carson waved Paull’s protest to silence. “You saved not only my life but the lives of hundreds of people, all vital to the running of this country. That was a vial of anthrax Nina Miller was about to open.”

Jack moved his head from side to side with some difficulty. His body still throbbed and ached from the beating Hugh Garner and his cohorts had delivered in the aftermath of the shooting. “And the vial Alli was carrying?”

“Confectioner’s sugar,” Paull said. “Thank God.”

Personally, Jack didn’t believe God had anything to do with it, but this was neither the time nor the place to say it. “Is she all right?”

“In light of what’s happened, she’s being evaluated more carefully this time,” the president said.

Paull opened a slim file. “The doctors found a small bit of matter encrusted in the fold behind one ear.”

“So Brady did drug her.”

Paull nodded. “So far, the lab has identified Sodium Pentothal and curare. There’s another, more complex substance the techs are still trying to analyze, but they figure it must be something that caused her to metabolize the other substances with unusual rapidity.”

“Jack,” Carson said, “do you know how he got to Nina Miller?”

“No, but I can make an educated guess,” Jack said. “Nina was traumatized early in life. Her brother molested her.”

“We know all about that,” Paull cut in. “It’s in her file. Her psychological profile was perfectly normal.”

“Profiles, like Alli’s medical exam, can be faulty,” Jack pointed out. “Even more so with psych tests. Nina couldn’t bear the fact that her brother was a successful married man.”

“Wait a minute.” Paull held up a hand. “Nina’s brother was killed twelve years ago in a drive-by in Richmond, Virginia. One shot through the head.”

“Why would she lie to me about that?” Jack’s synapses began firing again. “Did the cops ever find out who the killer was?”

Paull shook his head. “Apart from the bullet, there was no evidence—no motivation either. They gave up, said it was a case of mistaken identity.”

“What if it wasn’t?” Jack said. “What if Nina met Brady twelve years ago? What if he proposed a plan: He murders her brother, and in return, she becomes his accomplice.”

Paull began to sweat at the thought of the terrible mistakes he’d made professionally and personally.

“Brady was like a chess master—he planned his moves far ahead of time,” Jack continued. “The night he went out the window, he told me he’d killed his parents. At the time, I thought he was simply goading me, but now I can see a pattern. He felt he was justified in killing his parents, for whatever reason. Taking a look at Nina’s file gave him his opportunity. My guess is he sought her out. Nina felt that there was a privilege in loneliness. She said it made her feel alive, introduced her to herself. People like her are split off from themselves. They’ll pass even the most stringent psychological testing because at the moment, they believe what they say.”

Paull winced. He could feel Nina’s sweat-slicked body moving against him, her breath in his ear, her deep groans. He felt quite faint.

Jack shifted to rid himself of a stab of pain. “In the course of my investigation, I met a young woman, tough and smart—in many ways a younger version of Nina. Brady got to her. She was a nihilist just like him. I’m betting he found the darkness in Nina and pried her open. He was a master at mentoring.”

In his mind’s eye, Paull saw an image of himself walking into the bookshop where he’d ordered Summer Rain, Nina’s favorite novel. The dealer insisted he examine it before he bought it. It chronicled the struggle of an immigrant family, rootless and uneducated, marginalized by an indifferent society. He’d thought nothing of it then, but in light of what had happened since, he agreed with Jack. Nina’s love of the book was a reflection of her inner darkness. Why hadn’t he recognized it? But of course he knew. He’d blinded himself to the signs because her detachment, her rootlessness, her lack of desire for commitment or a family made her the perfect mistress.

“Good God.” President Carson ran a hand through his hair. “This entire episode is monstrous.” He turned his telegenic eyes on Paull. “My Administration will have zero tolerance for psychopathic agents, Dennis. You and your brethren are going to have to devise an entirely different yardstick to measure your candidates.” He stood. “Excuse me, I’m going to deliver the same message to the new director of national security.”

He leaned over the table, gave Jack’s hand a hearty shake. “Thank you, Jack. From the bottom of my heart.”

After he’d gone, Jack and Paull sat across from each other in an uncomfortable silence.

Jack leaned forward. “I’m only going to say this once: For the record, despite his best efforts, I didn’t kill him, he killed himself.”

“I believe you.” Paull’s voice was weary. “What went wrong, Jack?”

Jack rubbed the back of his head. “Brady—or whatever his name is—was no good to you anymore, sir. All he wanted was to impose a lasting legacy. He wanted to make a statement of the greatest magnitude. I imagine you’ll agree that obliterating virtually the entire U.S. government at a time when the reins of power were being exchanged, when the country was most vulnerable, more than qualifies.”

“Are you saying he was making a political statement?”

“I doubt it. Brady had moved beyond such considerations. He despised humankind, hated what he felt civilization had done to the world. He felt we were heading toward a dead end.”

“You have my personal thanks.” Secretary Paull stared at Jack for a long time. At length, he cleared his throat. “On another note, you’ll be pleased to know that there’s no sign of the organization known as E-Two. Frankly, I suspect it never existed. The former Administration required a domestic bogeyman to go after its main objective—the missionary secularists. Maybe E-Two was fabricated by the former National Security Advisor.”

“Or maybe Brady came up with the idea,” Jack said. “After all, misdirection was his forte, and those FASR defectors had to go somewhere.”

“A bogus revolutionary cell? Could be.” The secretary shrugged. “Either way, I’ve ordered the members of the First American Secular Revivalists released and reinstated. And, by the way, I protected them while they were in custody. No one interrogated them or harmed them in any way.”

“I know you did what you could.”

Paull rose, walked to the door.

“What was his name?” Jack said. “His real name?”

Paull hesitated only a moment. “Morgan Herr,” he said. “Truth be told, I know precious little about him. I’d like to know more, but for that I’d require you and your particular expertise. If you’re interested, come see me.”

February 1

Under the buttermilk sky of an early dusk, Jack stood at the front window of his living room, staring fixedly at the bleak view of his driveway. All the crispy leaves were gone. Overnight, a bitter front out of the Midwest had nailed shut the coffin of the January thaw. All day long, the District, home to mild winters, had been shivering.

Earlier in the day, he’d driven the white Lincoln Continental down Kansas Avenue NE. Parking outside the Black Abyssinian Cultural Center, he hurried across the pavement and through the door. There, he collected the month’s rent, minus an amount for the time Chris Armitage and Peter Link occupied the back room. The leaders wanted to pay the full month’s rent, but Jack said no. He drank a cup of dark, rich African hot chocolate with them, thanked them, and left.

Trashy wind, full of cinders and yesterday’s newspapers, followed him down the block to the FASR office. Inside, everything looked more or less back to normal, except that Calla Myers’s desk was unoccupied, wreathed in black ribbon. A number of lit candles clustered on the desktop in front of a framed photo of her with some of her coworkers. They were all smiling. Calla was waving at the camera.

Peter Link was out on assignment, but Jack spent a few minutes chatting with Armitage. He knew he’d made a friend there.

Jack abandoned the window and its bleak view to put a Rolling Stones record on the stereo. “Gimme Shelter” began, simmered to a slow boil. “War, children,” he sang in a melancholy voice along with Mick and Merry Clayton, “it’s just a shot away.”

He returned to the window, waiting. Tonight, he had a date with Sharon. He had no idea how that was going to go, but at last she had agreed to come to the house, Gus’s house, the house of Jack’s adolescence. If he and Sharon didn’t kill each other, then next Saturday the two of them would spend the afternoon with Alli. It was Alli’s idea; maybe she wanted to play matchmaker—or peacemaker, anyway.

He thought about Alli and her effect on him. There was a time when he didn’t know himself or the world. Worse, he couldn’t accept that he didn’t know himself, so he kept pushing everyone away. Without intimate mirrors, you have no hope of knowing yourself. So he kept Sharon and Emma—the two people best equipped to be his intimate mirrors—at arm’s length, while he deluded himself into thinking his job came first, that saving strangers was more important than allowing anyone to know him.

He recalled his first encounter with Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. He hadn’t liked the book, because he was too young to fully appreciate it. But with living comes wisdom. Now a line from the book surfaced in his mind. There’s a moment when Steppenwolf is struck by a revelation. In order to understand himself, and therefore the world, he needs to “traverse, not once more but often, the hell of his inner being.” This, Jack understood, was the most difficult thing a human being could attempt. Simply to try was heroic. To succeed, well …

He heard the soft crunch of the gravel, and then Sharon’s car nosed into the driveway. She pulled in to the right, parked the car, and got out. She was wearing a black ankle-length wool coat, black boots, and a tomato-red scarf wrapped around her throat. Aching to see her long legs, he leaned forward until his nose made an imprint on the glass and his breath turned to fog.

She stood for a moment, as if uncertain which way to go. Jack held his next breath, wondering if she was contemplating getting back in her car and driving off. That would be just like her—or at least just like the woman he had known.

Low, cool sunlight came through the branches, speckling her face. It shone off her hair, made the color of her eyes clear and rich. She looked young, very much as she had when he’d first met her. From this distance, the lines of worry and grief weren’t visible, as if time itself had been obliterated.

Jack saw her gazing at the house, taking in its shape and dimensions. She took a step toward him, then another. As she moved, she seemed to gain momentum, as if her intent had focused down. She looked like someone who had made up her mind, who knew what she wanted.

Jack understood that completely, and his heart swelled. His love for her was palpable, as if he’d never loved her before, or even knew what love was. Perhaps he never had. It was all too likely that the consequences of pain and loss had driven love from his heart. But not, it seemed, from him altogether. This was Emma’s gift to him. She had taught him not only to recognize love but to seize it as well.

Sharon mounted the steps. He left the window and never again thought the view through it was bleak.

He felt Emma all around him, like the collective shimmer of stars on a moonless night.

There are many paths to redemption, he thought. This is mine.

He heard the knock on the door, and opened it.

Preview

Read on for the first chapter of

Jack McClure now has a role as a special advisor to the president. When he’s asked by his new boss to investigate the mysterious death of a U.S. senator on a diplomatic mission to Ukraine, McClure can’t say no. His comrades on the investigation include a rogue Russian agent… and the president's daughter.

1

Moscow | April 5

Jack McClure, cell phone to his ear, stood in his hotel suite, staring out at the arc-lit onion domes of Red Square. It was snowing. The last snow, it was predicted, of a protracted and, even for Russia, frigid winter. Red Square was nearly deserted. The swirling black wind swept the last of the tourists, shoulders hunched, digital cameras stuffed inside their long coats to protect them, back to their hotels where steaming cups of coffee waited, spiked with vodka or slivovitz. Jack had arrived here a week ago with the presidential entourage on a trip that was both politically necessary and culturally important, which was why the First Lady and the First Daughter had been invited along. The trip had been arranged—brokered might be a more accurate term—by General Atcheson Brandt, who had commanded a wing in the Gulf War. He was both a decorated veteran and, now that he’d retired, a revered military analyst for both CNN and ABC. He knew everyone in Washington who mattered. When he spoke, senior politicians of both parties listened. Though the former administration’s mini cold war with Russia, and President Yukin in particular, had raged for eight years, General Brandt had made it his business to keep the private lines of communication with Yukin open. His public criticism of the former administration’s hard line against Russia had led to a brief summit between Yukin and the former president. Though nothing of substance had come of it, General Brandt had been praised on both sides of the Senate aisles for his efforts.

However, at the moment General Brandt was far from Jack’s mind. Jack hadn’t said a word for the past three minutes and neither had Sharon. Rather, they were listening to each other breathe, as they often did when they lay in bed together in Jack’s house in D.C. While Jack listened through the phone, he thought of her coming home after work, shedding her clothes layer by layer, until she was in her bra and the bikini underpants she always wore. He imagined her sliding into bed, pushing backward, feeling with her buttocks for that shallow indentation his absent body had left behind like a memory. He imagined her eyes closing as she drifted off to sleep. And then imagined she descended further. What did she dream of when all the artifice and layers demanded by civilization melted away, when she reverted to who she had been as a child, when she was certain no one was watching or, at least, able to pierce the veil of her sleep? He liked to imagine that she dreamed of him, but he had no way of knowing, just as he had no way of knowing who she really was, even though he knew her body almost as well as he knew his own, even though he’d observed over and over her every tiny motion, day and night.

He knew these questions assailed him because he was so far from home—traveling with the newly elected president of the United States, his longtime friend, Edward Harrison Carson, as Carson’s strategic advisor.

“What does that title mean exactly?” he’d asked Carson, when the two had met the week following the inauguration.

The president had laughed. “Just like you, Jack, cutting to the quick of everything. I pulled you out of the ATF to find my daughter. You brought Alli back to me when no one else could. I and my family feel safest with you close.”

“With all due respect, Edward, you have a platoon of perfectly competent Secret Service operatives better suited than I am to guard you and your family.”

“You misunderstand me, Jack. I have far too much respect for you to offer you a babysitting job, even though nothing would please Alli more. Besides, on a practical level, your special abilities would be wasted in that capacity. I have no illusions about how difficult and perilous the next four years are going to be. As you can imagine, there are already no end of people who are clamoring to whisper advice in my ear. Part of my job is to allow them this access, but you’re one person I’m inclined to listen to, because you’re the one I trust absolutely.

“That’s what ‘strategic advisor’ means.”

Sharon had begun whispering, which meant, according to the routine their calls had fallen into over the week Jack had been in Moscow, it was time for them to talk. Jack turned and padded in bare feet past the table with the photos of her and Emma he took everywhere he went, across the carpet to the bathroom. He was about to turn on the water, in order to defeat the listening devices planted in every room. No fewer than four representatives of the Russian government swore there were no such listening devices. But ever since the first night when Secret Service personnel had discovered one, he and everyone in the president’s service were warned to take precautions when speaking to anyone while in the rooms, even if the conversation seemed innocuous.

He heard voices rising up from the hot water pipes behind the toilet. Over the course of the week, he’d occasionally heard a drift of voices from the room on the floor below, but had never before been able to make out a single word. This time, a man’s and a woman’s voice were raised in altercation.

“I hate you!” the woman said, her raw emotion vibrating through the pipe. “I’ve always hated you.”

“You told me you loved me,” the man said, not plaintively, which might be expected, but with the guttural growl of a stalking male.

“Even then I hated you, I always hated you.”

“When I was pinning you to the mattress?”

“Especially then.”

“When I made you come?”

“And what was I screaming in my own language, do you think? ‘I hate you, I’ll see you in hell, I’ll kill you!’”

“Jack?”

Sharon’s voice in his ear caused him to twist on the water full force. He wasn’t one to eavesdrop, but there was a vengeful, knife-edged sharpness to both voices that not only compelled listening, but made it almost impossible to stop.

“Jack, are you at a party?”

“In my room,” he said. “The people downstairs are going at it tooth and nail. How are you?” An innocuous enough question, but not when you were forty-six hundred miles apart. When so much distance separated you, there was always a question in your mind: What is she doing, or, its more far-reaching corollary, what has she been doing? It was possible to tell himself that her day proceeded precisely as it did when he was there: She got up in the morning, showered, ate a quick breakfast standing at the kitchen counter, stacked the dishes in the sink because there was time to either wash them or put on her makeup but not do both, went to work, shopped for food, came home, put on Muddy Waters or Steve Earle while she prepared dinner and ate it, read an Anne Tyler or Richard Price novel or watched 30 Rock if it was on, and went to bed.

But he couldn’t help wondering if her day differed in some significant way, that it had been added to, that someone else might have inserted himself into her day or, far worse, her night, someone handsome, understanding, and available. Now he couldn’t help wondering whether this fantasy was jealousy or wish fulfillment. When, three months ago, Sharon had moved back into his house, he was certain they had reconciled the differences that had driven them apart in the first place. The intense physical desire for her that had first drawn him to her had never truly been entirely extinguished. But the fact was, they were still the same people. Jack was dedicated to his work, which Sharon resented, because she had no such dedication. She’d tried several different careers, all without feeling the slightest attachment to them. At first, she’d set herself up as a painter, but though technically accomplished she lacked passion—and nothing good, or at least worthwhile, can be created without it. Typical of her, she’d then drifted into dealing art, figuring to make easy money, but again her lack of conviction, or even interest, predetermined her failure. Finally, she was hired by a friend who worked at the Corcoran but was let go after less than a year. As a result, she now toiled joylessly in real estate, work that was tied to the vagaries of the economy, which, he imagined, could only further stir the pot of her simmering anger—at him, at the world, at her life without their daughter. He couldn’t help but think that she wanted him home for dinner every evening as a kind of revenge, for enjoying his job when she clearly didn’t. This was a desire that made him feel as if he were being strangled. He had always been an outsider—from his dyslexia to his unorthodox upbringing he’d never fit in and, as he’d finally been able to admit to himself if not to anyone else besides Alli Carson, he didn’t want to. One of the things that had bonded him with Alli was that they were both Outsiders. Sharon was conventional in most things; in all the others she was regressive. In the beginning, he’d loved her despite their differences, loved the smell of her, the sight of her both naked and clothed, the intense way she made love. Now Emma, or, more accurately, Emma’s memory, stood between them like an immense, immovable shadow that limned their differences with a cutting edge that was painful.

“Who’s that I hear whistling?” he said now.

“My mom. She arrived yesterday.”

Sharon’s mother had never liked him. She hadn’t approved of the marriage, telling her daughter that it would end in tears, which of course it had. That triumph of hers was in no way mitigated by Sharon having returned to him. Their daughter—her granddaughter— Emma was dead, killed at age twenty in a car accident. As far as Sharon’s mother was concerned it had all ended in tears, no matter what happened from now on.

“Jack, when are you coming home?”

“You asked me that yesterday and the day before.”

“And yesterday and the day before you said you’d find out.” She made that noise where her tongue struck the roof of her mouth. “Jack, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to come home?”

The subject, he suspected, would not be coming up so insistently if her mother hadn’t arrived with all her pernicious baggage. “I told you when I signed on with Edward—”

“My mother said you never should have taken that job, and I have to say that I agree with her.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you cared about me, if you cared about repairing the damage to our marriage, you would have found a job closer to home.”

“Sharon, this is starting to feel like déjà vu all over again. I can’t—”

“That’s your answer to everything serious, isn’t it, making jokes. Well, I can’t take that anymore, Jack.”

Silence on the line. He didn’t know what to say or, rather, didn’t want to say something he’d regret. It was strange how intimate conversations became attenuated—how emotions seemed muted, almost murky—when transmitted over long distances, as if the phones themselves were having the conversation. Perhaps it was his alien surroundings—his present, and therefore his priorities so different from her familiar ones.

“You didn’t answer my question.” Her voice sounded thick, as if during the interim she’d been crying.

“I don’t know. Something’s come up.”

“Something’s always coming up.” Her voice had sharpened like a knife at the strop. “But that’s precisely what you want, isn’t it? You—”

The rest of her acerbic response was drowned out by a sharp, insistent rapping on the door he had come to associate with the president’s Secret Service staff.

He took the cell away from his ear and ducked back into the main room, which was at once anonymous and oppressive, a hallmark of what passed for modern Russian decor. It was on the top floor of the vast H-shaped hotel, whose somewhat faded hallways reminded Jack of The Shining. The entire floor was allocated to President Carson, his family, and his entourage.

Dick Bridges, the head of Carson’s Secret Service detail, filled the doorway. He made no move to step inside, but silently mouthed POTUS, the Secret Service acronym for the President of the United States. Jack nodded, held up a forefinger in countersign: a moment. Now, Bridges mouthed, and Jack stepped back into the bathroom where the water was still running.

“Sharon, Edward needs me.”

“Did you hear a word I said?”

He was in no mood for her mother-instigated bullshit. “I’ve got to go.”

“Jack—”

He killed the connection. Back in the room, he stepped into his shoes and, without bothering to tie his laces, went out into the hallway. President Carson, flanked by two agents, was standing in front of the metal fire door that led to the stairwell, which had been blocked off to the floor below. They had the aspect of men who had been talking together for some time: Their heads were tilted toward one another, their mouths were half open, and familiar glances were being exchanged. All of these small observations told Jack that something of significance had arisen at this late hour.

Therefore, he was on high alert when Bridges opened the fire door and they all trooped onto the unpainted concrete landing. There was an unfamiliar mineral odor, as sharp as it was unpleasant, but at least there were no electronic eavesdroppers.

“Jack, Lloyd Berns died in Capri four days ago,” the president said without preamble. Lloyd Berns was Carson’s minority whip in the Senate and, as such, his death was a serious blow to the president’s ability to ram through legislation crucial to the new administration.

Now Jack understood why Carson and his bodyguards had been in conference. “What happened?”

“An accident. Hit and run.”

“What was Berns doing in Capri and why did it take four days to find out he died?”

Carson sighed. “We’re not sure, which is the problem. He was supposed to be on a fact-finding tour in Ukraine, up until ten days ago, that is. Then he disappeared. Best guess from our intelligence boys: He was taking time off from a failing marriage or—and this isn’t unrelated—in Capri with someone else. He had no ID on him and everything grinds slowly in Capri. Three days passed before it occurred to someone in authority that he might be American, so finally a rep from the consulate was contacted and dispatched, and so on and so forth.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “Be that as it may, I’ve got to get back to D.C. to straighten out the political mess.”

Jack nodded. “I’ll get packed right away.”

The president shook his head. “I’m wondering if you could stay with my wife and Alli. You know how important this accord with Yukin is. Once it’s signed, Russia will no longer aid Iran’s nuclear program, and American security will reach a new level. This is particularly imperative now because our armed forces are dangerously overextended, exhausted to the edge of endurance, and opening the current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia on yet another front would be disastrous. If my family leaves with me it could damage the fragile detente I’ve managed to form with President Yukin. I can’t have that; he and I are only days away from finalizing and signing the accord, and my entire first year as president hinges on the signing.”

The president seemed abruptly older, as if he’d aged five years since Jack last saw him, fifty minutes ago.

“And, Jack, on a private and very unpleasant note, Alli has begun to act out again—she’s unnaturally willful, contrary, sometimes it seems to me irrational.” His eyes seemed to be speaking another language entirely. “You’re the only one that can make her see reason.”

Alli had been psychologically traumatized. Her abduction was bad enough, but the man who had kidnapped her had also brainwashed her. Ever since Jack had brought her home, a team of psychologists had been working with her. But, more than that, she’d wanted Jack near her as much as was possible. The two of them had forged a close relationship and now, like her father, Alli trusted Jack over and above anyone else in the world, including her parents, with whom she’d always had a difficult and not altogether pleasant relationship.

Jack did, of course, understand. So even though he wanted to return to Washington to advise his old friend or, failing that, to be sent to Capri to find out the details of Lloyd Berns’s death, he did not argue with Carson’s suggestion.

“All right,” he said.

The president nodded, and the Secret Service contingent left them alone in the putrid stairwell. It was at this point that Jack realized every detail of this clandestine meeting had been meticulously planned.

When the two men were alone, Carson took a step toward Jack and handed him a slip of paper. “This is a copy of Berns’s itinerary in Ukraine. The cities I’ve marked are off the official itinerary, but it’s Kiev that was his last stop. Also, remember this name: K. Rochev. Rochev was the last man he saw or was due to see before he abruptly left Ukraine for Capri.”

Jack looked at him. “In other words, you have no idea what the hell he was doing in Kiev.”

Carson nodded. His concern was evident in his eyes, but he said nothing more.

All at once, Jack understood that the babysitting assignment was for the Secret Service personnel’s benefit. This was the real assignment. He smiled. It was part of Carson’s genius to get what he wanted either by suggestion or by leading the other person to the conclusion he desired.

Jack did not look at the writing, which, because of his dyslexia, he’d have to concentrate on fully in order to read. “I guess I’m going to Ukraine to find out what Berns was doing and why he left.”

“I think that’s the best idea. There’s a private jet with diplomatic privileges waiting for you at Sheremetyevo, but you can wait until tomorrow morning, if you wish.” Carson squeezed Jack’s shoulder. “I appreciate this.”

“Part of my job description.” Jack frowned. “Edward, do you suspect something?”

Carson shook his head. “Call it caution or paranoia, the choice is yours. In any event, as Dennis Paull has detailed in his most recent security briefing, my enemies from the previous administration are still powerful, and all of them have very long memories, especially when it comes to revenge. They fought like wild dogs against my nomination and, when I won it, they tried everything they could think of to undermine my candidacy. That they’ve made conciliatory statements in the press doesn’t fool me for a minute. They’re after my blood, and it seems damn lucky for them that Berns is dead, because they know better than anyone that without him I’m going to have the devil’s own time with the Democratic-led Congress.”

Jack did not say that killing Carson’s right-hand man was an extreme way of crippling him, because he’d had firsthand experience with people within the previous administration. He knew what they were capable of and that their thinking did not exclude murder. They’d arranged for Alli to be kidnapped, had almost succeeded in an attack on Carson at the inauguration, and while the perpetrators were either dead or behind bars, the people who had calculatedly planned the attack remained safe to this day behind veils of plausible deniability that even Carson with all his might and power couldn’t penetrate.

The president’s grip on Jack’s shoulder tightened. “Jack, I won’t bullshit you, this could be a wild-goose chase, but if it’s not, if Berns was killed or if he was involved in something that could turn into a scandal, you’re the only one I can trust, you’re my friend and you’re apolitical. I want you on this until you can tell me whether I’m right or wrong.” His eyes grew dark, indicating that he was deeply troubled. “And one other thing. No one is to know what you’re up to, not even Dick.”

“You don’t trust Bridges?”

“I trust you, Jack,” Carson said. “That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

LAST SNOW... COMING SOON

Acknowledgments

From the very first day I started writing fiction, I’ve been influenced by many sources, but none as telling or important as Colin Wilson’s brilliant book The Outsider.

As an Outsider myself, I never really understood who I was or how I fit in (or didn’t!) until I read The Outsider.

For this, and especially for all the help and inspiration his body of work provided while mapping and unraveling some of the characters in First Daughter, a heartfelt thank-you to Colin Wilson.

About this Book

When an accident takes the life of his daughter, Emma, ATF agent Jack McClure blames himself, numbing the pain by submerging himself in work. Then he receives a call from his old friend Edward Carson.

Carson is just weeks from taking the reins as President of the United States when his daughter, Alli, is kidnapped. Because Emma McClure was Alli's best friend, Carson turns to Jack, the one man he can trust to go to any lengths to find his daughter and bring her home safely.

Reviews

‘Rarely have I read a book that grabs you so fast in the opening scene, then keeps up the pace until the very last page. Goodbye, sleep; hello, First Daughter.’

Jeffery Deaver

‘I’ve long been a fan of Eric Van Lustbader, and he’s at his heart-pounding best with First Daughter. Here are the chills you’ve been looking for.’

Tess Gerritsen

‘Action, suspense, and politics blended to perfection by a master. An automatic buy-today-read-tonight author for me.’

Lee Child

‘The master of the smart thriller.’

Nelson DeMille

About this Series

JACK MCCLURE

Jack McClure is an ATF agent who has lost everything but his job. His daughter was killed in a terrible accident and his marriage disintegrated shortly after. And even in the ATF he is an anomaly: as a guy who grew up on the streets, he always has one foot on each side of the law. But he’s also a very gifted agent, with analytical talents that are unsurpassed in the service.

1. First Daughter

When a terrible accident takes the life of his only daughter and his marriage falls apart, Jack McClure blames himself, numbing the pain by submerging himself in work. Then he receives a call from his old friend Edward Carson – a man who is only weeks from becoming President of the United States.

Carson’s daughter Alli has been kidnapped and Jack is the one man he can trust to go to any lengths to find his daughter and bring her home safely.

For Jack, this is a chance to lay his past to rest… but at what price? His search for Alli puts him in the path of a dangerous and calculating man. Someone whose actions are as cold as they are brilliant. Whose power and reach are seemingly infinite. And who would do anything to the future first daughter to attain his ends…

First Daughter is available here.

2. Last Snow

“This is a copy of Berns’s official itinerary. Kiev was his last stop. Remember this name: K. Rochev. As far as we know, Rochev was the last man he saw before he left Ukraine.”

Four days ago, US Senator Lloyd Berns was killed in a hit-and-run on the island of Capri off the Italian coast. His death deals a serious blow to President Carson’s precarious new administration. But more worrying is that Berns was never officially on Capri. According to the White House, Berns was on a tour of the Ukraine.

Agent Jack McClure is babysitting Carson’s troubled daughter in Moscow. Alli is still traumatised by her abduction last year, and the only person she trusts is Jack, the man who rescued her. But the President needs Jack to investigate the Senator’s final days in the Ukraine, and since Alli won’t be parted from her protector, he’ll have to take her along.

Their starting point is the senator’s last known contact: K. Rochev. But all they find at Rochev’s address is the body of a young woman, brutally executed. And now Jack and Alli have attracted dangerous attention from the Ukrainian police, the FSB, and the Russian mafia...

Last Snow is available here.

3. Blood Trust

Alli Carson used to be the daughter of the President of the United States. She wanted for nothing. But now, after a terrible car crash killed her father and left her mother in a coma, Alli’s only solace is her work. She is determined to become the best FBI agent at the Fearington Institute, and prove herself to the one man who makes life worth living: National Security Adviser, Jack McClure.

But when Alli becomes the prime suspect in a murder at Fearington, it seems even her job is to be snatched from her. Jack knows she is innocent. But to prove it, he must unravel a complex web of lies that stretches from the secret service to a vast global enterprise that lurks in the shadows of power…

Blood Trust is available here.

About the Author

Eric Van Lustbader is the author of seven of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series. He has written more than twenty-five novels, which have been translated into over twenty languages. He lives in New York and Long Island.

Visit Eric Van Lustbader’s website.

About Head of Zeus

We hope you enjoyed this book.

We are Head of Zeus, a brand new publishing house dedicated to new authors, great storytelling, and fabulous ideas.

To find your next read – and some tempting special offers – why not visit our website?

First published in the UK in 2012 by Head of Zeus Ltd.

Copyright © Eric van Lustbader, 2008

The moral right of Eric van Lustbader to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB) 9781781850060

ISBN (XTPB) 9781781850077

ISBN (E) 9781781850541

Printed in Germany

Head of Zeus Ltd

Clerkenwell House

45-47 Clerkenwell Green

London EC1R 0HT

www.headofzeus.com

Contents

Cover

Welcome Page

Dedication

January 20: Inauguration Day

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part 2

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part 3

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Part 4

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

February 1

Preview

Acknowledgments

About this Book

Reviews

About this Series

About the Author

About Head of Zeus

Copyright

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