First Daughter

TEN

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 shop-windows, 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 to night, 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."

ELEVEN

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 cafe 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?"

TWELVE

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 alleyway?"

"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.

THIRTEEN

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, nee 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.

FOURTEEN

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 flag-stone 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.

FIFTEEN

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, I will have your career."

SIXTEEN

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."

SEVENTEEN

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 7 A.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.

EIGHTEEN

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.

NINETEEN

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."

TWENTY

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.

TWENTY — ONE

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. Growing 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 Black-Berry 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.

TWENTY — TWO

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."

TWENTY — THREE

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.