Germ

twenty-four

"Evidence!"

Julia said it out loud to the empty motel room.

If someone wanted to warn the CDC about an impeding bio-attack, wouldn't he bring some kind of evidence to prove he wasn't a nut?

She thought back to her last conversation with Goody. He'd reminded her that their communication was not secure. He'd said he was injured. She'd warned him of the compromised SATD signal. He'd said he'd turned off the tracking device. Wait. First he had said he was in a phone booth. But why would he have said that? She'd thought he was reiterating the unsecured status of the line, but it wasn't like Goody to state the obvious. And it had come at an odd time, after she informed him of the SATD problem. He'd told her to hold on, had left her hanging for half a minute, then came back with that cryptic message about the phone booth.

That was it! It was cryptic.

I'm in a phone booth.

No. I'm in the phone booth. Okay. That phone booth.

Then he had said it again. Emphasizing the sentence's importance? Yes, but something else . . . something . . .

He had not repeated the first sentence verbatim. No I'm the second time . . .

I'm in the phone booth. In the phone booth.

He'd meant "It—the evidence—is in the phone booth, the one you will know about if I don't make it back to retrieve the evidence myself."

That had to be what Goody wanted to say. She knew how his mind worked. Everything fit. Some kind of evidence was in that phone booth, and she was going to get it—as Goody had intended her to— right now. She dashed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

Atropos fumed. He stood in a thick copse outside Parker's

house and watched two cops pound on the door. The cruiser had been pulling into the drive as he came around the house after coming back up the hill, where he'd lost his quarry. He had ducked into the trees just as the headlamps swung past his position. After a long moment, they tried the knob. One cop, a woman, stepped off the tiled stoop and shined a beam around the grounds. It panned over Atropos's hiding place. He didn't budge. The other officer joined her. They surveyed the home's huge facade, whispering. Another flashlight snapped on. The two moved away from Atropos's position and rounded the far corner, sweeping their lights across windows, bushes, the yard.

Parker had reacted much more quickly than he'd expected. The man's survival instinct was calibrated high. Atropos liked that, the challenge of it.

He looked down at the pistol in his left hand and unscrewed the silencer from the gun's barrel. The sound-suppressing coils inside had absorbed too many shots already to remain effective. He dropped it on the ground, pulled another one from his jacket pocket, and attached it. Then he tucked the massive gun into a custom nylon holster under his left arm, where he hoped it would stay. Perhaps now that Parker had escaped, he still had a chance to use the gauntlet on him.

He flexed his gauntleted fist. Chick-chu, chick-chu.

He looked at his watch, then back up at the house. Parker was long gone, at least for now. But a guy like that, living in a place like this by himself—he loved his stuff. He'd be back, probably later tonight. Atropos would be waiting.

For now, he had another target to pursue. No current location, but he had some ideas, some places to check.

Moving out into the yard, he turned to make sure the police officers hadn't reconsidered their plan to circumnavigate Parker's residence. A faint glow of flashlights played against the trees on the far side of the house, growing fainter, moving away. He walked along the hedge, following the drive back to the street, where he'd stowed his rental between other cars a few blocks away.

twenty-five

"Hello?"

"This is the BellSouth automated operator. Will you accept a collect call from—"

"It's Allen! Pick up!"

"Press 1 to accept. Press 2 to deny."

"Hello?"

"Press 1 to accept. Press 2—connecting now."

"Stephen! It's Allen . . . Hello? Stephen?"

"I'm here. Just a little surprised."

"It's that kind of night. I need you to—"

"Where are you? Why'd you call collect?"

"I'm in town, but I don't have any money."

"That's a first."

"Listen—"

"Allen. Is this about Mom and Dad? Dad? Is he okay, man?"

"Dad's fine. Mom's fine. Everybody in the whole world is fine except me. Just shut up a second and listen, will you?"

"That's the Allen I know. Go ahead."

"I need you to come get me. Right away."

"You need me? Never thought I'd hear that. Are you hurt? You sound—"

"Whoa! You're moving your mouth again . . . Sorry. Look, physically, I've suffered a few lacerations, bruises, but I'm not seriously injured . . . yet."

"Yet?"

"I'll explain later. You need to come get me right now. This very minute. Pick me up at the Texaco at the corner of McCallie and Dodds. You have a running car, don't you?"

"Yes, Allen. I have managed to purchase a car and actually keep it running."

"What kind?"

"What?"

"What kind of car!"

"A Vega. Seventy-four. Hope it's good enough for you."

"What color?"

"Maroon . . . and orange and gray. The passenger-side door is blue. The hood's kinda reddish, pinkish—"

"Corner of McCallie and Dodds."

"Gotcha."

"And, Stephen?"

"Yeah?"

"Bring some extra clothes. You know, shirt, slacks, shoes. Some underpants."

"This I gotta see."

Stephen Parker cradled the phone slowly. Spontaneity was out of character for his brother. So what was this? Had he been robbed? Carjacked, more likely these days. But why not call the cops? Or one of his friends? Stephen hadn't been one of them for years.

He probably had been with someone he shouldn't have—the wife of a colleague maybe—and had to keep her involvement quiet. Or the husband had done the damage, and now all Allen wanted was for the situation to go away.

He sat on the edge of his rumpled bed and pulled on an equally rumpled flannel shirt.

He stood and walked into the two-room cabin's main living area, dropped his hulking weight into a nappy old chair, and grabbed his well-worn cowboy boots. Physically, Stephen was more bear than man: His bones were big and broad, arranged to a height of six foot five—all of it wrapped in thick bands of muscle. His body was nearly covered with a dark pelt of thick, curly hair; it exploded from his face and hung like an animal that had latched on and died. His face, as much as it showed, was bearish, too, with thick features and kind, heavily lidded eyes.

He moved into the area of his home that served as a kitchen, duly designated by the floor's pocked and stained linoleum; no covering at all protected the rest of the cabin's plywood floors from the feet that trod on it, or in turn protected the feet from it. From the cupboard under the sink he withdrew a paper grocery sack. In the bedroom again, he packed the bag with clothes and rolled the top closed.

He snatched a ring of keys from a nail by the front entrance and vent out, pulling the door shut but not locking it. He bounded over the crumbling wood step that he kept meaning to repair.

Heading to his car parked between the narrow space between the small church he led and his cabin, his thoughts returned to his brother. They hadn't even spoken in eight, nine months. They had nothing in common except their parents.

Allen thought Stephen had betrayed the family name by rejecting a career in medicine. Following the path forged by their father and grandfather was not only a privilege; it was expected.

Oh well, Stephen thought for the thousandth time. He'd tried being philosophical with his family, then pragmatic and pleading; in one end, it always came down to disappointed resignation: Oh well.

He reached the car door and stopped, throwing his big, hairy head rack to look toward the sky. "Lord," he said out loud, "whatever's happening with Allen, let me do right by him. And more important, let me do right by You. I thank You, Lord, for giving me this chance."

He folded his body into the small seat of the Vega. He used it mostly to pick up supplies in town and visit parishioners; otherwise, he didn't stray too far from the church. The starter chattered and whined before finally turning over and spurring the engine into action. A cloud of black smoke erupted from the tailpipe and engulfed the vehicle. Stephen punched the accelerator to escape the fumes, spewing sand and pebbles back at the smoky beast as it disappeared into the woods along the thin dirt drive.

twenty-six

The bar's windows were dark, its door shut, blocked by yellow crime scene tape. A police cruiser was parked directly in front of the entrance. Of course the place was guarded; the daylight massacre of a federal agent and his charge made it a red-ball case.

As Julia drove past, she saw a single patrolman behind the wheel. The dome light was on and he was reading a paperback. Smart, she thought. Destroy your night vision and make it easy for perps to see you before you see them.

She drove a few more blocks, turned left, and parked on a dark residential street behind an abused pickup. She popped the trunk lid and got out. From a metal bin in the trunk, she selected an assortment of rusty tools and a tire iron.

Traffic on Brainerd Road was light; she darted across unnoticed. She made her way to the trash-strewn alley that ran behind the businesses and turned toward the bar. The grungy backs of buildings towered above her on the right; an alternating cycle of tall pine and chain-link fencing lined her left. Tree limbs leaned over the boards, and leafy shrubs pushed through the fence. Purple Dumpsters hulked like sleeping bison at regular intervals. Where it wasn't pitch dark, it was deep gray. She trotted toward the bar.

On the way over, she'd used a pay phone to call the Chattanooga homicide desk. She'd given them the name of another female federal agent. A Detective Fisher was lead on the case. The on-call detective had offered to patch her through to him, but she'd said her involvement was too preliminary to bug him. She'd needed only a few facts: primarily, location and a basic chronology of the crime: Yeah, I know our people are all over it, but I'm just typing up a summary for my boss, and you know how it is, trying to get a straight answer from a team of twenty hotshots.

Two aspects of the crime were immediately intriguing. First, after Goody shot one of the assailants, the other was killed by a third assailant. The prevailing wisdom was that he had been a third member of the hit team who'd decided not to split the fee, though he could have been a separate hit man altogether, not associated with the first team, or some guy who'd stumbled onto the hit and acted to protect himself.

Then why'd he take out Despesorio Vero, as witnesses said he did?

That was the nature of crime investigations: anything goes, no matter how implausible, until other theories build more supportive tissue.

The other interesting element was a set of handcuffs found near Vero's body. According to the bartender, one of the first assailants had tossed them to Vero. You've got your target covered by a shotgun, and you tell him to cuff himself. You're not trying to kill him; you're trying to take him alive. Why?

She'd considered asking for access but quickly rejected the idea. If anyone in law enforcement saw her retrieve evidence, they could confiscate it. Plus, if the people behind Donnelley's murder had moles in law enforcement, could she trust any cop? No, she wanted to examine any evidence she found herself before turning it over to the investigative team—and only after she trusted the integrity of those involved.

She had reached the parking lot that flanked the side of the bar. The moon illuminated a single car, closer to her than the bar. It appeared empty. She ran all out, staying as close to the fence as the litter and bushes allowed.

The bar's back door and jamb were metal. A heavy-metal plate, welded to the door, covered the latch and dead bolt. Even the hinges were not exposed. The nearest window was barred. She tried the tire iron on the door. It didn't budge.

She shook her head. No way she was getting through it. She pulled out her CDC-LED badge and identification and marched out of the alley and along the side of the bar toward the cruiser. She stepped off the curb and went around the back of the car. She rapped on the driver's glass and leaned down.

The cruiser was empty. The dash-mounted lamp burned brightly; a Dean Koontz novel lay tented on the bench seat. But no cop. She stood and looked over the roof at the bar. She noticed its open front door. Just then, the windows flashed with light, and the peal of three rapid gunshots ripped into the night.

She ducked and withdrew her pistol. In the field, she kept a round chambered, saving the extra second it would take to pull the slide in an emergency. Still, she double-checked by pulling back on the slide a half inch. The brass casing of a .45-caliber bullet sparkled as it caught the streetlamp's glow. She lowered the gun to her side and pulled back on the hammer with her thumb.

She'd detected no impacts to the cruiser, so unless the shooter was an atrociously bad aim, the shots were not meant for her. She rushed to the door and slammed her back against the brick between the door and the huge front window. She threw her head around to look in the door and pulled it back in one quick motion. At the rear of the customer area the office door was half open. Weak light spilled out into the bar. Silhouettes of halogen lamps on tripods, left by the crime-scene techs. Had she noticed movement? She couldn't be sure. She looked again. Saw nothing.

Arms locked straight before her, pistol at chin-level, she swung around and stepped through the door. She panned her pistol to the right, toward the phone booth. Nothing. Back toward the rear of the bar. She smelled perspiration, her own, and the faint odor of blood and the much sharper tang of cordite. Now she saw the smoke, drifting lazily in the scant light from the office. She took another step. So dark.

She stopped at the edge of the bar counter, leaned over. The darkness was complete: she could be looking right at someone hiding down there and not know it. She didn't have a flashlight. She didn't want to turn on the bar lights—even if she did know where the switch was located.

Julia felt exposed. She put her gun and the palm of her other hand on the bar top, hoisted herself up, and dropped behind the counter. She felt shelves of glasses, cleaning supplies, bags of something, pretzels or nuts probably, then the thing she expected: a small refrigerator. She cracked the door open. White light burst from it, revealing an area behind the bar free of bad guys. She crouch-walked to the end of the bar and went around it.

She heard the metallic chink of door locks, then hinges creaking, fast and high-pitched. Someone had swung open the back door, the one she had tried to jimmy. She stood and ran toward the office, then stopped and crouched again. A body lay sprawled on the floor. The cop from the cruiser. He was spread-eagle, facing up, eyes open. The chest of his blue uniform glistened in a way it shouldn't have. He still clenched his gun in one hand; a flashlight had rolled several inches from the other. The dim office light caught the edges of the flashlight's shattered lens and bulb.

She squinted at the office door's porthole window over the top of her pistol. She scanned past the booths, then back to the office door. Bathroom doors ahead, on the left. She pivoted around to assess the area behind her, then back again. Only then did she move up to the body. Keeping her vision on the hovering white dot of her gun's front sight and the office door beyond, she reached down to feel his carotid artery. No pulse.

She stepped over him and moved quietly to the office door. A small, green-shaded lamp sat on a cluttered desk, casting the room's only light. The back door stood open.

Outside, a car door slammed. She ran through the combination office-storage room, weaving around stacked boxes and unused equipment. When she entered the alley, she spun left into the parking lot. A sedan was squealing out onto Brainerd, tires smoking, engine revved to critical mass. Julia raised her gun and fired three rapid shots. The back window shattered and rained out onto the trunk and blacktop like the jeweled train of a wedding gown. She started to squeeze off another round when the car disappeared beyond a building.

She dashed back through the back door, into the customer area, over the corpse, and directly to the phone booth. She holstered her weapon, stepped in, and shut the doors. The light flickered on. Not knowing what she was looking for, if it was breakable, she moved carefully. She stepped on the tiny seat and pushed her palms against the plastic light cover, raising it up. She contorted her hand up into the space between the panel and the area above it, slowly feeling around its circumference. The panel gave up its hold and fell past her to the floor. Ceiling and lighting fixture exposed, she found nothing. Next she checked the phone itself: the coin-return slot, the outside edges where it mounted to the booth. She used a pocketknife to pry the instruction card out of its metal frame. Nothing stashed behind, no messages written on it.

She was thinking about looking on the booth's roof when she slipped her hand beneath the seat and felt wads of rock-hard gum and firm, angular ridges that could be anything. Her heart stepped up its pace. She fell to her knees, pushed her head against the wooden side panel, and looked under. Too dark. She felt along the edges, the brackets holding the seat. Then something moved. She dug at it, and it slid out from a bracket. A small square of plastic.

A memory chip!

The tracking device was on it. Goody, you sly fox, she thought. He had turned the transmitter off but kept it with the chip so that anyone looking for it—Julia, anyway—would know immediately that he had placed it there.

With a tight grip on the chip, she opened the bifold doors, extinguishing the light. She made her way back to the rear door and stepped into the alley. She was halfway across the parking lot when she heard the first police sirens. The cop who'd been killed probably noticed a light or something inside, called for backup, then rushed to keep his appointment with death. She hurried into the alley on the other side, letting the shadows envelop her. When she reached the end of the block, she heard a chorus of sirens reach a crescendo, then drop off as tires screeched to a halt. She looked back to see red and blue lights splashing against the fence at the back of the parking lot— and something else.

A shadow. It had moved quickly into the gloom against the fence a half block back. Concealing her fear, she stepped casually around the corner of the last building on the block. She slipped the chip into the wide back pocket of her pants. She removed her pistol and moved to look back down the alley.

Shadows, just shadows.

She stood, continuing to stare into the blackness. Nothing moved. The lights at the far end wavered like a psychedelic dream. Slowly she backed away from the building's edge, turned quickly, and ran across the side street to the next dark alley.

It was when she was almost at the end of that block that she heard a shoe scraping the asphalt directly behind her.

twenty-seven

The Chevy Vega hitched and sputtered as it came off I-153 and onto Shallowford Road. The houses here roosted close to the street, not large, but well built and warm.

The car slowed as Stephen Parker tried to force the gearshift into second. The gears grinded in protest, then quieted as the lever slid into place. He popped the clutch, sending a plume of oily smoke out behind him, and the car lurched forward. He let up on the accelerator when he sensed he was traveling the posted speed; the speedometer needle had not budged from its peg at zero since Stephen could remember.

He had crossed Missionary Ridge and was watching for Dodds Avenue, which would be coming up in another two blocks or—

A ghostly figure bolted up in the headlights.

Stephen slammed on the brakes, bracing himself against the wheel. The car shimmied to a stop. With startled eyes, Stephen glared out at the apparition in the street.

It was Allen. Seeming as startled as Stephen, he tottered faintly in the whitewashed glare, clenching a filthy beige blanket around him. He came around the passenger side, yanked the door open, and climbed in.

"You can close your mouth now," he said.

"What is this?" Stephen yelled, his voice trembling at the lower end of the chromatic scale. "I almost turned you into road pizza, man! I thought you said the Texaco!"

Allen was unmoved. "I couldn't risk staying there. Probably the first place they'd look. Let's get this thing moving."

"They?"

"Just go."

"Where?"

"Back to your place." Allen looked at him. "That okay?"

"Fine by me." Stephen shoved the stick shift into first, made a U-turn, and gunned it toward the highway. "Who's they? What did you do, Allen? How serious is this, man?"

Cranked around in the seat, Allen watched the pavement pay out behind them. He turned, scanning out the side windows, then glanced again through the back-hatch glass.

"I have no idea who they are, except that one of them floats around like a shadow and has one big, honking gun. As far as I know, I didn't do anything. And it's as serious as life and death gets. Okay?"

"But you . . . I just. . . Man!"

They drove a few miles in silence, and Allen started to relax. He lifted his face upward, resting the top of his head on the seat back, and just breathed. After a few minutes, he lowered his head, looked around as if for the first time, and said, "Nice car."

"Cute blanket."

"Yeah. It was a seat cover in some old Buick. Did you bring the clothes?"

'"Course," Stephen affirmed, nodding toward the back.

Allen pulled the paper bag into his lap and fished out the underwear. He pulled them on; they floated around his middle like bloomers.

Stephen glanced at Allen. What he saw made him look twice. "You look like you just escaped the Chinese Torture of a Thousand Cuts."

"Feels like it."

"Care to share?"

"No."

"Come on, Allen. Here you are naked as a baby seal, cut to shreds, on the run from . . . who knows? Tell me something."

"I need to think it through first, all right? Everything happened so fast, I really don't know what's going on. I'll try to—to be up-front with you. Really."

"Uh-huh."

A few more miles in silence. When Stephen had coaxed the Vega up to speed on I-153, Allen said softly, "Thanks for coming to get me." He never took his eyes off the patch of road illuminated by the headlamps.

twenty-eight

There it was again.

A shoe scuffing the ground. Just a few feet behind her.

Julia lunged forward, tucking her upper body down and throwing her feet over in a somersault that lowered her profile, propelled her away from the attacker, and enabled her to draw her gun in one quick motion. She'd practiced it many times, but this was its first practical application. As her right foot touched ground again, she spun on it, raising her pistol, ready to fire from a squatting position.

No one there.

Just shadows—again.

A Dumpster, fifteen feet away. Trash and weeds cluttered the ground around it. Everything was bathed in the absence of light. Nothing moved except the occasional leaf or corner of some crumpled paper in an unfelt breeze.

But she'd heard it, the scrape. She'd even felt the presence of someone. No one could have hidden so quickly, vanished so completely. She was acting spooked. Acting? She was spooked. Her nerves were frazzled. Of course they were, but enough to make her see predators in the shadows, hear phantom footsteps? She didn't think so.

She rose and, holding the pistol close to her leg, traversed the rest of the block. Again she rounded the last building's corner, as casually as her excited muscles would allow, then plastered herself against the brick. She waited, listening, gun at the ready. One minute. Not a sound. Two. Nothing. She peered around the corner. In the distance, two blocks away but seeming farther, the police lights performed their silent ballet. Otherwise nothing moved, nothing appeared out of place, though darkness shrouded most of the back street.

Julia holstered her gun, turned, and walked away from the alley toward Brainerd and her car on the other side. An ambulance flew by in the direction of the bar, lights and siren blaring. She crossed Brainerd. At least a dozen cruisers were in front of the bar and around it into the parking lot. If a federal agent's murder couldn't light a fire under their investigative behinds, the death of one of their own would make them positively combust.

She stepped up to her car and unlocked the door, moving quickly. Before anything could rush out of the shadows at her, she was in the car and gunning the engine. She cranked the wheel sharply to get around a pickup parked in front of her, then punched the gas. She turned left, intending to travel on Brainerd, away from the activity at the bar, and wind through the city to her motel.

She had driven six blocks and had signaled to turn when a hand reached around from the backseat and gripped her throat. She jerked with surprise, and the car careened sharply as it turned the corner. She hit the curb. Two wheels rode on the sidewalk. She corrected the vehicle.

Still the hand held firm—tight but not choking. Julia thought one of the tires was losing air, but that's not what was making the sound.

It was her assailant, his lips near her ear: "Shhhhhhhhh . . . Shhhhhhhhh . . ."

She grabbed his forearm. It wasn't flesh; it was hard as steel but . . . not steel, warmer, textured in a way steel wasn't. A hard plastic maybe, and huge. It was some kind of . . . gauntlet. He applied more pressure, and she let go.

"What—?"

"Shhhhhhh . . ."

At McBrian, she ignored the stoplight and made a wide arc to the left, into the westbound lane.

Finally he spoke in whispered tones. His voice was gentle, pleasant.

"Keep both hands on the wheel," he said.

She nodded.

"Pull over."

"No."

He squeezed harder.

"Make a right up here and stop." The consonants were sharper, the gentleness gone.

"I said no," she repeated, driving past the road he wanted.

The grip contracted. She now found breathing difficult. Her pulse began to throb in her temple. Fragments of her assailant's features floated in the rearview mirror: eyes that flashed green whenever they passed under a streetlamp, messy jet hair, glasses.

"I won't hurt you," he whispered. "I've been sent to deliver a message."

"I don't believe you." Her voice was raspy.

"If I wanted to kill you, I would have."

Julia thought about that. It wasn't true: she had not given him the chance. She'd hopped into the car and taken off too fast. Since then, the car had been in motion. Killing her while she drove risked an accident—attention and injury to himself. But why hadn't he waited to reveal himself until she stopped again? Killing her at a stop sign or light would most likely prevent an injury accident, but not necessarily an accident altogether. In death her foot might jam down on the gas pedal in what coroners called a cadaveric spasm. He couldn't wait until she reached her destination and turned off the car. What if she was meeting the police? The last reason she could think of for his not waiting to kill her until she stopped on her own was that the farther she drove, the more distance she put between him and his own transportation. Then he'd have to either drive her car back, with or without her body, or find another way back. Did killers consider such things? She guessed they did.

"So?" he said. "Pull over."

Instead, she punched the accelerator. The car roared ahead, past other vehicles, through stoplights.

The hand clenched tighter.

twenty-nine

Allen had slipped into Stephen's oversized clothes by the time they pulled into the space between the church and his cabin.

"This is it?" Allen asked incredulously.

"Home sweet home," Stephen confirmed and climbed out.

The cabin was behind the rear wall of the church. The parking lot lay on the north side of the church, in front of the cabin, giving the appearance that a visitor could go either to the church or to Stephen's cabin, as though the cabin were historically significant. Dense pine forest surrounded the property. The dirt road leading to it ended at the clearing, where the gravel parking lot started. The lot had been rutted dirt until last year, when the tiny church finally had enough funds in the coffers to grade the area and pour the gravel.

Stephen led the way. At the porch steps, he avoided the middle one, pointing at it for Allen's benefit. When they were both inside, he said, "Want anything?"

"A shower."

"Bathroom's over there. Want something to drink, eat?"

"Water's fine." He hitched his head toward the bathroom. "Mind?"

"Mi casa, su casa." Stephen was weary, but his broad smile conveyed the sense of hospitality he genuinely felt.

"Muchas gracias." Allen sauntered into the bathroom, looking like a child in his father's clothes. "Towel?"

"Cupboard on the right."

Allen closed the door slowly, looking beat in every sense of the word.

Stephen went into the kitchen area. He filled two plastic cups with ice and water and placed them on the coffee table in front of the couch. "Water's here when you want it!" he yelled at the bathroom door before plopping onto the couch. He looked at the wall clock. After one. He always rose by five—an internal clock sort of thing—so he wasn't going to be worth much tomorrow.

He stared at the bathroom door. Allen was in deep trouble this time, no doubt about it. He wondered if he could or even should help him out with whatever it was. Sometimes the best thing you could do was let people sort out their own problems. He supposed it depended on how nasty the trouble could get.

A square of light from an approaching car splashed through the front window and panned across the wall of books. It was a pattern he knew well: as the car made the last turn in the drive before entering the parking lot, the light would sweep across the books, usually stopping between Matthew Henry's New Testament Commentary and Clear and Present Danger. Then it would shoot up to the ceiling as the car entered the parking lot, sliding to about center-room before creeping toward the door as the car approached the porch.

This time, however, the light vanished after hitting Dracula. Stephen sat upright on the couch. The car had stopped before entering the parking lot. That, mixed with the hour and the night's odd events, set off all kinds of alarms in his head. He rose and walked carefully to the window. The car was moving slowly in shadows, headlamps off, closing the thirty-foot gap to the clearing. When its bumper settled over the edge of the parking lot's gravel, it stopped.

And there it sat, in the gray haze of the night. The occupants would know someone was home. They'd see the Vega parked between the buildings, lights in the cabin. Was this the bogeyman Allen was running from?

"Allen?" he said softly. No answer. He repeated it, louder. He could hear the shower running through the bathroom door. It stopped. "Allen?"

"What?"

"Come here!"

The headlamps flicked on. The car started rolling again. Into the clearing. Moonlight peeled back the shadows like a CEO whipping off the covering of the company's newest model.

A Corvette—new enough to have headlamps that didn't retract into the front end.

It rolled slowly into the parking lot, then angled toward the cabin. The brake lights came on, making the trees behind it glow red. It stopped. He could see the ovals of faces inside, swiveling as the occupants surveyed the area. Then the car continued its slow progress toward the cabin.

Stephen pulled his face away from the window and leaned his head against the wall. Could be cops, bad guys, or simply people who'd gotten lost on their way back from the Drestin Dinner Theater. More than a few folks had stopped by for directions over the years.

The Vette stopped out front. He heard car doors open and slam. He moved to the door. Should he open it or ignore the knocks that would start in about five seconds? If the strangers needed help, he'd want to help them. If they meant harm, wouldn't they find a way in anyway?

He opened the door, flipping on the bright porch light as he did. Two men looked up at him, startled. Stephen grinned at them. One of the men stood at an angle in front of the car. He had short red hair and a zillion freckles. Something in the man's eyes caused Stephen to pause. He looked at the other man, older than Freckles, maybe forty. He sported a bushy mustache and black, black eyes.

Stephen heard the bathroom door open behind him.

"Did you say—?" Allen started.

Stephen looked over his shoulder at his brother. In the bathroom door, a towel around his waist, Allen was hunching over to gaze past Stephen. His mouth dropped, and his eyes grew wide.

"Stephen! No!" he yelled. "Shut the door! Don't—"

Stephen turned back to the men. Freckles was swinging a shotgun from around his side. He raised it, leveling it at Allen. One eye closed as he took aim.

The gun roared.

thirty

The car barreled down Brainerd Road, swerving

slightly through pools of halogen streetlights and traffic signals— green, yellow, red.

Julia gasped for breath, one weak hand touching the gauntlet. The attacker's fist closed, pinching her trachea like a straw. Fat dots of purple and red began to crowd her vision. In a mad effort to get free, she yanked the wheel sharply right, smashing into the door of a parked car. Sparks and headlamp glass pelted the windshield; metal screamed because Julia could not. The assailant in the backseat merely swayed . . . and loosened his grip. She gulped in huge breaths, her lungs on fire, her throat raw.

They were traveling now at more than sixty miles per hour along one of Chattanooga's busiest streets, a feat impossible to duplicate in daytime traffic. Now, at a quarter after one, Julia took advantage of the absence of commuters.

"Slow down," the assailant hissed, punctuating his words with light squeezes. Each one sent a bolt of pain up her neck and into the back of her right eye. Panic stirred within her, ready to free her mind of all restraints. He squeezed again, this time holding the pressure.

"I mean it," he said. "If you draw attention to us, I'll break your neck without a second thought."

She eased up on the accelerator; he eased up on her neck. The speed dropped to fifty, then forty-five.

"Good girl."

The car sailed through a red light, eliciting a loud honk from a car Julia didn't see.

"I understand," her captor whispered. "We've got something like a Mexican standoff here, don't we?"

The speedometer needle hovered around forty.

"You must be trying to guess my next move," he said. "Let me help you: right now, I'm considering my choices. I can kill you now and take my chances in a crash. Of course, I'd try to grab the wheel and steer to safety. That might work. Or I can wait until you have to stop—for traffic, an empty fuel tank, whatever. It has to happen sooner or later."

He let her ponder those options.

"Or you can pull over, I'll give you the message I was asked to convey, and be on my way."

Julia continued driving. A bead of perspiration broke off her brow and slid into her eye, stinging it. She tried to blink it out. Coppery blood on her tongue: she had reopened the cut in her lip. She didn't believe for a moment that he had a "message" to deliver—at least not one that involved leaving her alive. He wanted to instill doubt, to give her a flicker of hope. Hope would keep her from acting drastically and could possibly get her to pull off onto a darkened side street, where murder was much more comfortable.

"You know?" he said, his voice growing deep with menace. It sounded to Julia that he said the next sentence through clenched teeth. "I like the one where I kill you and take my chances."

Abruptly, he dropped his head lower. A police cruiser was approaching from the opposite direction a half block away.

"Don't—don't flash your brights," he said, every word as firm as the grip he had on her neck. "Don't make a face or twitch a finger. If you signal them in any way, I'll keep you alive long enough to choke on their blood."

She'd never believed anybody more.

The cruiser drew closer. Streetlamps illuminated the faces inside. Two patrolmen. Probably frustrated by orders to carry on as usual, while a cop-killing investigation was unfolding farther away. The officer in the passenger seat said something sharp. The driver agreed with a frown. They could be talking about their wives, for all Julia knew.

They were no more than twenty feet apart when Julia cranked the wheel into the police cruiser's lane.

The freckle-faced assailant had tried to take a step toward

him while firing the shotgun. As he was closing his eye to aim, his foot came down on the rotted step that Stephen had meant to repair. It splintered under his weight, sucking his foot into its maw. The gun boomed, taking out a head-sized chunk of the cabin's siding directly above the door, showering Stephen with splinters and dust.

Stephen stormed out the door, raising his elbow in the jaw-splitting fashion he hadn't postured since his days as a college linebacker. As Freckles was arching forward and down from his crash through the step, Stephen's elbow caught him squarely in the forehead. The impact sent him reeling back in the other direction. Stephen grabbed the shotgun by its barrel; it slipped easily from Freckle's unconscious hands.

He spun the gun around, raising it toward the other assailant, who was bringing a pistol around from behind his back.

"Freeze!" Stephen screamed.

The man didn't even pause. His pistol just kept coming, two seconds from fatal effectiveness. Stephen grasped the man's intention to go down fighting.

"Ahhhhh . . ." Stephen bellowed, the sound rising like a furnace under extreme pressure. He hurled the shotgun at the man, who raised an arm to parry the blow. By the time he swatted it away, Stephen was within striking distance. He planted a massive fist into the man's head, striking the temple. The man crumpled under the impact.

Stephen stood over him, startled by his own abilities. He bent and picked up the pistol and shotgun. Freckles had landed flat on his back on the car's hood, one leg stretching into the hole in the steps. His sport coat had flopped open, revealing an underarm holster. Stephen took that pistol as well. He saw the outline of a billfold in the coat's inner pocket and tugged it out. It flopped open, revealing a badge. Hamilton County Sheriff's Department. He slipped it into his back pocket. He took a few paces toward the woods and threw each weapon into the darkness. He checked the other man for ID and didn't find any. Then he strode into the cabin, calling for Allen. He found the bathroom door shut and locked. He shouldered it open. Allen's bare feet were slipping out a small window over the old-fashioned tub.

"Allen!" Stephen leaned over the tub to look out. Allen was scampering away on all fours, gripping clothes in one hand, a pair of shoes in the other. "Allen!"

He stopped and cranked his head around.

"Come around front, man," Stephen said.

He walked through the house and stood on the porch. Neither assailant showed signs of revival. He stepped off the porch and leaned into the Vette's open window. He came out with keys and a device that was larger than a cell phone and had a foot-long cylinder jutting from it. Stephen recognized it from Blue Planet, one of his favorite shows: it was a satellite phone, good almost anywhere in the world, not reliant on local networks or relay towers. The phone was tethered to a box that looked like a modem with a keypad. He had no idea what it was—he must have missed that episode. He turned around to see Allen coming out of the breezeway where he'd parked the Vega.

"Oh, wow," Allen said. "Oh, wow. You did this? Wow!"

It was the first smile he'd seen crease his brother's face that night. He pointed at Freckles. "That one's a cop."

"What?"

"Had a deputy sheriff's badge."

Silence.

"I don't think he was here as a cop, though," Stephen said. "He tried to shoot me without saying a word, and this is no cop car."

Allen swore.

"Get in the car. I'll be right there." Stephen took a step toward the woods and hurled the keys deep into them.

"What was that?"

"The car keys."

"What? Why?" Allen asked. "We should take their car. It's a lot nicer than yours. Look at it."

Stephen thought about it. "Too late now."

"What are those?" Allen asked, pointing.

"A satellite phone and some other gadget."

"Well, don't throw those away. Maybe we can use them."

"How?"

"I don't know, but we need to find some advantages here, right? You never know. What would it hurt?"

"Whoever these guys were communicating with can probably track the signal," Stephen said.

"Then turn it off. We'll turn it on to use it now and then when we're moving, so they can't pinpoint us."

Stephen was doubtful.

"Come on, man. We need something.'"

"All right, here." He handed the equipment to Allen. "Now get in the car."

He jumped over the porch steps and clomped into the cabin. A minute later, he came out carrying a paper sack. He switched off the cabin's overhead light and shut the door.

When he climbed into the Vega's driver's seat, Allen asked, "Where are their guns?"

"I chucked them."

Allen threw up his hands in exasperation.

"What would you do with guns?" Stephen asked and cranked the ignition. After some coughing and sputtering, the engine backfired once and settled into a fitful rhythm. He moved the stick shift into first gear and eased the Vega out from between the two buildings.

Allen threw his hand in front of Stephen's face, pointing. "Look!" he said.

The mustachioed cop was leaning into the car, pulling at something behind the seats.

"What's he doing?" Allen asked.

"Can't be good." He popped the clutch and pointed the lurching Vega at the road.

The man ducked out from within the car and stood, a weapon in his hands. It looked like the kind of thing Arnold Schwarzenegger favored, like it could blast holes in mountains. The man scowled at Stephen and Allen.

"Go! Go! Go!" Allen screamed.

The car fishtailed, moved closer to the drive.

"He's cocking it or whatever—!"

They came off the gravel, onto the dirt road, sliding between the first trees.

Metallic thunder filled the air. Trees exploded around them. Gas pedal jammed, Stephen glanced at Allen and saw only impossibly huge eyes.

Clouds covered the moon, drawing darkness over the road. For a moment Stephen had the wild idea that it was symbolic, God's way of portending their deaths. The car jolted sideways as a barrage caught the rear panel behind Stephen's seat. A jagged hole opened up on both sides of the car. Then Stephen swerved around the first bend, knowing they were invisible to the assailant now. All the same, he drove like the devil was on their heels.

After several miles, they crossed an ancient wood bridge over Chickamauga Creek.

"Where's the road?" Allen asked, as though he thought the assailants had taken it. "The paved road?"

"I'm not going to take any paved roads if I can help it. We're going deeper into the woods until we can figure out what to do next."

Allen began putting on Stephen's extra clothes for the second time that night.

Stephen looked over, shook his head.

"I wasn't about to tear through the woods naked again," Allen said.

"No, looked like you were crawling to me."

Allen said nothing.

"Look, Allen—"

The car went across a particularly deep rut. Their heads banged the roof.

"Look, whatever our differences are, we're in this together now. Whatever this is. You gotta let me know what's going on."

Allen nodded. "Get us someplace safe, and I'll tell you what I know, which isn't much."

thirty-one

Julia saw an instant of sheer horror on the police officers' faces before their cars collided. The headlight beams merged, growing intense between the two cars before bursting; hoods crumpled; windshields spiderwebbed, then shattered. The collision was deafening, two mountains crashing together.

Julia vaulted forward. Her seat belt locked, catching her so rigidly she felt a rib crack. Her air bag erupted like a kernel of giant popcorn, smashing her back. The assailant's arm tore from her neck. She sensed his body crumpling against the seat back before starting to flip over it, hip and leg first. A moment later, her seat belt kachinked open, her door popped wide, and she tumbled out. Trying to stand, she stumbled, stood, weaved.

Metal clanged to the ground somewhere, glass tinkled, radiators hissed, liquid dripped, one of the police officers screamed in pain or rage or both. She turned to the cruiser. The cop in the passenger's seat was pushing down an exploded air bag.

His door swung open and he stepped out, clutching the window frame for support. He had the crusty face of a lifelong beat cop, over-weight, near retirement. He looked utterly stunned. A ruptured cigarette was smashed against his cheek, strands of tobacco flaking away as he moved. He spotted her, and his face hardened.

She held up her palm. "Federal agent!" she yelled, her voice hoarse but clear. "FBI!" She could explain the difference later. She staggered toward the policeman, pointing at the twisted metal of her car. "There's an armed man in my car. He tried to kill—"

"Are you insane?" he snapped.

"I've got an armed gunman situation here!" She couldn't believe she was having to do this. She stepped closer, instinctively picking the cop's name off the patch on his shirt. "Officer Gilbert, my name is Julia Math—"

"Hold it right there!" He put a hand on his gun but left it in its holster. "Show me some tin, lady, or you can spread-eagle on the ground right now!" He slapped the cigarette off his face.

She glanced over at the wreckage of her car, saw no sign of the killer. She removed her identification wallet from her front pants pocket, then held it up. The cop—Gilbert—signaled her to step closer. A red crease split open across his forehead as a bullet grazed him, and he fell back. Julia turned toward her car. Through jetting steam and wafting smoke, made nearly opaque by one still-blazing headlamp, she saw the killer behind the glassless windshield frame of her car. He was leaning on the center of the dashboard, his right arm draped over it as if he were chatting it up at a neighborhood tavern. One side of his face glistened with blood. In his left hand he held a bulky semi-

automatic pistol, surely a .45. Already big, the addition of a long sound suppresser made it look more like a small machine gun. He turned it toward her. A point of red light flashed in her eyes.

She dropped straight down, hearing the thunk! of the shot, followed by the tinny sound of the spent cartridge clattering against the crumpled hood. Before she realized it, her pistol was in her hand.

Officer Gilbert leaped to his feet, the red graze on his brow glowing like war paint. He had drawn his pistol and come up shooting. From her hunkered position, Julia could not see the killer, but the cop obviously thought he had a target. He rattled off six rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger. He was clicking through the paces of reloading before the sound of the last shot faded away.

She scanned the street. No civilians. Good. The closest businesses were a closed bookstore and an all-night Laundromat that appeared empty. She sprang up, the bead of her pistol's front sight hovering over the spot she'd last seen the killer. Gone.

The other cop, the driver, clambered out, falling on his hands. He yanked out his legs and stood with a dizzy swagger. He was pale, but Julia suspected that was his usual complexion: tall, skinny, mid-twenties, a shock of orange hair burning the top of his head. Blood pulsed from his mouth. It was a fighter's injury: he'd lost a central incisor, rupturing a small artery in the upper gums. Dazed, he bent into the cruiser and emerged with a shotgun. He pumped the slide, chambering a shell. He spat out a mouthful of blood and yelled, "Whatcha got?"

"Gunman! In the car. I think he nicked me."

Neither man showed a trace of panic or fear, just determination and a healthy measure of ire.

Dang, they breed 'em tough up here, Julia thought. Crouching, she darted behind the cruiser.

The killer popped up from behind the dash, fired, and disappeared. She felt the slug zing past her head.

Both cops let loose with a volley of thunderous shots, evaporating huge chunks of metal and dash and seat upholstery.

Why is he staying in the car? she wondered. Something's wrong.

As if in answer, the assailant sprang up from behind the trunk, his laser-sighted weapon already leveled at them. Before they recognized his presence, he fired and vanished. The bullet shattered the window of the open driver's door and tore a hole in the chest of the orange-haired cop. He cried out and flew backward, knocking Julia to the ground and pinning her feet.

"Stinky! Stinky!" Officer Gilbert called. At least that's what she thought he said; it could have been "Stanky" or "Spanky." The officer's name patch was no help: the bullet had ripped right through it.

Gently, quickly, she pulled her legs out from under him. He gritted his teeth, grimaced, rolled his eyes toward her. He looked so young. She got her legs under her and crouched down, ready to leap, run, or roll. With one hand she applied pressure to the wound; the other gripped her pistol.

Gilbert was already screaming into a microphone, stretching its coiled cord out the door as far as possible.

"Officer down! I need backup! Now! Now! Now!" He gave the cross streets. A female voice squawked in reply.

He dropped the microphone, bobbed his head up and down, high enough to see the wrecked car through his own broken windshield. "How is he?" he asked, not turning to look.

"Alive. Looks bad."

Stinky was holding on to consciousness by a thread.

Gilbert jumped, seeing something. He rose, thrust his arms over the roof, and fired three rounds.

And waited.

Nothing.

Sirens swelled in the distance, approaching fast.

A flicker caught Julia's attention, and she looked down. A red spot of light hovered on Gilbert's ankle.

"Move!" she yelled and leaped toward him, too late.

His ankle exploded as if from an internal detonation. Before the next event happened, she knew it would. The cop yelled and fell to the street. A red spot appeared in the center of his forehead, seeming to have already been there, waiting for him. The back of his head ruptured with the assailant's exiting bullet. The killer had calculated that maneuver with obscene perfection.

"Noooooo!" Moving low, close to the rear tire, she hooked her gun under the car and rapid-fired along the ground in the general direction of the assailant.

On the opposite side of the cruiser, a police unit roared onto Brainerd from a side street and squealed to a stop, headlamps illuminating her Taurus. The assailant fired at it from behind the trunk.

Brainerd filled with a kaleidoscope of lights as a half dozen cruisers converged on the two wrecked cars, three from behind her car, bathing the assailant in white light. He spun on them, shooting huge holes into their windshields. Doors flew open, cops beat it for cover behind their cruisers.

The assailant bolted away from the car, running for an alley between the bookstore and Laundromat. As he did, he shot at Julia. The red point of his laser zigzagged around her as bullets plunked half-dollar-sized holes in the cruiser's sheet metal and shattered the asphalt in front of her. The tire behind her ruptured. Holding her ground, she fired back. As his foot touched the curb, one of her bullets struck his shoulder, spinning him around. He glared at her, his eyes wild.

She froze. Only a second . . . less. But in that time, he leveled his gun at her. She didn't see but felt the laser center on her forehead.

A thousand banshees screamed—it took her a moment to recognize the sound of many guns firing at once.

The assailant, still glaring at her, spasmed as round after round tore into his body. Blood and gore sprayed out behind him. Store windows erupted. White powder burst from brick facades, so fine and abundant the buildings appeared to be smoldering.

He would not fall. He jerked his head to look at the police, at the muzzle flashes and smoke that marked his demise. He swiveled his gun toward them and returned fire. He seemed to be absorbing the firepower and hurling it back.

Julia rolled behind the cruiser, trying to press her body into the street. From this prone position under the rear bumper, she took aim at the crazed assailant. She'd heard of doped-up druggies, so numbed to pain, so high on artificial stimulants that it took a virtual army to bring them down. But this was something . . . different.

Later, every cop there would admit to their colleagues, their wives, or themselves, feeling the same sense of astounded terror, like waking to the realization that everything you thought about the universe was wrong. Despite the killer's uncanny ability to withstand horrendous injuries, nothing startled them so much as the unflinching concentration he displayed when he changed ammo clips. In the midst of an unceasing barrage of gunfire, he swung another magazine up to his gun just as he fired his last round and the slide locked open. The spent clip dropped away. He jammed in the new one with the ease and thoughtless habit of checking the time. Shattered and shooting, he had somehow kept track of his every shot, knowing the precise moment to change clips. The process delayed his shooting no more than a second.

The moment the new magazine was seated into the handle of the gun, his free hand dropped down to his belt, where another magazine was clipped. His hand stayed there, ready.

Then his chest erupted in a mist, and he toppled.

The quaking of guns ceased. Silence rushed in to fill the void like water into a new footprint; its presence felt heavy. All eyes watched the body sprawled across the curb. A sheet of blood fanned out on the sidewalk from the chest and shoulders; rivulets of it began snaking from under other parts—head, arms, legs—and flowed into the gutter.

Somebody coughed, breaking the spell; another cursed loudly. Then the air filled with the sound of guns being reloaded, magazines refilled, spent shells being kicked on the ground and swept off car surfaces.

Julia watched as three patrolmen cautiously approached the body, shotguns poised to continue the onslaught should the body so much as twitch. They were spaced well apart to avoid being slaughtered as a group.

A noise erupted from the killer. A melody. Lights appeared on what Julia had thought was another magazine clipped to his belt. It was the man's cell phone, and it was ringing.

The three cops instantly locked into combat firing stances.

The musical ring tone was a song Julia knew: Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb." After about ten seconds, it stopped.

One of the cops glanced over his shoulder, checking his comrades for guidance they didn't have; another inched forward, kicked away the assailant's pistol, and stretched his hand to the assailant's neck. An eternity later, he gestured that he'd found no pulse. While the other two covered him, the first hefted the body on its side to cuff the hands behind the back. Julia had seen corpses cuffed before, but never with so much gravity. The cop ran a hand along the body's perimeter, pulling a heavy knife from an ankle sheath and the cell phone from the belt. He tossed them aside.

Julia closed her eyes and lowered her face to the pavement, feeling tiny pebbles bite into her cheek. She was grateful for their solidarity, for how real they felt. She stayed like that as EMTs assessed Stinky— he was alive with surprisingly strong vitals—and until a cop came over and pressed his fingers to her throat.

"I'm okay," she said and cupped her face in her hands.

thirty-two

Gregor woke from a dream in which he was field-stripping a rifle, alone in a vast arctic landscape. The rifle made sense: he'd broken down and cleaned and reassembled a fair share of them. He wasn't so sure where the winter conditions came from. His foster parents had lived in Wyoming, which certainly got cold and snowy, but nothing like in his dream. Maybe it had something to do with his thirty-year stretch in a tropic climate. No snow. Ever.

His room was dark, except for a soft, unfamiliar light. At the very moment that he saw the light was coming from one of the two cell phones on his nightstand, it rang. Its previous ring must have been what pulled him from his imaginary midnight wandering.

"Yes?" It came out as a croak. He repeated the word.

He recognized the voice on the other end, and his mind cleared immediately. The voice recited a code phrase. Gregor thought for a moment, then returned the proper reply. He listened. "But aren't you there now? . . . Chattanooga, Tennessee . . . Of course, I can resend the files, but—hold on, let me get a pen."

He threw back his blankets, swung his legs off the bed, and turned on the bedside lamp. Something wasn't right. The great warrior Ts'ao Kung said the essence of battlefield success was "to mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy."

The enemy! Gregor thought. Not your allies, not your commanders!

Code phrase or not, the call worried him. But the man was not someone you questioned or angered. He possessed the phone number, the code phrase, the voice. Gregor didn't know what else to do. He stood and stumbled toward his desk for a pen.

He wished he were back field-stripping a rifle in subzero temperatures.

thirty-three

Julia wasn't about to hang around. She'd been trying to avoid cops all day, and now she was surrounded by them. It wouldn't be long before they found their composure and wanted to know more about her involvement. She'd be brought in to police headquarters and questioned until the FBI or CDC showed up to relieve them of the burden that was Julia Matheson. No doubt there were people in several agencies who had questions for her.

At the moment, each member of the local PD was busy describing the action from his or her own perspective. There was the kind of laughter that comes after extreme stress, and cops saying, "No, no, no, this is the way it went down," and cops who were in a blue flunk about the casualties, and cops who wanted to fight because they didn't understand how someone could laugh at a time like this. There were few, it seemed to Julia, who had set all that post-traumatic stuff aside and were going about the business of securing the crime scene and interviewing witnesses. Those who were doing their jobs moved slowly, distractedly, and focused primarily on where the assailant's body fell.

She went to inspect her car. She found what had kept him in the car long after he should have bolted: in the accident, his right arm had apparently become wedged between the crumpled hood and dash. He'd only escaped by slipping his arm out of a wicked-looking gauntlet, leaving it behind. A string of blood dripped from it as if it were a severed arm.

She told a patrolman that she needed to pry open her car door and borrowed his crowbar; she had left her own crowbar with the other tools stashed in the alleyway behind the bar. She levered the hood metal back enough to wiggle the gauntlet loose, then dropped it into a deep canvas book bag, along with a few papers scattered about the interior. Then, acting as if she were doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing, she marched around the corner and kept on going until she reached another major street and hailed a cab.

She was in her room and slumping on the bed before the extent of her injuries became apparent: She hurt everywhere. Her side throbbed where the rib had fractured; her hips ached from thrusting against the seat belt; her throat still felt as fragile as blown glass; various spots of pain flared on her face and arms where fragments of erupting asphalt had bitten into her.

She pulled the memory chip from her pants pocket, turned it around in her fingers. So small. In centuries past, when people fought over a small item, it was usually a jewel or a key to a locked treasure, maybe a deed to some estate or a religious relic. Now, as often as not, it was information. And a lot of information could fit on a tiny square chip like the one she held. Didn't look like much. Worth ten bucks in a computer or camera store. But throw some information on it, and it became invaluable. She thought of the cost so far. Goody. Vero. The cop Gilbert. Even the assassins—the two killers who'd died in the bar and the one tonight. Not that their lives were worth anything, but they did contribute to the tally. And those were only the deaths she knew about. What had happened before Vero tried to get this chip into the right hands?

I hope you're worth it, she thought.

She scooted back on the bed, grabbed her laptop, and turned it on. She leaned over and rummaged through the computer case until she found an adapter card, which she pushed into the computer's expansion port. When she pushed the chip into that, the screen immediately flashed a pattern of multicolored static and froze.

Julia winced.

She restarted the computer four times: twice she started it with the chip already slotted, and twice she waited until the operating system had booted. Each time, it crashed the computer.

Groaning, feeling every bruised muscle, she rolled off the bed, grabbed her purse, and left the room. At the pay phone outside the motel office, she used a calling card to dial a long-distance number.

"Wha—?" She heard a male voice say on the other end of the line.

"Bonsai?"

"Who's this?"

"Julia. Don't say my last name."

"Like I would. What time—?"

"Late. I need your help."

"Call back in the morning, Julia. No, I'll call you. I'm really beat, you know, with the new kid and all."

"Goody's dead." There was so much silence, Julia said, "Bonsai?"

"Goody?" He was stunned. "When?" No sleep left in his voice.

"Today. Yesterday, now. There's some weird stuff going down. I need your help, and no one can know. Can you help?"

"Sure, yeah, whatever."

"Can you get to a secure phone?"

"This one's good. I sweep it every day."

Of course he does.

"I have a memory chip. It's—" She read a shallow impression in the chip's plastic case."An SDx30. I'm pretty sure it's at the heart of what got Goody killed. But I'm afraid it got damaged."

"What's it doing?"

"Whenever it tries to mount, the computer locks up."

"It's a full-volume encryption. Everything it needs to know it's a computer file—the hibernation files, swap files, the resource fork, all of it—is locked up. It's a pretty recent development in data security. Your computer doesn't know what to do with it, so it just dies."

She felt a wave of relief. "Can you do anything with it?"

"Probably. I'll need to send you an app that'll tell your computer not to attempt mounting it. Then you can send it to me."

"Bonsai, could you go somewhere else to receive it?"

"Are you talking about the tap the feds have on my Tl?"

"You know about that?"

"What kind of hacker would I be if I didn't? I got a second Tl nobody knows about."

"I should have known."

"You got Wi-Fi?"

"With a trace-interlock."

"Nice." A trace-interlock was like an antenna for wireless Internet connectivity. It pulled in Wi-Fi signals within a mile radius and ran a quick decryption on any firewalls it encountered, granting the user access without passwords. It was built into the SATD software.

He gave her a web address where they would meet online to swap files. He also issued her four pass phrases, which she would need to communicate with him online, one pass phrase at a time.

"I need to get back to my room and reboot," she said.

"My site has a VOIP function," he said. "You know VOIP? Voice Over Internet Protocol?"

"I know it."

"We can talk that way. It's secure."

Walking back to the room, she thought about Bonsai. He'd been a seventeen-year-old high school geek in Denver when he'd hacked into the Strategic Air Defense computers at NORAD's facility inside Cheyenne Mountain. He had done it only to see if he could, but Air Force brass, NSA goons, and the FBI came down hard on him. Before he'd fallen victim to a merciless judicial system, however, Donnelley had fought for his rehabilitation, pointing out the value of the kid's incredible computer savvy to national law enforcement. Prosecutors had reluctantly agreed, and Bonsai became a freelance computer hacker for the U.S. government.

The skinny kid with flaming acne and long oily hair had proved to possess one of the sharpest security minds in cyberspace, going on to make a six-figure income showing corporations the chinks in their firewalls—a computer system's version of a vault door. Now twenty-one, he had a wife and a newborn boy—Baby Bonz, Goody had called him, though his name was Christopher. Bonsai credited Goody for his freedom. Julia knew he had always wanted to repay the favor. News of his death must have cut deep.

Repositioned on the bed, Bonsai's web site on the screen, Julia waited for him to send her the application she needed. She started the transfer of the encrypted memory chip data. A bar graph appeared, indicating that the transfer would take a long time, maybe hours. Bosai's Tl line was fast, but Julia's Wi-Fi was slow; transfers always moved at the slowest speed in the conduit.

"Julia?" His voice came over the laptop's speakers.

"Hmm."

"Go to bed. I'm going too. I'll get on it as soon as I get the whole thing."

"Thanks, Bonsai."

She watched the bar graph. Progress was marked by a blue bar moving from left to right. She stared at it for five minutes, and it barely moved.

It might have locked up, she thought. I should call Bonsai, see what he thinks . . .

But then she was asleep.

thirty-four

Eternal night.

The morgue was as black for the shadowy figure gliding through its halls as it was for the bodies tucked coldly into the endless rows of metal cabinets. If human eyes had caught a glimpse of the fleeting shadow, they would look again and see nothing. It moved quickly along the edge of the corridor. Silent. Aware.

No amount of Clorox could eliminate the smell of death from the air. The figure inhaled the odor, discerned the metallic blood scent from the pungency of flesh.

A door opened, seemingly of its own accord. The shadow slipped through.

A fine beam of light erupted from the shadow, glinted off the lipped edges of an aluminum table. It flashed up to the far wall, which was sectioned into three-foot squares, each with its own stainless steel handle and dangling tag, a copy of the one tied to the big toe of the corpse inside.

A hand formed out of the shadow. Clad in black leather, it snatched the tags, turning them toward the light: Willows, R. . . . Jeffreys, M. . . . John Doe.

The hand stopped as the shadow contemplated the non-name: John Doe.

It lowered to the handle. A metal latch clicked, airtight seals ruptured, steel rollers slid on metal. A white sheet billowed up, drifted down.

The drawer slammed shut. The shadow hand continued past the names. Then stopped again.

Another John Doe.

Another click. Another tissshhh of escaping air. More rollers. The flutter of a sheet as the beam fixed on a face, pale and frozen as statuary.

The beam clicked off. The shadow, blacker than the dark air around it, engulfed the body. When it retreated, the body was gone.

A sound startled Julia out of sleep. She was sitting on the bed, leaning askew against the wall where a headboard would be in a nicer motel. Sunlight filtered through the tattered curtains, brightening the room almost reluctantly.

Julia looked around for whatever had awakened her. Bolts of pain shot up from her stiff neck. She became aware again of aches in her throat and side and other injuries, but realized they were less severe than they had been the night before.

She started to rise, and her leg bumped the computer, which had toppled off her lap and onto the bed sometime during the night. She tilted it up to look at the screen and tapped the track pad to bring it out of its own automatic slumber. The screen lit up. It showed Bonsai's web site and the words transfer complete.

The computer must have chimed to signify that Bonsai had received the file. That was fast. She looked at her watch and realized it hadn't been so fast. It was 9:28 a.m. She'd slept for seven hours. She wondered how long it would take for him to figure out the encryption.

She picked up her cell phone from the bedside table and turned it on. It rang immediately.

Yes!

"Bonsai?"

"Where in the name of Clint Eastwood have you been!"

She instantly recognized the gruff voice of Edward Molland, her boss. Each word rang as sharp as a rifle shot.

"I have been dialing this number since yesterday afternoon."

She thought of slamming the phone down, just dropping it and leaving the motel.

"The phone was off, sir."

"Well, why haven't you called? Why didn't you check in with the Bureau's Chattanooga office? Man alive! The fiasco down here. The death of a federal agent, Julia—Donnelley! And whatever that was you were involved in last night—the bloodbath they called me about. Sounds like you were smack in the middle of it, then just disappeared. They wanted to put an APB out on you, get a warrant for your arrest—your arrest, Julia! I convinced them to wait. Now you have to convince me."

"Arrest me? On what grounds?"

"You name it. You know how this works. At the least, you're a person of interest. They want to talk to you, and they'll find a way to haul you in, if you don't haul yourself in first."

"I'm trying to work a few things out first."

"Work what out? Julia, you are a federal agent. You are part of a spin-off agency of the FBI, if you need to be reminded. We have procedures, protocol. You've broken at least a dozen regulations that I know about. This is not like you, not like you at all."

He didn't say anything for a long time, and she didn't know how to respond. She wanted to cry or scream or . . . something. She could picture Molland, tapping manicured nails on the surface of his immaculate desk, hair just right, suit tailored just so, looking more like a politician than a chief law enforcement officer. Oddly, she wondered if someone was sitting on the black leather sofa in his office. If so, would their expression convey professional concern for her behavior or conspiratorial delight at having found her? She pushed the thought away. If there was a mole in the agency, the chances of it being Molland were slim. Goody had always trusted him. That was why he'd agreed to leave the Bureau for CDC when Molland had asked.

He cleared his throat. "What's the take on that guy you and the locals zapped last night?"

"I have no idea, sir. Hired gun. Very professional."

"You know he's gone?"

The blood in the base of her neck chilled, then cascaded down her spine.

"What do you mean?"

"Someone broke into the morgue this morning. Stole the body."

The room grew darker, as if the sun had slipped behind a cloud.

"Why?"

"That's the question. Coroner went in this morning, and the corpse was gone. Like he got up and strolled out."

"He had to have been shot two dozen times."

"That's what I heard."

Long pause. Molland spoke again, his voice much softer, even compassionate.

"Look . . . Julia. I'm sorry about Goody. I can't tell you how much. I know you two were close. I understand that you panicked, freaked out. But it's time to get back on track. Let's catch his killers, huh? What time can you be here? One? Two?"

"I need more time," she blurted. "I mean, I haven't slept, and I need to get organized." What she really needed was to sort through her notes and memory, then make a definitive decision either to go to the Bureau with her suspicions or to go somewhere else, like directly to the attorney general. She also wanted to give Bonsai time to decrypt the information on the chip.

"Okay. I understand. How about three?"

"Tomorrow morning would be better."

"Tomorrow?" He didn't say anything for a while, then: "Okay, look. You've been through the wringer. Take the day off. Be here first thing in the morning, right? My office."

"Thanks, Ed. See you tomorrow."

"Julia?"

"Yeah?"

"First thing in the morning. I mean it."

She disconnected and set the phone back on the bedside table. She had taken two steps toward the bathroom when it rang again. She picked it up and looked at the caller ID. Private number. Bonsai or Molland again. She pushed the talk button.

"This is Julia."

"We need to talk."

"Who is this?"

"Dr. Parker. Remember? We need to talk," he repeated.

"Parker?" She'd forgotten about leaving her number with him. "What do you mean, we need to talk?"

"Somebody tried to kill me last night. Twice."

"What? Who? No, wait—" Her head was spinning now. She expected Rod Serling to step through the door, calmly introducing the Twilight Zone episode her life had become. Meet Julia Matheson. Lonely federal agent. Her job requires her to think in terms of black and white, in logic and fact. But she's about to discover a place where logic and fact have no meaning. A place called .. . the Twilight Zone.

She said, "Are you where I can call you back in three minutes?"

"A pay phone."

"Give me the number." She memorized it. "Okay, three minutes."

Julia hung up, dug into her purse for coins, and walked in her stocking feet to the pay phone outside the hotel's management office. She dialed the number and dropped in the coins. When Parker answered, she said, "All right, who tried to kill you?"

"Three different people. One of them had a badge."

"A federal agent?"

"A local cop, a sheriff's deputy, I think. Another was a big guy, had a gun with a laser—"

"A gauntlet?"

After a moment, he said, "I didn't see anything like that. But he was fast and moved better than you'd think for a man that size."

"Glasses?"

"Yeah . . . thick black frames. You know this guy?"

"He attacked me last night too. He died in a shootout with the cops."

Parker made a noise that might have been a gasp or murmured profanity. She watched through the office's front window as an old man came out from a back room absently rubbing his chest under a stained T-shirt. He spotted Julia and waved.

Parker said, "So? Can we meet?"

"Me, as a cop?"

"No, not really. Maybe . . . Not officially. I don't know."

She laughed. "I think I know what you mean."

"Just you. No other agents, no cops, no surveillance."

"Just me."

"Okay. Meet us at the Appalachian Cafe on Market Street in Knoxville at—"

"Whoa, whoa. Knoxville?"

"There or nowhere."

"You're afraid of being in Chattanooga?"

"You're not?"

"I'm shaking in my socks. Who's 'we'?"

"My brother. He was with me last night. Noon?"

"Noon it is. Appalachian Cafe." She hung up.

A dozen thoughts tripped over themselves for her attention: the stolen body, the meeting with Parker, his attempted murder, Molland expecting her tomorrow morning . . . She squeezed her eyes shut and willed them all away. Not now, not now. Mentally, she constructed an agenda: shower (yes, long and hot. . . okay, not so long; Knoxville is a two-hour drive), enter the new data into her case journal (skip that, no time), check out of the motel (can't stay anyplace too long), hop a cab to a car rental company to replace her agency car, shoot up to Knoxville.

She went back to her room, stripped off her clothes, and laid them out on the bed. She added Call Mom to her list. Then she stepped into the steaming jets of the shower and let the pounding water wash away her concerns, if only for a short while.

She found a different phone booth to call home. Her

mother sounded tired, but she claimed to be mobile. She insisted she didn't need help. The next call Julia made was to Homecare, the home health agency. The company had a check-in service; a nurse would swing by the duplex every four hours to make sure everything was as it should be. That ought to drive her mom crazy.

thirty-five

Gregor knocked on the observation window until

Karl Litt turned from a biosafety cabinet. His arms were pushed into gloved ports that allowed access to the cabinet's sensitive contents. Gregor motioned and Litt nodded, pulled his arms out, and spoke to a young man standing beside him. A moment later, the laboratory door opened and Litt stepped through.

"A lead on Parker and the Matheson woman," Gregor said as Litt stripped off surgical gloves and smock and dropped them into a bin.

"Can we count on it?"

"Coffee?"

The compound's break room always featured a half pot of vile black sludge. Litt loved the stuff.

Litt nodded and stepped up to a metal door and absently passed his face before a square panel of black glass set in the wall. Behind the glass, an infrared camera scanned his physiognomy, creating a pattern of the invisible heat generated by the blood vessels under the skin. The scanner compared this thermal image with ones filed in its hard drive. Finding a match, it disengaged the door's lock.

When Gregor had first heard of a foolproof identification system that recognized individuals' unique thermal facial patterns—distinguishing even between identical twins—despite aging, cosmetic surgery, and the total absence of light, he had lobbied Litt to get the compound's security doors retrofitted for it. Years earlier, they had agreed to spend the bulk of the organization's financial resources on research and security, and because Litt had recently landed a lucrative contract to supply a Middle Eastern dictator with biochemicals, he had consented to Gregor's request.

They stepped into another corridor, this one much dimmer than the one that serviced the labs. Only one in three fluorescent tubes worked, and many of those sputtered on the brink of death. A dank odor filled the air. In some sections, the "corridors" were nothing more than large, corrugated-metal tubes, dripping water from the rivets and buckling and splitting like overstuffed sausages where earth pushed through. The military base had been abandoned over forty years before and wasn't in the best condition when new. Now it threatened to disintegrate back into the surrounding land, though Gregor knew Litt had done his best to keep it operational.

Falling in step beside the other man, Gregor continued. "The transaction-monitoring people have an affinity agreement with an organization that intercepts telephone transmissions. So, say your subject's away from his usual Internet service provider and uses a credit card number to temporarily tap into a new provider—something that happens frequently, I take it, if the subject suspects his lines are bugged. The transaction-monitoring guys pick up the credit card sale, which includes the new IP address he's using, and that, in turn, is associated with a phone or data line. The phone guys step in and bam, instant bug."

"Parker accessed the Internet?" Litt asked.

"No, he called the female federal agent, Matheson. He's not stupid, he watches TV, so he goes to a pay phone—and uses his credit card to make the call." Gregor grinned.

"Ahh," Litt said, appreciating the irony.

"So the phone bug kicks in—it's all automatic. Now we not only know which phone booth the guy is using—we got his conversation too."

"We got it?"

"MP3. I had it in my BlackBerry two minutes after he hung up. I forwarded it to Atropos."

"What'd he say?"

"No response yet."

They reached the break room, saw a biologist with a magazine and a mug seated at the only table, and stepped back into the corridor.

"Our accountant called this morning," Litt said quietly.

"Atropos doesn't come cheap."

"He mentioned another offshore transfer. Twenty thousand."

Gregor nodded. "That was to the service that gave us the lead on Parker."

"Doesn't matter. Soon enough, we'll be able to buy Anderson's entire firm." He scanned the dilapidated corridor. "And get this place fixed up."

The biologist exited the break room, greeted Litt and Gregor, and headed toward the labs. The two men went in. Gregor poured them each a cup of coffee, and they sat at the table. Gregor stared into the liquid's shiny black surface.

"Something else?" Litt asked.

Gregor shrugged, sipped from the cup. "It's just . . ."

"What?"

"So close to fulfilling the dream, Karl. I'm just thinking—" He looked into the black orbs of Litt's glasses, saw himself reflected in each lens. "Look, I don't have a problem with killing kids, as a means to an end."

"You don't believe it's necessary?"

He shrugged. "Strategically, I think it's a mistake."

"Our experts disagree. The plan was maximum impact. The public has to feel it, Gregor. It has to hurt."

"I just think there will be a backlash where children are involved."

"We want a backlash—against Kendrick, against his deceit, against his government's complicity."

"But is the list about getting attention or . . ." He tried to find the word.

Litt beat him to it. "Vengeance?"

"Your family . . . Who wouldn't want revenge? I'm just wondering if putting so many children on the list . . . I know it will wrench people out of their complacency, but might they not want your head instead of listening to the reasons you are striking back at them?"

"At first, maybe. Then they will say, 'Who has brought this on us? Who has awakened this monster?' And they will find Kendrick and their own government. They will bring down their own house from their grief and anger."

"I hope you're right."

Litt pushed back from the table, his chair screeching against the tile. He stood. "Either way, Gregor," he said, "it's too late now." He picked up his cup and left.

Gregor didn't move for a long time. He had studied war. He understood the power of demoralizing an enemy's citizens, of crushing their spirit and their will to fight. But he also knew that the tactic could backfire and result in a more determined enemy. Perhaps that wouldn't be so bad, he thought. He was sure Karl would respond in kind. Ten thousand this time. How many the next? One million was not out of the question. Karl didn't care. He had stopped caring decades ago.

Take my family, he imagined Karl thinking, and I will slaughter your children.

thirty-six

The Appalachian Cafe occupied a rustic brick building on a cheery block of downtown Knoxville, complete with wide sidewalks and a line of alternating old-fashioned streetlamps and mature trees. Modeled after the favored eateries of Europe, the cafe boasted a large front patio where wood-framed umbrellas shaded white metal tables. Now lunchtime on an outside kind of day, every table buzzed with business types. Microbrewed beer disappeared by the vat, along with whole crops of the latest trend in spinach salads. The image made Julia yearn for the day before yesterday, when she and Donnelley might have lunched in such a place and razzed each other over some investigative faux pas.

As she came up to the wrought-iron rail that separated the patio from the sidewalk, she scanned the diners for Parker. Everyone appeared to be laughing or smiling, which made her conscious of her own pouting mouth. Then she saw him, sitting across the table from a huge man who'd blocked him from view seconds earlier. They didn't look like brothers. He spotted her and nodded in greeting. She liked that: no conspicuous waves or shouts. Whether that meant he knew how to keep a low profile, she'd find out soon enough.

She had to enter the restaurant to get to the patio. The place exuded a smell like roasted almonds that made her mouth water despite her upset stomach. Only then did she realize that she'd last eaten more than twenty-four hours ago. Perhaps it was hunger and not only grief causing her stomach pains.

The hostess escorted her to Parker's table. Both men stood. They were positioned across from each other, leaving two chairs between them at the round table: one facing the street, the other facing the restaurant. She'd have preferred a seat where she could watch both of them at once. She settled for the one facing the street, putting Parker on her left, his brother on her right. She slipped the new gym bag off her shoulder and set it on the ground.

"I'm glad you came," Parker said, sitting again, scooting his chair close to the table.

She smiled politely and noted that he was wearing brand-new clothes, complete with factory-fold creases. Her new blouse had hanger marks on the shoulders, which her blazer hid. She took in the other man, his brother. He had to be one of the biggest people she'd ever seen. The hairiest too. But he possessed kind eyes and a ready smile. Where Allen was undeniably charming, perhaps a little too slick, this man was utterly and instantly likable. She hoped she wasn't simply needing a kind face and imagining it where it wasn't.

"We couldn't think of anything else to do," Allen said. "We had our reservations. I'd just as soon trust the waiter as a cop right now."

"I know how you feel," she said.

He gave her an inquisitive look, but she turned away.

"You're Dr. Parker's brother?"

"Stephen." They shook hands. In his, hers was small and pathetic looking.

"And call me Allen, please."

"You don't look like brothers."

"I got the looks," Allen said. "He got the . . . hair."

Stephen winked at her.

"Are you a physician?"

"He almost was," Allen said, a little harshly, Julia thought. "He dropped out two months short of graduation. He—"

"Allen, let's not go there." Stephen turned to Julia, his face softening. "I'm a pastor, and I have no idea what I'm doing here."

"Weren't you with Allen last night when he got attacked?"

"Yeah. I still don't know what I'm doing here."

She got it. What normal person would guess he'd be attacked by assassins and have to run for his life? "Me too. Allen, you too?"

"I know that everything was fine until your partner wound up on my operating table."

He was glaring at her, seeming to expect an answer to a question he hadn't asked.

"What are you saying?" she said.

He shifted in his chair. "I don't like being chased from my home. I don't like being shot at. I don't like my life being disrupted."

"You're acting like I had something to do with that."

"Didn't you?"

"No. I don't like it either. I've got a mother at home with multiple sclerosis, and I can't get to her, can't help her. The man you watched die on your table was my partner, yes, but he was also my best friend. He recognized one of the men who killed him. He thought he was a federal agent. So until I find out what's going on, I can't go back to my own agency, and I can't call in the troops. I'm out in the cold, and you're making it colder."

The confrontational expression remained hard on his face, then it softened and he said, "You hungry?"

"Famished, I think."

Allen gestured to the waiter, and all three ordered.

Julia unrolled flatware out of a cloth napkin, shook it out, and dropped it into her lap. As she did, she asked, "What kind of food do you like, Allen?"

He paused to look at her. "Steak, mostly. Seafood. Italian. Anything prepared well."

"I'm partial to Cajun. Blackened catfish, jambalaya, mmm. Where were you born—around here?"

"Chattanooga. Our father's a GP there, as was his father."

"Family business."

"Yes," he said, his eyes on Stephen.

Cool's the word, she thought. Allen didn't fidget. He looked her straight in the eyes. In her experience, the cooler the customer, the easier it was for him to lie. That was her reason for asking unimportant questions—she wanted to witness his behavioral baseline when he wasn't lying. Later, if his behavior changed, she would have cause for suspicion.

"So," she said, "what happened yesterday?"

He shook his head, then nodded, glanced at his brother, opened his mouth, shut it again. Clearly he wasn't sure where to start.

"Let me tell you my end," she offered. She told them about the call to pick up Vero, the hit attempt and escape that separated her from Goody, the loss of the SATD signal, Goody's call, the hospital. She explained how she went to the bar to examine the crime scene, but excluded mention of the memory chip. She didn't want to reveal her entire hand until she knew these men better, knew what part they would play in this situation's resolution, if any. She described her encounter with the assassin and the end he met.

Allen said, "You said the cops killed him. You think he's the same one who attacked me at home?"

She nodded. "Big guy, glasses, laser-sighted handgun."

Allen began his story with Goody's presentation in the ER. He described the wounds and the razor disk he found lodged in Goody's sternum.

As hard as she tried to stay objective and removed, Allen's words sliced her heart, just as those disks had sliced Goody. She was certain the memory always would. To get her mind off the details of his death, she said, "The only common denominator between us is Goody. So you think the attack against you has to do with him?"

"Absolutely. Just before I was attacked, a police lieutenant called. He said several other people who'd been with Donnelley between when he was shot and when he died in the trauma room were attacked and killed."

Julia's face expressed the shock she felt. "The killer must have been looking for something. Or else trying to keep people quiet about what they think Goody might have said. Did he say anything to you?"

"Oh yeah. For one, he said filoviruses are man-made."

"Man-made? You mean . . . like in a lab?"

Allen nodded. "And we're talking some nasty stuff. Marburg. Ebola. Severe hemorrhagic fever. Internal organs start to decay as though you're already dead, but you aren't. Your blood loses its ability to clot; then your endothelial cells, which form the lining of the blood vessels, fail to function, so blood leaks through. Soon it oozes from every orifice—the obvious ones and even from your eyes, pores, and under your fingernails. Then you die."

Julia wasn't hungry anymore.

"Most people think of the outbreaks in Africa," Allen continued. "But Ebola has struck in the Philippines, Italy, England. The strain known as Reston takes its name from the town in Virginia where it was first discovered. In 1996, a case of Ebola was reported in Texas. Marburg was first recognized in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany, and Belgrade, Yugoslavia."

"But man-made? What does that mean?"

"Just that, I guess. Somebody created it. It was genetically engineered. Whenever a terrible new virus is discovered, everyone just assumes it was some kind of natural mutation or that it's been lying around dormant for tens of thousands of years until something— man's encroachment into its territory, presumably—reactivated it or exposed humans to something that was always there."

"Of course we'd think that," Stephen interjected. "After all, who'd want to make something that terrible?"

"But maybe somebody has," said Allen.

"Is that even possible?" Julia asked.

"With what's going on in genetics these days, anything's possible," Allen said. "When Marburg first surfaced, doctors thought they were dealing with a strain of Rhabdoviridae—rabies. Maybe somebody genetically altered a rhabdovirus, I don't know, but on closer inspection they realized what they had on their hands was an entirely new family of virus. Filoviruses . . . Ebola is completely unlike any other known human pathogen. Its physical appearance is long and thin, like a snake—appropriate, considering its stealthy and deadly disposition. And it secretes an unusually high concentration of glycoprotein that shields it from the immune system. That means there are no vaccines and no cures."

"If you get it, you die?"

"Not necessarily. Some victims survive. No one knows why."

"But that's changing," said Stephen. "Allen looked into it last night. Ebola is getting worse, more virulent, as if someone is improving its effectiveness."

Julia stared at Stephen, then turned to Allen for confirmation.

"It's true," he said. "The first Marburg outbreak had a 28 percent mortality rate. Ten years later, the Ebola-Zaire's mortality was up to 75 percent. In 2001, it hit 90 percent. It's now one of the most lethal viruses ever known."

"As if that weren't enough," added Stephen, "transmission of the disease is getting more volatile. Earlier strains showed no signs of spreading through the air. Direct transmission was by contact with blood and other secretions containing high titers of virus. Then, about ten years ago, the Army reported that healthy monkeys caged across the room from monkeys with Ebola got infected. The Ebola had become airborne. Was this a natural evolution of the virus?" His bushy eyebrows shot up. "Or the fruition of someone's efforts to make the disease more deadly?"

Julia shook her head. "But why? I mean, it doesn't make sense."

"It makes perfect sense," said Allen. "Think about it. A disease with no known cure. No way to vaccinate against it. The person who controls such a thing could hold the world hostage. Symptoms of Ebola exhibit quickly, often just a few hours after infection. And it kills quickly, usually within a couple weeks. The short incubation means a tight quarantine can keep it from spreading out of control. But if someone were to systematically infect pockets of the population, he could wipe out whole societies without losing much control over its spread."

The table fell silent for a full minute. Julia stared down at her half-eaten sandwich, watching the tuna salad ooze from the croissant. She couldn't grasp the full implications of Allen's words; her mind would not project itself past the popular horror stories of Ebola's effects on the human body. But she did know that if people had created this disease, they would kill to keep it secret.

In fact, she thought, such people would be highly proficient at killing.

thirty-seven

He was almost there. Ten minutes, according to the rental car's GPS. Seven minutes, the way he was driving. He anticipated finding three targets. He'd try to take one alive, use him or her to retrieve his employer's property. He had never failed an assignment, and he didn't want to start now. Truth was, however, he didn't care too much about the property . . . or his employer. He did care about the targets.

He cared a lot about them.

Tension in his face. In the muscles of his forearms and hands. Bad for battle.

He focused on the sound of the radio coming through the car's cheap speakers: a country melody . . . heavy metal . . . some loudmouth ranting about a local politician's drive to . . . classical music—Vivaldi, the driver decided. The Red Priest. And what had that politician been up to? He wanted to raise the cost of parking meters—yeah, that was it. The radio jumped to the next station on the dial. A commercial for "champagne homes on a beer budget . . ."

He felt calmer.

Champagne homes on a beer budget. Who thought up these things? His foot edged down on the accelerator, and he shot through a light just as it turned red.

GPS said eight minutes. He said five.

thirty-eight

"There's one more thing that lends credibility to what

your partner told me," Allen said, poking at the fries on his plate. "No one has been able to find where Ebola resides when it is not in monkeys or humans. It disappears for years at a time, but no reservoir has been found, despite testing thousands of animals and insects." He gave her a sideways glance, as if to say,

Are you following?

"You're suggesting it can't be found in nature because it's not there."

"Pretty and smart," he said with a wink at Stephen. "The reservoir is actually a test tube in some mad scientist's lab. He keeps it there until it's time for another field test. Then back into nature it goes so he can watch what happens."

"Wait a minute," Julia said. "Isn't it possible that a virus can mutate itself in the ways you've described, for no other reason than its own survival?"

"Certainly."

"And scientists still might find a nonhuman reservoir in nature and figure out natural reasons for those other odd things about Ebola, right?"

"It's possible."

"I mean, you are viewing the evidence through the lens of suspicion."

"And in the context of a murderous cover-up," he agreed.

"Why wouldn't somebody have blown the top off this years ago?"

"Julia, I can only guess." Allen snatched a fry off her plate, bit it in two, and flicked the remainder at Stephen. "Maybe these guys are good at hiding. If they have been introducing Ebola into the population every time they needed to test it, they've been smart about it; probably giving it to monkeys first, or even infecting humans through monkeys, to throw investigators off the trail. In Africa they found the perfect red herring: poor countries where shoddy communication, transportation, and medical expertise combine with rough terrain and a staggering number of possible insect and animal vectors to hinder ecological investigations and throw a cloud of mystique over the whole puzzle. It is the Dark Continent."

"You're forgetting the more probable reason," said Stephen. "Look at the situation we're in. We may or may not know something, yet somebody is going all out to silence us. How do we know that other people, people before us, haven't tried to blow the top off, only to be stopped? By all indications, we're messing with powerful people."

They sat quietly for a while, looking at their partially eaten lunches, at each other, but not really at anything. The shadow under their umbrella seemed to have darkened.

"Okay," Julia said, pushing away her plate. "Let's say someone is making Ebola. Unless they're doing something more, I can't see—"

"They are," Allen said. "I think they are. The way your partner put it was—and I'm not trying to embellish or interpret—'bio . . . attack . . . filovirus . . .' I asked when. He said, 'Already happening.'"

Julia said, "'Under way'? That's what he said."

"We've got to do something," Stephen said, leaning in.

"I agree," she said. "But what?"

Allen said, "The sooner this breaks open, the sooner the heat's off us."

"Any ideas?"

"The media. Newspapers, television. It'll make headlines for a year."

"Allen, it's not going to happen," Stephen said with a dismissive wave of his hand. His frustrated tone told Julia the two had already covered this ground. "There's not a news organization in the country that'll touch this story without proof."

"Look!" Allen leaned on his elbows over the table, bringing his face to within a foot of Stephen's.

The wooden pole of the umbrella perfectly separated their firm profiles. The image reminded Julia of a billboard she'd seen outside Atlantic City for what promoters billed "the fight of the century." The Parkers made credible stand-ins for the boxers: handsome Allen would be the media darling—witty, enchanting, nimble of tongue and foot. But hulking Stephen would be the hands-down favorite, a monolith of unyielding muscle. She suspected that their discord ran deeper than the disagreement at hand.

"I know people, media heavyweights, who could help," Allen continued.

"You could be joined at the hip to Katie Couric—it's not gonna matter."

"You have a better idea?"

Stephen turned to Julia. "You're FBI?"

"Sort of. Like a division of it."

"Can we go there?"

Allen jumped in. "I told you, I'm not going to—"

Julia held up her hand to stop him. "Yesterday morning, I would have said there wasn't anyone in my agency or the Bureau I wouldn't trust. Now I don't know. What I do know is someone highjacked a satellite signal that's supposedly impossible to highjack. At least one, maybe two, hit squads are in play; they're not being discreet and they're not afraid of killing federal agents. At least two of them were probably cops, so whoever hired them has connections within the law enforcement community. All of this may have something to do with a man-made virus, which means either terrorism or the military. It's hard for me to imagine that the government isn't involved in this at some level. The muscles that are flexing are way too big to be private."

"The media, then," Allen said, leaning back, vindicated.

"I don't think so," she said. "I agree with Stephen. Unless you have hard evidence to support your claims, no reputable news agency will come near this. Your connections might get you lunch and a pat on the back, but that's all."

She raised her hand again to halt Allen's objection. "I'm not saying this isn't a huge story, but to newspeople, your saying that it is doesn't mean squat."

It was clear to her that Allen was not accustomed to being contradicted. The flesh on his face seemed to harden. His tight lips pushed out a bit, sliding back and forth slowly, as though he were working on a jawbreaker. His eyes bore into hers, unflinching. He'd obviously perfected this countenance of wrath to a degree that caused nurses, med students, and even colleagues to acquiesce rather than endure the gaze.

She leaned into it. "Contacting the media now will do nothing but tell our pursuers how much we know and where we are."

"The killings," he said. "The condition of Donnelley's body, his words . . ."

"Just words," Julia said, firm. "And nobody heard what he said but you, right?"

"You don't believe me?"

She hesitated a beat. "I do, because Goody told me some of the same things. And I'm not the media. You'd have to convince some pretty jaded people whose livelihood depends on checking and double-checking the facts. Even if they were to give you the benefit of the doubt, they'd keep the story under wraps until they investigated, until they were sure. That would give the people after us time to do what they probably do best: silence nosy journalists and their informants."

Allen blinked slowly. He was listening.

"Going to the press would put the spotlight on us, not them. Of course, you could sell the story to one of those grocery-store gossip rags. It'd be right next to a feature about the three-headed pig-boy who ate his neighbor."

His facial muscles relaxed. A slight twitch at the corner of his mouth formed into a shallow smile. This seemed to signal a kind of forgiveness of her insubordination. He glanced around, as if realizing for the first time where they were. He nodded. "So where does that leave us?"

Julia looked at Stephen, his big hairy face open to her, anxious for an answer. She moved her attention back to Allen. He was more cynical than his brother, more cocksure, even now when he was scared and unsure.

"Where that leaves us is alone."

thirty-nine

"So what do you suggest?" Allen asked.

She returned his gaze for a time, then turned her head to stare vacantly at the sidewalk beyond the patio's perimeter. Feet clad in various forms of shoes strode across her field of vision, but her mind registered none of them. Their situation was like a hole, into which she tried to fit a myriad of solutions. As idea after idea flashed into her mind, she'd size it up, hold it next to the hole, discard it for the next one. After a minute she looked up.

"Evidence. Whatever we eventually do—go to the media, go to the cops—we need to bring evidence. I have something from Vero, memory chip. It may be all we need, but it's encoded. I may have fixed that, but until we know for sure, we should turn over a few rocks, see what we find."

"We're going to investigate?" Allen's voice was high with disbelief.

"Have to," said Julia, distracted by the plan forming inside. "I can pull some info off of various data banks, find out what the Bureau knows, maybe the status of the investigation in Chattanooga. That may lead us to more clues, more avenues of discovery. We don't know yet what we're looking for exactly, but that's how all investigations.

start. Before you know it, the pieces fall together, and you have enough to make a case."

"Where do we start?" Stephen asked, ready.

"I'm thinking.

"Well, no matter how you cut it, we're on the run," Allen said. "I've never been on the lam before, but I imagine it can get expensive—food, transportation, hotels."

"And no credit cards," Julia said. She'd obtained her new car this morning from a rent-a-lemon place that accepted an extra fifty bucks and photocopies of her driver's license and LED creds in lieu of a major credit card. Now she was almost out of cash, and she hadn't considered where she would get more without leaving a paper trail.

"How about this?" He nodded at a business across the street. "That's a branch of a bank my dad uses. We called him this morning. He arranged a cash withdrawal in Stephen's name. I don't have my ID. We get the money, go somewhere, decide what to do."

"You've thought this through," she said, impressed.

"Leave it to Allen to nail the money angle," Stephen quipped.

"Speaking of which . . ." Allen's eyes made a sweep of the dishes.

Stephen pulled out his wallet and dropped two bills on the table, a big grin pushing away the hair around his mouth. "Allen sans cash," he said. "I never thought I'd see the day. Be right back."

He stood, stepping back from under the umbrella to avoid pushing it up by his towering height. He stepped over the patio's railing into the blazing sun. He squinted in one direction, then the other, waited for a car to pass, and jogged across the street. Julia marveled at the gracefulness of his movements.

"I need to make a call," she said. She tossed her napkin onto her plate and stood, pulling the gym bag up by its strap. "I saw a phone inside."

"I'll go with you."

"Suit yourself."

She tugged open the big French door that serviced the restaurant and stepped in. Over her shoulder, she said, "I'm only calling my mother. You don't have to—"

Then she saw him: crossing the street, as though he'd been watching them from a nearby storefront, and he'd seen Stephen go into the bank. Everything faded away. She saw only him, moving as if in slow motion, letting a car pass, darting behind it. Straight for the bank.

"What? What?" Allen's words sounded muffled, far away.

Jet-black hair, sticking up in spots. Thick-framed glasses. Tall and muscular.

"Julia, you're pale as a ghost."

She pushed past him, back onto the patio.

"Allen . . ." She pointed.

The man was standing in front of the bank's front window, peering in.

"What? I . . ." Allen started, then: "That looks like . . . I thought you said he was dead. You said he got blown away. That can't be him."

"It is him. That's the guy I saw the cops kill last night."

Her hand went to her pistol. It rested on the handgrip as she watched the assassin pause for a woman exiting the bank. He slipped into the space behind her, and the glass door closed. He was inside.

forty

"It wasn't him." Allen was leaning close to her, his hand on her shoulder. Already they were drawing stares.

"You know it was." But how? She had not seen a bruise or cut or bullet wound.

He echoed her thoughts: "How can that be?"

"I don't know. I just—don't know." Her mind poked at possibilities, but none of them made any sense. "We have to get Stephen out of there." She pulled out her mobile phone, flipped it open, and dialed 411.

"I thought we didn't want to use cell phones."

"They already know where we are." She recited the name of the bank. Ten seconds later, a computer voice informed her it was making the connection at no additional charge.

Allen said, "He might follow Stephen into the bathroom. Or the way these guys are, just go after him right in the lobby."

"I know, Allen. Shut up a second."

The receptionist inside the bank answered. Julia made her voice low and gravelly. "There's a bomb inside the building. In two minutes, you're soup." She flipped the phone shut. Two minutes would not give the bank manager time to consider his options.

"Soup?" Allen asked.

"Nice image, huh? If you were that receptionist, think you'd be giving the manager an earful about evacuating the building?"

"I'd probably just leave."

She looked at him. If he was joking, he showed no sign of it.

"Let's hope she's cut from a different bolt."

She hoisted the gym bag to her side, pulling the strap over her head to cross her body like a bandolier. She didn't want to lose it if things got crazy. They walked around the tables in front of them and stepped over the railing. She hoped Stephen would pile out with the crowd and beeline it for them. She'd lead them around the corner to her car, staving off the killer with her pistol, if necessary.

The bank doors swung open, and a nicely dressed woman shot out at the head of a massive knot of people. They pushed and shoved and exploded from the narrow doorway, spilling into the street. Cars braked and stopped. Somehow, the word had spread to the three-story building's upper floors; Julia could see bodies moving quickly out of the front-facing offices.

"Yell at him when he comes out," she said. "Tell him to run, just run. Anywhere."

She stepped off the curb. She was considering going into the bank. A movement in a second-floor window caught her eye.

It was Stephen.

He was looking through the closed window at the insanity on the sidewalk below, then he raised his head, searching for Allen and Julia. She waved her arms. He spotted her and shrugged.

Come on! she motioned.

He nodded and pushed up on the frame. It wouldn't budge. He leaned over and made a hammering gesture. Someone had nailed the windows shut, probably upon retrofitting the building with central air. He tried again. She could see his face contort. With a crack she could hear from across the street, the window frame splintered and the glass panel rose six inches . . . Another heave and it opened to a foot . . . then another two—enough for him to climb through.

She ran to the street's center line, sensing Allen behind her. Cars had stopped in both directions as bank customers and office workers milled about on the far side of the street. Heat radiated from the blacktop. Beads of perspiration sprang out on her forehead, her upper lip.

"Get out now!" she yelled.

The crowd, noticing the big man somehow stuck in the doomed building, joined in. Shouts rang out: "Come on, man!" "Get out!" "Jump!"

But the second floor was too high above the concrete pavement.

"He's in the bank, Stephen!" Allen called. "The killer!"

Stephen's face changed from confusion to concern. He began assessing his options. He eyed the arching fabric canopy jutting out from an expensive perfume shop next door.

"Hang from the ledge! Hang and fall! Now, Stephen, now!"

He nodded and immediately swung his leg through the opening. The crowd roared its approval. Crouching on the ledge, facing the window, he assessed the distance down, scanned the edge for handholds. His right hand clutched an envelope. He began to lower himself from the ledge when a shadow flashed in the room behind him. Wood and glass exploded over him. A fist shot out, grabbing hold of the hair on top of his head. Stephen jerked his head around, tethered to the fist. He wrenched his head back hard and lunged away from the window as far as his arms would stretch. A black arm and fist came out of the window, missing his face by inches.

Julia pulled in her breath. The fist bore hard spikes in the black knuckles—the killer was wearing the gauntlet she had retrieved from her mangled dashboard. Her hand dropped down to the gym bag hanging at her side. Through its nylon walls, she felt it, solid as a fossilized arm.

Another gauntlet!

This assailant was not merely similar to the one she'd seen killed; he was precisely the same.

She drew her pistol and watched as Stephen kicked off of the building, flying backward.

forty-one

The gauntlet had not missed Stephen's face. He felt it nick his brow. Warm liquid stung his eye. The black fist retreated, pistoning back for another strike. If the assailant leaned out, the fist would reach his head.

Stephen released his grasp on the window frame, focused all his strength into his legs, and pushed out, cranking his body sideways as he did. The arm crashed through the remaining glass, reaching for him. Pellets of glass hit his face, flew past him. The attacker's head and shoulders leaned out of the window. He had chiseled features, a twisted mouth, blazing green eyes behind nerdy glasses.

Stephen hit the canopy with a great wbup! His left shoulder caught a rib of the iron frame; the awning buckled, following the downward momentum of his body. Pain flashed up his side into his jaw. Maroon canvas enveloped him, closing out the sky above. He slammed to a stop. He thought he'd hit the pavement, then realized he was cradled in a hammock of fabric, rocking slowly. He scrambled to break free, probing for the ground with his foot. He found it, not far away, and spilled out onto it. His shoulder radiated lightning bolts of pain, and his arm felt numb to the elbow. He realized he was still holding the envelope of cash. He shoved it into his back pocket.

In the street to his left, Julia crouched in a target-shooting stance, holding her pistol in both hands and pointing it, lock-armed, at the window above. Stephen turned to look, saw nothing.

"This way!" Julia yelled, pointing in a direction that would cause him to cross in front of the bank. Her eyes never left the shattered window.

He hesitated, puzzled. She had approached the cafe from the opposite direction. Then it came to him: the crowd he'd only half noticed from the window had grown exponentially in the brief time it took him to make it down to the street. Gawking people stood at least ten deep in a wide semicircle, of which the bank was the epicenter. But no one dared to approach the area in front of the bank or the sidewalk for thirty yards on either side; Julia had chosen the path of least resistance.

Allen darted past her, toward the end of the block. That was enough to prompt Stephen to run as well. Julia moved sideways fast, keeping the gun poised at the window. She joined Stephen on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the bank from the canopied store.

The crowd made a sharp sound as if they were catching their breath all at the same time, apparently seeing something that was out of Stephen's view.

Another window above him erupted.

As the first fragments of debris struck his head, Stephen grabbed Julia's arm, pitching her forward, away from the destruction.

Then it came: big and heavy, smashing into the pavement behind him.

He swung around. A body was crumpled low, covered in glass and wood chips. For a moment, he was certain the assailant had hurled somebody through the window, hoping to crush Stephen. Then the shoulders moved, shaking off the debris. A face turned up to him. it was his attacker. He rose, shedding glass. Blood trickled from cuts in his forehead and cheek.

Stephen assessed the situation, realized that running was pointless. The man would overtake them all with predatory ease.

Stephen took a step back and opened his arms, a gesture of peace. "What is this, man?" he asked.

The assailant grinned, humorless and cold. But it was his eyes that convinced Stephen: he was here to kill. Nothing was going to stop him.

Nothing but me, Stephen thought.

He brought his left leg forward and shifted his hips back over his right leg—a hu kool chase stance. He was ready to kick or defend.

"Stephen!" It was Julia. "I got him. Get out of the way!"

The killer moved in, thrusting his armored fist forward, cat-quick.

Stephen parried the blow with an upward sweep of his left forearm. The impact was like slamming into a car bumper, but he succeeded in knocking the fist off course. Even before their arms made contact, Stephen's right arm sailed forward, the heel of his palm aiming for the spot between the nose and upper lip. A well-placed blow would cause incapacitating pain.

He never made contact.

As if time skipped a few beats, the killer was gripping Stephen's wrist, stopping the locomotion power of his hand two inches before its target.

The assailant glared at Stephen, inches from his face. Stephen saw nothing in his opponent's countenance but animal fury. Then the killer twisted his lips into what might pass as a smile in certain demonic circles and nodded. The gesture said Touche.

"We don't have to do this," Stephen said through clenched teeth. He knew they did, but deep inside, he remembered the last time he had battled; his conscience didn't want to be here.

The assailant pulled down fiercely on Stephen's arm, bringing his knee up at the same time, calculated to shatter the radius and ulna.

Anticipating the motion, Stephen swiveled his hips. The blow struck him hard on the thigh. Turning his defensive movement into an offensive one, Stephen swung his leg between them, then around his opponent's side. He yanked his leg back. It collided with the killer's leg, on which all his weight rested. His mind jumped ahead, working through the motions he'd make as his opponent hit the ground.

Which he never did.

Normally, a man will protect himself in a fall by swinging his arms toward the ground; but the killer never released Stephen's right wrist. Instead, he used it to hold himself up and pivot around with the force of Stephen's kick. Before Stephen realized what was happening, the killer's back was to him, and he felt himself pulled by his arm over the killer's head. He collided with the sidewalk. He sensed movement over him and rolled. The gauntlet smashed into the pavement where his face had been, kicking up rock chips and a quick plume of concrete dust.

If he'd kept rolling away, as his mind screamed at him to do, he knew his opponent would jump ahead, pin him, and kill him. Instead, he rolled back, grabbing hold of the killer's arm with both hands. Before the killer had a chance to kick, Stephen hoisted his lower body into the air and planted a stunning blow with the tip of his boot into the top of the man's head. Anchored by Stephen's grip on his arm, the killer staggered . . .

Then dropped his knee onto Stephen's forehead.

forty-two

Light swam back into his mind, forming itself into images: the building on his left, blue sky, white clouds, a flash of leg, and the killer standing over him, poised to bring his spiked fist into Stephen's head.

Stephen swung his arm straight up, aiming for the clouds high above. He struck the killer between the legs.

The gauntleted warrior tumbled away.

Stephen rolled and pushed himself up. He kicked out, catching the man in the side. As the killer staggered back, Stephen lowered his torso and kicked his booted heel into his opponent's sternum.

The killer flew backward into the bank's display window, crashing through and disappearing behind a waterfall of shattering glass. A huge pane sliced down like a guillotine. An instant later, Stephen caught the full force of a roundhouse kick to the side of his head as the killer leaped over the glass-toothed sill. Stephen's head snapped back painfully. He wanted to fall, to let the black cloud hovering at the edge of his consciousness engulf him and just. . . fall. Instead, he jerked his head upright and raged the black cloud away—just in time to see a saber-sized sheet of glass arcing on a horizontal plane toward his neck, blurring with speed.

He ducked.

The glass, clasped in the killer's hands, disappeared in a screaming, dissolving collision with the brick that flanked the bank's windows.

Stephen drove his head into the killer's stomach and felt the pain of a fist gripping the hair on the back of his head. Rather than pull back, he pushed forward, knocking his opponent off balance. They both went down. As the killer hit concrete, Stephen somersaulted over him, using the momentum to tear his head away from the fist.

He felt like he'd been cracked on the back of the head with a lead pipe. He blocked out the pain; it was something he was getting used to.

He rolled away, tumbling out of the killer's reach. On his feet, down for mere seconds.

The killer too—standing ten feet away, bent at the knees, arms out like an attacking wrestler. He rocked slightly on the balls of his feet, ready. The man was tall, only slightly shorter than he was, maybe six foot four. At roughly 260 muscular pounds, the man's proportions were similar to a body builder's; he possessed none of the lankiness common among tall men. Through the unzipped opening of the black Windbreaker, a dark green pullover clung to bulging pectorals. Quick eyes watched Stephen's every move.

Stephen sucked in a deep breath, then another. Sweat stung his eye. He tasted blood: a lot of it. A chill trickled down his spine as he realized the killer was breathing in the unhurried rhythm of a body at rest, barely perceptible in the shallow rise and fall of his massive chest. No perspiration at all. Just blood. Cuts and gashes and scrapes freckled the killer's face and one visible hand . . . a hand that still clutched a clump of brown, bloody hair and what looked like—a piece of scalp.

The attacker raised his fist to examine his prize. He focused on Stephen and smiled.

"That's gotta hurt," he said in a strong voice, no trace of humor. He casually pushed the hair into the breast pocket of the Windbreaker, seeming to dare Stephen to retrieve what had been taken from him.

"Stephen!"

It was Allen, behind him some distance. Panicked, by the sound of his voice.

The killer glared.

"Run, Stephen!"

"Stephen, I can get him." Julia's voice, closer. Cool as a whole patch of cucumbers. "Move out of the way."

He glanced back quickly. Julia was on the sidewalk right behind him, thirty feet—

"Watch—!" she screamed, and he dropped straight down, knowing what was coming. The gauntlet passed over him, so close he felt it stir the hair remaining on top of his head. He rolled into the killer's legs, but the killer leaped away so fast it was as though he had never been there. Stephen swept his massive leg around, appearing to target his opponent's ankles, but intending only to buy enough time to jump up.

When he did, he found the killer several steps away, nearly under the uncrushed part of the canopy that had cushioned Stephen's fall.

The man moved to strike a blow to Stephen's chest, but pulled away at the last moment.

Stephen kicked out, realizing too late that his assailant had feigned the punch to draw him in.

The killer caught hold of his leg, pinning it between the crook of his left arm and one of the poles that held the canopy frame. Stephen tugged, but he might as well have had his foot encased in the foundation of a building. He bounced on one foot, trying to keep his balance. He swung around to twist free, but the killer moved with him, countering his movements.

Pain fades in the heat of battle as the mind locks in on survival. But even a brief reprieve in the action can send it rushing back, as it did now for Stephen. His head felt cleaved, his shoulder savagely wrenched.

His opponent flashed that evil smile again, superior, unflinching.

As if in slow motion, the killer's arm, spiked and rock solid, pivoted back, then surged forward. Stephen tried to bring his arm around to block the blow but missed. He twisted sideways and felt the crushing impact on his ribs. The air burst from his lungs. He hitched for air that wouldn't come. Then he saw the killer bring his arm back for another strike. His enemy had been targeting his head all along; Stephen knew this one would find its mark, a blow he wouldn't, couldn't survive.

Then a gunshot rang out, sharp and close. Sparks sprang like fireworks from the pole in front of the killer's face.

Stephen was free, falling, crashing to the ground.

Another shot.

Vaguely he sensed someone running toward him, past him, stopping at his feet: Julia, gun in hand, taking aim. Someone else, Allen, rushed to him, tugging at his arm.

"Stephen! Come on, man! Let's go!"

Allen straddled him, lifting him. Stephen felt all the pain in the world shatter his body. He growled more than screamed. Allen raised his palm, drenched in blood, and grimaced.

"Can you move?"

The question prompted him to try. Catching a rush of adrenaline, he rose, then staggered. Allen moved to his left side, slipping under his arm, and maneuvered him away from the canopy. Stephen gasped for air, found he could breathe again. Fire radiated from numbness on his left side, pulsing fingers of it reaching toward his heart, his head, making his legs weak.

But with each step, each breath, he felt stronger. He pushed away from Allen to stand on his own. He was shaky, still in pain, but otherwise okay—he thought.

It'd take more than that to keep this old fighter down.

He sensed chaos all along the block, people screaming and scattering at the sight of guns, others watching the action from behind cars. Somewhere in the distance sirens wailed. He turned. Julia was occupying the spot where the killer had pinned him to the canopy pole. Gym bag slung over one shoulder, she clutched her gun at the end of two stiff arms, aiming. He looked past her in time to see the killer peer around the corner of a recessed entryway two storefronts away. She'd managed to drive him away, but not far. Julia fired, and a brick erupted near the killer's head.

"Go!" she yelled. "Go!"

A huge black gun sprang out from the entryway, turned toward them, spat smoke. Julia dodged to the left. Allen pulled at Stephen. Both spun and moved down the sidewalk, close to the buildings. The best Stephen could muster was a loping gallop. Allen moved in to help again, supporting and steering him.

At the corner, Stephen paused long enough to see Julia moving backward toward them, pistol poised. Then he and Allen were around the corner, into a different world where crowds didn't gather to witness bloody battles. Halfway down the block, in the circular drive of the Marriott-Knoxville's entrance, guests pulled luggage from their cars' trunks. Taxis and private vehicles lined both sides of the street.

A shot rang out, and Julia rounded the corner, crashing into them.

"Move it! He's coming!"

They bolted toward the hotel entrance, then Julia yelled, "Wait! Wait! Not there. It's too obvious."

She scanned the narrow stores that occupied this half of the block. All the shops carried expensive jewelry, clothes, and objets d'art. Their facades were all display windows and glass doors, which led no doubt into tastefully sparse showrooms; none looked like a particularly shrewd place to hide. Certainly they had back rooms, but not necessarily rear exits.

"The hotel!" Stephen rasped. "It's the only way!"

"No, here!" Allen said, pointing at the curb.

"What?" Stephen asked.

"Yes!" Julia said. "Under the cars! Now!"

She dove into the space between two parked cars, pushed the gym bag under the front one, and disappeared after it. Allen shoved Stephen toward the car behind hers and shimmied under the vehicle behind that. Stephen hunkered down and slid into the narrow space. Something bit into his back, and he pushed closer to the asphalt, scraping his body along. He craned his neck to be sure his legs weren't exposed.

Through the slim opening between the high curb and the car frame, he witnessed the killer's head pop around the corner. Gone again. A second later, he swung into view, a silenced pistol extending from one arm. Failing to spot his quarry, he lowered the gun and stepped to the first display window. He moved to the next window, spinning around between the first and second to check the area across the street and down toward the hotel. He moved with fathomless agility, like water erupting from a fountain. He flowed past Allen, past Stephen.

A boy of about thirteen on a skateboard approached at top speed, the wheels of his ride clack-clack-clacking on the pavement seams. The killer's arm shot out. He grabbed the boy by the shirt and lifted him off the skateboard, which sailed on without him.

"Where are they, boy?" the killer hissed into the teen's face. "A woman. Two men. Where?"

"I . . . I . . . don't know what you're talking—"

He tossed the boy aside like dirty laundry. The kid tumbled on the cement, coming to a stop facedown. When he lifted his head, he was staring right at Julia.

forty-three

The boy's eyes were huge. His mouth quivered, and she

was sure he would scream out.

She raised a finger to her lips.

The boy rotated his head a bit, saw Stephen under the car behind her. He swiveled around to look over his shoulder. The killer was glaring into a store window thirty feet away. He turned again to Julia, frightened eyes staring into frightened eyes. With a slight smile, he hopped up and bolted away from the killer, toward his wayward skateboard.

More man in that hoy than I thought.

As the killer made his way toward the entrance of the Marriott-Knoxville, Julia tried to anticipate his moves. Would he assume they took refuge in the hotel? Would the lobby area occupy his time long enough for them to escape? Or would he simply threaten the valets for information, as he had the boy? Perhaps this time with his pistol— picking off one to motivate the others.

Yes, she suspected that was his style.

Even if no one had seen them dive under the cars, the valets would surely convince him that the three hadn't entered the hotel. He'd keep tracking them outside, eventually thinking to look under the parked cars.

So what to do?

A pebble bore into her elbow. She tried to push it away and knocked her head painfully on the car's undercarriage. Something warm and wet touched her scalp—blood or oil. No matter . . .

He was almost at the hotel entrance. Could she bear to see him sacrifice a life in his search for them? No way. A threatening move was all it would take to push her into offensive action.

Images of last night's firefight brought a dark cloud of pessimism to her thoughts. Acid roiled through her stomach, and her mind ached at the need to know how this man had survived, how he had come back. Even in the heat of battle, the perplexity of it pushed at her thoughts. Had last night really happened at all? Had she been hypnotized? Drugged? Was she going crazy?

Not now, Julia! she scolded herself. Focus. Focus on this killer— whoever, whatever he was.

He had turned from the window and was scanning the row of cars parked along the street, paying particular attention to the taxicabs closest to the hotel entrance. He stepped to the next store's window.

She fished something out of a side pocket of the gym bag, then twisted around to look back at Stephen. The big man was absolutely packed under the vehicle. Bits of gravel clung to his beard, and a smudge of grease marred his forehead. His face expressed miserable distress. He spread his hands and opened his eyes wide, as if to say, What are we going to do?

She signaled him to stay put. Behind him, Allen was making emphatic hand movements at her, shaping his hand into the form of a pistol and jabbing it toward the killer: Shoot him! She gave Allen the stay-put signal as well. She crawled on her belly until her head was even with the front bumper. The car in front of her was a taxi. The killer had just stepped to the next store window when she made her move: she crawled out from under the car, staying low; then she turned onto her back and pushed herself under the taxi. A few moments later, her head popped out from under the vehicle on the street side. As she expected on this hot day and with the engine turned off, the cabbie's window was down.

203

"Hey," she whispered sharply. When there was no reaction evident in the elbow that protruded from the window, she tapped on the door. The elbow disappeared, and the car rocked a bit as the cabbie looked around.

"Down here!"

The door opened just a crack, and a startled face looked down at her.

"What the—?" he began, but she stopped him by displaying her badge and photo ID.

"Shhhhh," she whispered. "I'm a federal agent." She flipped her credentials case closed and raised the other hand, which held a wad of cash. "Take this, close your door quietly, and I'll tell you what I need you to do."

He hesitated briefly, then did as she had instructed.

While he was counting the bills, she whispered, "Don't look my way. Just do what you were doing before I got here." She lowered her head to see that the killer had reached the hotel and was scanning the area. She tucked her head under the car before a passing vehicle took it off. She whispered louder.

"Okay, listen. Give me fifteen seconds to get out from under here, then burn rubber outta here. Make a U-ie and haul down the street as fast as you can. Don't stop for anything—lights, traffic, anything. Got it?"

The whispered voice floated down from the cabbie's window. "Lady, you only gave me forty-seven bucks."

"It's all I have. If you get in trouble with the cops, with your boss, the Bureau will straighten it out. All you have to do is push it for about five miles, and you're forty-seven dollars richer. Deal?"

"Yeah, yeah. Fifteen seconds."

She backed away from the edge of the cab. Then she saw the killer and froze. He had a valet by the hair, bending him back and gripping his neck with a gauntleted hand. She knew too well what that felt like. She was reaching for her pistol when the cab's engine roared like a waking beast. She moved away fast, banging her head on the muffler. She'd just rolled onto her belly and slipped back under the other car when the cab screeched in reverse, slamming into hers. Grime rained down on her. She wondered frantically if the cabbie had misunderstood or was trying to annoy her, then realized that he had to pull away from the cab in front of him to get out. The rear tires started spinning on the blacktop, generating an unbelievable amount of smoke and sound.

The cab shot out into traffic, cutting a semicircle across three lanes, and sped away in the other direction. Horns blared and wheels locked in a chorus of wailing tires. Several cars smashed into each other.

And the killer did precisely as she had anticipated.

He dropped the valet and galloped into the street after the cab. His feet flashed by Julia's hiding place. She turned to watch his progress, but he was instantly out of sight, lost among the traffic. She heard cars a block away sounding their horns and locking their brakes. The cabbie was doing quite a job for forty-seven bucks.

She was out from under the car in seconds, chunks of greasy dirt falling from her hair and clothes.

"Allen! Stephen! Move it!"

She draped the gym bag's strap over her shoulder and stood on her tiptoes. The killer was two blocks away, only a half block from the cab. He stopped. Julia's breath wedged in her throat—she knew what he was doing. The back window of the cab shattered, shot out by the killer's silenced weapon. The cab veered and bounded onto the sidewalk.

I got him killed!

But it kept moving, coming off the sidewalk and swerving around a parked car. It made a sharp turn and disappeared. It took the killer a full ten seconds to reach the same spot and disappear himself.

Sirens warbled around the corner where the bank stood, then stopped. Witnesses would soon inform the police of the direction they had fled.

Allen and Stephen reached her side, congratulating her for a brilliant move.

"It's not over yet," she said. "Stephen, you going to make it?"

He touched his side and grimaced. "Yeah. Nothing a tight Ace bandage and some ibuprofen won't ease."

"Good enough." She ran to the first taxi in line.

forty-four

After they'd climbed in, they waited for the driver, who was standing outside his open door, looking in the direction of his apparently berserk colleague. "Driver, we're in a hurry!" Julia called.

He slid in behind the wheel, hooked an arm over the seat back, and glared at them. "I ain't going to do what Frankie just done," he said.

"We don't want you to," Allen said. He held his hand open to Stephen, who pulled the envelope out of his back pocket, groaning when he twisted, and placed it in Allen's hand. Allen pulled out a hundred-dollar bill and held it up. "Will this get us to Maryville?"

Julia was squeezed between Stephen and the door. Through the back window, she'd caught a glimpse of the killer darting between cars, moving quickly toward them.

"Let's go!"

"I can get you there," the driver said slowly, seeming to talk to the money, "for this here tip plus the fare there and back."

"Sounds good."

The hundred dollars disappeared into the driver's shirt pocket. He settled himself in behind the wheel and started the meter.

The killer was a block away. His arms pumped like an Olympic sprinter's—an Olympic sprinter with a really big gun.

"Go!" Julia pulled her pistol from its holster under her arm but kept it hidden beneath her jacket.

"Look, lady—"

"Another hundred," Allen said, digging in the bag, "if you do what the lady says. Now!"

The driver slammed the shifter into drive and punched the accelerator.

The killer stopped to aim. Leveling the pistol at the taxi, he jerked toward the sound of squealing tires behind him. He leaped to avoid being struck by a car, came down on its hood, and flipped off, disappearing from Julia's view. When he reappeared, he jumped on top of the car's hood. From that vantage point, he raised his gun again.

Julia caught the glint of the laser's ruby sparkle. Then the cab veered around the corner at Locust Street and roared toward the highway a block away. She holstered her weapon.

Allen tossed the hundred into the front seat, where it disappeared into the driver's shirt pocket. He turned to Julia. "Since when are killers resurrected?" he whispered. It sounded like an accusation.

Stephen groaned and said, "What are you talking about?"

"She said that guy back there was the one she saw shot to death last night!"

"Obviously someone else."

"It was the same person," Julia said.

"Same clothes maybe," suggested Stephen. "Same team of assassins, even. That would make sense if they were recruited under the same criteria: big, bold, tough as nails."

"No. It was him." She touched a sore spot on her neck where his fingers had dug in. "I don't know how to explain it."

A flash of memory caught her off guard: a seventh-grade science assignment to collect as many spiders as possible over a single weekend. Cobweb spiders, wolf spiders, jumping spiders, sac spiders, daddy longlegs. But the crowning jewel of any collection was a black widow. She'd known the prize would be hers. After exhausting the dark recesses of her house, she moved outside, overturning countless boards and stones. Finally she flipped over a chunk of concrete and there it was: glossy black, the size of a large marble—skittering right toward her bare knee as she knelt in the dirt. She barely jumped away in time and trapped it under a mayonnaise jar. Watching it try to escape, she sensed its dark hostility toward her. The trick would be to kill it without harming its body. She spent hours pushing alcohol-drenched cotton balls under the glass rim. The thing crawled over them, almost mocking. Finally she shot a stream of insecticide at it. It slowly rolled over and pulled in its legs like a fist. Cautiously she removed the jar, then the cotton balls.

It sprang to life. Moving for her, touching her hand before she could pull away. Stunned, crying out, she slammed a rock down on it, again and again.

For weeks afterward she'd awaken in the deep hours, drenched in sweat, swatting away dream spiders that dug into her skin with their fangs.

Something about that spider stayed with her—its intense desire to get her, even defying death for one last chance.

This man, this killer, reminded her of that indomitable black widow.

But he was infinitely more frightening.

"All I know," she said, "is that I saw that man, that one at the bank, blown to bits last night. A cop checked his pulse."

"Could he have been wearing a flak vest?" Stephen offered.

She scowled. "There was so much blood."

The brothers stared at her, Allen with doubt in his eyes, Stephen with compassion.

She turned away, caught her reflection in the glass. "I don't know," she said quietly. "Maybe I'm going crazy."

A dark silence filled the cab. At another time the taxi's strong stench of pine cleanser might have offended her; now she was thankful it masked the odor of blood from Stephen's shirt. After pulling onto I-129 south and finding a comfortable speed, the driver snatched the mike off the in-dash CB radio.

Julia leaned forward to touch his shoulder before he keyed it. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Need to call the fare in. Company regulations."

"Hold on a sec." She turned to Allen, shook her head. He nodded and scooted to the edge of the seat.

"A third hundred," he said, "if your records and your memory say you took us to Oak Ridge."

As the driver appeared to study the road ahead, his hand hooked itself over the seat, palm up. Allen slapped the bill into it. The money joined the other hundreds in the driver's shirt pocket.

"Four-fifteen," he said into the mike.

"Go ahead, four-fifteen," a woman's voice squawked.

"Got a fare to Oak Ridge. Let you know when I'm back."

"Ten-four, four-fifteen. Hey, Manny, you know anything about the excitement in the vicinity of Church and Market?"

"Negative, Nora. What's up?"

"Sounds like a bank robbery."

Manny's shoulders stiffened. Allen glanced nervously at Julia.

"Frank's been screaming at me through the box for ten minutes. Says someone shot up his steed."

"Wow," he intoned stoically to Nora, then clipped the mike to the radio. "Those hot C-notes you been feeding me, Jack?" He kept his eyes on the road.

"No," Allen said. "The bank wasn't robbed. If it was, our deal is off and you can come clean about where you really took us. Okay?"

He didn't answer immediately. "That's Oak Ridge, right?"

Allen sighed. "Right."

"Funny how that town looks more and more like Maryville every day."

forty-five

They made the half-hour drive into Maryville in

relative silence. The driver queried them for knowledge of the events back on Church Street, but they claimed ignorance. When they responded to his attempts at small talk in monosyllables, he flipped on his radio to a country station and didn't speak again.

A few times, Stephen groaned quietly. He simply smiled reassuringly when Allen or Julia turned to him.

Allen's head ached with disturbing thoughts. What had he gotten himself into? In the space of one day, he'd been driven from his home, nearly murdered several times, and thrown into a fugitive run with the brother he hadn't seen in two years and a streetwise federal agent.

He glanced at their profiles. They were deep in their own thoughts. As he watched, Stephen closed his eyes slowly, exhausted and hurting. As much as Allen begrudged his brother's choices, he admired what he'd just done. The fact that Stephen had held his own with an obvious warrior boggled his mind.

And Julia. He shook his head in wonder. Even while the killer was battling Stephen, her decisive action was stunning. Running toward the guy as he was about to crush Stephen's head, firing off round after round, driving and holding him back so they could make their escape—all while the killer was shooting back! Some of it was a product of her training, sure, but either you were born with courage or you weren't; no amount of instruction could instill raw bravery. Reliving those harrowing moments heightened his sense that something special had occurred.

He'd heard about men in combat who found themselves surrounded and outnumbered. Later they'd claim that everything had come together in that moment: with bullets and shrapnel whistling past their heads, they instantly remembered minute details of every evasive maneuver they had ever learned in training or in the field, they could accurately predict every inch of terrain they had never seen, their marksmanship became flawless, their feet sure. Only after escaping certain death did they realize that they had done things they could never, ever repeat or explain. But they had survived.

What Julia and Stephen had done back there was something like that.

His eyes traced the contours of her face, turned in profile. The strong forehead, straight nose, full lips. She was gorgeous—not in a fashion-model way, but with the kind of delicate beauty that shocks school-age boys into realizing there are things about girls worth noticing. Still, Allen found himself appreciating her for qualities the mirror could not reflect: the quickness of thought and fearlessness that had saved them from the killer. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt desire for a woman because of her strength of character, intelligence, compassion, or other uncaressable trait. The realization that he felt that way now made his stomach tumble, a thrill he had not experienced in years. He was vaguely aware that his attraction for her benefited him in a more valuable way as well: it took his mind off the predicament they were in.

Thirty minutes after leaving Knoxville, the taxi rolled into Maryville. Julia stared out at the passing buildings. She seemed to seek out each street sign as they passed it, nodding as though committing the name to memory—familiarizing herself with a locale from which they may have to escape. Very professional. He smiled, but the necessity of her precautions made him unable to hold it.

She noticed his attention and smiled, sweet but absent, then returned to her reconnaissance.

Allen looked out his own window. As he watched the sun-drenched town unfold in all its disarming beauty, he felt a pang of envy for those who lived peaceful lives here or visited with nothing more pressing on their minds than finding the nearest gas station or restaurant or bathroom. Maryville, nestled in the shadows of the Great Smoky Mountains and liberally studded with century-old buildings and trees in full bloom, made him ache for his own hometown, the near-perfect life he'd carved there for himself. His face flushed with anger at the faceless people who'd taken it from him.

Julia's voice distracted him.

"Pull in here."

Allen followed her finger to a Motel 6 sign just ahead. The driver whipped into the parking lot without slowing and jerked to a stop in front of the office at one end of the L-shaped structure. Bright blue and orange doors alternated like opposing sentinels before the rooms at ground level and behind the wrought iron railing of a second-story balcony.

Julia and Stephen clambered out as Allen paid double the fare. He climbed out on the driver's side and watched Julia over the roof as she pulled a newspaper from a machine, folded it, and slipped it into an open side pocket of the gym bag.

"Take care, buddy," the driver said, and Allen believed he meant it. Their melancholy silence had conveyed the true depth of their plight more than he'd realized.

"Just remember our deal."

"Oak Ridge."

Allen slapped the roof in acknowledgment, and the taxi pulled away.

forty-six

In the shade of the balcony, Stephen stood solid as

a totem pole, stone-faced and still a bit dazed by his injuries, which had to be cleaned and dressed.

Allen wanted a few hours of shut-eye for himself. He reached for the office door, but Julia stopped him.

"Not here," she said. Through the glass door, they could see that the office was unoccupied. Behind the brochure-crowded counter, a shadow moved on the open door to a back room. Julia hitched her head to the side, urging the men to follow her. They moved quickly into a breezeway at the elbow of the building where an ice machine and a soda dispenser hummed quietly.

"We're not going to take any more chances," she said. "The people after us are too determined and too resourceful. There's another motel about a mile back the way we came."

"Think the cabbie will rat us out?" Allen asked.

She smiled. Rat us out. "The killer saw us take off in the taxi." She combed her fingers through her hair, a quick, unconscious motion. "He was trying to shoot at us and dodge traffic at the same time, but I'm sure he took note of the taxi number or license plate. The guy's too proficient not to. The cabbie may or may not stick to his story about dropping us off in . . . Oak Ridge, you said?"

Allen nodded. "Yeah, it's a small town about the same distance from Knoxville as Maryville, but in the opposite direction. I figured the cabbie's odometer would support the story."

"Let's not count on it working. Sooner or later, our enemies will figure they've been duped. You figure that killer could pressure the truth out of the cabbie?"

"Without breaking a sweat," Stephen said. If the strong resonance of his words was any indication, he was feeling better.

"How are you doing?" Julia asked.

"Flesh wound."

"So what was that kung fu stuff back there?" Allen asked.

"Tang soo do, actually," Stephen said. "Like tae kwon do, but its emphasis is on respecting the humanity of your opponent. The object is to use only the moves and the force necessary to stop an attack, escalating the severity of your blows only as the threat becomes greater."

"How much greater could that warrior's threat have been?"

"Shoulda brought a rocket launcher."

"You should have brought some brains," Julia snapped. "That was a stupid move, taking him on."

Stephen looked hurt. Allen realized that Julia's bold actions had impressed his brother as well.

Stephen said, "I knew if we just ran, he'd overtake us, shoot us or something. I thought the only chance we had was for me to confront him. Turned out that was like a gazelle picking a fight with a tiger."

"I thought you did well," said Allen. "And you're right, we'd probably all be dead if you hadn't fought him."

"And that's how we'll all end up if we don't get moving." Julia shifted the gym bag to her right shoulder. "Let's take a back street to the motel."

The thought of a cool, dark motel room made Allen drowsy. He'd risen early yesterday after a restless night, only to put in a typically hectic day, followed by a decidedly untypical night of escaping from gun-toting killers. Three hours of fitful sleep in the cramped front seat of Stephen's Vega just didn't cut it. He heard himself say, "Four hours of undisturbed slumber sounds like nirvana to me."

"No sleep, Allen. We don't have time. I have some calls to make, and you have some errands to run."

Her words knocked him back a step. Who was she to determine their agenda? Returning her direct gaze, he sensed that the way he responded would shape an important dynamic to their relationship. He'd always been a leader himself, yielding authority to no one, especially a woman. She might have more experience in covert matters, but did her knowledge of the criminal mind and her prowess with weapons give her a right to assume control of their destinies? As he opened his mouth to protest, the ice machine loudly dumped a tray of ice into its holding bin.

Allen jumped and snapped his head toward the machine, feeling Stephen tense up beside him. Julia didn't flinch, merely continued to watch him. It seemed that surviving in the shadowy underworld of dark villains had made her unflappable. He had to admit, regardless of her gender and age, she was the most qualified to see them through this insane battle.

"What?" she asked.

"I think I feel a second wind coming on."

She spun and strode out the far end of the breezeway, heading for the street that ran parallel to Broadway Avenue.

He was glad she hadn't smiled. Stephen stepped past him, briefly patting him on the back with a mitt-sized hand.

"I will not give sleep to my eyes, or slumber to my eyelids," he said and walked on.

"Come again?" Allen moved to catch up with him.

"Psalm 132. David was determined to build God's temple. Julia is determined to triumph over these people after us." Stephen was walking in great strides now, either feeling no pain or simply ignoring it. The right side of his shirt clung to his skin. The blood on it had spread like a perspiration stain under his arm, spanning down to his hip.

"We have been moved already beyond endurance and need rest," Allen recited. At Stephen's inquisitive look, he said, "John Maynard Keynes, first Baron of Tilton."

"'Be strong, show yourself a man.' First Kings."

Allen laughed. "'A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.' Steward Alsop."

"Oh-ho!" Stephen roared, ready to counter.

They walked on like that, lobbing the wisdom of others at each other. Julia marched silently ten feet ahead, leading them toward the motel. While the bright sun warmed their skin, a gentle breeze sweeping off the mountains kept them from perspiring. Traversing this quiet back street so soon after arriving eased their sense of being pursued. This place, where an occasional dog barked from its backyard home and children drew hopscotch grids with colored chalk in driveways, was galaxies away from the pit that spawned germ-creating madmen and their bloody minions. Tension evaporated in the heat like morning dew. For a few minutes, they even felt safe.

The slowing movements of Julia's head revealed that her darting scrutiny of their surroundings had turned to careful observance. They deviated from their course once to patronize a drugstore she spotted across Broadway. Stephen purchased medical supplies and an XXL T-shirt emblazoned with the message HUGGABLE, which he probably should have slipped into at the store, but he decided to wait until they were ensconced in the motel. All three picked up toiletries.

Ten minutes later, Julia brought the group to a halt.

"Okay, there's the motel." A portion of its sign was visible over the roof of a house. "Allen, we'll say we're married. Stephen, hang out here for about fifteen minutes, then come. Our room will be the one with the washcloth sticking over the top of the door. We'll try to get one around back."

In the glow of the first brotherly camaraderie he had experienced in years, Allen had almost forgotten their fugitive status. "Why should he wait here?" he asked.

"Two shall live where three would die." She grinned and walked away.

"Shakespeare?"

"Julia Matheson," she called over her shoulder.

Allen threw Stephen an exasperated look and hustled after her.

forty-seven

All the rooms at the motel faced busy Broadway Avenue, so Julia insisted on keeping the curtains closed. Even with the lamps on, the room, decorated in brown hues, appeared murky. It was the sort of room for illicit rendezvous, drunken binges, suicide. Allen was sure it had seen its share of each; the stark ugliness of it alone could drive someone to self-destruction. As Julia fiddled with the zipper of her gym bag, he plopped onto the bed and pulled a pillow over his face.

"Did Goody say anything else?" she asked.

He lifted the pillow up to look at her.

"You said he mentioned Ebola, that it was man-made, coming here . . . Anything else?"

He thought. "He said something-pora. I didn't catch all of it. I thought maybe purpura, a rash of purple spots caused by internal bleeding. It fits. He mentioned some names. Karl Litt."

"Lit? L-i-t?"

"I guess. I Googled Karl L-i-t and L-i-t-t. Nothing. He said to tell Jodi and Brice and Brett—"

"Barrett."

"Barrett. He said to tell them he loved them."

"His wife and sons," Julia said, dropping down on the bed, the laptop forgotten in her hands.

"And you."

"Huh?"

"After 'Barrett,' he said 'Julia.'"

"He did?"

"'Tell them I love them. Jodi, Brice, Barrett, Julia.'"

Stephen's hearty thumps resounded through the door. Allen rose with a groan to admit him.

"Check the peephole," Julia said, turning away, wiping her eyes as if she were scratching an itch on her eyebrow.

"I am, I am," Allen said, though he wouldn't have without her warning.

Even through the peephole's fish-eye lens, there was no mistaking the hulking figure outside the door. Allen pulled it open. With the sun at his back, Stephen looked truly haggard. His hair and beard stood out in all directions; a tuft of fur protruded from a place just above his belly where his shirt had lost a button; blood, road dirt, and concrete dust scuffed his clothes; the lines on his face were deeper than they'd been the night before. Clutching the crumpled bag from the drugstore, he was a poster child for the homeless and destitute. He sauntered in, lowered himself into an armchair nearly as tattered as he. He stretched out his long legs and planted his feet on the bed.

"I'm feeling my age," he moaned.

Allen took the bag from him and said, "Take off your shirt."

"I'm all right." He raised his arm in protest and stopped short, skewing his face in pain.

"Yeah, right. Take it off." Allen began lining the supplies up along the bottom edge of the bed. "Needle and thread. Did you get needle and thread?"

"It's in there." He tossed the shirt into a wastebasket by Julia. She moved it into the bathroom.

"Get me some hot water while you're in there," Allen called. He found the small travel packet of thread and needles at the bottom of the bag and opened it. He knelt beside Stephen and started examining the worst of his wounds. "So where'd you learn that 'dang you too' stuff?"

"Tang soo do. One of my parishioners runs a dojang. He thought it would help with my coordination and keep me in shape."

"It worked," Julia said, setting down an ice bucket of steaming water and two washcloths next to Allen.

"I attend his class twice a week and perform katas every day." He glanced under his arm at Allen, seeming to assess his interest.

"Katas?"

"Formal exercises against imaginary opponents. They teach you how to control your breathing rhythm and eye focus; they develop balance, gracefulness, strength . . . stuff like that."

"What level are you?"

"Second dan black—ahhhhh!"

"Sorry," Allen said, dabbing at a particularly dark clump of blood. "Black belt? That's how you took down those guys at your cabin?"

He glanced at Julia, heading into the bathroom. She looked back and winked. If she realized he was trying to distract Stephen from the repairs he was making to his flesh, then Stephen probably realized it too; he was allowing himself to be distracted.

Stephen frowned. "The first one caught me off guard, the assailant, I mean. I just gave him an elbow in the face, pretty sloppy. My sa bom nim would have a fit."

"And the other?"

"I was getting into form with him. I gave him a hammerfist strike to the temple." He laughed. "I'd never seen it for real. Incredible."

Allen threaded a needle, prodded a spot on Stephen's side, and poised the needle over it.

"You still into meditation?"

"Keeps me sane."

Julia stepped from the bathroom as she brushed her teeth. Allen could tell she didn't want to miss the conversation.

He flashed a big smile at her. "He used to disappear inside himself so deeply, he wouldn't hear us yelling at him."

"I heard you."

"We used to say he was heavily meditated."

Julia laughed, a nice sound.

Allen said, "You know, being a toothbrush is the worst job in the world."

Stephen blurted, "Tell that to the toilet paper!"

Julia laughed again, spraying tiny droplets of toothpaste.

"Hey," Allen said, "you stole my joke," and Julia laughed harder.

After a few moments, she spoke around the toothbrush. "I thought meditation was something Buddhists and New Agers did."

"Depends on where your mind's at. I meditate on the ways of Jesus."

"But he got into it before all that Jesus stuff," Allen said, unable to keep a measure of disdain out of his voice.

"All right," Stephen said. Soothing, placating.

"This is going to hurt," Allen said.

"Just do it."

Allen looped the thread through a dozen times, cinching each stitch to close the wound. He remembered a joke about a new doc trying to suture a man with palsy. He turned to tell it, but Julia had disappeared back into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came out, but he wasn't in the mood anymore. Instead, he asked Stephen, "Having a black belt, what do you think of the Warrior?"

Warrior. With all the labels that described him—enemy, pursuer, assailant, killer, assassin—the three of them seemed to have settled on warrior. The title was disturbingly appropriate.

"One bad dude."

"I mean in skill, fighting skill."

"Allen, were you watching? He had me, would have killed me if Julia hadn't chased him off. He is faster, smarter, stronger than any man I've sparred with. He moved like he knew everything I was going to do and responded to it as though he'd had weeks to think it over."

"But we got away."

Stephen said nothing.

"You seemed . . ." Julia paused, thinking about her words. "Hesitant to engage him."

When Stephen didn't respond, Allen said, "He's a pacifist."

Stephen shook his head. "C. S. Lewis said that unless you can show him that a Nazified Europe would be better than the war that stopped it, he could not be a pacifist. That's how I feel."

"I've never seen a pacifist fight like that," Julia said.

Allen said, "I'm surprised you fought at all, after what happened.'"

"What happened?" Julia looked between brothers, getting nothing back.

Allen said, "He—"

"I just swore off . . . being like that. That's all."

Allen bit his tongue. He leaned back on his haunches, inspecting his work and the work yet to do.

Despite the brief tension, a peace settled over them then—the tranquility that comes from being at ease with the people around you. The shared experience of fighting for survival had connected them in a way Allen didn't understand. He felt it, nonetheless, and apparently the others did too.

Julia was slouched in a chair, seeming to assess both brothers. A smile quivered against her lips like an incomplete thought.

Memory has a tendency to seize upon moments that seem to an outsider mundane and unremarkable. The occasion is special only to participants, and even they often don't recognize it as memorable. This moment would prove to be like that. They would remember the stillness in the midst of chaos, their casual postures in the shadowy room, the sense of camaraderie.

The calm before the storm.

forty-eight

The gauntlet came down hard on the tabletop. It sat there, empty and cold and very frightening.

"It's the Warrior's arm," Stephen said, quietly awed.

Julia nodded.

Allen hopped off the bed for a closer look. Sure enough, the black, spike-knuckled gauntlet he'd seen shatter through the bank window lay motionless on the dresser. Somehow it seemed more sinister now. Before, he had not seen it in its entirety, bulging with artificial muscles, curled into a taloned claw. He reached for it, hesitated, then gripped its forearm. It was warm, like flesh, but firm as bone. He lifted it, surprised by its lightness.

"It can't weigh more than a pound," he said, stunned. He tilted it. The fingers closed into a fist—

Chick.

He jumped back a step, letting the gauntlet slip from his grasp. Both Julia and Stephen jumped as well, thinking the thing had snapped at Allen or done something equally startling.

"That's the sound I heard last night in the cemetery," Allen said, staring at the gauntlet, now palm-up on the carpet. "While the Warrior was searching for me: chick-chu, chick-chu, rhythmic like that."

"Clenching and unclenching his fist," Julia said.

Allen nodded, watching the gauntlet as if he expected it to scurry toward him.

Stephen picked it up. He pushed his hand into it, reaching straight out. The gauntlet instantly took on the appearance of black skin, buckling a bit the way skin would when Stephen turned his palm up, bulging in the forearm when he squeezed his fist. "Incredible. Where'd this one come from, Wal-Mart?"

"It was left in my car by the Warrior, the one who got blown away last night," Julia said, holding out her hand.

Stephen slipped it off—reluctantly, Allen thought—and presented it to her.

Julia returned it to the gym bag. "Just another mystery, I guess. I don't know how much good it'll do us, but it is evidence . . . of some kind." She tossed a folded newspaper at Allen. "Find us something to drive. Private party. Not too expensive. Something we can sleep in, if necessary."

"We can sleep in anything."

"Comfortably, I mean. A van or station wagon."

"I guess I can handle that." He snapped the paper open.

Julia said, "Whatever you find, make a big deal about looking it over, then tell the seller you prefer paying in cash. I doubt he'll object. Have him drive you to that FirstBank we passed on the way in. While Stephen keeps him occupied, go ask the teller to break a hundred, and make sure you get one of those little cash envelopes. Before you leave, put the whole purchase price in the envelope. Then hand it to the seller."

"Why the big production?" Allen asked.

"The alternative is to whip out a few grand in hundred-dollar bills. Just a bit suspicious. The cabbie thought there was a bank robbery in Knoxville. The media coverage might mention us, might not. In any case, we need to deflect suspicion as much as possible."

Allen smirked at her. "You ever get tired of thinking?"

"Not when my life depends on it."

Stephen picked up the drugstore bag and headed for the bath-room. At the door, he turned back toward Julia. "Seems like you're gaining momentum. Feeling better?"

Her face was grim. "I'm just tired of holding the dirty end of the stick."

Atropos sat behind the wheel of his rented Buick and watched the Yellow Cab garage across the street. Sunlight poured into the canyon of buildings and blazed against the surface of the windshield, making it impenetrable to inquiring eyes. Good thing, too, for the stony scowl of the face inside was the seed of nightmares. If moods were animals, his would be an enraged tiger, hateful and destructive. The events of the night before had left him irreparably damaged. A black void swirled through his being, and only the blood of those responsible could possibly fill it. His soul's need for their deaths was more acute than his body's need for oxygen.

He thought of the targets. Julia Matheson. Stephen Parker. Allen Parker. They had been full of fear and terror. They knew they could not win but had fought and run out of instinct. In the end, instinct would fail; where strength and skill were lacking, only hope had a chance to prevail, and he had given them no reason to hope. The ones who lasted longest were the ones who held to their belief that they would live—until their stopped hearts told them they didn't.

But there was something about them . . .

He felt a pang of anxiety, just a fleeting flash of doubt. Trusting his own instincts, he pursued it. The big one, Stephen, had strength and a few good moves, he'd give him that. The woman was brave and feisty. That meant she couldn't be counted on to behave the way most of his targets did when they knew he was after them. She wouldn't cower. He had not seen the doctor in action, except to run. But he was a physician. Probably intelligent. If he wasn't merely a savant in the medical field, if he possessed the ability to focus his intellect on things outside his field of expertise—an ability few seemed to have, in Atropos's experience—then the three of them together might make a challenging opponent. He'd have to pick them off one at a time. He'd have to stay sharp.

This headache wasn't helping. He'd downed half a bottle of Tylenol in the past two hours; it hadn't taken the edge off at all. He pulled off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose. He ran his fingers back through his hair, slipped the glasses back on.

A cab was pulling into the garage, his cab. The prey's accomplice had returned before the end of his shift, as Atropos knew he would. His wallet undoubtedly fattened, the man would have seen no reason to sweat through another three hours of drudgery. Predictable. Equally predictable was the lie he'd tell about the destination of his last fare and, ultimately, his telling of the truth as the bridge of his nose slowly collapsed.

Chick-chu. Chick-chu.

Atropos waited for the man to emerge and head for his personal car. When he did, Atropos hopped from the Buick and darted across the street, a disarming smile creasing his lips and a black-fisted hand concealed in his jacket pocket.

forty-nine

Alone in the shadows after Allen and Stephen left to buy a conversion van, Julia felt her adrenaline ebb. Malaise pressed on her like a warm blanket. She flung open the curtains, hoping the sunlight would dispel the room's gloominess, and the traces of her own. A quick scan of the parking lot and the street beyond, then she stepped clear of the window. Previously, she'd wanted the curtains shut because of Allen and Steven's naivete concerning covert operations. Her experience in babysitting government witnesses had taught her that most people will habitually step up to open windows at least a few times, even when they know better. Using the computer at the table and moving along the edges of the room, she would be invisible to the traffic on Maryville's main thoroughfare in front of the motel. An enemy directly outside the window would see her, but that would mean their enemies had found them anyway.

Which was a possibility she couldn't dismiss. The Warrior's appearance in Knoxville confirmed her suspicions that the people after them were powerful and resourceful. And Allen's comment about the "resurrected" killer had jarred her. She'd decided during the cab ride not to ponder the metaphysical implications of a killer who appeared to have come back from the dead to hunt them. That an assassin with obvious black-op experience had targeted them was enough; contemplating anything deeper threatened to unravel the moorings her mind had on reality. Besides, asking unanswerable questions only fostered frustration and drained brainpower from more productive endeavors. Whatever the explanation, he was after them. Her job was to keep them alive.

She pushed her hair back with both hands, feeling the grit and grease from the undercarriages she'd crawled beneath. She walked slowly into the bathroom and pressed her palms against the countertop, leaning over the sink. One of the two fluorescent tubes above her flickered madly, transforming her reflected face into something from a carnival fun house. The brown of her eyes, eyebrows, and hair, the maroon of a small cut on her cheekbone she didn't remember getting, appeared black against the white of her skin.

She splashed cold water on her face, then did it again. She poured it over the back of her neck, ran streams of it into her hair. Yes. Her skin thirsted for the water's briskness, its energizing purity. She threw her arms back to let her jacket fall to the floor, followed by her cream blouse. Water cooled her chest, streaked over her belly. The next thing, she was naked under the icy jets of the shower. The cold robbed her breath but ignited her mind. In minutes, she felt new, ready.

Then she added heat to the stream and lathered soap over her body and shampoo into her hair. She leaned against the tiles and watched the suds spiral down the drain until the water was clear. A sharp toss of her head snapped the water from her hair, and she stepped out. In the mirror, her skin glowed a healthy pink.

Okay, she thought. Time to get to work.

She sat cross-legged on the bed, the computer in her lap.

She called up the web site Bonsai had given her. It was blank except for a single rectangle in the middle of the screen that read CLICK ME. She did and was prompted to enter a pass phrase. The third one she entered caused the words in the box to change to PLEASE wait. She worked a towel over her moist hair. She hoped that Bonsai had been able to decipher the chip and that it contained enough evidence to end this thing.

He worked out of a home office in Morrison, Colorado, a quaint tourist town in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Denver. She pictured him there now, playing his computer keyboard with the vigor of a virtuoso pianist. In fact, he bore a fair resemblance to a young Beethoven: wild hair, fiery eyes, stern mouth. She assumed the acne had cleared up by now. When he typed, fingers blurring over the keys, his head bobbed spastically to a tune only he could hear.

A minute later she wondered what she was waiting for, if a glitch would keep her waiting forever. Not like Bonsai, but nothing was sure with computers or the Internet, regardless of the skills of the person trying to tame it.

Then a voice came through the speakers. "Julia?"

"Bonsai! Did you crack Vero's code?"

"Nope."

Her stomach lurched nauseously.

"Nothing to crack," he continued.

"What?"

"It's not encrypted. It's a new type of digital media, very cutting-edge. High-resolution, lightning-fast rendering, incredibly dense code. It requires an unholy amount of computing power to drive it. What compact disks are to eight-tracks, this thing is to anything on the market today."

"So what, I need special hardware?"

"Not anymore. I linked with some buddies at MIT's computer lab. After some trial and error, they were able to supply me with a program that converted this code to one that a top-of-the-line Pentium can handle."

"So what's on it? What kind of files?"

"Mostly video. You lose quite a bit of resolution in the conversion process, so it's grainier than the original, and the image stutters a little, but you can see it okay. What kind of brain you running?"

"The Bureau's best. Custom configured to power some pretty incredible satellite communications software."

"The clock-speed has to be fast, Julia. Nothing you can pick up at Sears. I mean—"

"Prototype Athlon two-gig processor, two gigs of RAM, a gig dedicated to video rendering, and a half-tera hard drive."

"Yow! Okay, then. I'm ready to send when you are."

"I need another favor first."

"What do you have in mind?"

"Hack into the Knoxville Police Department and the Tennessee State Criminal Investigation Division for any pending investigations of clone-phone dealers in the 423 area code. Make sure it's not a sting operation, just an investigation. I also need the name of one of the dealer's customers. Cross-reference it with recent busts; I don't want the dealer talking to the guy. Doable?"

"Consider it done. VOIP me in thirty minutes."