Germ

sixty-three

Now, disguised as Julia's "new player," Allen tried not to think of how completely alone he was. Julia and Stephen were waiting in the hangar, in the comfort of a Lear jet they'd secured as a staging area for this "operation," as Julia called it. He mustered his courage and edged to the corner of the hangar. He peered first left, at the parked planes, then right, toward the distant terminal.

All clear.

He stepped out of the shadowy alley and into the waning light, heading toward Atropos's Cessna. He walked along the front of a hangar, past the huge closed doors, moving fast. At the last hangar before a long stretch of tarmac, he heard music and saw that the sliding doors stood about five feet apart. As he approached, Freddie Mercury's mournful vocals swelled:

Mama, just killed a man

Put a gun against his head

Pulled my trigger, now he's dead . . .

A loud clang, followed by a string of expletives, slipped out the door. Allen hurried past the opening without looking. A sign jutted from the corner of the hangar: CAUTION—AIRPLANE CROSSING. He walked under it, casting a furtive glance to the left at an abandoned-looking building fifty yards beyond the end of the hangar. Wooden crates, oil drums, and tires formed a huge wedge against one side.

For about sixty seconds he felt utterly exposed—empty tarmac stretching away to a runway on his right; on his left, only crumbling asphalt, followed by a field of dry weeds for a hundred yards to the perimeter fence. Behind him lay the hangars, and way past them, the terminal. He resisted the urge to look over his shoulder. Instead, he tried to identify the planes he was approaching: a Beechcraft Bonanza, a Piper Cherokee, a Gulfstream IV—sweet. Then he was among the planes and felt the burden of exposure fade away like the remaining light.

The Cessna loomed larger with each plane he passed. It was parked at least fifty paces from the last plane. Worse, it was canted toward the terminal, toward him. A person sitting in the cockpit would have to be blind to miss his approach. But he needed to get right on top of the thing for Julia's scheme to work. To get there, he hoped to come off as an aviation geek with a weakness for big-ticket jets; later he'd be the menace Julia thought the assailants would respond to.

He stepped up to the last plane before the Cessna, putting it between himself and his target. It was a Piper Saratoga, the model that carried John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law to the bottom of the Atlantic. He pretended to examine the nose propeller but was actually scrutinizing the Cessna. The cockpit windows were too high, the interior too dark to know whether he was being watched in return. Through the six oval port windows on this side, he caught movement, a flicker as though someone had walked past all of them. Again light flickered against them, and he realized something inside was strobing softly, a television or computer screen, or maybe a security device.

The sun had traveled beyond the horizon now, pulling the last glow of solar radiance from the sky. Twilight began its brief presentation, with the scent of night close behind. The jet appeared more ominous in this light, more like a living thing that killed to survive.

Absently keeping his hand on the prop's nose cone, Allen maneuvered to the other side of the Piper, made an insincere attempt to examine a propeller, then broke away and strode for the Cessna. He tried to appear casual—just a fellow pilot admiring a beautiful flying machine, or airport security ensuring satisfaction with the accommodations. He'd have to decide which he was if he happened to be challenged before he could tamper with the jet's entry door—thereby becoming a threat, aka the new player. He pulled the gauntlet from under his Windbreaker and held it against the side of his upper leg. He cringed at the gravel crunching loudly under his feet.

Now that he was close, he tried to appear "sneaky, malicious, and knowledgeable"—Julia's words again. He bent his knees a bit and glanced around quickly, thinking these things fell under the "sneaky" category. He hoped he'd only have to rattle the door latch and run; no problem—what ten-year-old hadn't done that? If that didn't stir whoever was inside—Oh Lord, let it be a pilot, not Atropos—he wasn't sure what he'd do. Rattle-and-run was one thing; it was something altogether different to slap on a deer suit and tromp down to the watering hole during hunting season. He tucked the gauntlet back inside his Windbreaker. Nerves would have him extracting and replacing it every ten seconds if he let them.

He skirted around the jet's fiercely pointed nose and found himself standing in front of the closed door. He turned the latch, and the door sprang open, a portion hinging up, a section with built-in steps coming down. An air-conditioned breeze blew past him, tinged with a faint sweet fragrance—aftershave or overripe fruit. The interior was dark except for the grayish-blue strobing he'd seen through the windows. He leaned in. A galley with sink and cupboards sat opposite the door. The cockpit to the left. Leaning farther, he saw the cabin was set up like a studio apartment. He took a step up. The strobe came from a big plasma TV on the back wall. It was flashing through channel after channel, waiting for just the right show to appear, but no one was watching it. The plane was too small for hiding places. Allen knew that some pilots turned on lights or radios or other electronics when they left their unhangared planes to give the appearance of occupancy. A channel-changing plasma was something new, but he

supposed it was effective. But why would a security-minded person leave the door unlocked? Only one reason came to mind: because he had stepped out for only a moment, maybe just to the GA building for a vending machine snack or newspaper.

He backed off the step and crouched to look under the plane toward the general aviation building and terminal. No one in sight.

He stood and went into the plane. The light from the TV was enough to guide him to a small desk, where a laptop computer, a printer, and scattered papers lay. His heart shrank in his chest, a painful movement that left him hyperventilating. Printed on the top page was a picture of Julia, a brief description printed underneath. Scratchy, handwritten notes in the margin: pistol—under left arm, tactically evasive, carries duffle—why? He pushed it aside and saw his own picture, from his driver's license. Dr.—will mend wounds? Major ties to Chatt. Next: a picture of Steven. Big, strong—tae kwon do? Hesitant—weakness? The next page appeared to be a work order or invoice. Under the word Objectives, their names and one item were listed numerically:

1. Julia Matheson

2. Allen Parker

3. Stephen Parker

4. Memory chip (see desc.) and any known copies Then:

Package price, $500,000. All or none.

Warning: Other teams involved; well trained, well armed. Bonus, $20,000/per.

Next to the last line was a handwritten notation: Kendrick Reynolds.

Kendrick Reynolds. Maybe the old man was right—a shared enemy made him a friend. Kendrick had "teams" involved. To find Julia, Allen, and Stephen? To stop Atropos? He scanned the sheet. No addressee. This plane could belong to Atropos or another of Litt's hit teams or both. One thing was clear: someone other than Kendrick Reynolds wanted them dead.

A toilet flushed.

That minijet-engine sound familiar to every post-diaper human in the developed world.

He looked back toward the plasma, past it to a small alcove, where a door opened.

He grabbed a handful of papers and bolted for the exit. Something crashed behind him, then something else. His head cracked against the top frame of the opening. He ducked under, fell, missed the steps completely, and landed on the tarmac, wrenching his shoulder, pulling muscles in his back. The papers blew out of his hand and whipped away. He scrambled under the plane, came to his feet, and ran.

Like an auditory shadow of his own footsteps came the rhythmic footfalls of his pursuer, close. He bolted past the Piper Saratoga. He swerved around another plane and sprinted with all his might toward the third hangar. It sounded as if the man behind him slammed into a plane, crashed to the ground, and returned to the pursuit, all in the space of four seconds.

Allen flashed under the Airplane Crossing sign and promptly crashed into a mechanic who'd stepped into his path from between the hangar doors. Before he was ever really down, he was back up again, the mechanic still rolling and hollering.

Past the first hangar.

One more and he'd—

A bullet slammed into him. No noise—just the pinpoint force of a locomotive. He went down, hitting a patch of oily tarmac face-first, feeling gravel bite into his flesh, gouging deep furrows and ripping away a two-inch slice of beard.

I'm shot! shot! shot!—the only thought wailing through his head like a siren.

His lungs burned for air, his mouth gasped in vain. Finally a dusty cloud roiled in, at once relieving and torturing his lungs. His spine felt crushed. He tried to move, and did—but not well and not without a giant's hand painfully squeezing his torso.

He cursed the bulky Kevlar vest under his clothing.

This thing doesn't work!

He screamed and got his legs under him. He leaped forward. The gauntlet spilled out, and he knocked it aside in a mad scurry to put distance between him and his would-be killer. Fire radiated between his shoulder blades, but he pushed it aside.

Run! Just run!

Pounding behind him . . .

Then nothing.

The gauntlet must have slowed him. Yes!

Then he realized: his pursuer had stopped to aim. Allen zagged to the right, then veered left. He heard a plunk against the hangar by his shoulder, like a rock tossed at it. Not a rock, he knew: a bullet. He was almost at the alleyway between the hangars, wondering if he'd make it down the narrow corridor without being picked off, when he saw light slicing the twilight from an opening in the hangar doors. That was the way. Shut the doors behind him. Of course, it would have a lock or latch or something . . .

He made for the opening.

Almost there . . .

Another bullet punched him in the back. His face hit the edge of the door. He bounced off, hit the ground, rolled to push himself up.

The impenetrable bulk of a gauntleted arm encircled his throat and yanked him up.

sixty-four

Julia heard a scream and had just followed Stephen into the alley through the hangar's side entrance when the big sliding door in front clattered as if someone were pushing it open. She stopped in her tracks, holding on to the door.

"Stephen!" she called. "He's in here!"

Then she was back inside, dodging around planes and taking an infuriatingly circuitous path toward the front.

He's all right, she thought. He made it back.

Shortly after Allen had left, it became too dark to maneuver safely through the hangar, so she had flicked on the overhead lights. Now she watched for approaching shadows on the painted gray floors. She expected to collide with Allen at any moment. She cleared the last plane and froze solid.

Outside the big doors, illuminated only by a strip of pale light, Atropos held Allen in a death grip. Allen's head was yanked backward, his arm twisted grotesquely around his back, where Atropos gripped his wrist and hair in one black fist. The killer spun to glare inside, jerking Allen around like a doll. His other hand clutched Allen's exposed neck.

Dressed in black that faded into the darkening night, his skin white in the hangar's glow, Atropos resembled Julia's nightmare vision of Dracula—if Dracula needed vision correction and a comb. He smiled at her, a victorious grin. She fought the urge to back away.

Then he moved—maybe it was no more than a twitch—and she knew he was about to make his escape.

She raised her gun, centering the sights on his forehead. He stared back into her eyes.

Allen was gagging, strangled. He rolled his eyes toward her, and she realized that he was not gasping for air; he was trying to speak. He mouthed the words silently.

Stephen ran up behind her.

"Stay back," she told him.

His heavy breathing seemed right at her ear.

Movement—Atropos's arm shot out and pulled the hangar door shut.

She couldn't fire, not with Allen out there. She ran to the door. Sounds came from the other side. The squeal of a hinge, rattling metal. A lock! She pulled at the door. It wouldn't budge. She listened. Silence. She backed away, aimed at where she thought the lock was, fired. A second later, two holes ripped through the sheet metal. Atropos was shooting through the door. She spun away.

"This way!" Julia shouted, retracing her route to the side entrance. She pushed through into the alley beyond. She was on her second bounding stride when muzzle flashes erupted from the front of the alley. Bullets zinged past, rattling the metal walls as they struck. No gunfire. He was using a sound suppressor and subsonic rounds, the same rig he had the night before. If it was outfitted with a laser sight, he hadn't turned it on.

She returned fire, aiming high. She wanted Atropos to think twice about shooting at them, but she couldn't risk hitting Allen.

Stephen crashed through the door.

"Down! Down! Down!" she yelled.

More flashes and explosions as their enemy shot at Stephen. He bounded off a wall, landing heavily on the ground.

She laid down cover fire, hoping Atropos would believe he was in jeopardy of being hit. She looked back and saw in the brief light of the closing door Stephen sprawled in the dead center of the alley. He wasn't moving.

"Stephen?" she growled, panic cinching her throat.

"Yeah?" Low, quiet.

"You hit? You all right?"

"We can't just lie here. He's got Allen. We gotta—"

He didn't finish. She heard scraping against the concrete, the faint rustle of clothes. A shadow shifted to her right, moving past.

"Stephen—!"

Thu! Thu! Silenced gunfire.

Bullets sailed around them, punching holes in the metal walls, tearing chunks out of the wood fencing that sealed the alley behind them. The deafening reverberations seemed to last forever.

Finally Stephen whispered, "I'm okay." He was just ahead of her, on the ground. "He's trying to pick us off."

"We can go over that fence behind us, try to come circle him."

"He'll see us."

She thought about their options. She ejected her spent magazine and replaced it with the one she kept with her shoulder holster.

"Why isn't Allen fighting?" he asked.

"Atropos had him in a death grip," she said. "He may have passed out."

"Or he's already dead." Stephen's distress was obvious. He was on the verge of doing something rash.

"If we rush him, then we all die."

He said nothing, then: "I'm going over that fence. You stay here. He can't cover us both."

"Wait a minute." She watched the disappearing rectangle of near-black at the head of the alley.

"What?"

"Just a sec." She tossed the empty magazine against the opposite wall, fifteen feet in front of their position. There was no response from their attacker. She stood and began walking slowly forward, keeping to one side. "Keep your eye on that door," she whispered, indicating the hangar's side entrance. She moved faster up the alley.

Near the end of the alley, she moved out from the wall in a wide arc. She pictured the area to her left: the tarmac in front of the last hangar, an open space leading up to the parked planes, then the jet. To her right, far past the hangar she'd just exited, were the terminal buildings and . . . She didn't want to think about what else they might find crumpled on the ground before the hangar doors. Atropos would be on the left. She braced herself for action as more and more of the area on the left side of the opening came into view.

Fully expecting to find the assassin pressed like a malicious shadow against the hangar wall, she poked her head out of the alley, drew it back in fast. Clear. Hesitating only slightly, she glanced in the other direction. Despite their situation, some of the tension she'd been holding in her neck and shoulders drained away—Atropos had not deposited Allen's twisted body on the tarmac. She found hope in that.

She signaled for Stephen to join her. When he had, they stepped into the open together. They saw it at the same time—

The Cessna.

Beyond the parked planes, it was taxiing over to the runway.

"Oh no!" She was too shocked to say anything else.

Stephen said it for her: "Allen! Atropos is taking him!"

She ran—not directly for the plane, but straight out from the alley, parallel to the jet. She would cross the tarmac and meet up with it at the runway. Far off to her left now, it would have to come back in her direction to take off. She tried not to think, only to run.

Amazingly, Stephen kept pace, then actually pulled ahead. The jet's speed increased as it turned onto the runway. Neither of them saw the wide expanse of grass that separated the parking and maintenance tarmac from the runway. Stephen hit the edge of it first and went down in a tumbling mass of dirt and grass and groans. Julia hurdled him and pushed harder. She was on a direct trajectory to intercept the plane in about twenty seconds.

She squeezed her fist, feeling the gun. The jet picked up speed fast.

She wasn't going to make it. She leaped over a runway light and hit the pavement just ahead of the jet. In seconds it would pass.

Do something!

She leveled her pistol and sent a volley of lead into the cockpit windshield. Little plumes of glass dust marked her direct hits—

Then it streaked by: whining jet engines piercing her skull, gusts of turbulence slapping her face.

She ran after it . . . ten yards . . . twenty . . . No use.

"Nooooo!" she wailed. She watched it become airborne, grow smaller, and disappear.

sixty-five

Pain . . . blinding . . . screeching . . .

Unbearable.

Allen's right shoulder felt as though a knife had been plunged into it. Flames of agony fanned out from it in hot waves, causing perspiration to erupt from his pores, drenching his hair, stinging his eyes.

He slowly swung with the movement of the jet. Handcuffs ripped into the flesh of his wrists and lower hands as the weight of his body attempted to slip his hands through the cuffs, slung over a hook in the cabin's ceiling. Streaks of blood ran down his arms. He would have used his legs to support himself had they not been hog-tied and pulled backward by a rope that looped around his neck. Relaxing his legs, allowing them to droop, pulled the noose tight against his trachea. So, through the maddening pain, through the bouts of light-headedness, he held up his legs.

But nothing compared to the excruciating pain in his shoulder. Atropos had nearly wrenched his arm off when he'd seized him outside the hangar, yanking and twisting it high behind his head. Certainly, he had torn it from its socket. Delirious, Allen pictured an anatomical chart showing the head of the humerus pulled free of the glenoid cavity, the rotator cuff crushed, the coracohumeral ligament snapped. Meticulously detailed, those charts were coldly indifferent to the suffering they described. Dangling by his arms now was like probing a gunshot wound with a shovel.

The heavy punching bag Atropos had knocked from its hook in order to hang Allen like a side of beef rolled lazily across the carpeted floor toward him. He squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth. He braced himself for the jolt of fresh pain that would ignite within his shoulder when the bag bumped his knees, which were, he guessed, about six inches off the floor. After a minute, he opened his eyes to see that the bag had reversed directions and was resting against what looked like a black body bag. Vero, Allen thought. He remembered hearing that the assassin had taken the corpse.

His abduction and bondage had been a blur of murky images, viewed through ripples of pain and fear and confusion. Atropos's iron stranglehold had discouraged, through immediate piercing agony, all attempts to break free and rendered him a puppet under the assassin's control. He'd heard the hangar door slam . . . gunshots . . . then nothing. Atropos must have knocked him unconscious, for the next thing he knew he was flying through the plane's portal like a piece of luggage . . . Time stuttered . . . then a body fell to the floor beside him: no, it was a punching bag . . . Cuffs sharp against his wrist, feet tied . . .

Can't breathe!

. . . a noose! How long had it taken for him to realize that it was the weight of his own legs strangling him? It had finally dawned on him, even before full consciousness. When his head had cleared, it throbbed—and told him he was in big trouble.

He didn't recall the takeoff, but that the jet was now airborne was indisputable.

He was alone in the cabin. Recessed spotlights in the arched ceiling cast hard white circles on a chair, a countertop, the floor, and diffused an eerie glow throughout the cabin. Though Allen had flown in a number of private jets—Lears, Hawkers, Gulfstreams—he'd seen none quite like this. The cabin resembled a living room with all the accoutrements of a modern, expensive bachelor pad: The laptop and printer he'd seen earlier. The plasma—now off. DVD player, stereo components. Weights. An extremely comfortable-looking leather chair.

All the comforts of home, with a cruising speed of five hundred miles per hour.

But it was not a home, Allen felt, as much as it was a lair. And he was the hapless victim, waiting for a creature to return for its feast of human flesh.

The cockpit door opened behind him, then clicked shut. An inky shadow fell over him, and Atropos stepped into view. His Wind-breaker removed, a dark green T-shirt clung to the ripples and bulges of his torso and biceps. His face was so taut it might have been forged in steel. He glared at Allen with eyes that revealed nothing but hate.

A cold pressure gripped Allen's jaw. Atropos had seized him, so blindingly fast that Allen wondered if he'd blacked out for a moment. The pressure increased until Allen thought his oral cavity would implode. Atropos slowly pulled his hand back. The fake beard peeled away from Allen's cheeks, breaking free of the spirit gum. The adhesive stretched and snapped like skin. Atropos tossed the hair aside.

Allen tasted blood, salty, coppery. His teeth had lacerated the insides of his cheeks. A gentle probe with his tongue hinted that a few molars may have buckled under the pressure as well.

No words passed between them. The other's cool application of pain, his own refusal to acknowledge it, conveyed mutual disrespect. Beyond that, Allen had nothing to say. Would he plead for life? He'd have better luck negotiating with a frenzied shark. Would he threaten the man, something along the lines of "You won't get away with this!" Frankly, Allen suspected that Atropos would get away with murdering him, just as he had gotten away with it before. And more important, Atropos believed he'd get away with it, so saying otherwise amounted to groveling. And groveling was something Allen would not do.

Atropos turned. He rolled away the punching bag and gripped the body bag in two hands, then dragged it to within three feet of Allen. Crouching, he unzipped the bag and spread it open.

Allen's breath went away. He wanted to scream but found nothing in him to let out. The plane seemed to plunge a thousand feet, spinning, spinning . . . Colors washed away. The pain brought him back. He studied the mess in the bag and raised his eyes to Atropos. He knew then that this went beyond Karl Litt, beyond his virus, beyond anything so . . . widespread.

This was personal.

sixty-six

From where Stephen and Julia watched, the airport security's search resembled a nocturnal sweep of still waters for a drowning victim. Spotlights cut through the black night to pan the tarmac in looping circles. Trucks trolleyed between the parked planes, invisible except for their amber flashers and the cone-shaped projections of searchlights.

Across an untamed field, beyond perimeter fencing and an unlighted street, the van sat unnoticed, positioned so both occupants could observe the airport grounds through the windshield. Inside, Julia used binoculars to track the trucks' activity. The short nail of her right index finger scraped nervously up and down the binoculars' pebbled surface. She panned right, to where two Chattanooga police cruisers formed a crude V in front of the last hangar. Their headlamps illuminated a man dressed in mechanic's overalls. He seemed to be pantomiming the entire gun battle with wildly exaggerated arm movements.

"A witness," she said coolly.

Though she hadn't realized it at the time, the sound of Allen's scream outside the hangar had propelled her into what Donnelley used to call Full Battle Mode. It was a state of heightened awareness, when every synapse sparked for only one purpose: to survive. Muscles moved, seemingly on their own and aided by healthy doses of adrenaline, to aim a firearm with point-blank accuracy or move her out of harm's way. It was like a drug, and coming down was hard. After having functioned at 200 percent, even briefly, both mind and body plunged into exhaustion. Soldiers knew it. And cops. Donnelley had been both, and he'd taught Julia how to control the descent, to keep the specter of danger alive in her mind even after its white-hot breath had cooled from her skin, until she was truly safe and ready to rest. Such thoughts fooled the body to attentiveness and tricked the adrenal gland into doling out enough super-juice to keep the mind alert. By giving that specter the cold, impassive face of Atropos, she now found keeping it alive disturbingly easy.

Stephen said nothing. His attention was riveted on the trucks and their lights. If, by chance, Allen wasn't on the Cessna, Atropos would have dumped his body somewhere between the hangars and his jet— precisely where the searchers were looking now.

After the jet took off, Stephen and Julia had no time to scout the area. On the other side of the terminal, three trucks had converged from various points and sped toward them. They'd barely made it to the alley ahead of the trucks, and through the hangar to the van in the parking lot ahead of the men who'd clambered from them.

Julia lowered the binoculars and went to a memory: Allen's attempt to speak while Atropos was gripping his neck. What had he tried to say? She moved her mouth silently, visualizing Allen's face. He had been grimacing in pain. Would that have distorted his lip movements enough to prevent her from deciphering his words? His jaw had moved twice, indicating a two-syllable word or two monosyllabic words. She went through the alphabet, comparing the movements of her mouth to his.

She was thinking of words that started with s when she felt a tug at the binoculars. She let Stephen take them. Stress etched furrows into the flesh around his eyes, on his cheeks above the beard, on his forehead.

She touched his arm. "We'll get him back."

His eyes remained glued to the search area. One of the cops had broken away from the illuminated witness to wave his flashlight beam over the tarmac behind the cars.

"That's what I'm afraid of."

"Alive."

He lowered the binoculars to glare at her. "You don't know that." Cold. Angry. He lifted the binoculars again and scanned out the windshield.

"They took him, Stephen. They took him for a reason. They'll ransom him for the chip. They'll keep him alive until they have it in their hands. That buys us time to figure out a way to get him back."

They watched as the cops climbed into their cruisers and drove single file toward the terminal. The search trucks switched off their lights and followed, leaving the area dark except for a bold strip of light falling from the slightly open hangar doors, through which the dungareed mechanic disappeared. In another minute, that light also winked out.

"Why don't we just turn over the chip?" Stephen asked, surveying the darkness outside.

"Because that won't save him." Julia shifted in her chair so she was fully facing him, one leg tucked under herself. "That chip is evidence of something. I wish I knew what, exactly. But I'll bet it's not something these guys need to complete whatever it is they're doing. They want the chip only because it's evidence they don't want getting in the wrong hands. We've seen it. We've seen them. At least, some of them. We're as much a liability as the chip is. They're out to destroy us and the chip. They think they're going to use Allen to get the three of us and the chip all at once."

"So we're all dead." Stephen's deep, unwavering voice made the proclamation sound as though it had already happened.

"No," she said. She tried to back it up with a powerful fact. All she could say was, "Just . . . no."

A wry smile bent the hair around his mouth. "You have another plan, I suppose?"

"Look, they took the gauntlet too," she said. "It's on the plane, has to be. That means we can track it."

"Then what?"

"We go get Allen." This time she did sound certain.

Stephen looked out the windshield at the dark airport. He closed his eyes. His lips moved in silent prayer. She thought he'd fallen into a kind of trance and would be like that for some time; then he looked at her again. His face still harbored searing concern, but a measure of peace had returned to his eyes.

"Let's get to it, then," he said, keying the van to life and slamming it into gear.

sixty-seven

"He's coming here?" Litt pointed the double lenses of his sunglasses at Gregor. His high forehead crinkled as he raised what would have been his eyebrows had they not fallen out years ago.

"Should be in tomorrow," Gregor confirmed.

"But . . . why?"

"He said these targets injured him."

"Injured him? How?"

"He didn't say."

They were standing in one of the base's former hangars; like the others, it had been converted into a climate-controlled warehouse. A completely new building had been constructed within the interior walls of the fabricated steel hangar, leaving a rusty shell over a clean, poured-cement structure. The low hum of air conditioners filled the air and never ceased. An overhead door built into a hangar door rattled open, and an electric forklift glided in, carrying a pallet of boxes. On each were labels bearing a bar code, the name and address of a hospital or clinical laboratory, and several biohazard stickers. Litt watched the driver deposit the pallet and back through the door. A man approached the pallet and began cutting away a membrane of clear plastic that encased the boxes.

Litt spoke without looking away from the worker. "Why here, Gregor? We don't invite people here."

"I'm going to tell Atropos no? If you are worried about confidentiality, Karl, don't be. His reputation is everything he has, and it's impeccable. He doesn't divulge targets or clients, let alone anything about his clients. And my job has always been to protect this compound. You know I take that seriously. I would never have agreed to his coming if I thought it would jeopardize us in any way."

Litt still looked unsure.

Gregor continued, "People do come here, suppliers, workers. We have to trust some people, hoping none do what Despesorio did. Atropos is more trustworthy than any of these others, I promise."

He could not tell Karl that it had been he, Gregor, who had first broached the idea of Atropos's bringing Allen Parker to them. Parker was meaningless to Gregor, but an opportunity to meet the renowned Atropos? He fought to keep the smile off his face. He had brilliantly convinced Atropos that making Parker pay horribly for the injury he had inflicted was a matter of personal integrity and restitution.

Gregor wondered what sort of harm Atropos had suffered—he sounded fine; but the fact that he possessed a deep hatred for his targets was clear. Ah, the injury did not matter. The important thing was that Gregor was going to meet the man himself.

He remembered when Karl had once, out of curiosity, examined his bedroom, gazing at his images of assassins like Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski and Joseph Testa and brutal warlords like Genghis Kahn and Stalin; touching his replica of the rifle that had killed JFK; looking over his bookcase of the underground series How to Kill and biographies of spies and military titans. Karl had dubbed him a "death groupie," and Gregor had taken offense. It was simply that he appreciated the skills required to take a life and get away with it.

However, he was hoping Atropos would allow a photograph of the two together. Maybe that did make him a groupie.

Litt interrupted his thoughts. "Atropos has one of the targets?"

"Dr. Parker, apparently."

"Alive?"

"For now."

Litt watched the worker pull a box off the top and walk it over to a counter. A woman sitting at a computer monitor scanned the bar code and stared intently at the information that popped onto her screen. Her fingers flittered over a keyboard, and she reassessed the monitor's information. The worker strode back toward the mound.

"What do you think he wants from us?"

"We did explain a little about Despesorio's condition, just so he was prepared," Gregor ventured. "He knows the kind of work we do."

The employee started to pull down another box. Litt raised his hand and snapped his fingers. It was a fleshless sound, like striking bone against bone. The man looked. Litt waved him over.

"You think he wants a demonstration?"

"I'm guessing he wants Parker to get the same treatment. Maybe then he'll take him back and exchange him for the memory chip."

The worker approached with the box. He set it at Litt's feet and used a box cutter to open it. Litt crouched, opened the flaps, and extracted a clear plastic envelope. Inside was a card stained with three circles of brownish blood. Information on the card identified the blood's donor: a newborn boy named Joseph. His mother's name, address, and social security number. Litt nodded.

"Every year, these Guthrie cards become more uniform," he said. "Another few years, not only every state but every country will use the same blood spot forms. Makes our job much easier." He slipped the card back among the hundreds of others in the box, then nodded at the worker, who hoisted it up and carried it toward the counter and the woman.

Litt stood, stretched his back, and looked at Gregor. "So one more field test?"

"Looks that way."

"Since you invited him, you do the honors."

Gregor sniffed and wiped at his nose. "I was just getting over the last one."

Litt ignored him. "Are you familiar with the Balinese tiger?" he asked.

Gregor shook his head.

"It was a phenomenal creature. Quite similar to Siberians and Bengals. Fewer stripes, darker in color. But the most impressive distinction of the Balinese was the way it dispatched its foes. Not its prey, you understand—its enemies, such as other tigers encroaching on its territory, depleting its food supply, flirting with its ladies, that sort of thing." He tugged away a wrinkle in his pant leg, then began chafing the backs of his hands. "After roaring its displeasure, the thing would attack the intruder. An opponent who fell without inflicting serious injury was allowed to die swiftly, usually by having its throat torn out." He smiled, a lipless upturning of the dark line that was his mouth. "On the other hand, an opponent that fought well, perhaps even injuring the resident tiger but not besting it, was fated to a slow, excruciating death. Purely punitive."

He pushed an errant length of hair back off his face. His narrow fingertips found something on his scalp to scratch at while he talked. "After incapacitating its rival, the victor would back off, sometimes for days. When the loser seemed to gain some strength, the victor swept in, slashed at it, mauled it further—then moved away again. Often, the superior tiger would wait until its foe had recouped most of its strength before moving in to cut it down again. This amusement could last for weeks. The defeated tiger eventually starved or bled to death. Or grew too weak to fight off the scavengers vying for its flesh, and gave itself over to them. An ignominious end to the noblest of creatures."

Gregor frowned at the abrasion Litt's fingers had caused on his scalp. It looked ready to bleed. He patted the pockets of his camo outfit, looking for a cigarette. "Atropos is a Balinese tiger," he said. "Is that it?"

Litt shrugged. "Him, you, me. The desire for revenge is common to man. The harder the payback the better. But for an animal . . . That's what makes the Balinese so fascinating."

Gregor found a nearly empty pack of cigarettes in a pocket by his knee. He fiddled with it, anxious to leave the smoke-free warehouse. "You think Atropos is playing with Parker?"

"Of course. It's what I would do." He looked at his fingers and wiped them on his lab coat, leaving faint red streaks.

"Will we be ready for him?"

"What do you have on Parker?"

Sticking the crumpled pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket, Gregor pulled out his BlackBerry. He tapped the screen and used his thumbs to key something in, then handed it to Litt. Litt looked at it, and together they walked to the woman at the monitor. Litt showed her the screen. She squinted at it, typed, squinted, typed. She waited, then nodded.

"Get it," Litt instructed. To Gregor, he said, "Like ordering up a chocolate malt."

Gregor patted him on the back. "Years of hard work, my friend."

"Who'd have thought, huh?"

"I never doubted."

"Never?"

"Why do you think I gave you my shoes?" He winked and started for the exit, patting his pockets again. Halfway there, he stopped. "Karl . . . why past tense? What became of the Balinese tiger?"

"The last one was shot in 1937."

Gregor was thinking about that when Litt added, "I didn't do it."

sixty-eight

Julia climbed into the back of the van to set up the

satellite-tracking device, and Stephen drove slowly away from the airport. At her direction, he maneuvered the van erratically from lane to lane, down alleyways and in looping patterns around blocks. She called it dry cleaning, designed to spot and shake any tails they may have picked up at the airport.

She let out a heavy groan, and his stomach tightened. "What is it?"

"I was able to tap into a satellite, no problem. But the plane's altitude is throwing everything off. Maps are scrolling into place, but I can't get a lock on the device itself."

"You can't track it?"

"I can, but I'll have only a general idea of where it is until it lands again. My laptop is only loaded with software for land-based operations."

"Is there software for tracking planes? Can you get it?"

"I don't dare try, after what Kendrick Reynolds did. Accessing the Bureau's system might bring half the force down on us."

She made it sound as certain as skipping into the FBI's headquarters in Quantico. It was a different world, when you had to be as cautious electronically as you were physically. Crossing the road without looking could get you killed in either world.

"But you can tell they're moving? What direction?"

"South. Over Florida right now."

Stephen nodded, picturing the plane cutting through the night sky, Allen inside, hurt, scared. The gravity in the van grew heavier, pulling his face down, adding weight to his internal organs. His insides hurt.

After an hour of aimless wandering, he began feeling the weight of Allen's absence. It radiated from the blackness beside him, where Allen should have been sitting: a nothingness so great it threatened to swallow him whole and leave nothing but an aching heart as a testament to his inability to protect his brother . . .

"Julia?" he said, making his voice sound strong.

"Hmmm?"

"Could you come sit up here? For a few minutes?"

"I really want to keep my eye on this."

"I'd appreciate it."

The briefest pause.

"Sure," she said pleasantly, as if it had been her idea.

He heard what he imagined were the sounds of a woman extricating herself from a tangle of wires. Then she slipped under the table and popped up next to him. She placed a hand on his forearm, squeezed it, then slid back into the other captain's chair.

Stephen didn't look at her but stared straight ahead, trying to gauge the void. It was still there, but weaker. Like smoke, it had swirled away when her body had moved into its space. He felt that none of it had actually dissipated; it was simply less threatening, not all gathered in one spot.

He also felt foolish. He supposed she was used to working with professional investigators who didn't need hand-holding, who didn't let things like despair and regret interfere with getting the job done, who'd rather hear the ratcheting lock of handcuffs than a comforting word. But that wasn't him. His practical side insisted that she continue setting up the equipment needed to find Allen. But he also had to contend with his emotional side, which still felt the warmth of her hand on his arm and felt as good about that as an investigator would about a break in a case. He could not erect a wall between these sides.

Yes, they would find Allen and rescue him. His determination to do so was solid and big, a mountain that could not be moved. But they would have to do it as themselves, with only the gifts God had given each of them. With her technical brilliance, knowledge of the criminal mind, and prowess at executing covert operations and tracking people, Julia obviously held the greater advantage to accomplish their goal. They'd simply have to find a way to utilize his skills as well. Which were what, precisely? Physical strength. Okay, good, that's one. What else? Friends in high places? Definitely. But there had to be something else . . .

"Something else?" she said, startling him.

"Just thinking out loud, I guess. Thanks for coming up front."

They traveled in silence awhile, Stephen taking comfort from the splashes of light against Julia's face in his peripheral vision. He kept expecting her to suggest finding a motel or at least a place where they could park the van for the night, but she never did. She seemed to be thinking, working things out, and the impermanence of the view outside helped her do that. Finally he said, "How about a restaurant?" A glowing orange sign was approaching on the right.

She hesitated. "I really should get back to . . ."

Her voice trailed off, and he felt her gaze. He wondered how much of his urgency to get away from the van, from its muted shadows and its smell of Allen's cigarettes, showed.

"You know, I could eat," she said.

They rejected the first table to which the waitress led them, a cramped two-top, and settled for a big round booth in the corner. The fluorescent lights that cast the place in an unnatural, sterile luminance were bright in Stephen's eyes, a welcome change from the gloom of the van. Something about the artificiality of the place—its orange Formica tabletops, brick veneer wall, plastic plants, Naugahyde seat covers—made the harsh reality of life seem very far away.

Julia scanned the decor, examined her hands, rearranged the napkin dispenser, salt and pepper shakers, sugar packets, and small decanter of maple syrup.

"I'll be right back," she said.

For twenty minutes, he turned away an ancient waitress trying to take his order, her lipsticked smile failing to hide her boredom. Finally Julia returned, an extra wrinkle or two around her eyes.

"Trouble?" he asked. "Or should I say, what now?"

"My mother. She has MS. Most times, she's fine; I mean it hasn't gotten really bad yet. But you never know when she'll get an attack. They can be debilitating and pretty scary. She gets trigeminal neuralgia, these stabbing pains in her face." Her eyes moistened, and he handed her a napkin. "Sometimes she can't move, can't feed herself or go to the bathroom or pick up the phone. I bought her a medical alarm she's supposed to wear around her neck, but she says she's too young for 'one of those I've-fallen-and-can't-get-up things.' She keeps it on her nightstand." Julia touched the napkin to her eyes.

"Did you call her?"

"I went across the street and up the block, in case they trace the calling card. No answer. She might be sleeping. I asked a home health agency to check in on her. I got their answering service. I left the pay phone number and waited, but I didn't want to stand around too long. Maybe the wrong people would show up."

"I'm sure she's fine."

"I don't like to leave her for long." She laughed humorlessly. "Picked up my messages. Nothing from Mom or the health agency, but a bunch of calls from my boss. I forgot I was supposed to meet him this morning. I lost all track of time. Not that I'd have gone in, but I can't believe it's been two days."

"Allen called me to get him about this time last night." He shook his head. "All that's happened."

The waitress appeared at the table. Talking to the pad and pencil in her hands, she said, "Ready?"

Julia sniffed, squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and smiled.

Stephen realized she had put her mother worries in a box. Allen had always been good at that, compartmentalizing. Stephen, on the other hand, tended to trip over every little concern until he addressed it.

Julia said, "Short stack, one egg over easy, two strips of bacon, coffee."

Stephen ordered just coffee, thanks, and relinquished the menus.

"You should eat," she said. "Soldiers are taught, 'Eat when you can, sleep when you can. You never know when you'll get the chance again.'"

"You were in the military?" He couldn't quite see her with a helmet on her head, blasting an Ml6 at a beat-up car that had run a roadblock.

"Goody was. He used to regale me with words of wisdom from his time in the Marines. 'A good plan today is better than a perfect one tomorrow.' 'Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.'"

"He meant a lot to you."

"The world."

"I'm sorry." It was his turn to squeeze her arm.

She smiled away a frown, shook her head, said, "So eat."

"I'll grab something later. If my stomach settles."

The waitress returned with a carafe of coffee. She filled two cups and sauntered to a table with four men chatting half a room away. They were dressed in dirty coveralls, and two of them still wore the orange vests of the city's road-work crew. Only irregular snatches of conversation drifted to Stephen's ears, but Julia acted as though she could hear every word—and it fascinated her.

"Julia?" he whispered, leaning toward her. "What are you—?"

She held up her hand: Hold on. Concentration furled her brow, her lips moved in silent conversation.

"I know what Allen said in the hangar," she said. "I know what he wants us to do."

sixty-nine

Lying on his stomach, his face submerged in a down pillow, Kendrick Reynolds once again could not sleep. Every time the stage of his mind grew dim, a memory would dance on and the lights would come up. He raised his head, turned it the other direction, and plopped it down, letting the pillow slowly engulf it. His hand snaked out to the other side of the bed—years after her passing, the instinct to touch his wife was still strong. He rubbed his palm on the smooth bottom sheet where she should have been. It felt cold.

Nine years. She was nine years gone. It seemed only days ago she was chiding him for being gruff with the staff the defense department provided. She had always brought them fresh-baked cookies and lemonade: quaint and cliched and absolutely adorable. The staff had been more relaxed when she was there; as efficient, but not as tense. That defined him as well. Since her passing, he'd felt an ache right at the center of his torso, as if he were late for an appointment, but he didn't know where he was supposed to go.

As a young man, new to the state department and just starting to make real money, he'd purchased an MG TC roadster. He'd driven to Norfolk, taking the winding roads fast and hard. Several times he felt the rear end wanting to slide out from under him, inching toward an embankment; more than once he edged around a vehicle, barely missing a swerving, horn-blaring car coming the other direction. Afterward, alone with a bottle in his father's vacation chalet, his hands shook, his heart raced. He had the sense that Death's fingers had brushed his neck and he'd slipped away, and he was waiting for the Reaper's knock at the door. He felt like that all the time now. He suspected that Death had returned for him nine years ago, had reached and grabbed Elizabeth in error.

She had been a wonderful woman, tolerant of his many faults, his arrogance, his absences, his betrayals.

He missed her terribly.

Not for the first time, he wondered how his grief, his yearning to have her back, differed from Karl's feelings for his lost family. He was certain there was a difference, given how the two men reacted to their loss. Kendrick grieved quietly and moved on. Karl had— The only way Kendrick could describe it was that Karl had gone mad. And maybe Kendrick would have, too, under the circumstances.

What had Karl said—that Kendrick had wanted Rebecca and Jessica and Joe out of the picture? It was true that Kendrick believed Litt's family was a distraction, that his life as head biologist of a covert lab was incongruous with tending to a wife and rearing children. When he'd first conceived of staffing a secret lab with the German children, for whom there were no official records of their existence, he thought he could keep them unofficial and nonexistent. Soon he realized all life left footprints—there was simply no way to keep thirty-five children off the books indefinitely. They needed caregivers and tutors, food and sunshine. He'd wanted a secret staff of scientists, but not scientists who functioned in reality.

After many of Kendrick's staff became the children's foster parents and he and Elizabeth adopted Karl, they had seemed like a normal family.

He smiled at the memory of Elizabeth's giddiness over having the boy in their house, falling into the rhythms of maternal servitude, incessantly checking on him in bed those first weeks. For his part, Karl had been moody but had slowly warmed to Elizabeth's charms. How could he not?

All of the children were taught at a very private school consisting of only them and a handful of academics on the government payroll. As Joseph Litt had promised, the children's scientific acuity proved well beyond their years. When Karl was twelve, Kendrick moved all the children and their families to Elk Mountain, Wyoming. At the time, it was a small town of seventy people. The Department of Defense owned much of the surrounding land, originally intended for missile silos and never developed. Kendrick had one of the nearby hills hollowed out and turned into a laboratory. A fence went up, enclosing dorms, a playground, a cafeteria, and other assorted necessities. The whole thing was billed as a weather-monitoring station and education center, governed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Harvard University.

Of course, he and Elizabeth could not relocate. They tried to visit at least once a month, but still her heart ached; twelve was too young for a child to move out. She once told Kendrick that she coped by pretending they'd divorced and he had gotten custody. He suspected that in her heart she had indeed divorced herself from him for sending Karl away.

However, the wisdom of giving the children their own lab soon became apparent. At fourteen, Karl developed an aerosol strain of the Clostridium botulinum bacterium—botulism. He even provided the plans for a delivery system using a V-2 rocket. As the children developed, it was clear they needed advanced education and social experience. In groups of three and four, they attended top-ranked universities.

It was there that Karl met Rebecca. Kendrick discouraged the relationship, but his efforts went wherever it is that common sense hides in the face of young love. He knew Karl enough to understand that blocking his romantic pursuits would result in Karl's determination to never again provide what Kendrick wanted from the lab. A dozen years later, the union produced a baby boy, named Joseph, after

Karl's father. Baby Jessica came when Joe was six. Kendrick learned to loosen his grip, and the family seemed content in their small compound outside Elk Mountain.

Until the accident.

Kendrick pushed himself up from the pillow, rolled, and collapsed on his back. The room was so dark, nothing was visible. His eyes ached. He closed them.

Karl and his team had developed a virulent, airborne strain of rabies—a Level 4 biohazard—a dozen years before the CDC developed the four-level biosafety designations, and well before the techniques and equipment currently in use to safely handle and contain them. An aerosol canister fell over and its valve broke off, releasing the virus and triggering an emergency evacuation. Security immediately air-lifted lab scientists and staff to a site sixty miles away. There had been no evac plans for civilians, who were in or around the surface buildings. When Karl learned this, he frantically pleaded and threatened the security officers to return for them. He called Kendrick, who stressed the importance of following established procedures.

"There is the general public to think about," he told Karl.

"I don't care about them! Rebecca! The kids! Kendrick, you can circumvent procedures. Do it!"

"Put Major McCafferty on the line."

Kendrick had been told the hot zone was limited to a relatively small teardrop-shaped area around the facility, the shape a result of prevailing winds. There was an 88 percent chance family members in the dorms were already exposed; a 15 percent chance that Elk Mountain townsfolk were exposed. Kendrick could not risk pulling the infected people out of the quarantined area. He told Major McCafferty to act as though Kendrick had ordered him to retrieve the families at all cost. His true orders had been to stay clear of the compound.

When the helicopter sent to get the families never returned, Karl became a demon fighting to get out of hell. He tried to wrangle the sidearm away from one of the security officers and was about to be restrained to a cot when he settled down. Two hours later, he was gone. They stopped him at a roadblock, his desperately ill family with him. Their deaths were slow and excruciating. The baby succumbed on day four. Joe, day thirteen. Rebecca lasted nearly three weeks.

Kendrick threw off the bedcovers. He turned to sit on the edge of the bed. His fingers found a water glass on the nightstand, and he raised it to his lips. The water was tepid and smelled metallic. He set it down and missed, and it tumbled off. The room's thick carpet saved it from breaking; its contents splashed up his pajama legs and over his feet. He hardly noticed.

Karl had been infected as well. His symptoms matched his family's; however, where theirs pulled them into the grave, his lessened and reversed. The physicians could not say he'd recovered fully, but that he did at all had shocked them. His respiration was weakened, his eyesight noticeably diminished. The pallor of death on his skin never fully retreated.

"You're a lucky man," Kendrick had said, embracing him on the day he grew strong enough to step away from the hospital bed.

"You think so?" His voice was thin, raspy.

"You almost died."

"I wish I had."

Mumbled so quietly, Kendrick later wondered if Karl had really spoken. He squeezed Karl's shoulder.

"I won't pretend to fully grasp the extent of your pain, Karl, but I believe you'll learn to live again. Maybe even to love again."

Karl shuffled away. At the door, he leaned on the jamb and looked back. "You could have saved them."

Six weeks later he was back to work. Two weeks after that he disappeared.

Kendrick pushed his wet feet under the sheets and flipped the covers back over his body. Maybe he needed noise to lull him to sleep, to distract his mind. One of those sound boxes that imitated rain or a brook or a fan. Anything was better than counting his own heartbeat as the blood pulsed past his eardrums. Absently, he rubbed his feet against the sheets to dry them.

He'd heard nothing from or about Karl for years. He had assumed he'd taken his life, as his father had done. Then reports filtered in about a new dealer on the global bioweapons market. His scientists analyzed a culture of what he recognized as the Zorn virus from an outbreak in Africa, and he knew.

Karl was back.

seventy

"Send what?" Stephen looked at her in utter confusion.

"The data from the memory chip. We talked about sending the chip to Reynolds. That has to be what Allen meant."

"But he was against the idea," Stephen said.

"He must have seen or heard something that convinced him Kendrick can help." She glanced at the talkative road crew. Their mouths, framing the sounds she could barely hear, had acted like a lip-reading primer for her eager mind. They had given her the key. "He used what could have been his last breath . . ."

Stephen flinched.

"But wasn't," she added quickly. "At the time, he was in big trouble. A world-class assassin had him by the neck. He was turning blue. Yet he chose then to try to communicate that we should send the data. That's serious. That's important."

"'Send it.' You're sure that's what he said?"

"When you say it, I can see the movements of Allen's mouth exactly. Now that I know what he said, it's impossible to imagine that I didn't pick up on it immediately."

"But if it's Reynolds these people are trying to keep the chip

from," Stephen said slowly, articulating newborn thoughts, "then we'd be destroying any reason they would have to ransom Allen."

"We have to weigh that with the possibility that Reynolds can help get Allen back if he knows the contents of the chip."

They looked at each other. They were at an impasse, not a place you wanted to be when kidnappers had your brother, killers were on your tail, and some mad scientist was pointing a virus-cannon at your country.

Stephen ran his tongue over his lips. His mouth was so dry, it was like rubbing two sticks together. He took a sip of coffee, then said, "What do they expect us to do?"

"The people who took Allen? They expect us to sit tight, do nothing until they contact us."

"Then let's do the opposite. Let's send Reynolds the contents."

She smiled.

"And let's go get Allen."

The waitress approached with a tray of plates.

"To go, sorry, thanks," Julia said. To Stephen, she said, "I'll share with you." She slid out of the booth.

He watched her in wonder.

"We have a plan now," she said. "We can't just sit around."

"What's our plan?"

"Share what we know with Kendrick and go get Allen."

"Those are objectives, not a plan."

"Oh, come on." She held her hand out. "Gimme the keys. I want to see where they are. Can you get the food and pay?" She took a couple of steps, then turned back. "You're okay?"

"Yeah, I'm okay." He smiled, and she strode off. He guessed he was okay. It was either be okay or be useless—and he didn't want to be that.

He had opened the driver's door and leaned in to deposit the bag of food on the passenger's seat when, from the rear seat, Julia spoke.

"We got a problem."

"What?"

"They're over the Atlantic, heading south."

"Yeah?"

"A few hundred miles southeast of Nassau."

"Heading for Cuba?" His mind tried to grasp the meaning of the jet's leaving the United States. How would that hinder their pursuit?

"I don't think Cuba. Haiti maybe. They've already flown outside the boundaries of the detailed maps hardwired into this laptop. Unless they sweep back into U.S. airspace, I'll only be able to pinpoint the transmitter to the nearest city, but no better."

"I'm not believing this," he said. "We lost him?"

"Absolutely not. If we can get to within a hundred miles of wherever they take him, we can still track them down. Every activity leaves a trail, and I know how to find it and follow it."

The road workers exited the restaurant, talking and laughing. Stephen climbed in and shut the door. He hitched an arm around his seat back, turning to address her.

"Foreign soil," he said. "If the cards were stacked against us before, think how much more difficult getting to Allen will be in another country. Where would we go for help? The language barrier alone—"

"Stephen!" It was a verbal slap and quieted him as effectively as a palm upside the head. When she was sure he was listening, she said, "I'm telling you we can do this—we can find and rescue your brother. I don't care if they take him to Antarctica." As firm as her countenance had been, it somehow hardened even further. "We will get him back."

She made him feel hope—insane and untenable maybe, but hope all the same.

He glanced away, at the men getting into a sedan across the parking lot, at the darkness of the night beyond. Did he believe her when he wasn't pinned by her determined eyes? Incredibly, he did. He believed in his heart she could do what she said.

That's all he needed.

He rolled his head in a muscle-stretching circle and let out a long, deep sigh. His heavy beard parted in a smile. "Have you ever thought of selling cars?"

"I'm pretty good at wrecking them." She checked her watch. "Now get this thing moving. We've gotta get to Atlanta before the man we need to see gets too plastered to help us."

seventy-one

The staccato pops of gunfire woke Allen from a fitful slumber. Before his eyes opened, pain from his shoulder and wrists welcomed him to consciousness. Nearby, a man spoke, something about a conference in Geneva. Music came on. One eye opened; the other was crusted shut. Light, shadows flickering over it. He remembered the plasma TV, rolled his head to see it. He forced open his other eye. A news commentator was replaced by a black-and-white western was replaced by a commercial for car wax was replaced by a televangelist . . . For a moment, he imagined that these images were not coming to him, but he was going to them: bouncing around through time and space, appearing and disappearing, a soul caught in the cosmic equivalent of a tornado. He wondered if the people he saw, saw him back, a flicker of a ghost, here and gone, swept off to the next sight and sound before surprise registered on the faces.

He experienced a sense of weightlessness as the plane bobbed gently over air currents and he swayed, handcuffed to the hook in the ceiling.

He swung his head the other direction. The cockpit door was open. Atropos sitting at the controls, seemingly staring at the stars beyond the glass.

He tried to think of something to say. He was thirsty. He had to use the restroom. He became aware of a cold pressure on his leg and crotch, the stench of ammonia, and realized he had already wet himself.

Explosions came from the television . . . canned laughter . . . A woman's screams followed Allen back into unconsciousness.

Shadows tumbled in the gusty wind as Stephen waited for Julia outside a windowless tavern on one of downtown Atlanta's rattier streets. He knew it must have been a trick of his eyes or faulty electrical currents that fed the anemic yellow light on the corner a half block away, but the illumination undulated intermittently, as though something unimaginable kept fluttering past—the spirit of despair or desperation, he thought, looking around.

On the other side of the street, outside another "lounge," a loud argument escalated into a shoving contest. Stephen sighed, pushing his hands deeper into his pants pockets. Darkness shifted silently in a recessed doorway not far away. He had the uneasy feeling of being watched but had no desire to investigate. Instead, he turned away.

Staring at the streetlamp, trying to catch its flicker, he hoped she would hurry up. On the way over, she had explained that Sweaty Dave was an "identity broker," someone who arranged the acquisition of false identity documents. He would gather the raw materials like signatures and photographs and send them to someone more specialized to turn into official-looking IDs.

Husbands wanting hassle-free relief from nagging wives or greedy exes; militants looking to distance themselves from governmental scrutiny; debtors desperate for a fresh start; but mostly, it was criminals on the run who made up Sweaty Dave's client roster. They all thought they were buying a permanent escape from the mistakes of their past. But only one in ten succeeded in vanishing for good. The other nine eventually gave themselves away by slipping back into the grooves cut by their old habits and penchants.

Then again, some bad guys simply chose the wrong false-document handler, such as Sweaty Dave. The Bureau busted him several years ago, Julia explained, leading to a Faustian bargain for his freedom: he would continue his illicit brokering activities in exchange for timely tips on who was using his services. The Bureau would then wait months, even years, to collar certain fugitives, taking great pains to falsify the means of their detection. Sweaty Dave's operation was simply too sweet to risk causing criminals to cast a suspicious eye at it.

Julia had said she wasn't worried about using an FBI informant. They needed the temporary ability to leave the country undetected, and by the time their patronage found its way to someone who mattered, they'd be long gone.

The tavern door behind him crashed open. Julia backed out, tugging on the arm of a man who obviously had no desire to be with her.

"Lady, you're really starting to tick me off!" the guy yelled, craning his head back toward the dark refuge of the lounge. As soon as he cleared the door, a heavy spring started pulling the door shut.

Someone inside called out, "You tell 'er, Sweaty!" and two or three people howled in laughter. The door slammed closed, cutting off the noise.

"Now look—!" the man said and swung around to face Julia. Instead, he flattened into Stephen. He took a shaky step back, eyeing Stephen up and down. He turned to Julia. "What's this! You going to rough me up?" To Stephen: "Well, do it, big man. Whadda I care?" Defiantly, he pushed a greasy lock of black hair off his forehead.

Stephen rolled his eyes toward Julia, who made an exasperated expression and said, "Stephen, meet Sweaty Dave."

The man glaring at Stephen had a severely bloated face: chipmunk cheeks, tennis ball chin—complete with fuzz—and rolls of fat on his forehead. Within this soft terrain, beady eyes sat too close together, molelike. His lips were fat and puckered, not unlike two wet worms writhing over each other. And indeed he was sweaty. A thin sheen of

moisture that looked more akin to oil than perspiration covered every inch of his pasty flesh. He was about five eight and as similar to the Pillsbury Doughboy as anyone Stephen had ever seen.

"Dave, can you help us?" Stephen asked, kind, composed. His tender manner appeared to soothe Sweaty Dave's wrath. The identity broker's shoulders slumped.

"This ain't the way it's done," he said to Stephen. He turned to Julia. "This ain't the way it's done."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Two Gs before I even look at you again," Sweaty Dave said, holding up his palm and actually turning his head away from them.

She nodded. After a quick scan for nearby predators, Stephen pulled a wad of cash from his back pocket. He quickly peeled away twenty hundred-dollar bills and set them into the man's upturned hand.

Sweaty Dave pushed the cash into a front pocket of his jeans. Then he shoved past Julia and Stephen and shuffled away, mumbling. "Can't even have a drink in peace anymore . . . I'm telling ya .. . Next time I'm not gonna be so nice . . ."

She raised her eyebrows at Stephen, and the two followed Sweaty Dave down the street. Before reaching the end of the block, he turned into a dark portico. Keys rattled. Posters of comic-book heroes covered the inside of the store's display windows. A sign ran the width of the store above the door and window: Dave's Comix Trove.

A bell jangled as Sweaty Dave pushed the door open and snapped on the lights. He called back, "Either of you comic-heads? The Dark Knight? Strangers in Paradise? The Sandman? Gone but not forgotten. Lock that behind you."

Stephen pulled the door shut and thumbed a dead bolt. Piles of comic books rose like skyscrapers everywhere. With practiced agility, Sweaty Dave negotiated a narrow path toward the rear of the store. Julia followed, then Stephen, who had to walk sideways to avoid knocking over the piles.

Sweaty Dave stopped at a door on which someone had painted a horrendously bad rendition of Superman spreading open his shirt to reveal the S emblem underneath. He snatched a comic off a nearby pile and held it up to them. "Wolverine? Either of you a Wolvie fan?"

"Sorry," she said.

Sweaty Dave shook his head, disgusted, and tossed the comic down. "'Course, it's gone downhill since Larry Hama stopped writing it, but—"

Stephen tuned him out.

They stepped into the back room. Here, too, stacks of comics rose from every surface. The room was indistinguishable from the store-front, except for an old wooden desk and a bookcase behind it, both buried under mounds of comic books. Stephen looked for something, anything, that would give away Sweaty Dave's secret trade. Nothing did. He turned to see Sweaty Dave staring at him.

"Yes, you, tough guy," Sweaty Dave said. He pointed to the bookcase.

Stephen stepped around the desk and noticed that the piles of comics to the left of the bookcase were about six inches away from the wall—just enough to slide the bookcase along the wall behind them. Sweaty Dave nodded, and Stephen leaned into the right side of the bookcase. It slid easily, revealing a hidden portal of pitch blackness.

"Light switch on the right," said Sweaty Dave. "Think you can handle that?"

Stephen turned on the light and gasped at the room beyond. It was about twenty feet square and immaculate. White walls, aluminum countertops, an expensive-looking camera on a tripod facing a curtained wall. A huge bookcase dominated the opposite wall and was partitioned into hundreds of cubbyholes, each holding a stack of forms or documents or cards.

Sweaty Dave ushered them in. He stepped in front of the bookcase of forms, seeming to survey it with great pride. When he turned to face them, he was smiling. He clapped his hands together and said, "Now. What can I do you for?"

Two hours later, the two walked back to the van several blocks away.

"How many times did we sign our new names?" Stephen complained, shaking his right hand.

"Enough times to be able to duplicate it flawlessly, without hesitation. It didn't take me so long."

"Oh yeah. Jane Ivy. I got stuck with George Van Dorgenstien. I had the i and the e mixed up for the first twenty signatures."

"It all has to do with matching your age and nationality to people with similar profiles who are already dead."

"You mean there really is a George Van Dorgenstien?" He shivered.

"Was. He's dead. Plus, it didn't help that we needed a rush job. That meant we had to find a match among the birth certificates Sweaty already had on file." She sounded beat.

They arrived at the van, and he opened the passenger's door for her.

She climbed in, turned to him. "We have to be back here to pick up the new documents in"—she checked her Timex—"six hours."

"Got it." He walked around to the driver's door. He started the car and pulled away from the curb, glad to be leaving the neighborhood, at least for a while. They traveled in silence.

Finally Stephen said, "You must be pretty whipped, huh?"

When she didn't reply, he turned to see her slumped against the door. Her face was turned away, but in the fractured glow of passing streetlights, he could make out the slow rise and fall of her chest. A gray spot of fog appeared on the glass near her nose, then faded away before her soft breathing replaced it again, like a beacon quietly proclaiming her existence. Stephen supposed that even life-threatening excitement could stave off sleep for only so long.

"Sweet dreams," he whispered and started looking for a place to hide the van and rest his own increasingly heavy eyes.

seventy-two

Allen's head slammed painfully against the cage's iron bars. A fresh ribbon of blood broke from his brow and ran into his eye. Ignoring the pain, he spun around to defend himself, only to find the cage door closed and the men who'd taken him from the plane walking away. He slumped against the back bars. Everything hurt: his shoulder throbbed; his face ached as though it had been used as a punching bag, which essentially it had; his throat felt raw; the other assorted aches in his legs, back, and arms were less severe but added up to a whole lot of misery.

He wiped the blood away and tried to look around. Spikes of pain pushed through the backs of his eyes—the one swollen shut, as well as the one he laughably thought of as his good eye. Rotating his neck instead of his eye produced a pulsing ache that was much more tolerable. He appeared to be in an animal cage, probably designed for a lion or tiger, judging by the size. Bars ran on all sides, including the floor. At about four feet tall, the cage discouraged standing altogether. The sky spanned from orange to blue, the colors of morning. Through his light Windbreaker, he rubbed his arms against a nip in the air.

He shifted into a slightly less uncomfortable position. To his right, close enough to touch, the corrugated metal of a Quonset hut arched up and out of sight. Directly ahead of him, past a red dirt runway, metal hangars, and an unkempt field, a tall chain-link-and-concertina fence seemed to mark the compound's boundaries. Beyond it, a lush jungle rode steep green hills to a crest of red-rock cliffs. Around him lay more Quonsets and fields, one bearing a flagpole, bent and rusted.

He'd seen it all before; it was the old air base on the video he'd viewed on Julia's computer. Somewhere was a labyrinth of hallways, made that much grungier looking by the proximity of sterile laboratories. Considering what else that memory chip revealed, this backwater arrangement of old barracks and hangars hid secrets that could very well affect the planet's entire population.

The fragrances that hung in the humid atmosphere affirmed the vitality of the jungle on the other side of the fence. They were sweet and woodsy and wet. He could smell the earth, and it smelled somehow different from the earth of Tennessee, more ancient.

He noticed the birds now, their caws and calls, chirps and whistles. The musical sound reinforced Allen's already overwhelmed sense of surrealism. He rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. Exhaustion and anxiety swirled like colored oils through his confused brain. Countless questions presented themselves—Is escape possible? What are Stephen and Julia doing? Are any of my injuries life-threatening or incapacitating if they remain untreated?— and were pushed aside by a mind too overworked to grapple with any of them.

Think! he admonished himself, but the word held no meaning. He repeated it until repeating it was all he could do.

He must have dozed off; he came sharply awake when something struck the cage. Crouched beside the cage, looking at him through the bars, was a man who appeared to be in his midfifties, handsome and regal looking despite his clothes. He was wearing a camouflage jumpsuit covered with pockets and a matching beret.

The man smiled. "You look battle-worn, my friend." His voice was gruff and laced with Teutonic sharpness. When Allen did not respond, he rapped an object against the bars; it made the sound that had awakened him.

Allen saw it was the gauntlet Julia had given him to deliver. His stomach tumbled at the thought of the tracking device wedged into one of the fingers. Would rescuers be able to find him if it were destroyed or turned off? Would his captors punish him for bringing it? He didn't know the answers and didn't want to find out. He glared into the man's piercing eyes.

The man laughed, which became a cough, a phlegmy, painful sound. "I have found that when people are caged, either they fight and scream and lunge at the bars, or like you they become sullen."

"Would fighting get me out of here?" Allen asked, more quietly than he had intended. His parched throat was uncooperative.

"Not at all, but it does provide some entertainment."

The man balanced the gauntlet on his lap and pulled a PDA from a holster on his belt, similar to the Palm Pilot Allen used. He tapped the screen a couple of times with a fingertip. "Now let's see . . ."

He looked around, up at the sky. "Slight breeze, wouldn't you say? Not much, though." Tap, tap, tap. "Okay. And I'll just put we spoke for two minutes, but I think it was less." More taps.

He replaced the device, positioned the gauntlet under one arm, and stood. He sniffed and used the back of his hand to wipe his nose.

"What's your name?" Allen asked. He didn't know why it mattered, but it did. Maybe it was something human he could connect to.

The man gazed down at him. He rummaged through a pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He extracted one and stuck it in the corner of his mouth and lit it with a lighter he had pulled from another pocket. "Gregor," he answered. The word came out in a plume of smoke.

"Care to share?" Allen indicated the pack of cigarettes.

"They're German. Perhaps not to your taste."

"I'll take anything right now."

Gregor shook one out and handed it to Allen, who put it in his mouth and brought his face close to the bars. Gregor lit the cigarette. It smelled like burning manure.

Allen filled his lungs with the bitter, biting smoke. He coughed it out raggedly. "You're right," he hacked. "This is wretched stuff." He took another drag, wiping a tear from his eye.

Gregor nodded at something. Allen followed his gaze to the Cessna at the far end of the runway.

"He is quite extraordinary, yes?" Gregor sucked on the cigarette and let the smoke drift lazily out of his mouth and nostrils. "He said he needed sleep, but we talked for ten minutes. Fascinating man."

"One in a million."

Gregor looked down with a mild expression of surprise, as though he'd forgotten he wasn't alone. "Soon we will get you out of this sun and into your own bed. If you are fortunate, we may find you a private room." He shrugged. "But no matter, the ward can be pleasant at times. We do try to keep our patients comfortable."

"Why patch me up? What do you care?" Allen gently touched his swollen eye.

Gregor grunted. "Your injuries do not concern us."

"Then what makes me a 'patient'? I'm . . . not sick." Something in his chest shifted. He noted the snot crusting around Gregor's nostrils and suspected his own health had just taken a turn for the worse.

Gregor looked over the compound's seemingly abandoned fields and buildings. He pulled on the cigarette and shot a stream of smoke into the air, then coughed. "We think you are, Dr. Parker. If you are not, then our scientists have failed to do their jobs, and I will suffer this congestion for nothing." He squatted again and squinted at Allen. "And anyway, we promised Atropos a bonus for bringing you here."

"Bonus?"

Gregor waved a hand at him and made a face as though the details were beneath him. "Karl will cover all that with you. After you get settled." He tossed away his cigarette and held the gauntlet in both hands, appraising it.

"This, my friend, is legendary," he said. "The Atropos gauntlet." He turned it to appreciate it from different angles.

"I suppose you vacation at Auschwitz."

Gregor rapped the gauntlet hard against the bars.

Allen watched the tracking device fall from its armhole. It took every bit of self-control he could muster not to follow its trajectory to the ground. Instead, he locked his eyes on Gregor's face.

The German had not noticed. Yet.

Julia woke to find Stephen's yeti-like mug filling her vision. He was shaking her lightly and whispering.

"What?" she said, reaching for her pistol.

"It's beeping. The laptop."

She propped herself up with an elbow and saw she was in the van's rear bed. "How'd I get back here?" Her voice was thick with sleep. She remembered getting into the passenger's seat—and that was all.

"You fell asleep. I moved you."

Without waking her? She must have been exhausted. And he must have been very gentle. Still, it bothered her to know she could be manhandled without her knowledge. She was glad it was Stephen who had observed this weakness in her and not someone else. Like Allen. Behind him, the driver's seat was again flattened into a narrow bed.

"What time is it?" She raised her head to catch a glimpse out the window. She felt every muscle, every tendon. They were in the parking lot of what appeared to be a luxury hotel. Behind its tall facade, the sky was lightening. The laptop, programmed to continuously monitor the SATD transmitter, sat in the captain's chair behind the front passenger seat. And sure enough, it was beeping.

"5:38."

"Oh, man." She dropped back onto the bare mattress, closed her eyes. But the laptop's alarm was going off . . . She had to check into it . . . She had to . . .

Stephen was shaking her again.

"Okay, okay," she said, swinging her legs off the bed and sitting. She moved forward and knelt in front of the laptop as if at an altar. She supposed some people would think it an appropriate analogy, considering her dependence on the fool piece of technology. She forced her eyes to focus on the screen.

"The transmitter has stopped," she said.

"Stopped working?"

"No, I mean they aren't moving anymore. They've reached their destination."

"Where?"

She willed her sluggish fingers to type, instructing the SATD program to fine-tune its calculations, to triangulate the signal with area Global Positioning satellites, to cross-reference the information with every map held in its databases. The entire process took roughly fifteen seconds. She was pleasantly surprised by the SATD's precision, given her lack of detailed international maps.

"They appear to be . . . just northwest of. . . Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay."

"Paraguay? What's in Paraguay?"

"Apparently, Allen is. Does what you know about Paraguay jibe with anything we saw on the videos?"

"I have no idea. I suppose eastern Paraguay could be subtropical. Is that where this Pedro Juan town is?"

She checked the computer map. "Right on the Brazilian border."

"That abandoned base on the video had airstrips."

"There's a town here, almost touching Pedro Juan Caballero, on the Brazilian side . . ." She spoke slowly, leaning close to the screen.

"Yeah?"

"Ponta Pora. Allen said Goody mentioned something with 'pora' at the end of it. He said he thought maybe it was . . . something that had to do with internal bleeding, a rash . . ."

"Purpora."

"What if Goody had learned about Ponta Pora from Vero, and that's what he was trying to tell Allen?" She nodded and crawled back onto the mattress. "We're not due back at Sweaty's for a couple hours. Go back to sleep." When she opened an eye a minute later, Stephen was sitting on the driver's folded-down seat back, staring at her.

"What?" she asked.

"Isn't there something else we can do?"

She thought for a moment. "Call the airport. Find out which flight will get us closest to that town. Use a pay phone up the street, not in the hotel."

"Pedro Juan . . .?"

"Caballero," she said, rolling over, pulling herself into a ball. "Wake me at eight."

seventy-three

Stephen woke her precisely at eight, anxious to do

something—anything—that brought them closer to their goal of getting Allen back. By 8:20, they were sitting in the restaurant of the hotel in whose parking lot they'd spent the night. They'd washed up in the restrooms off the lobby, and now Julia used a cloth napkin to finish drying the nape of her neck and behind her ears. She'd ordered a breakfast similar to the one she'd had nine hours earlier in Chattanooga. This time Stephen had also ordered a substantial meal.

"It's a long way from here to there," he said, unfolding a map of the Western Hemisphere he had purchased in the gift shop while Julia was catching a few extra winks. He arranged the map so the eastern seaboard down through South America was centered on the table, and tapped the tip of his forefinger on Atlanta. "We have to be at the airport at 11:50 this morning."

"That's cutting it close." She'd woken with the skeleton of a plan rattling around in her head. They'd have to move quickly to get everything done in time.

"That's the last flight of the day for any airline." He ran his finger south to Sao Paulo, Brazil. "As it is, we don't get in till after midnight.

Tomorrow morning, we catch a commuter flight into Pedro Juan Caballero. Be there 'bout noon. Then we'll have to travel to wherever it is they took Allen." He shook his head, discouraged. "That's a long time for them to have him. According to the SATD, Atropos's plane made it in under ten hours. If it takes us half a day to find him, he'll have been there almost two days."

Julia frowned. "Half a day to find him may be optimistic."

"But you said—"

"We'll find him. It just won't be easy." She examined the map. It really was a long way. Farther, even, than Europe, though she'd always thought of South America as a near neighbor.

The waitress came and left, leaving their breakfast plates scattered across the Caribbean and Venezuela.

"How about chartering a jet?" Stephen suggested.

"The passports Sweaty's getting us will look great. They'll get us past busy airline clerks who are really checking for the destination country, but charter companies are very careful. They have to be, with pirates out there wanting to take their planes and terrorists looking to bypass airport security. I don't think our passports will work with them, and then we'd really be up the creek."

He nodded, solemn. "We're not going to miss that flight," he said firmly. He scooped an entire fried egg into his mouth and still had room to say, "So what's your plan?"

Allen lay on his side, his knees pulled to his chest, his arms hugging his legs. A metal crossbar pushed up through the green canvas of his cot, making his ribs ache. It was the least of his problems. A long time ago—hours? days?—when the sun had been high and hot, the guards who'd thrown him in the cage returned. They'd dragged him out, hauled him into a Quonset hut and down several flights of stairs, through dingy corridors to this room, this cell. Eight feet by eight feet, at best. The cot was bolted to the floor. A plastic wash bucket was his toilet. Wire mesh protected fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. There was no light switch; the tubes had burned bright white since his arrival.

The guards had stripped off his soiled clothes and left a khaki jumpsuit. People had peered through the window in the door and occasionally brought in water or a plate of inedible slop.

The first unattributable pain he noticed was in his eyes. They felt swollen, the eyeballs themselves stretching and pushing against the ocular sockets. The headache came next, a throbbing that picked up pace until it became a never-ending pressure. His vision blurred. His bowels cramped. His muscles arched. His fingernails hurt.

When two guards had pulled him from the cage, they might as well have worked a knife blade into his shoulder socket, the pain had been so great. Regardless, he had writhed around as if in the throes of a panicked escape attempt. Unable to break free, he had lunged for the ground, pulling his escorts with him. His face had struck the dirt. He found the tracking device with his lips and pulled it into his mouth. As the soldiers had forced him up, he swallowed.

It was still inside him, and he wondered if it was working. Certainly, the thing wasn't designed for such abuse. He had thought about what to do later and decided he couldn't risk being separated from it. He would have to swallow it again.

He thought about Stephen. He'd be hounding Julia to find him. He hoped she had understood his message and followed through with sending the data to Kendrick Reynolds. They would need all the help they could get to rescue him.

If it isn't too late.

Nix that. Think of something else. Julia. He did like the way she looked. He liked that she was tough too. And smart. Somebody he could get to know.

He thought of all the women he'd known, the ones he could remember. One by one, he counted through them, tried to recall how they'd met, what they'd done on their first date, their names.

He entertained any thought that entered his mind, anything but the most pressing, the most insistent. He didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to know—

Why am I feeling these pains? What have they done to me?

—Angelina. Pretty blonde. Senior prom. No, he'd taken Robin. Brunette. So how had he known Angelina? Homecoming?

The dead bolt rattled, thunked. The door cracked open. A face peered in, then bent low. A water bottle rolled in. The door shut, the lock thunked.

He was thirsty. He willed himself up to get the bottle. Didn't move. He watched the bottle, on its side, unmoving.

Reminded him of Patty. She loved water, wouldn't drink anything else. Drove him nuts, that girl.

When he returned to the comic shop, Stephen paid Sweaty

Dave the balance owed by purchasing a cellophane-sealed comic book with a thick stack of hundreds. The book itself was a new issue of an unpopular comic, worth a few bucks at best. The documents it hid, however, were invaluable.

Back in the van, he and Julia inspected the bogus identifications, stunned by their perfection. The passports possessed stamps from other countries, dating back half a dozen years. Some of the pages were dog-eared, and Stephen's had a coffee-cup circle stained into the front cover. The driver's licenses also showed signs of wear, but not to the extent that the numbers were illegible or the pictures hard to see. Sweaty or one of his cohorts had digitally removed his beard but left him with a mustache, so it appeared that it had been taken at a different time from the passport photo. Their new birth certificates appeared to be yellowing and slightly brittle from age. Julia said that the effect was achieved by immersing the paper in weak tea, then warming it in an oven at low temperature. As a final touch, Sweaty Dave had given each of them several major credit cards, complete with a few hundred dollars of available credit. Julia got a Sears card embossed with her new name.

"You have to shave," she told him, "or at least take a trimmer to it."

"I won't look like my photo."

"That's okay," she assured him. "People who check IDs expect appearances to change. They get suspicious when you look too much like your photo. They're trained to compare the nose, eyes, size of the ears, shape of the face, things that don't change. They'll know it's you, don't worry."

seventy-four

Gregor burst from the Quonset hut door, pistol drawn. Making his way toward the airstrip, he grimaced at the sky. Guards, two with rifles, two with Uzis, were already there, looking off toward the distant Amambay mesas to the south. The jet seemed to rise up from the treetops. It sailed overhead, low and loud.

At the end of the runway, the parked Cessna's door opened, and Atropos came out, stopping on the steps. He glared up, blocking the sun with his hand.

Gregor ran all out for him.

Atropos saw Gregor and pulled his gun.

Gregor stopped. He realized Atropos was responding to his own drawn weapon. He holstered it and jogged the rest of the distance.

Atropos's big pistol remained in his hand, pointed at the runway. His thick black hair was even messier than it had been when he arrived. His clothes were wrinkled, as though he'd slept in them.

"Another plane!" Gregor called. "One of yours?" He knew it had to be. It was the same model as the one Atropos flew.

"Have you taken care of Parker?" He saw Gregor's confusion and said, "Allen Parker. When can I take him?"

"Soon. We just want to make sure—do you know anything about that plane?"

Atropos stepped onto the packed-dirt airstrip. He strode past Gregor, heading for the four guards. Karl Litt appeared from behind the Quonsets. He scanned the sky as he moved slowly toward the guards.

"Atropos," Gregor pleaded. "I need to know—"

"Yes, that's me."

"You weren't supposed to tell others. I invited only you."

"I know."

They were almost within earshot of Karl. His scowl was already visible.

"This is a problem," Gregor said. "I told Karl you were coming alone."

Karl stepped toward them. "What's going on?" he asked loudly.

Gregor trotted ahead of Atropos, holding his palms up. "I was told—"

The jet roared up from the east, over the trees, and dropped down onto the runway. Its engines whined as its reverse thrusters kicked in. It taxied past the men at more than a hundred miles per hour. Slowing quickly, the sound ramped down. The plane reached the end of the airstrip, near the other Cessna, turned around, and approached them at a slow clip.

The guards brought up their weapons. Gregor felt Atropos's pistol push into his temple.

"Tell them to drop their weapons."

Gregor did, and the rifles and Uzis clattered to the ground.

Atropos lowered his pistol. He said, "Stay calm. Nothing is wrong." He looked at the guards, at Karl. He repeated, "Nothing is wrong."

The jet coasted up to them, stopped. A long moment later, the engines died, winding down like a dying breath.

Gregor saw movement in the cockpit, shadows, an indistinguishable face. He glanced at Atropos; he was smiling, looking pleased and relaxed.

The door clamshelled out, one half rising up, the other dropping to the ground. A man stepped out.

Gregor blinked, confused.

The man was identical to Atropos: same height and build, same thick-framed glasses, same mussed-up hair.

The guards hitched in their breath, uttered the first syllables of questions or exclamations; Gregor remained silent, gap-mouthed.

Atropos stepped forward. The other one came down from the jet's steps, and they embraced.

The assassin Gregor had met the day before turned. He touched his chest with four fingers and said, "Atropos." He tapped the chest of the new arrival with the same four fingers. He said, "Atropos."

"You—you're both Atropos?"

He nodded.

A sound reached Gregor's ears. Quiet, growing louder. The scream of twin jet engines, rolling in over the tops of trees.

His heart leaped at the sight of his brothers. They were standing on the packed-dirt runway, watching him bring the plane in. How long since they'd all been together? Two, three months, at least. Each had his own territory, his own quarter of the globe to administer his services. On rare occasions, when demand exceeded their expediency, they would share a continent or—very seldom—a job.

But a few times a year, they came together, not as colleagues, but as family. A chartered yacht out of Cuba. A hunting cabin in Bavaria's Hanau forest. A scuba adventure in the Andaman Sea of Thailand. Their time together was always relaxing and invigorating and, above all, fulfilling. They were the only times any of them felt whole.

Atropos had heard of long-married couples who ached when the other wasn't around; they'd been together so long and had ceded so many intellectual and emotional roles to the other, even sociologists conceded that these people were incomplete without their mate. That was them, Atropos, for months at a time, until they reunited and became one again.

Their father was a great assassin, also named Atropos, as his father was and his father before him. Their father had realized the potential profit in bearing twins—financially and to the reputation of his name. The new science of artificial insemination had yielded high success rates. At the time, the process had involved fertilizing three to four eggs; typically, only one survived to birth. He had convinced a doctor to fertilize eight eggs. Half had lived.

He had taught them the ways of the assassin and allowed them to experience their craft firsthand, on his jobs. Then later he had sent each of them to a different master: stealth and entry, escape and evasion, martial arts and close-quarter combat, weaponry.

Instruct one another, he had said. Become experts in one skill, then experts in all.

Only later they realized his wisdom. Not only did their talents surge, but the bond between them became as essential, as organic as the valves between the chambers of a single heart.

Their father had also instilled in them pride in the Atropos tradition. They understood their vocation, their role in affirming and growing their heritage. They were the first Atropos who could turn their family's myth into reality. Their forefathers had built the skeleton; they were the muscle and flesh. And so they had spread out, for the sake of their name.

The tires touched down, bounced up, then came down again and rolled. Atropos tore past the Cessna that was parked near the cluster of spectators and aimed for the other one at the far end of the airstrip. He noted the soldiers, their weapons on the ground.

His brothers had done that, made sure he was safe.

He tried to avoid the reason for this impromptu meeting, but he felt his throat tighten, his stomach cramp. Coming alongside the other Cessna, he turned and nudged the throttle. The jet taxied toward his brothers.

He stopped the plane, turned off the engines, and rolled out of the pilot's seat. He paused in the cabin to run his fingers back through his hair. It was thick and needed a cut. He took deep breaths, wondering where their other brother was, in one of the planes or someplace cooler, a morgue or refrigerator.

Hate made his chest feel hot. He diverted his attention to the television, flipping through channel after channel. After a few seconds, he was there, catching all the dialogue, every nuance the actors tried.

Okay.

He turned the heavy bolt on the door and pushed it open. Anxious hands from the outside gripped it, helping it along. His lips formed a smile, but he saw his brothers' faces and it fell away like dried clay.

He nearly fell out of the plane, into arms that welcomed him, needed him. He pulled them close. Their heads touched. He felt their strength. But more, he felt their grief. He wasn't whole. They were all together—all who remained—and they were not whole. He realized this hollowness would never go away.

seventy-five

While Stephen drove, Julia stayed in the back, click

ing away on the laptop.

"We have to be at the airport at least an hour early, you know?" he said.

"No problem."

Five minutes later he pulled to a stop. "Make it fast."

They were at the curb in front of an electronics store. She hopped out and returned after a few minutes, bag in hand.

"The sales clerk said there's a bowling alley up the street about ten minutes." She handed him scribbled directions on the back of a sales receipt. "It'll take me longer than that to transfer everything, so no hurry."

He checked the directions and got the van moving.

"Mr. Reynolds?"

Someone was gently shaking his shoulder. He felt the heat of the fire from the hearth on the right side of his face, then the weight of the binder in his lap. He had been reviewing security briefs from the various agencies that reported to the NSA when he'd drifted off. His eyes fluttered open to a blurry face in front of him. He'd found that coming out of sleep slowed with age. Now it was a struggle, like rising through water, wondering why the surface wasn't where you though: it would be. He suspected that the easier endeavor would be to simply stop struggling and let himself sink away. He'd never had the courage to try it.

One of Captain Landon's lieutenants smiled at him, a patronizing smile that irritated him.

"What do you want?" He straightened in his chair, folded the binder, and held it out to the kid. "Put this on the table there."

"A call, sir. Julia Matheson."

Kendrick noticed the cordless encryption phone in his hand. He snatched at it, feeling some resistance until the man let go.

"Get out of here."

When the lieutenant was gone, he spoke into the phone. "Ms. Matheson? How good of you to call."

"Atropos took Allen Parker."

"Took?"

"He flew away with him in his jet. Took."

"I've never heard of him doing anything like that. He's a killer. He kills. What does he want with your friend?"

"Ransom? The evidence?"

"You still have it?"

"And more. We know where he went. You said you wanted to find Karl Litt?"

Kendrick leaned off the back of the chair. He felt an old familiar pang in his chest, the anticipation of reaching a long-desired goal.

"You know where he is?" His voice was almost a whisper.

"We want Allen back. Will you help us get him?"

"Yes, of course. Where?"

"You'll help us rescue Allen? I have your word?"

"I will use every resource at my disposal, and I think you know my resources are considerable. Now, where?"

"Can you trace this call?"

"It's already done. Tell me where Karl Litt is, Ms. Matheson, and you will have your friend back before nightfall."

Silence.

"Ms. Matheson? Hello?"

He pushed himself out of the chair, grabbing the cane beside it. He stumbled and caught himself as he made his way to the door, faster than he had moved in a long time.

"Landon!" he called. "Somebody!"

He yanked open the door, startling the lieutenant on the other side. He held out the phone, like a tired and injured runner passing off a baton.

"Trace this. Hurry!"

Julia closed the cell phone and hard drive inside the locker and pulled out the key. She looked around at the bowlers and spectators, the few people at the snack bar. No one was paying attention to her. The air was ripe with beer and sweat and something like talcum powder. She imagined the people Kendrick would send, ripping open locker after locker until they found the right one. Something these regular folks would talk about for a while, then forget.

She didn't know if Kendrick would care what she and Stephen did after he got what he wanted, but she wasn't taking any chances. She wanted to be on the plane before he saw the data Vero had delivered. Nothing would stop them from getting Allen back. She only hoped Kendrick was good for his word.

On the way out to the van, she dropped the key in the trash.

On the 767, over the Carribbean, Stephen asked to watch Vero's video again. Julia set the laptop on his tray table and told him how to access it. His big fingertips hovered over the keyboard like fat birds trying to land on tiny perches. He brought an index finger down, depressing several keys at once.

"Ah!" he said and carefully tapped the right key. "The world wasn't made for big guys."

"I can't say I relate." She glanced at the monitor but saw nothing but the privacy screen she'd slipped on before arriving at the airport. Only the person sitting directly in front of the screen could see the images it showed.

"Stephen," she said slowly, thinking about what she wanted to say. "A couple times Allen started to say something about why you left medicine and became a pastor. You stopped him. Can you tell me now? I'm just curious." She reached out and laid her hand on his.

He stared at it, expressionless.

"I killed a man," he said. "I murdered him."

Her hand jumped slightly. She hoped he didn't notice.

He shifted his gaze to the window. "Back then—this was a few months before completing my MD—I was pretty cocky. Respected, wealthy family. No problem getting dates. Had a residency lined up at Boston's Massachusetts General. 'Course, med school is vicious. On the rare evening I didn't have night courses and wasn't studying or doing volunteer work at the local clinic, I hit the bars. Hard. Most of us did. We'd try to get two months of high tension out of our systems in one night."

He paused, shifted in the seat.

"We were in a sports bar, Malone's. Celtics and Bucks on all the TVs. We'd gotten pretty rowdy, a few of us."

He turned to Julia and leaned closer.

"Some guy at the bar told us to shut up. Jeff—a friend of mine— he got into a yelling match with him. The guy came over, all in-your-face, and dumped a plate of potato skins in Jeff's lap. Jeff was a wiry little guy, feisty like a Chihuahua. He just about jumped over the table to get at him. I put my arm out and stopped him. So the guy who'd come over starts saying, 'This your babysitter, that it? Doesn't want Jeffy to get hurt.' Stuff like that."

Stephen was looking past Julia, completely there, back in that bar.

"Jeff picks up a saltshaker and beans the guy right in the forehead.

Now they're both trying to get over the table. I had to stand up to hold them back. The guy sees me rising up and thinks I'm coming at him. He gives me a shove. And of course I shove him back, which puts him on his butt, sliding across the floor. He's up in a heartbeat, ready to dive at me. He stops and sizes me up. I got a hundred pounds and eight inches on him. He reaches round his back and pulls out a knife, starts carving little circles in the air, you know? I'm like, 'Whoa, buddy,' but now I'm really ticked off. I mean, the guy pulls a knife? He kind of lunges, and I haul off and plant my fist right in the side of his head."

He stopped, thinking. His face seemed to have slackened, like a candle just starting to feel the effects of its own burning wick.

"He went down and never got up. Ever. My punch fractured his skull and ruptured a middle meningeal artery. They arrested me for manslaughter, then eventually determined I'd acted in self-defense."

"Sounds right to me," Julia said.

He shook his head. "I was never in danger. That lunge was a half-hearted attempt to save face. It didn't come close. I saw it in his eyes. He was scared. He wasn't going to take us on, with or without a knife."

She patted his hand. "Law enforcement has what's called the twenty-one-foot rule. It says that a suspect with an edged weapon is a deadly threat within twenty-one feet. It takes one and a half seconds for a person to close that distance, about the same time a quick-thinking cop can draw and fire his weapon. And our society's infatuation with firearms has dulled us to the dangers of knives, which can kill with one puncture, one slash. In the situation you were in, any cop worth his spit would have shot that guy. Including me."

He studied her face, said nothing.

"He was freaking out, angry, probably had a few drinks. There's no way you have could have been sure he wouldn't have attacked you. He didn't even know, most likely."

She saw in his face that Stephen had long ago made up his mind: he'd killed an innocent man.

She said, "So that shocked you into dropping out of college, finding God?"

"The guy—his name was Wayne Reitz. Only twenty-two. His father came to see me. He was a pastor of a big church. He wept for his son; then he told me to get on with my life, not to let what happened crush me." He found her eyes. "Not to let it crush me. Well, I did feel crushed that I could do such a thing with my bare hands. A soon-to-be healer, practitioner of the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. There was this pressing weight on my chest."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"CliffsNotes version: I went to Pastor Reitz's church. I wanted to know if he really meant his kind words. How could he not hate me? He explained God's will and forgiveness. It took a long time, but I started to breathe again. I did some work around the church, went to seminary . . . didn't become a physician."

In his eyes she saw the pain, still there like the ghost sensations amputees experience. There was also compassion and caring. It all added up to a reluctance to do physical harm.

"As a pastor, as a compassionate man," she said, "you believe in fighting evil, right?"

He nodded.

She let the thought hang there. She smiled and slouched against the curving wall of the plane, pushed a small blue pillow behind her head, and closed her eyes. After a few moments, she heard Stephen fiddling with the laptop.

She opened one eye. "Get it?"

"I just want to watch those videos again," he said, slipping a pair of headphones over his ears. "We're missing something. I know it."

She closed her eye. "Let me know if you need a hand."

Julia used her fork to nudge the shriveled chicken breast

on Stephen's plastic dinner tray.

"Aren't you going to eat?" she asked around a mouthful of something that looked like string beans.

"Huh?" he said, pulling his eyes from the laptop's monitor. Her fork was still resting on his meal, which shared her fold-down tray since the laptop occupied his own. "Go ahead. I'm not hungry."

She craned around to get a look at the monitor. It was replaying the video of the man's violent death in the hospital. She swallowed hard. "Trouble?"

He leaned back, shaking his head. "I've watched the videos a dozen times, scrolled through the list of names, studied the map. I've got to believe they're all components of a plan to invade the U.S., but I get the feeling I'm missing something." He struggled to put his thoughts into words. "It's like standing too close to a mosaic: I can't see the big picture."

"The camera dwells on the victim," Julia said. "He has to be someone important."

"That's just it. He's nobody. Just some poor joe who contracts—" His face lost its color.

"Stephen? What is it?"

"It's so obvious," he said slowly, his eyes chasing erratic thoughts. "When did the man contract Ebola?"

"We assumed it was when the crop duster flew over, that it was in the powder it dumped on them."

"Them?"

"The men having lunch, our victim among them."

"When did the camera start following him?"

"Judging by the times and date on the screen, the filming began on the morning of the same day."

"That's it. Watch all the scenes, study them. Almost every one of the men eating lunch with the victim—maybe every one, I'll have to check again—attended his funeral. They're there, mourning, dancing, watching."

"So . . . ?" Julia said, drawing the word out as she shook her head.

"So," he said. His eyes were wide and frightened. "How did the camera operator know which man would contract Ebola from the powder dumped on a group of twenty?"