Eric Lustbader - First Daughter

"Here." Garner handed over the manifesto. "Read the rest yourself."

Jack, who was inordinately attuned to such undertones, wondered whether Garner suspected-or, worse, knew. Chief Bennett had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Jack's secret under wraps, but with the Homeland Security geeks, one never knew. They were as zealous as a Sunni imam, and if they didn't like you-and clearly Garner didn't like Jack-and if they felt threatened by you-and clearly Garner felt threatened as hell-they would move heaven and earth to find the skeleton in your closet, even if it was an enigma wrapped inside a conundrum.

Jack stared down at the impassioned tract, which was signed "The Second Enlightenment." It contained a stylized peace sign identical to those on the playing cards found on the Secret Service detail.

"It's official now," Garner said. "E-Two are terrorists of the first rank. They won't hesitate to kill again-I can guarantee you that because E-Two's manifesto calls for a drastic change in the current president's faith-based policies before he leaves office. We believe that it is seeking to discredit him in front of the entire world, to sabotage his legacy, to force him to admit that his policies are wrong." He took the document back from Jack. "It's clear from the evidence that E-Two has abducted Alli Carson. I want all our energies concentrated on this organization."

"Sounds like a leap of faith, rather than a leap of logic," Jack said.

Garner squared around, bringing to bear every asset that had allowed him to climb the jungle gym of federal politics. "Do I look like I care what it sounds like to you, McClure? Goddamnit, you're in my army now. The President of the United States has tasked me with getting Alli Carson back, alive and as quickly as is humanly possible. I'm telling you how. Either you're with us or get out of our way."

"I'd like to see some hard evidence-"

"The E-Two cards on the bodies of our fallen soldiers aren't enough for you?" Garner rose and, with him, Nina.

The atmosphere had deteriorated from unpleasant to toxic. Jack went to the window, stood staring out at the neat manicured lawns.

He gathered himself. "I need to see where it happened."

"Of course." Nina nodded. "I'll take you."

"I know the way."

Garner's knife-edge smile just barely revealed the tips of white, even teeth. "Of course you do. Nevertheless, I'll accompany you."

LIGHT, MELANCHOLY as a ghost, tiptoed into the room through a pair of mullioned windows. It was northern light, dismal, vagrant, at this time of year almost spectral. Hugh Garner had peeled back the yellow-and-black tape that marked the boundary of the crime scene like an admonishing finger, but as he was about to step across the threshold, Jack blocked his way.

Jack snapped on latex gloves. "How many people have been through here?"

"I don't know." Garner shrugged. "Maybe a dozen."

Jack shook his head. "It looks like a shit disco in here. You sure took your time getting me over here."

"Everything in this 'shit disco' was tagged, photoed, and bagged without your expertise. You read the reports," Garner said with peculiar emphasis.

"That I did." Jack knew by now that the only thing keeping Garner from kicking his ass off the grounds was the president-elect. Even the president couldn't say no to Edward Carson without looking like something you picked up on the sole of your shoe.

"If you find anything-which I seriously doubt-it'll be analyzed by our SID division at Quantico," Garner said. "Not only is it the best forensic facility in the country, but the security is absolutely airtight."

"Is that where you sent the two bodies?"

"The autopsies were done by our people, but the bodies are housed locally." Garner took out a PDA, scrolled through it. "At the offices of an ME by the name of-" He seemed about to read off the name but, struck by a sudden idea, turned the face of the PDA so Jack could read it.

"Egon Schiltz," Jack said, his brain vainly trying to decode the scrawly squiggles on the PDA screen. Mercifully, his guess was more than a shot in the dark. Schiltz was medical examiner for the Northern District of Virginia. Despite sharp political differences, they had a friendship that went back twenty years.

Returning his attention to the present, Jack entered the room, carefully placing one foot in front of the other until he stood in the center. It was perhaps twenty by twenty, he estimated, not small by dorm standards. But then, Langley Fields wasn't a standard college. You got what you paid for, in all areas.

The floor was plush wall-to-wall carpet. Beds, dressers, chairs, lamps, desks, closets, sets of shelves-there were two of almost everything. Alli's laptop, its hard drive ransacked by IT forensics, sat on her desk. The shelf above her bed was a clutter of books, notes, pins, pennants, first-place trophies she'd won for horseback riding and tennis. She was an athletic girl and intensely competitive. He took several steps closer, saw the bronze medal for a karate competition, and couldn't help feeling proud of her. Owing to her diminutive size and with Schiltz's daughter in his mind, he'd convinced her to take it up in the first place. His eyes passed over the spines of the books-there were textbooks, of course, as well as novels. Jack had been taught to locate a spot outside himself on which to fix his rabbity mind. The point was fixed. Like a spinning dancer trained to concentrate on a single point in the distance in order not to lose his balance or grow dizzy, it was essential that Jack concentrate on the point and stay there to tame the chaos in his mind. Otherwise, trying to make sense of letters and numbers was as futile as herding cats. He couldn't always locate it. The more extreme the tension he was under, the less chance he had of finding the point, let alone holding on to it.

He located his center point, six inches above and behind his head, and the whirling hurricane inside his head dissipated, his disorientation melted away, and he was able to read the book spines with minimum difficulty: Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon , Natsuo Kirino's Out , Patricia Highsmith's This Sweet Sickness , Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind .

Garner shifted from one foot to another. "After Emma's death, Alli Carson refused to have anyone else move in with her."

On what had been Emma's side of the room, nothing remained of her presence but a small stack of CDs. Everything had been taken by either him or Sharon, as if they were the contents of a house they were never going to share again. Seeing the CDs kindled a flame of memory: Tori Amos, Jay-Z, Morrissey, Siobhan Donaghy, Interpol. Jack had to laugh at that one. The day she moved in, he had given her an iPod-not a Nano, but one with a whopping big eighty-gigabyte drive. And as soon as she was able to rip tracks into MP3s, there went the CDs. Jack picked up the Tori Amos CD, and the first song his eye fell on was "Strange Little Girl." His heart, thumping and crashing like a drum set, threatened to blow a hole in his chest. His hand trembled when he put the CD back on the small stack. He didn't want them; he didn't want to move them either. Her iPod was living at home, untouched. He'd palmed it from inside the wrecked car without anyone seeing, the only thing miraculously undamaged. He couldn't count the number of times he'd promised himself he'd listen to the music on it, but so far he'd failed to work up the courage.

"So difficult," Garner continued, "I can only hope you can do your job with a clear head, McClure."

Jack was immune to the taunts. He'd been derided by eighteen-year-old professionals drawing on depths of sadism Garner got to only in dreams. He stood very still now, transferring his gaze from the specific, allowing it to sweep the room instead. He had what in the trade was called soft eyes. It was a phrase difficult to translate precisely but, more or less, soft eyes meant that he had the ability to see an area, a neighborhood, a house, a room as it was, not as it was expected to be. If you went into a crime scene with preconceptions-with hard eyes-chances were you'd miss what you needed to see in order to make the case. Sometimes not. Sometimes, of course, there was no case to be made, no matter how soft your eyes were. But that was a matter out of Jack's hands, so he never gave it a thought.