Eric Lustbader - First Daughter

She watched him stand up. She was shaking now, couldn't take her eyes off the pliers, which, glowing, swung in a short arc, back and forth. Then, without any warning, Kray disappeared into the blackness.

Alli couldn't believe it, but she actually began to weep. She tried to stop, but her body wouldn't obey. Some animal part of her nervous system had been activated. What she was feeling she could neither believe nor abide: She wanted him back. The feeling was so powerful, it was as physical as the pliers.

He was her only connection to the outside world, to life. "Don't leave me alone!" she wailed. "I don't care what you do to me, I'll never tell you about Emma," she said through her tears.

"Quite the little loyalist, aren't you?" His voice came from the darkness. "No matter. As it happens, I already know all I need to know about Emma McClure."

She felt a wave of nausea as her terror ratcheted up.

"No, no! Please!"

She wanted to shrink into the chair, to disappear like him, but she remained in the cone of light. She hung her head, the blood pounding in her temples.

"What is it?" Kray said, his voice suddenly soft. "I'm a reasonable man. Tell me."

She shook her head. Her fear clouded her eyes.

Kray stepped into the light. "Alli, please speak to me." His features took on a rueful cast. "It's not my fault. You forced me to frighten you. I didn't want to, believe me."

For a moment, utter stillness held her in its grip; then she began to weep, her breath fluttering like a spent leaf. "I need… I need to go to the bathroom."

Kray expelled a tender laugh. "Why didn't you say so?"

He unstrapped her from the chair, and she whimpered.

"There," he said.

She stared at him, wide-eyed, so stunned, her brain refused to function.

He brought over a bedpan.

"This can't be happening," she said more to herself than to him. "I won't." She was sobbing and begging all at once. "I can't ."

He stood in front of her, arms crossed like a corrections officer, detached, observant, his smoke-colored eyes on hers.

"Please!" she begged. "Don't look. Please, please, please turn away. I'll be good, I promise."

Slowly, he turned his back on her.

Stillness overcame her then, as her mind tried to accommodate. But it was so hard. Each time she thought she had a handle on her new reality, it turned upside down: good was evil, kindness was pain, black was white. She felt dizzy, alone, isolated. Terror crept into her bones, freezing the marrow. But, oh, her bladder would burst unless she peed, peed right now! But she couldn't.

"Emma didn't tell you a thing." She was trembling, the muscles in her thighs jumping wildly. "How do you know about me and Bark?"

"I'll tell you, Alli, because I like you. I want you to trust me. I know because there was a microphone in your dorm room. When you confessed to Emma, you were also confessing to me."

Alli closed her eyes. At last, head bowed, shivering, she let go, the sound like rain spattering a tin roof.

THE POTUS and Secretary Paull sat together in the backseat of the president's heavily armored limo on the way from the White House to where Air Force One was waiting to take the president and his small party to Moscow to meet with the Russian president, Yukin. In the briefcase that straddled the president's knees was the Black File Paull had provided, proof that Yukin's handpicked head of the state-owned RussOil was his still-active ex-KGB assassin.

The president could have taken Marine One, his helicopter, to the airfield but with its privacy shield between the passenger compartment and the driver, the limo provided absolute privacy, something with which the president, in the waning weeks of his Administration, had become obsessed.

"This abduction business," the president said, "how is it progressing?"

"We're following every lead," Paull said noncommittally.

"Ach, Dennis, let's call a spade a spade, shall we?" The president stared out the bulletproof smoked-glass window. "We've been blessed with a bit of great good luck. This business, unfortunate as it may be for the Carsons-and God knows every day I pray for that young woman's safe release-has provided us with the excuse we need to excise the missionary secularists- all of them." He turned back, his eyes burning with the fire of the devout. "What I want to know is why hasn't that already happened?"

"The president-elect's agent-Jack McClure-has been following a very promising lead."

"Well, you see, Dennis, now you've just put your finger on the nub of the problem."

Paull shook his head. "I don't understand, sir," he said, though he was quite certain he was reading the president all too well.

"It appears to me that Jack McClure is gumming up the works."

"Sir, I believe he's on to a lead that could bring us Alli Carson's abductor. I was under the impression that our first priority was her safe return."

"Have you forgotten our previous discussion, Dennis? Give the order to Hugh Garner, and let's get on with it. By the time I return from Moscow, I want the First American Secular Revivalists in custody. Then I'll address the nation with the evidence he'll have trumped up from his FSB security force."

"I'll inform Garner as soon as you board your flight, sir," Paull said with a heavy heart. He wondered how he was going to finesse this ugly-and quite illegal-situation the president had dropped into his lap. At the moment, he saw no alternative to turning Garner loose on the FASR, but he held out hope that if he insisted that Jack McClure assist in the operation, the president-elect's man could find a way to mitigate the damage. Of course, that would put McClure squarely in everyone's line of fire. He'd take the heat if he got in Garner's face, but that couldn't be helped. Agents in the field were designed to deal with whatever heat was thrown at them. Besides, McClure was expendable; Paull's agent in the Secret Service wasn't.

During the secretary's ruminations, the limo had arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. Paull, who had been debating all morning whether or not to bring up an extremely delicate subject, finally made his decision as the presidential limo rolled to a stop on the tarmac twelve yards from the near-side wing of Air Force One.

"Sir, before you leave, I have a duty to inform you…"

"Yes?" The president's bright, freshly scrubbed face seemed blank, his thoughts already thousands of miles away in bleak, snow-driven Moscow. He was, no doubt, licking his chops at the prospect of putting Yukin in his place.

"Nightwing missed his last rendezvous." Nightwing was the government's most productive deep-cover asset.

"When was that scheduled for?" the president snapped.

"Ten days ago," Paull replied just as crisply.

"Dennis, why on earth are you telling me this moments before I leave for Moscow?"

"He missed his backup dates four days ago and yesterday, sir. I felt it prudent not to bother you before this, hoping that Nightwing would surface. He hasn't."

"Frankly, Dennis, with your plate so full, I don't understand why you're even bothering with this."

"Assets are a tricky lot, sir. We ask them to do a lot of dodgy things-wet work. There's a certain psychology to people who kill without remorse. They tend to think of themselves as the center of the universe. This is what makes them successful, it's what keeps them going. But I've seen it happen before-every once in a while some developmental aspect becomes arrested. Their urge to be someone-to be special, to become known-overrides their self-discipline."

"What is this, psychology one-oh-one?" the president said testily.

"Sir, I want to make my position clear. When an asset's self-discipline disappears, he becomes nothing more than a serial killer."