Eric Lustbader - First Daughter

"What purposes?"

"That I'm not at liberty to disclose." How about kidnapping Edward Carson's daughter so the crime can be labeled an act of terrorism and laid at the missionary secularists' door , Paull thought. "At first, I suspected it might be the president himself, but now I think it might be the only other person who knows of the asset's existence: the National Security Advisor."

"So the National Security Advisor has been working, at the president's behest, against us."

Paull nodded. "It seems most likely. But I've bought us some time. I told him that I've been running you with an eye to getting closer to Jack McClure."

"That's too close to the truth."

Paull smiled thinly. "Have faith; that's as far as the truth goes. I sold them the story that I'm going to find a way to poison Jack against Edward Carson. Jack then goes to Reverend Taske, gets him to turn the power of the RMC against Carson."

Nina shook her head. "What I wouldn't give for fifteen minutes inside that brain of yours."

"Now that we know who we're fighting," Paull said, "we'd better rally the troops and man the ramparts."

"Good God, you're not talking about an all-out war, are you?"

"Not out in the open. But we've already felt the first shot across our bows-the turning of two of my men, plus my captain. Our first order of business is to root out any others. We can't mount a reasonable response if the opposite side knows every move we make."

"I'll get right on it," Nina said.

"Use the Secret Service facilities, not Homeland Security's."

"Gotcha."

They walked a bit farther, lost in their own thoughts.

"Now tell me what's new with our boy, Jack," Paull said.

"Sir, do you recall a double murder at McMillan Reservoir about twenty-five years ago?"

"That would be Metro Police territory, wouldn't it?"

"Apparently not this one. I checked Metro's records of the incident. There aren't any. According to Jack, there was very little in the papers. I checked out his story, and he's right. For that kind of crime, there was precious little ink spilled-not even the names of the victims. Everything was hushed up, so it must have been at a high government level."

"What's McClure's interest in the double murder?"

"I don't know, we haven't had time to talk about it at length," Nina said. "But he also has an intense interest in a local drug supplier working at the same time. Jack said no one knew who he was or where he came from, but that he had a tremendous amount of juice. No one could ever lay a hand on him, a man named Ian Brady."

For a moment, Paull thought that he'd been struck by a car that had jumped the curb. For certain he was having an out-of-body experience. When he was able to gather his scattered senses, he said, "Come again?"

"Did I say something-?"

"That name." Paull snapped his fingers impatiently. "Give me that name again."

"What? Ian Brady?"

"That's the fucking one."

Beside her, Paull stared off into the distance, his eyes seeing nothing. Brady was the key, the lynchpin to events unfolding all too rapidly. A serial murderer, a schemer, most probably a psychopath-this was the asset Paull had inherited. The most important intelligence asset stretching back twenty-five years. This was the monster he was forced to protect, whose whereabouts he no longer knew. Who did, then? His mind snapped into perfect focus. "Get Jack McClure," he said to Nina. "Bring him to me ASAP."

Nina took out her cell phone. "I'll call him right now."

"No," Paull said. "It's all too likely that our cell conversations are being monitored. I don't even want to use mine without prearranged coded signals."

"I'll find another way," Nina said.

Paull nodded gravely. "I know you will."

GET IT into your head, Jack," Sharon had said in the ER. "We all have a secret life, not just you." Now Jack knew the real truth of her words. His daughter was living a secret life right under his nose. It was as if he'd never known her at all-which was, of course, a deficiency that Sharon had accused him of repeatedly. But, given what she'd said to him, he determined that he had to know whether or not she knew about Emma's radicalization, her secret life.

"If she felt so strongly about the blurring of religion and government," Jack said, "why didn't she join a peaceful organization like the First American Secular Revivalists?"

"Because she was Emma," Alli said. "Because she never did things halfway, because she was strong and sure of herself. Above all, because she felt that the pack of evangelicals who had invaded the federal government were warmongers, that the only way to get their attention, to attack them, to expose them was with a radical response."

"She hated the warmongers so she became one herself?" Jack shook his head. "Isn't that counterintuitive?"

"The philosophers say fighting fire with fire is a legitimate response as old as time."

They were walking in the tangle of trees and underbrush behind the house. The sky was turning black, as if with soot, and a cold wind shivered the tallest branches. Jack was turning over what Alli had said because there was something about it that stuck in his mind, that seemed to loom large on the playing field he'd been thrust onto.

He stopped them at the bole of a gigantic oak. "Let's back this up a minute. Emma knew that your father would win the election, or at least that this current administration was on its last legs. Why not simply wait until the new regime came in?"

Alli shook her head. "I don't know, but there was an urgency in what she had to do."

"All right, let's put that aside for the moment. You said that she wanted to expose the Administration with a radical response."

"That's right."

"Did she tell you what she meant by that?"

"Sure. E-Two wants to provoke an extreme response from the Administration."

"But there's sure to be bloodshed."

"That's the whole point." Alli licked her lips. "See, the bloodier, the more militant, the more brutal the response, the better. Because E-Two is out to show the entire country what this Administration really is. They won't be able to round up the E-Two members easily. From what Emma said, they're all young people our age-no one over thirty. When there's blood on the streets, when America sees their own sons and daughters slaughtered, they'll finally understand the nature of the people who are exporting war and death to the world."

Jack was rocked to his core. "They're planning to be martyrs."

"They're soldiers," Alli said. "They're laying down their lives for what they believe in."

"But what they're planning is monstrous, insane."

"As our foreign policy has been for eight years."

"But this isn't the way."

"Why not? Sitting on their hands hasn't worked so well, has it? Anyone who has said or tried to do anything to protest faith-based initiatives has been ridiculed or, worse, branded a traitor by the talking heads controlled by the Administration. God, look at what wimps members of the opposite party have been through an illegal war, scandals, evidence that the government muzzles its scientists and specialists on the topics of WMDs and global warming. If the parties were reversed, you can bet this president would've been impeached by now."

Why was it, Jack thought, that he felt as if he were listening to Emma and not Alli? A strange thing was happening to him. It had begun when he and Alli entered the house and now had continued as they moved out into woods. There was the very curious sensation of the world finally starting to make sense to him-well, if not the whole world, then his world, the one he'd kept hidden from others and which kept him apart from them. Like his ability to sense Emma, though she was no longer in this world, at least by the limited understanding of man-made science, he felt as if his world and the one that had always been closed to him were beginning to overlap. Hope rose, completely unfamiliar to him, that one day he might even be able to straddle both, that he might live in one without giving up the other.