Eric Lustbader - First Daughter

This gift he very badly wanted to bestow on Alli. To this end, he said, "There's someone I'd like you to meet."

Alli regarded him with skepticism. "Not another shrink. I've had my fill of probing and prodding."

"Not another shrink," Jack promised.

Rather than return to the front of the house where he'd parked, he took her through the underbrush. On the other side was parked Gus's white Continental, which Jack kept in pristine condition.

Alli laughed in delight as she climbed into it. Behind the wheel, Jack turned the key in the ignition, and the huge engine purred to life. With the lights extinguished, he rolled away without the Secret Service detail parked on Westmoreland being any the wiser.

He turned on the tape player, and James Brown took up "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" in midsong.

"Wow!" Alli said.

Yeah , thought Jack. Wow .

Ten minutes later, when they arrived at Kansas Avenue NE, they couldn't get near the old Renaissance Mission Church building. Barriers had been erected on the street and sidewalks on either side of it. There must have been more than a dozen unmarked cars and anti-terrorist vans drawn up on the street within the barriers.

Jack's heart seemed to plummet in his chest. Telling Alli to wait in the car, he got out, flashed his credentials to one of the twenty or so suits milling around. Then he saw Hugh Garner, who was spearheading the operation, and put away his ID.

"Hello, McClure," Garner said. "What brings you here?"

"I have an appointment with Chris Armitage of FASR," Jack lied.

Garner pulled a face. "So do we, McClure. Trouble is, we can't find him, or his pal Peter Link." Garner inclined his head. " You wouldn't know where they've got to?"

"If I did, I wouldn't be here talking to you," Jack said. "I'd like to speak to someone else in the FASR offices."

"I'm afraid that's impossible." Garner looked smug. Hailed by one of his detail, he turned, gave a couple of orders, turned back to Jack. "No one's here. This office has been shut down."

Jack thought of all the busy, dedicated men and women he'd seen on his way into Armitage's office. "Where is everyone else?"

"In federal custody." Garner grinned. "They've forfeited their rights to due process. They'll be held as long as necessary. Neither you nor anyone else can see them without a written order signed by the National Security Advisor himself."

Jack rocked back on his heels as if struck a blow. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"The president went on the air an hour ago with evidence supplied by the Russian president himself that the FASR and E-Two are being funded by Beijing." Garner's grin widened. "Under the Anti-Terrorism Act of December 2001, they've all been charged with treason."

JUST SOUTH of where the sawhorses blocked off the avenue was an alleyway. Jack drove the car around to Chillum Place, parked in a deserted lot. Alli said nothing; he knew she understood perfectly well what had happened.

"Why are we here?" Alli said at last. "Sitting in the dark with the lights out and the engine off?"

"We're moving to the edge of the world," Jack said quite seriously. "We're heading off the grid."

"What'll happen when we get there?"

"Tell me more about Emma."

Alli felt a familiar terror clutch her heart. Ever since Jack and Nina had rescued her, she had felt as if she had a fever, racked by bouts of anxiety, cold sweats, dreams of menacing shadows whispering horrible things to her. She saw Kray everywhere, as if he were stalking her, monitoring her every move, every word she said, every breath she took. Often, alone, she shook, chilled to her bones. Kray had become the sun, the moon, the clouds in the sky, moving as she moved, the wind rattling through the trees. He was always with her, his threats mingling with his ideas, the strange and powerful openness and freedom she had felt with him. These contradictory feelings confused and terrified her all the more. She no longer knew who she was, or more accurately, she no longer felt in control of herself. Something eerie and horribly frightening had happened to her in that room with him. Truth to tell, there were moments she couldn't recall, which was a relief. She so didn't want to probe beneath the unfamiliar surface of that vague unease at not remembering. Something had slipped away from her, she felt, and something else had been slipped into its place. She no longer was the Alli Carson who had lain sleeping in her dormitory room.

On the other hand, there was now, there was Jack. She liked him immensely, and this led to a certain sense of trust. He made her feel safe as no other human being-armed or otherwise-ever had. She envied Emma now, having this man for a father and then, realizing all over again that Emma was dead, shook a little, felt ill with shame for even having the thought. Even so, the thought of talking to him about Kray, about what had happened, set off a panicky feeling she was unable to understand, never mind try to control.

"Emma once said to me that we never really see ourselves," she said in an attempt to calm herself as well as to answer him. She felt that as long as she continued to speak about Emma, her friend wasn't truly dead, that a part of her-the part of Emma they saw and heard-would remain. "She said all we ever see of ourselves is our reflection-in mirrors, in water. But that isn't how we appear at all. So we had this game we played at night. We'd sit on the bed facing each other and we'd take turns describing each other's faces in the most minute detail-first the forehead and brow, then the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the mouth. And Emma was right. We got to know ourselves in a different way."

"And each other," Jack said.

Alli stared out the windshield into the emptiness of the lot. "We already knew each other better than if we'd been sisters. We'd found each other; we loved each other. We shared the night with all its loneliness, its subversiveness, its secrets."

All at once, it was as if Emma were sitting there beside her, and with a sob, she began to cry. She should be here , Alli thought. She'd understand what happened to me, she'd be able to tell me why I'm feeling so strange, why everything feels threatening. Everything except Jack .

"Secrets like who Emma met under the oak trees outside Langley Fields?"

There was a silence for a moment as Alli squirmed in her seat. Inside her mind, a pitched battle was in progress between what she wanted to say and what she felt compelled to hold back. "Okay, I lied to you about that, but it was only to protect Emma, the part of her life she'd entrusted to me."

"So you know who she met?"

Alli bit her lip. As a cloud skims across the moon, a shadow came over her, her eyes lost their focus, her gaze seeming fixed on a distant shore. Her stomach was tied in knots; she could feel the cold sweat breaking out under her arms, at the small of her back. She couldn't backtrack now, and yet she knew she mustn't tell Jack Kray's name. If she kept to what Emma had told her, she thought she'd be all right. Talking about her friend, feeling closer to her was just about the only thing that calmed her. So she continued the process already begun by Kray himself of cleaving her thoughts in two: talking about the acceptable, pushing down the forbidden.

"Emma said his name was Ronnie Kray."

Until this moment Jack had thought the phrase "made his blood run cold" was merely a literary one. Now he experienced it literally. Emma had met with a serial killer, the man who had abducted Alli. Did Alli know that? He judged that now, as she was just beginning to open up, was not the time to tell her.

"But she suspected from the get-go Ronnie Kray might not be his real name," Alli said.

Every strangely wired synapse in Jack's brain was singing now. "Why would she question that?"