Eric Lustbader - First Daughter

"Emma, I want to listen," he whispered into the space between the curtain and the window. "Honest I do."

Moments later, amid an eerie silence, he returned to his escort and was taken away, down the paneled corridor hung with photo portraits of the college's more illustrious alumnae, who had achieved fame and fortune in their chosen fields. Before he reached the end, the door to the headmistress's office opened and a woman came out. Jack's escort stopped, and so did he.

Closing the door firmly behind her, the woman strode toward him with her hand outstretched. When he took it, she said, "Jack McClure, my name is Nina Miller." Her clear blue eyes regarded him steadily. "I'm a special operative of the Secret Service and the Department of the Treasury," she said with exquisite formality. "I'm assisting Homeland Security First Deputy Hugh Garner. The president has appointed him to spearhead this joint operations task force."

Nina Miller was tall, slim, proper. She wore a charcoal gray man-tailored worsted suit, sensible shoes with low heels, a pale blue oxford shirt buttoned to the collar. All that was missing, Jack observed, was a rep tie. This one was trying too hard to fit into an old-boys network that obviously wanted no part of her. She had the narrow face of a spinster, with a rather long, aggressive nose and a pale, delicate complexion that seemed as translucent as a bowl of light.

She gestured. "This way, please," as she led him to the end of the hall, opened the door to the headmistress's three-room suite. It had been transformed into another world.

The first room contained the desks of a pair of administrative assistants, as well as file cabinets in which were stored meticulously maintained documents on each student, past and present. For the time being, at least, the assistants were sharing space in their boss's office. A forensics field crew laden with machinery Jack could only guess at, agents with the latest surveillance equipment, and what seemed like a battalion of liaison personnel now clogged the space. The room was sizzling with electronics from multiple computers, hooked up variously to satellite nets, closed-circuit TV cameras, and every terrorist and criminal database in the world. A battery of laser printers continuously spat out minute-by-minute updates from CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the Secret Service, NSA, DOD, Pentagon, as well as the state and local police in Virginia, the District, and Maryland. Uniformed people were making calls, receiving them, barking orders, exchanging faxes, making more calls. Their pooled knowledge was like a living thing, a city of shadows being built out of the ether through which information traveled. Jack could feel the low-level hysteria that gripped everyone in the room, as if they had the jaws of a rabid dog clamped to their throats. Their shared concentration, like a stale odor, like sardines too long in the can, made him want to draw back to catch a breath.

Beyond, one could go left into the headmistress's office proper, or right into a room she used for private conferences. It was into the latter room that Jack was led. His silent escort left him at the door, disappearing presumably to handle other pressing concerns.

When Jack stepped into the room, a man looked up. He was perched impatiently on the edge of one of the two facing sofas separated by a glass-topped coffee table. Nina raised a hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled. "This is First Deputy Hugh Garner."

"Please sit down," Garner said with a smile as narrow as his retro tie. He was a tall man with prematurely gray hair, severe as his smile or his tie. He had a face Jack associated with a late-night TV pitchman-smooth of cheek, shiny of eye, his manner confident or glib, depending on your point of view. One thing Jack could see right away: He was a purely political creature, which put him at odds with Jack, and therefore dangerous. "You need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible."

He offered a sheaf of papers-forensic reports, possible witness interviews, search results, photos of everything that had been vacuumed up from Alli and Emma's room. (Jack couldn't help thinking of it in that way.)

Nina Miller settled herself by scooping the sides of her skirt under her thighs. Her eyes were bright, inquisitive, completely noncommittal.

Garner said, "First thing: We've sent out a news brief on the reason for government agents here, as well as the whereabouts of Alli Carson."

Jack, preoccupied with the reports, did not immediately respond. He had stood up, moved over to the window so sunlight spilled across the pages. He kept his back to the others, shoulders slightly hunched. He tried to relax his body without much success. The letters, words, clauses, sentences on the pages swam in front of his eyes like terrified fish. They swirled like snowflakes, spiraled like water down a drain, pogoed like Mexican jumping beans.

Jack was having trouble finding his spot. Stress always did that to him, not only made his dyslexia worse but interfered with the techniques he'd been taught to work around it. Like all dyslexics, he had a brain designed to recognize things visually, not verbally. The speed of his thought processes was somewhere between four hundred and two thousand times faster than for people whose brains were wired for word-based thought. But that became a liability around written words, since his mind buzzed like a bee trying to find its way into a blocked hive. Dyslexics learned by doing. They learned to read by literally picturing each word. But there was a host of disorienting trigger words, such as a, and, the, to, from -words crucial to decipher even the most elementary sentences-for which no pictures existed. In his lessons, Jack had been asked to make those words out of clay. In fashioning them with his hands, his brain learned them. But stress broke the intense concentration required to read, stripped him of his training, shoved him out onto a rough sea of swirls, angles, serifs, and, worst of all, punctuation, which might have been the scratching of a mouse against a wedge of hard cheese for all the sense he could make of it.

"There's no way of knowing, however, how long our disinformation will hold up. On the Internet, where every blogger is a reporter, there's a limited time we can keep something like this a secret," Garner continued.

Jack felt the others' eyes on him as he crossed the room. He spoke up, more to distract himself from his growing terror than from a need to engage Garner. In fact, his fervent wish was for a sinkhole to open up under Garner and Nina Miller, swallow them whole, but no luck. When he looked, both of them were still alive and well. "How long do we have?"

"A week, possibly less."

Jack turned back to the gibberish that spitefully refused to resolve itself into language.

"You aren't finished yet?" Garner said from over Jack's right shoulder.

"I'm sure Mr. McClure needs a moment to orient himself to our standards of methodology," Nina said, "which are quite different from those of the ATF." She walked over to Jack. "Am I right, Mr. McClure?"

Jack nodded, unable to get his vocal cords out of their own way.

"ATF, yes, I see." Garner's laugh held a rancid note. "I trust our protocols aren't too difficult for you to follow."

Nina pointed to paragraphs on certain pages, read them aloud, as if to speed the process of familiarization by highlighting elements the team found of particular interest. Jack, his stomach clenched painfully, felt relief, but with it came a flush of secret shame. His frustration had morphed into anger, just as it always did. Trying to control that poisonous alchemical process was the key to maneuvering through the briar patch of his disability. He shuffled the papers as if scanning them for the second time.

"The reports contain no pertinent information, let alone leads or conclusions as to which direction the investigation should go," he said. "What about the private-security people, any last-minute changes in the night watchmen, and have you reviewed the CCTV tapes for last night?"