First Daughter

In starless night, he lay in rageful silence, listening to the sound of his own ragged heart as he breathed in the stench that penetrated to the pit of his stomach until, unable to keep to inaction, he ran across the hall, there to violently lose his supper in the low porcelain bowl. In the adjacent room, his parents made love aggressively, raucous as sailors on shore leave, with no thought that they were not alone.

JACK AND Nina stood close together on the other side. Jack wondered whether Nina was thinking the same thing he was: Is this how Alli's abductors smuggled her out of the school? Over Nina's right shoulder, the hills rolled on, leading eventually to the Georgetown Pike.

Saigon Road, the site of Emma's crash, lay just five miles west down the Pike. He felt a stirring, as if a cold wind were blowing on the back of his neck. A prickling of his scalp. Was Emma here in some form or other? Was such a thing possible? In the course of his work, he'd come across a psychic who believed that spirits of the dead who had unfinished business couldn't cross over into the light or the dark until that business was finished. These thoughts sent his mind racing back to when Emma was alive.

At Sharon's fierce insistence, Emma had applied to Langley Fields. Jack saw no need for his daughter to be sequestered in what seemed like a four-year straitjacket, but Sharon had prevailed. The education was exceptional, she argued, and Emma would be exposed to a wide variety of students from all over the world. All Jack saw was the pretension of the consumerati: Mercedes, Bentleys, and tricked-out Hummers disgorging siliconed mothers, cell phones blaring Britney Spears, yapping dogs the size of New York City rats, the flash of platinum Amex cards held aloft. He had been obliged to take out a second mortgage on their house in order to pay the exorbitant tuition. He fervently wished he'd fought harder, insisted that she attend Georgetown or even George Washington, the other colleges to which she'd wanted to go, but Sharon had dug in her heels, wouldn't listen to either him or Emma. She wanted her daughter to have the kind of education she herself had always dreamed of getting, but never had.

Nina said, "I feel I should warn you that if Hugh Garner got wind of our roles in his task force, he'd find some way to discredit us with the powers that be, so that even the president-elect couldn't save us. That's what a political animal would do."

"I don't concern myself with politics," Jack said, his mind still engaged by Emma.

"I'm with you on that, but you'd better give it some attention now." Without her coat Nina shivered against the advancing chill of evening. "Hugh Garner is a political animal, par excellence."

Jack took off his coat, but before he had a chance to sling it across her shoulders, Nina shook her head.

"Alli's life is beyond adversarial parties, beyond politics altogether."

"I suppose it would be," Nina said dryly, "in another universe."

Nina looked around at the thick stand of old oaks, gnarled into fantastic shapes, the sly shadows moving in and out beneath the cathedraled branches. "This place reminds me of something. I almost expect the devil to come bounding through the trees."

"Why d'you say that?"

Nina shrugged. "Ever since childhood, I've expected dreadful things to happen that I can't escape."

Jack inclined his head. "It's only the path the students take into the heart of the trees."

"Who knows what goes on here?"

They picked their way through the failing light into the clotted shadows of a dense copse of trees. The heavy rain had thickened the underbrush considerably, made the ground springy, in places almost marshy, impeding or slowing their progress. A moment later, ducking around a low-hanging tree limb, they burst out into a tiny clearing. The last rays of slanted sunlight turned the copse's heart a reddish gold, as if they had stumbled upon a coppersmith's workshop. An immodest west wind molded Nina's skirt to her well-muscled thighs, provoked eerie sounds from the interweaving of branches that spread weblike all around them.

At the base of a tree, where the root flare rose up just above the ground, was a mound of freshly dug earth.

"What have we here?"

She followed Jack as he knelt beside the mound of earth. Scooping the earth aside revealed a recently dug hole. Jack pulled out an odd-shaped item six or seven inches on a side wrapped in oilskin.

Nina's mouth opened. "What the hell-?"

Carefully, Jack brushed off the dirt and skeletal leaves that had adhered to the oilskin, peeled back the moist covering, revealed inch by inch what was inside.

Pale, almost opalescent flesh appeared to bleed in the ruddy sunset light. It was a hand, smallish, delicate of fingers, ringed, nails blunt-cut like a boy's. Nevertheless, it was the hand of a young girl-a young girl who had been immersed in water, judging by the deeply wrinkled flesh of the fingertips.

Nina looked at Jack, said, "Dear God, is it Alli Carson's?"

Without touching the hand, Jack scrutinized the gold-and-platinum ring on the pale, cold third finger.

"This is Alli's ring," he said. "I recognize it." He pointed. "Also, look at the nails, no polish or clear lacquer. Alli's nails are square-cut, like a boy's."

"God in heaven," Nina said. "She's been drowned."

NINE

I'VE JUST been reading over E-Two's latest manifesto," the president said when De

Paull took a seat on the plush chair directly in front of the president's desk. The flags against the wall on either side of the thick drapes shone their colors in the burning lamplight. He felt as tired as they looked. Everyone around him did. In perpetual crisis mode, only the president, who leaned heavily on the advice of his close coterie of neo-conservative consultants, appeared sparkly eyed and rested. Perhaps, Paull thought, it was his faith, his vision, the absolute surety of the path his America was on, that made him burn so bright. Paull himself was ever plagued by doubts about the future, guilt about the past.

"The National Security Advisor brought it over himself." The president raised the sheets of paper. "This is pure evil, De

"I don't disagree with you, sir," Paull said.

The president threw the papers to the carpet, trampled them underfoot. "We've got to root out E-Two, De

"Sir, I told you before that in the short time left us, I didn't think we'd be able to do that. Now I know it for a fact. We've been scouring the country for months without the slightest success. Wherever they are, we can't find them."

The president rose, came out from behind his desk, paced back and forth across the thick American blue carpet. "This reminds me of 2001," he said darkly. "We never found the people responsible for those anthrax attacks. That failure has stuck in my craw ever since."

Paull spread his hands. "We tried our best, sir, you know that. Despite millions of dollars and man-hours, we never even got to first base. You know my theory, sir."

The president shook his head. "Blaming a rogue element inside the government is mighty dangerous speculation, De

"Yes, sir."

"All right, if we can't find even a trace of E-Two-" The president held up his hand. "We require a change in tactics. Forget about a direct assault on E-Two." His eyes narrowed. "We must make an example of these people. We'll go after the First American Secular Revivalists."