First Daughter

"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 ope

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 Ro

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 begi

"But she suspected from the get-go Ro

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

"Emma had done a lot of reading on the pathology of being an Outsider. In fact, she'd practically memorized a book called The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. That's where she got the term, that's how she knew she was one. She also read another book of Wilson's called A Criminal History of Mankind, I think. Anyway, she'd heard that name Ro

"They shared E-Two's point of view."

She nodded.

Jack felt the tug of his daughter. This important history had happened while he was obliviously going about his job. His daughter's life had slipped through his fingers like grains of sand. "Didn't she understand the potential for danger?"

"Of course she did," Alli said. "That was the lure, that was why she wouldn't back off. Then she began to suspect that Ro

"I can't believe this," Jack said, because he truly couldn't.

"Why not?" Alli said. "It sounds just like what you'd do."

There was no point mentioning that he was an adult with years of training. "I knew she didn't follow Kray blindly."

"Emma never did anything blindly."

"Not even drugs?"

"Especially not drugs. For Emma, taking them was a kind of, I don't know, social experiment."

"How d'you mean?"

"She wondered whether being stoned would allow her to approach another level of being an Outsider. To touch-I don't know-the infinite."

"And did it?"

"Uh-uh. It disappointed her. She was so sure there was something just out of reach, but so far out there, it was beyond our comprehension."

"I've had the exact same feeling," Jack said.

Alli nodded. "So have I."

He had a thought. "So did she really want to join E-Two or did she want to find out more about Ro

Alli shrugged. "Emma's motives were never simple. One thing I do know: She was far too smart simply to follow the pied piper. Her bullshit alarm was totally scary."

Jack thought of the times she'd busted him on his screaming matches with Sharon, how he'd let her words go in one ear and out the other. Why had he done that? Why had he devalued her opinion? Or was the truth of what she was saying too difficult to face?

"There's something else," Alli said. "I got the feeling that because she knew how dangerous her being with Kray was, she kept a journal."