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 Dennis Paull entered the Oval Office. He had to make way for the National Security Advisor, who was just leaving.
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, Dennis. These people are pure evil. They want to bring down the country, weaken it, make it more vulnerable to foreign extremists of every stripe. They want to destroy everything I've worked toward for eight long years.'
'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, Dennis.'
'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
'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.'
Paull was careful not to let his concern show. 'They're a legitimate organization, sir.'
The president's face darkened. 'Goddamnit, in this day and age we no longer have the luxury of allowing terrorists to hide behind the banner of free speech, which is for good, honest, God-fearing Americans.'
'It's not as if they're being funded by a foreign power.'
The president whirled. 'But maybe they are.' His eyes were gleaming, always a dangerous sign. 'President Yukin, who, as you well know, I'll be seeing in a few days, has just announced that he wants to stay on in power.' The president grunted. 'Lucky bastard. They can do that in Russia.' He waved a hand. 'With the evidence in the Black File you've provided me, I think I can get more out of him than concessions on oil, gas, and uranium.'
Paull, truly alarmed, stood. 'What do you mean, sir?'
'I think Yukin is just the man to provide whatever evidence we need that the Chinese are funneling funds to these missionary secularists.'
Paull smelled the National Security Advisor all over this. The president didn't have the mind to come up with such a scheme.
'I mean, what could be more obvious?' the president went on. 'You yourself told me that Beijing is in the process of setting up a Godless state. Americans have a long history of bitter antipathy toward mainland China. Everybody will be only too willing to believe that Beijing is attempting to export that Godlessness to America.'
JACK HAD tried Egon Schiltz's cell, but it was off, and he knew better than to leave a message on his friend's voice mail.
Egon Schiltz was not an old man, but he sure looked like one. In fact, give him a passing glance and he might be mistaken for seventy, instead of fifty-nine. Like a hairstylist, he was round-shouldered, with prematurely gray hair so thick, he preferred to wear it long over his ears. In every other way, however, Egon Schiltz appeared nondescript. One curious thing about him: He and his wife had tied the knot in the ME's cold room, surrounded by friends, family, and the recently and violently departed.
He and Jack had become friends when Jack was asked to investigate missing cartons of fry, as embalming fluid was known on the District's streets, where it had become one of a number of increasingly bizarre drugs illicitly for sale. On anyone's list of bad drugs, fry was near the top, one of the long-term side effects of ingesting fry being the slow disintegration of the spinal cord. Certain bits of evidence were leading the police to suspect Schiltz himself of trafficking in fry, but after a long talk with Schiltz, Jack didn't like the ME as a prime suspect. Jack went looking for the middle man, in his experience usually the easiest to latch on to, since he was usually less off the grid than either the thief or the pusher. Using his contacts, Jack found this particular fence, put the hammer to him, and came up with a name, which he gave to Schiltz. Together, they worked out the way to trap the thief, a member of the ME's staff too impatient to wait for his state pension. Schiltz never forgot Jack's faith in him.
Schiltz's offices, sprawled on a stretch of Braddock Avenue in Fairfax, Virginia, were in a low, angular redbrick government building in that modern style so bland, it seemed to disappear. Using mostly the Innerloop of the Capital Beltway, it took Jack just over twenty minutes to drive the 16.7 miles from Langley Fields to Schiltz's office.
'Dr. Schiltz isn't here,' the diminutive assistant ME said.
'Where is he?' Jack demanded. 'I know you know,' he added as her lips parted, 'so don't stonewall.'
The AME shook her head. 'He'll take my head off.'
'Not when he knows I'm looking for him.' Jack leaned in, his eyes bright as an attack dog's. 'You're new here, aren't you?'
She bit her lip, said nothing.
'Call him,' he said now, 'and tell him Jack needs to see him, stat.'
The Indian woman picked up a cordless phone, dialed a number. She waited a moment, then asked to speak with Dr. Schiltz. In a moment, he came on the line, because she said, 'I'm so sorry to bother you at dinner, sir, but-'
'Never mind,' Jack said, hustling out of the office.
EGON SCHILTZ was an Old Southern type. His meals were sacred time, not to be interrupted for anyone or anything. A creature of habit, he always ate his meals at one place.
