First Daughter

'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?'

'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 Ronnie Kray and looked it up. He was one of a pair of murderous twins in the East End of London. Their pathology fascinated her, and I think that was one of the reasons she even listened to this guy in the first place.'

'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 Ronnie Kray was keeping secrets, so she set out to discover what they were.'

'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 Ronnie Kray?'

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.'

This interested Jack immensely. 'I searched everything after her accident,' he said. 'I couldn't find anything.'

Alli's fear returned full force. 'Maybe I'm wrong. It's only a hunch. I mean she never said anything to me directly.'

Still, it was something to ponder, Jack thought. Maybe he'd overlooked something.

'C'mon, let's go,' he said, getting out of the car. When she'd joined him, he took her down the alleyway and around behind the buildings on Kansas Avenue. They had to be careful as they approached the rear of the FASR building, as it was lit up like an airport runway, crisscrossed by federal agents in flak jackets, riot helmets, and assault rifles loaded with rubber bullets.