First Daughter

'A burner I bought a couple of days ago.' He paused to stare out his bedroom window, where the branches of the oak tree reached toward the sky. 'Listen, Ian Brady's history.'

'What?'

'I tracked him down last night to a residence hotel in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He's dead.'

'What a relief.'

'Brady wanted to die, Nina. I'll give you the details after the inauguration, okay?'

'It's a date,' she said. 'Now I've got to get back to work.'

Downstairs, he pulled the suit Chief Bennett had waiting for him those long weeks ago when he was being prepped for his assignment to Hugh Garner's joint task force. He stripped off the dry cleaning bag. He turned on Emma's iPod. He wanted to hear more of her music while he dressed. Alli had said that she was always making playlists. Seeing a playlist category in the iPod screen, he clicked on it. Oddly, there was only one, called Outside. He set it to play. Immediately, 'Life on Mars?' — David Bowie's famous song about alienation-started up.

As Jack listened, he put on a freshly laundered white shirt, buttoned it up. 'Life on Mars?' segued into the Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy for the Devil.' As he knotted his tie, on came Screamin' Jay Hawkins singing 'I Put a Spell on You,' a good deal more raw and powerful than subsequent versions.

After reknotting his tie three times, he got it right. He slipped on his jacket and was about to turn off the iPod when he heard Emma's voice coming out of the speakers. He stood, transfixed, listening to the aural diary of her three meetings with Ian Brady. This was how the entry ended:

'Finally, I said to him that if he saw me as his Myra Hindley, he was sorely mistaken because I had no intention of either fucking him or falling under his spell. This was the one time he surprised me. He laughed. I had nothing to fear. He said that he already had his Myra Hindley.'

YOU'LL NEVER stop it.

Stop what? What had Brady planned?

Jack walked through the library's stacks. With each book he touched, he sensed a new door open to him. This was the place where his disability vanished, where he could read without the tension and frustration his dyslexia usually caused him. In the shadowed aisles he recognized Andre, Gus, Ian Brady, Emma. Each of their lives had meaning, a certain force that would remain with him even after death; of this, he was absolutely certain. Though they were beyond him now, still he sensed them, as an animal scents spoor and in its mind forms an image of what had once been there and has since moved on.

The truth was, Jack still felt the spoor of Ian Brady's mesmeric power, even though he was quite certain Brady had lied about his connection with Emma, had in fact been baiting him. Of course, this was precisely what Brady had meant to plant inside him, but Jack was only human, prey to human doubts and fears, just like anyone- anyone save Ian Brady perhaps.

Without quite knowing how it happened, Jack found himself at the section of the library that held the books of Colin Wilson. He ran his finger along the spines of the books until he found the intimidatingly thick A Criminal History of Mankind. Taking it down, he went over to a trestle table, sat down, and opened it up.

He was astonished to discover that the introduction was all about the real Ian Brady. Wilson had had a ten- year correspondence with Brady in prison. Wilson's conclusion was 'that even an intelligent criminal remains trapped in the vicious circle of his criminality, and cannot escape.'

Brady was involved in what Wilson termed a 'dominance syndrome' with Myra Hindley, a young woman he seduced, deflowered, and somehow coerced into being his accomplice for a horrifying string of rape/murders over a two-year period. It was Myra who lured the teenage victims into her car so Brady could perform his acts of extreme cruelty and degradation. The real mystery was how he converted a young innocent like Myra Hindley into a criminal.

Jack paused. He could not help thinking of his Brady and Emma. Emma heard what I had to say, and it drew her like a moth to a flame. Too bad she died so young-I had big plans for her. Aside from killing, mentoring's what I do best. Emma had real potential, Jack. She could have become my most ardent pupil. What had he wanted with a Myra Hindley? So far as Jack could tell, Brady was a loner-whatever missions he performed for the government were strictly on his own. Anyone with him would have been a liability. So what, then, was he up to?

Jack went back to reading. On page twenty-nine, he came across the most heinous of Brady's crimes. He and Hindley picked up a ten-year-old girl. They took pictures of her (Jack couldn't help but think of the photos of Alli and Emma on the wall at the Marmoset's house), recorded her pleas for mercy, then killed her and buried her on the moor, where another of their young victims was buried. 'Later,' Wilson wrote, 'they took blankets and slept on the graves. It was part of the fantasy of being Enemies of Society, dangerous revolutionaries.'

Sickened by what these two people had done, Jack looked up. Into his head now came something else that his Brady had said to him last night: I've had a good run, but now, like the president, my term has come to an end. And like the president, it's time for me to look to my lasting legacy.

Jack understood that Brady had wanted to die last night: he'd tried to shoot himself with Jack's Glock, he'd brushed Jack's hands away when Jack tried to save him from his fall. Might it be that this was why Brady had kept Jack alive that night, because he suspected this moment in his future would come, that he wanted someone worthy to finish him off? Truth to tell, I've run you like a rat in a maze. Every time you got to another point in the maze, I moved your cheese. Jack had not only successfully negotiated the maze, but he'd also survived the horned viper's attack, the fusillade of bullets coming through the apartment door.

So Brady knew he was going to die last night, and yet he was looking to his lasting legacy. What might that be? Not his clandestine work for the government. A lasting legacy involves notoriety-a very public display. And he had very deliberately invoked the president. Why had he done that?

Another three-dimensional puzzle was forming in Jack's head as his brain made connections with the speed of light. Brady's MO was misdirection; he'd used it time and again. What if there was a second reason for him talking about Emma being his disciple, besides wanting to enrage Jack? Emma was never meant to be his Myra Hindley. What if-?

You'll never stop it.

Jack stood up so fast, he nearly overturned the table. The sound of its legs banging back on the floor was like a thunderclap in his mind. As he ran out of the library, he checked his watch. As usual, he'd lost himself in thought and reading. It was far later than he'd realized. The inauguration was about to begin and, with it, Ian Brady's lasting legacy.

FORTY — EIGHT

ALLI, IT'S time to go,' Nina said gently.

Sam opened the door, stepped out into the wan January sunshine. Alli could hear him whispering into his mike, listening intently to security updates. When Sam nodded, Nina urged her charge forward, and Alli emerged from the plush cocoon of the limo into the seething crowd of politicians, foreign dignitaries, celebrities, the talking heads of worldwide media outlets, religious leaders, including Reverend Taske, head of the Renaissance Mission Congress, her father's special guest, military personnel in full-dress uniforms, Secret Service details crisscrossing the area with the concentration of marines landing in enemy territory.

Alli took all this in as if she were watching a film. Ever since she'd heard the first bars of Arcade Fire's 'Neon Bible,' she'd felt as if she were back in her dream with Ronnie Kray whispering in her ear. She felt detached and at the same time marvelously clearheaded. She had one mission to accomplish; everything else fell away as if off a steep cliff, vanishing from view. Her life was simple; all that was required of her was to remove the vial she somehow knew was basted into the lining of her coat and, at the proper moment, open it. What could be simpler? Her mind hummed along on the track Kray had set for it, using a combination of persuasion, fear, and a drug cocktail that included an efficacious dose of the horned viper's venom to metabolize the chemicals out of her system so quickly, it would be undetectable.

She was nearing her parents now. Her mother kissed her; her father smiled through her. The fanfare was playing, the Speaker of the House was preparing to take the podium for the Call to Order. Among the columns of the