had gone opaque as they sometimes did when she sat in her rocking chair in the evenings or on dark afternoons when rain clouds burst open and lightning forked through the sky.
“You have inherited the gift from me,” Granny said after a time. “I inherited it from my grandmother. That’s how the gift works; it skips generations.” Granny’s eyes cleared and she smiled as she touched Heroe’s cheek. “Don’t be frightened, child.”
“I’m not,” Heroe had said, sounding braver than she felt. “But I don’t understand.”
Granny’s smile broadened. “The world we experience with our five senses is only a sliver of what exists. Remember this, child, as you go through life. You and I have glimmers of what really exists beyond the limits. We are the fortunate ones.”
“But the premonitions—”
“Whispers from the other side of things, whispers from souls whose bodies have already turned to dust. Where they are, time doesn’t exist. Time is, after all, constructed by humans to make sense out of chaos. But in the vastness, past, present, and future coexist, as they must. It’s only that we lack the … tools to experience it the way it really is.”
Now, wading through the swampy water, Heroe was visited by a premonition. She “saw” the water as blood and knew that somewhere up ahead death awaited. And then into her mind swam Naomi Wilde’s face. It was covered in mud, distorted by caked blood. So vivid was the image that Heroe was forced to stop in her tracks. She held on to the branch of a tree, much as Naomi had done days before when Annika had led her to the buried body of Arjeta Kraja. For a moment the world seemed to spin wildly around her and she heard the familiar roaring in her ears.
“Who are you?” Heroe whispered. “What are you trying to tell me?”
Slowly, she regained her sense of equilibrium. The world, and, with it, her breathing, returned to normal. She stared at her fist, the knuckles white where she held on to the branch as if for dear life. Letting go, she pushed forward through the muck until she came to a large tree with spreading roots. More footprints here—fresh footprints, in fact. And between two of the largest roots the earth had been recently turned over.
The footprints went off into the foliage. She was looking in that direction when a powerful arm snaked around her throat and she felt a terrible pressure on the delicate bone just below her left eye.
“NO,” JACK said. “I forbid it. For you to go after Liridona alone would be the height of madness.”
“I suspected you would say that,” Alli replied. “That’s why I’ve asked Thate to go with me.”
At once, he saw the trap she had sprung on him, and while he admired her cleverness, he also knew that what she proposed was out of the question.
“I’m sorry, Alli. Your heart is in the right place, but under no circumstances are you going off on this wild- goose chase.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he recognized them as what Edward Carson had told him when he assigned Jack to investigate Senator Berns’s death.
Alli’s eyes were blazing. “You have no right to order me—”
“This isn’t a democracy, young lady. In case you have conveniently forgotten, the moment we step off the plane we’re back in enemy territory. An enemy, I might remind you, whose principal business is the enslavement and trafficking of girls and young women.”
She lifted her head. “I’m not frightened of Arian Xhafa.”
“That’s just what I’m afraid of, Alli, because you should be.”
“Well, shit, of course I am, Jack. I’d be an idiot not to be frightened of him. On the other hand, I’m not going to let that fright paralyze me. I mean, who does Edon have except us? Who can save her and Liridona from Xhafa, if not us? Her parents? Her father is the one who sold her and Arjeta to Xhafa’s people to pay off his gambling debts. Do you think he’s going to stop gambling and losing?”
Now it was she who took his hands. “Jack, Edon’s already lost one sister. I can’t stand by and watch her lose another.”
THE PRESSURE in Heroe’s head exploded behind her eyes like a mortar blast. She gasped as the shock wave drove through her, but her brain was far from paralyzed. She raised her service revolver until the muzzle pointed directly behind her. She pulled the trigger.
The percussion effectively deafened her in her right ear, but the agonizing pressure beneath her left eye vanished. She was released, and she staggered to her knees.
She was staring down, half-dazed by shock, the point-blank percussion, and the violent surge of adrenaline that had surely saved her life. Her knees had not sunk into the muck. They were resting on something hard. Dropping the service revolver, she dug her fingers in the muddy earth, scraped it away, and saw two faces appearing. One was of a young girl, very beautiful despite the disfigurement of her nose. Heroe had never seen her before. Feverish with dread, she uncovered more of the second girl and saw that it was Naomi Wilde’s face precisely as she had experienced it in her visitation.
She began to cry. But that release of emotion and tension brought her back to herself, and, bracing herself against the tree, she rose to her feet.
Turning, she saw Peter McKinsey sitting against the bole of a tree. The left side of his head was running red. Where the ear had been was a scorch mark, ragged and bloody.
He looked up at her and snapped his teeth together. In utter shock, she watched him lurch to his feet and come after her. She wanted to run, she wanted to defend herself, but her service revolver was at her feet.
And then he was upon her, and her nostrils dilated with the stench of death. His fists beat her down to the muck, until she was lying with Naomi Wilde and the unknown victim. And in that moment, she understood the nature of her visitation. The water turned to blood—her blood, her death. Nothing to be done, then. The future was already written. Today she would die.
McKinsey was on top of her, pounding her, and then he had her service revolver. He pointed it at her, grinning now, victory in sight. And then the world turned inside out, colors coalesced and collided. She no longer felt pain. There was no sound save the rushing of blood in her ears.
And at that precise instant, she saw the specter of Naomi Wilde rising up behind McKinsey like a twist of smoke, drawing her gaze to the ruined side of his head. No time to weigh a decision, or even for thought.
Lashing out with her left hand, she struck squarely on the gunshot wound. McKinsey howled in pain, rearing up, hands to his head. She struck him a two-handed blow that knocked him sideways. His cheek struck Naomi’s face and he howled again.
Struggling out from under him, she smashed her fist into his right eye. The blow drove the left side of his head into the ground and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. She grabbed her service revolver out of his hand and aimed it at him as she staggered to her feet.
“Get up,” she ordered. “Get up now!”
Instead, he lunged at her. She pulled the trigger.
IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING his speech to the NAACP at the Kennedy Center, President Crawford headed for the men’s room. This had already been vetted by a member of his Secret Service detail, and was staked out, ensuring no one could enter while the POTUS was doing whatever it was he needed to do in there.
Everyone, that is, except Henry Holt Carson. The president was not happy when Carson strode into the men’s room.
Crawford gave him a jaundiced look. “A Secret Service agent. Hank, for the love of God!”
“Calm down, sir.”
The president stared at him in the mirror that ran along the wall above the sinks. “I will not fucking calm down. Where in all our planning did we ever contemplate murdering a Secret Service agent?”
It was a rhetorical question. Carson was quite certain it required no answer, so he kept his mouth shut.
“And Naomi Wilde, of all people. Damn it, Hank, she was one of our best and brightest. I read the reports of how she handled the crisis in Moscow, how she took charge of your sister-in-law. I’ve spoken with her several times—I
