First Daughter (36 page)

"If she felt so strongly about the blurring of religion and government," Jack said, "why didn't she join a peaceful organization like the First American Secular Revivalists?"

"Because she was Emma," Alli said. "Because she never did things halfway, because she was strong and sure of herself. Above all, because she felt that the pack of evangelicals who had invaded the federal government were warmongers, that the only way to get their attention, to attack them, to expose them was with a radical response."

"She hated the warmongers so she became one herself?" Jack shook his head. "Isn't that counterintuitive?"

"The philosophers say fighting fire with fire is a legitimate response as old as time."

They were walking in the tangle of trees and underbrush behind the house. The sky was turning black, as if with soot, and a cold wind shivered the tallest branches. Jack was turning over what Alli had said because there was something about it that stuck in his mind, that seemed to loom large on the playing field he'd been thrust onto.

He stopped them at the bole of a gigantic oak. "Let's back this up a minute. Emma knew that your father would win the election, or at least that this current administration was on its last legs. Why not simply wait until the new regime came in?"

Alli shook her head. "I don't know, but there was an urgency in what she had to do."

"All right, let's put that aside for the moment. You said that she wanted to expose the Administration with a radical response."

"That's right."

"Did she tell you what she meant by that?"

"Sure. E-Two wants to provoke an extreme response from the Administration."

"But there's sure to be bloodshed."

"That's the whole point." Alli licked her lips. "See, the bloodier, the more militant, the more brutal the response, the better. Because E-Two is out to show the entire country what this Administration really is. They won't be able to round up the E-Two members easily. From what Emma said, they're all young people our age—no one over thirty. When there's blood on the streets, when America sees their own sons and daughters slaughtered, they'll finally understand the nature of the people who are exporting war and death to the world."

Jack was rocked to his core. "They're planning to be martyrs."

"They're soldiers," Alli said. "They're laying down their lives for what they believe in."

"But what they're planning is monstrous, insane."

"As our foreign policy has been for eight years."

"But this isn't the way."

"Why not? Sitting on their hands hasn't worked so well, has it? Anyone who has said or tried to do anything to protest faith-based initiatives has been ridiculed or, worse, branded a traitor by the talking heads controlled by the Administration. God, look at what wimps members of the opposite party have been through an illegal war, scandals, evidence that the government muzzles its scientists and specialists on the topics of WMDs and global warming. If the parties were reversed, you can bet this president would've been impeached by now."

Why was it, Jack thought, that he felt as if he were listening to Emma and not Alli? A strange thing was happening to him. It had begun when he and Alli entered the house and now had continued as they moved out into woods. There was the very curious sensation of the world finally starting to make sense to him—well, if not the whole world, then his world, the one he'd kept hidden from others and which kept him apart from them. Like his ability to sense Emma, though she was no longer in this world, at least by the limited understanding of man-made science, he felt as if his world and the one that had always been closed to him were beginning to overlap. Hope rose, completely unfamiliar to him, that one day he might even be able to straddle both, that he might live in one without giving up the other.

This gift he very badly wanted to bestow on Alli. To this end, he said, "There's someone I'd like you to meet."

Alli regarded him with skepticism. "Not another shrink. I've had my fill of probing and prodding."

"Not another shrink," Jack promised.

Rather than return to the front of the house where he'd parked, he took her through the underbrush. On the other side was parked Gus's white Continental, which Jack kept in pristine condition.

Alli laughed in delight as she climbed into it. Behind the wheel, Jack
turned the key in the ignition, and the huge engine purred to life. With the lights extinguished, he rolled away without the Secret Service detail parked on Westmoreland being any the wiser.

He turned on the tape player, and James Brown took up "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" in midsong.

"Wow!" Alli said.

Yeah
, thought Jack.
Wow
.

Ten minutes later, when they arrived at Kansas Avenue NE, they couldn't get near the old Renaissance Mission Church building. Barriers had been erected on the street and sidewalks on either side of it. There must have been more than a dozen unmarked cars and anti-terrorist vans drawn up on the street within the barriers.

Jack's heart seemed to plummet in his chest. Telling Alli to wait in the car, he got out, flashed his credentials to one of the twenty or so suits milling around. Then he saw Hugh Garner, who was spearheading the operation, and put away his ID.

"Hello, McClure," Garner said. "What brings you here?"

"I have an appointment with Chris Armitage of FASR," Jack lied.

Garner pulled a face. "So do we, McClure. Trouble is, we can't find him, or his pal Peter Link." Garner inclined his head. "
You
wouldn't know where they've got to?"

"If I did, I wouldn't be here talking to you," Jack said. "I'd like to speak to someone else in the FASR offices."

"I'm afraid that's impossible." Garner looked smug. Hailed by one of his detail, he turned, gave a couple of orders, turned back to Jack. "No one's here. This office has been shut down."

Jack thought of all the busy, dedicated men and women he'd seen on his way into Armitage's office. "Where is everyone else?"

"In federal custody." Garner grinned. "They've forfeited their rights to due process. They'll be held as long as necessary. Neither you nor anyone else can see them without a written order signed by the National Security Advisor himself."

Jack rocked back on his heels as if struck a blow. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"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."

J
UST 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 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?