Spiral

He wanted contact, to feel the warmth of her. He leaned toward her, and their shoulders touched. She kept looking at the woods, but he felt her body relax. On the railing, he placed his hand over hers, let it rest there. “You know,” he said, “it’s not just Dylan.”

“I know. But listen-”

Jake’s cell went off in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said.

She pulled her hand in. “It’s fine. Go ahead. Take it.”

He fished it out, and his pulse jumped a notch. “It’s Becraft,” he said to Maggie. He accepted the call. “Yes?”

“Professor Sterling? We need you to come down. Right away. It’s about the missing MicroCrawlers.”

“Did you find them?”

“Some of them, yes. The Onondaga medical examiner’s office just called.” Becraft paused. “Look. I’d prefer it if you came down.”

Jake looked to Maggie. “Tell me where you found them.”

“We just got Liam Connor’s autopsy report. They found four in his stomach.”

17

LAWRENCE DUNNE MADE HIS PLAY. CHOOSING ONE OF THE small black stones from the wooden bowl, he placed it with a sharp click onto the Go board. He tried to project authority, but it was a desperation move.

His opponent bit her lower lip, studying the pattern of stones arrayed in a gridlike pattern on the board. They were alone in a Motel 6, the yellow walls adorned with paintings of ducks and dogs. She was naked, sitting cross-legged on the bed. He sat across from her, as naked as she.

She clicked her piece down, smooth and white.

“Shit,” Dunne said.

Her wide smile lit up the generic room. “You’re mine.” She dove for him, knocking him backward onto the bed, scattering the stones.

Dunne wrestled her onto her back, enjoying the view. He allowed himself two indulgences, games he enjoyed whether he won or lost. The first was Go, the second this woman. Her name was Audrey Candor, née Pister. They’d met at Yale ten years ago, when she was an undergraduate student sitting in on his course on game theory and geopolitics. She was from Long Island, her father a Wall Street financier and her mother a minor movie star in the eighties. Audrey was married to the son of a rich diplomat from France, but Dunne and she had kept up their trysts over the years. She was smart, devilish, and unbelievably gorgeous. Dunne wasn’t an unattractive guy-he had a rakish charm-but she was in another category altogether.

He bent over her, staring down at smooth white skin and coal-black eyes. She wore a pale red lipstick, the kind he liked. Picking one of his black stones off the mattress, he balanced it on her nipple. She giggled.

“Run away with me,” he said. “We’ll crash a plane into a small Pacific island, live off fruit and berries. I’ll rig snares to trap wild boar.”

She laughed. “You’d better crash into an island with a Whole Foods.”

“You underestimate me. I can be a beast.”

“Show, don’t tell,” she ordered, pulling him down.

An unwelcome knock on the door.

“What?”

“Mr. Dunne? You don’t seem to be answering your cell. There’s a call from your assistant.”

“Get lost,” he said. His ringer had been very purposefully turned off. “I’ll be free in twenty.”

“Sir? He said Lancer absolutely needs to talk to you.”

“Holy Christ,” Dunne said, thoughts of the deserted Pacific isle long forgotten.

OUT FRONT A BLACK LIMO IDLED, TWO SECRET SERVICE AGENTS at the ready. Three minutes later, Dunne was on the vehicle’s secure line with the President of the United States.

“Lawrence?”

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“You need to get to Manhattan. Now.”

DUNNE WAS EDGY AS HE RODE IN THE SPEEDING LIMO, THE police escort’s horns blaring as they headed for Reagan National Airport. The President had sounded rattled, his trademark confidence shaken. The two men knew each other well. When the POTUS had started his improbable run at the White House, Dunne had been one of his earliest supporters and his primary foreign-policy adviser on Asian affairs. When he’d won in a landslide that surprised even his dedicated supporters, the President had rewarded Dunne with the position of deputy national security adviser. He’d offered Dunne the national security adviser job, but Dunne preferred to stay out of the media spotlight, where he could focus on policy rather than polish.

Now Dunne was on the phone with the deputy director of the FBI, William Carlisle, who described the situation with the Times Square victim: “Twenty-three years old, Japanese. Recently had his middle right finger chopped off, the wound crudely cauterized. He was incoherent, raving, clearly under the influence of a hallucinogenic, as yet unidentified.”

“What do we know about him?”

Carlisle sounded as though he was reading. “Undergrad at Columbia, art major. Specializes in sculpture, small pieces made from bits of wire. Originally from Tokyo. Nothing else in his background is unusual. Father is a low-level diplomat at the Japanese embassy in Ottawa, mother a poet. A team’s interviewing them now. So far nothing remarkable about him, save one thing. You ready? The kid’s name is Hitoshi Kitano.”