First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [121]
"Did I say something—?"
"That name." Paull snapped his fingers impatiently. "Give me that name again."
"What? Ian Brady?"
"That's the fucking one."
Beside her, Paull stared off into the distance, his eyes seeing nothing. Brady was the key, the lynchpin to events unfolding all too rapidly. A serial murderer, a schemer, most probably a psychopath—this was the asset Paull had inherited. The most important intelligence asset stretching back twenty-five years. This was the monster he was forced to protect, whose whereabouts he no longer knew. Who did, then? His mind snapped into perfect focus. "Get Jack McClure," he said to Nina. "Bring him to me ASAP."
Nina took out her cell phone. "I'll call him right now."
"No," Paull said. "It's all too likely that our cell conversations are being monitored. I don't even want to use mine without prearranged coded signals."
"I'll find another way," Nina said.
Paull nodded gravely. "I know you will."
FORTY
GET IT into your head, Jack," Sharon had said in the ER. "We all have a secret life, not just you." Now Jack knew the real truth of her words. His daughter was living a secret life right under his nose. It was as if he'd never known her at all—which was, of course, a deficiency that Sharon had accused him of repeatedly. But, given what she'd said to him, he determined that he had to know whether or not she knew about Emma's radicalization, her secret life.
"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?