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By Root 1314 0

you do. Nor are the great majority of the Millenarians, or groups like the Real Women. They’re no more likely to spawn mad bombers and random shooters than the rest of the population—maybe less, to the extent that their ideologies provide some sort of safety valve. I’ve caught a lot of murderers in my time, and although the ones I’ve encountered are a skewed sample, because all the people with real motives can usually be identified and arrested without requiring my kind of voodoo, they’re mostly loners unable to conceive of any escape from their own tortured predicaments. Conspiracies like the one that formed to snatch Morgan Miller are rare exceptions—and I can’t believe they’re enemies of the state, no matter what kind of rhetoric they employ. If Stella Filisetti knew Morgan as well as I do, she’d never have set this snowball rolling.”

“But you’d have to think that, wouldn’t you?” Smith observed, employing all the delicacy and sensitivity he’d displayed when he had blithely suggested to Herr Geyer that the Institute of Algeny was a neoNazi organization. “If only to save your own self-respect.”

“Yes,” she admitted, to herself as well as to him. “Maybe I would, even if I were wrong. But I’m not wrong. I do know Morgan Miller better than anyone else does, and I know that if he had what Stella Filisetti thinks he has, he wouldn’t have buried it and he wouldn’t be trying to dispose of it under the table to Ahausuerus or the Algenists.”

“I can’t assume that,” Smith told her flatly, “and as a member of the police force, neither can you.”

“I know,” Lisa conceded reluctantly.

The helicopter was settling gently into the space reserved for it in the university’s parking area. It was only a few hundred meters from there to the Renaissance Hotel, where Smith’s car was waiting. It wouldn’t matter much whether it was still harboring a bug or two, Lisa thought; there weren’t any more questions that Peter Grimmett Smith could profitably ask, and even he was tired of asking unprofitable ones. The conversation lapsed as the copter settled onto the tarmac and the three of them made their way to the other vehicle.

The silence allowed Lisa the luxury of a brief period of mental relaxation before Ginny pulled into the Renaissance parking lot. It required only a single unobtrusive sideways glance to reassure Lisa that Mike Grundy had done as he was asked and had brought her own car to the hotel. She collected her room key from reception and without any comment, accepted the bulky package that was handed over at the same time. She went up to her room, where she stayed close to the door as she took out the keys to her car, listening closely all the while for sounds of movement in the corridor.

As soon as she was reasonably sure she would be unobserved, she slipped out again and headed for the service stairs. She didn’t need to go through reception to get back to the parking lot, and there didn’t seem to be anyone watching as she slipped into her car and started the motor. No one followed as she drove away into the night. Dawn had still not fully come, but it could not now be far off.

EIGHTEEN

Although she had no watch to keep time with, Lisa’s impression was that it took less than ten minutes to get back to Number 39—but she might have been wrong, given that her onboard computer didn’t register a single offense or an instance of contributory negligence. She parked the car in the school playground, where her intruders had left their vehicle before making their own surreptitious approach to the building, and she let herself in with a minimum of noise. She tiptoed up to the second floor, then knocked softly on the Charlestons’ door.

Unfortunately, soft knocking didn’t do the trick. She had to knock harder, then harder still. In the end, though, she heard footsteps within the apartment and repositioned herself so that she could be seen through the glass peephole.

John Charleston must have recognized her immediately, but when he opened the door, it was only by a crack.

“Lisa?” he said anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said