AMBURG, GERMANY

JUNE 21, 2005

PRESENT DAY

Gina’s brother Victor called Jules back after he stopped crying. Vic had made up some ridiculous excuse for why he’d had to hang up—his call waiting was beeping—but Jules didn’t buy it for one second. What’s that you say? My sister, whom we’d been told died in a horrible terrorist bombing may not be dead after all? Whoops, I have to take this call, it’s the library. That book I wanted has finally come in...

All-righty then.

“It’s definitely not Gina?” Victor asked him now.

“It’s definitely not.” Jules told him what he’d just told Max. “It’s not a case of her body being misplaced, either. She’s not in the morgue. And so far all the DNA testing has come back negative.” He took a deep breath. “Which doesn’t mean she’s not dead.”

He’d been saying that a lot lately, Little Johnny Doom, spreading gloom and despair as he oozed—well, was driven, actually—through the streets of Hamburg.

His driver was tall and blond with a cute accent, but alas, he was about as gay as a November day in Schenectady. He wove his way through the crowded city with ease, taking Jules over to the blast site at Max’s request.

Jules would have preferred joining his boss over at Gina’s hotel. He wasn’t sure what good surveying the damage was going to do. But it was not his to ask why. It was his to do or die, stick a needle in his eye. Or however that went.

But, unless Max thought he might find something of Gina’s in the rubble—her shoe or that ring she used to wear—his going there seemed pointless.

Almost as if Max were finding him busywork to do, to keep him away from the hotel.

And there—aha!—was the point, Jules realized. Max wanted privacy as he went through Gina’s things, as he faced the fact that letting her leave in the first place had been one mondo stupidass freakadelic mistake.

“This is awesome,” Victor was saying, completely ignoring Jules’s gloomy words of warning.

“It doesn’t mean,” he started again, but Vic cut him off.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That she’s not dead. I got that. But we don’t need any glass-half-empty bullshit right now. Can you stick to the facts that you do know for sure?”

But Victor didn’t want all the facts—he only wanted the ones that were positive and hopeful.

Hope, Jules knew, could be a wonderful thing—in manageable doses. But if it grew too large, if it overshadowed reality, if all bad news was ignored in order to support the theory that Gina was still alive, well, it could prove to be very messy when the truth finally did rear its ugly head.

“Gina’s passport was in the possession of a young woman we now believe to be a terrorist,” Jules repeated the news he’d just shared with Max. In his opinion, it wasn’t particularly good news. In fact, it was very un-good. It meant that although Gina probably hadn’t died in the blast, it was likely that she’d died several days earlier. But if he said it cheerfully enough, maybe Victor wouldn’t catch on. “This woman had it in a security pocket that she wore underneath her blouse,” he continued.

Eyewitnesses put the woman he and Max had found in Gina’s coffin leaving a Volkswagen Jetta and running into a pastry shop moments before the car exploded.

This was a detail Jules had told Max, but couldn’t yet share with Gina’s family. He also couldn’t share the fact that there had been a ticket bought in Gina’s name for a flight to New York—one way—scheduled for the same day that the bomb had gone off.

In FBI-speak, that was called a Big Freaking Clue. As in, hello, if someone had just paid a bazillion euros for a plane ticket to New York, it seemed crazy to then go and blow oneself up in an out-of-the-way Hamburg cafe.

Still, they didn’t know for absolute sure that Gina herself hadn’t bought that ticket. Which was one of the reasons why Jules needed to talk to her brother.

“Last time Gina spoke to you she didn’t mention anything about coming home, did she?” Jules asked Victor now. “You know, for a quick visit?”

“No.”

“She wouldn’t, like, want to surprise you,” he persisted. “You don’t have a grandmother or someone with a birthday, or maybe a family reunion? Wedding? Funeral? You know, something that everyone thought she was going to have to miss, but then...?”

“No. We didn’t even know she was in fucking Germany,” Vic answered flatly. “Last we heard, she was staying in Kenya an extra nine months.” He paused. “Is it possible she’s still in Africa? That her passport was stolen or copied or something?”

“No. We finally spoke to Ben Soldano, the head of Gina’s AAI camp.” Jules had already thought of that. “She and a friend—a woman named Molly Anderson—left Kenya last Thursday.”

“You sure this guy’s telling the truth?”

“Considering they were on the passenger manifest for a Lufthansa flight into Hamburg—not to mention the fact that Soldano is a priest and God really doesn’t like it when priests lie—Holy shit!” Jules stared out the car window as a bus roared past with both Adam and Robin’s face on the side—part of a giant advertisement for the movie American Hero. Der Amerikanische Held. Ab Donnerstag. Manche Kriege führst Du in Dir—which had to be a translation of the movie’s tag line, The War is Within. “Jesus!”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Jules said. “Sorry.” He’d thought he’d be safe here, that Hollywood movies about World War II wouldn’t be particularly well received in Germany.

Color him one very deep shade of wrong.

“What?” Vic persisted. “You can’t just go holy shit and Jesus and then nothing.”

“It’s not about Gina.” Jules laughed. “Really, Victor, you don’t want to know.”

“Fuck you, douchebag—tell me what just happened.”

Okay. “An ex-lover and his... new boyfriend are both actors in a movie that’s apparently getting worldwide distribution,” Jules told him, even though it wasn’t quite true. Robin had only slept with Adam that once—he’d been experimenting, or so the allegedly straight actor had claimed. But no way was Jules going to attempt to explain that to Victor. “I see their picture—movie ads—wherever I go. Here I am, in fucking Germany—” he used Victor’s adjective “—and I still can’t get away from them.”

Silence.

“You still there?” Jules asked. “Or did my use of the words ex-lover and his cause a massive heart attack?”

“No,” Victor said. “I just... it must suck, is all. Is it... Tom Cruise?”

Jules laughed. Why did the entire straight and vaguely homophobic male population of America think that Tom Cruise was gay? Was it because they found him attractive and that frightened them? “No, sweetie. His name is Adam. You wouldn’t know him—this is his first real movie.” But apparently, from the amount of buzz American Hero was getting, it wasn’t going to be his last.

“I’d hate it if one of my exes were, like, on some billboard.” Victor actually sounded sympathetic. “I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I mean, on top of... I just... I know how much you care about Gina.”

It was weird hearing those sensitive words from the mouth of the man who’d once asked him if the gay thing was just a scam to meet chicks. Vic had actually used that word—chicks. Who talked like that? Although this was also the gentleman who’d asked if didn’t Jules think it was creepy, a guy as old as Max dipping his wick in someone as young as Gina?

Well, yeah, it was really creepy when Vic put it like that. Especially since it was his sister he was talking about.

Ew.

“Thanks, but an ex on a billboard is nothing compared to what your family is going through,” Jules said as the driver took a corner onto a street that was actually cobblestone. The buildings in this part of town looked like something out of a fairytale. “Hey, did Gina ever mention anyone named Leslie Pollard? From England? He showed up at the AAI camp in Kenya about four months ago...?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Vic said, “but I’ll ask Leo and Bobby. And Ma. She and Geenie aren’t as close as they used to be. You know. Before the, uh, hijacking. Lester, you said his name was...?”

“Leslie,” Jules corrected.

“Dude, that’s a girl’s name.”

“Actually,” Jules said, “it’s not. Well, it’s both.”

“Yeah, but what kind of parents name their son Leslie?” Vic asked. “Jesus, just fuckin’ tattoo I am a fag on the poor asshole’s forehead and send him off to school to be killed.”

Jules cleared his throat. So much for sensitivity.

“I’m just saying,” Victor said. “No offense.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t offensive at all.”

“You know it’s true. I mean, come on.”

“That actually makes it more offensive,” Jules pointed out as his driver pulled up to the curb. He was going to have to walk the rest of the way to the blast site. “Wait for me, please,” he ordered the driver as he got out of the car. He didn’t expect to be here long.

Victor tactfully, if not exactly eloquently, changed the subject as Jules flashed his badge to the armed guard standing next to big concrete barriers that would... what? Prevent another suicide bomber from driving his car into the wreckage?

Too little, too late.

But perhaps the idea was to create an illusion of security in a world that simply was no longer safe.

“So what is this we’ve been hearing on the news,” Vic asked. “That the explosion in Hamburg was some big-ass mistake—some terrorist screwup that wasn’t supposed to happen...? What’s up with that?”

The going theory was that the Hamburg blast was indeed an error. “We think it’s likely that the explosives went off accidentally,” Jules told him, using his handkerchief to cover his nose as he picked his way down the debris filled street. Jesus, the smell.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Vic asked.

It meant that instead of one mega explosion in a not-very-strategic part of the city, the analysts suspected that terrorists had intended for there to be four separate blasts.

Taking out four different commercial airliners, heading for not just New York, but also London, Paris, and Madrid.

It made sense. It explained the passport, the airline ticket in Gina’s name, the inanity of four suicide bombers in the car when a single martyr would have done the job just fine.

That is, if blowing up the regulars at Schneider’s bakery and cafe had really been their plan.

“Sorry, Vic, I can’t go into any details about this,” Jules said. “Not right now.”

But Victor wasn’t as stupid as he sometimes sounded. “That girl in Gina’s coffin,” he said. “The one who had her passport. If she was a terrorist... She was going to come to New York and either take out the plane and a chunk of the airport—or hit some target in Manhattan, am I right?” He laughed. “Yeah, don’t answer that. I don’t want you to get in trouble. It’s just... people like that—people who’d plan something as fucked up as that... They wouldn’t’ve said please when they took Gina’s passport from her, would they?”

“No,” Jules said quietly.

Victor was silent for a moment, reality making his hope shine a whole lot less brightly. “Are you going to be able to find her?” he finally asked, subdued. “If she’s, you know...”

Dead.

“We’ll do our best,” Jules promised him.

As he hung up his cell phone, he rounded the corner and stopped.

Whoa.

The crater from the blast was huge and deep, and now he really knew why Max had sent him here. It was so that he’d see this. With his own two eyes. Which were the only two eyes on the European continent that Max trusted as much as the two that were in his own head. Which was one hell of a compliment. Jules would have to take some time to think about that—later.

Right now...

God-a-mighty, this had to have been an accident.

And one hell of a miracle. The fact that the bomb had gone off in such an ineffective location truly was miraculous. If the car had been another half a block north, the death toll could have been in the thousands, rather than mere dozens. This was definitely the result of a bombmaker’s equivalent of premature ejaculation.

Also, just looking at the depth of that crater, Jules knew that if the terrorists had intended for this to be a true car bomb, they would have reinforced the car’s trunk in such a way as to send the explosion up and out instead of down into the ground. If they’d done that, far more people would have died, as well.

As it was, judging from that hole, anyone close to the car—say, a body belonging to someone who might have been killed for her passport and tossed in the trunk—would have been vaporized.

It was likely there’d be no DNA evidence left at all.

Of course, looking at that crater, and having a vague idea of the cubic footage of a Jetta’s trunk—which was large for a small car, but not enormous... With the amount of explosives needed to make this hole, Jules couldn’t believe there was room in that trunk for a body, too.

All this wasn’t particularly useful information in terms of finding Gina. But it did help them cross one more location off the list titled “Possible Places in Hamburg Where Gina Vitagliano May Have Died.”

Problem was, infinity minus one was still a huge number.

Still holding his handkerchief over his nose, Jules turned and headed back to his waiting car and driver.

KENYA, AFRICA

FEBRUARY 25, 2005

FOUR MONTHS AGO

“I can’t believe you told him!” Gina whispered.

“And I can’t believe you would think I wouldn’t tell him,” Molly said just as quietly, but no less intense. “Since when do friends resort to blackmail?”

“Hey,” Jones tried to interrupt, but they both flat-out ignored him. He sat down on Molly’s bed.

“Probably,” Gina said, “right after one friend finds out that the other has been lying to her.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” Molly got in her face. “I never lied to you.”

“ ‘Where are you going?’ ” Gina imitated herself and then Molly’s response: “ ‘Just out for some air.’ Left out a little, didn’t you? Like, ‘And to help some local girls escape from their parents to a place where they won’t be harmed.’ ”

Their argument—done in whispers so that no one would overhear—was all the more strange due to the fact that Gina was shivering in her bed, sick from what was looking more and more like an early version of the stomach virus that had taken down that busload of visiting priests.

Jones hadn’t caught it. Probably because there was nothing about him that was even remotely holy.

Molly alternately scolded Gina and pressed a cool cloth to her head. “Don’t be melodramatic,” she told her now. “I’m just the intermediary.”

“These days,” Gina corrected her. “Because you’re a potential target.” She looked over at Jones. “She’d probably be attacked if she left the camp. Did she tell you that?”

Attacked? “Jesus, Molly!” Frustration rang in Jones’s voice.

They finally both turned to look at him. “Shhhh!”

It would have been funny if this wasn’t so serious. The thought of Molly putting herself in danger made his stomach churn.

“My turn to talk,” he said, working hard to keep his voice low.

“Okay,” Molly admitted, “at one time, I may have put myself into danger, but over the past year, Paul Jimmo has smuggled the girls up to his farm and then—”

“My,” he said, “turn to talk.”

Or not talk, as he tried to make sense of all the information that had come flying at him over the past few minutes.

Starting with the fact that Gina had “figured out”—according to Molly—that he was really Dave Jones.

Which, in itself was a mind-bender, considering that he wasn’t “really” Jones. His real named was Grady Morant. Jones was just another AKA in a string of AKAs. But at least Gina didn’t know that.

Some of the facts were far more clear.

Paul Jimmo, a friendly young Kenyan man who frequently visited this camp, had just been badly injured in a tribal dispute over water rights. He’d been airlifted to the hospital in Nairobi. It wasn’t yet known whether he would survive.

A fifteen-year-old Kenyan girl named Lucy was currently hiding here—in Jones’s very own tent, as a matter of fact. Apparently, yesterday Molly had made an arrangement with Paul Jimmo to take the girl north to Marsabit.

Which Jimmo obviously now couldn’t do.

“What’s the girl running from?” Jones asked. “An arranged marriage?”

Molly and Gina exchanged a look, and his heart sank. Whatever they were about to tell him couldn’t be good.

“Do you know what FGM is?” Molly asked him.

He shook his head. “No.” But he knew he was about to find out.

“Female genital mutilation,” Gina said. “Also known less descriptively as female circumcision...?”

Oh, shit. “Okay, yeah,” Jones said. “I know what that is.” It was a rite of passage ritual done to women, and it was as awful as it sounded. The medical term was clitoridectomy. But it was usually performed by people with no medical training, using knives or even chunks of glass that were nowhere near sterile. The idea of it made him shudder.

“I used to think I knew what it was,” Gina said. “And then I came here.”

“It’s a purification ritual,” Molly explained. “Certain cultures believe that female genitals are unclean—that contact with an uncut woman can be dangerous to a man.”

Jones laughed his disbelief. “So, like: ‘Look out, I’m going to touch you with my unclean parts!’ And all the men run away screaming?”

He came from a very different culture.

“The cutting is just one part of the process,” Molly told him. “Some tribes perform something called infibulation, too.”

“That’s where they sew what’s left together, so that when it heals, the girl is essentially scarred shut, with an opening that’s maybe a little bigger than a pinhole,” Gina said. “It’s the equivalent of a physical chastity belt—what a terrific way to keep all the girls and women in line, huh? If the fact that their clitoris is completely gone doesn’t put a damper on their hankerin’ to step out, they’re stopped because penetration is impossible.”

“And it gets worse,” Molly said, sympathetic to the fact that he was turning pale. “When they marry, on their wedding night, their bridegroom has to cut or tear open the scar tissue in order to—”

“Yeah,” Jones said. “I get it.” Okay, that would make him run away, screaming.

“That’s if they survive the initial ritual,” Gina said. “Narari didn’t.”

Narari was... Oh, damn, those little girls who were still in the hospital...?

They couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old. He looked at Molly, who nodded.

“There’s a new law in Kenya,” Molly told him, “that allegedly prohibits the cutting of any girl younger than sixteen. At which time, she supposedly has to give her consent to have the procedure done.”

“But there’s not a lot of Grrl Power in this part of the world,” Gina added. “An unscarred girl can’t prove her purity, so men don’t want to marry her. Which means a family will lose her bride price. A girl may say no, but when the family who feeds and houses her says yes...”

“This girl—Lucy,” Molly told him, “has said no.”

Jones nodded. “Okay,” he said. “With Paul Jimmo in the ICU, how’re we going to get her to Marsabit?”

SHEFFIELD REHAB HOSPITAL, MCLEAN, VIRGINIA

JANUARY 9, 2004

SEVENTEEN MONTHS AGO

Ajay’s older brother finally came to visit.

After being noticeably absent during both Christmas and New Year’s, he just appeared, without advance notice, walking into the rec room where Ajay and Max were playing a hand of their ongoing game of gin rummy, while waiting for Gina to show up.

“Yo, Jay-man...”

Ajay looked up. Blinked. “Hey, wow, Ricky.” The kid was remarkably unenthusiastic, considering he always spoke of his brother with such reverence. “Finally found the place, huh?”

Tall and skinny, Rick Moseley was much older than Max had imagined—in his mid-twenties. He was also much whiter—as in Scandinavian—with hair that might’ve been blond if he’d bothered to wash it. He hadn’t. He also wore clothes that looked as if he slept in them.

Even though a lot of younger people worked hard to achieve that rumpled, messy-haired look, this was obviously not a fashion statement. The kid was ripe, like he’d done his sleeping in his clothes behind a dumpster.

He also moved like he couldn’t stand still for too long.

“Dude!” Rick took a wide berth around the table, heading for the big picture windows that looked out over the countryside. “You got some kind of view here, huh?”

“Yeah,” Ajay said. “It’s great.”

Rick hadn’t given Ajay a hug, hadn’t so much as touched the boy’s shoulder. It was possible he didn’t want to get too close, so as not to offend with his stench, but Max doubted it. Rick didn’t even look at Ajay. He just gazed out at the view during their whole conversation. If you could call this wimpy exchange of words a conversation. How about asking, How are you?

Ajay tried a variation on that theme, since it was obvious that Rick wasn’t doing too well himself. “Hey, how’s Cindy?”

“Ashley,” Rick corrected him. “Cindy is so over. Ashley’s much cooler. She’s uh, you know, out in the car... Yeah, this is some view...”

Max cleared his throat.

“Oh, hey, this is Max,” Ajay said, taking the cue. “Max, Ricky. We’re stepbrothers, in case you were wondering,” he explained. “My dad did the Brady Bunch thing with his mom. We shared a half-sister, but she didn’t... you know.”

Max did know. She hadn’t survived the crash.

Over by the window, Rick ran his hands down his face.

Granted, it had to have been difficult for him to deal with the loss of his entire family. No doubt it was hard, too, to see his little brother in a wheelchair, unable to walk, with those terribly scarred hands. Max could only imagine.

Still, Rick’s refusal to look at the boy came across as revulsion—at least that was the way Ajay appeared to interpret it. He’d tucked his hands out of sight, beneath the tails of his too-big shirt, as if they were something he had to hide.

“Max,” Rick said, finally turning. “You work here, Max? ‘Cause I’m wondering if you can’t push Jay’s chair to his room, so we can—”

“Max is a patient,” Ajay said, his voice a little higher pitched than usual. “Believe it or not, he plays cards with me because he wants to.”

“Lucky Max,” Rick said, approaching the back of Ajay’s chair. “Some of us have bills to pay.” He tugged on the chair, which didn’t budge. “How the fuck do you work this thing?”

“There’s a brake,” Max said, pointing. “You have to release... You know, Ajay can use the controls—”

“No, I can—” Rick tried to release the brake a little too forcefully, which made Ajay grab for the armrests. But he quickly hid his hands again.

Max pushed himself to his feet, but Rick finally got it, and rolled his brother away.

“How’re the nurses treating you? Good?” Max heard him ask Ajay as they went out into the hall.

He didn’t hear Ajay’s response.

Max found himself following them—not right on their heels. He still wasn’t up to that kind of speed.

By the time he reached the reception desk, the hallway that led down to Ajay’s room was empty. He and his brother had disappeared.

Max stood there, tempted to stroll past Ajay’s door, see if they’d shut it, see if he couldn’t hear them talking.

But that was just crazy. He’d definitely been in law enforcement for too many years. Not everyone was a criminal.

Rick wasn’t dangerous, he wasn’t a threat—at least not to his own brother. He was merely a twenty-something slacker who’d had a rough Saturday night, who was struggling to get his life back together after a terrible tragedy. He hadn’t been in that car with Ajay, but it was obvious that, in some ways, he was as badly scarred.

Max made himself take a right turn, going through the front doors toward the garden with its pretty sitting area, sheltered from the wind. On an unseasonably warm day like today, it was a good place to wait for Gina.

Nice and public.

He’d just sat down when the front door opened with too much force, hitting the side of the building with a crash.

It was Ajay’s stepbrother, coming back out.

Some visit. It hadn’t even been five whole minutes since he’d pushed Ajay out of the rec room.

The kid was moving fast and, cursing loudly, he nearly knocked over an elderly man—nice guy named Ted, served on a sub in World War II—who was on his way inside to visit his sister.

Max stood up. “Hey!”

Rick didn’t stop, he didn’t even slow down.

As Max shuffled for the rehab center door, Rick ran for his vehicle—a beat up pickup truck with West Virginia plates—climbed in the driver’s side, and left the lot, tires squealing.

Old Mrs. Lane had left her wheelchair outside the ladies room, and Max appropriated it, throwing himself onto the seat. He zoomed down the hall.

Ajay’s door was ajar.

He nearly killed himself braking, steering into the wall to come to a complete stop, instinctively reaching too far to stop himself and zinging his broken collarbone. Christ. He pulled himself up, shoved the chair back down the hall, then went in, knocking on the door as he opened it wider.

Ajay was sitting by the window.

“Are you okay?” Max asked. “Rick left in such a hurry...”

“Ashley was waiting for him in the car,” Ajay said, but he was close to tears.

There were pills on the floor. Lots of them, crunching underfoot.

“What just happened here?” Max asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did you spill a bottle of Tylenol?” he asked, knowing that wasn’t the case, bending down to pick one up, take a closer look.

“Yeah,” Ajay said. “That’s what happened. I have a headache. A bad one. I think I’m going to lie down—”

“These aren’t Tylenol,” Max said.

“That’s funny,” Ajay said. “Because the bottle said—”

“What’dya do?” Max asked him. “Steal these from the medicine lockup for your brother, only you took the wrong bottle by mistake?”

“No! Screw you! You don’t know shit—”

“I know Ricky was tweaked. What’s he using, Ajay? Crystal Meth?”

“Get out!”

“He must need money, right? That kind of habit is expensive—”

“You don’t have the right to come in here—”

“I also know,” Max said, speaking over him, “what happens when stolen prescription drugs are sold on the street for recreational use. Someone takes them for shits and giggles, doesn’t realize how much their judgment is impaired, gets behind the wheel and drives their car into another car and kills an entire family. Just wipes them off the face of the earth.”

“I didn’t steal them!” Ajay was crying now. “I didn’t! He wanted me to, but I didn’t. He said they kept something called Oxy-something in the closet, that there were bottles of it here, that I could just help myself and no one would even notice. Only, they keep the drugs locked up and inventoried, and even if they didn’t, I’m not a thief—he might be but I’m not! These were my pills, only he didn’t want these...”

Max realized that there was more than one type of medication on the floor—dozens of doses of medicine that Ajay apparently had fooled the nurses into thinking he was taking, but had actually never even put in his mouth.

Because he was saving it for his tweaked-out, wicked stepbrother.

Goddamn it.

“Hey, guys.” Gina knocked as she pushed open the door. “What’s...”

“Get the nurse,” Max ordered. “This idiot hasn’t been taking any of his meds for—” He looked at Ajay. “How long?”

“Since Christmas,” he admitted through his tears. “I’m so sorry. I just wanted him to come see me, so I told him I had the stuff he wanted, only it wasn’t, so he threw it at me...”

Gina was back almost instantly, followed by not just Gail, but Debra and the facility’s doctor, too.

“You messed up,” Max told him.

“I know,” Ajay wept. “I know.”

Gina was tugging on his arm, pulling him toward the door. “They need to examine him.”

“I’m sorry,” Ajay told him. “I don’t want you to be mad at me, Max.”

“Too bad—I am mad at you,” Max said. “You knew your brother had a problem and you didn’t ask for help. You know what I would do if I found out my brother had a problem with drugs? I would ask for help, because even though I know a lot, I don’t know anything about helping an addict. You’re a kid. In a wheelchair. With serious medical issues. How are you supposed to help Ricky? By bribing him to come see you?”

“I think he probably feels badly enough,” the nurse named Gail said as she tried to herd him the rest of the way into the hall.

But Max wasn’t done. “That wasn’t you helping him,” he told Ajay. “That was you being selfish.”

“I know,” Ajay sobbed. “I know.”

“You want to help your brother?” Max asked the kid. “I’ll help you figure out who we need to talk to, what we need to do, although, I’ve got to warn you, some people just can’t be saved. He’s got to want to help himself—”

“Mr. Bhagat, this really isn’t helping right now.” Gail looked ready to deck him.

Max stood his ground. “After the doctor checks you out—if stupidly not taking your meds for more than three weeks hasn’t won you a trip to the hospital,” he said to Ajay, “come into the rec room. I’ll be there with Gina. Maybe Gail can join us, too. She might have some suggestions for how to help your brother. Then after we talk, we can finish our card game, because I’ve got a hand I’m not just going to throw away.”

Gina’s pulling and the nurse’s pushing finally got him into the hall, where the door closed, practically in his face.

He stood there, shaking his head, breathing hard, pissed as all hell. Three weeks. What was Ajay thinking?

And what was he thinking, to let his anger loose like that?

Gina slipped her arms around his waist, hugging him from behind, her body soft against him. “She was wrong, you know. About it not helping.”

“Yeah,” Max scoffed. “It’s always good to call a crippled kid stupid and selfish.”

“You were being honest,” Gina said. “That’s why he likes you so much, you know. You don’t BS him. You don’t talk down to him, either. You just... talk to him.” She hugged him harder, then let him go. “My brother’s a social worker.” She took out her cell phone as she led him back toward the rec room, searching through her list of saved phone numbers. “He’s in New York, but he might know of some programs down here in D.C. You know, for Rick.”

Which of her three older brothers was a...? “Stockbroker, teacher, firefighter...”

Gina put the phone to her ear. “The firefighter—Rob—is also a teacher at Hofstra. Vic’s the broker, but Leo worked on Wall Street, too. He made enough money to retire at, like, twenty-eight, but got bored and went back to school and—” She turned away, speaking into her phone. “Yeah, Tammy, this is Gina. Is my brother around?” She laughed. “Yeah, thanks.” Back to Max. “You might be able to keep my brothers straight if we spent more time talking instead of—Yeah, Lee, it’s me. Hi.” She wiggled her eyebrows meaningfully at Max, a silent end to her unfinished sentence. “No, I’m still here in D.C.,” she told her brother, “Well, really it’s the burbs, in Virginia...”

The rec room was empty, and Max wandered to the window as Gina spoke on the phone, her laughter winding around him.

The irony was that they’d reached a place in their relationship—if you could call it that—where he was the one who didn’t want to talk. He’d gotten really good at feigning sleep.

Gina, in return, had gotten really good at steering clear of volatile subjects.

“He’s going to call back with some phone numbers,” Gina told Max as she put her phone into her shoulder bag. She sat on the window sill, facing him, her back to the view. “You know, I really wish you could be as honest with me as you are with Ajay.”

Damn. Max sighed.

“Look, I know you don’t need this now,” Gina told him quietly. “I know you’re worried about Ajay, and... Well, Jules told me he dropped off a couple more files—that you’re doing even more work—which is not what the doctor ordered, I might add, but... I found this woman, a thera-pist, who does some couples counseling.”

Ah, God. “Gina—”

“I spoke to her on the phone,” Gina said. “For about two hours. I told her everything. About the rape and... everything.”

If there was anything she could have said to shut him up, it was that. He closed his eyes against the sudden image of Gina thrown to the deck of that airliner’s cockpit, struggling to get away, crying out in panic and pain...

“I like her,” Gina admitted. “Most therapists piss me off, but she’s... I think she really cares. So. I made an appointment to go see her on Wednesday.” She smiled ruefully as Max met her gaze. He’d been urging her to get back into therapy for as long as they both could remember. “Big step, huh? Will you, you know, come with me?”

“Absolutely,” Max said. “But...” She wanted honesty. “Are we really a couple?” Okay, that came out sounding far more harsh than it had seemed as a mere thought running through his head. “I mean, it’s just so... I don’t know, isolated here, I guess. Like it’s not real.” He tried to explain. “I know it’s January, but it feels like we’re having a summer fling.”

And he couldn’t begin to figure out what was going to happen when he left here, and returned to his real life.

“Doctor says I’m gonna live.”

They both turned to see Ajay wheeling his way into the room.

“Give us a sec,” Max called to the boy, but Gina was already on her feet.

“Don’t bother, I understand what you meant,” Gina said, but it was clear that he’d hurt her.

Goddamn it.

It wasn’t the first time he’d hurt her, and it wasn’t going to be the last.

And so it began.

The beginning of the end.