A prickle of apprehension urged Roma to follow him. Had he found the device? Had something gone wrong with it?

He put on a wry smile and turned to the knot of attendees. "Excuse me, but apparently Mauricio wants lunch. We'll finish this discussion later."

They laughed as he moved off. At least he was free of those dullards, but what could have put Mauricio in this state? He saw the elevator doors open and half a dozen attendees step out, leaving the car empty. He hurried inside and pressed the "8" button.

"The Twins!" Mauricio said breathlessly as soon as the doors slid shut. "I saw one of the Twins!"

A chill rippled down Roma's back. "Impossible!"

"Don't say it's impossible when I saw him with these two eyes!"

"Where?"

"On the eighth floor—your floor."

The chill became a frozen hand against his spine. "Lots of other people on that floor as well. Just one Twin? What was he doing?"

"Sneaking along."

"Near my room?"

"No. He was at the other end of the hall. I didn't stay around to see any more. I was afraid I'd be recognized."

Roma glanced up and saw a red "6" on the floor indicator. Quickly he jabbed the "7" button.

"Good idea," Mauricio said. "You wouldn't want to step out of the elevator and come face to face with the Twins."

"They cannot possibly know who I am. But your true nature is not so well insulated. They might spot you. As for me, I'm sure I could walk right past them without their guessing."

"Why else would they be here? It's obvious the Enemy knows—"

"Hush," Roma said as the car stopped. "Let me think."

The doors opened onto the seventh floor elevator alcove. Roma stepped out, pressed the down button, and checked the hallway. Empty. As the elevator doors closed, he paced the alcove, trying to order his thoughts.

The Twins—ruthless, relentless agents of the opposition. Created sometime during World War Two as watchmen, after the first guardian was released from his duties, they had proved to be a nettlesome pair, barging into areas where the Otherness was making inroads. But their ham-handed methods often proved effective, and the men-in-black myth that had sprung up around them tended to work in their favor.

But now they might prove more than nuisances; now they could ruin everything. Worse, they would destroy him on sight—if they recognized him.

"Let us consider this logically," Roma whispered. "We can assume they do not know that I am The One. If they did, they would have grabbed me at the first opportunity—they would not care where, public or private…while I was giving the welcoming address last night, for instance—and torn me to pieces in front of everyone."

"But they must know something," Mauricio said. "Why else would they be here? Unless…"

"Unless what?"

"Unless they know what the Ehler woman discovered."

"Good thought, Mauricio. That might be it. Although, I will bet they know only that Melanie Ehler discovered something, and not what, and that is why they are here. They must have followed her husband right to our doorstep."

The slam of a door down the hall jolted Roma. It was followed immediately by the chime of the elevator car heading down. Roma leaped inside and jabbed the lobby button until the doors closed.

"Now will you abandon this folly?" Mauricio said quickly—neither knew how much time they had before the elevator picked up another passenger. "As I've said all along, it is not yet your time. Too many things have already gone wrong, and even if they hadn't, the arrival of the Twins alone is reason enough to abort it."

Roma shook his head. "These are merely complications. We will go ahead as planned. The second and final delivery is tonight."

"But we haven't located the first yet!"

"Then you must keep searching, Mauricio. Find that device!"

The elevator doors opened, admitting a young couple. Roma was glad of that. He knew Mauricio had more to say but he didn't want to hear it. All he needed was another twenty-four hours, and he would be able to fulfill his destiny.

7

"Look at your scars," Gia said, tracing her fingers across his chest. 'They're all inflamed."

Jack leaned against the tile wall of the shower stall with closed eyes. An hour of vigorous lovemaking had left him with partially vulcanized knees. The steam from the hot water was easing him into a pleasantly tranquil state of paralysis.

He opened his eyes and watched the water course over Gia's pale, lithe body as she leaned against him. The flow had molded her short blond hair against her scalp. He reveled in the soft feel of her.

The bathroom was old-fashioned white tile with time-darkened grout. But the enclosed shower was relatively new and roomy.

At Jack's urging, Gia and Vicky had moved into the Westphalen townhouse on Sutton Square. It was unofficially Vicky's anyway—she was listed in her aunts' will as the final heir. She'd be the legal owner when Grace and Nellie Westphalen were declared officially dead, but just when that would happen—their bodies never would be found—was anyone's guess. Since there was no one to object to Gia and Vicky living in the place and keeping it up, they'd done just that.

With what seemed like enormous effort, Jack looked down at the three red lines running diagonally across his chest, starting near his left shoulder and ending at the lower border of his right ribs.

The scene strobed through his mind as if it had been yesterday. Battery Park…Kusum's ship burning in the harbor…the scar-lipped rakosh closing in on Gia and Vicky…Jack clinging to its back, trying to blind it…the creature peeling him off and slashing at him…the talons of its three-fingered hand raking fire across his chest…

"Not all the scars," he said. "Just the ones made by that rakosh."

"Funny. They weren't red last time we made love."

"Yeah, well, they've been kind of itchy lately." At least he assumed they were the source of that itching out in Monroe the other day. "I dreamed about the rakoshi again last night."

"Again? Bad?"

He nodded, thinking: Please don't ask if you were in it.

Instead, she touched the scars again. "I'm hoping the whole thing will eventually seem like just a bad dream. But you'll always have these as reminders."

"I like to think of them as proof that we really did run up against those things."

"Who wants proof?" Gia said, snuggling tighter against him. "I want to forget them—forget they ever existed."

"But they were real, right? We didn't just imagine them."

She stared at him. "Are you serious? Of course they were real. How can you even ask?"

"Because of the people I've been hanging with at the conference. UFOs and aliens and Antichrists are real to them. If one of them said to a friend, 'Are the gray aliens real?' he'd get the same look you gave me just now, and the friend would say, 'Are you serious? Of course they're real. How can you even ask?' You see what I'm getting at? These people are absolutely sure these conspiracies, these beings, these secret organizations are real."

"Shared delusions," Gia said with a slow nod. She began soaping his chest, hiding the scars with lather. "I see what you mean."

"To me, they're nut cases. I mean, talk to any one of them for five minutes and you know that someone has stopped payment on their reality check. But what if you and I went around talking about the rakoshi? Wouldn't people think the same about us? And with good reason—because we can't prove a damn thing. We have no hard evidence except these scars of mine which, as far as anybody knows, could have been self-inflicted."

"It happened, Jack. We lived through it—just barely—so we know."

"But do we? What do we know of reality but what we remember? When it comes right down to it, who we are is what we remember. And from what I've read about memory lately, it isn't all that reliable."