Listen to me. Sound like a raving paranoiac.

Hey, everybody! I'm so important, there's a cosmic power out to get me and everybody close to me!

But... if he had indeed been drafted into the supposed shadow war, it might be true.

Jack felt the breath leak out of him. He had to find a way to get himself discharged, even if it was dishonorable.

But first-first-first: place Gia out of harm's way.

12

"Like I told you before," Fred Strauss said, his voice halfway to a whisper. "He's a ghost, a fucking ghost."

Eli Bellitto lay in his hospital bed and stared at the flickering polychromatic beacon of the TV screen in his darkened hospital room.

"Who's a ghost?" Adrian said.

Strauss sat at the right foot of the bed, Adrian at the left. The big man had propelled himself into the room in his wheelchair. His left knee was braced and straight out before him. Even in the dim light Eli could see the pair of ugly purple swellings on his bare scalp. His long arms hung at his sides, almost touching the floor.

"The guy who clobbered you and stabbed Eli," Strauss said, his words clipped with impatience. "Haven't you been listening?"

Adrian's short-term memory hadn't quite recovered yet and he'd been having difficulty following Strauss's excuses for coming up empty in his search for their attacker. Even Eli found his repeated questions annoying.

Adrian shook his head. "I have no memory of it. I remember having dinner last night, and after that... it's all a blank. If it weren't for my knee and this pounding headache, I'd think you both were having me on."

Adrian had regained some of his recent memory-at least now he accepted that this was August instead of July-but he'd made this same statement at least half a dozen times since his arrival. Eli wanted to throw something at him.

I'm the one who's suffered the real damage! he wanted to shout. You just got a knock on the head!

He clenched his teeth as a new gush of magma erupted in his groin. His left hand flailed about, found the PCA button, and pressed it; he prayed he hadn't already used up this hour's morphine allotment.

What a day. An afternoon from hell. A nurse, a three-hundred-pound rhino in white named Horgan had come in and insisted he get up and walk. Eli had refused but the woman would not take no for an answer. She may have been black but she was a Nazi at heart, leading him up and down the hall as he clung to his rolling IV pole, his catheter snaking between his knees, his half-full blood-tinged urine bag dangling from a hook on the pole for all to see. Agony enhanced by humiliation.

And then Dr. Sadiq had visited, telling him that he had to walk more, and how tomorrow they'd be removing his catheter-Eli's buttocks clenched at the thought of Nurse Horgan dragging the tube out of him, and that caused another eruption of pain. Dr. Sadiq said he anticipated discharging Eli tomorrow morning.

Not soon enough as far as Eli was concerned. As long as he could take this PCA unit with him.

"In other words," Eli said to Strauss as the morphine took effect, "once we trim away all your excess verbiage, we are left with the simple fact that you've failed us."

The detective spread his hands. "Hey, I can only do so much. It's not like you two've given me a whole lot to work with."

It frightened Eli to know that his attacker was still unidentified.

He knows me, but I don't know him.

He could be in the hospital now, pretending to be visiting someone else, but all the while waiting for Strauss and Adrian to leave so that he can come in and finish the job.

If only they had his name. The Circle could take it from there. With their connections they'd make short work of him.

"Did you bring me his number?" Eli asked Strauss.

"Yeah." He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket "Got it here."

"Dial it for me."

"You're kidding. It can't be traced and he doesn't-"

"Dial it now!"

Shrugging, Strauss punched the number into the bedside phone and handed Eli the receiver. After four rings, Eli heard a disembodied voice say the client he'd called was not available. He handed the phone back to Strauss.

"Leave the number on the nightstand."

"Waste of time, I tell you. Guy doesn't keep his phone on."

"I'll keep trying. Who knows? I may get lucky."

Eli wasn't sure exactly what he'd say, but the phone number was his only link to the man who'd violated him.

"Hey," Strauss said, pointing to the TV screen. "Isn't that-?"

Eli shushed him and turned up the volume when he recognized the Vietnamese child's face. He missed the introduction as the scene cut to a dark-skinned woman reporter on a crowded sidewalk, a scene obviously shot earlier in the day.

Her name was Philippa Villa and she was doing man-on-the-street interviews about how, in the wake of little Due Ngo's recent abduction, people thought child molesters should be treated.

Child molesters! Why did everyone assume that the child was going to be sexually molested?

As each bloated visage from Manhattan's multihued lumpen proletariat flashed onto the screen to mouth predictably banal comments about capital punishment being "too good for them," Eli's anger grew. These ignoramuses knew nothing of the Circle's exalted purpose, and were casting them as perverted lowlifes. They were being egged on by this reporter, this Philippa Villa. The Circle had a powerful link within the media. Eli would see to it that this woman's career came to a screeching halt.

He was about to change the channel when the reporter's grinning face filled the screen.

"And if you think the folks we've just seen are tough, you should have heard one woman who did not want to appear on camera. I wrote down what she said: 'The guy who snatched that little boy should be castrated-'"

Eli stifled a moan as he relived the moment when the blade of his own knife sliced into his tenderest flesh.

"'And after that he should have his hands cut off so he can never touch another child, and then his legs cut off so he can never stalk another child-'"

He saw Strauss lean back, as if trying to distance himself physically as well emotionally from the TV.

"'-and then his tongue ripped out so he can never coax another kid into his car, and his eyes put out so that he can never even look at a child again-'"

He saw Adrian wince and run a trembling hand over his face.

"'-I'd leave his nose so he can breathe in the stink of his rotten body.' "

Eli felt the PCA button crack under his thumb. He hadn't realized he'd been pressing it so hard.

Forget the reporter. Eli now had somebody else he would much rather ruin. If he could find her.

"Did you hear that?" he said to Adrian and Strauss. "Did you hear what that woman said about us?"