Now he had a body to dispose of.

Shit.

He picked up the pistol and popped the magazine: eight more cyanide-tipped rounds within. Starfires were perfect because of their big cavity. He worked the toggle to eject the chambered round. Now he needed a way to dump the nine cartridges without poisoning someone.

lie look a towel from the rack, unscrewed the suppressor, wiped it down, then wiped down the pistol too. He went to stow them back in the High Sierra bag but decided to give it one last, thorough search.

He upended it and dumped everything onto the bathroom floor. He checked all the end and side pouches and felt around inside for hidden compartments or a phony bottom panel.

Nothing else.

Just a change of underwear, a shaving kit containing an electric razor, toothbrush and toothpaste, a jar of Bed Head hair gel, a box of Starfires, yesterday's Miami Herald, a battered old John D. MacDonald paperback, a Manta Ray baseball cap, and sunglasses.

The banality of the pile depressed Jack. Who was this guy? Who'd sent him? And for whom?

Probably never know.

Jack used the towel to replace the pistol and suppressor in the bag. Since the sunglasses would take fingerprints, he picked them up with the towel as well. He was about to drop them back in when he noticed that they looked familiar. Too familiar.

Forgetting about prints, he held them up and stared through the lenses. No darkening—he could see the shower head perfectly. Yet when he flipped them over… impenetrable tinting.

A band of cold iron tightened around his gut as he jumped up and hurried to his own gym bag. He pulled out the shades Davis had given him and held them side by side with the dead guy's.

Identical.

Unless he'd stolen or found these, the guy in the tub was a yeniceri.

3

Jack drove along South Road until he came to Pemberton Road. The intersection lay on the outer limits of Novaton and, because this was the site of the hit and run on his father, he'd become well acquainted with it during his last visit.

The roads crossed in the swamps on the border of the Everglades and the area was as deserted now as then. More so now since the sun still had two hours to go before it cleared the eastern horizon.

Jack pulled over, got out, and popped the trunk. He grabbed Smith by the armpits and hauled him out. Then he dragged him to the shoulder and rolled him into a drainage ditch. No water, so no splash. He tossed the gym bag—pistol and all—in beside him.

He kept one round.

He'd looked up the number of the Novaton PD before leaving his father's house, and when he reached Route 1 he called it on his TracFone.

"Yes, I'd like to report a crime. I saw what looked like a body being dumped near the intersection of South and Pemberton. Thank you." He cut the connection.

There. That ought to set Novaton's finest into motion.

If not for the cyanide-tipped slugs he might have left Smith there as gator food. He could have disassembled the pistol and tossed it piece by piece into the swamp as he drove along South Road, but he didn't know what to do with the bullets. Anya had instilled a deep respect for the embattled Everglades, and he didn't want to add even a small amount of cyanide to its woes.

This way the Novaton cops would find him before anyone else; the cyanide hollow points would become their problem.

The big question now was, where to from here?

If he pushed it he could make it to the Fort Lauderdale rendezvous on time. His head told him to go there. Who knew when all the stars would again be aligned this way on the road to Bosnia? If he blew this, he might not have another chance before the baby was born.

But Smith's sunglasses added a major wrinkle, urging him to forget all that and find out what the hell a yeniceri assassin was doing in his father's house.

So which was it? The marina or the airport?

Whatever his final decision, he had to head north on Route 1, so he kept driving, hoping he could resolve this by the time he reached Fort Lauderdale.

4

The pain awakens him.

Another Alarm—and so soon after the last.

Then he plunges into that other place, the flashing gray space where he is shown things yet to be—things that must be prevented, and things that must be done.

The pain knifes through his brain and the lights flash. He is aware of his bed under him and he grabs the mattress as he feels it begin to spin. The flashes cycle faster and faster until they coalesce into a vision…

A restaurant… a copy of The New York Times lies on the counter where an attractive woman is paying the cashier… the headline concerns a Bay Ridge apartment linked to terrorists and runs above a photograph of a building.

The woman has short blond hair and carries another life within her.

The Oculus has seen this woman before. She appeared in another Alarm… two months ago… in November. In that one she was standing on a curb, waiting to cross Second Avenue when a truck went out of control and struck her, killing her. He saw the driver of the truck: Zeklos.

That Alarm was stomach turning, but nowhere near as painful as the one that followed a month later.

But real life had not mimicked the November Alarm. Zeklos missed the woman—some of his fellow yeniceri said on purpose due to a lack of resolve—and crashed into another truck instead.

Now the same woman, still with child, but not alone. A dark-haired little girl stands beside her, holding a candy bar. She appears to be pleading but the Oculus cannot hear what she's saying.

The clock behind the counter says half past one.

The vision fades to gray, then lights up with the woman standing on the exact same corner as the last time, only now she is holding the child by the hand while the child munches happily on the candy bar.

As the light changes, they step off the curb… and then, without warning, a white panel truck runs the red light and slams into the two of them, sending them flying. If he were seeing this with his eyes, the Oculus would have squeezed them shut. But since the scene is playing inside his head, he is compelled to watch. And in the driver seat of the truck he sees one of his yeniceri: Cal Davis.

The vision fades to gray, and then the gray fades, and with it, the pain.

The bed stops its vertiginous whirl but the Oculus doesn't move.

A yenigeri in an Alarm means the Ally needs this done.

Why? he wonders. Why does the Ally want this woman dead? The little girl wasn't in the previous Alarm. Does it want her life too, or is she merely collateral damage?

How will their deaths affect the fight against the Otherness?

And why must it fall to him to order their deaths?

He wonders if the Otherness is behind an Alarm like this, if it somehow taps in from time to time. But that can't be. He's tuned in to the Ally, and that's where the Alarm came from.

But although the Ally has never in his experience been cruel, he knows it can be merciless.