"I'd love to, mister, I really would, but Hank ain't gonna part with it. He loves that book."

"You know where he keeps it?"

"Yeah. In his room, on the top floor."

Thank you for that tidbit.

"Well, steal it back. You stole from me, now steal from Thompson." He hardened his voice. "You're not going to tell me you won't do that, are you?"

"No-no-no! I'll do it! I'll do it!"

"Great."

Jack rose, pulling him to his feet. He put the knife away, straightened Marty's clothes, then pushed him toward the sidewalk.

"Get to it. I'll be waiting."

Marty looked as if he couldn't believe his luck. He rubbed the back of his hand against his throat, glanced at the smear of blood on his skin, then back at Jack.

"You're letting me go?"

"Yeah. How else are you going to get me my book?" He shooed him away. "Move-move-move. I'll be waiting."

Marty moved.

Jack peeked out the mouth of the alley and watched him dash back to the Lodge and up the steps. As soon as he disappeared inside, Jack stepped out onto the sidewalk and hurried the other way.

Yeah, he'd be waiting, but he hadn't said where.

4

Back at the Indo-Pak shop he grabbed a window seat and watched the street while listening to a pair of forever-virgin college kids at a nearby table argue whether Spider-Man could beat Wolverine in a fight. He checked his phone, recognized Levy's number, and called him back.

"Where are you?"

"On Centre Street. Where are you?"

"I moved." He glanced at the menu and gave Levy the address. "Meet me outside."

He watched the Lodge. In less than a minute Thompson appeared leading half a dozen men—Marty among them—wielding two-by-fours and other im-provised clubs. They charged down the sidewalk and into the alley. A few seconds later they reemerged and stood in a group, talking and looking up and down the street.

Finally they all trooped back into their building. Thompson was the last to go in. He stood on the steps and scanned the street one more time.

Upset, Mr. Thompson? Rattled?

Hope so.

Levy's Infiniti showed up shortly after, pulling in by the fire hydrant in front of the coffee shop. Jack hurried out and jumped into the passenger seat.

Levy looked at him. "Where do we go from here?"

"We stay put."

"But the hydrant—"

"If there's a fire, we'll move. A meter maid comes by, we'll move. Otherwise we stick. I'm watching for someone."

"Who?"

Jack wondered if he should tell him. Hell, why not.

"Hank Thompson."

Levy's eyebrows shot up above the frame of his glasses. "Isn't that interesting. Just the man I want to talk to you about."

Damn right it was interesting, but Jack wanted to talk about someone else.

"First tell me how Bolton slipped past the NYPD? Didn't they print him?"

Levy nodded. "Of course they did. But when they ran those prints they came up empty."

"How is that possi—?"

"The agency had Bolton's record removed from ViCAP and the Atlanta PD and anywhere else it might be."

Jack whistled through his teeth. "You said they were connected, but… man."

"Yeah. That's why you don't want to get on their wrong side."

Amen to that, brudda.

He swallowed his disappointment—his perfect fix had flopped—and moved on.

"What've you got on Hank Thompson?"

"I looked up his file last night. He'd been strongly positive for oDNA in our earlier tests. So I had the lab dig out his old blood samples we've kept frozen all these years and run them through our latest quantifying protocols."

"And?"

Levy smiled. "Through the roof."

"As high as Bolton?"

The smile broadened. He was starting to look like the Cheshire cat. Jack wondered whv.

"His equal. They're neck and neck. Plus Thompson has the trigger gene as well."

"So we've got two live grenades out there—and they've been talking to each other. How's that? Can they sniff each other out?"

"I couldn't say. But I want you to look at something."

He opened the laptop lying on the seat between them. Jack noticed it was plugged into the lighter socket. Levy hit a few keys and a picture popped up on the screen.

"This is Hank Thompson when we discharged him from Creighton. Take a good look."

Jack saw a guy in his twenties. His face was fuller, the hair shorter, but he still had that Jim Morrison look. Yeah, a young Hank Thompson.

"Okay. What about it?"

He tapped a few more keys and another photo popped up beside the second.

"Guess who this is?"

The similarities, especially the eyes, were obvious.

"His brother?"

"That's Jeremy Bolton at age twenty."

"No way."

But as Jack stared at the photos, he realized that changing the hair, adding a beard and fifteen-odd years to the new guy would make him look very much like the Jeremy Bolton Jack had spoken to yesterday.

"They're brothers?"

Levy, still with that grin, shrugged. "Well, you're half right. They've got the same father."

A jolt of shock thumped Jack's chest. "That Jonah Stevens you told me about?"

Jack tore his gaze from the computer screen and checked out the Lodge. No activity.

"The same. Born in different states eleven months apart."

"Seems Jonah Stevens got around."

Definite family resemblance. But they reminded him of someone else. Who?

Levy said, "He stayed in contact with Bolton. Maybe he was in contact with Hank too, but I have no way of knowing."

"Sounds like he was a traveling salesman or something."

"Or something. We don't know what he did, but he had no arrest record. According to Bolton his father would visit and bring him a present every birthday when he was young."

"Did he tell him about his brother Hank?"

"Bolton never mentioned a brother. But he'd talk about his father's—his 'daddy's'—special gift. It seems Jonah was blind in one eye and told Jeremy that his bad eye could see things the good eye couldn't, things no one else could see. 'He could see what's coming.'"

"Didn't you tell me he was crushed by an elevator?"

"Something like that."

"That's one thing he didn't see coming."

Levy frowned. "No, I guess he didn't. But anyway, he told Jeremy he saw great things ahead for him, things that would come about because of the plan he had."

"What kind of plan?"

"Bolton was always cagey about that. I've interviewed him many, many times over the years, and I've approached this plan—always with a capital P when Bolton has mentioned it in writing—from every possible angle but I've never been able to make him slip. It's something he and his daddy cooked up. He didn't know his father was dead; he thought he'd just stopped visiting. When I told him, he was more upset about the Plan than his father's passing. 'Who's gonna finish the Plan?' he kept saying."

Jack remembered Bolton's remark about changing the world and the "Key to the future." Had he been talking about the Plan then?

"Maybe that's what he and his half brother have been discussing."

"I'm sure of it."

"Oh?"

"We had mics all around them whenever they'd meet, but they'd speak very low or whisper, and whatever we managed to pick up was cryptic. We did hear the Plan mentioned a number of times, however, and now in hindsight it seems a good guess that Jonah Stevens had discussed his Plan with his number-one son as well."

Number-one son… Jack shook off an audio flash of Warner Oland's bad Chinese accent and said, "Which makes it pretty obvious that they know they're related."

"No question."

"And I guess that clears up any questions about the source of Bolton's mystery money. The new question is: How do we use all this to put him back behind bars?"

Levy looked at him. "That's your department, I believe."