“I was just messing with his head!” I said. “I was teasing him! I didn’t know—”

“Teasing him?” She touched the side of my face and I flinched. “I think you’re teasing me, Jane. I mean, I saw the tape. Phil was practically pissing himself from fear, and you: you were into it. Teasing! You were being evil. You liked it. You were good at it. Good enough to make a casual observer think that maybe you’d had some practice…”

“Fuck you! I wasn’t—it was just that one day.”

“Yeah, right. That’s a hell of a coincidence, Jane. The one time you give in to a sadistic impulse, put on a performance that couldn’t have been better if you’d been trying out for the Troop, and we just happened to be there to record it…You know what I think? You had ten years with Phil before we took him, and I bet if we picked any day out of those ten years and put J.D.’s poster in a room with the two of you, we’d have caught something just as telling. Jane being evil? Hah. How about Jane being Jane?” She touched my face again, and whispered: “Bad monkey.”

This time instead of pulling away I turned on her, but my fists punched empty air. I heard the sound of her laugh off to my left and lunged for it, still swinging.

“Open your eyes, Jane,” she said. “I know you don’t want to see, but you’re never going to catch me blind.”

I opened my eyes. She was right in front of me, and this time I actually managed to get my hands around her throat before she melted away.

“Stop doing that!” I complained, as she rematerialized, just out of reach.

“All right,” she said. “You want a fair shot, I’ll give you one. Here, I’ll even give you a handicap…” She brought out the knife she’d used to kill John Doyle, and tossed it to me. “Now come on,” she said, showing me her empty hands. “No tricks this time, I promise.”

“OK,” I said. “Just one other thing…” And I lunged at her, leading with the point of the knife blade. She sidestepped, caught my wrist, and threw me face-first into the nearest wall.

“So where did it all go wrong?” she asked, pinning me effortlessly. “After such a promising start…Were you actually sorry when Doyle took Phil away? Or was it that business with Whitmer? I mean, no offense, that was pretty impressive for a fourteen-year-old, but still. You think taking out a serial killer makes you some kind of saint?”

She released me and stepped back, and I whirled around, slashing with the knife.

“Or was it the organization?” she said, dancing clear of the blade. “Talking to Catering on the phone, I can see how that might have an effect on a young girl, even a bad seed. Weird though, how they waited so long before actually recruiting you…Why do you suppose that is?”

I cut at her again, and this time she ducked beneath my arm, hooked a boot behind one of my ankles, and jerked my feet out from under me.

“Was that just a bureaucratic oversight, you think? Or did they maybe have a reason for not rushing to take you on?”

“I had a life,” I gasped. “They hoped…They wanted me to do something with it.”

“Oh, that line.” She laughed. “So why didn’t you do anything with it?”

When I’d landed on my ass, I’d dropped the knife. I tried to pick it up, but she got there first and toed it out of my reach.

“They did recruit me,” I said. “Maybe it took twenty years, but—”

“Yeah, and how’s that been working out? Word from our spies is, not great. Your mission failure rate is kind of an embarrassment. And why is that?”

I made another try for the knife. She kicked me in the face.

“What’s the problem, Jane? Are you just a titanic fuckup? Or could it be that your heart’s not really in it?”

As she hauled back to kick me again I sprang up and locked my hands around her throat. I felt her try to pull away and thought: Got you now, you bitch! But then her own arms came up, breaking my grip, and she spun me around and slammed me into the wall again, eye-to-eye with John Doyle.

“Yeah,” she said. “I really think that’s it, your heart’s just not in it. And I think you’ll feel a whole lot better once you admit it…Say it, Jane.”

“Fuck you!”

“Say it…” She pressed up against me, belly to back, like a full-body hug from behind, and then—the intimacy of it was hideous—our clothes, our skin, just dissolved, and we started to merge…

“Say it,” she commanded, her voice inside and outside now.

(I’m evil.)

“What’s that? I didn’t catch that, Jane. Say it again. Say it loud.”

“I’m—” I said, and then fought it, pushing back until the pressure in my skull was just too great to resist: “I’m evil!”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

She pulled back, withdrew, and I collapsed to the floor.

“First time’s always the hardest…” She squatted beside me, hands balanced casually on her knees. “So listen up, Jane, I’m going to tell you what your options are. Option one, you can deny what you just admitted. Go back to Vegas, try and square things with Love—or just run like hell, which amounts to the same thing, except he’ll be even less likely to believe you when he catches you. Option two, you can think it over some more. No one knows about this room but me—not even Phil—so you’ll be safe here, long as you like. But the lights stay on.

“And then there’s option three. You can stop hiding from yourself. Embrace what you really are, what you’ve always been. Join the Troop, and start making the kind of difference in the world you were meant to make. Now”—she leaned forward, lowered her voice—“I know what option you’re going to pick, because I know which one you want to pick. But I also understand you don’t want it to look too easy, don’t want to seem like you’re caving just because I kicked your ass. So we’re going to pretend you’re going for option two. You stay in here, ‘think it over’ as long as you need to, to save face—only not too long, OK, because we’ve got stuff to do. I’ll be waiting for you outside when you’re ready…”

When I dragged myself back into the den twenty minutes later, a black case was sitting on the bar. It was smaller than the case the Troop had given to Arlo Dexter, but the style was identical.

“You know one of the great things about evil?” the bad Jane said. “You can’t fake it. I mean, think about it, there isn’t a good deed you can name that an evil person couldn’t do, and still be evil afterwards. But it doesn’t work the other way around. You pass our shibboleth test, and there’s no question that you’re one of us.”

I popped the latches on the case, lifted the lid. “You expect me to use this?”

“‘Expect.’ When you say it like that, it makes it sound like there’s room for doubt. I have faith in you, Jane.”

“Who do you want me to kill?”

“Just some people. Nobody important. It’s part of an op you’ll be doing for us. For Phil, actually. He’s throwing a party next week, and he wants a Clown for the entertainment.”

“You mean Love? You want me to kill Robert Love?”

“No, I’m going to kill him. You’re just going to bring him in so Phil can talk to him first. And this”—she patted the case—“this is going to help you get him.”

I shook my head. “Even if I was willing to do that—”

“God, Jane, don’t start backsliding. You want to go another round in the poster room?”

“Even if I was willing to do it, there’s no way I could get back into the Mudgett Suite now.”

“Oh, you could probably get back into it. It’s getting out that’s hard. But that’s OK, you’re not going after him in the Suite, you’re going to hit him at the tables…He gambles,” she explained. “Baccarat, if you can believe it. I mean, of all the boring games…But that’s his thing, and tonight’s his usual night out. Of course he may have changed his plans after your little defection today, but I doubt it. We’ll know for sure in about an hour.”

“I want to talk to Phil.”

“You will. After you grab Love, I’m going to take you straight to him.”