“I haven’t heard from you since yesterday so I am calling to see if you are all right.”

“I’m fine,” Dan managed. This couldn’t be happening. Salinas couldn’t have traced him. It was impossible. He’d covered himself completely. “What do you want?”

“I would like some news. Our lost amigo is still missing. Has anyone found him?” Play dumb!

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really? Tell me then, do you recognize this voice?” Dan heard a click, then a recorded voice coming through the receiver: “What kind of half-assed operation are you running there, Salinas? I just learned that a bottle of pills belonging to the little girl was found in a house in Falls Church where someone was murdered. What the hell is going on?” Dan felt his stomach heave. My voice!

Had the distorter failed?

“How?”

“A miraculous world we live in, no? What is hidden can be found. What is distorted can be made clear.” Salinas’s voice lost all its lightness.

“Now tell me, señor, what are the latest developments?”

Dan raged—at himself, at this slimeball drug pusher— and thrashed about for a way out of this. He could speak—the chances of his home phone being monitored were near zero—but he loathed the idea of becoming a pawn to this creature.

“Hurry, señor. We do not have much time. This should be of equal concern to you because if I am taken into custody, my collection of tapes comes with me. Where is our friend?”

Dan sagged. He was trapped.

“No one knows. Supposedly he had a head wound. They’re searching high and low for him. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll find him first.”

“And the child?”

“Apparently she saw ‘our friend’ and can identify him. A woman is going to return her to her father in Atlantic City tomorrow.”

“A woman… that is very interesting. I will look into this. And I hope to hear from you frequently. Remember, your freedom is tied to mine.” The line went dead.

Dan sat with the silent handset dangling from his fingers. He felt dead inside. The only thing stirring was fear. No longer fear for his country and his career. Now he feared for his freedom, for his life.

What had he done?

Monday

1

“You’re a mess,” Snake muttered as he stood before the motel bathroom mirror and redressed his wounds. “But you’re alive.” That alone was a miracle.

Most of Saturday was still a blur. He vaguely remembered coming to in that empty house—Paulie had been there, lying next to him, but he no longer counted—and climbing to his feet, unable to see out of his right eye.

What he remembered best was the pain, the excruciating pain in his eye and the right side of his head. And the blood. Running down the side of his head, down his neck, under his shirt. He’d finally found a towel and tied it around his head.

Somehow he’d found his keys. He grabbed them and his revolver and staggered out to the Jeep. Somehow, he’d managed to drive away before the cops arrived.

And all the time his beeper going, each beep a spear of pain through his head.

He hadn’t wanted to go home, but that bitch had stolen his wallet and his jacket and he needed cash. Lots of it. He knew a guy in Northeast D.C., an M.D. whose license had been yanked because of his fondness for Class II controlled substances, and his habit of selling prescriptions for the same. But that hadn’t stopped him from practicing. His name was out: “You got a reportable wound you don’t want recorded, see Doc Moeller.”

But he only took cash.

The doc stitched up the ragged furrow the bullet had torn from the corner of Snake’s right eye, across his temple, to somewhere above his right ear, saying how lucky he was that the temporal artery had only been nicked. Straightened out his broken nose. That was the good news.

Nothing he could do about that right eye, though. It was shot—literally and figuratively. The bullet had nicked it, causing intraocular hemorrhage, the muzzle flash had seared it, and it was completely out of order.

Maybe an opthamologist could salvage it, but the doc doubted it.

At the very least the eye work would take days, and most likely a stay in a hospital, and Doc Moeller didn’t know of an opthamologist who wouldn’t report the bullet wound.

So that was out.

Call me Deadeye.

The bleeding had stopped, but the pain went on and on. A symphony of agony—deep throbbing basso aches inside his skull accompanied by tight steady whining jabs from his scalp and nose, highlighted by staccato bursts of glass-shard stabs in his eye socket. The Percodans he was popping like M&M’s did next to nothing to mute the pain.

He squeezed a glob of antibiotic ointment onto a gauze eye pad and pressed it over the red horror that had once been his eye. Then he began winding a roll of two-inch gauze around his head.

But then he dropped the roll and grabbed the sink, hanging on as the bathroom suddenly spun around him.

His head had been playing that trick for two days now. Doc Moeller had told him to expect it—post-concussion syndrome, or some such. Whatever it was called, it was scary. Didn’t want something like that to happen when he was driving.

But he was going to have to drive today. Get out of this neighborhood and find a phone. He’d stopped at the first motel he’d seen after leaving Doc Moeller’s—somewhere on Rhode Island Avenue. He had to be the only white man in a couple of miles. He sure as hell wasn’t going to call from this room. Probably have to go into the Federal area to find a phone that worked or didn’t have a pusher hogging it.

The room steadied and he straightened up from his death lock on the sink. He finished winding the fresh gauze around his head and stared at his handiwork.

Gauze encircled his forehead, running down over his right eye and covering the whole right side of his head, including the ear. Not as neat as the doc’s had been, but it would do.

He thought of Poppy and the hot surge of hate and rage made his pain recede a little. This was all her doing. What’d she think she was up to? Shooting him and running off with the kid. What was going on in her crazy head? When he got hold of her…

He could still see the look in her eyes as she’d pulled the trigger. She was crazy, that bitch. And she’d damn near killed him. A fucking broad had got the best of him. How the hell had he let that happen? Sure, he’d been groggy from that conk on the head, but still it wasn’t something he’d ever talk about. He could barely face himself.

And Paulie. For the life of him, Snake couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong with Paulie. Such a simple thing to chop off the package’s toe and send it to the father. What was the big fucking deal? Why couldn’t he have just done as he was told?

And why had he got in Snake’s way when he went after the package? Didn’t make any sense. Not at all like Paulie.

Only one explanation: Poppy. She’d done Something to Paulie’s head.

Probably got into some mother thing with the package. Snake remembered the way she’d been cradling the kid when he’d come after her. Yeah. Had to be it. And she’d infected Paulie.

So stupid!

Poppy’s fault. All of this.

His beeper went off again in the next room. Shit, didn’t Salinas ever give up? All right. He couldn’t put it off any longer. He was going to have to call in.

Luckily, things didn’t look near as bad as they really were. Unlikely that Salinas knew anything about the trouble at the Falls Church house. The story of the killing had been on the news, but nothing to connect it to a kidnapping. And no one had mentioned Paulie’s name.

And the Pres was still in Bethesda. Salinas should be happy about that. Sure. He could convince Salinas that he still had the kid and that everything was under control. They could go on stringing Vanduyne along while they waited for Winston to die.