In a drawer of the bureau under a pile of men’s pants Aharon found files. This was what he had come for, and though he wanted nothing more than to get out of this room as quickly as possible, he took out the files and sat with them on the floor.

There were half a dozen legal-sized manila folders with elastic bands to hold them closed. The one on top was his.

Aharon hissed in a breath and, fascinated, read someone else’s account of him. A photograph of him—a good one, taken outdoors, was in the front of the file. It had been taken without his knowing, apparently in Jerusalem. He was assessed as “fanatically Orthodox.”

Aharon looked at the picture of the man he had been and felt a strange tightening sensation behind the eyes. Looking at the photo, he would say that was a hard man, a man who believed he had all the answers, a man who, in fact, knew very little.

He put his own file down and flipped through the others. There was a file each on Dr. Talcott, Nate, and Denton. There was not a file, thankfully, on his wife. The last file was Anatoli’s.

Aharon knew that Anatoli had been going under a pseudonym for some time. In Poland he used the name Solkeski, not Nikiel. What frightened Aharon when he opened the file was the first image—a blown-up eight-by-ten photograph of Anatoli’s arm. There was a swatch of skin showing where his black wool coat sleeve had been raised, raised by the heavy, meaty hand that had a grip on the arm. The photograph must have been taken when the DoD agents were escorting Anatoli somewhere, Aharon thought. And it must have been taken with a telephoto lens. The numbers on Anatoli’s arm were as plain as day.

Aharon flipped the picture forward. Sure enough, there, on the biographical form was a photograph of Anatoli, at least twenty years old, and his real name. The file was thick, including printouts of some of the “pages of testimony” from Yad Vashem that mentioned Kobinski and Anatoli and camp records as well.

Aharon went to stroke his beard and found empty air. He clucked his tongue thoughtfully and rocked a little, the file in his lap.

The Mossad—Norowitz—knew who Anatoli was, that he was Kobinski’s closest ally and disciple. Aharon thought about the man who had wiped corned beef juice from his fingers to look at the code binder, the man who had called him so frequently in the last few months.

Rabbi, have you found any more of Kobinski’s manuscript?

What would Norowitz do to get his hands on Anatoli? What would he not do? But the DoD had Anatoli, at least for the moment. Then again, they’d also had Jill and that had not stopped the Mossad from attempting to kidnap her.

A beep startled Aharon from his cogitation. He scrambled to his feet, running to the window, heart hammering. Then he realized that the sound had not come from outside but from a device on the bureau that looked like an oversize portable phone. It beeped again.

He went over to it and picked it up. It was probably a satellite phone; it was the size of a large old-fashioned receiver, not like the modern cell phones at all. Underneath the buttons for dialing was a two-inch LED screen. There was a message on the screen. Its arrival must have been the source of the beep. It was in Hebrew, something Aharon supposed was encryption enough in most parts of the world. It said:

Calder was crawling across the face of the globe. That’s the way it felt. In his mind he was crawling, grasping fistful of earth by fistful of earth, moving one bloodied knee at a time. It was like crawling into his own cerebellum. Every hour, every moment, brought new memories. Few of them were pleasant.

Once, asleep sitting upright in the airplane, he’d had a memory-dream. He remembered himself—Calder Farris—screaming at his father. Calder remembered growing up with the hard man, and that he’d been beaten often. In this particular instance he had had enough, and in an unspeakable rage he’d shoved his father against the wall and pounded his face with his fist again and again. Then he had put back his head and howled. He awoke with the woman shaking him, a murmured whine still on his lips.

It occurred to him that the boy in the dream, Calder Farris, himself, had lived with that howl inside him for a long time. That was what had enabled him to do certain things, like almost kill his father and slaughter that Silver male and then cut him up like an animal. Perhaps it was the damage that had happened to his mind, but somewhere along the way he had lost the howl.

He didn’t want that rage, but losing it made him weak.

The woman was weakening him, her presence alone. Bringing her had been a mistake. It was hard enough just trying to cope, trying to hold it together against a flood of memories that were as sharp and painful as the pins and needles of an awakening limb.

What did she want from him? Why couldn’t she just leave him alone? It felt like his old job, his old life, was being foisted upon him before he was ready. He was sick; couldn’t she see that? She had tried to talk to him, early on, while they were in an airport restaurant in Poland. She had been talking about some weapons and her words had so disturbed him, had caused such black ripples to burn in his mind, that he had allowed a glass to tumble from his hand and shatter on the floor. She had shut up then.

After they left Poland, he had so much to deal with that he had stopped pretending she was his prisoner. He had even tried to ditch her, but she had stuck to him like glue. She looked at him with such concern, asked about his head, gave him pills that eased the pain. He had no idea why she was doing any of it, but he was too confused to resist.

All he could do was try to hold on as information flew at him. Planes, for example. At first they had seemed exotic, almost spooky, even though he had known what they were. But traveling on them, sitting in the cramped seats, feeling annoyed at the quality of the food, even the feeling he got in his ears on landing—these sensations were very familiar.

And the sun—the sun! It had been cloudy in Poland, and he hadn’t even remembered about the sun until it came out at sunrise on their flight to Paris. He’d stared out the window at it, felt its heat on his face, and known real joy.

It was not that he’d ever liked Centalia. He had survived there, nothing more. But once he saw the sun he felt a sense of possessiveness, of happiness, of pride for this world. He felt that he was home.

The hardest thing to reconcile was the people. How many people there were in this world, of every shape and size! There was no uniformity at all. And everyone moved without passes, with no one caring where they went, no one taking down their name on a logsheet or asking questions. There was basic security at the airports, but otherwise no one monitored their progress. The disorderliness of it scared him. How could society function with such liberties, with no one in control? How did things keep from simply flying apart?

He was not like them. Watching them, he felt hard and rigid where all around him was turmoil. He was like a stiff log in a churning river. Just as the sun had made him feel that he was home, the people made him doubt he had ever belonged on this world.

By the time they arrived in Paris, he had fallen back in love with chocolate chip cookies. And he was starting to feel that there could be a kind of fascination in the chaos. People-watching in the airport on their long layover, he could almost appreciate the flagrant willfulness of the disorder, was enchanted by the magic trick, that all the comings and goings and pairings and teeming could work without any visible means of structure. It was like a toy he remembered—a kaleidoscope. The thing always made amazing patterns no matter which way the random pieces fell.