Captain Dodd was at the bow with the other crewmen. He was motioning the helm operator into position as they approached the smaller vessel through the heaving sea. It was a small yacht. Denton struggled to make out the name on the side.

Why Knot Now.

Crap.

Denton’s excitement faded along with the headlines in his mind. They’d found the boat. There was no story. He’d come out here for nothing.

The crew secured a line to the Why Knot Now, and two of them, like Day-Glo monkeys, made a death-defying cross to the deck.

And Denton realized that something was wrong.

He snapped another photograph as the two men went inside the cabin of the yacht. The two men came out. One scrambled back over to confer with the captain while the other moved around the side of the yacht, his face turned out to sea, searching. And Denton knew: the Why Knot Now was empty.

“So what happened to them?” Jack demanded.

Denton had made the mistake of calling his editor on his cell phone before he’d gone out on the rescue, and there were three messages waiting when he returned to the hotel. By the time he’d gotten out of a hot shower, Jack had rung again.

Denton rubbed his eyes with both hands, the receiver crooked in his neck.

“The official report says they went overboard and drowned. But they didn’t, Jack, I swear. There were two life preservers untouched on the rail. It’s unlikely they all three would have gone in at once, and if they’d gone in one at a time they would have used the preservers, right? We searched for two hours—there was nothing.”

Jack didn’t answer. No answer was possible. They’d both been in this business long enough to know a dead end when they saw it. “Did you get pictures inside the yacht?”

“No.” Denton sighed. “Dodd wouldn’t let me on board. But one of the guardsmen told me nothing was out of place over there. Not so much as a cushion.”

“Well… write up what you’ve got. See if you can make it work.”

Jack didn’t sound very enthusiastic. There was no reason that he should be. And the real frustration was that it might well have been a legitimate case. And he’d been there. He’d been right the hell there. And he still had squat.

The series of articles on vanishings had been Jack’s idea, but Denton had been all over it. There were some interesting historical cases. In 1809 an Englishman named Benjamin Bathurst stopped at an inn. He went around the coach to check the horses and was never seen again. In 1900 Sherman Church went into a cotton mill in Michigan and never came out. Ever. In 1880 a farmer named David Lang was walking across his pasture when he simply winked out according to five eyewitnesses. The grass where he disappeared was said to have died and never grown back.

And there was one even Jack didn’t know about. In 1975 a little girl named Molly Brad vanished in a flash of light while playing in the woods.

Over two hundred thousand people were reported missing in the United States each year. And while most of those were probably runaways, deadbeats, or undiscovered homicides, Denton didn’t think it beyond the realm of possibility that some of them, just a couple, were like David Lang.

But he was never going to prove it here.

“I’m ready to come home. The Bermuda Triangle angle isn’t happening. I mean, I believe there are places where vanishings are more likely to happen, and that this is one of them. But if someone disappears out here there’s no way to prove they didn’t go into the sea. We need… I don’t know, more of a ‘locked room’ scenario. And call me a freaking idealist, but an eyewitness or two wouldn’t hurt.” Denton heard the whine in his voice. He was tired.

“Funny you should say that. Did you get that package I sent?”

Denton looked at the red, white, and blue mailer by the door. “Yeah. What is it?”

“Take a look. But don’t get distracted. I need you to finish the Triangle article. It’s due Tuesday.”

“I know. It’s almost done.” Mostly.

“Good. You sound bushed. I’ll let you get some sleep. ‘Night, Dent.”

“’Night.”

He almost didn’t open the package. His legs were the consistency of pâté from trying to brace himself on the ship for five hours, and the volume of adrenaline that had passed through his veins had left him with a hangover. But Jack’s hints had taken hold. He couldn’t go to sleep without knowing.

He ripped open the pull tab and looked inside. It was a book: Tales from the Holocaust.

It made no sense, because the Holocaust had nothing to do with the article he was working on. And yet that good old Wyle instinct roiled in his gut like the turning of some gigantic subterranean worm.

He opened to the earmarked page and began to read.

1.2. Aharon Handalman

Such a city. Rabbi Aharon Handalman had lived in Jerusalem for twelve years, and he was still amazed by it. He always left home before the crack of dawn so he could watch the sunlight warm the stones. There was a cold bite to the air this morning. His black wool coat and hat absorbed it like a sponge.

Aharon, along with his wife, Hannah, and their three children, lived in the new Orthodox housing near the Valley of Ben-Hinnom. At this time of the day, without the squeal and clamor of little ones, the plain, square apartments felt as hollow as cardboard boxes. They fell away behind him as he walked, the ancient walls appearing on his right like the edge of a woman’s skirts.

He drew close to the Jaffa gate. Before it rose the Tower of David, a thin and pointed shadow in the darkness. He turned into the city, the stone rising above his head. His fingers trailed along the arch as he passed, the Shma Yisroel on his lips.

Down the ancient avenue he went, into the heart of Yerushalayim. The roads outside these walls—especially Jaffa Road—were too modern for his tastes. Advertisements for Camel cigarettes and doughnuts marred shop fronts. But once you were inside, the twenty-first century fell away. Now he only had to deal with the indignities of the Christian Quarter on the left and the Armenian on the right. He walked quickly past these invaders, his lip curling. He could continue straight ahead, but it was his habit to turn into the heart of the Jewish Quarter, choosing alleys and courtyards for their aroma of antiquity. Later today, they would be crowded with kaftans and T-shirts, with cheap madonnas and stars of David. But now they were only dim stone chutes that might have existed a thousand years ago, two thousand, more.

He, Rabbi Aharon Handalman, might have been from a different time as well: forty years old, of average height and weight, still handsome, brown eyes glittering, brown beard free from gray as it hung long and untrimmed, his black clothes roughly twentieth-century. If the clock were rolled back twenty years he would not be out of place; two hundred years and the cut of his clothing might be a bit odd; two thousand years, put him in a different outfit and call it good. He liked to think that at heart, at heart, he was unchanged from his ancestors, unchanged from an Israelite who trod this very path on his way to the Temple in the days of Jeremiah. Reading the Scriptures Aharon identified exactly with the feelings of the prophets: that Jerusalem was storing up sins for some divine retribution thanks to the unholy ways of her people. In the days of Jeremiah that had meant harlots and drunkards and Jews with no sense of their past. In the days of Aharon Handalman that meant cut-off shorts and Uzis and Jews with no sense of their past. Even Moses had voiced the same frustration: You are a hard-necked people. More than stones never changed.