Cerreta grunted. "I don't know," he said. "Play that tape again, will you?"

Powell touched the button on his recorder, replaying the tape of Cyril's message they'd made from the Whittiers' answering machine. "A possible kidnapping, except that no one named Melantha has been reported missing," Cerreta mused. "Vague threats, but no indication of anything other than homegrown thugs. No foreign connections at all. I'm not sure we could get the Feds in on this even if we wanted them."

"So we do it ourselves," Messerling said. "Fine. When do we need to be set up?"

"That's part of the problem," Powell said. "The message indicates that the confrontation will take place tomorrow night. More recently we got information that it would be tonight instead. But those vans are already on the move, which means it could be as early as this afternoon."

"Or they may have decided it would be safer to cross the bridge when there was more traffic,"

Cerreta suggested. "Once they're in, it would be easy enough to go to ground and wait for nightfall."

He gestured at Powell's notebook. "Possibly at one of those restaurants."

From Powell's pocket came the faint ring of his cell phone. "Excuse me," he said, digging out the phone and punching in on. "Powell."

"Jon, it's me," Fierenzo's voice came tautly. "We've got it."

Roger was sitting in a small waiting area down the hallway from Merri Lang's office, staring at the fax she'd given him, when someone dropped into the chair beside him. He started; but it was just Fierenzo. "Lang told me where you went," the detective said, holding out his hand. "What do you think?"

"It's like two different people wrote this," Roger said as he handed over the fax. "The first part is obviously shorthand, but the meaning is crystal-clear. The P.S., on the other hand, is almost wordy by comparison, and about as clear as a bureaucratic form."

"But it is Caroline's writing on both of them?" Fierenzo asked, studying the paper.

"It all looks like her printing, yes," Roger confirmed. "I just don't understand why she would suddenly change styles that way."

"Let's assume Caroline has the first part ready to go when she suddenly learns something new,"

Fierenzo said, handing back the fax and leaning back in his chair. Lacing his fingers together behind his head, he stared up at the ceiling. "She wants to add it to the note; but for some reason she also wants to make sure it won't be understood if the wrong people find it."

"The wrong people being Sylvia?"

"That's the most obvious wrong person," Fierenzo agreed. "So now she has to write this new information in a way that only the right person will understand, that right person being you or one of the Grays."

Roger shook his head. "I've already run the multiple-X thing past Torvald. It didn't strike any particular chords."

Fierenzo frowned. "You talked to Torvald?"

"He met me on the way over here," Roger said. "We had an interesting conversation."

"You didn't tell him about the message, did you?

"I told him there was one, but that we still needed to figure it out," Roger said. "You have any thoughts?"

"Only the broad scenario I just laid out," Fierenzo murmured. "But don't forget that she doesn't necessarily think the same way you do. You may be looking at this in a literal way, whereas she might mean something symbolic."

Roger snorted. "Frankly, I was assuming the whole thing was symbolic."

"Not necessarily," Fierenzo said. "There are parts that are almost certainly literal. This 'roaming Warriors on Wed' line, for instance. The Wednesday reference seems pretty concrete."

"Well, we sure didn't see any Warriors last Wednesday," Roger told him. "At least, not that I know of. I sort of assumed the Wednesday reference meant tomorrow, not last week, and that she was trying to warn us that after whatever happens tonight there would still be Warriors around tomorrow."

"Possibly," Fierenzo said. "But I'm not ready to give up on last Wednesday just yet. Tell me everything that happened that day."

"We went to work," Roger said, frowning as he thought back. After everything that had happened in the past few days, last Wednesday seemed like an eternity ago. "We came home, ate dinner—"

"What did you have?"

"Fish," Roger said. "Then we got ready for the play, argued a little about whether to walk or take a cab and about not getting enough exercise. Then we went to the play. At the end she managed to lose a ring under the seat, so that when we left all the cabs were already gone. We started walking home, discussed the play a little..."

He trailed off as the whisper of something caught at the edge of his mind. Watch out for roaming Warriors....

"What is it?" Fierenzo asked quietly.

"She liked the play a lot," Roger said slowly. "I mostly didn't. It was one of these deep, psychological things, with a typically ridiculous love triangle in the middle of it." He shook his head as it belatedly struck him. "Relational thinking," he said. "No wonder she likes things like that while I don't. I'm watching the plot contrivances; she's watching the character interactions."

"What in particular did either of you say about it?" Fierenzo asked. "Anything about Romans?"

"No," Roger said, staring at the tiny letters Caroline had printed. "No, wait a minute. I did make a comment about—" He looked sharply at Fierenzo. "About Latin lovers," he said. "Roman Warriors; Latin lovers."

Fierenzo shook his head. "You've lost me."

"I called the villain in the play a Latin lover," Roger said, stumbling over the words as his tongue tried to keep up with his brain. "Caroline pointed out he was French; I said he was a Latin lover in the generic sense; she asked if that was the same sense as the 'when in Rome' cliche. You see? Latin

—Roman. Roman—roaming."

Fierenzo still had a wary look on his face. "I hope there's more to this."

"Plenty more," Roger said grimly. "Because right after I dropped that reference we argued a little about whether the main female character was a victim or not. I thought the woman was dragged unknowingly to her doom. She argued that the character knew what was going on the whole time."

"Knew what was going on," Fierenzo murmured, half to himself. "Knew what was..." He broke off.

"Sylvia knew she was leaving notes?"

"That's what it sounds like to me," Roger agreed. "And that fits with Caroline suddenly having to put this into code. What I don't understand is if Sylvia found out about that first note, why didn't she just keep Caroline inside where she couldn't leave another one?"

"Obviously, because she wanted Caroline to leave it," Fierenzo said grimly. "Sylvia's been feeding her disinformation and deliberately letting her pass in on to us." He looked at the fax. "Which means everything above the P.S. is garbage. The Greens aren't attacking from the north at all."

"But if Caroline knew it was a lie, why send it at all?" Roger asked, frowning.

"Because by then she knew her first note was disinformation, too," Fierenzo told him. "Problem was, there was nothing she could do to call it back. Since the Greens were vetting the notes, and since Sylvia obviously wouldn't let a straight warning get through, she had to say what Sylvia wanted and then piggyback this P.S. onto it and hope they couldn't figure it out."

"And hope that we could," Roger said, thinking back to her first note and the supposed confirmation of Damian's existence. "Does this mean that there isn't any Damian?"

"I'd say there's a real good chance of that," Fierenzo agreed. "Looks like Torvald and Ron were right

—the whole thing was never anything but a scam. A little bait to lure the Grays into planning for the wrong war." He tapped the fax. "And maybe being caught on the wrong part of the island to boot."