I went over to the bed. Took one out.

I rolled the marble between my thumb and forefinger. I had to admit that it felt precious.

The Saturdays I still had left.

How did I plan to use them?

Maybe that was the biggest mystery of all.

Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

Chapter Seventy-Eight

I had the feeling that I was being followed around in Washington during the next few days. Watched. But I couldn't seem to catch them at it. They were either very good, or I was completely losing it.

On Monday I was back at work. All that week I put in my time at the precinct, on the Job. I made sure I spent extra hours at home with the kids before I did overtime in my office in the attic. A colonel named Daniel Boudreau at the Pentagon was cooperating somewhat. He'd sent me Army records from the Vietnam War. Lots of paperwork that appeared not to have been looked at in years. He also suggested I contact the Vietnamese Embassy. They had records, too.

I read through the old files until I couldn't stay awake any longer and my head was throbbing severely. I was searching for anything that might link Ellis Cooper, Reece Tate, Laurence Houston, James Etra, Robert Bennett, or even Tran Van Luu to the string of murders.

I found no connection, nothing remotely promising. Was that possible?

None of the men had ever served together in Asia.

Late that night I got another e-mail from the Foot Soldier. Jesus Christ. Obviously, he wasn't Owen Handler. So who was sending the messages? Kyle Craig? Was he still trying to play with my head? How could he get the messages out of a super max prison?

Somebody was sending them and I didn't like it. I also didn't trust the information I was getting. Was I being set up, too?

Detective Cross,

lama little disappointed in your progress. You get on a good track, then you get off it. Look back at where you've been already. The answers are all in the past. Isn't that always the way it works out?

The note was signed Foot Soldier.

But there was something else at the bottom of the page. A very disturbing icon a straw doll. Just like the ones we'd found.

After work on Wednesday of that week I visited the Vietnamese Embassy on Twentieth Street in Northeast. The FBI had made a call for me. I arrived at a little before six and went up to the fourth floor. I was met there by a translator named Thi Nguyen. At her desk were four large boxes of old records kept by the government of her country.

I sat in her small office and Thi Nguyen read passages to me. She didn't want to be doing this, I could tell. I supposed she'd been ordered to work late. On a wall behind her was a sign: Embassy Of The Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Also a portrait of Ho Chi Minh.