Alicia… no question about it… seven years old, maybe eight, the face was pudgy, but it was she. And the boy she was with looked about twelve, and he was unquestionably Thomas.

He let his head drop back and closed his eyes. He swallowed hard, afraid he’d lose his morning coffee.

When was the last time he’d cried? He couldn’t remember. But he felt like crying now.

That innocent little face looking out at him as her brother…

The sheer monstrousness of it, the utter evil, the mind-numbing rottenness of a soul that could besmirch the innocence of any child like that… but your own daughter… someone who trusts you, looks up to you, depends on you for guidance and protection from the nastiness of the world… to take that trust, that responsibility and do… this…

Jack had run across the scum of the earth in his day, but Ronald Clayton took the prize. If he weren’t already dead, Jack might consider correcting that situation.

This confirmed what he’d suspected about Alicia. Now he understood why she wanted nothing to do with her father or her brother or that house, why she’d looked ready to jump out of her skin last night.

What a thing to have trailing after you all your life.

“Are they all like this?”

“Yes,” said the gunman.

“Poor Alicia.”

“And these are all that you found?”

“Every last thing.” He sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him about the weird little Rover, even if it meant nothing.

“You would not lie to me?”

Jack fished the key out of his shirt pocket and tossed it onto the backseat.

“Go back and check yourself.”

The gunman sighed. “No. That will not be necessary.”

He’s as frustrated as I am, Jack thought. And he knows more, damn it.

Which gave him a crazy idea.

“All right,” Jack said. “Tell me what this is all about. What’s so goddamn important about that house?”

What the hell? he thought. Can’t shoot me for asking. Can he?

“I do not know.”

“Come on. You’ve got to know more than me. How come it’s a Japanese guy against the Arabs and not someone from Mossad? Tell me what you do know.”

He watched the gunman’s eyes as he stared back at Jack.

I’ll be damned, Jack thought. I do believe he’s going to tell me.

5.

5.

Yoshio considered this ronin, this Jack-san.

Tell me what this is all about.

He immediately had dismissed the request as ludicrous. But the more he thought about it, the more he wondered whether it might be to his advantage to give this man some information. Not everything, of course, but Jack-san’s purposes did seem to run contrary to Muhallal’s, and that made him an ally… of sorts. A little information might make him a more irksome nettle against Kemel Muhallal’s hide than he already was.