“Be nice if we knew what the precious fucking secret was,” interjected Hardwick.

Gurney shrugged. “All we have to do is make him think we know, or that we’re about to find out. It’s a game we need to play—inside his head.”

“And the point of this game?” asked Esti.

“To disrupt the careful calculation he relies on for his success and survival. We need to hammer a wedge between the core lunatic and his rational support system.”

“You’re losing me.”

“We apply pressure in a way that threatens his sense of control. If control is his most intense obsession, it’s also his greatest weakness. Take away a control freak’s feeling of control, and the result is panic-driven decisions.”

“You hear what the man is saying?” interjected Hardwick. “He plans to poke a mass murderer in the eye with a sharp stick to see what might happen.”

It was a way of putting it that seemed to resonate with Esti’s growing anxiety. She turned to Gurney. “Suppose what happens after we apply this ‘pressure’ is that Panikos kills another six or seven people. What then? We apply more pressure? And if he slaughters another dozen victims at random? What then?”

“I’m not saying there’s no risk. But the alternative is to let him fade back into the shadows. Right now we’ve pulled him up close to the surface. Almost within reach. I want to keep him there, stir up his fear, make him do something stupid. As for his potential slaughter of innocent people, we can take the random factor out of his decision. We’ll feed him a specific target and use it to trap him.”

“Target?” Esti’s chocolate-brown eyes widened.

“We have to get him focused where we want him. It’s not enough to just ratchet up the threat level and push him over the edge. We have to be able to contain the response we provoke—keep it aimed in a manageable direction, within a manageable time frame.”

She looked unconvinced.

Gurney went on. “We set him up, generate the reaction we want, then reel him in—at a time and place of our choosing.”

“You say it so easily. But it’s very risky, no?”

“Yes—but not as risky as the alternative. Jack described Peter Pan as a murder machine. I agree. That’s what he does. Always has. Ever since he was a child. Always will, if he gets his way. He’s like a fatal disease that no one has figured out how to stop. I don’t see any risk-free options. We either let the murder machine keep running, keep converting people into corpses, or we do what we can to jam it up.”

“Or,” Esti offered hesitantly, “we could turn over everything we have to BCI right now and let them deal with it. They’ve got the resources. We don’t. And those resources could—”