She leaned her forehead against the cool tiles beside the mirror over the sink. “Problem is, I can’t walk away from them. I can’t just leave, walk out, and go back to life in Cambridge. It’s not just the government who’d want to bury me so deep the sun would never find me. The Clan can’t risk me talking. Now that I think about it, it’s weird that they let Roland get as far as he did. Only. If he’s telling the truth, Angbard is keeping him on a short leash. What does that suggest they’ve got in mind for me? A short leash and a choke collar?”

She could see it in her mind’s eye, the chain of events that would unfold if she were to walk into an FBI office and prove what she could do—maybe with the aid of a sack of cocaine, maybe not. Maybe with Paulie’s CD full of research, too, she realized, sitting up. “Shit.” A dawning supposition: Drug-smuggling rings needed to sanitize their revenue stream, didn’t they? And the business with Biphase and Proteome was in the right part of the world, and the Clan was certainly sophisticated enough…if her hunch was right, then it was, in fact, her long-lost family’s investments that Paulie was holding the key to.

In the FBI office first there’d be disbelief. Then the growing realization that a journalist was handing them the drugs case of the century. Followed by the hasty escalation, the witness protection program offers—then their reaction to her demonstrated ability to walk through walls. The secondary scenarios as the FBI realize that they can’t protect her, can’t even protect themselves against assassins from another world. Then blind panic and bad decisions.

“If the families decided to attack the United States at home, they could make al Qaida look like amateurs,” she muttered into her dictaphone, stricken. “They have the resources of a government at their disposal, because over here they’re running things. Does that make them a government? Or so close it makes no difference? They’re rich and powerful on the other side, too. Another generation and they’ll probably be getting their fingers into the pie in D.C. I wonder. They make their money from smuggling, and they’re personally immune to attempts to imprison them. The only thing that could hurt them would be if Congress decriminalized all drugs, so the price crashed and they could be shipped legally. Maybe the families are actually pushing the war on drugs? Paying politicians to call for tougher sanctions, border patrols against ordinary smugglers? Breaking the competition and driving the price up because of the law of supply and demand. Damn.”