Ben Ellison had been sitting in the waiting room for over an hour, sometimes pulling his briefcase onto his knees for no apparent reason and sometimes shoving it irritably to the floor. He’d had time to memorize the room’s stuffy, hard-edged mahogany furniture, the upholstery and wallpaper in various shades of drab mauve and pinkish tan. He’d also had time to take a piece of glossy white paper out of his briefcase and stare at it grimly before putting it away, only to reach for it again minutes later. He had it in his hand now. It was a drawing done in densely curving lines of thick black marker, and it showed a girl’s face in the sweep of a wave. A stroke of corkscrewing seafoam bowed just above her head and fell to either side of her shoulders like a mantle. The girl had short, jagged dark hair that fell in points across her broad forehead, and long, deep, expressive eyes. There was, Ben Ellison thought, a wrenching sense of solitude in that face, as well as a profound humanity. He knew perfectly well, though, that the face in the drawing didn’t belong to anything human. And that, he supposed, was why the image bothered him so much.

He’d looked at dozens of these drawings, sitting on the floor of the boy’s room, but he’d taken only one before he’d slipped the stack back into its hiding place. Now he wondered why he’d chosen a picture where no glimpse of the mermaid’s tail was visible. Did he want to forget that he was dealing with monsters and not with little girls?

“Agent Ellison?” He looked up at the slender receptionist in her crisp gray skirt and glossy blouse. “The Secretary of Defense is ready to see you.” As professional as she was, Ben Ellison noticed the half-concealed amusement in her face. She’d heard people talking about him, then: the high-ranked FBI operative—in charge of a special unit on maritime security, no less—who’d developed a ludicrous obsession with the idea that mermaids were routinely killing thousands of people worldwide and who’d somehow managed to persuade a contingent of other agents, and maybe even the Director, that he was right. He grimaced and stood up.

People wouldn’t find it amusing for much longer. That much seemed certain.

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