 
The Minotaur's Hit List

Glenn I. Roug

Published by 2D River, NH

Copyright © 2014 Glenn I. Roug and 2D River

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Map of the Labyrinth Cave in Gortyn, 1821, by Franz Sieber

I.

I don't get into trouble. Never. I'm forty five years old and other than one speeding ticket and six parking tickets, the law has never bothered me much. My ex-wife Jane says I'm more likely to die of boredom than of any other cause. And so it came as a shock to me when two FBI agents jumped me one day in Boston when I got out of my car to go home, and pushed me into their Crown Victoria.

"Go," the FBI agent who was now sitting to the right of me in the back seat ordered the driver. He and his partner, who pushed against me from the left, slammed the car doors almost in unison.

"What did I do?" I protested.

"Who said you did anything?" the agent on the right said. "Did we say you did something?" He was chewing on a wooden toothpick, and he smelled of something fried.

"Then why did you force me into your car?"

"To save your life."

"From whom?"

"Someone's planning to bump you off."

I was still too shocked from the suddenness of it all to be alarmed. "Who?" I said in a matter-of-fact tone, as if this was happening to someone else I read about in the paper.

The agent to the right shrugged. "I don't know yet."

"Then how do you know someone's planning to bump me off?"

"Because they got all the rest."

"Look," I said, "no disrespect, but I'm in no mood for riddles. They got all the rest of whom?"

Now the agent on the left spoke for the first time. He was short, with a slight Brooklyn accent and a broken nose. He handed me a piece of paper that said, AMERICAN AIRLINES 2251. He said, "You've been on that flight. Am I correct?"

I'm not good with numbers. Whether it is adding them, multiplying, or just recalling them from memory, I'm not your man. "I can't remember."

"Boston to Dallas, October 12th," he continued, somewhat impatiently. "Two years ago."

"Oh, yes. Yes I went down there on business."

"Congratulations," he said with a head nod. "You're the sole survivor of that flight."

"What do you mean? I don't get it. We landed safely. It was a perfectly ordinary flight."

"Yes it was," he conceded. "With sixty seven people on board, passengers and crew. Then two years go by and, lo and behold, you're the only one left. Everyone else on that flight was murdered."

I shook my head in disbelief. "Are you telling me someone just went and killed everyone who was on some ordinary commercial flight?"

"Everyone but you," the short agent said. "For now." His eyes, which had been focused on the piece of paper he had shown me, rose to meet mine. "Do you have any idea who they are?"

His question surprised me. "How should I know? You're the one who told me about them."

He sighed and scratched his nose. "We were hoping you could shed some light on this. To be honest, we don't have a clue."

After lowering my confidence in their ability with this admission, they refused to say any more except to tell me that I had to talk to their boss. We drove for a half an hour. It was raining hard. I did not have my umbrella on me. Now the only thing that bothered me was that I would get wet; as if nothing they had said stuck. That is human nature. We care more about immediate needs than theoretical dangers, no matter how great. A mosquito on your face is more annoying than a lion lurking a mile away.

It was getting dark now. They led me into an unassuming office building. For a moment I wondered why they put no handcuffs on me. Then I remembered that I was not under arrest. We climbed one flight up; there was no elevator. The taller agent knocked on a door, one of many in a narrow, windowless hallway. He went in, then came out a moment later. "She will see you now."

I walked in and they closed the door behind me and left me alone inside a tiny office with their boss. There was a narrow window in front of me as I entered, and to the right a small wooden desk, and on the opposite wall a few metal cabinets. The woman who sat at the other side of the desk was dressed in a business suit. She was in her fifties or sixties, hair carefully done. There was an air of calmness about her. She was typing something on her laptop slowly, then raised one hand without looking at me and motioned me to sit down on the only other chair in the room. I did as requested. After a few moments she raised her eyes from the screen and looked at me. "You are Albert DeSalvo I take it?"

"Yes," I said. I thought she had a pleasant voice.

She glimpsed at her computer screen. "Forty five years old. Lost your job in the Framingham Institute of Archaeology a year ago. Moved to Boston two years ago to be closer to your ex-wife and son."

"To be closer to my son."

"Are you still unemployed?"

"Yes."

"How's your job search coming along?"

"I had some interviews. In fact I was coming back from one today when your guys surprised me."

"Does it look promising?"

"No."

She tried to make a joke. "Maybe they don't like to hire people with the same name as the alleged Boston Strangler."

"Nobody knows who he was anymore. I'd have to change my name to Charles Manson if I wanted to be discriminated against."

She smiled, then assumed a more serious expression and leaned back in her chair. "I take it they told you on the way here why I wanted to talk to you?"

"Yes they did."

"That doesn't surprise me, considering that I strictly forbade them to do that. But you are an interesting case. As a junior agent, I too would have found it hard to pass up the opportunity to talk to you."

I spread my arms open in desperation. "Why do they want to kill me?"

"Don't get a swollen head. They want to kill everyone on that flight, not just you."

"Why?"

"If we knew that, we'd know who's behind it, and then we could arrest them. I'm afraid we know next to nothing at this point." She tapped on her laptop screen with her finger. "Until yesterday those were sixty six separate unsolved murder cases in our database without any seeming connection. Sixty six out of thousands. It was only yesterday that someone — one of the agents you met today — put two and two together and realized those sixty six had been on the same flight. He asked for the flight manifest and we got it this morning, only to find that you are the one person on that list still alive. I quickly sent three agents to pick you up, hoping we'd get to you before they did. If we hadn't, you'd have been just another file, lying there with the rest of them." She pointed to a stack of files that stood on the edge of the desk.

Now I began to feel some alarm. Not anxiety, just alarm, as if I found out that my car had a flat. It takes time for things of this magnitude to sink in. "So the flight manifest is now a hit list? Why would anyone want to do that?"

She sighed. "This is the strangest case I've ever handled. Serial killers, yes. But nothing of this scale, so focused and determined."

"I take it they're professionals."

"You bet they are." She picked up a piece of paper with names on it and ran her finger from top to bottom. "Each murder different." She began to read it to me. "Sally Hutchinson: shot by a sniper in a Los Angeles restaurant; Pete Mazurski: drank milk poisoned by someone who had stealthily broke into his Queens home the day before; Suleiman Naheja: a brick was dropped on his head from a library window in Seattle; Alice Lopez: thrown off a bridge in Switzerland when she went there on vacation. The list goes on and on. Sixty six people murdered in dozens of different ways in dozens of different locations — mostly in the US but some around the world. The assassins used different MO's, and sometimes struck twice in the same day on two different continents. Clearly not the work of a single person. Whoever did this, they have an army of hit men and a lot of spending cash. And no one was ever caught. Not once. This is the most professional criminal operation I've ever come across."

"Lucky me," I said dryly. "If someone is out to get me, they can't be some incompetent neighborhood hothead. No, they have to be the freakin' Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." I don't smoke, but at that moment I had an urge to put a cigarette in my mouth. I placed a yellow pencil in it instead. It tasted funny, as if the wood was rotted.

She put the paper down and focused on my face. "Try to think back on that flight. Anything unusual?"

I shook my head. "I used to fly a lot on business two years ago, when I still had a job. I can barely remember. But that answers your question, I suppose. I'd have remembered if there was something worthy of remembering."

"Did you get into a conversation with any of the other passengers?"

"I never do."

"Do you remember any of their names?"

"No."

"No of course not." She handed me the passenger list. "But try to see if any of these rings a bell, anyway."

I went over the list but could not recognize any of the names except my own. Sixty six strangers. I shook my head. On the wall behind her was a picture of a reindeer. I thought I'd see J Edger Hoover hanging there, or wanted posters. A reindeer made the room look informal and friendly, as if it were a real estate agency.

She knew I was at a loss to recognize any of the names, but persisted in trying to get something out of me anyway. "Do you think some of the other passengers had anything in common? Did they form groups for example?"

"Not that I can recall. Can't you see that in your database, whether or not they had anything in common?"

She shook her head with some fatigue. "We checked. Nothing in common except they were all on this flight. From what we can tell, most of them were also flying on business, like you. A weekday flight. There were just three couples on vacation. One of them had two children."

I'm sure my eyes were bulging out of their sockets at that moment. "They killed the children, too?"

"Oh, yes. An entire family was murdered by an intruder. Whoever did this made it look like a robbery gone wrong, but that family had nothing of value. The people we are dealing with here are no boy scouts, Al. They set out to kill everyone who was on that flight, and they're doing just that, regardless of age, gender, or physical condition. They shot a frail ninety year old lady, too, three months ago, and her eighty nine year old husband."

I stood up. "What the hell was there on that flight?"

She got up, too, and went over to a small fridge I did not notice before hidden among the cabinets. She took out a bottle of water and offered it to me. I declined. She sat down again. "I'd sell my own grandma to find out. If I still had one. Why do you think we were so eager to talk to you?"

I dropped back into the chair. "I wish I could help, but I have nothing. There was nothing special on that flight I tell you. Nothing. No interesting conversation, no accidents, no fistfights. I don't even think we had turbulence. I hate turbulence; I'd have remembered that."

"And yet there was something. Something the passengers — at least some of them — saw or heard or did. Or maybe it was the flight crew. They eliminated them as well."

Now I felt the cold grip of fear on my heart. "What will happen to me?" My voice was trembling a little, which I tried to conceal by coughing in mid sentence.

"You'll be safe if we have anything to do with it. But you can never go back home. Not until we crack this. We'll find you a safe place to stay."

"What about my kid, Aaron? He's thirteen."

"They won't touch him or his mother. They've never killed any family members. Only the people who were physically on the flight."

"They didn't need to until now. If they can't find me, don't you think they'd use him to get to me? Kidnap him to get me to come looking for him?"

She nodded slowly, acknowledging my concerns. I hated that she was about to agree with me on this. It was one of those instances when you want people to strongly disagree with you and give you some assurances that you worry for nothing. It is the very reason we worry out loud — so that someone would tell us not to. "They never needed to until now, I'll grant you that," she said. "We'll work on moving your family to a safe house. Until then, don't make any contact with them without going through us first, understand? Someone might track your phone."

"Good God. What do they want from me? I know nothing. I saw nothing. It's not like I'd be taking any secrets with me to my grave. Neither did the other passengers, I'm sure of that. If they had seen something I'd have seen it, too."

She pushed the flight manifest into my hand. "Here, you can hold on to this. Maybe it'll jog your memory. Go now and get some sleep. You need it. We'll talk some more tomorrow. We'll take you to a hypnotist, too, if you don't mind. Maybe he'll get you to remember."

"I don't mind. But where am I supposed to go now?"

"Agent Peterson will take you to a hotel room. Just for a few days until we can find a more permanent hideout. He'll be staying with you just in case."

"Do you snore?" I asked Peterson — that was the short guy with the Brooklyn accent — when he escorted me back to the car.

"Yes."

"Then I'll have to buy earplugs. I can't stand snoring, not even my ex wife's." And on the way to the hotel the only thing I could think of was, I don't have my things. I hate not having my things with me when I spend the night away from home. I know this is the stupidest thing to think about when your life is in danger, but that is just the way I am. My mind runs away on me. And on that occasion, it had lots of reasons to.

II.

The hotel room was large. It had two separate queen beds, standing five feet apart. This was good news for someone about to share the room with a stranger, let alone an FBI agent. The carpet was tan colored, cushy but not too thick. It had some stains. I was hoping it was not semen. I peeked under the bed to see if there was anything disgusting lurking there. I hate going to sleep not knowing what lies under my bed. There was nothing. A heavily perfumed aroma permeated the room, as if management were trying to conceal something. They said it was a non-smoker room, but since when? Last week? I didn't like it.

The windows were closed, and the drapes drawn shut. It was the fourth — and highest — floor in the hotel. Peterson chose it so that no one could look in from the adjacent two-story house. He took off his shoes for a moment. His ankle holster was showing. He seemed oblivious to it, as if he was born with it. His socks gave off a foul odor. He was probably aware of this, as he quickly changed them and then put his shoes back on.

"Can we get something to eat?" I said after a while. "I didn't get a bite since lunch, when I had a job interview, and that was an egg-salad sandwich I got from the caff before I left there, and I hate egg-salad sandwiches."

"Alright, quit yer bitching and complaining. I'll go get you something. Just don't leave this room."

"Can't we go to the restaurant at the lobby? There's no way the killers would know I'm here."

"Can't take a chance. If they get you I'm fired. D'you want to see me unemployed? I, too, have a kid and an ex wife to support."

So he knew about my family situation. Each and every one of those agents knew everything about me there was to know. What else did they find out? Did they know about the scandal when I was caught cheating on that exam twenty years ago? Did they care? I sat down on the bed waiting for Peterson to come back with some grub. Finally I had the time to stress out. A professional organization was on its way to eliminate me for reasons I could not imagine. People sophisticated enough to obtain the flight manifest, then track each and every one of the passengers and crew, learn about their habits and schedules, and send a never-fail hit squad to dispatch them. I wondered how many of those they employed and how much a hit man — or was it woman? — like that made. If you run a giant operation of this scale you cannot afford for any of them to get caught. They must be at the top of their profession, and that costs a lot of money. What did that mean? Fifty thousand a head? A hundred? Whoever was behind this had deep pockets. Why spend this kind of money to kill little ol' me? Because of what I know? I know what I know and I know that I don't know anything. I'm a danger to no one. Why not leave me alone to die of old age and crippling diseases like the rest of humanity? It won't cost them a penny and they could watch and enjoy my suffering as I struggle to find the money to pay for child support and still put something aside for old age.

Peterson came back with a ham sandwich and snapped me out of these thoughts. "That better than egg salad?"

I nodded. "Much. You even got me extra mayo, and for that, sir, I'm sure you'll get into heaven." I sank my teeth into it. I was not as hungry as I had expected. It must have been the stress.

"We better get some sleep," Peterson said. "Tomorrow we need to drive you out of state."

"Where will they stick me?"

He shrugged. "Not my department. As far away from here as possible I'd assume. Not sure how much good this'll do to be honest. These guys' tentacles reach anywhere on the globe."

"Can I ask for a specific country or state?"

"Don't be an idiot. We're not made of money."

He went to the bathroom and came out ten minutes later, and then it was my turn, and not a moment too soon. The stress had given me the runs. It was not the last time that evening, either. Two hours later, when I was already fast asleep, I needed to go again. Peterson was already snoring. I was careful not to turn on the light in the bathroom until the door was closed so as not to wake him.

Two minutes later I heard a noise from outside the bathroom. It sounded as if someone was moving the furniture around, and then there was a bang as if another person hit the wall with a sledgehammer. I startled. Now, for the first time, I was afraid, not just alarmed. I moved softly and stood by the bathroom door so I could surprise whoever might come in. There was nothing, and the room was quiet again. I let out a sigh of relief. Peterson probably dropped something. I called out, "Hey, Peterson, is everything okay?" and knocked gently on the door from inside the bathroom. No answer. I decided that he must have gone back to sleep, and finished my business. When I came out five minutes later I used the same tactic as I did when I got in — turning off the light in the bathroom first before opening the door to the room. But before my eyes got used to the darkness in the room, I stepped into something wet. I quickly turned the lights on. Peterson was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

He was on his side, grabbing his abdomen and whimpering. His gun was lying on the floor three feet away from him. He tried to say something but nothing came out. I turned around quickly. The door to the room was open a crack. A chair that had stood next to it was on the floor, a leg broken. I turned back to Peterson. He motioned me to leave.

"I'm not leaving you," I said. I reached a hand to my cell phone.

He was barely audible and slurred his words. "No not from your own phone. The lobby. Go have 'em call 911."

I still did not know what to do. It felt like a dream.

He clenched a fist in pain. "Quickly. They'll be back. I scared them off but they'll be back. They know you were in the bathroom. Go. Get lost now." He reached a hand inside his pocket and tossed his car keys a few inches towards me. Then he let out a groan.

I grabbed the keys and got up and nodded. The most important thing now was to call 911. There was no time to argue with him. Then, as if he remembered something, he gestured for me to come closer again. "Don't go back to the office. Someone told them you were here. Don't trust. No trust."

"I won't," I said.

"It's the Minotaur."

I thought he was delirious. "Minotaur?"

Another groan, and then he spoke quickly, almost incoherently. "He said Minotaur. He said Minotaur. I don't know what it means. He said Minotaur and then he shot me." He closed his eyes and moaned and did not say anything anymore, not even to rush me to leave. I grabbed my pants in one hand and turned around and ran down the hallway. I did not dare to stand and wait by the elevator, and took the stairs instead.

The receptionist must have recognized the alarm in my eyes, and besides it was probably not often that she encountered guests in their underwear holding their pants in their hand. She reached anxious fingers to the phone before I could open my mouth, maybe preparing for what I had to say, maybe to report me to someone. I said, "Quick. Call 911. Someone in 415 was shot. Quick he's dying."

She did not waste any time to acknowledge my request. She dialed with a quick flutter of fingers and began to speak into the receiver. I turned around and saw that the elevator was at the fourth floor, and now it was coming back down. I was not about to stick around and find out who was to emerge from it: the man who shot Peterson, or just another guest. I took off immediately. The receptionist called after me to come back but I ignored her and she did not have the nerve to give chase.

I got into Peterson's car and drove off. I wondered if someone saw us arriving earlier, someone who had followed the car from the FBI office to the hotel. But no, they did not need to: someone inside the FBI leaked everything to them. Peterson had just told me that. They knew where I was all this time.

I didn't know where to go. I could not go home and did not dare to go back to the FBI office, either. Going to the police was useless as they would only contact the FBI. I drove for a half an hour in circles, making unnecessary U-turns to see if someone was following me. Once I became convinced I was alone and almost developed a sense of confidence, it dawned on me that they might have attached a tracking device to the car before storming the hotel room. It was not safe to drive any car they knew about. I stopped behind the first parked taxicab I came across. I turned the engine off and put the keys under the seat, then got in the cab and asked the driver to take me to a hotel some sixty miles away from Boston, in Portsmouth New Hampshire. I did not know the name of any hotel over there, and made up a story about a convention tomorrow saying the first hotel he could think of would be fine by me.

By the time I entered the Portsmouth hotel I was a bona fide paranoid. I waited at the lobby for twenty minutes, ignoring the receptionist, to make sure I was not being followed. Then I booked a room but decided not to sleep in it, and instead loitered in the lobby pretending to be on the phone and watching every new face who entered the building. I could not sleep anyway. I thought about Peterson and whether he made it, and whether the receptionist from the Boston hotel was now at the police station working with a sketch artist to reconstruct my face from memory. The TV hanging from the ceiling was on, but there was nothing about it in the news. Either it was too fresh or the FBI hushed it up.

There was not much left of the night, anyway. By eight in the morning I ate breakfast and snuck out and walked the streets for an hour until I was satisfied that no one was following me, and then I went to a different hotel and slept there until eleven. That was when my phone rang. It was her on the other side of the line. She never volunteered her name, not back in that little office, and not now.

"Are you okay?" she asked. There was some background noise, as if she was in a busy public place.

"I'm okay. How's Peterson?"

She sighed. "Not good. In a coma. The doctors are not optimistic."

"I'm sorry," I said. "He's a good guy. I owe him a lot."

"Where are you?" She asked. She was not much given to sentimentality. I bet she did not visit him at the hospital yet, just made a call to see how he was. Or maybe she asked someone else to do that for her.

"Not in Boston," I replied, and immediately realized that she could have my phone tracked. Maybe they could, too. I have been an idiot.

"Where? I'll send someone to pick you up."

"I'm sorry, I can't. You guys have a mole there. Someone in your organization let them know where I was. If it was Peterson in the bathroom and not me I wouldn't be standing here talking to you right now."

Silence. She knows I'm right and trying to come up with something to say or just stalling for time so they could track me down. I could not trust her or anyone else for that matter. Only Peterson, and he was in a coma. Finally she said, "What if we hand this over to a new team? Would you feel more comfortable working with a different team?"

"The mole will find out where I am," I said. "I'm not taking chances. Do me just one favor, will ya? Put my kid in a safe place. They might go for him next."

"I agree. But we need to stay in touch, Al."

"I'll call you. What's a good number to reach you? I don't trust your Bureau lines."

"I'm speaking from a payphone so I can't be tracked," she said. Maybe she had also lost faith in her own organization.

"Give me an e-mail address," I said quickly. "Better we e-mail than talk." She did so without argument. I took the address down, then said, "Bye now," and hung up. I did not know how much time I had. I took the battery out of the phone and put the device inside a pretzel wrapper and threw the whole thing in a trash can. Then I left the hotel. Anyway they would know I was here as I was stupid enough to leave my credit card information with the receptionist. I was too innocent for a life on the run. I had to change my ways. I went to the bank and withdrew ten thousand dollars in cash. I took out my credit cards and cut them to pieces and threw them away. Then I went to the bus station with the intention of getting on the first bus out of town. But on the way I saw a delivery man leaving his truck unattended with the engine on. I had never stolen anything before in my life. Not even a pen at work like most of my coworkers. But now I got in the truck without giving it a second thought and put it in gear and headed somewhere, anywhere. I did not care about the law and I did not care about my destination so long as they did not know where I was going.

III.

I had no idea where to go. At first I thought of Manhattan. It would be easy to blend in while there and, should it come to a chase, I could run into a subway station and lose them. But sooner or later I would have to find somewhere to stay, and this meant that someone would check my ID and make a record of it, and those Horsemen of the Apocalypse will find out. If they managed to infiltrate the FBI, how hard would it be for them to search for records of my ID? No, whatever I do next must be in cash and without showing any identification to anyone. Manhattan was not a good place for that kind of a life.

But I headed southwest anyway. I did not have much choice, starting from New Hampshire. After six hours I was in New Jersey. Now I was tired. I parked somewhere in the back of a distribution center among other trucks and got in the back of the vehicle and closed the gate. There were cases of soda in there, on the polished metal floor. I pushed some of them together and threw a canvas that I found there on top and used it as a bed. I was lucky it was October: not too hot, not too cold.

It was not very comfortable and I did not get much sleep. When I woke up it was evening. I went into a nearby supermarket and bought some supplies for the trip ahead. I came back to the truck with many plastic bags. For a moment I entertained the thought of taking the soda cans from the back of the truck, but that would not be right as they were not mine. I did not want to make a habit of stealing. I bought the same cans in the supermarket, though it seemed ridiculous even to me.

I drove further south. Then, in Maryland, it hit me. Tennessee was where I wanted to be. I vacationed there once with Jane and the boy in a Gatlinburg chalet. This being Fall, there would be almost no one there. I could find an empty cabin in the mountains and break in and stay for a few months, no ID or even paying for it. I read that some people do this every year in the off season. Another person would have come up with a more brilliant plan than that, but having never been on the run limited me to simplistic thinking.

It took me twelve hours to get to Tennessee. I only stopped for gas, and twice entered a small town and drove around and again made unnecessary U-turns just to make sure I was not being followed. The sight of the Smoky Mountains and their giant woods finally instilled a sense of security in me. I went past Gatlinburg and got off the road and into the wood and drove among the trees for as long as I could, away from both the town and the hiking trails. The truck was not made for driving off road and it creaked and protested over the many bumps, and here and there a low-hanging bough would brush against the side and give me a scare as if someone was standing outside knocking for me to let them in. Then I found myself in front of a steep incline up a hill, and the trees became denser and I decided that it was as good a place as any to come to a stop. I must have been over a mile away from any road. It would take them days to find the truck, and even then, so what? No one could link it to me. And the cans of soda in the back would not spoil — the owner could even finish that delivery route I disrupted. I wiped my fingertips off the wheel and the door handle and anywhere else I touched in the cab and the back. I left the key in the ignition and walked away with my plastic shopping bags from the supermarket. There were a dozen of these and I must have looked ridiculous carrying them around with just two hands, stopping every few minutes to fix a torn handle or get a better grip. You don't see fugitives and hobos doing that in the movies. They have one backpack or bindle and they walk around carefree and whistle, and sometimes they have a dog, their best buddy to keep them company. I had ever-tearing plastic bags and a brownish beetle that sat on my sleeve, and I had no idea where I was in the woods or where I needed to go. But I drew comfort from the fact that no one knew where I was now. That was more than enough for me.

It was humid and not too cold. The sound of the cicadas on the trees was deafening, as if someone had turned on a thousand sprinklers all at once. No spot in the wood was free of it, but it was the kind of noise you could tune out if you were tired enough because it was monotonous. I had a sleeping bag in one of the shopping bags. I found a spot between two small hills, not visible from any trail, and slept for the reminder of the evening and the entire night. In the morning I heard a cough. I got up in panic and saw a one-legged, disheveled elderly man with a grey beard standing over me.

He had an old jacket on, and he was chewing gum. Next to him stood a small two-wheeled garden seeder which he dragged behind him, except that instead of seed the seeder carried the man's belongings, topped by an artificial leg. The seeder made no sound as it rolled forward. It must have been well oiled.

"How do you manage to go around in the woods?" I asked, pointing at the artificial leg. I knew it was not a polite way to start a conversation with a complete stranger, but the man did not strike me as someone who would be easily offended. I was still in shock from the events of the previous day, and welcomed any distraction.

"You be surprised how easy it is when you realize you ain't got no choice. Goes for everything in life."

"Why don't you put the artificial leg on?"

"The pegleg only slows me down. Gotta take care it ain't cracking or getting mud on it. Too much trouble. Would'a been different if I was cut below the knee, you see? A pegleg ain't so bad then. But above the knee like me, forget it."

"Then why lug it around in the first place?"

"'cause you don't leave your leg behind, that's why." He sounded a little irascible now. "What's with all the questions, mister?"

"I'm sorry, that's just the way I am: inquisitive and always sweating out the small stuff. I didn't mean anything by it." I got up and reached a hand. "I'm Al."

"Nathaniel," he said. He did not shake my hand. "You here to see black bears?"

"Yes," I lied.

"You won't be none too mobile with these." He pointed at the plastic bags. "No skin off my nose, but I think you ain't gonna get very far that way." He dove into his seeder and fished out a mud-stained backpack. "Here, I'll let you have this for twenty bucks."

I gave him the money and took the backpack. It would reduce the plastic bags to no more than four. I could live with four. I said, "Are you like a salesman, going around the woods looking for tourists?"

"First I walk round and see if I can't find me some junk that some idiots left behind, and then I turn around and sell that to other idiots who ain't got that junk yet."

I laughed. His expression did not change. A bee buzzed over him and his eyes followed it with some concern until it disappeared further down the wood, and then they kept following the course he assumed it took in there. He said, "I hate bees. All damn things do is sting and make honey and I don't appreciate neither."

He sat down beside me, on the ground. It did not bother him that I did not invite him to join me. As far as he was concerned, the mountains and every inch of ground on them were free for all. "You in trouble," he said.

"No," I denied quickly. "I came a little unprepared, that's all."

"No one goes hiking like this." He pointed at the plastic bags again. "No one goes that deep into the woods with a dozen plastic bags 'less they was in real hurry to get away from someone."

"If you think I'm that dangerous, why did you approach me?"

"I didn't say you was dangerous. You look like someone won't harm a fly. But you also look like you in some kind of trouble. Again no skin off my nose. All I'm trying to say is, if you need somptin' from the outside world, I could bring it to ya."

"I'm not wanted by the law if that's what you mean."

"Ain't my business if you are and ain't my business if you ain't. I won't even ask for your last name. Just to tell you that if you need help, old Nat is your man. That's all."

Maybe I could trust him. I could not trust anyone else, and did not have much choice. He was not one of them, or he would have shot me long ago, in my sleep. You could not get a better opportunity than this, miles away from any witnesses. I said, "I'd ask you for help if I knew what it was that I needed. Someone's after me, yes, but I don't know who and I don't know why. How do you run away from someone you don't know?"

He rubbed his beard. "And you can't go to the cops neither, I take it."

I nodded.

"And you new to being on the run."

I nodded again.

"Maybe I can teach you a thing or two. I been living in hiding darn near my whole life."

"From whom?"

"Charlie."

"Charlie who?"

"The VC. I done gave 'em plenty of reason to hunt me down back in the day."

I read about such people but had never met one before. I wondered if he was armed. "I see."

"Who do you believe you running away from?" he asked, trying again now that he thought he had opened up to me.

"I told you, I don't know."

He waved a hand in acceptance. "You don't have to tell me. It don't bother me none."

"I'm not trying to be evasive; just don't know. They made an attempt on my life and killed sixty six other people, but I have no idea why."

Again the hand wave. "I ain't the type to poke my nose into other people's business. I learned to be happy by not asking questions. You be surprised how far you can go by not asking questions. Besides, you ain't in any need of questions; it's help you need. You welcome to stay with me if it suits you, until things clear up for you."

"Where do you live?"

He swept his arm across the woods.

"You live outdoors?"

He nodded.

"Very nice of you to welcome me to stay where I already am."

He shrugged. "You can stay here and make wise-ass remarks or you can come with me where the rain that's going to be here in an hour's time ain't going to soak ya. Your call."

I went with him. He took us even further away from the road. On the way he told me he had many hiding places around. The one he was going to show me was not one of his best, he said, as it was half-exposed, but it was a good enough cover against the rain, and when he trusted me more he would show me other hideouts so good that Ho Chi Minh himself would step over them and never suspect there was someone underneath. After an hour's walk we arrived at a small cave, which was more of an overhanging rock that allowed a limited crawl space underneath. It was dark and not very deep, but wide enough to accommodate several people. You could sit there but not stand. He helped me get my things in it. He said I should not worry that it would collapse on us — he was worried about the same thing twenty years ago but it had not happened yet. I said I was not worried until he had brought up the subject. I opened one of my shopping bags and offered him a turkey sandwich. It smelled good, especially in the confines of the small space. He declined, saying he did not trust the stuff they put in commercial food nowadays. I nodded in understanding saying I also mistrusted preservatives, but he said it was not that; that it was the countries the ingredients came from, who hated the United States and put God knows what into the stuff. And then, as he was saying this, I saw a gigantic muzzle coming from behind me and snatching the sandwich away. I turned around in alarm and saw a black bear.

I scampered away from it, but tried to avoid making sudden moves. I read that these could trigger their hunter instinct. Then it dawned on me that Nat — he insisted I call him that now — had been able to see the animal the entire time as he was facing me. I turned to him in disbelief. He did not laugh at me but his eyes were saying, Well that is what you get for waving a sandwich in front of a bear.

"Is he yours?"

He shook his head. "She is mine. Or, if you like, we share a shelter whenever I come here." Then he pointed at my shopping bags for the third time that day and said, "I wouldn't leave these here goodies around her if I were you. That's why I got me this box." He took the liberty of putting my bags in a large metal box and locked it and gave me the key as a sign of trust.

I observed the bear. She was not much bigger than Nat himself. There was no malice in her eyes and she seemed far less interested in me than in the now-locked box that contained the goodies. I asked if he had named her.

"'course I did. How can you share a cave with someone who ain't got no name? She answers to Makwa."

"What does Makwa do other than eat my food?"

"She's in the same line of business as me: foraging for food and goodies. Except I trained her to recognize value when she sees it. She used to ignore objects like good pairs of shoes with many miles still left in 'em, discarded camping equipment and the such. I showed her how stupid that was. Now she brings it to me and in return I share my bread with her. We got ourselves a better partnership than most married couples."

My mood must have improved since that morning, because I asked if Makwa had suitors, to which he answered that she did, but that he scared them away with pepper spray and by firing in the air.

Now that my eyes were more accustomed to the dark I took a look around and found little in the covered space under the rock besides the metal box and a pile of old clothes and boots. There did not seem to be any remains of animal carcasses. There were no traces of charcoal or anything else that would hint at cooking or the consumption of meat. "Don't you hunt?" I asked him.

He twisted his lips uneasily. "Can't no more. I done seen people die that I shot. Took 'em hours. I can't kill nothing no more, not even for food. I get some locally-grown stuff from the farmers live around here. I also got some vegetable patches all over the place. That's for times when I know I shouldn't be venturin' out of the woods. When the VC is near."

"I understand," I said.

I stayed with Makwa and Nat for two days, building up confidence that no one would be able to track me down there. Makwa snored like a freight train and kept me up half the night. To think that just a few days earlier I was worried about poor agent Peterson's snoring. But survival makes people adjust quickly to extreme conditions — even someone as set in their ways as I am, who is besides not a great fan of wildlife. At first I was concerned that Makwa would eat me in my sleep, but she turned out to be better behaved than my labradoodle, who now lived with Jane and the boy and Jane's new fiancé Josh.

On the second day I went foraging with Nat, and found a titanium multi tool. Nat said he could easily get fifty bucks for it but offered it to me for free if I needed it, which I declined politely to the relief of us both. Then I told him a little more about my problem. He seemed shocked, which I took as a great compliment as he must have seen a lot in his day. "Why would anyone want to whack sixty seven people with nothing in common just 'cause they was on the same flight two years ago?"

"That's what I'd like to know."

When we were back at the cave he kept to himself for a while, even wandering off into the woods for a good hour. When he came back he shook his head. "That's no good. Crazy, even. There must be somptin' very sinister behind this. Maybe even a political thing."

"Looks like I have to spend the rest of my life like you." I tried to chuckle but it came out a gasp.

He shook his head again. "I know why they after me, so it ain't bothering me none and I can focus my energy on giving them the slip. But it ain't the same for you, Al. If you don't find out why they after you, you'll be going nuts. Your energy, it will go inwards and choke you. Worse, you won't know what to defend yourself against. A duck needs to know if he's running away from a fox, a shark, or an eagle. Catch my drift?"

"I understand, but how do I find out? I can't go to the law."

He made a disparaging hand gesture. "I wasn't gonna suggest nothing like that. You in a crazy situation; you need someone just as crazy. Someone who fights fire with fire." He reminded me of a character from a 1950's movie now. But I knew he was right.

"You mean you?"

He shook his head. "No, no, I ain't no good outside this wood and I know it." He squatted down and pulled open the tools in his new possession one by one as he spoke. A ray of sun that had managed to find its way through the treetops deflected off the multi tool, blinding me for a moment. "It's someone I served with. The only person who understands me."

I was not sure if I wanted to put my fate in the hands of someone who understood Nat, but I was desperate enough to try anything. I nodded for him to continue.

"His name is Doc Minus Two. That's on the count of he's missing two fingers in his left hand."

"Is he a good man?"

"He's the worst character you'll ever meet. But with him on your side, even God would lay off you."

"Is he smart at least?"

"Sharp as a tack that can pierce an ant's ass."

Then I got the full story from Nat about my would-be savior. Nat spoke for an hour and his tale was convoluted, but not uninformative. Doc Minus Two, according to Nat, was not a great financial success. He lived in a 19th century Gatlinburg cabin that was repainted so many times it was no longer considered a free-standing structure without the layers of paint that held it together. Nat thought that it used to be a barn at some point. And even that was difficult for Doc Minus Two to get a lease for because of his reputation in town. That, Nat said, should tell me something about the man. The landlord, who inherited it from some dead aunt, took six months to get a certificate of occupancy for the property, and when he received it he was so pleasantly surprised that he walked into a local bar and ordered a round of drinks for everyone. He knew even then that no one who could afford a better place would want to move into that dump, and that he would have to be very accepting. But even so, he was not accepting enough to have Doc Minus Two as his tenant, who until then lived in twenty-dollars-a-night hotel rooms from which he was often kicked out for attracting the wrong kind of visitors, mostly criminals and bums of all sorts. Instead, the landlord rented the cabin out to a fortune teller named Mathias. A month later Mathias had to leave town when one dissatisfied customer, who had taken out an expensive life insurance policy on a wife who did not get struck by lightning as Mathias had predicted, held him in a Half-Nelson and poured contact cement on his head so that they had to shave it clean to get the stuff out.

The landlord still did not want to do business with Doc Minus Two — so bad was his reputation in town — and so Amelia Ruth Perkins moved in next. Amelia's only companion was a pit bull named Killer. Killer was kind and housebroken and gentle except that occasionally he would run away and whenever Killer ran away he would get into a fight with another dog and whenever Killer got into a fight with another dog the other dog would lose an ear. When half the dogs in the neighborhood were missing an ear, the law rapped on Amelia's door and said she had to hand Killer over and pay a fine. Amelia agreed but skipped town the next day.

After Amelia, no one else wanted to occupy the barn-house, and so the landlord finally relented and let Doc Minus Two move in. Being welcome did not make Doc Minus Two as grateful as the landlord had hoped. When he asked him if he would try to keep his felon friends off the property, Doc Minus Two replied that at best he could keep them from setting the place on fire, and even that took all of his energy. Asked what he did for a living, he said that he was a medical doctor and a dentist and a tree surgeon and a private eye and a lawyer. That multi talent did not translate into a steady flow of income for Doc Minus Two, and he was often behind on his rent. The folks at Gatlinburg did not want to trust him with their health or their teeth or their trees, and so the only work he ever did manage to get in town was in the practice of law or as a private eye. He made his living fighting off traffic tickets and representing landlords who wanted to evict paying tenants who prevented them from renting the house to better paying tenants, and by doing all sorts of investigations on behalf of strange, often shady clients. Sometimes those clients would visit him at the cabin, and then the neighbors could swear that they heard gunshots.

Even the town's children hated Doc Minus Two. It was not that his appearance was scary – it was just a bit disheveled -- or that they set out to hate him because he was an outsider. No, it only took one act to make all the children in town hate him, and that act he did not direct at the children themselves. It was what he did to the man who spat out lizards.

The man who spat out lizards, Nat said, was a Gatlinburg fixture. He lived with his parents even though he was already forty. He always wore a red cap that looked as if a tractor had run over it repeatedly. He did not have a job, and so he would hit the pavement getting into friendly conversations with people, especially children and tourists, and children of tourists. He would talk to them about the weather, about baseball, about anything -- the blander the better -- and then, five or six minutes into the conversation, he would spit out a live lizard and act as if he was not aware of it, and continue to talk as if nothing had happened. He loved to see their faces when that happened. You can tell a lot about a person from the way they react to someone who spits out a live lizard and goes on talking as if nothing had happened. The children admired him because not everyone can talk with a live lizard hiding in the back of their throat, and a few of them who tried it themselves ended up swallowing their lizard. The children followed him around to witness the reaction of his victims. They thought he did it for their own amusement and over time it became true. And then he had to go and do that to Doc Minus Two. Doc Minus Two did not raise an eyebrow when he saw the lizard coming out of the man's mouth and landing on the pavement. He just lifted his foot and squashed the reptile into a red pulp, and he was very casual about it, too, and went on talking as if nothing had happened. The man who spat out lizards was paralyzed in shock, and after this he did not show his face in town again. This is how the children of Gatlinburg came to hate Doc Minus Two with intensity. And this was the man who Nat swore to me was the only person on earth capable of taking on an organization which had murdered sixty six people with ease.

IV.

I knocked on the barn-house door hesitantly. It was the way Nat described it: a cabin hiding under twenty coats of paint. In its current state it was green, but looked yellow from certain angles and reddish from others. It occupied a small clearing in the woods, and a short dirt road connected it to the street.

The door rocked on its hinges with every knock. It was a few minutes before Doc Minus Two opened it. He was a grey-haired man in his sixties, which was what I had expected from someone who had served with Nat in Vietnam. He was stout and of medium height. He had tired but penetrating eyes and an almost perfectly round head, and thinning hair that made that head look even more round. On his face there was an expression as if he was just about to retire to bed before I had disturbed him. I was to learn later that this was his default expression. It was there even when he relaxed his facial muscles and did not want to convey any emotion. He did not speak, and waited for me to plead my case.

"Nat sent me. He said I should hire you."

"Hire me for what?" He had a gruff voice.

"I need a P.I."

"You don't look like someone who needs a P.I." He slammed the door in my face.

I knocked politely again and he opened the door a second time with a show of impatience. I said, "I know I look like someone who's led a sheltered life and I'd be the first to admit it. But now I'm in deep trouble."

"Why don't you go to the cops?"

"I can't. Those who are after me have FBI informants. If I go to the cops they'll find me."

"Who's after you?"

"I don't know."

"Listen, shit for brains, go back to Nat and tell him I got enough crazy in my life; I don't need any more today thank you very much." He was about to close the door again, but I put my foot on the threshold and assumed a more aggressive tone and this slowed him down. "Someone's been bumping off all passengers and crew of Flight 2251 from two years ago. I'm the only one left. They killed sixty six people already. Children, too. They have a global reach. I'm not safe anywhere."

This made him less hostile. I don't know if it was the uniqueness of my story that got his attention or my persistence. He did not open the door wide for me, but he did stop trying to close it, and let me in. A strong smell of tobacco permeated the inside of the cabin, mixed in with the aroma of something fried. I had interrupted his breakfast. On a simple wooden table were a large omelet and a few pancakes, which is the national food in Gatlinburg — there seem to be more pancake houses in the area than in the entire state of Massachusetts. Behind the table was a small kitchenette with a dirty electric stove and a plastic sink. Doc Minus Two sat down to continue where he left off, and as he did this he raised his tired eyes from his omelet and hanged them on mine and said nothing and continued to chew. He did not invite me to sit down. The steam rising from the omelet combined with the smoke from a half a cigar that lay in an ashtray, and it made the air look as if it had texture that I could grab and stretch, and through that veil we saw each other. Still standing up, I told him everything that had happened to me in the past few days and handed him the flight manifest the FBI woman had given me. He gazed at it briefly, then asked if he could keep it.

"Does this mean you'll help me?"

"This means you can hire me, that's all it means. Whether I or anyone else can help you with this is a different question altogether." He wiped his mouth. "I don't come cheap, but I offer two price structures. A thousand a day if I do all the work alone, or six hundred if you help me. I don't have assistants."

"You want me to come along with you when you go to investigate people who might be out to get me? You don't have much regard for my safety, now do you?"

"No."

"All right, I'll take the six hundred a day plan and be your assistant." I did not have a lot of savings to fall back on, and besides I thought it a better option than sharing a cave with a black bear and not knowing what was happening with the investigation.

"You being my assistant would also increase the chances of failure, but that's mainly your problem. And of course, you'd need to pay all related expenses I may incur while on this case. Also, I'd expect a thousand now in good faith money." Then he leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the cheap brass chandelier that hung over the table, and I knew that I should not be disturbing him now as he was beginning to think about the case. I gathered the courage to grab a chair and sit down. He did not mind. After a few moments he said, "If I'm to believe your statement that you didn't do anything to them — and I'm not saying I don't believe you — then that leaves us with three possible reasons for them wanting to kill you. One, that you sixty seven people, or some of you, witnessed something you should not have witnessed; two, that one of you took something sensitive from the plane you shouldn't have taken and they don't know which one of you has it; and three, that you could have contracted something while on that plane that they don't want exposed."

"Like what?"

"Like a new virus someone's created in a lab. Something that stays dormant for years before attacking. You can kill half the population of a country this way and no one will be able to figure out who patient zero was because they contracted it so many years ago. No traces, see?"

"So why kill us?"

He took a drag from the cigar. "Maybe it was not ready for prime time yet. Say they just wanted to transport it to another lab and their courier screwed up and a vial that he had on him broke. They didn't want the virus discovered too early so decided to kill all those exposed to it. Of course, if that were the case, then one of the passengers was the courier, and they killed him, too. For all we know it could have been the government itself breeding those viruses, or a government. That would explain a lot."

This sounded far-fetched to me, not something a P.I should concern himself with. I began to question his sanity and wondered if I should leave now while I still had a chance. This was the second person who was not all there that I had met in the last couple of days, and were I not so desperate I would have had nothing to do with either of them. But I was desperate.

Doc Minus Two may have doubted his own sanity at that moment, because he waved a self-deprecating hand a moment later. "It's only a theory, of course, and probably not a good one, because if that were the case a lot more people besides the passengers would have been exposed to the virus — the ground crews, relatives and so on — and none of those were murdered that we know of." He stared at the brass chandelier again. "Whatever the reason for the murders, I sense fear. They are afraid of what you know or what you carry. This is no crime of passion and not the work of a madman. Someone is acting in self defense here. Someone is trembling."

"Good to know I'm not the only one."

"Don't look for sympathy here, kid," he said rudely. "I don't care if you're afraid or not. You want help with that go find yourself a therapist. You pay me to help you crack this case, not to make a man out of you."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I don't give a shit if you're sorry, either. Just shut up and let me concentrate, will ya?" He put the half-finished cigar in his mouth. His left hand with the three fingers tapped on the table slowly.

Embarrassed by my own insecurity I put emotions aside and went back to business. "What about the Minotaur? The man who shot Peterson said something about a Minotaur."

"Could be the babbling of a dying man. Or he may have misheard."

"How can we be sure?"

"I'm sure of nothing at this point, but I can't investigate a word somebody thought someone else had said. It's as useless to me as a self-adhesive toilette paper at this point." He raised his eyes. "Now, let's talk about evidence we might actually have. Do you still have your flight ticket from that flight, or the receipt?"

"I threw it away long ago."

"Pity. Do you remember where you bought it?"

"I got it from work. I was still employed then. They used the same travel agency for years."

"Did anything unusual happen before or after the flight, say at the airport?"

"I don't think so. I was in a rush. I made it to the gate just when they started boarding. That's the only thing I remember from the whole experience. The flight itself was uneventful."

"You didn't tell me about that. Why the rush?"

"I had to drop my son off at school on the way to the airport because my ex wife Jane, God bless her, would not give up yoga class." I wanted to gripe some more about Jane but then remembered that Doc was not the right audience for anything emotional.

"Hmmm. So you may have missed something that happened at the gate. How did the other passengers strike you? Were they talking excitedly about something they witnessed?"

"No, nothing unusual."

"We need to find the ground crew who manned the gate that day and question them."

I had more confidence in him now. At least he came up with a workable plan of action. I wanted to help. "The FBI planned to have me see a hypnotist before I ran off, to see if they could get me to remember what happened."

"The incompetent will always delegate to other incompetents. Hypnotists get out of you only what they want to hear, and you look the suggestible type to me." He put the cigar down and got up and began to make himself another omelet. He did not offer me any, nor anything to drink. "What we need to do now," he continued, "is put ourselves in the killers' shoes. They're afraid of something you might know or might have seen, or might possess, and so they must get you. They won't let go. But they don't know where you are right now, either. So, what's their next move?"

"They'll go to my ex and son. I asked the FBI to put them in a safe house."

"An exercise in futility. There is no way the FBI would have done that in time. Even if they did, someone would have been there to follow them to the new place. Someone was probably watching your ex's house not two hours after they lost you."

"Oh my God."

"Don't turn to jello on me; they won't touch them. They'll just wait for you to make contact, that's all. You can be sure there is someone watching their house right now, and that all communication is tapped."

This reminded me that I promised the FBI agent to write her, but I had no access to e-mail. I told Doc Minus Two about it and asked him what to do. I thought he would scold me for even raising the question but he said he did not mind if I made contact with her, if only on the off-chance that I might get some useful information out of her, but that I was not to volunteer any of my own. I should tell her anything she does not already know. He went into another room and came back with a laptop and put it in front of me. "I have several proxies I'm connected to. They are no more likely to trace where we log in from than a deer is to know the make of the rifle that got him. But don't dare use any other machine."

I wrote the FBI woman. The email address she had given me — a civilian e-mail of course — started with a 'k_' followed by a long number. I therefore decided to call her K, and opened with Dear K. I told her I was doing fine and let her know where I left Peterson's car at, and asked if she was able to move my family to a safe house, and also if she had any news for me. Doc Minus Two stood behind me and took the laptop away when I was done and warned me again not to make contact with anyone unless it was through him. Now he was my only connection to the outside world. I did not like it but notions such as like or dislike melt away when your life is in danger. I read about people who hid in the sewers, immersed in excrement for days, until the danger passed. I could at least handle not logging on to the internet for a few weeks.

"Can I e-mail my kid?"

"Would I have taken the machine away from you if I wanted you to e-mail your kid?"

"But why? You said yourself they could never trace it."

A cat came into the room now. It was a grey cat with a restless tail. It climbed onto the windowsill and stared at me with hostility. Doc Minus Two ignored it. He put the new omelet he had made on a plate and carried it back to the table and sat down to eat it. "They can't, but they'll use him to get to you. They'll send you a reply in his name that will force you to come out of hiding; maybe saying he was in danger or something to that effect. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they initiate contact themselves at some point, in his name or your ex's. If these people could infiltrate the FBI, there's little limit to what they can do. They have no shortage of resources, data, and skill. We must assume that they are almost as good as me."

In the light of the brass chandelier Doc Minus Two's eyes were as grey as the cat. I looked away from them. The room had no furniture besides the kitchenette, the table and four chairs, and a shelf that supported dusty scotch bottles and some papers. The smell of the omelet completed the impression that it was more a section of a restaurant than someone's dining room. I gathered up the courage to ask if I could use the bathroom; might as well take advantage the opportunity to use a real one while I could, before I was to go back to Nat's cave. He did not reply or lift his head off his plate, just motioned with his arm in the direction of the hallway. It was the first door on the left. A litter box was lying next to the toilette. The cat began scratching at the bathroom door anxiously as soon as I closed it behind me.

"Let him in," Doc Minus Two called from the living room.

"I'm not letting him in," I cried out.

"Let him in, he needs to use the litter box."

I opened the door a crack. The cat slithered in with a smug expression but did not go up to the litter box. Instead he sat down and stared at me and meowed incessantly. I cursed out loud and pulled up my pants and exited the small bathroom.

"That was quick."

"I couldn't go. Your cat."

"He had to kick you out; can't go so long as you're in there. He's shy that way."

"How polite of him." I was upset now. "I thought you didn't like animals."

"Who told you that?"

"I heard about the lizard."

He got up and now he seemed upset. "You look like someone who's read his share of books. Did you ever read Dante's Inferno?"

I had to admit I did not.

"The hero goes through the nine circles of hell in that book, each one worse than the one before. Each puts the souls through more terrible punishments than the circle above. Do you know what was the ultimate punishment, in the Ninth Circle? I'll tell you. Satan chews on the souls of traitors there. But they never die, the traitors. They get eaten for eternity. That boy of yours with the red cap, the one the entire town so adores, was doing the same thing to the poor lizard. I saw it there on the pavement covered with spit and slime and green stuff and twitching like it was in eternal death throes. I knew its fate was worse than any living thing I had ever seen. I saved it. If I could shoot that boy while I was at it and get away with it I'd have done that, too."

"I'm sorry," I said as he went back to his omelet.

"I told you, I don't give a shit if you're sorry or not. You asked me about the lizard, I answered you about the lizard."

I felt I had overstayed my welcome for that day. I counted one thousand dollars and put it on the table in front of him. "Is there anything else you need from me?"

"Not today. You go back to Nat now. Lay low. Don't even come here, to my cabin. I'll find you when I need you."

I was alarmed. "Not to come here? You don't think they might be watching this cabin, do you?"

"No, I just don't want you hanging around my house." And then he took the empty plate back to the sink and began to make himself yet another omelet.

V.

Nat had to go somewhere that night and he left me alone with Makwa. I don't know if it was my imagination, but Makwa's snoring seemed to get worse when Nat was not around. That night I tried several different designs for earplugs. I started with a simple chewed-up gum, but could still hear Makwa snore as if her muzzle was right in my ear. I tried rolled-up toilette paper and even a sock, but it was not much help. In desperation, I opened the metal box to see if Nat had anything there I could use. Holding a flashlight with one hand and digging with the other, I found some leather holsters, phone cases, a felt cap, and a rusty revolver. I picked up the revolver and examined it, and then looked at Makwa. It was not an ideal solution but I was tired and desperate to get some sleep, and could think of no better way to do it. I pushed the cylinder open and took out two rounds. The lead tips were easy to push into my ear canals, and provided a seal of sorts. I inserted pieces of toilette paper around to stabilize them. I could still hear the snoring, but it was faint and easier to tune out now.

In the morning I heard Nat say, "If those who are after you saw you with them 38 S&W sticking out your ears they'd of laughed so hard you could get away."

"She was snoring." I turned towards the bear, but Makwa was gone.

"You'll get used to it. She got used to you, didn't she? Don't think you don't smell funny to her." He sat down and dug into a pocket and handed me a piece of paper. "Here. Minus Two said to give you this, and to tell you meet him there at two."

"Where did you bump into him?"

He ignored the question. "He wants to take you somewheres I think. That's a great privilege to see the master in action."

I wanted to probe Nat about Minus Two's character, but was worried that it would sound disrespectful. I waited for him to bring us to the subject by asking about the previous day's meeting, but Nat never did. At one thirty I put a cap on and grabbed my newly acquired backpack and went to the address on the note. It was a mechanic's shop. Doc Minus Two came there to pick up his Jeep. It was a WWII Willys Jeep, olive drab and open and partially covered with mud. It was very noisy even as it idled. "Hop in," Doc Minus Two ordered me. The transmission screeched horribly as he put it in gear.

"I don't see you in this car," I said. "At least get a Vietnam era Jeep."

"You can only be nostalgic for a war you didn't take part in."

"Where are we going?" I yelled over the sound of the wind and the engine as we headed down the road. The Jeep did not as much as have a windshield. Even the pivot arms to hold a windshield in place were missing. Doc Minus Two did not want anything to come between him and the elements. I did not understand why someone who liked his vehicle that open did not just go and get himself a bike.

"I went over the passenger list you gave me," Doc Minus Two replied. "The widow of one of the victims lives right around the corner in Nashville. He was shot by a sniper a year ago when he left his house. Same house we're heading for now."

"Another passenger. That's a good start."

"Better. He was the pilot."

We cut through the woods time and again, staying longer off road than on any paved surface. I don't think it was necessary as the light traffic in the area did not justify any shortcuts. But Doc Minus Two seemed to have a need for going off road. He was only one step further into civilization than Nat, still unsure where he belonged. He seemed disappointed when we hit the highway and had to stay there for lack of available shortcuts. When we were at the outskirts of Nashville — 'around the corner' turned out to be four hours away — he stopped the Jeep by the side of the road and turned to me. "Now listen carefully; I'm gonna tell you what I need from you."

"I'm all ears."

"We can't just knock on the door and tell her that all the passengers on that flight besides you were done away with. She might go to the press with that and the whole thing will blow up and someone will read about this and figure out that you're here."

"I understand."

"We're going to pass ourselves up as agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."

"Why the ATF?"

"Because that's the only badge I've got." He pulled out a golden shield with two horizontal blue stripes and showed it to me.

"A fake badge."

"Not fake, just not mine."

"That's illegal."

"Do you want me to save your sorry ass or do you want to sit here and play lawyer?"

I nodded my head. "Gotcha. I was just making an observation. I'll let you do the talking when we get there. I'll just stand there lending moral support."

He put a half a cigar in his mouth. "No, kid, you'll be doing the talking."

I thought I misheard. "I what?"

"You'll be questioning her." He lit the cigar. "Look, I don't really care what she has to say, else I'd have done it myself. Anything she's going to tell us she already told the police, and if she knew what happened on that flight the perps would have killed her, too. That they didn't kill her evidences that she knows nothing of importance. That's why you'll be doing the talking. Get it?"

He took the wind out of my sails. I almost saw myself as having an important role in the investigation. I did not hide my disappointment. "So why go there at all?" It also bothered me that he had already made up his mind that the widow knew nothing before he talked to her. Was that a quality I was looking for in a detective?

"Because I need you to distract her when I check the house and the perimeter — alone. I want to see what they used for surveillance. I want to see what I can learn about their M.O. that the police, not suspecting an operation of this scale, missed."

We drove for a few minutes more and stopped five blocks away from the house. Doc Minus Two took out his cigar and parked it in one of the grooves in the spare tire's tread, and then we walked the rest of the way, as he said ATF agents do not typically arrive in a vintage WWII Willys Jeep. It was a nice ranch house with blue sidings and a white door that was held open by a rubber wedge. It seemed well kept. A truck was parked in the driveway and three young men were loading furniture from the house into it. Doc Minus Two ignored them and went straight through the open door. I followed right behind him. Inside, a lanky blonde with a thin, pointed nose was sitting on a folding chair in an otherwise empty room. She gazed at us briefly, then went back to staring blankly at the wall.

Doc Minus Two approached her. "Mrs. Rossi?"

She did not look at him. "Yes?"

He flashed his badge. "I'm agent McAlister; this is agent Boris. We're with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives."

"Oh." She got up. "Sorry, I thought you were with them."

"The movers?"

"They're no movers. They're repo men."

"I see."

She felt the need to apologize for her condition now that she thought she was talking to the authorities. "My late husband had some debt. His life insurance didn't cover all of it."

"That so?" Doc Minus Two said. He exited the house and walked over to a man who sat inside the cab of the truck. The man seemed older than the rest of the crew. Doc showed him his badge.

"What can I do for you?" the man said.

"I want you to stop what you're doing and put the stuff back in the house that you already took out. It's all evidence in a murder investigation."

The man did not seem disappointed or alarmed. He was paid by the hour. He just said, "I have to get approval from my boss." Doc Minus Two nodded for him to proceed and the man called the main office, where they told him not to get in trouble with the law and that they were going to check on their end. The crew returned the furniture inside the living room and left. When they were gone the widow turned to us and said, "You didn't do me any favor by having them do that. I was about to move anyway, to a much smaller place. Now how am going to get rid of all this useless crap? Will you take it off my hands?"

"We're not here to do favors," Doc Minus Two said curtly. "This is a serious investigation."

"I already told the police everything I know a year ago. Didn't you talk to them?"

"Of course we did. But we're the ATF. We need to look at it from a different angle."

She nodded her head in exasperation. I felt sorry for her. Her life must have been hell for over a year now and all she got from the authorities were more intrusive questions that would not help her. I did not know if Doc Minus Two also felt sorry for her, but if he did it did not make him change his authoritative tone of voice. "Agent Boris will question you while I take a look around the house if you don't mind."

"I'll show you around," she said in defeated tone.

"Ma'am," I dissuaded her in the most confident tone I could muster. "If you don't mind I have some questions for you. We don't want to waste time."

She sat down on the sofa we had the repo men bring back, and I on a smaller one across from her. Doc Minus Two disappeared down the hallway. I did not come prepared with any questions, but thought that I should try to prove Doc Minus Two wrong and get useful information out of her after all. "Would you have any theories yourself on why your husband was murdered?"

She shrugged. "None. All I know is he owed money all over town. He had a gambling problem. Maybe he borrowed from the wrong people."

"Anyone in particular that you have in mind?"

"I didn't know any of them. The first time I heard about him owing money was from the cops, after he died."

"Did he ever get into trouble on a flight, or at work in general?"

"What kind of trouble?"

"With passengers, with the handling of the plane, other crew members, anything."

"None that he ever told me. He was a competent pilot."

"I don't doubt it for a moment, but did he ever come home saying that something went wrong with a flight? I don't mean something that was his own fault necessarily."

"No, except sometimes there were flight delays that got under his skin."

"Think back two years ago. Anything unusual?"

"No. Do you suspect something?"

"Just eliminating all possibilities. Did he ever receive any threats?"

"No. None that I know of. He was an easy-going guy. Mellow. I don't think he quarreled too much with people."

"Anything different he said or done on the day he died?"

She shook her head. "No, no. I was asked about it a thousand times. He woke up and went to the bathroom and then talked to me like he does every morning — like he did every morning I mean — and ate the same breakfast he ate every morning, and he was in the same cranky but polite mood he was in every morning, and then he got dressed and left and I heard a thud against the door and opened it and his body just fell back into the hallway with a hole in his forehead. It was then that I realized that this was not going to be a morning like any other morning. Only then." She covered her eyes with one arm now. I thought she would burst into tears but she held herself together, and just rocked from side to side.

"I'm sorry," I said. Then I drew a blank. Just five minutes with her, and I ran out of questions to ask. Doc Minus Two was right. She knew nothing. None of the relatives of the victims would know anything otherwise they would be dead, too. But I still had to stall her so she did not go and disturb what Doc Minus Two was doing in her house. I began to ask trivial questions about her, about what she was doing for a living, why the couple did not have any children, where she was moving to, what her husband wanted to do with his life. She answered my questions obediently but unenthusiastically. At last Doc Minus Two came back into the room and we could leave.

The first word that I managed to utter when we were outside the house and she had shut the door behind us was, "Boris?"

He nodded. "I had to think of a name for you fast. You got to admit it's a good fit."

I ignored the provocation. "McAlister, is that your name?"

"No. Do I look like the kind of guy who'd go around using his real name when impersonating an ATF agent?"

"What is your real name, then?"

"You're paying me to save your life, not so you could ask me deeply personal questions. Now, did you get anything out of the blonde or did you waste your time like I predicted you would?"

"She doesn't know anything. Thinks they killed him because he owed money, but doesn't even know who he borrowed it from. I think I did waste my time."

"Al, you're so useless if you had a third hand you'd need another pocket to put it in. No matter, I didn't do much better myself this time around. No traces of any surveillance device, nothing unusual in his desk drawers and work bag."

"So we came here for nothing."

He shook his head. "The perimeter is what interests me the most, anyway. I didn't have high expectations for what's in the house."

I sat in the Jeep for another twenty minutes as he was sniffing around in a small wood across the road from the widow's front door. Then I saw him climb up one of the trees. I was surprised at how agile he was despite his advanced years and rotund figure; like an aging orangutan. This time when he came back, he was not empty handed. I'm sure he would have had a look of victory on his face had he been able to show any emotion but tired disdain. He handed me a rolled-up magazine. It was in terrible shape, discolored and swollen from numerous soakings in the rain. It had leaves stuck to it. With difficulty, I made out the title BIRDING.

"Stuck in a branch. The police says he was shot from a moving truck, but I think the killer sat up in that tree. And now I know he was a birdwatcher, too."

"What makes you think this magazine was his?"

"It's the right age, from about a year ago, and besides, what birdwatcher would sit up in a tree right here in the city unless he was passing the time waiting to do something else?"

"Can you get fingerprints off that?"

"No chance. Even if he was stupid enough to leave them, they'd never survive for more than a few days."

"Any subscription name?"

"No, this is store bought. But it narrows it down. There aren't too many assassins out there who are also birdwatchers."

We drove back home. He remembered to remove his half a cigar from the spare tire and put it in his mouth and light it up again before he started the car. I was hoping he would forget. I would have. I tried to chat him up on the way but he was not responsive. He dropped me off not far from the cave, well inside the wood, and left without a word about when and where we were to meet again.

But in the morning Nat — who had left me alone with Makwa again and now came back to wake me up — handed me a phone I did not know he had on him. Doc Minus Two was on the line. "Mrs. Rossi's vanished."

"The widow?" I said half asleep. "What do you mean 'vanished'?"

"Gone. The neighbors called the cops after they heard screams last night. Everything inside the house was intact but the front door was wide open. She's nowhere to be found and doesn't answer her phone or e-mail. Is that vanished enough for you?"

"Shit. I thought they don't touch the relatives."

He sighed. "So did I. I think it's time we talked about your own family."

VI.

He came by and had me pack all my things and put them in the back of the Jeep, and then we went to one of the many pancake houses that dot the streets of Gatlinburg so I could buy him breakfast there. We sat in the corner, far from the crowd. I asked him how he came to learn about Mrs. Rossi's disappearance.

"I got connections and access to law enforcement databases, that's how. I was searching for something and saw the police report. What does it matter how I found out, anyway? The important thing is to figure out why she disappeared."

"Isn't it obvious? They found us." I spoke softly, almost in a whisper, as if the assassins were already in the restaurant with us.

Doc Minus Two was chewing on his omelet slowly. He did not order any pancake, just a succession of omelets and several cups of coffee and a glass of coke. He was calm, a quality which I must admit had kept me from going insane. I don't know how a person can keep calm after so many cups of coffee. I could only imagine that without them he would be in a coma. "If that were the case you wouldn't be alive now," he said slowly. "If they saw us at her house they'd have followed us back here and bumped you off. No, they don't know you were there."

"So what are we to make of the disappearance?"

He let his fork down for a moment and graced me with a brief eye contact. "We didn't go there as ourselves, remember? We went as the ATF. The perps must have heard about it and it startled them. Why does the ATF get involved, they asked themselves? Maybe the perps are a little worried now. We know they have FBI connections, but probably no similar thing with the ATF. Maybe they wanted to know what the ATF was after."

"In that case they should let her go pretty quick, I'd think. I asked her worthless questions."

"They may have realized it by now, but maybe letting her go isn't that simple. She might talk. And maybe there's another reason. I don't know. But I think we've inadvertently gotten to them. They think a new agency is now involved and they don't like it."

"And my family?"

He resumed his eating. "I don't know that they are in any real danger, but as a family member of one of the victims just disappeared, it is logical to assume that the killers had broken their cardinal rule of not touching relatives. At this point we must be prepared for anything, however unlikely."

That reminded me that I did not check my e-mail to see if K had replied to me. I wanted to find out whether or not she had kept her word to move my family to a safe house. Doc Minus Two pulled out a smaller version of the laptop I saw at his house earlier and let me log in. There was no e-mail from K. "I don't like this," I said. "Why doesn't she write back?"

"Because she doesn't want to tell you that she's done nothing whatsoever about your family."

I pushed away my plate. "Why?"

"Put yourself in her shoes. You have sixty six murders you need to solve, and nothing that links them together other than the victims were all on the same flight. She's like a deer caught in the headlights. Has no clue what to do or where to start." He bent forward to stress what he had to say next. "She has no real plan of action. She'd like the perps to make contact again so she could track them. But the only way that the perps are going to make contact again is by trying to get to you. You are the last remaining thing they want. And since they can't get to you, your family is the next best thing. Do you understand? The perps getting to your family is the only hope the FBI has got of these guys revealing themselves again. They want them to do it. If they move your family to a safe place, what would they have?"

Of course he was right. The FBI was not there just to protect me and my family; they needed to crack the case. "Is it safe to assume, then, that the FBI is camped outside my ex wife's home watching over whoever else may be watching?"

"I have no doubt about it."

"I must do something. I must go there."

"Two parties will be waiting for you there when you arrive. Party number one would shoot you on sight; party number two, if they get to you first, would pick you up again and extend your life by about a day until party number one figures out where you are and gets to you anyway. Even your ossified archeologist brain should realize these simple facts of life."

"I don't care, I have to do something. They'll only wait a few more days before trying to kidnap my boy. I just know it."

"Alright, calm down. I've already done something."

"What?"

"I made some phone calls. You'll see soon enough."

He would not say anymore. I thought it best, anyway. Deep inside I did not want to know what he was doing, and preferred the vague sense of security that my family was going to be in good hands to a precise knowledge of the plan, which would open the door to doubt. We hit the road right after breakfast. This time he stuck to the highway and I knew we were leaving Tennessee. It was not easy sitting in the open, windshield-less vehicle for hours on end of highway driving. Even though the noisy, rattling machine rarely did more than fifty five miles an hour, it felt like sitting on the roof of a corrugated metal hut during a hurricane. After ten hours of nonstop driving and little conversation, we stopped at a gas station in West Virginia. I could barely feel my face, even though I swaddled it with a towel from one of the bags. I stepped outside the Jeep and gathered the courage to tell Doc Minus Two that I would not be climbing back into the vehicle today no matter what.

"We need to set up camp for the night, anyway," he said.

"I'm going to a motel."

"Do you have a fake ID?"

"No, but we can book the room on your name."

"I never do that."

"With a fake ID I meant. Someone like you, you must have one."

"I never burn my fake IDs on something as trivial as a motel stay. No, I carry my motel with me." He pointed to the back of the Jeep, where a flat canvas bag lay on the metal floor.

I did not mind sleeping in a tent. It was a decided improvement over sharing an open cave with Makwa. But after spending three days in the wild, I was desperate for a shower. I told this to Doc Minus Two.

"And that's why God made truck stops," he said. He took me to one fifteen miles from the gas station. He seemed to know exactly where it was. The facilities were rustic but I felt like myself again for the first time in days. I don't know if Doc Minus Two used the time to take a shower himself, but did not mind either way — that was the one advantage of riding in an open vehicle. At any rate, he was already waiting for me when I was done and we drove into a wood not far from there and pitched two tents, which came out of the flat canvas bag. He waited patiently for me to be build my own tent, not lending a hand or even helping with advice. I did not know whether he was enjoying watching my clumsiness or just testing my outdoorsman skills. When I was finally done, he went and put up his own tent a hundred yards away. I did not ask him why; it was obvious that this was the minimal distance he needed to put between himself and other people. Even that must have felt suffocating to him.

In the morning we were back in the Jeep, and made a stop at a small strip mall where I bought a parka, a scarf, and goggles to better withstand the ride. Doc Minus Two did not seem to need any of these things. He was wearing a light brown leather jacket and a dark green cap that said GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS, and was unconcerned about the wind, the noise, the ratting, or anything else that was abusing his old body. After visiting the strip mall we stocked up on sandwiches and checked e-mail. There was still nothing from K. We drove on.

By the afternoon we were deep in Pennsylvania. A road sign said Lewisburg was near. Again the Jeep went off road, this time following a narrow path in the woods for three or four miles. Now it was quiet enough for some audible conversation. "Where are we going?"

"To see your family."

"My family lives in Boston, not in some wood in Pennsylvania."

"Wanna bet?"

"What do you mean by that?"

He did not reply. We pulled up by an old log cabin. It looked abandoned. Outside a white van was parked. Two men with rifles got out of it as they saw us approaching. For a moment I thought a confrontation was coming, but Doc Minus Two did not seem concerned. He got out of the Jeep and walked towards them and then pointed at me without looking back and said, "Give them four grand."

"Do what?" I exclaimed.

"They saved your family's hide. The FBI wouldn't. You couldn't. You asked me to do something about it. I had them do it. They don't work for free. Now pay 'em."

"For what? What did they do?" The men stood expressionless, staring blankly in front of them, trusting Doc Minus Two to do their talking for them. He did it well. "Listen, fossil brain, we had to move your family to a safe place. You wanted it. I knew just the kind of people who could pull this off under the nose of both the FBI and the perps. If I were them I'd have charged you fifty thousand for something like that. Luckily for you they're not me and only asked for four. They're good people. Now quit your bitching and complaining and pay 'em."

It was hopeless. I could not lie about having the money, either, because he saw some of it when I gave him a thousand dollars the other day. I took out four thousand dollars and gave it to the men. I made a sour face, but the men did not care. They took the money just as if I was giving it away with a smile, and thanked me politely and asked Doc Minus Two if they should stick around or not.

"What's the daily fee?" Doc Minus Two asked them.

"Four hundred."

He turned to me. "It's up to you. For that kind of money at least one of them will be here at all times, bringing your family stuff and making sure no one comes and goes unnoticed."

I pointed at the log cabin. "Do you mean to tell me my family is in there? Right here in this stinking cabin?"

"I didn't have a lot of choice on where to put them up. I don't own property; I just know where there's property that no one else owns."

I left him and hurried to the cabin door. It was locked. I knocked frantically. Jane opened it. She did not seem surprised to see me there, and without saying a word she slapped my face, then made room for me to get in, then slapped my face a second time, hard. I walked past her and entered a small living room with two black futons and a cardboard box with a TV on it. My son Aaron was sitting on one of the futons, and Jane's fiancé Josh on the one next to it. Both made a face at me. Josh said, "I'll get you for this, Al." He tried to sound menacing but it came out wimpy. He was terrified. I was too, now.

"What's going on here?" I demanded from Doc Minus Two, who followed me into the cabin. "I didn't ask you to kidnap my family. You really are the worst character, aren't you?" Then I let out my biggest frustration. "And why Josh? He's not part of my family."

"It is what it is," Doc Minus Two said calmly. "My guys did not have much choice. The only way to get to your family without being noticed was when they went out — as a family — to the movies. The house is being watched over by two parties, remember? So, once in the theater, and with possibly two surveillance cars waiting outside, my guys had no alternative but to lead them out the back door and into the van."

"They said they were from the police," Jane said, pointing through the window at the men outside. She was visibly upset, and her small black eyes turned even smaller and she was flailing her arms. "They said they needed to take us down to the station for questioning about something you did. Then they forced a cloth soaked with a stinky liquid in our mouths and we lost consciousness. When we woke up we were here."

"But why Josh?" I persisted.

Doc Minus Two pointed at Josh. "He was with them. There was no way to separate him from them once it started, and my guys knew there may not be another chance if they aborted."

"I hope you realize this is kidnapping," Josh said. "Kidnapping is a crime." With Jane's outburst and my apologetic demeanor, he had gathered some courage. He got up. He was of medium height, pale and balding and somber looking and wearing rimless glasses. He was younger than Jane and much younger than me, barely into his thirties. He had no sense of humor and believed the same of me. I could not understand what Jane saw in an insecure little boy like that. "Do you know what you can get for kidnapping?"

Jane came closer and now her flailing arms almost knocked my head off. "They kept saying, 'It's for your own good. It's for your own good. Someone's after you.' The only people who were ever after us in our entire lives were those two." She pointed out the window again.

"Get us outta here, Al, before this spins out of control," Josh said. Josh Banes never liked me. Long before that day. As soon as he entered Jane's life he did not like me. My son told me that he often made fun of my profession and of how little I made. I was still employed when Josh first started seeing Jane, shortly after she left me. It didn't help that I lost my job a few months later. Now I not only had a ridiculous profession in his opinion, but was unable to support my ex wife and son. He felt that some of this burden fell to him and resented me. He kept grilling Jane about our relationship and any fights we have had, and then gave it a magnified, out-of-context meaning, and kept bringing it up whenever I came to visit my son. Of course he could not have done any of this had Jane not let him. She welcomed it. It was comforting to her to hear bad things about me. It validated her decision to leave me. With this kidnapping, every nasty word Josh had ever said about me was confirmed. It would not have mattered so much had it not been for the fact that Aaron was beginning to believe in it, too. He and Josh were getting closer. It was killing me.

"Sit down, all of you," Doc Minus Two ordered.

"I'm sorry, do I know you?" Jane snapped at him. But she sat down, anyway, and after her Josh, on the same futon. I sat down beside Aaron on the other futon. He moved away an inch.

"I work for your husband."

"Ex husband. I divorced him."

"I can't blame you for that," Doc Minus Two said. He remained standing. "If I were a woman I wouldn't go near him myself. But this one time he did the right thing. You were not safe in your own home." Then he told them what happened. Just the gist of it.

"I don't believe you," Jane said to me, as if I was the one who told the story. "Those guys outside said they're cops who needed to bring us in for questioning, and it turned out to be bullshit. Now you tell us you're at the center of some international intrigue. Why should I believe you? Why should I believe anything you say ever?"

"I never thought much of you," Josh threw at me. "But even I didn't think you'd stoop this low."

I had to make them believe me, if not like or admire me. At least my son. I was half turned towards him as I spoke. "Why else would I pay four thousand dollars to some strangers to get you to this place? What do I have to gain?"

Josh folded his arms over his chest. "If you have nothing to gain from this that only proves that you're insane. You have a screw loose, Al; I always noticed this about you but didn't know it was that bad. Being down on your luck for this long did it. You lost your wife, you lost your job, you can't find your place in this world. You're losing it, that's what it is. You've become delusional to compensate for feeling like a nobody. Come on: a top-notch crime organization is on a manhunt for you. They would spare no expense just to eliminate you. Because you are that important."

Josh had been working on a psychology degree for the past six years. He hadn't gotten it yet, and I was not sure what he did for a living in the meantime. But it was enough that he saw himself as an expert in human behavior. I wanted to say something nasty about that, but knew that it would not go down well with Jane and Aaron. "I'm not important. I just happened to be on a flight that someone wants to eliminate. This means all passengers and crew, Josh, not just me."

"Why?"

"I don't know why."

Jane shook her head vigorously. "You don't know because there is no such reason. If that was a real case the FBI would have picked us up long ago."

Doc Minus Two tried to explain, but Josh and Jane refused to look at it from the FBI's point of view. They did not believe I met with the FBI, either. Aaron, meanwhile, became increasingly nervous. He was biting his nails and rocking back and forth. I was aware that this was causing him much distress, which made it very hard on me. "Aaron, go in the other room," I said.

"He won't go anywhere," Jane yelled. "He'll stay here and see what kind of a moron he's got for a father."

"One of the victims' widow disappeared two days ago," Doc Minus Two said. "The danger is real."

Josh allowed himself to assume a snooty tone of voice now. "I'm sorry, I'm not going to get into a philosophical discussion about what is real to you as opposed to what is real to the rest of humanity. We are being held against our will and you must let us go."

If Doc Minus Two was offended, he did not show it. "It is of course your decision. Those two guys out there would not stop you if you tried to leave."

"Had I known that I'd have left long ago," Josh said.

"Just consider the danger you're putting your fiancée and her son in."

Josh was openly contemptuous. "I don't need to hide because of some cockamamie story, thank you very much. And if I feel that my fiancée is in danger I got a big family to turn to. We can live with them."

Doc Minus Two looked at me. "That's not an ideal solution. The perps would no doubt look for his family next if these three fail to come back to Jane's house. But it's better than nothing. At least it might buy us a few days."

"I want you to be safe," I told Jane. "You and the boy."

"We will be," she answered grumpily.

"Then at least promise me you'll get there straight away, to his family. Don't go back to the house. Trust me. For just a few days trust me. That's all I ask."

She nodded and Josh said, "Alright." He was staring down. I did not know if I could rely on him not to change his mind later, but did not have a choice. Then he said, "Can I call my brother in Boston to tell him we're coming?"

"Go ahead."

"I'll need your phone. Your hired goons took away ours."

Doc Minus Two handed him his phone and pulled me outside the cabin. "That fiancé of your ex is as mad as a mule chewing on bumblebees."

"I'd be mad too if someone kidnapped me like that," I said. "But now that they're here, I think it's far safer than letting them stay with one of Josh's relatives. They'll never find them here in the wood."

Doc Minus Two lit another half a cigar and put it in his mouth. "We don't really have a choice. Can't keep them here against their will indefinitely. You don't want to have them in chains, now do you? Plus it would be too costly. These guys don't come cheap." He pointed at the men with the van.

"That's another thing — how do you know they weren't followed here?"

"These two? If they didn't know how to give pursuers the slip they'd be in prison right now. There's a bounty on both. Besides, if they were followed here we'd have known by now."

I heaved a deep sigh and stared up at the tree tops. "Can I stay with my family?"

"I don't think they'd want you to. Or that they think of you as family. Don't take it hard, my family doesn't like me, either."

I shook my head. "My life's a tragedy. My family despises me, I'm unemployed and near broke, and a crack-team of hired killers is out to get me for reasons I may never know."

He gave me a hard look. "There was this a chef I knew who lived in the mountains. The man was a genius. Everything he made tasted like heaven. One time, a big publisher came to visit and had some of that cooking and offered him a cookbook deal on the spot. But the mountain chef used high-altitude cooking times, which were much longer than what the readers of his book — not living in the mountains — needed to use. So following the cooking times in the book, everything came out burned and overdone for them. Overnight he was ruined. Every critic wrote what a complete moron this man must have been, and no one recognized him for the genius that he truly was. He died broken hearted. That's a tragedy. A tragedy because this man was gifted. You are not gifted, and so your life is not a tragedy. Your life is a joke. There's a difference."

I didn't have a retort. He pointed at the Jeep. "We need to get a move on. Lots to do. They'll be relatively safe so long as we act quickly. Otherwise, you'd be dead long before anything happens to them. So either way don't worry too much."

"I hope Josh doesn't go to the cops."

"He might, but again, if we crack this it won't matter and if we don't, you'd be dead soon and won't have to worry about that, either."

"Thanks for setting my mind at ease."

We walked back into the cabin. Doc Minus Two collected his phone from Josh. I said a faint goodbye to Jane. Then I went over to Aaron and sat beside him again. I tried to put an arm around his shoulder but he pushed it away. He seemed more relaxed now that he knew they did not have to stay in the cabin, however. I tried to apologize and said it was for his own good, that his life could have been in danger. He did not answer at first, then said, "Maybe it's all because of the envelope."

"What envelope?" I asked.

"The one you took with you on the plane."

"What are you talking about?"

"The envelope I left in your car when you dropped me off on the way to the airport. The one I got by mistake."

"Oh, I remember now. No, it has nothing to do with that envelope. No one would kill people because of an envelope."

"Daddy I'm scared."

"Don't be," Josh replied before I had a chance to. "I'll protect you. Now let's have no more of that envelope silliness, alright? Everything will be okay."

"He's right," I said. "You'll be alright. No need to be scared." But he was still unsettled. "What about the dog?" he asked.

"I'll ask the neighbor to take care of him," Jane said.

We escorted them out of the house and into the van. Then I paid the two men fifty dollars to take them to a bus station. They grumbled a little about being demoted from kidnappers to taxi drivers, but accepted the task. Doc Minus Two thanked them again and then leaned against the Jeep and watched them disappear down the path. When they were out of sight he turned to me. "What was that about an envelope?"

"Nothing significant. I told you I dropped Aaron off on the way to the airport. Before he got out of the car he handed me a manila envelope with a pen drive in it. No, not manila, a little thicker, padded. He found it in his mail box."

"A thirteen year old boy has a mailbox?"

"It's my box. I had it for years and now I let him use it. He has this girlfriend from the old neighborhood and they send each other things he doesn't want his mother to know about. It's the only bonding we have, me and him, this mail box. But this envelope didn't come from his girlfriend and wasn't meant for him, either. Someone made a typo with the box number, and he got it by mistake."

"Any return address?"

"None."

"Who was the addressee?"

"It just said, To The Minotaur." I shuddered as these words came out of my mouth. "Oh God I didn't think of that. The Minotaur. It can't be a coincidence."

"It may mean nothing. Kids often use nicknames."

"Yes, they do. It didn't seem too unusual at the time, though now I think it very strange. Anyway, since it only had the wrong box number on it and no sender info there was no way to know who it was meant for, and no way to send it back. My son thought he'd take a look inside and found the pen drive."

"Why did he give it to you?"

"I don't know." Then I smiled meekly. "It's probably the Minotaur reference. Me being an archeologist and all. I told him the legend of the Minotaur once. He must have thought it would interest me."

"Where's the envelope now?"

"I put it in my hand luggage. It stayed in Dallas and came back home with me." Then something hit me and I said, "No wait: only the pen drive I brought home with me. The envelope was too bulky and I tossed it in the garbage."

Doc Minus Two stood in front of me now, not three feet away. For him this lack of personal space was unusual. He was also looking me in the eye and focusing on what I was saying. I found it disturbing, coming from him. "So the envelope never left the plane?" he asked.

"It may have. I think I chucked it in a garbage can in the airport. At any rate I didn't take it home with me."

"Anything odd about the envelope other than its being sent to the Minotaur at the wrong box number?"

"It was very thick and heavy for something that was supposed to contain a pen drive. Had a lot of tape on it, too."

"Was it rigid in some places, like there was something metal or plastic inside the padding?"

I scratched my head. "I think so. It was strange to the touch, not as soft as you'd expect."

"And the pen drive? Did you check what was on it?"

"No, I forgot all about it. It's in a drawer somewhere in my apartment."

"We better check it out, Al."

"So, Peterson was right that he heard his attacker mention the Minotaur?"

He nodded. "Yes, it would seem. At this point, we need to take it seriously. Seriously enough that we need to take a good look at that pen drive."

"I don't get it. Are you saying someone might be killing everyone on that flight just because of some pen drive?"

"The envelope you've just described to me is typical of either a bomb or an imbedded tracking device. Since it did not go off we must assume the latter. Someone must have thought this pen drive well worth tracking, and they must have been very surprised to see that it wound up on that flight instead of where it was supposed to go. There was something on this pen drive that the sender absolutely could not afford to fall in the wrong hands. And that sender was no kid using nicknames."

VII.

Doc Minus Two needed to write some e-mails and so we stopped at a gas station half an hour away from the cabin. When he was done I checked my own account and finally found something from K.

AL,

I KNOW IT WAS YOU WHO KIDNAPPED THEM. YOU'RE PUTTING THEM IN HARM'S WAY. LET US DO OUR JOB. STAY AWAY. ALSO, DON'T ASSOCIATE WITH VIGILANTES. I WILL WRITE MORE WHEN I HAVE NEWS. I THINK WE'RE GETTING CLOSER TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS.

It was not signed. "I think she was referring to you with the vigilante remark," I said. "How did she know? And how did she know it was me who kidnapped my family and not them?"

"She knows nothing, she's shooting in the dark. Full of wind like a corn-eating horse."

There was some doubt creeping in now, and guilt. The FBI was close to cracking this case and here I was standing in their way playing detective with this man whose only reference came from a mentally imbalanced recluse who lived with a bear. In the process I also employed two wanted criminals and may have put my son and ex wife at risk, and caused the disappearance of Mrs. Rossi. I pondered whether I should let Doc Minus Two go. We have done enough damage together. "Do you really think this pen drive has anything to do with the murders? Sounds like a coincidence to me and not an impressive one at that."

He looked at me askew. "It's all we got to go on. I thought you were the one who believed the Minotaur had something to do with it. So what happened?"

"I used to think so, but now I'm thinking, if there was something important on that pen drive, they'd have sent it electronically."

"Just the opposite. They know all traffic on the Internet is tracked. Any e-mail can be read. Haven't you heard of Snowden?"

I tried another approach. "What if it's Al Qaida? They love to target commercial flights."

Minus Two looked at me with more disdain than usual. "Al Qaida? Murdering the passengers one by one in a low key manner so that the public is kept unaware and unafraid? Oh, yes, a very useful tactic for a terror organization. Al, sometimes you're so dumb I think you could throw yourself on the ground and miss."

"So who can it be?"

"If I knew the answer to that I wouldn't be standing here charging you six hundred bucks a day."

I had to say something mean to him. "Will you give me a refund if the FBI gets there first?"

"I never gave a refund in my life. Nor asked for one. You're a self-centered bitcher and complainer like the rest of your generation. Now hop in the Jeep, wuss, and keep quiet before I start charging you by the word."

Wrapped in my new parka and scarf, I sat silently in the Jeep as he made several short cuts through the woods and then brought us to a highway that ended in New York State, not far from Rochester and Buffalo.

"I thought we were going to my place, in Mass, to pick up the pen drive," I yelled over the wind. This was the first time I spoke since I had gotten in the Jeep.

"We are." It was hard to understand him as he would not raise his voice even while doing fifty five miles an hour in an open vehicle. If you wanted to understand Doc Minus Two it was your problem, and he let you know it. "But we have to make a stop first."

"Why?"

"The ground crew."

I remembered now. He wanted to speak to whoever was at the gate when the flight departed, to make sure nothing happened before I arrived on the scene. I did not understand what they would be doing in Upstate New York as the flight took off from Boston.

"She quit. She now lives in Rochester and helping her old pa in his grocery store."

"How do you know all that?"

He pointed to the back of the Jeep, where the bag with his laptop was. Ah, yes, his databases and connections. Though he did not look it, Doc Minus Two always did his homework. We passed by the grocery store five minutes later. It was a shabby building with more paper ads covering its front than paint. Even the dying, reddish sun rays could not bring out any color but grey and faint yellow out of it. The storefront glass was dirty and a large crack went down its right side, nearly cutting it in half. Several cars were parked by the sidewalk. Doc Minus Two approached these and examined each one closely and entered the plate numbers into a tablet PC he had taken out of his jacket pocket, and which I had not seen before.

"This time, I don't want to be Agent Boris if you don't mind," I said.

He nodded his consent. A bell rang when we went into the store, and an old man who stood behind the counter looked at us briefly without moving his head. He was eating apples off a large porcelain plate. The store smelled of dust and a faint sweet odor that must have come from a spill that was recently cleaned up. Doc Minus Two flashed his ATF badge at the old man. "I'm agent Green. This is agent Boris. Is Pauline in?"

"No," the old man barked. He regarded Doc Minus Two with defiance.

"Liar," Doc Minus Two said.

The old man tilted his head as disbelief spread over his face. "What did you just say to me?" He pointed at the door. "Get the fuck outta here."

"Take it easy. I saw her car outside."

"I use it."

"So you arrived here today with two cars? Yours is parked out there, too, Mr. Mogeras."

The old man became very excited now, upset at being caught lying twice. He took a threatening step towards Doc Minus Two and then went around the counter and shook his head a lot and opened his mouth to say something nasty. Then he suddenly gripped his throat and made loud whizzing sounds and fell to the floor.

"Sir, are you alright?" I exclaimed in panic.

Doc Minus Two turned to me slowly. "Does he look alright?" he said sardonically. "No, he doesn't. That's because he is currently in the process of chocking on an apple. Understand?"

The old man's daughter hurried into the room now. She ran and then slid into a position next to her father, on the floor. "Pa, what's going on? Oh, God he's choking."

I squatted down behind the old man and began to administer the Heimlich maneuver. It did not work. "Stand aside," Doc Minus Two ordered us. "You two are as useless as a belly dancer in a naval battle." Then he grabbed an old metal vacuum cleaner that stood behind the counter and dragged it out of there and turned it on and shoved the hose right into the old man's mouth. The man struggled for a moment, and his cheeks caved in and his eyes widened. Doc Minus Two took out the hose with a swift pull a moment later. The old man coughed loudly and waived his arms. Then he began to curse at Doc Minus Two, and we knew that he was going to be alright.

"Now," Doc Minus Two said, "can I speak to your daughter already?"

The old man coughed again and cursed some more. The girl stood up. She did not know whether to thank Doc Minus Two for saving her father's life or be mad at him for disrespectfully shoving a hose into his mouth. "What do you want?" she said with some hostility.

Doc Minus Two showed her his badge. "I'm with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. We are investigating reports of criminal activity at airport gates prior to boarding."

"What kind of criminal activities?"

His tone became impatient. "Petty theft, grand larceny, fraud, human trafficking, battery, juvenile delinquency, cannabis cultivation, loitering, incest, and dealing cards on a Sunday." Doc Minus Two could not help himself; he had to be mean and sarcastic from time to time, and often at the worst of times. I was glad to discover this flaw in him, a chink in his professional armor.

"You're making fun of me."

"You are very astute, Ma'am, but if I told you the true extent of these crimes I'd be jeopardizing a major operation that has national security implications. I need you to trust me. I need your cooperation. Do I have your cooperation?"

She leaned against the counter and put her hands on her hips. "For now."

"Now is all I need. Think back two years ago if you can. October 12th or thereabouts. A Boston to Dallas flight. Do you recall seeing anything unusual at the gate? Any suspicious or just out-of-the-ordinary activity?"

She smirked. "Surely you don't expect me to remember one workday out of hundreds that far back?"

"If there was something worth remembering, you'd remember. If not, it is not important anyway."

She looked down at the floor as she tried to focus on the request. Behind her, the old man resumed his position behind the counter, but he did not go back to eating the apples. Instead he decided to tune out the unwanted visitors by going over the books with a pen wearing a resentful expression on his face. He did not speak again.

She scratched her nose. "Well, there was one thing. Nothing big, but that's the only thing that stands out. I'm not even sure about the exact date." She looked up from the floor now and gazed at us. "There were those three men in business suits. They sat together at the gate and they looked very concerned. Their eyes, they were darting from side to side like they were looking for someone, and they didn't talk. Then all of a sudden all three got up and went and stood behind a large group of tourists on an organized tour who stood at the other gate. I think they were hiding from someone."

"Did you see who they were hiding from?"

She shook her head. "No one that I could see, but they kept standing there, pretending to mingle with that group, until shortly before boarding ended. Then they rushed quickly to the back of the line."

"Would you say that whoever looked for them did not find them that day?"

"I think so. At least they assumed they were not seen."

"Anything else you recall about them?"

"Not really. They didn't act suspicious other than that."

"You wouldn't remember their names by any chance?"

"No."

"How about if I showed you some pictures? Would you remember their faces?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

Doc Minus Two turned on his tablet and showed her photographs of the sixty six victims. She remained motionless, almost ashamed that she could not provide a positive identification for any of them. He asked if she could describe the men she saw, and she said one was black and two white, in their thirties or forties. At least one she thought might have been a foreigner, someone from Europe.

"Greek by any chance?"

"Could be. I can't be sure."

Doc Minus Two thanked her and we left the shop. "You're a horrible person," I said to him once we were outside.

"Why? I saved his life."

"You're also the one who made him choke in the first place. You aggravate people."

I finally managed to get under his skin. He said, "They're safer with me than with you any day; I'm a doctor."

I laughed. "You mean you call yourself Doc."

"No, I'm a doctor. At lease I was. I don't practice medicine anymore."

I stopped and gave him an inquisitive look, but he continued to walk down the block and I had to catch up with him again, which made me look silly. Suddenly I understood everything. "You were an army surgeon."

He nodded.

"That's how you met Nat. You operated on him."

Again a nod.

"It was you who amputated his leg and fitted him with a prosthetic."

This topic of conversation did not appeal to him. "Enough about that. Back to your miserable life that you pay me to preserve. Do you remember the three men she mentioned? Were they on your flight?"

"No. Not saying they weren't but I don't remember them."

"Pity, that sounded promising. Someone was after them who may not have even known their names. Only knew that they were on this flight."

"So they decided to kill all passengers and crew just to be sure?"

"Only a theory. Always work with what little you got."

"Why did you ask her if one of them was Greek?"

"The Minotaur. If this is someone's nickname, I thought maybe they're Greek."

Something came to me. "If they were on that plane with me, then all three must be dead now."

"That's the way the cookie crumbles."

"But if they were the ones the killers were after, then, mission accomplished. Isn't it so?"

"What are you getting at?"

I waved my arms apologetically. "Just saying, had they known that, maybe they'd stop chasing after me."

"And how were you planning on breaking this news to them? And how is that not going to arouse their suspicion that you know something you shouldn't about the three people they were after? And that if they were after these three at all. It's just a theory based on the recollection of someone who can't even be sure about the date, not to mention the flight number."

I went silent. It was cowardice on my part to come up with that idea. I was angry at myself for my lack of self control. Doc Minus Two sensed that and made it worse. "Life is cheap. Yours more than most at this point. Deal with it. You won't get a chance to explain yourself to them. You won't get a chance to make friends with those who hunt you. No dramatic endings for you, either: you'll be dealt with as quickly and efficiently as possible, like swatting a fly. To them you are a name to dispose of, not a human being. Never make the mistake of assuming you can reason with them."

"What do you want to prove?" I asked with annoyance.

"I want you to let me focus on the investigation, while you focus on one thing: staying alive."

"Gotcha. Staying alive."

And then he risked my life by driving off just as I was getting into the Jeep. I held on to an outside handle and yelled and cursed at him as my ass was hovering over speeding asphalt with only one leg inside the vehicle, but he did not stop. Finally I managed to get a better grip and shifted my weight inside the Jeep. There I sat sulking until we arrived in Boston, not saying a word to him the entire ride. I think that was his intention.

VIII.

At a Massachusetts diner, Doc Minus Two let me check my e-mail. There were no messages from K, nor any from my family. Apart from my son and ex wife I only have a sister who lives in Alaska and with whom I seldom speak. I remembered her now and asked Doc Minus Two if I should be telling her anything. He said no, it is not likely they'd do much more than tap her phone line seeing how little contact there was between us, and that I best not attempt to speak to her. A moment later he glanced at his laptop and shook his head and pushed the device away from him.

"What happened?"

"No black box. I pulled some strings to try and get a copy of the flight recording to see if anything unusual took place on board. Turns out the airlines' data retention policy requires them to keep that data for only two years unless there was an incident. Since there were no problems with this flight, the data is already gone."

"What were you expecting to gain from the black box anyway if the flight landed safely?"

"At least the cockpit recording. Maybe the pilots made a comment about something that wasn't a safety issue, yet important to us. Anything would help at this point."

I poured myself a third cup of coffee. It was nice after all these hours on the open road. Up until the previous week I did not drink coffee at all, and now I could not do without it. "Then I'm sorry to hear about that."

"The plane itself is okay," he continued, thinking out loud. "Still in service, never a major incident before or after that flight. I may be able to gain access to do a little look-around, but I doubt this would teach us anything." He seemed frustrated now.

"Are you concerned that we don't have much to go on?"

"You bet I am. All we got is three men who may or may not have been on your flight and whose identity we have no chance of ever discovering, and a pen drive delivered with a tracking device that may or may not have a bearing on this case, and some obsession with the word Minotaur. The families of the victims don't have any helpful information for us and seem to be disappearing right after we talk to them."

"I hope that girl from yesterday won't disappear like the pilot's widow."

He waved a calming hand. "Don't worry about her. She was ground crew; not on their list. They don't even know she exists."

"What do you suggest we do?"

"There are only two useful things we can do now. Get the pen drive from your apartment and determine whether or not it has something of importance on it, and go look at select murder scenes to see if we can't find any more clues. We already know that at least one of the hit men was a bird watcher. By itself maybe it's not much, but a few more discoveries like this and we might be able to construct a profile. In fact I plan to go over police records in detail today. You'll have to leave me alone for a change."

"Anything you'd like me to do while I'm leaving you alone?"

"Yes. Retrieve that pen drive."

I startled at his seeming lapse of judgment. "You want me to go back to my apartment? You know someone must be waiting for me there."

He lifted his head over the remains of his omelet and gave me a penetrating gaze with his tired eyes, as if resenting my thinking so little of his intelligence. "I found us a cat burglar to do that. Your job is to tell the cat burglar how to gain access to your apartment and where the pen drive is. That is all. Think you can handle that?"

I concealed a small sigh of relief. "I'll just hand him the key."

"First of all, it's a her, not a him. Secondly, you give her the key and the perps are going to jump her as soon as she turns it in the lock. No, it has to look like a burglary. It has to be done in the middle of the night so that even if they do see her, they won't suspect it is in any way connected with you or ordered by you. For the same reason, she would have to remove some valuables from your apartment; the larger the better so they are seen. Those she will keep as part of her fee. The rest, four hundred dollars as per my agreement with her, you will give her in cash today."

"You expect me to pay a burglar to break into my own home and steal my own valuables?"

He signaled the waitress and asked her for more coffee and coke. "Your selfish point of view astounds me. You're paying her so you don't have to risk your own life, that's what you're paying her for. She can get killed doing this for you, and one of her is worth ten of you to me."

We did not say much after this. He dropped me off at an ice cream parlor in Boston later that afternoon, where he said the cat burglar would meet me soon. "How will I reach you?" I asked.

"When I'll need you I'll let you know," was his only reply, and then he took off. I watched his dirty Jeep disappear down the road, then turned around to observe the ice cream parlor. The place had an outdoors sitting area with wooden chairs and tables. Few customers walked in and out of the main door, and none were sitting outside. I went inside and got some vanilla ice cream and then sat down at one of the outdoors tables. I waited a long while. After an hour I began to wonder whether I would in fact meet a cat burglar there that day. Could it be that Doc told me a story about a cat burglar to get rid of me for the day? I was becoming paranoid. Never mind, so was he. But no, it was not a fair assessment of the man. Doc Minus Two took pains to prepare for every possible scenario, yes, but he did not always act with caution. He let me witness his use of a fake badge. How did he know I would not go and squeal to the authorities? He revealed too much about his methodology, and some of it was illegal, like hiring wanted criminals to kidnap people, or obtaining police records. I could have reported this, too, to someone. A paranoid would not have entrusted me with the means for his own destruction. What was he then? Could I define someone like Doc in one word?

When she finally arrived I thought it was a mistake. I imagined a limber young girl, athletic and confident, maybe dressed in black from head to toe. But the cat burglar turned out to be a middle-aged woman in jeans, somewhat on the heavy side, with a loud red handbag dangling from her shoulder. Her eyes were tired, though not as much as those of Doc Minus Two. "Al?" she inquired.

I nodded and got up to greet her. "Lili," she said. She shook my hand as if we were two corporate executives about to hammer out a deal. She did not smile but had a pleasant expression on her face.

"Wow," I said. "I never met a..." I looked around and saw no one within earshot but decided not to finish the sentence anyway. I had to practice being cautious. "Did Doc explain everything to you?"

"He did. He said you'll tell me how to get to the place, the ins and outs, and also give me practical information like are there any nosy neighbors, cop on the beat, where the pen drive is and where the valuables are."

I told her what I could. She seemed satisfied with the information. She reached inside her handbag and took out a tablet PC. She turned it on and gave it to me. A microphone set was connected to it. "Open the web browser. I have the link pre-set for you. That'll show you my camera feed." She took out a black bandana with a small camera in its center and wore it around her head so that the device was positioned over her forehead. The link came to life and I could see myself in the browser. "When I'm there tonight, you'll be able to see what I see and talk to me so we're on the same page."

"Aren't you afraid someone else might be able to see this?"

"It's encrypted. It'll only work on my own tablet. And I expect it back when I'm done, together with my four hundred bucks."

"So what happens now?"

"I'll give you a call just before I start out, around 2 AM. Be somewhere where you can talk freely and where it's quiet, because I'll be whispering."

Now I had to kill more than twelve hours, and did not know how. I went to three different restaurants and ordered only an appetizer in each. I walked up and down Longfellow Bridge and Cambridge Street, and spent some time at Granary Burying Ground where John Hancock and Samuel Adams have their final resting place. As it turned dark I knew I had to find a place to spend the night and communicate with Lili, but could not go to a hotel without showing my ID. This seemed hopeless. I could not stand on a street corner and give instructions to a cat burglar. I was tired, too. Days of riding for hours on end in an open Jeep were taking their toll on me. I needed to find a solution and quick. Then I remembered I had Lili's tablet with me, and immediately I knew what I needed to do.

I opened the web browser and looked up escort services in the area. I called one up, also using the tablet. I was nervous as I had never done this before. The voice that greeted me was cheery, as if it were a flower shop I was calling — one of those madams who know how to make the nervous feel comfortable. After some negotiations in a trembling voice, she agreed to send Vicky, someone whose picture I saw online, for two hours, which was the minimum. It was to be two hundred dollars an hour. But I was not done. I said, "There's one other thing I hope you could help me with."

"We usually can," she replied in the same cheery voice.

"I need her to book the hotel room for me. I'll come up later."

Silence on the other side. She was expecting something else, more in line with the nature of her business. Her tone was a little firmer now, but only just. "The client books the hotel room, sir."

"I'll pay her upfront. I'll meet her outside the lobby and give her the money in advance. You won't have to trust me with a dime."

Silence again. "I don't know. If something happens in that hotel room afterwards, they'll go to her."

"Nothing will happen. She can take a picture of me and the room before she leaves if she wants to have proof."

I never thought that someone could sound both cheery and suspicious at the same time, but she managed it. "Why can't you book the room yourself?"

"My wife has a top-notch divorce layer, and they go through every hotel registry in town. I can't have my name in there."

A sigh of understanding, maybe even relief that there was nothing more sinister behind it. "All right, if you pay her upfront for everything, and you tack on a hundred dollars for the service, we can accommodate you."

As I was waiting for Vicky outside the hotel lobby, I thought about my dwindling stash. Just a few days ago I considered ten thousand dollars to be a lot of money. Now this sum did not seem to get me through a week. Doc Minus Two was an expensive person to hang around with. Sooner or later I would have to go into a bank again and make another withdrawal, this time from my 401K, and so leave a trace. I would have to ask Doc Minus Two if it wouldn't be too risky.

Vicky showed up on time. She was very nice, and betrayed neither surprise nor hesitation at my unique request. The madam must have explained it to her and removed any doubts she might have had. I gave her the money and she went inside and after ten minutes I saw her through the glass door walking energetically towards the elevators. She made a hand gesture. I walked in quickly and found her still waiting there as several guests were going past her and through an elevator door that had just slid open. She handed me the key card and followed me into the next elevator. I had a hotel room now without having to show my ID and did not need Vicky anymore. I wanted to be the gentleman from the books and movies and let her go without using her services, like Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. But I was no Holden Caulfield and she was no cheap prostitute, and I had already made it so far. I felt that I had earned it, and that furthermore, I needed it. No one had a right to take it away from me now, certainly not some twisted morality that existed only in my head as the reflection of the copious amounts of popular culture I was fed since a little boy.

She was very nice, even to novices like me who kept apologizing every five minutes for what they perceived they had done wrong or not done enough or not wanted done to them. She even kissed me on the cheek before she left. I let her go early. It was now ten. I had four hours of sleep ahead of me. It felt like years since I last had a nice shower in a clean bathroom, and so I took my time about it. Then I lay in a comfortable bed, which, after spending days in caves or tents, felt like heaven. Forget the wheel or the internal combustion engine or the computer; humanity's most important invention thus far was the soft mattress, period. You may not think it true when you wake up refreshed in the morning, but you would sure as hell agree with me at night when you're dead tired and looking for something soft to support you as you lay unconscious. I fell asleep immediately. The alarm clock buzzed at two as I had set it to, and I opened the web browser in the tablet. I was groggy with sleep but not unfocused.

I could already hear Lili. "Alright, do you get the camera feed?" She asked. She was speaking very quietly.

"Yes." I could see my apartment house in green and white. It was very bright. "Are you using infra red?" I asked.

"Of course." Then she approached the house carefully and went to the back of the parking lot, underneath my bedroom window. She stood right by the outside wall and put her arms on it. She was wearing suction cups on her hands. I assumed she had these on her feet, too. She climbed up slowly, quietly. It was not a long way. My apartment was on the second floor. She took out a glass cutter and cut a square in my window pane and then removed it with one of the suction cups. She reached inside and released the latch, and slid the window open. Now she was inside my bedroom. This seemed too easy. I thought it must have been insulting for her, who was used to diffusing sophisticated alarm systems in much larger homes. My apartment had no protection because no one in his right mind would break into it. It is a sad situation, I thought, when you not only need to pay someone to break into your own place, but feel guilty about putting them through this.

I guided her towards the pen drive. It was in a desk drawer, but I could not remember which one, and made Lili open all six. I was embarrassed by the things she saw coming out of them; the moldy piece of cheese I forgot there six months ago and the gigantic green pencil I still kept from my sixth birthday, and the award for coming in third in a bowling competition at my old workplace. Lili said nothing. Once she found the pen drive she continued into the living room. There was an old twenty five inch TV and a cheap DVD player in there. She said, "Are these your valuables?"

"I'm newly separated."

"I'd have to pay someone to take these off my hands. I expected a laptop at least."

"I don't have any. I have a PC in the corner if you want, but it's eight years old. It used to belong to my son. I only use it to surf the internet."

"Nothing else?"

"No. Wait, are you into coin collections? I have one that my father left me. I never liked it much but didn't dare to throw it away. It's in the closet where the towels are."

She went to the closet and eyed the collection. A dozen coins sitting in a flat velvet box. I have not opened this box in decades; the sight was almost new to me. "These aren't even gold," she said.

"Silver."

She sighed. "Your father called that a collection? All right, I'll take those; they might bring in a hundred bucks or so. But Minus Two said I needed to take more out of the apartment in case I'm being watched."

"He told you about being watched?"

"Of course. He's honest. That's why I still work with him after all these years."

Now I felt guilty that I did not say anything to her myself, but she did not make a big deal out of it. "Now, what would you like me to take?" she said in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Take the DVD player and the PC screen. They're easy to carry."

"Sounds like a plan. But since your valuables are worthless, you'd need to sweeten the pot, honey. Six hundred instead of four. And I'm giving you a price, believe you me. I'm used to cleaning out five thou or more in one night."

"All right. I reckon burglars need to eat, too."

"Before I go I need to check for surveillance equipment. Minus Two's orders."

"Whatever you have to do."

"I don't need you for this. I'll be turning the camera off now."

"When will I see you?"

"You won't. I'll bring the stuff over to Minus Two. You make sure you bring him my tablet."

"So long," I said. She did not answer, and in the next moment I lost sound and visual. I went back to bed. I felt good, not because Lili retrieved my pen drive, but because for once I would be able to sleep late. That son of a bitch did not know where I was and would not be able to wake me up. I pulled the blanket over my shoulders and in a moment I was fast asleep.

But four and a half hours later, at seven, there was a knock on the door. Of course it was him and of course the tablet's GPS let him know where I was because I forgot to turn it off.

IX.

Doc Minus Two came in with his laptop, and did not say hello and did not say good morning. He ignored me and went straight for a little desk that stood next to the bed and immediately proceeded to power on the laptop as if this was his office and I was a visitor. He seemed as disheveled as always, and I wondered where he had spent the night. But it was not important enough to risk his wrath at my poking my nose into his affairs. He reciprocated by not asking me how I got the room and whether or not I showed anyone my ID. I did not know if this was because he already knew the answer or because he trusted me to have taken the right precautions. The first thing that came out of his mouth was, "You were an archeologist before you became a bum, is that right?"

"Yes."

"Then maybe you can recognize this." He turned the laptop screen towards me. On it was a map of a cave system, a scanned image of a black and white document. I recognized the familiar shape instantly.

"It's the Labyrinth of Messara in Crete," I said. "Near Gortyn."

"Very good. I figured it out for myself just from the Minotaur reference. I googled 'Minotaur' and 'cave', and came up with it."

"Was this map on the pen drive?"

"This map was all there was on the pen drive."

"That's it? A stupid map?"

"Yes. A stupid, well-known map you can easily find online."

I sat down on the bed. "But that makes no sense. Why send it in such a clandestine way, and with a tracking device, no less?"

"My thoughts exactly. And they encrypted it, too."

I pointed at the screen. "This map was encrypted? That's ridiculous. Why encrypt a nineteenth century map that's freely available online?"

He nodded. "No doubt it is odd. I ran it through some decryption apps before I was able to open it. Not a very strong code. I'm thinking it may be double encrypted: lets you easily get to this map so you think there's nothing more to it, but in reality it requires further encryption to get to the real message. I don't know how to approach it yet to be honest with you. I'd have to consult with some people."

I went over to the desk and put my nose to the laptop screen and studied the map closely. I have seen this labyrinth map many times, mostly in textbooks I remembered from college. It even hung on one of the walls in the institution I used to work for. Anyone who studies Greek mythology has heard of it, and many laypeople, too. There was nothing special about it.

Doc Minus Two interrupted my train of thought. "Tell me the story of the Minotaur."

I suspected that he was familiar with the story, but that he hoped it would help both of us think and so I did as requested. "Poseidon, God of the Sea, decided to punish the king of Crete, one Minos, for not sacrificing a white bull he'd sent him for that purpose. And so Poseidon went and made Minos' wife fall in love with the bull. Their love child was the Minotaur, with the head of a bull and the body of a man. Not entirely pleased with the Minotaur's appearance and with his habit of eating people, Minos had him imprisoned in a massive labyrinth, out of which he could not escape."

Doc Minus Two pointed at the map on the screen. "This one."

"That depends on who you ask. But yes, many people associate this labyrinth with the story. Now, to feed the Minotaur, King Minos would send the occasional unfortunate into the labyrinth — usually Athenians. These people would get lost, fail to find their way out, and eventually meet their hungry host."

"That must have pissed off some people because they sent someone named Theseus to kill the Minotaur," he said.

"Ah, so you know the story. Yes. Theseus was lucky in one thing at least: King Minos' daughter fell in love with him. Not wanting him to end up like the other victims, she gave him a ball of thread to help him find his way back out of the labyrinth. He was of course successful, as are most ancient Greek heroes, and he killed the Minotaur. But it was also tragic, like most ancient Greek myths, because on the way back home Theseus forgot to put up a white sail, sign of a successful mission. His father, not seeing the sail, assumed he died and killed himself."

Doc Minus Two kept staring at the map. "Good story. Nice map. But why encrypt it? Why try to prevent it from falling into anyone's hands? I can't see the perps going to the trouble of killing sixty six people — and one more to go — just to make sure no one who got this map by mistake lived to tell about it. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the pen drive means nothing; just a coincidence. A distraction."

"And the tracking device?"

"Maybe I was wrong about that, too. Maybe it was an old, recycled envelope that someone patched once too many times."

"You said you'll check if the file is double encrypted."

He waved a disparaging arm. "It's a possibility, but my gut tells me it would be a waste of time." For the first time since I've met him he seemed dejected.

I shook my head. "No. If this is just a map of the labyrinth same as you can find online, why encrypt it at all? Even the weak code you cracked? And the Minotaur? The man who attacked Peterson mentioned the name. This cannot be a coincidence."

"I don't have an answer to that." He got up and went over to the window and drew the curtains open, and now the room was bathed in the morning sun and it turned everything near the window white: the bed and a chair and the carpet.

Then something strange caught my eye as I peered at the laptop again, and I hurried to take Doc's place at the desk. I've seen this map a thousand times, but it never looked like the image that stared at me from the screen. At first I thought it might have been the color, the density, or the orientation, but there was something else. The original map had a system of tunnels roughly going in a closed loop, like a deformed circle, and five offshoots of various sizes sticking out from it, comprising of corridors and rooms. The map from the pen drive had another such offshoot. An extra corridor, so small it was barely visible. This did not seem right. I searched for the map online and found it to be exactly as I remembered it, without the additional section.

"Not the same map!" I called out to Doc Minus Two. "This map is different. Look." I showed him the difference.

"It's not the same map," he agreed. "You're right. Who would have thought that something good would come out of hanging out with an archeologist?" There was enthusiasm in him now, though hardly noticeable unless you knew him well. He searched for the map online himself and found it again and again in many versions. In all of them there were just five offshoots protruding out of the deformed circle. Now he was a happy man. There was no smile on his face but I could tell because he began to rub his chin vigorously. "This map, if genuine, may be worth a whole lot more than I thought."

"Tell me about it," I said excitedly. It is extremely rare that something as fixed in historical records and as well known to archeologists as this ancient labyrinth can still surprise us. "This could be the archeological discovery of the year." I began to pace up and down the room.

"Someone's made a discovery," Doc Minus Two said. "Maybe something big."

"A whole new section of the Minotaur's labyrinth."

"Not just an empty section. There must be something in there if they took the trouble to encrypt this map. And yet this person, rather than share the find with the world and become the most famous archeologist since Howard Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamon, decides to keep it to himself and then sends it to someone else taking great care that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands."

I was surprised that he had heard of Howard Carter, but had bigger fish to fry. "So, you no longer think it's double encrypted?"

"No, this map already contains the secret information — the new corridor — and this is a good enough reason to send it in such a secretive way. Now everything begins to fall into place."

I took a closer look at the map. The new, sixth section started on the east side of the cave, north of the entrance. It was not big. I assumed it was a few hundred feet in length. It was shaped like a lowercase a, curled back into itself. "Think about it," I said. "A section of the Cretan Labyrinth that has not yet been explored. A corridor that has not been damaged by any explosion or vandals or tourists."

"Explosion?"

"Yes. During World War II the German army used parts of the labyrinth to store ammunition. When they evacuated they blew up some of it, though not all. There's lots of ammunition still strewn about the place. There's lots of cave ins, too — some having occurred even before the explosions. It's a very dangerous place to go into. Many visitors died. This is why it's been closed to the public for years."

Doc Minus Two pointed to the new a-corridor. "Not to all of them, apparently. Someone must have gained access to discover this."

"Illegally. And I still don't understand why they chose to hide a discovery like this. No matter what's in there, if I was the one who found it, I'd go around the globe giving lectures. I'd write books. I'd make TV documentaries."

"You're thinking like an archeologist now. What if the person who found it was not an archeologist?"

I sat on the bed again. "What would a layperson do with some stuffy corridors, even if there's an important archeological find in them? They'd go tell a local TV station, that's all."

He shook his head. "Suppose whatever is in there has more than just archeological value? Suppose there is something in that corridor that appeals to the common thief? Not only valuable to science but easily convertible to cash?"

"What could that be?"

"I don't know: gold; diamonds; ancient relics that are difficult to remove from the cave; the fucking body of the Minotaur himself. Who knows? It was enough for someone to want to kill you and sixty six of your buddies."

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. In my professional excitement I forgot about the mess I was in. "You don't think that was the reason?"

"I'm beginning to believe that it was." He went over to the complimentary coffee set and made himself a cup and did not ask if I wanted one, and instead remarked that the coffee was weak and that only coffee that was strong enough to float an iron wedge was worth drinking. The aroma filled the room nonetheless, and reminded me that I still did not have breakfast. "Someone's made the discovery of the decade," he said. "Whatever is in that new section is far too valuable to him or her to share with the rest of the world. But the perp needed to bring at least one more person into the secret. Maybe someone who could evaluate the thing or who offered to buy it or who is to help remove it. The perp was too cautious to send this over the internet, and so he used the Post Office, except that he attached a tracking device to make sure it got to its intended destination. But he got the box number wrong and the envelope landed in your son's mailbox, which the perp didn't realize until it was too late. Next, he saw the package in his tracking device get on a flight to Dallas it shouldn't have been on, and the person who was supposed to receive it didn't receive it. Of course he must have sent that person another scan of the map, but now he knew that there was someone else out there who might recognize this fairly well-known map and realize that something about it wasn't right. That was too dangerous for them to ignore. They had to make sure that whoever had the map was eliminated."

"Why not just go to the owner of the box? Kill one, not sixty seven."

"Because the perp's made a typo in the box number, remember? They had no way of knowing in which box the envelope landed."

"They could have cross-checked the names of all box owners in that branch against the passengers on that flight. There should be only one name who both owns a box there and was on the flight: me."

"That is correct, and I believe this is exactly what they did. Except that in this case it didn't work because neither your name nor your son's is on that box."

"How did you know that? I didn't even think about it but you're right. It was a box I had there for twenty years, since the days I ran a small — and not very successful — real estate agency with a partner. The box is on his name."

"What happened to him?"

"Died in a car accident years ago."

He twisted his mouth. "No wonder they were at a dead end. The only clue they had was that someone who owned a mail box in that branch was also on that flight, but they couldn't figure out who. At this point the choice was to kill all mailbox owners or all passengers on that flight, and there are far more of the former. Going after the passengers was the most logical thing to do."

"But how did you know my name wasn't on the box?"

"Simple. You're alive."

I snickered. "That makes sense. Go on. What happened next?"

"Next, they found the discarded envelope in the trash at the airport. Maybe already at the dump. Either way, the pen drive was not there. Now they really panicked: someone was indeed interested in their little secret."

"And the solution was sixty seven separate murders."

He nodded. "Like I said it seemed the most logical solution given the information they had. It isn't an easy decision to make, but they must have had the budget for it, and the right level of fear. Money and fear, that's all it takes to ruin someone else's day."

I got up and went to the laptop and pointed to the a-corridor again. "And all that for this? What the hell can it be that's worth sixty seven lives? We must go see it."

He looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time. "You, of all people, want to go there?"

"Sure." I tapped on the screen excitedly. "Is that so hard to understand? I'm an archeologist. This, whatever it is, may be the biggest archeological discovery in decades. I want to see it. I want to have my name tied to it."

He nodded in mock appreciation. "I gotta hand it to you, Al, you finally managed to surprise me. I always thought you a coward. Now I see that you're a coward with delusions of grandeur. But much as I'd like to see you try, I have to strongly advise against it. The very reason they've killed all these people is because they fear that one of them has this map and is going to check out the new discovery. You better believe someone is guarding that cave. If you make it into it at all, you'd never see the light of day again."

"I don't care." I don't know where I had gathered the courage to say it. As if something foreign that had been lurking inside my mind all these years was finally let loose. I thumped on the desk. "All my miserable life I've never done anything that deserved the attention of even a school newspaper. I'm always looking at fossils someone else has dug out of the ground and trying to assess their age, or writing papers attacking someone else's research. Now's my chance to cut a figure in this world. I will never have an opportunity like this again."

"But you won't be allowed to pull it off, kid. So what's the point?"
Again he was right, but this time I desperately needed him to be wrong. He sensed that and said, "Once we crack this and put the perps behind bars you'd be free to go there and explore. Let's concentrate on catching them first."

I did not like that plan. "It may be too late then. More people would know about it." But I decided not to pursue the matter for now. Only for now, mind you, as I was not about to wait too long with this. If he did not want to go with me, I could always get the FBI involved. They would not have a problem going in there If I told them about the a-corridor. Even if I could not join them, at least I would find out what was in there. Maybe even have my name mentioned in connection with it. Finding a good job would be an easy task then. They'll be lining up at my doorstep. I determined to tell K about the labyrinth as soon as possible.

An envelope slid under the door. I startled, but it was only the hotel invoice. I had the room for a couple of hours more before checkout, before having to go back to that dirty, spartan, outdoorsy world of Doc Minus Two, with an open Jeep and every trace of comfort banished far away. He did not seem to miss comfort, Doc. He never even tried the bed. "So what do we do now?" I asked. "Now that we have the answer but still won't go to Crete?"

"I went through police files on the murder cases yesterday. All of them. Most won't teach us anything. But there's one murder I want to take a closer look at."

"What's so different about it?"

"Yesterday, the police arrested a suspect."

X.

The murder victim was one Dominique Lasbrant. He was shot once in the forehead while sitting in his car after leaving a bar near his Tampa home. This happened eighteen months ago, about six months after the flight. He was a young man in his early twenties, unmarried, and had no police record. His family did not take the news well. Lasbrant's mother attempted suicide a month later as a result, and was hospitalized for three weeks. His father quit his job to dedicate himself to caring for her. A few weeks ago, the police found out that Lasbrant had an affair with a married woman, and that her husband had learned about it. The husband, name of Robert Patrick, could not come up with a convincing alibi for the night of the murder, and so they arrested him.

"Poor guy," I remarked to Doc Minus Two. We met at the Tampa bus station where he had come to pick me up. I had refused to sit in that open Jeep all the way from Boston to Florida, and took the bus instead.

"Yes he is."

"Can't we do something for him? Tell the police the whole story so they understand what's behind the murders?"

He waited for me to climb into the Jeep, this time allowing for both my legs to come on board before taking off. "Do you really think the police is going to drop the charges just because some bozo tells them a fantastic story about an organization that's out to get everyone who was on board a flight from two years ago? And even suppose they did — how would you keep your name out of this? Inside of twenty four hours everyone would know you're here. What if the cops detain you at the request of the FBI? You'd be a sitting duck."

"You're right, we can't get involved. But the FBI can. Let me tell K about this. The FBI isn't some bozo. The police would listen to them."

"The FBI won't intervene until they catch the perp. They'll be watching Patrick's trial from the sidelines and do nothing. For the last time, Al: no matter how much they sweet-talked you, the FBI is not your devoted assistant. You're not the center of their world. Deal with it."

"What do you suggest we do?"

"I want to talk to the suspect. He's out on bail. Can't leave the house. This would make it easy to find him."

"Wait a minute. You don't seriously believe Patrick's done it?"

Doc Minus Two took out a half a cigar and put it in his mouth and lit it up as he was driving. I wondered if he had ever smoked a new cigar or was it by design that he always obtained them pre smoked. "This is where it gets interesting," he said. "Of course it's ludicrous to think that the perp would use a hit man that can be linked to the victim as this suspect is. But there is strong evidence pointing to his guilt. They found gunpowder residue on his jacket — a jacket very similar to one an eyewitness has described. They also found a yellow mask in his home that this eyewitness said he also saw. If that's not enough, someone testified that Patrick tried to have him get rid of a gun after the murder. He also has no alibi as I told you already, and he most certainly had a motive."

"So you think maybe it was a coincidence, then? That Lasbrant was murdered by Patrick before they could get to him?"

"It's a possibility. Or maybe he really didn't do it, which means that someone is trying hard to get a conviction to hide something. If this is the case, it means that someone on the Police force was on the right track and the perps, through their connections, are trying to thwart the investigation. It's a little suspicious to me that it took eighteen months for the cops to even begin to investigate Patrick's involvement. And this is why I want to talk to him. I will know if he's done it or not. I can read people."

Robert Patrick's home was a large, well kept colonial. Someone was doing the grounds maintenance; there was no trace of weed in the bright-hued lawn. He opened the door himself. He was alone in the big house. His wife had left him six months ago, with yet another man. She sued for divorce. The only reason he could still hold on to the house, Doc told me, was that it was underwater: he owed more on it than it was worth, and so she wanted nothing to do with it.

Patrick looked tired. He was unshaven, and wore old boxer shorts and a faded red T shirt. Doc Minus Two flashed his badge. "We're with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. I'm agent Salmond."

I was faster than him this time. "And I'm agent Boris." I think it annoyed him.

Patrick seemed surprised. "The ATF? Why do you guys need to get involved?"

"Illegal gun possession," Doc Minus Two replied. "This is not an official investigation. None of this will be used against you in court if you cooperate. We're mainly interested in a possible connection to illegal gun rings."

Patrick nodded his understanding and led us to a single sofa that stood in an oversized living room. The only object in the room besides the sofa was a small TV that lay directly on the carpeted floor. The bare walls revealed dust-free rectangles where paintings had been removed not long ago. Patrick was kind enough to offer us coffee. I declined; Doc Minus Two said he would have some, and to make it strong. Patrick disappeared into the kitchen. When he came back, he put a blue cup on the floor in front of Doc Minus Two. The cup seemed to have been bought in a cheap souvenir shop in Tampa itself, and I wondered whether his ex wife had left him anything at all if he had to resort to using souvenirs as dishes. He sat down on the floor with a can of beer and drew his knees to his chest. Now I noticed for the first time that he wore an ankle monitor. "So," he started, "Just like them, you also believe that I bought an illegal gun. You guys already decided I'm guilty. What's the point in me talking to you?"

Doc Minus Two shook his head. "Not at all. What you have to say carries a lot of weight with us. Forget what you told the police. We want to know what you think."

Patrick's tone was derisive. "What I think? I think the world has gone crazy, that's what I think. My wife is a serial adulteress; she took with her everything that was not bolted to the floor and my entire bank account; and if this is not enough, now they say I killed one of her back-door men."

"Did you?"

He threw his arms open in desperation. "If I killed that Lasbrant guy, then why not the man she ran off with a few months ago? Why not the two or three she had before Lasbrant? What makes him so special?"

"What did the police say to that?"

He guffawed. "They say I snapped. That everyone has a breaking point and that I reached mine. But that's silly: if I snapped, then why kill him and not her? I never laid a finger on her."

"The police report states domestic abuse."

"How?!" he shrieked. "Because she felt she was yelled at too much? Even she never claimed that I beat her, only that I pushed her out of my way in anger once, and that I pulled her by the arm a couple of times. And none of that around the time of the murder."

"And the gun?"

He wagged a finger. "You didn't waste too much time getting to that, ATF man. I don't own a gun. I never owned a gun. The police has no proof of illegal gun possession except for that guy they produced that says I tried to have him dispose of the weapon after the murder. And even he says he didn't see any actual gun, because, he says, he refused to do it. I only met him a couple of times in my life; he is an employee of my mechanic's. He says I recognized him in the street and approached him about this." He worked himself into an exasperated state now. "Do I look so stupid that, after I used a gun to murder someone, I'd just go and hand it over to someone I barely know to dispose of? Put my fate in the hands of a stranger? Do I really look that stupid? If I had a hot gun like that, I'd have disposed of it myself; melt it or toss it in the ocean or something. Wouldn't you?"

Doc Minus Two nodded his head slowly, never taking his eyes off Patrick's. "And the traces of gunpowder on your jacket?"

"You better ask Beth about that."

"Your ex?"

"Yes. She used to lend my stuff out to her boyfriends. Without my permission, of course. I don't know where they wore it to; went to a shooting range or hunting or whatever. Let me tell you again, I'm not stupid. Even if I were to do something like this in the heat of the moment, I'd know how to dispose of evidence. An hour after I shot anyone, everything I wore would be tossed away. The case the police is trying to build hinges on me being a complete moron. I'm a database administrator, for fuck's sake." He pointed at his head. "I work with my brain. I wouldn't have made such stupid mistakes."

"And the mask they found in your house?"

He pointed an accusing finger at Doc Minus Two. "That — that's was the part where someone got creative. One of your law enforcement buddies. They knew they don't have much to go on, so they went and planted something. Would I keep something like that around after I used it for a murder?"

"So, not yours?"

"No! And there were no fingerprints on it, either."

"Fingerprints don't survive on wool."

Patrick leaned back against the wall. "So how can anyone be sure it's mine? What do you want from me? I had nothing to do with this I tell you."

"The police report says you exchanged words with Dominique Lasbrant a few days before the murder. Angry words."

He spoke softly now, like a broken man would who had lost all hope. "I exchanged words with all of her lovers. One time it even came to blows, but not with Lasbrant."

"What did you tell him? Stay away from my wife or else? That kind of thing?"

"No. I said if he wanted her he should at least have the decency to pay for the entertainment. She used to put the restaurants and hotels on our joint credit card. I had to pay for it. Do you know how it feels when you have to pay for it? Your wife is cheating on you and you have to pay for it? Pay for the room they screwed in and for the wining and dining? Shouldn't the man take care of that, at least? No self respect. This sums up all the men she's been going out with: no self respect."

"What did he say?"

"He denied he was seeing her. They all do. But I had the phone bill with me and showed him the number she called, his phone number. She called it a hundred times on that bill alone. Guess who had to pay for that, too? And that jerk had the nerve to say she only called him about a weight set he was selling. A hundred times? Ever heard such bullshit? She admitted the affair later to me and to the police, of course." He fell silent for a moment, then said, "I'm tired. I'm very tired."

Doc Minus Two got up and touched him on his shoulder. "We won't trouble you anymore. I think we got what we needed."

Patrick burst into tears. Doc Minus Two turned around and walked towards the door. I felt I had to say something, even if it would not sound professional coming from an ATF agent. "I believe you."

He kept on sobbing and did not respond. I lingered another moment, then turned and followed Doc Minus Two out the door. I closed it after me. I do not think Patrick bothered to lock it after we left.

We sat in the Jeep. "Poor guy," I said. "That's a real tragedy. Those people ruined so many lives; not just the sixty six they've killed."

"That they did," he replied dryly. "But not this man's."

"How do you mean?"

"He did it."

I turned to him with a swift motion, almost jumping out of my seat. "How can you say that? You were there with me. You heard him."

"I heard him. I heard him all too well. He was lying like a drunk on a park bench."

"This makes no sense. Did he really strike you as stupid as that, to keep the mask and the jacket, to approach a stranger about disposing of a hot gun? And why would he kill only Lasbrant and not his wife and the other men?"

"No, he didn't strike me as stupid. Granted, he's a smart guy. He's someone who'd exercise good judgment. But let me ask you, all those people who get into accidents driving drunk, do they all lack judgment? No, they have good judgment, but only when sober. Robert Patrick may be of sound mind when he is himself, but he was not himself that night when he shot Lasbrant."

"I still don't get it."

"Lasbrant was shot outside a bar. Both men met there, so that means Patrick was likely drunk. Also, while his wife cheated on him with other men before, in Lasbrant's case the cheating was only part of the humiliation. Lasbrant had Patrick's wife pay for everything, which meant Patrick had to foot the bill. The police report says it came to tens of thousands of dollars." He reached inside his pocket but could not find a cigar and then became visibly annoyed and started speaking faster. "So he went to talk to Lasbrant, but that son of a bitch told Patrick he wasn't going to stop and that if Patrick had a problem with that, he should take it with his wife. From everything I gathered, not a nice guy, Lasbrant. Now Patrick flew off the handle and he went home and got a gun he must have bought in the black market long before that day, and he put a mask on and went back to the bar and shot Lasbrant as he was leaving. But a person doing this is not himself. Unless you're born a homicidal maniac, you're never yourself when you do something like this. He was in shock. He was fully under the control of his own rage, and he was drunk, too, let's not forget. That means he did not think straight. He was even careless enough to ask his mechanic's assistant — a pretty shady character if the police report is to be believed — to dispose of the gun for him. But the next morning he got a grip and decided to destroy it himself. At that point he was sober enough to try and hide some of the damning evidence, but may not have attached too much importance to his jacket — maybe even confused it with another jacket he believed he was wearing the night before — and completely forgot about the mask, which he had shoved in a drawer when he came back home from the murder."

"That's just a theory."

"That it may be, but the traces they found on his jacket aren't just any gunpowder; it is the same exact type of gunpowder used in the crime. They found lots of it on the victim; he was shot at point blank. Also, the man we just talked to sounds guilty as hell. Defensive, touchy, and talks just enough to allow us to know what went through his head when he pulled the trigger: 'Do you know how it feels when you have to pay for it?' He did it alright."

I scratched my head. "But if he did it, that means they did not. This is the one passenger they didn't get."

"Didn't have to. But it would still be very interesting to talk to the parents. To the father, at least. The mother is in no condition to talk about her son."

I felt bad about disturbing a man who had lost a son and went through an attempted suicide by his wife. It seemed to me that he had suffered enough. "What do you expect to get out of the father?"

He looked away from me as he spoke, as if afraid that I would break his concentration were our eyes to meet. "I have a hunch. It may be nothing but it may also be a major breakthrough. I need to talk to him. You don't have to come."

"I'd like to."

"I'd rather you didn't," he said harshly. "With this person, I want it to be a one on one. It's easier to reveal your soul to one person."

I laughed. "What do you know about revealing your soul? I don't know the first thing about you."

He sighed. "To be successful in my profession, you must know how to make other people reveal their soul to you, not the other way around. Besides, there is not much to know about me."

"Oh, I disagree. You're an interesting case. An army doctor, living on the outskirts of society, only a step closer to civilization than Nat. I bet there's a lot to know about you. Have you ever been married?"

"I'm still married."

My tone was skeptical. "Where is she? You live alone."

"Better this way. We haven't had a fight in years."

"Do you ever talk?"

"We do."

"When did you last see her in person?"

"Yesterday, on the way here."

"You're shitting me."

He shook his head, then took out a paper napkin from one of his pockets and began to polish the Jeep's speedometer. It was not something he would normally do, and so I knew that this topic of conversation made him uncomfortable. I liked it. "Just to make sure," I said. "It's a human wife we're talking about here, not a bear or an inflatable doll?"

"More human than you, this much I can tell you."

"I don't believe you. Can I meet her someday you think?"

He put the dirty napkin back in his pocket and started the Jeep. I knew I had milked it as far as it could go, and so changed the subject. "How did you lose your fingers?"

"In the old days I used to physically shut up idiots with my bare hands. One of them had sharp teeth. Since then I kicked the habit, but if you push me I'll pick it up again."

That was my queue to shut up. We drove on for a few more minutes and then he dropped me off at a movie theater so he could go talk to the old man alone. "I'll return in three hours," he said. "Make sure you're waiting for me right here. I don't have time to go looking for you."

It took him exactly three hours to come back. I waited the last half hour of these in the parking lot. The weather was nice, not cold like in Boston. I had happily left my parka in the Jeep and now rolled up my shirt sleeves. I was mulling over what to tell K. I wanted to go to Crete. I had to go to Crete. I had to convince her to help me. It was important to find out who was after me, but even more so to know what they were protecting in that cave. By the time Doc's Jeep pulled next to me my mind was made up. I planned to talk to him about it right away. "Listen," I wanted to say, and then take over the conversation and not let go until I had gotten what I wanted out of it. But he seemed to be somewhere else, deprived of his usual focus, and so I only said, "What happened?"

"I talked to the old man like I planned."

"And?"

"He also thinks it's Robert Patrick. Patrick threatened his son, he says. He admits his son was no angel, that he mooched off Patrick's wife and enjoyed seeing Patrick lose it when he told him he wouldn't stop. Lasbrant never worked a day in his life and never planned to. Saw himself as a playboy. His father had a lot of arguments with him, even threatened to kick him out of the house. Only the mother kept him from doing it. She lived in denial he says."

"So Patrick did do it. But you already knew that. Why do you look so dumbfounded?"

Doc Minus Two turned off the engine just as I was climbing into the Jeep. "I expected to confirm that. What I was more surprised to find out was that Dominique Lasbrant was never on that flight."

"That doesn't make any sense. He was on the list."

He nodded. "That he was. But the old man said he never flew. Anywhere. Ever."

"Maybe he doesn't know about it?"

"He lived with them the entire time. That would be hard for Lasbrant to hide. Besides, it sounded like he suffered from it and kept planning a vacation with Patrick's wife. On Patrick's dime, of course. He was excited about it, too; kept talking about looking forward to his first time on a plane."

"That is very strange."

"That it is. Those killers of yours, they've been so thorough so far. How could they make a colossal mistake like this?"

"Suppose we have the wrong Dominique Lasbrant?"

"That's what I thought at first, but after I left there I ran a search. There is no other Dominique Lasbrant. Not in the US, and not anywhere else I could find."

"Maybe it was a typo on the list?"

"Could be, but I doubt it. These things are computerized."

"How can this be then?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. We have someone who was on the list who wasn't on the flight and who was murdered by someone else and not our perps. Something here isn't right. I've been blind. I thought victims can't teach us much but maybe I was wrong. I need to talk to a couple more."

I let out a sigh. "Look, the key is not here, not in yet another murder scene. The key is in Crete, in the Labyrinth of Messara." I pointed to where I thought east lay. "That's what they're trying to protect. That's why they're killing all these people."

"Don't discount proper investigation methodology. Motive is only a part of this. I want to learn about their M.O., about why they make mistakes. Why they put people on the list who were not on the flight. There's something strange going on here, stranger even than it seemed when we first started."

"I'm not coming with you," I said defiantly. "I don't learn anything from this, I only pity these people we talk to and it reminds me of the danger I'm in myself." His expression did not change. I did not want to be disrespectful; there was something about Doc Minus Two that discouraged that. I changed my tone and tried to sound reasonable. "Look, I'm an archeologist. If I can be of any help at all, it would be with the labyrinth. I'm just a burden to you when we go to investigate murder scenes and interview family members. I know you agree with me on this."

He nodded slowly. I did not know if this was to signal his agreement or to indicate that he had despaired of me. He reached an arm to the back of the Jeep and grabbed a small bag and put it on his lap and took out a small envelope. He handed it to me. I opened the envelope carefully. Inside was a passport with a picture that looked a lot like me but was not mine. The name on the passport was Ben Durand. I gave him a quizzical look. "A fake passport?"

"A real passport of someone who looks like you."

"I appreciate the effort, but what if this gentleman himself decides to travel and then they'd realize he has two passports?"

"There's only the one, and he isn't likely to travel any time soon. He's in a mental institution. This is also why he doesn't have a driver's license. You can get one with this passport, though, if you feel like taking a road and written test."

"I don't need a driver's license. A passport is good enough. Why do you give me this?"

"You can't use your own ID and are too much of a wuss to be a real drifter. You'll need this."

"Who gave it to you?"

He sighed. "What difference does it make? I have connections. I asked them to get something like this for me, and send it to a motel in Tampa care of my name. Then I picked it up and now I'm giving it to you. Satisfied?"

"Thank you," I said. I put the passport in my pocket. Now, at least, I could go back to sleeping in hotels like a human being. The thought made me happy. He was right: I was not cut out for the kind of life he and Nat were living. Those two did not need a form of identification because they barely had any identity within the modern state at all.

"Thank me by handing me fifteen hundred dollars. It wasn't free. And I need another payment from you, for last week."

My shoulders drooped. "I have to take out more money."

"That's fine, you can go into a bank, so long as this is your final stop in this state. Just promise me you'll go straight to Tennessee from here. Go to Nat; I'll come get you when I'm done. It'll take me two or three days at the most."

I withdrew fifteen thousand dollars more. This time the money had to come out of my 401K. There was not much there but I did not have a choice. Besides, if Doc succeeded, I would have many years to close the gap in my retirement plan. If he failed, I would not need a retirement plan. I paid him what I owed him and he dropped me off at a train station. Four trains and three days later, I was again with Nat and Makwa. But now, with the passport, I knew I could go to the Labyrinth Cave any time I wanted. I knew also that I would not be able to resist the temptation for long.

XI.

I was more confident now than I had been when I first arrived in Tennessee, but also restless. I spent the next morning going with Nat on one of his treasure hunts. It was not a great success. We came back with a plastic water canteen and a box of condoms. Nat tried to offer me half the loot. I politely declined.

I wanted to check my e-mail, but with Doc Minus Two away I did not have access to the internet. I decided to risk it and went to the public library in Knoxville. They had workstations I could use, and I logged in to my account from one of them. There was no e-mail from K. Back in Tampa I had made up my mind to tell her about the Labyrinth and the new a-corridor, and now I followed through on it. I told her everything, from the way my son found the envelope to Doc's theories.

I sent the e-mail and then there was nothing more to do. I sat in the library and pondered my next steps. I wanted to know where Doc Minus Two was and how the investigation was coming along, but he never gave me a phone number or an e-mail address to contact him. There was nothing to do but wait, and I hated waiting when my life was hanging in the balance. Maybe it was a mistake to leave him alone. What if instead of the three days he promised he would take two weeks to complete his investigations? I would rot.

I had one consolation. With the false passport he had given me, I did not need to spend the nights in a cave with a black bear anymore. I could walk into any hotel I liked and check in. I did just that, choosing a picturesque Gatlinburg motel. I felt almost as if I had gotten my life back, which was ironic as it was someone else's ID that had made it possible. I took Ben Durand's passport out of my pocket and studied it closely while lying on the bed in my clean motel room. I thought again about travelling internationally. Even if they went through the name of every passenger to Crete, a Mr. Ben Durand would not attract much attention. I could go today if I wished to. But I wanted to wait for Doc Minus Two to come back first; give him a chance to come with me.

The next morning I had a good breakfast, and also the time to finish it slowly, like a human being. Not having Doc around had many advantages. I savored the toasted bagel with cream cheese and the hushpuppy and the three cups of coffee I downed. It was a long hour before I got up from the table. Then I rested in my room for a while, watching TV. Comfort made it easy to delude myself into feeling I had no care in the world. Around six in the afternoon I decided to take a taxi and check on Doc Minus Two's cabin to see if he was already back.

The old cabin looked exactly as it did when I left it over a week ago, with one exception: the front door was ajar. I felt a sense of alarm. Doc would never leave his door this way. Something did not feel right. I did not enter, and instead went around the side to the back of the cabin. The backyard was dirty and filled with junk from the fifties and sixties. There were old washing machines lying there and tires and even an entire Chevy Impala. All of it was rusty. The first window that overlooked the backyard — one of two — was more of a showcase for smudges and dust than a functional window. It was nearly impossible to peer inside through it, but I managed to find a dirt-free spot. The room I was looking into was dark and empty. It was not one of the rooms I've been to when I first visited Doc Minus Two in this house. Possibly a bedroom. I moved along the wall cautiously and then tried the second window. That was the other bedroom. All it had was a desk, yellow wallpaper, and a simple queen bed without a mattress. I listened in but could not hear anyone. Cautiously I returned to the front of the cabin and looked in from there at the living room. It seemed empty. I stepped inside the cabin slowly. The living room — if a living room it could be called — was not the same as when I was last there. The wooden table was lying on the floor upside down. The kitchenette behind it was in disarray, with pots and pans all over the place, mixed in with shards from broken plates. Sheets of paper from the shelf next to the table were strewn about the floor. I continued silently to the back of the house. The bedrooms also showed signs of someone having been through them. Then I remembered the cat. He was gone. The cabin did not feel safe. I went back to the door and walked out. I kept on walking until I was inside the wood, and then started running and kept at it for the better part of an hour. Exhausted and out of breath, I fell to the ground and remained there until evening.

All the confidence I had built up in the past few days evaporated. The killers had become an academic concept over that period, almost unreal. I was interested in who they were and what they were looking for in that cave, but no longer felt any real existential fear. That was Doc Minus Two's power, to make you feel safe. Now all of that was out the window, and I was more shaken than I had been the first time I came to see him.

I went back to the main road. It took me a while to find it in the dark. I followed it until I reached a strip mall and there I called a taxicab and had the driver bring me to the woods, near Nat's cave. I went to see if Nat was there. He wasn't. Makwa lifted her heavy head and glanced at me and then went back to sleep. I rolled open a sleeping bag and got in. I did not sleep well that night, no more than ten minutes at a time. In the morning, as expected, Nat was there, standing over me, holding on to his silent-rolling seeder. But there was a look of worry in his eyes. He sat down beside me. "Thank God you're alive," he said.

I sat up quickly. "What happened? Did they get him?"

He shook his head in a gesture that could have meant, 'I don't know,' or 'things are bad.'

"What happened, Nat? What happened in his cabin?"

"Someone was there who wasn't suppose' ta."

"I figured that part out for myself. I was there last evening. I saw the door open and walked in."

His eyes were scolding me. "That was a stupid thing to do. If they was still there you be dead."

"I thought so too. I don't know what got into me. Maybe I was hoping it was nothing serious." I got up and shook the sleeping bag off my feet.

He tilted his head to one side as if expecting something to drop out of his ear. "It's my fault anyway. I should of warned you but couldn't find you. You done took off."

"Warn me about what?"

Now he tilted his head to the other side, and I realized that he was trying to ease a stiff neck. "I got a text message from him when you went into town. It said, DON'T GO NEAR MY HOUSE. "

"Doc texted that? Is he alright?"

"I ain't heard nothin' from him afterwards."

"Do you know if he's been back to the cabin at any point?"

"No idea."

"Do you have his phone number?"

"'course I do. He trusts me. But he ain't answering his phone."

I sensed a dark feeling descending on me, like a sponge that is slowly soaked in acid. I was terrified. "Did he ever do this before, disappear like that without returning phone calls?"

"No."

I tossed a pebble at a nearby tree. "How did they find him?"

"I don't know but if they found someone like Minus Two, they'd be finding you. You better be on your way."

"No. There were no signs of a struggle in the cabin. If they had broken in he'd have shot them."

"Maybe they waited for him in the bushes and jumped him when he was fixin' to open the door to get in. I would."

I tossed another pebble and then another and then some pinecones. It was not out of anger but to fight the sudden dizziness that came over me. Nat never knew when to shut up. He continued. "Maybe they questioning him on where you at. Maybe he done told 'em you're coming back to Tennessee."

"Then they'd have been here already, and they're not. So either they didn't get him or he didn't talk. And if they jumped him, he wouldn't have had the time to text you, now would he?"

"Unless he suspected somptin' before he ever entered the cabin."

"I don't believe it."

Nat shook his head. "No, neither do I. Just thinking out loud. Minus Two ain't no dummy. He wouldn't of walked into a trap like this. And if he did, Doc, he'll be keeping his mouth shut."

That did not encourage me. I wished he would make up his mind. "I've got to find him," I said.

"I wouldn't do that if I was you. Don't get me wrong: I love the man. I owe him a lot. But you can't help him now. If you try to find him you be finding them. Right now they don't know where you at, so it's safe. If they knowed where to reach you they'd of tried to get you to come and save him. That's why he didn't wanna give you no phone, get it? He didn't want there to be a way for them to reach you if they ever caught him."

I stopped hurling pebbles and pinecones and turned to him. "I can't take a chance. If they have him, they might find out about this place sooner or later. It isn't safe for me here."

"You hit it on the head. You shouldn't be here. No siree. That's also why I never showed you any of my other hiding places. I got some even Minus Two ain't ever knowed."

"Let's not give up on him though. He might still be alive and well."

Nat shook his phone. "I'll keep calling."

I thought of something then. "Wait a minute. Where's his Jeep? If they surprised him at the cabin his Jeep would still be there."

Nat rubbed his beard. "That's a fair question. Maybe they took it with 'em."

"Then it would have left tracks. There's a dirt road connecting the cabin to the main road. I got to go back there and see if there are any fresh tracks."

"That's dangerous."

"I'll wear a disguise. I got to know. If there are no tracks, it means he hasn't made it back home."

He sighed. "I'll go, then."

"I won't ask that of you."

"They ain't after me. Besides, he's my friend. I need to know what happened to him."

I waited for him to come back. Meanwhile, I took the revolver out of the metal box and tried to clean it up with a torn shirt I had found. I wiped the rounds, too, and hoped they were still good. Then I tucked the revolver under my belt and sat in the back of the cave looking out.

Nat returned three hours later, pushing his seeder. He walked a little slower than he did when he left. Already from afar he began to shake his head. "Ain't nothin' there," he said when he came closer. "No fresh tracks."

"That's some kind of a relief I suppose. Maybe he's still on his way back."

"Then why ain't he answering his phone? Or send out more text messages?"

"Maybe his phone died."

"This is Minus Two we talking about here. He gots plenty of other devices he can call from. It ain't no coincidence that just when he texts me that warning, someone done broke into his home, searched for somptin' and didn't steal nothin'. Nah, somptin' fishy here. I don't know what it is but somptin' ain't right."

We decided to wait another day. I stayed at the motel until the next morning, passing the time reading newspapers and watching TV. In the morning I played a few rounds of mini golf at the course next door. At ten I called Nat from the motel room. He still did not hear back from Doc Minus Two. It was getting more serious by the minute. If not captured, Doc should have made contact by now. He was either dead or unconscious or imprisoned. "Something's gone wrong," I said. "And this time I'm not going to wait it out. I'm tired of being a shadow of a man."

"What do you reckon you should do?"

"I thought about it last night. Whether they caught him or not, they must go back to the cabin. This is the only place they know that I may come back to in the next few days. I'm surprised they weren't there already when I arrived yesterday. Maybe they still believed I was somewhere else. But they'll be back there soon. No doubt about it."

Nat nodded in agreement. "This is why we should be staying the hell away from that place."

"No. This is why I want to be there. For once I want to surprise them. For once it would be me hiding in wait for them to come back."

Nat reached a calming hand. "Now, wait a minute. Whoever they are, they be pros. Also, they got orders to kill you on sight. No disrespect, but you ain't no match for 'em."

"No. But I have the element of surprise on my side. Doc's cabin is at the edge of the wood. They would expect me to arrive from the road. I would take the long way home and emerge from inside the wood. I'll hide in the trees and watch over the cabin until I see someone."

"Then what?" Nat seemed amused by my plan, and now he picked up a twig and put it in his mouth and chewed on it as he listened to me.

I pulled out the revolver from under my shirt. Nat's expression was unchanged. He was not angry that I was planning to use his gun, and perhaps had forgotten that he ever owned it. He just said, "That thing's about as useful to you as a trap door on a canoe."

"Why?"

"First, if you miss or just wound 'em, you better believe they turn'll around and shoot you. That means you have to make sure they be dead on your first shot. And what good are dead people to you? They don't talk much."

"At least I'd be rid of them."

"You'd be ridding yourself of one hit man. There's lots more where he comes from. No, you need to interrogate 'em, son, and for that they need to be in some sort of good health, and for that you can't be using your rusty toy." He pointed at the gun now. "Believe me, I used guns on lots of people in the war and none of 'em ever talked to me after that."

I tucked the gun under my shirt and sat down. "What would you do if you were me? You have some experience in the such."

"I most certainly do," he said proudly. He spat the twig out of his mouth. "Your plan of sneaking round through the wood ain't bad — if you have decent camouflage. But when you get to an observation point near the cabin, your next step must be smart, not violent. You got to trap 'em, get it?"

"How?"

"Hunting people is the same as hunting ducks. You make the right kind of noise, and they'll be coming to you. In this case, your duck whistle is gonna be your mouth. Does that suit you?"

I jumped to my feet. "Yes. I'll do it. I'll say something like, Come and get me."

He shook his finger at me. "No, then they'll suspect somptin'. You need to lower their defenses. 'Help me, I'm stuck in a fucking bear trap,' is a much better opener. With that, you both get 'em curious and make 'em think they got nothin' to fear from you."

"And how do you catch them?"

"The best way is with a covered hole, but of course digging somptin' like that is gonna be noisy and take time. The next best thing is a spring-net trap."

He seemed serious. I said, "Is that what you used in Nam?"

He shook his head almost with contempt. "No, Charlie, he done used booby traps that could impale you or blow you up. There was no point in letting you rest comfortably inside a net. Your buddies would of set you loose." Then he looked at me as if revealing a secret he knew he should be keeping under his hat. "They still hope to get me that way. But I done spent so many years in the jungle that there is no trap made by man that I could not smell from a mile away. Seeing your friends get blowed up into a thousand little pieces in front of your eyes can do this to a man." Then he refocused and went back to business. "The trap we're going to make is for animals, not people. It's more humane."

It took us a while to get to the wood just behind Doc Minus Two's cabin. Nat knew his way around the woods, but he took his time about it. He insisted on pushing his seeder, on which he leaned for support, and did not put the artificial leg on. I never saw him with it attached. On the way he stopped somewhere that looked like any other spot in the wood to me and pulled on a rope that was hidden in the grass and opened a door in the ground. He brought out a net and some equipment from the now-exposed cavity and put it in his seeder. Everything was covered with mud. We continued to walk.

"Did Doc make it for you?" I asked, gesturing at his artificial leg and hoping I was not crossing a line I should not be crossing.

Nat did not seem to mind the question. "No. Doc, he amputates. He doesn't make peglegs. Not a skill he has."

I was glad he did not mind this topic of conversation. "So, he saved your life with that amputation?"

He let out a suppressed chuckle. "Any surgeon with a saw would of saved my life that day. It takes a special kind of idiot to cut above the knee when below the knee was all the leg needed."

"You're not saying he botched it?"

He gave a sharp nod with his head. "He sure did. Misdiagnosed. Even the other surgeons in the base gave him a hard time about it."

"I thought he was a good surgeon."

"Minus Two? Not him. Ain't got the talent for it and ain't got the bedside manner for it, neither. That's why he ain't touching the scalpel no more. Lousy doctor if I ever seen one."

"And yet you consider him a friend?"

"Not for the amputation. If that was all he'd done for me I'd of shot him. It was the mental institution thing. Some people thought I belonged there on the count of some of the things I done. They signed papers and committed me one week after the operation. Minus Two, he tried to stop it. He failed. No one listened to him on the count of him being such a lousy surgeon. So one day before they came to take me away, maybe for life, he done gone to the place they held me — I wasn't at the hospital no more — and showed 'em a fake ID making him a colonel or somptin'. They didn't know him from Adam there so it worked. He took me with him and gave me some false papers so I could go stateside. Without him I'd of been some zombie today with holes over here." He pointed to the top of his forehead with two fingers spread apart.

Nat's story did not surprise me, but it was hard to picture Doc Minus Two as an incompetent bumpkin. As if he had read my thoughts, Nat suddenly said, "Minus Two is good at everything he does except for being a doctor and that of all things he wanted to be. Life's tragic that way."

"How did he lose his fingers, anyway?"

Nat shrugged. "I never knowed him with more than eight fingers. Every time I ask him how he came to lose 'em I get a different story. One time it was that he put his hand through a lion's cage on a dare; in another story somebody took a shot at him and missed all of him except these two fingers; and last year he told me it was because he lifted his arm once to signal a chopper that was fixin' to land and didn't put it down in time. God only knows. Stop, don't take another step."

I stopped, alarmed. I looked around me but could see nothing but trees. "What happened?"

"We're here," he said in a half whisper. "He pointed somewhere between the trees, but I could still see nothing.

"Are you sure?"

He nodded. "His cabin's thirty yards away. This is where we need to set this up."

I advanced slowly in the direction he pointed in. "Careful," he said. "Don't let 'em see you."

After about ten yards I could see the chipping paint on the cabin's wall through a gap in the trees. I retreated carefully, making no sound. Nat had been able to navigate to within a few feet of the target without seeing anything but trees and without ever looking at a GPS device. "How did you do it?" I whispered.

"You got to tell one tree from another, that's how. Trees are as different as people. This here tree, two opposite branches go up in an arc, almost like the frame of a harp. There is only one tree like that and that's it right there. And down yonder where we came from, there's a little clearing and a puddle that's always there round this time of year. Between 'em I knowed where to turn and where to stop. Get it?"

"You spend a lot of time in the woods I see."

"I must know it better than the VC. The day they know it better than me is the day I die. Got to keep sharp."

He began to work on the trap. He searched for a good spot by looking not down at the ground but up, at the tree tops. When he was satisfied with what he saw he spread the net on the ground and then covered it with earth and leaves. Next he built a strange wooden device that looked like a triangle with sticks going through it. He tied it with a rope to another tree, across the net, and buried the rope in the leaves as well. His agility astounded me. He hovered over the ground as if he had two legs, sometimes using his hands for balance, lightly touching the earth. When he was done he signaled that he needed my help. Together we bent down a young tree that stood nearby, and which Nat referred to as a sapling even though it was twenty feet high, and brought its top almost to ground level. We used a rope and a manual winch to do that, and then Nat tied the top of the now-arched tree to the triangle. He made sure everything was covered again and moved away slowly, admiring his own work. "No one could see that," he said. "Except a highly trained VC, and I don't think your guys are VC. VC's don't go after amateurs, no disrespect."

"None taken. Now what?"

"Now we have to make sure someone is there before we try to attract their attention." He began to pull on lower hanging branches, removing leaves and twigs and shoving them into his clothes. He gestured for me to do the same. He handed me some tape to secure the camouflage with. He himself did not need any; the leaves and twigs attached themselves to him magically, as if he was covered with sticky goo. When he thought we were ready he led me crawling slowly on the ground until the cabin came into view again. "Now comes the hard part," he said. "The long wait. I got enough food and drink for two days, and even some toilette paper, for you. I want you to feel right at home."

XII.

It was twelve hours before anything happened. There was nothing to do but watch and wait. Nat did not seem to mind it. He remained silent throughout the entire time and would not let me speak or make any kind of noise, either. Retreating from position in order to relieve myself or eat was a protracted process that left my muscles stiff as I crawled backwards inch by inch for fifteen minutes at a time. I wondered how often in his life Nat had ambushed people in this way, and what happened to them, but did not dare to ask. He never escaped those he hunted; that much I did know without having to ask. They were always lurking in his mind, waiting for the right moment to pounce. He needed to stay focused on the task ahead, whether it was watching Doc's cabin or looking for things to sell to tourists. Living in the moment was the only way for Nat to survive those images that made up the fabrics of his mind.

Finally we saw a man approaching the cabin. We could not hear any car pulling into the driveway, and so assumed that he left it somewhere to retain the element of surprise. Through the uneven mesh of leaves that separated us from him we caught glimpses of his white shirt and brown shoes. He was stooping along the wall of the cabin, avoiding the windows. He made no sound. Then we saw one of his hands. He gripped a gun in it. I stopped breathing. The man reached for the door and then swung it open violently and disappeared inside the cabin.

"Quick," Nat whispered. "He'll be out in a minute when he sees there ain't no one in there. Go round the trap and stand behind that tree. Make sure you'll be positioning the trap between you and the cabin. Pretend you done been caught in a bear trap like we talked. I'll raise an arm when he comes out."

I got up slowly, though much quicker than the crawl I had been getting used to in the past twelve hours. I stood behind a tree so that one leg was hidden from anyone coming from the direction of the cabin.

Nat raised an arm. I bent down and gripped the leg I hid behind the tree and let out a panicky bawl. "Oh, God I'm caught in a trap! Help, I'm caught in a bear trap!"

At first there was no sound. I looked in the direction of the cabin. A few leaves were moving. Nat kept waving his arm. I kept crying for help. Now two branches moved apart and I could see a man's head peering inside the wood slowly. Upon seeing me the head froze for a moment, trying to ascertain what it was looking at. I buried my face behind the tree trunk. If he recognized me, he would shoot first and only then come closer. Only now as I was standing there waiting for him to approach did it occur to me that he might choose to shoot me anyway, just to be on the safe side. I did not think this through.

But he did not fire his gun. He approached slowly. "Do you live over there?" he called out. With my face behind the tree trunk I could not see him, but I assumed he was pointing to the cabin. I ignored the question.

"Help me please!" I cried. "It hurts, it hurts like hell!" I wriggled back and forth to give him the full flavor of my made-up anguish. Now I could hear his footsteps approaching at a steady pace. I knew that if the trap did not work I would be shot in under a minute. I noticed I was sweating, and barely breathing. I put one hand on the revolver. Maybe if I'm quick enough.

But he never reached me. I heard the snap of twigs and a loud creak and then a sharp whoosh sound and then the man gasped in panic. I slowly pulled my face from behind the tree and saw him dangling in the net, four feet in the air. Nat got up and approached us from the other side. The net bobbed up and down a few times before it settled. Lying on the leaves below it was the man's gun that he had dropped as the device snatched him off the ground. Nat may not have been all there, but he sure knew how to build a trap.

The man looked at us with a terrified expression. Nat's eyes were fixated on him. Nat had a gun of his own that he now produced. I approached the net about to ask the man some questions, but then as I had gotten close enough to see his face clearly I froze in disbelief. It was the FBI agent who sat on the right side of me when they picked me up that night. The one who spoke first, before poor Peterson took over.

"Shit," I muttered. I squatted down and buried my head between my hands. "Nat, I think we snared the FBI."

Nat put his gun away. His face registered some disappointment but little worry. To Nat anyone who was not the VC posed only a mild, unreal threat. "Then apologies are in order," he said.

I cut the net down. The FBI man struggled with it for a few moments and then took a hesitant step onto the ground, towards me, eyes on Nat as if he was afraid that he would make a sudden move. I handed him his gun back to show that he was in no danger. "I'm sorry," I said. "I thought you were them."

He spat on the ground. "I thought you were; just now when the net grabbed me that was the first thing that went through my head." He put his gun away into a shoulder holster. I was just as relieved as he was. With him thinking we were them, had his gun not fallen to the ground we could have found ourselves in a shootout with a federal agent. There could not have been a good outcome to this. I should have anticipated the FBI being there. I took it for granted that they were watching my house and my family's, so why not Doc's cabin? One of K's e-mails already hinted that they knew about him. Maybe they were also there outside the log cabin where Doc Minus Two transported my family. Maybe the goons he hired were not as good as they thought they were in evading the law.

"Why are you here if I may ask?" I said. "And by the way, excuse me for not remembering your name. I don't think you volunteered any."

"Terry Rieu." He rubbed his nose and pulled some leaves out of his hair and then brushed his clothes with his hands to remove the dirt that had clung to them. "We received a tip that Carl Hentschel disappeared. We wanted to confirm and to find out who's behind it."

"Who's Carl Hentschel?"

Nat said, "That would be Minus Two."

"Oh," I said. "I never thought..."

"That he had a name?"

"He refused to tell me his name. Deep inside I always knew he had one."

"Had one but ain't used it," Nat said. He turned to the FBI agent."Any idea what happened to him?"

"We don't know. We don't know if he was killed or kidnapped or scared away or none of the above. I take it from the question that you haven't seen him lately, either."

"No. But how did they know about Doc? How did you, for that matter?"

"How they knew about him I have no idea. How we found out is classified information."

Suddenly I remembered something and had to change the subject. "How is Peterson doing?"

Terry shook his head again, but did not seem emotional. "Not too good."

"Still in a coma?"

"Dead."

"I'm so sorry to hear. He was a great guy, really. I owe him more than I can ever repay."

"He knew the risk. We all do. It's the nature of the beast." He seemed eager to move on to a different topic. I did not know a thing about the relationship between them. Were they the best of friends? Rivals? Was Terry crying inside or happy at an opportunity for promotion? Either way, he was uncomfortable talking about Peterson. He took to quizzing me instead. "And you? Where have you been hiding?"

"That is classified information," I said.

He assumed a serious expression. "You shouldn't take risks like this. They'll get you sooner or later."

"I know what I'm doing."

He sounded sarcastic now, and a little impatient. "Do you? You suspect they're coming here to this cabin, and yet you show up to catch them. If I was one of them like you thought I was, I'd have taken a shot at you from the tree line over there before taking one step towards you. Only then would I have checked if it was you or not. These are professional killers, Al, not good Samaritans looking for an opportunity to save people from a bear trap. And that P.I. of yours, all of his survival skills didn't get him very far, now did they? For all we know he might be dead now."

"What do you suggest I do?"

"Come with me. We'll find you a hiding place where they won't get you."

"You found me a hiding place before, remember? I was in your capable hands. Were it not for poor Peterson I'd be dead for over a week now."

He let out a forced sigh. "Someone must have followed us back to the office. Granted, we should have been more careful. But we won't make the same mistake twice."

I shook my head vigorously, almost with anger. "Neither will I. Peterson himself..." and then I stopped before revealing Peterson's suspicions. I made up something quickly. "... drove me to the hotel and he was very careful we're not being followed."

I did not know if he saw through me or not, but if he suspected that Peterson knew something, Terry did not reveal it. His poker face betrayed the exact emotions he wanted you to see and nothing more. You could not figure out what was going on in his head. He thought he was being smart, but in fact he made himself untrustworthy that way. People who succeed in being inscrutable can never inspire trust in others.

He did not try to argue with me; maybe saw that the battle was lost, or maybe I was not important enough in his eyes. He said, "It's your call. No one's going to force you to take cover. The only thing I can do is strongly advise it, and I did just that."

"Suggestion noted." I was surprised at myself for talking to the FBI that way. Two weeks ago I would not have dared to. Spending time with Doc Minus Two does something to a person.

Maybe he was offended by my tone of voice, because he shook a finger at me. "We're your only hope you know. That P.I. of yours, if he's still alive, is not much of a detective. Not much of anything, judging by his file." Then he turned to Nat, who had been standing in silence a few feet away leaning against a tree trunk and chewing on a twig. "And who are you?"

"He's a friend," I answered for Nat. "From Boston." Nat confirmed with a nod and said nothing though I think he did not like to be from Boston.

Terry did not seem to believe me but he did not press the issue, and his attention reverted back to me. "You should not be here. The people we're dealing with — you're not in their league. If you don't want to trust us with your protection, at least try to stay the hell away from them. Tell me you'll at least take that advice."

"Gladly." He was right about that. Nat and I had been foolish to fly so close to the sun.

He turned around and began to walk away, without saying goodbye. I caught up with him. "Did you make any progress with the investigation?"

"I can't tell you the details at this point but I think we're close. I just wish you let us handle this and give up the gumshoe work. This isn't a game."

"Can you at least promise me you'll find Doc? I got him involved; I feel responsible."

"Now, how can I promise you something like that? How can anyone?" He was growing irascible and now hastened his pace. I stopped following him and in a minute he was out of the wood and we could not see him anymore. The last thing I noticed as I caught a final glimpse of the cabin was the cat jumping onto one of the windowsills, about to get back into the house.

I felt a hand gripping my arm. "Let's get out of here, now."

"Sure, let me help you fold that net."

"Forget the net. We need to disappear right now."

I could see what he meant. I began to think it myself. Peterson suspected a leak, one that had cost him his life. Terry was his partner; they worked together on the case. Peterson might have noticed something. When you work closely with someone they cannot fool you for long. When he was shot Peterson put two and two together. No wonder Terry was uncomfortable talking about him. It was guilt, that's what it was. He knew exactly where Peterson was taking me that night. One phone call from him was all that was needed. "I agree," I told Nat. I helped him with the seeder, now empty, that he then pushed hurriedly ahead of him, using it to stabilize himself as he hopped forward on one leg. It was not easy to keep up with him.

"I didn't like how he tried to get you to come with him," Nat said when we were a hundred yards away.

"No siree."

"He's the mole. For all we know he might be calling 'em right now."

"Yes he might."

"You shouldn't be staying here no more."

"No."

"I mean in Tennessee."

"I know what you mean."

"I didn't like how he talked about Minus Two, neither. Lousy doctor yes. Not lousy at what he does now. If they got him it ain't because he was lousy. It was because he was getting closer. This FBI agent ain't close to nothin'. If he was, you think he'd of been here bothering with Minus Two's cabin? He'd of caught them or be dead like that Peterson."

"I know. We can't be sure if Terry is the mole, but it wouldn't surprise me. Even if he's not, he'd have to let his boss know where I am, and that would be leaked to them in a matter of minutes. For all intents and purposes, they already know I'm here."

After a half an hour at a breakneck pace we had to stop and rest. I was more tired than Nat. He was a little red in the face, but nothing more. I was short of breath and sweating like a pig. It was humid, too, which made it very uncomfortable. We sat down on the ground, leaning against tree trunks.

"Where you planning on going now?" Nat asked after a while.

"I don't know. Far from here. Far from anywhere." I was lying. I already had a good idea where I was heading, but I did not want to share it with Nat in case he was captured, too. Terry had seen him now, and I doubted that he bought my story about Nat being a friend from Boston. I felt compelled to warn him. I was still ashamed of not telling the cat burglar she might be watched, and was not about to be dishonest with Nat, too. "Listen, Nat, now they know about you. They might come here to these woods looking for me, but on the way find you."

He laughed. "No matter how good they are, they ain't as good as the VC. Those guys, they been living in the jungles darn near their whole life and still I'm one step ahead of 'em. Your guys may be sophisticated, but they just city boys, no offence. Database hacking ain't gonna help 'em none in the woods."

"But they are real, Nat. They can..." Then I stopped. I was not going to convince him. There was not much I could say to a man whose proof of competence was that he had survived for decades against an imaginary foe.

"They'll be watching the roads soon," he said after a while. "You their last target. They'll be bringing everything to bear. They'll be starting a manhunt in the area soon as they get enough people in here. That gives you a few hours to slip away, no more."

"What do you suggest?"

"Minus Two, he done gave you a false ID, didn't he? Use it. Go to the airport. Board a plane. Disappear."

"What if they forced the name on the ID out of him?"

Nat put an arm around my shoulder like a platoon leader gently scolding one of his men. "Minus Two may crack under torture, yes, but he ain't no idiot. He won't give 'em information they don't ask for. They don't know nothin' about a false ID, so they won't ask about it. Get it? Even if they do suspect there's a false ID, there ain't no way for 'em to verify that the name he gives 'em is correct. Your false ID is safe. Use it. Get on a plane now. Within the hour."

Nat continuously alternated between sound logic and delusion, and I never knew which of the two I was witnessing. I felt guilty about leaving him behind. "Come with me," I begged him. "At least until the heat dies down."

"I have me here a system of underground tunnels can put an ant colony to shame. I'm safer in these here woods than any other place on the globe. Focus on yourself and lay low."

We resumed the walk, albeit at a slower pace. Nat brought me to a dirt road. A few private homes and chalets were visible a half a mile down the hill from us. He pointed at them. "Down yonder past the houses you'll see a pancake place. Use their phone to call a taxi." He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and scribbled something on it with an old pencil and handed it to me. "Call these guys. A brother and a sister. Rude, not punctual, and they drive jalopies that don't look like they can even roll downhill. But they not in the Yellow Pages. If your guys decide to talk to all the taxi dispatchers in town see if anyone picked up someone answering to your description, they'll still have jack shit."

We shook hands. That was the closest Nat could come to saying goodbye. We knew we might never see each other again. I went down the dirt road and did what he had suggested. Sitting in the back seat of the rattling taxi, I remembered that I forgot to thank him, and that I forgot to ask Terry what K's name was. But maybe it did not matter, because Nat would have been embarrassed and Terry would not have told me anything.

XIII.

Never in my life have I felt as lonely as when I pushed open the door to my hotel room in a JFK Airport Holiday Inn in Queens. For the first time, no one knew where I was. I did not tell anyone where I was going and did not have a device on me that could be tracked. Before that evening, either Doc Minus Two or Nat or the whole world knew where I spent the night. I either lived in a properly registered address that every mailing catalog in the world knew about, or in hotel rooms that someone was aware of. I have never spent time in a place where no one could find me, no matter how hard they tried. It was a strange feeling, as if I was not part of the human race anymore. I had a sense of relief, adventure and insignificance all at the same time.

The flight from Knoxville to New York was uneventful. My heart missed a beat when security checked my papers at the gate, but they did not say a word. The passport was good, just as Doc Minus Two had promised. No one waited for me when I exited the gate in New York, either. I felt safe. At least for now, I was a non-person: lonely but secure in my anonymity.

The more I thought about them and the FBI's ability to find me and Doc Minus Two, the more unsettled I became. I managed to stay ahead of the game, but only just. Terry and K were lying through their teeth when they said they were close to solving this. Could it be that they were only raising a smoke screen for that organization, pretending to look for the guilty party but really using their resources to track me down? Were both Terry and K moles? Just one duping the other? Or were they completely innocent and a third person was running the show, with access to FBI databases? Maybe it was the driver of the FBI car who first picked me up. He never said one word. And maybe the informant was outside the department altogether and they were all duped in the same way that I was. But no, I could sense some nervousness in Terry. He was uncomfortable talking to me, especially about Peterson. If not the actual mole he must have at least been in the know.

I had a plan now and I knew where I was going next. Doc was not around to talk me out of it, and the trip from Knoxville gave me the confidence I needed. I now believed that a flight to Crete was in the cards for me. I had to see what they were hiding in there even at the cost of my own life, and maybe, with my new false ID, that sacrifice would not be necessary. But I had to buy some insurance just to be safe. Foolishly, I had already written K about the a-corridor. The mole — whoever he or she were — must have informed them about it. They would not know me by name when I land in Crete, but they would be guarding the cave. I needed to throw them a red herring. Turn their own informers against them.

I left the hotel and went to another one nearby and sat at a PC that stood in the lobby for the guests' convenience. If they should track me down through the internet connection, let them come to this hotel, not the one I lived in. Not that I allowed this to happen: I used a Web proxy just as Doc Minus Two had taught me. I checked my e-mail. K had sent me something.

TERRY TOLD ME ABOUT RUNNING INTO YOU. YOU ARE TAKING CHANCES YOU SHOULDN'T BE TAKING. BEST IF YOU STAY AWAY OR LET US GIVE YOU A NEW IDENTITY AND PUT YOU SOMEWHERE SAFE. IF YOU DON'T WANT THAT, AT LEAST STAY WELL CLEAR. LEAVE THE COUNTRY FOR A WHILE. GO TO THAT LABYRINTH IF YOU LIKE. I DON'T THINK IT IS RELATED TO THE CASE AT ALL, JUST A COINCIDENCE, A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO KIDS. WON'T HURT FOR YOU TO GO THERE IF IT KEEPS YOU OUT OF TROUBLE, THOUGH.

This stunned me. Far from discouraging me, she was urging me to go to the cave. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If she was the informant, then she would want me to be where they could find me. If I go to Crete then they will finally know exactly where I was. But this time I was ready with a plan. I wrote her back that I had changed my mind since my last e-mail to her. That Doc Minus Two's disappearance shook me and that Crete was unimportant now. Instead, I said that I wanted to find Doc, that I had a hunch he was not too far from his home, and that I had decided to stick around and look for him in Tennessee. I even dropped her a clue. I said I was convinced he was being held in a warehouse in Knoxville; that I would not leave the area until I located him, and would let her know if and when I decided to go to Crete.

After this I ordered a ticket to Heraklion, Crete and went back to my hotel room. Now I had just a few hours to kill until the flight was to depart. I decided to go to bed early. I watched some TV and then drifted off to sleep.

The phone rang and I woke up in panic. I looked at the silver and black device and realized that I was suffering from paralysis. No matter how much I wanted to, I could not bring myself to reach for it. The rings persisted. At last I managed to move by dropping my shoulder, and then my arm felt free and I grabbed the receiver.

"Lester?" a male voice asked.

"You got the wrong room." I put the receiver down but was too nervous to feel relief. After this I could not go back to sleep. I tried to watch TV again but it did not make me sleepy. Neither did reading a newspaper or the hotel guide. I realized I did not feel safe after all. What if they were calling room by room to see if I was in that hotel? What if someone recognized my voice? But then why weren't they here already? Pernicious thoughts were ravaging my mind. I knew I had to get rid of them.

The smell of something burning drove the last nail into the coffin of my serenity. It may have come from next door or did not exist at all except in my imagination. When you are as tense as I was, even something as mild as a burned piece of toast could smell ominous. There was no point in trying to sleep so long as I was in that room, where this phone had rang. I knew I had become paranoid, but I resented the definition. It is one thing to fear that little green men are watching you or that the VC is after you right here in 21st century America, but when someone puts you on a hit list and kills everyone else on that list, you at least have the right to feel unsafe anywhere without being labeled a paranoid.

And so I got up and packed my things and checked out and took a cab to the airport. It may not feel comfortable sleeping on a chair where there was a constant hum and chatter and the sound of footsteps, but there were no phones there to disturb me and no debilitating sense of loneliness, no apprehension that the only people I might meet would be the ones who were planning to kill me. I found a bench comprising of six chairs held together by a metal frame, overlooking a parking lot. I put my bag on one of the chairs and lay on the other five. Sleep was still hard to come by, and served in small doses. But I found it considerably better to wake up in a bustling public place than in an empty hotel room that someone had called by mistake.

Not being able to nap at the airport ensured a good sleep on the plane, and the flight seemed shorter than it actually was. Again they let me through with no problems. No one said a word when I arrived in Heraklion, either. The experience was refreshingly uneventful. Heraklion looked beautiful; lots of small whitewashed houses and majestic mountains in the background, and the deep blue of the Mediterranean sea to one side. There was not a cloud in the sky. The place had a relaxing effect on me, as if I had just arrived on a carefree vacation. I had an overwhelming desire to go to the beach and forget about the world. I fought it. I had important things to do. But the relaxing effect was not wasted, because now I had a calming thought that maybe, if no one ever cracked the case, I would just stay here with my false ID. I would open a shop with the remainder of my money. I would sell antique coins and vases to tourists like me. Maybe some of them would try to sell me forgotten artifacts they had found nearby, and I'd pretend they were worthless and get them for next to nothing and then write a paper about them and publish it. It was one of these spontaneous day dreams that you do not really believe in but that gets you through the day. Some may say it is childish, but I think such things are crucial to keeping your sanity. All I knew was that last night I was a bundle of nerves and now I felt like a newborn baby.

I exchanged some dollars for Euros and then took a cab to the city of Mires, in the Messara Valley, not far from the cave. That place did not lack in beauty, either — another city of small whitewashed houses, much smaller than Heraklion and nestled within a tapestry of deep green farms and olive plantations, shut in by a row of mountains on either side of the plain. There was a smell of herbs in the air, and fertilizer and, I thought, also of figs. I liked the city before I set foot in it. I asked the driver to recommend an inexpensive motel and he brought me to a small inn with white walls and brown window shades and an outdoors sitting area covered by a wooden awning. There were many flower pots in front of the entrance, replicas of ancient reddish vases. The room had a simple wooden desk and chairs, and two very narrow beds. I was concerned that I would fall off if I were to try to roll onto my side. The room was well lit and a little too warm. For forty dollars a night, I could not ask for more.

I took a walk through the town. There was a market nearby, with lots of stands and even more tourists. In fact, few of the people I had seen in Mires were local. It made me feel safe not to stick out too much: no one paid any attention to me. I bought some fruit and peanuts — I don't know why as I usually hate peanuts but here they smelled good — and a few other things I needed for my plan, and then went back to the inn with two bags. I could not waste any more time on touristy pursuits. I had a mission. I sat down on the bed and began to think. I felt safe enough to think out loud.

The first thing I needed to do was change my appearance as much as I could without the aid of a plastic surgeon. They may not be waiting for me by the cave anymore now that I told K I was staying in Tennessee, and they did not know that I was in Crete, but I did not want to take any chances. Someone might still be stationed there to make sure nosey visitors would not be allowed to enter. If these guards had a picture of me, I had to make sure it would prove useless.

I had no makeup skills, and so knew that transforming myself into someone else would not be easy. But that was one of the reasons I went to the market earlier. I thought I would get some ideas looking at goods I had never been interested in before. I took out a silly mask I had bought there out of the bag. It was a grotesque devil-like face with rosy cheeks and horns. I did not buy if for these things but for the goatee. Rather than being just painted on the mask, the goatee was synthetic hair that was glued on to give it a 3D effect. I took a pair of nail cutters and carefully removed the goatee from the mask, hair by hair. I then glued it to my own face with an all-purpose cement. It held nicely so long as I did not twist my mouth too much.

Next I took out a ping-pong ball from the bag. I cut it in two and put both halves inside my mouth so that they pushed against my cheeks. It rounded up my face a little. The ball edges cut against my gums. I took them out and lined the cut edges with used chewing gum. Then it became more comfortable to hold them in my mouth. I put sunglasses on after this and a bright baseball cap and peeked at the mirror. I looked a little less like me now, but not enough.

I was too thin. I needed to look more paunchy. They would not expect this. I left the room and began to collect magazines from the lobby. When I returned I tore away the pages and crumpled them up individually and shoved them under my shirt. They gave me a weird figure with many bulges, but eventually I managed to work them into a reasonably smooth shape. Now I had a large beer belly. My own shirt and pants barely fit, but as I had lost weight over the past two weeks, they could still contain me.

Nationality was another identifier I wanted to work on. They were waiting for an American. The cap I had on, even with the French flag it bore, still looked hopelessly American. It occurred to me that any baseball-like cap would look American. I needed something else. I stepped out of the inn and into the outside sitting areas. Three groups of people were sitting there. Two looked like tourists, but the third comprised of two old men and a young couple. The old men were dressed too shabbily to be tourists, and they spoke Greek. It was clear to me that they came to visit the young couple, who were staying at the inn. One of the old men was wearing a black fisherman cap. It was worn and dull colored.

I approached the man. "Excuse me. Do you speak English?" I was happy to discover that speaking while holding two half ping-pong balls in my mouth slowed my speech and made me sound older.

The man had a puzzled expression on his face. He did not reply. The young woman translated for him. She had a slight Greek accent but spoke English fluently. "My uncle doesn't speak English. How can I help you?"

"Please tell him I'd like to buy his cap from him."

She looked at me funny, but translated the request. The old man did not seem as surprised as she was. It could be that he thought me a curious tourist desperate to come back home with an authentic souvenir rather than a commercial trinket. He raised five fingers and said something.

"Fifty Euros," the woman translated.

I paid without argument. The man seemed disappointed in himself for not asking for more, but took off the cap and gave it to me nonetheless. I went back to the room to look at the mirror. As I was walking I became aware that the magazine pages underneath my shirt were rustling. I slowed down and the noise was muffled. This gave me an idea. Changing my appearance meant more than changing my physical features. I also had to change the way I moved. I adopted a stoop and a limp and held my jaw unsteadily as if I were looking for a piece of chicken that was lost between my teeth. These things made me look much older. I practiced in front of the mirror and grew more confident in my ability to go unrecognized.

I took with me a small bag with a few energy bars and water and a flashlight and some tools, and called a cab. "Where to?" the cabbie asked.

I got in. "To the Labyrinth Cave."

He seemed puzzled. "Where?"

"The Labyrinth of the Minotaur."

"Ah, Gortynus Cave. No good go there. Closed."

"I know. I still want to see it. From the outside I mean."

"Not allowed tell where entrance. They say tourist go there no good for them. All people go there no good for them." He brought his hands up above his head and then crashed them down on it symbolically. "Fall. Stone fall."

"I know. I won't go in. I just want to see the entrance and the view from there."

He did not believe me, and made a defensive gesture. "Not allowed tell where entrance. Prefecture say to us no. Tourist die bad newspaper story. Bad newspaper story tourist no come."

I took out a one hundred Euro bill. "I'm not asking you to disobey the prefecture. Suppose I know where it is? Suppose you go there but I'll be the one to tell you exactly where to stop?"

"How you know?"

"You will cough when we've passed it."

He laughed, then took the bill off my hand and hit the gas pedal.

The ride was not long. The view did not change much — green plantations with mountains and hills all around. There was nothing special about the place we arrived in, either. We went through a narrow path and then drove off-road for a few minutes. All I could see when the taxicab came to a stop was a hill not unlike many others in Crete, except that this one had an area enclosed by a rusty mesh fence. I glanced at the cabbie to see if he was having me on but he pointed at a white metal sign that hanged from the fence. It had a skull and crossbones on it and the word DANGER in English, and two words in Greek.

"No trespassing," he translated. He shook his finger at me. "Don't go inside fence." He turned the engine off, as if waiting for me to snap a few pictures and then come back to the car. I said I did not need him right now, but asked if he could return in three hours as I did not have a phone on me to contact him with. He waved goodbye and started the car and drove away. I did not know if that meant a yes or a no.

I began to follow along the fence, looking for a hole I could get in through. On the other side were white-yellowish rocks but nothing that would indicate that a cave was accessible from there. I knew the entrance would be a narrow hole in the ground that could be seen only from up close, and so it did not deter me. I needed a way to get to the rocks. The fence seemed unbroken. I searched inside my bag for a pair of wire cutters I had brought with me.

Suddenly there was a little girl in a blue dress beside me. She had long brown hair. I did not see her arrive nor heard her footsteps. She said something to me in Greek and pointed to the fence. I made an apologetic hand gesture to indicate I could not understand her. She switched to English effortlessly. "You can't go in there," she said. She had a British accent.

"I know." I stopped searching inside my bag. "I read the signs."

She kept on lecturing me. "People die in there all the time. My grandpa died in there."

I wanted to change the subject. "Was he English?"

"No, he was from here. His son met my mom in England. Then we came here."

"I see."

She returned to her first topic of conversation. "A rock fell on his head. There are lots of them there, very loose. One time a whole bunch of kids died. Friends of my grandpa some of them. He was a kid too but he didn't go with them because he was sick that day. So he lived, but only fifty more years and then he went in there anyway and died. The rocks waited for him. There's a rock waiting for you, too."

"Alright, I won't enter," I said with a smile. "Seeing as it would upset you if something were to happen to me."

She pointed in the direction of a faraway road. "I don't care but the soldiers care. They saw the car and maybe they're coming here now. Sometimes they do that. That's what I came here to tell you."

"Thanks for the warning."

"If you go in there now you're stupid, because I told you not to. Also, some of the hairs in your beard just fell off." She turned her back to me and walked away into a nearby plantation, gradually turning into a small blue dot in the middle of a giant green carpet. I sat down on a rock and watched the road where the soldiers might be coming from. Thankfully I had not done anything wrong yet. The wire cutters were still deep inside my bag and the fence was undamaged. Since I had done nothing wrong I could not be arrested; at most warned off. I might even be able to hitch a ride with the soldiers into the village and call my cabbie from there. I would have to come back at night. I would be smarter about it the next time and ask the driver to drop me off a mile away, then get to the fence on foot and cut through it under the cover of darkness and without anyone having seen a car coming. I would use duct tape to temporarily repair the section I cut so no one would notice the intrusion. I could then either enter the cave or, if it proves hard to find, wait for daylight while already on the other side of the fence, and try again from there, undisturbed by snooty little girls or soldiers.

And then, just as I was beginning to feel comfortable with my new plan, someone hit me on the head from behind and put a tape over my mouth and a bag over my head. A moment later I was that someone's prisoner.

XIV.

I was too startled to be scared. I tried to stand up but before I could move a muscle my attacker dropped a few coils of rope over my shoulders and tightened them and made me fall back to the ground with my arms tied to the sides of my body. My ankles were then fastened to each other with another piece of rope. The attacker did not say a word, nor let out any sound besides the shuffling of feet on rocky terrain. I could not tell if it was one person or more. The whole thing took less than three seconds. One moment I was sitting on a rock immersed in thought; in the next I was tied up like a mummy, rolling on the ground blind and unable to move.

Mt attacker dragged me on the ground, pulling me onto a thin flat surface that kept bending underneath me and pinching me as it did. I imagined that the surface was made of three or four planks of wood tied together. It had wheels on one end — I could hear them rolling on the ground — and my attacker was pulling it behind him like a hand truck. I tried to yell but the tape on my mouth was too tight. There was nothing to do but lie still and hope that the soldiers get there in time. They didn't. I was dragged over fields and some rough terrain, judging by the bumps that were shaking my body, and could hear no one. It did not take long — ten or fifteen minutes at the most. Then my attacker rested the head of the surface I was lying on against something and lifted the bottom part and I slid head on onto another, harder surface. I heard a gate closing and an engine coming to life, and knew that I was in the back of a truck. It was an old vehicle judging by the many rattling sounds and the uneven suspension and the smell of burned oil. The ride took anywhere between five and twenty minutes — it is hard to tell time when you are in complete darkness and stressed out of you mind.

The truck came to a halt slowly, with a long sharp squeak. It was a few minutes before someone opened the gate. I was pulled onto a gurney-like cart and wheeled around, this time on level ground. I heard a door open and then I was pushed inside something and kept on rolling until I hit a wall. The door closed then, and I could hear the faint sound of the truck driving away. After this there was complete silence.

Moments went by and then, I assumed, hours, but no one came back to check on me. For the first time since I was abducted I had time to concentrate on myself. My heartbeat was through the roof and I was sweating and thirsty, but I was not injured. Fear found fertile ground now. I was free to think, which is not always a good thing, especially if you are terrified. No calm thoughts ever form in a terrorized mind. I tried to think rationally. Why did they not kill me outright? Why go through the trouble of tying me up and taking me somewhere else only to abandon me alone in there? They never minded leaving bodies behind until now; why go to any trouble to hide mine? Was it possible that they were not sure who I was? That my disguise had worked? Then why not remove the bag from my head as soon as we stopped and take a second look? No, whoever did this knew it was me. The only conclusion I could reach was that they wanted to interrogate me about the cave first before doing away with me. The person who abducted me must have gone to get his boss, and soon they will be back, ask some questions and then shoot me dead and dump my body by the side of the road.

I tried to wriggle out of the ropes but they were too tight. Then I heard a rustling sound and it hit me: the magazines. Those pages I had stuffed under my shirt. They gave my body an extra bulk that the ropes pressed against and that could be removed. My arms were tied but my fingers were free. Using my right thumb and index finger I pulled on the fabric of my shirt until I was grabbing a button. I managed to open it and reached inside. My fingers touched paper. Slowly I tore pieces of it away and threw them outside the shirt. The more paper I pulled out, the easier it became to reach deeper and remove even more paper, until almost none remained. Now the rope was loose, and I was able to wriggle out of it. I brought my head closer to my hand and removed the bag and the tape, and then spat out the ball halves. My gums were bleeding.

I observed the room I was in. It was a tool shed. Dimly lit by a few sun rays that managed to sneak in through cracks in the door, I could see metal shelves around me stacked with farming equipment and old engine parts. A rusty bicycle with no tires leaned against an old wooden wall. The place smelled of grease and sawdust. I undid the rest of the rope and now I was free. I got up and gently pushed the door so I could peer outside. Unlocked, the door moved willingly on its hinges, opening wide at the touch. I stopped it and pulled it back so there would only be a narrow crack between me and the world outside. There was no one out there, just a nearby field and a dirt road and those same mountains in the background, far less beautiful now than they had seemed when I first arrived in Crete. The person who abducted me did a shoddy job of tying me up and securing the door, and did not leave anyone to watch over me. But then the people who worked for them were killers, not kidnappers. Abducting someone was not part of their job description. I must have surprised them there at the cave and they had to act quickly, then went to ask their boss if I should live or die. There was probably just one of them there or they would have left someone with me.

I had to get away before they were back. I looked around for my bag but it was not there. That disturbed me as most of my money was in it, but I did not have time to stick around and curse at my bad luck. I ran through the fields towards the hills where I figured it would be easier to observe the area and find a village or a town I could go to. A distant house came into view, but I did not want to go there for fear that the shed belonged to its owner, and so he or she might be in on the kidnapping. Instead I ran to an olive grove that lay a half a mile away from the shed. Once among the trees, I felt safe. Hidden in the grove, I knew no one could see me from the shed, even if they did come back.

It was good timing. They came back minutes after I reached the grove. I could hear a truck engine approaching and took a dive between two trees and lay on the ground observing the shed. The truck was light green, with a two-door cab and a covered bed. I could not recognize the make from that distance but it seemed like an old Japanese light truck. A plume of dark smoke trailed into the air as it came to a halt near the shed. Someone stepped out of it. I could not see much from a half a mile away. He was just a dot. But there was only one person; that much I could tell. It was either my abductor coming back or someone else driving his truck. The dot went behind the shed. He must have entered through the door, which was on the other side from me. He came out a moment later and began to walk from one side of the shed to the other. No doubt he was looking for me, maybe even with binoculars. I made sure I did not move a muscle. At this distance he would not be able to see a thing inside the grove, even with binoculars, unless I made a sudden move. It must have worked because after five minutes of scanning his surroundings the man entered the truck and made a U-turn and disappeared down the road.

I got up. They knew I had escaped now. Whoever kidnapped me, who most likely was the person I saw coming back to the shed, must have been a low-ranking operative in the organization. Someone who either did not have a phone on him or who did not know who to call. It may have been a local, maybe the owner of the shed. I was lucky in that respect: a professional assassin would have known what to do with me. The assassins must have been too expensive to have them guard a cave without knowing whether or not the victim would show up. They did not know that I carried a false ID, either, or they would have been alerted that I had arrived in Crete, and would be better prepared. Doc Minus Two knew what he was doing when he gave it to me. I reached a hand inside my back pocket to feel the comforting texture of the passport and then froze in panic. It was not there.

My abductor must have taken it when he was done tying me up. That explained a lot. They were guarding the cave, and they did suspect it was me who was sitting by the fence. But my abductor wanted to make sure given my strange appearance, and the false passport he found on me only served to confuse him further. That must have been why he left me at the shed: he drove away to show it to someone. They must have told him it was me despite the fake name, and he came back to deal with me per their instructions. The false passport may have bought me just enough time to save my life.

But I knew I should not be complacent. Now they knew that I was in this country under the name of Ben Durand. I could not go back to the inn. They might be waiting for me there already. I could not leave the island, either, without that passport. I had my own ID but it was back in the hotel and too dangerous to use, anyway, and so for all intents and purposes I was without any usable identification. I had only a few dollars in local currency on me, and no possessions. A murderous organization was now closing in on me in an island where I had few places to hide, no friends, and not even the ability to speak to most of the inhabitants. I was a dead man.

It was pointless to continue to the hills now and look for a nearby village. There was no place I could stay in and no point in finding transportation to the inn. I could go to the local police and tell them everything, but they would quickly learn of my whereabouts. The same would happen if I were to go to the American consulate. And of course there would be more of them by the cave now, so going there would be suicidal. I was free, but a prisoner nonetheless, and my days were numbered.

But there is nothing like desperation to get your brain to reach into its furthest repositories and pull out a survival plan where none seemed to have existed a moment ago. For a split second, a first and last in my ordinary life, I was a genius. My plan, I thought, would not have shamed even a Hitchcock character. There was a way for me not only to survive, but to find out what was in that cave. I could see it now.

It was simple. All I had to do was go to the local police, but say nothing about them. Instead, I would tell the cops that I was kidnapped at the entrance to the cave and managed to jump off the truck. I would ask them to come with me as I was sure the perpetrator was still in the cave area waiting for innocent tourists to rob. As we arrive near the cave I would ask them to show me the entrance, making up a story about the man emerging from inside the cave. I would then sneak in past the cops, forcing them to run after me into the cave. Now I would have my own dedicated — albeit unwilling — bodyguards. I would run straight for the a-corridor and see what it was that they were hiding. They would not dare shoot me with the local police behind me — especially as at this point there could not be many of the killers in there. Once I find out what it was they were hiding and share it with the police, there would be no further need to eliminate me. Whoever needed to stop them would act, and I would be off the hook, even if temporarily arrested.

I had a smile on my face — something that five minutes earlier I could not have imagined ever entertaining again. I wished Doc Minus Two were there to witness this so that he would be forced to begrudgingly admire my plan. I began to march towards the hills when another idea struck me: why walk if I could ride? There was a bicycle in the shed. It did not have tires, but if I stuck to earthen paths it would not be so bad. No one would wait for me in the shed anymore. They would never dream that I would dare go back there. No person escaping his captors has ever willingly gone back to the place of his imprisonment.

I ran back to the small wooden structure. The door was still open as I expected. I pulled the bike out. The seat was in tatters and the chain made a noise like ten chalks scraping against a blackboard in unison, but it was in working order. The ride was not smooth. The contraption rattled my bones even more than I had feared, but I felt free and near invincible, and for once cared little for physical comfort.

A town came into view thirty minutes into the ride. Again small whitewashed houses and street vendors, but as I ventured further towards the center there appeared a few four and five story buildings. I asked a passerby, a middle aged man, where the police station was. He looked at me funny and I realized that I still had a few magazine pages sticking out of my shirt and that my fake goatee was half gone. The noisy, rusty bike with no tires served to complete the picture for him. I'm sure he wanted to point me to the nearest psychiatrist instead, but he was polite enough to give me the directions I requested.

The police station was housed in a three-story building with many windows that looked achingly modern compared with the more traditional structures that surrounded it. Small cars and motorcycles parked next to it. I went in and approached the desk sergeant. He lifted his eyes off a piece of paper he was reading and looked at me and his mouth gaped open a little. He said something in Greek.

I shook my head. "I don't speak the language. English?"

He waved an arm in reluctant acceptance. "Yes, but not much."

I came straight to the point. "I was abducted."

"What?"

"Kidnapped. Someone took me away against my will."

He lifted a finger and pointed at me. There was a question mark on his face. "You here."

"I managed to get away."

"Oh. Good, good." His eyes went back to the paper he was reading and he swiveled away from me on his chair.

I took a step closer. "No, not good. This is a crime. And they'll do it again, except next time whomever they abduct may not be so lucky. They prey on tourists."

He sighed and put the paper down and turned to me again. "Where they kidnap you?"

"At the Labyrinth Cave. The Messara Cave."

"Why you go there? You can't enter. Very dangerous."

I nodded demonstratively. "I know. I didn't want to enter, just to see the entrance. And then someone jumped me from behind and tied me up and put a bag over my head." I used my arms to animate my story and that made him chuckle. "You have hair glued to your face," he said, pointing to my chin.

I removed it with some embarrassment. "It's part of my Minotaur custom. I wanted to take silly pictures with that. With the cave in the background."

That did not seem to convince him and he eyed me suspiciously. "What he look like, man kidnap you?"

"I don't know. I never had a chance to get a good look at him."

He gave me a penetrating gaze. "How I know you not lie?"

I used his disbelief to hurry the process along. "Because I can prove it. Come with me to the cave and I'll show you. I even know where he is, the man who attacked me. He came from inside the cave, and I have reason to believe he is still there, waiting for other tourists."

He rose up in his chair and leaned towards me. "You said you never saw him."

"Not his face. I just saw a silhouette coming out of the cave entrance and disappearing, and then he was behind me."

"What is your name?"

"Ben Durand."

"Show me ID please."

"He took it. Also my money and a bag. I was robbed I tell you."

He nodded, half in understanding, half in frustration. "You from America?"

"Yes."

"Why did you come to Crete?"

"I'm a tourist."

Again the nod. He swiveled his chair to the other side, where a PC screen stood with its back to me, and asked me to spell out my name. He keyed it in. His facial expression did not change, but he said something into a microphone that was attached to the wall next to him. A moment later another officer appeared. The desk sergeant pointed to me, and the other officer went behind me and pulled one of my arms up and put handcuffs on it. He repeated it with the other arm before I was able to blink. "What are you doing?" I cried.

The desk sergeant stood up. "Ben Durand, I detain you."

"For what?"

"They will tell you."

"Who's they?" I shrieked.

"The FBI. Your FBI. They want to talk to you."

"Am I wanted for anything?"

"No. Not wanted. They want to talk to you. It's in the computer."

"If I'm not wanted for anything, then I don't want to talk to them."

He shook his head. "You have to. They coming now." He motioned with his hand and the other officer took me down a short corridor to a small cell with green and white walls and a single metal bench. I sat down on the bench and awaited the FBI agents. This time there was to be no evading them.

XV.

It took over two hours for the FBI agent to arrive. I wondered if this would be Terry or the driver of the car that picked me up or someone else who worked for K. But what would they be doing in Crete? The man who finally arrived was someone I did not know. He was in his late thirties, and dressed in a sports jacket. The local cops let him into my cell and closed the door behind him and went away. He smiled at me and flashed a badge. "Hello, Al. I'm agent Dan Rodriguez."

"I'm not Al. My name is Ben Durand."

"And I'll call you that when you legally change your name. Until then you are still Albert DeSalvo."

It was a losing battle and I did not want to prolong it any longer than I had to. "You work for K, right?" I asked instead.

"Who?"

"I don't know her full name. I assume it begins with a K based on the e-mail address she gave me. That's the woman who interviewed me when you guys first approached me. That's who I've been in contact with over the past couple of weeks."

He sat down on the bench beside me. "I work for someone named George."

I rubbed my forehead and looked down at the floor. I wished he was not there. "Look, I told her and her people and now I'm telling you: I don't want your help. I don't want you to hide me away. Your organization leaks everything to them. I can't trust you."

"Who's them?"

"You know very well who I'm talking about."

He nodded. "The organization you believe is after you."

His attitude upset me. I got up. "Believe? It was you guys who first told me about it. You guys who warned me. You guys who would have me change my name and go into hiding somewhere where they cannot reach me. Now all of a sudden it's 'the organization you believe is after you'?"

He reached a calming hand. "Take it easy. I'm here to help you."

I took a step away from him. "So were the other agents. You did a crappy job. You help me and inside of five minutes they find out where I am through your precious Bureau who can't seem to keep anything to itself. I had enough near-death experiences to last me a lifetime and I'm not hungry for more thank you very much."

"No leaks this time. No one will know I talked to you."

I pointed to the sergeant desk, which was visible at the end of the corridor. "He knows. It's in the computer now. If the database here knows, if you know, if your superior knows, then they know."

He had a confident smile that I hated: it was not his ass that was on the line; he had no right to smile about it. "No they don't," he said. "Trust me on that."

I began to pace up and down the cell. "Why should I trust you? Do you even grasp the danger I'm in? They're here. They're close. I was kidnapped today."

"I know you were kidnapped. I know all about that. They tied you up and put you in the back of a green truck. Am I right so far?"

I turned towards him as if stung by a bee. "How do you know all that? The color, too? I didn't know the color of the truck myself until after I escaped, and I didn't tell any of that to the desk sergeant."

The annoying smile never left his face. "I just know, and for now let's leave it at that. We are very close to cracking this."

"If I had a nickel for every time I heard that."

"This time it's true, Al."

I pointed to the desk again. The sergeant was still sitting there. "And that's another thing: how did you know who I was based only on the name I gave him? There's nothing in any database connecting Ben Durand with my real name."

He sighed and tilted his head to the side and closed his eyes for a moment as a school principal about to scold a misbehaving pupil. "You came into this country with somebody else' ID. That's not a good move. We found out."

I sat back down on the bench. "I thought that ID was foolproof."

"It was. But someone told us."

"You won't tell me who of course."

"Of course."

What do you want from me now?"

"I want you to come with me."

"Where?"

"I can't tell you. Not in this place. You need to come with me; then you'll see."

Something was not right. He knew too much and gave away very little. He asked me to trust him but trusted me with nothing in return. It did not compute. He behaved differently from the FBI agents I knew. They left me alone when I asked them to; he would not. I did not like the idea of putting my life in his hands. "You have no jurisdiction here," I said. "You don't even have a right to question me."

"Yes we do. There is something called a proxy detention, by which, at the behest of the US government, friendly governments — like Greece's — may make their own citizens or people staying within their borders available for an interview with us. We asked and the Greek government consented. It's a simple process, especially if we ask to speak to a US citizen like yourself."

"Am I under arrest?"

He shook his head.

"Then I don't want to come with you."

He sighed again. "You are not under arrest yet. We can see to it that this changes. You came into this country with a fake passport and used this passport even when dealing with local law enforcement agencies. That is a federal felony and it may carry up to ten years in prison."

"That passport was not a fake."

"Technically no, but it belonged to someone else. It is still fraud. Now, given that you did that to save your hide and not to commit a crime, we may choose to look the other way. But only if you help us with the investigation. Otherwise we will put in an official request for extradition. You will be detained in a local prison until the process completes and then be transported back to the States in handcuffs to face charges. Is that what you want?"

He won. There was no way for me to leave this cell and be free again unless I cooperated with him. I was like a deer on the run from hunters who suddenly finds himself outside the forest on exposed ground with no trees to hide behind. This man sitting next to me held the key to my fate and there was nothing I could do about it. They will find out now where I was if they did not know already. The only thing left for me to do was hope that this man would prove better at fighting them off than the other agents I had met. "There was an agent who paid with his life for trying to protect me. Are you ready to make that sacrifice?"

"If necessary." He was calm. Was he naïve or another mole?

I had no arguments left. I nodded reluctantly. He called the sergeant and signed a paper and then walked me out of the police station and into his car. It was a rental, a small silver Toyota. He told me to get in and did not put handcuffs on me and did not insist that I sit in the back. "No handcuffs?" I asked.

"I told you you're not under arrest."

"Suppose I bolt at the first traffic light and you never see me again?"

He did not look at me as he answered, and his relaxed tone of voice never wavered. "You have no money and cannot leave the island, and you would stick out like the tourist that you are. How long d'you think it would be before the local police picks you up if we made you a wanted man?"

I had nothing left to say. It was pointless to argue with this man. He did not seem eager to make conversation, either. He did not even turn on the radio or hum. There was a confidence about him that did not require any outside stimulants to maintain. He focused instead on the road, peeking at his GPS from time to time to make sure he was on the right path. After a while I realized that we were going back to Mires. Of course, if he knew everything about me, he also knew which hotel I stayed in. But when we had nearly arrived at the inn he took a turn in another direction and brought us to a different part of town. We drove through a small residential neighborhood. Those were narrow, one-way alleys with the ubiquitous whitewashed two-story houses. Some of the houses had shops in the first floor, and here and there we passed an old man or woman sitting on a wooden chair outside them. Every few yards, a tree sprung out of a hole in the pavement to add a dash of green to the overwhelming white and grey of the town.

Suddenly he made a turn into a narrow driveway and came to a halt in a small parking lot. This was a modest motel, cheaper-looking than mine, with room for only ten cars in the adjacent lot. There were three standing there when we arrived. One of them was a 1970's light green Mazda truck with a covered bed.

I shifted my gaze from the truck to agent Rodriguez. The expression on his face did not change. I know mine did. My first instinct was to open the door and run as quickly as I could down the street. I understood the futility of this and instead let out a frustrated moan. "What's going on here?" I said after a while, when I saw that he remained silent.

He still said nothing, instead pointing at the green truck. It was parked two spots away from us. There was no one in the cab. "What?" I said.

"He's staying here, at this motel."

"Who?"

"The driver of the truck."

I brought my face closer to his. "Are you with them? Tell me the truth." I had no strength left to continue with this game. I wanted it to be over with, whatever that meant.

He smiled again. "No, I'm with you."

"But you knew this truck would be here. The truck I was kidnapped in."

He seemed to enjoy not giving me more information than he had to. "Of course."

"Of course what? Are we here to arrest them?"

"Nope."

"Did you bring me here to turn me over to them?"

"I told you I'm on your side."

"Then why the fuck are we here?"

"The driver of the truck would like to talk to you."

"You mean the man who abducted me?"

"That would be him."

I put a hand on the door handle. "How are you on my side if you bring me back to my abductor?"

"Relax," he said. Then he took out a phone and dialed a number and put it to his ear. "We're here," was all that he said before he hung up.

The last lingering threads of resistance left me at the sound of his confident tone. I let go of the handle and sank deep into my seat. My eyes went down spiritlessly to the floor of the car and from there up again to the sky outside and the building and the green truck. A door opened at the front of the motel and a man walked out and approached us. It was a long moment before I could recognize who it was; so persistent is our mind in rejecting what seems to be the impossible, even when the evidence stares us right in the face.

"Hello, wuss," he said as he peered inside the car. He did not smile or show any emotion, but then, when did he ever do either? Instead he put one of his half cigars in his mouth and opened the door and asked us to join him in his room.

XVI.

Doc Minus Two was a bad host on the best of days. Being far from home did little to improve his manners. He did not invite us to sit down and did not offer us anything to drink, and did not close the door to the bathroom when he went in to take a leak, and did not ask us if we minded that his dirty laundry was strewn about the entire floor and the furniture and the bed. We had to remove socks and underpants from the small wooden chairs before we could sit on them — without invitation — and waited for him to be done in the bathroom so he could take his place on a third chair.

Only Doc's gruffness prevented me from bursting into emotional expressions of relief. "I thought you were dead."

"You thought wrong," he said apathetically. "I never was dead, not even for a minute. I can produce witnesses who will swear to it."

"What did they do to you?"

"Nothing."

He was worse than Rodriquez. "But you disappeared," I persisted.

"No, I was simply away from my cabin after they broke into it."

"So they did make an attempt on you."

He shook his head. "They knew I wasn't there. They only wanted to plant listening devices under the pathetic guise of a burglary. But I have some surveillance equipment of my own in there, and so I knew about it and stayed away from the cabin for awhile."

"You went into hiding."

He shook his head. "Nope, just stayed away from the cabin and ignored your phone calls. I had a lot of work to do."

His lack of consideration was grating on me. "You could have at least told us. Nat and I were worried sick."

"Nat was never worried sick about anything in his life except his imaginary VC. He helped you just for the distraction. As for you, you don't count because you're a wuss. If you didn't worry about this you'd have worried about something else."

"You're the most insensitive person I have ever met. I'm sorry I was ever worried about you. It won't happen again even if I see you drown with my own eyes; I can promise you that."

He dropped his head forward to show that he was exhausted by my touchiness. "I'm sorry," he said mockingly. "Next time I disappear I'd let you know with a note written on a pink greeting card with a picture of a bouncing baby and some chocolates on the side."

I did not let him insult me. I had a bigger bone to pick with him, anyway. "Why did you abduct me?"

"To keep you from committing suicide. You were about to go into that cave."

"Were they waiting for me inside?"

"Death was waiting for you inside."

"Couldn't you just warn me?"

"No. You'd have gone in there anyway as soon as my back was turned. You're a stubborn little man with delusions of grandeur. We've already established that."

I was not satisfied with this explanation. "But to scare me half to death like that, tying me up like a pig, taping my mouth shut. You could have suffocated me."

"I know what I'm doing; I'm a doctor."

"A lousy doctor."

"I tied you up loosely. Made sure you could escape if you wanted to and even came back to make sure that you did."

"Ah, so that's why the truck came back to the shed. Regardless, that was still a nasty thing to do. I thought that was the end of me, first from you, whom I believed to be one of them, and then from him." I pointed at Rodriguez. "I had hundreds of scenarios running through my head, all of them bad, some even a little crazy. You shortened my life by a year. That's not very doctor like."

"I couldn't take any chances. I needed just one more day to make absolutely certain of something, and until then I wanted you out of the way. Then I was planning to track you down and tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"Who's behind the whole thing."

"Well, who is it?"

He took a long drag from his cigar. "Can't tell you yet. I still need to confirm something. There is one more thing I need to do tonight. I was in the middle of planning it when you had to disturb me again by going to the police." He took his cigar out of his mouth and used it to point at me. "I got to hand it to you, that was a brilliant idea to get the local police to go with you to the cave. I never thought you capable of independent thinking of this caliber. I expected you to go into hiding for a week or so, like the coward you are."

That was the closest thing to a praise Doc Minus Two was capable of delivering, and I accepted it as such. It mollified me to an extent, but there was still much more I wanted to know. I turned to Rodriquez. "And you, a federal agent — you just sit there and let him do these things to me?"

Rodriquez smiled again. "We had bigger fish to fry. Besides, he didn't tell me about the kidnapping until after the fact. By then you went to the police."

I turned to Doc Minus Two. "How did you know I went to the police?"

He got up and opened a window to let the cigar smoke out. "I couldn't know where you'd wind up after you untied yourself and escaped from that tool shed. So, I asked Danny here to put in an official request to detain you if you ever turned up as Ben Durand. I figured this way we'd know if you got into trouble. And sure enough, you did."

I forced myself to laugh. "And you took my passport away to make sure I don't leave the island."

"What passport? I don't remember any passport."

"That's right, you don't," Rodriquez interjected. "Because if there was a passport belonging to someone else on you the two of you would be in big trouble."

"Why are you here, anyway?" I asked Rodriquez.

The FBI agent shook his head slowly. That annoying smile of his reappeared. "I can't tell you but you'll know soon enough."

I leaned back in the chair for the first time since I sat down. "So what now?"

"Now we go to the cave," Doc Minus Two said.

"I thought you said death was waiting for me in there."

"It's the same death I'm hoping to meet tonight," he said. "And cheat it. I wasn't planning on taking you with us cause we both know you're going to be as useless as a map of Belgium in the Sahara, but seeing as you're here anyway, you may tag along." He put out his cigar. "If you promise to do what we tell you."

I promised, and Doc Minus Two pointed at me and then at the shower. "You look like a scarecrow that's gone through a cow's intestines. Hit the shower and then get some sleep. We leave after dark."

"It's hard enough to find the cave entrance during daylight," I said.

"It's not the entrance I'm concerned about." But he refused to elaborate and I did what he told me and showered and went to sleep on one of the two narrow beds in the room. It was easy to drift off to sleep: Rodriquez had disappeared by the time I got out of the bathroom, and Doc Minus Two was not one to make noise unless he had to.

At eight Rodriguez came back. With him were two officers from the local police. I looked at him with bewilderment. "We're not allowed to make arrests in Crete," he explained. "That's why they need to escort us."

We took the green Mazda truck — I rode in the cab this time — and Rodriguez's rental and drove off to the cave. We must have stopped some distance away because once we parked the cars and continued on foot, it was still a good fifteen minutes before we got there. "Did you buy this truck?" I asked Doc Minus Two as we were struggling to find our footing in the dark.

"A local contact lent it to me. The same contact who owns the shed. If there's any damage to either it's your responsibility. You already owe them for the bike you stole you know."

The local police knew where the entrance to the cave was, which was fortunate as it was just a hole in the rocky ground and easy to miss. They did not use flashlights but one of them had infrared goggles on. A few feet down the hole there was a rusty metal gate that blocked the entrance. Three of the bars were bent down forward, however, so that visitors could squeeze inside through the gap. We went through easily, except for Doc Minus Two, who had to wriggle back and forth to get in. Once inside, he handed us hard hats with flashlights on them.

"I don't have the map on me," I remembered.

"I do," Doc Minus Two said. He took out his tablet and turned it on. The scanned map glowed in the dark.

A narrow white tunnel led inside. There were many inscriptions on its soft, lime sandstone walls. Most were from the twentieth century. Brick-sized stones were strewn over the floor. The tunnel passed underneath a blocked, second entrance and opened up into a medium-sized room. The room was also white, as were most rooms and corridors in the labyrinth. Most of the area of the floor was covered by piles of stone. The ceiling was a composite of several large flat sections that seemed as if they were about to come loose at any moment and drop down on our heads.

The next room, though originally also white, appeared darker, made so by black residue. In addition to stones, the floor was covered by old artillery shells that the German army had left from the time they used the cave as an ammunition dump. "Why hasn't anyone removed these?" I asked one of the local cops. "Suppose one of them goes off?"

He answered in Greek and Rodriguez translated for me. "They're safe here so long as people obey the law and don't enter the cave to play with them."

The next room also had a pile of ammunition on the floor. The exit from that room split in two, giving us, for the first time, a taste of the labyrinth. Doc Minus Two looked at the map and directed us towards the right exit, which was a short, curved corridor. After this, the rooms were pretty much the same. They were of medium to large size, high enough to allow us to stand upright in comfort, and had lots of old artillery shells on the floor. The rooms seemed a combination of natural spaces and some human digging. They started out as large sections of the cave that humans carved into square shapes and even added columns to support the ceiling where they thought it was necessary. Some of the rooms had a single exit, while others gave you two choices. When the number of choices began to add up, I became worried that we would not find our way back and regretted not bringing a ball of thread with us like Theseus had. The further in we went, the fewer inscriptions we saw, or other evidence of human visitors, which I took as a bad sign.

After a while, the cave became more primitive, less touched by man. Someone had still tried to give the walls and the ceiling a flat, carved shape, but huge piles of rock dominated the floor and lined up the walls. It was now more difficult to stand upright without touching the ceiling. "Looks like there were several cave-ins here," I said.

"Yes," the local police explained through Rodriquez. "Mostly because of explosions, but there were many natural cave-ins over the centuries even before that. There are lots of cracks in the walls and the ceiling and you got to watch out because from time to time chunks of rock will fall right on your head. They claimed too many lives already. That's why there's a ban on entering this cave."

Now we arrived at a long, narrow curve with piles of stone on both sides of it. I knew we were very close to the point the a-corridor started from. Doc Minus Two recognized it, too, as he was looking at the map more frequently. We continued into a section of the cave that seemed to have gone through an earthquake. Large slabs of rock looked as if they had come off the ceiling recently. Some were hanging down, partially touching the ground, and some were already in pieces, adding more obstacles to the already uneven, treacherous floor. The local cops looked concerned.

And then we were there. Doc Minus Two stopped and looked at the map and handed it to me. I agreed. That was the spot of the offshoot. It looked only a little better than the section we had just come out of, with overhanging slabs and fissures in the ceiling. But along the right wall, where the a-corridor was supposed to begin, there was a crude stone wall. It looked like those the Germans had built as generator rooms and for other enclosures, but it was too new and complete to have been constructed seven decades ago. If this wall was truly from the war period it would have shown damage and wear like other such walls in the cave we came across. "It's behind this wall," I said confidently.

"I agree," Doc Minus Two said.

Rodriquez shook his head. "But it's blocked. I wish we'd brought a sledge hammer with us."

"I doubt whoever built this sealed it permanently," I said. "Someone must be going in and out all the time. No, there must be a way in."

Doc Minus Two turned to me. "Archeologist, do your trick. Maybe you'll win someone's respect for once."

I approached the wall and started pushing the stones and banging against them with my hands. It was clear that the wall was not thick — one or two layers of stones at the most. It was no more than twenty feet long and seven high and was held together with a minimal amount of cement. An average contractor would have taken only a day or two to build something like this. The left side of the wall seemed especially thin and had almost no cement between the stones — just enough so they did not fall off at the touch. I began to push hard on some of the stones in that section. After testing a few, my hand brushed over something soft. I banged on it lightly and the surface went in pliably and bounced back. This was white cardboard that someone had sprayed with texture paint to give it the appearance of stone. I stuck a finger between it and the stone immediately next to it and peeled the cardboard away, revealing a small cavity in the wall. Inside was a metal handle. I reached a hand to grab it.

"Don't pull that handle!" Doc Minus Two yelled. It was the first time I ever heard him yell. It sounded unnatural to me.

I froze in my place. "But isn't this the reason why we're here?"

"Touch that and you'll look like a tongue that someone slammed a door on." He approached with a piece of rope and tied it to the handle carefully and then motioned us to get away and the five of us went fifty yards back inside the curved tunnel we had come from. He made sure we were all there and then gave the rope a forceful tug. There was a soft bang and then a loud thud of rock hitting against rock. He led us back to the stone wall, cautiously eying the ceiling through the clouds of white dust that now filled the room. We stopped ten yards away from it. A gigantic slab that had been part of the ceiling a moment ago was now lying on the ground in pieces just in front of the stone wall where I had stood. One such piece had knocked over much of the flimsy stone structure. Doc Minus Two observed the ceiling carefully to make sure no other sections were threatening to come down, and then motioned me to come with him. We went behind the remains of the stone wall through the hole the slab had opened in it. It was a disappointment. There was nothing on the other side of it except an ordinary cave wall. Someone had simply sealed off a few square feet of space.

I tapped on the newly exposed cave wall. "That's solid rock. How can the a-corridor start here?"

"It doesn't," Doc Minus Two said.

"Where is it then?"

"It isn't anywhere, don't you get it? It never was part of the cave."

I felt a sharp stab of disappointment going through my body. "Are you saying the map is a fake?"

"That's right. But don't look crestfallen. It gets interesting."

"Why fake the map?"

"To kill you."

"You mean to kill whoever pulled the handle?"

"No, to kill you. Someone's picked a good spot in this cave where there was a ceiling that was near collapse and hid small explosive charges inside the fissures. Next, they built a stone wall right underneath with a handle that would set off the charges. Then they altered the original map to make it look like there was a mysterious extension, knowing that you would not resist the temptation to go and investigate."

"That's ridiculous. Why go through all this trouble just to kill me? Why not put a bullet through my head like they did to the others?"

"The point of this entire operation was for you to die right here. Not anywhere else."

I sat down on a rock and buried my head in my hands. "Why? Why here of all places?"

"Your death right here in this cave would have removed the last obstacle preventing the perps from reaching their ultimate goal."

"What goal?"

Rodriquez stepped forward now. "Doc, if what you said before is true — and I now believe that it is — then we better reposition. We don't have much time."

"Reposition for what?" I asked.

"For the truly interesting part of the evening," Doc Minus Two replied. "That handle did two things — set off the charges and let them know it has done its job. They'll be here shortly to confirm that you died and to retrieve this suspicious device that they planted here in the wall." He began to untie the rope from the handle and rolled it into a ball.

"So that's why you needed the local police and the FBI. You knew."

"That's right."

"And you couldn't warn me about this trap beforehand, you son of a bitch?"

"Not warn you? I tied you up good and kidnapped you and then had you arrested by the local police; all that to keep you away from this trap. What more do you want? With you, if it's not served with a kiss and whipped cream on the side, it is nothing."

We started on our way back. Doc Minus Two led with his map. Walking at a quicker pace this time, we reached the entrance in half the time it took us to get from the same entrance to the stone wall. Outside it was pitch dark. We went around the base of a nearby hill. Now the local cops took over and ordered us to lie down facing the entrance to the cave. They took out dark capes from a backpack and handed them to us. We wrapped these around us like blankets so we would not be seen in the dark. Then they put their infrared goggles on and ordered us to be quiet — me they warned twice as I was a novice in their eyes — and waited.

It took another half hour before they spotted something in the dark. "Someone's approaching," Doc explained to me as he saw one of the cops waving an arm. The cops lay still for a few more moments, then, once the person they saw was inside the cave, they got up slowly. "One man," they whispered. "You stay here." They trod lightly towards the cave entrance while Doc Minus Two, Rodriquez and I stayed behind.

It took awhile for the visitor to come out. "Maybe he's puzzled at not finding a body underneath the slab," I whispered.

"Probably, but some of these pieces are so large it should not come as a surprise. He'd have to assume that you're under there somewhere, then go get some help to move the slabs. Either way we got him."

I knew that he finally came out of the cave when the cops began to bark orders loudly. Then there was a metallic click as they slapped handcuffs on him. We got up and ran towards them, now with flashlights on. When we arrived we saw a man sitting on a rock, his hands behind his back and the two cops to his sides with their arms on his shoulders. The man seemed scared and confused and was trying to convince them that they were making a mistake. Next to him lay the handle-trigger device I almost pulled an hour earlier. Then the man turned his head towards us, and I could see his face caught in the cross beams of three flashlights.

"Peterson?" I said. I wondered if I was seeing things but as I came nearer there was no mistaking it. "I thought you were dead."

"You know this man?" one of the local cops asked.

"I sure do. He's a dead FBI agent."

Doc Minus Two cleared his throat. "Being a lousy doctor and all, I won't venture an opinion on whether he's alive or dead. But I can tell you this much: his name is not Peterson and he is not an FBI agent. The only FBI agent you ever met in your miserable life is Danny Rodriquez over here."

XVII.

I climbed into the cab of Doc's truck as the local cops and their suspect went with Rodriquez. The man I knew as Peterson denied he had ever seen me before and demanded they let him go. The cops ignored him. "Will you make the call now?" Doc Minus Two called out to Rodriquez before he took off.

Rodriquez nodded affirmatively. "I don't get it," I said after they were gone and Doc started on his way to drop me off at my inn. "Are you saying that K and Terry and the driver of the car that picked me up — none of them were FBI agents, either? I took it for granted that I was dealing with the real McCoy."

"Of course someone like you would take it for granted. You can't tell a testicle from an egg."

"So who were they?"

"They were them."

"That's ridiculous. They had me where they wanted me. Why not kill me right then and there?"

"They were killing you. I told you, you were meant to die here under that slab. Nowhere else. Everything they did, they did to get you to come here and pull that handle."

"But why? I still don't get it. Why should I alone have to die here when a conventional murder was good enough for the other sixty six passengers? You said my dying here would have allowed them to reach their ultimate goal. What goal?"

Doc Minus Two put out a calming hand. "Not yet. There is one more thing we need to do and then you'll know everything. Until then there are some lives at risk, and I don't mean your own this time."

I rubbed my temples and gazed at the dark, winding road. "He tricked me, that Peterson. There was no break-in that night, was there? He faked a fight and pretended to be dying and then warned me not to trust his own bosses. Said that there was an informer inside the FBI. Why would he do that?"

Doc Minus Two sounded almost excited for the first time since I've known him. He lit a half a cigar. "That — a true act of genius. Can't you see? Now that you think there was an informer, you won't go to the FBI or to any other law enforcement agency for that matter, because you think that the perps would find out where you are. With this little trick they ensured that you won't go to the authorities. The criminal convinced his victim not to trust the law. This is beautiful; true artwork. You must grant them that."

"I'm glad they pleased you," I said. Even I could notice the envy that snuck into my tone of voice.

"I always said they were not stupid. But they had their slip ups."

"What slip ups?"

"Not Yet."

I was annoyed. "Ah, the convenient 'not yet'. Keep me in the dark some more why don't you?"

"That's right. Builds character."

"You had slip ups of your own. You're not as good as you think."

He sounded bemused. "Such as?"

"That passport you gave me, of the man in the asylum. Rodriguez knows about it, and that could get me in deep shit, and you too as the supplier."

"He's the supplier."

"What?"

He put the cigar in his mouth and spoke without taking it out. "I lied about the asylum. The FBI provided the passport so you'd feel safe travelling here. Back then we didn't know enough and thought it would help the investigation if you went to the cave. Turns out we didn't really need you here after all."

I turned to him and almost yelled. "Are you saying you already knew back then in Tampa that the people I met were not the FBI? You already knew they were them?"

"I only suspected it."

I waved both arms frantically. "And of course there was no way you could have volunteered any of that information? It would have interfered with your scare-your-customer-to-death professional code, wouldn't it?"

"My job, if you still did not get it at this point, it to ..."

"Keep me alive and crack the case, and the hell with any lasting psychological damage to my fragile soul. If I want a shrink I should hire one separately."

"So you do get it. So why are we having this conversation?"

I stopped arguing. He dropped me off at the inn — it felt as if I had not been there in weeks — but before taking off he had to stress me out a little more. "Be ready at eight. We have a flight to catch."

"What do you mean? Why so soon?"

"Got to be in Washington tomorrow."

I was tired and had my fill of him for one night. "Why should I be inconvenienced because you have to be in Washington tomorrow? It's already four in the morning. I had a long day; I want to sleep late. I'll take another flight."

"Not me, you have to be in Washington tomorrow," he said.

"Why?"

"Need you for a lineup."

I sighed. "I don't suppose these are the FBI impostors I'm to identify?"

He nodded. "They're being picked up as we speak."

"Who was the head of that operation?"

"The woman you knew as K."

"Oh, shit."

"Yes indeed," he said almost with satisfaction. "All this time, you've been feeding information to the head of the snake even as the body was trying to strangle you. The next time I call you an idiot I expect an enthusiastic concurrence."

I did not reply. He took pity on me then, which was a testament to the state I must have been in. "Don't look so down. You're about to find out why they're out to get you. You would never believe it."

I nodded in exhaustion. I almost did not care anymore. Just three hours of sleep ahead of me. I opened the door and stepped out of the truck. "May I get my passport back?" I said before I closed it.

"The fake one? Rodriquez retrieved it. Get your own."

"Isn't it dangerous to travel with my own ID?"

"Not anymore."

I went into my room and set the alarm clock and threw myself on the bed. I got up even more tired when the clock went off, and broke it in retaliation and packed my suitcase and checked out. Doc was waiting for me in the parking lot in a taxi. I had been hoping he would be late so I could get some sleep on the bench outside the lobby, but being late was not one of Doc Minus Two's weaknesses. "Where's the truck?" I asked.

"Had to return it to my friend. Besides, it's much more fun when you pay for the ride."

"For the flight, too, I imagine?"

"How else? But don't worry, this is the last big ticket item I'll be charging you for. You'll get a final bill from me tomorrow."

"I'm not worried, I'm ruined anyway."

"That's the spirit."

I'm not sure if he said anything else after that, because I fell asleep as soon as I hit the back seat of the taxicab. He woke me up at the airport, where I went to sleep at the gate, and then on the plane, and on the second plane. For the first time, we were a great team. I enjoyed the sleep and he the silence that came from my direction. We landed in Dulles International late in the evening. I thought we were going to a hotel, but Doc called someone on his phone even as we were still sitting in the plane and said to me, "The FBI people are waiting for us."

"Where?"

"At their headquarters. Why do you think we're in Washington?"

I expected him to hail a cab, but he led us towards the airport parking lot. I was afraid to ask, and indeed there she was, with her missing windshield and layers of dirt. It was already early November. It was too cold to ride in an open car like this. But Doc Minus Two did not care, and did not neglect to make me pay at the exit. There was not much traffic that time of night, which meant that we got to our destination quickly, but also that nothing stopped Doc from driving like a maniac and freezing me solid.

The J Edgar Hoover Building is an ugly structure inside and out. It has a boring, uninspiring façade, and possesses all the charm of a cold-war era utilitarian monolith. Its roof looks as if an oversized airport control tower decided to perch on top of it without regard to whether or not it fit in there. Inside there are many doors and wall sections with small windows, and people sitting in front of glowing computer screens along narrow tables, no doubt dreaming of the day when they could work in another building. They let us in after Doc Minus Two spoke to someone on the phone, and then they took us to a small meeting room with two tables pushed together and six chairs, and told us to wait.

Someone walked in ten minutes later. She was a light-skinned black woman in her late fifties, smartly dressed and with rimless glasses sliding down her nose. Her and Doc Minus Two's eyes met briefly as she entered, and then he went back to his tablet and she pulled up a chair and sat next to me. "Al?" as asked softly.

I nodded and reached a hand. She shook it. "Eileen Hentschel. Section Chief. Glad you could come."

"Hentschel?" I glanced at Doc Minus Two but he did not budge. "That's a rare enough name that it would be a weird coincidence if the two of you were not related."

"We are married," she said. She did not sound happy about it.

I shot out of my chair and pointed at her and then at him. "You two are married?"

Doc Minus Two was still busy with his tablet. "Why is that so hard to believe?" he asked.

"It's hard to believe any woman would marry you," I said to him. "Let alone one with a job. I thought you lied about having a wife back then."

"Let that be a lesson to you. I don't lie about marriage. It's too solemn a subject."

"So your wife is with the Bureau? I'd never have believed it. Are you two still together or working on a divorce?"

She sighed. "We're separated, not divorced, if you have to know."

"How can someone whose job is law enforcement be married to this man?"

"It often puzzled me, too," she said. "Of course any marriage with this man wouldn't last. Even if I were to ignore his numerous faults, I'd have to report him to my bosses for his investigation techniques alone. For the sake of us both, we decided to separate."

"That and she didn't like the company I was keeping," Doc Minus Two interjected. "I didn't like her friends, either. I find people without a criminal record boring."

I was still unable to recover from this even as I sat down again. "That explains how you're so well connected."

That offended him. He put the tablet down and glared at me. "No, the opposite is true." He pointed at his wife. "They are the ones who enjoy my connections. In this case, as in many others, I point out crimes and suspects to them that they should have discovered by themselves if they had half the competence I do. The only thing I ask in return is help with the apprehension of some of these characters."

She nodded. "We're still good partners. Let's say we use each other."

"With such FBI connections," I asked Doc Minus Two, "Why didn't you know from the start that K and her people were impostors? It took you until Florida to figure it out."

"It didn't occur to me to check at first. I had no reason to believe they were lying to you. I even bought the story of the FBI informer. Hook, line, and sinker. It didn't surprise me." He gave his wife a quick glance but she did not react to the provocation.

"What gave them away?" I asked.

"The flight manifest."

"What do you mean?"

"It started with the pilot's widow. Remember Mrs. Rossi?"

"The one who disappeared?"

"The one who resurfaced a few days later."

"They found her? Glad to hear. Is she okay?"

He nodded. "As okay as someone with a drinking problem could be. That night she suffered another of her nervous breakdowns, screams and all, and she wandered off into a bar without an ID and drank herself to the point that she passed out. She spent two days in the hospital until she remembered who she was and they let her go."

"So, they never touched her."

"No, they didn't. Then I got some more information about her husband. The underworld really does believe he was killed for unpaid debts. I double checked and guess what? He was never assigned to Flight 2251."

"Are you saying he wasn't the pilot on that flight?"

"He wasn't on the flight, period."

"Why was he on the list, then?"

He lifted a finger. "Ah. There you go. Remember Dominique Lasbrant?"

"The one whose parents said had never flown?"

He nodded. "So now you have two people on the list who were nevertheless not on 2251. I began to go over the rest of the list."

"You found more who weren't on that flight?"

"Let me put it this way: the only person on the list who was on that flight is you."

I could feel my eyes narrow. "That was not the flight manifest, then."

"You got it. I managed to get a hold of the real manifest for that flight and it has nothing to do with the list they gave you. What you received from K was a random list of sixty six people who have been murdered in the course of the previous two years — and you."

"Why me? Why was I added to the list? Why tell me it is the manifest?"

"To scare you," Eileen said. "To make you believe there was something special on that flight that someone was willing to kill all passengers to keep a secret."

"The map?"

She nodded. "They were slowly leading you in that direction, so that you'd want to go to Crete and into that cave despite all the dangers and the outright ban. That takes some persuading. They made you think there was something in there that's so important someone would kill sixty people for it. They knew you wouldn't be able to resist."

"All this to get me to die in that cave?"

"Not exactly," Doc Minus Two said. "That too was just a means to an end. There was a purpose to all this, and you were a tool, not the ultimate goal. But they needed you dead under that slab."

"Will someone finally tell me what was their ultimate goal?"

"Soon," he said. "I'm all ready to tell you, but you got to do this one last thing for us. Telling you now would ruin it."

"The lineup?"

"Not a real lineup," Eileen said. "Just one person we want you to identify. One who wasn't picked up yet; the last suspect." She got up and looked at me until I rose from my chair, too.

"Where are we going?"

"To the hospital?"

"What hospital?"

"George Washington University Hospital, right around the corner," Doc said. He got up, too.

"What am I going to do in a hospital?"

"Visit your wife."

I was getting tired of being surprised. "What?"

"She's there for extensive examination at our request," Eileen said. "You better come, but I must insist you remain behind the agents. That goes for you, too." She gestured at Doc Minus Two. "You let them do their job."

"Examined for what?" I protested. "Why would you ask her to get examined and why here in Washington?"

"Because they have a great cancer center here and because it's easier to protect her while she's in Washington," Eileen said. And then they refused to answer any more questions.

XVIII.

We were six who entered the hospital. Two young FBI agents led the way with a quick step. A short distance behind them was another operative, a lower level chief, who supervised the two. Eileen walked behind him. Her job consisted of making sure Doc Minus Two and I stayed at least one hallway length behind the three men, and that we did not talk too much. I was still trying to find out more. "Why would the last suspect come to this hospital where my wife is? Is it to take her hostage?" But Eileen and Doc Minus Two shushed me.

We went down several white hallways. The agents knew where they were going. They did not stop to look around. After five minutes we saw them enter a patient room. Eileen stopped us from following them inside it. One of the agents stuck his head out a moment later and signaled her that it was safe, and only then did she let us in. It was a small white room with two beds. Jane was lying on one of them, surrounded by medical devices that hooked up to a battery of electrical sockets on one end and to various parts of her body on the other. She seemed tired and depleted. She stared blankly at us as we entered and said nothing. Josh was there, too, sitting on a chair next to her bed, holding her hand and rubbing it softly. On the floor next to him was a bag of goodies that he had brought for her, with food and drinks and a change of clothes. The three agents sat silently on the other bed, waiting for Eileen's cue.

"What are you doing here?" Josh said to me with evident hostility. "And who are all these people?"

I ignored him. "Why didn't you tell me you were in a hospital?" I demanded of Jane. "Thank God we got here in time before the last suspect made it here."

"He's already here," Doc Minus Two said.

"Arrest this man," Eileen ordered.

The agents approached Josh. Jane was too shocked to react. I felt a duty to speak for her. "Wait a minute. There must be some mistake. I can't stand the guy but he's no criminal."

"He most certainly is," Eileen replied as the agents read Josh his rights and put handcuffs on him. Josh did not try to resist. He only looked at Jane. "What are you doing to my fiancé?!" she managed at last.

"We're arresting him on suspicion of attempted murder," Eileen said.

"Of whom?"

She pointed at me and then at Jane. "Him, and you."

Jane tried to get out of bed but the tug of the wires and the tubes overwhelmed her and she sank back in. "Are you out of your goddamn mind?"

The agents carefully picked up the bag Josh had brought with him, and two bottles of drink he had given Jane. They put them in plastic bags and marked them. Then they escorted Josh out of the room.

"What is going on here?" I said. "Josh?"

"Joshua Banes," Eileen explained. "Of the Banes gang. I believe you have met the rest of them. His mother, Edna, was known to you as K. His bothers are Jack Banes, known to you as Peterson, Michael Banes, known to you as Terry, and Alex Banes, whom you knew only as the driver of the FBI car."

"I want a lawyer," Jane cried out. "My doctor deceived me. He said to come here for cancer tests."

"He didn't deceive you," Eileen said. "They found pre cancerous cells in you. That man we just picked up is responsible for it."

"You're lying!" Jane shrieked. "He's a good man. Is everyone out of their fucking mind? Bring him back!"

Eileen took out a piece of paper and unfolded it carefully and gave it to Jane. She sat down on the edge of the bed beside her and tried to hold her hand. Jane shook off her grip. "This is a lab analysis of a glass of wine we retrieved from your home the other day," Eileen said. "Paradichlorobenzene, formaldehyde, pesticides, and some other potent carcinogens. He's been poisoning you for months, Jane."

"I don't believe this. I know my fiancé. He would never do that." She shook the paper and tried to tear it up, then let it drop beside her on the pillow. Eileen looked at us and gestured that we should leave her alone with Jane. Doc and I left the room and began to walk down the corridor.

"Will you finally tell me what's going on?" I said.

Doc Minus Two searched his pockets for a half a cigar, then, realizing that he was in a hospital, gave up and began to talk. "The Banes Gang is a very sophisticated, very smart bunch of people. Other than holding down a job they could do anything. In fact the last one of them who had a job of any kind was the father, Laurence Banes. He was a corporate executive. He and the rest of the family did not see eye to eye. They loved the easy life; he was a workaholic and a very frugal person. He wanted to squirrel away his money, not spend it. One day he died of a heart attack. No one knows exactly why — he did not have a history of heart disease. No one could prove any wrongdoing. His wife and four sons collected his life insurance. Not a whole lot, but enough to allow them to live comfortably for a few years without having to work. And sure enough, they did not work. Not one of the four sons ever looked for a job. Instead they became mixed up in easy-money schemes like credit card fraud, horse race fixing, and so on. None of it was too successful, and so they decided to go back to the one thing that did work for them: life insurance and inheritance. The elder, Jack, whom you knew as Peterson, married a wealthy woman who mysteriously disappeared a year after the wedding. He got whatever money she had alright, but not her life insurance. The insurance company refused to pay without a body, and the will is contested till this very day."

"Amateurs."

"Back then, yes, but they learned quickly. The next boy to marry was Alex. Again a wealthy woman. Again a will and a life insurance policy. This time they were much smarter, though. The woman died of ovarian cancer two years later. Alex got the money with no questions asked."

"Pulling what they were now trying to do to Jane?"

"Most probably. The woman was only thirty five and healthy as an ox when she met Alex. The genius of what they did was that unlike a conventional poisoning, carcinogens leave no traces unless you catch the perps in the act, like we did Josh here. It is impossible to prove what had caused the cancer after the fact." He led us into an elevator. "So now they were rich. But the family of the woman must have suspected something because they mounted several court challenges. They had the money to pay for a good lawyer, too. They lost, but the Baneses were out some lawyer's fee themselves, and learned two valuable lessons: one, don't mess with a rich family who can sue you, and two, a life insurance policy on a new wife is always suspicious no matter how natural her death. This time around they were going to be extra careful and extra smart, and..."

"And take a life insurance policy not on the wife but on the ex husband."

He nodded. "Josh — the next in line from the Baneses to pull his weight for the family — had Jane take out a five million dollars life insurance policy on you. He purposely looked for a woman with a loser husband — no offence — so he could seem to intervene on her behalf and tell her she should not let the ex get away with financial irresponsibility. He got her to get your consent to the policy. Feeling guilty about your financial situation and worried about your son's welfare should you die, how could you refuse, especially when she is paying the premiums?"

Now I could remember her coming to me with that policy two years ago, along with several unrelated documents I had to sign. "That's true. I didn't think twice about that policy. My son, if not Jane, is my responsibility."

"No need to apologize. They're not here and I don't care. Now, back to the Baneses: what they did was — again — genius because if you go and die and the mother of your son collects the five million dollars, no one is going to suspect anything. Certainly they're not going to suspect Josh. He gets nothing."

"And then he would slowly give her cancer so the money would revert to him in the end as the surviving spouse. And there'll be no insurance company to investigate as they already paid her."

"Exactly." He scraped his grayish stubble noisily — he hadn't shaved since Crete — and led us into another corridor. I realized that he was bringing us to the exit. "The only problem was getting you to die a natural death, or at least a non-suspicious one. He couldn't slowly poison you the way he did her. Instead, he tried to learn everything he could about you. What were your weak points? You were a frustrated archeologist with delusions of grandeur. He went through your books and saw the map of the labyrinth somewhere. The idea of building a death trap for you there was born quickly afterwards: you, believing there was a mysterious new corridor unknown to science, would drop everything and rush to Crete to find out. Once you were buried under a rock, all that would be left to do is retrieve the trigger device and notify the local authorities. So a stupid tourist went where he should not have gone and found his death. Who cares? Good enough for the law, and good enough for the insurance company. And so they put together a mysterious looking envelope with a the map of the labyrinth on a pen drive, shoddily encrypted, and sent it — supposedly accidentally — to your son's mail box. He gave it to you knowing that you were into this kind of thing. But then, nothing happened."

"I never looked at it. The envelope slipped my mind."

"They didn't know that. From talking to Aaron Josh learned that you did get it. They assumed you looked at the map. So why didn't you go to Crete? Maybe you were not taking it seriously enough. They had to make sure you acted. Time was running out: Jane and Josh were to be married by the end of the year, and Jane would find out she was sick any day now. And so they came up with the most elaborate plan I've ever seen. The pinnacle of genius this gang has ever reached. Josh's mother and brothers impersonated FBI agents who picked you up and warned you about a plot to kill every passenger on a flight you took two years ago." Doc Minus Two had a desperate need to put a cigar substitute in his mouth now, and so he stole a wrapped straw from a food tray he saw on a medical trolley. He peeled the plastic wrap off noisily and held the straw between his teeth. "This was so easy to put together it boggles the mind: all they had to do was compose a list of sixty six people who happened to be murdered in the past two years, add your name to it, then claim that this was the flight manifest. I must admit it was foolish of me not to suspect it from the start, but that is the nature of genius that you don't suspect it."

"So now I thought someone's after me. They scared me half to death."

"That's right. And with 'Peterson's' little show, they sealed the deal in your mind. They even had him say that his attacker mentioned the Minotaur. Slowly — with some help from K's e-mails and your own son, who was coached by Josh — you made the connection they wanted you to make and assumed that the murderers were trying to protect the secret of the cave. After that it was hard even for me to stop you from going to Crete before we were ready."

"So what went wrong?"

"It almost didn't go wrong. Without me, you'd have been under a rock in a cave right now, your wife five million dollars richer and slowly dying, and in two or three years the Banes gang would have moved on to their next victim. They thought they fool-proofed it, even managed to scare you off going to the authorities. But they didn't count on you going to a private eye. Certainly not someone of my caliber."

I smirked. He did not take notice. "Thanks to me they were shaken to their foundation. The kidnapping — Jane and Josh and Aaron. They never saw it coming. Josh thought he was running things; all of a sudden he was a prisoner and I was in control. It terrified him. He didn't even know who I was. This is where they began to make mistakes."

"How did they find out who you were, anyway? You never introduced yourself to them."

"Ah. Another rare act of stupidity on my part, I'm afraid. I let Josh use my phone to make a call to his family, remember? I thought him safe, being a friend of your family. So now he had my phone number and could find out who I was. Next they tried to plant surveillance equipment in my house, to see what I was up to. They were running scared and felt they had to know what was going on and why you were not at the cave yet. They disguised it as a burglary, but I had my own cameras there and saw what they did. This and the fact that the victims we investigated were not on that flight told me we were on the wrong path. I did some research and found out that the pilot was killed for gambling debts just as the police thought. I discovered who it was, too: one of the goons who worked for a local loan shark had a thing for bird watching. Remember the magazine up in the tree? I informed the police and they picked him up a week ago and now they believe he was the triggerman."

"So now you knew they didn't kill the pilot."

"Exactly. So much for the hit list. There were too many inconsistencies for an organization that was supposed to be all powerful, all knowing. By the time you thought I disappeared I already knew the flight manifest was bullshit and the murders unrelated, and that the solution was in the cave. I talked to my wife and we found out who Josh was and what kind of a family he came from. I had a pretty good idea what this was all about at that point but still needed proof. The best proof was catching one of them as they went to retrieve the trigger from the cave, convinced you had died.

"And that's how we got Peterson."

"Jack Banes, to be exact."

"Who did you ask Rodriguez to call back then, after we caught him?"

"At that point we just needed to round up the rest of the family. But for Josh, I knew that would be more difficult: we also wanted to prove that he was trying to poison Jane. As I said, because we were dealing with carcinogens and not just any conventional poison, you have to catch them in the act, delivering the drinks. Hence the little drama you've just witnessed in Jane's room."

"Jane," I said. Now that the initial shock was wearing off, concern was taking its place. "Will she be okay?"

"She has what could easily develop into malignant tumors. But with the stimulant out of the picture and with good care, she might be able to avoid a worst-case scenario."

"How did you manage to get a wine glass from her house?"

"I didn't. Your son did. I talked to him and said we needed to make sure no one was trying to poison the entire family — meaning the crazy organization his father was talking about — and he got me a sample."

I rubbed my nose. "So, the organization was the Banes gang, and the only people marked for death were Jane and myself. But what would have happened to Aaron? If Jane and I were dead he might have had a claim to the five million."

Doc Minus Two shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? The husband controls the estate after the wife's death, so Josh might have planned to squander it all away without leaving Aaron a penny when he reached eighteen. He probably would not have had to kill him, but Aaron could certainly not expect any help or money from the Baneses. He would have had a hard life."

There was anger in my voice. "I wish I could deal with them myself."

"You're no match for them, kid. They'd insert a stick up your ass and use you for a broom. The legal system is in place to protect wusses like you, so let them do their job." We reached the exit and he walked on and left the hospital without saying another word; without asking if there was anything else I wanted to know. I stayed inside the building and collapsed into a bench and slept until morning, when they told me Jane had already checked out.

XIX.

The prosecutor won a conviction on all counts against the Banes family. Josh received a life sentence, as had Jack, Alex and Edna. Michael received twenty years for his part.

Jane did develop cancer a few months later. She is undergoing treatment and we hope for the best. I come to visit often. We are not back together, but I'm closer to Aaron now. Jane says she will never date again because she distrusts all men except me, and me she detests.

Doc Minus Two disappeared from my life except for two occasions: one when he sent me a final bill that had stripped me of the remainder of my 401K and any other money I had ever put away. The other was when he called the other day. He did not ask me how I was doing or even how Jane was. He just said that he had heard of an opening for a "wuss archeologist" somewhere in Boston, and thought I might be a good fit for it. The job turned out to be an archivist in the Department of Historic Resources and Archaeology in a New England organization. I applied and got it immediately. I don't know if he or someone he knew had put in a good word for me. I did not much care, to be honest. I finally had a job and a way to get back on my feet, and that was enough for me.

I printed out the map of the Labyrinth Cave — the fake one — and hung it in the living room in my new apartment, which I rented shortly after starting at my new job. Some would think me insane for staring at such bad memories every evening when I come back home from work. I don't see it that way. I think every person must have something he or she are willing to die for, otherwise they are no more than purposeless chunks of meat doomed to wander this world aimlessly for the rest of their days. For me, that was the thing I was willing to die for, and whenever I look at it I know that despite everything Doc Minus Two had said about me, I am not a wuss.

——

