"I won't," she said, and squeezed his hand.

"If anybody hurts Jack I'm going to the police," he said defiantly.

She leaned down and kissed his forehead. "I hope Jack knows what a great friend you are," she said as he smiled at her through cracked lips.

When Susan arrived at the cafeteria Shane Scully was sitting in a booth one over from where Dr. Lance Shiller had drawn his crude oval heart on the place mat and explained to her about Herman's arrhythmia. It seemed as if that had happened years ago.

Susan got some coffee and then slipped into the booth across the table from him.

"He okay?" Shane asked.

"Yeah, I think so, but, my God, his face is a mess. He lost some teeth… he took that beating but refused to talk." She paused to sip her coffee as she thought about it, then added, "Sometimes people surprise you, what they do, how strong they are, underneath." She told him what Miro had overheard while under the desk, about the call to Mr. Valdez, and the plan to take them to a place called Black Star in Cleveland. After she finished, they sat there looking at one another, each lost in thought.

"He's not in Cleveland. That doesn't make any sense at all," Shane finally said.

"But that's where Miro said…"

"I don't care. He must have misunderstood, or they said that because they knew he was listening. Why take Jack two thousand miles away? DARPA is a federal agency with access to offices everywhere. What's in Cleveland that they can't get here? It's nuts."

"I don't know, maybe that's where Valdez is."

Shane pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number.

"Who're you calling?"

"My wife, Alexa. She's the exec at Detective Services Group downtown and twice the cop I am. Let's get her take." After he got her on the phone and told her what Miro had overheard, he listened.

Susan watched and waited.

"Where is that?" he finally asked. "Okay, I'll get a map and look. Thanks, babe." Another pause, then, "Okay, I'll call and let you know." He folded the phone and put it back in his coat pocket.

"Alexa says she thinks there's a wilderness area east of here, between Orange County and San Bernardino County, called the Cleveland National Forest."

"A national forest. That would be federal land," Susan said.

"Makes slightly more sense than Cleveland, Ohio."

They left the cafeteria and went upstairs to the hospital gift shop where they bought a travel book that included a map of Southern California. They found the Cleveland National Forest and huddled together, staring at it.

"Some cop I am. It's less than sixty miles away and I never even heard of it," Shane muttered.

Susan borrowed a pair of magnified reading glasses from a display rack and squinted closely at the page. Little fire roads and trails crisscrossed the wilderness area. She could just barely read the tiny print on the map. She saw areas marked as Blue Jay Camp Ground and Trabuco Canyon Trail on the southern section of the Cleveland forest, then continued searching the tiny roads to the west. Finally, on the northeast section of the map, up around Lake Elsinore, near Riverside County, she found it-a little trail that splintered off something called Santiago Road and led to Black Star Canyon.

The room was small, locked, and windowless. The air-conditioner cranked freon-cooled air down on him through two large ceiling vents.

He'd been taken there in the van from the airport in Van Nuys-no stops-his head sacked up again like a bag of vegetables. Toward the end of the two-hour drive he'd felt the tires bouncing on what seemed like a badly paved road. He thought he smelled pine needles, but that could have been his imagination.

The van stopped, the door was thrown open, and he was dragged out and roughly pushed across some open ground by commandos who kept the conversation simple and guttural, sticking to phrases like "Shut the fuck up" and "No talking, asshole." Mind-expanding discourse.

He was shoved into a room where the temperature was around fifty. Only two places Jack knew of kept the thermostat that cold: the Polar Bear exhibit at the Los Angeles zoo and the LAPD Computer Center. Crude as his captors were, he didn't think he was about to be fed to a bear-so maybe he was in some kind of computer lab.

Detective reasoning at its tip-top best.

Taking it a step further, if this was a computer lab, maybe it was part of Octopus or Echelon.

After they pushed him into the cold room they uncuffed him and left. A few minutes later he decided, What the hell, go for it, and removed his canvas bag.

The room was concrete block-no windows, no chairs. Minimalist digs.

The hours ticked by while he grew goose bumps. He paced the room. He put his ear next to the concrete wall and listened. Something was humming faintly in two separate octaves behind the thick concrete. Water pipes? Power lines? Motown singers?

"Well, Jack, you've really fucked up big this time," he said to the humming wall.

Later, the same, dark-skinned, snake-cold Hispanic man he'd seen at the airport entered the room and closed the door behind him. "I'm Vincent Valdez."

Jack thought it probably wasn't a good sign that the man told him his name. Valdez stood close, not ten feet away, as if Jack posed absolutely no physical threat to him.

Jack stood and growled: "Before ripping your geek head off and shoving it up your ass, I'm required to inform you that I'm a black belt in four martial arts disciplines." Tired old bullshit, but there it was. The guy was pissing him off.

"Let's see what you got then."

Jack shrugged and gave him his best police academy hand-to-hand move, the old feint-to-the-left and pivot kick to the right. Before he got halfway through it he was flying backward, spinning wildly in flight, yelping something Three-Stoogish, like woo-woo-woop! He flew against the wall, landing with a thunk like a load of wet laundry, then slid down to the floor. Immediately, his worthless back went into a full spazoid convulsion. He was jerking around on the floor like a power company lineman with a handful of hot ends.

"I'm a fifth-degree black belt." Valdez was looking down at Jack, who was now desperately trying to get his lower lumbar region under control. "This might be a good time for you to tell me what you think you know," he instructed.

Jack finally stopped spasming and cleared his throat. "Okay… here's one thing I heard."

"I'm listening."

"Ashly Lynn may be getting out of porno."

Valdez didn't answer. He just glared and walked out of the room, relocking the door. No "Nice knowing ya," no "Have a nice day." He just froze Jack's balls with a look and left.

Incompetence pissed off Vincent Valdez more than anything else he encountered in life… more than stupidity, more than insanity or moral corruption. Incompetence was usually bred from a combination of careless thinking and bad tactics, both elements within the sphere of control. Failure indicated that you had not adequately foreseen problems inside your command venue. That reflected directly back on Valdez and made him angry with everybody around him, but mostly at himself.

This whole leak on the Ten-Eyck Chimera Project was totally unacceptable and had been getting worse with each passing hour. General Buzz Turpin had actually yelled at Vincent over the phone yesterday-something the whispering general had never done before. God only knew how many people now had information about the existence of the supersecret project, and all because of a silly lawsuit to protect a butterfly. The whole tangled mess had started there and had somehow gotten completely away from him.