"Okay." Atticus eyed the padlock. "You've found something out?"

"Come upstairs."

Upstairs, Kyle logged back in to his computers. "The Dog Warriors are one of five biker gangs that make up the Pack. They're not like any outlaw motorcycle club I've ever heard of—not that I'm an expert."

"Outlaw" denoted the one percent of biker gangs, like the Hell's Angels, who embraced being outside the law. Kyle knew enough to distinguish between the "one-percenters" and normal, law-abiding motorcycle clubs; it was a bad sign that he labeled the Dog Warriors as such.

"How so?"

"Well, they don't pretend to be a club. They don't have a clubhouse, membership dues, charter rules, officers, or any of that stuff. They don't even seem to have a base city or state—they're complete nomads."

Kyle connected with the Internet and pulled Web pages out of his history log. "This is their leader, Rennie Shaw." Under a banner of blazing red that read, "Wanted by the FBI," and a long listing of crimes starting with, "Murder (eighteen counts)," was a slightly blurred photograph of a man with grizzled hair and vivid blue eyes. "His lieutenant, Bear Shadow." Another "Wanted" page, another blurred photo, this of a Native American with feathers braided into his hair and a necklace of bear claws at his throat. "Shaw's girlfriend, Hellena Gobeyn." A compact, dark-haired woman sat astride a fallen log, cleaning a pistol.

Kyle pulled up one page after another. "There are approximately twenty members of the Dog Warriors. All of them are wanted by the FBI."

This was the fear that been eating at Atticus since taking the jacket off of Ukiah. Still, it felt like he'd swallowed cold gravel. "Ukiah too?"

"No." Kyle hated to abandon his fearful suspicions. "He's not listed with the Dog Warriors. The Demon Curs, another Pack gang, has been active in Oregon for the last few weeks, in and around Pendleton and Ukiah; it's spammed all my searches for your brother. Without a last name, I haven't been able to isolate anything about him."

"Wearing a jacket doesn't automatically make him one of them," Ru reasoned. "If he's not listed with the others, then maybe he got it from a thrift store, or found it and didn't know what it was."

They looked at him.

"I'm farting out my mouth here, aren't I?" Ru said.

"Yes," Atticus and Kyle said.

"We're sitting on a quarter million dollars, enough guns to take out a police department, and a possibleFBI most wanted locked in the basement." Kyle hedged for Ru's sake. "Brother or not, this isn't good."

"Do some more digging," Atticus said. "We need to know who we're dealing with. What about his killers?"

"They're just as scary in a totally different way." Kyle closed up the FBI pages. "I tapped into the state police system. There was a shootout after you left. One of the men was killed, the other three hospitalized. They've identified themselves as Byte, Ascii, Coaxial, and Binary of the Temple of New Reason."

"Ascii and Coaxial? You've got to be kidding."

"No, it's some New Age cult that seems to be on everyone's hit list of 'loonies to arrest on sight.' The members use computer terms for names. The state police notified everyone from ATF down to NSA." Kyle pulled up some files copied from the state police, and scrolled down through them quickly, knowing that Atticus could memorize an entire screen in a glance. "The cult had a public Web site like Heaven's Gate, but took it down. I found an old cache of it. They have lots of weird ideas about the end of the world."

ATF had been notified because the cult was suspected of massing large numbers of automatic and semiautomatic weapons and buying explosives. The NSA were seeking the cult for wiretapping and hacking government computers. The FBI wanted them for kidnapping and murdering several infants in the Pittsburgh area.

"Wait, go back," Atticus said as a phrase leaped out at him. He leaned over Kyle's shoulder to page backward through the reports. He could call it up in his memory, but then Ru and Kyle wouldn't be keyed in to his thoughts. "Here. New York State Police want them in connection with cremated bodies found near Buffalo. Forensics shows that the bodies had been hacked apart with a bladed instrument, probably an axe, and burned, which matches the MO of murder victims found around the Boston area."

"Buffalo and Boston," Ru murmured.

"Do you think that's what they planned to do with your brother?" Kyle asked. "I mean, if they hit him with a car, shot him dead, and then tied him up, maybe they knew that the only way to keep him dead was to burn his body."

Anger flashed through Atticus, surprising him. Certainly no one deserved such brutal treatment, but this was more than general indignation. Why was he enraged? He forced himself to be honest, backtracking to the source of his fury. He found a series of images and impressions that had preceded the anger—like lightning before the thunder.

The boy lying dormant and helpless in the truck, surrounded by the fearful mice.

Ukiah licking the milk mustache from his lips.

His brother in his arms, reduced to helpless and harmless by sleep, so like Atticus that he couldn't tell where his brother ended and he began.

In his mind he knew there was no reason to trust Ukiah. The boy—no, not boy! Atticus forced himself to remember the snarling young man crouched in the bathroom. He couldn't let himself ignore all facts and suspicions; this was a feral, dangerous stranger. For Ru's and Kyle's sakes, he couldn't harbor any feelings toward this person, not now, and perhaps not ever.

Probably picking up on his inner turmoil, Ru checked his wristwatch. "Well, the buy is going down in about twelve hours. What do you think? Call it a night?"

If Atticus didn't go to bed, neither would they. Kyle rarely slept, driven either by insomnia or hyperactivity—Atticus was never sure which. Ru would stay awake, worrying about him—he could be such a mother hen. All things considered, they needed to be sharp in a few hours.

"Let's lock down," Atticus said, "and get some sleep."

***

A storm was blowing in off the ocean. Atticus stood leaning against the glass wall of the master bedroom, watching the darkness rush over the water as clouds obscured the moon. Light eaten by darkness.

I have a brother. He's a Dog Warrior. A bunch of religious loons tried to destroy him utterly.

The door to the master bathroom reflected in the window, a rectangle of light, the quiet sounds of Ru getting ready for bed. The light snapped off, the clouds covered the moon, and he was in darkness.

"It's like seeing into the past." Ru came to stare out the window with him. "I look at him, and I see you back when we first met."

"Is that how I looked to you? Like some wild creature?"

Ru laughed softly. "Okay, so he's like a wolf-man version of you. That stare he has—it's like he looks right down into your soul." Ru breathed out and his breath smoked the glass. "I wonder what happened to him that he's like that."

The wind gusted and roared against the house.

"This has really weirded you out, hasn't it?" Ru asked.

"When I touch him, I can't tell where he ends and I begin. I can feel his emotions. When I walk around the house, it's like I have a compass needle in me, and he's north. I can't smell him over my own scent. When I touch things he's used, I only feel myself on the item. He's so close that's he's invisible."