Nick Malone, who had once been F.B.I. Supervisory Special Agent Nicholas Donnelly, clenched the handle of his rolling suitcase until his knuckles went white as he looked around the cavernous lobby of the hotel.

He had, for days, been expecting to die. He'd listened for the quiet footfalls of a skilled assassin behind him. Anticipated the sudden push at his back that indicated he'd been hit by a sniper's bullet. Waited for another confrontation with the Man in the Suit himself. Whatever form it took, he had expected some response from Mr. Smith, some retaliation for the agent's surveillance of Christine Fitzgerald. And he was moderately certain that the response would prove fatal to him.

But this – this was beyond the pale. This was a cruelty he had never anticipated from the soft-spoken Smith.

Across from the front doors was a vast fireplace with a huge hearth with a thin façade of stone. Above it, fake moose antlers stretched across ten feet of fake chimney. The furniture was made of molded plastic shaped as rough-hewn tree branches, roped together over visible steel bolts. The cushions sported Indian patterns that he was quite certain no Native American tribe would recognize. There were fake deer hides and beaver pelts on the walls, along with smaller antlers of every description. Every guest sign was faux-burned into a faux-round ring of a tree, with the faux bark still on it, under a quarter inch of shiny polyurethane.

There were, of course, many, many wolves. Stuffed wolves, carved wolves, mass-produced oil paintings of wolves. There were even muddy faux wolf prints shellacked onto the faux-pine board floor.

There was, on a high shelf over the arch that led to one of the guestroom halls, a jackelope.

The lobby of the Hunting Wolf Hollow Lodge and Resort looked like the bastard child of 'Twin Peaks' and Motel Six, circa 1970, in some demented Golan-Globus nightmare extravaganza.

Tacky did not begin to describe it. It was tacky on steroids. Super-sized tacky. Radioactive tacky.

The lobby also featured the only thing that could have possibly made it more distasteful to Donnelly: It was stuffed with roughly two hundred loud, unwashed, acne-spotted young teens, along with a handful of their weary chaperones.

The former agent immediately came to the only conclusion that was possible, under the circumstances: Mr. Smith had dispatched him to Hell.

Donnelly's life, since his faked death, had been a whirlwind of identities and relocation. He'd had multiple surgeries, both therapeutic and cosmetic, in multiple hospitals. Mr. Smith had sent literally dozens of handlers, groomers and coaches, each of whom had worked with him on a particular aspect of his background story. They moved him to new locations every few weeks. They gave him a new name in every location. They trained him. They helped him learn his new final identity, the one that would be permanent.. They tested him. He learned to walk on a prosthetic foot, and he'd learned to be ambidextrous. They'd changed his face, and they'd taught him his new background.

They had re-created his life from scratch.

He'd spent three days in a rehab facility in Cincinnati, being fitted with a more advanced prosthetic foot and learning how to walk with it. At the end of the third day, two sisters, both in their seventies, both very spry, came to pick him up. "You might as well stay the weekend with us, Nicky," Stella said. Angela nodded her agreement.

Donnelly had been in the Smith Identity Reassignment Program, as he called it in his head, long enough to know that he should just nod, pack his overnight bag, and go with them.

They took him to a massive Victorian home. "Rose Hill Avenue," Angela said. "North Avondale. This is where you grew up."

Donnelly nodded. He got out of the car and looked around. It was a nice neighborhood. Lots of big, old homes. Yards and sidewalks. A good place to raise a family. Nick Malone, the identity he would eventually use, had three younger sisters. And this street, which he'd never seen before, was where they'd grown up.

He followed the ladies inside the house. They fed him a huge dinner, roast beef, tender carrots, potatoes with gravy, homemade biscuits, and fresh carrot cake. They fussed over him as if he really were their long-lost relative, finally come home. And they talked, mostly to each other, about the neighborhood. The time they'd re-paved the street and the new surface was so slick the cars couldn't get up the hill and it had to be torn out and re-done. The time the kids built a snowman eleven feet high, using ladders from Mr. Gregory's garage to put the head on. That scary year they'd had all the break-ins. They talked about the neighbors who'd come and gone. The hermit, Mr. Morris, who chased the kids out of his yard with a rake. The poor Cirinos, who had lost four babies before they were born. And then that Spevak girl, who'd gotten a baby when she had no husband …

Donnelly ate, and he listened. He absorbed; he learned. This had been his home. These were his stories. Some he would remember for himself. Some he'd only heard the adults talking about when he was supposed to be in bed.

This was who he was now.

They kept him all weekend, Angela and Stella. They fed him within an inch of his life, and they stuffed his mind with the stories of the childhood he'd never had.

On Monday morning they took him back to the rehab center, and he never saw either of them again.

In Sacramento, a girl with blue hair and a stud in the corner of her mouth dyed his hair blond. Then she sat and stared at him for a full ten minutes. "No," she finally said.

"Okay," Donnelly answered carefully. He did not disagree with her.

She twirled his chair around and reached for another bottle of hair color.

In Lansing, Michigan, he was assigned to homeschool Breslin Wyse. The boy was thirteen years old, Donnelly was told, and he had a seizure disorder that was only partially controlled by medication. His regular tutor was on a 20-day cruise that she'd won in a customer appreciation drawing at her bank.

Breslin's mother was a woman who looked weary and worried. "He's a good boy," she said, leading Donnelly to the back of the house. "Very smart. But it's hard to keep him on task."

"I'll do the best I can," Donnelly assured her. He'd thought he had a good handle on the direction Smith was leading him, but this assignment mystified him.

The mother introduced them and left the room. Breslin looked up from his computer keyboard and gestured to a chair. "Sit."

Donnelly did so. "Which subject do you want to start with, Breslin?"

The boy looked at him like he was insane. Then he gestured to a blue binder on the shelf above them. "All my assignments are done. They're in that binder."

"For the next three weeks?"

"Yeah."

"Oh."

"Yes," the boy said, exasperated, "I'm way smarter than they think I am. But since this seizure thing will probably kill me before I'm twenty, I don't feel like spending all my time doing school work. A doctorate at eighteen isn't going to do me a damn bit of good."

"Okay," Donnelly said carefully. "You don't need a teacher. So why am I here?"

"Because you need a teacher," the boy said impatiently. "I'm supposed to teach you to hack."

The former agent opened his mouth to protest. Then he closed it. Smith had sent him here. The kid would be the best teacher he could find.

He thought, very briefly, about Christine Fitzgerald. She would have been a great teacher, too.

"All right," Donnelly said. "Where do we start?"

Breslin grinned. "Wanna hack the Pentagon?"

In the process of learning from his various handlers, the former agent learned very few things about Smith – his benefactor or remote captor; he still hadn't decided. He learned that money was never a consideration. He'd suspected as much from his treatment in the hospital, but the complete disregard for expenses confirmed it. He learned that Smith was intensely detail-oriented. Each of Donnelly's visitors had a specific purpose, which he or she was highly qualified to carry out. He learned that Smith did not trust anyone. Each of the handlers had exactly the information they needed about their task and their employer and nothing more.

He learned that Smith was extraordinarily careful. He had no digital footprint that Donnelly could find, even after Breslin Wyse's brilliant tutelage. He couldn't find a single image of him online, anywhere. Even when he knew specifically where and when to look – outside the neighborhood theater on Christmas Day, entering and leaving Christine Fitzgerald's invitation-only screening of Les Mizerables - the man was simply invisible.

Beyond the facts, there were more things he could surmise:

Smith was not with the government. There was no government agency that could do the things that Smith apparently could, and none with the secrecy he displayed.

Smith had access to massively sophisticated technical equipment and assistance.

Smith was unreasonably wealthy.

And it was, Donnelly was fairly certain, Smith himself who possessed the wealthy and was in charge of the operation, whatever it was. From their brief meeting in his hospital room, Donnelly had been certain the unassuming little man was at the top of the food chain, and nothing he'd learned since then disproved that impression.

Smith had described John Warren as his partner. Not his employee. His partner.

Donnelly still didn't know what that meant.

And he didn't know how to explain the frantic voice on the phone. Smith's voice, imploring him to stop his vehicle. Telling him his life was in danger. Just a little too late to save him.

Smith had known he had John in the back seat. And yet he'd tried to save him.

Or – just to slow him down until the attack could be executed?

But that didn't make sense. The violence of the crash could have killed John, could have killed all of them.

He didn't know many things. But he used the ATM card he'd been provided to take out cash, and used cash to purchase a new computer. He used the skills that Breslin Wyse had taught him to begin to look for more answers. He was discrete, careful. He knew that the people who were recruiting him might be watching, and he was certain that Smith would be. But he also reasoned that his future employers would expect him to be using his skills. And Smith – well, Smith had given him the skills. If he hadn't thought Donnelly would use them, he wasn't quite as smart as the former agent thought he was.

One of the measures Donnelly felt fairly safe in taking was to set up notifications for major crimes in large US cities. He got twice-daily reports on murders and attempted murders, rapes, abductions and large robberies from across the country. He looked at statistics, patterns, repetitive names. He looked more closely at some case files, when he could. He formed theories, traced suspects. Sometimes he looked a report and knew immediately who the authorities involved should arrest, or at least interrogate. But he kept silent. It was not his place interfere, or consult. Not yet.

Though he looked at other cities for cover, he was particularly interested in New York. He wasn't surprised to see a pattern of the Russian mob reasserting its hold on the city. He fully expected the rise in clearly HR-related crime, as well; he'd known their wide-sweeping raid hadn't gotten the head of the organization. He was, however, surprised by the unexpected drop in successful crimes. The murder rate in NYC was down steeply for the third year in a row. The arrests for attempted murder, on the other hand, had climbed in directly inverse proportion.

The murders and other major crimes were being stopped before they happened. Donnelly could ascribe that trend the excellent police work – if he hadn't known that the very core of the NYPD was corrupt. There were still good cops there, certainly, smart and dedicated men and women doing their best. But he also knew that their work was being undermined at every turn by their dirty colleagues.

So why was the crime rate dropping? It was suggestive of something. He just wasn't sure of what.

He was in another nondescript chain hotel near the airport in Atlanta, browsing, when he saw the report of a shooting in a police precinct in New York. His thoughts immediately turned to Detective Carter. She had been a good cop, a damn good cop, until the Man in the Suit had managed to turn her. The Man and Smith, he amended mentally. He looked around the bland hotel room. Technically, he supposed, Smith had turned him as well.

He shook his head. Whatever had happened to Carter, until he could understand it clearly, he wished her well. He hoped very much that she hadn't been killed in her own precinct.

It seemed very likely that HR was somehow behind the shooting.

For more than an hour he wasn't able to acquire any further information beyond the initial report. It was frustrating, but understandable: Filing reports was not the priority in that situation. The first thing that popped was a casualty report. One dead, one wounded. He searched for more, but there was nothing for another twenty minutes. And then, finally, the case file was generated. Donnelly was relieved to see that the incident hadn't taken place in the 8th Precinct. That greatly reduced the already-small probability that Carter had been involved.

And then, to his surprise, Christine Fitzgerald's name came up as a victim.

Donnelly pushed the computer away and stood up. He strode the little room in a frantic little circle. Christine was dead? How could Christine be dead? That was simply inconceivable. She was careful, paranoid. Guarded. The Department of Defense had an intense interest in protecting her, as Donnelly had learned firsthand. Smith had some unknown interest in her as well. With so many people dedicated to keeping her alive - how could she be dead?

In a police precinct …

Even HR shouldn't have been able to …

If he hadn't taken Smith's deal, Donnelly thought, and the guilt shot through him. If he'd been in New York. If he'd asked her to come with him …

Damn it.

The computer beeped with an update and Donnelly strode over to it. Name of deceased was …

… some man he'd never heard of.

He closed his eyes and sat back. Not her. She'd been shot, but she wasn't dead.

He breathed deliberately, deeply.

The tension drained out of his back. He rubbed his neck. Then he opened his eyes and reached for the computer again.

Donnelly knew he needed to stop obsessing over her. Christine Fitzgerald thought he was dead. The life she'd been a tiny part of was over. He would never see her again. Never speak to her. That had been the choice he'd made. There was no going back. Ever.

And even if he could …

He'd had a chance to be her lover, if only briefly. He'd had a remote chance to try to be something more. He hadn't taken either. She'd told him from the start that they were fundamentally incompatible. He abhorred chaos and she lived there. And yet …

And yet. It was a fantasy, nothing more. It wasn't the actual Christine Fitzgerald that he pined for. It was his imaginary Christine. The one that would understand him, who would embrace his obsession with justice. The one who would accept the long hours his career, his mission demanded, without complaint, without feeling slighted. The one who – what the hell, it was all a fantasy anyhow – would juggle the happy healthy children and have supper on the table every night if he managed to get home, and still have time to talk politics and crime theory and practice, and then happily share his bed ...

The Christine in his imagination bore only a passing resemblance to the pedophile-hunting, obsessive-compulsive, commitment-phobic hacker Christine was in real life. She simply wasn't real.

Donnelly allowed himself this: Since he would never see the actual woman again, there was no harm in letting himself embrace the imaginary one.

Until, of course, the real woman showed up on his computer screen.

He knew he should turn off the computer and leave it alone. But he also knew that he could not. He pulled up the full police report – still preliminary – and read through it. He wasn't surprised to find that she'd been reporting on yet another pedophile when she was shot. He was relieved to find that she'd given a statement after the shooting. That said that the wound wasn't critical.

Detective Fusco's name featured prominently in the report. Interesting.

He found the name of the hospital she'd been transported to. And then, though he knew he really shouldn't, he hacked in there, too.

Wyse had been right. It was stupidly, terrifyingly easy to do.

Her injury was simple, as gunshot wounds went. Straight through-and-through, in her shoulder. No surgery required. Treated and released. In the care of Will Ingram.

Donnelly whistled softly. That was pretty. The wealthy and eligible young bachelor heir was all over the pages of the tabloids that day, shopping for baby clothes with a 'mystery woman' on his arm. The former agent hadn't read the articles, but he'd skimmed the pictures. Something about a car crash, about the young doctor being a hero. He'd have to go back and look. But more to the point – Will Ingram had been with Mr. Smith at Christine's Christmas movie party. And now he'd checked her out of the hospital.

On a whim, Donnelly looked up the young man's address. He wasn't very surprised to find that he was living in his father's old loft. He scanned around for a bit, looking for surveillance cameras, but nothing Wyse had taught him gave him any access. If cameras existed, he couldn't get to them.

Donnelly got out the slim pad of stationary the hotel provided and began to doodle a little graph with initials and connections. Some connections had solid lines. Christine and Will Ingram. Ingram and Smith. Smith and John in the Suit. John and Carter. Carter and Fusco. Fusco and Christine. Then the dotted lines began. Fusco with Christine when she was shot, and then Ingram at the hospital – so, Ingram and Fusco? Fusco and Carter were partners, so Fusco and John? John and Smith were partners, so Smith and Carter? And Fusco? Ingram with Smith at Christine's party – so Smith and Christine?

And that, of course, was the critical question. Smith had denied that Christine was involved with whatever he and the Man were doing. Donnelly wasn't sure he believed that. He'd suspected very early on that the woman was involved with John, somehow. Her vehement denial the first time he'd met her had been unconvincing. A few days later a massive child pornography ring had been neatly delivered to his desk, all the evidence concisely packaged, a fat easy bust on a silver platter. He was sure it had come from the woman. He had never been sure why. When he asked, she said that she hadn't trusted it to anyone else. But it had proved an undeniable distraction from his search for the Man, as well.

Christine and John. Working together all along. And her friendship with him, then, was a sham. Her attempt to seduce him was precisely the diversion he'd suspected it of being at the time.

He didn't want to believe that, either. But he looked at his little graph again, and it was difficult to deny.

So, the actual Christine Fitzgerald had lied to him. Had deliberately subverted his search for the Man in the Suit. Had pretended to befriend him in order to gain information about his investigation …

… except that she hadn't. She'd never asked about his investigation. He'd asked her about the Man and she'd lied, but she'd never tried to get information from him.

If she wasn't after information, what was the point of continuing to meet with him? The evenings at the movies. The late dinners and the long talks. The blind date she'd sent him on with Theresa Ramos. The invitation to the Christmas movie, where she must have known she'd see Smith.

Surely after the first night she hadn't thought that she could use his friendship to gain any benefit for John, in the event that Donnelly caught him.

So what was her angle?

He tapped his pen on the dotted line that connected her to John. He still wasn't sure.

Maybe both things were true. She knew about John, knew what he and Smith were doing, and still had been Donnelly's friend? If that were true, she would have had to lie to the agent, and possible to John, too. And it meant that she approved of what they were doing, enough to try to protect them. But Christine had always been the champion of the underdog, the defender of the downtrodden. So why would she protect criminals?

Unless she thought that whatever they were doing helped the same people she was trying to help, somehow.

It was possible.

It really didn't matter. He'd already accepted that he'd never see her again. Whether she'd lied to him or not didn't matter, except as a matter of his ego. He would find out, some day. But for now, he needed to live with the question a while longer. He'd already pursued her much further than was wise.

His Imaginary Christine had never lied to him.

He pushed the paper away and paced a little more. The room was too small. Suffocatingly small. His body was stiff, cramped. He wasn't hungry, but it was late enough for an early dinner. He grabbed his jacket and his room key and went for a walk.

He was half-way through a bland chicken cutlet when he remembered that he hadn't shut down his computer before he'd left his room. He hadn't even shut down his search for a way to get eyes on the loft. He looked around anxiously, but of course no one was watching him. No men in dark suits and sunglasses stood in the doorway; no black SUVs prowled the parking lot.

Smith would probably be far more subtle than that.

He turned back to his dinner. It was still tasteless.

His laptop screen had gone dark when he got back to his room. He ignored it and took a shower. Then he sat down and tapped the keypad.

Instead of his home screen, he saw a dim bedroom.

Donnelly froze, his fingers lingering in the air over the keyboard.

There was no one in the room, no motion. It could have been a single image, except for the time stamp running in the upper right corner. Live feed, then. From the angle, the camera was in the ceiling, and the ceiling was very high. He could see a bed, neatly made with a pale blue comforter and several extra pillows. Beyond was a dresser, two armchairs bracketing a small table, and a huge window, curtained in matching blue. The room was dim; brighter light came through the curtains and from a source under the camera, probably an open door.

Donnelly guessed that it was a camera within Ingram's loft. But he wasn't sure how he'd accessed it. In fact, he was pretty damn sure he hadn't accessed it. But somehow it was on his screen.

He didn't touch anything. He was afraid that whatever miracle had got him access would vanish.

He pushed away from the desk and paced the room, turning his body so he could keep the screen in sight. Nothing happened in the room.

He should not be watching. Never mind that it was illegal. It was dangerous. If his future employers realized who he was watching, they would want to know why. They could not know that Nick Malone was the same Nicholas Donnelly who had been and FBI agent in New York …

…Smith wouldn't like it.

Which was, of course, reason enough to keep doing it.

But he was deeply uneasy. He knew he hadn't hacked the camera. He'd been given access. But by whom, and why?

This might be a mistake. It might well be a fatal mistake.

But he could not turn away from the screen.

Nearly an hour later, the room light suddenly switched on. Christine Fitzgerald came in, with her arm in a sling.

Mr. Smith was with her.

"Damn it," Donnelly said. He dropped into the desk chair to watch.

The woman went through another door and closed it behind her. Smith walked to the bed.

They not only know each other, Donnelly thought, but they're lovers.

He'd been a complete idiot.

He kept watching.

The man turned the bed down, looked around the room. He seemed to be lost in thought. Donnelly was somewhat relieved that he didn't start to take his suit off. He just waited.

Absently, he picked up the pen and lined in the dotted connection between Christine and Smith on his little chart. He traced back over the line, again and again, until the pen tore through the paper. Christine and Smith. So Christine and the Man was almost a certainty.

It had all been a scam. Every word she'd ever said to him. And her proposition? That had been part of the scam, too.

How ruthless do you have to be, to ask your lover to seduce someone else to protect your operation?

But he already knew how ruthless Smith and the Man in the Suit could be.

He heard a cough, quiet behind the close door, and then Christine's voice, inaudible. "Are you alright?" Smith called.

She answered, and a bit later came out of the bathroom and climbed into the bed. He phone rang as Smith pulled the covers up for her, and he brought it out and put it on speaker.

"Hey, John," Christine called.

Donnelly dropped his chin to his chest, rubbed his forehead again. His last lingering hope died. Of course she knew John.

He listened to them talk. It was casual. John sounded gruff, perhaps angry. But it also sounded more like friendship than anything particularly intimate.

Which made sense. Because she was Smith's lover, not John's. That should have made him feel better, but it didn't.

After the phone call ended, he watched the two of them, and began to revise his first conclusion. They were close, certainly. But nothing that happened between them was overtly romantic. Helpful touches, aiding her in removing her sling, adjusting her blankets. Words of concern, of care. Extra pillows arranged to cushion her injury. Smith was caring, gentle, certainly, but nothing more.

She called him Random. That wasn't his name, Donnelly knew, any more than Smith was. But she acted as if it was her private nickname for him. As if she knew his true name and chose not to use it.

Smith scolded her gently for taking too many chances.

"Are you really going to sit there and lecture me about taking chances with my life?" she challenged.

"It's different, Christine. John and I are …"

Donnelly sat forward, listening intently. John and you are what? But Smith didn't finish the thought. He seemed a bit chagrinned at whatever he'd been going to say.

"We worry about you," he finally said. "You're …precious to us. To both of us."

What the hell did that mean? How was she connected to them? She might not be Smith's lover, but she was clearly more than an employee. She was Smith's hacker, obviously, but what else?

She was staying in Ingram's loft. How much did the young billionaire know? Or was the doctor just looking after a friend? Had she befriended him just as she'd befriended Donnelly himself?

If he'd still been in New York when she'd been shot, Nicholas wouldn't have hesitated to let her spend the night in his apartment, despite his suspicions.

She was pale and obviously tired. Smith offered to stay and read to her, but she declined. He kissed her on the forehead – on the forehead, not the lips – and left the room. He clicked the light off on his way out, and the room was suddenly mostly dark again. A slice of light came in from the hallway; Smith had left the door ajar.

Christine coughed in the darkness, softly. Then she was quiet.

Donnelly sat back and stared at the screen. Only the time stamp continued to move; everything else was silent and still.

He glanced down at the notepad. Some of the lines remained dashes, but Christine and John and Smith – they were connected. Undeniably connected.

The kiss on the forehead. That was not employer-to-employee behavior. It wasn't lover behavior either. It seemed almost paternal. Smith's daughter, maybe? He shook his head. He knew about Christine's father, a pathetic, mentally disturbed vet, a self-medicating addict who'd died in a hail of police bullets. If she were Smith's child, the man could certainly create a false identity for her, but that one was much too tragic to be fictional. Donnelly knew personally that Christine's emotional scars were too deep and enduring to be faked.

Still, there was something there.

Christine and John and Smith. The elite hacker, the elite ex-agent, and the secretive millionaire, perhaps billionaire. Plus Carter, the good cop turned bad. And Fusco, who was bad to begin with. No reason to think he wasn't part of it.

He didn't know how Will Ingram fit into their arrangement, or if he did at all.

But what the hell were they up to?

Donnelly thought back to his first encounter with the phantom Man in the Suit. The collision. The smoke grenade through the windshield. The prisoner taken from them, the man who'd assassinated a congressman. But not a hand laid on any of the agents. John could have killed them all; they walked away with mild bruises and headaches from the smoke. And then Scott Powell returned, unharmed, with his name cleared. It had become clear that he'd been framed by someone extremely skilled with computers. That he'd been an innocent patsy, and marked for death.

It was the sort of frame Smith and Company could obviously easily hang on someone. But if they'd framed him, why had John taken him? Why had they saved him?

He glanced down at his little chart. Then he ripped the sheet off the pad and tore it slowly, deliberately into thin little strips.

He looked at the darkened screen. He should shut it off. He wasn't going to learn any more, except perhaps whether Christine Fitzgerald snored. And yet …

… and yet …

He would never see her again. He didn't know how this connection had happened, but he knew it wouldn't last. In the morning she'd leave the room, go back to Chaos, and he wouldn't be able to see her or hear her ever again. She'd lied to him. Perhaps betrayed him. But he couldn't work up any anger at her. He would never see her again. This little time of watching in darkness was the end. His chance to say goodbye.

He left the screen on.

He paced the room again, sipping coffee that he's made with the little in-room pot. It tasted mostly like the foil package.

Christine coughed.

He turned and looked at the screen. It was still dim in the room, lit only by the hallway light that came past the partly-open door. The bed was in shadow. But he could hear Christine perfectly well. She coughed again, more harshly. A bit of movement as she shifted position. Then quiet, for the space of sixty seconds.

She coughed again. This cough sounded wet, congested.

Donnelly dropped into the chair, leaned very close to the screen, and turned the laptop's volume all the way up.

More movement. More coughing. And then her breathing changed, became louder. Labored. One more cough, weak and wheezing. Then only breathing, louder by the second.

Another sound, a hand slapping the mattress. Four times. Then nothing.

She couldn't call for help.

"Damn it, damn it," Donnelly said. He tiled the view and began scrolling frantically for a phone number. He could call 9-1-1, of course, but explaining who he was, where he was calling from – she didn't have time, even if they rolled right away. Will Ingram was right across the hall. He just needed to find a phone number for him.

"Ingram," he muttered aloud. Of course his cell phone number was unlisted. But people would have it. Friends. Smith, of course, but Donnelly had even less hope of reaching him. Employers. MSF. Doctors Without Borders would have contact info. His fingers flew over the keyboard, remembering everything Wyse had drilled into his head. They'd done speed drills, competitions in the last week he was there. He could do this. He needed to stay calm.

It was very hard to stay calm when he could hear Christine Fitzgerald suffocating in the dark.

"I need a number," he said aloud. "I need a phone number for Will Ingram."

The site he was trying to crack blinked and vanished. Donnelly swore. He'd done something wrong, tripped some firewall defense. He could find other residents of the building then, maybe. He could …

A phone number appeared on the screen.

Donnelly stared at it for a split second. But there was no time to question: the woman's breathing was growing inaudible. He grabbed the hotel phone, an old-fashioned wired phone with big push buttons, and dialed the number.

Impossibly, he heard a phone ring distantly on his monitor.

Then he heard a young man's voice. "What?"

Ingram sounded blessedly wide awake, if somewhat pissed off.

"You need to check on Christine," Donnelly said.

There was a pause. "What?"

"She can't breathe," he snapped. "Help her!"

He slammed the phone down, re-opened the surveillance window to full screen.

Voices. Footsteps, running. The door opened fully; more light flooded into the room. Christine was flat on her back, gasping for air. Dying.

The young man, the one Donnelly had seen and identified at the theater on Christmas, wore only briefs. He grabbed Christine and pulled her upright. There was blood on her dressings, but only spots of red, not a serious hemorrhage. She was fighting for air. The doctor swore.

Then there was bright light in the room, and another young woman came in. The woman from the pictures in the paper. She was about Ingram's age. She did not panic.

Ingram checked Christine's eyes, listened to her lungs. He moved quickly, efficiently. Calmly. Decisively.

Donnelly clenched his fists and watched. There was nothing more he could do. Anything he tried would only distract them from Christine, and she needed all their attention. She was dying, right there in Ingram's arms. He couldn't even call an ambulance for them; the other woman had already done that.

And then there was a meat thermometer – a damn meat thermometer, and Donnelly cringed, torn between horror and hope, but he didn't let himself look away, and it worked, there was blood everywhere but it worked and Christine was breathing better, muttering, half-conscious …

Donnelly had never liked being helpless, and he didn't like it now, but they were helping her, she was going to live, at least get to the hospital alive.

When the ambulance had come and gone, when they had carried Christine out with Will Ingram at her side, barking orders, when the blonde woman had turned off the light in the bedroom and only the dark stain remained visible in the dim light, only then did Donnelly sit back and breathe deeply. He ran both hands through his hair, over his face. He was sweating. And thirsty. He drank the last of his bad cold coffee. He stood and went to refill his cup, but there was only a trickle remaining in the tiny pot.

He went into the bathroom, got a glass of water, and splashed more water on his face.

His hands were shaking.

He walked back to the computer and minimized the surveillance window. The phone number was gone.

Donnelly didn't know where it had come from. For that matter, he didn't know where the camera view had come from. He'd thought that had been an accident. But the phone number? That was something else. That was deliberate.

He'd suspected that someone might be monitoring his computer usage. He'd never expected them to directly help him.

He licked his lips. Despite the water, his mouth was still dry. The phone number had allowed him to help save Christine's life. He didn't know who had provided it or why. But he knew it had arrived just when he'd needed it.

On a whim, and though he felt like an idiot, he opened a text window and typed in, Thank you for helping me.

For a long moment the cursor simply blinked at him. Donnelly shook his head. They might be monitoring him, but they certainly weren't going to …

I CAN NO OTHER ANSWER MAKE, BUT, THANKS, AND THANKS.

Donnelly took a sharp breath. His heart raced; confusion swirled through his mind. But also, there was an odd sort of calm. A confirmation, finally, of the impossible things he'd imagined.

The Man in the Suit had seemed to have a guardian angel. It hadn't been Carter, not entirely. He'd thought it was Smith. But Smith wouldn't have needed Donnelly to manage this situation. There was a third party involved, and though the former agent had no idea who or why, he was deeply thrilled to finally make contact.

He typed, You needed me to help you save Christine?

Another, longer pause.

ALONE WE CAN DO SO LITTLE; TOGETHER WE CAN DO SO MUCH.

He sat back, filled with a mixture of fear and elation. He'd been right. He'd been right. Who are you?

I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR.

IF YOU LIVE AMONG WOLVES YOU HAVE TO ACT LIKE A WOLF.

He tried again. Who are you?

He waited. The cursor flashed. There was no answer.

And then the text window closed.