Breathless

also need any text-messaging devices you’re carrying.”
    “Oh, son, I have too few years of life remaining to spend one minute text-messaging.”
    Northcott, on the other hand, proved to be a walking telecom store. Grumping, he shed two cell phones and an array of devices that filled Vincent Palumbo’s available sport-coat pockets.
    As the agent went forward again, carrying their laptops, Simon Northcott said, “They’re all idiots at Homeland Security. This does it. I’m going to take my name off the volunteer specialists roster.”
    The more enlightened officials in the federal government were aware that the scientists directly in their employ were not generally speaking the most brilliant in their fields—with the exception of some people at NASA and a number in institutes completely funded by the Department of Defense. Consequently, specialists in numerous sciences were solicited to volunteer to be available to Homeland Security in crises, if called.
    As one of many on the roster who had his skills, Lamar had been tapped only six times in seven years, and he imagined there had been as many as a hundred crisis responses during that period. He doubted that Simon Northcott was drafted as often, because only a fraction of terrorist plots involved biological weapons, whereas aspecialist in probability analysis and chaos would be a valuable team member regardless of the threat scenario.
    “Priority One Incident,” Northcott said with a sarcastic note, “yet it’s not a threat, it’s an issue. A Priority One
Issue
—now there’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one.”
    Lamar put his forehead against his window, looking down at the shadow of the helicopter racing over the landscape below them.
    Grady Adams of Colorado. Marcus had no closer friend than Grady Adams, who had been with him when he died.
    Carl Jung, the psychologist and philosopher, had believed that coincidence—most of all that most extreme kind of coincidence called a synchronism—was an organizing principle of the universe as real as any of the laws of thermodynamics and of gravity. On issues such as culture and human exceptionalism, Lamar Woolsey had little in common with Jung, but there was certainly a place for the man in chaos theory, where hidden order could be found in even the most seemingly disordered and formless systems like the actions of wildly tossing storm waves and the furies of tornado winds.
    Grady Adams. Lamar figured, drawing this card at this time was like being dealt the most meaningful card from a thousand-deck shoe.

Forty-five

D riving to Grady’s place, Cammy’s attention repeatedly strayed from the highway to her hands on the steering wheel.
    Having resisted embracing victim status for so long and having lived with the scars for most of her life, she thought about this disfigurement hardly more often than she stopped to think that each of her hands had five fingers and fourteen knuckles. The scars were a fact of her hands that embarrassed her no more than the fact that she had fingernails. A survivor could not be embarrassed by proof of her resolute spirit and endurance.
    She kept glancing at the scars now because she felt trapped for the first time since her fifteenth birthday, for the first time in more than twenty years.

    The trap from which she escaped on that long-ago birthday had been one that she endured from the age of five. It began when hermother and her mother’s boyfriend, Jake Horner, took Cammy across state lines to avoid abiding by a child-custody decision handed down by the divorce court in Texas.
    The court gave both parents joint—and equal—custody. Cammy’s mother, Zena, didn’t like anyone telling her what to do.
    Jake Horner had inherited some money. He used part of it to buy a boat, a fifty-six-foot coastal cruiser, which he named
Therapy
.
    Jake, Zena, and Cammy cruised ceaselessly, from Vancouver south to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and back again. They were never in port more than two weeks at a time.
    Mike Rivers, Cammy’s dad, tracked them down at a marina in Northern California, eight months later. Because differences in the laws between California and Texas hampered him, he took matters into his own hands.
    When Mike Rivers appeared on the dock, he was talked aboard
Therapy
by Zena, who expressed remorse and fear of the authorities, and by Jake, who said he was unaware that Mike either wanted custody of his daughter or was granted any such arrangement by a judge. Jake was angry