The Guardian's Deceit (A Vector Smith Thriller)

By Patrick Reinken

Vincent Smith is keeping secrets.

He isn't actually a smalltown math teacher.

Despite what the people in town think, he also isn't known as Vincent anymore. At least not in his real life.

In that life, he's Vector. In that life, he carries a gun.

And the rebellious sixteen-year-old orphan in his class...? Well, she has a secret of her own. A big one. One she doesn't even know.

But Vector does.

Vector Smith is an agent for the United States Secret Service. And Jess Malone is the illegitimate daughter of the President.

Someone else knows that secret about Jess, too. And now they've taken her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Reinken
• Release date: Dec 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466128248

Patrick Reinken

Patrick Reinken is the author of Glass House, Omicron, and The Guardian's Deceit. He also wrote Judgment Day, which Publishers Weekly described as "a nearly seamless medical/legal chiller that's one slick piece of work." Judgment Day was published by Simon & Schuster and, in Japan, by Hayakawa Publishing. He is the Director of Legal Affairs for the National Marrow Donor Program in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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The Guardian’s Deceit

Patrick Reinken

Publication and Copyright Information

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

Copyright 2011 by Patrick Reinken (Smashwords edition)

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Cover design by Patrick Reinken

Cover photograph, Marine One Over The South Lawn, and photograph modification by Patrick Reinken.

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Table of Contents

The Guardian’s Deceit

Opening Proposition: The Givens Shift

First Theorem: Rendering to Zero

Chapter 1 – Jessica

Chapter 2 – Out from Hamilton Place

Chapter 3 – Kagastan

Chapter 4 – A Formal Report, a Purpose Undesired

Chapter 5 – Beautiful as a Dream

Chapter 6 – The Closet

Chapter 7 – Spoils of War

Chapter 8 – Ogorodnikov

Chapter 9 – Corrigan

Chapter 10 – The Former Helen Howards

Chapter 11 – The Door Opens

Chapter 12 – Cards Played Close

Second Theorem: Driving Systems

Chapter 13 – The Five-Minute Greed

Chapter 14 – The Thousand-Year Pride

Chapter 15 – Conversing with the Bureau

Chapter 16 – Balance and Order

Chapter 17 – Another Morning Decision

Chapter 18 – Colton Childs

Chapter 19 – Dragon Haze

Chapter 20 – NIBIN

Chapter 21 – At the Table of Colonels

Chapter 22 – The Adaptive Smith

Chapter 23 – Ultimatums

Third Theorem: The Psychology of Building, the Pathos of Reducing

Chapter 24 – Going Out, Coming In

Chapter 25 – Israel Huggins

Chapter 26 – DarkStar

Chapter 27 – Up from Diego

Chapter 28 – The BATs

Chapter 29 – Announcement

Chapter 30 – In the Kara Kum

Chapter 31 – Louisville

Chapter 32 – Jessica Sees the Light

Chapter 33 – Fallout

Chapter 34 – At the House of Steven Soucheray

Chapter 35 – Devon Wright Asks for the Night

Chapter 36 – First Family

Chapter 37 – From the Desert City to the Volcano Island

Chapter 38 – Jess Put Back

Chapter 39 – A Call at the Galt House

Fourth Theorem: Unanticipated Predictables – The Penny-Doubling Effect

Chapter 40 – Alive in the Desert

Chapter 41 – Tate Assesses

Chapter 42 – Near Jordan

Chapter 43 – Up and In

Chapter 44 – Three Dimensional Coordinate Geometry

Chapter 45 – Circle Call

Chapter 46 – Harlan Addison, Alone

Chapter 47 – Morning in Manhattan

Chapter 48 – Toward Kadar

Chapter 49 – The Airport

Chapter 50 – Flight

Chapter 51 – Thirty Miles and a World Away

Chapter 52 – Hocke on the Road

Chapter 53 – Logic

Chapter 54 – Valentine

Chapter 55 – Omaha

Chapter 56 – The Russians Arrive

Chapter 57 – Awake

Chapter 58 – Fill Up, Phone Call, Pop-Tart

Chapter 59 – Money Counting

Chapter 60 – The Fog-Damp Lanes

Chapter 61 – Knives

Chapter 62 – Hocke and Kenneth

Chapter 63 – Analysis

Chapter 64 – The Deal

Chapter 65 – Television News

Chapter 66 – Truth

Chapter 67 – Consequences

Fifth Theorem: Nothing to be Counted On

Chapter 68 – Devon

Chapter 69 – Malinkov

Chapter 70 – Breakfast

Chapter 71 – Different Sides

Chapter 72 – Final Probabilities

Sixth Theorem: Equals

Chapter 73 – Back to Hamilton Place

Chapter 74 – Knife

Chapter 75 – Ragged and Rough Lines

Chapter 76 – Danny Hocke

Chapter 77 – At the Gate

Chapter 78 – The Oval

Chapter 79 – The Guardian’s Deceit

Summation: The Cemetery

Author’s Note

COMING SOON

Black Talon

About the Author

Opening Proposition

The Givens Shift

The opening proposition – the basis for everything that follows – always is simple, for math is an easy certainty when all is known: one plus one always is two, one minus one always leaves nothing. It is only when the underlying considerations come forth, when they raise their heads and make themselves apparent and influential in life’s grander equations, that the seeming givens are seen to be, even in the real world, things that can shift.

Vector Smith

Treatise on the Philosophy of Mathematical Algorithms

Introduction, p vii

(Scholars Consolidated University Press, 1992)

Brilliant blue skies, with a bright sun in them. The late winter day is perfect and cloudless. Any snowflakes in the air are coming off the trees like flour blown from a cold crust of bread, as an easy breeze cuts through branches.

The man hurries past a house where Jesus is in the front yard and Mary is next door. He sees the statues with a fleeting glance that doesn’t register surprise and that moves on in a quick but studied and trained way.

He’s in his third year in this town, and he’s well into it at that. The sight of saviors and saints in front yards doesn’t catch his attention anymore.

His feet clip on the frozen ground. His heavy leather boots tap quickly as he walks, and his breath puffs sighing fogs every second step or so.

Despite his hurry, the man is calm. He’s out of place. His check-in call went long, so he’s late and isn’t at all where he’s supposed to be. But he’s still calm, with his careful and controlled breath and quick steps.

His name is Vector Smith. Over Vector’s three years here, the people in town have thought his name is something else. They still think that, which means that both Vector and his name aren’t exactly what those people believe.

He wears jeans that are half an inch too short. A plaid shirt, with the green and black and blue that some call the Black Watch. The shirt’s sleeves are a quarter inch too long but the extra length doesn’t show right now, since the shirt is mostly covered by Vector’s down-insulated, nylon jacket.

The shirt’s colors – the green with black undertones – match the trees he passes, the dark-flecked green of his squinting gaze, and the ink-black hair, which is close-cut and thick and cow-licked at the edges.

And the jacket....

Wherever he is, whatever he does, Vector Smith wears a jacket or coat of some kind. His hands always hide in its pockets and his shoulders shrug its back up and down with an affected gesture he characteristically displays.

On ninety-degree days. On days he wears shorts. In church and at the store. Visiting a neighbor or working in the garden. He wears a jacket even in the high school, where he teaches math.

Jackets and coats are such a constant fixture on Vector that the people in Long Prairie don’t notice them on him anymore. Which is partly the point.

Vector passes the courthouse, sitting on its stubby hill. It looks out on him and the town through windows that are haunted-house eyes. He turns the corner and starts up the next hill, toward the church he can now see. He increases his pace.

The area ahead is the wealthier neighborhood of Long Prairie, such as it is. The officials of the meat rendering company are there. The judge. The handful of lawyers and doctors.

The church itself sits beyond those homes. It’s been there since 1911, centered in a park square. The spire on top once towered above the neighboring trees, but these days it barely peeks over them at its highest point – the crowning cross. Even at the end of winter, the clutch of trees blots out most of the rest of it.

From his approach, Vector can’t see the small church’s sturdy, red brick sides. He can’t see the stained glass windows that members saved nickels and dimes for through two wars. He can’t see the roof that the minister has declared will be repaired when the weather warms some more.

And he can’t see the narrow room added at the side a decade after the church was built. The place for Sunday school. For occasional meetings of children’s and teens’ or school groups. For Ladies’ Aid or the Men’s Auxiliary.

The place where Vector is supposed to be.

He hurries a little more.

He is liked in Long Prairie. He’s quiet, and while he’s recent, he’s a part of the community now. More important, he’s a teacher of the town’s children. A tutor after hours and on weekends, if needed.

As much as the people like Vector, though, and as well as they regard him and on occasion comment pleasantly about him when they’re gathered for coffee at the drive-in, the people don’t know he’s Vector.

In Long Prairie, Minnesota, a location Vector has been for not quite three years, Vector is Vincent. He’s known there as Vincent Smith, which is the name on his driver’s license and every graduation certificate he’s ever received, all the way back to kindergarten. It’s the name on his birth certificate – the name his mother, holding a newborn son on her belly, gave him.

The people in town have never heard of Vector Smith. Among other things, it’s a name given to him for communications over radios the people never see, so those people don’t need to know that name.

To them, Vector Smith might as well not exist. And to them, Vincent Smith is a sturdy, helpful, and well-mannered schoolteacher. Nothing more and nothing less.

He’s smart, and the kids like him, despite the subject he teaches. He doesn’t swear. Each Sunday, he goes to this very church, where he sits in the fourth pew back and sings on key.

He’s soft-spoken and more than a little distant, but he’s never had an unkind word for anyone. Including the two or three burnouts in his classes.

Including, that means, for Jessica.

Jessica, with her sharp intellect and sharper tongue. Her bright mind and its always-bored veneer. Its innocence, hidden beneath contempt.

Jessica has to pass trigonometry this year, so she has her math teacher Mr. Smith tutoring her in the narrow room alongside the church. If only he weren’t late.

Vector hit the stairs to the church at a near gallop, striding them two at a time before stopping at the top and forcing himself to slow down. He breathed deeply. The air, over-chilled for this late in March, stung in his nose and lungs. He sucked it in anyway, reaching to the handle on the church door.

The brass was cold to the touch. He pulled, and the door swung out toward him.

The church’s small size might suggest scrimping, but the interior showed an understated grandeur. The woodwork was dark and shining oak that stood out boldly against the white plaster walls. The finishes were first-rate, the carpeting a subdued crimson that ran along the center aisle, its edges tacked down with gleaming brass runners.

The stained glass windows colored the sunshine in broken, patchwork images that lit the cushioned bench seats and the floor. Gold touches glinted from the nave at the head of the aisle. From cups and candlesticks, picture frames and a cross, the rainbows of light from the windows reflected in gold-tinted sparks.

Vector was halfway across, the door to the side building still ahead of him, when he noticed how quiet the room was. Churches are hushed places even at their busiest, and this modest one was no different. But they have their sounds when people, any people, are in them. The creaks of floorboards, the closings of doors, the echoes of voices that sound distant even when they’re close.

He heard none of those things.

Vector stopped. His right hand went to his hip and rested there for a moment.

When he started forward again, his movements were more deliberate and cautious. He made his way to the end of the aisle in a shifting step that let him keep his sights on the door to the side building, and he looked away from the door only when he was standing in front of it.

Glancing back, Vector scanned the open space in the church, checking the windows and doors he could see. Looking over the pews. Picking out the entries and exits, the vantage points. The hiding places.

He leaned and listened at the door. Nothing.

Vector checked his watch. He was thirteen minutes late, but Ray wouldn’t have been late at all. Ray Nash, an ordained pastor who was known to the community as Ray Cooper, would have been right on time.

So Ray should be in there working. Talking. Maybe chatting with Jessica until her math tutor showed up.

Ray should have been keeping an eye on her.

Vector listened for a full minute, waiting for sound. Any sound.

He reached to the door with his left hand and gently wrapped his fingers around the knob. His right hand went back to his hip, once more resting there, on a semiautomatic pistol that was hidden and holstered inside his waistband.

When he went in, he didn’t go quietly or warily. He moved with a slim hint of exasperated hurry about him, in the manner of a man who’s late but has gotten there at last.

In a single, swift motion, Vector twisted the knob and pushed the door and swung it wide. It banged against the wall with a clatter and shake as he stepped into the room. He opened his mouth in what would have been an apology, but he finished with his back pressed to the near wall and the weapon drawn and lifted in front of him.

The sight that greeted him made him swing the pistol left to right in a quick, securing scan. He watched for anything that moved. Any actor, bad or good. Anything that could excuse or inform or clarify.

In short, he looked for something to explain the blood and the bodies. And he didn’t see anything that could.

The blood formed a rough H pattern in the room. First, down the wall to his left, where it was splotched in three paintball bursts. Then, across the floor in the middle, in trails that were streams when they started at the sides but trickles by the time they reached their farthest points, with no footprints or other signs of movements through them. Finally, on the wall to Vector’s right.

There were more paintball splatters there, two of them this time. One of those had a comet tail end, a stretching-out of the blood’s pattern in a fading smear.

Vector studied the scene. He drank it in, blinking rapidly. Each time his eyes closed, he locked another image away.

Shit, he whispered then.

There was a phone was on the table near the door. Its handset sat in its cradle, its wire into the wall – Vector checked – intact.

He reached to it but stopped himself. His hand floated over it, opening and closing uncertainly, but he turned his attention back to the room.

Three bodies were scattered in the space around him. Two were at the left, one nearer that wall at the room’s head, the other a few feet closer to Vector. The third body lay to Vector’s right, the legs just visible where they stuck out from beneath a table.

Ray, he thought. He’d be one of those at the left. Near the head of the room, where he belonged and where he would have placed himself as he waited for Vector’s arrival.

Vector registered everything he could see in a matter of seconds before sliding down the wall to the left, his back to it. The pistol was in his grip, held easily but firmly, its nose angled down. When he reached the corner, he edged farther into the room, moving to the nearest body. It was face down, in a half-curled position.

Vector bent. The man was Lloyd Sherman. A custodian. He worked at the church and school. Three hours a day, minimum. Extra shifts as needed, if you gave enough notice.

He’d had lunch with Lloyd two days ago, laying out a brownbag spread of turkey sandwiches and potato chips, with two small and strong coffees on the side. The men made themselves comfortable in Lloyd’s workroom, and they talked of cars, specifically of the precious Buick that Lloyd was near to fully restoring. Vector had asked if he could drive it someday, and Lloyd laughed him off.

A single exit wound was centered in his back, and streams of blood ran into the room from under Lloyd’s chest. Vector knew what he’d find but checked the custodian’s neck anyway – He’s too pale, he thought, even before confirming the Buick would be finished by someone else.

He stepped over Lloyd’s body and came to Ray.

Ray Nash when Vector first met him and when they’d come together to Long Prairie. Ray Cooper ever since.

But no mystery surrounded Ray’s existence anymore, because no matter his last name, Ray was dead. Two bullet holes were in his forehead, the cardinal color of the blood stained down his face and across the pastor’s shirt and collar he’d been wearing.

Ray had worn a jacket, too. Always. Though no one in town ever noticed that similarity between the men they knew as Vincent Smith and Ray Cooper, Ray had worn a jacket of some sort every single day he was in Long Prairie, just as Vector had.

His right hand was caught behind him, under the jacket and at his waistband on that side, just above the hip. Ray had died reaching for something he never got to.

Vector didn’t touch him. There was no point.

He went to the other end of the room, moving quickly. Stepping around the table to see the body better, Vector realized it was Billy Hollander.

Billy had graduated from Long Prairie High only a year before, and he’d told Vector he was coming back into town for a visit this weekend. The teenager had talked about dropping by.

His timing could have been better. Like Lloyd Sherman, Billy had been shot in the chest.

A year ago, Billy was the best student in Vector’s calculus course. As recently as two days ago – hell, twenty minutes ago – Billy was alive and coming back to report what a fantastic first semester he was having at college. College that Vector himself wrote a recommendation for.

But Billy was dead, as certainly as Lloyd and Ray were. Billy’s blood was tacky and sticking, and it painted the floor and walls around his body.

Vector straightened. He faced the center of the room.

There was a second door at this end, a door to the outside. He paced a step over to stand beside it, and he reexamined the room from that position, a second location to add to the information memorized at the first.

Three people. All dead. All men.

Which left one teenage girl missing, by immediate appearances.

And god help me ultimate appearances, he thought.

Three men. All dead.

Two at the head of the room. One here, at the back.

From the outside door where he stood, Vector looked to the far wall by Ray’s body, over to the church entry, and down to Billy Hollander, stretched out near his feet. He raised his gun from point to point, tracing the path his eyes had just run. He counted as he gazed toward Ray – one, two, three holes at least – then turned to the door into the church, paused as he considered that entry and ruled it out because it would have meant going through the church, and finally looked behind him, adding more.

It would be four for poor Billy Hollander. And the next one on this side was five, probably since Billy was no small package to handle.

He wouldn’t have been expected, either. Billy shows up to visit with his old math teacher and maybe do a little bragging, but he gets more than he ever thought he would.

He wouldn’t have been expected at all....

Vector counted bullet holes again.

Five. Again.

Three in the front wall by Ray. Two here, by Billy.

Five bullets in walls. Maybe more, still lodged in the bodies.

It was limited entry, against three unsuspecting men and a teenage girl. Put it at six or seven gunshots, most to the headwall, the balance to the rear one where he stood. Three deaths.

With one disappearance. A no-show or escape at best, an abduction at worst.

But an abduction would need an extra person. Which meant one shooter and a spare for space control and contingencies, plus that third person for Jessica.

It’s three, he thought.

He played it through, visualizing the entry, the sight and shot lines, the wounds, the splatter patterns, the progress of shooters through this space, the surprise of Billy’s appearance. When he played that through his head behind eyes that were narrowed in calculations, he thought three actors.

But then he played it again.

It was the angles that caught him. It was the angles he noticed.

He imagined the dead men standing near the places where they fell. An unaccounted-for, additional person now gone. The need to command the room in tight quarters while claiming a person there. A single access point and an uncertain number of persons who’d have been waiting inside.

He went around it again. Pistol lifted again, its nose bucking silently again as he counted softly.

One … two … three shots. Maybe more.

And on this side.

Four … five. At least five shots. Maybe more.

He gauged the height of the marks on the walls. He compared the resting places of the bodies. He worked the numbers in his head.

Four, he thought. At least four men came into this room and did this.

No more than two minutes had passed, but Vector knew he didn’t have time for more. He didn’t hesitate.

On his way to Lloyd’s body, Vector re-holstered his pistol. He pulled a jacket sleeve over his hand and rolled the custodian’s body.

There were two chest wounds, not just one. Two entries and one exit.

He moved to Ray. He looked from the body at his feet to the wall in front of him. Up and down, up and down, his gaze shifted quickly as he platted out the death of a man who’d become a friend.

Vector stepped past Ray’s body and over to the wall. He studied it, concentrating on the three blood spatters.

He saw what he wanted, what he hoped for. Two of the splotches were painted around holes, but the third showed only a dent at its center. That shot, that single one of the three, hadn’t lodged, and Vector stooped and scanned the floor.

The slug was against the baseboard. It had struck and fallen, then rolled to a stop there. He pulled his jacket sleeve up again, retrieved the slug, and pocketed it.

He went back to Ray and pulled Ray’s arm out from under the right side of his shirt. Then he unfastened Ray’s inside-waistband holster and tugged it all out – the holster and the semiautomatic pistol it held, which was a match for Vector’s own.

He was almost done.

Vector stepped outside. He surveyed the surroundings and made for Ray’s car, parked a few feet away. They’d go through it, of course. He knew that. The police would eventually search the car as a routine matter. But he only needed a little time, and he’d have at least that.

The car was unlocked, and he reached in to pop the trunk. There, he lifted the spare tire cover and put Ray’s holstered pistol into it. Then he added his own, replaced the cover, and closed the trunk again.

He returned to the small room off the church. Once inside, he went to Billy’s body.

Vector stepped over it and reached deliberately to the front of the young man’s blood-soaked shirt. He took hold of the fabric, feeling the glue-like blood stick and squeeze between his fingers, then dropped Billy’s body back to the floor. It fell with a heavy and empty sound that should have been horrifying but that Vector scarcely noticed.

He raised his dirtied hands to his face and pressed them to his cheeks. Even as he dropped them back to his sides, Vector purposefully stepped into the trails of blood running from Billy. He sucked in his breath as he moved along, calmly and clinically, and he let out a scream that rocked the room. A single, loud and long bellow.

Oh my God!

He screamed again – "Somebody come somebody hurry god hurry up oh God!" – feeling the grate and rasp of it in his throat.

Forcibly wide-eyed, Vector stepped toward the door that led into the church. Toward the phone, sitting beside it. Untouched.

The door opened as he lifted the handset, and the face that appeared behind the door lit up at the sight of him.

Mr. Smith!

Margaret Calvin stood there, seventy years old but with precocious, lively fingers that were just perfect for the piano accompaniment during the services.

Whether it was the limited eyesight of old age or the oblivion that sometimes pushes away the incomprehensible, she didn’t notice Billy Hollander’s blood smeared on Vincent Smith’s face. She didn’t see Vincent’s bloody hand holding a bloody phone.

Not at first, anyway.

There you are. I understand Pastor Cooper was looking for you. Did he find –?

She didn’t finish. She was screaming on her own by then.

First Theorem

Rendering to Zero

Civilization always has comfortably lived with the concept of existence – with the ordinals and cardinals and their suggestion of actuality, of something truly there. It is only the development of the null or naught, of the zero and its nothingness, that has rendered humanity’s capacity truly dangerous, with its ability utterly to destroy.

Vector Smith

Treatise on the Philosophy of Mathematical Algorithms

Ch One, p 4

(Scholars Consolidated University Press, 1992)

Chapter 1

Jessica

At one point, she feels a rat cross her hand. She’s sitting in the corner, the walls, the floor, the air – everything – black around her. Her knees are tight to her chest, her arms are straight at her sides, her hands are flat to the floor. Her chin is tucked down. It presses against her knees.

She’s as small as she can make herself. And she does not move, save for a slight sway and the hitching of her blended breaths and soft cries.

When the rat comes, she’s fourteen hours into a day she doesn’t know and can’t measure in the darkness. The animal stops at her hand. Its small scratching feet scurry onto her fingers. Its bare tail slides over her fingertips.

The rat stops and sniffs her skin with tickling whiskers and tiny puffs of its breath.

She thinks it’s a breeze. She believes with a wandering and still-confused mind that a delicate wind is cutting under the door a few feet to her left. Or a loose piece of carpet has grazed her. Or she’s shifted and touched something without realizing it.

The bite tells her otherwise.

The rat nibbles her skin. Only a little, but at the sharp stinging pain of it, she shrieks and shakes her hand as though snapping a towel. The rat flies into a nearby wall, and she hears it hit, drop, and scurry away.

Jessica is sixteen years old, and she’s used to being alone because she’s been an orphan for most of the personal history she can recall. Her mother died years ago. Jessica remembers that very well, but she doesn’t remember and has heard nothing about a father. She doesn’t know any brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts. No relatives of any kind, for that matter.

She’s angry about those things in ways she can’t articulate well. Her school counselor has gently pressed her on it before, and she’s managed to say only that she’s tired of always being alone. But she’s angry about a host of other things, as well. That much is apparent.

All the anger has been replaced for now, though, because Jessica is as frightened as she’s ever been.

The first time she opened her eyes after the nightmare at the church, the darkness around her was deep and absolute, and Jessica couldn’t tell if she was awake or asleep, alive or dead. Not daring to move for an amount of time she couldn’t measure, she’d finally summoned the courage to reach out into that blackness, if only to see if had some end to it.

She’d found an end all right. It was three feet or so from where she’d begun. Certainly no more than that.

She’d touched a wall, at first flinching back at the contact and then cautiously reaching again, her hands moving slowly, the fingers out and trembling in the dark until they came to the wall once more. She pressed a hand to it then, pushing against the surface and telling herself, It’s real, it’s real, it’s real….

She pressed harder and moved to it. She pushed herself into it, flattening her body to the wall as if it were a loved one.

She stayed that way for five minutes, ten minutes, a half hour. She had no idea how long.

But then she’d started to her left, tracing the confines of the space.

That first wall, then a corner and another wall. Crawling along that next one, one shoulder rubbing it. To another corner. Crawling again. The end of the third wall, and then a final wall that was broken by a door. She’d run her hands up over the wood surface to the left and right, until she found a knob.

She twisted it but it didn’t move. She rattled it gently and turned it again. Nothing. She shook harder. Then harder still.

At the end, she was hanging from it. Kneeling. Arms up and fingers tight around it. The sound of her wrestling with the knob was lost in her cries for help.

She went on that way for two hours, alternating between screaming shouts and soft sobs. No one came in that time. No one spoke to her. She had no one – no contact of any kind – to prove to her that she actually still existed and wasn’t simply lost somewhere inside her own head.

The tears exhausted from her eyes but damp on her clothes, Jessica slept for more uncountable time. She woke to stumble across a box of juice and a small package of dry cereal. Asleep, she’d missed their arrival.

She ate ravenously, at a time when she imagined she wouldn’t have been able to do so. She washed it down with the juice – sweet apple that was warm by the time she got to it – and she thought she might puke before she managed to choke the feeling back.

She’d retreated to the corner after that, sitting silently, her eyes uselessly wide. That was when the rat came.

She searches for it after hearing it hit the wall and scamper off. Scrambling through the small space – she knows now that it’s a closet – Jessica pats the carpet across every inch of its surface.

She wants to find the animal. She wants to find it and kill it, crush it even, her muted aggressions and common anger taking over in circumstances where she otherwise finds herself horribly impotent.

She finds a hole. It’s a small one, no bigger than a nickel. A perfect little hiding hole.

Jessica kneels forward, propping on her elbows, positioning herself. She can wait. At this point, she seems to have all the time in the world.

Chapter 2

Out from Hamilton Place

As a boy, Vincent Smith went through a time when he loved Alexander Hamilton above any other person or thing. More than his parents and Mickey Mouse, games and stuffed animals, M&Ms and macaroni and cheese – the kinds of things that are important when you’re three going on four.

To be sure, a child’s adoration of the nation’s first Treasury Secretary is odd, something a boy’s parents don’t brag about to neighbors and friends. But it was a strongly- and earnestly-held fascination for him, and no one had ever described Vincent in terms suggesting normality anyway.

A month shy of turning four, he’d read his first biography of Hamilton. He did it out loud, in his young child’s high-pitched and lisping voice, announcing it like a radio play to parents who a moment before had been listening idly to a television sitcom until their only son grabbed their attention with a precocious talent they never knew he had.

The biography was from a children’s book, a slim, large-print sketching of American history characters that was filled with more pictures than words. But Vincent’s parents were still startled when their boy popped up in front of the TV and reported the historic duel in which Hamilton, soldier turned statesman turned plotting politician, was fatally shot by Aaron Burr.

Vincent read another biography, a longer and more challenging one, before he was five, and by the time he was six, he’d memorized Hamilton’s history down to the slightest detail. His parents could call their son from his room, mention a year in the man’s life, and listen – more proud by then but also, truth be told, somewhat alarmed – as he worked through a week-by-week report of what happened in that time period.

Vincent’s interest in Hamilton faded into the background after that. He never lost it altogether; in a way, it even affected his jobs. But the young boy’s interest waned as other things came to the forefront.

Mainly, that was mathematics. He was already a math whiz by then, and he only got better. He burned through algebra in two months between six and seven, swallowing it whole, like a man who’s crawled from the desert and has the chance to dive into a lake for a quick drink he desperately needs.

Geometry, both pure and coordinate, followed, with those leading into trigonometry. That collective of subjects took less than a year.

When he was eight – a time when his parents were insisting he stay in his normal place in third grade – Vincent took on calculus and linear algebra at home. He mastered the fundamentals in six months and started digesting analysis and combinatorics in his spare time. He told his parents it helped him focus.

They kept college at bay as long as they could but finally let him go when the prodigy at eight turned out to be an instructor himself a half decade later, tutoring others when he was thirteen. He was Vector by that time. Vincent had disappeared as anything but a legal identity, a name on a birth certificate and a driver’s license that he wouldn’t be able to get for another three years.

The nickname was a toss-off comment by a tutor Vector had left behind when he was nine. Almost certainly disparaging when applied, it stuck when the boy heard it. It had a sound to it, a certain grownup sleekness and coolness that Vincent hadn’t experienced as a mathematics oddity.

He took it on like a wrapping blanket. In every research program, every formal or informal analysis he did, every paper he submitted or that bore a name, he was Vector Smith. And every mention made of him over that time appeared to be ignorant of Vincent and enamored of Vector.

Which perhaps was the problem.

He graduated from college at fourteen and had his master’s degree less than a year after that. He started his doctorate the same week.

He never finished. The last notice the world had of Vector Smith, child math phenom, was the publication of the book he once intended to be his doctoral work. It was an impressive piece – an analysis of human philosophy and psychology, as guided by the mathematics principles that were everything he knew. That were his lifeblood.

But he disappeared at the book’s completion, a then willingly-vanished curiosity seeking exile from the cover of Time magazine. He was sixteen, and no one ever looked for him again.

In the broader world, a place less focused and more generic than the academically heated one he was leaving, Vector at that time fit in perfectly. He was built solidly but with an unassuming appearance, a mishmash of features that were no better or worse than anyone around him. He was an