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symptoms were consistent with dementia but the scans weren’t. Dementia patients have a general overall degradation of function due either to apoxia or plaque, in the case of Alzheimer’s. Mainly centered around the hippocampus. Here I was seeing degradation of the striatum, unusually so. The patterns were strange. If I hadn’t seen the patient myself, I would have said that his brain had been . . . destroyed by an outside force. A little like a cloak thrown over the higher functions. But underneath, the scan showed a great deal of activity, like a banked fire. He tried to communicate verbally, but it wasn’t working. He became exhausted. Dementia patients forget words. It didn’t seem like this patient forgot words so much as was unable to physically get them out.”
    Though Mac still didn’t see the connection, the fact that this was a company controlled by Arka Pharmaceuticals made it definitely his business.
    “So . . . what? You read his mind?”
    His sarcasm got more of a reaction than he thought it would. She jerked slightly, eyes rounded.
    “No.” She drew in a deep breath. “No, I didn’t read his mind. They don’t teach that at med school. I found the key by sheer chance. I was typing my notes onto my iPad when his head jerked. His eyes went from my pad to me and then back to the tablet. I turned my tablet around and was astonished when he started keying in letters.”
    “Okay,” Mac said. “I’ll bite.”
    “He wrote that I should say nothing and turn off the vidcams. I have a security code that allows me to do that. However, so it wouldn’t alert the guards watching the monitors or any bots that might have been established, I simply created a loop of him sleeping.”
    Smart thinking. Even if she wasn’t an operator, she had some good moves in her. But then, Mac reflected, you don’t get several Ph.D.s by being dumb.
    “From then on, we communicated laboriously, by fits and starts, over the course of two days. The first thing he told me is that his name wasn’t the name we had in our files, Edward Domino, which immediately made me suspicious. Dementia can merge into psychosis easily, and dementing patients are often paranoid. I’ve had patients who insisted they were John Kennedy, George Washington, Marco Polo, Albert Einstein. So I was prepared to hear something preposterous, but he gave me another name which meant nothing to me. I have a feeling, however, that it might mean something to you.”
    She stopped, looking at him. Mac turned his face to stone.
    She sighed. “Lucius Ward.”
    “Holy. Shit,” Jon’s voice said in his ear. Mac could hear Nick swearing in the background.
    “The name means nothing to me,” Mac said, raising his eyebrows slightly. He felt as if he’d been sucker-punched but nothing showed on his face. “Why should it?”
    “I have no idea. All I know is the fierce determination of this man—whether he was Edward Domino or Lucius Ward makes no difference to me. He communicated with great difficulty, he sweated and he shook, but he wouldn’t give up. He repeated his name and said I absolutely had to find Tom McEnroe. That’s a direct quote. He spent an hour, white-faced with fatigue, telling me this. He also gave me something.” She dug in a pants pocket and brought something out in a small fist. She tossed it onto the table, where it rolled a few times, then stopped a few inches from Mac’s hand. He stared at it, barely able to breathe.
    “Jesus Christ.” This time it was Nick’s voice coming in over his earbud. “The Captain’s Hawk.”
    It looked like nothing. A tiny, almost invisible pin made of black metal. Only under a microscope could you see that it was beautifully detailed. The pin was a hawk in flight, perfectly crafted down to individual feathers, a tiny gold stripe running down its back. It was made from the barrel of the gun that had killed bin Laden.
    It was the badge of a Ghost. Ghosts were banned from having flashes or insignia of any