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toward the stairs.
    The house was a quaint, two-story Cape Cod overlooking a rugged stretch of mid-Atlantic coastline just south of Pelican Bay, Virginia. This upscale bedroom community was home to all manner of government types, from well-heeled policy wonks to senior intelligence analysts. The place was a little rich for Grove’s blood, but the Bureau had helped him relocate here last year after his Alexandria home burned to the ground in a terrible, inexplicable fire. It was, in a way, another in a long line of compromises he had been making lately.
    The truth was, the teaching gig had been a compromise as well, a mutual decision made last year between Grove and his benefactor, confidant, and section chief, Tom Geisel, in the aftermath of a profiling assignment gone bad. On that job, the predator Grove had been obsessively hunting had somehow learned the location of the Grove family safe house in rural Indiana. Fortunately, in the eleventh hour, Grove had managed to save his wife and his baby son. But the incident had taken its toll. For months afterward the memories had wormed their way into Grove’s dreams. It wasn’t the first bout of post-traumatic stress that he had ever experienced, but it was turning out to be his first full-blown identity crisis. He didn’t know who he was anymore, and he was increasingly defensive about his new job, especially when VIPs visited, especially since he was supposed to be this big rock star at the Bureau. So what was he doing slumming down at the Academy?
    â€œMake you a deal, slick,” he murmured into the boy’s ear as he carried him up the stairs. “You take your bath like a good boy, and I’ll tell you another exciting tale of romance and adventure.”
    The boy had no idea what romance and adventure were, but from the sound of his squeals, it was clear that he thought a story was a good idea.
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    A few hundred miles to the south, on a leprous outcropping of mid-Atlantic coastline known as Emerald Isle, a battered, rust-pocked panel van pulled into the vapor-lit darkness of a deserted public parking lot. The lot was adjacent to a public pier known as Bogue Inlet. The van parked near a column of weather-beaten steps.
    Nobody saw the dark presence emerge from that vehicle like a moving shadow.
    Presence , because the individual with the odd headwear seemed to absorb light like a black hole. Face shaded by his shopworn top hat, broad shoulders draped in a black oiler, hands gloved in black rubber, the figure might as well have been invisible—despite the strange headgear and imposing height.
    The stranger went around behind the van, opened the double doors, and pulled out a large canvas duffel bag that seemed to be loaded with cinder blocks from the way the big man hefted the strap over his shoulder.
    He went over to the stairs and descended with an almost robotic stoicism, the hat tilted forward just enough for the brim to shade most of his face, which looked from a distance as though it were covered in soot. The hat itself—which had begun to show its age (a little shiny at the edges, the felt tattered and pilled along the top)—had an elaborate history.
    Stolen from the British Museum in the late 1980s, it had floated around on the black market for decades, traded and relished by collectors of the outré, before coming into the possession of this tall, mute man in black. The hat was originally found at a murder scene in Whitechapel, London, in the year 1888. It was believed to have once belonged to Jack the Ripper.
    Now the tall man was crossing the deserted beach, the sea wind buffeting his coat, flapping his hood, and threatening to toss his hat off, yet he remained oblivious to the elements. The inky black waves, shimmering with moonlight out beyond the sandbar, were merely vectors and angles of light to this unseen presence. Nature mattered only as a grid across which a higher purpose played itself out. It was nearly 9:43 P.M .