Son of the Morning

She inhaled suddenly, and the room turned dark around her as knowledge struck with the force of a blow. The Treasure. Ford and Bryant had died because these stupid papers told the location of the famed, lost Treasure of the Templars: Creag Dhu.

Money. That was what it came down to. They had died because of money, money that Parrish Sawyer wanted. Because she had the papers, he had either assumed she had already translated enough to know what they were about and also told Ford and Bryant, or he had wanted to wipe out all knowledge of them regardless.

She had thought the grief would be easier to bear if she just knewwhy.

It wasn’t.

Conrad lay quietly in bed, lights off, but the city was never dark and the bland hotel walls were washed with muted, flickering colors from a plethora of neon. The latest computer list lay on the desk, put aside for now. Some things were best reserved for the night, but others had to wait for busy daylight and normal office hours. The delay didn’t bother him; he was a patient man. Grace wasn’t going anywhere, at least not yet. She had gone to ground somewhere in the massive urban sprawl, and she would stay there as long as she felt safe. She was a scholar, a researcher; she would research. The libraries inChicago were very good. Yes, he was confident she would remain inChicago for a while, and all the time he would be looking for her. She wouldn’t know he was close until he was ready to pounce.

Mr. Sawyer had a small army of men out combing the streets, but Conrad didn’t put any faith in that tactic. The people who operated in the underground economy weren’t about to answer any questions truthfully, for one thing, and for another, Grace had proven herself capable of quite a few disguises. By now she could have shaven her head and dressed in leather, so relying on description was a waste of time.

Conrad preferred his own methods. To him it was simple: if anyone on the run remained in one place for long, he or she would have to establish an identity. For some it would be as uncomplicated as selecting a name. That worked so long as there was no need for credit, or a driver’s license, or you didn’t try to work in a legitimate place that demanded a social security number. In the long run it was smarter to establish a documented identity, and Grace St. John had impressed him with her intelligence.

The process was simple, but slow. To document an identity, one had to have a birth certificate. To get a birth certificate, one had to have a real name. Obviously, using a living person’s name could be complicated when the two identities began colliding with each other, as would inevitably happen, so the best thing was to go to a cemetery and read tombstones. Find someone who had been born at approximately the same time as you were, within a couple of years either way, but who had died young. Sometimes the parents’ names were on the tombstone, too: something along the lines of "Beloved Daughter of John and Jane Doe." Bingo, you had the information you needed to get a birth certificate.

Requests for birth certificates would go to the state capital, in this caseSpringfield . Getting a birth certificate was fairly easy; it was getting a full set of identification papers that would take time. Next she would have to get a social security number, and the federal government was slow. He had time to focus on the birth certificate requests.

With the Foundation’s resources, gaining access to theIllinois state computer system had taken a mere phone call. He had been surprised, however, by the volume of requests. It was amazing how many people needed to prove their existence, whether for social security claims, passport applications, or whatever. The sheer numbers involved were what was slowing him down.

He could automatically delete those requests for men, but again there were a lot of people with ambiguous names. Shelley, for instance. Male or female? And what about Lynn, or Marion, or Terry? Those people had to remain on his list until he could check them out.

Nor did he have a specific date of request, which made his task more difficult. She couldn’t have made a request any sooner than the day after he had almost caught her in Eau Claire, but what if she waited a few days, a week, maybe even a couple of weeks? That uncertainty added literally hundreds of people to the list, from allover the state. He narrowed the focus to theChicago area, but that still left hundreds because he figured at least a fourth of the state’s entire population lived in the metro area.

Checking out that many people took time, and the list grew every day. Some of the people who requested birth certificates had moved in the meantime; they had to be located, and sometimes they had moved out of state. Some had gone on vacation, but until he had traced them he didn’t dare eliminate them from his list. Grace could be hiding behind any of those names, even the most improbable. He would not underestimate her again.

"Girl, you look like shit,"Matty said genially, uncoiling his compact, graceful body from the tattered sofa in his apartment.

"Thanks," Grace muttered. She was tired from sitting up nights trying to decipher Gaelic. Her eyes felt gritty, she had the energy of a slug, and she had burned her hand that day when she picked up a pan to wash and discovered it had justbeen taken from the oven. Harmony had tended the bum, scowling the entire time, and then had insisted on accompanying Grace toMatty’s for another "lesson," just to make certain something else didn’t happen to her.

"Just skinhangin ‘ on a rack of bones," Harmony pronounced, still scowling. "I can’t get her to eat, no matter what I cook. She’s done lost ten pounds or more since she’s been living in my house, whichain’t exactly the best advertisement I could have."

Grace looked down at herself. She was used to Harmony’s complaints that she didn’t eat enough, but still she was surprised now when she reallylooked at herself, and saw her bony wrists, her body lost within the baggy folds of clothes that had once been the right size. She knew she’d lost weight, a lot of weight, that first horrible week after the murders, but she hadn’t realized she was still losing weight. She wasthin. and verging on downright skinny. She had to use a safety pin to tighten the waistband of her jeans so that they didn’t slide right off. Even her underwear was too big these days, and loose panties weren’t comfortable.