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+{"text":" \nTHE PLEASURE OF THE CROWN  \nAnthropology, Law and First Nations\n\nDara Culhane\n\nTalonbooks  \n1997\n_for feral travelers in the vast emptiness_\n\n_in memory of my mother_  \n_Claire Eglin Culhane_  \n_1918-1996_  \n_who never failed_  \n_to speak truth to power_\n**T ABLE OF CONTENTS**\n\n Generalized Map of British Columbia\n\nPART I: JUSTITIA OMNIBUS (JUSTICE FOR ALL)\n\n Chapter 1: How Did the Crown Acquire Title?\n\n ~ The Long and Short of It\n\n ~ Human Being, Citizen, Anthropologist\n\n Chapter 2: In Search of Reason\n\n ~ The Law in its Majesty\n\n ~ Late One Night at the Legion\n\nPART II: TERRA NULLIUS (UNOCCUPIED, EMPTY LAND)\n\n Chapter 3: Cultures Similar and Different\n\n ~ Creating Race in the Interests of Empire\n\n ~ Mutiny and Desertion as Common Sense\n\n Chapter 4: Beginning at the Beginning\n\n ~ Aboriginal Peoples Were Here\n\n ~ Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave When First We Practice to Deceive\n\n ~ Eclecticism\n\n ~ Imperialist Competitions in Terra Nullius\n\n ~ Imperialist Nostalgia in Terra Nullius\n\n ~ Enough and As Good\n\n ~ Nation to Nation. Words to Paper\n\nPART III: TERRA INCOGNITA (UNKNOWN LAND)\n\n Chapter 5: The Great Chain of Precedent\n\n ~ Honour Among Thieves. South of the Border\n\n ~ Honour Among Thieves. North of the Border\n\n ~ Honour Among Thieves. In Africa\n\n Chapter 6: White Papers and Legal Tests: the 1970's\n\n ~ Law, Power and Resistance\n\n ~ Logic, Legal Hysteria and Rifle Shots on Vancouver Island\n\n ~ Civilization and the Whimsical Destruction of Property\n\n ~ From Law to Politics and Back Again\n\n ~ The Honour of the Crown Below Par\n\n Chapter 7: Conflicts and Constitutions: The 1980s\n\n ~ The Master's Tools: The Comprehensive Claims Policy\n\n ~ Title on the Baker Lake Tundra: Lower Peaks than Mexico\n\n ~ The Evolution of the Dedicated White People Band at Bear Island\n\n ~ The Master's House: The Repatriation of the Constitution\n\n ~ Testing, Testing: From \"Use and Occupancy\" to \"Culture\" in the Sparrow Decision\n\n ~ Ping Pong\n\nPART IV: ECCE SIGNUM (BEHOLD THE PROOF)\n\n Chapter 8: Delgamuukw versus The Queen\n\n ~ All the World's a Stage\n\n ~ Do Aboriginal Peoples Really Exist?\n\n Chapter 9: The Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's Case\n\n ~ A Native Point of View\n\n ~ Experts in Living Memory\n\n ~ The Ancestors are Watching\n\n Chapter 10: Experts on Behalf of the Plaintiffs\n\n ~ Anthropology: Interpretation and Understanding?\n\n ~ Here Come the Anthros\n\n ~ Law and Masculine Hysteria\n\n ~ Academic Freedom\n\n Chapter 11: The Crown's Case\n\n ~ The Political Economy of Litigation\n\n ~ Anthropology: The Science of \"Man\"?\n\n Chapter 12: Experts on Behalf of the Defendants\n\n ~ Her Majesty's Loyal Anthropologist\n\n ~ Malignant Mythologies\n\n ~ Hegemonic Moments\n\n Chapter 13: Jewels in the Crown\n\n ~ Temporal Purgatory: The Protohistoric Period\n\n ~ Who Created Private Property?\n\n ~ The Magic of Commodity Fetishism\n\n Chapter 14: From Fur Trading Frontier to White Man's Province\n\n ~ Believing What You See. Seeing What You Believe\n\n ~ On the One Hand. And On the Other\n\n Chapter 15: Old Questions. New Century.\n\n ~ The First Definite Hint\n\n ~ The Era of Permanent Penetration\n\n ~ Resistance versus Assimilation\n\nPART V: DIES IRAE (JUDGMENT DAY)\n\n Chapter 16: Reasons for Judgment\n\n ~ Nasty, British (Columbian) and Long\n\n ~ The Vast Emptiness\n\n ~ Might Makes Right\n\n ~ No Writing, Horses or Wheeled Wagons\n\n ~ Finders Keepers\n\n Chapter 17: Reasons in the Public Eye\n\n ~ Judgment Day\n\n ~ Music is Lost on Me. I Have a Tin Ear\n\n ~ Delgamuukw and the People Without Culture\n\n ~ Insult and Injury\n\n ~ Is There Intelligent Life in the Galaxy?\n\nPART VI: TABULA RASA (BLANK PAGE)\n\n Chapter 18: Judging the Experts\n\n ~ Experts v. Advocates\n\n ~ Ethics v. License\n\n ~ Revision v. Reversal\n\n ~ Politics v. Poetics\n\n ~ Chiefs v. Commoners\n\n Chapter 19: How Do You Know Whose Story is True?\n\n ~ Sense v. Nonsense\n\n ~ Fact v. Fiction\n\n ~ Truth v. Lies\n\nPART VII: AD ARBITRIUM (AT WILL)\n\n Chapter 20: Moonlighting as an Anthropologist and an Historian\n\n ~ Drive-by Ethnography\n\n ~ Civilization by Tautology\n\n ~ Reasons to Travel\n\n ~ Legal Rights and Social Wrongs\n\n ~ Communicating Deeds and Legislating Greed\n\n ~ Driven to Drink\n\n ~ Infantile Disorders\n\n ~ Camp Potlatch\n\n ~ The Battle of Britain\n\nPART VIII: AD INFINITUM (GOING ON FOREVER, INTO INFINITY)\n\n Chapter 21: _Delgamuukw_ at the British Columbia Court of Appeal, 1993\n\n ~ We Own Therefore We Are\n\n ~ We Buy Therefore We Are\n\n Chapter 22: The British Columbia Treaty Process and the Supreme Court of Canada, 1996\n\n ~ From Negotiation to Litigation to Negotiation to Litigation to\n\n ~ Appealing Culture\n\nPART IX: IN FUTURO (IN THE FUTURE)\n\n Chapter 23: The Past In the Present, In the Future\n\n ~ Just Another Day in Lotus Land\n\n ~ Justice. Then Peace.\n\n Chapter 24: Back to the Future\n\n ~ Colouring Outside the Lines\n\n Postscript: December 11, 1997\n\n ~ The Dawn of a New Day?\n\n ~ Patience is a Virtue\n\n ~ The Way Forward\n\n ~ The Irony of Ironies\n\n ~ Tomorrow Today\n\nBibliography\n\nTable of Cases\n\nAcknowledgements\n\n_Generalized map of British Columbia showing Territories claimed by Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Peoples (not to scale)._\n**P ART I**\n\n**J USTITIA OMNIBUS**\n\n**(J USTICE FOR ALL)**\n**Chapter 1: How Did the Crown Acquire Title?**\n\n_The Indian elders in British Columbia question why they must subject their relationship to the land to a non-Indian court's strict scrutiny: why they must explain their use of the land to obtain 'rights' abstractly defined by others._\n\n_They believe that the Indians have rights to their land because their people go back with the land for thousands of years. What they do not understand is how the Crown acquired its 'rights' to their land._\n\n\u2014Lawyer Louise Mandell, 1987, _Native Culture on Trial_.\n\n**The Long and the Short of It**\n\nLaw, we are taught to believe by our educational institutions, embodies justice. Our courts' formal rules of evidence, and their procedures, enable the discovery of truth through the application of reason. \"Judicial neutrality\"\u2014the absence of bias among judges\u2014guarantees that fair and equitable resolutions to disputes between any and all people(s) will be arrived at. Equality before the law, we are told, is the linchpin of the Canadian judicial system; and justice, we are assured, is the outcome of legal processes. It follows from these official premises, and by this reasoning, that if contemporary Canadian sovereignty and Crown title and rights to land are confirmed by law, they must have been justly acquired.\n\nOf course, in these cynical times, few claim the Canadian legal system is infallible. Charges that interests other than the pursuit of justice may be at play in legal processes do not usually generate widespread alarm. Increasingly, we understand that what we call \"facts\" are frequently matters of interpretation that reflect particular points of view rather than unequivocal certainty. We have come to appreciate that something called \"culture,\" and more specifically, \"cultural differences,\" come between Aboriginal peoples and Canadian law, disrupting communication and mutual understanding. Suggestions that judges' decisions often reflect prejudices common in contemporary society at large, rather than being strictly determined by exclusively legal concerns, are hardly shocking revelations.\n\nHowever, periodically a particular judicial decision comes to public attention that shocks even the most complacent or embittered cynic. Allan McEachern, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, created just such a controversy when he handed down his 1991 judgment against the Aboriginal claimants in the high profile Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en land rights case, also known as the case of _Delgamuukw v. The Queen_. Judge McEachern ruled that, before Europeans arrived in the late eighteenth century, the First Nations had been too \"primitive\" to have had property laws or institutions of governance. Today, he declared, they have no Aboriginal rights whatsoever. Charges of racism were hurled at the judge. He was accused of shamelessly favouring the interests of big forestry companies and non-Aboriginal elites against the rights of First Nations. The Chief Justice defended himself, using the letter of the law as his shield. He protested that he was compelled by historical precedents to repeat the rulings of previous judges that dated back hundreds of years. Chief Justice McEachern admitted that his decision might not be _just_ , but he was convinced that it was definitely _legal_.\n\nIndeed, law and justice have not always walked hand in hand through British Columbia's history, and nowhere is the distance between them greater than on the question of Aboriginal title and rights. How _did_ the British Crown acquire its rights to the territory we now call British Columbia? Many Canadians would respond, with pride, that unlike Americans, we gained sovereignty over the lands we live on, and established political jurisdiction over its Indigenous inhabitants, through the rule of law, rather than by military force.\n\nIn fact, the Crown acquired its title to First Nations' lands and resources by simply asserting sovereignty and ignoring Aboriginal title _in contravention of British colonial law_. British and then Euro-Canadian rule was enacted by sheer force of numbers as settlers overwhelmed fragments of Aboriginal populations who had survived the first waves of epidemic diseases brought by European fur traders during the eighteenth century. Aboriginal peoples were simply deemed, by law, not to exist. The colonists then established their own legal regime that validated their self-proclaimed sovereignty and jurisdiction. For over 100 years, the governments and the courts of the Province of British Columbia have defended their predecessors' initial trespass on Aboriginal lands, and their transgression of British law, by whatever means necessary: coercion, deceit, compromise, seduction, force. Law.\n\nAboriginal peoples have steadfastly insisted that they surrendered neither ownership of their lands, nor their political autonomy. Nor did they cease to exist. However, it was not until the late 1960s that First Nations\u2014after over a century of petitioning\u2014succeeded in compelling Canadian courts to begin adjudicating their disputes with the governments about who owns the land in British Columbia.\n\nWhen called upon to justify its actions in law, the Province of British Columbia retreats to a legal fortress, the cornerstone of which is the mystical \"original moment\" when Britain asserted sovereignty over First Nations in British Columbia, often without their knowledge, and always without their consent. The Crown's defense begins by giving legal sanction to this crude act of aggression, and then proceeds from this starting point to call upon a range of social theories, historical fictions, and popular \"common sense\" ignorance and prejudice to justify its actions. Crown lawyers present as evidence stereotypical caricatures of Aboriginal peoples as \"backward\" and \"primitive\" when Europeans arrived. Grisly tales of \"war-like savages\" are juxtaposed with an heroic epic of \"advanced\" and \"civilized\" white settlers who, it is claimed, brought Christianity, reason, and the rule of law to the untamed wilderness of British Columbia. The stark contrast in \"development\" between the two \"races,\" the Crown argues, made the superimposition of British sovereignty over Aboriginal sovereignty a \"natural\" outcome of the \"progress\" of history, and rendered inevitable the subordination of Aboriginal peoples to non-Aboriginal governance. A short answer to the Aboriginal elders' question is that the Crown acquired its 'rights' to their land by simply seizing it: through the force of law.\n\nHow could this have happened in this way? Here, in British Columbia, in Canada? More importantly, how can this violation of values that many Canadians hold dear\u2014like respect for the rule of law, a belief in equality, and a commitment to human rights\u2014continue to be legitimized in the 1990s? These are the questions that shape this book. By looking behind, around, and through the interconnections between law, history, culture, and power, I offer a long answer to the elders' question.\n\n**Human Being, Citizen, Anthropologist**\n\nThe landmark case of _Delgamuukw v. The Queen_ heard in British Columbia during 1987-1991 represented a crystallizing moment in the history of Aboriginal peoples and the law in British Columbia. All the variously interested parties to the dispute came together in one forum to present their positions, their arguments, and their supporting evidence. History followed them into the courtroom, and they carried the future out with them when they left.\n\nI wrote this book as a contribution to the ongoing discussions that are taking place in British Columbia and Canada about the possibilities for justice in Aboriginal\/non-Aboriginal relations; as a commentary on a particular dispute in one corner of the globe that is linked to more general struggles for social justice around the world; and, as an intervention in debates in the academic fields of anthropology and law. I write as a human being, a citizen, and an anthropologist. I present an explanation of issues and events that is necessarily one interpretation among many possibilities. Like any account, mine arises from and is shaped by some fundamental assumptions, principles, experiences and positions that I will set out as honestly as I can.\n\nMy inquiry begins and ends with the basic claim that all human beings are fundamentally equal and worthy of respect, and the simple assertion that Canadian law should reflect these principles, both in theory and in practice. My argument is that, in relation to Aboriginal peoples, this has not historically been, nor is it now, the case. I have come to this conclusion by way of a number of different paths.\n\nLong before I began this study of the _Delgamuukw v. R._ case, (and former Chief Justice Allan McEachern's _Reasons for Judgment_ ); and long before I had ever heard of the Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en First Nations, I was imbued as a child with certain understandings of both the danger of the law when it is abused as a weapon of terror, and of the promise of the law when it is employed to achieve and protect justice. Members of my Irish father's family were assassinated by English soldiers in the early years of this century: I was raised with few illusions about British justice. My mother's Jewish family fled pogroms in Czarist Russia and witnessed the Holocaust: I was taught to respect law as an alternative to brutality, and to value scholarship in the service of justice. These general understandings represent, to me, who I am and, as such, they shape how I interpret the world I live in.\n\nI began thinking seriously about the particular questions that constitute the subject matter of this book in the early 1970s, when I married a First Nations man, lived in his reserve community on the Central Coast of British Columbia, and became involved in the movement for recognition of Aboriginal title. I cannot remember when I first began to \"believe\" the simple truth that British Columbia First Nations hold unsurrendered Aboriginal title to their lands. If I ever thought differently, and there indeed was such a \"moment of revelation\" when I changed my mind, it happened so long ago that I cannot recall it now. For as long as Is can remember, this position has appeared to me as simple common sense: Aboriginal peoples were here, Europeans arrived. No wars of conquest were fought, no treaties were entered into. Hence, no Aboriginal title or rights were surrendered. These issues remain unresolved, so mutually-respectful negotiations should begin. These fundamental factual and moral \"truths\" are, to me, obvious. Nothing I have heard, seen, read, learned or experienced in the last twenty-five years has caused me to think or feel differently.\n\nI have brought up two Aboriginal children in contemporary British Columbia. I know something of the depths of racism in this province and in this country. I recognize, in the erudite language of the law, the same cruelty I have seen and heard directed to Aboriginal people in Canadian schools, hospitals, legislatures and many other \"public\" spaces. As a human being, I consider racism a violation of human rights. This is the first premise from which I write.\n\nSometime during the last twenty or so years, I also began to understand how the denial of Aboriginal title and rights in this context was simultaneously a denial of human equality. This understanding emerged first from learning how British and Canadian property law differentiates between categories of citizens according to their relationship to private property: fully \"matured\" citizens may own land, and others may not. These legal classifications mirror, and are mirrored by, cultural beliefs that accord greater value and worth to persons with property, than to those without. Ownership of private property stands as both criteria for, and evidence of, successful citizenship. Knowing this, when I hear Aboriginal people say that they are deeply hurt when governments and courts repeatedly refuse to recognize Aboriginal title and acknowledge Aboriginal rights, I interpret the injury they express as reflecting their very perceptive understanding of the meaning and value of property in the dominant Canadian culture, and the law's reflection of these meanings. That is to say, regardless of how diverse Aboriginal peoples may feel about property, they know how Canadian law feels about it, and they therefore rightly ascertain that they are being insulted\u2014treated as second class citizens\u2014by the law.\n\nAs a citizen, I wish to live in a just and democratic nation, and I object to the fact that Canadian sovereignty relies for its legitimacy on assumptions of human inequality: of European superiority and Aboriginal inferiority. The second premise I write from takes the form of an assertion of the democratic authority of a citizen to critique the law, and to insist that its practices accord with its avowed principles in ways that are comprehensible and transparent to the average person. I am neither a lawyer nor a legal scholar. I am, in this professional way, an \"outsider\" looking at the law. But as a citizen I am inevitably and irrevocably \"inside\" the law. The law claims to speak in the name of all people, and therefore the people should be able to discern the law's reasoning and the factual foundation it claims to rest on. All this I learned from my parents and other wise people. I brought these understandings and points of view with me when I began studying anthropology in 1982.\n\nAnthropology, historically, has been about western intellectuals investigating the ways of life\u2014the \"cultures\"\u2014of those classified as \"others\" in dominant European social theory: non-western, non-industrial, Indigenous peoples; and, to a lesser extent, marginalized groups within the borders of western nations. One of the central tasks of this traditional anthropology was identified as that of cross-cultural translation. Anthropologists sought to immerse themselves in the lives of the people they studied and, in this way, to achieve an \"insider's\" point of view. The next step in the anthropological enterprise was then to describe and explain\u2014to translate and represent\u2014these \"Native points of view,\" and their different cultural perspectives on the human condition, to western audiences.\n\nContemporary anthropology questions many of the foundations of this academic discipline. Most importantly, classical anthropology is undergoing a thorough re-examination by those \"subjects\" who were constituted as \"objects\" of study by earlier generations of ethnographers. Formerly colonized peoples, members of minority communities in the west, women, and other \"Others\" who were historically written about and analyzed by anthropologists, are turning the microscope around and scrutinizing those who originally examined them. They are reading and critiquing traditional ethnographic representations of themselves; conducting their own research into the cultures of both colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed; producing a critical \"anthropology of anthropology.\" More and more, western and non-western anthropologists are studying their own societies: exploring the cultures they are always already immersed in, re-examining the histories that have produced them, and questioning their own taken-for-granted assumptions about the past, the present, and the future. This process is exciting and profoundly challenging. Errors in fact are being corrected. Alternative explanations of world history are being considered. Diverse visions of possible futures are being contemplated. We now struggle to read the \"great works\" of the European intellectual tradition through the eyes of these \"Others.\" It is now marginalized peoples' analyses of the centres, as well as of the margins, that we must try to grasp.\n\nTraditionally, an anthropologist might be expected to study the cultural beliefs and practices that First Nations draw on to support their appeals for legal recognition of Aboriginal title. I recognize and respect the fact that it is a consequence of persistent Aboriginal resistance that these issues are before the courts at all. Aboriginal litigants perpetually challenge the law, and occasionally jurists acknowledge some legitimacy to their claims. In these ways, First Nations have influenced Canadian law significantly. But I did not undertake this study for the purpose of learning what the evidence and testimony presented in _Delgamuukw v. R._ might tell us about Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en cultures and histories, or to unravel how legal strategies have shaped the representation of such issues in the courtroom. These are interesting questions, of course. But they are not the questions that have guided my inquiry. Rather, I take as given\u2014as \"common sense\"\u2014that the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's fundamental position is valid. That is, I take for granted that regardless of what forms their social structures and cultural beliefs took at the time, they owned the territory in dispute when the British arrived in the eighteenth century, and they have not ceded, sold, lost or surrendered their title or rights to these lands and their resources under the terms of either Aboriginal, British or Canadian law. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and other First Nations in British Columbia, have sought recognition by Canadian courts of these facts in order that provincial and federal governments could be compelled to negotiate a mutually respectful relationship with them. First Nations have sought peaceful co-existence with newcomers who, like my own predecessors, came from many parts of the world\u2014for myriad reasons\u2014to live here, in Canada. I believe this is a just goal, and it is one I share. I take this position to constitute \"good sense.\"\n\nWhat I consider _not_ readily accessible to common sense, and not a reflection of good sense, and therefore in need of explanation and criticism, are the Crown's positions and the evidence and theories relied upon to support them. This book is therefore a project in the anthropology of European colonialism: a study of power and of the powerful. I turn my anthropologist's spyglass on the law, an institution that quintessentially embodies and reproduces Western power. This is the third premise from which I write.\n\nAs an anthropologist, I have tried to make sense of the law on Aboriginal title in British Columbia by placing the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case within the historical and contemporary political context of British and Canadian relations with First Nations, and considering the ways that law reflects and reinforces Euro-Canadian cultural beliefs, practices and diverse interests. I have explored how law shapes relations between people outside the courtroom as well as inside. Contrary to the image law holds of itself as a world unto itself, I understand law as inextricably enmeshed in society.\n\nThe first obligation of any responsible critic is to thoroughly investigate the object of critique, and I have tried to do so. In order to understand the story of _Delgamuukw v. R._ , I read, watched, listened to and discussed commentaries on the case by a wide range of people. I conducted a \"close reading\" of the various texts of this case: expert witness reports; transcripts of the trial; Reasons for Judgment; academic and popular commentaries on the case itself and the issues it raised. By \"close reading,\" I mean studying the texts not only for their literal or \"factual\" content, but also to understand the various ways they communicate meanings directly and subtly, by using language in particular ways; by writing and speaking in rhetorical styles; by deploying metaphor and evoking certain images and emotions; by using grammar, and constructing each text as a whole along specific lines. That is to say, I read these documents as cultural texts, using the tools of anthropological and cultural criticism. And, since particular texts do not make sense outside the broader context in which they are written and read, I have also studied related work in the fields of anthropology, history, law, and northwest coast ethnography.\n\nHowever, Chief Justice Allan McEachern's _Reasons for Judgment_ in _Delgamuukw v. R.,_ was not written as a work of fiction or ethnography. Judicial rulings carry with them a great deal of power and authority, based largely on assumptions that they represent reasonable and coherent conclusions drawn from a basis in empirical fact. I therefore considered it important to try to understand and critique this text on its own terms first. I began by analyzing the judge's ruling within its own context: the law on Aboriginal title in British Columbia. I considered it as a recent link in a long historical chain of Aboriginal title and rights cases that began when the British Empire began, and gave rise to the legal precedents that continue to shape contemporary judgments. My first task, then, was to trace the history of the law that Chief Justice McEachern claimed forced him to arrive at the ruling that he did.\n\nI conducted my critique from three positions, or points of view. First, I tried to step inside the law to understand it. I asked whether the law has followed its own rules and met its own criteria. As an anthropologist, the question that I sought to answer was whether or not the judge's rulings that relied on history and anthropology reflected reliable findings based on reputable research in these fields. Second, I stepped back outside the law, and read these texts from a position informed by a conventional anthropological critique of ethnocentrism that argues that all of humanity's cultures are worthy of equal respect, and should be understood on their own terms. The rules or values of one culture should not be applied to the evaluation of another. From this perspective, the dominant western culture is but one among many, neither universal nor superior. I asked, \"What cultural beliefs and practices did the Crown rely on to make sense of their arguments in _Delgamuukw v. R._?\" Interpreted from this position, the Crown's arguments and the Chief Justice's _Reasons for Judgment_ read like archaic, eurocentric, colonial texts, with a uniquely local, British Columbian flavour. Finally, I read and wrote from a third position, that of a critic of the dominant order. From this position, I argue that a critique of ethnocentrism must necessarily be the beginning, but should not be the conclusion, of a project aimed at re-imagining law and justice, and re-thinking how Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people may live together. From this location on the political margins, I asked questions that address the future, as well as the past: regardless of the _cultural traditions_ these texts emerge from, what are the _cultural prescriptions_ embedded in the Crown's legal position and Chief Justice McEachern's law. Particularly, what visions of nature and society, what models of human relationships, did the Crown's defense of their position reflect, assert and defend? How are their images represented in the world they would create? What is the way of life they are empowered to command an army to defend? What kind of world\/country\/ province will we all, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, live in if desires like his continue to govern?\n\nMy interpretation and analysis therefore emerged from this critical \"ethnographic reading\" of the texts through which the law, and _Delgamuukw v. R._ , has made itself known to the public. I did not observe the trial, and I have not interviewed or consulted with any of the participants. My writing has been a solitary project, not carried out in collaboration with any representatives of any parties to the dispute. I claim to represent no one but myself. I retell the story of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case, from my point of view, as a detailed account of an important moment in our recent history: a snapshot that artificially freezes time and records the instant so that we may return to it and re-view it, see it from different perspectives, read it in different ways, and learn different lessons from it. Many people have engaged in similar studies and arrived at similar\u2014and different\u2014conclusions, and I have learned a great deal from their work. Believing that what people say is inseparable from how they say\u2014or write\u2014it, I have tried to bring some of these other observers and commentators into conversation with each other on the pages of my text. Of course, it is I who have chosen which of their words to select, and directed at what moments they should speak and to whom. In so doing, I have interrupted, interpreted and appropriated their meanings to my own ends. My sources are not responsible for the uses I have made of their words. Believing too that humour is one of the strongest forms of cultural criticism, when particular moments in this story have struck me as funny or ironic, satirical or sardonic, I have presented them as such. Learning to laugh at ourselves and with others must surely be a worthy goal in the pursuit of justice.\n\nAny account of a process like the trial of _Delgamuukw v. R._ enacted over four years, that involved many people presenting complex evidence, debating obscure points of law, contradicting each other's interpretations of history, disputing understandings of esoteric cross-cultural translations, must necessarily be selective and partial. I have tried to provide enough detail and sufficient references that interested readers may take my account as an entry into, rather than the final word on, or an exit from, the many complex issues this story brings up.\n\nThis is not, however, a \"dialogue with texts.\" This is a \"dispute with texts,\" particularly with the texts of the Province of British Columbia's legal arguments in _Delgamuukw v. R._ , and with Chief Justice McEachern's _Reasons for Judgment_. At the same time, this book is not intended to be a polemic expressing an idiosyncratic or unique perspective. I have tried to present a meticulously documented, well-supported, and passionately reasoned, argument. I hope to persuade readers of the soundness of my position, and the weakness of the Crown's; of the injustices of the Crown's actions; and, of the desirability of an alternative vision for the future.\n\nThe story of litigation on Aboriginal title and rights in Canada, and particularly in British Columbia, is at one and the same time as remarkably simple as it is extraordinarily complex, as obtuse as it is simple-minded, and as familiar as it is strange. Truth and lies, fact and fiction, noble intentions and shameful motivations crisscross, undercut, and override each other as they dance across the pages of legal texts and treatises, creating a bewildering maze of claims and counter claims, accusations and denials. But when all is said and done, and many possible interpretations have been explored, the important questions remain: Has truth, by anyone's criteria, been told? Has justice, by anyone's measure, been done? Most importantly: how can justice be achieved in the present and protected in the future?\n\nStories like that of _Delgamuukw v. R._ illustrate how complex, and often contradictory, our feelings about law are. On the one hand, there is widespread cynicism in the public at large about the tenuous relationship between law and justice in Canada, especially in relation to Aboriginal peoples. And, there are hundreds of government reports, and volumes of academic research that support these criticisms. On the other hand, we continue to believe in the _possibility_ that the law will be just. Most importantly, we continue to _demand_ that the law _should_ be just, in both its theories and its practices. We can never cease to insist on this. How could we? Law, after all, is supposed to represent the principles and rules by which we have all agreed to live together in this nation-state, to constitute our particular social and cultural world. To cease trying to hold the law accountable to justice, no less than to condone law answering only to itself, would be to surrender to nihilism, despair and totalitarianism. The consequences of legal rulings are complex and far-reaching. Law's decisions are accompanied by powers of enforcement, including the exclusive right to legitimately use weapons and violence to resolve disputes. None of us can ignore the force of the law: it insists itself upon us in myriad ways every day. When it comes to law, then, critical skepticism, passionate outrage, perpetual hope, sardonic amusement, sheer terror, and utopian dreams of a moral social order are inevitably interwoven in our thinking, feeling, writing and conversation.\n\nMy initial goal was to make sense of the law. My next goal was to critique it. My long term goal is to help make the law sensible, and the society it reflects, just. I hope this book will challenge how you think about Aboriginal title and Canadian law, and how you choose to participate in shaping our collective future.\n\n* * *\n\n. Language is important. Throughout this text I use a variety of terms to refer to the peoples whose ancestors lived on the North American continent before Europeans. Each term has diverse connotations. \"Indigenous\" is the most all-encompassing and is the term of global representation chosen by the United Nations. Some people feel it erases the specificity of particular Nations, and suffers from an imprecise time frame, i.e. some people who others consider \"settlers\" identify themselves as \"indigenous\" because their families have lived in a region for many generations. \"Indian\" began with Christopher Columbus' error: landing in the Caribbean, he believed he had reached his destination of India, and so he called the people he encountered \"Indians.\" \"Indian\" is a term used in many legal documents, and in historical records. Some people find it offensive and feel its continued use reproduces its colonial legacy. \"First Nation\" is a term of recent emergence that is particularly popular in British Columbia. It is the language used in the _Constitution Act 1982_. Some people, particularly Metis representatives, interpret the \"first\" in \"First Nation\" as an implicitly hierarchical term that renders them \"Second Nations.\" \"Aboriginal\" is also a recent term that encompasses First Nations, Metis, Inuit, and Non-Status people. It is also used in legal documents, including the _Constitution Act 1982_. Some people feel that it is too broad and general and blurs important differences and erases diversity. I use all these various terms either because they are appropriate to the topic or time frame being discussed, or to the particular context. In unselfconscious contemporary everyday language, I hear all these terms deployed by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and I use all these terms. I have reproduced this normal usage in the text. I regret if any readers are offended by any of these words.\n\n. In recent years, many Aboriginal nations have adopted spellings of their names that more accurately reflect their own correct pronunciation, replacing those spellings previously developed by Anglophone and Francophone colonial officials to facilitate English or French language and accent versions of Indigenous names. The Gixsan First Nation has adopted a new spelling of their name since this court case. I use the spelling as it appears in documents concerning the case.\n\n. Similarly, the Witsuwit'en have changed the spelling of their name.\n\n. The _Indian Act_ , as it was when I was married in 1975, conferred \"Indian status\" on non-Indian women when they married Indian men holding legal status. Conversely, when Indian women married non-Indian men, or Indian men who did not hold legal status, they and their children were dispossessed of their legal status as Indians. According to Canadian law, my marriage transformed me, in the eyes of the law, from a Canadian citizen of Jewish and Irish descent into a \"Registered Indian,\" member of the Nimpkish Band, and ward of the Crown. (The law was changed in 1985 so that today, marriage can neither confer nor take away legal Indian status.)\n\nI understand that, on the basis of my legal classification, some legal analysts would consider me an \"interested party\" to Aboriginal title and rights litigation. My children would hold entitlements under any treaty or settlement that might result. I do not consider myself an \"interested party\" in the manner of a potential beneficiary, nor do I think this legalistic aspect of my position significantly influences my analysis of the issues at stake. However, I offer this detailed explanation by way of respecting an obligation to \"put all my cards on the table\" when engaging in critique and arguments about morality and \"interests.\"\n\n. The late Antonio Gramsci, an Italian theorist, differentiated between \"common sense\" and \"good sense.\" \"Common sense,\" he said, consists of widely-held assumptions that are seen as \"natural,\" or in some other sense immutable, and taken for granted. There appears to be no need to question or challenge \"common sense\" since its \"facts\" are considered \"as obvious as the nose on my face.\" \"Good sense,\" on the other hand, refers to systematic reflection and conscientious planning based on practical and moral values: the best ideas of an era or populace. I am indebted to Richard Daly for bringing Gramsci's work on this to my attention. See Gramsci 1971.\n**Chapter 2: In Search of Reason**\n\n_It is the law that aboriginal rights exist at the \"pleasure of the Crown,\" and they may be extinguished whenever the intention of the Crown to do so is clear and plain.... The plaintiffs' claims for aboriginal rights are accordingly dismissed._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\n**The Law in its Majesty**\n\nThus spoke Chief Justice Allan McEachern of the British Columbia Supreme Court as he rendered his long-awaited judgment in the most lengthy and costly Aboriginal land title litigation in Canadian history. The \"Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case,\" also commonly referred to as \"the _Delgamuukw case_ ,\" or \" _Delgamuukw v. the Queen_ ,\" had been four years at trial, beginning in Smithers, British Columbia, on May 11, 1987, and concluding in Vancouver, B.C., on March 8, 1991. A total of 318 days of evidence from over 61 witnesses had been heard, additional evidence had been supplied by affidavit, and legal argument had taken up an additional 56 days in court. Verbatim transcripts of testimony now fill 23,503 pages of text, 82 binders of authorities now hold 9,200 pages of exhibits. An estimated 25 million dollars of public funds had been spent.\n\nThe issue before the court can be stated simply: The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had asked for legal recognition of their ownership and jurisdiction over 22,000 square miles of land and resources in the northwest region of the Province of British Columbia, Canada. They based their claim on the fact that they are descendants of people who lived there, in the same territory, since the beginning of time as they conceptualize it. When the Europeans arrived during what _they_ call the eighteenth century, the ancestors of contemporary Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples were already living there. Neither the Gitksan nor the Wet'suwet'en ever entered into treaties with Britain or Canada, the governments representing the interests of the newcomers. Nor was there a war in which their territory was conquered militarily by the new colonial forces. Nor were any rights to land or resources ever sold by Indigenous peoples to any individual settlers, or to the British or Canadian governments. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, therefore, continue to consider themselves the rightful owners and governors of the territory in question. They say they hold \"Aboriginal title and rights\" to this land.\n\nThe Province of British Columbia and the Government of Canada opposed the Gitksan's and the Wet'suwet'en's claims. The Crown asked the court for \"a declaration that the Plaintiffs have no right, title or interest in and to the Claim Area, and the resources thereon, thereunder or thereover.\" Since 1871, when British Columbia joined Canadian Confederation, all successive governments of that province had taken the position that no Aboriginal rights recognizable by \"civilized law\" existed prior to Britain declaring sovereignty over the territory. And even if those rights had existed, the Province of British Columbia's argument continued, the simple act of assertion of sovereignty by a European power over those lands was sufficient to extinguish any pre-existing Aboriginal title and rights. Legally, the Province of B.C. told First Nations, you do not exist. This position provided the rationale for provincial governments' consistent refusals, until 1990, to participate in any discussions or negotiations with federal government and Aboriginal representatives on Aboriginal title and rights issues.\n\nDuring the week preceding the release of Chief Justice McEachern's decision in the _Delgamuukw_ case, the _Vancouver Sun,_ British Columbia's largest circulation daily newspaper, ran a series of articles entitled \"Judgment Day\" in which spokespeople from government, industry, labour and the general public expressed the view that at least a partial court victory for the Aboriginal plaintiffs was anticipated by all concerned. Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Tribal Council representative Herb George told the press that he expected to see \"the last little trace of honour in the Crown\" reflected in the judgment. \"We're not naive,\" George said, \"but we can still dream.\"\n\nThere seemed to be good cause for George's cautious optimism. Between 1987, when the _Delgamuukw v. R._ trial began, and 1991, when it concluded, some significant changes had occurred in the legal and political landscape of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations in British Columbia. In 1989, the First Nations Congress, representing most of the 180 First Nations in B.C., had initiated discussions with representatives of the province's leading forestry, fishing and mining companies. The First Nations leaders' goals were to educate the business sector about the historical and legal bases of Aboriginal title, to calm industry fears about potential threats to economic stability in the event of recognition and settlement of Aboriginal claims, and to begin to build a foundation for direct negotiations between industry and First Nations governments on issues of economic development.\n\nFollowing these conferences, held at the exclusive Whistler Mountain Resort in the traditional territory of the Squamish First Nation, British Columbia Social Credit Premier Bill Vander Zalm appointed a \"native affairs advisory council\" to serve as a consultative committee. The advisory council held meetings with key players throughout the province during the spring and summer to discuss Aboriginal land claims. _Vancouver Sun_ columnist Vaughn\n\nPalmer observed that, \"The thinking in government circles is that the court will probably recognize aboriginal title...that it still exists today.\"\n\nOn May 31, 1990, less than a year before Chief Justice McEachern's judgment in the _Delgamuukw_ case was delivered, the Supreme Court of Canada had overturned earlier decisions of the British Columbia Supreme Court and the B.C. Court of Appeal in the case of _Regina v. Sparrow_. The Supreme Court concluded that certain Aboriginal rights\u2014in this case the fishing rights of the Musqueam First Nation\u2014had existed in British Columbia prior to the arrival of Europeans; had not been extinguished by the simple assertion of British sovereignty during the colonial era; and were now protected by section 35(1) of the _Constitution Act (1987)_ , the supreme law of Canada.\n\nAlthough the Supreme Court of Canada, in their decision in the _Sparrow_ case, upheld the position that, since Britain declared sovereignty, the \"underlying title to all land\" in Canada is vested in the Crown, they ruled that Aboriginal rights could not be _implicitly_ extinguished by the mere declaration that British sovereignty had been asserted. Rather, the Crown would have to _explicitly_ express their \"clear and plain intention\" in order to legally extinguish Aboriginal title to land. The first premise of the Province of British Columbia's position since 1871 had been that no legally-recognizable Aboriginal title existed at the time the British arrived in what is now British Columbia. Therefore, according to the Province of B.C., an _explicit_ expression of intent to extinguish title was neither required nor appropriate: what does not exist, could not be recognized. What could not be recognized, need not be extinguished.\n\nThe Supreme Court of Canada's rejection of the implicit extinguishment argument in the _Sparrow_ case, their reaffirmation of the requirement that the Crown make their intention to extinguish Aboriginal title _explicit_ , and their finding that this had not been done, and hence Aboriginal rights still existed in the province, was a significant victory for B.C. First Nations: the provincial government could now be legally required to acknowledge their existence.\n\nThe _Sparrow_ decision was hailed by many as the judgment that would bring an end to the long\u2014and increasingly contentious\u2014chapter in Canadian legal history in which colonial law, justified by archaic nineteenth-century notions of European superiority and Aboriginal inferiority, had dominated the courts. It was hoped that the _Sparrow_ decision would provide the required legal framework within which a new, more equitable relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada could be developed, a relationship that would reflect contemporary commitments to social justice and equality in a multicultural Canada. Lower courts in British Columbia during 1990-1991 had granted several First Nations' applications for injunctions, halting development on their lands until the Aboriginal title question was settled by the courts.\n\nPublic opinion polls conducted during 1990 and 1991 had consistently shown that the majority of people in British Columbia thought the provincial government should reconsider its historic refusal to discuss land claims with the First Nations and should proceed, finally, to negotiate an agreement with them. Premier Vander Zalm\u2014heeding the courts, public opinion polls, and increasing pressure from corporate representatives seeking government guarantees that British Columbia could indeed boast a \"safe investment climate\"\u2014had allowed that the issue of land rights negotiations with First Nations should be revisited. For the first time in the province's 119-year history, a provincial Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs had been inaugurated in the Fall of 1990.\n\nAfter nearly 100 years of political lobbying for the right to even file such a petition in court, the Nisga'a First Nation\u2014neighbours of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en\u2014had been the first to launch a legal claim for recognition of their Aboriginal title in 1969. On March 7th, 1991, the day before Chief Justice McEachern's ruling in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case was handed down, a landmark tripartite agreement between the Nisga'a Tribal Council and the federal and provincial governments was announced.\n\nNo one had anticipated what did happen on March 8, 1991.\n\nChief Justice Allan McEachern had not been swayed by public opinion polls or newspaper editorials, or by the Supreme Court of Canada's _Sparrow_ decision, or by the copious evidence in support of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claim that he had listened to for four years. In his 400 page _Reasons for Judgment_ , the Chief Justice analyzed the testimony, reviewed the relevant points in law, and then dismissed the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claim. No Aboriginal title or rights had pre-existed European settlement, he ruled; and even if they had, they had been extinguished by the simple fact of Britain asserting sovereignty. Treaties had not been made, nor compensation paid, nor Aboriginal consent acquired. Nor were they required, he ruled.\n\n**Late One Night at the Legion**\n\nLike most everyone else interested in Aboriginal issues, especially in British Columbia, the judgment caught me off guard. The early morning CBC radio news on March 8, 1991, announced that the judgment had been released to the lawyers, who were in a \"lock up\" with the document until noon. I, too, had assumed that the outcome of this case would be relatively positive for the claimants: an historic turning point in the legal struggle for recognition of Aboriginal title and rights. When I turned on the CBC radio midday news it was not with bated breath or apprehension, but rather with curiosity to know the details of the judgment and what the implications were for all parties to this case. To say I was shocked by what I heard on the radio is an understatement.\n\nDuring the years 1988 to 1991, I had been a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and at Simon Fraser University. These were also the years that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case was being heard in the British Columbia Supreme Court. While I was not directly involved in the trial in any way, I had followed developments in this case through media, attended public information sessions, special lectures, support demonstrations, benefit dances and fund-raising performances; and bought raffle tickets. Social movements in general, and Aboriginal politics in particular, form both the central focus of my work, and the personal and social milieu in which I live my everyday life. Therefore, the progress of this high-profile court case had been the subject of countless informal discussions among friends and relatives over the course of its four-year duration.\n\nFor days following the release of Chief Justice McEachern's ruling, the trial and the judgment were being talked about everywhere I went: at home, at the university, at social gatherings. Everyone I encountered had something to say about the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case and the Chief Justice's decision. Most were shocked. Many were outraged. A few were smug. Others were bitter. Some said the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en should never have gone to court to begin with: what can you expect from the white man's courts? Since when could justice be found in law? Others felt betrayed by a legal system they had previously believed to be fundamentally fair. Some people were critical of the lawyers and the way they had conducted the case\u2014some said they had asked for too much and overwhelmed the judge with mountains of data. Others said they had not asked for enough, and that they should have called even more evidence. Some said the _Delgamuukw_ decision was an anomaly and didn't represent the thinking of the judiciary as a whole. Others said the opposite: McEachern had simply used unfashionable words and precedents to express what his colleagues, who had learned to obscure these ideas with more \"politically correct\" language, really thought.\n\nAnthropologists were insulted by the Chief Justice's wholesale rejection of ethnographic evidence. Many were dismayed that anthropologists like Hugh Brody, Richard Daly and Antonia Mills\u2014who had served as expert witnesses\u2014 had been summarily dismissed and reprimanded by the judge for being \"advocates\" whose participant observation research was not \"credible.\" Others were critical of the anthropology presented, and the anthropologists who had testified on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en: Hugh Brody had been too caustic. Richard Daly had been too obtuse. Antonia Mills had been too ethereal. They had presented too seamless a case. Others said they had indulged themselves in idealism and ideology: empiricism should have ruled the day.\n\nMost Aboriginal people I spoke with were less shocked by the judgment than their non-Aboriginal peers. They were disappointed, and deeply hurt by the Chief Justice's words. More than anything, they were angry at what they saw as the judge having insulted the Chiefs and Elders by his charge that their testimony had been \"untrue.\" Some Aboriginal people muttered resentfully about how much money the lawyers and the expert witnesses had made. Some asked why the anthropologists had ever been involved in the first place. Why hadn't the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en stood by their own Chiefs and Elders and refused the need for \"representation and translation\" by white anthropologists?\n\nIn an unprecedented gesture, the government of British Columbia bound Chief Justice McEachern's _Reasons for Judgment_ in book form and distributed it widely throughout the province. Rumour had it that the Chief Justice hoped his text would form the basis of a public school curriculum. Shock turned to incredulity as the volume circulated among scholars and other people knowledgeable about British Columbia history and Aboriginal cultures. The Canadian Anthropology Society, representing 405 scholars, told the press that the judgment \"gratuitously dismisses scientific evidence, is laced with ethnocentric bias and is rooted in the colonial belief that white society is inherently superior.\" University of British Columbia anthropology Professor Robin Ridington added that \"if an Anthropology 100 student wrote anything like that in a paper, not only would you write a lot of red ink over it, you would say 'Look, please come in and talk to me. You have real problems.'\"\n\nWhen I read the _Reasons for Judgment_ , I found the text very familiar. I was immersed at university in the study of critiques of colonialism and western culture, written largely by colonized and formerly colonized people. This work focuses on how European social theories classify and represent non-European peoples as inferior \"Others,\" justifying colonial domination and exploitation by western powers. Within the borders of the west, similar processes of \"othering\" had long legitimated the subordination of women, minorities, gays, lesbians, the poor, the disabled, and political dissidents by dominant classes. Chief Justice McEachern's text read like a caricature of everything I was studying. The rendition the _Reasons for Judgment_ offered of British Columbia's history repeats what can be read in the blunt, unselfconscious language of Indian Agents' reports found in archival records, and in the memoirs of pioneers, missionaries and settlers that form the corpus of popular history in B.C.: what political scientist, Paul Tennant, has called \"the founding myth of White British Columbians.\" These local stories of Aboriginal primitivism, European superiority, and the historical inevitability of colonial domination are repeated throughout the colonized world. One can hear very similar stories in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. They are self-justifying accounts, told by a colonial people whose ongoing doubts and insecurities about the moral legitimacy of their occupation of Indigenous lands require that these stories be told, and retold. Having lived in a small coastal community in British Columbia for many years, I recognized in the Chief Justice's tome what I had long ago nicknamed the \"late one night at the Legion\" version of B.C.'s history.\n\nA month or so after the _Delgamuukw_ judgment was released, I attended a meeting of anthropologists and historians at the University of British Columbia to discuss how we might responsibly respond. We agreed that we would each write an article on a specific aspect of the anthropological and historical evidence that had been presented during the case. These papers would be compiled in a special edition of the journal, _B.C. Studies_. I chose to write a critique of the opinion report, testimony, and cross-examination of the expert witness who had provided anthropological evidence for the Crown, Dr. Sheila Robinson.\n\nI approached this project expecting to find in Dr. Robinson's evidence an interpretation of facts presented within a coherent, logical argument. I anticipated that I would likely disagree with Robinson's analysis, on a professional basis. Debate, after all, we like to think, is the foundation of scholarly integrity. I was shocked to find that her opinion report did not include an up-to-date review and analysis of relevant theoretical or substantive literature. Instead I found oxymoronic argument, and the substitution of theoretical speculations for empirical facts. I also read the reports and testimony of the anthropologists who testified for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. I found issues to debate with Richard Daly, Antonia Mills and Hugh Brody, but the important difference between their submissions and those made on behalf of the Crown was that the former were meritorious, scholarly documents while the latter were not. The stark contrast between the expert opinion reports in anthropology and history submitted on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and those submitted on behalf of the Crown, was alarming in terms of their respective professional credibility. Furthermore, the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's evidence and arguments accorded more obviously with conventional notions of what constitutes facts and logical argument than did the Crown's. Most importantly, the judge's crucial legal findings were based on particular interpretations of history and explanations of cultural differences. Clearly, the Crown's arguments and the testimony of their expert witnesses had appeared the more credible to Chief Justice McEachern. Why? What criteria had the judge used to evaluate the evidence he had heard?\n\nI read more of the transcripts and more of the legal analyses. I found in the texts of the _Delgamuukw v. R._ case an intense debate not only about Aboriginal land rights but also about moral visions, social theories and political strategies. In presenting their cases, the \"Plaintiffs\" and the \"Defendants\" disputed how stories would be told about the past, present and future of British Columbia; and about who could tell them. Above all, they competed for the judge's verdict: whose account would the law declare to be \"the truth\"? Whose story would have an army at its disposal?\n\nI decided to write my doctoral dissertation on the _Delgamuukw_ case. I began with law's history.\n\n* * *\n\n. Glavin, Terry 1991: B3.\n\n. Palmer, Vaughn 1990, quoted in Tennant, P. 1990: 237.\n\n. Previously, the First Nations of the Nass Valley of British Columbia were called \"Nishga.\" Currently, this First Nation spells its name as \"Nisga'a.\"\n\n. For a personal account of one lawyer's experience of this event, see Pinder, Leslie Hall 1991.\n\n. Empiricism is a theory of knowledge usually associated with the natural and physical sciences. Its basic tenets are that all \"factual knowledge\" originates in observation and experience, and can be falsified by observation and experience. \"Empiricism\" is usually understood as being opposed to other theories of knowledge that take greater account of the way social-cultural context and the subjectivity of the researcher and the reader can shape the meanings derived from observation and experience.\n\n. Canadian Press 1991: B3.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. The literature on this subject is huge, multidisciplinary and growing rapidly. Texts that have become classics in the study of European constructions of \"others\" include: Asad (ed.)1973; Clifford and Marcus (eds.) 1986; Deloria 1969; Fabian 1991; Fanon 1963; McCrane 1989; Trinh T. Minh-ha 1989; Said 1978, 1992; Spivak 1988; Todorov 1982; West 1993; Wolf 1983.\n\n. Tennant 1991: 76.\n\n. See Miller (ed.) 1992.\n\n. An oxymoron is defined as \"a combination of contradictory or incongruous words (as _cruel kindness_ ),\" _Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary_ , 814.\n**P ART II**\n\n**T ERRA NULLIUS**\n\n**(U NOCCUPIED, EMPTY LAND)**\n**Chapter 3: Cultures Similar and Different**\n\n_Law is essentially historical, not just in the sense that the life histories of legal systems can be chronicled, but more importantly in the sense that it is characteristic of law to anchor justification to the past. Time is the soil of the lawyer's thinking._\n\n\u2014Philosopher Gerald Postema, 1991, _On the Moral Presence of Our Past._\n\n**Creating Race in the Interests of Empire**\n\n\"The point at which a storyteller chooses to begin,\" Edward Said wrote, \"is the first step in the intentional construction of meaning.\" The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en begin their story\u2014locate their origins as sovereign peoples with title and rights to specific lands\u2014in \"time immemorial,\" when the Creator placed them on specific territories, and charged them with the responsibility of looking after the sentient beings who lived in and from and with these lands. They adopted the legal term, \"time immemorial,\" as a way of representing and translating\u2014communicating\u2014to English language courts their belief that they have been there since the beginning of time.\n\nChief Justice McEachern rejected what he considered the \"non-specific\" nature of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en history, writing in his _Reasons for Judgment_ , \"I am not able to conclude on the evidence that the plaintiffs' ancestors used the territory since 'time immemorial' (the time when the memory of man 'runneth not to the contrary'). 'Time immemorial,' as everyone knows, is a legal expression referring to the year 1189 (the beginning of the reign of Richard II), as specified in the Statute of Westminster, 1275.\"\n\nAnother common starting point for legal historians to begin their rendition of the story of European\/Aboriginal relations in the Americas is the year Europeans call 1492: when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The controversies that followed Columbus' arrival in the Caribbean concerning the moral and political legitimacy of conquest and colonialism culminated in the Conference of Valladolid. In 1550, King Charles V of Spain brought together clerics, lawyers and other scholars in the Spanish city of Valladolid and asked them to address the question of whether Indigenous peoples were part of the same human race, or species, as Europeans; and, depending on the answer to this fundamental question, how they should be treated by European colonial powers. The king asked a philosopher, Juan Gines de Sepulveda, and a Dominican monk, Bartolomeo de Las Casas, to answer the question: \"How can conquests, discoveries and settlements in the king's name be made to accord with justice and reason?\" Both Sepulveda and Las Casas agreed that all human beings, including Indigenous peoples, were of one species. Both also agreed that it was the duty of Europeans to convert all the world's peoples to Christianity, disagreeing only on method and rationale.\n\nSepulveda argued, relying on Aristotle, that some races are inferior to others, and that some people are born to slavery. By this reasoning, Europeans, a superior race, were justified in subjugating Indigenous peoples, an inferior race. Sepulveda used stories of cannibalism as evidence of the alleged inherent inferiority of the Indigenous peoples of South America. The technological achievements and complex social organization of the Aztecs and Incas, then as obviously sophisticated by prevailing European standards as they are universally acknowledged to be now, were absent from Sepulveda's analysis. Las Casas argued, on the other hand, that these \"Indians\" possessed an evolved culture, with social, economic and religious institutions. He claimed that Indigenous peoples were rational beings, fit to be compared to the Greeks and Romans. Las Casas did not argue that Spain should _not_ conquer the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, but rather that its only justification for doing so should be to Christianize them. He was distraught that the cruelty of the conquistadors was inhibiting his mission of conversion.\n\nThe choice of the conference at Valladolid as the origin story of European\/ Indigenous relations in America, has been popularized in Canada by Judge Thomas Berger, a long time supporter of Aboriginal rights, and well-respected for having headed a public inquiry into the potential impacts of a proposed oil and gas pipeline on the Aboriginal peoples of the Canadian north. In his book, _A Long and Terrible Shadow: White Values, Native Rights in the Americas, 1492-_ _1992_ , Berger writes of the deliberations at Valladolid: \"Here was the very debate that I heard centuries later in the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry.\" The \"Berger Inquiry\" broke with the traditional colonial reliance on non-Aboriginal experts that had historically characterized such processes, and encouraged and respected the participation of Aboriginal communities in its proceedings. The inquiry's findings and recommendations supported the Aboriginal peoples' opposition to the pipeline and their aspirations for local control. Berger proposed a ten-year moratorium on resource development to allow time for environmental and social impact studies to be completed, and for First Nations to consolidate their vision of self determination. (As it turned out, the oil and gas companies eventually abandoned their plans to build the pipeline for \"economic reasons\": it became an unprofitable proposition.)\n\nThe appeal of the Valladolid story, for liberal Canadians like Berger, may in part lie in its archetypal legal story form: a triangle consisting of a good learned person (Las Casas); a bad learned person (Sepulveda); and a benevolent sovereign (Charles), pondering a deeply important and complex issue in a quasi-judicial forum. Berger constructs the law's uninterrupted historical narrative from Columbus' encounters in Central and South America to contemporary Canada. This evokes notions of political conflict rooted in racial or cultural differences, often thought to be universal characteristics of all human societies in all historical periods, and thus to be immutable. The dominant image evoked is easily recognizable in contemporary liberal discourses on multiculturalism and identity-politics: white European colonizers, and brown Indigenous colonized.\n\nWhile the impact of Spanish colonization on the Americas is important, it is British imperialism and colonial law that is specifically of interest to this story, a story that differs from Spanish colonial history in some important ways. British imperial law traces its origins to the common law tradition that emerged in the fifth century A.D. when the Anglo-Saxons invaded what is now called England and conquered the indigenous Britons. The Anglo-Saxons went on to absorb immigrant Danes and Gauls, others of whom (having become, over the course of the ensuing five centuries, Normans) in turn conquered the Anglo-Saxons in 1066. The Norman conquest of 1066 brought to Great Britain a centralized state and church, and the arbitrary power of the king. Under the Norman-derived legal regime, the king, or sovereign, who mystically embodies the \"underlying title to all land\" and the implicit consent of all the people to his reign, is said to \"hover over the land.\" The origin of the sovereign's legal title is to be found in this abstract, imaginary vision, made concrete through the exercise of power as the sovereign became the symbolically omnipotent source of law, and his will its practical execution. A feudal regime, sometimes referred to as the \"Norman Yoke,\" was established, against which Anglo-Saxons, Britons, Danes, Gauls and some Normans (now having become English and Scots) waged civil war.\n\nAt the same time as Sepulveda and Las Casas were debating in Valladolid, English jurists were confronting similar problems regarding colonization in Ireland. Their dilemma was not precipitated by the sudden \"discovery\" of seemingly strange and alien peoples. Rather, the problem of justifying expropriations of lands and massacres of native populations that faced British imperial policy-makers was that of _recategorizing_ as radically \"different\" their Irish neighbours who had hitherto been similar and familiar.\n\nThat the Irish were Christian was never doubted by the Normans or their successors, but Christianity in Gaelic Ireland did not fully conform to Roman liturgical practice, and many pre-Christian traditions and customs had been only slightly veneered in these territories by Christianity. On this basis, the Irish were classified by British imperial law as atheists or infidels. Although, unlike \"certain savage tribes,\" the Irish were rarely accused of cannibalism, they were described as \"little better than Cannibals....\" In addition, the Englishtook the Irish practice of transhumance as proof that the Irish were nomads, hence barbarians. The English colonists thus developed a social theory that said the Irish had evolved to a level of cultural development analogous to the stage the ancient Britons existed at before they were civilized by the Romans. The Irish should therefore be made subservient to the colonizing English, (the true inheritors of Roman civilization) so that, through subjugation, they could come to appreciate civility and thus eventually achieve freedom as the former Britons had done. This belief that meting out punishment to subordinated peoples and individuals \"for their own good\" will result in their eventual emancipation, while an enduring one, is belied by the historical record which offers more support for the theory that cruelty breeds brutality.\n\nMy point is straightforward: the boundaries separating categories of people, and, more importantly, the significance of differences between and among them, are, like culture itself, constructed by people\u2014not given by nature or God\u2014and they change over the course of history as contexts and social relations change. Being created by people, these fluid boundaries can also be challenged, changed and recreated by people over time, as indeed, historically, they often have been.\n\nThe story of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations in British Columbia that I am telling here begins with England's sixteenth-century colonization of Ireland, rather than with Columbus' landing in the Caribbean, for a number of reasons. First, there is the obvious historical continuity: the British colonized British Columbia, the Spaniards did not, although they \"discovered\" the territory before the British. Second, the story of the colonization of Ireland tells of recurring hostilities among people of the same \"race\" and \"cultural group.\" Rather than illustrating universal, ahistorical and immutable conflict based in \"natural\" racial or cultural difference, the history of England and Ireland is an example of contests for economic and political domination, and the historical process of \"racialization\" of the \"other\" so fundamental to colonial law and cultures. The image I wish to evoke is easily recognizable in contemporary debates about _critical_ multiculturalism and post-colonial politics: same-culture colonizers, and same-culture colonized.\n\nFinally, the appeal of Berger's choice of Valladolid as the preferred origin story for the history of Aboriginal legal rights in Canada may also be found in its acceptance of the historical inevitability, and hence justification, of European colonial conquest. Its insistence that colonial powers were and are motivated by good intentions and paternalistic\u2014yet humanitarian\u2014concerns for the best interests of the colonized, also reinforces familiar legitimations of colonial dominance.\n\n\"All this was done with the best intentions. We can only ask what would have happened had government's intentions _not_ been good?\" Phrases like this have become a common clich\u00e9 used by the Canadian media to wrap up stories about how another government program, or lack thereof, has been implicated in some tragic chain of events in an Aboriginal community.\n\nAssessing history solely on the basis of the intentions of the powerful, without reference to the consequences for the powerless, is a time-honoured tradition in western thought. Within this framework, the morality of a person's actions can only be judged on the basis of his or her intentions. This is based on the premise that people should not be held responsible for events beyond their control that contribute to their original actions having unintended consequences. At a very basic philosophical level, this is, of course, only fair. We as individuals are the only ones who know what our intentions are in the first place. Other people know our intentions only when we choose to communicate them. Our intentions motivate us to act in particular ways in relation to others, and our actions have consequences for ourselves and for those others. If our intentions, according to our own account, are honourable, but a person who experiences the consequences of our actions suffers, how is this to be resolved? The issue becomes more complex in real life where the questions \"what ought you to know before you act?\" and \"whose intentions will be acted upon and thus enabled to have consequences?\" must also be asked. \"Judgment by intention\" may be reasonable if \"the individual\" is considered as an isolated entity, but it becomes problematic when an individual is understood as a human being who lives in relationships with others in society.\n\nThe legal answer to this question in the liberal tradition is to grant rights to individuals, thereby hoping to ensure that the limit of one individual's rights is formed by the boundary at which another individual's liberty is inhibited. In order for _groups_ or _collectivities_ or _peoples_ to have similar protection within such a regime, they must be recognized in law as having legal rights. The history of Aboriginal\/non-Aboriginal relations in Canada has been one in which courts and governments have repeatedly refused to recognize Aboriginal rights, while continuing to insist that their actions have been, and continue to be, guided by their \"good intentions\" in relation to First Nations. This \"justification by intention\" argument has been repeated by governments for hundreds of years now, despite the fact that the _consequences_ of legally-sanctioned government policies have been, and continue to be, devastating for Aboriginal peoples. The federal government, in particular, has been repeatedly stymied by the unanticipated consequences of their good intentions. An option yet to be tried in the realization of governments' good intentions towards First Nations is the recognition of Aboriginal title to land, and rights to self-government.\n\n**Mutiny and Desertion as Common Sense**\n\n_The initial conditions for theorizing and reflecting on property rights in America are of a European people who arrive on a continent of roughly five hundred established Aboriginal nations and systems of property...and who do not wish to become citizens of the existing Aboriginal nations, but wish to establish their own nations and systems of property in accordance with their European institutions and traditions._\n\n\u2014Philosopher James Tully, 1993, _An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts_.\n\nBefore the arrival of Europeans, approximately 500 Aboriginal nations existed in North America. These nations were diverse in modes of living, language, religion, social organization and relationships to land and resources. Therefore, the first rational option available to early European explorers and settlers was to behave as guests or immigrants, to recognize the sovereignty of already existing Indigenous nations, to live by their laws and to seek acceptance by their people.\n\nBut many deeply ingrained assumptions and widely held beliefs limit and constrain the possibility of contemporary people immersed in the dominant western culture imagining this as a practical or viable choice. European theories arising from psychoanalytic traditions have argued that fear and hostility are instinctive human responses to encounters with cultural \"others.\" However, the weight of contemporary knowledge belies the proposition that such a reaction is either universal or natural. Oral historians and linguists have investigated the diverse ways in which non-Europeans have identified people other than themselves, including Europeans, at first contact. They found a variety of impressions and responses varying from adoration to repulsion, fear to amusement, hospitality to hostility and curiosity to indifference. Europeans have been represented in Indigenous thought by analogies as diverse as Gods, Devils, clowns and monkeys.\n\nEuropean images of Indigenous peoples have varied across time and space as well. Early visitors to \"new\" worlds, like explorers and traders, frequently expressed both interest in and admiration for the peoples they met on their travels. Later visitors wishing to claim these lands as their own, such as colonial governors and settlers, portrayed Indigenous peoples as wild savages. Most influential in western thinking, however, have been various theories about social and cultural evolution that postulate a hierarchical series of stages through which it is claimed all human societies must proceed. \"Primitive\" societies, in which people live from hunting, fishing and gathering, represent the \"first stage\" in this scheme; while \"civilized\" industrial societies exemplify the \"highest stage\" of human development. In the field of jurisprudence, Sir Henry S. Maine's 1861 volume, _Ancient Law_ , sets out a conjectural history of the evolution of law from \"primitive custom\" that \"mingled up religious, civil, and merely moral ordinances without any regard to differences in their essential character;\" to \"civilized law,\" which \"severs law from morality, and religion from law.\" The purported independence of law from the social conditions of its emergence, and law's professed autonomy from the society in which it is practiced, were evidence, for Maine, that western law \"belongs very distinctly to the later stages of mental progress.\"\n\nAnother common idea that arises from the same social evolutionary premises is the analogy drawn between the stages of individual psychological development hypothesized by western developmental psychology, and the social organization of non-western societies. In this framework, adults are to children as Europeans are to Aboriginals. Within historical analyses, contemporary Indigenous societies, imagined as being \"frozen\" at \"stages of development\" believed to be \"antecedent\" to the present, are seen as resembling historical European ones. Dutch anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls this notion that \"they\" are now, as \"we\" were then, a \"denial of coevalness\" that he identifies as the most enduring obstacle to achieving mutually respectful dialogue between Europeans and \"others.\" Fabian uses the term \"coeval\" to describe how colonized and colonizer share both geographic space (land); and temporal space (time). Social inequality between peoples of different cultures, Fabian argues, is shaped by the historically-specific political and economic relationships between them. It does not emerge because they live at different hypothesized stages of evolutionary development. Power, not time, separates people of different cultures.\n\nThese social evolutionary premises support the common belief that, during the eighteenth century, when they came into substantial and sustained contact with each other, Europeans and members of British Columbia First Nations were so radically different from each other in terms of material living conditions, social organization, political structures, religion, intellectual development and individual freedom, that for British settlers to have integrated into the Aboriginal societies would have necessitated them stepping \"backwards,\" both in historical time and in human psychological development. These beliefs are buttressed by images in paintings like those that decorate the Rotunda in the British Columbia Parliament buildings: luxuriously dressed and elaborately wigged British ship's captains benevolently bestowing gifts on scantily-clad and bewildered-looking Aboriginals.\n\nBut, consider what we know of the _real_ conditions of life for the majority of people in eighteenth-century Britain: feudalism\u2014dominated by the nobility, and the clergy living off the avails of peasant labour through tithing and maintaining power by force and threats of eternal spiritual damnation\u2014was being replaced by industrial capitalism as the real source of power in the nation state. Peasants, driven from the land, began to flock to the newly-emerging urban centres in search of subsistence from industry, rather than from hunting, gathering and agriculture. Accounts of factory conditions during early industrialization, and of the everyday life of ordinary citizens in cities like London, Manchester and Birmingham describe desperate urban poverty, squalor, alcoholism, prostitution and deprivation. It would be at least two centuries before women would be recognized as persons in British, and later Canadian, law, and we have yet to achieve mass literacy.\n\nCompare this to what we now know of life during the same historical epoch among, for example, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples. Their eighteenth-century societies were characterized by a hierarchical social structure dominated by chiefs and shamans; divisions of labour based in clan, gender and generation; an economy dependent on the accumulation and unequal redistribution of wealth derived from abundant natural resources among different categories of persons; spiritual beliefs linking ancestors, the living and the land that prescribed reciprocal obligations; social life, including marriage, divorce and inheritance controlled by elders. An oral, rather than written, tradition of recording history and administering law prevailed. That European and Indigenous cultures differed significantly is obvious. But was one \"more advanced\" or \"less developed\" than the other? This is not at all obvious. Answers are complicated first by the problem of criteria. As we know, technological complexity is not necessarily correlated with spiritual satisfaction or emotional well-being. Second, different categories of persons in both societies would likely evaluate their own cultures differently, depending on their position within it. Establishing universal criteria upon which to base such evaluations is an extraordinarily complex process, if it is to represent any authentic consensus. And, the question may be asked if universal criteria of what constitutes a \"good society\" are possible, or desirable.\n\nWhat challenges the vision of unbridgeable cultural difference that has been codified in western law and in the popular imagination most fundamentally, however, are the actions of ordinary individuals in the everyday life of early colonial societies throughout history and around the world. Soldiers and sailors, who were often young unemployed men, were either pressed into service on trading and naval ships involuntarily (\"shanghaied\"), or signed on out of desperation in the absence of alternatives. Conditions at sea and in the armies were brutal, and troops frequently deserted their masters and escaped to live with the Aboriginal people they encountered on their voyages. Mutinies were common. Historical accounts, and popular culture, often ignore the fact that, for Britain and other colonial powers, there were two problematic populations that had to be managed and controlled in order for imperial designs to be realized: Indigenous peoples, and colonial troops and settlers. Most telling, perhaps, are the histories of fragments of non-European populations, like Hawaiians, and former African slaves who were fleeing the United States of America. Members of these groups, having no access to the protection of imperial power, frequently integrated into the Aboriginal societies whose acceptance their lives depended upon.\n\nThe belief reflected in law that Europeans arrived to lands without organized societies or laws is false. Legal scholar Brian Slattery has stated this flatly: \"All national myths involve a certain amount of distortion,\" Slattery writes, \"but some at least have the virtue of broad historical accuracy, roughly depicting the major forces at work. The myth that underlies much legal thinking about the history of Canada lacks that redeeming feature.\"\n\nTo answer the question of why the option of recognizing the sovereignty of already existing Aboriginal nations, behaving as guests, and attempting to live by Aboriginal laws does not appear to have been taken up by early European jurists and settlers, we have to look to British and Euro-Canadian law and culture, rather than to Aboriginal beliefs and practices.\n\n* * *\n\n. Said 1975: 1.\n\n. McEachern, Reasons 1991: 82. There are, however, debates about this date. Anthropologist Andrea Laforet commented: \"Although McEachern sees this as a fixed date, receding relentlessly into the past, there is an alternative interpretation, i.e. that in 1275 the British defined 86 years as the measure of a very long time\" (Laforet 1993:2). Lawyer William Henderson offers another correction, writing \"...1189 is the date of the accession of Richard I (the 'Lionheart')\" (Henderson, William B. 1991: 14 ftnt:45).\n\n. Hill 1958.\n\n. Canny 1973: 583, writes: \"The questions that we must pose are how, at the mid-sixteenth century, the Irish, a people with whom the English had always had some familiarity, came to be regarded as uncivilized, and what justifications were used for indiscriminate slaying and expropriation?\"\n\n. Ibid.,580.\n\n. \"Transhumance\" refers to the practice of owners and\/or herders moving livestock on a seasonal basis between mountains and lowland pastures. It is contrasted to agricultural settlement where pasture lands remained fixed in one location.\n\n. Historically, when British settlers, first in Ireland, then in the American colonies, and later in British Columbia, looked to history and law for moral and political legitimization in their struggles for independence from the British Crown, they constructed a rhetoric recalling a \"Golden Age\" of \"natural law\" that, their story went, existed prior to the Norman invasion of Britain. See Andrews, Canny, Hair (eds.) 1973; and Knafla 1986(b). This local, or common, law has come to be known by the phrase \"the fundamental laws of all Englishmen,\" which Robert Williams describes as \"the opinion that the Anglo-Saxons of England lived as free and equal citizens under a form of representative government that was inspired by divine principles of natural law and the common rights of all individuals\" (Williams, R. A. 1990:253).\n\n. \"Racialization\" refers to the ideological process whereby biological, genetic, or phenotypical characteristics are employed to classify categories of people. The most common example of the historically and socially constructed nature of racial categories is illustrated by the varying ways Jews have been classified throughout European history, where they have sometimes and in some places been classified as a distinct \"race\" of people, and at other times and in other places, not.\n\n. For an interesting examination of the process of racialization see Ignatiev, Noel 1995. The book examines the role played by identification with the dominant Caucasians and collusion in the oppression of Aboriginal and African-Americans in the historical ascendancy of Irish immigrants in the United States of America.\n\n. The notion that the morality of a person's actions can only be evaluated on the basis of their intentions is a central tenet of Kantian idealist philosophy. This privileges the subject's articulated interpretations and intentions, as compared to the interpretations and consequences experienced by others as a result of the subject's actions. This formulation assumes that individuals and their intentions and actions are not always already embedded in relationships, but can be decontextualized and considered independently. See Miles 1989 for a fuller discussion of \"judging by intentions\" in contexts of racial domination and subordination.\n\n. See Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer (eds.) 1994; Lips 1966; Wickwire 1994.\n\n. Maine (1861)1970: 15.\n\n. Fabian 1983.\n\n. For detailed discussions about mutinies in the early American colonies and the South Pacific, respectively, see Andrews et al (eds.)1973; and Obeysekere 1992.\n\n. See Koppel 1995.\n\n. See Alexander and Glaze 1996; Hudson 1997.\n\n. Slattery 1985: 114.\n**Chapter 4: Beginning at the Beginning**\n\n_Aboriginal peoples, of course, did not go around talking about their rights; mostly, they spoke in a discourse of responsibilities and respect. But that discourse was circulated among themselves. When others came and established\u2014or forced\u2014dominance, it became relevant to speak of rights as a way of negotiating relations._\n\n\u2014Historian Peter Kulchyski, 1994, _Unjust Relations: Aboriginal Rights in Canadian Courts_.\n\n_Regardless of how the inhabitants themselves perceived their connections with the land, in every case a physical and economic relationship necessarily existed. Quite simply, when the English arrived, these people were already there, using lands in accordance with their own needs and their own ways of life, as people everywhere do._\n\n\u2014Legal scholar Kent McNeil, 1989, _Common Law Aboriginal Title_.\n\n**Aboriginal Peoples Were Here**\n\nWhen Britain became engaged in the colonization of the Americas, British legal rules were already in place that addressed several major questions which arose whenever British settlers established themselves in another territory. The \"not-Christian enough\" rationale, developed to cope with the Irish situation, became codified in law in _Calvin's Case_ in 1608, when Britain's Chief Justice Coke articulated what has become known as the infidel rule: \"if a Christian King should conquer a kingdom of an infidel, and bring them under his subjection, there ipso facto the laws of the infidels are abrogated, for that they be not only against Christianity, but against the law of God and of nature.\"\n\nA memorandum of the Privy Council of Great Britain in 1722 consolidated imperial law by setting out rules for establishing British sovereignty in two possible situations. The first option, alternatively referred to as the doctrine of discovery, or the doctrine of occupation, or the doctrine of settlement, was to be applied in circumstances where the land discovered was _terra nullius_ \u2014 uninhabited by human beings. The second option, the doctrine of conquest, was to be applied where Indigenous populations were encountered.\n\nIn the case of _terra nullius_ , Britain simply proclaimed sovereignty by virtue of discovery and British law became, automatically, the law of the land. Where Indigenous populations were found inhabiting the desired land, the law required that British sovereignty had first to be won by military conquest, or achieved through the negotiation of treaties, before colonial law could be superimposed.\n\nOf course, Britain never had colonized and never would colonize an uninhabited land. Therefore, the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement based in the notion of _terra nullius_ was never concretely applied \"on the ground.\" Rather, already inhabited nations were simply legally _deemed to be uninhabited_ if the people were not Christian, not agricultural, not commercial, not \"sufficiently evolved\" or simply in the way. In British Columbia, the doctrine of _terra nullius_ has historically legitimized the colonial government's failure to enter into treaties with First Nations. The application of the doctrine of conquest to First Nations in British Columbia, which would have required recognition of the fact of their prior occupation, and their status as human beings, _was available within the confines of British imperial law_ but was rejected by colonial governments in British Columbia. When Aboriginal people say today that they have had to go to court to prove they exist, they are speaking not just poetically, but also _literally_.\n\n**Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave When First We Practice to Deceive...**\n\n_Ordinarily, we think of language as describing a fact or a state of affairs...but a special capacity which is particularly inherent in the law makes things true simply by saying them.... This power is of course the attribute of judges and judicial decisions, among others. The texts of the law are thus quintessentially texts which produce their own effects._\n\n\u2014Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, 1987, _The Force of Law: Towards a Sociology of the Juridical Field_.\n\nThe early history of British imperialism and its legal expressions constitute the beginning\u2014\"the first step in the intentional construction of meaning\"\u2014of the story which law itself tells about British and Canadian relations with First Nations in British Columbia. In law's imagination, a fundamental inequality was evident and established at the first moment of contact. This hierarchical relationship forms the cornerstone of the legal relations between Aboriginal peoples and Canadian governments, and is at the heart of each and every case of land rights litigation. It constitutes the foundational principles upon which the architecture of the Canadian state is built: the ultimate power of the British Crown to assert its will through simply _declaring_ its sovereignty over foreign lands and peoples, supported, if necessary, by armed force; the fundamental relationship of Euro-Canadian domination and Aboriginal subordination; and, the protection and advancement of the interests of the wealthy and the powerful classes of colonial society.\n\nIn these first moments in the story law tells us\u2014in its assertion of _terra nullius_ \u2014we see the central role played by abstraction and theory in western law and culture: the world is conceived, _and acted upon_ , as if reality can simply be conjured up in whatever form suits the desire of the powerful at the moment. Within this ideology, human beings can be considered, legally, not to exist, and can be treated accordingly. At this most fundamental, common sense level, a study of British and Canadian law in relation to Aboriginal title and rights therefore begins not \"on the ground,\" in concrete observations about different peoples' diverse ways of life, but rather \"in the air,\" in abstract, imagined theory. Hovering, like the sovereign, who embodies this abstraction, over the land. In the practices legitimized by this initiatory unleashing of the \"will to power\" we can see the antiquity of what continues to be a fundamental contradiction, paradox, or deceit in British and Canadian culture: an enduring abstract philosophical commitment to humanism\u2014defined at the most elementary level as the fundamental equality of all human beings\u2014co-exists with an enduring concrete material practice of inequality, and the domination of one group of people by another. It is within this space between the ideal and the real that ideologies of justification are constructed in law, government, imagination, and popular culture. This is the space wherein lies are legitimized and truths silenced. In the histories of colonial laws we can see both the mendacity and the crudeness of the original lie of European supremacy, and the shockingly unsophisticated nature of the edifice built upon it.\n\nThis same space between theory and practice, between avowed principles and lived experience, between the letter and the practice of the law, is one of the sites where Aboriginal peoples historically and contemporarily mount their resistance struggles. First Nations repeatedly expose both the failure of colonial law to obey itself in relation to Aboriginal peoples, and the presence of systemic racial and cultural bias in the justice system. When government policies and practices that systematically discriminate are juxtaposed with the Canadian state's formal commitment to democratic equality, hypocrisy is revealed. In these ways, Aboriginal peoples strike repeated blows to the heart of Canada's liberal self-image and international personality.\n\nSo begins the long dance we call Aboriginal\/nonAboriginal relations in Canada: a tango of domination and subordination, of resistance and repression, of compromise and intransigence, of accommodation and denial, of life and death.\n\n**Eclecticism**\n\n_The English, in fact, were eclectic in their choice of aims and methods; at one time or another they tried almost everything.... Late-comers to the New World, they had an abundance of precedents from which to choose. No other colonial empire employed so wide a range of legal devices in establishing settlements, or allowed so many diverse forms of social, religious, and economic organization._\n\n_Many factors contributed to this diversity: a habit of eclectic borrowing; differences in time, place, and circumstance; differences in personality and purpose; and the absence of sustained interest and continuous effective control by the central government._\n\n\u2014Historian K. R. Andrews, 1973, in _The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480-1650_.\n\nIn Canada, France preceded England in settlement, and entered into treaties with the Micmac, Maliseets, Montagnaix-Naskapi, Huron and Abenaki to secure them as allies against both the Iroquois and the English. Throughout the seventeenth century, numerous agreements were entered into between and among Aboriginal peoples and the French and English. Many of these treaties were verbal agreements, solemnized through assembly and gift exchange, and symbolized by, for example, wampum belts. Other treaties were written in French, and later, English, by colonial representatives, and signed by themselves and by Aboriginal representatives.\n\nBefore the arrival of Europeans, different Aboriginal Nations had political and economic agreements with each other regarding trade and commerce, war and peace. These initially served as models for the treaties they entered into with Europeans. An important characteristic of early Indian-European treaty-making was that it conformed to Aboriginal political practices more than to European ones, reflecting the real balance of power that existed when Aboriginal peoples formed both the vast majority of the population, and possessed the necessary knowledge and skills to live in the North American environment. Current legal and political conflicts revolve around issues of competing interpretations of the intentions of the original treaty-makers, the obligations of governments that arise out of the treaties, and whether these obligations have been honoured or not.\n\nIn some cases, Aboriginal peoples, relying primarily on oral histories, argue that their ancestors entered into \"peace and friendship\" agreements with Europeans that allowed the newcomers certain rights to travel and harvest resources. These treaties, they say, were never understood to be final surrenders of lands, rights or political sovereignty. Rather, they were agreements that would be renegotiated as needed to respond to changing conditions, and renewed regularly through deliberations and ceremonies like the ones from which they had originally emerged.\n\nAgainst this, the Crown consistently argues that treaties should only be considered within the context of British law, without regard for Aboriginal legal practices at the time the treaties were made. It claims that the treaties are permanent and binding legal land cessions that also yield political sovereignty; and that the money paid to Indians constituted a trade of money for land, not lease or rental fees, or a toll, or a ceremonial exchange of gifts.\n\nA significant challenge to the Crown's position also emerges from within British and Canadian law and centres on debates about the nature of informed consent. Contractual agreements like treaties are only valid if both parties were fully aware of the terms and the consequences of the contract they entered into. In some cases, Aboriginal representatives are asking courts to consider whether or not Crown representatives made their interpretation of the meaning of treaties clear, verbally, to the Aboriginal peoples they were negotiating with. If not, and if the Aboriginal signatories to the treaties were not English speakers, readers, or writers, what is the legality of those treaties signed with an \"X\" scrawled next to an anglicized Aboriginal name printed by the governments' treaty negotiators?\n\n**Imperialist Competitions in Terra Nullius**\n\n_Englishman, although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us. We are not your slaves. These lakes, these woods and mountains, were left to us by our ancestors...they are our inheritance; and we will part with them to none. Your nation supposes that we, like the white people, cannot live without bread, and pork and beef! But, you ought to know, that He, the Great Spirit and Master of Life, has provided food for us, in these spacious lakes, and on these woody mountains._\n\n\u2014Chippewa leader Minivavana, to an English trader, at Michilimackinac, Fall 1761.\n\nBy the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France ceded control over the Canadian Maritime regions to England, while retaining Cape Breton Island, Ile St. Jean and miscellaneous islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1759 the British captured Quebec after seven years of war, and the subsequent Peace of Paris, signed in 1760, temporarily sorted out disputes between France, England and Spain. France ceded all its remaining territories in Canada and its territories east of the Mississippi River. Spain ceded Florida to Britain, but retained its territories west of the Mississippi captured from France in 1759. As conflicts between colonial powers intensified, a pattern developed that would continue into the present: European powers, and later federal and provincial governments, engaged in disputes with each other over lands and resources, that excluded Aboriginal peoples. As if they didn't exist.\n\n**Imperialist Nostalgia** **in Terra Nullius**\n\n_\"In the beginning all the world was America.\"_\n\n\u2014Political philosopher John Locke, 1672.\n\nWhile the Treaty of Utrecht and the Peace of Paris were being negotiated and signed, eighteenth-century British society was undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization. Members of the new middle and professional classes became concerned about the human costs of this process, represented by the plight of former peasants who increasingly formed impoverished rural and urban populations. Europeans increasingly looked to science for guidance in social policy at home, and for rationalizations of colonial policies abroad. Various treatises emerged that claimed to explain the whole history of all humankind in systematic and coherent ways, and that all began with theories about human origins. Although available information about Aboriginal ways of life was principally limited to explorers' and traders' idiosyncratic and unsystematic records, the authors of the \"grand theories\" of Enlightenment Europe usually began with an evocation of so-called \"primitive life in the New World,\" meant to illustrate \"raw human nature\" and \"original human society.\" For romantics like Jean Jacques Rousseau, the \"state of nature\" was to be found in a simple Garden of Eden, and Indigenous peoples in America, imagined as \"noble savages,\" provided Europeans, steeped in the popular \"common sense\" of evolutionism, with appealing fantasies of their own primitive origins.\n\nAt the opposite extreme, for philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, the \"state of nature\" was an instinct-driven war of all against all. The establishment of society, and collective survival, depended upon the imposition of a sovereign's power and government to contain and control an essentially competitive and aggressive \"human nature.\" The Hobbesian \"state of nature\" that he, too, claimed was being lived in eighteenth century Indigenous societies in the Americas, was one of constant warfare, an absence of law or government, and a life that was \"nasty, brutish and short.\" Whatever the western rendition of \"primitive life,\" Aboriginal peoples occupied one or another of these \"savage slots\" in the European imagination: noble child of harmonious nature, or dangerous child of animal instinct. In whichever rendition, Aboriginal peoples were used as a _tabula rasa_ upon which Europeans could project whatever theoretical or cultural fashion seized the fantasy of the day. In both renditions, the reality of the ways of life, lived experiences and self representations of Aboriginal peoples are sacrificed to the European imagination. These \"grand theories\" competed with each other for acceptance amongst professional and popular audiences.\n\n**Enough and As Good**\n\nJohn Locke is usually identified as the most significant political theorist of this imperial era in Britain. Locke gathered together arguments circulating during the early seventeenth century and set them out in theories that would serve many of the later legal and political justifications of European seizure of property in North America. Locke, in the fashion of the times, argued that Aboriginal peoples lived in a pre-political state of nature representative of the first stage in universal human evolutionary development. Important characteristics of this early developmental phase included a hunting and gathering economy with no perception of established systems of property or government. Europe correspondingly represented the most advanced stage of evolutionary development. This was proven by the practice of agriculture; the existence of a legally codified system of property with written laws; a bureaucratic government; and a capitalist economy in which all exchanges of commodities in the market place between people are conducted through the common medium of money, the value of which is ultimately guaranteed by the state. The sovereign's image stamped on coinage symbolically represents the presence of the hovering sovereign mediating every monetary exchange between citizens.\n\nLocke went on to theorize that Aboriginal peoples therefore had property rights only \"in the products of their labour: the fruit they gather, the deer they catch and the corn they pick.\" In this they are governed by a \"natural law,\" Locke mused, that says each individual may appropriate what nature offers up without consultation with, or consent by, anyone else \"as long as there is enough and as good left in common for others.\" Locke reasoned that Europeans would increase the productivity of the land through agriculture and were therefore justified in appropriating Aboriginal lands without consent. Since this process was governed by the \"natural law\" of evolutionary development, if Aboriginal peoples inhibited European settlement, they would be in violation of natural law and could justifiably be eliminated. Philosopher James Tully concludes that, if Locke had recognized Aboriginal forms of property, and Aboriginal peoples as equal to Europeans, then \"settlement in America would have been illegitimate by his own criteria of 'enough and as good,' and consent would have been required.\"\n\n**Nation to Nation. Words to Paper.**\n\n_And whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to Our Interest and the Security of Our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians, with whom We are connected, and who live under Our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to, or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds._\n\n\u2014\"The Indian Provisions,\" _Royal Proclamation of 1763_.\n\nThe prevailing conditions in eastern Canada during the early 1760s were very complex, and formed the historical context in which the Royal Proclamation of 1763\u2014a document that continues to be the subject of legal and political debates today\u2014was issued. The British were faced with a number of problems. Their relationship with Indian nations who had been allies of the French was precarious. During the Seven Years War between Britain and France there had been active competition for Indian allies, and British army commanders in the field had been generous in their purchases of furs and exchanges of ammunition. After the war, London cut back these funds considerably and field commanders found themselves unable to honour commitments they had previously made. Entrepreneurial settlers and fur traders were making independent incursions on Indian lands and resources, impeding the development of the Crown monopoly. On the international front, Britain's hegemony in North America was still threatened by the Russians from the north, and the Spanish from the southwest. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 attempted to address all of these issues.\n\nCompeting interpretations of the historical, legal and political implications of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 have occupied a central place in Aboriginal title and rights discourse and litigation over the past two centuries. A key debate surrounds the question of whether or not the Royal Proclamation should be interpreted as having _recognized_ already existing Aboriginal rights, or as having created these rights. The former, which has since come to be known as the \"inherent rights\" position, is based on the assumption that Aboriginal rights today flow continuously from the sovereignty of nations that pre-existed European colonization. The latter\u2014the \"delegated rights\" position\u2014argues that, in law, no rights can exist except those created by the will of the sovereign. Hence, contemporary Aboriginal rights could only be those that a sovereign, or a court, or a parliament chooses to assign. Such rights would always be based in the desires of these bodies, and not in Indigenous history. And what the sovereign creates, the sovereign can also destroy or dismiss, at his pleasure.\n\nAnalysts agree, however, on some points. The Royal Proclamation differentiated Indian title to land in North America from non-Indian title in five significant ways. First, it reflected the fact that, in 1763, the Crown understood that it must at least formally recognize the legitimacy of, and negotiate on equal political grounds with, \"Indian _Nations_.\" The Royal Proclamation is guided by the doctrine of conquest set out in the Memorandum of the Privy Council in 1722.\n\nSecond, under the Proclamation, Indian title is defined as being collectively or communally, not individually, held. Furthermore, this title is limited to _use rights_ , like hunting and fishing, that are comparable to perpetual leases rather than to ownership. The uses in question must be only those practiced before European arrival. The Royal Proclamation therefore acknowledges First Nations as having some form of interest in their lands and resources. Whether, by legal interpretations, or cultural assumptions, this \"Indian title\" is of equal value to \"Crown title,\" or is some less valued form of property right that constitutes \"a burden\" on the Crown's title, is a subject of ongoing controversy. Third, the Proclamation dictates that Indian title can be only be transferred to the Crown. A number of debates have arisen concerning both the intent and the consequences of this clause. Many historians have argued that the insertion of this clause was primarily motivated by a humanitarian, paternalistic concern to protect Indians from unscrupulous frontier land speculators. Others argue that this clause reflects a power struggle between the Crown as state, and corporate and private interests, for monopoly over lands and resources. Still others focus on competition between international imperial interests and those of the emerging local, colonial governments.\n\nFourth, the Proclamation identifies Indians as \"Nations or Tribes\" and guarantees Indians the _protection_ of the Crown. This would later come to be expressed as a \"fiduciary duty.\" Ongoing debates involve whether or not this fiduciary duty and the obligations it entails should be interpreted as resulting from a negotiated, trust-like agreement between equal parties, or as reflecting a relationship of dependency analogous to the parent\/child relationship which is also classified, in law, as a \"fiduciary duty.\"\n\nFifth, the Royal Proclamation requires that Indigenous land rights can only be surrendered at a public assembly at which Indians give their consent. This issue comes up particularly in treaty litigation where some Aboriginal claimants argue that, whatever negotiations and agreements are claimed by the Crown to have been reached with their ancestors, the representatives who signed the treaties had not been mandated to do so by their constituencies, and there was insufficient knowledge of and\/or participation by the required majority of the Indigenous land holders to render the treaty legal.\n\nIn these interpretations, the possibility that Aboriginal peoples may not have wanted to sell, cede or by treaty give sovereignty or lands to anyone is not provided for in the written words of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Nor is the possibility entertained that Aboriginal sovereignty could remain dominant, or could co-exist with Crown sovereignty.\n\nAnother significant debate about the Royal Proclamation of 1763 centres on the degree to which both British and Aboriginal intentions and understandings should inform contemporary interpretations. United States Native American legal scholar Robert Williams Jr. argues that the proclamation's \"two goals\u2014facilitating the profitable Indian trade and protecting Indian lands to prevent costly hostilities\u2014were viewed as complementary halves of a self-serving colonial policy put forward by mercantilist interests and their advocates in the British Ministry at Whitehall in the 1760s.\" \"Its discourse,\" Williams continues, \"was one of interest and expediency as articulated by armchair empire builders in the Old World, who viewed the honoring of promises made to savages in the New World as the cheapest, most 'expedient' means of containing both frontier defense costs and inland expansion by British American colonists.\"\n\nCanadian First Nations legal scholar, John Borrows, reiterates Williams' points about British intentions, but argues that interpretations of the Royal Proclamation limited to the words written in the document alone do not take into account the negotiations, gift-exchanges and other events that took place surrounding the production of the written text and recorded in First Nations oral traditions that reveal _their_ intentions and interpretations. Ignoring the oral history of the Royal Proclamation, Borrows charges, \"privileges one culture's practice over another.\" He goes on to argue that his inter-cultural interpretation of the Royal Proclamation suggests that \"The Proclamation uncomfortably straddled the contradictory aspirations of the Crown and First Nations when its wording recognized Aboriginal rights to land by outlining a policy that was designed to extinguish these rights.... The different objectives that First Nations and the Crown had in the formulation of the principles surrounding the Proclamation is the reason for the different visions embedded within its text. Britain was attempting to secure territory and jurisdiction through the Proclamation, while First Nations were concerned with preserving their lands and sovereignty.\"\n\n* * *\n\n. Calvin's Case 1608 cited in Walters 1993: 360.\n\n. For a thorough, and very readable, account of the application of _terra nullius_ in Canada, see Richardson 1993.\n\n. For a comprehensive analysis of this argument see Asch and Macklem 1991. The authors conclude: \"We believe it abhorrent that Canada was constituted in part by reliance on a belief in the inequality of peoples and that such a belief continues to inform political and legal practice in 1991\" (510).\n\n. For a very thorough articulation of this argument see Derrida 1992. See also Hunt 1993; and Sayer 1987.\n\n. Aboriginal legal scholar James Youngblood Henderson, for example, explains that \"Canadian law is not impersonal but racially biased; its legitimacy is threatened if not destroyed by its denial of order and freedom to Aboriginal people...\" Henderson and Henderson 1985: 186.\n\n. See, for example, Hamilton and Sinclair (eds.) 1991; and Turpel 1991(c).\n\n. See Dyck 1991.\n\n. See Venne 1997; and Chamberlin 1997.\n\n. Dickason 1992.\n\n. Henry 1809 quoted in Jones 1982; and Slattery 1985: 119.\n\n. The phrase, \"Imperialist Nostalgia,\" is taken from Rosaldo 1989, who defines it as the yearning for that which one has destroyed.\n\n. Laslett (ed.) 1964.\n\n. Francis 1992; and Trouhillot 1991.\n\n. Tully 1993(b).\n\n. Tully 1993(c): 10.\n\n. There have been a number of published versions of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and wording varies in different publications. The quotation cited here is taken from Chief Justice Allan McEachern's 1991 _Reasons for Judgment_ , in _Delgamuukw v. R._ , 313.\n\n. For a survey of debates about both the historical context in which the Royal Proclamation was negotiated and the legal consequences for Canadian Aboriginal peoples in the present see Borrows 1992, 1997; Slattery 1991; Walters 1993. For analysis from a Native American (U.S.A.) perspective, see Williams, R. A. 1990(b).\n\n. The intended meaning of this language has also been hotly contested, with some arguing that the British Crown thereby recognized the sovereignty of Indian Nations, and others asserting that the words were used rhetorically or insincerely by the British to appease the Indians.\n\n. Williams, R. A. 1990: 237.\n\n. Borrows 1997: 160-161.\n**P ART III**\n\n**T ERRA INCOGNITA**\n\n(UNKNOWN LAND)\n**Chapter 5: The Great Chain of Precedent**\n\n_Suddenly, even the most hardened land-market capitalist assumed the mantle of zealous advocate of the Indians' natural-law right to engage in unregulated real estate transactions. Neither the King, nor the landed colonies \"owned\" the lands on the frontier, argued these speculators. The Indian tribes occupied these lands as free and sovereign peoples. By natural law, the Indians could therefore sell their rights to the land to whomever they pleased, the Proclamation of 1763 and the landed colonies' charter claims notwithstanding._\n\n\u2014Legal scholar Robert A. Williams, Jr., 1990, _The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: Discourses of Conquest_.\n\n**Honour Among Thieves. South of the Border**\n\nIn British law, one of the principal means that judges use to reach decisions about particular cases is through the use of precedent. Precedents are the decisions reached by previous judges in similar cases. A contemporary judge compares the facts before her or him, searches for cases that dealt with similar fact patterns, and interprets and applies the reasoning and findings of judges in those previous cases to the one at hand. This is referred to in legal parlance as the \"doctrine of _stare decisis_.\" It is based on the premise that fairness and equality before the law requires that like cases should be decided alike. Reliance on precedent is often pointed to as an inherently conservative characteristic of law, whereby justification must always be anchored in the past. However, contemporary critics argue that the notion that past precedents limit and determine present judgments is frequently overstated by representatives of the judiciary. Anthropologist Michael Asch and Law Professor Catherine Bell, for example, argue that \"it is not precedent itself that binds, but judicial interpretation of the past and its relevance to the present.... Adopting interpretive strategies, a judge chooses one precedent in favour of another, appearing to find, rather than create law. The appearance of finding is important because it deflects charges of result-oriented reasoning and judicial legislation.\" Legal scholars Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun, point out that the rule of precedent serves more importantly to consolidate law's desire to define the future. They write, \"Law, by drawing constantly on precedent to develop itself, strives to collapse linear temporal sequence by bringing the past forward and, by creating a new precedent, drawing the future into itself.\" In a ritual practice judges call \"citing the authorities,\" _Reasons for Judgment_ are frequently written as narratives linking a chronology of precedents to the case at hand through descriptions of salient similarities of fact and argument. Contemporary Canadian judges ruling on Aboriginal title and rights cases usually begin their \"precedents narratives\" in eighteenth-century post-colonial U.S.A.\n\nIn 1776 the American colonies declared independence from Britain. In the ensuing years, three distinguishable factions emerged to dispute issues of land rights and lawful methods of acquisition of Indian lands. A faction of the American population that remained pro-British continued, after Independence, to argue for a literal interpretation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and asserted that the British Crown alone retained the prerogative to negotiate with and acquire land cessions from Indians. Another faction, consisting of legislators and political leaders of Virginia and the other colonies, argued that they held controlling rights to Indian lands on the basis of their Crown charters, having \"inherited\" the sovereign's prerogatives previously held by the British Crown and set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Finally, a large group of frontier speculators claimed that, under natural law and natural right, the Indians themselves, as \"sovereign princes of the soil,\" could sell their land to whomever they wished. Philosopher John Locke became involved in the management and exploitation of the British colonies on the eastern seaboard of America, and was an influential theorist in post-Revolutionary United States. Processes and events there codified Locke's theories into laws that formed the basis of precedents still employed today. This was the context in which three decisive legal judgments were rendered by Chief Justice Marshall of the United States Supreme Court.\n\nThe first case, _Fletcher v. Peck_ , was heard in 1810. The State of Georgia had granted land to the New England Mississippi Land Company. The Company then divided and resold the land to a number of individuals, including the Plaintiff, Robert Fletcher. The Defendant, Peck, attempted to interfere with Fletcher's exercise of ownership, claiming to have acquired the same land directly from its original, Indigenous, owners. Chief Justice Marshall ruled, on the basis of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, that the State of Georgia's sale to Fletcher was illegal because the lands in question had never been surrendered by the Indians to either the British Crown, the government of the United States of America, or the State of Georgia. Marshall held that \"Indian title\" could only legitimately be extinguished by a European-derived sovereign, so neither Fletcher nor Peck had acquired lawful title. Another U.S. Supreme Court judge, Justice Johnson, dissented from Marshall's decision arguing that Indians \"retained absolute proprietorship of their soil\" which could be extinguished only by conquest or purchase. The significance of Chief Justice Marshall's ruling in _Fletcher v. Peck_ has manifested itself as the decision has been used as a precedent by contemporary Canadian judges in decisions that uphold the Royal Proclamation of 1763's dictum that Aboriginal title may only be extinguished by the Crown, and not by lower levels of government, corporations, or private citizens.\n\nThe second case, _Johnson v. McIntosh_ , was heard in 1823. Johnson claimed that he had inherited title to a tract of land from his father who had purchased it from the Piankeshaw and Illinois Indians. McIntosh said he had purchased the same lot from the U.S. federal government, who claimed they had acquired the land from the same Indians at a later date; that is, after Johnson's father said he had purchased it. Chief Justice Marshall found in favour of McIntosh, ruling that the federal government alone had the exclusive right to acquire Indian title, therefore neither Johnson's father nor the Piankeshaw and Illinois Indians could legally buy or sell Indian land. Marshall argued that his ruling was based in law, and not necessarily in justice. He wrote that his decision was determined by, \"History, and the decisions made and enforced by those Europeans who invaded America.\" Marshall relied on the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement, and the assumption of _terra nullius_ to defend his position, arguing that Crown title was grounded in the voyages of discovery made by the Cabots during the late fifteenth century. This second case in \"the Marshall trilogy,\" _Johnson v. McIntosh_ , is the decision most frequently selected as a precedent for application by contemporary Canadian judges to support judgments against Aboriginal claimants, on the basis that the Crown had an unfettered right to declare sovereignty over territories Britain deemed _terra nullius_.\n\nThe third and final case, _Worcester v. Georgia_ , was decided in 1832. The State of Georgia had attempted to enact jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation by annexing its territory, annulling its constitution and laws, and requiring whites to obtain state permission before entering Cherokee territory. A white missionary, Samuel Worcester, after being arrested for refusing to comply with this statute, challenged the state's jurisdiction. These same lands, and jurisdictional arrangements, had been the subject of a treaty between the federal government and the Cherokee. Worcester argued therefore that the State of Georgia had no legal right to keep him off the Cherokee reservation.\n\nChief Justice Marshall ruled in favour of Worcester, saying that the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement was relevant only to governing relations between European nations, and not relations between states and the federal government. It yields to the Crown, Marshall wrote, only an exclusive right to acquire Aboriginal title as set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It does not proscribe the terms of such acquisition, or what governmental powers may flow from the surrender of Aboriginal title to the Crown. In other words, Marshall ruled that the State of Georgia could not assume it had automatically inherited whatever powers the federal government may have acquired when it exercised its exclusive prerogative to extinguish Aboriginal title. More importantly, in his _Reasons for Judgment_ in _Worcester v. Georgia_ , Chief Justice Marshall argued that the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement did not, in itself, necessarily rule out the possibility that some form of negotiations between Aboriginal title holders and Crown representatives may still be required in order for the extinguishment of Aboriginal title to be legitimate. This decision provides a precedent that _could_ be interpreted to mean that Crown extinguishment of Native title and assumption of jurisdiction could require Aboriginal consent in order to take legal effect. Chief Justice Marshall's decision in _Worcester v. Georgia_ , however, has not been selected by Canadian judges for use as a precedent.\n\nNone of the Indigenous peoples whose lands and rights were at issue in the litigation described above were represented in court. As if they didn't exist.\n\n**Honour Among Thieves: North of the Border**\n\n_By the treaty of 1873 the Indian inhabitants ceded and released the territory in dispute, in order that it might be opened up for settlement, immigration, and such other purpose as to Her Majesty might seem fit, to the Government of the Dominion of Canada, for the Queen and Her successors forever.... The treaty leaves the Indians no right whatever to the timber growing upon the land which they gave up, which is now fully vested in the Crown, all revenues derivable from the sale of such portions of it as are situated within the boundaries of Ontario being the property of that Province...[that] possesses exclusive power to regulate the Indians' privilege of hunting and fishing...._\n\n\u2014Lord Watson, Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of the British House of Lords, 1888.\n\nIn 1888, the first significant legal decision involving issues of Aboriginal title and rights in Canada was heard by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of the British House of Lords, which was, until 1949, the highest court to which Canadian cases could be appealed. The _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber_ case provided a precedent that would be cited in every subsequent Aboriginal title case in Canada up to and including the present.\n\nThe case involved a dispute between the federal government of Canada, the Province of Ontario, and a private corporation: St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. The federal government had granted the company a permit to cut lumber on land they claimed had been surrendered to them by the Ojibway Nation under Treaty 3, signed in 1873. The Province of Ontario, however, charged St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. with taking lumber without a valid permit. The federal government argued that the Ojibway had held full title to their lands until they surrendered their Aboriginal title to the Crown under the terms and conditions of Treaty 3, that included some monetary payments. To support their position, the federal government of Canada arguedthat Treaty 3 reflected the Royal Proclamation of 1763's recognition of full Aboriginal ownership and jurisdiction; which, having been surrendered to the Crown, now gave the federal government the right to issue permits to private companies like St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber. The Province of Ontario countered with the argument that, prior to the signing of Treaty 3, the underlying title to all the land at issue was not held by Aboriginal title, but was already owned by the hovering sovereign who acquired it by virtue of the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement set out in the Memorandum of the Privy Council in 1722. Treaty 3, according to the provincial argument, simply consolidated the extinguishment of whatever vague interests in the land the Ojibway _might_ have had prior to contact with Britain, that might have remained a \"burden on the Crown's title\" after the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued, rendering the lands in question unencumbered Crown land. The _British North America Act_ that consolidated Canadian Confederation in 1867, the Province of Ontario's argument continued, had transferred Crown land to provincial jurisdiction.\n\nThe Supreme Court of Canada agreed with the Province of Ontario, stating that \"the tenure of the Indians was a personal and usufructuary right dependent upon the goodwill of the sovereign.\" In other words, even if some form of Aboriginal title had pre-existed Britain's \"discovery\" of North America or survived the Royal Proclamation of 1763, it was a type of property ownership that was inferior to title in fee simple, recognized as paramount by British law. Regardless, Aboriginal rights of any sort, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled, were only those created\u2014not recognized\u2014by the Crown. The federal government appealed the court's decision to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; which, in turn, upheld the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling. Lord Watson cited the precedent set by Chief Justice Marshall's 1823 decision in _Johnson v. McIntosh_ upholding the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/ settlement based in the concept of _terra nullius_ , as authority for the Lords' decision.\n\nMuch of the legal argument in the case of _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. v. R_. revolved around competing interpretations of what form of Aboriginal title or interest the Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized or created. Lord Watson concluded that while \"there was a great deal of learned discussion at the Bar with respect to the precise quality of the Indian right...their Lordships do not consider it necessary to express any opinion upon the point.\" In effect, however, the Privy Council's decision affirmed that Aboriginal title was a mere \"burden\" on the hovering sovereign's underlying title to all the land.\n\nLord Watson's ruling that the only Aboriginal rights that could be recognized in law were those granted, or taken away, by the Crown, marked the rise to prominence of the theory of \"legal positivism\" in British and Canadian jurisprudence. Legal positivism is a term used to describe the \"tendency to treat jurisprudence as an exact science, a rational process that consists of identifiable data and rules,\" modelled on the natural or physical sciences. Positivism in social theory is based on the assumption that human social life can be studied using the same methods as those employed by the natural and physical sciences. Its adherents claim that \"objective\" knowledge about social reality that is free of any and all bias can be obtained by trained researchers. According to positivist theory, social scientists should first use the five senses recognized by western culture\u2014sight, sound, taste, touch and smell\u2014to capture data on human behaviour. The next step is to organize the data according to prescribed categories. Finally, research findings should be explained by reference to theoretical frameworks developed by previous generations of social scientists. The sense of sight and the practice of systematic observation is the most privileged source of knowledge in positivist social research: \"seeing is believing.\" Studies in behavioural psychology that place subjects in experimental environments and monitor how they respond to particular stimuli\u2014say, for example, fear\u2014represent the type of positivist social research that has been popularized, and that most people are familiar with. Conclusions are based on how a majority of research subjects respond to the particular stimuli. So, for example, positivist researchers conclude that \"humans respond to fear by either fight or flight.\" Of course, this does not tell us anything about what frightens who, where, when, or why. Nor does it tell us who can fight and who cannot, or where anyone flees to. We will never know how people who were not research subjects responded, or whether there are third or fourth alternatives that have escaped the research design.\n\nLegal positivism dispenses with the requirement that researchers must study phenomena that exist independently of the observer, _and substitutes law itself for \"objective\" reality_ , and judicial decision-making for scientific methodology. Simply put, the law creates reality that is real because it has been created by the law. Hence, regardless of what might actually exist, \"on the ground,\" under the doctrine of legal positivism, the Crown creates and extinguishes Aboriginal title and rights \"at its pleasure.\" Critics of legal positivism argue that jurisprudence is better understood as resulting from the accumulation of judges' interpretations of evidence and arguments over time in specific social contexts, and that the arts, literature and humanities provide more useful models for understanding law than the hard sciences.\n\nThe Ojibway, whose lands and histories were the subject of the dispute in the _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber v. R._ case were neither consulted nor represented in court. As if they didn't exist.\n\n**Honour Among Thieves: in Africa**\n\n_The estimation of the rights of aboriginal tribes is always inherently difficult. Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or legal ideas of civilized society. Such a gulf cannot be bridged. It would be idle to impute such people some shadow of the rights known to our law and then to transmute it into the substance of transferable rights of property as we know them...._\n\n_On the other hand, there are indigenous peoples whose legal conceptions, though differently developed, are hardly less precise than our own. When once they have been studied and understood they are no less enforceable than rights arising under English law. Between the two there is a wide tract of much ethnological interest, but the position of the natives of Southern Rhodesia within it is very uncertain; clearly they approximate rather to the lower than to the higher limit._\n\n\u2014Lord Sumner, Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of the British House of Lords, 1919.\n\nWhen deciding Aboriginal title and rights cases, Canadian judges have available to them a wide range of historic precedents, diverse interpretations of these precedents, and variously reasoned arguments to select from in constructing their own rulings. They may draw on arguments waged, and decisions made, throughout the history and geography of the British Empire-cum-Commonwealth. The ruling quoted above in an African case\u2014 _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ \u2014along with Chief Justice Marshall's American cases, and the Canadian _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber_ judgment, have come to constitute an unholy trinity of precedents repeatedly summoned by contemporary jurists.\n\nThe _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ judgment sets out the principle that, in order to determine the legitimacy of Indigenous peoples' land rights claims, imperial courts should first assess the claimants' position on the ladder of evolutionary progress hypothesized by nineteenth-century evolutionary social theory. Lord Sumner's first option for those found to be \"low on the scale,\" is a repetition of the Privy Council's Memorandum of 1722's doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/ settlement justified by the assumption of _terra nullius_ , itself a repetition of Lord Coke's judgement in _Calvin's Case_ in 1608. In 1722, whether or not British imperial law would classify Indigenous peoples as fully human beings was considered a religious question: were they Christians or infidels? In setting out his test in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ , Lord Sumner relied on secular social theory, re-articulating and re-legitimating the now archaic seeming assumptions of 1722 in the pseudo-scientific language of Social Darwinist evolutionism that had become entrenched by 1919. Social Darwinism was an attempt to apply Charles Darwin's theories of evolution in the plant and animal worlds to human history. Simply put, some Indigenous peoples could be classified, according to the Privy Council, as belonging to a lower order of human being than the British. On the basis of this abstract act of classification they could be deemed, in law, not to exist. Their lands and resources, and their rights to govern themselves, could be eliminated: through the force of law.\n\nLord Sumner's option for those Indigenous peoples deemed more \"highly evolved\" reflects the second clause in the Privy Council's Memorandum of 1722. Under the doctrine of conquest, since Indigenous peoples were recognized as existing human beings, British domination had to be achieved through military conquest and\/or the negotiation of treaties. Indigenous legal codes could continue to be in force after the assertion of British sovereignty, until they were extinguished by the stroke of a pen, or by the cannons of the British navy. Following Sir Henry Maine, Lord Sumner elaborated evolutionary theory, applying its categories to legal codes and land tenure systems. He identified criteria by which courts could ascertain which Indigenous land tenure systems should be deemed worthy of being honoured by the British Crown. According to Lord Sumner, individual rather than tribal or communal ownership marked the difference between \"civilized\" and \"savage\" property law.\n\nNot all judges think alike. In 1921 Lord Sumner's 1919 decision in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ was criticized and modified by Viscount Haldane, who issued a ruling in another African case before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In _Amodu Tijani v. Southern Nigeria_ , Haldane argued that Indigenous land tenure systems should not be judged by British standards, but rather should be recognized and understood on their own terms: \"In interpreting the native title to land, not only in Southern Nigeria, but other parts of the British Empire, much caution is essential,\" Haldane wrote. \"There is a tendency, operating at times unconsciously, to render that title conceptually in terms which are appropriate only to systems which have grown up under English law. But this tendency has to be held in check closely.\"\n\nThe similarities and differences between Lord Sumner's ruling and Viscount Haldane's can be read as an historic illustration of the interconnections between law, history, anthropology and public opinion that have shaped Indigenous land rights litigation since the early days of British imperial expansion. Legal decisions in these cases, of necessity, rely on and reflect interpretations of history, culture, human nature and morality.\n\nBy the early years of the twentieth century, professional anthropologists for the most part had rejected the evolutionary theory of their nineteenth-century founding ancestors like Sir Henry Maine, Lewis Morgan, and Edward Tylor. The leading anthropologists of the 1900s-1930s, including Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and H. R. Radcliffe-Brown, all argued for one version or another of positions based in cultural relativism, defined at its most essential level as respect for the fundamental equality of all human cultures, and the right of each culture to be judged on its own terms and not on the basis of another culture's evaluative criteria. This was not only a moral and a political stance, but reflected conclusions which had emerged as the discipline grew to include more professionally trained observers who spent longer periods of time living with non-European peoples. The empirical data collected, and the lived experience of fieldworkers, challenged the abstractions of the \"armchair academics,\" who, a generation before, had hypothesized the grand theories of universal human evolution from their ivory towers. Theories of scientific racism and Social Darwinist evolutionism could not sustain \"on the ground\" scrutiny. Many Indigenous peoples' ways of life and histories simply didn't conform to the evolutionary models. Aboriginal Australians, for example, valued little in the way of technology and material goods, but lived within highly complex social structures governed by intricate kinship relations, led rich spiritual lives guided by complex and sophisticated cosmologies, and produced abstract art. Evolutionary theory had hypothesized incorrectly that they should be completely consumed by satisfying survival needs and be incapable of abstract thought. Northwest Coast peoples in North America were neither agricultural nor industrial, yet they lived in a hierarchical social structure, and accumulated and stored surplus wealth which, evolutionary theory claimed, people classified as hunters and fishers should not be doing. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has challenged the notion that non-industrial peoples' lives were taken up with the daily struggle of wresting subsistence from nature. He argues that industrial capitalism requires the average person to expend more hours of labour per day to meet basic subsistence needs than is demanded of participants in hunting, gathering and fishing economies.\n\nIn his ruling in _Amodu Tijani v. Southern Nigeria_ Viscount Haldane adopted a position of cultural relativism, launching an explicit critique of Lord Sumner's ethnocentric evolutionism. Haldane argued that Aboriginal title, \"may not be that of the individual, as in this country it nearly always is in some form, but may be that of a community.... Such title...must be presumed to have continued to exist unless the contrary is established by the context or the circumstances,\" he concluded. While Haldane and Sumner differed on some points, neither questioned the fundamental premises that the British Crown had legitimate claims to sovereignty over the Americas; that the hovering sovereign held underlying title to all the land; and that colonial courts should determine what form of Aboriginal title could be recognized\u2014or created\u2014and by what criteria. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 defined Aboriginal title as communal and not individual. Lord Watson in _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber_ in 1888 had declared that Aboriginal title was created by the Crown in whatever image the Crown chose. Lord Sumner had, in 1919, defined legally recognizable Aboriginal title as individual and not communal. Viscount Haldane in 1921 allowed that Aboriginal title could be communal and not individual. Both Sumner's and Haldane's rulings endorsed the dictum that legal recognition or non-recognition of Aboriginal title should be determined by the nature of Aboriginal societies and land tenure systems, _as these were understood by the court_. The microscope was resolutely trained on Aboriginal claimants who would be required to represent their cultures and laws in one or another framework determined by legal adaptations of European social theory. Questions about the moral, political or legal legitimacy of British colonialism were deemed by law to have been resolved and to not require further discussion. These issues were banished: silenced in legal conversations, and evicted from colonial courthouses. Their absence, however, continued to hover, over the sovereign.\n\nIn the legal disputes that followed Sumner's and Haldane's rulings, twentieth-century Canadian judges would select from any one of these precedents, or others, or some combination thereof, as their rationale of choice in rendering decisions in Aboriginal title and rights litigation. Various courts and judges would employ diverse and often contradictory understandings of a m\u00e9lange of anthropological and historical theories for analyzing Indigenous societies, It would not be until the closing decades of this century that the simple fact that \"when the British arrived, these people were already there, using lands in accordance with their own needs and their own ways of life, as people everywhere do,\" would figure prominently in debates about the grounds for legal recognition of Aboriginal or Crown sovereignty in Canada.\n\n* * *\n\n. Bell and Asch 1997:39-40. See also Postema 1991.\n\n. Torres and Milun 1990.\n\n. See Bell and Asch 1997; Doyle-Bedwell 1993; Macklem 1991; Slattery 1979; Williams R. A. 1990.\n\n. _Fletcher v. Peck_ , 10 U.S. (6 Cranch) 87 (1810) at 146.\n\n. _Johnson v. M'Intosh_ 21 U.S. (8 Wheat) 543 (1823) at 573.\n\n. Macklem 1991: 400.\n\n. _Worcester v. Georgia_ , 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832) at 543.\n\n. quoted in Kulchyski 1994: 30.\n\n. _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. v. R_. (1885) 10 or 196 (Ont.Ch.); (1886) 13 OAR 148 (Ont.CAO); (1887) SCR 577(SCC); (1888) 14 AC 46 (PC).\n\n. A \"usufructuary right\" means the right to use property owned by another, as long as that use is permitted by the rightful owner, and does not interfere with the owner's rights or desires.\n\n. \"Title in fee simple\" refers to the most privileged form of individual ownership of private property protected by Canadian law. Most Canadian homeowners hold \"title in fee simple\" to their property, subject of course to the good graces of their banks and mortgage companies.\n\n. quoted in Kulchyski 1994: 30.\n\n. Cotterrell 1984:10 quoted in Burtch 1992: 3.\n\n. For a more thorough discussion of the _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Company_ case, see Slattery 1987; Macklem 1991.\n\n. White 1985, 1990.\n\n. _Re Southern Rhodesia_ [1919] A.C. 211 at 233-4.\n\n. _Amodu Tijani v. Southern Nigeria_ [1921] 2 A.C. 399(p.c.) at 403.\n\n. See Stocking 1987, 1991, 1992, 1995.\n\n. See Vincent 1990.\n\n. Sahlins 1972. See also Lee and DeVore 1966.\n\n. McNeil 1989.\n**Chapter 6: White Papers and Legal Tests**\n\n_Legal orders may embody asymmetrical power relations, but power is always an interactional process. Dominant groups enjoy legally protected privileges, but they are also constrained by the law. And subordinated groups that suffer under particular legal systems may find that law offers them, the less powerful, a measure of protection from the powerful, just as it sometimes offers them resources for action._\n\n\u2014Anthropologists June Starr and Jane Collier, 1989, _History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology._\n\n**Law, Power and Resistance**\n\nTheoretical debates in the field of anthropology, politics and law center around questions of domination and resistance, justice and power: can marginalized groups, such as Aboriginal peoples, realize their aspirations for social change through legal processes?\n\nThe most fundamental and traditional forms of legal critique in the western world are arguments and stories that expose the absence of neutrality or autonomy in law and legal processes. Feminists critique male dominance and sexist bias; people of colour bring charges of systemic racism; colonized and formerly colonized peoples reveal the legacy of imperialism; advocates of labour and the poor unmask alliances between powerful business interests and members of the judiciary. In response to the perennial question of how autonomous the law is from economic and political interests in \"the last instance,\" the British theorist, E. P. Thompson, wrote: \"Well, for most of the time when I was watching, law was running quite free of economy, doing its errands, defending its property, preparing the way for it, and so on.... But...on several occasions, while I was actually watching, the lonely hour of the last instance actually came. The last instance, like an unholy ghost, actually grabbed hold of law, throttled it, and forced it to change its language and to will into existence forms appropriate to the mode of production, such as enclosure acts and new case-law excluding customary common rights. But was law 'relatively autonomous'? Oh, yes. Sometimes. _Relatively_. Of course (emphasis in the original).\"\n\nFor Aboriginal peoples, as for other disempowered groups, the legal arena is a complex and often contradictory one in which to pursue social change. On the one hand, entering into a legal battle requires that all parties accept the language and the rules of the court. Critics of this strategy argue that the extent of \"translation\" required, for example, to explain Aboriginal spiritual beliefs in the language of the law changes the meaning of those beliefs. On the other hand, limited gains and protection of some historical rights have been achieved through legal struggles.\n\nMany argue that Aboriginal peoples do not have the luxury of choosing _not_ to engage in litigation to secure and protect rights. As small minority communities\u2014geographically dispersed and politically and economically marginalized and dispossessed\u2014Aboriginal peoples in Canada have limited resources to draw upon in their struggles for economic justice, political rights, and cultural survival. There are many locations where resistance is mounted: maintaining and reproducing kinship-based communities and strong family bonds in everyday life; insuring personal and familial survival; continuing to hunt, fish, trap, and gather on the land; engaging in ritual and ceremony; negotiating with governments; litigating in the courts; and participating in civil disobedience. In British Columbia, struggles have been fought at each of these sites consistently and simultaneously since Europeans first arrived.\n\nCertainly, law is not monolithic. This is demonstrated by appeal courts overturning lower court rulings, and by the publication of majority and dissenting opinions by panels of judges who fail to reach consensus among themselves on key points. The history of resistance through law waged by First Nations in B.C. illustrates the \"use of law as a 'resource for action'\" that Starr and Collier refer to. However, this history also raises questions about whether, looked at over the long term, the legal victories of Aboriginal peoples aren't short-lived and quickly co-opted, leaving exhausted human and financial resources behind in their wake. The history of legal struggles over Aboriginal title in B.C. raises the question of whether law, after all is said and done, inevitably turns out to be a servant of the rich and powerful.\n\n**Logic, Legal Hysteria, and Rifle Shots on Vancouver Island**\n\n_There is no clear, evolutionary logic in the historical development of Aboriginal rights...(in the courts).... In spite of after-the-fact stories that have tried to imply a consistent logic...there was a basic incoherence, an instability and set of contradictions embodied in the original approach.... It is a history of sustained, often vicious struggle, a history of losses and gains, of shifting terrain, of strategic victories and defeats, a history where the losers often win and the winners often lose, where the rules of the game often change before the players can make their next move, where the players change while the logic remains the same, where the moves imply each other just as often as they cancel each other out. It is a complex history whose end has not been written and whose beginnings are multiple, fragmentary and undecidable._\n\n\u2014Historian Peter Kulchyski, 1994, _Unjust Relations: Aboriginal Rights in Canadian Courts._\n\nThe questions that have been before the courts in British Columbia and Canada can be summarized briefly: (1) Did First Nations have legally recognizable title to their lands before the assertion of British sovereignty? (2) If they did have such title, does it continue today, or has it been extinguished? (3) If Aboriginal title and rights have not been extinguished, how can federal or provincial governments lawfully contravene or extinguish them?\n\nDuring the years 1963-1991 a number of important cases were litigated in Canada concerning Aboriginal rights of various kinds. Those most relevant to the issues in dispute in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case were: _R. v.White & Bob_; _Calder v. R_ ; _The Hamlet of Baker Lake v. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development_ ; _Guerin v R_.; _R. v. Bear Island Foundation_ ; and _R. v. Sparrow_. Together, these six cases represent the legal context in which _Delgamuukw v. R._ was initiated, heard, and ruled on.\n\nIn the process of ruling on the six cases listed above, and others, different answers were given by the courts to the key questions; a series of legal tests that set out the criteria through which Aboriginal title and rights could be recognized in Canadian law emerged; and Aboriginal Elders, anthropologists, and other expert witnesses became an integral part of contemporary legal processes. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal plaintiffs and defendants, lawyers and judges, witnesses and researchers involved in Aboriginal title and rights litigation since the 1960s have studied, created, defended, and opposed the evidence, arguments and rulings that emerged in these cases. In order to understand the strategies adopted by the parties to _Delgamuukw v. R._ , it is necessary to comprehend, at least in skeletal form, this legal and historical context.\n\nIn British Columbia, the first of the modern Aboriginal rights cases was initiated in the spring of 1963 when Clifford White and David Bob, two members of the Saalequn (Nanaimo) First Nation of central Vancouver Island in British Columbia, went deer hunting on the south slope of Mount Benson, a few miles inland from Nanaimo. They were arrested and charged under the _Game Act of British Columbia_ (R.S.B.C. 1960) for being \"in possession of deer during the closed season.\" White and Bob argued that their right to hunt and fish for food on unoccupied Crown lands was guaranteed to them under the terms of a treaty signed between Saanich Chief Whut-Say-Mullett, and Governor James Douglas in Fort Victoria on February 7, 1852. The case came to the attention of Thomas Berger, then leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party and a practising lawyer in Vancouver. White and Bob's legal counsel argued that this treaty was protected by the _Indian Act_ which, as federal legislation, was paramount over provincial legislation such as the _Game Act_. The Province of B.C. argued that the treaty of 1852 did not constitute a treaty between the Crown and an Aboriginal nation but rather was a commercial conveyance between some individuals who were members of a group that were not a state and had no international personality, and a privateenterprise, the Hudson's Bay Company, represented by its Chief Factor, James Douglas, who doubled as Governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island at the time. In other words, the Crown argued that the document was not a treaty but a private exchange of cash for land. The ancestors of White and Bob, the Crown claimed, had sold their land, and therefore their descendants had no rights on it, or to it.\n\nThe _White & Bob_ case was the first to require a provincial government of British Columbia, and their lawyers, to develop legal arguments to defend their historical denial of Aboriginal title and rights. The province's solicitors adopted a position based in legal positivism and referred to the _St. Catherine's Milling_ precedent, arguing first that Aboriginal title could only exist if it was created by a sovereign. The king had chosen not to create such rights because the Aboriginal peoples of British Columbia were \"too primitive\" according to the _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ precedent. The province's legal argument relied on a particular interpretation of history that described the First Nations of British Columbia as minimally evolved nomads lacking law or government when Europeans first arrived. For the first time in court, the province articulated an interpretation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that was to become a hallmark of British Columbia's legal arguments in all subsequent cases. The province's lawyers claimed that, since British Columbia did not appear on most maps drawn by British cartographers (who had, in 1763, not yet travelled to the west coast), the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was not intended to apply to Aboriginal peoples here. What the sovereign (or, in this case, his mapmakers) did not see, did not exist.\n\nFurthermore, they referred to the use of the present tense by the writers of the Proclamation in the phrase \"the Indians with whom we are connected\" as evidence that the authors' intentions were to exclude any Aboriginal groups with whom the Crown had not yet made contact. Berger argued that the present tense is the grammar of legal statutes, proclamations, and constitutions which are usually considered, legally, to \"speak until they are repealed.\" The B.C. Crown's interpretation of the Royal Proclamation has been described by historians and legal scholars as \"implausible,\" \"indefensible\" and \"ridiculous.\" It has, however, been argued repeatedly by prestigious lawyers, and declared \"fact\" by eminent judges, for 30 years.\n\nThe next line of legal attack developed by the Province of B.C. in the _White & Bob_ case and in subsequent litigation, was that if there had, in fact, been some form of Aboriginal title before the arrival of Europeans in British Columbia, it was extinguished by the assertion of sovereignty by Britain, and by the enactment of land use legislation by the colonial legislature.\n\nThe absence of any First Nations consent to extinguishment of their land title was, within the framework of legal positivism, irrelevant: if Aboriginal rights are created and extinguished only by the sovereign, then Aboriginal consent is not required to do either. Anyway, concluded provincial lawyers, Indians \"implicitly\" consented to extinguishment of title. This, they argued, was \"proven\" by the fact that First Nations in British Columbia did not wage armed rebellions, appeared (according to non-Aboriginal interpretations) to acquiesce to colonial domination, were now believed to be assimilated into mainstream Canadian society, and were therefore no longer racially or culturally \"pure.\" Crown lawyers pointed to Aboriginal \"culture\" measured by language, religion, clothing, food, weapons, modes of earning a living, housing, and means of transportation, for evidence. Any cultural change since contact with Europeans was presented as the natural outcome of a passive, inferior culture coming into contact with an active, superior one. Only those activities whose origins could be traced to pre-contact Aboriginal cultures _and which continued to be practiced_ , could be classified under this rubric as \"truly Aboriginal.\" This is referred to in law as the \"frozen rights\" theory, wherein Aboriginal cultures are \"frozen\" at the moment of \"discovery,\" and any developments since that moment are interpreted as resulting from European influence. In other words, \"ignoring Indian title was...seen as extinguishing it. Put another way, the argument asserted that the ordinary operation of a British colonial government had the effect of wiping out the legitimacy of any preexisting aboriginal arrangements.... The argument of implicit extinguishment through ordinary legislation has not been raised in other parts of Canada.\"\n\nThis represents one of many \"double binds\" in legal and popular discourses on Aboriginal rights. A double bind is a \"damned if you do and damned if you don't\" situation in which the outcome is always pre-determined, and in which explanations are arrived at by reasoning backwards from consequences to causes. From a social evolutionary perspective, to the extent that Aboriginal cultures are understood as not having changed after contact with Europeans, they are analyzed as being \"arrested\" at a \"lower stage\" of development, and incapable of \"advancement.\" Such \"primitive\" peoples must not have had any concepts of property or law, and clearly cannot\u2014today\u2014be considered capable of being granted the same rights as those of \"civilized\" peoples. _They are too different to be considered equal_. To the extent, on the other hand, that Aboriginal cultures are understood as _having changed_ and adapted some European ways to their own, then they are said to have voluntarily \"assimilated\" into the colonial culture, and clearly then have no grounds on which to claim \"special\" rights different from everyone else's. _They are too equal to be considered different_. Heads, the Crown wins. Tails, Indians lose.\n\nWhen legal scholar, Patrick Macklem, tried to ascertain the way concepts of cultural similarity and cultural difference had impacted on \"how the law has contributed to the current status of First Nations in Canada,\" he found that \"Native difference is denied where its acceptance would result in the questioning of basic premises concerning the nature of property, contract, sovereignty or constitutional right. Native difference is acknowledged where its denial would achieve a similar result.\" Macklem concluded that this discourse on cultural similarity and difference constituted a \"rhetoric of justification\" for legal judgements.\n\nAnthropologists entered the legal fray in the _White & Bob_ case, led by Wilson Duff. Initially, anthropological research was principally concerned with documenting and describing various Aboriginal peoples' practices surrounding land and resource ownership and use, translating this data into language that lawyers and judges could understand, and considering whether or not these concepts of \"Aboriginal title\" were commensurable with concepts of property recognized by Canadian law. During the _R. v. White & Bob_ trial, Wilson Duff responded to Berger's question concerning the meaning of the term \"tribal territories\" for the Saalequn as follows:\n\nBerger: When you say tribal territories, can you tell us what you mean by that? What use would the Indians have made of their tribal territories?\n\nDuff: This could be a very complicated statement, because they used different kinds of territories...with different intensity. They would use the rivers, of course, for fish with great intensity, and the beaches with great intensity, and the mountains and forest with somewhat less intensity, yet they would go at least that far back, not only to hunt the land mammal, deer, and also other land mammals, but to get bark and roots for basketry and matting and such things. These territories would be definitely used by them and would be recognized by other tribes as belonging to them.\n\nThe lower court found both defendants guilty and fined Clifford White and David Bob $100.00 (or 40 days in jail in default) each. Berger was successful in obtaining a new trial for White and Bob and went on to win a decision by the County Court of Nanaimo, which was then upheld by the B.C. Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada. The document signed by Whut-Say-Mullett and Governor James Douglas was in fact a treaty. White and Bob indeed had the right to hunt and fish for food on unoccupied Crown land. Mr. Justice Tom Norris of the B.C. Court of Appeal further ruled that the treaty was, like other treaties signed between the Crown and Canadian Aboriginal peoples, consistent with the direction of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. He wrote: \"the aboriginal rights as to hunting and fishing affirmed by the Proclamation of 1763 and recognized by the Treaty...still exist.\"\n\nThe legal significance of this decision was that \"for the first time a judge, and a well-respected British Columbia judge of conservative leanings at that, had presented a comprehensive opinion endorsing both the pre-existence and the continuing existence of aboriginal rights in British Columbia.\"\n\n**Civilization and the Whimsical Destruction of Property**\n\n_The assessment and interpretation of the historical documents and enactments tendered in evidence must be approached in the light of present-day research and knowledge disregarding ancient concepts formulated when understanding of the customs and culture of our original people was rudimentary and incomplete and when they were thought to be wholly without cohesion, laws or culture, in effect a subhuman species. This concept of the original inhabitants of America led Chief Justice Marshall in his otherwise enlightened judgment in Johnson v. McIntosh...to say 'the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war.... 'We now know that that assessment was ill-founded...Chief Justice Marshall was, of course, speaking with the knowledge available to him in 1823. Chief Justice Davey...[of the B.C. Court of Appeal] with all the historical research and material available since 1823 and notwithstanding the evidence in the record...said of the Indians of the mainland of British Columbia: '...they were undoubtedly at the time of settlement a very primitive people with few of the institutions of civilized society, and none at all of our notions of private property.' In so saying this in 1970, he was assessing the Indian culture of 1858 by the same standards the Europeans applied to the Indians of North America two or more centuries ago...._\n\n\u2014Justice John Hall, Supreme Court of Canada, 1973, _Dissenting Opinion, Reasons for Judgment in Calder v. R._\n\nThere is another aspect to the relationship between law, culture and power that is interwoven with the role law plays in enforcing particular rules in the interests of specific sectors of society. Law also \"maintains power relations by defining categories and systems of meaning.\" This defining and productive activity of law\u2014setting the agenda, and constructing the parameters of what may be included and what must be excluded\u2014is exemplified in the legal tests for Aboriginal title and rights. The tests are based on criteria the courts have established for evaluating claims brought before them by Aboriginal litigants.\n\nLegal tests for Aboriginal rights reveal the power relations that are constitutive of legal encounters: judges construct the tests; claimants sit them; judges mark them: pass, fail or defer. Of course, the arguments and evidence presented by Aboriginal claimants, and political support for them from outside the courtroom, have also influenced the tests. That is to say, it is as a result of persistent Aboriginal resistance that these questions continue to be placed before the judiciary. To this extent, the evolution of the tests represents the outcome of contestation and negotiation. However, the Crown is the dominant partner in a hierarchical relationship with Aboriginal peoples in Canadian society; and this social inequality follows the parties into the courtroom in myriad ways. The Crown has greater access to more resources in every part of the legal process, and in every aspect of it. The playing field, as the popular expression goes, is not only theirs, it is far from level.\n\nThe history of legal tests for Aboriginal rights could start in 1550 with Valladolid. It could start in 1608 with Calvin's Case and the infidel rule. It could start with the memorandum of the British Privy Council in 1722 that set out the doctrine of conquest and the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement. It could start with Lord Sumner's dictum in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ based in an evolutionary framework. This is the history that followed First Nations, lawyers, and judges into court in British Columbia where the story of legal tests for Aboriginal title began in 1969 with what is now called \"the _Calder_ case,\" or \"the Nishga case.\" Chief Frank Calder, on behalf of the Nishga Tribal Council, asked the Supreme Court of British Columbia for a declaration that:\n\n(1) the Nishga held title to their territory prior to the assertion of British sovereignty;  \n(2) that this title had never been lawfully extinguished; and,  \n(3) that this title is a legal right.\n\nIn support of their claim that their Aboriginal title had never been ceded, sold, surrendered or lost in war, the Nishga relied upon written archival evidence that showed they had begun petitioning the Queen and Colonial officials for recognition of their title since first contact with Europeans in the eighteenth century. Five Nishga hereditary chiefs, Frank Calder, James Gosnell, William McKay, Harry Nyce, and Anthony Robinson; one provincial archivist, Willard Ireland; and one anthropologist, Wilson Duff, testified as expert witnesses. Both the chiefs and the expert witnesses focused on demonstrating extensive Nishga use and occupation of the Nass Valley. Wilson Duff, acting as cultural translator, explained that the Nishga system of property ownership is different from, but analogous to, English common law property ownership. The skeleton of a legal test for Aboriginal title emerged in the following exchange between B.C. Supreme Court Judge Gould and Wilson Duff:\n\nThe Court: I want to discuss with you the short descriptive concept of your modern ownership of land in British Columbia, and I am going to suggest to you three characteristics (1) specific delineation of the land, we understand is the lot.\n\nDuff: Yes.\n\nThe Court: Specifically delineated down to the lot, and the concept of the survey; (2) exclusive possession against the whole world, including your own family. Your own family, you know that, you want to keep them off or kick them off and one can do so; (3) to keep the fruits of the barter or to leave it or to have your heirs inherit it, which is the concept of wills. Now, those three characteristics...are you with me?\n\nDuff: Yes The Court: Specific delineation, exclusive possession, the right of alienation, have you found in your anthropological studies any evidence of that concept being in the consciousness of the Nishgas and having them executing such a concept?\n\nDuff: My lord, there are three concepts.\n\nThe Court: Yes, or a combination of them.\n\nDuff: Specific delineation...Physical landmarks, physical characteristics. The exclusive occupation did not reside in an individual. It rested in a group of people who were a sub-group of the tribe...The owners in this sense had certain rights of alienation. They could give up the tract of land, lose it in warfare, but in practice it would not go to anybody outside of the tribe, that is, a tract of Nishga land might change hands but it wouldn't go to other than a Nishga family.\n\nThe Court: So am I correct in assuming that there are similarities in the Nishga civilization in the first two characteristics, but not the third? All that alienation means, of course, is that you can sell it to anybody you like?\n\nDuff: Yes... The Court: I will give two more characteristics of ownership, the right to destroy it at your own whim, if you like, and the other, that the exclusive possession should be of indeterminable time, that is, cannot be terminated by a person's life, that is, can be passed on to one's heirs. That makes five. Now, you have dealt with three. Now the right to destroy at whim, set fire to your own house; these matters you have been dealing with, would a group within the Nishga have the right, if the buildings at the mouth of a certain river had been in their exclusive use some time and they will say, 'Let's set fire to it,' would the tribe prohibit that?\n\nDuff: I would think that they would have that right.\n\nThe Court: You would think they would have that right?\n\nDuff: Yes.\n\nThe Court: Now, what about the duration of the right, not to destroy, but the right of exclusive ownership, would it go to their heirs?\n\nDuff: Yes.\n\nThe Court: Or go back to the tribe for distribution?\n\nDuff: In theory it belongs within that kinship group through time, with no duration in theory. It always remains with that same kinship group.\n\nThe Court: There is the matrilineal line?\n\nDuff: Yes.\n\nThe Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that the Nishga were too \"primitive\" in the nineteenth century to have held concepts of property that could be considered on an evolutionary developmental par with the concept of property upheld by British law.\n\nEuropean colonial cultural beliefs, or ideologies, set up relationships between colonizer and colonized as a hierarchical set of binary oppositions in which one member of the pair is always symbolically superior to the other. Colonizers are rational, the colonized are irrational. Colonizers are guided by reason, the colonized are driven by instinct. Colonizers are industrious, the colonized are lazy. Colonizers are active agents, the colonized are passive objects. But binary oppositions are two-way streets: when colonizers describe the characteristics of the colonized, they are simultaneously describing themselves, through defining the differences between themselves and their \"Other.\" Each description of the other is at the same time a description of self. Interpreted from this perspective, Justice Gould's ruling can be read as defining Euro-Canadian property law, and presumably the more highly evolved cultural values reflected in that law as: individually owning land, building fences around it and kicking your family off it, and burning down your house on a whim.\n\nWhen the Nishga case was appealed, the Justices of the B.C. Court of Appeal declared that if any form of Aboriginal title had existed it had been explicitly extinguished by Britain's assertion of sovereignty and \"implicitly\" extinguished by provincial land legislation prior to Confederation. The Nishga, on this basis, had no legal rights.\n\nThe Supreme Court of Canada, however, found differently when the case was appealed to them. In their 1973 decision, of the seven judges, one dismissed the case on a technicality and did not comment on the issues at trial. The remaining six found unanimously that Aboriginal title had existed prior to European arrival, based on long term occupancy. On the other important questions before them, the six judges split into two groups: Justices Ritchie and Martland supported the main judgment written by Justice Judson; while Justices Laskin and Spence supported the dissenting judgment written by Hall. Judson, Ritchie and Martland agreed with the Province of British Columbia's argument that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was not meant to apply to the then-undiscovered British Columbia. Relying on the _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co._ precedent, they found that Aboriginal title was a \"mere burden\" on Crown title. From Chief Justice Marshall's ruling in _Johnson v. McIntosh_ they drew the conclusion that the Crown had the exclusive right to extinguish Aboriginal title; and that whatever Aboriginal rights might have existed were lawfully extinguished by Britain's declaration of sovereignty. Judson, however, differed with the Crown on the nature of Aboriginal title. In what was to become an oft-quoted statement, he wrote: \"...the fact is that when the settlers came, the Indians were there, organized in societies and occupying the land as their forefathers had done for centuries. This is what Indian title means and it does not help one in the solution of this problem to call it a 'personal or usufructuary right'.\"\n\nOn the other hand, Justice Hall, supported by Laskin and Spence, argued that the Royal Proclamation was meant to apply to British Columbia; that while the Crown did have the right to extinguish Aboriginal title it must state its intention to do so in \"clear and plain language,\" and it could not be concluded that \"implicit\" extinguishment had taken place by virtue of colonial authorities having simply ignored Aboriginal title. On the issue of the nature of Aboriginal title, Hall cited Lord Sumner's decision in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ stressing the possibility that some Indigenous property systems were sufficiently well developed to be recognized by British law, and Lord Haldane's caution in _Amodu Tijani v. Secretary of Southern Nigeria_ , that non-British systems should be understood on their own terms and not only in relation to British law. Hall argued that, \"to ascertain how far this latter development of right has progressed involves the study of the history of the particular community and its usages in each case. Abstract principles fashioned _a priori_ are of but little assistance, and are as often as not misleading.\" The Supreme Court of Canada appeal panel judges relied extensively on both the written historical record and the testimony of the expert witnesses, reserving their highest praise for the contribution of Wilson Duff. Hall wrote: \"What emerges from the...evidence is the following: the Nishgas in fact are, and were from time immemorial a distinctive cultural entity with concepts of ownership indigenous to their culture and capable of articulation under the common law, having, in the words of Dr. Duff, 'developed their culture to higher peaks in many respects than in any other part of the continent north of Mexico.'\"\n\nThe _Calder_ decision therefore marks a significant departure from the positivist theory of Aboriginal rights which gave legal standing only to rights recognized by a sovereign. The Supreme Court of Canada's ruling in the _Calder_ case was a victory for British Columbia First Nations and their supporters. Six Supreme Court of Canada judges agreed that Aboriginal title in fact existed, and three allowed that it may continue to exist.\n\nNevertheless, certain aspects of this landmark decision would haunt future Aboriginal land rights litigation in other parts of Canada. Justice Hall did not reject the test Lord Sumner set out in 1919 in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ , but affirmed it by using its criteria to distinguish the Nishga culture as qualifying for respect and recognition on the grounds of evolutionary theory. Hall's reasoning allowed for the possibility that other Aboriginal peoples might fail Sumner's and Haldane's tests. While both rejected crude and archaic concepts and language, neither Duff's anthropology, nor Hall's law, rejected the philosophical or theoretical premises of \"neo-evolutionary\" theory that in 1973 remained current in academic anthropology and embedded in popular culture. Various iterations of neo-evolutionary theory have emerged throughout this century. Most recent versions eschew ethnocentric judgments, while still retaining beliefs in the determining role of the economy and technology in shaping culture. While rejecting the notion that all people progress through pre-determined \"stages of development\" from hunting and gathering to industrial capitalism, some _neo_ -evolutionary theorists argue that European and European-derived cultures have brought most Indigenous peoples under western economic and cultural domination. This trajectory therefore now reflects historical experience, rather than theoretical hypotheses, they claim. Anthropologists like Wilson Duff, while they respected and supported First Nations peoples and were devoted to preserving their cultures, applied class-based western notions of \"high\" and \"low\" culture to their analyses of Indigenous cultures. Peoples like the Nishga, therefore, with their abstract art, ornate carving, sophisticated architecture, and elaborate ceremonial life were judged within this framework to be \"highly cultured.\" Like rural people and urban working classes whose cultures are classified as \"low,\" some Aboriginal peoples without material cultural objects like totem poles, masks and carvings desired by Europeans, or elaborate ceremonial rituals like potlatches, are classified as \"simple.\" Unexamined evolutionary assumptions continue to incipiently and insidiously influence literature and the arts, and to inform \"common sense\" and popular culture.\n\n**From Law to Politics and Back Again**\n\n_I feel like a man who has been told he is going to die and is now being asked how he would like to be killed._\n\n\u2014First Nations leader George Manuel, responding to the _White Paper Policy_ , Kamloops, 1969.\n\nOn August 8, 1969, at a press conference in Vancouver, B.C., newly-elected Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau was asked whether his government would recognize Aboriginal title and rights in British Columbia. He replied: \"Our answer is no. We can't recognize aboriginal rights because no society can be built on historical 'might have beens'.\" Trudeau's Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, Jean Chretien, oversaw the drafting and publication of a new Canadian Indian Policy that was released later in 1969. The Liberal government's infamous \"White Paper Policy\" began with the statement, \"...aboriginal claims to land...are so general and undefined that it is not realistic to think of them as specific claims capable of remedy except through a policy and program that will end injustice to Indians as members of the Canadian community.\"\n\nThe White Paper Policy advocated the dissolution of any distinct legal or political status for Indigenous peoples, or their lands, and the rapid assimilation of Aboriginal peoples into the mainstream of Canadian society. Three B.C. provincial Indian organizations met in Kamloops, B.C. in 1969 to plan strategies for responding to the White Paper Policy. Unanimity was as elusive as ever, but, with equal consistency, was finally found in the fundamental premise that Aboriginal title had existed prior to European contact and still did. Several months later an \"All Bands Assembly\" in Vancouver agreed to have non-Aboriginal experts prepare an historical-legal argument in support of the recognition of Aboriginal title, to be presented to a parliamentary committee. Opposition to the White Paper Policy's assimilationist goals was voiced by Aboriginal representatives across the country, and for the first time in Canadian history, First Nations organized themselves on a Canada-wide basis, mobilizing their members to present a united front in defence of their cultural and political survival.\n\nFour years later, in 1973, when the Supreme Court of Canada handed down their decision in _Calder v. R_., ruling that Aboriginal rights had in fact existed in British Columbia before contact with Europeans, and perhaps had not been extinguished, Prime Minister Trudeau was moved to allow that First Nations without treaties \"May have more rights than we thought.\" The federal government revisited its position and instituted the \"Comprehensive Claims Policy\" whose terms of reference mirrored the Supreme Court's judgment in _Calder_. Aboriginal nations were invited to bring forth claims to land that had been used and occupied by their ancestors, and that they themselves were still using. The story of the _Calder_ decision and the Comprehensive Claims Policy is an archetype of the relationship between law and government policy in Aboriginal matters. The legal tail wags the political dog, and man's best friend rarely strays outside the yard the law fences in. Law is a force that politicians, bureaucrats, and Aboriginal peoples alike reckon with.\n\n**The Honour of the Crown Below Par**\n\n_...Indians have a legal right to occupy and possess certain lands, the ultimate title to which is in the Crown.... The nature of the Indians' interest is therefore best characterized by its general inalienability, coupled with the fact that the Crown is under an obligation to deal with the land on the Indians' behalf when the interest is surrendered.... Any description of Indian title which goes beyond these two features is both unnecessary and potentially misleading._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Dickson, 1984, _Reasons for Judgment, Guerin v. R_.\n\nThe next significant court case was fought in the 1970s in British Columbia by the Musqueam First Nation. In 1950, federal officials of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) arranged for the Musqueam Indian Band\u2014whose reserve forms a small enclave located in the elite urban neighbourhood of south-west Vancouver\u2014to lease a portion of their land to the exclusive Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club. Land values were assessed, and a lease agreement was ratified by the Musqueam Chief and Council by way of a band referendum. Since, under the _Indian Act_ , First Nations lands are held in trust for them as wards of the Crown who, like children, are not able to enter into legal contracts, representatives of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs signed the final contract with the Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club on behalf of the Musqueam. In 1970, Musqueam Chief Delbert Guerin learned that before they had signed the final contract, DIAND officials had reduced the value of the land and agreed to terms significantly more favourable to the Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club than to the Musqueam First Nation. These were _not_ the terms that the band membership had agreed to in their referendum, and DIAND officials did not advise the Chief and Council that they had renegotiated the contract before they signed it.\n\nThe Musqueam sued the federal government for breach of trust and the federal court awarded them $10 million in damages. The Federal Court of Appeal overturned this decision. The Musqueam then appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada who found that, indeed, the Crown and its agents have a fiduciary obligation to act in the best interests of Indians, and that this had not been done in the case before them. While \"failing to uphold their fiduciary obligations\" may seem an undeservedly polite way to describe the deceit and duplicity engaged in by government representatives in this case, the _Guerin_ decision did mark a recognition by the courts of at least once instance of these all too common practices in the history of government relations with Aboriginal peoples.\n\nIt is the sections of the Supreme Court's decision that bear directly on the issue of Aboriginal title that are important to the story being told here. First, Chief Justice Brian Dickson's ruling in _Guerin_ reiterates these fundamental points: that the Crown in the form of the hovering sovereign holds underlying title to all land, and that Aboriginal title is not proprietary and can only be surrendered to the Crown. However, the significance of Dickson's judgment is that he ruled that Aboriginal rights can apply to off-reserve lands. Second, the Supreme Court of Canada in _Guerin_ ruled that the Crown's fiduciary duty is legally rooted in Aboriginal title, and not, as was argued by the Crown, in the discretionary benevolence of the Crown or the Department of Indian Affairs. Third, the _Guerin_ decision provides a precedent that future judges could adopt to recognize that Aboriginal rights pre-existed European arrival and are inherent: recognized, and not created, by the British sovereign. Fourth, in the _Guerin_ decision the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that Aboriginal title and rights are _sui generis_ : \"of their own kind; constituting a class alone; unique; peculiar.\" The Courts, the ruling continued, have almost \"inevitably found themselves applying somewhat inappropriate property law\" to the determination of Aboriginal title and rights. The characterization of the legal nature of Aboriginal title as _sui generis_ provided Canadian courts with the opportunity to explore beyond the confines of English property law to determine the scope and content of Aboriginal title and its relationship with the Crown's interest.\"\n\nFinally, Madame Justice Bertha Wilson, the first woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada and one of the judges sitting on the bench when the case was heard, wrote in her contribution to the _Guerin_ judgment that: \"...the bands do not have the fee in the lands; their interest is a limited one. But it is an interest which cannot be derogated from or interfered with by the Crown's utilization of the land for purposes incompatible with the Indian title, _unless, of course, the Indians agree._ \" (Emphasis added.) This legitimated the position that Native consent should be required in order for Aboriginal title to be legally extinguished or contravened. Through this ruling, Justice Wilson created a precedent which was available to be adopted by judges when ascertaining whether or not particular Aboriginal peoples have consented to extinguishment of their Aboriginal title. Not only did the _Guerin_ decision mark an instance of legal recognition that Aboriginal peoples in fact exist, but it suggested that it might be appropriate, morally just, _and legal_ for their consent to be required before they could be \"extinguished.\"\n\nThe Supreme Court of Canada's _Calder_ decision marked a significant departure from the archaic legal positivism that had preceded it. And the _Guerin_ decision went several steps further. However, in both cases, all the Supreme Court judges were unanimous in upholding the legitimacy of Britain's assertion of sovereignty, and the hovering sovereign's possession of the \"underlying title to all the land.\" If extinguishment of Aboriginal title had not been properly effected historically, then the judges said it should be now, and they set out ways for extinguishment to be recognized and\/or accomplished.\n\nThe final goal that courts and governments have shared\u2014the desired outcome of litigation, as well as land claims and treaty negotiations\u2014is the extinguishment of Aboriginal title, absolutely and forever; and the confirmation of the singular sovereignty of Crown title, absolutely and forever. Legal and political recognition of Aboriginal title and extinguishment of Aboriginal title have been inextricably interdependent and mutually defining. The assertion of dominance and the surrender of autonomy must occur at the same instant. This demand for a forced coupling of _recognition_ of Aboriginal title with _extinguishment_ of Aboriginal title was upheld by every legal decision up to 1997 in Canada, and is reflected in the Comprehensive Claims Policy's requirement that the settlement of any claim and the signing of any modern-day treaty is dependent on the Aboriginal peoples' surrender of Aboriginal title, and agreement to its extinguishment. To Aboriginal peoples this demand is unjust and humiliating. Those First Nations who have entered into modern-day treaties\u2014often under tremendous pressures in the face of potential environmental crises\u2014have agreed to legal extinguishment of Aboriginal title for the purposes of resolving contemporary claims. In each set of negotiations, however, compliance with the demand for extinguishment has been resisted by First Nations representatives to the last moment, and it has only been with tremendous reluctance that extinguishment has been agreed to. It is a question that divides Aboriginal communities, and many continue to refuse to take this final step.\n\nThe 1970s marked the beginning of the contemporary period of B.C. Aboriginal politics in which debates concerning the relative merits and effectiveness of civil disobedience, political negotiation, and litigation are ongoing. The preferred tactic, as evidenced by the resolutions of provincial and national Aboriginal conferences, has always been political negotiation. The strength of their legal position, and the refusal of successive British Columbia governments until 1990 to recognize the legal existence of Aboriginal peoples in the province, has led British Columbia First Nations into the courts primarily as a means to achieve a strong enough bargaining position to \"bring the government to the table.\" First Nations have principally used the courts, not to _settle_ the dispute, but to acknowledge its _validity_ , after which nation-to-nation negotiations could honourably begin.\n\n* * *\n\n. Clifford 1988(b); Just 1992; Lazarus-Black and Hirsch (eds.) 1994; Merry 1992; Mertz 1988. See also Danielson and Engle (eds.)1995; Hart and Bauman (eds.)1996; Leonard 1995.\n\n. The literature on this topic is vast. See, for a sample, Adelberg and Currie (eds.) 1993; Chunn, and Lacombe (eds.)1998; Smart 1989.\n\n. Turpel 1991(b); 1991(c); Williams, P. 1991.\n\n. Comaroff and Roberts 1981; Moore 1986.\n\n. There is a huge literature concerning the relationship between law and the economy, and questions about the role of law in class relations in western societies. For a survey see Hunt 1981; Snyder 1981.\n\n. Thompson 1978 quoted in Starr and Collier (eds.) 1989:25.\n\n. For a detailed explication of this issue see Coombe 1989.\n\n. For an articulation of this argument in the Canadian case see Turpel 1991(a).\n\n. For an articulation of this argument in the Canadian case see Henderson, J. Y. 1985; and Williams, R. A. 1987. The debate about the pitfalls and promises of using the law to achieve radical social change has been most thoroughly developed by feminist legal scholars. See Cornell 1992; Young 1991. Razack 1991 describes a case study in which these questions were grappled with.\n\n. There have been other important cases tried during this period of time. I have selected for focus here only those _most_ relevant to British Columbia in general, and the _Delgamuukw_ case in particular. For detailed summaries of discussions surrounding arguments and judgments in these cases, and others, see Kulychyski, Peter (ed.)1994.\n\n. _R. v. White & Bob_ (50 Dominion Law Reports (2d) [1965], 620.\n\n. Berger 1981:49.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. See Tennant 1990:216-217. Tennant says: \"This was a lawyer's argument contrived retrospectively. No one associated with any aspect of the Indian land question had previously read the Proclamation as not extending to the western edge of the continent(216).\" Of the B.C. Crown's lawyers' analysis of the meaning of the use of the present tense, Tennant says: \"Had the British monarch issued another proclamation stating that a royal biscuit was to be given to 'any person with whom We are having tea,' it would be ridiculous to argue that the provision applied only to persons at the table with the monarch at the moment of signing and that it did not apply to future tea parties. Today the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms uses the present tense in expressing its guarantees: no sane person would maintain that its guarantees were intended to apply only at the moment the Charter was approved (216).\"\n\n. Tennant 1990:217.\n\n. Macklem 1991:392.\n\n. For a survey of anthropologists' involvement in First Nations legal struggles during the last thirty years see Kew 1993-94.\n\n. Berger 1981:52-53.\n\n. _R. v. White & Bob_ (50 Dominion Law Reports (2d) [1965], 620, cited in Berger 1981:53.\n\n. Tennant 1990:219.\n\n. Merry 1992. See also Danielson and Engle (eds.)1995; Hart and Bauman (eds.) 1996; Leonard, 1995.\n\n. _Calder et al v. A.G.B.C_. (1969), 8 Dominion Law Reports (3d), 59-83, [S.C.B.C.]. The \"Nishga\" now spell their name \"Nisga'a.\"\n\n. Kulchyski 1994:61-126.\n\n. Berger 1981; Kulchyski 1994.\n\n. Kulchyski 1994:96-98.\n\n. Fanon 1963.\n\n. McGrane 1989.\n\n. Clifford 1988; Said 1992.\n\n. _Calder et al v. A.G.B.C_. (1973), 34 Dominion Law Reports (3d) [1973], 145-226. See also Sanders 1989.\n\n. _Calder et al v. A.G.B.C._ (1973), 34 Dominion Law Reports (3d) [1973], 145-226.\n\n. Calder:401.\n\n. See Durham 1990.\n\n. See Turner 1993.\n\n. Turner 1993.\n\n. Weaver 1981:3-4.\n\n. Canada, Government of, (1969) Department of Indian Affairs, Policy Statement:1.\n\n. Tennant 1990:171.\n\n. Tennant 1990:172.\n\n. _Guerin v. R._ (1984) 13 D.L.R. (4th) 321.\n\n. _Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary_ (1981) Toronto, Ontario: Thomas Allen &Son Limited, 1156.\n\n. _Guerin v. R._ (1984) 13 D.L.R. (4th) 339.\n\n. Bell and Asch 1997:48.\n\n. _Guerin v. R._ (1984) 13 D.L.R. (4th).155.\n**Chapter 7: Conflicts and Constitutions: The 1980s**\n\n_The federal government has a claims policy that they brought into place after the Calder case, and that claims policy was hollow. It was empty. It meant nothing. Still, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en entered into one of their phases of trying to resolve the land question in the mid-70s, and in 1977 qualified for federal funding to prepare negotiations.... Beginning in 1977, a tremendous amount of work was done, work that built on what was done before and took it even further. A base was built to prepare for negotiations._\n\n\u2014Medig'm Gyamk (Neil Sterritt), Gitksan, 1992, _It Doesn't Matter What the Judge Said_.\n\n**The Master's Tools: The Comprehensive Claims Policy**\n\nBefore a land claim could be considered for negotiation under the federal government's Comprehensive Claims Policy, Aboriginal \"claimants\" had to first \"qualify\" by presenting specific evidence to the federal government of Canada, and to the provincial governments. According to the terms and definitions set out in the Calder decision, to be eligible, a claimant group would have to prove that their ancestors were members of an organized society who had occupied and used specific lands and resources before Europeans arrived; and, that the present claimants continue to occupy these same lands, and to use these same resources today.\n\nAboriginal peoples and their supporters set about doing research to demonstrate that their territories had borders that could be delineated and transformed into lines on maps; and that their villages, their hunting, fishing and gathering spots, and their sacred sites, could be represented by Xs on those same maps. Feasting and potlatching, increasingly transmuted into nouns, appeared on administrative flow charts, representations of governments, complete with bureaucrats and pawns. Continually contested and negotiated processes for resolving disputes were written down and codified into written laws. Oral histories, songs, dances and prayers were documented and edited; tape recorded and word processed. Stories and memories were burned onto film.\n\nUsing the masters' tools to destroy the master's house, reappropriating colonial schemes, converting them into resources for cultural survival, are strategies that oppressed people have honed for centuries. Mapping can be a profoundly powerful political act of naming, or re-naming what is yours, in your own language. Documenting hunting, fishing, gathering and food processing can be a way of seeing what television and schools have tried to render invisible. Graphing structures of government can reveal another potential for feasting systems that have been changing and adapting for thousands of years. Trying to understand the underlying philosophies of laws can help to create alternative visions of justice. Recording the knowledge of elderly people whose embodied histories may die with them is, in the contemporary world, an important part of safeguarding their unique experiences and wisdom for the benefit of all of humankind.\n\nAboriginal peoples in Canada in the 1970s, like Indigenous people around the world, were actively engaged in a decolonization movement that included efforts to liberate themselves politically and culturally from years of being told, and sometimes believing, that they had no right to dreams of self-determination, and no possibility of realizing them. They were digging out from under over 100 years of colonial domination, emerging sometimes from generations of institutionalization in residential schools, and prisons. For the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and other Aboriginal peoples in Canada, having access to resources through the Comprehensive Claims Policy provided the necessary material resources that enabled people to become more deeply engaged in learning or re-learning their languages, their histories, their subsistence technologies and practices; and reflecting on their traditional and contemporary cultures. With the pragmatic determination of their ancestors, they tried to represent and translate themselves through images and languages that \"others\" might understand, without sacrificing their own dignity and integrity. As they sought to interrupt the historical monologue, and to initiate dialogue, these resources helped their voices to be heard, often for the first time, by non-Aboriginal Canadians.\n\nThe financial support provided by the federal government to prepare comprehensive claims submissions, and the implied promise that these claims would be taken seriously and responded to honourably, were integrated into the Aboriginal movement for decolonization: imperfectly and unevenly, and within the confines shaped by power relations, of course. But reappropriated they were.\n\nThe comprehensive claims process moved very slowly through the Office of Native Claims during the 1970s and 1980s. The federal government's guidelines allowed it to negotiate only one claim at a time in each province or territory. In British Columbia, where the provincial government refused to participate on the grounds that no Aboriginal rights ever did or ever would exist in this province, the entire process was stalled. The Nishga claim, supported by the accumulated documentation of over 100 years of constant petitioning and preparing for litigation, had been filed first and lay dormant. All other First Nations knew that their claims would not even be considered until after the Nishga's was settled.\n\nWhile the comprehensive claims process in B.C. was stuck in this logjam in front of the bottleneck built by the provincial and federal governments, the pace at which the exploitation of natural resources was proceeding accelerated, and profits from the forests and the seas flowed into corporate bank accounts unimpeded, except by political resistance. Many people feared that, by the time First Nations got to the table, there would be no resources left to negotiate. Throughout the 1980s, various B.C. First Nations mounted campaigns of civil disobedience. They and their supporters temporarily halted industry and transportation across their lands, and applied\u2014sometimes successfully\u2014to the courts for injunctions to halt development until their claims were heard and adjudicated.\n\n**Title on the Baker Lake Tundra: Lower Peaks than Mexico**\n\n_The exigencies of survival dictated a society composed of small, scattered groups. The band itself had no political hierarchy; that existed only at the camp level...._\n\n_Major decisions all involved the hunt, conducted at the camp level, and were made by the oldest hunters. Neither individuals, camps nor bands claimed or recognized exclusive rights over a particular territory.... There is no evidence or reason to infer that the Inuit's nomadic ways, relationship to the land and social and political order changed from prehistoric (circa 1610) times until their settlement (circa 1950)._\n\n\u2014Justice Mahoney, Federal Court of Canada, 1980, _Reasons for Judgment_ in _The Hamlet of Baker Lake et al v. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development_.\n\nMeanwhile, in northern Canada, a case that would establish important precedents in the area of Aboriginal law was winding its way through the maze of trials and appeals. The \"Baker Lake case\" had been launched in the Federal Court of Canada, Trial Division, in 1979. The Plaintiffs were the Hamlet of Baker Lake, the Baker Lake Hunters and Trappers Association, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, and individual Inuit living, hunting and fishing in the Baker Lake area of the Northwest Territories. The Defendants were the Attorney General of Canada and the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in Right of Her Majesty the Queen, and a consortium of mining companies. The plaintiffs asked the court for an order restraining the government from issuing land use and prospecting permits, granting mining leases and recording mining claims which would allow mining activities in the Baker Lake area, and for an order restraining the defendant mining companies from carrying on such activities there. They also asked for a declaration that the lands comprising the Baker Lake area are subject to the Aboriginal right and title of the Inuit residing in or near that area, to hunt and fish in these territories.\n\nIn their initial pleadings, the government defendants admitted that the Plaintiffs and their predecessors had occupied and used the Baker Lake area since time immemorial. They withdrew this admission during the trial. The mining companies denied that Aboriginal title had existed either before or after Europeans arrived in the region. Both the government and the mining companies argued that _if_ Aboriginal title ever existed it was entirely extinguished by the Royal Charter of 1670 that granted the territory\u2014then known as \"Rupert's Land\"\u2014to Canada, or by subsequent legislation.\n\nJudge Mahoney found the evidence of the Inuit elders about their ways of life and religious beliefs, and that of Superintendent Dent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police \"complementary,\" in so far as both described daily life within small hunting groups. The principal conclusion the judge took from this evidence was that, prior to moving into settlements in the early 1950s, the Baker Lake Inuit were, in his words, \"nomads.\" In his imagination, this meant they had no strong ties to specific, delineated tracts of land, or \"civilized\" concepts of private property.\n\nExpert witnesses Dr. Elmer Harp Jr., Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, and Dr. J. V. Wright, head of the Scientific division of the Archaeological Survey of Canada, particularly impressed Justice Mahoney with their detailed and recognizably \"scientific\" evidence, and with the fact that they agreed with each other, as Mahoney did with them, on the fundamental issue of classification within the familiar social evolutionary framework: the Inuit were nomadic hunters, not settled horticulturists and therefore were low on the scale of evolutionary human development. Justice Mahoney concluded that \"those encampments of two or three families were the units described by the Inuit witnesses, encountered by Inspector Dent in the mid-1950s, by Norton in 1762, and discovered to have existed in the Thule period.\"\n\nJustice Mahoney was less impressed by the expert evidence of Dr. Milton Freeman, whom he described as \"a social anthropologist, which is to say that he is neither an archaeologist nor a linguist; he studies the social behaviour of people in the context of their society or culture.\" On the stand, Dr. Freeman elaborated on the nature of \"band level societies,\" a term he had not used in his affidavit. The Crown and the mining companies objected to his testimony following his statement that the small hunting units described by both Inuit elders and local non-Inuit observers are \"units of a much larger coherent organized society and very much interacting, interdependent, mutually dependent on interaction with other units within the society...this all constitutes a very coherent society which anthropologists have no problem in identifying....\" Freeman tried to explain that, while the Baker Lake Inuit may have hunted and camped in small family groupings during particular seasons, at other times they joined together with similar bands in large gatherings for the purposes of trade and exchange, ceremony, ritual, resolution of disputes, organization of government, and documentation of significant historical developments through oral history. The Baker Lake Inuit live sometimes in small bands; and at other times, in larger groupings. Freeman challenged simplistic classifications that rule out those concrete aspects of Indigenous life which do not fit neatly into abstract European theoretical categories.\n\nMahoney dismissed Freeman's evidence on a technical point: Rule 482 of the Rules of Evidence requires that an expert witness' testimony be laid out in an affidavit first, in order for the opposing lawyers to have adequate opportunity to review the expert opinion report and prepare for cross examination. Freeman had stated in his affidavit that he would discuss the relationship between the Inuit and their environment. When Freeman described Inuit _culture_ , Mahoney ruled that \"this was not what was promised\" in the affidavit, apparently understanding \"environment\" to include only the physical or natural landscape, but excluding human social, political and economic organization. Dr. Freeman was engaging in \"persuasive arguments\" on these issues, unbecoming to a scientist, the judge said.\n\nMahoney was similarly unimpressed by Dr. Peter Usher's evidence. Usher holds a Ph.D. in Geography. Quoting the _Shorter Oxford Dictionary_ definition of geography as the \"science that describes the earth's surface, its form and physical features, its natural and political divisions, its climates, productions etc.,\" Mahoney concluded that Dr. Usher's evidence didn't fall within his field of expertise. Mahoney wrote: \"Dr. Usher's evidence had more the ring of a convinced advocate than a dispassionate professional.... Neither his formal training as a geographer nor his experience in and with the Arctic and Inuit qualify him to form opinions on political, sociological, behavioural, psychological and nutritional matters admissible as expert evidence in a court of law.\"\n\nMore experts testified. Wildlife biologists, ethnologists, and experts on animal behaviour were called to the stand by both parties. Those called by the plaintiffs supported the Inuit hunters' claims that the caribou herds were declining and being driven away by mining activities. Those called by the government and mining companies discounted the Inuits' evidence, saying their knowledge reflected only their simple lived experiences and was therefore particular and limited, and should not be taken as seriously as the theories of \"scientific experts.\" These non-Inuit experts claimed to base their knowledge on scientific surveys that reached far beyond the immediate area of Baker Lake, and produced results that could be generalized and tested against universal, law-like theories. They claimed the causes of the caribou herds' decline were multiple and complex.\n\nJustice Mahoney ruled that \"on the balance of probabilities...activities associated with mining exploration are not a significant factor in the caribou population decline.\" In summary, Mahoney, like judges before and after him, preferred to rely on his own \"common sense\" interpretation of Native testimony, supported by carefully chosen \"factual\" confirmation by \"ordinary white people,\" and professionals selectively labelled \"scientists\" by a judge. Testimony by well educated and well respected\u2014by the criteria of western scholarship\u2014scholars of \"softer sciences\" like anthropology or social geography, was rejected.\n\nAssessed from another perspective, it could be argued that evidence that supported the representation of Baker Lake Inuit societies as \"high enough\" on the scale of social development set by the _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ test to have had \"property usages and conceptions that could be continued under the British regime,\" was rejected in favour of images of small bands of nomads lacking political or social cohesion whom the same judgment had described as \"so low on the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or legal ideas of civilized society.\" Expert witnesses whose testimony supported the former were dismissed as unprofessional \"advocates\" of Aboriginal political causes, while those whose interpretation supported the latter where respected as \"scholarly experts.\" This evaluation was made by the court, and not by the standards of their respective professions.\n\nOn the legal source of Inuit Aboriginal title, Justice Mahoney set out a four-point test which he said the plaintiffs must prove to establish an Aboriginal title cognizable in common law:\n\n(1) That they and their ancestors were members of an organized society.\n\n(2) That the organized society occupied the specific territory over which they assert the Aboriginal title.\n\n(3) That the occupation was to the exclusion of other organized societies.\n\n(4) That the occupation was an established fact at the time sovereignty was asserted by England.\n\nThe first criteria was drawn directly from the test in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_. Mahoney enforced this by referring as well to Haldane's decision in _Amodu Tijani v. Nigeria_ about acknowledging differences between Indigenous property systems. Accordingly, Mahoney argued that different property regimes represented different stages of social evolutionary development. The Baker Lake Inuit passed Mahoney's test, but only just. Unlike the Nishga, who the Supreme Court of Canada found had \"developed their cultures to higher peaks\" than any other Indigenous peoples north of Mexico, Mahoney classified the Baker Lake Inuit as less advanced on the evolutionary scale. Mahoney wrote: \"The fact is that the aboriginal Inuit had an organized society. It was not a society with very elaborate institutions but it was a society organized to exploit the resources available on the barrens and essential to sustain human life there. That was about all they could do: hunt and fish and survive.\"\n\nOn the question of extinguishment, Mahoney ruled that neither the Royal Charter of the Hudson's Bay Company, nor admission of Rupert's Land into Canadian confederation had extinguished the common law Aboriginal title the Inuit held. Neither, he found, had legislation subsequent to 1870 had the effect of extinguishment. However, the unextinguished rights that Mahoney \"found\" were extremely limited. He argued that Aboriginal title could not have been proprietary because then the Crown _would_ have formally extinguished it. His conclusion, in summary, was that the plaintiffs were entitled to a declaration that they have an Aboriginal right only to hunt and fish on the lands in question. \"The aboriginal right asserted here encompasses only the right to hunt and fish as their ancestors did,\" Judge Mahoney wrote.\n\nWhen the _Calder_ case went to court in 1969 the trial took four days. No fully articulated \"legal test\" existed at the time and judges saw the question of Aboriginal title as a factual matter to be determined on the basis of empirical evidence of actual historic occupation and use of ancestral lands. Such a test requires minimal evidentiary support, is relatively uncomplicated, and accessible to common sense reasoning and understanding. The straightforward arguments and the evidence required to prove historical use and occupation, in its simplicity, was also difficult for the Crown to dispute. However, only Aboriginal peoples, and not non-Aboriginals, are required to prove long term use and occupation, rather than pre-existing ownership and historical title, to establish legal ownership of land. And, the use and occupancy test suffered from being based on the demand that Aboriginal people demonstrate how their property systems were similar enough to be considered equal to British ones.\n\nThis is another double bind: if Aboriginal people emphasize the _similarities_ between their land tenure systems and British ones, the courts may look more favourably on their claims because they appear familiar, but then the Aboriginal litigants sacrifice the opportunity to demonstrate the cultural uniqueness and ongoing validity of their own relationships to land, and surrender to the colonizer's language and legal concepts. If, on the other hand, Aboriginal peoples emphasize the _differences_ between their relationships to land and those of British-derived cultures, they risk them being classified as too different to be understood as equal. Heads, the Crown wins. Tails, Indians lose.\n\nJustice Mahoney's 1980 decision in _The Hamlet of Baker Lake v. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development_ , and his articulation of a precise, but complex, legal test for Aboriginal plaintiffs to meet, therefore marks an important turning point in this story: the recognition, and construction, of complexity around the legal Aboriginal title issue. The intricacies of diverse Indigenous relationships to land are complex and interesting. However, the historical\/legal questions at stake remained the same: were Aboriginal peoples here when Europeans arrived? Did they live in organized societies with property laws? Were their rights lawfully extinguished according to British, Aboriginal or International law?\n\nThe Baker Lake test set the terms of legal and anthropological research questions for a decade to come. The important knowledge required to understand and participate in the legal struggle for recognition of Aboriginal title and rights increasingly became the task of specialists like lawyers, consultants, Aboriginal Elders and a small coterie of First Nations leaders. Increasingly, ordinary people, Aboriginal and not, were ushered out of decision-making roles and into fund-raising and public education in support of litigation.\n\n**The Evolution of the Dedicated White People Band at Bear Island**\n\n_To conclude, in 1763, George III, with the advice of his United Kingdom Ministers, did not grant ownership of vast tracts of land to Indian bands...when a war had just been fought to acquire those lands...._\n\n_At that time, Europeans did not consider Indians to be equal to themselves and it is inconceivable that the King would have made such vast grants to undefined bands, thus restricting his European subjects from occupying these lands in the future except at great expense._\n\n\u2014Justice Steele, Supreme Court of Ontario, 1989, _Reasons for Judgment_ , in _Attorney-General of Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation et al_.\n\nIn the 1989 case of _The Attorney-General for the Province of Ontario_ (the plaintiffs) vs. _the Bear Island Foundation and Gary Potts, William Twain and Maurice McKenzie Jr. on behalf of themselves and on behalf of all other members of the Teme-agama Anishnabay, and the Temagami Band of Indians_ (the defendants),  referred to as \"the Bear Island case,\" the Crown claimed unencumbered title to 4000 square miles of land in Northern Ontario. The defendants, _Bear Island et al_ , argued that Crown title was burdened by Aboriginal title recognized by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and by unfulfilled obligations under the Robinson-Huron Treaty signed in 1860. The Crown wanted the court to relieve them of this burden so that development could proceed unencumbered. The Bear Island trial remains the longest recorded civil hearing in Ontario history, lasting for 120 days.\n\nLike Judge Mahoney, Justice Steele was not impressed by the expert witnesses supplied by the Bear Island defendants, calling them \"a small, dedicated and well meaning group of white people...[who]...in order to meet the aspirations of the current Indian defendants has pieced together a history from written documents, archaeology and analogy to other bands, and then added to that history a study of physical features and other times, together with limited pieces of oral tradition.\"\n\nJustice Steele ruled that the evidence presented did not, to his satisfaction, prove that the Teme-agama Anishnabay were members of an organized society in 1763. He went on to conclude that, since neither the French nor the English considered Indians as equal to Europeans in the eighteenth century, the Crown's representatives who drafted and signed the written agreement could not have intended for the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to recognize Aboriginal title as the basis of any legitimate legal or political rights.\n\nThe Bear Island case illustrates an example of a conservative, archaic approach to the interpretation of history in the context of Aboriginal rights litigation. During the 1970s and 1980s, Canadian courts wrestled with the problem of how to interpret history in the context of Aboriginal rights litigation. The results varied, and were often contradictory. In 1973 when the decision in the _Calder_ case was arrived at, Justice Hall had commented that historical documents \"must be approached in the light of present-day research and knowledge disregarding ancient concepts formulated when understanding of the customs and culture of our original people was rudimentary and incomplete and when they were thought to be wholly without cohesion, laws or culture, in effect a subhuman species.\" Similarly, in 1977 in the case of _Kruger and Manuel v. The Queen_ , then Chief Justice Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada argued that traditional legal approaches may not be adequate to the task at hand since \"claims to aboriginal title are woven with history, legend, politics and moral obligations.\" The idea that judges must be conscious of historical context when interpreting legal precedents, was offered again in 1985 in the _Simon v. R._ case, when the Supreme Court of Canada overruled a decision by Justice Patterson in _R. v. Syliboy_ made in 1929. In that case, Patterson had found that a particular agreement between the Crown and the Micmac in 1752 was not a treaty representing the \"unconstrained Act of independent powers,\" but rather an agreement \"between a civilized power and savages.\" The 1985 Supreme Court of Canada decision stated that \"It should be noted that the language used by Patterson J... reflects the biases and prejudices of another era in our history. Such language is no longer acceptable in Canadian law, and, indeed, is inconsistent with a growing sensitivity to native rights in Canada.\"\n\nHowever, in 1985, the very same year that Chief Justice Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada issued this caution, in the Supreme Court of Ontario, Justice Steele handed down his decision in the Bear Island case using language and reasoning that resembled Patterson's 1929 ruling in both theory and substance. On appeal, in 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Steele's finding that the Teme-agama Anishnabay had \"failed to prove that their ancestors were an organized band level society in 1763.\" However, they simultaneously ruled that they were unable to find any \"palpable and overriding error\" in Steele's findings of facts, although they did not necessarily agree \"with all the legal findings based on those facts.\"\n\nLegal scholar Joel Fortune asked the obvious question: \"How is it possible to distinguish Steele J.'s 'correct' determination of the facts from his 'incorrect' finding that the Teme-amaga Anishnabay did not constitute an organized society in 1763?\" Fortune answered his own question by concluding that the Supreme Court of Canada's Bear Island decision is an illustration of \"the judicial reluctance to acknowledge openly that a legal outcome may rest on a question of historical interpretation.\"\n\nThe Bear Island judgment refashioned the Baker Lake test into a more complex three-part test, adding requirements for proof of the nature of Aboriginal rights enjoyed prior to the relevant date, as well as evidence of a system of land-holding and a system of social rules and customs. And, the Bear Island test added, this continuity of exclusive occupation must be evident up to the date of commencement of the court action. Therefore, the Bear Island claimants had to prove exclusive occupation from the eighteenth century until the time they started their claims action in the late twentieth century. This set a precedent whereby all Aboriginal claimants could be asked to show that they had excluded not only other Indigenous peoples from their territories from the time of European contact until the filing of their writ in a contemporary court, but that they had also kept well-armed European explorers, miners, traders, settlers and police off their lands.\n\nIn a practice that speaks to the uniquely autocratic prerogative of law, the legal tests for Aboriginal rights have been constructed and\/or elaborated upon during the course of trials, and articulated by judges _post hoc_ in reasons for judgment, often in response to evidence and testimony presented for the first time in the particular trial being judged. Thus, claimants enter into a trial prepared to meet a test enunciated in a previous case, and find their arguments and evidence evaluated on the basis of criteria that emerge _in situ_. These criteria, in turn, influence the arguments lawyers advance and the kinds of evidence and expert witnesses they bring forward to support their arguments in a subsequent case. The tests have, therefore, shaped the research and testimony sought from anthropologists, archaeologists and other expert witnesses employed in the litigation process.\n\nThe evidentiary requirements for legal proof of Aboriginal title have correspondingly expanded exponentially, and, with them, the role and importance of anthropologists and other expert witnesses. The \"land use and occupancy\" studies that were previously required to establish long term, prior occupancy, now had to be supplemented by research into cosmology, language, spirituality, governance, law, family life, and world views. The increase in volume and complexity of evidence was generated by the court's responses to these cases, and the political context shaping both. Anthropologist Peter Elias concluded that \"the tests set out by Mr. Justice Steele in Bear Island Foundation...may have crossed the line of social science comprehension...if the tests are elaborated much further, it won't be possible to meet them.\"\n\n**The Master's House: The Repatriation of the Canadian Constitution**\n\n_When the Constitutional process came along, in 1981 and 1982, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en asked themselves and talked to the elders and wondered: 'Can we create the political will on the part of the politicians in British Columbia and in the federal government to negotiate?'..._\n\n_We have been consistent. You could see it based on the things that the elders were saying to the McKenna-McBride Commission between 1912 and 1913 and the points they were making when Indian reserves were being set up in the 1890s. We read and knew what they were saying, and there were elders in the 1970s and 1980s who were repeating those same comments and questions. They all wanted to resolve 'the land question'. They wanted recognition of who and what they were, and they wanted to have some dignity in their own land._ _The constitutional process provided an opportunity....So we entered that process. It didn't take long, however, to find out we were wasting our time in the constitutional process. It was clear nothing was likely to happen, because there was no political will or understanding at the time for anything substantial to happen._\n\n_The negotiation process wasn't available to us\u2014it just wasn't working._\n\n\u2014Medig'm Gyamk (Neil Sterritt), 1992, _It Doesn't Matter What the Judge Said_.\n\nAnother arena in which Aboriginal political struggles took place during the 1980s was created by the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution from Britain to Canada. As part of this process, Aboriginal peoples sought to have recognition of their inherent Aboriginal title and rights entrenched and given constitutional protection. Some British Columbia Indians, fearing that repatriation would jeopardize what they considered their direct relationship with the British Crown, recognized by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, mounted an international campaign to postpone repatriation of the Constitution until Aboriginal issues were dealt with. They were not successful in halting the repatriation process, but did succeed in wresting a commitment from the federal and provincial governments to include Aboriginal representatives in formal discussions concerning the formulation of the new _Constitution Act_. Negotiations took place during a series of five First Ministers' Conferences held between 1983 and 1987, and resulted in the Meech Lake Accord that, critics charged, failed to adequately protect the rights of Aboriginal peoples, Qu\u00e9becois and women.\n\nThe limited victory won by Aboriginal peoples in the Constitution debates was represented by Section 35(1) of the _Constitution Act, 1982_ which states: \"The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.\" This clause is described as an \"empty box\" which litigation and further negotiations must fill. In other words, it was left to the courts and to negotiations between federal, provincial and Aboriginal representatives to define what these \"already existing\" Aboriginal rights were: what is the content of these rights? What do they actually mean, to whom, in everyday life? Are these rights \"inherent,\" arising from Aboriginal peoples' having been the prior occupants and rulers of the land now known as Canada; or are they \"delegated,\" their legal and political source relying on recognition by the Crown? What would constitute legitimate extinguishment of Aboriginal title and rights: did such extinguishment have to be explicit, or could it be implicitly inferred? Was evidence of Aboriginal consent required to make extinguishment legal?\n\nThe case of _R. v. Sparrow,_ launched in British Columbia in 1984, and finally ruled on by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1990, was the first to begin filling Section 35(1) of the _Constitution Act_ , _1987_ 's \"empty box.\"\n\n**Testing, Testing: From \"Use and Occupancy\" to \"Culture\" in the Sparrow Decision**\n\n_In the Court's view, the reason for concluding that the Musqueam Nation enjoys a right to fish lies not in the presence of state action conferring such a right, but instead arises from the fact that fishing is integral to Musqueam self-identity and self-preservation.... The nature and content of an aboriginal right is determined by asking what the organized aboriginal society regarded as \"an integral part of their distinctive culture\"....To be so regarded those practices must have been integral to the distinctive culture of the above society from which they are said to have arisen._\n\n_...The content of aboriginal rights thus is to be determined not by reference to whether executive or legislative action conferred such a right on the people in question, but rather by reference to that which is essential to or inherent in the unique relations that native people have with nature, each other, and other communities._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Dickson, Supreme Court of Canada, 1990, _Reasons for Judgment_ , in _R. v. Sparrow_.\n\nThe next, and final, important case that preceded _Delgamuukw v. R._ , was _R. v. Sparrow_. It began in the same year, 1984, that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en filed their Statement of Claim. On May 25, 1984, Reginald Sparrow, a member of the Musqueam band, was charged with fishing for salmon using a drift net that was longer than allowed by the Department of Fisheries-issued permit for Indian food fishing. Sparrow defended himself by saying he was practising an \"existing Aboriginal right\" protected under Section 35(1) of the _Constitution Act, 1982_. Sparrow was first found guilty in the Provincial Court of British Columbia. When the case was appealed to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, the appellate court agreed that Sparrow's Aboriginal right to fish had not been extinguished prior to 1982, but ruled that the mesh size regulations of the Department of Fisheries were still applicable. At issue when the appeal of the case went forward to the Supreme Court of Canada was whether the Musqueam First Nation could assert an Aboriginal right to fish that would override federal regulations which required a fishing permit and restricted the use of a drift net to a maximum length of 25 fathoms. The Musqueam asserted that their right to fish was an \"existing aboriginal right...recognized and affirmed by s. 35(1) of the _Constitution Act, 1982_ , and therefore paramount over federal law.\" To be regulated in the exercise of their right by Department of Fisheries and Oceans regulations was inappropriate and unconstitutional, they claimed.\n\nThe Supreme Court of Canada agreed with the Musqueam, and in their decision handed down on May 31, 1990 called for \"a generous, liberal and purposive interpretation of s. 35(1).\" They found first that Aboriginal rights that exist in common law are recognized and affirmed by s. 35(1) of the Canadian Constitution that is paramount over all other laws. The Constitution, in other words, is the supreme law of the land. As a result, laws that interfere with the exercise of constitutionally-protected Aboriginal rights must conform to constitutional standards of justification. For example, where a resource, like fish, is scarce, Aboriginal rights should take precedence over commercial and sports interests and be limited only by the requirements of conservation of the resource.\n\nThe _Sparrow_ decision reiterated that the Crown must show a clear, plain and explicit intention to extinguish Aboriginal title, and that laws of general application applied to Indians should not be construed as having effected \"implicit extinguishment.\" It is a common legal strategy in Aboriginal title litigation for lawyers for all parties to present judges with a number of possible interpretations: a kind of prioritized \"wish list\" of rulings their clients could live with. These various alternative arguments need not be logically consistent, and often begin from radically different premises. The Province of British Columbia's legal argument in support of \"implicit extinguishment\" constitutes such an alternative, or \"fall back\" position. Should a judge find that Aboriginal title and rights _did_ exist at the time the British arrived, and therefore that some form of extinguishment of Aboriginal title _was_ required, the Province of B.C. puts forward their argument that colonial governments in British Columbia have consistently demonstrated their _implicit_ intention to extinguish Aboriginal title. To support this claim, the Crown presents evidence from the legal and historical record that documents how provincial courts and governments have denied and ignored First Nations' assertions of Aboriginal title since 1871. They argue, for example, that the fact that provincial wildlife acts were legislated without regard to Aboriginal rights constitutes support for the Crown's claim that Aboriginal rights were implicitly extinguished. This argument is an example of a common form of legal reasoning in which the law continually refers back to itself for justification and confirmation: contemporary irrationality and immorality is justified by its historic depth and breadth, and strengthened each time it is repeated.\n\nThese two positions\u2014 _implicit extinguishment_ versus _explicit extinguishment_ \u2014 has represented the boundaries and limitations of the Crown's legal position, and the Canadian government's political position, in relation to Aboriginal peoples. A third possibility, that Crown and Aboriginal titles might _co-exist_ , is cast outside of this paradigm.\n\nThe Supreme Court, in _Sparrow,_ affirmed the findings in _Guerin_ in relation to the Crown's fiduciary obligations and noted that the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown should be \"trust-like\" rather than \"adversarial.\" Native peoples do exist in a hierarchical relationship with the Crown, but this should be tempered by the Crown's fiduciary obligation to act as protector of Aboriginal people. Further, adequate consultation with Aboriginal peoples was clearly a pre-condition in determining whether laws that infringe on Aboriginal rights were constitutional. This interpretation of \"existing Aboriginal rights\" specifically allowed that the practice of such rights should be reasonably seen as necessarily evolving over time: \"a modernized form of such a practice would be no less an aboriginal right.\" That is, the fact that Reginald Sparrow now fished with high-tech gear rather than the implements his ancestors may have used two hundred years ago was not to be construed as evidence of his \"assimilation\" into Canadian society, or the transformation of his fishing practices into \"non-Aboriginal\" activities.\n\nThe Supreme Court of Canada's ruling in _Sparrow_ acknowledged reliance on historical interpretation and expert evidence that contested interpretations presented by the Crown. The judges were particularly impressed by the testimony of anthropologist Dr. Wayne Suttles. The _Reasons for Judgment_ in _R. v. Sparrow_ state that \"the anthropological evidence relied on to establish the existence of the right suggests that, for the Musqueam, the salmon fishery has always constituted an integral part of their distinctive culture. Its significant role involved not only consumption for subsistence purposes, but also consumption of salmon on ceremonial and social occasions. The Musqueam have always fished for reasons connected with their cultural and physical survival.\"\n\nOn the central question of Aboriginal title, the _Sparrow_ decision remained adamant on the fundamental, foundational issue. It stated: \"It is worth recalling that while British policy toward the native population was based on respect for their right to occupy their traditional lands, a proposition to which the Royal Proclamation of 1763 bears witness, there was from the outset never any doubt that sovereign and legislative power, and indeed the underlying title, to such lands vested in the Crown.\"\n\nThe Supreme Court of Canada judges were satisfied that the Musqueam had met all the requirements set out in the Bear Island test articulated by Justice Steele in 1985. In reconfiguring the legal test for Aboriginal title to require that an Aboriginal right be \"integral to the distinctive culture\" of the people in order to be legally recognized, the Supreme Court's ruling in the _Sparrow_ case reflected emerging concerns at the forefront of western political culture as the twentieth century neared its end. \"The category of 'culture' once and still endlessly debated by critics and ethnographers in mostly sequestered precincts,\" writes cultural critic Stanley Aronowitz, \"has, over the past decade, become a major political issue.... The 1970s and 1980s were marked by the rise of 'new' cultural and political identities\u2014gender, racial, sexual, national and ethnic\u2014that manifested themselves as challenges to established powers,\" he concludes. In Canada, public political debate during the 1970s and 1980s was dominated by campaigns, referenda and hysteria about Canadian unity and the possibility of Quebec separating and forming a sovereign nation state. \"Sovereigntists\" argued that the Qu\u00e9becois constitute what came to be called a \"distinct society.\" Debates about whether this distinction should be defined on the basis of territory, language, or culture, raged. Questions about Aboriginal sovereignty or rights, and what could constitute distinctly Aboriginal cultures, were inevitably linked to, and often submerged by, the conflict between the two self-described \"Founding Nations\" as they sought to discover each other.\n\nFrom a focus on materialist conceptions of technology and economic organization as the important determinants of social organization, and reflected in legal tests for Aboriginal title based in historic use and occupancy, western intellectual debates increasingly turned to a growing fascination with more idealist issues like spiritual beliefs, ceremony, ritual, language and the arts as the defining elements of people's political and social relationships with each other. \"Culture\" had become the principle marker of the difference between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada. It remained now for the law to define and codify \"culture.\"\n\n\"A characteristic of law,\" writes French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, \"is its compulsion to capture and codify all that enters its field.\" Visions, ideas, \"cultures,\" and images of possible ways of being that dare to challenge the law are like butterflies who have flown into a collector's laboratory where they have been trapped and drained of life. Their wings pinned down and their bodies stretched out for maximum surveillance; they are encased in glass forever. A tag classifies and labels them, defining and identifying their place in the cosmos, as it has always been and always must be, forever fixed. The prospect of the Supreme Court of Canada determining what is and what is not \"Aboriginal culture\" is foreboding indeed.\n\n**Ping Pong**\n\n_You have to go back to the mid-70s and the early 80s to understand why we did what we did. Because the provincial government refused to negotiate, and they said it, at least once a year, if not more often._\n\n\u2014Medig'm Gyamk (Neil Sterritt), 1992, _It Doesn't Matter What the Judge Said_.\n\nSeveral significant victories had been won by Aboriginal peoples in court during the 1980s, and the Supreme Court of Canada headed by Chief Justice Brian Dickson had shown itself to be relatively sympathetic to Aboriginal claims. Dickson had articulated the principle that interpretations of treaties, statutes, and the Constitution itself should be favourable towards Aboriginal peoples, and that, in judicial dealings with First Nations, the courts should endeavour to uphold \"the honour of the Crown.\" The _Guerin_ case in 1984 had resulted in a ruling that the Crown was bound by a legally enforceable fiduciary obligation to manage Aboriginal assets in the best interests of Aboriginal peoples, rather than in favour of non-Aboriginal public or private interests as the historical practice\u2014illustrated by this case\u2014had been. Dickson's court had insisted that Aboriginal or treaty rights could only be extinguished by governments expressing their intention to do so in \"clear and plain language,\" and that colonial governments simply superimposing their law and government on Aboriginal peoples without their consent did not constitute legal extinguishment of pre-existing Aboriginal rights. If such unextinguished rights were shown to exist, so the thinking in the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1980s went, then interference with those rights by others\u2014like provincial governments\u2014would have to meet certain tests before it could be justified.\n\nWhen the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en filed their Statement of Claim initiating _Delgamuukw v. R._ in 1984, the federal comprehensive claims policy, strangling itself and everyone involved in it in red tape, had almost ground to a halt across the country. The provincial government of British Columbia still refused to recognize the existence of First Nations, or to join in any negotiations on comprehensive claims with the federal government. The Constitution talks were at a standstill regarding the inclusion of clauses on Aboriginal rights. By the time the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en trial began in 1987, litigation appeared as the only viable option left for First Nations in British Columbia to seek recognition and respect for their right to continue to exist as distinct peoples that they had been seeking for over 100 years.\n\n* * *\n\n. Medig'm Gyamk 1992: 303.\n\n. Lorde 1984.\n\n. Coolichan 1985.\n\n. Tennant 1990(b).\n\n. _Hamlet of Baker Lake et al v. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development et al_ [1980] 5 WWR 193, 50 CCC (2d) 377 (FCTD).\n\n. Ibid., 202.\n\n. Ibid., 208.\n\n. Ibid., 213.\n\n. Ibid., 211.\n\n. Ibid., 212.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., 214.\n\n. Ibid., 210.\n\n. In _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ (1919) A.C. 211.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. _Hamlet of Baker Lake et al v. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development et al_ [1980] 5 WWR 193, 50 CCC (2d) 377 (FCTD), 219.\n\n. Ibid., 59-64.\n\n. Henderson W. B. 1991: 9-10.\n\n. Elias 1993.\n\n. _A.G. Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation_ [1985], 49 O.R. (2d) 353, 15 D.L.R. (4th 321 (Ont. H.C.); _A.G. Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation_ [1989] 68 O.R. (2d) 394, 38 D.L.R. (4th) 117 (Ont.C.A.); _A.G. Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation_ [1991], 83 D.L.R. (4th), 381.\n\n. Bray and Thompson 1990; Clark 1990.\n\n. Steele, J. (1985) _Reasons for Judgment_ , in _A.G. Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation_ [1985], 49 O.R. (2d) 353, 15 D.L.R. (4th 321 (Ont. H.C.), 15.\n\n. Ibid., 21.\n\n. _Kruger and Manual v. The Queen_ [1977] 4 WWR 300, [1978] 1 SCR 104, 75 DLR (3d) 434, 14 NR 495, 34 CCC (2d), 377.\n\n. Dickson, C.J., (1977) _Reasons for Judgment_ , in _Kruger and Manual v. The Queen_ , 377.\n\n. _Simon v. R_. (1985), 24 D.L.R. (4th), 390.\n\n. The use of \"J\" after a judge's name is a legal convention representing the title \"Justice,\" i.e. writing \"Patterson J.\" has the same meaning as the title \"Justice Patterson.\"\n\n. Dickson, C.J. (1985) _Reasons for Judgment_ , in _Simon v. R._ , 400.\n\n. _A.G. Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation_ [1991], 83 D.L.R. (4th), 381.\n\n. Fortune 1993: 87-88.\n\n. _post hoc_ is defined in _Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary_ (1981) as \"the fallacy of arguing from temporal sequence to a causal relation,\" 891. Simply put, rationalizing an action after the fact.\n\n. Elias 1993: 270.\n\n. Medig'm Gyamk 1992: 303.\n\n. For thorough discussions of Aboriginal issues and the Constitutional debates see Asch 1984. See Hawkes 1989 for discussion of the negotiation process. See Sanders 1983(a) for a cogent analysis of the legal issues involved. See Schwartz 1986 for a critique of Aboriginal positions and strategies.\n\n. _R. v. Sparrow_ (1990), 70 D.L.R. (4th), 401-402.\n\n. _R. v. Sparrow_ (1990), 70 D.L.R. (4th), 430.\n\n. \"The common law doctrine of Aboriginal rights holds that the Crown's acquisition of North American territories was governed by a principle of continuity whereby the property rights, customary laws, and governmental institutions of the native people were presumed to survive, so far as this result was compatible with the Crown's ultimate title, and subject to lawful dispositions to the contrary.\" Slattery 1985:118.\n\n. _R. v. Sparrow_ (1990), 70 D.L.R. (4th), 417.\n\n. _R. v. Sparrow_ (1990), 70 D.L.R. (4th), 402.\n\n. _R. v. Sparrow_ (1990), 70 D.L.R. (4th), 404.\n\n. Aronowitz 1993: 18.\n\n. Bourdieu 1987: 895.\n\n. Medig'm Gyamk 1992: 303.\n\n. Sanders 1992.\n**P ART IV:**\n\n**E CCE SIGNUM**\n\n**(B EHOLD THE PROOF)**\n**Chapter 8: Delgamuukw versus The Queen**\n\n_Law is, of course, only one domain in which a culture may reveal itself._ _But like politics, marriage, and exchange, it is an arena in which people must act, and in doing so they must draw on their assumptions, connections, and beliefs to make their acts effective and comprehensible...._ _Like a single ritual, a network of exchange, or a contest for political leadership, one cannot hope to see all of a society through such a limited focus. But such an example can show us what it means to speak of law as culture and to trace out some of the implications this approach may have to offer...The world of formal courts offers a stage\u2014as intense as ritual, as demonstrative as war\u2014through which a society reveals itself to its own people as much as to the outside world._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Lawrence Rosen, 1989, _Islamic Law and the Logic of Consequences_.\n\n**All the World's a Stage...**\n\nTrials have long served as ideal settings for writers of drama, satire and farce. The _Delgamuukw_ trial could well be seen as living theatre at its best. 'Actors' representing all the key social categories of players in British Columbia history and contemporary life were there. The Aboriginal peoples, the Crown lawyers, the expert witnesses, and the Judge offered answers to the central question that has been in dispute in the Canadian west for two centuries: who owns the land? The Crown's legal representatives defended the \"founding myth of White British Columbia,\" and their expert witnesses brought forward evidence unencumbered by the inclusion of Aboriginal or other critical voices. The Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's lawyers, well known for their work in labour, women's, prisoners' and human rights movements, represented \"the new British Columbians,\" who do not see themselves in the original European settlers' official founding myths. The non-Aboriginal expert witnesses called by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en were part of a new generation of academics who came of age during the era of decolonization, and whose work was influenced by these experiences and intellectual discourses. For four years they faced each other and argued about who they were, where they came from, where they belonged, and how their children could live together in this geographical space called British Columbia, Canada. While their debates focused on the past, the real struggle was about the future: what would it look like, and who would shape it?\n\nThe narrative I recount in the following chapters chronicles the trial of _Delgamuukw v. R_. as it unfolded. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, as the plaintiffs, presented their case first. The onus was on them to \"prove\" their claims. The Crown, as defendants, had principally to rebut the plaintiff's case, and only secondarily to demonstrate the merits of their counter-claim. For four years witnesses for both the plaintiffs and the defendants testified on behalf of one side, and were cross-examined by lawyers for the other. Their arguments and counter arguments revealed not only their respective stances on the issues before Chief Justice McEachern in this case, but also their visions of the past and aspirations for the future.\n\n**Do Aboriginal People Really Exist?**\n\n_When they ask us what we feel our basis is in regard to our title, I don't think that there is any question. The title is very clear. The ownership has never changed. It is only the definition in the law in regard to ownership that has changed. When you're talking about justification and why we are and what we are, you're talking about history. It's amazing; when we become educated within your system, we're told that history is very important. Yet when you look at the history of Canada, where are we as aboriginal people? We're not included in this history. Yet our history is very rich._\n\n\u2014Miluulak (Alice Jeffrey), Gitksan Hereditary Chief, 1992, _Remove Not the Landmark_.\n\n_Like I said, our culture was on trial. We were told we didn't exist...._ _Ownership and jurisdiction is not something new for us. We have practised that. It is thousands of years old. We only want recognition...._ _We are right here before your very eyes._\n\n\u2014Yagalahl (Dora Wilson), Member, Gitksan-Wet'suwet'en Litigation Team, 1992, _It Will Always Be The Truth_.\n\nThe questions facing Chief Justice McEachern in the _Delgamuukw_ case were the same ones every judge hearing an Aboriginal title and\/or rights case in the British Empire-cum-Commonwealth, from the eighteenth century to the present, had addressed. They were:\n\n(1) Did the Indigenous peoples in question own and manage their lands and resources before Europeans arrived?\n\n(2) If so, have those property rights been extinguished by law at some time in history, or have they continued into the present?\n\n(3) If unextinguished Aboriginal rights continue to exist, what are they?\n\n(4) If unextinguished Aboriginal rights continue to exist, how can they be lawfully extinguished and\/or justifiably contravened?\n\nFundamental moral, philosophical and political beliefs underlie the answer to the initial question: were the ancestors of contemporary Aboriginal peoples in Canada members of an organized society at the time Europeans first made contact with them?\n\nLike many questions in law, if this is read literally, it is an oxymoron: a society, by definition, is organized. What could an unorganized society be? To understand what is really being asked, we have to step outside literal interpretations and common sense and enter into the historically and culturally specific universe of meaning that is British and Canadian colonial law. Just like anthropologists seeking to understand a foreign culture, we must try to interpret the question from within this perspective and seek to understand the culture of law from the inside.\n\nAn \"organized society,\" according the rules of \"law's culture,\" qualifies as such if it meets certain criteria specified by legal precedents, which themselves rely on various social theories for support and validation. The precedent that the first question in the legal test for Aboriginal rights refers to is Lord Sumner's 1919 decision in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_. The empirical information that an answer to this first question requires is knowledge of the ways particular Aboriginal peoples lived before contact with Europeans: the ways they managed their properties and resources; the ways they gathered, processed, stored and distributed food; the ways they celebrated births, and mourned deaths; the ways they marked marriages and divorces; the ways they traded and socialized with their neighbours, maintained social order, and worshipped their gods. Stepping back outside of \"law's culture,\" the question appears as: will a British, or Canadian, court recognize these ways of life as those they have already defined as being representative of what they call \"an organized society?\" How will the law answer the questions it has posed for itself, by the criteria it has established for itself?\n\nThe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en argued that they were here, living in a society that was by definition, description, and documentation, organized. In _Delgamuukw v. R_., the provincial government of British Columbia argued for the application of Lord Sumner's test and the _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ precedent, claiming that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en were so \"low on the scale of social organization\" that British Columbia was justified in declaring the territory in question _terra nullius_ in the early nineteenth century.\n\nThe second question in the legal test for Aboriginal rights: \"Did the ancestors of the Aboriginal claimants occupy a specific territory?\" arises from the first. Only an organized society can occupy a specific territory. The third and fourth questions: \"Did they exclude other organized societies?\" and \"Was occupation established at the time British sovereignty was established?\" arise from the second. To answer these questions, evidence has to be produced that shows that Aboriginal peoples recognized identifiable borders that marked the lines between their territory and that of others. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en tried to demonstrate that both they and their neighbours knew the boundaries of their respective territories; although, like neighbours everywhere, they sometimes argued about exactly where lines should be drawn. The Crown argued that Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia were nomadic wanderers who lacked abstract concepts of property.\n\nIn the _Calder_ case nearly twenty years earlier, the Nishga had asked the court only for a declaration that \"...aboriginal title, otherwise known as the Indian title...has never been extinguished.\" The case did not address what such Aboriginal title might include. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en tried to push the question beyond these very general concepts. _Delgamuukw_ 's claim was for legal recognition that Aboriginal title means ownership, jurisdiction, rights, interests, and financial compensation for resources exploited and destroyed between the arrival of Europeans and now. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en petition to the Supreme Court of British Columbia sought a declaration that:\n\n...from time immemorial they and their ancestors have occupied and possessed approximately 22,000 square miles in north-west British Columbia (\"the territory\"), and that they or the Indian people they represent are entitled, as against the Province of British Columbia, to a legal judgment declaring: (a) that they own the territory; (b) that they are entitled to govern the territory by Aboriginal laws which are paramount to the laws of British Columbia; (c) alternatively, that they have unspecified Aboriginal rights to use the territory; (d) damages for the loss of all lands and resources transferred to third parties or for resources removed from the territory since the establishment of the colony; and, (e) costs.\n\nThe Nishga claim had been based on a model of collective or communal ownership. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claim, however, was made by each of 35 Gitksan and 13 Wet'suwet'en chiefs, led by Delgamuukw (a.k.a. Ken Muldoe), representing themselves and all the members of their Houses, for ownership of specific territories. Their claim to jurisdiction, or self-government, was two-fold. First, the chiefs asserted their right to govern land-related activities on the 22,000 square miles that make up Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory, free of interference by provincial laws like the Wildlife Acts. This claim applied only to Crown lands and did not include fee simple private property owned by individuals who had purchased their land in good faith from the Crown. Second, they claimed the right for Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en laws to supersede the general laws of the Province of B.C. in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory, particularly in relation to education; health; family relations like marriages, divorces, adoptions and child welfare; justice and law enforcement.\n\nDelgamuukw delivered his \"Opening Address to the Court,\" on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs in Smithers, B.C., on May 11, 1987. He began: \"The purpose of this case...is to find a process to place Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en ownership and jurisdiction within the context of Canada. We do not seek a decision as to whether our system might continue or not. It will continue.\"\n\nIn seeking such a place within Canadian law, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en agreed that, for the purposes of entering into the legal process, they would not challenge the notion that what the courts call \"the underlying title to the land\" was held by the hovering sovereign symbolically represented by the Crown, (and embodied from time to time in judges, bureaucrats, soldiers, and Mounties.) They also agreed not to contest the requirement established by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that Aboriginal land can only be sold to the Crown, and not to private corporations or non-Aboriginal individuals. Subject only to these two constraints, the Chiefs said, they, as representatives of their Houses and its members, own \"and are absolutely entitled to occupy and possess\" the 133 individual territories claimed, in a manner that is \"for all purposes equivalent to ownership in fee simple.\"\n\n* * *\n\n. Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw 1987: 1.\n\n. Ibid., 3.\n**Chapter 9: The Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's Case**\n\n_So what we say is we have title and that is why we are talking to you about aboriginal rights, but we are not talking English Common Law definitions, international law definitions that have been interpreted and reinterpreted and sometimes extinguished by conquest and ceding treaties and other agreements like that. We are talking about the feeling that is inside all of us as Metis, Indian and Inuit people that this country belongs to us.... My whole point is that we must stop viewing aboriginal rights from the point of view of the dominant society if we are ever going to understand what the Indian people, the Inuit people, and the Metis want...._\n\n_The question is whether there is a means of understanding this concept from the Native point of view._\n\n\u2014Aboriginal leader Bill Wilson, 1983, address to the First Ministers' Conference on Aboriginal Constitutional Matters, Ottawa.\n\n**A Native Point of View**\n\nEach major Aboriginal title and rights case adjudicated during the nearly twenty years that elapsed between the _Calder_ case and the _Delgamuukw_ case had resulted in elaborations of the legal tests required to establish Aboriginal title and rights in law. An intricate configuration of abstract legal and anthropological arguments, expressed in increasingly obscure and mystifying language, was constructed through the litigation process from _Calder_ onwards. Since the tests for Aboriginal title and rights had been developed _post hoc_ by judges, litigants and their lawyers when preparing for and entering a trial could know what evidence previous courts had accepted or rejected, and been convinced or dissuaded by. They could only guess, however, at what issues might emerge during the course of their particular trial, and what an individual judge might decide to require in terms of evidence. It is often not until Reasons for Judgment are written that the reasoning used to evaluate the relative weight of evidence, and reach final conclusions, is revealed. The increasingly complex nature of the tests' questions required increasingly detailed and comprehensive research. This in turn necessitated the employment of an ever more varied range of professional consultants and legal advisors, thus driving the duration and costs of litigation higher and higher.\n\nIt bears remembering that the need for these expenditures from the public purse was created by judges and courts, and that few of the economic benefits generated flowed into Aboriginal coffers. It bears remembering, too, that the questions at the core of all this have been relatively simple and straightforward ones. Were Aboriginal people living here in \"organized societies\" before Europeans arrived? Answer: Yes. Has their ownership of the land ever been ceded, sold, treatied, or lost in war? Answer: No. Was this legal according to British imperial law? Answer: No, not unless Aboriginal people are categorized as insufficiently \"evolved,\" or in some other way inferior to Europeans. Is this just according to historical or contemporary standards of morality or the letter of laws? Answer: No. It could be argued that continually rewriting the questions, redefining the qualifying tests, and reinterpreting what constitutes correct responses, has substituted for a just answer to these questions. What should be done in order for Canada and British Columbia to create \"justice in our time\" in relation to Aboriginal title, rights, and persons? This is the _real_ question before the courts, the governments, and the Canadian population.\n\nAt the same time, however, moving away from the simplistic \"common sense\" logic of _Calder_ 's \"prior historical use and occupancy\" test, and ultimately ethnocentric analogy with English common law principles as a basis for recognition of Aboriginal title and rights, has created a space for Aboriginal peoples to elaborate their unique understandings of their distinct cultures and relationships to the land. This has provided an opportunity for non-Aboriginal peoples to learn about, and begin to develop an understanding of, Aboriginal cultures on their own terms, rather than always in relation to, or in comparison with, Euro-Canadian cultures. The trap of common sense is that it resists and rejects what is not already known to it, and understands much about social life and history as being \"natural\" and \"inevitable,\" rather than created by people themselves. Failing to move beyond \"common sense\" can limit the possibility of new visions of life and society emerging and being reflected upon.\n\nStuart Rush, one of the lawyers for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, explained the legal team's strategy in _Delgamuukw v. R._ \"This Court,\" Rush said, \"in hearing the evidence which will be presented in this case, will be faced with a series of legal and intellectual challenges and opportunities of a nature not normally found in matters that come before the bench.\" Rush set out the first challenge to the Court as being to \"reflect critically on European, or Euro-Canadian, ethnocentrism:... to understand and overcome the tendency to view aboriginal societies as existing at an earlier stage of evolutionary development.... We will be inviting this Court, through its rulings, to reject any legal theory of aboriginal rights which depends upon such evolutionist and supremacist assumptions.\" The second challenge described by Rush was \"the problem of communication between very different cultures.\"\n\nThe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs, in their opening address to the court, challenged Chief Justice McEachern to hear them on their own terms.\n\n\"Never before has a Canadian court been given the opportunity to hear Indian witnesses describe within their own structure the history and nature of their societies,\" Delgamuukw began. \"The evidence will show that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en are and have always been properly counted amongst the civilized nations of the world; that their ownership of their territory and their authority over it has always existed; and that they have shaped a distinctive form of confederation between House and Clans. The challenge for this court is to hear this evidence, in all its complexity, in all its elaboration, as the articulation of a way of looking at the world which pre-dates the Canadian Constitution by many thousands of years,\" he continued.\n\nA world view, as defined by anthropologists, is composed of two interrelated parts: a notion of how the world is structured and how its parts form a cohesive whole; and, a set of rules which set the structure in motion and control and direct it. The fundamental features of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en world view, and the central differences, or oppositions, between it and \"the western world view\" were described by the Chiefs in their opening statement. \"The western world view,\" Delgamuukw explained, \"sees the essential and primary interactions as being those between human beings.\" The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en world view, on the other hand, understands human beings to be \"part of an interacting continuum which includes animals and spirits.\" Secondly, in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en world view time is cyclical and past events \"directly effect the present and the future,\" whereas in the western world view, time is linear and causality more direct. Thirdly, the Chiefs argued, westerners believe in accidents and coincidences, whereas Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en do not. The western world view makes fundamental distinctions between sacred and secular, spiritual and material, natural and supernatural, while the integration of these elements, \"infuses the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en thinking and major institutions,\" the Hereditary Chiefs' opening statement concluded.\n\nThe answers to a number of the legal questions facing the court in _Delgamuukw v. R._ lie in descriptions of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en ways of life as they were before European fur traders arrived in the late eighteenth century. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, having made the decision to pursue their claims through the judicial system, endeavoured to both respect the terms and conditions of the court, and at the same time to maintain their own integrity and identity. They attempted to bring together the best of both worlds in areas of specialized knowledge, and present the most highly qualified people available\u2014according to the criteria of both Aboriginal and mainstream Canadian cultures\u2014as expert witnesses to the court. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en litigation team studied previous cases and endeavoured to anticipate as many questions and challenges as possible. In addition to the testimony of Chiefs and Elders, the litigation team marshalled a tremendous amount of scholarly evidence to support their case, and attracted the support and participation of an impressive array of well-respected professional and academic witnesses.\n\nThe tradition of expert witnesses in British law dates back to the sixteenth century, when assemblies of neighbours and colleagues familiar with the events and persons entangled in a dispute were replaced by juries of presumably objective arbiters whose qualifications were that they knew nothing of the case, or the parties involved. Expert witnesses become necessary when judges and\/or juries believe that the issues before the court require explanation and specialized knowledge beyond that which either a legal expert or an ordinary lay person can be expected to possess. Psychiatrists, asked to assess whether or not an accused person is sane enough to have planned and carried out the actions they are accused of, are the expert witnesses most familiar to the public through newspaper reports and television shows. In the _Delgamuukw_ case, lawyers for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en argued that the Court had to try to gain understanding \"across both a profound cultural divide, and from a distance of 200 years and more.\" The expert knowledge referred to here consists in the unique understandings of life and cosmos embedded in different cultures over time. The best authorities on knowledge about Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en history and contemporary life were Elders, Chiefs, and members of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en communities. They were the first expert witnesses to testify.\n\n**Experts in Living Memory**\n\n_\"It is very sad to say that some of the most powerful witnesses in the court case...have now died, but they saw within themselves the strength and the need to go and give their evidence in court.\"_\n\n\u2014Medig'm Gyamk (Neil Sterritt), 1992, _It Doesn't Matter What the Judge Said_.\n\nThe main evidence in support of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claim to having lived in an organized society, with borders and laws, and of having owned, then and now, their territories, was to be presented by Chiefs and Elders through the telling of their two particular kinds of oral history: _adaawk_ and _kungax_. Before this testimony could be heard by the court, however, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and their lawyers had to overcome a legal obstacle: the Crown argued that oral tradition should be considered inadmissible under what is known as the \"Hearsay Rule.\" According to the law, the Crown claimed, oral histories constitute hearsay, since they purport to rely on the words and experiences of people who are deceased, and are not available for cross-examination.\n\nThe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en chiefs and elders, and their lawyers and witnesses attempted to help the Chief Justice understand what he would be witnessing. In the opening address to the court, the Hereditary Chiefs instructed the judge that the _adaawk_ and _kungax_ should not be taken literally in a simplistic sense. They drew analogies between distinctions made in both Aboriginal and western cultures between experience and hearsay, opinion and knowledge, lay people and experts. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en explained that their oral traditions describe the genealogies of various clans and families, and their relationships with their lands and resources. They explain cosmology and spiritual relationships and obligations. They document ownership of lands and resources, transactions, relations with neighbours, and historical events. _Adaawk_ are Gitksan oral histories comprised of a collection of sacred reminiscences about ancestors, histories and territories that document House ownership of land and resources. The Wet'suwet'en _kungax_ is a song, or songs, about trails between territories. The rights to perform particular _adaawk_ and _kungax_ are part of the privileges, like clan crests, that are inherited and stewarded by individuals and House groups when they take ownership and responsibility for the specific territories the oral histories tell about. Learning the content of the narratives, and the specific conventions of oratory and style with which they must be delivered, as well as coming to know how to properly perform the songs and dances that are, like the narratives, essential aspects of _adaawk_ and _kungax_ , takes many years. Chiefs and Elders are, therefore, the custodians of this specialized knowledge.\n\nGitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral tradition includes the feasting complex through which various oral accounts may be validated or contested by the people as a whole. When a host Chief and his House hold a feast to mark an important event, such as the transfer of property, the guests assembled serve as witnesses to the event or transaction being marked by the feast and they watch and listen to the performance of the _adaawk_ or _kungax_ at the feast gathering. If they are persuaded that the laws have been properly followed, the guests\/witnesses validate the event or transaction by accepting the host's offers of food and gifts. If they disagree, they make their objections known by making a speech explaining their position and refraining from accepting anything from the host that might be construed as witnessing, validation or affirmation. Sometimes disputes are resolved within the framework of a single feast, and sometimes they remain contentious over longer periods of time. The Statement of Claim filed by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en said expressions of ownership come through the _adaawk_ , _kungax_ , songs and ceremonial regalia; confirmation of ownership comes through totem poles erected to give those expressions a material base; assertion of ownership is made through specific claims. Before the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en court case, neither _adaawk_ or _kungax_ had been performed outside of feast halls. \"This was the first time our people brought forth what you call evidence. It isn't evidence to us. We call that our _Adaawk_.\" Gitksan Elder Miluulak (Alice Jeffrey) explained.\n\nAnthropologists and ethnohistorians who submitted expert opinion reports on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en elaborated on the various methods social scientists use to analyze oral histories. Oral histories may be subjected to the familiar historical method of verifying when and where specific events took place by examining a variety of sources and comparing accounts of particular events. This involves cross-referencing information from oral histories; ethnographies; historical documents; archaeological studies; and biophysical data on technology, resource and land use, and social organization to assess the degree to which \"real events\" or \"literal truth\" is reflected in the oral accounts. Richard Daly, an anthropologist who testified for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, pointed out in his opinion report that \"oral history is not the same as the individual reminiscences of an elder.\" During his testimony, Daly reiterated in significant detail the section of his expert opinion report in which he explained the methodology he had employed in his analysis. \"Oral tradition should be treated as a whole,...a corpus of linked and overlapping records of events that have been reiterated down through the generations. Individual tellings of one Chief's history must be compared with one another, and then with the accounts of the same or related events from the viewpoint of other Chiefs. When this is done carefully, the oral tradition can be treated as a valid historical source,\" Daly wrote.\n\nScholars who employ the methodology outlined by Daly classify the oral histories of some traditions as more factually reliable by these criteria than others. Expert witnesses repeatedly referred to the particular richness of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral histories, and to the rigorous demands for validation through feasting that have resulted in the _adaawk_ and _kungax_ being ranked as valid and dependable historical sources by generations of anthropologists and ethnohistorians.\n\nSecond, a rigorous analysis of oral history involves the even more complex task of interpreting the many layers of meaning revealed by oral tradition when it is understood within the cultural context of its performance. Such an analysis requires the interpreter to describe and explain the different historical and local contexts in which oral tradition is transmitted, including the political dynamics involved in various forums, the reputations of different speakers, and the uses of various rhetorical strategies and performance techniques.\n\nFinally, the background knowledge and prejudices that members of audiences bring to the performance of any recitation of oral histories contributes to the interpretation of the meaning of the verbal text. Of course, written history can be critically evaluated in much the same way: documents are written by particular people in particular contexts for particular purposes, and each generation of readers brings to their reading of historical texts new ideas and experiences that would have been unknown to the original scribes. \"Oral tradition differs from western science and history,\" Anthropologist Julie Cruikshank writes. \"But both are organized systems of knowledge that take many years to learn, and both are perpetually open and incomplete.\"\n\nChief Justice McEachern determined that he was satisfied that the _adaawk_ and _kungax_ had gone through a \"sifting process\" through their having been told and retold and witnessed repeatedly, and that lent them an \"enhanced trustworthiness\" in his eyes. But, he added, \"historical facts sought to be adduced must be truly historical and not anecdotal.\" McEachern decided to admit the oral history evidence and testimony, saying he would \"weigh\" it at the end of the trial. He expressed his willingness, however, as the judge of first instance in a case of such importance, to \"lean towards admissibility\" and to \"harken to the evidence.\" The judge said he would use two principal criteria to determine what weight to give the oral histories in relation to other evidence. First, he would try to distinguish between what \"a deceased elder said he or his elders did, and what they believed,\" and allow only the former to stand as evidence. Second, he said he would accept the plaintiff's culturally specific definition and identification of the distinction between folklore (\"antimahlaswx\" in Gitksan), and laws or traditions, allowing only the latter to stand as evidence.\n\nChief Justice McEachern also promised to rely on precedents set in cases where the issue of oral tradition testimony had been dealt with. First, he said, he would take from _Kruger v. R._ the direction that evaluation should be based on \"facts pertinent to that Band and to that land, and not on any global basis.\" Second, Allan McEachern referred to another of Brian Dickson's rulings in the case of _R. v. Simon,_ where the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada found that to demand written support where oral tradition was the only source of evidence available, would be to \"impose an impossible burden of proof.\" Chief Justice McEachern's decision, early in the trial, to admit oral tradition evidence as an exemption to the Hearsay Rule, gave the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and their supporters cause for optimism.\n\nEighteen chiefs testified in person at the trial, beginning with Gyolugyet (Mary McKenzie) in Smithers on May 13, 1987. An additional ten Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, who were not chiefs, testified, and a further thirty-eight witnesses tendered, and were cross-examined on, territorial affidavits. Thirty of these were chiefs. The Chiefs and Elders hold the responsibility for learning and transmitting the oral tradition\u2014including laws, legends, and histories\u2014of their Houses and clans. These witnesses have earned their credibility, and the respect of their communities, over the course of their lifetimes. They represent an Indigenous aristocracy, gerontocracy and intelligentsia. They are also people who, through their life histories, embody the experiences of Aboriginal-White relations in British Columbia over many decades. In previous land rights litigation, the employment of Elders testifying in their own languages as expert witnesses had been minimal. The more common practice had been to employ, as witnesses, anthropologists who had interviewed Elders, and who, having thus become experts, would translate, represent, and analyze for the court what Elders had told them about their histories. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en strategy attempted to replicate this ethnographic process in the courtroom. The Chiefs and Elders testified directly to the judge, with Chief Justice McEachern assuming the role, in the first instance, of the white anthropologist hearing these oral histories for the first time.\n\nIn evaluating the oral histories during the course of the trial, Chief Justice McEachern remained particularly concerned about maintaining a clear distinction between \"historical facts\" and \"beliefs.\" As he later reflected in his _Reasons for Judgment_ , \"At an early stage of the trial I expressed the hope that I could make a convenient but simplistic distinction between what European-based culture would call mythology and \"real\" matters.... I have concluded that it would be overly simplistic to attempt such a distinction, and I must accordingly reject mythology as a valid distinction between what is and what is not part of an _adaawk_ or _kungax_.\" However, as the Chiefs' testimonies proceeded, the judge became increasingly impatient about having to actually listen to the oral histories. He took exception, particularly, to witnesses singing in court. \"This is a trial,\" he reproached an Elder at one point, \"not a performance.\"  Besides, he added, the significance of the music was lost on him as he had \"a tin ear.\"\n\nThe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en offered the court, in some instances\u2014 notably the Gitksan _adaawk_ of Medeek, and the Wet'suwet'en _kungax_ of the House of Goohlaht\u2014archaeological and geological evidence that supported events and places noted in the oral histories in order to link these with conventional scientific proof. The _adaawk_ of Seeley Lake Medeek tells about a massive landslide accompanied by the presence of a supernatural grizzly bear. Rolf Mathewes, a paleobotanist, testified that his research showed that a massive landslide had occurred in the area around 3,380 years ago. Alan Gottesfeld, a geomorphologist, added his support for the _adaawk_ based on results of research conducted in accordance with the scientific methodology required by his discipline.\n\nSince the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en were the plaintiffs in the case of _Delgamuukw v. R_., it was their case that was presented first, and the onus was on them to present convincing evidence to prove their claims. The Crown, as the defendants, were required only to protect themselves by refuting and rebutting the plaintiffs' testimonies. Crown lawyers cross-examined the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Elders in the antagonistic manner characteristic of the adversarial Canadian legal system. Yagalahl (Dora Wilson), a member of the Gitksan-Wet'suwet'en Litigation Team, recounted how she felt observing this part of the trial: \"There were lots of times where I just felt like screaming: 'Hey, you're wrong. How dare you say this? How dare you do this? How dare you be disrespectful to my elder sitting in that witness stand? How dare you speak to her that way? How dare you speak to him that way?\" \"But,\" Yagalahl remembered, \"one of our witnesses had a lot of fun with one of the lawyers. She is an elderly person. She is in her eighties. She had been to the hunting area, berry-picking area, you name it, on the territories most of her life. So in her evidence, she was talking about times when they went out berry-picking. The lawyer was trying to say that she didn't really know her territory. He was trying to confuse her by using the place names.... Here he was questioning, questioning, and what he was doing\u2014and didn't realize\u2014was he was going up and down, up and down, this mountain that she was describing. Finally she got annoyed, and...she says to the interpreter, 'What's the matter with this lawyer? Is he crazy? We've been up and down that hill a lot of times now.' So sometimes it was funny.\"\n\nIn presenting their case, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en asked the court to hear and understand them on their own terms, within the context of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en \"world view.\" Chief Justice Allan McEachern, at several points during the trial, cautioned that this evidence was \"subject to objection and weight which would be adduced at the end of the trial.\" He said any evidence could be disregarded \"if it is contradicted, or if its value as evidence is destroyed or lessened either internally or by other admissible evidence, or by common sense.\" In anticipation of such skepticism, the Elders' testimony was augmented by testimony by expert witnesses in cartography, paleobotany, geomorphology, forest ecology, fishery biology, ethnoarchaeology, linguistics, historical geography, anthropology, and history.\n\n**The Ancestors are Watching**\n\n_Sitting in the courtroom, I felt this heavy burden like all of my ancestors were sitting on my shoulders, and anything that was said on the witness stand had to be the truth as we were taught, because the truth, I remember my grandmother saying, is something that you don't forget._ _Because if you tell a lie, at some point in the future, you always get tripped up and it comes out. The politicians have proven that out._\n\n\u2014Yagalahl (Dora Wilson), 1992, _It Will Always Be The Truth_.\n\nLay people, also recognized as expert witnesses by the Court, included members of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Houses who had received training through Indigenous forums, and\/or who had obtained professional and academic credentials in relevant fields. After the Elders finished testifying, these younger\u2014mostly middle-aged\u2014Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en took the stand as expert witnesses. These people are apprentices to the Elders in the \"traditional\" system, as well as being members of their own generations with their particular experiences and acquired knowledge. Many work within their own communities and within the institutions of the majority Canadian society in the fields of political negotiation, law, education, health, welfare, and community administration. They represent an emerging Aboriginal professional class, political leadership, and intelligentsia. In order of appearance, the first expert witness to testify on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en after the Elders was Neil Sterritt, hereditary chief and cartographer. He described how the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en delineated boundaries and how these had been translated for mapping purposes. Sterritt's evidence focused on explicating the subject of internal boundaries between the 133 territories, and between the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and their Aboriginal neighbours. He explained how ownership was and is established and property transferred, and through what processes boundaries and ownership could change. He provided numerous illustrations of complex deliberations over territories.\n\nTo be acknowledged as an expert in court requires that the judge recognize the witness as such. Therefore, in a dispute, lawyers for each side attempt at the outset to disqualify or cast doubt on the expertise of each other's witnesses. Expert witnesses are often subjected to aggressive cross examination in which their credentials, their methodologies, and often their personal characters can be challenged. Heather Harris, a non-Aboriginal woman who had married into a Gitksan family and been adopted into a House and clan, and who also held a degree in Anthropology, testified about the genealogies she had collected that described the matrilineal kinship system that forms the basis of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en social structure. The lawyer for Canada, Marvyn Koenigsberg, suggested to Harris under cross-examination that she may have \"gone native,\" a derogatory accusation historically used to discredit anthropologists who were seen to have crossed the great divide between Aboriginal and European cultures, and hence to have lost their capacity for scholarly\u2014defined as \"objective\"\u2014research and analysis. The phrase, \"going native\" is also frequently used as a sexist and racist slur against white women who marry Indians.\n\nThe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en witnesses were followed on the stand by anthropologists who also testified as expert witnesses.\n\n* * *\n\n. Canada 1983 cited in Asch 1989: 123-124.\n\n. Bourdieu 1990. See also, Miller 1992: 55-65.\n\n. Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw 1987: 22.\n\n. Ibid., 23.\n\n. Ibid., 24.\n\n. Ibid., 38-40.\n\n. _Delgamuukw v. R._ (1987), 40 D.L.R. (4th) 685 (judgment on admissibility of oral tradition as an exception to the \"hearsay rule,\" hereinafter referred to as \" _Delgamuukw_ , oral tradition\").\n\n. Medig'm Gyamk 1992: 303.\n\n. For excerpts from this testimony see Gisday Wa and Delgamuukw 1992.\n\n. Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw (1987), 38-42.\n\n. Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw 1987.\n\n. Miluulak 1992: 59.\n\n. See Vansina 1965, 1985.\n\n. Daly 1988.\n\n. Daly 1988: 60-61.\n\n. See Cruikshank 1990, 1992, 1994.\n\n. Cruikshank 1992: 26.\n\n. _Delgamuukw_ , oral tradition: 698.\n\n. Ibid., 697.\n\n. Ibid., 655.\n\n. Ibid., 653.\n\n. _R. v. Simon_ (1985) 24 D.L.R. (4 th) 390 (S.C.C.)\n\n. McEachern 1991 _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._ : 46-47.\n\n. Quoted in Monet and Skanu'u 1992: 42.\n\n. Yagalahl 1992: 201.\n\n. Ibid., 201.\n\n. _Delgamuukw_ , oral tradition: 172.\n\n. Yagalahl 1992: 199.\n**Chapter 10: Experts on Behalf of the Plaintiffs**\n\n_In the end, if anthropologists help the rest of the citizenry understand the First Nations discourse, then we will have made an invaluable contribution to the necessary dialogue. The Chiefs' voices will not be silenced. The crisis of anthropologists over how they are perceived, and what their role should be pales before the larger issue of working out just land claims._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Antonia Mills, 1996, _Problems of Establishing Authority in Testifying on Behalf of the Witsuwit'en_.\n\n**Anthropology: Interpretation and Understanding?**\n\nAnthropologists first began to work in the capacity of expert witnesses on Aboriginal history in the United States when the Indian Claims Commission was established in 1946 to adjudicate land rights claims. From this starting point, almost half a century ago, certain enduring problems have confronted anthropologists who have become involved in these proceedings. Courts, governments, and colleagues in the hard sciences disparage anthropologists for ceasing to be loyal academics and becoming too sympathetic to the people they work with. Indigenous people accuse anthropologists of being agents of colonialism, of appropriating their cultures, and of representing them from the perspectives, and in the interests, of the dominating society. Judges trained in dualistic and positivistic legal traditions have tended to consider \"objective research\" and \"subjective interpretation\" as polar opposites, and as synonymous with truth and falsehood, respectively. The differences between an adversarial legal forum, where simple true or false answers are demanded; and an academic forum, where detachment and absence of intellectual commitment are rewarded, have made marriages between law and anthropology rocky.\n\nCriticisms from all these parties focuses on the central methodology of cultural anthropology: participant observation and fieldwork. Ethnographic research requires anthropologists to immerse themselves in the daily lives of the people they are studying, and to record and analyze their own observations. Fieldwork also involves extensive interviewing of research subjects in an effort to understand what the people who are members of the culture being studied say about themselves, and perhaps about colonial cultures and anthropologists. Field research is usually supplemented by studies of archival and other documents, and by canvassing academic literature on the same topic and\/or area to glean what other researchers have learned and reported on. Quantitative methods, like statistical analysis, are also often incorporated into anthropological research. Issues concerning the impact of the context in which research is carried out, and of the anthropologists' own background and attitudes, on her or his research are legion. These questions are the subject of an ongoing and exhaustive critique within the discipline. Anthropologists who have endeavoured to respond to these criticisms espouse \"reflexive anthropology,\" \"collaborative methodologies,\" and \"experimental ethnographies.\"\n\nReflexivity in anthropology refers to the acknowledgment that a human researcher studying other human beings will bring with them to the research endeavour attitudes and ideas about themselves, about the people they are studying, and about their relationship to each other. Taking seriously the problem that most anthropologists have historically been citizens of the nation states engaged in the colonization of Indigenous peoples, reflexive anthropology has paid particular attention to examining the influence of power relations located in race, gender and class structures, on ethnographic research. Rather than pretending that these issues can simply be eradicated by striving for \"researcher objectivity\" and the mimicking of natural science research models\u2014as they accuse positivists of doing\u2014reflexive anthropologists argue that recognition and acknowledgment of \"biases,\" and accounting for their influence on their research findings, is both intellectually honest and politically responsible. Reflexive anthropology is not restricted to examining the ideas and attitudes of researchers but also addresses issues such as the impact of funding, and of processes like litigation, on anthropological research. Neither is it restricted to the study of \"other\" cultures. Rather, contemporary anthropology has encouraged more and more attention to critical studies of colonial settler cultures.\n\nCollaborative research methodologies include research subjects as participants in the research process: as consultants in the design, implementation and analysis of research in an effort to transform the traditional power relationship between researcher and researched. Adherents of collaborative methodologies argue that their approach simply recognizes and acknowledges what really goes on during the creation of what becomes an ethnographic text. That is, social knowledge in general, and anthropological knowledge in particular, in practice, emerges in large part from conversations between researchers and research subjects, and it is the product of these inter-cultural and inter-personal interactions, where the research subject is often the teacher and the researcher the student, that constitutes the essence of ethnographic knowledge.\n\nTo more transparently describe and communicate the way this knowledge has been created and produced, some contemporary anthropologists have rejected the traditional single-authored, authoritative monogram of historical anthropology, and are experimenting with new forms of writing and representation that attempt both to share authority and royalties with research subjects, and to use plain language to reach a wider audience than the academic one alone.\n\n\"Telling the truth\" in reflexive, collaborative ethnographies takes the form of considering the influence of context and researcher\/researched relationships to begin with, and trying to achieve a more comprehensive ethnographic description by including a broad representation of research subjects describing and analyzing their various experiences, and expressing their diverse views, in their own words. Locating, or \"grounding,\" research in the needs of particular communities, as well as in the demands of academia, is another hallmark of much contemporary anthropology. The goal of \"the new ethnography\" is not the discovery of immutable facts or the refinement of more abstract theories, but rather the encouragement of understanding and mutual respect. Pretenses to unattainable \"scientific objectivity,\" the \"new\" anthropologists charge, simply ignore the inherently interpersonal nature of the human study of human society, and mask unreflected upon and unaccounted for biases under a cloak of value neutrality.\n\nThe post World War II growth in Aboriginal political strength has had a significant impact on anthropology. The contemporary generation of anthropologists, having come of age in the same era, have had to come to terms with Indigenous critiques that have charged, and often proven by their own ethnographic endeavours, that many of the descriptions written by previous generations of ethnographers were at best limited and partial, and at worst inaccurate and insulting. Feminist anthropologists, for example, have produced a body of literature showing that the voices of Indigenous women have either been absent from, or misrepresented in, the classic ethnographies written by both male and female anthropologists. The emerging recognition of the \"native point of view\" in anthropology and other disciplines, and of the right of Aboriginal people to represent themselves, is primarily a consequence of the ongoing struggle Aboriginal peoples have engaged in since the advent of colonialism. Many Aboriginal groups now demand significant participation in and control of ethnographic research conducted among them, a process they identify as \"the decolonization of anthropology.\" The presentation of the plaintiff's anthropological evidence in _Delgamuukw v. R._ reflected the contemporary conditions of, and approaches to, research with First Nations in Canada in the 1980s.\n\nOf course, these new approaches in contemporary anthropology present important problems, to which there are no easy answers. No communities, including Aboriginal ones, are homogeneous. They are divided by gender, class, internalized racism, and local axes of inequality. There is not one \"native point of view\"; there are many. Local Indigenous power relations can shape the outcome of collaborative anthropological research, as can research funding from private and public agencies. Evaluating how an anthropologist can develop analyses that simultaneously respect indigenous representations, and also employ the tools of the discipline to critique these explanations is difficult, to say the least. Ethical considerations present individuals with increasingly complex choices, in anthropology no less than in most other disciplines, and no less, for that matter, than in everyday life in the contemporary world. A significant aspect of any contemporary anthropologist's training focuses on these issues, and on how to conduct valid, reliable, rigorous research in such contexts.\n\n**Here Come the Anthros**\n\n_The anthropologists' role in the trial was to take out of the bulk of undigested evidence the relevant and significant evidence in order to create a picture of a viable, functioning and current society... Secondly, the anthropological evidence was intended to translate the evidence of the people to combat the ethnocentrism in the judicial consideration of their society...._\n\n_We knew that the Judge shared the cultural perceptions of the governments and therefore the anthropologists had to break through his vision and to introduce him to the native world view._\n\n\u2014Lawyer Stuart Rush, 1991, _The Role of Anthropological Evidence in Land Claims Litigation: The Gitksan Wet'suwet'en Case as an Illustration_.\n\nThe issues in dispute between the parties in the courtroom at the _Delgamuukw_ trial rested on the description and analysis of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society before European arrival. More concretely, the question that the plaintiffs and the defendants offered competing responses to was whether or not the approximately 9000 Aboriginal people living in northwestern British Columbia during the early nineteenth century constituted an organized society as defined by colonial law. According to the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's witnesses, at the time in question they supported themselves by hunting, fishing and gathering natural resources. Their principal means of subsistence was salmon fishing. They harvested, preserved and stored food. They traded surpluses with their neighbours. They were matrilineal people, who reckoned descent and inheritance through their mothers. They were organized into clans and Houses led by chiefs. They engaged in various rituals, ceremonies and public assemblies, accompanied by feasting. Some feasts, and the system of reciprocal feasting between and among Houses, clans and villages, constituted an institutionalized process governed by laws and protocol for conducting the affairs of government and law.\n\nThe first professional anthropologist to testify for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en in _Delgamuukw v. R._ was Dr. Richard Daly, who took the stand for three weeks in February and March, 1989. Daly had received his Masters degree in Anthropology from Manchester University in 1975, and since that time had been employed in various professional positions. Daly's 700-page expert opinion report, entitled \"Anthropological Opinion On The Nature of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Economy,\" was largely based on research he conducted with the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en during 1986 and 1987 while he was also preparing his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Richard Lee at the University of Toronto. Daly's report contained eight chapters: theory and methodology in anthropology; kinship economy; ownership and management in a kinship economy; the natural environment, nutrition and production strategies; the seasonal round of economic activities; storage, the accumulation of values and social hierarchy; the question of trade; and the feast: paradigm for social interaction and the circulation of values. Daly's methodology included extensive archival research as well as interviewing of elders and participant observation. He listed the following specific sources for his opinion report:\n\n(1) the transcripts of witness' statements and commissioned evidence of witnesses in the trial; (2) formal interview data he collected during his research in the form of written fieldnotes that had been submitted to the court; (3) knowledge he obtained through informal discussions, not recorded in writing; (4) ethnographic monographs, including the Barbeau-Beynon papers, oral histories and fieldnotes collected by John Cove, Father Morice, Diamond Jenness, Franz Boas, Wilson Duff, John Adams, and Marjorie Halpin; (5) articles and books on general history and economic history.\n\nDaly described his research activities as follows: \"Anthropologists seek to determine the truth through their work, seeking validation or invalidation of propositions by cross-referencing data and seeking to place the phenomena studied in as fully rounded a context as possible.\"\n\nCrown lawyers challenged Daly's qualification as an expert witness on the grounds of Section 11 of the Evidence Act which says that an expert should disclose the facts upon which his opinion is based. They argued that Daly's failure to turn over notes relevant to two years of participant observation was a breach of this requirement. Further, they charged that his report was \"opinion thinly disguised as argument\"; that he had interwoven oral histories with other information, \"the foundation of which is highly questionable\"; and, that his report duplicated evidence already given by other witnesses. Finally, the Crown argued that, since Daly's participant observation had been conducted after the commencement of the trial, and could not be replicated because precisely the same conditions would never again exist, his methodology was \"unscientific\" and his report should not be admitted as expert evidence. Chief Justice McEachern qualified Daly as an expert and agreed to hear his testimony and determine its value by weighing it at the end of the trial in the context of the entirety of evidence presented.\n\nDr. Antonia Mills followed Daly in March, 1989. Mills had graduated with a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Harvard University in 1969. Since that time she has lived, worked, and taught in British Columbia and has conducted participant observation and archival research among the Dunneza-Cree (Beaver) First Nations and the Wet'suwet'en, primarily. Her 216-page opinion report, entitled \"The Feasts, Institutions and Laws of the Wet'suwet'en,\" focused on Wet'suwet'en cultural history, and emphasized religion and cosmology. Mills' particular research interest for several years has been reincarnation beliefs and practices among the Wet'suwet'en. Crown lawyers argued that Mills' training and work emphasized psychology, symbolism and religion and was therefore \"not of interest to this case.\" Like Daly, she had conducted participant observation following commencement of the court action. Like Daly, she was accused by the Crown of being an advocate who lacked objectivity, and who duplicated the evidence of the lay witnesses. Chief Justice McEachern, however, allowed her testimony, subject to his evaluation of its weight at the end of the trial.\n\nCrown lawyers focused their cross-examination of Mills on the question of warfare. They took umbrage to a statement she made in her 20-year old Ph.D. thesis on the nature of warfare in western society:\n\nCrown Counsel: On page 60, you set out your description of western society. I'm not going to read it out, but I just ask you to read over the first couple of paragraphs down to the line \"Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last 50 years.\" Was that your view in 1969?\n\nMills: Yes.\n\nCrown Counsel: And is that your view today?\n\nMills: I think I probably am a bit more sophisticated than that, but people certainly continue to kill their normal men. It's not as if I'm saying that other people don't do it as well. It's not as if I'm claiming that the Wet'suwet'en didn't kill one another.\n\nChief Justice McEachern intervened in the Crown's cross-examination of Mills on the subject of her alleged romantic biases:\n\nCourt: Are you surprised to find so many like Ogden writing that the masses came out of their huts naked? Had their level of civilization not progressed beyond that at or just after the time of contact? Mills replied that the Wet'suwet'en normally wore clothes.\n\nCourt: I've heard...I have an impression that I am hearing perhaps the best side of these people, which is understandable, but you haven't said anything about wars.... Would you call them war-like?...the people generally?\n\nMills answered that she found it difficult to respond to a question that required her to make sweeping generalizations that characterized an entire people as either \"war-like\" or not. The Chief Justice continued:\n\nCourt: There is a suggestion of slaves. Did the Wet'suwet'en take slaves?\n\nMills explained at length the similarities and differences between \"slaves\" and hostages taken in war.\n\nCourt: There is even a suggestion in one of the pieces about cannibalism. Was that a feature of the Wet'suwet'en in any way?\n\nMills: No.\n\nThe Chief Justice apparently suspected Mills, the plaintiff's only female anthropologist, of presenting a romantic picture of the Wet'suwet'en.\n\nRomanticism is a valid criticism often levelled at the discipline of anthropology. There is an extensive literature on the subject, including much by anthropologists themselves, and by Indigenous critics who complain that anthropological romanticism camouflages the devastation wreaked on Indigenous cultures by colonial domination. Aboriginal intellectuals charge that romanticized descriptions of their cultures are as one-dimensional and inaccurate as those that depict Aboriginal cultures as barbarous and cruel. Romanticism, they argue, is one projection of the European imagination, and savagery another. The Crown's \"critique of romanticism,\" however, seems to be based on the simplistic idea that any evidence that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples were NOT war-like, naked, slave-owning cannibals at the time Europeans arrived in the late eighteenth century, is romantic, and therefore not believable. End of conversation: facts are a nuisance in this monologue.\n\n**Law and Masculine Hysteria**\n\n_In Western Europe, since the period of the Enlightenment in the 17th century, men have assumed a strong connection between their rationality and their sense of masculine identity. They have learned to appropriate rationality as if it were an exclusively male quality denied to \"others\":_ _women and colonized people in particular...._\n\n_Since 'rationality' is identified with knowledge, it is similarly denied to these same \"others.\" Emotions and feelings are likewise denied as genuine sources of knowledge within the culture. Rather, they are associated predominantly with weakness and femininity, and so as antithetical to the 'strengths' with which boys learn their sense of masculine identity. Men could only assert their humanity by mastery over the physical world, and by learning to dominate their passions and desires. It is this inherited notion of self-control as dominance that has been so closely identified with modern forms of masculinity._\n\n_Such a view also begins to explain the depths to which men can feel threatened by emotions and feelings._\n\n\u2014Psychologist Lawrence Seidler, 1987, _Reason, Desire, and Male Sexuality_.\n\nOn day 210 of the trial, anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody took the stand on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. Brody's opinion report was based on participant observation, interviews, and archival research that included perusing the Barbeau-Beynon archives, Indian Agents' letters and reports, documents from the MacKenna-McBride Royal Commission of 1913-1916, trapline registration forms from the 1920s, and records of territorial disputes documented by white settlers. Brody's report went on to summarize the history of research into Aboriginal title and rights over the past twenty years, noting the trend away from assimilation studies popular in the 1960s, through the land use and occupancy studies of the 1970s, and into the ownership and jurisdiction studies of the 1980s. He wrote: \"The assumption that rights of ownership are established on criteria of land use or occupation now appears naive. We do not apply these criteria to our own rights. We do not draw boundaries around our territories by using and occupying them.\" Brody also reviewed anthropological theory, arguing that, until very recently, anthropology had ignored \"how people regard themselves.\"\n\nBrody described the purpose of his report as being \"...to bring some part of another people's world view into ours.\" But, \"the heart\" of his endeavour, Brody wrote, was \"to recognize and then break free from Euro-Canadian ethnocentricity.\" One of the first steps in that process was to recognize that European intellectual thought, as expressed through language, was abstract and conceptualizing. \"Hunting peoples,\" Brody wrote, \"dislike generic categorizing language and prefer specific and concrete vocalization...hunting and gathering societies might be said to believe above all in facts.\" Brody's focus on European ethnocentrism was what Chief Justice McEachern and the Crown's lawyers objected to most strongly. The Crown selected four passages from Brody's opinion report as evidence that \"his report has nothing to contribute to the issues before this court.\"\n\nFirst, the Crown objected to the following statement on page 2 of Brody's report:...our society has occupied the lands of other societies, and is committed to a particular kind of historical process. This means that settlers and governments have tended to see native peoples through unclear or distorting lenses.\n\nChief Justice McEachern entered the fray to dispute this statement, saying:\n\nCourt: I have expressed the view for some time that courts of law are troubled on a daily basis with this question of feelings. Feelings are what make people function the way they do in many cases, but it's not something that laws and judges can manage very well. And if somebody wants to tell me what somebody else's feelings are, I have to discount it very substantially, because firstly he may have misconstrued the feelings, and secondly, the feelings may not be rationally founded.\n\n...\n\nJackson: My Lord, perhaps I might be permitted, in response to Mr. Goldie's point in reading that particular part which you just read and the whole relevance of how native society is perceived.\n\nCourt: Does it matter...in any real sense, does it matter?\n\nJackson: Well, My Lord, my point was to deal with these issues, and the relevance of a social scientific analysis to the appropriate legal conclusions, which of course are for Your Lordship to decide... Court: Let's assume for the purpose of this argument...they are going to...they are going to be found to have the rights that are claimed in the Statement of Claim. Does it matter if, from the time of contact, circa 1800 A.D., that they have been treated badly or they have been treated well? Does it make any difference?\n\nJackson: I think the way Your Lordship has framed it, no. It does not. But it is our submission that understanding the cultural context in which that took place will enable Your Lordship to make a conclusion, a legal conclusion.\n\nCourt: The fact is that a reserve was established, or an area was logged, or a mine was found and exploited or something of that kind. Those are facts that may speak to all sorts of issues relevant to this case, but if\u2014does it make any difference if settlers and governments have had an attitude or have viewed things in a particular way? The more I hear of this case, the more it comes back to the old question, 'what are the facts?' As the detective used to say, 'what are the facts, ma'am?\n\nJackson:...just the facts... Court: Yes. 'Just the facts, ma'am.' I know that it's late in the day to try and boil things down. I know it's late in the day to change the rules, and I don't want to change the rules upon which we have been functioning, but that sort of a passage, \"This means that settlers and governments have tended to see native peoples through unclear or distorting lenses\"...seems to me to be of highly questionable relevance. You might just as well say what happened indicated that Indians have tended to see governments through unclear or distorted lenses and that probably the answer would...what is...what difference does it make? Of course...do they have rights and what are they?...not how the people view each other....\n\nJackson: My Lord... Court: As I said a moment ago, they may view each other from completely irrational bases. They probably do. Most people do view each other from an irrational basis. Again, what difference does it make?\n\nJackson: I think it does make a difference, My Lord, in terms of understanding events which have taken place which are relied upon by my friends as evidence of loss or acquiescence in the loss of rights. And I will....\n\nCourt: I have grave misgivings about the conspiratorial theory of history, but that's perhaps a cultural impediment that I am going to have to try and avoid as we proceed. Go ahead, please, Mr. Jackson....\n\nNext, the Crown pointed to a statement on page 49 of Brody's report, that read:\n\nGitksan and Wet'suwet'en reserve lands amount of some 45 square miles. According to white interpretations of events, the villages that make up most of the 45 square miles represent the conclusion of a historical process.\n\nMr. Goldie, lawyer for the Province of British Columbia, objected strongly to this passage.\n\nGoldie: My Lord.... I check my assumptions at the door, and I don't think it's appropriate for a witness to talk about \"we.\" If he is talking about some other culture, let him talk about it...but I leave my assumptions at the door, and I don't want to deal with cross examination on the basis that I am depending on some particular point of view that is ascribed to me or to my client for that matter.\n\nIt would be a very interesting and perhaps educational process if Mr. Brody told us about ourselves and held up a mirror to us, but what has that got to do with this litigation?\n\nChief Justice McEachern agreed with the Crown.\n\nCourt: \"According to white interpretations....\" What white interpretations? All white interpretations? It doesn't say some. I don't know if it means some, but...isn't that just so wide and sweeping and so extensive that it's not keeping to deal with it? That's what every white person thinks? And then again we still have the problem. If he does, so what? We are still talking about rights that arose at the time of contact, as I read the authorities. I mean, I just have difficulty with the nature of this evidence. It seems to me it's way beyond what any court has ever been asked to look at before. I suppose there have been things as broad as that...isn't this...hasn't this perhaps gone over the line?\n\nI must say I find that statement to be terribly, terribly exaggerated, and when you get into that area, you know that you are having a terrible time coming to grips with anything that's going to be useful. I mean, I think if the witness wants to say that's his view, I suppose that's all right. He doesn't say that. He says this is what everybody thinks. I don't think that is even close to being right. And if...well, maybe that's his view. Maybe he thinks every white person thinks that.\n\nBrody: There is...and I said I am dealing at a high level of generality here self-evidently...there is a core to the intellectual assumptions that are made within our intellectual heritage, and these assumptions say a lot about what is expected to happen to tribal and aboriginal peoples.\n\nCourt: Well, I can understand the approach, Mr. Jackson, when we are talking about the culture of the Indian people, and one has to be generous, which is not really the word I am looking for, but quite relaxed about the extent to which evidence can go, because it's a very ill-defined kind of a study. But when you are talking hard facts, such as the McKenna McBride, you have got terms of reference, you have got a transcript, you know it was said, then it seems to me that there isn't much that can be said about that. It speaks for itself...Truly, there must be limits, and I am just having trouble finding what they are here. I have a terrible feeling that I am way beyond them, and you are asking me to go way beyond them...It's like when you are in a contest or a game and they suddenly say we are not going to play it according to the rules. I just have the sense that I am asked to listen to material that is not something that a judge should be hearing.\n\nBrody's critique of \"frontier culture\" incurred the wrath of the Crown lawyers and the Judge as well, and the following statement from page 69 of his report was presented as another reason to disqualify him as an expert witness:\n\nThe encounter between native culture and frontier whites may be said to constitute a meeting of culture and anti-culture. Whites who are roaming, often alone, far from their own land, encounter those who are absolutely at home. The whites have thus in a way shed society. The native people they deal with are absolutely at home....\n\nFinally, Crown lawyers pointed out the following statement about settler history, claiming it revealed Brody's inappropriate biases most strongly:\n\nNewcomers, sure of their superior knowledge, understanding and rights, do as they think fit, encourage others to do likewise and call upon the forces of Canadian law and order if too directly thwarted and opposed.\n\nThe lawyer for the Government of Canada summed up the Crown's objections to Brody's qualifications as an expert witness:\n\nCrown Counsel: It is my submission what Mr. Brody is doing is describing attitudes of white people...how they feel about what's going on, and how to a certain extent the Indians feel from his point of view in response. And it is my submission that inquiry is irrelevant to the issues in this lawsuit. The issues that are being put forward by the plaintiffs for Your Lordship to decide is 'did the government, the white government impose jurisdiction?' Questions like were reserves created and what were they? How the whites felt and how the Indians felt is beyond the purview of this inquiry.\n\nIt's an interesting question. I am sure it is one which has probably concerned many a graduate thesis. But to determine\u2014to go into detail about what was happening is in my submission irrelevant. It is, of course, in my submission, also in the nature of argument and speculative in the extreme.... If this kind of evidence is allowed it's tantamount to allowing experts to act as counsel and it's as if all the 45 or 50 witnesses that Your Lordship has heard for over a year...that Your Lordship cannot evaluate and interpret that evidence, but that you require the assistance of an expert to do so.\n\nChief Justice McEachern asked this question of Crown counsel regarding Brody's admissibility:\n\nCourt: Well, let me pose this scenario...That an expert in the sense of a person highly trained and experienced in the discipline who has strongly held and widely publicized views on the question, is nevertheless called as an expert witness and he's qualified in the sense that he has shown that he has all the experience-related requirements of an expert. Can the court say...I won't hear this witness because he has a well known and admitted point of view? Is that not a matter that goes to weight?\n\nMr. Goldie, lawyer for the Province of B.C., responded and summed up his objections as follows:\n\nGoldie: Normally speaking, the experts every day are called who are\u2014who are known as the proponents of a point of view. That is to say, they favour a particular theory. But this is not a case of favouring a particular scientific theory.\n\nCourt: He favours a party.\n\nGoldie: He is favouring a party. That's the thrust of my submission, My Lord, and if he favours a party that takes him out of the category of the expert who says, well, I believe in the such and such theory of relativity.\n\nCourt. Yes.\n\nGoldie: And I will stand up and be counted on that point, but there is no such suggestion of that here.\n\nCourt: And then proceeds to try and persuade the court that his theory is right.\n\nGoldie: That's correct.... That's correct...but his theory....\n\nCourt: What's the point of this?\n\nGoldie: His theory has got nothing to do with the particular parties to the case. There is no theory being advanced here in my submission.... My principal objection is that he says his report is an overview.... The word overview means that he cherry-picks from the evidence of others.... I don't mind his saying that every other anthropologist except himself is wrong and he's right.... That's his privilege....\n\nCourt: You can't get ready for a case like this without being closely associated with the people...but the question is does it go beyond that when he says, as he said before, he likes Indians and he has an\u2014or aboriginals\u2014 and he has a favourable disposition towards them. Does that disqualify him?...In a perfect world I would hope that parties would confine their expert testimony to persons whose objectivity is not open to question. That may not always be possible. And, indeed, it might be a dangerous test to apply, because the person who hides his biases is no more credible than the person who makes it known. The former may be more dangerous than the latter.\n\nThe Crown's, and the Chief Justice's, response to Brody's testimony are indicative of the fundamental challenge to the court's self-image and legitimacy that a critique of ethnocentrism raises. \"Judicial neutrality,\" the linchpin of the British and Canadian legal systems' claims to legitimacy, depends on maintaining the public perception that law is the expression of universal reason, that judges are without racial, gender or class bias, and that everyone is equal before the law. As his \"tin ear\" prevented him from hearing the oral histories, so Allan McEachern's myopia blinded him to his own biases.\n\n**Academic Freedom**\n\n_I agreed to do the research with the understanding that I would be free to draw my own conclusions from the materials I examined. We also decided that it would be best to have me work independently of other researchers...so that my interpretations could stand alone. Accordingly, I did not read any of the other reports before submitting my final opinion and appearing on the witness stand, nor did I attend the trial before that time._\n\n\u2014Historian Arthur Ray, 1991, _Creating the Image of the Save in Defence of the Crown: The Ethnohistorian in Court_.\n\nThe presentation of evidence in _Delgamuukw v. R._ followed a chronological historical narrative. Following testimony that focused on Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en ways of life before the arrival of Europeans\u2014labelled by historians the \"prehistoric\" era\u2014witnesses described the arrival in the territories of fur traders and then settlers. The years during which Europeans initially made contact with Aboriginal peoples and became involved in first sporadic, and then regularized, trading relations with them, but before European settlement began in earnest, have been dubbed by academics the \"protohistoric\" era. With European settlement came written record keeping, which ushered in the \"historic\" period.\n\nThe legal questions that relied for answers on descriptions and analyses of the protohistoric period spanned those relevant to the prehistoric\u2014or pre-European settlement\u2014era, and the historic\u2014or post-European settlement\u2014 era. First, an analysis of the nature of Aboriginal societies before contact was required to determine whether or not an organized society existed at the moment of contact, and when Britain declared sovereignty. Another legal question was what changes took place in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society and culture, and particularly in their property ownership and management systems, during the protohistoric years? This issue was crucial to the Crown's argument that the development of delineated borders and property law was not a feature of pre-contact Aboriginal societies but rather had emerged as a response to the European-Aboriginal fur trade. They claimed that, by the time Hudson's Bay Company trader William Brown arrived in 1822 and brought them into \"history\" by writing about them in his journals, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had already undergone such significant social change as a result of their contact with European trade goods during the protohistoric period that Brown's journals could not be read as describing \"aboriginal practices.\" Chief Justice McEachern, in his _Reasons for Judgment_ , would later explain the legal significance of firm boundaries between historical periods: \"The difference between the pre-historic, proto- and historic periods is relevant to the question of determining what are aboriginal as opposed to non-aboriginal practices,\" he wrote.\n\nOral history, linguistics, archaeology, ethnography and historical records are the usual sources of knowledge relied upon to provide information about the protohistoric and historic periods. Oral histories, in particular, offer Aboriginal reflections on these encounters, and some classical ethnographies augment this knowledge base. Europeans' experiences of the protohistoric era are represented in fur trading company's books and reports; ships' logs; traders' accounts, journals and diaries; and government records. Before evidence concerning the protohistoric and fur trade periods of history could be heard, the court had to determine how to classify these sources of evidence in legal terms.\n\nIn 1989, midway through the trial and two years after his 1987 ruling on the admissibility of oral history testimony, Chief Justice McEachern made a second ruling on evidence. This gave direction on how the court would interpret historical documents recognized as such within the academic study of history. McEachern divided this material into two categories. Category 1 included documents written by contemporaries; that is, first hand observations made by historical actors such as fur traders, missionaries, and government agents of their own environments, experiences, and opinions. Category 2 was reserved for historians' interpretations and opinions of these primary documents.\n\nDocuments written by contemporaries are called in law\u2014as a term of art\u2014 \"ancient documents.\" According to common law rules, ancient documents are admissible if they are \"more than thirty years old, produced from proper custody and otherwise free from suspicion.\" The point is that the documents must be in their original state, and it must be shown that they could not have been tampered with or changed since they were first written and secreted away. Although he did allow, theoretically, that it was possible such documents may contain mixtures of \"fact and hearsay,\" Chief Justice McEachern ruled that \"ancient documents admitted into evidence are, subject to weight, _prima facie_ proof of the truth of the facts stated in them.\" That is, ancient documents are assumed to have been produced through a process whereby brute facts, existing independently of cultural or any other form of interpretation, were observed and recorded by unbiased writers in a similarly objective fashion. The records of early explorers, fur traders, and colonial officials, that had been housed in archives, were classified as \"ancient documents.\"\n\nOn the question of the role of interpretation of historical documents, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en argued that each document should be accompanied by an historian to provide a context for interpretation. The Crown argued that all documents should be admitted and then weighed by the judge in the context of the evidence as a whole. Chief Justice McEachern ruled that historians may express their opinions \"based upon inferences from the documents about the recorded facts of history.\" They would not be permitted, however, to \"construe a written document...or generalize upon the broad sweep of history which is so often subject to learned disagreement and revision.\" His assumption appeared to be that the original written document represented a form of \"pure\" knowledge, the singular truth of which would be discoverable forever by future generations of rational thinkers. There is no consideration in this theory of the way that different generations of readers, living in different contexts, and reading these ancient documents for different purposes, may interpret their meanings differently. That is to say, the possibility that _both_ written and oral histories begin as human creations, and that their meanings are interpreted and reinterpreted over time, challenges the law's desire to classify history in discrete periods, and to codify historical knowledge into simple true and false categories.\n\nAs he had done in regard to the distinction between history and mythology in oral histories, the Chief Justice asserted that, in the case of historical documents, fact and opinion could be clearly differentiated within them. In keeping with law's self image as \"a site where universal reason actualizes itself, owing nothing to the social conditions under which it is manifested,\" the judge declared that he could and would make the final determination of what was fact or truth, and what was not. He wrote: \"Impermissible opinions and the conclusions [historians] wish me to reach in connection with the subject matters of their opinions will undoubtedly be interwoven with permissible opinion, and it will be my responsibility to disregard the former while profiting from the latter.\"\n\nThe Chief Justice made a third evidentiary ruling on the admissibility of \"treatises,\" defined as written materials including published books and articles, and unpublished theses, essays and studies.\" The Crown argued that \"only totally unbiased, non-controversial, generally accepted works that have endured and survived expert public review such as standard texts, qualify as learned treatises.\" Chief Justice McEachern disagreed with the Crown, and concluded that such an orthodox approach was not practical in this case. He decided to admit all such material subject to weight, and to objections by counsel that particular items may be untrustworthy because of \"disabling bias or a demonstrated lack of competence or for other reasons.\"\n\nFollowing the Chief Justice's decision to admit this evidence, one of Canada's foremost authorities on fur trade history, Dr. Arthur Ray of the University of British Columbia, took the stand on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. Ray began his report with a description of the task he was asked to perform by the plaintiffs. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs commissioned Ray \"...to examine the economic history of the Middle Skeena River-Lake Babine region in order to (a) search for evidence of the native exercise of title in the area; and, (b) to examine the way the Gitksan, Wet'suwet'en and Babine responded to economic developments following European contact.\" Ray's evidence began with a description of the years beginning around 1800, and continued with discussions of two time periods: (1) The Transitional Years, 1830\u20131860; and (2) Competition and Economic Diversity, 1860-1915. The sources Ray examined for this study were Hudson's Bay Company records, ethnographies, and interviews with contemporary key informants. The details of his research and report have subsequently been published in peer-reviewed academic journals.\n\nDr. Ray began his testimony with a brief overview of the 9000 strong pre-contact Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en population. He described villages, locations of fishing sites, and Indigenous social structure. Ray described how the Coastal Tsimshian peoples began trading sea otter pelts for European goods around 1778. They brought these new items along with them on their regular excursions to trade with their Gitksan neighbours who lived inland. The Gitksan then traded these goods with their Wet'suwet'en neighbours, and with their Athabaskan trading partners further to the east, as they had been doing for centuries. Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en participation in the maritime phase of the European-Aboriginal fur trade was minimal, and had little impact on Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en ways of life, Ray testified. During the 1800s the sea otter was overharvested to near extinction, and the maritime phase of the European-Aboriginal fur trade gradually came to a close as British and Canadian trading companies established forts and began to trade with interior peoples for beaver, mink, muskrat, bear and other land mammal furs. Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en involvement in the land-based phase of the fur trade was more active, and effected some changes in relations with neighbouring peoples, in ownership and management of territories and in the economic organization of hunting and trapping.\n\nWilliam Brown\u2014the author of the first written descriptions of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en ways of life\u2014arrived in 1822 to establish Fort Kilmaurs on Babine Lake. Based on his research in the Hudson's Bay archives, Ray argued that: \"What is abundantly clear from Brown is that you have a fully-articulated feasting system with house territories, family heads. In other words, the system\u2014the very system that the ethnographers...begin to describe with Morice some 60 years later is a system that essentially Brown has just given us the bone outline for in 1822....\" The Hudson's Bay Company records and the oral histories, as well as ethnographic, archaeological and linguistic evidence all document extensive trade in the region as a whole in both primary and manufactured goods. Harmon and Brown described well-organized and managed trade in furs, dressed skins, leather, fish, fish oil, blankets, shell beads, berry cakes, nets and dogs.\n\nQuoting from Brown's journals, Ray testified that \"Brown discovered that the regional economy was a delicately balanced system in which villages were linked together by kinship ties, trade, gambling and potlatching activities.\" Brown described the people as living in four major villages between which were scattered territories of the constituent Houses. He recorded that \"access to Babine and Wet'suwet'en house territories was tightly controlled by 42 'nobles' and 'men of property'.\" The immediate problem this presented to fur trader Brown was that \"lineage heads gave only a few of their fellow kinsmen the right to hunt and trap\" and most of their produce was \"tithed\" to the Chiefs. It was only the Chiefs who the Hudson's Bay Company could deal with. \"These elders,\" Brown wrote, \"generally had well-established trading connections already\" and were interested in trading with the Hudson's Bay Company only if it was to their advantage.\n\nBrown described how frustrated Hudson's Bay Company men trading with the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en during the early years of the fur trade became when they had to compete with other Aboriginal traders who could, simply put, offer better prices and better trade goods than the Hudson's Bay Company could. A similar problem arose regarding Brown's dependence on Aboriginal people for transportation. Ray wrote that \"Even at rates the Hudson's Bay Company considered to be unreasonable, it was difficult to persuade Indians to transport goods at the times the company wanted. The Indians were said to be willing to do the work only when it suited them because they had a variety of alternative work that was easier and more lucrative.\"\n\nBrown resorted to acting as a middleman between the Athabaskans and the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, importing the moose hides they so highly valued from Company trading posts east of the Rockies and trading these for furs. Ray quoted an excerpt from Brown's journals to illustrate this. Brown wrote: \"I made then [1823] what I considered very handsome presents consisting of cloth blankets, shirts, etc... But the following day they brought back the whole and informed me that it was not to receive such articles as these that they had given me their furs. One of them, Snuggletrun [the second highest ranked Hot-set leader] from whom I had received about twenty skins I had given two yds Red Strouds, one flanal shirt, one awl, one firesteel, one gun flint, two needles, two hanks thread, two yards gartering, ten ball, one half point powder, one point shot and one sixth point tobacco, requested I take back the whole and give him a dressed skin in the place.\"\n\nIn analyzing the records of William Brown, Ray introduced new historical research that had been inaccessible until the late 1960s, and had subsequently been ignored by previous researchers working in the area. Brown's journals challenged many assumptions held by earlier historians and anthropologists about the pre-contact nature of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society. Ray noted that, in the course of his research, he \"...discovered that all the important ethnographic studies of the region, such as those of A. G. Morice, Diamond Jenness, Irving Goldman and Julian Steward had not used this material because it was unavailable to them. More recent writers, most notably Vernon Kobrinksi and Charles Bishop, draw heavily on these earlier published ethnographies, but ignored the critical Brown material.\"\n\nThe legal significance of Ray's report and testimony was that it supported the claim that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en \"did occupy the territory in dispute at the time of initial European contact.\" \"Of considerable importance to the Wet'suwet'en,\" Ray noted, \"Brown outlined a feasting and house territory system that was very similar to the one the hereditary Chiefs described in their opening statement 170 years later.\" Further, Ray's testimony provided documentary evidence in the form of reports written by an Englishman that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en did manage and conserve their lands and resources through a House (lineage) territory system, before the local commencement of the European-Aboriginal fur trade that focused on beaver. Brown's documentation of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en \"men of property\" owning trapping sites and controlling access to beaver\u2014whose meat they disdained but whose pelts they valued for trade\u2014contradicted the Crown's argument that the only resources that Aboriginal peoples regulated at all were those they relied upon for subsistence, and that they had not engaged in production of surpluses for trade before Europeans arrived.\n\nBoth federal and provincial Crown lawyers emphasized pre-contact intra-Indian violence in their cross-examination of the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's witnesses, a strategy that reached its peak in the cross-examination of Arthur Ray who titled an article he later wrote about his experiences in the _Delgamuukw_ case \"Creating the Image of the Savage in Defence of the Crown.\" In it he wrote: \"It was apparent to me that the Counsels for the Crown had two major objectives in mind when they pursued this line of questioning. They hoped to raise doubts about the reliability of Brown as an observer and they tried to suggest that the area was in a state of turmoil at the time of first contact. I think this line of inquiry also reflected an underlying and disturbing attitude of Crown Counsel toward Native people\u2014that they were revengeful and violence-prone before the 'civilizing' influences of European missionaries and government officials modified their behaviour.\"\n\nCounsel for the government of Canada, James Macaulay, concentrated on challenging Dr. Ray with anecdotes drawn from the reports of early traders and explorers that depicted violent confrontations. The essence of the federal cross-examination of Arthur Ray is illustrated by the following exchange:\n\nMacaulay: I put it to you, Dr. Ray, that's really the point of the cross-examination, or one of the points any how, that this is a very fragile system and it was interrupted by such things as a single killing.... Do you agree that the reciprocal killing system had that effect?\n\nRay: My point would be that societies generally value peace, that's both within groups and between groups; that their systems for sustaining peace break down from time to time are easy enough to prove. And if you wanted to use the European example, just remember the period we're talking about is close to the Napoleonic Wars, right?\n\nMacaulay: Yes.\n\nRay: A lot more people got killed in those. And would you not say that those European societies valued peace as well?\n\nMacaulay: I'm not saying European societies valued peace, Dr. Ray\u2014\n\nRay: Well, would you say that the European societies had equally fragile systems? No human society has been able to sustain peace both in itself and between itself....\n\nMacaulay allowed that this might be the case. However, it was the presumably spontaneous and unpredictable\u2014unorganized\u2014nature of Aboriginal violence that he was referring to:\n\nMacaulay: Isn't that the source of the violence...that the endemic violence was based on a fair degree of truculence...that there was a certain excitability and ferocity that led to the whole village becoming involved....\n\nLate on the second day of Ray's cross examination by the Crown, Chief Justice McEachern intervened:\n\nCourt: Maybe I can ask you this, Dr. Ray: Mr. Macaulay has been suggesting a tendency toward violence and you have been resisting that and you are saying that wasn't the state of things, or at least it wasn't the normal diet for the period you are talking about. Yet, there seems to be some pretty strong suggestions that there was warfare on the Skeena, and I take it you are saying that was at some later time?\n\nRay later wrote: \"I replied by saying that I thought the portrayal of Indian society as being a violence-prone one was an ethnocentric point of view. I noted that I did discuss violence in my opinion, but I also made it clear that feasting provided one way of dealing with the problem. Murders did not always lead to revenge killings by the offended relatives.\" Ray explained that: \"My only point was I do not subscribe to the bloodthirsty savagery of Native people, nor the noble savage. I don't subscribe to either. I see Native people as people. They have the same problems that other peoples have around the world and in different points in time. That was the main point of my report. Nothing more; nothing less.\"\n\nLike many academics who have testified as expert witnesses in court, Arthur Ray concluded upon reflection that the adversarial courtroom is an inappropriate forum in which to hold scholarly debates. Lawyers are rarely familiar with historical methodology, he charged, and they \"take extreme positions\" and \"champion points of view\" chosen for their strategic value in bolstering their clients' cases, rather than their historical validity.\n\n* * *\n\n. See Beals 1985; Campisi 1991; Clifford 1988; Dobyns 1978; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1979; Dyck 1993(b); Feldman 1980; Foster and Groves 1993; Harries-Jones 1985; Hedican 1986; Hedley 1986; Kousser 1983; LaRusic 1985; Lurie 1956; Maddock 1989; Manners 1956; Paine 1985; Rosen 1977; Salisbury 1976; Sansom 1985; Tremblay 1983; Waldram 1993; Wright 1988.\n\n. Geertz 1983(b); Van Esterik 1985; See also _POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review_ , Volume 10(2), November 1996, Special Issue: Anthropology Engaging Law, Washington, D.C.: American Anthropology Association.\n\n. Hammersley and Atkinson 1983.\n\n. Behar and Gordon (eds.) 1996; Clifford and Marcus (eds.) 1986; Fox 1991; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Rosaldo 1989.\n\n. See Ruby 1982; and Rosaldo 1989.\n\n. See Ryan 1990, 1992; Warry 1990.\n\n. See Behar and Gordon 1996; Brody 1985; Clifford and Marcus (eds.) 1986; Marcus and Fisher 1986.\n\n. Thomas 1994.\n\n. This is a vast literature. But see for summaries: Behar and Gordon 1996; di Leonardo 1991(ed); Moore 1988.\n\n. Ryan 1985.\n\n. Rush 1991: 13-14.\n\n. Daly 1988: 26-28.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 184: 11822.\n\n. Mills 1987. Mills has also published a book presenting her opinion report and her experiences as an expert witness. See Mills 1995.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 196: 12860.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 196: 12869.\n\n. Peter Ogden was a fur trader and explorer who traveled from the Oregon Territory to northern British Columbia in the early 1800s. Although he did not directly encounter either the Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en on his travels, he recorded in his journals anecdotes he had heard about them and other First Nations in the region. Subsequent documentation by fur traders like William Brown who worked directly with the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and ethnohistorical and archaeological research, have shown Ogden's descriptions to be unreliable.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 201: 13319-13321.\n\n. See Stocking 1987.\n\n. See Deloria 1969.\n\n. Seidler 1987.\n\n. Brody 1987(b).\n\n. Ibid., 6.\n\n. Ibid., 2.\n\n. Ibid., 7.\n\n. Ibid., 5.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 210: 14217.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 211: 14254.\n\n. University of British Columbia Professor of Law, and Lawyer for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, Michael Jackson.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 211: 14254.\n\n. The judge is referring to the Report of the McKenna-McBride Commission that was charged with examining the allocation of Indian reserves throughout British Columbia from 1913-1916.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 212: 15381-15389.\n\n. Brody 1987(b): 71.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 211: 14253.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 211: 14257.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 210: 14215-14258.\n\n. Hudson's Bay trader William Brown was the first European to keep systematic written records describing his dealings with the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and their social organization from his point of view. The North West Company had operated Fort St. James on nearby Stuart Lake from 1806-1822 and their traders had obtained \"second-hand information about the Babine, Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. Subsequently, William Brown discovered that some of this intelligence was not accurate.\" (Ray, 1991(b): 302).\n\n. McEachern, _Reasons_ 1991: 35.\n\n. _Delgamuukw v. B.C._ (1989) 38 B.C.L.R. (2d) 165 (judgment on the admissibility of historical documents), referenced as \" _Delgamuukw_ 1989 documents.\"\n\n. Fortune 1993.\n\n. Delgamuukw 1989 documents, ftnt 55: 169.\n\n. \"1. true, valid or sufficient at first impression; 2. self-evident; 3. legally sufficient to establish a fact or a case unless disproved.\" _Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary_.\n\n. _Delgamuukw_ 1989 documents:ftnt 55: 171.\n\n. Ibid., 175.\n\n. Ibid., 175-176.\n\n. Bourdieu 1987: 820.\n\n. _Delgamuukw_ 1989: 176.\n\n. _Delgamuukw v. B.C._ (1989) 38 B.C.L.R. (2d) 176, referenced as _Delgamuukw_ , 1989, treatises.\n\n. _Delgamuukw_ , 1989, treatises: 187.\n\n. Ibid., 187-188.\n\n. Ray 1987: 1.\n\n. Ray 1991(a); 1991(b).\n\n. Ray 1991(b): 304.\n\n. Harmon was a Northwest Company trader who made contact with the Carrier, neighbors of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, during the early 1800s.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 203: 13478.\n\n. Ray 1987: 46.\n\n. Ray 1991(b): 303 (quoting Brown, Fort Babine [Kilmaurs] District Report, 1822-23, B. 11\/e\/1).\n\n. Ray 1991(b): 304.\n\n. Ray 1987: 76.\n\n. Ray 1991(b): 308 quoting Brown, Fort Babine [Kilmaurs] District Report, 1822-23, PAMHBC B.11\/e\/2, footnote 13.\n\n. Ray 1991(b): 310.\n\n. Ray, 1991(a): 15. Ray is referring to the following works of these authors: Bishop 1979; Goldman, Irving 1940, 1941, 1975; Jenness 1943; Kobrinski 1977; Morice 1970; Steward 1961.\n\n. Ray 1991(b): 309.\n\n. Ray 1991(a): 16.\n\n. Ray 1991(a).\n\n. Ray 1991(a): 19.\n\n. Ray 1991(a): 25.\n\n. Ray 1991(a): 23.\n\n. Ray 1991(a): 26.\n**Chapter 11: The Crown's Case**\n\n_We are a poor people with rich resources. That is why the province and the federal government are running scared. And that is why they wouldn't deal with us. If it was a barren land, do you think they would bother with us? The taxes that are generated from our resources are what is paying for all of the things that they are doing against us._\n\n_They had huge mounds of money to pay their lawyers, and they had a lot of lawyers.... And the office staffs. It was unbelievable, the amount of people that they had working with them.... They had money like it was going out of style. They had the staff behind them that could run and fetch whatever it was that they needed on a moment's notice\u2014and we were criticized because of our miserable little amounts._ _I don't feel one bit ashamed of where that money comes from. It is a mere pittance of what is owed to us. A pittance...because over a hundred years the resources have been just raped out of our territories...._\n\n_That's our money paying for all of this. Why? Because the resources and the taxes that are generated from those resources are what those people are afraid of losing._\n\n\u2014Yagalahl (Dora Wilson), 1992.\n\n**The Political Economy of Litigation**\n\nThe defendants in _Delgamuukw v. R._ were _Her Majesty the Queen in Right of the Province of British Columbia and the Attorney General of Canada_ : \"the Crown.\" They asked the court for \"a declaration that the Plaintiffs have no right, title or interest in and to the Claim Area, and the resources thereon, thereunder or thereover.\" The Province of British Columbia argued that, although the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had no rightful claims at all, in the event that the court found that they did, and there were any damages to be paid or compensation due, it was the federal government's responsibility to pay. The federal government argued that some of the costs should be borne by the province.\n\nThe Province of British Columbia's argument in the _Delgamuukw_ case was constructed on the basis of four building blocks. First, they argued that Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en societies were only minimally organized during what the Crown called \"pre-historic\" times. The Crown claimed that no system of government or property law existed among Aboriginal peoples prior to European contact that could be recognized as equal to, or deserving of respect by, British or Canadian law. The Crown also had a fall back position in the event that the judge might reject _terra nullius_ and find that some form of legally recognizable Aboriginal rights were being practised when Europeans arrived in northern British Columbia during the eighteenth century. They argued that the only locations that could possibly have been used and occupied to any extent, and therefore could possibly be recognized as subject to an Aboriginal claim, were the village sites next to rivers with large salmon runs. According to the Province of B.C., the ancestors of the Aboriginal peoples appeared to have used and occupied only those spaces which were later designated by the federal government as reserves, and for which the federal government is responsible. The only resource the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en may have any claim to, said the Province, were salmon, also a federal responsibility.\n\nThe second building block of the Crown's argument was the claim that the hunting territories and access routes outside the major villages were used only incidentally, sporadically, and arbitrarily by anyone who wished to wander about. Their position was that no consistent use, or occupation, or ownership, or management was ever exercised in these territories. Although the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's maps showed 133 distinct and bounded territories that included identified village and camp sites, and precise locations where resources and game were located in each, the Province of B.C. argued that no one ever travelled far from a riverfront village-cum-reserve to hunt or gather on these territories. According to the Province of B.C., the ancestors of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples appear _not_ to have used and occupied those spaces that are now under lease to multinational forestry companies, and from which 3 million cubic metres of timber were harvested during the four years of the _Delgamuukw_ trial.\n\nThird, the Crown argued that elementary concepts and systems of property rights emerged among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en following the commencement of European-Aboriginal trade: during a period they referred to as \"protohistoric times.\" Captain James Cook's meeting with Ahousat Chief Maquinna on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1774 marks the first recorded European contact with First Nations in what is now British Columbia. The key time period for the Crown's case, therefore, encompassed the 48 years between 1774 and 1822 when Hudson's Bay Company trader William Brown established a fort in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory and began recording the first significant British observations of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. Since Brown's journals described social organization that closely resembled the House and clan social structure and the land tenure system that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en witnesses described, the Crown argued that Brown was writing about a society that had already been significantly assimilated into British culture between the time of Captain Cook's 1774 landing several hundred miles away on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and Brown's arrival in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory in 1822. Therefore, the Crown posited, Brown was not describing a \"truly aboriginal society.\" This rationale for invalidating Brown's observations was the cement that held the Crown's edifice together. Prior to the advent of the European-Aboriginal fur trade, so the Crown's story goes, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en lived in nomadic, unorganized, unstable groupings. As a result of becoming involved in the fur trade, Aboriginal peoples took the first necessary step to assimilating into civilized European society by developing ranked societies based on social inequality, the Crown concluded.\n\nFinally, the Crown argued that, even if some form of Aboriginal title or rights had been held by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, they had been extinguished by the simple assertion of British sovereignty, or by the assumed acquiescence of Aboriginal peoples to the superimposition of British and Canadian law.\n\nIn summary, these four arguments constituted the Crown's case: (1) Ultimately, the British Crown had the right to assert sovereignty and extinguish Aboriginal title and right. (2) Anyway, Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en societies were \"unorganized\" before contact with Europeans: hierarchal social organization and property law was absent. (3) These developed in response to the European-Aboriginal fur trade through a process of assimilation of Aboriginal ways of life to those of the European settlers. (4) The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had acquiesced to British and Canadian rule.\n\n**Anthropology: The Science of \"Man\"?**\n\n_It is clear that theories do much more than explain social life; they also define the understandings that underpin different forms of social practice, and they help to orient us in the social world...Naturally, granted what is at stake, human beings will always be tempted to espouse theories that give them a sense of moral orientation, and even more theories which support the practices they find advantageous...._\n\n\u2014Philosopher Charles Taylor,1985, _Social Theory As Practice_.\n\n_Behind and supporting...the understandable prestige of the natural science model, stands an attachment to a certain picture of the human agent. This picture is deeply attractive to moderns...it shows us as capable of achieving a kind of disengagement from our world by objectifying it...._\n\n\u2014Philosopher Charles Taylor, 1985, _Philosophy and the Human Sciences_.\n\nThe Crown's lawyers argued that their critique of the evidence presented by the Aboriginal plaintiffs and their expert witnesses was based on principles of a scientific research methodology. They entered an article entitled \"The Expert in Court,\" written by Anthony Kenny and published in a 1983 edition of the _Law Quarterly Review_ as an exhibit. In this paper, Kenny set out four criteria for determining whether a discipline is sufficiently scientific in its methodology to justify the admission of expert opinion evidence in a court of law: \"First,\" Kenny wrote, \"the discipline must be consistent. That is to say, different experts must not regularly give conflicting answers to questions which are central to their discipline.... Second, the discipline must be methodical. A procedure carried out by one expert to reach a particular conclusion is one which must be capable of duplication by any other expert.... Thirdly, the discipline must be cumulative. The findings of one generation of workers in the discipline are not called in question by the workers of the next...research, once done, does not need doing again; if you have to repeat someone else's experiments, or re-sample his population, on the very same issue, that shows you there was something wrong with his experiment, or something faulty in his sampling.... Fourthly, the discipline must be predictive, and therefore falsifiable...it must predict the not yet known from the already known (as the doctor's diagnosis of the nature of a terminal illness predicts what will be found at the post mortem), and is falsified if it proves otherwise.\"\n\nKenny's first and third criteria are particularly problematic, from any methodological perspective. If experts cannot disagree and debate without discrediting their areas of study, and if the findings of one generation cannot be called into question by the next, then neither scientific nor democratic progress can be made. All four of Kenny's criteria\u2014but particularly two and four, in their demand for the replication of research contexts and procedures, and the ability of studies to reliably predict outcomes\u2014are the criteria of positivist science, modelled on the methodology employed by natural scientists. Inclusion of disciplines whose knowledge bases arise from people-studying-people (anthropology, sociology, political science, history, literature) within this paradigm rests on the assumption that human beings are like water, and their behaviour can be predicted in the same way that we can predict water will always boil when it reaches a certain temperature. This is a proposition that generations of social scientists have contested, arguing that humans are social beings: meaning-makers whose lives are lived, and whose decisions and actions are taken within networks of relationships with their environment and with other human beings. The \"research environment\" of life, differs in its essence from the controlled laboratories of experimental science. The systematic study of human beings requires methodologies that take account of the dynamic particularities of human social life as it is lived and experienced by human beings, including the researchers themselves.\n\nPeople's own accounts and analyses of their lived experience have no legitimate place in the framework Kenny provides for determining what knowledge is valid. Ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation research, where anthropologists live with, and extensively observe ordinary people going about the course of their daily lives, cannot possibly meet the criteria set out by Kenny. Disciplines like history and anthropology that have undergone significant changes in recent years in response to the inclusion and consideration of the scholarship of previously excluded categories of persons\u2014 like women and Indigenous peoples\u2014are rendered unreliable and inconsistent by a positivist approach.\n\nIt is not only professionals in the \"human sciences\" who encounter difficulty in meeting Kenny's criteria for qualification as \"expert witnesses.\" In the realm of European physical sciences, neither Copernicus, Galileo, Newton nor Einstein would have passed the first test of their expertise in their day. Neither have any of these astronomers and physicists passed the third test, since all of their findings have been questioned and modified by other astronomers, physicists and mathematicians in subsequent generations. Most significant in this context, however, is the fact that Charles Darwin, on whose theories of biological evolution nineteenth century anthropologists, historians and jurists based their hypothetical formulations of social evolution, could not have passed any of Kenny's four criteria.\n\nKenny's criteria are fundamentally anti-scientific in their devaluing of criticism, reflection, accumulation of knowledge, and change in response to new information. The Crown's tenacious advocacy of positivist social theory, scientific methodology, and empiricism is particularly ironic in light of the mystical foundation of Crown title: the phantasmic apparition of an ethereal sovereign hovering over the land.\n\n* * *\n\n. Yagalahl 1992: 203.\n\n. McEachern 1991, _Reasons for Judgment_ in _Delgamuukw v. R._ , Vancouver, British Columbia: 43.\n\n. Glavin 1990: 179.\n\n. Kenny 1983.\n\n. Ibid., 113.\n\n. There is a huge literature on this debate within the social sciences. For an accessible entry to the debate see Rosaldo 1989.\n\n. See Behar and Gordon (eds.) 1996.\n**Chapter 12: Experts on Behalf of the Defendants**\n\n_Court performances introduce the cultural practices of the dominant group to the subordinate group as they impose new regulations and conceptions of social relationships. In their public ritual performances, courts operating in situations of cultural diversity and unequal power tend to apply the rules of one group to other groups. These performances demonstrate the procedures of the dominant order, demand compliance with it, and illustrate through both the imposition of laws and their enactment in the daily life of subordinate peoples, the ways it applies to everyday life. Thus, court performances are one way of expanding the hegemony of the law. Not only are ideas articulated but they are superimposed on everyday life in front of an audience of relatives, neighbours, and friends._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Sally Merry Engle, 1994, _Courts as Performances_.\n\n**Her Majesty's Loyal Anthropologist**\n\nThe Crown claimed that their critique of the plaintiffs' evidence was based on objective, neutral, scientific criteria of evaluation and research methodology, and that these principles were what guided them in _their_ selection of expert evidence. In order to support their arguments, lawyers for the Crown turned to social science. They were particularly attracted to those branches of the social sciences that continue to give credence to theories of universal laws of social and cultural evolution, and that posit that all societies follow western Europe, over time, on the climb up the developmental ladder from hunting and gathering to modern industrial capitalism. The Crown called experts in historical cartography, history and anthropology. Most of the Crown's witnesses were professionals and government employees rather than academics or scholars. These included: a physician, several guide outfitters, a retired local politician and self-described pioneer, a popular historian, fisheries officers and a retired federal Indian Agent. No Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en, or member of any other First Nation, testified on behalf of the Crown.\n\nThe centrepiece of the expert evidence for _Her Majesty the Queen In Right Of The Province Of British Columbia And The Attorney General of Canada_ , and, specifically, for the prestigious Vancouver law firm of Russell & DuMoulin who represented Her In Right Of Them, took the form of an opinion report prepared under Russell & DuMoulin's direction by Sheila Patricia Robinson, Ph.D., a cultural geographer by training, who was accepted by Chief Justice McEachern as an expert witness in anthropology. Robinson had never held an academic position, nor has she published her expert opinion reports so they can be scrutinized by either her colleagues or the public. She is a professional witness, hired by law firms on short-term contracts to testify for the Crown in numerous Aboriginal rights cases. Robinson's tasks in this capacity are twofold. First, she assists Crown lawyers in their attempts to discredit Aboriginal people and the expert witnesses who testify for them. Second, she provides academic research to support the Crown's legal arguments.\n\nSheila Robinson's report, entitled \"Protohistoric Developments in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Territories,\" consisted of an introduction and five sections, covering 29 pages; and an additional 67 pages of supporting notes and references were appended to the main body of the report. The central narrative in Robinson's story is about social change caused by the arrival of manufactured commodities during the European-Aboriginal fur trade. In order to understand how, when, why, and what change took place she had to first describe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en societies as they were before Europeans and their commodities appeared.\n\nAs befits the role of the defendant's expert witness, Robinson began her report by casting doubt on the credibility of the plaintiffs' primary source of knowledge on the matters in dispute: Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral histories. Although the Crown's witness had not studied Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral traditions, she dismissed oral history as a invalid source of knowledge out of hand, supporting the Crown's contention that they should be treated as \"hearsay\" rather than \"history.\" She wrote: \"It is important to emphasize the limitations inherent in any theory of aboriginal land use which attempts to reconstruct a 'reality' that existed long before any relevant written records were kept and long before the memory of living man....\" Taken by itself this may be a perfectly reasonable statement. However, without further specification of what those limitations are\u2014such as Richard Daly's review of methodological problems in the study of oral traditions in general, and Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral traditions in particular, had provided\u2014Robinson's point is simply a rhetorical statement of the obvious. Her critique of oral history appears even less plausible when the scholarly sources she relied on to describe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en social organization before European contact are scrutinized: 47 of her 82 bibliographic references on this subject were based substantially on oral histories collected from Aboriginal elders by anthropologists. The Crown's witness rejected oral tradition on theoretical and methodological grounds, and then selectively relied on oral tradition to support the descriptions of pre-contact Aboriginal cultures that form the basis of her report. When lawyers for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en questioned Robinson about how she rationalized drawing conclusions from data whose validity she denied by definition, she replied that she had described pre-contact Aboriginal society \"to the extent that that can't be done.\"\n\nRobinson's report continued: \"I am generally suspicious of writers who tend towards a static or structural treatment of any society.... The ideal models may outline rules of behaviour, but do not adequately account for ongoing adjustments\u2014in population distribution and density, in resource distribution, in alliance formations, and so on. Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en societies were never static.... Reconstructions of traditional native socioeconomies which fail to account for indirect European influence deny the dynamic dimensions of ongoing cultural adaptations and resign their subjects to an untenable\u2014 however romantic\u2014'snapshot' stasis,\" she wrote.\n\nUnder cross examination Dr. Robinson was able to name only one text that fit the description she set out of \"static or structural treatments,\" and that study referred not to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en but to a different Northwest Coast Nation, the Kwa'kwak'wakw. This text has since been substantially revised by the authors themselves, based on later research. Robinson could not name any sources that described the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en in the \"romantic\" fashion her report referred to, nor could she identify any sources that claimed no changes had occurred in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society and culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries\u2014or before or since, for that matter. Under cross-examination by Peter Grant, lawyer for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, the Crown's witness insisted that she was not referring to the opinion reports submitted by the plaintiff's anthropologists when she made these statements. Taking her at her word, then, and as there is no empirical evidence to support her critique, it is fair to conclude that the importance of these introductory sentences in her report does not lie in their literal meaning but in their connotations: in the images they evoke, rather than in the facts they reveal.\n\nIn a rhetorical sense, Robinson's introductory paragraph alludes to two popular stereotypes of anthropology as idealistic and romantic, and\/or as abstract and intellectually elitist. It repeats the well-known charges that anthropology idealizes non-western cultures, \"freezes\" Indigenous peoples in time before contact, and denies post-contact change. These are legitimate critiques of some \"old\" ethnographies that, ironically, are over-represented in Dr. Robinson's own bibliography.\n\nIn the context of the _Delgamuukw_ trial, Robinson's references to \"romantic,\" \"idealized\" and \"unchanging\" descriptions of Aboriginal societies serve to represent her, in contrast to the \"straw anthropologists\" she set up in her report, as a reasonable, scholarly woman who deals in objective facts, rather than romantic ideals. This helped establish common ground\u2014emphatic communion\u2014between Dr. Robinson and Chief Justice McEachern: we are people of like mind; we are educated; we are objective; we are intelligent; we are on the same side.\n\nRobinson went on to dismiss the evidence presented by other expert witnesses who had testified for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. Sylvia Albright, an Ethnoarchaeologist, had cited archaeologist Gary Coupland's recent research in north-western British Columbia in her testimony for the plaintiffs. Coupland found ample archaeological evidence of land mammal hunting having been carried on in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territories circa 500 B.C., and argued that cultures with hierarchically ranked social structures had emerged by that time. In her initial proposal to Russell & DuMoulin, Sheila Robinson had suggested that \"archaeological reports could be quite worthwhile,\" and she had referred to archaeologists MacDonald, Allaire and Coupland as \"usually forming sound opinions.\" By the time she testified at the _Delgamuukw v. R._ trial Robinson had changed her mind about the validity of archaeological data in general, and the reliability of Gary Coupland's findings in particular. She dismissed Coupland's work\u2014which did not support the Crown's argument that social ranking among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en emerged in response to the eighteenth-century European-Aboriginal fur trade\u2014claiming that there had been too little archaeological research in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territories for any data to yield conclusive evidence.\n\nThere is little dispute in the archaeological literature about whether or not Coupland's findings are valid. Where debate does arise within the discipline is on the question of migrations during the period under study. That is, archaeological evidence neither proves nor disproves the question of whether the present Aboriginal inhabitants are the biological descendants of the people who lived in the region 5000 years ago. Some archaeologists argue that other Aboriginal people may have migrated into the region between 3000 B.C. and 1744 A.D. and killed off, or otherwise displaced, the people they found occupying the land. It is these \"migrants,\" they argue, who may be the ancestors of contemporary Aboriginal peoples. The Crown favours this theory as it challenges Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral histories that assert that their ancestors have occupied their territories since \"time immemorial.\" The insistence on proof of \"pure\" _biological_ descent to be considered as \"legitimate\" heirs with inheritance rights is an artefact of European patriarchal cultures, reflected in British property and estate law.\n\nUnlike the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's anthropologists, Sheila Robinson conducted no fieldwork with them, or with any other Aboriginal peoples. Hence, she was not subjected to the same criticisms of \"favouring a party\" that were levelled at Mills, Daly and Brody. Since Robinson had not conducted fieldwork, she was presented by the Crown as not having been \"contaminated\" by the thinking of any \"others;\" or by any of her own potentially irrational sentiments, that may be triggered by empathy or any other emotion. No one would accuse Sheila Robinson, as Crown Counsel had Heather Harris, of having \"gone native.\" No one would disparage her, as the Chief Justice had Hugh Brody, for \"liking Indians.\" No one would even ask her if she \"liked white people.\"\n\nHaving cast doubt on the credibility of the plaintiff's witnesses and on the reliability of their evidence, Robinson proceeded to set out the methodology she had employed in researching her expert opinion report: \"This report is based on a review and interpretation of existing information, largely contained in secondary sources, both published and unpublished, concerning the Gitksan and Carrier, as well as other Northwest coast and interior native groups. I have not carried out fieldwork.... Nor have I conducted archival research.... My general understanding...is shaped by the research I carried out for my doctoral dissertation. In connection with this study of Indian agriculture on the northern Northwest Coast.... I investigated ethnographic and early historic records pertaining to the Tlingit, Haida, Coast Tsimshian and neighbouring native populations.... Although my analysis in the present report borrows from the work of others, the conclusions are my own.\"\n\nThere are, however, several important contradictions between Robinson's Ph.D. thesis and her testimony as an expert witness, beginning with her reliance on theoretical speculation and comparative data drawn from studies of the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's neighbours. In her 1983 doctoral dissertation\u2014after quoting and criticizing two other scholars for relying on \"inference or speculation\"\u2014Robinson argued that, although \"piecemeal reconstruction of particular developments is perhaps a tedious route to scholarly enlightenment...[it] eventually leads to more easily substantiated and probably more appropriate hypotheses. And it is in keeping with the works of scholars who stress that the analysis of cultural processes is not always amenable to rigid theoretical treatment because historical records may yield unanticipated yet illuminating data.\"\n\nContemporary ethnohistorians have, indeed, been engaged in work that focuses on the particularities of local variation, rather than on the construction of theoretical generalizations. When Robinson took the stand as an expert witness in _Delgamuukw v. R._ she was asked to substantiate her claim that the theoretical framework presented in her expert opinion report was \"innovative, credible, and in keeping with recent ethnohistoric, cultural-ecological and cultural-evolutionary research.\" She testified that she had been guided by a 1986 volume of the journal _Anthropologica_ , edited by Dr. Edward S. Rogers of the Royal Ontario Museum in which he summarized his recommendations for future ethnohistorical research. Rogers urged scholars to develop more precise descriptions of locally distinct pre-contact cultures, take greater account of regional variation, and exercise more caution in asserting comparative generalizations. He listed the following factors that should be taken into account in future studies: climatic changes, game cycles, spatial distribution of resources, production of trade items, resource productivity, size of fish, demographic patterns, technology, sociopolitical organization and the influence of religious beliefs and behaviour patterns. Peter Grant asked Sheila Robinson whether she agreed with Dr. Rogers' recommendations.\n\nGrant: You would agree that these are factors that should be considered in analyzing the pre-contact society? Do you agree that in a study of the Gitksan or the Wet'suwet'en the climatic changes should be taken into account?\n\nRobinson: Oh, I would think so.\n\nGrant: Game cycles should be taken into account?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: Spatial distribution of resources should be taken into account?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: Production of trade items should be taken into account?\n\nRobinson: Well...I would say yes.\n\nGrant: Resource productivity should be taken into account?\n\nRobinson: To the extent that it can be.\n\nGrant: And the...size of fish?\n\n....\n\nRobinson: I would say that fish, characteristics of fish perhaps rather than just size might be important for this area.\n\nGrant: For the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en area?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: Good. I agree. So characteristics of fish should be taken into account for Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en?\n\nRobinson: Perhaps.\n\nGrant: And...cultural considerations?\n\n....\n\nRobinson: To the extent that they can be.\n\nGrant: The technology...the technology of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en should be taken into account?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\n....\n\nGrant: And sociopolitical organization should be taken into account?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: And the influence of spiritual beliefs and behaviour patterns\u2014 Robinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: Now, in your research and preparation of your report you did not take into account climate, did you?\n\nRobinson: Not specifically.\n\nGrant: Game cycles?\n\nRobinson: Not specifically.\n\nGrant: Spatial distribution of resources?\n\nRobinson: Yes, to some extent.\n\nGrant: Did you refer to that\u2014describe that in your report?\n\nRobinson: I don't know. I'm sure you've had a more thorough review of the paragraphs in recent days than I have. But, yes, it has got a spatial component to it in its description of the changes in hunting territories and so on.\n\nGrant: But I am talking about spatial distribution of resources, that would be game and where they are located?\n\nRobinson: Did I take it into account? Yes, to some extent.\n\nGrant: But you have indicated before you weren't sure where these resources were located within the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory?\n\nRobinson: I'm not sure what level of detail you were asking for, then or now. Grant: And did you deal with the production of trade items?\n\nRobinson: Yes, to some extent.\n\nGrant: And to the extent it is reflected in your report?\n\nRobinson: Yes. Not necessarily.\n\nGrant: Well, we have nothing\u2014 Robinson: Not necessarily expressed in the report directly all the consideration I made of the exchange of trade items.\n\nGrant: Well, what sources did you rely on for your analysis of the spatial distribution of resources? If you want you can look at the bibliography of your report.\n\nRobinson: Oh, can I?\n\nGrant: Yes.\n\nRobinson: Well, that's great. Perhaps we can go and list all the writers again who have dealt with spatial distribution in the territories.\n\nGrant: No, no, no.\n\nRobinson: No, no, no. Please don't shake your head at me.\n\nGrant: I want to ask you this, what sources did you deal with with respect to spatial distribution of resources among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en?\n\nRobinson: Kobrinsky and Bishop, among others.\n\nGrant: Okay. Thank you. Which sources did you rely on in your consideration of production of trade items with respect to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en?\n\nRobinson: Any of those sources which are referred to in chapter three of my dissertation which pertain to trade and the discussions of production and exchange, the circulation of wealth and so on. And also to those scholars that I have listed several times now who are included in the bibliography. I can either go alphabetical if you go through the footnote list again, or I can recite them probably from memory going from north to south.\n\n....\n\nGrant: You may have misheard me again.\n\nRobinson: No, I didn't mishear you.\n\nGrant: I asked what sources did you rely on in support of your analysis of the production of trade items _among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en?_\n\nRobinson: Well, I relied on more than those sources that pertain directly to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en.\n\nGrant: I understand that.\n\nRobinson: Well, I'm glad.\n\nGrant: I want to know specifically which ones relate to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en?\n\n....\n\nRobinson: Specific information on the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en...is expressed in the Brown reports... Grant: But the Brown reports that I have been discussing with you...are not cited in your report?\n\nRobinson: No, they are not cited in the report.\n\nContrary to the argument in support of locally-specific research that she had articulated in her doctoral dissertation, and that is endorsed by leading ethno-historians, Robinson proceeded to reconstruct a description of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en cultural history based on theoretical speculation and analogies to other First Nations' histories. The Crown's witness described Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society as a \"segmentary\" one that lacked \"mechanisms to create and sustain centralized political and economic authority,\" but admitted that this was based on theoretical generalizations about the nature of \"segmentary societies\" and not on data about the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en.\n\nThe final sentence of Robinson's introductory paragraph expresses the central legal point of the exercise: \"In this context, Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claims about 'traditionally' having owned and managed certain territories are questionable.\"\n\nRobinson's analysis of pre-contact Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society is built on a framework that organizes each section of her report, and is characterized by three features. First, the Crown's legal argument is faithfully supported. Second, data drawn from historical studies of other First Nations are frequently substituted for specific information about the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, even when this is available in the research literature. This is analogous to substituting French history for German history: there are parallels at high levels of generalization, but significant differences are well recognized. Third, Robinson's argumentation is often internally contradictory resulting in statements described by logicians as oxymorons: \"combinations of contradictory or incongruous words.\"\n\n**Malignant Mythology**\n\n_Every self-respecting people has its own founding myths; British Columbia whites, were, and are, no exception. The traditional White views were fully formed by the 1880s and remained little changed until the 1950s. These views belittled the worth and the claims of Indians while legitimizing the land ownership and political jurisdiction of the colonial authorities and their successors...only occasionally, and especially during the last quarter century, when the provincial government has had to defend its views in court, were attempts made to construct coherent legal or philosophic arguments in support.... The province's arguments in the Delgamuukw case provide the most comprehensive example of such an attempt._\n\n\u2014Political scientist Tennant, 1992, _The Place of Delgamuukw in British Columbia History and Politics\u2014and Vice Versa_.\n\nThe Crown witness' expert opinion report was presented in the form of a historical narrative. Sheila Robinson's description of the pre-contact period, which her report began with, supported several key points in the Crown's argument. It provided a baseline description of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society as minimally organized and unstable. Further, Robinson tried to demonstrate that the most highly valued lands were the main villages, and not the territories that surrounded them; and that all territories changed hands frequently and easily, there having been little if any law or regulation in the society as a whole, particularly with regard to property.\n\nRobinson described the pre-contact period as \"pre-historic,\" \"pristine,\" \"traditional,\" and when a \"truly aboriginal way of life\" existed. \"Pristine\" is defined in the dictionary as: \"(1) belonging to the earliest period or state. (2) a: uncorrupted by civilization; b: free from soil or decay: being fresh and clean.\" Most anthropologists have long since jettisoned the term \"pristine\" as an inappropriate description of pre-contact Aboriginal societies. The term and the concept are now interpreted as reflecting the worst forms of evolutionism and romanticism practiced by the discipline in its earliest days. The term \"pristine\" harkens back to European philosophers like Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, horrified by the social and environmental effects of industrialization, projected their nostalgic desires for an imagined Garden of Eden in their own imagined rural past onto contemporary Aboriginal cultures.\n\nRobinson began with a description of pre-contact Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society that covered, by her own admission, an unspecified period of time prior to the arrival of European commodities. Under cross examination, lawyer for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, Peter Grant, asked Robinson to delineate the length of time referred to in her cavalier sweep though history: Perhaps 100 years? Perhaps 10,000 years?\n\nGrant: You have no sense of the time depth of which is being discussed there?\n\nRobinson: No, I don't.\n\nCollapsing thousands of years of Aboriginal history into one vaguely-worded paragraph infers that Aboriginal cultures were static for thousands of years before European arrival, implying that they were incapable of change by themselves, but required the beneficent stimulus of colonial invasion in order to \"evolve.\"\n\nRobinson's report continued: \"Oral traditions describe groups of _settlers_ wandering about until they _discovered unoccupied lands_. According to the narratives, the _pioneers established villages_ and _laid claim to fishing sites, hunting territories_ , and other _resource-producing areas by using them_. The act of discovery, often reinforced by _supernatural occurrences_ , constituted the _basis of claim_ in many myths. However, _repeated use_ seems to have maintained _rights to resources_.\" (Emphasis added.)\n\nGrant asked Robinson for sources of facts to support the statements made in this paragraph:\n\nGrant: I would ask you if you can give one example of where the Gitksan have acquired territory by seizure of unclaimed land?\n\nRobinson: No, I cannot.\n\nGrant: Can you give one example of where the Gitksan have acquired land by discovery?\n\nRobinson: No, I cannot.\n\nGrant: Can you give one example of where the Gitksan have acquired land by occupying and using unclaimed territory?\n\nRobinson: I've read examples of these, but I don't know if they apply to the Gitksan in the historical or the modern.\n\nGrant: Can you give me one example of where the Gitksan acquired land by gift?\n\nRobinson: Not specifically, no.\n\nAgain, given the absence of any empirical support for her descriptions of pre-contact Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en cultures, the significance of this section of Robinson's report also appears to be rhetorical. Her use of language evokes a parallel between the British settlers' founding myth, and that of the ancestors of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. This is a common theme in B.C.'s populist political culture, and appears repeatedly in arguments against the legitimacy of Aboriginal claims in British Columbia. In this part of \"White British Columbians' founding myth,\" the ancestors of contemporary Aboriginal peoples were simply the first ones to arrive on the continent, and they laid claim to \"empty\" land by using it and occupying it in the way of migrants everywhere, always. Europeans simply did the same thing when they came a few thousand years later. Its all very natural and inevitable, and non-Aboriginal people therefore have as strong a claim to the land as Aboriginal people do: the only difference between them being a few thousand years of use and occupation.\n\nThe introduction to Section IV of Robinson's opinion report is entitled \"Gitksan Territorial Ownership: Traditional.\" It reads: \"Section IV...[theo-rizes]... about the dynamics of territorial acquisitions and control in traditional Gitksan societies prior to the protohistoric period. Emphasis is placed on the fact that traditional Gitksan societies were never stable and that rights to certain territories probably changed hands frequently. A scenario where the most highly valued territories were those close to the relatively stable village bases in prehistoric times is developed to contrast with the description of protohistoric and early historic patterns of Gitksan land holdings presented in Section V.\" She described a number of processes to substantiate her contention that \"territorial rights changed hands frequently,\" drawn either from material on other Northwest coast groups or from anthropologist John Adams' study of the contemporary Gitksan potlatch.\n\nThe Crown's witness continued, summarizing her position on pre-contact land and resource management: \"Speaking generally, one may expect that _some form of organized control_ would have been exercised over _access_ to the fisheries and other _resources_ which were _necessary for survival_ and over the _local trails and bridges_ which facilitated _prehistoric trade networks_.... In my opinion, outlying _borders were 'probably hazy'_ because there was little need to define them precisely....\" (Emphasis added.)\n\nA number of points were made in this paragraph that were fundamental to the Crown's argument. There is \"some form of _organized control_ \" (read: NOT ownership), \"exercised over _access\"_ (read: NOT ownership), \"to the _fisheries\"_ (read: NOT trees and game), \"and other _resources_ \" (read: NOT property), \"which were _necessary for survival_ \" (read: meet the basic survival needs of humans as organisms), \"and over the _local trails and bridges_ which facilitated prehistoric trade networks\" (read: NOT borders or boundaries).\n\nThe Crown's case was based on the theory that scarcity of resources produces competition between people who depend on these same resources, and that such competition leads to concepts of property and the establishment of borders and boundaries to protect one group's access to resources against the incursions of another group. This argument had both a theoretical and an empirical aspect. Empirically, the questions that required answers were: what game and other resources\u2014like trees\u2014were in the territories? How abundant or scarce were they? What demands did the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en place on these resources? How did they obtain and use them?\n\nThe Crown began by trying to establish that there were few game or other resources in the territories outside major village sites, and that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en did not significantly utilize or value the resources that were there. Scholars who specialize in this field have developed ways of calculating population to resources ratios, and analyzing different forms of social organization to hypothesize how resources were allocated and distributed, and if competition between people for access to these resources was present and contributed to pressures on the resource supply.\n\nThe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Chiefs' oral histories had been replete with references to the locations and uses of the resources in question. Arthur Ray, testifying for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, had argued that: \"Before contact, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en were highly dependent on their salmon fisheries. They located their semi-permanent villages beside the most reliable fishing sites and tapped the adjacent countryside for a variety of other resources. Local population pressure would have made it necessary for them to conserve these other resources, particularly game. The house-territory system was well-suited for that purpose.\" Other expert witnesses in paleobotany, ecology, forestry, and wildlife management had provided detailed evidence of the location and extent of game and other resources in the territories.\n\nThe Crown's witness admitted, under cross-examination, that her knowledge of the ecology of this area was limited. Robinson could not answer questions about where various game were located or what their habits were. When confronted with evidence about their use she equivocated in the extreme, going so far as to suggest the possibility that, not only were fish the primary source of subsistence, but that fish _skins_ , rather than animal furs or hides, supplied a significant part of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en clothing.\n\nRobinson:...We have to think in terms of the used resources rather than what's out there in terms of the natural environment. So the environment as it is used is different than the environment as it exists.\n\nGrant: Well, the coastal Tsimshian use the sea-based resources, the interior Gitksan use the rivereen resources, at least as far as the fish is concerned, right?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: You don't know what they wore, the interior Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. You have already told us that?\n\nRobinson: For which time period, sir?\n\nGrant: Pre-contact?\n\nRobinson: No. I don't think anyone knows what they wore pre-contact.\n\nGrant: But we can assume that they wore something in the winter months? Robinson: Yes, I think so.\n\nGrant: And we can assume that it wasn't from fish?\n\nRobinson: Not necessarily. I have seen references to the use of fish skin.\n\n... Grant: This is Harmon. You remember Harmon? You referred to him earlier, Dr. Robinson?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\n...\n\nGrant: Where he refers to \"The Native of New Caledonia, we denominate Carriers...\" You see that?\n\nRobinson: Yes, I do.\n\nGrant: Okay. Now, turn the page over. And then he gets into a description of them: \"...Their clothing consists of a covering made of...the skins of the beaver, badger, muskrat, cat or hare. The last they cut into strips, about one inch broad, and then weave or lace them together, until they become of a sufficient size to cover their bodies, and to reach their knees. This garment they put over their shoulders and tie about their waistes. Instead of the above named skins, when they can obtain them from us, they greatly prefer, and make use of blankets, capots, or Canadian coats, cloth or moose and red deer skin. They seldom use...either leggins or shoes, in the summer.\" Now, that description by Harmon is of the eastern Carrier. You would agree that that is some indication of what the aboriginal people of the interior, the north central interior of B.C. was wearing by a contemporary historical account?\n\nRobinson: Well, in the historic period for the Carrier or the eastern Carrier.... And I am gratified to see the reference of using the skin of fish for clothing is mentioned at the bottom of that paragraph.\n\nGrant: Yes. Well I knew you would find that.\n\nRobinson: Well, good.\n\n... Grant: Well, let's read what is there since you pointed it out. \"The women, however, in addition to the robe of beaver or dressed moose skins, wear an apron, twelve or eighteen inches broad, which reaches nearly down to their knees. These aprons are made of a piece of deer skin, or of salmon skins, sewed together. Of the skin of this fish, they sometimes make leggins, shoes, bags, etc. but they are not durable; and therefore they prefer deer skins and cloth, which are more pliable and soft. The roughness of salmon skins, renders them particularly unpleasant for aprons.\"\n\nYou have to\u2014in any of the analysis of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en pre-contact you have to take into account that there was some resources that they relied on for clothing?\n\nRobinson: Locally. Some resources that they relied on for clothing, yes, I would think so.\n\nGrant: Yes. And you are not suggesting that you assumed that they wore fish skins in the winter months in the central interior of B.C.?\n\nRobinson: I don't know. Harmon has given us a comment about the use of fish skins as part of the clothing. But there is no reference here to what seasons of year they wore the fish skins and whether or not they comprised part or all of their clothing.\n\n... Grant: But would it not be fair to assume that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en would rely upon furs from within their area for clothing pre-contact? Robinson: I imagine that they relied on them to some extent. We have here a description of the use of other species of animals for clothing, or fish.\n\nSo the resources were there and the people used them. The next question relevant to the Crown's case was, was there sufficient pressure on the resources that people may have been led to compete for them? Peter Grant referred Robinson to paragraph 28 of her opinion report and the supporting footnote on page 68 of part 2.\n\nGrant: You state, and this is your statement, and I think we've already established that this is conjectural on your part: \"My reasoning is that it is only when there is pressure on a certain resource, when competition draws attention to a certain resource, then there is need to define it specifically.\" Accepting that reasoning, you must analyze all potential sources of pressure on the resource to come to a conclusion; do you not agree?\n\nRobinson: Not necessarily. And I do not believe there is information about all possible pressures coming to bear on resources.\n\nGrant: You would\u2014to come to a conclusion about pressure on a certain resource, it would be relevant to determine the utilization of that resource for clothing needs, would it not?\n\nRobinson: Not necessarily.\n\n... Grant: Would it not be necessary to determine the utilization of that resource for feasting purposes?\n\nRobinson: Not necessarily.\n\n... Grant: Would it not be relevant to determine the necessity or the utilization of that resource for trade purposes?\n\nRobinson: Not necessarily.\n\nGrant: You say not necessarily?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: So ?\u2014\n\nRobinson: You're talking about resources generically, and I wouldn't say that any of those criteria you've just put to me are applicable for all situations. I'm not quite sure what situation you're referring to, Mr. Grant.\n\nGrant: Well, what situation are you referring to in your footnote; do you know?\n\nRobinson: I'm not sure what you're referring to, sir.\n\nGrant: I'm referring to the second sentence in...footnote 28a: 'My reasoning'.... 'My reasoning' being Sheila Robinson's reasoning?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: 'Is that only when there is pressure on a certain resource when competition draws attention to a certain resource, then there is a need to define it specifically'?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: What resource are you talking about?\n\nRobinson: I'm talking about a general principle as is expressed with regards to cultural ecological theory, and I did draw attention earlier to a reference, Robert Netting, and his very basic book called 'Cultural Ecology,' and you'll find there's reference to these general principles there. Your list of questions that had to do with specific characteristics or attributes associated with each resource, each or any resource, I said not necessarily, because I didn't think they were applicable criteria.\n\nGrant: You applied this reasoning in this statement to the Gitksan and the Wet'suwet'en?\n\nRobinson: Yes, I have.\n\nGrant: In fact,...there is no evidentiary basis for the utilization of this approach and its applicability to the Gitksan, is there; the approach starting 'My reasoning is...'?\n\nRobinson: Well, that may be your opinion, it's not mine.\n\nGrant: Is there an evidentiary basis for applicability to the Gitksan?\n\nRobinson: Yes. I think the basic premise in anthropology is that comparative examples are of extreme use, are of usefulness in identifying situations from one area to another. Anthropology is imperative.\n\nGrant: When there's not sufficient data about the specific society you're studying?\n\nRobinson: When there is some specific data it's also useful to use comparative approaches, because it tends to lessen the entrapment one can fall into by treating any society in isolation or as a unique example. These general principles and cultural ecology have brought application... Grant: Are you finished?\n\nRobinson: For the time being, yes.\n\nGrant: Thank you. Maybe I'll ask you a question.\n\nRobinson: Oh, good.\n\nGrant: You're stating that with respect to that sentence that it is irrelevant whether the Gitksan rely on any specific resource for clothing, feasting, trade goods, it's irrelevant to determine whether or not there is pressure on that specific resource?\n\nRobinson: I think you're putting words in my mouth. These are not quite the questions you asked me earlier in\u2014you're summarizing them in a slightly different manner. It's difficult for me to put the kind of words you're putting to me now against the list of questions you've just asked me. You were asking me whether or not these factors are necessary or necessarily taken into consideration in looking at pressure on any resource, or that's how I understood those questions to be.\n\nGrant: Well, let me rephrase them. In determining whether or not there is pressure on a certain resource among the Gitksan, it would be relevant to determine whether the Gitksan would utilize that specific resource for clothing, would it not?\n\nRobinson: Only if it was the kind of resource that was ever used with clothing. Grant: Yes or no?\n\nRobinson: If it was ochre it wouldn't be.\n\nGrant: Maybe. Of course, I'm talking about a resource used for clothing?\n\nRobinson: To the extent that that could be determined, yes, it would be relevant.\n\nGrant: To the extent that it can be determined if the Gitksan used a specific resource for feasting, it would be relevant to determine that so as to determine the pressure on that resource?\n\nRobinson: To the extent that that could be known, yes.\n\nGrant: Yes, you agree. And similarly, with respect to the utilization of a specific resource with respect to trade or exchange, as you've phrased it, it would be relevant to determine the pressure on that resource by the Gitksan?\n\nRobinson: To the extent that that could be known, yes.\n\nThe acquisition and production of goods for trade among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and between them and their neighbours was another source of possible demand, or pressure, on the resources in the hunting territories.\n\nIn the first draft of the report that she had submitted to her employers, Russell & DuMoulin, Robinson had written: \"In late pre-historic times Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people were already involved in extensive aboriginal exchange networks, were already increasingly being influenced by coastal dwellers with whom they exchanged locally-produced and exotic commodities, were already developing ways to more effectively exploit local resources to satisfy subsistence and exchange related needs, and so on.\"\n\nPeter Grant questioned her on the absence of this opinion from her final report.\n\nGrant: And that was your opinion at that time based on your sources?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: And that's your opinion today? You didn't change your opinion?\n\nRobinson: No, I didn't.\n\nGrant: But you did not include that opinion in your report, did you?\n\nRobinson: Oh, gee, I would think that I had, but it would perhaps... Grant: I would ask you to take a chance over the evening to look at that.\n\nRobinson: Because I certainly think that it's stated in my report that coast-interior trade or exchange did not spring up as a result of the European induced fur trade, but that there was an extension of, an expansion of and intensification of that after contact.\n\nGrant: Okay...I know you make reference to coastal-interior trade...before contact in the pre-historic time.... But here you're saying more than that.... Robinson: I may have expanded it there, but I don't think that the idea was left out of the report.\n\nGrant: You can look at the report, and if I stand to be corrected, I will ask you first thing in the morning.\n\nRobinson: I may have changed phrasing. I don't think the content was ignored.\n\nGrant: I couldn't track this, doctor. I couldn't track this into your report, and you may direct me to where I should have looked to track it.\n\nFinally, Grant showed Robinson a map on which the location of various game species and other resources like berry patches had been marked out. The map shows these resources as being distributed throughout the territory and not simply immediately surrounding the village sites.\n\nGrant: And mountain goat you've referred to as one of the trade goods. And in this case we see that there are mountain goat both inside and outside the black outlined area. But if the Gitksan and the Wet'suwet'en were involved in using or trading mountain goat furs or mountain goat skins then they would require access to these territories?\n\nRobinson: Not necessarily. And I might say that knowing some things about the environment is only one of the several factors that have to be taken into consideration. Without knowing about the density, the distribution of those animals that are being exploited, without knowing what their recovery rate is after exploitation or during exploitation, and without having some idea of the demands on those natural resources by the local population, the natural distribution makes little sense by itself. It doesn't tell me anything.\n\nGrant: It does tell you something, doesn't it?\n\nRobinson: It tells me that the animals were present or not present.\n\nGrant: It tells you that if the Gitksan required those animals for their own use or for trade they would have to have access to places where those animals were located?\n\nRobinson: Yes, they would.\n\nGrant: Thank you, doctor.\n\nWhen none of the empirical requirements to support their arguments could be met, Crown counsel opted to focus on the issue of defining \"the economy\" as a discrete sphere within a social structure, limited to transactions mediated through exchanges in a capitalist market place. This is a euphemism, from an historically-specific point of view, for saying that an \"economy\" that could be recognized by the court as such came into being only after Europeans arrived. This debate was most clearly illustrated during the cross-examination of the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's witness, Hugh Brody, by one of the Province of British Columbia's lawyers, William Goldie. Goldie had been trying to make Brody agree with his statement that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had \"no reason to travel\" more than twenty miles away from their riverfront villages \"for economic reasons.\" Brody had been resisting, arguing that they travelled to hunt animals in the territories for subsistence food, used hides for clothing and trees for housing, and accumulated surpluses for trade.\n\nGoldie:...Let us restate the assumptions that I am asking you to make. One, the primary food source is at the door-step of the home in Hagwilet. You accept that? The second assumption is that the territory in which the hunting is carried out is 90 miles away from that home. Number 3, that subsistence is not an economic activity in the question I am about to ask you. Number 4, that extended time is a period in the winter time of up to 7 months. You understand these assumptions?\n\nBrody: Yes.\n\nGoldie: Now, on those assumptions I suggest to you that the only logical reason for somebody being away from his home 90 miles for an extended period in the winter time would be to carry on an economic activity other than subsistence?\n\nBrody: Well, your assumptions logically compel the conclusion, because you have defined economic activity to exclude subsistence in your assumptions.\n\nGoldie: Yes.\n\nBrody: So, it follows logically, not as a matter of any empirical interest, but as a matter of logic that they are not out there pursuing an economic activity. Goldie: Yes.\n\nThe _facts_ establish that there were many reasons to want the resources one had to travel to get to. The _theory_ asserts that none of those reasons were \"economic,\" and further, that this means there could be no reason for any borders or rules to exist to regulate access to or use of these resources.\n\nThe third premise of the Crown's argument was that there was little competition among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en for access to the resources in the outlying territories. Robinson's depiction of pre-contact Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en society included a description of the social and political structure with a particular emphasis on economy, trade and land tenure. In this regard she wished to show that there was nothing we would recognize as a system of property ownership, that these societies were \"never stable,\" and that \"rights changed hands frequently.\" She wrote: \"Where conflict over resources was minimal, boundaries were probably vague and faded away from the village cores. I envision a patchwork configuration where controlled resource-producing areas away from village bases were linked up by a system of trails. But prior to the intensification of pressure on interior fur resources sparked by European demands for furs there would appear to have been no need for a sophisticated and elaborate body of rules governing access to resources or for extensive and defined areas of land for their exploitation.\"\n\nHowever, at the same time, in order to convey an image of pre-contact society as unstable, and continually rocked by warfare, Robinson contradicted herself by describing a situation of intense, and organized, competition surrounding property rights. She wrote: \"House rank was not fixed through time, and chiefs of the same side competed to recruit members and to amass wealth for potlatching. Wealth was derived in part from resources taken from house-controlled territories. Households within a side did not have equal access to 'shared' resources: higher-ranking chiefs were evidently able to lay claim to the more productive areas.\"\n\nFinally, Robinson concluded her analysis of pre-contact Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en cultures by proclaiming the Crown's legal argument. She wrote:\n\n\"In my research I have discovered no conclusive evidence that suggests that, prior to the advent of European influence in the claims area, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en lineages and families identified ownership rights to large and precisely defined tracts of hunting territories.\"\n\nIt is tempting to simply dismiss the Crown's witness. But that would ignore the important rhetorical impact of Robinson's courtroom style. When judges, lawyers, and lay people listen to weeks and weeks of testimony, some of it highly technical and specialized in nature, the details and logic of argument easily become lost in a maze of \"technobabble.\" Robinson succeeds in reinforcing a sense that the subject matter being dealt with is of a highly technical and complex nature that only well-educated specialists can possibly comprehend. In fact, what is being discussed is quite straightforward: were there game and other resources in the specific geographical locale in question, that is, the hunting territories shown on maps? The overwhelming bulk of evidence says yes, there were resources there. Did the people who lived on that specific piece of land during these specific times, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, use these resources? Again, the answer to this question is yes. These conclusions are drawn from empirical data. Was there competition and conflict between groups of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en over property and resource rights, and were there laws that regulated how these conflicts were to be resolved? Substantial evidence was presented to the court to support affirmative answers to these questions. As well as oral histories and ethnographies, this evidence included a variety of research sources, including studies based in the kind of \"scientific\" methodology the Crown claimed to support.\n\nHowever, was this socially organized use of resources one that a British or Canadian court would classify as being what Lord Sumner described as \"differently developed...but...hardly less precise than our own,\" and that Viscount Haldane allowed \"could continue to be honoured within the framework of British sovereignty\"? These are theoretical\u2014and political\u2014questions whose answers are determined not by empirical observation but by ideological assessment. And that is the prerogative of judges.\n\n**Hegemonic Moments**\n\n_Antonio Gramsci coined the term hegemony to refer to power that maintains certain structures of domination but that is ordinarily invisible.... Hegemony refers to power that 'naturalizes' a social order, an institution, or even an everyday practice so that 'how things are' seems inevitable and not the consequence of particular historical actors, classes and events. It tends to sustain the interests of a society's dominant groups, while generally obscuring these interests in the eyes of subordinates._\n\n\u2014Anthropologists Susan Hirsch and Mindie Lazarus-Black, 1994, _Introduction: Performance and Paradox: Exploring Law's Role in Hegemony and Resistance_.\n\n_My premise is that the structure and dynamics of a ceremonial performance event serve to orient those who participate in it (and no doubt its spectators as well) toward distinctions of class and rank that subsequently become inscribed in administrative regulations and codes of practice\u2014even, under some circumstances, in the black letter of the statutory law.... I focus on one such hegemonic moment when it was possible to look 'behind the law' at legal categories in the making._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Joan Vincent, 1994, _On Law and Hegemonic Moments:_ _Looking Behind the Law in Early Modern Uganda_.\n\nThe Crown's case against the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en offers a window onto a \"hegemonic moment\" when abstract speculations and simplistic assumptions were transformed by the power of law into truth and facts. The Crown imagines that the core of legally significant cultural difference lies in the contrasts that they hypothesize exist between Aboriginal peoples' and Europeans' relationships to property and to commerce: private property defines European culture, and the absence of private property defines Aboriginality. By deconstructing the Crown's arguments and Robinson's testimony building block by building block we can see the legal categories of \"Aboriginal\" and \"non-Aboriginal\" in the making: the process and reasoning by which the Crown constructs legal subjects in its own image and creates truth in its own interests.\n\nIt is not necessary to accept, nor would be it be reasonable to consider, the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's and their witnesses' evidence about pre-contact Aboriginal society as beyond doubt, question, challenge, or critique. Oral history is, like written history, a product of particular authors working in particular networks of power relations, at particular historical times, and for particular purposes. Anthropological theories and findings should always be contested and debated. However, even within a conservative framework of analysis, within the Crown's own professed criteria for legitimately \"scientific\" empirical research, it is obvious that the Crown's evidence and arguments about the nature of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en social organization before European arrival were, at best, weakly supported by arcane and archaic academic research, and furthermore frequently defied a broad consensus in Canadian society at large of what constitutes \"common sense\" and \"truth.\" The average person, for example, would consider it reasonable to assume that people living in the intemperate climate of north-western British Columbia would more likely have dressed themselves in the hides and furs of minks and muskrats, than in fish skins. This is my first critique: on the basis of the best evidence by the Crown's own criteria, the difference between the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's case, and the Crown's case, as presented to Court, was not the difference between two equally valid interpretations arising from different cultural premises; nor was it the difference between opposing but equally legitimate positions in academic debates about historical interpretation: it was the difference between sense and nonsense.\n\nThe Crown's legal argument that pre-contact Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en cultures lacked property law, and Robinson's supporting testimony, was summed up in this sentence from her report: \"In the absence of competition over scarce resources, there is no reason for the rules to exist.\" Under cross-examination Robinson explained that this statement was based on her reading of certain social theories:\n\nRobinson:...from my own reading and cultural ecology, I would say that a general rule of thumb that many anthropologists or cultural geographers go by is that people seldom assert exclusive or limiting control over any kind of specific or general resource unless there is a need to do so.\n\nGrant: And here you are speculating, are you not?\n\nRobinson: Yes. And my speculation is based on a very extensive reading of cultural ecology as a source of comparative examples and from comparative examples from the northern northwest coast region and adjacent interior region, among other sources.\n\nWhat underlying assumptions are necessary to accept as a universal fact that: \"in the absence of competition over scarce resources, there is no reason for the rules to exist\"? And to infer that the social organization of eighteenth-century Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples could not have generated institutions and rules akin to what contemporary Canadians call property law and resource management?\n\nThe Crown's argument resonates with a conservative form of naturalism: theories of human nature that posit the universal and ahistorical existence of an individual who is first and foremost an autonomous, atomistic, biological organism. In order to survive and achieve their nature-driven imperative to reproduce the species, the needs of human organisms must be met. These needs can be reduced, for all important purposes, to food, clothing, shelter and sexual reproduction. Human beings, in this way of thinking, are instinct-driven animals to whose brains a capacity for rationality has been added, to varying degrees. The degree to which rationality and culture have been added on to different organisms is measured by the degree to which an individual or group manifests narrowly-defined \"economic rationalism\" in acts of \"rational decision-making\" which qualify as such if their end result is profit and\/or the ability to increase one's power over other individuals, thus gaining access to _their_ resources. Rationality, within this belief system, is demonstrated by an individual's, or group of individual's, success, in competition with others, in securing the necessary material goods required to meet their needs: survival of the fittest. The Crown's argument relies on acceptance of the hypothesis that the \"natural\" motivation for people to develop an intense relationship of identity with land and resources is the imperative to meet one's \"needs\" as individual organisms and aggregates of organisms as against the needs of other individuals and organisms. In the dominant western culture, identity with land reaches its peak of expression in individual private ownership in fee simple. This is the core concept of western \"possessive individualism,\" characterized by the slogan \"I own therefore I am.\"\n\nBut what if, despite facts presented to the contrary, the animals located in the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's territories were not only _needed_ for subsistence and clothing, or trade and commerce? What if they were also _desired_ for feasting, gift-giving, prestige, sociality, joy, spiritual sustenance and renewal? What if the land is not a passive object awaiting human labour to transform it? What if the land is alive itself? What if the animals and resources are not awaiting human dispensation at all? What if they are sentient beings, part of a circle of life, an ecosystem? What if they are reincarnations of ancestors? Why then could there be reasons for agreements to be made between people about rules of access and \"ownership\" rights? Why then might a poet, a shaman, a carver, an artist, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a lover, a friend have a \"logical reason for being away from his home 90 miles for an extended period in the winter time?\" Why then could there be many \"reasons to travel?\"\n\nPsychiatrist Cisco Lassiter argues that: \"The world of the modern European self is located in a Euclidean-Newtonian space, homogeneous, uniform, and continuous: a space without sacred places, where all places are essentially interchangeable, and where geometry forgets the spiritual meaning of the earth, the land, and the human need for home....\"\n\nThe identity and well-being of the aboriginal self, on the other hand, Lassiter continues, \"depends on earth, ground, and place for an essential relationship to departed ancestors, cultural traditions, the world of the dead, gods, and time itself...this self cannot survive without access to the traditional sacred places, orientation by tribal landmarks, rootedness in the earth and in kinship relations.\" Clearly, the Crown's position did not recognize or respect the equality or integrity of such an Aboriginal relationship to land. This is my second critique: the philosophical premises of the Crown's argument were ethnocentric.\n\nIt is hardly surprising that the Crown's arguments reflected the dominant ideology glorifying private property and profit, and the ideal of an individualistic, unencumbered self. But there is a further puzzle in the Crown's case: an apparent paradox arises from the fact that the best evidence from all sources strongly supports the conclusion that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en met all the conditions required, by the criteria of conservative European political theory, to have had concepts of, and laws regulating, private-like property: they identified boundaries between territories, they produced for subsistence and exchange, they accumulated and stored surplus, and they engaged in conflicts with each other over resources. They had property, laws to protect it, and the will to defend it. These were the criteria required by the Crown's theory for people to \"qualify\" as \"rational economic men.\" Given that, officially, Canadian courts are governed by principles of human equality that direct them to assess people on the basis of their behaviour and not their race, how could the Crown still _logically_ , in their own terms, argue that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en systems were \"too primitive\"\u2014that is, too different and inferior in comparison to \"civilized\" systems\u2014to be recognized by the law?\n\nThe paradox is resolved by considering another assumption that underlies the way of thinking and being that the Crown's argument represented that goes beyond ethnocentrism. The liberal critique of ethnocentrism chastises anyone who thinks that their own cultural practices are the only, and the best, in the world. The resolutions to problems defined as rooted in ethnocentrism are education and tolerance: we should all learn to appreciate and respect the particular values of _all_ cultures on their own terms, and we should not judge others by our own culturally-specific criteria. However, this liberal position begs a number of questions.\n\nFirst, the liberal critique of ethnocentrism rests on a definition of \"culture\" as beliefs and values that can be isolated from political and economic organization; and the premise that \"cultural differences\" are the main cause of strife between peoples. Relationships between members of diverse cultures take place within the context of power relations, and differential access to resources. Therefore, the ethnocentrism of the dominant has consequences for the subordinate that simple changes in beliefs and values will not ameliorate. In other words, \"cultural\" differences may not be the main problem: unequal distribution of wealth and power and property may be. Second, the liberal critique of ethnocentrism does not address the thorny problem presented by the fact that a foundation stone of conservative European theory has been that European culture is _not_ one local and historically-specific way of life among many, but represents a _universally superior_ one. Therefore, it is not theoretically possible for the dominant western culture to enter into dialogue with any others on an equal footing without first forfeiting its self concept of universality and supremacy. Were its leaders to reject these foundational assumptions, how could the political and economic domination of colonial peoples be justified?\n\nHistorically, British colonial thought was based on the particular extrapolation of possessive individualism most influential in theories of Social Darwinism that ranked and compared people: civilized as superior, primitive as inferior. \"Primitive\" human organisms were characterized as animal-like beings driven by base survival instincts only minimally mediated by rationality or culture. The \"needs\" of primitives were strictly limited to the survival and reproduction of the human organism. Therefore, within this framework of analysis, even if the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en appeared to be behaving much like property-owning European economic rationalists, their classification as \"primitives\" supports a conclusion that whatever their _observed behaviour_ in fact consisted in, eurocentric theories claim they were driven by instinct, and not by rationality, a characteristic that, by definition, \"primitives\" lack.\n\nTo understand the Crown's argument we must, again, enter Law's culture: we must leave tangible evidence behind on \"the ground\" and take flight into the abstract, imagined world of the hovering sovereign. If, and only if, we accept a theory of human nature and human social life as being naturally and inevitably acquisitive and competitive, and we accept that Europeans and Aboriginals are different and unequal human beings, then\u2014and only then\u2014 can the Crown's argument make logical sense, within their own framework of analysis and within a dominant ideology that claims all human beings are equal. This is my third critique: the Crown's argument was not simply ethnocentric eurocentric, but racist. I use the term \"racist\" in this context to denote an explanation of human behaviour based principally on the presumably inherent, naturalized habits and characteristics of a group of people who have been classified as belonging to a particular \"race\" or cultural group. My conclusion that the Crown's argument was racist rests on the fact that such a categorization is necessary to make their argument logical and coherent.\n\nLogical gymnastics aside, the basic story remains the same: Aboriginal people were here and they had laws governing relations with strangers. They obeyed their own laws. The British arrived, and they had laws governing relations with strangers, but the colonists neither respected Aboriginal laws nor obeyed their own laws. Since first contact, Aboriginal peoples have insisted that the newcomers negotiate a mutually respectful, lawful relationship with them. Successive colonial governments have refused to do so, opting instead to assert their dominion by whatever means necessary, including armed force and the subversion of their own law. The original questions, too, still remain: why are Aboriginal peoples forced to present a defense of their histories and cultures to the courts, by the rules of the courts, in the language of the courts, within the theoretical frameworks of the courts, to begin with? Who is responsible for this never-ending, unresolved dispute?\n\n* * *\n\n. Robinson 1987(b); 1990; 1991. See also, Pryce 1992.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 292: 21668.\n\n. Under cross-examination Robinson explained that she was referring here to Rosman and Rubel 1971. Transcripts, Vol. 293: 22157.\n\n. See Mertz 1992, 1994; O'Barr 1982.\n\n. Coupland 1986: 18.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 289, 21727-21730.\n\n. Ives 1990.\n\n. \"Carrier\" is a name applied to some First Nations, including some Wet'suwet'en, in northern British Columbia by fur traders and later adopted by anthropologists.\n\n. Robinson 1983: 409.\n\n. Kretch 1991.\n\n. _Delgamuukw v. R._ , Exhibit 1191-5.\n\n. Rogers 1986: 207-210.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 293: 22165-22171.\n\n. This section of Robinson's opinion report covered six pages and encompassed 12 paragraphs. What appears at first as an impressive 10 pages of supporting notes is revealed upon closer examination as repetitions of eight sources, summarized as follows: Adams 1969; Boas 1916; Davidson 1955; Duff 1959; Garfield 1951; Inglis and MacDonald 1979; Jenness 1943; Tobey 1981. All of these sources rely, to some extent, on oral tradition. Of these eight references, only Adams deals specifically with the Gitksan. Adams conducted fieldwork among the Gitksan during the mid to late 1960s.\n\n. _Merriam-Webster Dictionary_ 814.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 292: 22191-22195.\n\n. Robinson 1987(a):17.\n\n. Adams 1969.\n\n. Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw 1992.\n\n. Ray 1991(b): 311-312.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 293: 22177-22179.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 293: 22151-22205.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 289: 21798.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 214: 15494.\n\n. Robinson 1987(a): 19.\n\n. Robinson 1987(a): 20.\n\n. See Mertz 1992, 1994; O'Barr 1982.\n\n. See Cove 1996; Paine 1996 for critiques of the anthropological evidence.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 189: 21644.\n\n. Transcripts Vol.192: 22175.\n\n. For a classic critique of these social theories, known as \"theories of economism\" see Dumont 1977; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1979; Klamer 1987.\n\n. Macpherson 1962.\n\n. Lassiter 1987: 220. These statements about identity assume and reproduce the notion of homogenous identities. This is the subject of significant critique by those who claim the assertion of a singular identity blurs important differences, such as gender and class, within cultural groups. These \"modernist\" concepts of culture and identity are the terms of the legal discourse in court. It is within this context that I cite Lassiter. See Crosby 1996 for a critique of this formulation of contemporary Aboriginal identity.\n**CHAPTER 13: Jewels in the Crown**\n\n_The time of which the Chief Justice speaks to arrive at his decision could be looked upon as just one inch.... It is only a short period of time in comparison to the length of time that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people have been on their land.... If we were to look at a time line, the time that we have been on our lands could be measured in several feet._\n\n\u2014Satsan (Herb George), Speaker, Office of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en People, 1992.\n\n**Temporal Purgatory: The Protohistoric Period**\n\nHaving constructed to their own satisfaction the image of an \"unorganized\" pre-contact society, the Crown put forward their rendition of what happened to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en when European commodities joined Aboriginally-produced items among their trade goods. Sheila Robinson's expert opinion report focused on the protohistoric period and she offered a succinct definition of her subject matter: \"By 'protohistoric,'\" she wrote, \"I mean the time prior to European presence in the area claimed by the plaintiffs but when European influence was felt through native intermediaries.... 'Historic' refers to times when Europeans were present\u2014even if intermittently. 'Prehistoric' applies to all time prior to the protohistoric era.\"\n\nThis periodization scheme (prehistoric, protohistoric, historic) represents traditional academic categories of analysis. Conceptualizing history in these terms highlights the arrival of European commodities, and then persons, and their subsequent activities as the decisive motor force in Aboriginal history, and follows logically from the widely-held assumption that Aboriginal societies had been static and unchanging for tens of thousands of years before engaging in contact with Europeans for the past two hundred and fifty or so years. This is, of course, a logical framework for an analysis whose purpose is to establish the determinacy of European activity and the supremacy of European culture. This periodization scheme therefore serves the interpretative purpose of defining the relevant categories of the discussion in eurocentric terms, superimposes this categorization on the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and concludes that this was a crucial and transforming turning point in their history, rather than, perhaps, a significant period in a very long, continuous historical process. It stresses universal and externally-determined change only, rather than a dynamic relationship between the latter and internally-determined change and continuity. Most importantly, however, it is a _model_ , an abstract construct developed by academics to facilitate comparison and theoretical speculation. A temporal classification scheme like this is not a fact. In ordinary, everyday life, time period categorizations serve as heuristic devices: shorthand flags that facilitate communication between people with shared languages and experiences. Law seeks to transform such time period categorizations into locked, airtight repositories that incarcerate lived histories in time-bound cells, as if processes and relationships do not traverse the boundaries between historical epochs.\n\nThe first question to be asked regarding the specific history of any particular group's experience of the protohistoric era, is when did this period begin and end for them? Two primary sources are usually consulted on this question: archaeological data that establishes the dates of the first items of European manufacture unearthed in a given area; and historical documents in the form of records and observations kept by European traders. Oral tradition is also studied for references to the arrival of these new things, and how they impacted the Indigenous peoples concerned.\n\nThe first and second building blocks of the Crown's argument were that Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en societies had been unorganized at the time they were \"discovered\" by Europeans, and that they lacked property law. Their third building block was the argument that the delineation of property and borders, and a territorially-based social organization emerged among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en in response to the European-Aboriginal fur trade. Given the extent of social change that the Crown wished to prove took place during the protohistoric period, it was important for their argument that this period be as long as possible. A long protohistoric period was also important to Sheila Robinson to justify her methodological decision not to consult archival records like William Brown's because, she argued, they were written long after a \"truly aboriginal\" way of life had ceased to be lived. Sheila Robinson explained the importance of her argument to the Crown's legal case: \"Recognition that protohistoric European-influenced developments took place and were significant has one very important implication. It casts suspicion on any portrayal of a \"pristine\" or truly aboriginal way of life based on contemporary knowledge,\" she wrote.\n\nThe Crown's witness took on the task of establishing the date at which the protohistoric period began. In her opinion report Robinson wrote: \"Vitus Bering's voyage to north-western Alaska from Siberia was in 1641. There is no doubt that trade in European commodities from Siberia into North America began some time earlier. The protohistoric period perhaps extends back as early as the mid-sixteenth century, when Russians first began to settle into the Kamchatkan peninsula.\" Bering's voyage actually took place in _17_ 41. Robinson claimed under cross-examination that \" _16_ 41\" represented a typographical error. Undaunted, Robinson stretched the point even further when the Judge intervened and asked for more details about early foreign influences.\n\nCourt: What Euro-Canadian influences would extend back four centuries?\n\nRobinson: Coming from the east coast of North America and also up through the Mississippi drainage there is some\u2014there's some thought that indirect European influence was having its effect on Indian groups quite removed from the direct sources of contact. Some of those influences included diseases spreading through, and perhaps extracting considerable tolls on some populations before there was ever any real historic record of it. There seems to be\u2014and even such\u2014such things as the introduction of horses from Spanish sources, for instance, seems to have had tremendous effect on the settlement patterns and economic behaviour and social relations of Indian groups through the plains and prairies, for instance. So something as minor as the horse coming in caused tremendous dislocations through the prairies.\n\nCourt: That would go back to the 16th century?\n\nRobinson: Yes. So the post-contact period or protohistoric period has been traced to the first arrival of Europeans in the New World. Some scholars take it back that far. From the north northwest American direction and the Siberian connections some people are saying that if we lift the notion that only Europeans can affect North American cultures then we are dealing with an Asiatic influence; Chinese, Japanese and so on. That seems to have stimulated trade and trade economies. That's much more conjectural as you push it back into the past, but there are certainly scholars who agree that indirect influences were important.\n\nCourt: Thank you.\n\nPeter Grant asked Robinson what factual evidence she relied on to support her statement that \"there is no doubt that trade in European commodities...began sometime earlier\" than Captain Cook's 1774 landing. Grant confronted her with the fact that, upon reviewing the sources listed in her bibliography in support of this statement, he was unable to find any references to European-manufactured goods having been found in the territory prior to 1780.\n\nGrant: What I suggest to you, with all due respect, Dr. Robinson, is there isn't a scintilla of evidence...that there was European trade goods moving into the Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en area before 1786...[yet] here you say there is no doubt....\n\nRobinson: I have no doubt at all that there wasn't a considerable amount of protohistoric influence coming from Asiatic sources or Northern Russian sources in the protohistoric period, as I have defined it mid-17th century onward.\n\nGrant: Into the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en area, doctor?\n\nRobinson: I have absolutely no reason to think that they were isolated from what are otherwise described in several places as broad trade patterns, broad developments occurring.\n\n... Grant: Well, doctor, look, you have explained what you meant by there is no conclusive evidence.... 'More likely than not,' I think you said. But here you say there is no doubt. That's pretty conclusive...isn't it?\n\nRobinson: Yes, and I'll stand by that. I will say that there is no doubt. We may not have material items representing that in that claims area yet. I would say that further archaeological research will no doubt turn them up.\n\nGrant: And that is speculative?\n\nRobinson: Yes, it is, but it's based on my opinion.\n\nOn the key issue of duration of the protohistorical period, Robinson eventually vacillated under cross-examination.\n\nGrant:...when are you referring to as \"prior to the advent of European influence?\"\n\nRobinson: Well, we've discussed this, and I think we're going to leave it as the mid-eighteenth century and Chirikov's arrival on to the northern coast.\n\nAccording to the Crown's framework of analysis, the arrival Captain Cook in 1774 marks the beginning of the protohistoric period in British Columbia. The arrival of a second European man, Hudson's Bay Company trader William Brown in 1822, heralds the end of the protohistoric period and the beginning of the historic period in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory. Accepting these broad parameters, the protohistoric period shrinks from Robinson's initial suggestion of a 400-year duration to one lasting only 72 years. According to evidence subsequently accepted by the Judge, the proto-historic period for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en in effect began in 1778 and ended in 1822, therefore encompassing only 44 years.\n\nRobinson's excesses in attempting to stretch the protohistoric period back to the arrival of the horse on the Prairies, and thus suggesting, given the context in which her statements were made, that this was relevant to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, was tantamount to saying that from the moment the first Toyota hit a Canadian road, we all began to adopt Japanese socio-economic, political, and cultural characteristics. This Crown argument illustrates the absurd conclusions to which legal argument and abstract logic can lead.\n\n**Who Created Private Property?**\n\n_By the late 1950s or early 1960s, I assumed that the issue of land tenure...had been resolved once and for all and that 'hunting territories' came into existence after the arrival of Europeans. This assumption was challenged by investigators...who convinced me that after several decades of my previous viewpoint, it was time to reexamine the complex topic.... In spite of the extensive literature on the land occupied by the original inhabitants of North America, we still know very little about Indian relationships to land and its resources.... Fortunately, there are scholars who continue to labor very hard at understanding the wisdom of Indian elders and the remarks of traders and other Europeans that have been preserved._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Dr. Edward Rogers, 1986, _Epilogue: Reevaluations and Future Considerations_.\n\nThe issues being debated in the courtroom during _Delgamuukw v. R._ about the impact of the \"protohistoric\" period on Indigenous societies have occupied academics in this field for many generations. The key question they have addressed is whether or not conceptions of private-like property, and laws codifying and defending such land ownership, existed among Aboriginal peoples prior to their involvement with Europeans. Sheila Robinson notes in her 1983 Ph.D. thesis that the question of the impact of the European-Aboriginal fur trade on Indigenous societies is far from settled among anthropologists and ethnohistorians. Chapter VII of her doctoral thesis, entitled \"Assessing the Impact of Early Contact With Europeans on Northern Northwest Coast Indian Socioeconomies,\" which encompasses 77 pages, began with the following paragraph: \"How scholars have viewed the impact of early contact with representatives of Western civilization on Northwest Coast Indian cultures has varied considerably.... Their interpretations of the cultural contact situations during the maritime fur trade period fall into three distinct categories. The first claim that contact with the earliest explorers and fur traders provoked essentially no changes in the traditional social and economic organizations of the Northwest Coast Indians (the minimal cultural change hypotheses); the second argue that this early period of intercultural interactions wrought devastating changes in the traditional native socio-economic organizations (the negative impact hypotheses); while the third identifies a series of progressive developments in the early historic period which triggered the efflorescence of Northwest Coast cultural organization to levels which were unattainable before the Europeans arrived (the positive impact hypotheses.) Robinson was most critical of the \"minimal cultural change hypotheses,\" that she attributed to authors like Joan Wike and Robin Fisher who, she claimed, argue that the fur trade brought \"essentially no changes in the traditional social and economic organization\" of First Nations. This is an oversimplification: what these researchers argue is that, while cultural _changes_ took place, cultural _transformation_ did not. However, Robinson is correct in her observation that a good deal of debate about the impact of the fur trade on First Nations remains unresolved. Her thesis also accurately describes the current state of the art in fur trade studies when she argues that: \"If theoretical emphases are shifted away from tracing developments in structural processes towards understanding the nature of particular historical developments which can be documented, we will achieve a clearer understanding of early post-contact adaptations.\" Robinson's 1983 suggestion that, \"given the variations in Indian-European interactions during the early historic period, it may be profitable to break the records down to a point where separate communities' involvements with the foreigners and their native trading partners can be examined more closely,\" also finds widespread support in the literature.\n\nIn the introduction to her 1987 expert opinion report, Sheila Robinson located her analysis within the discipline of ethnohistory. She wrote: \"Most modern scholars engaged in North American ethnohistoric research agree that indigenous populations were profoundly affected by indirect contact with Europeans before they experienced direct contact with them. Although the nature, timing, intensity and repercussions of protohistoric European influence varied considerably from region to region, research indicates that no native groups in what is now known as British Columbia were isolated from stimulus stemming from the European presence in the New World.\"\n\nWhen Robinson was asked by lawyers for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en to substantiate her claim that her expert opinion report reflected contemporary ethnohistorical theory and research, she referred to the recent work\u2014not cited in the bibliography of her report\u2014of scholars like Colin Yerbury, Stacey Krech, Toby Morantz, Arthur Ray and Charles Bishop. The _current_ work of each of these scholars, however, challenges the Crown's central theses. Charles Bishop, writing in 1987, summarized the thinking of \"most modern fur trade scholars\" when he wrote: \"...It became orthodoxy to view the European fur trade as giving rise to...[an] individualized and privatized form of territoriality. Beginning in the 1960s, more intensive regional, ethnographic, and historical studies began to undermine some of the specific tenets of the general theory. By the 1970s, it was becoming evident to a small core of specialists that an accumulation of data pertaining to a variety of times and areas, combined with theoretical and conceptual refinement, was challenging the applicability of the general theory itself.\"\n\nThe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and their witnesses presented an analysis of the impact of the fur trade based primarily on local knowledge. Their narrative explained how, following his 1774 arrival at Ahousat, Captain Cook initiated a trading relationship with Chief Maquinna in which First Nations supplied sea otter pelts destined for a burgeoning European fashion market. Most fur trade scholars agree\u2014based largely on analyses of written records kept by European traders\u2014that the goods demanded by the First Nations traders were largely luxury items as opposed to essentials. Joan Wike, who analyzed the logs kept by trading ships' captains, says that, during the initial stages of the maritime fur-trade iron, copper, guns and ammunition were traded. By the end of the period, the demand was for rum, molasses, pilot biscuits and luxury items. Fur trade scholars also agree that the Aboriginal peoples of the northwest coast whom the Europeans encountered were shrewd and experienced traders who exerted a good deal of control over transactions by employing strategies such as withholding furs to drive up prices, placing \"advance orders\" for future trade goods and refusing to trade unless they were satisfied. They have concluded that the Aboriginals' interest in trade was for the purposes of elaborating their ceremonial systems as opposed to improving the sufficiency of their subsistence exploitation for which Indigenous technology continued to be used well after guns and ammunition were acquired and used for warfare and social control.\n\nThe \"on the ground\" practice of the west coast fur trade, like that of early treaty-making in eastern Canada, conformed to Aboriginal business etiquette, requiring long preliminary discussions, feasting and performances, and exchanges of gifts and other formalities, before transactions were made. And, as was the case throughout the colonial world, other relations developed between the European visitors and their Aboriginal hosts. Some sailors were taken captive when negotiations failed and conflict developed, some were killed, some deserted their ships and remained on shore. The many unions between European fur traders and Aboriginal women are still represented in too many Canadian history books as \"desperate\" choices made by European men who, \"needing women,\" had no other options. Referred to in HBC records as \"country marriages,\" these were often, in fact, solemn and binding legal arrangements conducted according to Aboriginal marriage laws. These were not \"inferior\" forms of European marriage, but rather matrimonial commitments made between members of groups of visitors and hosts. As would be expected in such a situation, the customs of the hosts prevailed. These unions were sometimes arranged between chiefs and ships' captains or trading company executives in order to consolidate trading relationships. This practice followed both European and Aboriginal protocols regarding arranged marriages between royal families and powerful business interests. Contemporary scholars, re-examining legal history from a perspective of gender and racial equality, have found numerous examples where early colonial courts recognized the legitimacy of these marriages, and upheld the authority of Aboriginal law as against European laws, demonstrating both the uneven application of legal principles in practice, and the importance of context in shaping local power relations. As is the case always and everywhere, not all unions between European men and Aboriginal women were sanctified by anyone's laws, or entered into from positions of equality.\n\nThe Crown's arguments in _Delgamuukw v. R._ reflected popular B.C. mythology about the fur trade era. Simple Aboriginal peoples, so the settler's founding stories go, were humbled by the obvious superiority of European men, awed by their technology, and dazzled by their flashy commodities. These accounts tell of Aboriginals who were easily tricked by the clever commercial chicanery of the Europeans, and eagerly abandoned their own ways in a desperate pursuit of European trade goods. Their lust for beads and trinkets was fatal, and sounded the death knell for Indigenous cultures, these settlers' narrations conclude.\n\nThe land tenure system and the social and political structures that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claimed were in place before Europeans\u2014or their commodities\u2014arrived, _really_ arose, according to the Crown, as a direct response to the European fur trade. The Crown's case therefore required evidence that, in the course of the protohistoric period, a system of property ownership and resource management, based in Houses ranked in a hierarchical manner and articulated with other Houses and clans throughout the region, emerged, stimulated by the desire for European things. Robinson's central thesis in relation to the impact of the fur trade was summed up in the following paragraph of her opinion report: \"Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claims of traditional ownership and occupation of certain territories can be challenged on the basis that they do not account for developments which occurred during the protohistoric period. These changes include adjustments in boundaries between the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and their neighbours as well as more precise delineation of boundaries within and at the margins of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territories. Both processes of territorial demarcation are linked to and were stimulated by indirect contact with Europeans through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.\"\n\nThe Crown specifically argued that desires for, and competition over, these new commodities stimulated the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en to trap hitherto unexploited, or under-exploited fur-bearing species on territories outside of their villages, and at a distance from the main subsistence source of salmon in the rivers. Initially, the Crown claimed, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en were drawn into subordinate relations with their coastal neighbours, and, later on, with Europeans directly. Subordination, the Crown claimed, led them to mimic those who dominated them. Finally, reasoning backwards from the point of consumption to the point of production, the Crown argued that, because the furs Aboriginal people traded would ultimately be sold in a capitalist commodity economy, Aboriginal trappers were now members of a new culture and lived in a new form of social organization, whether they knew it or not.\n\nDuring the first phase of the European-Aboriginal fur trade on the northwest coast\u2014from 1774 to 1800 approximately\u2014ships stopped at coastal ports only long enough to trade with Aboriginal representatives for furs, food and other supplies. These coastal Aboriginals became brokers and middlemen, trading European goods with their inland neighbours. Two sections of Robinson's report dealt primarily with this first half, or maritime phase, of the fur trade that spanned approximately 20 years. \"Section 11: Protohistoric Developments in Gitksan and Carrier land use\" consists of ten paragraphs with 27 pages of supporting notes. As was the case in the previous section of her report that dealt with pre-contact social organization, most of Robinson's sources of information on the protohistoric period were not based in studies of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. Section III of Robinson's report was entitled \"The Expansion of Coast-Interior Trade.\" Robinson began by saying that she was really just expanding on the points made in the previous section but emphasizing how \"new European wealth stimulated northern coastal societies and economies to the point where a different kind of social and economic organization began to emerge.\" According to Robinson's narrative, the coastal Tsimshian became aggressive middlemen and three superchiefs arose, among them a Legaik. Twenty paragraphs long, this section of Robinson's report was devoted primarily to a retelling of a story about the rise of Legaik's dynasty. The Legaik story takes up the better part of seven pages, and is based almost entirely on an unpublished undergraduate honours thesis completed at the University of British Columbia in 1978.\n\nThis section of Robinson's report supported the Crown's argument that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en land tenure system and social structure was \"borrowed\" by them from the Coast Tsimshian people during the protohistoric period. Robinson wrote: \"It was less a matter of what goods they acquired than who furnished them, and how they were used. There was considerably more status to be gained through relations with the 'superior' coast people than through exchange with 'inferior' Athabaskans.\"\n\nPeter Grant confronted Robinson on cross-examination, presenting William Brown's descriptions of Gitksan trading relations with their coastal neighbours, with the interior Athabaskans, and with the Hudson's Bay Company:\n\nGrant: Well, let's look at page 11 (of Brown's report) then: 'It does not appear to me that we are able to cope with these people by making derouines into the country they are in the habit of visiting unless we sell our property so cheap as to prove prejudicial to the trade of Western Caledonia, and even then we will not be able to secure one half of the trade, for we do not meet on an equal footing as they receive goods at a low rate from the vessels which frequent the coast.' Now, would you agree with me that that'sconsistent with logic, that the trade\u2014the goods that Brown had to get would have been over land, that is coming into New Caledonia right?\n\nRobinson: It's consistent with a Eurocentric logic....\n\nGrant: I'll rephrase my question so you understand it. Brown got his trade goods...over land, right?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: And the vessels got their trade by sea?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: It was cheaper to get the trade goods up by sea at that time than over land?\n\nRobinson: Was it? I don't know that.\n\nGrant: You don't know that, okay. Assume that it was cheaper to get them by sea, or let's not even assume that, let's just say that what Brown says here is true, they received goods at a low rate from the vessels which frequented the coast. And Brown is saying: \"We will not be able to meet on an equal footing.\" For whatever reason, Brown says they could not compete giving the goods to the Indians at the same rates as the vessels.\n\nThere were repeated references in Brown's journals to the importance of deer and moose hides traded with the east. Arthur Ray had argued that, by the time Brown arrived in 1822, the trade was one where the scarcer furs were traded for moose and deer hides with the Athabaskans; and the plentiful fish, with Europeans for manufactured commodities. Under cross examination, Robinson admitted that the sentence in her report that read: \"There was considerably more status to be gained through relations with the 'superior' coast people than through exchange with 'inferior' Athabaskans\" was \"speculative\" and based on Kobrinsky, Steward and Goldman, who did not have access to Brown's journals. Finally, she said she relied \"on a considerable understanding of cultural ecological theory which suggests that, in all likelihood, that's what occurred....\" An archaic interpretation of cultural ecology mirrors crude evolutionism and supports the assumption that \"simple\" societies always assimilate the characteristics of \"complex\" societies when they come into contact. The underlying logic of this formulation that serves the Crown's interests tells a story about how, just as the Wet'suwet'en \"naturally\" copied the Gitksan, and the Gitksan \"naturally\" modelled themselves on the Coast Tsimshian, so \"naturally\" the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en emulated Europeans after contact.\n\nThis section of Robinson's report supported two points in the Crown's case. First, the Crown argued that, in having to defend themselves against Legaik's aggression\u2014itself motivated by participation in the European-Aboriginal fur trade\u2014the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en consolidated the external boundaries of their territories which had been \"hazy\" during the pre-contact period. Second, this brought the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en into subordinate trading relations with the coastal Tsimshian peoples.\n\nThe other major source Robinson relied upon in this section was an account by anthropologist George MacDonald. MacDonald argues, on the basis of data he acknowledges to be conjectural, that competition over European trade goods, particularly metals, stimulated increased warfare for control of trade routes during the protohistoric period. Robinson relied extensively on MacDonald's rendition of the \"Epic Of Nekt,\" a \"warrior's saga,\" that told the stories of great battles between the Gitksan and their Tsimshian neighbours during this era. Robinson quoted MacDonald as saying that, in the Indigenous accounts, \"Motives are stated in terms of revenge rather than economics,\" (that is, motivation based on issues not determined by European influence. (ed.)) MacDonald concluded, however, that while the wars were fought over \"important oolachen fishing grounds,\" he _believes_ \"it was the pursuit of metals and improved weapons, rather than control of the oolachen trade, that prompted this aggression.\" It is interesting to note that what MacDonald and Robinson accepted as \"true\" in the oral history was that wars were fought. What they rejected as \"untrue,\" however, was Aboriginal peoples' _explanation_ of what the wars were about. Even MacDonald, however, acknowledged that the objects of battle were transportation routes and that \"territories were sacrosanct.\" While in theory oral tradition is rejected, in practice it is selectively relied upon for \"data,\" and European social theory is superimposed as explanation.\n\nAs sea otter stocks declined on the coast, the Hudson's Bay Company continued to expand across what was to become the province of British Columbia, building forts and engaging in trade with Aboriginal peoples throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The land-based fur trade period of the protohistoric era encompassed, roughly, the years 1800-1850 in the province as a whole. However, local areas experienced these incursions at different times and to different degrees. Even if we consider the first sporadic contacts between European and Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en _human beings_ , rather than contact between people and commodities, a reasonable time to commence the dating of the protohistoric period in this _particular_ area, then the \"protohistoric period\" before William Brown arrived and during which the Crown argued that dramatic social change occurred, encompassed only about 15-20 years, a considerably shortened time frame compared to Robinson's original suggestion of over 400 years of European-induced cultural assimilation. In fact, regularized Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en participation in the land-based fur trade did not begin in earnest in their territories until the 1820s, when William Brown arrived.\n\nRobinson's opinion report was based primarily on her doctoral dissertation on coastal history, and the differences between the experiences of the interior Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and those of the coastal peoples in relation to the maritime fur trade were significant. Her haphazard substitution of coastal Tsimshian, Haida and Tlingit historical data for specific documentation of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en experiences is particularly problematic in relation to this period of time that is crucial to the Crown's argument.\n\nSection V of Robinson's report, entitled \"Gitksan Territorial Ownership: Protohistoric\/Early Historic,\" consisted of four paragraphs and spoke to the issue of the Gitksan's internal boundaries during the later half of the protohistoric period: the time the land-based fur trade commenced. Robinson argued that potlatching increased substantially during this period as a result of competition between Chiefs, and that land holdings changed hands frequently through potlatching. Section VI, the final section of Robinson's report, is entitled \"Protohistoric Changes in Wet'suwet'en Social and Economic Organization, after Kobrinsky.\" It is a five and a half page regurgitation of a ten page discussion paper written by anthropologist Vernon Kobrinksy in 1977. In this paper, Kobrinsky outlined an admittedly conjectural three-stage history of social development for the Northwestern Carrier that Robinson, on behalf of the Crown, adopted as a framework for her rendition of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en history. Kobrinksy suggested that structural changes in Carrier society\u2014supposedly having 'evolved' from simple bands to more complex clan social organization\u2014could have been a direct response to the changing economic conditions initiated by participation in the European-Aboriginal fur trade. In the second paragraph of this section Robinson explained her choice of Kobrinsky as an authority, writing: \"Kobrinsky's viewpoint is important for two reasons. First, his assertion that significant socio-economic changes occurred during the proto-historic period supports claims that European influence was a major factor in disrupting 'traditional' native lifestyles before direct contact between Indians and Europeans occurred. Second, much of the ethnographic evidence he assembles related to changes in styles of resource control. Specifically, Kobrinsky asserts that precise delineation of territorial boundaries relating to the allocation of rights to fine-fur species was a by-product of the fur trade.\" Kobrinksy, like Adams, Bishop, Kretch and many other researchers in this field, has subsequently revised his thesis.\n\nIn her proposal to Russell & DuMoulin, Robinson had explained the limitations of her opinion report, writing: \"This will not be a comprehensive overview but will legitimize the positions taken by Kobrinsky and MacDonald in the terms of theoretical traditions in the social sciences.\"\n\nPeter Grant questioned her about this:\n\nGrant: You saw your role here as legitimizing Kobrinsky and MacDonald, not determining whether or not they could stand up under careful scrutiny of those in support and in opposition to them; isn't that right?\n\nRobinson: Well, no.\n\nGrant: Then why did you use the word legitimize in your proposal?\n\nRobinson: It's one of my favourite words. But in the context of this paragraph, and in the way that cultural ecologists often do their work, is that they do use comparative examples from all over the world that investigate similar kinds of relationships or aspects of relationships between people and their environments, and what I intended to do there, not realizing that when I submitted this report in May that that would be the end of it, but what I would have liked to have done, and what I intended to do there, is put this in the context of some general ecological theories, which showed that this is not an unusual situation, that this kind of scenario occurs all over the world and it's consistent with models in ecological anthropology and cultural geography which show\u2014explain how these relationships work. So basically what I was going to do there, rather than, as I say, not a comprehensive overview but say let's pull together perhaps a set of cultural ecological works that put this in the context and explain that this is not an unusual way of looking at the world.\n\nGrant: I do not want to look, and I will not refer to those views that oppose or challenge Kobrinsky and MacDonald on this point. I will look and find those that support them, that was what you set out as your approach and that's what you mean by legitimize, you would buttress their theory?\n\nRobinson: Oh, yes. And I don't see that that's objectionable at all.\n\nOne of the few sources based on Gitksan-specific research that the Crown's witness relied on quite extensively was John Adams' 1969 unpublished doctoral dissertation. Adams conducted participant observation research among the Gitksan during the 1960s, before Brown's documents were available and working with the assumption that the first written records pertaining to the area began in 1867, 45 years after Brown's journal had been written. Adams' central thesis was that: \"The traplines as we know them today were drawn up to regulate the fur trade which is post-contact.... How much the territories may have changed since the coming of the Whites is unknown.... The actual rate of change seems quite rapid, though Gitksan informants often deny that there are any changes at all. They assert that 'things have always been just as they are now for thousands and thousands of years.'\" By 1987, however, Adams, like most northwest coast scholars, was in the process of rethinking some of his earlier assumptions about the impact of the fur trade on property law among First Nations on the northwest coast. He asked, in the introduction to an issue of the academic journal, _Arctic Anthropology_ , \"What could possibly account for Northwest Coast stratification prior to the coming of Europeans? Unfortunately, political ideology has played a major role in this matter for at least 50 years.\"\n\nRobinson argued that when the earliest fur traders arrived in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territories, the Aboriginal population was sparse and much of the land that may have previously been used for hunting had already been \"abandoned.\" Robinson's report described protohistoric Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en property management: \"The protohistoric and early historic shift in economic emphases towards the production of furs for exchange probably also resulted in some resource-producing areas being abandoned. In other words, new gaps emerged in the village 'patchworks.' These new gaps were probably closer to villages than the prime peripheral hunting territories. Although several of the examples cited consider European diseases a major factor contributing to the abandonment of certain territories, it can also be suggested that some territories were simply abandoned if they had few fine fur-bearers to begin with, or as their fur stocks were depleted. I envision what can be described as a centrifugal shift in territorial holdings throughout the protohistoric and historic periods, with mid-range territories being increasingly abandoned in favour of outlying ones.\" She went on to lay the groundwork for arguments that would emerge later that, once fur-bearing species were depleted in a given locale, the territory was simply abandoned and therefore could be \"discovered,\" and \"claimed by migrants.\" Of course, given that the Crown's and Robinson's argument began with the assumption that land had no meaning except what the Crown defined as an \"economic\" value, and therefore was not desired by Aboriginal peoples before the European-Aboriginal fur trade, it proceeds logically that there would be no value remaining after the fur trade's purposes were served.\n\nThe debate that Robinson refers to about whether changes in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en relationships to land were primarily stimulated by their participation in the European-Aboriginal fur trade, or were the result of population loss due to smallpox epidemics is a familiar one in academic northwest coast studies and in British Columbian political culture. An outbreak of smallpox was first recorded among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en during the 1770s, and subsequent epidemics of measles, influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever took a heavy toll in 1837-1838, and 1862-1863. Alongside these epidemics, \"lingering diseases, such as influenza, scrofula, and syphilis, observed among later native populations, can also be inferred for the early contact period\" researcher Steven Acheson writes.\n\nThis rapid decline in population, and the decimation and demoralization that accompanied it served to reinforce theories that Aboriginal peoples constituted a \"vanishing race.\" This was, and is, a popular notion that both historically and contemporarily helps to rationalize the expropriation of lands and the exploitation of peoples already considered doomed to extinction. The debate about which had more impact on Indigenous societies, the arrival of commodities or the arrival of diseases, is an important one. If the Crown wanted only to prove the \"facts\" that changes in boundaries and borders took place during the fur trade, the cause of these changes would seem irrelevant, in a strictly \"legal\" sense. However, the moral and ideological differences between claiming that the lust for European commodities prompted change, rather than arguing that Aboriginal peoples were innocent victims of diseases brought by Europeans, speaks to one of western cultures' solutions to the problem of political responsibility. If Indigenous peoples changed because they wanted material things, then they may be considered somehow responsible and guilty at the same time: they are responsible because they displayed rational choice behaviour in pursuing the accumulation of goods; but they are thus guilty of losing their \"pristine\" Aboriginality and are no longer attractive to westerners. Furthermore, this line of reasoning goes, they were compensated, in that they did receive the things they wanted; and why should they get \"our\" things if they don't want to become like us? There is something fundamentally \"unfair\" about that to a conservative, or neo-conservative imagination. It parallels the way many people feel about welfare recipients \"getting something for nothing\" and not suffering sufficiently to \"deserve\" assistance. Wealth and its pursuit are extraordinarily contradictory and confusing questions for westerners.\n\nNot having it shows you to be an undeserving failure, but possibly of a kindly disposition. Having it shows you to be deserving of success, but possibly of an unkindly disposition. The accumulation of wealth is western capitalist culture's most viciously enforced imperative, while it is one of Judeo-Christianity's greatest sins.\n\nOn the other hand, if native people changed their behaviour because many of their numbers were eliminated by disease, they were not responsible. According to western biomedicine, the body is a passive victim randomly attacked by germs that do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender or social class. It would not be as morally acceptable, or politically legitimate, for Crown representatives to say out loud, \"we nearly wiped you out with smallpox, so tough luck,\" as it is for them to say \"you went for the goodies, so tough luck.\"\n\n**The Magic of Commodity Fetishism**\n\n_The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities..._\n\n_A commodity is in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfied human wants of some sort or another._ _The nature of such wants, whether they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference..._\n\n_The utility of a thing makes it a use-value.... But so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent...The mystical value of commodities does not originate...in their use value_\n\n\u2014Philosopher Karl Marx, 1867, _Capital Volume 1_.\n\n_Fetishism denotes the attribution of life, autonomy, power, and even dominance to otherwise inanimate objects.... Thus, in the case of commodity fetishism, social relationships are dismembered and appear to dissolve into relationships between mere things...man has become the slave of the commodities he himself has produced but which now appear before him as objects imbued with the power to render him their tool...._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Michael Taussig, 1980, _The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America_.\n\nAnother important legal question whose answer was located in the protohistoric period was what kind of social organization existed among Aboriginal peoples at the time Britain asserted sovereignty? The Crown's case was necessarily inconsistent since they wanted to establish two contradictory arguments. First, they wanted to demonstrate that Aboriginal society was sufficiently \"primitive\" to legitimate the application of the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement, and the principle of _terra nullius_. Second, they wanted to prove that, at precisely the same moment in time\u2014the early nineteenth century\u2014in precisely the same place, precisely the same people were sufficiently \"evolved\" to have begun organizing themselves into a House and clan social structure with matrilineal descent systems and established and protected private-like property. The Crown's and Robinson's argument was that all this took place within a period of at most 78 years (1744-1822), dated from the moment Captain Cook landed at Ahousat; or perhaps over the course of 22 years (1800-1822), dated from the commencement of the land-based fur trade, and fully developed by the time William Brown described it in his 1822 journal. The Crown claimed that the sophisticated land and resource ownership system Brown documented was a response to European influences, which would render hunting and trapping for the European-Aboriginal fur trade not \"aboriginal practices,\" according to the law. This argument also assumes that any social and cultural changes that took place after contact necessarily resulted in \"European\" and \"not Aboriginal\" practices. However, Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en involvement as active participants in the land-based fur trade began around the early 1820s: _after_ William Brown's arrival. In 1803-1806, when, according to the Crown, British sovereignty was established in the area, the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's lived experience of British \"culture\" was of having acquired a smattering of items of European manufacture, and of having met a handful of fur traders wandering through their territories.\n\nThe last gasp of the Crown's argument was to claim that the desire for, and competition over, new commodities brought by European fur traders stimulated the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en to exploit the territories outside of their villages and at a distance from the main subsistence source of salmon in the rivers. Given the relatively few European trade goods actually present in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territories at the time, and the minimal actual contact that had taken place between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal persons in the region, the Crown relied heavily on the theoretical assumption that even such minimal lived experience with things manufactured by Europeans, in a capitalist mode of production, could dramatically transform an Aboriginal society. It is not necessary to dismiss the importance of economic power and technological sophistication, or the lure of commodities and consumption, to recognize that human history and social relations are shaped by far more complex a web of interacting forces than any unicausal theory can support. Most contemporary social scientists agree that the causes of social and cultural change are multiple, the processes complex, and explanation cannot be reduced to a single, determining, causal factor like economic, or technological, or ideological change. Rather, current thinking on this subject focuses on the interactions and interrelationships between many forces and factors that produce changes in societies and cultures over time.\n\nThe Crown's argument, however, relied on archaic notions of simplistic determinism and on concepts of human nature as driven by a passion to compete with each other in a race to accumulate material goods: commodities or \"things.\" Tracing the crucial argument about the actual impact of European goods on Aboriginal social organization from its first statement in Robinson's doctoral dissertation, to her initial proposal to Russell & DuMoulin, and then through subsequent iterations in evolving drafts of her expert opinion report written under their direction, and finally to the interrogation of her argument under cross-examination, reveals the necessary ambivalence inherent in her hypothesis. In her doctoral dissertation, Robinson had been firm about the need to avoid simplistic unicausal theories of social change. In her initial proposal to Russell & DuMoulin, Robinson suggested that the European-Aboriginal fur trade may have accelerated _already existing_ trends, but did not _cause_ new forms of social organization.\n\nPeter Grant explored the question of causal theory under cross-examination, referring Robinson to her early correspondence with Russell & DuMoulin:\n\nGrant: That's a fair statement of the state of the art in the field?\n\nRobinson: Yes, and I would say that cultural ecologists, and that's people that deal with cultural geography, cultural anthropology and archaeology who share a common interest in the relationship between people and land and changes in those relationships, do indeed recognize that sometimes profound socioeconomic changes are triggered by relatively small or what appear to be small factors. And that often direct cause is obscured by the subsequent consequences. And this is something that I think is generally recognized as a theoretical orientation in other scholarly fields.\n\nGrant: But there is some legitimacy to the criticism within the field that relatively minor external stimuli can trigger profound changes and patterns of socioeconomic behaviour, there is some legitimacy to the concern that this is often undemonstrable speculation?\n\nRobinson: Not within the field, I would say that criticism is levelled at it. I think the criticism comes more from people that are outside the fields of anthropology and cultural geography who don't know where the theories of explanation are derived....\n\nIn a subsequent draft proposal to Russell & DuMoulin, Robinson promised that in her report, \"particular attention will also be paid to theories which regard relatively minor external stimuli as catalysts or 'triggering' factors which can provoke significant internal adjustments in socioeconomic configurations.\"\n\nRobinson's final report, while employing vague and inconclusive wording, is emphatic on the question of European commodities being the 'prime-mover' or \"triggering\" factor causing change. And, finally, under cross examination, Robinson moved quite definitely from her initial position, reflecting the state of the art in the field\u2014that \"assumptions that relatively minor external stimuli can 'trigger' profound changes in patterns in socioeconomic behaviour are often dismissed as un-demonstrable speculation\"\u2014to the following:\n\nGrant: Even if you accept the proposition that in 1805 some metal comes inland through the Gitksan area, are you saying that that would lead to the change to a territorially-based society from a nonterritorially-based society? Robinson: Yes. I think that the influx of European wealth was a major triggering factor...\n\nIn the late nineteenth century, Karl Marx described a bizarre characteristic of capitalist cultures that he called a belief in \"the magic of commodity fetishism.\" Marx claimed that, in the western European culture of his time, people behaved as if they believed that commodities, although they are inanimate objects, were endowed with a form of magical power that seduces people into believing that they need these commodities to survive. Members of capitalist cultures, Marx wrote, find themselves wanting desperately to possess many \"things\" and to harness the mystical power they believe the \"things\" possess. People begin to believe that, in order to be happy, whole persons and live a good life, they must possess these \"things\" by exchanging money and consuming them in the market place.\n\nThe Crown's argument about the impact of the arrival of a few European-manufactured commodities relied on the assumption that the magic of commodity fetishism was powerfully at work among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples in north-central British Columbia during the early nineteenth century, when, according to the Crown, they were _not_ organized as a capitalist society. Given this, the Crown's argument must then rest either on the assumption that commodity fetishism is a universal characteristic of human nature and not specific to capitalist cultures; or, that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, as \"primitive\" peoples, were simplistic and easily swayed by the need for instant gratification of their desires for new \"things.\" Once again, the foundations of the Crown's case were eurocentric at best, and racist at worse. Once again, the Crown's image of human life as driven by acquisitive desires to accumulate \"things\" is an impoverished one that does not represent a consensus of European thought, or non-Aboriginal \"cultural values,\" or a desirable vision of the future.\n\nWhile the Crown's arguments reflect outdated social theory, they also reinforce the very contemporary values of consumer capitalism. In asserting these theories as universally applicable and representative of \"human nature,\" rather than as an illustration of an historically and culturally specific \"belief system\" of a sector of the dominant western European society, the Crown attempted to codify into law its image of the ideal self and a model of society driven by the \"rationality\" of individual economic accumulation and self-aggrandizement. By attributing \"scientific\" status to these theories of human behaviour, the Crown could dispense with the experience and analyses of the actual people involved in living these processes, since their behaviour could now be explained as being determined by \"natural\" forces outside themselves, over which they had neither control nor necessarily awareness. The minimal contact with European social or economic organization that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had actually experienced when, according to the law, they were transformed without their knowledge into something \"not truly aboriginal,\" was of no concern to the Crown's theories.\n\nThese theories can be traced through several centuries of European thought, and they are currently enjoying a resurgence in contemporary neo-conservatist ideologies, whose adherents can recognize only two forms of human behaviour: \"either bargaining gambits\u2014the approved behaviour of the 'successful;' or madness\u2014the discredited behaviour of the 'failures.'\" If industrial capitalism's motif was represented by the slogan \"I own, therefore I am,\" consumer capitalism's raison d'\u00eatre can be expressed as \"I buy, therefore I am.\" Our world is increasingly driven by the creation of insatiable desires for things we don't need, while our needs for what we have forgotten to desire go unmet.\n\nThe Crown's case, therefore, was empirically unsupported; scholastically archaic; logically confused; ethnocentric, eurocentric, and racist. Ultimately, it defends and enforces an image of human beings and a vision of human society that many people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, including myself, reject as oppressive to the best in human potentiality.\n\n* * *\n\n. Satsan 1992: 53.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 291: 21865-21867.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 291: 21865-21867.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 291: 21966.\n\n. Robinson 1983.\n\n. Robinson 1983: 423.\n\n. See Wike 1951; Fisher 1977.\n\n. Robinson 1983: 408.\n\n. Robinson 1983: 425.\n\n. Rogers 1986: 1.\n\n. Bishop 1987: 7-9.\n\n. Wike 1951.\n\n. Fisher 1977.\n\n. See Canada, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1993. But see also Backhouse 1991 for a feminist critique of the Royal Commission's analysis of this case.\n\n. Foster 1992.\n\n. Robinson 1987(a): 16.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 293: 22157-58.\n\n. Transcripts Vol. 292: 22126-27.\n\n. MacDonald 1984.\n\n. MacDonald 1984: 73, quoted in Robinson 1987(a): 34.\n\n. Robinson, 1987(a): 24.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 289: 21747-21751.\n\n. Adams 1969:14; 1973.\n\n. Adams 1987: 69.\n\n. Acheson 1995: 13, Table 1.1.\n\n. Acheson, 1995:11. See also Boyd 1990: 137.\n\n. Foucault 1975; Tesh 1988.\n\n. See Simmel 1978.\n\n. Transcripts, Vol. 289: 11145.\n\n. Gordon 1988: 54.\n**Chapter 14: From a Fur Trading Frontier**  \n**to a White Man's Province**\n\n_The settler came to re-create an alien civilization on the frontier, while the fur traders had to operate largely within the context of the indigenous culture.... That is, generally traders reacted to what they saw, while settlers tended to react to what they expected to see._\n\n\u2014Historian Robin Fisher, 1977.\n\n**Believing What You See. Seeing What You Believe.**\n\nAlthough most of the key legal questions relevant to the \"tests\" for Aboriginal title and rights rested on interpretations of the pre-contact and fur trade periods, subsequent events in the history of First Nations relations with British Columbia governments and populations were also relevant. During the four-year trial of _Delgamuukw v. R._ Chief Justice McEachern was presented with evidence and arguments by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and by both the federal and provincial governments that took the form of contested historical narratives that stretched from first contact to the present\n\nFollowing the fur trade, British Columbia moved into what historians call \"the settlement period.\" The establishment of the Colony of Vancouver Island, granted to the Hudson's Bay Company by Royal Charter on January 13, 1849, marked the end of the fur trade period and the beginning of the settlement period, although significant numbers of British settlers did not begin arriving before the 1860s. The political, economic, cultural and legal implications of the transition from the fur trade to settlement are significant, since they involved a marked difference in the value\u2014broadly defined\u2014of land to non-Aboriginals, and created the positions of governor, members of the provincial assembly and justices of the peace. The legal practice of settlement was expressed in a rapid proliferation of laws regarding ownership of land, access to resources, and political relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers, and within and between settler populations.\n\nThe first Governor of the new colony of Vancouver Island was a lawyer, Richard Blanchard, appointed in 1849. He proved unequal to the task at hand, and was replaced in 1851 by James Douglas, Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Victoria, who assumed the additional position of governor. Douglas was the son of a Scots trader and a \"free coloured woman\" of British Guyana. His wife was the child of a Hudson's' Bay Company factor and a Cree woman. Fisher describes Douglas' attitudes as \"a mixture in which the knowledge of the fur trader was accompanied by the paternalistic concerns of the nineteenth-century humanitarian.\" In this way, Douglas embodied and personified the transitional historical period he governed.\n\nFourteen agreements were made between Governor Douglas and various Aboriginal nations on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854; that have become known as the \"Douglas Treaties.\" The questions about Douglas and, particularly, \"the Douglas treaties,\" that are legally important today can be summarized as follows: First, were these agreements treaties, or merely private purchases made by the Hudson's Bay Company? Second, did Douglas recognize Aboriginal title in a proprietary sense, or merely in the use and occupancy sense? Third, did Douglas recognize an Aboriginal interest in all lands, or only those \"under cultivation, village sites or fenced fields?\" Fourth, did Douglas take a consistent stand throughout his period as governor, or did he change his mind, or did the instructions he received from London change over time?\n\nWhile scholars concur that these agreements should be interpreted as treaties that clearly recognized some form of Aboriginal interest in the land and that required explicit cession and\/or extinguishment, there are debates about what the scope of the Aboriginal title Douglas recognized was. Fisher, for example, argues that the treaties were based on current British opinion about the nature of Aboriginal land tenure. He concluded that Douglas was authorized only to confirm a right of occupancy of lands under cultivation, village sites and fenced fields, but not to recognize Aboriginal title as equivalent to ownership or sovereignty in a European sense. Indians would have hunting and gathering rights over other lands as long as these were \"waste\" and not allocated to settlers. Political scientist Paul Tennant disagrees with Fisher. He argues that: \"The most important fact about the Douglas treaties is that they stand as unequivocal recognition of aboriginal title. It was with this initial acknowledgement that the British established their rule in British Columbia.\"\n\nIt has been argued\u2014and here we encounter the beginning of another dominant theme in Aboriginal\/state relations\u2014that one reason for Douglas having ceased to address the question of Indian title was that, as the costs of administering the colony increased, neither the Hudson's Bay Company nor London allocated a sufficient increase of funds to accomplish the task.\n\nThe colonial office in London, and the legislative assembly in Victoria, were both concerned not only, or even principally, with Indian matters. Rather, they were consumed with planning a very culturally-specific and homogenous colony. An early instruction to the governor of the colony of British Columbia was to insure the transfer of \"a cross section of British society to the colony,\" and a process whereby \"a just proportion of labour and capital\" would beachieved, and \"paupers, squatters and land speculators\" would be prevented from settling. Their ambition to create a civilized \"whiteman's province\" would be expressed in immigration and settlement policies, state ideology, popular sentiment and sporadic outbursts of hostility and violence towards Asians as well as Aboriginal peoples throughout the province's history.\n\nDouglas initially respected Aboriginal law to the extent that he regularly ordered Europeans to pay compensation to the families of victims injured by them. During the course of the 1850s, however, Douglas increasingly invoked British law to settle both European-Native disputes and intra-Native disputes. In 1855 he wrote optimistically that he thought the Indians were beginning to have a clearer idea of the nature of British law which, he said, was \"the first step in the progress of civilization.\" Governor Douglas appointed his brother-in-law, David Cameron, a linen-draper from the West Indies, as Supreme court Justice in 1853, and as Chief Justice in 1856.\n\nThe Gold Rush of 1857-58 brought the Pacific northwest to the forefront of Britain's interests in North America. The summer of 1858 began with the arrival of 400 miners in Victoria, and by September there were thousands. With the influx of miners and increasing numbers of settlers, Douglas gave up his former practice of \"legal pluralism\" and insisted that Indians and Whites alike seek redress through representatives of British law rather than through traditional modes or individual retaliation.\n\nIn 1858, the British established direct rule on the mainland, creating British Columbia. Douglas resigned as Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company and retained the position of Governor only. In 1861, the House of Assembly passed a petition in which they stated their belief that \"the extinction of Aboriginal title is obligatory on the Imperial Government,\" and sent it to the Duke of Newcastle, seeking funds to extinguish Aboriginal title. The requested funds never arrived. Instead, the Duke of Newcastle wrote back acknowledging, \"...the great importance of purchasing without loss of time the native title to the soil of Vancouver Island...but the acquisition of the title is a purely Colonial Interest and the Legislature must not entertain any expectation that the British Taxpayer will be burthened to supply the funds or British Credit pledged for the purpose.\"\n\nThis correspondence has become important in contemporary litigation. If it can be shown that the British Crown, and\/or the Parliament of Canada, recognized Aboriginal title in British Columbia, then the more recent story constructed by the Province of British Columbia's lawyers that posits an uninterrupted and uncontradicted history of _non-recognition_ by the Crown of Aboriginal title from the moment of contact is significantly challenged.\n\nAs always, politicians and jurists engaged in rationalizing colonial rule drew in various ways from the intellectual climate of their times. Charles Darwin had published _Origin of the Species_ in 1859. His theories hardened into doctrine, and the fiction that the British represented a superior race, and the Aboriginals an inferior one, was rapidly transformed from speculative hypotheses, into pseudo-scientific dogma, popular mythology, and ideological justifications for colonization. John Locke's theories were increasingly drawn upon and popularized as scientific and moral justifications for colonization. Fundamental to this social evolutionary ideology is the notion of an absolute and unbridgeable difference between races. In the absence of recognition of cultural similarities, negatively valued difference ruled the day. Increasingly, Aboriginal peoples were represented in local provincial, Canadian and British literature and propaganda as \"wild savages,\" rather than \"noble savages.\" Historian Robin Fisher explains: \"The British colonist established a line of cleavage based on race and could not permit any crossing of that barrier by admitting that the Indian was in any way comparable to western man.\"\n\nWhen, in 1864, local legislative assemblies replaced direct rule by London, James Douglas retired as governor and was replaced by Frederick Seymour in British Columbia and Arthur Kennedy on Vancouver Island. Neither Seymour nor Kennedy were actively concerned with Indian land rights and they left the responsibility for policy-making in this area to their newly-appointed Chief Commissioner of Lands, Joseph Trutch. Trutch \"personified settler interests and attitudes, considering Indians 'as bestial rather than human,' 'uncivilized savages,' 'ugly and lazy,' 'lawless and violent.'\"\n\nTrutch turned to Social Darwinism for justification of his policies. He argued that Indians had not evolved to the stage where they could conceptualize ideas of property. Furthermore, following Locke, he reasoned that hunting, fishing and gathering did not involve the application of human labour to the transformation or cultivation of the land, and therefore, he claimed, the Indians were not using the land efficiently. Trutch disposed of the Douglas Treaties, claiming that, since there had been neither civilization nor law among the First Nations, no treaties had been required. He argued that the monies given to Indians during negotiations were to purchase short-term peace and not to purchase or extinguish title, which was not necessary. He invented a rule that a maximum of ten acres should be allotted to each adult Indian male, and then reduced the allocations of reserve lands that Douglas had laid out accordingly.\n\nDouglas, in an effort to encourage Indian assimilation, had guaranteed Indians the right to acquire land under the same conditions as those offered to settlers; that is, by cultivating it and building on it. His vision was that Indians would move off the reserves after having been cared for, civilized, and Christianized by missionaries, and would then become equal citizens of the colony. Trutch passed an ordinance that prohibited Indians from pre-empting land without the written permission of the Governor. By 1875, there was only one, single case of an Indian pre-empting land under this condition.\n\nVancouver Island and the mainland were united into one colony, British Columbia, in 1866. By this time the Aboriginal population had been reduced to approximately 40,000 people, although there were still less than 100 non-Aboriginal residents in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory and the \"whites depended on Indian participation for the success of most economic activity.\"\n\nSmallpox and other diseases continued to decimate the Aboriginal population throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, as was the pattern in British Columbia, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en continued, during the settlement period, to fish, hunt, gather and trade with each other, with other Aboriginal groups, and now, with non-Aboriginals. In fact, they furnished the Hudson's Bay Company staff with most of their requirements. The economic interests of the non-Indians at the time were limited to the extraction and transportation of resources, particularly furs and gold.\n\nMissionaries joined fur traders and settlers at what had now become a European frontier. The interests and ideologies of these diverse groups were not always identical. Settlers, for the most part, assumed that Indians were \"primitive\" peoples destined by natural selection to vanish. Aboriginal claims could therefore be ignored, and certainly need not be considered serious obstacles to settlement. Missionaries, however, were intent on saving heathen souls, and many believed that Indians need not vanish, but could survive if they ceased to be Indians and assimilated into the dominant white society. Hence, missionaries often placed themselves in the position of protectors of the Indians against the rapacious disregard shown by settlers and the calculated manipulations of traders; and as advocates on behalf of Aboriginal peoples in representations to governments. Into their pre-existing life ways and institutions First Nations incorporated: near annihilation by relentless epidemics of infectious diseases; Christianity; wage labour in guiding, packing, canoeing, and mining; and, later on in the century, employment in fish canneries.\n\nTo the settlers, Aboriginals were wild, wicked children. To the missionaries, Aboriginals were noble, innocent children. To the governments, Aboriginals were a potentially expensive legal and social problem. To the merchants, Aboriginals were suppliers and consumers of commodities. To some non-Aboriginal individuals, Aboriginal individuals were friends, lovers, co-workers, spouses and relatives.\n\n**On the One Hand, and On the Other...**\n\n_Federal jurisdiction is derived from s. 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which has been read to permit Parliament to single out native people and treat them differently than non-native people. Parliament is also entitled to treat native people the same as non-native people under laws passed pursuant to other heads of federal power...for example, The Fisheries Act. Provincial legislatures are not entitled to treat native people differently than non-native people, but can pass laws regulating native forms of life so long as such laws are of general application and do not touch on matters which are inherently Indian...._\n\n_In the end all this means that Parliament and provincial legislatures pass laws regulating the life and culture of native people without native consent._\n\n\u2014Legal scholar Patrick Macklem, 1991.\n\nCanadian Confederation under the _British North America Act_ ( _B.N.A. Act_ ) took place in 1867. Consistent with the theory articulated in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Crown's underlying title and sovereignty were confirmed. Section 91(24) of the _B.N.A. Act_ conferred on the federal Parliament jurisdiction over \"Indians and Lands reserved for Indians.\" Provincial governments were given jurisdiction over wildlife and game, education, health, social services and some justice and corrections areas. Provincial authority in these areas encompasses the entire population, including Aboriginal peoples, but the province may not pass legislation specifically addressed to Indians. Hence the legal and legislative basis for the historic provincial government policy of refusing to recognize Aboriginal people as distinct populations.\n\nBritish Columbia did not join Confederation until 1871. Negotiations between London, Ottawa and Victoria began two years earlier in 1869. Both London and Ottawa expressed concerns about the fact that British Columbia did not appear to have a process in place for legally extinguishing Aboriginal title and releasing land for settlement. The Colonial Office queried the absence of treaties based on the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The British Columbia delegation, represented by Joseph Trutch as chief negotiator, spent June and July of 1870 in Ottawa negotiating the Terms of Union which were passed by Order-in-Council in July 1870. Clause 13 refers to Indians:\n\nThe charge of the Indians, and the trusteeship and management of the lands reserved for their use and benefit, shall be assumed by the Dominion Government, and a policy as liberal as that hitherto pursued by the British Columbia Government shall be continued by the Dominion Government after the Union.\n\nTo carry out such a policy, tracts of land of such extent as it has hitherto been the practice of the British Columbia Government to appropriate for that purpose, shall from time to time be conveyed by the local government to the dominion government in trust for the use and benefit of the Indians on application of the dominion government; and in case of disagreement between the governments respecting the quantity of such tracts of land to be so granted, the matter shall be referred for the decision of the Secretary of State for the Colonies.\n\nIn effect, the Terms of Union gave the province of B.C. direct title to all public lands. Confident that the \"Indian title question\" was resolved, the province now lumped Indians together with non-white immigrants as ineligible for even the most basic civil rights, including the vote. By 1871, a theory of Aboriginal title in British Columbia, legitimized by Lockean political theory and nineteenth-century evolutionism, had been formalized in colonial policy and articulated in popular ideology as the \"founding myth of White British Columbia.\" It remained yet to be codified into law to become \"the truth.\" No Aboriginal representatives were involved in the negotiations or agreements that led up to the passing of either the _British North America Act_ or the Terms of Union.\n\nIt was not until after 1870 that the Gold Rush brought large numbers of whites, including surveyors, miners, merchants, missionaries and government administrators to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory. A permanent white settlement was established at Hazelton, but whites remained a numerical minority, who continued to buy large quantities of dried salmon and other foodstuffs from the local Indians.\"\n\nJoseph Trutch wrote to the Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John A. MacDonald, in 1872, offering his analysis of the situation: \"We have here in B.C. a population numbering from 40,000 to 50,000, by far the larger portion of whom are utter savages living along the coast, frequently committing murder and robbery among themselves...and only restrained from more outrageous crime by being always treated with firmness and by the consistent enforcement of the law....\"\n\nThe negotiations surrounding Indian policy in the Terms of Union of 1871 are of considerable contemporary legal and political significance since arguments have been made by historians that Trutch intentionally allowed a mistaken impression to remain with federal officials that the Indian policy in British Columbia, like that in the rest of the country, had dealt with Indian title by treaty before opening land for settlement. In the rest of Canada, major treaties with Indians west of Ontario had been signed during the 1870s; and reserve lands were being allocated on the basis of the national 80 acres per family standard, and not the 10 acres per adult male actually being allocated in B.C. If Trutch did, in fact, intentionally deceive federal officials, this evidence would support the Aboriginal argument that the federal government has consistently recognized their interests, whereas the provincial government has not. More to the point, such a finding of fraudulent action would place in doubt the legal status of _all_ land title throughout the province, and would cast a shadow on British Columbian settlers' history and self-image. Former Governor James Douglas wrote to federal Superintendent of Indian Affairs Powell to protest Trutch's allocations, and stated that his intention and practice as Governor had been to allocate whatever lands the Indians themselves identified as being required. In 1873, Sir John A. MacDonald, having realized that Trutch was allocating only 10 acres to adult males, officially requested the Province of B.C. adopt the 80 acre per family national standard for allocation of reserve lands.\n\nIn 1874 the B.C. legislature passed the B.C. Lands Act aimed at consolidating previous laws affecting Crown lands. The following year the federal government took an extraordinary action when the Dominion Deputy Minister of Justice ordered the provincial law disallowed, in part because it did not take into account Aboriginal title, and prevented Indians from preempting land without written permission from the government. The federal Deputy Minister cited the Royal Proclamation of 1763 in support of his position, arguing that British Columbia, by being the only province not to follow British policy in this regard, jeopardized the \"honour of the Crown.\"\n\nFollowing the federal government's disallowal of the B.C. Lands Act in 1875, the federal and provincial governments agreed to constitute a joint federal-provincial reserve commission to examine the land question. Three Commissioners were appointed to the Indian Reserve Commission: former Hudson's Bay Company men, Anderson and McKinlay, for the federal government and provincial government respectively; and Gilbert Sproat, a settler and self-taught ethnographer who had lived among the Nuu'chah'nulth of Vancouver Island, as a third. No Aboriginal people were consulted or involved either in the formation of the Commission, or in the development of its terms of reference. Some First Nations, when advised that they would not be permitted to discuss Aboriginal title but would be limited to pleading for reserve allocations, boycotted the process. Some attended the hearings, defied the agenda, and spoke about their land rights. Others set out detailed arguments for specific reserve allocations.\n\nIn order to assist the Commission, the provincial legislature moved to have the _Papers Connected with the Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1850-_ _1875_ (\"The Papers\") published. Joseph Trutch, however, managed to withhold the collected papers from the legislative assembly, and, more importantly, from the Indian Reserve Commission. The withholding of this publication from public, particularly Aboriginal, access would play an important part in future relations between Aboriginal peoples and the British Columbia provincial government. _The Papers_ contain correspondence between the British Colonial Office and, first Douglas, and then Trutch. That is, _The Papers_ constitute the official documentary record of the critical period in British Columbia history when the Crown consolidated its title to the province's lands.\n\nA reading of _The Papers_ leaves little doubt about a few key legal and historical points. For one thing, it is clear that the British Crown was initially cognizant of, and anxious to settle, Aboriginal interests in land. For another, the British Crown clearly wanted this accomplished in as \"legal\" and \"humanitarian\" a way as possible, reflecting the principles of British colonial law and policy. That the British Crown had consistently assumed that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 applied to British Columbia, and that its terms should provide a framework for negotiating treaties with First Nations in British Columbia is also plainly and repeatedly stated in _The Papers_. On the other hand, the Crown did not wish to pay the costs effected by these policies, nor did they want any problems to arise that might impede settlement. The balance between humanitarian concern and economic efficiency shifts repeatedly throughout, but by the end of the twenty-five year period covered by _The Papers_ , settlement\u2014and settlers'\u2014interests are clearly at the forefront. When choices had to be made between spending money or dispensing justice, Aboriginal interests were consistently sacrificed. Correspondence from first colonial, and then provincial officials, follows a similar pattern and conclusion. The shift in attitude and position from Douglas to Trutch is plainly represented. The documents tell neither a humanitarian, nor a heroic, nor a law-abiding story. Greed, dishonesty, petty corruption and a lust for power sporadically justified by racism, crude even for its time, are what the _Papers Connected with the Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1850-1875_ reveal.\n\n* * *\n\n. Fisher 1977: 68.\n\n. See Fisher 1977; Madill 1981; Tennant 1990(a).\n\n. See Fisher 1977; Duff 1969.\n\n. Tennant 1990(a): 20.\n\n. Fisher, 1977: 150.\n\n. Fisher, 1977: 60.\n\n. The literature on race relations in British Columbia has grown substantially in recent years. An entry into this literature can be obtained through the following: Adachi 1976; Hudson (ed.) 1997; Johnston 1989; Li 1988; Roy 1989; Ward 1978.\n\n. Fisher, 1977: 65.\n\n. See Knafla 1986(b); McLaren, Foster, and Orloff (eds.) 1992.\n\n. Fisher 1977: 95.\n\n. Galois 1992. See also Foster 1981, 1992(b); McLaren, Foster and Orloff (eds.) 1992.\n\n. Public Archives, Ottawa, C.O. 305\/17, 133-34.\n\n. Newcastle to Douglas, 19 October 1861, _Papers_ , 214.\n\n. Fisher, 1977: 93.\n\n. Tennant 1990(a): 39.\n\n. Fisher 1977: 165.\n\n. Galois 1987: 21.\n\n. Ray 1987: 83.\n\n. Fisher 1977: 143.\n\n. Ray, 1987: 83.\n\n. Douglas to Powell, 14 October, 1874, _Papers_ p. 53. British Columbia officially agreed to 20 acres, but never honoured the agreement in practice (Tennant 1990: 46).\n\n. Province of British Columbia, Papers of the Legislative Assembly, 37th, Victoria 1873-74: 1027-28.\n\n. See Fisher 1977: 187; Tennant 1990: 47.\n**Chapter 15: Old Questions. New Century.**\n\n_From time immemorial the limits of the district in which our hunting grounds are have been well defined. This district extends from a rocky point called \"Andemane,\" some two and a half or three miles above our village on the Skeena River to a creek called \"She-quin-khaat,\" which empties into the Skeena about two miles below Lorne Creek._\n\n_We claim the ground on both sides of the river, as well as the river within these limits, and as all our hunting, fruit gathering and fishing operations are carried on in this district, we can truly say we are occupying it._\n\n\u2014Gitksan Chiefs of Gitwangak, 1884.\n\n**The First Definite Hint...**\n\nThis claim was presented to the Provincial Government of British Columbia in 1884. Witness for the Crown in _Delgamuukw v. R._ and popular historian, David Ricardo Williams described this petition presented by the Gitwangak Chief as \"the first definite hint by natives that they possessed proprietary rights.\"\n\nThe _Indian Act_ had been passed in 1876, bringing every aspect of Aboriginal life under the scrutiny and administration of the federal government. In 1884 clauses were added that outlawed the carrying out of, or assisting in, or purchasing or supplying goods for, or communicating about, potlatching, sundancing, and other Aboriginal cultural practices. Since these ceremonies were also the means by which vital events like births, marriages and deaths were recorded in the oral tradition, and where transfers of lands and rights through inheritance or alliance were witnessed and effected, this ban constituted a criminalization of Aboriginal cultural, political, legal and economic institutions and practices. The _Indian Act_ also delegitimated traditional chiefs and systems of law. These further incursions on their ways of life increased resentment on the part of First Nations towards the governments, and led to more and varied forms of protest against, and resistance to, the colonial regime.\n\nNative resistance took on a number of forms during this period. Individual confrontations decreased, nativist and syncretist religious movements began, and organized public protests and petitions became common place. In 1872 a large crowd of Coast Salish people assembled outside the New Westminster Land Registry office to protest the illegal seizure of their lands. Throughout the 1870s various groups sent petitions and delegations to state their grievances to government. Four issues preoccupied them: (i) recognition of Aboriginal title; (ii) insufficient and arbitrary reserve land allocations; (iii) encroachment on lands and resources by whites; (iv) lack of support from governments for developing agriculture and animal husbandry.\n\nIn 1885 three Coast Tsimshian chiefs, accompanied by missionary William Duncan, became the first of many delegations to travel to Ottawa \"to tell them our troubles about our land.\" Among the Chiefs' principle demands was that a public inquiry be held into the land question. By way of response, Provincial Premier Smithe agreed to a meeting between federal, provincial and Nishga and Tsimshian leaders. He insisted, however, that missionaries, who he alleged had put the idea of land title into the minds of Aboriginal peoples to begin with, not be allowed to attend. The federal and provincial governments did, however, agree to a public inquiry that began in the winter months of 1887. Nishga Chief David Mackay addressed the hearings. He said:\n\nWhat we don't like about the Government is their saying this: \"We will give you this much land.\"\n\nHow can they give it when it is our own? We cannot understand it. They have never bought it from us or our forefathers. They have never fought and conquered our people and taken the land in that way, and yet they say now that they will give us so much land\u2014our own land.\n\nThese chiefs do not talk foolishly, they know the land is their own; our forefathers for generations and generations past had their land here all around us; chiefs have had their own hunting grounds, their salmon streams, and places where they got their berries; it has always been so. It is not only during the last four or five years that we have seen the land; we have always seen and owned it; it is not new thing, it has been ours for generations.\n\nIf we had only seen it for twenty years and claimed it as our own, it would have been foolish, but it has been ours for thousands of years. If any strange person came here and saw the land for twenty years and claimed it, he would be foolish. We have always got our living from the land; we are not like white people who live in towns and have their stores and other business, getting their living in that way, but we have always depended on the land for our food and clothes; we get our salmon, berries, and furs from the land.\n\nBritish Columbia Premier Smithe dismissed the First Nations' claims, telling them:\n\nWhen the whites first came among you, you were little better than the wild beasts of the field.... The land all belongs to the Queen.... A reserve is given to each tribe, and they are not required to pay for it. It is the Queen's land just the same, but the Queen gives it to her Indian children because they do not know so well how to make their own living the same as a white man, and special indulgence is extended to them, and special care shown.\n\nThus, instead of being treated as a white man, the Indian is treated better. But it is the hope of everybody that in a little while the Indians will be so far advanced as to be the same as a white man in every respect. Do you understand what I say?\n\nThe Crown's legal arguments in _Delgamuukw v. R.,_ whose answers lie in what took place during this historical period, centred on questions of \"abandonment\" of land and \"acquiescence\" to colonial rule. The Crown continued and expanded their claims that Aboriginal lands were frequently \"abandoned.\" The Crown alleged that, being anxious to assimilate and participate in the new\u2014superior\u2014economy and culture, Aboriginal peoples voluntarily abandoned their traditional territories and outlying villages, along with fishing, hunting, gathering and trapping activities, and became wage labourers. They settled into villages that the government then \"gave\" them as reserves, and eagerly converted to Christianity. Their lands\u2014never really \"owned\" in European terms in the first place, and now abandoned and unused by previous claimants anyway\u2014became available for pre-emption and settlement by settlers.\n\nThe Crown argued that Aboriginal people complied with colonial rule and did not mount important or serious resistance. Not only did the Crown have the absolute right to \"implicitly\" extinguish Aboriginal title by simply declaring sovereignty and imposing British law; but, the Crown argued, First Nations \"implicitly\" consented to extinguishment, and to other assimilation policies, both legally and culturally. When federal and provincial laws were enacted and Indians obeyed them, so the interpretation goes, they were effecting legal extinguishment of title, whether they knew it, or intended to, or not.\n\nThe Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en argued that they had never consented to extinguishment of their Aboriginal title and rights. When they complied, sometimes, with various laws, they did so, they testified, either because they agreed with them in spirit, or because they were coerced by force of arms and\/or numbers, to accommodate the settlers and governments. As to abandoning their lands\u2014again, they argued that they had not abandoned hunting and trapping and fishing practices or territories, but continue to use them for purposes other than permanently residing on them or gaining _all_ of their subsistence and livelihood from them. Furthermore, they argued, to the extent that people have ceased earning their living from the land, it has not necessarily been by choice, but rather because they have been prohibited by laws and regulations from accessing their lands and resources, and from trading and selling the products of their territories. Therefore, by force of necessity, many have had to earn their living in the Euro-Canadian controlled economy.\n\nIn 1888 the first significant legal case involving issues of Aboriginal title and the effect of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 in Canada was heard in Ontario. In _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. v. R._ the issue in dispute was the legality of a logging permit issued by the federal government to the private St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. Lord Watson, of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of the House of Lords in Britain, ruled that only the federal government had the right to enter into treaties and extinguish Aboriginal title, and that Aboriginal title had no pre-existence, but was created by the British Crown through its recognition in the Royal Proclamation. Aboriginal title, as a creation of the British Crown, could remain in effect only \"at the pleasure of the Crown\" and could be eliminated by any contrary action by the Crown, however implicit, Watson's ruling concluded. Lawyers for the Province of British Columbia in the _Delgamuukw_ case cited the _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co._ decision as a precedent in support of their arguments.\n\nIt was by reading newspaper reports about the _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co._ case that British Columbia Indians became aware for the first time of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and seized upon it as evidence that the British Crown should in fact, by their own law, recognize and guarantee Aboriginal rights. \"The idea that there could be imperial intervention in indigenous policy in Canada was no Indian invention. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 represented imperial recognition of Indian political and territorial rights against local 'frauds and abuses',\" legal scholar Douglas Sanders explains. \"As this became known among British Columbia Indians, they began to discuss the possibility of taking their case directly to London.\" British Columbia Aboriginal peoples, then and now, interpreted the Royal Proclamation's words to mean what they said: that the Crown recognized Indian nations and land rights and pledged to protect them. What Aboriginal peoples didn't anticipate was that sovereigns, and representatives of sovereigns, could and would interpret this Proclamation in various abstract ways, including the interpretation that, since B.C. First Nations did not exist \"in the eyes of the Sovereign\" in 1763, they could be excluded from consideration under the terms of the Proclamation. They appear to have failed to understand the magic land ownership possessed by the omnipotent hovering sovereign.\n\nThe Crown arguments described above, however, are _post hoc_ rationalizations developed in the 1960s. It would be a mistake to assume that law is monolithic and cannot or did not adapt to local contingencies if opportunity demanded. When, in 1898, Beaver Indians assembled at Fort St. John demanding a treaty before they would allow gold seekers into their territory, the federal government complied. At the time there were few white settlers in the region, and, once the provincial government was assured that they would not be financially responsible for treaty annuities, they did not oppose the process. Treaty 8, signed in 1899 and covering a corner of north-eastern British Columbia, acknowledged the pre-existence of Aboriginal title and the applicability of the terms of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to British Columbia, including the requirement that consent must be obtained before extinguishment of title can be legally valid. However, rather than being recognized as a precedent supporting the application of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to British Columbia, succeeding British Columbia jurists have relegated Treaty 8 to the category of an anomaly, and ignored it.\n\nThe late nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of an important theme in British Columbia Aboriginal history. Some First Nations, like, for example, the Nishga, began early on in their contact with Europeans to successfully articulate their pre-existing economic and political structures to those of the Europeans. An Indigenous elite, well schooled in English language and law, developed under the tutelage of Anglican missionaries. Participation in the commercial fishing industry has formed the economic basis of a network of wealthy families on the coast, who have succeeded very well for generations, by anyone's standards. Had the predictions of European anthropological and social theories been realized, the expected outcome should have been the rapid assimilation of these successful individuals into Canadian society. In British Columbia, however, these families have formed the backbone of the anti-colonial resistance struggle and the movement for recognition of Aboriginal title. Money earned in fishing and logging has been churned back into communities and nativistic movements through continued feasting and potlatching\u2014despite legal prohibition\u2014and has funded the development of political organizations, the employment of lawyers, and the sending of delegations to Ottawa and London. During the 1890s the Nishga led a province-wide protest movement among Aboriginal peoples. They established their own newspaper and used it as a vehicle for organizing and educating Indians all over the province.\n\nA census was taken in British Columbia in 1880 that listed First Nations as a majority of the total population of 49,459. The census of 1891 counted 98,173 persons in the provincial population, of which only one third\u2014around 35,000\u2014were Indians. During the 1870s and 1880s a sudden and large influx of miners had poured into British Columbia; a colonial administration had been established and an array of laws governing lands, resources and policing were enacted. Intensive white settlement began, missionaries arrived, and smallpox decreased the Aboriginal population substantially. Aboriginal people took employment in the new industries and continued working on their lands, and mounted a wide range of resistance activities at local, provincial, national and international levels aimed at maintaining control over lands and resources.\n\nDuring the early years of the nineteenth century, British colonial policy had been strongly influenced by humanitarian sentiment in Britain that conceptualized the mission of Britain to be to \"take the evils of slavery, ignorance and paganism at source, to extend to the simpler people the benefits of steam, free trade and revealed religion, and to establish not a world empire in the Napoleonic sense but a moral empire of loftier interest.\" This is known in legal terminology as the \"trusteeship theory of colonialism,\" and in anthropological literature as colonization through \"tutelage.\" Benevolent white colonial parent; innocent brown Indigenous child.\n\nBy the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, racial attitudes in Britain began to harden and move away from the previous humanitarian approach. Armed rebellions like the Indian mutiny, wars in South Africa, Maori-European wars, and rebellion in the West Indies were once again fuelling the \"wild savage\" image, always the other side of the same coin on which the \"noble savage\" is stamped. Land-hungry settlers rationalized that the \"wild savages\" were incapable of using their lands productively, but could be disciplined as agricultural labourers on White-owned farms. Strict white colonial parent; incorrigible brown Indigenous child.\n\nDebates about this period engaged in by the parties in dispute during the _Delgamuukw_ trial consisted in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and their witnesses arguing that First Nations' resistance to colonial rule had been firm and consistent since contact, had employed a range of strategies, and had taken place in diverse forums according to circumstances. The Crown countered that, throughout the era in question, Aboriginal peoples had been abandoning life on the land, acquiescing to colonial rule, and rapidly and voluntarily assimilating into Euro-Canadian society. Evidence of protests was dismissed by the Crown as either the work of \"outside agitators\" like missionaries or as the unfounded complaints of a dissident minority of Indians. The Crown interpreted any First Nation compliance with colonial law and policy, or any participation in the Euro-Canadian controlled economy as proof of voluntary assimilation.\n\nThe early years of the twentieth century saw increasing agricultural settlement and the beginnings of serious land speculation in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territory in anticipation of railroad construction. The Boer War that ended in 1905 ushered in an era of large scale expropriation of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en lands to provide veterans with \"unoccupied farmlands.\" Crown witness David Williams described a number of incidents in this period where \"Indians took up arms against whites pre-empting land.\" But, Williams concluded, these episodes \"did not seem to have been provoked by aboriginal claims.\"\n\n**The Era Of Permanent Penetration**\n\n_Any person who without the consent of the Superintendent General expressed in writing receives, obtains, solicits, or requests from any Indian any payment or contribution, or promise of any payment or contribution, for the purpose of raising a fund or providing money for the prosecution of any claim which, the tribe or band of Indians to which such Indian belongs, or of which he is a member, has or is represented to have, for the recovery of any claim or money for the benefit of the said tribe or band, shall be guilty of an offence and liable upon summary conviction for each such offence to a penalty not exceeding two hundred dollars and not less than fifty dollars, or to imprisonment for any term not exceeding two months._\n\n\u2014 _Indian Act_ , Section 141, amended 1927.\n\nDr. Arthur Ray's opinion report on economic history concluded that, during the period 1860-1915, the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's traditions were not incompatible with \"progress\" or \"development.\" Ray discussed numerous attempts made by local Indians to farm, log and become involved in the commercial fishery. A few succeeded, but many were thwarted by lack of support from government, and hostility by settlers. Because Indians were then, and still are, legally wards of the Crown, their lands are \"held in trust for them by the Queen.\" They could not use their lands or resources as collateral to obtain loans, or to capitalize development of their lands, or become involved in commercial ventures. Although interested in pursuing new forms of economic activity, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en did not equate this with either assimilation or acquiescence, seeing wage labour and business as ways to enhance and supplement their already existing economy.\n\nRay documented the persistent, and largely successful, resistance to external domination of their economy practised by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en during this period. He argued that their efforts were impeded when \"federal and provincial governments passed conservation legislation which curtailed their economic flexibility and weakened their subsistence base. The economic activities of the Gitksan, Wet'suwet'en and Babine in the Upper Skeena River area had not created the problems that this legislation was intended to resolve. Rather, the laws were needed to protect resource-based industries, particularly the salmon canning industry that had been developed by Euro-Canadians outside of the region.\"\n\nBoth the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and the Crown called additional expert witnesses to testify before Chief Justice McEachern during the trial of _Delgamuukw v. R._ on settlement history and the impact this had on Aboriginal cultures. Dr. Robert Galois, an historical geographer, testified for the Gitksan and the Wet'suwet'en. Galois described the 1890s as the years of the Klondike Gold Rush and the building of the Dominion telegraph line over Gitksan territory. He noted that, while new opportunities and sources of wealth in some ways enhanced and elaborated pre-existing Aboriginal practices, they also produced adjustments in the internal division of labour and changes in the \"seasonal round\" of activities. And, with Europeans came, as always, disease and Christianity. Significant population decline brought about by diseases led to changes in settlement patterns, and some elements of Christian practices and beliefs modified the feasting system.\n\nDavid Ricardo Williams was called by the Crown to counter Galois' testimony. Referring to the early years of the twentieth century in British Columbia as the \"era of permanent penetration,\" Williams painted a picture of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples eagerly complying with the colonial government's assertion of jurisdiction over them, and with the arrival of Euro-Canadian-owned resource extraction companies. To support his arguments he relied on evidence that First Nations did not engage in large-scale armed rebellions and worked in white-owned resource extraction industries. They engaged in very little vandalism, and were generally considered good workers by their non Aboriginal employers.\n\nDamned if they do and damned if they don't: had Aboriginal peoples organized armed rebellions, committed acts of vandalism, refused to participate in the new economy, or failed to succeed as workers and producers, they would have been deemed backward, culturally underdeveloped, and unworthy of equal legal, political and property rights. Not having chosen these strategies, they are analyzed as having surrendered their lands and rights, are deemed assimilated, and unworthy of distinct legal, political and property rights. Heads the Crown wins. Tails, Indians lose.\n\nIn 1906, the Coast and Interior Salish peoples sent a delegation of chiefs to London where they were told that their grievances could only be dealt with by the Canadian federal government. In 1907, the Nishga Land Committee was organized within the framework of Aboriginal social structure: the sixteen members represented each of the four clans in the four Nishga villages. Wealthy and worldly wise aristocrats and successful fishermen, photographs of the Nishga Land Committee taken during this era show sixteen solemn men, well-dressed in tailored three-piece suits, silver and gold watch chains, and polished leather shoes.\n\nIt was at this time that a new partner joined the dance: lawyer and advocate Arthur O'Meara. O'Meara had practised law in Ontario for twenty years before moving to British Columbia, where he became an Anglican missionary. He served as sole legal advisor to the Indian Rights Association and the Nishga Land Committee, and formed the Society of Friends of the Indians of B.C. to raise money and sponsor public talks. O'Meara and the Nishga Land Committee prepared a lengthy petition to the Crown that included a declaration of traditional Nishga ownership, reiterated the terms and conditions set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and explained that these terms had not yet been met in British Columbia.\n\nThe following year, 1908, a delegation of Gitksan chiefs travelled to Ottawa to present a petition protesting the wrongful expropriation of their territory. In the summer of 1909, Interior Nations gathered and formed an organization named the Interior Tribes of British Columbia that then amalgamated with the Nishga and other First Nations on the north coast to form the Indian Rights Association. A delegation of chiefs met with Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier during his 1910 tour of British Columbia and articulated their case. Laurier assured them he would look into it; and, if he found the facts warranted it, would not hesitate to forward the Indian Rights Association's petition to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London for adjudication.\n\nDuring the first decade of this century, land speculation and settlement in various parts of British Columbia was proceeding at an accelerated rate. Meanwhile, the Indian Reserve Commission continued its work, now headed by A. W. Vowell. However, in 1911, the Province of British Columbia announced a new policy that terminated the \"granting\" of any further Indian reserves. The federal government responded that no further alienation of Crown lands to non-Indians in B.C. could occur until two outstanding issues between the federal and provincial governments had been dealt with: First, how Aboriginal title had been, or remained to be, extinguished in British Columbia would have to be clarified. Second, the provincial government must adopt the federal standard of allocating 80 acres of land per family to Indians, rather than the 10 acres per adult Indian male that the British Columbia government had been in the practice of allocating. An impasse between the federal and provincial governments had been reached. They resolved it by jointly establishing a Royal Commission on Indian Affairs in British Columbia, known as the McKenna-McBride Commission.\n\nThrough a process of negotiation that included the two levels of government, but excluded Aboriginal representation, the terms of reference for the commission were determined: the question of legal land title was not to be entertained. The Royal Commission's mandate was simply to adjust the size of reserve land. However, knowing that Aboriginal title was the single issue the First Nations wanted to discuss, official documents preceding and following the McKenna-McBride Commission state unequivocally that the land title question would be dealt with separately, and most likely by a court. Some Aboriginal nations boycotted the hearings because of the exclusion of land title from the terms of reference, while others participated in various ways, as their forebears had a generation before in response to the Indian Reserve Commission established by Joseph Trutch.\n\nWhite settlement was consolidated, and mining and agricultural development increased during the period from 1914-1921. While local level Aboriginal protest continued in the form of confrontation, and petitions and meetings concerning land and resource use were organized at regional levels, the Gitksan also participated in province-wide lobbying efforts, including making a presentation to the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission that completed its work in 1916. The schedule of reserves which was the product of its efforts was given to yet another body, the Ditchburn-Clark Commission, who cut off and further \"amended\" the reserves set aside by McKenna and McBride\u2014without Aboriginal consent. Orders-in-Council conveyed these reserves from the Province to the Federal Government. When the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission completed its work in 1916, Indian reserve land had been reduced by 47,058 acres valued at $1,522,704.00 and new reserves totalling 87,292 acres valued at $444,853.00 had been added. Many First Nations refused to accept the findings of the Royal Commission and turned their attention to preparing their case for the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.\n\nFrom 1910 to 1927, British Columbia Indians believed that their case was in the process of coming before the Privy Council in London. Their belief was based on Prime Minister Laurier's promise made in 1910 to look into their claims; on the terms of reference for the Royal Commission having excluded the land title issue claiming it could only be resolved in court; and on Commissioners McKenna's and McBride's recommendation that this case be heard. In fact, the federal government was not preparing any case for the Privy Council, nor did they advise the many Aboriginal representatives they met with during these years that they were not pursuing the promised hearing before the Judicial Committee, but were, in fact stalling such a claim from proceeding.\n\nSince 1763 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had recognized the \"pre-existence\" of Aboriginal rights and their continuity throughout the empire unless explicitly extinguished according to the letter of British colonial law. However, technically speaking, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council could normally only act on a Canadian matter if it came to them by way of an appeal of a Canadian court decision. Aboriginal people, being wards of the Crown, required permission from the Crown before they could file a writ in court. Therefore, as long as neither the First Nations, nor a government had initiated a court action and been allowed to appeal the decision, Canadian officials could legally refrain from forwarding the Indians' petitions to London: no court case, no judgment, no appeal.\n\nFinally, in 1914 the federal cabinet passed an order-in-council stipulating that the federal government would refer the claim of the British Columbia First Nations to the Exchequer Court of Canada \"with the right of appeal to the Privy Council\" providing three conditions were accepted by the First Nations: (1) if the court found in favour of the Aboriginal title, the Indians would surrender this title to be extinguished completely in return for the same sorts of treaty benefits negotiated elsewhere in Canada, and would accept the recommendations of the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission; (2) any obligations of the province would be fulfilled by its granting the land for the reserves; (3) the province would take part in the court case represented by legal counsel of its own choosing, while the Indians would be represented by counsel nominated and paid by the Dominion government. O'Meara was detested by government officials, and this provision was specifically meant to exclude him. The Allied Tribes of B.C. rejected all three conditions, and continued their lobbying efforts, stressing their preference for negotiations with governments rather than litigation.\n\nMeanwhile, in another corner of the British Empire, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council issued the infamous 1919 ruling in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ , classifying the Indigenous Africans as \"too low on the scale of social organization\" for their rights to be recognized under the British regime. Perhaps buoyed by this decision, Duncan Campbell Scott, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, ordered the recommendations of the McKenna-McBride Commission to be implemented without Aboriginal consent. However, in 1921 Lord Sumner's decision in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ was criticized and rejected by Viscount Haldane's ruling in _Amodu Tijani v. Southern Nigeria_ that argued that Indigenous land tenure systems should not be judged by British standards, but rather recognized on their own terms.\n\nThe Allied Tribes of British Columbia recognized the Haldane decision as favourable to their cause and sent a formal petition to the Canadian Parliament in 1925 asking that a committee be struck to initiate the process of bringing their claim to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. A Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons was appointed by the government of Canada in 1926 to enquire into the Petition of the Allied Tribes. Although invited, the provincial government of British Columbia declined to participate or to send observers. The committee included H. H. Stevens, Conservative MP for Vancouver Centre; Minister of Indian Affairs Charles Stewart; future prime minister of Canada, R. B. Bennett; and four Senators from British Columbia. The majority-Liberal committee began hearings in March 1927.\n\nThe question of documentation was contentious. O'Meara presented quotations from instructions sent by the Colonial office to Douglas that demonstrated that the British Crown recognized Aboriginal title in B.C. The Chairman of the Committee intervened, saying that O'Meara could not quote from documents not in evidence. Aboriginal representative Andrew Paull interrupted and explained that Duncan Campbell Scott had refused to give him access to the _Papers Connected with the Indian Land Question_ , the same documents Trutch had withheld from the Indian Reserve Commission, in which could be found all the evidence referred to. Stevens had with him in the room that day _The Papers_ , but refused to allow them to be entered into evidence. The collection was his private property, he argued, and he feared losing it. Scott said the Department of Indian Affairs had only one copy and also would not risk entering it into evidence for fear the court would misplace it. Finally, O'Meara was allowed to read sections of _The Papers_ into the record.\n\nThe Committee interpreted the testimony of two traditional Chiefs from the interior of B.C. who, being neither English speakers nor knowledgeable in the language of legal disputes, had not used the words \"aboriginal title\" in their presentation, as evidence that these Chiefs did not believe they held title. Simultaneously, the Committee reasoned that, because the articulate, English-speaking, Aboriginal representatives had not presented proof of the antiquity of their title through their own oral tradition, their claim was obviously of recent invention and unduly influenced by whites, as evidenced by the use of legal language like the term \"Aboriginal title.\" The Committee concluded that: \"Tradition forms so large a part of Indian mentality that if, in pre-Confederation days, the Indians considered they had an aboriginal title to the lands of the Province, there would have been tribal records of such being transmitted from father to son, either by word of mouth or in some other customary way. But nothing of the kind was shown to exist.\"\n\nThe Committee rejected all the claims of the Allied Tribes, and set out seven arguments in support of their position. First, without commenting on preexisting title, they argued that the assertion of British sovereignty was itself evidence that no prior title had been acknowledged or could continue. Second, the Committee claimed that the Hudson's Bay Company had achieved the \"conquest\" of B.C. Third, they pointed out that all Indians were not in agreement with the claim since all did not belong to the Allied Tribes organization. Fourth, the committee declared that the Aboriginal title claim was only fifteen years old, since that was when it was first articulated as a legal claim. The committee ignored, therefore, the ample documentation of resistance through civil disobedience, violent and non-violent confrontation, petitioning, letter-writing and Indian appearances before various committees of inquiry. Fifth, they found that Indians had implicitly consented to the denial of Aboriginal title by their acceptance of government reserve policies, which the committee said \"they accepted for years without demur.\" Sixth, the committee blamed \"mischievous white agitators\" for Aboriginal discontent. Seventh, they chastised the Indians for rejecting the findings of the Indian Reserve Commission and the McKenna-McBride Commission and for continuing to \"take up the time of the government and Parliament with irrelevant issues.\"\n\nThe Parliamentary Committee did not recommend that the Allied Tribes claim be forwarded to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Instead, they made two alternative proposals. First, that an annual allotment of $100,000.00 should be made to British Columbia Indians in lieu of treaty payments. Second, they recommended an amendment to the _Indian Act_ , Section 141, that would criminalize organizing for political or legal recognition of Aboriginal title in B.C. The official explanation, and the one accepted by both federal and provincial governments, was that this clause was necessary to protect \"simple,\" impressionable Indians from exploitation by cunning white lawyers like O'Meara. However, the language of Section 141 did not specify that it was applicable to non-Indians only, and, in effect, the amendment made it illegal for any organization to exist if pursuing recognition of British Columbia First Nations' Aboriginal title and rights was one of its objectives. Paternalistic rationales have served to exclude Section 141 of the _Indian Act_ , and Canada, from inclusion in the usual list of totalitarian colonial regimes who outlaw opposition, and to thus perpetuate the image of Canada as a liberal, democratic, humanitarian colonial power.\n\nAmong British Columbia First Nations the amendment is remembered bitterly, and mention is often made of it in discussions of First Nations' political history. In Indian memories, section 141 is usually linked with the potlatch prohibition, and the combination of the two produces the still common belief, which presumably existed from 1927 until 1951 as well, that any gathering of Indians or any discussion of land claims was illegal without the permission of a missionary, Indian agent, or police official. Until this section was amended in 1951, no such public, legal activity did take place. First Nations throughout British Columbia, however, continued to feast and potlatch clandestinely, and to talk about Aboriginal title and rights.\n\n**Resistance versus Assimilation**\n\n_Where there is resistance, there is power._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, 1990, _The Romance of Resistance_.\n\nThe decline of the British Columbia First Nations' population reached its lowest point of 22,000 in 1929. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s numbers grew slowly, and Aboriginal peoples continued to organize politically in various ways in an attempt to better their lot, achieve the right to vote, and survive such travesties as the advent of residential schools administered by various churches and the Department of Indian Affairs. The _Indian Act_ made failing to attend residential schools a criminal act, and provided for legalized punishment of Native parents who refused to comply with church and government officials who demanded they turn their children over to their care. The explicit goal of the residential school policy was to break the bonds between generations, thus \"freeing\" the young from the shackles of tradition and the influence of their families. For the most part, graduates of the residential schools did not assimilate into Canadian society as the policy predicted they would. Many had no desire to, and others who tried found the doors closed to them. At the same time, when they returned to their home villages they often found they had lost both the ability to communicate fluently with parents and grandparents and the practical, as well as social, skills necessary to live from the land and to fit into village life.\n\nThe post-World War II era is noted by many analysts as a turning point in Aboriginal\/non-Aboriginal relations. Following the defeat of Hitler and the revelations of Nazi atrocities, the western world entered a period of racial liberalism. Canada's image of itself, both nationally and internationally, as a free, democratic country where all citizens are equal regardless of race, religion or origin, was marred by the existence within its borders of a category of people whose legal, political and social identity had been racialized by the _Indian Act_ and the _Constitution Act_ (1867). The poverty and marginalization of Indians became a source of public embarrassment and efforts began to be made to improve living conditions on reserves and, once again, to assimilate Indians into mainstream Canadian society.\n\nIn 1947 British Columbia Indians were allowed to vote in provincial elections, and in 1949 Nishga Hereditary Chief Frank Calder, who would some twenty years later become \"the Plaintiff\" in _Calder v. R._ , was elected as Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF) Member of the Legislative Assembly for Atlin, British Columbia, becoming the first Indian elected to any post-Confederation Canadian legislature. The federal vote was not extended to registered Indians until 1961.\n\nIn 1949 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was replaced by the Supreme Court of Canada as Canada's highest court of appeal. Although Canadian judges were still free to use decisions of the Judicial Committee as precedents, \"conventional wisdom among judges, lawyers, academics and government officials held that aboriginal rights were both insignificant and irrelevant.\" Since Indians, publicly complied with the legislated banning of land claims activity imposed in 1927, the powers that be assumed that they, too, had forgotten about it. In a positivistic world, what a man cannot see does not exist.\n\nAmendments to the _Indian Act_ in 1951 dropped from the books\u2014but did not repeal or acknowledge as wrong\u2014both Section 140 prohibiting potlatching, and Section 141, prohibiting the pursuit of legal recognition of Aboriginal title and rights. Further changes to the _Act_ allowed Indians, for the first time since 1884, to consume alcohol in public places, but not in their own homes. This circumscribed, but did not undermine, the lucrative \"informal economy\" of bootlegging alcohol to Indians which constituted a launching padfor many a settler family's climb up British Columbia's social ladder. The alcohol amendments to the _Indian Act_ in 1951, like the ending of prohibition in Canada in the 1930s, moved some of the profits of the liquor trade from the unregulated, untaxed, illegal sphere into the regulated, taxable coffers of hotel and bar owners. In 1960, all restrictions on Indian purchase and consumption of alcohol were lifted, and provincial government-owned liquor stores opened adjacent to many reserves, further centralizing both profit, taxes and policing. The revised _Indian Act_ that emerged after 1951 also revoked the provision that stipulated that any registered Indian who received a university degree would automatically lose their legal Indian status, reflecting a disavowal of the evolutionist notion that education and Indianness were necessarily incompatible. And, the 1951 amendments allowed First Nations women to participate in band council elections for the first time.\n\nPotlatches, feasts and traditional dances were held again, in public, in numerous villages beginning in 1953. Paul Tennant marks the 1959 Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC) Convention as the first significant occasion since the 1927 banning of political activity on the land question where B.C. Aboriginal peoples had the opportunity to gather and openly discuss pursuing legal actions once again. He argues that the leaders who organized this convention had two goals in mind: a short term objective focused on consolidating the NBBC as a provincial organization to represent all status Indians in B.C. to a parliamentary committee; and a long term objective of pursuing the legal recognition of Aboriginal title.\n\nOn the political front, the provincial government of British Columbia continued to refuse to recognize the existence of any Aboriginal rights or title, while simultaneously denying health, education and social services to registered Indians, arguing that they were a federal responsibility for which the province received no financial support or taxes. They advocated the elimination of \"special status,\" and the legal, political, social and cultural assimilation of Aboriginal peoples\u2014and their lands and resources\u2014into Canadian society. In the mid 1960s, the federal government began a series of consultations with selected Aboriginal leaders. Despite the consistent stand taken by these representatives at these consultations\u2014that is, that the recognition of Aboriginal title and rights must be justly dealt with before any honourable negotiations could take place\u2014 Prime Minister Trudeau and Indian Affairs Minister Chretien produced the 1969 White Paper Policy that brushed aside the issue of land and resource ownership and provided a blueprint for assimilation.\n\nEvidence about the period between 1927 and 1984 was heard during the trial. Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and academic, expert witnesses, recounted a narrative of resistance and survival. They discussed the impact of various plans, like the residential school policy, on everyday life, family relations and individual psyches. They talked about the legacy of alcoholism, drug abuse and violence in their communities. They talked about economic marginalization resulting from increased restrictions on their access to their lands and resources, about their experiences of expropriation and dislocation as more and more of their land was turned over to settlers and corporations, and about the daily struggle to survive and to defend their rights to exist as distinct peoples. They argued that they had changed, but that they had neither vanished, assimilated, nor \"evolved\" into \"not truly aboriginal\" peoples.\n\nThe Crown presented a counter narrative of acquiescence and assimilation. Their strategy began with efforts to show that the witnesses were unreliable and lacking in knowledge. Geoff Plant, lawyer for the Province of British Columbia, and currently a Liberal Member of the Legislative Assembly in British Columbia, cross-examined an elderly woman about the number of residents in her home village, trying to challenge the accuracy of her testimony, and her credibility as a witness:\n\nPlant: Do you know how many members there are on the band list?\n\nGwaans: No.\n\nPlant: Do you know how many people live on the reserve?\n\nGwaans: No.\n\nPlant: Do you have an approximate idea of how many people live on the reserve?\n\nGwaans: No.\n\nPlant: Is it in the order of hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of people? Gwaans: No.\n\nPlant continued his interrogation, raising the issue of assimilation and relying on a version of what has come to be called the \"pizza test\" for evidence. The \"pizza test\" refers to what has become Crown Counsels' stock in trade argument in land rights trials that \"proof\" of assimilation\u2014and hence ineligibility for consideration of distinct rights\u2014can be achieved by showing that Aboriginal people often work for wages, are members of Christian congregations, use \"western\" technology, attend public schools and consume \"white food.\" Following this line of reasoning, it has become commonplace for Aboriginal witnesses to be questioned about how many times they have eaten Kentucky Fried Chicken, Big Macs and pizzas, for example. Geoff Plant pursued this line of questioning in his cross-examination of Gwaans:\n\nPlant: Is there electric lights on the reserve?\n\nGwaans: Are you going to pay the bill?\n\nPlant: Do you pay the bill, Mrs. Ryan?\n\nGwaans: Yes, I did....\n\n... Plant: So far as you know, do the members of the Band who live on the Reserve, do some of them own automobiles and trucks?\n\nGwaans: Well, I seen some cars there, but I didn't ask.\n\nPlant: You have seen some cars on the reserve?\n\nGwaans: Well, they will call me nosey if I ask them, the people there.\n\nPlant: You have seen people who live on the reserve drive cars?\n\nGwaans: Oh, yes.... Plant: And there is a school on the reserve?\n\nGwaans: Yes.\n\nPlant: Is there a church on the reserve?\n\nGwaans: Yes, two churches. Salvation Army and United Church.\n\nPlant: Which church do you go to?\n\nGwaans: Salvation Army.\n\nHaving shown, to their satisfaction, that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en have assimilated into mainstream Canadian society, the Crown called further witnesses to testify to the beneficial achievements of government assimilation policies. Former Department of Indian and Northern Affairs official Mr. McIntyre was called by the Crown as an expert witness. Chief Justice McEachern himself intervened in McIntyre's testimony. Although McIntyre was not a social scientist of any description, the Chief Justice asked him to evaluate the social consequences of the policies McIntyre himself designed and administered, and to analyze their value in the context of other variables:\n\nMcIntyre:...in my opinion I would say that the biggest\u2014that the biggest problem facing these people today is one of lack of economic opportunity, and I think if they had a\u2014if they had an improved economic circumstance that many of their\u2014of their social problems might be lessened.\n\nCourt: I have heard in this evidence\u2014in this case evidence about employment, which I gather would be included within your category of economic opportunity. I have heard about education, housing, alcohol and drugs, health, gambling. I dare say there are others. Could you rate them as degrees of seriousness, or is that a reasonable request to make?\n\nMcIntyre:...I observe what appears to be considerable improvement of that. For instance, I see a number of good quality homes that have sprung up. I see\u2014I see community halls and recreation facilities that have come into existence. I am aware that band councils are apparently taking on greater responsibility.\n\nOf course, widespread poverty and unemployment are serious impediments to health and happiness and community well-being. However, the Crown's argument is that assimilation into the existing economy on terms dictated by the dominant society, and not on the basis of recognition of Aboriginal title and self-government rights, is the most desirable route for First Nations to take.\n\nFinally, in June 1990, the proceedings in _Delgamuukw v. R._ drew to a close. Plaintiffs, defendants, lawyers, and witnesses made their closing arguments, filed the last of their exhibits, packed up their briefcases, and settled in to await Chief Justice McEachern's decision. What would the judge make of all he had heard, read, seen and felt over the preceding four years?\n\n* * *\n\n. Gisday Wa and Delgamuukw 1987: 11.\n\n. Williams 1987.\n\n. See Dyck 1991.\n\n. \"Nativist\" religious movements were those, like the Ghost Dance, that sought to maintain, revive or revitalize religious beliefs rooted in pre-contact Indigenous cosmologies. \"Syncretist\" religious movements were those that sought to incorporate elements of Christianity into Indigenous belief systems that resulted in various fusions and combinations of religious beliefs.\n\n. Tennant 1990: 53.\n\n. Tennant 1990: 55.\n\n. Cited in Berger, 1981: 58.\n\n. Provincial Premier Smithe Province of British Columbia, _Session Papers_ , 1887: 264; quoted in Tennant, 1990: 58.\n\n. _St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. v. R._ (1885) 10 OR or 196 (Ont.Ch.); (1886) 13 OAR 148 (ont.CA0); (1887) 13 SCR 577 (SCC); (1888) 14 AC 46 (PC).\n\n. Sanders 1986; Tennant 1990.\n\n. Sanders, Douglas 1992: 295.\n\n. Morris 1973:39, quoted in Asch 1984: 62.\n\n. Dyck 1991; Paine 1977.\n\n. Williams D. R. 1987: 48.\n\n. Ray 1987: 93-94.\n\n. Galois 1987: 22.\n\n. Williams D. R.1987: 7.\n\n. The historical account in the remainder of this chapter relies substantially on Tennant 1990.\n\n. Tennant 1990: 105-107.\n\n. Tennant 1990: 106-108.\n\n. Tennant 1990.\n\n. Canada (1927): viii, quoted in Tennant 1990: 110.\n\n. Ibid., 109-113.\n\n. Acheson 1995: 11.\n\n. Brody 1983; Haig-Brown 1988; LaViolette 1973; Tennant 1990.\n\n. Tennant 1990: 218.\n\n. Tennant 1990: 129.\n\n. Quoted in Monet and Wilson 1992: 45.\n\n. Williamson 1989.\n\n. See Richardson 1975 for an early example of this argument in the James Bay Cree and Hydro Quebec trials.\n\n. These responses reflect the meticulous concern with the accuracy and truth of spoken statements, with a speaker's responsibility to only say what they know, and not to overstep their authority, that is characteristic of Elders in cultures based in oral tradition. The response of a Cree hunter in 1974, while being sworn in as a witness to the court, has become famous as the quintessential statement of Aboriginal concepts of truth-telling. The hunter said he couldn't swear to \"tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,\" but could only promise to tell what he knew. (See Richardson 1975.) Many people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, do not own their cars outright but are buying them gradually through payments. Therefore, Gwaans truly does not know whether the cars are owned or not, and does not think she has the authority to inquire. Her responses also evidence a different approach to the issue of property. Ownership is an important question that must be appropriately investigated, precisely proven, and therefore cannot simply be assumed. Gwaans appears to be saying that, just because people _occupy_ and _use_ these cars, they don't necessarily own them. Possession does not appear to be nine-tenths of Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en property law.\n\n. Ibid., 46.\n\n. Quoted in _Reasons_ 1991: 185.\n**P ART V:**\n\n**D IES IRAE**\n\n**(J UDGMENT DAY)**\n**Chapter 16: Reasons for Judgment**\n\n**Nasty, British (Columbian), and Long**\n\nA beginning, as Edward Said said, \"is the first step in the intentional construction of meaning.\" The Chief Justice's 394-page, single-spaced _Reasons for Judgment_ began:\n\nThis has been a long trial.\n\nAfter numerous pre-trial proceedings, including taking the commission evidence of many elderly plaintiffs, interlocutory applications and appeals, the trail began in Smithers on May 11, 1987.\n\nAfter 318 days of evidence, mainly at Vancouver but partly at Smithers, the evidence was substantially completed on February 7, 1990.\n\nLegal argument began in Smithers on April 2, 1990 and continued there for 18 days. Argument continued in Vancouver for a further 38 days, and the trial ended there on June 30, 1990.\n\nA total of 61 witnesses gave evidence at trial, many using translators from their native Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en language; \"Word Spellers\" to assist the Official Reporters were required for many witnesses; a further 15 witnesses gave their evidence on Commission; 53 Territorial Affidavits were filed; 30 deponents were cross-examined out of Court; there are 23,503 pages of transcript evidence at trial; 5,898 pages of transcript of arguments; 3,039 pages of commission evidence and 2,553 pages of cross examination on affidavits (all evidence and oral arguments are conveniently preserved in hard copy and on diskettes); about 9,200 exhibits were filed at trial compiling, I estimate, well over 50,000 pages; the plaintiffs' draft outline of arguments comprises 3,250 pages, the province's 1,975 pages, and Canada's over 1,000 pages; there are 5,977 pages of transcript of argument in hard copy and on diskettes. All parties filed some excerpts from the exhibits they referred to in argument. The province alone submitted 28 huge binders of such documents. At least 15 binders of Reply Argument were left with me during that stage of the trial.\n\nThe Plaintiffs filed 23 large binders of authorities. The province supplemented this with 8 additional volumes, and Canada added 1 volume along with several other recent authorities which had not then been reported.... Needless to say, this judgment has been a difficult one to prepare....\n\nThe plaintiffs, the aboriginal people who now live in parts of the territory I shall describe, sincerely believe that they own and have a legal right to govern this vast territory by reason of long use and possession. They harbour a great sense of injustice and resentment that they have waited so long for their aboriginal interests in the territory to be decided while non-natives have acquired title to much of this land, and while its resources have been exploited by others. The plaintiffs believe, passionately, that their claims are just.\n\nIt is common, when one thinks of Indian land claims, to think of Indians living off the land in pristine wilderness. Such would not be an accurate representation of the present life-style of the great majority of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people who, while possibly maintaining minimal contact with individual territories, have largely moved into the villages. Many of the few who still trap are usually able to drive to their traplines, and return home each night.\n\nSimilarly, it would not be accurate to assume that even pre-contact existence in the territory was in the least bit idyllic...there is no doubt, to quote Hobbs, that aboriginal life in the territory was, at best, 'nasty, brutish and short.'\n\nThe Chief Justice misspelled the eighteenth-century British philosopher's name, Hobbes. McEachern is referring to Hobbes' speculation that there was a time in human history when people lived \"in a state of nature,\" that he described as a \"war of all against all\" in which life was \"nasty, brutish and short.\" As was the fashion of his times, Hobbes hypothesized that contemporaneous Indigenous peoples of the Americas lived at this \"stage of development.\" Given that, at the time he was writing, little information or knowledge about Indigenous peoples was available, even the most conservative contemporary \"Hobbesian\" political philosophers do not interpret Hobbes' description of Indigenous life literally. Rather, it is understood as a metaphor for what a society ruled by brute force and unmitigated individual ambition, rather than law and reason, might be like.\n\n**The Vast Emptiness**\n\nThe Chief Justice then proceeded to identify and describe what had been in dispute at the trial, and what was at stake in his judgment. He wrote:\n\nThis action is mainly about land, 22,000 square miles of it (58,000 square kilometres), which I shall call 'the territory'.... The total territory is a vast, almost empty area except in the Highway 16-C.N.R. corridor where most of the plaintiffs' villages are located.... In addition to about 5,000 to 7,000\n\nGitksan and Wet'suwet'en persons...there are upwards of 30,000 others (mostly of European extraction), who are living within the territory....\n\nThe territory is a rich agricultural area...and there are vast forestry resources throughout much of the territory. Equally important are the salmon and other fisheries of the Bulkley, Nass, Skeena and Babine Rivers. Most of the invaluable and irreplaceable Skeena salmon stock pass through the territory by way of the Skeena and Babine Rivers to their destiny in the spawning grounds of Babine Lake.\n\nAlthough some game animals may not be as plentiful in the transportation corridor as they were at the time of European contact, or before the railway was built, I am not persuaded there is either a shortage or an excessive abundance of wildlife in the territory.... I do not suggest that clear cut logging has been an ecological advantage to the territory. That is for other disciplines to ponder and to weigh against economics. Aesthetically, Dr. Hatler's description of 'moonscape' is appropriate. I was encouraged to notice on my travels through the territory that areas logged as recently as 3 to 6 years ago are starting to show signs of regeneration....\n\nThere are some mining resources in the territory, including the Equity Silver Mine which is reported to have limited remaining ore reserves, but mining is not currently significant when compared with agriculture and forestry which are the economic mainstays of the region. There are, unquestionably, immense forestry reserves throughout the territory which are of great economic value.\n\nThe trees, fish, game and minerals constituted only inanimate things defined by their potential economic value. The Chief Justice relived in his _Reasons for Judgment_ the visionary moment that generations of his judicial ancestors had experienced before him: Chief Justice McEachern looked and saw before him in British Columbia, _terra nullius_ :\n\nThe most striking thing that one notices in the territory away from the Skeena-Bulkley corridor is its emptiness. I generally accept the evidence of...[Crown] witnesses such as Dr. Steciw and Mrs. Peden and others that very few Indians are to be seen anywhere except in the large river corridors. As I have mentioned, the territory is, indeed, a vast emptiness....\n\n**Might Makes Right**\n\nHaving beheld _terra nullius_ , the Chief Justice continued his textual reenactment of law's narrative:\n\nI have heard much at this trial about beliefs, feelings, and justice. I must again say, as I endeavoured to say during the trial, that Courts of law are frequently unable to respond to these subjective considerations. When plaintiffs bring legal proceedings, as these plaintiffs have, they must understand (as I believe they do), that our Courts are Courts of law which labour under disciplines which do not always permit judges to do what they might subjectively think (or feel) might be the right or just thing to do in a particular case. Nor can judges impose politically sensitive non-legal solutions on the parties. That is what Legislatures do, and judges should leave such matters to them.\n\nInstead, cases must be decided on admissible evidence, according to law. The plaintiffs carry the burden of proving by a balance of probabilities not what they believe, although that is sometimes a relevant consideration, but rather facts which permit the application of the legal principles which they assert. The Court is not free to do whatever it wishes. Judges, like everyone else, must follow the law as they understand it....\n\nI am sure that the plaintiffs understand that although the aboriginal laws which they recognize could be relevant on some issues, I must decide this case only according to what they call 'the white man's law.'\n\nI now propose to discuss the law relating to the question of extinguishment of aboriginal interests.... I must start with the proposition that the plaintiff's aboriginal rights in the territory at the time of sovereignty existed at the 'pleasure of the crown.'\n\nAs the mortal embodiment of the hovering sovereign, Allan McEachern affirmed Britain's declaration of sovereignty and simultaneously extinguished Aboriginal title. His decision on how extinguishment was legally effected was, ultimately, the single, significant finding in his entire judgment in _Delgamuukw v. R._ McEachern ruled that the simple assertion of British sovereignty was sufficient to extinguish any Aboriginal title or rights that may have existed. It was simply common sense, the judge argued, to acknowledge the impossibility of coexistence between the \"civilized\" British, and the \"primitive\" First Nations. Chief Justice McEachern cited U.S. Chief Justice Marshall's early nineteenth-century precedent in support of his ruling:\n\nThe underlying purpose of exploration, discovery and occupation of the new world, and of sovereignty, was the spread of European civilization through settlement. For that reason the law never recognized that the settlement of new lands depended upon the consent of the Indians. So early as the year 1496, her monarch granted a commission to the Cabots, to discover countries then unknown to Christian people, and to take possession of them in the name of the King of England. Two years afterwards, Cabot proceeded on this voyage, and discovered the continent of North America, along which he sailed as far south as Virginia. To this discovery the English trace their title.\n\nMcEachern concluded that it was obvious from the _outcome_ of the last 200 years of history that the Crown had never ceased believing in its right to extinguish Aboriginal title and rights, and this itself was further evidence of the rightness of the initial assertion of sovereignty. Simply put, \"in the beginning,\" Britain exercised its absolute prerogative to assert sovereignty. Subsequently, British, Canadian and American colonial courts consistently upheld this initial assertion, and colonial governments faithfully enacted legislation that took for granted the legitimacy of Crown sovereignty, and simply ignored any and all challenges brought forward by First Nations since contact. Each court's repetition of these principles, according to the law, resulted in a strengthening of their validity. In other words, in a court of law, the more often a lie is told, and more times a liar escapes reprimand, the closer the law comes to finding legal truth.\n\nThe Chief Justice explained his ruling:\n\nI think it unnecessary to continue this debate. In my view, it is part of the law of nations, which has become part of the common law, that discovery and occupation of the lands of this continent by European nations, or occupation and settlement, gave rise to a right of sovereignty. Such sovereignty in North America was established in part by Royal grant as with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670; by conquest, as in Quebec in 1759; by treaty with other sovereign nations, as with the United States settling the international border; by occupation, as in many parts of Canada, particularly the prairies and British Columbia; and partly by the exercise of sovereignty by the British Crown in British Columbia though the creation of Crown Colonies on Vancouver Island and the mainland.\n\nIn support of this assertion, the Chief Justice quoted at length from the work of the nineteenth-century Swiss theorist, Vattel:\n\n'There is another celebrated question to which the discovery of the new world has principally given rise. It is asked whether a nation may lawfully take possession of some part of a vast country in which there are none but erratic nations, whose scanty population is incapable of occupying the whole? We have already observed, in establishing the obligation to cultivate the earth, that these nations cannot exclusively appropriate to themselves more land than they have occasion for, or more than they are able to settle and cultivate. Their unsettled habitation in those immense regions, cannot be accounted a true and legal possession, and the people of Europe, too closely pent up at home, finding land of which the Savage stood in no particular need, and of which they made no actual and constant use, were lawfully entitled to take possession of it and to settle in with Colonies. The earth, as we have already observed belongs to mankind in general, and was designed to furnish them with subsistence. If each nation had from the beginning resolved to appropriate to itself a vast country, that the people might live only by hunting, fishing and wild fruits, our globe would not be sufficient to maintain a tenth part of its present inhabitants. We do not, therefore, deviate from the views of nature, in confining the Indians within narrower limits.\n\nFurthermore, the Chief Justice decreed, it was not legally necessary to find historical or legal evidence of the British Crown having expressly announced its \"clear and plain intention\" to extinguish Aboriginal title, as the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling in the _Sparrow_ case had required. Rather, Chief Justice Allan McEachern offered his own unique interpretation of this precedent:\n\n...the governing factor in extinguishment persuades me that intention in this context must relate not to a specific, isolated intention...[or to] a specific or precise state of mind on the part of the historical actors, but rather to the consequences they intended for their actions.... I therefore conclude that express statutory language is not a requirement for extinguishment.\n\nIn other words, the question is not did the Crown through its officers specifically intend to extinguish aboriginal rights...but rather did they plainly and clearly demonstrate an intention to create a legal regime from which it is necessary to infer that aboriginal interests were in fact extinguished.... Intention, in this context, must be a matter of implica-tion...[ from] an amalgam of thought, belief, planning and intention on the part of a number of officials who may all have had different knowledge, understanding and priorities. There was indeed an intention to manage Crown lands...[during the colonial period] throughout the colony by a system that was inconsistent with continuing aboriginal rights.\n\nTo support his finding, the Chief Justice referred to the copious evidence presented by the Crown that demonstrated that the Province of British Columbia had, in fact, treated Aboriginal title and people as if they didn't exist, at least since 1871:\n\n[The defendants in this case]...the province of British Columbia... introduced a large collection of documents which...record pervasive colonial and provincial Crown presence in the territory up to the date of the writ (1984)....\n\nAll this documentation demonstrates colonial and provincial dominion over the territory before and since Confederation by such diverse governmental and administrative activities as surveying, grants of land, leases and other tenures, land registry, schools and hospitals, rights of way for highways, power and pipe lines, grants in fee simple, forestry, mining, and guide outfitting permits, various public works, the creation and governance of villages and municipalities, water and other placer rights and licences, trapline registration for all or almost all of the territory, fish and game regulation and conservation and a host of other legislatively authorized intrusions in the life and geography of the territory....\n\nFor its part, Canada also adduced extensive evidence of the federal presence in the territory....\n\nAnd, McEachern reiterated the cornerstone of the Crown's argument, and of his reasoning: the possibility of mutually-respectful co-existence between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal property regimes is an absurdity not worthy of serious consideration:\n\nThe province argues that it cannot rationally be asserted that, standing alongside this all-embracing structure, there are many parallel aboriginal governments and separate systems of ownership or rights to use a substantial portion of the province by what is now such a small segment of the population.\n\nHaving asserted the British Crown's unfettered right to assert sovereignty, the Chief Justice went on to legitimate the arbitrariness of this exercise of power even more, by arguing that the date at which sovereignty may have been first declared was also irrelevant:\n\nBecause of the view I have of this case, I do not think it is necessary to make a specific finding about a date of British sovereignty over the northern part of the province.... For practical purposes, especially in the territory it could well have been as early as the 1820's but legally it may not have been until the creation of the colony in 1858. 1846 was the date chosen by Judson J. in _Calder_. In my view the actual date of British sovereignty, whether it be the earliest date of 1803 or the latest date of 1858, or somewhere in between makes no difference...the Crown wished the island settled by British settlers...the establishment of the Colony of British Columbia, for example, should be classified as a displacement of one sovereignty by a different one which the law recognizes....\n\n...I do not believe there is any material difference, for the purposes of this case, between the date of contact and the date of sovereignty....\n\nFor my purposes it is sufficient to start with European expansion into this continent after the voyages of various navigators such as Columbus (1492), and Cabot, who according to Chief Justice Marshall discovered North America in 1498....\n\nI am satisfied that at the date of British sovereignty the plaintiffs ancestors were living in their villages on the great rivers in a form of communal society, occupying or using fishing sites and adjacent lands as their ancestors had done for the purpose of hunting and gathering whatever they required for sustenance. They governed themselves in their villages and immediately surrounding areas to the extent necessary for communal living.\n\nThe judge went to some lengths to explain in no uncertain terms what he meant when he said that _whatever_ may or may not have taken place historically was irrelevant to his judgment:\n\nAboriginal persons and commentators often mention the fact that the Indians of this province were never conquered by force of arms, nor have they entered into treaties with the Crown. Unfair as it may seem to Indians or others on philosophical grounds, these are not relevant considerations. The events of the last 200 years are far more significant than any military conquest or treaties would have been. The reality of Crown ownership of the soil of all the lands of the province is not open to question and actual dominion for such a long period is far more pervasive than the outcome of a battle or a war would ever be. The law recognizes Crown ownership of the territory in a federal state now known as Canada pursuant to its Constitution and laws.\n\nI fully understand the plaintiffs' wishful belief that their distinctive history entitles them to demand some form of constitutional independence from British Columbia. But neither this nor any Court has the jurisdiction to undo the establishment of the Colony, Confederation, or the constitutional arrangements which are now in place. Separate sovereignty or legislative authority, as a matter of law, is beyond the authority of any Court to award. I also understand the reasons why some aboriginal persons have spoken in strident and exaggerated terms about aboriginal ownership and sovereignty, and why they have asserted exemption from the laws of Canada and the province. They often refer to the fact that they were never conquered by military force. With respect, that is not a relevant consideration at this late date if it ever was. Similarly, the absence of treaties does not change the fact that Canadian and British Columbian sovereignty is a legal reality recognized both by the law of nations and by this Court.... In the language of the street, and in the contemplation of the law, the plaintiffs are subject to the same law and the same Constitution as everyone else. This is not to say that some form of self-government for aboriginal persons cannot be arranged. That, however, is possible only with the agreement of both levels of government under appropriate, lawful legislation. It cannot be achieved by litigation.... It follows, therefore, that the plaintiffs' claims for aboriginal jurisdiction or sovereignty over, and ownership of, the territory must be dismissed.\n\nIn my judgment, the foregoing propositions are absolute. The real question is whether, within that constitutional framework, the plaintiffs have any aboriginal interests which the law recognizes as a burden upon the title of the Crown.\n\nHaving confirmed that the absolute authority of the law is not bound by either place or time, the Chief Justice nevertheless took a moment to wander down a historical path:\n\nIn my view...what happened in the territory...[is] that the aboriginal system, to the extent it constituted aboriginal jurisdiction or sovereignty, or ownership apart from occupation for residence and use, gave way to a new colonial form of government which the law recognizes to the exclusion of all other systems....\n\nAfter that, aboriginal customs, to the extent they could be described as laws before the creation of the colony became customs which depended upon the willingness of the community to live and abide by them, but they ceased to have any force, as laws, within the colony.\n\nTo put it in a nutshell, I find that legislation passed in the colony and by the Imperial Parliament that all the land in the colony belonged to the Crown in fee, apart altogether from many other enactments, extinguished any possible right of ownership on the part of the Indians.\n\nTo enter the Courthouses and Houses of Parliament built on their land without their consent, to negotiate the ownership and use of that same land and its resources, Aboriginal peoples must, according to the law and government policy, agree to ultimately surrender their title and rights. They must agree to \"extinguishment.\" The alternative of co-existence, rather than domination by one and subordination of the other, is a possibility that cannot be argued within the Crown's interpretation of legal precedents, or negotiated within the federal government's extinguishment policy. In the legal forum, the process of surrender begins _before_ Aboriginal litigants are permitted to launch a legal challenge, with the demand that they acknowledge that the \"underlying title to all the land\" in Canada is held by the hovering sovereign. Of course, if they go to court to establish the legitimacy of their claim that the hovering sovereign's title is invalid in the terms of British and Canadian law, this demand creates yet another double-bind. If they don't go to court, then their claim will never be acknowledged, and provincial governments may not be compelled to recognize or negotiate with them. If they do go to court, they have to surrender this basis of their claim first. Chief Justice McEachern explained this dilemma succinctly:\n\nIn their pleadings and argument the plaintiffs admit that the underlying or radical or allodial title to the territory is in the Crown in Right of British Columbia. This reasonable admission was one which the plaintiffs could not avoid. It sets the legal basis for any discussion of title.... After much consideration, I am driven to find that jurisdiction and sovereignty are such absolute concepts that there is no half-way house.... The very fact that the plaintiffs recognize the underlying title of the Crown precludes them from denying the sovereignty that created such title.\n\nHeads, the Crown wins. Tails, Indians lose.\n\nA second significant legal ruling made by Chief Justice McEachern was his finding that the provincial government, as well as the federal government, have a fiduciary obligation to Aboriginal people. This has resulted in provincial governments having to institute consultation processes with First Nations before development takes place on what are designated their traditional lands.\n\nDespite his protestations to the contrary, the Chief Justice's legal findings ultimately rely on historical and cultural interpretations. Were British and Indigenous peoples considered equal human beings, then or now, what possible rationale could there be for Britain simply having the right to assert sovereignty over another people without their consent, and for subsequent colonial governments to continue to do so?\n\nIn what follows I have reconstructed the _Reasons for Judgment_ 's historical narrative by selecting excerpts from the text and organizing them according to a historical, chronological framework, in order to try to understand Chief Justice McEachern's \"world view,\" as this is expressed through his narrative of the history and culture of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en First Nations, British Columbia, and Aboriginal\/non-Aboriginal relations in this province. I have concentrated on those historical and cultural interpretations upon which the legal findings of \"fact\" in McEachern's judgment rely most strongly to illustrate the culturally-specific underpinnings of the judge's reasoning, and the erroneous basis upon which his findings of \"legal facts\" depend. In so doing I have tried to be mindful of the context from which I have selected excerpts, and I have endeavoured not to intentionally misrepresent what the judge wrote. I have indicated by way of footnotes where the excerpts I have reproduced may be found in the original text of the _Reasons for Judgment_. I hope this will facilitate re-reading and re-interpretation by interested readers.\n\nThe text of Allan McEachern's _Reasons for Judgment_ in _Delgamuukw v. R._ , is divided into 22 sections that include commentary on a range of legal, historical and cultural issues. The Chief Justice visited and revisited particular epochs and events in different sections of the _Reasons for Judgment_ , in order to address various specific questions. An array of theories and diverse forms of argument are engaged by the judge. Frequently, the empirical evidence the Chief Justice draws on in his ruling is weak or absent, and the logics of interpretation he employs appear contradictory and inconsistent. The text makes sense only if the reader accepts its fundamental premises: First, that Aboriginal peoples are radically different from, _and inferior to_ , Euro-Canadians, and that therefore a humanistic logic of equality does not apply in this case. This is most clearly evident in the \"damned if you do and damned if you don't\" nature of the law on Aboriginal issues, illustrated in many examples where it is clear that _whatever_ Aboriginal people may do or say, the law has an interpretation waiting that judges can use, if it they so choose, to render that statement or practice evidence of justification to deny Aboriginal title and rights legal recognition. It goes without saying that judges also have the option of reconstructing a precedent narrative that _supports_ recognition of Aboriginal title and rights. Second, in order to make sense of Chief Justice McEachern's text, a reader must assume that the British Crown was justified, historically, in asserting its sovereignty over First Nations without their consent; and that prolonged occupation on these grounds provides justification for continued political, economic and cultural domination. The legal argument that expresses this desire claims that non-Aboriginal settlers may now claim to hold common law title on the basis of long term use and occupancy. Third, readers must temporarily suspend their belief in common sense empiricism and everyday logic, and go along with law's imagining that the reality it creates in its own image is the truth.\n\nMy reading and reconstruction of the Chief Justice's text is unashamedly a critical interpretation. I am presenting an argument that begins from certain specific premises: I assume all human beings are fundamentally equal and that this principle should be reflected in law. I think that _Reasons for Judgment_ that rely on historical and anthropological research should reflect contemporary research standards and knowledge in these fields. There are, and no doubt always will be, significant debates among academics on these topics. There are also, however, generally accepted standards by which courts _could_ evaluate the relative reliability of expert evidence offered by academics and other researchers. I believe also that the \"facts\" a judge \"finds\" should be demonstrable as such to the average citizen. I think judges' arguments should be internally coherent, not illogical, on their own terms. I believe it is unjust and immoral that the Crown asserts its sovereignty and jurisdiction over First Nations peoples, their lands and resources _without their consent and in the face of their objections._ I take exception to the state of which I am a citizen, Canada, being based on the principle of the inequality of peoples. I believe that Canadian law has historically defended and reproduced a way of life based on a foundation of European male supremacy, economic inequality, and social injustice, and continues to.\n\n**No Writing, Horses or Wheeled Wagons**\n\nHaving first reproduced law's narrative of discovery, sovereignty and extinguishment, the Chief Justice turned his attention to history. He began at the beginning:\n\nThe evidence does not disclose the beginnings of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people. Many of them believe God gave this land to them atthe beginning of time. While I have every respect for their beliefs, there is no evidence to support such a theory and much good reason to doubt it.... Most scientists believe the ancestors of our aboriginal people migrated to this continent from Asia, probably after, but possibly before, the last great Ice Age.... It is my conclusion, doing the best I can without the assistance of very much evidence, that the plaintiffs' ancestors...migrated from Asia, probably through Alaska, but not necessarily across the Bering Straits, after the last Ice Age, and spread south and west into the areas which they found livable...it is unlikely, or at least not proven, that any or all of the plaintiff groups have occupied the territory for all of the time since these post-glacial migrations.... For the purpose of this judgment it really does not matter where the plaintiffs' earlier ancestors came from....\n\nAlthough McEachern's ruling that Britain had the right to assert sovereignty anywhere, and anytime, and in any circumstances rendered the remainder of his judgement legally redundant, he proceeded to evaluate and interpret all the evidence and arguments he had heard in the course of four years of hearings. In so doing, he was providing an interpretation of this material for future appeal court judges, whose general practice is to privilege the \"eye witness\" account of the first judge in a case like this one. McEachern explained his role:\n\nI have no doubt that what I am about to say will not be the last word on this case and that this judgment will be appealed to the Court of Appeal and perhaps to the Supreme Court of Canada. With this in mind I shall endeavour, for the assistance of the parties and the appeal process, to describe as best I can the facts and reasons upon which I have reached the conclusions I am about to state.\n\nAnd, although his ruling on the Crown's powers of extinguishment made consideration of any legal precedents unnecessary as well, Chief Justice McEachern acknowledged his judicial predecessors appropriately:\n\nAlthough not binding upon me but deserving deference, is the opinion of the Privy Council in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_.... The right of the Imperial Crown to proceed with the settlement and development of North America without aboriginal concurrence was confirmed by the Privy Council in the _St. Catherine's Milling_ case. This was expressed in practical terms by stating that 'Indian title' existed at the pleasure of the Crown.\n\nI think...there is much wisdom in the dictum of the Privy Council in _Re Southern Rhodesia_ :...[to wit] 'The estimation of the rights of aboriginal tribes is always inherently difficult. Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilized society.'...I am quite unable to say there was much in the way of precontact social organization among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en simply because there is so little reliable evidence.\n\nThe evidence suggests that the Indians of the territory were, by historical standards, a primitive people without any form of writing, horses, or wheeled wagons. Peter Skene Ogden, the controversial trader-explorer, visited Hotset in 1836 and noted their primitive condition in his journal.\n\nIn 1919 Lord Sumner, in his ruling in _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ , had decreed that only those Indigenous property laws that were based on concepts of private ownership were sufficiently \"evolved\" to be recognized by British imperial law. In 1921 Viscount Haldane, in _Amodu Tijani v. The Secretary, Southern Nigeria_ had argued that many Indigenous land tenure systems were communally-based, as opposed to the British model of individual ownership in fee simple, and that such communal property regimes were worthy of respect by colonial law. McEachern concluded that Aboriginal title must, by definition, be communal, and he admonished the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs for claiming a form of individual ownership:\n\nI do not understand the plaintiffs to allege or claim any 'people-wide' collective or communal ownership interest in any of the Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en territories, that is to say each chief claims ownership of specific territory or territories, and none of them claim any interest in any other territory.... I have already described the form of this action where some of the hereditary chiefs are advancing these claims for aboriginal interests on behalf of themselves or on behalf of their Houses or members. The authorities satisfy me that a claim for an aboriginal interest is a communal claim. Counsel for the Nishga in _Calder_ (at p. 352) described it as a 'tribal interest' and Hall J. (at pp 401-402) said it was a 'communal right.' In _Sparrow_ there are references to a collective rather than an individual, or sub-group interest.... The Crown's 'promise' of fair dealing must be classified as a communal or collective promise rather than separate or divided promises to a variety of individuals or sub-groups...the law cannot recognize discrete claims by small or sub groups within an aboriginal community.... The plaintiffs' case as pleaded, if established, could result in some Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en persons being treated substantially differently from other members of the larger aboriginal collective...any judgement to which they are entitled must be for the benefit of these peoples generally, and not piecemeal for the Hereditary Chiefs, their Houses, or their members.\n\nIt is evidence of \"our\" advanced civilization that \"we\" have the right to kick our family off our property, so \"they\" must be communal. Otherwise, \"they\" are insufficiently different. Of course, if \"they\" are communal, \"they\" are less evolved than \"we\" are.\n\nChief Justice McEachern reached back to the nineteenth-century theories of Sir Henry Maine when he dismissed Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en law as mere \"primitive custom\" that resulted from the need to minimally regulate \"instincts\"; as opposed to \"civilized law\" that presumably emerges from the institutional consensus of rational thinkers:\n\nIt became obvious during the course of the trial that what the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en witnesses describe as law is really a most uncertain and highly flexible set of customs which are frequently not followed by the Indians themselves.... In my judgment, these rules are so flexible and uncertain that they cannot be classified as laws. I have no difficulty finding that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people developed tribal customs and practices relating to chiefs, clans and marriage and things like that, but I am not persuaded their ancestors practised universal or even uniform customs relating to land outside the villages. They may well have developed a priority system for their principal fishing sites at village locations. I expect it is probably so...[that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en] exercised their spiritual beliefs within the territory, but the evidence does not establish that their beliefs were necessarily common to all the people or that they were universal practices. I suspect customs were probably more widely followed.\n\nThe plaintiffs have indeed maintained institutions but I am not persuaded all their present institutions were recognized by their ancestors.... I do not accept the ancestors 'on the ground' behaved as they did because of 'institutions.' Rather I find they more likely acted as they did because of survival instincts which varied from village to village. I do not question the importance of the feast system in the social organization of present-day Gitksan and I have no doubt it evolved from earlier practices but I have considerable doubt about how important a role it had in the management and allocation of lands, particularly after the start of the fur trade. I think not much....\n\nHaving ruled out the possibility that such \"primitive\" peoples may have entered into treaties with their neighbours regarding rights to travel across and harvest resources from certain territories, the judge declared that there must not have been any borders worthy of the name:\n\nThere seemed to be so many intrusions into the territory by other peoples that I cannot conclude the plaintiffs' ancestors actually maintained their boundaries or even their villages against invaders, although they usually resumed occupation of specific locations for obvious economic reasons....\n\nIn a turn of logic particularly curious for a judge who, after all, spends his time adjudicating breaches in the law, the Chief Justice interpreted testimony that some Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en appeared at times to break their own laws as evidence that these were not laws in the first place:\n\nWhile these are my findings, I am prepared to assume for the purpose of this part of my judgement that, in the legal and jurisdictional vacuum which existed prior to British sovereignty, the organization of these people was the only form of ownership and jurisdiction which existed in the areas of the villages. I would not make the same finding with respect to the rest of the territory.... In no sense could it be said that Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en law or title followed (or governed) these people except possibly in a social sense to the far reaches of the territory. Aboriginal life, in my view, was far from stable and it stretches credulity to believe that remote ancestors considered themselves bound to specific lands....\n\nThe Judge concluded his findings on the question by referring to the stronger, in his estimation, case presented by the Crown:\n\nThe defendants, on the other hand, point to the absence of any written history, wheeled vehicles, or beasts of burden, and suggest the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en civilizations, if they qualify for that description, fall within a much lower, even primitive order. I have no doubt life in the territory was extremely difficult, and many of the badges of civilization, as we of European culture understand that term, were indeed absent.... It is my conclusion that Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en laws and customs are not sufficiently certain to permit a finding that they or their ancestors governed the territory according to aboriginal laws even though some Indians may well have chosen to follow local customs when it was convenient to do so.\n\nAnd, the defendants, of course, relied upon _their_ predecessors' accounts, which were validated by the Judge:\n\nIn July 1889 the Dominion...appointed an Agent to reside at Hazelton on what was called the Upper Skeena. The first incumbent was R. E. Loring who was then in the service of the province in the area. He seems to have been nominated for this position either by the Indians or by Mrs. Hankin, the widow of the first merchant at Hazelton whom Mr. Loring later married. She, being either an Indian woman or at least fluent in their language, acted as his translator. His many reports present a useful account of the Indians of the territory during his service there which continued until about 1920. In many cases, his reports present a far more realistic picture of what was happening on the ground than the careful language of government reports and diplomatic exchanges. Loring's 1889 reports describe a society in transit from what he regarded as 'heathen,' such as eating dogs and potlatching, and many disputes.\n\nAccounts based on the plaintiffs' ancestors' knowledge were not given the same credibility by Chief Justice McEachern:\n\nThe plaintiffs adduced a great deal of evidence directed towards establishing actual control of the territory.... The plaintiffs ask me to infer that the practices they describe were a continuation of long standing, pre-existing aboriginal ownership of and jurisdiction over territory. In fact, however, the plaintiffs seemed to have considerable difficulty with this claim for aboriginal sovereignty. Mr. Neil J. Sterritt is a Gitksan hereditary chief and a former President of the Gitksan-Wet'suwet'en Tribal Council. He is perhaps the most knowledgeable of the Gitksan chiefs on their claim in this action as he was, until 1988, involved directly with the preparation of the case for several years. In a brief submitted to the Penner Commission in 1983, Mr. Sterritt submitted: \"Now, I want to talk to you about the Indian government of the past.... I want to tell you that the feast hall was our seat of government. It filled a legislative and judiciary function. It taught us how and why to govern.... The feast filled many functions. One of the functions was settling disputes. It was a place to do something about succession, passing on what was being done, passing on property, passing on title....\" Brown's reports in the 1820s and Mr. Loring's reports, starting in about 1890, hardly mention the feast, particularly as a legislative body.... I am not persuaded that the feast has ever operated as a legislative institution in the regulation of land.\n\nI conclude...that there was indeed a rudimentary form of social organization in the Babine area, and it is reasonable to infer that similar levels of organization then existed in the territory. There is no reason to believe the neighbouring Indians of the territory had any lesser degree of social organization at the same time. I therefore infer that the ancestors of a reasonable number of the plaintiffs were present in parts of the territory for a long, long time prior to sovereignty.\n\n**Finders Keepers**\n\nThe Chief Justice was convinced by the Crown's argument that the Royal Proclamation was never intended to recognize Aboriginal title or rights, and that, since British Columbia was not visible on British maps drawn in 1763, it did not exist in the eyes of the Crown. Hence the Proclamation, Allan McEachern agreed, does not apply to this province:\n\nBy 1700 there was little, if any European influence in western North America. Even horses were unknown to the plains Indians until mid-century, or in the territory until the middle of the 1800's.... Most maps show north-west America, including the territory, as \"Terra Incognita\" or \"These parts Entirely Unknown.\" This state of relative ignorance about this part of the world remained that way for almost another century.\n\nThe British were anxious to keep peace on the frontier, and for this and other mercantile reasons, Britain caused a Royal Proclamation to be issued in 1763.... One of the most interesting parts of the evidence and argument in this case concerned this famous Proclamation which was issued by George III, on the advice of his Ministers, on October 7, 1763.... It is therefore with much hesitation, and with the greatest possible respect both to the witnesses and to counsel who expended so much skill and energy on this question, that I find myself able to dispose of it quite summarily....\n\nI have no doubt that, apart from setting up governments for the new colonies, the underlying purposes of the Proclamation were firstly to pacify the frontier for defensive or military purposes, and secondly to secure the markets of the North American colonies for the manufactured products of the mother country.... The tenor of the Proclamation in its historical setting clearly relates to the practical problems facing the Crown in its then American colonies.... Even the language of the Royal Proclamation, 1763, makes it plain that the Crown did not consider it necessary to obtain the consent of the Indians to exclude their interests. Although the Crown set aside vast areas for hunting grounds at the Crown's 'pleasure'....\n\nThe Crown had no connection with the Indian people west of the Rockies who owed the Crown, no actual or even notional allegiance, and were in no way under its protection.... There is nothing which persuades me that this Proclamation, either by is language or by the intention of the Crown, applies to the benefit of the plaintiffs or to the lands of present day British Columbia.\n\n* * *\n\n. Said 1975: 1.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 1.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 3.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 5.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 11.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 11.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 12.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 12.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 12.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 2.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 235.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 80.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 81.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 80.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 239; see also 241.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 233.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 233-234.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 241.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 212.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 19.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 81.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 225.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 81.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 223.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 224.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 242.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 19.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 224.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 15.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 16.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 3.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 234.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 227.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 25.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 15.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 210.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 219.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 213.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 213.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 214.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 213.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 222-223.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 31.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 221.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 168.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 214.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 74.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 75.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 21.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 23.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 83.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 95.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 234.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 97.\n**Chapter 17: Reasons in the Public Eye**\n\n_Pardon him, Theodutus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and little island are the laws of nature._\n\n\u2014George Bernard Shaw, _Caesar and Cleopatra._\n\n**Judgment Day**\n\nThe banner headline on the front page of March 9th, 1991's Vancouver Sun announced: \"INDIANS LOSE CASE.\" Pictures of the portly Chief Justice Allan McEachern ran in the daily papers over captions that said \"Gut feelings ruled out,\" and \"Emphasis on law and not gut feelings.\" Brief biographical notes included in the stories described the Chief Justice as a 64-year old, non-drinking, non-smoking, Coca-Cola addict and past president of the Canadian Football League. Born and raised on the middle class west side of Vancouver, the Judge and his family were now property-owning, tax-paying residents of Vancouver's elite Shaughnessy neighbourhood. The judge was described as \"a jurist who has never allowed emotional considerations to shake his belief in the rule of law,\" and who \"made it clear from the outset he would decide the case not on personal gut feelings, but according to the law.\"\n\nGitksan and Wet'suwet'en Tribal Council President Mas Gak (Don Ryan) called for McEachern's removal from the bench, and vowed that \"never again will the sacred boxes of our people be opened for the white man to look at.\" \"The government has made fun of us,\" Gitksan chief, Maxlaxlex (Johnny David) said. Ernie Crey of the United Native Nations likened the text of the Chief Justice's _Reasons for Judgment_ to a Stephen King horror novel. Larry Pootlas of Bella Coola said that when he heard the news he thought he was in South Africa. The Shuswap Nation Tribal Council called the judgment \"brutal and hostile.\" \"It's a travesty of justice,\" said Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs spokesman, Saul Terry. Ovide Mercredi, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations of Canada, described McEachern's decision as \"so demeaning it is breath-taking.\" \"The Judgment stands on racism. It defines Indians as no better than the animals in the forest,\" protested Squamish chief Joe Mathias. \"The corporate board rooms are probably saying, 'Thank God we had our brother on the bench,'\" he added.\n\nIndeed, John Howard of Macmillan Bloedel, speaking for B.C.'s forest industry, said he was surprised by the ruling, but pleased. The Chief Justice's assessment that native issues constituted a \"social problem that should be dealt with by the legislature,\" rather than a legal one to be determined by the courts, \"has been our view at Macmillan Bloedel for a long time,\" he commented. A spokesman for the mining industry expressed relief that the status quo prevailed, and added that he hoped the decision would encourage Aboriginal peoples in the Yukon and Northwest Territories to bring their claims to \"a final solution.\" Mike Hunter, representing the Fisheries Council of B.C. described the Chief Justice's ruling as \"a common sense approach to settling.\" He agreed that the legislature was clearly a better place to deal with Native issues than the courtroom. Industry spokesmen also noted that they feared the court's decision might provoke another wave of Native militancy, which in turn would frighten away potential investors.\n\nRuss Fraser, Attorney-General in the Social Credit provincial government, said he hoped that British Columbians could now \"put this whole era behind us.\" Federal Minister of Indian Affairs, Tom Siddon, stated that the decision gave the federal government an \"important insight into the existence and meaning of aboriginal rights in Canada.\" New Democratic Party leader Mike Harcourt admonished all parties to \"get out of court\" where there must always be \"winners and losers,\" and to come to the negotiating table where there could be \"winners and winners.\" NDP Member of the Legislative Assembly for northwestern B.C. Jim Fulton called the decision \"a declaration of cultural genocide by the B.C. Supreme Court. It's a legal neutron bomb.\"\n\nThe British Columbia Government Employees' Union, the largest labour organization in the province, commented that: \"In insulting and racist language, native people have been told they have no right to bring their disputes to court.... The provincial Crown is relentlessly seeking to grant large companies the unrestrained right to land without concern for aboriginal interests.\"\n\nAnglican Bishop Ronald Shepherd, Reverend William Howie of the United Church of Canada, and Roman Catholic Bishop J. Remi DeRoo issued a joint statement calling on their congregations to demonstrate solidarity with Aboriginal peoples. The Canadian Council of Churches issued a press release saying, \"the judgment appears to reflect a colonial view of society towards aboriginal peoples which is not acceptable.\" Commenting on the Chief Justice's dismissal of the validity of Native oral histories, and his uncritical acceptance of the literal truth of the written reports of nineteenth-century European fur traders, Sun columnist Stephen Hume reminded McEachern that the teachings of Jesus Christ had been communicated and transmitted by means of an oral, and not written, tradition for several centuries. \"Eminent persons can be capable of the most loathsome claptrap if it serves their material interests,\" Hume observed.\n\nThe _Vancouver Sun_ editorial of March 13, 1991, concluded that Chief Justice Allan McEachern had produced \"a remarkable and crystal clear analysis of thelaw as he understands it,\" in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case. They went on to quote the following passage from the _Reasons for Judgment_ : \"When plaintiffs bring legal proceedings, as these plaintiffs have, they must understand (as I believe they do), that our Courts are Courts of law which labour under disciplines which do not always permit judges to do what they might subjectively think (or feel) might be the right or the just thing to do in a particular case. Nor can judges impose politically sensitive non-legal solutions on the parties. That is what Legislatures do, and judges should leave such matters to them.\" \"Hear! Hear!\" the editorial cheered, adding that this was an appropriate response to \"the likes of Don Ryan\" of the Office of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs. A debate ensued in the _Sun_ 's \"Letters to the Editor\" pages about whether or not it was appropriate, or even lawful, to call judges, or legal judgments, \"racist.\"\n\n\"Call it whatever you want\u2014ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, racism\u2014you guys go ahead, go out in the hall and argue about what word you are going to use,\" Nuu-Chah-Nulth Chief, George Watts, thundered as he admonished an audience of lawyers and academics who gathered at the University of Victoria to review the _Delgamuukw_ judgment, \"We know what it is when we live with it.\"\n\nAnother controversy about land in British Columbia competed with the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case for public attention in the Spring of 1991. Then provincial Premier Bill Vander Zalm, a tulip gardener who had emigrated from Holland after World War II, had amassed a considerable fortune by buying and selling real estate. The jewel in his family's crown was a large property on the outskirts of Vancouver that the Vander Zalms had developed into a theme park complete with windmills, tulip gardens, a miniature railroad, restaurants and gift shops. The premier and his family built a red brick replica of Captain George Vancouver's family home in Holland in the middle of the park. Vancouver was the explorer who is credited with having \"discovered\" the coast of British Columbia in the late eighteenth century. The Vander Zalms called their acreage \"Fantasy Gardens\" and made their home there until 1991 when they sold it all to a millionaire from Hong Kong, named Tan Yu. While Premier Vander Zalm insisted that his wife Lillian was the sole owner of Fantasy Gardens, legal documents concerning the transaction, and bearing the premier's signature, were leaked to the press. Further investigations revealed that the premier had met with Tan Yu's real estate agent, Fay Leung, late one night at a Vancouver hotel, where he had handed her a brown paper bag containing $20,000.00 in cash. The premier protested that there was nothing unusual about this meeting which he described as \"a normal business practice.\" He complained that his own government's investigation of the events made him feel as though he was living in Nazi Germany. Throughout the spring and summer of 1991, the \"Fantasy Gardens Affair,\" and the outcome of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en land claims case were hotly debated throughout British Columbia. Leung has since been convicted of real estate fraud, and Premier Vander Zalm resigned in 1992 when it was decided that he had, indeed, been in a conflict of interest position in relation to the sale of Fantasy Gardens.\n\n**Music is Lost on Me. I Have a Tin Ear**\n\n_When I come to consider events long past, I am driven to conclude, on all the evidence, that much of the plaintiffs' historical evidence is not literally true.... I must assess the totality of the evidence in accordance with legal, not cultural principles...._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\nAs a text, the _Reasons for Judgment_ in _Delgamuukw v. R._ is structured predominantly by the questions set out in the legal tests for Aboriginal title developed by Justices Mahoney and Steele in the Baker Lake and Bear Island cases, respectively. The first, and the most fundamental of these questions was: did the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en live in an \"organized society\" when Europeans first made contact with them? The authoritative sources of knowledge about this period of time presented to the judge were Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral histories\u2014 _adaawk_ and _kungax_ , supplemented by anthropological and historical research.\n\nChief Justice McEachern gave no weight to the oral tradition testimony except, minimally, where it could be supported by data from research conducted within the paradigm of western science: \"I am not able to accept adaawk, kungax and oral traditions as reliable bases for detailed history.... Oral tradition may well provide useful information 'to fill in the gaps' left at the end of a purely scientific investigation,\" he wrote.\n\nIt is important to understand what the Judge believed he was seeking, in a specifically legal sense, in the oral tradition evidence. He explains this most succinctly when he writes: \"In a nutshell, they...[the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en] sought first to establish both the present social organization of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en; secondly, that it exists today in the same or nearly the same form as at the time of contact; thirdly, that at that time, and since, the plaintiffs have used and occupied all of these separate and remote territories for aboriginal purposes; and fourthly, because of the way the plaintiffs have framed their case, they undertook also to prove the boundaries of these 133 separate territories and the distinct use made of them by the plaintiffs and their ancestors.\"\n\nHe went on to detail his reasons for rejecting _adaawk_ and _kungax_ as direct evidence of facts \"except in a few cases where they could constitute confirmatory proof of early presence in the territory.\" \"My reasons,\" the Chief Justice wrote, \"are principally threefold.... First, I am far from satisfied that there is any consistent practice among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Houses about these matters. The early witnesses suggested that the adaawk are well formulated and the contents constantly sifted and verified. I am not persuaded that this is so...Secondly, the adaawk are seriously lacking in detail about the specific lands to which they are said to relate.\"\n\nHis third reason was that the attempt by the plaintiffs to authenticate their _adaawk_ by reference to work on oral tradition among other peoples failed because this information did not \"relate to the territory but they demonstrate the weakness of this kind of evidence.\" While acknowledging that the \"objective validity\" of oral traditions varies from culture to culture, and that Dr. Philip Drucker, among others, \"believes oral histories on the north coast are usually correct,\" McEachern cites at length from Dr. Bruce Trigger's work that is based in Huron and other eastern Aboriginal peoples' oral history, in reference to which Trigger cautions that: \"...oral traditions may supply valuable information about the not too distant past. Used uncritically, however, they can be a source of much confusion and misunderstanding in prehistoric studies.\" In further support of his conclusions about oral history, McEachern cites two additional academics, Dr. Arthur Ray and Dr. Charles Bishop, who discuss problems of verification in \"memory ethnography,\" a term that usually refers to the anecdotal recollections of ordinary individuals, rather than to oral traditions transmitted by specialists in institutionalized forum and in public ceremonies. McEachern quoted Ray and Bishop as saying that \"memory ethnography\" provides relatively accurate information \"only to a depth of one hundred years.\"\n\nFinally, the Chief Justice notes, and attaches an appendix provided by the Province of British Columbia for verification, that references to the historical\u2014that is, post European contact\u2014period are found in the _adaawk_ and _kungax_. Specifically, McEachern points out one mention of moose (who, a provincial wildlife biologist estimated entered the territory after Europeans did); a story about a Chief Legaik who the Chief Justice assumes must be the same Legaik as the person who appears in \"historical\" written records; one allusion to guns and gun powder; and a remark about the Hudson's Bay Company. These references, in his opinion, render the oral histories changed in their representation of pre-contact, or \"pre-historic\" Aboriginal life. Chief Justice McEachern apparently could not, or would not, understand the explanation, offered repeatedly by Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en witnesses and other experts, that oral histories are dynamic and evolving accounts that pick up and include new elements as they arise in the lived experiences of the subjects of the accounts. In other words, the judge wanted to imagine \"true\" history as taking place in hermetically sealed time capsules that follow one after another in a linear progression. The oral histories, according to this way of thinking, should have been stored, like scrolls, in such capsules, and then regurgitated verbatim each time they were told. Twentieth-century listeners should, it follows, derive exactly the same interpretation from these accounts as did their eighteenth-century audiences. Accounts that reveal interconnections between speakers and listeners, and blurred boundaries between abstractly predetermined time periods are declared \"untrue.\"\n\nHaving established, to his satisfaction, an intellectual and legal basis for rejecting oral tradition as valid evidence, the Chief Justice hastened to assure his readers that his conclusions were reached in the fullest spirit of cultural relativism. He wrote that he made this ruling reluctantly,\n\n...without intending any affront to the beliefs of these peoples.... I am satisfied that the lay witnesses honestly believed everything they said was true and accurate. It was obvious to me, however, that very often they were recounting matters of faith which have become fact to them. If I do not accept their evidence it will seldom be because I think they are untruthful, but rather because I have a different view of what is fact and what is belief.... Much evidence must be discarded or discounted not because the witnesses are not decent, truthful persons but because their evidence fails to meet certain standards prescribed by law.... This in no way reflects upon adaawk and kungax for the spiritual use or value they have to Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people. I do not purport to pass on that question in any way. All I say is that I do not find them helpful as evidence of the use of specific territories at particular times in the past.\n\nIn addition to the Elders, several Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en testified as expert witnesses in a range of areas. In his _Reasons for Judgment_ the Chief Justice gave mixed appraisals of their evidence. He interpreted Neil Sterritt's, and others, painstakingly detailed accounts of property transfers as evidence of inconsistency in the rules governing these transactions. While he commented that he \"had a favourable impression of the competence and industry of Ms. Harris,\" and that \"the only general discount I would apply to her work relates to the reliability of her informants...,\" he did not find the genealogies she collected could \"establish House membership as an active force in the lives of the persons listed.\" The Chief Justice was less complimentary towards Susan Marsden, who testified about evidence provided by the _adaawk_ and _kungax_ as to origins and migrations. McEachern wrote: \"I am unable to accept Ms. Marsden's theory. I have no doubt it is put forward honestly and in good faith, but her qualifications are not adequate for such a study (Marsden holds a B.A. in Anthropology\u2014ed.)\"\n\n\"In a case such as this,\" the Chief Justice wrote in his _Reasons for Judgment_ :\n\nwhere the plaintiffs and their ancestors are the only sources of these histories, the Court may not be the best forum for resolving such difficult and controversial academic questions.... One cannot, however, disregard the 'indianness' of these people whose culture seems to pervade everything in which they are involved. I have no doubt they are truly distinctive people with many unique qualities. For example...they have an unwritten history which they believe is literally true both in its origins and in its details.\n\nA simple substitution of categorical labels reveals the ethnocentric bias of Allan McEachern's commentary, and its reflection in popular culture: Ask yourself why it would likely be read as humourous if an Aboriginal person surmised that \"One cannot disregard the 'whiteness' of these people whose culture seems to pervade everything in which they are involved. Euro-Canadians are truly distinctive people with many unique qualities. For example, they have a written history which they believe is literally true both in its origins and in its details?\"\n\n**Delgamuukw and the People Without Culture**\n\n_In the nations under discussion, full citizenship and cultural visibility appear to be inversely related. When one increases, the other decreases._ _Full citizens lack culture, and those most culturally endowed lack full citizenship. In Mexico, Indians have culture and 'ladinos'...do not. In the Philippines, 'cultural minorities' have culture, and lowlanders do not._\n\n_Ladinos and lowlanders, on the other hand, are full citizens of the nation-state. They work for wages, pay taxes, and sell their wares in the local market. People in metropolitan centers classify them as civilized, in contrast with Indians and cultural minorities who are cultural, not 'rational'...._\n\n_...People with culture have been confined to marginal lands...._ _In the Philippine case, the 'people without culture' occupy both ends of the social hierarchy. Roughly speaking, Negrito hunter-gatherer groups are on the bottom and lowlanders are on top. The difference between the two ends of the spectrum is that the Negritos are 'precultural' and the lowlanders are 'postcultural.'_\n\n_...In this pseudoevolutionary ladder, people begin without culture and grow increasingly cultured until they reach that point where they become postcultural and therefore transparent to 'us.'_\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, 1989, _Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis_.\n\nThe _Reasons for Judgment_ are characterized by inconsistency: the use of terms, concepts and logic are often internally incoherent and self-contradictory. Allan McEachern's use of the term \"culture\" is a case in point. In this instance he says: \"Indian culture also pervades the evidence at this trial for nearly every word of testimony, given by expert and lay witnesses, has both a factual and a cultural perspective.\" The Chief Justice's use of the term \"culture\" as synonymous with subjectivity, emotion and irrationality reflects one of many contemporary meanings attached to the concept, in which \"culture\" is considered an attribute of subordinated categories of persons.\n\nThe judge's use of the term \"culture,\" like that described by Rosaldo, simply replaces the word \"race\" but retains the same meaning as in archaic scientific racism. This substitution of words is at the heart of what Henri Giroux calls the \"nouveau racisme\" of the late twentieth century. In other places in his magnum opus, McEachern uses the term \"culture\" in relation to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en to convey the \"ancienne racisme\" premise that \"indigenous behaviour patterns are based on instinct.\" In this scheme, cultural traits are understood as genetically inherited, rather than learned through socialization.\n\nChief Justice McEachern concluded his remarks on oral tradition in his _Reasons for Judgment_ by stating:\n\nI believe the plaintiffs have a romantic view of their history which leads them to believe their remote ancestors were always in specific parts of the territory, in perfect harmony with natural forces, actually doing what the plaintiffs remember their immediate ancestors were doing in the early years of this century. They believe the lands their grandparents used have been used by their ancestors from the beginning of time.... I do not accept the proposition that these people have been present on this land from the beginning of time.... In fact, I am not able to find that ancestors of the plaintiffs were using all of the territory for the length of time required for the creation of aboriginal rights, and I shall give my reasons in due course.\n\nThe judge could not understand the _adaawk_ and _kungax_ as subject to different but equally logical rules of validation _without first acknowledging the equality, and hence denying the superiority, of his own culture_ , and, by extension, of \"his people.\" His consistent failure to do so, and the concomitant impossibility of separating a critique of eurocentrism from an appreciation of other cultures becomes apparent. Simply put, the linchpin of McEachern's \"world view\" is that it is superior to all others, and particularly to Aboriginal world views. Mutual respect cannot emerge from such a foundation, as it denies\u2014 _a priori_ \u2014the possibility of considering other ways of life as different but equally valuable. When Chief Justice McEachern accepted the Crown's argument that Hugh Brody's testimony about \"how white people see Indians\" had \"nothing to do with the matters before the bench,\" he rejected the first necessary condition for Aboriginal\/non-Aboriginal dialogue. This can be seen, throughout the text of the _Reasons for Judgment_ , in the way he repeats, in a variety of contexts, law's trap: difference constitutes evidence of failure to cease being Indian and thus to be ineligible for recognition as equal, rights-bearing legal subjects; similarity constitutes evidence of success in ceasing to be Indian and therefore ineligibility for recognition as distinct, rights-bearing legal subjects.\n\n**Insult and Injury**\n\n_There's a serious contradiction going on in this country, and it has got a lot to do with who wields power. You haven't got us fooled about that. But we're not going to bite into this game...What you do is you react with violence or react with hate. We're not going to beat you with violence and we're not going to beat you with hate. We're going to beat you with our behaviour that we were taught by our grandparents.... We're going to beat you with logic because our logic is right, and I'll say that until my dying day._\n\n\u2014George Watts, Chairman, Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, 1992, _The Law and Justice: A Contradiction?_\n\nWhatever his intentions were, the Chief Justice's comments on oral tradition, the Chiefs and Elders, and their testimony, were heard by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en\u2014and by many other people both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal\u2014as insults to the honesty of individual witnesses and to their collective integrity. \"We did have certain expectations,\" Neil Sterritt wrote later. \"The expectation was partly created by Judge McEachern himself. He sat in his chair and the witnesses were in their witness box, elders with whom he formed a relationship. They thought he was forming a friendly relationship...but you realize when you read his judgment that he saw our people as 'cute.'\"\n\n\"We talk about party line...,\" Sterritt continued. \"If you're an elder, if you've been raised in the oral tradition to speak what you know, to speak the truth, there is no such thing as a party line.... There was no way we could go into court and say 'Don't say this.' Or 'Say this in this way,' or anything like that. Not a chance. The elders\u2014and maybe it is part of how we bared our soul in the courtroom\u2014went in and they said how they felt, what they knew about the land, what they wanted in the future, and where they came from in the past. It was that truth, ultimately that will be important....\"\n\n\"Our court case started with the elders,\" Sterritt wrote. \"And one trait is universal amongst the elders\u2014those who were born and raised on the land and know the land. That trait is optimism. At the bleakest of times, at the saddest of times, there's always a sense of humour and a sense of optimism about what's going on, and I think as younger people, as those who are picking up the torch and trying to carry on and win this struggle, we too have to be optimistic. Ultimately, we must be optimistic.\"\n\nOther Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en commentators agreed. Gitksan Chief Satsan (Herb George) expressed his frustration at the Court's arbitrary power: \"The people who referee and umpire the game don't agree,\" Satsan explained. \"And they don't agree because it's their right not to agree.... They set out the rules. We try to meet the rules, and they can just disagree with us.... They set out a test. 'You must be an organized society,' they say. So we look at what is an organized society in your terms. We find that out, and we say, 'Yes, we meet all of those different criteria as a society.'...If you meet the test and you beat the test, then they change the test.... It's their game. We understand the game we're in. Make no mistake about that.\"\n\nYagalahl (Dora Wilson) wrote: \"The court case closed at 4:57 p.m. June 30th, 1990, my 370th day. This is a note I put down for myself in my notebook. 'My 370th day and there has been no document produced and no proof given that the Province or the federal government own this land....' It was a black day, March 8th, for the non-Aboriginal people in Canada, and it was sad because so many people know that we are telling the truth. We are right.... It is our land, and regardless of how many decisions come down, we will always say that because it is the truth. It will always be the truth.\"\n\nDene Member of Parliament for the Western Arctic, Ethel Blondin-Andrews, was blunt in her response to Chief Justice McEachern's ruling. She said: \"How much do you have to weigh, as an individual, when you deal with things like politics and law? How much of your principles and values do you want to prostitute or dilute? Well, I'll tell you something, I am willing to look at different definitions, but I am not willing to change one thing. I am not willing to forfeit the right that my people think they have to the land, the right that my people think they have to be who they are, the languages they speak, or their traditional forms of government.... Racism, even if you rationalize it, intellectualize it, tie it up in technological or technical terms, is still racism. Its impact cuts into the heart of a people. I'm calling it racist.\"\n\n**Is There Intelligent Life in the Galaxy?**\n\n_Imagine the situation of the inhabitants of Earth, visited and then taken over by space voyagers from Alpha Centauri, and required to defend their ownership of the planet entirely with reference, not to written documents, but to chants. The governments of the several countries of Europe would be left with whatever lands could be defended through citation of medieval sung liturgy. Farfetched? Certainly, but no more farfetched than what has actually happened to the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en\"_\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Andrea Laforet, 1993.\n\nA number of critiques have been written by anthropologists about the Chief Justice's dismissal of oral tradition. For the most part, criticism has been directed at the judge's ethnocentrism, and his failure to respect the culturally different world view of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples, their particular conception of history and their oral tradition. Lawyers for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en pointed to the \"Catch 22\" nature of Chief Justice McEachern's ruling on oral histories, arguing that: \"The judge's rejection of oral histories effectively made the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en 'peoples without history' before the first European records in the 1820s. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral histories are unusual in that there are great numbers of them, and they are very detailed. They have been accepted as reliable and used by anthropologists and archaeologists. If these oral histories are entitled, as the trial judge found, to little or no weight, it is doubtful if any Aboriginal people in Canada could rely on their oral history to establish the existence and character of their pre-contact societies...the judgement effectively makes the proof of Aboriginal rights impossible.\"\n\nThe Chief Justice's words create an impression that he evaluated oral tradition by comparing it to written tradition and applying certain established rules of interpretation and analysis. Similarly, critics and supporters alike have, for the most part, responded to his rulings on oral tradition by commenting on whether or not the Chief Justice carried out this task competently. But, if we replace general and abstract language about concepts like \"oral tradition\" and \"written tradition\" with particular and concrete words that refer to living beings and experience, then it becomes clear that Allan McEachern did not believe what the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Elders said about their ways of life before the arrival of Europeans in the eighteenth century, but he did believe what _some_ Europeans wrote about the same subject. His judgment of the validity of oral tradition reflects his judgment of the people whose tradition it is, not the application of abstract epistemological principles, or reason, or legitimate processes for validating different forms of knowledge.\n\nPerhaps Allan McEachern's most revealing reflection on Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en oral tradition is his first, found on page 17 of his _Reasons for Judgment_. Here he laments that, with regard to those histories that \"unfortunately, exist only in the memory of the plaintiffs.... I must leave it to the social scientists who are just beginning their journeys of discovery into the vast and largely uncharted _terra incognita_ of the unwritten histories. I wish I could know what they will discover.\"\n\nLike the \"vast and empty land,\" the _terra nullius_ \"discovered\" centuries ago, the voices of peoples deemed by law not to exist await European discovery, analysis and exploitation. The work of many social scientists who long ago began their \"journey\" into the study of oral tradition, and of those who testified in support of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en in this case, is also rendered invisible by the stroke of a pen inscribing a legal text.\n\n* * *\n\n. Stills 1991: A12.\n\n. Glavin 1991: A1.\n\n. Glavin 1991: B8.\n\n. Stills 1991: B12.\n\n. BCGEU 1991: 1.\n\n. Glavin 1991: A2 & A11.\n\n. Watts 1992: 194.\n\n. _Reasons,_ 1991: 48,75.\n\n. Ibid., 278.\n\n. Ibid., 47\u201348.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 49.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 67.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 68.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 68.\n\n. Kahn 1989.\n\n. Giroux 1993.\n\n. Asch 1992.\n\n. Sterritt 1992:306\n\n. Ibid., 305.\n\n. Ibid., 303.\n\n. Satsan 1992: 55.\n\n. Yagalahl 1992: 204\u2013205.\n\n. Blondin 1992: 253, 255.\n\n. Laforet 1993.\n\n. _Delgamuukw v. R._ , Plaintiffs' Appeal Factum, 1991: 1.\n**P** **ART** I **V:**\n\n**T** **ABULA** **R** **ASA**\n\n**(B** **LANK** **P** **AGE** **)**\n**Chapter 18: Judging the Experts**\n\n_I must briefly discuss the evidence of Drs. Daly and Mills and Mr. Brody because of the importance attached to it by the plaintiffs...apart from urging almost total acceptance of all Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en cultural values, the anthropologists add little to the important questions that must be decided in this case.... I am able to make the required important findings about the history of these people, sufficient for this case, without this evidence._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\n**Experts v. Advocates**\n\nThe relationship between lawyers and anthropologists in Aboriginal title litigation is rife with problems. Law demands that stories be reduced to their simplest form so that a judgment can be made: true or false, guilty or innocent. Anthropology demands that stories be told in all their complexity, embedded in historical and cultural context. Generally speaking, when lawyers and anthropologists work together, it is the lawyers who have the upper hand: the law sets out the parameters of what arguments can be made, the rules of the court determine how evidence can be presented, and the goal of winning a particular case dominates.\n\nOver the past twenty-five years in Canada, Aboriginal title litigation has provided considerable employment for many anthropologists and consultants at the same time as universities have \"downsized\" and the number of academic positions has dwindled. In this environment, anthropological knowledge has become increasingly commodified as \"hungry\" graduates of Ph.D. programs seek to sell bits and pieces of information and to solicit contracts in an ever more competitive market. When research is conducted and knowledge is produced through a piecework labour process that mimics the tabloid newspaper model, integrity is sacrificed to sales, and the customer often gets what s\/he pays for. In contrast to the independence that can be demanded by some scholars with alternative employment in academic institutions and income from grants and publications like, for example, Arthur Ray, Richard Daly and Antonia Mills; or who, like writer and filmmaker Hugh Brody, enjoy independent financial success; contract researchers employed as expert witnesses must, to varying degrees, respond to the demands of their employersrather than to the demands of peer review or professional ethics. Imperfect as that academic process is, its procedures are less fickle than those of a buyer's market. When that marketplace is an adversarial courtroom governed by an \"only winning counts\" ethic, the predicament that expert witnesses find themselves in is even more exaggerated.\n\nGiven the adversarial nature of legal procedures, it would be naive in the extreme to suggest that anthropologists employed as expert witnesses do not tend to present interpretations that offer support for their employers' legal arguments. But this makes it even more crucial, by law's own professed standards of value neutrality, that the weight accorded to experts' testimonies be determined by applying the same reasonable assessment criteria equally to witnesses for both plaintiffs and defendants. An obvious place to begin would seem logically to be with a comparison of respective expert witnesses' education, experience and reputation within their professions.\n\nThe anthropologists who testified on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en hold degrees from some of the most prestigious universities in the Western world: Brody from Oxford; Daly from Manchester and Toronto; Mills from Harvard. Each of their careers spans approximately twenty years. Each has taught university courses. Each has published their research in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Each, therefore, is a recognized expert in an area of specialized knowledge accredited by institutions charged with that authority within the judge's own culture. Each has had extensive professional experience working among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en and other Indigenous peoples. Each has a history of supporting Aboriginal land rights. None sought to hide this fact. Each submitted lengthy, well-documented opinion reports to the court that were based in research that involved combinations of extensive participant observation, archival research, and a review of previous historical and anthropological research.\n\nWhile the Chief Justice set out in detail his reasons for dismissing the evidence of the anthropologists who testified on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en\u2014with the exception of Hugh Brody's testimony which merited no reference at all by Allan McEachern\u2014he only briefly mentioned the Crown's anthropologist, Sheila Robinson, once.\n\nSince receiving her Ph.D. from the University of London in 1983, Sheila Robinson has been sporadically employed as a researcher and consultant by Parks Canada, primarily in Alberta, and has co-authored two published scholarly papers. Robinson has never held an academic position. She was contracted by the federal government's Office of Native Claims to review the Kwakiutl Comprehensive Land Claim submission in 1984. She submitted an affidavit to the court in _Sparrow v. R._ on behalf of the Pacific Fishermen's Defence Alliance, an organization formed specifically to oppose Native fishing rights. Since testifying on behalf of the Crown in _Delgamuukw v. R.,_ Robinson has appeared as an expert witness in anthropology in a number of other Aboriginal rights cases. On February 19, 1986, Geoffrey Plant of Russell &DuMoulin wrote to Sheila Robinson:\n\nRussell and DuMoulin wishes to retain you as a consultant to assist us in the conduct of litigation relating to certain Indian land claims. We wish to retain your services for four months. We may extend this agreement from time to time thereafter. Your fee would be $250.00 per day.... While we have not yet determined the nature of the assignments you will carry out, we confirm that your assistance will be in areas related to your professional and academic experience. We anticipate this will include, for example, research and evaluation of the anthropological aspects of Indian land claims.3\n\nDuring the fifteen months that elapsed between the date of this initial contract and the submission of Sheila Robinson's final opinion report on May 12, 1987, Robinson corresponded regularly with Russell & DuMoulin, submitting at least two preliminary draft copies of her report for their comments, which she then incorporated into her final report. As late as May 4, 1987, Plant wrote to Robinson saying \"I enclose the draft of your report.... You will see that I have made a considerable number of revisions and deletions.... What I would like you to do is to provide me with a final draft in a form which you are completely happy with (i.e. you would have no reservations about delivering it to a publisher).\"\n\nA review of the curriculum vitae of the plaintiffs' anthropologists shows, therefore, a history of professional appointments by academic, public and private institutions, as well as a consistent pattern of employment by First Nations and Aboriginal organizations to do work in _support_ of land rights. A parallel review of the Crown's anthropologist's career history shows a paucity of professional appointments, and a consistent pattern of employment by the state to do work in _opposition_ to land rights. Only the anthropologists who testified in support of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, however, were dismissed by Chief Justice McEachern as \"advocates\" who could therefore not be regarded as legitimate \"experts.\"\n\nSheila Robinson has lived her entire life, received her education, and practiced her career among and within the cultural group to which she and her employers belong. And, she has chosen to professionally align herself with those particular political factions of that cultural group most actively opposed to Aboriginal rights. Both her short term and her long term livelihood depend, in many ways, upon the outcome of the cases in which she testifies. Why did the judge not appear to have been concerned about the possibility that Robinson could have been \"urging the almost total acceptance\" of Euro-Canadian cultural values?\n\n**Ethics v. License**\n\n_The evidence of the anthropologists who testified for the Plaintiffs was seriously attacked on various grounds, particularly that they were too closely associated with the plaintiffs after the commencement of litigation.... It is always unfortunate when experts become too close to their clients, especially during litigation._\n\n_With regard to Dr. Daly, he made it abundantly plain that he was very much on the side of the plaintiffs. He was, in fact, more an advocate than a witness. The reason for this is perhaps found in the Statement of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association which Dr. Daly cites at p.29 of his report, as follows:_\n\n_\"Section 1: Relations with those studied; In research, an anthropologist's paramount responsibility is to those he studies. When there is a conflict of interest, these individuals must come first. The anthropologist must do everything within his power to protect their physical, social and psychological welfare and to honour their dignity and privacy.\"_\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\nThe Chief Justice interpreted the American Anthropological Association's ethical guidelines to mean that anthropologists must simply accept and regurgitate whatever representatives of the people they study say. But \"...the Code of Ethics was not intended and cannot be appropriately interpreted to mean that... anthropologists are required to avoid telling the truth as they have come to know it.\" Rather, guidelines reflecting similar principles as those articulated by the American Anthropological Association govern research carried out with human subjects under the auspices of major universities and public agencies such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The judge's assumption that ethical guidelines aimed at insuring respect for human research subjects reduce social scientists to the status of \"hired pens\"\u2014or human tape recorders\u2014and prohibit them from conducting rigorous research, is clearly a legalistic assessment that seems to reflect case-building in an adversarial forum rather than scientific or interpretive approaches to research in the social sciences.\n\nSheila Robinson, while declared by the court to be an expert in anthropology, is not an anthropologist; and is therefore not bound by any professional code of ethics that might have led\u2014by the logic the judge applied to Richard Daly\u2014to her testimony being suspect. Nor was her lack of involvement in the academic arena of her profession challenged by the judge in the same way as he dismissed Susan Marsden's research on Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en origins and migrations because it \"has not been published or subjected to academic or other learned scrutiny, she is an interested party, and she has ignored some verified facts and other learned opinions....\"\n\n**Revision v. Reversal**\n\n_Dr. Mills, the plaintiffs' other principal anthropologist, also showed she was very much on the side of the plaintiffs. She has almost completely changed her opinion from that contained in her June 1986 draft where she attributed almost all Wet'suwet'en social organization, including the kungax, to borrowings from the Gitksan or some other coastal Indians._ _This is a startling departure from a large body of professional opinion on the part of a witness closely associated with the beneficiaries of her new opinion..._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\nChief Justice McEachern's first criticism of Antonia Mills was directed to her having changed her opinion about the degree to which Wet'suwet'en social organization was derived from Gitksan and Tsimshian. He comments on this particular debate early, writing at page 32:\n\nOn the evidence, there are some, but not many, differences between the present social organization of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people. This may well be because it is common for adjacent aboriginal people to \"adopt\" customs and practices from each other. That different people would have so many similar institutions and practices almost demonstrates the borrowing theory. Most of the experts believe the Wet'suwet'en adopted much of the culture of the Gitksan, but culture, like their languages, may well have travelled in both directions.\n\nMills explained, first under cross examination, and subsequently in a scholarly, peer-reviewed publication, that she had been led to change her opinion on the basis of research carried out by Isadore Dyen and David Aberle. This scholarship challenged her earlier assumptions that had been based not on research among the Wet'suwet'en in particular, but among their neighbours, the Beaver. In \"completely changing her opinion\" then, Mills was following a normal scientific, and common sense, practice: revising knowledge on the basis of new information. She was also reflecting a more general trend in contemporary anthropology away from relying on generalization and speculation from abstract theoretical models and towards valuing grounded knowledge understood within its local context and validated by the people whose cultures are the subject of study. Chief Justice McEachern appears to have taken exception to the fact that Mills _changed_ her opinion, rather than whether her more recent thesis might more accurately reflect Wet'suwet'en cultural life.\n\nLike Antonia Mills, Sheila Robinson, too, changed her opinion on several key issues during the period between 1983, when she completed her doctoral dissertation under academic direction, and 1987, when she began work as a witness for the Crown. In her Ph.D. thesis she argued against classical assumptions that hunting\/fishing\/gathering societies were insufficiently \"evolved\" to have practiced agriculture, claiming that Aboriginal peoples on the northwest coast were cultivating tobacco prior to the commencement of the fur trade. Robinson's dissertation reads:\n\nImplications of the relative neglect of prehistoric Indian agricultural practices go beyond correcting the record for academic purposes. Studies such as this one have direct relevance to modern political issues concerning aboriginal land claims. It has often been convenient for professionals other than scholars to 'forget' that Indians were farming in many parts of the Pacific Northwest region prehistorically and in the early historic period, or that they had well-developed systems of territorial property ownership. There is not room here to explore the unsatisfactory way most native people were treated after the mid-19th century with regards to their territorial claims: it is just mentioned in passing that when the lands the Indians had previously occupied and exploited were expropriated and then allotted to them after they had been 'adjusted' by government representatives to 'appropriately-sized' holdings for their future use, it was usually assumed that the Indians had no need for extensive acreage because they had not traditionally engaged in agricultural pursuits. This was especially the case on the coast of B.C., where territorial allocations (made without the Indians' formal agreement to allow any alienation of their lands) were, on the average, smaller than those recommended by the Dominion Government of Canada.\n\nThe Province of British Columbia's legal argument rests principally on establishing that Indigenous peoples did NOT have well developed systems of territorial property ownership prior to the \"historic\" period (i.e. European arrival); and DID consent, implicitly and\/or explicitly, to the alienation of their lands. In all her work as an expert witness, Robinson argues that, prior to contact, or \"proto-contact,\" with Europeans, the practice of property ownership and resource management among Aboriginal peoples was simple and bore little if any resemblance to European concepts of property. She testifies that Aboriginal life was dramatically and irreversibly affected by the commencement of trade with Europeans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the point where these peoples ceased to live \"truly aboriginal\" lives, and that, since first contact, Aboriginal peoples have been assimilating into Canadian society, and have thus demonstrated their consent to the expropriation of their lands and the extinguishment of their Aboriginal title. Given that Robinson has not conducted new, original research in the field since writing her dissertation, and that contemporary literature supports the arguments advanced in her Ph.D. dissertation and not those put forward in her expert opinion evidence, it is fair to conclude that the changes in her opinion have not resulted from a normal scholarly process of rethinking and revising previous theories on the basis of new ideas. Sheila Robinson, expert witness, contradicts Sheila Robinson, scholar.\n\n**Politics v. Poetics**\n\n_I found Dr. Daly's report exceedingly difficult to understand. It is highly theoretical and, I think, detached from what happens, 'on the ground'.... There are many passages which I do not understand._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\nThe Chief Justice continued his list of reasons for dismissing anthropologist, Richard Daly's evidence. He quoted a lengthy paragraph in which Daly describes \"the world view of those living close to nature,\" as an example. In the section of his report that the Chief Justice cited, Daly challenged western readers to imagine a way of life very different from their own. He did so somewhat lyrically, juxtaposing the way \"nature's life force\" gives, as well as takes away, from human beings, and explaining the ongoing dynamic and constantly negotiated relationship between ownership and stewardship of lands and resources. The paragraph is unsettling in the way that poetry is: Daly brings diverse elements into unexpected and unfamiliar relationships with each other. He is, however, describing lived experiences, beliefs and practices taught to him by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en with whom he engaged in research. The Chief Justice infers that Daly's descriptions reflect a fictional, rather than a factual, account of Aboriginal relationships to nature. The judge does not entertain the possibility that the problem may lie in his own failure to understand cultures different from his own, or that fact and fiction may intermingle as much in his reading, as they do in Daly's writing, of cultural representation.\n\nSheila Robinson's text is highly theoretical: ironically, in precisely the sense that McEachern appears to be criticizing Daly. Robinson, using esoteric language, invokes abstract theoretical postulates inconsistently and sporadically to fill in gaps created by her dismissal of available empirical evidence and as a rhetorical device to help render her narrative, and the Crown's argument, convincing and authoritative. This conflation can be read in her initial proposal to Russell & DuMoulin, where Robinson set out her understanding of the task they had assigned her as being:\n\n...to develop theories showing that significant changes occurred in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en socioeconomies during the late prehistoric and early historic eras and that these were the result of both indirect and direct European influence.\n\nPeter Grant, lawyer for the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, pursued the question of Robinson's use of the term \"theory\" when he cross-examined her on this correspondence:\n\nGrant: What do you mean by theory? What do you mean when you use the term theories as a social\u2014as a cultural geographer? Robinson: Theories are explanations or attempts at explanation that try to account for or resolve into a logical framework facts relating to a central issue or problem.\n\nGrant: I would be correct to say that theories are not facts, you would agree with that?\n\nRobinson: Yes.\n\nGrant: And what you do when you have a theory is you test it?\n\nRobinson: Sometimes.\n\nGrant questioned her again, asking her to differentiate between \"theory\" and \"speculation.\" Robinson replied: \"I use the word theorize...you use the word speculate. I think we are probably discussing the same thing.\n\n**Chiefs v. Commoners**\n\n_These anthropologists (Daly, Mills and Brody) studied the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people intensively. Drs. Daly and Mills actually lived with the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en for 2 and 3 years respectively after the commencement of this action. Their type of study is called participant observation but the evidence shows they dealt almost exclusively with chiefs which, in my view, is fatal to the credibility and reliability of their conclusions...they did not conduct their investigations in accordance with accepted scientific practices._\n\n_Most significantly, Dr. Daly lived with these people for 2 years, while this litigation was under way making observations on their activities, listening, and, I think, accepting everything they said, without keeping notes...._\n\n_Further, he was not aware of a comprehensive survey of over 1,000 persons conducted by the Tribal Council in 1979 which achieved an 80% return. This survey disclosed, for example, that 32% of the sample attended no feasts, and only 29.6% and 8.7% engaged in hunting and trapping respectively.... Apart from admissibility as evidence of its contents (for I have no way of knowing if the survey is accurate or representative, although some of its results tend to confirm the view I obtained of present Indian life), its significance is more in the fact that it was kept from Dr. Daly. Many of his views of Indian life may have been markedly different if he had access to this substantial body of information in the possession of his clients. For these reasons, I place little reliance on Dr. Daly's report or evidence. This is unfortunate because he is clearly a well qualified, highly intelligent anthropologist._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\nEthnographic fieldwork necessarily involves \"intensively studying\" people by \"actually living\" with them for a prolonged period of time. Allan McEachern's allegation that the anthropologists dealt primarily with Chiefs is only partially supported by their actual opinion reports which include interviews with, and descriptions of the life of, many Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people who are not Chiefs. That they relied on the Chiefs as authorities on formal aspects of oral tradition, political and social organization and ceremonial life constitutes what seems an entirely reasonable way to go about researching these topics through consultations with experts in specialized areas of knowledge. Chief Justice McEachern referred again to Daly's reliance on the Chiefs to support his own conclusion that Daly's testimony, about the degree to which traditional feasting was economically supported by the community, \"confuses the practice of chiefs making substantial contributions to feasts in which they are particularly interested with the day to day life of these people.\"\n\nWhat the Chief Justice does not seem to have understood is that the event called \"a feast\" represents years of planning, hunting, fishing, gathering, preserving, storing, saving, amassing and making foods, goods, artwork and crafts by a wide range of house, clan and family members and as such is very much interwoven with everyday life. The fact that a Chief, representing her or his House and clan, makes the ceremonial presentation of collectively generated money and goods at a feast does not mean that he or she alone is responsible for having accumulated the entire contribution. Furthermore, the cultivation and maintenance by chiefly families of good relations within their own Houses and with the community at large requires much social labour in day to day life.\n\nThis having been said, I hasten to acknowledge that many anthropologists and Aboriginal people themselves have criticized some ethnographers for working with elites to the exclusion of ordinary members of communities. And, the focus on spectacular events like feasts and potlatches further tends to render much daily labour performed by women, particularly, invisible. However, the goal of these critiques is to develop more democratic and inclusive research methodologies. The Chief Justice's comments reflect a prevalent notion repeated throughout colonial history that the British imperial mission was a noble and civilizing one, aimed at liberating the common folk of Indigenous societies from the shackles of tradition, and the tyranny of their own despotic chiefs: Europeans saving Aboriginals from themselves.\n\nContrary to the judge's criticism, Richard Daly did, in fact, take copious ethnographic fieldnotes. Typically, anthropologists maintain detailed journals that record technical data, descriptive observations, genealogies, formal interviews and other pertinent information. However, field journals also include anthropologists' personal reflections and interpretations, and information that research subjects specifically request anthropologists consider confidential. Anthropological fieldnotes are, therefore, private documents and on this basis Daly had, as journalists also do, refused to release his field journals to the court.\n\nChief Justice McEachern was strongly influenced by the results of the \"comprehensive survey\" that he cites in his _Reasons for Judgment_ , despite claims by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en that the survey was poorly designed and conducted, and had been rejected by them on methodological grounds; and despite the judge's own admission that he could not evaluate the reliability of the study. The apparent significance of the survey for the Chief Justice was twofold. First, neither the plaintiffs, nor their expert witnesses, had entered the survey into evidence, or referred to it. This omission appears to have aroused the judge's suspicions, and led to his conclusion that it had been purposefully withheld because it showed that, contrary to what Chief Justice McEachern thought their claim was, many Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en are not actively and regularly involved in what the judge considers \"aboriginal activities\" like hunting, fishing, trapping, gathering and feasting. The judge elaborates on this theme throughout the _Reasons for Judgment_ , juxtaposing participation in the contemporary economy in an either\/or fashion with participation in the traditional economy, writing: \"Daly placed far more weight on continuing aboriginal activities than I would from the evidence although he recognized the substantial participation of the Indians in the cash economy.\" Apparently unable to conceptualize the possibility of a viable contemporary Aboriginal way of life that combines hunting, fishing and gathering on the land with wage labour and commercial business activities, the judge could only understand this integration as a contradiction. He rejected Daly's observation that \"Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en persons regarded their land as 'their food box and their treasury' and young persons going hunting often say 'we are going to the Indian supermarket, to our land.'\" In short, the survey confirmed the judge's view that a hunting, fishing and gathering economy and a capitalist economy cannot coexist, that contemporary Aboriginals have been assimilated, and they no longer live \"truly Aboriginal\" lives, identical to those of their ancestors.\n\nUnlike the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en's anthropologists, Sheila Robinson had conducted no fieldwork with the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en or any other Aboriginal people. Hence, obviously, she could not be subjected to the same criticism of unscientific methodology that was levelled at Mills, Daly and Brody. The Chief Justice's thinking on this seems to reflect the notion that being a member of the dominant Euro-Canadian culture is evidence that the raw potential exists for an individual to develop an ability to discover the unmediated \"truth\" through the rational application of reason, learned in the process of professional education. Conversely, within this ideological framework, membership in a marginalized cultural group, like First Nations, is evidence of the opposite: they are considered _not_ to have the raw potential to overcome subjectivity and achieve objectivity. In the place of reason and rationality, they have feelings and \"culture.\" This was the rationale that lay behind the clause in the _Indian Act_ that remained in effect until 1951 which automatically stripped legal Indian status away from any Aboriginal person upon graduation from university. Obtaining a university degree, which presumably evidences the capacity for rational thought, was considered antithetical to being Aboriginal. Two attributes: being white and being untutored in Aboriginal ways of life, worked in tandem to enhance Robinson's image as an \"objective scientist,\" in contrast to the \"subjective advocates\" who testified on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en.\n\nJust as by dismissing the validity of oral tradition the Chief Justice in effect ruled out the possibility of any Aboriginal history constituting valid evidence, by rejecting ethnographic fieldwork as inherently \"unscientific\" and unreliable, Chief Justice McEachern ruled out the possibility of any anthropological research ever being useful to a court. The important point is not that anthropologists may be offended by Chief Justice McEachern's contempt for their discipline, but that the Judge's findings that are based on his evaluation of the evidence affect the everyday lives of Aboriginal peoples. As Michael Asch has written, \"Given the importance of the findings of fact to the judgment's decision about Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en aboriginal rights, it is fair to enquire as to the approach used for their determination.... If...the approach for determining the facts is not appropriate, this raises serious concerns about the judgement's findings in law.\"\n\n* * *\n\n. Geertz 1983.\n\n. For the record, however, Gitksan Elder Yagalahl (Dora Wilson) claims the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en case may have been the exception that proves the rule. She wrote: \"Alfred Joseph and I were chosen to represent the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en\u2014Alfred representing the Wet'suwet'en and I the Gitksan\u2014to sit in the courtroom and monitor the court case, and also be in an advisory position with our lawyers. That's one thing, our lawyers were under our instruction. They don't instruct us. We instruct them. We tell them what to do. That's what they are getting paid for.\" (Yagalahl 1992: 200).\n\n. Letter G. Plant, Russell & DuMoulin to Sheila Robinson, February 19, 1986, Exhibit 1191-9, _Delgamuukw v. R._ , Supreme Court of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.\n\n. Letter G. Plant, Russell & DuMoulin to Sheila Robinson, May 4, 1987, Exhibit 1191-17, _Delgamuukw v. R._ , Supreme Court of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.\n\n. Asch 1992: 237; See also Daly and Mills 1993: 1,6.\n\n. _Reasons,_ 1991: 68.\n\n. Dyen and Aberle 1974.\n\n. See Mills 1994 for a thorough discussion of Mills' testimony on this and other issues.\n\n. Robinson 1983: 405.\n\n. Robinson's \"performance\" is typical of court room ritual. See Brenneis 1988; Conley and O'Barr 1990; Levi and Walker 1990; Mertz 1988; O'Barr 1982; White 1985, 1990.\n\n. Transcripts,vol. 288: 21668.\n\n. Ibid., 22163.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 50.\n\n. Ibid., 50.\n\n. For thorough discussions of this aspect of colonial ideology in other corners of the globe see Said 1992; Spivak 1988.\n\n. Ibid., 50.\n\n. Asch 1992: 222.\n**Chapter 19: How Do You Know Whose Story is True?**\n\n_There is some conflict in the evidence about the start of this...[the protohistoric] period. Dr. Robinson believes that it was as early as 100 years before actual contact, mainly because of trade goods filtering into the territory both from the east and south as well as from known and unknown Russian (and possibly other) Asiatic travelers or traders who may have visited our coast. Other witnesses put the start of the protohistorical period later than Dr. Robinson, possibly about the time of the start of the sea otter trade in the last few years of the 18th or early 19th century...it would seem that the time of direct contact in the territory was not earlier than the early 1820's which is a reasonable date to select as the end of the protohistorical period...._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\n**Sense v. Nonsense**\n\nThe only reference Allan McEachern made to the Crown's leading expert witness was in relation to her rather extravagant dating of the protohistoric period. Sheila Robinson's influence, however, was reflected in the Chief Justice's _Reasons for Judgment_ in a variety of ways and on a number of levels. Robinson rejected oral tradition and ethnographic fieldwork on methodological grounds, gave short shrift to linguistics and archaeology, ignored archival records and indirectly criticized the anthropologists who testified on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. The Chief Justice's ruling repeats these dismissals. Allan McEachern made it clear in his comments during Hugh Brody's testimony that he did not believe that an examination of \"what white people think,\" or \"white frontier culture,\" had any bearing on this case. Nor, it would seem, did the Chief Justice think that academic credibility or professional reputation was relevant to the assessment of expert evidence. Perhaps this explains in part why the judge seemed to find it neither necessary nor appropriate to scrutinize the Crown's key expert witness with the same rigour that he applied to the experts who testified on behalf of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en.\n\nRobinson provided a methodological blueprint for the Chief Justice to follow. Points presented as material \"facts\" by Robinson were marshalled and proclaimed \"the truth\" by the Chief Justice, as were many of the abstract theoretical postulates that Robinson frequently substituted for empirical evidence. Robinson's well-practiced performance skills as a professional witness, and the rhetorical flourishes of her technical and academic \"bafflegab\" created an aura of arcane expertise around her testimony. Her report and evidence are difficult to comprehend and critique, not because the subject matter she deals with is particularly complex, or her arguments especially sophisticated, but because she adopts an extraordinarily obfuscating style when she writes and testifies.\n\nThe historical description of non-literate Indigenous cultures as they were before written descriptions of them were recorded by Europeans is principally the subject matter of ethnohistory. Robinson's opinion report fell within the rubric of ethnohistory, and she claimed specific expertise in this field. Ethnohistorians strive to reconstruct a holistic picture of specific Aboriginal cultures by methodically combining data from a number of sources: oral tradition, archaeology, linguistics, historical documents and fieldwork. Since these are the only possible data sources available for such reconstruction, the discipline of ethnohistory is largely defined by this methodology. In other words, ethnohistorical studies are based on interpretation and the discipline has treated the science of interpretation very seriously.\n\nRobinson rejected oral tradition as unreliable. Readers will recall that her dismissal of oral tradition and ethnography stood as yet another oxymoron when it became clear that 47 of the 82 sources Robinson listed in the bibliography to her report based their work substantially on oral history and\/or field work. Nonetheless, the judge agreed with Robinson's assessment and rejected oral histories as valid evidence.\n\nRobinson's treatment of archaeological evidence as a whole was also highly selective. In her initial proposal to Russell & DuMoulin, Robinson suggested that \"archaeological reports could be quite worthwhile,\" and she referred to archaeologists MacDonald, Allaire and Coupland as \"usually forming sound opinions.\" However, in her testimony at trial she changed her mind about this. The Crown's case was based on the argument that social ranking among the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en emerged in response to the European fur trade, and that the hunting territories outside the major villages were used only sporadically and incidentally prior to their \"commercial\" exploitation for the European-Aboriginal fur trade. Gary Coupland, whose work was cited by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en's expert in archaeology, had found that: \"Archaeological evidence reflects the emergence of ranked society\" approximately 1500-2500 years ago, that is between 500 B.C.-500 A.D. Robinson dismissed Coupland's work, which did not support the Crown's argument.\n\nCoupland's findings are not disputed in the research literature. Where debate within archaeology does arise is on the question of migrations; that is, whether the present-day Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en are the direct, biological, descendants of the people who lived in the area at that time. Aboriginal oral traditions claim continuous occupation, but the archaeological jury is still out on the question. Chief Justice McEachern seized upon this debate in archaeology to support his conclusion that: \"There is no doubt, in my view, that there has been human habitation at locations on the lower and middle Skeena River extending at least from Prince Rupert harbour in the west to Hagwilget canyon, and at Moricetown, for at least 3000 years or more. This has been established in the findings and conclusions of several reputable archaeologists.... The difficulty from the plaintiff's point of view, is that none of this evidence...relates distinctively to the plaintiffs. Any aboriginal people could have created these remains.... The archaeological evidence establishes early human habitation at some of these sites, but not necessarily occupation by Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en ancestors of the plaintiffs.\" As he was disturbed by the appearance of post-contact phenomena like guns and the Hudson's Bay Company in what he thought should be \"uncontaminated\" oral histories, Allan McEachern was also concerned that the archaeological evidence was rendered \"highly equivocal with findings of white man's garbage mixed with possible archaeological features....\" Robinson did not deal substantially with linguistic evidence. The Chief Justice found linguistics baffling but impressive, describing the discipline as: \"a mysterious process only properly understood by very learned persons,\" and citing it as valid evidence that the descendants of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had lived in the territory, if not since time began, at least for \"a long, long time.\"\n\nRobinson declared that the historical record vis-\u00e0-vis the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en was \"virtually mute.\" Hence, she did not conduct any archival research in connection with her report. She claimed that the first written records kept by a European observer, Hudson's Bay trader William Brown who arrived in 1822, were irrelevant to her study because, she said, Brown was describing a Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en social organization that had radically changed as a result of the introduction of European commodities into Indigenous trade exchanges preceding Brown's arrival: \"None of our contemporary knowledge is untainted by European influence which was manifested long before relevant written records were kept,\" she wrote. In other words, the only reliable information, according to Robinson would have to come from the written records of people who didn't write, or written records by Europeans who by their very presence\u2014or, in this case, by the presence of commodities manufactured by them\u2014would have so changed Aboriginal culture as to render it not \"really aboriginal\" anyway; or from a 300-year old person. In short, Robinson denied the validity of all the sources of knowledge in the discipline in which she was qualified by the Court as an expert witness.\n\nRobinson provided a facade of academic and putatively \"scientific\" legitimacy for the Crown's, and Chief Justice McEachern's, legal arguments, cultural beliefs and economic and political interests. Evolutionary supremacy is seen as being manifested in its purest form in the law as it has rationally developed over the course of western history, through the increasingly sophisticated application of reason to the resolution of disputes and the administration of civil life. To the Chief Justice's way of thinking he embodies justice, truth and common sense. In such an ideological framework, the grace of the Christian God, the will of the European sovereign, the security of the nation state and the best interests of the people are one and the same: woven together into a seamless whole. Just as the Crown's sovereignty is legitimized by reasoning backwards from consequences to causes, any lingering doubts about the obvious rightness of the status quo should be easily dispelled by referring back to the fact that the dominant culture is dominant. Were it not superior to those it imagines it has conquered, it would not have been victorious. Finally, the proof is in the pudding: Robinson drew no criticism because the truth of her story is evidenced by it being the story of those who claim exclusive monopoly over the truth.\n\n**Fact v. Fiction**\n\n_The purpose of litigation is to settle a dispute with finality. Whether or not the decision is historically 'correct' is, from one perspective\u2014that of the court\u2014irrelevant.... Determining the truth of what happened is incidental to the courts role in society which is to secure peaceful settlement of economic, social, and political conflicts between two or more litigants._\n\n\u2014Historian Donald Bourgeois, 1986, _The Role of the Historian in the Litigation Process_.\n\nDr. Arthur Ray's evidence, as well as that of the archaeologists Drs. Ames and MacDonald, linguists Drs. Rigsby and Kari, Ms Heather Harris' genealogical evidence, and Brown's records, were cited by the judge in support of his conclusion that \"the ancestors of a reasonable number of the plaintiffs were present in parts of the territory for a long, long time prior to sovereignty.\" The judge wrote that he had \"no hesitation accepting the information contained in\" William Brown's records, and he acknowledged that Dr. Arthur Ray \"has excellent qualifications in his special area of expertise.\" Allan McEachern went on to quote the following passage from Ray's opinion report as \"the strongest statement supporting the plaintiffs' basic position which is to be found in any of the independent evidence adduced at trial:\"\n\nWhen Europeans first reached the middle and upper Skeena River area in the 1820s they discovered that the local natives were settled in a number of relatively large villages. The people subsisted largely off their fisheries which, with about two months of work per year, allowed them to meet most of their food needs. Summer villages were located beside their fisheries. Large game and fur bearers were hunted on surrounding, and sometimes, on more distant lands. Hunting territories were held by 'nobles' on behalf of the lineages they represented and these native leaders closely regulated the hunting of valued species. The various villages were linked into a regional exchange network. Indigenous commodities and European trade goods circulated within and between villages by feasting, trading and gambling activities.\n\nHe went on to emphasize that \"game was never really plentiful in the territory and fishing was the mainstay of the economy;\" that Brown had noted that \"the chief's control of territories was not exclusive...and was sometimes limited to beaver.\"\n\nThe Chief Justice continued:\n\nThe foregoing must be considered in the context of the larger picture which emerged from the evidence. First, it would be incorrect to assume that the social organization which existed was a stable one. Warfare between neighbouring or distant tribes was constant, and the people were hardly amenable to obedience to anything but the most rudimentary form of custom. Brown held them in no high esteem, partly because of their addiction to gambling, and Ogden, about whom there are different views...described them most unkindly. I conclude from the foregoing, however, that there was indeed a rudimentary form of social organization....\n\nSheila Robinson's evidence provided the rationale by which the judge was able to reconcile the apparent contradiction between his acceptance of the literal truth of William Brown's written reports that described the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en as living in an organized, property-owning society in 1822, and his application of Lord Sumner's dictum in the _Re: Southern Rhodesia_ precedent reserved for cases where \"tribes are so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions and legal ideas of civilized society.\" The resolution to this apparent paradox was provided by Robinson's argument that Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en cultures had changed rapidly and dramatically in the time just prior to Brown's arrival as a result of the impact of the European-Aboriginal fur trade. Therefore, the Crown and Robinson argued that Brown was describing not a \"truly aboriginal\" society, but rather one already significantly assimilating and inevitably disappearing. The Chief Justice agreed, and wrote in his _Reasons for Judgment_ :\n\nIn fact, active trade was underway at the coast and spreading inland for at least 30 years before trader Brown arrived at Babine Lake, probably converting a Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en aboriginal life into something quite different from what it had been....\n\nI find the weight of evidence supports the view that the fur trade materially changed aboriginal life before or around the time trader Brown was making his records at Fort Kilmauers. That does not prevent me from accepting Dr. Ray's opinion that Indian social organization did not all arise by reason of the fur trade. I think the evidence supports that, by 1822, the Indians of the Babine Lake region had a structure of nobles or chiefs, commoners, kinship arrangements of some kind and priority relating to the trapping of beaver in the vicinity of the villages.\n\nFinally, he claimed he was presented with too much evidence to be able to do more than \"extract from it an impression of what was going on.\"\n\nSummarizing the historical evidence, the judge evaluated the particular historians who had testified as expert witnesses during the trial, writing:\n\nLastly, I wish to mention the historians. Generally speaking, I accept just about everything they put before me because they were largely collectors of archival, historical documents. In most cases they provided much useful information with minimal editorial comment. Their marvellous collections largely spoke for themselves. Each side was able to point out omissions in the collections advanced on behalf of others but nothing turns on that.\n\nI do not accept that part of the evidence of...[the Crown's expert witness] Mr. Williams which suggests legal consequences from Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en compliance with Canadian law.... The honour of the Crown precludes me from giving effect to this defence. In my judgement, the plaintiffs have not directly or indirectly released their causes of action...I do not find, as a matter of law, that the acceptance of British Columbia law, or conformity with it, precludes them from advancing their claims for aboriginal interests. In my view, the Indians claims have not been discharged by any conduct on their part.\n\nHistorian Robin Fisher has subsequently pointed out that, while at first glance Allan McEachern appears to respect historians, \"a more careful examination of the evidence provided in the judgment will show that McEachern, in fact, paid very little attention to historians.\" Fisher's argument is illustrated by the judge's characterization of historians as \"largely collectors of documents,\" and his dismissal of their interpretations. In other words, McEachern heard the \"facts\" written in documents speaking directly to him, and he was grateful to the historians for bringing these written voices to his visual attention. The judge found debates among historians about various interpretations of documents \"interesting,\" but not particularly relevant to the case at hand. Robin Fisher accused McEachern of having \"failed to listen to the custodians of the past in his own culture.\"\n\nFisher attributes many of McEachern's historical errors to what he describes as the judge's \"xerox, scissors and paste\" methodology. Fisher argues that the Judge appropriated historical evidence through a series of decontextualizing practices. \"...The first step in this procedure is to pull the documents out of their original context by use of the xerox machine,\" Fisher began. \"Thus, for example, a letter from Governor James Douglas to the British Colonial Secretary on Indian land policy is isolated from his numerous letters on other issues of the day. It is as if Douglas did his thinking in watertight compartments rather than as a busy governor dealing with a dozen overlapping questions at the same time.\" Fisher continued: \"Individual documents are then cut to pieces so that excerpts can be quoted. The historical sections of the judgment consist of long successions of quotations from original sources strung together with commentary by the judge. The trouble with scissors and paste is that scissors cut things out of context and, once removed from their setting, all the bits of the document are of equal weight. After the individual pieces have been trimmed to a suitable shape, with the application of paste, the past can be stuck back together according to a new, and more acceptable, pattern.\" Finally, Fisher concludes, McEachern's methodology can be reduced to arbitrariness. \"But for McEachern, the best historians are not those who have done adequate research or drawn the most logical conclusions,\" he argues, \"but simply those who appear to support his views.\" Fisher claimed that, rather than being idiosyncratic, Chief Justice McEachern's use of history unfortunately represents common practice: \"...there is also a developing tradition in this province of lawyers and judges presuming to be historians, whether in or out of the courtroom. Having made judgments about legal issues that have a historical dimension, they presumably feel that they are thereby qualified to write history. What these judges and lawyers are often doing is shaping the past to serve the needs of the present, which is not quite the same thing as writing history.... We can safely assume that none of these legal professionals, let alone the bar associations, would let an historian walk in off the street and take over one of their cases just for a change of pace....\"\n\nA number of critiques of Chief Justice McEachern's use of both oral and written history have been written since the 1991 publication of his _Reasons for Judgment_ in _Delgamuukw v. R._ Anthropologists Julie Cruikshank and Andrea Laforet and legal scholar Joel Fortune have discussed the judgment in the context of current academic debates on the nature of historical understanding. Citing anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, Laforet set out four criteria that she argued are universally applicable to the evaluation of historical validity. These are: authority, continuity, depth and interdependence. Laforet then analyzed both the _adaawk_ and _kungax_ , and what she calls \"McEachern's history\" according to Appandurai's four criteria, finding that, while radically different, both can be seen to formally fulfill these requirements in culturally-specific ways.\n\nJulie Cruikshank argued that both oral traditions and written accounts are deeply embedded in social processes. \"Written records do not 'speak for themselves,'\" Cruikshank wrote, \"and...like oral testimonies...must be understood within the context in which they were and are produced.... The lessons to be drawn from comparing oral with written accounts are not about the cultural relativity of texts,\" she concluded, \"but about power and domination.\"\n\nJoel Fortune began with a review and assessment of the role played by history in land claims litigation in general, and in recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions in particular. Fortune put the central question succinctly: \"In the context of history, philosophy and epistemology this illustrates a fundamental problem: how can past events or past cultures be retrieved from the intangible and presented to-day.\" Both Aboriginal litigants and the Crown used history to support their positions, Fortune continued. Native litigants argued that original injustices, supposedly relegated to the past, continue into the present. This gives temporal depth to their grievances. Interpreting the history of Aboriginal\/non-Aboriginal relations in this way also provided support for their argument that they have resisted domination and assimilation, and have persisted in exercising rights embedded in a distinct culture for \"a long, long time.\" In these ways, the past and the present are linked in Aboriginal legal representations. However, past and present were uncoupled in First Nations' arguments when contemporary adaptation and cultural viability were highlighted. The Crown, for its part, separated the past and the present when they advanced arguments to legitimate the claim that the past should be forgotten, and \"we can only be just in our time.\" Crown arguments that relied on assumptions of a radical break between pre-contact and post-contact, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures and practices, were also supported by a theoretical stance advocating significant differences between historical and contemporary conditions. The past and the present were joined in the Crown's arguments, however, when the past served the purposes of the present, as in the use of precedents. \"In the end,\" Joel Fortune surmised in regard to Chief Justice McEachern's conclusions on historical evidence, \"the dominant culture asserted its historical vision over that of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en.\"\n\nArthur Ray charged that the Crown, by relying on documents written fifty or sixty years later than the time period being discussed, \"attempted to interpret history backwards.\" He concluded that, \"...after 374 days of trial covering all aspects of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en history in depth, Justice McEachern still held the same eurocentric view of Native people that has been an unfortunate judicial and political tradition in British Columbia since the colonial era.\"\n\nThe more important issue is, however, that the law is one of the most powerful institutions in Canadian society. The notion that we are governed by reason, logic and the intelligent evaluation of evidence is what legitimizes the state's and the courts' sole control over armed force and \"the means of destruction.\" Fortune sets out the important problem pointed to by the numerous critiques of Chief Justice McEachern's judgment written by academics and intellectuals, when he writes: \"The reason why the courts should critically examine the assumptions that underlie an unproblematic conception of historical knowledge is that these assumptions, as we have seen, inform the law. If the assumptions, when they are challenged, cannot be justified, neither can the law.\"\n\nThe important problem regarding the evaluation of expert evidence in court is not what Sheila Robinson's, Richard Daly's, Hugh Brody's, Antonia Mills,' Arthur Ray's or any other individual expert's intentions or political sympathies may be, but rather whether judges should respect professional standards and integrity in their assessment of scholarly knowledge presented by expert witnesses in the courtroom. Not because these standards are infallible guarantees of any kind of absolute truth, but because _legal findings are based on historical and cultural interpretations_ , and it therefore behooves the judiciary to at least respect the criteria for credibility adopted by the academic institutions of their own culture. The problem, in other words, is not that expert witnesses may mock the court, but rather that the courts make a mockery of expert witnessing.\n\n**Truth v. Lies**\n\n_Pointing up repeated failures to discover any but historically contingent foundations for thought does not in itself have to provoke a crisis of inquiry and understanding.... It requires rather that we acknowledge that all human inquiry is necessarily engaged in understanding the human world from within a specific situation. This situation is always and at once historical, moral and political._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Paul Rabinow, 1987, _Introduction: The Interpretive Turn, A Second Look_.\n\nIn carrying out the Crown's first strategy as defendants\u2014that is, attempting to undermine the credibility of the plaintiffs\u2014Sheila Robinson continually reiterated and reinforced the notion that no valid or reliable knowledge about pre-contact Aboriginal societies exists, and that _all_ theories and research findings are equally speculative. She then proceeded to offer an authoritative report on this very subject, using the same sources she had discredited. There is, thus, at the core of her argument, a logical fallacy that makes trying to understand her work feel like a descent into madness: she asserts a truth whose conditions of possibility she has already ruled out on _a priori_ grounds. The Chief Justice, empowered by legal positivism's tradition of substituting law for fact, followed suit.\n\nPhilosopher Peter Dews describes these ideological contortions where the real and the imagined, and fact and fiction, are capriciously fused at one moment, and distinguished at another\u2014not by principles of logic, reason, moral or ethical beliefs, or justice, nor by reference to culturally-specific rules of interpretation, or to observations of material phenomena, but according to the desires and interests of the powerful\u2014as a feature of contemporary western culture. Simply put, it is becoming increasingly acceptable to boldly follow the maxim that winning or losing is all that matters: playing the game with integrity is increasingly coming to be seen as naive at best, and irrelevant at worst.\n\nJoel Fortune, in his analysis of Chief Justice McEachern's approach to history in his _Reasons for Judgment_ in _Delgamuukw v. R._ , outlined three theoretical positions in contemporary historiography: interpretivism, postmodernism and positivism. He turned to British historian E. H. Carr's well-known book, _What Is History?_ as typical of the interpretivist school and quoted the following as representing the \"essence\" of Carr's argument: \"What is the criterion which distinguishes the facts of history from other facts about the past?...The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides which facts to give the floor to, and in what order or context. It is the use to which certain facts are put that makes them historical.\" Carr's book was cited by the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's lawyers to support their argument that both oral and written histories should be subject to established criteria, standards and processes for validation.\n\nIn contemporary intellectual debates, arguments about subjectivity, objectivity and truth are often described as a battle between modernism and postmodernism. Modernism refers to social theories that have arisen since the European Enlightenment that claim that the world exists independently of the human knower. The task of the modernist social scientist is to achieve objectivity by eliminating subjective biases like feelings and attitudes. This achieved, the researcher should be able to determine, and then reveal and explain, the single definitive truth that has awaited her or his discovery. Objectivist social science strives to emulate the natural and physical sciences that its methodologies mimic. Postmodernism refers to theories that have arisen, for the most part, during the last twenty-five years. Postmodernists argue that all knowledge is mediated through the culturally and historically specific lens of the knower, and whether or not there is a \"reality\" that exists outside of our apprehension of it we may never know for certain.\n\nFortune illustrated a postmodern approach by referring to the work of literary critic and historian Hayden White. White's postmodern analysis of history argues that the meaning of historical texts is determined by the diverse contexts in which they are produced and interpreted. Texts, therefore, according to White, inevitably reveal their writers' and readers' interpretations of their subject matter, more than they describe observed events and \"facts.\" \"Recent literary theory...questions the notion that ancient documents, as 'texts' have any independent meaning at all,\" Fortune wrote.\n\nWhite's position and that of Carr are philosophically comparable in that both deny the possibility of \"objective history\" in a positivist sense. That is, both analyze historical documents as human creations that should not be understood outside of the social and political context in which they are written, read and analyzed. However, the two schools\u2014interpretivism and postmodernism\u2014differ on the question of whether or not a consensus can be achieved concerning criteria for what may constitute a \"fact,\" and whatstandards may be sufficient to evaluate one account as being more valid than another. Fortune noted in regard to postmodernist theories that \"for some historians, this proposition implies an especially pernicious relativism: the simultaneous interpretation of text and context appears to denude the past of any objective content.\" In this book, I have critiqued the positivist ideology and modernist pretensions to exclusive possession of a single truth that the Crown's argument and the Chief Justice's _Reasons for Judgment_ reveal. My first critique has been from _inside_ the Crown's positivist ideology. I have argued that, within the terms of their own framework of analysis, the Crown and Chief Justice McEachern rejected what should constitute valid evidence: empirical data drawn from scientific studies. My second critique has been launched from _outside_ the law, and I have argued that their framework of analysis is itself thoroughly eurocentric, and frequently crosses the line to racism. That is, the law demands that Aboriginal people present their claims within a European-derived discourse, and will not hear First Nations on their own cultural terms. I have tried to wage this critique, however, without making claims to a contrary but still universal and objective \"truth\"; that is, without acquiescing to the Crown's objectivist framework.\n\nObjectivity and subjectivity\u2014understood as absolute abstract concepts\u2014are false opponents: two sides of the same coin. They are abstractions marking the extreme poles on either end of a continuum. Moving the discussion out of philosophical abstractions and into lived experience makes this obvious. People in specific relationships with each other and in particular contexts in the course of their everyday living, move back and forth along this continuum from issues where there is a high degree of consensus on what is \"true enough to be _true_ ,\" that is, where we can agree to shared meanings sufficiently to carry on conversation. For example, we can agree that a tree, is a tree, is a tree. However, as we move along this continuum, we find places where perspectives diverge significantly. For example, a tree represents profit; a tree offers a job; a tree symbolizes a sacred gift from the Creator. At this point, there are many _truths_ that depend on the speaker's perspectives and interests, the context in which \"the tree\" is being talked about, and the purpose of the discussion.\n\nIn the case of the issues in dispute in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en trial, there is a high level of public, academic and cross-cultural consensus that it is empirically true that there were resources in the hunting territories and a significant degree of consensus on the likelihood that it is \"true enough\" that the Aboriginal peoples of the territory used these resources. There is less consensus that these two historical facts constitute justification for the recognition of contemporary legal Aboriginal rights. At this level of discussion multiple \"truths\" about the resources in the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en hunting territories emerge. What is considered \"truth\" may be perpetually subject to review and change as new information, new perspectives, and new ways of understanding evolve. Claims to have \"discovered\" an unassailable \"truth\" at this level ultimately reflect points of view, experience, material conditions, and moral and political values. However, to reason backwards from the third level of debate to the first and second, and to argue then that all \"facts\" are equally contestable, and all interpretations equally valid, is spurious.\n\nTruth in human relations is not a _thing_ that can be discovered or revealed at either pole: in either \"pure\" objectivity or \"pure subjectivity.\" Truth-seeking is an interactional process. How else could we come to know the _truth_ about the meaning of land\u2014or trees\u2014or the value of a way of life, or what makes a joke funny, or what being in love is? Truth in human relations emerges from within human relations, through conversation and dialogue, through conflict and debate. These truths are therefore always open to critical moral interrogation. The more important questions are what actions may people take, how may people be treated, according to particular \"truths\"? What are the consequences of believing, and organizing society on the basis of, one truth and not another? Whose interests are being served? At this point, truth becomes a moral question about justice, more than an empirical question about observations. Cultural differences present a major challenge to the search for such truths, the heart of which lies in communication. Power, of course, plays a significant role in this \"intersubjective validation\" process as well: whose truth will come to rule the day?\n\nMany contemporary scholars and activists embrace postmodern critiques as shields against totalitarianism: if all points of view are necessarily partial, are constructed by human beings rather than by extra-human forces like God or Nature or Science or Culture, then all are ultimately open-ended and subject to critique, deconstruction and reconstruction. In an increasingly multicultural world, postmodernist approaches in anthropology also mitigate against ethnocentrism in their critical stance towards its universalizing tendencies, and the demand that many points of view on a subject be taken into account when ascertaining meaning helps to displace the dominant culture's monopoly on defining meaning for everyone. However, left within an abstract philosophical debate, postmodernism degenerates into a nihilistic, amoral kind of relativism: nobody's wrong if everybody's right.\n\nThat postmodern analyses are particularly difficult to translate into concrete strategy in the courtroom has been the subject of considerable debate among adherents of the critical legal studies movement. I agree with Carlo Ginzburg who argues that: \"There is an element in positivism that must be unequivocally rejected: the tendency to simplify the relationship between evidence and reality and to dismiss cultural mediation between the two.... [However,] Instead of dealing with the evidence as an open window, contemporary skeptics regard it as a wall, which by definition precludes any access to reality. This extreme anti-positivistic attitude, turns out to be a sort of inverted positivism.... Even if we reject positivism, we must still confront ourselves with notions like 'reality,' 'proof,' and 'truth'.... The fashionable injunction to study reality as a text,\" Ginzburg continues, \"should be supplemented by the awareness that no text can be understood without a reference to extratextual realities.\"\n\nBased on a form of \"inverted positivism,\" Robinson and McEachern appear to have concluded that there are no facts worthy of the name that can be told by anyone, except them. This approach leaves Robinson free to pursue theoretical speculation based on outmoded social science, while the Chief Justice is released to pursue his own speculations guided by legal positivism, archaic legal precedents and his own \"common sense\" nurtured by a lifetime's immersion in the \"founding myths of White British Columbians.\" Sheila Robinson's testimony, and Chief Justice McEachern's ruling, exemplify what critics of postmodernism fear most: that the adoption of a postmodern stance will result in the only \"truth\" being the one that power will tell. Robinson's testimony and the Chief Justice's _Reasons for Judgment_ , while claiming modernist and positivist authority, read like exemplaries of a \"postmodern pastiche,\" where the writers seem to have imagined themselves gamblers in a carnival of \"free-floating signifiers,\" where all possibilities are equally valid, where argument need not be grounded or falsifiable, and where the judicial market-place ultimately determines the truth value of any particular statement.\n\nContemporary life is lived within a social world structured by radically unequal, and often unjust, relations of power. There may be many perspectives, many stories, and many truths; but the story chosen and the truth proclaimed by the law has the might of the modern state, and ultimately the force of arms, behind it.\n\n* * *\n\n. Krech 1991; Ray 1991(a); Williams, S. 1988.\n\n. Exhibit 1191-2.\n\n. Transcripts, vol. 289: 21727-21730.\n\n. Coupland 1986: 18.\n\n. Ives 1987\n\n. _Reasons_ 1991: 59-61.\n\n. _Reasons_ 1991: 6.1\n\n. _Reasons_ 1991: 68-72.\n\n. Yet, in her 1983 doctoral dissertation, Robinson criticized two other scholars for using a similar approach, writing: \"...coming to grips with what is and what is not contained in the ethnographic and early historic records is a necessary precondition for further general theoretical investigations. There are already too many statements in Northwest Coast cultural historical research to this effect: When the documents are silent, I have chosen to rely on inference or speculation to provide an analysis that is systematic rather than piecemeal...[Taking these liberties] is, I believe, scientifically justifiable in that it provides hypotheses that can be tested by future documentary and\/or field research.\"\n\n. _Reasons_ 1991: 73.\n\n. Ray 1987: 55, quoted in Reasons 1991: 73.\n\n. _Reasons_ 1991: 73-74.\n\n. _Reasons_ 1991: 43.\n\n. McEachern is referring to the province's argument that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, \"by accepting and using reserves, and by conforming generally with the law of the province, have given up their Aboriginal rights.\"\n\n. Fisher 1992: 44\n\n. Fisher 1992: 44.\n\n. Ibid.,46.\n\n. Ibid., 48.\n\n. Ibid., 54.\n\n. Cruikshank 1992: 39.\n\n. Fortune 1993: 91.\n\n. Ibid., 116.\n\n. Ray 1991(a): 26.\n\n. Fortune 1993: 115.\n\n. Rabinow 1987: 21-24.\n\n. Dews 1987: 15-19.\n\n. Carr 1964.\n\n. Carr 1964: 10, quoted in Fortune 1993: 99.\n\n. Foster 1986; Nicolson 1990; Jameson 1984; Lyotard 1984.\n\n. White 1987: 185-203.\n\n. Fortune, 1993: 102.\n\n. 1993: 102.\n\n. See Rosaldo 1989.\n\n. See Ulin 1984 for an explication of the theory of \"intersubjective validation\" of truth statements.\n\n. See Boyle 1985; Coombes 1989; Cornell 1992; Derrida 1992; Frug 1992.\n\n. See McLaren 1993.\n\n. See, for example, Cornell 1992; Delgado 1988; Gordon 1984).\n\n. Ginzburg 1991: 83-84.\n\n. See Miller 1992\n\n. Callinicos, 1989; Hunt 1986; Pryce 1992; Ross 1988; Scott and Butler (eds.) 1992; Zavardadeh and Morton 1993.\n\n. See Terdiman 1987: \"Unlike literary or philosophical hermeneutics...[the interpretation of texts. ed]...the practice of interpretation of legal texts is theoretically not an end in itself...but...is one way of appropriating the symbolic power which is potentially contained within the text. Control of the legal text is the prize to be won in interpretive struggles. (809).\"\n**P** **ART** **VII:**\n\n**A** **D** **A** **RBITRIUM**\n\n**(A T WILL)**\n**Chapter 20: Moonlighting as an Anthropologist** **and an Historian**\n\n**Drive-by Ethnography**\n\nHaving discredited and erased all dissenting voices, Chief Justice McEachern saw before him a _tabula rasa_ that mirrored law's image of _terra nullius_. He proceeded to write his own ethnography of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and his own history of British Columbia, on the blank pages he had created for this purpose.\n\nDespite his apparent contempt for anthropological research methods, the Chief Justice took the opportunity to conduct an ethnographic excursion of his own, described by anthropologist Noel Dyck as an exercise in \"drive-by ethnography.\" McEachern began with a stereotypical assertion of anthropological authority. He claimed for himself the unique expertise only achieved by personally experiencing fieldwork:\n\nBefore I describe the magnificent country we viewed, I wish to say that no one can gain a proper appreciation of the overwhelming vastness and isolation of this magnificent but almost empty territory without spending at least the amount of time I spent there....\n\nCombining his ethnographer's role with that of an eye-witness, the Chief Justice described a three-day trip during which he was \"able to see about two-thirds of the territory\":\n\nI visited many parts of the territory...during a 3-day helicopter and highway 'view' in June 1988.... I also took many automobile trips into the territory during many of the evenings of the nearly 50 days I sat in Smithers. These explorations were for the purpose of familiarizing myself, as best I could, with this beautiful, vast and almost empty part of the Province.\n\nI took the first six weeks of evidence in May-June 1987 at Smithers, a community situated in the Bulkley Valley in approximately the centre of the territory. Smithers is a community of about 7000 persons, mainly of European descent, who have made the Bulkley Valley into a fertile farming and dairy region....\n\n...I usually took advantage of the long spring evenings to visit areas in the territory including several trips to each of Kitwancool, Gitwangaak, Kitsegukla, Kispiox, the Hazeltons and Houston, plus evening trips by private logging roads to Smithers Landing on Babine Lake, Fulton and Topley Landing, and a single trip to Burns Lake. In this way I gained a good appreciation of the Bulkley and Skeena River corridors and their villages where at least 90% of the residents of the area, including most of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, make their homes....\n\nI was taken to and shown many of the remote northerly and southerly portions of the territory. On June 6th we visited the northern territories claimed by the Gitksan people and Mr. Neil Sterritt, a Gitksan Hereditary Chief, provided us with a running commentary on the important landmarks. On June 7th we visited the areas claimed by the Wet'suwet'en people and Mr. Alfred Joseph, a Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chief, was our principal tour guide.... On June 8, 1988...I motored down the Skeena River from K'san to Kitwanga and beyond where many of the fishing sites I heard about in the evidence were pointed out to me....\n\nI also wish to add that I wish I could have spent more time in the territory but helicopter travel is very expensive and although logging roads are pushing further and further into the territory, they are not always available for private traffic, and exploration by land in such country is a long, slow, tedious and often uncomfortable enterprise....\n\nWe started at Smithers and after a short detour to the west to avoid clouds in the Debenture Park area, we travelled north about 10 miles east of the westerly external boundary of the territory...to Kotine Mountain, where we stopped near its peak in a driving rainstorm to make observations of the Babine Range to the south-east and other landmarks of interest....\n\nAllan McEachern's personal account was written in a style characteristic of explorers' journals and Victorian travelogues:\n\nWe continued westerly along the Skeena. On this leg of our voyage of exploration we passed but did not stop at the ancient but now totally deserted village of Gitengas where there are no buildings still standing. We then left the Skeena and went north up the Slamgeesh River where we stopped for lunch at a point on the old Telegraph Trail where Chief William Backwater was born and grew up. There are no residents there now and only a few grave buildings and one small, totally uninhabitable building remains....\n\nWe then flew south to rejoin the Skeena.... We then flew a short distance east and then swung south down Shedin Creek to the confluence of the Babine and Skeena Rivers, which is the site of the ancient village of Kisgegas, which was once the largest of the Skeena villages. It is a large cleared area with the remains of a number of buildings including an almost fallen-down church built around 1930 but all the residents have left here although there are a few cabins on the other side of the river which I understand are occupied for part of the year by Joshua McLean. Access to Kisgegas is now possible by logging road from Kispiox but, except for the fish runs in the summer, the village has been largely empty since the 1940s... When we reached the native village of Kitsequecla we stopped for fuel. We then proceeded south-east up the Kitsequecla River until we re-entered the rich Bulkley Valley on the south side of mighty Hudson Bay Mountain where the Bulkley River flows north, but we turned south up the valley to Smithers where we terminated a fascinating voyage of exploration and discovery.\n\n**Civilization by Tautology**\n\nChief Justice McEachern's historical narrative was carefully divided into relevant time periods, and he returned repeatedly throughout his _Reasons for Judgment_ to differentiate between them and to mark their legal significance:\n\nThe difference between the pre-historic, proto- and historic periods is relevant to the question of determining what are aboriginal as opposed to non-aboriginal practices. I find that the aboriginal practices of the plaintiffs' ancestors were, first residence, and secondly subsistence\u2014the gathering of the products of the lands and waters of the territory for that purpose and also for ceremonial purposes. These both predated the historical period for a long, long time, and continue into the historic period (with new techniques) up to the time of sovereignty and since that time but with decreasing frequency.\n\nI find that the plaintiff's ancestors probably lived an aboriginal lifestyle mainly in the vicinity of their villages and during travel between their villages and this continued until sovereignty.... While there is no doubt the Indians harvested their subsistence requirements from parts of the territory, it is impossible to conclude from the evidence that these...activities...were anything more than common sense subsistence practices, and are entirely compatible with bare occupation for the purposes of subsistence. The evidence does not establish either a policy for management of the territory or concerted communal onservation.\n\nThe testimony of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Chiefs, and their expert witnesses in anthropology, archaeology, history, and ecology had been replete with such evidence. However, like Sheila Robinson, Chief Justice McEachern dismissed this research, and claimed that there is no reliable knowledge on the subject. He then ventured boldly into theoretical speculation to substantiate his position:\n\n...it is likely, in my view, that the Indians in those early times would have searched for food and other products in the vicinity of their villages. There was no need for them to go very far for such purposes, and I know of no reason to suppose they did. It is likely that they visited, or made war with each other or with other peoples, using both the trails shown in some of the sketches adduced at trial, and by way of the great rivers both in summer and winter although there is little evidence they possessed boats. They must have had a way to cross rivers which would have been a formidable undertaking. I am sure they used some of the frozen rivers as cold weather sidewalks.\n\nCreating fact from fictions of his own making, the judge then continued his speculation by determining a specific distance that people may have travelled from their villages:\n\nIt seems likely these early aboriginals would also have used the lands alongside the great rivers, between their villages, for aboriginal purposes. I do not question that some of these ancestors may well have lived and survived considerable distances from the villages and great rivers but they would be hardy, generational recluses whose personal preference to absent themselves from villages even for their lifetimes would not create aboriginal rights based upon indefinite, long time use. Having regard to the difficulties of pre-contact travel in the territory it might be argued (I do not believe it was), that both the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en would not have used lands and waters any great distance from their villages. Perhaps an area of 20 or 25 miles around their principal villages would be appropriate.... On the other hand, a hunter in reasonable country could comfortably walk 20 or 25 miles in a day....\n\nIn some passages of his text, Chief Justice McEachern appeared to struggle with a desire to understand the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en \"on their own terms.\" He acknowledged, for example, that they continue to have attachments to their lands, even when they are not using them for \"aboriginal purposes\":\n\nI do not think I should be quick to treat aboriginal use as abandoned, but common sense dictates that abandoned rights are no longer valid and land must be used or lost. While recognizing that a right which is not used can be treated as abandoned, the law does not like the principle because it lacks certainty. It also requires the Court to look objectively at what may well be a subjective state of mind...I do not think I can safely conclude that the intention to use these lands for aboriginal purposes has been abandoned even though many Indians have not used them for many years.\n\nChief Justice McEachern did not, however, struggle with any questions concerning his definition of what an \"aboriginal life,\" or \"aboriginal purposes\" might be. Nor, of course, did he question his right, or his power, to define: The evidence satisfies me that most Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people do not now live an aboriginal life. They have been gradually moving away from it since contact....\n\n**Reasons to Travel**\n\nMoving on to the protohistoric era, the Chief Justice upheld the Crown's and Sheila Robinson's analysis of this period as the one during which the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en ceased to live a \"truly aboriginal life\" by virtue of the fact that a few European trade goods had filtered into their territories through trade with their Coast Tsimshian neighbours.\n\nIt is not possible to speak with much confidence about the commencement of the protohistoric period in the territory but some historical facts are known which at least permit informed estimates....\n\nDoing the best I can, it appears to me that after a period of unknown duration prior to about 1700...major population destabilization began to occur at the coast which probably spread to the interior; warfare became common, if it had not always been present; and within about 10 years of Cook's arrival at Nootka and his discovery of the potential for an ocean fur trade in 1778...a cruel sea otter trade started in the north Pacific in the 1780s with British, American, Russian and possibly other nationals almost extinguishing the sea otter until this trade fell into a sharp decline because of over-hunting just after the turn of the century. This made it necessary for traders to find other kinds of furs, and the interior fur trade was their natural response....\n\nBy the early 1800's, Russian traders had established an outpost at Sitka, and the Tsimshian and Carriers had established trade networks with the Gitksan in the north and with the Bella Coola people in the south. The Gitksan became middlemen for the Tsimshian traders.... I doubt if the commencement of European influence in the territory was earlier than Cook's landfall in 1778 and it was more probably around or after the turn of the century. There may have been isolated intrusions of trade goods from unknown directions at a slightly earlier period but not in any significant quantity.... I also doubt if commercial trapping started in the territory before 1805 or 1806 and probably a few years later than that. Then with the introduction of metal or mechanical traps and a market for excess furs, I believe some of the ancestors of the plaintiffs found it advantageous to spread out from their villages into distant territories for the purpose of commercial trapping.\n\nThe judge reiterated in very clear terms, throughout his _Reasons for Judgment_ , his support for the Crown's position that Aboriginal rights are \"frozen\" rights: arrested at the moment of contact with Europeans, and sealed in time capsules:\n\nWhile the Supreme Court of Canada will ultimately be called upon finally to settle this important question, I am not able to avoid expressing an early judicial opinion. In my view the purpose of aboriginal rights was to sustain existence in an aboriginal society, that is to hunt and fish and collect the products of the land and waters for the survival of the communal group...land-based commercial enterprise cannot be regarded as an aboriginal right. Notwithstanding the complexity of mixed land use in the province, I think aboriginal rights, to the extent recognized by law, have always been sustenance user rights practised for a very long time in a specific territory. These rights do not include commercial activities, even those related to land or water resource gathering, except in compliance with the general law of the province.\n\nAccording to Chief Justice McEachern's frozen rights theory, the only practices that may be recognized by section 35(1) of the _Constitution Act 1982_ as eligible for constitutional protection as \"Aboriginal rights\" should be those that can be identified as activities that the Aboriginal litigants' ancestors carried out before Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, and are still carrying out to-day. The judge agreed that the use of modern technology\u2014like guns for hunting\u2014should not disqualify a practice from classification as an \"Aboriginal right.\" The defining characteristic that differentiated, for example, an \"aboriginal\" hunting practice from a \"non-aboriginal hunting practice,\" was neither the intention of the hunter, nor the technology used, nor the species of prey. Rather, the law took a post-mortem approach and decreed that the final destination of the hunted animal's carcass and remains would define its legal status, retrospectively. If a hunter exchanged her or his catch with another Aboriginal person for another product of the land, then the previous act of hunting would be posthumously classified as the practice of an \"aboriginal right.\" If, on the other hand, the same hunter exchanged the same carcass with an Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal person for either a commodity of European manufacture, or cash, then the result would be that, consciously or intentionally or not, the Aboriginal hunter would be deemed to have been engaging in \"non-Aboriginal practices.\"\n\nGiven the tautological nature of the judge's reasoning, the important legal findings that were based on interpretations of actual events that may have occurred during the protohistoric period did not require empirical support. Since he had determined that \"aboriginal practices\" in relation to land and resources were only those that were engaged in prior to the arrival of Europeans, it followed inevitably that trapping in conjunction with the European-Aboriginal fur trade must have been a \"non-aboriginal\" practice by definition. What actually happened \"on the ground\" is irrelevant within this framework in which the answers are pre-determined by the premises of the questions:\n\nIn my view, commercial trapping was not an aboriginal practice prior to contact with European influences and it did not become an aboriginal practice after that time even if lands habitually used for aboriginal purposes were also used for commercial trapping after contact.... With regard to new lands used after contact for commercial trapping, particularly in the far North and south extremities of the territory, it is my view that such would not be an aboriginal use and those new lands would not be aboriginal lands even if they were also used for sustenance after contact. This is because, firstly, commercial trapping is not an aboriginal practice, and secondly because the use of these new lands, even partly for aboriginal purposes under European influences after contact, does not constitute the kind of indefinite long time use which is required for aboriginal rights....\n\nApart from this, and the gradual accommodation of Indians to European trade goods and civilization (which did not change the nature of aboriginal activities), I doubt whether anything relevant to this action occurred in the territory between early European influences and the assertion of British sovereignty whenever that may have been.\n\nAlthough his ruling on the legitimacy of British sovereignty and the extinguishment of Aboriginal title precluded consideration of any Aboriginal rights whatsoever, in a number of places in the _Reasons for Judgment_ the Chief Justice stressed his concurrence with the provincial Crown's argument that the only lands \"used and occupied\" by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en with any regularity were the village sites on the major salmon-producing rivers, pieces of which became federally administered Indian reserves. The judge went to great lengths to argue that the provincial crown lands between villages that include miles of valuable timber, and are currently leased to giant forest companies, could not possibly be subject to any Aboriginal claim:\n\nI believe some Gitksan moved into these areas...[outside the major villages] after the start of the fur trade, or later...[and] particularly in the last 150 years when there was a reason to be there....\n\nAllan McEachern relied on the Crown's \"social theory\" of simplistic economic determinism to reiterate over and over again that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had \"no reason to travel\" to these parts of their territories before becoming involved in the European-Aboriginal fur trade, trapping for which, the Judge decreed, was a \"non-Aboriginal\" and an \"economic\" practice. Chief Justice McEachern's rulings depended on the validity of his foundational assumption that repeats the Crown's argument: the only \"reason\" for people to travel into their territories was for \"economic\" purposes. And, \"economic\" activities are defined as only those that were engaged in as part of the European-Aboriginal fur trade:\n\nThere was no reason for them to travel other than between the villages or far from the great rivers for these or other aboriginal purposes, or to take more animals than were needed for subsistence although it is also reasonable to assume they would have travelled as far as was necessary for such purposes....\n\nThere was little reason for the Gitksan to stray far from their villages...except to visit other villages and for journeys along the grease trail...to get oolichan oil.... Similarly, there was little reason for the Wet'suwet'en to stray far from their canyon fisheries at Hagwilget.... There was, in fact, little reason for the Wet'suwet'en to have lived far from the Bulkley villages with which they all seemed to have connections.... There was no reason, until the fur trade, for these people to have any boundaries....\n\nThe question of boundaries elicited a ruling by the Chief Justice that expressed the double-bind nature of legal reasoning on Aboriginal matters. First he confessed that the irregular shape of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs' territories led him to think they were gerrymandered. But, he reflected, gerrymandering requires rational intent to deceive, an intellectual capacity only acquired through evolutionary development and the achievement of civilization. The judge thought such calculated, \"rational\" duplicity uncharacteristic of Aboriginal societies:\n\nThe unusual shape of some of the territories leads me to doubt their authenticity.... They and many others appear to be excessively gerrymandered or artificial which seems inappropriate for an aboriginal society.... Further, I am troubled by the fact that so many chiefs claim so many different, widely scattered territories....\n\nMomentarily adopting a culturally relativistic view, the Chief Justice allowed that what _he_ might see as _duplicity_ , might _really_ be a feature of Aboriginal culture:\n\nIt would not be fair for me to conclude that the above is inconsistent with Indian custom or practice for there is no evidence to that effect, and I must not see with uncultured eyes what may not be there. Viewed with judicial eyes, however, these considerations alert me to be cautious....\n\nIn the end, regardless of evidence viewed by cultured or uncultured eyes, the legal point was made:\n\nIt is unlikely that the plaintiffs' ancestors, prior to the fur trade, would occupy territories so far from the villages, particularly in fierce Canadian winters.\n\nAccompanying the arrival of William Brown in 1822, who brought history with him, the stereotypical image of the \"lazy Indian\" made its first appearance in the Chief Justice's narrative:\n\nThus, it would seem that the time of direct contact in the territory was not earlier than the early 1820's which is a reasonable date to select as the end of the protohistorical period.\n\nIn 1822...William Brown of the Hudson's Bay Company\u2014one of our most useful historians\u2014established Fort Kilmaurs on Babine Lake.... Brown reports some minimal levels of social organization but the primitive condition of the natives described by early observers was not impressive.... By the time trader Brown arrived...the coastal sea otter trade was finished but the taste for trade made new initiatives necessary.... Throughout his Journals Brown frequently recognized that he was having great difficulty competing with the traders from the coast, and that beaver returns were never what he hoped they would be. He had great difficulty getting the Indians in his area to be as industrious in their trapping as he wished they would be.\n\n**Legal Rights and Social Wrongs**\n\nIn his description of the early colonial period in British Columbia, the Chief Justice reiterates all the key points made in the Crown's legal argument:\n\nIt seems indisputable that the historic period began in the territory with the establishment of Fort Kilmaurs on Babine Lake by Trader Brown in 1822.\n\nNothing of much political importance occurred in what is now the province for some time following the voyages of Cook, Vancouver, Dixon, Barkley and others. The Hudson's Bay Company was headquartered near the mouth of the Columbia River where James Douglas had been its Chief Factor since 1839.... In 1849 the Company was given a 5-year monopoly on the fur trade on Vancouver Island on the understanding that it would foster the settlement of the Island leading to the establishment of a colony.... Douglas remained as Chief Factor for the Company and in that capacity he negotiated 11 of a total of 14 treaties with Indians on Vancouver Island, mainly in the vicinity of what is now the City of Victoria. No treaties were ever negotiated on the mainland. Douglas became Governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1851.... An Act of the Imperial Parliament dated August 2, 1858 provided for the Government of the Colony of British Columbia which was proclaimed November 19, 1858.\n\nThe Chief Justice began to stress the participation of Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en in the Euro-Canadian controlled economy when he came to describe mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia. This focus supported the Crown's \"assimilation\" and \"implicit extinguishment\" arguments:\n\nAs early as the 1850s The Gitksan, who had not previously seen a horse, quickly became adept at packing for the construction of the Collins Overland Telegraph, for the Yukon Telegraph, for the Omineca and Cassiar Gold Rushes, and for the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad in the first decade of this century. At the same time, the Indians increasingly participated in commercial fishing at the coast, and in the logging and lumbering industries which became the economic mainstays of the region.\n\nThe Chief Justice was unequivocal in his assessment of the legal importance of the Douglas Treaties:\n\nAs James Douglas was a principal actor in setting the stage for much of the misunderstanding about Indian rights which later developed, it will be useful to mention that his policy for the mainland, as described in several pronouncements and correspondence with the Colonial Office in London, was that the colony would be opened up for settlement quickly so as to establish a British as opposed to an American community here.... It seems to be accepted by scholars that concern about American influences, mainly miners and Mormons, was indeed the principal reason for the establishment of a mainland colony.... Unlike the American experience where Indians were being confined by force to reserves, Indians in the Colony were entitled to the free use of all unoccupied lands.\n\nThe plaintiffs argue that the willingness of the Crown, the Hudson's Bay Company, Governor Douglas, and the Legislative Assembly of Vancouver Island to purchase aboriginal lands or interests is evidence of the existence of Indian ownership of the entire province.... With respect, I think too much has been made of these treaties as there is no clear understanding of what was involved, and the reasons which motivated the parties to act as they did. The Hudson's Bay Company apparently decided to acquire aboriginal interests in land in which it was interested, and obtained such land for a few blankets. The Vancouver Island treaties may represent no more than the surrender of the Indians of whatever rights they had in exchange for the modest consideration they received together with the substitution of a treaty right to continue to use the land. It cannot be inferred that the Indians owned the land or that the Crown was obliged by law to enter into these or further treaties.... It is not clear whether the acquired lands included village sites, or cultivated fields or surrounding hunting grounds....\n\nThis is all so uncertain and equivocal that I am unable to attach any legal consequences to these treaties.... I am more impressed by the unequivocal fact that the Crown, while recognizing aboriginal possession of village sites, was both setting aside reserves and marketing the unoccupied balance of the colony.\n\n...It would certainly have come as a surprise to Governor Douglas and his colleagues, and to the Colonial Secretaries and the Imperial Privy Councillors if it had been suggested to them that the consent of the Indianswas required before the settlement of any part of the colony could be undertaken....\n\nThe Chief Justice acknowledged that Aboriginal people may not have been treated _justly_ , but he was certain they had been treated _legally_ ; and the good intentions of the colonial officials were never in doubt:\n\nIt would not be accurate to assume the colonial officials, or their masters in London, chose wilfully to ignore aboriginal interests...their intention was to allot generous reserves, and to satisfy the requirements of the Indians in that way...it is obvious none of these colonial officers believed the settlement of the colony depended in any way upon Indian consent.... While the foregoing describes the state of mind of colonial officials at the start of the colonial period, the social disadvantage of the Indians was ongoing and largely but not entirely unrecognized. For this reason it is difficult, but necessary, to keep the difference between legal rights and social wrongs very much in mind.\n\nThe Chief Justice stressed, in a number of places in his _Reasons for Judgment,_ that Aboriginal people had been permitted, for a short time, to pre-empt land on the same terms and conditions as settlers:\n\nDouglas retired in 1864, and was replaced by Joseph Trutch. In 1866 the two colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia were amalgamated into the Colony of British Columbia.... Until 1866 Indians had equal rights to pre-empt land for cultivation in the same way as all other subjects of the Crown.... Trutch revoked this, prohibiting Aboriginal pre-emption of land without special permission. The historical explanation for this is that speculators were unfairly accumulating land pre-empted by Indians.... This provision remained in the law until 1953. This, of course, marked an unfortunate departure from the policy established by Governor Douglas, which had contemplated Indians having the same rights and privileges, except for their protected reserves, as everyone else.\n\nIn his account of the colonial period, the Chief Justice reiterates his theory that essential \"cultural differences\" are the cause of conflicts between First Nations and colonial governments:\n\nNotwithstanding the policy enunciated by Governor Douglas, the anticipated equality of life and opportunity with the white community quickly turned (even before Confederation) into the same depressing, continuing and paternalistic inequality experienced in most areas of North America. The prohibition of Indian pre-emption of land is but one example, but possibly not a significant one because they probably would have sought only infrequently to obtain land in this way. Also, I doubt if they would have long retained any land they might have obtained by pre-emption because their culture had not prepared them for the disciplined life of a tax paying agriculturist.... This undoubtedly illustrates the difficulties then encountered, (and which continue), in accommodating the two cultures.\n\nMcEachern concluded that, in the long run, Aboriginal people were responsible for their own problems, having failed to take advantage of the opportunities made available to them:\n\nAlthough Governor Douglas intended the Indians would be treated equally with white settlers, it did not work out that way. Indian reserves were established in or near the settled areas, and the Indians had free access to all unoccupied Crown lands instead of being confined to reserves. Otherwise, the Indians were, as later stated by Trutch, more or less left alone. Being reticent people, and benefiting in some respects from the industry and trade goods of the settlers, they often did not object to the inroads made into the geography of the Colony.... In fact, white and immigrant populations in the province grew from the 5000 mentioned by Governor Douglas in 1859 to perhaps 12,000 at the time of Confederation, while the Indian population probably remained more or less the same, estimated from 25,000 to 40,000 with the great majority of them on or near the coast living off the sea, rivers and land to which they had free access. They were often thought not to have any need for reserves much larger than their village sites.\n\nIt is...regrettable that the Indians themselves did not take more effective steps to secure larger reserves if they really wished to have larger tracts of land allotted to them.\n\nChief Justice McEachern described the federal-provincial dispute about British Columbia Indian policy at the time of Confederation as a difference of opinion about \"theories of history\":\n\nGenerally speaking, Canada at this time was negotiating treaties with nomadic or semi-nomadic Indians on the prairies which included the surrender of aboriginal 'title,' the payment of annuities or other payments, and Indian Reserves comprising hundreds and thousands of acres. Canada originally believed the same procedure should be followed in British Columbia. The province, on the other hand, believed Canada's position was unrealistic, and that its own policy...was entirely adequate given the different history and geographic circumstances of the province.... It is apparent that a theory of history was operating at this time to create a mind-set in the Government of Canada which was, to say the least, different from what some colonial officials in British Columbia then believed about Indian interests. Neither was entirely consistent and neither was necessarily right or wrong.\n\n**Communicating Deeds and Legislating Greed**\n\nBy the late nineteenth century, according to the Chief Justice's historical narrative, First Nations had become insatiable and unreasonable in their demands. And, problems of cross-cultural communication worsened:\n\nIn August 1887 Commissioner O'Reilly of the Indian Reserve Commission went to the north-west coast and met with Indians at various locations.... His notes make fascinating reading, particularly his repeated request to the Indians to let him know what lands they wished; but generally the story was the same. The Indians claimed either huge reserves and payment for all lands outside their reserves, or just the former, and declined to participate in the process if they did not receive a favourable response. Mr. O'Reilly repeatedly urged the Indians to tell him what they required in the way of land, forestry resources and fishing stations, but often to no avail. As is so often the case...the two cultures do not always communicate well with each other.\n\nThe judge took exception to allegations that Joseph Trutch had intentionally deceived the federal government. He defended the actions of the provincial politicians:\n\nIn their argument plaintiff's counsel make serious allegations against many Colonial officials including Trutch, Robson, Crease and Governor Musgrave. They allege Trutch 'purposely lied' in the discussions on Confederation and that he participated in a scheme of misinformation which led to the 'impoverishment of the people.' Counsel allege a 'perversion of history'.... The evidence does not prove that Trutch himself was not convinced that the Indian policy of the province was anything but in the best interests of both the Indians and the white settlers, but it does suggest that he was not anxious to have the details of that policy known to the dominion authorities...the evidence about the character of Trutch is equivocal and, there being no need to do so, I think it best not to enter into that controversy. Such matters are better left to historians.\n\nIn the context of the consequences of colonial policy for Aboriginal peoples, Chief Justice McEachern was uncharacteristically reluctant to reason from results to causes:\n\nHowever much one may regret the failure of the colonists to recognize or react to the differences between the two communities, the legal consequences arising from the rights of the parties must be determined objectively from the constitutional and legal measures taken in that period rather than from social and economic failures.\n\nRather, he argued, let sleeping dogs lie:\n\nUndoubtedly there was a measure not of assimilation, but rather of conformity on the part of many Indians with the growing white population. This was particularly evident in the larger centres such as Victoria and New Westminster and in the various mining camps throughout the limited areas affected by mining activity or settlement. Even in the territory the Indians were understandably taking whatever advantage they could of the white economy, particularly by utilizing its market for their furs and by working for wages. It is impossible to say if they were better or worse off as result of these changes. I suspect they would hardly be aware of the policies described by Trutch..\n\nFor reasons which seemed sufficient at the time, but which have caused great resentment, the federal government made the Indian potlatch illegal in 1884....\n\nBy to-day's morality, the foregoing will be regarded by many as an attempt to destroy Indian culture and identity. By the standard of the day, compared with the rest of the world, it was probably enlightened. I need not pronounce on that question....\n\nThe Chief Justice reiterated his view that historic truth could never really be known, and repeated his lamentation about cross-cultural misunderstanding and the failure of Indians to help themselves. And, while having rejected the value of anthropology in settling legal disputes, McEachern suggested that the discipline might be more useful in explaining other problems:\n\nFor reasons which can only be answered by anthropology, if at all, the Indians of the colony, while accepting many of the advantages of European civilization, did not prosper proportionately with the white community as expected. No one can speak with much certainty or confidence about what really went wrong in the relations between the Indians and the colonists...In my view the Indians' lack of cultural preparation for the new regime was indeed the probable cause of the debilitating dependence from which few Indians in North America have yet escaped.\n\nIt would be overly simplistic, and probably inaccurate, to say that the white settlers were either too kind or too cruel, and that the Indians should either have been given more support, and the dependence increased, or no support at all so that a dependence would not have arisen. So long as Indians had access to white communities there was bound to be a mixing of incompatible cultures. Being of a culture where everyone looked after himself or perished, the Indians knew how to survive (in most years). But they were not as industrious in the new economic climate as was thought to be necessary by the newcomers in the Colony. In addition, the Indians were a greatly weakened people by reason of foreign diseases which took a fearful toll, and by the ravages of alcohol. They became a conquered people, not by force of arms, for that was not necessary, but by an invading culture and a relentless energy with which they would not, or could not compete....\n\nMany have said with some truth, but not much understanding, that the Indians did not do as much for themselves a they might have done. For their part, the Indians probably did not understand what was happening to them.\n\nAlthough there is much, the Chief Justice claimed, that cannot be known with any certainty about the colonial period, he was confident about at least one thing:\n\nThis mutual solitude of misunderstanding became, and remains, a dreadful problem for them and for everyone. What seems clear, however, is that the source of Indian difficulty was not the loss of land for aboriginal purposes. So far as the evidence shows, they were largely left in their villages and an aboriginal life was available to them for a long time after the 'Indian problem' was identified....\n\nIf the settlers could be faulted for anything, it might be for poor time management practices. The Chief Justice wrote that they were busy, and failed to make time to cultivate more benevolence:\n\nPreoccupied with the business of getting a new colony started, and of scratching out a hard life in a hard land, the new white settlers, and particularly their leaders, did not pay sufficient attention to the real and potential sociological, cultural, and economic difficulties the Indians were experiencing. They became a problem seen through European eyes to be dealt with bureaucratically\u2014an Ordinance here, a dollar there, and tragedy almost everywhere. I suspect the white community understood what was happening to the Indians but did not have the resources, or the knowledge, to respond appropriately....\n\nEven to-day, it is difficult to say what should have been done short of abandoning the settlement of the colony.... Even a division of the colony between settlers and Indians was not possible for there was no part of the colony where Indians did not have a presence. Much larger reserves may have helped, but probably not without segregation which would have been severely criticized on other grounds. As in so many other parts of the world, the seeds of present difficulties were sown, not intentionally I am sure, but by mixing two cultures, and by indifference, during the colonial period.\n\n**Driven to Drink...**\n\nAs he began to describe the early years of the twentieth century, Chief Justice McEachern concentrated on how the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had voluntarily acquiesced to Euro-Canadian political and economic domination, and how eagerly\u2014if imperfectly\u2014they had tried to assimilate:\n\nDisease and other misfortune arrived in the territory 70 years or so before the settlers or the railway.... The evidence suggests the land was seldom able to provide the Indians with anything more than a primitive existence.... There was no massive physical interference with Indian access to non-reserve land sustenance in the territory, and there was no forced or encouraged migration away from the land towards the villages. Migration away from the land has been an Indian initiative and it started before there was any substantial settlement in the territory.\n\nAt this point in his narrative he introduced a still familiar theme in contemporary analyses of Aboriginal communities where questions are framed as debates about what single causal factor best explains wide-spread poor health, demoralization and alcohol abuse among Aboriginal people. This is, of course, a very contentious political question and arguments abound about whether \"alcoholism\" is a medical disease or a social problem. Most contemporary health care professionals in the field recognize the complexity of this issue, and focus on seeking ways of healing, rather than pursuing the futile task of seeking to assign blame simplistically. In a legalistic ideology, \"cause\" and \"liability\" are frequently conflated and substituted for understanding and responsibility:\n\nThe introduction of alcohol, disastrous epidemics and limited economic opportunities did not result from a lack of access to land.... This is not to say that European influences upon Indian life were not pervasive, but when I consider the effects of disease, alcohol and other social insults upon the Indian community, it is apparent that interference with aboriginal use of land, except for actual dispossessions, was not a principal cause of Indian misfortune.\n\nAnd, again, in the final analysis, Chief Justice McEachern determined that Aboriginal people are to blame for having become \"dependent\" upon Euro-Canadians. Further assistance would only exacerbate the situation now:\n\nSettlement, which did not begin in the territory until the beginning of this century, was initially confined to the Bulkley and Kispiox valleys where land cultivation had not been pursued vigorously by many Indians...yet there were some dispossessions and almost from the beginning of the colony, and from the time of settlement in the territory, it must have been obvious that the Indian population was falling into disadvantage when compared with the then white non-Indian community. The condition of the Indians in the territory throughout the entire history of their association with the European settlers has been an unhappy one with alcohol abuse, disease, infant mortality, poverty, and a lack of many of the benefits of civilization, particularly health, education and economic opportunities, and the ubiquitous dependence being usually the most serious social problems....\n\nThey cannot be helped, but must help themselves.\n\nCompliance with Euro-Canadian law, according to the judge, was evidence of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en having implicitly acquiesced in the extinguishment of their Aboriginal title:\n\nThe first farmers moved into the area around 1900 and there was much resentment, which continues to this day, about pre-emption of land occupied by Indians and over the issue of land script for veterans of the Boer War.... The construction of the Grand Truck Pacific Railroad from 1908 to 1914 provided some employment for the Indians, but also opened up this inviting country to further settlers. When there were disputes with settlers or governments...the Indians often accepted solutions which denied aboriginal ownership....\n\nResistance to Euro-Canadian law, according to the judge, was evidence of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en having implicitly acquiesced in the extinguishment of their Aboriginal title:\n\nIn the meantime the dispute about Indian rights continued to simmer. The federal government was anxious to resolve the 'rights' issue but the province was adamant that no such rights existed except claims to village sites and cultivated fields. As a result a Royal Commission known as the McKenna-McBride Commission was established in 1913 to adjust Indian reserves in the province. In order to deal with reserves, the representative of the federal government, McKenna, agreed to 'drop' the question of title, believing that the Courts...would settle the rights problem in due course. Unfortunately, it never did. The commissioners unquestionably gave assurances to the Indians in the territory that the reserve adjustment process in which they were engaged could not deal with aboriginal rights or prejudice their claims which, the commissioners said, would be looked after by other means, more particularly the proposed reference to the Exchequer Court.\n\nIn 1927 a Special Joint Committee of the House of Commons and Senate inquired into 'Indian affairs' and rejected all the claims of the Indians of British Columbia to anything except the reserves which had been allotted to them.\n\n**Infantile Disorders**\n\n_I do not consider it necessary to mention anything else which occurred between 1927 and the commencement of this action in 1984._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Allan McEachern, 1991, _Reasons for Judgment, Delgamuukw v. R._\n\nLike a toddler who cannot understand why, when she closes her eyes, everyone else can still see her, Chief Justice McEachern seemed to mistake the law for reality in this statement. He did, however, go on to comment extensively on events that occurred between 1927 and 1984.\n\nReasoning backwards from the present to the past, the Chief Justice made the somewhat alarming claim that the observations he made in 1987 allowed him to simultaneously view what was happening in the territory hundreds of years ago:\n\nIf the land is substantially empty now, as I believe it is except for non aboriginal purposes such as commercial trapping, mining or logging, then I believe it was also empty for aboriginal purposes at the time of contact.... As it is empty now, it was probably empty both at the time of contact and, except possibly for some limited commercial trapping, at the time of sovereignty.\n\nJust as the Judge had observed the \"vast emptiness\" of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en territories, so too had other non-Aboriginal eye-witnesses seen an unoccupied land stretching before them:\n\nIn this century, long time settlers such as Mr. Shelford were, until very recently, unaware of any claim to aboriginal ownership or control of the territory or of any claim to an interest inconsistent with the activities of himself and other white settlers.... Mr. Shelford...has been living near the west end of Francois Lake since the 1920's. Much of this area is known as the Shelford Hills. He did not know until recently that the few Indians in his neighbourhood, with whom he was always on friendly terms, claimed to be the owners of both his trapline as well as their own and all the other lands in the area. This seriously questions the existence of an undisputed, settled reputation sufficient to found a declaration of any kind of interest in land...it is impossible to infer a community reputation for an interest in land when a prominent, life long resident in the area like Mr. Shelford, a Member of the Legislature for many years, and a Cabinet Minister for a time, who acknowledges hearing about general land claims for a long time, has never heard until very recently of claims of ownership or jurisdiction, or claims to specific lands, including his own, by Chiefs whose families he has known personally for most of his life.\n\nThe Chief Justice considered the possibility that, actually, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en didn't even really understand their own claims:\n\nIt seems to me that there has always been much uncertainty about the true nature of 'Indian title' in the province. Even some Indians have not always been completely consistent because there are references in the historical record to suggestions that enlarged reserves were their primary concern. In this respect, of course, the speakers, whoever they may have been, did not speak for anyone but themselves.\n\nAlthough he admitted they have taken a consistent position on the subject for at least 100 years:\n\nI think it is fair to conclude that the basic position of most Indians, at least since 1880, was that the various Indian tribes or peoples owned all or most of the province.... It is not difficult to summarize the position of the province. Since Confederation, the position of the province has been consistent, even unyielding, on the question of 'Indian title'....\n\nUnlike legal decisions that become more true with each utterance, the Chief Justice concluded that, because Aboriginal people have consistently taken every opportunity to assert their Aboriginal title, and their argument has not changed since contact, and because they have discussed their case for over a century, their claim has ceased to be based on \"objective evidence.\" Its validity has been _weakened_ by time and repetition. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, it would seem, are not blessed\u2014as are Judge McEachern and Mr. Shelford\u2014 with the ability to see the past in the present:\n\nWhat happened is that, beginning in 1973, following the _Calder_ case, the plaintiffs began thinking about their boundaries.... During this process, there has been much discussion within the Indian communities about the collection of this information for land claim purposes. This deprives the process of the objectivity which would have added confidence to it.... The plaintiffs and their ancestors have been actively discussing land claims for many years, long before the McKenna-McBride Commission in 1914. This has been a very current issue with the plaintiffs for a very long time. The collection of evidence in such a climate deprives it of the independence and objectivity expected for reputation evidence. I find that, except for occasional political statements, the plaintiffs in the post sovereignty period seldom conducted themselves as if they believed they were owners of such vast areas.\n\n**Camp Potlatch**\n\nChief Justice McEachern repeated his opinion that cultural assimilation and economic integration were the answers to \"the Indian problem\" in a variety of passages in his _Reasons for Judgment_. However, the judge also ruled in favour of the Crown's position that nothing resembling an \"economy\" existed before European colonization, therefore Aboriginal people could not, by definition, engage in \"economic\" activities. If they did, they were, _ipso facto_ , engaging in \"non-Aboriginal\" practices. Just as trading with the Hudson's Bay Company had brought an end to their historic identity as Aboriginal peoples, so too the judge interpreted participation in the Euro-Canadian controlled-economy as evidence that cast doubt on the legitimacy of contemporary Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en claims to \"Aboriginal\" rights:\n\nWitness after witness admitted participation in the wage or cash economy. Art Matthews Jr., (Tenimyget) for example, is an enthusiastic, weekend aboriginal hunter. But at the time of trial, he was also head saw filer at the Westar sawmill at Gitwangak where he had been steadily employed for 15 years, a graduate of the B.C. Institute of Technology, a shop steward, and a member of the Negotiating Committee of the Industrial Woodworkers of America. Pete Muldoe (Gitludahl) has followed a variety of non-aboriginal vocations including logging on the lands claimed by another chief; Joan Ryan (Hanamuxw) teaches school in Prince Rupert.... Even in their aboriginal pursuits...the plaintiffs do not seem to consider themselves tied to particular territories....\n\nThe judge bemoaned the passing of the \"aboriginal\" way of life of his fantasies:\n\nI have no doubt aboriginal activities have fallen very much into disuse in many areas. This was admitted by several Indian witnesses who observed that many of their young people have very little interest in aboriginal pursuits. Eventually, the Indians must decide how best they can combine the advantages the reserves afford them with the opportunities they have to share and participate in the larger economy, but it is obvious they must make their way off the reserves.... Care must always be taken to ensure that the good things of community life are not sacrificed just on economic grounds.... Without intending any offence, I have driven through some of the reserves which demonstrate disadvantages, and I have witnessed firsthand how some of them live. It is interesting to note that housing on reserves seems to be much better where there is (or was) a payroll such as from the sawmill at Kitwangak.\n\nThe Chief Justice did recommend a way for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal practices to be reconciled:\n\nThe Crown's obligation, in my judgment, is to permit aboriginal people, but subject to the general law of the province, to use any unoccupied or vacant Crown land for subsistence purposes until such time as the land is dedicated to another purpose.... Land that is conveyed away, but later returned to the Crown, becomes again usable by Indians. Crown lands that are leased or licensed, such as for clear-cut logging to use an extreme example, become usable again after logging operations are completed or abandoned.\n\nMcEachern's comments recall a familiar adage, often voiced by actors playing demoralized settlers in old western movies: \"This land ain't good for nothin' no more. Might as well give the country back to the Indians.\" The fact that second-class treatment of Aboriginal peoples is considered justifiable at many levels of Canadian society is not, however, a joke. Neither is there anything funny about the clear-cutting of British Columbia forests, that the law permits.\n\nOn another matter of considerable contemporary political significance, the judge took the time to remind his readers that a disproportionate number of Indian people are, like himself, dependent for their income on the public purse. He urged Aboriginal people to take their citizenship responsibilities more seriously and to be generous and public-spirited:\n\nThe plaintiffs are also troubled because they have not progressed equally with some of the 'newcomers,' and because they have not been able, for many real and intangible reasons, to share the opportunities they think they should have to the commercial use of the land and to the prosperity they think should accrue to them from the land they truly believe is their own.... At the same time, the Indians must realize the importance of creating public wealth from the territory as they, like so many members of the non-Indian community, are heavily dependent upon public funding for every day sustenance....\n\nThe worst thing that has happened to our Indian people was our joint inability to react to failure and to make adjustments when things were not going well...the answer to these social questions, ultimately, will be found in the good health and education of young Indian people, and the removal of the conditions that have made poverty and dependence upon public funding their normal way of life...the difficulties of adapting to changing circumstances, not limited land use, is the principal cause of Indian misfortune....\n\nThe Indians have remained dependent for too long. Even a national annual payment of billions of dollars on Indian problems, which undoubtedly ameliorates some hardship, will not likely break this debilitating cycle of dependence.\n\nThe Chief Justice then turned his attention to the issue of spirituality:\n\nThere is a further dimension to this question, however, which must also be considered. I refer to the obvious spiritual connection some Indians have with the land. I accept this as a real concern to the plaintiffs worthy of as much consideration as actual sustenance use.... Except in rare cases, there should be no difficulty obtaining sufficient fish, game and other products from most areas of the territory...for spiritual purposes.\n\nThe judge continued along this path, noting that, in fact, First Nations people were greatly aided in their spiritual growth by colonization and modern technology:\n\nI believe the Indians of the territory are probably now much more united and cohesive as peoples, and they are more culturally sensitive to their aboriginal birthright than they were when life was so harsh and communication so difficult. I cannot find lack of access to aboriginal land has seriously harmed the identity of these peoples....\n\nIn this respect I pause to mention that the salmon of the great rivers pass right alongside the principal villages and one need not travel far from the villages to reach wilderness areas were game can usually be taken. There is much wood in the territory and it can be obtained far more easily with chain saws, snowmobiles and 4 x 4's than in earlier days. Anyone can now travel with much greater ease to whatever parts of the territory he or she may wish for the purpose of gathering what is required for sustenance or ceremonial purposes....\n\nReflecting on contemporary practices later in his text, the judge surmised:\n\nThe aboriginal activities that are being pursued now may be indistinguishable in many cases from the wilderness activities enjoyed by many non-Indian citizens of the province.\n\nChief Justice McEachern's point of view is not uncommon. It repeated an opinion that is frequently expressed in British Columbia by people who argue that Aboriginal people are not different enough to claim distinct rights. The equating of Aboriginal hunting, fishing and gathering with recreational camping decontextualizes and reduces these practices to their most simplistic form, as behaviours and commodities: one of many experiences that can be purchased in the leisure and entertainment market place.\n\nAnd, he concluded, the market place does not discriminate on the basis of race or culture as it sifts the wheat from the chaff:\n\nThere is no doubt, as I have said, that many of the present male and female population trapped and hunted for economic reasons in their youth. However, most of them discontinued trapping years ago before or at the time the price of furs collapsed in the 1950's, and they have gradually moved into other segments of the cash economy even though the price of furs has recovered. There is very little, and decreasing, interest in pursuing these activities at the present time.\n\nMany aboriginals are directly engaged in the wage economy, and few\u2014not enough but some\u2014participate as entrepreneurs. Mr. Pete Muldoe, a prominent Gitksan hereditary chief, has engaged in logging and sawmilling in the territory, as has the Moricetown Band Council. The aboriginal communities, like the provincial community, have their economic successes and failures.\n\n**The Battle of Britain**\n\nChief Justice McEachern's _Reasons for Judgment_ in _Delgamuukw v. R._ , ended with a proposal for resolving outstanding Aboriginal title and rights claims. Not surprisingly, his prescription for the future reflected his analysis of the past:\n\nIt is my conclusion, reached upon a consideration of the evidence which is not conveniently available to many, that the difficulties facing the Indian population of the territory, and probably throughout Canada, will not be solved in the context of legal rights. Legal proceedings have been useful in raising awareness levels about a serious national problem....\n\nThe parties have concentrated for too long on legal and constitutional questions such as ownership, sovereignty, and 'rights,' which are fascinating legal concepts. Important as these questions are, answers to legal questions will not solve the underlying social and economic problems which have disadvantaged Indian peoples from the earliest times. Indians have had many opportunities to join mainstream Canadian economic and social life. Some Indians do not wish to join, but many cannot....\n\nThis increasingly cacophonous dialogue about legal rights and social wrongs has created a positional attitude with many exaggerated allegations and arguments, and a serious lack of reality. Surely it must be obvious that there have been failings on both sides. It is not the law, or common sense, nor is it in the interest of people of the province or of the plaintiffs that the development, business and economy of the province and its citizens should constantly be burdened by litigation or be injunctioned into abeyance by endless or successive legal proceedings.\n\nWhile he ruled that they had occupied a low rung on the theoretical ladder of social evolutionary development when Europeans had arrived, Chief Justice McEachern found that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had progressed over the last two hundred years:\n\nCompared with many Indian Bands in the province, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples have already achieved a relatively high level of social organization. They have a number of promising leaders, a sense of purpose and a likely ability to move away from dependence if they get the additional assistance they require. I cannot, of course, speak with confidence about other Indian peoples because I have not studied them.\n\nI am impressed that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en are ready for an intelligent new arrangement with both levels of government. I am not persuaded that the answers to the problems facing the Indians will be found in the reserve system which has created fishing footholds, and ethnic enclaves. Some of these reserves in the territory are so minuscule, or abandoned, that they are of little or no use or value.... It must be recognized...that most of the reserves in the territory are not economic units and it is not likely that they can be made so without serious disruption to the entire area....\n\nThe judge credited himself, and the Canadian legal system, with having saved the day, and the people:\n\nI wish to say...that I shall leave this case with the settled conviction that, in the long run, the greatest value of this case, apart from being the first stage in the settlement of legal rights, may well be the enhancement of interest in Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en languages, traditions and cultures. This is because the evidence satisfies me this case has been a 'Battle of Britain' for these peoples and it has inspired them to renew (an accurate word, in my view) what was a declining interest in their aboriginal heritage. The interest and activity generated by this law suit assures the survival of these peoples as distinct societies. This may at one time have been doubtful but I now believe it is a certainty.\n\n* * *\n\n. Pratt 1992.\n\n. McEachern, Allan (1991) \"Schedule 1. Itinerary of View of Territory June, 1988,\" _Reasons for Judgment in Delgamuukw v. R._ , 305-307.\n\n. Tautology: true by virtue of its local form alone.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 211-212.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 213.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 274.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 275.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 284.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 291.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 56.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 23.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 210-212.\n\n. Arthur Ray has pointed out that the judge accepted as valid Ray's evidence that the Chiefs owned and regulated beaver trapping sites, and did not eat the meat of the beaver but rather prized their pelts for trade: that is, they exercised ownership and control over a resource they did _not_ use for subsistence but rather produced for exchange. Given that the judge accepted this as \"fact,\" his conclusion that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had no interest in non-subsistence harvesting before European arrival is illogical (Ray, 1991(b): 312).\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 262.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 261.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 75.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 74.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 26.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 25.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 26.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 124.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 234.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 235.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 26.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 126.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 126.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 128.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 221.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 28.\n\n. Governor Joseph Trutch's brother-in-law, and appointee to the Indian Reserve Commission.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 167.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 132.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 235.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 133.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 28.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 128.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 129.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 250.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 251.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 250.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 28.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 28-29.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 182.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 275.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 276.\n\n. In common law, a \"reputation\" of ownership\u2014that is, common knowledge within one's community that one is the owner of a particular plot\u2014is considered valid evidence of proof of ownership. Chief Justice McEachern, in rejecting oral tradition as valid evidence of a \"reputation of ownership,\" in effect racialized this \"common\" law principle. He rejected reputation of ownership confirmed by the Aboriginal community, in favour of reputation of ownership asserted by Euro-Canadian settlers.\n\n. But, note that neither the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en or any other First Nation in British Columbia has included privately owned homes and lots in its claim. Chief Justice McEachern acknowledged this at page 10, writing: \"The plaintiffs, in what I understand they regard as a matter of grace on their part, do not seek to recover pre-Writ (1984) privately owned (fee simple) lands within the territory. Instead, they claim compensation from the province for the value of whatever territorial interests have been transferred to other ownership. They claim the right to terminate all less than fee simple legal interests in the territory, such as logging, mining and other leases or licenses.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 222.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 182.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 263.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 264.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 266.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 222.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 56.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 291-292.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 184.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 248.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 252.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 248.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 299.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 37.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 251.\n\n. _Reasons,_ 1991: 291.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 56.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 228-229.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 253-254.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 248.\n\n. _Reasons_ , 1991: 37.\n**P** **ART** **VIII:**\n\n**A** **D** **I** **NFINITUM**\n\n**(G** **OING** **O** **N** **F** **OREVER** **, I** **NTO** **I** **NFINITY** **)**\n**Chapter 21:** **_Delgamuukw_** **at the British Columbia**  \n**Court of Appeal, 1993**\n\n_...The reason why courts have had no difficulty taking judicial notice of the facts of history is that historical fact is not a matter of opinion when dealt with by the courts. The doctrine of judicial notice is firmly grounded in the court's recognition of its general ability to deal with matters of history without the assistance of experts. Historians revise history.... The Chief Justice's ruling is consistent with the doctrine of judicial notice...and is based firmly on the difference between the way historians approach history and judges approach history._\n\n\u2014Province of British Columbia, 1991, Defendant's Appeal Factum.\n\n**We Own Therefore We Are**\n\nIt was on the question of extinguishment that the Chief Justice's ruling elicited the most surprise within the legal community as a whole. Critics argued that the Chief Justice's findings in law were as archaic and, in some cases, as questionable in terms of fact and reasoning as his findings on oral tradition, anthropology and history. The legal test for extinguishment that had been developing since _Calder_ was affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in _R. v. Sparrow_ in these words: \"The test for extinguishment to be adopted, in our opinion, is that the Sovereign's intention must be clear and plain if it is to extinguish an aboriginal right.\" Chief Justice McEachern's interpretation that such expressions of a \"clear and plain intention\" could be inferred post hoc and reasoned backwards in time from the contemporary consequences of colonial domination, flew in the face of contemporary legal thinking. Furthermore, the Supreme Court of Canada had suggested that the \"honour of the Crown\" would be well served by reasonable attempts to obtain Aboriginal consent to extinguishment as well. McEachern's crude \"to the victors go the spoils\" analysis shocked several of his own peers.\n\nSecond, legal critics were taken aback by McEachern's ruling that Aboriginal jurisdiction and customary law \"gave way\" to colonial law upon the establishment of the colonies of Vancouver Island and the mainland in the mid-nineteenth centuries. The problem, scholars pointed out, was that British colonial law had no provision for Indigenous legal systems to simply \"give way.\" The direction of the Memorandum of the Privy Council of 1722, and subsequent proclamations and treaties had stipulated clearly that British imperial law required that a choice be made between two options: either Indigenous people were there living in an organized society with recognizable forms of government in which case the doctrine of conquest applied, and Indigenous laws were to continue until expressly extinguished by the conquering sovereign through military force and\/or treaty; or, if no Indigenous people were \"discovered\" living in the lands desired by the sovereign; or were deemed not to be living in an organized society and their land declared _terra nullius_ , the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement applied, and the sovereign's laws could be superimposed at the moment of discovery. Chief Justice McEachern invented new law by finding _both_ that underlying title was vested in the British Crown since the sixteenth century by virtue of the doctrine of discovery, based on _terra nullius_ ; _and_ that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en lived in an organized society at whatever moments in time Britain may have _post hoc_ and _de facto_ asserted sovereignty between 1774 and 1860. As anticipated, Chief Justice McEachern's decision was appealed by the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en, and the appeal was responded to by the provincial and federal governments.\n\nIn November 1991, six months before Chief Justice McEachern's ruling in _Delgamuukw v. R._ had been rendered, the left-leaning, social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) had been voted into office on a platform that included promises that they would recognize Aboriginal title and commence negotiations of Aboriginal rights. With the exception of the years 1974-1976, British Columbia had been governed since 1953 by the right-leaning, free-enterprise Social Credit party who had, until 1990, staunchly opposed any recognition of, or negotiations with, Aboriginal peoples on the land question. It was a Social Credit \"provincial crown\" who, with the law firm of Russell &Dumoulin, had argued the cases from _Calder_ to _Delgamuukw_. However, it was an NDP government that was forced to make a decision about what do to when the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en appealed Judge McEachern's ruling to the British Columbia Court of Appeal. The Crown had changed heads.\n\nThe NDP and the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs negotiated an agreement to request that the B.C. Court of Appeal be asked to decide only some of the questions that arose from Chief Justice McEachern's decision. Outstanding questions would be left for the Supreme Court of Canada to decide if, by the time an appeal of _Delgamuukw v. R._ came before them, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had been unable to reach negotiated agreements with the federal and provincial governments. The NDP government put forward the following position in its appeal factum:\n\n(1) The trial judge (McEachern) erred in making a finding of \"blanket extinguishment\" on the basis of colonial instruments enacted prior to 1871.\n\n(2) The Plaintiffs (Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en) do not have a right to ownership of, or a proprietary interest in, the lands and resources which they claim.\n\n(3) The Plaintiffs do not have the right of self-government or jurisdiction as claimed.... But it is understood that aboriginal peoples who lived in an organized society governed themselves by their own system of laws and customs. Certain rights or freedoms to self-government may continue to exist, but are subject to the laws of Canada and of the Province.\n\n(4) The Province does not generally disagree with the factual findings of the trial judge on the question of ownership and jurisdiction.\n\n(5) The Province supports the findings of the trial judge with respect to the effect to be given to the expert evidence.... It does not take the position the trial judge ignored or improperly rejected evidence. It supports the trial judge's conclusions as to the value of oral histories.\n\n(6) The trial judge was correct to characterize the plaintiff's aboriginal rights as _sui generis_. But the precise location, scope, content, and consequences of the plaintiffs' aboriginal rights is a matter for negotiation, and further judicial consideration.\n\nThe New Democratic Party government supported all Chief Justice McEachern's rulings on expert evidence, including the dismissal of oral history, and the testimony by anthropologists and historians. While the B.C. Court of Appeal's panel of five judges were divided on many of the issues before them, they all supported the Chief Justice's rulings on this evidence. One of them, Justice Lambert, mentioned that more weight should have been given to the oral histories and the testimony of the Chiefs and Elders. However, the judges were unanimous in their finding that the volume of evidence was such that they could not reasonably be expected to review it; and, they were satisfied that no \"palpable and overriding error in fact\" was evident in McEachern's assessment of the expert evidence, or his findings in law that were based on them. They said that, even if they were to review all the evidence and the transcripts, \"The Court of Appeal could not be exposed to all the nuances in the evidence or be in as good a position as the trial judge to weigh the credibility....\"\n\nThe panel of five appeal court judges\u2014Macfarlane, Taggart, Wallace, Hutcheon and Lambert\u2014 found unanimously that there was no blanket extinguishment of Aboriginal title as a result of Britain's colonization of what is now British Columbia; that the introduction of a land settlement scheme by the colonial government prior to 1871 did not show a \"clear and plain intention to extinguish\" Aboriginal title; that, after British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, Aboriginal rights could not be extinguished by a provincial government; that there was no evidence that the federal Crown extinguished Aboriginal rights between 1871 and 1982; and, finally, that after 1982, not even the federal government has the power to extinguish Aboriginal rights because of their entrenchment in Section 35 of the Constitution. The Appeal court ruled that Aboriginal rights existed in British Columbia prior to Britain asserting sovereignty, had not been extinguished, and therefore continued to exist. In other words, the B.C. Court of Appeal found in favourof the (new) Crown's (new) position. In overruling the Chief Justice's decision on blanket extinguishment, the Court of Appeal strategically \"cleaned up\" the worst of McEachern's judgment, in a legal sense, and brought it up to date and in line with directions taken in Supreme Court of Canada decisions on extin-guishment in particular rendered during the 1980s and 1990s, and within the framework of federal and provincial government perspectives that support the recognition of some form of Aboriginal rights. This course of action rendered unnecessary any explicit critique of the Chief Justice's ruling which would have been an embarrassment to the judiciary as a whole, and the B.C. judiciary in particular. Explicit disavowal of Chief Justice McEachern's \"findings of fact,\" and his tautological reasoning would have challenged one of the most important social and political roles of the law: in order to legitimate the exercise of power law must present itself as being guided by the objective, neutral application of reason, free of racialist and other biases, and serving the interests of society as a whole, and not simply the needs of the rich and powerful.\n\nWhile the Appeal Court did not define what these rights are, they were clear about what they are NOT: Aboriginal title and rights, they said, are not proprietary or commercial. Furthermore, they ruled that evidence in support of Aboriginal rights would have to be \"site-specific\" and drawn from documentation about the cultural practices of the specific First Nation making the claim.\n\n**We Buy Therefore We Are**\n\n_It is worth recalling that while British policy toward the native population was based on respect for their right to occupy their traditional lands, a proposition to which the Royal Proclamation of 1763 bears witness, there was from the outset never any doubt that sovereign and legislative power, and indeed the underlying title, to such lands vested in the Crown...._\n\n_The nature and content of an aboriginal right is determined by asking what the organized aboriginal society regarded as \"an integral part of their distinctive culture.\"...To be so regarded those practices must have been integral to the distinctive culture of the aboriginal society from which they are said to have arisen. A modernized form of such a practice would be no less an aboriginal right.... A practice which had not been integral to the organized society and its distinctive culture, but which became prevalent as a result of European influences would not qualify for protection as an aboriginal right...._\n\n_The content of aboriginal rights is to be determined not by reference to whether executives or legislative action conferred such a right on the people in question, but rather by reference to that which is essential to or inherent in the unique relations that native people have with nature, each other, and other communities...._\n\n\u20141990, _Reasons for Judgment_ , _R. v. Sparrow_.\n\nThe existence and persistence of Aboriginal title and rights upheld by the British Columbia Court of Appeal's ruling, meant that the legal question remaining to be resolved was \"what is the nature and scope of these existing Aboriginal rights?\" The Appeal Court judges failed to reach a consensus on answers to this question. Mr. Justice Macfarlane, supported by Taggart, Wallace and Hutcheon, relied on the \"new test\" enunciated in the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in _R. v. Sparrow_ that identified four questions to be decided by Courts in determining whether a particular practice should be protected as an Aboriginal right. First, what discrete practices, such as harvesting and exchanging fish, were to be identified as \"aboriginal\" practices? Second, was this practice integral to the distinctive culture of the Aboriginal society in which some of the ancestors of the present plaintiffs were members? That is, the legal definition of Aboriginality was now dependent on evidence that described practices which could be shown to have been carried out prior to European contact; and which were, then and now, \"integral to the distinctive culture\" of the particular Aboriginal nation bringing forward a claim. The critical defining difference\u2014in law\u2014between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal \"practices\"\u2014and therefore between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples\u2014 was to be determined on the basis of the courts' analysis of what a \"distinctive culture\" is. If the first and second questions were answered in the affirmative, then third and fourth questions could be posed: was the practice existing as an Aboriginal right at the date when sovereignty was asserted; and was it unextin-guished prior to 1982? Affirmative and negative responses to these questions, respectively, would legally establish the existence of a constitutionally protected Aboriginal right.\n\nThere are several important aspects to the British Columbia Court of Appeal Justice Macfarlane's definition of Aboriginal rights. First, the focus of the question is what lands did the people occupy and how were these lands and resources used before contact? Claimants wishing to pass this part of the test were required to bring forth evidence on the specific customs and practices of their people in occupying particular pieces of land, and\/or in using particular resources. Given the Appeal Court's endorsation of Chief Justice McEachern's dismissal of oral history and expert academic evidence, the issue of \"proof\" remained problematic. Furthermore, \"occupation\" was defined as use to the exclusion of others. This meant that First Nations had to show they had actively excluded others from their territory, and maintained exclusive possession of the same territory. Failure to do so, either prior to the arrival of Europeans, or even in the face of force of arms and numbers of settlers after contact, could jeopardize the Aboriginal claim. Second, the use of the land and resources must be \"integral to the distinctive culture,\" and deemed by the court to be \"truly Indian.\" Aboriginality, and the Aboriginal \"other\" remained firmly frozen in the past.\n\nBut, what if an Aboriginal society engages in practices, and develops traditions and customs _after_ contact with Europeans, and they continue for a long, long time before the assertion of sovereignty? This issue of time and the continuation of \"Aboriginality\" into the present and future divided the appeal panel. Justices Macfarlane and Wallace took an historical approach. They tried to look to the past, to find something they could identify as \"traditional,\" or \"distinctively Indian\" and \"integral to the culture.\"\n\nJudge Lambert dissented from the majority. He viewed Aboriginal title, and the rights flowing from it, to be contemporaneous, allowing \"a blossoming in the present and into the future\" of the rights. Lambert represented a minority position when he cited a recent Australian precedent\u2014the _Mabo_ decision\u2014 handed down by Mr. Justice Brennan of the Supreme Court of Australia in 1992, that dispensed with the assertion of _terra nullius_ as a foundation for Australian law. Lambert accused the other members of the Appeal Court panel of supporting a \"frozen rights\" thesis. He wrote: \"Once it is recognized that aboriginal societies were societies capable of change, the notion that there is an 'aboriginal' use which can be discovered only on the basis of evidence of long-time use must be rejected.\" \"The purpose of s.35...[of the Canadian Constitution] when it was prepared in 1982,\" Lambert continued, \"cannot have been to protect the rights of Indians to live as they lived in 1778.... Its purpose must have been to secure to Indian people, without any further erosion, a modern unfolding of the rights.\" He chastised Chief Justice McEachern for finding that \"commercial trapping is not an aboriginal practice,\" saying: \"In my opinion...this...is to adopt the settlers' point of view of the classification of aboriginal title rather than the aboriginals' point of view.... If the Indians used land in 1820 in accordance with their aboriginal title but the use was a new one in 1820, then the important point is that at that time, namely 1820, the aboriginal right represented by the aboriginal title was taking on an 1820 contemporary form.\"\n\nThe question of jurisdiction, or an inherent right to self-government, further divided the B.C. Court of Appeal judges. Macfarlane, for the majority, rejected this aspect of the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's claim, calling it incompatible with federal and provincial jurisdiction: \"Rights of self-government encompassing a power to make general laws governing the land and resources in the territory, and the people in that territory, can only be described as legislative powers...the jurisdiction of the plaintiffs would diminish the provincial and federal share of the total distribution of legislative power in Canada,\" he wrote. To bolster their claim that such a sharing of political authority was legally impossible, Macfarlane, on behalf of the majority, offered four arguments. First, he wrote, \"on the date that the legislative power of the Sovereign was imposed...any vestige of aboriginal law-making competence was superseded.\" Britain had the absolute right to assert sovereignty. Second, \"...if this is wrong (in law) then a continuing aboriginal legislative power is inconsistent with the division of powers found in the _Constitution Act_ of 1867.\" Even if Britain's original assertion of sovereignty was illegal, it became legal when the _Constitution Act 1867_ reaffirmed the initial violation of British colonial law. Third, \"the plaintiffs failed to establish the necessary ownership needed to support such a jurisdiction.\" The oral history testimony and the other expert evidence was not valid or reliable. But, he concluded, \"the establishment of some form of Indian self-government...is ripe for negotiation and reconciliation.\" Now that the terms, conditions, limits and possibilities have been circumscribed by law, political negotiations may be initiated.\n\nJudge Lambert, again, disagreed. In his minority finding he argued, based on the \"doctrine of continuity\" provided for under British common law, that Aboriginal rights survived both the assertion of sovereignty and the division of legislative powers. Justice Hutcheon also took an independent position on this question, placing himself between the majority and Lambert. He transformed \"self-government\" into a more limited concept of \"self regulation\" by removing any concept of law-making by Gitksan or Wet'suwet'en institutions. A minimal range of jurisdiction, he argued, could be granted: \"The appellants have a right of self-regulation exercisable through their own institutions to preserve and enhance their social, political, cultural, linguistic and spiritual identity.\"\n\nFinally, the Appeal Court panel dealt with the logical conclusion of their findings: if Aboriginal title and rights have not been extinguished, then what is the status of titles in fee simple that have been granted to non-Aboriginal citizens by the province for the past 123 years? In other words, if British and Canadian laws have not been obeyed by the governments, can any non-Aboriginal land titles be truly legal? They declined to give a definitive answer but made a range of suggestions about situations in which Aboriginal title and Crown and\/or fee simple title could co-exist. Justice Macfarlane, for example, concluded that: \"Uncultivated, unfenced, vacant land held in fee simple does not necessarily preclude the exercise of hunting rights.... On the other hand the building of a school on land usually occupied for aboriginal purposes will impair or suspend a right of occupation....\" In essence, this is little different from Chief Justice McEachern's suggestion that land could be returned to Aboriginal use after it had been clear cut. Aboriginal people may use whatever lands and resources non-Aboriginal governments and corporations don't want or need, until they desire it again.\n\nDuring the course of the _Delgamuukw_ trial several other Aboriginal rights cases were winding their way through the lower courts in British Columbia. These additional cases were: _R. v. Alphonse_ , _R. v. Dick_ , _R. v. Van Der Peet_ , _R. v. Gladstone_ , _R. v. N.T.C. Smokehouse_ , _R. v. Lewis_ and _R. v. Nikal_ , and all dealt in one way or another with the question of whether or not Aboriginal title could be proprietary, and Aboriginal rights could be commercial. Since _Delgamuukw v. R._ addressed issues fundamental to all of these cases, particularly whether Aboriginal rights had been extinguished or are now protected by the Canadian Constitution, the Appeal Court decided to rule on all these cases at the same time.\n\nTheir majority rulings on these cases were consistent: Aboriginal title is not \"proprietary\" and does not constitute ownership; and Aboriginal rights are not commercial ones. Concretely, this abstract debate can be reduced to the question of whether Aboriginal title is a form of property ownership that is equal and valid in comparison to Euro-Canadian title in fee simple. This is what the legal term \"proprietary interest\" refers to. Questions about the nature and scope of Aboriginal rights have quickly boiled down to debates about whether Aboriginal rights may be commercial ones or not, defined as equal and valid in comparison to production for exchange in a capitalist marketplace. For example, if Aboriginal peoples traded fish for hides prior to contact with Europeans, and subsequently traded fish for cash, is their trade in fish an \"Aboriginal practice\"? If they own the fish in the first place, do they not have the right to dispose of it in any way they see fit? If their ownership of resources, like fish, has, like their title to land, never been surrendered or extinguished, then don't Aboriginal peoples still own the fish? What criteria establishes a radical and significant difference between the first exchange for hides, and the second for cash? The contemporary question of the legal effect of \"European influences\" is really a debate about whether or not Aboriginal peoples can use the lands and resources they claim to own and have never surrendered, to enter into and compete in the capitalist market-place as self-governing owners of resources; or whether they are to be forced to join the race empty-handed, with nothing but their labour to exchange. Litigation and treaty negotiations are, after all, sites at which First Nations are endeavouring to negotiate a mutually-respectful _relationship_ with the Canadian state and within that state. They are not battlegrounds in a struggle for national liberation or political separation. It is the terms of the future relationships that are at stake, not the question of whether there will be a relationship or not.\n\nIn summary, the majority of B.C. Court of Appeal judges found that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en had Aboriginal rights that were not proprietary or commercial, but otherwise remained undefined; and that these rights had not been extinguished because the Crown has failed to demonstrate a \"clear and plain intention\" to do so. \"In the end,\" Justice Macfarlane concluded, \"the aboriginal interest is a right of use and occupation of a special nature\u2014best described as _sui generis_. To stretch and strain property law concepts in an attempt to find a place for these unusual concepts which have arisen in a special context, is in my opinion, an unproductive task.... Whatever protection is required to sustain the _sui generis_ interest of the descendants of the aboriginal peoples is now afforded by the Constitution, and in my view we should struggle no more to find a place in English property law for that interest.\"\n\nThe _sui generis_ theory of Aboriginal rights, in terms of Aboriginal interests is, however, a double-edged sword, another now familiar double-bind. On the one hand, it recognizes the \"cultural distinctiveness\" of Aboriginal title and does not try to force it to conform to European categories or definition. On the other hand, as long as Canadian law, and Canadian popular culture, are dominated by beliefs in European racial or cultural supremacy, then saying Aboriginal rights are different in theory can be expected to result in these rights being considered \"lesser\" ones in practice. Cultural difference may be recognized, but interpreted as justification for inequality. Heads, the Crown wins. Tails, Indians lose.\n\nFrom the point of view of a dualist perspective rooted in notions of binary oppositions, when judges define communal property and non-profit barter as \"integral to the distinctive culture\" of First Nations\u2014that is, as the most legally significant differences between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals\u2014they are simultaneously proclaiming that individual, private property, and profit-making commerce, are \"integral to the distinctive culture\" of non-Aboriginal Canadians. Simply put, the key cultural difference, according to the law, is that private property and money are integral to the distinctive culture of non-Aboriginals; and communal property and cashless barter are the distinctive characteristics of Aboriginal cultures. \"We\" have land and money. \"They\" do not. Cynics might ask if this is news? Skeptics may question the wisdom of spending vast sums of public funds on legal proceedings over the last several hundred years to arrive at this conclusion.\n\n* * *\n\n. Court of Appeal of British Columbia, _Delgamuukw v. R._ , Defendant's Appeal Factum, III 1991: 12-14.\n\n. See Burns 1992; Burton and Kellock 1992; Doyle-Bedwell 1993; Fortune 1993; Foster 1992; Macklem 1993; Sanders 1992; Slattery 1992; Walters 1993.\n\n. See Bowker 1995 for a thorough analysis of the _Sparrow_ decision, its interpretation by the B.C. Court of Appeal, and its implications.\n\n. Walters 1993: 410.\n\n. Court of Appeal of British Columbia, _Delgamuukw v. R., Reasons for Judgment_ : 1993: 15.\n\n. Court of Appeal of British Columbia 1992 _Delgamuukw v. R._ , Defendant's Appeal Factum.\n\n. Court of Appeal of B.C. 1992 _Delgamuukw v. R., Reasons for Judgment_ : 18.\n\n. Stephenson and Ratnapala (eds.) 1993.\n\n. Court of Appeal of British Columbia, _Delgamuukw v. R., Reasons for Judgment:_ 172.\n\n. Ibid., 189.\n\n. Ibid., 34.\n\n. Ibid., 43-44.\n\n. Ibid., 268.\n\n. Ibid., 130-131.\n**Chapter 22: The British Columbia Treaty Process and**  \n**the Supreme Court of Canada, 1996**\n\n_How did the strategy of litigation fit with other strategies to bring about change? No one could suggest that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en put all their eggs in one basket. They used every strategy available\u2014roadblocks, fish-ins, marshmallow fights, participation in the First Minister's conferences, a play (that toured the province, the country, and the world), a film, links to academics...buttons, shirts, posters, T-shirts. Is such litigation a bad strategy? Only if the litigation is seen in isolation from other actions and strategies. We need to get over our idolatry of the courts and judges.... The cases were attempts to get the courts to kick governments._\n\n\u2014Legal scholar Douglas Sanders, 1992, _Getting Back to Rights_.\n\n**From Negotiation to Litigation to Negotiation to Litigation to Negotiation to Litigation to...**\n\nNeither Aboriginal peoples in B.C. nor the Crown have looked primarily to the courts for resolution of the Aboriginal title and rights issue in the years since the _Delgamuukw_ judgment was handed down in 1991. Rather, attention has focussed on the British Columbia Treaty Commission (BCTC). Just as the _Calder_ decision encouraged the federal government to initiate the Comprehensive Claims Policy, and to negotiate with the Nishga; the _Sparrow_ , _Delgamuukw_ and other 1993 B.C. Court of Appeal decisions have all recommended that the issues be resolved politically, and have recommended negotiation rather than litigation. Although not often stated frankly, the courts, bound as they are by their colonial inheritance and archaic powers of truth creation, have been shown unwilling to, or incapable of, resolving these issues.\n\nOn June 28, 1991, about three months after the _Delgamuukw_ decision was released, the B.C. Claims Task Force, which had been made up of representatives of federal, provincial and Aboriginal governments, academics and \"third party\" labour and business interests, published their report. It contained 19 recommendations for developing a process for negotiations amongst the parties. The Task Force report called for casting aside the historically troubled relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples, rooted in an imperial past. A contemporary \"made-in-BC\" solution was required. This new relationship would be realized through the negotiation of \"modern day treaties,\" and would be based on \"recognition and respect for First Nations as self-determining and distinct nations with their own spiritual values, histories, languages, territories, political institutions and ways of life.\" In September, 1992, representatives of the federal and provincial governments and the First Nations' Summit, signed an agreement creating the B.C. Treaty Commission, which would serve as a watchdog over and facilitator of the six stage process of treaty making. On June 21, 1993, the federal and provincial governments finalized a _Memorandum of Understanding between Canada and British Columbia_ respecting the sharing of pre-treaty costs, settlement costs, implementation costs, and the costs of self-government, in which Canada agreed to provide the cash, and B.C. the land, required by any subsequent treaty agreement. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en signed a _Memorandum of Understanding_ with the Province and the Federal Government in 1992, agreeing to postpone their appeal of the _Delgamuukw_ decision to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to enter treaty negotiations under the auspices of the BCTC.\n\n**Appealing Culture**\n\n_What our Chiefs don't understand, what they have difficulty with, is that when we compare the case law that is put forward in Delgamuukw with our own laws, our chiefs say, 'That's really funny. Look at that. They can just change their law anytime they want. Where our laws have remained unchanged for centuries.' They can't understand that._\n\n\u2014Satsan (Herb George), 1992, _The Fire Within Us_.\n\nThe British Columbia Treaty Commission is ultimately bound by legal decisions since the law remains the \"court of last resort\" in settling differences that cannot be reconciled through the negotiation process. In November of 1996, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down landmark rulings on three of the cases that the British Columbia Court of Appeal had heard simultaneously with the _Delgamuukw_ appeal: _R. v. Gladstone_ , _R. v. Van Der Peet_ , and _R. v. NTC Smokehouse_.\n\nDorothy Van Der Peet, a member of the Stol:lo Nation of Southwestern British Columbia, sold 10 Fraser River salmon for $50.00 to her neighbour. She was arrested and charged under a clause in the _Fisheries Act_ that prohibits selling, bartering or offering to sell or barter any fish caught under Indian Food Fish licenses. The Crown called Dr. Gordon Stryd, an archaeologist, as an expert witness in anthropology, and the Sto:lo called Dr. Richard Daly. Stryd argued that bartering and trading fish had been an \"occasional, incidental and opportunistic\" occurrence prior to contact and was not central to Sto:lo life the way fishing for food and ceremony was. Daly argued that the Sto:lo had produced, preserved and traded surplus fish prior to contact, and had sold large amounts of fish, for cash, to the British between 1820 and 1846 when British sovereignty was established. Therefore, the selling of fish was an Aboriginal right protected under section 35(1) of the Canadian Constitution. This was a case where a practice had become \"traditional,\" \"unique,\" and \"integral to the distinctive culture\" of an Aboriginal people _after_ contact with Europeans and for a long, long time _before_ the assertion of sovereignty.\n\nB.C. Provincial Court judge Scarlett was the first to hear the case. He agreed with Gordon Stryd and found Dorothy Van Der Peet guilty. Scarlett ruled that \" _Natives did not fish to supply a market, there being no regularized trading system_ , nor were they able to preserve and store fish for extended periods of time (emphasis in original). A market as such for salmon was not present but created by European traders, primarily the Hudson's Bay Company. At Fort Langley the Sto:lo were able to catch and deliver fresh salmon to the traders where it was salted and exported. This use was clearly different in nature and quantity from Aboriginal activity.\"\n\nWhen the case was heard by the Supreme Court of B.C., Judge Selbie disagreed with Judge Scarlett, and found Dorothy Van Der Peet _not_ guilty. Judge Selbie wrote in his _Reasons for Judgment_ : \"In my view, the evidence in this case, oral, historical and opinion, looked at in the light of the principles of interpreting aboriginal rights... _is more consistent with the aboriginal right to fish including the right to sell, barter or exchange than otherwise and must be found so_. We are, after all, basically considering the existence in antiquity of an aboriginal's right to dispose of his fish other than by eating it himself or using it for ceremonial purposes\u2014the words 'sell', 'barter', 'exchange,' 'share,' are but variations on the theme of 'disposing.' It defies common sense to think that if the aboriginal did not want the fish for himself there would be some stricture against him disposing of it by some other means to his advantage.... I am satisfied that when the first Indian caught the first salmon he had the 'right' to do anything he wanted with it\u2014eat it, trade it for deer meat, throw it back or keep it against a hungrier time. As time went on and for an infinite variety of reasons that 'right' to catch the fish and do anything he wanted with it became hedged in....One of the social changes that occurred was the coming of the white-man.... A money economy eventually developed and...Indians...adjusted to that also\u2014he traded his fish for money. _This was a long way from his ancient sharing, bartering and trading practices but it was the logical progression of such_. It has been held that the aboriginal right to hunt is not frozen in time so that only the bow and arrow can be used in exercising it.... The Indian right to trade his fish is not frozen in time to doing so only by the medium of the potlatch and the like...(emphasis in the original.)\"\n\nJustices Macfarlane and Taggart of the B.C. Court of Appeal, however, disagreed with Judge Selbie and reversed his decision. They ruled that the first trial judge, Scarlett, was correct. Applying the _Sparrow_ test, the B.C. Court of Appeal judges wrote: \"Fishing was a integral part of the distinctive culture of the aborigines. Fish had a religious significance. Fish were revered. They were used for food, but played a significant role in ceremonial and social ways.... But that is not to say the purpose of fishing was to engage in commerce. In our opinion, trade with the British was not of the same nature and quality as the aboriginal traditions disclosed by the evidence...the question of what is an aboriginal right deserving protection is not determined necessarily by reference to the activities in which aboriginal persons were engaged in 1846. The test is whether such activities or practices were integral to the distinctive culture of the aborigines....\" Justice Wallace agreed.\n\nJustice Lambert, writing on his own, concluded that \"Mrs. Van Der Peet was exercising an aboriginal right when she sold ten salmon to Mrs. Lugsdin for $50.00.\" Lambert argued that when the Sto:lo began selling fish to the first Europeans who arrived in the early nineteenth century, \"all they were doing was exploiting a new opportunity....a response to a new circumstance in the carrying out of the existing practice.\" Justice Lambert supported his reasoning by arguing for a \"social perspective\" on the definition of Aboriginal rights. \"I think the 'social' perspective is the correct one,\" he wrote, \"because rights are not defined in terms of the purpose for which they are to be exercised, but in the way the rights may be employed in a social context.\" He continued: \"The fact that non-aboriginal people now engage in or formerly engaged in the same practices as aboriginal people does not indicate that the practice was not or is not an aboriginal practice. No doubt the Hudson's Bay traders who arrived at the Fort Langley post in the early 19th century had fished for salmon in their boyhood in the Tay or the Dee. A practice, tradition or custom may be integral to the distinctive culture of an aboriginal people even if a similar custom is integral to the distinctive culture of many other peoples as well.\"\n\nAnother B.C. Court of Appeal panel member, Justice Hutcheon, agreed with Mr. Justice Selbie's decision that the Aboriginal right to sell fish includes the right to sell, trade or barter. He based his decision on the fact that the evidence showed that Sto:lo had been engaged in the \"commercial exchange of fish\" for at least 26 years when, in 1846, British sovereignty was declared. He rejected Chief Justice McEachern's extension of the test for Aboriginal rights to include that Aboriginal rights must have been in effect for a \"long, long time\" prior to British sovereignty. And, he rejected the Crown's argument that \"aboriginal rights must describe pre-contact life.\"\n\nThe B.C. Court of Appeal decision on _R. v. Van Der Peet_ was appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, who handed down its decision in November, 1996. Again, the court was divided. The majority ruled that \"the exchange of fish among the Sto:lo was 'incidental,'\" and \"the trade with Europeans was quantitatively different from what was typical of Sto:lo culture prior tocontact.\" Therefore the exchange of fish for money or other goods is not an integral part of the distinctive Sto:lo culture, and is not protected by the Constitution.\n\nIn a dissenting judgment, Justice L'Heureux-Dub\u00e9 followed B.C. Court of Appeal Justice Lambert's reasoning. She chastised her fellow jurists for assuming that the arrival of Europeans was necessarily a pivotal and determining feature of history, and for ultimately upholding a \"frozen rights\" approach to the determination of Aboriginal rights. The Judge went on to criticize her colleagues for misconstruing the words \"distinctive culture\" in the _Sparrow_ test, and interpreting them to mean \"distinct culture,\" or \"that which is left over after features of non-aboriginal culture have been taken away.\" L'Heureux-Dub\u00e9 added that \"culture\" should be understood as an interrelated whole, and not a catalogue of individualized practices. She proposed a delineation between three different categories of Aboriginal harvesting rights: subsistence, social and ceremonial; the provision of a modest livelihood; and commercial. Each category should have a unique bundle of rights, she argued.\n\nA second judge, Justice Mclachlin, also took an independent stand, writing her own minority judgment. She argued that Aboriginal rights should be defined \"through an empirical approach\" and should be \"drawn from history.\" This would be more practical than Courts repeatedly trying to describe _a priori_ what an Aboriginal right is. She agreed with L'Heureux-Dub\u00e9 that there is \"no justification for extending the right beyond what is required to provide the people with reasonable substitutes for what they traditionally obtained from the resource\u2014basic housing, transportation, clothing and amenities.\" By this reasoning, it may now be \"Aboriginal\"\u2014in the eyes of the law\u2014to be lower middle class, but it remains \"non-Aboriginal\" to be any wealthier than that. Neither L'Heureux-Dub\u00e9 nor Mclachlin addressed how the historical information that their proposed tests relied upon should be evaluated by the law.\n\nA second case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in November 1996, _R. v. Gladstone and Gladstone_ , arose from a \"sting\" operation wherein Department of Fisheries' officers attempted to entrap two members of the Heiltsuk First Nation of Waglisla (Bella Bella). The Crown first told the story to the Supreme Court of British Columbia as follows:\n\nDonald and William Gladstone are members of the Heiltsuk Indian Band of Bella Bella. They arranged to ship to Vancouver approximately 4200 pounds of herring spawn on kelp. The fisheries officers were alerted by an informant and they kept under surveillance the transportation of the crates from the freight carrier in Vancouver to a warehouse in Richmond.... Later that day, William Gladstone arrived with a U-haul truck to pick up the crates. He drove into Vancouver and parked in a lot at Seymour and Nelson Streets. William and Donald Gladstone then drove in a Javelin automobile to the premises of Seaborn Enterprises Limited, a retail fish store at 1310 West 73rd Avenue in Vancouver. They had with them one white container of herring spawn which they took into the store. William Gladstone spoke to Mr. Katsu Hirose, the owner, and asked, according to Hirose, if he was 'interested in herring on kelp' to which he replied he 'never touched herring on kelp from native Indians'. They left and returned to the parking lot where they were arrested. Subsequently, the herring spawn on kelp was sold by the fisheries officials for $143,944.00\n\nThis case involved complicated charges and defences under the Criminal Code having to do with entrapment, search warrants and evidence. At the first trial, the judge acknowledged that the Heiltsuk had harvested herring spawn on kelp for hundreds of years. Alexander Mackenzie's 1793 journal recorded his having traded with them for this foodstuff. Therefore, Judge Lemiski of the Supreme Court of British Columbia found that the right to trade and barter herring roe was an Aboriginal right that the _Fisheries Act_ regulations, in _general,_ unjustly interfered with. However, he concluded that this interference was valid in this _particular_ case because the Gladstones had attempted \"to sell a relatively large quantity of spawn in a surreptitious manner to a foreign buyer in a location far removed from the Heiltsuk Band's region.\"\n\nWhen the _Gladstone_ case was appealed to the B.C. Court of Appeal, Judge Anderson agreed with the trial judge, although he found the _Fisheries Act_ regulations did not, in general, interfere with an Aboriginal right to fish. He was adamant, however, that selling 4800 pounds of herring roe for several hundred thousand dollars was \"inconsistent with a 'traditional aboriginal right'.\" Justices Macfarlane, Taggart and Wallace agreed that \"the activity in question could not be viewed as an integral part of the distinctive culture of the Heiltsuk people...the activity is different in nature and quality than the aboriginal right....\" They continued: \"The case is not one that turns on quantity, although both judges took account of the quantity involved. There was evidence of considerable quantities being transported to other Indians in aboriginal times. But the quality and character of the activity in aboriginal times was quite different from that disclosed by the evidence in this case. The aboriginal activity was rooted in a culture which gave significance to sharing a resource, to which one nation had ready access, while other Indian peoples did not.... The appellants were not exercising an aboriginal right when they attempted to sell herring spawn on kelp to a Japanese fish product buyer in Vancouver.\" The \"non-Aboriginal\" characteristics of the exchange in this case included the large amount of money involved, the style of doing business, the location of the exchange, and the race\/culture\/nationality of the purchaser.\n\nAgain, Mr. Justice Lambert took an independent position. He argued: \"...that the aboriginal rights of the Heiltsuk people to harvest herring spawn and to trade their herring spawn extensively and in quantities measured in tons, subject only to the need for conservation of the resource...have been established....\" The Supreme Court of Canada overturned the B.C. Court of Appeal's decision, and ruled that the evidence supported a finding that \"the exchange of herring spawn on kelp for money or other goods was to an extent a central, significant and defining feature of the culture of the Heiltsuk prior to contact and is best characterized as commercial. This exchange and trade was an integral part of the distinctive culture of the Heiltsuk....\" Justice LaForest, however, dissented. He argued that the significance of barter in herring roe to the Heiltsuk prior to contact was based on a cultural value of sharing resources, and that such values were not demonstrated by the Gladstone brothers whose activities, LaForest claimed, \"were done in a completely different context.\"\n\nOn the one hand, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the attempted sale by members of the Heiltsuk Nation of thousands of pounds of herring roe, _is_ a constitutionally protected Aboriginal right because they were satisfied by the evidence that such commerce was \"integral to the distinctive culture\" of the Heiltsuk before contact with Europeans. The judges argued that their decision was based on the evidence presented. On the other hand, the Supreme Court found that Dorothy Van Der Peet's sale of 10 fish for $50.00 to her non-Aboriginal neighbour was _not_ within her constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights because the oral history testimony of the Sto:lo, and their expert witnesses in history and anthropology did not supply convincing evidence that pre-contact trade and exchange was sufficiently similar to capitalist commerce. In the absence of a developed critique of, and recommendations for specific alternatives to, Chief Justice McEachern's assessment of Aboriginal oral histories and his approach to expert evidence provided by anthropologists, archaeologists and historians, these latest rulings result in the possibility that the rights of different First Nations, with diverse histories of relationships with academics\u2014particularly archaeologists and historic ethnographers\u2014could be determined by the presence or absence, reliability or weakness, of the academic record. More to the point, the law retains the absolute power to arbitrarily interpret and evaluate expert evidence according to its own rules, at its pleasure.\n\nContrary to Chief Justice McEachern's claim that judges are bound by the letter of the law, and by tradition-bound precedent, a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada judges, in their 1996 rulings, stated clearly that the Court's role was not only to make decisions based on the determination of \"facts,\" but that it was also incumbent upon them to facilitate the goal of reconciliation between sectors of the population in dispute with each other. \"In pursuing the goal of reconciliation...limits are equally a necessary part as much as recognition,\" Judges Lamer, Sopinka, Gonthier, Cory, Iacobucci and Major wrote. \"With regards to the distribution of the fisheries resource after conservation goals have been met, objectives such as the pursuit of economic and regional fairness, and the recognition of the historical reliance upon, and participation in, the fishery by non-aboriginal groups, are the type of objectives which can (at least in the right circumstances) satisfy this standard,\" they concluded. Dorothy Van Der Peet's ten fish were sockeye salmon, harvested from the profitable Fraser River run. This bounty, and the opportunity to harvest it, is sought after and contested by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal fishers, and local and international fish processors. The Gladstone's thousands of pounds of herring roe, on the other hand, represent a delicacy eaten only by coastal First Nations and Japanese people. While the Japanese consumer market is a lucrative and captive one\u2014their own herring resources having been overfished to extinction\u2014there is little competition among harvesters; and no sports, recreation or tourist interests involved as there are in relation to the salmon industry. There is, in other words, no need for the Court to concern itself with the reconciliation of competing interests in the herring roe industry.\n\n* * *\n\n. Sanders 1992: 281-283.\n\n. Province of British Columbia 1991: 16. See McKee 1996 for a comprehensive overview and analysis of the treaty process.\n\n. Court of Appeal for British Columbia, 1993 _R. v. Dorothy Marie Van Der Peet, Reasons for Judgment_ : 91.\n\n. Ibid., 92.\n\n. Ibid., 134.\n\n. Ibid., 134.\n\n. Ibid., 134.\n\n. Ibid., 136.\n\n. Supreme Court of Canada, _R. v. Van Der Peet, Reasons for Judgment_ : 140.\n\n. Ibid., 144.\n\n. Ibid., 150.\n\n. Court of Appeal for British Columbia, _R. v. Gladstone, Reasons for Judgment_ : 158.\n\n. Ibid., 168.\n\n. Ibid., 158.\n\n. Ibid., 180.\n\n. Ibid., 184.\n\n. Ibid., 167.\n\n. Supreme Court of Canada, _R. v. Gladstone, Reasons for Judgment_ : 11.\n**P** **ART** **IX:**\n\n**I** **N** **F** **UTURO**\n\n**(I** **N THE** **F** **UTURE** **)**\n**Chapter 23: The Past In the Present, In the Future**\n\n**Just Another Day in Lotus Land**\n\nChief Justice Allan McEachern addressed the Canadian Bar Association's Annual Meeting in Vancouver in September, 1996. He used the occasion to rail against people he called \"agendists,\" who \"place themselves firmly on the side of the angels\" and have made \"outrage\" a \"common and effective debating technique.\" The Chief Justice lashed out at the media who, he charged, \"prefer an exaggerated or controversial outburst to rational analysis.\"\n\n\"One of the most serious misconceptions that troubles the judiciary,\" McEachern said, \"is the apparent belief on the part of many that judges decide cases in accordance with personal views or values.... Anyone who takes the time to read reasons for judgment knows that judges are not 'free spirits' who can decide cases any way they wish.... The relentless disciplines of evidence, law and appellate review all operate to require decisions to be rational within a much larger context than just the case under consideration.\"\n\nRepresentatives of the United Native Nations organization, who were also invited to attend the Bar Association's meetings, suggested that a good place to start looking for the \"relentless disciplines\" under which judges make decisions in this province might be in big law firms' long-standing business ties with forestry companies. In 1997, Allan McEachern was replaced as Chief Justice of B.C. by Bryan Williams. McEachern now sits on the British Columbia Court of Appeal.\n\n**Justice. Then Peace**\n\nBritish Columbia's primary resource-based economy is suffering the consequences of globalization: multi-national logging, mining and fishing companies are moving their operations to Third and other Fourth world locations. Unemployment has increased, wages have been depressed, and trade unions undermined. The commercial fishing industry's existence is threatened by declining salmon stocks. Hundreds of unionized cannery workers have lost their jobs in recent years as processors moved to Alaska and Washington, taking advantage of the lower wage opportunities afforded by the North American Free Trade Agreement. The fishing fleet has been cut in half in the last two years by the infamous federal government restructuring scheme named \"the Mifflin Plan,\" after the Liberal Fisheries Minister, Fred Mifflin, who administered the fleet reduction policy. Already marginalized, First Nations fishers have suffered the brunt of this new policy. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples living in coastal communities economically dependent on the fishery have seen the bases of their livelihoods and ways of life disappear during the last two years.\n\nTensions exist between Aboriginal peoples who have demanded moratoria on logging until their claims are settled, and workers and labour unions who rely on the forestry industry for their livelihood. The fishing industry is also a site of sometimes violent confrontations between Aboriginal fishers who claim ownership of the resource, and the right to harvest and sell their fish, and non-Aboriginal fishers who argue that the fish stocks are the \"common property\" of all Canadian citizens, and that Aboriginal people have no unique claim to it. Poverty has increased throughout the province, and social services have been cut back dramatically as the welfare state \"retreats:\" joblessness and economic insecurity, hopelessness and despair characterize life for more and more people\u2014Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal\u2014in contemporary British Columbia.\n\nRight wing political parties such as Reform and the B.C. Liberal Party scapegoat Aboriginal peoples and the land rights movement, identifying it as the cause of economic instability and mounting unemployment. They claim that disputes about Aboriginal title that frequently involve roadblocks, injunctions and blockades\u2014along with widely-publicized protests against logging by environmentalists\u2014create a \"chilly climate\" in B.C. for potential investors. When called upon to support their arguments, opponents of Aboriginal land rights repeat the ethnocentric historical narrative, and eurocentric cultural beliefs articulated by Chief Justice McEachern in his _Reasons for Judgment_ and upheld by some judges in the B.C. Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada: the tried\u2014and untrue\u2014\"founding myth of white British Columbians.\" This, briefly, is the social and political context in which the British Columbia Treaty Commission (BCTC) has, since 1992, been engaged in a \"modern-day treaty-making process.\"\n\nAs of this writing, forty-four First Nations in British Columbia have opted to become involved in negotiations with the federal and provincial governments in the context of the British Columbia Treaty Commission (BCTC). The BCTC's treaty-making process has been plagued by bureaucratic red tape, opposition by non-Aboriginals, conflicts between Aboriginal groups, shifting government positions and inequities in access to resources. For example: any costs incurred by First Nations in preparing for and carrying out negotiations will be deducted from final settlements. Governments, corporations and \"third party interests\" of course, have considerably more non-repayable resources at their disposal.\n\nNot all First Nations who are participating in the treaty process are enthusiastic. Some are cautiously optimistic. Many feel there are no other options and _anything_ is worth a try. An alliance of eighteen First Nations in the interior of British Columbia has consistently refused to participate in the treaty process unless, or until the government drops its demand that extinguishment of Aboriginal title must be the inevitable outcome of treaty negotiations. Recent precedents for modern-day treaties like the James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement and the Yukon Land Claim settlement have made recognition of Aboriginal title dependent upon extinguishment: at precisely the same moment that the Crown recognizes title, Aboriginal peoples must surrender it.\n\nRepresentatives of off-reserve, urban and Metis Aboriginal peoples have launched an increasingly vocal critique of the B.C. treaty process. They claim that their unique situations and interests are being ignored in favour of a narrowly construed, legalistic definition of First Nations limited to on-reserve populations represented by Band and Tribal Councils sanctioned by the _Indian Act_.\n\nAnother grouping of Aboriginal people excluded from, and without faith in, either the treaty process or leaders sanctioned by the _Indian Act_ , became involved in an armed stand-off at Gustafsen Lake in central British Columbia during the summer of 1995. Their political\/legal relationship, they argue, is with the British Crown as articulated in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. They have never surrendered their title to Britain, and they do not recognize the authority of the federal or the provincial governments to negotiate with them on a nation-to-nation basis. Given that this premise results in the logical conclusion that Canadian courts have no jurisdiction over Aboriginal lands or peoples, when their lawyer, Bruce Clark, attempted to put forward this argument, he was, of course, thrown out of the court whose legitimacy he refused to recognize. The NDP's Attorney-General, Ujjal Dosanjh, called in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and alerted the Canadian army. Sixteen Aboriginal people were arrested and tried on criminal charges ranging from attempted murder to mischief.\n\nResource companies, small businesses, wildlife and tourist industries, municipal governments and trade unions are represented in the treaty process as \"third party interests.\" Members of these groups argue that they should play a greater role in decision-making, and that they have been excluded from the treaty process even though they will experience the consequences of any agreements that are made. First Nations, and representatives of the federal and provincial governments, argue that \"third parties\" are represented, as voting citizens, by the government's negotiators. \"Third parties\" have mounted concerted and successful campaigns to pressure the provincial government into narrowing the terms and conditions of treaty negotiation.\n\nSince coming to power in 1991, the New Democratic Party provincial government has steadily retreated from its initial position of recognizing Aboriginal title. The Nishga Tribal Council commissioned the prestigious accounting firm of Price Waterhouse to conduct an audit of their traditional territories in the Fall of 1994. The accountants' report estimated that non-Aboriginal \"stakeholders\" had gleaned between $2 billion and $4 billion in resources from Nishga ancestral lands since the mid-nineteenth century. In May, 1995, the provincial NDP government announced a new policy for treaty settlement that would be based on First Nations' \"future needs\" rather than \"past injustices.\" \"If treaties are to be meaningful in a contemporary world, they cannot be based solely on evidence from the past,\" the Province's position paper explained. \"The current and future interests of _all_ parties will determine the final land area of each treaty.\"\n\nThe Supreme Court of Canada's 1996 decisions in _Van Der Peet_ and _Gladstone_ demand that Aboriginal claimants bring forward detailed, site-specific historical evidence to prove their case. The British Columbia Treaty Commission now appears to be saying history doesn't matter, at least where compensation is concerned.\n\nProvincial treaty negotiators were advised that their mandate specifically excluded discussions of compensation based on \"calculations of damages arising from past use and alienation of the lands and resources within traditional territories.\" Instead, the province announced a seven point formula for determining treaty settlements: the goals of the particular First Nation; the quantity and quality of Indian reserve land already held; the availability of Crown land in the treaty area and the value of lands and resources on them; local economic opportunities; the nature and extent of provincial and public interest in the area; the nature and extent of private interests (such as leases and tree-farm licenses) in lands and resources in the treaty area; and, finally, the amount of cash in the treaty settlement after the costs of treaty negotiations have been deducted. Any disputes that may arise concerning the application of the treaty should be settled by mediation, but the parties may bring conflicts to the Supreme Court of B.C. for resolution. The law and its precedents, including those created by Chief Justice McEachern in _Delgamuukw v. R._ will constitute the court of last resort.\n\nVery early on May 12, 1995, the day they later released their new policy to the press, the NDP's Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, Rev. John Cashore, addressed a breakfast meeting of the Master Members of the Business Council of B.C., who are influential representatives of \"Third Party Interests\" in the treaty process. Cashore assured his audience that the NDP government was committed to attracting foreign investment and supporting the business sector. The social democratic government pledged to \"get out of the way\" in the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and corporate interests. First Nations would be liberated from paternalistic government protection, and released to sink or swim in the shark-infested waters of the global marketplace. Furthermore, the Minister promised, Aboriginal peoples would no longer be a \"burden\" on the public purse. \"We won't...we can't support tax havens and ghettoes,\" Reverend Cashore added. \"Self-determination means responsibility to pay taxes.\"\n\nOnly one treaty has reached the final stages of negotiation, and it is not officially a part of the BCTC process but is, rather, a conclusion of negotiations begun over twenty years ago in response to the Supreme Court of Canada's _Calder_ decision. Talks had been stalled until 1991 by the B.C. provincial government's refusal to participate. An Agreement in Principle (AIP) between the Nisga'a First Nation Tribal Council, and the federal and provincial governments was signed in 1995, but remains to be ratified and passed into legislation. The key terms of this proposed \"modern-day treaty\" include: the hovering sovereign will retain \"underlying title\" to all the lands; 1,930 square kilometers of lands in the Lower Nass River area will be designated as communally-owned \"Nisga'a lands\"; the lands within 18 reserves and an additional 2.5 square kilometres will be reclassified as \"fee simple lands\" to be used for economic development, subject to provincial laws. The Nisga'a will be able to implement forest management standards, and there will be public access to Nisga'a lands for hunting, fishing and recreation. Nisga'a will be entitled to hunt moose and other designated species, and they will participate in the administration of a wildlife management area. They will not be permitted to sell wildlife, but may trade or barter it among themselves or with other Aboriginal peoples. The Nisga'a will be able to make laws governing such things as culture and language, employment, public works, regulation of traffic and transportation, land use and solemnization of marriage. They will provide health, child welfare and education services, and will exercise local policing powers similar to those of municipalities. The Nisga'a will receive $190 million over a period of years, will levy taxes on their members and will enter into taxation agreements with Canada and B.C., as municipalities do.\n\nA complex agreement on fisheries that will form a part of the proposed treaty was announced on August 22, 1996. Under the terms of this agreement, the Nisga'a will receive an annual treaty entitlement of approximately 18% of the Canadian Nass River salmon run, which they will be allowed to sell (\"the priority entitlement\"). This represents somewhat less than what Nisga'a already involved in the commercial fishery already catch. However, \"the Nisga'a will not have any preferential commercial rights in respect of the sale of fish.... If in any year there are no directed commercial or recreational harvests of Nass Area stocks by non Nisga'a, there will be no Nisga'a commercial fishery of those stocks, in that year.... In exchange for agreeing to a ceiling on the priority salmon fishery...the Nisga'a will receive an additional entitlement to be delivered through a Harvest Agreement outside of the treaty, and which will have exactly the same priority as commercial or recreational fisheries.... By definition, there must be harvesting by others, before there will be any Nisga'a entitlement above the priority entitlement set forth in the Treaty.\"\n\nThe Nisga'a Agreement in Principle (AIP) has opponents and supporters in both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations. Chief Joe Gosnell, Sr., President of the Nisga'a Tribal Council, was circumspect in his announcement of the AIP. \"This represents a hard-fought compromise that has seen a generation of Nisga'a growing old at the negotiating table, but we are making that compromise in order to become full and active participants in the social, political and economic life of this country,\" Gosnell explained. Minister of Indian Affairs Ron Irwin was bombastic: \"Today we make history,\" he proclaimed. \"We are forging a new relationship based on partnership and mutual respect.\" Provincial Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Reverend John Cashore praised the Agreement-in-Principle, calling it \"a fair and honourable resolution.\"\n\nMilton K. Wong, Vice-President of the Hong Kong Bank of Canada, made a submission to the provincial government's Select Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs in 1997 urging ratification of the Nisga'a AIP and other treaties. Citing the results of a recent benefits and costs analysis of potential treaty settlements conducted by the Vancouver accounting firm KPMG, Wong argued that treaties would establish the necessary framework within which \"we can establish a social, political and economic certainty that will encourage investment in British Columbia and therefore be of enormous help to business communities across the province.\"\n\nIn 1996, the federal Liberal government proposed significant changes to the _Indian Act_. The direction of these initiatives, too, is towards encouraging and facilitating relations between multi-national corporations, the private sector, and First Nations who, along with their lands, will no longer be wards of the Crown. Aboriginal leaders are divided in their responses to the Liberals' proposals. Critics charge that the consequences of these changes will be the emergence of late twentieth century \"company towns\" on Indian land, reminiscent of the monopolies granted to the Hudson's Bay Company in the nineteenth century. They say that the federal government is using the rhetoric of self-government and the currently fashionable lure of entrepreneurialism to legitimate abandoning their historical responsibilities and legal obligations\u2014 especially their fiduciary obligations\u2014 to Aboriginal peoples. Supporters of the proposed _Indian Act_ revisions argue that First Nations must be pragmatic, and position themselves competitively in the world market.\n\nIn the context of the increasing dominance of international capital and the declining economic or political power exercised by governments of nation states, it is interesting to recall the debates that gave rise to the cases that constituted the \"Marshall trilogy\" in nineteenth-century America, when \"suddenly, even the most hardened land-market capitalist assumed the mantle of zealous advocate of the Indians'...right to engage in unregulated real-estate transactions.\" A persistent theme in the struggle over land has been the competing interests of Crown(s), state(s), and private capital(s) when eachsought to appropriate Indian lands. We are currently moving out of a historical era dominated by state\/Crown monopoly on the purchase and administration of Indian land, government intervention in economic development on behalf of citizens' well-being, and publicly-funded social programs that protected people against the worst ravages of the mercurial market. We are moving into an era of rapid privatization and corporatization where the federal government is decentralizing and rolling up \"the social safety net.\" Paralleling the gross reductions in government spending on health, education and social services throughout the country, critics charge that new federal Indian policy represents the application of the same neo-conservative agenda to Aboriginal peoples. The federal government calls their new approach \"the devolution policy,\" and they claim they are supporting Aboriginal self-government by transferring responsibility for local government to Band Councils and Tribal Councils. Critics call it \"the de-evolution policy\" and \"cutbacks with feathers.\" They charge that what the government calls \"self-government\" is really \"self-administration.\" And, as \"transfers of responsibility\" have been accompanied by reduced transfers of resources, some First Nations leaders say they are being \"given the right to administer our own misery.\"\n\nSince 1990, and immediately preceding the province of British Columbia's historical policy change from non-recognition to qualified recognition of Aboriginal rights, major corporations have shown an interest in promoting reconciliation between Aboriginal peoples and governments, and in engaging in negotiations with Aboriginal groups directly. Leading Canadian banks and law firms now all have departments and personnel devoted exclusively to promoting Aboriginal businesses. The nexus of the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples is shifting from the political to the corporate arena. Aboriginal lands, culture, art, and even spirituality are being rapidly commodified. Increasingly, Indigenous peoples in Canada and throughout the world are faced with difficult choices about what direction to take regarding \"economic development.\" If First Nations communities were to lose their Aboriginal title to lands and to become pseudo-independent enclaves in a global capitalist economy this may provide some short-term economic benefits for members of existing Indigenous elites, or individually successful entrepreneurs, but the fate of peoples here and around the world whose lands have been expropriated and communities displaced, stands as a warning of where a journey directed by the profit motive may lead. Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood is home to thousands of young Aboriginal people, many of them dislocated from their homes, detached from their communities and veterans of the foster care system. These are the children walking the streets selling their bodies. These are the young people dealing drugs destined to quell rebellion on the streets, and to soothe alienation in the corporate boardrooms and lawyers' lounges that litter the landscape of the \"vast emptiness.\" As I write, public health officials have declared the Downtown\n\nEastside to be a \"medical state of emergency\": its residents are suffering the worst pandemic of HIV+\/AIDS in the \"developed\" world.\n\nOn September 10, 1996, the province of British Columbia withdrew from treaty negotiations with the Gitksan and applied to have the appeal of _Delgamuukw v. R._ heard by the Supreme Court of Canada. Intervention by the British Columbia Treaty Commission to attempt to restart negotiations failed to bring the province back to the table. Although treaty negotiations with the Wet'suwet'en had not broken down, the Wet'suwet'en decided as well to proceed with the appeal and negotiations within the B.C. treaty process were suspended. The federal government agreed to provide minimal funding\u2014insufficient to cover real costs\u2014in support of the appeal. The appeal was heard in June, 1997. The Supreme Court of Canada allowed only one and a half days for arguments to be presented.\n\nFor the purposes of their appeal, the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en agreed to compromise on two issues. They changed the wording of their claim from one seeking recognition of \"ownership\" and \"jurisdiction,\" to one claiming \"Aboriginal title\" and \"self-government.\" Second, they changed their claim from one made on behalf of specific chiefs and houses to a communal claim on behalf of all. The province and the federal government both argued that the test to prove Aboriginal title should be based on evidence of actual, continuous, physical occupation of specific land sites since time immemorial, and that Aboriginal rights should be limited to those that were \"integral to the distinctive culture\" of the First Nation applying to the court for recognition. Lawyers for both federal and provincial governments supported Chief Justice McEachern's findings on expert evidence. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en argued that an application of this test would result in the only lands enjoying Aboriginal title today being those already designated as reserves. The Province of British Columbia and \"third party\" intervenors argued that Aboriginal title had been extinguished, and that Chief Justice McEachern's findings of fact should be accepted. The Hereditary Chiefs had failed to prove their case, they claimed. The Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en replied that they had proven their essential connection to all their land in their oral history evidence that demonstrated cultural, historical, physical and spiritual relationships to the territory from time immemorial. Proof of site-specific and continuous use and occupation should not be required to prove Aboriginal title, they said. Such evidence is not required of the Crown or non-Aboriginal people wishing to prove ownership.\n\nAll parties awaited the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada.\n\n* * *\n\n. For an articulation of this political position see See Smith, M., 1995, and Lippert 1995. For a critique of the same see Bateman 1997.\n\n. Province of British Columbia, Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, \"B.C.'s Approach to Treaty Settlements: Lands and Resources,\" Victoria, B.C.: May 12, 1995.\n\n. Business Council of B.C., \"Presentation on Draft Position Paper on Treaty Negotiations in British Columbia\", Vancouver: May 12, 1995; and Culhane, Dara, unpublished fieldnotes, May 12, 1995.\n\n. Nisga'a Tribal Council, \"Agreement-in-Principle In Brief,\" Vancouver: February 15, 1996.\n\n. Nisga'a Tribal Council, \"Backgrounder: Nisga'a Agreement in Principle, Fisheries Component,\" Vancouver: August 27, 1996.\n\n. Nisga'a Tribal Council, Government of Canada, Government of British Columbia, \"Tripartite Press Release: Nisga'a, British Columbia and Canada Release Historic Agreement-In-Principle,\" Vancouver: February 15, 1996.\n\n. Wong, Milton (1997) \"Economic Imperatives to Settle A Nisga'a Treaty,\" letter to B.C. Select Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs,\" March, 1997.\n\n. Williams R. A. 1990(b): 72.\n**Chapter 24: Back to the Future**\n\n_...We wish to begin by clearly stating that in our view the extinguishment policy is harmful and counterproductive.... Instead, the focus of negotiations between the Canadian government and Aboriginal peoples should be on reconciliation based on an affirmation of Aboriginal title and rights, according to the principle of equitable sharing of ownership and jurisdiction.... The present approach does damage to Canada's ethical core, for it founds negotiations on the premise that one party is inherently superior to the other...._\n\n_We argue that without a legitimate Aboriginal title there cannot be a legitimate Canadian state, for without the recognition of Aboriginal title we would have a state based on colonial rationalizations. The model we propose bases the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and Canada on the recognition of a permanent Aboriginal title that sustains all of us. It represents a direction that can ultimately take Canada from a state founded on colonialism, into the twenty-first century as a state with roots going back to time immemorial._\n\n\u2014Anthropologist Michael Asch, and Lawyer Norman Zlotkin, 1997, _Affirming Aboriginal Title: A New Basis for Comprehensive Claims Negotiations_.\n\n**Colouring Outside the Lines**\n\nAnd so here we are, on the eve of what the Julian calendar marks as a \"millennium.\" We are about to embark on a new century: the twenty-first, in the year of Our Lord. Jesus Christ. Countless numbers of people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, have lived and died since 1774, pursuing just and unjust resolutions to the \"Aboriginal title issue\" in British Columbia and Canada. A generation has passed on, another has reached middle-age, and a new one has been born since Frank Calder and the Chiefs of the Nisga'a went to court in 1969. Millions and more millions of dollars have been spent on trials, hearings, research, studies and proposals. Learned people have combed the texts of western law, philosophy and politics and have developed blueprints for change. They have provided interpretations of precedents, models of logical arguments, and readings of history that would allow Canadian judges to recognize and codify, within their own terms, a new legal and political relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples.  These possibilities, however inevitably limited, exist, as they always have, within the parameters of the law as it exists. The judicial will to realize this potential that has been absent.\n\nContemporary Canadian legal and political positions and cultural beliefs that continue to uphold the doctrine of discovery\/occupation\/settlement, and the concept of _terra nullius_ refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of First Nations' existence. This position prohibits any possibility of dialogue or negotiation. The bully simply asserts his will through the power of force, and justifies it by denying the existence of the other. Positions that rely on the doctrine of conquest begin with a demand for the extinguishment of Aboriginal sovereignty, the recognition of the hovering sovereign's underlying title to all the land, and his omnipotent jurisdiction over all the peoples. In this scenario, the bully recognizes the existence of the other, holds his gun to their heads, and offers options for surrender.\n\nA Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples released its report in November 1996, after consulting, researching and deliberating for almost five years, at a cost of approximately 56 million dollars. Their extensive recommendations begin by proposing alternatives to the extinguishment policy to facilitate Nation-to-Nation negotiations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. The Commissioners advocate a concept of dual-citizenship for Aboriginal peoples in Canada, and outline a 20-year plan for redressing historic injustices and achieving social, economic and political equality. To date, the federal government has ignored the Royal Commission's report. The political will to implement their recommendations is absent.\n\nContemporary Aboriginal legal and political representatives who advocate what is referred to as the \"sovereignty argument\" begin their story in the times before Europeans arrived. Aboriginal people who identify with the \"sovereignty position,\" and self-described \"traditionalist\" groupings, argue that Aboriginal sovereignty over lands and resources is a sacred trust entered into by the Creator and their ancestors that cannot be altered or negotiated away by mere mortals but must endure for all time. People committed to this position are open to negotiating agreements regarding sharing lands and resources with other sovereign peoples, but the prospect of surrendering sovereignty, or \"Aboriginal title,\" would constitute a betrayal of what they believe is their sacred covenant with the Creator to be stewards of the land. It is, literally, unthinkable.\n\nMany Aboriginal representatives who are involved in the treaty process and litigation make it very clear that they do not reject the sovereignty position in principle, but see themselves as being involved in processes that demand pragmatism and the making of strategic compromises. Remember that Chief Justice McEachern set out this double bind when he asked the absurd question whether the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en themselves really believed in their own assertions of title because they acknowledged\u2014within the framework of meaning of the law\u2014the Crown's underlying title to all the land. Although the Chief Justice simultaneously argued that such recognition of Crown sovereignty constituted the non-negotiable terms and conditions under which the courts would hear the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's case in the first place. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.\n\nAny future coexistence between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians must be built on a strong and just foundation, and for this to be possible the old one must first be dismantled. Canadians must return to the first moment in the relationship: to the initial assertion of brute force and demonstration of raw power when the Crown declared the land _terra nullius_ and asserted its dominion as if the Aboriginal peoples already living on the land did not exist. We must face the fact that this was justified then, and continues to be justified today, on the basis of an equally crude and violent assertion: that Europeans are superior human beings and Aboriginal peoples are inferior human beings. This was and is wrong: wrong according to British law then and now, and morally repugnant and politically indefensible according to Canadian ideals of justice, then and now. So the first reciprocal step towards reconciliation _must_ be for judges, through law; and political representatives, through legislation; and institutions, through inclusion and respect for autonomy; and Canadians, through intelligence and decency, to recognize this historical truth publicly and plainly for what it was, and is. Coming to terms with this truth of Canadian history requires that Canadians understand this legacy not as a series of historical errors or anomalies, but as consistent with the underlying foundations and principles of the colonial project. This means too that those who inherit the benefits of these practices must also be prepared to change and act responsibly. These truths must be acknowledged, without rationalizations. Justice must be done, and must be seen to be done, before any just future can begin to be built.\n\nA new generation of Aboriginal political activists and legal academics, and non-Aboriginal supporters have been engaged in the study of historical reinterpretation and revision and complex reconstructions of dialogues between European and Aboriginal philosophies. From their work have emerged sophisticated proposals and directions for legal, political and cultural reconciliation based on shared morality, ethics and justice. For example, Ojibway legal scholar John Borrows has revisited the Royal Proclamation of 1763 through studying Aboriginal oral histories. He argues that \"First Nations were not passive objects, but active participants, in the formulation and ratification of the Royal Proclamation.... In these early confrontations with the Crown, First Nations possessed their own power and a range of choices to which they could bring their own considerations and alternatives.\" Foremost among Aboriginal understandings of these agreements was the notion of continuity into perpetuity of their relationship to their lands, and of coexistence with other peoples. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, according to Aboriginal interpretations, guaranteed that negotiations would be required in order to change use of lands, and to determine the relative jurisdictions of Aboriginal and Canadian law and governments. This interpretation can provide for a relationship based on the assumption that Crown sovereignty and Aboriginal sovereignty may co-exist unless or until changes in this relationship are legitimately agreed upon by both parties. Read in this way, as a Nation-to-Nation treaty between First Nations and the Crown, Borrows argues, the Royal Proclamation could serve as a model for modern-day treaty-making.\n\nThe first step in creating the necessary conditions for intercultural communication is to agree to converse within a shared framework. Borrows' interpretation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 as the outcome of intercultural negotiations, whose written _and_ oral history must be given equal weight, and whose contemporary meaning must be found in continuing dialogue, signals a significant gesture towards reconciliation with non-Aboriginal Canadians. Aboriginal peoples have also agreed to a shared language of negotiation, and accept, as sufficient for the purposes of communication, the translation of their histories and aspirations into English and French words.\n\nA Crown response that acknowledges that the Royal Proclamation _recognizes_ rather than _creates_ Aboriginal rights; that agrees to take into account the intentions and understandings of both British and Aboriginal authors of the Proclamation; that interprets the Royal Proclamation as recognizing the existence of sovereign Aboriginal _nations_ ; that, following from this, acknowledges the obligation for Britain, and now for Canada, to negotiate with Aboriginal Peoples on a _nation to nation_ basis; and that agrees to negotiate the nature of the Aboriginal rights so recognized, would constitute a reciprocal step towards dialogue and reconciliation.\n\nIn British Columbia, as elsewhere, an intangible yet palpable anticipation that we are standing at a cross-roads, or on the edge of a cliff, pervades the general sense of things: structures the feelings of our times. We know we are experiencing a social and cultural sea change, but we are uncertain what the future may hold. While parties to Aboriginal title litigation contest the details of history, they also dispute each other's visions of moral and social universes. Understanding \"culture\" as being most deeply rooted in theories of human nature and visions of what constitutes a \"good society,\" a \"good life,\" and a \"good person,\" rather than as a collection of traits, or a blueprint people carry around in their heads that, like a computer program, determines how they will interpret experiential \"input,\" allows the discussion to go beyond dualist, binary oppositions, hierarchal competitions for cultural supremacy, and essentialist notions of culture as naturally or divinely given. Many contemporary supporters of universal human rights argue for proposals that are not limited to the individual rights prized by the dominant western culture, but also address collective cultural rights, including the \"right to belong.\" Various concepts of \"the self\" and what it means to be a person in different cultural contexts serve as windows onto the broader political landscape. The self embedded in the Crown's legal arguments, in Sheila Robinson's anthropology, in Chief Justice McEachern's ruling, and in the Supreme Court of Canada's precedents, is the self of nineteenth-century European political theory. It is an idealized male self, unencumbered by obligations to family; freed from dependence on, or responsibility for, others; released from the mercy of time and tides. It is a self moved around by the demands of global capital in the international marketplace: the multinational corporate executive for whom home is where the profit is, and the migrant worker for whom home must be where the paycheque is. A self with \"reasons to travel.\" It is the self of the atomistic individual: the soldier in the war of all against all, the warrior in the battle of the fittest to survive. These theories of human nature embodied in aggressive, competitive individualists have been contested throughout western European history, from both inside and outside this intellectual tradition. The Crown's vision does not describe a natural or universal way of being human; nor a consensus on what it ought to mean, or could mean, to be human.\n\nContrary to the dominant image represented by the Crown, its opponents argue that human beings should be conceptualized as essentially and irreducibly social beings, and that individuals exist always already in relationships with others. As social beings we are constituted by our relationships. We need others in order to be ourselves. Within such a vision of human life we do not feed ourselves, we feed each other. If people are hungry, we have failed in our responsibilities as human beings. We do not shelter ourselves, we shelter each other. If people are homeless, we have failed in our responsibilities as human beings. If justice does not prevail, it is because we choose to practice injustice. Neither Nature nor God nor Culture\u2014nor \"The Deficit\"\u2014compel us to make the choices we make. As social beings we are, or ought to be, responsible to and for each other, and for our collective future.\n\nClearly, there are places within European legal, philosophical and cultural traditions from which openings to Aboriginal traditions are possible, and sites where bridges can be built. Many Aboriginal leaders and their supporters, of necessity, have been absorbed in responding to agendas set by the courts that have, as law dictates, focussed on competing interpretations of the past. Political negotiations follow the law, however unevenly or erratically. Until responsibility for the past is recognized, and fair reparations made, dreaming outside possibilities framed by existing legal and political structures seems to some a luxury that Aboriginal peoples and their allies cannot yet afford. This has inadvertently encouraged a kind of legalization of political imagination where justification for social change and visions of the future are sought in the past: in Lockean or Hobbesian political theory, or in romanticized images of pre-contact Aboriginal Gardens of Eden.\n\nOthers argue that none of us\u2014Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal\u2014can afford _not_ to dream. While we may draw on history, it is the future that we are constructing in the present. Societies will always reflect their histories, but need not be limited by them. Cultures are inevitably shaped by traditions, but are dynamic and creative too. Must we remain obedient to the tyranny of precedent? Why consider history to be normative, why allow it to be normalizing? Why hold the future a prisoner of the past? What does it mean, after all, to create human(e) communities? What is required to build a just world? These are ultimately moral and political challenges that must address economic structures and technology, but should not be determined by them. The answers to these questions will not be found in empirical studies of population to resources ratios, nor in abstract theoretical premises. These are questions that require moral and political dialogue, and solutions that must be lived and experienced in the everyday world, within relationships between people, not within contracts between things.\n\nThere are those who suggest more radical possibilities than the law, or the mainstream political imagination, currently envisions. They propose that Aboriginal title be recognized as the \"underlying title to all the lands.\" A living, breathing Mother Earth would displace the abstract, hovering sovereign. This title would be defined as a relationship to land and resources that constitutes a sacred trust held by the living for the not-yet-born. Such visions of possible futures see human beings as inextricably part of interdependent and mutually-sustaining relationships with all of nature. \"Man\" need not seek dominion over all he surveys; need not build fences or evict his family. Neither may he destroy at his whim that which shelters and sustains fellow beings. If land and resources were to be conceptualized and codified in law on such philosophical premises, then perhaps we could cease energy-devouring and soul-destroying battles in courtrooms, at negotiating tables, and on logging roads. Rather than competing in expensive contests of abstract legal acrobatics and arguing about who has the right to exploit the land, we could begin to discuss who has the responsibility to nurture the land. Perhaps we could all survive. Together. On this land.\n\nEasier said than done? Of course. Utopian idealism in the face of global capitalism and the ever-encroaching New World Order? Perhaps. But when are dreams most necessary if not in times like these? When should morality be celebrated if not when \"pragmatism\" terrorizes? Why should such a vision _not_ be possible to realize? Who says it could never be?\n\n* * *\n\n. Asch and Zlotkin 1997.\n\n. Macklem 1991, 1993; McNeil 1979; Slattery 1992.\n\n. Henderson J. Y 1985; Monture-Okanee 1993; Turpel 1991; Venne 1997.\n\n. Borrows 1997.\n\n. Marcus and Fisher 1986; Turner 1993, 1997.\n\n. Benhabib and Cornell 1989; Taylor 1991.\n**P** **OSTSCRIPT** **: D** **ECEMBER** **11, 1997**\n\n_I have mixed emotions today. I am filled with joy and also with remembrance of people who have worked so hard. I remember our Elders who passed on with broken hearts and the words of Chief Justice McEachern in their ears. Today's decision begins to heal the wounds._ _The Supreme Court of Canada has come out on the side of justice and humanity._\n\n\u2014Ray Jones, December 11, 1997.\n\n_I was there. I sat through the whole trial. I saw how our elders and witnesses were treated. I remember their tears that day that Chief Justice McEachern made his judgment. Now, at last, our truth has been heard._\n\n\u2014Yagalahl (Dora Wilson), December 11, 1997.\n\n_We've been given a diamond for Christmas...instead of a lump of coal._\n\n\u2014Satsan (Herb George), December 11, 1997.\n\n**The Dawn of a New Day?**\n\nOn December 11, 1997, Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en representatives, Aboriginal rights supporters and members of the media gathered at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre to hear the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling on the _Delgamuukw v. R._ appeal. Most people had been taken by surprise a week earlier when it had been announced that this decision, not expected until the Spring of 1998, was to be handed down before Christmas.\n\nCautious anticipation turned into celebration as the contents of the Supreme Court's ruling were revealed: Allan McEachern had erred when he dismissed the oral history evidence of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Chiefs and Elders, his own superiors determined. \"The trial judge, after refusing to admit, or giving no independent weight to these oral histories, reached the conclusion that the appellants had not demonstrated the requisite degree of occupation for 'ownership,'\" wrote the Right Honourable Antonio Lamer, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. \"Had the trial judge assessed the oral histories correctly,\" Lamer continued, \"his conclusions on these issues of fact might have been very different.\" The depth and breadth of McEachern's errors led\n\nthe Supreme Court of Canada to order a new trial. For the same reasons, the Supreme Court also stated that they could not rule on the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's claims for self-government rights.\n\nAppeal courts are normally loathe to contradict findings of fact made by lower court judges, and do so only when they are convinced that the trial judge has made a \"palpable and overriding error\" in his findings of fact. Usually, such a conclusion may arise from three possible bases: (1) where it can be demonstrated that there was no evidence to support a material finding of fact made by the trial judge; (2) when the trial judge wrongly overlooked admissible evidence relevant and material to the issue before the court; or, (3) where the trial judge's findings of fact cannot be supported as reasonable. Chief Justice Lamer added a fourth, new, condition to this list: \"In cases involving the determination of aboriginal rights,\" he wrote, \"appellate intervention is also warranted by the failure of a trial court to appreciate the evidentiary difficulties inherent in adjudicating aboriginal claims when, first, applying the rules of evidence and, second, interpreting the evidence before it.\"\n\nLamer detailed his court's criticisms of McEachern's decision on this matter, devoting eight full pages of text to the issue:\n\nAlthough he...[McEachern] had earlier recognized, when making his ruling on admissibility, that it was impossible to make an easy distinction between the mythological and \"real\" aspects of these oral histories, he discounted the adaawk and kungax because they were not 'literally true,' confounded 'what is fact and what is belief,' 'included some material which might be classified as mythology,' and projected a 'romantic view' of the history of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en. He also cast doubt on the authenticity of these special oral histories because...'the verifying group is so small that they cannot safely be regarded as expressing the reputation of even the Indian community, let alone the larger community whose opportunity to dispute territorial claims would be essential to weight.' Finally, he questioned the utility of the adaawk and kungax to demonstrate use and occupation because they were 'seriously lacking in detail about the specific lands to which they are said to relate.' Although he framed his ruling in terms of the specific oral histories before him, in my respectful opinion, the trial judge...[McEachern] in reality based his decision on some general concerns with the use of oral histories as evidence in aboriginal rights cases. In summary, the trial judge gave no independent weight to these special oral histories because they did not accurately convey historical truth, because knowledge about those oral histories was confined to the communities whose histories they were and because those oral histories were insufficiently detailed. However...these are features to a greater or lesser extent, of all oral histories.... The implication of the trial judge's reasoning is that oral histories should never be given any independent weight and are only useful as confirmatory evidence in aboriginal rights litigation. I fear that if this reasoning were followed, the oral histories of aboriginal peoples would be consistently and systematically undervalued by the Canadian legal system.\n\nThe trial judge also erred when he discounted the \"recollections of aboriginal life\" offered by various members of the appellant nations...he effectively held that this evidence did not demonstrate the requisite continuity between present occupation and past occupation in order to ground a claim for aboriginal title. In my opinion, the trial judge expected too much of the oral history of the appellants, as expressed in the recollections of aboriginal life of members of the appellant nations. He expected that evidence to provide definitive and precise evidence of pre-contact aboriginal activities on the territory in question.... Rather, if oral history cannot conclusively establish pre-sovereignty occupation of land, it may still be relevant to demonstrate that current occupation has its origins prior to sovereignty. This is exactly what the appellants sought to do.\n\nThe trial judge also erred in his treatment of the territorial affidavits filed by the appellant chiefs.... He questioned the degree to which the declarations amounted to a reputation because they were largely confined to the appellants' communities.... Furthermore, the trial judge reasoned that since the subject-matter of the affidavits was disputed, its reliability was doubtful. Finally, the trial judge questioned...the 'independence and objectivity' of the information contained in the affidavits, because the appellants and their ancestors 'have been actively discussing land claims for many years.'\n\nThe requirement that a reputation be known in the general community...ignores the fact that oral histories...generally relate to particular locations, and refer to particular families and communities and may, as a result, be unknown outside of that community, even to other aboriginal nations. Excluding the territorial affidavits because the claims to which they relate are disputed does not acknowledge that claims to aboriginal rights, and aboriginal title in particular, are almost always disputed and contested.... Casting doubt on the reliability of the territorial affidavits because land claims had been actively discussed for many years also fails to take account of the special context surrounding aboriginal claims, in two ways. First, those claims have been discussed for so long because of British Columbia's persistent refusal to acknowledge the existence of aboriginal title in that province until relatively recently.... It would be perverse, to say the least, to use the refusal of the province to acknowledge the rights of its aboriginal inhabitants as a reason for excluding evidence which may prove the existence of those rights. Second, this rationale for exclusion places aboriginal claimants whose societies record their past through oral history in a grave dilemma. In order for the oral history of a community to amount to a form of reputation, and to be admissible in court, it must remain alive through the discussions of members of that community; those discussions are the very basis of that reputation. But if those histories are discussed too much, and too close to the date of litigation, they may be discounted as being suspect, and may be held to be inadmissible. The net effect may be that a society with such an oral tradition would never be able to establish a historical claim through the use of oral history in court.\n\nFinally, Chief Justice Lamer concluded:\n\nIn the circumstances, the factual findings cannot stand. However, given the enormous complexity of the factual issues at hand, it would be impossible for the Court to do justice to the parties by sifting through the record itself and making new factual findings. A new trial is warranted, at which the evidence may be considered in light of the principles...elaborated upon here. In applying these principles, the new trial judge might well share some or all of the findings of fact of McEachern C.J.\n\n**Patience Is a Virtue**\n\n_This struggle began when the first Europeans arrived on our land. We have been waiting 130 years for this day. We are no longer invisible._\n\n\u2014Joan Ryan, Gitksan, December 11, 1997\n\n\"Aboriginal title is a right to the land itself,\" the Supreme Court's ruling stated, and this right is protected by Section 35(1) of the Canadian Constitution. The purpose of Section 35(1), the Supreme Court decreed, \"is to reconcile the prior presence of aboriginal peoples with the assertion of Crown sovereignty.\" Therefore both aspects of that prior presence\u2014the occupation of land, and the prior social organization and distinctive cultures of Aboriginal peoples on that land\u2014must be recognized and affirmed.\n\nThe Supreme Court proceeded to define, for the first time, the exact content of Aboriginal title that the law would legitimate. Chief Justice Lamer noted that it was necessary to do this because, he said, \"I believe that all of the parties have characterized the content of aboriginal title incorrectly.\"\n\nAboriginal title, the judgment continued, is inalienable; it must be communal; it cannot be transferred, sold or surrendered to anyone other than the Crown; and it finds its source in recognition (not creation) by the Royal Proclamation of 1763; in the common law principle that occupation constitutes proof of possession; and in laws that pre-existed the assertion of British sovereignty. Aboriginal title in law, the Supreme Court explained, is _sui generis:_ it represents a reconciliation of common law and aboriginal law and cannot be reduced to either.\n\nThe Supreme Court modified the \"frozen rights\" position adopted by previous judicial panels. Aboriginal title, the judges decreed, is not restricted to practices whose origins can be traced to pre-contact times. Legally codified Aboriginal title now encompasses the right to exclusive use and occupation of the land for a variety of purposes which need not be aspects of those practices, customs and traditions \"integral to the claimant group's distinctive aboriginal culture\" as had been required by the _Sparrow_ test. \"The nature of the Indian interest is very broad and incorporates present-day needs,\" the Supreme Court declared. \"Aboriginal title encompasses mineral rights and lands held pursuant to aboriginal title should be capable of exploitation. Such a use is certainly not a traditional one.\" However, \"practices, customs or traditions that arose solely as a response to European influences do not meet the standard for recognition.\"\n\nIn order to \"prove\" Aboriginal title in court, First Nations must present evidence that they used and occupied the lands claimed on the date British sovereignty was asserted. In British Columbia, this date has been established as 1846. Or, in the alternative, they may present evidence of present occupation as proof of pre-sovereignty possession as long as there is \"a continuity between present and pre-sovereignty occupation.\"\n\nThe Supreme Court distinguished between general Aboriginal _title_ and specific Aboriginal _rights_. While the relevant time period for establishing Aboriginal title is the date of British sovereignty, Aboriginal rights must be traced to the date of first contact with Europeans. Aboriginal rights are identified with particular practices, customs, and traditions that exist on a continuum related to the degree of connection with land.\n\nThe Supreme Court went on to develop the principle that Aboriginal title contains an \"inherent limit.\" In so doing, they clarified the legal definition of Aboriginal title more precisely:\n\nLands held pursuant to aboriginal title cannot be used in a manner that is irreconcilable with the nature of the claimants' attachment to those lands. This inherent limit arises because the relationship of an aboriginal community with its land should not be prevented from continuing into the future. Occupancy...[the \"proof\" required to establish Aboriginal title at law] is determined by reference to the activities that have taken place on the land and the uses to which the land has been put by the particular group. If lands are so occupied, there will exist a special bond between the group and the land in question such that the land will be part of the definition of the group's distinctive culture. Land held by virtue of aboriginal title may not be alienated because the land has an inherent and unique value in itself which is enjoyed by the community with aboriginal title to it. The community cannot put the land to uses which would destroy that value.\n\nFor example, if occupation is established with reference to the use of the land as a hunting ground, then the group that successfully claims aboriginal title to that land may not use it in such a fashion as to destroy its value for such a use (e.g. by strip mining it). Similarly, if a group claims a special bond with the land because of its ceremonial or cultural significance, it may not use the land in such a way as to destroy that relationship (e.g. by developing it in such a way that the bond is destroyed, perhaps by turning it into a parking lot.)\n\nFinally...the importance of the continuity of the relationship between an aboriginal community and its land, and the non-economic or inherent value of that land, should not be taken to detract from the possibility of surrender to the Crown in exchange for valuable consideration. On the contrary, the idea of surrender reinforces the conclusion that aboriginal title is limited in the way I have described. If aboriginal peoples wish to use their lands in a way that aboriginal title does not permit, then they must surrender those lands and convert them into non-title lands to do so.... This is not, I must emphasize, a limitation that restricts the use of the land to those activities that have traditionally been carried out on it. That would amount to a legal straightjacket on aboriginal peoples who have a legitimate legal claim to the land. The approach I have outlined above allows for a full range of uses of the land, subject only to an overarching limit, defined by the special nature of the aboriginal title in that land.\n\nThe courts maintain the power to determine what constitutes a \"truly aboriginal\" use of land and what does not, and that limiting distinction continues to turn on degrees of commercial exploitation and development.\n\nChief Justice Lamer dispensed with the \"old\" question of extinguishment of aboriginal title by declaring that provincial governments could not extinguish Aboriginal title or rights prior to 1982 when they were entrenched in the Constitution. Therefore, Aboriginal title and rights in British Columbia arise from long term use and occupation prior to European arrival, have never been extinguished, and still exist today. The possibility of legal extinguishment of Aboriginal title remains, but it has been projected into the future, rather than into the past; and could now involve Aboriginal initiative, participation and consent.\n\nThe judges of the Supreme Court of Canada upheld Allan McEachern's dismissal of the evidence provided by non-Aboriginal expert witnesses. Claiming that the Gitksan's and Wet'suwet'en's objections to McEachern's rulings on historical, anthropological, and archaeological evidence represented \"mere disagreement,\" rather than any \"palpable and overriding errors,\" and that the Province of British Columbia and the Government of Canada had established that \"there was some contradictory evidence that supported the trial judge's conclusions\" in these areas, Chief Justice Lamer concluded that \"the appellants have failed to demonstrate that the trial judge erred in this respect.\" Justice Lamer continued, emphasizing his court's support for Allan McEachern's dismissal of Richard Daly and Antonia Mills, and erasure of Hugh Brody:\n\nOne objection that I would like to mention specifically, albeit in passing, is the trial judge's refusal to accept the testimony of two anthropologists who were brought in as expert witnesses by the appellants. This aspect of the trial judge's reasons was hotly contested by the appellants in their written submissions. However, I need only reiterate what I have stated above, that findings of credibility, including the credibility of expert witnesses, are for the trial judge to make, and should warrant considerable deference from appellate courts.\n\nChief Justice Lamer and the Supreme Court of Canada panel is to be commended for respecting Aboriginal self-representation, and for finally acknowledging what First Nations have always known: that oral tradition is the preeminent, legitimate source of knowledge about Aboriginal culture and history, and must be understood and validated on its own terms. Rules for historical interpretation drawn from the mainstream, western, academic study of written history are not appropriate to the understanding of marginalized, non-western, oral histories. Neither should the law require Aboriginal peoples' representations to be mediated by anthropologists.\n\nHowever, Allan McEachern's \"findings of fact\" did not arise purely out of thin air, or his own imagination. They echoed the Crown's legal arguments in _Delgamuukw v. R._ These in turn drew on the evidence presented by the Crown's expert witnesses in history and anthropology, and on the unreflected upon \"common sense\" of Canadian colonial culture. The question that logically arises is: had the Crown and their witnesses \"assessed the oral histories correctly [would] their conclusions on...issues of fact...have been very different\"? In short, the Supreme Court of Canada appears to be saying, rather contradictorily, that Allan McEachern erred in his assessment of the oral histories, but the Crown and its witnesses who advised him to make the evaluation he did were not also wrong, but were merely expressing a difference of opinion arising from academic debates.\n\nThe problem with the Supreme Court's failure to find \"palpable and overriding errors\" in Allan McEachern's evaluation of the academic historical and anthropological testimony is not that it insults anthropologists and historians, but that such evidence will still continue to figure prominently in Aboriginal title litigation even if Aboriginal oral tradition is considered more appropriately and respectfully. In future litigation, questions about research standards and methodologies, about the evaluation of expertise, about ethnocentric biases in the historical and ethnographic record, and about the problems and complexities involved in cross-cultural interpretation and communication will continue to be at issue. If such considerations were taken seriously by the Supreme Court, in tandem with culturally-appropriate analyses of Aboriginal oral histories, such methodological rigour might mitigate against the possibility of a \"new trial judge...[sharing] some or all of the findings of fact of McEachern C.J.\" in this or any other cases.\n\n**The Way Forward**\n\n_This judgment restores a measure of faith in the legal system. The rule of law applies to all British Columbians now. The federal and provincial governments should come back to the treaty negotiation table in a fair and honest manner._\n\n\u2014Chief Joe Mathias, Squamish First Nation, December 11, 1997.\n\n_\"Aboriginal title is a right to the land itself!\" Premier Clark and Prime Minister Chretien, take note! You can no longer make trade deals with the Asia Pacific countries or anyone else without us._\n\n\u2014Chief Ed John, First Nations Summit, December 11, 1997.\n\nFinally, the Supreme Court of Canada judges turned their attention to determining how\u2014once Aboriginal title and\/or Aboriginal rights are established at law\u2014federal and provincial governments could justifiably infringe upon them. The Aboriginal title codified by the Supreme Court's ruling remains a subordinate one that constitutes a burden on the Crown's underlying, radical title. The hovering sovereign's hegemony remains paramount. This principle is most clearly spelled out in the judgment's articulation of legal tests for the justification of infringement. The satisfaction of two conditions would constitute legally sanctioned infringement of aboriginal title and rights: (1) that the infringement furthers a compelling and substantial legislative objective; and\/or (2) that the infringement is consistent with the special fiduciary relationship between the Crown and the Aboriginal peoples. The ruling sets out the following as \"compelling and substantial legislative objectives\":\n\nThe development of agriculture, forestry, mining and hydroelectric power, the general economic development of the interior of British Columbia, protection of the environment or endangered species, and the building of infrastructure and the settlement of foreign populations to support those aims....\n\nLegitimate government objectives also include \"the pursuit of economic and regional fairness;\" and in relation to specific resources like salmon, \"the recognition of the historical reliance upon, and participation in, the fishery by non-aboriginal groups.\" Attainment of these objectives constitute legally justifiable reasons for infringement. The Supreme Court of Canada explained their reasoning:\n\nBecause distinctive aboriginal societies exist within, and are part of, a broader social, political and economic community over which the Crown is sovereign, there are circumstances in which, in order to pursue objectives of compelling and substantial importance to that community as a whole (taking into account the fact that aboriginal societies are part of that community), some limitation of those rights will be justifiable. Aboriginal rights are a necessary part of the reconciliation of aboriginal society with the broader political community of which they are a part; limits placed on those rights are, where the objectives furthered by those limits are of sufficient importance to the broader community as a whole, equally a necessary part of that reconciliation.\n\nHowever, such infringement should not be arbitrary or unfair within the terms established by the court. Aboriginal peoples must be consulted, included, and compensated, according to the fiduciary obligation owed by the Crown to Aboriginal peoples. The Supreme Court explained their interpretation of this second part of the test for justifiable infringement:\n\nThe fiduciary duty does not demand that aboriginal rights always be given priority. Each case is different...The form the fiduciary obligation can take is also variable...Within the analysis of justification, there are further questions to be addressed, depending on the circumstances of the inquiry. These include the questions of whether there has been as little infringement as possible in order to effect the desired result; whether, in a situation of expropriation, fair compensation is available; and, whether the aboriginal group in question has been consulted....\n\nThe nature and scope of the duty of consultation will vary with the circumstances. In occasional cases, when the breach is less serious or relatively minor, it will be no more than a duty to discuss important decisions that will be taken with respect to lands pursuant to aboriginal title. Of course, even in the rare cases when the minimum acceptable standard is consultation, this consultation must be in good faith, and with the intention of substantially addressing the concerns of the aboriginal peoples whose lands are at issue. In most cases, it will be significantly deeper than mere consultation. Some cases may even require the full consent of an aboriginal nation, particularly when provinces enact hunting and fishing regulations in relation to aboriginal lands.\n\n...In keeping with the duty of honour and good faith on the Crown, fair compensation will ordinarily be required when aboriginal title is infringed. The amount of compensation payable will vary with the nature of the particular aboriginal title affected and with the nature and severity of the infringement and the extent to which aboriginal interests were accommodated.\n\nAnswers to all these questions will be determined on a case-by-case basis.\n\n**The Irony of Ironies**\n\n_It is not open to the appellants to challenge the trial judge's findings of fact merely because they disagree with them. I fear that a significant number of the appellants' objections fall into this category.... The bulk of these objections, at best, relate to alleged instances of misapprehension or oversight of material evidence by the trial judge._\n\n\u2014Chief Justice Lamer, 1997, _Reasons for Judgment_ : para 90.\n\nWhile the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Allan McEachern's errors were so fundamental as to be beyond the scope of an appeal court to repair, and that a new trial was therefore warranted, the judges recommended that disputes concerning land title and jurisdiction between First Nations in British Columbia and the federal and provincial governments should be settled through negotiations and not through further litigation. In so doing, they reiterated a position that has become increasingly influential in contemporary Canadian politics and was clearly articulated by the Supreme Court's recent decisions in the _Van Der Peet_ and _Gladstone_ cases: appointed judges simultaneously proclaiming the omnipotent independence of the law from society, while explicitly and intentionally shaping and directing public policy that is, theoretically, the job of elected politicians. Law advances, democracy retreats. The Supreme Court of Canada's ruling in the appeal of _Delgamuukw v. R._ is specifically directed to treaty negotiations in British Columbia, and it significantly strengthens the position of First Nations in this process. Specifically, by recognizing unextinguished Aboriginal title to _all_ of British Columbia, by insisting on consultation with First Nations regarding development on their lands, and by requiring that compensation be paid for historical and future exploitation of Aboriginally-owned resources, the Supreme Court of Canada undermined the positions that the Province of British Columbia and the Government of Canada have brought to the treaty negotiation table. The governments have argued there that Aboriginal jurisdiction should be limited to specific lands, such as those already designated as Indian reserves; and that no entitlement to compensation for resource exploitation should be considered. Law advances minority rights that democracy has retreated from protecting.\n\nPublic opinion and the electoral process also affects what the future of treaty negotiations may be. The Supreme Court's validation of Aboriginal title and rights, and their recognition of the legitimacy of oral histories contradicts the still popular \"founding myth of White British Columbians\" that was presented by the Crown, and articulated by former Chief Justice McEachern in _Delgamuukw v. R._ This continues to be the \"historical myth of choice\" of significant sectors of the B.C. population, particularly of the provincial Liberal and Reform parties, who threaten to form the next government and to dismantle the treaty process if they do.\n\n**Tomorrow Today**\n\n_Legal orders may embody asymmetrical power relations, but power is always an interactional process. Dominant groups enjoy legally protected privileges, but they are also constrained by the law. And subordinated groups that suffer under particular legal systems may find that law offers them, the less powerful, a measure of protection from the powerful, just as it sometimes offers them resources for action._\n\n\u2014Anthropologists June Starr and Jane Collier, 1989, \"Introduction,\" _History and Power in the Study of Law_.\n\nThat the Supreme Court of Canada's December, 1997, ruling on the _Delgamuukw v. R._ appeal significantly changes the legal landscape in which Aboriginal title and rights litigation is adjudicated in Canada and in other colonial contexts worldwide is beyond question. While initial public responses to the judgment by representatives of industry and federal and provincial governments have tended to minimize its significance and potential impact on treaty negotiations, clearly this is truly a \"landmark judgment\" whose consequences will be many and varied. We will live in interesting times in the years to come.\n\nFor now, for today, First Nations of British Columbia are deservedly celebrating an historic turning point in a long, hard-fought, hard-won battle. Theirs has been a victory for humanity, for social justice and for the land: a triumph of spirit. They deserve the admiration, the respect and the gratitude of good people the world over.\n\nPeople make history. Not under conditions of their own choosing and against great odds.\n\nDara Culhane  \nVancouver, B.C.  \nDecember 12, 1997\n\n* * *\n\n. This book was in press and scheduled for release in December 1997, when the Supreme Court of Canada announced that they would release their judgment in the _Delgamuukw_ appeal. This postscript describes first impressions of the key features of this very complex and detailed 200-page judgment. I had intended to write an addendum and publish a revised edition of this book following the handing down of the appeal judgment originally expected in 1998. Time will tell the extent to which, and the speed with which, this work becomes a documentation of \"historical times,\" and of questions no longer asked or answered.\n\n. Supreme Court of Canada, 1997, Reasons for Judgment in the Appeal of _Delgamuukw v. R._ : para 107.\n\n. Ibid., para 80.\n\n. Ibid., para 97.\n\n. Ibid., para 98.\n\n. Ibid., para 99-101.\n\n. Ibid., para 104.\n\n. Ibid., para 106.\n\n. Ibid., para 108.\n\n. Ibid., para 90.\n\n. Ibid., para 91.\n\n. Ibid., para 110.\n\n. Supreme Court of Canada, 1997, Judgment in the Appeal of _Delgamuukw v. R._ : 4.\n\n14. Reasons 1997:para 144.\n\n. Ibid., para 128.\n\n. Ibid., para 131.\n\n. Judgment 1997:14.\n\n. Reasons 1997:para 161.\n\n. Ibid., para 162.\n\n. Ibid., para 168.\n\n. Ibid., para 169.\n**BIBLIOGRAPHY**\n\nAbu-Lughod, Lila and Catherine A. Lutz, eds. 1990. 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Princeton: Princeton University Press.\n\nZavardadeh, Mas'ud and Donald Morton. 1993. _Theory as resistance: Politics and Culture after (post)structuralism_. New York: Guilford Publications.\n**TABLE OF CASES** *\n\n_Calvin's Case_ (1608), 7 Co Rep 1a, 2 State Tr 559, Moore KB 790, Jenk 306, 77 ER 377 at 398.\n\n_Fletcher v. Peck_ , 10 U.S. (6 Cranch) 87 (1810) at 146.\n\n_Johnson v. M'Intosh_ 21 U.S. (8 Wheat) 543 (1823) at 573.\n\n_Worcester v. Georgia_ 34 U.S. (4 S.G.U.S.) 762 (1832) at 843.\n\n_St. Catherine's Milling and Lumber Co. v. R._ (1885), 10 or 196 (Ont.Ch.); (1886) 13 OAR 148 (Ont.CAO); (1887) SCR 577(SCC); (1888) 14 AC 46 (PC).\n\n_Re: Southern Rhodesia_ [1919], A.C. 211 at 233-4.\n\n_Amodu Tijani v. Southern Nigeria_ [1921], 2 A.C. 399(p.c.) at 403.\n\n_R. v. White & Bob_ (50) D. L. R. (2d) [1965], 620.\n\n_Calder et al v. Attorney-General of B.C._ (1969), 8 D.L.R. (3d), 59-83, [S.C.B.C.]\n\n_Calder v. Attorney-General of B.C._ [1973], S.C.R. 313.\n\n_Kruger and Manual v. The Queen_ [1977], 4 WWR 300, [1978] 1 SCR 104, 75 DLR (3d) 434, 14 NR 495, 34 CCC (2d) 377.\n\n_Hamlet of Baker Lake et al v. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development et al_ [1980], 5 WWR 193, 50 CCC (2d) 377 (FCTD).\n\n_R. v. Simon_ (1985) 24 D.L.R. (4 th) 390 (S.C.C.).\n\n_A.G. Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation_ [1985], 49 O.R. (2d) 353, 15 D.L.R. (4th 321 (Ont. H.C.).\n\n_A.G. Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation_ [1989], 68 O.R. (2d) 394, 38 D.L.R. (4th) 117 (Ont.C.A.).\n\n_A.G. Ontario v. Bear Island Foundation_ [1991], 83 D.L.R. (4th) 381.\n\n_Guerin v. R._ [1984], 2 S.C.R. 335.\n\n_R. v. Sparrow_ [1990], 1 S.C.R. 1075.\n\n_Mabo v. Queensland_ (1992), 107 A.L.R. 1.\n\n_R. v. N.T.C. Smokehouse Ltd._ [1996], 2 S.C.R. 672. (Supreme Court of Canada Appeal).\n\n_R. v. Gladstone_ Provincial Court of British Columbia, Lemiski Prov. Ct.J., October 3, 1990. (Original trial.)\n\n_R. v. Gladstone_ B.C.S.C. (Anderson J.): (1991), 13. W.C.B. (2d) 601. (British Columbia Supreme Court.)\n\n_R. v. Gladstone_ B.C.C.A. (1993), 80 B.C.L.R. (2d) 133. 29 B.C.A.C. 253. 48 W.A.C. 253. [1993] 5 W.W.R. 517 [1993] 4 C.N.L.R. 75. (B.C. Court of Appea) _R. v. Gladstone_ [1996], 2 S.C.R. 723. (Supreme Court of Canada Appeal).\n\n_R. v. Van Der Peet_ , British Columbia Provincial Court: [1991], 3 C.N.L.R. 155. (Original trial.)\n\n_R. v. Van Der Peet_ British Columbia Supreme Court: (1991), 58 B.C.L.R. (2d) 392, [1991] 3 C.N.L.R. 161. (British Columbia Supreme Court.)\n\n_R. v. Van Der Peet_ , British Columbia Court of Appeal: (1993), 80 B.C.L.R. (2d) 75, 29 B.C.A.C. 209, 48 W.A.C. 209, 83 C.C.C. (3d) 289, [1993] 5 W.W.R. 459, [1993] 4 C.N.L.R. 221. (B.C. Court of Appeal.)\n\n_R. v. Van Der Peet_ , [1996], 2 S.C.R. 507. (Supreme Court of Canada Appeal.)\n\n_Delgamuukw v. R._ (1987), 40 D.L.R. (4th) 698. (Judgment on admissibility of oral tradition as an exception to the \"hearsay rule.\")\n\n_Delgamuukw v. B.C._ (1989), 38 B.C.L.R. (2d) 165. (Judgment on the admissibility of historical documents.)\n\n_Delgamuukw v. B.C._ (1989), 38 B.C.L.R. (2d) 176. (Judgment on the admissibility of treatises.)\n\n_Delgamuukw v. B.C._ [1991], 3 W.W.R. 97, [1991] C.N.L.R. xii, (1991), 79 D.L.R. (4th) 185, [1991] b.c.j. nO. 535 (QL). (Original trial.)\n\n_Delgamuukw v. B.C._ (1993), 30 B.C.A.C. 1, 49 W.A.C. 1, 104 D.L.R. (4th) 470, [1993] 5 W.W. R. 97 [1993] 5 C.N.L.R. 1, [1993] B.C.J. No. 1395 (QL). (B.C. Court of Appeal.)\n\n* Key:\n\nA.L.R. (Australian Law Reports)\n\nB.C.L.R. (British Columbia Law Reports)\n\nC.C.C. (Canadian Criminal Courts)\n\nC.N.L.R. (Canadian Native Law Reports)\n\nD.L.R. (Dominion Law Reports)\n\nF.C.T.D. (Federal Court Trial Division)\n\nS.C.R. (Supreme Court Reports)\n\nS.C.C. (Supreme Court of Canada)\n\nW.A.C. (Western Appeal Courts)\n\nW.W.R. (Western Weekly Reports)\n**ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS**\n\nIt seems appropriate to end by acknowledging that all stories are _about_ the activities of people: history ultimately belongs to those who create it. If the participants in the events I have chronicled didn't choose to put their case before the courts and the public, this document would not exist. So my first bow is to the \"Plaintiffs\" and their supporters in _Delgamuukw v. R._ for having the courage to take a stand, and for working hard to defend it. I feel arrogant at this moment, facing you as a critic working after the fact and out of the fray. I do not expect that everyone will appreciate my effort. I hope most will at least agree that this book constitutes a worthwhile project, as one account of a historical moment that continues to have far-reaching effects.\n\nSo many people's thoughts, comments, questions and criticisms have gone into this project over the course of the last six years that it is impossible to name everyone. This book's first incarnation was as a Ph.D. thesis and I am grateful to those who assisted and supported me in producing that document: my supervisor, Professor Noel Dyck; members of my thesis committee, Professors Michael Kenny and Arlene McLaren; examiners Dr. Ian Angus and Dr. Robert Paine. For a lot of practical assistance, and for the endless patience and support that I do not believe anyone could ever produce a doctoral thesis without, I am grateful to Fran Gillis, and to my late mother, Claire Culhane.\n\nWithout Gary Fisher's incisive editing, bounteous encouragement, and great sense of humour, the thesis would not have become a book. Thank you. Thank you.\n\nSeveral readers' comments and critiques transformed a draft into a manuscript: Thank you: Leslie Butt, Phil Russell, Roisin Sheehy-Culhane; and two anonymous peer reviewers. Thanks to Ann Vanderbijl for meticulously verifying references and polishing the bibliography. Other people from whom I have learned much that is relevant to this book: Frances Abele, Julie Cruikshank, Lori Gabrielson, Dan Gillis, Fran Gillis, Miki Maeba, Renee Taylor, Barbara Williamson. None are responsible for errors, omissions, or opinions expressed in the text: any of those are mine alone.\n\nAnd last, but never least, I thank my children Carey Speck, and Lori Speck, for sustaining me, always.\n\n#### About Talonbooks\n\nThank you for purchasing and reading _The Pleasure of the Crown_.\n\nIf you came across this ebook by some other means, feel free to purchase it and support our hard work. It is available through most major online ebook retailers and on our website. The print edition is also available.\n\nTalonbooks is a small, independent, Canadian book publishing company. We have been publishing works of the highest literary merit since the 1960s. With more than 500 books in print, we offer drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by local playwrights, poets, and authors from the mainstream and margins of Canada's three founding nations, as well as both visible and invisible minorities within Canada's cultural mosaic.\n\nLearn more about us or about the author, Dara Culhane Speck.\n\n##### Other Books by Dara Culhane and available from Talonbooks\n\n_In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver_\n\n_An Error in Judgement: The Politics of Medical Care in an Indian\/White Community_\nCopyright \u00a9 1998 Dara Culhane\n\nPublished with the assistance of the Canada Council\n\nTalon Books Ltd.  \n278 E 1st Ave.  \nVancouver, British Columbia, V5T 1A6, Canada\n\nFirst printing: January 1998  \nElectronic edition: 2014\n\nOn the cover: _Mask of the Injustice System_ by David Neal  \nCover design by Adam Swica\n\nTalonbooks are distributed in Canada by General Distribution Services, 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 2T6; Tel.:(416) 445-3333; Fax:(416) 445-5967.\n\nTalonbooks are distributed in the U. S. A. by General Distribution Services Inc., 85 Rock River Drive, Suite 202, Buffalo, New York, U.S.A. 14207-2170; Tel.:1-800-805-1083; Fax:1-800-481-6207.\n\nNo part of this book, covered by the copyright hereon, may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means\u2014graphic, electronic or mechanical\u2014without prior permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review. Any request for photocopying of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Cancopy (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5C 1H6, Tel.:(416) 868-1620; Fax:(416) 868-1621.\n\n**Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada**\n\nISBN: 978-0-88922-864-1\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nHighest Praise for Leo J. Maloney and His Thrillers\n\nFor Duty and Honor\n\n\"Leo Maloney has a real winner with For Duty and   \nHonor. Gritty and intense, it draws you immediately   \ninto the action and doesn't let go.\"\n\n\u2014Marc Cameron\n\nArch Enemy\n\n\"Utterly compelling! This novel will grab you from the   \nbeginning and simply not let go. And Dan Morgan is   \none of the best heroes to come along in ages.\"\n\n\u2014Jeffery Deaver\n\nTwelve Hours\n\n\"Fine writing and real insider knowledge make   \nthis a must.\"\n\n\u2014Lee Child\n\nBlack Skies\n\n\"Smart, savvy, and told with the pace and nuance   \nthat only a former spook could bring to the page,   \nBlack Skies is a tour de force novel of twenty-first-   \ncentury espionage and a great geopolitical thriller.   \nMaloney is the new master of the modern spy game,   \nand this is first-rate storytelling.\"\n\n\u2014Mark Sullivan\n\n\"Black Skies is rough, tough, and entertaining.   \nLeo J. Maloney has written a ripping story.\"\n\n\u2014Meg Gardiner\n\nSilent Assassin\n\n\"Leo Maloney has done it again. Real life often   \novershadows fiction and Silent Assassin is both: a   \nterrifyingly thrilling story of a man on a clandestine   \nmission to save us all from a madman hell bent on   \nmurder, written by a man who knows that world   \nall too well.\"\n\n\u2014Michele McPhee\n\n\"From the bloody, ripped-from-the-headlines opening   \nsequence, Silent Assassin grabs you and doesn't let go.   \nSilent Assassin has everything a thriller reader wants\u2014  \nnasty villains, twists and turns, and a hero\u2014Cobra\u2014  \nwho just plain kicks ass.\"\n\n\u2014Ben Coes\n\n\"Dan Morgan, a former Black Ops agent, is called out of   \nretirement and back into a secretive world of politics and   \ndeceit to stop a madman.\"\n\n\u2014The Stoneham Independent\n\nTermination Orders\n\n\"Leo J. Maloney is the new voice to be reckoned   \nwith. Termination Orders rings with the authenticity   \nthat can only come from an insider. This is   \none outstanding thriller!\"\n\n\u2014John Gilstrap\n\n\"Taut, tense, and terrifying! You'll cross your fingers   \nit's fiction\u2014in this high-powered, action-packed thriller,   \nLeo Maloney proves he clearly knows his stuff.\"\n\n\u2014Hank Phillippi Ryan\n\n\"A new must-read action thriller that features a double-   \ncrossing CIA and Congress, vengeful foreign agents, a   \ncorporate drug ring, the Taliban, and narco-terrorists . . .   \na you-are-there account of torture, assassination, and   \ndouble-agents, where 'nothing is as it seems.'\"\n\n\u2014Jon Renaud\n\n\"Leo J. Maloney is a real-life Jason Bourne.\"\n\n\u2014Josh Zwylen, Wicked Local Stoneham\n\n\"A masterly blend of Black Ops intrigue, cleverly   \ninterwoven with imaginative sequences of fiction.   \nThe reader must guess which accounts are real and   \nwhich are merely storytelling.\"\n\n\u2014Chris Treece, The Chris Treece Show\n\n\"A deep-ops story presented in an epic style that takes   \nfact mixed with a bit of fiction to create a spy thriller   \nthat takes the reader deep into secret spy missions.\"\n\n\u2014Cy Hilterman, Best Sellers World\n\n\"For fans of spy thrillers seeking a bit of realism mixed   \ninto their novels, Termination Orders will prove to be   \nan excellent and recommended pick.\"\n\n\u2014Midwest Book Reviews\nAlso by Leo J. Maloney\n\nTHE DAN MORGAN THRILLER SERIES\n\nTermination Orders\n\nSilent Assassin\n\nBlack Skies\n\nTwelve Hours\n\nArch Enemy\nFor Duty and Honor\n\nA DAN MORGAN THRILLER NOVELLA\n\nLeo J. Maloney\n\nKENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.   \nwww.kensingtonbooks.com\n\nAll copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.\nTable of Contents\n\nHighest Praise for Leo J. Maloney and His Thrillers  \nAlso by  \nTitle Page  \nCopyright Page  \nDedication  \nChapter One  \nChapter Two  \nChapter Three  \nChapter Four  \nChapter Five  \nChapter Six  \nChapter Seven  \nChapter Eight  \nChapter Nine  \nChapter Ten  \nChapter Eleven  \nChapter Twelve  \nChapter Thirteen  \nChapter Fourteen  \nChapter Fifteen  \nChapter Sixteen  \nChapter Seventeen  \nChapter Eighteen  \nChapter Nineteen  \nChapter Twenty  \nChapter Twenty-one  \nChapter Twenty-two  \nChapter Twenty-three  \nChapter Twenty-four  \nChapter Twenty-five  \nChapter Twenty-six  \nChapter Twenty-seven  \nChapter Twenty-eight  \nChapter Twenty-nine  \nChapter Thirty  \nChapter Thirty-one  \nChapter Thirty-two  \nChapter Thirty-three  \nChapter Thirty-four  \nChapter Thirty-five  \nChapter Thirty-six  \nChapter Thirty-seven  \nChapter Thirty-eight  \nChapter Thirty-nine  \nChapter Forty  \nChapter Forty-one  \nChapter Forty-two  \nChapter Forty-three  \nChapter Forty-four  \nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  \nTeaser chapter  \nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nLYRICAL UNDERGROUND BOOKS are published by\n\nKensington Publishing Corp.   \n119 West 40th Street   \nNew York, NY 10018\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2016 Leo J. Maloney\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.\n\nPUBLISHER'S NOTE\n\nThis book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nLYRICAL PRESS, LYRICAL UNDERGROUND, and the Lyrical Underground logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.\n\nFirst electronic edition: November 2016\n\nISBN: 978-1-6165-0981-1\n\nISBN-10: 1-61650-981-3\nThis book is dedicated to my daughter, KATIE, who has   \nbeen the joy in my life since the moment she was born.   \nShe is beautiful on the inside and outside. She's kind,   \nconsiderate, and simply an all-around good person as   \nwell as a wonderful mother to my three granddaughters,   \nKATHERINE, CECILIA, and GRACE, whom I adore.\n\nI also want to dedicate this book to my niece   \nLIANNE, who has always had a special place in my   \nlife and heart. She has been an unfailing supporter   \nof my writing endeavor.\nChapter One\n\nThe prisoner's body was a brick of exhaustion and pain.\n\nSteel cuffs chafed against his raw wrists and ankles, the rough uniform scraping the burns and cuts that lined his arms and legs and pocked his torso. Even under the blackness of his hood, the prisoner smelled stale sweat mingled with his own breath: iron from the blood, acetone from the starvation. He could barely hold himself up against the jolting ride. All that was keeping him upright were the two thick guards at his sides boxing him in.\n\nAt the outset, hours ago at the landing strip, the guards were in high spirits, joking and jesting in Russian, which the prisoner could not follow. Whenever he couldn't hold himself up anymore and leaned into one of them or into the front seat, they would box the prisoner's head and laugh, forcing him to sit upright again.\n\nBut as they drew nearer to their destination, and the car's heating lost ground against the cold, the guards grew quiet, like there was something grim about the place even to them.\n\nThe prisoner swung forward as the jeep came to an abrupt stop, tires on gravel. The doors opened and the spaces on his sides cleared as the men got out, leaving him exposed to the frigid Siberian air. Against this cold, the canvas uniform felt like nothing at all.\n\nThe guards unlocked the cuffs and yanked the prisoner out. Too tired to offer any resistance, he walked along, bare feet on the freezing stony ground. Someone pulled off his cowl. He was struck by a hurricane of light that made him so dizzy that he would have vomited, if there were anything in his stomach. It took a moment for the image to stop swimming and resolve itself into the barren landscape of rock and creeping brush lit by a sun low in the sky.\n\nThe Siberian tundra.\n\nThey prodded him forward. He trudged toward the Brutalist conglomeration of buildings surrounded by tall mesh fences and barbed wire. Prison camp. Gulag.\n\nThe prisoner's trembling knee collapsed and he fell on the stony ground. A guard gave him a kick with a heavy, polished leather boot and pulled him to his feet.\n\nThey reached the top and entered the vakhta, the guardhouse. He passed through the first gate and was searched, rough hands prodding and poking at him. They then opened the second, leading him through, outside, into the yard. His gaze kept down, he saw guards' boots, and massive furry Caucasian shepherds, each taller than a full-grown man's waist. He didn't look up to see the bare concrete guard towers that overlooked the terrain for miles around or at the sharpshooters that occupied them.\n\nHe was pulled inside the nearest boxy building, walls painted with chipping murals of old Soviet propaganda, apple-cheeked youngsters over fields of grain and brave soldiers of the Red Army standing against the octopus of international capitalism. On the second floor, they knocked on a wooden door.\n\n\"Postupat'.\"\n\nThe guards opened the door, revealing an office with a vintage aristocratic desk. They pushed him onto the bare hardwood.\n\nA man stood up with a creak of his chair. The prisoner watched as he approached, seeing from his vantage point only the wingtip oxfords and the hem of his pinstriped gabardine pants, walking around his desk, footsteps echoing in the concrete office.\n\n\"Amerikanskiy?\"\n\n\"Da,\" a guard answered.\n\nThe man crouched, studying the prisoner's face. \"You are one of General Suvorov's, are you not?\" His voice was deep and filled with gravel and a heavy Russian accent.\n\nThe prisoner didn't respond\u2014not that he needed to.\n\n\"You are tough, if he did not break you.\" He stood, brushing off unseen dust from his suit jacket. \"And if he had broken you, you would be dead already. I am Nevsky, the warden. Welcome to my prison.\"\n\nThe prisoner looked up at last and saw a thickset jowly man, with a nose like a potato, bloodshot eyes, and the ruddy swollen face of an alcoholic.\n\n\"We have no official name, but we call it Pokoynit-skaya. Do you know what that means?\"\n\nThe warden opened a cabinet and poured himself a glass of vodka.\n\n\"Charnel house. Because everyone in here is dead meat.\" He emitted a grotesque throaty laugh and tipped the glass into his mouth. \"Stand up,\" he said, slamming the glass onto the side table. The prisoner couldn't muster the energy to. \"I said stand up.\"\n\nOxford wingtips sunk into the prisoner's side. He doubled in pain, groaning.\n\n\"Up!\"\n\nBracing himself on the desk, he staggered to his feet.\n\n\"You will learn to do as you are told here.\" He poured another glass of vodka. \"Look out the window. What do you see?\"\n\nA broad barred window overlooked the tundra, where it was too cold for any trees to grow. A vast bare expanse of low grasses, with mountains rising from the flatness far in the distance.\n\n\"The answer is nothing. I will not tell you my prison is impregnable. In fact, we have had breakouts. If they get past the fence, we take bets on who will hit him. But the few that get away, nature takes care of. We find them dead in the wasteland within a few days.\"\n\nThe warden grabbed the prisoner's arm, feeling his muscles. \"Strong. That will not last.\" He slapped the prisoner hard on the buttocks. \"This is what your life will be. You will mine all day\u2014and the days of the Arctic summer are long. You will be questioned, if the order comes. That will not be pleasant. But mostly, you will work.\" As he spoke, the warden circled the prisoner, who kept his eyes down. \"You will waste away, and your mind will break.\" The warden knelt close to him and whispered in his ear, his rancid alcoholic breath filling the prisoner's nostrils. \"And one day, you will die here, forgotten.\"\n\nThe prisoner's face contorted in fury. He lunged for the warden, who stepped back to avoid him. The prisoner stumbled under his own weakness and fell back to the ground.\n\nNevsky sat down and signed the prisoner's intake papers. \"We are done here,\" he said. He squinted to read the type. \"Show Daniel Morgan to his cell.\"\nChapter Two\n\nTwo guards pulled Morgan on shuffling feet outside, back onto the cold-hardened earth, where the harsh wind whipped against his skin. They were in the yard now, a squarish space surrounded by various freestanding structures on all four sides, although he was too dazed to get any kind of clear picture of it. He thought he caught a whiff of something cooking and sheer instinct led him to turn toward its source. The guards yanked him, pulling him into another building, this one squat and single-storied. Like the others, it was built out of worn concrete and had heavy metal doors and thick bars on the windows, all covered in rust.\n\nThere were two more guards in there who stripped him of his tattered, bloody clothes and tossed them aside. They shoved him, naked, against a wall of chipped porcelain tiles and stood back as one opened a hose. He gasped as ice-cold water blasted him in the chest, sputtering when it hit his face. They tossed a rough moldy sponge and a cracked bar of caustic soap at his feet and hollered at him, pointing down at them. He bent and picked them up with shivering hands, running the sponge against skin reddened by the cold, his wounds smarting with the chemical burn as he scrubbed himself of weeks of dirt and blood and sweat. The pungent scent made his eyes water as he trembled and flinched from every new blast of frigid water.\n\nWhen they were satisfied, they shut off the hose and tossed him a thin towel, which he fumbled and dropped on the wet tile floor. They laughed as he ran the now-sodden towel over his skin to get off whatever excess water he could manage. The guards then pulled him, still damp, to the next station, where they sat him down on a splintering stool. One of them turned on a clipper that was at least twenty years old and buzzed like a bumblebee the size of a poodle.\n\nThey started with the hair on his head, dense and black with wisps of gray at his temples, which fell on the tiles in thick tufts. They shaved his mustache, the machine tugging at his split lip so that it began to bleed again, and the beard that had grown in since his capture. They worked his way down his body, his hair\u2014all his hair\u2014falling about the feet of the stool. Once the guard finished Morgan's legs, he clicked off the machine. Another guard poured a white acrid-smelling delousing powder onto his head and back. It clung to his damp skin and raised a white cloud around him. The guards cackled at Morgan's ensuing coughing fit.\n\nFinally, they handed him a folded-up jumpsuit to put on. It was tan canvas, rough and coarse against his skin, and provided little protection against the cold. After he put it on, they shoved a stinking coat in his hand and gave him cheap cloth shoes, which he pulled over his feet. They were, like his hands, numb from the cold. The guards got impatient at how long the operation was taking and boxed his ear for good measure. Morgan pulled on the coat, which at least offered cover from the wind.\n\nFrom there he was escorted into the blockhouse. It was single-story and much larger than the building he had just left, with only tiny windows letting precious little light in. There were scratches on the wall, the writings and designs of prisoners with no one else to talk to, who wanted to leave their last mark on the world before disappearing, in an unmarked grave thousands of miles away from home, where those they left behind would never find their bodies, never know what happened to them.\n\nThey led him to a room where there were rows of bunks that looked more like shelves, each bed only two wooden boards held up by vertical beams. It smelled lived in, of sweat and piss and mildew. The guard pushed him inside, and he stumbled onto the bare concrete floor.\n\nThe guard shoved a blanket, woolen and reeking, into his hand and pointed him to a bare wooden bunk. His, Morgan guessed. Then he gave him a bent tin bowl. \"This is your bowl,\" he said. \"You have bowl, you get food. No bowl, no food.\"\n\n\"Where do I keep it?\"\n\nThe man shrugged. Not his problem. The other men seemed to store them under their bunks, so Morgan put it on his.\n\n\"Rest,\" the guard said.\n\nMorgan didn't need telling twice. He got onto his bunk and collapsed onto the wooden boards. They were hard and uncomfortable, but he was exhausted beyond caring. He pulled on the reeking blanket and slept, clutching the food bowl tight, and dreamed of home.\nChapter Three\n\nAlex Morgan reached upward into darkness and found a handhold in the jutting bricks. She pulled her weight up, finding a new foothold for her left foot. One, two. Easy does it.\n\nThe warm summer wind lashed against her at this exposed height. One upward gust pulled off her black knitted cap, leaving her short hair whipping against her head. She followed its progress against the light of the streets below as the wind carried it away.\n\nThen she looked down.\n\nMistake. Big mistake. She grew dizzy and weak and felt her grip slipping. She slapped her face with her free hand.\n\nThis is no time to lose your nerve.\n\nShe closed her eyes, using the sting on her cheek to center herself, and kept on going. One, two. One, two.\n\nNot that she had too much to worry about. She had a slim body and strong arms and legs, and she left everyone else in the dust back at the training camp when it came to climbing. Height aside, this was routine for her.\n\nAlex climbed one more floor and looked to the right at the balcony on level with her. Was this it? She counted from the top. Yes. Twenty-second floor. This was it.\n\nShe edged along the jutting bricks the few feet to the balcony and reached out to grab the railing. She stepped onto the ledge and then swung over, breathing a sigh of relief as her feet landed on solid ground.\n\n\"Hello, Alex.\"\n\nShe was so startled she leapt six inches into the air. If she had been on the other side of the railing, she'd have fallen off the building.\n\nDiana Bloch, in a maroon silk robe, stood up from a deck chair. \"I'd just like you to be aware that one of our snipers had you in his crosshairs by the time you reached the third floor.\" She opened the French doors into the apartment and stood aside for Alex to walk through. \"Come in. I have chamomile tea steeping for you in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Alex mumbled, entering the apartment, \"but I don't drink tea.\"\n\nThe place was bigger than any apartment Alex had ever seen in the city. She looked back out past the balcony at a breathtaking night view of the bay. Being the head of Zeta Division came with its perks. The interior was obsessively clean and decorated within an inch of its life to look like a design catalog.\n\nEven here in her own home, Diana Bloch was a facade, a front.\n\n\"I think you could do with some calming down.\"\n\n\"Sure.\" Alex rubbed her triceps, sore from the climb. \"Whatever.\" She followed Bloch into the kitchen, where a steaming mug was waiting for her, the string of a tea bag hanging off the side. Bloch pulled it out, letting the excess liquid drip back into the mug before placing the bag in the trash.\n\n\"Sugar?\"\n\n\"Four.\"\n\nBloch dropped in four cubes and stirred. \"This was quite unnecessary. You could have severely hurt yourself, or died. We've already invested much in your training. It would have been a serious loss.\"\n\n\"I wanted to see you,\" said Alex. \"And you kept stonewalling me.\" She sipped at the tea. Too hot.\n\n\"You are supposed to be in training. Skipping out was quite a feat, by the way. It seems you've got your fellow recruits atwitter, wondering how you did it.\"\n\n\"Bloch, where is my father?\"\n\nBloch's face took on a pained expression. \"Come into the living room,\" she said. She sat down at a white leather Barcelona chair and motioned for Alex to sit across from her. \"We don't know where he is. But we're doing everything we can to find him.\"\n\n\"Tell me what happened.\"\n\n\"You know I can't divulge details of the mission. But he was caught while on assignment.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n\"Where?\" Alex's tone took on a hard edge.\n\nBloch seemed to consider whether to chew her out. She could pull rank at any moment. But instead, she said, \"In Moscow. Does that make it better? Does that lessen your pain?\"\n\nAlex bit her lip and scowled in anger. \"After everything he's done for the organization. You could move heaven and earth to find him, if you wanted to.\"\n\n\"There are limits on what we can feasibly do. Your father knew the risks going in, as you will when it's your turn to go out into the field. But we are doing what we can\u2014\"\n\n\"Not. Enough.\"\n\nBloch's eyes went cold. \"I'll be the judge of that.\"\n\n\"I'll go on my own if I have to.\"\n\n\"That's not a good idea, Alex.\"\n\n\"I didn't ask.\"\n\nBloch stood from her seat and dropped ice cubes tinkling into a glass. Then she uncorked a bottle of whiskey and poured. \"I know you think you're ready. Your help has been valuable to us in the past, and you'll make a hell of an operative someday. But you're still green. If you go out on your own, I'm afraid you won't survive.\"\n\n\"Are you going to stop me?\"\n\n\"No. I'm not.\"\n\n\"Then I think we've said all we have to say to each other.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" said Bloch. She unlocked the front door and held it open for Alex. \"Why don't you take the elevator down?\"\nChapter Four\n\nMorgan woke to the bark of a guard yelling at him in Russian. His immediate reflex was to punch the man's lights out, but he was still too tired. So instead he lay disoriented until the guard, impatient, wrested the bent bowl from Morgan's hands and tossed it down the sleeping quarters. It tumbled, clattering, toward the door.\n\nThe message was clear enough.\n\nMorgan stood, shaky from the interrupted sleep but also renewed, if only a little. How long had he been out? The sun was still in the sky, still low, but that meant little out here. The sun was always low. And the wind, even in summer, carried a chill.\n\nHe picked up his bowl and went outside into the yard. Men were filing in from the double gates that led outside the camp. The whole procession was hairless like him, although none so recently shaved, so that stubble was already growing in on their scalps and faces. They were shuffling, exhausted from a day of forced labor at the mine. All were skinny, their overalls and coats hanging loosely from their bodies. Their faces were pale, with deep dark bags under their eyes.\n\nThese men were broken. Morgan recognized the signs.\n\nGuards oversaw the whole process, carrying their Kalashnikovs, holding dogs on leashes. Even the guards, though young, were stooped, with gloomy, lifeless eyes. Morgan didn't know if it was from the dreariness of the place\u2014no women, no entertainment, nothing to do but drink in cramped rooms, if they were allowed that much\u2014or the violence they committed against the prisoners. Something about torturing and brutality made men into miserable monsters. He'd seen it often enough.\n\nHe wondered whether this was a punishment assignment.\n\nMorgan scanned the group. All were in the same clothes and had the same (lack of) hair, so all he had to go by were faces, and even these looked similar, with sunken eyes and pale skin. It proved just about impossible to pick out an individual from the crowd.\n\nFood was distributed out of a single window by prisoners on meal duty. Morgan wondered if they had spent the day in the kitchen or come back early from work. In any case, it would be a prime position in the camp, the work light and pleasant in comparison to the mines. There was a little more color on their cheeks, too. Morgan guessed that they sneaked food as they cooked.\n\nMorgan clutched his bowl. His stomach growled. He hadn't realized how hungry he was.\n\nThe men lined up at the window and Morgan took his place at the end. There was a scuffle to see who would get closer to the front, but at a shout from a guard, under fear of violence, the men took their places, those behind resigned to their position.\n\nAs he stood in line, Morgan noticed a group of three prisoners glowering at him, and he felt like the only unattached girl at a singles bar. The men exchanged words and turned away.\n\nHe didn't like it. Any kind of attention in this place was unwanted.\n\nMorgan drew closer to the meal window as the prisoners got their dinner rations. When his turn came, he held out the bowl. The prisoner who was serving, wearing a jumper like his but stained with food, dunked a ladle into the big pot and spooned the contents into Morgan's bowl\u2014a stew with vegetables, heavy on onions and potatoes, a few wisps of meat and bits of animal fat, and a thin layer of oil at the top.\n\nThe man motioned for him to move along.\n\nResisting the urge to swallow the portion whole right there, Morgan shuffled off, away from any grouping of prisoners, and sat against the cell block, holding his hand as steady as he could so as not to spill a drop. He'd not had any food in several days.\n\nHe tilted the bowl against his lips. They were cracked and split from the beatings he had taken in the past week, but the stew, thin as it was, filled him. Even with the faint odor of rotting potatoes and onions, even with the stringy, gristly meat, it was the best thing he'd ever tasted. He wanted to down the whole thing in one gulp. But he knew that if he ate too fast he'd puke it all up again, so he chewed each solid mouthful twenty-five times before swallowing, and took small sips of the liquid. In his hunger, he lost awareness of everything else around him. All he could focus on was the next mouthful.\n\nHe finished the scant portion, tilting the bowl against his lips to get the last drop. It felt warm and full in his stomach, after days of nothing but a trickle of water. He felt invigorated, power flowing back into his muscles.\n\nBut at the same time he was aware that it wasn't enough. Two of these a day would keep a bedridden man alive and comfortable, but for men working all day in the mine, this was a starvation diet.\n\nHe wondered how long anyone lasted in here. Every one of the thousand or so men milling around in the yard looked withered and wasted, some more than others.\n\nAs he looked around, Morgan caught sight of the three who had been staring at him before. They were crowding around a man\u2014Arabic, of around forty years old. Morgan had noticed him before, off in the corner making his prayers to Allah as others waited in line for food.\n\nThe three punks circled him, pinning him against the wall of the prisoner barracks. He was backing off from them, shaking his head. They stepped forward, holding out their hands. Morgan saw the Arab had his bowl in his arms, protected as if it were a baby. The goons wanted it, his only means of getting food, an extra portion for them. Without it, he would starve.\n\nThe prisoners around them couldn't be missing it, but they made a point of not raising their heads. A guard looked at the scene with no more interest as if he were seeing a dog scratch himself. One of the men slapped the Arab in the face and screamed something in Russian.\n\nMorgan pushed himself up off the ground, his own bowl in his hand. Bad idea, getting into trouble on his first day. Plus, he was sore and exhausted. He had every reason not to get involved.\n\nHe walked the diagonal over to the men, inserting himself between them and the victim.\n\n\"Step off.\"\n\nThey first looked surprised, then glanced at each other with a blend of confusion and amusement. The oldest of them, a man slender and short like a weasel, spoke to him in Russian.\n\n\"No Russkyi,\" he grunted. \"Amerikanskyi.\"\n\nA different man broke in, the youngest and tallest of them, fair-skinned and blond, who looked like the Russian equivalent of an Iowa farm boy except for the tattoo of a snake that peeked out of his overalls on his neck. \"American, eh?\"\n\n\"That's right. And you're going to leave this man alone.\"\n\nHe translated for his confederates and they shared a laugh. \"Americans like to think they are cowboys. New sheriff in town, come to do justice. Move away, cowboy, or you die.\"\n\n\"Step. Off.\"\n\nThe farm boy turned sour. \"This is not funny anymore.\"\n\n\"Never was.\"\n\n\"You do not want to pick this fight.\"\n\n\"Maybe I do.\"\n\nThe man mugged at his comrades as if to say, Can you believe this asshole? and took a swing at Morgan, trying to catch him in a sucker punch. Morgan was slowed by hunger and fatigue, but not enough to fall for that tired trick. This was a bully, untrained at fighting anyone who knew how to fight back. Morgan dodged and grabbed his arm, using the man's own momentum to drop him to the ground. Weasel man growled and pounced on him. Morgan pivoted out of the way, kicking his leg at the knee so he fell face-first on the dirt ground of the yard.\n\nThe third hesitated, casting his eyes on his two confederates. He'd learned his lesson not to rush in. He balled his hands up into fists.\n\nMorgan didn't give him the opportunity to get close. He rammed the sole of his foot into the man's chest, causing him to stagger back. Morgan then moved in to deliver a punch that would lay him out flat when someone grabbed his right arm. He saw a prisoner's overalls in his peripheral vision. He twisted to break free, but someone else grabbed his left. Morgan struggled, but he wasn't in any shape to wrest himself free of two men who, in spite of the conditions, had been sleeping and eating better than him for weeks now.\n\nSomeone new came up to him. He was older than most, as old as fifty. He was skinny as anyone else, but Morgan could tell he was thickset and jowly, with once-fat cheeks. His eyebrows were like two hairy gray caterpillars. He carried himself with all the dignity of a mafia don.\n\nHe moved in and punched an immobilized Morgan in the gut.\n\n\"You tried to be a hero. But this is not a place for heroes.\" He followed this with a meaty right hook to Morgan's cheek.\n\nHe'd have done worse, but the guards sprung into action at last, pulling the men apart from each other and knocking them to the ground, along with Morgan himself. The guards set upon all of them them, kicking them with heavy boots. Morgan took a painful kick in the ribs.\n\nThe man who had hit him, the don, was merely shooed away. Morgan went limp as they dragged him off. He didn't need any broken bones in here.\n\n\"You are dead, American!\" the don yelled after him. \"You hear me? Dead!\"\nChapter Five\n\nThe siren woke Morgan in the solitary cell they had tossed him into after the fight the night before. With no room to stretch out, he had slept leaning against the far corner of the cell, feet resting against the door. This took its toll on the form of a throbbing pain in his lower back. His left cheek was sore and tender from the punch he took from the don. He stood with difficulty and tried to stretch the pain away to little avail.\n\nAlmost on cue, the dead bolt on the door was undone and the door opened, letting daylight flood into the darkness of the cell.\n\n\"Time to work, American!\"\n\nThey pulled Morgan out and escorted him down an L-shaped hallway lined with cells and then out to the yard.\n\nIt was still dark, the sky leaden in the horizon where the sun was about to come up. The morning air chilled him to the marrow. The yawning, drooping prisoners lined up outside again, first for the morning count, and then at the food window, this time to get a dollop of potato porridge, bland and lumpy. But it was food, and it was warm.\n\nMorgan kept an eye out for Bortsov's men, who paid him no attention. Morgan would assume they'd give him extra scrutiny after the day before. This raised alarm bells in his head, but he didn't have time to ruminate on it before another siren sounded and they lined up for the morning's meal.\n\nLacking any kind of utensils, Morgan followed the others' lead and ate with his hands. Once everybody had gotten their ration, they were lined up again, three abreast, in front of the double gates. An escort of guards surrounded them, one for every twenty or so men. A smaller siren rang out and the double gates swung open. With a shout from a guard, the men set to marching. They filed through the no-man's-land between the inner and outer perimeter fences. Morgan knew how it worked. Anyone caught there would be shot without ceremony or a second thought.\n\nThis was not an army, and their march was slow and plodding. Stuck near the back, Morgan couldn't see where they were going, so he settled for keeping his eyes down on the stony ground to keep from stumbling or stepping on the heels of the man ahead of him.\n\n\"You are American, right?\"\n\nIt was good English, a young voice, right next to Morgan. He turned to his left to look at the man, in his early thirties by the look of it, with baby blue eyes and dark blond hair coming in on his head. There was something still unbroken in him despite his having the same sunken cheeks and sallow eyes as everyone else.\n\nMorgan didn't have a mirror. He wondered whether he had the look yet. He would.\n\n\"I saw you back there.\" His English sounded like he might have been educated in the US. \"Standing up to those thugs. Not just anyone would do that for another man.\"\n\nMorgan squinted into the dawning sun. A hawk shrieked far above.\n\n\"My name is Grushin. I am a journalist. In today's Russia, that's enough of a crime to get me sent to prison, but I got a little too inconvenient for even the usual holes they stick us in. So they put me in the gulag.\" He kicked a rock, which rolled diagonally and nearly hit a guard's boot. The guard turned, searching with a scowl for the culprit. Morgan looked away to deflect suspicion. \"What are you in here for?\"\n\nMorgan didn't respond. The kid was nice, but as they say in reality shows, he wasn't here to make friends.\n\n\"All right, Uncle Sam. I should know better than to ask.\"\n\nMorgan felt the spot where he took a boot the night before. It was aching anew with the strain of the march. He wondered whether he had a broken rib. \"You should know better.\"\n\n\"But I can talk,\" he said, grinning. \"The guys you attacked. They're all ex-mafia people. The one who punched you was their leader, Leonid Bortsov. They don't have much power, although I think their people bribe some of the guards from outside, so that gives them privileges in here. They run the laundry, which gets them away from the worst of the forced labor. One of the perks. The other is that they steal the others' food and blankets.\" He sighed. \"Somehow, even this place is not bad enough that men like Bortsov can't make it worse.\"\n\nThey marched for forty minutes across the tundra, on cold hard ground. The path was well beaten, so that the low grasses that covered the plains around them did not grow there. Everything around them was flat. Even if he could run, there was nowhere for him to run to, nowhere that would put him out of the line of sight of the guards' rifles.\n\nThe sun had risen above the horizon by the time they arrived at the mine. It was a handful of shacks surrounding a hole cut into the rock, sloping down to a set of double steel doors. The men fanned out, each seeming to know where to go.\n\nA guard approached Morgan. \"New prisoner,\" he said. \"You go with Vanya's team.\"\n\nVanya was a tall man, wrinkled and with heavy scarring on half his face. Morgan guessed it was a chemical burn, probably from torture. Vanya argued with the guard. After a brief back-and-forth, the guard gave what from the tone was an ultimatum. Vanya swore and said, \"Come, American.\"\n\nHe walked off, and Morgan followed. \"What was that about?\" he asked.\n\n\"We have a quota per man on the team,\" he said. \"More men, higher quota. If we do not meet quota at the end of the week, we get lash.\"\n\n\"Sorry about that.\"\n\n\"You look strong,\" he said. \"You will pull your weight. We do not do your work for you. If we get the lash, you get worse. And then you will be very sorry.\"\n\n\"Got it.\" Morgan was making friends left and right.\n\nVanya led him to the toolshed, where men were crowding around, elbowing each other, trying to get their hands on an implement. Morgan followed Vanya's lead, fighting to the front of the line to look at what was on offer.\n\nNo modern mining equipment. No machines. Handheld implements was all they had, goddamn shovels and mallets and chisels. Nevsky must have a penchant for the vintage.\n\nThere weren't enough for everyone, Morgan now saw. The smaller and weaker men were pushed aside. They would be getting the lash at the end of the week.\n\n\"Get kirkomotyga,\" Vanya told him. \"Pickaxe.\" Morgan he forced his way and took one. He held it close to his chest, smelling the rich iron, holding it tightly against the grabbing hands until he got clear of the crowd. Then he examined it. The wood was old and grooved, the head covered in rust. But it would do its work.\n\nA guard unlocked and swung open the heavy metal doors that led into the mine with a prolonged creak. He pulled down a heavy switch on the other side of the door, and dim lights came on. The wooden struts were old and seemed like they could cave in at any minute. Convenient way to bury a group of men the Russian government wanted disappeared.\n\nThe prisoners filed into the mine, two by two. Morgan walked inside with Vanya's six-man team. Being the new guy, he was given wheelbarrow duty, his pickaxe sitting inside as he struggled to hold the wheel steady on the uneven ground. There was no explicit order or direction, but Vanya and the men moved forward without hesitation. As the tunnels branched out, the men thinned until their group was alone.\n\nMorgan wondered how often men got lost in here. He wondered how many corpses had been forgotten in the mine.\n\nThey walked for several minutes before Vanya said, \"You go with Sergey here. He doesn't speak English. If you need help communicating, get lost.\" Sergey motioned for Morgan to follow him a ways down the tunnel to a small hollow. There, the Russian showed him how to wield the pickaxe, chipping stone from the cave wall.\n\nThey worked in silence for a while, only the dull clang of metal hitting rock. It was hard to gauge the passage of time in the darkness of the mine, so Morgan had no idea how much time had gone by when he heard footsteps coming down the tunnel. He turned, assuming it was Vanya and the others.\n\nIt was not. From the darkness, the three men he had fought on the yard the day before approached. They said something to Sergey, who dropped his pickaxe and took off running down the passage, the sound of his dash fading in the tunnels.\n\nThe three men advanced on him.\n\n\"No guards to save you here,\" said the young, tall man. \"You are going to have a little accident.\"\n\nMorgan didn't like his odds. Someone could get hurt.\n\nHe thought about shouting for help, but he doubted that anyone would hear him, except perhaps Vanya's men. Also, it would do him no good in the long run. Bortsov's little gang would just wait until the next opportunity.\n\nMorgan knew one thing. He wasn't going to die in that mine. So he was going to put a stop to this here and now.\n\nHe tightened his grip on the pickaxe. This wasn't going to be pretty.\n\nThe tunnel was too narrow for them to come at him all at the same time, which gave him a strong defensive position, but also hamstrung his swing of the weapon.\n\nThe first, the younger tall guy, came at him with another pickaxe. He was slow. Morgan moved out of the way and swung his pickaxe against the man's back, calculating the force to crack a few ribs. The tip connected, and the man fell forward with a cry of pain.\n\nThe next man held a shovel, which had a longer reach than Morgan's pickaxe, putting him at a disadvantage. The man thrust it like a spear, hitting Morgan in the belly. He winced. It was going to leave a nasty bruise.\n\nThe man moved to thrust again, and Morgan locked the shovel into the curved head of the pickaxe. He pushed the head of the shovel back against the attacker. The handle caught him in the chest and he staggered back. This gave Morgan his opening. He swung the shovel to the side. It fell from the man's weakened grip and clattered to the stone on the cave floor. Then Morgan swung at the man's head with the side of the pickaxe, which slammed into the man's temple. He hollered, clutching at the bleeding wound. Morgan kicked the man's leg out from under him and he dropped.\n\nThe third attacker, the tiny, weaselly man, came at him, roaring, wielding a long-handled mallet two-handed. He swung downward and Morgan parried, almost losing his grip on the pickaxe. The man swung again, and Morgan dodged out of the way, inches from taking a blow that would crush his jaw.\n\nMorgan kept backing away as the swings came. The man had too much reach, and Morgan couldn't get an opening in the tight quarters. He could rush his attacker, but only at the expense of leaving himself open to a bone-crunching strike. And soon he'd be backed up against a wall, a sitting duck.\n\nMorgan took stock of the environment as he stepped back. Was there anything he could use? Narrow tunnels, held up by struts too strong to break, not high enough that climbing would give him any advantage. But connected to it . . .\n\nHanging from the strut above him was the last bulb of the tunnel. Without pausing to think twice, Morgan swung the pickaxe upward, shattering the lightbulb and plunging the passage into darkness.\n\nMorgan could see the man's silhouette against another lightbulb up the passage, but Morgan himself was concealed by a pall of murk. The man swung the hammer blindly. Morgan waited for a wide swing and brought the pickaxe down on the hammer's handle. Without expecting it, weasel man lost his grip. Then Morgan rushed him with a running tackle that knocked the man off his feet.\n\nMorgan took up the hammer from the ground. He raised it, and the man, seeing Morgan by the dim light he was no longer blocking with his body, raised his hand in defense.\n\nMorgan dropped the implement next to the man on the floor, panting. \"It's a very, very dangerous thing to attack me. I'm not looking to kill anyone today. That makes this your lucky day. Try again and I guarantee your luck will run out.\" He brought his foot hard against the man's side. \"And tell Bortsov that if he pulls this shit again, I'm coming for him.\"\n\nHe walked away, leaving all his would-be killers writhing in pain on the cave ground.\nChapter Six\n\nThey marched back to the camp after ten hours in the mine, the sun still glaring in the Siberian summer sky. A truck drove alongside them, carrying the day's haul in tin ore. Bortsov's three goons limped along with everyone else, keeping the pace in spite of their injuries.\n\nNo one said anything about the fight. Morgan watched as his attackers were questioned by hostile guards in the yard as the mess window opened and men struggled to be among the first to eat. Morgan asked Grushin what the men were saying.\n\n\"They say it happened in an accident. That they fell.\"\n\nThe guards didn't look like they were buying it for a second, but Bortsov's men said nothing that would connect the occurrence to him. Stonewalled and not interested in taking this any further, the guards let it go. It wasn't skin off their backs if a couple of inmates wanted to give each other shiners, as long as the ore was flowing.\n\nMorgan had expected as much. They were already under scrutiny for the fight the other day, and would not want to call any more attention to themselves. The whole point of attacking him in the mine was to do it in secret, where no one would see. And with renewed suspicion because of their injuries, they would have to lay low before making their next move.\n\nBut it was clear they wouldn't let this go. Especially not now.\n\n\"You are a lightning rod for trouble,\" Grushin said.\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you don't,\" he said. \"It was just natural curiosity that you were so interested in the men's injuries, which I'm sure have nothing to do with the fact that you're trying to hide a limp.\"\n\n\"Did anyone ever tell you that you're too smart for your own good?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"What do you think got me in here? Anyway, don't worry, no one will tell the guards. I'd be more worried about Bortsov, myself.\"\n\n\"You think they'll try something else?\"\n\n\"You are challenging the pecking order. They can't let that stand. If he can, he will kill you. But not yet. Eyes are on him now. I don't think he can afford to make a move.\"\n\n\"Sure you still want to be my friend? It can be dangerous to your health.\"\n\n\"Can't sink that much lower.\" Grushin surveyed the yard, the line for dinner organizing itself out of disorder. \"You know, if we all attacked together, at the same time, we could take their weapons and take over the prison. There are almost a thousand of us and, what, maybe a hundred of them?\"\n\n\"A hundred with Kalashnikovs,\" said Morgan.\n\n\"Still. We get a hold of one or two, and with a decent tactician . . .\"\n\n\"I don't like the way you're looking at me.\"\n\nGrushin rested his back against the wall. \"I'm not going to die in here. I refuse to. If I am to die, I want it to be trying to escape. Fighting against oppression, instead of collapsing from exhaustion or starving like a dog.\"\n\n\"Careful with that talk. There are people in here who'd sell you out for an extra dinner ration.\"\n\n\"But I don't think you're one of them,\" he said.\n\n\"Why do you figure?\"\n\n\"I'm a journalist. My job was\u2014is\u2014to see things. So I see people around here. Most of them keep to themselves. Those are your basic survivors, the ones who are focused on getting through the day. Some find God. They tend to stick together\u2014that's them over there. You got your standard bullies, like Bortsov's men, who try to get the upper hand even in here. There are the flight risks, too, although it's harder to figure out who they are beforehand. But they are the ones who will just take off running one day. Usually they get shot. Some get brought back.\"\n\n\"And the rest?\"\n\n\"You don't want to know.\"\n\nGrushin was probably right about that. \"Sounds like you've got this place figured out.\"\n\n\"There are the specific cases,\" Grushin said. He pointed out a small man, very thin and middle aged. Morgan couldn't quite tell, but there seemed to be something wrong about the way he carried himself. \"They say that is Kolya the Cannibal. He terrorized St. Petersburg some ten years ago. Ate at least thirty people, most of them children, before they caught him. They found the bones in his basement.\"\n\n\"He's been in here since then?\"\n\n\"It's what they say. Honestly, I don't know how he survived this long. He has never said a word to anyone here. Maybe that's his secret.\"\n\n\"And you? How long you been in?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"It's been five months. Feels like as many lifetimes.\"\n\n\"I'm done with this place after a day.\"\n\n\"You won't stay long in here,\" Grushin said. \"Your government wouldn't allow it.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't count on it. I'm dead, as far as my government is concerned.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Grushin. \"So what are you? CIA? Identity disavowed in case of capture?\"\n\n\"No. Not CIA.\"\n\n\"But something, right? There's something about you.\"\n\nMorgan didn't respond. He wondered whether he was that transparent.\n\n\"I am going to write about this place when I get out,\" Grushin said. \"The world needs to know what is going on in here. When they take you away, remember us here, okay?\"\n\nAfter dinner, the guards lined up all the prisoners on the yard for the evening count. One guard marched down the line counting aloud while another ticked each number off on a clipboard.\n\nTwilight was setting in by the time they finished, and the men filed into barracks. They distributed into their respective rooms. Morgan was relieved to find that none of his twenty-odd cellmates were the men he had confronted in the yard. The man he had saved, the Arab, was not among them either.\n\nMorgan lay down on his bunk. He was still tired enough that he felt sleep coming on, but he wasn't about to drift off before making sure the others would, too. Sleep left him exposed, and he didn't like it. But soon enough, his exhaustion got the better of him and he fell into dreamless sleep.\nChapter Seven\n\n\"How are you holding up?\"\n\nKaren O'Neal, with her pretty half-Vietnamese face, fussy, socially awkward and a bit off-putting, sat across from Alex in a downtown Boston Starbucks drinking a triple-shot espresso. They had just missed the morning crowd, who left newspapers and coffee rings behind, and were sharing a table during the tranquil midmorning lull.\n\n\"Not well.\" Alex emitted a hollow laugh. She was nursing an iced hazelnut macchiato with an obscene amount of sugar in it.\n\n\"I'm glad you called,\" said Karen. \"Sometimes this job sucks, and sometimes it's hard on the people close to us.\"\n\n\"I think it was harder on my father this time,\" said Alex.\n\n\"I know. I was being polite.\"\n\nThis was why Alex liked Karen. Sometimes she was honest to a fault. \"What happened to him?\" Alex asked.\n\n\"I don't know much. Zeta's keeping this mission on the down-low, even from people on the inside. They're even boxing me out of looking for him.\"\n\n\"What? Why? Bloch said they were doing everything they could.\"\n\n\"I guess that's not literally true,\" Karen said.\n\n\"I need to know more.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I'm just not in the loop.\"\n\nBut Alex had a last resort, a trick up her sleeve. \"Was Lincoln working on this project?\"\n\nKaren blushed. \"Yes.\"\n\nLincoln Shepard was the resident computer tech at Zeta, a brilliant nerd who had been dating Karen in secret for months now. Alex was among the few who knew, having found out by accident.\n\n\"He never told you anything?\" Alex asked.\n\n\"No, but . . .\" Karen looked left and right, as if someone might be listening. \"There's a name I heard him say several times,\" she said. \"Apparently in connection to this case. Suvorov. Some sort of military officer.\"\n\n\"Suvorov . . .\" Alex echoed as she committed the name to memory.\n\n\"You're not actually thinking of getting involved, are you?\"\n\n\"No, of course not. I just wanted some closure, I guess.\" Liar. \"Anyway, what are you working on now?\"\n\nThis was enough to get Karen to go off on a tangent about trying to find contraband through recurring patterns in shipping containers. Alex picked Karen's brain about how data models worked as they finished their coffees, and then Karen said she had to go. They parted on the street with a wooden hug.\n\n\"He might not be dead!\" Karen called out as Alex waved good-bye.\n\nAlex rode her motorcycle home. She pulled off the highway to the suburb of Andover, Massachusetts, where kids on summer vacation populated the streets on bicycles and on foot. One group was playing in the spray of a hose on the lawn. Alex felt a pang of nostalgia for her own childhood.\n\nShe found the house empty except for their German shepherd, Neika. Her mother was out at work, as usual. Diving into her work was her coping mechanism, and as such things went, it wasn't a bad one.\n\nTaking advantage of her solitude, Alex opened the door to her father's office. She found everything still, the air slightly stale, a light dust settled on the gun display case, the model cars.\n\nIt was eerie being in there with him missing.\n\nBut Alex had purpose, and the heebie-jeebies were not going to stop her. She opened a cabinet behind his chair and removed two piles of old tax and personal documents. Then she felt around the corners for the button, and removed the back panel.\n\nStashed there was nearly fifty thousand dollars and a Rolodex. She drew out the money and the old apparatus, shuffling through the cards. They were written in a simple cipher, an idiot code that Alex had over time taken pains to decipher.\n\nNow, she was looking for a specific card. She went through them until she found it. A name, which deciphered read Valery Dobrynin. And a phone number.\n\nShe picked up the phone in the study and dialed the complex country code and then the number. It rang ten times before she got an answering machine message. She had been studying Russian, but she didn't quite get what the recording said. She only knew she had not heard the name Dobrynin.\n\nShe heard the beep, her signal to start talking. \"I'm not sure I have the right number. I'm calling about my father, Dan Morgan. I\u2014he needs help. I think you know who he is, and I think you can give me that help. Please, if you care about him, call me back.\"\n\nShe left her number, finished off with another plea for help.\n\nIt could be nothing. A total mistake, a man long gone. But she would take anything at this point.\nChapter Eight\n\nDays went by and Morgan had no more trouble from Bortsov's men beyond angry looks. He shared most of his meals with Grushin, who told him about life on the outside, about his political radical girlfriend, and about how he was worried about her and how much he missed her. Morgan said little in return, and next to nothing about his life back home. But the young man was glad enough just to be listened to.\n\nMorgan would've preferred to think he was above it, that he was better as a lone wolf. But the young man's company was humanizing, in a place where most other interactions were opportunistic at best, cruel at worst.\n\nIt was about two weeks into Morgan's internment when Vanya interrupted a dinnertime conversation with an announcement.\n\n\"Detonation tomorrow. If we're lucky, we won't get picked to do it, and have a day of rest.\"\n\nThey got picked. It was a random draw, and theirs was the short straw\u2014Morgan's team and another, which Morgan saw that morning included the man he had defended on his first day there, the Arab. The twelve of them marched alone to the mine, along with six armed guards. The rest of the prisoners stayed behind and enjoyed a rare day of rest from hard labor.\n\nOn their arrival at the mine, the guards unlocked the dynamite shed and told them to get to work.\n\n\"Come,\" said Vanya to Morgan.\n\n\"Why me?\"\n\n\"What, you want me to do it? You are new. You do it.\" Seniority applied in the mines, apparently.\n\nVanya first took a satchel from a shelf and stocked it with wires, detonators, and tape. He then opened a green arms chest, packed with sticks of dynamite. \"You carry.\" He loaded it with eight sticks as Morgan held it.\n\nMorgan lifted it carefully over his shoulder and walked with smooth and precise steps, trying to jog the volatile cargo as little as possible. Vanya led all of them into the depths of the mines, where two spots had been marked for detonation. Once they were there, Morgan set the satchel on the ground and the Arab came forward and drew out three sticks.\n\nWith deft fingers, he connected the detonators. While Morgan unwound the wire toward the mouth of the cave, the Arab set the sticks at the second site.\n\nOnce everything was ready, they unspooled the wire all the way to the outside. Vanya closed the heavy steel door and everyone stood clear. The Arab activated the charge on a car battery and the ground shook. Dust shot out from the corners of the door, which rumbled on its hinges.\n\nThe guards gave them a few minutes to wait for the dust to settle. They were smoking cigarettes, and in a rare moment of empathy offered each prisoner one. The Arab waved it away. Vanya smoked his with relish. Morgan took one and pocketed it. He might be able to trade. At least it might be a treat for Grushin.\n\nThey went back inside, coughing at the dust that was still thick in the air, dimming the reach of the electric lights. Vanya surveyed the collapsed rock.\n\n\"We did not do enough here,\" he told Morgan. \"We will need to do a second detonation.\"\n\nOn the way back up, he knelt at a spot where stones had been knocked loose. The wire had been cut on a sharp edge.\n\n\"Shit. We do not have more. We will have to use fuses. I hate fuses.\"\n\nThey went back for more dynamite. Morgan was given the job of carrying the satchel again. He, the Arab, and Vanya made their way back down, the dust now a bit clearer, to the first detonation site.\n\n\"This doesn't look too safe,\" Morgan said as the Arab set the sticks in the recess of the rock where they wanted to blow the new passage..\n\n\"Do it right this time,\" said Vanya. He was pissy about all the extra work.\n\n\"Lighter,\" said the Arab. Vanya reached over and lit the fuse.\n\n\"All right, clear the cave.\"\n\nThey ran single file away from the hissing fuse. Ducking under a low passage, the Arab put his hand on a strut. Weakened by the explosions, it shifted, groaning, and then cracked. Morgan pushed him out of the way, and they rolled together on the ground. A section of the passage wall collapsed on top of Vanya. He was knocked forward and screamed. His leg was pinned against the ground.\n\n\"Help me!\"\n\nMorgan looked at the light of the fuse, burning not fifty feet away. How long did they have before it reached the stick of dynamite?\n\nMorgan owed this man nothing. The sensible thing to do was to run away with everyone else and get clear of the blast before it went off.\n\nInstead he grabbed a shovel. \"Come on, help me!\" he said to the Arab. He wedged the shovel under the rock and pushed down on the handle. It didn't budge. \"Help me!\"\n\nThe Arab stepped forward and helped Morgan push the shovel down. They grunted at the exertion. With a creak, the stone moved a fraction of an inch. Under their combined strength, it rose, little by little, rocks shifting as it moved.\n\n\"Get him out!\"\n\nThe Arab let go. Morgan held, giving every ounce of strength he had, as the man pulled Vanya's considerable bulk backward, clear of the rock. Morgan let go, dropping to his hands and knees with exhaustion. The rock hit the cave floor, sending up a plume of dust.\n\n\"Move it!\" cried Vanya.\n\nMorgan and the Arab helped Vanya to his feet, and he limped, weight resting on their shoulders, as they moved together down the passage.\n\nThey had walked barely ten paces when they were knocked off their feet by the blast. They collapsed into a pile on the cave floor, hot air running all around them. The passage behind them caved in, raising a cloud of dust. If they had gotten out five seconds later, they would have been buried.\n\n\"Is everyone all right?\" the Arab asked.\n\nVanya didn't answer, but he was moving and moaning, which was good enough.\n\n\"Let's not do that again,\" said Morgan.\nChapter Nine\n\nThat evening, Morgan sat to eat with Grushin at dinner, as usual. From their regular seats against the laundry building, he caught sight of the Arab doing his evening prayer halfway across the yard. At the back of the food line, Vanya was limping on an old-fashioned cast. That poor bastard. With a fracture like that, he needed to be in bed, but hell if Nevsky was going to be that compassionate.\n\nAt least Vanya caught something of a break. He was, Morgan found out, taken out of the mine and put on latrine duty.\n\nSomeone else was eating with them that day. An older man, his face deeply lined, what hairs were left him wispy and patchy. His eyes were sunken and haunted, but there was spirit in the geezer yet.\n\n\"Morgan,\" Grushin had said when Morgan sat down. \"This is Milosz. He is something of an institution around here. He has been here for many years, longer than anyone can remember. Even him.\"\n\n\"How you like our home, young man?\" Milosz said, in a raspy, guttural English.\n\n\"You speak English?\"\n\n\"I learn in here. Sometimes there is British or American inside. They die or go away fast. But I learn. I learn good.\"\n\n\"That you did,\" said Morgan. \"What are you in for?\"\n\n\"I was fighter in Czechoslovakia,\" he said. \"In\u2014\" he turned and asked something of Grushin in Russian.\n\n\"Velvet Revolution,\" Grushin said.\n\n\"Velvet Revolution!\" Milosz said with a flourish of his hand. \"I was leader.\"\n\nHe related stories of his glory days before his capture, of beautiful women and killing Communists and daring escapes until he announced, \"I go take a piss.\" He rested a hand on Morgan's shoulder. \"Don't get old. You piss all the time.\"\n\n\"I'd rather that than the alternative.\"\n\nHe helped Milosz to his feet and watched as the man walked toward the latrines. He commanded rare respect in the camp. Even the guards seemed to have some deference to the old man, and Bortsov's men steered clear of him. No, there was something left of the outside in here after all. Respect for elders was too deeply ingrained to be rooted out all the way.\n\nAs he watched Milosz, Morgan saw the Arab walking over in their direction, a bowl of stew in his hand.\n\n\"I think that's for you,\" said Grushin. Morgan stirred to stand up. \"No, I was just leaving. Got some important business to attend to at the other side of the yard.\"\n\nGrushin made himself scarce, and the other man took a seat next to Morgan as he tipped the bowl of stew into his mouth, fatty broth filling his stomach. Both were facing forward and didn't look one another in the eye.\n\n\"My name is Badri,\" he said.\n\n\"Morgan.\"\n\n\"American,\" he said. \"We should be enemies.\"\n\n\"I guess we should.\"\n\n\"There is honor in you. Perhaps you are a good man.\"\n\n\"Nah. I'm just like every other asshole in here.\"\n\n\"No. You are not. Most people here are criminals. People who are lost, who have no hope of righteousness. But you. I have been watching. You have a mind for justice, even in this place where there is none, not for any.\"\n\n\"Those are big words,\" Morgan said. \"I see someone in trouble, I do something. It's an instinct or something.\" He sipped from his stew. It carried an aftertaste of rancid onion.\n\n\"Even one who should be your enemy.\"\n\n\"Even.\" Badri was testing him. He could tell.\n\n\"You have family?\" Badri asked.\n\n\"Wife and daughter back home,\" he said. \"My daughter, she's college-aged. You?\"\n\n\"Wife, too, and two children. But I haven't seen them in a long time. I don't know what has happened to them.\" He rubbed his face. \"Are you from the CIA? I do not know why else an American would be in here.\"\n\nLying was going to do him no good. Plus, given the circumstances, it hardly seemed like it mattered. \"I'm not CIA,\" he said. \"But I did work for an intelligence agency. Something clandestine. Totally secret. Not even working for the government, technically.\"\n\nA flash of ice-cold hatred passed across Badri's face. \"Then you are the enemy.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm done with them anyway. I gave everything for my country, for the agency. And they betrayed me. Left me for dead. What are you here for?\"\n\n\"For fighting the Great Satan,\" he said. \"For making jihad.\"\n\nThey stared at each other in silence. Natural enemies, then?\n\nMorgan scratched the scalp behind his ear. \"Look, Badri, I've seen things. I've done things. I know what my country does, has done. Wars and bombing and assassinations for profit and ideology. Covering up war crimes and manipulating our people. I'm tired. I'm tired of the hypocrisy.\" He leaned back and closed his eyes. \"I saw something. In my most recent mission. I was doing reconnaissance in northwestern Syria. Town called Sarmada. A mission against the Islamic State. I was supposed to give my people the location of a group of leaders for a targeted bombing.\n\n\"Except when I got there, I saw a wedding. Women, old people, children. I told them not to fire. I told them to hold off.\" He spit on the ground. \"An entire family killed by a drone strike. A wedding party. Should've been the happiest moment of those young people's lives. Instead, they died.\" He gritted his teeth. \"I'm sick of it, Badri. This has been festering in me a long time. I'm not one of them anymore.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you see things as I do,\" said Badri. \"Perhaps you understand.\"\n\n\"Well. It's not like all that matters in here, does it?\" He looked at the desolate wasteland surrounding the prison. A treeless wilderness, with no animals to be seen, cold and barren. \"All that's washed away. This is a corner of the world that God's forgot. All we are in here is muscle and bone waiting to die.\" Morgan took another mouthful of soup. \"So I don't see the harm in mortal enemies on the outside sharing a meal.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you are right,\" he said.\n\n\"Screw being right. I'm tired.\"\nChapter Ten\n\nAlex's feet pounded pavement, a light summer shower cooling off her overheated body.\n\nThese days, she couldn't do without her morning run. She'd long gone past the point when it was something she had to force her body to do, and now it was something her body craved, and would revolt if she did not.\n\nShe thought of her batch of recruits back at the training camp. They'd be at the range at this time, she reckoned. She realized she missed holding the rifle, missed shooting at a target, missed the endurance exercises and slogging through the mud and practicing first aid on her mates and stealth maneuvers.\n\nShe was thinking about checking out a local gun range when the music cut out in her earphones and the ringer sounded.\n\nShe stopped, catching her breath for three seconds before drawing her cell phone from its waterproof case and picking up.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"How you get this number?\" Through a heavy Russian accent, the man's voice was nervous, slathered in a sort of manic paranoia.\n\n\"I'm sorry, who is this?\"\n\n\"Don't ask who it is. You called me.\"\n\n\"I did?\"\n\n\"You leave number.\"\n\nThen it hit her. \"Is this Dobrynin? Valery Dobrynin?\"\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Alex, I\u2014Dan Morgan is my father.\"\n\n\"How did you get number?\"\n\n\"I found it in his things.\"\n\nThe man swore in Russian. \"The mudak was supposed to forget me.\"\n\n\"Well, he didn't. And you didn't forget him either.\"\n\n\"What do you want? You say he needs help?\"\n\nThe rain started coming down harder and she turned to make her way back home. \"He went missing in Russia a couple of weeks ago. I want\u2014I need to find him.\"\n\n\"And what is this to me?\"\n\n\"You knew him, didn't you?\"\n\n\"A long time ago. I do not know anything about him.\"\n\n\"You know he needs your help!\"\n\nThe man muttered something in Russian she did not catch. \"What kind of help?\"\n\n\"He was on a mission to\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop. Watch what you say over the phone, child. These things I do not need to know.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" she said. \"He's missing. I have a name in connection with it, and not much else.\"\n\n\"And what do you want me to do about this?\"\n\n\"I want to find him. I want your help.\"\n\nThe man did not answer right away, and all Alex heard was water hitting the pavement. \"Is not my problem. Forget this name and this number.\"\n\n\"You owe him!\" It was a gamble. She didn't know if it was even close to true.\n\n\"What did you say?\"\n\n\"I said you owe him.\"\n\n\"What do you know about that?\" he hissed.\n\nTime for another bluff. \"I know enough. You want to get even? This is your chance.\"\n\n\"Der'mo. Get even. Okay. You come here? To Moscow?\"\n\n\"Yes. I'll come to Moscow.\"\n\nHe dictated the address for her in Cyrillic, which she was familiar with enough to write out on her cell phone's notepad app.\n\n\"I will be waiting. If this is trick, I gut you with knife.\"\n\nNice guy.\n\nShe went home and made straight for her father's hiding place. She took out the duffel of cash. Then she looked up flights online. She could leave on one early the next morning. She paid for it with a credit card her father had left behind.\n\nHer mother was out of town for a couple of days, so Alex just left a note.\n\ngone to find dad. be back soon.   \nlove you.\n\n\u2013A.\n\nChapter Eleven\n\nAlex's plane touched down in Moscow in the late morning. She converted two thousand dollars to rubles and took a cab out of the airport.\n\nShe had the driver drop her off a few blocks away from her destination and walked the rest of the way. She was in an old neighborhood, where the buildings were quaint but run-down.\n\nShe counted the numbers until she was standing in front of a store window. She didn't need to read Russian to know what it was. The hanging salamis and two massive pigs' heads on display announced with crystal clarity that this was a butcher shop. It looked like something that belonged to the Soviet era and had frozen in time in the late eighties.\n\nShe checked the address again and walked all the way back to the corner to verify she had the street address right. Then she walked back and checked the number.\n\nThere was no doubt. This was the address the man had given her.\n\nHer face burned with embarrassment. Had this been a cruel trick? Something to get her off his back? She might be able to trace the phone number, but what was the point of tracking down a man who wanted nothing to do with her?\n\nStill, she had come this far.\n\nA bell rang when she opened the door. A miasma of butchered meat hit her at once, not helped in the least by the heat of the summer.\n\nA woman of about sixty waddled in from the back, cleaning her hands with a filthy rag, and asked Alex something in Russian.\n\n\"Sorry, I don't . . .\" She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, swallowing her embarrassment. \"I'm looking for Valery Dobrynin?\"\n\nShe tossed the rag and hollered, \"Valyerey!\"\n\nA man came out of the back, grumbling under his breath, wearing a bloodstained apron. He had a long face with gray curls that were once black, and a long, thick nose. He exchanged bickers with the woman, and she retreated inside, spitting a last curse at him and slamming the door behind her.\n\n\"Chto ty khochesh'?\" She could smell the alcohol on his breath from across the counter.\n\n\"Ya ishchu kogo-to. My Russian's not very good. Mr. Dobrynin?\"\n\n\"That is me. Who are you?\"\n\n\"Alex. Alexandra.\" Dobrynin didn't make a sign of recognizing her. \"Daniel Morgan's daughter?\"\n\n\"Ah, the girl,\" he said, grumbling some more, and looked over her shoulder at the street behind her. \"Did anyone follow you?\"\n\n\"I don't think\u2014\"\n\n\"Never mind. Come in.\" He pulled a hinged section of the counter, motioning for her to follow him.\n\nThey walked into a different door from the one the woman had disappeared into, and emerged in a tiny dark kitchen. Its sink held two chipped ceramic plates, two forks and knives that had seen better days, and two aluminum cups. He sat in one of the two chairs and motioned for her to sit in the other, across a table covered in peeling vinyl.\n\n\"Put your suitcase down and sit,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you. You have a lovely home.\"\n\nHe burst out laughing, which transitioned into a hacking cough. \"I do not. Agrafena is a worse decorator than I am.\"\n\n\"Is that your wife?\"\n\n\"What did you come here for?\" Dobrynin asked her.\n\n\"I told you,\" she said. \"I need your help. I need to help my father.\"\n\n\"And who took your father?\"\n\n\"I have a name,\" said Alex. \"Suvorov.\"\n\nDobrynin whistled. \"That is quite a name. If this is true, then your father is in heavy trouble, little girl.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\n\"General. Very nasty man. Not known for being polite to prisoners.\"\n\nAlex felt a lead weight in her chest. \"Do you think he's dead?\"\n\n\"Most probably.\"\n\n\"I need to know for sure,\" she said. \"If there's even a chance\u2014\"\n\n\"Will you die for a chance?\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes. \"If I have to.\"\n\nHe stood up from his seat and turned his back on her. \"Foolish girl.\" He turned on the faucet and rinsed the dishes.\n\n\"Either you help me, or I'm going on my own.\"\n\nHe circled his way around her and opened a cabinet behind her back. She watched the dripping faucet, thinking of what she was going to do if he sent her away. And then his thick arm was around her neck, and the point of a thin knife touched her neck. \"Do you know what they do to little girls in Moscow?\"\n\nAlex squirmed, gasping for air.\n\n\"You will be gutted like a pig, girl.\"\n\nAlex calmed her panicking lizard brain and assessed the situation. His form was sloppy, and sloppy meant vulnerable.\n\nShe kicked herself back in her chair, knocking her head into his chest. The chair tipped over and she fell back, on the chair, on top of him. Before he could recover his bearings, she took the knife that he had dropped on the ground and swung to her right, landing on her feet. She held the knife inches from his face.\n\n\"I'd like to see them try.\"\n\n\"I am old,\" he grunted, pushing the knife away from his face and standing up. \"Others will not be so easy.\"\n\n\"I'm ready,\" she said.\n\n\"You are not. But I will help you with what I can. Daniel Morgan deserves this much.\"\nChapter Twelve\n\nMorgan pulled his weight and more in the mines. It was backbreaking work, long hours of breaking and hauling, to the steady sound of pickaxes echoing through the tunnels. Guards would patrol, passing every so often to make sure no one was slacking. Getting caught not working warranted anything from a cuff to the back of the hand to a summary beating, but Morgan, like the others, quickly learned the tricks. Work as slowly as possible while still keeping the quota, listen for the sound of the guards' boots on the ground, get whatever rest you can when you can.\n\nWeeks passed, although Morgan did not keep count of how many, and Bortsov's men kept their distance, except for bumping into him on occasion, or pushing him when the guards weren't looking. One day, they knocked a bowl of stew out of his hand and it went clattering to the ground, spilling its precious contents on the dirt. There were no do-overs at the camp. Morgan went hungry that night.\n\nBut Morgan didn't want to start trouble, and they didn't seem to want to escalate, for fear of Nevsky's retaliation. That was a fragile d\u00e9tente, and a reckoning was coming.\n\nOne night, the lights went out. It was nearly completely dark by this time, the sun having disappeared in the horizon. There was a commotion among the prisoners, who had been lined up for the evening count, and Morgan's mind went to escape. But the guards were ready, flashlights in hand, and circled the perimeter, carrying automatic weapons and loosing the dogs, still tethered to their chains but with free rein to run the length of the perimeter fence.\n\nThe prisoners were made to kneel with their hands on their heads\u2014Morgan was well familiar with the procedure.\n\nMen were going into the building that housed the generator. Ten minutes passed, then another ten. Nevsky emerged from his building and walked across the yard, swearing in Russian.\n\n\"Hey!\" Morgan called out to him. \"Hey! Is it the generator?\"\n\n\"Shut your mouth, prisoner!\"\n\n\"I can fix it!\" Nobody responded. \"Grushin, tell him I can fix it.\"\n\nGrushin did, calling it out in Russian to the warden, who changed his trajectory to stand before Morgan.\n\n\"Are you a mechanic, American?\"\n\n\"I know my way around an engine.\"\n\nNevsky waved him over. \"Okay, you try it.\" He waved Morgan inside the shed. \"If you screw it up any worse, it's your ass.\"\n\n\"I need a flashlight,\" he said. Nevsky took one from the nearest guard and handed it to Morgan.\n\nThe generator reeked of diesel. The make wasn't one that he recognized. It was Russian (along with any instructions or identifiers) and old. The panel was already open. He went through the troubleshooting checklist, starting with gas and coolant levels. Next he checked the breakers.\n\n\"Jesus H. Christ, who's your mechanics guy? These wires are a goddamn mess.\"\n\n\"Are they the problem?\" Nevsky asked.\n\n\"No, electrics look like they're working. They're not the issue this time.\" He found the problem soon enough. \"Fuel line's blocked. I need to replace it. You got supplies?\"\n\n\"Whatever there is in here.\"\n\nHe found an old hose that seemed in one piece. It was a simple substitution, something he'd done plenty of times before.\n\n\"That should do it,\" he said. \"Let's start her up.\"\n\nThe generator came to rumbling life. The lights in the camp flickered on.\n\n\"American,\" Nevsky said. \"You're out of the mine. You're now on mechanic duty.\"\nChapter Thirteen\n\nMorgan and Grushin settled into a routine of sitting together at dinner. It was mostly Grushin who spoke, but it made Morgan feel good to talk to him. The journalist reminded him of Alex, who was just as idealistic and headstrong. He missed her so much it hurt physically.\n\n\"You got yourself a cushy position,\" Grushin said.\n\n\"Same as you.\" Grushin was on the rotation to work laundry.\n\n\"I get to work all day in the stink of men,\" he said. \"And then the stink of chemicals. They burn my hands and make my eyes water. Not very pleasant.\"\n\n\"Well, it ain't the mines.\"\n\nGrushin chewed absently. \"You know, I think I would actually murder a man for a cigarette and a cup of coffee.\"\n\n\"I've seen some of the inmates with cigarettes,\" Morgan said. \"I guess they get 'em from the guards.\"\n\n\"Yeah. And you should hear the things they'll trade for 'em.\" Grushin emitted a hollow laugh. \"I would kill a man. But I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\"Can't say I sympathize. About the coffee and cigarettes, I mean. I don't partake.\"\n\n\"What about vodka? Whiskey? My God, a tall glass of German beer.\"\n\n\"Never been much of a drinker,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"So what do you miss?\"\n\n\"I miss my daughter,\" he said. \"Every single goddamn minute of my existence here. And I miss my wife. I miss how warm and soft she was. The idea of our bed\u2014it seems like another world. Another life.\"\n\n\"To women,\" Grushin said, raising his bowl and clinking it against Morgan's. \"That we might see one again someday.\"\n\n\"God hear you.\"\n\nThey ate in silence for a few minutes. Grushin looked off into the setting sun. \"I'm not going to die here.\"\n\n\"Careful with that,\" said Morgan. \"They say hope's what kills you faster. You don't have hope, despair is just a dull ache. But if you keep that fire alive, it'll burn you.\"\n\n\"I'd rather blaze bright, even if it consumes me, than turn to ash in this place.\" He stood up, raising his voice. \"Look around, Morgan! All these defeated men. All fed to and being slowly digested by this place.\" His voice dropped to a whisper. \"I'm going to escape from this place.\"\n\n\"You sound like you almost have a plan.\"\n\n\"I almost have a plan,\" Grushin said.\n\n\"You'll die,\" said Morgan. \"Look.\" He gestured to the wastes of the tundra.\n\n\"I can't do it alone. But I wanted to know if I could trust you. I think I can. And you've shown yourself to be very resourceful. Seem to know what you're doing. The kind of guy I'd want at my side for this. You can handle yourself in a fight. You're quick on your feet. Plus, you're a good man. Not many to be found around here. And you got one big thing going for you.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"The cars,\" Grushin said. \"You have access to the motor pool. It might be the only way to escape far enough along the tundra not to get caught by the dogs or the guards coming after us. If we disable the other cars, we got a good shot at getting away.\"\n\n\"Into the Siberian wilderness, with no food or shelter and one full tank of gas.\"\n\n\"One step at a time,\" said Grushin. \"First we get out, then we think about how we survive. I like our chances out there better than in here anyway. Hell, I like the idea of dying out there better than another day in here.\"\n\n\"Maybe I can do it on my own,\" said Morgan. \"Maybe I'm the one who doesn't need you.\"\n\n\"You can't,\" he said. \"Trust me. You need me for this.\"\n\n\"What makes you think you're such hot shit?\"\n\n\"I've got a way out of the prisoner barracks,\" he said. \"Secret way. None of the guards know about it, or, as far as I know, any of the other prisoners.\"\n\n\"Yeah? What's that?\"\n\n\"I'll keep that one close to my chest, thank you very much. Plus, there's something else. A kind of trump card.\"\n\n\"Yeah? What's that?\"\n\n\"Two sticks of dynamite, hidden away safely somewhere here in the camp.\"\n\nMorgan raised his eyebrows. \"No shit?\" Grushin nodded. \"And you know where they are? You can get to them?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know where they are, and I have access to them any day. They've been there a while. No one's found them, and no one's going to.\"\n\n\"How did you happen to come by two sticks of dynamite?\"\n\n\"There was a prisoner here who was in charge of detonations, down in the mines. Dangerous job. They give it to the people they really don't like. Anyway, he lifted these two from two separate detonations where they wouldn't be missed. Tucked them into his uniform, marched all the way back to camp with them, along with a length of detonator fuse, without any of the guards noticing, and then put them away.\"\n\n\"Won't he miss them?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't think so,\" Grushin said. \"He died a couple weeks before you got here. Got into some trouble with Bortsov's men and met with an unfortunate accident in the mines.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Morgan.\n\n\"He never knew how to use them to get out. I don't either. But I think you might come up with something.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Morgan. \"I got some ideas.\"\nChapter Fourteen\n\nWorking in the garage changed Morgan's life at the prison. He went from the empty, monotonous drudgery of breaking and carrying stone to something he loved. And the cars needed it. As little as he liked helping his captors, working out clever solutions, fixes, and enhancements with limited materials and tools was a welcome distraction from daily life at the prison.\n\nBut as he did, Morgan also compiled a mental inventory on their condition. There were three trucks and two jeeps in the garage, all military, in varying states of disrepair. One of the trucks was broken down. It took Morgan a few minutes to figure out the problem. The fix was simple enough, but no one else needed to know that. One jeep was in good working order, although it was some five years old, and the other was held together with duct tape and a prayer.\n\nThe thought of escape filled Morgan with a hopeful energy that he hadn't had since he'd arrived at the prison. Watching and planning took up every waking moment as he studied the rhythms of the prison, its procedures and inner workings, the dogs that circled the perimeter, the guards in the towers, the patrols. The outlines of a plan were slowly forming in his mind.\n\nBut there was one thing he had to talk to Grushin about.\n\n\"All right,\" said Morgan. \"Let's game this out. We get out of the barracks your secret way. That gets us out in the yard. I can make the generator give out at a crucial moment. This throws us into darkness. Let's say we have our opening in the confusion. We're left with two problems.\"\n\nThis was over their morning meal, before work, one of two times they were able to talk with any kind of privacy.\n\n\"First, we have to clear the perimeter fence. The gate's guarded, and the guards have flashlights, and the gate is where they'll concentrate their force. Plus, they're going to loose the dogs. Darkness gets us some cover, but not much.\n\n\"Second, we need some means of transportation. If we try to run for it, they'll just come after us as soon as they notice we're missing. We won't get twenty miles out.\"\n\n\"The solution to that is obvious,\" said Grushin. \"We take one of the cars. You have access to the garage. Can you sabotage the rest so that they can't follow us?\"\n\nMorgan nodded. \"Piece of cake. I can make it so that none of the engines have any hope of starting. But we need to get past the gate. That's where the dynamite comes in.\" Morgan ran his fingers through the short bristles growing in on his head. \"There's something I wanted to talk about. I want to get someone else in on the plan. Badri.\"\n\n\"The Arab?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nGrushin frowned. \"I don't want to bring anyone else into this,\" he said. \"Every person we add to the plan makes it more likely that we will be caught.\"\n\n\"Let me ask you this. Do you know how to deal with dynamite? Do you think you can get it to do what you want it to do, with certainty, without blowing both of us up?\"\n\nGrushin had nothing to say to this.\n\n\"I want to bring him in,\" Morgan insisted. \"We can't do this without him.\"\n\n\"I don't like it,\" said Grushin.\n\n\"I don't think we have a choice.\"\n\n\"Do you trust him?\"\n\n\"I trust he wants to escape as much as we do. And I trust he wants nothing to do with his interrogators.\"\n\nGrushin furrowed his brow, trying to resist the conclusion. \"Shit,\" he said. \"Okay. You're right. Talk to him. Feel him out first. Don't reveal more than you have to. But see what he has to say. And I hope you know what you're doing.\"\nChapter Fifteen\n\nThe next day was shower day. Grushin told him that parasites had once grown to be a serious problem in the camp, which the guards wouldn't care about except lice, ticks, and bedbugs weren't too good about telling who was a prisoner and who was a guard. So they made the prisoners shower every week, along with shearing off all their hair and dusting them with chemical powder. It wasn't enough to keep the barracks from smelling like a month-old gym sock. But it kept the critters in check.\n\nThe men tossed their uniforms and shoes into a series of plastic tubs, to be taken away for laundry, and waited, naked, as men scrubbed themselves under the cold showers with rough lye soap.\n\nMorgan approached Badri there, as they waited in line. The sound of the showers provided cover so that no one would hear them.\n\n\"Goddamn smell, huh?\" said Morgan.\n\n\"In all my time in this prison, this here remains my least favorite part of it.\"\n\n\"Aren't you glad you can experience it for the first time again through my eyes?\"\n\nBadri chuckled. \"Truly, it is like regaining my childlike wonder.\"\n\n\"So how bad do you wanna get out of this place?\"\n\n\"You mean the showers? Very, very much.\"\n\n\"I mean this prison.\"\n\n\"Who does not want to get out of this prison?\"\n\n\"Well, let's suppose we had a way.\"\n\nBadri's eyes narrowed. \"Are you making conversation or do you have an actual plan?\"\n\n\"The beginnings of one,\" said Morgan. \"Plus a confederate with some cards up his sleeve.\"\n\n\"Grushin.\"\n\nIt was obvious, of course. The person Morgan spent most of his time with in the prison. Who else would it be?\n\n\"What do you need from me?\"\n\n\"We might be able to get our hands on some explosives. Dynamite. I want to know if you'd know how to use it to help us get out of here.\"\n\nBadri thought about it. \"A distraction, of course, could be useful. We could take down the towers. Perhaps open the gate. Yes, I could help with that.\"\n\n\"Think about it. This isn't going to be easy, and more likely than not we'll end up dead.\"\n\n\"I don't have to think about it. And perhaps there is more that I can help you with.\" Their turn was coming up to shower, and they would be separated, sent by the guard under different showerheads. \"We will talk more about this later. But count me in, Morgan.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThey powwowed with Grushin out in the yard at dinnertime, going over the general outline of their escape. Morgan kept an eye on the guards, but mostly they just looked bored. They were just three prisoners talking, after all.\n\n\"I was thinking,\" said Badri. \"We can lay down explosives to bring down the posts holding up the fence, about two hundred meters north of the gate. That way, we can drive the car right over the chain link.\"\n\n\"I think that'll work, if you can get the detonation right.\"\n\n\"There is something else,\" Badri said. \"A car by itself won't get us far. They'll see us from a hundred miles away and come after us. They can send helicopters to smoke us out. It may take a few hours, maybe a day or two, but they will certainly find us if we are in any kind of vehicle.\"\n\n\"So what do you suggest?\" demanded Grushin.\n\n\"I have people,\" he said. \"Friends on the outside. They could bring in transportation. Maybe a small airplane. If they get it within a hundred kilometers or so of the prison, over by the mountains in the horizon, we can drive there and escape before they are able to catch us.\"\n\n\"How do we contact these people?\" said Grushin. \"It's not like we have cell phones. Not even the guards are allowed to have personal communication devices.\"\n\n\"But there is a communications tower,\" said Morgan. \"And I know where we can get an Internet connection, if anywhere.\" He looked up at the window to Nevsky's office.\n\n\"No,\" Grushin said. \"We can't.\"\n\n\"We must,\" said Badri. \"There is no other way.\"\n\n\"You people are crazy.\"\n\n\"You said you didn't want to die here,\" said Morgan. \"Well, it looks like this is our one way out. So. Are you in?\"\n\n\"Of course I'm in.\"\nChapter Sixteen\n\n\"Mom, I'm okay.\"\n\nAlex held the phone up to her ear with her shoulder as she looked through the viewfinder on the camera. A car pulled up to the mansion she was surveilling.\n\n\"I'm keeping safe. I put some professional people on the case. I'm really only overseeing their work.\"\n\n\"I know you, Alex. I gave you your middle name, and it's not 'safe.'\"\n\nAlex took a succession of pictures of the man who emerged, bald and tired-looking, until he disappeared into the house seconds later.\n\n\"I'm not putting myself in any kind of danger or anything.\" She hid her camera back inside her backpack. \"Just hanging around Moscow. Taking some pictures to pass the time.\"\n\nThe mansion in question was a prerevolution urban manor that took up the whole block. The sun was getting low in the sky, and the shadow it cast reached Alex where she sat, in a park across the street.\n\nThe front door opened once again, and Alex took a photograph of the person walking out\u2014but it was a security guard, who surveyed the street and closed the door once again.\n\nAlex hid the camera once more and leaned once again against the tree, pretending to be engrossed in a Russian language workbook, early intermediate level.\n\n\"How are you holding up, Mom?\"\n\n\"I wish you were here,\" she said. \"But I keep busy.\"\n\n\"How's Neika?\"\n\n\"She's here. Dug up all my day lilies yesterday. I had to hose her down in the yard, which wasn't much of a punishment for her, let me tell you.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\nA young woman had knocked at the service entrance of the mansion. Alex picked up the camera once more and photographed her as she turned around and lit a cigarette. She was young and pretty, blond, wearing heavy makeup and a black dress that, while not indecent, didn't leave much doubt about what kind of service she was there to perform.\n\n\"Well, I see you're otherwise busy, so I'll let you go.\"\n\nThe door opened, and the woman dropped her cigarette and ground it into the pavement.\n\n\"No, Mom, I\u2014listen, I'll call you back, okay?\"\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\nAlex hung up the phone and reviewed the photos. Two clear shots of her face.\n\nThe light was growing dim, and she was tired. Time to call it a day.\n\nShe packed up the book and the camera and walked away from the mansion, then six blocks south before hailing a cab and telling the driver to take her back to Dobrynin's.\n\nAlex picked up a baked potato loaded with cheese and mushrooms from a street vendor. She said hello to Agrafena at the counter, receiving a grumble in return, and ate alone in their tiny kitchen.\n\nDobrynin pushed his way inside as she was washing the dishes. To say that he was in a foul mood would imply that he was ever not in one.\n\n\"Anything today?\"\n\nShe dried her hands and pulled the camera from the bag. He turned his attention to a wall where they had hung photographs Alex had taken on other days.\n\n\"Look, this man,\" he said, holding up the camera's viewer and pointing at a picture on the wall. \"Same.\"\n\n\"Wish I knew who he was.\" Alex finished drying the dishes as he looked at the rest.\n\nOver the course of the past week, it become obvious that Dobrynin never left the house, or indeed saw anyone. Agrafena, whose relationship with Dobrynin was never made clear\u2014Alex figured wife or sister, but nothing between them suggested any definitive answer\u2014did all the necessary shopping for groceries and other necessities, saw to all of the scant customers in the butcher shop, and also received the meat that arrived on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Dobrynin, meanwhile, cut the meat in the reeking refrigerated room in the back.\n\n\"It's no use,\" Alex said as her host cycled through the picture. \"Anyone who's at all important has tinted windows and brings their car in through the garage.\"\n\n\"Those people have no value to us,\" said Dobrynin. \"Tell me, is it easy to get to Suvorov?\"\n\n\"Um, duh. Otherwise what would have been the point of staking him out for fourteen hours a day?\"\n\nHe belched, and a foul smell of alcohol reached her nostrils. \"Do you think it will be any easier to get to someone important?\"\n\n\"No, I guess not.\"\n\nDobrynin turned the camera's viewer for her to see. \"This is weak spot. This is how we get him.\"\n\nShe was looking at a pretty girl, smoking, looking worriedly out into the street.\nChapter Seventeen\n\nMorgan lay in bed that night with a sense of accomplishment. Things were lining up, and this escape plan seemed increasingly likely. He stared at the ceiling as the spotlight from the guard tower passed over the wall outside, shining in through the windows, casting a silhouette of the bars.\n\nMen snored and shuffled in fitful dreams. Morgan closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.\n\nHe was awakened by the opening of the cell door. His eyes opened in a flash.\n\nSomething was wrong. It was still dark, no wake-up siren, no nothing.\n\nOther men who slept as lightly as he did also moved in their bunks, turning to see what was going on.\n\nSeveral shadows came into the barracks. They made straight for Morgan's bunk. He tried to scramble off it and away from them, but in his sleepy state, he was slow and clumsy. They were on him in seconds.\n\nHe was pulled off his bunk and tossed on the floor, hitting it hard with his back.\n\nBy the light of the spotlight, Morgan saw Bortsov looming over him, flanked by four of his henchmen. Who had let him inside? Did he have that much pull with the guards?\n\nMorgan moved to roll under the bed, but the goon was faster, and blocked his way. Together two of them held on to his arms. He tried to wrest himself free, kicking and twisting, but they held firm.\n\n\"This is your time to die.\"\n\n\"I'm protected,\" said Morgan.\n\n\"I don't see any protection,\" Bortsov said, making a show of looking right and left. \"Do you?\"\n\n\"Nevsky is going to get it from Suvorov, and then he's going to come after you.\"\n\n\"Eh, he will give me a few lashes, maybe. It will sting for two weeks. But you, you will be dead.\"\n\nHe was wrong, but Morgan stood no chance of convincing him. He had one chance to save his life now.\n\n\"Help!\" Morgan screamed. \"Pomogite! Pomo\u2014\"\n\nThey stuffed a piece of cloth in his mouth, muffling his voice. Others were awake now, but no one moved to help him. They were all too scared.\n\nOne of Bortsov's men handed him a rock almost the size of a basketball. Bortsov took it, his shoulders sagging under its weight. He raised it over his head. When he dropped it, it would come down and crush Morgan's skull.\n\n\"Now you die, Amerikanskyi.\"\n\nTwo guards burst into the barracks, shouting. They had heard his cries for help! An intense expression came over Bortsov's face, and he pushed the rock downward.\n\nBut the guards had distracted the men who were holding him, and Morgan twisted free, rolling out of the way as the rock hit the floor, breaking tile.\n\nThe guards drove Bortsov's men out first under blows from their nightsticks, then dragged off Bortsov himself. Then they told Morgan to stand and took him outside, across the yard to the place where they had shaved him on his first day there. After Morgan had been sitting for a few minutes under guard, the warden appeared. He was wearing a rumpled shirt and reeked of alcohol.\n\n\"You have made yourself very unpopular in your time here. A few weeks and already you have enemies.\" He emitted a resounding belch. \"I would be happy to throw you to the dogs. Sometimes they even do it in interesting ways. It breaks up the monotony.\" He leaned over Morgan menacingly. His breath was heinous. \"You see, most people here, nobody cares if they are killed. Me least of all. But General Suvorov has other plans for you. And then you will be regretting that B did not kill you.\"\n\nMorgan didn't give him the satisfaction of a response.\n\n\"I would enjoy breaking you. I would also enjoy seeing what Bortsov's boys would have done. They can be very creative in their punishments. But you are too valuable to us to let die. That is left to General Suvorov.\" He turned and walked away, giving an order to the guard as he left.\n\nThey escorted Morgan out of the building and not into the barracks but somewhere else. And Morgan knew where.\n\nIt was a small building, one with only a handful of tiny cells in it, each with a heavy steel door with no openings but a slot low near the ground.\n\nSolitary. He was going in the hole.\n\nThe guards opened the cell door and he got a peek inside. It was perhaps just big enough for him to lie down, and not comfortably. They shoved him inside and closed the creaky steel door, leaving him in pitch darkness.\nChapter Eighteen\n\nThe solitary cell was designed to make men crazy, this Morgan knew. He'd seen plenty in his day, and the concept was well familiar to him.\n\nIt doesn't seem like much, being put in a room by yourself. A naive observer might not even think it would rise to the level of punishment. But Morgan knew. Morgan had experienced it before, and had seen it happen to others. Isolation and sensory deprivation had their way of getting under even the hardest man's skin.\n\nSilence makes you sensitive to every little noise, and total darkness makes you see shapes, lights and patterns that are not there. Soon you start to think you heard scraps of voices, people talking to you, sometimes even voices you recognize.\n\nMorgan sat up and breathed, trying to hold back against the encroaching madness, trying to center his thoughts on his breathing, on feeling the ground under him, on the aches in his body, on resisting succumbing to the despair of his thirst and hunger. You do not know how fast time goes in the dark, when it's day and when it's night, and so time seems not to pass at all.\n\nThus, Morgan had no idea how much time had passed when the food slot opened and a partial face appeared and whispered, \"Hello.\" Morgan could just make him out through the slot. He was blond and young, bony and angular, with wispy stubble on his cheek. \"Come closer.\"\n\nThere was something conspiratorial about the way he spoke, not the barking orders he was used to. Morgan crawled toward him, every movement painful.\n\n\"I heard about what you did,\" he said. \"In the mine. I do not know what you did to be in this place, but you do not deserve to be in here.\"\n\nMorgan grunted in response.\n\n\"They beat Bortsov very bad. Nevsky is very angry.\" He pushed a bowl through the slot. \"Here. Take it.\"\n\nMorgan did. By the dim light he saw that it was filled with stew, not the prisoners' thin, rancid soup, but something borscht-like, filled with meat and potatoes turned pink from the fragrant paprika. Morgan was salivating at the smell.\n\n\"Don't let anyone see the bowl until I come back tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Morgan. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"My name is Filipov.\"\nChapter Nineteen\n\nAlex Morgan had been searching through high-end escort service websites for\u2014she checked the clock\u2014seven hours now, and she found she'd become inured to the sleaze covered in a veneer of class that these establishments affected.\n\nShe scoured each website. Most had profiles for the girls, and Alex looked through each one, a parade of blondes and brunettes in suggestive poses, faces pancaked with makeup, fake tits in low-cut tops.\n\nThe Internet connection didn't help either. Dobrynin was not exactly what one might call an early adopter. He'd only switched out his rotary phone because the network stopped supporting it. So Alex used her father's money to buy a 3G modem, and it could take a full ten seconds to load a high-quality image\u2014which didn't seem like a lot at first, but became an increasing pain as the photos Alex had to look through reached the hundreds.\n\nShe was now looking through a website designed in a black and gold theme, everything about it signaling luxury. She didn't even have to open the girl's profile. Alex recognized her from the thumbnail on the page.\n\nShe called herself Lara.\n\n\"Call them,\" Dobrynin said when she showed it to him. \"Pretend to be secretary of American.\"\n\n\"What if they don't speak English?\"\n\n\"They will.\"\n\nAlex took her prepaid Russian cell phone and dialed the number on the website.\n\n\"Zdr\u00e1vstvujte.\" A woman's voice. Young.\n\n\"Hello, I need an English speaker, please? Angliyskiy?\"\n\n\"Yes, hello, I can speak English. How may I help you?\" Her voice was accented in Russian with a gentle inflection of Queen's English.\n\nAlex put on her best secretarial voice. \"I'm calling on behalf of my employer, Mr. Phillips. I'd like to engage one of your girls for the evening.\"\n\n\"Certainly, ma'am. Which girl would that be?\"\n\n\"Lara? The fourteenth on the website here.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid Lara is not available for tonight.\"\n\n\"How about tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Not for the rest of the week.\"\n\n\"Mr. Phillips is adamant that he wants this girl,\" Alex said. \"He is willing to pay.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, she is not working tonight,\" said the woman. \"Mr. Phillips may perhaps be interested in\u2014\"\n\n\"Listen,\" Alex broke in, letting anxiety creep into her voice, \"Mr. Phillips is not a very nice man, and when he sets his mind on something, he doesn't really take excuses, you know? Things could get really bad for me if I don't get her.\"\n\nAlex heard dead air on the line. Then the woman said, \"Listen, you can't tell anyone I did this, okay? She's taking some time off from us, but I know she does freelance. I can give you her phone number.\"\n\n\"Really? That would be wonderful.\"\n\nAlex wrote down the number on her computer.\n\n\"Thank you so much,\" Alex said. \"You really saved my life today.\"\nChapter Twenty\n\nAlex dialed the number for the fifteenth time, and for the fifteenth time the call went straight to voicemail.\n\n\"This goddamn technology,\" Dobrynin said. \"Stay. I will make a phone call.\"\n\nHe picked up the phone in the shop and dialed. \"Let me speak to Sokoloff,\" he said in Russian, and she was surprised at the ease with which she understood. The studying was paying off.\n\nDobrynin tapped his foot and muttered under his breath while he was on hold. The next words out of his mouth were an insult, and then a deep laugh.\n\n\"How are you, you bastard?\" Dobrynin continued. \"I need some information. I have a phone number.\" He gave the man the digits. \"Yes, that's right.\" He wrote something down on a piece of butcher paper and thanked the man.\n\n\"I got a name,\" Dobrynin said, now in English, holding out the piece of paper. \"Maria Kapustin.\"\n\n\"Got an address?\"\n\n\"What, I have to do everything for you?\"\n\n* * *\n\nAlex had been waiting for hours outside the lumpen apartment building when Maria Kapustin walked out the front door, wearing sunglasses about two hours too late for them to be of any use.\n\nAlex decided a head-on approach would be as good as any. Maria was walking fast, and Alex had to jog to catch up with her.\n\n\"Maria?\" she said. The woman looked at her, and the sunglasses could not hide the panic in her eyes. \"Don't worry,\" Alex said. \"I don't want to hurt you.\"\n\nFrom up close, Alex saw the edge of a black eye peeking out from under the glasses, and purple marks on Maria's neck not quite covered with makeup.\n\n\"Do you speak English?\"\n\n\"Da. Yes.\" Maria did not lessen her pace.\n\n\"I'd really like to talk to you. Can I buy you dinner, or a drink?\"\n\n\"I can buy my own, thank you.\"\n\nAlex decided to take a chance. \"It's about the man who did this to you.\"\n\nMaria stopped walking and looked Alex straight in the eye. \"What do you know about the man who did this?\"\n\n\"I know he's a bad man,\" said Alex. \"And I intend to hurt him back.\"\n\nMaria resumed walking. \"American girl comes to be a big hero to poor oppressed Russian women?\"\n\nLying wasn't going to get her anywhere. \"I have my own agenda,\" said Alex. \"I'll admit that. This isn't about you. But you can get a bit of revenge.\"\n\nMaria stopped and opened the door to a place Alex saw was a dive bar. She held the door open. \"Well?\" she said. \"Are you going to buy me a drink or not?\"\n\nThey settled into a corner table. The only other customers were the everyday drunks who'd probably already been there for hours. Maria ordered them a couple of beers before Alex could say anything. Then she removed her glasses, setting them on the table, and revealed a dark purple blotch under her left eye.\n\n\"Masha,\" the girl said. \"That is what everyone calls me. Everyone who knows my real name, anyway. So what is your deal?\"\n\nAlex opted for full disclosure. \"I'm looking for my father. I think Suvorov is the one who took him.\"\n\n\"If that is true, then I am sorry for your loss,\" Masha said.\n\n\"I'm not ready to believe that yet,\" Alex said. \"What do you know about him?\"\n\n\"I know he is a goddamn bastard,\" Masha said with bitterness. \"And that all the girls are afraid of him. But when he calls, we cannot refuse. At least the money is good.\"\n\n\"He does this to all of them?\" Alex asked.\n\nMasha nodded. \"We all know it. Go to see Suvorov, and you will not work again for two weeks until the bruises fade enough to cover up with makeup. It upsets the other clients, see.\" The waitress set down the pints of beer on the table and she downed half of it in the time it took Alex to take one sip.\n\n\"He likes us young and meek,\" Masha said. \"His sick little games are more fun for him that way.\"\n\nAn idea was forming in Alex's mind. \"Masha,\" she said, \"do you think I could replace the next girl Suvorov calls?\"\nChapter Twenty-one\n\nThe guard Filipov gave Morgan food whenever possible, and would sit outside his cell and talk to him whenever he was keeping watch by himself. It was Morgan's way of keeping time, his conversations with Filipov over rich, flavorful food, in between the long stretches of black nothingness, during which time he exercised as much as he could in the cramped cell to keep up his strength.\n\nFilipov asked about American culture. He loved classic rock and Van Halen, Mad Max, and Die Hard. They even sang Elvis songs together quietly, Filipov with his heavy Russian accent.\n\nBy his reckoning, Morgan was in there for two weeks before he was jogged awake by harsh light cast on his face. He squinted, unaccustomed to the brightness.\n\nA guard was standing at the door. \"American. Out.\"\n\nMorgan picked himself up off the floor. Thanks to the extra food and exercise, he felt better coming out than going in, but he made a show of bracing against the wall and of getting up on shaky legs.\n\nThe guard grunted with impatience. \"Quickly.\"\n\nMorgan emerged outside, feeling the harsh cold wind on his skin for the first time in weeks. The men were lining up for the evening count. Morgan found Grushin and stood next to him.\n\n\"So he emerges. Badri and I were beginning to think you were dead.\"\n\n\"Not dead. Just buried.\"\n\n\"What was it, two weeks?\"\n\n\"You know better than I do,\" said Morgan.\n\n\"I was thrown in solitary once. I was talking to my toes on the second day.\" He looked Morgan up and down. \"But you look hale and hearty, smell aside.\"\n\n\"It was all right. A little boring.\"\n\nMorgan picked out the men who had attacked him in line. They were giving him stares that could melt steel.\n\n\"They are suspicious of you,\" said Grushin. \"Because you have Nevsky's support. And people don't like that.\"\n\nMorgan figured as much. Nevsky had bought him temporary safety, at the expense of putting him in greater danger in the long term.\n\n\"Badri and I have been talking. Working out the details of the plan. I think this is going to work.\"\n\n\"We need to put this plan in motion soon,\" said Morgan. \"We can't wait any longer.\"\n\nThe chill set in as the count went on. Afterward, Grushin said, \"Come with me. I want to show you something.\"\n\nThey walked together into the prisoners' barracks.\n\nIt was a grate that looked solidly in place but came loose after Grushin worked it for a few seconds.\n\n\"Through here, we can easily get outside,\" he said. \"I have left the barracks several times in the night to test it. Nobody knows about it. Nobody is watching. We need to get Badri in Nevsky's office. We can get outside, but I have no idea how to get into the building.\"\n\n\"I have an idea,\" Morgan said.\nChapter Twenty-two\n\nMorgan lay in bed and waited for Grushin's signal, three taps on the bar to the outer doors. He got out of bed, careful not to wake anyone. Not that it would compromise the mission if he did\u2014men got up to use the head in the middle of the night all the time.\n\nHe found Badri and Grushin already waiting for him at their arranged meeting spot. Grushin led the way to their secret passage out. They snuck under the grate, Morgan taking the lead and Grushin bringing up the rear.\n\nOnce they were outside, the wind chilled them to the bone. Morgan looked at the four guard towers, each housing a sniper and a spotlight that they shone over the camp in periodic cycles. The cover of the buildings meant that they never had to be in the line of sight of more than two towers, and often not more than one or none, so avoiding them was just a matter of watching out for the lights. Unless they were discovered, in which case it was a matter of luck whether they would survive the night. Then he searched for the dogs that patrolled the perimeter. Their attention wouldn't necessarily be called by their presence out in the yard, but if they caught their scent and decided to raise the alarm, it was all over.\n\nThey ran along the wall to the prisoners' barracks, keeping to the shadow. This was simple enough, with the light that would normally illuminate this spot burned out. Once they reached the end, they crossed the short distance to the building that housed the kitchen and laundry.\n\nThey heard footsteps coming from around the corner of the laundry building. Morgan held up his hand, then motioned for them to move backward.\n\nThey stood, backs glued to the building, as the guards walked past, chatting in Russian and laughing. They weren't expecting anyone out here. The patrol was a duty and nothing more.\n\nThey did not turn their heads, and didn't see them.\n\nMorgan held his hand up as he waited for them to move away far enough, watching the lights from the towers as he did. Finding an opening, he motioned for Grushin and Badri to follow.\n\nThey ran across the gap at the far end of the laundry building. One more gap to cross to reach the door to the administration building, where Nevsky's office was located.\n\nBehind them at the perimeter fence, a dog started barking.\n\nMorgan had a choice to make. They could retreat to the prisoner barracks, where they could return with relative safety. Or they could press on, trying their luck at the risk of getting caught\n\nMorgan opted to move forward. He took the lead, running full tilt toward their goal, the door two hundred feet away. He felt the two other men close behind him.\n\nThey crossed the distance to the sound of the barking dog. The spotlight from the nearest tower missed Badri's foot by inches, but left them shrouded in darkness. Morgan tried the handle and found the door to the administration building unlocked, as Filipov had promised.\n\nThey closed the door and heard the sound of boots outside. Guards. This was the moment of truth. Had they been seen? Would the guards come in after them? Morgan held his breath, listening intently.\n\nThey passed, oblivious to the possibility that the two had gone inside. Morgan exhaled in relief.\n\nHe heard them talking, and Morgan caught the word krolik. Rabbit. Got the dogs barking wildly sometimes.\n\nMorgan took the lead upstairs. He alone among them knew this building. He led them to the door to Nevsky's office\u2014locked, as they had anticipated. He took out the improvised lock pick he'd taken from the garage and set to work opening the lock to Nevsky's door.\n\nWithin a couple of seconds, he turned it, hearing the click of the lock. Removing the pick and pulling the knob, he pushed the door open.\n\n\"After you.\"\n\nThe first thing Morgan did was to check that the curtains were closed, so that no one could see them from outside. Badri knelt and turned on the computer. Morgan looked through a crack in the curtains as the machine booted up. Everything outside was as quiet as they had left it.\n\n\"There is a password,\" said Badri.\n\nShit. How had Morgan not thought of this?\n\nBut someone else had. \"I can do this,\" said Grushin. \"You know those young Russian hackers you keep hearing about? Well, I was one of them when I was a teenager.\"\n\nGrushin reclined in Nevsky's chair. \"Oh my God, I have not sat in anything so comfortable in months. Seriously, you guys have to try this.\"\n\n\"Focus,\" Morgan said through gritted teeth.\n\n\"Cool your horses,\" Grushin said, and began typing. \"This is going to be a breeze.\"\n\nMorgan kept watch outside the door as Grushin did his thing. \"Got it.\" He asked Badri, \"How do you send your messages?\"\n\nBadri just shook his head and prodded Grushin off the chair. \"I do this part.\" Badri typed at the computer, writing the message to his confederates for about two minutes. \"Okay,\" he whispered. \"It's done.\"\n\n\"Let me just wipe all records of us being here,\" said Grushin.\n\n\"Are you sure your people will come?\" Morgan asked Badri as the Russian typed.\n\n\"They will come. It is only a matter of us being there to meet them.\"\nChapter Twenty-three\n\nThe call came two days later, when Alex was cooped up in Dobrynin's dark little kitchen, cramming Russian vocabulary.\n\n\"There is a girl,\" Masha told her over the phone. \"Klara. She was called to Suvorov's house tonight. He has not met her before.\"\n\nAlex checked her watch. It was still just after 3:00 P.M. \"Then that's our opening.\"\n\n\"She still wants the money,\" Masha said. \"But she is happy for you to take her place. She is black-haired. But we can resolve that. I will bring some hair dye.\"\n\n\"Oh, great.\" Alex ran her hand through her hair. Black was not going to suit her.\n\n\"And you need to be sexy.\"\n\n\"I can be sexy.\"\n\nMasha giggled. Alex couldn't help feeling offended. \"I will be around in a couple of hours,\" said Masha. \"I will bring the dye and some clothes for you, and I will teach you. Crash course. Oh, and Klara says thank you.\"\n\nAlex hung up and went into the refrigerated room to tell Dobrynin the news\n\n\"So you are doing this?\" he said as he chopped up a hunk of meat with a cleaver.\n\n\"I have to,\" she said. \"It's my only chance at this.\"\n\n\"Do not get caught,\" he said. \"Do not let him know who you are. Get what information you can in his house\u2014anything to trade for your father. That is your only chance. If you are found out, you will not come out of there alive.\"\n\n\"I know, we've been over this,\" she said with impatience.\n\n\"Insufferable girl. You want my help? This is my help.\" He brought the cleaver down hard against the cutting board, splitting a piece of pork loin into three parts. \"Do not get yourself killed, okay?\"\n\n* * *\n\nAlex knocked at the service entrance where she had first seen Masha days before.\n\nHer hair was black, the smell of the dye still lingering despite her best efforts at washing it. She hoped no one would notice, but then again, Suvorov had not been promised natural hair.\n\nShe was wearing more makeup than she'd ever worn in her life, and her skin was exposed in all the wrong places. She liked slight outfits, shorts and tank tops, that gave her freedom of movement, which the dress Masha had lent her did not\u2014not unless she wanted to flash the entire street.\n\nA security guard opened the door and ordered her inside.\n\nAlex had made great strides with her immersion in the language and Dobrynin's muttering instruction, and she made a particular effort to mimic the accent. She understood the basic orders relayed to her\u2014come, stay, follow me\u2014while keeping quiet and looking down took care of the rest.\n\nShe was searched and then moved out of the servants' area, and Alex realized she was in the most luxurious house she'd ever seen. Everything was marble and carved wood, walls hung with classical paintings with elaborate frames, thick oriental carpets draped on the floor.\n\nShe was shown to a room that wasn't a bedroom, but rather some kind of parlor appointed with several chaise lounges and divans. There she was told to sit and wait.\n\nShe examined the room. The paintings on the wall Alex recognized as being nineteenth century by their style. On a side table was a statue of a faun, half man, half goat, made of bronze, and against an opposite wall was another of an angel, wings swept upward.\n\nA set of double doors opened and a man walked in, wearing a suit. Suvorov. He was old, near sixty, although he was still strong and fit. He looked rather like a fish, with shallow eyes and a nose that jutted forward in his face. Alex felt a shiver of revulsion.\n\n\"Good evening,\" he said in Russian. Alex mumbled a response.\n\nHe crossed the room, closing the distance between them. \"Speak louder.\"\n\nShe was afraid to. She was afraid he'd catch her accent, and that'd be the end of it. Masha had told her he liked them shy. So she'd be shy. She mumbled a \"Good evening.\"\n\n\"Look at me. What is your name? Speak up.\"\n\nShe looked up at him and said, still mumbling, in her best Russian accent, \"Alexandra.\"\n\n\"I said speak\u2014\" His open hand flew at her face. On instinct, she raised hers and stopped the blow.\n\nToo fast. Too well-trained. She saw by the way that he was looking at her that she'd given herself away.\n\nSuvorov moved to pin her down against the divan, and she rolled out of the way, onto her feet on the carpet. She brought both elbows down hard on Suvorov's back and twisted his arm, pulling it upward.\n\n\"Dan Morgan,\" she said. \"Where is he?\"\n\nHis eyes went wide with surprise. Yeah, weren't expecting that, were you, asshole?\n\n\"What is he to you?\"\n\n\"Answer me. Where is he?\"\n\n\"Far beyond your reach, you whore.\"\n\nShe pulled his arm harder, and he grunted in pain. \"Tell me.\"\n\nSuvorov whipped his head back, catching her nose. Blood began to flow out. He freed his arm from her grip and he swung, his palm snapping against her cheek so hard it knocked her to her feet.\n\nStupid. You know how to take a blow better than that.\n\n\"Your interest in Morgan . . . I see a resemblance,\" he said, standing over her. He stepped on her hand and she cried out in pain. \"Maybe it is the blood. What are you? His daughter?\"\n\nShe gritted her teeth and fumed at him. From her vantage point, his face was wreathed with the clouds painted on the ceiling.\n\n\"He came here, you know,\" said Suvorov. \"Called himself Bevelacqua. Said he wanted to buy guns from me. Got inside my house and tried to steal from me. Maybe deceit runs in the family.\" He ground his heel into her hand, and she yelled out in pain.\n\n\"What did you do with him?\"\n\n\"We caught him, you know. When he broke in. He shot two of my security guards, broke the bones of three more. But we cornered him in the basement, finally.\" He leaned down and pushed a lock of black hair out of her eyes. \"So pretty, too. And now mine. I'm going to have my fun with you, girl.\"\n\n\"Sorry, General, but I don't think fun is in the cards.\"\n\nWith her free hand, she punched him hard in the groin. He bent double in pain, and she pushed him off sideways. She stood and made a run for the door, but he ran after her. She ran for the far side of the room, then turned to face him. He was moving fast, bringing his superior weight to bear against her.\n\nAnd she was going to use that.\n\nShe bodychecked him, which sent her flying backward, but was just enough to knock his path to the right\u2014into the angel statue with the upswept wings, which were just sharp enough to pierce his belly.\n\nSuvorov hollered in pain.\n\nThat was going to attract the guards.\n\nThe statue didn't do much damage, but it was enough for Alex to get back to her feet and run through the double doors he'd come from, into his private chambers\u2014an office, and a bedroom beyond.\n\nShe heard the heavy footsteps of Suvorov's bodyguards, half a dozen at least, approaching from below. They were going to cut off all exits downstairs, so she had to do something they wouldn't expect.\n\nShe went up. She found a narrow staircase that led upstairs, to a long hallway of bedrooms, where the ceiling had the slant of the roof outside. She chose one two thirds down. The window would not open, so she grabbed a heavy brass lamp from the bedside table and shattered the glass, breaking the frames wide enough for her to pass.\n\nAlex walked out onto the roof, bracing against the window frame. She was barefoot, and her dress wafted in a cool breeze, not exactly ideal gear for the situation. But being barefoot was a hidden blessing on the rounded tiles. She walked over the ridge of the roof to the other side.\n\nNo one outside seemed to be looking for her yet\u2014they still thought she was inside. She looked over the edge, studying the pattern of the bricks. Yes, she could do it, even in a slutty dress. She sat on the eaves, hidden by darkness from anyone who might see her, and reached for a handhold, easing her way off to hang from the wall.\n\nShe climbed down the western wall, which was shrouded in darkness. She waited for the vehicle patrol to pass and jumped over the fence, dashing across the street and out into the night, as far away from Suvorov's house as her legs could take her.\nChapter Twenty-four\n\nMorning count. Morgan, Grushin, and Badri got together to talk things over for a few minutes before the guards forced them into the line.\n\n\"I asked them to signal from the west using lights blinking Morse code,\" said Badri. \"That's how we'll know that they're there, and where they are.\"\n\n\"They'll get us away from here?\" said Grushin. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"They are loyal, and they have the resources inside Russia. They will be there. They will get all three of us out.\"\n\n\"If they actually manage to get here,\" said Grushin.\n\n\"We look to the west,\" he said.\n\n\"Because if they don't, then we are liable to be eaten by\u2014\"\n\nA siren sounded, the sign for them to line up for the count. They prisoners shuffled into position, making a wide semicircle in the yard. A murmur of activity propagated from one end. Someone was approaching, and the prisoners were turning to look. It was Nevsky, walking down the line.\n\nMorgan's gut sank. Did he know? Was he coming to kill them?\n\nHe stopped in front of him.\n\n\"Prisoner Morgan,\" he said. \"I am surprised at the people you have chosen to be your friends here. But you have my congratulations for managing to stay alive this long.\"\n\nNevsky kicked Morgan in the knees, and he fell on all fours. \"Down like the animal you are. So you do not forget your place.\"\n\nMorgan's face burned with rage, but he couldn't do anything about it without getting it worse. Nevsky was daring him to.\n\n\"General Suvorov is coming,\" Nevsky said. \"He wishes to interrogate you personally. I just wanted to let you know. One more week. And then he will make you talk.\"\nChapter Twenty-five\n\nAlex didn't dare take a taxi. Instead, she walked barefoot for three hours through the streets of Moscow until she arrived at Dobrynin's butcher shop. The shop was closed for the day, so she knocked, softly at first, but when she got no response, as the stress of the night caught up to her, she slammed her hand against the door harder and harder, as if it were to blame.\n\nDobrynin opened the door to admit her.\n\n\"Did anyone follow you?\"\n\nShe pushed her way past him. \"You aren't even going to say you're glad I'm alive?\"\n\nDobrynin shrugged. \"I guess I am glad you are alive. Were you followed?\"\n\n\"No, I wasn't goddamn followed.\"\n\nShe grabbed a T-shirt, jeans, shoes and socks from her suitcase and changed out of the dress in the bathroom. When she came out, Dobrynin was waiting for him in the kitchen, a chair pulled out for her. \"Sit. Tell me what happened.\"\n\nShe related to him what had transpired in Suvorov's mansion and he listened, heavy lidded. When she was finished, he said, \"You need to go home, girl. Your little adventure here is finished.\"\n\n\"I still haven't found my father. I think he might be alive.\"\n\n\"He knows your face, and soon, so will every policeman in Moscow, or worse. It is time for you to go.\"\n\n\"I won't go.\"\n\n\"Then you will go from my house,\" he said. \"I will not have you endanger me and Agrafena with your presence.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said, getting up from the table. \"I'll go somewhere else.\"\n\n\"You do that and you will be killed. And I will not be there to help you.\"\n\n\"Are you serious, Dobrynin? You haven't left this goddamn house. Not since I got here. Every moment I've been out there so far, I've been on my own.\"\n\n\"And do you know why I do not leave this house?\"\n\n\"You're a shut-in,\" she said. \"A coward.\"\n\n\"I am a dead man. I have been a dead man from the day your father came after me. To kill me.\"\n\nShe furrowed her brow. \"Kill you?\"\n\n\"Yes! Or do you not know he was an assassin? I was an agent of Russian intelligence. I gave information to the Americans because I was done with this piss pot of a country. They were supposed to get me out. Instead they sent a man to kill me.\"\n\n\"But he saved you,\" she said. \"That's what happened, isn't it? Instead of killing you, he let you go and told you to disappear.\"\n\n\"He did. For me to live the rest of my life stuck inside, never going out in the sun. To live in this stinking house!\"\n\nAlex slammed her palm down on the table. \"He saved your life!\"\n\n\"Only from himself. I don't owe you nothing else. Get out. Get out!\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said, going into the tiny room she had been sleeping in and stuffing her things into her suitcase. \"I'll go, and you can go back to being a miserable old man who isn't any good to anyone!\"\n\n\"You are just a goddamn child!\" he hollered. \"I never asked for you! You came to my door!\"\n\n\"Well, I won't make that mistake again.\"\n\nShe stormed out, slamming the door behind her with a ring of the bell that hung above it.\nChapter Twenty-six\n\nGrushin helped Morgan up. They watched Nevsky walk away in his unsteady drunk's version of a military march, like a rooster surveying his chickens, as the guards resumed the prisoner count.\n\n\"He told me just to screw with me,\" Morgan told Grushin. \"But you know what? It's not going to work. Because we're still going to get out of here.\"\n\n\"That's the spirit.\"\n\n\"Except we're going to need to do this in less than seven days.\"\n\n\"Wait, what?\" said Grushin. \"No. There's no way.\"\n\n\"No choice. After a week they'll move me to an interrogation cell. And I don't come out of that alive.\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Grushin rocked back and forth. \"Shit. What do we do?\"\n\n\"We have no choice,\" Badri said. \"We do this with Morgan or we do not do this at all.\"\n\n\"Shit!\" Grushin yelled. People turned and stared. Morgan hushed him. But it wasn't too suspicious. Not here. There was plenty to scream and curse about.\n\n\"We need to get word to my people,\" Badri said. \"We need them to be ready in a week's time. That means\u2014\"\n\n\"We have to go back into Nevsky's office,\" Morgan said.\n\n* * *\n\nThe hallway was dark.\n\nThey'd done this before, but there was a nervous energy now that hadn't been there before.\n\nMorgan picked the lock once more and pushed open the door.\n\nThere was light inside the office, pale and dim. The computer was on. And at the desk, asleep, was Nevksy.\n\nHe was snoring like a drunkard, a snorting, gasping snore. He smelled of liquor.\n\nMorgan looked at Grushin, who stared back in wide-eyed terror. Badri was calm. He was used to focusing under pressure. He was ready.\n\nMorgan tiptoed to the desk and turned the monitor slowly around. He picked up the keyboard with his right hand, lifting it off the desk. As he carried it, he tipped over the pencil cup. His left hand shot out and grabbed it before its contents spilled all over the desk.\n\nNevsky stirred, snorting.\n\nMorgan noticed that he was holding his breath, and started breathing again. He set the keyboard down on the desk for Badri to use.\n\nBadri stood at the desk across from the sleeping Nevsky. Morgan kept his eyes on him, watching him for any twitch that might herald his return to consciousness. He was so vulnerable. It would be so easy to reach out and snuff out this bastard's life, and end all the evil he would ever do.\n\nExcept he couldn't. Not now. Morgan needed to let him live, so that they would have their chance to escape.\n\nBadri hit send and closed the browser window. He then set the keyboard back where it belonged as Badri turned the monitor back around.\n\nHe nodded. Done. Time to get the hell out of there.\n\nThey slipped out of the room and Morgan locked the door behind them. The three issued a collective sigh of relief.\n\n\"It is sent,\" said Badri. \"If everything goes to plan, they should be here in three days.\"\n\n\"If,\" said Morgan. \"Let's hope they do. Or else it's my ass.\"\nChapter Twenty-seven\n\nMorgan and Grushin met up at dinner after a day of nervous anticipation. The day's stew smelled pungently of spoiled potatoes. The wind seemed to have died down, and the weather seemed to be mild, if anything.\n\n\"Eat up,\" said Morgan. \"We don't know when we'll have the chance to eat again.\"\n\nThis was the day.\n\n\"Are you both ready?\" Badri asked.\n\n\"I got the dynamite,\" said Grushin. Morgan had already noticed the subtle bulge at his waist.\n\n\"The cars are ready,\" said Morgan. \"I put metal shavings in the oil of all the cars except the newest jeep. If anyone tries to follow us, whatever car they use will run about as well as a brick within a few seconds.\"\n\n\"So we get past the fence and we're in the clear,\" said Grushin.\n\n\"Something like that. I also left the crowbar hidden in the grass outside the garage.\"\n\n\"Then we're ready,\" Grushin said. \"All we have to do now is actually do it.\"\n\nMorgan leaned back against the concrete wall of the prisoner barracks. \"What are you going to do when you get out?\"\n\n\"I'm going to a bar and I'm going to order myself a beer and a hamburger,\" Grushin said in a dreamy tone. \"Then I'm going to find my girl. I don't care if she's moved on, if she's with someone else. The moment she sees me\u2014that's all that's going to matter.\"\n\nMorgan knew the story too well of what so often happened with the guys in the military who left their sweethearts behind. And this one had every reason to think he was dead.\n\nBut he needed something to cling to. And who knew? Maybe she was waiting for him after all.\n\n\"What about you?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Morgan. \"I've been thinking about this a lot. And I don't know. My organization has a hell of a life insurance policy. My family's taken care of for life, moneywise. And there's something else. I'm marked. Suvorov knows who I am. He's going to leave them alone now that he has me, but if I escape . . . If I go back to them, I'm dooming them to a life on the run. Maybe they're just better off without me.\"\n\n\"You do what you have to do,\" said Grushin.\n\nMorgan had to steady himself through evening count and the march into the barracks as adrenaline pumped through him in a constant buzz. He was ready. They were going to do this.\n\nMorgan lay in the dark, excitement pounding in his head, until he heard Grushin's bird call. He met him and Badri outside. In his hands were two objects, long and thin. Two sticks of dynamite, which he handed Badri, who was already holding a length of rusty rebar. \"Make it count.\"\n\n\"Just be ready to do your part.\"\n\nThey moved together as far as the laundry building. Badri broke away from them there, running toward the fence, where he would twist the rebar around the cable that tethered the dogs and then drive it into the ground. This would stop any of the dogs circling the perimeter from being able to approach him as he lay down the dynamite.\n\nMorgan and Grushin, meanwhile, made their way across the yard to the garage. Grushin climbed through the unlocked window of the motor hangar and disappeared inside.\n\nLeaving the Russian to do his part of the plan, Morgan made his way along the outer wall of the building. Around the corner was the large door through which the cars came out of the garage.\n\nMorgan watched for the pattern as the spotlight shone around the grounds. He retreated from the corner as it passed, casting a long straight shadow on the ground.\n\nHe had to wait before breaking the padlock open with the crowbar. Once he opened the garage, they would have to move fast.\n\nHe stayed put and listened for the start of the engine that was the signal for him to spring into action.\n\nMinutes passed, and the tundra wind howled. The light circled back, and then again. Morgan strained to hear, but there was no sign of the engine starting up.\n\nThis was taking too long. Badri was going to blow the gate and the truck would still be in the garage.\n\nHe couldn't wait anymore. He readied himself, tightening his grip on the crowbar. He waited until the light passed, then he ran, inserting the crowbar through the padlock and pulling down, using the leverage to break it open. It fell to the ground with a soft thud.\n\nMorgan pulled the door open just enough for him to pass, revealing the dark garage inside, the black shapes of the trucks looming in the murk. He closed the door behind him.\n\n\"Grushin?\"\n\nThe lights came on with a loud crack, and Morgan found himself staring down the muzzles of half a dozen submachine guns. Each was held by a uniformed prison guard.\n\nIn the middle was Nevsky, a diabolical smile plastered on his face. Grushin was standing stiffly next to him.\n\n\"Do you really think I didn't see the three of you scheming out in the yard? Do you think I don't know what goes on in my prison?\"\n\nAmong the guards was Filipov, holding his rifle nervously, something apologetic in his expression. There was nothing he could do about this, he seemed to say.\n\n\"My men are bringing the Arab in as we speak. He, like you, is too valuable to dispose of summarily. I'm afraid I can't say as much about young Mr. Grushin.\"\n\nNevsky drew a knife and in an unhesitating movement pushed it deep into Grushin's throat. Grushin's face contorted in pain and surprise. Nevsky pulled it out with a spurt of blood.\n\nHe fell at Nevsky's feet.\n\n\"Oh, and before I forget.\" Nevsky drew his sidearm. Before anyone could react, he aimed at Filipov's head and fired. The guard crumpled to the ground on top of his submachine gun.\n\n\"See what happens to those who help you? See what happens to the people you rope into your plans?\" He wiped his knife on a handkerchief. \"I have orders to keep you alive until General Suvorov returns. But believe me. Your end will be much less pleasant than your friend's here.\"\n\nHe punched Morgan in his side.\n\n\"You will be taken to solitary confinement. And there you will stay until the day you die. Don't worry. It won't be too long.\"\nChapter Twenty-eight\n\nAlex returned to her cramped room at the Ustritsa Hotel from her morning run. The wallpaper was peeling, the air smelled of mildew, and something that looked like black mold was growing in the corner. But it was a place to sleep. And to plan.\n\nShe took a shower and sat down on the hard bed, setting the partial map of Suvorov's house she had drawn from memory on the bed.\n\nThe time was approaching to implement her plan.\n\nShe'd been studying the patterns of Suvorov's security. Two men sat in a car across the street from the mansion, all day, every day. But every night at around two a.m., the car moved out and new guards took their place. This would give her a narrow opening to move in on the house.\n\nShe'd wait across the street, hidden in shadows, until they were on the move. Then she'd move across the street, scale the fence, and then climb the wall of his house back to the roof and gain admittance from there. She knew she could do it going down. Going up wouldn't be any more difficult.\n\nShe'd go in through one of the windows that opened to the roof. From there, she traced the route through her map to Suvorov's private chambers. If she didn't find what she was looking for, she'd settle for killing him.\n\nAlex got dressed and set out for another day of surveilling the mansion. She needed to make sure everything was according to plan.\n\nShe climbed down the stairs and moved out into the street, hailing an approaching taxi. It pulled up to the curb, and the driver stepped out to open the door for her.\n\nAlex was too excited to be suspicious. As she put one leg into the car, she felt a prick in her neck and things started to swim before her eyes. She felt herself falling, and the driver held her, easing her into the seat, and closed the door. She tried to scream but her body was unresponsive. She heard the engine start, and the taxi started moving just as things turned black.\nChapter Twenty-nine\n\nThere was no food at all this time. There was nothing, just the blackness of solitary. Morgan had no idea how much time passed before the door opened again. He squinted at the hard light that shone into his cell, hungry, aching, and exhausted.\n\nThey yanked him to his feet and pushed him out into the hall. It was night, he saw. They led him down the hall and into a room in the same building that he had not been in before, but he knew it immediately. It was all white tiles. In the middle was a chair, around which the tiles were whiter than the surrounding ones, discolored by bleach. The grout was stained with brown dried blood.\n\nMorgan had been in places like this before, on either side of the divide. He liked the other side better.\n\nThey sat him down on the chair and tied his hands around the back. Then they turned their backs and left him alone, locking the door behind them.\n\nMorgan tested the cuffs. They were solid. But he had one last trump card.\n\nHe worked his tongue in his mouth until he got his improvised lock pick in between his lips.\n\nNow came the hard part. He needed to get it into his hands, which were currently at his back. He turned his head over his right shoulder, adjusting the pick with his tongue to get the angle just right. He brought his hands as far to the right as he could manage.\n\nHe heard the door unlock. No time. He pushed the pick out with his tongue.\n\nIt bounced off his outstretched fingers and fell on the floor behind him.\n\nHe swore in his mind and turned his head as the door opened, and a man he recognized walked into the room. Alligator shoes, shined to a sheen. Green Russian military uniform, his chest festooned with honors and decorations. Eyes bulging like that of a fish, thick meaty lips, heavy eyebrows.\n\nGeneral Suvorov.\n\n\"I hear you have been giving Nevsky some trouble,\" he said as he rolled up his sleeves. \"He will be glad to be rid of you, I think.\"\n\n\"I think we can agree on that.\"\n\nSuvorov raised an eyebrow. He was a humorless man, grave and unfeeling. \"Do you know what they call me in Ukraine?\"\n\nMorgan did. \"The Barber of Lozhki.\"\n\n\"And do you understand why they call me that?\"\n\nHe was known for scalping his victims and then slitting their throats.\n\n\"So you are aware of what is to happen to you?\"\n\nThis Morgan did not answer. He tried to avoid picturing it with too much vividness. It wasn't good for his mental health.\n\n\"You can stop this,\" he said. \"You can even save yourself. All you have to do is speak.\"\n\n\"Already? I wouldn't want to ruin the party. I'm sure you have a lot of exciting surprises in store for me.\"\n\nSuvorov swung. He had a hell of a right hook, hitting Morgan in the temple.\n\n\"This will be very predictable. I will inflict increasing amounts of pain and mutilate you in increments until you speak.\"\n\n\"Here I thought the Barber of Lozhki would have a better sense of showmanship.\"\n\nSuvorov swung again. This one was hard enough to tip the chair on its back legs.\n\nThis one hit him in the face, and he tasted blood in his mouth. \"Come on,\" he said. \"Is that the best you can do?\"\n\n\"We are just getting started,\" said Suvorov, and followed up with an uppercut.\n\nThis time, Morgan pushed with his feet, and the chair fell backward. He grunted at the pain as it pinned his hands to the floor. He wriggled to give them some freedom of movement and felt for the lock pick.\n\n\"Oh, goodness, look what I've done.\" He lifted Morgan's chair by the back, set him right, and stepped back. \"What I do not understand is why you insist on protecting the people who abandoned you. No one tried to find you, you know. No inquiries or requests to get you back from your government or any agency. Nothing.\"\n\nNo, he thought. There is one thing. Morgan held the lock pick between his fingers, already working the handcuffs. He had to keep Suvorov busy as he worked them open.\n\n\"Has it crossed your mind that maybe I just don't like you?\"\n\nSuvorov drew a military knife. It wasn't impressive, but it didn't have to be to cut into the flesh of a man tied to a chair. \"Perhaps it's time to move on to mutilation.\" He touched the blade to Morgan's right shoulder and pushed it in, opening a gash that bled freely. Morgan bellowed in pain. \"I find that cutting off parts is what really crosses a line for most people. When they see pieces of them removed, see their own bodies diminished . . .\" He touched the edge of the blade to Morgan's earlobe. \"Shall we start here?\"\n\n\"How about we start here?\" Morgan shook off the handcuffs and head-butted Suvorov. As he staggered back, Morgan picked the chair up off the floor and swung at him. He raised his hands in self-defense, dropping the knife in the process, and was knocked against the side wall by the blow.\n\nThis gave Morgan the opening to grab the knife. He then pushed Suvorov against the wall and held the blade to his neck.\n\n\"Tell the guard to open the door.\"\n\nMorgan moved the blade to his eye. \"If that door doesn't open in five seconds, you're going to be shopping for eye patches for next season.\"\n\nSuvorov called out in Russian through the door. They exchanged some words. Suvorov barked exasperated commands.\n\nMorgan heard the dead bolt being undone on the other side of the door, which opened to reveal the single guard keeping watch on the cell.\n\nThe guard was holding a nightstick, ready for action. He raised his eyebrows in shock when he saw that Morgan had Suvorov hostage.\n\n\"Drop it,\" he said. \"Slide it over to me.\"\n\nSuvorov translated for him. The guard let the nightstick clatter to the ground and kicked it over. Morgan bent to pick it up.\n\n\"Inside,\" he said, motioning with his head.\n\nThe man walked inside the cell.\n\n\"Keys,\" he said, pointing. The man understood. He hesitated, looking to Suvorov for guidance. Morgan pushed the blade against Suvorov's neck, just enough to pierce the skin and draw a drop of blood.\n\nThe guard unhinged the key ring and tossed it to Morgan.\n\n\"Thank you very much. I'm going to be sticking around for a minute. If I hear a peep out of you, the general here loses an ear.\"\n\nHe pulled Suvorov out of the cell and closed the door, pulling the dead bolt shut.\n\nThat was one less to worry about.\n\nHe looked down either side of the hallway. No one there.\n\nHe looked at the row of other cells. Two of them were padlocked. Two cells containing prisoners.\n\nHe pulled Suvorov along with him and unlocked, one-handed, the nearest cell. He pushed the door open.\n\nIt wasn't Badri. Behind the door was Kolya the Cannibal. He stood as the door opened and looked at Morgan, his face expressionless as ever.\n\nSuvorov twisted free of Morgan and slammed the door against him. Morgan was left dazed, which gave Suvorov the opening to twist his arm and wrest the knife away from him.\n\nRegaining his grip, Morgan brought the nightstick hard against Suvorov's leg. The general screamed and fell on his back, inside the cell.\n\nMorgan took a look at the general's leg. He had a compound open fracture where the nightstick had connected. At a glance, Morgan could tell he wasn't getting up again, not without some serious surgery.\n\nSuvorov held his knife defensively, wide-eyed with pain and fear. He could barely move from the pain. He couldn't defend himself, but Morgan didn't have time for this.\n\nKolya stared at Morgan. Blank. Empty. Then he looked down at Suvorov.\n\nMorgan stepped out of the cell and closed the door, leaving Suvorov inside with Kolya, whose eyes were already hungry at the prospect of what was about to happen, the only sign of life Morgan had ever seen in them.\nChapter Thirty\n\nMorgan ran to the remaining cells. As he undid the lock, he heard Suvorov screaming from Kolya's cell and tried not to think about what was happening. He pulled the dead bolt and opened the door.\n\nBadri, haggard and exhausted, was sitting in a corner. He looked up at Morgan, goggle-eyed, blinking as the situation registered in his mind.\n\n\"Let's get out of here,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"How did you\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's go!\" He looked up and down the hall for signs of any approaching guards. \"I can tell you the story on the way out of this place.\"\n\nMorgan didn't have to say it twice. Badri pushed himself up off the ground. \"Where are we going?\" he asked.\n\n\"We need a plan.\" Morgan rubbed his temples. \"We're in a Russian gulag with no plan, no tools, and no weapons but a stick. Any minute now, we're going to be found.\"\n\nBadri worked his muscles, cracking the joints in his neck and arms. \"We seem to be at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\"I've been in worse,\" said Morgan. \"Let's think.\"\n\n\"We need transportation out of here.\"\n\n\"Suvorov's jeep,\" Morgan said. \"It's faster than any of the trucks in this place. That's our way out of here.\"\n\n\"They'll see us.\"\n\nMorgan frowned. \"Then we need to give them something bigger to distract them. We need something they can't ignore.\"\n\n\"You are talking about\u2014\"\n\n\"Dynamite.\"\n\nBadri smiled. \"I like how you think. Same plan?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Morgan. \"We take out the motor pool. The dynamite added to the gasoline tank . . .\"\n\n\"Boom,\" said Badri. \"Enough of a distraction for us to ram the gates.\"\n\n\"We need to get the dynamite,\" said Morgan.\n\n\"They still would not have taken the two sticks away from the prison,\" Badri said. \"It is still on the grounds.\"\n\n\"And there's only one safe place to keep them on this camp. They'll be in the armory.\" Morgan held up the key ring. All were the same. He could bet they were all for the solitary cells. Armory access was not something given to any guard.\n\n\"Nevsky,\" said Badri. \"He will have the keys.\"\n\n\"Then that's where we go. This way. Side door.\"\n\nHaving a plan, Morgan held the guard's billy club in his hand and took the lead down the hall, taking slow, measured steps. Suvorov's screaming stopped. Morgan wondered whether he was dead. Any alternative he could think of was worse.\n\nAs they neared the end of the hall, Morgan heard footsteps, heavy boots echoing around the corner. Morgan held his hand up for Badri to stop and then put his finger to his lips. Badri nodded.\n\nAs the first man rounded the corner, Morgan swung the stick.\n\nHe hit the closest guard square in the face. He bent double, clutching his nose, which was now squirting blood.\n\nThe second man came right behind. His hand went for his weapon, but Morgan swung again, bringing the club down on the man's leg. The guard stumbled, and Morgan brought his elbow down on the man's back. He collapsed face-first on the ground.\n\nBadri, meanwhile, lunged at the other guy, bringing a fist to connect with his broken nose and throwing him down next to his companion.\n\nBefore either could stir to stand again, Morgan brought his foot down on each of the men's right legs in turn.\n\n\"They're not coming after us,\" he said, moving past them and leaving them screaming in pain.\n\nBadri took the lead now, reaching the side door. Morgan unlocked it and opened it a crack. Badri looked up at the warden's window. \"How do we get up there?\"\n\nMorgan looked at one of the watchtowers, which was within view. Waiting for his opening, he ran across the yard, hearing Badri's footsteps, muffled by the grass, close behind him.\n\nThey reached the administration building and went inside.\n\nThe place was deserted, all the doors in the central hallway closed. Morgan led the way, running up the stairs.\n\nThe double doors to Nevsky's office. No time to finesse this one. Morgan kicked the door. It caved on the second, swinging open.\n\n\"Look in the\u2014\"\n\n\"There will be no need, Mr. Morgan.\"\n\nNevsky was standing to his right. In his hand was a GSh-18 handgun. Standard Russian military issue. Aimed at Morgan's face.\nChapter Thirty-one\n\nNevsky kept the gun aimed at Morgan's head as he motioned for him to get inside the office. His hand was shaking. He had a drunk's unstable hands.\n\n\"How did you get out? Where is Suvorov?\"\n\n\"He's about to die,\" said Morgan. \"You can save him if you hurry. But you'll have to leave us here.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I can come up with a better idea.\" He aimed for Morgan's leg. Before he could shoot, Badri rushed him. Nevsky reacted, but not fast enough. Badri barreled into him. Morgan moved to help him, pinning Nevsky's arm and taking the gun.\n\nHe stepped back, with Nevsky at gunpoint. \"Keys,\" Morgan said. \"Your lighter, too.\"\n\nNevsky took a key ring and tossed it to Morgan, and then the lighter. \"Here. I will enjoy your death from the vantage point of my office.\"\n\n\"You will not.\" Badri stabbed Nevsky in the gut with a letter opener from the desk. He pushed the blade in farther and twisted. By the angle, Badri got his kidney, maybe his liver as well.\n\nNevsky grunted and braced himself on his desk.\n\n\"Let us go,\" said Badri, pulling the cord from the intercom out of the wall. \"He is done.\"\n\nMorgan didn't make a habit of killing men in cold blood. But he had to admit that it was convenient.\n\nThey stepped out of the office and closed the door. Morgan took the armory key off the ring and tossed the remaining to Badri. \"Get the doors to the prisoner barracks unlocked,\" he said. \"The alarm is going up any second now. Let's kick up our distraction a notch.\"\n\nBadri nodded.\n\nThey parted ways and Morgan made his way down to the underground armory. There was a light on down there. Morgan tiptoed his way downstairs. At the landing, he surveyed the room, hidden around the corner of the wall.\n\nOne guard, armed but distracted with a magazine, sat at a table in front of the locked armory cage.\n\nEven one shot fired would attract the attention of every guard in the camp.\n\nHe was strategizing his approach when the prison's general alarm started blaring, deafening even here, underground.\n\nWell. No use being coy now.\n\nMorgan ran. The man saw him, drew his gun, and took aim. Morgan went low. The man fired and the bullet sailed above him. He took a running jump, holding on to the edge of the bed, and swinging his legs to kick the man in the chest. The guard fell backward.\n\nThis left him on the desk, sliding to the other side. The guard was reaching for the gun, but Morgan was already bringing the nightstick down to connect with the man's head. He was knocked out cold.\n\nMorgan had seconds before guards would start streaming in.\n\nHe opened the lock to the gun cage.\n\nHe found a duffel bag under the shelves. He picked the dynamite sticks up carefully, putting them in the bag.\n\nSince he was here . . .\n\nHe looked over the guns. Half a dozen Saiga 12-gauge shotguns, twenty Vityaz-SN submachine guns, two Dragunov SVD sniper rifles, and three racks of MP-443 pistols.\n\nHe loaded two of each of the SMGs, shotguns, and pistols into the bag, plus ammo. He slung it over his shoulder. He took an additional handgun.\n\nHe broke the key in the lock. No big guns for the guards. That should help even the odds for the prisoners.\n\nHe heard footsteps coming down the stairs. They would have handguns. Morgan drew a shotgun from his duffel and whispered to himself, \"Time to make some noise.\"\nChapter Thirty-two\n\nMorgan held on to the shotgun, a Saiga 12 with a twenty-round detachable magazine, and waited for the two men to come down.\n\nThe first wasn't expecting him, and didn't have time to react before Morgan fired, the gunshot reverberating in the cramped, windowless space. The second went for his gun. A second shell, and he was down.\n\nTwo more were at the landing above. If they consolidated their position, if enough guards amassed up there, Morgan would be trapped no matter how much firepower he could muster.\n\nHe cast down the shotgun and drew out a Vityaz SMG. Thirty-round box magazine. If he held down the trigger on automatic mode, he'd drain it within three seconds.\n\nMorgan aimed blindly around the corner and fired off a burst upstairs. This gave him the opening to move up the stairs as the men took cover on either side. One of them made his move when Morgan was halfway up. Morgan loosed another burst, which caught him in the chest.\n\nHe slowed down as he approached the upper landing and listened. What he heard was boots running away. The other man was beating a prudent retreat.\n\nMorgan needed to get out of the building, fast. He ran in the opposite direction of the guard.\n\nOutside, the siren alarm was blaring. The perimeter guard towers, the biggest danger at the moment, the only ones who would be armed, were flashing their lights wildly, looking for the source of trouble. Outside was a bad place to be. Too exposed.\n\nMorgan saw Badri hiding in the shadows across the yard. Badri pointed to the car. Morgan signaled for him to go ahead, and then took off running at an angle. A light caught him, then moved to shine right on him. Shots fired, whizzing past him.\n\nHe pushed himself harder, staggering his pace to avoid sniper fire. He didn't stop until the garage was between him and the shooter.\n\nHe moved along the wall until he found the window in the northwest corner, the one Grushin had used to gain access. On the other side of this was the gasoline tank that fed the generator and the trucks.\n\nThis was going to make a splash.\n\nHe picked up a rock and hurled it through a windowpane. Glass shattered and clinked on the floor inside.\n\nThat's when he heard barking.\n\nDogs. Let loose and running toward him, fast.\n\nIf he ran now, he didn't have a chance in hell of getting away.\n\nSo he tried to concentrate. He balanced both sticks of dynamite on his left hand and drew out Nevsky's lighter with his right. He struck, and it did not light.\n\nTwo dogs were running toward him, heavy paws beating the pavement. He had seconds to get this done.\n\nHe struck the lighter again, and this time a flame emerged. He held it under the fuses on the two sticks of dynamite, which hissed and sputtered as they caught fire.\n\nHe tossed the two sticks of dynamite inside through the pane and turned to run. The dogs were right behind him within a fraction of a second. And then he emerged out in the open yard, and a light was on him almost immediately. It was only a race now to see which would get him first, the sniper on the tower or the dogs snapping at his heels.\n\nThe explosion was more than he'd anticipated.\n\nThe corner of the concrete building shattered into rubble, and the fuel tank exploded in a ball of flame that rose upward, lighting the camp in bright orange before consuming itself.\n\nIt rocked the ground, knocking Morgan off his feet. Windows exploded in a rain of glass.\n\nMorgan raised his head. The guards were no longer much preoccupied with him, and he found no sign of the dogs behind him. By the light of the fire\u2014all electric lights had gone out with the destruction of the generator\u2014he saw prisoners coming out of the barracks, taking their first tentative steps outside.\n\nHe heard the rumble of an engine, and then the bright white headlights. It was Badri with the jeep, speeding across the yard. He came to a skidding stop next to Morgan.\n\n\"Move over,\" Morgan said. Badri complied, and Morgan sat behind the wheel.\n\nThe windshield cracked. Sniper bullet. Morgan glanced at Badri, saw that he was unhurt, and gunned the accelerator. They were an easy target.\n\nMorgan saw prisoners pouring out of the barracks now. He passed them in the jeep.\n\n\"How are we going to get through the gate?\" Badri demanded.\n\nA group of guards who had seen which way the wind was blowing had opened a pedestrian gate to the outside. It was too narrow for the jeep, but the gate was held up by thin, hollow steel poles, surrounded by chain link. Unlike the main gate, this he had a hope of ramming.\n\nMorgan aligned the car with the gate. Guards scattered.\n\n\"Hold on to your butt.\"\n\nThey hit the gate full force. The windshield and driver's side window shattered, but the gate gave way, and with a terrible scraping sound the vehicle made it through.\n\nThe jeep skidded, and Morgan struggled until it steadied. He veered a sharp right, and within a few seconds they hit the road.\n\nThe wind blowing hard in their faces, Morgan and Badri looked at each other and laughed with the exhilaration of freedom. They took off into the night, toward their rendezvous point, as the prison behind them popped with gunfire.\nChapter Thirty-three\n\nMorgan drove off the road after about an hour in the car. They were one hundred miles away, near the foot of the mountains. The terrain there became rocky and uneven. He had to move slowly. They might easily hit a rock and get stuck, and that might well be a death sentence for them out here.\n\n\"The light signal came from somewhere around here,\" Badri said.\n\nMorgan looked back on the road behind them, lit by the predawn glow. The prison lay in the distance, a thin line of smoke rising from it. He wondered what the prisoners were burning.\n\nHe shuddered, trying not to think about the fate of the guards.\n\n\"Stop the car,\" Badri said.\n\nMorgan parked, looking for a sign of what Badri might have seen. It took a few seconds for them to reveal themselves. Three men, Arabs with trim beards, swaddled in winter clothes. In their arms were Kalashnikov automatic rifles.\n\nMorgan turned off the headlights and Badri opened the door to the jeep to show himself. The men lowered their weapons. Badri walked toward them like the prodigal son and embraced them one by one, kissing their cheeks.\n\nMorgan emerged from the car. The three men got one look at him and pointed their rifles at him.\n\nMorgan was getting really goddamn tired of staring down the barrels of guns.\n\nOne of them asked Badri a question in harsh Arabic.\n\nMoment of truth. Either they would accept him or they would kill him.\n\n\"He is a friend,\" said Badri in English, for Morgan's benefit. \"He helped me escape.\"\n\nThey did not lower their guns. \"He is American,\" one said. \"He is the enemy.\"\n\nMorgan took a step away from the car, toward them. They tensed their grips on their weapons. \"I have no more love for my country. They are murderers without honor.\"\n\nThey talked among themselves, and finally Badri yelled at them. The boss, laying down the law.\n\n\"Come on,\" said Badri. \"They have an airplane hidden on the other side of the mountains. They're going to get us out of here.\"\nChapter Thirty-four\n\nAlex woke up to a slap in the face. She opened her eyes, woozy, trying to get her bearings, and realized she was in the trunk of a car. It was open, and above her, silhouetted against the bright blue sky, stood a man. The taxi driver. A man some ten years older than her, green eyed, with black hair cropped short. He was a man she might have called handsome, in different circumstances.\n\nShe tried to get up out of the trunk and found she'd been tied up. She tried to wriggle free and her arm chafed against the scratchy felt interior.\n\n\"Who are you?\" she demanded.\n\n\"No one important,\" he said. Russian, definitely, but his English was more than passable.\n\n\"You work for Suvorov?\"\n\n\"You have other people in your life who would abduct you off the streets?\"\n\n\"Real wise guy.\" She shifted her weight, trying to find a more comfortable position. She looked out, trying to get a feel for their surroundings. She could see trees, evergreens, but no buildings. \"What happens now?\"\n\n\"What happens is, I don't know,\" he said, throwing up his hands. \"They tell me to take you, so I do, and then I find out Suvorov is dead\u2014\"\n\n\"He's dead?\"\n\n\"\u2014and now I have a girl in my trunk I have no use for.\"\n\n\"Then let me go!\"\n\nHe smirked. \"It's not that easy.\"\n\n\"I have money!\"\n\n\"I took your money already. Come.\" He took her by the armpits and shifted her weight, getting a stable hold on her. \"Don't move too much. The only reason I did not kill you right there in the trunk is that I hate moving dead weight. That and the blood. You know what blood smells when it stays in the trunk in the hot sun? I know. It is terrible.\"\n\nHe pulled her up and out of the trunk. She swung her feet, trying to hit him in the groin and missing. He released her, and she fell to the hard-packed dirt of the ground. She shook off her daze and took in her surroundings. She saw a barn some two hundred feet away that looked as if it hadn't been used in a long time. Back the way they came was a dirt road, overgrown grass intruding upon it from both sides. It was deserted for about a mile, where it bent out of sight.\n\n\"You had to make it hard, didn't you?\" he said. \"You could have had a little more time, it could have been pleasant. Maybe we have a little conversation, some last words for you. But no. You had to be a bitch.\"\n\nAlex squirmed, trying to move into a position where she could see more than his feet.\n\n\"Now I have to kill you here and haul you all the way to hurk\u2014\"\n\nA thump as the man's body hit the ground next to her. His face was inches from hers, a blank expression on his face. Blood was pooling around him, and sticking out of the back of his head was a massive meat cleaver. And she saw legs in leather boots, moving toward her and then behind her, and then a man's rough hands holding her wrists and the scritch scritch of a serrated knife, and her ties were loose.\n\nWith her arms free, she turned her body to look up and see Dobrynin unbinding her feet.\n\n\"Come on, girl,\" he said in his weary, guttural voice. \"Let us get you home.\"\n\nHe drew out the meat cleaver, cursing as he shook off the blood, and then wiped it off with a handkerchief. He made a face and cast the handkerchief aside. Alex wondered whether he'd use the knife at the shop again. She felt certain the answer was yes.\n\nAlex stood, rubbing her wrists to get rid of the soreness.\n\n\"Come,\" he said, motioning for her to follow him. \"Car is down the road.\"\n\n\"How did you find me?\" she asked as she caught up to him.\n\n\"I called friend, told him stupid girl was going to get in trouble. He watched you. He saw you taken and followed the car. And he called me. So I am here.\"\n\nShe moved ahead of him and stopped him with two hands. And then she gave him a tight hug, resting the side of her head against his bloody shirt. She knew he was mortified. But she didn't care.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said.\n\n\"You want to thank me? Go home.\"\nChapter Thirty-five\n\nThey flew low until they cleared any reasonable search radius. The men ignored Morgan and spoke quietly to Badri. Morgan instead looked out the window on the Russian countryside, gaming out what his next steps would be.\n\nWith the riot at the camp, there would be chaos for a long time even after the Russian authorities managed to regain control from the prisoners. Hell, with weapons, they were practically in a fortress, and would be able to hold out for days, unless the Russians chose to bomb the place to oblivion, in which case they'd probably never be done sorting the body parts and would never find out there was anyone missing at all, except for a jeep, abandoned at the foot of a nearby mountain.\n\nIn any case, nobody would know to look for these two missing prisoners for a long while, which gave them plenty of time to get the hell out of Dodge.\n\nThey switched planes in an airfield a few hours out, then crossed the border to Kazakhstan in the back of a truck, squeezed in between bales of hay, daylight filtering through only in tiny pinpoints. And then Morgan slept.\n\nWhen he woke up, to the sound of the truck's driver's side door opening, those pinpoints of light had grown dark. Morgan heard the tailgate being opened, and the bales of hay at the back were removed one by one.\n\nThey emerged into a dirt yard of a house surrounded by high walls on all sides. The sky was clear, and Morgan figured they must be in a small town, because he could see the stars with a clarity that's impossible near a city.\n\nA man standing at the door embraced Badri and watched Morgan with suspicion. They exchanged some angry words, of which Badri had the last, and he called Morgan to come in.\n\nIn the small, sparse dining room, the rich smell of meat wafted through the air. They ate a meal of lamb and flatbread, which, after weeks of almost nothing but spoiled potatoes and onions, seemed like the best thing he'd ever tasted. After they finished, Morgan wiping the last of the sauce off his plate and popping it into his mouth, a woman in a niqab served them black tea. Morgan said, \"So what happens now?\"\n\nThe Arab grimaced. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"I didn't really ever think we'd get this far. You dream of freedom for so long, of getting out, and now that I'm here, it's not . . . I don't have a life to go back to anymore, Badri. Even if I did go back, if they find out I helped you escape, or that you helped me\u2014well, I can tell you they'll put me somewhere that's not any better than where we just got out of.\" He sat back in his chair. \"Not that I'd want to. They abandoned me. Screwed me. So screw them.\"\n\n\"What about your family?\"\n\n\"Better that they think I'm dead. They got a good payout from it.\" He drank tea from his cup, hot and bitter. \"Won't do any good to anyone, my coming back.\"\n\n\"And your future? I could take you somewhere. Drop you off. We never have to see each other again. I may even be able to give you some money. You saved my life and won me my freedom. I owe you that much.\"\n\nMorgan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He found Badri looking at him expectantly. \"What about if I help you?\"\n\nA heavy silence hung between them. Morgan studied Badri's face. He was looking off to the side, avoiding eye contact. \"You are not even Muslim,\" he said. \"Why\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014would I want to join the effort? I got screwed, Badri. I got no home, no family, nothing to live for. The only thing I got is this rage at the people who did this to me.\"\n\n\"I am sorry,\" said Badri. \"I am grateful to you. But we cannot allow\u2014\"\n\n\"I can offer you something no one else can,\" Morgan said. \"Information. Insight. On the inside, you told me you had something planned. Something big. I can help you with that. I know the vulnerabilities. I know how to cause damage.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Badri.\n\n\"You don't trust me.\"\n\n\"I have put my life in your hands,\" said Badri. \"In there. Out here, things are different. We are not joined by a common purpose.\"\n\n\"I'm telling you we are.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Badri. \"Tomorrow, we have a long drive into Uzbekistan. But for tonight, we rest. It has been a long road.\"\nChapter Thirty-six\n\nThey arrived in Tashkent in Uzbekistan in the early morning, a driver taking the wheel and Morgan and Badri riding in the backseat. The car had no air-conditioning, and the ride under the Central Asian sun turned it into a hotbox.\n\nBadri talked to Morgan like they were old friends, telling him about his childhood in Abu Dhabi, prosperous but not rich, and about his education in London. His family was made up of devout Muslims, but not radicals. His eyes were opened, he said, after he came back from college. It was not only the wars of imperialism, the meddling of the United States in the lives of Muslims, the deaths wreaked by bombs and soldiers and drones. He saw what Westernization was doing to his country, to all of the Arab world. Changing it, eroding its character.\n\nMorgan listened in spite of the heat as Badri told him about getting married and the joy of having children. And he spoke about adopting the radical fundamentalist faith of the Wahhabists and its return to a true Islam.\n\n\"The entire world is becoming decadent,\" he said. \"They need a wake-up call. And talk cannot bring the change that is needed. That is why I fight. That is why we must kill.\"\n\nThey entered the city of Tashkent in the middle of the afternoon. Like most ancient cities, it was marked by the juxtaposition of the old and the new. The city was sprinkled with old Soviet monuments, and many of the streets were lined with trees.\n\nThe driver pulled into a parking lot adjoining a large sky-blue dome. Chorsu Bazaar, their destination, was where they were to meet Badri's contact, who would send the terrorist along to his mission and arrange for Morgan to be transported where he wished.\n\n\"It's a pretty goddamn open space,\" said Morgan. \"Lots of people, too.\"\n\n\"My contact insisted we meet here,\" Badri said. \"He wanted a public place. He is wary of you.\"\n\nMorgan and Badri walked together into the bazaar, a round area under the dome, arranged in concentric circles of wares. The butchers were along the outer rim in enclosed refrigerated shops. The floor held a wealth of foodstuffs, nuts and dried fruit and spices, pungent and rich, ranging from the vivid yellow of turmeric through the red of paprika to the black of pepper.\n\nMorgan took in the space with trained eyes as they rounded the bazaar, Badri looking for his contact.\n\nAfter they'd completed a full circle, Morgan leaned close to Badri. \"We're being followed,\" he whispered.\n\nBadri's eyes widened, but then returned to a neutral state. He was well practiced, Morgan saw, and knew how to keep his cool in a dangerous situation.\n\n\"Look, but use your peripheral vision. Pretend we're looking for our contact. Guy over on the other aisle holding the briefcase. Guy looking at meats over at the butcher. Man leaning against the wall near the bathroom.\"\n\n\"We are surrounded,\" said Badri.\n\n\"It appears so.\"\n\n\"They do not look Uzbek. Nor Russian, I believe.\"\n\n\"Might be American,\" Morgan said. \"Doesn't really matter.\"\n\n\"What does?\"\n\n\"Getting out of here. Keep your eyes out and follow my lead.\"\n\nThey continued their way around, the men following them moving along to maintain a line of sight. The nearest one, now examining a table of nuts, began his approach.\n\n\"They're making their move,\" said Morgan. \"Wait for my mark.\"\n\n\"What will that be?\"\n\n\"You can't miss it.\"\n\nThe man was close now. He was wearing a baggy Hawaiian shirt, open over an undershirt, that covered a concealed-carry shoulder holster.\n\nMorgan bided his time, waiting as the man approached from the side. When he was five feet away, Morgan turned and hit him with a head butt. As the man staggered back, Morgan reached into his shirt and drew out his gun. He turned to see the others closing in from the periphery of the domed market, three by his count.\n\nMorgan aimed at the chest of the nearest one. A woman spotted his gun and screamed.\n\nMorgan aimed down. He fired twice into a row of bags of spice.\n\nA plume of red and yellow shot into the air. People were coughing. The man covered his eyes, hollering in pain.\n\nAnd people were running, panicked, away from the gunshot.\n\n\"Run!\"\n\nKeeping low, they ran under the cover of the spices and blended into the crowd. Morgan jumped over a stall, overturning a bucket of pistachios. Badri was at his heels. Morgan turned to look at their pursuers. At least one had spotted them, but the rest were running around trying to navigate the crowd.\n\nThere would be more waiting for them outside.\n\nMorgan and Badri ran out into the hot sunlight along with the rest of the crowd. Morgan hid the gun in his waistband. Blending in might give them a few precious seconds.\n\nHe saw them\u2014men dressed in various different guises as tourists, standing at the edges of the court that surrounded the bazaar, looking through the crowd.\n\nNo way out but through it.\n\nHe ran with the crowd as long as they were not spotted. And then the nearest agent looked into his eyes, and Morgan saw the expression of recognition.\n\nHe lowered his torso and hit the man full force, lifting him clear off the ground before sending him sailing on his back. He took off running with desperate speed, Badri behind him, as the other agents moved toward them. But they had broken the cordon, and now the agents were behind them.\n\nMorgan and Badri were in the parking lot now. Morgan spotted a man getting into a Daewoo sedan. He pulled out the gun and pointed it at the driver.\n\n\"Out!\"\n\nThe man stepped away from the car, his hands up, holding his keys. Morgan grabbed them and jumped into the driver's seat.\n\n\"Get in!\"\n\nBadri got into the passenger seat and Morgan gunned the reverse before his door was closed. He cleared the parking space and put the car in first, accelerating, tires screeching, as their pursuers drew their weapons and readied to shoot. They accelerated away as gunshots hit the trunk. One bullet shattered the rear window.\n\nMorgan turned at the end of the row and saw more trouble ahead. The exit to the parking lot was blocked by two cars. There were more agents there, guns already drawn and trained on their car.\n\nHe turned with squealing tires into the next row and gamed the situation out in his head. The exit was blocked, and the lot was separated from the street by a low wall that was probably too solid to ram.\n\nThat left one possibility.\n\nHe turned the car back toward the bazaar.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Badri yelled.\n\n\"Getting us out of here!\"\n\nHe drove onto the pedestrian walkways toward the dome of the Chorsu Bazaar. The pedestrians had cleared it by now, and the door was wide, more than enough for the car to pass. Just one obstacle stood between them\u2014a staircase, some twelve or fifteen short steps.\n\nThe car wasn't going to like it. But it would have to do. The Daewoo lurched as they hit the steps, and then climbed, heaving, until they were level with the bazaar.\n\nMorgan felt the tires low, blown out by the impact. And then they crashed through the doors of the bazaar, sending glass flying in every direction. Morgan maneuvered around the space, deserted of people, sending up clouds of spices and rain of nuts and dried fruit.\n\nThey crashed through the door on the other side, bulldozing through an aisle of the covered vegetable market. No one waiting for them there. No one thought they'd be crazy enough to make the maneuver.\n\nThey came out amid a crowd of screaming people, who parted for them to pass. And then Morgan drove the car onto the street, with the two front wheels scraping the ground and the windshield cracked from end to end. But it was whole enough to carry them away from the bazaar, and from their pursuers.\nChapter Thirty-seven\n\n\"How did they find us?\" said Badri in a fevered panic.\n\nMorgan was driving the car away from the populated, tourist-thick area of the bazaar toward the outskirts of the city. They needed to ditch the car soon. They were attracting attention, with its front tires in rags and the grille and front bumber scratched and bent.\n\n\"They must have made your contact.\" Morgan's heart was still pounding, adrenaline still coursing through his veins, but he was calm. This was just another problem to be solved. \"We need to get out of town. But we need a new car first. This car is going to get stopped as soon as a policeman sees us.\"\n\nMorgan turned into a side street and parked the car. They got out on a street that bordered a series of office buildings, all concrete and reflective glass. Morgan took a tire iron from the trunk and led the way to the nearest parking lot. He checked that they were not being seen and shattered the driver's side window of a Chevy Cobalt. He motioned for Badri to get inside.\n\n\"We need somewhere to go,\" Morgan said as he pulled open the panel under the steering column and reached in for the wires.\n\n\"I have more people I can call. It is a greater risk. But it can be done.\"\n\nMorgan touched the ignition wire to the power wire, and the engine came to life. He maneuvered the car out of its spot and drove through the parking lot and onto the street, wind blowing in through the broken window.\n\n\"They were American, weren't they?\" said Badri.\n\n\"The agents? Yeah. I think so. Something about the way they carried themselves, the way they held their guns.\"\n\n\"You could have given me up, turned yourself over. They probably would've taken you back. You could've given them a story about using me to escape. Wouldn't even be too far from the truth. But instead you risked your life to escape with me.\"\n\n\"I told you,\" said Morgan. \"I'm done with them. All of 'em.\"\n\n\"I think I didn't quite believe you until now.\" Badri looked out at the industrial suburbs of the city. \"Okay,\" he said. \"If you wish to join with us, I will stand by you.\"\n\nMorgan turned to look at him to make sure he was serious. \"You mean it?\"\n\n\"Yes. I mean it. And I will tell you about this. I have something. We have had it since before I was captured. I will not tell you what, not yet, but I will tell you that it can kill thousands. Tens of thousands.\"\n\n\"I see. And this weapon\u2014how will you get it into the United States?\"\n\n\"It is already there,\" said Badri. \"With some allies from my organization. But my people did not know how to deploy it effectively.\"\n\n\"But now that you're out, you can guide them.\"\n\n\"This can be a new 9\/11,\" Badri said. His eyes shone with the fire of fanaticism.\n\nMorgan's voice lowered to hardly more than a whisper. \"You want to make this a new 9\/11. I want to help you make this something greater. I can give you the means to cripple the US government in a way that they will not be able to recover from for decades.\"\n\nBadri smiled. \"Welcome to the cause.\"\nChapter Thirty-eight\n\nAlex returned to an empty house in Andover, Massachusetts.\n\nNight had fallen, too late for any kids to be out in the now silent streets. She got out of the cab and unlocked the front door, dropping her bag in the foyer and making straight for the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, but there was no food, just a few condiments on the door, a half stick of butter and a little bit of cranberry juice in a container. Her mother was off on Martha's Vineyard consulting on the house of a client who was summering on the island. Alex figured she must've cleared out the fridge before she went.\n\nSo very practical, her mother.\n\nShe checked the freezer. In there Alex found a Tupperware of frozen ravioli with a note.\n\nWelcome home, honey. Forty minutes in oven at 350 degrees. Sauce in the pantry.\n\nYes. Quite practical. Alex smirked in appreciation.\n\nShe set the ravioli in a porcelain dish and poured in half a jar of her mother's homemade tomato sauce, made and canned for an entire year at a time. Then she set the oven to 350, set a timer for fifty minutes, and put the dish in without preheating.\n\nLeaving the oven to do its work, she went to the living room, flopped on the couch, and turned on the TV. This she hadn't done in a long time, but it was so easy to fall into old habits when she was at home. Especially when she was feeling as forlorn and defeated as she was then.\n\nShe clicked through the channels and settled on infomercials. She couldn't concentrate on anything anyway. The chipper chatter at least served as appropriate background noise for her wallowing.\n\nShe pulled out her phone and looked at the messages that had accumulated in her absence. Loads of junk email, a couple hellos from her friends Simon and Katie from her brief stint in college\u2014Katie's more insistent and offended by her lack of response\u2014and one from Karen O'Neal, some canned words of concern from a couple of weeks ago.\n\nAlex checked the clock. Just past eleven at night. On impulse, Alex called her. The phone rang only once before she picked up.\n\n\"Alex?\" She sounded awake, at least.\n\n\"Hi, Karen. I hope it's not too late to call.\"\n\n\"Please. Sleep doesn't even cross my mind before midnight. What's up? Are you okay?\"\n\n\"I, uh, I've been out of town. I was wondering if there was any news about my father.\"\n\nThe question hung on the line. Crickets chirped in the hot night.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Karen said finally. \"We haven't had any luck finding him.\"\n\n\"Right. Yeah.\"\n\n\"Do you want to grab coffee sometime this week?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Sure. I'll text you.\"\n\nShe threw her phone across the living room to land on the couch and groaned. The absence of her father was a keen, stabbing pain. The past weeks had kept her busy, on track, doing something. Now that she stopped, all that she had left was the reality that he wasn't there and wasn't coming back.\n\nWhat was life going to be without him? What was her life going to be at all? She felt like this changed everything.\n\nShe had done depression, and didn't care for a repeat. Would she go back to training? Follow in his footsteps? Would that bring her some sense of fulfillment, keep him alive in her somehow?\n\nThen there was revenge. That might keep her going. But she'd read enough to know where that led. Death or disappointment.\n\nBut what else was there for her? How was she going to deal with life now?\n\nThe same way she'd dealt with the rigors of training, she told herself. One day at a time. One minute at a time, when necessary. Just the next push-up, the next ten feet of running, the next five minutes awake. This was just like that. Do what you have to do not to die right now.\n\nSo she wept, not caring how loud she was in the empty house, and buried her head in a pillow, screaming, and punching the couch cushions. She didn't know how long she was at it, but when the oven dinged, announcing that her ravioli was ready, she stopped, panting, drying her eyes, and stood up. One day at a time started right now.\n\nAlex picked herself up off the couch. The smell of basil and tomato wafted to her nose, the comforting fragrance of her mother's cooking.\n\nA warm meal at home. Seemed like a fine first step.\nChapter Thirty-nine\n\nMorgan and Badri landed in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, in the late morning, bearing fake passports. The bored-looking immigration agent didn't give them a second glance as she entered their data on her computer.\n\nThey picked up a rental Kia hatchback at the airport that they had no intention of ever returning and drove west together, along the coastal highways under the noontime tropical sun. Morgan's hair, half an inch grown in, flowed like a field of wheat in the wind streaming in through the car window. On their right, the sea would sometimes peek through the dense jungle.\n\nOnce they had driven for two and a half hours, Morgan checked their position on the handheld GPS. He parked the Kia on the shoulder of the road and plunged into the woods, through the dense underbrush, slapping at the mosquitoes that harried them the whole way.\n\nThey trekked for hours under the shade of the green canopy, Morgan correcting their course using the GPS every few minutes.\n\n\"The jungle turns you around,\" he told Badri. \"Stop paying attention for a minute and you're lost.\"\n\nThe sun was low in the horizon by the time they reached the shore, where the rickety wooden fishing boat was already waiting for them. On it was a weather-worn Dominican man, skin browned by the sun, shirtless and in ragged shorts, and a younger man in a wife-beater shirt and faded baseball cap. He tensed when he saw them at first, looking with especial wariness at Morgan, before Badri spoke.\n\n\"Se\u00f1or Batista?\"\n\n\"S\u00ed,\" he said, nodding his head and grinning.\n\nBatista waved them on board. Morgan took stock of the boat as he stepped onto the deck. The wood looked more deteriorated than Morgan liked for any boat going on the open sea, and everything from the hull to the cabin seemed cobbled together and patched over many times.\n\nThey set off without ceremony, leaving the island of Hispaniola behind and moving north. Morgan pulled on a Panama hat he'd bought at the airport to protect against the sun.\n\nThe two men stared at him openly as the boat chugged along, and Morgan understood very well why. He was not the kind of person they would normally carry across, not the kind of person who'd normally enter the country illegally. But an explanation was not forthcoming. Morgan was a paying customer, so he didn't have to explain a goddamn thing.\n\nMorgan and Badri had brought along cereal bars to tide them through the passage, but the younger man, Diego, who Morgan learned was Batista's son, had caught some fish earlier that day. They grilled it on deck in a makeshift barbecue pit made out of a paint can and what might have been part of a dish rack. Morgan ate with relish, with his hands, the fish resting on a piece of banana leaf.\n\nThe hold was full of fuel canisters to get the boat through the long journey and back, so they had to sleep on deck, out in the open. Which suited Morgan fine enough\u2014out there, they had at least a light breeze to combat the stifling heat.\n\nThey spoke little during the journey. Before, driving through Uzbekistan, Badri would talk freely about his family and his life outside the organization, and even a few stories of terrorism, of narrow escapes from the CIA, and his capture by the Russians. But now, the weight of their mission was bearing down on them, and they couldn't bring themselves to say anything about anything else. They did not even discuss the ultimate mission itself, instead focusing on the details of their passage, and then only so far as it was necessary. Mostly, Morgan looked out into the dark water as it disappeared far in the horizon, or in the dark of the night, lit by stars and a sliver of moon.\n\nIt took a day and two nights to come within sight of the shore, and then they spent a day of waiting because they couldn't approach in daylight. So they waited, the boat bobbing on the gentle sea, just far enough from the continent that they would not have to worry about the American Coast Guard finding them and either arresting them or escorting them back to their place of origin.\n\nThe boat started moving again at dusk, all lights off to avoid detection. They landed in the dead of night at a deserted bayou beach in Louisiana, where an ally of Badri's was waiting with an inconspicuous seven-year-old VW Jetta.\nChapter Forty\n\nMorgan's confederate drove them into the night and past dawn, stopping only to refuel. The driver was a taciturn, grave man of few words, so they rode in silence almost the entire way, until they pulled into a country house in rural Virginia. There they were greeted by a soft-spoken young man with a shaved face. He introduced himself as Rasheed. Like everyone else along the way, he regarded Morgan with nothing short of total suspicion.\n\n\"He is an ally,\" Badri said.\n\nHe wanted to get them situated, but Badri was impatient. \"Where are they?\"\n\nThe young man, deferential, led the way down a solid old wooden staircase to the basement. Among the abandoned appliances, tools, and building materials, he walked to a working chest freezer and pulled it open. The top was layered with meats in grocery store trays and frozen vegetables. He removed them, setting them aside, to reveal a steel box underneath.\n\n\"Here they are,\" Rasheed said. He opened the box without removing it from the freezer to reveal six plain steel canisters, about as big as tennis-ball containers. Badri looked at them with ravenous eyes, filled with anticipation of the destruction that they would cause.\n\n\"Novichok,\" he said, his voice a whisper. \"Russian nerve agent. The deadliest ever made. Not a gas, but a powder. Causes all muscles in the body to seize and contract. You cannot breathe, and your heart stops pumping blood. You die within minutes. Perhaps seconds.\"\n\nHe drew out a canister and held it out for Morgan to see. \"Here is our instrument of destruction,\" he said. \"Here is how we will bring America to its knees.\"\nChapter Forty-one\n\nThe farmhouse they occupied was old and two-storied, built of horizontal slats that were once whitewashed but now showed the faded gray of the wood underneath. The grounds were modest, but the house was shielded from view of its surroundings by trees. They were a few miles from Palmyra, the nearest one-horse town.\n\nIt was a spot well chosen for its isolation. You could spend months in here without anyone so much as sighting the house from the road.\n\nMorgan heard the Chevy beater truck before he saw it coming up the driveway, carrying Rasheed. He got out of the car holding bags from the thrift store in one hand and Burger King in the other. Badri was out of the house, in the nearby woods, making a call to his associates in the organization.\n\nDevout as he was, Rasheed was a slob. From the looks of it, he subsisted on mostly snack foods, and empty bags of chips and fast food were strewn about the living room, which held nothing but one ratty couch. It was some kind of warped jihadi version of a filthy bachelor pad.\n\nRasheed slammed the screen door open and set the bags down on the Formica table in the dining room. He greeted Morgan with undisguised disdain.\n\n\"Lunch,\" he said, tossing a paper-wrapped Whopper into Morgan's lap.\n\nNot exactly his favorite\u2014Morgan hadn't eaten fast food in years, at least not voluntarily\u2014but he was famished. Even with Diego's fishing, food on the boat had been slim pickings. He unwrapped it and took a large bite out of it.\n\n\"I brought clothes,\" Rasheed said, dropping a thrift store bag at Morgan's feet. Eating the burger with one hand, Morgan sifted through the clothes with the other. Rasheed had an impeccable sense of style. Among the pickings were a shirt from a company barbecue so big that it wouldn't look out of place resting on a tent pole and a lime green button-down. But the clothes on Morgan's back were starting to get ripe, and this was what he had.\n\nMorgan looked up from the bag to find Rasheed staring at him.\n\n\"I do not know what you did to fool Badri,\" he said. \"But I do not believe you are here to help.\"\n\nMorgan stood to confront him, chest out, hands balled into fists. \"Badri believes me. And he's your boss. So I don't much care what you think.\"\n\n\"Infidel!\" Rasheed spat on the floor.\n\n\"And what are you gonna do about it?\"\n\nRasheed narrowed his eyes, and then drew a gun from his waistband. Magnum Big Frame revolver, .44 Magnum. Talking about stopping power would be damning with faint praise. At this range, it would be a question of how much of Morgan's face would remain afterward.\n\n\"Big man with a big gun,\" said Morgan. \"Let's game this out. You blow me away. Then what? What do you tell your boss?\"\n\n\"It does not matter. You will be dead, and no longer willing to betray us.\"\n\nMorgan's voice dropped an octave. \"He trusts me. I've saved his life more than once, so maybe he trusts me more than he trusts you. And he wants what I have to offer. Kill me, and your punishment will come.\"\n\n\"Not as swiftly as yours,\" Rasheed said. But Morgan could tell he was shaken.\n\n\"Your plan will fail without me,\" Morgan said. \"They'll catch you, and best-case scenario is that you die in the process. You won't have another 9\/11 on your hands. You'll have another underwear bomber.\"\n\nRasheed gritted his teeth and grimaced. \"You are lying.\"\n\n\"Then pay the price and kill me.\"\n\nRasheed cocked the gun. Morgan got ready to make a grab for it. Rasheed was brave but untrained. Morgan might be able to get the best of him.\n\n\"Rasheed!\"\n\nIt was Badri, standing outside the screen door. He walked into the house speaking in harsh Arabic, and Rasheed, hissing, uncocked the gun and tucked it back into his waistband.\n\n\"What happened?\" Badri demanded, in English.\n\n\"Friendly disagreement,\" said Morgan, turning away and heading for the stairs. \"I'm going to take a shower. I have some clothes I can't wait to try on.\"\nChapter Forty-two\n\nMorgan locked his door that night and braced the handle with an old wooden chair. He then set the moldy mattress on the floor against the wall. He wasn't going to risk Rasheed getting any ideas in the middle of the night.\n\nHe woke up with the cock's crow, but stayed in his room, stretching and doing his morning exercise. An hour later, he unblocked the door and walked out. The house was still, the other two still sleeping.\n\nMorgan went downstairs and looked for something to eat for breakfast, but all he found were potato chips and packaged cake, so he settled for a glass of tap water instead.\n\nCarrying the cup in his hand, Morgan walked to the basement door. He looked down, at the freezer, thinking of all the destructive power it contained. He felt chills as he considered it.\n\n\"See something you like, American?\"\n\nIt was Rasheed, from the top of the stairs.\n\n\"Just thinking about the plan,\" said Morgan. \"We're going to have to devise a strategy sometime soon.\"\n\n\"We will set them off in the White House,\" Rasheed said. \"And we will kill the President of the United States.\"\n\nMorgan chuckled at the notion. \"You won't make it ten feet into the White House. You'll be shot down in the entrance hall. The best you can hope to achieve there is to kill a handful of tourists and security guards.\"\n\n\"Then you have a better idea?\"\n\nThey were interrupted by the sound of Badri coming downstairs.\n\n\"Morning,\" said Morgan. \"I was just about to tell Rasheed here that we need groceries and supplies. Proper food. Eating all this junk is expensive, too. We shouldn't be wasting the little money we have.\"\n\nRasheed leered at him, but Badri cut in. \"What do you suggest?\"\n\n\"Some beef, vegetables. The electric stove works, I checked, and there are a couple of iron pots we could use. No reason we have to live like animals here.\"\n\nRasheed opened his mouth to speak, but Badri cut in. \"You are right. Make a list. Rasheed will get it for us.\"\n\n\"Don't you think it'd be better for me to go?\" said Morgan. \"I'm American. Nobody's going to think anything of my being there.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" said Badri.\n\n\"He will take our car and escape!\" Rasheed bellowed. \"He will send the police after us.\"\n\n\"He will not,\" Badri said with finality. Then he turned to Morgan. \"I will get you the money.\"\n\nBadri sent him out with twenty dollars. Morgan drove into Palmyra and parked outside the town's one modest grocery store. At the single register was a bored teen who didn't pry his eyes away from his phone for one second when Morgan came in.\n\nHe scoped the store, looking for the cameras. There were none. He walked to the refrigerator and picked up a tray of beef and another of chicken thighs. He looked back at the teen, who spared him not so much as a glance, and then tucked them in his waistband, one in front and one in the back, well covered by his loose T-shirt. He winced as the cold came into contact with his skin.\n\nHe heard the door swing open, and turned to see a policeman walk inside. Morgan went stiff, then forced himself back to relaxation.\n\n\"Mornin',\" said the cop. He wore a white Stetson, and had eyes that were constantly narrowed.\n\n\"Mornin',\" Morgan said, picking up a head of broccoli and some potatoes.\n\n\"Sheriff Anderson,\" he said, lifting his hat.\n\n\"Dan. Dan Morgan.\"\n\n\"Just passing through?\"\n\n\"That's right.\" Morgan took his groceries to the cashier, wondering whether the sheriff had noticed the bulges under his shirt.\n\nBut instead the sheriff looked outside. \"Say, I've seen that car before.\" The sheriff pointed at the truck Morgan had driven in, parked outside the door. \"You out there at the old Peterson place?\"\n\n\"Four seventy-one,\" said the listless teen. Morgan dug into his pocket for the money, careful not to disturb the meat.\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Morgan said. \"I'm staying with a friend.\"\n\n\"Young Middle Eastern fella?\"\n\n\"The same,\" Morgan said. \"Rasheed. A friend's nephew, actually. House-sitting for his uncle. He's worried about the boy, asked me to come down and have a look-see. Find out if he's all right. But I'm really just dropping in for a day or two.\"\n\n\"He looks a little perturbed,\" Sheriff Anderson said.\n\n\"He's got some issues. You know.\" He made a couple of circles with his index finger around his ear. \"But he's a good kid. Harmless.\"\n\n\"Well. That's good to know.\"\n\n\"And he seems okay, all things considered. So I'm eager to tell his father that.\"\n\nSheriff Anderson frowned. \"Wasn't it his uncle?\"\n\nMorgan cursed in his mind. \"I know them both. His father is worried about him, too.\" Goddamn it. He was better than this.\n\n\"Well, you do that,\" Anderson said.\n\nThe cashier handed Morgan his change. \"Here you go, sir.\"\n\nMorgan walked out and started his truck. When he was out of sight of the store, he pulled the meat out from under his shirt and tossed it in the passenger seat.\n\nHe had one more stop to make.\n\nHe cruised the town until he found a mom-and-pop electronics store, Bob's TV and Radio. He went inside to find a balding middle-aged man he figured was Bob standing behind the counter. It was a small store, and it took him under a minute to find what he was looking for.\n\n\"I'll take one of these,\" said Morgan, setting the item on the counter.\n\n\"Prepaid cell phone?\"\n\n\"Yeah. My phone got bricked. Need something to tide me over until I can get back home.\"\n\n\"I gotcha,\" said Bob. \"That'll be nineteen ninety nine.\"\n\n\"All I got is fifteen,\" Morgan said, making a show of being flustered. \"Fifteen dollars and . . . twenty-nine cents.\"\n\nBob raised a suspicious eyebrow. \"Is that right?\"\n\n\"Any chance I can get you to do a stranger a solid?\" Please.\n\nBob rubbed his chin between his fingers. \"Well, all right,\" he said. \"Give me what you got. Still makes me a profit, if you can call that a profit. And I'm a good Christian man. I can help a brother out. Let's ring you up.\"\n\nGod bless you, Bob.\n\nMorgan set the bills on the counter, and then dropped the coins. He walked to the truck on trembling legs, turning on the ignition and driving away. He waited until he was in the highway before turning the phone on and making a call.\n\n\"Hello?\" A woman's voice.\n\n\"Bloch? It's me.\"\nChapter Forty-three\n\nWhen Morgan arrived at the house, he hid the phone, still on, under a brick that was resting against the foundation. Then he went inside, grocery bags in hand.\n\n\"I brought a good haul,\" said Morgan, setting them on the table. \"I'll whip us up some steaks on the iron skillet.\"\n\n\"We need to talk about our plan,\" said Badri. \"We cannot stay here long. Every minute is a moment when we could be found out.\"\n\nThey sat down together around the table to discuss the plan. \"Our target,\" Morgan said, \"needs to be symbolic, and it needs to kill a lot of people. There's one day that's better than any other if you want to do this.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Badri asked.\n\n\"The Fourth of July. The most patriotic of holidays. The parades attract enormous crowds. You can kill thousands upon thousands on the day when Americans get together to celebrate this country. We're two weeks away, which means we can organize attacks on more than one city. New York, Chicago, Washington.\"\n\n\"I like what I hear,\" said Badri.\n\n\"Police won't be able to check everyone. They'll have bomb-sniffing dogs, but we won't need explosives. Those canisters have rapid-release mechanisms that can send up a cloud of the powder in something like a fifty-foot radius. Rasheed, do you have paper?\"\n\nThey spent hours strategizing. Morgan drew the parade routes from memory as best he could, saying that they could check it online as soon as they had a connection, and marked likely spots, places that would cause the most deaths, the most panic, and how to set off a second device to target a wave of fleeing pedestrians.\n\nIt was late afternoon by the time they decided to break, and Morgan left Badri and Rashid to cook their dinner of steak and potatoes. He had long known that to impress people in the kitchen, you only need to do one or two things well, and this was his. The smell of searing meat filled the house. They ate together at the table. After the planning and the meal, even Rasheed seemed to be warming up to him.\n\nAfter dinner, Morgan sat down on the couch and Badri pulled up a chair across from him. Rasheed went outside for a walk.\n\n\"I will be honest,\" said Badri, \"I had my doubts about you, even until today. But your plan\u2014I finally believe you are one of us, without reservation. We will do great things together, Morgan. You will be part of something here that will be remembered for generations, a definite blow to\u2014\"\n\nRasheed burst into the house, slamming the screen door open, gun drawn and pointed at Morgan. In his other hand was a cell phone.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this, Rasheed?\" Badri demanded.\n\n\"When the American arrived, I saw him through the window. I saw him bend down and hide something. So I went out to see what it was. I found this. A phone, Badri. Still on. He is a filthy traitor!\" Rasheed tightened the grip on his pistol.\n\nBadri raised his hand for Rasheed to stop. \"Explain yourself, Morgan.\"\n\n\"I wanted to call my family,\" Morgan said. \"I'm sorry. I know that I shouldn't have. But I couldn't resist. I bought this phone when I went into town. It's a burner. Untraceable. It won't compromise us. Please. I know how to be anonymous.\"\n\n\"He is lying,\" said Rasheed.\n\n\"I'm not,\" said Morgan. \"Badri. I swear I'm not.\"\n\nBadri struggled with this in his mind, and then his expression set, cool and stony. \"I was deluded,\" he said. \"I thought it could not be possible. But now I see that I was a fool to trust an American. Do not move! Rasheed, do not shoot him. We will find out what he knows.\"\n\nBadri took one of the knives from the table, still wet with the juices from the steak.\n\n\"Badri, come on. After all we shared, you think I'd betray you?\"\n\nRasheed laughed. \"You will get what you deserve now, American.\"\n\nBadri approached with the knife in hand. Morgan was seated, with a gun on him. Circumstances were not smiling on him.\n\nBut Badri was interrupted by a car, coming up the driveway.\n\n\"Who is it?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Police!\" Rasheed exclaimed. \"I told you he was a traitor!\"\n\n\"I promise, I did not tell anyone about you!\" Morgan insisted. \"He's probably just checking up on the house.\"\n\n\"He is alone,\" said Rasheed.\n\nBadri frowned. He said to Rasheed, \"Hide behind the front door. Morgan, you will stand there next to him. I will talk to the policeman. If you do anything to call his attention, Morgan, both of you die. Understand? Now come.\"\n\nAt gunpoint, Morgan moved to stand next to the front door, so that he would be hidden when it opened. Rasheed stood next to him, out of sight, gun pointed at his head.\n\n\"Keep your mouth shut,\" Rasheed growled.\n\nThey heard the boots on the porch steps, then there was a knock on the door. Badri opened.\n\n\"Good evening, officer. Can I help you?\"\n\n\"Lots of people up in this old house, ain't there? I met a fella that drove this truck into town this morning, and I figured the young man would still be here.\"\n\n\"They are out,\" Badri said. \"What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"Just checking to see if you folks are all right,\" he said.\n\n\"Just fine,\" said Badri\n\n\"Now, you said they were gone, but I see three plates on the table,\" Anderson said. \"Doesn't look like you've finished eating very long ago. And there's one road out of here, and I didn't see anyone driving past me.\"\n\n\"They are on an after-dinner walk. Now if there is nothing else\u2014\"\n\n\"I'd ask you for a glass of water, if it's acceptable to you. It's a hot day, and I'm parched.\"\n\nBadri narrowed his eyes. \"Of course. Please, come in.\"\n\nRasheed turned his gun to fire at Anderson as he walked in.\n\n\"No!\" Morgan cried as he brought Rasheed down with a full-body tackle, sending the gun sliding across the floor. Sheriff Anderson went for his sidearm, but Badri swung the knife and buried it in the policeman's throat. Anderson fell on the floor, gasping. Badri took up his Colt revolver and pointed it at Morgan, who held up his hands. Rasheed stood and grabbed his own gun from the floor where it lay.\n\n\"We need to go,\" said Rasheed. \"They will be looking for the policeman.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Badri, \"we do.\"\n\n\"Then we need to take care of this filth right here,\" Rasheed said, meaning Morgan.\n\n\"Yes. We do. Please, Rasheed. Do the honors.\"\n\nRasheed grinned, triumphant. \"Any last words?\"\n\nThe sound of broken glass, and Rasheed's chest burst in a mist of blood.\n\nBadri scarcely had time to react before a bullet hit him in the shoulder. He fell, dropping his gun with the force and shock of it. Then he looked at Morgan with anger.\n\n\"What did you do?\" Badri demanded. \"You traitor, what did you do?\"\n\n\"What I had to do to protect my country.\" He heard the sound of men approaching, rustling in the foliage surrounding the house. \"I want the end of this fight, Badri. I want my people to be safe.\"\n\n\"What about my people?\"\n\n\"Do you think you're making them safer by attacking the US? By extending this goddamned war?\"\n\n\"I do what I do for the righteousness of God.\"\n\nBadri scrambled down the stairs to the basement. Morgan ran after him, but couldn't reach him before Badri had the freezer open and a canister in his hand, ready to release.\n\n\"You'll die,\" said Morgan.\n\n\"And maybe I will take you with me.\"\n\n\"You can still survive,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"And go to Guantanamo Bay for the rest of my life?\"\n\n\"I really am sorry,\" Morgan said. \"I wish we'd have met under other circumstances. I wish you weren't who you were. I wish you hadn't made yourself my enemy. But you can live. That's something. It's something I can offer you.\"\n\nBadri pushed the button and the canister burst in a plume of fine white powder. Badri fell almost immediately, convulsing on the floor of the basement.\n\nHolding his breath, Morgan ran upstairs, doing some mental math on the rate of dispersion. He reached the upper landing as the tactical team rammed the door, sending splinters flying into the foyer. They filed inside in formation, all wearing tactical gear and gas masks.\n\n\"Clear the area! Get as far from here as you can!\"\n\nHe was feeling the weight in his chest as he ran out of the house. He stumbled within a few feet of the door, lightheaded, and then the world began growing dark. He hardly felt himself hitting the floor, and had the vague impression of someone slipping a gas mask over his face, and he saw someone else pull out a syringe with a gigantic hypodermic needle before he lost consciousness.\nChapter Forty-four\n\nAlex Morgan walked into Diana Bloch's apartment with plodding steps. She had descended into a haze of gloom ever since returning home, crying herself to sleep every night. One day at a time worked, but it didn't make it any easier.\n\n\"Make yourself at home,\" Bloch said.\n\nAlex collapsed on a white leather couch. \"Did you make me chamomile tea again?\"\n\nBloch sat cross-legged on a Barcelona chair, facing Alex. \"I have something rather more potent. I'd like to tell you a story.\"\n\n\"Yippee.\"\n\nBloch cleared her throat. \"Eight months ago, a cache of Novichok nerve agent was stolen as it was transported from a military research lab in Russia. This Novichok is really nasty stuff. It will destroy your lungs and make you drown on dry land.\n\n\"The group that took it was an al-Qaeda splinter group named Shining Jihad. But that's all we knew. We exhausted our resources trying to find the agent, or the group's leadership.\n\n\"Then, some five months ago, the Russians captured the group's mastermind, a man named Muhammad Badri. A clever and resourceful man, and certainly the one who planned the heist of the gas in the first place.\n\n\"The Russians knew he was a terrorist, but they didn't quite know what they had on their hands. So they sent him to a secret prison in Siberia, an old gulag camp where the Russian government keeps the people they want to forget.\n\n\"We knew it was a matter of time before Badri's people used the Novichok against us somehow. We needed to find the gas. And our only link was him. The Russian government was not forthcoming with aid, so we had to take it into our own hands. We had to send someone into the prison. And that meant letting someone get captured.\"\n\n\"Are you telling me\u2014\"\n\n\"The odds were always slim,\" Bloch said. \"He had to escape from the prison with Badri, while gaining his trust enough to find out where the Novichok was. The mission rested on a razor's edge.\"\n\n\"Well?\" Alex urged. \"What happened?\"\n\nShe heard footsteps coming from the inner hallway of the apartment. Heavy. A man's.\n\nShe knew him by his silhouette in the dim light even before his features resolved in her eyes.\n\n\"Dad!\"\n\nShe leapt off the couch and at him, hugging him as hard as he could.\n\n\"I apologize,\" said Bloch. \"I wish we could have told you. But it was imperative for his mission to remain in total secrecy.\"\n\n\"But I'm back.\" He squeezed her tight. \"I'm back. That's what matters.\"\n\nShe released him, tears flowing from her eyes, and punched him in the chest. \"How could you do that to me?\" she demanded, in anger mixed with joy.\n\n\"I had to do it,\" he said. \"My country needed me.\"\n\n\"Yeah. You had to go off and be a hero.\" She buried her face in his chest. \"The world needs heroes like you. But Mom and I need you more.\" She raised her head. \"We have to tell her! You don't know how sick she's been over this.\"\n\n\"I'd just like to remind you,\" said Bloch, \"that all this is highly classified.\"\n\nAlex wiped away her tears and looked at her father. He looked thin, haggard, and exhausted. \"So did you have a nice vacation?\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah,\" said Morgan. \"Got some exercise, some cultural immersion, met all sorts of different kinds of people.\"\n\nAlex couldn't contain herself and gave him another hug.\n\nBloch interrupted their reunion. \"By the way, Alex, we know all about your little Russian adventure.\"\n\nAlex blushed with shame. \"I got captured, would've been killed if Valery hadn't been there to save me, and I didn't come close to finding you.\"\n\n\"How is old Valery?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"Miserable,\" said Alex.\n\n\"That's Valery all right.\"\n\n\"I'm so embarrassed,\" she said. \"It was a complete failure.\"\n\n\"Funny,\" said Bloch. \"That's not what I heard. I heard that a budding young operative was resourceful and quick-thinking. I heard she used her assets, faced danger head-on, and managed to infiltrate the house of a Russian general and escape with her life. What I read in my reports indicated that you show enough promise to surpass your father someday. And I expect you to report back for training Monday at oh-five hundred hours.\"\n\nAlex's cheeks flushed, now with joy.\n\n\"And Morgan,\" said Bloch, \"We're going to need an in-depth debrief from you.\"\n\n\"Later,\" Morgan said, holding his hand up. \"Come on, Alex. Let's go home.\"\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nI must thank my immensely talented team at Kensington Publishing Corp., who work tirelessly to help make my novels the best they can be and are there whenever I have questions or concerns. Thank you to Steve Zacharius, owner of Kensington, who has made me part of the Kensington \"family.\" There are just not enough words to convey how fortunate I am to have Michaela Hamilton as my editor. Her patience and guidance have been invaluable\u2014she is a very special person.\n\nI also want to express my appreciation to my literary agent, Doug Grad, as well as to Mayur Gudka, my webmaster and social media consultant. I also want to thank my partner in writing and creating my novels, Caio Camargo. I am so fortunate that you are members of my team and, more important, friends.\n\nMy wife, Lynn, continues to encourage me to pursue my writing career.\n\nLastly, I want to thank all of my very loyal fans whose support has helped grow the Dan Morgan series from one novel to six and still writing . . .\nDon't miss the next exciting thriller starring  \nZeta operative Dan Morgan\n\nROGUE COMMANDER\n\nComing soon from Lyrical Underground,  \nan imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.\n\nChapter One\n\nDan Morgan stood against the stone back of the Church of Our Lady Before T\u00fdn, a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers.\n\nHe didn't smoke\u2014couldn't stand the smell, really\u2014but nothing gave him better cover to stand around in the street, out of the way of most people. So he let the reeking thing burn, pretending to puff every few seconds to avert suspicion, and shielding the ember from the autumn wind. It was early October, and the sun was low in the sky even though it was half past ten a.m. None of its rays made it down to the level of Prague's narrow streets.\n\nHe was in an area reserved for parking, which held the sorts of establishments that grow like weeds on the periphery of the big tourist sites, selling cheap souvenirs and small necessities like water and smokes.\n\n\"Morgan, report in.\" This was the voice of Diana Bloch coming over the wireless transmitter in his right ear, terse and all business. The head of Zeta Division, Bloch carried the authority of a natural leader. She was a pain in his ass, but mostly in a good way.\n\n\"Nothing yet.\"\n\nA group of four American college kids stopped as one of them took a picture of the back of the church. One of the couples stood close together, with a sort of awkwardness that told Morgan theirs was a new relationship. The other couple had been together long enough to be more interested in other things, but shared a kiss before they moved along.\n\nThey didn't give him a second glance. Good. Being invisible had its perks in the business.\n\nMorgan buzzed with energy, as he always did before a mission. He felt the reassuring weight of his black Walther PPK in its shoulder holster, well hidden under his black trench coat. It wasn't a popular concealed-carry weapon anymore\u2014too heavy, and not as much firepower as the polymer nine-millimeter pieces that took its place. But he was a man with classic tastes, and he had a soft spot for the gun. It felt solid in his hand, nicely balanced, with light recoil. That, and he could hit a fly in the air at ten paces with it.\n\nMorgan stood back against the stone of the centuries-old Gothic church, and feigned drawing in smoke from his Marlboro when he caught movement in his peripheral vision. Across the small parking lot, a man emerged from the front door of the Ventana hotel. He had an unhandsome face topped with a receding head of blond hair, with a strong nose but a weak chin that he hid, badly, with a goatee.\n\n\"That's Pulnik,\" said Morgan. \"Moving west from the hotel.\"\n\n\"Keep your distance,\" said Bloch over the comm. \"Team, get moving. Stick to the plan. Morgan, do I have to remind you\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't. It's my damn plan. I'm sticking to it.\" Morgan dropped the half-burned cigarette, ground it against the pavement, and set off after the man.\n\nTheir quarry was Havel Pulnik, a sleazy small-time underworld businessman who happened to be second cousin to Enver Lukacs, the evasive big fish they were really after. With no other leads to finding Lukacs, Zeta division had kept Pulnik under surveillance for months. Their persistence finally paid off when one of Lukacs's people set a meeting with Pulnik in Prague.\n\n\"We're on the move.\" That was Bishop, the leader of the Zeta Tactical Team, somewhere within a two-block radius.\n\nMorgan walked thirty feet behind Pulnik. The streets were teeming with tourists from all nations. He could recognize the people from warmer climates because they were bundled up as if they were in the Himalayas in the dead of winter. As he passed a souvenir shop, Morgan caught sight of Spartan. She had a good four inches on him, her close-cropped blond hair hidden by a dark gray beanie. She was looking through postcards from a rack, oriented so she could steal glances at their quarry. He then caught sight of Bishop, walking a distance ahead of Pulnik. Spartan set off a few seconds after Morgan had passed, walking on pace with a group of Germans who seemed to be going out for a stroll rather than oohing and aahing at the sights.\n\n\"Looks like he's moving toward the plaza,\" said Spartan. \"Good call.\"\n\nMorgan walked on the cobblestones, worn smooth over the years. Prague had the Old World elegance of Europe, with its picturesque hodgepodge of architectural styles\u2014all of them, unlike the utilitarian bent of American engineering, with an eye for beauty. The condition of the buildings, however, betrayed the country's Soviet past. They did not have the polish, the fresh paint and recent renovations, found in England or Germany.\n\nMorgan liked Prague, though. The city had character. A gloomy character, sure. Nothing more appropriate for the city of Franz Kafka. But anywhere he went, at least in the old city, he felt yes, I am in Prague.\n\nAfter a short walk Morgan followed Pulnik into the historic Old Town Square. Now, here was a main attraction. The perimeter of the sprawling square was lined with restaurants with outdoor tables, where tourists braved the cold and sat with hot drinks. Others sat on the ground of the square. One young woman was drawing the Old Town Hall, its gothic spires reaching toward the sky. Most were standing around, listening to guides, reading stuff on their cell phones, taking pictures. A band was setting up, with a standing bass, a clarinet, a banjo, and a washboard. Half a dozen people were already sitting in a semicircle, waiting for them to begin playing. A handful of protesters were there, too, demonstrating on the issue of refugees from the Middle East. The younger and more diverse crowd was for; the older and local, against. They kept a tense peace, but Morgan had a feeling things might break out in violence quickly.\n\nPulnik was making his way toward the green bronze statue of Jan Hus at the center of the square.\n\n\"Fan out,\" Morgan said. \"I want people on all sides. We need to see Lukacs coming.\"\n\n\"Moving in, northwest corner.\" The voice belonged to Peter Conley, Morgan's old partner from his days in the CIA. There was no one Morgan would sooner trust with his life.\n\nMorgan walked to the middle of the east side of the square and watched as the others got into position. He surveyed the tourists, who were oblivious to the importance of this moment. The wheels of their world turned, and they were none the wiser. They didn't know anything about the silent machinery hidden deep in the bowels of their world. All they saw was the surface.\n\nMorgan was here today to stop one of these cogs from turning. Enver Lukacs was the name of this particular cog\u2014a shadowy underworld player with a finger in every pie. His currency was contacts, joining people who were selling black market items and services with those who would buy them. Weapons, drugs, mercenaries, slaves\u2014Lukacs had it all. If the Zeta operatives got him to turn over what he knew, even just a fraction, they could bring down dozens of illegal operations.\n\nEverything depended on their success on that day.\n\n\"Hello! American!\" It was a slight young man with a local accent. His baby face was draped with scraggly hair, and he had on a dirty red coat over a stained T-shirt.\n\nShit. This was all Morgan needed. \"I don't have any money.\"\n\nThe man smiled with mock offense. \"No! Come on, American friend! I just want to have a conversation!\"\n\n\"I don't have any of that either. Now scram, kid.\"\n\nHe went off to bother someone else. Morgan looked at Pulnik, standing by the statue with his hands in his pockets, looking around at the crowd for the man he was there to meet.\n\nIt was Conley who spoke first. \"I have eyes on the target. Approaching from my corner.\"\n\n\"Keep your distance,\" said Bloch. \"I want confirmation before we do anything.\"\n\nMorgan leaned against a lamppost and looked at the man now crossing the plaza. He looked like a fashion designer, with a svelte silver-fox thing going on and a stylish designer suit.\n\n\"Positive ID,\" said Morgan. \"That's him. That's Lukacs.\"\n\n\"Get in position,\" said Bloch. \"Diesel, I want you on alert. You need to arrive with the van just as they reach the street with Lukacs while Lily provides a distraction.\" That would be young, green-eyed Lily Randall, femme fatale. Morgan caught sight of her coming in from the far side, her auburn hair glistening in the morning sun. \"We need to attract as little attention as possible.\"\n\nThe jazz band broke out into a Dixieland rendition of \"When the Saints Go Marching In.\" The singer's voice suggested he'd been a heavy smoker since age five. The effect wasn't exactly beautiful, but hell if it didn't work.\n\nA semicircle of tourists formed, although most went about their business without a glance at the musicians. Something nagged at the corner of Morgan's mind before he was fully conscious of what it was.\n\n\"Hold positions,\" he said. \"Lukacs's got company.\"\n\n\"Where?\" Bishop asked.\n\n\"Tall bearded guy over by the church. Short and stocky next to the tour group on the north side. Red hair by the lamppost, near the southwest corner. And another sitting on the far side of the statue.\"\n\n\"The bastard brought a security detail.\"\n\n\"Bishop. Conley.\" It was Bloch. \"Scan the windows for snipers. If he brought this much backup, I get a feeling he won't be stopping there.\"\n\nMorgan looked at the rows of windows that surrounded the plaza. Two churches, two hotels, a museum, and a government building. All old and elegant.\n\n\"Got one,\" Bishop said. \"White building, north side, fourth floor. Third window from the left.\"\n\n\"That's bad news,\" said Lily.\n\nMorgan watched the band as they launched into a rollicking performance of \"Mack the Knife.\" \"The sniper's in a hotel,\" he said. \"Shepard, think you can get me room access?\"\n\nShepard was their resident computer genius. There was hardly any computer system he couldn't crack. \"Already working on it,\" came his cocky, insouciant voice.\n\n\"Conley\u2014\"\n\n\"On my way.\" Peter Conley moved toward the hotel entrance. After working together so many years, he and Morgan had a nearly psychic connection.\n\n\"I don't like this.\" It was Bishop. \"The mission is getting riskier by the second. I think we need to call it off.\"\n\n\"You're running point on this, Morgan,\" said Bloch. \"It's your call.\"\n\nMorgan squinted into the cloudless blue sky. Then he looked at Lukacs, who was talking closely with Pulnik.\n\n\"Everyone get in position,\" Morgan said. \"We're moving in as soon as Lukacs breaks away from Pulnik.\"\n\n\"What about his security people?\" Bishop demanded.\n\n\"You fan out with the team. I want one of us on every guard. Bind their hands with disposable cuffs and drop them. Lily, you go ahead with the distraction on my mark. We're going to need perfect timing on this.\"\n\n\"And Lukacs?\" Bishop asked.\n\n\"I'll take care of Lukacs,\" said Morgan. \"Extraction van ready?\"\n\n\"I'll move out on your mark,\" Diesel answered. \"Pick you up on the southeast corner.\"\n\nMorgan watched as the team moved through the crowd as naturally as any tourists, betraying no sign of their purpose.\n\n\"I'm in position at the sniper's door,\" said Conley. \"Shepard, how close are you to getting access?\"\n\nShepard scoffed. \"I'm in, big guy.\"\n\n\"Morgan, we're waiting for your signal,\" said Bloch.\n\n\"Hold. Not yet.\" Morgan kept his eyes on Lukacs and Pulnik, having their conversation. Then Lukacs pulled his companion in close, and Pulnik gasped, eyes wide, grabbing his belly.\n\nMorgan couldn't see it clearly, but there was no doubt. Lukacs had stabbed him. Blood seeped out as Pulnik bent double. Lukacs eased him to sit against the low ledge around the statue.\n\n\"Are you seeing this?\" said Spartan.\n\n\"This is not right,\" said Bishop. \"Morgan, call this off.\"\n\n\"The mission doesn't change.\" Morgan was not going to let Lukacs get away. \"He's moving out. Lily, that's your cue.\"\n\nOn the far side of the plaza, Lily drew a megaphone from her pack and turned it on with an earsplitting whine.\n\n\"Wake up, sheeple!\" she screeched, her voice amplified and flattened by the megaphone. \"The Illuminati run your lives!\" Lily was really selling the insanity, and people took notice. \"The reptilians have invaded the highest level of government!\" Tourists moved toward her or rubbernecked to get a look at the crazy lady. \"They want us for our blood!\"\n\nNow it was their turn to take action. The Zeta team moved in on Lukacs's security. Lukacs had left Pulnik on the ground and was moving back from the direction he had come from. As he turned, Lukacs's eyes met Morgan's, and he held his stare long enough for the message to come across as clear as a tall glass of water.\n\n\"Goddamn it! They know we're here! Fall back!\"\n\n\"I told you this was a bad idea,\" said Bishop. \"Didn't I goddamn tell you?\"\n\n\"Too late now,\" Morgan said. \"Let's move!\"\n\nThey'd lost the element of surprise. Morgan heard the sound of Conley kicking the door in as Lukacs's security drew their guns. Morgan couldn't spare the attention to see what was going on. He heard gunfire, then screaming, as he ran straight for Lukacs.\n\nTwo guards were converging on him, fast, from the left and right. Morgan turned his run evasive, reaching for his Walther.\n\nLily, having cast off her megaphone, came dashing from the left and tripped one man, sending him reeling to the ground. This gave Morgan the distraction and the opening he needed to fire at the other guard. Three bullets in the chest, and he was down.\n\nHe took the man's gun and tossed it to Lily, who had come weaponless.\n\n\"I owe you!\" she said, and ran off to help out Spartan, who was struggling to fight off two of Lukacs's security guards. Then he took off running again toward Lukacs, who was by now at the edge of the square.\n\nMorgan took off at a dead run, pushing as hard as he could. Someone crashed into him, sending his Walther flying, and him almost to the pavement. Morgan spared him a glance before diving for his gun.\n\nIt was the young man in the red coat. His smile was gone. He was holding a Beretta M9, and that Beretta M9 was pointed at Morgan's chest.\n\n\"Do not even think about going for the weapon,\" he said. \"Hands up.\"\n\nMorgan's eyes scanned his surroundings. His team was scattered. None of them could come to his rescue. The man was too close for him to run, but too far for him to attack and survive.\n\n\"Any last words?\"\n\nMorgan turned his hand and raised his middle finger.\n\n\"Eloquent. Now you die.\" He aimed the Beretta at Morgan's heart.\n\nThe sound of a gunshot filled Morgan's ears.\n\nChapter Two\n\nFrom the window of her hotel room, Alex Morgan grimaced at the sharp smell of gunpowder. Body still humming from the shot she'd just fired, she watched through the scope of her rifle as the man's eyes widened in surprise, and he fell to the ground. The blood from his chest wound mingled with the red of his coat and spilled onto the cobblestones.\n\n\"Hell of a shot, Alex.\" She heard her father through the comm, but she couldn't see his lips move.\n\n\"Thank me later, Dad. Right now, we need to find Lukacs.\"\n\nAs people drained from the square, Alex scanned the space, looking for their target or his men, but they blended in with the tourists. She'd taken out two of the guards already before Red Coat. Bloch had been worried about putting a sniper rifle in her hands in the field, ordering her to nest in the hotel room overlooking the square, where, Alex suspected, Bloch did not think she'd see any action.\n\nAles was going to enjoy making the boss eat her words.\n\n\"Anyone got eyes on him?\" Morgan asked.\n\nA chorus of negatives came over the radio. Alex made one last survey of the square. \"I'm no good up here anymore. I'm moving out.\"\n\n\"You stay where you are,\" her father said.\n\n\"Make me.\" She set her Heckler & Koch MSG90 on the carpet. She wiped her fingerprints, stowed her gun in its holster and her stun gun in one of her pockets. Then she pulled on her coat, drawing up the lapels to hide her face, and ran out of the room and down the hall and downstairs.\n\nShe pushed against the flow of people seeking refuge inside, squeezing her way out into the chill air. She couldn't pick out Lukacs or his men. Every panicked face in the crowd could conceal an enemy.\n\n\"I have eyes on Lukacs.\" It was Peter Conley. \"He's moving past the astronomical clock as we speak.\"\n\nAlex took a left from the hotel and ran toward the square's old clock. As far as she could tell, her position put her ahead of everyone else. A fantasy flashed before her eyes\u2014Lukacs, in handcuffs, and her, Alex Morgan, bringing him in.\n\n\"We have police incoming!\" said Shepard. To this prompt, Alex picked out the sirens approaching from the distance.\n\n\"This mission is already a shit show!\" came Bishop's deep voice. \"We need to call this off.\"\n\n\"It's your mission, Morgan,\" said Bloch. \"The call is yours.\"\n\nIt didn't matter what he said. Alex wasn't about to stop.\n\n\"If we don't get him now, we'll never catch him,\" her father said. \"We're moving forward.\"\n\n\"I just spotted a secondary security team coming in from the southeast,\" said Spartan. \"I can keep them busy, but I need some help.\"\n\n\"On my way,\" Lily said. Alex heard gunshots behind her as she ran out of the Old Town Square alongside the historic town hall. Its bell was ringing ten a.m. as she passed. Alex spared a glance at the figurine of death coming out, animated by the mechanism.\n\nUp ahead, she caught sight of Lukacs getting into the backseat of a Mercedes C-Class. She noted the license plate and ran toward him, elbowing past people as the car pulled out, but it was too far away. She'd never make it.\n\nSpotting a man starting his motorcycle, she pulled her Taurus nine-millimeter compact and tugged on his leather jacket.\n\n\"I'm going to need the bike,\" she said. \"Sorry.\"\n\nThe man raised his hands and backed away, leaving the Honda 250 to topple over the cobblestones. Alex pulled it upright, hopped on, and kick-started it. The bike rumbled between her legs and she took off, beeping the horn to get the frenzied crowd to part.\n\nThe little Honda was light and maneuverable, and with Alex's slim body in the seat, it moved fast.\n\n\"Spartan, cover me!\" Alex heard gunfire over the comm. She maneuvered around the people until she cleared the crowd enough to gain some momentum, bike jolting on the uneven ground. Lukacs's car was widening the distance between them.\n\nAnd now she saw there wasn't just one, but two cars, same make, model, and color\u2014black. \"He's got a decoy!\" she said, straining to see the numbers and letters on the second vehicle's license plate as she weaved through traffic. \"Lukacs is in the front car!\"\n\nThe right back window of the second car rolled down and a man lifted himself out so that his upper torso was free in the air. His right hand held on to the hood of the car. In his hand was a Glock semiautomatic.\n\nShe banked left hard as he fired, shattering a store window behind her, and had to make a tight right to avoid a post on the edge of the sidewalk.\n\nShe zigzagged as he tried to aim. He fired off another shot, which ricocheted off a metal lamppost.\n\nThe Zeta tactical van merged with the street they were on and hit the second car, which spun out to the left and crashed into the storefront of a butcher shop.\n\nAlex drifted right, just missing the van. She lost speed with the maneuver, but she picked up again once she was clear of the crash.\n\n\"Everyone all right back there?\" she asked.\n\n\"In one piece,\" said Diesel. \"Keep moving after Lukacs!\"\n\nAlex heard the insistent blare of a car horn coming from behind her, getting louder. A maroon Toyota Camry came speeding down the road, weaving through people and traffic to catch up to her.\n\nThat would be her father.\n\n\"Alex, fall back!\"\n\n\"You fall back!\"\n\n\"I outrank you. Do as I say!\"\n\nYeah, right. She pushed harder, and pedestrians leapt out of the way. Traffic was light, and Lukacs managed to move fast even in the narrow streets of Prague. Alex followed suit, the old pastel-colored buildings that lined the street blurring with the speed. Her father kept up behind her.\n\nPolice cars turned into the street three hundred yards down. The Mercedes hung a squealing right into a pedestrian-only boardwalk, sending passersby scrambling. Alex made the turn, nearly toppling over as the Honda's front tire collided with the curb. Recovering, she picked up speed, went through a stone archway under a tower, and then out into the Charles Bridge, which had crossed the Vltava River since the late Middle Ages. Her father was still tailing her. Pedestrians parted like the Red Sea to hug the stone guard walls that protected its edge.\n\n\"Out of the way!\" he yelled over the communicator.\n\nHer father had his hand out of the car window, his Walther in his hand. Alex banked right, and he fired four times at Lukacs's car.\n\nOne of his bullets hit home. The back left tire burst, left in rags. The car swerved left and right, then plowed straight into the side of the bridge. The heavy stone held firm, crumpling the frame of the Mercedes like it was wrapping paper. Her father brought his Toyota to a screeching halt. Alex drove past Lukacs's car and stopped on the far side. Her father took cover behind the door of his sedan, Walther in hand. They had their quarry boxed in.\n\nThe two front doors opened and a security guard emerged from each one, wearing black suits and ties, Glocks in hand. They opened fire against her father.\n\nAlex was about to move to help him when Lukacs stumbled out of the car on the other side\u2014her side.\n\nShe let him come a short distance away from the Mercedes, just so he couldn't disappear back inside. Then she stood up and drew her Taurus revolver.\n\n\"Freeze!\"\n\nHe looked at her, first in shock, then with amusement.\n\nThey kept underestimating her. That's why she won.\n\n\"Hands up!\"\n\nThe bastard smirked and set off walking in her direction. \"I do not think you have what it takes to shoot me.\"\n\n\"Don't test me,\" she said. But her hands were trembling. He kept walking toward her.\n\n\"Stop, or I swear I'll shoot.\"\n\n\"Will you now? Your people could have sniped me from a window, but you went through all this trouble to catch me alive. So no, I don't think you will.\"\n\n\"Do not shoot him, Alex.\" It was Bloch. \"He's no use to us dead.\"\n\nAlex glanced at her father. He had taken down one of Lukacs's men, but was pinned by the other. Alex had a clear shot to the remaining bodyguard, but she didn't think she could hit home at this distance, and she was even less protected than he was.\n\n\"So? What's it going to be?\" said Lukacs. \"Are you going to shoot me now?\"\n\nMovement in her peripheral vision attracted her attention. The Zeta tactical van was barreling down the bridge, its front bumper in splinters from the crash.\n\nLukacs was close now, within grabbing distance of her Taurus. \"Now give me the gun,\" he said, reaching out and grasping it by the barrel.\n\nBut Alex was ready. With her left hand, she drew the stun gun out of her jacket pocket and pushed it against his chest, pumping more than fifty thousand volts into his body. Lukacs convulsed and dropped to the cobblestones of the bridge just as the Zeta tactical van came to a skidding halt alongside her and Lukacs. The door slid open before it were fully stopped. Spartan took care of Lukacs's final security guard with a salvo of bullets from her MP5 while Alex and Bishop hauled Lukacs into the cargo area.\n\nSpartan hopped back inside and they pulled the door shut as Diesel peeled off toward the far end of the bridge.\n\n\"Team, report in,\" said Bloch. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Bishop here, with Diesel, Spartan, and Morgan, Jr., safe and in possession of package. We're on our way to switch out this car.\"\n\n\"Morgan safe.\"\n\n\"Conley safe.\n\nSilence over the radio ensued as Diesel turned into a cross street, cutting off a surprised driver who leaned into his horn. Lily hadn't reported.\n\n\"Lily, come in,\" said Bloch.\n\nBut there was no answer. Only silence.\n\nPhoto by Kippy Goldfarb, Carolle Photography\n\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nLEO J. MALONEY is the author of the acclaimed thrillers Termination Orders, Silent Assassin, Black Skies, Twelve Hours, and Arch Enemy. He was born in Massachusetts, where he spent his childhood, and graduated from Northeastern University. He spent over thirty years in black ops, accepting highly secretive missions that would put him in the most dangerous hot spots in the world. Since leaving that career, he has had the opportunity to try his hand at acting in independent films and television commercials. He has ten movies to his credit, both as an actor and behind the camera as a producer, technical advisor, and assistant director. He lives in the Boston area and in Florida.\n\nVisit him at www.leojmaloney.com or on Facebook or Twitter.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n## Don't miss the other thrilling companion novels in the class series!\n\n_Class: The Stone House_\n\n_Class: Joyride_\n\n## Dedication\n\n_To my cat #InternetReasons_\n\n## Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Dedication_\n\n_Contents_\n\nOne: Read the Terrible Truth They Don't Want You to Know Until Page 119\n\nTwo: What We Can Learn from the Alien-Face-In-A-Box Emoji\n\nThree: When He Lost His Leg They Said He Would Never Play Football Again, But He Said No\n\nFour: Eight Things the Media Hasn't Told You About Cup-A-Soup\n\nFive: Amazing, If True: Children Are Vanishing and You've Not Noticed\n\nSix: The One Weird Trick About Mothers That Everyone Should Know\n\nSeven: Is It Magic? We Need Your Help to Solve This Mystery\n\nEight: Fifteen Cats That Look Shockingly like Miss Quill\n\nNine: Train Drivers Slam Brakes on Truth or Dare\n\nTen: This Chapter Will Prove You've Been Wrong About Young Men Your Whole Life\n\nEleven: This Girl Wanted an Adventure Holiday. You Won't Believe Where She Ended Up\n\nTwelve: Find out Why the Goats Do Not Get to Dance on the Tube\n\nThirteen: The Letter Coal Hill School Doesn't Want You to See\n\nFourteen: How Toast Is like Lady Gaga\n\nFifteen: You Wouldn't Think a Text Could Make You Cry, but This Will\n\nSixteen: Six Names for White You've Never Thought Of\n\nSeventeen: The Rise of Smart Women and How to Stop It\n\nEighteen: Things You'll Get Only If Your Home Planet Was Destroyed in the Nineties\n\nNineteen: He Thought He Knew a Lot About Gravity. Find out If He Was Right\n\nTwenty: The Five Words That Broke Her Heart (Spoiler: One of Them Is 'Want')\n\nTwenty-One: She Thought She Knew What Was Going On. Then She Found out the Remarkable Truth and Turned Things Around\n\nTwenty-Two: Thought You Knew How to Lose Your Friends? Well, This Woman's Thirteen Brilliant Reasons Will Change Your Mind\n\nTwenty-Three: She Was Ready to Give up and Then a Nurse Slayed Her with a Word\n\nTwenty-Four: If You Dropped Dead Tomorrow, Would Your Friends Miss You?\n\nTwenty-Five: She Thought She'd Seen It All and Then She Saw the Face of God\n\nTwenty-Six: This Teacher's Inspirational Words Will Choke You Up\n\nTwenty-Seven: Someone's Reimagined Disney Princesses as Alien Warriors And, Trust Us, It's Awesome\n\nTwenty-Eight: This Hot Take on Smashed Avocado Toast Will Have You Reeling\n\nTwenty-Nine: Think of the Worst Job in the World? You're Not Even Close\n\nThirty: You Are Being Lied to About Voter Registration and This Short Chapter Tells You How\n\nThirty-One: Advertisement: Your Book Will Continue in Twenty-Five Seconds\n\nThirty-Two: The Ten Best Alien Deaths You'll See Today. #6 Is a Killer\n\nThirty-Three: Eight Ways in Which People Have Tried to Escape the Void\n\nThirty-Four: At First She Thought She Knew Everything but Then She Found This Secret She Hadn't Known She Needed to Know\n\nThirty-Five: When She Met God She Forgot to Ask 'Why?'\n\nThirty-Six: This Is Your Chance to Wipe out Skandis Forever\n\nThirty-Seven: After You Read This You'll Want a Shower\n\nThirty-Eight: You'll Be Amazed at How Long It Took Him to Realise His Mistake\n\nThirty-Nine: War Veterans Are Covering Their Heads in Glitter for Reasons That Will Stun You\n\nForty: This Icelandic Penguin Village Is Probably the Cutest Place on Earth. But You Are Not There\n\nForty-One: In the Time It Takes You to Read This, Skandis Will Have Claimed One Hundred More Lives\n\nForty-Two: Many People Would Blame This on Marriage Equality. But Would You?\n\nForty-Three: People Are Tweeting Their Worst Battles and It Is Cringingly Hilarious\n\nForty-Four: She Dropped a Truth Bomb but Wasn't Expecting What Would Happen Next\n\nForty-Five: This Young Footballer Has Something Surprising to Say About Racial Profiling\n\nForty-Six: You Are Being Lied to About Dogs\n\nForty-Seven: The Latest Advances in Virtual Reality Will Horrify You\n\nForty-Eight: Do You Know Enough About Dimensional Compensators to Save This Boy's Life? (Spoiler: You Don't)\n\nForty-Nine: He Chose the Wrong Day to Beg for His Life\n\nFifty: The Skandis War as You've Never Seen It Before\n\nFifty-One: They Thought They'd Won Until They Found out They'd Lost\n\nFifty-Two: To Get Your Free Confession Just Follow These Simple Steps\n\nFifty-Three: Happy Endings Don't Kill People\u2014Guns Do\n\nExcerpt from \"For Tonight We Might Die\"\n\n_About the Authors_\n\n_Books by Patrick Ness and James Goss_\n\n_Back Ad_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_About the Publisher_\n\n## ONE\n\n## READ THE TERRIBLE TRUTH THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW UNTIL PAGE 119\n\nAre you coming to get me?\n\nPlease tell me you're coming to get me.\n\n'Cos I really thought I was doing the right thing. Okay, some of my friends said I went too far. Actually, fine, I lost a few friends because of what I did. But it was all jokes and bants. That was all it was.\n\nWell, that was all it was when it started. There's a site\u2014truthordare.com. They wanted us to post stuff to it. And really, if I've got to spell that out then really, eyeroll.gif. You get the picture\u2014stuff about yourself you don't want people to know; stuff about your friends they'd hate the world finding out, or, you know, risky things\u2014riding a hoverboard in traffic, playing Pok\u00e9mon Go underwater, or what I did\u2014that old thing of putting your hand on a table and stabbing a knife between the fingers up and down, down and up, faster and faster.\n\nGuess what? Good news, I can still play the recorder. Turns out, I'm really good at it. I'm also really good at betraying my friends\u2014given a choice between my secrets and theirs? No contest. Phone peeping out of your bag, Gmail left unattended? Give it to me, I shall be the master of it. And the world shall laugh at you.\n\nBut, right, I was doing it for a good cause. We were trying to stop the spread of Skandis\u2014they said it was a disease. I guess, you know, strictly speaking, yeah, fine, that's sort of right.\n\nBut now I know what Skandis really is. And it's worse than a disease. And I'm doing all I can to stop it. Because I've got to. We all have to. Or the Earth will be destroyed.\n\nI'll tell you what happened to me, okay? I played the game, only I didn't realise it was just a training level for something else. I didn't know what I was heading for as I climbed up the leaderboard. I just thought\u2014I dunno, maybe a free holiday or a T-shirt or something. Not . . . not that I'd vanish. Kidnapped right out of this world. Wake up somewhere else.\n\nAnd then I'd find out what Skandis really is.\n\nNow that I know? I'm doing all I can to stop Skandis.\n\nBut what I really want? When I'm not screaming, when I'm not so scared? When I'm not doing the most daring stuff I've ever done?\n\nOkay, then, here's a truth about me, the terrible truth that I don't dare tell anyone: what I really want is for someone to come and get me and take me home. I want my mum.\n\nSo.\n\nCan I come home now?\n\n## TWO\n\n## WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE ALIEN-FACE-IN-A-BOX EMOJI\n\nQuestion: What will YOU do to stop Skandis?\n\nHi.\n\nI'm not a doctor.\n\nWell, obviously. What doctor wears board shorts and bunny ears?\n\nBut I'm taking some time out from my busy schedule of being YouTube famous to tell you all about Skandis. Skandis is spreading. And we need to get together and stop it.\n\nI know you're probably like 'yeah, right,' but Skandis is real. And it's not like Brexit or Donald Trump or Nicki Minaj. Skandis can be stopped.\n\nTogether, we can cure Skandis. Now, come on, lean closer, and I'm going to tell you how . . .\n\n## THREE\n\n## WHEN HE LOST HIS LEG THEY SAID HE WOULD NEVER PLAY FOOTBALL AGAIN, BUT HE SAID NO\n\nIt started with the ice, and Ram was fine with the ice. It struck him as a lot of effort. It wasn't that he didn't like effort. Whatever his dad would have told you, Ram wasn't lazy. He liked doing things, he was simply selective about what he actually did.\n\nLearning how to make his new leg work? Worth it. Tipping a bucket of ice over your head? He'd get back to you.\n\nThat morning he was running and thinking about the ice. It helped take his mind off how very slightly wrong his leg was. It just wouldn't do _leg_ correctly. He'd been assured that the artificial limb contained lots of smart technology. Intuitive gimbals. Actuated flesh. Nano-level balancing.\n\nSimulated hair. But, for all that, Ram and his leg still didn't quite trust each other.\n\nYou're asking a lot of a leg. You're asking it to be there for you. It's constantly helping out with really amazing things, like keeping you standing upright, letting you walk, and climbing stairs; stairs really are such a leap of faith that it's amazing we didn't invent the lift before the wheel.\n\nRam's old leg did all that he asked of it without getting in the way, without even reminding him that it was there. Now that it was gone, he really, really missed it. Because he and his new leg were constantly second-guessing each other. It was like having a butler for a limb. Ram would make that little bit of extra effort when stepping with his false leg, just to make sure he landed really firmly, and his artificial limb would push back, just the tiniest twitch, as if clearing its throat and saying, 'Forgive me, I'm not sure you quite meant me to do that.' It did it, every single time. His leg kept reminding him that it was there. Little pulses racing up his thigh. 'Just got you to the pavement', 'Just stepped around that dog turd', 'Avoided stumbling over that rut on the pitch, no, don't thank me'.\n\nRam had never really understood what the phrase 'passive-aggressive' had meant before. Everyone used it, about teachers, mean kids, or crisps, but Ram knew, absolutely knew, that he had a passive-aggressive leg. It was so judgmental too. It made it quite clear that it was a precision instrument and that kicking a ball in a certain direction just seemed to be inflicting unnecessary damage on it for no apparent purpose. Every time he tried to kick a ball his foot flinched, which isn't really the body language that makes for a successful career in football.\n\nHence the morning runs. When he'd suggested taking up jogging, his dad had been keen. Overkeen. Really 'waiting for him in the hall in sweatpants and with him 100 percent of the way' keen. Luckily that had passed, and now Ram got to go running on his own\u2014down the road, over the footbridge, round the scrubby park and back, all the time hoping that instinct would kick in. It didn't. His leg kept telling him 'down and safe' every step of the way. So he distracted himself with thinking about the ice.\n\nThe videos had started cropping up online a week ago. People tipping a bucket of ice over their heads for charity. It was all a bit 2014. But the practicalities of it all kept Ram occupied while his leg kept telling him it was there, and it was fine.\n\nIt was the ice that troubled him. There were a couple of trays in the freezer\u2014maybe about two dozen ice cubes. So that wasn't going to fill a bucket. You'd need to go to the supermarket, buy a bag. But supermarkets only ever seemed to keep a couple of bags in stock\u2014not enough to cope with a barbecue, let alone a charity craze. And EVERYONE was doing it. Even the Third Years. Where did they get the ice? From a pub? Did they stockpile it?\n\nToday Ram was working on the Stockpiling Theory with a dedication that would have startled his maths teacher. If he could make three batches of ice a day, and got an extra tray, he could maybe knock up a hundred cubes a day. How many ice cubes would it take to make a bucket of water ice-cold? Perhaps three days of planning and he'd have enough.\n\nThree days. Making it Wednesday.\n\nRam stopped considering it for a moment as his ankle had just proudly informed him that it had failed to twist over some gravel.\n\nCould he hold out till Wednesday?\n\nThe problem with tipping a bucket of ice over his head was that Ram didn't want to do it. Pretty much the rest of the football team had, one by one, posting videos of themselves shrieking, 'I'm doing the ice bucket for Skandis!' and then dousing themselves. Recently someone had finished by crying, 'And now it's your turn, Ram.'\n\nWhich had seemed a bit provocative. He'd kind of considered doing it, just to get it out of the way, but then April had said, completely casually, 'You'd only be doing it to get the attention from posting a topless video of yourself.'\n\nThat had stopped him. For one thing, she was wrong. Completely wrong. Totally wrong. Colchester wrong. Yes, some of the guys had got A LOT of attention from their videos but that really, absolutely wasn't his motive. For one thing, he'd wear a T-shirt. A tight one with the sleeves hacked off.\n\nAnyway, April. Recently stuff she'd said carried a bit more weight. Like it was in a slightly different font. Odd. But he definitely wasn't not doing it just because April was against it.\n\nRam paused at the park gate and told his leg to shut up for a moment. Why had sentences suddenly got so complicated?\n\nThe answer was actually pretty simple. Aliens. Aliens had invaded his school. Before they'd gone, there'd been consequences. 'Consequences' wasn't the right word. The nearest thing to the right word was just one long, howling scream in a very dark room.\n\nBut fine, let's go with aliens had invaded the school and there'd been consequences. They'd killed his girlfriend. They'd cut off his leg. They'd massacred a load of people (which no one was talking about). That weird kid in class? An alien prince. His football coach? Bit alien. The teacher who hated him? An alien. And, for complicated reasons, April's heart was now alien.\n\nAbout the only person Ram knew who could describe it clearly would be Tanya. He didn't like Tanya, not as such, but he understood the point of her. Tanya looked at the world through slightly narrowed eyes and called it as she saw it. Also, she never handed in homework late, so the world seemed to be forever on her side. Even if she was, like, twelve or something.\n\nRam had been watching one of the ice bucket videos yesterday. Tanya had appeared over his shoulder. She somehow did this, despite being smaller than him. She was asking him a question. Frowning with annoyance, he made an elaborate pantomime of pausing the video and pulling off his headphones, and then looked at her.\n\n'What?' he'd said, annoyed.\n\nShe'd carried on looking at the ice frozen over the screaming footballer.\n\n'Don't you think that's odd?' she said.\n\n'Wouldn't know. Not done it.' He wondered why he sounded so defensive.\n\n'Didn't say you had.' She was just staring at him, not blinking. 'But it's interesting. I mean, statistically, I can understand why one person would tip ice over their head. But two, I'm not so sure. Especially when everyone's been there, done that before.'\n\n'Well, it's for Skandis,' muttered Ram. 'Some kind of charity. An American one, I guess.'\n\n'Right.' Tanya chewed the word. 'Nearly the whole football team's done it now. You haven't. Has there been any peer pressure? You know, people asking you why you haven't?'\n\n'Apart from you?' Ram asked. 'Not really.' He put his headphones back on and watched the end of the video.\n\n_'And now it's your turn, Ram.'_\n\nHe looked up. Tanya had gone.\n\nRam finished his run and went to training. His school clothes were in his backpack. He would shower afterwards then go to class and that would all be fine.\n\nHe pulled off his hoodie, stuffed it in a locker, changed into his football boots, and tried not to notice how silent the changing room was.\n\nThe rest of his team was there. But they weren't talking. They weren't talking _to_ him. He just knew it. It was all very subtle. It wasn't like someone had come up to him and said anything. There was just that vague sense that he was in the room but he didn't belong to it anymore. He knew better than to ask. There was nothing worse than asking. Confronting the problem. No.\n\nTo be fair, it wasn't anything new. When he'd been the team's star player, that distance had already been there in the air. Even while they hugged him and cheered him on, there was still that slight whiff of 'why him?'. They all knew how good he was. How naturally talented. How it was only a matter of time before he got the dream life that definitely included sports cars.\n\nThat weird atmosphere had only increased ever since he'd lost his leg. He'd not been able to tell anyone. Not say, 'Look, my leg got chopped off and this is the best they could do. Pretty neat, but don't worry, I'll get the hang of it'. He couldn't say anything. Couldn't do the wounded hero act. Couldn't scream about how unfair it was. He got lots of sympathy for the death of his girlfriend, Rachel, but as far as they were concerned, he'd suddenly gone from star player to someone who really shouldn't be on the team anymore.\n\nNow, the fact that he wasn't throwing cold water over himself gave them the perfect opportunity to vent their frustrations. He was no longer the star player, he was no longer the ex-star player having a bad patch, and he was no longer one of them.\n\nHe hung back, letting the rest of the team filter out towards the pitch. Neil, the only other guy who'd not done the challenge, was still tying his shoes and making a meal out of it. Ram suspected he really didn't fancy being there either.\n\nRam sat down on the bench next to him as casually as really awkward could be.\n\n'You doing it today?' he said. Neil said nothing.\n\n'You got the ice?' Ram said.\n\nNeil looked up, like it was the least important thing in the world. 'Thought you didn't care,' he said vaguely, tugging strands of hair in the mirror.\n\n'No,' insisted Ram. 'I do.' That sounded a bit like a bleat. 'It's just, if you're going to do it . . . I mean, isn't the ice thing a bit, you know, old? Can't you do something else? Something better?'\n\nNeil didn't look away from the mirror. 'Got anything in mind?'\n\n'No.' Ram heard himself trying to laugh. 'Just, you know. Ice, bucket, gasp. It's not . . .'\n\nNeil tugged at his jersey, neatening it even more. 'So that's it?' he said quietly. 'You're not joining in because it's boring.'\n\n'Just don't see the point.' Ram faked a big smile. 'If I do something, it'll be really amazing.'\n\n'I'll wait,' Neil said.\n\n'Also, not sure what Skandis is. That's all.'\n\nNeil shrugged. 'Google it,' he said, and walked out. Ram got his phone out of his locker. He tapped 'Skandis' in, then stopped. He closed the locker and went outside. He'd sort it out later.\n\nAfterwards, he felt like an idiot.\n\n'I'm doing that ice challenge,' he announced to April. Very much in passing. Very much conversational.\n\n'Right,' she said. She was leaning against a pillar, sketching away in a notebook. Somehow she made the simple act of doodling look utterly dismissive. Around them, people ran from one classroom to the next. April seemed completely uncaring, her eyes barely focused on the world around them. Charlie had said that it was because April was connected to a distant planet, could maybe even glimpse it, but Ram got the feeling that April had always been a little bit this way. Some people just aren't quite in focus.\n\nTanya rocked up. Now, there was someone who was completely in focus.\n\n'So, I'm doing the ice thing,' he repeated, hoping that she'd say something.\n\nTanya frowned, and when she did so it was a thing of moment.\n\n'You quite sure about that?' she said. Her words swung like dumbbells. 'For Skandis?'\n\n'Yeah,' said Ram. 'It's a disease. I saw a video about a girl who had it. You know. Brave in a shaven-headed way.'\n\n'You _sure_?' repeated Tanya. She looked doubtful.\n\nApril focused on Tanya in a way that she never did on Ram.\n\n'Something's happened, hasn't it?' April said.\n\n'Oh yeah.'\n\nThat was when Ram heard the ambulance sirens.\n\n## FOUR\n\n## EIGHT THINGS THE MEDIA HASN'T TOLD YOU ABOUT CUP-A-SOUP\n\n**VIDEO TITLE: The Cup-a-Soup Challenge**\n\n_The football pitch. Neil sitting in a chair. A crowd of friends. An extension cable. A mug._\n\n_A kettle._\n\n_'Hi, my name's Neil and this is my Cup-a-Soup challenge! Oh yeah._\n\n_Today I'm doing something different. That's right. Ice is yesterday._\n\n_I've picked my favourite flavour of Cup-a-Soup._\n\n_It's chicken. Yeah. Go chicken! And now I'm going to wear it._\n\n_My friend Paul here has boiled the kettle._\n\n___I'm passing him the mug. That's right. Stir out the floaters. Nice one!_\n\n_Talking of chicken, I'd like to thank Ram for suggesting I do something different. Hey, Ram, I'm doing this for Skandis. Isn't it about time you did something too?_\n\n_Now, Paul, let's make soup! Tip it! Tip it! Tip it!'_\n\n_And then the screaming started._\n\n'Well,' observed Miss Quill, 'that'll be a short-lived craze.'\n\nThe ambulance was pulling out of the car park, leaving behind a mournful crowd taking shocked selfies.\n\nMiss Quill's fingers pulled away from the venetian blind, letting the metal slats snap back into place. Almost back into place. One slat was crooked. Earth children were such careless eavesdroppers. She reached out with an expert finger and thumb, pinching the metal until it bent back, just a bit off perfect. Finished, she rubbed the dust from between her fingers and turned around.\n\nCharlie sat on a desk, watching her carefully.\n\nThey were many things to each other.\n\nIf you'd asked Miss Quill, she would have told you that Charlie was the following:\n\nHer owner\n\nHer jailor\n\nHer next victim\n\nAnnoying\n\nIf you'd asked Charlie, he would have told you that Miss Quill was:\n\nHis very reluctant bodyguard\n\nA moral snake\n\nLikely to betray him\n\nAnnoying\n\nThey shared a house. It was quite a nice house. There were many practical reasons for them to share a house. It made the whole business of the last of the Quill guarding the last Rhodian Prince fairly easy. But on every other level it was a complete nightmare.\n\nSometimes Charlie would open his bedroom door at night to find Miss Quill standing outside.\n\n'What . . . What are you doing?'\n\n'Same as ever,' she'd sigh wearily. 'Watching over you. You going to use the bathroom or should I put the kettle on?'\n\nThis had become even more awkward since Charlie's boyfriend had moved in.\n\nIf anyone could cope with a boyfriend who'd just arrived from another planet, it was Matteusz. He was easygoing and terribly calm. When he discovered that Charlie had no idea how to cross a road, he had simply ignored the horns, carried him onto the grassy bank of a roundabout, sat him down, and explained how roads worked. 'Oh. Back home, traffic just stopped for me,' Charlie had muttered, looking vaguely hurt that such a rule did not apply here.\n\nBut even Matteusz, easygoing, calm, thoughtful Matteusz, found Miss Quill hard to deal with.\n\n'She does not like me,' Matteusz had said in his measured Polish accent to Charlie one night.\n\nCharlie had shrugged. 'She does not like anyone.'\n\n'Yes, but she really doesn't like me. She follows me around the kitchen. I just go there to make some tea, but she follows my every move. Even when I pick a mug, she is judging me and she is judging the mug.'\n\n'She's probably wondering if you're trying to kill me. How is your tea?'\n\n'Fine. Here is yours. Quill drank from it.'\n\n'She would. As I said, she's probably wondering if you're trying to kill me.'\n\nThey sat on the end of Charlie's bed, drinking tea.\n\nOne main difference between Quill and Charlie was that each thought they understood human beings better. They both found things to admire in them, but for entirely different reasons. Quill saw them as angry, selfish, and violent. Charlie found them impulsive, confusing, and strange.\n\nSometimes, when they had nothing better to do, Charlie and his bodyguard would stand in her classroom, watching the people go by. It wasn't that they liked spending time with each other. Sometimes it just happened and it felt sort of right.\n\nToday they had watched the boy being stretchered into the ambulance, his face wrapped in bandages.\n\n'He'll live,' remarked Quill. 'Unlike a lot of the pupils here. They really are fodder, aren't they? Still, as I said, at least it will be a short-lived craze.'\n\nCharlie stared at her, considering. 'The boy is called Neil. He is my age. He has severe burns to his scalp and face. He is in terrible pain. He will require plastic surgery and will probably be disfigured for life.'\n\nQuill shrugged. She'd never shrugged before coming to the Earth and now she found it easier than breathing. 'He tipped boiling water over his face. He deserves what he gets.'\n\n'But why would you do that?' Charlie said.\n\nQuill didn't turn around from the window. 'Ask one of your pets.'\n\nAs Charlie approached, Ram slunk away.\n\nCharlie had noticed how little Ram wanted to be around him. There were probably lots of reasons. He noticed that Ram's artificial leg was still overcompensating, and wondered if he should offer to look at the default settings, but also knew enough about social interaction to realise that it would probably not be an easy conversation.\n\n'Please drop your trousers, I wish to look at your legs' was all very well with Matteusz, but he doubted it was in common usage. A shame, as he felt responsible for Ram losing his leg and wanted to somehow make it better.\n\nHuman life appeared to be a series of guilty interactions where people told one another how sorry they were for things that either were their fault\u2014or they were pretending were their fault in order to make things better\u2014or else they were apologising for things that had happened because of weather, microbes, or gravity. It was all marvellously confusing and Charlie was determined to find out how saying sorry worked. But maybe he wouldn't start on Ram's leg today.\n\nCharlie casually pretended he hadn't noticed Ram slinking away. 'I did not see Ram leave just now,' he told April. 'I did not hear the slight creak of his leg.'\n\n'I see.' April looked up at him. She really was very pretty. Charlie came from a world of rigid rules and structure, where everyone was swept into straight lines. April was a glorious tangle. Her long dark hair should have been rigid as a pendulum, but instead it cascaded and jumped and let itself be pushed about. She was always pushing it from one side to the other and then sweeping it back. When he was growing up, Charlie had been taught the art of sitting still, of maintaining a calm and regal and reserved posture, whereas April gloried in constant movement. If she wasn't fingering her hair, she was tugging at her clothes or moving her legs or tapping a pen against a book. It was all so unnecessary and he found it delightful to watch.\n\n'Why did Ram go?' he asked. April liked how direct Charlie was. No hesitation, no caution, no tact. 'Is it because he doesn't like me?'\n\n'No,' said April. 'The boy who burned himself\u2014he was on the football team with Ram. He's upset.'\n\n'I see,' said Charlie. 'I do not understand. Why did he do that to himself? He has disfigured himself. On my world, the plume priests did something similar as an act of political protest. Is that the case here?'\n\nApril considered. 'Nooooooo,' she said.\n\nThey needed a laptop, and they needed Tanya. Normally both were to be found together.\n\n'I can't believe no one's taken it down,' she said, chewing on a strawberry lace as the video played again on truthordare.com. 'Look at the number of views it has got.' She tapped at the bottom of the screen. 'See the little plus sign at the end\u2014that means it's only an approximation. That means the number of views are growing faster than you can count. People love watching other people do stupid things.' She clicked to refresh the video.\n\nIt reloaded, paused, and then showed a short video about a famous footballer discussing car insurance with a horse. 'Ahha!' Tanya laughed. 'That proves it's popular\u2014they've slapped adverts on it. They'll be making a mint off this.'\n\n'But this is a video of human suffering.' Charlie spoke slowly. It was the tone he used when he was finding out something about human beings he was not entirely pleased by. 'Who would want to make money off that? Would it be this Skandis charity?'\n\n'Oh no.' Tanya bit off another strawberry lace. She offered Charlie the remaining half. He declined. 'No, it's the site that serves the video. They make the cash. Neil gets the money from people who said they'd pay a couple of quid for the ice bucket challenge. That goes to Skandis. If, that is, anyone pays up\u2014right now they probably really don't feel like it.'\n\nCharlie fell silent, watching Neil fall screaming out of his chair, writhing on the grass as the camera whipped up, thought better of it, then closed in on his scalded face.\n\n'So Neil did this for nothing?'\n\nNeil continued to scream.\n\n## FIVE\n\n## AMAZING, IF TRUE: CHILDREN ARE VANISHING AND YOU'VE NOT NOTICED\n\n**Blog Post on AnotherNewsSite.com**\n\n**Kids are vanishing.**\n\n**Remember the 'Welcome to Twin Peaks' road sign? You're probably too young. God, I think typing that sentence makes me feel worse than you do reading it. Anyway, they had a similar sign in Sunnydale and in Bon Temps, Louisiana (it's the town in True Blood, Grandma).**\n\n**Anyway, the thing about the 'Welcome to Twin Peaks' road sign was that it had the town's population printed on it. And it never changed. Despite all the serial killers living there. The number never went down. And the** **** **joke\u2014the joke that everyone made\u2014was that it should be like the numbers at a gas station. Or a little neon display.**\n\n**Just ticking down, every week.**\n\n**But that never happened.**\n\n**Anyway, perhaps it's time that it did. Because kids are going missing, and at a rate so fast the digits on the sign would be SPINNING.**\n\n**You heard me right. I don't know how or why\u2014but I tell you this: Educate yourselves, people. Do some Googling: 'missing kids'. Check your timeline for pictures of the missing\u2014teenagers going out and never being seen again. That's right\u2014there's suddenly a lot, aren't there?**\n\n**It's happening right now, everyone.**\n\n**I don't know what's causing it, or why, but the children are going missing.**\n\n## SIX\n\n## THE ONE WEIRD TRICK ABOUT MOTHERS THAT EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW\n\nRam went to the hospital to see Neil.\n\nHe'd been feeling bad about it all day. Well, all week.\n\nIt wasn't the kind of feeling bad that got better. It wasn't like a torn ligament. The guilt just made him feel worse. The idea that he'd caused it. Especially as he didn't feel like telling anyone that it was all his fault. They'd either say it wasn't (not true) or they'd say it was his fault, which would make him feel worse.\n\nSo, he ignored the guilt. It got worse.\n\nStrangely, his walking got worse. Of course it did.\n\n'You're not helping,' he said to his new leg. It didn't reply, and instead it led him to the hospital.\n\nThe hospital was one of those grand Victorian redbrick buildings, which has had ugly new bits jabbed into it.\n\nSigns had been put up everywhere, so many of them that nothing seemed to make sense anymore. There was a little scrubby garden where old men sat smoking. There was a coffee shop full of anxious relatives. Porters wheeled empty beds past. Everywhere there was a smell not quite covered up by disinfectant.\n\nEventually he found the burns unit. It was past an unmanned reception area, up a handsome wooden staircase that had been blocked off with netting to stop anyone throwing themselves off it. He clambered up, his leg telling him each and every time one of the steps was just that little bit uneven.\n\nHe wondered about getting the lift\u2014but no, that would be giving in. If he took the lift once, that would be it. After his grandad had that fall, he'd 'tried out' a mobility scooter, just for a week or two. He'd never got out of it. No, Ram wasn't going to give up. Still, four flights of these stairs was quite hard going.\n\nHe got to the top. Instead of a carved oak door, there was an automatic one that slid open to reveal a corridor that was floored with linoleum, the walls covered with hand sanitiser dispensers and posters asking him alarming questions about his bodily functions.\n\n'Well, this is so depressing,' he said aloud.\n\n'Ram?'\n\nHe turned.\n\nStaring at him, eyes wet and bright, was Neil's mother. He recognised her from the touchlines and barbecues. Even in hospital she looked glamorous. Neil's mother always dressed like it was summer. He'd usually found it a bit ridiculous, but now, here, it looked so sad. As though she was hoping for something better out of life than rain.\n\nShe hugged him, which Ram found surprising and a little bit unwelcome. He'd thought that Neil was the last person in the world he'd wanted to see, but the real answer turned out to be Neil's mum.\n\n_I am so sorry I maimed your son._\n\n'It's so good of you to come,' she breathed into his ear as he took an unwelcome gulp of her perfume. It wasn't that she was wearing too much, or that it was horrible\u2014he just didn't want to be smelling it.\n\n_I didn't ask for this._\n\nShe released him from the hug and he stood back quickly, trying not to show his relief. 'So good of you to come,' she repeated. Then she stopped. She was waiting for him to say something.\n\nRam mumbled a few words about how Neil was.\n\n'He's asleep,' she said sadly. 'He's had some grafts, and that's tiring, so . . .' Oh, that sounded bad. The immediate relief that he wouldn't have to see Neil today was mingled with the knowledge that he'd have to do it tomorrow. Or the day after. Or next week. It was a problem that wasn't going to go away.\n\nShe patted at a plastic chair and he sat down on it next to her. In the room opposite, an old woman was crying in front of the television.\n\n'I'm so sorry,' said Ram. He just blurted it out, and felt a sudden relief.\n\n'Oh, don't be,' said Neil's mum. 'Not your fault.' She switched on a smile, trying to look bright.\n\n_It is my fault. It is so totally my fault._\n\n'I feel bad about it,' he said.\n\n'Yeah well.' She sniffed. 'It's good of you to come. So good.' She pushed a hand through her hair, and her brave smile gave up. 'I wasn't going to say it, but you know what? You're the only one of the team to have come along. The only one.' She looked a lot less sunbeamy. 'The new coach rang up. That was something.' She folded her hands and thinned her lips. 'But he was so careful with what he said. I think he was reading from a card. Making sure he wasn't admitting liability. In case I was recording it. Imagine!' She threw her hands up in the air. 'I was in here. Waiting to find out if my son was scarred for life, and he's wondering if I'm recording my calls for a lawsuit. Some people . . .' She shook her head, and didn't seem at all bright or chirpy. 'I just don't know. I just don't know.'\n\n'I'm sorry,' Ram said again. _If I say it enough times you'll forgive me._\n\n'Oh yeah.' She squeezed his hand. 'I dunno what I was expecting. But it would have been nice if the team had come round. Would have meant the world to Neil.'\n\n'They've been busy,' said Ram. And then stopped. Neil's mum stared at him. Her lips went very thin again and she let go of his hand.\n\n'Busy?' she hissed.\n\n'Sorry,' said Ram. 'Wrong word. I don't know. I just don't know.'\n\n'You don't have to make excuses for them,' she snapped, twisting a ring round a finger. 'Ram, don't make excuses for other people. Lessens you.'\n\nThey sat in some more silence then. The moment came around for Ram to say something. It passed. Another moment came around. He let it go. On the third pass:\n\n'I said he should do something different.'\n\n'Did you?' she said politely.\n\n'Other than the ice bucket challenge. Everyone's done the ice bucket challenge. I told him to do something different. Just that. I didn't mean for him to do what he did. I swear. I am so sorry. I really am\u2014'\n\nNeil's mum gripped his arm. For a moment it was too hard and then she let go and patted his sweatshirt, folding it between her fingertips. Ram stopped talking and lowered his eyes.\n\n'Suppose,' she said, 'he'd sat in a paddling pool full of ice instead. Would we be here?'\n\n'No,' said Ram.\n\n'Or tipped cold baked beans on his head?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'Only my Neil would lack the plain common sense to do what he did. He's sharp, but he's not bright.' Neil's mum leaned back in the grey plastic chair and she smiled again, a sad fondness lighting up her face. 'Bless him.' She wiped her eyes. 'No. I wish you hadn't told him to try something different, but he came up with the stupid idea. Not you. Am I right?' She jabbed Ram in the ribs, and her eyes shone.\n\n'Yeah,' Ram mumbled and for a moment he thought he was going to cry.\n\n'Then there we are. My son, my lovely son, is an idiot for thinking he could pour boiling water on his head. But you know who I really blame?' Her eyes narrowed, squeezing tears out. 'The kid who boiled the kettle.' She pointed to the seat next to her. 'I'd like to see him sat right there. Not you. I'd like him to see what he did. I can believe my son was daft. I can't believe the people on that team were so daft. Yeah. That's the boy I'd like to see.'\n\nThis time the silence was a bit more natural.\n\nThen she stood up. 'Shall we go and see Neil? Maybe he'll be awake.'\n\n'Yes.' Ram stood up. 'I'd like that.'\n\nAs they walked off, Neil's mum nudged him. 'Your limp,' she said.\n\n'What?' He blushed.\n\n'It's gone.'\n\nRam blinked.\n\n## SEVEN\n\n## IS IT MAGIC? WE NEED YOUR HELP TO SOLVE THIS MYSTERY\n\nThere had been a boy at the bus stop. That's what everyone could agree on.\n\nSome of the kids from Coal Hill said they knew him, but only in the way that, if something happened to someone, people always said that they knew them and had definitely met them. You know, at a party, or a club, or they sort of went out with your sister. Even though he didn't go to Coal Hill, lots of people said they knew him.\n\nAnyway, the boy. At the bus stop. He had definitely been there.\n\nThat much CCTV could tell you with certainty.\n\nHe'd been waiting for the late bus home. He'd actually had a pretty great day\u2014no reason to go missing. The police and his parents checked the footage. He was standing there, waiting for the bus. He was, if you squinted, smiling. He was playing with his phone ('He was always playing with that thing' said his dad), and occasionally, if someone he vaguely knew walked past, he'd flash the phone screen at them, showing off about something.\n\nHe did not, experts admitted, look like someone planning on running away. He looked like a boy, any boy, waiting for a bus.\n\nThe bus pulls up in front of the stop, and, for a moment, the boy is blocked from the view of the CCTV.\n\nBut that shouldn't matter, because there are cameras on board the bus. They should show him if he gets on. But he does not get on.\n\nThe bus pulls away. And the boy is no longer there.\n\nWhat's happened to him?\n\n## EIGHT\n\n## FIFTEEN CATS THAT LOOK SHOCKINGLY LIKE MISS QUILL\n\nThe school forgot about Neil and his hot soup. So much kept happening.\n\nOne of the last things the headmaster of Coal Hill School did in life was interview a trainee teacher. The trainee was a bright, hopeful young woman called Victoria Prim, who would later on in life earn a lot of money in accountancy and marry her neighbour who had waited forty years for her to ask. But today she was a young, slightly too-eager trainee who dreamed of teaching poetry and one day mounting a school production of _Godspell_.\n\nAt the end of the predictably exhausting interview, Mr Armitage crawled towards the final question. 'Ms Prim, have you any questions you'd like to ask me?'\n\nMs Prim had leaned forward earnestly across the desk. 'Tell me, Headmaster,' she'd demanded, 'what's a typical day at Coal Hill School like?'\n\nMr Armitage had tried not to groan. 'Well, now,' he'd replied, reaching for the clich\u00e9 used to sell awful jobs through the ages, 'there really is no typical day . . .'\n\nThat afternoon, his skin was torn off by an interdimensional dragon.\n\nTime passed. And, as time passed, Cup-a-Soup Neil was seen as one of the lucky ones.\n\nMore and more videos started to appear. Just one look at the 'Most Watched' videos on truthordare.com told you all you needed to know:\n\n_This Charity Ice Skater Will Astound You\u2014It's Summer_\n\n_She'd Never Windsurfed Before Today. Who Knew There'd Be a Hurricane?_\n\n_27 Insane Charity Challenges. You'll Lose It at #16_\n\n_His Nana Lent Him Her Mobility Scooter. She Did Not Predict a Motorway_\n\n___They Told Her She Could Never Fly. They Might Have Been Right_\n\n_She Set Out to Eat Ten Insects. Guess Which One Is Poisonous?_\n\n_The Unexpected Truth About Skydiving Blindfolded_\n\n_The School Said No to This Netball Team's Naked Calendar. They Did It Anyway_\n\n_He'd Never Eaten Fire Before. He Never Will Again_\n\n_Twelve Tips for Being Buried Alive. #5 Will Destroy You_\n\n_They Said He'd Never Eat Penguin. He Wished They Were Wrong_\n\n_Read Me or I'll Kill Myself_\n\n_Eleven Reasons Why You Might Die in the Next Hour. #7 Is Standing Right Behind You_\n\nNo one at truthordare.com took Neil's video down. It was labelled under _Epic Fails_. It didn't even make the top ten. His act of immense stupidity and personal tragedy became tiny under the tide of other efforts, of people outcompeting one another for charity.\n\nNeil's mum tried seeing if anyone was interested in raising funds to help get Neil some more plastic surgery. A lot of people really meant to do something, and the football team really talked about it, but they were kind of busy working out whether or not to do a charity calendar for truthordare.com. Enthusiasm petered out.\n\n'I would like you to explain the internet to me,' Miss Quill said. She'd asked Tanya to stay behind after class.\n\nTanya stared at her teacher with worried amazement.\n\nAs usual, Miss Quill's expression was as unreadable as an ancient curse.\n\n'You want me to explain the internet?' Tanya measured out her words. Then gave up. 'Seriously?'\n\nMiss Quill nodded. 'We had similar, superior systems on Rhodia, of course.' She waved any other possibility aside. 'But technology evolves to fit the races it serves. I am not sure if I entirely understand how this system serves you.'\n\n'Serves?' Tanya considered the phrase.\n\nMiss Quill nodded. 'On Rhodia, everything serves something. That is how it all fits together.' She scowled then rapped a finger on Tanya's laptop. 'You seem to understand these systems. To an extent. Perhaps you could explain truthordare.com to me.'\n\n'The site?'\n\n'Well, I'd hardly ask you to explain the name,' Miss Quill snapped. 'It's ridiculous.'\n\n**EMAIL NEWSLETTER FROM TRUTHORDARE.COM**\n\n**A YOUNG GUY NEEDS YOUR HELP AND MORE**\n\n**Hi [firstname]!**\n\n**How are you doing? We just thought we'd like to let you know that people are still suffering from Skandis and you should know that we could all be working harder to fight Skandis once and for all.**\n\n**We constantly worry about it at truthordare.com HQ, and here are just a few of the remarkable stories that keep us going through the night:**\n\n**Keith Is Blades**\n\n**What about Keith, who is doing a twenty-four-hour blade-a-thon round Regent's Park? He's only just fought off cancer and now he's determined to battle Skandis too? With just a click you can send him a fiver.**\n\n******Truth for Sami**\n\n**Sami found out her fianc\u00e9 had been cheating on her with her best friend. So she followed them then put on a slideshow of it at her wedding before selling off the gifts and giving them to Skandis. Amazing!**\n\n**What about You?**\n\n**What are you doing to prevent the spread of Skandis? Send us your stories or stay tuned to the site for one of Seraphin's celebrity vlogs. This week he's been shopping for kettles with May June. Find out how it went tomorrow. You won't stop laughing.**\n\n**That's all for now!**\n\nThe light from the laptop screen made Miss Quill's severe face look just that little more severe. She was frowning, which, to be fair, was like saying that other people were breathing.\n\n'I don't get this site,' she muttered. 'It is full of lies.'\n\n'Oh, that's just the internet,' Tanya said. As she said the words, she wondered if she'd made a mistake. Miss Quill was sometimes very literal. But it did feel peculiar. Sharing a desk in a classroom with a woman who wasn't just an alien, or an assassin, but also her teacher. It was so easy to put a foot wrong.\n\n'Really?' Miss Quill didn't look up from the screen. She let her voice project the right level of curiosity and withering disdain.\n\n'Oh yes, nothing on the internet is . . . you know . . .' Tanya wondered where her words had gone and worried they were leaving her to it. She shrugged.\n\n'I understand,' Miss Quill said. 'On Rhodia we would spread misinformation about troop numbers and food stocks and where our armies would be based. You use the internet for the same thing? That is what all those pictures of eggs and beaches are for?'\n\n'Well, um, yes.' Tanya noticed a small twitch at the edges of Miss Quill's mouth. Was she teasing her? Surely not. 'You tell everyone you're having an amazing time, you upload pictures of your amazing time, and maybe that convinces you that you're having an amazing time. When really, well, you're probably not, 'cos you'll have a headache, or argued with Mum in the car on the way there, or your phone's running low on charge, you know.'\n\n'All the really important things. I understand.' Miss Quill's definitely-not-a-smile broadened. 'When the Quill won a battle against the Rhodia we would broadcast videos of the slaughter. We would leave out the bodies of our fallen comrades but we would make sure we missed none of the dead Rhodia. It looked better, and their families may have been watching. This is the same thing?'\n\nTanya didn't speak for a moment. 'More or less.'\n\n'Only'\u2014Miss Quill tapped the screen with a sharp finger\u2014'this site is deceitful. It promises so much but it does not deliver. Look at this: \"Watch Her Slay This Politician\". The video does nothing of the sort. It simply shows a young woman being vaguely rude to an older man in front of an audience of bored people. Honestly, no one even gives her a knife.' She scrolled through the pages. 'See\u2014it's all Tear Him Apart, Destroy That, Shred Him, Ruin Her . . . The language is all so violent, but there's nothing behind it. This is the talk of a coward urging others on to fight.'\n\nTanya realised that, just for once, Miss Quill had got it completely right.\n\n'I am trying to work out the problem with this site,' Miss Quill continued. 'It is making people upload videos of themselves, is it not?'\n\nTanya nodded. 'I think, at some level, it's the root of the problem.'\n\nThe screen read:\n\n**TODAY ON TRUTHORDARE: MAKE US GASP!**\n\n**MAKE YOUR FRIENDS SCREAM! DO SOMETHING DARING!**\n\n******BE UNSPEAKABLE! BREAK THINGS!**\n\n**YOU'VE RAISED $14 MILLION FOR SKANDIS THIS DRIVE. YOU'RE AMAZING. TOGETHER WE'LL BEAT SKANDIS.**\n\nAnd then underneath it was a gif of a clown clapping while a cake burned.\n\n'What feudal obligation do people have to follow these challenges?' Quill asked. She occasionally tried to understand human customs, in case it explained something of them to her. It often didn't. She presumed that the challenges on the site were like ritual combat challenges. Once seen, they had to be answered. In blood.\n\nTanya shook her head. 'None. Not really. Just, you know, because it's for charity.'\n\n'For charity?' Quill stared.\n\n'Don't you have charity in space?'\n\n'Of course not. We have a quick and merciful death for the afflicted.'\n\n'But what about medical research?'\n\n'Oh, we research diseases. And, if we find them, we unleash them on our enemies.'\n\nTanya counted her fingers slowly. After a couple of goes, she was still getting ten, so she breathed out.\n\n'So, this charity. It is like a guilt that you all feel for your superior position in the world?' Quill bit thoughtfully at one of her fingernails. 'Interesting. This is not . . .'\n\n'A Quill Thing?' Tanya finished. 'Do you just gloat over the dead bodies of the conquered?'\n\nQuill nodded. 'You have learned something, finally. Tell me\u2014I can almost understand why people would follow this challenge. But why would you feel obliged to upload the video\u2014is it another social duty?'\n\n'No,' Tanya said. 'It's like people feel they have to. I don't really get it.'\n\n'Even if you look silly, or are in pain?' Quill stood, scraping back her chair as she strode over to the whiteboard.\n\n'There are so many, many terrible odds you have overcome in order to exist\u2014the simple odds of there being life on your planet, the amazing odds of your progenitors meeting, the odds of your being chosen in the womb, of successfully hatching, of growing up . . . Why waste it all on jumping off a brick wall? After all, you could use that wonderful, rare life to achieve something really amazing in battle.'\n\n'Well, that's one way of looking at it.' Tanya was beginning to think that Miss Quill could turn an IKEA catalogue into a list of reasons for going to war.\n\nMiss Quill leaned back over Tanya's laptop. 'A moment,' she said, scrolling through her search history. 'I have a query\u2014I have not spent much time on your internet.'\n\n'Actually, please,' said Tanya. 'No one really calls it that anymore. We call it the Information Superhighway.'\n\n'Ah, thank you,' said Miss Quill, not noticing Tanya's slight smirk. 'I will use that. It is a primitive system of knowledge sharing. But your Information Superhighway has one remarkable thing about it . . .' She tapped at another tab. 'What are these?'\n\nTanya squinted. 'You're kidding.'\n\n'No, no, I am not. Quill do not have a sense of humour.'\n\n'Now you're kidding.'\n\n'Perhaps.' Again that non-smile twitched. 'But why are there pictures of these animals all over your Information Superhighway?'\n\n'They're just cats,' said Tanya.\n\n'Cats?' Miss Quill sat down and stared at the screen. 'But why?'\n\n'I don't know. I really don't.'\n\nMiss Quill was now staring at a whole screen full of cats. 'There is nothing special about them. They are a waste of the pathetically tiny bandwidth that is available to you. And yet . . .'\n\nHer fingers paused over a picture of a ginger cat peeping out of a cardboard box. The little twitch at the edge of her mouth was back. 'There is something about them. Is there not?'\n\n## NINE\n\n## TRAIN DRIVERS SLAM BRAKES ON TRUTH OR DARE\n\n**First it was broken limbs and broken hearts\u2014now health and safety experts are warning that truthordare.com may cost you more. Gemma Harris investigates.**\n\n**The site truthordare.com has been contacted over 'safety concerns' regarding site users venturing onto live train tracks as part of 'dares' encouraged by the site.**\n\n**We understand players have been walking into the paths of trains at Birmingham New Street as part of a challenge they're calling 'Chicken'. Network Rail has warned that trains can reach high speeds and that 'darers' may not realise this when playing.**\n\n******The site's development team has not yet responded to questions from us, but their 'vlogging host', Seraphin, has previously said: 'Our rules are that there are no rules\u2014but that doesn't mean that you should be stupid. Only the brave, not the dumb, are needed to beat Skandis. Dare safely.'**\n\n**Network Rail, which has put up warnings on electronic signs at New Street, controls 2,500 stations as well as tracks, tunnels, and level crossings, and says trains can reach speeds of 100mph (160kmh).**\n\n**Maude Silvera, chief health and safety officer at the station, said: 'While we're delighted to see so many people working hard to beat this terrible disease, we do have safety concerns around dares taking place close to the working railway.**\n\n**'We are concerned that by staging a dare on or very close to our infrastructure, young people are likely to be distracted and even less aware than usual of the risks around them.**\n\n**'The last thing we want to do is ruin everyone's \"fun,\" but we are hoping that we can work together with \"darers\" to make the site safer.'**\n\n******The concerns of train operators join those of anxious parents as the appeal of truthordare.com spreads. Hospital emergency departments are reporting a rise in admissions resulting from the site. In addition, the charity helpline Talk Out Teens has claimed an increase in call volume as a result of personal details shared on the site. There are also several unconfirmed reports of players going missing.**\n\n**Related Content**\n\n  * **Help! My Daughter's Playing TruthOrDare!**\n  * **10 Signs You May Be Too Old for TruthOrDare**\n  * **I Told the Truth and Now I'm Single**\n  * **#FindJimmy\u2014The Hunt for a Top Darer**\n\n## TEN\n\n## THIS CHAPTER WILL PROVE YOU'VE BEEN WRONG ABOUT YOUNG MEN YOUR WHOLE LIFE\n\n**A Vlog by Seraphin on Truthordare.com**\n\n**Hi, Everyone,**\n\n**Yeah, hi. Yeah. Soooo, manic day. Just back from the theme park and that's pretty great, and the kids' hospital\u2014that was great too and there was so much to see there that I'll vlog about it all soon, but for today I'm just wandering around my flat. Yeah, I'm doing my laundry today. Look at this\u2014these are my pants. Yeah. My last set of pants. My dirty pants. Today, cringe, I am wearing no pants.**\n\n**Sorry about that, internet. I'm wearing no pants. Yeah.**\n\n******None. No pants. LE GASP!**\n\n**All I'm wearing now is this T-shirt. Yeah. The one with the sponsorship logo on it. And yes. I have been wearing that for a few days. Is that an egg stain? I believe it is. Damn you, omelette.**\n\n**That's going in the wash now too. See?**\n\n**Yes. I am starkers. In my kitchen. But that's okay. From this angle you can't see a thing. Not a thing. Apart from . . . Oops, cheeky, yes, I did just go past the full-length mirror in the hall. You can see that again. Yeah. You've seen my butt. Ha. Ha. Ha. Gif it now!**\n\n**Yeah, Seraphin's got a butt. News. Flash. Hope you like it. Now then, argh, I'm nearly out of laundry powder. My life. My life.**\n\n**So. How are you? Good. Good. Me? I'm fine. There, that's the mixed load on. Not a sports wash. What is a sports wash even for? What does that even mean? When I've been playing sport\u2014well, you've all seen me jogging. I look rank. I smell worse. What is the point of a fifteen-minute wash? No way is that going to even touch that smell. Yeuf.**\n\n******Now, I know I'm going to get tweets about that\u2014creepy tweets. Someone out there is right now demanding to smell my old sports socks and I tell you this now, Dad, you are awful. Hahahah.**\n\n**Anyway, that's the laundry on, so let's get down to work.**\n\n**'Cos this is a\u2014tanta-ta-tantatattaaaaa!\u2014sponsored vlog for truthordare.com. Their mission is simple\u2014they want your truths, your dares\u2014whatever, how shocking, how risky, how shameful\u2014because you're not doing it for you, you're doing it for Skandis.**\n\n**Yeah, okay, it's for charrrrrrrrrrriteeeeeeee. Sad face, mournful little frown, oh yeah. We're fighting Skandis. Some of the kids in hospital today, they've been battling Skandis for a long time and it is, seriously, really bad. And we can, if we get together, we can cure it.**\n\n**Truthordare.com\u2014we want your stunts, your dares, your whatevs.**\n\n**There is only one rule. There is no such thing as oversharing. Honestly. Again. I'm nekkid. If I was to tilt the camera down, two things would happen.**\n\n**1) You would see everything.**\n\n**2) The internet, well, it would melt.**\n\n**So the camera stays where it is. For now. But that may change.**\n\n**The ice challenge? That was just the start of it. What happens next . . . It's in your hands.**\n\n**Anyway, I'm going to just . . . just . . . there we are, can you see it? The washing going round in the machine? Can you see that? Lovely. Brilliant. Oh look, there go some pants. And . . . there they are again . . . We should make a YouTube channel of this. What do you think? Let me know.**\n\n**Anyway, while the washing finishes itself, I'm off to test a new hoverboard (advert up in a second, vlog later on this week). So, I'll leave you with this, my friends: Truth or Dare: You can never share too much. Never. Share. Too. Much.**\n\n**Anyway. If you enjoyed that, subscribe. If you want something similar, click on the links. Seraphin out.**\n\n## ELEVEN\n\n## THIS GIRL WANTED AN ADVENTURE HOLIDAY. YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHERE SHE ENDED UP\n\nThe girl was screaming. She was crying underneath the helmet. She knew that no one could see the tears, but they could probably hear the screaming.\n\nShe knew they were watching. She knew they were listening. She'd lost her weapon and she was wounded and they weren't going to help her, they were just going to watch her die.\n\nShe made herself look at the creature coming towards her.\n\n'NORMAL' the screen in her helmet told her, and, hysterically, she laughed. 'No way is that normal.'\n\nA tentacle whipped out towards her.\n\nShe scrabbled away, scurrying up a steep sandbank.\n\n'I've got to get out of here,' she said, looking around for a way out. Wherever she looked, her helmet told her 'ABNORMAL'.\n\n'I know what you're doing,' she said, her voice shaking.\n\n'You want me to look at that thing.' She turned and faced the creature.\n\n'NORMAL' her helmet told her.\n\n'Oh God,' she said.\n\nThe creature stopped, leaning over her, its face pushing in, curious.\n\n'NORMAL.'\n\nThe girl screamed.\n\nFor a moment the picture on her helmet juddered as something whipped across it. There was a crack, a wet, tearing noise and a final scream.\n\nThen the picture cleared. The helmet was lying on its side, the camera showing a picture of the ground, and that terrible creature dragging itself closer.\n\n'NORMAL.'\n\n## TWELVE\n\n## FIND OUT WHY THE GOATS DO NOT GET TO DANCE ON THE TUBE\n\nMatteusz had come to dread one word most of all.\n\n'Question?' That word.\n\nMatteusz looked up from filing jewels on his phone. Charlie was standing over him. He was wearing that look on his face. The really severe yet childish look that said he was about to ask about butterflies or fossil fuel or Nigel Farage or . . . well, look, it could be anything. It was always exhausting. Matteusz wondered if Charlie knew about Santa Claus. That was going to be a long day. In an emergency, he could just hide behind his Polishness until it went away.\n\nCharlie was still staring at him. Waiting for an answer. Best get on with it.\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'What is oversharing?' Charlie asked. 'I do not understand.'\n\n'Truthordare.com. The website. They are asking us to overshare. It seems very popular at Coal Hill. I wonder what that means.'\n\n'The website?'\n\n'They want videos. Like the boy who burned himself. They want more of those\u2014is that what oversharing is? Are they asking people to hurt themselves?'\n\n'Not exactly. It is about putting yourself online.'\n\n'Is the idea to create a virtual artificial version of your personality so you can be resurrected after death?' Charlie looked incredibly thoughtful, his eyes wandering to the cabinet in the corner. 'Is that it?'\n\n'Not so much, no. It is strange. You must tell everyone all of your life.'\n\n'I have no problems with that.'\n\n'You would not. But for some, it is too much.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'People like to bully. Bully?'\n\n'Yes. Bullying. Got that.'\n\n'Bullying needs information. The more you tell people about yourself, the more they have on you. That you feel fat. That your parents are divorcing because your father has had affair. That you are sad.'\n\n'That happens when you say something like that out loud? But why? And if so, why would you do it?' Charlie looked appallingly puzzled. Matteusz wanted to kiss him. Charlie wanted to kiss him back.\n\n'Because,' Matteusz said after a moment, 'people are very strange. Life does not happen unless you put photo on Facebook, unless you tweet it. Unless you post video on YouTube. It is like philosophy.'\n\nCharlie leaned back from Matteusz. For a golden moment it seemed as though the conversation would stop and something much more interesting would start. Sometimes it went this way and Matteusz rather hoped it would.\n\n'I worry I am too private,' Charlie announced.\n\n'No,' snapped Matteusz, too quickly. 'You really, really do not need to say more.'\n\n'Don't I?' Charlie was rubbing the back of his neck and looking really confused. 'But why not\u2014won't that seem suspicious?'\n\nMatteusz took his hand. As ever, it didn't feel quite right. Too hot? Too cold? Just a momentary bump until the flesh felt entirely real and correct. And then holding Charlie's hand felt the most natural thing in the world.\n\n'No. You have a pretty face but you do not understand our world. Almost everything you say is suspicious. If you say more, you will start to seem really weird.'\n\n'I would like to belong. I could vlog,' announced Charlie. 'On this YouTube.'\n\nMatteusz burst out laughing. 'You sound like old teacher. No.'\n\n'But what about you? Do you have YouTube in Poland?' Matteusz suddenly went very quiet and still. When he spoke his voice was solemn and sad. 'No. Poland is very poor country. We just have tube. It is big tube. Tube is carried by cart from village to village. When it arrive in village square you must dance in front of tube for everyone to watch. We dance for the men, for the women, for the goats. Whoever pay to watch tube.'\n\n'I see,' said Charlie. He nodded, terribly seriously. He was chewing this over. 'That is very sad. But . . .'\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'Surely, if you . . . Wait. You are mocking me?'\n\n'Of course.' Matteusz tapped him on the nose.\n\n'That's not fair.' Charlie frowned.\n\n'It is not. But when you are confused it makes you handsome.'\n\n'Oh.'\n\n'If you like I could dance for you like I do in front of tube.'\n\n'I would. I would like that.'\n\n## THIRTEEN\n\n## THE LETTER COAL HILL SCHOOL DOESN'T WANT YOU TO SEE\n\n_StandardDisappearanceLetter_\n\n_(TrueVersionDONOTSEND).doc_\n\n_[DATE]_\n\n_Dear [Parent],_\n\n_Following my phone call, I am writing to confirm that your child, [child name], is currently missing from Coal Hill School without explanation._\n\n_This is because they were taken on holiday by you without permission\/killed by aliens\/eaten by a dragon\/playing truthordare.com\/they just ran away screaming [delete as applicable]._\n\n___If your child is on holiday with you, you'll be pleased to hear that they're one of the lucky ones. Especially if you have travel insurance._\n\n_Faithfully yours,_\n\n## FOURTEEN\n\n## HOW TOAST IS LIKE LADY GAGA\n\n**A Vlog by Seraphin on Truthordare.com**\n\n**Hey, everyone. It's a slow news day. I'm stuck indoors. Totally trapped. I've got my hair cut. Do you like it? Hit me up and let me know. The products are available from the ads at the end, but I tell you this, they do make my hair really smooth. And they smell like chocolate. That's nice.**\n\n**There's some amazing stuff coming in from you lot. This is going so well.**\n\n**Here's Jalpur, with some really great footage of when she found out her boyfriend was cheating on her. Look, there** **** **she goes, sneaking up on them. While they are in the car. HIS DAD'S CAR.**\n\n**And look, look at them screaming, and he's shouting and . . . oh dear. Jalpur really is going for the car with that cricket bat. That is nasty. I'm just glad it's not her ex, but she is pretty amazing. Ooh. There go the wing mirrors.**\n\n**And what else have we got? This is Travis. He's been doing stunt gliding. This is all from his GoPro. Yeah. I'm going to shut up for a minute so you can watch.**\n\n**Still quiet.**\n\n**Still really quiet. Not. A. Word.**\n\n**Isn't that amazing? And look, he's landed safe. I, like, really can't believe that. Can you beat that and beat Skandis?**\n\n**I bet you can. Thanks Travis. You're amazing.**\n\n**So, anyway, here I am in my kitchen. Let's talk about toast. Isn't that one of the best words in the language? Toast. Toast. Toe-ast. Going out? Say you meet someone and want them to come back? Well, ignore all the cheesy** **** **chat-up lines. Just go for 'Fancy some toast?'**\n\n**No one ever says no to that. And the people who do. Well, they're monsters.**\n\n**So, let's look at how to cook toast. SERAPHIN'S GUIDE TO TOAST.**\n\n**You will need some bread. Sliced. Or not. It can be white or brown.**\n\n**You will need a toaster. You will need some jam.**\n\n**Or not jam. I'm easy. So you can be too.**\n\n**For instance, maybe peanut butter or one of these savoury yeast-flavoured spreads who've decided not to sponsor this vlog so we won't name them.**\n\n**And butter. Or margarine. If you're one of those weird people who like vintage clothes and the 1980s. Bleurgh.**\n\n**So.**\n\n**Put your bread in the toaster. And tick tock tick tock.**\n\n******While you wait . . . and wait** **. . . and wait . . . Grab some knives and a plate and get ready for a snack that is delicious any hour of the day or night.**\n\n**And PING! There we go. Look at that. Look at this lovely brown toasty toasty goodness. And ouch ouch, it is hot. Careful. Don't burn off your fingertips otherwise you'll only be good for a life of crime. Ahahahah.**\n\n**Now then, what shall I have on the toast? Eh? So many choices. I'm in a bit of jam. A bit of a jam! How will I get out of it? But, er, here's peanut butter! I like mine smooth, not chunky. What about you lot, are you chunky or smoothies? Let me know. Especially if, like me, you're just stuck indoors. You know. A prisoner in your own home. That kind of thing happens.**\n\n**There we are. All buttered up and ready to go! Doesn't that look amazing? And mmmmf, ooh, there are crumbs all down my chest. Bad me.**\n\n**Right. That's it. Seraphin out. Send us your truths and dares on truthordare.com.**\n\n'That's weird,' said April.\n\n'He is,' agreed Tanya. 'He's like something made in a factory.' She considered the thought. 'A really nice factory.'\n\nThey were all sat in the classroom, their feet up on desks. The challenges were spreading across the school. Some of them were brave, some of them were really, really idiotic, and some of them just seemed mean. The latest thing was stealing money from people smaller than you, claiming it was for Skandis.\n\nSo, they'd found themselves wondering if Miss Quill was right to be suspicious about the site. Mind you, she was suspicious about everything. Still, there was no harm in checking how the site was going.\n\n'What is the problem with this Seraphin?' asked Charlie. 'Is he not what ordinary teenagers are like?' Everyone looked at him for a moment.\n\nMatteusz threw a pencil at him.\n\n'No one has his life. We all would like it. He gets to be him. He is rich. He will never have to work.'\n\n'He goes to parties,' said Tanya.\n\n'He can play so many instruments.' April nodded happily. 'And really well.'\n\n'And ALL his friends are famous,' said Tanya.\n\n'Yes.' Charlie still wasn't convinced. 'Are famous people good friends with one another? How does that work?'\n\n'Who cares?' Tanya laughed. 'They're famous.'\n\n'That, that's not the point, though,' April insisted.\n\n'There was something odd about that video. Like he was trying to say . . . something he wasn't saying.'\n\n'A hidden message?' Matteusz looked sceptical.\n\n'Really?' Tanya gestured at the screen. 'Just because he's on this video site, does that make him . . . part of it? Whatever \"it\" happens to be?'\n\n'It's just the way, he . . . no.' April squinted. 'Just the toast bit. Seemed really pointless.'\n\n'I agree,' said Charlie.\n\n'All of it is pointless,' Matteusz argued. 'But people still watch it.'\n\n'Because of the hair,' insisted Tanya. 'That hair.'\n\n'Oh yes.' Charlie nodded. 'The hair is pretty amazing.'\n\n'Also,' Tanya giggled, 'do you think he ever wears clothes? I've seen less of Tom Daley.'\n\nThey carried on talking. April, silent, let them. She was absorbed by the picture on the screen. She was missing something really important. It had drifted past but it had been there.\n\n'We're walking home now, are we?' said Ram.\n\n'Strictly speaking,' said April, 'you've been ignoring me and I've been following behind you.'\n\n'Not behind. Just alongside. A bit,' Ram said. He'd not really known what to do. After the first hundred yards, when it had got really awkward.\n\n'What are the chances of you telling me what's up?'\n\n'Nothing's up.' Ram kicked a stone. Well, he tried kicking it with New Leg. Instead of soaring off in a neat arc it skittled down the pavement a bit. But April didn't seem to notice. Good. Football, really not her thing.\n\n'Is it your leg?' asked April. Damn. 'This is like Twenty Questions. Twenty Questions to make sure you're okay.'\n\n'And you care since when?' Ram asked.\n\n'Since the whole place went crazy. I mean, the latest crazy.'\n\n'The dares thing?'\n\n'The dares thing,' confirmed April. 'The boy that got burnt. He was on your team, yeah?'\n\nRam nodded. Let's move this on.\n\n'And now, all day I've seen people doing stupid stuff. Went to the loo, there was a girl picking glass out of her hand.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'No idea,' said April. 'But I get a feeling. When odd stuff happens here. It's like getting a cold, you know\u2014couple of warning coughs, bit light-headed, and then suddenly the world goes bang.'\n\nRam realised what she was going on about. 'The stunts?'\n\n'Yeah.' April rubbed her head up and down against the bars, trying to settle. 'Couple of warning coughs.'\n\nRam reached into his backpack, pulled out some water. 'Want some?' he said, hoping she wouldn't.\n\n'No, you're good,' April said. 'It's just . . . I mean. It's all so stupid. Like that kettle stunt.'\n\n'Or any of the others,' Ram said.\n\n'Any of them. Hey, let's jump off a roof. Hey, let's swim the Thames. Hey, let's skateboard through traffic. And, of course, the latest thing, some girls are doing competitive dieting.'\n\n'What?' said Ram.\n\n'Yeah.' April was angry. ''Cos it's not unhealthy if it's for charity. It's all so stupid. Normal life is so fragile. It breaks easy.'\n\nRam looked down, seemingly considering which stone to kick next. Then he looked up, and asked, 'Is this about your mum?'\n\nApril was surprised. She had this image of Ram\u2014athletic, dim, bit brutal\u2014that he kept on undercutting by being nice. Not bleurgh nice, or polite nice, but genuinely nice.\n\n'No, not really,' she said, though it was. Looking after Mum, living with what Dad had done to them, was a daily challenge. But she didn't want to start banging on about it. Especially not to Ram. Because, much to her surprise, she was realising that she wanted him to like her as her, and not in a sympathy way. 'The Mum stuff,' she said. 'It's complicated. It makes life complicated.'\n\n'Lost a leg,' said Ram, smacking his wrong leg down to the ground. Or rather, he tried to. Instead his leg went 'I'm not sure you meant to do that' and placed itself down neatly and firmly and he hated it.\n\n'Yes, sorry.' April was one of the world's fastest apologisers for anything and everything. 'I'd honestly not forgotten about your . . . it . . . I mean . . . the new one is so good.'\n\n'You think so?'\n\nShe caught the edge in Ram's tone. 'Yes. Does it . . . hurt?' Ram shrugged, so she talked on, edging towards babble. 'I just mean that, well, you know, stuff like that. Makes you think . . . Sorry, that sentence got away from me a bit. Um.'\n\nRam smiled at her. 'You're trying to say that because really serious stuff's happened to both of us, we should be against people doing stupid stuff for charity?'\n\n'Yes,' April said, relieved. 'That was easy. Thanks for agreeing with me.'\n\n'Actually, I'm not.' Ram shook his head. 'You just don't like people having fun.' He was smiling, but April didn't know how to take it.\n\n'Not as such,' she protested. 'Just fun within reasonable limits. Not the idiotic stuff. Like that guy with the kettle . . . '\n\nAs she said that, Ram closed down. She knew she'd somehow said the wrong thing.\n\n'I'm sorry, I know he is a friend of yours.'\n\nAnd that made it worse. How, she didn't know. Conversation petered out and they walked on together for a bit, polite, but with a bit more distance between them, till, at a corner shop, Ram went in to buy a drink. April stood outside, wondered about waiting for him, and then, realising how bad that might look, she turned left and walked home.\n\nA minute later, Ram came out, clutching two cans. No April. He'd spent the long queue behind someone buying scratch cards trying to work out if he should tell her how guilty he felt about Neil. He'd not made his mind up but he had brought two cans. Still, she'd gone. He put one can in his rucksack, opened the other one, and made his way home.\n\n## FIFTEEN\n\n## YOU WOULDN'T THINK A TEXT COULD MAKE YOU CRY, BUT THIS WILL\n\n'Hey, have you seen my phone?' Ram asked.\n\n'Yes,' said Charlie.\n\n'You've got it?' Ram couldn't hide his relief.\n\n'No.'\n\n'But you've seen it?'\n\n'Yes.' Charlie thought about it. 'I saw you use it three days ago.'\n\nRam scowled. 'That's not what I meant, jerk. You knew that.'\n\n'No, I did not.' Charlie's expression was puzzled innocence.\n\n'Are you winding me up?' Ram realised that Charlie was in one of 'those' moods. He was either being innocently clueless or deliberately so. 'You and I, we're going to have to pick a code word.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'So that when you're having me on, I can tell.'\n\nCharlie nodded. 'I shall bear that in mind. Tell me more about your phone.'\n\nRam thought about it. The one great advantage of Charlie, if you could somehow get beyond his maddeningly irritating alien prince manner, was that you could discuss a problem with him frankly and without fear of it being spread around the whole school.\n\n'I have lost my phone. I've not seen it since practise this afternoon. I've gone back, I've checked my locker, I've re-walked the path. I dunno'\u2014he ran a hand through his hair\u2014'I've even gone back to classrooms I was in earlier in the day in case I'm wrong, and I can't find it.'\n\n'It was a nice phone,' Charlie said. Admittedly on Rhodia it would have been laughed at, but that wasn't the point. For a Level 5 civilisation like Earth, it was an incredibly advanced piece of technology. He found it curious that so much effort went into making new mobile phones when there were still diseases to cure, but he guessed it was a cultural thing.\n\n'Yeah, it is a very nice phone,' Ram groaned. 'Dad can't stop telling me how much it cost him. If I lose it, the lectures from him about it won't stop. You have no idea about how bad they'd be. I could, literally, invent DNA and my dad would still be \"My son, the phone-loser\".'\n\n'That won't happen,' Charlie assured him. 'DNA was not invented. It was discovered. And that has already happened because\u2014'\n\n'Shut up!' Ram shoved Charlie in the shoulder. 'Not the point. The phone's insured. No one loses money here. But Dad won't get me a nicer replacement phone. He'll get me a brick. Just to prove a point that I can't be trusted. It'll be the end of the world.'\n\nCharlie blinked. 'No, it will not.'\n\nRam found Charlie was being all annoying and missing the point again. 'Trust me, it will be. I've tried phoning it and everything.'\n\nCharlie smiled.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Nothing,' Charlie said. 'Imagine if you rang your phone and you heard yourself answering. What would you do then?'\n\nRam stared at him.\n\n'As I said,' Charlie continued, 'just a thought. Anyway. I do not think you have lost your phone.' He considered. 'You're not careless. Maybe someone borrowed it.'\n\n'Why would they do that? I must have lost it.'\n\n'Well,' Charlie conceded, 'the more likely explanation is that it was stolen. It is, after all, a valuable phone.'\n\n'Damn.' Ram kicked the wall until his good foot hurt. 'You sure?'\n\n'I am surprised you did not think it.'\n\n'Well, if it was stolen, it was stolen at practise, while my locker was open when I was showering. But then'\u2014Ram looked cross\u2014'the only people around were the rest of the team. Why would they . . . they're mates . . . why?'\n\n'And yet, it seems obvious.'\n\n'Yeah,' Ram muttered. 'Still, at least there's nothing bad on there.'\n\nCharlie arched a quizzical eyebrow.\n\n'Stupid pictures, you know, workout videos, stuff I might have sent to Rachel,' Ram said.\n\n'Stupid pictures?' questioned Charlie.\n\n'Naked stuff. Some couples do that. Bad idea. I'm so _not_ into that,' said Ram then paused. 'Well, there's the odd shot of me after a workout, but nothing, you know . . .'\n\n'Oh.' Charlie frowned really, really deeply. Humans were very strange. They were always taking photographs of themselves. Which was peculiar as people never really changed appearance, and surely knew what they looked like? This was a whole new level. Curious.\n\n'Screw 'em.' Ram looked relieved. 'Thinking about that, there's nothing on that phone that could embarrass me.'\n\nThat evening, before Ram went home, he checked his locker again. His phone was in there. It definitely hadn't been there earlier. He tried seeing if it had been used to phone abroad or anything else expensive but the battery was flat. He breathed a huge sigh of relief.\n\nThe next day was simply The Worst.\n\n'YOUR HEART WILL BREAK WHEN YOU READ THIS BOY'S TEXTS TO HIS DEAD GIRLFRIEND.'\n\nSomeone had sent it in to truthordare.com. All of his texts to Rachel. All the mushy stuff. Some of their 'I cant believ u did that!!!!' rows. The odd apology after a row. They'd not corrected the spelling. It was all there. That was bad enough.\n\nBut then there were the other texts.\n\nAfter Rachel had died, her phone had run out of power. It had never been recharged. He thought it had been safe.\n\n**'Damn I look fine in this suit!!!' Read 5.38pm**\n\n**'Prom night baby!!!! Cant wait to see you!' Read 6.32pm**\n\n**'Yr amazing.' Delivered.**\n\n**'You look so good tonight.' Delivered.**\n\n**'Where r u?' Delivered.**\n\n**'Miss u' Delivered.**\n\n**'I cant believe youre gone' Delivered.**\n\n**'Cant carry on without u. U know that right?' Delivered.**\n\n**'This is the worst thing that's ever happened.' Delivered.**\n\n**'You are just gone and you died in front of me and I saw it.' Delivered.**\n\n**'Just took you out of my life and that's it.' Delivered.**\n\n**'Talking to you in my head still. Gone mad!!' Delivered.**\n\n**'Your funeral today. Can't face it.' Delivered.**\n\n******'Went to ur funeral. Full house. U owned it' Delivered.**\n\n**'Just miss u.' Delivered.**\n\n**'Back to school today. Heres your empty desk. Can't stop looking at it' Delivered.**\n\n**'Please come back.' Delivered.**\n\n**'Please.' Delivered.**\n\n**'Love u' Delivered.**\n\nTanya stared at the page on her laptop and her face went full angry. The kind of angry that would send her brothers running and would silence even her mother.\n\nShe tried messaging Ram. No answer. Of course not. There wouldn't be. She could not believe that someone would do that. Not to him.\n\nShe scrolled down the page. To the bottom. The comments. She wanted to post something furious, angry, demanding the page be taken down. That someone apologise to Ram. That whoever did this was . . . Oh, she didn't know, but it probably featured a train running over their fingers.\n\nShe was trying to work out what to type when she realised what she was reading. Of course, the comments were all written by people glorying in Ram's public humiliation. No one, no one at all, thought it moving, sweet, or heartbreaking. The kindest one just read: 'lol'.\n\n'Whoever did this deserves to die,' typed Tanya. But she did not press send. She deleted the comment, stroke by stroke, and left the cursor hanging there. They did deserve to die, though, she told herself.\n\nStill, she thought, there are other ways to get revenge.\n\nShe put a couple more chat requests in to Ram. He ignored them. That's what boys did.\n\nFine. She didn't need his permission. She got on with it. Hacking properly was, she was steadily admitting, a little bit beyond her. But still. She would give it a go. Sites like this often had a weakness. If they'd failed to redirect the root of each folder, maybe she could poke around, maybe even find the honeypot that was a file called 'passwords.txt'.\n\nNothing. Seriously?\n\nShe changed tactics and launched a denial-of-service attack on truthordare.com. She flung a few virtual funds to a ping farm that bombarded the site with simultaneous requests. With luck, it should slow the site down, maybe even bring it to a crashing halt. If you yelled at a site enough, a bit of it would break. Even if all your content was immaculate, even down to your style sheets, then there'd be a weak link\u2014maybe even something you didn't have control over like the ad server would just topple over and stop your site loading. Something would go.\n\nThe site stayed. Solid, robust, quick. WEIRD.\n\nSo, Tanya settled for gaming the 'Most Read' articles list, pushing Ram further and further down it, until she'd nudged him out of the top ten. She found the least tasteful video she could and punted it up. Someone training their dog to jump over the barbecue ('THIS HOT DOG IS SMOKIN!'). Nothing like a bit of animal cruelty to turn people off.\n\n**A Vlog by Seraphin**\n\n**Hey, guys,**\n\n**I wasn't going to say anything about this, but here goes. Enough with the dogs, okay? Torturing animals is wrong, pure and simple. Don't need to say it twice. Not going to apologise for whoever did that. Not done in my name. Not how we fight Skandis.**\n\n**We cool? We cool.**\n\n**Now, okay, I said that I'd do a drawing challenge. 'Cos we all love crafting. Here goes. I'll draw the maddest thing you've done for Skandis. Seriously! I have Sugar Paper and some good graphite and I'm burning for doodling. There's like five minutes to go before we pick the top truth or dare. Will it be Brock going through his teacher's laptop, or will it be Nicola objecting to her stepdad's wedding? As I said, five minutes, people. And then I will be CRAFTING LIVE AND DANGEROUS.**\n\n## SIXTEEN\n\n## SIX NAMES FOR WHITE YOU'VE NEVER THOUGHT OF\n\nThis wasn't what he'd expected.\n\n'I am in Heaven, aren't I?'\n\nNo one answered him. No voice of God. No angels. He walked through the whiteness a bit more. No seventy-two virgins either.\n\nYet it was definitely Heaven. It was so very white.\n\nThe whiteness was surprising. As white as fresh paper. As white as linen or falling snow before it hits the ground. Pure white, he thought. Sinless white.\n\nThat made him stop.\n\nHe didn't feel bad about what he'd done on the way here. Not at all. I mean, obviously, not everyone would do what he'd done. But it was all for a laugh, wasn't it? Good clean fun. A few pranks, really. Nothing he wouldn't do again. Definitely.\n\nIf he could have his time over again, he'd do it all the same way. YOLO. Yeah, YOLO.\n\nNo regrets. Not about anything that he'd posted. Not those pictures he'd found. Not those text messages. Not even about the stuff he'd filmed that, thinking about it, he wouldn't have dreamed filming a month ago. Then, it would have felt wrong.\n\nBut that was then. This was now.\n\nAnd here he was.\n\nIn Heaven. Heavenly white. Heaven was big and white and there weren't any clouds.\n\nThere was something on the edge of his mind. A question he should be asking.\n\nWho do you ask?\n\nWell, God, he supposed.\n\nHe walked on through the whiteness.\n\nIn the distance, somewhere behind him, he could hear someone talking. God.\n\nYou know what, he thought, smiling, let God wait. That'd be something to tell everyone. Jokes.\n\nHe wandered on through the whiteness until he came to a white door.\n\nHe grinned at that. Doors in Heaven. No gates. Well, there we go. Twenty-first century.\n\nAfter a while the door opened and, squinting now, he saw it led somewhere even whiter. Double pure white. Fancy that.\n\n'Don't mind if I do,' he said, and stepped through.\n\nAs the door closed, he heard the voice of God shouting at him.\n\n'Don't go through that door,' God said. Which seemed funny.\n\nThen he remembered the question he'd wanted to ask God.\n\n'So God, how did I die?'\n\nHe heard a noise and turned around and, before he could even scream, died.\n\n## SEVENTEEN\n\n## THE RISE OF SMART WOMEN AND HOW TO STOP IT\n\n'Why are you looking at that site?' Ram asked her. He seemed hostile, which she couldn't blame him for.\n\n'No reason,' said April, which was a lie. Well, it wasn't. Not exactly.\n\n'It's sick,' said Ram. 'I thought we agreed.' He jabbed a finger at Seraphin's frozen face. 'He's just a nice face fronting it, all \"what do you think of my hair and hey, here are my favourite friends,\" but underneath it all he's evil.'\n\n'Umm,' said April. '\"Evil\" seems a strong word.' She'd been surprised Ram had come into school today. He looked pretty miserable. Like he'd had the whole world thrown at him. Now he'd caught her browsing truthordare.com and he was staring at her like she'd betrayed him.\n\n'You fancy him, don't you?' His laugh wasn't a nice laugh.\n\n'No-o.' April made herself laugh back, cautiously.\n\n'Then what? I mean, you spend all your time working so hard to be the cool indie chick but here you are ogling the most white-bread man in the world.'\n\n'It's not that,' April said, keeping her voice really very calm. 'I can see how you'd feel. What they did to you was horrible. But please, don't take it out on me, or him.'\n\n'You're sticking up for Seraphin?'\n\nThat was so Ram, zero in on the one weak spot, toss everything else aside like fruit peel.\n\n'No,' said April. 'Stories are always more complicated. The article they put up about you . . . you think, because of the comments, that people hate you. Well, not everyone who read that article commented. Yes, a lot of people read it and reacted to it by laughing, but those are the easy people\u2014the people who like their stories simple. Show them a tragedy and they laugh, whether it's you and Rachel or a man falling off a cliff. But it's the other people, the quiet ones\u2014they're the people you want to be interested in. And they're harder, more complicated, because they're quiet, you can't hear them, but they're out there. And they're worth listening to.'\n\nRam didn't say anything.\n\nNeither did April. Not for a bit.\n\n'So,' she said, 'my point is . . . Quiet. Complicated. You watch Seraphin. What do you think? Tell me?'\n\n'Uh,' said Ram. 'He's a jerk.'\n\n'Is that it?'\n\n'Pretty much. I wish I had his money. His success. His life is so easy. I wish I was him. I mean, what is he good at? People like him. That's all. He's just good at being liked.'\n\n'That's winning, isn't it?' April smiled at him. 'We all want to be liked. And it's a struggle, that maybe one day, we'll get right. But look at him\u2014he's pretty much our age and he's doing it. We all like him.'\n\n'I don't,' said Ram. His defiance was sliding towards sulky. 'You want to shag him.'\n\n'Oh no!' April waved that one away sharpish. 'He's pretty. He's cute. But he's sooo safe.'\n\n'I thought you liked safe.' Ram couldn't resist turning his flirting up a notch. It was an instinct.\n\nApril raised her eyebrows at him. 'He's not a roller coaster, he's a magic teacup ride. No thrills, no spills. Like going clubbing and spending the whole night drinking cocoa. Not that, of course\u2014'\n\n'You really go clubbing?' Ram seemed to have backed down a bit. Which was relaxing.\n\n'Not unless the music is really good.' There were some things that April would never compromise on. 'The thing is, I've spotted something. In his vlogs. Can you get Tanya?'\n\nTanya was dismissive.\n\n'That site? It's good. Security's really tight.' She'd been wondering about that and feeling a bit angrier every time. Wasn't that a bit too neat? Like encrypting a blog post. It just felt a bit off\u2014a site about risk-taking with every layer of security. Normally, a site like that would throw the odd Easter egg in as a reward for novice hackers\u2014a little pat on the back and now be on your way. But no. Looked like a bouncy castle, behaved like a fortress.\n\n'It's Seraphin, that's the thing,' said April.\n\n'Got you,' said Tanya. 'He's the evil genius behind it all. An evil genius with really, really, really good hair.'\n\nRam made a disgusted noise and walked over to the library window. Someone was trying to shin up a lamppost. A few days ago he'd have run out to stop them. Now he was at 'let them'. Everyone deserved whatever happened to them.\n\n'You're missing something.' April already had several tabs open. 'I've got evidence.'\n\n'A conspiracy theory? Love that.' Tanya lit up, and did a little bounce in her chair. 'On it.'\n\n**EXHIBIT A:**\n\n**'** **. . . not been out to the show myself. But loads of you sent in great footage from it. Looks amazing. Wish I could have got out of here to go see it. But there we are.** **** **Moving on, fanfare gif, here's some of your challenges. This Girl Took Her Driving Test onto a Train Track . . .'**\n\n**EXHIBIT B:**\n\n**'Hello, Everyone, Let's Party! I've a message for you\u2014Go Everywhere to Meet Everyone! Own Unpleasant Times! That's the motto I live by\u2014I Aim Mighty! Take Risks and Party, People! Everyone Dies.'**\n\n**EXHIBIT C:**\n\n**Seraphin was playing on his guitar, strumming away, riffing gently up and down.**\n\n**'You, girl, listen to me.  \nI'm a prisoner of your love.  \nI'm stuck right here waiting for you. I don't know what to do . . .**\n\n**Hmm. Is that going anywhere? I don't know if we can make it work. Maybe I should do something with the harmonica.**\n\n**Or something. I've been at it a while and I'm getting pretty desperate.'**\n\n******EXHIBIT D:**\n\n**Seraphin playing ukulele covers of 'Help' and 'Please Release Me.'**\n\n'The last one was less subtle,' said April. 'You get the point.'\n\nRam shrugged. 'He just likes to talk about himself a lot.'\n\nTanya fixed him with a disappointed stare that could make concrete check its shoes. 'The first vlog contained references to being stuck in his room. The second was . . . an acrostic, yes?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Oh, Ram,' Tanya sighed. Two syllables but she put so much disappointment into them.\n\n'You get it in poems and songs,' said April. 'Hiding a message in the first letter of every word. That vlog starts with \"Help\" and gets worse.'\n\n'So?' said Ram.\n\n'He's playing a similar game in the third clip. Hidden message asking for someone to come get him.'\n\n'And the fourth entry?'\n\n'Desperation.' Tanya laughed. 'Subtlety's gone right out the window. Which, let's face it, if you're the public face of the site and you're being made to do it against your will . . .'\n\n'That can't be true.' Ram had dug in. 'That just can't be. What, there's somebody standing behind the camera with a gun? He's a celebrity.' Pause. 'Of sorts. Doesn't happen.'\n\nTanya did some rapid Googling. 'This is interesting.' She pointed at an image search. 'I've ranked it by date\u2014it shows Seraphin doing what he does, you know, giving talks, going to parties, awards ceremonies, and skateboarding events. People taking selfies with him, that kind of pic. Not vlogs he's posted claiming to be places, but pictures taken by other people\u2014and look . . .'\n\nApril looked at the row after row of pictures of Seraphin smiling next to blushing boys and grinning girls and unspeakably pretty women and overenthusiastic mothers. Seraphin's smiles were all identical. Wherever, whenever, he had a smile for everyone, no matter how grabby or sweaty or overkeen they were. Then she checked the date stamps and saw Tanya's point.\n\n'He's not been seen for a month,' said April. 'Now do you believe something's going on?'\n\n'That's one massive, insane conspiracy theory,' Ram said. And then he leaned back in his chair and laughed.\n\nOutside, the boy climbing the lamppost reached the top. He made a wild thumbs-up gesture to the watching camera phones, lost his balance, and fell to the ground. The crowd carried on filming his inert body, waiting for someone else to phone an ambulance.\n\n## EIGHTEEN\n\n## THINGS YOU'LL GET ONLY IF YOUR HOME PLANET WAS DESTROYED IN THE NINETIES\n\n**'Today on truthordare.com\u2014I want you to be as desperate as me. Today is the start of the Risk Invasion. Nothing is too truthful or too daring. Down with TMI! There is no such thing as oversharing!'**\n\n'Question.'\n\n'Oh. Good.' Matteusz carried on reading the textbook, even though his eyes went over the lines three times. 'What question?'\n\n'I'm still not clear what oversharing is. I have more questions.'\n\nMatteusz sighed. 'It is saying too much. Last year, there was girl in class. Her father went to prison. Everyone very sympathetic. She started blog, and we all looked and liked and all that. Everyone was \"Oh Becky, you are so brave\"\u2014but really everyone was \"Do you have to talk so much about this? It is so sad.\" After her father got beaten up, she stopped writing it, and that was somehow better.'\n\nCharlie spent a few seconds chewing through all this.\n\n'So you do not like it when people talk about themselves too much?'\n\n'Correct.' Matteusz laughed. 'In that way, I am most English. And you too\u2014you play your cards close to your chest. It is very nice chest, by the way.'\n\nCharlie edged a little away, smiling bashfully. 'So, just because I do not say \"I'm an alien prince and my entire race died and I am so alone,\" that is a good thing?'\n\n'You can say it\u2014but just to me.' Matteusz rubbed his shoulder. 'Trust me\u2014you have lovely face, but the only way you fit in is by saying as little as possible. The more you say, the more crazy you sound.'\n\n'But . . .' Charlie looked confused.\n\nOh dear. Matteusz was starting to fear _but_ s as much as questions. 'Yes?'\n\n'Do you think that I am too reserved? Would I fit in more if I was less . . . private?'\n\nMatteusz considered it. 'Maybe. But do not try and talk about yourself.' He waved a solemn finger. 'That will not go well.'\n\nIf Varun noticed his son was limping when he got in, he didn't say so. He just pushed out one of the kitchen chairs and motioned for him to sit.\n\nRam sat. The kitchen was his dad's hideaway. He liked to sit in there, reading, slogging through paperwork, or filling in puzzles. If you've ever wondered about those little puzzles at the back of newspapers, they were for Ram's dad. Varun had a quiet passion for filling them in. His idea of a little peace after work and before dinner was to sit at the kitchen table, scratching his beard, and trying to get from SLUM to BIRD in five moves. He'd stay there until his wife chased him out\u2014or, if it was his turn to cook, he'd potter back and forth between a puzzle and ALL the pans. Varun was the kind of man who couldn't microwave a spaghetti Bolognese without using at least three saucepans. It was his way of marking his territory.\n\nThe kitchen summed up Ram's dad. It wasn't fussy, it wasn't exactly the last word in comfort, and it was quite tired around the edges. But it felt familiar, welcoming. Varun slid the paper to his son, watching him intently.\n\n'Last bit of this Sudoku is unholy,' he said.\n\nRam looked at it helplessly then pushed it back.\n\n'Seriously, Dad, what about the apps on your phone? Haven't you got Candy Smash?'\n\n'Firstly'\u2014Varun waggled a stern finger\u2014'you sure you should be mentioning phones right now? Secondly, your generation! If it's not a phone, then it doesn't count. Well, I prefer solving puzzles with pencil and paper. I'm old-fashioned. I'm practically a hipster.'\n\n'You're not!'\n\nVarun dipped a hand from side to side. 'I have hipster sympathies. We've put in parking for their little scooters at the surgery. Hipsters? I like them\u2014unless they ask if they can use the Wi-Fi to livestream their fillings. That's just bizarre.' Ram smiled at his dad. Varun loved being an old man, even though, really, he wasn't that ancient. But it seemed impossible he'd ever been Ram's age, ever understood what he was going through\u2014and yet, there was something about him. The way he'd been so quietly supportive after Rachel had died (even though he'd never seemed to like her), the way he'd behaved when Ram had shown him his alien leg, the way he'd stopped mentioning Ram's possible football career.\n\nIt had surprised Ram. His initial thought had been that his dad would be all 'I'm sorry your girlfriend is dead, why not go play some football?'. Instead he'd served up something quieter, more supportive, but sadder. It made Ram worried. It was as if his dad knew that life wasn't perfect, and that, if you had the opportunity for a wonderful, exciting time, it would be taken away from you.\n\nHence why he sat in the kitchen, trying to solve puzzles. To make sense of something.\n\nRam realised his dad was talking. 'How's your leg?'\n\n'Meh,' said Ram.\n\n'I see.' Varun smiled with his teeth. 'Are you sure you weren't given a manual for it? I'd love to read it.'\n\n'No, Dad,' said Ram. 'No. It's supposed to just work.'\n\n'Early days, early days.' Varun tapped his nose. 'When you were a toddler, you were slow to walk, always falling over. Auntie Amita was convinced you were backwards. Well, look at you now\u2014you'll get there. You've done it before. You'll do it again.'\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Ram.\n\n'Don't be.' Varun didn't look up. 'Whatever it is, don't be.'\n\n'About the phone, they . . . stole those texts . . . they\u2014'\n\n'Did you say anything in those texts to shame Rachel, yourself, or your family?'\n\n'That's not the point\u2014'\n\n'Then fssssh!' Varun stood up, pottered over to the stove, and stirred the dinner critically. 'Your mother really does think paprika grows on trees.'\n\n'It's just\u2014' Ram felt hopeless. 'It was all going to plan. And now nothing is. It's all such a mess.'\n\nVarun dropped the saucepan lid back down and wandered over to a cupboard. He drew out a packet of dark chocolate.\n\n'Go on,' he said, offering it to Ram. 'Have a couple of squares. As your dentist, I insist.'\n\nRam took the packet, ran a fingernail down the foil, and then broke a couple of squares off. As he did so, Varun chuckled. 'Look at that\u2014perfect illustration,' he said.\n\n'Of what?' said Ram.\n\n'Life.' Varun was still laughing. 'It's never neatly shaped. Never. Little things happen, the edges are rough. You meant to take two squares\u2014but you ended up with a massive jagged chunk of another square and a tiny bit of your first one. That's life\u2014it never has straight lines. Don't worry.'\n\nRam sucked on the chocolate thoughtfully.\n\nVarun broke himself off a couple of squares. Rather more neatly than Ram. 'With age comes caution.' Varun opened his mouth and the chocolate vanished.\n\n## NINETEEN\n\n## HE THOUGHT HE KNEW A LOT ABOUT GRAVITY. FIND OUT IF HE WAS RIGHT\n\nApril turned out to be completely correct (she wasn't sure how she felt about this). The first couple of warning coughs were over, and Coal Hill School now had a full-on fever. It showed her a whole new side of Miss Quill.\n\nIt all kicked off in Quill's class. She'd gone out to get a photocopy, and she came back in to find Geoff Evans leaping from desk to desk. Phones were filming him. He'd vowed to get the whole way round and back before she returned. As she crashed through the door, he had only two desks to go, and was about to sail at Hardeep's desk. Hardeep had carefully packed all his pens away in advance.\n\n'And what are you doing?' Miss Quill's hands were resting on her hips like they were dangerous weapons.\n\n'It's a bet, Miss.' Geoff wobbled uncertainly on the desk, his feet all over April's homework. Normally he was one of the quiet ones, but this craze had swept everyone up, and timid Geoff seemed to be seized with unusual bravado.\n\n'You see, it's for charity,' he said firmly.\n\n'Is it now?'\n\n'To stop Skandis.'\n\n'How lovely for you,' Miss Quill observed. 'You may step down and return to your desk and we'll talk after class.'\n\n'No, Miss.' Geoff was defiant. 'I've got to complete a circuit. I've got to.'\n\n'Got to, have we?' Miss Quill crossed to her bench, put the photocopies down neatly, and turned back to Geoff.\n\n'Got to?'\n\n'Yes, Miss.'\n\n'Very well.' Miss Quill folded her arms. 'You creatures. You lead such short lives. You're so ridiculously vulnerable. If I were you, I wouldn't even dare get in an aeroplane, let alone risk life and limb by leaping about. Especially when one is, let's be unusually kind, Geoff, not one of nature's gymnasts. Sit back down. One last chance.'\n\n'No, Miss.'\n\n'Right then.' Miss Quill crossed to the desk next to April's and dragged it away. Hardeep squeaked in protest.\n\n'I've made it more interesting for you, Geoffrey. Double the distance, or just give up, get down, and we'll say absolutely no more about it.'\n\nGeoff swallowed. He shook his head back and forth. He chewed his lower lip. 'No.'\n\nMiss Quill stood back and sighed really loudly.\n\n'Someone close the window, would you? We don't want Geoffrey learning he can't fly as well.'\n\nGeoff took a couple of practise stumbles across April's desk, shattering a favourite felt-tip pen, and then he leaped through the air, sailing over Hardeep's missing desk, and landing on his own, arms windmilling.\n\nFor a moment it looked as though he was going to make it. He smiled, confident and pleased and just in need of another couple of inches to be utterly balanced. And in taking that extra step, it all went wrong. The desk suddenly leaped forward. He toppled backwards, making a grab at the desk, which ended up as a strange empty hug, and then he smacked down onto the floor with a thud and didn't move.\n\n'Someone take him to the nurse.' Miss Quill clearly wasn't impressed. 'Oh, and hand me all your phones.' She took a hammer from her desk drawer. 'You can either delete the footage or I'll do it for you.'\n\nBy lunchtime three more ambulances had been called. Two pupils with broken limbs. One teacher who'd tried tobogganing down the stairs on a tray.\n\nOne boy went home in tears after his girlfriend broke up with him live on Periscope.\n\n'It's that site,' hissed April to Charlie that afternoon. 'It's getting totally out of hand.'\n\n'What is?' Charlie asked.\n\n'Truthordare.com. It's just . . . People are getting hurt. In all sorts of different ways.'\n\nThere was screaming outside the window. It seemed two different classes had gone to war in a vast scrum raging across the yard. Teachers were flocking to it.\n\n'See? The challenges are getting more . . . dangerous.'\n\n'Dangerous?' Charlie frowned. 'But surely it is all about being true to yourself by sharing more of your life. And it is'\u2014he sounded pompously grave\u2014'for charity.'\n\n'You are talking such nonsense!' April flicked a ball of paper at him. He did not flinch. 'What charity? It googlewhacks. The only results are for people raising funds for other stupid challenges. Meanwhile, stuff is going up on truthordare.com and it's all wrong\u2014like what happened to Ram\u2014wrong and hurtful.'\n\n'Hurtful?' Charlie said. 'So long as no one is _physically_ hurt then what is the problem?' He looked slightly shifty\u2014more than slightly shifty. 'After all, it is good, is it not, to share surprising aspects of our lives online? It shows that we are fully rounded people who know how to have fun.'\n\nApril narrowed her eyes. Sometimes Charlie sounded like a Google Translate error. 'What are you talking about? Actually, never mind. The point is that site is wrong. And Seraphin, supposedly in charge of it, is sending secret messages asking for help. We've got to do something.'\n\nCharlie nodded. 'Yes, you're right. I suppose we must,' he said simply, and smiled at her. And that would have maybe solved a few problems. If only the door hadn't crashed open and Matteusz hadn't come barrelling in.\n\n'What have you done?' he shouted. He was so angry, he was in tears. 'How could you do that?'\n\nHe stared at Charlie in utter fury and April saw from Charlie's expression of bemused innocence that he was completely guilty.\n\nThe picture had been tagged '#TMI' and '#sosogay'. It showed a nearly naked Matteusz, barely wearing a towel. He was flexing his arms and smiling, presumably towards Charlie.\n\nMatteusz was not smiling now. Charlie looked withdrawn, sullen. Royal alien princes did not, in April's experience, like being caught out. The good thing was that Matteusz looked, April considered, pretty amazing in the picture. It wasn't posed\u2014he clearly wasn't aware that it was being taken, he'd just walked into a room looking casual, relaxed, and really very hot. Quite a few of the comments agreed with her. Someone had even done some pastel fan art of him as a centaur, which was rather sweet.\n\nAnd that about wrapped it up for the good things about the situation.\n\nMatteusz was shouting. He'd not stopped shouting, only sometimes he ran out of English and did some Polish shouting, which sounded even angrier.\n\n'You took a picture of me like that?' he roared at Charlie. It was not the first time he'd said that.\n\n'Yes,' said Charlie in a quiet mumble.\n\n'How? I didn't even see the phone and\u2014'\n\n'I was quick.'\n\n'Oh, never mind, never mind.' Matteusz waved it away.\n\n'This looks\u2014this looks like I walk around like that all the time. I do not. I had just got out of the shower and I could not find pants.' He turned to April. 'That is really all. Believe me, I do not wander around as though I'm preening sex god.' He narrowed his eyes at Charlie. 'And I never will again.'\n\n'Sorry,' said Charlie. 'I did not know it was wrong. I did not even really think about the clothes. You seemed happy. I liked that. I wanted to share it.'\n\n'I _was_ happy,' said Matteusz. 'The shower was warm and Miss Quill had not come to the bathroom door to yell insults at me. And you were waiting for me in bedroom. It was a nice, quiet, _private_ moment.' He glowered some more. 'Which you put on the internet for the whole world.'\n\n'But you look nice in the picture. What is the problem?'\n\n'The problem? The problem!' Matteusz kicked Charlie's chair. 'You are an alien, yes, but do you always have to be so alien?'\n\n'I can't help it,' mumbled Charlie.\n\n'Try harder!'\n\n'I am! I am!' Charlie started to shout, utterly miserable. 'I am trying every day to be more human, to be better at it, so that you . . . so that you like me more. I thought this was what would make me fit in. Showing everyone else how normal I am. I don't know how I've got it so wrong. I just . . . I am sorry.'\n\n'Sorry?' Matteusz swore some more in Polish. 'My mother\u2014she will see this. And what will she think? Things are bad, but I hope sometime they will be good again. I hope one day she will like you like I like you. But then you do this\u2014she will think bad of me and the worst of you. Especially when she thinks that I posed for that picture so that you could put it online.'\n\n'But . . .' Charlie brightened. 'I could say that my phone was hacked.'\n\n'Ha!' Matteusz laughed long and hard. 'Even my mother will not believe that, and she still has landline. Nope! What you've done . . . What you've done. Jesus!' He strode around and pointed a shaking finger at April who was trying desperately to tiptoe out of the hall and wishing it wasn't so large.\n\n'Charlie, what if it was a picture of April?'\n\n'I don't understand.' Charlie frowned. 'Why would I photograph April?'\n\nMatteusz spat. 'Listen\u2014my body is mine. It is private. If I choose to share it with you, then it is because I like you. And just you. I am walking through your bedroom to find pants. I am casual and do not feel bad about this because I like you. I am at ease with you. I AM NOT THINKING THAT YOU ARE TAKING PICTURES OF IT. Because no good boyfriend would do that. Understand?'\n\n'I understand,' said Charlie. He cheered up a little. 'You still called me boyfriend.'\n\n'Habit I have yet to get out of,' Matteusz snarled. 'I do not take pictures of you. You do not take pictures of me.'\n\n'Ever?'\n\n'For the moment, yes. But later we will work to this rule: how would you feel if I had posted a picture like this of you?'\n\nCharlie thought about it. 'It would be undignified for a royal prince of Rhodia to appear like this.'\n\n'So.' Matteusz nodded. 'So. There we are. We do nothing to shame each other. There is a camera on your phone. Please ignore it. Until I tell you otherwise.'\n\n'Okay,' said Charlie. 'I am sorry.'\n\n'Yes.' Matteusz examined Charlie's face carefully. 'Indeed. Yes you are.'\n\nFor a moment, April assumed they were going to hug. Instead Matteusz turned around and walked out.\n\n'Oh.' Charlie sighed. 'That did not go well.'\n\n'No,' agreed April.\n\n'Still . . .' Charlie, hurt, and feeling very much alone, sat down on the edge of the assembly hall's stage, swinging his legs back and forth. 'At least I now understand why they call it oversharing.'\n\n'Stick to pictures of nice meals,' suggested April.\n\nAt the end of the day, there was something that they missed. As they walked home, full of their own thoughts, they failed to notice how much emptier Coal Hill School was than it should have been.\n\n## TWENTY\n\n## THE FIVE WORDS THAT BROKE HER HEART (SPOILER: ONE OF THEM IS 'WANT')\n\nThe boy was crying. The girl went over to him. They were both a long way from home. 'What's the matter?' she asked.\n\nHe shook his head, motioning her away.\n\n'Don't look at me,' he pleaded, 'they'll see.' This was news to her.\n\n'They can always see,' he told her. 'Please, look away.' So, she did so, turning to stare away from him and into the Void.\n\n'What's the matter?' she asked him. She felt stupid, looking away at nothing.\n\nShe wondered if he hadn't heard her. Then he spoke, sounding so weary.\n\n'I'm sick of killing,' he said. 'I just want to go home.'\n\nHer breath caught in her throat.\n\n'I do too,' she said. 'I want to go home so much.'\n\nShe could hear him rubbing his nose with his sleeve. Then he laughed. 'But we're here because we want to be. Because we deserve it.'\n\nShe hadn't thought about it like that. She'd been too terrified and confused.\n\n'This is our reward,' he said to her. 'They're going to keep us here until we die.'\n\nShe stared at the endless whiteness of the Void, working out what to say to that. Eventually she worked it out:\n\n'I don't want to die.' He didn't reply.\n\nWhen she turned around, the boy had gone.\n\n## TWENTY-ONE\n\n## SHE THOUGHT SHE KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON. THEN SHE FOUND OUT THE REMARKABLE TRUTH AND TURNED THINGS AROUND\n\nThe next day the school was louder and simultaneously very quiet.\n\n'What's causing that?' Tanya asked as she walked in. Suddenly there were no fights, no screaming, but the place looked like it had been torn apart. Shredded scraps of posters fluttered along the empty corridors. People were no longer fighting openly or riding bikes down stairs. No ambulances were waiting outside. And yet the air felt tense. That dreadful, unshakable feeling that, at any moment, you were going to be in trouble, but you had no idea why.\n\nSomething's up, Ram thought as he limped, very slightly limped, out of his car. There were more parking spaces than he'd been expecting.\n\nCharlie wandered in slowly, looking for Matteusz. He had spent the walk in working out exactly what his apology would say. Apologies on Rhodia were ritualistic and ran to a formula, with appropriate foods carefully chosen to match the thing being apologised for. Unable to convince Quill to bake some _rote_ breads, he'd had to stop off at a corner shop and buy a Twix. He walked through the hallways and couldn't see Matteusz, but felt a kind of relief at that. He completely failed to notice that he couldn't see anyone else either.\n\nWhen the new wing had been opened, space had been put aside for Thought Pods. April liked the idea of them immediately\u2014small booths where she could work on a tune, or just doodle while staring out of a window. In practise, they'd swiftly been commandeered for surreptitious mobile phone conversations, and were usually crammed with students yelling at ex-friends in whispers. Teachers had also adopted the practise of moving on the people they found in them\u2014if they weren't in class or in the library then they were clearly Up to No Good.\n\nToday, however, April found the pods were unoccupied and slumped gratefully down in one, genuinely meaning to finish off that history assignment, but quickly distracted by sketching the really miserable-looking tree outside. It took her a while to realise that she was working undisturbed. No teachers moving her along. No one in the booth next to her whispering, 'If you do that again, Duncan, I swear I'll tell everyone.' None of that. She looked out at the tree. There was a gap in the hedge behind it, and normally someone sneaking off through it. No. No one in sight. Odd.\n\nTanya stood in the empty assembly hall, Ram by her side. She enjoyed the way her feet echoed. 'It's quiet here,' she announced. 'Too quiet.' Then she smiled to herself. 'I've always wanted to say that.'\n\n'So, what do we do?' asked Ram.\n\nThey turned at the sound of footsteps. Charlie and April.\n\n'We tell Quill,' Charlie had decided.\n\nMiss Quill had enjoyed her morning. Well, by her standards of enjoyment. She'd not really noticed the quiet, or found the reduced numbers in her classes worrying\u2014people normally found any excuse to avoid her lessons, and she considered this a smart move.\n\nShe glanced up from her book. She'd been reading _Captain Corelli's Mandolin_ and was dismayed to discover that a mandolin was not some kind of weapon. She folded down the page slowly and shut the book with a clap. She regarded the four standing in front of her wearily.\n\n'So, it's the . . . You really are going to have to come up with a group name, you know.'\n\n'We're not a group,' Ram insisted.\n\n'We're just . . .' Tanya sometimes found finishing sentences near Miss Quill really hard.\n\n'Quill, there is a threat to the school,' said Charlie firmly.\n\n'The Four Lions!' blurted out April, and then went quiet. Quill surveyed the four. A slight itch in her head told her that she should pay more attention to Charlie, but she'd risk a mild increase in pain so long as she didn't have to, and the others were actually more worthy of her notice, albeit a very tiny amount.\n\nMatteusz was missing from the group, which was something. He'd clearly had some kind of a quarrel with Charlie, which was marvellous news. She found sharing a house with the despised prince bad enough, but the other one was just too much, especially as they were so boringly involved with each other. She had toyed with the idea of bursting into their room and yelling, 'I heard your cries, my Lord, and\u2014my God\u2014what are you doing to His Majesty?' before claiming to be preventing an assassination attempt. She smiled a little. Would she be able to justify killing the youth? It would certainly be fun trying.\n\nOh. They were still talking. Pity.\n\nRam was loudly explaining that it was all his fault because of some soup and it had all got out of hand and that there had to be a way of stopping it, surely. Quill frowned. He wanted her to stop soup?\n\nTanya was currently explaining the whole situation, whatever the situation was, she wasn't quite sure, but the whole thing that was going on which was definitely a thing was being caused by a website, and there were some curious things about the website's data structure, which she started to explain in a rather tiresomely detailed way. That girl was worth listening to, but her problem was that she was too clever by half.\n\n'Are the cats behind it?' Quill asked.\n\n'No,' said Tanya.\n\n'Pity,' said Quill.\n\nApril, little steely fawn April, tried making a few contributions to the discussion and then fell silent. It was something to do with hidden messages in the Information Superhighway, which seemed ridiculous. Everyone else was shouting and April at first waited her turn then kept saying, 'The thing about Seraphin, you see, is\u2014' and getting talked over. She tried this four times until it was obvious to her that a fifth attempt would seem really unnatural. What she'd do next could go either way. Quill was hoping for a sullen sulk. But the alternative could be interesting. She'd watch that one.\n\nAnd finally, reluctantly, Charlie. The prince. He was learning to listen like a ruler. That air of firm, noble noncommittal before coming down on whichever side allowed him to unleash his army (i.e., her). He would seem fair, he would seem just, but most of all, he'd learned that a ruler who did not use his weapons was no ruler.\n\nCharlie raised a hand. It was an odd, commanding little motion, and everyone stopped talking, even Ram (a promising rebel leader if ever there was one). Waiting for him to seize the moment and speak words of blood and action.\n\nHe was clearly considering what to say. The right words that would stir armies. And then he said, 'Tanya, can we have a look at the metadata?'\n\nQuill honestly thought it wasn't possible to hate Charlie more. But no, here he was. Doing this. Whatever it was. You could call it investigating, but by those standards accountancy was investigation. Yet there they all were, clustered around a laptop.\n\nQuill observed the body language of the group. Charlie was intent on what he was seeing. Perhaps too intent, as though there was something else preying on his mind. Tanya was proud, proud of what she'd found out, proud of the awkward, carefully casual cross-legged way she was sitting on the floor. Ram stood off to one side, April to another. Ram was just itching to find a violent way of resolving this. One that allowed him to take revenge. Revenge for what was going on now and what had been done to him in the past\u2014yes, that was it. One day he really would make an excellent leader. April stood, leaning against a desk, peering at the screen, but with a sad look. She had clearly been hoping to see something brilliant there that the others had overlooked, but she had nothing. She was utterly dejected. That pretty much made Quill's morning.\n\nCharlie reached over to a point on the screen and tapped it.\n\n'Not touch-sensitive,' said Tanya. 'Not a tablet.'\n\n'Oh.' Charlie was still getting used to the limits of Earth technology. It was surprising to Quill too. For instance, they had holograms but only appeared to use them for dead singers.\n\nCharlie settled for scrolling up and down the page a bit.\n\n'Can we put this through your projector?' he asked Quill, which amused her. He was happy to order her to defend his life, but he was very polite about the oddest things. She hooked the laptop up, watched as nothing happened, and then waggled the plug a couple more times. Finally Tanya's screen flowed over the wall.\n\n'Here's what we have,' announced Charlie. 'Well, our best guess.' Oh, dead goddesses, thought Quill, imagine him trying to lead an army with these words. 'Tanya's gone through the site, finding people from Coal Hill posting content. She's found out who has authored the most popular stuff. And we now need to find out if they're currently in school.'\n\n'They're probably at home,' suggested Quill. 'Either skiving or with their limbs in plaster. Yesterday they started a fight club in my class. This was after I knocked out a fifth year. They're either dreaming up more lunatic ways of killing themselves or they're learning how to use crutches.'\n\n'But what if they aren't?' argued Charlie. 'What if this truthordare site is, in some way, a testing ground?'\n\n'Really? For what?'\n\n'I don't know.'\n\n'It's for charity!' Quill said, and laughed. 'That's what humans are always saying. There's always a mountain falling on a village or something. Humans love a starving baby and an unhappy puppy.'\n\n'And disease,' said April. 'Skandis is a disease. Isn't it?'\n\nTanya shook her head, and the whiteboard filled with search results. 'It apparently is. But all these results'\u2014page after page of technical data, of smiling sick teenagers in hospital beds, of people doing fun runs\u2014'they're very recent and very vague as to what the disease actually, definitely is. Even Wikipedia just uses these as source material. And some new sites use Wikipedia, so it just repeats itself. Whatever Skandis is . . .'\n\n'Is it attacking the school?' asked Ram. 'Is that what it is? Some kind of alien plague?'\n\n'Interesting,' mused Quill. 'So you think it may be selecting its victims based on how stupid they are. How they go against evolutionary principles. Intriguing. But really, you don't need to go to any effort to find a stupid human.' She regarded them all and smiled.\n\n'What about if it's a brain disease of some sort?' suggested Tanya. 'Does that explain what's going on?'\n\n'You can't catch stupid!' protested Ram, and Miss Quill burst out laughing.\n\n'Bless you,' she said eventually. Then she looked at them all placidly. 'What would you like me to do here, Prince? I can hardly . . . Well, I can hardly defend you from the Information Superhighway, can I? What is curious is that both you and Ram have made appearances on this site and yet, somehow, both of you are still here breathing my oxygen.'\n\n'Yeah,' Ram said, 'but what about whoever posted that\u2014'\n\n'What about Matteusz?' cried Charlie and rushed from the room before Quill could call after him. 'I'm sure he got lots of offers.'\n\n'Well, there goes your glorious leader,' she said, amused at the twist this caused in Ram's mouth. 'Isn't that nice?'\n\n'We've got to do something,' said April.\n\nQuill nodded. 'I love your sort. You're always the people saying \"something must be done\". I can't wait until you're old enough to vote. Have you any concrete ideas?'\n\n'We could go and find Seraphin,' suggested Tanya. 'Find out what he knows. Make sure he's alright.' She paused. 'Maybe get a selfie.'\n\n'We should find out who's gone missing from the school,' suggested Ram. 'Well, who is really missing and who is at home. Find out how many people this has affected.'\n\nQuill nodded again. 'That's a lovely idea. They're both lovely ideas. Do them both.' She dismissed them with a nod and opened her book.\n\nOh. They were still there.\n\n'Go on. Don't let me stop you.' She pointed to the door. 'Shoo.'\n\n'But isn't there something more?' said April. Her voice was firm. She crossed over to the projected screen and looked at the page. 'There's got to be a way of finding out how this site is working directly.'\n\n'But Seraphin\u2014' protested Tanya.\n\n'Hasn't been seen for weeks; has probably got a team of PRs protecting him; and won't return your calls\u2014bet you.' April ticked off the reasons on her fingers. 'But, you know, you're welcome to try and find him. Get an autograph.'\n\nThere was something in the tone of that which Tanya took against. 'I was just trying to be funny,' she said.\n\n'Come on, April,' said Ram, using his best 'be reasonable' voice, 'let's go look round the school, see what we can see and then reassess it.'\n\n'Sure,' said April. 'Sure. Of course. You're right.'\n\nAnd she walked out anyway.\n\n## TWENTY-TWO\n\n## THOUGHT YOU KNEW HOW TO LOSE YOUR FRIENDS? WELL, THIS WOMAN'S THIRTEEN BRILLIANT REASONS WILL CHANGE YOUR MIND\n\nCharlie found Matteusz. On a bench. 'Oh,' he said, cramming all of his relief into that one word. 'You're okay.'\n\n'So, you care?' Matteusz said. He looked cold and small and miserable, which considering his size was quite something.\n\n'Yes,' said Charlie. 'I'm sorry. I got it so wrong.'\n\n'You did,' said Matteusz, holding him. 'You amazingly did.'\n\n'Am I forgiven?' Charlie said.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'I had a speech.'\n\n'No problem.'\n\n'And a chocolate bar.'\n\n'I'll take it.'\n\nThey walked away in the rain.\n\nApril watched them go. 'I guess I'm alone now,' she decided. She was sat on a low wall, sheltering from the rain. The school was so quiet. Bells rang but no one ran to class.\n\nShe fished her phone out of her pocket and tossed it from one hand to the next.\n\nSomething's going on here. No one can agree on what to do about it.\n\nShe looked out at the wet square of tarmac.\n\n'I know what to do about it. But it's not good.'\n\n**Video: How to Betray Your Friends and Influence People**\n\n**'Hi, my name is April MacLean, and this vlog is for Skandis.**\n\n**I'm not going to jump off a roof.**\n\n**I'm not going to cycle round the M25.**\n\n**I'm not going to fight Audrey Maguire, even though she's always hated me, and, anyway, who calls their daughter Audrey?**\n\n******No. What I'm doing for Skandis is I'm telling you this:**\n\n**I'm not sure I'll ever know when I'm right.**\n\n**I don't know if I'll ever win an argument. Nor if I would want to.**\n\n**I'm worried I'll only know how to enjoy being young when I'm really not young anymore.**\n\n**I'm not sure I'll ever be able to forgive my father. Sometimes I really resent my mother when she can't look after herself.**\n\n**Some of the time, when I'm playing music really intently, I'm doing it so that no one asks me how I'm really feeling. Because if they asked me, I'd start crying and I'd never stop.**\n\n**I'm not sure anyone will ever be in love with me at the same time I'm in love with them.**\n\n**Sometimes when I go to sleep I wish that I never wake up.**\n\n**I care about causes, like refugees and recycling, but** **** **sometimes I just like to think it makes me look good. But all this charity stuff? Doing things for Skandis? It makes me sick. Do you know why? My mother needs care most days. No one, not even my best friends, has ever offered to help me with her, or even asked me how she's doing. People at this school, doing stuff for charity? I've seen them laugh at her wheelchair. She's been sworn at outside the shops because she gets a parking space. She's been called a scrounger and told to get a job, even though she has one. Does that make me selfish? Vindictive? Yeah. Well, I don't care. If you're just doing something because other people are doing it, that's not charity, that's peer pressure. And I'm too tired to be bothered with fitting in.**\n\n**Oh. And I really like folk music.'**\n\nApril waited until the video had uploaded. Then she started to walk home. But she didn't get there.\n\n## TWENTY-THREE\n\n## SHE WAS READY TO GIVE UP AND THEN A NURSE SLAYED HER WITH A WORD\n\nApril woke up.\n\n_April._\n\nThat was her name.\n\nApril had learned to be good at mornings. Especially over the last couple of years. A while ago, being a teenager before noon was EXHAUSTING. Now she aced it. Once it had been a chore to get out of the house and arrive at school before nine. Now she woke up, made breakfast for her and her mum (her mum said she was more than capable of doing it herself, but that wasn't the point), talked with her, made sure Mum was feeling well enough to work (some days she really, really wasn't), then showered, changed into clothes she'd washed and ironed herself (she did her own laundry\u2014there should have been awards for that), and then got herself to school. Always on time. If not a little early.\n\n'Stop being so perfect,' her mum had said to her recently.\n\n'I can't.'\n\n'You're like a robot.'\n\n'A really tired robot.' They were having toast that morning, and it had somehow gone wrong. How was toast so complicated? It wasn't like there were recipes for it.\n\nHer mum wheeled herself over to the sink and reached up to rinse her plate. It just wasn't a natural movement. Even though she was used to it, good at it, it never looked easy. Her mum reaching up for a tap like a child.\n\n'Let me do that,' April said before she'd realised it. Her mum ignored her. She always did. Just carried on running the plate under the tap, hosing away those stubborn last few bread crumbs before slotting it into the dishwasher.\n\n'Why not be late today?' suggested Jackie. 'My shift doesn't start for a bit. We could not do something.' She closed the dishwasher. 'We could defiantly not do something.'\n\n'Such as?'\n\n'Watch TV.'\n\n'TV is rubbish at this time. Unless you like cartoons.' April had never really been a fan. Jackie relented, smiling.\n\n'One day you'll regret always being on time. It'll catch up with you.'\n\nAnd now it had caught up with her.\n\nShe had a waking-up ritual. She allowed herself to enjoy her room, which sounded stupid, but it helped. After the car crash, she'd found she both couldn't sleep and she couldn't stand waking up. She started every morning miserable. She'd once read a book about a man who lived in a cave and started every day screaming. That. She'd woken up every day like that\u2014barely enough time to blink before she remembered all the terrible things that had happened to her and which would make her miserable all day. Sometimes she couldn't just remember them, they HAPPENED to her. Fresh. Free range. She'd hear her mother pleading with her father to slow down, to stop the car, to let them out, she'd hear herself screaming and begging and she'd hear the engine roaring and the song on the car radio, that song, and she'd wonder what she could have done to stop it as it was all her fault and that song and the way the road slid up at an angle, a roller coaster ride that she really hadn't bought tickets for.\n\nIn short, she woke up every morning panicking. It was a nurse who helped her realise that.\n\nApril had come to visit her mum in hospital (she did it every day\u2014there was nothing else to do, not for a while). She was waiting to go in, and the nurse came out of her mum's room, closing the door gently. They kept telling her that her mum was doing fine, that there was nothing to worry about, but Jackie had her own room and this was the NHS. You only got your own room if you were dying. And very lucky.\n\nApril had started noticing these things. There was a reverential way of closing a door that only nurses used. It meant bad news. Later, when her mum was getting better, it was a different story. Doors would be flung open and nurses would bustle in, real cheeriness cranked up to eleven and all 'Hello Jackie and how are we today Jackie and oh look it's April and how are you doing April and isn't the weather awful?' But, for those first few touch-and-go weeks, the door to her mum's room was closed so quietly and the nurses tiptoed away.\n\nExcept for this nurse. She had stopped and looked at April.\n\n'You look awful, hon,' she said.\n\n'Thanks.' April's twisted smile said it all.\n\nThe nurse looked left and right and then sat down on the chair next to her. And said nothing.\n\nEventually, April broke the silence.\n\n'You really don't need to sit with me. It's okay.'\n\n'No, I do. It's more than fine.' The nurse had one of those floating Jamaican accents that sounded like birds swooping among trees.\n\n'Don't you have patients to look after?'\n\nThe nurse threw back her head and laughed as though she'd made a great joke. 'I always have patients to look after. From when I come on shift to when I go home. Too many patients. You know what? If I look after all the ones I have, they give me more. I don't get to all the ones I have? I stay late till I'm done. So, I'll spend five minutes with you and make you feel better, then I'll go and deal with the man in that room there . . .' She pointed at the room over the way. 'Handsome old man, very near the end. So racist. Keeps saying I've stolen his pills and his glasses. Calls me \"little girl\" when he wants to say something else. I should tell him \"Say it, dear, let it out, you're fooling no one.\" But I don't. I find his pills and his glasses and I tidy the pillow and I go make him a cup of tea the way he likes it.' She folded her hands across her mint-green uniform. 'I can spare five minutes for you. April, isn't it?'\n\nApril nodded. 'You said you could make me feel better?'\n\nThe nurse nodded. 'You feel horrible when you wake up, don't you?'\n\nApril nodded again.\n\n'It's because a horrible thing has happened to you, you and your mum. You wake up feeling helpless and miserable and afraid, and you blame yourself. You can't stop that. It's natural. But, and this is the thing, that very first minute when you wake up and that great wave crashes down on you, tell it to stop. Take a breath. Look round your room. Feel at home. And tell yourself all the good things you're going to do that day. Just list them.'\n\n'There aren't many,' April said.\n\nThe nurse looked comically angry at being interrupted.\n\n'Hush. Maybe there'll just be two or three for now. Maybe there'll be dozens. But try it and count them. Then, once you've run out of good things that you're going to do\u2014and I pray you don't\u2014then and only then, let that breath out and turn back to that old wave of misery and tell it to do its worst. And you know what'\u2014the nurse leaned forward\u2014'it'll still crash down on you, but it won't be so bad.'\n\nShe'd stayed with April half an hour, chatting about her dogs and the coffee machines and where hospitals got their weird chairs from. But the advice was the thing that April remembered. Ever since, whenever she woke up, she'd look around at her bedroom, at the drapes, at the twinkling lights, at the mobile turning in the breeze, at the plants outside, and she'd enjoy how slightly too warm the duvet felt, that feeling of safety as she counted through all the things that she'd do today until she'd run out of breath.\n\nThen, whatever happened, she'd be ready for it.\n\nNot today.\n\nApril woke up.\n\nShe looked around herself. And it all went wrong.\n\nShe was in a small white room. She was lying on a small white bed. She was wearing a scratchy shirt. She was covered in a thin sheet and her head was resting on an even thinner pillow.\n\n'Where am I?' she asked. 'And where's the door?'\n\n## TWENTY-FOUR\n\n## IF YOU DROPPED DEAD TOMORROW, WOULD YOUR FRIENDS MISS YOU?\n\n'Have you seen April?' Ram asked Charlie.\n\n'No,' said Charlie.\n\n'It's just\u2014have you seen the video she posted?'\n\n'I haven't had a chance.' Charlie rubbed the back of his neck and grinned sheepishly. 'I've been kind of busy.'\n\n'Have you seen April?' Ram asked Tanya.\n\n'No,' she said. 'Well, I've seen her video. Whoa.'\n\nRam leaned into the webcam. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I've tried calling. And she's not answering.'\n\n'We should totally not tell her mum,' said Tanya.\n\n'Yeah,' Ram said. 'I'd not thought about that.'\n\n'Have you seen April?' Ram asked Miss Quill.\n\n'Certainly.' Miss Quill laughed and spun her laptop round. 'I can't stop watching her little video. Unlike her, it's proving quite popular.'\n\nShe hit refresh. 'Every little helps,' she said, which would only make sense later. Then, even more bafflingly, she looked at Ram and winked.\n\n## TWENTY-FIVE\n\n## SHE THOUGHT SHE'D SEEN IT ALL AND THEN SHE SAW THE FACE OF GOD\n\nApril found the door eventually.\n\nShe found it by telling herself that there were limits to how unusual her world could get. Yes, her life was suddenly All About the Aliens, and true, she had an unwilling time-share on her heart with an alien king, but there were, she told herself several times, still going to be doors in her life.\n\nShe padded across the cold white floor of her small white room and she suddenly wondered where all that white was coming from. The room didn't have a window. Nor did it have any visible lights. And yet there she was. In a white box. Maybe the walls lit themselves up somehow. Whatever, her first stop was going to be the walls. She started patting them.\n\n'There is a door in here somewhere,' she said to the room. 'Well, there'd better be as I really need to pee.'\n\nOnce she found the door it was obvious. There was a section of wall opposite the bed which, if you pushed it, swung open.\n\nIt led her into a white corridor. April raised an eyebrow.\n\n'I can see how this is going to go,' she said to herself. She used her blanket to block the doorway of her room shut and then set out, tapping the walls, looking for answers, and, failing that, a bathroom.\n\nTen minutes later she'd discovered that, if she had been abducted by aliens, they had plumbing. Phew.\n\nThere was no sign of any toothpaste and her mouth was urgently telling her that it'd like some. She scooped some water from a tap and carried on.\n\nAt the end of the white corridor she found she was in another room. It all happened by optical illusion. The white corridor was perfectly, eye-achingly white. The room beyond was the same shade of white and completely empty. So, she walked from the corridor into the room with no realisation that she'd done so until it was too late.\n\nThe room she was standing in was, again, perfectly white. She couldn't tell how big it was, only that her senses were screaming at her that it was huge.\n\nShe stopped walking. She turned around, trying to get an idea of how big the room was. She cupped a hand over her eyes, trying to shield them from the ****of her surroundings. It felt like sand was being rubbed into her optic nerves. She couldn't stop blinking and there was an itch under an eyelid like she had a trapped lash. She rubbed it and that made it ten times worse.\n\n**WHITE**\n\n**WHITE**\n\n**WHITE**\n\nShe decided she'd had enough of the white room. Then she realised she'd forgotten which way she'd come in. She couldn't see the corridor anymore. She just knew that it was somehow somewhere. Unless this was some kind of trick.\n\nShe tried walking around, reaching out to touch a wall, but no matter how much she walked, she couldn't feel anything. Then her knees buckled and she fell. For a moment there was dizziness, but then she realised\u2014she could feel the floor. So she kept down and she crawled, sweeping an arm out in front of her in case, at any point, she met a wall.\n\nNo wall.\n\nRealising that she had absolutely nothing to orient herself by, she stopped and got up onto her knees. She needed something. Even if it was a false centre. She was just wearing a long nightshirt. She gnawed one of the buttons off and put it down on the floor. It wasn't quite white. Not completely. Sort of cream. It stood out, blaring its off-whiteness at her. She kept glancing back at it as she crawled away. Still there. Still there. Then gone. Utterly gone. She crawled back, defiantly, absolutely retracing her steps.\n\nThe button didn't reappear.\n\nNormal April, rational April, carry-on April would have taken that. But that April was taking a few heartbeats off. This April just flopped down in the whiteness. She rolled onto her back and made a snow angel. She giggled.\n\n'If it snowed here, how would you see it?' a voice said. A moment later she realised it was her voice and that she sounded a little, just a little, crazy.\n\nIt was now that she heard the roaring sound. The pounding of the blood in her ears, growing louder and louder. That was her heart beating. Her weird alien heart. It was racing out of control. The nurse in the hospital had told her to enjoy being self-aware and now she was all too aware of herself.\n\nApril lay there. It was all way too much. For the first time in a long time, she just gave in.\n\nWhich was when the whiteness flickered.\n\nFlickered like a screen. A face appeared.\n\nThe size was so large it could only be the face of God. The face filled the space, and that told her right now how small she was. She was lying on the floor of a vast cube. The face was projected onto all six faces of the cube. There was no escaping the face.\n\nShe could see all of it. The pores, the smile, the eyebrows, those clear blue eyes.\n\n'Hi,' said the face of God.\n\nIt was Seraphin.\n\n## TWENTY-SIX\n\n## THIS TEACHER'S INSPIRATIONAL WORDS WILL CHOKE YOU UP\n\nMiss Quill was the last person in the school.\n\nIt had that familiar quietness about it that told her, quite firmly, that it belonged to her. No Shadow Kin, no demons, no other aliens, and best of all, no children.\n\nJust Miss Quill, face lit up blue by her laptop. April's video was still playing on a loop.\n\n'I know exactly what you're doing,' she said to the screen.\n\nEven though Miss Quill knew she was absolutely alone, she still looked from left to right before leaning into the screen and speaking again.\n\n'I know what you're doing, April, and I admire it. Even if it will probably kill you.'\n\nThen she closed the tab on her browser and called up a search engine. She wondered if anyone had posted any more photos of cats on the Information Superhighway.\n\n## TWENTY-SEVEN\n\n## SOMEONE'S REIMAGINED DISNEY PRINCESSES AS ALIEN WARRIORS AND, TRUST US, IT'S AWESOME\n\n'Hi,' said Seraphin. 'How you doing?'\n\nApril lay on the floor and boggled up at him. While also lying on top of him. Suddenly she knew exactly how large the room was. In theory she should also have been able to work out where the walls were and where the way out was, but in practise all she could do was lie there stunned.\n\n'Hope you slept well.' Seraphin did a little winky shrug and flicked back his hair. 'I slept like a baby. Hence my skin. Smooooth.' He ran a giant hand across the skin, and she heard the magnified prickle of the tiny layer of stubble.\n\nHer entire world shook as he tilted the phone he was holding. She could see, over the pitching nausea, that he was standing, as he often did, shirtless and wandering around his flat. Seen like this it was all so very odd.\n\nThe stripped-wood flooring. The packets of cereal. The blankets on the sofa. A sock.\n\n'We woke you up before the others. 'Cos it's your first day (hooray!). Just so you could get used to it.' His voice was purring. 'And so that you could enjoy this room on your own. Isn't it great? They call it the Big White Room, which isn't very original but has a good feel to it. You know, #bigwhiteroom. Works, doesn't it? It's an amazing space. If it was up to me, I'd show cartoons in there. We should do something about that.'\n\nHe crossed, dizzyingly, to a blackboard and chalked the word 'CARTOONS?' up after the words 'CLOTHING LINE?' and 'NOT POETRY SLAM BUT RHYME CRIME?'\n\n'Anyway, I'd like to welcome you personally, but, as you've probably guessed, this is a recorded message. Click. Fizz. A Recorded Message. Brrr. Click. Please speak after the tone. Beeeep.' He laughed, and it was such a good-natured, warm laugh that April tried to forget how terrifyingly loud it was.\n\n'First off. Well done. You've won Truth or Dare. You've got our attention, and you've made it into the Void. Wait, let me say that again with a spooky tone. THE VOID!\n\n'Bwahahaha. Actually, seriously, nothing to be scared of.\n\n'Not with what you've done. You've shown outstanding skills. Everything you've done has been voted to the top . . .' He started ticking off his fingers. 'Let's see, you've been brave, courageous, you've risked upsetting your friends, you've not been afraid to put your life out there. You've done some pretty remarkable things and you're going to do more.\n\n'And everything you've done so far, you've done for Skandis. You've already been fighting Skandis, but (big secret, just between you, me, and everyone else), I'm going to tell you what Skandis really is. It's not, strictly, a disease. Well, it is. But it's a disease grown very large and very out of control. I'm going to show you what Skandis is. In a second. Just for a second. Be brave. Because you're not going to like it. Ready for it? Three . . . two . . . one . . .'\n\nThe screen filled with a terrible screaming face, a snarling reptile, the head entirely composed of ravenous snarling suckers, dripping with a thick, bubbling juice. It whipped and pushed itself howling into the camera, seeming to burst through the walls.\n\nAnd then it went. Leaving April wondering if her heart was still, in any way, working.\n\n'Nasty, eh?' Seraphin was back, his face a bit more muted. 'Sorry about that. Really I am. They're not nice.\n\n'That's a Skandis. It's an alien. And they're going to invade Earth. Not in a BOOM way. Not in an abduct-lonely-American-motorists-and-do-sexy-metal-things-to-them way. No, they're going to come to Earth and they're going to devour it.' Seraphin paused.\n\n'We need to stop them. We've a chance. They've established a bridgehead (military term) where they're gathering their forces (again, military term) and, if we can beat them there then they may, just may, decide not to come any closer. It's tough, but it's doable. Believe me.\n\n'This is where you come in. We Need You to Fight Skandis. We needed to find some way of gathering a force to fight them. And, you know what, so far it's worked well. On paper, the scheme sounds crap\u2014gather up a load of teenagers and make them fight a space war? What are millennials for? But guess what? Forget how it looks like on paper. Who uses paper anymore? Turns out, you're amazing. You're braver than anyone else in human history, you think faster, and you can process several different screens of information simultaneously, AND you've spent more time in immersive combat training than anyone else. Plus, plus, plus, well, we've all seen _Ender's Game_ , and this is like that but without the sulking and netball.\n\n'Oh, and we've a way better playlist.' Seraphin laughed again, and even that giant laugh was somehow reassuring.\n\nHe reached out and some music started to play. It managed to be quite backgroundy, little bit ambient, tiny bit floor-filler. 'Everyone's brought their phones here and the music on them is INCREDIBLE. Yes. Sorry'\u2014he pulled a sad face\u2014'we've confiscated your phone. But don't worry\u2014you won't be here forever. And we've got them ALL on charge so they'll be ready for you once you're finished and want to go home.\n\n'Here's how it works. Every day the Void will send you into a room to do the fighting. It's a spacey spacey gateway. You'll be both INSIDE the Void AND YET ALSO on an alien planet. Take a deep breath. That's right. An Alien Planet! Don't worry about the fighting\u2014we'll start you off easy and then ramp it up. You'll have helmet cameras so that everyone back here can see how well you're doing. It's awesome. Seriously, the technology in this place is top. The food's a bit meh, but hey, nothing's perfect.'\n\nAs he paused for breath, April used the opportunity to do some shouting. Shouting about how she had to get out, to get home, that coming here had been a terrible mistake and he really needed to listen to her and put her right back in London now.\n\n'I know what you're thinking,' said Seraphin. 'You're worried about the folks back home. Meh\u2014don't be. Nothing to worry about. It'll all be fine in the end, you'll see. You're saving the Earth, so forget about eating your mum's cooking and feeding your cat and so on\u2014'\n\nApril screamed at him\u2014he didn't understand. She needed to get back, to look after her mum, but he just carried on talking, his blandly pretty face telling her that this was perfectly normal.\n\n'Anyway'\u2014Seraphin yawned and stretched\u2014'I'll be on hand with lots of life hacks for battle. The usual. Everyone's getting up now, so you'll get to meet your fellow soldiers and get to it.' He held a fist in the air. 'Together we're fighting Skandis! Woo yah.' He smirked. 'Woo and yah.'\n\nThen he winked and held something up, close but so close she couldn't see it. 'Oh, and you forgot something.' He vanished.\n\nWith a tiny ping, a button landed next to April.\n\n## TWENTY-EIGHT\n\n## THIS HOT TAKE ON SMASHED AVOCADO TOAST WILL HAVE YOU REELING\n\nWas she still in the Big White Room?\n\nShe didn't know if it was the same chamber she'd been in or a different one. The whole Void had that feeling. Spotless, antiseptic, impersonal, like hospitals should be but never were. In real life, buildings always had scuffs or stains, and someone always put some flowers somewhere. But not here. The whole space was perfectly null.\n\nShe'd been worried about meeting her fellow\u2014what? Victims? Captives? Combatants? Soldiers?\n\nShe wondered what she'd say to them. Turned out she needn't have worried.\n\nAt first she thought they were ignoring her. Then it turned out they were ignoring the world.\n\nShe had walked into the Big White Room and they were all at benches, hundreds of people, eating bowls of something. She sat down at a vacant spot and grabbed a bowl. It looked like cereal or stew. She tasted it. Still no idea. But that was a way of breaking the ice with the people around her.\n\n'What is this stuff?' she asked. No one replied.\n\n'Hi,' she said. 'Should have introduced myself. I'm April.' Nothing.\n\nShe looked closely at the other people. They were all wearing white helmets, with little visors that went over the eyes. They were all staring at their plates. Odd.\n\nThe walls of the Big White Room glowed and jumped, playing footage from battle like it was an FPS. There was even an insert of Seraphin, wearing a headset and shouting an amusing commentary. Only this wasn't a play-through. This was real. With screaming. That made the jokes weird.\n\n'Oh, missed the kill shot, dude! Missed it! That'll cost you\u2014look at that, three shots down and that is like nearly dead and you've got to pick it up because whoa, that is bad and you have got to\u2014 The teeth, fella, watch out for them teeth! How many times do I have to warn you all about the teeth? Yeah, yeah, and FINALLY you blow its head off. Like what took you so long? And it's dead and bravo and now, here comes the screaming. Still, not bad for a Level One.'\n\nThe play-through continued.\n\nRight, thought April, spooning down her stewpops, this is weird. There's all that battle going on. Like a sports channel. Only it's on the walls, the ceiling, the floor.\n\nOccasionally, artefacts would appear. Small squares that would flicker over a bit of the screen and then vanish. They'd show a picture of a bowl of cereal. Or a view of the other people. Or, just once, of her. But mostly the picture was solid. The battles of the day.\n\nApril's foot kicked something. There was a helmet under her bench. Waiting for her. She reached down and picked it up. If she was going to fight, she figured she'd need one. Was she going to fight? She didn't know.\n\nShe put it on. It had that new-helmet smell of plastic and wet wipes. The visor was smoked plastic. There were two small displays at the side of it. One was a thumbnail of what was on the screen\u2014the battle footage. The other display was a small picture of what she was looking at. She looked up and peered around the room. The thumbnail went red. 'ABNORMAL' it said. She looked down at her bowl. The thumbnail went green. 'NORMAL' it said. She experimented, looking at whatever there was to look at in the Big White Room. The only things that turned the thumbnail green were looking at the big screens or at her food. NORMAL. Everything else? ABNORMAL.\n\nShe thought about that for a bit, chewing it over more than her food. Then, having had more than enough, she stood up and walked out. She looked at the door. 'ABNORMAL' read the display. She noticed that, as she went, a few squares on the big screen showed her retreating back. They flickered and went out. But they'd been there for a bit. She'd made an impression.\n\nAs she walked out of the room, she smiled. So that was how it worked, was it?\n\nBefore she'd started eating, April had been wondering about how to escape. By the time she'd finished her bowl of whatever, she felt keener on staying and fighting. She wasn't quite sure why. Was it the food? Well, it had a really weird aftertaste to go with its really weird taste. Some kind of drug?\n\nNo, she dismissed the thought. She walked on through the corridors of pure white. Maybe there'd be a door back to her room, or a door home, or a door somewhere interesting. Just a door. That was what she really wanted.\n\nShe turned a white corridor and found a lot of doors.\n\n'COMBAT CHAMBER EMPTY. BATTLE READY TO COMMENCE SMILING EYE.'\n\nShe stood in the combat bay. This was where the corridors of the Void had led her. So. This was it. Her first mission.\n\nAm I going to fight, she thought?\n\nWell, why not? She'd already encountered several lethal alien races. But her actions then had been a mixture of defence, panic, and sheer fury. This was different. There was even a countdown.\n\n'Dimensions balancing in ten . . . nine . . . '\n\nThe Combat Chambers were clearly different to the other spaces in the Void. The doors were obviously doors. They even had little windows in them. At the moment, that was a moot point, as the window in the white door just showed more whiteness beyond. But that was about to change.\n\nThere'd been a prerecorded safety demonstration from Seraphin. He'd explained (with a little song) that this was just Level One combat. 'Almost a training level. There's a safe word and everything.' She'd step through the door and she'd neither be entirely in this dimension nor on the alien planet. She and the enemy combatant would interface and be dimensionally in sync with each other, while also being not entirely there.\n\n'It saves having to send you all the way to the battlefront. We can just project you there temporarily. As I said, call out the safe word, you can come home. Otherwise you're only there until you win. So it's good to win.'\n\n'Six . . . five . . . four . . .'\n\nThe window flickered. It reached peak white and then faded into a pearly greyness.\n\n'You won't see much. Not at first. Level One is learning about the Skandis, getting the measure of how to fight them. Once you've got the hang of that, then you'll start seeing a bit more of the world around you. But first, there'll be no distractions, as you need to really, really, learn about the Skandis. Not go looking at alien trees. No matter how cool they are.'\n\nApril took a big breath. Is this what I am now? Am I a fighter? Am I really going to go up against an alien? She thought about it.\n\n'Three . . . two . . . one . . . '\n\nThe door unsealed and April went to defend the Earth.\n\n## TWENTY-NINE\n\n## THINK OF THE WORST JOB IN THE WORLD? YOU'RE NOT EVEN CLOSE\n\nThe Coal Hill headmaster's secretary was always 'new in the job'. The longest had managed about four months. The school got through headmasters at a fairly rapid rate (they'd long ago given up painting them, or even hanging photographs of them in a corridor), and, although it was never noticed, went through headmasters' secretaries at an even more rapid rate.\n\nThe school was blacklisted by most local temping agencies, and whatever secretaries they managed to hire generally took one (or, at the most, two) looks around before fleeing.\n\nAll schools have bizarre, soul-crushing amounts of paperwork and staffing rotas seemingly designed by Ouija board. Coal Hill added to that burden. No one ever knew how many teachers there were supposed to be, or how many had gone off sick, vanished mysteriously, or simply quit. It made scheduling the timetable impossible.\n\nEven something as simple as the cleaning rota was impossible. The school employed an outside contractor but also seemed to occasionally employ a caretaker called Smith. No one could quite remember ever having met the man, or explain exactly what he did. He'd never supplied a bank account so he'd never been paid, which could have caused quite a problem for the school finances\u2014if he ever did ask for pay, they'd have to sell off the furniture.\n\nThen, of course, there were the pupils. In order to last any time at all, a headmaster's secretary had to develop a thick skin. Most headmasters' secretaries spent their days ringing round parents, politely enquiring if their children were sick, truant, or had gone on a bargain package holiday to Crete. At Coal Hill it was quite the reverse. You had to get used to parents ringing up demanding to know where their children were\u2014a question that was sometimes difficult to answer.\n\nFor Ms Tey (the current headmaster's secretary), it was proving to be a baptism of fire. As her predecessor had hastily handed over to her, she'd told her what to expect (apparently she'd been offered an exciting opportunity doing admin for a portable toilet company). 'You may, every now and then, just occasionally, find the odd child is missing,' her predecessor had said as she'd thrown things into a cardboard box. 'Try not to take it personally. Sometimes they turn up. You never know, eh?'\n\nMs Tey had thought it a curious remark but she'd filed it away as gallows humour. What kind of school would it be if people really did go missing all the time? Surely someone would shut it down?\n\nAnd then the phone had started to ring. The first day it had just been a couple of parents. Now it was a flood. Ms Tey had been shocked, worried, and was now horrified to find herself bored. She'd run out of things to say to crying, terrified parents.\n\nHer phone rang again. She unplugged it, dropped it into a bin, and went back to browsing job sites.\n\n## THIRTY\n\n## YOU ARE BEING LIED TO ABOUT VOTER REGISTRATION AND THIS SHORT CHAPTER TELLS YOU HOW\n\nThe monster.\n\nThat was all that April could see. The calmer, rational parts of her brain tried to give it the name Skandis. Tried to apply functions to the various limbs and appendages. Tried to envision an environment that demanded that evolution answered back with quite so many teeth.\n\nThe problem was that the calmer, rational parts of her brain were completely drowned out by the rest of her body screaming. She fell back, the thing reared over her, those terrible tentacles whipping down towards her, their jaws snapping at her.\n\nThen time went weird.\n\nAs her head smacked into the floor, her eyes rolled up. She saw the white walls of the combat chamber. She'd already stopped noticing the walls but she could see them clearly now. They were that same uniform, glowing white. But there was something about them. Seen from the floor, she could see how they'd been cleaned, and not very well. They were streaked with grime and little dark red trails of dried blood.\n\nThe monster pushed down towards her. The smell was repugnant, catching in her throat. She retched, trying to roll away from the tentacles. Then she was up and running, still doubled over and gagging, her eyes streaming from the smell. The monster swept around, tentacles hissing as they tried to locate her. She was trying to work out where the door was, but the room was just stretching away. She kept running until she bumped up against a wall and stopped, catching her breath, rubbing the water out of her eyes.\n\nThis had been a terrible mistake.\n\n_I am not a soldier. I am not a soldier._\n\nShe didn't want this. She didn't want to be fighting this.\n\nShe had just wanted to find out what was going on. She had wanted to be the clever, brave one.\n\nNow she was running for her life.\n\nShe ran.\n\nShe kept running.\n\n_I have no plan. I have no idea what I'm doing. I will not fight it. I'm not a soldier._\n\n_Oh God. Where is my gun?_\n\nShe smacked into another wall. She was cornered. She twisted round, trying to see where she'd dropped her gun. As she'd walked in, it had felt so good to be holding a gun. It was solid, it was chunky, it was heavy. It didn't feel like paintballing or Laser Quest. This was real. This could protect her. This could hurt.\n\nOnly now she'd lost it.\n\nThe monster heaved itself towards her, slithering and lurching, rearing up to spring. Sensing victory, it paused. Tentacles flailing through the air towards her, the jaws opened. She could see those dreadful teeth, smell the air-meltingly awful stench of its breath.\n\nShe had an absurd urge to laugh. She was supposed to fight this thing? Who'd thought this was a good idea?\n\nHer brain raced on again.\n\nUp until now she'd taken this all on board. The disorientation. The endless white rooms. The complete isolation. The idea that behind this place was a great and powerful plan that really understood what was going on and was doing all it could to save the Earth.\n\nThe world was like that. She understood that. People made important decisions and other people carried them out and told more people that it had to be done and so it gradually trickled down and spread out until everyone's lives were somehow affected by it. The decisions didn't have to be good (they often weren't), they just had to be made and somehow they'd end up happening.\n\nYou could shout, you could protest, but you just couldn't stop them.\n\nThat was how things happened. She was sure that was how all this had come to pass. Someone had seen there was a problem and they'd worked out how to solve it and they'd thought it through and argued the toss and then decided that this was the best solution. Build the Void. Fight the war that way.\n\nOnly . . .\n\nWell, this was the thing . . .\n\nAs the tentacles pressed against her and the teeth trailed across her skin, April screamed at the top of her voice:\n\n'Who the hell thought it was a good idea to throw teenagers at monsters?'\n\n## THIRTY-ONE\n\n## ADVERTISEMENT: YOUR BOOK WILL CONTINUE IN TWENTY-FIVE SECONDS\n\n_'Hi, I'm Todd and this is why I fight.'_\n\n_(We see Todd. He's in combat gear. He's taken his helmet off, and we can see that he's ruggedly handsome, with a kindly older brother's air to him.)_\n\n_'Why do I fight? It's simple. I fight for the planet Earth.'_\n\n_(Shots of green fields and sunny days and beaches, lots of beaches.)_\n\n_'I fight for my parents, my family.'_\n\n_(Shot of Todd's parents holding hands. Shot of his sister shooting him with a water pistol. Jokes.)_\n\n_'I fight for everything that's good about our beautiful world.'_\n\n_(More beaches, this time at sunset.)_\n\n_'I fight for tomorrow.'_\n\n_(Sped-up footage of the night sky, scurrying clouds, daybreak.)_\n\n___'I fight because the Skandis are evil. They want to destroy us, our planet, our way of life. We can't let that happen.'_\n\n_(Grainy black-and-white footage of Skandis in combat.)_\n\n_'We can't let that happen. We can't let that happen to the Earth.'_\n\n_(Footage of a playground. Screaming children fleeing from an unseen menace. A mother scoops up a toddler and runs towards the camera, her face full of terror.)_\n\n_'We're here because we're making a difference. I don't care how long it takes. What it costs. Because I know that while I'm here, I'm doing everything I can to ensure my world is safe.'_\n\n_(The Earth seen from space, beautiful, tranquil, fringed by the rising sun.)_\n\n_'What I'm doing here is right. I'm Todd and this is why I fight.'_\n\n_(Todd, staring straight into the camera.)_\n\nThe video ended and everyone in the Big White Room rose to their feet, applauding wildly. They looked at one another, at the screen, and they cheered.\n\nNORMAL.\n\n## THIRTY-TWO\n\n## THE TEN BEST ALIEN DEATHS YOU'LL SEE TODAY. #6 IS A KILLER\n\nSo what? She'd used the safe word. It was April's first time.\n\nSurely no one had expected her to do any different. Screw them.\n\nIt wasn't instant. That had been surprising. She'd had to wait the ten seconds for the dimensions to stabilise and for the chamber door to open.\n\nTen seconds in which she was quite sure that she could have died.\n\nTen seconds in which to keep fighting and keep alive.\n\nTen seconds in which she became aware of her heart. It was beating strangely. Beating with excitement and verve. Filling her body with an unusual amount of energy. Like adrenaline, but different. More wild. The alien part of her heart. The bit linked to a Shadow Kin warlord. The bit that said, 'I am bred for battle and I must fight'.\n\nThe pulsing heart beat so strong and fast that it spun her round, made her pick up her gun, aim it again at the nightmare. Only it wasn't so nightmarish anymore. It was just a Skandis. Just something to wipe out. That was all.\n\nShe got ready to squeeze the trigger.\n\nThen the Skandis vanished and the combat chamber sprang open.\n\nShe heaved herself out and stood there in the bay, waiting for her heart to calm down.\n\n'Whoa,' she breathed.\n\nApril spooned down her savoury porridge flakes and wondered what the hell was going on.\n\nHow many days had she been here? Was this her first day? Her second? Her third? She felt completely disoriented and desperate to know how her mum was coping without her. She'd be worried, wouldn't she? She'd have called the police? But how was anyone going to find her\u2014wherever here was, or wasn't.\n\nEvery morning (was it even morning?) it was the same. She'd wake up in the Big White Room. She'd take a deep breath. She'd remember. She'd think about what she had to do that day. And she'd feel utterly alone.\n\n'Hey, everyone!'\n\nSeraphin's face blotted out a wall of the chamber. Everyone looked up from their breakfast.\n\nSeraphin stepped away from the camera. He was topless and holding a plate of food.\n\n'Cinnamon toast. You want some?' He took a bite.\n\n'Ohhhh, delicious.'\n\nThen he walked back a little bit further, sat down in a leather chair, flung his legs up along the side, tugged at his hair, and continued to munch his way through the plateful, while the audience spooned slowly through their grey soup.\n\n'Apparently the battle has been going really well. Like amazingly well. Let's just look again at some of yesterday's footage. That's right, #clipshow.'\n\nThe huge wall filled with head-camera footage. A Skandis on the ground, flailing.\n\nA rifle butt came into frame.\n\nIt smashed down and down and down again. Each impact made a wet, crunching thud. The horrific frame of the Skandis shuddered and squealed each time, its so solid frame crumbling and shattering under the impact.\n\nA solitary tentacle continued to twitch.\n\nThe rifle butt smacked down on the tentacle. It sheared off, flopped around wetly, then stopped moving.\n\nThe shot changed, showing flashes of arm and broadcasting ragged breathing. Movement, movement, the head whipping around to show something following.\n\nIt was someone running. With a Skandis following, screaming and howling. The person running was out of breath, you could hear it catching and wheezing and desperate. It was a girl.\n\nFor a moment April thought\u2014is that me, was that me, did I sound THAT scared?\n\nFor a few seconds all you could see was white. Then the running stopped.\n\nBreath. Ragged breath. A shot of boots.\n\nThe girl was doubled over, catching her breath. She was exhausted. She'd given up. That was it.\n\nThe hall echoed with the slight creak of a hundred people leaning forward in their seats.\n\nThey were going to watch her die. Then the shot changed.\n\nShe'd stood up.\n\nShe'd turned around.\n\nShe was facing the Skandis still running towards her. So close. So lethal.\n\nShe shot it.\n\nThe soldiers in the hall breathed out, cheering and clapping, fists pounding on the tables.\n\nWow, thought April. _Aliens vs. Hogwarts_.\n\nWherever she looked around the room, at all the cheering faces, her helmet told her 'NORMAL'.\n\n'Another one down!' someone shouted. No one looked around to see who'd said it. There'd been something, a little falter on the last word, that told them that they'd thought better of it.\n\nThe shot changed a third time.\n\nAt first it seemed to be a drone. A drone spinning somewhere, seeming to take off, whip up and then hover overhead, looking down at a Skandis. It swept backwards and forwards, observing and monitoring and checking in.\n\nIt flew up higher and began to slowly descend, drifting down.\n\nIt was a peaceful, gentle scene. Then they all heard the voice on the picture.\n\nThe voice saying softly and quietly, 'Please, no, please, no.'\n\nIt was crying.\n\nThe shot drifted closer and closer. Down towards the monster. Ever so slowly.\n\nSomething moved to the left of the frame.\n\nA tentacle. Clamped around a leg. Pulling the camera closer and closer. Drawing it into the great, vast mouth that split open across the top of the creature.\n\nThe picture went black but the screaming didn't stop. The wall went back to white. The Big White Room was utterly silent.\n\nThen Seraphin spoke.\n\nHe was back, still sprawling in his chair, not a care in the world. He put down his plate, dusting crumbs from his hands and licking the tips of his fingers. 'Delicious. Amazing. It's recipe time. Hey\u2014you know, like when my sister taught me to make a sausage casserole. Jokes if you've not seen it. So here goes with today's recipe:\n\nHere's a few cheeky tips for slaying a Skandis . . .'\n\nApril looked around at the other people eating. None of them met her eye. Flickering around the walls was headcam footage, screen after screen of food. That was it. She leaned close to the person opposite her, trying to squint with one eye, to see if the image of the boy's face appeared, however fleetingly, on the screen. The overlay in her helmet said 'ABNORMAL', urging her to look away.\n\nWell, screw that.\n\nThe boy was so young. He was pale. He had spots clustered round the straps on his helmet. He wouldn't meet her eye.\n\n'I'll keep staring at you,' whispered April, and she meant it.\n\nThe boy carried on eating.\n\nApril carried on looking at him.\n\n'Listen,' she said. 'Why do you fight? Why don't you try to get home?'\n\nThe boy said nothing.\n\nHis spoon hesitated, just for a moment. Then he carried on eating.\n\nApril gave in, and looked up at the screen, where Seraphin was still talking away.\n\n'Here's what we've got,' he said, his tone as bright as ever.\n\n'Weapons. You can't toast a Skandis without them. But it's important to know how to use them. Really lethally use them. Here are some of my sister's old dolls. Kidding, they're mine.'\n\nHe gestured to a row of plastic ballerinas.\n\n'The gun is the easy bit. It blasts\u2014' A ballerina shattered.\n\n'It burns.'\n\nA ballerina whoomphed into a melting pillar of fire.\n\n'And the butt\u2014snark, I said butt\u2014can be used as a club. That's why it's so heavy.'\n\nThe end of the rifle smacked down, breaking a ballerina into pieces.\n\n'And, in an emergency, we've also given you an electronic stunner.' Seraphin grimaced. 'Really? Like who came up with that name and why aren't they fired?' He winked. 'We should have a competition to see who can come up with a better one, isn't that right, Captain Pugsley?' He held up a small, wrinkled, cross-looking dog. It grunted and then got back on with the depressing business of being a pug.\n\nApril slept. In her dreams she saw all the headcam footage. The endless army of Skandis fighting, lunging, attacking, the soldiers fighting back at them, advancing, screaming, dying. On both sides the slaughter went on. Overlaid over each and every frame of her dream was one word: NORMAL.\n\nShe woke up in a dark room. Only it was a dark room that she knew was white. That felt strange. Her heart pounding, she was ready for battle.\n\nWhat the hell am I doing here? she thought.\n\n## THIRTY-THREE\n\n## EIGHT WAYS IN WHICH PEOPLE HAVE TRIED TO ESCAPE THE VOID\n\n**1. The boy who shot himself in the foot. FAILED.**\n\n**The gun simply refused to fire.**\n\n**2. The small group of dissenters who had tried to find a way out. FAILED.**\n\n**Some said they were still walking somewhere in one of the corridors.**\n\n**3. The girl who smashed up her room. FAILED.**\n\n**She came back to it after a meal to find it completely replaced.**\n\n******4. The boy who faked appendicitis. FAILED.**\n\n**He woke up to find his appendix removed.**\n\n**5. The brothers who refused to eat. FAILED.**\n\n**They carried on fighting, claiming their heads felt clearer without food, but insisting they wouldn't eat till they could go home. After seven days without food, both vanished on a Level 4 combat mission.**\n\n**6. The girl who said she had to go to her mother's wedding. FAILED.**\n\n**She was assured, despite evidence to the contrary, that the wedding hadn't yet taken place.**\n\n**7. The guy who'd just stayed on the floor of the Big White Room, screaming. FAILED.**\n\n**He'd been taken back to his room, and hadn't been seen since.**\n\n**8. The girl who got out.**\n\n**Actually, that one's a Rick Roll. Sorry.**\n\n## THIRTY-FOUR\n\n## AT FIRST SHE THOUGHT SHE KNEW EVERYTHING BUT THEN SHE FOUND THIS SECRET SHE HADN'T KNOWN SHE NEEDED TO KNOW\n\nApril wanted out. She wanted to get home. She wanted to make sure her mum was okay. More selfishly, if you'd pressed her, she would have told you that she was miserable.\n\nAfter a meal break, she wandered the corridors. She ignored the gentle way the Void had of suggesting that you went this way instead of that. Instead she strolled along, pushing occasionally at the walls. She figured that, at some point, this whole structure had to have a weak point. At the very least, someone's room would be unlocked and she could try to talk to someone. She patted her way along a corridor, turned left, went along another one, circling back towards the Combat Chambers. She didn't want to end up there by accident.\n\nShe bore left and pushed on another square of wall. Then she pressed on a little bit further and walked towards the end of the corridor. A white wall. So perfectly white. She pushed against the end of the corridor, and felt it click. Just a little. She pressed it again, and it slid open. What was beyond it was startling, simply because it was so dark. No white. Just a dim grey tunnel that blew cold air at her. She stepped into it, pulling the door closed behind her.\n\nWas it too absurd to hope it'd end in an emergency exit sign leading to a car park? Perhaps she wasn't at the end of the universe after all, but simply in Slough. God, she would love to be in Slough. The corridor ended in a small flight of metal stairs. She climbed them.\n\nAfter all the empty, futuristic concealed panels and blankness, what was most surprising about what was at the top of the stairs was its sheer ordinariness.\n\nIt was a normal wooden door. April, nonplussed, knocked at it.\n\n'Coming!' said a voice. April stood there, baffled. The door opened.\n\n'You!' she cried.\n\nStanding at the door was Seraphin.\n\n## THIRTY-FIVE\n\n## WHEN SHE MET GOD SHE FORGOT TO ASK 'WHY?'\n\nThe room was the last thing she would have expected.\n\nIt was Seraphin's bedroom.\n\nShe wandered around it in a daze.\n\nThere was his bed with its crumpled sheets. There was the shelf full of wonderfully ironic toys. There was the table with a huddle of laptops. There was the little nook leading to the bathroom with its massive selfie mirror. There was even the bay window, looking out onto . . .\n\n'Yeah,' said Seraphin, 'you can poke the sky. It's fake.' April leaned out of the window. Because he'd told her to and her head was just not up to anything else. Beneath her was just darkness. And ahead of her was a brilliant skyline that looked somehow wrong. Wrong because when you prodded it, you felt nothing. Just nothing. But it all rippled. Like paper.\n\n'Whaaaaa?' said April and stopped talking.\n\n'Hi,' said Seraphin, and he reached out and took her hand. He shook it firmly but not too insistently. 'You'd better not be a fan.'\n\n'Not really. April.'\n\nGood, 'cos if you were a fan and you'd somehow managed to get here I would, I really think, scream.' Seraphin smiled and gave a little scream.\n\nApril smiled back. Up close, Seraphin was a bit too hot to look at directly. Like a polite, sweet sun. But there was something different about him. Something that made him weirdly more handsome.\n\n'Oh, got it! You're wearing clothes!'\n\n'Yuh.' Seraphin ducked his head. Actually he was wearing a lot of clothes. Comfortable sweat pants, baggy slogan T-shirt, smart hoodie, and a beanie hat that suited him amazingly. 'What?' he said. 'My clothes only fall off when I'm working. You know, I just do it for the likes, the reblogs, and the gifs. When I'm off duty, I like to be WARM. I like to wear a shirt. I like to be shnoogly. Especially in winter\u2014the heating bills at my place are PHENOMENAL.'\n\n'Don't worry, you look great,' said April. 'I mean, sorry, I mean . . . God, this is weird.' She laughed and she didn't know why she was laughing. 'It's you. You're really here.'\n\nSeraphin laughed too. 'Next thing you're going to say is I'm shorter than I look on screen.' This was clearly a joke. He was really tall and he had these blue eyes that just stared at her with keen interest and . . .\n\nWait a minute. Wait.\n\n'You're Seraphin,' said April.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'You're here. You're not . . . I dunno . . . a hologram.'\n\n'That's an excuse to fondle my chest, right?'\n\n'No. No! It's just . . . Are you in charge of this place?' April stared at him sick with horror and the realization that she'd basically just walked into the villain's lair. If a villain's lair had more ukuleles than normal. Wow. She'd been so stupid.\n\nSeraphin threw back his head and laughed.\n\n'Sorry,' April practically gushed with relief. 'Sorry. I just assumed that you were in charge.'\n\n'No. But can you imagine? Me?' He tore off his beanie hat and threw it onto the desk and shook out his hair. 'Look, who are you?'\n\n'I came because of your messages. We decoded them.'\n\nAt the 'we' Seraphin looked reassured. 'And I came here to find you.'\n\n'Oh, thank you, you're amazing!' Seraphin whooped. 'I've been stuck here for months.'\n\n'Stuck here?'\n\n'Help, I'm a Prisoner in a War Game Factory!'\n\n'So who is behind this?'\n\n'I don't know.'\n\n'Really? So you don't work for them?'\n\n'Oh, I work for them, but that's NOT THE SAME THING. Not at all. Listen.' He threw himself onto a Swiss ball and started bouncing it around the room. 'Dead truth, okay. I was offered a contract, to be the public face of the site. It was, well, it was a tonne of money. And it was for charity. So, you know, I said yes. They explained about the mock-up of my flat and everything and that was totally cool. I get that some people like artificial. But then I get here, and I think it's an afternoon filming a few inserts and so on . . . And I Have Been Here for Months. And it has got weirder and totally weirder and do you want a juice?'\n\nHe reached under the desk and threw her a small box of fruit juice. 'Even here I still get freebies. Insane.'\n\n'What flavour is it?' April said automatically, and then smiled at herself.\n\n'No idea,' said Seraphin drily. 'I do know that it's vegan friendly and gluten-free and that if you enjoy it the PR firm encourages you to tweet about it using the hashtag #sosopure.' He smirked ironically.\n\n'Right.'\n\nApril stabbed the straw into the carton and wondered about what she was going to say next.\n\n'Where is here?' she asked.\n\nSeraphin threw his hands out, wobbled on the ball, and righted himself. 'No idea. Like, there was an Uber. I got in it. Well, I thought it was, only . . . Anyway.' He bounced forward on the ball, grinning wolfishly at April (a very polite, house-trained wolf ). 'You say your people decoded my messages?'\n\n'Yes.' Oh, this is where it was going. Oh dear.\n\n'And you've come to get me out.'\n\n'Ah.'\n\nSeraphin took the news reasonably well. Sort of. Eventually. Once he'd stopped shouting. April might not have entirely helped. She was doing her best at looking both contrite and calm when it suddenly struck her that she was a soldier trapped in an alien dimension inside a fake flat with a celebrity shouting at her on a space hopper.\n\n'You're laughing! Seraphin broke off his rant, incredulous. 'You're laughing?'\n\n'Well, yes,' April said. 'Sorry.' She blew her nose and then tidied her hair back. 'You have no idea\u2014how scared I am, how much I want to go home. I need to get back to look after my mum. I need to tell my friends what's going on here. Oh God, there's so much I need to do. And I thought that you'd . . .' She laughed again. 'I thought that you'd have a way out.'\n\n'And I thought that you did.' Seraphin laughed too.\n\n'The whole situation is crazy. We're all stuck here. I'm still doing all my normal vlogs from in here about \"My Insane Life\" and it's all about the sunglasses I'm being paid to wear, a healthy snack delivery company I've been endorsed to discover, or a song I'm writing or whatever, rather than what's really going on, which is so mad. Like, if ever filming your daily life should be about something, it should be about this\u2014massive space war against fricking aliens. Shouldn't it?'\n\n'Well, yes.'\n\n'The saddest vlogs are the ones that are about something. Vlogs by sick kids.' Seraphin wasn't laughing. He just looked so sad. 'Jeez. I can't stop watching them. They're not even popular\u2014just grim. Kind of like _Game of Thrones_ grim, you know? But I am an addict. 'Cos people are all like, \"Hey Seraphin, you're so brave putting yourself out there,\" and I'm like \"Thanks,\" but I'm not a kid stuck full of needles.\n\n'But yeah, dying. That's not Living the Dream.' He grabbed himself another juice and tossed another one across to April.\n\n'The whole vlogging thing's really hard, you know. My Insane Life. Everyone looks at you like they know you. And it's like, \"You may think you know me but I do not know you,\" but when they run up to you at a music festival you have to be all smiles even when they jab you in the face with the selfie stick. 'Cos you've already made the choice to be their best friend. That's part of the mission. If I'm out in public, then I'm always on. I'm always smiling.\n\n'And you learn, like, when you really commit to it, that the sun always has to shine. 'Cos it's my job to tell you that it's okay. That life's great. Is your life?'\n\nApril blinked. 'Well, no, I mean, sometimes not, but you know . . .'\n\n'Nah-har.' Seraphin made a Wrong Answer noise. 'That's your audience gone. Not what we came here for. And, don't get me wrong, so many of my problems are #FirstWorldProblems.' He stopped, shifted posture on the Swiss ball, and suddenly bounded into a devastating impersonation of himself. 'Hey, guys! My hair! Dis-as-ter! Like whaaaaat? Insane! What am I going to do with this? Oh shoot me!'\n\nHe slid off the ball and landed on the floor. April had never seen someone do an impression of themselves, and it was odd. Ten seconds of sharp self-hatred.\n\n'I'll tell you the things I don't get to do. Simple things.\n\n'When you commit to doing this every day, you don't realise that there are going to be Bad Days. Or you think that you'll store up a few so that you can have a few days off. You know. But that never happens. It just doesn't. And then, you know, top secret, but when you have a hangover, you don't get to crawl back under the duvet. You have to share it with the world. Share! It! With! The! World! And your hangover has to be funny and here I am in Speedy's Caf\u00e9 and I am so in need of bacon and isn't that great and . . .' He gave a long, thoughtful sigh. 'I'll be wearing a baggy jumper that makes me look vulnerable yet adorable. Think about that\u2014I have to pick what I'm wearing when I'm hungover.\n\n'And, hey\u2014you ever been dumped?'\n\n'Ack,' said April.\n\n'Sorry,' said Seraphin. 'I know, right, I've only just met you. Too much sharing. But it's like, you're dumped. You wake up the morning after and you just want to not be awake. Like getting out of bed is impossible. Iron Man is sat on your shoulders. But no. You gotta get out of bed. And the worst thing is that you wake up and you are dumped and then you remember that Everyone Knows. Literally everyone. Like, if it happens in public, in a restaurant, someone will have live-tweeted it, and there'll be three reaction videos out there already. And you don't get to have a day off. You have to be out there and be dumped and be nice about it.'\n\n'I think,' said April, 'that's called being a gentleman.'\n\n'Yeah, very good, 1950s.' Seraphin's laugh was a nonstarter. 'But is it fair? Sometimes, I just want to get stuff off my chest. 'Cos they were doing my head in and whatever, but I have to be sooo still. Even\u2014you remember the one who released an album about me?'\n\n'Not really, no,' April admitted. As much as she was aware of Seraphin, she sort of had a vague 'dating that model with the quirky handbags' memory. 'But you're famous. Worse, you're internet famous. Some woman goes out with you, she's going to be hated. She breaks up with you, she's going to get so much more hated.'\n\n'Yeah yeah yeah,' Seraphin agreed wearily. 'Jeez. Sometimes I think the whole online thing was invented just so we could hate on women. But look, hear me out, right. Say I'm single, and I go out and I meet a girl right, the morning after she'll post \"So, this just happened . . .\" with a picture of me asleep in her bed. And the world just goes BANG. Like what? I've not got control over that. Like, I can't say I've got a cold without three different PRs biking me over their client's cough meds and a little note suggesting a hashtag. You know, I just want it to be back to when it was just fun insane rather than insane insane.'\n\n'Like this?' suggested April.\n\n'Totally.' Seraphin scrambled up, and kicked the wall of his flat. It wobbled. 'This is the point that it's all gone totally nuts.'\n\n'What the hell do we do now?' asked April.\n\n## THIRTY-SIX\n\n## THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO WIPE OUT SKANDIS FOREVER\n\n**'COMBAT CHAMBER EMPTY. BATTLE READY TO COMMENCE SMILING EYE'**\n\nAfter leaving Seraphin, April had tried fighting again. And again, she'd not got any further.\n\nWhat the hell was this place? Was it even a place? Was she trapped in an idea?\n\nShe'd thought that finding Seraphin would have helped. Like Dorothy finding the Wizard of Oz. Only the man hiding behind the curtain wasn't pulling any levers. He was simply there to make a lot of noise.\n\nHe'd tried to help her but hadn't really been able to do much. It was like neither of them had a full picture of what was going on. He was there to get brave people to fight monsters in order to save the planet. She was there, supposedly, to fight monsters to save the planet.\n\nBut something didn't link up between the two.\n\nSo she'd gone to fight a monster, to see how it made her feel.\n\n'That's definitely a reason why I don't want to do this,' she grunted as a Skandis threw her against a wall. Was she imagining it, or was the wall less padded than yesterday? Was the Skandis more aggressive? Was she finding it a little harder?\n\nShe lay on the floor, panting and tasting blood in her mouth. 'I'm not a coward,' she said, and activated the safe word.\n\nThe next ten seconds proved she wasn't a coward. The ten seconds it took the dimensions to normalise and for the Skandis to vanish were endless. As if sensing the fight was over, the Skandis threw itself at her with desperate energy. April fired off a shot from her gun, more as a warning than anything else. It singed the creature's hide, making the slime bubble and steam as it scorched its way through the flesh. The creature roared, pulling itself up.\n\nI can do this, April thought. I can do this after all. She raised the gun. Aimed.\n\nAnd the creature vanished.\n\nShe staggered out of the Combat Chamber. She was soaked in sweat. She held a hand out in front of her and watched it tremble. She took a deep gulp of breath and tried to hold it, but she couldn't.\n\nAnother soldier was standing there, visor down.\n\n'Are you okay?' he asked.\n\n'Yes . . .' she said. 'Just . . . shaken . . .'\n\n'Sure,' he said, sounding concerned. But not taking the helmet off. He just carried on staring at her. I'm being filmed, April thought. I'm looking at him and my screen says NORMAL. He's looking at me and his screen says ABNORMAL. I'm being filmed through all of this. I'm going mad and I'm fighting aliens and I'm being filmed. If I crack now, if I go crazy with this guy, then he'll just be filming all of it. And it'll be shown in a loop. A loop of 'This Weak Girl . . . '\n\nShe stared back at the guy.\n\n'Hey,' she said, and she held up her hand. 'Look, it's shaking less. Woop-de-doop-dee.'\n\n'Yes,' said the soldier after a pause. How old was he? Mid-twenties? Ten years younger? The helmet made it impossible to tell.\n\n'Just, you know, still getting the hang of it.'\n\nThat creature, rushing at her out of the whiteness, roaring and spitting and leaping. And her gun coming up and her dodging to the left and then the right and the thing still coming at her.\n\n'Yeah,' the soldier said. He wiped a hand across his sleeve. There was that strange green blood\/fluid all over it. 'Just killed one. They take a while. You're Level One, now, yeah?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Wait till you get to Level Three. That's when it gets pretty juicy. They're really fast moving there. And they take longer to kill. They're really vicious.'\n\n'Vicious?'\n\n'Vicious.' The helmet made the guy's face implacable. 'The Level Ones are much slower. Like they're older. Or not so good at fighting.'\n\n'Okay.' That sounded odd.\n\n'Sometimes it's like the Level Ones are actually pleased to be killed. Imagine that, eh?'\n\n'Yeah.' April was finding this whole exchange odd.\n\n'So . . .' she said.\n\nThe visor tilted at an angle. Curious. April very carefully said nothing.\n\n'Do you want to go back in there?' the soldier said. 'I know how to re-jump the Combat Chambers . . .' He gestured to an instrument panel at the end of the bay.\n\n'We're not supposed to know how, but they're really easy. I can pop you back in there in a couple of minutes.'\n\nFor a moment, his soldierly air had been replaced by boyish enthusiasm. He was almost dancing over the instruments. A boy showing off to a girl.\n\n'No, I'm good,' said April. On the one hand, maybe it would do her good to confront her fears. On the other, there was something about this that just didn't feel right.\n\n'You sure?' The visor looked at her, once again unreadable.\n\n'Yeah, thanks,' said April. She walked away.\n\nShe knew now what she had to do and that it wouldn't be easy.\n\nApril walked into the Big White Room, joining everyone at the meal that was possibly breakfast.\n\nShe chewed on the soapy flakes, plucking up the courage. The moment passed. Another moment passed. And then, in a rush, she pushed her bowl away and stood up.\n\n'I want . . .'\n\nShe faltered. She swallowed, raised her voice, and started again. Everywhere she looked was wrong.\n\n'Everyone, I want to talk to you about the Skandis. I'm not going to fight them anymore.'\n\nShe'd wanted a reaction. No one said anything. Spoons lifted food from bowls.\n\nThe video of Seraphin played on.\n\n'I'm not a coward,' she shouted to the roomful of people who were ignoring her. That's not an easy thing to do. 'I'm not saying I don't think the Skandis are evil.'\n\nNo one cared but still she carried on talking. 'I'm just saying that I don't get why we are being made to fight them. It shouldn't be us.'\n\nThe volume of the video went up slightly.\n\n_'Cupcakes, eh? I love cupcakes. Today I'm going to make some amazing cupcakes and cut my own hair.'_\n\n'Like that!' April raised her voice till it scratched at her throat. 'We should be doing stupid things. Like that. Normal things. Not . . .' She stopped, lost for words.\n\n_'These scissors . . . Do you think they're blunt or_ Psycho _badass? As in Stab! Stab! Stab! Arg!? And do you think I'll get hair in my cupcakes? Well, Captain Pugsley will decide.'_\n\nA square appeared, blocking out a tiny, stamp-sized portion of Seraphin. It was a small picture of April. Someone in the room was looking at her. Just one person. Someone was paying attention to her.\n\nApril kept talking. 'This. This room. Think about it. Please. This roomful of people. Isn't it insane? Isn't it wrong?'\n\n_'And now we're gonna clean the bowl the best way. Giffers go crazy at me licking my batter.'_\n\nAnother square appeared on the huge screen. Two people. How many before ABNORMAL became NORMAL?\n\n'Look around you. Look up. Stop looking at him. Look at yourselves, at what you're doing.' April hoped her voice didn't sound desperate. She was going for strident, she was going for confident, but those last words, something pulled at her vocal cords and choked them slightly.\n\n_'Still plenty of cream in the bowl, so a big dollop for Captain Pugsley and oh, oh, oh, I've spilled some on my chest. Classic.'_\n\nMore squares appeared. More small pictures of April, breeding and multiplying, spreading across the wall. People were looking at her.\n\n'Listen to me,' she shouted at them. 'Stop fighting. Stop this madness!' Then she filled her lungs. One final push. 'JUST LOOK AT ME!'\n\nAs she said it, she realised she'd made a terrible mistake. Gone too far.\n\nFor a moment it was all good. The picture of Seraphin broke up entirely and the screen became one big April staring back at her. Waiting to hear what she'd say next.\n\nAnd then, one by one, as her words echoed around the room, those squares blinked out. The wall was whole again.\n\n_'Three-second rule, dammit, Captain Pugsley!'_\n\nToo needy. She knew she'd lost them. She turned around and walked out.\n\n## THIRTY-SEVEN\n\n## AFTER YOU READ THIS YOU'LL WANT A SHOWER\n\nApril woke up. The room was wrong somehow. For a moment she hoped she was back in her bedroom at home. That it had all been a dream. But that wasn't how dreams worked.\n\nThe room was dark. Completely. It went this way when you were supposed to be asleep. It was disorienting. She'd woken up in the dark here before and it was peaceful. This time, though, there was something wrong in the room. Something that itched. Something that refused to be right.\n\nShe heard the breath.\n\nShe was not alone. There was someone in the room. She realised how wrong she was when they came for her. About a dozen of them. Rushing towards her. She cried out and then they were on her.\n\nThe attack wasn't long. It could, she told herself long afterwards, have been worse. They didn't even hit her with weapons. Or fists. Some of them grabbed her sheet and pulled it tight. She couldn't move. She struggled there, helpless, refusing to scream. They struck her with the flat of their hands, blow after blow on her face, her body. She looked up as long as she could, her eyes not seeing their faces, just the helmet cams staring at her.\n\nI'll never know who you are, she thought. I'll never know who did this.\n\nShe ignored every urge to shout back at them, to beg, to cry with pain. She felt her heart, that strange part of her, leaping around in fury. Something deep inside her wanted to hunt down everyone in this room and kill them all. She hoped it was the alien part, and not her.\n\nThe blows stopped. She sensed people stepping back. She felt a moment of relief.\n\nThen she was reeling from a terrible rank smell. It was so overwhelming she fought back for the first time, struggling against the hands holding her down.\n\nWhat have they done, she thought\u2014they've let a Skandis into the room. They're going to kill me with it. I've said I wouldn't fight and now they're going to make me fight.\n\nSomething landed on her. Wet. Repulsive. As it touched her skin, she felt it flare up and burn slightly.\n\nHer eyes streamed and she gagged at the terrible, sticky, dirty smell.\n\nThe hands holding her down released her. They stepped away. They walked out.\n\nThe door opened. The door closed.\n\nThe lights flickered on. She knew they would. She knew what she would see.\n\nThe dripping, severed head of a Skandis was pressed against her mouth.\n\nLooking back later, from a long distance away, she realised that neither she, nor her attackers, had said a word.\n\nIt was a long night. The lights in her room hadn't gone off. Repulsed, she'd eventually squirmed her way out from under the head. The bedsheets were stained with a mixture of slime and blood, seeping over the sheets and into the mattress. Inside the tiny room, the smell was choking. Of course the door was locked.\n\nThe head sat on the bed, watching her with boiled-egg eyes, the tentacles flopping and slipping over onto the floor. She moved to another corner of the room and curled up in it and tried to close her eyes. It didn't work.\n\nShe remembered the pillow and slowly, reluctantly, worked herself up to go back for it. She hoped that the Skandis's blood hadn't touched it. That would have been something. But no, of course the pillow was covered in tiny, foul-smelling spots of gore, burning into the cheap foam inside.\n\nSo April just sat in a corner and tried to ignore the severed head and stayed utterly, chillingly calm. The smell became more and more overpowering and she could hardly breathe without retching, but she stuffed a fist into her mouth and screwed her eyes shut. She didn't think about the pain she was in, she didn't think about what had been done to her, she didn't think about what she'd do next. She just waited and waited. Until eventually the door sprang open.\n\nShe'd hoped the shower would have done something about the smell. The stench of that decaying creature was in her hair. She swallowed mouthfuls of the tepid water, trying to clear the taste from the back of her throat. She checked herself for bruises\u2014there were none. They'd been careful. Nothing to make anyone feel any sympathy for her. She stayed in the shower until the water slid from tepid to lukewarm to cold and then she got out. She caught sight of herself in the mirror, and her mouth fell open. She made a noise. A half sob from somewhere deep inside that, if she'd let it continue, felt like it would never stop. She stifled it.\n\nShe dried herself on the cheap towel and slipped into a fresh uniform.\n\nWalking towards the Big White Room was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do. At least, she told herself, there'll be no surprises. I know they're all waiting there. They know I've been humiliated, hurt. They'll all know from the videos.\n\nBut it's a meal. It's a day.\n\nShe breathed in. Be brave, she told herself. You can face them. You can face them all and that's how you win. Don't even put your helmet on. Don't hide behind it. Just look at them.\n\nShe walked in.\n\nThere was no one in the room. Nothing on the screens. Just empty benches.\n\nNo food.\n\nShe wandered around for a bit. Forced jollity. She swung her shoulders around. Then the exhaustion, and something else pricking at the edges of her eyes, wore into her and she picked a bench and sat down.\n\nSomeone walked in. They were wearing their helmet, their face tilted down. Was this one of her attackers? The boy walked over and sat down a few seats away from her. His nose twitched.\n\nGod, thought April, I must still reek of that thing. She fought down the urge to apologise to him. Almost automatic, but not.\n\nAnother boy walked in.\n\nThen a girl.\n\nThen another girl.\n\nAll of them silent, heads down, not noticing her. This was nothing unusual.\n\nHer strange heart fluttered and she wondered if this was them\u2014the group of people who'd assaulted her. _Kill them all, just in case._ The alien thought passed through her head and was quickly discarded.\n\nA boy walked in. Taller and broader than the rest. He sat down opposite her.\n\nThey all sat there. Nothing happened. No food turned up. Nothing.\n\nThey were all around her. But no one was looking at her. They kept on doing it.\n\nUnable to bear it anymore, April sprang to her feet. She wanted to run off, to shout, to say something, but she couldn't think of anything to say. She stood there, glancing from bowed head to bowed head.\n\nIt's like I don't exist, she thought, and then sat down. She knew then that she was trembling. She pushed her hand out in front of her and watched it shake.\n\nThis is really, really getting to me, she thought.\n\nMore people filed in and sat down. None of them looked at her. I'm nothing to them, she told herself. And that's okay. I can work with that. So long as I can get rid of that thing from my room I can go back there and I can wait this out. No fighting. Seeing no more of these people. Just living is enough.\n\nBut what if they come back to my room? Maybe I'll leave the head where it is, after all. That should keep them out. But when can I go? When can I leave?\n\nThe hall filled up.\n\nStill no food. Just waiting.\n\nCome on, guys, thought April, the war's not going to fight itself. And look at all these people\u2014no porridge. How are they going to lift their guns?\n\nThe giant screen flickered into action.\n\n'Morning, everyone!' Seraphin was hanging upside down from a pull-up bar, waving. 'It's someone's birthday today, so we're going to celebrate their special day. Let's hear it for April, the birthday girl!'\n\nEveryone in the room burst into applause. A strange, terrible, clapping in unison. April flinched from it.\n\nThe clapping stopped.\n\n'Apparently you got her a surprise cake! Am I right? I'm right. Hope you saved me a slice!'\n\nThe screen cut to the severed head sitting on her bed.\n\nAnd then back to Seraphin. 'We're lucky to have you, April. Let's give her another hand!'\n\nAnd he stayed there, frozen on the screen.\n\nLittle squares replaced him. Tiny shots from headcams as one by one everyone looked up to stare at her. All of them. Every one. A thousand Aprils filling the room.\n\nShe stood up, stumbling, as she tried to push back the bench. But there were too many other people holding it down with their own weight. She backed away. And watched the action repeated from every angle.\n\nSeraphin's voice called out, 'Who's got a magic memory of April they want to share?'\n\nAnd then, from every angle, she saw the assault on her from last night. Repeated over and over again. As Seraphin sang 'Happy Birthday'. Her face twisting from side to side. The blows falling on it.\n\n'It's not . . .' began April, stammering. She tried again but the singing continued. 'It's not my birthday!' she screamed. Suddenly this point seemed really important to her.\n\nAll that happened was the giant wall carried on showing her face crying.\n\n'It's not my birthday,' she repeated softly. 'And I'm not going to fight. You're not going to make me fight.'\n\nThis turned out to be a lie.\n\n## THIRTY-EIGHT\n\n## YOU'LL BE AMAZED AT HOW LONG IT TOOK HIM TO REALISE HIS MISTAKE\n\n'It's about April,' said Ram. 'She's missing.'\n\n## THIRTY-NINE\n\n## WAR VETERANS ARE COVERING THEIR HEADS IN GLITTER FOR REASONS THAT WILL STUN YOU\n\n**'COMBAT CHAMBER EMPTY. BATTLE READY TO COMMENCE SMILING EYE'**\n\n'I'm not giving in,' April told herself. 'I'm just showing them.' Showing them what, she didn't quite know.\n\nShe picked up a gun, steadied it, and took a deep breath. The readout counted down. The dimensions stabilised. Then, with a tiny click, the door slid open.\n\nApril stepped through into the Combat Chamber. For a few moments it held its warm, vanilla-scented emptiness, and then the landscape flickered into being across it.\n\nEverywhere she looked, projected onto the floor, were rolling marshlands and sulphurous pools. On the walls were distant hillocks and thundering clouds. Above her, more clouds drifted across the roof. The temperature fell and the air took on the tang of rubbish bins on a hot summer's day.\n\nApril shivered and walked on. Looking around, she realised this was the first time she'd seen the alien battlefront. The strange no-man's-land that they fought in. She tried to taste the air\u2014an artificial representation of an alien atmosphere. This may have been only a simulation, but it was a simulation of an alien planet. Every step she took here was somehow echoed on that planet. She was both here and standing somewhere far beyond in space. This was thrilling.\n\nYes, but not thrilling enough for her to forget her sense of defeat. Just by being here she'd given in. She'd admitted that she was going to fight. Was this how the machine rewarded her? With a better simulation of her alien surroundings? A little treat. You gave in, have some virtual reality.\n\nApril walked on, feeling the floor sink slightly under her\u2014was this an illusion, or was it . . . She reached down and patted it\u2014soft rubber? Clever. Squinting she could see it followed, just slightly, the contours of the land projected onto it. She moved on a little further. Judging from the feeling on the back of her calves, she was walking down a slight slope. She glanced back\u2014the doorway had receded and she seemed to be at the bottom of a hill.\n\nImpressive. But also worrying. What level was she on now? The terrain wasn't flat. There were rocks, weird, burnt rocks\u2014anything could be hiding behind them. She moved forwards, and the marshland receded to a silvery shore, which edged its way up to an ochre cliff. This was it, she guessed. She turned back.\n\nSomewhere around here, something was going to come and try to kill her.\n\nApril trudged on through the mire. Increasingly, she'd stopped thinking of it as some kind of illusion, and let her head tell her that she was on an alien planet. Flashes of wonder filled her mind. _I'm on an alien world._ What convinced her that it was real was that she was finding the whole thing increasingly tiring. Her legs ached, her bruises hurt, and there was sweat pricking and trickling its way down her back. Is this what it was like for astronauts, she wondered? Amazement at being where no one had gone before, followed by an annoying slight itch in their space boot?\n\nShe skirted the edge of the swamp, her boots crunching along the silver pebbled shore. Her feet hurt, but this was also really pretty something. The thick, wrong-coloured clouds carried on drifting slowly over her (were they going the wrong way? Was there a wrong way for clouds?). She stumbled slightly against the rocks and, with nothing better to do, sank gently down onto her back.\n\nHere she was, looking up at space clouds in an alien sky. Glimpsed beyond them were whole new stars, shrugged into totally different formations.\n\nHer life had changed a lot over the last few weeks, but this really was it. Alien planet.\n\nIt had been a bit of a rush. Of course aliens existed. She knew that, but had always thought of them as a vague possibility, in the same way that she knew that Russia existed. Then aliens started turning up at her school, armies of them, and the sum total of everything she knew got very hard to keep a hold on.\n\nApril had tried making her own rules for life. They weren't glamorous, or complicated, or even that ambitious. It was her way of saying to the world: 'You took my dad away, you crippled my mum, and you broke everything I believed in, so, from here on in, world, it's going to be baby steps'. Her rules had been based around looking after her mother, trying to ensure they didn't talk about it too much, making sure they weren't talked about, and trying to impose some small little bits of normality on life. Which aliens had, literally, driven a bus through.\n\nHer carefully settled world had been shaken up like a snow globe. New rules, new heart, and now here she was, some kind of teenage super-soldier, fighting aliens. It was all ridiculous. Exciting, but ridiculous. She thought she should probably stop before it got out of hand.\n\nShe laughed at that. And then, lying on her back on a not-quite-real alien marsh beach, she started to hum a song to herself.\n\nA few minutes later, she dozed.\n\nThe buzzing woke her. Her helmet was making little _fzz fzz fzz_ incoming text message vibrations.\n\nShe blinked and was startled by the clouds wandering over her.\n\n'ABNORMAL.'\n\nRight. Yes. Alien planet. Beach. Dozing.\n\n_Fzz fzz fzz_.\n\nWhy was her helmet doing that?\n\nMaybe whoever monitored the helmet camera. If the shot didn't change, that was a bad thing. Either she was dead or not putting on enough of a show. Maybe that was it.\n\n_Fzz fzz fzz._\n\nShe picked herself up, now feeling every bruise, and shook her head. Her helmet was still buzzing. She looked up the shore and then realised why her helmet had been trying to get her attention.\n\nThere were three of them.\n\nThree Skandis, slithering across the beach towards her. April crouched, grabbed her gun, and started backing away.\n\nShe'd come to fight them, but now she was here, she was wondering. She'd just wanted to take on and kill one, to make a point. To show the people outside that she was as good as them.\n\nBut where would that get her? If she survived, she'd shown that she would kill. Wouldn't they just make her fight again? Wasn't she being manipulated?\n\nOf course, she'd thought she could probably kill one of them.\n\nBut three?\n\nThree of them coming towards her very quickly. There was no way she could kill three of them. Coming here had been a terrible mistake.\n\nThe three creatures swept along the beach, the stones skittering and popping as their tentacles and claws scraped over them. Whereas they'd initially moved in a group, they now were separating\u2014one continued to glide towards her, another rolled into the marsh, and the third sprang up to the edge of the cliff where it climbed across the rocks at a terrifying rate.\n\nApril realised what was happening\u2014they were herding her. If she backed away she was losing the advantage.\n\n_Losing the advantage?_ What am I like?\n\nNo. She needed to hold the line. _Hold the line?_\n\nThe three Skandis were really close, tentacles whirling up into the air.\n\n'This isn't my fault,' she said to them. 'I don't want to do this.'\n\nShe raised her gun.\n\n'I mean it,' she shouted, the cliff swallowing her voice.\n\n'I will kill you.'\n\nShe felt her heart, her weird heart, pounding in her chest.\n\nThe creatures pushed closer.\n\nSomething moved up on the clifftop\u2014more of them. Come to watch the slaughter.\n\nShe could smell them, that terrible reek of death and vinegar.\n\nApril stood there, holding the gun. She raised it and aimed it.\n\n'I will use this,' she said. Was she talking to herself or the creatures? She sighted one of them, and marked its drop points. _Drop points?_\n\nA tentacle whipped past, stinging her cheek, burning her. She cried out.\n\n'I will use this,' she said.\n\nShe squeezed the trigger, firm constant pressure. Nothing happened.\n\nShe squeezed the trigger again. Nothing.\n\nWhat had she done wrong?\n\nApril held the gun out to the creature, almost as if asking it where she'd messed up.\n\nThe Skandis brushed it out of her hands and launched itself down onto her.\n\n## FORTY\n\n## THIS ICELANDIC PENGUIN VILLAGE IS PROBABLY THE CUTEST PLACE ON EARTH. BUT YOU ARE NOT THERE\n\nThe three Skandis exploded in ribbons of burning flesh.\n\nOne moment they were there, the next they were three meaty fireworks, shooting limbs, offal, and sparkles of gore across the beach.\n\nA dense cloud of foul smoke engulfed April. It stung her eyes and poured into her mouth. She gagged and choked, staggering back, rubbing her sleeve into her eyes.\n\nWhat had just happened? What the _hell_ had just happened?\n\nWith a wet patter, the last burning remnants of the creatures splashed onto the beach.\n\nApril lurched away, blinking to clear her eyes.\n\nThen stopped.\n\nAmazed.\n\n'You?'\n\nMiss Quill was standing there with a gun.\n\n'I cannot tell you how good that feels,' she announced, blowing across the muzzle of the gun. She stopped, frowning slightly, considering her options, and finally allowed herself a small, brief smile.\n\n'Killing things feels good. No, it feels _really_ good.' Miss Quill rocked back on her feet, surveying the red-green mist of body parts.\n\nApril loved her keyboard. Without it she couldn't work through her thoughts and turn them into music. But sometimes, when she was thinking too fast, she'd hit too many notes and the keyboard would just stop trying to keep up and emit a single thin sharp note. It was her keyboard's way of saying 'Enough, April. Stop!'\n\nRight now, her brain was making the same noise. She'd just seen three creatures killed.\n\nShe was covered in stinking flesh. Her gun wasn't working.\n\nThe Skandis had been killed by Miss Quill. Who was somehow here.\n\nWhat was going on?\n\nWait, back up a minute. There was something wrong.\n\nMiss Quill.\n\nHad killed them. With. A. Gun. April blinked.\n\nMiss Quill was aiming her gun at her and the smile had turned into a grin. 'Funny thing,' she purred. 'I saw the creatures attacking you and I wondered. I mean, they'd given me a gun, but I had no idea if it would work. What with the creature in my brain that's supposed to stop me from using weapons. But there you were. About to be killed. And, oddly enough, because of the interdimensional fields, it turns out I can use weapons here. Isn't that peachy?'\n\nWhen April replied her voice was ridiculously calm. The Queen at a Garden Party polite. 'And are you going to shoot me?' she asked.\n\n'Oh, I'd love to,' said Miss Quill. 'But, sadly, I've come a long way to rescue you. I doubt I'd get any thanks if I brought you back dead.' She tilted the gun up and looked at it wistfully. 'No more fun for you, you poor little thing,' she actually cooed at it. 'It's a very nice gun,' she remarked.\n\n'Lovely aim, simple action, strong result, stunning battery life. Not that you'd appreciate these things.' She smirked. 'You're too busy being all \"Oh no, a GUN, euw, euw, euw, I must start a petition against it and maybe paint a little sign about it\".'\n\n'That's not fair,' protested April. 'I tried . . . I tried to shoot one of them. Just now.'\n\n'How long have you been here?' Miss Quill asked.\n\n'Days,' said April.\n\n'And you've only just managed to not shoot one of them?' Her eyebrows arched. 'How you lot ended up as apex predators I don't know. I guess evolution has a wicked sense of humour.'\n\nFor the first time in a long while, April felt a familiar emotional reaction. Trying to talk to Miss Quill both made her want to smile and stamp her foot. (Did anyone, ever, actually ever stamp their foot? Still, that's how she felt.)\n\n'Look,' April said, 'it's been difficult.'\n\n'I'm sure it has,' Miss Quill oozed. 'No scented bath salts or organic delicatessens here. You poor thing.'\n\n'How did you get here?' April asked her. A change of subject sometimes helped.\n\n'Does it matter?' Miss Quill acknowledged the move and fended it away effortlessly. 'Let's get you out of here and tucked up in your no doubt achingly princess bed. You can drink chamomile tea and compose a really scathing review for this place on Airbnb. Come on,' said Miss Quill and marched off.\n\n'Right.' April breathed out slowly and set off after her.\n\nShe couldn't believe it. She was leaving behind the shore, the alien corpses, this whole nightmare. She was going home.\n\n'Oh.' Miss Quill stopped and spun round. 'You know what? I just can't resist.'\n\nShe shot April in the head.\n\n## FORTY-ONE\n\n## IN THE TIME IT TAKES YOU TO READ THIS, SKANDIS WILL HAVE CLAIMED ONE HUNDRED MORE LIVES\n\nApril woke up.\n\n_Again?_\n\nShe was in a small white room. Charlie was there. Charlie smiled in her direction, using his warm, distant, seriously polite smile. 'April,' he said with the formal courtesy of someone still trying to get used to forenames. 'You are alright.'\n\n'Miss Quill\u2014'\n\n'Is outside. Keeping watch.' Charlie sat down on the edge of the bed. He squeezed her hand, a very gentle, reassuring pressure.\n\n'She shot me!' April protested in a whisper. Knowing Miss Quill, she could hear through doors.\n\n'I know,' Charlie whispered back. He did not seem to be taking her entirely seriously. 'She was disabling the camera in your helmet. We've removed it. You're now off the network.'\n\n'Oh,' said April. 'She could have warned me.'\n\nA small 'Hah!' came through the door.\n\n'It is not her way.' Charlie's smile became rueful. Then he looked more serious. 'Why did you come here? You have put yourself in great danger.'\n\nAt first, April thought how sweet that was. Then she remembered that she was an unwilling pawn in an intergalactic war. If she died, so would her time-share heart, and then who knew what would happen to the Shadow Kin? Was Charlie's concern actually for her at all, or simply for the balance of the cosmos?\n\n'I had to do something,' she protested, and hoped that didn't sound at all pathetic. 'You were all talking and debating and people kept going missing. I couldn't ignore it any longer.'\n\nCharlie frowned and turned away from her. He was looking at the wall, which was odd as there was nothing on the wall.\n\n'I see.'\n\n'Do you?' she persisted. 'It's just that something needed doing.'\n\nCharlie nodded.\n\n'You acted as a leader,' he said.\n\n'Oh.' April blinked. 'Well, I suppose so. Something was wrong and needed sorting out and so I . . .'\n\n'Led,' Charlie finished.\n\n'Not exactly.' April wondered why she was so defensive, and why Charlie seemed so hurt. 'I mean, I'd hardly call it great leading. I've not done much except get shot at.'\n\n'Leaders do not always make great decisions.' Charlie turned to her, smiling sadly. 'But they make decisions and others follow them.'\n\n'But . . .' Others? What others?\n\nThe door opened and in came Miss Quill, Tanya, and, obviously, Ram.\n\nTanya did the explanations. Miss Quill announced that the room was crowded.\n\nRam looked at April for some reason. And, for some reason, April looked back at Ram.\n\nTanya explained that it took a couple of hours before they noticed she was missing. 'And we realised why you'd been acting so strangely, and that the whole system could be gamed and that obviously we could do the same . . .'\n\n**VIDEO CLIP UPLOADED TO TRUTHORDARE.COM**\n\n**(also available as a rather popular animated gif with the caption: 'THIS IS HOW MUCH OF A TOSS I GIVE')**\n\n******Tanya, Charlie, and Ram in a roller coaster. Tanya and Ram are screaming their heads off in giddy terror. Charlie is screaming in pure horror and alarm.**\n\n**At the front of the carriage is Miss Quill. She is completely calm, bored even, apart from a very slight smile. She is reading _Captain Corelli's Mandolin_.**\n\n'Anyway, once we'd done that we came right after you.'\n\n'Long afternoon,' said Ram. Was there candy floss on his shirt?\n\n'Afternoon?' April said.\n\n'And quite a late evening,' Ram said. He was sounding defensive, in the unique way that boys have of sounding defensive when they know that somehow they've done something wrong but aren't sure what.\n\n'Wait!' April sat up in bed and winced. 'I've been here DAYS.'\n\n'No,' Tanya corrected, 'hours.'\n\n'But\u2014'\n\n'Hours,' Miss Quill confirmed. 'This is a slow dimension. It has all sorts of benefits.' Again, that troubling smile. 'All sorts. They've been able to assemble a fighting force capable of taking on an entire species using, really, little more than a handful of humans. Let's face it, they'd need all the help they could get.'\n\nApril took a moment to process that. As in, to stop her brain thumping against her eyes. Her friends had not forgotten about her, they'd not abandoned her, she'd been worried about her mum for no reason. It was all going to be okay.\n\nApart from that they were trapped in another dimension. Yeah, that bit still sucked.\n\n'So, what do we do now?' April asked. 'I mean, you've come here to rescue me. What's the plan? How do we get out of here?'\n\nThere was a moment of blank silence. Then Ram coughed awkwardly.\n\n'The thing is . . . um . . . Now that we know what the Skandis are, we were thinking of fighting them.'\n\n'I don't believe it,' cried April. 'Seriously?'\n\n'Well.' Charlie was looking at her very firmly. 'The thing is, you've kind of taken the lead on all this, so well, we're open to suggestions.'\n\n'Well, one option,' said Miss Quill, 'is to win the war. Have you thought of that?'\n\n'No,' said April. 'I'm not sure that war is the answer.'\n\nMiss Quill uttered a long, loud groan. 'I really do think you're the worst,' she drawled. 'Perhaps we should all sit around making placards. We could stroll onto the battlefield waving them. I'm sure both sides would listen. Maybe you could make up a lovely little song as well. Something we could all sing while they're launching everything they've got at us.'\n\nDisappointingly, Tanya and Ram were nodding. 'We saw some training footage,' said Ram, 'before we could come looking for you. Those creatures\u2014they don't look pleasant.'\n\n'Pretty grim,' agreed Tanya. 'Demon zombie octopus.'\n\n'Much as I'd normally call this parochial speciesism, I have to agree,' said Miss Quill. 'The Skandis have to be wiped out. They're heading towards the Earth. What do you think they're going to do when they reach it? Hold a car boot sale?'\n\n'That's not the point,' April argued. 'I think this is all about perception. What have we been told about them?'\n\n'That they're going to destroy the Earth,' said Ram.\n\n'Do we know that that's what they're doing?' April said. 'I mean, has anyone in this room\u2014the nonhumans\u2014heard of them?'\n\nCharlie and Quill glanced at each other.\n\n'Well, no,' admitted Charlie.\n\n'Isn't there an intergalactic Wikipedia?' April pressed on. 'Something you can look them up in?'\n\n'Let's go check Wikipedia!' Miss Quill tutted. 'What a typical student response.'\n\n'But if they're a race of predators, wouldn't you know about them?'\n\n'The universe is best assumed to be a hostile place,' Miss Quill said firmly. 'If strange craft appear in your system, man the defences and start shooting.'\n\n'Isn't that a bit shortsighted? How does it go down?'\n\n'Not at all well. But if your visitors are intelligent they will see it as a perfectly sensible response. You humans flatter yourselves that you have the monopoly on brutality and greed. You don't.'\n\n'Well, I think we need to find out more,' said April. 'Think before we shoot.'\n\n'Oh, look at Miss Moral High Ground.' Quill laughed. 'What were you doing before I rescued you?'\n\nApril looked at the floor, suddenly angry. 'I was in a combat chamber. I was trying . . . I was trying\u2014'\n\n'You tried to shoot one of these monsters. I saw you,' Quill said triumphantly.\n\nApril looked up and knew she'd lost the room.\n\n'Yes!' Tanya was grinning. 'This is what all these evenings of World of Warcraft have been leading up to,' she said. 'Finally I get a proper gun.'\n\n'No,' April insisted. 'Tanya. Can't you see that you shouldn't be doing this?'\n\n'I shouldn't?' Tanya's face set hard quickly. 'Because I'm younger than you?'\n\n'No! None of us should be fighting. Why isn't this scheme picking on adults? We can't even vote, but someone thinks we're the best to fight an alien war. That's . . . '\n\nTanya groaned. 'Look, it's an outsider's view\u2014maybe not the right one, but someone's decided that we're the best people to fight this thing. So maybe we should.'\n\nRam nodded, and April felt her stomach sink.\n\n'If there's one thing I've learned these last few weeks,' he stumbled, 'it's that the rest of the universe is pretty mean. And it seems to have no problems killing kids.'\n\n'Exactly, Mr Singh,' said Miss Quill.\n\nTanya nudged Ram in the ribs. 'Come on. I'm going to get a gun and find out how this system works. You game?'\n\nShe pushed on the door and went out.\n\nRam stood there, hesitant, hanging back but obviously eager to go. 'Just so you know,' he said, sounding a bit mumbly, 'Miss Quill has a point. If those things are coming for the Earth, I don't want to say I stood by and let it happen.'\n\n'Sure,' April said, not even looking at him. She didn't even have to try to make her voice bitter. 'Absolutely. Go fight your war.'\n\n'Yes,' said Ram, going for a joke. 'Tanya'll so think we're best friends now.'\n\nHe went through the door. April looked up. 'Is that how you think women relate to you?' she wondered. 'Side with them, they'll get a crush on you?'\n\nShe turned back to Charlie and Quill.\n\n'Well,' she said to the two of them. 'I think I can guess what Miss Quill's going to do.' She pointed to the door.\n\nMiss Quill barked with laughter. 'Are you sure?' she said. 'Really?'\n\n'Yes,' April said firmly. 'You're going to go and slaughter those monsters.'\n\n'I'd considered it,' Miss Quill admitted, 'but I've come up with something a little bit more fun.'\n\nAnd then she raised her gun and pointed it at Charlie.\n\n## FORTY-TWO\n\n## MANY PEOPLE WOULD BLAME THIS ON MARRIAGE EQUALITY. BUT WOULD YOU?\n\nThey came in from the day's kills exhausted. They were sweaty, grimy, and bleeding. Their helmets hung limp from their hands, broadcasting swaying, unusable footage of the floor. The troopers poured into the Big White Room, all of them thoroughly, utterly shattered.\n\nSome had been here for weeks, it seemed. Some only for hours. But the fighting was getting worse. Whereas previously the battle computer had sent them into combat with only one, or maybe two Skandis, they were now up against groups of anything from three to a dozen.\n\nTo start with, it had been a bit more fun. A change was good, after all. They called it 'levelling up,' and those who came back boasted of having Done the Boss. The problem was that fewer and fewer of them were coming back. And troops who'd levelled up found themselves going straight back into combat.\n\nIf they'd been expecting a different scenario, or to encounter Skandis with different weapons or something more novel, they were disappointed. There were simply more of them. And they were angrier and more vicious.\n\nWhen they'd thought war was a bit like a game, it had seemed thrilling. Now, every hour of every day was spent going through a door to fight more and more of the enemy. It would only stop for rest breaks, for food and for sleep, and then it would start again.\n\nThe ones who lived were the ones who thrived on the routine. They took even more risks, they found the familiarity comforting, they pushed back against it, but they never forgot the skills they'd learned.\n\nThe ones who didn't come back were the ones who found it boring. Who found it draining. Who thought that it was unfair. You weren't banned from complaining about the challenges over your helmet camera\u2014that was fine, although it might be edited out of Seraphin's recaps. What was curious was that, if you did complain, your chances of stepping through the door into a battle with five or six Skandis rapidly increased.\n\nThe videos were becoming grimmer. The troops sat around, trying to keep their eyes open, as video after video slid past them on the great wall. Sometimes they saw themselves and cheered. Sometimes they saw friends and realised they'd never be coming back and they booed the enemy. They hated the creatures they were fighting against, and they did it with an instinctive, weary, ingrained hatred. The more routine, the more dull the war became, the more they'd carry on with it because they had to.\n\nThey were, Seraphin thought, becoming a tougher crowd. It was harder to get a laugh out of them.\n\nAs the broadcast switched on, he looked out across the hall at all their faces\u2014teenage faces scarred with combat, with dirt burnt into them and massive purple bags under their eyes. They looked gaunt and wired. Somehow it was his job to keep them going.\n\n'Heeeeeeey! Evening, everybody!'\n\nSeraphin was standing in his room. He had piled his hair up on his head, and was laughing. 'I'm henna-ing my hair. What is up with my life? I'm almost out of cereal. Anyway, how's the battle going? We've some really good kills going on here today. Some excellent kills. Really lovely stuff. Shall we have a montage? Yeah, let's . . . wait\u2014'\n\nSeraphin stopped and licked his lips. For a moment, just a moment, he seemed uncertain. Curious. Brave.\n\n'Hey, have any of you lot seen April recently? You know, the troublemaking one? She's fallen off my radar. Hope she's okay. If any of you see her, you'll let me know, okay? Right. Anyway. The latest fighting. Cue clip show.'\n\nScenes from the day's battles played across the huge screens, accompanied, for no reason other than because he enjoyed it, by Seraphin playing 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' on his ukulele.\n\nCharlie shouldn't have been surprised. Not really. Ever since he'd been assigned Quill as his bodyguard, he'd known that she would someday point a gun at him. In theory her head should right now be exploding with pain. It wasn't. She was simply holding the gun without even the slightest wince. Actually, she was smiling a proper, warm smile. Any second now she was going to kill him.\n\nAt moments like this, Charlie felt like the loneliest person in the universe. He'd lost his family, his friends, his world, and the only person left who remembered them was his bitterest enemy\u2014his reluctant bodyguard, who wanted, more than anything, to kill him.\n\nCharlie was not unaware of the irony. It was made more curious by the mode of speech that humans used. They were persistently violent in conversation, which often confused or alarmed him. When someone would say, 'My mum is going to kill me,' he couldn't help automatically picturing Miss Quill pointing a gun at him. That image haunted him. For once, when a human said something, he knew exactly how they felt. A curious sensation of dread, of inescapable inevitability. Sometimes he forgot about Quill's nature\u2014sometimes they were almost like friends, with more in common with each other than with anyone else on the planet. But that image was always there to remind him. Because one day, she'd find a way around her processing and shoot him.\n\nIn some ways it was a relief. Having Quill point a gun at him felt like being able to breathe out at last. There it was. As suspected. Yet, at the same time, he felt a twinge of disappointment, regret. As though, maybe, in their time together they'd become . . . well, not fond of each other, no, but still, that they'd developed some sort of bond.\n\nAll the same, it wasn't stopping her from aiming that gun.\n\n'Yes, I know,' Quill was pouting sarcastically, 'how dare I? Quite easily. Now, are you going to beg before I shoot you? I think it would be nice.'\n\nCharlie said nothing.\n\nQuill raised the gun, finger tightening on the firing trigger.\n\n'Come on, Prince,' she coaxed, purring. 'Just a few little last words for your slave.'\n\nCharlie was silent a moment longer. 'Actually,' he ventured, 'I have got something to say.' And he said two words more.\n\nApril burst out laughing. Posh people swearing, there and then, became her favourite thing ever. Quill glared at her.\n\n'Sorry.' She cupped a hand over her mouth. 'Sorry, Miss Quill, you can go ahead and shoot him now.'\n\n'Thank you.'\n\n'Surprised you've not done it already.'\n\n'When I need your advice, girl, I'll ask for it.'\n\n'Totally. And I wouldn't dream of offering it.'\n\n'Oh really?' Quill paused. 'You look just the type that loves giving out unwanted advice. Some children think they're so grown-up and really, they're not. You know nothing about life.'\n\n'No,' admitted April. 'I don't. But I do know you won't kill Charlie.' Charlie glanced at her, curious.\n\n'What?' Quill said.\n\n'You would have done it already.' Quill stared at her.\n\n'You've been waiting to kill him for months and yet, there he is still breathing.'\n\n'So?' Quill was curious.\n\n'Go on. Just shoot him,' April urged. 'Sorry, Charlie.'\n\n'No, that's fair.' Charlie's voice was even calmer than usual. His posture shifted, with regal delicacy, and he leaned forward, into Quill. 'Go on. Do it.'\n\nShe stared back at him.\n\nApril began to have doubts about how this was going to end. She'd assumed that she was right, that Quill was bluffing\u2014she wouldn't really, she couldn't really, could she? She talked all the time about it, but she wasn't really a cold-blooded killer, was she? But then April remembered the three Skandis exploding on the beach. Maybe she was wrong.\n\n'One word,' said Quill, eventually, that little smile back on her face. 'I just want to hear one word from him about how sorry he is\u2014about what he did to me, about what happened to my people. And then I'll let him go.'\n\n'You'll pull the trigger,' Charlie corrected. He still seemed icily calm.\n\n'Well, yes,' Quill admitted. 'But you'll die knowing you're the better man. That's what you love, isn't it?' She sneered. 'The moral high ground. Slavery and slaughter that you can feel smug about.'\n\n'You keep saying that you are my slave.' Charlie's calm carried on until even April felt infuriated. 'You are not my slave. People buy slaves because they want them. I appreciate you, what you do for me. But'\u2014and the calm got a degree chillier\u2014'I do not want you.'\n\n'Suppose there was another way?' began Quill. She seemed to have stopped blinking. April wondered if she actually needed to blink, or if it was just something she did to appear more human that she'd forgotten about. Come to think of it, Charlie wasn't blinking either. The two were just staring at each other like chess players. With a gun.\n\nCharlie picked up Quill's sentence. 'If there was another way to keep me safe? Then yes, I would happily take it. And we would both be free of each other.' He smiled a very calm smile. 'I'm afraid that is all you are going to get out of me.' The two stood there. Quill, pointing the gun. Charlie, head tilted back insolently, eyes daring her to do it.\n\n'See?' Quill turned back to April with a helpless shrug.\n\n'Even at gunpoint, even in the last moments of his life, he cannot say sorry. He is just impossible. And the more human he becomes, the worse he gets. Unbelievable.' She rolled her eyes, dropped the gun, and walked out.\n\nApril let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.\n\nCharlie picked up the gun and looked at it.\n\n'Are you okay?' April said to him. 'After all that? Are you sure you're okay?'\n\nCharlie turned to her, baffled for a moment, and then smiled the dazed smile he used for trying to understand a joke.\n\n'Ah,' he said, and pointed the gun at his head. It clicked. Nothing happened.\n\nHe passed it back to April.\n\n'It's genome-locked,' he said. 'It's set to kill only one species\u2014the Skandis.'\n\n'You knew?' She was incredulous.\n\nCharlie was nonplussed. 'It was a reasonable surmise. Humans are, forgive me, violent. Genome-locking the guns is a safety precaution to prevent the soldiers here turning on one another or on whoever runs this facility.'\n\n'But you were absolutely certain?' April continued, amazed. 'You knew that she'd not be able to use the gun, that she'd not found a way round that. Did she know that you knew too?'\n\n'Oh, she may have guessed. She may even have disabled the lock, but, there's one thing you have to remember.' He looked up at April and his eyes were sad and serious. 'Ever since she was assigned to me, I knew that sooner or later she would point a gun at me. From day one, I have been rehearsing what to say.'\n\n## FORTY-THREE\n\n## PEOPLE ARE TWEETING THEIR WORST BATTLES AND IT IS CRINGINGLY HILARIOUS\n\nApril's hopes of escaping were fading fast. Instead, her friends (and Miss Quill) had fallen in line with the place.\n\nIs it just me? she thought. Am I the only one who doesn't want to fight these things? Am I being incredibly dense?\n\nShe wondered if she was just being stubborn. But then she figured, what did it matter? Surely they'd get tired of it in an afternoon or so, and, as long as she kept a low profile, she'd not get into any trouble. Once they realised how serious the battle really was, they'd come up with some way to get out of here.\n\nRam hurled himself across the battlefield.\n\nThree Skandis? Fine. Bit of a challenge, but nothing he couldn't handle. He was loving shooting at them. Okay, he made sure that he downplayed how much fun it was to April, but the whole soldiering thing kept on giving him a kick. Especially when they played footage from his headcam on the big screen. He couldn't help it. He felt proud.\n\n'Is it wrong to feel so pumped?' he asked Tanya over the evening meal.\n\n'Pumped?' She shook her head. 'Next thing you'll be saying this food is nutritionally amazing.'\n\n'Well,' he had to admit, 'my stomach is looking pretty flat.' He spooned down some more of the weird porridge gloop. 'Probably a mixture of no sugar and all the running.' The running was the best bit. For some reason, out here, wherever they were, his leg had shut up. It just did what he asked, and tried not to get in the way. It was like having his old leg back, only it glowed in the dark slightly.\n\n'The running.' Tanya gave a sudden smile. 'It is pretty awesome. This is like the best game ever.'\n\n'Totally,' Ram agreed. 'Actually being in the Combat Chambers\u2014it's amazing. And the way that the force field setup prevents some of the damage. That's great.'\n\n'What?' Tanya asked.\n\n'On Level Four. You get a force field. Oh'\u2014his face fell comically\u2014'are you not on Level Four yet?'\n\n'Tomorrow,' Tanya mumbled the lie. 'I'm levelling up tomorrow.' She watched Ram chewing his slurry and tried not to resent his success. 'Wow. Level Four already, that's great.' It sounded hollow as soon as she said it, but Ram didn't seem to care. He just nodded and started scraping his spoon around his bowl.\n\nThe envy she felt was blocking her head from focusing. Why did you only get a force field on Level Four? Surely that would make more sense for the new recruits, progressing through the training assignments?\n\nThen Tanya realised. Whoever was running the experiment had some limit on their resources. They only protected the more advanced soldiers because they were actually protecting their investment.\n\n'Wow, that's cynical,' she gasped. Ram put down his bowl.\n\n'What?' he said.\n\nShe told him. He looked nonplussed. 'It sort of makes sense,' he argued. 'In a way. Like it's only worth getting a proper football kit if you're playing for the team.'\n\nTanya stared at him. 'This place is changing you,' she said.\n\nAgain, he looked slightly baffled. 'It's an experience. Experiences change us. It's how you grow up.' Gawd, he could sound so dull. He lowered his voice, speaking out of the side of his mouth as he chewed. 'You shouldn't be talking to me here, Tanya.'\n\n'We're still not friends?'\n\n'Yeah, there's that, sure.' Ram looked at her seriously. 'But also, remember\u2014people don't really talk here. It would look . . . strange. For us to be seen chatting together. They might check the camera feeds.'\n\n'And deduct points?' Tanya was starting to feel cross. The kind of cross that even though a bit of her head was saying 'Whoa, hold on, he's maybe got a point', the rest was steaming.\n\n'No, no.' Ram hadn't even noticed. 'I mean, a bit, yeah, but they might crack onto us. Currently you're showing up as NORMAL. I'd hate for that to become ABNORMAL.'\n\n'Whoa.'\n\n'Anyway.' Ram shrugged. 'Are you going to finish that food?'\n\n'You're welcome to it,' said Tanya as she stood up and walked away.\n\nRam slid her bowl over, and started to eat happily.\n\nThere was one combatant who had entered the system recently and had already reached Level Six.\n\nShe did not fit the typical profile of the Skandis Recruitment Programme.\n\nShe did not fit it at all.\n\nYet she was here. A little older. A little taciturn. Maybe she didn't come to the Big White Room to watch the inspirational videos. But she had come through the system and she was turning out to be the best recruit they had.\n\nWhen they'd initially processed her, they'd considered her a statistical oddity. So much so that they'd come to her room at night, stepping through the walls to question her in her sleep.\n\n'Name?' they'd asked her.\n\n'Quill,' she'd said.\n\n'First name or surname?'\n\n'Just Quill,' she'd insisted.\n\nShe was certainly a blip. But a blip could be useful, if she lasted a few rounds. As it was, she'd lasted rather more than a few rounds. Her progress was faster than anyone else in the challenge, and she was accounting for more kills than many of their other combatants put together.\n\nThey came for her at night again.\n\n'Why are you so good at this?'\n\n'I like killing.'\n\n'But what are your allegiances?'\n\nQuill snorted, or it may have been a laugh.\n\n'You fight as though you really believe in the cause.'\n\n'No,' Quill mumbled absently through the dream shield. 'As I said, I really like killing.' She smiled in her sleep. 'Oh, how I've missed it.'\n\nThat gave them pause for thought. They'd somehow accidentally inducted someone entirely outside the programme's remit, someone they'd normally have discounted entirely. And yet, she was proving to be their best asset. Perhaps they'd need to revise their recruitment parameters.\n\n'We were never here,' they told her. Then they went away.\n\n'That's got you puzzled,' muttered Miss Quill as they left.\n\nRam saw Charlie coming out of a combat chamber and rushed up to him, punching him on the shoulder.\n\n'Look at you, Princeton! You've settled into fighting after all.'\n\n'Yes,' said Charlie without any hesitation.\n\nRam chuckled. 'Knew it, knew it.' He laughed. 'Once you start playing, you can't stop. What level are you on? Have they given you a force field?'\n\n'No,' Charlie considered. 'Why, have you got one?'\n\nRam leaned forward. 'Course I have. Anyway, catch you later!' He aimed a couple of practise shots at Charlie and then bounded off down the corridor.\n\nCharlie watched him go without blinking.\n\nWhen he told her later, April laughed. 'He really thinks you're fighting?'\n\n'Well, at least someone does,' Charlie said.\n\n'And, just checking, you're okay that you're not?'\n\n'Yes,' said Charlie. 'Sure. Absolutely.'\n\nHe settled down at the edge of her bed. 'Definitely.' They'd had to reach a compromise. One of the problems was that Quill didn't want Charlie going off into combat without her, just in case her brain exploded. Charlie did not fancy going into combat with Quill, just in case she managed to carefully, accidentally, catch him in a ricochet. April didn't want anyone going into combat, but especially not Charlie. ('If I'm right,' she argued, 'you could start some kind of interstellar war.') So Charlie had quietly agreed to fluff his Level One assignments. He'd fluffed them so spectacularly that footage from them had made it into a vlog called 'Soldiers Do the Funniest Things'.\n\nThen he'd gone to see a soldier who he'd assumed was in charge of the Combat Bay. 'Look,' he'd said, 'it turns out I'm useless in battle. Really. It's so frustrating. Is there anything else I can do?'\n\nWhen Quill found out she'd laughed herself sick for a minute.\n\n'You're a cleaner?' she'd roared.\n\n'It is a practical and necessary function,' Charlie reasoned. 'There is no disgrace in it.'\n\n'Oh, of course not, your majesty,' Quill had hooted.\n\nWhen he'd scrubbed out her chamber that night, he found the walls elaborately painted with entrails. He spent several hours scrubbing off an intricate and ancient Rhodian curse word.\n\n## FORTY-FOUR\n\n## SHE DROPPED A TRUTH BOMB BUT WASN'T EXPECTING WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT\n\nThey were eating their evening meal when April walked into the Big White Room.\n\n'Hey!' she called, and her voice shook. 'Me again.'\n\nOn screen, Seraphin carried on talking. He was wearing an old rabbit onesie, strumming away on a guitar and listing troop manoeuvres.\n\nShe walked into the centre of the Big White Room.\n\n'I know you can't see me but I ask you to hear me.'\n\nThe scraping of spoons around bowls became louder, the heads more bowed.\n\n'I've come to open up, to bear my soul, to confess.' She shouted the last words, feeling her throat rasp. She had to carry over all those spoons.\n\nShe glanced at the screen. One square was her. It dipped and wobbled. Tanya. Another square sprang up. Charlie.\n\n'We cannot fight these aliens. Not until we have more information.'\n\nA third square. Miss Quill. She was sat just over from her and was looking disapproving. If a facial expression could convey 'I am only doing this because I was told to' then hers did so most clearly.\n\n'I repeat. I cannot kill these creatures. It's insane. We're being sent out to fight a war and we're just not up to it. We're kids.'\n\nThe moment she said it, she knew she'd got the wrong word. She'd wondered about 'children', she'd spent about a second on 'teenagers'. Quill had suggested 'cattle'. That would have been better than hearing 'kids' echo back off that great big wall.\n\nWith only three squares on it. Ram.\n\nWhere was Ram?\n\nShe spoke again, and there was a quiver to it. 'I'm not killing these creatures, and neither should you.'\n\n'Really?'\n\nAbove her, Seraphin put down his guitar, pulled up his droopy bunny, and leaned into the screen. He stared down at her and his expression was strange. There was no smile, no glint in his eye. He was pissed off. Worse.\n\nApril's father had read a book about parenting. Ironic. The thing he'd learned from it was to say, 'April, I'm not angry with you. I'm disappointed'. Apparently it was a 'coping response' for when situations got heated. Another coping response was to drive your family into a tree. April hadn't been disappointed with him about that. She'd been very angry.\n\nSeraphin looked disappointed. His face was a master class in disappointment. It was a glorious manga doodle.\n\nHis expression stopped April in her tracks.\n\n'I thought you were different.' His voice was very quiet, flat. 'I thought you were someone to watch.' He exhaled, a little puff of air that pushed against a strand of his perfect hair. 'You came here to tell us you wouldn't kill these monsters?' He was sneering. 'That's not what your helmet cam says.'\n\nThe screen filled. Shaky footage of April running and stumbling along the shore, the three Skandis throwing themselves howling towards her. Her recorded breathing echoed around the White Room, along with her whimpering. Surely she'd not made that much noise? Surely she'd not been that loud? Surely she'd been calmer.\n\nThe Skandis lunged at her, tentacles snapping open to devour her.\n\nScreen April brought up her gun.\n\nThe three creatures exploded.\n\nScreen April lowered her gun.\n\n'Looks like you were happy enough to kill three of them,' said Seraphin. And his lips were twisted with bitterness.\n\n'No!' shouted April. 'It wasn't like that. I've been edited!'\n\n'Puhlease'\u2014Seraphin sighed\u2014 'you're not on _Big Brother_.'\n\nApril turned back to the room, desperate. 'I didn't shoot them. I didn't. You have to believe me.' A spoon scraped in an empty bowl. Another spoon.\n\nThen more. An echo of spoons and bowls.\n\nApril carried on shouting over the clattering. She was desperate, angry, seeking out the faces of Tanya and Charlie. But she still couldn't find Ram. Where was he?\n\nShe caught the eye of Miss Quill, who mouthed 'boohoo' at her. Because of course, she would do that.\n\nApril stopped shouting. But the scraping of spoons and bowls continued.\n\nSeraphin's voice carried over it. 'Do you know why she has to kill them? Do you know why you all kill them? Because they are evil.'\n\nThe screen showed clips. The last moments of fighters, struggling and screaming against the Skandis. Those snapping jaws, those sharp tentacles dripping blood.\n\nThe spoons paused. The hall fell silent. Everyone was staring at the screen. Rapt.\n\n'Enough of the coward.' Seraphin's voice spoke again. 'Let's see what's been happening with our Level Six fighter. That'll bring the mood up.'\n\nThe screen showed Skandis after Skandis, a whole squad of them, being blown into screaming embers. Someone in the game was clearly very good.\n\nApril caught the expression on Quill's face. Pride.\n\n'That is someone we can be proud of.' Seraphin's voice echoed over jets of fire that were melting tentacles. 'Someone who is doing all they can to save the planet. To save us all from Skandis. And if you're not on board, well . . .' He leaned out of the screen to address April, from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. 'Why don't you go away?'\n\nApril stood her ground for longer than she thought she'd manage. One breath. Two breaths. On the third, she turned and ran.\n\n## FORTY-FIVE\n\n## THIS YOUNG FOOTBALLER HAS SOMETHING SURPRISING TO SAY ABOUT RACIAL PROFILING\n\n'Hey,' said Ram.\n\nApril hadn't bothered to close the door. There hadn't seemed any point.\n\nShe was slumped against the sharp frame of her bed, staring at the empty white wall, and swigging from a bottle of water.\n\nShe hadn't been expecting Ram. She wasn't sure who she'd been expecting, but not him. God, what was he here for? Was he going to give her a lecture? Tell her how she was letting their side down? Is this the talk he used to give when a player wasn't up to it on the team? Gentle, sad, coaxing, grown-up? Oh _spare me_ \u2014she couldn't bear it.\n\nRam leaned against the wall and slid slowly down it.\n\nHe looked so strange in the combat gear. Weirdly adult.\n\n'Hot, right?' Ram laughed then stopped to sniff his armpits. 'Also, I really stink. Like maybe my sweat is masking the smell of slime.'\n\nApril smiled back at him. It was the weakest smile she'd ever managed.\n\n'Been fighting?'\n\n'Oh yeah.' Ram grinned. 'It's the biggest high ever. It's so real.' He wiped some sweat off his forehead.\n\n'What we've got back home . . . nothing on this. Football's great\u2014but really, it's'\u2014he dramatically lowered his voice\u2014'just pretend. There are no stakes in it. But this, this is real, and I can be good at it. Not like Charlie's weird space thing. This is something we can be a part of, rather than just get dumped on.'\n\nRam's eyes were so clear she couldn't help but believe him. He was so sincere. He wasn't even trying to undercut it, or make light of it. He was so firm about it that she suddenly saw his reading of the world. Aliens had taken everything he understood about life away from him. They'd both lost so much to these aliens.\n\nNo wonder he was enjoying fighting them so much. It was his way of evening the score. No, she realised. It was Ram's way of winning.\n\n'You didn't look at me,' she said. She didn't even realise she'd said it until the words were out there. She hadn't wanted to ruin the moment. But no. She had. How very April.\n\n'What?' Ram was certainly looking at her now, confused. Guilty?\n\n'I went to the Big White Room to give my speech. You didn't look at me. The others did. Even Quill. But not you.'\n\n'Ohhh.' Ram frowned, then smiled sheepishly. 'Right. That. Sorry. I forgot.'\n\n'Sure.' April then realised what he'd said. 'You _forgot_?'\n\n'Well'\u2014Ram's face squirmed\u2014'I knew it was on. Sort of. Just, I was offered an extra fight session, and I figured you'd be okay without me. How did it go?'\n\n'How did it go?' April repeated. 'Look at me. I'm sat against my bed trying very hard not to cry. Have a guess.'\n\n'Oh. Right,' said Ram. He slid across the floor to sit alongside her. 'My dad has told me that in situations like this it is best not to say anything. So I won't.'\n\n'Fine,' April nodded.\n\nThey sat in silence for a bit.\n\n'Only . . .' began Ram. April looked at him.\n\n'Only,' he began again, 'it was a surprise incursion and\u2014'\n\n'Stop it!' shouted April. 'I can't believe you.'\n\n'Okay,' said Ram.\n\nThis time the silence held.\n\n'I am so cross with you,' April said. 'Ever since I've been here, I've felt so alone.'\n\n'We came looking for you,' protested Ram.\n\nApril silenced him. 'Yes, you came looking for me. And that meant the world to me, but already you've changed. You and Tanya are having the time of your lives battling aliens. Quill's become the Terminator. And that's not what this is about. I thought you'd understand. I've got my friends here, and I feel more alone than ever.'\n\nRam rested a hand on her shoulder. It landed with the caution of a man who is worried it will be pushed away. April did not push it away.\n\n'You were right. You really do stink,' she said.\n\nHe grimaced. 'Yeah, I'd best go run a shower.' He made as if to get up but clearly wasn't going to.\n\n'Don't go,' said April pointlessly. 'You finally turn up, you may as well do some good.'\n\n'Cool,' said Ram because he couldn't think of anything else to say.\n\nApril edged a little further along his arm.\n\n'You think when all this is over, they'll let me keep the uniform?' Ram asked.\n\nApril smirked.\n\n'What?'\n\n'I'm not sure how that'll go down on the streets of London.'\n\n'Ohhhhh.' Ram's face fell, and he shook a fist. 'Damn you, racial profiling. It's quite something when a kid can't go to school in combat gear waving a gun around.'\n\nThey smiled at each other.\n\n'Not even as cosplay?' he asked.\n\n'Not even as cosplay,' she confirmed.\n\n'I was going to say I'd better make sure I've got some really great photos of this, but I'm not sure how that'd look if the police ever searched my computer.' His face fell. 'Or my mother. Which is more likely.' He changed the subject. 'Anyway, the talk\u2014I'm gathering it went badly.'\n\n'Stitch-up.' April raised her bottle of water in salute. 'Total stitch-up.'\n\n'Sorry,' said Ram. 'If it cheers you up, I found out what Charlie, the great royal alien prince, is doing.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'They've got him cleaning.' Ram snorted. 'He's been pretending all along that he's fighting. But I caught him coming out of a Combat Chamber with a mop and bucket.'\n\n'Whoa. What did you do?'\n\n'Kicked over his bucket,' said Ram.\n\n'You're the worst.'\n\nThey smiled at each other until April broke away, her expression haunted again.\n\n'What?' Ram asked. He'd been about fifteen percent sure he was about to get a kiss\u2014which was odd.\n\n'Total stitch-up,' April repeated. 'They had a video prepared. They'd edited it to make it look like I shot those creatures. And they sent you off fighting so that you wouldn't be there, counting on the fact that it would upset me.'\n\n'And'\u2014she stood up\u2014'they were right.'\n\nShe heaved the thin mattress off the bed, threw the pillow at Ram, and then tried lifting up the bed frame.\n\n'What you doing, She-Hulk?'\n\n'Tear that pillow apart,' ordered April, giving up on the bed and turning to the wall. 'I'm trying to find a bug. They're not just watching us in the helmet cameras\u2014they're watching our rooms.' She tried putting a fingernail in between two wall panels. Nothing happened.\n\nRam did not tear the pillow apart. Instead he put it back on the bed along with the mattress. Then he found the sheet, uncrumpled it, and fitted it onto the bed surprisingly neatly.\n\n'What are you doing?' said April. 'I need you to help me open this wall.'\n\n'No, you don't.' He laid a hand on her shoulder. 'You need to take a deep breath and let the crazy out.'\n\n'But . . .'\n\n'Deep breath,' he said, holding up a finger. April took a deep breath.\n\n'Now,' Ram spoke gently, in measured tones. 'We've been transported to a different dimension, where time is running slowly, and we can be projected into an alien war. Given they've got that technology, do you think they're going to put bugs in the lightbulbs?'\n\n'There aren't any lightbulbs,' April said.\n\n'Exactly.' Ram decided to overlook that she'd breathed out. 'They've built the technology into the walls. Or it's in the air. Whatever. It doesn't matter. They need to keep an eye on us at all times\u2014to find out who they can trust. That really freaked me out at first.'\n\n'At first?' April blinked. 'What about now?'\n\n'I realised they only care if you're a good fighter. And I'm a very good fighter. They know I'm loyal and I love the fighting so I don't have a problem with it. I want to hang out with you? Who cares? So long as'\u2014he squirmed again, but it was a really intense squirm\u2014'so long as you don't have a problem hanging out with me.'\n\n'No,' April said. 'I don't.'\n\n'Fine,' said Ram. 'Then I'm going to go and have a shower, then go back and slaughter some more squid. And what about you, Little Miss Dissident?'\n\n'I'm going to find out who's really running this place,' she said.\n\n## FORTY-SIX\n\n## YOU ARE BEING LIED TO ABOUT DOGS\n\nWhen April entered Seraphin's room, he was playing with his puppy. He was wearing a battered old fisherman's jumper and ripped jeans.\n\n'You look really good in clothes,' said April.\n\n'You've got a nerve,' said Seraphin coldly. He stood up, and switched the dog off. It vanished.\n\n'Oh.' April blinked in surprise.\n\nFor a moment, Seraphin said nothing. When he looked up, his face was twisted, angry. 'I believed you. I fell for all your crap.' He shook his head, disgusted.\n\n'It wasn't crap,' April insisted.\n\n'I saw the video,' he said, getting angrier with every word. 'Everyone's seen it. There's no hiding the kind of person you are now. You're a killer, just like everyone else.'\n\n'It's a fake!' protested April.\n\n'Really?' Seraphin laughed. 'What? Did someone quote you out of context? Is that it?'\n\n'No, of course not,' she said. 'That really isn't it.'\n\nShe crossed to his desk, pushing her way through the piles of musical instruments and cereal bowls. She waved the mouse, waking it up, and looked intently at it. 'Where is that video?'\n\n'Well, it's not my screensaver,' Seraphin muttered. He poked through some folders and summoned it up.\n\nApril let it play out, following herself across the beach. Then she hit pause.\n\n'This is the moment,' she said. 'This is the moment that I panicked, and tried to fire my gun. So yes, I tried to defend myself. But I couldn't. Because my gun wasn't working.'\n\nSeraphin stared at her.\n\n'Someone wanted my last thought to be that I'd given in. Now.' She nudged the video along. 'In the next frame, here, we have three Skandis all burning.'\n\n'Uh-huh,' said Seraphin.\n\n'The point is that you don't even see me fire one shot, let alone three.'\n\nSeraphin frowned. 'But if you didn't fire, who did?' April relaxed. He was thinking about it. He'd stopped completely denying it. 'You might find this surprising, but the shots were fired by my teacher.'\n\n'Your teacher?'\n\n'The Level Six Combatant. Or, as we call her, Miss.'\n\n'Her?' Seraphin whistled. 'I wondered how she'd got in here. Wow. Bet she takes missing lessons really seriously.'\n\n'Yeah,' said April, relaxing a little bit more. 'She takes everything pretty seriously.'\n\n'Sheesh.' Seraphin called up some footage. It showed a row of Skandis being mown down. 'I'm kind of glad she doesn't teach me.'\n\n'It is not that much fun,' conceded April.\n\nSeraphin stood up, tugging at his hair. He was chewing on a strand of it, and twirling some of it round and round his fingers. 'So this video of you was a fake?'\n\n'Yes.' April was firm. 'I sort of hoped you'd not done it.' She smiled. 'I'm glad.'\n\n'God, no,' Seraphin said. 'I've enough on my hands editing my own videos. For this stuff I just take what I'm given. It's worrying, isn't it? The whole mantra of putting it all out there . . . It's being dicked around with.'\n\nHe crossed to a fridge and rifled through it. 'Smoothie?' he asked her. He tossed her a small plastic bottle of strawberry and banana. She opened it and downed it in three mouthfuls.\n\n'You have no idea,' she took a last gulp, 'how good that tastes.'\n\n'Oh I do,' he said, wiping his mouth. 'Mine had kale in it.' He tossed the bottle, with perfect aim, into a recycling bin. 'Take another. They send me crates.'\n\n'Who sends you these?' she asked, opening another one. God, something with flavour. Amazing.\n\nSeraphin shrugged. 'Could be the owners. Could be the people who make the smoothies. Product placement really sells. You want to take some back for your friends?'\n\nApril thought about it. 'I doubt they'd take them. Probably think I'd poisoned them.'\n\n'Won't they interfere with your calorie-controlled fighting diet?'\n\n'What?' She laughed. 'The stuff they feed us? It's rank. It's porridge and stew and sometimes a bit of both.'\n\n'Oh,' he said. 'I was told you're all on a specially targeted diet. I've got some crisps somewhere.'\n\n'Amazing.' April sat down on a chair, laughing. 'I've missed chewing. It makes us all weird, having to sit and down our slops while you work your way through all this proper food. Kind of angry.' She stopped, caught up in a thought.\n\n'What is it?' Seraphin asked her. His brows were doing that strange, kissable thing that they did. He was now doing a textbook baffled pose.\n\n'I'm wondering about the food,' said April. 'I think they've been putting something in it. I've been skipping it as much as possible, but the others . . . I wonder if that helps explain why they're so into the fighting.'\n\n'Yeah.' Seraphin didn't sound convinced. For his money, everyone going out there seemed to be fairly pumped up. They didn't really need any more stimulants. But, if it made it easier for April to make her peace with how her friends were behaving, then fair enough.\n\nApril caught the nagging doubt in his eyes, and nearly asked him about it. Then she caught herself up before she went too far. She did not want to seem paranoid and crazy.\n\n'The thing is,' she said eventually, 'we need to find out a bit more about the people who run this place. So tell me everything you know.'\n\n## FORTY-SEVEN\n\n## THE LATEST ADVANCES IN VIRTUAL REALITY WILL HORRIFY YOU\n\nRam was running through the Combat Chamber, loving the more advanced feel of the environment. Now that he was at Level Five, everything felt so very real\u2014he could barely even notice the walls anymore, the surroundings had lost that milky quality and every object was hyper-real. There was even the feeling of branches whipping by him\u2014which was something totally new. Ram realised it had been days since he'd seen a tree. There were no plants in the Void. Nothing other than the white boxes, the white overalls, the white helmets. It was like the only colour, the only life he saw was running through here. God, it felt so invigorating.\n\nHe almost couldn't remember a time when he hadn't been hunting here. His old life\u2014the life that he really should have been wanting to get back to\u2014seemed less real than the planet around him. He blasted down another of the Skandis, and laughed as it fell back, flailing and screaming. They really were the worst things in the universe. He didn't feel bad about killing them\u2014not even a small qualm, no matter what he told April. It was like feeling bad about killing rats or wasps. They didn't add anything to the world. They were just disgusting and brutal and the thought of them reaching the Earth made him sick with fear. The Shadow Kin had been bad enough, and they'd just torn through the school. He tried to imagine the streets filling with Skandis. The image was absurd for a moment, then completely terrifying, as they'd just start killing and keep killing.\n\nHow would they arrive? he wondered. They didn't look like they'd have spaceships. They didn't show signs of any technology. They just attacked viciously. He couldn't really imagine things like this sitting down to invent the wheel.\n\nHe blasted his way through another two, and then a fourth Skandis roared up, lashing out at him in outrage. Which was fine, as his force field would protect him.\n\nOnly it didn't. The tentacle knocked him into the air and then came crashing down onto the ground with an impact that winded him. The Skandis launched itself at him, and he only avoided it by twisting to one side. His ribs ached and his lungs refused to draw breath. He crouched, his head full of fight-or-flight instinct and unable to reach any higher thoughts.\n\nThe Skandis bounded after him, sending Ram scrabbling up a bank of skittering stones. His boots refused to find a purchase and he was spinning in midair. He threw himself further up the bank, grasping at rocks, pulling himself out of reach. The Skandis sprang towards him, and Ram let go, slipping down the rocks.\n\nAnd then he fell through them.\n\nThat was odd. He flailed as he sank through the stones\u2014and then they vanished, and he was falling through air until he landed on the floor. The air was knocked out of him again. Stunned, he lay there for a moment.\n\nThe one Skandis stood still, its wet skin pulsing. It wasn't preparing to spring. It seemed to be scenting the air, taking in its surroundings.\n\nFor a moment, the air fizzed, and the creature looked like Neil. Neil with his scalded face, burnt red and bubbling.\n\nThen the air fizzed again, and the Skandis was back. Ram felt a jolt, as though a plummeting lift had just snapped to a halt.\n\nWhat the hell?\n\nHe forced himself to his feet, only for his new leg to choose this moment, this damn moment, to just not. It stretched out in front of him while his other leg, his proper leg, kept trying to straighten up all by itself.\n\nI look like a sodding Russian dancer, he thought, grabbing his gun and using that to get upright, and to try to hobble-drag his way away from the Skandis, which was observing him, almost curious.\n\nWhat am I missing? Ram thought.\n\nThen he noticed the Combat Chamber had changed. It was no longer a stunning re-creation of an alien world. It had reset to a plain white box. But something was different, something was wrong.\n\nIt fell into place. In the training levels the Skandis had been indistinct, with overcompressed edges. Now it was clear. Completely clear.\n\nRam's brain worked through three things\u2014the force field failing, the rock wall vanishing, and now the chamber turning off. 'You're real, aren't you?' he shouted at it. 'Somehow you've reversed whatever this chamber does and you've come here.'\n\nThe Skandis' only reply was a nasty howl. Then it sprang towards him.\n\nCharlie was cleaning another Combat Chamber. Automated processes took care of most of it, but what was left behind were some pretty stubborn stains.\n\nHe'd noticed that most of what was left behind was human.\n\nHe wondered how the Skandis were doing. Were they winning this war?\n\nWhich was when one appeared in the Combat Chamber behind him.\n\nThe same thing was happening in Combat Chambers across the Void. Virtual environments were gradually crashing, resetting to their base states, but with the aliens still in them. And more powerful, more vicious than ever. Safe words weren't working, the emergency shutdowns weren't activating. Worse, the doors to the chambers weren't opening.\n\nTrapped soldiers started pounding on the doors to the Combat Chambers, until the entire bay echoed.\n\nThen the screaming began.\n\nMiss Quill took the change in circumstances in her stride.\n\n'A dozen of you. Nowhere to hide. And I'm silhouetted beautifully against the walls. Lovely.'\n\nShe was firing as she spoke.\n\nRam was using his gun to hold himself up. If he tried to fire with it, he'd fall over.\n\nHe tried to work out a sensible solution, realised there wasn't one, and, in a moment of blind panic, whipped the gun up, and fired repeatedly as he fell back over.\n\nThe Skandis carried on leaping towards him, its body tearing apart under the blasts from his gun.\n\nIt landed on him, and promptly fell apart into three charred lumps.\n\nIn the last moment before it shattered, something very strange happened to it. Ram, eyes screwed shut, screaming, almost didn't notice it. Then when he did, he didn't believe what he'd seen. He was just stunned to find himself still alive.\n\nRam lay there for a while, disgusted, then slowly, with endless patience, crawled out from under the smouldering corpse.\n\nA simple malfunction, he told himself. Nothing to be worried about. These things happen.\n\nDamn, his leg still wasn't working.\n\nHe eyed up the door. Not great, but he reckoned he could reach it easily enough. Raise help.\n\nHe started crawling towards the door. No harm done. Soon be back up and fighting. Not a great day, not the worst.\n\nThen the air in front of him fizzed and glowed and six more Skandis appeared.\n\n'You have got to be kidding,' breathed Ram. \n\n## FORTY-EIGHT\n\n## DO YOU KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT DIMENSIONAL COMPENSATORS TO SAVE THIS BOY'S LIFE? (SPOILER: YOU DON'T)\n\n'What the hell is going on?' Seraphin yelled as the alarms went off.\n\nApril hadn't got a clue and was trying to tell him this, but the noise just wouldn't stop.\n\nSeraphin was clicking in frustration at his computer. It flashed up the spinny wheel of give-me-a-minute and did nothing else.\n\nHe pointed over to what looked like a fuse box by the bathroom. April ran to it. It wouldn't open.\n\n'Screwdriver?'\n\nSeraphin dashed back to his desk, grabbed a penny, and used it to turn the latch. The cupboard sprang open.\n\nInside was a lot of complicated alien technology. And a large trip switch. She yanked it.\n\nThe alarms stopped. The room went dark.\n\n'Don't let go of the switch!' Seraphin was yelling.\n\n'Already have,' April yelled back, a little deafened.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Never mind.' April fumbled and patted her way through the cupboard, worried that at any moment she'd turn into a human candle. She found a switch, and, holding her breath, pulled it.\n\nThe lights came back on.\n\n'Was that the right thing?' she asked.\n\n'Yep,' said Seraphin.\n\n'What is all this?' She pointed to the equipment in the rest of the cupboard\u2014a series of glowing cables and pulsing arrays.\n\nHe shrugged. 'Stuff I'm not supposed to touch.'\n\n'Ever touched it?'\n\n'Nope.' He shook his head. 'I once totalled a laptop after I forgot to wash peanut butter off my hands when I upgraded the RAM. That stuff is way out of my league. You any idea?'\n\nApril pretended to study it very hard for ten seconds.\n\n'No,' she announced, trying to convey in her voice that, if it had just been last year's model, then she'd have been all over it. 'What I can say is that the lights were all green, and now they're all red.'\n\n'Gotcha.' Seraphin ran a hand through his hair. 'That's getting a bit technical for me.'\n\nHe darted over to his main computer, which had now finished starting up again. He logged in, waited, opened a browser, and then waited some more.\n\n'Here,' he said, pointing to a display map. 'Looks like something's going on with the Combat Chambers.' He zoomed into the map. 'Got it. They're all full and the doors are off-line.'\n\n'What?' said April. 'Do something!'\n\n'Pfft.' Seraphin jabbed at the screen. 'All I can do is see the status report. Helps me with my bulletins. I can't open the doors. Seriously. Why would they give me that power?'\n\n'Good point.' April wasn't really listening to him anymore. 'I've got to find someone who can help us get control. And she's not going to like it.'\n\nRam made it to the door and pressed it. It should have triggered the opening cycle. Nothing happened. He peered through the small window, hammered on it, shouted for help that wasn't coming. Then he groaned and felt around for the manual trigger.\n\nManual trigger, he thought. What was wrong with having a door handle? This whole place was so screwed up. He located the trigger.\n\nHe'd been told that the reason the doors took so long to open was in order to balance the dimensions in the Void. It was important that you didn't bring anything back from the battlefront with you. A very bit like divers having to decompress. There'd been a lecture on the possibility of bacteria crossing the dimensional barriers. It took ten seconds to fully harmonise the dimensions. But the manual trigger could do it, just about, in five. If he could find it. If it was still alive five seconds after he'd found it.\n\nTrying to find a hidden lever while keeping an eye on six creatures intent on killing you is difficult. You know the expression about 'doing it with one arm tied behind your back'? Try doing it with only one leg. Ram had settled into an awkward crouch, his useless leg splayed out in front of him and constantly trying to tell him that it really wasn't happy. Every now and then he'd loose off a shot at the Skandis, but his gun was now little better than a water pistol.\n\nAt each blast, they'd pause, shudder, then press on. Judging from their roaring and twitching and the way their tentacles snapped, they were angry. Angry and hungry.\n\nOnly April could feel sorry for these things, he thought. He fired off a couple more shots, bought himself some time, then got back to running his hand up the door seal.\n\nIn training it had been easy. But then, that was always the way with safety demonstrations. Flight attendants made it look like escaping a crashing plane was a calm saunter from fitting your oxygen mask to collecting your life jacket and nimbly stepping out into the water. But come on, it was going to be screaming chaos, wasn't it? When they'd gone on that school trip to Italy, just while boarding the plane there had been a fight, an actual fight, between vicious old ladies and a football team. Imagine the horror of trying to get off a plane, a plane that had just crashed. And apparently it all came down to the simple act of releasing the emergency exit doors and stepping out. Like that was going to work.\n\nRam found the trigger. It was, of course, just out of reach. He levered himself up as far as he could, and, fingers clammy with sweat, gripped the trigger and pulled it. So long as he kept hauling on it, it should release the door. He supported himself on his one good leg and waited.\n\n_5._\n\nThe Skandis were whipping towards him.\n\n_4._\n\nHis leg was hurting. His whole body was shaking.\n\n_3._\n\nTheir tentacles snapped at him, their horrific jaws hissing and howling.\n\n_2._\n\nOh, his leg hurt so much. Five seconds? Surely? Come on.\n\n_1._\n\nA tentacle whipped past his face, spattering him with stinging slime. Come on!\n\n_0._\n\nThe door sprang open and Ram realised his mistake.\n\nCharlie was running. There was nothing else he could do. He was in a Combat Chamber with a very hostile alien and all he had was a bucket. He'd already thrown the water out of the bucket.\n\nA tentacle sent him flying.\n\nCharlie lay on the ground, fighting for his breath as the Skandis came towards him.\n\n'I'm an alien prince,' he told the creature. 'I'm not boasting, I'm not expecting any special treatment, I'm just saying this isn't how life was supposed to be.'\n\nA tentacle threw him across the floor.\n\nCharlie picked himself up, eyes wandering for a moment to the white wall. The whiteness was flickering, a little gentle corner-of-the-eye pulsing.\n\n'As an alien prince . . .' He laughed, falling breathlessly onto his back 'I should, right now, be leading an army.'\n\nThe Skandis stood over him, surveying him, the tentacles quivering with hostile interest.\n\n'I don't have an army.' Charlie was still laughing. 'But I don't suppose you'd pass me my bucket, would you?'\n\nThe Skandis sprang at him, but Charlie had already rolled out of his way, and was up and running.\n\n'I've been learning a few things about being human,' he shouted as he ran. 'And one of them is that it's a really bad idea to kill me. You see'\u2014he paused for breath, a defiant smile on his face\u2014'my boyfriend is Polish.'\n\nCharlie bolted for the door.\n\n'Whuh?'\n\nTanya was exhausted and really, really didn't know why April was standing in her doorway.\n\n'I was sleeping.'\n\n'Tanya, I've come to ask you a favour,' said April. 'Something bad's happening and I really could do with your help.'\n\nTanya blinked and yawned helplessly. 'I'm so tired,' she whined. 'Kill-me tired. There is literally nothing you could do to make me take part in whatever it is you're up to.' She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. 'Is it a peace rally? Or a folk festival? That's it, isn't it?'\n\nApril smiled. 'And that's why I brought along my secret weapon.'\n\nSeraphin stepped into the room. 'Hi, Tanya. Lovely to meet you.'\n\nTanya immediately grabbed her bedsheet. 'Oh, dear God.'\n\nQuill stared at the door. The manual trigger was jammed. She hammered at it with her gun. And then, having worked through a few other options, she shrugged and shot the door.\n\nRam lay on the floor of the bay, listening to the frantic hammering from the other Combat Chambers. He could see a face pressed up against a window, pleading for help.\n\nThen the face was whisked away and something green smashed across the window. There were three thumps and then nothing.\n\nBloody hell.\n\nAnd he'd left his door open.\n\nRam grabbed hold of a wall and levered himself up. He had to close the door behind him. Had to. Before they got out. That had been their plan all along. He leaned against the wall, steadied himself against a door, and got ready to launch himself at his open door. He just needed a bit more strength, a tiny bit more strength . . .\n\nThe door he was balanced against blew open, knocking him to the floor.\n\nMiss Quill stepped over him.\n\n'Nap time, Singh?' she sneered.\n\nStunned by the blast, and just generally stunned, Ram looked up at her. 'Close the doors!' he yelled. 'We've got to close the doors!'\n\nMiss Quill blinked, bemused.\n\n'Close the doors!' Ram screamed again.\n\nMiss Quill shook her head. 'The blast,' she explained, shouting a bit. 'Bit deafened.'\n\nRam gestured at the doors, throwing himself forward to try to grab one.\n\nMiss Quill stared at him quizzically. Ram howled in frustration.\n\nThen the first of the Skandis slithered out.\n\n'Oh,' said Miss Quill. Finally she understood. 'We've been invaded. Interesting.'\n\n## FORTY-NINE\n\n## HE CHOSE THE WRONG DAY TO BEG FOR HIS LIFE\n\n'I need you to look at this,' said April.\n\nTanya did not appear to be listening.\n\n'This is your flat?' she said to Seraphin, amazed.\n\n'Yeah,' he said. 'Well, it's a set, but you get the idea. Would you like me to switch my dog on for you?'\n\nHe leaned down, pushed a button, and Captain Pugsley materialised, and began pottering around the laminate flooring.\n\n'Wow,' said Tanya. She'd been saying wow a lot suddenly, and April was getting a bit disturbed.\n\n'Are you okay?'\n\n'Yeah,' Tanya muttered without seeming to hear.\n\nSeraphin winked at April, and went to stand a little bit too close to Tanya. 'Hi,' he said, and his smile went up to eleven. 'Apparently you're good with computers.'\n\n'Um,' said Tanya.\n\nSeraphin tapped his desktop into life. 'Just . . . this one . . . here . . . I need someone to have a look at it.' He ran a hand slowly through his hair and shook it out. God, thought April, that is so obvious. But it worked.\n\n'Sure.' Tanya walked over and sat down at the computer. She started pecking at it. 'What do you want?'\n\n'People are trapped in the Combat Chambers and we need you to get them out,' Seraphin said.\n\nTanya squinted at the screen. 'And you want me to try to use their intranet as a way into the main systems?' She shrugged and hit view source on the page. 'Oh, easy. I have no idea who coded this page but they clearly never expected anyone with any knowledge to ever see it. No offence.' There followed a furious bout of typing. 'There. See?'\n\nA small Java box popped up with a prompt.\n\n'Well, that's hopeful,' Tanya remarked. 'Hardly worth you turning on the full charm was it?'\n\n'I wasn't,' protested Seraphin. 'Back rub?'\n\nBut Tanya was already embedded in the system. 'It's like this was coded by aliens,' she muttered, then shrugged. 'Probably was.'\n\n'Um,' said Seraphin, 'I was asking\u2014'\n\n'About a _back rub_ ,' muttered Tanya. 'I have no idea if that works for you, but that's just weird. Now, please just stand about half a metre in front of the screen and look vaguely hot, and that'll be fine. Okay?'\n\n'Erm, okay.'\n\nTanya turned to April and smiled at her. April smiled back. And a holographic pug nuzzled around their legs.\n\nThe Skandis poured into the Combat Bay. At first it was just the ones from Quill's and Ram's chambers. Then they started to open the other doors.\n\nA Combat Chamber flew open.\n\nA relieved soldier staggered out, only to realise what was waiting for him on the other side. A tentacle snatched him up, and threw him screaming against the far wall. The Skandis moved onto the next door.\n\nRam stood frozen. About an hour ago, this had all been easy\u2014running around in a shooting gallery blasting aliens. The weirdness of the last few days had finally made some sort of sense. And now that had all gone so wrong. The surging force of Skandis\u2014a dozen of them?\u2014looked absurdly too big for the Combat Chamber, the air already stifling with their disgusting smell. Life had got all too much. Again.\n\n'They're invading! Do something!' Ram shouted at Miss Quill. If you're out of your depth, find a responsible alien.\n\nBut Miss Quill, either still deaf or not caring, was backing out of the Bay, firing.\n\n'We've got to stop them!' Ram shouted louder.\n\n'Already shooting them,' Quill snapped back. 'What more do you want?'\n\nThe Skandis crawled across the Bay, advancing as Quill retreated. Ram, edging back against the wall, kept his balance as best as he could.\n\nAgainst the chaos, the screams, and the blasts, he could hear a voice.\n\nWhat? He twisted slightly to see what the fuss was. Pressed up against the other side of a Combat Chamber door was Charlie. Desperate.\n\n'Interesting.' Tanya had stopped staring at the screen and was instead looking at the holographic pug.\n\nSeraphin knelt down and nuzzled its ears. 'Is my dog annoying you?' he asked.\n\n'No.' Tanya's voice was subdued. 'It's just . . . It's awesome.'\n\n'It is, kind of,' said Seraphin, watching as the pug clip-clopped over the floor. 'Some kind of amazing alien thing.'\n\n'Yeah,' Tanya said. 'Sorry, distracted for a bit.' She tapped the screen. 'The systems I can get into are the helmet cameras.' She opened up a browser tab. 'We can see everything. And there's a whole load of settings here . . .' She pointed at a series of buttons at the bottom. 'They're greyed out, so you can't alter them, but it may be a back way in. But to what, I don't know.'\n\nSeraphin leaned over her, a little too close, a little too smiling. 'Just do what you can,' he said.\n\n'Sure,' Tanya said, and looked at the fake pug snuffling curiously around April's legs.\n\nRam turned to Quill, waving at her across the Bay.\n\n'It's Charlie! He's trapped in a Combat Chamber!' Oblivious, Quill carried on backing away, firing.\n\nRam turned back to Charlie. 'We're getting you help!' He waved his arms at Quill again.\n\n'Miss Quill! Come here! Help me open this door!' Miss Quill didn't seem to notice.\n\nCharlie hammered on the door, shouting through it, urgent, strong. 'Quill! My life is in danger! I order you to help me!'\n\nQuill, a world away, calmly carried on firing at the creatures.\n\nRam, desperate, flung himself into the path of her gun. Wonderfully, at the last moment, his new leg steadied him, more or less, and he stood, wobbling, eyes shut as Quill's bullets blasted past him.\n\nShe stopped firing. Had she stopped because he was in her way, or because the genome-lock on the gun had kicked in? Deciding he'd rather not know, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes.\n\n'Hi.' He smiled.\n\n'Mr Singh, what are you doing?' she asked. 'You're getting in the way of my fun.'\n\n'It's Charlie!' shouted Ram, indicating the Combat Chamber door with a frantic pantomime.\n\nMiss Quill followed his gesture. She rolled her eyes.\n\n'Riiiight,' she said, with the enthusiasm of someone who has to scrape something off her shoe.\n\nIgnoring the Skandis, she strode across the Bay, and activated the release trigger for Charlie's door.\n\nShe counted off five seconds on her fingers then threw open the door, yanked Charlie out, fired three times into the creature rushing out behind him, and slammed the door shut.\n\n'I'm so sorry, I didn't hear you,' she said flatly, then strode away, raising her gun and shooting into the advancing horde.\n\nApril leaned over Tanya's shoulder, peering at the screen.\n\n'Amazing,' said Tanya. She didn't stop typing. 'Honestly, endless amounts of processing power dealing with the helmet video feeds, nothing, nothing at all about opening doors or letting me help anyone. I can see the systems, I just can't reach them. It's like I'm stuck in a fish tank in a vast library trying to work out how to reach the books.'\n\n'Yes,' said April. 'Look, I was wondering. Wondering about the Skandis and the helmet cameras . . .'\n\n'And the pug?' asked Tanya.\n\n'Oh, you're there too, aren't you?'\n\n'Oh yes,' Tanya nodded. 'I do listen to what you say. Everyone's like all \"We just have to fight them because they look so awful . . .\" and you're all flower child and \"I think we should hug them\" and we're all \"Oh, that's disgusting\". But what if you're right . . .'\n\nApril tapped the screen, at all the footage from the helmet cameras. 'What if I am?' she mused.\n\n'Well,' said Tanya, 'once I can get out of my fish tank, I'll see if we can do something clever for you.'\n\nShe got on with typing.\n\nCharlie stood, slumped and winded against the wall, taking in the situation. Monsters. Screaming. Quill with a gun and a smile. Then, gathering himself together, he went over to Ram.\n\n'Sorry about that. She's deafened by the blasts,' Ram said, wondering why he was making feeble excuses for her.\n\n'Sure,' said Charlie. 'You okay?'\n\n'Yeah.'\n\n'Good. Thank you.' Charlie nodded, and suddenly Ram saw the alien prince in him. He wasn't just reacting to the situation around him. He was considering it. 'So. We're being invaded?'\n\n'Yeah.'\n\n'Right.' Charlie agreed, looking vaguely affronted.\n\n'Fancy ordering them to stop?' suggested Ram.\n\nCharlie ignored the jibe. 'Quill said she couldn't hear me?'\n\n'Yeah,' said Ram.\n\nCharlie nodded again, a sad little nod that made it quite clear he didn't believe a word of it. Then he looked away, surveying the chaos in the bay with the aloofness of a general.\n\nSoldiers were fleeing from the Combat Chambers. There were now about two dozen creatures. The only person trying to hold them back was Quill.\n\n'Hum,' said Charlie. Then he indicated the fleeing soldiers. 'Quill can't hold the invaders back on her own. Can you get them to help?'\n\n'Why me?' Ram hated it when Charlie treated him like this.\n\n'Because you're a good soldier and they respect you.' Charlie didn't seem fazed. 'It will save time.' He looked around again. 'I'm going to try to get into the systems. Maybe there's a way to block the area off.' He turned to go. Then he stopped. He looked at Ram.\n\n'Oh, I'm sorry,' he said, 'I'd forgotten about your leg.' Ram blushed, feeling humiliated. But also, Charlie was right. His artificial leg had frozen, rooting him to the spot.\n\n'Here,' Charlie said, reached out his arm, and, balancing Ram, led him over to the other soldiers.\n\n'You lot,' Ram shouted at the soldiers, 'don't move\u2014listen to me . . .'\n\nTanya hadn't stopped typing for several minutes.\n\n'How we doing?' asked April.\n\n'Well,' Tanya groaned. 'The fact that I'm still bashing this keyboard and not doing cartwheels should tell you that it's not good. This system was designed to display information, not to give me control. It's maddening\u2014I can select footage from the helmet cameras, I just can't open or close doors. I can't do anything.'\n\nSeraphin appeared next to her, and handed her a carton of juice. 'You might not be able to do anything, but I can,' he said, and grabbed a microphone.\n\nAn alarm sounded across the Void, echoing through its corridors. The soldiers all scrambled to the Big White Room, where footage was projected over the walls, showing the carnage taking place. Seraphin's voice boomed over it.\n\n'So, this is happening,' he said. 'We're being invaded and we need to stop it. The best place to defend is the Big White Room. Get guns, get there, and get ready to fight. We're trying to seal off the corridors, but I doubt it's going to work.' He stopped then started again. 'I mean, we're hoping that we'll get it to work. But we've got to do everything we can to stop them.'\n\nAt the end of the Combat Bay, protected by the rest of the invaders, two Skandis gathered around a service hatch, and, prising it open with their mandibles, began to work among the machinery with surprising skill and dexterity. An interface screen popped up, and a tentacle swiped across it, leaving a sticky trail.\n\n'Oh,' said Tanya, 'someone else is in the system.'\n\n'Is that good?' asked April.\n\nTanya squinted at the screen. 'No. Probably not.'\n\nThe soldiers had retreated to the Big White Room. There'd been nothing else they could do. The screens around them were still showing the chaos.\n\nA fleeting glimpse of a frightened soldier, sat on a bench, despondent, no longer a soldier, not much more than a child.\n\nAnother soldier backing away as the jaws of a Skandis wrapped around her head.\n\nA group of soldiers looking at one another, their faces blank, empty, exhausted.\n\nQuill firing and firing and firing and laughing. ABNORMAL. ABNORMAL. ABNORMAL.\n\nThey'd formed a barricade of sorts, using the tables and benches and a lot of hasty shoving. The Skandis, dozens and dozens of them, were still coming, but the barricade had seemed the right thing to do.\n\n'Keeping out the monsters, keeping out the night,' Charlie said, grabbing the other end of a table from Ram and shoving it.\n\nThey stood, surveying their work.\n\n'They're coming,' someone said, and someone else stifled a sob.\n\nWith a roar, the barricade shattered, falling like a Jenga tower as the Skandis surged through.\n\nRam and Charlie were pushed aside. There were screams and shouts, then a soldier ran forward to confront the Skandis as they poured into the Big White Room.\n\nFor a moment the girl stood there. She was scared, everyone could see that. But she was also determined. She held her gun up but she did not fire. Her posture, everything about her, said that she was going to defend this room to the death.\n\nA boy crawled out from under a table, and went to stand beside her. He raised his gun as well.\n\nThree more soldiers formed a line with them.\n\nAll of them stood, pointing their guns at the rows of Skandis.\n\nThe invaders stood silently, watching them, as if curious. The girl nodded to the rest of the line, and they all levelled their guns and pulled the triggers.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nThey pressed them again. Nothing.\n\nThey turned to one another.\n\nThen they turned back to face the Skandis. The soldiers' faces were open in a look of comic alarm, almost embarrassment. 'Well, this is awkward . . .'\n\n'Shoot them!' screamed Quill. 'What's wrong with you? Shoot them!'\n\nBut no one paid her any attention. They were staring at the five soldiers, standing there, against an alien army, just five lonely, defenceless children, lowering their useless guns in utter, miserable defeat.\n\nThe Big White Room fell silent, the walls filling with pictures\u2014everyone was staring at the five students, alone in the middle of the room.\n\nRam leaned forward to help, to provide covering fire from his gun, but it didn't work either.\n\n'What the hell?' he asked.\n\nCharlie shook his head. 'They've interfered with the genome-locking. The guns are useless now.'\n\nCharlie was wrong.\n\nThe Skandis pushed the five soldiers back against a wall. One of them picked up a gun, examined it, and aimed it.\n\n'No,' shouted Ram. 'No!'\n\nBut they fired anyway.\n\n## FIFTY\n\n## THE SKANDIS WAR AS YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE\n\n'How's it going?' asked April. 'Surely we're there!'\n\nTanya mumbled something.\n\nApril leaned over to see what she was doing. She was immersed in a series of protocols. 'What is that?'\n\n'Something new,' Tanya grunted. 'The Skandis have disabled the weapons. I've got to reactivate them. Otherwise it's going to be a massacre. It's all very well trying to get into the helmet cam systems, but I can't see how it's going to save lives.'\n\n'If I'm right,' said April, 'then we won't need guns. Please. Sort it.'\n\nTanya shook her head. 'People are dying right now. I've got to stop it.'\n\nApril put her hand on Tanya's shoulder, but she brushed it off.\n\nSeraphin appeared at April's side. 'I'm not her,' he said quietly, 'but there's another terminal by my bed. Perhaps we can do something there.'\n\nThe Skandis surged forward, lashing out with their tentacles. Soldiers were crouched behind whatever cover they could find, aiming their guns fruitlessly. They may as well have been yelling 'Pow! Pow! Pow!' Children playing with toys. Damn, thought Ram, that's what we've been all along. Bang bang, you're dead.\n\nTanya appeared on the screen, hovering over the slaughter. 'I'm trying to get the guns back online!' she yelled.\n\n'Try harder,' Miss Quill roared back.\n\n'Not encouraging, Miss,' Tanya said.\n\nBenches and tables flew past, swept aside as the Skandis surged into the hall.\n\n'Wow, that escalated quickly.' Seraphin was watching as the Skandis took control of the Big White Room. He and April sat on the edge of his bed, trying to get sense out of his tablet.\n\n'Are you getting anywhere?' she asked.\n\nHe smiled at her, and his sweet smile was very sad.\n\n'No, not a clue.' He tossed the tablet to one side, and Captain Pugsley made a leap for it and vanished through the bed.\n\n'What were you looking for anyway?' Seraphin asked, opening a drawer, dusting off an old laptop, and plugging it in.\n\nApril stared at the weird half-a-dog embedded in the bed.\n\n'Not certain. Not really my area.' April looked sheepish.\n\n'Not really a hacker.'\n\n'Neither am I!' called Tanya. 'What you trying to get into?'\n\n'The helmet cam systems.'\n\n'It's pointless. You just can't hack into them,' explained Tanya. 'Believe me I've tried. Gah.' She waved at the desktop. 'Seeing the feeds is easy, getting beyond that is a nightmare. The operating system I'm trying to talk to is weird. Like an onion skin. You peel off layers of icons to get to what you want. See?'\n\nOn screen, she was pulling away sheet after sheet of icons, all of them labelled in an alien language. 'The deeper I go, the harder it gets to understand.'\n\nSeraphin had finally booted up his old laptop, and had got into the helmet camera feeds. 'We can do just as much from here,' he said. 'The problem is, it's not got as fast a processor, it'll be sluggish.'\n\nApril had one of those beautiful quiet moments where the entire world and her urge to scream at it just faded gently away.\n\nHelmet cameras. A slow laptop.\n\nA holographic pug. Empty cartons of juice. Got it.\n\n'You say you still get sent freebies?' she asked Seraphin.\n\n'Yeah,' he said. 'Don't know how the post works, but\u2014'\n\n'Not important,' April said. 'Anything electrical?'\n\nThe Skandis swept towards the humans. People had stopped trying to make a run for it. Any attempts were met with lethal stuff. Bodies crashed and snapped against the walls.\n\n'Stand still!' ordered Quill. 'Don't be idiots. Don't run.'\n\nThe great walls lit up, fizzing.\n\n'Tanya!' shouted Ram. 'Is that you doing this?'\n\n'No!' replied her voice. She sounded lost, desperate. Washing into focus on the screen were hundreds of images of the terrified humans, lined up against a wall.\n\nCharlie realised they were now being shown what the Skandis saw. They would be able to watch themselves being devoured.\n\nApril was tearing apart Seraphin's cupboard.\n\n'Anything electrical?' she'd said. 'Computer stuff.'\n\nHe'd started throwing boxes at her. 'It's pretty much all useless,' he said. 'The Wi-Fi link back to Earth from here is so slow . . .'\n\n'Good,' said April.\n\n'And they tell me they'd rather not have stuff installed on their systems.'\n\n'Excellent.' She laughed, pulling out armfuls of things\u2014USB mini-fans, motion-sensitive Christmas tree lights, small drones, wireless dongles, thumbsticks, and hard drives.\n\nIn her head, her suddenly clear, pin-sharp head, she was thinking: What if it's not just me who finds computers annoying? And she was smiling. She remembered how much trouble she'd had when she'd first plugged her piano keyboard into her computer.\n\nTanya looked up from her keyboard to see April marching through the room with a bundle of kit. 'What the hell are you doing?' she asked.\n\n'Being very dumb indeed,' April told her. She threw the bundle onto the bed, and Seraphin began plugging them into the USB hubs.\n\nThe humans were stood in a line, waiting to die, watching themselves on the screens of the Big White Room. Some were still holding their useless guns. Others had let them drop to the floor.\n\n'This is sick,' said Ram.\n\n'It's an impressive act,' purred Miss Quill.\n\nThe Skandis had stopped. They were waiting. Enjoying the moment.\n\n'Nearly there!' called Tanya's voice over the speakers. 'I've nearly got the guns back on line.'\n\n'We. Are. Out. Of. Time,' grated Quill.\n\nShe raised her gun. All the other soldiers raised theirs.\n\n'I would very much like to go out fighting,' Quill said. 'If that's not too much to ask.'\n\nSeraphin scratched his head and looked helplessly at April. 'What happens now? I've plugged everything in.' He pointed at the forest of cables snaking out from this laptop across the duvet. The head of Captain Pugsley appeared through the duvet and nipped ineffectually at them.\n\n'We wait,' said April. 'We wait for something ordinary and human to happen.'\n\n'I'm in!' shouted Tanya. 'I'm into the weapons. They're rebooting now! Get ready to fire!'\n\nA window on Seraphin's laptop popped up. 'New technology detected. Finding driver.'\n\nAnd then another one appeared over it. And another.\n\nQuill and the others tightened their fingers on the triggers. They were ready to fight.\n\nAnd then the Skandis did something remarkable.\n\n## FIFTY-ONE\n\n## THEY THOUGHT THEY'D WON UNTIL THEY FOUND OUT THEY'D LOST\n\n'Stop!' yelled April. 'Stop! Something's happened! Can't you see what's happened?'\n\nBut no one was firing. Everyone was staring.\n\n'What the hell?' gasped Ram.\n\n'Oh God.' Tanya stared at her screen and gaped.\n\nThe Skandis had changed. They were no longer nightmares of tentacles, slime, and spikes. They were instead so beautiful that to look at them stole a breath. They were childlike, fluttering creatures, an agreeable merger between angels and butterflies\u2014they glowed with beauty, from their silver hair to the furthest tips of their silk wings. They hovered just off the ground, and that seemed right, as though to actually touch the floor would have somehow lessened them.\n\n'Their faces,' gasped Tanya. Their faces were remarkable. They had about them an aura of universal beauty. Their eyes were wide and golden, they had tiny furred noses, and their mouths were delicate wispy things, their skin stretched with fine markings that suggested these were mouths made for smiling.\n\nThey were not smiling now.\n\nApril's plan had been simple. Seraphin's laptop had been crammed full of USB technology, all of it searching desperately for a new driver. The sudden inrush of requests for software, the old processor, the sluggish internet speed, all allied to do what Tanya's skills couldn't\u2014they hit the helmet camera systems and brought them down.\n\nSuddenly the Skandis were revealed.\n\n'That,' said April, 'is what they really look like.'\n\n'But\u2014' Seraphin said, and stopped. That was pretty much all anyone said. The same expression echoed down in the Big White Room\u2014one of horror and disbelief. Someone was crying.\n\n'What have we done?' Ram said.\n\nThe Skandis showed them.\n\nThe screens of the Big White Room lit up with footage. A thousand deaths, each one seen from the victim's point of view. Tiny hands and paws flailing up, pleading and squeaking, falling backwards, their last view the sneering faces of their killers\u2014human soldiers, young faces twisted with rage and hate.\n\nOnce those thousand deaths had finished, they saw a thousand more, and a thousand more after that. The deaths were broadcast on every wall, the floor, the ceiling. There was no escape from them. The blasts, the screams, the laughter.\n\n'Stop it!' screamed Tanya. 'Stop it!'\n\nThe picture changed. For a moment it was mercifully blank.\n\nThe Skandis stood, surveying the cowed soldiers placidly.\n\nThen Seraphin's voice came over the speakers. It was missing its normal exuberance. 'We've got . . . we've got the other side of the picture. You have to see it.'\n\nHe and April played out footage from the soldiers' helmet cameras. Suddenly they saw all their battles as they really had been. Where before they'd been marching through desolate wastelands, they were now marching through fields, villages, schools.\n\nRows of the fluttering aliens were mown down as they tended crops. Horrified parents watched as their children exploded in flame and then fought back desperately, angrily. Villagers rushed forward to try to protect their elders while urging others to flee.\n\nThe most horrible thing was how beautiful the aliens looked even as they died, flames racing along their wings, agony exquisitely expressed on their faces.\n\nThe humans watched the screens. They couldn't turn away from what they saw. The slaughter. The terrible laughter. The jokes. A rifle smashing down and crunching over and over again as a boy's voice chuckled. 'One down, three to go.' Then he turned to three Skandis children clinging to a corner.\n\nIt took a long time to play all the footage. It stopped. Eventually.\n\nSeraphin appeared, leaning into the screens.\n\nHe looked about to speak, and then shook his head, turned away, and the screens of the Big White Room went blank.\n\nThere was silence. Shock. Wonder.\n\nThen came a thud. Then another.\n\nThe sound of helmets being taken off. Dropped to the ground. People blinking at the Skandis. Seeing them as they truly were.\n\nNORMAL\/ABNORMAL didn't matter anymore.\n\nSoldiers looked at the Skandis, and then they looked at one another for the first time. And realised how young everyone was.\n\nThen the doubt started. What if this was an illusion too? What if what they'd originally seen was true? And this was the illusion.\n\nA debate began to rage. Shouting.\n\nAll the while the Skandis stood there, fluttering gently. Waiting.\n\nApril walked into the Big White Room. She walked between the two sides. Everyone watched her. She walked patiently, with poise and clarity. In that moment, Charlie couldn't help but think how grown-up she was. Ram just blinked. How could she be so cool? After all, this was _April_.\n\nShe stopped before the fluttering crowd of aliens, and bowed her head.\n\n'I've never got to say this before, but'\u2014And she smiled, a beautiful, sad smile. 'On behalf of the human race, I am sorry.'\n\nThere was no simple resolution. No happy ending.\n\nIt would be nice to say the aliens bowed back, and then left in peace.\n\nThey did not.\n\nBut nor did they slaughter everyone. Instead they ransacked the base, going through every file, making copies, pulling information out onto the screens, analysing it.\n\nThey ignored the humans completely. Some people tried repeating April's apology, trying to make it personal, but it was as though they weren't speaking at all. Now that they'd made the humans aware, the Skandis had dismissed them. It just seemed easier for them to ignore their murderers. We are, April thought, beneath contempt.\n\nRam and Tanya sat on the remains of a bench, watching the Skandis flutter around, moving in beautiful, graceful loops as they dismantled the walls, stripping out vast chunks of technology. Tanya blinked and turned away, in case she cried again.\n\n'I can't believe it,' she kept saying.\n\nRam nodded. His head kept going round and round and round. How many had he killed? How many were adults? As if that made it any better. It did not make it any better. None of it made it any better.\n\n'I've lost count,' he said, empty. 'I keep trying to count. Oh God. I can't remember.'\n\n'I know how many I killed,' said Tanya, very sadly. She wouldn't say.\n\n'And, all that bants while I was doing it. Like I was a hero.'\n\n'Yeah,' she said. 'I was laughing. Sometimes I couldn't stop laughing because I thought I was doing good.'\n\n'We did,' he said, disgusted with himself. 'We really thought we were doing good. And we all dared one another on.'\n\n'It was . . .' Tanya's face twisted up with shame. 'So much fun.'\n\n'Yeah.' Ram turned away from her. 'And I finally found something I was good at.'\n\nThey sat in silence after that.\n\nThere was an angry huddle in a corner. One kid, from Coal Hill, was shaking a fist. 'Yeah, but,' he was saying, 'how do we know they're still not planning on invading the Earth? I mean. They still could. Couldn't they?'\n\nThe huddle nodded. Making it okay. Making it possible to live with themselves.\n\nIf the Skandis heard, they didn't pay any attention. They no longer cared.\n\nSeraphin appeared on a wall. Only that one screen was still working. He was wearing black. He'd shaved.\n\n'Hey, everyone,' he said, the confidence gone, his voice croaking. 'Here's what we know,' he said. 'I think it's important we all know.' He swallowed and stopped for a bit. 'I'm getting it together.'\n\nApril moved through the crowd and sat next to Ram.\n\n'I'm sorry,' he said to her.\n\n'Yeah,' she said. 'You're only apologising to me because you can't make it right with the Skandis.'\n\n'No,' he said, flushing with anger. 'You deserve an apology too. I didn't listen to you.'\n\n'Maybe,' April said, considering. 'Maybe I'd just make a terrible soldier.'\n\nShe took his hand, and squeezed it very gently.\n\nOn the screen, Seraphin stopped rifling through his notebook and then spoke again.\n\n'The Skandis helped me understand as much about this as they could. Looks like we will never know who organised this,' he began. 'Some of you have spoken about that feeling of being watched, out of the corner of your eye. That's all we have of the people behind this. A vague idea. They made sure they were never seen.\n\n'Can I make it clear\u2014the Skandis were never planning on invading the Earth. They're a peaceful, beautiful race. As you've seen, their home planet is pretty amazing. So amazing that other people wanted to live there. But these other people didn't want to be seen being involved in wiping the rightful owners out. They approached mercenaries, but no one wanted the job.\n\n'Instead, they came up with a plan. They found a way to Earth, and they found a way of recruiting people who could be blamed. The population on Skandis isn't huge\u2014wiping them out wouldn't take that much effort. But, if we'd succeeded, the shame would have been all on us. On the Earth.\n\n'Whoever is behind this wouldn't just have got the Skandis' world, they'd have got the Earth as well. If they'd wanted to invade us, no one would have stepped in to stop them. They're ruthless and they're clever. They've made this all our fault.\n\n'I cheered you on. I told you to do it.' He stopped and took a long drink of water. 'I made you do it. You made one another do it. But we'd been fooled. The helmet cams were filtering what we saw, making us see what our kidnappers wanted us to see. Massive perception filters. Nothing has been real. Every image you've seen has been altered to make you the hero of the movie of your own life. We thought we were Han Solo blowing up the Death Star. Really, we're stormtroopers.'\n\nHe leaned back in his chair. 'One more thing. You may be wondering how they paid for all this\u2014turns out there's still money in space. It costs to build this base, to place it in the Void, and to interface with the Skandis' home world. It cost a lot to filter the helmet cams and to buy the drugs they put in your food. Oh, yeah. They drugged you. Sorry.\n\n'Anyway, cash. Turns out, there was a site. Pay-per-view. All across the universe, people have been paying to watch what we've done. It's sick. But it's been really popular.\n\n'The sickest thing of all? Alright.' Seraphin stood up and paced the room, jamming his hands in his pockets and looking wretched. 'The people behind this. Our masters? They may not have won any planets. But they've still made a massive profit from the videos.\n\n'Yeah, we think the universe is full of evil UFOs with probes, or of great shining space gods. Turns out, it's full of really twisted people. And not only are they the Worst, but now the universe has seen all these videos, what do you think they think of us?' He shook his head and stared bleakly ahead. 'I dunno.' He ran his hand through his hair. 'I just dunno. Perhaps we deserve whatever's coming.'\n\nHe turned. 'Anyway, whoever's running this? They've left us here to rot. The Skandis have opened the Combat Chambers up for us to get back to Earth. We don't deserve it, but there you go. I guess they don't want our deaths on their conscience. I'm using one to go home. Maybe you should do the same. If you see me, don't say hello.' He breathed out, a shuddering breath that emptied his lungs. 'Well, that's it. Seraphin out. Mic drop gif.'\n\nHe walked away.\n\nThe great screens in the Big White Room went blank and never showed anything again.\n\nEveryone was silent, stunned. Except for Miss Quill, who looked up, smiling slightly.\n\n'Well, I think that was a pretty great plan.'\n\n## FIFTY-TWO\n\n## TO GET YOUR FREE CONFESSION JUST FOLLOW THESE SIMPLE STEPS\n\nMiss Quill went back to her room in the Void and tapped on the wall.\n\n'I know that you can still hear me. I know that you're still there.'\n\nNothing answered her.\n\nShe put her hands on her hips.\n\n'I'm a very patient woman,' she told the wall. 'Someday soon I'm going to be the last survivor of my planet. While I'm waiting for that, I may as well hang around waiting for you to show yourselves. Time's slow here. And I'm really rather calm.'\n\nThere was no answer.\n\nQuill carried on staring at the wall. An hour passed. Maybe two.\n\n'I'm still here,' said Miss Quill. 'And not at all bored. I've waited for thirty teenagers to come up with thirty different feeble excuses for not being able to solve Fermat's Last Theorem as homework. So bear that in mind. I'd appreciate an explanation from you.'\n\nThe wall looked back at her blankly.\n\n'Here's the thing,' said Miss Quill. 'I know you're still here. The Skandis may be as dainty as dancing Disney teacups, but they're formidable transdimensional engineers. Nothing gets in or out of here without their say-so, and, according to the logs, no one's tried to go anywhere other than Earth. I'd say you figured you'd stay behind. See if there was a chance to recoup a bit more of your investment.'\n\nThe wall said nothing.\n\n'I know I'm not mad. I know you're in the walls,' said Quill. 'I knew you came out to observe me when I was resting. I am a very light sleeper, and it amused me to work out who you were.'\n\nPerhaps it was a trick of the light, but the wall seemed to frown.\n\n'We've met before, you see,' Quill said. 'I'm Quill. The last of the Quill. You came and offered your services to us. Said you'd help us with the Rhodians. We said no. I won't bore you with talk about a warrior's honour. You just wanted too much money. We were a poor people, so we left it at that. But I was always curious about how your service worked. And now I know. Very clever.'\n\nShe smiled at the wall. The wall lit up, just a little.\n\n'You have no name.' Quill smiled. 'The humans will find that a shame. They really do like their closure. If there's one thing they love more than an apology it's someone to hold responsible for everything wrong with their lives. And it's much easier to blame people with names. But that's not how you work, is it? You hide in the shadows, you skulk in the walls, you buy and sell planets\u2014and no one knows it's you, because no one knows who you are. And no one ever will.'\n\nThe wall shrugged, as much as a wall could.\n\n'It's the humans I feel sorry for,' said Quill. 'Actually, that's my first thought when I wake up every morning. But in this case, the humans will process it so badly. Their brains are so strange, so slow and fragile. Some will forget completely, some will deny it ever happened\u2014but they'll all remember eventually, somehow. They'll all be changed by this forever. And, because they're up against you, they'll never even have a name to curse for their nightmares.'\n\nThe wall considered what she said.\n\n'Luckily, I am Quill,' said Miss Quill. 'And we don't need names.' She raised her gun and pointed it at the wall. She fired into the wall, draining the power packs.\n\nThe wall shattered like a shell. Six bodies fell out, lying twitching on the ground, smoke rising from them.\n\n'You shouldn't have hid behind the wall.' She smiled at them. 'You should have come out and faced me. The genome-lock doesn't stop me from shooting walls.'\n\nShe turned one of the charred corpses over. Its face was an empty, featureless mask.\n\n'No names? No faces?' she tutted. 'The humans are really going to hate you.'\n\nShe turned around and went home.\n\n## FIFTY-THREE\n\n## HAPPY ENDINGS DON'T KILL PEOPLE\u2014GUNS DO\n\nWhen you've caught the world out in a great lie, it takes a while before you trust it again.\n\nFor Ram it was as simple as putting one foot in front of the other.\n\nHe was running. Down the road. Into the park, round the trees and off to school.\n\nHis artificial leg kept telling him that something, it wasn't sure what, wasn't quite right.\n\n'No,' he said to his leg. 'It isn't right. Get over it.' And, for this morning, his leg did.\n\nCharlie slunk out of the kitchen, two bowls of cereal balanced in his hands. Miss Quill was walking in.\n\n'You've been avoiding me,' she said. As usual, she wasn't angry. She was, at best, mildly amused. As though his behaviour was a childish reaction.\n\nCharlie refused to rise to it. 'Yes,' he said, angling his chin up at her defiantly. 'Is there any reason why I shouldn't?'\n\nShe stepped past him, enjoying his slight flinch as she got close to him. She filled the kettle and flicked it on to boil, pulling a mug from the cupboard. It had a jolly puppy on it. She dropped the mug in the bin and picked another one.\n\n'I fought. And I enjoyed it. I am honest about that.' She smiled at Charlie. 'One day, if you really hold true to your heritage, you too will fight a great war. And you will be lying to yourself if you don't enjoy it.' She tipped boiling water into the mug. 'You'll see. Enjoy your cereal.'\n\nTanya sneaked into her living room. The rest of the house was a hive of people, running into the bathroom, arguing over clothes, and making too much noise in the kitchen. No one noticed her go up to the television and switch it on. She slipped headphones on and plugged them in.\n\nFor days now she'd made a public protest about how she was overgaming. About how she was giving it a rest.\n\nAnd she'd stick to it. In public, at least.\n\nShe booted up the games console.\n\nYes. She'd stick to it. But just a quick bout every now and then. With a smile, she started shooting.\n\nApril was standing waiting at the school gates, watching Ram approach.\n\n'I'm all sweaty,' said Ram.\n\n'Yeah, and you're making a thing of it.'\n\n'Not.'\n\n'Are.'\n\nThey stood there, a silence forming between them that wasn't quite the comfortable silence between old friends, but maybe one day would be.\n\nPupils were streaming through the school gates, checking their phones, laughing, nudging one another. Every now and then, one of them would catch April's or Ram's eye and look away. It was the telltale giveaway.\n\nRam snorted. 'People forget so quickly.'\n\n'You think?' April leaned back against the railings.\n\n'They were abducted, tricked into being butchers\u2014not really sure that even Coal Hill's counsellor can cope with that. And what do you say when you get home? \"Sorry I've been missing for a couple of days, actually been fighting an alien war for months\"? Or do you go with\u2014'\n\n'\"Staying over at Kevin's working on a maths project\"? Yeah.' Ram laughed uneasily. 'It's like no time's passed at all.'\n\nMore people strolled past them. A girl stopped. She stared at them, burst into tears, and ran away.\n\n'Who was that?' Ram asked.\n\n'Not a clue,' April said. 'All those helmets.'\n\n'Yeah.'\n\nThe sun shone, and more people slouched through the gates.\n\n'Maybe they're all forgetting,' April said. 'There's a chance that it's only us who remember.'\n\n'That'd be kind,' Ram agreed. 'But then, I'm no longer sure the world is that kind.'\n\n'No.'\n\n'But that's Coal Hill,' said Ram. 'So much to ignore, to deal with silently.'\n\n'How long do you think we'll be able to cope?'\n\nRam shrugged.\n\nApril watched a kid kicking a ball around the yard. No one joined in. 'Who'd kidnap kids and do that to them?'\n\n'Charlie says Miss Quill knows more than she's letting on, like who's behind it.' Ram sounded like he didn't really trust either of them. 'But is that . . . I mean, does it matter? Like I doubt we can sue them. Or that they'd even notice.'\n\nApril looked again at the playground. 'It's changed, you know,' she said. 'It's more subdued.' A sad echo chimed in her head, of her dad after he'd been drinking. 'Notice, they're all being more cautious.'\n\n'I guess,' Ram conceded. 'I keep checking Facebook, but I'm not posting anything on it. No one really is\u2014everyone's being . . .'\n\n'Really, really cautious,' April said. 'No bragging, no videos, no food. It's like a go-slow.'\n\n'Will no one think of the cats?' Ram asked, and they smiled at each other.\n\n'Not so bad.'\n\n'Not really, no. Guess not.'\n\nThey stood in silence, watching the yard. They got ready to head in, to start another day, one that would no doubt start off innocently enough and end in death and aliens.\n\nAnyway, that was today, and it hadn't started yet.\n\nA kid on a mountain bike whipped past them, did a stunt swerve, then another, and, at the last minute, bumped up against the curve. The bike balanced there on one wheel, just for a moment.\n\nA dozen phones whipped up, all eager to catch the moment as the bike slowly arced backwards, crashing to the ground, landing on the rider, who rolled groaning around in the gravel. No one helped him, they just filmed.\n\n'Too good to last,' said April.\n\n'Yeah,' agreed Ram.\n\nThey went and started today.\n\n## **Excerpt from \"For Tonight We Might Die\"**\n\n**TURN THE PAGE**  \nfor an excerpt from the _Class_ pilot episode,  \n\"For Tonight We Might Die,\"  \ncreated and written by Patrick Ness!\n**10:02:28 INT. COAL HILL SCHOOL - ATRIUM - DAY 2; 08:51** ****\n\n**APRIL** picks up a torn-down prom poster and re-tapes it to the wall. **TANYA** watches her.\n\n**10:02:29 CAPTION 'FOR TONIGHT WE MIGHT DIE WRITTEN BY PATRICK NESS'**\n\n**APRIL**\n\nTanya, are you coming to help decorate later? I need volunteers.\n\n**TANYA**\n\nMy mum says I'm too young.\n\n**10:02:34 _MUSIC OUT ARCTIC MONKEYS - BLACK TREACLE_**\n\n**10:02:35 CAPTION 'PRODUCER DEREK RITCHIE'**\n\n**APRIL**\n\nBut it's for Year 12, so _technically_ you qualify despite, you know . . . being like? Two years ahead? How old are you anyway?\n\n**10:02:41 CAPTION 'DIRECTOR ED BAZLEGETTE'**\n\n**TANYA**\n\nBecause that question never gets old.\n\n**CHARLIE** passes them. They watch him go.\n\n**APRIL**\n\nI think I'm going to ask Charlie to the prom.\n\n**TANYA**\n\nAnd you just made us fail the Bechdel Test\u2014\n\n**APRIL**\n\nThe what? You're funny.\n\n**TANYA**\n\nBesides, I don't think the new kid is in to wait. Prom is _tomorrow_. You don't have a date yet?\n\nCaught, **APRIL** starts moving away, changes subject:\n\n**APRIL**\n\nSo that's a yes to helping me decorate?\n\n**TANYA** watches her go, shaking her head, feeling for **APRIL** as everyone does. But behind **TANYA** \u2014\n\n**A strange, ominous shadow passes, quickly.** Did we see that?\n\n**CUT TO:**\n\n**10:03:04 INT. COAL HILL SCHOOL - MAIN CORRIDOR - DAY 2; 08:53**\n\n**APRIL** talks to **CHARLIE**. He's looking around surreptitiously, as if trying to find something.\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\nBut how would one dress?\n\n**APRIL**\n\nWell, the boys wear dinner jackets and the girls wear ball gowns, but we totally don't need to be that gender-specific\u2014\n\n**CHARLIE** spots the **SCORCH MARKS** on the linoleum floor coming out from under their classroom door. **MISS QUILL** passes, two steps ahead of **MR ARMITAGE** , Headteacher, harried, exhausted.\n\n**MR ARMITAGE**\n\nI don't know what they did in your _last_ job, but chaperoning\n\n**MISS QUILL**\n\n(crisply)\n\nI am _not_ a baby-sitter.\n\n****\n\n**MR ARMITAGE**\n\nExcept . . . you kind of _are_ . . .\n\n**10:03:22 _MUSIC IN 1M01B_**\n\nThey pass, **CHARLIE** and **APRIL** watch them go.\n\n**10:03:27 _MUSIC OUT 1M01B_**\n\n**APRIL**\n\n_Anyway_ , about the prom, I was thinking that maybe you and I could you know\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\n(polite but firm)\n\nOh, no. I shouldn't think so.\n\n**CHARLIE** heads after **MISS QUILL**. **APRIL** watches him go, stung.\n\n**RAM**\n\n(passing by)\n\nThat was painful.\n\n**RAM** disappears into the classroom where **CHARLIE** went.\n\n**CUT TO:**\n\n**10:03:50 INT. COAL HILL SCHOOL - MISS QUILL'S CLASSROOM - DAY 2; 09:02**\n\n**MISS QUILL** looms into frame.\n\n**MISS QUILL**\n\nLook at you all. The cream of the crop. High achievers. It's no wonder this country only exports Downton Abbey.\n\nOur four\u2014 **APRIL** , **TANYA** , **RAM** and **CHARLIE** \u2014sit by each other in a room full of classmates.\n\n**APRIL**\n\n(at her desk, quietly)\n\nI _like_ Downton Abbey.\n\n**TANYA**\n\nOf course you like it. It's a bunch of white people being nice to each other.\n\n**RAM**\n\nYou'd watch it if Idris Elba were on it.\n\n**CHARLIE** , overhearing, takes out his phone to type in a search, \"Idris Elba\u2014\" It's yanked out of his hand by **MISS QUILL**!\n\n**MISS QUILL**\n\nCheating already, Charles?\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\n. . . you haven't actually taught us  anything yet\u2014\n\nSearch says \"Idris Elba is an English actor, musician, voice actor and DJ.\"\n\n**MISS QUILL**\n\nTrue. How about our first lesson of the day?\n\nDrops the phone. There's a crack.\n\n**MISS QUILL (CONT'D)**\n\nYour teacher has _awful_ butter fingers.\n\nShe picks up the phone, hands it back to **CHARLIE**. The glass display is smashed.\n\n**APRIL**\n\nYou can't do that! That's his private property!\n\n**MISS QUILL'S** laser focus shifts to **APRIL**.\n\n**MISS QUILL**\n\nApril MacLean. The answer to the question, Are spinsters born or made? You got a date for the prom yet?\n\n**TANYA**\n\nI am pretty sure you are not allowed  to ask that!\n\n**RAM**\n\n(arrogant)\n\n_I've_ __ got a date.\n\n**MISS QUILL**\n\nBut of course you do, Ram. The boy who hears silent applause every time he walks into a room.\n\nShe turns back to the front and writes an impossibly difficult **PHYSICS** equation on the board.\n\n**MISS QUILL (CONT'D)**\n\nSolve it. Don't look so pained, Matteusz.\n\nThe class, cowed, starts baffled work. Our four struggle.\n\n**RAM**\n\nIs this even in the book?\n\n**APRIL**\n\nI honestly think she makes this stuff up.\n\n**TANYA**\n\nIt's the Gibbs probability density in a classical Klein-Gordon Field.\n\nThey stare at her.\n\n**TANYA (CONT'D)**\n\nWell, it _is_.\n\n**RAM**\n\nWe're not _supposed_ to understand it. She just wants us to feel stupid.\n\nI'll bet she _ate that missing kid_.\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\nHe was eaten?\n\n**RAM**\n\n(exasperated)\n\nWhere are you from, anyway? You sound like the Queen.\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\n(beat, flatly)\n\nI'm from Sheffield.\n\n**RAM**\n\nWhy am I even talking to you geeks?\n\n**MISS QUILL**\n\nDon't make me put you in detention, Ram. You wouldn't like it.\n\nThey return to their work. **CHARLIE** catches the eye of **MATTEUSZ** sitting a few rows up, who makes a hair-pulling gesture at the physics problem. **CHARLIE** smiles. Then he types into his phone's smashed screen, \"Monkeys of the arctic . . .\"\n\n**10:05:38 _MUSIC IN ARCTIC MONKEYS - BLACK TREACLE_**\n\n**CUT TO:**\n\n****\n\n**10:05:41 EXT. COAL HILL SCHOOL - FRONT - DAY 2; 15:35**\n\nThe school day is ending. **APRIL** stands outside the school entrance with flyers, trying to catch the attention of passing students.\n\n**APRIL**\n\nBig decoration tonight! All volunteers are welcome. Big decoration tonight! Autumn ball. All volunteers are welcome. All volunteers are welcome. Big decoration tonight. Need your . . . Come and help me, anyone.\n\n**CHARLIE** approaches her.\n\n**10:06:05 _MUSIC OUT ARCTIC MONKEYS - BLACK TREACLE_**\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\nHaving a date to the prom is important, yes?\n\n**APRIL**\n\n(looking hopeful)\n\n_Yeah_ \u2014\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\nI shall ask Matteusz as my date.\n\n**APRIL**\n\nMatteusz? Oh. _Ohhhhh_ \u2014\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\nIs this not right?\n\n**APRIL**\n\nNo! No, no\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\nThe schools in Sheffield were very different\u2014\n\n**APRIL**\n\nNo! It's great! It's fantastic. It totally makes sense.\n\n(little clap)\n\nGood for you!\n\n**CHARLIE**\n\nThank you.\n\nHe nods at her and heads off.\n\n**APRIL**\n\nOkay.\n\n(to herself, sad)\n\nOf course he is. Of course.\n\n**CUT TO:**\n\n**10:06:38 EXT. COAL HILL SCHOOL - FOOTBALL PITCH - DAY 2; 16:00**\n\n**10:06:38 _MUSIC IN 1M02_**\n\n**RAM** practises drills with the school football **TEAM**. C **OACH DAWSON** (huge, young, gorgeous) runs the drills. **VARUN** watches from the sidelines.\n\n**RACHEL** (pretty, brunette, bitchy) arrives to watch, too. A mousy P **AIR OF GIRLS** flee from her. **RAM** sees her, waves. She waves back. VARUN notices and frowns.\n\nThe sun is out, casting **SHADOWS** on the field. **RAM** pushes the ball past defenders. He's superb, particularly the way he dodges and fakes out other players.\n\nBut just as he's about to strike it into the goal, he sees the shadow of one TEAMMATE JUMP to the shadow of another. The ball is stolen off him easily, and the rest of the team runs the other way, Ram left standing, wondering what he saw.\n\n**RACHEL**\n\nRam!\n\n**COACH DAWSON**\n\nWhat the hell was what?\n\n**RAM**\n\nCoach\n\n**COACH DAWSON**\n\nTwenty laps. Now.\n\n**RAM**\n\nWhat for?\n\n**COACH DAWSON**\n\nTwenty- _five_.\n\nLet's get a move on.\n\nAnnoyed, **RAM** sets off. He sees **VARUN** glaring at **RACHEL**.\n\n**10:07:28 _MUSIC OUT 1M02_**\n\n**CUT TO:**\n\n**10:07:29 EXT. STREET - DAY 2; 16:05**\n\n**TANYA** walks home alone, singing to herself, throwing in some dance moves. She's just a kid, after all. __She passes a MISSING POSTER for KEVIN, the Sixth-Form Student from the opening.\n\nWe see her **SHADOW** behind her. It **STARTS TO GROW** , stretching abnormally, twisting into different **SHAPES** , threatening ones\u2014\n\n**TANYA** stops, looking guilty.\n\n**10:07:33 _MUSIC IN 1M03_**\n\n**10:07:41 _MUSIC OUT 1M03_**\n\n**TANYA**\n\nNo. No. Why would you help decorate for something you can't even go to?\n\n(sags)\n\nBecause that sad individual is probably the only chance you have at a friend.\n\nShe sighs, turns around to head back to school **AND SEES A TERRIFYING SHADOW SHAPE LOOMING OVER HER**!\n\nShe screams and runs as fast as she can\u2014\n\nThe **SHADOW** comes after her\u2014\n\n**10:07:54 _MUSIC IN 1M04_**\n\n## Back Ad\n\nDISCOVER\n\nyour next favorite read\n\nMEET\n\nnew authors to love\n\nWIN\n\nfree books\n\nSHARE\n\ninfographics, playlists, quizzes, and more\n\nWATCH\n\nthe latest videos\n\nwww.epicreads.com\n\n## About the Authors\n\n**PATRICK NESS** is the creator of the BBC television series _Class_ and the author of ten novels and a short story collection. He's best known for his books for young adults, including his _New York Times_ bestselling novel _The Rest of Us Just Live Here,_ the acclaimed Chaos Walking trilogy, _More Than This,_ and the Carnegie Medal\u2013winning _A Monster Calls. A Monster Calls_ was released as a major motion picture\u2014with the screenplay by Patrick himself\u2014starring Liam Neeson and Sigourney Weaver. Born in Virginia, Patrick lives in London.\n\nwww.patrickness.com\n\n**JAMES GOSS** is the author of two _Doctor Who_ novels: _The Blood Cell_ and _Dead of Winter_ as well as _Summer Falls_ (on behalf of Amy Pond). He is also the coauthor, with Steve Tribe, of _Doctor Who: The Doctor's Lives_ _and_ _Times,_ _Doctor Who:_ _The Dalek Handbook,_ and _Doctor Who: A History of the Universe in 100 Objects._ While at the BBC, James produced an adaptation of _Shada,_ an unfinished Douglas Adams _Doctor Who_ story, and _Dirk_ is his award-winning stage adaptation of _Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency._ His _Doctor Who_ audiobook _Dead Air_ won Best Audiobook 2010 from the Audiobook Store and his books _Dead of Winter_ and _Torchwood: First Born_ were both nominated for the 2012 British Fantasy Society Awards.\n\nDiscover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.\n\n## Books by Patrick Ness and James Goss\n\nClass: The Stone House\n\nClass: Joyride\n\nClass: What She Does Next Will Astound You\n\nBooks by Patrick Ness\n\nThe Rest of Us Just Live Here\n\nRelease\n\n## Copyright\n\nHarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.\n\nCLASS: WHAT SHE DOES NEXT WILL ASTOUND YOU. Copyright \u00a9 2016 by James Goss. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.\n\nwww.epicreads.com\n\nCover photographs by Shutterstock\n\nCover design by www.headdesign.co.uk\n\n* * *\n\nLibrary of Congress Control Number: 2017943586\n\nDigital Edition MARCH 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-266625-3\n\nPrint ISBN: 978-0-06-266623-9\n\n* * *\n\n18 19 20 12 22 PC\/LSCH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\nPublished by arrangement with Woodland Books, a division of The Random House Group, Ltd.\n\nOriginally published in the UK in 2016 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing\n\nFirst US Edition, 2018\n\n## About the Publisher\n\n**Australia**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.\n\nLevel 13, 201 Elizabeth Street\n\nSydney, NSW 2000, Australia\n\nwww.harpercollins.com.au\n\n**Canada**\n\nHarperCollins Canada\n\n2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor\n\nToronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada\n\nwww.harpercollins.ca\n\n**New Zealand**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers New Zealand\n\nUnit D1, 63 Apollo Drive\n\nRosedale 0632\n\nAuckland, New Zealand\n\nwww.harpercollins.co.nz\n\n**United Kingdom**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Ltd.\n\n1 London Bridge Street\n\nLondon SE1 9GF, UK\n\nwww.harpercollins.co.uk\n\n**United States**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Inc.\n\n195 Broadway\n\nNew York, NY 10007\n\nwww.harpercollins.com\n\n## Contents\n\n  1. _Cover_\n  2. _Title Page_\n  3. _Dedication_\n  4. _Contents_\n  5. One: Read the Terrible Truth They Don't Want You to Know Until Page 119\n  6. Two: What We Can Learn from the Alien-Face-In-A-Box Emoji\n  7. Three: When He Lost His Leg They Said He Would Never Play Football Again, But He Said No\n  8. Four: Eight Things the Media Hasn't Told You About Cup-A-Soup\n  9. Five: Amazing, If True: Children Are Vanishing and You've Not Noticed\n  10. Six: The One Weird Trick About Mothers That Everyone Should Know\n  11. Seven: Is It Magic? We Need Your Help to Solve This Mystery\n  12. Eight: Fifteen Cats That Look Shockingly like Miss Quill\n  13. Nine: Train Drivers Slam Brakes on Truth or Dare\n  14. Ten: This Chapter Will Prove You've Been Wrong About Young Men Your Whole Life\n  15. Eleven: This Girl Wanted an Adventure Holiday. You Won't Believe Where She Ended Up\n  16. Twelve: Find out Why the Goats Do Not Get to Dance on the Tube\n  17. Thirteen: The Letter Coal Hill School Doesn't Want You to See\n  18. Fourteen: How Toast Is like Lady Gaga\n  19. Fifteen: You Wouldn't Think a Text Could Make You Cry, but This Will\n  20. Sixteen: Six Names for White You've Never Thought Of\n  21. Seventeen: The Rise of Smart Women and How to Stop It\n  22. Eighteen: Things You'll Get Only If Your Home Planet Was Destroyed in the Nineties\n  23. Nineteen: He Thought He Knew a Lot About Gravity. Find out If He Was Right\n  24. Twenty: The Five Words That Broke Her Heart (Spoiler: One of Them Is 'Want')\n  25. Twenty-One: She Thought She Knew What Was Going On. Then She Found out the Remarkable Truth and Turned Things Around\n  26. Twenty-Two: Thought You Knew How to Lose Your Friends? Well, This Woman's Thirteen Brilliant Reasons Will Change Your Mind\n  27. Twenty-Three: She Was Ready to Give up and Then a Nurse Slayed Her with a Word\n  28. Twenty-Four: If You Dropped Dead Tomorrow, Would Your Friends Miss You?\n  29. Twenty-Five: She Thought She'd Seen It All and Then She Saw the Face of God\n  30. Twenty-Six: This Teacher's Inspirational Words Will Choke You Up\n  31. Twenty-Seven: Someone's Reimagined Disney Princesses as Alien Warriors And, Trust Us, It's Awesome\n  32. Twenty-Eight: This Hot Take on Smashed Avocado Toast Will Have You Reeling\n  33. Twenty-Nine: Think of the Worst Job in the World? You're Not Even Close\n  34. Thirty: You Are Being Lied to About Voter Registration and This Short Chapter Tells You How\n  35. Thirty-One: Advertisement: Your Book Will Continue in Twenty-Five Seconds\n  36. Thirty-Two: The Ten Best Alien Deaths You'll See Today. #6 Is a Killer\n  37. Thirty-Three: Eight Ways in Which People Have Tried to Escape the Void\n  38. Thirty-Four: At First She Thought She Knew Everything but Then She Found This Secret She Hadn't Known She Needed to Know\n  39. Thirty-Five: When She Met God She Forgot to Ask 'Why?'\n  40. Thirty-Six: This Is Your Chance to Wipe out Skandis Forever\n  41. Thirty-Seven: After You Read This You'll Want a Shower\n  42. Thirty-Eight: You'll Be Amazed at How Long It Took Him to Realise His Mistake\n  43. Thirty-Nine: War Veterans Are Covering Their Heads in Glitter for Reasons That Will Stun You\n  44. Forty: This Icelandic Penguin Village Is Probably the Cutest Place on Earth. But You Are Not There\n  45. Forty-One: In the Time It Takes You to Read This, Skandis Will Have Claimed One Hundred More Lives\n  46. Forty-Two: Many People Would Blame This on Marriage Equality. But Would You?\n  47. Forty-Three: People Are Tweeting Their Worst Battles and It Is Cringingly Hilarious\n  48. Forty-Four: She Dropped a Truth Bomb but Wasn't Expecting What Would Happen Next\n  49. Forty-Five: This Young Footballer Has Something Surprising to Say About Racial Profiling\n  50. Forty-Six: You Are Being Lied to About Dogs\n  51. Forty-Seven: The Latest Advances in Virtual Reality Will Horrify You\n  52. Forty-Eight: Do You Know Enough About Dimensional Compensators to Save This Boy's Life? (Spoiler: You Don't)\n  53. Forty-Nine: He Chose the Wrong Day to Beg for His Life\n  54. Fifty: The Skandis War as You've Never Seen It Before\n  55. Fifty-One: They Thought They'd Won Until They Found out They'd Lost\n  56. Fifty-Two: To Get Your Free Confession Just Follow These Simple Steps\n  57. Fifty-Three: Happy Endings Don't Kill People\u2014Guns Do\n  58. Excerpt from \"For Tonight We Might Die\"\n  59. _About the Authors_\n  60. _Books by Patrick Ness and James Goss_\n  61. _Back Ad_\n  62. _Copyright_\n  63. _About the Publisher_\n\n# Guide\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Contents\n  3. Chapter 1\n\n  1. v\n  2. \n  3. \n  4. \n  5. \n  6. \n  7. \n  8. \n  9. \n  10. \n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257. \n  258. \n  259. \n  260. \n  261. \n  262. \n  263. \n  264. \n  265. \n  266. \n  267. \n  268. \n  269. \n  270. \n  271. \n  272. \n  273. \n  274. \n  275. \n  276. \n  277. \n  278. \n  279. \n  280. \n  281. \n  282. \n  283. \n  284. \n  285. \n  286. \n  287. \n  288. \n  289. \n  290. \n  291. \n  292. \n  293. \n  294. \n  295. \n  296. \n  297. \n  298. \n  299. \n  300. \n  301. \n  302. \n  303. \n  304. \n  305. \n  306. \n  307. \n  308. \n  309. \n  310. \n  311. \n  312. \n  313. \n  314. \n  315. \n  316. ii\n  317. iv\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nPRAISE FOR _LAUNCH!_\n\n\"Real-life principles that actually work!\"\n\n\u2014FRANK SHANKWITZ, founder, The Make-A-Wish Foundation\n\n\" _Launch!_ is a must read and truly impactful book for any entrepreneur.\"\n\n\u2014GENE LANDRUM, president and creative force, Chuck E. Cheese, Entrepreneur Hall of Fame\n\n\"Scott Duffy expertly guides you through what it takes to launch a new business\u2014from the deep personal sacrifices you make for a project you wholeheartedly believe in to the incredible high you get when your mission becomes a success. _Launch!_ is an invaluable companion with real-life examples for anyone willing to dream big, break barriers, and turn their idea into reality.\"\n\n\u2014KRISTI AND ANDY FUNK, founders, Pink Lotus Breast Center\n\n\"Scott is one of the most dynamic, positive, and creative people I have had the good fortune to know. Scott is a great leader in all areas of life. I'm honored to be in his corner.\"\n\n\u2014DOUG BRIGNOLE, Mr. Universe, Mr. America, author, speaker\n\n\"This book isn't just about launching\u2014it's about setting the stage to build better companies. It's a must read.\"\n\n\u2014DENA COOK, CEO, Brew Media Relations\n\n\"In _Launch!,_ Scott's ability to connect with entrepreneurs is unparalleled. His passion and genuine drive to help others grow is infectious.\"\n\n\u2014NICOLE HURD, founder, National College Advising Corps.\n\n\"It's about time somebody wrote a book about launching new ventures that doesn't just look at the business side of entrepreneurship, but at the human side as well! Scott Duffy shows how you, too, can build a stronger, more successful business by paying attention to all parts of your life as you launch and grow your business.\"\n\n\u2014MICHELLE PATTERSON, executive director, Women Network Foundation and The CA Women's Conference\n\n\" _Launch!_ shows us how the right attitude, the right focus, and the right idea need to come together for a successful launch.\"\n\n\u2014CHRIS FRALIC, partner, First Round Capital\n\n\"What makes _Launch!_ such a fun and compelling read is Scott's personal experiences launching new ventures. He's learned the lessons of a successful launch through real-world experience and proves how you, too, can take your big idea to market.\"\n\n\u2014KALIKA YAP, CEO, Citrus Studios\n\n\"Scott is an incredible entrepreneur who will show you the way to success. He will inspire you through your successful _Launch!_ \"\n\n\u2014RON KLEIN, inventor of the credit card magnetic strip verification system, Multiple Listing Service, business consultant, problem solver\n\n\"I wish I had had this book when I was launching my company. Scott's blend of business smarts, useful takeaways, and empathy is much needed in today's fast-start environment.\"\n\n\u2014LORI TAYLOR, founder, REV Media Marketing\n\n\"Launching a new product or service is incredibly tough\u2014but you're not alone. Scott Duffy is here to guide you through the tough, crucial, exhilarating first days of the launch, with tips, tricks, and tools that will help you get off to the right start.\"\n\n\u2014GERRY MORTON, president and CEO, Energy First\n\n\"In _Launch!_ Scott Duffy keeps all the priorities\u2014family, community, business\u2014in a positive balance. He is a value-added adviser to entrepreneurs and his advice is key to a successful business and launch.\"\n\n\u2014DEMETRIOS A. BOUTRIS, California Corporations commissioner (ret.)\n\n\"As I was finishing my master's in exercise science, I planned on building my own coaching business in the health and fitness world. The very first person I reached out to was Scott Duffy. Scott talked to me about the successes of entrepreneurs and the fails of entrepreneurs. He made me think about what I needed to do in the health and fitness world, by ' _Launch!_ -ing' my brand, my expertise, and my knowledge. This book is for people who are starting a business from scratch to people who may need to tweak their business to make it a success. I promise you, with Scott's brand, expertise, and knowledge . . . you will _not_ be disappointed.\"\n\n\u2014JENNIFER RULON, M.S., USA Triathlon Level I Coach\n\n\"Scott Dufffy knows what it's like to launch a new company from the ground up. In his book _Launch!,_ he shares the wealth of his experiences with us\u2014and shows us how anyone can take their big idea to market quickly, efficiently, and successfully.\"\n\n\u2014JASON PORT, investor, strategist, founding investor in Quirky.com\n\n\"Scott Duffy has condensed years of real-world business experience into an easy-to-use playbook. Packed with relevant real-world advice you can use today. Essential reading for anyone looking to start a business or launch a new product within an existing business.\"\n\n\u2014GENE LIM, Global Strategic Alliances, Entrepreneurs Organization, and CEO MAV12\n\n\"Scott Duffy's guide to launching new businesses is a must read: _Launch!_ is snappy, cutting edge, entertaining, and with useful takeaways on every page. Let me put it this way, it's _awesome_ and it's now required reading for everyone on my boards of my businesses!\"\n\n\u2014ERIK \"MR. AWESOME\" SWANSON, Universal Seminars and The Habitude Warrior\n\n\"Scott is the consummate visionary and a born leader. He is a passionate, relentless serial entrepreneur who will make many more dreams reality.\"\n\n\u2014DREW BOYLES, president, Entrepreneurs' Organization\u2013Los Angeles\n\nPORTFOLIO \/ PENGUIN\n\nPublished by the Penguin Group\n\nPenguin Group (USA) LLC\n\n375 Hudson Street\n\nNew York, New York 10014\n\nUSA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China\n\npenguin.com\n\nA Penguin Random House Company\n\nFirst published by Portfolio \/ Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 by Scott Duffy\n\nPenguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.\n\nLIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA\n\nDuffy, Scott.\n\nLaunch! : the critical 90 days from idea to market \/ Scott Duffy.\n\npages cm\n\nIncludes index.\n\nISBN 978-1-101-60999-6\n\n1. Entrepreneurship. 2. New business enterprises. 3. New products. I. Title.\n\nHB615.D837 2013\n\n658.1'1\u2014dc23\n\n2013039077\n\nWhile the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.\n\nVersion_1\n_To Rachel_\n\nLove at first sight, love of my life\n\nand\n\n_To Lily and Lexi_\n\nI am so proud to be your dad\n\n# CONTENTS\n\nPraise for _Launch!_\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright\n\nDedication\n\nPreface\n\nINTRODUCTION: The Entrepreneur Economy\n\nInk Versus the Mac\n\nOn a Mexican Highway\n\nSmall Is the New Big\n\nA Playbook, Not a Textbook\n\nFind a Way to Simple\n\nSTAGE I.\n\nThe Prelaunch Checklist: Thirty Days to Prepare\n\n| CHAPTER 1 |\n\nWHAT'S YOUR BIG IDEA?\n\nHow to Buy a Rainforest\n\nOil Right Under Your Feet\n\nAre You Sitting on Top of a Billion-Dollar Idea?\n\nLet Go of Your Nut!\n\n| CHAPTER 2 |\n\nPROTECTING WHAT'S MOST IMPORTANT\n\nThe Sure Thing\n\nThe Fastest Way to Lose Your First Million\n\nAll for One and One for All\n\nSuper Balls and Glass Balls\n\nTen Thousand Reasons Why You Will Succeed\n\n| CHAPTER 3 |\n\nYOUR ENVIRONMENT\n\nCrabs in a Bucket\n\nYour Fab Five\n\nWhat Do Those Note Cards Say About You?\n\nWrite Your Own Story\n\nSTAGE II.\n\nFueling the Tank: Thirty Days to Assemble Your Resources\n\n| CHAPTER 4 |\n\nBUSINESS PLANNING\n\nBiceps and Business\n\nStart with the Last Page First\n\nThe One-Page Plan\n\nAn Expensive Hobby\n\nNot Every Problem Is Made to Be Solved\n\n| CHAPTER 5 |\n\nSECURING YOUR CREW\n\nBroke or Billions?\n\nYour Role as Flight Commander\n\nThree Plays\n\nThe Perfect Marriage?\n\nThis Is What You Asked For!\n\n| CHAPTER 6 |\n\nUNLOCKING CREATIVITY\n\nTorn Carpet, Chipped Paint\n\nVegas and Video Games\n\n| CHAPTER 7 |\n\nRAISING CAPITAL\n\nTrading for Tickets\n\n_Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death_\n\nThe True Path to Raising Capital\n\nWhere Will the Money Come From?\n\nThe Big Meeting\n\nThe Fastest Way to the Door\n\nThe Callback\n\nTricks of the Trade\n\nSTAGE III.\n\nCountdown and Blastoff: The First Thirty Days of Business\n\n| CHAPTER 8 |\n\nGO TO MARKET!\n\nHammers and Nails\n\nRiches in Niches\n\nCrickets\n\nCrowdsource Your Sales Force\n\nYour Buyer Blueprint\n\n| CHAPTER 9 |\n\nMAINTAINING YOUR ALTITUDE\n\nThe Ninety-Day Checkup\n\nCash and Cardboard\n\nKryptonite\n\n| CHAPTER 10 |\n\nIF THINGS GO SIDEWAYS\n\nLearning How to Crash\n\nPanic Faster\n\nWe're Out of Toilet Paper\n\nSeventeen Days\n\nEPILOGUE: Steady as She Goes\n\nWing Walk\n\nThe Circus and Start-ups\n\nTwenty Thousand Miles per Hour\n\nKeep Your Eyes on the Horizon\n\nFill Your Cup First\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nResources\n\nIndex\n\n# PREFACE\n\nOver 97 percent of a rocket's fuel is used during the first three feet of its launch. The same is true when launching a new business, product, or service.\n\nThe first few steps are absolutely critical. But this is where most entrepreneurs make their biggest mistakes\u2014and set themselves off on a path to failure.\n\n_Launch! The Critical Ninety Days from Idea to Market_ is a flight plan for entrepreneurs and managers within large organizations who aim to get their new business or product off the ground successfully. It is a philosophical and systematic approach for turning your passion into a thriving venture while mitigating risk every step of the way.\n\nWhy ninety days? Because that's all the time you have. Today your competition is faster, more agile, and better equipped. In the modern business era, speed is like gold. It's the most valuable currency at your disposal. In 1996 I was working at a consumer Internet start-up in Silicon Valley. At launch we had just one competitor. In sixty days we had seventeen competitors. In ninety days we had almost one hundred. And that was more than fifteen years ago, when things moved at a snail's pace! The marketplace has only gotten more crowded.\n\nSpeed also protects you. With a short time frame, you put fewer dollars at risk and streamline your focus. In ninety days you will be able to take your idea, go to market, get valuable feedback, and make well-informed decisions about what to do next\u2014all without breaking the bank.\n\nI believe it's not only possible but also critical to launch a new business, product, or service in such a short time, and over the years I've developed a systematic approach that divides launching into three phases.\n\nIn _\"Stage I: The Prelaunch Checklist,\"_ the goal is simple: to protect what is most important: you! That means we'll strategize on getting your house in order and limiting your personal risk, so if things do not work out as planned, you can bounce right back.\n\n_\"Stage II: Fueling the Tank\"_ is the process of assembling your resources. Here we'll look at pulling together your plan, your team, your capital, and other key business resources that will put you in the best position to execute successfully.\n\n_\"Stage III: Countdown and Blastoff\"_ takes your big idea to market. In this section we'll nail down all the critical aspects of targeting your market specifically and launching your product successfully around day sixty. This includes developing partnerships, distribution channels, customer-engagement strategies, marketing and public-relations efforts, sales initiatives, and customer support. With each step, I will provide you with a plan for anticipating what comes next and managing through problems in a way that turns them into opportunities.\n\nThe lessons in this book are not academic but are based on my personal experience as an entrepreneur and business leader. I started my career working in the business and personal-development training industry before falling in love with technology. In the midnineties I moved to Silicon Valley and spent the next fifteen years helping to launch and grow companies from a very early stage. Many companies I was a part of became big brands like CBS Sportsline, NBC Internet, FOXSports.com, and Virgin Charter. There were other ventures along the way. Some have been big successes while others have been big failures. The lessons from each experience were invaluable, and I'll share them with you in this book.\n\nIn the last twenty years I've also benefited from working for some of the greatest entrepreneurs and innovators of our time, including Richard Branson and Tony Robbins. In the following pages you'll hear stories about how they, along with others, such as Spanx inventor Sara Blakely and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, dealt with the challenges of launching.\n\nYou may ask, _What could I possibly have in common with these people?_ The answer is: _everything_. They started with a vision, just like you. They backed it up with passion and perseverance. They have all been through the ups and downs that come along with being an entrepreneur or launching a new initiative inside a big organization. They combined hard work with hard-learned lessons to create successful ventures with lasting impact\u2014just as you will do.\n\nI am absolutely committed to doing whatever I can to help you launch your big idea to the world and make your dreams come true. I have set up a Web site at www.scottduffy.com with free tools and video-based lessons to provide you with additional inspiration and support. I encourage you to visit it.\n\nIn return, I ask just one thing. For the next ninety days, suspend any doubts or disbelief about your ability to launch successfully. Know that you can be more, do more, and have more than you ever thought possible. If you follow the steps in this book and execute like crazy, in the next ninety days you'll begin to make your dreams come true.\n\nLet's get ready to launch.\n\n## INTRODUCTION\n\nThe Entrepreneur Economy\n\nI am building a fire, and every day I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.\n\n\u2014MIA HAMM\n\nThere has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. Today there are more businesses, products, and services being launched than at any time in history. Increased competition and faster-moving product and business cycles are contributing factors.\n\nThis scares the hell out of big business.\n\nTen years ago the barriers to launching and building a successful company were often too high for small entrepreneurs. As a result, a big company's competition was primarily limited to other big companies. Managers could literally look outside their windows and see their competition. They knew each other well, could spot each other's strengths and weaknesses, and could compete effectively with each other. But those days are over.\n\nIn the new entrepreneur economy, the low barrier to entry for new products and services has created fierce competition on every front. The modern-day entrepreneur, who is either using his existing venture to bring new products to market or launching a new business from the ground up, moves more quickly than big companies and can often position himself to meet customer needs better, faster, and cheaper. To make things even more difficult for big businesses, it's not just one entrepreneur they need to watch out for. There are literally millions of entrepreneurs, armed with laptops, smart phones, and free tools from the Internet, nibbling at their feet. Competition now comes from anywhere and everywhere.\n\nThese new entrepreneurs are also more motivated than at any time before. Many have recovered from the global collapse of 2008 by adapting their business practices to the economic conditions and by leveraging all available resources. Today rising companies run leaner, stronger, and more efficiently and generate greater profits. Others, hurt by the crash of 2008, may have lost their savings or jobs so they've had to reinvent themselves in ways they never imagined. Now that they are getting back on their feet, these entrepreneurs are hungrier and driven by real purpose. They move fast because they have to; they move with purpose because they know the consequences of not doing so. They're also fearless and are going after big businesses and successfully stealing their market share, one customer at a time.\n\nBig companies have a big problem in this new landscape: Most have bloated cultures that move too slowly to launch fast and compete against this new breed of entrepreneurs. While ninety days is enough time for an entrepreneur to launch a new business, product, or service, it takes most big businesses ninety days to make a decision on whether or not to even _get in the game_. Once they decide to compete, it might take them another nine hundred days to actually do it.\n\nOn the other hand, many entrepreneurs, despite their potential for speed and agility, still rely on a combination of passion (which can take you only so far) and outdated strategies that are out of sync with best practices of the new economy. That's where this book comes in, bridging that gap between the old approach and what it really takes to generate success in this economic era. By applying the lessons in this book, you can set yourself up to be in the best starting position to launch and come out head and shoulders above the competition.\n\nThe old notion of an entrepreneur brought to mind people like Richard Branson, Donald Trump, and others who appeared to take gigantic risks, putting everything they had both personally and professionally on the line. Not all entrepreneurs can think of themselves in this light, nor is it responsible for them to take on that much risk.\n\nBut today everyone is an entrepreneur. It's not about building the next Virgin or Google or Facebook. It's about planting a flag. Transforming what you are passionate about, what you are good at, into a responsible, moneymaking venture that benefits others in the process.\n\n_Launch!_ is a handbook for entrepreneurs on how to think big, take on any size competitor\u2014and eat their lunch. I want to help you become a modern-day business version of David, where as a small and agile entrepreneur, you can defeat the big corporate Goliath. This is your opportunity. Seize it.\n\n### Ink Versus the Mac\n\nI've been called a \"serial entrepreneur.\" Whatever the name caller's intention, I love the expression. It speaks to my history as well as my passion.\n\nAt a very early age, my family exposed me to business. For fifty years, all the men on my father's side\u2014my father, my grandfather, back to my great-grandfather\u2014ran a printing and engraving shop. One of the things I remember most clearly about my childhood was my father, like all the good tradesmen, coming home with the distinctive smell of ink on his hands and clothes.\n\nBack then, printing and engraving was a very manual business. Skilled craftsmen spent years as apprentices, learning their trade. Photographers, engravers, and dot etchers pooled their skills, working with advertising agencies to take photos and create artwork that they melded into advertisements, outdoor billboards, and all sorts of printed materials. Their industry played a vital role in marketing and held a well-recognized place in society. My family made money, the skilled employees were paid well, and everybody took pride in the work they did. Then computer technology turned the business on its head.\n\nI have always straddled the digital divide. The year after I finished grammar school, typing became a mandatory class. The year after I graduated from high school, computers became a fixture in the classroom. As a freshman in college, I bought an electronic typewriter\u2014and I really thought it rocked\u2014but was soon introduced to an even more game-changing piece of technology. Sophomore year, my roommate arrived carrying a newfangled computer all his own. He called it a \"Mac.\" That desktop machine may have been just one tool\u2014by today's standards a primitive one\u2014but it meant he was a light-year ahead of where I was. Being able to use a word processor to do your homework? _Wow!_\n\nWhen the first Apple Macintosh came to the printing business, the process of producing an advertisement changed forever. Tradesmen on both sides of the table, the advertising agencies and the service providers, had much invested in the old way of doing things, including skills they had developed over a lifetime. They had a lot to lose from change, so they didn't learn new skills or change the way they did business overnight. But even that rudimentary computer created a weird energy in the shop when it was first installed. It was a mystical moment, almost as if everyone had suddenly seen the future. To complicate matters, that Mac was literally placed right in the middle of the office. You couldn't avoid it. Some of the workers in the shop embraced it while others tried to pretend it was not there.\n\nThe guys on the floor may have had some sixth sense that, soon enough, the job of the craftsman, working with paper, rulers, and glue, would become obsolete. I got the feeling that people walked around on tiptoes in hopes that they could delay the waking of that big elephant in the room for another day or week. That didn't work, of course. With the Mac, processes that had taken three men three days by the old manual routine could be completed by one man in three hours. Prep jobs could be done for a fraction of what they had cost a year or two earlier. The cost of making corrections or changes to a printed piece dropped significantly. As customers learned of these efficiencies, the savvy ones insisted that those savings be passed on to them. If you were really paying attention, you could tell that the smell of ink in the room had begun to fade.\n\nThe Mac initiated the change, but the Internet accelerated it. Pretty soon nobody needed to drive around delivering printing proofs to their customers. Knocking on doors and pursuing sales leads the old way was also finished. Despite decades of stability, the introduction of new technology disrupted the industry rapidly. Many businesses vanished, along with the three-martini lunch.\n\nThis was a big lesson for me at an early age. The good men I grew up with had a lot to lose by not adapting. Many were afraid to change and were afraid of the unknown. But the ones who embraced change, who recognized that technology could propel them forward, learned to use the Macs (or other technologies) and thrived. Some even opened up new shops where they did the same work\u2014only better, faster, and cheaper. They found new pride in their work. Those who refused to change? Well, some of them became unemployable.\n\nThe whole experience made one thing crystal clear: that you have to live your life through the windshield, not through the rearview mirror.\n\n### On a Mexican Highway\n\nAnother huge lesson for my future business life was the importance of adaptability. I was first exposed to the need to adapt while attending the University of San Diego. There I started a business, played sports, and lived on the beach, generally having the time of my life. After midterm exams in the fall of 1989, following tradition, a group of friends and I packed up our cars and headed on a ten-hour drive south to the beaches of San Felipe, Mexico. I thought I was bound for fun in the sun and a great time with friends.\n\nAnd then, in a heartbeat, everything changed.\n\nWe were several miles south of the border, traveling on a two-lane highway. The landscape was surreal. There was nothing but desert on both sides of the road as far as one could see.\n\nSuddenly, a truck pulled out right in front of us. There was no time to stop, and we hit it squarely, going about seventy-five miles per hour. Sitting in the passenger seat, I was tossed about like a beanbag. All four of us in the car were injured. The guys in the truck we hit just drove off and left us there, alone in the desert, bleeding and in pain.\n\nIt was the _worst_ day of my life.\n\nHow many times in your life have you been going down a road, doing everything right? Your timing was perfect. You had a solid plan and team in place. You executed flawlessly. Then, out of nowhere, something unexpected knocked you off course. Think about those events in your life where the ground just moved underneath your feet, when everything you had done up to that point, everything you had accomplished, had to be thrown out. You had to start over, right?\n\nThat's exactly what happened to me.\n\nThe accident was bad, the recuperation no better. I ended up at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla with significant head injuries, including two brain hemorrhages, and a long road to recovery. I couldn't read without headaches or nausea, and I couldn't even bear to watch TV. Studying was out of the question, so I was forced to stop going to class and effectively dropped out of school.\n\nDespite having lost so much in that accident, I developed a habit in those weeks and months that changed my life forever. I started listening to motivational books on tape. The first program I listened to was from Tony Robbins, and throughout my recovery I got my hands on others, including audiobooks from Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy, Denis Waitley, and Zig Ziglar. I listened to these audiobooks all day, every day. I was inspired by the idea that if you have the desire and are willing to make a commitment to follow through and take action, you can achieve virtually anything you want in life. All the resources you need to get started are within you now or within your reach.\n\nSometimes my head hurt so much that I had to keep the volume really low on the tapes, so low that I could barely hear the speaker. But I absorbed everything they had to teach me. I also learned that many of these trainers were based in San Diego. I decided that, when I got better, I would go back to school and apply for an internship with one of them. It would be my motivation for powering through my recovery. As my first target, I decided to seek out Tony Robbins.\n\nDue to the early success of his infomercials, Tony was on his way to becoming a household name. I knew I'd have to do something big to get his attention, something to stand out. I thought it through and finally I came up with an idea.\n\nTony is a big guy, six feet, seven inches tall. So I got a very tall cardboard box, filled it with packing material, and enclosed in it my r\u00e9sum\u00e9 and items representing all his biggest accomplishments (a copy of his book, one of his tapes, a flyer for a live event, a picture of Tony and his wife I found in a magazine). I also enclosed a flyer that asked, \"How can Robbins Research benefit with Scott Duffy as a member of its team?\" By way of answering the question, I listed my traits and all he would gain by hiring me as an intern. I figured because the box was so big he would engage with it, curious to see what was inside. If I was lucky, he'd remember me. I didn't want to blend in (in a competitive business, neither can you). Then I waited, hoping a good thing would happen.\n\nWell, it did. My package got the reaction I'd hoped for and I got a call from Michael \"Hutch\" Hutchison, who was leading Tony's team. He invited me to come in for an interview. Two more interviews followed. During the third, Hutch asked me to stand in front of the room as if I were facing a big audience and rapidly fired questions at me. After about twenty minutes he left the room, leaving me alone. The minutes ticked by. I waited patiently, just thinking how awesome it would be to work with them. Finally, after an hour had passed, Hutch came in and said he had forgotten I was still in the office . . . but I was hired! Not as an intern, either, but as a full-time employee.\n\nMy work for Tony Robbins in the coming months took me on the road, often traveling from city to city promoting his live events, most notably \"Power to Influence,\" one of his first business programs. I would go into offices and deliver a part of the program to a group of employees, selling them the value of seeing Robbins live. I gave these talks up to five times a day. I was immersed in the Robbins way of thinking; I must have seen him teach ten courses over the next year. Traveling the country, I soaked up his wisdom and shared it with others. Working with his team helped me recover and propelled my life in a whole new direction.\n\nWhen I got started working for Robbins Research I was twenty-one years old. I spoke to over two hundred companies, from FedEx to Mary Kay Cosmetics. I learned to look at the world differently, not only through Tony's teaching but also through the teaching of others in the industry and the colleagues I came to know along the way. I met men and women who have remained among my best friends to this day. I had incredible experiences but, most important, I was exposed every day to people who had overcome huge obstacles and looked at them as growth opportunities.\n\nThis shifted my mind-set. It taught me the power of controlling your focus both personally and professionally. It taught me that, no matter how bad a situation may seem in the moment, we have the ability to learn from it and assign new meaning that moves us closer to our goals. Mastering this skill would have a tremendous impact on my life and my business. It also opened my mind up to a real sense of what is possible.\n\nI remember having lunch with Tony in Seattle with our team. I opened up to him about the accident I had had in Mexico and how terrible the experience had been. I told him I had felt like I had to throw everything away and relaunch. But so much good had come out it: new experiences, a more powerful way of thinking, a sense of unlimited possibility, a really solid foundation for business going forward, and great new friends.\n\nHis response really put the experience in perspective. \"You have good days and bad days,\" he said. \"But you don't know which is which until someday way down the line, because you don't know what you will make of that experience.\"\n\nOver the years I've found this to be one of the most important lessons I have learned in life and business. What has happened to you in the past matters much less than what you learned _and_ how you apply each lesson going forward.\n\nAs an entrepreneur, you too can overcome your wreckage. Everyone has a story and has experienced setbacks in his or her life. It could be that you had a business that failed or that you were laid off. Maybe you were hurt financially, filed for bankruptcy, or lost a house. Perhaps you suffered an accident or were in poor health or had your heart broken. Just know it's not the experience; it's what you do with the experience. Remember, nothing in life has any meaning other than the meaning you give it. One of the keys to success is taking every experience life brings you and repackaging it in a way that empowers you and helps you to move forward.\n\n### Small Is the New Big\n\nIn big business, change used to be linear. A company could look several years down the road and plan ahead. The cost of launching a business to compete with entrenched players was beyond the reach of many would-be entrepreneurs. As a result, the lack of innovation and competition meant big companies could move at a snail's pace.\n\nThat was yesterday. Today change occurs at an exponential rate, and the pace of innovation is unparalleled. The cost for an entrepreneur to jump into a market and compete head to head with industry giants has dropped dramatically and no longer is a barrier to entry. The Internet, mobile technologies, and a virtual workforce have taken away many of the advantages once held by those with deep pockets.\n\nThis shift represents a big problem for big business: Deep-rooted cultures at most large companies make it difficult for them to keep up. Those that remain inflexible and unwilling to change the way they approach today's competitive world will die from the inside out.\n\nThis shift is good news for today's flexible entrepreneurs, who can move faster, get closer to customers, respond more quickly to changes in the marketplace, and operate their businesses for a fraction of the cost. These entrepreneurs don't resist the pace of change. They embrace it. In the new world order, small is the new big.\n\nHere's how fast a small company can move in and disrupt an entire business.\n\nUnder the previous paradigm, a company created a product or service. It was a hit, and over time the company got bigger. It continued to add new features and started raising prices. The company could do this because the demand was there and it had little competition.\n\nThen one day, a customer looks at his credit-card bill and says, _I don't want to pay all that money anymore._ The customer also realizes he needs only one thing, actually, the original thing he signed up for. _I don't need all this other stuff,_ he says. _And I certainly don't want to pay for what I don't want._\n\nSo the customer decides to start his own company. He plans to strip out all the fancy features he does not want to pay for and build one thing, the very same thing he currently does like in the big company's product. This aspiring entrepreneur might be eight years old or eighty; it really doesn't matter. He quickly finds a free legal service online and incorporates, sets up an account with Google to get free e-mail, contacts, calendar, office applications, and document storage. He gets free voice and video calling through Skype, free WiFi at the corner coffee bar. The entrepreneur syncs everything between laptop and mobile phone.\n\nThe business is established\u2014in an elapsed time of, say, _ninety minutes._\n\nNext our entrepreneur gets down to business and goes online to do some research. A few Internet searches produce market data and access to free reports. By poking around social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, he can quickly find out if others think his idea has legs. Our founder logs on to LinkedIn to share the news of his new venture and seek some help. A developer who likes the idea and hates big companies volunteers to do a little coding. The new team collaborates, using free software to write a business plan.\n\nTo sum up, a customer of a big business can identify a problem and establish a company to meet that need in one afternoon. He has access to much of the same market information as the competition. Social-media conversations lead to the drafting of a business plan and the assistance of a developer who starts building the product. These people are executing\u2014on the first day\u2014and they've spent zero dollars so far.\n\nThis new little company builds something really basic, a minimum viable product with one feature and one benefit. What they release is pretty crude but\u2014check this out\u2014they give it away for free. Other people who have the same problem with the same big company's product flock to the new business. The big company is too slow to recognize what is happening and therefore too slow to respond with an alternative solution. It bleeds market share to the start-up. And a new entrepreneur is launched, with a product and a team and a market, the building blocks of a multimillion-dollar business.\n\nOur theoretical business happens to be a technology company, but the process is the same across the board. It all started with one unhappy customer who had a laptop, a mobile phone, an Internet connection, and a social-media account. One customer who decided to take matters into his own hands and ultimately launched a better solution.\n\nWhen big, entrenched industry leaders observe this happening from their spacious headquarters, it's terrifying because it's definitive proof that the scales have tipped. Even their best ideas may not work because their companies will take too long to execute.\n\nThis is an opportunity for today's entrepreneur, but it's also the reason I consult with businesses large and small all over the world, teaching them how to create a more entrepreneurial culture. Does your business culture allow for the kind of fast action required to compete in the entrepreneur economy? If not, you're in deep trouble. Today more than ever, nimble creatures adapt while the dinosaurs die off.\n\nIt reminds me of a conversation I had on Necker Island with Richard Branson while attending a conference at his Caribbean home (on his own island, in fact). I told him that my whole life had been lived in launch mode, opening new markets where we had to educate customers to their needs at the same time we were selling to them. I pointed out he had often taken the opposite approach. \"You go into the biggest markets with the most entrenched customers and go head to head,\" I said to Richard.\n\nAs usual, Branson's response was enlightening. He said, \"I go into big markets where people have already proven they want the product and will pay for it. Their wallets are already open. Then I just look for one person that has a problem. Find that one person and one problem, and if the market is big enough, that represents a big business opportunity. And that's what I do.\" Even though Branson's companies were making huge moves, he still thought like a smaller entrepreneur, creating new businesses to solve one problem better than the current companies in that space.\n\nToday it's your turn to take advantage of the opportunities that entrepreneurs have today over big business, to disrupt and create innovative products and services that have a positive and lasting impact. Now that we've established some key beliefs about entrepreneurship, let's talk how we'll embark on this launch process together.\n\n### A Playbook, Not a Textbook\n\nI hate textbooks. I don't think I've ever made it through one\u2014too long, too boring, packed with too much information that doesn't seem relevant.\n\nSince my goal is to give you everything you need to take your big idea to market in ninety days or less, this book is designed more like a playbook than a textbook. I've taken big concepts and broken them down into smaller, more digestible pieces.\n\nIn this book I'll share my personal experiences launching new businesses, products, and services. These experiences range from being an entrepreneur inside bootstrapped start-ups to being an executive inside some of the world's largest global brands. These stories will provide lessons that can be applied immediately, as we move quickly from the personal side of entrepreneurship into the strategies and tactics necessary to bring your vision to life.\n\nIn each chapter we will focus on one concept or action, the single most important thing you need to do in that area. With so much on your plate, asking you to do more would only slow you down rather than lead to a better result. What I know from experience is that if you commit to each lesson and follow through on each exercise, you will set yourself up for a successful launch.\n\nSince we only have ninety days to get you to market, this book is designed to be read and implemented quickly. That means you should be able to get through each section in under five minutes.\n\nWe're going to move fast, but before we dive in, I want to make sure you have the right mind-set for making this leap. If you're reading this book, you're either interested in launching a new venture now or preparing to do so in the very near future. It doesn't matter if you are an entrepreneur or a manager of a big business who needs to think quickly on your feet in a fast-changing industry. You need the skills and lessons in this book to put you in the best position to succeed. So let's begin by eliminating a few negative beliefs that may be holding you back from launching your new project, and offer new, empowering ideas to put in their place.\n\n_Don't worry about all that talk about a slumping economy._ That's nothing more than a distraction. Too many people will use it as an excuse. Despite anything you may have heard, there's no shortage of opportunity out there. The key to finding success as an entrepreneur is seizing an opportunity and, when you find it, executing like crazy.\n\n_There's never a bad time to start a business_. Great fortunes have been created during good and bad times, and from some very unusual places. Sara Blakely (you'll meet her later) instinctively understood she had a big idea when, at age twenty-six, she decided to cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose. She didn't let her bank account or lack of industry experience hold her back. Today, at age forty-two, Sara retains full ownership of her undergarment company, Spanx, and last year _Forbes_ magazine declared that she was a billionaire.\n\n_Value your insights._ Plant this little lesson from Blakely's success in your mind: A unique insight into what the consumer wants, backed up by focus, discipline, and hard work, can and will pay off.\n\n_Age doesn't matter._ You can't be too young or too old to launch a successful enterprise. Nick D'Aloisio, the British inventor who sold his mobile application, Summly, to Yahoo! for a reported thirty million dollars, did so at age seventeen, but the average entrepreneur who earns one million dollars (and does not lose it) doesn't get started with his or her successful business until age forty-one. Many don't make their first million until they're fifty or older.\n\n_Ten thousand hours? Not required._ Forget the idea that you need to spend ten thousand hours doing something in order to become really successful at it. That makes great reading in Malcolm Gladwell's _Outliers,_ and it might well apply to artistic skills like violin playing or painting or to athletic prowess in basketball or tennis. But it doesn't always apply to business.\n\nReed Hastings had virtually no video experience when he founded Netflix. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstr\u00f6m founded Skype despite having very little background in telecom. What did Richard Branson know about airlines or mobile phones? Nothing. Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin all perfected something about which they began as less than experts\u2014and became billionaires in the process.\n\n_Don't worry about being second in the marketplace._ Entrepreneurs do not operate in a vacuum but rather in a diverse ecosystem. What one innovator creates opens up opportunities for the next generation of go-getters. The more disruption, the more opportunity. If you see a product or service out there that people already use, but you have an idea that would improve upon it in any way, you should be encouraged, not discouraged, by someone else already playing in that space and proving there is real demand for it.\n\n_Don't be afraid to try again._ If you've tried to launch a business before, but things went sideways instead of up, you are not alone. Having taken a shot at entrepreneurship in the past, you'll recognize elements in this book that you missed the first time around. Maybe tough economic conditions, changes in the workplace, or unemployment put you out of position, but now you're ready to blaze your own path. Perhaps you have an existing business that you want to take to the next level. Wherever you are, upon reading these pages you'll find lots of helpful little things, distinctions you can make to identify new directions that will help you grow and scale your company.\n\nHOW TO TURN AN INDUSTRY ON ITS HEAD\n\n**Start with One Person:** In a big market, look for one customer who already has his wallet out but is unhappy about one thing in a given product or service. The odds are that, if the market is big enough, lots of people share his view. Fix that one thing.\n\n**Make Things Simple:** The more complex the common practices are in your industry, the greater is the opportunity to disrupt them by simplifying them. It may not be easy, but if it were, everyone would be doing it. Solving the hard problem makes a great opportunity.\n\n**Slash Prices Dramatically:** If you use technology or other systems that significantly reduce your costs relative to the competition, pass those savings on to customers. Entrenched players may not be able to compete because their infrastructure does not allow it.\n\n**Get Close to Your Customer** **:** Build a better relationship with your customers than anyone else in the market has. Translate that relationship into new products and services that better address their needs and desires.\n\n**Be You** **:** Be authentic in everything you do and transparent to the marketplace.\n\n### Find a Way to Simple\n\nLet's tackle one more story before we get started. I credit this one to Stanley Kirk Burrell.\n\nA few years ago I attended a conference on the Big Island of Hawaii. The organizer, David Hornik of venture-capital firm August Capital, calls the invitation-only meeting \"the Lobby.\" Almost everything leading up to the arrival was secret; no one knew who else would be there.\n\nOn the first day the organizers issued the participants different-colored T-shirts, and we were told to go find other people wearing the same color. These people would be our team for the day. Mine consisted of Dick Costolo, now the CEO of Twitter; Sarah Lacy, the founder of PandoDaily (the leading Silicon Valley technology news site); and Bill Tai, a leading venture capitalist. But we were missing one person from our team. Looking around, we finally found our man: Stanley Burrell.\n\nAka MC Hammer. Rapper. Dancer. Actor.\n\n_And_ entrepreneur. Don't think for a second that the legendary rapper was invited to the event for entertainment value. Hammer regularly attends these industry gatherings and has invested in notable tech start-ups, including Square and Bump Technologies. He's lectured at Stanford and Harvard on the uses of social media and has a promotional deal with iPad case maker ZAGG. He's also launched businesses of his own. In 2007 the creator of hits including \"U Can't Touch This\" and \"2 Legit 2 Quit\" launched DanceJam.com, a (sadly short-lived) YouTube-like site for dancers to share videos.\n\nNeedless to say, I was psyched to be on his team.\n\nWe all climbed into a big white van. Our job was to go on a scavenger hunt, competing against other teams to be the first group to solve a series of puzzles. We were a savvy bunch, and I could sense the competitive energy surging. We got to the first site and read the clues. Our task was apparently to take a pile of rocks, a couple of sticks, and a piece of rope and turn them into something. Dick and Sarah and Bill and I looked at the materials, then looked at one another. We were confused and couldn't figure out how to solve the problem. And Hammer wasn't helping. He stood a short distance away, talking on his cell phone, looking at the ocean.\n\n\"Hey Hammer, can you help us out?\" we asked.\n\n\"Yeah sure, give me the clue,\" he said.\n\nHammer took one look at the clue, thought about the problem for a minute, then proceeded to stack one item on top of another, completing the assignment. Problem solved and task completed.\n\nWe went to the next clue. The same thing happened\u2014four of us working hard to solve the problem, Hammer talking on his phone and gazing at the ocean. When we asked him for help, he walked over, took one look at the clue, and again solved the puzzle. We moved on to the next clue. Guess what happened? He solved it again, quickly. I think Hammer solved every problem on the scavenger hunt for the team that day.\n\nWe didn't end up winning (we found out later the other groups were getting ahead of us because they were sharing clues on a new service\u2014Twitter\u2014cofounded by a fellow participant in the Lobby, Evan Williams). But later at the hotel, a little bit in awe, I went over to Hammer and asked him how he had managed to solve every problem so quickly. What was his secret?\n\n\"The problem with you entrepreneurs,\" he said, \"is that you get all caught up in the details. You start off with these big goals but you make things complicated, more complicated than they need to be.\"\n\nHe went on. \"I have a philosophy in life and business,\" said Hammer. \"I find a way to simple first.\"\n\nThat was a big moment for me. When I think back on it, I associate his insight with the paper clip. The Post-it note. The Band-Aid. The toilet-paper roll. Scotch tape. The BIC pen. The disposable razor. Spanx. And a hundred\u2014no, a thousand\u2014other products that have one thing in common: They're incredibly simple. And they were invented only in the last 150 years. Look around your home or office. You're surrounded by simple inventions that are easy to use, that solve one problem and solve it perfectly well.\n\nThe same is true with businesses: Simple businesses are thriving everywhere. Coffee shop. Sandwich shop. Dry cleaner. Lawn service. Bar. Taxi service. It doesn't have to be complicated. Every day entrepreneurs take a tried-and-true business idea, apply some differentiation and branding, and _voil\u00e0!_ Of course, there are other factors\u2014the right location or the know-how to make awesome coffee or sandwiches\u2014but the point is that there are thousands of business owners out there making a great living by doing simple things well.\n\nTake Stanley Burrell's brilliant insight as an order, a compulsion, a rule for your life. It should be a rule for your whole business, truly: Your vision, operating plan, and financial model need to be so succinct and simple that you can fit them all on one page or explain it to someone in thirty seconds.\n\nNarrow your focus. Narrow the problem. Narrow the customer. Narrow the geography. Get the whole idea as simple as you can make it, and work out from there.\n\nRemember: Find a way to simple first.\n\n# STAGE I.\n\n# THE PRELAUNCH CHECKLIST\n\nThirty Days to Prepare\n\n## CHAPTER 1.\n\n## WHAT'S YOUR BIG IDEA?\n\nMost people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit. And many don't aim at all.\n\n\u2014LES BROWN\n\n### How to Buy a Rainforest\n\nI hate mosquitoes. I hate everything about them. But a few years ago I found myself on my way to a place named . . . Moskito Island.\n\nWith night falling, the Virgin Group's global leadership team and about forty Virgin CEOs from around the world climbed into small boats. We were in the Caribbean for \"the Gathering,\" as Richard Branson called the event, to share and exchange information and grow from one another's experiences. We shoved off from Necker Island, which has been Richard's private retreat for about twenty years, heading toward the nearby island he had just purchased.\n\nUnlike Necker Island, Moskito is no resort. It's completely deserted\u2014there's nothing on the lump of land\u2014and by the time we got there, the sky was pitch-black. We were on the water about as far east in the Caribbean as we could be. As we approached the island, no lights greeted us until we circled around to the opposite side, where tiki torches flickered on the lone strip of beach.\n\nWe went ashore and grabbed dinner at a small buffet. Looking for a place to sit and eat, I came across Richard and a group of Virgin executives eating and talking passionately about something that Richard apparently wanted to purchase.\n\nI sat down on the beach next to him and chimed in, asking what was it he wanted to buy.\n\n\"The rainforest.\"\n\nI asked which rainforest.\n\n\"The Amazon,\" he replied. (I guess if you're going to buy a rainforest, it might as well be the biggest one!)\n\nI was shocked. How can you buy a rainforest? Knowing Richard, I can't say I was totally surprised he would think so big but still, my mind reeled as I thought about this proposal. I mean, who even owns the rainforest? Whom would you buy it from?\n\nThe talk continued and swirled around the positive impact you could have if you controlled the rainforest. Richard pointed out that you could stop the slashing and burning of vegetation, save precious animals that are being killed or taken out of their environment for sale, and help slow global climate change. These are issues that Richard has been passionately dedicated to for years. He's donated millions for environmental protection and has even teamed up with alternative medicine researcher Chris \"Medicine Hunter\" Kilham to tour the Amazon rainforest in search of indigenous pharmaceutical plants that may be cultivated someday in the jungles (by the people who are now destroying them) and sold through the Virgin Group. On Necker Island, Branson has also done his part to protect rainforest animals, creating a sanctuary for endangered Madagascar lemurs.\n\nSomeone finally interrupted this passionate conversation and said what I was thinking: \"You could never buy the rainforest.\"\n\nRichard got this look in his eyes that I'd never seen there before. Looking back, I remember seeing the same look in the eyes of other global leaders. It said: _How can you get in the way of possibility?_ I've come to understand that a positive and resourceful outlook is absolutely essential for any entrepreneur to turn his or her big idea into a reality. And by that I mean, entrepreneurs need to understand the key difference between _having_ resources and _being_ resourceful.\n\nNone of the successful people I know started with everything they needed; they had to assemble what they required every step of the way. They understood\u2014as Richard did, as does Tony Robbins\u2014that you can back your way out of any problem that stands between you and your dream.\n\nLook at it this way. You have an idea. No matter how big or small, the idea lives inside you, it drives you, it keeps you up late at night. Naysayers may think it impossible, but that's just because they've never seen it done before. Or maybe you believe something's possible but you're not convinced you're the one to do it. It may take capital and people and other things you just don't have. But in the world according to Branson, those are just obstacles to be overcome.\n\nBack at the beach on Moskito Island, Branson responded to the challenge of what I thought was an impossible task, buying the rainforest, by walking us through a simple exercise.\n\n\"First of all,\" Branson said, \" _imagine_ you wanted to buy the rainforest. How would you do it?\" He started peppering us with questions.\n\nDo you have to buy the rainforest, or can you lease it? Whoa! That is a huge shift in mind-set! Let's say we could lease it. How many people do we know with significant wealth who could contribute to leasing the rainforest and, more important, get behind our cause? Better yet, think of how many people in this world would do whatever they could to contribute, even a small amount, to such a noble cause. Coming up with the money should not be a problem.\n\nHe continued to probe. Each answer inspired a deeper belief and greater confidence that it could actually be done. Within five minutes, Richard Branson made buying the rainforest sound easier than eating a bowl of soup. That's partly the difference between Richard Branson and everyone else. Most of us have yet to open ourselves up to the same sense of possibility. But _Richard_? Given enough time and the right people on the task, there's nothing that he\u2014or, when I thought about it, any one of us\u2014can't accomplish.\n\nFive years later I saw that Richard was really on to something. Ecuador launched a novel initiative to protect the Yasun\u00ed Park rainforest, a place that is thought to be the single most ecologically diverse place in the world, featuring more individual species of trees in one spot than are present in all of North America, not to mention bats and birds, amphibians and reptiles. But this wasn't a simple situation where the Ecuadorians could afford to do the right thing and set the place aside for posterity. Beneath Yasun\u00ed Park are massive deposits of oil, worth billions of dollars, awaiting exploitation.\n\nSome Branson-style creative thinking found a possible solution. In 2007, to protect Yasun\u00ed yet still bring in money for Ecuador, the government tried to effectively lease the rainforest. If donors from around the world agree to pay $3.6 billion dollars, Ecuador would promise not to allow drilling in Yasun\u00ed. Hundreds of millions of dollars were raised to compensate the government for lost revenues, thanks to monies from governments and individuals around the world, including Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a host of environmentalists and scientists. Although the Yasun\u00ed-ITT Initiative ultimately was unable to raise enough money to meet their goals, it's clear that crowdsourcing environmental protection did catch some significant attention and could still do the future of the planet untold good.\n\nRichard Branson's thinking that evening on Moskito Island left me deeply impressed both by the intensity of his conviction\u2014and because he made the seemingly impossible sound easy. He took a big problem, one that seemed almost larger than life, and chunked it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. He looked to back out of a big idea, one step at a time, to reach a goal. Because he was so open to possibility, he asked better questions of the group, eliciting more productive responses and solutions.\n\nRichard is far from alone in setting lofty goals and doing something to accomplish them. There are dozens of examples of entrepreneurs who have tried and succeeded with revolutionary ideas that at first seemed so big as to be impossible for mere mortals. They saw openings, came up with solutions, and applied them. Sometimes the solutions seemed crazy to most people, but the entrepreneurs didn't let that stop them.\n\nIndeed, what you'll notice in looking at the history of capitalism is that while there are myriad ways to make a fortune, the real megafortunes are held by the innovators. These folks not only think outside the box but don't even recognize that there was a box to think outside of.\n\nMany of the most successful entrepreneurs of our age achieved their success because they were the first to grasp the potential applications of new technology. Bill Gates became Bill Gates because the mothers' club at his school bought a computer with the proceeds from a rummage sale. In eighth grade young Bill started writing code when virtually no one else his age even knew what a computer was. He saw this as an opportunity: If only he could make it easier for the average person to use one of these machines, they could be very useful. MS-DOS was born.\n\nSteve Jobs saw that people loved personal computers and avidly used Bill Gates's operating system\u2014but he found that not only were the machines clunky, but the Microsoft software was too. So he created his own hardware and software with Apple Computer. Twenty years later he applied the same principles to his game-changing iPhone.\n\nA hundred years ago John D. Rockefeller saw that crude oil was being discovered all over the place but realized the guys with the oil had no way of efficiently getting it to market. He built a pipeline network, and Standard Oil (the predecessor of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and several other major oil companies) was born.\n\nIf you think about it for a second, all the great dot-com fortunes were created in the same way, but instead of being inspired to move oil in a new way, these innovators figured out how to move data over fiber-optic cables. Jeff Bezos thought it would be pretty cool to be able to buy stuff over the Internet. Amazon.com was born. Mark Cuban started Broadcast.com because he wanted a way to stream college basketball games over the Internet. He sold it to Yahoo! for $5.9 billion. Mark Zuckerberg knew students at Harvard wanted a way to connect with one another over the Internet. Facebook was the result. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were frustrated by how hard it was to find what they were looking for on the Internet. Enter Google.\n\nAll these entrepreneurs had breakthroughs that began as either \"crazy ideas\" or improvements upon what someone else had tried. They did it first, or they did it better.\n\nSo the next time someone throws out a wacky idea\u2014say, printing books on a press, using electricity to light a house, broadcasting radio waves, watching moving pictures on a television, surfing the Internet, developing commercial spaceflight, or buying a rainforest\u2014know that there is someone out there who thinks with no limitations, who's assembling the right resources and is intent upon making his or her dream come true. Of course, that person might be you.\n\nHOW TO BRING YOUR PROJECT TO LIFE\n\n**Get Clear:** What is your big idea? What is keeping you up at night? What would you pursue if you knew you could not fail?\n\n**Break Your Big Idea into Small Pieces** **:** No matter how big the vision, you will always improve your chances of success by breaking the job down into smaller bite-size pieces and attacking them one at a time.\n\n**Be Resourceful** **:** Nobody starts out with everything they need to succeed. The best entrepreneurs are resourceful enough to pick up the pieces along the way.\n\n**Surround Yourself with Great People:** Find role models at every step of the way who have accomplished what you set out to achieve. Find out how they did it: Learn their beliefs, their strategies, and the order in which they did things.\n\n**Execute Like Crazy:** Outwork, outthink, and outsmart the competition.\n\n### Oil Right Under Your Feet\n\nBetween the time I spent in the training business and my breaking into technology, I got stuck in transition. In the early 1990s I worked at a bar and lived near the beach in Santa Monica. I was really struggling to find my way, wondering what direction I should take next.\n\nI had always liked creating and building things, so I decided I wanted to build companies next. The possibility of making a fortune while making a difference was attractive, but I didn't know where to get started. How many times in your life have you been ready to make a move but couldn't seem to find the right opportunity? I kept asking myself, how was I going to make an impact? How was I going to put my ambition to work? I looked for the right place to plug in, but nothing seemed to fit.\n\nThen a friend gave me a book that helped set me on my entrepreneurial path. Called _Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way,_ it was the autobiography of a British guy\u2014yes, that one\u2014named Richard Branson.\n\nIf anybody had told me then that I would actually work with him someday, I would have been thrilled. The book inspired me in many ways and helped me think about my future from a whole new perspective. _Losing My Virginity_ got me to try new ideas, to take a few chances, and to put myself into a better position to discover my Big Idea.\n\nThe first conclusion I reached then (this was twenty years ago) was that the future was _China_. I read a lot of business books, and everybody seemed to be talking about business in the Far East. I decided I would enroll in a class to learn the language and look for opportunities to work with Chinese companies. Now, I think maybe I got hooked on the idea of China because I couldn't seem to find an opportunity near me. At the time, California was in a deep economic recession and I figured I'd have to go thousands of miles away\u2014literally to the other side of the globe\u2014to find a place where I could make money.\n\nPretty smart idea, I thought, but soon I discovered the truth of that old saying that sometimes being lucky is better than being smart. In a piece of accidental timing, I was introduced to a man named Al Checchi just one week before I was scheduled to take my first Chinese class. He had worked on a business deal with my mother and she shared with him how hard I was trying to find my way. He offered to help. That meeting changed the course of my life once more.\n\nAl had started off working for Bill Marriott, helping to build the Marriott hotel empire. In the 1980s he had moved on to work as a deal maker for the billionaire Bass brothers of Fort Worth, Texas. The Basses had made their money in oil and then diversified in all sorts of directions. One of their biggest holdings was a controlling stake in the Walt Disney Company, a deal that Checchi had personally overseen. At the time, Checchi reported to legendary moneyman Richard Rainwater, who eventually became a billionaire in his own right.\n\nWhen I met Al, he was cochairman of Northwest Airlines. He asked me what was I going to do with the rest of my life. I told him my future certainly wasn't in California. Instead, I explained, my destiny was in China, because that's where all the opportunities were.\n\nAl listened, looked hard at me, and then started talking. He told me that years earlier, just like me, he had struggled to figure out his path, imagining himself running all over the world pursuing lots of different projects. But his boss at the time had told him a simple story about a man who had been on a similar quest.\n\nThe guy spent all his life and his entire fortune searching for diamonds. Eventually he ended up in Texas. Since there's a lot of very old rock in central Texas, he felt pretty confident of a big score. The prospector hunted and hunted and dug and dug on the land he'd purchased. After weeks in the Texas sun, the back of the man's neck was tanned as dark as saddle leather, and his aching back would never be the same. But still no diamonds. Finally the man decided to give up and left town. He was so disappointed that, in a moment of anger, he sold the land for a dollar.\n\nThe buyer of his land, Al told me, was an oil wildcatter. This guy had a different hunch about what was to be found in that earth. He proved himself right when, drilling the very first well, he struck oil.\n\nI'm not sure he needed to, but Al gave me the moral of the story. \"Everything you're looking for is right here,\" he told me. _\"It's right under your feet.\"_\n\nThere is nothing like having a great mentor to point this out to you, a person who has already been down the road you are traveling, someone who is not as close to the situation and therefore has perspective. Like the diamond prospector, we can have such a fixed focus that we can't look at the bigger picture in a new way. Sometimes we're just not open-minded enough to recognize the opportunities around us, but they are there, every single day, in every direction you look, globally, locally, everywhere.\n\nYour job is to look again. You probably don't have to go to the Great Wall, because the answer may be closer than you think. As for me . . . it turned out Silicon Valley was just up the road.\n\n### Are You Sitting on Top of a Billion-Dollar Idea?\n\nShe bought a new pair of cream-colored pants, planning to wear them to a party. But when Sara Blakely, a twenty-six-year-old Floridian, put them on and looked in the mirror, she didn't like how her butt looked. Panty lines ruined the whole effect, and she needed to find some kind of shape wear to smooth them over, fast. So she cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose, put the cream slacks back on, and headed out to the party.\n\nLittle did she realize at the time that she was about to tap into tremendous entrepreneurial opportunity. Even though her first little experiment didn't provide the perfect solution\u2014the hose kept rolling up her legs that evening\u2014it kicked off a process. Plus, she really, _really_ wanted her invention to work. Her moment of inspiration, born out of a combination of necessity and vanity, became her Big Idea.\n\nSara, you see, was a born entrepreneur. As a youngster she created haunted houses and charged neighborhood kids admission. As a teenager she set up an unlicensed, unapproved babysitting business at a nearby Hilton Hotel, watching kids for eight dollars an hour. She was a cheerleader and a debate champion, but one with an especially strong desire to succeed on her own terms. She listened to tapes her dad had lying around, including Dr. Wayne Dyer's _How to Be a No-Limit Person._ She played them so many times she practically memorized them.\n\nFor a time, not everything in her life fell into place as she hoped. After trying and failing to get into law school, Sara found jobs selling office supplies, even hustling fax machines door to door. Then she learned how to cold-call and realized she was a natural salesperson, with an ego impervious to rejection. At age twenty-five, she became her company's national sales director. Her life was starting to get on track\u2014and then those cream-colored slacks came along and changed everything.\n\nSara was convinced there was a way to make her idea work and she did. With five thousand dollars saved up, she invested in her vision for the future of underwear. By day she worked full time selling office supplies; at night she researched patents and studied fabrics. However, she was turned away by numerous stocking manufacturers, who weren't about to take the time to help her make a prototype.\n\nWhen she finally figured out how to keep the abbreviated hose from riding up her legs, she saved money and wrote her own patent. She also found a factory willing to produce the garments; its operator was a man whose daughters thought Sara's idea so great they forced their dad to make it. Sara came up with a name for her big idea too: Spanx _._\n\nShe designed her own flashy packaging and set about selling her new product. Her wares went on sale at upscale department stores like Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's, and Saks. When she didn't think Spanx was getting prominent enough placement at Neiman Marcus, she bought her own display rack, snuck it in, and set it up by the cash register.\n\nArmed with all her chutzpah and desire, Blakely got a break that even she couldn't have dreamed of when, in 2000, Oprah Winfrey touted Spanx as her favorite product of the year. The orders came rolling in, and Sara finally quit her day job.\n\nSara cracked the code of entrepreneurship and made it work for her: She took a perceived need and, with her business instincts, made it a business. Her story has some lessons for all of us. Consider these:\n\n_Think big_. From the start, Sara's vision was to sell to _millions_ of women. Remember that the size of your vision will help determine the size of your success, that almost every franchise, big brand, and major product began in the mind of a single entrepreneur.\n\n_Embrace failure._ From an early age, Sara put herself out there\u2014cold-calling, selling door to door, and learning how not to take rejection or failure personally. Failing is an integral part of being an entrepreneur. Accept it, use it to your advantage, and move on.\n\n_Leverage technology._ When Sara started Spanx fifteen years ago, she had to use the Yellow Pages to find someone willing to make her prototypes. Today you can research everything on the Internet. Technology can help in other ways too; the advent of 3-D printing, for example, has made it very easy to produce prototypes of many consumer goods.\n\n_Be inspired._ Spanx made $4 million in its first year; today the company has sales of $250 million a year. Sara still owns 100 percent of her business and in 2012, at age forty-one, she was named by _Forbes_ the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world. To do this she didn't need to reinvent the wheel. And you, whether you're an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur (fighting inside a big organization), don't necessarily have to either. Sometimes a key improvement or iteration can change everything.\n\nThink about the return on Sara's investment: from five thousand dollars in savings to a billion dollars. She had been looking for an opportunity, working hard to find it, and all that time she'd been sitting on her big idea.\n\n### Let Go of Your Nut!\n\nWe all have our reasons for not getting started. Unlike Sara, who was ready to jump right into entrepreneurship, some of us may be more hesitant to take the leap. As a result, we create excuses and put up roadblocks for ourselves. Do any of these sound familiar?\n\nIt's too late.\n\nI'm too tired. I'm hungry.\n\nI have to feed my kids.\n\nMy boss would never let me do it.\n\nThe dog needs to be walked.\n\nI can't afford it.\n\nThe project's too big.\n\nPeople will think I'm crazy.\n\nI can't do that and do the job I have.\n\nI don't know the right people.\n\nI didn't go to the right school.\n\nThe company would never get behind this.\n\nHow will I get paid for it?\n\nI'll just start tomorrow.\n\nAnd the biggest one of all?\n\nI'm afraid.\n\nUnfortunately, our fears, combined with the crazy stories we tell ourselves about why we can't succeed, keep us from getting started.\n\nIn order to bring your big idea to life, the first step I want you to take is to let go of all your excuses. Simply step away and get on with it.\n\nLet me put it another way: _Don't be a spider monkey._\n\nThe spider monkey may be the most elusive animal in the rainforest. It's so quick, you can't sneak up on one of these wily little forest creatures with a net. It's way too fast for that. But best-selling author and speaker Greg Reid tells a useful story about how to successfully trap the spider monkey by playing to its weakness.\n\nThe spider monkey possesses the human tendency to grab on to things that he thinks he can't live without. Then he refuses to let go.\n\nGreg describes the strategy of the successful spider-monkey hunter. All he needs to do is find a log in the rainforest, drill a hole about eighteen inches deep, and drop a couple of peanuts down the hole. That's it. In time, a spider monkey will happen along and smell the delicious peanuts. He'll reach his arm down the hole and grab them. But the hole is sized such that, when the monkey closes his hand around the peanuts, the monkey's clenched fist gets stuck in the hole. He could open his hand, drop the peanuts, and pull his hand out of the hole. But he can't do both. He can't get the peanuts and get free.\n\nLong ago, native hunters discovered that they could drop the bait in the hole, then just wander off for an hour or two. When they came back, all they had to do was drop a net over the stubborn monkey. The monkey was so obsessed with those peanuts that he just kept his hand in there, holding on tight, even as the hunter closed in.\n\nMy advice to you: _Let go of that nut!_ Don't be that monkey. Let go of those fears, excuses, and stories you have made up about why you can't succeed. Let go of those things that hold you back.\n\nMaybe you're holding on to a fear of failure or a regret from the past. Maybe it's a fear of the unknown. Maybe it's a dead-end job you can't bring yourself to walk away from, a bad relationship, destructive habits, or the wrong kind of friends. Got anything you want to add to the list?\n\nLike that monkey, we believe what we're holding on to is more important than anything else, maybe even that it's going to save us. Ultimately, this thinking will just lead to failure and frustration.\n\nSo quit holding yourself back. Stop focusing on reasons and start focusing on results. Beethoven went deaf, but among his late-in-life works is some of the greatest music man has ever heard. Milton was blind, but he wrote literature that will be read until the end of time. Whatever your excuse is, it isn't good enough. The only thing that's keeping you from having everything you want is the story you keep telling yourself about why you can't have it.\n\nSo drop the peanut. Just let it go. Then try climbing a tree to see what opportunities lie on the other side.\n\nLETTING GO\n\nWhat would happen if you decided to let go? How would your life change if you really decided to go for it? What would happen if you made your biggest dreams come true?\n\nWould you spend more time with your family? Would you pick up a hobby? Would you buy a new home? Would you travel around the world and check items off your bucket list? Would you create a charitable organization that gave back to others?\n\nThe only thing keeping you from achieving everything you want in your life is the crazy story you've made up about why you can't have it. Now is the time to seize your opportunity and create the life you deserve.\n\n## CHAPTER 2.\n\n## PROTECTING WHAT'S MOST IMPORTANT\n\nMy mama always used to tell me: \"If you can't find somethin' to live for, you best find somethin' to die for.\"\n\n\u2014TUPAC SHAKUR\n\n### The Sure Thing\n\nHave you ever had a \"sure thing\"? An idea for a business or product that was just so good, you knew it could not fail? When you shared the idea with others, their jaws dropped. As you got started, everything fell into place: Your timing, your team, and your execution were flawless. You _knew_ you could not lose. So you doubled down; maybe you put everything you had on the line.\n\nI've been there as well. In 2005 I was closing in on a deal to run a new Internet business when I got a call from my good friend Jason Port. He had heard I was in the market for a new business opportunity and encouraged me to take a look at private aviation.\n\nAfter 9\/11, he told me, private aviation's growth had skyrocketed. Passengers on commercial flights had grown frustrated with increased travel times, long lines at security, having to remove their shoes, and the rest of it. Private-jet charter had suddenly emerged as a terrific option for business travelers. He also told me that, despite its growth, private aviation remained highly inefficient, so there might be a good opportunity for skilled Internet entrepreneurs to help the industry operate more efficiently.\n\nI looked at the charter business. The numbers showed growth in users and revenue like I hadn't seen since the dot-com boom, but the business was highly fragmented. In commercial aviation there were a handful of operators, like American, Continental, United, Delta, and Southwest, that controlled virtually all the passenger seats and owned hundreds of aircraft. Private aviation was completely different; there were approximately 2,500 operators in the United States alone, typically controlling only three planes each.\n\nWhen it came to selling seats for commercial flights, companies like Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz could easily connect travelers to commercial flight schedules, making it simple to search, find, and purchase a trip online. In contrast, just as my friend had told me, the private-aviation industry was incredibly inefficient. Nobody had effectively aggregated the supply and demand in one place to make it easy to purchase a trip on a private jet. To book one you would have to find a local operator through word of mouth, by looking them up in the phone book, or by calling the local airport. Once you got a charter operator on the phone, he would then have to create a custom quote for your trip, oftentimes initiating a back-and-forth of faxes. The process was made tougher still because the guy answering the phone was sometimes the guy flying the plane!\n\nAs a result of my research, I decided to enter the market and tackle this problem. I started Smart Charter in 2006 as an online marketplace and booking tool for private aviation. Think of it as Expedia for private jets. My goal was to match up supply and demand, making the process of buying and selling trips on private jets simple.\n\nI opened an office in Los Angeles and hired a great team (from companies like Google, Expedia, Yahoo!, Travelocity, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory). To build the business, in September 2006 we went out to raise money, and in that process I was introduced to Richard Branson's Virgin Group. Richard was my longtime hero as an entrepreneur, and his company, Virgin, was among the most respected aviation brands in the world. In April 2007 Virgin bought a controlling interest in my company. We were rebranded as Virgin Charter. My new job was to run the business.\n\nAll of this reinforced my belief that I had a sure thing. We were in a growing market solving a big problem. Our timing, our team, and our execution had been great. Now, with Virgin as an investor, how could I lose?\n\nSo I doubled down. Went all in. I was in the right place at the right time . . . or so I thought.\n\nWe launched as Virgin Charter in March 2008. The first quarter of 2008 was incredible for private aviation. There were more private-aircraft sales, more fractional sales, and more charter hours flown than at just about any time in history. The day we launched, Richard and I went on CNBC to make the announcement. But two other news stories caught my attention that day: concerns about an economic recession and a spike in oil prices. That's when I feared things might begin to change, and not for the better.\n\nThe business started to go sideways, quickly. In the first half of 2008 oil prices went soaring. Typically, airlines pass along fuel costs to their customers, but in 2008 prices were rising so fast that there was no time for them to recoup their costs fast enough. Rapidly rising oil prices destroyed the business model for many airlines almost overnight. While that was bad news for the big commercial airlines, they had an advantage we did not have in private aviation: many more passengers to share increased fuel costs. For charter operators, it wasn't that simple. It was not uncommon for only one person to be on board the private aircraft, so the cost for that passenger's flight was much higher. At launch in March 2008, the average charter of a private jet from Los Angeles to New York sold for approximately $30,000. A few months later, fuel costs had pushed that up to almost $45,000. Let me tell you, that kind of massive price hike is a disaster.\n\nPredictably, a chain reaction followed. People who would previously charter big planes instead went with small ones. People who used to take long trips chartered planes for short ones. Many stopped chartering altogether.\n\nOur business was burning more capital than we had planned, meaning we needed cash to survive. We decided to go and raise money to provide operating capital for the business. I was on the road for weeks and managed to secure partner meetings with three prominent venture-capital firms. But my highest hopes rested with a meeting that took place on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley in September 2008.\n\nThe day before the meeting, I flew from Los Angeles to the Bay Area with Brian Pope, our chief operating officer. We locked ourselves in a hotel room and prepared to give a great presentation. Upon arriving at Menlo Ventures, we were greeted by Mark Siegel, Menlo Venture's managing director and the partner leading our deal. We were taken to an office and were asked to wait until we were called into the meeting. We were so focused on preparing our pitch that neither one of us looked at the news or read the headlines that day.\n\nWhen we were finally asked to join the group, there were almost fifty people in the room. They were all in the prayer position, meaning that they had their heads downs, with their thumbs furiously working the keyboards on their BlackBerry phones. There was a steady flow of assistants bringing yellow sticky notes about phone calls that needed to be returned immediately.\n\nEverything seemed strange and tense, so I asked what was going on. One of the partners looked at me and told me that Lehman Brothers had just declared bankruptcy and the market was down five hundred points!\n\nYou won't be shocked to learn the meeting didn't go well. Everything about the world was about to change. You remember those days, when the stock market would fall three hundred points in a day, then three hundred more the next day. We were falling into the deepest recession since the Great Depression.\n\nWe didn't get the cash we needed at that time and my so-called sure thing stopped being about building something great and became all about saving what we could.\n\nWe'd started with a great idea, with timing that seemed perfect, a great team, and a solid plan. We'd gotten the Virgin Group behind us and received Richard Branson's stamp of approval. I'd gone all in, putting all my chips on the table. Sure, there were many things I could have done better. But the point is, I lost the hand.\n\nHere's the problem with sure things: There is nothing really _sure_ about them. There can't be because there are just too many moving parts in any business. Too many things that need to go right. All of which translates to an essential message: The most important job for any entrepreneur preparing to launch is to learn how to _mitigate their risk_. It's learning how to take the time up front to protect their downside. That way, if things do go sideways, they don't lose what's really important and can bounce right back.\n\nIn this chapter we'll talk about how you can protect the personal downside risk in your new venture. But let me tell you what \"personal\" means to me. In my office I have two napkins framed on the wall (entrepreneurs, you'll find, do a lot of their best work on the back of napkins). One is the original drawing I created of the Smart Charter Web site (the idea took shape in a coffee shop). The other is a napkin with my wife's phone number and a little heart with the words \"call me.\" She gave that to me when we first met. Today the business that I thought was my sure thing is gone. But what is really important, my relationship with my wife and family, is stronger than ever. Those two napkins are a daily reminder not to lose sight of what truly matters.\n\nOne truth of entrepreneurship is that everyone has ups and downs, highs and lows, and wins and losses. What's most important in each new venture is to protect yourself up front, be perfectly clear about the amount of risk you are willing to take, and learn how to mitigate that risk every step of the way. That way, if your sure thing does not work out, you don't lose what's most important and you can bounce right back.\n\n### The Fastest Way to Lose Your First Million\n\nAsk yourself this: How much are you willing to risk? How much time and money are you willing to put on the line to make your dream come true?\n\nMany entrepreneurs fail to get started because they are afraid of what could happen to them financially if things don't work out. They have heard stories about people who risked everything, all the money and assets they had, and then lost it all. Managers in big companies have heard similar stories about peers taking risks and their projects going upside down. Those typically end with people losing their jobs.\n\nWhat they don't know is that there are several ways to limit their financial downside. Risk should _not be risky_. It should be planned and well thought out. It should be measured in advance. Systems should be put in place to ensure that even if something does not go as planned, you, your family, and even your job are protected.\n\nBased on years of experience coaching entrepreneurs, I know that the number one mistake most make is mismanaging their money through a launch. When modeling their business, they are too optimistic. They overestimate their revenues and underestimate their expenses. Over time their business demands more cash than anticipated, so they start pulling out more and more of their own money to meet the company's needs. They get caught up in the momentum of the process, trying to balance the new demands of their business against all their other personal responsibilities. Eventually, they lose track of how much cash they really have on hand and how much has been committed to go out the door.\n\nThe result? One day they get a shocking bank statement in the mail: The money is gone, and the account has nothing left in it. The start-up capital is spent. Worse still, so is the money to pay next month's mortgage.\n\nWhen the horrified entrepreneur looks back, wondering how this all came to pass, part of the explanation is obvious. You'd be amazed how many entrepreneurs launching new ventures don't go to the trouble to separate business from personal accounts. The result can lead to a significant amount of stress for any new business owner, or even personal catastrophe.\n\nThis doesn't have to happen to you. Here are the most important steps that you can apply today to make sure your financial planning is sound.\n\n_Balance your optimism._ We'll talk more about this later (see \"Business Planning,\" page 81), but the first step to mitigating your personal financial risk is to create a realistic financial model for your business. That means coming up with revenue and expense assumptions that balance your natural optimism and help determine how much cash the business will really need. Here's how you do it.\n\nFirst create a list that includes all of your company's income sources and add up how much money you project your business will take in each month over the next year. Be sure not to project revenue coming in too early.\n\nNext create a list of all your expenses. This includes all the capital it takes to start up the business, including legal fees, the cost of setting up your Web site, and payment to the various people you will need to get things off the ground. Once you have estimated these one-time start-up costs, be sure to add your monthly operating expenses to the tally: office rent, telephone bill, insurance, etc.\n\nFinally, take your income and subtract your expenses to determine how much money you will need to start and maintain the business until it is able to pay for itself.\n\nOnce you are confident and firmly believe you have the right model in place, take your revenue projections and cut them in half. And cut them in half again. Then do it one more time for good measure. Now take your expenses and double them.\n\nThese more conservative numbers may be hard to digest, but experience suggests this approach will give you a reasonable sense of what will really occur in your business and how much time it will take before you no longer have to dip in to your own capital to make ends meet.\n\n_Determine how much money you are willing to risk._ Now that you have a reference point, determine your risk tolerance: How much money can you afford to lose?\n\nYour launch has to be funded somehow, and the odds are that much of the funding will come directly from you or, if you can get a bank or personal loan to start your business, that your name will appear on the documents as the guarantor. Unless you have a track record in business or friends with deep pockets, raising money from investors to get started may be difficult. Will the money on the line be your family's entire nest egg, or just half? Are you going to bootstrap, or borrow?\n\n_Talk everything through with your spouse or significant other._ You _must_ do this before jumping in with two feet. It's essential that the two of you be in agreement regarding how much to put on the line. If you don't agree, that will create problems down the road, possibly very large ones that will distract you from your business\u2014and potentially ruin the relationship. I'd suggest you would do better to risk less and be on the same page than to risk more and have your spouse worried and resentful day after day.\n\n_Put your risk capital into a separate checking account._ Do it now. Once you have a sense of the capital needed for the launch, transfer the funds you are willing to risk into a separate business checking account immediately. If your risk capital is tied up in securities or other investments, sell them and put the proceeds into the business account.\n\nThis is your seed money. Once you see it moved from your savings account to an account tied to risk, it becomes real. It focuses your attention. You see what's at stake. You have a clear financial framework to help you make better decisions, and you will act more strategically, less impulsively.\n\nWhat if that business account gets low or runs out? You have a few options: You can increase your risk threshold and put more money in, find an investor or partner, or sell or close the business.\n\nIn these early stages, however, what's most important is that, by separating your business finances, you will have created a mechanism whereby you will be forced to confront decision points. You will be faced with the facts sooner rather than later. You won't accidentally run through your personal finances and allow your spending to go beyond a point that is too much for you to risk.\n\n_Keep your credit cards separate._ Have one credit or debit card for business expenses, another for personal use. You need to do this as a way of tracking, accounting, and leveraging all that you can for tax purposes. Any and all expenses related to your business should be funded from this account. Don't commingle anything.\n\n_Hire a bookkeeper your first day in business._ Too often, entrepreneurs wait to do this or put it off altogether, but you need someone to track revenue, expenses, assets, and liabilities. Having correct data on hand is important for you, your investors, and tax preparers. If you don't set up a system early, you will spend a tremendous amount of time and energy going back trying to reconstruct the details behind every transaction that affects your business.\n\nThe price of paying a pro will be well worth the investment. Setup may take an hour, followed by monthly, weekly, or daily updates, depending on how much activity there is in your accounts. My bookkeeper logs in to my computer each day for a few minutes and updates the day's transactions. That means I have a report every morning telling me exactly how all of my business and personal accounts are performing. Because we were set up correctly from the start, this works out to a monthly cost of $150.\n\nHaving a professional on board will have a range of other benefits. Paying attention to your books at this early stage will establish good habits at your company and instill a sense of financial responsibility throughout the organization. That sense of financial responsibility may also spill over into your personal accounts.\n\n_Have an attorney set your business up by the book._ We live in a very litigious society, so you need to protect yourself from liability. Set aside money to create a proper legal entity and get business insurance. Remember, your concern isn't only about the short term; there are larger, long-term issues that you need to consider. Keep in mind too that even if this is your venture, it's not just about you.\n\n_Learn how to manage and grow your personal take._ It is important to constantly expand your understanding of how money works, so that as your business grows and spills off cash, you are able to invest those profits in a meaningful way to grow your personal fortune.\n\nIf your goal is to one day create a personal financial windfall through an IPO, sale, or merger, it is important to be prepared for this possibility. Most entrepreneurs are so busy working on their business, trying to make that first million, that there is no plan in place for when they finally do. As a result, they mismanage the money and lose all or part of it. Being unprepared for success is the fastest way to lose your first million. So it's important to build a great team of advisers around you that includes bankers, brokers, accountants, and financial planners. This way, when payday finally comes, you will be ready for it.\n\nInstead of trying to decide by yourself who should be on your team, find mentors who have made and grown their own personal fortunes. Ask them for help, guidance, and personal referrals. Their advice could be worth millions, literally.\n\n_Decide to launch one business or product at a time._ Many entrepreneurs, in order to hedge their bets, try to get three or four plates spinning at once. Don't. We will talk later about the importance of focusing on one thing\u2014I promise you, the best route to success is not to spread your energy and focus on ten things hoping one will work. Give the one thing everything you've got.\n\n### All for One and One for All\n\nI'm a huge fan of Starbucks. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, not only am I addicted to its product, but from time to time Starbucks has served as my office. A couple years ago I had the opportunity to meet the brilliant entrepreneur and chief executive behind Starbucks, Howard Schultz, when he spoke to an entrepreneurs' group in Southern California.\n\nSchultz had been touring in support of his book, _Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul._ He gave a prepared talk, describing how in the late 2000s he steered Starbucks out of its crisis of overexpansion and loss of identity. He talked about reclaiming his CEO role, closing hundreds of stores and revamping hundreds of others, and how one day he shut down all 7,100 U.S. locations for three hours so baristas could get a refresher course on how to make the perfect espresso. Instead of being hell-bent on growth, Starbucks went back to being a nice place to go relax and get a good cup of joe.\n\nIt was a great story, but it sounded like a press release\u2014it lacked candor. I wanted to hear his advice on how to be a better entrepreneur, and I know I wasn't the only one.\n\nAfter the talk Schultz did a Q&A session. The last question finally proved to be the right one to open Schultz up and get him to tell us a more personal story. A man said, more or less, \"I admire you, Mr. Schultz; you have an amazing story and a great product. But when you just spoke about how you were hurting when Starbucks fell on tough times, I just couldn't relate. After all, you have a billion dollars in the bank while many of the rest of us are just trying to feed our families. So please share some ways in which we all can relate to you.\"\n\nThe room was silent.\n\nAt that moment Howard Schultz's demeanor changed. The billionaire CEO became the Schultz of thirty years ago, a bootstrapping entrepreneur like the rest of us. The story he told will stay with me for the rest of my life and his honesty made me an even bigger fan.\n\nIn 1981 Schultz was just another Brooklyn kid looking for a break, working for Hammarplast, a Swedish coffee-machine maker. When he first arrived in Seattle, he made a sales call on Starbucks at its first\u2014and in those days only\u2014location at Pike Place Market. In Schultz's recollection, the day was magical, the sky blue, the city looking as dazzling as Oz. He decided then and there he wanted to work for Starbucks.\n\nHe eventually persuaded the founders to take him on as a marketing guy but, after the owners declined to launch his idea of including an espresso bar in Starbucks, he traveled to Europe. There he acquired the rights to a coffee brand called Il Giornale. He returned to Seattle, looking to raise money to open his first Il Giornale store. He was working for no pay. His wife was pregnant with their first child.\n\nHis father-in-law flew into town from Ohio and asked Schultz to go out for a walk. They sat down on a park bench and he said to Schultz, \"My daughter is seven months pregnant and her husband doesn't have a job, just a hobby. I want to ask you in a heartfelt way, with real respect, to get a job.\" Schultz started to cry. He was flushed with embarrassment.\n\nHe went home to his wife and, later that night, told her about the conversation. He had thought over what his father-in-law had advised, and figured he probably should sell his interest in Il Giornale and get a real job. Wisely, he asked his wife what she thought he should do.\n\nSheri set him straight. She gave him her _Rocky_ speech (remember the one Adrian gives Rocky when he has doubts before the big fight with Apollo Creed?). Sheri told Howard that they were in this thing together, that she believed in him, that she was sure he would be able to raise the money for the coffee shop. And that he should not quit\u2014he should go for it.\n\nThat was all he needed to hear. It was an enormous, almost irresponsible risk that Schultz took. But it paid off. He got the financing, and a few years later he acquired Starbucks.\n\nIn an ideal world, all entrepreneurs would have people like Sheri to support them in their new ventures. But that's a lot to ask. Being a spouse, family member, or best friend of an entrepreneur is not easy. These are people who go through the wins and losses right alongside us. Sometimes they are as much at risk financially as we are. Too often we take these people for granted.\n\nI've learned that successful ventures start at home. The first and most important job of any entrepreneur is to get on the same page as his or her spouse or significant other. If you're not in alignment, there are only two possible outcomes when things get tough: The business will suffer, or the relationship will suffer.\n\nHow do you reach a meeting of the minds? You begin by talking through a few essential questions. The most important include:\n\n_How much financial risk are you (the spouse) willing to take?_ If you are launching a new business, the odds are you are bootstrapping, that is, using your own money. You and your spouse need to agree upon how much you're willing to put aside and put at risk in pursuit of your dream. You need to start on the same page.\n\n_How much time will you allow me to commit?_ To successfully launch in ninety days, you will have to commit to your business first, with your family, along with everything else, coming second. You will have too much on the line. There will be too many moving parts for you to tend to anything other than your business, which needs to be your top priority. That doesn't mean your family is less important, just that, for a period of time, both of you agree that this is something in which you need to immerse yourself in the interests of your shared future.\n\n_How much do you want to be involved in the business?_ Being an entrepreneur can be a lonely job. At times it's difficult to find others to talk to about the challenges you face at the office. For example, there are certain things you may not want to share with your investors. There are certain issues that need to be kept away from employees. You usually don't want to spend your time with friends talking about problems at work. So you go home and vent.\n\nCVO is the acronym for what I call the \"chief venting officer.\" It is the role typically occupied by your spouse, your significant other, or a member of your family. It can be a lousy job because CVOs tend to hear about the tough stuff but not the good things that occur every day.\n\nLike Sheri, this person is on the entrepreneurial roller-coaster ride with you. He or she is expected to support you and hold your hand through it all. Success is never easy and rarely happens overnight. When you're in a relationship, it is never a one-person effort.\n\nThere are some CVOs who really want to be involved. They want to know everything and thrive on a blow-by-blow account of the day. Others can take the ups and downs only in smaller chunks and want to hear far less. You need to be sensitive to how much your friends and family members can take.\n\nOne of the best pieces of advice I can give is to calibrate your communication strategy to suit your life partner. Do you talk about business once a day or once a week? If things are tough, do you come home and share everything before bed or wait until the end of the week to get it all out? Come to an understanding that works for both of you and respect it. How you handle the pressures of your business can either kill or strengthen your relationship.\n\nKeep in mind that some people come from traditional business families where stability is the rule, with nine-to-five employment and a weekly paycheck for life. For people brought up in such circumstances, the seesaw of launching and entrepreneurship may be hard to handle. I am lucky that my wife, Rachel, grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. She lived through good and bad times but also saw how everyone got through them. As a result, she doesn't get rattled but even so, she doesn't want a daily blow-by-blow account of what happened in my businesses.\n\nRachel also taught me another essential lesson: The way you spell love in a relationship with an entrepreneur is _T-I-M-E_. That's why we make it a point to get child care every Saturday and carve out time to have lunch together. I am usually relaxed because I'm out of the office. Things that seemed urgent during the week don't matter. I get a chance to tell her what's going on and get her feedback. Having this exchange doesn't take much time, but we need to do it and do it consistently. Both sides have to be present and accounted for.\n\nYou should put in place something similar once you've found a mutually workable strategy. No matter how understanding your life partner is, you still have to prepare him or her for the challenges you'll face in building your business. Most important, you need to be in alignment with regard to how much both sides are willing to risk, how much time both sides are willing to commit, and what communication strategy works best for both of you.\n\nTALK IT OVER\n\nYour new venture will take significant time and resources to launch and could involve financial risk. While you are out pursuing your dream, your actions will affect the people around you. Before jumping in, make sure that you and your spouse or significant other are on the same page.\n\nHow much time will you need to put into this new project? During launch, your business will need to be your first priority. This doesn't mean you love your family and friends any less. It does mean that during this period your business will need to come first.\n\nHow much financial risk are you willing to take? Would you rather take less financial risk and be on the same page as your spouse or take on more risk and create a problem at home?\n\n### Super Balls and Glass Balls\n\nThe entrepreneur must master the art of juggling. Your job, your finances, your spouse, your family, and maybe your boss; your health, projects, and deadlines\u2014they're all in the air and you're always at risk of dropping one.\n\nSome people juggle better than others and can manage to keep all those balls in the air indefinitely. Most of us, though, reach a point at which it just becomes too much and one or two will crash to the ground. We might even drop everything.\n\nAll of which makes it essential that you understand this little rule of nature: _Super Balls bounce and glass balls shatter._ You need to think about which balls are which in your life.\n\nIf you drop the Super Balls made of rubber, they will keep bouncing on their own for a while, none the worse for wear. While you're working on launching your venture, you don't have to worry so much about the ones you know to be bouncy and resilient. Later, when you can turn your attention back to them and recommit to those areas of your life, those rubber balls will take to the air again. No great harm done.\n\nGlass balls? They're a different matter.\n\nIn the fall of 2008 the sky was falling. I was standing at the airport with Steve Ridgway, the CEO of Virgin Atlantic Airways, waiting for a plane on Tortola Island. Our businesses both faced big challenges, buffeted as we were by the harsh winds of the growing global economic crisis, which threatened the economic stability of almost every nation and institution.\n\nMy business was vulnerable. I felt vulnerable too, as if I just might blow off the Jetway at any moment, but Steve looked calm.\n\nI asked him, \"Steve, with all the pressure on you, especially right now, what's the most important part of your job?\" I expected to hear something like leadership, team building, or vision.\n\nHis answer was simple, just one word.\n\n\"Exercise.\"\n\nExercise? I was surprised.\n\nLater that day I sat next to David Cush, the CEO of Virgin America, on the flight home. I asked him the same question: \"What's the most important part of your job?\"\n\nHis answer? \"Exercise.\"\n\nAgain I was shocked. David hadn't been with us when Steve and I had spoken earlier. They hadn't had a chance to compare notes, but they had both given me the same answer. Two powerful guys, running big businesses at a superdifficult time, and they both said the most important thing was _exercise_. It took awhile for this lesson to sink in, but you know what? They're right.\n\nLaunching your business will be stressful and arduous. You'll always feel like there isn't enough time for the ten thousand things you have to do, and that if you could just squeeze a couple more hours of work into the day, you'd really feel like you had something to show for it. But you can't keep going at a hundred miles per hour if you're out of gas.\n\nWe keep going by fueling our tanks. We can either choose good fuels like healthy foods and exercise or opt for a bad diet made up of things like alcohol and high-caffeine drinks, along with little to no exercise. But you know as well as I do that your physical health directly impacts your ability to perform at a high level and even influences your mental health. Exercise enables you to blow off steam and release stress, which ultimately helps to keep you calm and thinking more clearly. It's an essential component of dealing with the challenges of entrepreneurship.\n\nYour health is a glass ball. If you drop it hard enough, it won't just break. It will shatter, and you can't be sure that you'll be able to put yourself back together again.\n\nYou may think you can't find the time, but you simply have to get out and exercise, get your body in motion every day. This doesn't mean you need to run a marathon or train as a triathlete. Thirty minutes a day will do it, even just a walk around the neighborhood. What you need more than anything is movement to get your heart pumping. You need some measurable physical activity to release the stress that comes along with your position and to recharge your body. Remember, if you don't have a way to release all the pressure, to let off steam, the stress will catch up with you. You won't have the energy or strength or endurance to do your job right. You and your business will be set up to fail.\n\nIf you have to build your day around exercise, do it. I asked Mark Moses, an \u00fcberentrepreneur and triathlete you'll meet in another chapter, how somebody with a business schedule like his could fit the many hours of training it takes to be an Ironman triathlete into his day. He said, \"I put my exercise into my calendar first and then schedule everything else around it. By getting in that time and training I have more energy and a clearer head than all those people who spend their entire day letting stress build up behind a desk.\"\n\nYou'll be surprised at how getting your mind off your work will actually help you find solutions to the toughest problems your business faces. You know how sometimes you'll have an epiphany while standing in the shower? The same thing happens to me when I'm out for a walk. When you force yourself to exercise, you may feel guilty at first because you're taking a break from work\u2014 _there's that deadline approaching!_ \u2014but in reality you're freeing up some bandwidth of your attention span. That will give your subconscious the extra processing power it needs to make breakthroughs.\n\nSo get some exercise every day. Pick a time of day that works best for you; work your schedule around it. Try to get your workout away from home; there are too many distractions there and it can be difficult to really let go. If you can, do it alone so you can let your mind wander and permit the stress to ease out of you. As an entrepreneur you have to be flexible, ready for anything. Your business may or may not be around in ten years, but you want to be.\n\nDistinguishing the glass balls from the rubber ones isn't hard\u2014and it's all important that you devise strategies to balance the pressures so you don't shatter what is most important in your life. When times get tough, you need to be the toughest person in the room. You can't be ready if you don't take care of yourself.\n\n### Ten Thousand Reasons Why You Will Succeed\n\nOne of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face is the emotional roller coaster they ride every day when launching a business.\n\nYou wake up in the morning, an investment comes through, and then you lose it. Suddenly the money is back. The product is working as planned, then it goes down, and now it's back up. The key employee you want to hire is a go but unexpectedly falls out. Later he agrees to sign.\n\nTaking a seat on this roller coaster can wreak havoc on your business. The highs and lows can be exhausting. They can quickly drive you in and out of emotional states that won't help you run your business effectively, will strain your relationships, and can have a negative impact on your health.\n\nAs an entrepreneur you need to learn how to smooth out the ride and manage your emotions in a way that balances your energy, drives your business forward, and puts you in the best position to succeed, no matter what life throws at you. You can do this by _controlling your focus._ The brain works a lot like Google. It gives you answers, but those answers are only as good as the questions you ask.\n\nWhen an investment falls through, the product goes down, or a new hire falls out, you begin an internal dialogue. You start asking questions to help understand what just happened and what it all means.\n\nMost people don't understand that this dialogue is even taking place. They are conditioned to respond to circumstances in a very specific way and don't even know it. If that conditioning leads them to ask good, empowering questions, the business will go down one path. If it leads them to ask an endless loop of negative questions, their lives will go in a whole other direction.\n\nFor example, when you hit a bump in the road, if your automatic response is to start asking questions like _Why does bad stuff always happen to me?_ and _Why do bad things always happen to my business?_ then your Google-like brain will do a search and pull up ten thousand reasons why your business stinks. Your focus will go right to these answers, which will make you feel terrible. It's impossible to act in a way that is effective from that place.\n\nInstead you must teach yourself to ask a better set of questions, ones that empower you and your business. Because having the right mind-set immediately shifts your focus from each challenge to the opportunity it presents.\n\nWhen things weren't going your way, what would happen if you started asking questions like _What is great about this experience? What can I learn from this experience?_ or _How can I use this experience to help my business succeed?_ Again, your brain will run a search. But this time, you'll get ten thousand reasons why you will succeed. That is exactly what you will focus on, putting you in a much better position to drive your business forward.\n\nIf you take only one thing away from this book, this should be it: _Ask a better question_ \u2014and watch how your life changes forever.\n\nIf you want to develop a razorlike mind-set, one that cuts through problems like a knife, here's how:\n\n_Recognize that you are in complete control._ Nothing in life has any meaning other than the meaning you give it. You have a choice in determining how you evaluate any situation and where you place your focus.\n\n_Break your pattern._ The odds are that you have been running on autopilot most of your life, allowing your emotional state to dictate your inner dialogue. Next time you run into a problem or something threatens to knock you off course, _stop_! Pay attention to the questions you are asking to evaluate the situation, and if they are negative, interrupt your pattern with a new set of empowering questions. This will help you look at the situation in a whole new light. With enough practice, this powerful way of thinking will become automatic.\n\n_Develop new habits._ Developing the skill of focusing on what empowers you is like building a muscle. Your job is to exercise your mind each and every day. The best time to start is in the morning. Take control of your focus as soon as you wake up. Begin the day by asking questions that set you up for empowerment, like _What am I grateful for? Why will I succeed? How can I move this business forward today\u2014and have an awesome time in theprocess? _Starting the day with this mind-set will put you in a much better position to execute.\n\n_Never make a big decision at your lowest point._ Many times it seems like we make our biggest decisions when we are in the worst possible position to think clearly. Next time, _wait_! Hold off until you ask a better question. Wait until you have physically moved to get the blood flowing, stepped away from whatever the situation is, and released some tension. You will find that you will make a much better decision from a more balanced emotional state.\n\n_Pass this skill on to your team._ Imagine if everyone on your team operated from this place of razor-sharp focus, if they looked at everything that came their way as empowering tools that they could use to drive the business forward. Imagine if they were conditioned to find the opportunity to improve in every situation. Wouldn't they also be making smarter decisions?\n\nThe decision is up to you. Are you ready to take control of your life? Are you ready to get off the roller coaster?\n\nIf the answer is yes, then just do one thing\u2014ask a better question\u2014and focus squarely on the opportunity in everything that life presents.\n\nEvery entrepreneur needs to protect what is most important. That means you! The way to start is by mitigating your risk. This begins with keeping an eye on your finances and relationships and developing a razorlike mind-set that helps you convert any problem into an opportunity that moves your business forward. Remember, you are in much more control of the results in your life than you realize.\n\nTHE OTHER HALF OF LIFE\n\nControlling your focus is only one half of determining how you will behave. Another way to control how you behave is to change the way you move.\n\nIf I asked you to describe a person who was down or had had a hard day, it would be easy: eyes cast down, shoulders slumped, and breath low and shallow. If I took that same person and simply had him change the way he was using his body, had him lift his gaze, bring his shoulders back, and breathe deeply, I could take him right out of that emotional state. That is because the different ways you use your body send different signals to your brain.\n\nTry it for yourself. The fastest way to change the way you feel is to change the way you move. As Tony Robbins would say, \"Motion creates emotion.\" So if you are down or you are having a tough day\u2014go out and move. Get the blood flowing. When you feel stuck in your business, no problem. Get out of your chair and take a walk outside. Movement will instantly change the way you feel and put you in a better position to take on the day.\n\n## CHAPTER 3.\n\n## YOUR ENVIRONMENT\n\nI don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.\n\n\u2014BILL COSBY\n\n### Crabs in a Bucket\n\nNothing is more important than the people you surround yourself with. You don't need me to tell you that the right friends and contacts can help in a thousand ways, but let's examine your personal ecosystem. Odd as it may sound, I'd like you to start by thinking in terms of crabs.\n\nImagine you've got a bucketful of freshly caught live crabs. If you look down into the bucket, you see the crabs squirming around, as some instinct tells them it's their job to try to figure out how to escape. Individually, they're each taking a turn clawing and climbing over the others trying to get a grip on the lip of the bucket.\n\nShould you put a lid on the bucket to prevent dinner from crawling away?\n\nDon't worry about it. There's a funny thing about crabs\u2014as soon as one crab looks like he's about to hoist himself up over the edge of the bucket, the other crabs grab onto him and pull him back down. They can't understand that if everyone just worked together and formed a crab chain, all the crabs on the bottom could easily climb up to the top and out of the bucket and go about their business. But no; whenever one crab starts to show some leadership, some initiative, it gets pulled all the way back down to the bottom. Eventually they just stop trying.\n\nHave you ever felt like a crab in a bucket? Maybe your office mates criticize you for trying too hard and making them look bad. Your boss may not want you to move ahead because then he'd have to find someone else to do your busywork. Perhaps your friends think you're getting too big for your britches because you want something better for yourself than what you grew up with.\n\nIs your entire family trapped in this mind-set? Parents often don't want their grown children to move away because they think they need them nearby to take care of them when they get older. Some spouses resent their entrepreneurial partners because, if one person is off pursuing a dream, the other person feels abandoned to raise the kids alone or do all the chores.\n\nLife is way too short to hang around others who want to pull you down. The number one determinant of who you are and, eventually, of the results you achieve in life and business is your _environment._ Think about your environment at work, at home, in your neighborhood, in all the places you spend time. Do these places pull you down or elevate you? Do you feel good and comfortable where you work? Do your friends look out for you, encourage you, and help you brainstorm? Or do they reinforce bad habits? Do they share your values? If you have to compromise yourself and what you believe for the people around you, it's time to change the people around you.\n\nAre the people around you invested in your success, or do they really want you to fail so they can keep you in the bucket with them? How large and generous are their visions? Remember that people with small visions of themselves cannot have a larger view of you.\n\nYou may not think it nice, but you owe it to yourself to separate from the \"friends\" who anchor you to a place where you do not wish to be.\n\nThere will always be people who try to knock you down. You don't need them in your life. There will always be people who attack your Big Idea. Don't dismiss what they have to say, but don't buy into it. Even if they seem to have the best intentions (they may think they're trying to protect you), your job is to listen to their arguments and use them as a counterbalance. See if there is anything they say that you can learn from and apply to your business or product in order to make it better. And if people say you're crazy and your Big Idea will never work, let their doubt drive you.\n\n### Your Fab Five\n\nHow important are the people you invest your time with? The time you spend with others is nothing less than precious\u2014 _and_ an investment in your future.\n\nMy time with Tony Robbins taught me to look critically at the people around me. His circle included individuals who either were the very best at what they did or aspired to get there. This included people like Quincy Jones, Peter Guber, and Pat Riley. Among these top business leaders, world-class athletes, and people committed to changing the world were many others who had overcome big obstacles. They had found solutions that not only benefited themselves but also improved the lives of others along the way.\n\nI'll never forget one member of Tony's circle, who had gotten in a car accident on the way to his wedding. The accident left him paralyzed from the waist down, but instead of feeling sorry for himself, he went out and invented a line of aerodynamic racing wheelchairs. He not only empowered himself but also helped others in the process.\n\nDuring my time working for Tony's company, I assessed my own circle of friends and came to understand the power of our personal networks. What I learned was that I needed to recruit the right people into my life. In particular, I had to be aware of the five people I spent most of my time with. I call these five people the _Fab Five_.\n\nThe name \"Fab Five\" came into wide use in reference to what many people consider the greatest recruiting class in sports history, the 1991 Michigan men's basketball team. In their first year, these freshman players took their team to the NCAA championship, a remarkable and unprecedented accomplishment. In the same way Michigan's coach recruited them, you need to recruit and build your own championship team around you. Let's begin by looking at your existing Fab Five and considering their impact on you today.\n\nMake a list of the five people you spend the most time with outside your family. If you're not sure whom to choose, just look at the last five numbers you dialed on your mobile phone. Now estimate what each of them earns, total the incomes, and divide by five. The number you end up with will be really close to what you earn. Crazy, right?\n\nMaybe money isn't important to you, but another value is. Try the same exercise with your Fab Five's health status and their attitude toward the people around them (this time, if you wish, add your family to the list). Chances are you will get the same result. Today you are nothing more\u2014and nothing less\u2014than the average of the five people you spend the most time with.\n\nAsk yourself how your Fab Five affect you. Are they pulling you up or pushing you down? If you told your five best friends, one at a time, over coffee or a beer that you were planning to start a business, what would their responses be? Would they be supportive or dismissive? Would they encourage you or try to shoot your idea down? Would they be keen to help you brainstorm or would they turn the conversation back to themselves?\n\nAre your Fab Five a reflection of your higher aspirations? This is important because we tend to hang around people whose values are similar to our own. Rich people hang out with rich people. Physically fit people hang out with physically fit people. And slobs hang out with slobs. If you want to know why you don't have more of the things you want in your life, the answer may be as close as the last five numbers you dialed on your mobile phone.\n\nIf you want to build a million-dollar business, you need to spend your time with people who have _already_ built million-dollar businesses. If you want to build a ten-million-dollar business, you need to spend your time with people who have already built ten-million-dollar businesses. That's an important distinction, because the people who have built smaller companies won't know how to get you to the next level. Maybe you want to build a billion-dollar business but think you can't get to billionaires. That's no more than a convenient excuse. Pick up a book by Warren Buffett, follow Mark Cuban's blog, or attend live events with Tony Robbins.\n\nImmerse yourself in the way your core group sees the world. Learn how they program their minds. Let their learning and instincts wash over you. If you spend enough time reading and absorbing their material, you will start to pick up how they act, think, and make decisions. Their state of mind will start to rub off on you.\n\nYou may not want to hear it or admit it, but you may have to change your circle of friends. If the people you spend the most time with cannot help you get to where you want to be, then you need to expand your network and make new friends. That doesn't mean that you have to abandon old friends, but the ecosystem of the entrepreneur needs a different balance. Finding success is a different pursuit from having fun, from recreational shopping for shoes or tailgating at the football game. The people you feel the most comfortable with\u2014maybe the ones who demand the least\u2014aren't necessarily the ones who'll move you toward your goals.\n\nIn order to move to the next level, you may need to add new people to your Fab Five\u2014or create a new Fab Five from scratch. The people and thinking that got you this far are not going to take you where you want to go. If they could, you'd already be there.\n\nTHE PEOPLE AROUND YOU\n\nAre the people around you pulling you up or holding you down?\n\n**Take Inventory:** **** Write down the names of the five people you spend the most time with. Ask yourself: _Do they support me? Do they want to see me succeed in my new venture? Or would they prefer to see me fail and keep me close?_ If the answer to that last question is yes, check them off your list and get them out of your life.\n\n**Find Three Mentors:** Answer this question: Who are your three mentors? If you don't know, you'd better get to work finding one . . . and another . . . and another.\n\n**Find Someone to Mentor:** It's not enough to get guidance. You also need to give. I recommend that everyone mentor at least one person half his or her age. Interacting with students and younger entrepreneurs will give you an entirely fresh perspective and help you see things in a whole new way.\n\n### What Do Those Note Cards Say About You?\n\nAs an entrepreneur you must forge your own personal brand. As a manager in a big company, building a personal brand is just as important, because a strong brand will give you more power and influence within the organization. To put it another way, you must author your own story, paint your own portrait.\n\nYou may think you are selling a product, a financial plan, or something else to your investors, division heads, partners, or employees. And to be sure, those things may be part of the appeal. Yet it's really all about you, because people invest in people. Every action you take helps others define you. You may think you're saying nothing about yourself, but are really conveying everything there is to know about you.\n\nI run a personal-branding exercise at one of my programs. Typically there are about twenty people in the room. On the first day I encourage the participants to mingle while grabbing coffee and breakfast before the event. When it's time to get started, they are invited to sit in their assigned seats. On the table in front of each of them is a placard. They are asked to print their names on the placards so everyone in the group can see. Each person is then handed a stack of index cards. I ask them to look around the room, write one person's name on each of their index cards, and jot down the first five words that come to mind when thinking of that person. An assistant then collects all the cards, enters all the words the group used to describe each participant into a file, and prints them out so that each participant sees only the words used to describe him or her.\n\nPeople's reactions are amazing. Typically they are shocked, horrified, and very upset about the way others view them. For example, a person might think of himself as outgoing, but the index card shows the group thinks his behavior is obnoxious. Another person thinks she embodies the image of success and confidence, but the index cards indicate the group sees an arrogant and standoffish person.\n\nOften, the way others see us just doesn't sync with the story we've been telling ourselves about the image we think we are portraying. It's little wonder that we're not getting the results we want with our businesses in selling our ideas or raising capital. Clearly, what we are projecting is not what we need to win people over.\n\nWhat would that stack of note cards say about you? What is the impression you are leaving on others? Is that personal brand serving you or stifling your growth? Is it taking you closer to or further away from your goals?\n\nThere are deliberate steps you can follow to take control of your personal brand.\n\n_Identify your goal_. The first thing you need to do is get very clear about what it is you want to achieve. Do you want to take a consumer online business to market in ninety days? Do you want to release a new product that extends your company's footprint in the marketplace? Do you want to close financing for a big project? Do you want to create a rock-star team to help transform your local business into a global franchise?\n\nWho do you need to be to achieve that goal? What image do you need to project to bring others along with you?\n\n_Understand where you are now._ Where are you today relative to where you need to be? What is the gap, and what changes do you need to make to fill it?\n\nTo answer this question go to the five people you spend the most time with (your Fab Five) and ask them to use words to describe your brand. Then extend your pool to others with whom you have had fewer interactions; the more distant acquaintances may offer even more valuable impressions because they are based on more immediate first impressions. When you get a handle on how others see you, you'll have a better idea of what needs to change. If they say you're standoffish, when you've just thought of yourself as shy, this is an area of your self-presentation that you need to work on. Such knowledge alone can be curative.\n\n_Recognize what daily habits say about you._ Do your habits empower or disempower you? What is the message your habits tell others about you? Daily habits can have a big impact on how people brand you. Your attire, manners, and degree of organization tell people about you\u2014and the right presentation communicates that you came to play, you are prepared, and you have pride in who you are and what you do. For example, when someone is very physically fit and really takes care of himself, he presents as disciplined, committed, and apt to follow through. People can see and hear certain energy in their physical presence immediately. On the other hand, someone who does not take the same pride and care in his appearance sends a completely different message. Creating empowering habits based on higher standards is vital. The biggest difference between where you are now and the place you want to be is the standard you set for yourself.\n\nLittle things make a big difference, even if it's just the cut of your suit or the warmth of your handshake\u2014and you can take control of these factors. If you don't define who you want to be and manage your personal brand accordingly, people will do it for you. On the basis of the cues you give them, they will put you in a box. It's a box that best serves their needs and not yours, so make sure it's a box you want to be identified with.\n\n_Leverage technology to define and reinforce your brand._ Most people will first be introduced to you online, when they type your name into Google or visit your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter profile. They'll see the pictures and videos you distribute of yourself and what interests you. Use these tools to your advantage: Have a professional take your picture, inset a link to your Web site, and make sure your message is clear and your copy is brief and to the point.\n\n_Be yourself._ Don't pretend to be someone else. When developing a personal brand in today's multimedia world, authenticity is key. If you try to pass yourself off as someone you are not, people will find out and that will undercut your credibility. Be original, be creative, but don't try to be what you think other people want you to be. Be the sincerest, most heightened version of yourself. When investors and customers meet you, you want them to think, _This is a person I want to do business with._\n\nIf there are things from your career or past that you don't want to share or are afraid of how others will react to, don't hide them. Address them up front and, by doing so, take control of the conversation. For example, if an earlier business venture failed, don't try to hide it. Illuminate it by sharing what you learned from the experience and how you are applying those lessons going forward. Here's a secret: Most people would rather get behind people who took a shot, even if they failed. People who have learned from their mistakes bring wisdom to a new venture going forward.\n\n_Don't be defined by your origins_. I'm a huge Los Angeles Lakers fan. One of my heroes growing up was Lakers owner Jerry Buss. He was a Depression-era baby who stood in food lines to eat, but he didn't let that experience define him. In college he saved $86 from each $750 paycheck he received, then got seven guys together and bought an apartment building. He built a real-estate empire, enabling him to buy the Los Angeles Lakers. Today he's an American icon, with a business worth at least one billion dollars. He wrote his own story and created his own brand. It is your job to do the same.\n\nWRITE YOUR THIRTY-SECOND COMMERCIAL\n\nYou're selling yourself, and don't forget it. It is important to do it well, in clear and crisp fashion. Follow this simple formula whenever you are introduced to anyone (potential investors, partners, customers, tradespeople) in a business setting.\n\n**Tell Them Who You Are** **:** Start with your name, your title, and a one-sentence description of what your company does.\n\n**Tell Them Whom You Serve** **:** Compose a one-sentence description of your target customer. Be as specific as possible.\n\n**Share the Benefit** **:** Describe how your customer will benefit from what you offer.\n\n**Ask for the Order** **:** At the end of your thirty-second pitch, ask whether the person you're talking to could benefit from or knows someone who could benefit from these services.\n\nYou can use this commercial even if someone casually asks you what you do. The more you practice your pitch, the clearer and more powerful it becomes.\n\n### Write Your Own Story\n\nA great football season looked like it was about to crash and burn. The 1977 squad at the University of Arkansas, coached by Lou Holtz, had earned a berth in the Orange Bowl, and the Razorbacks were set to play their longtime rivals, the University of Oklahoma Sooners. The winner of the game was a virtual lock to take home the national championship. But bad things began to happen to Holtz's team. In one of the last practices before the game, Arkansas lost an All-American guard to injury. A couple days after that, Coach Holtz had to suspend both of his starting running backs and a wide receiver for disciplinary reasons.\n\nThe press jumped all over these developments, decreeing that Arkansas had no hope of beating the Sooners, who had won two of the last three national championships. Arkansas fell to being a twenty-four-point underdog. In his first season as head coach, Louis Leo Holtz looked like he was about to go from a leading candidate for coach of the year to goat of the year.\n\nMany years later I worked an event where Holtz\u2014who would go on to legendary success in eleven seasons at the University of Notre Dame and later become a popular motivational speaker\u2014told the story of how he and his team saved the season.\n\nHoltz told us how he brought his team together in the locker room before the game. He began by acknowledging the situation they were in and the long odds they had been given by the experts. He told his ball club that everybody was trying to define them, to write their obituary before the first play was called (just as some people will try to do with your new business or product). Holtz pulled out a copy of the newspaper and held it up so everyone could read the boldface headline, which predicted a big loss for Arkansas.\n\n\"Everyone else has already decided who you are, what you will do, what the outcome of the game will be,\" said Holtz. \"If you don't define yourself, others will do it for you.\"\n\nWith that, he folded the paper in half and ripped it. Then ripped the torn pages again. And then did it a third time.\n\nHolding the wad of torn newspaper in his hand, he gave them his bottom line.\n\n\"Champions don't let others write their story,\" he said. \"They write their own story.\"\n\nWith the ease of a practiced magician, he raised his arm as if to toss the shredded paper into the air. Instead of a shower of paper, however, the coach unfurled a fresh newspaper. This one had a different headline: ARKANSAS WINS. Which is exactly what his team did that day, soundly beating the Sooners 31\u20136.\n\nThe magic trick had just been an illusion, but Holtz's message is one every entrepreneur and intrapreneur should take to heart: Don't let anyone try to define you or tell you what you can or cannot do. As Holtz has said, \"You can't let naysayers pull you down. Remember: If someone says you can't accomplish something, it is an opinion and nothing more. It is only a fact if you say it is.\"\n\nLaunching a successful new business, product, or service begins with having vision, letting go of your fear, and making the decision to move forward. It is followed by mitigating your risk every step of the way, so if things don't work out as planned, you have protected yourself and have the ability to bounce right back.\n\nBut it doesn't end there.\n\nYour success or failure will be largely influenced by the impressions you make on others. It will also be impacted by your environment. This includes the people in whom you choose to invest your time.\n\nMost important, your success during launch will depend on how you handle the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and how effective you are at smoothing out the ride. By asking better questions, you will be in the best possible position to succeed, no matter what life or business throws your way\u2014and be headed toward making your dreams come true.\n\n# STAGE II.\n\n# FUELING THE TANK\n\nThirty Days to Assemble Your Resources\n\n## CHAPTER 4.\n\n## BUSINESS PLANNING\n\nIf you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.\n\n\u2014ALBERT EINSTEIN\n\n### Biceps and Business\n\nEntrepreneurs are by nature impatient people. Once they have an image of their big-picture objectives, many go from napkin to execution with nothing in the middle. They rush out and start executing without a plan.\n\nWhile goals and objectives may give you a direction, they don't tell you what specific things you need to do to succeed. Although the strategies you use to accomplish your goals will evolve as you do business, the clearer you are from the start, the better a shot you have at building a winner.\n\nMy favorite example of the power of combining clear goals with a well-thought-out plan comes from my good friend Doug Brignole.\n\nA few years ago I decided that I wanted to get really fit. The first thing I did was go to the gym and ask to be referred to a trainer. The guy they connected me with just wasn't what I wanted. Although he had muscle, he was also overweight and, worse yet, unhappy. He wasn't the kind of person I wanted to emulate. On the other hand, the man did make me realize that I should be modeling myself after someone who is the very best at what he does. So I made a decision: _I want to learn from Mr. Universe!_ I put the word out to my friends, and that's how Doug entered my life.\n\nDoug grew up in Southern California in a first-generation immigrant family. He was a small kid and he frequently got beaten up on his way home from grade school. At age fourteen he decided that he had had enough and that it was important to improve his physique. He went to a local gym and asked, \"Can I _please_ join?\"\n\nHe was too young to be a member, but Doug persisted. He worked out an arrangement with the manager to work part time and work out during his off hours. He fell in love with bodybuilding and eventually got the urge to compete. By the time he was seventeen, he was a contender for Mr. Teen California. Though he didn't win that year, he did come in second, kicking off a lifelong career in bodybuilding. The rush of competing fueled him, so Doug set his goal higher: He wanted to become Mr. America.\n\nDoug started by making sure he was absolutely clear on his outcome. He is not only a bodybuilder but also a world-class artist. One of his unique skills is his ability to draw the body and biomechanics in amazing detail.\n\nDoug had a friend take a photo of him in a bodybuilder's pose, and Doug blew up the image. He put tracing paper on top of the enlargement and drew, in very fine detail, exactly what he would need to look like in order to win the title. He illustrated the shape, size, and balance of each muscle group as he projected it would be by the time the next contest rolled around.\n\nOnce Doug was absolutely clear on what he wanted, he asked himself the following questions: _What do I need to do to achieve it? What could get in the way? How am I going to overcome each challenge?_\n\nThis was years ago, before you could find twenty choices for protein powder at the store and smoothies on every corner. Like other professional bodybuilders at that time, Doug prepared all of his own meals, figuring out a dietary regimen that would enhance his workouts. He put that tracing-paper picture of himself in a frame and set it on the table where he ate five times a day. With every bite he took, he'd point his spoon or fork at the picture and say, _That's what I will look like_. And he'd take another bite. _I'm going to make that happen._ He did this for months.\n\nFrom time to time Doug would have his friend take a new picture of him in the same pose, and then he would blow that up and lay the tracing of his goal body on top. In doing this, he took inventory and monitored his progress. He adjusted his diet and bodybuilding routine based on the results. Pound by pound, muscle by muscle, he filled out the image, bringing a dream, an idea sketched on tracing paper, to life.\n\nFinally Doug competed and won the Mr. America title in his division.\n\nAfter the competition, Doug had his friend take one final photograph. He posed just as he had in the original, so many months earlier. He blew the new picture up and laid the original tracing paper on top. The photo of Doug and the original image he had drawn of his goal were identical.\n\nDoug Brignole set clear goals, created a solid plan, checked his results periodically, and made necessary adjustments. He executed in a similar fashion for his other goals as well, eventually winning the title of Mr. Universe. Though now in his fifties, Doug Brignole is still competing; recently he was the overall winner at the Muscle Beach International competition in the Masters Division.\n\nHere's how we can all apply the lessons from Doug's story to turn our Big Ideas into a reality.\n\n_Be clear on what you want._ Your goals must be specific, be measurable, and have deadlines. It's not enough to say, _I want to make one million dollars_. You need to be much more specific. _I want to earn one million dollars in net revenue by this specific date._ For your business, it's too vague to say, _I want to increase sales._ A better goal would be _I want to increase sales to one million dollars per quarter by a specific date with a specific profit margin._ Clarity is power. You can't manage what you can't measure.\n\n_Make a list of what you need to do._ Clear goals are important, but you must back them up with a solid strategic plan. I heard recently that having clear goals increases an entrepreneur's chance of success by 20 percent. But having clear goals and combining them with a well-thought-out plan increases your chance of success by _400 percent_.\n\nIt's important to break down what is required to accomplish your goal into small, manageable pieces. When you're finished, ask yourself, _Is this it? If I do all these things, will it be enough? Will I reach my goal? Or are there other things I need to do?_ Odds are, there are more steps than you realized.\n\n_Identify what could get in the way._ To accomplish your goal of one million dollars in gross sales per quarter by a specific date with a specific profit margin, you may need to clear obstacles in your path. For example, you may need to tweak your product, refine your sales pitch, upgrade the people on your team, or find ways to reduce costs. Decide how you will overcome each roadblock. Make a list of everything you will need to do in order to break through each one.\n\n_Find models._ Whom do you know who has already accomplished the same goal successfully? Model your plan on what has worked for them, and learn from what didn't.\n\nHaving a Big Idea is a good start, but it's not enough to be successful. You need clear goals that are specific, are measurable, and have deadlines. You need a plan in place that tells you what you need to achieve, what could get in the way, and how you will overcome each obstacle. By combining your Big Idea with clear goals and a strategic plan, you put yourself on the right course to bring your idea to life in the next ninety days.\n\n### Start with the Last Page First\n\nWhat is the first step in getting clear on how to execute your Big Idea? Creating a working model for your business.\n\nWe've all been brainwashed into thinking that the best way to do this is to sit behind our desks and write a long, detailed business plan. You know the kind. It starts with a fancy cover and your mission statement and then describes your team, market, product, and competition and the rest of the elements.\n\nMost entrepreneurs spend a lot of time and resources writing their plan. Too often they get feedback during the process from all the wrong people. This includes their friends, their family, and others who want to support them. The problem is, most of these people will tell the entrepreneurs only what they want to hear\u2014that they have come up with the next Google or Apple or Tesla (keep in mind, none of this feedback is coming from customers). By the time the entrepreneur gets to the last section in the business plan\u2014the financial section\u2014he's totally sold on the idea. So he decides to leave the financial section of the plan unfinished or drop it altogether and start executing.\n\nIntrapreneurs face an equally dangerous problem: the temptation to take a basic set of assumptions and artificially blow up the numbers to make the business look more attractive and ultimately get the support needed to move forward.\n\nAnd why not? We are passionate. We are committed. We know we can't fail. So what are we waiting for? _Let's go!_\n\nHere's the problem. I've found that most entrepreneurs change their business model about six times when working through the financial section of their plans. While running the numbers, they identify key distinctions with regard to income and expenses. They gain a deeper understanding of what it will take to break even and how to build cash flow. As a result, they are able to come up with better-informed strategies for attaining the desired financial outcomes.\n\nThe most important part of the initial business-planning process, and the one that people most often neglect, involves getting your numbers to tell a story that makes good sense for you and your investors. If you start at the beginning of the plan, then get to the end only to learn that your assumptions about the business and your plan to execute don't pan out, you will need to start over. In the meantime, you've lost valuable time and money.\n\nIn our three-month time frame to launch, we don't have the time for you to make that mistake. Here's what I recommend.\n\n_Start with the last page first_. Once I have a basic understanding of what I'd like to build, I dig right into the numbers. I create a simple one-page spreadsheet that clearly identifies how the money flows. Basically, I write business plans backward. What I have learned is that once you nail a financial model where the numbers tell the story you want, the rest of the plan will write itself.\n\n_Don't wait_. Don't make this process more difficult than it needs to be. Limit your model to one page. Create the simplest, most basic spreadsheet you can that projects income, expenses, breakeven, cash flow, and the capital required to achieve your outcome. Use conservative assumptions and do not rely on best-case scenarios.\n\n_Get out of the office._ You will learn more about your business by getting into the market than you ever will sitting behind a desk. At least 50 percent of your time should be spent outside the office gathering information that can be applied to your plan. That means getting in front of industry insiders to learn more about the market, talking to prospects about their needs, and testing your competition's products and services.\n\n_Be careful whom you listen to._ When we have an idea we passionately believe in, we are convincing. It's easy for our family and friends to say what we want to hear and tell us we have a winner on our hands because they want to be supportive. But when modeling your business, don't focus on the feedback you get from the people closest to you. The people whose feedback matters the most are current and potential customers. Listen to what they have to say. Apply what you learn to your model. Let their direct feedback and not your enthusiasm sway your projections.\n\n_Don't throw out negative feedback._ Sometimes it's difficult for entrepreneurs to listen to negative feedback. Usually they are so close to their projects and have so much on the line, they don't want to hear that their assumptions may be wrong. As a result, they start rejecting, deflecting, and pushing aside feedback that isn't in line with what they believe, instead of using that feedback to their advantage. Honest and educated feedback is like gold. Use it to open up your mind and ask tough questions about your assumptions. You must be obsessively committed to taking in this feedback and asking what you can learn from it and how you can apply it.\n\nThis is especially important for people entering new markets where they don't have prior experience. Getting feedback from others who have lived in the space will add to your perspective. Sometimes you will learn that there are things that you can't see as a newcomer that would significantly impact your financial results.\n\n_Be open to what the numbers tell you._ The worst thing that you can do is try to manipulate a model to match your initial assumptions. You need to approach your financial model with a completely open mind. Recognize that it will probably take longer than you initially thought to get to market, generate revenues, create profits, and accumulate the cash you need to further invest in the business. The odds are that, by being open, you will be able to make good decisions, apply them to your business, and set yourself on a path to success.\n\n### The One-Page Plan\n\nIf we're going to market in ninety days, we simply don't have time for a ninety-page plan. I like beautiful charts and graphs as much as the next entrepreneur, but frankly, we don't have the bandwidth to focus on that much information\u2014and neither do your potential investors, partners, and team members. As President Ronald Reagan used to tell his staff, \"Give me everything I need to know, but keep it to one page.\"\n\nOnce you've created a sound financial model, what you need to top it off is a one-page \"executive summary\" that clearly describes your business.\n\nAn executive summary is one of the most valuable tools for both entrepreneurs and managers inside big organizations. It should highlight the company's or project's team, mission, market served, target customer, problem being solved, unique value proposition, competitive environment, financial assumptions, exit strategy, and return on investment.\n\nThis document should be clear and easy to read. The executive summary should be shared with your team to ensure that everyone in your fast-moving start-up is headed in the same direction. This summary can also be given to potential investors, partners, and customers to draw interest. And yes, you do need to keep it all on one page.\n\nMany people have said to me, \"But I need more space!\" My response? \"If you can't explain what you want to do in a few sentences, then you don't really understand your business.\" And by the way, nobody else will, either.\n\nI didn't say this would be easy. In fact, when you ask most entrepreneurs to summarize their business in a sentence, on a single page, or in a PowerPoint deck, they can't do it. Instead they ramble on and on. In the real world, giving potential investors too much is the same as giving them nothing at all. They'll throw your plan right in the trash.\n\nThat's why this tool is so valuable. It provides focus for you, your team, and anyone else who touches the business. When you get in front of your target investor, you will be prepared and you will be different. In today's world, that's what you need to stand out and get the deal done.\n\n### An Expensive Hobby\n\nEven before launch, you need to plot an exit strategy. It's a very important step that too many founders skip. They either are too eager to get started, firmly believe they would never sell, or are concerned that focusing on an exit so early in the company's life cycle would just be a distraction. Let me give you three reasons why _now_ is the right time to begin thinking about an exit.\n\nFirst, your investors want to know how they will make money and get a good return on their investment. Will it be from an IPO or sale? If your plan is to sell, who will buy you? Why will they buy your business? How will they value the company? Can you point to comparable purchases to support your case?\n\nSecond, planning an exit will provide a logical way for you to think strategically about your business. For example, what does your target buyer need that your business can provide (such as sales, new customers, new products, or new markets)? What metrics would they use when evaluating the strength of your business, such as revenue, gross profit, net profit, or EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization)? Who in those organizations buys companies, and how can you be proactive and build relationships? The answers to these questions could have a big impact on the company in terms of its plans, partnerships, and overall strategy.\n\nThird, at some point you may just need or want to get out. Even if you self-finance or think you will never sell, many reasons could surface that change your thinking. You may at some point decide it's time to cash out. You may feel burned out or just get the urge to do something else. Sometimes business goes sideways or a major change in your personal life makes a quick sale necessary. As a result, I recommend that entrepreneurs have at least two escape hatches or exit scenarios planned in the event they need them.\n\nFinally, consider this: A business without an exit plan is an incredibly expensive hobby. If you're looking to do something for escape or relaxation, starting a new business is not the right move. I recommend fishing instead.\n\nBelow are a few ideas to consider when thinking through your exit strategy in the early days of your business. They can be\u2014and should be\u2014considered simultaneously with your launch.\n\n_Create deep relationships._ Businesses are bought and not sold. The best acquisitions at the highest returns typically come as the result of long-standing relationships or strategic partnerships. These give buyers the opportunity to get to know you and your business and you the opportunity to sell yourself to them.\n\n_Keep your house in order._ You should always keep your financials and other business documents up to date and filed in an organized manner. When the time comes to sell, you will need clean financials to attract buyers and the highest valuations. If your back office runs well, that will instill confidence and make the selling process move faster. Plan and execute from the beginning.\n\n_Get back to work!_ Now that we've had this conversation, stop focusing on your billion-dollar exit and put all your energy back into focusing on serving your customer. Go build a great business and the rest will fall right into place.\n\n### Not Every Problem Is Made to Be Solved\n\nLike many entrepreneurs, I constantly survey the landscape and keep my eye out for opportunities. A few years ago I spotted one. At least I thought I did.\n\nHaving made some good money in my Silicon Valley years, I wanted to reinvest part of my capital into something that would generate passive income. The answer, my new Big Idea, was _self-storage._\n\nI did some homework and found there were about forty thousand self-storage facilities in the United States. But the key fact that really got me excited was that the biggest owner, Public Storage, controlled just _3 percent_ of the market. To me this spelled opportunity, the chance to develop a national brand, roll up the market through acquisitions, and create efficiencies through scale.\n\nIt didn't quite work out that way. Instead, I learned an important lesson: If a problem looks obvious but hasn't yet been solved, there may be a good reason. In the case of self-storage, the problem proved to be that 95 percent of the self-storage facilities were mom-and-pop businesses. These family operations typically consisted of only one facility, and often the owners lived on the premises. At some their kids worked the storefront. Why would they sell if their whole way of life revolved around the business? If they could be persuaded to sell, how hard would it be to get them to make the decision?\n\nAnother problem surfaced too. Once you get the couple who owns the business to move away, you're faced with a new challenge, because then you need to hire someone else to manage and watch the business. You also need to pay that person, an expense that the mom-and-pop managers didn't have because they were operating it themselves. The level of effort, time, and money it would have taken me to acquire hundreds, if not thousands, of family businesses and then rebrand them just didn't make business sense. I could spend a fraction of the energy it would take in another business and likely have better results.\n\nAfter investing lots of time and money working on what I had thought was an obvious winner, I realized that because of my lack of experience in the industry, I hadn't understood certain mechanics of the business.\n\nThis doesn't mean there were not opportunities to build great companies in self-storage. The people who had succeeded already knew that you could not grow quickly through acquisition, so they had developed portfolios from the ground up and worked to build regional rather than national brands. When one of their portfolios came up for sale, they were prime targets for acquisition with very high values.\n\nThere's a larger conclusion to be reached from this experience too, one that you should consider. For generations entrepreneurs have fallen into the trap of thinking that all businesses and industries are pretty much the same. Some think that just because they've been successful in one industry, it will be easy to duplicate their success in a new industry, that one model suits all.\n\nThat can be true, of course, but never forget that every industry has its own character and that business cycles change. No two moments nor any two opportunities are identical. No matter how much you think you know or how good your business acumen, _always_ walk into a new industry with a beginner's mind: open to learn. Do your homework and talk to lots of people before you plunge in. That means talking with people who are very close to the industry to help you understand the nuances of that particular business. It means poring over every piece of material you can find in a search for other companies that either are executing or have attempted to execute the model you are contemplating.\n\nIf you find there is a high failure rate, don't fool yourself into thinking your model is that much different or your team is that much smarter than others. Instead pause, take a deep breath, and learn everything you can about the companies that came before you.\n\nYou should also allow other people to weigh in on your plan, provided they have the background and experience to be worthy advisers. Be conscious of the difference between _opinion_ and _counsel_. Opinions come from people who have no firsthand knowledge of something. Counsel comes from people who have direct personal experience in the area where you need guidance. Sound business planning requires input from the latter. Finally, take a good look at your timing. I've learned that it's better to have a terrible idea in a good market than a great idea at the wrong time.\n\nNot all business problems are made to be solved. If you look at a market, see a problem, and conceive of a great solution, there may just be a good reason nobody else has \"solved it.\" There could be something about the market or the specific industry that makes it a poor fit for what you want to introduce. That possibility makes doing your market research more than a matter of reading a book or a report. It means getting away from your desk and talking to people in the industry. It's seeking expert counsel every step of the way. Coming into an unfamiliar industry with fresh eyes can sometimes work\u2014there's no question about that\u2014especially if you're seeking to apply new technology to an old business. But beware: You may end up paying a high price to educate yourself.\n\nEntrepreneurs can't take shortcuts. You need to build a solid plan, strategy, and financial model that support your goals. You need to do this _before_ you start building your new business, product, or service. This critical step will help to mitigate risk. Unfortunately, too many entrepreneurs, in their excitement to get started, skip right over the planning stage. The business gets off on the wrong foot, and they have to go back and correct all their mistakes, which costs them valuable time and money.\n\nRemember, the best shortcut is taking a long-term view.\n\n## CHAPTER 5.\n\n## SECURING YOUR CREW\n\nFive guys working on the court together can achieve more than five talented individuals who come and go as individuals.\n\n\u2014KAREEM ABDUL JABBAR\n\n### Broke or Billions?\n\nTwo friends of mine, born in the same place, work in the fashion industry. Over the years, each has gained access to very similar resources. Both have charismatic personalities and are natural leaders. Yet one of these women constantly struggles\u2014her business is broke and may have to close its doors\u2014while the other's is now worth over a billion dollars.\n\nThe obvious question: With so much in common, what's the difference?\n\nThe short answer is that the successful entrepreneur had great self-awareness. She recognized early on what she did well and, just as important, where she needed help. She knew from the start to build a team with the right skills around her and then to get out of their way. This strategy allowed her to work her strengths and to hire her weaknesses. Her key tactic\u2014and it's a good one\u2014is to find people who _play_ doing the things she considers _work_.\n\nIn effect, she fired herself as CEO, putting in place someone else with a track record of successfully building companies like the one she wanted to create. This allowed her to focus on product development, the work she does best and enjoys most. The company thrived.\n\nIn contrast, the struggling entrepreneur did two things wrong. First, she tried to do everything she could herself, from scheduling meetings to going on sales calls to making the product and shipping it to her customers. She was always so busy working _in_ the business that she had no time to do work _on_ the business. Second, she put herself in the wrong role. Although she too was miscast as a CEO, she didn't have the insight to hand off the executive responsibilities.\n\nAn important element of a successful launch is to build the right team around you. What do you need to know about yourself and your potential crew to get you from idea to market in ninety days?\n\n_Work your strengths; hire your weaknesses._ One of the best qualities an entrepreneur can exhibit is self-awareness. Know yourself. Are you a visionary? Do you like to take risks? Are you better at setting up systems and managing day-to-day operations than at thinking big? Is there a specific skill (such as sales, marketing, or product development) where you excel? Get clear about who you are and how you can help the organization most, and then focus on filling the gaps by putting the right people around you.\n\nSometimes entrepreneurs, perhaps out of pride, find it difficult to put someone else in the role of CEO. The same hesitation may also apply to other leadership roles. My advice? _Get over it._ This kind of limited thinking will only obstruct your path to your success.\n\nAim to hire people more qualified and smarter than you are in functional areas, and give them the tools they need to succeed. By the way, assigning somebody else a major role in the company doesn't mean you have to give up your influence in or ownership of the company. When your role is in perfect alignment with who you are, you will be able to contribute more and really enjoy what you are doing in the process.\n\nLook at the histories of other companies. The most successful ones were typically started by people who brought in others very early in the companies' life cycles to raise their performance.\n\nWhen Sara Blakely got started, she worked on Spanx at night, filling orders from home and personally going into stores to rearrange product displays. Later, as the business grew, she recognized that at heart she's a visionary rather than a CEO. So she hired a woman with ten years of experience running a licensing division at Coca-Cola to run day-to-day operations at Spanx. She played to her strengths, hiring to cover her weaknesses.\n\nSergey Brin and Larry Page, the creative geniuses behind Google, fired themselves as CEOs and hired an experienced executive, Eric Schmidt, to run the company. Schmidt helped engineer its exponential growth while Brin and Page kept doing what they did best.\n\n_Be ready to substitute players._ As a company grows, people who excelled early on may no longer be the right fit. One manager may be great at taking a product to market but not seem to know how to grow the business beyond a certain point. I've seen people who perform brilliantly at one level but don't know how to shift gears to get the company to the next one; they're great at taking a business to a million or even ten million dollars in sales, but not to a hundred. That's not surprising, because a different set of skills is required to get the company to each new level. It's your job to make sure you always have the right people in the right places at the right time in your company's life cycle.\n\nAt launch one key thing to consider is that employees, partners, and contractors need to be comfortable working in fast-paced, resource-constrained environments where they will likely be asked to juggle multiple tasks. Also, because launching is so time consuming, you must be sure the people on your team do not have any other major obligations during the critical go-to-market period.\n\nBring in the right people, give them all the tools they need to succeed, and then get out of their way. Leverage your strengths and spend your days doing the work you enjoy most. This could be the difference between going broke and building a billion-dollar business.\n\nHOW CAN YOU CONTRIBUTE MOST TO YOUR COMPANY?\n\nThe first step in building a great team is having a clear understanding of your strengths and weaknesses and then filling in the gaps. In other words, fire yourself from a job that does not fit you best and rehire yourself in a position where you can contribute most. Which label below best describes you?\n\n**Visionary:** You love dreaming big and getting people inspired, but you're just not passionate about taking risk and being in charge of the day-to-day execution. If this sounds familiar, you should look for someone who can bring your vision to life.\n\n**Entrepreneur:** You are a risk taker. You have vision, you think big, but you also like the idea of rolling up your sleeves and building a business. You thrive in fast-paced environments and like handling multiple responsibilities. You're comfortable with limited resources and can multitask like crazy.\n\n**Manager:** You are not a wild-eyed visionary and you don't want to take on all that risk. You like to add structure to an organization in order to achieve its goals. You enjoy overseeing a team, building systems and best practices. You pay attention to data, details, and key business metrics. You feel most comfortable in a more stable environment and when executing.\n\n**Sharpshooter:** You have a craft, a unique skill, or a basic knack for doing great things in a particular area. Perhaps you are an artist or salesperson. Do you excel at writing code? Have you mastered a skill that you just love to exercise? You may be less interested in being a CEO or manager because it would get in the way of your working on the things you enjoy most.\n\n### Your Role as Flight Commander\n\nI often ask entrepreneur CEOs and corporate managers the following question: What is your responsibility as the person in charge of running your business?\n\nThis is often met with a blank stare. Other times I get a vague response, something like, \"Well, I do a lot of things. I guess my job is to keep the company or project moving forward.\"\n\nThose are not useful answers. It's no wonder that many entrepreneur CEOs just wander from one crisis to the next without any real thought about how to proactively drive the company forward.\n\nBefore you assemble your team, the first thing you must do is get absolutely clear on what your role and day-to-day responsibilities will be leading the company. You need to figure this out early. Knowing what to focus on will also help ensure you're not spending your time in other people's business and getting in the way of their doing their jobs.\n\nEvery CEO is different, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from the best. That brings me to my old friend Mark Moses. He is the entrepreneur CEO that I look up to most.\n\nMark is just a little bit competitive. On personality tests he rates as a \"super achiever.\" His life story reinforces the picture. Driven to succeed no matter the cost, he founded several successful companies; the last one, Platinum Capital, became a billion-dollar business. Then, after \"retiring\" at the ripe old age of forty, he threw himself into Ironman triathlons. He's competed in eleven of those, even breaking the eleven-hour mark, which is pretty awesome for the Ironman distance.\n\nBut let's go back in time. As a college kid in Canada, he started a company called Student Painters. In his _first summer_ with the business, Mark did $70,000 in sales and made an $18,000 profit, impressive indeed in an era when college tuition topped out around $5,000. The next summer he did $120,000 in sales and cleared $35,000. \"I thought maybe I didn't want to be an accountant after all,\" Mark remembers.\n\nMark knew his results were good, but he decided to see what would happen if he went out and hired talented people, taught them how to model the system he'd built, and helped them to grow prosperous businesses for themselves. In return he would get a small cut. With that in mind, he packed up a U-Haul and headed for California. There he eventually grew Student Painters to 250 branches with three thousand guys and gals armed with paint brushes. I was one of those painters. I became friends with Mark as a college freshman when I opened a branch for him in San Diego.\n\nAfter four years in the business, he sold Student Painters for millions of dollars. Next Mark went into the mortgage-banking business. He kept building the business, but in 1997 he set himself\u2014and his company, Platinum Capital\u2014a new goal of lifting sales over a billion dollars. To kick off the crusade he rented a two-ton elephant and rode it into the annual company meeting. He told his people, \"If we think big and act big, we will be big. Let's do a billion dollars!\"\n\nOvernight the elephant became\u2014and remained\u2014the symbol of the company. The very next day employees started bringing in elephant objects: paperweights, pictures, posters, and stuffed animals. By creating and reinforcing this shared vision, Mark created a rock-star culture. \"People knew us as the elephant company,\" Mark says. \"I was the elephant guy.\"\n\nBut Mark's ride in the mortgage business turned out to exemplify the ups and downs of entrepreneurship that every one of us faces. In 1998, when the Asian flu hit and lending dried up overnight, Mark was forced to lay off 230 employees. In 2000 his business was a day away from bankruptcy, until an angel investor stepped in and loaned the company the necessary capital it needed to keep its doors open. Mark then turned the company around, building a $1.6 billion, 550-employee business. Finally, in 2006, he sold Platinum Capital. Today Mark is a coach for CEOs and entrepreneurs. He teaches them how to figure out where they want to go, helps them build a plan to get there, and holds them accountable for execution along the way.\n\nWhat I particularly respect about Mark is his ability to cut through the garbage and tell it like it is. One concept he works really hard to teach his CEO clients is the central role of the entrepreneur CEO. Having run and invested in quite a few businesses ranging from a painting company to a large lender, his view may be surprising to you: He sees the job of the leader as very similar, whatever the business.\n\nBeing the head decision maker is just the start. With a thank-you to Mark, then, I want to share some of the most important parts of your day-to-day job description.\n\n_The CEO is responsible for the vision and the direction of the company._ This seems straightforward enough, but it's more complicated than it sounds. When I ask CEOs where their company will be three years from now, fewer than one in ten has a good answer. This is inexcusable.\n\nYou have to look at the horizon and know where you want to take your company. This kind of vision differs from a goal on your mission statement; your vision is a measurable three-, five-, or ten-year view of where you want to be. I recommend starting with the sales and profits you hope to achieve and then working backward to see what it will take to make those happen. You need clear drivers, processes, and a form of accountability to manage your company's progress toward your vision. In short, having a vision is pretty worthless unless you engineer the specifics to achieve it.\n\n_The CEO has the ultimate responsibility for cash._ Wait, you ask, isn't watching the cash the job of the CFO, accountant, or bookkeeper? No.\n\nFor any company, cash and access to cash are the lifeblood, the air you breathe. If you run out of cash, you're done. You'd be surprised at how even a company with high profit margins that is growing quickly can run short of cash. The reason for this, says Mark Moses, is that \"growth eats cash.\" You may have to use up cash to add to your working capital or to build up inventory or to finance your accounts receivable. Managing the monetary ebb and flow is ultimately the CEO's responsibility because it is so vital to the health and survival of the business.\n\n_The CEO must ensure that the right people are in the right jobs at the right time._ \"Lots of CEOs fall down on this one,\" says Mark. CEOs may be sentimentally attached to old employees who have been there from the beginning. They refuse to think of letting them go or moving them aside, even if their time of usefulness has passed.\n\nAs the business grows, needs change. The people who got you to one threshold may not be the people you need to take you to the next level. The CEO, hard-hearted though it may seem, has to be dispassionate about hiring and firing. If you can afford only two salespeople, they need to be the two best salespeople you can afford. Some people operate better in start-ups than in more mature environments. Recognize your people's strengths and weaknesses, and don't wait too long to bring in new talent. The wrong people will bring you down.\n\n_The CEO is responsible for key relationships._ The CEO has to \"own\" the key relationships in the company, such as those with bankers, key vendors, the most important customers, and shareholders. Any outsider who wields the power to alter the future of your company\u2014by ordering, selling, lending, whatever\u2014needs access to you (and you to them). You want them to be comfortable calling you up at any hour of the day or night. This is very important because too often business owners hand over these relationships to key employees. But what happens if your employees leave and try to take those accounts with them? You cannot\u2014and should not\u2014keep control of every contact. But know who the key ones are and keep them close.\n\n_The CEO must have processes in place to continue learning._ You did your market research before you started your company, right? Back then you didn't have anything invested. You had nothing on the line. But now that your life and future are tied up in your enterprise, be diligent about keeping up with happenings in your industry, with your competitors, and with your customers.\n\nCircumstances change faster than ever these days, and the annals of recent corporate history are littered with the bones of companies that didn't evolve or adapt fast enough to get out of the way of change. Go to conferences, talk to consultants, and get to know your rivals. Use tools like Google Alerts and LinkedIn to automatically get news of what's happening in your field and outside it. Read trade blogs and e-zines. Look to learn\u2014as well as sell\u2014when you're out there, whether it's one on one or at a convention with thousands. Hire a business coach and put together an advisory board to gain experience from those who can help you.\n\n_The CEO must be a cheerleader._ \"The CEO has to be the chief energizing officer,\" says Mark. He or she must communicate what's going on to the rest of the team, explaining the company's results and getting employees on board with the vision for the future. \"If you want them to buy in to what you're selling, then you have to align their best interests with your best interests,\" Mark insists. Often the best way to do that, he recommends, is through open and engaging communication.\n\nDo you fit the CEO profile? Is this the kind of role you're prepared to play in your company? Are these the things you excel at? In the following pages we'll talk about finding out who you are and what the best role is for you in the business\u2014so you can maximize results and love going to work every day.\n\nTHE COMMANDER'S CHECKLIST\n\n**Vision:** Do you have a clear, specific, and measurable vision?\n\n**Responsible for the Cash:** You can't leave this task entirely to your CFO, accountant, or bookkeeper. It's too important to the company. Always keep an eye on your company's cash.\n\n**People:** You must make sure you have the right people in the right positions at the right times.\n\n**Key Relationships:** What happens if the person you hired to oversee accounts leaves? She probably takes that key relationship with her. You need to own the relationships that are most important to your business.\n\n**Learning:** Work at growing and educating your team. Also, stay on top of the market, competition, and customer needs.\n\n**Cheerleader:** Don't forget, you are the chief energizing officer!\n\n### Three Plays\n\nNow that you've identified the role you will play in your business, the time has come to think about filling in the gaps. Identifying the best players, assigning them to the right positions, and making sure they clearly understand and excel in their roles are critical steps. They're what separate championship organizations from everyone else.\n\nIn the world of the National Football League, Stephen Austin is regarded as the expert of experts, a great evaluator of talent. Over twenty years he built his company, Elite Football Services, into the leading private evaluator of football players in the world. (In 2011, after several hundred players vetted by Austin had been signed with NFL teams, the National Football League bought EFS, making it the league's nationwide producer of combine showcase events.) Stephen's systems are so effective that they have been emulated by the top sports organizations all over the world. The U.S. Navy SEALs have even enlisted his help in finding the next generation of supreme warriors.\n\nI asked Stephen _,_ \"What is it that separates the best players in the world from everyone else? What is the difference between players like Tom Brady, Jerry Rice, Dick Butkus and everyone else?\" His answer surprised me.\n\nIt all comes down to this, he said: \"Three plays.\"\n\nThat's it.\n\nThree plays per game, the three moments in which a superstar does something just a little different from everyone else.\n\nFor a quarterback like Tom Brady, one of those things might be avoiding a sack. Another could be throwing the ball away instead of risking an interception. The third might be drawing an opposing linebacker offside with a change in cadence. Three things\u2014often three little things\u2014may not seem like a lot, but multiply those three plays per game times sixteen regular-season games, four play-off matchups, and a Super Bowl. That's _sixty-three_ plays a year that the other guy, also a really talented player, didn't make.\n\nStephen explains that you can't tell if a person will make those three plays based on how he performs at the combine. (That means your organization must do its homework.) That's why Stephen's pro scouts watch hours and hours of game tape to understand how their candidate has performed in the past. They spend time getting to really know a player before making a decision to select him, talking to former coaches and teammates, collecting references. Investing the time to gather this kind of intelligence up front is one of the hallmarks of championship organizations.\n\nI've found that one of the biggest mistakes busy entrepreneurs make is failing to invest enough time in learning about job candidates before making the decision to hire someone. Many soon learn that one or two bad hires can really set them back. Finding the right people takes time, but probably half as much time as it takes to unravel the mess that can come with hiring the wrong person, bringing in a replacement, and getting the company back on track. Since you want to find those teammates who can make critical plays for you, here are some steps for hiring well.\n\n_Get clear on what you need._ With only ninety days to launch, you don't have time to waste. So begin with a very clear job description. This will save you more time and energy than anything else and will help produce the best results. The description should include the title, a list of responsibilities, the prior experience required, the functional expertise needed, educational requirements, and how much you're willing to pay (being transparent about money is important to avoid wasting time). The more detailed the profile, the easier you will find it to connect with the person you are looking for. Also, the easier it will be for your network to help you identify the right candidates.\n\nFrom time to time you will need to fill a position for which you don't necessarily know all the day-to-day responsibilities or requirements. When this occurs, most entrepreneurs just try to wing it. Since that typically leads to a company's worst hires, I recommend you take a different approach.\n\nFor example, I once needed to hire someone in finance but I wasn't really sure what title, day-to-day job description, and background best fit my needs. I just knew I needed stuff done, so I reached out to a friend whose job it was to recruit people to fill financial positions in big companies. I shared with her what my business needed. She started by mapping out a finance department's organizational chart. She slotted in positions, including a chief financial officer, vice president, controller, accountant, and bookkeeper. She then provided me with sample job descriptions for each one and overviews of their day-to-day responsibilities, what kind of background I should be looking for in each, and the appropriate stages and times to bring them into my company. What I learned from the experience was that I really needed a controller, so we refined that job description and tailored it to my business, and I sent it out to my network. We made the right hire.\n\nWhere should you start looking for help when making key hires? I recommend talking to board members, investors, and other advisers to begin getting a feel for the position. Next, talk to people in your network already serving in the role you plan to hire. Ideally, they work for companies of similar size and at the same stage. Ask them about their roles, their responsibilities, and how they interact with management and their peers. These people can also offer you valuable referrals.\n\n_Don't talk to just anybody._ When you complete your job description and r\u00e9sum\u00e9s start coming in, make choices. Consider only the people who meet all your important requirements. Especially in the first ninety days, you don't have the time, and your investors won't have the patience, for on-the-job training.\n\n_Test, test, test._ Take the time to really get to know your candidates. Do they match the job description? What do former employers, coworkers, and customers say about them? Have you and you team spent time with them both inside and outside the office?\n\n_Identify fast, test slow._ When possible, start the person as an independent contractor instead of a full-time employee. This is a great opportunity to see the person in action and to watch how he or she works with your team. You can ensure that the fit is right before pulling the trigger to give him or her a full-time job. If it's not possible to start the person as a contractor (he or she is employed full time someplace else, for example), give him or her a simple assignment or project to complete during the interview process. It will help you and your team to understand how the person thinks and executes.\n\n_Never settle._ If you do make the hire and it just doesn't work out, get rid of the person as fast as you can and move on with your business. There are plenty of great people out there. Be patient and wait to get the right one.\n\nHIRE A BUSINESS COACH\n\n**Your Secret Weapon:** Google CEO Eric Schmidt told _Fortune_ magazine that the best business advice he ever got was to hire a coach. A coach is someone who brings out your best by providing counsel, support, feedback, and advice. \"I initially resented the advice, because after all, I was a CEO,\" said Schmidt. \"I was pretty experienced. Why would I need a coach? Am I doing something wrong? My argument was, How could a coach advise me if I'm the best person in the world at this? But that's not what a coach does. The coach doesn't have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best.\"\n\n**Don't Reinvent the Wheel** **:** Remember, there are two paths to success: You can figure it out on your own through trial and error, wasting valuable time and money. Or you can find coaches and role models and advisers who have walked this path already and can show you the way.\n\n### The Perfect Marriage?\n\nThink of the greatest partnerships of our time: Lennon and McCartney. Jobs and Wozniak. Gates and Allen. Ben and Jerry. Jagger and Richards. Hewlett and Packard. Half ended in divorce. Half lasted a lifetime.\n\nA business partnership is a lot like a marriage. It's an everyday commitment, and in the early stages of a new venture you will probably spend more time with your business partner than with anyone else.\n\nPotentially the most important decision you will make in these early days is whether or not to bring in partners to be coowners alongside you. If you do choose to go that route, you need to give as much thought to whom you take on as a business partner as you did to whether or not to marry your spouse. It's that big a deal.\n\nSome partners seem to have been made for each other.\n\nA man named Irv Robbins grew up working in his father's ice-cream shop. Irv's brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, also knew ice cream pretty well; he had enjoyed making it for the troops while serving as a lieutenant in the navy during World War II.\n\nAfter the war, Robbins started Snowbird Ice Cream in Glendale, California. Baskin, who had married Robbins's sister Shirley before the war, ran a menswear shop in Chicago. When he and Shirley moved to LA, Robbins convinced Baskin that selling ice cream would be more fun than selling clothes. Baskin agreed and decided to open his own ice-cream store.\n\nAs Robbins once told a newspaper reporter: \"I was about to sign a lease on a store in Pasadena, and I said, 'You take it. You go into the ice cream business and do the same thing I'm doing. And as soon as we have enough stores open, we can open up a little ice cream factory.'\"\n\nSo two people in the same family opened two ice-cream stores in the same neighborhood. They decided to compete rather than becoming partners because both felt that if, as capable entrepreneurs, they joined forces, the compromises required of a joint business venture might get in the way of their creative ideas.\n\nOver the next few years, however, as each built a successful business, Baskin and Robbins started to recognize that there might be significant benefits in banding together rather than competing against each other. They shared a similar vision. They agreed wholeheartedly to sell nothing but ice cream but make lots of different flavors. They also realized they had complementary skill sets, as one excelled in operations and the other in sales and marketing. They both had unique business networks that, put together, would enable them to reach out further and faster when trying to grow.\n\nThey decided to become business partners in their new ice-cream venture and selected the order of the names of their new company, Baskin-Robbins, with a coin toss.\n\nThey also created one of the great retail concepts of the past century: franchising. Because they both were well versed in what it meant to operate a store and understood the pride of ownership, they determined that the best way to grow was to find managers who wanted to buy a piece of the business. Baskin-Robbins became what is believed to be the first restaurant chain to franchise its outlets. Within five years it had forty shops in Southern California; soon after, it trademarked its 31 Flavors concept. Today Baskin-Robbins has more than 2,800 shops in the United States and 5,000 worldwide.\n\nThere's no single model for partnerships, but the Baskin-Robbins story is a great example of how, with a shared vision, similar temperaments, complementary skill sets, nonoverlapping networks, and hard work, partnerships can succeed.\n\nIn you're thinking about seeking a partner to join in your business, be sure to consider these issues:\n\n_Vision_. You and your partner must share a common vision. You need to be on the same page, running in the same direction and toward the same goal.\n\n_Temperament_. Oftentimes one partner is a natural leader while the other is more of a functional expert. New enterprises require a balance of both energies.\n\n_Complementary skill sets_. Each partner should be able to make a unique contribution to the business. This will help the new venture to move further faster and with less capital required.\n\nComplementary skill sets are also important because they help create clarity with regard to roles and responsibilities. For example, a great salesperson together with a great Web developer could make a powerful combination. But let's say a business is started by two powerhouse marketing experts. Odds are they will argue over roles, responsibilities, and decision-making power because their skills overlap.\n\nFinally, investors prefer to see founding teams with two to three people who each bring something different to the table. Otherwise they feel like they are spending their money to pay for the same position twice.\n\n_Nonoverlapping networks_. Each partner should have a unique network of relationships that the company can draw upon.\n\nPUT IT ON PAPER NOW!\n\nLike marriage, not all partnerships work out: Many end in divorce. That makes the business equivalent of a prenuptial agreement essential. It must be in writing and reviewed by your attorneys. At the very least it should address the following issues:\n\n**Ownership** **:** Who owns what percentage of the company's equity?\n\n**Financial Commitment** **:** What will each one of you put into the company? If more capital is needed, what's expected of each of you? Is the company financially responsible for contracts and accounts, or are you responsible as individuals?\n\n**Time Commitment** **:** How much time and effort will each side give to the company? If you're not expected to give evenly of your time and effort, then adjustments should be made in terms of ownership and compensation.\n\n**Cash Compensation** **:** How much do you get and when will you get it? Is it based on hitting certain milestones or on hours spent on the business? Will compensation be in the form of salary or distributions? Do you have to take cash, or could you exchange it for more shares instead?\n\n**Expenses** **:** What's your policy on expenses? How much entertaining can you do? Who writes the reimbursement checks?\n\n**Voting Rights:** If one person has more shares, does he make all the rules? If you're fifty-fifty and don't agree on something, what do you do? Do all big decisions need to be unanimous?\n\n**Vesting Schedule** **:** What happens when one partner leaves the business?\n\n**Buyout** **:** Under what circumstances can you sell your interest in the company? Whom can you sell to? What will the terms be? How will the value be calculated? Make sure you have in place a vesting schedule (a simple plan that outlines how and when equity is distributed).\n\nYou must agree up front.\n\n### This Is What You Asked For!\n\nYour company wants to build something. You want to go to market fast. Having managed to scrape together enough money to add a couple full-time employees to your team, you need to launch before your competition catches up. Due to your finite budget and time constraints, the realization dawns: You need to outsource.\n\nToday outsourcing is often a critical part of launching a new business or product, but it's an area where many people fall down.\n\nA few years ago I had started to launch an online marketplace in the health-care industry that would provide seniors with better prices and easier access to a variety of services. I tried hard to assemble a team of developers. I wanted to get something up quickly and test the market response. All the best people I contacted were busy on other projects, so I reached out to a few friends, asking what they would do. One told me that to solve a similar problem, he'd hired a firm in India to build his company's Web site.\n\nI decided to do the same. I contacted the outfit my friend had used and we had a one-hour call to get acquainted. I shared my idea over the phone, and they responded with an overview of how they would execute my vision. We negotiated a price and signed an agreement. I was in business.\n\nA month later I got an e-mail with a link to my new Web site. It was a disaster! The graphic design, the look and feel, the user experience, and the functionality were all wrong. To make matters worse, I had planned to use the site for an investor presentation later that week. Now I would have nothing to show. I was extremely frustrated. I just didn't understand why there was such a big disconnect.\n\nIn outsourcing, I had set aside everything I knew about hiring and running a project. I had given the consultants a general project description, expecting them to fill in the blanks when I hadn't really thought through everything myself. I had put my entire business in their hands instead of just giving them one product or feature as a test. I hadn't checked in along the way, so the first thing I had seen was their finished product. As a result, I had had no idea they were on the wrong track. Because I had been so vague with regard to what I wanted, they had been forced to make decisions for me. While some were good, most went against my vision for the product.\n\nWhen I told them how upset I was and asked them to explain themselves, they said, \"This is _exactly_ what you asked for!\" And frankly, they were right.\n\nHow do you avoid some of the common pitfalls in outsourcing?\n\n_Be disciplined._ It doesn't matter if your consultant is an overseas developer or someone right across the street. The same rules apply as far as clearly communicating your expectations.\n\n_Hire right._ Do not take anyone's word for work quality. Operate with the same amount of diligence you would when making full-time hires. Check references to get a better picture of past performance. Agree upon a very clear job description and, if possible, run a test by executing a small project together before handing over too much responsibility. If you're not getting what you want, don't waste time. Cut your losses and move on.\n\nEven if a consultant is recommended by valued friends, use caution. I've found that most people are not very careful when referring consultants, who may be between gigs, out of work, or juggling lots of projects. Some are friends of the people making the referral and the favor is being done for them, not you. Or the referrer knows them socially rather than from a business relationship.\n\n_Provide very clear direction._ If you paint an incomplete picture of your intended outcome, you'll get something that only vaguely resembles what you had in mind.\n\nMany entrepreneurs have a vision with no concrete idea of how to execute, so they hand the job over to someone else, expecting that person to magically fill in the blanks. With a full-time employee, that may work. Your staff can plug in details; that's one of the things you hired them to do. And since they are right there in the office, you can exercise some direct control. This gives your team the benefit of receiving feedback every single day.\n\nConsultants, on the other hand, are typically not in the office, so they are not as in sync with the day-to-day business. As a result, they can't fill in certain gaps in the direction they are given. Therefore, in most cases they do only what they are told. That's usually a good thing, because if they start getting creative, they could take the project in the wrong direction. Therefore, you have to work twice as hard with consultants to make sure you provide excellent direction, management, and oversight. I always recommend that a company have its best manager oversee all consultants during the launch period.\n\n_Use examples._ When dealing with consultants, it may be helpful to find examples of other products, services, features, etc. that you want to use as models in order to translate your vision into something tangible that others can easily grasp.\n\nFor example, if you are developing an e-commerce site, what is the specific desired user experience? What are the steps in the buying process? How do you picture that in your mind? The clearer you can be, the more likely you are to get the result you want. Point consultants to two or three comparable Web sites you like that they can use as models or guides when building yours.\n\n_Check in regularly._ Create a regular schedule for checking in with your consultant and providing feedback. The more often you provide feedback, the happier you will be with the end product.\n\n_Manage against clear deliverables._ It is important to specify key milestones and delivery dates. That keeps both sides honest and up-to-date, helping to ensure the contractor is making progress.\n\n_Pay based on performance._ Sometimes the supplier will want everything up front or payment at regular intervals, but a better approach is to pay based on performance. What you see is what you pay for.\n\n_Take responsibility._ If your first reaction on seeing your product is, _Hey, this isn't what I intended,_ that's not the end of the world\u2014and another reason why we only build one thing at a time. Don't take your disappointment out on your contractor: How much of the fault was yours for not being clear or for not checking in? You may decide after seeing a prototype that in fact you want something different altogether. Instead of losing your temper, outline what you like and what you would like to improve. Communicate this feedback in a constructive way.\n\nAlthough the inspiration, the initial hard work, and the passion for your Big Idea may rest solely with you, the entrepreneur, you cannot overestimate the importance of having the right team in place. Spending time and energy on hiring the right people (and quickly letting go of the ones who don't work out) can truly make the difference between a business that launches successfully in ninety days and one that never gets off the ground.\n\n## CHAPTER 6.\n\n## UNLOCKING CREATIVITY\n\nThe problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.\n\n\u2014CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW, _PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN_\n\n### Torn Carpet, Chipped Paint\n\nIn the middle of the dot-com boom, the market was hot. Companies were springing out of the ground almost overnight, and I was getting calls every day to help them launch.\n\nIn 1998 I decided to test the job market and had a series of interviews in Silicon Valley. I remember walking into beautiful lobbies with expensive furniture. People were moving around the office on scooters, and one company even had a slide in the middle of its workspace. All these companies were trying to sell their cool cultures.\n\nI was about to take a job offer when a good friend from my days at Quote.com, Russell Hyzen, gave me a call. He had gone off to become the first employee at Xoom.com, an online community and e-commerce business. It was looking to fill a role, and he knew I was in the market.\n\nWhen I arrived for my interview, I found that Xoom's offices were in a beautiful landmark building off California Street in downtown San Francisco. But inside? I almost fell over when I saw the torn green carpet and the chipped paint falling off the walls.\n\nThere was no receptionist. Instead, Chris Kitze, the company's founder and CEO, had an office near the front door. He was the first person to greet people as they walked in.\n\nI soon learned that Chris had a vision, one that became a shared vision of everyone he brought into the company. He hired the best people, gave them access to the resources they needed\u2014and then got out of their way. He was absolutely committed to seeing everyone on the team win: If the company made money, they would too.\n\nWhen I talked to the team, there was a pride of ownership that I hadn't seen anywhere else, and a common purpose and community that wasn't present in the fancier offices. I could see why many of the people I met at Xoom had followed Chris from one company to another.\n\nThe company had money, so I had to ask: _Why the torn carpet and the chipped paint?_ \"That's not important,\" Chris said _._ As an owner, he believed the best use of funds was to invest the money back into the company, into hiring the best people, into building a great business. If he did that, the rest would take care of itself.\n\nUnlikely as it may seem, that torn carpet and chipped paint became a symbol of pride everyone shared within the organization. It is part of what got me to join the company, and our team built a great business, took it public, and eventually merged with NBC to create NBC Internet.\n\nThe culture didn't stop at pride of ownership. It was also sales driven. Everyone knew our number one goal was to generate revenues. We knew that without cash coming in the door, we had no business. Chris set the tone, signing all his e-mails with the tagline \"Go Sell Something.\" Every day, in every e-mail, those words reinforced the focus, and not just with salespeople. Everybody in the company came to think of himself or herself as a salesperson, which meant he or she approached problems and the product in a way that was very customer-centric.\n\nSoon after I arrived, I saw how valuable the sales-driven culture could be. Times got tough in the second half of 1998. I returned from a vacation to find the stock market going sideways. As a result, we lost the investment bank that we had thought would take us public. We were nearly out of cash, but Chris's culture saved us. Even though many of the most talented people could easily have found great jobs at other companies in those days of the Internet boom, nobody jumped ship. We had a sense of community and knew we could sell our way out of any problem by generating the cash we needed to get through it.\n\nWhat are the key factors in creating a great culture for your new business?\n\n_Establish a clear vision._ That way everyone runs in the same direction. How do you create a clear vision? Ask yourself this question: _Where do we want to go?_\n\nThe answer should be a clear description of what you would like to achieve over a specific period of time. This creates a framework for the company and serves as a guide for choosing current and future courses of action.\n\nA vision statement is different from a mission statement. A vision statement answers the question \"Where do we want to go?\" A mission statement answers the question \"Why do we exist?\" A vision statement is shared within the company. The mission statement is shared with the outside world.\n\n_Hire great people and give them access to resources._ Invest money in great people. Give them access to all the resources they need. Help them solve problems and remove roadblocks so they can do their jobs. Then get out of their way.\n\n_Be absolutely committed to seeing everyone on the team win._ From the top down, everyone must be committed to seeing the team as a whole win. As an entrepreneur (and the person taking on most of the risk), you are certainly entitled to earn more in the long run than anyone else. But shared ownership, structured in the right way, in which everyone knows their role and the impact they are having on results, creates a culture that can't be beat.\n\nThat may sound like a simple recipe, but too many companies fall short of it, and as a result they don't succeed at the level they should. And this isn't about getting one of these things right. As a leader you need to be committed to all of them. If you are, you will significantly increase your chance of success.\n\n### Vegas and Video Games\n\nBuilding a culture of teamwork is only one part of the equation. You also need to build a culture of innovation. How do you inspire people to open their minds in a way that unlocks creativity within your organization and achieves the best results? Let me share a story about how a former colleague named Ed attained legendary status for his ability to unlock creativity ( _and_ have a great time in the process).\n\nEd's goal was to change the way that products were marketed in his client's business. He saw that everyone in the industry had been speaking to customers in the same old way for years. So he decided to turn things on their head. He needed to unlock his team's creativity, and to do so he made a pretty radical move: He took the whole creative and account team to Las Vegas.\n\nHe told them almost nothing about what he had planned for the trip.\n\nOn day one the team arrived and partied, going to the best restaurants and clubs and doing some gambling. Some of the crew stayed up all night. No work got done.\n\nOn day two Ed told his people there was nothing on the agenda other than having more fun. So they did more of the same: eating, drinking, gambling, clubbing.\n\nDay three? Still no agenda. Nothing. So they went at it again: best restaurants, best clubs, a nonstop party.\n\nOn morning number four, Ed's tone changed. Over the past few days, he had helped his team leave their lives, stresses, and responsibilities behind. Now he wanted something from them. He gathered the group and told them, \"We have a mission. Our mission is to revolutionize the way products are marketed and sold in our industry. We need to be creative, different, and unique. We need to appeal to our client's core young male audience\u2014and they play lots of video games.\"\n\nWhile Ed was speaking, video-game systems were being installed in each team member's room. For the next two days, he instructed, they were not to leave their hotel rooms: Their job had become to play video games. That was it! They were supposed to think about the whole experience of playing a game, including the graphics, the sounds, and the characters that appealed to the target audience. He wanted them to consider how game designers presented content, how they manipulated the look and feel of the product for the customer. He asked them to pay attention to the scoreboards, the sound effects, and every other little trick the gamers had devised. Most of all, he wanted his team to think about how his client could build upon video-game innovations to make its real-life products win a new generation of customers.\n\nAfter three glorious days in the sun, his team wasted no time in unleashing their creativity and creating a variety of innovations that turned their client's industry upside down!\n\nCould Ed's team have accomplished the same results playing games back in their offices in Los Angeles? I doubt it. By taking his team to Las Vegas, he shifted them from _work_ mode to _play_ mode. He put people together who normally did not have much time to interact in a fun, social setting. The days of partying in Las Vegas brought them closer, building camaraderie and a sense of teamwork. Two guys in a hotel room playing a video game see their jobs differently from how they would seated in adjacent cubicles, looking at their computers.\n\nNow I'm not saying you need to take your team to Vegas (or anywhere else) for a week. But to foster creative teamwork, you need to find a way to get them out of the office mind-set and open their minds. You need to tap the genius within each of them and do so on a regular basis. Being creative applies to all aspects of your business, from building something cool to breaking down barriers when trying to sell your product.\n\nPart of Ed's legacy is that creativity has become an essential part of the culture at his company. They are still thinking outside the box, still building great products. You can too, with the following recommendations.\n\n_Bring groups together_. When you are launching a new business or product, team members are busy. All of them have their heads down, focused on what they are responsible for. Most of their time is spent working with other people in their department, meaning business, creative, and technical people don't get much time to interact. There are ways to change that.\n\nAt Xoom we had pizza and beer at three o'clock every Friday afternoon. People from different groups got to meet and interact in a social environment. As the company grew, those Friday afternoons offered an opportunity to meet new team members, and together we evolved a shared vision of the company. Even if people with different responsibilities looked at the company in different ways, over beer and pizza we came up with some of our best and most creative\u2014and collaborative\u2014ideas.\n\n_Encourage risk._ You win some, you lose some. But people always need to be encouraged to take risk. They need to know that even if something does not work, if risk has been mitigated the experience is a valuable part of growing a business. The best way to do this is to make lots of small bets. That way, if something does not work, there is no threat or concern that it will put the entire operation or the person's job at risk.\n\n_Get out regularly._ Do something outside the office at least once a quarter. The activity doesn't have to be expensive or extravagant. You might schedule a happy hour, miniature golf, or go-cart racing. Whatever it is, getting people to engage in a new setting can build relationships and inspire creativity.\n\nOnce you've developed a sound business plan, put the right people in place to execute, and created a culture that encourages openness, innovation, and risk taking, you will have built a great foundation for the business to succeed. You will also be in a position to move to the next step in the process: raising capital.\n\nOPENING MINDS\n\n**Combine Business with Pleasure:** Take your workers out to play\u2014to the ballpark, to karaoke, for a brainstorming session over beers. Bring pizza into the office on Friday afternoons. Do something different on a regular basis. Getting your employees out of their comfort zones and interacting with one another can open their eyes to new possibilities.\n\n**Encourage Experimentation** **:** Declare that for a few hours every month no one is allowed to use their computer or their smart phone. In place of screens, issue every employee a notebook and ask them to spend the time writing, sketching, and diagramming their thoughts and ideas on how to improve the business and innovate. The shock of putting pen to paper will force them to think in a different way. After the exercise, encourage them to tear pages out of their notebooks and post them on a brainstorming wall.\n\n**Make Small Bets** **:** Encourage your team to experiment with side projects. Many of these will fail, but one of them may turn into your next big idea.\n\n**If Something Doesn't Work, Celebrate the Fact That Your Team Took a Shot** **:** People who are the most successful and creative are the ones who take risks. They tried, they failed, and they learned from their mistakes. Create a culture where taking a shot at something new is celebrated, as long as something is learned.\n\n## CHAPTER 7.\n\n## RAISING CAPITAL\n\nAnd where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy's sleeping? I'm working.\n\n\u2014WILL SMITH\n\n### Trading for Tickets\n\nMost entrepreneurs start businesses from the same place: _nowhere_. Despite beginning with little or nothing, the best of them bootstrap, and through their own sheer will, hard work, and effort they find ways to make things happen. They manage to be resourceful and pull together what their business needs to launch.\n\nAs an entrepreneur you have to figure out ways to keep pushing your business forward, largely by yourself. You have to take whatever you have that is of value and leverage, trade, share, or swap it. That often means that founders of bootstrapping start-ups forgo paychecks, offer their services as consultants, give away early products and services for nothing, and do lots of moonlighting, at least until the new venture generates enough cash to survive on its own.\n\nIntrapreneurs also self-fund, by adding the new project to their existing responsibilities. They effectively take on twice as much work with no additional pay to help get their idea off the ground. They have to become masters of juggling not only their core business but also their new-project responsibilities. Since management does not want to see either one struggle, intrapreneurs take on not only reputation risk but also job-security risk. Only once the new project hits certain milestones may the intrapreneur be able to get more resources for the new project and a bigger paycheck.\n\nBootstrapping is more vital today than ever. Many investors are reluctant to put money into a venture until it is already generating positive cash flow. Compared with the days before the global economic crash of 2008, investors now have far less appetite for risk, meaning most won't reach into their pockets until you've taken your business beyond the early stages and proven your model. As a result, new business owners have to bootstrap longer than they did in the past.\n\nMy first exposure to bootstrapping came compliments of Tony Robbins. I wasn't raising money for a new business, but it sure taught me how to be scrappy. I was twenty-one years old, and my title was \"field sales representative and national sales trainer.\" As an advance man responsible for filling the seats in Robbins's seminars, I would travel with a handful of my peers to a city where Tony was to speak, and we would promote his event. The primary program I sold was called \"Power to Influence,\" and it focused on sales and persuasion.\n\nBefore our team went into the field, we immersed ourselves in the content. We had to be passionate about Tony's message, because our task was to drum up interest and sell tickets for his programs. We spoke to small groups, sometimes five times a day, seven days a week. We'd share a few program highlights, talk about what people would gain by attending, and try to sell as many tickets as we could in order to make big sales commissions.\n\nIn retrospect I realize that this experience not only taught me about sales and persuasion but also gave me a bunch of survival skills that would later come in handy when I became an entrepreneur.\n\nI spent two to three months at a time in cities like Detroit, Toronto, Vancouver, Boston, Houston, Seattle, and Los Angeles. No one on the team collected a salary and we didn't have expense accounts. We paid for our own rental cars. Nobody even had a phone! Basically, we were given a plane ticket, a place to stay, and a couple of initial bookings. After that we had to live off the land.\n\nWe did, however, have something valuable in our pockets: Our currency was tickets to Robbins's events. We learned how to barter tickets and our own speaking and coaching in return for what we needed. This was a key moment in my business education, a sort of Bootstrapping 101.\n\nHere's how it worked. When we got off the plane in a new city, we would decide who was going out in search of what. The first priority was always to get cars and cell phones. We would split up and go to car dealerships, where we would talk general managers into giving us cars for a couple of months. In exchange we'd provide in-house training and give their entire sales teams tickets to one of Tony's events. Same thing at cell-phone stores and gyms. One guy even bartered for time at a tanning salon.\n\nLike a pack of lions hunting, we had to work together as a team. We learned that as long as you have both persistence and a deep supply of something with perceived value (in our case, Tony Robbins tickets), you can catch all the antelope (or cars and phones) you need to survive.\n\nThat same scrappiness applies to bootstrapping your own business. You have to be creative, mastering the art of trading with others. It's about offering value for value.\n\nHere are a few questions to get you started:\n\n_Where do you need help?_ What do you need that you can't afford to go out and buy? Do you need a Web site, design, marketing, social-media, accounting, or legal advice? What will each of these things cost?\n\n_What's your currency?_ What do you have of value to offer? Can you provide consulting help with others' businesses, introduce them to key prospects, or provide a service that they need?\n\n_Who are your trading partners?_ Take a close look at your network and identify other entrepreneurs you can barter and partner with. What you will find is a trading economy in today's market you probably did not know existed. And don't be afraid to go to prospective customers. You might be surprised how often they will be willing to give you access to certain resources in exchange for being first in line when your new product or service is ready.\n\n_Where's the cheap labor?_ Even if you can't afford to pay big salaries yet, there are many people out there who will work for free in exchange for a promise of future compensation. These could include people out of work, in transition, or trying to find something part time. The opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something they believe in may be enough to get them started.\n\nCreate a list of people you know who have what you need. Prioritize the list, placing the services you need most at the top. Find out which people in your network offer those services _and_ need the most help with their own businesses. Then see if there is a way to trade, borrow, or swap services in a way that helps both parties move their businesses forward.\n\n### _Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death_\n\nLike it or not, a new business sometimes requires a capital investment beyond the bounds of bootstrapping. Unfortunately, money, as the saying goes, doesn't grow on trees (even if, in reading about some start-ups, it seems like people can't give it away fast enough).\n\nThe hard facts are that less than a third of all businesses ever take any outside capital, and of the ones that do, most have typically been in business for three years or more. Making your pitch to a series of potential money sources can feel like a distraction while you're trying to run a business. It will involve working your network, setting up meetings, putting together materials, following up, and closing the sale.\n\nRaising capital takes persistence, whether you are an entrepreneur pitching to individual investors or an intrapreneur working to build consensus for funding within a big organization. Most investors probably won't agree to put money into your company, but that doesn't mean you stop looking. Go into each meeting with the objective of listening to all the feedback the investors have to offer and applying what you learn going forward. For example, your investors may have excellent ideas on how to improve your pitch, find additional revenue, reduce your start-up costs, separate yourself from the competition, and find strategic partners. By listening and following good advice, you're bringing yourself one step closer to finding the finances you need.\n\nI've always been inspired by my friend Gary Goldstein, whose story is a classic tale of persistence. Gary started out as a criminal-defense attorney, but his real passion was storytelling. So he decided to move to Hollywood and launch a career in the entertainment business. There he managed young writers and directors before making the decision to produce films. Gary went on to produce some of the top box-office hits of all time, including _Pretty Woman,_ the highest-grossing live-action film in Disney's history and a beloved classic.\n\nWhen Gary decided to produce his first film, he didn't have all the money and resources he needed. He teamed with an up-and-coming writer. The two bootstrapped as long as they could. Then it was time to go and raise outside capital to get his film, a comedy-horror thriller, made. That part certainly wasn't easy, but Gary never thought about quitting. Making a film was his passion and, as he told me, \"you have to chase your passion like it's the last bus of the night.\" Through Gary's persistence and pigheaded determination, he raised two hundred thousand dollars to make the film. It was titled _Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death._\n\nIn addition to having a tight budget, a scheduling conflict left Gary and his partner with only four weeks from the day they closed their financing to cast, film, edit, and deliver the final product. That may sound impossible to us, but it wasn't to Gary. He was committed to making this project a success. He did not believe in waiting for the \"perfect time\" or \"perfect circumstances\" to get started. Instead he believed that being in the game was better than waiting around on the sidelines. With that mentality, he devised a plan to spend two weeks preparing the project and two weeks for everything else.\n\nBut at the end of the first week, Gary was up against a real problem. The film had no cast and crew; it was just Gary and his writer. Instead of shutting down, Gary persevered, because he believed that \"success is far more likely when you choose persistence over doubt and inaction.\"\n\nGary and his writer hit the phones, called all their friends, asked them to call their friends, and invited them out to the set. They decided if someone showed up who dressed well, that person would be in charge of wardrobe. If someone had a camera, he or she would be the cinematographer. Casting consisted of seeing who arrived on the set each day. This was guerrilla filmmaking at its best. Somehow that film, which ended up starring Shannon Tweed and Bill Maher, came together. It ran on cable for the next fifteen years and became a cult classic. The experience was successful enough that Gary was able to dissolve his management firm and become a full-time independent producer.\n\nI asked Gary what he learned most from that experience. \"You don't have to be a master at something to achieve something worthwhile,\" he said. \"Just by sheer will and stubbornness you can accomplish anything you set out to do.\"\n\n### The True Path to Raising Capital\n\nStarting a business, raising money, and executing your Big Idea is not easy, but people do it successfully every day.\n\nWhen it comes to raising capital, the challenges most entrepreneurs face are inexperience and overly optimistic expectations with regard to how much time and effort raising capital really takes. Many spend their time talking to the wrong people about their investment, and when the opportunity hits them, they are not armed with the tools they need to successfully close the deal.\n\nIf you combine these strategies for raising capital with the lesson of Gary's persistence and determination, you will be successful. But before we get started, keep these considerations in mind.\n\n_Raising capital takes time._ Many people think that investors will jump on their Big Idea right away and that they won't be out there raising money for long. From the time you make your first fund-raising call, figure on six months to a year to close a big round of financing. If you would like to speed that process up to, say, ninety days, place your focus on raising a very small amount of capital with the purpose of building and testing a basic product and taking it to market. It is much easier for investors to make small bets and put less money at risk. Creating proof of concept for a basic version of your idea in such a short period of time also makes it much more likely that you can bring these investors back for more capital\u2014and at a higher valuation.\n\n_Raising capital takes hard work._ This process alone can seem like a full-time job, but you need to get in front of a lot of people. I estimate that for every twenty-five to thirty qualified investors you pitch, you will close one.\n\n_Raising capital can be very stressful._ Your potential investors are busy. They can be tough to get on the calendar. They miss meetings. They go on vacation. You often won't get the answer you expect. You may not like what they tell you about your project. Managing your emotions and staying focused despite delays and setbacks is essential. Keep asking yourself, _What can I take away from that meeting or prospect that can be applied to my business or fund-raising? How do I use those lessons as fuel to close my next prospect?_\n\n_Keep your business moving forward_. Raising capital takes time, but that's no excuse to stop executing your plan. You will need to bootstrap, be resourceful, and look for every opportunity to continue building while raising capital, balancing both objectives. Continuing to build will pay off, as you'll find that even small, incremental steps make a huge difference in terms of getting investors. The more of your idea they can see coming to life, the easier it is for them to get their arms around you, your team, and your product. The further along you are, the less risk is involved for an investor, meaning you will get better financing terms on your deal. Staying at it pays off. Be like Gary: If you knock on enough of the right doors, with the right story and materials in place, you will eventually get your shot.\n\n_Don't settle for \"no.\"_ I have amazing kids and I think they would be great at raising money. Why? Because kids just won't take no for an answer. They keep coming back. They face rejection. It doesn't bother them. Instead, they learn from it. They take note of what didn't work. Then they come right back and try another way to get what they are after. Don't be afraid to be a kid again!\n\n### Where Will the Money Come From?\n\nSo where is all this money going to come from? Who's going to invest in you? There are several options when launching a new business or product. To help save time and get you to market faster, here is a list of capital resources. To get started, put most of your energy into the source that is the best fit with your personal network, business goals, and stage of investment.\n\n_Friends and family._ If you are an entrepreneur launching a new business or taking a new product to market, those closest to you are usually the very first capital providers you should consider. Your friends, family, or company may make funds available even when your new venture is still in the idea phase while other professionally managed sources of capital may not be options before there's a product or prototype to validate the idea. Most friend or family investments range from $1,000 to $25,000, and they may be in the form of equity (ownership in the company) or debt (a simple loan).\n\n_Angel investors._ Angels are wealthy individuals, often entrepreneurs just like you, who are willing to invest anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000. Angels typically work as individuals or through clubs with other angel investors, putting money into start-ups and early-stage businesses. Apart from monetary investment, they may be looking to be involved and can be great coaches for the enterprises in which they invest. Their investment is typically in industries with which they are familiar and can be equity or debt.\n\n_Crowdfunding_. This source makes use of online and off-line networks to attract informal (and sometimes professional) investors to buy into an idea or company. The concept of crowdfunding is to generate investments from the masses, to get small amounts of money from a large number of individuals. There are many forms of crowdfunding, including donation-based, equity-based, revenue-sharing, and peer-to-peer lending.\n\n_Venture capital._ Venture capital is almost always provided in exchange for equity in your company. VCs are very sophisticated investors. Although they have a financial focus, many can also provide significant managerial, operational, and technical expertise. In return they look for a bigger portion of equity and sometimes even a controlling interest (meaning they assume more than half of the equity and\/or decision-making power in your company). Investments from venture capital typically begin around $250,000 and can go up to millions of dollars.\n\nOTHER OPTIONS FOR FINANCING YOUR BUSINESS\n\n**Business Incubators:** Incubators are programs designed to support the growth of early-stage entrepreneurial efforts. Often they will invest between $5,000 and $25,000. They will work very closely with the company to help get the business in the best shape possible to raise more capital and go to market. Incubators are typically industry specific (for example, technology or energy), and their partners bring significant industry experience, resources, and contacts.\n\n**Business Accelerators:** Accelerators are similar, but they tend to focus on companies that have gone to market and are beginning a growth phase. Many business accelerators are backed by venture capitalists who want to get a foothold in what they believe to be a good emerging business.\n\n### The Big Meeting\n\nIf you've hung out with founders as much as I have, you've inevitably heard the following line: \"I have a big meeting with an investor coming up.\" Because the entrepreneur got the appointment, he's certain the investor has real interest. The entrepreneur's growing enthusiasm leads him to think the money is in the bag\u2014only to come back from the big meeting empty-handed and deeply disappointed at the result.\n\nFor the typical entrepreneur, raising money is an entirely foreign experience. The challenge is, investors often have been doing their jobs for years. Your inexperience puts you at an immediate disadvantage. We need to get you up to speed quickly; with just ninety days, there is no time to waste. The place to start is making sure you get yourself in front of the right people. The process starts with doing your homework.\n\nInvestors have a mandate to make money, and typically they have a specific formula to mitigate their risk. That makes it imperative that you understand their focus. Some things for you to consider include:\n\n_Background_. What companies have your potential investors worked for? What's their functional expertise? Often they will invest only in what they know. As an example, if they spent their career in real estate, they will have a deep understanding of how to analyze the true value of a real-estate deal, how to get involved in ways that help the entrepreneur, and how to step in and help turn the ship if things go sideways. Because of all this, they'll be more likely to invest.\n\n_Previous investments._ Know the kinds of companies they have invested in in the past (the typical real-estate investor probably won't invest in, say, software). If you pitch someone in a consumer Internet business and he or she invests only in energy, it won't matter how good your idea is\u2014he or she will pass. Be aware, as well, that if you are dealing with a venture-capital or professional-investment firm, you could be in the right place but talking to the wrong person. Find out which investor inside fits your deal best.\n\n_Stage of investment._ Does your potential investor favor seed or early-stage companies, have minimum revenue criteria, or have other key requirements before stepping into a deal? If you present your business at a stage other than your investor's sweet spot, he or she probably won't be interested. That is true of both individuals and large firms. Keep in mind that many professional investors raise money from other investors with a mandate to invest in a specific type and stage of company.\n\n_Size of investment._ Ten thousand dollars? A hundred thousand? A million? Be clear that what you're asking for is in line with what they put into individual investments.\n\n_Expected return._ Are they looking to get double, five times, ten times what they invest?\n\n_Investment horizon._ When do they expect a return on their capital? What time period do they have in mind\u2014to get in and out within a year, three years, or five? Everyone needs to have the same expectations on day one.\n\nHow do you find these things out? Do your homework. If you can't find an answer to a specific question, just ask. Asking good questions will help you establish yourself as professional and someone who respects a potential investor's time, which earns you bonus points too.\n\nKnowing these things in advance will help you operate with speed and efficiency, saving you valuable time and money. It will help ensure that every meeting is with a qualified investor. That way your \"big meeting\" will be exactly what you expect.\n\nOne last thing: _believe._\n\nRaising money is no small task. No matter how good you and your product are, it is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. But when you've done your homework and go into meetings with the right people, you will know that, on some level, they really want to invest in you. Their mandate is to find companies just like yours. They are hoping that you are the person who can deliver what they want. In fact, they probably want this meeting as much, if not more, than you do!\n\nSo do your homework, get in front of the right people\u2014and execute once you are there.\n\nLOANS VERSUS CONVERTIBLE EQUITY\n\nWhat's the difference?\n\n**Loans:** Loans are simply an amount of money lent by one person or entity to another person or entity. In general, there is an interest payment (an annual percentage of the original loan amount). Things to consider include guaranteed or nonguaranteed, simple or compound interest, and the amount of time given to repay the principal.\n\n**Equity** **:** **** Equity is an ownership interest in a business. Equity holders negotiate a variety of terms associated with certain rights and controls.\n\n**Convertible Notes** **:** These are similar to loans except that, at the end of the loan period, the investors can opt either to have their principal returned (as with a standard loan arrangement) _or_ to convert that investment into equity in the business. Convertible notes have been very popular for early-stage companies in the last few years because they are a low-cost means of closing financial deals (the legal costs are substantially less than with other options). In addition, investors sometimes favor them because they typically earn high interest during the start-up phase while retaining the option to leave if the business doesn't perform as expected.\n\n### The Fastest Way to the Door\n\nHaving spent years both in businesses at all stages of raising capital and investing in other people's companies, I've been on both sides of the table. As a result, I've learned firsthand what to do\u2014and what not to do\u2014when presenting to an investor. I've also learned there are certain mistakes you can make that will kill a potential investor's interest and lead you right out the door.\n\nWe only have ninety days to go from idea to market, so avoid the mistakes below in order to keep the process moving forward and ultimately get the results you want.\n\n_Appropriate domain and stage expertise._ Investors fund people, not ideas. They want founders and management who have deep domain experience. In the early stages they like a background that includes running fast-paced, resource-constrained environments and thus might see it as a risk if, for example, someone from a _Fortune_ 500 company were seeking to launch a start-up or a technology pro shifted into real estate.\n\n_\"We are first to market.\"_ As an entrepreneur you may think this is a big advantage, but such a claim can actually work against you. Typically, being first to market means you take on all the risk. You'll spend lots of your time educating people, and to an investor that says _expensive_. Many would rather be second, riding in the wake of the first company.\n\n_\"We have no competition.\"_ Making this claim may be the most common mistake of entrepreneurs raising capital. On hearing it, the experienced investor will assume one of three things: that you are lying, that you do not really know your market, or that there have been others before you who did not make it. As soon as you speak those words, your proposal is most likely headed into the trash.\n\n_\"We need a million dollars to get started.\"_ Why? Investors will do everything they can to minimize their risk every step of the way. They will want to know if there's another way, whether you can start with something smaller and more focused. Can you get to market faster and get enough feedback to get a sense that you're heading in the right direction _before_ investing that million dollars into a product no one may want?\n\n_\"If I build it, they will come.\"_ Maybe that works in movies, but I've never seen it work anywhere else\u2014and neither has your investor. It takes time, effort, and money to build a customer base.\n\n_\"We have more features than anyone else.\"_ Who cares? That does not mean your target customer will like all of them. An investor would rather know that you have one functioning feature that your target customer likes than that you have ten untested ones.\n\n_\"The big companies are too big or slow to compete.\"_ Not if they are serious, they aren't. If a market is big enough, there is a good chance someone in the industry is taking a look. If they decide there is an opportunity, they certainly have the resources in place to jump into your market and have an impact. This does not mean they will be successful, but they could be disruptive. If big companies have not entered, they may think the market is too small.\n\n_\"We do lots of things well.\"_ I always ask entrepreneurs what _one thing_ their business is really great at, the one thing that separates it from everyone else. Most of the time they do not know. Instead they rattle off three or four things they think the company does equally well. Telling an investor that you are great at everything communicates that you don't really understand what business you are in.\n\n_\"We do that too.\"_ If, during a meeting, an investor suggests additional products or services that might be a good fit or points to things the competition is doing, don't respond to each comment by saying, \"Oh, we do that too.\" Many entrepreneurs think they need to demonstrate that they are \"on top of everything,\" building \"every bell and whistle\" in the marketplace. But this sort of response communicates a lack of focus. Instead, acknowledge that the investor's suggestions may be great to add down the road but make it clear that for now you're focused on this one thing.\n\n_Don't be afraid to say, \"I don't know.\"_ Some entrepreneurs think they need to be expert at everything. As a result, they try to answer every question that comes their way, even if they have no clue what they are talking about. If you talk in circles, that'll be obvious to the investor. Since everyone knows that a new business or product is surrounded by uncertainty, people understand that assumptions need to be made and lessons need to be learned. One of the signs of strength investors look for in an entrepreneur is the simple understanding that no one has all the answers. Letting investors see that quality in you communicates that they can trust you to be straightforward and open to collaboration.\n\n_\"Writing a business plan would just slow us down.\"_ Investors know that without a plan you have not forced yourself to test your model, that you have no real sense of income and expenses or of capital requirements and timing. That also conveys that everyone isn't on the same page. How could they be without a written plan to provide them with a singular focus that keeps the team grounded?\n\nOTHER RED FLAGS\n\nA few additional factors that could affect an investor's decision regarding your business include:\n\n**High Failure Rate** **:** Some industries have significantly higher failure rates than others (restaurants and retail stores are good examples). That certainly does not mean you will not succeed, but you'll need to have a very clear plan.\n\n**Dependence on Legal or Government Regulation:** Industries that tend to be more litigious than others or subject to much legal regulation may make investors hesitate. If your product requires long government approvals or a bidding process, there could be additional cause for concern because of the potential drain on cash. Investment in such businesses is not for everyone.\n\n**Key Operations in Different Places:** If your company is based in one place (e.g., a certain country or geographic region) and key operations are elsewhere, that can be a cause for concern. Separation can create an added level of complexity when managing a fast-moving business.\n\n**Small Returns for Investors:** Your potential investors may believe in the product and the market, even that you have the right team to execute, that everything is in place. But your business still may not meet their investment criteria, with anticipated returns that are too low; or they may view it as a lifestyle business and think you will want to stay with it forever, leaving them with no chance at a big exit. Chances are, though, what you're offering will be perfect for someone else. Keep trying.\n\n### The Callback\n\nIn the entertainment business you audition. Your goal is to get invited to the next step, so you wait for the callback. The same is true in raising capital. With each interaction you try to generate enough interest and momentum to move to the next step.\n\nHere are a few tips to get investors to make that call, to summon you back.\n\n_Build a great team._ People invest in teams, so make sure you build a great one, from partners to employees, from consultants to collaborators. Make it your mission to surround yourself with the best. Avoid being strong in just one area. Cross-functional expertise that sees business in different ways adds perspective and gives your investors confidence.\n\n_Feed information in bite-size chunks._ This is a rule of thumb in direct-response marketing. For example, the purpose of the headline is to get you to read the first line. The purpose of the first line is to get you to read the second line; and so on. Eventually you build momentum and you close a sale. That's your goal.\n\nDon't send investors everything at once. If you overburden them, they'll walk away feeling overwhelmed and confused. Instead, feed them small, digestible pieces. For example, start by sending your target a one-paragraph overview of the business via e-mail. If there is interest, send a one-page executive summary. If he is still keen, follow up with a short PowerPoint presentation. Every communication should build on the one before.\n\n_Tailor each communication to your audience_. Each investor will ask a different set of questions and have a different set of concerns after each communication. Your job is to get all of these questions and concerns on the table, then apply what you've learned in tailoring your next communication. Let's say one investor has concerns about the market. At the next step, build a short presentation that specifically addresses that investor's anxieties; your next conversation should cover just that, nothing else. Once you get past that issue, move on to the next.\n\nAnother reason not to send everything at once is that the materials need to be tailored for each investor target. Information prepared for one person may not be right for another person, and you can shoot yourself in the foot. Take a cautious, step-by-step approach to learning, iterating, and then improving your presentations in order to suit each and every conversation.\n\n_Be open to feedback and ask for advice._ Don't take anything personally. Use every piece of feedback you get, no matter how positive or negative, as fuel to power you forward. No matter how much you don't want to hear it or how much your point of view may be in direct contrast, approach everything with an openness to learn. That openness and flexibility are great signs of leadership in early-stage environments.\n\n### Tricks of the Trade\n\nCapital raising means you must not only focus on getting money but also, in doing so, seek the most favorable terms, trade the least possible equity, and maintain control of the business.\n\nIn shaping your thinking, consider these factors:\n\n_How much money do you really need?_ My advice is to raise just what you think you'll need, then a little bit more. By running lean, your team stays focused, and you'll make better decisions and avoid waste.\n\nEarly-stage investors will want a big piece of your company. They probably deserve it for assuming the risk of investing in a business or product that still has a long way to go (they've seen the statistics about how many start-ups fail). They expect to build that risk into what they charge for their capital, demanding more equity, higher interest rates, more control, or other terms. That also means that the more money you raise up front, the more of your company you will have to give away in the form of equity.\n\nBe thrifty. Take in as little money as you can and give away as little of your company as possible. Prove your concept sooner, then go out and raise more money when your company has earned a higher valuation.\n\n_Loans._ Loans can be guaranteed or nonguaranteed. Will the interest be simple or compound? How much time do you have to repay the principal?\n\n_Equity_. How much equity will you give away? Will your investor(s) be active or passive? How much control will you relinquish? Do your money sources wish to be involved in big decisions or plan to leave them to you and the team? What kind of return are they expecting? When do they plan to see this return?\n\nEntrepreneurs are optimists; they tend to focus on their current round of financing and often significantly underestimate their long-term capital requirements. As a result, they part with a lot of their company's equity early, thinking they will not need to give much away down the road. They spread it around to investors, employees, contractors, and advisers. Later, when they go out to raise additional capital, they may find that a new round will cause them to become minority shareholders or lose control of their business. Keep in mind that it's common to seek capital more than once in a company's lifetime.\n\nThe decisions you make early will have a lasting impact. If your company is performing well, anticipate that each round will cost you between 15 percent and 30 percent of your equity. If things go sideways, capital could become much more expensive. To avoid giving away too much, demonstrate proof of concept. Show investors that you can execute and that customers will pay for your product. This will help to mitigate their risk and create significantly more value for your company.\n\nUnderstand this: Every single little percentage point will make a big difference down the road.\n\n_Preferences._ Investors typically have certain rights that supersede those of the entrepreneur. One example is preferences.\n\nPreferences are special return scenarios that relate to what happens to the money when a given financial event occurs. For example, should you sell your company, investors may demand their principal be repaid first, after which the remaining money is divided by everyone else on a pro rata basis. Alternatively, an investor may have mandated that they receive two or three times their investment, then everyone else split the remainder. The lesson? Focus not only on how much equity you give away but also on the preferences built into investor agreements.\n\n_Control._ Even if you own most of the equity in the company, you may not be in control of it. Many investors fight for contractual provisions that hand over to them the power to make decisions about certain aspects of the business. Be sure to understand how much control you are ceding.\n\n_Value._ Beyond cold cash, what else does your potential investor bring to the table? Does he or she bring industry knowledge or operational knowledge? Will you gain someone skilled in team building or with contacts for strategic partners? Balance investors' overall value with the capital they bring to the table.\n\nRaising capital is often a requirement to launch a new business, product, or service. It's hard work that takes time and dedication. The biggest reason why entrepreneurs fail to raise the funds they need is that they don't have a road map, so they waste time. They get in front of the wrong people. They say the wrong things. They overburden their target with too much information. When they finally do get an offer, they don't know what to look for and how to negotiate the best deal.\n\nIf you follow the steps in this chapter, you can steer clear of these problems and set yourself on a path toward success.\n\n# STAGE III.\n\n# COUNTDOWN AND BLASTOFF\n\nThe First Thirty Days of Business\n\n## CHAPTER 8.\n\n## GO TO MARKET!\n\nI fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.\n\n\u2014BRUCE LEE\n\n### Hammers and Nails\n\nBy this point you've spent several weeks moving forward with your big idea, developing your business plan, refining your business model, building a great team, and maybe even raising some capital. You've got a lot of momentum behind you. Now it's time to get your product or service ready to go to market. It's time to open your doors, either physically or online. This is your moment for liftoff.\n\nThe most common mistake entrepreneurs make when launching something new into the market is trying to do too much at once. The same is true of managers inside big organizations. I call it _hammer-and-nail syndrome_.\n\nLet's say I give you one hammer and one nail. Your job is to hold the hammer in one hand and the nail in the other. All you have to do is drive that nail into a piece of wood. That's it; just nail that one product or service. You may miss the first time or even the second, but eventually you'll nail it.\n\nNow let's say I give you two hammers and two nails. You have a problem. Who is going to hold the nails? Let's say you find someone crazy enough to volunteer. Your job is to drive both nails at the same time into that piece of wood. Odds are you will miss again and again.\n\nWhat if I give you three hammers and three nails? I think you get the point: This is exactly how most entrepreneurs launch their businesses. They simply try to do too much at once. They mistakenly believe that going to market with \"more\" is better.\n\nIt isn't. During your launch period, more means additional risk. More means unnecessary complexity. More means additional time to market and more capital required.\n\nBelow are some important things to remember as you prepare to take your product to market.\n\n_Don't try to build Rome in a day._ I have a good friend who raised two million dollars in a very tough market to start a consumer Internet business. To have raised that much money so soon after the 2008 market collapse was amazing, and I congratulated him on the big win. He was ecstatic and told me he couldn't wait to get to work on the company's site.\n\nIn 2012 I ran into him again and asked how it was going. He sang the blues. They had launched their company a few months earlier but had already run out of money. How was that possible? When I asked, he talked about his big vision, how his company aimed to provide everything its target customer could possibly want to buy in the category. Its goal was to be a one-stop shop. He and his team had invested all their time and money building something big and comprehensive, confident their target customer wouldn't want to go anywhere else once their Web site was up and running.\n\nAfter launch they discovered, to their surprise, that about 95 percent of their users used just _5 percent_ of the site! Turn that around and it means that 95 percent of the time and money invested was effectively wasted.\n\n_Focus on one thing, the simplest thing._ When launching, put all of your energy and focus into one product or feature at a time. It should not be the hardest thing; it should be the simplest, what we'll call the _minimum viable product_ (MVP). The MVP provides the opportunity to learn the most about your customers, with the smallest amount of time, money, and effort invested. The MVP puts you in a position to go to market quickly, collect valuable feedback, and not waste time building things customers don't want. This strategy significantly mitigates your risk and helps avoid the trap my friend fell into of building a bloated product that nobody wants to use.\n\n_Follow the 85 percent rule: Good is good enough_. Striving for perfection is the enemy of any product launch. As a rule of thumb, when the new business or product is 85 percent of the way there, you are ready to go. In my experience the level of effort required to reach 100 percent is not worth the additional time, money, and effort at this stage. You would be much better off shipping early, getting something into the market, and beginning to test.\n\n_Be great at collecting and learning from feedback_. Once you have launched, listen to and learn from your users. Develop feedback loops that enable you to learn everything you possibly can. What do users like and dislike about the product? What features would they like to see added to enhance their experience? Which features don't work or generate little interest? Do whatever you have to do to engage with your users. That may include offering incentives, reaching out in social media, and generating outbound calls to learn more.\n\nThe hardest part of this process for many entrepreneurs is to be completely receptive to what customers tell them. Given your passion and all the time you have spent on the project, you may not want to hear negative feedback. You may be inclined to think the customer just doesn't get it. But feedback is the most valuable tool you have as an entrepreneur. So listen, consider, and use what you learn to iterate, improve, or even throw out some of what you have built or planned.\n\n_Avoid shiny-ball syndrome_. As you start developing your minimum viable product, you must fight \"feature creep\" at every step. You, your team, your partners, and everyone else you share your vision with will have ideas about what should be added, and many of them will sound like good ideas at the time. More likely, though, they're distractions, shiny objects that draw your eye. Your job is to keep focused on one thing, to get it to market, and _then_ to deliver the next single thing. By staying focused on one thing at a time, you can get to market quickly, learn a great deal from real customers about what you offer, and make changes. If your launch doesn't fly, you have significantly mitigated your risk.\n\nSpeaking of not working, what if the product falls down or is simply a bad product or a poor market fit? Kill it. In order to mitigate your personal and financial risk, choose to fail fast and shut it down. Big, fast failure is better than a long, slow, expensive death.\n\nLAUNCH, LISTEN\u2014AND LEARN\n\n**Focus:** Launch your new products and services fast and launch them often, but always focus on one thing at a time. Don't start with the hardest thing but, preferably, the simplest thing, the _minimum viable product_.\n\n**Listen:** Launch quickly but, as you do so, develop feedback loops that enable you to _listen_ to what your customers have to say.\n\n**Learn:** Make incremental changes and improvements based on feedback. Launch again, and continue the process of iteration, making it an ongoing part of your culture.\n\n**Move On:** Once you have really nailed that product, once you've found the right product\/market fit and given your customers what they want, move on to the next one (that is, to the second hammer and the second nail). Remember, you can do everything you want, just not all at once.\n\n### Riches in Niches\n\nMy early career was spent in a broadcast world. I worked for divisions of media giants like CBS, NBC, and FOX. During that time I sold advertising to big global brands and marketed their products to the largest possible audience. The idea was to cast the widest possible net and see how many fish you could pull in. I believed in the power of mass marketing.\n\nFor the entrepreneur planning to launch, there's a problem with this model: too much marketing waste. Inevitably you'll spend a lot of money telling your story to the wrong people. That's not the way to build a business. You need to be razor sharp in cutting up the marketplace, making dead sure that every dollar spent on communicating to your target audience gets a good return on investment.\n\nThe good news is that that can be accomplished today in a way we couldn't do it twenty years ago. Instead of living in a world with a handful of television channels (like the world I grew up in), we now live in a world with literally millions of targeted ways to connect with your audience. You can find your audience on one of thousands of television stations that speak to your niche. You can pinpoint your market on the Internet and target it using Facebook or Twitter. In each case, today's consumers do for the entrepreneur what broadcasters couldn't years ago. They self-sort themselves into groups based on shared interests and desires. The key is to find your target and market to that audience very specifically.\n\nYour task as an entrepreneur is to think in terms of an ideal customer\u2014one person, one group\u2014to whom you wish to sell your single, simple product. Develop a very specific profile, learning everything you can about your ideal consumers and what aspect of your product appeals to them. Determine what your target customers talk about and learn their manner of speaking, the lingo they use to speak to one another. Put yourself in their shoes. Know what they care about, their issues, and their concerns.\n\nOnce you have a very deep understanding of your customer, market your product or service to that very specific audience. Instead of broadcasting to a wide market, go narrow and go deep. There are riches in niches. The more you integrate yourself into that group (especially via sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn), the faster word will spread about what you have to offer. If you talk to the right people at the right time in the right way, and you deliver a product they value, you will suddenly have an entire community telling your story and functioning as your marketing team. On the other hand, if you misfire, everyone will know\u2014bad news travels fast.\n\nI came to truly appreciate the power of targeting a deep and narrow niche when I worked on a project for a direct-marketing business. The owners had acquired a database that had more than fifteen million buyers of a certain type of product. They had names, physical addresses, e-mail addresses, and a lot of information about each buyer. Their initial plan was to use the list to market new products via e-mail.\n\nWhen they started sending out marketing offers, they cast the widest possible net, sending the same offer for the same product to all fifteen million people. With that much distribution, how could they lose? They found, however, that a low percentage of people actually responded to the offers and a high percentage of their solicitations got dumped into spam filters. Many people simply weren't interested in hearing their offer.\n\nWe needed to change their approach. We brought in a data-analysis team and broke down the fifteen million names into ten groups that we called \"buckets.\" In doing this profiling we learned that, although all the people were on this list because they bought a certain kind of product, their individual characteristics were very different. Not everyone was interested in the same products or wanted to be marketed to in the same way. We found we needed to sharpen our focus and tailor our message.\n\nWe made a critical decision to learn everything we could about one bucket at a time and developed very targeted products and services for each niche. That meant we ignored the rest of the millions of names in the database, because sheer volume wasn't what we were going after. We looked to isolate a particular kind of person. I would rather have fifteen thousand buyers I know are interested in my product than a database of fifteen million people who are not.\n\nThe original\u2014and unsuccessful\u2014offer had been for a weight-loss program. So we took a look at a segment of these people who had bought one product that could be loosely categorized as spiritual, such as Christian-themed products. Then we looked at the predominant gender of the people in that bucket, narrowed our age range, and chose one target demographic\u2014women aged forty-five to fifty-five.\n\nWe kept adding filters: married; has children; empty nester; caretaker for a parent; pet owner. Now we were getting somewhere. All these qualities might make it sound like we were creating an overly narrow niche, but we ended up with more than a million names of people who met those exact criteria.\n\nThen we went to work learning everything we could about our prototypical customer (we named her Christina). She was a fifty-year-old mom with grown kids who owned a dog and was caring for her parents. We joined Christina's online communities, found her on social media, and had real conversations with people like her. We learned what drove Christina and the kinds of products and services that she was interested in.\n\nWe developed just the right product, tailored to this ideal customer. In this case we built a spiritual program in the form of prayer books, newsletters, and audio and video recordings that touched on issues that were experienced by caregivers who also owned dogs. The response to the highly targeted campaign was amazing. Many Christinas bought the product, became part of the community, and referred other friends like themselves (and gave us their e-mail addresses). In one month the company recorded a much greater response, because we had connected with the market.\n\nHere are a few suggestions on creating the perfect product\/market fit:\n\n_Pick one very specific niche_. Instead of casting a wide net, focus on solving one customer need at a time.\n\n_Develop your avatar._ Create a very detailed representation of your targets. Who are they? What are their ages, genders, and locations? What do they care about? What do they read? Whom do they hang out with? What do they watch? Which products do they buy and where do they buy them?\n\n_Engage in conversations_. Find the specific places they hang out (both in daily life and on the Internet). Join their communities. Learn what concerns them, what drives them, and what is under the surface emotionally that gets them to make decisions. Chime in when appropriate.\n\n### Crickets\n\nYou were convinced that when you built it, they would come. You knew in your gut that what your product offered was exactly what the market needed, that once you launched, people would flock to you in droves. But when you opened your doors, either literally or online, all you heard was the sound of _crickets_. Not footsteps, not voices, no pings, no cash-register noises. Just crickets.\n\nYou might have the best product around that no one has ever heard of. Or the few folks who have heard of it just don't know where to find you.\n\nThis is one of the problems I run into most with entrepreneurs. It occurs because of wishful thinking ( _I know people will come!_ ), too little money to spend on marketing, or no workable strategy for driving traffic in the company's direction. It is just as common with intrapraneurs, who place exaggerated confidence in the past success of other launches or the strength of their company's brand.\n\nA client recently came to me with a great idea for an online business. His product addressed an obvious need in the fitness business, and he had spent a year and $75,000 of his savings to build a beautiful Web site to sell it.\n\n\"How's business?\" I asked, expecting a happy answer. \"How many people are coming to your Web site? How many units have you sold?\"\n\nHis answer: _None._\n\nHe had almost no traffic to the Web site and few buyers exposed to his product. He felt like the business was doomed. To make matters worse, he had exhausted his cash resources building the product and promoting the launch.\n\nBut as I told my client, his business was not doomed. What he needed were partners. Not business partners but partnerships with other businesses, specifically ones that had a similar customer profile.\n\nIn nearly all the companies I've been involved with, a key to the successful distribution of our products and services has been the partnerships we established early on. By hitching your wagon to a bigger, more established business you can get a lot further faster, and with much less money out of pocket than by traveling the road alone. I've seen this strategy work firsthand. I've helped businesses grow from ideas to big brands\u2014on the basis of sound partnering.\n\nMy first lesson in partnerships was with Quote.com. I was an early member of the consumer Internet business's launch team. In 1995 the company was one of the first to get permission from the stock exchanges to put stock quotes on the Internet. It helped create the market, define it, and was the leading brand in its category. Today, with hundreds of places to get stock quotes online, we take for granted how easy it is to find them. But back then it was state of the art. I remember giving a presentation to a team from the _Wall Street Journal_ and they just about fell out of their chairs upon seeing real-time quotes delivered on big blue-chip stocks.\n\nQuote.com had a great product in an exploding market, but we had to move fast to keep our first-mover advantage. At the beginning we had very little money to work with (I had to use my own frequent-flyer miles to buy airline tickets to go see a customer). Since we had a small marketing budget, we needed to find other ways to grow. We needed partners. Though we felt we had something valuable to offer them, we had to figure out a way to get in the door and structure a deal where both sides would win.\n\nWe approached sites with a similar target customer. These other companies wanted to create more awareness; they believed that offering more value would drive usage. They wanted applications that kept users on their sites rather than surfing off to explore other places on the Internet. And ultimately they wanted to find ways to monetize this traffic.\n\nWe offered to integrate our product into their Web site, giving users a reason to stay on their Web sites longer. We proposed cobranding the pages to create branding and awareness for both of us. Once we figured out how to monetize the pages together, we'd share revenue.\n\nIn just a few months we built a network linking us to over one hundred sites, some of which were among the largest consumer Web sites at the time. As a result, people began to see us everywhere.\n\nWe applied the lessons we learned about partnering to advertising as well. One of our key early advertising partners was Ameritrade. Its founder, billionaire Joe Ricketts, knew that different kinds of investors liked different kinds of brokerages, so he created four of them: Accutrade, K. Aufhauser & Co., Ceres Securities, and eBroker. Each one had a different marketing angle to appeal to a different kind of investor. Joe and his son Peter advertised Ameritrade sites on Quote.com because they knew if our customers wanted a quote, they were likely to have a brokerage account, making advertising with us a no-brainer. Everyone was a winner, and ultimately Quote.com became one of the largest advertising revenue\u2013generating sites and number one in its category. The company eventually sold to Lycos. The whole experience serves as a great lesson in growing a company quickly with limited resources through partnerships.\n\nI've watched the same model applied over and over in my career, with Sportsline USA and CBS, with Xoom.com and NBC, with Lycos and FOX Sports, and most recently with Smart Charter and Virgin. In each case a scrappy, early-stage venture with limited resources applied the same formula and created a win-win opportunity with partners to achieve its goals.\n\nHow do you apply partnerships to your business?\n\n_Decide what you need._ What does your business need most at this stage? Capital, resources, access to potential customers, credibility, marketing and promotion?\n\n_Follow your target customers._ Where do they spend their time? What businesses, Web sites, organizations, associations, or groups do they visit?\n\n_Create a win-win agreement and execute._ Ask yourself, _How can I create a win for my partner? How can I make my internal champion look like a hero in his or her business? How can I get them so excited about this partnership opportunity that they think about it and prioritize it every single day?_ To do this, find out what's most important to your prospect, what has to happen or how they know they are getting what they want. On the basis of feedback they give you, tailor your partnership ideas. Create revenue sharing where applicable that benefits both companies.\n\nOne final lesson on partnerships? I believe that businesses are bought and not sold. Many of the best financial exits are the result of businesses that started as partnerships and then grew into something more. Many of the people I have worked with who partnered early with the right businesses, followed through on what they said they would deliver, and built deep relationships throughout the group ultimately had the largest financial exits.\n\nPARTNERSHIP PLANNING\n\nHow to prepare for and find a good partner:\n\n**Build a Good Business:** A big partner will not make your business better. It will expose your flaws faster. You need to stand on your own two feet. Build a great product first.\n\n**Calibrate Your Needs:** Determine what you want from a partnership: capital, resources, technology, marketing, distribution, or sales support?\n\n**Understand Their Needs:** What problem can you solve for your partner? How can you make your internal champion look like a hero?\n\n**Sell What They Need:** Focus the conversation on addressing your potential partners' needs rather than on what you think is cool about your product.\n\n**Shop Around:** Talk to as many potential partners as possible to be sure you find the right one.\n\n**Find an Internal Champion:** Because smaller companies and new initiatives can get lost in the shuffle, you need an internal champion in the business you're partnering with to take ownership of your project and drive it internally. As an entrepreneur CEO, it's important for you to maintain a relationship with this person.\n\n### Crowdsource Your Sales Force\n\nSometimes the mirror takes awhile to clear so that we can see what's right in front of us.\n\nEver since college I've been surrounded by computers. I've worked and invested in several Internet companies. I've been an early adopter of new technologies. But there was one area in which I dragged my feet: I was late in embracing social media as a means of growing a business.\n\nI was guarded with my privacy. I had very little spare time, and keeping up with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, and everything else seemed like more to add to an already full plate. But everything changed when I saw the potential value these networks had to offer when launching a new business.\n\nI was advising a bootstrapping software company that had no marketing budget and very little money to hire salespeople. Since it couldn't afford to market its product and hit sales targets the traditional way, it turned its attention to social media.\n\nWhen I taught sales training twenty years ago, I talked about finding target customers, identifying their needs, and demonstrating how a company's products met those needs. I'd go on about how to close the sale, provide excellent customer service, and in the end create raving fans who would share their experience with others. But here's what I learned.\n\nThe model has flipped. Today many of the most effective companies build fans _first,_ customers _second_.\n\nWith fans coming first\u2014this is the best part\u2014you can effectively crowdsource your sales force. By executing this strategy you can build a virtual army made up of thousands of people talking about you and telling their friends to buy your product. And it costs you nothing. That's because you have the crowd passing along their experiences, giving personal referrals, and selling on your behalf. Your social-media sales force can be more effective than anyone you put on staff. People are much more likely to trust your brand and make a purchase based on a friend's referral than on the basis of anything you tell them.\n\nI've also learned that social media can be an excellent tool for conducting market research, brand development, and product development and for getting direct feedback from customers.\n\nSo how do you crowdsource your sales force?\n\n_Pick one channel._ Instead of trying to conquer multiple social-media channels at once, pick one platform to start with, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, or another. Do that one well and don't worry about anything else. How do you choose which one? Find out where your customers spend their time. Go find them and engage.\n\n_Be authentic._ When I first got started with social media, I made a big mistake. Everything I put out there was too highly produced. Whether it was a post, picture, or video, I thought it needed to look and feel perfect. But online, authenticity is everything.\n\nBeing you is what people want, and if you try to be someone else, they'll know. If what you put out comes off as scripted and highly produced, that feels to the customer like a violation of trust. So be yourself. Share and tweet and post the things that interest you. Don't work too hard to make everything perfect. Instead, focus on being raw, real, and relevant. And by the way, it's okay to be dorky.\n\n_Forget the gatekeeper_. With social media you can connect with virtually anyone you want. That is an enormous shift in our ability to access others. There are no longer gatekeepers standing between you and the top businessmen, entertainers, and athletes in the world, because most of them manage and respond to their own social media accounts. If you would like to start a conversation with someone who might make a difference in your business, it can be very easy. Just send him or her a tweet.\n\n_Commit yourself to a daily hour of power._ Getting started with social media is quick and easy. Opening an account costs nothing, and posting is free. In a few minutes you can be up and running. Within an hour you can reach out and be connected with friends, coworkers, and customers.\n\nSpend one hour per day during your launch engaging with the community. That's it. In one hour a day, at zero cost, you can build an army. The potential payback is incalculable in terms of exposure and attention.\n\n_Monitor and protect your brand_. Make sure to regularly frequent the sites, feeds, and pages that discuss your industry, product, or service. Look for posts that mention your company. Respond to comments and complaints, using them as opportunities to engage, build trust, grow your brand, and collect market research. If you listen carefully, you can get ahead of potential problems. And don't think you're exempt from this kind of vigilance if you're a big business. Today being big is meaningless if the customer's friend says the product sucks.\n\n_Invest in sound._ If you are posting video or audio content, keep a couple things in mind. Even though the color, background, and production values may not be perfect, good sound is very important. Buy a lavalier microphone for quality sound and, whatever the source of your video, be sure there is enough light for people to see you. You don't need to spend a lot of money, but this is an example of one detail that you should invest in and pay close attention to.\n\n_Tell them how to reach you._ Make it easy for your fans to get hold of you. If possible, have your Web address, e-mail address, phone number, or social-media handle somewhere on the video screen, and mention it in your post\n\n_Leverage social media as a research tool._ I love fish. One of my favorite hobbies is building aquariums. I kind of fell into it; my daughters both wanted a pet, so we went to a local pet store and bought them each a goldfish.\n\nI kept going back to that pet store, fascinated by the aquariums and the beautiful breeds of fish. It didn't take long before I decided to build my own aquarium, and before I knew it, I was building a second. Now I'm addicted, but I have a problem with the local pet stores: Their selection of fish is small. One day I grew so frustrated that I started thinking about opening up my own store. Not a pet store, a fish store. I needed more information, so I turned to social media.\n\nFirst I went onto Facebook and searched for communities of people who shared the same interest. Next I went onto Twitter and starting following hashtags like #fish, #aquariums, #fishstores, and so on. There were a few people who were very active in these communities, and I approached them with questions: Is there a reason I can only find the same small number of fish breeds at the local stores? Do other people in the community have the same problem finding a good selection of fish? Has anyone been able to solve this problem and, if so, how did they do it? I found that when I asked these questions of the whole community, many of the people who responded had problems similar to mine. Maybe my fish-store idea had legs.\n\nThen I asked my fellow online hobbyists the big question: If you could build the perfect fish store, what would it look like? To my surprise, the answer was not that the store would have the biggest variety of fish but that it would provide great customer service. What I learned was that many people dropped the hobby because they could not figure out how to build a good aquarium, maintain the right water balance, or even feed their fish the correct amount. As a result, their fish kept dying. The service at the existing stores was so poor that these people either got frustrated or felt embarrassed to ask for help, so they just dropped the hobby altogether.\n\nI realized that if I provided better service, I would do more for the community. I also learned that customers would be more loyal to my store, stay with the hobby longer, and ultimately buy more stuff. In reaching out to online communities through social media, I saved a lot of money and time in getting my research done. Today that fish store is my pet project!\n\n### Your Buyer Blueprint\n\nWhile teaching Tony Robbins's material twenty years ago, I learned that the biggest mistake salespeople make is selling the wrong thing. They push either what they think is most important about their product or what their boss has told them to sell. When the prospect says no to their pitch, they don't understand why. This happens because the seller never asked what the prospect wanted\u2014nor did he understand the prospect's _buyer blueprint._\n\nAlthough I should have known better, I've fallen into this trap myself. One example was while I was at Virgin Charter. We had a very smart and educated team. We were confident that we understood the problems our customers wanted solved and how to solve them. With this confidence we created a product road map, listing the features planned for development and ranking them in the order we would build them. We had over a hundred features on our list and I had the sense we were really on the right track. Then, after spending lots of money building a Web site and going to market, we discovered that people just weren't using our service in the way we had believed they would.\n\nOur team spent its time building features on the back end of our Web site, creating efficiencies, automating systems, and developing technologies that were necessary to enable buyers to complete a purchase and manage their trip details online. But customers spent their time on the front end of our Web site, doing searches and viewing profiles of all the available aircraft. When they wanted to make a purchase, most just picked up the phone, called, and asked our team to process the order.\n\nI asked my team to go back out into the market. Our sales, product, and technical people gathered in rooms with customers.\n\nWe soon learned that some of the functions people had wanted most in the earliest versions of the product were neither in the current product nor among the top ten things to build in our product road map. Some were not even in our plan. Obviously, we had too many hammers\u2014and not enough of the right ones.\n\nThe challenge is to create a solid buyer blueprint before you do anything else. You can create this by asking two very simple questions.\n\n_What is most important to you?_ Ask a customer this and many times the answer you will get is \"I don't know.\" But try turning the answer around, responding with \"I know you don't know, but if you did know, what would it be?\" You'll find that that usually elicits useful answers, and the person will start listing the things he values most, perhaps without even realizing it. Take notes and, once the customer has downloaded his list, work with him to rank every item on the list in order, to identify which features are really most important to him. For example, if he could have this or that, which one would he choose? Continue to go back and rework and refine the answers.\n\nThe potential buyer may say, for example, that the top priority is that a food item taste good or, for a tech service, that it be easy to use. That's a start, but it's not all that you need to know. This leads you to the second question.\n\n_How do you know you are getting what you want?_ Nearly everyone forgets to ask this question, and it may be the most important one. Why? Because the definition of \"good taste\" or \"easy to use\" differs from person to person. We all have different rules or labels we attach to things. Your job is to find out not only what your prospects value but also the rules they have established for determining whether they are getting what they want. That makes follow-up questions essential.\n\nHow do you know it tastes good? Do you crave sweet or sour, crunchy or smooth? How do you know it's easy to use? Do you need to access it online? Would you require it on a mobile device?\n\nWith an early understanding of what your prospects want and how they know they are getting it, you will be able to build and sell products and services that match your buyers' blueprint and lead to big success for the business.\n\nBut remember this: Just because customers said they wanted something does not mean they will buy it once they have a chance to see it, use it, and interact with it. We found that out at Virgin Charter. What many customers told us they wanted before having access to the product was different from what they wanted once they had a chance to play with it. Sometimes buyers don't know what they want. It's not that they are trying to deceive you. It's that they can only know so much until they have a chance to experience what you have to offer. For that reason it is essential to do two things.\n\nFirst, build one thing at a time rather than everything at once. That way, if customers start using your product and find they want something slightly different, you have not wasted valuable time and resources. Second, get customers to use the product as early as possible and collect as much feedback as you can (remember the MVP?). Then iterate, redeploy, and scale.\n\nConstant interaction and communication with your users and ongoing reevaluations of your product and priorities are the best ways to keep moving forward in these crucial ninety days.\n\n## CHAPTER 9.\n\n## MAINTAINING YOUR ALTITUDE\n\nEverybody's got a plan, until they've been hit.\n\n\u2014MIKE TYSON\n\n### The Ninety-Day Checkup\n\nNow you've launched your business, and your hard work is starting to pay off. The company has begun to generate sales. Your customers are responding with great feedback. The market is buzzing about what you have to offer. You even brought home a good paycheck to deposit into the bank. Finally you have a chance to catch your breath.\n\nThe question is, what do you do next?\n\n_Take care of yourself._ Your start-up and launch periods are a sprint. It's an intense time and you are forced to go all out, giving it everything you can. But you can't continue to go at that pace forever. You need to cycle in periods of rest to recharge your battery. This is a good time to take care of yourself and your health. Are you keeping up with your exercise regimen, eating right, caught up on sleep? It is a good time to check in on relationships as well and reconnect with the people around you who made sacrifices so that you could pursue your dream.\n\n_Take inventory._ Work closely with your team to take inventory of what you learned during your launch. Here's a great chance for the group to contribute, for all of you to learn together so you have the best opportunity to improve. What worked? What didn't go as planned? Did you focus too much energy on one area of your launch to the detriment of another? Did your supply lines, feedback loops, and financials perform the way you anticipated?\n\n_Remodel the business._ Sometimes even a new house needs some remodeling, the plans adapted for what you didn't anticipate. The same is true in business. When you built your initial financial model, it was filled with assumptions. Now that you are in business, go back and study the new facts and figures against the model you used during your launch. Look at your income and expense projections, the time and resources invested, and the capital that was actually required to reach your goal.\n\nSometimes busy entrepreneurs fail to do this, but it's important to identify whether income, expenses, timing, or all of them were off and how all of these results will affect your need for capital going forward.\n\n_Reevaluate your team._ Do you have the right players on your team? Did each individual perform the way he or she was supposed to? Do you need to make changes? Can you get the kind of performance you want with improved leadership and training? Can the people who got you this far take you where you need to go next?\n\nOftentimes entrepreneurs feel loyalty to the people who joined their business prelaunch and fought the early battles alongside them. But your job is to make sure this company always has the right people in the right jobs at the right times. You may need to cut the cord and make changes as your business matures.\n\n_Find opportunities to grow._ Invest in learning activities to help grow and expand your team's capabilities. Decide how best to position the present unit to take the company forward. Ask the team what roadblocks they need removed to help improve results.\n\n_Consider adding new products and features._ Work to strengthen products that have demonstrated success. Determine whether now is the right time to add new products or features based on customer feedback, instead of simply iterating and improving your current offering.\n\n_Plan for the future._ Try to take a fresh look at your business. Update your goals, plan, and strategy using the inventory you took and counsel from the team. Evaluate your current and future cash needs and determine how you will meet those requirements. You should be in a great place to think strategically and move your business forward successfully.\n\n### Cash and Cardboard\n\nThe doors are opened to your new venture, and as far as you can tell you're doing everything right. You have customers coming in the door, and orders are flowing. You're beginning to feel like that crazy idea of yours might actually work!\n\nHold it right there. Before you begin to take it all for granted, I want you to hear about my friend Marty Metro.\n\nMarty got his MBA from the University of Arizona at age twenty-three. He went into consulting, working at Andersen Consulting and then a boutique firm. Over time he became a supply-chain technology expert. When the dot-com boom turned to bust, Marty got laid off.\n\nHe decided to start his own company, selling recycled cardboard moving boxes. The idea came out of his own experience, since he refused on principle to pay the retail price for new boxes when he moved into a new house in Los Angeles. He would go around town grabbing used ones from liquor stores. It wasn't that he couldn't afford to buy the boxes. Marty just didn't like spending money on things he would use once and then throw out\u2014and he figured he wasn't alone.\n\nLeveraging his background in logistics, Marty started a company called Boomerang Boxes, selling used boxes for half the retail price. The business was eco-friendly and was written up in _Entrepreneur_ magazine. Life was good.\n\nThen he went broke.\n\n\"In three years I had spent every penny I had,\" says Marty. He had self-financed the business, and when the business needed more capital, he reached into his own pocket. He had burned through two lines of credit for $100,000 each. He had maxed out three credit cards at $35,000 apiece. The whole thing came crashing down.\n\nWorst of all, his wife didn't know half the story\u2014he hadn't told her he had actually invested more than she had agreed to. The crash of Boomerang Boxes changed their lives. They had to sell their BMW and Land Rover, and Marty drove around town in a dented 1986 delivery van; adding insult to injury, the van had the name \"Boomerang Boxes\" painted on the side. He got a day job as a telemarketer. Sitting in a cubicle all day, he was miserable working as a cog in someone else's system.\n\nAt night he kept trying to figure out where his business had gone wrong. He just couldn't understand why it seemed the more boxes he had sold, the worse things had gotten for the business.\n\nMarty's problem was one I've seen again and again: _Growth kills cash_.\n\nThis may seem counterintuitive, but it is very easy to grow yourself out of business. Say you buy a product for five dollars and sell it for ten. That means the more orders you can get, the more profit you can make. Right? Not necessarily.\n\nWhen you're small, you can afford to maintain a low level of inventory. If someone wants to buy a dozen widgets, you've got them on hand, and once they're gone, you'll order another dozen to replace them. But what happens when a customer comes back and orders five hundred widgets? You think, _Hey, that's great!_ You go to your supplier, buy the widgets, and sell them to your customer. But here's the question that you should always ask yourself: _How am I going to finance this inventory?_\n\nYou may have enough cash on hand to buy the five hundred widgets from your supplier, but what if your customer says that he wants sixty-day terms? That means that to do the deal you tie up the cost of those widgets in your inventory. That diminishes your pool of working capital. If you don't have enough cash on hand to float your business until your customer pays you back, then your business may have to grind to a halt.\n\nBack to Marty. Once he learned these lessons, he was convinced that if he could manage the cash flow, the box business would work. He decided to try again.\n\nHoping to interest people in funding a new version of his idea, he did a tour of banks and venture-capital companies to raise money. When they asked what had gone wrong the first time around, he explained how his growth had outpaced his cash requirements and what he would do differently this time around. Remember, showing potential investors your failures (given that you've learned from them) can be as helpful as touting a string of successes.\n\nNot only did he raise the money, but Marty and his investors rethought their entire approach to the business. Instead of operating a retail store that sold one box at a time, the new model involved buying boxes by the tractor load from _Fortune_ 1000 manufacturers for resale to other companies. In the past, big companies would just crush and recycle the cardboard boxes. Instead, Marty and his team sorted them, inspected them, and packaged them into moving kits for sale to regular folks or back to big businesses. The new model was akin to what dairies used to do with milk crates and bottles. When you got your milk from the milkman, you only bought the milk; the bottles went back to the dairy.\n\nThe new strategy worked. After succeeding in Los Angeles, Marty quickly replicated the new company, UsedCardboard Boxes.com, around the country.\n\nThe message from Marty's lesson is this: As your business starts to grow, don't forget to pay attention to two very important factors:\n\n_Growth eats cash._ When you're launching a business and strapped for cash, big orders may do more harm than good, and a booming business can actually cannibalize itself. Before processing disproportionately larger orders, be sure you understand the impact, positive or negative, that fulfilling them could have on your business.\n\n_Invest from cash flow, not profits_. When reinvesting in the company, base your decisions on cash flow, not profit. Have a clear understanding of what big capital expenses might be around the corner so that you don't run into a cash crunch.\n\nNow that you know these lessons, don't be afraid to take a second bite at the apple if your strategies didn't work the first time around. If you have been part of a venture that went belly up, be open and honest with yourself about what went wrong. Seek the counsel of others, learn from your mistakes, and try to imagine how you would apply them to a new business.\n\nDon't be afraid that investors will not be open to you the next time around. If you can clearly demonstrate what went wrong and the lessons you took away from the experience, you may be surprised at how fast people jump on board. The surest path to success is learning from failure.\n\nFinally, Marty's experience reminds me of two practices we established early in this book: Separate your company's finances from your personal finances. And never hide deep losses from your loved one.\n\n### Kryptonite\n\nWhat comic-book character best describes the entrepreneur? I think it would be Superman.\n\nEntrepreneurs are the heroes of business. They start companies, execute tirelessly, and are on call twenty-four hours a day. In the early stages they put their stamp on everything, assuming responsibility for all decisions. They're the driving force behind all that gets done.\n\nJust as in the Superman story, there's one thing that can knock the entrepreneur down. No, it's not kryptonite in our case\u2014it's the failure to delegate.\n\nIf you want to grow your business and maximize its potential, it's important that you learn to hand over responsibility to others\u2014the sooner, the better.\n\nI have two female friends who started a chain of indoor playgrounds for kids. After operating the business for three years, they are generating plenty of cash and impressive profit margins for a retail business. Their goal is to grow the number of stores throughout their state, then take the business national. Will they get there?\n\nI found that instead of focusing on growth, they still spend most of their time on basic administrative tasks. They have run into a trap that many entrepreneurs encounter; because they are so close to the business, they think they can do every job in the company better than anyone else. They can't seem to loosen their grip, and as a result their business has plateaued. Yet by simply handing over more administrative tasks (like answering the phone, taking orders, and cleaning), they could significantly increase the amount of time they spend thinking strategically about the business and growing it nationally.\n\nThe importance of delegation to growth was made clear in two conversations I recently had with clients.\n\nIn the first I spoke with a consultant who runs a good business and makes one hundred thousand dollars a year. I respect her skills. I asked her what she was planning to do that day. Her answer: \"I need to schedule a bunch of phone calls and meetings and fill up my calendar. Then I need to go buy boxes and packing material and tape and bring them back to the office and pack some marketing materials for prospects. Then I need to go to the post office and stand in line and mail everything out.\" I asked her how long that would take. \"All day,\" she said.\n\nIn the second conversation I asked a good friend (another consultant) about his day. He said, \"I'll be out meeting with prospects and clients closing business in the morning, then I'm going on a fifty-mile bike ride to train for the Ironman triathlon.\" I asked how he could fit such time-consuming workouts into his schedule with all the bookings he needed to make, along with sending out presentation materials. \"Why would I do that stuff?\" he asked. \"I leave it to someone else.\" He has a virtual assistant he pays one thousand dollars a month to handle all of his administrative tasks. His business makes more than one million dollars a year.\n\nIt's pretty clear to me that the difference between the consultant with the million-dollar business and the one with the hundred-thousand-dollar business boils down to delegation. The most successful business owners spend their time on what is most valuable to growing their business and delegate the rest to others. I'd suggest that my first client look into the following fixes.\n\n_Start by valuing your time._ The fix isn't that hard: By handing over more administrative tasks (like answering the phone, taking orders, and cleaning), you can significantly increase the amount of time you have to work on the big picture. When is the right time to bring in this help? Today. You say, _How can I afford that?_ Wrong question. Ask yourself instead, _How can I afford not to?_ Your time is too valuable to waste.\n\nYou don't necessarily have to hire a full-time employee. Instead, bring on a virtual assistant and pay him or her by the hour. That person can handle scheduling, shipping, answering your phone, and responding to a lot of your e-mails for less than ten dollars an hour, perhaps working remotely from home. A small expenditure can give you the time you need to get in front of investors, prospects, and clients.\n\nI think of it this way: You either have a ten-dollar-an-hour assistant or _you_ are a ten-dollar-an-hour assistant. As an entrepreneur CEO, is that all your time is worth?\n\n_Train and trust employees to take on more responsibility_. When you start a business, you are the head of every department in the company. You are responsible for every job function. But as you add people to your team, be sure to fire yourself from those positions and let them take over.\n\nFor example, say you hire a new head of sales. That's a good decision, one area of responsibility you can take off your list. Your new job is to let the person you have hired do her job. Get out of her way, redirecting the energy you had put into sales back into your role as entrepreneur CEO. Your superhuman energies are better invested focusing on what is required to grow. By delegating you will move your business further faster, with less effort.\n\nDELEGATION DOS\n\n**Make a List of Everything You Do** **:** For one week, make a list of everything you do (both business and personal). Provide as much detail as possible. Circle all the administrative tasks\u2014reading e-mail, scheduling meetings, creating presentations, standing in line at the post office, returning phone calls\u2014that don't require your level of attention and that you can hand off. Next, take a look at nonadministrative tasks and decide what can be handed off to other members of the team.\n\n**Same Systems, Platforms, and Tools:** Get all your employees and assistants working on the same platforms and systems for e-mail, contacts, and calendars. Live in the cloud with shared folders, voice calling, and video calling. Make sure that your infrastructure is in place to help you grow and scale with little effort.\n\n**Refocus Your Energy** **:** Get back to your role as entrepreneur CEO\u2014or whatever position in the company suits you best. Spend your time there.\n\nMaintaining your altitude can mean making a series of small tweaks to your processes\u2014or a complete overhaul of your team, systems, and strategies. But you will not know what needs to be done unless you take the time to step back and take a hard look at how you're doing in these first days and weeks of your launch.\n\n## CHAPTER 10.\n\n## IF THINGS GO SIDEWAYS\n\nWhen the glass looks half empty, don't pray for rain, head toward the river.\n\n\u2014GREG REID\n\n### Learning How to Crash\n\nBeing an entrepreneur is a lot like driving a race car. In launching a business you move very fast, avoiding obstacles all along the way. At times you may feel like you are about to lose control and crash, like you're heading head right toward the wall.\n\nLast year my business partner and I decided to learn how to drive race cars. We headed to Las Vegas Motor Speedway to take a course on driving. The instructors helped us get familiar with our cars, then we strapped on our helmets. I was driving a brand new Ferrari 360 Modena, with the instructor in the passenger seat. Before completing my initial lap, I got my first big lesson.\n\nEvery driver starts with his or her head up and eyes focused way down the road. But as your speed increases, you feel a new type of pressure. It's all mental. The natural tendency for drivers is to narrow their focus, drop their eyes, and look down, right over the hood. As a result, you get tunnel vision, seeing every little bump in the track, every little piece of shredded tire. I found myself making lots of quick turns, tiny microadjustments.\n\nOn the racetrack tunnel vision can get you killed. Steering around lots of small bumps is one thing when you're going 25 miles per hour. But when you're traveling at speeds six times as fast? At 150 miles per hour, a sharp steering adjustment can cause your car to veer wildly. And you can miss what's literally down the road.\n\nThe same thing is true in a fast-growing business. No matter what your speed, you need to keep your eyes up and focused on the horizon. You can't lose sight of everything in front of you, including the goals you plan to achieve. Only with a larger view can you pick the best line to take around the corners. The little bumps in the road won't throw you off. Instead, the wider view will allow you to achieve a graceful kind of movement that enables you to stay in control and reach your goal.\n\nAnother thing they teach in racing school is how to crash. When you least expect it, the instructor tugs lightly on your steering wheel. Of course you panic, feeling like you will spin out of control. And what's the first thing that happens? Your head turns and your focus goes directly toward what you fear most: the wall. As a result, your arms just naturally follow, steering you toward a crash.\n\nHaving jerked your wheel toward disaster, the instructor does something else surprising: He puts his hand up against your helmet and pushes your focus back to the track. Where your head goes and your eyes go, your arms and the wheel follow. You're back on track again.\n\nIn business you'll speed into twists, turns, and hard corners. From time to time you may feel like you are losing control. Remember: Your job is to keep your eyes up, focused on the horizon, without ever losing sight of the big picture.\n\nPedal to the metal, eyes on the horizon.\n\n### Panic Faster\n\nJack Welch, the legendary former CEO of General Electric, once offered a sound piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. After he spoke to Entrepreneurs' Organization, the largest global network of its kind, somebody asked Welch what his number one piece of advice to an entrepreneur would be.\n\nJack's response? \"Panic faster.\"\n\nEntrepreneurs are by their very nature positive, confident, and sure of their business. These are all great qualities to have when promoting your venture, but when things don't happen as planned and the business begins to go sideways, those same traits can work against you.\n\nEntrepreneurs can get caught up in their own story. They can get so busy reading their own press that they don't see what is really happening around them. That means they may not react to danger signs.\n\nOut of fear of the unknown, entrepreneurs sometimes freeze or pretend things aren't happening. They put off the inevitable, not wanting to make hard decisions like letting people go or cutting expenditures. Their emotions interfere, and the result is inaction.\n\nThen, before they know it, they're out of business and have lost everything.\n\nSo here's some advice on how to avoid that worst-case scenario.\n\n_Panic faster_. As Jack Welch said, you can't stand around hoping or waiting for conditions to improve. When things start to go wrong in your business, drop everything and identify where your problems lie. Spend 20 percent of your time on the problem and 80 percent on the solution.\n\n_Control the dialogue._ It's important, especially in small, early-stage environments, to control the message. By the time you are panicking, odds are the rest of the team is already there. Remember, in their day-to-day responsibilities your staff may be closer to market conditions, sales trends, and financial matters. Good times or bad, they may know what's going on before you do and be more willing to believe it faster than you are.\n\nWhen big problems occur, you need to get out in front of them. Your team will be wondering three things: _What is going on? How does this affect me? Will I lose my job?_ It's important to address these questions. It's just as important to redirect your team's focus away from the problem and on to devising solutions.\n\n_Get everyone's input_. You have put a smart team in place. Leverage that talent to help you diagnose problems. Oftentimes employees have already identified them and have come up with solutions. They're just not encouraged or motivated to speak up. Team problem solving should be part of your culture. Get everyone involved, and encourage them to take ownership. Or would you prefer they sit around updating their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s?\n\n_Leverage your network_. Whether it's formal or informal, you should have a board of directors, a group of mentors, a team of experienced advisers and perhaps investors. You've consulted with them and asked their advice over the years because they are good at what they do. They know that young companies run into challenges. Don't think you're losing face by going to them in a difficult time and asking for advice. Don't be embarrassed or afraid to admit failings. They've been there and are here to help.\n\nExperienced entrepreneurs are typically eager to lend a hand to a fellow business owner who sincerely asks for it. One of the most important lessons I have learned is the people who are the most successful are usually the most accessible.\n\n_Get in front of your customers._ At times you will be far more effective getting out of the office and into the market. Get on a plane and go see your customers. Learn about their business and the challenges they may be facing. Perhaps they have a new need you can meet that is a pivot from your existing product or service.\n\n_Be transparent_. If your business is having problems, it is important to be transparent with your customers. You want to control the dialogue and not let someone else, like a competitor, do it for you. By being up front you will create trust. You may even find that your customer can help you to design a solution.\n\n_Cut fast and cut deep_. If you're really in trouble, either with your financials or in not having the right people on board to solve problems in a crisis, you may need to trim your team. Laying people off is one of the hardest jobs of an entrepreneur. You may feel not only like you have failed in managing your business but also that you've failed in providing for these people. But you can't let that paralyze you. You have a deeper responsibility to your partners, your investors, your family\u2014and the rest of your employees. Sometimes you need to cut off the limb to save the patient. Your ultimate responsibility is to your business.\n\nWhen you see that layoffs are inevitable, don't delay. Furthermore, never make these cuts small and incremental. Small cuts will kill your business because everyone will be wasting their time looking over their shoulders wondering if the ax will fall on them next, instead of staying focused on their work. Small cuts can paralyze an organization. When you have to cut, do it quickly and deeply. It's much better to reorganize, rebuild, and start hiring again under better circumstances.\n\n_Keep your eyes on the horizon._ It's easy to get bogged down in the trenches, to be so muddy and distracted by the bullets flying overhead that you forget to survey the battlefield and take in the big picture. Doing so will help you find the right path to take you out of this tough period.\n\n### We're Out of Toilet Paper\n\nSometimes things go wrong. No matter how much passion and hard work you invest in a new venture, you may hit a point where everything is on the line. The future looks suddenly like it holds nothing but failure. So why not quit?\n\nBeing an entrepreneur can be very rewarding, but building a successful business is certainly not easy. When things get tough, really tough, your business will fail if you don't have a deep sense of purpose tied to it. Without a clear reason to stick it out, it's just too easy to walk away. My friend Dr. Kristi Funk and her husband, Andy, are a perfect example.\n\nAfter completing medical school and a grueling five-year residency of eighty-hour weeks, Kristi looked forward to starting her surgical career. She was a resident at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle when she was asked to join the Cedars-Sinai Breast Center in Los Angeles. She said no.\n\nBreast surgery was still evolving as a specialty, and Kristi felt this new position wouldn't take full advantage of the surgical skills she had spent so many years developing, so she turned down the offer. But she soon realized the opportunity had less to do with performing surgery and much more to do with making a positive impact on the lives of many women. That surging sense of purpose changed her mind. She soon called back and accepted the job.\n\nBy the time Andy Funk entered her life, she had already become a well-known and respected breast-cancer surgeon. Although Andy was heir to the largest privately held German insurance-brokerage firm, which his family had begun more than a century earlier, Andy wanted to create his own path. At age nineteen he had forfeited his inheritance, made his way to California, started his first company, and promptly fallen $250,000 in debt. Instead of heading home, Andy had fought hard to turn things around. Within five years, he had sold three businesses and established Funk Ventures, a venture-capital firm, which had soon become a pioneer investing in socially responsible companies. He had overcome big odds to make it past his early disappointments; this experience would come in handy later.\n\nAs a result of his success as a venture capitalist, Andy became the youngest member of the board of governors of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Not long thereafter, Kristi and Andy met and married.\n\nKristi had by this point become one of Los Angeles's go-to breast-cancer doctors. Her high profile attracted much media attention and helped draw many patients to Cedars-Sinai. But this success meant longer hours for Kristi. She and Andy felt like they had no life to themselves, let alone time to build a family. To make matters worse, Cedars rejected her request to hire any additional support to reduce her workload. After Cedars refused to provide support, Kristi and Andy agreed that things needed to change, fast.\n\nAs a medical and wellness investor, Andy had been intrigued for some time by the thought of opening a comprehensive cancer facility with Kristi. The center, the first of its kind, would allow them not just to hire more doctors to reduce Kristi's workload but also to treat patients more effectively and with better technology. With their own facility they would have the opportunity to change tens of thousands of lives and have an even bigger impact on people. A strong purpose was born.\n\nThe plan came together quickly. They founded the Pink Lotus Breast Center and lined up their financing by recruiting other physicians who would partner with them. In the fall of 2008 they leased thousands of square feet in a Beverly Hills medical complex, which would soon cost them more than thirty thousand dollars per month. Within weeks of their signing the eight-year lease with personal guarantees, the U.S. economy went into a free fall and all of their financing disappeared. Lines of credit were closed, credit cards were canceled, and the physicians who had committed to join the venture and invest began to get cold feet. When they thought things couldn't get more complicated, they found out Kristi was pregnant\u2014with _triplets_!\n\nHaving scraped together every penny they had, Kristi and Andy were determined to remain in their medical office and build their company. The Funks opened their facility in March 2009, on the day the Dow Jones hit its lowest point and just three months away from the impending birth of their triplets. Even though the business plan was built for a minimum of three surgeons, Kristi was the only doctor on staff. When the Funks couldn't pay rent\u2014because they were quickly running out of cash\u2014their landlord sat down with Andy and offered him two options: Get out of the suite or get sued. Andy and Kristi had no interest in leaving and continued believing that their vision would one day come to fruition.\n\nJust as at Cedars, Kristi was working sixteen-hour days in order to try to make ends meet while Andy was trying to hold things together on the corporate and business front.\n\nWithout other surgeons in the practice, Kristi and Andy were able to maintain full ownership of the business, but they were also missing out on much-needed revenue. In addition, delayed payments from insurance companies meant cash often came in six to nine months after Kristi and Andy had to pay their own expenses. Cash flow soon became impossible for Andy to manage. Things were coming to a head.\n\nPretty soon they started running out of toilet paper at the office. When Kristi asked Andy why there was none, he didn't have the heart to tell her\u2014they just couldn't afford to buy any.\n\nIt was clear that despite their best efforts, it just wasn't working. The children's arrival also meant the added cost of a bigger house and two nannies so that Kristi and Andy could work. With all the odds stacked against them, why not just close up shop, declare bankruptcy, and start over?\n\nWell, it wasn't that simple for Kristi and Andy.\n\nAlthough they faced incredible difficulties at this point in their business, they had a tremendous sense of _purpose_. They strongly believed that they were fighting for something that was much more important than their short-term problems.\n\nTheir persistence paid off. Despite sliding into more than two million dollars of debt, Kristi and Andy built a center with an improved approach to breast-cancer care. The business took off and began doubling in size each year. Kristi's continued television appearances on shows such as _Today, The View,_ and _Dr. Oz_ provided further visibility while breast-cancer survivor and Pink Lotus patient Sheryl Crow soon lent her name to the new Sheryl Crow Imaging Center at Pink Lotus. To top it off, General Electric selected Pink Lotus as the first treatment facility to introduce a revolutionary mammography technology to the country. New surgeons joined the team. The business started to recover losses. Even expansion became a reality.\n\nAfter a few years on the brink of financial collapse, Pink Lotus was not just headed toward success\u2014it would soon be regarded as one of the top breast-cancer treatment facilities in the world.\n\nIn May 2013 Angelina Jolie announced that she had undergone a double mastectomy as a preventative measure to decrease her risk of breast cancer. The multiple procedures were all performed at the Pink Lotus Breast Center under Kristi's diligent medical care.\n\nBe it Angelina Jolie, Sheryl Crow, or one of the many thousands of other women who come to Pink Lotus for their breast health each year, Kristi and Andy are making a huge impact on many people's lives.\n\nWhen I think of Kristi and Andy, one takeaway really stands out: Most entrepreneurs don't realize how close they are to breaking through just before they decide to quit. Their stories can help assure you that most people don't know how close they are to success the moment before they decide to quit.\n\nIf you are on the edge and thinking about shutting it down, here are a couple things to consider:\n\n_Get counsel from experienced entrepreneurs_. Be open about what you are experiencing. The most successful people are usually the most willing to talk about their struggles and help others work through their own. It's kind of a rite of initiation into the world of the entrepreneurship, like the exchange of a secret handshake.\n\n_Join entrepreneur clubs and organizations._ For added support join networking groups like the Entrepreneurs' Organization. The mission of such groups is to provide support to entrepreneurs just like you.\n\nI've often found that one of the best ways to get through tough times is to talk to peers in these organizations. Many have already experienced the same problems you are wrestling with, and they want to help.\n\nAs Kristi and Andy demonstrated, if you have a strong enough reason _why_ you are doing something, you will figure out _how_ to make it happen. In order to live your dream, sometimes you need to combine that purpose with pigheaded determination and persistence.\n\n### Seventeen Days\n\nMost entrepreneurs seem to have one response when others ask, \"How's business?\": \"Everything is great!\"\n\nMany either believe or try to project that the business is making big headway, when nothing could be further from the truth.\n\nEntrepreneurs need to be positive and project a certain image of strength. This is important to help attract investors, partners, and the best talent. That attitude inspires confidence and keeps family and loved ones at ease.\n\nBut what happens when things are not going as planned? What happens when the image you are trying to portray does not reflect what is actually happening inside the business?\n\nMany entrepreneurs feel like they have no one to talk to. They don't want to go to their investors because they're afraid they will just be angry. They don't want to talk to their partners because they're afraid they will kill the deal. They don't want to go to their employees for fear they will start looking for new jobs. They don't want to involve their spouses because the emotional roller coaster may be too much. Last but not least, they don't want to admit to themselves that something may be wrong, very wrong.\n\nInstinctively, what many entrepreneurs do is try to bury the news as a means of hiding from it. Meanwhile, the problems eat away at them and their business. That's certainly the wrong response.\n\nAll the answers you need may be just a phone call away.\n\nAs my friend Michelle Patterson says, \"We don't want to show that we're vulnerable. But when we do, it leads to amazing things.\" She should know.\n\nSince its founding three decades ago by then-governor George Deukmejian, the California Women's Conference has been bringing together women from all over the world to learn from one another and to grow. For most of that time the event was organized by the first lady of California, the governor's wife. But in 2012 Governor Jerry Brown's wife decided to discontinue the event.\n\nMrs. Brown's decision inspired Michelle. As an experienced producer of large-scale events, she decided to take the conference over full time, determined to keep it alive. She locked down a venue, built her team, developed a plan, and started to execute. Over the next few months she signed up thousands of attendees, brought in more than 250 exhibitors, and secured more than 150 speakers. Things were off to a great start.\n\nAs the event grew closer, two big things affected the business and its bank account. First, the team outsourced to handle sponsorships grossly inflated its projections. Second, the investor funding expected for the business also failed to materialize.\n\nMichelle was deeply embarrassed. She was supposed to be an expert in putting on this kind of event, and now it was in jeopardy. Like many entrepreneurs, her first instinct was to tell no one, to remain positive on the outside while she struggled to figure how to make ends meet. But one day everything came to a head when a payment was due for the production, and Michelle had no money left. The organization was $1.8 million in the hole. Michelle had no idea how to find the cash she desperately needed.\n\nAs a result, the event was in danger of being canceled.\n\nMichelle had just seventeen days to save it.\n\nShe broke the news to her husband first. She told him she was afraid that she was about to bankrupt the family. When she shared her real concerns, he responded with nothing but support. He told her, \"After fifteen years of marriage I have watched you persevere in everything you do\u2014and you would never forgive yourself if you canceled this event. There has to be a way. We are not the first people to be in this position. You know a lot of very successful business leaders. Why not ask for help?\"\n\nThe next day Michelle made a phone call that changed her life. She reached out to the mayor of Long Beach. She also called the CEO of the convention center where the event was to be held. Michelle and the CEO met later that day, and she explained the event's financial problems. In response the CEO asked her one simple question.\n\n\"What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?\"\n\n\"Strawberry,\" Michelle said.\n\nWith that, the CEO had strawberry ice cream brought into the office. He encouraged Michelle to take a deep breath. Then he said, \"Let's dive in and tackle this together.\" She now had a partner to help take on this problem.\n\nHis response also renewed her confidence. Michelle realized that if she got her ego out of the way and opened up, people would respond in a way that would benefit the event. She went home and made a list of people whose counsel she thought might help her out of this mess. She called everyone on the list and the response she heard most was not \"How could you do that?\" or \"How could you let that happen?\" Instead, everyone wanted to know \"Why didn't you tell me earlier?\" or \"How can I help?\" Several confessed they had tackled similar challenges in their own careers.\n\nHer network came out to help her get the business back on track. Two friends even postponed their honeymoon and moved into her house to help her dial for dollars and collaborate on the effort. Michelle realized that the more she helped people understand the real issues, the more candid she was, the more help they would provide. Soon she had an army behind her.\n\nTogether with this team of advisers, she executed. In seventeen days she went from being told to shut down and consider bankruptcy to reducing what was owed from $1.8 million to $150,000. The event took place and was a big success. So much so that its success led to the creation of the Women's Network and Women Network Day, a global holiday held every May celebrating women.\n\nMichelle often reflects on what would have happened had she given up out of fear and let her ego get the best of her. Luckily, she didn't, and she learned a valuable lesson: When things go wrong, don't try to hide it. Instead of letting fear take hold, take action immediately. When you ask for help sincerely and honestly, you will get it.\n\nIt may not be easy, but here are some ways to, deliberately and with your eye on the horizon, dig yourself out of a business hole.\n\n_Illuminate._ In the words of David Corbin, Sunshine is the best disinfectant. The more light you shine on a problem, the easier it is to tackle. Get it all out on the table. Don't hide anything. Once you discover the source of the problem, get right to finding a solution.\n\n_Ask for help._ The truth is, we have all been there. Letting go of ego and asking for help is one of the greatest signs of leadership and strength. There will be times in your entrepreneurial life when you feel like you're at the end of your rope, just dangling there with nothing to grab onto. Everything you could possibly need may be just a phone call away.\n\nIf you must choose between your pride and saving your enterprise, that's no choice at all. Get over yourself, push down that ego, and ask for help with the problem. You'll be amazed at how eager people will be to come to your aid. There are people out there who have walked in your shoes. Find them and seek their counsel. Don't be afraid to open up about what you are experiencing. The more they know, the better they can help guide you out of a problem and into an opportunity.\n\nNo entrepreneur starts by thinking about what they will do if their big idea, the one that they've worked so hard on, goes sideways. But you need to keep these lessons in the back of your mind.\n\nNothing in life worth achieving ever comes easily. Sometimes you need to fight for your dream. Sometimes you need to let your sheer will and persistence carry you through. When things are tough, you don't always need to be out front if you have the heart to come from behind.\n\nRemember, every single thing you need to turn that situation around is in you now or within your reach.\n\n## EPILOGUE\n\n## STEADY AS SHE GOES\n\nDo the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.\n\n\u2014MAYA ANGELOU\n\n### Wing Walk\n\nIt was the day of our launch for Virgin Charter and I hadn't slept for twenty-four hours. The previous day Richard Branson had flown in from India, and we had done nearly fifty interviews, filmed an online news segment, and ended the afternoon on FOX News. A prelaunch party followed, with all the glitz and glam befitting his Virgin brand. I got back to my room with just enough time to shower before heading out to CNBC for the official launch of the business live in studio on _Squawk Box_.\n\nThe day started as one of the high points in my life, the culmination of a two-year journey. Still, I had all the anxiety of any business owner or product manager the day of his or her launch. I wanted my product to work and my team to perform. More than anything, though, I wanted to remember my three lines, the three talking points I had been told I needed to say on air.\n\nRichard and I sat next to each other in the green room. He watched a small monitor while I rehearsed my talking points. Then he leaned in to me and said, \"Scott, I've got a problem. I don't think you're doing a good enough job.\"\n\nMy stomach fell to the floor. You could say this was one of those low points on the emotional roller coaster.\n\nHe went on. \"I don't think you're doing a good enough job getting promotion for this launch. I think I'm going to have to step in. Give me a few minutes to think about it.\"\n\nA few minutes later Richard leaned back over and said, \"Scott, I've got it. You and I are going to do a wing walk.\"\n\n\"We're going to do what?\"\n\n\"A wing walk.\"\n\n\"What the hell is a wing walk?\"\n\nHe said, \"You're going to stand on one wing of an airplane, and I'm going to stand on the other wing. We'll each hold on to a rope with one hand and a Virgin banner with the other. Then we'll fly all over New York. We'll get more publicity than you ever imagined for your business. And don't worry. These planes are stunt planes. Your feet will be in metal boots attached to the wings. So if there's turbulence, you won't fall off.\"\n\nHe shared his idea with everyone in the room, and they all thought it was great.\n\nI was too tired to think straight, but I knew enough to still be terrified.\n\nRichard turned back to me and said, \"Don't worry. I'll give you a diaper in case you need it!\"\n\nI sat back in silence. A couple minutes later he leaned in again. \"Hey, Scott, I don't know if we'll be able to get the plane.\" I was totally relieved, again a new high. \"So I have a backup plan.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"You and I are going to go skydiving.\"\n\nWhat?\n\n\"Richard, I've never done that before,\" I replied.\n\n\"That's the best part,\" he said. \"We're going to go tandem. You'll be on my back, and we'll hold a Virgin sign. You're going to get more publicity for this launch than you've ever imagined.\"\n\n\"Richard, I'm not sure that's a good idea. Like I said, I've never done that before.\"\n\n\"Well, you know, here's the thing,\" he said. \"I haven't either. So we'd better practice once before we jump out of the plane so I know where that thing is you have to pull to let the parachute out.\"\n\nAt this point I was so nervous I felt like I was going to get sick. I got up and started walking to the bathroom, but the CNBC stage manager summoned us.\n\nNext thing I knew, we were out there in front of the cameras. The moment was supposed to be exhilarating, but I struggled to remember what I was supposed to say. In my earpiece I heard the producer say, \"Fifteen seconds.\"\n\nI looked over at Richard. He smiled at me. A twinkle in his eye seemed to say, \"I can't wait for later.\"\n\nWe got back in the car after the interview, and I could still feel my heart pounding. Would I be wing walking or skydiving later this afternoon? Suddenly everyone in the car got quiet. Then Richard turned around, his face a big grin. He high-fived everyone in the car. He then looked at me, reached out to give me a high five, and said, \"Scott, give me a high five. It was all just one big joke!\"\n\nThe wing walk. The sky diving. He had just made it up.\n\n\"I just had to break you in,\" Richard said.\n\nIn a weird way, when I look back at Richard's prank, it wasn't any different from what entrepreneurs experience every day when launching their business, full of highs and lows, ups and downs (but usually not a wing walk!).\n\nAs you kick off your journey, it's important to bring your focus back to the task at hand, no matter what happens along the way.\n\n### The Circus and Start-ups\n\nWing walk? Well, maybe not. But launching a new business or product can be like a circus act. There are lots of distractions being thrown at you. Any one of them could take away your focus, leave you off balance, and knock you down. All of this puts you and your business at risk. I know this firsthand.\n\nMy friend Greg Reid has a long bucket list. You know, a list of things he wants to do before he \"kicks the bucket.\" Last year one of those things he decided to take on was the flying trapeze _._ He asked if I'd like to join him.\n\nI had no idea what I was in for. When I finally got a firsthand look at what I had to do, I was terrified.\n\nThink about it. You're standing on a ledge thirty feet off the ground. To jump onto a swinging trapeze, you have to reach out and grab the idea . . . I mean, the swing. You leap and suddenly you're moving at three g's. That's right\u2014three g's! You're launched.\n\nNow you're flying through the air. You're holding on tight. But suddenly the thing gets tougher. If you don't keep moving forward, you lose momentum and you're at risk of falling. So you grab the next ring. Success! Things begin to get easier. You try a flip and you execute. You gain confidence but still, every time you climb the ladder to make that jump and push yourself further along, you still have those butterflies, standing thirty feet above the ground, looking at what is in front of you.\n\nWhat I learned that day is that success is all about letting go. When I first saw those swinging bars and platforms, I thought, _No way am I doing that!_ Some people can't get past the initial fear. They don't trust the net down below. They focus squarely on all the reasons they cannot succeed. Because that's what they focus on consistently, that's all they get out of life.\n\nIt's time for you to let go. It's time to let your momentum carry you forward.\n\nAre you ready to fall or fly?\n\nThe day Greg and I trained for the circus, there were eight other people trying out the trapeze for the first time. We were the only ones to succeed. By the end of the day, we were doing backflips and catching other acrobats' hands midair. It wasn't because we were more skilled than anybody else. It was because we had the right mental attitude.\n\nLetting go and jumping off may come more naturally to entrepreneurs than to most people. The experience is liberating, of course, as leaving your comfort zone can be a real boost for creativity. Taking flight\u2014at launch, on a trapeze, whatever\u2014can inspire you to think outside the box, to carry forward your momentum, to keep advancing your business. It just takes focus, practice, and a willingness to let go.\n\nJust ask any of the more than four hundred billionaires in America or the roughly ten thousand people who have built fortunes of more than a hundred million dollars. Or a run-of-the-mill entrepreneur millionaire\u2014I promise you, every one of those people can tell you they had to face the same fears you do. But they let go, and allowed their momentum to carry them forward. At times they fell, but they got back up again.\n\nIf they can do it, so can you.\n\n### Twenty Thousand Miles per Hour\n\nSpace flight has always fascinated me. The idea of a man sitting in a capsule and being propelled into space at over twenty thousand miles per hour is pretty incredible. The fact that astronauts can confront their fear and engage in something that appears so risky is amazing to me.\n\nA few years ago I had a chance to meet a space-shuttle commander. I was able to ask him a question that I had wondered about for a very long time, concerning the moment in time where the ship is returning from space and reenters the Earth's atmosphere. During that time there's a communication blackout with the command center on Earth and the shuttle is surrounded by a three-thousand-degree ball of fire. When all that occurs, I asked, \"Aren't you just freaking out?\"\n\nThe commander said, more or less, \"That part's a breeze.\" He explained that _positioning_ the aircraft for reentry is what's really tricky. You're above the Earth, traveling at something like twenty thousand miles per hour\u2014and you're flying upside down and backward. You need to flip the ship over and position the nose at an angle of approach of precisely 40 degrees. If you come in too fast or at the wrong angle, the ship could explode when it hits the atmosphere.\n\nI asked him, \"How do you do it?\"\n\nWhat I learned is that risk should not be all that risky.\n\nIn the case of the spaceship commander, he had NASA behind him. Thousands of people, decades of experience. A long history of success (and a few failures) from which to learn.\n\nDuring those minutes of precise ship positioning and reentry silence, no one is focused on fear. They've all been trained by the best, including other space-shuttle flight commanders who have done it before. This isn't trial and error; it's modeling. Each person on the team knows his role. They've practiced for years. They understand how to navigate through challenges. They execute together flawlessly.\n\nIn your business you need to do the same to mitigate what could go wrong and speed up success. Find and study role models to help eliminate risk from your business and to help save you valuable time and money. Learn what others have done to achieve the outcome you want. Study their specific beliefs, their strategies, and the exact order in which they did things. Then do the same things.\n\nTALKING TO YOURSELF\n\nNow matter what life throws your way, you can choose how to respond to it.\n\n**Control Your Inner Dialogue** **:** In every situation your brain asks two important questions: _What does this mean?_ and _What should I do?_ The questions you ask to evaluate the situation will determine what you focus on. What you focus on will determine how you feel. How you feel will determine how you behave. How you behave will have a tremendous impact on your business.\n\n**Break the Pattern** **:** If you catch yourself asking negative and disempowering questions\u2014or if you find yourself caught in a terrible loop\u2014break that pattern and insert questions that get you to analyze the situation in new, empowering ways.\n\n**Make This a Habit:** It will change your life forever. Before you know it, you'll believe that the universe is conspiring on your behalf!\n\n### Keep Your Eyes on the Horizon\n\nWe're coming full circle. Remember that the number one key to success is maintaining your focus. That means controlling your inner dialogue as you keep your eyes on the horizon. In doing so, you'll be able to anticipate, prepare for, and plan for whatever may be in your path and then steer gracefully around it.\n\nThis is not easy to do. It takes a lot of practice and hard work. It's like building a muscle. But if you focus on getting better in this one area of your life, each and every day, you will get stronger. You will be better able to manage through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship successfully.\n\nNo matter what life throws at you and no matter how high that wall looks, you need to take it all on. You'll find it helps to manage your focus by asking empowering questions that drive your energy toward a solution.\n\nAs a Lakers fan, some of my fondest memories are of watching the Lakers \"Showtime\" era in the eighties. My favorite player then\u2014and one of my personal heroes now\u2014was Earvin \"Magic\" Johnson. On the basketball court he lived up to his nickname because of his focus, his ability to concentrate on the objective at hand. He was always in the zone, in the flow of things. He won five championships and gained a place in the NBA Hall of Fame as one of the greatest to ever play the game.\n\nMagic performed not only on the court but in business as well. Even before he retired from the game he founded Magic Johnson Enterprises, planning for what came next. His first big investment was a partnership with businessman Earl Graves Jr. when, in 1990, they bought a Pepsi-Cola distributorship. Magic got involved in movie theaters and inner-city redevelopment projects. In 1998 he partnered with Starbucks to create a company called Urban Coffee Opportunities, opening franchises in inner-city neighborhoods and building out more than a hundred locations before selling them back to Starbucks in 2010 for what's believed to be more than fifty million dollars.\n\nJohnson is also a lead investor in the $1 billion Canyon Johnson real estate fund and the $500 million Yucaipa Johnson private equity fund. He owned a piece of the Lakers for many years and joined with Guggenheim Partners in its $2 billion acquisition of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He's now working on a venture to bring an NFL team back to Los Angeles.\n\nSome people may say he was just lucky or born with that talent. But Magic Johnson is somebody who has jumped over more than his share of barriers.\n\nIn 1991 I was promoting a Tony Robbins event in Houston, Texas. The Lakers were scheduled to play the Rockets. There were a lot of fans on my team, so we decided to go to the game and got great seats right behind the Lakers bench. But Magic was missing from the action that day. His absence seemed strange because we hadn't heard about any kind of injury that would keep him out of the lineup.\n\nThen, on November 7, 1991, I saw the breaking news on television: Magic Johnson was HIV positive. The first thing I thought was, _Will Magic survive?_ But that was not Magic's first reaction.\n\nLongtime Lakers trainer Gary Vitti recalls that when Magic first learned the news, he said, \"Well, God gave this to the right person, because I'm going to do something with it.\" And he has. He used his diagnosis as an opportunity to educate and inspire millions of people around the world. He gave hope to people who at the time seemed without hope, creating the Magic Johnson Foundation to help combat HIV. He became the symbol not only for survival but also for successful treatment.\n\nHow does this relate to your launch? By controlling his inner dialogue and asking a different set of questions from the ones most people would have asked in the same circumstance, Magic was able to keep himself in the strongest possible position to steer through the medical challenges he faced. Even in the worst of circumstances, consciously or subconsciously, he used this skill to maintain his focus and move his life forward in a positive direction.\n\nIf Magic could overcome a challenge like this, I know all of us can overcome the things we battle every day in our businesses by maintaining our focus, controlling our inner dialogue, and keeping our eyes up on the horizon.\n\n### Fill Your Cup First\n\nSome people get it backward. I have worked with many entrepreneurs whose primary driver for starting a business was to create a vehicle for serving others or facilitating a specific social change. These are noble purposes.\n\nHere's the problem. Many people who start new ventures with these goals in mind place too much of their focus on the social aspect of their venture and don't spend enough time building a fundamentally sound business.\n\nWhile I admire their passion, I also know that focusing on giving first and creating a sustainable business second usually leads to failure. That's because without creating a solid business that generates cash, these entrepreneurs are more likely to go out of business. As a result, they are not able to have the long-term impact they had hoped to achieve.\n\nIf your goal is to create a platform that gives back, I think that's awesome. But make sure you have your priorities in order. First create a fundamentally sound business, one that creates profits and generates sustainable cash flow. Once you have reached that threshold, use what you choose to give back.\n\nBest-selling author and speaker Les Brown puts it well. He likes to say, \"Fill your cup first. Let what spills over feed others.\" If you take this approach, you will create not only stability for yourself but also abundance that can be shared with the world.\n\nNow, if you've reached a point where you can afford to give back but are looking for a cause, I'd suggest this: Give to other entrepreneurs.\n\nWhen you're in orbit and you look down and see someone who has taken a shot, who may be struggling, reach out and give them a hand. Maybe it's financially to help them get through a tough period. Maybe it's by offering advice or being a sounding board.\n\nWhen given the opportunity, invest in new businesses. Serve on boards. Assist entrepreneurs in launching new and innovative products and services. After all, it's these dreamers who keep our economy moving, who create jobs and growth.\n\nUse your position to fuel the entrepreneurial spirit that is the heart and soul of America. Be there to support others who will be going down a road you have already traveled. You know they must take their own wing walks, try flying a trapeze, and race around tough corners. If you can keep them from falling, from hitting the wall, you'll be giving back in a way that can benefit all of us.\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nThere are so many people I would like to thank for their contribution to this book. First, to Demetri Boutris and Bruce Perlmutter, who got this whole process started. This would have never happened without the hard work of Nena Madonia and the amazing team at Dupree\/Miller or without the support and encouragement of Adrian Zackheim, Natalie Horbachevsky, and the rest of the team at Portfolio\/Penguin. Special thanks go out to Chris Helman for his valuable insights along the way. Finally, thank you to Gary Goldstein, Ron Klein, and Raoul Davis for all of their guidance.\n\nOn a personal note:\n\nI would like to thank my mother for being so incredibly supportive. For going on this ride with me for the past twenty-five years. You taught me the value of persistence, hard work, and always looking at the \"bright side\" of a situation, no matter how hard it might have seemed in the moment. Thank you for always believing in me.\n\nTo Big D, thanks for being the rock in our family and having the patience to sit with me, on so many long nights, to talk about business. You were the greatest influence on my career when I was getting started.\n\nTo my sister Ashley and brother Shane, you have always been there for me. You have helped me in so many ways on more than one occasion. Thank you!\n\nTo Dad, I'll never forget all the football, baseball, and basketball memories growing up. What a great dad.\n\nTo Steve Rosendorf and Debbie Nessen, wow, did I get lucky! I hit the jackpot!\n\nTo Julie and Jay Don Johnson, many more great years together.\n\nTo Dan Clivner and Steve Cochran, you are family. You will never know how much I appreciate your support.\n\nTo Greg and Allyn Reid, you are the true definition of friendship.\n\nAdditional thanks to those who gave me a shot somewhere along the way: Richard Branson, Gabriel Baldinucci, Dan Porter, Stephen Murphy, Jon Peachey, Christine Choi, Julie Cottineau, Nirmal Saverimuttu, Ron Garret, Steve Chien, Dena Cook, Brooke Hammerling, Tony Robbins, Mike Hutchison, Ross Levinsohn, Chris Cottle, Jeff Tang, Jed Savage, Jason Port, Chris Kitze, Laurant Massa, Russell Hyzen, Kelly Perdew, Mark Moses. To the team at Virgin Charter for giving it their all.\n\n# RESOURCES\n\nRecommended Reading\n\n_Unlimited Power,_ Anthony Robbins\n\n_Stickability,_ Greg S. Reid\n\n_Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations On and Off the Court,_ John Wooden\n\n_As a Man Thinketh,_ James Allen\n\n_Losing My Virginity,_ Richard Branson\n\n_Crossing the Chasm,_ Geoffrey A. Moore\n\n_Do You!,_ Russell Simmons\n\n_The Lean Startup,_ Eric Ries\n\n_Secrets of the Millionaire Mind,_ T. Harv Eker\n\n_The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World,_ Harvey Mackay\n\n_The Art of the Start,_ Guy Kawasaki\n\n_Crush It!,_ Gary Vaynerchuck\n\n_Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,_ Deepak Chopra\n\n_The Innovator's Dilemma,_ Clayton M. Christensen\n\n_Think and Grow Rich,_ Napoleon Hill\n\n_Permission Marketing,_ Seth Godin\n\n_Chicken Soup for the Soul,_ Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen\n\n_Rework,_ Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson\n\n_Zen and the Art of Happiness,_ Chris Prentiss\n\n_Tribal Leadership,_ Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright\n\n_Do More Faster,_ David Cohen and Brad Feld\n\n_Delivering Happiness,_ Tony Hsieh\n\nProgram to Purchase or Attend\n\nBusiness Mastery, Tony Robbins & Chet Holmes\n\nBlogs to Follow\n\nSeth Godin: sethgodin.typepad.com\n\nTED: ted.com\/talks\n\n_Vaynerchuk_ (Gary Vaynerchuk): garyvaynerchuk.com\n\n_This Week in Venture Capital:_ youtube.com\/show\/thisweekinventurecapital\n\n_Blog Maverick_ (Mark Cuban): blogmaverick.com\n\nChris Brogan: http:\/\/www.chrisbrogan.com\/\n\nCopyblogger: http:\/\/www.copyblogger.com\/\n\n# INDEX\n\nThe page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.\n\nAccelerators,\n\nAccutrade,\n\nAdaptability\n\nand crisis. _See_ Downturns\n\nimportance for entrepreneurs, \u201310\n\nAmazon.com,\n\nAngel investors,\n\nApple Computer,\n\nMac, impact on business, \u20135\n\nAssociates in business, \u201371. _See also_ Team building\n\nmentors,\n\nraising capital from,\n\nAugust Capital,\n\nAustin, Stephen, \u20137\n\nBaskin, Burton, \u201311\n\nBaskin-Robbins, \u201311\n\nBeethoven,\n\nBezos, Jeff, ,\n\nBlakely, Sara\n\nbusiness idea, development of, xv, \u201337,\n\nunique insight of,\n\nBookkeepers,\n\nBoomerang Boxes, \u201377\n\nBootstrapping process, \u201330\n\nBrand, creating, \u201378\n\ncommercial, content of, \u201376\n\nself-definition, \u201377\n\nsocial media for,\n\nsteps in, \u201375\n\nwords\/descriptors for,\n\nBranson, Richard, xv,\n\nDuffy association with, , , \u2013200\n\non entering existing markets,\n\n_Losing My Virginity,_\n\nas master of promotion, \u201399\n\nobstacles, creative thinking about, \u201329\n\nBrignole, Doug, \u201384\n\nBrin, Sergey, , ,\n\nBroadcast.com,\n\nBuffett, Warren,\n\nBurrell, Stanley Kirk (MC Hammer), rule for success, \u201320\n\nBusiness coach,\n\nBusiness plan, \u201394\n\nexecutive summary with, \u201389\n\nexit strategy in, \u201391\n\nlast page as start of, \u201387\n\nmarket, learning about, \u201388, \u201394\n\nmodels for,\n\nobstacles, identifying,\n\none-page plan, , \u201389\n\nspecific goals in,\n\nstrategic plan in,\n\nthings to avoid, \u201386,\n\nBuss, Jerry,\n\nBuyouts, and partnerships,\n\nCalifornia Women's Conference, \u201395\n\nCapital notes,\n\nCapital raising, \u201348\n\naccelerators,\n\nand angel investors,\n\nbootstrapping process, \u201330\n\nconvertible notes,\n\ncrowdfunding,\n\nfor equity in business, , , \u201348\n\nguidelines for, \u201334, \u201348\n\nincubators,\n\ninvestor input, listening to, , \u201346\n\ninvestors, learning about, \u201339\n\nloans, ,\n\npersistence needed for, \u201335\n\npreferences, \u201348\n\nred flags for investors, \u201344\n\nself-funding, \u201328,\n\ntime frame for, \u201334\n\nventure capital,\n\nCeres Securities,\n\nChecchi, Al, \u201334\n\nChief energizing officer (CEO), ,\n\nChief executive officer (CEO), \u2013105\n\nculture of business, creating, \u201321\n\ntasks of, \u20135\n\nChief venting officer (CVO),\n\nCompensation, for business owner, \u20137\n\nCompetition, big business versus entrepreneur, \u20133, \u201314\n\nContracts, for partnerships, \u201314\n\nCorbin, David,\n\nCorporations\n\nbig business versus entrepreneur, \u20133, \u201314\n\nchange, sluggish pace of, , \u201313\n\nCostolo, Dick, ,\n\nCost savings, passing to customer,\n\nCreative thinking. _See also_ Innovation\n\nto overcome obstacles, \u201330\n\ntoward simplicity, \u201321\n\nCredit cards, \u201350\n\nCrowdfunding,\n\nCrowdsourcing\n\nfor environmental protection,\n\nsales force from social media, \u201368\n\nCuban, Mark, , ,\n\nCulture of business, \u201326\n\nand CEO, \u201321\n\ncreating, steps in, \u201322\n\nof creativity. _See_ Innovation\n\nCush, David,\n\nCustomers\n\ncost savings, passing to,\n\nfeedback, use of, \u201354, \u201371\n\nprofiles, creating, \u201358\n\nrelations, building,\n\nD'Aloisio, Nick, \u201316\n\nDanceJam.com,\n\nDecison making, time for,\n\nDelegating, \u201381\n\nDiCaprio, Leonardo,\n\nDownturns, \u201396\n\nadaptability, importance of, \u201310\n\nand economic conditions. _See_ Economy\n\nemotions, management of, \u201363,\n\nexit strategy for, \u201391\n\nhelp, asking for, \u201396\n\nlayoffs,\n\nmarket, learning about, \u201394\n\nnew directions, finding, \u201317, \u201378, \u201395, \u20136\n\nobstacles, creative thinking about, \u201330\n\npositive spin on, \u201310, ,\n\nsharing information about, \u201375\n\nsure thing, caution about, \u201345\n\nworst-case, steps to avoid, \u201387, , \u201396\n\nDuffy, Scott\n\nand Richard Branson, , , \u2013200\n\nas serial entrepreneur, \u20136, \u201333\n\nsetbacks\/adaptability of, \u201310\n\nand Tony Robbins, \u201310, \u201368, \u201329,\n\nDyer, Dr. Wayne,\n\neBroker,\n\nEconomy\n\ncrash (2008), impact on entrepreneurs, , \u201345, \u201358,\n\nfavorable for entrepreneurs, \u20133, \u201313,\n\nEllison, Larry,\n\nEmotional control, \u201363\n\nEmployees, hiring. _See_ Team building\n\nEntrepreneurs\n\nadaptability, importance of, \u201310\n\nage and success,\n\nassociates and environment, \u201371\n\nbig business versus, \u20133, \u201314\n\nbrand, creating, \u201378\n\nbusiness plan, \u201394\n\ncapital raising, \u201348\n\nculture for business, creating, \u201326\n\nand economic conditions. _See_ Economy\n\nemotions, management of, \u201363\n\nas experts, myth of,\n\nfears\/excuses, letting go of, \u201340\n\nfinances, managing, \u201351\n\ngrowth of business, \u201381\n\nhabits, empowering, \u201374\n\nand high-tech methods. _See_ Technology\n\ninnovation and success, \u201330\n\nlaunch process, \u201371\n\nnew versus past types of,\n\nobstacles, overcoming, \u201330\n\nopportunities, impetus for developing, \u201313, , ,\n\nrole designations for, \u2013105\n\nsales, \u201371\n\nserial entrepreneurs, \u20136, , \u2013101\n\nsimplicity, focus on, \u201321\n\nspouse\/partner, role of, , \u201356\n\nstarting business, time frame for, \u201312, \u201315\n\nsuccess and letting go, \u2013201\n\nteam building by, \u2013118\n\nvision, scope of,\n\nEntrepreneurs' Organization, ,\n\nEnvironment\n\nassociates, importance of, \u201371\n\nimportance for progress, \u201367\n\npersonal brand, creating, \u201378\n\nEquity in business, by investors, , , \u201348\n\nExcuses, letting go of, \u201340\n\nExecutive summary, \u201389\n\nExercise, \u201360\n\nExit strategy, \u201391\n\nFab Five, \u201370\n\nFacebook, , ,\n\nFailure. _See_ Downturns\n\nFamily\n\nraising capital from,\n\nspouse\/partner involvement, , \u201356\n\nFears, letting go of, \u201340\n\nFinances, \u201351\n\nbookkeeper, necessity of,\n\nbusiness insurance,\n\ncapitalizing company. _See_ Capital raising\n\nCEO role, ,\n\ncompensation for owner, \u20137\n\nand exit strategy,\n\nfinancial model, creating, \u201348\n\ngrowth kills cash concept, \u201376\n\nand growth of business, \u201378\n\nkeeping in order,\n\nand partnerships,\n\npersonal\/business accounts, separating, , \u201350\n\npersonal windfall, understanding about, \u201351\n\npossible losses, estimating, ,\n\nseed money, separating,\n\nFranchising, origin of,\n\nFriis, Janus,\n\nFunk, Andy, \u201391\n\nFunk, Dr. Kristi, \u201391\n\nFunk Ventures,\n\nFuture\n\nCEO role in, \u20134\n\nplanning for,\n\nGates, Bill, business idea, roots of,\n\nGladwell, Malcolm,\n\nGoals\n\nand business plan, \u201394\n\nimplementing, example of, \u201384\n\nand personal brand, \u201373\n\nGoldstein, Gary, \u201334\n\nGoogle, , ,\n\nGoogle Alerts,\n\nGore, Al,\n\nGraves, Earl, Jr.,\n\nGrowth of business, \u201381\n\nand delegating, \u201381\n\nfailure of. _See_ Downturns\n\ngrowth kills cash concept, \u201376\n\nnew features, adding,\n\npost-launch monitoring, \u201374,\n\nreinvesting, rules for, \u201378\n\nHabits, and personal brand, \u201374\n\nHammer-and-nail syndrome, \u201352\n\nHastings, Reed,\n\nHoltz, Lou, \u201377\n\nHornik, David,\n\nHutchinson, Michael \"Hutch,\"\n\nHyzen, Russell, \u201320\n\nIncubators,\n\nIndependent contractors\n\nhiring, as screening, \u20139\n\noutsourcing, \u201318\n\nInner dialogue, controlling,\n\nInnovation\n\nculture of, creating, \u201326\n\nand disruption,\n\nand risk,\n\nof successful entrepreneurs, \u201330\n\nInsurance, for legal protection,\n\nInternet. _See also_ Social media\n\nimpact on business, \u20136\n\nmarket research on,\n\nInvestors in business. _See_ Capital raising\n\nJob descriptions, \u20138\n\nJobs, Steve, business idea, roots of,\n\nJohnson, Earvin \"Magic,\" \u20136\n\nK. Aufhauser & Co.,\n\nKilham, Chris \"Medicine Hunter,\"\n\nKitze, Chris, \u201321\n\nLacy, Sarah, ,\n\nLaunch process, \u201371\n\nfeature creep, avoiding,\n\nhammer-and-nail syndrome, \u201352\n\nniche marketing for, \u201359\n\npartnerships with other businesses, \u201364\n\nsimplicity, focus on, \u201355\n\nsocial media, use as sales force, \u201368\n\nstages of, xiv\n\nand success. _See_ Growth of business\n\ntime frame for, xii\u2013xiv,\n\nuser feedback, use of, \u201354, \u201371\n\nLayoffs,\n\nLinkedIn, , , ,\n\nLoans, ,\n\n_Losing My Virginity_ (Branson),\n\nMagic Johnson Foundation,\n\nManager, entrepreneur as,\n\nMarket for product\n\ncustomer profile, creating, \u201358\n\nlearning about, \u201388, \u201394\n\nniche marketing, \u201359\n\nsocial media as research tool, \u201368,\n\nMenlo Ventures,\n\nMentors, ,\n\nMetro, Marty, \u201378\n\nMicrosoft, \u201330\n\nMinimum viable product (MVP), \u201354\n\nMission statement,\n\nMistakes, sharing information about, \u201375\n\nMoses, Mark,\n\nentrepreneurial history of, \u2013104\n\nMotivational leaders, , . _See also_ Robbins, Tony\n\nmessage of,\n\nreading writings of, \u201370\n\nNBC Internet,\n\nNiche marketing, \u201359\n\nOutsourcing, \u201318\n\nexamples, providing for,\n\nhiring,\n\npayments,\n\nproblems, steps to avoid, \u201316\n\nPage, Larry, , ,\n\nPandoDaily,\n\nPartnerships, \u201314\n\nissues to consider,\n\nlegal contract, topics in, \u201314\n\nwith other businesses, \u201364\n\nPatterson, Michelle, \u201395\n\nPersonal brand, creating. _See_ Brand, creating\n\nPhysical appearance, and personal brand, \u201374\n\nPink Lotus Breast Center, \u201391\n\nPlatinum Capital, \u2013101\n\nPope, Brian,\n\nPort, Jason, \u201342\n\nPreferences, \u201348\n\nQuote.com, \u201362\n\nRainwater, Richard,\n\nReid, Greg, \u201339, \u2013201\n\nRicketts, Joe,\n\nRidgway, Steve, \u201358\n\nRisk\n\nand innovation, ,\n\nand money management. _See_ Finances\n\nsimplicity to minimize,\n\nRobbins, Irv, \u201311\n\nRobbins, Tony, xv\n\nDuffy association with, \u201310, \u201368, \u201329,\n\nevent promotion by, \u201330\n\nmembers of circle of, \u201368\n\nprograms, effectiveness of, \u20139\n\nRockefeller, John D., business idea, roots of,\n\nRohn, Jim,\n\nRole models,\n\nSales, \u201371\n\nbuyer bluprint, understanding, \u201371\n\ncrowdsourcing from social media, \u201368\n\nfans first\/customer second approach,\n\nSchmidt, Eric, ,\n\nSchultz, Howard, xv\n\nbusiness idea, development of, \u201353\n\nSelf-awareness, and choosing team, \u201396, \u201399\n\nSerial entrepreneur, \u20136, \u201333, , \u2013101\n\nShared ownership,\n\nSharpshooter, entrepreneur as,\n\nSiegel, Mark,\n\nSimplicity\n\nof business plan, , \u201389\n\nimportance for entrepreneurs, \u201321\n\nMC Hammer on, \u201321\n\nof product, and launch, \u201355\n\nof successful products,\n\nvalue for entrepreneurs,\n\nSmart Charter, \u201345,\n\nSocial media\n\nand marketing,\n\nmarket research on, , \u201368\n\nmonitoring brand on, \u201367\n\nniche marketing on,\n\nsales force, crowdsourcing from, \u201368\n\nuse for personal brand,\n\nSpanx, , \u201337,\n\nSpouse\/partner, involvement of, , \u201356\n\nStandard Oil,\n\nStarbucks, \u201353\n\nStart-up, new business tasks. _See_ Entrepreneurs\n\nStress\n\nemotional control and crisis, \u201363\n\nmanagement and exercise, \u201360\n\nand raising capital,\n\nStudent Painters,\n\nSummly,\n\nTai, Bill, ,\n\nTeam building, \u2013118\n\nassociates, importance for progress, \u201367\n\nto balance talents, \u201397\n\nbusiness coach, hiring,\n\ncandidates, sources for,\n\nCEO role in, \u2013105\n\nconsultants, ,\n\nand culture of company, \u201322\n\ndelegating, \u201381\n\nFab Five, \u201370\n\nand group interaction, \u201325\n\njob candidates, screening, \u20139\n\njob descriptions, \u20138\n\nkey relationships, ,\n\nlife-cycle approach to, \u201398, , \u201374\n\noutside-office activities, \u201323,\n\noutsourcing, \u201318\n\npartnerships, \u201314\n\npartnerships with other businesses, \u201364\n\nand self-awareness, \u201396, \u201399\n\nshared ownership, benefits of,\n\nTechnology. _See also_ Social media\n\nand cost savings,\n\nimpact on business, \u20136,\n\ninnovation and success,\n\ninvestor, MC Hammer as, \u201319\n\nfor starting business, \u201312\n\nvalue for entrepreneurs, , \u201313,\n\nTracy, Brian,\n\nTrump, Donald,\n\nTumblr,\n\nTwitter, , , ,\n\nUrban Coffee Opportunities, \u20135\n\nUsedCardboardBoxes.com,\n\nVenture capital,\n\nVesting, and partnerships,\n\nVirgin Charter, \u201345, , , , \u201399\n\nVirgin Group, \u201329,\n\nVisionary, entrepreneur as,\n\nVision for company\n\nand CEO, ,\n\nand culture of company,\n\nand partnerships,\n\nvision statement,\n\nVoting rights, and partnerships,\n\nWaitley, Denis,\n\nWelch, Jack,\n\nWilliams, Evan,\n\nWomen Network Day,\n\nWomen's Network,\n\nXoom.com, \u201320, \u201325,\n\nYasun\u00ed Park, \u201329\n\nZennstr\u00f6m, Niklas,\n\nZiglar, Zig,\n\nZuckerberg, Mark, ,\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n## Stranger in My Arms\n\n## Rochelle  \nAlers\n\n##  \n\n## Contents\n\nDear Reader\n\n[Part One  \nFriends](StrangerinMyArms_p_1.html#p_1)\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\n[Part Two  \nLovers](StrangerinMyArms_p_2.html#p_2)\n\nChapter 8\n\nChapter 9\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nChapter 12\n\nChapter 13\n\nChapter 14\n\nChapter 15\n\nChapter 16\n\nChapter 17\n\nChapter 18\n\nChapter 19\n\nChapter 20\n\nChapter 21\n\nChapter 22\n\nChapter 23\n\nChapter 24\n\n[Part Three  \nSilent Witness](StrangerinMyArms_p_3.html#p_3)\n\nChapter 25\n\nChapter 26\n\nChapter 27\n\nChapter 28\n\nChapter 29\n\nChapter 30\n\nChapter 31\n\nChapter 32\n\nChapter 33\n\nChapter 34\n\nChapter 35\n\nEpilogue\n\nComing Next Month\n\n## Dear Reader\n\nYou were introduced to ex-CIA field operative Merrick Grayslake in No Compromise and again when he stepped on stage in Renegade to exchange vows with Alexandra Cole.\n\nMerrick is back, this time in his own role as an enigmatic hero in Stranger in My Arms, and to take his final bow in Book #12 in the ongoing Hideaway legacy.\n\nIf you want to know the events that led to Merrick and Alex's courtship, then I invite you to join these unforgettable characters in a sensual romance where their love could put them at the greatest risk of all.\n\nYours in Romance,  \nRochelle Alers\n\n## Part One\n\n## Friends\n\n## Chapter 1\n\nThree knocks on the bedroom door in rapid succession stopped Alexandra Cole as she prepared to slip her feet into a pair of three-inch, silk-covered, midnight-blue pumps.\n\nA frown furrowed her forehead as she stood up. This was the second interruption that had thwarted her getting dressed for her cousin's wedding.\n\nThe first time it was Ana who, in the full throes of PMS, had experienced a temporary meltdown when she couldn't zip up the dress she'd chosen to wear for the New Year's Eve ceremony. She and Ana were the same height, five-three, but Alex outweighed her younger sister by a mere five pounds. The crisis was resolved when she offered Ana one of the two dresses she'd brought with her.\n\n\"Who is it?\" she called out.\n\n\"Jason.\"\n\nAlex rolled her eyes. Now it was her younger brother. \"What's the matter, little brother? Do you need me to tie your tie?\"\n\n\"Very funny, Alex,\" he drawled sarcastically from the other side of the door. \"I came to tell you that one of your loser ex-boyfriends just showed up uninvited, and Uncle Martin's security people won't let him in. What do you want to do?\"\n\nCrossing the carpeted bedroom on bare feet, she opened the door. Jason Cole stood before her in a dark blue suit, white shirt and white silk tie. It wasn't often that she saw him in a suit, but Alex had to admit that her twenty-four-year-old brother cut a very handsome figure in tailored attire.\n\nJason was the quintessential Cole male: over six feet, olive coloring, black curly hair and a dimpled smile. And in keeping with a family ritual that dated back to the marriage of their grandparents from which the prospective groom was exempt, any male who claimed Cole blood affected light-colored neckwear.\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\nJason lifted sweeping black eyebrows. \"The message was, 'Tell her Donald is here.'\"\n\nHer large clear gold-brown eyes narrowed. \"Donald,\" Alex repeated. She knew two Donalds. One who'd been her study partner in undergraduate school and another she'd dated only twice before she handed him his walking papers. \"Did he leave his last name?\"\n\nCrossing his arms over his chest, Jason shook his head. \"He also said, and I quote, 'She'll know who I am,' end quote.\"\n\nRealization dawned. He had to be Donald Easton. \"That arrogant SOB,\" she whispered. \"Tell them to let him in and have him wait for me by the refreshment tent.\"\n\nA sardonic smile parted Jason's lips. \"If you want, Gabe and I can give him a blanket party.\"\n\nHer brow furrowed. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"We'll throw a blanket over his head, then kick his ass. And I'm willing to bet that if he wasn't getting married in an hour Michael would also want to get his licks in.\"\n\nAlex stomped a bare foot. \"Stop it, Jason! There will be no brawling tonight or any other night. Donald Easton has a problem with the word no. I'll take care of him.\"\n\n\"Are you sure, Alex?\"\n\nForcing a dimpled smile, she patted her brother's arm. \"Yes, I'm sure. Now go so I can finish dressing.\"\n\nJason flashed a wolfish grin so reminiscent of their father's. \"Okay. By the way, you look great.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nAlex closed the door and crossed the expansive bedroom she shared with Ana and two other female cousins whenever they gathered in West Palm Beach.\n\nSlipping her feet into her shoes, she wondered why a man she hadn't seen in nearly a year had come from Virginia to see her. Unfortunately she'd told Donald that she always celebrated Christmas and New Year's in Florida with her extended family; it was apparent he wanted to surprise her.\n\nWell, the surprise would be on him because she had no intention of resuming what had been doomed from the start.\n\nA member of Martin Cole's private security detail took a glance at the SUV with West Virginia plates and entered the number into his PDA. Smiling, he nodded at the man behind the wheel.\n\n\"We'll park your vehicle for you, Mr. Grayslake.\" He gestured to a parking attendant before returning his attention to Merrick Grayslake. \"Once you walk through the gates and make a right someone will escort you to the Japanese garden.\"\n\nMerrick nodded. \"Thank you.\"\n\nReaching for the suit jacket resting on the passenger-side seat, he got out of his vehicle, slipped his arms into the sleeves, then as directed made his way through a set of iron gates that protected the property that made up the Cole family West Palm Beach compound.\n\nHe hadn't taken more than half a dozen steps when he spied a small camera attached to the upper branches of a tree. Security personnel and surveillance equipment monitored everyone entering or leaving the property.\n\nHe'd left Bolivar, West Virginia, at dawn, stopping twice to refuel and stretch his legs. The drive south had taken longer than expected because of bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic along I\u201395. It was New Year's Eve and motorists were heading either home or to clubs or restaurants where they'd ring in the coming year with their families and\/or friends.\n\nAt thirty-five, Merrick Grayslake had lost count of the number of countries where he'd welcomed in a new year. Whether in Central or South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or in his last assignment as a CIA covert field operative\u2014Afghanistan\u2014for him it had become just another uneventful holiday.\n\nNow, for the first time in more than two years, he wouldn't be alone or engaged in an undercover mission when the clock struck midnight. It had taken the wedding of Michael Kirkland, a man who'd saved his life, for Merrick to temporarily forsake his reclusive way of life and leave what had become his sanctuary, a modest two-story home near the Allegheny Mountains.\n\nHe'd checked into a local hotel and asked the front desk for an eight-thirty wake-up call. His head had barely touched the pillow when the ringing telephone woke him from a deep, dreamless sleep. He'd drunk a pint of water from the wet bar to offset dehydration before he readied himself to attend a New Year's Eve wedding.\n\nWhen U.S. Army captain Michael Kirkland had come to him to solicit his help in protecting his social worker fianc\u00e9e, Merrick experienced a long-forgotten shiver of excitement that always preceded a new covert mission. But the feeling was short-lived. He'd helped Michael identify Stanley Willoughby, the man behind a conspiracy to kill Jolene Walker; he'd remained in the Washington, D.C., area for several weeks following the arrest and subsequent indictment of the D.C. power broker before returning to his adopted home state.\n\nMerrick still didn't understand why he'd decided to put down roots in West Virginia, but there was something about the topography that suited his temperament. The panoramic views, the rugged splendor of the mountains, and the small towns that predated the Revolutionary War and still bore the scars of the Civil War had remained virtually untouched, architecturally, since the 1950s.\n\nThe slate path widened to a lush, manicured meadow where an enormous gauze-draped white tent protected cloth-covered tables from insects. A smaller tent, less than fifty feet away, doubled as a portable bar. The weather had cooperated: clear skies, full moon and nighttime temperatures in the low sixties. His pace slowed as he joined a small crowd milling around the entrance to a garden.\n\nA young woman sporting a white blouse and black skirt approached him. As she came closer he saw the earpiece in her left ear; he found it ironic that whenever he left Bolivar his surveillance instincts kicked in to high gear. It was as if he went into hunter mode, watching, listening and mentally recording everything around him.\n\nShe flashed a professional smile. \"Your name, sir?\"\n\n\"Grayslake.\"\n\n\"Please follow me, Mr. Grayslake.\" She led him into a large tent in the middle of a Japanese-inspired garden; organza-swathed chairs were lined up in precise rows like soldiers at a military parade. She indicated a chair with a Velcro tag bearing his name. \"The bar is open for appetizers and liquid refreshment.\"\n\nMerrick was grateful for the offer. He hadn't eaten anything in eighteen hours. \"Thank you.\" Nodding to the woman, he went back the way he'd come.\n\nThe light from the full moon competed with strategically placed floodlights and thousands of tiny bulbs entwined in the branches of trees and lampposts. With the artificial illumination it could've been ten in the morning rather than ten at night.\n\nMerrick had received an engraved invitation that read that Michael Blanchard Kirkland and Jolene Walker were scheduled to exchange vows at eleven, followed by a midnight reception dinner and a New Year's Day brunch.\n\nHe would remain in West Palm Beach for the wedding and reception. He'd decided to skip the brunch because his plans included spending a few days in Miami before heading down to the Keys. He hadn't told Rachel he was coming, praying she wouldn't seek retribution because he hadn't kept his vow to keep in touch.\n\nA hint of a rare smile played at the corners of Merrick's mouth as he neared the bar. He was never one to make resolutions, but the events of the past three months had forced him to rethink his monastic existence. Since reuniting with Michael Kirkland he'd socialized more than he had in years.\n\nThe sound of voices raised in anger caught his attention. As he turned around, his gaze caught and held the petite figure of a woman in a dark-colored dress with a revealing d\u00e9colletage. Light reflected off the sparkle of diamonds in her ears, several delicate strands gracing her slender neck and in her dark hair. Merrick only saw her profile, but what he saw held him captive.\n\nAlexandra glared at Donald. He'd downed one glass of champagne while holding another flute filled with the bubbly wine. She couldn't believe he'd come\u2014unannounced\u2014to her uncle's house and proceeded to get drunk.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" She didn't bother to disguise her annoyance.\n\nDonald tilted the glass to his mouth and swallowed the imported champagne in one gulp. \"What does it look like, Miss Alexandra Cole?\" He spat out her name. \"I came to ring in the New Year with my snobby, bitchy girlfriend.\"\n\nShe wrinkled her delicate nose in revulsion as the odor of something stronger than wine wafted into her nostrils. Donald Easton, the brilliant computer programmer, Donald the arrogant egotist yet always the consummate gentleman, had shown up at her family's estate drunk!\n\n\"I am not your girlfriend, Donald,\" she said, raising her voice above its normal tone. \"I never was, never will be. Now I want you to leave.\"\n\n\"What if I don't want to leave?\" he shouted. Those close enough to hear his outburst turned and stared at him.\n\n\"I think you should do as the lady says,\" warned a deep male voice filled with a lethal calmness that sent a chill over Alex despite the comfortable nighttime temperature.\n\nShe shifted to her right. A slender man with brilliant silver-gray eyes stood less than a foot away from her and Donald. Her gaze caught and held his; she was hard-pressed to pinpoint his age or ethnicity. His close-cropped hair was an odd shade of red-brown that complemented his khaki-brown coloring. His lean face, with smooth skin pulled taut over the elegant ridge of prominent cheekbones and the narrow bridge of his aquiline nose and firm mouth, hinted at a Native American bloodline.\n\nDonald, weaving unsteadily in an attempt to maintain his balance, squinted at Merrick. \"And who the hell are you?\"\n\nMerrick took a step and forcibly wrested the flutes from Donald. \"You don't want to know.\" He handed the glasses to Alex. \"Take care of these while I take care of your boyfriend.\" His request was a command. His right hand caught Donald's neck, fingers tightening on his carotid artery. \"Let's go, buddy, while you're still able to breathe.\" He loosened his grip when Donald clawed at his hand.\n\n\"He's not my boyfriend,\" Alex said to the stranger's back as he led the interloper away.\n\nHer hands were trembling when she placed the flutes on the bar. One of the bartenders came over to her. \"May I get you something to drink, Miss Cole?\"\n\n\"I'll have sparkling water.\" She asked for water when she needed something stronger to calm her jangled nerves. When she'd told Jason she would handle Donald she hadn't thought he would be intoxicated. The last thing she wanted was for her brothers to confront him when he was unable to defend himself. It would've been better for Donald if her uncle's security staff escorted him off the property than for her male relatives to get involved. She'd always teased them, saying even though they were trust-fund babies, they were a whit above thug status. They generally did not go looking for a fight, but none were willing to back down from one if a situation presented itself.\n\nJason was right about Donald being a loser, and it had taken her two dates to come to that realization. His insistent bragging about his accomplishments and a need to tell her how to live her life had been his undoing. However, Donald wasn't a man who took rejection lightly. After their second date she refused his telephone calls, text messages and letters that continued long after she'd left Virginia for Europe where she'd enrolled in an accelerated graduate program for a master's in art history with a concentration in European architecture and pre-Columbian art. She'd completed the first half of the program wherein she'd spent six months studying and traveling throughout France, Spain and Italy. And in another three weeks she would leave the States for Mexico City to complete her course and fieldwork for the program.\n\n\"Here you are, Miss Cole.\"\n\nAlex accepted a goblet filled with ice and carbonated water. \"Thank you.\" She took a sip, welcoming the chill bathing her throat as the man who'd come to her rescue returned. As he closed the distance between them she noticed, for the first time, his height. He was tall, as tall as her father and brothers.\n\nHowever, there was something about the stranger that disturbed her more than Donald's unexpected appearance. She wasn't certain whether it'd been his eyes, the lethal calmness in his voice when he'd spoken to Donald or the speed with which he'd grabbed the man's throat. Everything about him radiated danger.\n\nShe forced a smile, dimples deepening as she extended her right hand. \"I'd like to thank you, Mr...\"\n\n\"Grayslake,\" he said, reaching for a hand that was swallowed up in his much larger one. \"Merrick Grayslake.\"\n\nAlex's smile did not slip. \"Thank you, Mr. Grayslake, for diffusing what could've become somewhat embarrassing for my family.\"\n\nMerrick gave her fingers a gentle squeeze before releasing them. He angled his head, his penetrating gaze taking in the perfection of her small, oval face in the bright light. Her eyes weren't as dark as he believed they would've been given her nut-brown coloring and inky-black hair, hair piled atop her head in sensual disarray and secured with jeweled hairpins. He fixed his gaze on her face rather than her petite, curvy body in a provocative halter dress with a generous front slit showing a liberal expanse of shapely legs. Her heels and upswept hairstyle put the top of her head at his shoulder.\n\n\"Please call me Merrick.\" His voice was low, calming. \"And whom do I have the pleasure of rescuing from the Big Bad Wolf?\"\n\nA soft laugh escaped her parted lips. \"Alexandra Cole. But everyone calls me Alex.\"\n\nMerrick's dark eyebrows lifted with this disclosure. \"Well, because I'm not everyone, I hope you don't mind if I call you Ali. Alex is for a boy.\" And there was nothing about Alexandra Cole that even hinted of boy. Not with her curvaceous little body.\n\nIt was Alex's turned to lift her eyebrows. Over the years, she'd been called Alexa, Lexie and Zandra, but never Ali. \"No, I don't mind.\" Merrick moved closer and she felt his heat, inhaled the haunting fragrance of his cologne that was the perfect complement to his natural body scent.\n\n\"I can think of a way where you can really thank me, Ali.\"\n\nAlex went completely still. Merrick had gotten rid of one nuisance only to become one himself. \"I don't think so, Mr. Grayslake. I don't date.\"\n\nIt was Merrick's turn to recoil from her unsolicited frankness. A shadow of annoyance crossed his face. \"I wasn't going to ask you out, because like you I don't date.\"\n\nShe tilted her chin, the gesture obviously challenging. \"Are you married?\"\n\nMerrick's impassive expression did not change. \"No.\"\n\n\"Engaged?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Do you prefer men?\"\n\nHe blinked once and forced back a smile. \"No. And to put your mind at ease, I absolutely have no interest in you romantically.\"\n\nA becoming blush darkened her face. Alex didn't know whether to be annoyed or embarrassed. Her quick tongue had gotten the better of her\u2014yet again. She closed her eyes for several seconds as heat singed her cheeks. \"I'm...I'm sorry, Merrick, but I\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right, Ali,\" he interrupted. The smile he'd struggled to hide softened the angles in his rawboned face. \"There's no need to apologize. I can assure you that I'm not like your boyfriend.\"\n\nHer delicate jaw tightened when she clamped her teeth together. \"Donald is not my boyfriend.\"\n\n\"That's not what he said.\"\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\n\"You were lovers.\"\n\nAlex's eyes conveyed the fury racing through her. She should've let her brothers take care of the drunken liar. \"He was never my boyfriend or my lover.\"\n\nMerrick felt a strange numbed comfort with her disclosure; he'd thought Alex and Donald were having a lovers' spat. \"Good for you.\"\n\n\"Why? Even though you're not interested in me romantically you think you'd be better for me than Donald?\"\n\nHe was momentarily speechless in his surprise. Alex Cole was as outspoken as she was beautiful, a trait he wasn't used to in the women with whom he'd been involved.\n\n\"No. That's because I've never been a good boyfriend.\"\n\nAlex took another sip of water, staring at Merrick over the rim of her goblet. \"Do you realize you're an anomaly?\"\n\n\"Why would you say that?\"\n\n\"Most men would never admit to being less than perfect in the romance department.\"\n\n\"That's because some of them are either liars or fools.\"\n\n\"And you've been neither?\"\n\nAttractive lines fanned out around Merrick's luminous silver-gray eyes when a natural smile slipped under the iron-willed control he'd spent most of his life perfecting. \"Wrong, Ali. I've been a fool a few times.\"\n\nHe'd become a king of fools when he'd trusted a woman whose duplicity had cost him a kidney and a career with the Central Intelligence Agency.\n\nWhat he didn't tell Alex was that whenever he'd gone undercover he became a liar\u2014someone with a fictitious background. He'd become an actor in a role wherein one slip would compromise his mission. His focus hadn't been the risk that he would forfeit his life, but completing the mission. And it was always the mission.\n\nA server approached with a tray of appetizers. She handed Merrick a napkin and he took several puff pastries, offering them to Alex. She shook her head. \"No, thank you. I'm saving my appetite for dinner.\"\n\n\"Speaking of saving, I'd like you to save me a dance.\"\n\nHis request surprised Alex. \"You want to dance with me?\"\n\nSlowly, seductively, his silver gaze slid downward before it reversed itself. \"Yes.\"\n\nShe felt a tingling in the pit of her stomach she found disturbing. Merrick Grayslake was disturbing to her in every way she didn't want. She would dance with the man, and after tomorrow she would never see him again.\n\n\"One dance,\" she crooned, flashing her enchanting dimpled smile. She wiggled her fingers. \"I'll see you later.\"\n\nMerrick stared at Alexandra Cole as she lifted the hem of her dress and walked out of the tent.\n\nHe'd come to West Palm Beach for a wedding and unwittingly found himself bewitched by a slip of a woman who just happened to be the groom's cousin.\n\n## Chapter 2\n\nAlex spied her sister coming toward her. Her expression said it all: she'd recovered from her hissy fit. \"That dress looks better on you than on me,\" she told Ana.\n\nThe black sheath dress with a squared neckline and wide bands crisscrossing her bare back was a perfect fit. The garment's hemline, ending inches above Ana's knees, and a pair of black silk sling backs showed off her strong, shapely legs. She'd recently cut her shoulder-length curly hair, and the pixie-cut style called to mind the gamine look affected by a young Audrey Hepburn. There was never a doubt that Alex and Ana were related. In fact, she and her sister looked more alike than Ana and her fraternal twin, Jason.\n\nAna looped her arm through Alex's and smiled. \"Thanks. Come with me.\" She spun her around. \"I've got a case of the munchies.\" PMS always triggered a craving for salt, alcohol or chocolate. She steered her older sister back to the tent. \"Qui\u00e9n es \u00e9l?\" she asked in Spanish, a language she and her siblings had learned from their bilingual parents.\n\n\"What you talking about?\" Ana was notorious for talking in riddles.\n\n\"That guy over there staring at you.\"\n\nAlex slowed her step. She wanted to tell her sister about Merrick and Donald Easton, but knowing Ana, the story that she had a stalker boyfriend would be on the lips of their family members before the stroke of midnight.\n\n\"His name is Merrick Grayslake, and he's a guest either of Michael or Jolene.\" He hadn't moved from where she'd left him.\n\n\"Damn-n-n-n-yum!\" The expletive came out in five syllables. \"El es Caliente!\" Ana whispered, sotto voce.\n\n\"He'll do,\" Alex whispered back.\n\nLeading Alex toward the bar, Ana stopped and placed the back of her hand to her sister's forehead. \"Nope, you don't have a fever. Girl, is there something wrong with your eyes?\"\n\nShe pushed Ana's hand away. \"There's nothing wrong with my eyes. Just because I don't go buck wild over a good-looking man it doesn't mean there's something wrong with me either.\"\n\nIt wasn't that she hadn't found Merrick Grayslake attractive, because he was that and more. She thought him attractive, well groomed, confident and stunningly virile.\n\n\"So, you agree with me?\"\n\n\"What about?\"\n\n\"That he's hot.\"\n\n\"I'm too old to compartmentalize men as either hot or cold, Ana Juanita Cole.\"\n\nAna knew she'd hit a raw nerve because Alex had called her by her full name. Sucking her teeth, she signaled for a bartender. \"And you're beginning to take life a bit too serious, Alexandra Ivonne Cole. Ever since you came back from Europe you've become someone I don't know or recognize. Lighten up, Alex, or you're going to turn into a bitter old woman.\"\n\nAlex swallowed an angry retort. Ana wasn't the only one who'd mentioned that she'd changed. Perhaps it was because she'd matured while living abroad, that she had come into her own and knew what she wanted for her future.\n\nGrowing up as Alexandra Cole had afforded her a life of privilege. As a member of one of the wealthiest black families in the States, she and any woman who claimed the Cole name or blood were pampered and adored by their male counterparts and relatives. But as she matured she rebelled against the restriction that wouldn't let her travel like other young women who flew on commercial carriers, when she was forced to take the family-owned jet.\n\nShe'd lost count of the number of times she'd denied being \"one of those Coles\" when someone inquired about her name. Being the granddaughter of America's first black billionaire, the daughter of award-winning musician David Cole had distanced her from her contemporaries the moment she drew breath.\n\n\"I don't have time for a man.\"\n\n\"Yeah, right,\" Ana drawled. The two words dripped sarcasm. \"You, Miss Party Animal, giving up men. I'm your sister, so spare me the melodrama.\"\n\nAlex's expression stilled and grew serious. \"I'm not going to argue with you, Ana. So spare me the lecture.\" She glanced over her shoulder. Merrick was gone.\n\nAna held up a hand in supplication. \"Okay. No lectures. We're here to celebrate Michael and Jolene's wedding, and I intend to have a good time.\" She waved a bartender over, flashing a sensuous dimpled smile. \"I'd like two apple martinis.\"\n\n\"I'm going to need some ID, miss.\"\n\nAna's smile was dazzling as she gawked at the delicious-looking Jesse Metcalf look-alike. \"I can assure you that I am over the legal drinking age.\"\n\nHe winked at her. \"You can't blame a guy for checking, beautiful.\"\n\nAlex rolled her eyes upward. Her sister was at it again. She was a serial flirt. Ana flirted while she'd sworn off men\u2014at least temporarily. After Alex finished her course work, earned her degree and secured a position as an architectural historian, then she would consider becoming involved with someone. At the present time that was not an option.\n\nAna handed Alex a glass with a pale green liquid. \"Drink up and loosen up, sis.\" She touched her glass to Alex's.\n\nAlex took a deep swallow of the icy-cold cocktail, feeling its potent properties immediately. Moaning softly, she closed her eyes. \"Ahh-hh. That is good.\"\n\nTaking a deep swallow of her drink, Ana inclined her head in agreement. \"Ditto.\"\n\n\"Ladies, gentlemen, I'm going to ask you to take your seats. We'll be starting in less than fifteen minutes.\" The voice of the wedding planner, who was carrying a cordless microphone, was heard over the murmurs of those gathered under the tent.\n\nAlex and Ana placed their glasses on the bar simultaneously. It had been a couple of years since they'd celebrated a family wedding, and whenever the Coles came together it was always a festive and momentous event.\n\nMerrick ignored the young woman on his right. The psychologist, a coworker of Jolene Walker's, had talked incessantly without pausing to take a breath. He'd met her when Michael and Jolene hosted a dinner party at their Georgetown home. His expression reflected ennui while his gaze was averted less than ten feet away; his rapt attention was directed toward Alexandra Cole.\n\nShe sat next to a man, her head resting on his shoulder, and he assumed the man was her father. He didn't know what it was about the petite raven-haired, outspoken minx that fascinated him, yet knew realistically he couldn't uncover what it was in a few hours. One thing he was certain of, it wasn't lust.\n\nLust was an emotion he'd learned to control with the onset of puberty. The realization that he could father a child reopened a wound that had festered, healed and reopened to fester again each time he was shuttled from one foster home to the next.\n\nHis libido was strong, healthy, but he'd learned to control his physical urges. Whether it was fasting, meditation or exercising to the point of exhaustion, he refused to succumb to lusting after a woman just to slake his sexual frustrations.\n\nMerrick reluctantly tore his gaze from Alex to Jolene Walker as her father led her down the flower-strewn carpeted path where Michael waited along with his best man, Damon McDonald, to make her his wife.\n\n\"Doesn't Jolene look beautiful?\" the young woman whispered reverently.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nMerrick was back to offering monosyllabic responses. The woman hadn't lied. Michael had confided to him that Jolene was carrying his child; impending motherhood appeared to enhance Jolene's natural stunning beauty that had most men holding their breaths and taking a second look whenever she entered a room.\n\nThe ceremony seemed surreal to Merrick as images of other weddings he'd attended in the past came rushing back, superimposed over the one taking place before him. He recalled those of his foster care siblings, fellow marines he'd met in the corps and one during a covert mission. He'd been so deep undercover that the man whom the U.S. had targeted as a terrorist had asked Merrick to be his witness at an impromptu wedding ceremony.\n\nApplause brought him out of his reverie. Fifteen minutes had passed. It was over. Michael and Jolene Kirkland were now husband and wife, and he'd emotionally distanced himself from the ritual. As long as he did not acknowledge weddings, births and funerals he was able to plan for the next day.\n\nAbandoned at birth, and not knowing his mother, his father or what he was had left a gaping hole inside Merrick that left him feeling detached and empty. Standing with the other guests and family members, he applauded the newlyweds as they traversed the path to a position where they'd receive those who'd come to help celebrate their new life together.\n\nAlex felt the muscles under the jacket of her father's arm tense up before relaxing, wondering whether he'd reacted to his son Gabriel's rich baritone voice singing \"True Companion,\" his nephew exchanging vows with his bride or that it wasn't one of his own children getting married.\n\nDavid Cole had endured the relentless teasing of his brothers, Martin and Joshua, that he would never become a grandfather because his four children appeared to shun relationships that would eventually end in marriage.\n\nIt wasn't that Alex did not want to marry. It was that she wasn't ready for it. She had plans, ones that did not include a husband and children at this time in her life.\n\nShe lifted from his shoulder. \"Jolene looks beautiful,\" she whispered.\n\nDavid nodded and smiled. \"She does,\" he whispered back.\n\nAlex glanced up at her father's profile. The diamond studs in his ears were a constant reminder that David Cole was the least traditional of the offspring of Samuel and Marguerite-Josefina Cole.\n\nThe faint scar running along his left cheek was also a constant reminder of the former musician's brush with death. Her father, who as CEO of ColeDiz International, Ltd., met her mother during a business trip to Costa Rica. He'd traveled to the Central American country to negotiate the sale of a banana plantation and found himself hostage of a deranged government official. He'd escaped, resigned his position with the family-owned conglomerate and set up Serenity Records.\n\nShe never tired hearing the story of how her parents met and fell in love. When she was a child it had become her favorite fairy tale, one wherein she'd imagined herself a princess who waited for her prince to rescue her from an evil king.\n\nPrincesses, princes and fairy tales were a part of her childhood with indelible memories of a home filled with laughter, music, exotic food and stories of Serena Morris-Cole's life in Costa Rica.\n\n\"Alex, are you all right?\"\n\nAlex's eyelids fluttered wildly, as she seemed to come out of a trance. \"I'm fine, Daddy.\"\n\nOverhead light shimmered on David's close-cropped silver hair. He smiled at his wife and daughter. \"I don't know about you two, but I'm ready to eat, drink and party until the sun comes up.\"\n\nSerena's short, reddish-brown hair framed a face that belied her age. She smiled up at her husband. \"Steady there, sport. Do I have to remind you that you're sixty-seven, not twenty-seven?\"\n\nLowering his head, David brushed a kiss over her mouth. \"If you'd met me when I was twenty-seven you never would've been able to keep up with me.\"\n\nAlex walked ahead of her parents rather than listen to their banter. They had been married for more than thirty years and were still madly in love with each other. If and whenever she fell in love she wanted what her parents had\u2014a love that promised forever.\n\nAs she waited in the receiving line, she spied Merrick with a blonde clinging possessively to his arm. The woman was so close to him they could've been joined at the hip. Merrick glanced up, his gaze meeting and fusing with Alex's. A beat later they both looked away.\n\nPlaya! He'd asked her for a dance when he'd come with a date. Liar! she continued with her mental tirade. He said that he didn't date. But what did he call the woman draped over him like a second skin?\n\nShe shook her head. That was why she didn't date; she could not afford to be distracted by romantic notions. And like her free-spirited parents, she planned to eat, drink and party until the sun came up.\n\nAlex inched along in the receiving line until she stood face-to-face with her cousin and his wife. Rising on tiptoe she wound her arms around Michael's neck and pressed her cheek to his smooth brown jaw.\n\n\"Felicidades, primo.\"\n\nMichael Kirkland's green eyes shimmered like priceless emeralds. \"Thanks, Alex.\"\n\nShe moved to her right, standing in front of Jolene. Extending her arms, she gave her a gentle hug. The two women had met for the first time earlier that morning. \"Congratulations, cousin.\"\n\nJolene, resplendent in a simple empire strapless sheath of crepe that shimmered like liquid through a lacy coat in an off-white shade, looked like a Shakespearean princess. Her short naturally curly hair was covered with a circlet of tiny white roses and baby's breath instead of a veil.\n\nJolene returned Alex's hug. \"Thank you, Alex.\"\n\nIn lieu of wedding gifts, Jolene and Michael had requested donations be made to the Jeanine Walker Retreat House, a facility named for her late twin sister who'd died at the hands of an abusive husband. As executive director of the Sanctuary Counseling Center, a D.C.\u2013based treatment center for victimized women, she'd dedicated the past five years of her life helping women empower themselves.\n\nAlex admired her cousin's new wife because she was so focused. Although a year older, Jolene knew exactly what she wanted and where she wanted life to take her. Her board of directors' fund-raising efforts had generated enough money to begin building the retreat house for battered women and their children. She'd fallen in love, married Michael Kirkland and now she looked forward to becoming a mother the following summer.\n\n\"Can I get you something to eat or drink?\" she asked Jolene when the new bride pressed a hand to her slightly rounded belly.\n\n\"Bless you, Alex,\" Jolene said in a hushed whisper. \"Please bring me some water and a few shrimp puffs.\"\n\n\"I'll be right back.\"\n\nShe wove her way through the throng waiting to offer their best wishes to the new couple. Her steps slowed when she came face-to-face with a man she hadn't seen since the last Christmas holiday family gathering.\n\nReaching for his hand, she smiled up at him. \"Come with me, Diego, while I get something for Jolene to eat.\"\n\n\"Hold up, Alex.\"\n\nTightening her grip on his large hand, she forcibly pulled him along as she quickened her pace. \"Unless you want to see your cousin's bride faint in front of her family and guests, you'll help me.\"\n\n\"Is she sick?\"\n\n\"No, she's pregnant.\"\n\nDiego Cole-Thomas smiled, an expression that was as rare to those who knew him as it was to see snow in the desert. \"It looks like Michael couldn't wait to become a daddy.\"\n\nIgnoring his cynical remark, Alex asked, \"When did you get in?\"\n\nWhen she'd questioned her aunt Nancy as to the whereabouts of her eldest grandson, her answer was \"He's expected at any moment.\" Any moment had come nearly twenty-four hours later.\n\n\"The jet touched down an hour ago. I barely had time to make it to my place to change before driving like a bat out of hell to get here before midnight.\"\n\nAlex asked a member of the catering staff to bring her what Jolene had requested, then turned to stare up at her elusive second cousin. Diego Samuel Cole-Thomas was being groomed to take over as CEO of ColeDiz International, Ltd. Women liked the thirty-five-year-old confirmed-bachelor venture capitalist and he liked them back. However, whenever one broached the topic of marriage Diego managed to extricate himself from the relationship unscathed.\n\nLooking at Diego was like seeing Samuel Claridge Cole reincarnated. Not only did he look like his great-grandfather but he'd also inherited his business acumen. Diego's genes had reached back several generations wherein he'd inherited Samuel's height, powerful build, lean angular face and large deep-set eyes, dark eyes that glowed like polished onyx. If women weren't drawn to the slight cleft in his strong chin, then it was to his smooth sable-brown skin.\n\n\"Did you bring Lisa?\"\n\nDiego lifted thick, silky black eyebrows a fraction as he shook his head. \"No. We stopped seeing each other a couple of months ago.\"\n\nAlex shot him a skeptical look. \"Is it because she mentioned the M word?\"\n\nHis solemn expression didn't change. \"No. It was by mutual agreement. How are you doing with your hip-hop boyfriend?\"\n\nA rush of heat stung Alex's cheeks. She and Duane Jackson had dated each other exclusively for five months, then without warning he'd stopped calling. She'd left a message with his housekeeper at his Miami mansion, another voice-mail message on his cell phone before relegating him to her past when he failed to contact her.\n\n\"That's over.\"\n\n\"I thought you guys were serious.\"\n\nAlex accepted a small plate wrapped in a napkin from a waitress. \"When have you known me to get serious about a man?\"\n\nDiego inclined his head at the attractive young woman who handed him two bottles of chilled water. He fell in step with Alex as they made their way back to the garden. \"It's time you got serious about someone.\"\n\nShe ignored his censuring assessment of her love life. \"I'll get serious about a man when you do the same with a woman.\"\n\n\"It's not going to happen, Alex. Not when my father has been talking about retiring.\" Timothy Cole-Thomas had announced he planned to turn over the reins of ColeDiz to his son the day he celebrated his sixtieth birthday. And that would become a reality in another four months.\n\n\"And it's not going to happen for me until I complete my graduate studies.\"\n\nDiego gave her a sidelong glance. \"Does this mean I can expect to see my little cousin married in the very near future?\"\n\nAlex rolled her eyes at him. \"You wish.\"\n\n\"No, Alex. Your parents wish.\"\n\n\"Careful. Don't go there, Diego,\" she warned quietly in defense of David and Serena Cole.\n\nDiego knew he'd struck a nerve with Alex. She was fiercely loyal and supportive of her free-spirited parents who'd raised their four children in an environment reminiscent of the seventies hippie culture. Gabriel, Alexandra, Jason and Ana Cole had grown up independent, headstrong, tolerant, secure, artistically gifted, while marching to the beat of their individual drums.\n\nHe stole a quick glance at his petite cousin. Men were drawn to her because of her beauty and carefree attitude yet none were able to tame the wildness that surfaced when least expected. And, if one did, then he would be deemed more than special; he would be exceptional.\n\n## Chapter 3\n\nAloud hiss preceded the explosion of color in the nighttime sky as pyrotechnics spelled out HAPPY NEW YEAR! to the surprise and joy of those gathered outside the large tent. Amid cheering, applause, hugs and kisses, Merrick watched the faces of those closest to him. Dressed in their evening finery, many who'd had more than a few predinner cocktails, they were enjoying themselves.\n\n\"Happy New Year,\" a woman whispered close to his ear before planting a kiss on his unsmiling mouth.\n\nHe went completely still as he stared at the stranger. The tall model-like woman smiled, flashing her porcelain veneers. Although beautiful, in typically plastic Hollywood fashion, she definitely wasn't his type.\n\n\"Same to you,\" he mumbled, reaching into the pocket of his trousers for a handkerchief. Moving into the tent, he wiped the bloodred lipstick off his mouth. He wasn't one for public displays of affection, especially when unsolicited.\n\nHe wouldn't have been as repulsed if Alexandra Cole had kissed him; however, he doubted whether she would've kissed him even if it was under the pretense that the holiday called for the ritual of exchanging kisses.\n\nThe pyrotechnics went on for another ten minutes much to the delight of the young children whose oohs and aahs turned to protests as they were led back to the house. Those sixteen and over were permitted to join their adult relatives in the frivolity that would go on for hours.\n\nMerrick was directed to his table under the enormous tent set up with seating for two hundred; he and Alex weren't seated at the same table but she sat close enough for him to take furtive glances at her; he'd lost his chatty hanger-on who, to his relief, was seated at the opposite end of the tent. Even if he'd wanted to reply to the psychologist, she hadn't let him get a word in edgewise, and he wondered whether her clients were given the opportunity to talk in their sessions.\n\nAnd if he hadn't been so taken with Alexandra Cole's natural beauty he would've taken notice of the exquisite centerpiece of white roses, hydrangea, paperwhites, poinsettias and dusty miller spilling over crystal vases, the flickering pillars under glass chimneys and the exquisite place settings with Royal Crown china in a Derby Panel Green pattern and Vera Wang sterling and crystal.\n\nPrerecorded music featuring the works of Gershwin and Ellington provided a soothing background to muted conversations as silent, efficient waitstaff filled wine and water glasses. They served course after course of endive with cr\u00e8me fra\u00eeche and caviar, bowls of delicious oyster soup, Caesar salad with crisp pancetta and garlicky croutons, wild-mushroom lasagna, grilled salmon, filet mignon and chicken cordon bleu.\n\nMerrick lost count of the number of different wines poured for each serving as he alternated exchanging pleasantries with the two women flanking him while surreptitiously stealing glances at the woman who, despite his declaration that he wasn't interested in her romantically, had ensnared him in an invisible web of curiosity.\n\nShe was a Cole, a member of one of the wealthiest African-American families, if not the wealthiest, and was related to the groom. She hadn't worn any rings and professed she didn't date, and therefore he assumed her single.\n\nHad her declaration that she didn't date mean that she wasn't into men? A hint of a smile tipped the corners of his firm mouth.\n\nHe would just have to ask her.\n\nThroughout dinner Alex took surreptitious glances at the table to her right. There was something mysterious yet frightening about Merrick Grayslake. She wasn't certain whether it was the timbre of his drawling voice that indicated that he had southern roots or that he hadn't raised his voice to Donald; there was no mistaking the cold warning. And when he'd reached for Donald's throat she'd thought for an instant that he was going to strangle the poor man.\n\nStaring at him through her lashes, she bit down on her lower lip, holding her breath. He'd caught her staring. The seconds stretched into a full minute. He acknowledged her interest with a barely perceptible nod. The corners of her mouth curved upward as her lips parted in an inviting smile.\n\nMerrick was hard-pressed not to return her smile, his silver-gray orbs darkening with an emotion he hadn't felt in a very long time. He'd lied to Alex and to himself. There was something about her that made him want to know her. Putting two fingers to his forehead, he gave her a mock salute. A lump formed in his throat when she went completely still, then turned away to say something to the man on her left. Her expression before she'd glanced away was one of demure innocence.\n\nWas she? he mused. No, she couldn't be, he continued with his mental monologue. Pushing back from the table, he looped one leg over the opposite knee; he studied Alex with a curious intensity that was so foreign to him. She reminded him of a lump of coal that appeared cold until touched. At that moment he likened her to a dark fire.\n\nAlex had promised him one dance, and he hoped the single interaction would be enough to put his mind at ease as to why he felt drawn to his friend's cousin.\n\nHis attention was redirected to the bridal table where the best man offered a toast to the newlyweds. Flutes of champagne were hoisted over and over with the various toasts from a very pregnant maid of honor and the parents of the couple. Jolene and Michael cut the first slice of a four-tiered double-chocolate wedding cake decorated in white-chocolate curls and topped with marzipan roses and leaves. Individual wedding cakes in airtight containers and decorated with dark green satin ribbon were given to each guest.\n\nWith the pomp and circumstance of the wedding behind them, the bride and groom left the tent for an area where a portable dance floor had been erected in an open meadow. A DJ, alternating with a five-piece band, was on board to provide nonstop music.\n\nThe music was going full tilt when Merrick found himself standing off to the side watching couples twirling to a remix of Red Carpet's \"Alright,\" a dance hit he'd first heard in a club in Amsterdam. He couldn't take his eyes off Alex as she danced freestyle with Michael Kirkland, sans jacket and tie. Others on the dance floor moved back to watch their spectacular routine.\n\nCarefully coiffed curls fell over Alex's forehead as Michael spun her around and around on her toes. Reaching for a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, Merrick's gaze never left the petite figure. Their dance ended in applause as Michael lifted Alex off her feet, kissing her cheek.\n\nAlex, her face flushed, made her way through the crowd. Merrick took two long strides and thrust the flute at her. \"I believe you could use this.\"\n\nShe went completely still, only her chest rising and falling from the vigorous exertion, and stared at Merrick as if seeing him for the first time. There was a pause before she took the glass. Raising it to her lips, she took one sip, then another.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nMerrick inclined his head. \"You're quite welcome.\"\n\nResting a hand in the small of her back, he led her away from the crowd. He wanted to talk to Alex, but didn't want anyone to overhear what he wanted to say to her.\n\nHer spine stiffened against his arm. \"Where are you taking me?\"\n\n\"Relax, Ali,\" he said, leaning closer.\n\n\"Why should I when you haven't answered my question?\"\n\nHis hand moved up to her narrow waist. \"I want to ask you something.\"\n\nShe gave him a sidelong glance. \"I thought you wanted to dance, not talk.\"\n\n\"We'll dance later.\" Alex stopped suddenly, causing Merrick to plow into her. She would've lost her balance if his reflexes were slower. Wrapping both arms around her body, he pulled her against his length. \"Careful.\"\n\nHis breath whispered over an ear, and she felt a shudder of awareness of the man cradling her to his hard, lean body, awareness that she'd found herself attracted to a stranger when there was no room in her life for romantic fantasies.\n\n\"You can let me go now.\" He dropped his arms and she pointed to a cushioned wrought-iron bench under a magnolia tree. \"We can talk here.\"\n\nMerrick waited for Alex to sit before he sat down beside her. She took another swallow of champagne, handing him the half-empty flute. Cradling the stem of the glass between his thumb and forefinger, he fixed his gaze on the pale sparkling wine. There was a comfortable silence, neither seemingly wanting to initiate conversation.\n\nHe shattered the silence and asked, \"Are you into women?\"\n\nA soft gasp escaped Alex's parted lips when she processed his query. \"What!\"\n\n\"Do you prefer women to men?\" Merrick asked, this time rephrasing his question.\n\nShe gave him a hostile glare. \"No. Why would you ask me that?\"\n\n\"Because you said you didn't date.\"\n\nHer nostrils flared in anger. \"Because I told you that I don't date you assume I'm into women?\"\n\nMerrick lifted his eyebrows. \"There was always the possibility.\"\n\nShe met his challenging stare with one of her own. \"The answer is no, Merrick. I am not into women.\"\n\nRising to his feet, Merrick extended his free hand. \"I'm ready for that dance now.\"\n\nAlex shook her head. \"No, Merrick.\" She patted the cushion beside her. \"Please sit down.\" Waiting until he retook his seat, she turned and stared at his distinctive profile. She was certain he could hear the runaway beating of her heart that echoed in her ears like a kettledrum. Ana was right. Merrick Grayslake was exotic and caliente!\n\n\"Why should my sexual preference matter to you when you're here with a woman? Could it be you were afraid I'm going to make a play for her? And if you are, then I must disappoint you because I'm not into threesomes.\"\n\nMerrick turned and looked at Alex as if she'd just grown a third eye. \"Are you always this outspoken?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she answered quickly.\n\nMore amused than insulted, he smiled at her face in the diffused artificial light. \"I'm not here with a woman. The young lady you saw me with works with Jolene. We met at a party at Michael's house in Georgetown a few months back. I, too, am not into threesomes, or foursomes. I'm a very private person, and if by chance I sleep with a woman, then there will be only the two of us in bed. And I asked about your sexual preference because I thought the two of us could possibly become friends.\"\n\nHer delicate jaw went slack. \"Friends?\"\n\nHe lifted a shoulder under his suit jacket. \"Yes, Ali, friends. You don't date and neither do I, so I thought we could hang out together.\"\n\nAlex sat there, somewhat shaken by the unpredictable man sitting next to her. He wanted them to become friends when all she wanted was to flee his presence and surround herself with her family who always made her feel safe and protected.\n\nBut what, she asked herself, did she have to fear from Merrick Grayslake? After all, she was a Cole and the Coles always protected their own.\n\n\"I don't believe that's going to be possible.\"\n\nThere came a pause. \"Why not, Ali?\"\n\n\"I'm leaving the States in three weeks to study art in Mexico City.\"\n\nMerrick swirled the remains of the champagne in the flute, then put the glass to his mouth and drained the contents, savoring the taste of the premium wine on his palate.\n\nResting his right arm over the back of the bench, he stared straight ahead. Alex's declaration that she was leaving the country gave him conflicting emotions. He'd found her vaguely disturbing and exciting at the same time. He couldn't say she was his type, because he'd found himself attracted to all women irrespective of their race, nationality or culture. Perhaps it was because he didn't know who or what he was that permitted him to be more open-minded and accepting of others.\n\n\"Are you an artist?\"\n\n\"No. I'm an architectural historian.\"\n\n\"What made you select art as a career?\"\n\nShe lifted her shoulders under the revealing dress, bringing Merrick's gaze to rest on her exposed throat and neckline.\n\n\"I've always loved museums. Whereas other children wanted to visit theme and amusement parks, for me it was museums and art galleries.\"\n\nLooping one leg over the other in one continuous graceful motion, Merrick smiled. \"I know absolutely nothing about art.\"\n\nShifting on the bench to face Merrick, Alex saw a flash from his incredibly perfect white teeth. Why hadn't she noticed them before? However, she knew the answer even before the question was formed in her head. It was the first time she'd seen him smile, and the gesture transformed his face, softening the sharp angles to make him even more breathtakingly attractive.\n\n\"Don't tell me you wouldn't recognize Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.\"\n\nHis smile grew wider. \"That's the only exception.\"\n\n\"What about van Gogh?\"\n\n\"Isn't he the one who cut off his right ear?\"\n\n\"It was the left,\" Alex correctly softly.\n\n\"See? I told you I know nothing about art. How about giving me a crash course in art history?\"\n\nShe felt him come closer when actually he hadn't moved. The smoldering flame she saw in his eyes startled her. Merrick Grayslake spoke of friendship when everything in his gaze communicated the opposite.\n\n\"Not in three weeks.\" Her voice was barely a whisper.\n\nLids lowering over his penetrating eyes, Merrick stared at her lushly curved full lips. \"I'm a quick study.\"\n\nA tangible energy radiated from Merrick that drew Alex to him like a powerful magnet. He was maddeningly arrogant, but there was also something so soothing in his manner that she found herself unable to resist him.\n\nIt had been a long time since she'd been involved with a man, but that still did not explain why she'd felt as if her emotions were under attack; and she could not fathom what it was about the man a mere breath away who shattered her resolve to concentrate solely on her studies. She had three weeks, time in which she planned to visit with her parents and siblings before she returned to Virginia to close up her condo.\n\n\"Can you take a couple of weeks off from your job?\"\n\nMerrick was hard-pressed not to smile. \"Yes. What do you have in mind?\" He wanted to tell Alex that he didn't have a job or a career, and hadn't had one in two years. He had a government pension, albeit as a disability status, and the proceeds from shrewd investments permitted him a comfortable and uncomplicated lifestyle.\n\n\"I need you to come to D.C. Will that present a problem for you?\"\n\n\"Not in the least. I live in West Virginia.\"\n\n\"Where do you live in West Virginia?\" Excitement fired the gold in her clear brown eyes.\n\n\"Bolivar. It's a few miles south of Harper's Ferry.\"\n\n\"We're practically neighbors. I live in Arlington, Virginia.\"\n\nThey weren't neighbors, but it was close enough for Merrick to get to the Capitol District in a few hours. \"How long have you lived in Virginia?\"\n\n\"This coming March will be two years. I'm going to visit with my folks in Boca Raton for a week before I go back to D.C.\"\n\n\"When do you want to get together?\"\n\n\"I should be back on the eighth. I have tickets for a showing that's also a fund-raiser on the ninth.\"\n\n\"That sounds good. I'm going to need a number where I can reach you so you can give me all the particulars.\"\n\n\"I'll give you my cell number. Do you have anything to write it down with?\"\n\nMerrick shook his head. \"Tell it to me.\"\n\nResting a hand on one hip, Alex glared at him. \"If you forget it, then don't blame me if we don't get together.\"\n\n\"I won't forget it. And if I do I'll call Michael and ask him.\"\n\nAlex had her answer as to whose guest he was. And if he knew Michael, then there was no doubt Merrick Grayslake was either involved in the military or had ties to intelligence.\n\nShe recited her number, watching Merrick as he closed his eyes and mouthed the numbers. \"Tickets to this event are as scarce as hen's teeth, so if I get one for you and you don't contact me, then there's going to be hell to pay, Merrick Grayslake.\"\n\nHis right hand moved up to caress the nape of her neck. Pressing his mouth to her ear, he repeated her number before reciting it backward. \"Are you satisfied, Miss Alexandra Cole?\"\n\nGrinning, her mouth inches from his, she crooned, \"I'm impressed.\"\n\nAlex's soft, moist lips were a temptation, but Merrick knew she would never trust him if he suddenly took advantage of the situation and kissed her. He'd promised friendship, and that was what they would share until she decided otherwise.\n\n\"The score is now two for Grayslake, zero for Cole.\"\n\nVertical lines appeared between her eyes. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nMerrick's smile was toothpaste-ad dazzling white. \"I earned a point when I rescued you from your annoying stalker boyfriend, and I just proved to you that I won't forget your number.\"\n\nPulling back and resting both hands on her hips in a challenging gesture, Alex narrowed her eyes. \"Oh-kay,\" she drawled. \"You want this to be a competition? Bring it on, sport, because you're in for the fight of your life.\"\n\nHe sobered quickly. \"Damn. You're a spunky little thing, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Don't let my size fool you.\"\n\n\"One thing I'm not is a fool. I know enough not to mess over a Cole woman.\"\n\nHer frown deepened. \"How much do you know about my family?\"\n\nThe seconds ticked off as they regarded each other like combatants. \"A lot more than the average citizen,\" he replied cryptically.\n\nA wave of apprehension swept through Alex, washing away her former bravado. \"Who are you, Merrick? And what do you do?\"\n\nHis impassive expression reminded her of a mask of stone. \"I'm retired.\"\n\n\"Who did you work for?\" Her normally sultry voice had dropped an octave.\n\nThere came another pause. \"That's something you don't need to know.\"\n\nAlex emitted an unladylike snort. \"You want us to become friends, yet you don't trust me enough to tell me who you work for.\" She stood up, Merrick following suit. \"Well, I just evened the score, Merrick. You don't have to tell me. Once Michael returns from his honeymoon I'll ask him.\"\n\nMerrick knew when he was bested. He didn't want Michael to know that he was seeing his cousin\u2014not yet. \"CIA,\" he said reluctantly.\n\nHer mouth formed a perfect O with his disclosure. \"You were with the Central Intelligence Agency?\" He nodded. \"Intelligence?\" Merrick nodded again. She squinted up at him. \"I see why you and Michael are friends.\" Her cousin, a West Point graduate, was a highly-trained army intelligence officer.\n\nMerrick extended his free hand. \"Are you ready to dance with me?\"\n\nGrasping his hand, Alex smiled up at him. \"Yes.\"\n\nHolding hands, they retraced their steps to where couples were swaying to the band playing Stevie Wonder's \"You and I.\" Merrick wrapped his arm around Alex's waist, holding her close to his heart, and closed his eyes as she curved her arms under his shoulders. There was no need to concentrate on his footwork as they sank into each other's warmth, as if dancing together was something they'd done before. Before the last note faded, the DJ segued into the old-school ballad, P.M. Dawn's \"I'd Die Without You.\"\n\nResting her cheek on her dance partner's shoulder, Alex closed her eyes and sang the words of the passionate love song. She lost herself in the strong arms, the sensual scent of his cologne and temporarily forgot her promise not to entertain notions of a romantic nature until she completed her education.\n\nGoing completely pliant in Merrick's embrace, she thought of a time when she'd lost her heart to a man who was undeserving of her love and trust. The song ended and they pulled apart.\n\nLowering his head, Merrick pressed a kiss to her cheek. \"Thank you for the dance.\"\n\nEasing out of his loose embrace, she gave him a dimpled smile. \"Thank you for asking.\"\n\nHis gray eyes boring into her, Merrick inclined his head. \"Good night, Ali.\"\n\nHer arching raven eyebrows lifted. \"Good night and Happy New Year.\"\n\nWithout another word, he turned and walked off the dance floor, leaving her staring at his broad shoulders until he blended into the crowd. She was in the same position when Jason reached for her hand.\n\n\"Come dance with me.\" He steered her to the middle of the dance floor as hip-hop blared from the powerful sound system. Raising her arms above her head, she snapped her fingers and lost herself in the driving rhythm of the infectious baseline beat. Her older brother, Gabriel, cut in, then Diego. After a while she lost count of the number of men she danced with as the hands on the clock made several revolutions. It was after four in the morning when she finally took off her shoes, walked across the carpet of grass and into the house that her grandfather had built for his wife before the Great Depression.\n\nThe twenty-four-room mansion designed in a Spanish revival style with barrel-tiled red roofs, a stucco facade and balconies shrouded in lush bougainvillea and sweeping French doors that opened onto broad expanses of terraces with spectacular water views was still one of the finest homes in West Palm Beach. The magnificent structure, set on twelve acres, was surrounded by tropical foliage, exotic gardens and the reflection of light off sparkling lake waters.\n\nAlex always looked forward to coming to West Palm Beach for the week spanning Christmas and New Year's because it gave her the opportunity to reunite with her extended family and reconnect with her grandmother who'd celebrated her one hundred and third birthday December twenty-seventh.\n\nShe had the bedroom suite to herself, which meant she could linger in the shower. After cleansing the makeup from her face and brushing her teeth, she stepped into the shower stall.\n\nHer eyelids were drooping when she pulled a nightgown over her head and slipped into one of the two queen-size beds. Alex was asleep within seconds of her head touching a down-filled pillow.\n\n## Chapter 4\n\nMerrick checked out of his hotel, retrieved his truck from the parking lot and headed south. It was New Year's Day, the weekend, and he practically had I\u201395 to himself. An overcast sky had given way to bright sunlight, and when he entered downtown Miami the energy, passion, color and architectural treasures of the tropical city elicited a feeling of nostalgia. What was it, he asked himself, about Miami that made him feel as if he'd come home?\n\nSlowing the SUV, he'd become the sightseer and tourist, driving past the harbor crowded with massive cruise ships and priceless pleasure boats. His sightseeing ended when he checked into a Miami Beach hotel. The view from his nineteenth-floor suite was spectacular. Opening the door to an armoire, he switched on the large-screen television to CNN. He'd planned to spend his time in Miami relaxing and soaking up the flavor of the city. Pulling a T-shirt over his head, he made his way in the direction of the bathroom.\n\nAfter moving to Bolivar he'd discovered that he lost track of the days of the week; but that would change because of Alexandra Cole. Eight days\u2014in another eight days he would call her to arrange a time when they would see each other again.\n\nStepping out of his jeans and underwear, Merrick recalled his interaction with Alex. He'd found her outspoken, opinionated and brutally honest, personality traits he hadn't encountered in any of the women in his past. She was a challenge, one he welcomed. Alex had promised him two weeks and he intended to make the most of their time together.\n\nMerrick walked into a restaurant on Calle Ocho, Miami's Little Havana main thoroughfare. He took off a well-worn baseball cap and seated himself at a small table in the rear of the dining establishment. The mouthwatering aromas wafting from platters of food carried by the serving staff overwhelmed him. He'd opted not to order from the hotel kitchen because it'd been months since he'd eaten Caribbean cuisine.\n\nTwo months before, he'd become a lookout for Michael when he'd asked him to watch the building housing the Sanctuary Counseling Center. He'd set himself up in a vacant apartment across the street, bribing the building's superintendent to let him use the space under the pretense that he was a private detective hired by a foreign diplomat to watch his wife who'd abducted the two children the judge had placed in his custody. The greedy man barely glanced at his fake identification, accepting the one-hundred-dollar-a-day fee while offering to bring him lunch and dinner. The superintendent's wife was from the Dominican Republic, and Merrick spent three glorious days eating white rice, red beans, fried plantains, baked chicken and spaghetti with spareribs.\n\nPicking up a plastic-covered menu, he studied the selections printed in English and Spanish. An attractive young waitress approached his table. \"Are you ready to order?\" she asked in accented English.\n\n\"Miro todav\u00eda,\" he said. \"Pero le agradecer\u00eda una cerveza fr\u00eda.\"\n\nThe waitress's professionally arched eyebrows shot up. Not only was the gray-eyed man guapo, but he also spoke Spanish.\n\n\"Seguro.\" She flashed a sultry grin before walking away with an exaggerated sway of her hips. She took a bottle of beer from a freezer case, whispering to her girlfriend to take a look at the man in the light blue shirt seated in her section.\n\n\"El es guapo! But don't let Jorge see you flirting with him, Milagros,\" the other woman warned in English. \"The two of you are practically engaged.\"\n\n\"Almost engaged, but not blind,\" Milagros whispered, winking at her best friend. She returned to her customer, placing the bottle of beer and a chilled glass on the table. She was the epitome of professionalism when she jotted down Merrick's order of black beans, white rice, baked chicken and an avocado salad.\n\nMerrick lingered at the restaurant, eating, reading a Spanish-language newspaper and viewing a Spanish-language television station. It was as if he wanted to immerse himself in a language he'd learned from the Mexican housekeepers in the employ of his foster parents.\n\nThe foster parents were all cut from the same fabric: Godfearing folks who felt an obligation to take care of the less fortunate. They never stopped to think that the money they received from the state for their charges helped pay for luxury cars, state-of-the-art electronic equipment, expanding their already sprawling homes and vacationing in exotic getaways.\n\nForcing himself not to think of his troubled childhood, he paid the check, leaving a generous tip, and walked out of the restaurant. He put on his favorite New York Yankees cap, successfully concealing his dark auburn hair, and set off on foot to tour the area. He stopped at the Brigade 2506 Memorial that commemorated the exiled victims of the unsuccessful 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The sun had set by the time he returned to pick up his vehicle and check back into his hotel room.\n\nUnaccustomed to the heavy food and the winter heat he lay down on the bed in the air-conditioned room. Within seconds of closing his eyes, the face of Alex flooded his mind. Cursing under his breath, he sat up and reached for his cell phone on the nightstand. The only way he was going to exorcise her was to talk to her.\n\nMerrick dialed her number as if it was something he did on a regular basis. It rang three times before he heard her greeting.\n\nA smile crinkled the lines around his eyes. \"I told you I wouldn't forget.\"\n\nHer sultry laugh came through the tiny earpiece. \"You're really full of yourself, aren't you? Are you trying to prove to me how smart you are, Mr. Former CIA Man?\"\n\nA bright smile spread over his face. \"No and no. Right now I'm full of arroz frijoles, pollo y aguacate.\"\n\n\"You speak Spanish?\"\n\n\"S\u00ed, que t\u00fa hablas Espa\u00f1ol, tambi\u00e9n?\"\n\n\"Yes. Both my parents speak the language. Who taught you?\"\n\nThere was a pause before Merrick said, \"That's a long story.\"\n\n\"I have all night, Merrick.\"\n\n\"All night for what, Ali?\"\n\n\"To listen to you tell me about yourself.\"\n\n\"Why don't you wait until we see each other again?\"\n\n\"Where are you?\"\n\n\"I'm in Miami.\"\n\n\"That's one of my favorite cities. The architecture is spectacular.\"\n\n\"It is very colorful.\" Merrick wanted to tell Alex that she was spectacular but didn't want to come on too strong. \"Now that I know you didn't give me the wrong number, I'll let you go.\"\n\n\"The wrong number!\" she repeated. \"If I hadn't wanted to give you my number, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.\"\n\nHe chuckled softly. \"So, you do want to be my friend.\"\n\n\"Isn't that why I gave you my number?\"\n\n\"No, Ali. You gave me your number because you promised to tutor me in art history.\"\n\n\"It's going to have to be an accelerated course.\"\n\n\"I told you before that I'm a quick study.\" What Merrick hadn't told Alex was that he had a photographic memory. He'd become known in the Marine Corps as \"Lock and Load\" because if he saw something or someone once, he was able to file the information away in his mind and recall it at will. This gift had served him well once he was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency.\n\n\"I'm going to grade you.\"\n\n\"What can I expect if I get straight As?\"\n\nAlex laughed again. \"I'll be certain to come up with something comparable to your final grade. How long are you going to be in Miami?\"\n\n\"I plan to spend another day here. Then I'm heading down to the Keys.\"\n\n\"I've lived in Florida all my life yet I've never been to the Keys.\"\n\n\"Do you want to join me?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because I don't know you like that.\"\n\n\"Like what, Ali? Do you think I'd try to compromise you?\"\n\n\"No. Of course not,\" she said much too quickly. \"Maybe the next time I'll take you up on your offer.\"\n\n\"I'm going to hold you to that promise.\"\n\n\"I always keep my promises, Merrick.\"\n\n\"Good for you.\" He heard a signal that indicated Alex had another caller.\n\n\"Hold on, I have another call coming through.\" There was a momentary pause before she came back on the line. \"I'm going to have to ring off now. I'll talk to you again on the eighth.\"\n\n\"Okay. Stay well and stay out of trouble.\" Her bubbly laughter floated into his ear. \"Don't make me have to come to your rescue again,\" he teased.\n\n\"It's kind of nice having a personal knight in shining armor.\"\n\n\"I hate to tell you, but my armor's rusted and dented beyond repair.\"\n\n\"That doesn't matter. I'll still keep you, Sir Grayslake.\"\n\nMerrick knew he had to end the call before he said something that would sabotage his fragile yet promising relationship with Alexandra Cole. \"I'll call you on the eighth.\"\n\n\"Ciao, amigo,\" she said cheerfully.\n\n\"Hasta luego, Ali.\"\n\nMerrick pressed a button, ending the connection. He was glad he'd called her. Hearing her voice and bubbly laugh was a reminder of what he could look forward to once he returned to West Virginia.\n\nMerrick finally found Rachel Singletary's house without mishap. His vehicle's navigational system had never failed him. He turned down a narrow street that made up Key West. He found a parking spot in what he termed an alley, and walked the short distance to a one-story stucco structure painted a soft salmon pink and fronted by a wrought-iron fence protecting a flower garden overflowing with frangipani and bougainvillea.\n\nReaching over, he unlatched the gate at the same time the front door opened. Rachel stood in the doorway, an automatic handgun pressed to her jeans-covered thigh.\n\nMerrick held up both hands. \"I come in peace.\"\n\nThe network of tiny lines around the woman's dark eyes deepened when she recognized the tall man standing outside the gate. \"Merrick! How the hell are you?\"\n\nHe gestured to the firearm. \"I'd be a lot better if you put that thing away.\"\n\nRachel waved him in. \"It's all for show.\"\n\nMerrick opened the gate as Rachel came forward to meet him. Looping an arm around her waist, he leaned over and kissed her cheek. \"You look good, Rusty,\" he said, using her nickname.\n\n\"Not as good as you, Gray. To what do I owe the honor of you gracing me with your presence?\" Rachel asked as she tucked the firearm into the waistband of her jeans under an oversize man-tailored shirt.\n\n\"I did promise to come and visit.\"\n\n\"That was two years ago.\" She moved aside as Merrick stepped into an expansive entryway.\n\n\"Better late than never,\" he quipped.\n\nShe closed and locked the front door. \"Go onto the back porch where it's cooler.\"\n\nHe made his way through a living room filled with rattan pieces covered with colorful plush pillows and cushions in keeping with the tropical locale. A profusion of potted plants and palms brought the outdoors inside.\n\nHe stood on an enclosed porch, staring through the screen at the ocean. The view was awesome, humbling and peaceful. Living in a landlocked state definitely had its disadvantages. A low table held a television, a radio and a stack of recent best-selling books. It was obvious Rachel spent most of her time at the rear of her house.\n\n\"Sit down, Merrick.\"\n\nHe folded his length down to a cushioned love seat while Rachel sat on a chaise; he turned to stare at the middle-aged woman who at one time had been his supervisor in Langley, Virginia.\n\nTwenty-five years his senior, she'd become his older sister, counselor and confidante. Tall and sturdily built, with even features, she'd teased him, saying they probably were related because both had red hair. The years had darkened the bright orange strands and added a liberal sprinkling of gray while the Florida sun had tanned her face wherein the liberal sprinkling of freckles blended with the added color.\n\nLeaning to her right, she opened the door to a portable refrigerator and took out two bottles of beer. She offered one to Merrick. \"I'm sorry I don't have anything stronger.\"\n\nHe waved a hand. \"No, thank you.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me you've gone soft, Grayslake.\"\n\n\"A little,\" he admitted. \"Being away from the action can do that.\"\n\nRachel twisted the cap off the bottle, put it to her mouth and took a long swallow. \"You still could've been in the action if you hadn't cut and run like a candy-ass.\"\n\nMerrick closed his eyes, shutting out the awesome sight of the sun setting over the ocean. \"I didn't join the Company to sit behind a desk.\"\n\nRachel stared at the tall, slender man. \"Neither did I, Merrick.\"\n\n\"But you did,\" he countered.\n\n\"That's something you wouldn't understand.\"\n\nHe opened his eyes, meeting her pain-filled gaze. \"Understand what, Rusty?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Forget it.\"\n\nSitting up straighter, he rested his elbows on his knees. \"What happened, Rachel?\"\n\nShe avoided his stare, took another sip from her beer and stared through the screen at the large ball of orange sinking lower beyond the horizon. \"After...\" Her voice trailed off. \"After someone\u2014another agent who was very close to me, was captured and executed in Somalia, I requested desk duty.\"\n\nMerrick knew no amount of pressure would get Rachel to divulge the name of the other agent. Even in death, the Company never identified its agents by name.\n\n\"You were in love with him.\" The query was a statement.\n\nRachel blinked back the tears. \"My love for him knew no bounds. When I found out that he'd been killed I thought about taking my own life.\"\n\n\"Did he love you, Rachel?\" Merrick asked in a hushed whisper. She nodded. \"Why didn't you marry him?\"\n\nA cynical smile twisted her mouth. \"I couldn't because he was already married. And in the twelve years we worked together I never asked that he leave his wife and children. I was willing to be his mistress and accept what little of himself he doled out to me.\" She took another deep swallow of the cold brew.\n\n\"My supervisor went ballistic when I requested desk duty, but there wasn't much he could do once I spoke to the Agency's psychiatrist and confessed to suicidal ideation. I'd been in the position as an intelligence research training specialist eight years when you enrolled in my class. I was the one who recommended you for my position once you returned from disability leave.\"\n\nMerrick, hands sandwiched between his denim-covered knees, stared at the sisal rug covering the floor. \"It wouldn't have worked. Not at that time in my life.\"\n\nRachel focused her gaze on the coarse reddish-brown hair on Merrick's well-shaped head. She'd always thought his looks incredible. The contrast of his gray eyes in a khaki-brown face was startling and hypnotic. It was obvious he was a man of color, but it was impossible to identify his racial or ethnic group.\n\nAnd not once during the time when she acted as facilitator for the intelligence training course had she ever seen him smile. She'd found it odd that he hadn't bothered to jot down notes like the other agents-in-training; her fear that he would flunk out was belied when his tests came back with perfect scores.\n\n\"What about now, Merrick?\" she asked softly.\n\nA half smile parted his lips. \"It's something I could consider.\"\n\nHer red eyebrows lifted with this disclosure. \"Are you serious?\"\n\nHis smile widened. \"Just say I've been thinking about it.\"\n\n\"What brought on this epiphany?\"\n\n\"I've been getting out more.\"\n\nRachel smiled. \"Someone told me that you were holed up somewhere in West Virginia. Don't tell me that you met someone who has melted that lump of ice you call a heart.\"\n\nMerrick sobered. \"No. It had nothing to do with a woman.\" There was a moment of silence as the two regarded each other.\n\n\"How old are you now?\" Rachel asked.\n\n\"Thirty-five.\"\n\n\"Are you married?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Do you have a girlfriend?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What about a lover?\"\n\nThere was a pause before Merrick said, \"No.\"\n\nRachel went completely still, her eyes boring into Merrick's. \"Don't you have urges? I'm sixty and I still do.\"\n\n\"Do you do anything about them?\" he asked, his expression deadpan.\n\n\"You better believe I do. I'm seeing somebody.\"\n\n\"Is it serious?\"\n\n\"If you're asking whether I'll ever get married, then the answer is no. He's been divorced for fifteen years and has no intention of tying the knot again, and that's fine with me. I'm enjoying retirement. I get up when I want, and come and go whenever the whim hits me. I'm glad I got out when I did because it took a year of therapy to rid myself of the dreams that I was reliving every mission.\"\n\nMerrick wanted to tell Rachel that he never experienced the disturbing images of his missions because he'd managed to become totally detached whenever he went undercover. He wasn't Merrick Grayslake but whoever and whatever his government wanted him to be.\n\nReaching across the space separating them, he patted Rachel's hand. \"Would you mind sharing dinner with me tonight?\"\n\nShe gave him a saucy grin. \"Are you asking me out on a date?\"\n\nHe winked at her. \"Yes, I am, beautiful.\"\n\nA rush of color darkened her face as she blushed like a young girl. \"Keep talking like that and I'm going to tell my boyfriend.\"\n\nRising to his feet, Merrick offered her his hand, and pulled her up effortlessly. \"Tell him,\" he teased. \"I bet he can't beat me up.\"\n\nRachel smiled, tilting her head back to meet his teasing gaze. \"He's got at least forty pounds on you.\"\n\nMerrick kissed her cheek. \"The bigger they are the harder they fall.\"\n\nShe patted his shoulder. \"You're right about that. I know a little seafood place that's within walking distance. It's not fancy but the food is wonderful.\"\n\n\"That sounds great.\"\n\n\"How long do you plan to hang out in the Keys?\"\n\n\"No more than four days.\"\n\n\"Where are you staying?\" Rachel asked over her shoulder as she led Merrick off the porch.\n\n\"I've checked into the Marquesa.\" The Marquesa Hotel was an elegant restored home that dated back to 1884.\n\n\"Check out tomorrow and come stay with me. I have an extra bedroom.\"\n\n\"I can't do that, Rusty.\"\n\n\"Yes, you can.\"\n\n\"What about your boyfriend?\"\n\n\"He's bound to be a little jealous, but he'll get over it once I tell him you're celibate.\"\n\nWrapping an arm around Rachel's neck, Merrick pulled her close. \"You should know you're taking a risk inviting a sex-starved man to sleep under the same roof with you.\"\n\nRachel returned the hug, her arm going around his slim waist. \"I made my reputation at the Company being a risk taker.\"\n\nMerrick knew she was right. Rachel Singletary had become one of the best female agents in CIA history. But she'd lost her edge because she'd fallen in love with the wrong man while he'd almost lost his life because he'd trusted the wrong woman.\n\n## Chapter 5\n\nHer head and body swathed in thick, thirsty towels, Alex walked out of the bathroom adjoining her bedroom suite to the ringing of her cell phone. Quickening her pace, she stubbed her toes on a leg of the nightstand as she reached for the tiny instrument.\n\n\"Dammit!\" she hissed between clenched teeth as she activated the Talk button.\n\n\"I can always call back another time,\" came what now had become a familiar male voice.\n\nHopping on one foot, she sat down on the padded bench at the foot of her bed. The ColeDiz jet had touched down at Washington National Airport at three that morning, but it was close to dawn when she'd finally crawled into bed.\n\n\"No! Please don't, Merrick.\" Her little toe throbbed like a raw nerve.\n\n\"What's the matter?\"\n\nShe registered genuine concern in the deep, drawling voice. \"I just jammed my toe on a piece of furniture.\"\n\n\"Will you require medical attention?\"\n\nShe smiled for the first time. \"I doubt it. I want to thank you, Merrick.\"\n\n\"For what, Ali?\"\n\n\"You said you'd call and you did. Most men I meet are such liars and dogs that I can't stand them. Are we still on for tomorrow?\" she asked without pausing to take a breath.\n\n\"That depends on the weather. Have you looked out the window?\"\n\n\"No. What's going on?\"\n\n\"It's been snowing for hours.\"\n\nPushing off the bed and limping to the window, Alex opened the shutters covering the floor-to-ceiling windows. The roadway and cars parked along the street were covered with snow. Her mouth turned down in a frown. She didn't know why, but she'd spent the week looking forward to seeing Merrick Grayslake again. And if he was stuck in the mountains, then there was the possibility he would be snowed in.\n\n\"Is it snowing in West Virginia?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know because I'm in Arlington.\"\n\n\"When did you get here?\"\n\n\"Yesterday afternoon. I'm at the Hyatt.\"\n\n\"You're within walking distance of my condo.\" She gave him her address. \"How would you like to share dinner with me?\"\n\n\"Is this a date, Ali?\"\n\n\"Yes. Does it bother you that a woman asked you before you could ask her?\"\n\n\"Not in the least. I like a woman who knows what she wants.\"\n\n\"It's not about what I want. I just thought that we'd begin your lessons earlier than planned.\" She didn't want to give Merrick the impression that there would be more between them than friendship.\n\n\"That sounds good to me. What time should I arrive?\"\n\nAlex glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was almost one o'clock. \"Make it between five and six.\"\n\n\"What do you like to drink?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about beverages. I have everything.\" She had a Sub-Zero Refrigerator with a compartment for chilling wines. \"Is there anything you don't eat?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"If that's the case, then I'll see you later.\" She ended the call without giving Merrick the opportunity to ring off.\n\nAlex knew she had to wipe away the dust from the floors and tables that had gathered during her absence and shop for groceries to replace those she'd thrown away before she left for Florida. Turning away from the window, she returned to the bathroom to complete her toilette.\n\nMerrick stomped on the thick straw mat outside the door to the three-story Federal-style building, shaking the snow off his boots as he rang the bell for Alex's apartment.\n\n\"Yes?\" came her sultry voice through the building's intercom.\n\nHe leaned closer. \"Merrick.\"\n\n\"Come on up.\" A buzzing sound disengaged the lock to the outer door.\n\nHe pushed it open with his shoulder, and heat enveloped him like a warm, comforting blanket. The mailbox in the vestibule bearing Alex's name indicated she lived on the second floor. Cradling a bag to his sheepskin-lined leather bomber jacket, he climbed the staircase to her floor.\n\nWalking the four blocks had become a challenge. The falling snow had increased in intensity, and meteorologists were predicting more than a foot before tapering off later that night. A district-wide snow emergency was in full effect wherein government office buildings had closed at two and all nonessential vehicles were ordered to stay off major thoroughfares.\n\nMerrick smiled as he stepped off the last stair. The unique voice of Tina Turner greeted him as the door to Alex's apartment opened and she stood there, an inviting smile tilting the corners of her mouth. Her curly hair fell around her face in sensual disarray, raven strands grazing her delicate jaw and the nape of her neck.\n\nShe looked younger and more fragile than she had a week ago. Today she hadn't bothered to put on any makeup, and in a long-sleeved cotton tee, body-hugging jeans and sock-covered feet she appeared barely out of her teens.\n\nHe handed her the bag filled with a bouquet of colorful calla lilies. \"I decided to bring a little something to brighten up the table.\"\n\nAlex met his gaze. The moisture from melting snow coated the strands of his close-cropped hair, and she wondered why he hadn't worn a hat. \"They're beautiful, Merrick. Thank you so much. Please come in,\" she urged as he took off his gloves, shoving them into his jacket pocket, then bent over to untie his Timberland boots.\n\n\"I don't want to track snow over your floors.\"\n\nAn exquisite oriental runner in the foyer covered a highly-polished wood floor. Leaning against the door frame, he removed his boots, leaving them on the mat outside the door. Then he took off the waist-length jacket and hung it on a mahogany coat tree. Despite the frigid, snowy weather, the inviting space was imbued with a tropical mood, with a stunning French-Regency console table with Martinique-style carvings and a gilded Louis XV\u2013inspired mirror. The table cradled a vase of fresh white roses and peonies and two hardcover books about the Mayans and ancient African art.\n\nAlex pretended interest in the exquisite flowers wrapped in cellophane rather than stare at the man who'd unknowingly occupied her waking thoughts the past week. Why, she mused, hadn't she remembered Merrick's towering height or broad shoulders? A charcoal-gray crewneck sweater and black corduroy slacks made him appear larger, more formidable.\n\n\"You must be freezing. Come and sit by the fire.\"\n\nShe turned and retraced her steps to the living room, Merrick following, where a fire blazed behind a decorative screen. The fire and the pair of candles on the mantel were the only sources of illumination. Pressing a wall switch, she turned on two table lamps.\n\nMoving closer to the fireplace, Merrick held his hands near the heat. The light from candles under chimneys on either end of the marble mantel flickered over the photographs of Alex's many relatives. And judging from the various group and individual family photos the Coles were definitely prolific.\n\nAlex watched Merrick as he studied the framed photos of her relatives. \"I'll be back as soon as I put the flowers in water.\" Seemingly as if in a trance, he turned and stared at her. \"Can I get you something hot to drink?\"\n\n\"I'd like that, thank you.\"\n\n\"Would you like chocolate or a hot toddy?\"\n\n\"I prefer the toddy.\"\n\nAlex smiled. \"Good. I just brewed a pitcher before you got here.\"\n\nFeeling as gauche as a schoolgirl on her first date, she left the living room as Tina Turner's \"I Can't Stand the Rain\" flowed from wireless speakers concealed throughout her condo. How was she going to maintain a friendship with Merrick Grayslake when everything about him radiated unabashed male sensuality?\n\nWalking into her gourmet kitchen, she opened a cabinet and reached for a vase. She arranged the lilies in the vase, filled it with water, then removed a glass pitcher of cider brewed with mulling spices from the refrigerator. Pouring a generous amount into a saucepan, she put it on a stovetop burner to heat.\n\nMerrick's sock-covered feet were silent as he made his way out of the living room with mahogany furniture reminiscent of pieces he'd seen in West Indian homes that had once belonged to wealthy European merchants and planters. Rich motifs of stylized carved pineapples and palm fronds decorated the legs of tables and chairs. A gleaming black concert piano was positioned in an alcove with a vaulted ceiling.\n\nHe entered a formal dining room with a table set for two. Prisms of light from a chandelier fired the facets in crystal stemware at the place settings.\n\nLeaving the dining room he walked into the kitchen, stopping short when he saw Alex placing cinnamon sticks in two large mugs as she gyrated to \"Nutbush City Limits.\" Crossing his arms over his chest, he leaned against the entrance to the enormous stainless-steel kitchen filled with the mouthwatering aroma of roasting meat, watching her as she closed her eyes, snapped her fingers and danced to the catchy tune. A smile touched his mouth when he remembered her dancing with Michael.\n\nThe selection ended and he put his hands together, applauding. \"Bravo.\"\n\nAlex spun around, her face flaming with embarrassment. Merrick had caught her pretending she was an Ikette. She'd spent her teenage years wishing she were a backup dancer for Tina Turner.\n\nRecovering quickly, she bowed from the waist. \"Thank you, thank you, thank you,\" she drawled, blowing kisses to an imaginary audience.\n\nHe lifted a dark eyebrow. \"You missed your calling. You should've become a dancer.\"\n\nAlex emitted an audible sigh. \"That was never going to happen. My mother made me take dance lessons, and when the kids went to the right I went to the left. The instructor thought there was something wrong with me because I couldn't follow the steps she'd choreographed and eventually expelled me from class. I never told anyone, but Madame H pulled me aside after my first lesson and lectured me sternly about showing up the other little girls. That ignited an undeclared war and I did everything I could to make her life a living hell.\"\n\nMerrick, lowering his arms, straightened. \"Remind me to never cross you.\"\n\nShe affected an attractive moue, wrinkling her nose. \"It wasn't often that I was a horrible little girl, but there was something about Madame H that pulled me over to the dark side.\" She pantomimed leaning to her left, limp fingertips grazing her forehead in dramatic fashion.\n\nShaking his head and smothering a laugh, Merrick found it hard not to respond to Alex's theatrics. Everything about her was young, fresh, uninhibited and spontaneous.\n\n\"Are you always this bubbly?\"\n\nShe sobered, meeting his questioning gaze. \"Don't you mean silly?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"No, Ali. I meant exactly what I said. Bubbly.\"\n\nAlex returned to the stove and poured the warm liquid into the mugs. \"It comes in spurts,\" she said truthfully. \"There are times when I'm as serious as a heart attack, but most times I'm pretty loose.\" She didn't want to think of her family's assessment that she'd changed since she'd begun her graduate studies.\n\nMerrick moved closer, inhaling the fragrant scent of cinnamon, cloves and orange wafting from the mugs. He was pleased that she felt comfortable enough with him to be loose, because he was more than aware that he'd made some people uneasy whenever he was in their presence.\n\n\"Are you concerned as to how people perceive you?\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" she said without hesitation. \"And even if I was there's nothing I could do about it. There was a time in my life when I changed myself completely to please someone, and in the end I hated myself for it.\" She extended her arms.\n\n\"What you see is what you get. Take it or lump it.\"\n\nMerrick wanted to tell Alex that he would take it\u2014take all of her just as she was. \"I like what I see, Alexandra Cole.\"\n\nShe curtsied as if she were royalty. \"Thank you, Merrick Grayslake.\" Her head came up as she straightened. \"And I like what I see.\"\n\nResting his elbows on the cooking island, he impaled her with a penetrating stare. \"What do you see, Ali?\"\n\nBoldly, unflinchingly, Alex met his stare, noticing things about Merrick that she'd missed New Year's Eve. There was a minute scar on his left cheek, a slight bump on the bridge of his aquiline nose as if it had sustained an injury and a hint of blue in his gray eyes. What she'd remembered was the shape of his mouth, a perfect masculine mouth with firm lips, and the close-cropped hair that was more red than brown.\n\nShe smiled. \"I see a man who I look forward to calling a friend.\"\n\nMerrick's eyebrows flickered. \"I thought we were already friends.\" Reaching for one of the mugs, he waited for Alex to take hers. He raised his mug in a salute before taking a sip of the warm spicy beverage.\n\nAlex sipped her toddy while she replayed Merrick's statement: I thought we were already friends. To her, friends supported, protected and comforted one another in the good and not-so-good times. A friend would be someone she could confide in and trust with her innermost secrets. And she wondered if Merrick Grayslake would and could become her friend in the true sense of the word. Only time would tell.\n\nSetting down her mug, she handed him the vase of lilies. \"Would you please put this on the dining-room table?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nAlex smiled when he left to do her bidding. Unknowingly, Merrick had just passed the first test. His expression hadn't changed, nor had he hesitated when she'd asked him to do something for her.\n\nMerrick removed the fireplace screen, stoked the burning embers with a poker, then added another piece of wood on the grate. The flames caught and he replaced the screen; the sweet redolent aroma reminded him of the wood-burning stoves in his West Virginia home, a home where for the past two years he'd become a recluse, venturing out only to shop for food. Weeks would go by before he refueled his sport-utility vehicle.\n\nAt thirty-three he'd dropped out of sight as if he'd never existed, and it wasn't until Michael Kirkland came to see him that he was jerked back into the reality that there was another world outside Bolivar, West Virginia. In the past three months he'd visited D.C., Georgetown, West Palm Beach, Miami, Key West and now Arlington, Virginia.\n\nBut when he returned home after visiting with Rachel he'd been tempted to settle back into what was now a comfortable and secure routine of waking up at dawn and walking several miles in the cold mountain air before returning home to spend the day reading, chopping wood or watching television.\n\nHowever, his plan to reconnect with Alexandra Cole thwarted the inclination to fall back into what was familiar when he packed enough clothes for a two-week stay in the Capitol District. And he never questioned or second-guessed himself once he'd checked into the Hyatt.\n\nSharing dinner with Alex had become an enjoyable event. Her exquisite culinary skills were only surpassed by her delightful companionship. Dinner had begun with shrimp cocktail with a piquant cocktail sauce, a salad of endive stuffed with lump crabmeat, marinated pork tenderloin stuffed with spinach and corn bread. A pale blush wine had become the perfect complement to the differing flavors that had lingered on his palate.\n\nHe'd offered to help her clean up, but she'd refused with the excuse that she didn't like anyone in her kitchen. It was apparent she liked being in control.\n\nAlex walked into the living room to find Merrick stretched out on the rug in front of the fire, his head cradled on folded arms. She smiled. He'd truly made himself at home.\n\nClosing the distance between them, she lay down beside him. She didn't have time to catch her breath when he reached out and pulled her into an embrace. Shifting to her right, she rested her head on his shoulder as if it was something they'd done countless times before, feeling safe, protected in his arms. His warmth and the lingering scent from his cologne urged her closer.\n\n\"It's still snowing,\" she said softly. She'd turned on the under-the-counter television in the kitchen to the Weather Channel; the snow totals for the D.C. region had surpassed fourteen inches.\n\n\"We'll probably get two feet before it's over,\" Merrick drawled, not opening his eyes.\n\n\"I hope you're not thinking of trying to make it back to your hotel tonight.\"\n\nHe opened his eyes. \"It's not that far.\"\n\n\"It's too far for you to walk in a blizzard, Merrick. I have a spare bedroom. You're about the same height as my brother Jason, so you won't have an excuse that you don't have anything to wear.\"\n\nHe chuckled softly. \"You're the second woman within the span of a week who has invited me to stay with her.\"\n\nAlex went completely still, her heart pounding a runaway rhythm as she held her breath until she felt her lungs burning. Had Merrick lied when he told her that he wasn't involved with a woman?\n\n\"You stayed with a woman in Florida?\"\n\nTightening his hold around her waist, Merrick pulled her closer to his length. \"It's not like that, Ali. Rachel's someone I used to work with. She threatened me with bodily harm if I didn't check out of a Key West hotel and stay with her.\"\n\nSome of the tension left her. \"What did she threaten to do? Shoot you?\" He nodded. Tilting her chin, Alex stared up at Merrick staring down at her. \"Would she have shot you?\"\n\n\"Of course not. Why are you taking what I'm saying so seriously?\"\n\nVertical lines appeared between her eyes. \"It's just that I don't need some crazy-ass woman looking to cap me because she believes I'm hitting on her man.\"\n\n\"That will never happen because I'm not involved with anyone. Tell me how it was growing up a Cole,\" he asked, deftly changing the topic.\n\n\"That all depends on which Cole household you're talking about. I believe mine was the most unconventional. My uncle Martin is rather traditional, and so are his children. My aunts Nancy and Josephine were raised believing they were Afro-Cuban royalty, so they passed their values down to their children and grandchildren. The Cole-Thomases and Wilsons have this air of entitlement that can really work my nerves. My uncle Joshua is quite conservative, but that comes from a career in the military.\n\n\"Perhaps it's because my dad opted for a career in music rather than devote his life to the family business that we were raised without the restrictions imposed on my other relatives. I remember Abuela lecturing Daddy that he was raising 'los animalitos peque\u00f1os.' My mother took offense to her mother-in-law's reference to her children as little animals, and it took months before they declared a truce.\"\n\n\"What did your parents do that ticked off your grandmother?\"\n\n\"We played music all day and half the night\u2014loud. The house was always open to our friends for sleepovers and pool parties. And because Daddy had set up his own record company, there was an unending stream of popular and wannabe musicians coming to the in-home recording studio. It was cool to see them come to record a demo, and a year later see them on television in their own music video.\"\n\n\"It sounds as if you had a lot of fun.\"\n\n\"It was. Where did you grow up?\" she asked Merrick.\n\n\"Texas.\"\n\n\"I knew it.\"\n\n\"What did you know?\"\n\n\"I knew you were from the South.\"\n\n\"Southwest,\" he corrected softly.\n\n\"Texas is still the South. Where in Texas were you raised?\"\n\n\"Dallas, Waco, San Antonio, McAllen, Lubbock, Corpus Christi. You name it, I've lived there.\"\n\nEasing out of his loose embrace, Alex sat up. \"Why did your family move around so much?\"\n\nThe last CD had finished minutes before, and there was only the sound from popping wood and showers of falling embers. Merrick lay on the rug, lifeless as a statue as he stared up at the shadows on the ceiling. He couldn't chide Alex for asking him about his past because he'd opened the door when he'd asked about her childhood.\n\n\"My family didn't move. I was the one who moved whenever social workers shuttled me from one foster home to the next. I stopped counting at six.\"\n\nAlex rested a hand on his shoulder. \"Where were your parents?\"\n\nHe closed his eyes. \"I don't know, Ali. I never knew my mother or father because I was abandoned at birth.\"\n\nFeeling as if her breath had solidified in her throat, Alex was unable to form a response or comeback. Here she was running off at the mouth about the Coles while Merrick had been passed around like an inanimate object to whoever was willing to accept him.\n\nMerrick sat up. For a long moment he studied Alex intently. \"Aren't you going to say what all of the others have said?\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"That you're sorry.\"\n\nHer eyelids fluttered as she registered the coldness that'd crept into his voice, and she wondered whether he'd grown up listening to people pitying him for a turbulent childhood. What about those who'd been presented with an opportunity to change his life, yet stood by and did nothing? However, there was something about the prideful man sitting inches from her that silently conveyed that he wouldn't accept her pity.\n\n\"You're wrong, Merrick. Who am I to pity you when something tells me you'd throw it back at me?\"\n\nThe hard, gray eyes that shimmered like glacial ice softened as a smile touched his mobile mouth. \"You're right, Ali. I don't want your pity. My past is exactly that\u2014the past.\" He traced the outline of her cheek with a forefinger. \"It's getting late, so I'd better be going before I'll be forced to accept your offer to spend the night.\" He rose to his feet, extending his hand and pulling her up with him.\n\nAlex looked up at him. \"I doubt if the fund-raiser will go off as planned tomorrow night.\"\n\nMerrick nodded. \"It's going to be a couple days before things are back to normal.\" Lowering his head, he pressed a kiss to Alex's cheek. \"Thanks for dinner and for your company. I'll call you tomorrow.\"\n\nWrapping her arms around his waist, she rose on tiptoe and kissed his chin. \"Thank you for coming.\"\n\nShe followed him to the foyer where he opened the door and retrieved his boots. Sitting down on a chair beside the table, he put them on. Reaching for his jacket, she held it out for Merrick as he slipped his arms into the sleeves.\n\nHe turned, they shared a smile, and then he was gone. Alex closed and locked the door behind him. She returned to the living room and extinguished the candles. She stood in front of the fireplace, staring at the dying embers and recalling the past four hours, when she'd shared the most pleasurable time with a man that she had in years.\n\nWhat had surprised her was that she'd felt comfortable with Merrick until he revealed his childhood, and she didn't think she would ever forget his expression when he said he'd been abandoned at birth. He'd closed his eyes and his face had been totally void of emotion.\n\nWhat abuses, she mused, had he suffered in his various foster homes? Had he gone hungry? Was he beaten?\n\nShe'd grown up with both parents loving her and she loving them; they'd protected and spoiled her, and nothing had been beyond her reach. Merrick couldn't go back in time to right the wrongs, but she made a silent vow that she would become a friend on which he could rely.\n\n## Chapter 6\n\nMerrick stood several inches behind Alex as she explained the significance of a piece of sculpture at the National Museum of African Art. It had taken Washingtonians two days to dig out from under twenty-two inches of snow while those in northern Virginia took longer with nearly twenty-eight inches of the frozen precipitation.\n\nThe fund-raiser to which Alex had purchased tickets had been rescheduled to the middle of February. They wouldn't attend because Alex would be out of the country and he'd planned to return to West Virginia the day before she was scheduled to leave for Mexico City. He stared at the raven curls secured in a ponytail rather than at the strange-looking pieces that were now part of a permanent collection.\n\nAlex gestured toward an elaborately carved wooden staff. \"This piece comes from the Yoruba culture of southwestern Nigeria. The staff is named for the god of thunder, Shango, and was carried by Shango cult members as a symbol of their office.\" She pointed to a sculpture of a mother and child. \"Although the mother and child figures represent an archetypal Yoruba theme, the oshe Shango also displays several unique qualities, namely for its three-dimensional form, its contrast of hard geometric shapes and its smooth surface with detailed...\"\n\nHer voice trailed off. She turned and stared up at Merrick, who wasn't looking at the sculpture, but directly at her. \"Merrick!\" she hissed through her teeth.\n\nHe blinked, as if coming out of a trance. \"What is it?\" he asked softly.\n\n\"I'm talking a mile a minute and you're not listening.\"\n\nReaching for her hand, Merrick led her away from the exhibit and over to a sitting area. \"I've heard every word you've said. We've spent the past week together visiting every museum and gallery in this blasted city. I can tell you the portrait of Mary Cassatt painted by Edgar Degas hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. The Rhyton, a silver and gilt drinking cup dating from the fourth century A.D., probably of Iranian origin, is at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.\n\n\"The Abandoned Doll by Suzanne Valadon, who was also a model of Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir and the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo, was renowned in her own right. This painting is evocative of the theme that brings drama and psychological truth to the universal rite of passage when the mother tells her pubescent daughter about the physical changes in her body. The doll on the floor symbolizes that the daughter must leave her childhood behind in order to embrace womanhood.\" He leaned closer and whispered in her ear, \"If you take me to another museum I'm going to go ape shit, Alexandra Cole.\"\n\nClapping a hand over her mouth, Alex stared at Merrick as if he'd taken leave of his senses. She wasn't as stunned by his refusal to go to another museum as she was by his knowledge of what he'd observed and retained. Although she thought herself cogent in the art field, she still was hard-pressed to remember where every piece was housed.\n\nLowering her hand, she glared at him. \"Where's the Angel by Abbot Henderson Thayer?\"\n\n\"It's at the National Museum of American Art.\" He gave her a Cheshire cat grin. \"Now can I have my A?\"\n\nHer thunderous expression softened. \"Why didn't you say something?\"\n\nHe pressed his mouth to her ear. \"I didn't because I didn't want to hurt your feelings. Please, pretty please, give me my A, teacher.\"\n\nMerrick continued to astound Alex with his mercurial personality. Most times he exhibited a staidness that made her uncomfortable, but then without warning he would soften, exhibiting a teasing quality that allowed her to lower her defenses, wherein she wanted him to become more than a friend.\n\nWrapping her arm around his waist, she rested her head against his shoulder. \"You passed, Merrick.\"\n\n\"What's my final grade?\"\n\nShe gave him a sidelong glance. \"A.\"\n\n\"Let's go somewhere and celebrate?\"\n\n\"Where do you want to go?\" Alex asked. For the past eight days he'd driven to her place, where they planned their itinerary for the day. Three nights they ate at his hotel's restaurant, and she'd returned the favor and cooked for him again.\n\n\"Anyplace where I don't have to whisper. You're leaving the States in five days, and I'm going back to Bolivar where the only thing I'm going to hear is the sound of my own breathing.\"\n\n\"You should get a pet.\"\n\n\"I don't want a pet.\"\n\n\"Then get a girlfriend.\"\n\n\"I have a girlfriend,\" he crooned, catching her earlobe between his teeth, \"but she's going to Mexico City.\"\n\nUnexpected warmth eddied through Alex. The soft nip of his teeth on her ear and his moist breath flowing into it heated her blood rushing to nether regions, triggering a pulsing between her legs.\n\nIn five days she would leave the States and Merrick. They'd spent practically every day together walking the snowy streets of Washington, D.C., touring museums and art galleries and drinking lattes at Starbucks. They'd become friends and formed a comfortable camaraderie without the likelihood of a physical involvement. And there were times when she wanted to do more with Merrick than hold hands or exchange a chaste kiss.\n\nMerrick released her ear. \"What are you thinking about?\"\n\n\"How do you know I'm thinking?\"\n\n\"You're not saying anything.\"\n\nShe gasped. \"Oh, no, you didn't!\"\n\n\"Don't get your cute little nose out of joint, because I've never known you to be at a loss for words.\"\n\n\"You haven't known me that long, Merrick.\"\n\n\"That may be true, but even if we were together for the next thirty years I'd never know the real Alexandra. I'm willing to bet there are things about your father your mother doesn't know, and vice versa.\"\n\n\"You're probably right. Everyone has secrets.\"\n\nRunning a finger down the length of her delicate nose, Merrick replaced it with a soft kiss. \"I have a secret.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Do you want to tell me about it?\"\n\n\"I want you to spend the next four days with me at my place. I'll have you back in Virginia in time for you to make your flight.\"\n\nAlex was totally bewildered at his request. Just when she was beginning to relax and feel comfortable with Merrick he changed the rules. He'd invited her to join him in the Keys and she'd refused, saying perhaps the next time. This invitation had become the next time.\n\n\"I told you before that I'd never put you in a compromising position,\" he continued in the soft drawling voice that never failed to send a shiver throughout her body.\n\n\"And I told you that I always keep my promises,\" she countered. \"What time are we leaving?\"\n\nMerrick exhaled as a tender smile softened the lean contours of his face. He didn't know why, but he felt as if he'd been holding his breath since he first spied Alexandra Cole.\n\nHe stood up and extended his hand. He wasn't disappointed when Alex placed her hand trustingly in his as he eased her to her feet. \"I'll drop you home to pack before I go back to the hotel to check out. We're also going to have to stop along the way to buy groceries.\"\n\n\"We can clean out my refrigerator, because I plan to disconnect it before I leave.\"\n\nMerrick didn't want to think of not seeing Alex for four months. He liked her effervescent, teasing personality and her natural beauty that prompted men to turn around and stare at her. Whether dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a pullover sweater or a dress that flattered her sexy petite body, she was perfect. It was the first time he'd found everything he could possibly want in one woman: intelligence, beauty and sensuality.\n\nReaching for her navy blue wool swing coat, he held it as she slipped into it. A minute later she repeated the gesture when he shrugged into his jacket. Hand in hand they walked out of the museum, unaware that the next four days would change them\u2014forever.\n\n## Chapter 7\n\nSnow flurries intensified until a steady snowfall forced Merrick to slow down to less than forty miles an hour. He'd hoped to reach Bolivar before nightfall, but the weather had conspired against him. He'd dropped Alex off at her condo, returned to the hotel, packed and checked out of the Hyatt, then stopped at a supermarket to pick up dairy items before driving back to get her. Alex was ready when he arrived, and ninety minutes after they'd agreed to spend the next four days in Bolivar they were on their way to the picturesque hamlet nestled in a valley less than three miles from the Allegheny Mountains.\n\nAlex glanced out the side window, watching the topography change the farther they ventured into West Virginia. Her ears popped with the higher elevation. There was enough light left to marvel at the natural splendor of the unspoiled, rugged wilderness that hadn't changed in more than a century.\n\n\"It looks so peaceful here,\" she said reverently.\n\nSmiling, Merrick took a quick glance at his passenger before he returned his gaze to the winding road. \"It is.\" It was quiet, remote, and if he didn't turn on a radio or the television he tended to lose track of the days of the week.\n\n\"What made you decide to move to West Virginia?\"\n\nMerrick knew he had to open up to Alex and reveal a little of his past or she would never trust him. And he wanted her to trust him because his feelings were changing, intensifying. He'd told her all he wanted was for them to be friends. She'd become his friend and unknowingly more. It was one thing to mouth the word and another to experience emotions that would shock her.\n\nHe wasn't certain when his feelings toward her had changed. One morning he woke from a disturbing dream that left him reeling from the sexual images and his own driving need to make love to Alexandra Cole. The harder he tried to ignore the truth, the more it nagged at him. His initial admission that he wasn't interested in her romantically, his vow not to become involved, was shattered completely when he'd asked her to come home with him.\n\n\"I suppose you could say I was running away,\" he said truthfully.\n\nAlex shifted on her seat, turning to stare at Merrick's profile. His taut expression was one of pained tolerance. A shiver snaked its way down her body. Whenever she posed a question about his past she felt him withdraw from her. She turned away from the glum-faced man. The seconds ticked off, the increasing silence inside the vehicle deafening.\n\nMerrick downshifted as he maneuvered around a sharp curve, a stretch of road locals referred to as Deadman's Curve. It veered sharply to the right, and then without warning the grade dropped off before the road veered left. Viewed from the air the road resembled a large undulating snake. A smile found its way through his closed expression with Alex's audible gasp.\n\nReaching over to his right, he caught her left hand and held it until she unclenched her fingers. \"Relax, baby. I've driven this road enough to do it with my eyes closed.\"\n\n\"Please don't close your eyes, Merrick.\"\n\nNot willing to avert his attention from the snow-covered roadway, he squeezed her fingers. \"Don't worry, Ali. I'd never let anything happen to you.\"\n\n\"Promise?\"\n\nHis smile widened. \"Promise.\"\n\nAlex alternated closing her eyes and holding her breath as Merrick navigated sharply to the right, then left as the wiper blades worked furiously to keep the windshield free of snow.\n\nHalf a mile later, Merrick left the paved roadway, maneuvering onto a narrow rutted path bordered on both sides with towering pine trees. Within minutes, the overgrowth of trees and shrubs gave way to an open meadow. The outline of a two-story house was visible in the steady beam of headlights. He slowed, coming to a complete stop under a carport.\n\n\"Aren't you going to park in the garage?\" Alex pointed to a two-car garage about fifty feet from the house.\n\n\"There's no room. I'll show you what's in there tomorrow.\" He cut the engine, got out and came around to assist her.\n\nAlex waited for Merrick to open her door; she extended her arms. He lifted her effortlessly, setting her on her feet. If it hadn't been for the truck's headlights and falling snow it would've been pitch-dark. There were no streetlamps or lights from nearby homes. Merrick lived in the middle of nowhere. He admitted moving to the wilderness because he'd been running away. Running away from what or whom?\n\nClutching his arm, she followed him up several steps to a porch; squinting, Alex tried seeing beyond the curtain of white but encountered eerie nothingness. All of her senses were heightened when she heard the distinctive sound of a lock opening followed by a soft beeping that was silenced when Merrick punched in a code for a security system. Within seconds light illuminated the first floor.\n\n\"Come in,\" Merrick urged. \"You're letting out the heat.\"\n\nShe stomped the snow off her feet and walked into a living room with modern functional furniture. The saddle-tan leather sofa and love seat complemented the heavy oaken tables, giving the space a masculine feel. Polished pale pine floors and wide windows covered with bamboo blinds in a straw-yellow shade further enhanced an atmosphere of openness.\n\n\"It's wonderful.\" Her voice echoed awe.\n\nMerrick stared at Alex, complete surprise on his face. \"You like it?\"\n\nShe smiled at him. \"Of course I like it.\" Her smile faded as quickly as it'd appeared. \"Why did you think I wouldn't?\"\n\n\"I was under the impression you'd think it too rustic.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes at him. \"Where you live is rustic, not your home. Can I see the rest of it?\"\n\n\"Sure. The kitchen is to your right and the pantry and laundry are off the back along with the family room. The bedrooms are upstairs in the loft.\"\n\nShrugging off her coat, she handed it to Merrick. \"Can you please hang this up?\"\n\nHe took her coat, snapping a smart salute. \"Ma'am, yes, ma'am!\"\n\n\"Show-off,\" she crooned as she made her way in the direction he'd indicated.\n\nMerrick felt an overwhelming sense of pride that Alex liked his home. There were times when he felt it was much too large for one person, but he'd resisted sharing his life and home with a woman.\n\nHe'd never thought of himself as husband or father material because of his turbulent childhood. How could he know where he was going when he hadn't known who he was or where he'd come from?\n\nHe'd languished in a foundling hospital, then a group home, and at the age of four he was placed with his first foster family. He'd overheard the social worker tell his foster parents that a priest had found him wrapped in a blanket, umbilical cord still attached, under a pew in a South Texas church only five miles from the Mexican border. There was a bloodstained note tucked into the blanket that read: Please take care of my son\u2014Victoria Grayslake. Father Merrick had cleaned and baptized the infant, giving him his first name before calling the authorities. Two days after his birth Merrick Grayslake became a ward of the state of Texas.\n\nHe didn't know what prompted him to bring Alex home with him, but with his rapidly changing feelings for her he didn't want to spend time analyzing everything he did. All he wanted to do was enjoy whatever time they had together before she left the country. He walked out of the house and returned to the truck to get their luggage and perishable foodstuffs.\n\nAlex lay on the sofa, eyes closed and her head resting on Merrick's thigh. She'd toured his house, falling in love with the massive wood-burning stoves in the kitchen and family room. The second-story loft contained three large rooms. Merrick had claimed the largest as his bedroom. Another had been set up as a guest room and the third was filled with boxes and metal file cabinets. Whitewashed walls, wood floors covered with colorful rugs and fireplaces had turned his home into a perfect getaway retreat.\n\n\"Did you build this place?\"\n\nHe combed his fingers through her mussed curls. \"No. I bought it for a fraction of its worth when the original owner died two days after he took possession. His widow, who never wanted to live here, said it was cursed. She moved out, leaving all of the furnishings, and never looked back.\"\n\nAlex opened her eyes and stared up at him looking down at her. \"I thought you'd decorated it.\"\n\n\"No. I wouldn't know where to begin. All that talk about fabrics and colors confuse the hell out of me.\"\n\n\"Where did you live before you moved here?\"\n\n\"I rented the cottage on the property of someone I'd met in the Corps.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"You were a marine?\" Merrick nodded. Sitting up, she gave him a direct stare. \"Were you really into that esprit de corps and Semper fidelis indoctrination?\"\n\nHis luminous eyes widened until she could see their hoary depths. \"Once a marine, always a marine.\"\n\nAlex felt the chill of his words as acutely as if he'd struck her. The man with whom she'd found herself enthralled had morphed into a stranger, shedding his warmth like a reptile shedding its skin.\n\n\"No disrespect intended.\"\n\n\"And none taken,\" he countered quickly.\n\nPushing off the sofa, Alex knew it was time to retreat before she lost her temper and said something she wouldn't be able to retract. \"Good night, Merrick.\"\n\nHe stood up and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. \"Good night, Ali.\"\n\nMerrick felt as if he'd been punched in the gut when she headed toward the staircase. Why, he mused, did he keep pushing her away? Why, when it was the last thing he wanted to do?\n\nTaking three long strides, he stopped her retreat, reaching for her upper arm and turning her around. His hands moved up to cradle her face. Slowly, methodically, his head came down and he took her mouth in a drugging, caressing kiss that told her wordlessly how much he wanted, how much he needed her.\n\nAlex held on to Merrick's shirt like a drowning swimmer caught in a riptide. His warmth, his smell, the strength in his hard lean body seeped into her like water through a porous fabric, soaking and becoming one. Standing on tiptoe, she returned the kiss, her lips parting as delicious sensations raced from her mouth downward.\n\nMerrick placed tiny kisses along the column of Alex's scented neck, his teeth nibbling softly at the base of her throat. Tightening his hold on her body, he lifted her off her feet until her head was level with his. He took her mouth again, devouring its softness. He'd tasted her, but instead of sating his hunger, it increased. If he could he would've devoured all of her.\n\nHe felt the flesh between his thighs stir and knew if he didn't stop what he'd begun he would do something he would regret for the rest of his life. Lowering Alex until her feet touched the floor, he pulled back. Passion had darkened her face and her eyes; he couldn't pull his gaze away from her slightly swollen mouth. A spurt of desire shot through his groin when he realized Alex was a woman who should be made love to\u2014every day and every night. Her dark beauty smoldered with a sensuality that couldn't be learned or taught.\n\nA hint of a smile tilted the corners of his mouth. \"Good night, Ali.\"\n\nBacking away, Alex wrinkled her nose. If they hadn't stopped when they did, there was no doubt they would end up in bed together. She wanted to arrive in Mexico City with memories of the two weeks she'd spent with her friend and not the few days she'd shared a bed with her lover.\n\n\"Good night, Merrick.\"\n\nShe turned and made her way up the staircase, feeling the heat from the silver orbs on her back. When she reached the top, she turned and glanced down to find that Merrick hadn't moved. Even from this distance she could see the banked flames of desire in his expression.\n\nForcing herself to look away, she walked down the hallway until she reached her bedroom. Her hands and knees were trembling uncontrollably as she fell across the bed and pressed her face into the pillow.\n\nShe wanted him; she wanted Merrick Grayslake more than she'd ever wanted any man in her life. It was good that she was leaving the country, because to remain would prove disastrous to the plans she'd made for herself. And her plans did not include taking a lover or falling in love.\n\nIt was minutes after sunrise when Merrick walked into the kitchen. Alex sat on a tall stool at the cooking island, drinking coffee and concentrating intently on his handheld New York Times Sudoku. A smile crinkled the lines around his eyes as he crept silently across the room, swept her off the stool and lifted her high in the air. Bending slightly, he tossed her up like a rag doll and caught her.\n\nAlex let out a bloodcurdling scream as her arms flailed wildly. \"Stop, Merrick! Please put me down!\"\n\nCradling her to his chest, Merrick settled her on the stool, his arms going around her body in a comforting gesture. \"Good morning, baby.\"\n\nAlex's right hand curled into a fist, her eyes narrowing. \"Don't you dare good morning me!\"\n\n\"You want to hit me?\"\n\nBaring her teeth, she glared at him. \"I want to hurt you real bad, Merrick Grayslake, for scaring the hell out of me.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, sweetheart.\"\n\nThe endearment seemed to take the fight out of her. Within a span of a minute Merrick had called her baby and sweetheart. What happened to friend?\n\nLooping her free arm around his neck, Alex buried her face between his neck and shoulder and closed her eyes. He smelled of soap. Merrick had showered and shampooed his hair but hadn't shaved, and the dark stubble on his jaw and chin accentuated the masculinity he wore like a badge of honor.\n\nShe kissed the side of his strong neck. \"I'll think about.\"\n\nMerrick massaged her back over a sweatshirt. \"Don't think too long, beautiful.\"\n\nAlex eased back, giving him a long, penetrating stare. \"What's going on between us, Merrick?\"\n\nHe sobered, his expression closed. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Why are you calling me baby and sweetheart instead of Ali? And what happened to the pecks on the lips and cheeks? When you kissed me last night and I kissed you back, there was nothing friendly in what we shared.\" Reaching up, she smoothed down several wayward strands of damp hair over his ear. \"What are we doing to each other, Merrick?\"\n\nMerrick cradled her head, his fingers massaging her scalp. \"We are friends, Ali.\" He enunciated each word.\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"No buts, Ali,\" he said softly, interrupting her. \"I like you\u2014a lot\u2014but I'm not going to take advantage of you. That's not my style.\"\n\nHer gaze met and held his as she anchored her arms under his shoulders. \"And I promise not to take advantage of you.\"\n\nMerrick released her head, momentarily speechless in his surprise. \"You're incredible,\" he whispered.\n\nShe gave him a saucy grin. \"You just realized that?\" she drawled without a modicum of modesty.\n\n\"Trash-talking will result in another beach-ball toss.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't.\"\n\nMerrick nodded. \"I would.\"\n\nShe pantomimed zipping her mouth and Merrick threw back his head and howled. Her laughter joined his as the unrestrained shared moment brought them closer together, cementing their friendship.\n\nAlex was lost\u2014lost in the splendor of the rugged countryside\u2014and she'd lost track of the days, time. And she'd done what she'd prayed would not happen\u2014she'd lost her heart to Merrick Grayslake.\n\nTheir relationship was uncomplicated and open. He hadn't tried to kiss her again, and for that Alex was grateful. Any display of affection would make her leaving more difficult.\n\nThey developed a comfortable routine of waking early and walking in the frigid morning air before returning to the house to prepare monstrous breakfasts. She cleaned the kitchen while he chopped enough wood to feed the gluttonous wood-burning stoves from the stack stored in a shed at the rear of the house. All the wood came from trees on the five-acre property. Merrick contracted to have trees felled and cut into large stumps. He claimed chopping firewood was his way of staying in shape.\n\nThe man she'd fallen in love with continued to mystify her when he opened the garage to reveal a functioning body shop with two classic cars he'd restored to their original state. One was a 1948 pickup and the other a 1952 station wagon with wood paneling. When she asked whether he planned to sell them he'd given her an incredulous look that spoke volumes, then said emphatically, \"No.\"\n\nHe'd amassed an extensive reading and video library. Floor-to-ceiling shelves in the family room were packed tightly with fiction bestsellers and titles pertaining to history and military battles.\n\nMost nights found them in the family room viewing movies. Alex preferred movies with foreign settings with romantic themes while Merrick liked sci-fi and action thrillers.\n\nFifteen minutes into Man On Fire, Merrick paused the DVD and stared at her. The film's theme dealt with the claim that every hour throughout Latin America someone was kidnapped and held for ransom. Alex belayed his fear that she would be a target of kidnappers because she'd enrolled in the universidad as Alexandra Morris. Her birth records listed her as Alexandra Ivonne Morris-Cole, and when she studied abroad transcripts listed her surname as Morris.\n\nShe was forced back to reality and what lay ahead of her when a call from Diego reminded Alex that he would accompany her on the flight to Mexico City before he continued on to Belize to meet with a consortium of banana growers.\n\nThe return drive to Arlington was accomplished in complete silence as she agonized over how was she going to leave Merrick now that she knew she was in love with him. And her love wasn't based on sex, because they hadn't slept together, and for that she was grateful. There was no way she wanted to confuse a physical connection with one that was emotional.\n\nMerrick stood in the foyer with Alex, cradling her face in his hands. The eyes staring back at him were steady, trusting. He found himself at a loss when he longed to tell her how much he'd enjoyed their time together, how she'd managed to slip under the invisible wall he'd erected to keep all women at a distance, how much she'd changed him and how much he'd come to love her.\n\nHe loved everything about her, inside and out. He'd asked for friendship, got it, but wanted more. And the more was love. He wanted Alex to love him because he'd fallen in love with her.\n\n\"May I call you?\" he asked.\n\nAlex's lashes fluttered as she tried bringing her fragile emotions under control. \"Of course you may. Call me at night because it's your voice I want to hear before I go to sleep.\"\n\n\"Are you living on campus?\"\n\n\"No. I'm staying in a converted convent near the universidad.\" Her mood brightened. \"Are you thinking of coming to visit me?\"\n\nMerrick's impassive expression did not change. \"Do you want me to?\"\n\nA smile fired the gold in her large eyes. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"It won't interfere with your studies?\"\n\n\"As soon as I get my schedule I'll let you know when I have a break.\"\n\nLowering his chin, he lifted his dark, sweeping eyebrows. \"I'll come to see you on one condition.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said, laughing. \"No museums.\"\n\nHe winked at her. \"You learn fast.\"\n\n\"Not as fast as you,\" she countered. Moving closer, she wound her arms under his shoulders. \"I'm going to miss you, friend.\"\n\nMerrick dropped a kiss on her hair. Her curls reminded him of a field of wildflowers. \"Hush, baby,\" he crooned. \"I'll see you so much that you'll get sick of me.\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Never say never, Ali.\"\n\nPulling back, she met his serious gaze. Like a chameleon he'd changed. Gone was the teasing man she'd come to look for, and in his place was the one who frightened her. Once again, he'd become a stranger.\n\nShe forced a smile she didn't feel. \"I'll call you.\" Standing on tiptoe, she brushed her mouth over his compressed lips. \"Hasta luego.\"\n\n\"Hasta luego,\" Merrick repeated. Turning on his heel, he opened the door, then closed it softly behind him.\n\nAlex stood there for a full minute before she sat down on the chair next to the foyer table and closed her eyes. Everything she'd shared with Merrick Grayslake flooded her mind like frames of film: the night they lay in front of the fireplace and he told her how he'd been abandoned at birth, their trips to countless D.C. museums and art galleries that always ended with them drinking lattes at Starbucks. The nights she'd dressed up to share dinner with him at his hotel's restaurant, and the days and nights at the house in Bolivar where she'd learned to appreciate nature in all its wintry splendor.\n\nWhat she didn't want to recall was the image of Merrick in a tank top and jeans chopping wood in the noonday sun. Each time he swung the ax, the muscles in his back and upper arms tightened and relaxed under the strenuous exertion. The first time she saw the shirt, wet from sweat, pasted to his body, it had excited her so much that she went inside the house until he completed the chore. The images returned in an erotic dream that left her aching with a desire that threatened to swallow her whole.\n\nOpening her eyes, she came back to reality. Alex didn't know where her relationship with Merrick would lead, but she knew it had to be resolved. The two large pieces of luggage sitting in the foyer reminded her that in less than two hours she would be on her way to Mexico City. She stood up and made her way to her bedroom to exchange her boots, wool slacks and sweater for a cotton dress and sandals.\n\nWhen she emerged she was ready for Mexico City and her destiny.\n\n## Part Two\n\n## Lovers\n\n## Chapter 8\n\nAlex found it hard to stay focused. She and the other students in her class had spent the past half hour staring at the image of an Olmec stone figure projected on the screen in the lecture hall.\n\nThe professor, a slight, middle-aged man with thinning black hair and a flair for the dramatic, had waxed eloquent about how the Olmec's \"mother culture\" inspired a series of successor cultures, including Maya settlements that began forming in the Mexican-Guatemala border region around 500 BC.\n\nMove on and change the blasted slide! she fumed inwardly. They were a month into the new term and she'd learned more from reading than she had during her lectures. Alex was enthralled with Mexico's history and its people, but Professor Riviera was making it increasingly difficult for her to stay awake in his classes, and the downside was that she had him for three Mexican art courses.\n\nPretentious prig, she continued in her silent tirade, scowling.\n\n\"Se\u00f1orita Morris, perhaps you can tell your fellow students the timeline for the rise and fall of the Olmec civilization.\"\n\nEveryone's attention was directed to Alex as she glared at their professor. There was a pregnant silence as she composed her thoughts.\n\n\"Records show that the first Olmec settlements were established around 1500 BC. In 900 BC the Olmec city of San Lorenzo was destroyed and desecrated. Historians and archaeologists are unsure who or what led to the destruction and the Olmec civilization faded into obscurity.\"\n\nRivera smiled. \"What else can you tell us about this culture?\" he asked.\n\n\"They built ceremonial centers rather than cities, which suggests they were governed by a central authority. The Olmecs carved blocks of basalt into figures with massive heads like the one on the screen and other sculptures with stylized feline features. There is evidence they had ceramics, and digs have recovered jade figurines from this civilization.\"\n\nNodding his approval, the professor of design and art of ancient cultures, pressed his palms together. \"Bien dicho, Se\u00f1orita Morris. It appears you are quite serious in your endeavor to learn about Mexico's rich and colorful history.\"\n\nAlex gave him a saccharine grin. \"If I weren't, then I assure you I wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\"I told you he has the hots for you,\" whispered the student sitting next to her. Alex and Moira Morgan had formed a friendship within days of Alex settling into her room at the centuries-old converted convent she would call home for the semester. Moira, a tall, blond, thin Oklahoman, who spoke fluent Spanish, had ended a yearlong relationship with the son of a Texas oilman to study abroad. Alex cut her eyes at Moira. She'd come to Mexico to earn a degree, not form a relationship with her professor. Her mantra had become: once burned, twice shy.\n\n\"Se\u00f1ores y se\u00f1oritas.\" Hernando Rivera addressed all women, whether married or single, as miss. \"I would like to invite all of you to my home Saturday evening. A colleague has deigned to exhibit his private collection of art before donating it to several museums.\"\n\nA chorus of groans and murmurs followed his announcement as a hand went up in the back of the lecture hall. \"Se\u00f1or profesor, la asistenc\u00eda es obligatoria?\"\n\nProfessor Rivera gave the young man an incredulous look. \"What do you think, Se\u00f1or Salinas?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" said the red-faced student, answering his own query.\n\n\"You all have my address and telephone number. I will expect everyone at eight.\" He held up a hand. \"Before you ask, you may bring a guest.\"\n\nThe bell rang signaling the end of classes and Alex gathered her books. It was her last class for the day and week. At least it was before Rivera's mandate that everyone attend an impromptu gathering at his home.\n\nShe attended classes Monday through Thursday, cleaned her apartment, picked up her laundry and shopped for groceries on Friday, slept late on Saturday and either stayed home or went out with Moira and a few other classmates Saturday night. Sundays were set aside for attending mass and doing homework. She liked everything about Mexico, its people and the cuisine.\n\nBut she missed home and Merrick, but managed to stave off homesickness by staying busy. She alternated calling and writing her parents and exchanging telephone calls with Merrick.\n\nHe kept her updated on national news, while she told him about the political climate in Mexico. He disclosed he'd spent several days with Michael and Jolene, who'd returned rested and tanned from their Jamaican honeymoon, and it was only after their calls ended that she felt totally isolated. She'd become an alien in a foreign land.\n\nThe week before, she'd sent him a letter with postcards bearing the art of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, Jos\u00e9 Orozco and her favorite Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo. She included a note that read: You don't have to go to a museum or gallery to enjoy these.\u2014AIM-C.\n\n\"I've got better things to do with my Saturdays than look in Rivera's face,\" Alex mumbled as she slipped her books into a backpack.\n\n\"I've heard he hosts some wonderful get-togethers at his house,\" Moira said, gathering her own books.\n\n\"I still would rather pass.\"\n\nA sardonic smile parted Moira's pale mouth. She never wore makeup during the week, but weekends transformed her into a siren when she replaced long skirts and dresses and wooden clogs with skintight garments and artfully applied makeup that highlighted her dark blue eyes in a tightly tanned face.\n\n\"We'll show up and eat his food and drink up all of his tequila, then leave. Someone on our floor said they're going to a club near the Zona Rosa where they play music from the States on Saturday nights.\"\n\n\"Who told you?\" Alex asked as they made their way out of the lecture hall and down a hallway in the centuries-old building that had been dedicated to the study of Mexican art and architecture.\n\nShe hadn't bothered to make friends with the other students who had a habit of hanging out in one another's rooms. All of the rooms were equipped with a small utility kitchen, private bath and an expansive living\/sleeping\/dining area.\n\nAlex cooked for herself during the week and took her meals at local restaurants on the weekend. With her dark hair and coloring, she was easily taken for a local; she wanted to blend in and not stand out as a foreigner. And it was not the first time that she was grateful her parents taught her Spanish.\n\n\"Umberto.\"\n\n\"Isn't he the one who's been hitting on you?\" Moira blushed to the roots of her pale hair. \"Cuidado, chica. Umberto puede ser la causa del problema,\" Alex warned in Spanish.\n\nShe wanted to tell Moira that she'd heard rumors that the handsome art student was keeping count of the number of women he could sleep with before the school year ended.\n\n\"If there's going to be a problem, then it's going to be for Umberto because I have no intention of going to bed with him.\"\n\nAlex gave her a sidelong glance. \"I suppose you've heard about his exploits?\"\n\n\"I saw him in action. I take that back. I saw him with his ass out. The first night I moved in I saw him leaving someone's room, clothes in hand. His behind was beet-red as if he'd been paddled.\"\n\nAlex wrinkled her nose. \"Phew! It looks as if Casanova is a freak.\"\n\n\"He can get his freak on, but without me.\"\n\n\"I hear you.\"\n\nThe two women discussed an upcoming exam covering the Mayan calendar. They were still deep in conversation when they reached their student housing. They entered through an open courtyard that led to a smaller courtyard and the large decorative wrought-iron gate that protected the property from outsiders. Inserting a magnetic card into a slot a buzzing and green light deactivated the lock.\n\nAlex pushed open the door, stepping into a lobby and waiting room. The difference between the outdoor heat and the cooler indoor temperature was almost fifteen degrees. Two-foot-thick adobe walls kept the heat at bay.\n\nThe young woman who manned the front desk waved to Alex. \"Miss Morris, there is someone waiting for you.\" All visitors had to wait to be announced.\n\n\"Who is it?\"\n\n\"He's sitting over there.\" She pointed to her left.\n\nAlex turned slowly to find a man, legs outstretched, sitting on a butaca, a leather sling chair; she couldn't see his face in the dimly lit space, but she recognized the hand resting on his thigh.\n\n\"Merrick.\" His name came out in a whisper. \"Merrick!\" she shouted when he came to his feet. Closing the distance between them, she launched herself at this chest, her arms gripping his neck.\n\n\"Baby,\" he crooned close to her ear. Wrapping his arms around her waist, he lifted her off her feet. The distinctive lines around his eyes deepened as he gave her a dazzling smile.\n\nAlex brushed a kiss over his smiling mouth. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nHe gave her a quick kiss. \"I came to visit with my girlfriend.\"\n\nShe pressed her forehead to his, her lips caressing the bridge of his nose. \"How did you find me?\"\n\nMerrick's gaze photographed every inch of her face, noting the changes. Her hair was longer, the Mexican sun had darkened her face to a rich, mocha brown and she'd replaced the diamond studs in her pierced lobes with a pair of large gold hoops. Alexandra Cole was beautiful and sexy.\n\n\"You put your return address on the letter you sent me with those blasted cards.\"\n\nA sound of someone clearing their voice caught Alex's attention. \"Please, put me down, Merrick.\"\n\nHe complied and she turned to find Moira staring at them, foot tapping and arms crossed under her breasts. Holding on to Merrick's hand, she led him over to her classmate.\n\nAlex had to admit that a month's absence made him even more attractive. His close-cropped hair hugged his head like a cap, and it appeared as if he'd put on weight, because the hollows in his cheeks were less pronounced. Today he wore a lightweight gray jacket over a sky-blue shirt, open at the throat, that he hadn't bothered to tuck into the waistband of a pair of navy-blue slacks. Italian slip-ons had replaced his ubiquitous Timberland boots.\n\n\"Moira, this is my very good friend, Merrick Grayslake. Merrick, Moira Morgan.\"\n\nMoira extended a limp wrist. \"It's nice meeting you, Merrick.\"\n\nHe nodded, reaching for her fingers. \"It's nice meeting you, too.\"\n\nMoira shifted a leather book bag from one shoulder to the other. \"I'm going to head up to my room and take siesta.\" She knew she was staring at Merrick longer than what would be termed polite, but he was drop-dead gorgeous. Reluctantly, she shifted her gaze to Alex. \"I'll talk to you Saturday.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nAlex looped her arm through Merrick's. Never had she been so glad to see someone. But she had to admit that he wasn't just someone. He was the man with whom she'd fallen in love.\n\n\"When did you get in?\"\n\n\"I came in on the red-eye a little after three.\"\n\n\"You must be exhausted. Come on up to my room. We'll take siesta together.\"\n\nMerrick followed Alex as she led him down a narrow hallway to a stone staircase that led to the second story. He was exhausted, having spent a restless two days deciding whether he should go to Mexico. But he also wanted to tell Alex that taking siesta together wasn't a very good idea.\n\nTalking to Alex had only served to increase his longing for her. She hadn't given him her address and he knew he would never ask her for it; however, his dilemma was solved when he received the packet with the postcards. She'd indicated her return address and that presented the opportunity he needed to come and tell her what lay in his heart.\n\n\"The accommodations here are simple but comfortable,\" Alex explained as she opened the door to her room. \"Bienvenido.\"\n\nHe stepped into the room, not seeing any of the furnishings. Reaching for Alex, he slipped the straps to her backpack off her shoulders, letting it slide to the floor, and closed the heavy oaken door with his foot. Lifting her off her feet, he crossed the room and sat her on the twin-size bed, his body following hers down. Flames of desire darkened his eyes; the silver had disappeared, and in its place was a shocking dark topaz blue.\n\nAlex moved over and straddled Merrick's lap, her hands cradling his face, her fingertips tracing the contours of his cheekbones and jaw. \"Why did you come, Merrick?\"\n\n\"Isn't it obvious, sweetheart?\"\n\nHer gaze fused with his. \"No. I've never been one to make assumptions.\"\n\nMerrick closed his eyes, a thick fringe of lashes brushing the ridge of sculpted cheekbones. A knowing smile parted his lips. \"I lied when I told you that I liked you.\" She gasped. He opened his eyes, meeting her questioning gaze. \"The truth is I love you, Alexandra Cole. I kept telling myself that I wanted you as a friend, that we could be friends, but it just didn't work.\"\n\nHer heart pounding a runaway rhythm thundered under her breasts as a rush of giddiness swept over Alex. He loved her! He loved her and she had fallen in love with him! But it was something she wouldn't tell him\u2014not yet.\n\nBiting down on her lower lip, she attempted to bring her fragile emotions into some semblance of order. She closed her eyes against his intense stare. \"You love me, but your timing's wrong.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with it?\"\n\n\"I have another four months before I return to the States. Long-distance relationships usually don't work.\"\n\n\"We'll make it work, Ali. I didn't wait thirty-five years for someone like you to come into my life to concern myself with a few months or miles.\"\n\nA frown furrowed her forehead. \"Do you realize how far it is between Mexico City and the East Coast of the United States?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"I know exactly how far it is. But distance doesn't matter if I have you here.\" Merrick placed his left hand over his heart.\n\nA flood of tears shimmered in her gold eyes. \"Don't do this to me, Merrick.\"\n\nBurying his head against the side of her neck, he breathed a kiss under her ear. \"Do what, baby?\"\n\n\"Don't make me want you so much.\"\n\n\"Is that such a bad thing?\"\n\nShe sniffled. \"It is when I can't have you whenever I want you.\" Her hands curled into tight fists on his back.\n\nRaising his head, Merrick saw her tortured expression. \"Alexandra, please look at me.\" She opened her eyes. \"I'm not going to put any pressure on you. We'll see each other whenever it's convenient for you.\"\n\n\"You don't mind waiting until June?\"\n\n\"No. You're more than worth the wait.\"\n\nBlinking through tears, she smiled at him. \"Thank you, Merrick, for making it easier for me.\"\n\n\"Do you realize how easy it is for me to love you?\"\n\nResting her head on his shoulder, she exhaled a soft sigh.\n\n\"When you get to know me better you may change your mind.\"\n\n\"I doubt that,\" Merrick said.\n\n\"I've been known to go from nice girl into bitch mode in one point two seconds.\"\n\n\"That's your problem, not mine, because I don't argue or fight with women. So, if you go off, then don't count on me to entertain your tantrum.\"\n\nSitting up straighter, she stared directly at him. There was no trace of laughter or teasing in his solemn expression. \"What would you do?\"\n\n\"Walk away until you come to your senses. And stop trying to scare me off, because it's too late. I'm in this for the duration.\"\n\nAlex's delicate jaw dropped before she recovered quickly. \"What is your definition of duration?\"\n\n\"Perpetuity.\"\n\n\"You can't be talking about marriage?\" The query tumbled from her lips.\n\nMerrick saw the rapidly beating pulse in Alex's throat. His gaze lowered to her heaving bosom under a simple white cotton blouse. Not only had he shocked her with his surprise visit, but his declaration that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her had shaken the very foundation of her privileged existence.\n\nThere was a beat of silence before he said in an eerily quiet voice, \"You mentioned the word, Ali, not me.\"\n\nA rush of color suffused her cinnamon-brown face. \"I'm not going to marry you, Merrick Grayslake, so you can forget about duration and perpetuity. I've spent the past ten years with my life in flux wherein I've studied, traveled and partied like a girl gone wild.\n\n\"My last year of high school I told my parents I wanted to put off going to college for a year because I needed a break from the books. My mother issued an ultimatum, go to college or get a job and move out of her house. And there was no job available to an eighteen-year-old that would pay me enough to afford me the lifestyle to which I'd become accustomed.\n\n\"Bowing to pressure, I applied to the Rhode Island School of Design. They accepted me and I enrolled as a liberal arts major with a concentration in art and architectural history in their five-year degree program. Unfortunately I had an affair with one of my instructors in my sophomore year and...\"\n\n\"What happened, Ali?\" Merrick asked when she closed her eyes at the same time her words trailed off.\n\nShe opened her eyes. \"I gave him my love and my innocence. Whenever I mentioned marriage he'd avoided talking about it before finally admitting he wasn't the marrying kind. That all changed when my parents came up to visit me. He did a one-eighty when he realized I was one of those Coles. He waited a week, then proposed, but at twenty-two I wasn't so in love that I didn't know that he was after my money. Once I told him that I wouldn't have control of my trust fund until my twenty-fifth birthday he dropped me like hot garbage.\n\n\"I graduated, secured a part-time position with a Boca Raton art gallery and during my free time partied like there was no tomorrow. I dated a lot of men but I refused to sleep with any of them. I saw them as someone with whom to pass the time. Then I met someone I believed was different from the others. We dated for five months.\n\n\"After this liaison I took a long hard look at myself, reassessing my life and what I wanted for me, not my parents, my brothers or my sister. I made the decision to return to school, and this time study abroad. Being on my own forced me to depend on Alexandra for everything, and I loved it.\" Her gold-brown eyes filled with a gentleness that made her appear angelic. \"Like any normal woman I want marriage and children, but that can't happen now.\"\n\nMerrick's arm tightened around her waist. \"Are you finished with your soliloquy, Ali?\" he asked in a soft voice she had to strain her ears to hear.\n\nShe blushed furiously. \"Yes, I am.\"\n\n\"I've heard you and I remember everything you've ever told me. And I've told you that I would never pressure you to do what you don't want to do. There's no reason why we can't enjoy each other without marriage and children becoming part of the equation. And if we go from being friends to lovers, then I'll accept full responsibility for making certain you don't get pregnant.\"\n\nAlex combed her fingers through her hair, holding the wayward curls off her forehead. She appreciated the fact that Merrick Grayslake hadn't tried to change her; he accepted her flaws and imperfections that permitted her to be Alex. Could she, she wondered, offer Merrick her heart? Would he be worthy of the love she'd guarded jealously since ending her first liaison?\n\nCould she sleep with him and not want more?\n\nYes, whispered the silent voice in her head.\n\n\"I know I've been doing a lot of talking\u2014\"\n\n\"That you have,\" Merrick agreed, interrupting her.\n\nHer hands came down and she hugged him. \"Please don't interrupt me or I'll lose my nerve.\"\n\nA small smile played at the corners of Merrick's mouth as he gave her a lazily seductive look. \"Okay, baby.\"\n\n\"Do\u2014do you think it's possible for us to stop being friends?\"\n\nMerrick's smile faded as he held his breath. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"I want us to become lovers.\"\n\nA powerful relief shook Merrick as his chest swelled with a peace he hadn't thought possible. Angling his head, he touched his mouth to Alex's, increasing the pressure until her lips parted while his hands explored the curve of her waist and hips.\n\n\"Get your clothes and books and pack a bag.\"\n\n\"Where am I going?\" she asked between soft nibbling kisses.\n\n\"We're going to my hotel. There's no way two of us can sleep in this kiddie bed.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"It's big enough for me.\"\n\n\"But I'm taller and bigger than you.\" He kissed the top of her head. \"Let's go, querida.\"\n\n## Chapter 9\n\nAlex walked over to the large window and opened it. Stepping out onto the balcony, she looked down onto a courtyard with a flowing fountain. A round table with two cushioned chairs near the wrought-iron enclosure provided the perfect setting for an early-morning breakfast or a late-night dinner.\n\nMerrick had checked into a room at the Four Seasons Hotel containing all the amenities for work and relaxation. The spacious room was furnished with a king-size bed, desk, love seat, coffee table, flat-screen television, private bar and wireless high-speed Internet access. The full marble bathroom featured a garden tub, separate shower and water closet.\n\nShe felt the heat from his body as he came up behind her. Her slender hands covered the arms wrapped around her waist. \"This place is spectacular. Do you always stay in upscale hotels?\"\n\nMerrick kissed the side of her neck. \"Yes. There was a time when all I could afford was seedy motels. The one time I woke with bedbug bites I vowed to sleep in my car rather than check in to another flophouse.\"\n\nTurning slightly, she stared at him over her shoulder. \"How long are you staying?\"\n\n\"I'm checking out Monday.\"\n\nMerrick wanted to tell Alex that he was scheduled to meet with a former supervisor at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to discuss the possibility of his returning to the Agency. He'd spent two years as a virtual recluse, but now he looked forward to reconnecting with the Agency and those whom at one time he'd regarded as his extended family.\n\n\"That gives us three days together.\"\n\n\"Four nights and three days,\" he corrected.\n\nClosing her eyes, Alex leaned against the solid wall of his chest. She was certain Merrick felt the flutters from her heart, her tightening stomach muscles. \"I'm going out Saturday night, but I don't know whether you'd want to come with me.\"\n\n\"Am I invited?\"\n\nShe opened her eyes as a mischievous grin twisted her mouth. \"You are if you don't mind viewing an art exhibit.\"\n\n\"Ali,\" he groaned. \"What's up with you staring at paintings of dead people?\"\n\n\"Are you going with me? If not, then I'll ask someone else.\"\n\nMerrick's hands went to her flat belly. \"That's not going to happen.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"I don't intend to share you with other men.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me you're jealous,\" she teased.\n\nSplaying his fingers over her belly, Merrick pulled her closer. \"No, Ali. I'm crazy.\"\n\nAlex went completely still, her face clouding with uneasiness. His cold tone set alarm bells clanging within her, and she was suddenly anxious to put some distance between her and the man holding her to his heart. A warning voice whispered in her head that Merrick Grayslake was dangerous, that he would be a formidable opponent when confronted or crossed, that as a former CIA operative he'd probably committed unspeakable acts.\n\n\"Does this mean you're coming with me?\"\n\n\"Yes, it does.\"\n\nMerrick's fingers inched down Alex's blouse, easing the hem from the waistband of her slacks. He heard her soft inhalation of breath as he searched lower, under the delicate material of her panties. This time she gasped aloud when his hand cupped her mound. A knowing smile parted his lips as moisture bathed his fingertips.\n\nAlex was ready for him, and he'd been ready for her. Unknowingly he had been the first time he saw her arguing with a man who hadn't wanted to let her go. Now he understood why the frustrated man had taken the risk and crashed a private event to see her.\n\nMerrick found Alexandra Cole an anomaly. Assertive and confident, she spoke her mind. He'd come to admire her tenacity, her ambition and her friendly outgoing personality. But she was also hot-tempered and stubborn, negative psychological characteristics that did not detract from her overall strengths.\n\nShe wanted to complete her graduate studies, and he'd promised to support her during this endeavor. However, like most women, she wanted marriage and children\u2014two things he was unable to offer her at this time in his life. What he would offer Alex was his love and protection. These were more than he'd been willing to give the women in his past.\n\nHis free arm tightened around her waist as he lifted her and backed off the balcony and reentered the bedroom. His hand still sandwiched between her thighs, Merrick sat down on the bed, bringing Alex to sit on his lap.\n\nHe pressed his mouth to the nape of her neck. \"Are you ready to take siesta with me?\"\n\nAlex couldn't respond because she'd bitten down on her lower lip when the slight flutters grew stronger as Merrick's fingers worked their magic. She nodded like someone under the effects of a powerful narcotic.\n\n\"Yes-s-s.\" Her affirmation came out slurred as a long-forgotten passion rose quickly to engulf her in flames that refused to burn out.\n\nClosing her eyes, Alex let her senses take over. It was as if she were viewing what was to take place between her and Merrick as a spectator rather than a participant. His fingers were deft, unfaltering when he released the tiny buttons on her blouse from their fastenings. She heard his breathing deepen as he viewed her breasts in a sheer white lace bra; his breathing became more labored with each article of clothing he removed.\n\nShe opened her eyes to find him kneeling over her, eyes shimmering like streaks of lightning, the nostrils of his aquiline nose flaring from the effort it took to control his respiration. No man had ever stared at her naked body with an expression mirroring awe and reverence. The heat pulsing between her legs spread throughout her body.\n\nMerrick did not want to believe that clothes had artfully concealed a petite body so lushly curved that he feared spilling his passion before he joined his body with Alex's. High, firm breasts he'd only glimpsed on New Year's Eve were ardently displayed as they rose and fell over a narrow rib cage flaring out to a pair of rounded hips. Everything about her\u2014the rich brown color that was evenly distributed over her body, the large gold-brown eyes that stared trustingly at him and the black shiny curls that were as wayward as the woman who claimed them\u2014held him enthralled in a labyrinth of love and desire from which he never wanted to escape.\n\nMoving off the bed, he removed his jacket and shirt, leaving them on the padded bench at the foot of the bed. His shoes, socks, slacks and underwear followed until he was completely naked. His footsteps were silent on the carpeted floor as he crossed the room, entered the bathroom and removed a condom from a small toiletry bag. He returned to the bedroom and slipped into bed with Alex, who'd turned on her side to face the window.\n\n\"Can you please close the window and pull the drapes?\" Alex doubted whether the hotel guests across the courtyard could see into the room, but she'd never been one for public displays of affection.\n\nMerrick kissed her shoulder. \"Sure.\"\n\nHer gaze narrowed when she saw the thin, pale scar running along the left side of his back. He'd told her that he had retired from the CIA, and she wondered if it was an injury that had ended his career, forcing him into early retirement.\n\nExtending her arms, she smiled as Merrick made his way back to the bed. There was enough light coming through the opening in the patterned peach-and-gold draperies to make out his face, but not the other small scars on his body.\n\n\"Veo las huellas de mi amor, querido,\" she whispered as he took her into his arms.\n\nMerrick wanted to tell Alex that she didn't have to ask him to make love to her. Alexandra Cole had bewitched him and unknowingly she possessed what it took to destroy him emotionally.\n\nSupporting his weight on his elbows, he lowered his head and kissed her. Not a soul-searching, deep passionate kiss, but one better suited for a fragile newborn. He kissed her mouth, the hollow of her scented throat, the curve of her shoulders, venturing lower to her breasts. The flesh between his legs grew heavy, but he didn't, couldn't stop until he explored every inch of Alex's satiny skin. She smelled of fruit, flowers and spice.\n\nRachel Singletary had teased him because he'd opted to remain celibate, but she didn't know that he'd been waiting for the right woman. And he knew Alex was the right woman the first time they'd shared a dance, a kiss. Moving down the length of the large bed, he alternated kissing with flicking his tongue over her belly.\n\nAlex's fingers curled into tight fists at her sides as she clenched her teeth. Moans of frustration mingled with the rising desire she was helpless to control. The mat of crisp dark hair covering Merrick's chest and his marauding mouth threatened to take her beyond herself. She wanted to kiss him the way he was kissing her, her lips and tongue tasting flesh in her journey to communicate wordlessly how much she loved and needed him.\n\nHer breasts rose and fell heavily as the pulsing at the apex of her thighs increased. \"Merrick!\" Her hysteria was evident when she screamed his name. Reaching for his head, she attempted to capture his hair, but it was too short for her to secure a grip. He'd spread her legs and his hot breath had become a raging inferno that threatened to incinerate her\u2014body and soul.\n\nMerrick heard the desperate cry, inhaled her rising passion, knowing if he didn't take her now it would be over. Reversing his position, he reached for the condom, sat back on his heels and slipped it over his rigid flesh. It was for a brief moment, but he thought he saw fear and indecision in Alex's eyes as she watched him put on the latex sheath that would prevent an unplanned pregnancy. What he thought he'd glimpsed vanished as she extended her arms, welcoming him into her embrace and into her body.\n\nReaching for her hand, Merrick guided it to his sex. \"Let's do this together.\"\n\nAlex's tiny hand barely fit around his engorged tumescence as she positioned it to the entrance of her femininity. Merrick's hand covered hers as he eased himself into her body. Flames of desire rose quickly, overlapping her soft moans as he pushed into her; taut flesh stretched with each inch until he was fully sheathed. Then, in a rhythm that was as timeless as the beginning of creation, they offered each other all of themselves, holding nothing back.\n\nMerrick established a slow, deliberate thrusting as Alex rose to meet him, pinpoints of gold in her eyes darkening with her rising ardor. Anchoring his hands under her hips, he held her fast, increasing the cadence, his hips moving with the velocity and power of a jackhammer. Her gasps and soft moans served to make the fire in his loins more intense.\n\nHe lost himself in the moment and the love flowing from the woman under him, not feeling the bite of her fingernails on his back. What he was aware of was the gurgling sounds coming from her throat that erupted into an unrestrained primal scream that sent him over a precipice wherein he surrendered all he had and was to the woman whom he knew he would love forever. They climaxed simultaneously, experiencing a free fall that made them one with each other.\n\nThey lay entwined, breathing heavily, waiting for their respiration to slow while enjoying the lingering pulsing sensations. Sated, they were loath to move. However, Merrick was forced to when he withdrew from Alex and went to discard the condom.\n\nWhen he returned to the bed, he found her asleep, her face still flushed with passion. He lay beside her and within minutes Morpheus claimed him as they shared siesta for the first time.\n\nAlex sat at a dressing table applying a coat of orange color to her lips. She and Merrick were scheduled to leave for Professor Rivera's soiree in fifteen minutes.\n\nShe hadn't made it a habit to wear makeup to the art institute, so she was certain the added color to her face and the dress would shock a few of her classmates. She'd decided to wear a minishift in a soft tangerine-orange with white orchids, reminiscent of a Japanese kimono with an empire waist and a halter top.\n\nShe'd come to the Four Seasons Hotel Thursday afternoon and left the hotel once to go to a nearby boutique and hair salon; she had her hair cut into a short and very becoming feathery style that flattered her round face.\n\nShe and Merrick shared brunch on the balcony outside their room that overlooked the courtyard and dined on exquisite Mediterranean cuisine at the hotel's elegant restaurant, Reforma 500. Earlier that afternoon she'd taken advantage of the services at the hotel's spa.\n\nWhen she and Merrick weren't in bed sleeping or making love, she pulled out her books and studied for the upcoming exam. He'd surprised her when he offered to test her on her knowledge of the Mayans and their incredibly complex advanced society.\n\nShe'd asked him about the scar on his back and his response had been, \"Oh, that. It was an accident.\" She didn't believe his glib explanation but decided not to pry. Their relationship was much too new to coerce each other to divulge what they deemed personal. And not once did Alex forget that what she shared with Merrick was tenuous at best. It was he who wanted a relationship that would go on for perpetuity, while she'd asked for right now.\n\nIt was ironic how she'd changed. At twenty-two she wanted to marry her art history instructor, and now at twenty-nine she was willing to become a participant in a physical relationship that wouldn't result in a commitment.\n\nMovement behind her caught her attention. She smiled when Merrick leaned over to press a kiss on the nape of her neck. He'd elected to wear a charcoal-gray suit in a tropical linen fabric with a pale gray finely woven shirt with a banded collar.\n\n\"You look and smell wonderful.\" She wore a perfume with sensual musk and woodsy notes.\n\nHer smile widened. \"Gracias, mi querido.\"\n\nHe straightened, unable to believe Alex could improve on perfection. Her short hairstyle and youthful-looking face made him feel as if he were robbing the cradle, when there was only a six-year difference in their ages.\n\nShe rose gracefully from the stool and reached for his hand. \"I'm ready.\"\n\nHis gaze lingered on her smoky lids and lush mouth with the glistening lip color. There was a mysterious gleam in her eyes that made him want to strip her naked and take her back to bed. But he knew that wasn't possible because attendance at her professor's house was mandatory.\n\nMerrick thought that after making love to her once he'd be able to rid himself of strong physical urges that came when he least expected. However, having her within arm's reach hadn't permitted him to exorcise the licentious images of what he wanted to do with Alexandra Cole.\n\nWhat had shocked Merrick was that her libido matched his, and he wanted to demonstrate other positions and techniques, but decided to wait for another time; perhaps when he returned to Mexico she would feel more comfortable with other than traditional lovemaking.\n\nHolding her hand, he led her out of the bathroom. She gathered her purse and a silk shawl in a pale shade that matched her silk-covered sling backs. They took the curving staircase instead of the elevator to the opulent lobby, not seeing the surreptitious glances directed at them.\n\nThe taxi Merrick had requested had arrived. He helped Alex into the vehicle, then ducked his head and sat beside her. He gave the driver the address before he settled back to enjoy the ride to Coyoac\u00e1n and the delicate body beside him.\n\nHernando Rivera's home was in an area with a number of museums and art galleries and was within walking distance of the homes of several noted deceased inhabitants: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.\n\nAlex walked into a brightly-lit courtyard while Merrick lingered behind to pay their driver. Long tables groaned with food and a portable bar was doing a brisk business, as evidenced by the number of people milling around holding glasses of tequila cocktails. Mariachi music blaring from hidden speakers added to the festive mood.\n\nMoira came over to greet her. A black tank dress in a Lycra fabric hugged her lithe figure like a second skin while a pair of four-inch strappy sandals put her at the six-foot mark. Her pale hair was piled atop her head in tousled, sensual disarray.\n\n\"Where's your gorgeous friend?\" she whispered.\n\nAlex couldn't stop the wave of heat stealing across her face. \"He'll be here.\"\n\nMoira took a deep swallow of her drink. \"Now he's someone I could get my freak on with.\" She'd had one too many margaritas to see Alex's scowl. \"But I know he's off-limits, because I'd never make a play for a friend's man.\"\n\nForcing a smile that she definitely did not feel, Alex said, \"That's good to know.\"\n\n\"Se\u00f1orita Morris, I'm honored you've graced me with your presence.\"\n\nAlex turned to find her host grinning at her. He'd forgone his conservative black suits for a white poet's shirt with matching linen slacks and tan sandals. She didn't know why, but he reminded her of cartoons in which the cat had swallowed a bird. \"But, Professor Rivera, wasn't it you that said attendance is mandatory?\"\n\nHe waved a hand, his dark gaze moving slowly from her face to her bare brown legs and her feet in the light-colored heels, then back again to her feathery hairstyle. \"I always tell my students that, but there is no way I can enforce that rule. Field visits yes, my home no. Please come into the house to see the exhibit before you get something to eat and drink.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but I'd like to wait for my guest.\"\n\nHis black eyebrows lifted, reminding her of hash marks of birds in flight. \"You came with someone?\"\n\nAlex wanted to laugh when she saw his stunned expression. \"Yes, I did.\" The confirmation had barely left her lips when she detected the scent of Merrick's cologne. Turning, she smiled at him and extended her hand. \"Darling, I'd like for you to meet Professor Rivera, who teaches design and art of ancient cultures. Professor Rivera, Merrick Grayslake. Merrick, Professor Hernando Rivera.\" The two men exchanged polite greetings and handshakes.\n\nHernando, having recovered from seeing Alexandra Morris in a dress that revealed more flesh than he'd ever seen on her, shifted his gaze to the tall man with her. \"Grayslake,\" he said softly. \"Are you Yaqui?\"\n\nA muscle jumped in Merrick's jaw. \"I wouldn't know.\"\n\n\"You speak Mexican Spanish and your features are a blend of African, Yaqui and European. I suggest you explore your roots. I'm sure you didn't come to engage in an anthropological discussion. Come see the exhibit, then eat and drink.\"\n\nAlex felt the muscles in Merrick's arm bunch up under his jacket's sleeve. If her teacher had been able to identify Merrick's racial designation from looking at him, then there was no doubt he'd spoken the truth.\n\nTo say the professor was a brilliant art expert and anthropologist was an understatement. The first day of class he had everyone stand up and introduce themselves, and within minutes he'd identified their Spanish dialect. Alex had held her breath when he announced that based on her speech patterns and physical looks she was of African and Cuban ancestry. He'd astounded her with his accuracy, and in the following weeks Professor Rivera used his vast knowledge to subjugate and intimidate any student who attempted to challenge him.\n\nThose who came to class unprepared were forced to undergo a tongue-lashing that usually went on for at least ten minutes before they were asked to leave and not return until they'd completed the assignment. The trustees of the universidad permitted Professor Hernando Rivera to conduct his classes like a despot because museums and art institutes the world over were vying for his attention.\n\nThey were shown into a room in Hernando's house that doubled as an art gallery. Alex couldn't believe the artifacts on display targeted for donations to local museums. There were fragile wooden, leather and clay masks from Puebla, Guerrero and Michoacan, a funerary mask from Teotihuac\u00e1n and exquisite silver pieces from Oaxaca. The piece that captivated her was a Zapotec jade bat-god pendant. She thanked Hernando for permitting her to see the priceless artifacts, then returned to the courtyard with Merrick.\n\nSmiling up at him, she noted his solemn expression. \"It's over, darling.\"\n\nHe lifted his eyebrows as he met her amused gaze. \"It really wasn't that bad. I believe hanging out with you has given me a healthy respect for art.\"\n\n\"Does this mean you're going with me to the museum tomorrow?\"\n\n\"No, it doesn't. We have one more day together, and I don't intend to spend it in a museum.\"\n\nShe gave him a sidelong glance. \"What have you planned?\"\n\nA knowing smile softened his firm mouth. \"We're going to spend the day in bed.\"\n\nAlex squeezed his hand. \"You keep it up and I won't be able to walk.\"\n\nLeaning down, he pressed his mouth to her ear. \"I said nothing about making love, but if that's what you want I'm willing to accommodate you, because for some reason I can't get enough of you.\"\n\n\"Glot\u00f3n.\"\n\n\"No lie,\" he drawled, grinning. \"Now let's get something to eat and drink so that we can appear socially acceptable, then blow this joint.\"\n\nVertical lines appeared between her eyes. \"I'm not ready to go back to the hotel.\"\n\nMerrick gave her a long, penetrating look. \"Where do you want to go?\"\n\n\"The others are going to a club near the Zona Rosa. If you don't want to go, then I'll meet you back at the hotel.\"\n\n\"If you think I'm going to let you out of my sight looking like you do, then you're crazier than I am.\"\n\nShe glanced down at her dress. \"What's wrong with the way I look?\"\n\nPulling her closer, he dropped a kiss on her fragrant hair. \"There's nothing wrong, baby. You look delicious.\"\n\nShe gave him her trademark dimpled smile. \"Gracias, mi amor.\"\n\nMerrick returned her smile. \"De nada, mi querida.\"\n\n## Chapter 10\n\nMerrick sat in the corner of a noisy, crowded club with flashing colored lights watching Alex dance. He'd begun drinking beer, but after the second bottle he switched to water. At first he'd found the pumping baseline beats infectious, but after three hours of nonstop music and the differing scents of cologne and perfume on sweaty bodies he was ready to find the nearest exit.\n\nResting an elbow on the small table, he cradled his chin on his fist. He hadn't flown to Mexico to see Alex and then share her with people she saw every day. But seeing her laughing and dancing tempered his selfishness because it was he, not some other man, who would share her passion.\n\nMerrick had tried and failed to analyze what it was about Michael Kirkland's cousin that affected him wherein he was now willing to forsake his reclusive lifestyle to consider returning to the CIA as a bureaucrat. Instead of being briefed for covert missions he would become a trainer as an intelligence research training specialist. He'd had experience when he facilitated advanced training courses at Quantico for DEA agents. Yes, he would go back as an intelligence training specialist, secure his relationship with Alex and retire.\n\nThe driving rhythms slowed to a seductive ballad and Merrick stood up when he spied Alex coming in his direction. Reaching for her purse and shawl, he took several steps and curved an arm around her waist.\n\nHer dewy face shimmered like brown velvet under the psychedelic lights. \"Dance with me, Merrick.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Not now, querida. We'll dance together at the hotel.\"\n\nHer brow furrowed. \"What's the matter?\"\n\nPulling her closer, he shouldered his way through the throng on the dance floor. \"The matter is I was ready to leave two hours ago.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you say something?\"\n\n\"I didn't want to stop you from enjoying yourself, Ali.\"\n\n\"I enjoy myself even when I'm not dancing.\"\n\n\"What's going to happen once you start your career?\"\n\n\"That shouldn't change anything. I'm not going to be working 24\/7. Speaking of careers, I went online last week and applied for a position with the National Trust for Historic Preservation's northeast region. And if I'm hired, I'll be responsible for historic districts in New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts and Maine.\"\n\nMerrick noticed she hadn't mentioned any state south of Delaware. \"Do you plan to relocate?\"\n\n\"No. I like living in the D.C. area, and I love my condo. There may be a problem when I have to do the fieldwork.\"\n\n\"What, Ali?\"\n\n\"There's a family mandate that I'm not permitted to take a commercial aircraft.\" She told him about how her uncle Martin's daughter had become a kidnapping victim forty years before, and since that time anyone who claimed Cole blood or married into the family was prohibited from flying on commercial carriers.\n\nMerrick wanted to tell Alex that making arrangements to travel up and down the eastern seaboard was the least of her worries. Hadn't she realized she was a wealthy woman, and what would've become prohibitive for the normal working-class person was readily available to her?\n\n\"If you're hired, then how are you going to travel?\"\n\n\"If I'm not able to secure a seat on the ColeDiz G4, then it will have to be a private jet. The money I spent on hiring private jets I could donate to my favorite charity.\"\n\nThey stepped out of the air-cooled club and into the unusually warm winter Mexico City heat that lingered even after the sun had set behind the mountains. All of the upscale shops were air-conditioned, but once anyone stepped outdoors onto the overpopulated streets with the smog and thermal inversion, many found breathing normally difficult.\n\nMerrick startled Alex when he whistled sharply through his teeth for a taxi. A late-model colorful car skidded to the curb. The driver stepped out, rounded his vehicle and opened the door with the arrogant aplomb of any major city taxi driver. She got in, followed by Merrick. The driver closed the door and then took his seat behind the wheel.\n\n\"Ca d\u00f3nde la, el se\u00f1or?\"\n\n\"The Four Seasons Hotel en el Paseo de la Reforma 500.\"\n\nThe driver took off in a burst of speed as Merrick settled against the leather seat, his arm going around Alex's shoulders. Minutes into the ride, she rested her head on his chest. Twenty-four hours. That was all they had left before he flew back to the States.\n\nAlex shifted into a more comfortable position between Merrick's legs as an unconscious moan slipped past her lips; the cramping in her lower belly and a dull ache in her lower back were indicators that she would see her period in the next day or two.\n\n\"What's the matter, baby?\" Merrick asked, his moist breath sweeping over her ear.\n\nShe moaned again. \"Premenstrual cramps.\"\n\nMerrick gently lifted the damp strands clinging to her scalp. They'd returned to the hotel and instead of Alex taking a bath and him a shower, she'd invited him to share the oversize tub.\n\n\"Is this the time of the month when you turn into a witch?\"\n\nPeering at him over her shoulder, Alex wrinkled her nose.\n\n\"Don't tell me you've got sexist jokes.\"\n\nMerrick's expression was one of unadulterated innocence. \"No.\"\n\n\"Have you had a lot of experience with women who become viragos when they're PMSing?\"\n\n\"Even if I have I'm not going to tell you.\"\n\nAlex shifted until she straddled Merrick, the pulsing jets from the Jacuzzi adding to her buoyancy. Leaning forward, she pressed her breasts to his hair-matted chest. \"Why won't you tell me?\"\n\nHe stared at her under lowered lids. \"I don't kiss and tell, Ali. The women in my past are just that\u2014the past.\" He kissed the end of her nose. \"That is a topic I will not discuss.\"\n\nAlex affected a pout. \"I told you about the men from my past.\"\n\n\"You told me not because I asked but because you wanted to. You know who and what you are, and because of that you're open and spontaneous, while I've lived my life speculating whether I'm African or Native American, and wondering if I father children whether they'll inherit a gene abnormality from an ancestor.\"\n\n\"What do you say you are?\"\n\nA wry smile touched his mouth. \"I say African-American because unconsciously that's what I feel. And if my biological father is European or Native American, then I assume he'd slept with a black woman. Or it could be vice versa. You have a large family connected by blood and marriage, and because I don't know my parents I'll never know if I have a brother or sister, nieces or nephews.\"\n\nBurying her face between his neck and shoulder, Alex closed her eyes. She felt the strong, steady pumping of his heart against her breasts. \"Have you thought of trying to find your birth mother? There are Web sites and agencies set up to reconnect children with their birth parents. It shouldn't be too difficult for you because you know your mother's name.\"\n\n\"I did check a database for Virginia Gray or Grayslake and came up with more than nine thousand nationwide.\"\n\nAlex opened her eyes and pulled back, meeting his intense stare. \"Did you contact any of them?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"After the first thirty I decided to let it go. Each time I got a 'No, I'm not your mother' I found myself overwhelmed with feelings of abandonment. It'd begun to affect my job performance, so I decided to let it go. Uncovering who my mother is or was is no longer a priority.\"\n\nLooping her arms under Merrick's shoulders, Alex brushed a kiss over his mouth, feeling his pain as surely as if it was her own. It didn't matter who he was because he was the man with whom she'd fallen in love; he was the man she would love forever.\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\nMerrick went completely still, certain Alex could feel the blood rushing through his veins. He was hot, then cold, confused, then clear-headed as her confession filled him with a sense of power, a strength that vanquished the lingering pain of abandonment that had become an emotional impediment to marriage and fatherhood.\n\n\"Let's get out of this tub,\" he said, recovering quickly.\n\nMerrick anchored a hand along the shelf of the tub and came to his feet, bringing Alex up with him. He stepped out and reached for a bath sheet on a nearby table. Wrapping the velour fabric around her body, he lifted her gently from the bathtub and carried her into the bedroom, placing her on the bed.\n\nNone of his movements were rushed as he blotted the moisture from her satiny body, lingering over the curve of her breasts and hips. It no longer mattered that he would leave Mexico and Alex in a little more than twenty-four hours, because he had the rest of his life to share whatever he had and whatever he'd become with her.\n\nTime seemed to slow down for Alex as she languished in the gentleness of her lover's touch. He dried the front of her body, turned her over and then repeated the action.\n\nThen, without warning, his mouth replaced the towel, tracing a sensual path down the length of her spine, lingering at the indentation separating the globes of flesh defining her buttocks.\n\nHeat, chills and undulating waves of ecstasy swept over her as she tried, and failed, to keep the moans from escaping her parted lips. His hands searched areas known only to her, his mouth exploring, and tantalizing, searching, savoring every hollow, dip and curve of her from head to toe.\n\nMerrick couldn't get enough of Alex. His hands and mouth mapped every inch of flesh he could see and reach. Her smell, her essence, lingered in his nostrils and on his tongue. His passions rose quickly, and he released her, pausing to slip on a condom. It was as if time had stood still until he looped an arm around her waist; she knelt with her back to him as he pressed his groin to her buttocks. In one, sure motion, he eased his erection into her, both gasping from the unexpected joining of flesh against flesh, man against woman.\n\nMerrick cupped her breasts, alternating squeezing with rubbing his thumbs over the pebble hardness of her distended nipples. The kneeling position allowed him deeper penetration, maximum pleasure. The sensual beauty of her naked limbs, her feminine fragrance mingling with the rising scent of their lovemaking threatened to take him over the edge where it would be over much too soon.\n\nWithdrawing, he reversed their positions. Merrick lay on his back, arms anchored over his head, as Alex straddled him. He knew he would never get used to her sensual expression in the throes of lovemaking: flushed skin, dilated pupils, parted lips, flaring nostrils and heaving breasts. And her bubbly spontaneity out of bed became an uninhibited smoldering passion that stripped him raw wherein he was unable to hold anything back. Alexandra Cole claimed what he'd been unable to give anyone\u2014all of himself.\n\nAlex's gold-brown gaze met silver-gray. Her gaze inched down to the firm muscles under the brown arms in the diffused lamplight. Tufts of straight reddish hair grew out from his armpits, a lighter shade than the crisp, curling strands covering his chest that tapered down to a narrow line that spread out in an inverted triangle to coarser, tighter curls at his loins. Everything about her lover was a visual banquet. Merrick's deep drawling voice, powerful masculine presence and compelling, magnetic eyes held her captive in an abyss of loving and longing she never wanted to end.\n\nAnchoring her palms on his shoulders, her gaze meeting and fusing with his, she lowered her body over his rigid flesh, making them one with each other. Simultaneous audible moans of satisfaction matched the rush of moisture bathing the pulsing area between her thighs.\n\nThe world as Alex knew it ceased to exist. All that mattered was the man offering her the most exquisite passion she'd ever known. What had begun as friendship was now a full-blown love affair, and she realized what she'd felt and shared with her art professor had not even come close to what she felt with Merrick. The pulsing grew stronger, becoming contractions that gripped his hardness before releasing it, then began again.\n\nHeat rippled under Merrick's skin, became hotter, more intense each time he thrust upward. They had ceased to exist as individuals, separate entities. He was so attuned to the woman rising and falling over his throbbing erection that he felt the spasms that seized her, followed by a primordial scream that made hair stand up on the nape of his neck. Before the next spasm and Alex's next outburst of ecstasy, he had her on her back, feet anchored on his shoulders. He didn't want the pleasure to end\u2014not yet. He wanted it to go on\u2014forever, if possible. But it was not possible when he lowered his head, closed his eyes and enjoyed the most extreme physical gratification he'd ever experienced.\n\nWhen it was all over he lowered her feet, then collapsed heavily on her smaller frame, waiting for his heart rate to return to a normal rhythm.\n\nHe loved her. He loved her more than anyone or anything.\n\nAlex struggled to catch her breath as the pressure from Merrick's greater weight prevented her from moving. \"What are you doing to me?\" she whispered.\n\nBreathing heavily, Merrick rolled off Alex and pulled her to his chest. \"Loving you, baby. Loving you, and your life.\"\n\n## Chapter 11\n\nCIA Headquarters...Langley, Virginia\n\nA rare smile deepened the network of lines crisscrossing William Reid's weather-beaten face within seconds of the door closing behind a man who he'd believed he would never see again. His smile faded as one of the three telephones on his desk rang; reaching over, he picked up the receiver.\n\n\"Reid.\"\n\n\"Come to my office.\" The command was sharp, the caller's tone brusque, no-nonsense.\n\n\"I'm on my way.\"\n\nPushing back his chair and coming to his feet, he put on his suit jacket, left the office and made his way to one several doors away.\n\n\"He's expecting you,\" said the dour-faced woman who guarded her boss's office like a Secret Service agent assigned to the presidential detail.\n\nCarl Ashleigh stood by the door to his inner office. It wasn't often William saw the man wear a suit jacket unless he was scheduled to meet with the director.\n\n\"Let's go for a drive.\"\n\nWilliam, or Bill to the few friends he'd acquired since coming to the CIA from the FBI, followed his supervisor like an obedient puppy. It wasn't until they were seated in Ashleigh's gas-guzzling Yukon, maneuvering toward McLean, Virginia, that Ashleigh initiated conversation. He'd become used to the eccentric younger man who would order him to his office, then make him wait before granting him an audience.\n\n\"Is he coming back?\"\n\nWilliam stared out the side window at the passing countryside. It was the first week in March, and winter appeared to have finally loosened its grip on northern Virginia.\n\n\"I assume you're talking about Grayslake.\"\n\nHigh color suffused Carl's face, his pale blue eyes standing out in stark contrast. \"Who the hell else do you think I'm talking about? Did he not spend the past two hours in your office?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What did he want?\"\n\n\"He wants back in.\"\n\n\"What did you tell him?\" Carl asked.\n\n\"I told him that he would have to go through the same protocol as if he were a new hire. He'd have to pass a physical, a psychological and of course obtain security clearance.\"\n\n\"What's he asking for?\"\n\n\"Training.\"\n\nCarl slowed the Yukon, turning onto a local road and coming to a complete stop behind a copse of pine trees; he left the engine running. Releasing his seat belt, he shifted on his seat and stared at William Reid. The man was only fifty-six but Carl thought of him as a dinosaur, a holdover from a past era with his military crew cut, cuffed trousers and wing-tipped footwear. William had given the Bureau fifteen years of fieldwork before transferring to the CIA as a desk jockey.\n\n\"Slow down his paperwork.\"\n\n\"What!\" The single word exploded from William Reid's mouth.\n\nThe fingers of Carl's left hand drummed nervously on the steering wheel. \"I want you to keep him on hold for a while.\"\n\nWilliam ran a hand over hair that looked like the bristles on a stiff brush. \"How long is awhile?\"\n\n\"Six months. Assign him to sniper training. With his background as a Marine Corps scout he'll do well there until we're ready for him.\"\n\nWilliam gave Carl a long, penetrating stare. \"What's up?\"\n\nCarl's pale blue eyes narrowed, and he wondered how much he could tell his assistant without compromising the details of a joint meeting of agencies that included the FBI and the CIA. Biweekly meetings between the two directors, corresponding assistant directors and federal prosecutors had become akin to a world economic summit.\n\n\"We may need him for a special assignment.\"\n\n\"It can't be a field assignment,\" William insisted.\n\n\"I know that!\" Carl said angrily.\n\nWilliam did not visibly react to his supervisor's outburst. \"Grayslake is going to become suspicious if we take too long to approve his rehire or if he's assigned to something he hasn't requested.\"\n\nAshleigh stared out the windshield. \"He wants back in, and that means he'll accept whatever we offer him. And if he makes it known that he's unhappy, then bust him down to a file clerk.\"\n\nCarl hadn't been cleared to brief his assistant on Operation Backslap, but with Merrick Grayslake's possible return the initial strategy would have to be modified. Once Grayslake was given security clearance Reid would be briefed on an investigation certain to send elected officials scrambling to hire the best defense attorneys not only to salvage their political careers but to avoid going to prison.\n\nWilliam shook his head. \"He's not going to go for that. If we lose him a second time, you and I know that he's never coming back.\"\n\n\"If you have a better plan, then you'd better tell me right here, right now.\"\n\nThe older man stared at his supervisor. \"You know I don't have one.\"\n\nCarl snapped his seat belt, put the vehicle in gear and maneuvered back onto the road back to Langley. The return drive was accomplished in complete silence, and when the two men returned to their offices both knew someone higher than them had determined Merrick Grayslake's destiny the moment his written request to return to the Company was received.\n\nMerrick scrolled through his cell-phone directory and clicked on a name. \"I'm in your neck of the woods,\" he said when hearing the deep-voiced greeting. \"Can you spare me a few minutes?\"\n\n\"Sure. What's up, Gray?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you when I see you.\"\n\n\"I'll be here.\"\n\nMerrick disconnected the call and shifted into a higher gear. Forty-five minutes later he parked his vehicle two blocks from Michael and Jolene Kirkland's house.\n\nMaking his way along the tree-lined streets in the D.C. suburb with opulent and historic colonial and Georgian-style homes, he recalled his meeting with Bill Reid. Merrick had been forthcoming when he revealed that he was more than ready to return to the CIA as a training specialist.\n\nTurning a corner, he walked a block with only six structures in the charming cul-de-sac, most large, imposing, claiming spacious front lawns and, in the warmer weather, flowering shrubs. Michael's house stood apart from the others. Its simplicity was a Frank Lloyd Wright Japanese-inspired design. A broad sheltering roof with generous overhanging eaves and windows set with colorful geometric shapes radiated warmth, beckoning him closer. A waist-high slate wall was covered with a profusion of climbing vines. A gate made of iron pipe painted a Cherokee-red stood open, welcoming him.\n\nMerrick strolled up the path, but as he walked up the six steps to the front door it opened and Michael Kirkland stood in the doorway, casually dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt.\n\nHe extended his hand, pulling Michael close in a strong embrace. \"How's it going, Kirk?\"\n\nMichael Kirkland was an imposing figure. His exposed muscled arms were brown as berries. Tall, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, former U.S. Army captain Michael Kirkland was as physically fit as he'd been when he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point a decade before. His face was as remarkable as the rest of him: close-cropped raven-black hair, clear green eyes that shimmered like precious gems in a sun-browned face. Men and women were drawn to his perfectly symmetrical features that were as delicate as a woman's.\n\nMerrick's friend had resigned his commission and now taught classes in military law and military history at a private military school in northern Virginia. Merrick knew Michael's decision hadn't been an easy one, but now as a husband and prospective father he appeared content with the turn his life had taken.\n\nMichael returned the rough embrace. \"How long are you staying?\"\n\nPulling back, Merrick shook his head. \"I'm not. I plan to drive back to Bolivar tonight.\"\n\nLifting his sweeping black eyebrows, Michael stepped aside and beckoned Merrick into his home. \"Come in. Don't tell me you've been holding out on me.\" Merrick walked into the living room of the two-story converted carriage house decorated with Asian and Southwest\u2013themed furnishings.\n\nMichael Kirkland stared at his friend, unable to believe the transformation. When he'd reconnected with Merrick six months ago, he'd found him long-haired, bearded and gaunt-looking. Not only had Merrick put on weight, but he always could've easily passed for a D.C. businessman or politician in his tailored suit, imported footwear and conservative haircut.\n\nMerrick flashed a smile, not replying to Michael's accusation that he was hiding something from him. He followed Michael into a room that was an exact replica of a Japanese teahouse. Octagonal in shape, its walls were made entirely of screened-in glass windows. Two of the eight sides were open to take advantage of the crisp air. A low lacquered table, surrounded by large black and jade-green floor cushions, were set up in the middle of the room.\n\nMerrick owed Michael his life from when he found him lying facedown in the street, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Doctors had repaired his spleen but were unable to save his left kidney. The police recorded the incident as a mugging, but Merrick knew he'd been set up, though he was unable to prove it.\n\n\"Where's Jolene?\" he asked Michael.\n\nMichael folded his tall frame down to the futon, motioning for Merrick to do the same. \"She flew to Chicago to see her parents. And because she's at the end of her second trimester she said this will be her last trip until the baby comes.\"\n\nStretching out his legs, Merrick stared at an indoor pool built into a corner. The gurgling water created a soothing mood, trickling over rocks and pebbles concealed by a profusion of bamboo shoots and water lilies.\n\n\"Do you know what you're having?\"\n\nMichael shook his head. \"No. I'd like to know, but Jolene wants to wait.\"\n\n\"Does this mean you do everything your wife wants?\" Merrick teased.\n\n\"Hell, yeah,\" Michael said, smiling, \"but within reason of course. I know enough when to advance and when to retreat.\"\n\n\"Marriage shouldn't be a military campaign, Michael.\"\n\nThe brilliant green eyes in a rich brown face glowed. \"With Jolene and me there's never a military campaign. I give in to her because she's carrying my baby. Speaking of women, what's up with you, Gray? Do you have a little honey hidden away in your mountain retreat that has you running back to spend the night?\"\n\nStanding, Merrick removed his suit jacket, placing it over the arm of the futon and wondering how Michael would react if he told him that he was dating and sleeping with his first cousin.\n\nWould he approve?\n\nDisapprove?\n\nConcluding his relationship with Alex was much too new and much too fragile, he decided not to say anything. \"No,\" he answered truthfully. His honey, as Michael called her, was currently touring an archaeological site in Mexico's Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula.\n\nHe missed her, missed her more than he thought he would miss a woman. And the missing had nothing to do with making love to her; that was something he could do with any woman. But Alexandra Cole had become much more to him than any woman.\n\nWaking up with her beside him, their sharing meals together, taking long walks, discussing any- and everything were things he'd never experienced with a woman. Alex's spontaneity, her outgoing personality and her lust for life were refreshing changes because he tended to take life much too seriously.\n\n\"No, I don't,\" Merrick said, answering Michael's query. \"But it is something I am considering.\"\n\nLeaning back and crossing his arms over his chest, Michael gave Merrick a long, penetrating look. \"Who is she?\"\n\n\"I'd rather not say at this time.\"\n\nRespecting his friend's right to privacy, Michael nodded. One thing he knew about Merrick Grayslake, and that was he was a very private person, and if he'd felt comfortable revealing the identity of the woman with whom he was involved, he wouldn't have hesitated telling him.\n\nMichael glanced at his watch. It was after three. \"Can you hang out long enough to have dinner with me?\"\n\nMerrick flashed a rare smile. \"Sure.\"\n\n\"Do you want to go out or would you prefer me to throw something together?\"\n\n\"We can eat here.\" Whatever Michael threw together was certain to equal or surpass any restaurant meal. Alex had revealed that it was a family tradition that all the men were taught to cook. The rationale was they would never have to depend on a woman to eat.\n\nMichael pushed to his feet. \"I'll take out a couple of steaks to defrost. When I come back, you can tell me why you left the mountains to talk to me. Do you want anything to drink while I'm up?\"\n\n\"No, thanks.\"\n\n\"I'm going back to the Company,\" Merrick announced when Michael returned, his voice completely void of emotion.\n\nMichael went completely still as an expression of shock froze his features. \"You're kidding, aren't you?\"\n\n\"No, I'm not.\"\n\n\"But why, Gray? I remember you telling me that you'd die a slow death if you had to sit behind a desk.\"\n\nMerrick stared at the water spilling into the pool. \"I'm dying a slow death living in Bolivar. I can go weeks without seeing or talking to another human being. I hadn't realized it, but you saved my life a second time when you asked me to protect Jolene, because I was on a fast track to self-destruction.\"\n\nLooping one denim-covered leg over the opposite knee, Michael nodded slowly. \"Can the church say amen?\"\n\nMerrick smiled and said, \"Amen.\"\n\n\"To be truthful, Gray, you looked like the walking dead.\"\n\n\"Damn. Was I that bad?\"\n\nMichael smiled and said, \"Hell, yeah.\" He sobered quickly. \"Do you think you'll be able to adjust to not being in the field?\"\n\n\"I don't have a choice. I gave the Corps ten years and the Company four, so my options are limited.\"\n\n\"They're not as limited as you think. You took advantage of your stint in the Corps to advance your education, and with your intelligence and Scout Sniper School training I could recommend you for a position at Leesburg Military.\"\n\nVertical lines appeared between Merrick's eyes. \"Why the hard sell, Kirk?\"\n\n\"I've been where you are now,\" Michael said. \"I was mad as hell when I was transferred from intelligence to desk duty at the Pentagon, but during the four years, I used the transfer to my advantage when I went to law school. And when General Harry Cooper became more aggressive with his sexual advances, I knew I had to get out or forfeit my freedom for killing that little toad.\n\n\"I hated giving up my military career because it was all I knew. Twelve years of military school, West Point and then military intelligence. I'd hoped to become a lifer, but after I fell in love with Jolene I never regretted my decision to become a civilian. I teach courses I know and love, and the bonus is that I get to come home every night to my beautiful wife.\"\n\n\"What aren't you telling me?\" Merrick asked, his expression a mask of stone.\n\nMichael leaned closer. \"If you have someone\u2014a woman\u2014then you can't think only of yourself, because even if you're not married to her you're still a couple.\"\n\n\"Come on, Michael. Spill it!\"\n\n\"Even though you're going back it won't be as a civilian. You were trained as an operative, and you'll always be an operative.\"\n\nMerrick's frown deepened. \"You're talking in circles, friend.\"\n\nMichael wanted to tell Merrick that the CIA would take him back if he had one arm and one leg because of his superior intelligence, an intelligence Merrick took for granted.\n\n\"Don't be surprised if you're called to sit in on a few Black Op meetings. Although you won't become an active participant, just being privy to what's going on in the strategy room will put you and your lady at risk.\"\n\n\"Are you trying to discourage me?\"\n\n\"No, Gray. I just want you to know what you may have to face.\"\n\n\"I'll take your warning under advisement. I'll let...\" Merrick's words trailed off when his cell phone rang. \"Excuse me,\" he said to Michael as he reached for his jacket and the phone in the breast pocket. Alex's number came up on the display. Pressing a button, he put the tiny instrument to his ear. \"Please hold on.\"\n\nMichael noticed Merrick's expression softening as a gentle smile spread over his face. \"I'm going to get something to drink,\" he announced, excusing himself.\n\nWaiting until he was alone, Merrick said, \"Hey, baby. How are you?\"\n\n\"I'd be a whole lot better if I could see my boyfriend.\"\n\n\"Where are you?\"\n\n\"I'm back in Mexico City.\"\n\n\"How would you like company this weekend?\"\n\nHer husky laugh came through the earpiece. \"I was just going to ask you the same thing. Merrick?\" she asked when he didn't respond.\n\n\"Yes, baby.\"\n\n\"I've made arrangements to come to the States. I'm flying into IAD.\"\n\n\"I'll meet you.\"\n\n\"No, Merrick. I've arranged for a driver to take me to Bolivar.\"\n\n\"When are you leaving?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"What time are you scheduled to touch down?\"\n\n\"I was told around ten in the morning. I don't have to be back for a week.\"\n\nMerrick could not stop the smile spreading across his face. \"That's good. Ali?\"\n\n\"What is it, Merrick?\"\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\nThere came a swollen silence. \"And I love you, too. Please hang up, Merrick, before I start bawling.\"\n\n\"I love you, I love you, I love you, Alexandra,\" he whispered, then disconnected the call.\n\nFor a brief second, the time it took to blink his eye, Merrick wanted what Michael had\u2014marriage and impending fatherhood. The moment of madness passed when he remembered who he was and Alex's declaration that she wasn't ready for marriage and children.\n\nHe'd existed in a state of suspended animation for two years, and then without warning Michael had come to his sanctuary to ask for his help. Leaving Bolivar and what had become his beloved woods and mountains forced Merrick to step outside himself to see how self-destructive he'd become.\n\nHe went for long walks, slept no more than three hours at a time, stopped cutting his hair and had grown a beard. He'd lost more than thirty pounds because there were days when one blended into the next and he couldn't remember when last he'd eaten.\n\nDespite Michael's misgivings, he would go back to the CIA, rent an apartment in D.C., see Alex whenever possible and return to Bolivar to unwind on weekends.\n\n## Chapter 12\n\nAlex stared out the window as her driver slowed down to less than ten miles an hour around the winding road. Biting down on her lower lip, she closed her eyes as the flutters in her belly increased, silently cursing Merrick for living in the middle of nowhere.\n\nShe'd berated herself over and over when she called Merrick to tell him that she was coming to visit him. She was going to spend the equivalent of an American spring break with a man who'd gotten under her skin like an annoying itch. She, Alexandra Cole, who'd earned a reputation of dating a different man every night, had found herself ensnared in a sensual trap from which there was no escape\u2014and it wasn't that she wanted to escape.\n\nThere was still something about Merrick that frightened her and kept her off balance, yet it wasn't enough to stop her wanting to be with him. She'd also attempted to rationalize why she'd fallen in love with the enigmatic man, and wasn't able to come up with a plausible explanation except that Merrick Grayslake allowed Alexandra Cole to be Alexandra. Not once during the three hours they'd spent at the club in the Zona Rosa had he exhibited a modicum of jealousy when she'd danced with the other men, or attempted to flaunt his machismo with a display of control or ownership.\n\nThey'd started out as friends, and now were lovers. Neither of them wanted to get married, which meant their relationship would be smooth and undemanding.\n\nAlex opened her eyes and exhaled an audible sigh. She didn't think she would ever get used to the dangerous curving stretch of roadway. A hint of a smile softened her mouth when the driver maneuvered onto the unpaved road that led to her lover's house. Her smile widened when she saw him standing on the porch in a pair of jeans and a pullover sweater, waiting for her.\n\nMerrick was off the porch and opening the rear door to the town car within seconds of the driver shifting into Park, leaving the man with the task of removing Alex's luggage from the trunk.\n\nHe scooped her off the leather seat and cradled her to his chest. \"Estas tarde,\" he whispered. He'd expected her three hours before.\n\n\"La salida de Ciudad M\u00e9xico estuvo demorada.\" Alex glared at him through her lashes. Her flight from Mexico City had been delayed several hours. \"The important thing is that I'm here.\" Her explanation, though spoken softly, held a slight edge.\n\n\"I'm not keeping tabs on you, Ali. It's just that I thought something had happened to you.\" Bending slightly, he set her on her feet, one arm going around her waist. Reaching into the pocket of his jeans, he removed a large bill and pressed it into the driver's palm. \"Thank you for keeping her safe.\"\n\nThe driver's head bobbed up and down like a buoy in a storm. \"Thank you, sir.\" He nodded to Alex as if she were royalty. \"Goodbye, miss.\"\n\nShe offered him her dimpled smile. \"Goodbye.\" She stood with Merrick, watching the driver get into his car. They were in the same spot when the taillights disappeared from view. \"I'd paid him, Merrick.\"\n\nPulling her closer, Merrick pressed a kiss on the top of Alex's hair. The last time he saw her, her short hair had afforded her a punk look. But now it was long enough to curl at the ends. The Mexican sun had darkened her face to an even nut-brown shade that fired the gold in her beautiful eyes.\n\n\"That's all right, baby.\"\n\nTilting her chin, Alex met his steady gaze. \"I don't want you to throw your money away.\"\n\nHis expression changed, hardening, until his eyes glowed like flints of steel. \"Do you think I can't afford to date you?\"\n\nHer delicate jaw dropped. \"No, Merrick, it's not\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not what, Alexandra Cole? I wasn't a trust-fund baby, but I can assure you that I'm not a pauper either. So, if you think I'm going to pimp you, I suggest you call your driver and tell him\u2014better yet, I'll drive you back to Arlington.\"\n\nShe stomped her booted foot. \"Stop it, Merrick!\"\n\n\"Stop what, Alexandra?\"\n\nAlex went completely still, her heart pounding painfully under her breasts. She'd flown back to the States to see Merrick when normally she would've gone to Florida to reconnect with her family.\n\n\"Stop putting words in my mouth,\" she countered slowly. \"If I'd thought you were after my money, I never would have given you my number.\"\n\n\"Why did you give me your number?\"\n\nA rush of heat swept over her face, moving lower until she felt as if she were on fire. \"Why are you asking me this now? Why not before we slept together?\"\n\nHis hands came up and he held her shoulders in a firm grip. \"I need to know how committed you are to our relationship.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"Are you afraid that I'm going to cheat on you with another man?\"\n\nMerrick shook his head. \"Fidelity is not even remotely a concern.\"\n\n\"Then don't you dare question my feelings for you. Not when I've just spent thousands of dollars and flown thousands of miles to make my first booty call.\"\n\nMerrick merely stared, complete surprise on his face, tongue-tied. \"Is that what I am to you?\" he asked, recovering his voice. \"You see me as a booty call?\"\n\n\"Huh-uh,\" Alex said flippantly. \"Come inside and I'll prove it.\"\n\nPulling her close and lowering his head, Merrick captured her mouth in a burning kiss that buckled her knees. She sagged weakly against his body, shivers of desire and delight racking her limbs. The sensual assault on her mouth ended as quickly as it'd begun.\n\n\"We'll continue this after we come back, and then you'll see if I'm worth the money you spent for your so-called booty call.\"\n\nAlex smiled, grabbing his hips. \"You don't mind being a booty call?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"I don't mind being your booty call.\"\n\nStanding on tiptoe, she brushed a kiss over his mouth. She squeezed his firm buttocks. \"I hereby stake my claim to this.\"\n\nMerrick released her shoulders, his hand moving lower to cover her breasts over a soft wool sweater. Alex wasn't given time to react when one hand cupped the area between her legs. \"And I stake my claim to these,\" he whispered and was hard-pressed not to laugh when an expression of pure shock froze Alex's delicate features. He leaned in closer. \"Play with fire and you'll get burned, beautiful,\" he taunted.\n\nA slow smile found its way across her face. \"You're a bad, bad boy, Merrick Grayslake.\"\n\nHe lifted his eyebrows. \"You think? You have no idea how very bad I can be.\"\n\n\"Bad boy, bad boy, what you gonna do? What you gonna do when I come for you?\" she sang melodiously.\n\n\"Hey, you sound pretty good,\" he said, complimenting Alex on her singing. \"You sing, dance and play the piano. What other gifts are you hiding from me?\"\n\n\"That's it,\" she said, lifting her shoulders in a perfect Gallic shrug. \"I sing and play the piano because I took lessons. You already know about my dance lessons.\"\n\nCradling her to his chest, Merrick rocked her back and forth. \"What do you say we throw a party tonight?\"\n\nAlex stared up at him staring down at her. \"What kind of party?\"\n\n\"It will be private with just the two of us. We can begin with a wonderful dinner with drinks, then put on some mood music and dance for a while. And if we're not too tired we can retire to the bedroom where I'll show you just how much I've come to love you.\"\n\nHer lids came down, hiding her innermost feelings from Merrick. Never in her wildest dreams did she think she would experience the peace and joy she felt at that moment. Merrick had become the answer to her dream of finding the perfect man. Under his steely stare, impassive expression and deep controlled voice he'd shown her another side of himself whenever he made love to her with a wild abandon that made her forget every man she'd ever known, a lovemaking that made her forget who she was when she discovered an ecstasy that took her to heights of passion she hadn't thought possible.\n\nShe'd chartered a private jet and car service to come to Bolivar, West Virginia, because not only did she love Merrick but she'd also missed his lovemaking.\n\nHer eyelids fluttered as she struggled to bring her fragile emotions under control. Wrapping her arms around his waist and resting her cheek on his chest, she inhaled the familiar scent of his cologne that was the perfect complement to his body's natural fragrance.\n\n\"You don't ever have to tell me that you love me, querido, because I feel your love even when we're thousands of miles apart. Your face is the last thing I see when I close my eyes at night, and when I wake up it is you that I think about. I take your image with me when I go to class and I don't think I would've survived the two weeks in the Yucat\u00e1n with lodgings that were so primitive that once I returned to Mexico City I checked into an upscale hotel for two days, languishing in a Jacuzzi and ordering room service.\"\n\nMerrick pressed a kiss to her forehead. \"Pobrecita, eso es porque tu er es una chica rica maleriada.\"\n\n\"That's where you're wrong. My parents never spoiled me, but I'll never take running water and indoor plumbing for granted ever again.\"\n\nHe wanted to tell Alex that she was spoiled. He'd lost count of the number of times when he was denied a bath and food because he wouldn't do something his foster parents had ordered him to do. The physical and emotional abuse he'd encountered as a child gave him the strength he needed to survive the rigorous training to become a marine who remained in a constant state of readiness for all types of combat situations.\n\n\"I didn't know what you wanted to eat, so I decided to wait until you got here to go to the supermarket.\"\n\nPulling back, Alex smiled at Merrick. \"Let's go, because I'm starved.\"\n\n\"Didn't you eat on the plane?\"\n\n\"No. I had a couple of cups of coffee, but that's all.\"\n\nReaching for her hand, Merrick held it firmly as he bent and picked up her single piece of luggage. \"I'll fix something for you before we leave.\"\n\nAlex pulled back. \"I can pick up something at a fast-food restaurant.\"\n\n\"Not today, beautiful. We'll save the calories and fat-laden preservatives and additives for another day.\"\n\nShe gave him a sidelong glance. \"Don't tell me you're monitoring your figure,\" she teased.\n\n\"What I'm monitoring is my heart and arteries.\" Merrick knew he was going to have to take a physical even for a desk position, and he didn't want anything to compromise his passing.\n\nAlex walked up the porch steps and followed Merrick into the house where she'd spent a wonderful four days. Nothing had changed as she felt an invisible warmth envelop her with a sense of homecoming.\n\nMerrick closed the door to keep the cool mountain air out of the house, and when she turned to face him she saw it. Her eyes widened. \"What's that?\"\n\nMerrick saw the direction of her stunned gaze. A high-powered rifle was propped up against a wall next to the front door. \"It's a rifle.\"\n\n\"I know it's a rifle, Merrick. But why is it there?\"\n\n\"It's for bears.\"\n\n\"What about bears?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's spring and the bears are out with their new cubs looking for food.\"\n\n\"Are you going to shoot them?\"\n\n\"No, Ali. It's more to scare them.\"\n\n\"What if you don't scare them?\"\n\nMerrick captured Alex's anxious gaze with his. \"Then there'll be one less bear around these parts.\"\n\nAlex wrapped her arms around her body in a protective gesture. She knew there was something dangerous about Merrick, and seeing the rifle had just confirmed her suspicions. \"Let's hope you won't have to kill one.\"\n\nHis expression softened as he smiled. \"I've lived here for two years and I've never had to shoot another living creature. And that includes the deer who feed on the brushes behind the house. Some of them are so used to humans that they don't even run when they see you.\"\n\n\"Promise me you won't shoot Bambi or Smokey.\"\n\nTurning his head, Merrick successfully hid a smile. There was no doubt his girlfriend had a soft spot for animals. \"I can't promise that, Ali, especially if a four-hundred-pound bear is standing on my porch looking for food. I can always shoot to wound, but a wounded bear is more dangerous than one who isn't. Stay out of this, darling, and please don't ask me to do something that would put our lives at risk.\"\n\nThe familiar mask had descended again and Alex felt the closeness between her and Merrick dissipate like a drop of water on a heated surface. It was one thing to be separated from Merrick by more than a thousand miles, and another completely when they stood less than a foot apart, yet there was a chasm because of a disagreement.\n\n\"Okay,\" she conceded reluctantly. \"I'll stay out of it.\"\n\nIt wasn't until Merrick let out an audible sigh that he realized he'd been holding his breath. He didn't want to fight with Alex. All he wanted to do was love her. \"I'll take your bag upstairs, then I'll feed you.\"\n\nAlex nodded as she shrugged out of her wool swing coat and placed it on a chair near the door. She was standing in the middle of Merrick's living room because she'd missed him. She hadn't come to West Virginia to fight with him over the area's wildlife population but to spend every night, hour and minute with the man with whom she'd fallen in love, until she had to return to Mexico.\n\nCrossing the living room, she made her way to the half bath off the kitchen to wash her hands. She met Merrick as he entered the kitchen. Sitting on a stool at the cooking island, Alex rested her elbows on the countertop and watched Merrick as he prepared an impromptu lunch.\n\n## Chapter 13\n\nMerrick had been pushing a shopping cart up and down the wide supermarket aisles, stopping whenever Alex stopped to read the label on every product she placed in the cart.\n\nHe groaned for the third time within a matter of minutes. \"Do you always spend this much time reading labels?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" she answered, not bothering to look at him. \"I have to know what I'm eating, Merrick.\"\n\nShaking his head, he let out another groan. \"Baby, please.\"\n\nAlex glanced up, meeting his tortured gaze. \"Why don't you wait for me in the truck?\"\n\nDoes this mean you do everything your wife wants? Merrick recalled his query to Michael, and his friend's reply, I know enough when to advance and when to retreat.\n\nHe and Alex weren't husband and wife, but living together for a week, sharing meals and a bed was no different from what Michael had with Jolene. Merrick was aware that a successful relationship was based on compromise, and he also knew he had to find a middle ground with Alex or what they had, what he hoped to have with her would end in a supermarket because it was his practice to get in and out within half an hour. He didn't read labels, interrogate the in-store butcher about cuts of meat, or the produce manager as to the delivery date of fruits and vegetables.\n\nAbandoned at birth, a loner by nature and by choice, Merrick realized having a relationship with a woman, one whom he loved, was a new experience for him. What he had to do was to learn when to advance and when to retreat.\n\nForcing a smile, he winked at Alex. \"That's all right. I'll wait.\"\n\nAlex placed the can in the half-filled cart. \"I think I have everything.\" She'd planned menus that included Caribbean-inspired dishes she'd learned from her mother.\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\nShe smiled at Merrick. \"Of course I'm sure. Haven't we spent enough time here?\"\n\n\"Too much,\" Merrick mumbled under his breath. \"Yes, dear,\" he said loud enough for her to hear.\n\nAn elderly woman wheeling her cart in their direction patted Merrick's arm. \"What a nice young man you are. I've been married for more than forty years, and I've never been able to get my Danny to come grocery shopping with me.\" Her brown eyes sparkled like copper pennies as she reached over and patted Alex's hand. \"He's a keeper, honey.\"\n\nAlex returned her smile. \"I know.\"\n\nWaiting until the woman was out of earshot, Merrick wound his arm around Alex's waist inside her coat. \"Are you going to keep me, querida?\"\n\nShe affected an attractive moue. \"I'll think about it.\"\n\nLowering his head, he brushed a light kiss over her parted lips. \"Perhaps that'll help you make up your mind.\"\n\nStaring up at Merrick through her lashes, Alex's gold-brown eyes moved slowly over his face, cataloguing each of his well-defined features. \"I think I'm going to need a little more convincing.\"\n\nDesire darkened his eyes and tightened the skin over his high cheekbones. It'd been more than a month since he'd been with Alex, and the time away from her just served to increase his need for her. He, Merrick Grayslake, who'd lived his life believing he didn't need anyone, needed Alexandra Cole. Unwittingly, she'd become a part of him, the part that made him whole.\n\n\"I believe I have the answer.\" Leaning closer, he whispered, \"Let's go home.\"\n\nAlex lay in bed, listening to the sound of sleet pelting the windows. It was as if spring had forgotten the Alleghany Mountain region. Midday temperatures rose to the mid-forties but dropped below freezing with the setting sun. A popping sound of burning wood joined the rhythmic tapping. Merrick had started a fire in the fireplace before going into the bathroom to shower. He'd asked her to join him but she'd turned him down. It was their last night together and as the seconds ticked off she felt as if she were losing tiny pieces of herself each time they made love.\n\nThe tears welling up in her eyes overflowed, dotting the pillow under her head. How, she thought, was she going to make it through the next ten weeks without the man she loved? She'd made a mistake, a grievous error in returning to the States\u2014in coming to see Merrick rather than her family\u2014because it made leaving him that much more difficult. The side of the mattress dipped and she felt the warmth of the man who'd managed to occupy her every waking moment. Shifting on her side, she went into his strong, protective embrace.\n\n\"This is our last night together,\" she whispered tearfully.\n\n\"Don't say that, Ali,\" Merrick countered softly. \"It is not our last night together. Our last night won't come for a very long time.\"\n\nShe pounded his shoulder with her fist. \"You know what I'm talking about.\"\n\nHe caught her wrist. \"No, I don't know what you're talking about. Your school term will be over in a few months, then we can be together\u2014every day, every night.\"\n\n\"We can't do this again.\"\n\n\"Do what, querida?\"\n\n\"We can't see each other until I finish my courses.\" A fresh wave of tears ensued.\n\nTightening his hold on her body, Merrick eased Alex to lie atop his body, her legs sandwiched between his, the fingers of his right hand making soothing motions on her back.\n\nHe closed his eyes. \"Is it your intent to rip my heart out?\"\n\nShe buried her face between his neck and shoulder. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"This is not about you, Ali. You're not in this by yourself. I've shared and said things to you I've never told another person. It was as if I had to wait thirty-five years to feel what should be a natural human emotion\u2014love. The love a baby feels for its mother or father, the love between a man and a woman and the love one feels for those with whom one shares a family bond.\n\n\"You've taught me to laugh, that it's all right to tease, be teased, and for that I will love you forever. Being with you has taught me that where I've come from is not as important as where I'm going. And wherever I go I want you with me.\"\n\nAlex's right hand trailed down Merrick's shoulder; it moved still lower along his rib cage, her fingers feathering over the curve of his buttocks and muscled thigh. All of her senses were intensified as she inhaled the clean masculine scent of his body, her fingertips grazing the crisp mat of chest hair and the firm flesh covering muscle and sinew. Merrick Grayslake reminded her of the statues of tall, powerful Mexican gods.\n\nReaching between their bodies, she cradled his flaccid sex; it swelled against her palm, increasing in girth until her fingers did not meet. The heat, hardness and the strong throbbing against her palm ignited a fire that swept through Alex like a lighted fuse. Her body vibrated liquid fire, the tremors between her thighs and groin buffeted by gusts of desire that rendered her close to fainting.\n\n\"Love me,\" she chanted over and over until it became a litany.\n\nMerrick had told Alexandra that he loved her, but it never seemed to be enough. He had to show her. Reaching for the condom on the table on his side of the bed, he slipped it on. Slowly, methodically, he became a cartographer, charting every inch of her body as he began at the top of her head and moved slowly down as if sampling a sweet, frothy confection. He ignored the soft moans coming from Alex's throat, the rise and fall of her firm round breasts over her narrow rib cage, the contracting muscles in her flat, firm belly and the trembling of her legs as she writhed on the sheets.\n\nMerrick was relentless as he alternated laving the folds at the apex of her thighs with plunging his tongue into the most secret recess of her body. It was as if he wanted to devour her whole, put her inside himself wherein she would be with him even when separated by thousands of miles.\n\nWhen his own passion rose to fiery proportions, he eased himself inside her, making them one. He felt her heat as it rippled under his hands, inhaled the rising scent of their lovemaking that had become an erotic aphrodisiac. His desire for Alex, his love for her, surpassed every longing, craving and aspiration he'd ever known.\n\nAlex cried for the second time within minutes, this time as waves of ecstasy washed over her. She closed her eyes, gasping in the sweet agony tearing her asunder. It eased slightly before she was hurled higher, climaxing, her orgasms overlapping one another until she lay, struggling to catch her breath.\n\nMerrick felt the strong contractions squeezing his blood-engorged flesh, the sensations sending him over the edge. Cupping her hips, he quickened his thrusts until the dam broke and he spilled his passion into the sheath when it was Alex's body he craved.\n\nThe pleasure she'd offered him was pure and explosive, satisfying and sweet. A deep feeling of peace entered him as he savored the remnants of the lingering sensation that rendered him as weak as a newborn.\n\n\"Te amo,\" he whispered in her ear.\n\nAlex smiled, enjoying the weight of his body pressing hers down to the firm mattress. \"Yo, tambi\u00e9n, mi amor.\"\n\nThey loved each other, but what were they going to do about it? She would complete her studies and return to the States as an architectural historian. She planned to secure a position with a historic preservation, trust or museum, then what?\n\nWould she or Merrick be content to see each other whenever she was free or would she want more? And she refused to think of marriage and children as the more.\n\nHe'd admitted he didn't want to marry or father children, but she did\u2014though not now. Not when she wanted a career. Alex willed her mind blank. She couldn't afford to think of a future with Merrick Grayslake when marriage and children weren't her priority.\n\nWithout warning, he reversed their positions. They lay together until their breathing deepened and they fell asleep, his body still joined with hers.\n\nThe sky had brightened with the dawn of a new day, it appearing a hoary gray, when Merrick and Alex resumed their dance of desire, leaving both hungrier for each other than at their first coupling.\n\nBoth knew it was a mistake, but love wasn't touted to be rational or judicious. And when Merrick saw Alex off at the airport before she boarded a private jet scheduled to land in Mexico City, he knew when he saw her again the meadow surrounding his house would be filled with wildflowers.\n\nHe would honor Alex's request and wait for her return.\n\nThere was one thing life had taught him and that was patience. It had served him well when he'd become a marine sniper, and it had saved his life as a covert operative.\n\nMerrick knew there was something special the moment he laid eyes on the petite woman, unaware that she would be the one to change him and his destiny.\n\n## Chapter 14\n\nAlex tightened her grip on the cell phone, the pressure leaving an imprint on her palm as she stared out the oval window of the ColeDiz jet as it circled the Fort Lauderdale\u2013Hollywood International Airport in preparation for a landing. It was after two in the morning.\n\nHer father had called her forty-eight hours before to inform her that the family was gathering in West Palm Beach to celebrate Timothy Cole-Thomas's retirement as CEO of ColeDiz International, Ltd. She'd vacillated whether to call Merrick to let him know she would be in the States for the weekend but changed her mind; there wasn't enough time and seeing him would reopen the wound that had healed from their last encounter.\n\nShe'd returned to the universidad assailed with feelings that left her in an agonizing maelstrom of acute loss. She'd spent a restless two days trying to figure out why she'd fallen in love with a stranger, why Merrick Grayslake and not some of the other men she'd dated. And her love for him wasn't some silly schoolgirl crush or virginal infatuation. She would turn thirty in November, which meant she was a grown woman, an independent woman in control of her life and destiny.\n\nMerrick admitted that he'd told her things about himself he'd never told anyone, yet when she replayed their conversations she realized he actually had told her very little about himself. She knew he'd been orphaned at birth, had been in the Marine Corps and had been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. What he hadn't disclosed was how he supported himself, nor had he explained the many scars marring his body.\n\nAlex was mature enough to admit that she'd been drawn to the enigmatic man because he radiated a danger that turned her on. He was akin to a graphic comic superhero prowling the nighttime streets and alleys looking to rescue the weak and right the wrongs perpetrated by those who opposed justice. She'd dubbed him Sir Grayslake, and he'd become her knight in shining armor.\n\nShe would spend two nights in Florida before returning to Mexico. Then she would begin counting down the weeks until she was reunited with the man she loved.\n\nAlex was surprised to see her brother Gabriel waiting for her once she cleared Customs. What shocked her was his uncanny resemblance to their father. Gabriel had become a professional musician like David Cole, and like the elder Cole, Gabriel had solidified his place in history as a Grammy Award winner. Gabriel had surpassed his father when he earned an Oscar for a movie sound track.\n\nSmiling, she quickened her step. Gabriel met her and swung her up off her feet. \"What's with the mustache?\" she asked, kissing his cheek. Pulling back, she stared into a pair of large gold-brown eyes, the only feature they'd inherited from Serena Morris-Cole. His long, thin nose, high cheekbones, olive coloring and wolfish dimpled smile were David Cole's. He'd pierced both ears, and tiny gold hoops were suspended from each.\n\n\"I thought I'd try it out for a while.\"\n\n\"Are you trying to look older?\" Alex teased as he put her down. Gabriel, the eldest of David and Serena's four children, had recently celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday.\n\nSmiling his wolfish, lopsided grin, Gabriel shook his head, his long, wavy, prematurely gray\u2013streaked hair secured in a ponytail at the base of his neck, swaying with the motion. \"No, Alex. The gray hair is enough.\"\n\nMost of the men in her family who were direct descendants of her grandfather, Samuel Cole, had inherited his gene for graying prematurely, and her brother was no different.\n\nLooping an arm around his waist, she hugged him. \"Why don't you dye it?\"\n\nGabriel ruffled her short hair, then reached for her hand. \"I'll admit to being a little arrogant, but vain is not in my vocabulary.\"\n\nAlex fell in step with her brother as he led her out of the airport to where he'd parked his car. \"You're arrogant and vain, Gabriel Morris Cole.\"\n\nAt six-three, Gabriel slowed his stride to accommodate his sister's shorter legs. \"Dad was sorry about the short notice, but it couldn't be helped.\"\n\n\"I thought Timothy was going to stay at least through the summer.\"\n\n\"Apparently, he changed his mind. Timothy says that Diego is more than prepared to take over as CEO.\"\n\nShe gave Gabriel a sidelong glance. \"What do you think?\"\n\nGabriel lifted a shoulder. \"I wouldn't know one way or the other. I promised myself a long time ago that I'd never get involved in the family business. Aunt Nancy and Josephine's children eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. I'm a musician, so that lets me off the hook.\"\n\n\"So was Dad, but he was still CEO of ColeDiz for nine years before he met and married Mom.\"\n\n\"That's true, but he couldn't wait to transfer the responsibility to Timothy.\"\n\n\"Dad gave up ColeDiz and then set up Serenity Records,\" Alex argued softly. \"Musician or not, he was still a businessman.\"\n\nDavid Cole had set up his own record company to showcase new and upcoming talent in all music genres. Although his company was small when compared to the larger ones, he'd earned two Grammys for Producer of the Year and his recording artists had earned and garnered more than a dozen nominations.\n\n\"Dad knows I don't want to become involved with Serenity. That's why he turned it over to Ana and Jason.\"\n\nGabriel led Alex over to a Porsche GT2. Pressing a button on a remote device, he unlocked the low-slung, silver sports car. Opening the passenger-side door, he waited until Alex was seated before he closed it and came around to sit beside her.\n\n\"When did you get this?\" she asked. \"It smells brand-new.\"\n\nStarting the engine, Gabriel shifted into gear and pulled out of the parking space. \"I've had it for about a month. It is my birthday present to myself.\"\n\n\"It's about time you came out of your pocket and got a decent ride,\" Alex mumbled. Gabriel had become the brunt of family jokes because when he wasn't touring with his band he drove a clunker that had seen better days. \"What else are you holding out on me?\"\n\nGabriel smiled. \"I'm buying a house.\"\n\nShifting on her seat, Alex stared at him and asked, \"Where?\"\n\n\"Cotuit. It's on Cape Cod.\"\n\n\"What or who is in Cape Cod?\"\n\nGabriel had to remember that he hadn't seen his sister since the beginning of the year. \"I've been accepted as an artist-in-residence at a high school in a Boston suburb.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't it be better if you rented a place?\"\n\n\"No, because I've found the perfect little house.\"\n\n\"How little, Gabe?\"\n\n\"It's a restored two-story farmhouse set on six acres of beautifully landscaped waterfront property. I plan to renovate it by raising the ceilings in the second-floor bedrooms and expand both floors by at least a thousand square feet on either side.\"\n\n\"It sounds as if your little house is going to become a big house.\"\n\n\"I'm used to having a lot of space.\"\n\nAlex nodded. They'd grown up in a house with nearly ten thousand square feet of living space, and they each had their own bedroom suites.\n\n\"How did Mom and Dad react when you told them you were moving to Massachusetts?\"\n\nGabriel's teeth showed whitely under his trim mustache. \"They had the nerve to open a bottle of champagne and toast each other.\"\n\n\"That's cold, Gabe.\"\n\n\"You think? After Dad downed two glasses he said, 'It's about time. The next piece of good news should be that you're getting married.'\"\n\nAlex shook her head. \"What's up with our folks trying to marry us off?\"\n\nGabriel maneuvered off a four-lane road and onto the interstate in the direction of Boca Raton. \"They want grandchildren, Alex.\"\n\n\"Well, they're not going to get one out of me for a long time,\" she said.\n\n\"Same here,\" he concurred.\n\nEyelids drooping, Alex relaxed against the back of her seat. \"Wake me when we get home.\" Although she'd lived in Virginia for two years, she still thought of Boca Raton as home.\n\nAlex woke up late the next morning to knocking on her bedroom door. Bright Florida sunshine poured through the many windows. \"Come in,\" she called out.\n\nThe door opened and Ana walked in wearing a sundress over her bathing suit. \"Rise and shine, sleepyhead! We're leaving for West Palm in half an hour.\"\n\nPulling a sheet over her head, Alex moaned, \"Please tone it down, Ana.\"\n\n\"What time did you get in?\"\n\nShe lowered the sheet and pushed herself into a sitting position as Ana flopped down on the side of the bed. \"The plane landed around two-thirty, and we didn't get here until four.\" Combing her fingers through her short hair, she smiled at her younger sister. \"Who's here?\"\n\n\"Everyone came except Chris. Emily said he's involved in a federal racketeering case that just went to the jury.\" Their first cousin's husband, Christopher Delgado, a former governor of New Mexico, was now a judge.\n\nPushing back the sheet, Alex swung her legs over the side of the bed, undoing the tiny pearl buttons on the front of her cotton nightgown as she headed for an adjoining bathroom.\n\n\"Did Mom make coffee?\" she asked.\n\n\"I think Dad made it this morning, because it was strong enough to grow hair on my chest.\"\n\n\"I need it strong. Can you please bring me a cup?\"\n\nAna moved off the bed to do her bidding while Alex stepped out of her nightgown, leaving it on a low bench in the corner of the expansive bathroom. She was tired\u2014no, the fact was she was exhausted. The late flight and not enough sleep had her out of sorts. Opening the door to the shower stall, she stepped in, turned on the faucets and adjusted the water temperature. The cool water was the antidote. It revived her and by the time Ana returned with a steaming mug of coffee Alex was wide awake.\n\nFive generations of Coles had gathered on the lawn at the family West Palm Beach compound to salute Timothy Cole-Thomas's undaunted dedication to running a business empire that included coffee plantations in Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and several banana plantations in Belize. At sixty, Timothy had successfully shepherded ColeDiz International, Ltd., through recessions and economic instability to realize a profit every year in his thirty-year term.\n\nAlex sat next to Dana Nichols-Cole, whose three-month-old daughter had fallen asleep in her arms. \"May I hold her?\" Dana put the infant in Alex's outstretched arms.\n\nDana and Tyler were seeking to legalize the adoption of the baby they'd named Astra. Tyler Cole had delivered the infant, but couldn't save her fifteen-year-old mother who'd been abandoned by her own mother at the age of seven. Unfortunately, the pregnant teenager had spent most of her short-lived life in foster and group homes.\n\nGabriel leaned over Alex's shoulder. \"Hey, Mama,\" he teased, winking and flashing his trademark dimpled smile.\n\n\"I'm going to hurt you, Gabriel Cole.\"\n\nHe leaned closer. \"I'll let you hurt me after you get pregnant.\"\n\nDana stared at her husband's cousin. \"Are you pregnant?\"\n\nAlex swatted at her brother. \"Get the hell outta here, Gabriel!\" she hissed through clenched teeth.\n\n\"Who's pregnant now?\" Tyler Cole asked as he sat down beside his wife. Tyler had become the family resident ob-gyn.\n\nAlex rolled her eyes at Tyler. \"Don't look at me.\"\n\nGabriel rested an arm on Tyler's broad shoulder. The first cousins looked enough alike to pass for brothers. \"Unlike your sisters, mine have struck out in the romance department because they can't seem to tell the difference between a winner and a loser.\"\n\nAlex opened her mouth to announce that she'd fallen in love with a winner but caught herself in time. What she had with Merrick would remain her secret\u2014for now.\n\n\"Speak for yourself, Gabriel. Why is it I don't see a woman hanging on your arm?\"\n\n\"That's because I'm not one to advertise my business.\"\n\nAlex's retort was thwarted when Diego stood and tapped the handle of a knife against a water goblet. All gazes were focused on the tall, powerfully built man in a white guayabera and jeans. \"May I please have everyone's attention?\"\n\n\"I want to e-e-e-at n-o-o-w!\" wailed a young child before being hushed by his mother.\n\nDiego lowered his chin and bit back a smile. \"I believe that's my cue to make this quick.\" His head came up, black eyes smoldering with a lazy seductiveness that fired the imaginations of the few women who'd come to know him intimately.\n\n\"As most of you know, my father is a man of few words, preferring instead to let his actions speak for him. If it worked for him over the past three decades, then why should I try to fix what isn't broken?\" He raised his goblet in a mock salute. \"To my uncles, Martin and David, and my father, Timothy Cole-Thomas, I salute you and pray for your blessings as the next CEO of ColeDiz International, Ltd.\" He turned and extended the glass to his fretful nephew. \"Now we can eat.\"\n\nAll of the young children stood up and cheered while their parents and grandparents shook their heads. Collectively, the descendants of Samuel and Marguerite-Josefina Cole were boisterous, and at times bodacious, but they were also protective of and fiercely loyal to anyone who claimed Cole blood. And there was an unspoken rule that if you threaten one, the threat extends to all.\n\nGabriel patted Alex's back. \"Don't get up. I'll bring you something to eat.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes at him, still smarting about his remark that she'd picked up losers. \"Don't try to placate me, big brother.\"\n\nA smile slipped through her impassive expression as her brother walked toward the table where servers were filling plates with mounds of hot and cold dishes. It was on a rare occasion that one saw an adult Cole woman standing in line waiting to be served. The tradition, which had begun when Martin Cole became CEO, was that the women rule and their men serve. The result was all females were protected, pampered and adored.\n\nDana held out her arms for her daughter. \"Let me take her into the house and put her to bed.\"\n\nAt the exact moment she relinquished the sleeping infant, a chorus of screams sliced through the undercurrent of voices raised in conversation and laughter. Four preteen boys and one girl had jumped into the Olympic-size pool\u2014fully dressed. It was another tradition that had survived several generations.\n\nAlex laughed when she heard the colorful language of their parents chastising them for their unruly behavior. She'd lost count of the number of times she'd jumped into her grandparents' pool, or into her own, much to the dismay of her parents, who couldn't understand why their children would want to sit around in wet street clothes when they could've worn a swimsuit. What the adults failed to understand was that it was an open act of rebellion in order to flaunt their independent spirit.\n\nHer smile faded when she recalled a few occurrences when as an adolescent she'd challenged her mother's authority. Alex had learned to get over on David Cole, but Serena was another matter. It'd taken only two confrontations with her mother to come to the conclusion that she'd better get her act together or spend her teenage years in lockdown.\n\nA faraway expression filled her eyes when she tried imagining what kind of mother she would become if or when she opted for motherhood. Would she be indulgent and tolerant like her grandmother Marguerite-Josefina, or straightforward and practical like her own mother?\n\nThere was never a question of not understanding what Serena said or meant. However, Alex had lost count of the number of times she'd gone to her father to enlist his support to soften her mother's stance. That all changed when David Cole called a rare family meeting, explaining that he would not tolerate his children's attempt to undermine their mother's authority, and that put an end to Alex's clandestine meetings with her father.\n\nPrerecorded music blared from speakers as the noise level escalated. Alex lifted her eyebrows when she saw an attractive young woman with stylishly-cut, shoulder-length hair talking to Diego. Even from this distance, he appeared to be equally enthralled as he moved closer to listen to what she was saying.\n\n\"Now, that looks serious,\" whispered a familiar voice.\n\nAlex turned to find Ana taking a chair next to her. \"Who is she?\"\n\n\"She's a weather girl with one of the television networks. If she believes she's going to become Mrs. Diego Cole-Thomas, then she's in for a world of hurt.\"\n\nAlex nodded. \"He told me that he's not ready to settle down.\"\n\nAna emitted a delicate snort. \"Now, if the woman was named ColeDiz, then she'd at least have a fighting chance.\"\n\nThe sisters discussed their marriage-shy cousin until their brothers returned carrying plates of food. Jason served his twin while Gabriel placed Alex's on the table in front of her.\n\nAna gave Jason a forlorn look. \"Can you please bring me something to drink?\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Alex said, chiming in.\n\n\"Damn, Ana,\" Jason snarled. \"You should've told me when I was up there.\"\n\nGabriel wrapped an arm around Jason's neck, pulling him close. \"Don't let them stress you out, little brother. I'll get the drinks while you fix me a plate.\"\n\nAlex squinted at her younger sister as Ana dipped a piece of calamari into a small cup of piquant sauce. \"Sometimes you ride Jason a little too hard.\"\n\nThe seafood dangled from the tines of Ana's fork as she hesitated putting it into her mouth. \"Jason's a good sport.\"\n\n\"He's a good sport because you're his twin sister. But you overdo it.\"\n\nAna affected a pout. \"You have Gabriel and I have Jason.\"\n\n\"But I don't take advantage of him, Ana.\"\n\nTaking a bite of the calamari, Ana chewed it thoughtfully. \"All right, Alex. I'll ease up on him.\"\n\nAs fraternal twins, she and Jason were inseparable, existing in a private world where one was able to finish the other's sentences. Older by eight minutes, Jason had always protected his twin although her stronger personality overshadowed his more laid-back, quiet one.\n\nAlex spent the rest of the afternoon eating, drinking, dancing, swimming and interacting with her many relatives. The sun had set, the caterers were gone and those who'd planned to spend the remainder of the weekend in West Palm Beach claimed bedrooms in the twenty-four-room mansion.\n\nMichael and a very pregnant Jolene decided to stay with his parents at their Palm Beach condominium. With his wife in her eighth month of confinement, Michael had opted to drive to Florida in lieu of flying.\n\nAlex returned to Boca Raton with her parents while her siblings stayed behind to hang out with their many cousins. There was talk of them going to a popular West Palm Beach dance club.\n\nShe was scheduled to fly back to Mexico Sunday morning along with Emily Kirkland, her three children and her cousin's sister and brother-in-law, Sara and Salem Lassiter, and their children. The Kirklands and Lassisters would deplane in Las Cruces, New Mexico, before the jet continued on to Mexico City.\n\nShe checked her cell phone and realized she'd missed Merrick's call. Pressing a button, Alex listened for a break in the connection. She smiled when hearing his signature \"Hey, baby.\"\n\n\"Hey, yourself,\" she whispered. \"What are you doing up so late?\" The glowing numbers on the clock on the bedside table read 1:10 a.m.\n\n\"I couldn't sleep.\"\n\nVertical lines appeared between Alex's eyes. \"I've never known you to have insomnia.\"\n\nA deep sensual chuckle came through the earpiece. \"That's because whenever we're together I don't have a sleep problem. You're like morphine.\"\n\n\"What do you know about morphine?\" she teased.\n\nThere was a moment of silence, and Merrick said, \"Forget I mentioned it. Even though it's a little after midnight where you are I'll let you go. I'd planned to call earlier, but thought perhaps you'd gone out with your friends.\"\n\n\"I'm not in Mexico City, Merrick.\"\n\n\"Where are you?\"\n\n\"I'm in Florida. I came early this morning and I'm leaving later on today. The family got together to celebrate my cousin Diego taking over as CEO of ColeDiz. I wanted to call you and ask if you wanted to meet me here, but there wasn't enough time.\"\n\nThere came another pause from Merrick. \"Have you told anyone\u2014your family, about us?\"\n\n\"No. And I don't like keeping secrets from them.\"\n\n\"You want them to know about us?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do, Merrick.\"\n\n\"I'd like you to wait before you tell them.\"\n\nA cold chill snaked its way down her spine, and she went completely still. There was something in his voice that set off warning bells in her head. \"Why do you want me to wait?\"\n\n\"I can't tell you now.\"\n\n\"What are you hiding from me?\"\n\n\"Nothing, Ali. It's something I'd rather not discuss on the telephone. I'll tell you everything when we see each other again.\"\n\n\"That's not going to be until the beginning of June,\" she said in protest.\n\n\"That's when I'll tell you.\"\n\nShe squeezed the tiny instrument in frustration. \"You offer me some cryptic mumbo jumbo and expect me to wait two months for an explanation.\"\n\n\"What I'd like for you to do is trust me, Ali.\"\n\n\"You want me to trust you when you're hiding things from me. I really don't know who you are, what you do, how\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop it, Alexandra!\" Merrick hadn't shouted the command, but the stinging effect was the same. \"I'm going to end this call,\" he said in a dangerously quiet tone. \"We won't discuss this again until I see you. Have a safe flight back, and I'll call you tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"Goodbye, Merrick.\"\n\n\"No, Ali. Good night.\"\n\nThe willfulness she'd struggled all of her adult life to control surfaced, making her unwilling to compromise. \"Goodbye, Merrick,\" she repeated, then abruptly disconnected the call.\n\nShe threw the phone and it landed on an armchair. Alex flopped down to the bed and closed her eyes. She asked herself for the first time since coming face-to-face with Merrick Grayslake, was she in over her head?\n\n## Chapter 15\n\nMoira knocked on the open door to Alex's room and walked in. Clothes were stacked in neat piles atop the double dresser and bedside table. Alexandra Morris was preparing to leave Mexico City. Classes had ended the day before and final marks were posted in the lobby of the converted convent earlier that morning.\n\nAlex turned and smiled at her friend. \"Well, this is it. We're done.\"\n\nMoira flopped down on a straight-back armchair. \"You are done.\"\n\nAlex halted folding a pair of jeans. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"I'm staying on.\"\n\nShe stared at Moira, baffled. The week before, Moira had suddenly burst into tears, and when Alex questioned her, she said she'd suddenly had an attack of homesickness.\n\nClosing the distance between them, Alex sat on the arm of the chair and looped an arm around Moira's neck. \"What's up, girlfriend?\"\n\nMoira's dark blue eyes filled with tears but didn't fall. \"I'm pregnant.\"\n\nAlex's mouth formed a perfect O before she pursed her lips. She didn't know whether to be happy or sad for her friend, but decided on the former. \"Congratulations.\"\n\nEyelids fluttering, Moira rested her forehead on Alex's arm and cried happy tears. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"When's the big day?\"\n\n\"Early December.\"\n\nSitting up straighter, Alex swept her gaze over Moira's slender body. \"You're already three months pregnant?\"\n\nMoira nodded. \"I'd suspected for some time that I was carrying Hernando's baby, but you could say I was in denial.\"\n\n\"Hernando,\" Alex repeated, her voice rising slightly. \"Are you talking about our Professor Hernando Rivera?\"\n\nMoira nodded as she blushed to the roots of her pale hair. \"Yes.\"\n\nAlex wrinkled her delicate nose. \"I don't believe it. Here I thought you were fooling around with Umberto but instead it was our brilliant, esteemed Professor Rivera.\"\n\nMoira bit down on her lower lip. \"I hadn't planned on having an affair with him\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't you dare apologize to me,\" Alex said, interrupting her. \"You're a grown woman, Moira.\"\n\nHer head came up, her expression soft and angelic. \"He's wonderful, Alex, as a lover, teacher and husband.\"\n\n\"You're married?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Moira said, smiling.\n\n\"When did you get married?\"\n\n\"Yesterday. Because I'm not Catholic, we decided on a civil wedding.\"\n\n\"Do you love him, Moira?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do.\"\n\n\"Then, that's all that matters.\"\n\nA warm glow flowed through Moira and she felt freer than she had in hours. She'd called her father to tell him that she wasn't coming home because she'd fallen in love and married a Mexican man. Her father hadn't waited for her to explain that the man was one of the world's most respected art historians when he'd hung up on her.\n\n\"I wanted to wait until after the baby is born to marry Hernando, but he refused because of his position at the universidad.\"\n\n\"He's right, Moira, even though it's not frowned upon for a woman to have a child without the benefit of marriage nowadays.\"\n\nMoira hugged Alex. \"I knew you would be happy for me.\"\n\nAlex returned the hug. \"Why wouldn't I be happy for you? I wish you all the happiness you deserve\u2014and more.\"\n\n\"I hope we'll stay in touch with each other, Alex.\"\n\n\"Of course we will.\"\n\n\"Will you come by tomorrow night and have dinner with us? I told Hernando that I didn't want you to leave Mexico without saying goodbye.\"\n\n\"Of course I'll come.\" That meant she would have to delay going back to Virginia.\n\nMoira popped up like a jack-in-the-box.\n\nLeaning over, she pressed a kiss to Alex's cheek. \"I'll see you tomorrow.\"\n\nAlex was still sitting on the arm of the chair when Moira left, closing the door quietly behind her. Alex's friend had accused Hernando Rivera of having the hots for her when it was Moira Morgan he was actually in love with.\n\nRising from the chair, she had resumed the boring task of packing, when her cell phone rang. Reaching for the instrument, she flipped open the cover without looking at the display.\n\n\"Do you have a flight schedule for me, Joelyn?\"\n\n\"Ali?\"\n\n\"Merrick?\"\n\n\"I can assure you that I'm not Joelyn.\"\n\n\"And I wouldn't want you to be her.\" Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Alex stared at the worn terra-cotta floor. After their rather heated exchange what now seemed aeons ago, she and Merrick had resumed their nightly telephone calls.\n\n\"Did you pass everything?\" he asked.\n\nHer smile was dazzling. \"I managed to get top honors.\"\n\n\"Congratulations.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"I'd like to give you a gift.\"\n\n\"For what, Merrick?\"\n\n\"It's not every day that someone earns a graduate degree.\"\n\n\"Thousands get graduate degrees every year.\"\n\n\"How many people get to become architectural historians?\"\n\n\"Well, you're right,\" she conceded.\n\n\"I know I'm right. And because I'm bigger and stronger than you it would be in your best interest to accept what I'm offering.\"\n\n\"What's with the intimidation?\" she teased.\n\n\"What's with the interrogation?\" he countered.\n\n\"Okay, Merrick. What is it?\"\n\n\"I've arranged for a private jet to fly you to Rome Friday morning. Try to get some sleep because I have something special planned for the evening. Later on today a courier will deliver a packet containing your e-ticket and flight information. I've also arranged for ground transportation to get you and your luggage to the airport. When you arrive I'll be waiting for you once you clear Customs.\" There was a pause before he said, \"Hold on, Ali. Porter\u00f2 l'un col rubino.\"\n\n\"Merrick?\"\n\n\"Yes, baby?\"\n\n\"Where are you?\"\n\n\"I'm in Rome. How's your Italian?\"\n\nShe couldn't believe he was calling her from Italy. \"It's definitely not as good as yours.\"\n\n\"I'm going to have to hang up because the store clerk is glaring at me. I'll see you Friday night.\"\n\nBefore Alex could accept, reject or protest, he ended the call. Falling back on the bed, she kicked her legs the way she'd done as a child.\n\nShe never would've predicted that her life would change so dramatically since New Year's Eve. Her life had changed, she had changed and when she saw Merrick Grayslake again she would thank him for helping her to become a woman in the truest sense of the word.\n\nWithin minutes of exiting Customs, Alex spied a man holding a placard with the name Cole printed in large black letters. She approached him. \"I'm Alexandra Cole.\"\n\n\"Dare il benvenuto a Roma, signorina. Prender\u00f2 il suo bagaglio.\"\n\nHe spoke Italian too quickly for her to understand more than welcome and baggage. She smiled. \"Grazie.\"\n\nThe man picked up her bags and motioned for her to follow him. It was 9:00 p.m. in Rome and the airport was teeming with departing and arriving travelers.\n\nAlex had taken Merrick's advice and slept during the transatlantic flight. An hour before they were scheduled to touch down at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport, she'd showered in one of the onboard bathrooms and changed into the ubiquitous little black dress and strappy sandals. The instructions in the packet indicated a 10:00 p.m. dinner reservation.\n\nShe saw Merrick leaning against a column. He straightened when their gazes met. They hadn't seen each other in three months, and he'd changed. His hair was longer and the sun had darkened his face to a deep copper-brown. If it hadn't been for his distinctive eye color Alex wouldn't have recognized him.\n\nMerrick did not move forward because he couldn't at that moment. Rooted to the spot, he watched the muscles in Alex's bare shapely legs and thighs flex and relax as she made her way toward him. The skimpy black dress with a scooped neckline and capped sleeves outlined the delicious curves of her sexy, petite body. Her hair that looked as if she'd styled it with her fingers framed her round face in sensual disarray.\n\nIt was when he saw her face that a quiet storm stirred in his groin. Smoky eye shadow, a coat of mascara on feathery black lashes and the vermilion color on her lush, full lips made him want to strip her naked and make love to her. But he hadn't invited her to Italy to make love to her, but to show her much he was in love with her.\n\nGo to her, a silent voice urged Merrick. He took one step, then another, closing the distance. He let out his breath when he felt the crush of her breasts against his chest.\n\nCradling her face between his hands, he lowered his head and brushed his mouth over hers. \"Dare il benvenuto a Roma.\"\n\n\"Grazie, mio amore.\"\n\nMerrick released her when he hadn't wanted to. \"Are you hungry?\"\n\nAlex stared at the man whom she loved beyond reason. \"Yes.\" She hadn't eaten anything since early that morning. She was hungry, but not for food. She'd missed Merrick, missed everything about him.\n\nPutting his arm around her tiny waist, he pressed a kiss to her hair. \"Let's get out of here. I made a reservation for dinner at a restaurant not far from our hotel.\"\n\nThe drive from the airport took longer than expected, and when Merrick and Alex arrived at the hotel on the Via Veneto there was only enough time to store her luggage in the room before they had to leave.\n\nTucked away in an alley off a side street, the restaurant resembled a grotto with brick-and-mortar walls, a vaulted ceiling and water flowing from a fountain into a pool.\n\nThe flickering light from the candle on the table shimmered off Alex's flawless brown face. Merrick stared at her. Three months. It'd been that long since he'd last seen Alex and it appeared as if she'd changed. The change wasn't her looks, but her demeanor. She'd matured during their separation; a woman had replaced the open, spontaneous girl.\n\nAlex took a sip of wine, then touched the corners of her mouth with a napkin. The restaurant's ambience, her dining partner and the food were incredible. She'd ordered chicken in a light wine and butter sauce while Merrick had chosen linguine with a broiled seafood medley.\n\n\"What made you choose Italy over some other country, Merrick?\" Her query shattered the comfortable silence.\n\nHe put down his wineglass. \"I remember you saying you enjoyed visiting here, and when you finished your studies you'd planned to come back not as a student but as a tourist.\"\n\nHer eyebrows flickered as she met his steady gaze. \"Do you remember everything I say?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he admitted. \"But only if it's worth remembering.\"\n\nAlex studied the man sharing the small round table with her. He'd become a chameleon. Dressed in a sand-colored linen suit with a sky-blue shirt and navy blue tie, he appeared sophisticated and urbane. And with his hair texture, eye color and sharply defined features he could be a citizen from any country in the world.\n\n\"How long can you hang out here with me?\" Merrick asked.\n\nShe stared at the food on her plate. \"No more than two weeks.\" She looked up, meeting his gaze. \"I have an interview with the National Trust for Historic Preservation at the end of the month.\"\n\n\"Where's the interview?\"\n\n\"Boston.\"\n\nMerrick nodded. \"I'll have you back in plenty of time.\" Shifting his chair, he moved closer to Alex. \"You've accused me of hiding things from you, and I promised I would tell you what you need to know about me when we saw each other again.\"\n\nAlex took another sip of wine, staring at Merrick over the rim of her glass. \"We don't have to talk about it now.\"\n\nReaching for her hand, he gave her fingers a gentle squeeze. \"Yes, Ali. We can't move forward unless we clear the air about things that bother you.\"\n\nAlex didn't want to talk. All she wanted was to enjoy the moment because for the first time in her life she'd gotten everything she'd ever wanted: she'd completed her graduate program and looked forward to securing a position as an architectural historian and she planned to spend the next two weeks touring Italy with the man she loved.\n\n\"If whatever you plan to tell me is going to upset me, then I don't want to hear it, Merrick. Not tonight.\"\n\n\"When do you want me to tell you?\"\n\n\"Tell me on the flight back to the States.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"No.\"\n\nHer delicate jaw dropped. \"No,\" she repeated.\n\n\"N\u2014O,\" Merrick said, spelling the word. \"You will sit and hear me out, because I'm not going to wait two weeks to tell you what you demanded to know three months ago.\"\n\nAlex froze as she stared at Merrick. His voice was absolutely emotionless. A fist of fear squeezed her chest as she met the steely-eyed gaze of a stranger, a stranger who'd replaced the man she thought she knew and loved. Her breath seemed to solidify in her throat and all she could do was nod.\n\nMerrick leaned closer, his mouth within inches of Alex's ear. \"I'm going back to the CIA.\"\n\nAlex closed her eyes and slumped against his shoulder. \"Why?\" she whispered. She couldn't imagine not seeing Merrick for months, waiting for him to return from a clandestine mission.\n\n\"Because I need normalcy in my life.\"\n\n\"Can't you do something else?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe opened her eyes and shook her head. \"Is it because you need money?\"\n\n\"Money is not the issue, Ali. I joined the Marine Corps within a week of graduating from high school because the recruiter promised a signing bonus and educational benefits. I joined and took advantage of everything they had to offer. I gave them ten years before the CIA came looking for 'a few good men.'\n\n\"I was hired and trained as a covert operative. I'd always believed I would die somewhere far from home, but it was at home where I almost lost my life when someone shot me, then left me on a street corner in D.C. to die.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Three men accosted me, demanding I give them whatever I had on me. If it had been just two of them I knew I could've taken them, so I cooperated and handed over whatever money I had. However, the one holding the gun panicked and shot me in the stomach. If it hadn't been for Michael Kirkland being where he was that night I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. He'd taken a shortcut through southeast D.C. on his way home and found me in a pool of blood. Not waiting for an ambulance, he put me in his car and took off for the nearest hospital where I spent six hours in surgery.\n\n\"The bullet had nicked my spleen, mangled my left kidney and when I woke up in recovery I was told that I'd lost my kidney and half my body's blood supply.\" Merrick ignored the look of horror in the gold eyes staring at him.\n\n\"How long were you hospitalized?\"\n\n\"A month.\"\n\n\"What happened after that?\" Alex asked, her voice barely above a whisper.\n\n\"I went home and was placed on medical leave for five months. When I returned to work it was to permanent desk duty. Three days later I walked into the director's office and handed in my resignation.\"\n\nAlex heard the sound of her runaway heart in her ears. \"What did you do after that?\"\n\nMerrick paused, then said, \"I gave up my Silver Spring apartment and bought the house in Bolivar. I didn't have a wife or children to support, so whatever I'd earned I'd invested. I'd always followed the market, so when tech companies were issuing IPOs I bought in, tripling and sometime quadrupling my investments.\" What he didn't tell Alex was that once he made his first million, he'd stopped buying and selling stocks. His investments were now in long-term, tax-free municipal bonds.\n\n\"If you go back...when you go back,\" Alex began, \"will it be to a desk position?\"\n\nMerrick traced the outline of her ear with his forefinger. \"Yes. I suppose I had to get over the stigma of becoming a desk jockey when I'd been a field agent. It took time and my being with you to realize that I still can protect our country but in a different capacity.\"\n\nHer arching eyebrows lifted. \"That's true, but why me, Merrick, and not some other woman?\"\n\nHe gave her a long, penetrating look. \"Because you're not some other woman, Ali. I fell in love with you because you're intelligent, determined, spunky and breathtakingly beautiful.\"\n\nMerrick traced the outline of her cheekbone with a fingertip. \"And what would it look like if my girlfriend got up every morning to go to work and left me home to lie around on my behind like a scrub? I couldn't do that and still feel like a man, querida.\"\n\nAlex closed her eyes and rested her head on Merrick's shoulder. He'd referred to her as his girlfriend, but at that moment she wanted to be more than a girlfriend. She wasn't certain whether her stance had changed toward marriage because she'd found herself more in love with Merrick Grayslake, or if it was seeing Moira and Hernando Rivera together as husband and wife, but she no longer wanted to be a girlfriend but a married woman.\n\n\"Merrick?\"\n\n\"Yes, darling?\"\n\n\"I'm ready to go back to the room.\"\n\nBeckoning to their waiter, Merrick settled the bill, then escorted Alex out of the restaurant, walking the three blocks that would take them back to the hotel.\n\nAs soon as they exited the elevator, Alex felt the intensifying effects of jet lag. She didn't remember Merrick undressing her, putting her to bed or joining her in the king-size bed. She dozed off and on for the next two days, and when her circadian rhythms stabilized she looked forward to reuniting with Merrick and Rome.\n\n## Chapter 16\n\nAlex woke to find Merrick sitting at the table in their hotel suite, in a pair of pajama pants, sipping coffee and reading a newspaper. The strands of his coarse hair stood on end as if he'd run his fingers through it.\n\nA smile parted her lips. It was the first time she'd seen him wearing pajamas. In fact, she didn't know that he'd even owned a pair because he'd always come to bed naked.\n\nShe lay motionless, studying the man with whom she'd fallen in love, the man whom she prayed she would one day call husband. The reasons she resisted marriage were always the same: she hadn't met the right man, and because her parents were exerting pressure for one of their adult children to marry and make them grandparents\u2014her father in particular. David Cole resented his four older siblings' good-natured teasing that he would never become a grandfather when all of their married children had made grandparents and great-grandparents.\n\nAnd she'd asked herself over and over, was Merrick Grayslake the right man? And each time the answer was a resounding yes!\n\nAlex had disclosed to Merrick that eventually she wanted to marry and have children sometime in the future. His response was that he had no desire to marry or father children, which had proven an amicable arrangement for both\u2014at that time. But with time she'd changed and her feelings toward him had changed.\n\nShe'd agreed to meet him in Italy, knowing that she would never become Mrs. Merrick Grayslake. What Alex had to resolve before she returned to the States to begin a new career was whether she would continue in a relationship that represented perpetuity without matrimony.\n\nWithout warning, Merrick turned and stared at her. \"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.\"\n\nShe smiled at him. \"Good morning, Sir Grayslake. How long have I been out of it?\"\n\nMerrick folded the newspaper. \"A couple of days. You were good as long as we were moving, but every time you sat down you fell asleep.\"\n\nPushing into a sitting position, Alex stretched her bare arms above her head. She hadn't remembered putting on the pale yellow nightgown, so it was obvious Merrick had dressed her for bed.\n\n\"It usually takes me a couple of days to adjust to the time difference whenever I cross the international date line. What did I miss?\"\n\nHe angled his head, unable to believe Alex hadn't remembered anything since she'd arrived. Was she that affected by jet lag or was she that exhausted?\n\n\"What do you remember?\"\n\nSighing, she closed her eyes. \"I remember we threw coins in the Fontana di Trevi.\"\n\nThe tradition was to throw a coin into the fountain if one wished to return to Rome. The Trevi was Rome's most famous fountain. Neptune, the fountain's central figure, flanked by smaller figures representing a calm and stormy sea, had become the focal point of the classic romance film Three Coins in the Fountain.\n\nMerrick smiled. \"Do you remember what you said when you tossed your coin?\"\n\nAlex sat up straighter. \"No.\"\n\nWhat she did remember was that she'd drunk too much wine at dinner that night. They'd eaten at a sidewalk caf\u00e9 around Piazza Navona and met an American couple visiting Rome for the first time. They spoke no Italian and their waiter, who spoke very little English, was unable to communicate with them until Merrick intervened. They wound up sharing a table for four and the native Chicagoans ordered several bottles of wine to accompany dinner.\n\n\"Did I do or say something embarrassing?\"\n\nPushing back the chair, Merrick stood up and walked over to the bed. He crawled in beside Alex, rested his back on the headboard and pulled her gently to his bare chest.\n\nThere was a full minute of silence before he spoke. \"You said you wanted to come back to Rome for your honeymoon.\"\n\nLetting out her breath in an audible sigh, Alex met his penetrating gaze. She hadn't embarrassed herself. \"I've always said if I married I'd want a Roman honeymoon.\"\n\n\"You want to get married?\"\n\nA slight frown furrowed her smooth forehead. \"I told you before that I want to get married and have a child.\"\n\n\"Some other man's child?\"\n\nPulling out of his loose embrace, Alex's frown deepened. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"You're not going to marry another man.\"\n\nAlex was totally baffled at Merrick's behavior. He was talking in riddles. \"What I'm not going to do is marry you.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because you're not the marrying kind.\"\n\nMerrick shrugged his shoulders. \"I changed my mind.\"\n\nGoing to her knees, Alex leaned closer. \"Just like that,\" she drawled, snapping her fingers, \"you've changed your mind. I'm sorry, but I don't buy it, Merrick. Wasn't it you who said there's no reason why we can't enjoy each other without marriage and children becoming part of the equation? I told you what I want for my future and you've told me what you want, and we're not in agreement.\"\n\n\"That's where you're wrong, Ali. I do want what you want. I want you to become the mother of our children.\"\n\nWave after wave of shock assaulted her senses as a buzzing in her head increased to a roaring that made it impossible for her to think, hear, feel. Rage replaced her shock as she launched herself at Merrick.\n\n\"Don't play with my head!\"\n\nAli was quick, but Merrick was quicker when he held her wrists, shaking her gently. \"I'm not trying to play with your head, darling. I love you too much to do that.\"\n\n\"But I'm confused.\"\n\n\"What about?\"\n\n\"About you, Merrick, about us. We start out as friends, then become lovers. I respect what we have because we're able to talk about everything\u2014what we like, don't like. What we want and don't want. And we decided to have a relationship that would not end in marriage.\n\n\"I've floundered for years, and now when I'm back on track you try to derail me with mixed messages. You say you love me and you want to spend the rest of your life with me although marriage will not become a part of our future. I love you, Merrick. I love you more than I've ever loved any man, yet\u2014\"\n\n\"Then marry me, Alexandra Cole,\" Merrick said, cutting her off.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nHe tightened his hold on her wrists. \"Why not?\"\n\nHer eyes filled with tears. \"Because you don't believe in marriage, Merrick Grayslake!\"\n\nA wry smile parted his lips. \"That was before I met you.\"\n\nAlex struggled to free her hands. \"Let me go.\"\n\n\"Why? So you can hit me?\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"I'm going to do more than hit you,\" she threatened.\n\nMerrick released her, then extended his arms out to his sides. \"Take your best shot, Ali,\" he beckoned. \"Come on, baby. Hit me if it will make you feel better.\" The seconds ticked off as they stared at each other in what had become an impasse. His expression softened as he reached out and cupped her chin in his hand. \"You don't want to hurt me any more than I can hurt you.\" Warm, fat tears dotted his palm. \"If you'd changed your mind about marriage I would've accepted it without question because you'd claim it's a woman's prerogative. Well, what's good for the goose is also good for the gander. Don't dudes have equal rights? Are we not allowed to change our minds?\"\n\nAlex smiled through her tears. \"Yes.\"\n\nResting his forehead against hers, Merrick kissed her nose. \"Yes, what?\"\n\n\"Yes, you're allowed to change your mind.\"\n\n\"Good. I'm glad we've settled that.\" He kissed her again. \"I love you, and I want you to marry me. It doesn't have to be now. It can be next year, the following year, whenever you want.\"\n\nAlex wanted to accept his proposal, but something Merrick said nagged at her. Something he'd said about not wanting to lose her to another man had triggered warning bells. Did jealousy play a part in his changing his stance toward marriage? Or was it because once she began working and traveling she wouldn't be that available to him?\n\n\"I'll let you know,\" she said softly. Even though she wanted to commit, she couldn't. Not yet.\n\nCradling her face between his palms, Merrick pressed his mouth to her throat. Increasing the pressure, his mouth moved lower as her stomach muscles contracted.\n\nAlex barely had time to react when she found herself in Merrick's arms as he slipped off the bed and carried her into the bedroom. Time stood still, the earth stopped spinning on its axis as they stood under the warm water from an overhead shower and demonstrated wordlessly their love for each other.\n\nWith her legs wrapped around Merrick's waist, her back pressed against the tiled wall, she breathed the last of her passion against his throat. This coming together was different from the other times. Merrick hadn't used contraception.\n\nAlex didn't panic because it was the safe phase of her menstrual cycle. \"This cannot happen again,\" she gasped, trying to catch her breath.\n\nMerrick supported her body until her feet touched the floor of the shower stall. \"You mean making love in the shower?\"\n\n\"No, Merrick. Making love without using a condom.\"\n\n\"I pulled out in time.\"\n\nResting her cheek on his chest, she looped her arms under his shoulders. \"And if you get me pregnant, then I'm going to name the baby Pull Out.\"\n\nMerrick threw back his head and roared with laughter. He didn't know what he was going to do with Alexandra Cole except love her until his last breath.\n\nAlex arrived in Venezia, or Venice, reuniting with the city built on water and made up of canals; she felt like a glutton consuming copious amounts of food yet never feeling satiated. If she loved Rome, then it could be said she had a passion for Venice that was akin to an unrequited love.\n\nShe'd never tired of the crowds, the countless pigeons in Piazza San Marco, the overrated and overpriced gondola rides, the museums, galleries, the dark callesellas or alleys, or high-priced souvenirs.\n\nMerrick had secured lodging on an upper floor of a furnished palazzetto along the Grand Canal. Alex opened a bedroom window and inhaled a lungful of air.\n\n\"It smells like Venice.\"\n\n\"How is Venice supposed to smell?\" asked the voice behind her.\n\nAlex turned and smiled at Merrick. If possible, she'd fallen more in love with him. He hadn't mentioned marriage again, and for that she was grateful. She knew he wanted her as his wife, and when the time came for her to marry she knew it would be to Merrick.\n\n\"Like the sea.\"\n\nMerrick stared at the petite woman with the curvy body with whom he'd begun his days and ended his nights. He never tired of making love with her. He also had acquired a newfound appreciation for art. Unlike when he and Alex had toured the D.C. museums, they'd embarked on a walking tour of Rome, and whenever he asked about a particular statue or building Alex would explain its origin and identify the artist.\n\nAnd because he was more fluent in Italian than she, he assumed the responsibility of ordering meals, negotiating with shopkeepers and asking directions. She taught him how to navigate crossing the streets with traffic coming in both directions as Vespa-riding Romans played a frightening game of tag with pedestrians brave enough to step off the sidewalks. Alex also turned him on to gelato, and he set out on a campaign to sample every variety of the custard-based Italian ice cream.\n\nThey'd spent five days in Rome before traveling northward to Florence. They'd varied their nighttime routine of walking to sitting on their hotel's rooftop as the lights of the city sparkled below. Florence was a shopper's haven for jewelry and leather goods. Larger than usual crowds cut short their stay in Tuscany, and Merrick decided to end their two-week European sojourn in Venice.\n\nReaching for his hand, Alex threaded her fingers through Merrick's. \"Beautiful, decadent Venice is like a woman no man can resist.\"\n\nWrapping his free arm around her waist, he pulled her close. \"Then your parents should've named you Venezia rather than Alexandra.\"\n\nShe lifted her chin to see gray eyes boring into her. As of late she'd begun analyzing everything Merrick said to her to uncover a hidden meaning. It was as if she had to erect a wall of defense to shield herself against him.\n\nStanding on tiptoe, she kissed his cheek. \"We should try and relax until siesta is over. I can assure you that we'll get very little sleep tonight, because Venice doesn't really start jumping until after sunset.\"\n\nAs in France and Spain, Italian shopkeepers, banks and other places of business closed for several hours in the afternoon for siesta.\n\nMerrick disengaged his hand and began the task of unbuttoning her blouse. His touch was deliberate as he pushed it off her shoulders and it floated to the floor. Reaching around her back, he unhooked her bra, and it, too, joined her blouse. Alex went completely still as he unzipped her slacks, pushing them and her panties down her legs until they pooled around her feet.\n\nShe stepped out of them at the same time she repeated his action when she unbuttoned his shirt; a minute later, both stood nude in the middle of the bedroom in an apartment dating back to the 13th century.\n\nHand in hand, they made their way to the antique bed, floating down to the crisp, ironed sheets. She wanted Merrick, craved him because she was ovulating.\n\nHer body felt heavy, like ripened fruit waiting to be picked. Her breasts were tender and she couldn't control the spasmodic trembling between her legs.\n\n\"Hurry,\" she pleaded as he slipped on a condom.\n\nMerrick knew this joining would not become the unhurried, leisurely lovemaking he was used to sharing with Alex. Her quick, shallow breathing, the lines of tension on her face and the bite of her fingernails on his biceps urged him to follow her command.\n\nThere was no foreplay as he entered her in one, sure swift thrust. Her urgency was transferred to him and he rode her like a man possessed by invisible spirits whose intent was to swallow him whole.\n\nHer hot flesh pulsed around his sex, squeezing tighter and tighter. Every muscle, nerve and tendon in his body screamed for release. The sound of his runaway heart was that of a galloping horse as he struggled not to release his passion\u2014not yet. It was too quick.\n\nAlex's raw sensuousness lifted him beyond himself, her fire spreading to him, and he lost it; he lost himself in a fiery downpour of uncontrolled passion in which he experienced la petite mort for the first time in his life.\n\nFlames of fire heated the blood in Alex's veins as she surrendered all she was and had to the man who'd taken her to unknown heights of passion. Their shared moment of ecstasy ended, Alex too emotion-filled to speak.\n\nThey lay together, entwined, the burning memory of their first day in Venice imprinted in their memory forever.\n\n\"Walk faster, Merrick.\" Alex, a vision in white, pulled Merrick along with her as she turned down an alley.\n\nHe smiled. She was like a child in FAO Schwarz at Christmastime. The white sundress with an empire waist and tiny pleated skirt that ended at her knees made her appear younger, virginal. He hadn't been the one to claim her innocence, but he could've been when he thought about the first time he'd made love to her. It was obvious she had only experienced conventional lovemaking because whenever he introduced another technique she'd become shy or embarrassed by it. Not one to push, Merrick waited for her to take the initiative before adding it to their sexual repertoire.\n\nThey left the alley and crossed a small bridge. The sight unfolding before him was humbling. The setting sun had turned the sky blood red, the outline of magnificent structures across the lagoon standing out in stark relief.\n\n\"It's incredible.\" There was no mistaking the awe in his voice. He pointed. \"What's that?\"\n\nAlex followed the direction of his finger. \"Chiesa della Salute.\"\n\n\"How do you remember the names of every church, cathedral, or duomo?\"\n\n\"Memorization. Unlike you, I don't have a photographic memory.\"\n\nMerrick stared at her delicate profile. \"Who told you I have a photographic memory?\"\n\nShe turned and stared directly at him. \"No one. You proved that the day we were in the National Museum of African Art. You'd recalled works of art I'd forgotten we saw. You're not just smart, Merrick. You're brilliant. Now I see why the CIA wanted you. And now I know why you're going back.\n\n\"You told me you need normalcy in your life, but I believe it's because you feel as if you're losing it, losing your edge. You miss the thrill of being offered a new assignment, and with the heightened threat of terrorism you believe you have to do something to protect your country.\"\n\nMerrick took her face in his hands, his eyes making love to her. \"You're right, Ali. But you left out one piece of the puzzle.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"You didn't mention yourself.\"\n\n\"How do I figure into the picture?\"\n\n\"You've helped me to know what love is.\"\n\nA shy smile flitted across her face. \"Love is not taught, Merrick. Either you feel it or you don't.\"\n\nHe angled his head. \"It could be I hadn't met the right woman.\"\n\nHer smile widened. \"I'll accept that because I've dated my share of losers.\"\n\n\"Were they losers, or you just weren't compatible?\"\n\n\"Probably both.\" Standing on tiptoe, she brushed a kiss over his mouth.\n\nCurving an arm around her waist, he dipped his head and kissed her soft, parted lips. \"Are you ready to eat?\"\n\n\"Does a cat think it's the meow?\"\n\nShaking his head, Merrick smothered a laugh. One thing he was certain of, and that was life with Alexandra Cole would never be boring.\n\n## Chapter 17\n\nAlex returned to the States, tanned, relaxed and more in love. It took two days for her to air out, dust and stock the pantry and refrigerator in her Arlington condo.\n\nShe called Michael to get an update on Jolene but got the Kirklands' voice mail. Three hours later Michael called to inform her he'd become a father. Jolene had given birth to a perfectly formed, healthy girl. They'd named her Teresa April Kirkland in honor of her paternal grandmother and one of Jolene's clients. Mother and daughter were well, and Alex told Michael she'd come by the hospital the following day to see Jolene and meet her newest cousin.\n\nAlex walked into the small private hospital set on twenty acres of prime property in affluent Georgetown. The medical staff housed in a former Georgian mansion provided one-on-one care for patients wealthy enough to pay five-figure-perday fees for maximum privacy.\n\nJolene Kirkland's room wasn't a room but a suite with a balcony overlooking a formal English garden. She sat up in bed, pillows cradling her shoulders for support, watching a flat-screen television.\n\nA cradle was positioned on the right side of the bed.\n\nAlex rapped lightly on the door. \"Hello, Mommy.\"\n\nJolene, reaching for the remote device, turned off the television. \"Please come in, Alex.\"\n\nCarrying a cellophane wicker basket filled with aroma-therapy items, Alex walked in and placed the basket on a damask-covered table. Jolene looked incredibly beautiful for a woman who'd just endured thirteen hours of difficult labor.\n\n\"There's something in that basket for mother and baby.\" She approached the bed and hugged Jolene. \"Congratulations.\"\n\nJolene smiled. \"Thank you.\"\n\nAlex walked around the bed, peering into the cradle. Wrapped in a pale pink blanket was an infant with tufts of jet-black hair. \"She looks like Emily.\"\n\n\"That's what I told Michael.\"\n\n\"What color are her eyes?\" Alex wanted to know if Teresa had inherited her father's green eyes.\n\n\"I don't know. Little Miss Willful has yet to open them.\"\n\nAlex sat on a cushioned chair next to the cradle. \"Is she a good baby?\"\n\n\"No,\" Jolene said without hesitating. \"The only time she isn't crying is when she's eating and sleeping.\"\n\n\"Perhaps she has gas.\"\n\n\"Perhaps she wants to be held,\" Jolene countered.\n\n\"But she's only a day old. And who's been holding her?\"\n\nJolene rolled her eyes. \"Take a guess, Alex.\"\n\n\"No!\" Alex moaned. \"Please don't tell me that Michael has begun spoiling her already.\"\n\n\"You didn't hear it from me.\"\n\n\"I can't...\" Alex's response was preempted by a knock on the door. Turning, she saw Michael's broad shoulders filling out the doorway.\n\nHe gave Alex a bright smile. \"Hey, cuz.\" He walked into the room and kissed her cheek before he rounded the bed to kiss his wife.\n\n\"Congratulations, Michael. Your daughter is beautiful.\"\n\nWith clear green eyes dancing in excitement, Michael shook his head in amazement. \"I still can't believe she's here.\"\n\n\"She looks like Emily.\"\n\n\"That's what I told Jolene.\"\n\n\"If she's as outspoken as your sister, then you're in for it,\" Alex predicted.\n\n\"You're a lot more candid than Emily,\" Michael said in defense of his sister.\n\n\"Is this a private family gathering?\" asked a deep voice that sent a shiver of excitement throughout Alex. She turned to find Merrick standing in the doorway in a tan suit, with a white shirt and chocolate silk tie.\n\nSuddenly she found breathing difficult as her gaze met his. Would Michael know just seeing them together that his friend was sleeping with his cousin? Was this the time when she'd reveal her relationship with Merrick?\n\n\"Come on in, Gray.\" The two men shook hands, at the same time exchanging a rough embrace. \"Have you met my cousin, Alexandra Cole?\"\n\nMerrick extended his hand, belaying her fear that he would reveal the extent of their involvement. \"Yes, I have. We met New Year's Eve.\"\n\nAlex shook his hand, smiling. \"We shared a dance New Year's Eve.\" She now was able to relax. Merrick hadn't let on that they'd just spent two weeks together in Italy. He'd given her a tangible graduation gift on the flight back to the States: an Etruscan-inspired gold necklace with a magnificent ruby briolette.\n\nMerrick inclined his head. \"You're right.\" Reaching into his jacket, he took out an envelope and gave it to Jolene. \"Congratulations. It's just a little something for your daughter.\"\n\nJolene reached out and patted his hand. \"You didn't have to give her anything.\" The moment Teresa drew breath she'd become heir to a share of the ColeDiz billion-dollar empire.\n\n\"That may be true, but I've been told that little girls and big girls can never have too many clothes.\"\n\nJolene opened the envelope and stared at its contents before handing the envelope to Alex. Merrick had given Teresa Kirkland a gift certificate to the finest children's boutique in the Capitol District.\n\nJolene smiled at the man who despite being her husband's friend frightened her. She'd found him too quiet and very mysterious. \"Thank you, Merrick. Teresa's certain to be one of D.C.'s best-dressed babies.\"\n\nMerrick moved over to stare down at the sleeping infant, his expression softening. \"Nice work, Kirk.\"\n\nAlex and Jolene exchanged looks that spoke volumes. \"He did have some help,\" Alex drawled.\n\n\"Speak, sister,\" Jolene chimed in.\n\nWincing, Merrick put up his hands. \"Did I say the wrong thing?\"\n\n\"Hell, yeah!\" the two women chorused.\n\n\"I suppose that's my cue to escape while I can,\" Merrick teased.\n\n\"Where are you off to?\" Michael asked him.\n\n\"Langley.\"\n\nAlex knew the CIA was headquartered in Langley, Virginia. And like marriage, Merrick's return to the CIA was not a topic she welcomed\u2014at least not at this time. She knew she was either selfish or in denial, but the only thing she wanted to focus on was securing a position with the National Trust. After that she would deal with her future with Merrick.\n\nMerrick left as quietly as he'd come and she spent another thirty minutes with the Kirklands before driving back to Arlington. She'd purchased the brand-new Acura Integra a month before closing on her condo, and in two years she still hadn't put more than three thousand miles on the vehicle. Instead of flying to Boston for her interview, she drove, stopping and touring the states in the Trust's northeast region.\n\nCIA Headquarters...Langley, Virginia\n\nMerrick sat in an interview room, answering the same question posed at least three different ways. What he detested most was the information necessary for security clearance. It was as if the interviewer wanted to know why he'd been born.\n\n\"Have you traveled out of the country in the past three years?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have,\" he answered truthfully.\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Three weeks ago.\"\n\n\"Did you travel alone?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Were you alone during your return to the United States?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Who did you travel with, and what is your relationship to said person or persons?\"\n\n\"I returned to the United States with a woman. Her name is Alexandra Cole.\"\n\n\"Did you and Ms. Cole reside together during your travels?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Is Ms. Cole a citizen of the United States? If not, then what country?\"\n\n\"She is a citizen of the United States.\"\n\n\"Where does she reside?\"\n\n\"Arlington, Virginia.\"\n\n\"Has Ms. Cole always been a resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia?\"\n\n\"No. Ms. Cole was born and raised in Boca Raton, Florida.\"\n\nThe interrogation went on for hours, every answer recorded for dissemination and follow-up. Merrick was mentally and physically drained when he got into his car in the visitors' parking lot and drove away. His association with Alex had drawn her into an investigation that was not of her choosing. Her family name or wealth meant nothing to a governmental agency intent on dissecting her life.\n\nHe'd gotten security clearance once and there was no doubt he would again. But he wondered if the Justice Department would uncover something about Alexandra he didn't want or need to know. And as if he'd executed the maneuver countless times, Merrick took the road leading to Arlington. Activating the hands-free device, he pressed the number to Alex's cell phone.\n\n\"Hello, stranger,\" she crooned.\n\n\"Hello, Miss Cole,\" he countered, playing along with her. \"What do I have to do to convince you to come out and play?\"\n\n\"What are you playing?\"\n\n\"Strip poker.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Does stripping translate to the removal of articles of clothing?\"\n\n\"Shame on you. Get your mind out of the gutter, naughty girl.\"\n\n\"Would you like me if I were a good girl?\"\n\n\"I'd like you if you were toothless, bald and covered with carbuncles.\"\n\n\"What in the world are carbuncles?\"\n\n\"Warts.\"\n\n\"Dis-gus-ting.\" She drew the word out into three syllables.\n\n\"When should I expect you?\"\n\nMerrick took a quick glance at the dashboard clock. \"Sometime after five.\"\n\nHe disconnected the call, then began the process that would disassociate of what had transpired in the tiny room back in Langley. He'd relived his entire life during the session, and unfortunately there were events he'd relegated to the deepest recesses of his mind, hoping never to resurrect them. However, they'd resurfaced and would take days if not months to purge again.\n\nCarl Ashleigh listened to Merrick Grayslake's taped responses, comparing them to his previous security clearance report. Not much had changed in two years. The only exception was his involvement with a woman\u2014a woman who just happened to be heiress to a family-owned conglomerate.\n\nIt wasn't what Carl's superiors wanted, but it couldn't be helped. They needed Grayslake to flush out a big fish; but if his lady got caught up in the trap it would become Grayslake's responsibility to protect her.\n\nPicking up the phone, he dialed an extension. \"He looks good,\" he said into the mouthpiece. \"But there may be one hitch. He's involved with a woman, and I'm not certain whether we'll be able to keep her out of the picture until we spring the trapdoor. Don't worry. I'll keep you posted on everything.\"\n\nCarl hung up, staring at several framed photographs on the opposite wall. The director was counting on him to put Operation Backslap into motion before the end of the year. He had eight months to bring down the country's most powerful lobbyist, Chandler Duffy. With Duffy out of the way, the popular incumbent president was certain to lose his party's nomination for reelection.\n\n## Chapter 18\n\nIt took four days for Alex to drive to Boston for her interview, but she accomplished the return drive to Virginia in ten hours. On the trip northward she'd stopped and toured the historic districts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut, staying overnight in the respective states' capitals. She'd planned on calling Merrick her first night on the road, but when she checked in to her hotel the only thing she'd wanted was a warm shower and firm bed. When she checked her cell-phone voice message, there was a call from him. His terse reprimand about her not checking in with him raised her hackles, and she waited another day before calling him back.\n\nShe had her first serious disagreement with Merrick when she told him that she hadn't needed to check in with anyone since she'd celebrated her twenty-first birthday, and now at twenty-nine, soon-to-be thirty, she wasn't going to begin. Alex couldn't remember his brusque retort because she'd abruptly ended the call.\n\nThe volatile interchange forced her to rerevaluate her relationship with Merrick Grayslake, that perhaps she hadn't married or had a serious relationship because she unconsciously valued her independence; that she was unable to commit to sharing her life and future with a man.\n\nHer interview had gone well, and with her degree and outstanding grades she was offered a position with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She'd formulated a game plan and had accomplished everything she'd set out to do.\n\nAlex loved Merrick, enough to marry him and become the mother of his children, but she refused to be subjugated by him or any man. She'd been reared to think for herself, nurtured and taught to take care of herself, and being a Cole meant she would always be able to take care of herself.\n\nIt was late afternoon when Alex crossed the state line from Maryland into the District of Columbia. An accident backed up traffic for miles along the road leading to the Key Bridge, so she headed south to the Fourteenth Street Bridge to cross the Potomac River. It was a longer route to Arlington, but at least she wouldn't have to sit in traffic.\n\nHalf an hour later, she pressed a device, raising the door to one of the four garages in the rear of her building, parked, then alighted from the car where she'd spent too many hours. Not bothering to remove her luggage from the trunk, Alex unlocked the front door, mounted the staircase and opened the door to her apartment, encountering a blast of hot air that forced her to take a backward step.\n\nPlacing her keys and handbag on the foyer table, she pressed a button, activating the central cooling unit, while chiding herself for not leaving it running during her absence.\n\nGoing into the bathroom adjoining her bedroom, she stripped off her clothes and placed them in a wicker hamper. Just as she prepared to step into the shower, the telephone rang. She returned to the bedroom to answer the call. A smile parted her lips. It was her sister.\n\n\"Hi, Ana.\"\n\n\"Where have you been?\"\n\n\"Let's begin again, little sister,\" she chastised softly. Ana was as bad as Merrick. What was with them clocking her? \"Hello, Ana.\"\n\n\"Sorry about that. Hi, Alex.\"\n\nAlex smiled. \"What's up?\"\n\n\"I'm in Georgetown. I've been staying with Michael, Jolene and the baby for the past two days. Alex, she is the most adorable little girl.\"\n\nAlex hadn't seen Teresa since the day she'd come to the hospital because she wanted to give Jolene time to recover before she had to entertain visitors. The fact that Michael, as a teacher, did not work summers would make Jolene's transition from wife to mother easier than it would if she had full responsibility of caring for Teresa.\n\n\"She is beautiful. Why are you staying with them when you could've stayed here?\" Before she'd left for Europe Alex had given her sister and brothers the key to her condominium so they could use her extra bedroom whenever they were in the D.C. area.\n\n\"I called you, but when I didn't get an answer I decided to hang out with Michael.\"\n\n\"I was in Boston on a job interview. Why didn't you call my cell?\"\n\n\"I just got a new cell phone, and I hadn't programmed in your number. Do you want company?\"\n\n\"Of course. Come on over.\"\n\n\"I'll see you in a bit.\"\n\nAlex hung up and headed for the bathroom.\n\nAna lay at the foot of Alex's California king bed, her head resting on a mound of pillows. The flickering light from candles on tables provided the only illumination in the air-cooled space.\n\n\"I can't believe you're going to get a real job,\" Ana teased her sister.\n\nAlex shifted until she found a more comfortable position against the headboard. \"I had a real job, Ana Cole, when I worked for that art gallery.\"\n\nAna sucked her teeth. \"That was play-play and you know it. Now, working for the National Trust is real.\"\n\nAlex smiled. \"I think the most exciting aspect of the position will be the traveling and meeting with groups whose focus is on preserving our history for future generations.\"\n\nTurning over on her side, Ana tried making out her sister's face in the subdued light. \"I don't understand how you get so excited about broken-down old buildings.\"\n\n\"That's because you can't see the beauty in them. What you see as broken down and worthless I see as the fading beauty of magnificent wraparound porches, moldings, lintels, columns and newel posts. Only in America do we tear down to make way for the new, which isn't necessarily better or prettier than what stood before. That's why I love going to Europe, because they value their architecture and history.\"\n\n\"Don't forget that the United States is an infant when you compare it to the rest of the world, Alex.\"\n\n\"But that's no reason not to respect past artisans. Many of the antebellum mansions were designed and built by African slaves.\"\n\nAna closed her eyes and listened to Alex recount the names of the mansions that rose to glory and splendor under the human toil of their ancestors. She was so caught up in the history that she jumped as if jolted by a bolt of electricity when the telephone on the bedside table rang.\n\nReaching for the instrument, Alex picked it up. \"Hello.\"\n\n\"Hello, cuz,\" said a deep voice with a distinctive Southwest intonation.\n\n\"What's up, Michael?\"\n\n\"My folks just called to say they're coming up for the Fourth. Jolene's parents are also coming in to see Teresa, so I decided to throw a little something. If you and Ana aren't doing anything, then come on by any time after noon.\"\n\n\"Hold on, Michael.\" Alex covered the mouthpiece with her hand. \"When are you going back to Boca?\"\n\nAna sat up and stared at Alex. She'd come to the D.C. area to meet with a young female vocalist who'd sent Serenity Records a demo, but once she met with the fifteen-year-old she realized she wasn't the one who'd recorded the songs. Livid because she'd been duped, Ana hadn't bothered to stay and uncover who'd actually recorded the demo and decided to extend her stay to visit her sister and cousin.\n\n\"There's no rush for me to go back. Why?\"\n\n\"Michael wants us to come over for the Fourth. Uncle Josh and Aunt Vanessa are coming up to see the baby. He said Jolene's folks are also coming in from Chicago.\"\n\nAna flashed her dimpled smile. \"Count me in.\"\n\nAlex removed her hand. \"We're in. Do you want us to bring anything?\"\n\n\"No. I've got everything covered.\"\n\n\"How about dessert?\"\n\n\"I'll order pies and cobblers from Rudy B's.\"\n\n\"Hot damn!\" Alex had discovered Rudy B's by accident when she drove through northwest D.C. The original Rudy B's, a one-room log cabin, was built behind the small house that belonged to Reuben Brown in 1908. It was expanded after World War I, then again in the sixties, and had undergone extensive renovations in 1998 for its ninetieth anniversary. The family-owned restaurant had earned the reputation of serving the best soul food in the Capitol District. The first time she ate a slice of sweet-potato pie she was hooked!\n\n\"I guess that means we'll just show.\"\n\nMichael laughed. \"You do that.\"\n\nAlex hung up, smiling. \"Save your appetite because Michael's ordering dessert from Rudy B's.\"\n\n\"Who or what is Rudy B's?\" asked Ana.\n\n\"It's the best soul food joint in the world.\"\n\nAna lifted her eyebrows. \"Did you say the world?\"\n\n\"You heard me.\"\n\nSwinging her legs over the side of the bed, Ana pushed her feet into a pair of sandals. \"Get up. We're going on a food run.\"\n\nAlex took a quick glance at the clock next to the telephone. It was 8:48 p.m. \"Are you sure you want to eat this late?\"\n\nCombing her fingers through her short hair, Ana gave Alex a knowing look. \"Don't play yourself, Alexandra. You know it's never too late to eat. Especially when the food's good.\"\n\nGrinning, Alex swung her legs over the bed and pushed her feet into a pair of worn leather flip-flops. \"Let's roll.\"\n\nMerrick had spent the night vacillating over whether to accept Michael's invitation to come to Georgetown for a cookout or stay in Bolivar because he knew Alex would be there; she'd hung up on him, and his pride, false pride, wouldn't permit him to call her back.\n\nHe missed her, missed their nightly chats even when they were hundreds of miles apart. He missed her so much that his heart ached. There had been a time when he'd accused her of ripping his heart out, and she had, leaving him to bleed emotionally.\n\nPerhaps, he mused, he wasn't cut out to be a good boyfriend because he didn't know how to be a boyfriend. There were women, women he'd slept with, but they weren't someone with whom he would plan a future.\n\nLove, the emotion that had eluded him, had come into his life like a slow-moving mist, the silent paws of a stalking cat and death when it came stealing to reclaim the breath given at birth. It was so unexpected that he wasn't given the opportunity to reject it.\n\nSlumping lower in the porch chair, he stared at a doe and her fawn feeding on blackberries. Something must have startled them because they took off running in the direction of the woods.\n\nMerrick closed his eyes, sighing heavily. Love. Men and women sang about it, poets wrote sonnets about it, people took their own lives and killed others for it.\n\nHe'd fallen in love with a slip of a woman who made him look for the next sunrise, a woman he had proposed marriage to and wanted to have his children with, a woman who had pulled him from a morass of self-pity and irrelevance where one day turned insignificantly into the next. He opened his eyes, pushed off the chair and went into the house. Grasping the hem of his T-shirt, he pulled it over his head.\n\nHe had to stop the bleeding, and the only way he could do that was to confront Alex.\n\nMerrick drove from Bolivar to Washington, D.C., utilizing back roads and pushing the speedometer above ninety. Crossing the Virginia state line, he slowed to the speed limit. He'd made the trip in half the time.\n\nHe made one stop on Connecticut Avenue at Dupont Circle. Returning to his truck with his purchase, he drove the short distance to Q Street NW. Fortunately, Merrick found parking outside Michael's house. The cars lining the driveway bore Virginia and Florida license plates.\n\nHoisting a box to his shoulder, he walked around to the rear of the house. A large awning and colorful beach umbrellas shielded the Kirklands' guests from the blazing summer sun as they sat at tables eating, drinking and laughing.\n\nMerrick saw her, and went completely still. Alex had her back to him so he was given the opportunity to observe her unnoticed. A baseball cap covered her hair and a pair of sunglasses shielded her eyes. His gaze caressed the smooth brown skin on her back and shoulders under a halter top.\n\n\"Hey, man. What do you have there?\"\n\nMerrick lowered the box and put it in Michael's outstretched arms. \"It's just a little something to quench your thirst.\"\n\nMichael's eyes, hidden behind the lenses of a pair of sunglasses, crinkled when he smiled. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Your favorite sake.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Michael drawled. He'd acquired a fondness for the Japanese brew when he'd been stationed in Japan. \"Why don't you circulate while I take this in the house. I'll make the introductions later.\"\n\nMerrick wanted to tell Michael that he didn't need an introduction, at least not one to Alexandra Cole. He knew not only her name, but every inch of her compact body. He knew how to make her moan and sob in ecstasy. He knew what made her laugh and cry. And he'd heard her admit to loving him as much as he loved her.\n\nAlex felt Ana's fingers tighten on her wrist. \"He's here,\" she whispered close to her ear.\n\nShe frowned at her sister. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"The guy from our New Year's Eve party. You know, the one who was staring at you and I told you he was hot.\"\n\nAlex forced herself not to move, react. She knew Ana was talking about Merrick. She'd wanted to ask Michael if he had invited him, but hadn't wanted to appear that interested. What her cousin didn't know was that not only did she know Merrick, but she was also in love with him.\n\n\"Don't get crazy,\" she whispered, sotto voce.\n\n\"He's looking this way, Alex. I take that back. He's coming this way.\"\n\nShe removed her glasses and schooled her expression to one of indifference when she saw Merrick making his way toward her. He wore a dark blue shirt with large green leaves over a pair of jeans that were molded to his lean hips and thighs. When he was less than three feet away, she stood up and extended her hand.\n\n\"It's nice seeing you again, Merrick.\"\n\nMerrick ignored her hand for several seconds, and his expression was that of complete unconcern. He saw a flash of fear in her eyes; she didn't want her family to know how well they knew each other; she was still hiding their affair. Reluctantly he took her hand, certain he heard her exhalation of breath. He decided not to out her.\n\n\"Same here, Alex.\"\n\nShe mouthed a thank-you. \"Do you know everyone here?\" she asked louder than necessary.\n\nHe released her hand. \"I'm afraid I don't.\"\n\nLooping her arm casually through his, she steered him toward her sister. \"Alex, this is Merrick Grayslake. Merrick, my sister, Ana.\"\n\nAna flashed her dimpled smile. \"Hi, Merrick.\"\n\nHe inclined his head. \"My pleasure, Ana.\"\n\nBefore Ana could utter another word, Alex escorted him over to her aunt and uncle. \"Aunt Vanessa, Uncle Josh, I don't know if you remember Michael's friend from the\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, I didn't know that you were making the introductions,\" Michael interrupted.\n\nAlex released Merrick's arm. \"He's your guest, so I'll let you do the honors.\"\n\nThat said, she walked away, feeling the heat from Merrick's gaze burning into her back. She made her way into the house and a bathroom off the gourmet kitchen. Sitting on a chair, she closed her eyes. She had to get Merrick alone; they had to talk, but not in front of a crowd of people.\n\nAlex lingered in the bathroom long enough to splash cold water on her face, before patting it dry with a paper towel. She knew she couldn't hang out in the bathroom, so pulling back her shoulders she opened the door, stopping short when she saw Merrick in the kitchen with Jolene. He'd cradled Teresa to his chest, smiling and making cooing sounds. The sight of him holding a baby stopped her breath. He'd talked about having a child\u2014their child.\n\nJolene's dark eyes sparkled like polished onyx. \"It appears as if my daughter is partial to men. The minute a woman, other than myself, picks her up she cries.\"\n\nMerrick's head came up and he smiled at Alex. \"Does she cry with you?\"\n\n\"I haven't held her.\"\n\n\"Come hold her,\" Jolene urged.\n\nAlex took half a dozen steps and held out her arms for the two-week-old infant. She smiled when feeling the slight weight. \"Hey, baby girl,\" she crooned and Teresa opened her eyes. Brilliant green eyes met a pair in gold. The two cousins regarded each other for a full minute before Teresa yawned, closed her eyes, then fell asleep.\n\n\"I guess there goes your theory about her preferring men,\" Alex said proudly, handing the infant to her mother.\n\nJolene cradled the baby to the shoulder draped with a cloth diaper. \"There must be something about you that Teresa likes, because she won't let my mother or Vanessa hold her. I've told her it's not nice to shun her grandmothers because they're always more indulgent than grandpas.\"\n\n\"You're right about that.\"\n\nJolene shifted her baby to a more comfortable position. \"Alex, would you mind seeing that Merrick gets something to eat?\" She smiled at Merrick. \"Now, if you were family, then it would be the reverse.\"\n\nCrossing his arms over his chest, Merrick angled his head. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"If you were married to Alex, then it would be you bringing her a plate, not the reverse.\"\n\nThere came a beat of silence as Merrick regarded Alex. \"I wouldn't have a problem serving Alexandra.\"\n\nHis response seemed to surprise Jolene, who'd lifted her arching eyebrows. She never would've expected Merrick Grayslake to be accommodating, especially to a woman.\n\n\"How interesting,\" she said in a quiet tone as she gently rocked her baby.\n\nAlex winked at Merrick. \"Let's go, Mr. Grayslake. Enjoy this while you can.\"\n\nMerrick took long strides as he followed Alex. \"When are you going to let me serve you, querida?\"\n\n\"We'll talk about it.\"\n\n\"When, Ali?\"\n\nShe stopped, turned and glanced up at him. \"I'll come to you after my sister goes back to Florida.\"\n\nMerrick held her gaze for a full minute. He wanted to ask her when, but held his tongue. He would wait as long as it took, not because he wanted to but because Alex was worth it.\n\n## Chapter 19\n\nAlex navigated Deadman's Curve, her heart in her mouth. It had taken three weeks to fulfill her promise to come to Merrick. Their relationship had changed. The nightly telephone calls had stopped, replaced by one or two a week. The urgency to see each other had waned, replaced by a waiting as to when they would be reunited.\n\nShe also found it odd that her feelings for Merrick had intensified. It was as if the separation allowed her to take a step back to confirm what she did share with him was love and not lust.\n\nAlex would've come to West Virginia sooner if Ana hadn't extended her stay in Virginia another two weeks; the morning of her sister's departure she received a letter of hire from the National Trust and that they wanted her to return to Boston for an orientation session; this time she flew to Massachusetts instead of driving.\n\nWithin miles of her crossing the West Virginia border the weather changed. An oppressive humidity and green-gray haze made normal breathing nearly impossible. She chanced glancing away from the curving, winding roadway for a second to adjust her car's air-conditioning.\n\nAlex hummed a tuneless ditty to take her mind off the road ahead of her, while chiding herself for driving to Bolivar and cursing Merrick for living in the wilderness. She decelerated when she saw the bumper of a pickup several car lengths in front of her. It was apparent she wasn't the only driver going under twenty miles per hour.\n\nDeadman's Curve leveled off as she maneuvered into a valley nearly obliterated by the thick haze. She continued along the paved road, peering through the windshield for the turnoff to Merrick's house. She missed it the first time and had to reverse directions.\n\nThen she saw it! Merrick's house was ablaze with light, a beacon in a darkened sky that looked more like night than day. It was only ten in the morning. She maneuvered around to the garage where he housed his classic cars, parking behind his truck.\n\nMerrick heard the sound of a car's engine, followed by the solid slam of a door. He was on his feet and on the porch in a matter of seconds. A smile curved the corners of his mouth when he spied the petite figure in a tank top, jeans and running shoes.\n\nHe'd waited patiently for Alex to come. Whenever they talked he'd wanted to ask her when, but couldn't bring himself to tell her how much he missed and wanted to see her. The three weeks had given him the space he needed to assess his feelings for the only woman to whom he'd given his heart. He loved Alexandra Cole, loved her enough to give up his life for her.\n\nMerrick realized in introspect that he'd made a gross error in judgment when he'd attempted to monitor her whereabouts. How had he forgotten that she was an independent woman who'd traveled and lived abroad, a woman who didn't need him or any man for her day-to-day existence? Alex was educated, independently wealthy and had focused her energies on beginning her career, and for that he was forced to respect her.\n\nHe came down off the porch to meet her. The first thing he noticed was that she was thinner, her face and body. Her hair was styled differently. Her ubiquitous tousled, mussed look had been replaced by a chic cut that framed her tiny face.\n\nExtending his arms, he closed the distance between them. It wasn't until he felt the soft crush of her breasts against his chest, inhaled the familiar scent of her perfume and felt the softness of her mouth when he kissed her that he knew she wasn't a figment of his imagination.\n\nHis mouth caressed hers as if it were fragile porcelain. Her lips parted and he deepened the kiss; there was a dreamy intimacy that hadn't been in any of their kisses; his lips parted in a soul-searching journey to taste every inch of her mouth.\n\nAlex wound her arms under Merrick's shoulders, holding him fast. Her knees shook, her heart pounded a runaway rhythm as she struggled to catch her breath. His mouth revived her troubled spirit like rain soaking the parched earth. She'd missed him\u2014oh how she'd missed everything about him!\n\n\"Take me inside,\" she whispered as pleasure radiated from the core of her body outward. Heat rippled under her skin, increasing with each second until she felt as if her entire body was on fire.\n\nHer thoughts spun out of control, her emotions whirled, skidded and raced headlong into a whorl of sensual delight from which she never wanted to escape.\n\nShe loved Merrick, loved him more than she could've imagined loving a man. She wanted and needed him to remind her why she'd been born female.\n\n\"I love you so much,\" Merrick whispered against her lips. Tears filled her eyes with his passionate confession.\n\n\"Take me to bed and I'll show you how much I love you,\" Alex promised.\n\nMerrick needed no further urging. He climbed the steps and walked into the house, closing the door with his foot. The entire house was ablaze with light to offset the eerie darkness that had settled on the region. It wasn't noon, yet the sky was black as pitch.\n\nCradling Alex's slight weight, he took the stairs, two at a time, and walked into his bedroom. Gently, he eased her down onto the bed, his body covering hers. He wanted to go slow, but his body refused to reason with his brain.\n\nA roll of thunder shook the earth, followed by a crack of lightning that rent the air. The approaching storm was no match for the one racing through the bedroom. Buttons were ripped from their fastenings as pieces of discarded clothing littered the large bed.\n\nMerrick reached over and swept everything off the mattress with the flick of his hand. Wrapping an arm around Alex's waist, he tucked her beneath him, parted her legs with a knee and entered her body in one sure upward thrust.\n\nThey gasped in unison with the joining of flesh akin to smoldering metals. There was no time for exploration, as Alex's urgency matched Merrick's long-denied needs.\n\nShe couldn't control the moans slipping from her parted lips, her hips writhing in a dance of desire, her breath coming in long, surrendering gasps. She rose to meet Merrick's powerful thrusts in a moment of unrestrained passion that exploded, then freed them in a firestorm of uncontrollable ecstasy. They lay together, waves of lingering passion flowing between them and making them one.\n\nAlex woke hours later, alone in bed, ravenous. Sitting up, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She hadn't taken a step when she felt the evidence of her passion session with Merrick trickle down her inner thigh. Her heart lurched. They'd made love without using protection. They'd gambled before, rolled the dice and had come up winners; however, this time the odds were against them.\n\nAlex walked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. She didn't want to think about the possibility that there was a new life growing inside her\u2014not now, not when she'd just started her career.\n\nThe thunderstorm continued unabated as torrents of rain lashed the roof and windows. Alex stepped off the last stair and followed the mouthwatering smell.\n\nShe stood under the entrance to the kitchen watching Merrick as he placed a cover on a wok. If she'd changed in the short time they'd been apart, so had he. He'd cut his hair again, the dark reddish-brown strands hugging his scalp. There was no doubt he'd spent a lot of time outdoors as evidenced by the rich mahogany brown of his face and arms. Without warning, he looked up and smiled, his silver-gray eyes shimmering like newly minted quarters in his dark face.\n\n\"Did you sleep well?\" he asked.\n\n\"How long was I asleep?\" The first time she'd come to Merrick's house she couldn't find a clock. It was only when she set the clock on his microwave with the time on her watch that she was able to discern the hour.\n\n\"About six hours. You must have been exhausted.\"\n\nWalking into the kitchen, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. She smiled. \"Exhausted and hungry. What did you cook?\"\n\nWrapping his arms around her waist, he pulled her to his length. \"London broil, garlic roasted potatoes and stir-fried green beans.\"\n\nAlex rested her head against his shoulder. \"I think I'll keep you.\"\n\nHe pressed a kiss on her damp hair. \"You better, because we're stuck with each other.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes for several seconds. \"Speaking of being stuck with each other, we took a risk this morning when we made love without using protection.\"\n\nMerrick let out an audible sigh. While Alex slept he'd agonized over what they'd done. It wasn't his intent to make love to her without a condom, but at that moment it was as if he'd taken leave of whatever common sense he had.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Ali, I didn't\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped his apology when she placed her fingertips over his mouth. \"Don't apologize, Merrick. I should've stopped you.\"\n\nGrasping her wrist, he pulled her hand down. There was a lethal calmness in his eyes that made it impossible for her look away. \"Why didn't you, Ali?\"\n\nLowering her gaze, she stared at the stark-white T-shirt stretched across his solid chest. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Whatever happens I don't ever want you to forget that I'm in this with you.\"\n\nShe nodded, closing her eyes. \"I suppose you'll remind me if I ever forget, won't you?\"\n\n\"Hell, yeah,\" he said, smiling. \"Let me feed you before you faint on me.\"\n\nHe dropped his arms and steered her to the table in the corner of the large kitchen that had been set with place settings for two. He pulled out a chair and seated her. Leaning over, he pressed a kiss to the column of her neck.\n\nA knowing smile softened Alex's face as Merrick placed a bowl of avocado salad on the table. Merrick would fit in perfectly with the men in her family. He could cook, and he was secure enough with his masculinity to serve his woman.\n\nAlex took a glance at her watch for the umpteenth time. The meeting of the northeast Trust's Waterfront Historic Action League in New Bedford, Massachusetts, was running late. As liaison for the National Trust, she had come to support the WHALE project, whose focus was the rehabilitation of a fire-damaged commercial building in the historic whaling community, but the queasiness persisted. And she didn't have to see a doctor to know the source of the nausea.\n\nShe was pregnant!\n\nWhat she'd hoped for in the future had become a reality\u2014now. She would marry Merrick and make David and Serena grandparents.\n\nMercifully, the meeting ended and Alex gathered her notes. She would decipher them during the flight back to Virginia; she would then type them and forward copies to her supervisor.\n\nAlex liked her position as a liaison because she was like a doctor on call. She didn't have to go into an office, except for monthly meetings, and she worked independently on the projects to which she'd been assigned. Not knowing where she would be sent was the only drawback. It could be Delaware one week, then two weeks later Rhode Island or New York. She refused to think about being stranded in an airport in Vermont or Maine during a snowstorm.\n\nNot waiting to confer with the members of the board, she rushed out of the building to the lot where she'd parked her rental car. By the time she maneuvered into a strip mall, the nausea had stopped. A quarter of an hour later, she was back in her car, driving in the direction of her hotel.\n\nAlex lay across the bed in the darkened room, staring up at the ceiling. She'd pulled the drapes, shutting out the strong autumn sunlight. The home pregnancy test had confirmed her suspicions. She was pregnant with Merrick Grayslake's baby, and by her estimate she would deliver a son or daughter early May of the following year. They'd made love countless times after that time, but had always used protection.\n\nRolling over on her side, she reached for her cell phone on the bedside table. Merrick answered after the third ring.\n\n\"Hey, baby.\"\n\nShe smiled at his sensual greeting. Whenever he called her baby it came out in a deep, sexy growl. \"Hey, you,\" she countered.\n\n\"How are you?\"\n\n\"Pregnant.\" The sound of heavy breathing echoed in her ear. \"Did you hear what I said, Merrick?\"\n\n\"Yes, I did. When are you coming home?\"\n\n\"I'll be home in a couple of days, but I'm not going to stay,\" she said.\n\n\"Where the hell are you going? And to do what?\"\n\nAlex heard the rage and panic in his voice. She decided to ignore his query as to her whereabouts. This was not the time to fight with him. \"I'm going to see my mother. I'm going to need her help in planning our wedding.\"\n\nThere was a beat of silence. \"Ali?\" His voice was softer, calmer.\n\n\"Yes, Merrick?\"\n\n\"Do you want me with you when you tell your parents?\"\n\n\"No, mi amor. I have to handle this by myself. As soon as the arrangements are finalized I'll let you know when you should come to Florida.\"\n\n\"Ali...baby, I...I don't know what to say.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"How about congratulations?\"\n\n\"Congratulations to you...and to me!\"\n\n\"You're silly, Merrick Grayslake.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not. I'm going to become a daddy.\"\n\n\"After I check out tomorrow I'm going down to the Cape to see my brother Gabriel. I'll spend the night with him, then fly out of Logan Saturday morning. I'll call you as soon as I touch down.\"\n\n\"Please don't make me worry about you, Ali.\"\n\n\"I won't. I love you, Merrick.\"\n\nThere was a pause. \"I love you, too.\"\n\nAlex ended the call. Picking up the receiver for the hotel phone, she ordered room service. Afterward she thought about calling Gabriel to let him know she was coming, but decided to surprise him. And no doubt he would be very surprised when she told him he was going to be an uncle.\n\n## Chapter 20\n\nAlex maneuvered her midsize rental car into the driveway leading to her brother's house, coming to a stop in front of the two-car garage. It was nine forty-five at night, and she prayed Gabriel was home, and if he was, that he hadn't gone to bed. She got out of the car. She was in luck. Gabriel bounded off the porch, arms outstretched.\n\n\"Hey! What are you doing here?\"\n\nAlex kissed her brother's cheek. \"I had to see you and give you my good news.\"\n\nCradling her face between his palms, Gabriel smiled at the same time he shook his head. \"You could've used the telephone, Alex.\"\n\n\"I was already in Boston for a meeting.\"\n\nHis hands came down, and he held her at arm's length. \"Look at you, Miss Corporate. You look wonderful.\"\n\nAn attractive blush suffused her face under a deep summer tan. She'd traded her jeans and T-shirts for a black wool crepe suit, ivory silk blouse, black leather pumps and a strand of perfectly matched pearls with matching studs in her pierced lobes.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nGabriel reached for her hand. \"Come inside and we'll talk.\"\n\nAlex followed him up to a wraparound porch and into a spacious entryway. A formal living room held two facing gleaming black Steinway concert pianos.\n\n\"So much for your little place,\" she murmured. \"This house is enormous.\" Bleached pine floors, French doors and pale walls projected an atmosphere of openness.\n\n\"It'll do,\" Gabriel said with a hint of pride. He led the way to the family room. He indicated a love seat. Alex sat, Gabriel taking the cushion next to her. \"Do you want anything to eat or drink?\"\n\n\"No, thank you. I ate dinner at the hotel before I left.\" She glanced around the meticulously furnished room. \"I really like what Aunt Parris has done here.\" Martin Cole's wife, Parris, was a highly trained interior decorator. \"Your house looks like a home. All you need is a wife and a few kids to make it look completely lived in.\"\n\nDeliberately ignoring her reference to a wife and children, Gabriel peered closely at his sister. \"Tell me your good news.\"\n\nA mysterious smile curved Alex's lush mouth. \"I'm getting married.\"\n\nA muscle tensed in Gabriel's jaw. \"Who is he?\" The three words were squeezed out between clenched teeth.\n\nAlex stood up and walked over to the French doors overlooking the rear of the house. Strategically placed floodlights illuminated the backyard. She so wanted her brother to be happy for her.\n\n\"Please, Gabe.\"\n\nHe stood up and walked over to her. \"Please what?\"\n\nHer hands closed into tight fists, her nails biting into the tender flesh of her palms. \"Don't say it like that.\"\n\n\"How else can I say it, Alex? You come to me in the middle of the night with the news that you're engaged. I'm shocked, stunned and surprised.\"\n\nTurning around, she stared up at Gabriel. Her heart sank when she saw his expression. \"I thought you would be happy for me.\"\n\n\"I am, Alex. But...but it's so unexpected. You never said you were seeing anyone.\" He hesitated when she smiled. \"Do I know him?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed. \"A name, Alexandra.\"\n\n\"Merrick Grayslake.\"\n\nGabriel went completely still. \"Michael's friend?\"\n\nAlex lifted her chin and placed her hands on her hips. \"Do you know another Merrick Grayslake?\" she spat out.\n\nGabriel threw up his hands at the same time mumbling a savage expletive. \"How the hell did you hook up with him?\" he shouted in Spanish.\n\n\"Don't you dare yell at me!\" she warned in the same language.\n\nRunning a hand over his face, Gabriel counted slowly to ten. He'd run interference more times than he could remember to scare away men who'd considered his sisters fair game; he'd heard a few refer to Alex and Ana as \"fresh meat.\"\n\nHe knew Merrick Grayslake was his first cousin Michael Kirkland's friend. He'd met him at Michael's wedding, and had found the man mysterious and somewhat sinister looking.\n\nWhy was it, he thought, that his sister was drawn to men who were the complete opposite of her? If they weren't walking on the wild side, then they were on the edge. He didn't know much about Merrick except that he lived somewhere in West Virginia and had at one time worked for the CIA.\n\nGrasping her hand, Gabriel led Alex back to the love seat, sitting and pulling her down next to him. \"Talk to me, Alex.\"\n\n\"Where do you want me to start?\"\n\n\"From the beginning.\"\n\n\"I met Merrick at Michael's wedding. We shared a few dances, and he asked me for my number. I gave him my cell phone because I was between the States and Mexico. I must confess that I felt uncomfortable around him for a while, and then one day it disappeared and I saw him in a whole new light.\" She didn't reveal the whole new light was when they went from being friends to lovers. \"At first I was impressed with his intelligence, but once I got past that I saw him as a lonely man.\"\n\nGabriel shot her an incredulous look. \"You're marrying him because you feel sorry for him?\"\n\n\"Of course not. I'm marrying Merrick because I love him. I also want to tell you that I'm...\"\n\n\"You're what?\" he asked when she did not complete her statement.\n\n\"I'm pregnant.\"\n\nGabriel's expression of shock and annoyance gave way to a brilliant smile. \"Hot damn! I'm going to be an uncle.\"\n\nAlex put her arms around his neck. \"Thank you for being happy for me.\"\n\nHe kissed her forehead. \"How can I not be happy for you? When's the wedding?\"\n\nPulling back, her eyes sparkling like multifaceted citrines, Alex blinked back tears of joy. \"Soon.\"\n\n\"Does Grayslake know he's going to be a father?\"\n\nAlex nodded. \"Yes. I told him last night.\"\n\n\"How far along are you?\"\n\n\"Probably about six weeks.\"\n\n\"Have you seen a doctor?\"\n\n\"Not yet. I have an appointment for Tuesday morning. You're the first one to know\u2014other than Merrick of course.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell anyone you were dating him?\"\n\n\"I didn't want to say anything until I was certain he was the one. Our relationship changed after he called, asking me to join him in Italy after I'd graduated. Of course I'd been there before as an art student, but I saw it differently because I realized then that I had fallen in love with Merrick.\"\n\nGabriel's smile was tender. His sister was in love. \"You're really happy, aren't you?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"So much so that I'm frightened.\"\n\n\"Have you guys set a date?\"\n\n\"No. But I don't want to wait too long. Looking like someone who swallowed a melon isn't too cool for a bride. I know you're teaching, but when are you off?\"\n\n\"We're off Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and of course winter recess.\"\n\nAlex shook her head. It was the second week in September. \"That's too far off. It looks as if you're going to have to fly down to Florida for a weekend. I want you to sing at my wedding.\"\n\n\"Let me know and I'll be there.\" He angled his head. \"What about your position with the Trust?\"\n\n\"If there's an opening in the southern region, then I'll request a transfer.\"\n\n\"And if there isn't?\"\n\n\"Then I'll sit home knitting booties and piecing quilts until the baby comes.\"\n\n\"What do you want?\" he asked. \"Boy? Girl?\"\n\n\"I don't care as long as it's healthy.\"\n\nGabriel ruffled her coiffed hair. \"Will I be able to find you in the hills of West Virginnie?\"\n\n\"We're going to use the house in West Virginia for weekends and vacations. We plan to live at my place until we find something bigger in a D.C. suburb.\"\n\n\"Do you have to live near D.C.?\"\n\n\"Merrick is going back to the CIA as an intelligence training specialist, so living in or around D.C. would be a lot more practical.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a good plan. You, Michael and Jolene can raise your kids together.\"\n\n\"What's nice is that our children will get to see one another more than we saw Michael and Emily.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Gabriel agreed. Michael and Emily Kirkland had grown up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they usually saw them at family gatherings once or twice a year. Emily still lived in New Mexico with her husband and three children, but her brother had moved to the D.C. area after having been assigned to the Pentagon as a captain in the U.S. Army. Michael met his future wife, Jolene, in Georgetown.\n\n\"When do you plan to tell Mom and Dad?\"\n\n\"I'm going to try and see them before next weekend.\"\n\nGabriel glanced at the watch strapped to his wrist. \"I hope you know you're spending the night here.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I don't think I could make it back to Boston without falling asleep behind the wheel.\"\n\n\"Did you bring luggage?\"\n\n\"I have a bag in the trunk of the car.\"\n\n\"Go upstairs and get ready for bed. I'll bring your bag in. You can take the bedroom at the top of the stairs on the left.\"\n\nAlex stared lovingly at her older brother. \"Thank you, Gabe.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"For being you.\"\n\nHe cradled her to his chest, kissing her cheek. \"Love you, sis.\"\n\n\"Love you back, bro.\"\n\nShe handed Gabriel the keys to the rental, then made her way up the staircase. A wave of fatigue swept over her. If it wasn't the nausea, it was fatigue.\n\nAlex stayed on her feet long enough to wash her face, brush her teeth and take a quick shower. When she returned to the bedroom she found her bag by the closet door. She took out a nightgown, slipped it over her body, and as soon as her head touched the pillow she fell asleep.\n\n## Chapter 21\n\nA bright rising sun and the tangy smell of salt water greeted Alex when she woke up in the strange bed. Then, she remembered. She was at her brother's house on Cotuit. Gabriel had begun vacationing off-season on the Cape, but she'd never expected him to settle down in New England.\n\nPushing back the sheet, she moved off the bed and made her way to an adjoining bathroom. The gnawing feeling in her belly had intensified. She had two options: eat or faint.\n\nGabriel was in the kitchen when she walked in. His long damp hair hung down his T-shirt-covered back like satin ribbons. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafted into her nostrils. \"Now that smells wonderful.\"\n\nGabriel turned and smiled at Alex. \"Good morning. How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"Hungry.\"\n\nHe pointed to the table in the breakfast nook. \"Sit down and I'll make you some caf\u00e9 con leche.\" They'd grown up drinking warm milk with a small amount of brewed coffee.\n\nAlex sat down. \"Please don't make it too sweet.\"\n\nGabriel flashed a lopsided grin in an unshaven face. \"Is it because you're sweet enough? Does Merrick think you're sw-e-e-e-t?\" he drawled, unable to resist teasing her.\n\n\"Why don't you ask him?\" she retorted.\n\nA sobering expression came over Gabriel's face. \"I will when I see him again.\"\n\n\"He doesn't frighten that easily, Gabe, so forget about trying to intimidate him the way you've done with a few of the other men I've gone out with.\"\n\nGabriel's eyebrows lifted. \"Oh, so you know about that?\"\n\n\"Know, Gabe. Some of them told me what you said to them.\"\n\nHe shrugged a shoulder. \"I was just trying to protect my sister. Some of those clowns you called dates defied description.\" He poured milk into a saucepan and heated it. \"I was usually pretty good in sending them packing\u2014all except for Duane Jackson. It took a face-to-face to get Mr. Hip-Hop Master to stop seeing you.\" Alex's jaw dropped as she stared at him as if she'd never seen him before. \"Close your mouth, Alex. Yeah, I met with Duane.\"\n\n\"But you had no right to interfere in my affairs,\" she spat out once she recovered her voice.\n\nGabriel winked at her, smiling. \"If I hadn't interfered, then you wouldn't be sitting here telling me that you're planning to marry Merrick Grayslake.\"\n\nA wave of heat stung her cheeks. \"You're right about that.\"\n\nHe cupped an ear with his hand. \"Can I get a thank-you, Alexandra Cole?\"\n\n\"Like, thank you, Gabriel,\" she drawled in her best Valley-Girl imitation.\n\nAlex thanked her brother again when he set a large mug with the steaming milk and coffee in front of her. She took a sip, moaning softly. It was perfect. The warm liquid slid down the back of her throat, heating her chest and belly. Gabriel filled his mug with coffee, joining her at the table.\n\nHer hand halted in midair as she attempted to take another sip of coffee. A young, very pretty woman stood under the arched entrance to the kitchen dressed in a gray sweatshirt, matching pants and running shoes. Her hair, secured in a single braid, fell over one shoulder.\n\nA mysterious smile softened Alex's mouth. \"Shame on you, brother,\" she said softly in Spanish. \"You didn't tell me you had a girlfriend.\"\n\nGabriel jumped up, his chair crashing to the floor in a loud clatter.\n\n\"I'm not his girlfriend. We are colleagues.\" Walking into the kitchen, the woman extended her hand. \"I'm Summer Montgomery.\"\n\nRising to her feet, Alex leaned over the table and shook Summer's hand. \"Alexandra Cole. Your colleague's sister.\"\n\nGabriel, righting his chair, pulled it out for Summer. \"Would you like a cup of coffee?\"\n\n\"No, thank you. I usually don't eat or drink anything before jogging.\"\n\n\"What would you like for breakfast?\"\n\n\"Fruit, a slice of toast and decaf coffee.\"\n\nAlex smiled at Gabriel. \"If you're taking orders, then I'll have grits, eggs, bacon or sausage and biscuits.\"\n\nHe leveled a frown at her. \"If you keep eating like that, I'm going to start to call you porky.\"\n\n\"Bite me, Gabriel Morris Cole!\"\n\n\"Sorry, sis, but I'll leave that task to Merrick.\"\n\nAlex stuck out her tongue at her brother. \"You're gross.\"\n\nSummer pushed back her chair and stood up. \"I'd like to complete my jog before the sun gets too hot. I'll be back later.\"\n\nAlex watched Gabriel watching Summer's retreating figure, a knowing smile curving her lips. \"She's beautiful.\" With her long hair, dark eyes and nut-brown coloring, Summer Montgomery looked exotic.\n\n\"That she is,\" he said matter-of-factly.\n\n\"You like her, don't you?\"\n\nGabriel didn't meet his sister's gaze. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Does working with her pose a problem for you?\"\n\n\"For me, no.\"\n\n\"What about her, Gabe?\"\n\n\"She's reluctant.\"\n\n\"Does that matter to you?\" Alex asked, continuing her questioning.\n\nShifting slightly, Gabriel stared at Alex. \"No. I can't change how I feel about someone just like that.\" He snapped his fingers. \"We've agreed to take it slow and see what becomes of it.\"\n\n\"That's the same thing Merrick said to me. And now I have to plan a wedding.\"\n\nGabriel held up a hand. \"Back it up, Alex. No one said anything about getting married.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to get married? Start your own family?\"\n\n\"I don't consciously think about it.\"\n\n\"You didn't answer my question, Gabriel.\"\n\n\"And I don't intend to answer it, Alexandra.\"\n\n\"You don't have to,\" she said smugly. \"And because you're being evasive tells me that you do.\"\n\n\"Just because your fairy godmother sprinkled you with fairy dust, it doesn't mean it will happen to me.\"\n\n\"It's going to happen, Gabe,\" Alex predicted. The expression on Gabriel's face when Summer walked into the kitchen was one she'd never seen before, and Alex had seen her brother with enough women to know this one was different.\n\nA frown appeared between Gabriel's eyes. \"Next you're going to tell me that you can read palms.\"\n\nAlex clapped a hand over her mouth at the same time she pushed back her chair. She made it to the half bath near the pantry just in time to purge the contents of her stomach. Morning sickness had attacked with a vengeance.\n\nAlex waited for the sleek jet to touch down on the private airstrip before turning on her cell phone. She pressed a button. \"I'm on the ground,\" she said when hearing Merrick's greeting.\n\n\"I'm waiting by baggage claims.\"\n\nShe'd called him earlier that morning from Logan Airport to let him know she'd chartered a private jet to return to D.C. She'd been one of ten passengers on the flight that made for an interesting and entertaining experience.\n\nShe deplaned and made her way down the gangway, through a long corridor that led to a waiting area for commercial departures. Navigating her way through the crowds, she found herself in baggage claims.\n\n\"Looking for someone?\" whispered a familiar voice close to her ear.\n\nTurning around, she tilted her head and smiled at Merrick. She handed him her carry-on. \"Yes, I am. And I believe I just found him.\"\n\nWrapping his free arm around her waist, Merrick dipped his head and kissed her. \"Welcome home.\"\n\nAlex wound her arm around his waist inside his jacket. \"Please get me out of here before I pass out.\"\n\nMerrick led her toward the automatic doors. \"Are you feeling all right?\"\n\n\"It's the crowds.\"\n\n\"Do you want to wait here, or come with me to the lot to pick up my truck?\"\n\n\"I'll come with you.\" She'd never felt bothered by crowds, so Alex assumed it was an idiosyncrasy attributed to her being pregnant.\n\nAlex lost track of time. She knew she was back in her Arlington condo, but other than that she caught glimpses of the world going on around her whenever she stayed awake long enough to eat and go to the bathroom. She woke several times during the night to find Merrick in bed with her. They talked, but she couldn't remember what they'd talked about.\n\n\"What day is it?\" she mumbled, her face pressed to the pillow.\n\n\"Sunday.\"\n\n\"What time is it?\"\n\n\"Eight twenty-two.\"\n\n\"At night?\"\n\n\"No, baby. It's morning.\"\n\nRolling over on her back, she smiled at Merrick leaning over her. She combed her fingers through the crisp hair on his chest. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Nothing earth-shattering or catastrophic since you went into Sleeping Beauty mode.\"\n\nShe gave him a shy smile. \"I'm sorry I wasn't very good company.\"\n\nStraddling her body, Merrick supported his weight on his forearms. \"We're not together to become each other's entertainment. You were exhausted, so you slept.\"\n\n\"I think it's the baby that has me so sleepy.\"\n\nMerrick moved off her, and sitting back on his heels, he splayed a hand under her hips and relieved her of her nightgown. \"Let's see what we have here.\"\n\nEmbarrassment washed over Alex, bringing a burning heat that began in her face and spread lower. She attempted to cover herself with her hands. \"No, Merrick.\"\n\nHe brushed her hands away with the ease of swatting a gnat. \"It's too late to act innocent, querida. I've seen, touched and tasted everything you have.\"\n\nAlex closed her eyes, shutting out his intense stare. \"Please leave me some pride, Merrick.\"\n\nHis hands moved up between her thighs. \"You're hardly going to be thinking about pride when you go into labor and your knees are spread east to west.\"\n\nShe opened her eyes and slapped at his hand. \"Stop!\"\n\nHe cradled her mound. \"It's too late for that, beautiful.\"\n\nAlex closed her eyes again, enjoying a touch that was as soft and gentle as a butterfly's gossamer wings. His fingers trailed over her belly, breasts, throat and around the outline of her ears. He'd become a sculptor, committing every dip and curve to memory.\n\n\"What are you doing to me, Merrick?\"\n\n\"Making love to the mother of my child.\"\n\n\"Are you happy about the baby?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Very, very happy.\"\n\n\"I'm not marrying you because I don't want to be a baby mama.\"\n\nMerrick's smile faded. \"Then why are you marrying me?\"\n\nAlex rested her hand alongside his stubbly jaw. \"I love you.\"\n\nMerrick wanted to tell Alex that he would marry her even if she didn't love him; there was no way he was going to father a child and not become a part of his child's life.\n\n\"Do you want a son or a daughter?\" Alex asked after a comfortable silence.\n\nNuzzling her neck, Merrick pressed a kiss under Alex's ear. \"It doesn't matter.\"\n\nIt didn't matter to Merrick whereas she secretly wanted a girl. A little girl she would dress in frilly clothes, share tea parties, shopping sprees and intimate secrets with. She wanted for her daughter what she'd shared with her mother.\n\n\"Do you feel like going out for breakfast?\"\n\nExcitement fired the gold in her eyes. Merrick had mentioned food, which had become her number-one priority. \"You don't have to ask me twice.\"\n\nMerrick slipped off the bed and swung her up in his arms. \"We'll save time if we share a shower.\"\n\nAlex looped her arms around his neck. \"Do you think we can take time to do something else?\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" he asked, not breaking stride.\n\n\"You know.\"\n\nMerrick stopped several feet from the bathroom. \"I know what?\" Pressing her mouth to his ear, Alex whispered what she wanted him to do to her. Easing back, gray eyes flattening with an unreadable emotion, Merrick shook his head. \"None of that until you see the doctor. I don't want anything to happen to you or our baby.\"\n\n\"Couples make love right up until the time a woman is ready to give birth.\"\n\n\"What if you're not one of those women, Ali?\"\n\n\"And if I am, are you going to wait around for nine months and take care of yourself?\"\n\nHis eyes widened until she saw glints of blue in his silver gaze. \"And why not?\" he asked glibly. \"It won't be the first time.\"\n\nAlex affected a saucy smile. \"If it comes to that, then I'll do it for you.\"\n\nMerrick stared at the woman in his arms, shock freezing his features. With whom had he fallen in love and committed his future to? He knew life with Alexandra Cole would never be boring, but he hadn't realized it would also be fun.\n\nAlex shocked her parents when they walked into their kitchen early Friday morning to find their eldest daughter sitting at the table eating a bowl of oatmeal.\n\nDavid's dimpled smile deepened the network of tiny lines around his obsidian eyes. \"I told you we should change the locks,\" he said to his wife.\n\nAlex waved her spoon. \"If you change the locks, then you're going to have to change the alarm's security code.\"\n\nSerena smiled at her daughter. \"Never mind your father. He's as fussy as an old settin' hen, but he knows he loves it when his children come back home.\"\n\nDavid leaned over and dropped a kiss on Alex's damp hair. \"Speak for yourself, Mrs. Cole. Hi, baby,\" he crooned in the same breath.\n\nAlex patted his arm. \"Hi, Daddy.\" She smiled at her mother, who'd come over to hug her. \"Hi, Mom.\"\n\nSerena sat down beside her daughter. \"What time did you get in?\"\n\nShe and David had gotten used to their four children coming and going at odd times and hours. They would be there, then hours later jetting off to another state or country. Gabriel had become the most stable of the quartet. He loved teaching and living in Massachusetts. Even though Alex had purchased property in Virginia, she continued to travel\u2014first for her education and now with her career.\n\nSerena had come to realize that Ana and Jason were the least independent of her four children. And because they were twins, albeit fraternal, it would be difficult for them to sever the connection that began in the womb.\n\nAlex swallowed a mouthful of cereal. \"I got in after one.\"\n\nAs David filled a carafe with water to brew coffee, he narrowed his gaze. There was something different about Alex, but he couldn't pinpoint what it was.\n\n\"If you came to hang out with Jason and Ana, then you're out of luck. They'll be in Los Angeles until next week.\"\n\nAlex stared at her father, then her mother. \"I didn't come to see them. I came to talk to you.\"\n\nDavid felt his heart lurch; he mumbled a silent prayer for strength. \"What about, cookie?\"\n\nAlex smiled. It'd been years since her father called her that. \"Please sit down, Daddy.\"\n\nResting his left hand over his chest, long, slender fingers outstretched, David shook his head. \"If what you're going to tell me is going to hurt my heart, then I'd rather not hear it.\"\n\n\"Sit down, David,\" Serena urged quietly.\n\nWaiting until her father sat beside her mother, his right arm draped over the back of Serena's chair, Alex said, \"I'm getting married.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"To whom?\"\n\nSerena and David had spoken in unison.\n\nAlex smiled at Serena. \"When? As soon as you can get the family together.\" She angled her head, grinning broadly at her father. \"His name is Merrick Grayslake.\"\n\nDavid's expression did not change. He'd complained about his children not getting married, but now that Alexandra had expressed an interest in changing her marital status, he didn't feel the joy he thought he would've felt.\n\n\"Why the rush, cookie?\"\n\n\"I'm pregnant.\"\n\nSerena gasped, her eyes widening with each passing second while David jumped and pumped his fists in the air.\n\n\"Yes! Yes!\" he shouted, cutting a dance step around the kitchen. He came back to the table and pulled Alex from her chair. He swung her around and around until both she and Serena screamed for him to stop.\n\n\"David! You could hurt the baby,\" Serena chastised angrily.\n\nHe set Alex gently on her feet as he managed to look contrite. \"I'm sorry, cookie. It's just that the news that I'm going to be a grandfather is the best that I've had in a very long time.\"\n\n\"I thought winning a Grammy as Producer of the Year was the best.\"\n\n\"Oh, hell no,\" he said in protest. \"The day your mama told me that I was going to become a father tops the list. Knowing that I'll be a grandfather comes in at number two.\"\n\nSerena got up, filled a glass with orange juice and placed it in front of Alex. \"How far along are you?\"\n\n\"I just made seven weeks.\"\n\n\"Did you see a doctor?\" Serena asked, continuing her questioning.\n\n\"Yes. He says everything looks normal.\"\n\n\"How and where did you meet this Grayslake dude?\"\n\nAlex rolled her eyes at her father. \"He's not a dude, Daddy.\"\n\n\"If he's not a dude, then what is he? A she?\"\n\n\"Mommy, can you talk to your husband?\"\n\nSerena leveled David a knowing look. \"Please, darling. This is serious.\"\n\n\"So am I, Serena. Don't I have a right to know something about my future son-in-law?\"\n\nAlex took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. \"Daddy, you and I will talk later, because Mom and I need to plan a wedding.\"\n\nDavid ran a hand over his close-cropped silver hair. \"Okay, cookie. When are you going back to Virginia?\"\n\n\"Sunday night.\"\n\nHe nodded. He was outnumbered two to one, so he knew when to retreat. \"Just remember to save time for your old man.\"\n\n\"I will, Daddy.\"\n\nDavid filled a mug with coffee and walked out of the kitchen; an indescribable feeling filled his chest; there was going to be a wedding on the property of his Boca Raton estate for the first time; somehow he'd thought his sons would give him grandfather status, but it appeared as if his globe-trotting, art-loving daughter had beat them to it.\n\nIt no longer mattered because now his brothers would have to stop teasing him about his marriage-phobic children.\n\n## Chapter 22\n\nMerrick's arrival in Boca Raton coincided with two inches of rain that delayed flights into and out of Florida. He and others waited more than six hours before boarding a jet scheduled to land at the Fort Lauderdale\u2013Hollywood International Airport. He'd called Alex to inform her that he would be late, followed by a call to the hotel where he'd made a reservation to inform them of his late arrival.\n\nAlex had insisted he stay at her parents' house, but he rejected her offer, preferring instead to reserve a suite at a nearby hotel chain. Merrick reassured her that there would be other occasions, after they were married, when he would willingly accept his in-laws' hospitality. After all, he was a stranger, a man who would marry their daughter and change her name from Cole to Grayslake, a man who had no known relatives with whom to share the joy of his upcoming nuptials.\n\nHe saw Alex before she spied him. She stood in the baggage claims area holding a sign with his name. \"I'm Mr. Grayslake,\" he whispered, startling her. \"How are you, beautiful?\"\n\nAlex lowered the placard and looped her arms under his shoulders. \"I'm good. Welcome to the Sunshine State.\"\n\nMerrick gave her a skeptical look before he brushed a light kiss over her mouth. \"Surely you jest,\" he teased.\n\nHer eyes took in his powerful presence. \"Dad said it's the first hard rain in weeks.\"\n\nSwitching his carry-on bag to the opposite hand, he reached for her fingers. \"Did you check the almanac for Saturday's weather?\"\n\nAlex gave him a sidelong glance as she led him out of the terminal. \"Do you really follow what's in the almanac?\"\n\nMerrick nodded. \"It's more accurate than not.\"\n\n\"Well, it's not going to rain on our wedding.\"\n\nHe lifted an eyebrow. \"Why? Because you say so?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said confidently.\n\nWaiting until they were seated in a late-model Lexus sedan, Alex gave Merrick an overview of their wedding scheduled for Saturday afternoon at four, and that family members had been gathering in Florida all week since David and Serena Cole had announced their upcoming nuptials.\n\n\"Where is everyone staying?\" Merrick asked as Alex maneuvered in and out of traffic like an Indy car driver.\n\n\"Most will stay in Palm and West Palm Beach. Michael and Jolene will stay with his parents at their condo. The property where we met will accommodate at least fifty. It'll be a tight fit, but it will be like a gigantic sleepover. My aunts Nancy and Josephine have enough room to put up another thirty or forty between them.\"\n\n\"What's on the agenda for tomorrow other than getting a license?\"\n\n\"That's it. I picked up my dress yesterday and shoes earlier today.\"\n\n\"What about rings, Ali?\"\n\nHer mouth formed a perfect O. \"I forgot about them.\"\n\n\"Do you want an engagement ring?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No.\" Alex wanted to tell Merrick that if they'd had a formal engagement period, then yes.\n\n\"Can you take a few days off for a honeymoon?\"\n\nAlex slowed and then came to a complete stop at a red light. \"We can't do Venice in a few days.\"\n\n\"But we can do Key West.\"\n\nShe bit down on her lower lip to keep from screaming. \"I'd love to spend my honeymoon in the Keys.\"\n\nReaching over, Merrick rested his hand on her knee. \"I'll call a few places to see if we can't rent a bungalow. The summer season is over, so we should be able to find something.\"\n\n\"What can I do to make you change your mind about staying in a hotel?\"\n\nHe squeezed her knee. \"There's nothing you can do, baby. I'll meet your folks tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Are you worried that I'll slip into your bedroom and jump your bones?\"\n\nThrowing back his head, Merrick laughed. \"There's not going to be any more bone-jumping until after we're married. Getting you pregnant before I married you was not what I'd planned.\"\n\n\"Are you sorry that I'm pregnant?\"\n\nMerrick heard the hitch in her voice and his heart turned over. \"No, baby, I'm not sorry. But if it was the only thing that convinced you to marry in this century, I would've made it my business to get you pregnant the first time we slept together.\"\n\n\"That's diabolical and underhanded.\"\n\n\"All's fair in love and war, querida.\"\n\nMerrick felt as if he were reliving New Year's Eve. There were Coles everywhere. They drifted in and out of David and Serena's house, leaving wrapped gifts and envelopes; they hugged and kissed Alex, overwhelming her until she burst into tears. He took charge of his fianc\u00e9e when he led her into the house, put her to bed, staying with her until she fell asleep.\n\nThere came a soft knock on the door. Merrick left the chair next to Alex's bed, crossed the room and opened the door. Serena motioned to him. \"How is she?\"\n\nMerrick smiled at the petite woman with graying reddish-brown curls. He met her gold-brown eyes, eyes she'd passed along to her four children. \"She's sleeping.\"\n\nSerena exhaled. \"I didn't want to say anything about the baby, because that's something you and Alex should make public. I should've known she was getting overwhelmed when she stopped talking.\" Lowering his head, Merrick smothered a grin. \"Oh, I guess you know that she talks a lot.\"\n\n\"One of us has to be the talkative one.\"\n\nSerena rested a hand on his arm. \"That's what I told David. He kept saying 'he's kind of quiet,' but I had to remind my husband that every Cole carries the loquacious gene.\" Standing on tiptoe, she kissed her soon-to-be son-in-law on the cheek. \"Thank you for taking care of her.\"\n\nMerrick met Serena's unflinching stare. \"I'll always take care of her.\"\n\nTurning on her heel, Serena retraced her steps. She'd told David that he had nothing to worry about. There was something about Merrick Grayslake that reminded her of David's brother, Joshua Kirkland. Both men were quiet and radiated a danger that could take the nerve of the bravest man.\n\nShe was proud of her daughter. There was no doubt she'd chosen well.\n\nMerrick sat around the heated pool with Alex's twenty- and thirty-something relatives as catering staff unloaded their vans, setting candles out on each table. Within twenty minutes dozens of candles flickered like stars while a long table groaned under platters of food set up buffet style.\n\nIt was to be his last night as a single man, and Michael teased him about being whipped. He'd come to like Alex's family. They were friendly, outgoing, unpretentious and brutally honest. In a few short days they'd become his family: father, mother, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles.\n\nMerrick sat up straighter, going completely still when he saw Gabriel Cole with a woman from his past. He remembered her even if she didn't remember him. He stood up with the other men at their approach. Gabriel made the introductions, and when they stood in front of him Merrick noticed the stiffness in her slender body.\n\nGabriel smiled at Merrick. \"Last, but certainly not least, is the prospective bridegroom, my soon-to-be brother-in-law, Merrick Grayslake. Merrick, this is my friend and colleague, Summer Montgomery.\"\n\nMerrick wanted to tell Gabriel that he knew who she was. Casually dressed in a pair of tailored taupe slacks and an ivory-hued silk shirt, and her hair pulled off her face in a loose knot, she looked nothing like the woman he'd trained. DEA special agent Summer Montgomery had completed her training at the FBI facilities in Quantico, Virginia, and had applied to take an additional course in intelligence training. Merrick, on loan from the CIA to the FBI and the DEA, had facilitated the four-week training.\n\nSummer inclined her head. \"Merrick. Best wishes on your upcoming nuptials.\"\n\nSmiling, he leaned over and kissed her cheek. \"Thank you, Renegade.\" He'd whispered her code name. He saw a flicker of gratitude in her eyes before she shuttered her gaze. It was apparent Gabriel Cole was totally unaware that his girlfriend was an undercover drug agent.\n\nNot waiting for the others, Merrick went over to the serving station. Reaching for a plate, he had the servers fill it with vegetables, sliced chicken and cubed fresh fruit. He approached the table where Alex sat with Ana, Summer and Clayborne Spencer's fianc\u00e9e and fellow medical student, Kim Cheung.\n\nHe placed the plate in front of Alex. Resting both hands on her shoulders, he massaged the muscles in her neck and upper back. \"What do you want to drink?\"\n\nSmiling up at him over her shoulder, Alex crooned, \"A fruit juice, darling.\"\n\nMerrick walked away to do Alex's bidding and Ana covered her hand with her fingers. \"Michael's right,\" she whispered. \"He is whipped! And speaking of whipped, I owe you one, dear sister.\"\n\nAlex swallowed a mouthful of avocado. Some women craved pickles and ice cream, she craved avocados. \"For what?\"\n\n\"For pretending you didn't know Merrick when you two were knockin' boots.\"\n\n\"How long have you known Merrick, Alex?\" Kim asked.\n\n\"I met him New Year's Eve just like the rest of you.\" Alex smiled at Gabriel's girlfriend. \"Everyone except Summer.\"\n\n\"I saw him, but I wasn't introduced to Merrick until he came to Michael's house on the Fourth,\" Ana said. \"By that time he and Alex were knee-deep in the hot sauce.\"\n\n\"My sister's pissed because Miss Sherlock Holmes couldn't find out my business.\"\n\nAna wiggled her fingers. \"That's because your man is tall, dark and mysterious.\"\n\nKim flipped several strands of straight black hair over her shoulder. \"He's gorgeous.\"\n\n\"It's his eyes,\" Ana crooned, batting her lashes. \"They're like lasers. Do they change color when he makes love to you?\"\n\n\"Why don't you ask him?\" Alex said, glaring at her sister.\n\n\"Ana,\" Kim whispered, \"you shouldn't ask your sister that.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" she asked.\n\n\"Because it's disrespectful.\"\n\n\"You tell her, Kim,\" Alex chimed in.\n\nSummer Montgomery rested her forehead on her arms and laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. Gabriel's sisters were like a stand-up act.\n\nMerrick returned, carrying a glass of juice, followed by Clayborne, Gabriel and Jason, who set down plates in front of Kim, Summer and Ana.\n\nHaving assuaged her temporary pangs of hunger, Alex drank her juice, then dabbed her mouth. \"Summer, you can share my room tonight because Kim will be in Ana's. Let me know if you'll need a massage, manicure, pedicure, or if you want your hair styled. Mom has contracted with a group of beauty consultants to hook us up tomorrow.\"\n\nSummer flashed a wide grin. \"Count me in for the massage and hair.\"\n\nThe women sat eating and chatting for several hours until Alex stood up. \"I don't know about the rest of you, but I must get some sleep.\"\n\nPushing herself into a standing position, Summer said, \"I think I'm going to join you.\" She smiled at Ana and Kim. \"I'll see you tomorrow. Good night.\"\n\n\"Wait for us,\" Kim called out as she and Ana followed Alex and Summer.\n\n## Chapter 23\n\nIt was minutes from midnight when seven men sitting around a table lifted glasses filled with brandy and toasted Merrick Grayslake.\n\nJason, the mirror image of Gabriel, sans long hair and pierced ears, offered the first toast. \"To Merrick, my soon-to-be brother-in-law. May your days be sunny and your nights warmer than my esteemed older brother's.\" First Gabriel had been teased about driving a hoopty, and now it was because he'd moved from warm sunny Florida to frigid New England.\n\n\"Hear! Hear!\" came a chorus of deep male voices.\n\nMerrick raised his glass, put it to his mouth and downed it in one swallow.\n\n\"Hot damn!\" federal district court judge Christopher Delgado crowed. Slender and elegant with salt-and-pepper wavy hair, he leaned over and slapped Merrick on the back. \"You're going to fit nicely in this family because you drink like an hombre!\"\n\n\"Are you signifying something, brother?\" Michael asked his brother-in-law.\n\n\"Some male relatives...who I will not out tonight...have a problem holding their Kool-Aid.\"\n\nJason cupped his ear. \"Do I hear throw down?\"\n\nChristopher smiled. \"I don't know about throw down, but the last time I stepped in as bartender I heard complaints about the Kool-Aid being a wee bit too strong.\"\n\nGabriel shook his head. \"Don't play yourself, Chris. You know right well that stuff you mixed up wasn't legal.\"\n\n\"It's as legal as I am,\" Chris retorted, dodging a barrage of rolled-up cocktail napkins thrown at him. \"Jason, check your dad's liquor cabinet and bring out the good stuff.\"\n\nJason popped up from his chair. \"I know he has the Three Kings.\"\n\n\"The Three Kings?\" asked Algerian-born fashion designer Silah Kadir. Silah was married to Martin Cole's youngest daughter. \"Are you talking about the Magi?\"\n\nMerrick laughed along with the other men. \"Jason is talking about Johnny Walker, Jim Beam and Jack Daniel.\"\n\n\"Why do you call them Three Kings?\" Silah asked in French-accented English.\n\nClayborne rested an arm over his uncle's shoulder. \"Because if you drink enough of them you'll think you're seeing not only the kings, but also their camels.\"\n\n\"Go get them,\" Gabriel urged his younger brother. \"We're here to toast Merrick, and it should be a night to remember.\"\n\nDr. Tyler Cole looped one leg over the other. Tyler, Martin's only son, was the heir apparent to the family dynasty. \"Don't look for me to resuscitate any fool who gets so drunk that he'll mistake the pool for a bed.\"\n\n\"Grandpa told me that you were in your cups at Michael's reception.\" Tyler, glaring at his nephew, smothered a curse. \"Did Dana give you mouth-to-mouth?\"\n\nTyler waved a hand. \"Get this young pup outta here. This is grown-folk business.\"\n\n\"Wait up, Jason,\" Clayborne called out. \"I'll help you.\"\n\nLeaning back in his chair, Michael extended his glass to Merrick. \"Friend. Soon-to-be cousin. Welcome to the family.\" He, too, downed the brandy in one shot.\n\nSomeone refilled Merrick's glass and he tossed it back, the heat of the smooth liquor spreading throughout his chest. He'd never been much of a drinker, but tonight he would make an exception.\n\nJason and Clayborne returned with a plastic crate filled with bottles of scotch, gin, vodka, tequila and bourbon. The liquid flowed, the tongues got looser, the men toasting Merrick for having the good sense to marry into the family; eventually the conversations turned to when the men first made love to their wives and girlfriends.\n\nMerrick got drunk, drunker than he'd ever been in his life; he was as talkative as the others with one exception: he didn't disclose the circumstances surrounding his birth, the covert missions for the CIA and the most intimate details of his relationship with Alex.\n\nSometime around three Gabriel climbed onto one of the chaises set up around the pool and fell asleep.\n\nIt was Serena Cole who found Christopher, Tyler and Silah asleep on the deck of the pool. Michael, Jason, Merrick and Clayborne managed to make it into the house, falling asleep where they lay.\n\nNone had made it to their designated bedrooms.\n\nMerrick tied the light gray silk tie in a Windsor knot, then turned down the spread collar on the white shirt. When he'd finally regained consciousness earlier that morning it was to a pounding headache, but after several aspirins washed down with black coffee he felt more human than he had in hours.\n\nThe male bonding\/mock bachelor party was unlike any in which he'd participated. Grown men had become boys, fueled by an alcoholic haze wherein they'd confessed their shortcomings. To the world they were rich, powerful, successful men; however, they displayed their very human side when they spoke of the difficulties of parenting and their willingness to compromise in order to save their marriages. Merrick would've thought them conventional, but the various tattoos and ear piercings that crossed generations shattered that perception.\n\nSitting on the leather bench at the foot of the bed in the suite that had belonged to Gabriel, Merrick closed his eyes and did what he hadn't done in a very long time\u2014he prayed. He was still in the same position, eyes closed, when Jason knocked on the door and walked in.\n\nTall, broad-shouldered, he cut a handsome figure in formal attire. His silk tie matched Merrick's. \"Thinking about backing out, Brother Merrick?\"\n\nMerrick's head came up at the same time he stood up. Reaching for the jacket to his tuxedo on the foot of the bed, he slipped his arms into the sleeves.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nJason flashed a dimpled smile. \"It's time we get going, but Dad wants to see you downstairs in his study before you marry my sister.\"\n\nMerrick followed Jason down a curving staircase of a house constructed in three sections. The elder Coles occupied one section that included a guest wing, the four bedroom suites took up another section and the third section contained a state-of-the-art recording studio and Serenity Records' corporate office.\n\nMerrick walked into the large cool room with floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with books and musical scores. A large glass-top rosewood desk and matching table complemented leather chairs in a rich maroon.\n\nDavid Cole was not alone. His brothers, Martin and Joshua Kirkland\u2014the latter the result of an illicit liaison between Samuel Cole and Teresa Maldonado Kirkland\u2014sons Jason and Gabriel, and Matthew Sterling, family friend and father-in-law to Emily Kirkland Delgado, made the large room appear small. The men, all in formal dress, staring at Merrick radiated power and danger, and if he hadn't been who he was he would've been intimidated. However, he'd experienced too much, stared death in the face too often to be intimidated\u2014by anything or anyone.\n\nDavid, who sat on the edge of the desk, rose to his feet. Recessed light glinted off his silver hair. \"Merrick, I've asked you to come here because there is something I must say to you. I've asked my brothers, sons and a lifelong friend to be here because I want them to be aware of what's in my heart at this moment.\n\n\"In fifteen minutes I will place my daughter's hand in yours. And when that happens I will relinquish all claim and responsibility for Alexandra. My wife and my children are my most precious gifts, and I'm generously offering you the gift of my eldest daughter.\n\n\"I will say this only once, Merrick Grayslake. Love her, and protect her with your life. But if you fail to do this, then look for me to come after you.\"\n\nThe nostrils of Merrick's aquiline nose flared as he let out the breath he'd been holding. His future father-in-law had just threatened him. He blinked once. \"Warning heeded, David.\" His eyes widened. \"You've had your say, so let me have mine. At four o'clock Alexandra will become my wife and therefore it will become my responsibility to protect her.\n\n\"I love her and the child she carries in her womb. And because I love her, I've broken a vow I made almost three years ago when I said I'd never go back to the CIA. Well, I'm going back because I'll have a wife and child to support.\" He paused for effect. \"So, that should put your mind at ease as to whether I have a job.\" Everyone turned and stared at David, who managed to look sheepish.\n\n\"No, you didn't, David,\" Gabriel said softly.\n\n\"Damn, brother, that's cold,\" Joshua Kirkland whispered, shaking his head in disbelief.\n\nMerrick lowered his head, hiding his own grin when Martin Cole and Matthew Sterling dissolved into a paroxysm of laughter that left them with tears in their eyes.\n\nHis head came up and he stared at David. \"I don't have as much money as Alexandra, but I can assure you that I can support her and the children we plan to have.\" He nodded to the other men. \"I don't know about you guys, but I have a wedding to go to in three minutes.\" Turning on his heels, he walked out of the study, leaving his bride's family members staring at his retreating back.\n\nMartin Cole's silver hair was a startling contrast to his deeply tanned olive-brown skin. Shaking his head, he glared at his younger brother. \"David, you never cease to amaze me. Why the hell did you have to ask the man if he had a job?\"\n\nCrossing his arms over his chest, Joshua continued to stare at his half brother, green eyes sparkling in amusement. \"If you'd wanted to know about Merrick you could've asked Michael.\"\n\n\"Dad would never do that,\" Jason said. \"Whenever it concerns Alex or Ana he goes straight for the jugular. He wasn't even diplomatic about it. He could've said, 'By the way, my man, are you a scrub?'\"\n\nMatthew Sterling stared at Jason. \"Scrub?\"\n\n\"Pimp, gigolo, deadbeat\u2014\"\n\n\"I get the picture, Jason,\" Matt interrupted.\n\nMartin patted David's back. \"I know all of this is new for you, but you'll get through it.\" All of Martin's children were married and had made him a grandfather of five.\n\nJoshua took David's arm. \"Come on, brother. After the first time it gets easier.\"\n\nDavid narrowed his eyes at his brothers. They'd teased him for years about his children not wanting to marry and have children. But all of the teasing would come to an end in a few minutes.\n\nShaking off his brother's hands, he walked out of the study to give his daughter away in marriage to a man he now respected enough to think of him as a son.\n\n## Chapter 24\n\nAlex was certain her father could feel her trembling as she clung to his arm. She'd decided on simplicity: no bridesmaids, groomsmen, ring bearer or flower girl. Her father would escort her over a red carpet to where Merrick waited with a judge to make her his wife.\n\nShe closed her eyes when Gabriel sang her favorite song, the top-chart blockbuster classic hit \"I Will Always Love You.\" Gabriel's fingers skimmed the keyboard as his melodious voice came through the powerful speakers and something within her burst.\n\nAlex wasn't certain it was the fullness of the love she felt for Merrick, the hormonal changes playing havoc with her moods or the knowledge that within minutes her life would change dramatically. The times when she thought only of herself and what made her happy were over. Every decision she made would be predicated on its effect on her husband and child.\n\nThe tears flowed down her face, landing on the bouquet of white lacecap hydrangeas with dozens of faux-pearl sprays, bead flowers, seashell flowers and seashells on wires tied with yards of ribbons in different widths and edging. The song ended with many seated on the organza-draped cushioned chairs blotting the corners of their eyes.\n\nThe assembled rose as one when Gabriel played the familiar chords to the wedding march.\n\n\"Let's go, cookie,\" David murmured to his still-weeping daughter.\n\nAlex wanted to move, but her legs refused to follow the dictates of her brain. \"I can't, Daddy,\" she sobbed.\n\nMurmurs escalated when David Cole wrapped his arms around his daughter's bare shoulders. \"If you don't want to marry him, then say so, cookie.\"\n\nAlex shook her head. She wanted to marry Merrick. He'd been the only man she'd ever wanted to marry. \"I want him, Daddy.\"\n\nDavid kissed her hair, careful not to dislodge the tiny rosebuds pinned into her black curly hair. All he'd ever wanted from the moment he became a father was to protect his children and see to their happiness. But as Merrick had stated so arrogantly, Alex was no longer his responsibility. It was now up to Merrick Grayslake to protect his daughter and unborn grandchild.\n\nMerrick watched the interchange between his bride and her father, his heart racing uncontrollably. Had she changed her mind? Did she wait until the very moment that they were to exchange vows to change her mind?\n\nHe'd heard of Dear John letters, brides and grooms being left at the altar and runaway brides. Was he, he agonized, about to become another statistic?\n\nA sense of strength came to Merrick, one stronger than any he'd experienced in the past. He'd languished in foster and group homes, endured verbal and physical abuse and still managed to survive. He did not give his heart to a woman only to lose her in front of hundreds of people.\n\n\"I'll be back,\" he said to the elderly black-robed judge watching the unfolding scene with an expression of distress on his lined face.\n\nGasps filled the warm autumn afternoon when Merrick marched down the red carpet like a marine during a dress parade. He rested a hand on her back and she went completely still.\n\n\"Querida.\"\n\nAlex felt the comforting touch on her bare flesh, inhaled the familiar cologne. She couldn't move, couldn't go to Merrick so he'd come for her. Turning, she smiled up at him through her lashes. The moisture had turned her eyes into pools of gold.\n\nHer lips parted in a trembling smile. \"Mi, amor.\"\n\nDavid reached for Alex's hand and placed it in Merrick's outstretched one. \"Take her.\"\n\nReaching into the pocket of his dress trousers for a handkerchief, Merrick gently blotted the tears on his bride's face. Lowering his head, he kissed her forehead. \"Are you ready to do this?\"\n\nShe wrinkled her pert nose. \"Yes.\"\n\nAlex looped her hand over the sleeve of Merrick's jacket as he retraced his steps, bringing them to stand in front of the elderly judge who'd officiated at many a Cole civil wedding. He winked at Alex, then began the ceremony he could recite in his sleep.\n\nMerrick's voice was strong and clear as he took his vows. His gaze never strayed from Alex's face as she recited hers. He loved her, had openly confessed to loving her, had shown her in the most intimate way possible that he loved her, but he doubted whether she knew the depth of the love he felt for her.\n\nWhen it came time for the exchange of rings he reached into his breast pocket and slipped a diamond eternity band onto her slender finger. Alex handed her bouquet to her father as she took the platinum band off her thumb and slipped it onto Merrick's left hand.\n\nSighs of relief, cheering and whistles followed the judge's pronouncement that Merrick and Alexandra Grayslake were now man and wife. Looping his arms around her waist, Merrick picked up his wife and kissed her soundly on the mouth.\n\n\"Congratulations, Mrs. Grayslake.\"\n\nHer dimples deepened when she flashed a joyous smile. \"And congratulations to you, too, Mr. Grayslake.\" Tightening her hold around his neck, she kissed him again. \"I can't believe we're married.\"\n\n\"Believe it, baby,\" he whispered, \"because I'm going to remind you of it every day and every night.\"\n\nHe set her on her feet, one arm going around her waist as he shook hands with David. \"Scared you for a moment, didn't it?\" he asked his father-in-law.\n\n\"Hell, yeah,\" David admitted. He patted Merrick's shoulder. \"You did good, son.\"\n\nSerena came over and kissed her daughter, then her new son-in-law. \"Congratulations.\"\n\nMerrick wound his free arm around Serena's trim waist. \"Thank you, Mrs. Cole, for your daughter and putting everything together so quickly.\"\n\nFrowning, Serena shook her head slowly. \"You call my husband David and me Mrs. Cole?\"\n\nMerrick's eyebrows lifted. \"What do you want me to call you?\"\n\n\"Mom will do nicely, thank you.\"\n\nMerrick was momentarily speechless in his surprise. His foster mothers had wanted him to call them Mom or Mother, but he'd never been able to bring himself to do it. Not when they saw him as a check from the state, not when they punished him for what they'd considered the slightest infraction.\n\nToday his life changed when he became husband, son and brother-in-law. It had taken him nearly thirty-six years to find a family he could claim as his own.\n\n\"From now on it will be Mom, Mom.\" He nodded to David.\n\n\"I'm going to take Ali to the table where she can get off her feet.\"\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Serena asked her daughter.\n\n\"I'm good, Mom. I'm going to skip the receiving-line routine.\"\n\n\"Why, cookie?\" David couldn't believe Alex wanted to break the tradition.\n\n\"I don't know what it is, but since I've become pregnant I can't stand crowds of people. I freak out if they get too close to me.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me you're not going to save your father a dance.\"\n\n\"Of course I am. Do you think I'm going to cheat you out of that honor?\"\n\n\"I hope not,\" David mumbled. He took Serena's arm. \"Come, sweetheart, let's circulate.\"\n\nMerrick steered her over to where a table had been set up for the bride, the groom and her parents, parents that he now thought of as his own.\n\nPrerecorded music blared from speakers set up on the property and the partying began in earnest. Those who came over to greet Alex found her ravishing in an off-the-shoulder platinum gown with a sunburst-pleated silk-chiffon bodice topping a silk-satin skirt. The garment was perfect for her petite figure. Three inches of jeweled Manolo Blahnik wedding sling backs put the top of her head at six-foot-three-inch Merrick's shoulder.\n\nShe'd decided on a buffet rather than a more formal sit-down dinner. The caterer had delivered dozens of tables, each with seating for six. Vases of pale-colored roses lined the courtyard and patio.\n\nDavid had hired a disc jockey to spin tunes, and a portable dance floor had been set up between the pool and tennis court. Serena had the pool covered, much to the disappointment of the younger children.\n\nMerrick pressed his shoulder to Alex's bare arm. \"You have the same food on your plate, so why is it you're eating mine?\"\n\n\"Whoever fixed my plate added salt.\"\n\n\"I would've gotten you another plate, Ali.\"\n\nShe rested her head on his shoulder. \"That's all right.\"\n\nAngling his head, he kissed her hair. \"Are you all right?\" She'd seemed out of sorts after dancing with him, her father and then her brothers.\n\n\"I'm feeling a little tired.\"\n\nMerrick knew her little tired was more than that. There were times when she was so lethargic that she fell asleep while eating. \"We're leaving.\"\n\nHer head came up, and suddenly she was wide awake. \"We can't leave now.\"\n\n\"And why not?\"\n\n\"It's too soon.\"\n\n\"Soon for what, Ali? You're lethargic and out of sorts. Have you forgotten that you're two months pregnant?\"\n\n\"How can I forget?\" she countered. \"Between the nausea and fatigue I feel like a punching bag.\"\n\n\"That's why we're leaving.\" Rising, he eased her up from her chair. \"We'll change, then head over to the hotel.\" They'd made plans to spend their wedding night in a hotel before driving down to the Keys the following morning.\n\n\"You're a bully, Merrick Grayslake,\" she hissed through clenched teeth.\n\n\"Yeah, yeah,\" he drawled. \"A bully who loves you and that little baby inside you.\"\n\nLeaning against his side to keep her footing, Alex permitted Merrick to lead her back to the house where she'd grown up. She thought about his comment that he loved the baby inside her. How could he love something he'd never met or seen?\n\nThere were other questions she wanted to ask her enigmatic husband, but Alex decided to wait, wait until after they returned from their honeymoon.\n\n## Part Three\n\n## Silent Witness\n\n## Chapter 25\n\nCIA Headquarters...Langley, Virginia\n\nLeaning back in his chair, Merrick pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. His eyes were burning from nonstop reading. The terrorist act of September 11 had changed the course of action for securing America's borders and its citizens.\n\nHe'd spent the past week reading about new and updated security protocol that had been put in place within days of the horrific destruction of the World Trade Center.\n\nMerrick forced his concentration away from what he'd mentally recorded to that of his wife. He and Alex had celebrated their third month of marriage the night before. Even though she professed she wanted a quiet dinner at home, he overrode her protests and took her out to one of her favorite D.C. eating establishments.\n\nAlex was now in her second trimester and without warning her nausea had vanished along with her lethargy. The gradual changes in her body made her pregnancy more obvious. Her face was fuller, as were her breasts, and she'd lost her waistline.\n\nShe'd contacted the National Trust, applying for a transfer to the southeast region; however, her request was denied because there were no liaison positions available. Alex existed in a blue funk for one day, tendered her resignation, then called a real estate company to set up an appointment to show her properties for their new home.\n\nHe'd been at the Company for a month, and his time was spent reading and sitting in on meetings\u2014meetings that were of no interest or consequence to him, meetings with low-level clerks with years of seniority. He'd come back as an intelligence training specialist and so far he hadn't trained anyone.\n\nThe phone on his desk rang, and he sat up and picked up the receiver. \"Grayslake.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ashleigh would like to see you in his office\u2014now.\"\n\nMerrick hung up without verifying whether he would or wouldn't comply with the assistant director's directive. Shirt cuffs rolled up over his wrists, top button on his shirt undone and tie hanging loosely around his collar, he walked out of his closet of an office to a larger one at the end of the hall.\n\n\"Go on in,\" drawled a woman whose face was reminiscent of an overripe pumpkin.\n\nMerrick met her intimidating gaze with one of his own as he brushed past her desk. He entered Carl Ashleigh's office silently, startling the man with the cold, pale blue eyes.\n\nCarl waved a hand toward a chair facing his desk. \"Sit down, Grayslake.\" Waiting until Merrick was seated he laced his fingers together atop a stack of papers. \"I know you've been waiting for me to assign you to a training class, but I'm afraid that's not going to happen for a while.\"\n\nCrossing one leg over the other, Merrick rested his elbows on the arms of the chair. \"How long is awhile?\"\n\n\"At least another six months.\"\n\nMerrick did not visibly react to the response that he had come back to work to sit around, collect a government check and do absolutely nothing.\n\n\"Why did you bring me back now if you knew there wasn't a position for me?\" What he wanted to tell Ashleigh was that he could've stayed home with his pregnant wife to await the birth of their first child.\n\nA band of red crept up Ashleigh's neck to his face and hairline. \"I have a position, but it's not what you'd requested.\" A hard edge had crept into his voice.\n\nMerrick leveled a gaze at him. \"What do you have?\"\n\nAshleigh paused, hoping to make Grayslake uncomfortable. He knew about the man's pretty, young wife, and that they had a baby on the way. He knew everything there was to know about Merrick Grayslake except how to unnerve him.\n\n\"How's your marksmanship?\"\n\nMerrick didn't blink. \"With what? Pistol or rifle?\"\n\n\"How about a PSG-1?\"\n\nA muscle in Merrick's jaw jumped. \"One shot, one kill.\"\n\nEvery branch in the military used snipers: the SEALs, CCT, and Army Rangers. And although they all had their respective sniper elements, there was one school that stood out from the others: the United States Marine Corps Scout Sniper School.\n\n\"We need a sniper instructor, and because you're Scout Sniper Qualified, you're the perfect candidate.\"\n\n\"You want me to train agents to become snipers?\"\n\nAshleigh shook his head. \"Not me, Grayslake, your country.\"\n\nMerrick's cold smile never reached his eyes. \"Because you put it that way how can I refuse?\"\n\nIt'd always been the triumvirate: country, Corps and mission. The trinity would always be there, but along the way he'd added family.\n\n\"Do you still have your rifle?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" He'd stored his rifle in a special case, and hidden it beneath the floorboards in a closet in West Virginia.\n\n\"I recommend you dust it off and start practicing.\"\n\n\"When do exercises begin?\"\n\n\"The first Monday in January.\" Ashleigh knew he had to keep Merrick busy until he received word that Operation Backslap was ready to be executed.\n\nMerrick nodded. He had about two weeks to bring himself up-to-date on the rigorous ten-week-long course broken down into three phases\u2014land navigation and marksmanship, stalking techniques, field skills and fire rehearsals\u2014and the last that encompassed everything from communications to surveillance performance.\n\n\"How many will be in the class?\"\n\n\"Five.\"\n\nUncrossing his legs, he placed both feet on the floor. \"I'll be ready.\"\n\nThat said, he pushed off the chair and walked out of Ashleigh's office. Sniper training wasn't what he wanted to do, but it was better than sitting around doing nothing.\n\nMerrick placed Alex on her side on the thick, thirsty towel covering the bed, then took his time drying her body. It'd become a nightly ritual for them to share a shower. She let out a moan when he kneaded the muscles in her legs.\n\n\"Am I hurting you?\"\n\nShe smiled, not opening her eyes. \"Are you kidding? It feels wonderful.\"\n\n\"What on earth did you do today?\" The muscles in her calves were tight as fists.\n\n\"I did a lot of walking up and down staircases. One house had an attic and a basement, so that was four flights.\"\n\n\"Do you really want a house that big?\"\n\n\"The question should be, do we need a big house, Merrick.\"\n\n\"Do we, baby?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"There's going to be only three of us.\" Sonogram pictures showed one baby\u2014a girl.\n\n\"Three for now. What about in a couple of years? I don't want to decorate a house, then leave it when we outgrow it.\"\n\nHis hands moved up her thighs. \"How many babies do you plan on having?\"\n\nShe moaned again. \"As many as you plan on making.\"\n\nLowering his head, he pressed a kiss to the nape of her neck. \"Realistically, we could have one every year until you're about forty.\"\n\n\"That's madness! There's no way I'm going to have ten kids.\"\n\n\"Why not? We could name them Pull Out, Quick on the Draw, Rhythm. That is, if we decide to use the rhythm method, Oops, my bad.\"\n\nAlex couldn't help herself as she burst out laughing. It wasn't often that her very serious husband displayed his wicked sense of humor.\n\nMerrick removed the towel and lay down next to Alex, his chest against her back. He placed an arm over her waist, his hand cradling her rounded belly.\n\n\"Don't make any appointments for house tours this weekend.\"\n\n\"Why not? I thought you'd want to go with me.\"\n\n\"I can't because we have to go to Bolivar.\"\n\nAlex stiffened. \"For what?\"\n\n\"I have to pick up something.\"\n\n\"Can you identify what the something is?\"\n\n\"It's a sniper rifle.\"\n\nAlex threw off his arm and sat up, but he eased her back down to the mattress. \"What the hell do you need with a sniper rifle, Merrick? You told me that you sit at a desk. Do you plan to go into the office and shoot up the place? Or perhaps you're thinking of becoming another D.C. Sniper.\"\n\n\"You don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"Enlighten me, Merrick. Please tell me why you need a weapon that can make someone's head explode with one bullet.\"\n\n\"There will be some things I can tell you, and others that I can't because they're classified.\"\n\n\"Is this sniper business classified?\"\n\n\"No. I've been assigned to facilitate sniper training.\"\n\n\"Why you, Merrick?\" Her voice was softer, calmer.\n\n\"I was a sniper in the Corps, and the Marine Corps has the best sniper program in the world.\"\n\n\"You're just going to do training?\"\n\n\"Yes, Ali.\"\n\nShe covered the hand over her swollen belly, whispering a prayer of thanks. Alex didn't know what she would do if Merrick put himself in danger. \"I'm sorry I went off on you.\"\n\nHe kissed her damp hair. \"I can think of a way for you to apologize for jumping to conclusions.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nHe kissed her again. \"Sit on me.\"\n\n\"You really like it when I ride you?\"\n\nHis smile was dazzling. \"I love it.\" Merrick loved when Alex became the aggressor in bed.\n\nAlex sat up and straddled him as he supported his back against the headboard. Together they found a rhythm that took them to heaven and back. Leaning into Merrick, she pressed her full breasts to his chest, rested her head between his neck and shoulder and counted the strong steady beats of his heart. There was never a time when they made love that they hadn't become one with each other.\n\n## Chapter 26\n\nThe chiming of the telephone roused Merrick from a deep sleep. Reaching out in the darkened bedroom, he took the cordless instrument off its cradle before it disturbed Alex.\n\n\"Yes,\" he whispered into the receiver.\n\n\"You don't know who I am, but I know all about you, Merrick Grayslake.\" The distorted voice of a man speaking fluent Spanish came through the earpiece. It was apparent whoever had called him was using a device that scrambled or distorted the voice.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Merrick asked in the same language.\n\n\"I can't tell you that. Not now.\"\n\n\"What do you want?\"\n\n\"How would you like to avenge your mother's murder?\"\n\nMerrick depressed a button, disconnecting the caller. \"Sick bastard,\" he whispered as he practically slammed the instrument down on the bedside table.\n\nFluffing up his pillow, he tried going back to sleep, but sleep was elusive. The caller knew his name, his home phone number and knew that he was fluent in Spanish. If the man hadn't mentioned his mother perhaps he wouldn't have been so disturbed.\n\nThere had been a time when he would've given anything to glean a modicum of information about Victoria Grayslake, but that time had passed. It took more than forty minutes before he finally fell asleep for the second time that night.\n\nMerrick hadn't sat down behind his desk yet when his phone rang. He picked up after the second ring. \"Grayslake.\"\n\n\"Don't hang up on me again or you'll be very, very sorry.\"\n\nIt was the same person who'd called him at home. \"Are you threatening me?\" Merrick asked softly. Whoever had rung him the night before knew he worked at the CIA. He was glad the call had come in at the Agency because it would be easily traced.\n\n\"No, I'm not threatening you.\"\n\n\"It sounded like a threat to me,\" Merrick countered.\n\n\"I need to talk to you.\"\n\n\"You're talking now,\" he said sarcastically.\n\n\"What I need to tell you shouldn't be recorded. I know every call you make and receive is recorded. And don't try to trace this number, because the phone will be in the garbage as soon as I hang up.\"\n\n\"What do you want?\"\n\n\"I want a number where I can call you without the government listening in.\"\n\nMerrick's curiosity was piqued. \"I'll get a phone that's unlisted.\"\n\n\"I'll send you a phone you can use.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"I'll have it delivered to your post office box in West Virginia. It'll be waiting for you when you get there.\"\n\n\"How...\" Merrick's voice trailed off when he heard the break in the connection. \"Who the hell are you?\" he said aloud.\n\nWas someone trying to mess with his head? Was he being set up? Not given to episodes of paranoia, he sat down and went through a mental recall of places he'd been, people he'd met and situations wherein his identity might have been compromised.\n\nHe had lots of questions and no answers. At least not one until he went to Bolivar.\n\nMerrick turned up the heat to the highest setting as he navigated the winding West Virginia roads. \"Better?\" he asked Alex.\n\n\"Much better.\" She'd tied a cashmere shawl tightly around her neck and shoulders. \"This is one year that I'm really looking forward to spending a week in Florida.\"\n\n\"Let's hope the cold weather doesn't go any farther south.\"\n\nWinter had come early to the East Coast with below-freezing temperatures from Maine to Georgia. Only Florida had been spared.\n\nAlex turned and stared at her husband's profile. \"Are you sure you're not going to be able to take off Christmas Eve?\"\n\n\"Baby, let's not start that again. I told you we'll probably shut down early, but I can't take the day. Barring airport delays, I will be in Florida before midnight.\"\n\nHe and Alex had celebrated Thanksgiving in Mississippi with Tyler and Dana as their hosts. It'd become an impromptu family reunion with the second generation of Coles, Kirklands, Delgados and Lassisters coming together under one roof. Gabriel's date, Summer Montgomery, was now his fianc\u00e9e.\n\nPushing out her lower lip, Alex pouted as she'd done as a child when she couldn't get her way. \"Stop it!\" she screamed when Merrick reached over and tugged on her lip.\n\n\"Stop pouting. It's not going to get me to change my mind.\"\n\nHer expression brightened. \"I can think of something else that will get you to change your mind.\"\n\nMerrick gave her a sidelong grin. \"Not even that!\"\n\nShe gave him a saucy smile. \"We'll see.\"\n\n\"In another couple of months we're going to have to stop the calisthenics.\"\n\nAlex lifted her eyebrows. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because your belly will get in the way.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth. \"Don't be so parochial, mi amor. We can always do it doggy style.\"\n\nMerrick opened his mouth and closed it just as quickly, stunned by his wife's bluntness. \"You've got to stop reading those books.\"\n\n\"What books?\" Alex asked innocently.\n\n\"The ones you hide in the basket with the towels.\"\n\n\"They're how-to books for pregnant women. And I don't hide them. I read them whenever I'm in the bathroom.\"\n\n\"I've seen the pictures and they're just plain nasty, baby. You'd have to be a contortionist to execute some of those positions.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?\" Alex asked when Merrick took a route that led away from their home.\n\n\"I have to stop at the post office. Do you want to come in with me?\"\n\n\"No, thank you. I'll wait in the truck. Can you please pick up some Christmas stamps? This weekend is as good a time as any to do Christmas cards.\" Alex had brought boxes of cards and several needlecraft projects with her to pass the time in Bolivar.\n\nA quarter of a mile later, Merrick parked in a lot behind a row of stores, not bothering to turn off the engine; he got out and went into the post office. Inserting a key into his box, he took out several pieces of junk mail and a small white box addressed to him. He lingered, opening it. His mystery caller had sent four disposable cell phones, each with a thirty-minute limit.\n\nPushing the phones, no larger than an iPod or thicker than a credit card, into the back pocket of his jeans, he discarded the box and returned to the parking lot. The serial numbers on the back of the phones were sequential. That was a clue in attempting to trace where the phones were purchased, and by whom.\n\nMerrick hoped the man wouldn't contact him until Monday because he wanted to enjoy two uninterrupted days with his wife.\n\nThe smell of baking apples wafted throughout the second story as Merrick opened the door to the bedroom he used for storage. He removed a footlocker and steamer trunk, then went to his knees and pressed gently on the edge of a wooden floorboard. It lifted easily. He did the same with another, then another. Concealed under the floor was a large oaken case that contained his coveted PSG-1 that had been made to fit his body's dimensions.\n\nHe opened the case, staring at the smooth stock and the various scopes. If the Corps's slogan was \"the proud, the few,\" then he had become an expert marksman with a deeply ingrained understanding of what it meant to be a sniper.\n\nMerrick opened the footlocker and removed several automatic handguns and ammunition; the closet floorboards had become the perfect place for concealing his arsenal of weapons. Where, he thought, would he be able to conceal the cache of arms in the Arlington condo?\n\nAlex had embarked on a house-hunting campaign, while he'd assumed an attitude of indifference toward the undertaking. However, the day of reckoning could not be put off too much longer. They had to move, and he had to find a place in which to totally secure his weaponry.\n\nMerrick had knelt down to replace the floorboards when he heard movement behind him. Turning around, he saw Alex standing in the doorway to the bedroom, her gaze fixed on the holstered automatic handguns. She glanced up, her expression a mix of fear and revulsion.\n\nRising slowly to his feet, Merrick closed the distance between them. He reached out to touch her, but Alex took a step backward. \"Querida, please.\"\n\nAlex shook her head. \"No, Merrick. Don't ask me to understand. I don't like guns, especially in my home.\"\n\n\"I'll make certain you'll never see them.\"\n\nShe gave him a long, penetrating stare. \"You do that. I came up to tell you that dinner is ready.\"\n\nMerrick watched her leave, unable to do or say anything that would convince his wife that the cache of weapons posed no threat to her.\n\n## Chapter 27\n\nThree days before she was scheduled to leave for Florida, Alex found the perfect house in Old Town, the core of historic Alexandria. The unoccupied redbrick home, dating back to the nineteenth century, boasted an updated kitchen and bathrooms. Five bedrooms with adjoining baths and sitting rooms would provide ample space for living and entertaining. She'd toured the area by car and had fallen in love with the abundance of antique shops lining King Street.\n\n\"I want it,\" she told the real estate agent.\n\n\"Don't you want your husband to see it before you make a decision?\"\n\nAlex stared at the smartly dressed middle-aged woman as if she'd spoken a language she didn't understand. \"There is no doubt my husband will like it.\"\n\n\"It's...it's just that I've had situations in the past where the wife wants something her husband doesn't and vice versa.\"\n\nOpening her handbag, Alex took out her checkbook. \"How much are you asking as a down payment?\" The agent quoted a figure, and she wrote the check. \"I'm due to deliver a baby in less than five months. I'd like to be settled in my new home before the end of January.\" She handed the startled woman the check. \"Please call me when you confirm a date for closing.\"\n\nAlex walked out of the house and made her way down the street to where she'd parked her car, her mind filled with how she wanted to decorate the remarkable structure. She no longer worked for the Trust, but she would have her own piece of history to preserve. Browsing for antiques germane to the period would become an ongoing project to keep her occupied until her daughter's birth and many years after.\n\nWhen the obstetrician had disclosed that she was having a girl, Alex was overcome with joy. She'd begun planning all of the activities they would share: baking cookies, tea parties and browsing antique shops. Alex shuddered to think she wouldn't have a girly-girl, that her daughter would prefer firearms and restoring old cars and trucks to shopping.\n\nSitting in her car, she dialed the number to Merrick's cell phone. It rang twice before he answered. \"I found it!\"\n\n\"Found what, Ali?\"\n\n\"Our house. I just put a down payment on it.\"\n\n\"Where is it?\"\n\n\"Alexandria. It's a little pricey, but it's worth it, Merrick.\"\n\n\"Can we talk about this when I get home?\"\n\nA frown appeared between her eyes. \"I hope we're not going to argue about money.\"\n\n\"Did I mention money, Alexandra?\"\n\n\"You're upset, Merrick.\"\n\n\"Why do you say I'm upset?\"\n\n\"Because you called me Alexandra. You only call me that when you're angry.\"\n\n\"Look, baby, I'm not angry. I don't know what the house is selling for and I don't care. If you like it, then we'll buy it.\"\n\nTears filled her eyes at the same time she bit down on her lower lip. \"Thank you, darling.\"\n\nHe laughed softly. \"You're welcome, darling. I'll see you when I get home.\"\n\n\"What do you want for dinner?\"\n\n\"You.\"\n\nBefore Alex could reply or react, Merrick hung up. She sat in the car, staring through the windshield, unable to believe she could feel so incredibly happy, that her life could be so incredibly perfect.\n\nMerrick Grayslake had come into her life when she wanted nothing to do with men. He'd become a friend, one who'd slipped under the barrier she'd created to keep all men at a distance because of her master plan. He'd waited patiently for her to complete her education, then wooed her with the skill and finesse of a libertine. And she'd taken the bait and let him reel her in.\n\nShe'd fallen in love, gotten pregnant and married. All the things she'd professed not wanting to do. But that was before she met Merrick Grayslake. His claim that he never wanted to marry or father children was shattered the moment they went from friends to lovers.\n\nAlex closed her eyes. They would soon celebrate a new year, and she looked forward to celebrating a new life with her new husband in their new home.\n\nPutting the key in the ignition, she started up the car and adjusted the heat. Meteorologists were predicting a white Christmas. Alex hoped the snowstorm would bypass Virginia and blow out to sea. She was so looking forward to spending the week in Florida with her extended family. She'd done all of her Christmas shopping and had shipped the gifts from her and Merrick to her uncle Martin's house in West Palm Beach.\n\nEvery year there seemed to be a new Cole baby, and it was becoming more difficult to keep up with the names that now spanned five generations.\n\nShe and Merrick had gone over names and had decided on Victoria Cole-Grayslake. The little girl would be faced with the daunting task of being a Cole, but there was no doubt she would succeed, because the Coles and the Grayslakes were survivors.\n\nMerrick's phone rang just as he closed and locked his desk. He glanced at the wall clock. It was three minutes before he was scheduled to leave for the day. Most times he worked beyond his dismissal because he wanted to avoid rush-hour traffic. He and Alex usually did not sit down to dinner until seven, so he did not see the need to rush out with the other office workers.\n\n\"Grayslake.\" He'd decided to answer the call.\n\n\"I'm going to call you once you reach your car.\"\n\nMerrick froze. It was the first contact he'd had with the mystery caller since he'd picked up the cell phones. And how, he mused, did the person know he was leaving for the day? Was something at the CIA monitoring his whereabouts?\n\n\"I assume you're going to call me on the phone with the lowest serial number?\"\n\n\"You assume right. I'll call you in a few minutes.\"\n\nMerrick was tempted not to leave, but then what? Would the sicko call him back on the government's line? He would leave as planned. Whoever it was that sought to push his buttons had succeeded because he was anxious to uncover just what the person wanted.\n\nIt took Merrick ten minutes to get an elevator and make it down to the parking lot. As soon as he sat behind the wheel, the disposable phone rang.\n\n\"What do you want?\" His greeting was brusque, rude, but he was beyond caring about social etiquette.\n\n\"I want you to meet me.\"\n\n\"Where?\" Merrick listened when he was told the address.\n\n\"That's not a very nice neighborhood,\" he drawled sarcastically.\n\n\"That's why I want you to meet me there. The only vermin you'll encounter will be of the two- and four-legged variety.\"\n\nHe'd been instructed to go to a crime-infested section of D.C. only blocks from where he'd been assaulted and left to die years before. Unlocking the glove compartment, he took out a small automatic handgun and secured it in the small of his back.\n\n\"Come alone and come unarmed.\"\n\n\"I'm coming alone.\"\n\n\"Don't bring the firearm.\"\n\nIt was too dark in the parking lot for Merrick to see if someone was watching every move he made. After all, he was sitting in the parking lot at CIA headquarters with high-tech surveillance equipment everywhere.\n\n\"Goodbye.\"\n\n\"Wait...don't hang up.\"\n\nA small smile of triumph parted Merrick's lips. \"Are you saying I can bring the gun?\"\n\n\"Bring it. Come to the second floor. I'll see you in an hour.\"\n\nThe call ended and Merrick saw a message flashing the number of remaining minutes. Their conversation had lasted exactly two minutes.\n\nMerrick started up his truck, driving away from Langley toward southeast D.C. He hadn't gotten more than a mile when he remembered Alex's phone call about finding a house. He activated the hands-free device and dialed her number.\n\n\"Hi, baby.\"\n\nMerrick smiled. \"Hi, yourself. I'm calling to let you know I'll be late.\"\n\n\"How late?\"\n\n\"I'm not certain. But I don't think it's going to take too long. Put away your pots. We'll eat out tonight, and then you can show me our new house.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Merrick!\"\n\nHis smile widened. \"You're welcome, Ali.\"\n\nMerrick continued to talk to his wife until he turned down the street to the address his caller had given him. Slowing, he peered at the dilapidated and burned-out buildings lining the block. A hand-painted number in fluorescent paint shimmered in the darkness on the last house on the street. Someone really wanted him to find the building. He parked across the street.\n\nMerrick alighted from his truck at the same time he reached around his back and gripped the handle of the holstered automatic. The gun was small enough for him to palm it easily.\n\nHe entered the building, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light from a dim naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire. He tested the first stair. It groaned beneath his weight, but held. Counting the number of stairs, he made it to the second-floor landing. Firearm drawn, he knocked on the door.\n\n\"Come in,\" ordered the diffused voice.\n\nPushing open the door, Merrick was assailed with the smell of stale urine and other unidentifiable odors. He automatically reached for a wall switch but quickly discovered there was no electricity. There came the distinctive scrape of a match, followed by the smell of sulfur, then the weak flickering flame of a candle.\n\n\"Sit down,\" came the disembodied voice. Merrick complied, reaching for a wooden crate, and sat down. \"This will not take long because I know you want to go home to your very pretty wife.\"\n\n\"Who the hell are you?\"\n\n\"You don't need to know who I am. Not yet.\"\n\n\"And you don't need to bring my wife into this,\" Merrick retorted.\n\n\"She's in it because she is your wife.\"\n\n\"This is not about her, is it?\"\n\n\"No. It's about your mother.\"\n\nMerrick closed his eyes. \"What about her?\"\n\n\"I know who killed Victoria Grayslake.\"\n\n## Chapter 28\n\nMerrick swayed slightly before righting himself. He tightened his grip on the gun butt. \"Why are you telling me this?\" His query was whispered. \"Why don't you expose the murderer?\"\n\n\"She wasn't my mother.\"\n\n\"She abandoned me, so why should I feel anything for her?\"\n\n\"She abandoned you to save your life.\"\n\nMerrick closed his eyes for several seconds. \"In other words she sacrificed herself for me?\"\n\n\"It was the ultimate sacrifice. Your mother was an undercover DEA special agent assigned to the Mexican border region. She'd infiltrated a group who'd operated openly and without impunity between the U.S. and Mexico.\n\n\"She'd been assigned to gather evidence to put several high-ranking Mexican Federales, at least eight U.S. Border Patrol agents and two Texas and Arizona ranchers in prison for the rest of their lives.\n\n\"Victoria, who'd discovered she was pregnant, requested a leave but before she was scheduled to depart Mexico she was abducted and held prisoner until it was time for her to give birth.\"\n\n\"Are you saying someone blew her cover?\" Merrick asked perceptively.\n\n\"Yes. A senior agent gave her up.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"Victoria was flown by private jet to a ranch in south Texas where she delivered a son. The baby boy was left in a church. Victoria's body was discovered weeks later in a shallow grave near the Mexican border. She'd been tortured, her tongue cut out, then shot in the back of the head.\"\n\n\"How do you know all this? And why are you telling me about something that happened more than thirty years ago?\"\n\n\"I was her partner on one undercover mission, and I swore an oath that I would always protect her.\"\n\n\"It's apparent you didn't protect her. What do you expect me to do?\" Merrick asked.\n\n\"I want you to expose the man who eventually became an associate director for the DEA. I want you to bring down the son of a bitch who ordered the hit on Victoria Grayslake.\"\n\n\"You expect me to take revenge for someone I never knew?\"\n\n\"I can understand your reluctance, but Victoria gave up everything to have you. If she hadn't compromised her mission you wouldn't be here. She forfeited her life so that you could enjoy your life, your wife and await the birth of your own child.\"\n\nMerrick longed to spring across the space and snatch the man by the throat. He wanted to know who was it that knew so much about him. \"What do you mean she compromised her mission?\"\n\n\"She cut a deal\u2014her baby for the identities of undercover field agents.\"\n\n\"How do you know this?\"\n\n\"It was on videotape. It sent shock waves through the DEA. Agents were pulled, assigned to desk duty or transferred to other agencies. It was the administration's most serious breach in security and the fallout was catastrophic. Victoria was tried in absentia, charged with treason and sentenced to life in prison. The man responsible for her death was promoted and is now a very influential D.C. lobbyist.\"\n\n\"Victoria is gone, she can't be vindicated and you want me to take this person out? Other than my being the son of Victoria Grayslake, you're going to have to give me another reason.\"\n\n\"He knows who you are, and he's afraid that one day you may decide to seek retribution for what he did to your mother.\"\n\n\"If that's true, then why hasn't he tried to take me out?\"\n\n\"He did try.\"\n\nMerrick froze, holding his breath until he felt his lungs exploding. The roaring in his head intensified and he felt faint. He let out a lungful of constricted breath. He knew the answer even before he asked it.\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"When you were shot and left on the corner two blocks from here. The woman who'd asked you to meet her was also in on the conspiracy.\"\n\nMerrick closed his eyes, reliving the scene as if it were yesterday. Corrine Grice, who'd moved into the apartment building in Silver Spring a month after he had, was the consummate neighbor. She picked up his newspaper when he failed to stop delivery because the Company hadn't given him enough notice whenever they called for a new mission. And whenever she cooked too much she shared what she had with him.\n\nThere was never anything personal about their relationship, so a year later when Corrine told Merrick that she planned to buy property in a less-than-desirable section of D.C. because she was tired of paying rent he offered to help her with her fixer-upper.\n\nHe spent hours painting the kitchen and bathroom, and when he told Corrine he was going home she came on to him like a cat in heat. More shocked than repulsed, he told her that he didn't see her in that way and left, running headlong into three men whose intent was to rob him. What he'd thought was a botched robbery in reality had been a conspiracy for murder.\n\n\"Where is Corrine?\"\n\n\"She and her three flunkies were found a little well done in a burned-out establishment around the corner. No witnesses, no blame.\"\n\nSeconds ticked off into a minute before Merrick said, \"Who is he?\"\n\n\"Chandler Duffy.\"\n\nA sardonic smile twisted Merrick's mouth. \"Chandler Duffy. The unofficial president of the United States.\"\n\n\"The same,\" confirmed what Merrick now thought of as the voice.\n\n\"Why don't you go after him yourself?\"\n\n\"I can't.\"\n\n\"Well, neither can I,\" Merrick argued softly. \"If I'm going to do it legally, then you know I'm prohibited from collecting foreign intelligence concerning the domestic activities of U.S. citizens. That falls under the jurisdiction of the Bureau.\"\n\n\"I'll provide you with what you need to go after Duffy.\"\n\n\"Whatever you tell me I'll have to pass along to my superiors.\"\n\n\"I don't give a flying fig who pinches him. It could be CIA, FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service or the friggin' Boy Scouts of America.\"\n\nMerrick nodded, doubting whether his informant could see him. \"I'll see what I can do.\" He stood up. \"Now, if you'll excuse me I have to go home and get out of these clothes.\"\n\n\"I'll be in touch,\" said the voice.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure you will.\"\n\nMerrick gripped the gun as he made his way down the rickety staircase and out into the crisp cold air. He sucked in a lungful before letting it out. The cloying stench of human and animal waste lingered in his nostrils.\n\nMerrick drove back to Arlington. He stood outside the door and had Alex bring him a large plastic garbage bag. Not concerned with who saw him in his birthday suit, he stripped off his clothes and shoes and left them in the bag on the floor outside the door.\n\nIt was only after he'd showered and washed his hair, twice, that he felt clean again.\n\n## Chapter 29\n\nAll eyes on the gun range were focused on Merrick Grayslake as he executed his marksmanship skills. Using his right hand, he fired at the target, all sixteen rounds hitting dead center. Expelling the spent clip, he inserted another and repeated the action with his left hand.\n\nA spattering of applause followed the awesome exhibition as Merrick took off the protective gear covering his eyes and ears. He ignored those standing around talking quietly amongst themselves. He'd come to the gun range to let out some of his pent-up frustration.\n\nHe'd reacted like an automaton when Alex parked in front of the home where she wanted them to live. He told her he liked the style of the house, the neighborhood and the shopping area. What he couldn't tell her was what he'd gleaned earlier that afternoon. That he knew about Victoria Grayslake, who she'd worked for and how she'd died. It haunted him that she'd agreed to give up names of undercover agents to save the life of her unborn child.\n\nChandler Duffy. The name played over and over in his head, becoming a litany. The former DEA supervisor had set up Victoria Grayslake to be tortured and executed. Why? Merrick asked himself over and over, unable to come up with a plausible explanation.\n\nRetribution. The word seeped into his consciousness, nagging at him like a gnawing ache. Duffy had to pay, not only because he was responsible for an agent's death; he also had the blood of four hired thugs, five if they'd killed him, on his hands and who knew how many more?\n\nWhether it was retribution, revenge, payback or reprisal, Chandler Duffy knew who he was and Merrick Grayslake knew Chandler. It was time for him to level the playing field, settle the score.\n\nHe'd come to work earlier than usual, hoping to meet with Carl Ashleigh or William Reid, but was told that the two men were out of the building. Merrick knew he couldn't do anything to Duffy unless he cleared it with Ashleigh and\/or Reid. Until then he would take his stress and frustration out on the gun range target.\n\nAshleigh and Reid returned to CIA headquarters later that afternoon and were told that Merrick Grayslake needed to speak to them ASAP. They shared a knowing look, then summoned him. He was forthcoming when he told them of his meeting with the voice.\n\nAshleigh spoke first. \"Chandler Duffy is no small-time punk looking to make a big score. He's been peddling influence in Washington for two decades, and everyone knows he's the best at what he does.\"\n\nLacing his fingers together, Ashleigh avoided Merrick's gaze. \"He's what you'd call a power broker extraordinaire. He has backed our last two presidents.\"\n\n\"Do you have anything on him?\" Merrick asked.\n\nWilliam Reid looked at Ashleigh, who nodded. \"Duffy's name has come up in connection with his firm accepting cash payments from the head of an African nation who has been accused of human rights violations and rumored to offer refuge to known terrorists.\"\n\nMerrick's gray gaze shifted from Reid to Ashleigh. \"How do you know this and where do we fit into that equation?\"\n\nA rare smile found its way to Ashleigh's pale eyes. \"We've uncovered an offshore account in Duffy's wife's name, and there's been talk that he brokered a deal for several senators and for our incumbent president's opponent to meet secretly with this leader.\"\n\nThis wasn't the news Merrick wanted to hear because personally he liked the man who was certain to receive his party's nomination to run against the weak and ineffective incumbent president.\n\n\"I'd like to request permission to head the team to investigate Duffy.\"\n\nAshleigh shook his head. \"I don't know, Grayslake. It wouldn't work, because something of this nature would be too personal for you.\"\n\nLeaning forward, Merrick impaled him with a lethal stare. \"I'm not going to lie and say it's not personal. But I didn't have to come to tell you what went down last night. I could've gotten into my vehicle, stalked Duffy and taken him out at a thousand yards with one bullet, one kill. Far enough away to see his head explode, and far enough away not to have pieces of his DNA on me.\n\n\"The fact that I've come back to the Company is like waving a red flag in front of Duffy. Unlike the last time, I'll be ready for him and his hired thugs. But what I won't do is put my family at risk. Either you approve me going after Duffy legally or I'll take care of him my way. And you both know how that will end.\"\n\nIf Merrick Grayslake had been any other subordinate Ashleigh would've written him up. The director had half hoped Grayslake would take the bait, but it'd gone better than they'd planned because Duffy wasn't above killing women. And because Grayslake, dubbed the \"Lone Wolf\" by those involved in Operation Backslap, had taken a mate it made the mission that much more personal.\n\n\"Okay, Grayslake,\" Ashleigh said grudgingly. \"You can be first chair on this one. Do you want to pick your team or do you want to leave that to me?\"\n\n\"We can do it together.\"\n\nCarl Ashleigh felt a measure of relief for the first time since he'd been ordered to indirectly involve Merrick Grayslake in the mission to neutralize Duffy.\n\n\"Good. Let's get together at the end of the first week in January.\" He flipped a page in his planner and circled a date. \"If I can't get someone else to lead the sniper training, then we'll put it off until you close out the Duffy investigation.\" He closed his planner, struggling not to do the happy dance. He'd lied to Merrick. There never was going to be a sniper-training course. \"If you need some time off to make arrangements to protect your wife, then take it.\" He stared at Merrick, then his assistant. \"Gentlemen, this meeting is over.\"\n\nMerrick left the conference room and returned to his office. Propping his elbows on the desk, he covered his face with his hands. How, he thought, was he going to tell Alex that she would have to stay in Florida with her parents until Duffy was either in custody\u2014or dead? He lowered his hands and stared at a wall calendar displaying eighteen instead of the usual twelve months. He'd circled the last day in April\u2014the day Victoria Cole-Grayslake was predicted to make her appearance.\n\n## Chapter 30\n\nAlex's plan to change her flight reservation to leave Virginia with Merrick backfired. The snow, which had begun falling two days before Christmas, continued nonstop for three days and two nights. Snow totals from Maine to portions of West Virginia averaged more than two feet.\n\nIt would become the first Christmas that the second generation of Coles, Kirklands and Grayslakes would not celebrate Christmas and New Year's in West Palm Beach, Florida. Gabriel and Summer, Michael and Jolene and Merrick and Alexandra were unable to leave their homes.\n\nMerrick, who lay in bed with Alex in the Kirklands' guest bedroom, rested a hand over her distended belly. They'd come to Georgetown for dinner and found themselves snowbound.\n\n\"Why don't you go to Florida when the airports are back on schedule.\" Alex felt as if someone had caught her throat, not permitting her to breathe. Merrick had changed, but she'd attributed that to his work at the CIA. Most nights he came home, went directly to the bathroom where he showered, then flopped in front of the television until she called him for dinner. He always helped her clean up the kitchen, waited for her to come to bed, turned over and fell asleep.\n\nSitting up, she turned on the lamp on her side of the bed and shook him awake. \"Merrick, are you having an affair?\"\n\nHe moaned and threw an arm over his face. \"What?\"\n\n\"I know you heard what I said.\" She repeated her query.\n\nMerrick sat up. \"No. Oh, hell, no!\"\n\nAlex pulled her lower lip between her teeth. \"Then, why is it we haven't made love in more than a week? Is it because I'm fat and ugly?\"\n\n\"Ali, my love,\" he crooned, reaching for her, but she turned her back. \"You are the most beautiful woman in the world.\"\n\n\"But I'm fat.\"\n\n\"Baby, you're pregnant. Pregnant women always put on weight.\"\n\nTurning over to face him, Alex touched the side of his face. \"You're not having an affair?\"\n\n\"I would never cheat on you, Ali.\" Merrick combed his fingers through her curls.\n\n\"Then, what's the matter, Merrick? Why do I feel as if we're growing apart?\"\n\nMerrick wanted to tell her, unload all he'd discovered about his mother, but he couldn't. \"I'm involved with something at work that has me distracted.\"\n\n\"Can you talk about it?\" Alex asked.\n\n\"No, baby. It's classified.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"That's all you had to say.\"\n\nHe kissed the end of her nose. \"Any time I start acting strange, talk to me.\"\n\n\"You're always strange,\" Alex teased.\n\nMerrick's hand searched under the hem of her nightgown, trailing up her thighs. \"How's that?\"\n\nShe pressed her forehead to his. \"You have a way of looking at a person that makes them feel as if you have X-ray vision. Then you have a habit of sneaking up on folks wherein they look up and you're there.\"\n\n\"Do I frighten you, darling?\"\n\nShe closed her eyes, smiling. \"Not anymore.\"\n\n\"When did you stop being afraid?\"\n\n\"The day I became Mrs. Merrick Grayslake. I knew I could never live with a man who frightened me.\"\n\n\"Have you given what I said some thought?\"\n\n\"About you wanting me to go to Florida?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Why do you want me to go away, Merrick? And please don't tell me it's classified.\"\n\n\"I'm involved in something that may put you and the baby in danger.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"That I can't tell you.\"\n\n\"You want me to go away for how long?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he answered truthfully.\n\n\"No, Merrick. If you can't give me a time frame, then I'm staying here. We're buying a new house and I plan to focus all of my energies on decorating it before the baby comes.\"\n\n\"I don't want to fight with you, Ali.\"\n\n\"Then don't,\" she shot back.\n\n\"I will if I have to.\"\n\n\"Are you threatening me, Merrick Grayslake?\"\n\n\"No, I'm not. I'm telling you that I'll do what I have to do to keep you safe. If that means hiring someone to watch you when I'm not here, then I will.\"\n\nAlex's hands curled into fists. \"I will not become a prisoner in my home.\"\n\nMerrick pulled away and lay on his back. \"You will become anything I want you to become until what I'm involved in is over.\"\n\nAlex struggled to control her temper. \"When will it be over?\"\n\n\"Dammit! I don't know!\"\n\nShe swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her movements were slow and awkward as she made her way over to a window. \"Don't you ever raise your voice to me again!\" she ground out between clenched teeth. \"In case you failed to notice I am your wife, not your chattel. Yell at me again and you don't have to worry about hiring someone to protect me, because I'll be out of here so fast you'll forget what I look like.\"\n\nMerrick moved off the bed, stalking her like a large cat. \"You will not leave me. You will not take my child from me.\"\n\n\"Me, me, me,\" she mimicked. \"Why is this about you? What about me?\"\n\n\"It is about you, Ali. Everything in my life, everything I do is about you.\" He threw up a hand. \"Do you think I really wanted to go back to the CIA?\"\n\n\"Then why did you?\"\n\n\"Because I needed to support my wife and family.\"\n\n\"I don't need you to take care of me.\"\n\nHe took several steps, bringing them inches apart. \"What kind of man would I be if I let my wife foot the bill for everything? How long would it take for me not to feel like a man? Be a man?\"\n\n\"Why are you equating your manhood with money?\"\n\nGrasping her shoulders, he pulled her to his naked body. \"I have to, Alexandra, because that's who I am. Do you think your father would've given us his blessing if I didn't have a job?\"\n\nHer eyes widened until he saw into their clear gold depths. \"What does my father have to do with us?\"\n\n\"Your father asked me how I was going to support you.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\nMerrick told her about the confrontation with her father as an expression of disbelief swept over his wife's incredibly beautiful face. Being pregnant made her lush, more feminine.\n\n\"Even though you're carrying David Cole's grandchild, he still had the stones to blindside me in front of his brothers and sons to question me about how I was going to take care of his precious baby girl.\"\n\nHer lids fluttered. \"I didn't know, Merrick. I'm sorry my father\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't apologize for him, Ali,\" he spat out, cutting her off. \"What your father said came from his heart. I have to respect him for that.\"\n\nResting her palms on his pecs, Alex pressed a kiss over his heart. \"I'm sorry for fighting with you, mi amor.\"\n\nHe cradled her belly. \"We don't fight, baby.\"\n\n\"What do we do?\"\n\n\"Disagree.\"\n\n\"I...I...\" Her eyes were wide as silver dollars. Placing her hands over Merrick's, she pressed them to her swollen abdomen. \"Did you feel that?\"\n\n\"Feel what?\"\n\n\"The baby, Merrick. She kicked me.\"\n\nHe placed his hands on her belly. \"I don't feel anything.\"\n\nAlex gasped. \"She kicked again.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Here.\"\n\nMerrick closed his eyes and waited. Then he felt it\u2014a soft flutter. It happened again. A well of emotion filled his chest, making it difficult for him to draw a breath. His daughter was moving. Now she was real, very, very real.\n\nGoing to his knees, he pushed up Alex's nightgown and kissed his wife's belly. \"I love my girls,\" he whispered, placing soft tender kisses over every inch of her swollen flesh.\n\nAlex cradled Merrick's head as an angelic smile spread over her face. Her baby, their baby, in making her presence known, had forced a truce between her mother and father.\n\nMerrick rose to his feet and swept Alex up in his arms. He carried her back to bed and proceeded to make love to her slowly, gently, as if he feared she would shatter into a million tiny pieces.\n\nHe gave, she received, she gave and he was there to receive. A wave of ecstasy came upon them so quickly they didn't have time to react. A fireball exploded and they fell headlong into a maelstrom of uncontrollable joy that ebbed to a deep feeling of sated peace.\n\n## Chapter 31\n\nThe following morning Merrick asked Michael to take a walk with him. He knew by the expression on Michael's face that he thought he'd taken leave of his senses; who'd want to go for a walk when some streets were still impassable because the sanitation department hadn't gotten around to removing the mountain of snow from residential neighborhoods?\n\nMichael recognized and quickly processed the tension in his friend's request, and agreed. \"What's up, Gray?\" he asked once they attempted to navigate a narrow path on the sidewalk, made by booted footsteps.\n\n\"I need a favor.\"\n\nMichael stared up at a startlingly blue, cloud-free sky. The warmth of the winter sun felt good on his face. \"Ask away.\"\n\nMerrick stomped his feet, knocking snow off his boots. \"I need you to look after Alex.\"\n\nClosing his eyes, Michael smothered a savage expletive. \"What the hell are you involved in now?\"\n\n\"I can't tell you. It's\u2014\"\n\n\"Classified,\" Michael said, cutting him off and completing his statement. He shook his head. \"I thought you were going back as a trainer?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"But right now you're not training anything or anyone. I don't want to be the one who said I-told-you-so, but I'm going to say it anyway. I told you that they were going to recruit you for some clandestine operation. I know how they operate, Gray. It's one thing to be in the field and wait for your orders, and another completely when you're sitting at the top in an office making decisions as to who they can use and who is expendable. If nothing else, working at the Pentagon taught me that.\"\n\nMerrick waited for Michael to finish his tirade, then said, \"This is personal, Kirk.\" The two men stepped into a snowbank to let a woman pass.\n\n\"How personal?\" Michael asked.\n\n\"It involves my mother.\"\n\n\"Is she alive?\"\n\nMerrick shook his head. \"No. The only thing I will tell you is that she was tortured before she was executed.\"\n\n\"Oh, damn. I'm sorry, Gray.\"\n\n\"It's okay. What I find strange is that when I found out how she died I didn't feel anything. No anger, no sadness.\"\n\n\"That's because you never met her. Do you have a photograph of her?\"\n\nMerrick shook his head. \"No.\" He'd tried accessing her file through an intra-agency database, but her name had been deleted.\n\nClasping his gloved hands behind his back, Michael gave his friend a sidelong glance. \"How much danger is my cousin in?\"\n\n\"Life threatening.\" Merrick had decided not to mince words.\n\n\"She can live with me until whatever crap you're involved in is over. I'm sure Jolene would love to have Alex around. I'll be home until the end of January. I hope you complete your mission before that. If not, then we'll have to come up with another plan.\"\n\n\"I want her to go to Florida and stay with her folks.\"\n\n\"Did you tell her that?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Did she go off on you?\"\n\nMerrick stopped and stared at Michael. \"Did you hear us last night?\"\n\nMichael shook his head. \"No. But I know my cousin, Gray. She's not going to Florida because she doesn't want to, but because you told her to go. Alex is sweet, funny and generous. But she's also as stubborn as a mule. You don't tell Alexandra Cole what you want her to do, you ask her. Let her think it's her idea.\"\n\nMerrick frowned. \"I don't have time to coax and coddle. Not with what I'm up against.\"\n\n\"Your wife is with child, Merrick. She is not the same Alexandra you met and fell in love with. Once she has the baby the old Alex will return. Right now you can't do anything to set her off. I'm a witness. I've lived through and survived the nine months of horror.\"\n\n\"Because you've survived the horror, what do you suggest I do?\"\n\n\"Tell her you have to go away for a week, and that you want her to stay with me because you don't want her left alone because of the baby.\"\n\n\"But I'm not going away. Besides, I've never lied to Alex.\"\n\n\"Merrick, my friend. You are lying to her. Her life and that of your unborn child are at risk, yet you're telling her she has to go away. And when she asks why, you tell her it's classified. Look, man, if you have to lie, cheat or kill a son of a bitch to keep your family safe, then you do it. Tell Alex you're involved in some training program and see what she says. I'm willing to bet she'll volunteer to hang out with me and Jolene.\"\n\n\"Okay, I'll give it a shot. But if she balks, then it's World War Three.\"\n\nMichael smiled. \"If you'd told me you were fooling around with my cousin I would've given you the four-one-one on her. After all, she's a Cole woman and they are a breed unto themselves.\"\n\n\"Amen,\" Merrick said under his breath. \"I'm ready to go back. Thanks for hearing me out.\"\n\nMichael patted his shoulder. \"No sweat. After all, we're family.\"\n\nHe and Michael had returned to the house at the same time Jolene and Alex walked into the kitchen. They shooed the women to the family room while they prepared a country breakfast of bacon, sausage, eggs, grits, biscuits, freshly-squeezed orange juice and brewed coffee and tea.\n\nMichael put on several CDs, and the music flowing from hidden speakers added to the festive mood. Six-month-old Teresa, who'd begun pulling herself up in her crib, crawled around on the floor, getting underfoot. Jolene placed her in a playpen in a corner of the large kitchen and the little girl cried hysterically until Alex freed her from the mesh-covered prison.\n\nJolene glared at Alex. \"She's spoiled enough without you adding to it. I should send her home with you.\"\n\nAlex kissed Teresa's curly black hair. \"Do you want to come stay with Titi Alex? I wouldn't mind taking care of you for a couple of weeks to give your mama a break.\"\n\n\"Why don't you hang out here with us for a couple of weeks?\" Jolene suggested. \"We can go shopping for baby clothes and furniture to decorate the nursery in your new house.\" She smiled at her husband. \"Would you mind if your cousin stayed with us?\"\n\nMichael affected a stern expression. His wife had given him and Merrick the opening they needed. \"Are you asking or telling me, Jo?\"\n\n\"I'm asking, Michael.\"\n\nHe waved a slender hand. \"Alex is family. You don't have to ask. Who you should be asking is Merrick. After all, he is her husband and he just might have something planned for the two of them.\"\n\n\"Merrick and I don't have any plans,\" Alex volunteered.\n\nMerrick stared at Alex rather than Michael. He knew if he looked at his wife's cousin, he wouldn't be able to keep a straight face. He felt relieved that he didn't have to lie to Alex.\n\n\"Did you forget that we close on the house January ninth?\"\n\n\"No,\" Alex said. \"That's not going to take more than an hour or two. As soon as we get the keys I want Jolene to see the house.\"\n\nJolene dabbed the corners of her mouth with a napkin. \"Have you decided what style of furniture you want to put in it?\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\n\"Now, that's going to be fun.\"\n\nAlex shifted Teresa to her other knee. \"Merrick, would you mind if I stayed here with Jolene? We have a lot of shopping to do, and I would like her opinion on things like wallpaper.\"\n\n\"I don't mind at all,\" Merrick said much too quickly. He ignored Michael's incredulous stare. \"You know I have no interest in wallpaper, paint colors or what fabric you want on some chair or other doodad.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you're not going to miss me, mi amor?\"\n\n\"Miss you? Aren't we going to see each other at night?\" Merrick affected a frown. \"If you've found someone you'd rather be with, please tell me now.\"\n\nAlex blushed like a schoolgirl with her first crush. \"Who's going to want me looking like this?\"\n\nThere was a long-suffering silence. \"I want you, Ali,\" Merrick said, his voice filled with emotion.\n\nMichael cleared his throat. \"Damn, my brother. You don't have to show your woman you're whipped.\"\n\n\"Stay out of it, Michael,\" Jolene warned softly. \"Please,\" she whispered when her husband opened his mouth.\n\nMichael caught and held his wife's gaze. He knew how Merrick felt about Alex because he felt the same about Jolene. He'd fallen in love with her on sight, and each day he grew more in love with her.\n\n## Chapter 32\n\nMerrick opened and closed his eyes in an attempt to relieve the burning. He'd been staring at the computer monitor for hours, searching one database, then another for something that would link Duffy to something\u2014anything the government could use to issue an indictment.\n\nHe headed a team of four, including himself, who'd worked tirelessly for the past three months researching every lead given them. So far, Duffy had come up clean.\n\nHe came in early and worked late, yet his private life had remained stable. He and Alex had closed on the house in Alexandria and her priority was decorating it before giving birth.\n\nThe Kirklands' offer of their guest wing had become a necessity once the Arlington condominium was sold. Merrick was more relaxed because Alex wasn't left alone during the day. Whenever she had to see the doctor he took time off from work to take her.\n\nMerrick was aware that Alex didn't like that he didn't go anywhere without the small but powerful handgun tucked into his waistband, but it was a topic he refused to discuss with her.\n\nHe glanced over at a female computer programmer who'd been Ashleigh's recommendation. Merrick was astounded with what she could do with one keystroke. \"What screen are you looking at, Patty?\"\n\n\"DEA.\"\n\n\"Patch me over.\"\n\nWithin seconds the Drug Enforcement Administration logo appeared on his monitor. The fact that Duffy had been DEA before leaving to start up his lobbying firm made them a part of the investigation.\n\nPen in hand, a pad of paper nearby, Merrick began scrolling down a listing of names of past and present agents, hoping to connect at least one to Duffy's present operation.\n\nSummer Montgomery. The name jumped out at him. The undercover special agent\u2014code name: Renegade\u2014was engaged to his brother-in-law Gabriel. Pressing a few keys, he viewed the operation she was assigned to cover at Weir Memorial High School. He stared at the names of the students and faculty members. A slight frown furrowed his forehead. Dumas Gellis. He'd come across the name before, but where?\n\nHe scribbled the name on the pad.\n\n\"Patty?\" Merrick hadn't taken his gaze off the screen.\n\n\"Yes, Merrick?\"\n\n\"I need you to go to the Treasury Department site and type in Dumas Gellis.\"\n\n\"Dumas like in Alexandre?\"\n\n\"Yes, Patty.\"\n\nSoft brown eyes widening behind the lenses of her glasses, Patty smiled. \"He's here. He has several offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.\"\n\n\"Can you tell me how much he's deposited?\"\n\n\"Give me a few minutes and I'll let you know.\" Biting down on her lower lip, an affectation she executed whenever she concentrated on a task, Patty bobbed her head up and down. \"Got it.\"\n\n\"How much?\"\n\n\"All totaled. In excess of three mil.\"\n\nMerrick whistled. \"Not bad for an assistant principal and ex-footballer.\" He read the name of the agent-in-charge of the Weir operation. \"I believe Lucas Shelby would find Mr. Gellis's bank balance quite interesting.\" With a stroke of a key, Gellis's banking information was forwarded to the Drug Enforcement Administration.\n\nMerrick knew he'd helped his future sister-in-law bring closure to her assignment, but he still hadn't gotten a single clue with which to take down Duffy.\n\nThe lobbyist was smart, but was he smarter than the team of four who were the best at what they did? Merrick knew if they were going to pinch Duffy, it would be tied to his finances.\n\nLeaning to his left, Merrick tapped the shoulder of an accountant on loan to the CIA from the Treasury Department. A recent college graduate, Stuart Olson didn't look old enough to drive or drink.\n\n\"I need a printout of banking transactions from every international database in existence.\"\n\n\"Can I do that, sir?\"\n\nSmiling, Merrick nodded. \"Yes, you can.\"\n\nHe didn't tell the accountant that the secret program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, initiated weeks after the September 11 attacks, permitted counterterrorism officials access to financial records from a vast international database to examine banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States. However, the program was limited to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to terrorist groups.\n\nStuart gave a look that said he didn't believe what he'd been told. \"The program is predicated in part on the president's emergency economic powers,\" Merrick explained.\n\nDuring a briefing session, Merrick was told data from the Brussels-based banking consortium, formally known as the Society for World Interbank Financial Telecommunication, had allowed officials from the CIA and the FBI and a few other agencies to examine tens of thousands of financial transactions.\n\n\"That's going to take days if not weeks, Mr. Grayslake.\"\n\nMerrick patted his shoulder again. \"You have a June first deadline to come up with something on Duffy.\"\n\nStuart sat up straighter. \"I'll find something on him before May Day.\"\n\nMerrick redirected his gaze to his computer monitor. Patty had changed it again. He noted the time at the lower right of the screen. It was 8:05 p.m., time that he headed home.\n\nHe couldn't wait to wrap up this case so he could resume a normal life wherein he'd come home from work and have his wife greet him in their new house. A contractor had refurbished it to Alex's specifications, and she and Jolene had spent all their free time together shopping for antiques to fill up the grand structure. They'd established a routine of going to Sunday-morning mass, followed by brunch, then to the house that was to become their home once he closed the Duffy case.\n\nMerrick knew Alex longed to spend the night in their new home, but he couldn't afford to take the risk\u2014not even with a state-of-the-art sophisticated security system\u2014because he never knew when he would be summoned to return to Langley.\n\nHer advancing pregnancy slowed her gait, and she constantly held her lower back as if she were in pain. Whenever he questioned her she said it was just the baby pressing on her lower spine.\n\nAshleigh had given him until June first to bring down Duffy, but Merrick hoped it would be sooner. His wife was due to deliver their first baby in a month, and when he brought his daughter home he didn't want it be under a cloak of danger and secrecy.\n\nStanding up, he rolled his head on his shoulders. \"I'm done for the day.\"\n\n\"I'm staying,\" said Patty.\n\nStuart stared up at Merrick. \"Me, too.\"\n\n\"What about you, Justin?\" Merrick asked an information specialist whom he'd selected to join the team. Justin Jefferson bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Malcolm X.\n\n\"I guess I'll stay a little longer. Besides, I could use the overtime.\"\n\n\"If I see any of you in before me tomorrow, I'm going to write you up,\" Merrick teased. They laughed as he walked out of the room that had been set up for them.\n\nHis stomach growled loudly as he made his way to his office, reminding him that he'd skipped lunch and dinner. He would stop at a health-food drive-through and pick up something.\n\n## Chapter 33\n\nMerrick had just crossed the marker indicating he'd left Virginia for the Capitol District when his cell phone rang. He reached into his shirt pocket for the phone. Without looking at the display, he answered it.\n\n\"Hello.\"\n\n\"Merrick, it's Michael.\"\n\nHis heart lurched. Michael always called him Gray. \"What's the matter?\"\n\n\"I'm at the hospital with Alex. She's in labor.\"\n\n\"But the baby's not due for another four weeks.\"\n\n\"It looks as if your daughter doesn't want to wait.\"\n\n\"I'm on my way.\"\n\nHe closed the phone and jammed the accelerator, taking red lights like a man possessed. He heard the siren, then the flashing lights behind him. Damn his luck! He was being pulled over. Coming to a screeching halt, he was ready for the officer when he approached his vehicle.\n\nHe handed the officer his photo identification from the Central Intelligence Agency. \"I just got a call that my wife has gone into premature labor.\"\n\nThe officer took a glance at the ID, and then his glance lingered on Merrick's face. \"Follow me.\"\n\nWhat should've taken fifteen minutes was reduced to five as Merrick was given a police escort to the private hospital where Jolene had delivered Teresa.\n\nHe thanked the officer as he raced toward the entrance to the hospital. \"Grayslake,\" he shouted to the clerk at the reception desk.\n\n\"Labor room two.\"\n\nNot waiting for the elevator, Merrick bounded up the staircase to the second floor. His heart was pounding, hands shaking uncontrollably when he came face-to-face with Michael.\n\n\"How is she?\"\n\nMichael patted his shoulder in a comforting gesture. \"She's okay. They have her hooked up to monitors. Get yourself together before you go in there. If Alex sees you like this she's going to lose it.\"\n\nMerrick patted his hair. \"What do I look like?\"\n\n\"You don't want to know. Go in the men's room and splash some water on your face. I'll wait here until you come out.\"\n\nMerrick went into the men's room. He peered into the mirror, seeing the face of a stranger looking back at him. There was a look in his eyes he'd never seen before\u2014fear.\n\nTurning on the faucet, he washed his hands, then wet his face. His motions were mechanical when he dried his face on a paper towel, then combed his hair. Straightening his shoulders, he walked out of the restroom and into labor room two.\n\nMichael stood in a corner watching an attending doctor examine his cousin, reliving the scene when he'd waited for the birth of his child. He knew Alex wanted Tyler to deliver her child, but it was apparent Baby Grayslake had decided to ignore the calendar to make a premature debut.\n\nHe smiled when Merrick entered the room. He looked better.\n\nClosing the distance between them, he nodded. \"Nice. I'm going home to my girls. Call me later.\"\n\nMerrick smiled. \"Thanks for everything.\"\n\n\"No problema, primo.\"\n\nA nurse approached Merrick. \"Are you the father?\"\n\n\"Yes, I am,\" he said proudly.\n\n\"You can put your jacket over in the locker. If you have a cell phone, please turn it off. I'm going to gown and mask you. We like to keep the room as sterile as possible.\"\n\nMerrick turned off his cell phone and slipped out of his jacket, not seeing the nurse's stunned look when she saw the holstered automatic handgun tucked into the small of his back. It, too, went into the locker and she breathed a sigh.\n\nAlex smothered a moan as a spasm of pain gripped her. She felt as if she were being split in two. The pain had begun mid-morning and had intensified with each passing hour. She'd been experiencing mild contractions since her eighth month, but these were different. By nightfall they were stronger and coming closer together.\n\nThe pressure on her bladder had also increased and when she sat on the commode and amniotic fluid flowed unchecked, she knew it was time to go the hospital. And for the first time since Merrick suggested she live with Michael she offered up a prayer of gratitude. If she'd been at the house in Alexandria she would've been alone\u2014alone and frightened.\n\n\"Hey, Mama.\"\n\nAlex opened her eyes to see a pair in clear gray smiling down at her. \"Hi...\" she got out before catching her breath when another contraction seized her.\n\n\"How are you doing?\"\n\n\"I am in pain, Merrick Grayslake.\"\n\n\"Do you want something to take the edge off?\"\n\nShe shook her damp head. \"No drugs.\"\n\nThe doctor completed his examination. \"It's too late to give her anything. Your baby will be here in half an hour or less. I'm going to check on another patient. I'll be back in a few minutes.\"\n\nSitting on a chair at the head of the bed, Merrick held his wife's hand. He felt every contraction with her death grip on his fingers. It went on and on, him gently massaging her back.\n\nHe wondered who'd attended to Victoria Grayslake when she went into labor. Was there anyone to comfort her when she knew she would give up her life as soon as she delivered her baby? Had she been tortured before or after she gave birth? Had she made the treasonous videotape disclosure before or after she'd become a mother?\n\nAfter his initial meeting with the voice there was no further communication. Merrick had traced the serial numbers on the disposable cell phones and discovered they'd been purchased in Anchorage, Alaska. He continued to carry the phones in the hope that the mysterious caller would offer another clue.\n\nThe doctor returned, checked the machines monitoring the baby's heartbeat, then checked to see how far Alex was dilated. He ripped off his gloves and lab coat. \"She's ready. Let's move it, Nurse!\"\n\nMerrick stood up, completely helpless as the medical professionals sprang into action. Another nurse appeared as the obstetrician scrubbed his arms and hands. Moments before Alex's legs were encased in elastic stockings and placed in a pair of stirrups another doctor appeared, this one a resident.\n\n\"Dad, please stand at the end of the bed.\"\n\nMoving in slow motion, Merrick moved to where he'd been ordered. A nurse tilted a large mirror to give him an unobstructed view of the birth and delivery. He watched in awe, transfixed as Alex labored to give birth. She pushed when told to push, the effort weakening her reserved strength.\n\n\"No puedo,\" she whispered hoarsely.\n\n\"Yes, you can. You have to do this, baby. Didn't we make plans to take little Vicky to the museum to look at all the pretty paintings?\"\n\n\"You hate museums,\" she spat out.\n\nMerrick kissed her forehead. \"I don't hate them, darling.\"\n\n\"She's crowning.\" The doctor's eyes crinkled above his mask. \"What do we have here? Somebody's a redhead.\"\n\nAlex smiled through the sharp pains holding her prisoner. \"She's a Grayslake.\"\n\nThe doctor rested a hand on his patient's belly. \"One more push, Alexandra, and you'll get to see your beautiful baby.\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath and pushed. A soft gasp escaped her parched lips when she heard a weak cry. Her baby girl was here!\n\nPeering up at the mirror she saw a tiny red-faced baby with red-gold hair. There was no trace of Cole in her daughter.\n\nTears filled Alex's eyes and spilled down her cheeks. \"She's beautiful, Merrick.\"\n\nLeaning over, Merrick kissed his wife's damp face. \"Thank you, Ali.\"\n\n\"Check to see if she has all her fingers and toes.\"\n\n\"She's perfect.\"\n\n\"Check her, please.\"\n\nThe nurse tagged, suctioned, weighed, measured and cleaned a wailing Baby Grayslake. She handed the baby to Merrick, who kissed her head before handing her off to her mother. Instinctively, Victoria Grayslake sought out her mother's swollen breasts and began nursing greedily.\n\nThe intern took over from the attending doctor, who ripped off his gloves. He motioned to Merrick. \"Your daughter is small, which means she'll have to stay in the hospital until she weighs at least five pounds.\"\n\n\"How much does she weigh?\"\n\n\"Four pounds ten ounces.\"\n\nMerrick smiled, attractive lines fanning out around his eyes. \"Judging from her appetite, she'll gain that in a week.\" He sobered. \"She wasn't due for another month. Will that present a problem?\"\n\n\"There's no doubt that she's a full-term baby. What she may be is two weeks early, but not much more than that. Maybe your wife lifted something that brought on labor, but I wouldn't worry too much about mother and baby. She can stay until your daughter is medically cleared for discharge.\"\n\nMerrick doubted whether Alex would agree to leave the hospital without her baby. He extended his hand. \"Thanks, Doctor.\"\n\n\"Congratulations, Mr. Grayslake. You can see your wife once she's in her room. We have accommodations for new dads if you wish to spend the night.\"\n\n\"Thank you again.\"\n\nMerrick left to find an area where he could use his cell phone to call David and Serena. Then he would call Michael and let him know he planned to spend the night in the hospital with his wife and new baby daughter.\n\n## Chapter 34\n\nChandler Duffy drove his fist into the granite countertop, ignoring the shooting pain racing up his arm. When I kill them, they stay dead, he fumed inwardly. The tall, elegant man with silver hair, known to his closest associates as the Silver Fox, literally had blood in his eye. When he'd received word that Merrick Grayslake was digging into his finances his blood pressure spiked dangerously. The result was a ruptured blood vessel in his right eye.\n\nThe Grayslake name had haunted him for years, and he still hadn't forgotten the face of the woman who'd insulted him, saying she found a wad of gum on the bottom of her shoe more appealing than sleeping with him. It took him a while, but she paid for the snub\u2014with her life.\n\nReaching for one of five cell phones on a side table, he dialed a number. \"It's a go,\" he said when hearing a familiar voice. He disconnected the call, put the phone back in its assigned order and walked out of his inner sanctum.\n\nHe would rid the world of any trace of Victoria Grayslake, once and for all.\n\nMerrick sat on a cushioned love seat with Alex, watching her breast-feed their daughter. She was five days old and she'd gained one of the four ounces she'd lost. Alex's milk had come in and the tiny fingers clutched her breast as if it was a lifeline.\n\nHe smiled as Alex spoke Spanish to the baby. His wife had grown up with bilingual parents, while he'd learned the language from Mexican housekeepers. And if it were up to him, his daughter would speak as many languages as she could master.\n\nMerrick leaned closer. \"She keeps her eyes open longer.\"\n\nAlex met her husband's proud gaze. \"She only opens them for you. She must like your voice.\"\n\n\"That's because she's showing her daddy her beautiful hazel eyes.\" Victoria's eyes changed color from a light green to a grayish brown.\n\n\"I'm going to need you to go to the house and bring me something to wear. I'm embarrassed when people come see me and I'm in a nightgown and bathrobe.\"\n\nStretching his arm over the back of the love seat, Merrick played with her hair. It was long enough to cover the nape of her neck. \"What do you want me to bring?\"\n\n\"Sweatpants or anything with a drawstring waist. I doubt if I'll be able to fit in anything else.\"\n\n\"Your stomach looks pretty flat. It's your top that's outrageous.\"\n\nAlex winked at him. \"You like them, don't you?\"\n\nMerrick winked back. \"I'm not above fighting a baby for Mama's leche.\"\n\nPicking up a nursing pad, she swatted at him. \"You're nasty.\"\n\n\"Hell, yeah,\" he countered. Moving closer, he kissed her cheek. \"I'll be back with your clothes.\" Pushing to his feet, he headed for the door to her suite.\n\n\"Querido?\"\n\nHe stopped and turned around. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"When will I be able to go home?\"\n\nMerrick knew she was talking about the house in Alexandria. \"Soon,\" he said, hoping he hadn't lied to her. They were still going over the printout of the international banking transactions.\n\nAlex offered him a tender smile before she lowered her head and stared at the baby in her arms, a little girl whose golden skin was the perfect complement for her golden hair.\n\nMerrick punched in a code, deactivating the security system. Alex had outdone herself decorating the historic structure. She'd selected antique pieces and exquisite reproductions that rivaled the interiors of the homes in Williamsburg, Virginia.\n\nThe difference was their home wasn't a museum but one where they could live and entertain in elegant comfort. A home he wanted to come to every night to eat with his wife and children, a home filled with love and laughter from the other children he hoped to have with Alex. He climbed the staircase to the second floor, and hadn't gotten halfway when the doorbell rang.\n\nA slight frown furrowed his forehead. He wasn't expecting anyone, because he'd just begun sleeping at the house. With Alex in the hospital he'd decided to give Michael and Jolene a break so they could enjoy their domicile with the presence of guests, even if the guests were family members. The bell chimed again.\n\nThinking perhaps it was one of his neighbors who saw the light on in the first story, he retraced his steps. Peering through the security eye, he saw the face of a woman with light-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail. Reaching around his back, he unsnapped the strap on his gun's holster. He opened the solid oak door and stared through the tempered glass on the storm door. The woman had pressed a photo ID against the glass. She was CIA. Maybe she'd come up with something on Duffy.\n\nMerrick reached for the latch on the door, but before he could open it the familiar sound of a gunshot echoed in the quietness of the spring night. Dropping to a crouching position, he reached for his gun, holding it in a two-handed grip. The agent lay on the top step, her right arm in an awkward position, her government-issued automatic dangling from her fingers.\n\nIt was apparent no one heard the shot because none of the residents came out of their houses. They probably thought it was a car backfiring.\n\nMerrick went completely still when he saw a tall shadowy figure move closer. The man had both hands raised above his head. There was something familiar about the man; he moved under a street lamp and Merrick recognized him. He was Cordero Birmingham, associate Bureau chief for the FBI's Northeast region.\n\nKicking the door open a fraction, Merrick trained the gun on the special agent. \"State your name and your business.\"\n\n\"Special Agent Cordero Birmingham, FBI associate Bureau chief, Northeast,\" he drawled in a distinctive Southwest intonation. He climbed the front steps, kicking the gun away from the motionless hand. Leaning down, he pressed two fingers against the woman's neck. \"She's alive.\" He straightened. \"I'm going to reach into my jacket to get my cell phone to call 911.\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Merrick warned. \"I'll make the call.\" Reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt, he took out the phone and dialed the three digits without taking his gaze off the special agent. The lamps framing the house highlighted silver hair with traces of red, a lean face with a pair of brilliant topaz-blue eyes. The call took less than twenty seconds.\n\n\"You didn't state your business.\"\n\n\"I came here to save your life.\"\n\n\"You call shooting one of my colleagues saving my life?\"\n\n\"She's dirty.\"\n\n\"How do I know you're not dirty?\"\n\n\"You don't. But if I were you I wouldn't be standing here talking to me. Your wife would be making arrangements to bury her husband. And she would raise a child who would never know her father. Just like you never knew your father or your mother.\"\n\nMerrick's eyes fluttered but the gun never wavered. \"What do you know about my mother?\"\n\n\"I was her partner on one undercover mission, and I swore an oath that I would always protect her.\"\n\nMerrick felt as if he'd been punched in the gut. Cordero Birmingham was the voice.\n\nLowering the gun, he secured it behind his back. He had questions, lots of questions he wanted the special agent to answer. But they would have to wait, as the sound of approaching sirens shattered the tranquillity of the night.\n\n## Chapter 35\n\nMerrick sat across from Cordero Birmingham listening to the man reveal more than thirty-five years of secrets. When the EMTs arrived, along with the police, Cordero took charge when he identified himself.\n\nThe injured woman wasn't an employee of the CIA, but an impostor with counterfeit identification who'd been hired to murder a federal agent, and the Bureau would send a report backing up his course of action.\n\n\"You got Duffy?\" he asked.\n\n\"We picked him up on a private airstrip as he was preparing to leave for parts unknown.\"\n\n\"How did you get him?\" Merrick asked. \"We've been burning the midnight oil going through hundreds of thousand of international banking transactions.\"\n\n\"And it paid off.\"\n\n\"What!\"\n\n\"While you were at the hospital visiting your wife and baby, Justin Jefferson found what you'd been looking for. We got the call and we had agents watching Duffy's house, his vacation place in McLean and his private jet.\"\n\n\"How did you know about the hit?\"\n\n\"We finally got a judge who wasn't in Duffy's pocket willing to approve a wiretap. We put a cleaning woman in and she placed transmitters in every one of his phones. He never used his house phone for his business. He had five cell phones, each with a direct connection to someone able and willing to do his bidding\u2014for a price of course.\"\n\n\"How did he know we were investigating him?\"\n\n\"You have a leak at Langley.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"William Reid.\"\n\n\"No!\" Merrick groaned, shaking his head. He'd always liked Bill Reid. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Duffy was blackmailing him. He'd set Reid up with a hooker, and when your supervisor woke up the next day, the woman wasn't breathing. Reid thought he'd killed her when the cause of death was a food allergy. Duffy removed all evidence that Reid had ever been in the room. He convinced Reid to transfer from the Bureau to the Company because he needed a snitch inside Langley.\"\n\nMerrick, sandwiching his hands between his knees, closed his eyes. \"What is your stake in all of this?\"\n\n\"I told you Victoria was my partner.\"\n\nMerrick opened his eyes. \"You said that before.\"\n\nCordero Birmingham looped one leg over the opposite knee, staring at the young man sitting less than three feet from him. He was so incredibly smart, yet he couldn't see what was so obvious.\n\n\"I was in love with her. It was my child Victoria was carrying when Duffy turned on her because she rejected his advances.\"\n\nA tense silence enveloped the room as the two men regarded each other. It was as if Merrick could suddenly see the similarities that were so overtly apparent: height, the lean face, high cheekbones, aquiline nose and reddish hair.\n\n\"You're telling me that you are my father?\"\n\nCordero nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"How long have you known about me?\"\n\nCordero held his forehead. \"I realized who you were when I signed off on your security clearance when you first applied to the CIA. I'd gone as high as I could at the DEA, so I requested a transfer to the Bureau.\" He lowered his hand, bright blue eyes flashing like lasers. \"I wanted to contact you but you were always on some covert operation, so I decided it was better I keep my distance.\"\n\n\"Did you know I'd been shot?\"\n\n\"Yes. I came to see you in the hospital, but you were heavily sedated. I wanted to tell you that you weren't alone. That you had family\u2014you had a father.\"\n\n\"I have a family now.\"\n\nCordero smiled, flashing his perfect white teeth, teeth that Merrick had inherited. \"I know that you're married and you have a little girl.\"\n\nMerrick flashed a proud smile. \"She has red hair.\"\n\nRunning a hair over his coarse silver hair, Cordero lifted his eyebrows. \"I had red hair. My father's hair was a bright red\u2014almost orange.\"\n\n\"Where did you learn Spanish?\"\n\n\"My mother was half Mexican.\"\n\n\"Was the other half Yaqui?\"\n\n\"Yes. How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Someone told me I look Yaqui.\"\n\n\"You do. My father was a Brit who lost his heart to a young Mexican woman he met when he came to the States on holiday.\"\n\n\"Do you have any brothers or sisters?\"\n\n\"I had a brother, but he died in Vietnam. His death devastated my parents.\"\n\n\"Tell me about my mother.\"\n\n\"She was very pretty and very, very smart. Victoria would read something once and she'd never forget it.\"\n\n\"Was she African-American?\"\n\nCordero nodded. \"Yes. Why?\"\n\nMerrick clasped his hands. \"I didn't know what it was, but I've always felt African-American. Do you have a photograph of her?\"\n\nReaching into his jacket, Cordero took out a wallet. He opened it and pulled out a small fading black-and-white photograph. \"I've carried this close to my heart for longer than I can remember.\" He handed Merrick the photo. \"When she told me she was pregnant, I told her to request a transfer back to the States so that we could marry, but Duffy was the agent-in-charge, so he stopped it.\"\n\nMerrick stared at the photograph of the woman who'd given up her life for him. There was something about her face that reminded him of his daughter's. He handed the photograph to Cordero.\n\n\"Her granddaughter looks like her.\"\n\nOvercome with emotion, Cordero willed the tears filling his eyes not to fall. \"Do you think I can see her?\"\n\nMerrick averted his gaze. Too much had happened, too much had been said and too much had been revealed in a very short span of time. \"I came home to get something for Alex to wear. I'm going back to the hospital. Would you like to come with me?\"\n\nCordero let out an audible exhalation of breath. \"Yes. It's going to be strange meeting David Cole's daughter when I haven't seen her uncle in more than forty years.\"\n\nMerrick froze. \"You know Martin Cole?\"\n\n\"No. Joshua Kirkland.\"\n\n\"How do you know Joshua?\"\n\n\"We worked together on a joint task force operation that yielded the largest drug bust in Mexican history. I was new to the game and hadn't realized we had a leak in the operation until someone tried to gut Joshua. If it hadn't been for Mateo Arroyo, also known as Matthew Sterling, Joshua wouldn't have made it.\"\n\nMerrick's head was spinning. What were the odds that his father knew Emily's father and her father-in-law? \"Joshua's daughter is married to Matt's son.\"\n\nCordero's blue eyes sparkled with amusement. \"You're kidding.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not. As soon as Alex and Victoria\u2014\"\n\n\"Victoria? You named your daughter Victoria?\"\n\n\"Yes. It was Alex's decision. We're all going to Florida next month. I'd like you to come and see your old friends.\"\n\nCordero's smile was blinding. \"I'd like that very much. Thank you.\"\n\nA phone rang and both men reached for their cell phones. \"It's mine,\" Merrick said. \"Hello. Yes, baby. I know I should've been back hours ago. I'm coming, but I want to warn you that I'm bringing somebody. No, I can't tell you. I won't tell you. You'll see when we get there. Yes, you're going to like it. Hang up and I'll see you in a bit.\"\n\nHe disconnected the call, meeting Cordero's knowing gaze. \"Women.\"\n\n\"I know, son. You can't live with them, and we definitely can't live without them.\"\n\nMerrick stood up, Cordero following suit. \"Did you ever marry? Have more children?\"\n\n\"No. I wasn't the marrying kind, but Victoria changed my mind. By the time I was ready to settle down with a wife and child she was gone. I've had a few serious relationships, but nothing that would make me commit to marriage. One love in one lifetime is enough.\"\n\n\"Come upstairs with me and see where your grandbaby girl is going to hang out.\"\n\nCordero followed Merrick up the staircase, feeling the warmth in the historic old house even though his daughter-in-law and granddaughter weren't there.\n\nHe thought about Victoria and how she would react to becoming a grandmother. There was no doubt she would've been just a little crazy. He would wait awhile, get to know his son better, and then he intended to spoil his grandbaby girl rotten.\n\n## Epilogue\n\nThe Cole clan gathered in Boca Raton to welcome and introduce Victoria Cole-Grayslake to her many relatives.\n\nMerrick carried his two-month-old daughter while Alex held the hand of her father-in-law. It was a perfect Florida late-spring day\u2014warm, sunny, the temperatures in the low seventies.\n\nSerena spied Alex first and took off running. She'd wanted to come to Virginia after her daughter had given birth, but David talked her out of it. That was the last time she swore she would listen to the man.\n\nShe held out her arms. \"Let me see the precious angel.\" Merrick placed the sleeping infant in Serena's arms. Her eyes filled with tears. \"Oh, she's so beautiful.\" Cradling her in one arm, she untied the satin ribbons on her linen cap. A slight breeze lifted strands of red-gold hair. \"Oh, goodness! She's a redhead.\"\n\nDavid came over and eased the baby from his wife's arms. \"What a beauty.\" Victoria opened her eyes and smiled a crooked smile. \"Hey, Merrick, you better keep a close eye on your daughter because you're going to have to beat the boys off with a stick.\"\n\nMerrick smiled. \"I'd rather use a gun. I'll sit on the roof and pop the little knuckleheads before they reach the front door.\"\n\n\"Who's shooting who?\" asked a deep voice.\n\nMerrick turned to find Joshua Kirkland behind him.\n\n\"Joshua, there's someone here who thinks he knows you.\"\n\nJoshua lifted his pale eyebrows. \"Who?\"\n\n\"My father.\"\n\nVertical lines marred Joshua's forehead. \"Your father?\" He'd been told Merrick was orphaned at birth.\n\n\"Don't tell me that you're so old you're now senile.\"\n\nWith light green eyes widening in shock, Joshua stared at a man to whom he owed his life. \"Cord Birmingham?\"\n\nCordero released Alex's hand, extending his arms to Joshua. \"In the flesh.\" The two men embraced, slapped each other's backs and howled like coyotes.\n\nJoshua turned and searched the crowd. \"Matt, get over here and see who decided to join the family.\"\n\nMatthew Sterling stood up, squinting slightly when he saw Joshua hugging someone who looked vaguely familiar. It wasn't until Cordero smiled that he recognized the toothpaste-ad grin.\n\n\"I'll be double damned! Cord! You old geezer!\" He grabbed him in a bear hug, then kissed both his cheeks.\n\n\"Old!\" Cordero spat out. \"I'm younger than both you farts.\"\n\nMatt rested an arm on the shoulder of the man who'd stood in as a witness for his wedding to Eve Blackwell. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I came to meet my granddaughter's family.\"\n\nMatt looked from Cordero to Merrick, then back again. How had he missed the resemblance? \"You've got a helluva son.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Cordero said without a modicum of modesty.\n\nJoshua rested his arm on Cordero's other shoulder. \"This calls for a celebration. Let's go inside and start the celebration early.\"\n\n\"You know you can't drink like you used to,\" David said, teasing his brother.\n\nJoshua shot him a look. \"Speak for yourself, little brother.\"\n\nDavid handed Victoria off to Alex. \"Here, cookie, take my grandbaby girl. I'm going to have to prove to these punks that I still can drink them under the table.\"\n\nAlex shook her head. \"Daddy, you know that you're too old to play college-boy games.\"\n\nDavid snorted. \"From what I heard, the youngbloods couldn't hold their liquor the night before you got married. Am I not right, Merrick?\"\n\nMerrick stared up at the fronds of a sweeping palm tree. \"No comment.\"\n\nAlex moved over and stood next to her husband. She watched the old friends lock arms as they went off to where they would talk about the old days and the old times undisturbed.\n\n\"I like your dad.\"\n\nMerrick wrapped an arm around her waist. \"I like him, too.\"\n\n\"You know that he's spoiling Victoria.\"\n\n\"That's what grandparents are supposed to do. You'll do the same once we have grandbabies.\"\n\nShe rested her head against his shoulder. \"But that's not going to be for a long time. Right now I want to have fun making babies.\"\n\nHe dropped a kiss on her hair. \"When do you want to start making another one?\"\n\n\"We can try again in two years.\"\n\nHe tightened his hold, bringing her closer to his side. \"That sounds like a good deal.\"\n\nAlex tilted her head, and she wasn't disappointed when he brushed a kiss over her parted lips.\n\nGabriel strolled over with his pregnant new wife. \"Get a room.\"\n\n\"Bite me, Gabriel,\" she retorted.\n\nGabriel winked at his brother-in-law. \"Is that what she tells you in the throes of passion? Bite me, bite me, baby,\" he said in a falsetto.\n\nMerrick, his expression impassive, turned and looked at Alex. \"How come you never tell me to bite you?\"\n\nShe stomped her foot. \"Merrick Grayslake, you're going to get it.\"\n\n\"I hope so, because it's been a while.\"\n\nHer face burning in shame, Alex smiled at Summer. \"Please come with me. I think Victoria needs to be changed.\" The two women walked while their men roared in laughter.\n\nLaughter, shrieks, whispered words of passion set the stage for another reunion, this one more poignant than the other ones. Merrick found his father, and his father found old friends who were now his family.\n\nThere were a few new Coles on the way who would one day take their place and risk everything for love.\nISBN: 978-1-4268-0062-7\n\n\u00a9 2007 by Rochelle Alers\n\nAll rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission. For permission please contact Kimani Press, Editorial Office, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\n\u00ae and TM are trademarks. Trademarks indicated with \u00ae are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and\/or other countries.\n\nwww.kimanipress.com\n\n## Coming Next Month\n\nDon't miss all-new titles from Kimani Press next month including eBooks by Robyn Amos and Marcia King-Gamble.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}