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typing away on her laptop, which was sitting on the fold-out table in front of her. Adrian Kennedy was sitting to Hunter’s right, across the aisle from him. Since they left Captain Blake’s office, he seemed to have been on his cellphone the whole time.
    The plane took off smoothly and quickly climbed up to a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. Hunter kept his eyes on the blue, cloudless sky outside his window, wrestling with a multitude of thoughts.
    ‘So,’ Kennedy said, finally coming off his phone and placing it back inside his jacket pocket. He had swiveled his seat around to face Hunter. ‘Tell me about this guy again, Robert. Who is he?’
    Taylor stopped typing into her laptop and slowly rotated her seat around to face both men.
    Hunter kept his eyes on the blue sky for a moment longer.
    ‘He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met,’ he said at last. ‘Someone with tremendous self-discipline and control.’
    Kennedy and Taylor waited.
    ‘His name is Lucien, Lucien Folter,’ Hunter carried on. ‘Or at least that’s the name that I knew him by. I met him on my first day at Stanford University. I was sixteen.’
    Hunter grew up as an only child to working-class parents in Compton, an underprivileged neighborhood of South Los Angeles. His mother lost her battle with cancer when he was only seven. His father never remarried and had to take on two jobs to cope with the demands of raising a child on his own.
    Hunter had always been different. Even as a child his brain seemed to work through problems faster than anyone else’s. School bored and frustrated him. He finished all of his sixth-grade work in less than two months and, just for something to do, he read through all the modules for the rest of his lower-school years. After doing so, he asked his school principal if he was allowed to take the final exams for grades seven and eight. Out of sheer curiosity and intrigue, the principal allowed him to. Hunter aced them all.
    It was then that his principal decided to get in contact with the Los Angeles Board of Education; after a new battery of exams and tests, at the age of twelve, he was accepted into the Mirman School for the Gifted.
    But even a special school’s curriculum wasn’t enough to slow his progress down.
    By the age of fourteen he’d glided through Mirman’s high school English, History, Math, Biology and Chemistry curriculums. Four years of high school were condensed into two and at fifteen he’d graduated with honors. With recommendations from all of his teachers, Hunter was accepted as a ‘special circumstances’ student at Stanford University.
    By the age of nineteen, Hunter had already graduated in Psychology – summa cum laude – and at twenty-three he received his PhD in Criminal Behavior Analysis and Biopsychology.
    ‘You said he was your roommate?’ Taylor asked.
    Hunter nodded. ‘From day one. I was assigned to a dorm room on my first day in college.’ He shrugged. ‘Lucien was assigned to the same room.’
    ‘How many sharing the room?’
    ‘The two of us, that’s all. Small rooms.’
    ‘Was he also a psychology major?’
    ‘That’s right.’ Hunter’s gaze returned to the sky outside his window as his memory started to take him back to a long time ago. ‘He was a nice guy. I never expected him to be so friendly to me.’
    Taylor frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
    Hunter shrugged again. ‘I was a lot younger than anyone around. I had never been too much into sports, going to the gym, or any sort of physical activity, really. I was very skinny and awkward, long hair, and I didn’t dress like most people did at the time. In truth, I was a bully magnet. Lucien was almost nineteen then, loved sports and worked out regularly. The kind of guy who’d usually have a field day with someone who looked like me.’
    From Hunter’s look and physique, no one would ever have guessed that he’d been a skinny and awkward kid when young. He looked like he’d been a