“They stole your laptop and smashed your computer.”

“Then it’s got to be GEM.”

“I think you’re right.”

Admitting that was a spike through her heart.

“I should have left their goddamn computer alone. But why you?”

Nadia had loosened the binding enough by then for him to wriggle his hand free. As he went to work on his left wrist and she tackled his right foot, Nadia told Doug about Loki-Berzerk and her suspicions.

When he was free he gathered her into his arms and she sobbed with relief and terror against his chest. His face was stubbled, his clothes wrinkled and smelly, but he was Doug and he was alive and holding her.

“I had no idea what they were planning when the little guy was talking to me,” he said.

“The one who imitated your voice? He… he was uncanny.”

“He came in with this big dog-faced guy and started talking to me, asking me if I needed anything and did I know why I’d been brought here. He didn’t give me any answers, just kept asking questions. Now I know he was studying my voice.”

Nadia studied his face in the flickering light. “Did they… have they hurt you?”

“Not a bit. They bring me food—plenty of it—and water.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘There’s even a bathroom. Except for tying me up an hour ago, they’ve treated me pretty decently.”

Nadia looked around, not seeing much. “And there’s no way out?”

“None. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

She stared at the candle flame. “What if we started a fire?”

“Thought of it, but who’s going to send a fire alarm? These folks could probably put it out before anyone noticed, and even if fire trucks did show up, we’d probably be dead from the smoke before they got us out.

“OK,” Nadia said. “No fire. Let’s stay alive.”

“That’s what’s got me. If what we know is so dangerous, why didn’t they simply kill us?”

“If they haven’t yet, they probably don’t intend to. I can’t think of any other reason to keep us safe and dry and well fed, can you?”

He shook his head.

Heartened by the simple logic of her reasoning, Nadia wrapped her arms around Doug and clung to him.

11

Milos Dragovic sat in the rear of his Bentley in sullen silence. The car glided uptown on Park Avenue, a black cocoon of steel-girded stillness amid the midtown cacophony. Pera, his driver, didn’t speak—didn’t dare. No music and certainly no news. Milos had heard enough news for the day.

Vuk and Ivo dead… he still could not believe it. How was such a thing possible?

He had seen it on the midday news—the burnt-out, bullet-riddled husk of his car, the two bagged bodies being wheeled away on stretchers, and still he could not accept it. And even less the story that it was a lone assailant.

Witnesses said they had seen one man fleeing in a stolen taxi, but Milos knew this could not be the work of a single man. The news was calling the incident drug-related. It was not. These were the same people who had attacked him in the Hamptons. Now they’d moved to the city. This had been an ambush, a well-planned execution carried out with the precision of a military operation.