Opening Fishin’ Hole is the last thing he wants to do, but when the alternative is just sitting here with his broken wrist and his swollen, pulsing gut and watching a stream of high-caliber bullets divide Holly’s head from her slight body? Not an option. And besides, he has read a person can’t be hypnotized against his will. It’s true that Dinah Scott’s console almost put him under, but then he didn’t know what was happening. Now he does. And if Brady thinks he’s tranced out and he’s not, then maybe . . . just maybe . . .

“I’m sure you know the drill by now,” Brady says. His eyes are bright and lively, the eyes of a boy who is about to set a spiderweb on fire so he can see what the spider will do. Will it scurry around its flaming web, looking for a way to escape, or will it just burn? “Tap the icon. The fish will swim and the music will play. Tap the pink fish and add up the numbers. In order to win the game, you have to score one hundred and twenty points in one hundred and twenty seconds. If you succeed, I’ll let Ms. Gibney live. If you fail, we’ll see what this fine automatic weapon can do. Babineau saw it demolish a stack of concrete blocks once, so just imagine what it will do to flesh.”

“You’re not going to let her live even if I score five thousand,” Hodges says. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

Babineau’s blue eyes widen in mock outrage. “But you should! All that I am, I owe to this bitch sprawled out in front of me! The least I can do is spare her life. Assuming she isn’t suffering a brain bleed and dying already, that is. Now stop playing for time. Play the game instead. Your one hundred and twenty seconds start as soon as your finger taps the icon.”

With no other recourse, Hodges taps it. The screen blanks. There’s a blue flash so bright it makes him squint, and then the fish are there, swimming back and forth, up and down, crisscrossing, sending up silvery trails of bubbles. The music begins to tinkle: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea . . .

Only it isn’t just music. There are words mixed in. And there are words in the blue flashes, too.

“Ten seconds gone,” Brady says. “Tick-tock, tick-tock.”

Hodges taps at one of the pink fish and misses. He’s right hand–dominant, and each tap makes the throbbing in his wrist that much worse, but the pain there is nothing compared to the pain now roasting him from groin to throat. On his third try he gets a pinky—that’s how he thinks of them, as pinkies—and the fish turns into a number 5. He says it out loud.