“Do you?” she asked warily. “What do you want to know? I couldn’t have been more frank with you before.”

“And what you told me was raw and painful and should have been enough for me? What kind of beast would ask anything more of you? Except I could see that you’d already put it all behind you, and you were strong enough to keep it there.” He smiled. “And that’s where I want you to keep it. I know about the struggle; now I want to know about how you fought back.” He nodded at the computer on the seat beside her. “When I was making my phone calls before Lara blew me away, I took the time to notice how absorbed you were in your computer. Your fingers were flying over the keys, and you were very intense. What were you working on?”

She gave him an innocent stare. “Solitaire?”

He shook his head. “Close. Though I bet it did have something to do with gambling. What did you find out about me?”

She looked at him for a moment. “Not much. It’s difficult to access information when a person doesn’t want his background known. Your public persona is evidently as inscrutable as your personality. I found out about your time in the service, but nothing about you being an extractor. You now own at least three casinos, perhaps more. But if you do, they’re not in the name of Tanner. I checked on this plane and it once belonged to a Claude Starbarth, a billionaire corporate giant, but it’s now registered in the name of Tanner Industries.” She smiled. “That’s as far as I got today.”

“Pretty good. I’m impressed. You’d probably have done even better if you’d had more sophisticated equipment. That computer looks fairly basic.”

“Anything else would have been too expensive, and Anton wasn’t going to buy it for me.” Her lips tightened. “But I couldn’t do without a computer, so I ‘persuaded’ him to buy the first one years ago. I’ve been homeschooling Lara all her life, which means I’ve been teaching myself, too. I taught myself all kinds of skills to get ready for the time when I’d find us a way to escape.” She reached out and touched the computer. “We’ve gone through a lot of computers in that time. But I had to make sure they all looked the same so Anton wouldn’t realize that Lara would occasionally bring home a new one when they sent her out on one of those damn Trials.”

“She stole them?”

Maria stiffened. “How do you think she’d get them? And you should be impressed. You have no idea how difficult it was for her to figure out a way to get a computer I needed when she was in the middle of concentrating on a Trial.”

“Or how you hated to ask her to do it?” He held up his hand. “I wasn’t criticizing. I’m lost in admiration for both of you.”

“Sarcasm?”