“Never mind what I said,” Chino interrupted. “Now all bets are off.” He paused. Something was happening. “Gregory, Commander Merrill is isolated again. He can’t hear us. I don’t know what he heard of what she said about six o’clock. It hardly matters. Disconnect the speakerphone but stay on the line while I give him his marching orders. And no smoking, please. It causes birth defects.”

In the excavated room under the house the brief silence ended as Chino started talking again. “Commander! Gregory will confirm that your wife will be well-cared for. Isn’t that right, Gregory?”

“Yes, Chino.” Merrill caught the change in his voice: Gregory was on the handset, so Amy couldn’t hear — if she could still hear at all. No, Chino wanted her for himself. Gregory was just going to have to settle for being sorry he wasn’t going to get his own way about her, whatever that was. Merrill realized he had never imagined what that was, Gregory’s way. Merrill knew now he had never come close to imagining it.

“Excellent,” Chino said. “We’ll talk again in a few minutes.” Merrill heard Gregory disconnect. “As for you, Commander, you can go to your grave without knowing why. Without knowing why an example was made of you, without knowing what happened to your wife for the rest of her life —”

“Why don’t you just blow it out your ass!” Merrill shouted. He produced the chauffeur’s cell phone and waved it at the camera. “Do I disappoint you now?”

“Where did you get that?”

“A second cell phone is the latest thing.” He entered the code he had given Jennifer Waller’s cell phone number and pressed Recall.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m telling my people exactly where I am and what I see here. If they can’t figure out how to undo it, you can figure they will track you down anywhere in the world and step on you like the bug you are.”

“Domino’s Pizza,” Scott Waller said. “Please hold.”

“Take down these coordinates —”

“I still have your wife!” Chino boomed. “I can still call Gregory! Do you want to hear her die right now?”

“I heard that,” Scott Waller said. “Do whatever he says —”

“Lieutenant, I’ll call you back,” Merrill said, without disconnecting. “Let’s talk!” he called to the ceiling. He put the cell phone face up on the television control console. “You’ve got a satellite transmission dish in the back yard, a television studio and some kind of giant gizmo in an excavation under the house. What is that thing, Chino? It’s too small to be a pile driver. A wooden crate with Russian writing on it.”

“Polish.”