He was vaguely aware that he was now naked, his clothes removed. Their hands were all over him, their thin, precise fingers probing the skin around his midriff.

Then something cold touched him and was immediately followed by the sensation that he had burst into flames.

The fire slid along his muscles. Somewhere in the distance, somebody was screaming. He knew who it was, but by now he was dissociating. He was no longer Tom Turner. He was no longer really a human being at all. He was pain, that and knowledge, and the knowledge was that he was being skinned alive.

Mercifully, shock dulled his mind, but he was vaguely aware that he had begun falling, but that they were still holding him. As the torment continued to distance him from reality, he did understand that he was not falling, but flying in a carefully controlled manner, held among four of them. He did not know that his skin and eyes were already neatly packed in preservative, ready for the use for which they had been intended from the moment the decision had been made to lure him into this trap.

They went much farther down than the Challenger Deep, or even the seven miles of the Kola Well in Siberia. They dropped efficiently, their captive helpless among them, down a shaft constructed with engineering expertise as far in advance of what mankind could accomplish as the lovely tools of Cro-Magnon had been in advance of the coarse flints of Neanderthal.

Controlling their fall with the grace of masters of gravity, they slid down the darkness with their writhing, abject captive, twenty-two miles into the bowels of the earth.

There, they would use delicate instruments to capture his memories, even his tone of voice, for the new deception that they had devised, which would end either in the deaths of the two rogue hybrids, the unacceptable first and second generations, or their induction into the new army.

All that was left was to lure the one in Washington out here, then deal with them both. And that was settled: They would capture a storm, and throw it at Washington.

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

HALF-HUMAN IS TOO MUCH

On the way back to Willoughby, Linda Hicks had sat huddled against the door, obviously uncomfortable. She’d stifled a moan as Mark drew a space blanket around her. When he’d asked her if she was hurt, she had given her head sharp, angry shakes.

She lay now on the creaky motel bed, as still as a corpse, her skin pale, the veins faintly visible in the hard overhead light. Here and there on her body was a red, blotchy area. On her neck and right arm, occasional tiny droplets of blood formed and ran down, but when they did, she brushed them away.

“I’m going to get up,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me!”