She stood there with her eyes on him. No one spoke. He looked around the room.

“So, what now?” he said.

Musil’s cell phone rang in his pocket before anybody could answer.

Grigor sat on a lawn chair in the bungalow’s vacant sunroom, the girls in a corner facing him on two identical chairs. His right leg was bent upward, his right arm straight across the knee. It made a comfortable, steady base for the Glock in his hand. A fulcrum on which he could angle the gun smoothly from side to side.

At the moment, he was keeping it still, its barrel aimed at a point perfectly between them. He held the satellite phone in his left hand to his ear.

“Hello, Agent Musil,” he said, in their father’s voice. “Agent Musil speaking.”

“Where are my daughters?”

“‘Where are my daughters?’” Grigor repeated. The voice could have been a perfect digital recording of Musil, an instant playback. After a half second’s pause, he shifted to his own voice. “My apologies. Birds like to flap their wings. I don’t mean to provoke.”

“Where are they?” Musil said.

Grigor swung the gun left toward the older girl, then right onto the younger, then left again. He had told them not to move, and they were being cooperative, though he’d allowed the older one to put a soothing arm around her sister.

“I may or may not be looking at their pretty faces,” he said. “It’s quite possible I have a gun on them. You can be certain they aren’t dead yet.”

“I want to speak to them,” Musil said.

“Time for that in a while.”

“I want to speak to them.”

Grigor was quiet.

“I imagine you’re in an office,” he said. “After the excitement on Tenth Avenue, you would have contacted your children’s school to check on their safety. But when you heard I pulled them out of class—or should I say you pulled them out?—you probably ran to your colleagues for help. And now I assume you’re all huddled in that very imposing headquarters building.”

“Put my daughters on the phone.”

Grigor looked at them over the gun barrel.

“I want to tell you it can’t be tracked,” he said. “My phone, that is. And your daughter’s phone is gone. Just so you don’t waste your time.”

“What do you want from me?”

Grigor was silent a moment.

“You should understand something,” he said. “I have your children. I can kill them or not. It makes no difference to me. But it does to you. Which means I’m in control.”

Musil didn’t answer. Grigor liked that. It was a silent concession.