“I want a video report every half hour to prove Liz is alive and healthy,” he demanded.

“Every two hours is often enough. Remember, the world won’t end if the task force lets Nick go. But your world will end, if they don’t. Give me my brother, or I’ll give you your fiancée’s dismembered corpse.”

• • •

LIZ AWOKE TO POUNDING PAIN in her face.

Keeping her eyes closed, she reached to hold her burning cheeks, but her wrists were secured to something. She was slumped on a padded surface. As she struggled to remember where she was, the sound of voices penetrated her foggy mind. With a chill, she recognized them as those of her kidnappers. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she’d heard them talk to each other and to someone else, a woman, on what sounded like a speakerphone. The woman had addressed one of them as Rudy and the other as Max. Breathing deeply to fight the pain, she made herself focus on them.

“John J. was on TV last night,” Rudy was saying.

“ ‘John J.’? What are you talking about?” Max asked.

“John Rambo. You know, First Blood,” Rudy said. “When I was growing up in Moscow, I got better at English by watching the movies.”

She noticed the slight hissing of his s’s, a characteristic of some English-speaking Russians.

“Rambo hardly says a word. How could you learn English from those movies?” Max asked.

“From the other characters.”

“After the way the third Rambo movie made us Russians look, I’m surprised you watched any of them.”

“I admit the third one isn’t the best, but that first one was great.”

She was learning nothing from them, so she forced her eyes open and saw that she was lying on a weight lifter’s bench beside a massive Nautilus machine. As her mind cleared, she realized that the plastic zip-tie cuffs on her wrists encircled one of the machine’s metal poles, holding her arms up. The restraint was so tight it cut into her skin. She studied the pole and the multigym station with its pulleys, handles, and weights, wondering whether there was a way to twist free. It didn’t look hopeful, and if she succeeded, she’d still have to deal with the two bastards who’d grabbed her.

“If you wanted to learn English from Rambo, you should’ve read the novel,” Max said.

“There’s a novel?”

“He dies at the end.”

“No, the police chief’s still moving at the end. You can see him twitch when they put him in the ambulance.”

“Not in the novel,” Max said.

“The police chief dies in the novel?”

“And Rambo.”

“Stop bullshitting me.”

Following the sound of their voices, she peered across the room and saw that this was some kind of security center—the two men were sitting in the middle of a long curved desk, while above and around them rose five levels of closed-circuit TV monitors displaying views of a steel gate, a driveway, the exterior of the log house, and a chain-link fence, most in dense woods. Because the majority of screens showed the fence, she guessed it surrounded the property and there must be many forested acres.