“I — um.” She faltered and coughed and that made her moan all the more loudly. “What happened? My face, it’s numb, and my body, I think my ribs are broken.”

“You don’t remember? You were beaten up, tortured. You said they never asked you any questions.”

“Did they hit you, too?”

Merrick’s heart squeezed. Through her pain and confusion, Susan Donleavy could still care about his condition. Most people never would have asked and just gone on about their own injuries. He wished, God how he wished, that she hadn’t been dragged into this nightmare. “No, Susan,” he said gently. “They didn’t.”

“I’m glad about that,” she replied.

“I learned who kidnapped us, and why.”

“Who?” There was hope in her voice when she asked, as if putting a name and face to their captors would make their situation better.

“My former business partner.”

“Dr. Singer?”

“Yes, Dan Singer.”

“Why? Why would he do this to you?”

“To us, you mean. Because he’s sick, Susan, a twisted, bitter man who wants to show the world his warped vision of the future.”

“I don’t understand.”

Neither did Merrick. He couldn’t get his mind around what Singer had already accomplished and what he was about to carry out. It was all just too much. Singer had already killed thousands of people and no one knew it. Now he was preparing to kill tens of thousands more. And for what? To teach the United States a lesson about environmental control and global warming. That was part of it, but Merrick knew his former best friend all too well.

This was personal to Dan, a way for him to prove to Merrick that he had been the brains behind their success. They had been like brothers in the beginning, but Merrick was the charmer, the one who could turn a good phrase in an interview, so it was inevitable that the media singled him out as the face of Merrick/Singer and marginalized Dan to the shadows. Merrick had never thought this had bothered his partner. He’d been an introvert at MIT so why would it be any different in the real world? He now knew that it had, that Singer had fostered a hatred toward him that bordered on the pathological.

It had changed everything about Singer’s personality, driving him from the company he’d helped build and sending him to the fringes of the environmental movement, where he used his wealth to do everything he could to ruin Merrick/Singer. But when that failed he turned his back on his newfound eco-friends and returned to his home in Maine to lick his wounds.