Juan kept his hair short enough so he didn’t need to brush it. He put on deodorant and decided he looked more dangerous with thirty hours of beard so he left his straight razor on the bathroom counter. The dark circles under his eyes and their red rims gave him a demonic cast. He dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt. He called down to the Magic Shop for a tech to get his combat leg and on the way to the ship’s hold he stopped in to grab a sandwich from the galley.

Linda Ross was waiting outside the hold. She was holding a BlackBerry that was receiving signals from the shipboard Wi-Fi network.

“How’s our guest?” Juan asked as he approached.

“Take a look yourself.” She tilted the small device so he could see the screen. “Oh, and I want to congratulate you on pulling off the rescue.”

“I had a lot of help.”

Susan Donleavy was strapped to a stainless-steel embalmer’s table in the center of the cavernous hold where Juan had packed his parachute the day before. The only light came from a single high-intensity halogen lamp that formed a focused cone around the table so she could see nothing beyond. The feed to the BlackBerry came from a camera placed just above the lamp.

Susan’s hair was lank from so long in the desert without enough water for personal hygiene, and the skin on her arms was blotchy from insect bites. Blood had drained from her face, leaving her washed out, and her lower lip quivered. She was covered in sweat.

“If she wasn’t tied down she would have bitten her fingernails to the quick,” Linda said.

“You ready?” Juan asked her.

“Just going over some notes. I haven’t done an interrogation in a while.”

“Like Max always says, it’s like falling off a bike. Do it once and you never forget.”

“I hope to God he didn’t put a sense of humor down on his job application.” Linda thumbed off the BlackBerry. “Let’s go.”

Juan opened the door into the hold. A wall of heat blasted him. They’d set the thermostat for a hundred degrees. Like the lighting, the temperature was part of the interrogation technique Linda had settled on to crack Susan Donleavy. They stepped silently into the room, but remained just beyond the circle of light.

He had to give Susan high marks because she didn’t call out for nearly a minute. “Who’s there?” she asked, a manic edge in her voice.

Cabrillo and Ross remained silent.

“Who’s there?” Susan repeated a bit more stridently. “You can’t hold me like this. I have rights.”