Jack’s mouth had gone dry while Kusum spoke. The man spoke his madness so casually, so matter-of-factly, with the utter conviction of truth. No doubt because he believed it was truth. What an intricate web of madness he had woven for himself.

“The necklace?” Jack said.

He had to keep him talking. Perhaps he would find an opening, a chance to get Vicky free of his grasp. But he had to keep the rakoshi in mind, too—they kept drawing closer by imperceptible degrees.

“It does more than hide one from rakoshi. It heals… and preserves. It slows aging. It does not make one invulnerable —Westphalen’s men put bullets through my parents’ hearts while they were wearing their necklaces and left them just as dead as they would have been without them. But the necklace I wear, the one I removed from my father’s corpse after I vowed to avenge him, helped mend my wound. I lost my arm, true, but without the aid of the necklace I would have died. Look at your own wounds. You’ve been injured before, I am sure. Do they hurt as much as you would expect? Do they bleed as much as they should?”

Warily, Jack glanced down at his arms and legs. They were bloody and they hurt—but nowhere near as much as they should have. And then he remembered how his back and left shoulder had started feeling better soon after he had put on the necklace. He hadn’t made the connection until now.

“You now wear one of the two existing necklaces of the Keepers of the Rakoshi. While you wear it, it heals you and slows your aging to a crawl. But take it off, and all those years come tumbling back upon you.”

Jack leaped upon an inconsistency. “You said ’two existing necklaces.’ What about your grandmother’s? The one I returned?”

Kusum laughed. “Haven’t you guessed yet? There is no grandmother! That was Kolabati herself! She was the assault victim! She had been following me to learn where I went at night and got—How do you Americans so eloquently put it?—’Rolled.’ She ’got rolled’ in the process. That old woman you saw in the hospital was Kolabati, dying of old age without her necklace. Once it was replaced about her neck, she quickly returned to the same state of youth she was in when the necklace was stolen from her.” He laughed again. “Even as we speak, she grows older and uglier and more feeble by the minute!”

Jack’s mind whirled. He tried to ignore what he had been told. It couldn’t be true. Kusum was simply trying to distract him, confuse him, and he couldn’t allow that. He had to concentrate on Vicky and on getting her to safety. She was looking at him with those big blue eyes of hers, begging him to get her out of here.

“You’re only wasting time, Kusum. Those bombs go off in twenty-five minutes.”

“True,” the Indian said. “And I too grow older with every minute.”