“Oh,” Fred said. “Right. No problem, Oscar.”
Oscar and Ms. Willis went downstairs and through the lobby. Dutch party music echoed down the entrance loggia. “Sure is a nice hotel,” Willis remarked.
“Thanks. Maybe you’d like to check in for the weekend.”
“On my salary? I can’t afford a classy place like this.”
“If you’re discreet about this little incident, ma’am, I’ll treat you and any guest of your choice to a three-day stay with full room service.”
“Gee, that’s a mighty generous offer. This Gretel person must really mean a lot to you.” Willis led him down the paved walkway and into the street. A limo-sized white ambulance waited under the pines, with its lights on and the driver’s door open. Willis waved cheerily at the driver, who waved back in evident relief.
“She’s lyin’ in the back, on a stretcher,” Willis said. “It’s a pretty bad break. You want some good advice, compadre? From now on, don’t make your dang girlfriends sneak around in the dark.”
“I’m sure that’s good advice,” Oscar said. He stood up on the bumper and gazed into the ambulance. Greta was lying on a canvas stretcher in a metal rack, with her hands behind her head.
Willis slapped her hands against Oscar’s rump and gave him a hefty shove. Oscar stumbled into the ambulance, and Willis immedi-ately slammed the double doors. The vehicle went as black as a tomb.
“Hey!” Oscar blurted.
The vehicle left the curb and racketed away with a jounce of hydraulics.
“Greta,” he said. No response. He crawled in darkness to her side, reached out. His questing hand landed somewhere on her rib cage. She was unconscious. But she was alive; she was breathing.
Oscar quickly produced his telephone. He was grimly unsur-prised to see it fail to register a signal. But there was enough feeble glow from the dial face for him to painstakingly scope out his sur-roundings. He brought the faint glow of the phone to her face. She was out cold — and for good measure, they’d glued a membrane strip of adhesive over her mouth. Her hands were cuffed with thin plastic police straps. There was, of course, nothing wrong with her ankle.
The back of the vehicle resembled an ambulance, but only at first glance. It had some battered secondhand stretcher gear, but there was no life-support equipment. It was windowless. To judge by the way it took corners, the phony ambulance was sheathed in solid metal like a bank vault. They’d lured him into an armored thermos bottle, corked him up, and driven away.
By phone light, with his fingernails, he slowly peeled the gag from her mouth. He gave her silent lips a healing kiss. There was no heating inside the evil little vault. Greta felt chilled. He climbed onto the stretcher with her and embraced her. He held her tightly, pressing warmth into her body. He was appalled to discover how much he cared for her. She was so human. So far beyond his help.
They’d been disappeared. It was as simple as that. They had made a little too much trouble for someone, and they had exhausted the patience of some deeply evil player. Now they were heading for an assassin’s graveyard. They were going to be tortured, humiliated, and buried with bullets in the backs of their heads. They would be gassed, rendered, and cremated. Vile and hideous people would replay the videotapes of their secret and lingering deaths.
Oscar rose from the stretcher. He lay on his back on the floor, and began stamping on the forward bulkhead. He industriously kicked his way through paint, a layer of porous plastic, and hit a wall of solid iron. The perambulating coffin now began producing a series of drumlike booms. This was progress. Oscar continued to kick, and with more enthusiasm.
A speaker crackled to life somewhere in the rear of the compart-ment. “Would you knock it off with the noise, please?”
“What’s in it for me?” Oscar said.
“You really don’t want us to get tough, compadre,” the speaker said. It was Willis. “You know, just ’cause you can’t see us, doesn’t mean we can’t see you. We can see every dang move you make back there. And frankly, I wish you wouldn’t feel up the merchandise while she’s unconscious. It’s kinda disgusting.”
“You think that I’m helpless back here — but I still have options. I could choke her to death. I could say you’d done it.”
Willis laughed. “Jesus, would you listen to this character? Listen, vato — you try anything stupid, and we’ll just turn on the knockout gas. Would you take it easy back there, please? We’re not your problem. We’re not gonna do anything to you. We’re just your delivery service.”
“I’ve got a lot of money,” Oscar said. “I bet you’d like some.” There was no response.
He returned his attention to Greta. He searched her pockets, fmding nothing useful for chiseling through solid metal. He tried to ease her position. He put her feet up, chafed her bound wrists, massaged her temples.
After half an hour, she emitted a series of groans and woke up.
“I feel so dizzy,” she said hoarsely.
“I know.”
She stirred. Her wrists drew up short with a hiss of plastic strap.
“Oscar?”
“We’ve been kidnapped. It’s an abduction.”
“Oh. All right. I remember now.” Greta gathered her wits. “They told me you’d been hurt. That you needed to see me at your hotel. So when I left the dome, they just… grabbed me.”
“That’s my story too,” Oscar said. “They used us as bait for each other. I should have been more suspicious, I guess. But why? How on earth could we live like that? There’s no way to outguess something like this. An abduction is completely stupid. It’s such a weird gambit.”
“What are they going to do to us?” Greta said.
Oscar was briskly cheerful. He’d already worked himself through a black pit of terrified despondency, and was properly anxious that she not share this experience with him. “I can’t really tell you, because I don’t know who they are yet. But they haven’t really hurt us, so they must want something from us. They took a lot of trouble, with the disguise and the ambulance and so forth. This isn’t my usual crowd of assassin lunatics.” He lifted his voice. “Hey! Hello! Would you people care to tell us what you want from us?” There was no answer. This was much as he had expected.
“They can hear everything we say,” he told her. “We’re bugged, of course.”
“Well, can they see everything we do? It’s pitch-black in here.”
“Actually, they can. I think they have infrared cameras.”
Greta thought this over for some time. “I’m really thirsty,” she said finally.
“Sorry.”
“This is craziness,” she said. “They’re going to kill us, aren’t they? This is such a mess.”
“Greta, that’s just a speculation.”
“They’re taking us for a gangster ride. They’re going to bump us off. I’m going to die pretty soon.” She sighed. “I always wondered what I’d do, if I knew I was going to die.”
“Really?” Oscar said. “I never gave that issue much thought.”
“You didn’t?” She stirred. “How could you not think about that? It’s such an interesting question. I used to think I’d react like Evariste Galois. You know, the mathematician. I’d write down all my deepest speculations in my math notebook, and hope that somebody understood someday … See, if you think that problem through, there’s an obvious deduction. Death is universal, but knowing when you’ll die is a rare statistical privilege. So since you’ll probably never know, you should take a few hours out of some random day, and prepare your final testament beforehand. Right? That’s the rational conclusion, given the facts. I actually did that once — when I was eleven.” She drew a breath. “Unfortunately, I’ve never done it since.”