"Two!" he called. "Select our guests!"

"Two" was Jean-Paul. He approached a knot of people roughly, and first of all grabbed the arm of a four-year-old French girl.

"No!" her mother screamed. Jean-Paul pointed his weapon at her, and she cringed but stood her ground, holding both shoulders of the child.

"Very well," "Two" told her, lowering his aim. "I will shoot her, then." In less than a second, the muzzle of his Uzi was- against the little girl's light-brown hair. That made the mother scream all the louder, but she pulled her hands back from her child.

"Walk over there," Jean-Paul told the child firmly, pointing to Juan. The little girl did so, looking back with an open mouth at her stunned mother, while the armed man selected more children.

Andre was doing the same on the other side of the crowd. He went first of all to the little Dutch child. Anna, her special-access name tag read. Without a word, he pushed Anna's father away from the wheelchair and shoved it off toward the castle.

"My child is ill," the father protested in English.

"Yes, I can see that," Andre replied in the same language, moving off to select another sick child. What fine hostages these two would make.

"You bloody swine!" this one's mother snarled at him. For her trouble she was clubbed by the extended stock of Andre's Uzi, which broke her nose and bathed her face in blood.

"Mummy!" a little boy screamed, as Andre one-handed his chair up the ramp to the castle. The child turned in his chair to see his mother collapse. A park employee, a streetsweeper, knelt down to assist her, but all she did was scream louder for her son: "Tommy!"

To her screams were soon added those of forty sets of parents, all of them wearing the red T-shirts of the Thompson company. The small crowd withdrew into the castle, leaving the rest to stand there, stunned, for several seconds before they moved off, slowly and jerkily, down to Strada Espana.

"Shit, they're coming here," Mike Dennis saw, still talking on the phone to the captain commanding the local Guardia Civil barracks.

"Get clear," the captain told him immediately. "If there is a way for you to leave the area, make use of it now! We need you and your people to assist us. Leave now!"

"But, goddamnit, these people are my responsibility."

"Yes, they are, and you can take that responsibility outside. Now!" the captain ordered him. "Leave!"

Dennis replaced the phone, turning then to look at the fifteen person duty staff in the command center: "People, everybody, follow me. We're heading for the backup command center. Right now," he emphasized.

The castle, real as it appeared, wasn't real. It had been built with the modern conveniences of elevators and fire stairwells. The former were probably compromised, Dennis thought, but one of the latter descended straight down to the underground. He walked to that fire door and opened it, waving for his employees to head that way. This they did, most with enthusiasm for escaping this suddenly dangerous place. The last tossed him keys on the way through, and when Dennis left, he locked this door behind him, then raced down the four levels of square spiral stairs. Another minute and he was in the underground, which was crowded with employees and guests hustled out of harm's way by Trolls, Legionnaires, and other uniformed park personnel. A gaggle of park-security people were there, but none of them were armed with anything more dangerous than a radio. There were guns in the counting room, but they were under lock, and only a few of the Worldpark employees were trained and authorized to use them, and Dennis didn't want shots to be fired here. Besides, he had other things to do. The alternate Worldpark command post was actually outside the park grounds, just at the end of the underground. He ran there, following his other command personnel north toward the exit that led to the employees' parking lot. That required about five minutes, and Dennis darted in the door to see that the alternate command post was double-manned now. His own alternate desk was vacant, and the phone already linked to the Guardia Civil.

"Are you safe?" the captain asked.

"For now, I guess," Dennis responded. He keyed up his castle office on his monitor.

"This way," Andre told them. The door was locked, however. He backed off and fired his pistol at the doorknob, which bent from the impact, but remained locked, movies to the contrary. Then Rene tried his Uzi, which wrecked that portion of the door and allowed him to pull it open. Andre led them upstairs, then kicked in the door to the command center-empty. He swore foully at that discovery.

"I see them!" Dennis said into the phone. "One man two-six men with guns-Jesus, they have kids with them!" One of them walked up to a surveillance camera, pointed his pistol, and the picture vanished.

"How many men with guns?" the captain asked.

"At least six, maybe ten, maybe more. They have taken children hostage. You get that? They've got kids with them."

"I understand, Senor Dennis. I must leave you now and coordinate a response. Please stand by."

"Yeah." Dennis worked other camera controls to see what was happening in his park. "Shit," he swore with a rage that was now replacing shock. Then he called his chairman to make his report, wondering what the hell he would say when the Saudi prince asked what the hell was going on-a terrorist assault on an amusement park?

In his office, Captain Dario Gassman called Madrid to make his first report of the incident. He had a crisis plan for his barracks, and that was being implemented now by his policemen. Ten cars and sixteen men were now racing down the divided highway from various directions and various patrol areas, merely knowing that Plan W had been implemented. Their first mission was to establish a perimeter, with orders to let no one in or out-the last part of which would soon prove to be utterly impossible. In Madrid other things were happening while Captain Gassman walked to his car for the drive to Worldpark. It was a thirty-minute drive for him, even with lights and siren, and the drive gave him the chance to think in relative peace, despite the noise from under the hood. He had sixteen men there or on the way, but if there were ten armed criminals at Worldpark, that would not be enough, not even enough to establish an inner and outer perimeter. How many more men would he need? Would he have to call up the national response team formed a few years ago by the Guardia Civil? Probably yes. What sort of criminals would hit Worldpark at this time of day? The best time for a robbery was at closing time, even though that was what he and his men had anticipated and trained for - because that was the time all the money was ready, bundled and wrapped in canvas bags for transfer to the bank, and guarded by park personnel and sometimes his own… that was the time of highest vulnerability. But no, whoever this was, they had chosen the middle of the day, and they'd taken hostages - children, Gassman reminded himself. So, were they robbers or something else? hat sort of criminals were they? What if they were terrorists… they had taken hostages… children… Basque terrorists? Damn, what then?

But things were already leaving Gassman's hands. The senior Thompson executive was on his cell phone, talking with his corporate headquarters, a call quickly bucked up to his own chairman, caught in a sidewalk caf+й having a pleasant lunch that the call aborted instantly. This executive called the Defense Minister, and that got things rolling very rapidly indeed. The report from the Thompson manager on the scene had been concise and unequivocal. The Defense Minister called him directly and had his secretary take all the notes they needed. These were typed up and faxed to both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, and the latter called his Spanish counterpart with an urgent request for confirmation. It was already a political exercise, and in the Defense Ministry another phone call was made.