“Detective Bennett here,” I said, taking the phone from the weeping CEO. “How’s Mary Beth? Is she okay?”

“Mary Beth is fine, Mike. For now. She has a big test coming up, though. A final final, you might say. It’s all in her hands. I’ll call you back the second her score is tallied.”

“Wait a minute. Don’t you want money?”

“All the money on this earth couldn’t prevent Mary Beth from facing her destiny, Mike.”

What the hell did that mean? How did that make sense? There was a sharp sound in the background suddenly, a distinctive click-clack. I winced. Goddammit. He’d just chambered an automatic pistol.

“Pray for her, Mike. That’s all she has now.”

MARY BETH HAAS bit harder into the thick wraps of gauze gagged into her mouth as she wrestled herself up into a cramped seated position.

She was in a pitch-black metal box with a low lid and cold, rusty walls and floor. Her arms were tightly wrapped around herself in a straitjacket. She’d been in the box for several hours. At first she’d been terrified. Then angry. Now she was just sad, infinitely, inconsolably, hopelessly sad.

As she sat in the cramped dark, the events of the afternoon kept playing and replaying through her mind in a nightmare loop.

She knew she wasn’t really allowed to leave campus to run laps at the Brearley Field House on 87th, but since she was a senior and the cocaptain of the reigning New York State Championship volleyball team, her teachers and her coach often looked the other way when she snuck out during her morning free period.

She had been coming through one of those cavelike construction scaffolding tunnels across the street from the gym when a man standing beside the open door of a van had said, “Mary Beth?”

She remembered a stinging numbness in her chest as she turned toward the voice. Her whole entire body seemed to cramp at once as she fell forward, powerless. A strong, wet, medicinal smell filled her nose and mouth then, and she was out.

She’d woken up in the straitjacket with a massive headache. That had been what? Seven? Maybe eight hours before? Eight hours of blackness and silence. Eight hours of being starving and thirsty and dirty and having to use the bathroom. It was like she was stuck at sea. A sea of darkness where there seemed to be no hope of being rescued.

At first, the sadness had been sharp, but now it was lessening, weakening like a candle dying out. She thought of her friends and teachers. Her mom. I’m sorry, everyone, she thought. Sorry for being so stupid. Sorry for messing up.

She didn’t know how much more time had elapsed when she heard the clacking of a steel shutter rolling up.

Oh, God! Somebody was coming. The man who had taken her.

An unhinging bolt of animal panic gripped her, froze her. He would touch her now, wouldn’t he? That’s what they did, right? Crazy men? Hurt you. Raped you. Killed you. She whimpered. It would be better just to be buried. She didn’t want to be in pain.

That’s when she shook herself out of her pity. She found a hard place inside herself and went there. She would fight for her life. She would bite and scream and kick. She found the thought of it comforting. She wanted to live, but more than that, she wanted to fight. She suddenly knew she could, and that was somehow better.

There was the sound of a car motor approaching. The clackety-clack of a metal gate going back down again. The killing of the engine and the sound of the door opening made her new strength waver for a moment, but then she bit down harder on the gag, and it was back.

I want to live, she thought. Please, God, just allow me the chance to live.

THE METALLIC SCRAPE of a lock was loud right next to Mary Beth’s ear. The lid of the steel box screeched as it opened.

Even in the poor light, she knew it was him. The suit. The gray hair and the glasses. He looked intelligent, fatherly, like a kindly doctor or a popular professor. How could men be so evil? she thought.

Her arms and especially her hands were strong from volleyball. He’d free her to get at her, wouldn’t he? First chance she got, she’d smash the side of her fist into his glasses, try to ram a shard into his eye as deep as it would go.

He lifted her out by the straps on the back of her jacket. She saw that she’d been held in a large industrial toolbox. They were in an enormous dark warehouse of some kind. Behind the van were girderlike pillars and welding gas tanks. Could she kick one over and start a fire? Best of all was a high window above the steel shutter of the door. The world lay on its other side.

Make it there, she urged herself. For everything that everyone in your life has done for you, make it there.

The man sat her on a bench beside a metal table and sat down on the other side of it.

He took two items out of his jacket pockets and laid them on the tabletop for her to see. She made another whimper at the sight of them.

They were a straight razor and a black pistol.

“I’m going to remove your gag. If you scream, I’m going to have to cut up that flawless face of yours, Mary Beth. Nod if you understand.”

She nodded. He leaned across the table, slid the cold flat of the razor to her cheek, and shredded the gauze. She breathed through her mouth as she worked her sore jaw, wishing her hands were free to scratch her cheeks.

“Hi, Mary Beth,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”

Um, let me guess, she thought. You’re the sick freak who’s going around killing rich teenagers?

“The man from the paper. The one the police are looking for,” she said instead.

He nodded, grinned.

“Guilty as charged,” he said. “I won’t lie to you. The people who have died so far have done so because they failed a test. We no longer have the luxury in this world to allow those who are unworthy to live. That’s why I have brought you here. I need to find out if you are worthy.”

A test, Mary Beth thought as the man rolled and then lit a cigarette. As he exhaled blue fragrant smoke from his nose, she allowed herself a tiny sliver of hope. She suspected that he was lying, just playing games with her, but if he wasn’t, maybe she could pull this off.

If anything, she was smart. She’d gotten a 2120 on her SAT, been early accepted to Bard, her first choice. Most kids she knew came up with a whole bunch of bull crap for their college applications, but hers, all her volunteering and extracurricular activities, were actually true. She really did love to learn and read and engage her mind.

Please let it be true, she thought.

He tapped some ash on the table between the razor blade and the gun.

“Okay, question one: Tell me about fair trade coffee prices and their effect on South American coffee growers.”

Oh, my God, Mary Beth thought excitedly. I actually know this. It was last month’s topic from her Political Awareness committee at school.

“The modern fair trade movement began in ’eighty-eight in Holland,” she said. “It came about because of the horrendous exploitation of the Southern Hemisphere fieldworkers. It’s basically an economic partnership that protects small coffee growers and gives consumers a choice to pay a little more for their joe while providing a living wage for the workers. The summer I was fifteen, I actually went on a fair harvest trip to Nicaragua.”

For a moment, it looked like the cigarette was going to drop from the gray-haired man’s lower lip. He recovered quickly.

“You’re right,” he said, taking a drag. “Now let’s shift gears to global warming: How many gallons of gasoline are consumed by Americans each year?”

“One hundred forty-six billion gallons,” Mary Beth said without hesitation. She knew this answer because of the mock United Nations project she’d completed at school. She’d been given the role of representative from Darfur on their global-energy-issues debate.