"Where are they, Andrew?" Dr. Tarver asked in a singsong voice. "Do you want an up-close-and-personal experience with these creatures of God? Perhaps your lovely bride likes serpents better than you do."

Tarver danced over toward Lisa. She huddled on the sofa in a fetal position, alternately shutting her eyes and opening them wide, unable to endure the horror but too afraid she would be bitten while her eyes were closed.

"These are sacred creatures, Lisa," Tarver murmured. "They represent both life and death. Death and rebirth. I'm sure through your provincial eyes, you see the serpent of the Christian garden, who so easily corrupted Eve"-he bent and caressed Lisa's thighs with a scaly tail-"but that's such a limited view."

The scream that burst from Lisa's diaphragm ballooned her taped-shut lips and trumpeted from her nostrils. A few more screams like that, Rusk thought, and she'll be bleeding from her nose. She'll drown in her own blood.

Laughing quietly, Dr. Tarver took two steps back and opened the mouth of a white croker sack with his foot, then dipped and thrust one of the moccasins into the bag. Stepping on the mouth of the moving sack, he pulled it tight with a drawstring. Then, caressing the head of the remaining snake, he came around the desk and addressed Rusk again.

"I'm going to partly remove the tape from your lips, Andrew. You will not scream. You will not beg. You will not plead for your life or hers. I know the stones are here. I know your escape plan, remember? I set it up. But it's time to let go of your banana-republic dream and save yourself, like the smart man you've always thought you were."

He reached out and pulled an inch of tape from the corner of Rusk's mouth. Rusk remembered his instructions, but he could not obey them. In a parched croak, he said, "You're going to kill me no matter what I do."

Dr. Tarver shook his head with an expression of regret, then walked to the corner and picked up a putter that Rusk kept there to practice his short game. Gripping the head of the golf club, Tarver began to tease the moccasin with its padded handle. He jabbed its snout again and again, causing the snake to bare its fangs and strike at the club.

A sharp odor of musk filled the room, utterly alien and yet, after Rusk had inhaled it two or three times, eerily familiar. Some primitive part of his brain had recognized the odor of a reptile under stress, and the swampy scent sucked fear from his glands in a way he had never known before.

"He's a fearsome killer, Agkistrodon piscivorus," said the doctor. "Nothing like the coral snake. The elapids are deadlier per milliliter of venom, but the results of envenomation are quite different. With the coral snake, you get numbness, sweating, shortness of breath, paralysis, and death. But with these babies, you get a much nastier spectrum of consequences. The venom is a hemotoxin, a complex mix of proteins that starts destroying blood cells and dissolving vascular walls the instant it enters your flesh. It even dissolves muscle tissue. The pain, I'm told, is really beyond description, and the swelling, my God, I've seen it split the skin. Within hours gangrene sets in, and the skin turns black as roadkill on an August day. A life-altering experience altogether, Andrew, if you survive it. Are you sure you don't want to change your mind?"

Rusk stared back at Tarver with utter resignation. No matter what the doctor promised, he meant to kill them tonight. To Rusk's surprise, this knowledge freed him from much of his fear. He had tempted death often in the past, but he'd always done it by choice, usually with other thrill-seeking yuppies who knew that if the shit hit the fan, paid experts would pull their asses out of the fire or off the mountain, whatever the situation required.

This was different.

This was a battle to the death, and there were no paid allies on his side. What he knew was this: he was willing to die in agony, but he wasn't willing to let Eldon Tarver steal the fruits of five years' labor. Rusk also knew that his newfound courage was not based on a rush of endorphins that would dissipate in a few minutes. Somewhere deep within him, a remnant of the Boy Scout still survived. And that scout knew that the bites of cottonmouths and rattlesnakes, while every bit as painful as Tarver had described, were rarely fatal. If the cottonmouth coiling around Tarver's arm bit Rusk on an extremity, he might well lose an arm-or even a leg-in the morning. But he wouldn't die. And therein lay his secret advantage. He was willing to trade an arm for $20 million. Because by morning, the FBI agents outside would start to wonder why he hadn't left for work. And if Alex Morse was pushing as hard as she usually did, they might crash in here even sooner. Rusk looked steadily at Tarver and said, "The diamonds aren't here."

What happened next blasted all his logic to hell. Tarver leaned over Lisa, rapped the snake twice on the snout with the golf club, then let it go. The moccasin struck in a blur, hitting Lisa in the upper chest. When the blur stopped, the snake's head was clenched tight around Lisa's forearm. She leaped up from the sofa and flung her bound arms around like a woman possessed by demons. Finally, the snake let go, and its heavy body thudded against a row of books.

Dr. Tarver was on the snake in a moment. He distracted it with the flashing head of the putter, then grabbed it behind the head and held it high.

Lisa had collapsed onto the sofa and was now staring at two puncture wounds in her forearm. Her breathing grew more and more frantic until foam emerged from her nostrils. When she started jerking like an epileptic, Rusk feared she might have a heart attack.

Dr. Tarver walked back to the desk, his eyes devoid of emotion. "You see the consequences of noncooperation. I'm going to give you one more chance, Andrew. Before I do, I'm going to explain something. I have no intention of killing you. If I kill you here, that creates a host of problems for me. Your EX NIHILO mechanism, for example. Not to mention a murder investigation. But if I leave you alive, there'll be no murder investigation, and you'll take care of the EX NIHILO business for me. You can't release that confession, because your hands are tied by your own guilt. The way it's always been. You see? You can survive this night. Your diamonds are the price of life. I know you've had your heart set on spending that money, but what's money weighed against thirty or forty more years of life? You have plenty of time to earn more. But I don't. I must take what life offers."

Tarver came around the desk and sat only inches away from him. The moccasin was struggling to escape. "Put your trust in logic, Andrew. I'm much safer with you alive than with you dead."

Rusk looked across the room. Lisa lay shivering on the sofa, still staring at the holes in her arm. Two tracks of blood and yellow fluid had dribbled down to her hand, and there was already pronounced swelling at the site of the bite. As Rusk stared, her facial expression changed from the stunned shock of an accident victim to fearful curiosity. She lifted her taped hands and pulled down the front of her tank top, exposing her left breast. Where the inner curve of the breast met her sternum were two more puncture marks, an inch apart and joined by a dark purple swelling. Lisa's eyes bulged like those of a woman suffering hyperthyroidism. She tried to get to her feet again, but this time she tumbled onto the floor.

"Are you ready to tell me where they are?" Tarver asked softly.

Rusk nodded. "I'll tell you. But what about Lisa?"

"After I leave, drive her to the emergency room. Tell them you were watering your lawn. She went outside to switch off the faucet, and she felt something hit her. Once she got inside, you saw the puncture marks. Use your imagination, Andrew. Just make sure she tells the same story you do."