“Got it,” he said. “I’ll give them your coordinates and phone number and email, and we’ll see what they can arrange.”

“Good,” Dagmar said, and then she added, “Thanks, Charlie.”

“No problem.”

“You keep saving me,” she said.

“I haven’t saved you yet,” he said. “And if I’m going to, I’d better hang up and contact the troops.”

“I love you, Charlie,” Dagmar said with sudden urgency.

There was a moment of silence as Charlie dealt with his surprise.

“I’m fond of you, too,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t leave the hotel.”

“No problem there.”

“Take care. Someone will call soon.”

“Thanks!” But Charlie had hung up.

Dagmar reluctantly closed the phone and returned it to her belt.

“Your boyfriend?” asked Mrs. Tippel.

Dagmar shook her head. “My boss.”

Mrs. Tippel seemed a little surprised.

“He must be a good employer,” she said.

He’s hiring mercenaries to rescue me, Dagmar almost said. But she reflected that so far as she knew, no mercenaries were coming for the Tippels or for anyone else in the breakfast room, and that to mention her good fortune might seem tactless, as if she were boasting about her return to the life of a privileged Westerner.

“We went to college together,” she said.

Hiring mercenaries, she thought.

It was like something you’d do in a game.

After breakfast, Dagmar checked with Mr. Tong to see if anything had changed, and found that nothing had. So she went to her room, booted her ultrathin computer, and checked her email.

Her handheld could do anything her computer could, but she preferred a standard keyboard to having to thumb long messages on the phone’s little keypad. She wiped out spam, answered some routine queries, and sent messages to friends about her situation. She wrote about the riot and about being trapped in the music store, and about the bodies she thought she’d seen on the trip to the hotel.

As she typed on the familiar keyboard, in the hotel room that smelled of clean sheets, with the hushed sound of the air-conditioning in the background and the room’s coffeemaker hissing and snorting as it provided Dagmar’s caffeine fix, the previous day’s hazards began to seem unreal, a brief dip into a nightmare that had been banished by the morning’s strong tropical light.

The plangent sounds of Johnny Otis echoed in the room. Dagmar snatched at her phone. The number flashing in the display had a country code she didn’t recognize.

“Hello?” she said cautiously.

“Is this Dagmar Shaw?”

The male voice had some kind of Eastern European accent.

“Yes,” she said.

“My name is Tomer Zan,” the man said. “I work for Zelazni Associates. Your employer, Mr. Ruff, has retained us to see about your safety.”

Dagmar restrained her impulse to begin a joyful bouncing on the mattress.

“Yes,” she said. “He told me to expect your call.”

“Can you describe your situation, please?”

She did. She mentioned the riot the previous day, and being trapped in the music store, and the fact that she had $180 in cash. She told Tomer Zan that she was on the fourteenth floor of the hotel, with a view to the northwest. She mentioned that meals were no longer being served on the third-floor terrace because the hotel management considered it unsafe.

“I’m looking at a satellite picture of your hotel on Google Earth,” Zan said, “and I can tell you right now that I don’t like it. You’re too close to that traffic circle with the Welcome Statue, you’re too close to the government buildings that are going to be targets for demonstrators. The natural path for marches or riots runs right past your front door.”

“Great,” Dagmar said.

“We’re going to try to move you someplace safer. But we don’t have any assets in Jakarta, so that may not be possible for a few days.”

Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.

“You don’t have anybody in Jakarta?” she asked.

“No, we don’t.”

“So why did Charlie hire you?”

“Because,” Zan explained patiently, “the companies with assets in Jakarta are all overcommitted right now.”

Figures, Dagmar thought. She wandered to the window, parted the heavy curtains, and looked down at the street below. There was very little traffic, and none on foot. And no police.

“We’ll have someone on the ground there in a few days,” Zan said.

He seemed very confident of this.

“Okay,” she said.

“You’re not with anyone?” Zan asked.

“No. I’m alone.”

“Okay. I want you to change your schedule every day. Eat meals at different times, and in different restaurants in the hotel, if that’s possible.”

“Why?”

“It takes three days to set up a kidnapping. If you keep changing your schedule, that makes an abduction more difficult.”

Dagmar began to say, But why would they kidnap me? then clacked her teeth shut on the words because they sounded just like the sort of thing a stupid tourist would say.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

“The power supply may be erratic, so keep your cell phone and your computer charged. Buy extra batteries if you can-or make sure your miniturbines have extra fuel.”

“My phone doesn’t have miniturbines.”

“Then charge it every chance you can, and buy extra batteries if you can find them in the hotel. And don’t use the phone for anything except absolutely necessary calls.”

“All right.”

“If there’s a store in the hotel where you can buy food, buy all you can. Even if it’s junk food. The average city has only a three-day supply of food, and calories may get scarce.”

“What do I buy the food with? Do I use my dollars?”

There was a long moment’s silence.

“Save the dollars,” Zan said.

He then went on to tell Dagmar that he wanted her to find six different ways to escape the hotel from her room. And another six exits from every other place she regularly visited within the building.

“What do I do if I have to leave the hotel?”

“Find a place of temporary safety, and call me.”

He went on to tell her not to wear any expensive jewelry or be seen carrying her computer, because that might mark her out as someone worth robbing.

“Another thing,” he said. “I need you to be on the roof of the hotel at sixteen hundred hours Jakarta time.”

“This afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“So the satellite can get a look at you. I need you facing east and looking up.”

Dagmar wondered how much it was costing Charlie to retask someone’s satellite, and decided it was better not to know.

“You can use my picture on the Great Big Idea Web page,” she said.

“We’re getting pictures of the roof anyway,” Zan said, “in case we want to extract you from there. So we might as well find out what you look like now.”

Extract, Dagmar thought.

“All right,” she said.

She was placing herself in the hands of experts. Not that it had worked so far.

Tomer Zan advised her to keep her passport and money on her, preferably in a money belt, or in a pocket that could be buttoned or zipped.

“I have a pouch I can wear around my neck,” she said. Which she rarely used, because it wasn’t designed for people with tits.

“That’s good,” Zan said. “Would you like me to repeat any of my instructions?”

“Change my schedule,” Dagmar said. “Six exits, no jewelry or computer in public, on the roof at sixteen hundred.”

“You forgot to buy batteries,” Zan said. His voice betrayed absolutely no sense of humor.

“Buy batteries,” Dagmar said. “Check.”

“Don’t lose this number. I’ll send you email in a few minutes repeating everything I’ve said.”

“Okay.”

Zan said good-bye and hung up. Dagmar located his number in her phone’s memory and shifted it into the directory under the name Charlies Friend.

Ten minutes later, Zan’s email turned up on her computer.