“Am I? How about this—you like to joke about a ‘perfect ten’ being ten years old. Your pedophile pals find it very amusing. In fact one of your many screen names is P–10.”

“Oh, God.”

“God has nothing to do with it, Dr. Monk. Blame it on the Child Pornography Task Force. That’s where I come in. I’m the agent-in-charge of the Child Pornography Task Force, New York. Which gives me access to all the hi-tech goodies, including some rather amazing spyware that’s going to put your nuts in a blender.”

“Spyware?” blusters Munk, who clearly understands the terminology and grasps what it implies. “But the firewalls—I thought…”

His voice trails off, unable to complete the sentence, as it all sinks in. “You know the amazing thing?” Cutter says, training the pistol on Munk’s jean-clad scrotum. “Sickos like you always manage to convince themselves that a thirty-nine-dollar piece of firewall software can protect them. What a joke. It’s like using a piece of cheap cardboard to stop a speeding bullet. Our task force uses a spyware program developed by the NSA, on loan to Treasury. You know what the program is called? Creepster. Because it finds creeps like you, Dr. Munk. It finds you and lives in your computer and every time you go on the Internet, Creepster reports directly to me, and makes a record of everything you’ve done and said, everywhere you’ve gone on the Internet, every image you’ve looked at. Every keystroke, every downloaded file. I know your screen names, your passwords. I know every dirty, sick thing about you.”

That isn’t strictly true, about the NSA developing the program, but Cutter figures the doctor has heard of the National Security Agency, and that it will impress him. In actual fact, the spyware had been liberated from a counterterrorist intelligence unit assigned to Delta Force. Payment for the shaft job he’d gotten from the Army Special Operations Force, their ever-so-polite suggestion that he’d be more comfortable as a civilian. In that desperate hour he’d offered to take a drop in rank, or even return to the enlisted ranks, but the offer was declined “without prejudice.” Meaning shut up about what you did and please go away. So he’d burned the very useful spyware program onto a CD and smuggled it out, with the intention of selling it on the black market. Good thing he hadn’t, as it had made everything else possible. No spyware, no mission, simple as that. Spyware that had allowed him to explore every digitized aspect of Stanley Munk’s complicated life and find a way to make him malleable.

The good doctor—and he’s a very good doctor, as far as that goes—is the founder of one of the most exclusive and successful surgical clinics on the East Coast. The clinic rakes in millions in fees, enough to support himself and his five partners in high style—much, much more than any of them could have commanded in the public hospital sector.

Near as Cutter can determine, none of the medical partners is aware of or share in Munk’s sexual proclivities. His trophy wife—third in a line of trim, tiny-breasted little blondes—has no clue. He’s never been arrested, never been reported, never been caught, and when he seeks actual flesh-and-blood victims, he apparently ventures to safe foreign locales like Thailand and Bangkok and the Philippines, where his anonymity can be assured.

Sick bastard is careful but not, as it happens, careful enough.

“What do you want?” Munk asks, managing to sound both plaintive and angry. “Money?”

Cutter leans in, using his killer smile, and is gratified to see the good doctor wince, pressing himself against the wall. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

“What I want,” Cutter says, “is for you to understand what is at stake. I have in my possession, and duplicated on agency files, evidence that links you to possession and exchange of illegal child pornography. If this evidence is introduced into normal channels, you will certainly be arrested. If convicted, you may or may not serve time, depending on the deal your lawyer cuts, but you will be registered as a sex offender. No way to avoid it.”

“Oh, my God,” Munk blubbers. “Oh, my God.” Panting like he’s about to be physically ill, as if he can taste the gorge rising in his throat.

“Luckily, you have a rare skill. One that’s going to make things right for both of us.”

For the first time in the most terrifying five minutes of his life, Dr. Stanley Munk looks hopeful. “What do you want?” he asks.

“An exchange of value,” Cutter says. “We’re going to help each other.”

“I’m listening,” Munk says.

Cutter leans back in the chair, lets the man think about it for a crucial minute or so. Tenderizing his enormous ego, an ego that won’t let him admit that despite being brilliant and successful, he’s allowed his sick sexual deviance to put him in peril.

“I can make all of this evidence disappear,” Cutter tells him, nodding at the laptop. “In exchange, you will arrange for the admission of a new patient at your clinic. You will schedule a certain procedure for the day after tomorrow, and then let your famous hands do their magic. That’s it.”

“New patient?” Munk’s eyes light up, convinced he’s figured it all out. “So that’s what this is all about! You’re the new patient.”

Cutter smiles, shakes his head. “Not me,” he says. “My son.”

32 one thin dime

Tomas has been walking the wall edge for an hour. Or maybe for ten minutes. Without a watch or a clock or window or a television there’s no good way to gauge the passage of time. He’s tried counting his pulse, but doesn’t know how fast his heart beats, so it tells him nothing useful. Not that knowing what time it is would make any difference to his present situation. Whatever time it is, time is running out.

He must find a way to escape or he will die. Of this, Tomas is certain. Steve is going to kill him, or do something that’s even worse than death. Something so bad it can’t be imagined. Not that Steve threatened to hurt him. The man promised to take care of him, to make sure he wasn’t hurt again by the men he called the wild boys.

“No more wild boys,” he had promised, holding Tomas so close against his chest that the boy could feel the thumping of his heart. “They’ve been taken care of, son. Fired, I mean.”

The way he sometimes called Tomas “son” makes the boy shiver inside. Something is wrong with Steve, inside his head. At first he’d seemed better than the other two, who had cursed at him for wetting the bed. But when he’d taken off the black ski mask and made Tomas look at his face, the boy had sensed that something was terribly wrong with him. He had no experience with mental illness, so Tomas didn’t know if the man who called himself Steve was insane or just so deeply unhappy about something that it had made him sick in the head. Whatever it was, he was all twisted up inside. It made him smell, too. A stink of bone-deep anger that frightened Tomas even more than the sneering violence of the wild boys who had broken his nose and promised to kill him.

The stinky smell made Tomas want to barf, it was that bad. Smell like that story in the book when he was little, about the Stinky Cheese Man. It was a funny story, really, but for a while it had been scary, just thinking about a stinky cheese man, a weird little guy with a round wheel of cheese for a head, and Tomas used to ask his mother to look under the bed and promise he wasn’t there. Which she always did, and in a way that never made fun of his being scared of the dark.

Good old Mom. It was her voice he listened to now, in the white room. Telling him to get out.