Hanratty's eyelids fluttered behind his lenses. His lips twisted in a weak, moist smile. "Now, now, Ms. Creed. Please don't take our Colonel Thompson too seriously. He seems to feel a certain bluster befits his position."

"Bluster, my ass. Why the hell didn't you back off after all the warnings you got?"

"Warnings?" she asked.

"That parking lot at UNM?" he said. "Mexico City? The Philippines? That hippie art gallery in Albuquerque? Your little artist friend. Did those slip your alleged mind?"

"They seemed more like assassination attempts to me," she said coolly. She thought it important to show him his bluster could not intimidate her.

"Didn't it ever penetrate that thick head that if you were pissing people off that bad, it might be a good idea to jump back?" Thompson raged.

"Now, now," Hanratty said mildly, fluttering a pale, well-manicured hand at his security chief on his way back to the desk. "There's no call to take such a tone with our guest."

Glaring, his face even redder than it had been when she first walked in, Mad Jack subsided with the good grace of a junkyard dog who'd had his leash yanked hard. It did not escape Annja's notice that Hanratty had refrained from yanking the lead until after Thompson got to establish his bad cop credentials.

Hanratty smiled. "Would you care to sit down, Ms. Creed?" he asked, indicating a chair across from his desk.

"Do I have a choice?"

"Of course, of course." Hanratty bounced his head like a bobble-head doll.

"Then I'll sit." She slid into the chair and tried to relax. It was not so much for the impression she gave her captors. She knew, especially from her study of meditation and martial arts, that allowing herself to remain in a state of tension would only drain her and tighten her up so neither mind nor body could respond with rapid flexibility should the opportunity arise.

"I'm sure you will understand, Ms. Creed," Hanratty said, "that we regret the necessity of constraining your person – as well as the unfortunate incidents to which my esteemed associate referred. You must understand our position, though. We are engaged in research of the utmost importance to our nation, especially engaged as we are in a generations-long war on terror."

"Cut to the chase," Annja said. "What's with the monsters? I'm presuming they're yours."

Cogswell shrugged his big shoulders. He was dressed in the same knobbly houndstooth coat he had worn when she met him, although his waistcoat and tie were of more subdued shades. "Our experiments have enjoyed varied levels of success."

He tipped his big, round, bristle-haired head briefly to the side. "There have been various levels of side effects. Ranging, primarily, from alarming to extremely alarming."

"Why are you running your damned mouth like that, Bergstrom?" Thompson shouted. "She's a goddamned TV reporter. You want to give her the frigging story?"

Annja scowled at that characterization of her. She found it even more demeaning than unflattering comparisons with Kristie Chatham. She said nothing. There was no point in letting him know he'd scored off her.

"Now, Nils," Hanratty said, "I know you love your theatrics. But please don't exaggerate the situation quite so excessively." He clasped his hands on the old-fashioned green blotter before him and turned to Annja. "Of course everything is really going well with the project. Quite well. Indeed, we are ahead of schedule. It's just that there have been certain unavoidable side effects – "

"Like three dead and eleven injured at the sanctuary?"

His brows came together like a large caterpillar. "Well, with the best of will, you surely cannot expect us to make omelets without breaking a few eggs. Can you?"

"I always hated that cliché," Annja said. "People aren't eggs. Multiple homicides aren't omelets. Maybe I just don't see the connection."

"You have an awfully smart damned mouth on you for a woman in your position," Thompson said, though at reduced volume from before.

"How unexpected of you to notice," she said, making him blink and then glare. "My intelligence, I mean. So you're somehow letting these horrors loose to terrorize the population, Dr. Hanratty. That doesn't sound to me as if you've got the situation all under control. What have you done to the child?" she asked.

Thompson barked a laugh.

"You must be dumber than you look, if you bought all that 'baby Jesus' shit," he said.

"We don't really have words to describe our experiments," Cogswell said. "What we see, quite candidly, are results far in excess of our ability to comprehend their causes."

"So what you're telling me, Doctor," she said, looking directly at Bergstrom, "is that you are messing with forces you don't understand."

His black eyes looked right back into her amber-green ones. "Precisely."

"Wonks," Thompson said in disgust. "What the hell good are you?"

"Fortunately that determination lies in the provenance of people with larger and more powerful heads," Bergstrom said, "if only marginally."

Thompson's red face purpled. "Listen, you overstuffed sack of ivory-tower shit – "

"Gentlemen, please," Hanratty said with a briskness that surprised Annja.

"We do not wish to give our guest the impression of discord among our ranks, do we?" Hanratty said.

"In any event," Bergstrom said to Annja, "we've run into some trouble with anomalous creatures that have appeared in various parts of the state."

She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. "So why are you telling me this, anyway? Why is this happening? I'm not your guest. I'm a prisoner."

Mad Jack Thompson's laugh was harsh as a steel brush on her bare cheek. "We want you in the right frame of mind when we interrogate you," he said.

"It's important, Ms. Creed," Hanratty said apologetically, polishing his spectacles with a monogrammed silk handkerchief. "You must understand the vital importance of this project..."

"Oh, stuff it," Thompson said. "After Little Miss Muffet here gets a taste of our meds, she'll be only too eager to tell us everything she knows."

He turned to Annja. "I want to know how you found out about us, who you told. Everything. We're going to discover every secret you're keeping."

Chapter 25

Carefully Annja paced the stark white cell. Four steps by four. Allowing for detours around the bed and the sink and the chrome-steel toilet, all seeming to sprout from the floor on gleaming metal pedestals.

The padding on the bed was just that, a pad, plush enough, with a pillow-like protrusion at the head end, but integral with the pedestal bed. It was covered with some soft, resilient material that resisted a tentative attempt to tear it with her fingernails. Certain that she was being constantly watched by hidden cameras, she tried nothing too extreme. The point was there was nothing, sheet or otherwise, that a captive might tear into strips to hang herself.

Not that much presented itself to hang oneself from. The light, which she had not seen dim and suspected never did, was inset in the ceiling, no doubt shielded with polycarbonate or some other unbreakable synthetic. The air vents were high up, covered with heavy grilles well bolted, and too small in any event to pass any body larger than a house cat. There would be no escape by crawling through the HVAC ducts.