Ollie made Rovil face the wall, then crouched and quickly tied his ankles together with zip ties. He yelped and nearly lost his balance. She emptied his pockets, then helped him shuffle to the loveseat and drop into it. The gun was in her jacket pocket now.

“This is insane,” Rovil said.

“It’s pretty standard, actually. Hands together.” She cinched his wrists. “One time in Syria I let the guy stay in bed. Figured, we’re going to be here a while, might as well be comfortable.”

“You’re not going to torture me?”

Ollie grinned. “See, I knew you’d looked up my résumé.” She shook her head. “No, we’re just going to talk.”

“Then why are you tying me down?” He delivered this with a well-modulated tremor of desperation, not too over-the-top.

“Because you’re a guy. You’d be tempted to try to overpower me or do something stupid, like yell for help. By the way, the house next door is empty, and the one on the other side is too far away to hear you. But if you do scream, I will gag you, and if you fight me I will have to hurt you. I don’t want that. I’m not like the man you hired. He’s got an antiquated way of dealing with people—Guantanamo Classic.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know who—”

“The cowboy, Rovil.”

“The cowboy? But you can’t think that I—?”

“Breaking your own fingers was a nice touch. Not that many people would have the commitment to the gag. But you were right to do it—just bandaging up your hand wouldn’t have sold it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“It’s okay, Rovil. I know you feel the need to keep up the performance. But we’ll all go home a lot faster if we can get past that.”

He kept professing his ignorance, pretending shock and confusion. While he talked, Ollie arranged the space. She placed a wooden chair a few feet in front of the loveseat. Beside it she set a small pile of rags, including a couple of pillowcases and bath towels that she’d cut into more manageable strips. Nearby was her black backpack, as well as a plastic bucket, a case of bottled water, a jug of Lysol, and a radio. Rovil didn’t ask about any of the items—he just kept talking, reasoning with her.

She sat down in the chair and waited for him to stop babbling. “Can I ask a question?” she asked at last.

Rovil sat back. He breathed deep, then exhaled, performing his exasperation. “Sure.”

“What do you like on your pizza? For later, I mean. I’d like to plan the menu.”

*   *   *

“Why are you asking me questions if you’re not even listening to the answers?”

“Oh, I’m listening,” Ollie said without looking up. It was late afternoon. They’d been in the basement for ten hours. She’d emptied the piss bucket for him twice. So far he’d resisted the urge to shit—he did not want to do that in front of her—but sooner or later it would have to happen.

And sooner or later she’d have to decide what to do with Rovil. They could not stay down here forever. If he did not talk soon, then she had only one other option. She’d been trying to decide if what she was contemplating was a sin.

She did not always believe in sin, or in God. For most of her adult life she’d considered faith to be something she’d left behind in her childhood with her high school track suit. Then, on a cold February day about a month after she lost her job as an intelligence analyst, she was surprised to find herself walking through the big wooden door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A midday service was in progress. Ollie took a seat in a middle pew.

She hadn’t been thinking of God, or religion, or the church—especially not the Catholic church. She was raised Lutheran, for goodness’ sake. About the only thing she’d given serious thought to lately was suicide. Late at night, and often in the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon as well, she’d lie in bed, turning the idea over in her mind like a black opal. Admiring the way it gleamed. Lusting after it, like a woman saving up her money.

She stayed through the service to the end. Then she went back the next day, and the day after that.

She went only on weekdays, to the 12:10 service. Less than a dozen people would show up, old women mostly, a few tourists. (And Ollie thought of herself as a different kind of tourist.) They would settle into the pews one by one like lumps of cold dough, leaving plenty of space between them. The air inside seemed only a bit less cold than the street. Before the service began, Ollie would stare at the votive candles flickering at the Virgin Mary’s feet like spiritual pilot lights. Then the voice of the priest would call out and the voices of the old women would murmur in response, stirring the air. They would rise to sing, and the organ, a fortress of silver pipes, would bellow and thrum, vibrating her chest. Then she would kneel, resting her forearms on the back of the pew, and the old polished wood under her would seem to radiate like a lodestone charged from a hundred years of prayers. And sometimes (not every time, but often enough, barely often enough) something in her that had been numb and silent would slowly unclench, unfold, and fall away from her.

For a day. Sometimes only for a couple hours. But it was enough to get her through the winter.

“I’ve told you everything I can think of,” Rovil said sometime later. “And you’ve got all my devices. What more can I give you?”

She was looking at his corporate slate at that moment. She also had his wallet and personal pen. Electronically speaking, she had become him. It had taken her less than fifteen minutes to get access to every bank account, mail service, and online drive he owned. The rest of the day she’d spent browsing, reading, and copying files. She found her own name in his personal contacts list. He’d discovered her last name, and had pasted in links to the few pages on the internet where her biographical information popped up.

More interesting were the custom fields next to her name, and the names of dozens of other people. He’d created over twenty attributes such as Loyalty and Intelligence, with scores for each. He’d reduced everyone to a character sheet from a role-playing game. Ollie had scored three or below on most categories.

“Only a one on scent?” she asked. “That’s hurtful.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant for anyone to see those.”

“You’ve got Lyda and Mikala in here—everyone from Little Sprout—from when you used to take care of the rats.”

“I did a lot more than that. I was a trained neuroscientist. In fact, I was the one who steered them toward the change that made One-Ten possible.”

She looked up from the screen. Finally, she thought, a little ego. She’d been waiting for the real Rovil to show up. With very little prompting she got him to tell her the story of how he came to work for them, and how he almost-singlehandedly saved the company.

“And you only got five percent of the stock?” she asked, her tone sympathetic.

“Two percent.”

“Ouch. You must have been pissed.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it. “I’ve made peace with it. My god has helped me—”

“Ganesh. Right.” She flipped to a new page on the pen. “Hey, Landon-Rousse’s stock price is up,” she said.

“You don’t say,” he said flatly. He didn’t like being interrupted.

“You have over five thousand shares in your ESOP,” she said. “You should be happier.” She’d been able to go surprisingly far into Landon-Rousse’s network with Rovil’s permission set. Most of the files were in plain text, but the encrypted ones with interesting names she’d outsourced to cracker services—paid for with Rovil’s credit. Some of those decrypted files were already back in her inbox.

“Of course, a lot depends on the new product you’re in charge of,” she said. “‘NME: Stepladder.’ I like the code name rather than numbers.”

“Please! This is all proprietary information!”

“I know, I know,” she said. “Didn’t sign the NDA. Did you come up with the name?”