“Fair enough. We’re in the same boat there, no matter how we got dropped into it.” Anielewicz pointed at Drucker. “If you know the Fuhrer, why aren’t you using your pull now to have him help you look for your kin?”

“Two main reasons, I suppose,” Drucker answered after a little thought. “I wanted to do it myself, and… I’m not sure there’s anyone to find.”

“Yes, knowing they’re dead would be pretty final, wouldn’t it?” Anielewicz’s voice was grim. “Still and all, if you’ve got a card left to play, don’t you think it’s time to play it?”

Drucker considered, then slowly nodded. He raised an eyebrow. “And if I try to find out for myself, maybe I should try to find out for you, too?”

“That thought did cross my mind,” Mordechai Anielewicz allowed. “I’ve got pull with the Lizards, myself. Shall we trade?” Drucker considered again, but not for long. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it.

Sam Yeager had never imagined that a jail could be so comfortable. His place of confinement didn’t look like a jail. It looked like, and was, a farmhouse somewhere in… nobody had told him exactly where he was, but it had to be Colorado or New Mexico. He could watch television, though no station came in real well. He could read Denver and Albuquerque papers. He could do almost anything he wanted-except go outside or write a letter or use a computer. His guards were very polite but very firm.

“Why are you keeping me here?” he demanded of them one morning, for about the five hundredth time.

“Orders,” replied the one who answered to Fred.

Yeager had heard that about five hundred times, too. “You can’t keep me forever,” he said, though he had no evidence that that was true. “What will you do with me?”

“Whatever we get told to do,” answered the one called John. “So far, nobody’s told us to do anything except keep you on ice.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you ought to count your blessings about that, Lieutenant Colonel.”

By which he no doubt meant they could have buried Yeager in the yard behind the house without anyone’s being the wiser. That was probably-no, that was certainly-true. “But I haven’t done anything,” Sam said, knowing full well he was lying. “And you haven’t even tried to find out whether I’ve done anything,” which was the God’s truth.

Fred looked at John. John looked at the one named Charlie, who hardly ever said anything. He didn’t say anything now, either-he only shrugged. John, who seemed to be the boss, answered, “We haven’t had any orders to interrogate you, either. Maybe they don’t want us knowing whatever you know. I don’t ask questions. I just do what I’m told.”

“But I don’t know anything,” Sam protested, another great, thumping lie.

Fred chuckled. “Maybe they don’t want us catching ignorance, then.” Of the three there that day, and of the other three who spelled them in weekly shifts, he was the only one with even a vestigial sense of humor. He pointed at Sam’s empty cup. “You want some more coffee there?”

“Sure,” Yeager answered, and the-agent? — poured the cup full again. After a couple of sips, Sam tried a question he hadn’t asked before: “By whose orders are you keeping me here? I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, after all.”

He didn’t really expect to get an answer. Charlie just sat there looking sour. Fred shrugged, as if to say he was pretending he hadn’t heard the question. But John said, “Whose orders? I’ll tell you. Why the hell not? You’re here on the orders of the president of the United States, Mister Officer in the U.S. Army.”

“The president?” Sam yelped. “What the dickens does President Warren care about me? I haven’t done anything.”

“He must think you did,” John said. “And if the president thinks you did something, buddy, you did it.”

That, unfortunately, was likely to be correct. And Sam knew only too well what Earl Warren was liable to think he’d done. He’d done it, too, even if these goons didn’t know, or want to know, that. He had to keep up a bold front, though. If he didn’t, he was ruined. And so he said, “Tell the president that I want to talk to him about it, man to man. Tell him it’s important that I do. Not just for me. For the country.” He remembered the papers he’d given Straha and the things he’d told Barbara and Jonathan. It was important, all right.

“Crap,” Charlie said-from him, an oration.

John said the same thing in a different way: “President Warren’s a busy man. Why should he want to talk to one not particularly important lieutenant colonel?”

“Why should he want to make one not particularly important lieutenant colonel disappear?” Sam returned.

“That’s not for us to worry about,” John answered. “We got told to put you on ice and keep you on ice, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Yeager didn’t say anything. He just sat there and smiled his most unpleasant smile.

Charlie didn’t get it. Yeager hadn’t expected anything else. John didn’t get it, either. That disappointed Yeager. After a few seconds’ silence, Fred said, “Uh, John, I think he’s saying the big boss might want to see him for the same reason he had him put on ice, whatever the hell that is.”

“Bingo,” Sam said happily.

John didn’t sound or look happy. “Like I care what he’s saying.” He sent Sam an unpleasant look of his own. “Other thing he’s been saying all along is that he doesn’t know why he got nabbed. If he’s lying about that, who knows what else he’s been lying about?”

What that translated to was, Who knows what we’re liable to have to try to squeeze out of him? Back in his baseball days, Sam had known a fair number of small-time, small-town hoodlums, men who thought of themselves as tough guys. It had been a good many years, but the breed didn’t seem to have changed much, even if these fellows got their money from a much more important boss.

At this point, Sam had two choices of his own. He could say something like, Anything happens to me, you’ll be sorry. Or he could just sit tight. He decided to sit tight. These guys struck him as the sort who would take a warning as a sign of weakness, not as a sign of strength.

He wondered if Straha had yet decided he was really missing, and whether the ex-shiplord had looked at the papers he’d given him. Sam had his doubts. If Straha had seen those papers, wouldn’t he have got them to the Lizards in Cairo just as fast as he could? Yeager’s bet was that he would have. And if he had, the fur would have started flying by now. Sam was sure of that.

Maybe his captors had been expecting him to speak up and warn them. When he sat tight, they didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Were they unused to people who could bargain from a position of strength? Or were they just too dumb-and too far down on the totem pole-to realize he had some strength in this bargaining match?

Fred was the one who looked to have a clue. He gathered up the other two by eye and said, “I think we need to talk about this.”

They couldn’t go off into another room and leave Sam unattended. If they did, he was liable to be out the door like a shot. He didn’t know where the next closest house was-he’d come here at night, and had no idea how big a farm this was-but he might well make life difficult for these guys. Of course, they might shoot him if they caught up with him. It would be too bad if they did, too bad for him and, very possibly, too bad for the USA and the whole world.

He wondered if he could slide out of here while they talked among themselves. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind than John said, “Don’t even think about it, buddy.” Yeager wondered how he’d given himself away. Had his eyes slid longingly toward the door? Whatever the answer, he sat where he was.

After a couple of minutes, his guards broke apart. “Tell you what we’re going to do,” Fred said, his voice so full of sweet reason, Sam instantly grew suspicious. “We’re going to do just like you say, Lieutenant Colonel. We’ll pass your request along, and we’ll see what comes of it. If it gets turned down, it’s not our fault. Is that fair?” He beamed at Yeager.

“I don’t think kidnapping me in the first place was exactly fair,” Sam answered. “Besides, how do I know I can believe you? You can say you’ll pass it along and then just forget about it. How would I know you’re telling the truth?”

“What do you want us to do?” John asked. “Put it in writing?”

“That’d be nice,” Yeager said dryly.

Everybody laughed, as if they were good buddies sitting around shooting the breeze somewhere. Nobody was going to put anything in writing. If some people hadn’t put this, that, and the other thing in writing, Sam wouldn’t have been where he was now. In a lot of different ways, he wished he weren’t.

He decided to press just a little: “When you do pass the word along, you might want to let people know it’s already liable to be later than they think.”

“Crap,” Charlie said again.

“If you say so,” Sam answered. “But I think it’s important for the president to know everything that’s going on.”

“Now you listen up, Lieutenant Colonel,” John said. “You aren’t in a real good place to start telling people what to do. Nothing’s happened to your family-yet. You want to make real sure nothing does, you know what I mean?”

“Why, you son of a-” Sam surged to his feet.

He took half a step forward, but only half a step. All three of his watchdogs packed Army.45s. All three of them had the pistols out and pointed at his brisket in less time than he would have imagined possible. The difference between these guys and the small-town muscle he’d known in his younger days suddenly became obvious. The small-town punks had been minor leaguers, same as he’d been in those days. These fellows could have played in Yankee Stadium, and made the all-star team every year, too. Yeah, they were bastards, but they were awfully damn good at what they did.

Very slowly, Yeager sat down again. John nodded. “Smart boy,” he said. His.45 disappeared again. So did Fred’s. Charlie held on to his. He looked disappointed that Sam hadn’t given him the chance to use it. John went on, “You really don’t want to get your ass in an uproar, Lieutenant Colonel, honest to God you don’t. We said we’d pass things along, and we will.”

Sam studied him. “Saying things is easy. Really doing them-that’s something different. I’m telling you, President Warren needs to talk to me. He doesn’t know how much trouble he may end up in if he doesn’t.”