There was a perimeter of police barriers set up outside the building; no one was allowed any closer than the opposite side of the street. Police and SWAT teams were everywhere, but they seemed to be very busy doing nothing. Of course, there wasn't a whole lot they could do at the moment. They'd sent in the press as ordered, complete with an undercover cop disguised as a cameraman. As Ralph arrived on the scene, the police were sitting back and waiting for matters to unfold.

Ralph struggled through the crowd of onlookers toward a city cop who stood by the barrier making sure nobody unauthorized got through… and in his case, unauthorized meant just about everyone.

"Officer," Ralph called.

He got a response. "Stand back, please."

"My wife is in there. Can you tell me what's going on?" He had come too close to the perimeter and the cop waved him back. "Look, you don't understand. My wife…"

"There's a lot of people in there, pal."

He moved on before Ralph could argue any further. If he hadn't been so worried, he would have been furious. "I thought you were supposed to protect and serve," he called after the cop. "Usually I don't mind doing it myself, but…" His mind raced, trying to come up with something else he could do. Anything. Nothing came. Ralph looked around helplessly. "The bag was in the car…"

Suddenly there it was. His 'anything else'. "Bill's car." Ralph pounded his right fist into his left palm while turning to fight his way back out of the milling crowd. With any luck, the suit would be right where he'd left it.

After a few desperate minutes of searching, Ralph found the Dodge Diplomat parked on a side street. He shielded his eyes from the glare and peered into the back seat. No bag. "I knew it sounded too easy," he sighed.

He circled the car, carefully examining the windows. They were all rolled up all the way, of course. Bill was paranoid. Ralph knew the man would be unlikely to leave his keys in the ignition, even when only planning to be gone for a few minutes, and Ralph figured that was as long as he'd planned on being gone. Just check in at the office before taking Pam home. Why he couldn't have worked in the opposite order was… well, it was something Ralph forced out of his mind. There was no point wishing for what might have been.

Ralph got down on his hands and knees and checked under the bumpers for an extra key. Desperation made him temporarily insane. "Look at me," he berated himself. "I've got to be out of my mind."

He got to his feet, brushed himself off, and in anger and frustration yanked hard on the handle of the driver's side door. He almost knocked himself flat when the door flew open. Unlocked!

"I don't believe it." Ralph dove into the back seat, hoping against hope that the bag would be there. He pulled out from under the seat a misfolded map. "Great." A menu from a Chinese take-out restaurant in Woodland Hills. "Typical." An extra pair of socks. "Come on."

He spotted the communicator peeking out from underneath the floor mat, and snapped it up eagerly. Crouched low on the floor of the sedan, Ralph switched it on and called into it. "Bill! Bill, come in!"

00o00

Conditions in the FBI office hadn't improved… or, if they had, they had improved in Rahim's favor. At the moment Bill was having handcuffs snapped onto his wrists and, to add insult to injury, they were his own. His suit jacket had been draped over the back of his chair and he and Pam stood side by side nearby. Since the discovery of the suit, Bill had become noticeably more subdued. Pam found herself wondering if this meant he would play by the rules since help wasn't just a holler away this time. She found herself distracted from this train of thought when she realized that, except for a pregnant typist, she was the only woman in the room, a fact which Rahim seemed to have also noticed.

Pam glanced away when she realized the terrorist leader was trying to catch her gaze. "He's giving me the creeps," she murmured to Bill, folding her arms across her chest.

"That ain't all he's givin' me," Bill replied as he watched Aram methodically yank phone cords out of the walls, leaving only one phone in service, the one Rahim had used earlier. Bill pulled sharply on the cuffs, succeeding only in discovering that they were secure.

Rahim stopped trying to get Pam's attention when Aram motioned to him from across the room. The two men then went into the latest of a series of huddles that the rest of their party weren't privy to. Pam watched, but couldn't hear a word they said. "We're really in it this time," she sighed.

"Uh huh."

"You don't sound too worried about it."

"Worryin' about it won't get us out of here." There it was again, that incisive Maxwell logic. He was right, but somehow still managed to sound wrong.

"It's not quite so much fun when we're on our own, is it?" Pam asked with a touch of sarcasm.

"Just stay frosty," Bill told her. "I'm working on it."

That was just too much. "Bill, what can you possibly be planning to do about all this?"

A few feet away, emanating from Bill's coat pocket, the answer came to both of them. "Bill! Bill, come in!" the muffled, staticky voice requested.

Pam reacted a little too quickly; moving toward the chair which held Bill's jacket. Aram caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye and raised his gun threateningly. Bill stepped toward Pam, hoping to prevent what he was afraid was about to happen, but Aram didn't fire and Pam stopped on a dime when she realized her danger. She lowered herself slowly into Bill's chair.

"Do you mind?" she asked Aram. "I just… wanted to sit down."

He allowed her to stay there. As soon as he was occupied with Rahim once more, Pam slipped the communicator from Bill's coat pocket and passed it to him. Bill then stepped away, out of earshot of the rest of the group. Once he felt as alone as he was going to get, he raised the communicator and spoke into it. "Ralph!"

Ralph had never been so happy to hear a voice before in his life. "Bill! What's going on in there?"

"What's going on?" Bill glanced around. "We're up to our eyebrows in heavy artillery, that's what's going on."

Same old Bill. "I'm in the back seat of your car. Where's the suit?"

Bill looked remorsefully in the direction of his desk. "Well… it's up here."

"Oh, terrific." Ralph shook his head in frustration. "That's a big help."

"Yeah, tell me about it."

"Is Pam all right?"

"She's fine," Bill affirmed. "We're just sitting around up here playin' a coupla hands." He yanked again on the cuffs. "I got a pair of fives, nothing up my sleeve. Outta aces."

"I don't know what to do."

"There's not much you can do, kid; not with the jammies here. I guess maybe we gotta let the local blue suits handle this one. What are they doing out there anyway?"

"Not much of anything, if you ask me," Ralph replied. "Setting up a lot of Do Not Cross signs. You guys gonna be all right up there?"

"I guess we'll have to be, Ralph. I can't…" Bill broke off when he spotted Rahim approaching, gun drawn. Time to sign off. He palmed the communicator so it couldn't be seen. Thank God for microchips.

Rahim spoke very pleasantly, not a good sign at all as far as Bill could tell. "Please," he said, indicating the rest of the captives. "Shortly we will make our selection."

Bill had neglected to press the off switch, which meant he was broadcasting everything he and Rahim said to the worried man hunched in the back seat of the sedan several blocks away. "What are you yammerin' about now?"

Rahim continued in the same slow, careful voice… a voice one might use to persuade an animal into a trap. "If we do not receive positive news within the next half hour, we will execute a hostage. We will continue to do so every fifteen minutes until our demands have been met."

"Or you run outta hostages," Bill couldn't resist.

Rahim motioned again for him to rejoin the others, and this time Bill obeyed.

Ralph started to say something into the communicator, then realized that it would further endanger Bill. He kept silent, but he could almost hear his own palms start to sweat. Half an hour.

Bill was led back to stand by Carlisle and pushed down into a chair. Carlisle waited until Rahim walked away, then leaned over to Bill. "What was that about?"

"About fifteen minutes…" Bill replied absently, his mind fixed on deciding what his next move would be. He hadn't come across one he liked yet.

As usual he was making very little sense to Carlisle. "What?"

Bill just shook his head. No sense going into that now. It wasn't good news and there was nothing he could do about it anyway. Carlisle, however, had ideas of his own.

"The passage of time wears down any adversary," he whispered. "Then options develop."

That sounded vaguely familiar to Bill; like maybe it was from the late show last Monday night. "Huh?"

"Haven't you read the manual?" his superior demanded.

"Sir, in this case, the passage of time'll just wear down the hostages. They're talking about picking one off for every fifteen minutes their Christmas wish list don't get filled." Bill motioned to Rahim and Aram standing nearby with looks of mutual distrust on their faces. "Those goons are starting to grate on each other," he observed. "If we get real lucky, maybe they'll kill each other and forget about us." The handcuffs were starting to cut into his wrists. Bill realized he'd been pulling on them without even thinking about it. "If I could only get outta these charm bracelets."

00o00

Any port in a storm, and any plan was better than no plan. Ralph marched up to the officious city cop he'd been perturbing before and pulled out his press ID card. "Sir, excuse me. I'm with the press."

The cop was less than impressed. "So?"

Ralph flashed the ID. He hoped it was good enough to pass. The cop inspected it, then looked at Ralph as if he'd lost his mind. "The Whitney Weekly Write-Off?"

Smiling weakly, Ralph thought fast. "An… uh… up-and-coming local…"

The officer handed him back the piece of oaktag with his signature and photo on it. Giving the card a quick glance as he tucked it back into his wallet, Ralph thought he'd done a pretty good job of it. He had a stack of them sitting in his desk drawer at school, waiting to be distributed to his students. Of course, he realized, none of them were likely to try and fool a policeman with the cards. Liquor store clerks, yeah, but not the police.

"You've got to be kidding," said the cop. "We got no press in there now."

"Well, then perhaps you wouldn't mind if I got some comments from you." Ralph hadn't been watching Kimberly Welch all morning without having learned a thing or two.

"Get lost, okay?"

He started to walk away. Ralph, with nothing to lose, followed him. "Sir?"

"Look, I got a job to do," complained the cop.

Ralph started to feel desperation setting in. He began to talk in a flood of words. "Unless, well, you probably don't have all that much to do with the real action, the really important stuff. Busy with crowd control and whatnot. I'm afraid that won't make for very interesting copy, even for high school kids. Could you possibly direct me to someone who can tell me what's happening?"

The most sensitive and vulnerable part of any human being: the ego, and Ralph had scored a bulls-eye with his comment. "What do I look like to you?" asked the cop indignantly. "I know what's going on!"

"Of course you do," Ralph nodded, fishing in his pockets for a notebook, a pencil, anything that would serve as a prop to keep his act rolling. "I'm really sorry. I'm a little new at this. Would you mind terribly if I…" Abruptly, Ralph broke off, pointing away from the building into the crowd. "Mr. Mayor! Could I have a word with you, sir?"

The cop craned his neck to catch sight of the mayor exactly as Ralph wanted him to. In that moment Ralph ducked under the barrier and ran like blazes for some cover nearer to the building.

It took the officer a moment to realize he'd been had, and by that time Ralph was nowhere in sight. "Hey!" he called in no particular direction. "Hey, wait a minute!"