"You got something?"

"About six miles up the road, David. The guard rail was taken out, and it was recent."

"You see the Suburban?"

"No. I see something, but the trees are in the way. I'm heading down the slope to investigate."

"Six miles? I'll be there in five."

"Ten minutes, David. Lots of curves, lots of cliffs. I don't need you rolling your car as well."

"Right. Ten."

Charlie's jaw dropped. He had to try twice before he could get anything coherent to emerge. "What are you doing here?"

"We decided to go for ice cream," Darren explained.

"Darren couldn't remember how to get to the park," Nancy added with a certain amount of scorn for her compatriot.

That wasn't important. What was important was that they had, somehow and against all conceivable luck, acquired a mode of transportation. "Where did you get this car?"

"It's not a car," Darren told him. "It's an SUV."

"Right. Where did you get it?"

"Down the road." Nancy pointed.

Big question time. Charlie took a deep breath. "Does it run?"

Darren grinned. "Yup."

That answer was in contradiction to several statistical probabilities, all of which Charlie could recite at the drop of the proverbial hat, but the important caveat to all those analyses was one. They were all several million or so to one.

One chance was all that Charlie needed.

"Give me the key," he ordered. "Get in. We have to get my brother, and—"

Snick.

The sound of a loaded rifle being cocked.

Yet another probability, several million to one, coming to pass.

A heavily accented voice came from behind the SUV.

"Next person move, I shoot."

So tired.

Waves of agony, all digging into his side.

Good thing he couldn't see. Didn't want to know how much blood he was losing, moving around like this.

The ground felt good, lying there. Cold. No movement. No effort.

Too bad he had to move on. Stupid brother, running off. Serve him right if Don got there too late to save him.

Handgun in his holster, banging against the hole in his waist. Hurt like hell every time it connected.

Hope I don't have to use it.

Not fair.

That was the first thing to cross Charlie's shell-shocked brain: not fair!

Kidnapped. Cross-country trek. Finding Don covered in his own blood. Running from a gunman with murder on his mind. Coming across Nancy and Darren with a working vehicle, hope springing into existence.

And now this.

Not fair.

So far, Charlie had only seen this man from a distance, and he would have been extraordinarily happy to keep it that way. Medium height, blond hair, medium build, but with a well-toned body and muscles that said that keeping himself in shape was important to this man's line of business. Considering that this man's line of business included shooting FBI agents, Charlie tended to agree.

It was the eyes: icy blue and cold. The rest of the man was unremarkable, well able to blend in with a crowd, but the eyes were what gave it away. This man was a killer. Charlie knew that as well he knew the first hundred digits of pi. He carried the rifle in his hands as easily as Charlie held a laser pointer for a lecture, as comfortable with his tool as Charlie was with his laptop.

This man was a killer.

A Slavic accent of some sort; Charlie couldn't identify which country it came from. At the moment, that was irrelevant.

The man regarded the three of them. "Not nice, stealing car."

"It's not a car, it's a SUV," Darren corrected him.

Charlie winced.

"Where I come from, we shoot people who steal car."

Darren shut up.

The man looked them over thoroughly, noting the lack of weapons. He glanced up and down the road. He came to a decision. "Move. Over there." He indicated a grove of trees, not easily seen from the road. "Go."

"Why?" Nancy asked, before Charlie could shush her. "Mr. Math Professor, why does he want us to go there?"

The man took it upon himself to explain. "More confusion," he said, a vicious smirk trying to emerge. "Take off clothes."

"But it's cold."

"Or I shoot you first, then take off clothes," the man told Nancy. Then he offered the explanation. "Make look like orgy. Confuse cops little while."

"What's an orgy?"

The man frowned for a moment, then his face cleared. "Ah. One of Gideon's morons."

"I'm not a moron—"

"It's okay, Darren." Any more, and the man would simply shoot Darren to shut him up. Charlie had no doubts on that matter. "Just do as he says."

"But, Mr. Math Professor," Nancy objected, "it's not nice to take off your clothes, except in your bedroom. And then you put on pajamas. That's what you're supposed to do."

"Take off blouse," the man insisted, lifting the rifle. "Now."

"Take off your clothes, Nancy," Charlie instructed her, adding under his breath, "and be slow about it."

"I don't see any blood, but I don't see Don." Megan straightened up from examining the ground. "The Suburban is trashed."

"Don walked away from it," David insisted. "Look. Here's his footprints. Evenly spaced, straight line."

"He was running," Megan thought. "The distance between the prints is longer than a single stride. Someone was chasing him."

"Krikov," was David's opinion, "and fast and close. Don didn't have time to pull the HTR from the back, which means that he doesn't have his rifle. All he's got is his handgun. What does Krikov have?"

"Anything he damn well pleases, since he's a gun runner," Megan said grimly. She automatically felt for her handgun in her own holster. "Let's take a moment, David, and pull our own HTR's out. I have a feeling we may need some heavy firepower."

"You," and the man indicated Charlie, "rape her."

"What?" Charlie couldn't believe what he was hearing. Was the man mangling English?

He wasn't. He pointed the rifle at Charlie. "Make look like orgy. Or I shoot right now," he added.

Their clothes were on the ground, three naked and shivering people menaced by a man with a rifle. It was summer but it was high in the mountains, and the summer's sunlight wasn't enough to compensate for the cold air.

The gunman had chosen his site well, some few hundred yards away from the road, far enough that it couldn't be seen and there was a boulder creating a natural wall between where they were and the road. It was a grove of birches, the white bark spiraling up the tall trunks to branch out into a leafy canopy, with smaller bushes of indeterminate parentage surrounding and enclosing the area. Nancy had carefully folded her clothing, even her brassiere, positioning the clothing on top of one of the bushes as if the bush were her bureau back in her home in L.A. Both men, less fastidious, had draped theirs over the boulder on the opposite side of the grove, as much to say that one side belonged to the men and the other to the ladies.

Humiliating. That was the only word for it: humiliating. Charlie kept his eyes averted from the distaff member of the group, saw that Darren—his face beet red—was doing the same. Darren's hands were trying to hide his evidence.

Not so the gunman. The man was eying Nancy thoughtfully, teeth nipping hungrily at his lower lip, contemplating what he had in front of him, in his power. Charlie could see the momentary desire at war with common sense in the man's face, and saw common sense win out. The man wanted this to look like an orgy to throw off the locals who would discover this scene, and leaving a heavy helping of his own DNA behind in a dead body would lead those locals straight to whoever the man was; clearly not something that this man wanted to do. He needed to delay the pursuit, not add another crime to his own list.

"Do her," the man demanded of Charlie, rightly figuring that the mathematician alone would understand what the gunman was trying to say. "Give her good time. Or I shoot all three. Die now."

Right. Complete the scene, make it look like two men dragging off a woman into the woods. It wouldn't stand up to scrutiny for long, but it would be long enough for this man to make a clean getaway. Any local cop who found it would take his time getting a Forensics unit here, thinking that it was just some low-lifes from L.A. having a good time, and it would take another day before the information meandered its way to the FBI.

Not only would there be three dead bodies here, but there would be a fourth, somewhere almost a mile away. Without help, Charlie knew, his brother Don was a dead man. Charlie only hoped that Don hadn't already bled his life away into the ground.

Charlie couldn't help it; he looked at Nancy. Not at anything below the neck—he couldn't bring himself to do that—but at her face. At her eyes; scared, pleading hazel eyes. Eyes that had once looked into Reuben Magenbrot's eyes and found love. Eyes that deserved to once again find love, somewhere in a better place. She shivered, and not merely from the cold.

Charlie knew what the man wanted him to do. He wanted Charlie to take Nancy here, in front of Darren, on the cold and unyielding forest floor. He wanted Charlie to make her last moments on Earth the worst of her life. The gunman wanted to make her last moments of life occur in the arms of a man she didn't know, force her to give herself in the most intimate fashion in front of her killer. Looking into those terrified hazel eyes, Charlie realized that Nancy was a true innocent. That she and Ben had never been intimate, that the two of them had listened to Meredith and the others in the household when they were told not to indulge themselves until they were married. Charlie wondered if she even understood what the gunman meant.

This would be her first—and her last.

Charlie straightened himself up. He turned away from Nancy to face the man with the gun. He could buy the three of them a few more moments of life, or he could spare Nancy the most degrading experience of her life—and of his. Either way, they were going to die.

"No. I won't."

The man shrugged. "Too bad for you." He lifted the rifle to his shoulder.