Patricia: Thanks :D

Q the omnipotent night fury: Heh, fair enough ;-) And thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying it so much ;-)

halfcent: Yeah, looks like Decker's starting to get a little freaked out (though it's hard to imagine ;-)) As for what he saw/heard...well, maybe he'll confide in Face, maybe not XD

There was a car in the next room.

Yeah, I know. That sounds nuts. But I swear it's true. And not just any car either; this was a new-looking, blood red Mercedes-Benz with cream leather seats. The kind of car I'd buy if I could afford it. Or to be more accurate, if I could guarantee my oh-so-considerate commanding officer wouldn't get it riddled with bullet holes at any given time.

"Wow." I limped up to it, all fear lost in admiration, and noted that my ankle was getting better. In terms of pain, it was about level with my knee (like an idiot, I'd twisted the wrong damn ankle, ending up with injuries in both legs). There was no sign of a car key – that would have been just too easy – but on the other hand, there was no sign of any trap inside. Then again, it didn't have to be an obvious trap; after all, I'd never noticed any way for gas to be pumped inside that barbwire room. Maybe the exhaust was connected to feed directly into the car and choke anyone who sat in it.

Decker looked at the car, then at me. "Reckon you can hotwire it?"

I raised my eyebrows. My mechanical expertise when it comes to engines is unrivaled, and one-way. This means that I can take a car engine to pieces very easily, but have absolutely no clue how to put it back together again.

"Sure I can hotwire it, Decker. Just show me what to do."

He glanced at me. "You're a fugitive, Peck; you know damn well what to do."

"We were convicted of bank robbery, Decker, not grand theft auto!" I couldn't help stealing a look at Nadia as I said this, and noticed her face was completely neutral...which was odd, when I came to look back on it much later. There should have been something, even if it was only shock or I knew it.

Instead, Nadia just said, "How did it get in here, anyway? The doors are too small."

I looked at the exit door at the far end and agreed; there was no way you'd get a car through there, although the corridor was big enough...ah.

I skittered away from the car hood as though someone had just revved the engine. I suddenly had a nasty idea of how this room was going to try and kill us.

Nadia walked up, although I noticed she didn't seem too keen to step in front of it either. Maybe she was just picking up on my nerves.

"Could you bring it in piece by piece and put it together here?"

I shrugged. "I guess, but I building a car's not exactly something you can do in an afternoon. It'd probably be quicker to blow up one of the walls, drive the car through and park up, then rebuild the wall behind it."

Decker glanced around the bare room. "Maybe there's a key somewhere."

"Yeah. Right. Decker, even if there was a key, have you forgotten that whoever is behind this is trying to kill us? That means that even if we find this hypothetical car key, there's a very good chance that we'll try to start the engine with it and get blown sky high!" That probably went for hotwiring it as well, although I didn't know enough about engines to say so for sure.

I strolled around in front of the car – it couldn't run me over, not all the time the engine wasn't going – and, with a little difficulty, managed to open the hood and rummaged around inside.

"What are you doing?" Decker stared at me, arms folded. "I thought we agreed this thing was no good to drive anyway."

I glared at him. "And what if we're wrong, Decker? I don't want whoever locked us up here to come after us in this!"

I yanked out the distributor cap and all six spark plugs, throwing them to the ground. Five of them smashed. The sixth bounced defiantly and skittered across the floor to Nadia, who picked it up.

"Face? Are you sure you were supposed to do that?"

I glanced at her. "Well, can you think of any reason why I shouldn't have?"

I was being sarcastic but I don't think I did a very good job of it; Nadia took me seriously and answered, "Face, when three people in our situation are brought into a long tunnel with a car at one end, they run for their lives. A normal kidnap victim does not take a few minutes out to root around in the engine and pull out the distributor cap and all the spark plugs first!" She held the one in her hand out to me as evidence, and I took it automatically.

"Yeah, well, maybe not," I informed her before Decker – who had opened his mouth – had a chance to answer, "but a kidnap victim with any sense does."

I strolled down to the far end of the room, taking care to keep my eyes and ears peeled for any sign of a threat.

Nothing happened. There was no gas, no hidden guns, no nasty little trapdoors. I made it there safely, and it was only when I turned to call back to the others that I came face to face with Decker.

"While our little friend is still lingering back there—" jerking his head toward Nadia, who was moving up toward us at a far slower pace than I'd used— "suppose you tell me what the hell you were playing at back on that beam?"

I didn't have to ask what he meant, nor did I see any harm in admitting the truth. "I heard you – or someone who sounded exactly like you – yell in my ear." I rubbed the ear in question; it was still twinging a little. "Right in my ear," I couldn't resist adding.

Decker raised an eyebrow. "You did, huh? And you're sure it wasn't..." He cut his eyes toward Nadia.

"Not unless she's one hell of a ventriloquist. It came from right behind me, Decker, and anyway, how the hell could a fifteen year old girl manage to impersonate yoursof all voices? I know you're hung up on this whole Nadia's-The-Enemy, but you might at least try a little common sense with that paranoia!"

For a moment, Decker looked like he was struggling not to say something, then he nodded once, curtly.

"Yes. You're right."

I blinked. "I'm...sorry, what?"

"I said you're right."

There was a stunned, disbelieving silence between us. At least, Iwas stunned and disbelieving. Decker just looked impatient.

"I don't suppose you'd put that in writing, would you?" I said at last.

"You don't suppose correctly, Peck."

I stared at him, trying to make sense of it all. "But you heard that guy, right? The one who yelled my name?"

"No, Peck, I didn't hear anyone yell your name. In fact, I didn't hear anything except what we said ourselves! When you yelled like that, I thought someone had grabbed you from behind, someone who you naturally would have assumed was me, since I was the only person in a position to sneak up behind you."

I slumped against the wall, then looked up at him. "I did think it was you, but there's no way you could have got up behind me, yelled in my ear and got back to that platform so quickly without making some kind of noise. Maybe there was someone else there. Maybe that beam we crossed on had others branching off sideways, only we never noticed because it was too dark. Yeah. If the guy was wearing night vision goggles, he'd be able to sneak up and yell like that. Or he could have recorded your voice and played it back over a hidden loudspeaker or something."

Decker's expression was unreadable. "That's all very well as a theory, Peck, except for one thing: why are you the only one who heard it?"

I rolled my eyes. "Great. Wonderful. Now I'm nuts." Something occurred to me and I frowned suddenly. "Hold on...Decker, when you got to the end of that beam, you saw something. Something that scared the pants off you."

Decker froze, his expression as hard as stone, and about as readable. "I don't know what you mean, Peck."

"Decker, if you wanna keep it to yourself, that's fine. I'm not gonna pry, but the point is that I didn't see or hear anything. So if I'm nuts, what does that make you?"

Decker shook his head. "Even if I did see something, Peck – which I didn't—"

"Oh, of course not," I agreed, a little too sarcastically.

"—it was nothing more than an hallucination caused by this place."

I just shrugged. I had no doubt that whatever he'd seen had been caused by this place, but I was less sure that it was an hallucination. I couldn't help wondering who or what Decker had seen, though. I mean, nothing gets to that guy. He's like granite.

I'd reached out to open the door when Decker spoke again.

"Do you trust her?"

I glanced at him. "Huh?"

"Nadia." He kept his voice very low (which isn't hard for someone like him, believe me). "Do you trust her, Peck? Really trust her? Do you even know who she is?"

"Do you?" I countered and then, when he was silent, "Look, I'm not an idiot, Decker! If you know something about her that I don't and you think she's a part of all this, then tell me now! She's had plenty of chances to kill us, and so far she's answered every query you had about her. Okay, maybe the answers were a little flimsy, but they were plausible."

Decker shook his head. "I don't know anything about her, Peck, not for certain. I didn't see her when I went past the slicer, which means that at some point, she was dragged and strapped to it, just in time for you to come along and find her there. She hadn't moved far enough along for the slicer to do any damage, which meant she would have been put there very recently."

"Yeah, well, it was lucky for her that she was!"

"Oh yeah, very lucky. Someone straps her to the slicer just in time for you to come along and save her."

"Maybe it was another test, Decker! Maybe she's still a prisoner, only she's a part of the game too. I could have opened another door with that card, or I could have freed her. I chose to stay in the game."

Decker sighed. "Yes, Peck. Very noble, and I'm sure your damn Colonel Smith will be proud of you – if you live to see him again – but think. Do you really believe that everyone else who went through here wouldn't have saved her?"

"Yeah...well...maybe I was the first."

"You weren't. Those bags right back at the beginning proved that. Besides, I went ahead of you and I never saw or heard her; and that's another thing, Peck. If she was fully alert and conscious, not at all groggy, then she was probably that way when she was strapped onto the slicer in the first place, and yet you never heard her screaming or fighting. And from what you say, she wasn't screaming or crying; in fact, if your report is accurate, she was remarkably calm for a fifteen year old civilian who had been facing what would have been a very gruesome and terrifying end. Yet she wasn't in any kind of shock. You say she clung to you at one point, which I would expect, but was she crying? Even with relief?"

I thought back, then shrugged. "I don't remember."

He nodded. "Then how do you explain it?"

"I don't, Decker, because I'm not paranoid apart from believing the entire US Army and every police force in the country is out to get me, which doesn't even count as paranoia since it happens to be true! Look, I'll puzzle this out with you all you want once we get out of here – from South America or somewhere else you can't arrest me – but right here and right now, Nadia hasn't done anything to threaten us and until she does, I'm still gonna work on getting her safely out of here!"

Fuming, I turned away from him and pulled the door open, then froze.

"Something wrong, Peck?"

"Uh. I guess. Maybe." I stepped aside enough for Decker and Nadia to see the small opening in the wall, about three foot by two, that the full-size door had been concealing. There was no light inside that I could see; the lights from this room illuminated it just enough for me to make out that it was solid concrete inside.

For a long time the three of us just stared at it. Then I forced a grin that probably looked as good as I felt right at that moment.

"So...how are you guys at crawling?"

So...a short but in many ways important chapter ;-) More will be along next Monday at the same time; in the meantime, hope you liked this and if you read, please review!