"Hopefully, we're going right this minute. There's a river. But if that doesn't work out, there's something I can do to buy us a month's time. Alex Goddard's got a laboratory here, just down the hall, in back of his office. It's the evil center of this place. So if I can get in there and dump all his petri dishes, his in-vitro culture mediums . . . Baby, it's all so dis­gusting. But I'm going to take care of it."

I was starting to have real trouble just stringing words together into sentences. My hallucinations were still grow­ing, the loud whispers of light, but I did manage to tell him how I thought we could get Sarah and elude the Army, if we did it before sunup, though my plan probably came out pretty jumbled. Yet I felt that if we did it together, we could take care of each other. . . .

Then, with my remaining strength, I launched into action.

"Let me check the hall. I just want to shut down his lab. Call it . . . call it insurance. Five minutes, and then we'll be out of here."

It also would be a kind of justice, to even the score for what he'd done to Sarah and to me.

I leaned Steve back against the wall, then walked slowly across the tile floor to the door and tested it. Surprise, sur­prise, it was locked. I again tried the knob, an old one, then again, but it wouldn't budge, just wiggled slightly. He'd locked us in.

Now what?

Then I remembered the time Steve and I were in a similar situation. When we got locked in my room at the Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, he'd just taken his Swiss Army knife and unscrewed the knob, then clicked it open. He'd made it look like a piece of cake, but he had a way of doing that.

He was barely conscious, so this time I'd have to do it myself. I glanced around at his bag.

"Is your Swiss still in there?"