Vance twisted around and tried to see his watch. He couldn't make out the hands, but they both seemed to be pointing in the general direction of down. Whatever that meant exactly, the time had to be getting on toward dawn. The six hours that Cally had talked about, the six hours left before the liftoff: how much of that time was left? It had to be half gone.
What now? Maybe his cock-and-bull story had impressed the French hood enough to get him out of the room for a while, but it wasn't going to cut any ice with anybody who knew anything about lasers. Sooner or later, he was going to come back. Not something to let the mind dwell on.
One thing was sure: he felt like he had been run over by a truck. The blood from the beating was slowly starting to coagulate, crusting on his face. It had begun to itch, and something where his liver used to be was emitting stabbing bursts of pain. It would come, then subside, then come again. He tried to focus his eyes on the room, the piles of empty crates, wondering if maybe a sharp object was protruding somewhere, maybe something he could use to cut away at the cord that held his hands.
Nothing, and it was a stupid idea anyway, left over from too many B movies. But now his mind was beginning to attempt to function with a little more rationality, and along with that came the glimmerings of an idea. The bomb was aboard one of the vehicles and a countdown was under way, now being handled by Bill's supercomputer. There was no obvious way to stop it. Maybe, however, there was a not-so-obvious way. A last-minute reprieve. Assuming he ever got the chance.
He groaned and leaned back, wondering . . .
What happened next came so fast he couldn't really comprehend it at the time. Only later could he roughly reconstruct the dizzying confluence of events. But that was as it should have been. The door was suddenly slammed wide, and two smoke grenades plummeted into the room, followed by a flash grenade. Next, through the smoke and confusion three men dressed in black pullovers plunged through the opening and dropped to their knees, MP5s at the ready.
Jesus! He gasped for breath, blinded by the flash grenade but still trying to see through the billowing CS that was engulfing everything. In what seemed like less than a second, one of the men appeared by his side, and he saw a knife blade flash. A hand was slapped over his mouth as another rough set of hands yanked him from the chair. His legs were numb from the bindings, but they came alive as his weight went back onto them. Terra firma had never felt better.
The men's faces were all covered in balaclavas, but one of them gave two sharp clicks and, on that signal, they began to drag him out the door.
He knew better than to say a word. The whole operation had been carried out with clockwork precision and in perfect silence—except for the destruction of the door. Had there been any terrorists in the room, they would have been dead, scarcely knowing what had happened.