To get to the ground floor of this hotel, he would be required to descend twenty-two flights. Then he would have to make his way through treacherous rubble-strewn public areas-while three homicidal psychopaths pursued us.

Throw in a few dumb, manipulative, scantily clad women, add a few even dumber but hunky guys, include the requirement to eat a bowl of live worms, and we pretty much had the premise for a new reality-TV show.

I quickly searched several rooms along the south end of the main corridor, looking for a place where Danny could hide in the unlikely event that I proved able to separate him from the explosives.

If I didn't have to worry about keeping him on the move with gunmen chasing us down, and if he was beyond easy discovery, I would be better able to deal with our enemies. With Danny in hiding, I might even feel that circumstances had changed sufficiently to make it safe to bring in Chief Porter.

Unfortunately, one hotel room is pretty much like another, and they don't offer any challenges to a determined searcher. Datura and her thugs would breeze through them as quickly as I did and would be aware of the same possible hiding places as those that caught my attention.

Briefly I considered artfully rearranging a jumble of quake-tossed furniture and decorative items to create a hollow in which Danny could be tucked out of sight. An unstable mound of chairs and beds and nightstands was likely to shift noisily when I tried to reconfigure it, drawing unwanted attention before I could complete the job.

In the fourth room, I glanced out a window and saw that the land had grown darker, shadowed by a warship fleet of iron clouds that had expanded their dominion to three-quarters of the sky. The landscape flickered as if with muzzle flashes, and a cannonade, still distant but closer than before, shook the day.

Remembering the eerie quality of the thunder that earlier had echoed down through the elevator shaft, I turned from the window.

The corridor was still deserted. I hurried north, passing Room 1242, and returned to the alcove.

Nine of the ten sets of stainless-steel lift doors were shut. For safety, to facilitate rescue, they would have been designed in such a way that they could be forced open manually in the event of a loss of power from both the public-utility company and the backup generators.

They had been closed for five years. Smoke had probably corroded and gummed their mechanisms.

I started on the right-hand bank. The first pair of doors were ajar. I wedged my fingers in the one-inch gap and tried to pull the doors apart. The one on the right moved a little; initially, the other resisted, but then slid aside with a raspy noise that wouldn't have traveled far.

Even in the dim gray light, I had to pry the doors apart only four inches to discern that no cab waited beyond. It was at another floor.

Sixteen stories, ten elevators: The mathematics allowed that none of them had come to a stop on the twelfth floor. All nine sets of doors might conceal empty shafts.

Perhaps, when power was lost, the elevators were programmed to descend on backup batteries to the lobby. If that was the case, my hope was that this safety mechanism had failed-just as others in the hotel had failed.

When I let go of the doors, they eased back into the position in which I had found them.

The second set were closed tighter than the first. The leading edges were bull-nosed, however, to facilitate prying in an emergency. Shuddering in their tracks, they opened with a creaking that made me nervous.

No cab.

These doors remained apart when I released them. To avoid leaving evidence of my search, I pressed them shut again, eliciting more shudders, more creaking.

I had left clear images of my hands in the grime that filmed the stainless steel. From a pocket I withdrew a Kleenex and brushed lightly to obscure the prints, feather them out of existence, without leaving a too-clean patch that might raise suspicion.

The third pair of doors would not budge.

Behind the fourth set, which opened quietly, I found a waiting cab. I pushed the doors fully apart, hesitated, then stepped into the lift.

The cab didn't plunge into the abyss, as I half expected that it might. It took my weight with a faint protest and did not settle whatsoever from the alcove threshold.

Although the doors slipped shut part of the way on their own, I had to press to complete the closure. More prints, more Kleenex.

I wiped my sooty hands on my jeans. More laundry.

Although I thought I knew what I must do next, it was such a bold move that I stood in the alcove for a minute or two, considering other options. There weren't any.

This was one of those moments when I wished that I had striven harder to overcome my deep-seated aversion to guns.

On the other hand, when you shoot at people who also have guns, they tend to shoot back. This invariably complicates matters.

If you don't shoot first and aim well, maybe it's better not to have firearms. In an ugly situation like this, people who have heavy weaponry tend to feel superior to people who don't; they feel smug, and when they're smug, they underestimate their opponents. An unarmed man, of necessity, will be quicker of wit-more aware, more feral and more ferocious-than the gunman who relies on his weapon to think for him. Therefore, being unarmed can be an advantage.

In retrospect, that line of reasoning is patently absurd. Even at the time, I knew it was stupid, but I pursued it anyway, because I needed to talk myself out of that alcove and into action.

Datura.

The leaf in the moonlit water, sharing its essence with the pool, sinking deep and carried on a lazy current that pulls, pulls, pulls…

I stepped out of the alcove, into the corridor. I turned left, proceeded north.

Some tough, violent phone-sex babe, crazy as a mad cow, gets it in her addled head that she's got to kidnap Danny so she can use him to force me to reveal my closely guarded secrets. But why does Dr. Jessup have to die, and in such a brutal fashion? Just because he was there?

This phone-sex babe, this nut case, has three guys-now two- who apparently are willing to commit any crime necessary to help her get what she wants. There's no bank to be robbed, no armored car to be held up, no illegal drugs to be sold. She's not after money; she's after true ghost stories, icy fingers up and down her spine, so there's no loot for the other members of her gang to share. Their reason for putting their lives and freedom on the line for her at first seems puzzling if not mysterious.

Of course even nonhomicidal guys often think with the little head instead of with the big head that has a brain in it. And the annals of crime are replete with cases in which dim-bulb men in the thrall of bad women did the most vicious and idiotic things solely for sex.

If Datura looked as sultry as she sounded on the phone, she would find it easy to manipulate certain men. Her kind of guy would have more testosterone than white blood cells in his veins, would lack a sense of right and wrong, would have a taste for excitement, would savor every cruelty he performed, and would have no capacity to think about tomorrow.

Putting together her entourage, she would not have encountered a shortage of candidates. The news seemed to be full of such cold-blooded men these days.

Dr. Wilbur Jessup had died not just because he was in the way, but also because killing him had been fun to these people, a release, a lark. Rebellion in its purest form.

In the elevator alcove, I had found it hard to believe that she could have put such a crew together. While walking a mere hundred feet of hotel corridor, I had come to find them inevitable.

Dealing with these kinds of people, I would need every advantage that my gift could provide.