"They're willing to sacrifice you to find out what I'm capable of."

"Keep talking, asshole." Merritt stood in formal range stance-aiming at the ceiling sensors. He started shooting them out, one by one, waiting a second after each shot.

"Did they even tell you-"

The fourth shot cut him off. A reflective, white plastic panel shattered as the bullet hit it. The voice was gone. Merritt shot out another identical sensor on the far wall, then flipped the safety on the pistol, holstering it. "Blah, blah, blah."

Merritt noticed his reflection in a mirror over the mantel as he walked farther into the room. His whole face was crimson red and covered in blisters, with the headset melted onto his cheek. His Pro-Tec helmet had protected his scalp, but the whites of his eyes were shockingly blood red-and blood trailed down from his nose over his burnt chin. The Nomex hood and suit had kept him alive, but he might soon be entering cataleptic shock. The dizziness came at him in waves. He felt the rage building in him again. His men had had much worse.

Merritt heard a slight tick sound and a sizzle of static electricity. He spun around to see the plasma-screen television come to life. A 3-D graphic of the mansion as seen from the air resolved on-screen. It looked like a briefing schematic.

"You're here for the server room. It's down the hall, to the left, and to the left again. I'm sure they gave you a map, but in case it burned up, here are directions…" The 3-D graphic leaped into action, with the camera performing a virtual fly-through, coming down on the mansion from above, straight through the doors Merritt had entered by. The camera flew down the adjoining hall, banked left, then sailed through the billiard room, left, and up to the cellar door-which flung open as the camera went down into blackness. It was like a first-person video game.

Merritt grabbed an end table nearby, clearing off the lamp standing on it.

Sobol's voice continued, oblivious. "Did you want me to replay that? Yes or no."

The face of the plasma-screen television shattered under the impact of the heavy end table, and the entire thing keeled over backward on its stand-sending up a puff of electrical smoke as it died hitting the floor.

"No more mind games." Merritt strode past it and grabbed a piece of the sectional sofa, pulling it up with great effort from the sunken area onto the main floor level. He shouldered it in front of him as he advanced toward the doorway leading farther into the house. He held the shotgun in his free hand.

The dimensions of Sobol's house went beyond anything Merritt would consider a home. To him it felt more like a university building. He guessed these were twelve-to sixteen-foot ceilings, and the doors and adjoining hallways were all two or three times wider and taller than necessary. The hall adjoining the entertainment area was easily ten feet wide, with terra cotta tile flooring in two-foot squares. The hall could pass as a serviceable elevator lobby for the Biltmore. It ran along the center of the house and was braced here and there with gargantuan furniture-angry-looking armoires and iron-studded cabinets done in something akin to Spanish Inquisition style. They looked large enough to serve as a redoubt in the event of Indian attack.

As he stood at the entrance to the wide hallway, Merritt leaned right and left to glimpse a little of what lay ahead. He couldn't see into any of the doorways. He pushed the sofa section onward, down the left side of the hall. The sofa's metal-studded feet scraped the tile like nails on a chalkboard.

Suddenly the floor dropped away beneath the sofa section, and Merritt caught himself just before pitching forward into the yawning blackness below the trapdoor. The sofa splashed into a water-filled pit, and then the floor section snapped up, almost hitting Merritt in the face. He heard a latch click,locking the floor in place. It was obviously meant to prevent escape from the pit once a victim fell in.

Merritt pounded the trapdoor with the butt of his shotgun. The floor seemed firm. He didn't want to take any chances, so he backed up to get a running start. He sprinted and leaped over the farthest seam of the trapdoor, landing in a tumble he purposely shortened by rolling hard into an armoire the size and height of a squatter's shack. In a moment he was up and ready with the shotgun.

He felt the humming sound of the acoustic weapons powering up. He glanced right and left up near the ceiling and found the nearest acoustic pod. A blast from the shotgun took it clean off the wall. He found its twin behind him and blasted that as well. He collected his breath in the resulting silence.

Suddenly a voice in front of him said, "Slap a pair of tits and a ponytail on you, and we've got ourselves a game."

Merritt just gave Sobol's voice the finger. Let him talk. Merritt had to conserve ammunition.

It was time to orient himself. He pulled a laminated floor plan card of Sobol's house from his chest pocket. It was warped from the heat of the fire but still legible. Merritt found his location and realized he wasn't far from the cellar door-and the pit that swallowed the bomb disposal robot. Merritt looked up and noticed the silence.

"What's the matter, Sobol? Run out of things to say?"

The voice spoke from the same place-right in front of him. "I didn't catch that."

"I said, cat got your tongue?"

"I didn't catch that."

It couldn't really understand him. This was all an elaborate technological trick. A logic tree with weaponry.

"Dead retard." Merritt pocketed the card and put a shoulder behind the heavy armoire, trying to push it ahead of him. It insisted on being stationary. He took a step back to look at it. He'd seen railroad trestles built with less wood. It looked a century old and its shelves were lined with Talavera plates and wooden carvings of Dia de los Muertos figurines. Merritt smiled humorlessly at the little skeletons cavorting and going about their daily business-apparently unaffected by their demise. Real cute.

He grabbed a bronze candlestick off the shelf and looked ahead of him. A twenty-foot stretch of barren hall lay before him. After that, he'd be at the doorway opening onto the billiards room-which led to the cellar door.

He slung the shotgun and got down onto his belly, spreading his weight over the tile floor. He turned back to rap the hollow floor behind him-to get a sense for its sound. Then he rapped the floor under him. Solid. Very different sound. Merritt faced forward again, and he started crawling, cautiously rapping on the floor with the heavy candlestick as he went.

Merritt was halfway along the open stretch of hall when Sobol's voice spoke again a foot or so in front of Merritt's face. "I hate to interrupt, but now I have to kill you."

Merritt heard something from deep inside the house. It sounded like a sump pump-only many times larger than the one in Merritt's house. The sound of water coursing through pipes came to his ears, and suddenly water began to silently spread out across the floor from an unseen vent beneath the baseboards. Then Merritt glanced left, right, and back behind him. The water was coming at him from ahead and behind-spreading out from the walls across the tile floor about a half-inch deep. Merritt got up into a crouch, not sure what to do next. He'd never reach the armoire before the water overtook him.

And what could the water do, anyway? Sobol could never fill this room-there were six or seven doorways leading into it. Merritt started scanning the walls for hidden danger. And he quickly found it.

Ahead of him, one of the electrical outlets in the wall suddenly extended out and down onto the floor. It was mounted on the end of a curved bar. A zap and pop were audible as the socket hit the surface of the water-which was now electrified.