It was Thomas, all right. As for the bodyguards— One didn't seem to be. He was a thin, tallish guy with some kind of instrument on the table in front of him. The other was a woman, young and good-looking in a hard, lipless way, but a bodyguard sure enough. One of her hands rested on a machine pistol, an Uzi. Anyone who'd carry one of those where an ordinary pistol would do, is at least a little crazy.
Thomas looked me up and down, then nodded. I noticed Miller rubbing his right fist. I hoped he'd broken it; sprained it at least.
"He yelled," my captor told Thomas. "Right through the gag."
Thomas grunted. "So that's what that was." He looked at the quiet one, Fischer. "Mr. Fischer," he said, "go outside and see if anyone's poking around who seems curious about the noise. If there is, tell them someone was, uh, preparing to braze a door handle and burned himself with the torch. Be casual but convincing. At this hour, I doubt anyone would investigate, but let's not take anything for granted."
Fischer left. Thomas was looking at me again. "So. Mr. Seppanen," he said. "You see, I know your real name. I am going to have your gag taken off so you can answer some questions. If you become abusive or refuse to cooperate, I'll have to have you disciplined and perhaps injected. If you cooperate, we'll finish our business here and I'll have you returned to your car."
Yeah, I thought. Dead. The victim of a mugging, no doubt. A clock glowed pale on a walclass="underline" It was minutes after two in the morning.
"Miller, be prepared to, um, punch Mr. Seppanen in the abdomen if he becomes unruly. Hard enough to subdue him. Collins, take his gag off."
Collins took the gag off, and I stood there working my jaw from side to side. Thomas looked at me thoughtfully. The bodyguard hadn't moved, as far as I could tell. I'd a lot rather have Miller mad at me.
"We'll have to have his hands in front of him. Collins, do you have the key to his cuffs?"
"Yes, sir." Collins took the ring of keys from his belt clip again and held one up.
"Mr. Seppanen," Thomas told me, "get down on your knees."
I did. Collins took the cuff off one wrist, had me put my hands in front of me, then chained them together again. With the cuffs over my shirt sleeves—that was Thomas' order. Then Thomas had me stand up and sit on a chair across the table from the thin man, whose instrument panel lit his face a ghostly blue.
Thomas looked at him. "Will there be any difficulty getting reads with his hands manacled?"
"There shouldn't be."
"Fine. Mr. Seppanen, please pick up the electrodes and rest your hands in your lap." The electrodes were a pair of metal cylinders. I picked them up, wrapping my hands around them.
"Very good. Now please don't move any more than you must, and don't touch the electrodes together. The instrument is a psychogalvanometer. I presume you know what that is?"
"It's used in polygraphs; it measures electrical resistance across the skin."
"Very good." He turned to his technician. "Selkirk, talk the dial down into range."
"It's there now, Mr. Thomas."
"Oh? Well then, we'll begin." Thomas turned back to me. "You are a man of exceptional self-possession, Mr. Seppanen. My congratulations."
He wanted to keep me calm, to make the galvanometer readings as meaningful as possible. "Thanks," I said.
His eyebrows lifted. "Well then, let's begin."
It was a short interrogation. First he asked me some ranging and calibration questions: My name, where I'd grown up, if I'd ever committed a sex crime, any other crime, things like that. And what, before my present assignment, I'd thought of the Church of the New Gnosis.
His first meaningful question was what, specifically, I was investigating. I told him: the disappearance of Ray Christman. That we suspected he was dead or kidnaped. Thomas didn't look surprised or angry, but the question seemed to introvert him. He didn't ask who our contract was with.
Then he asked who my suspects were, and I told him: the Noeties, the COGS, factions within the church, and the various and numerous people with grudges against it. I didn't mention the Merlins; I no longer suspected them.
The guy with the psychogalvanometer never said a word; presumably he would have if he'd had any meaningful instrument readings.
But to me, Thomas' response was especially important: He looked thoughtfully past me and said, "How could any Noeties or COGS have gotten to Ray? It would have been virtually impossible. Surely you considered that?"
"They could have hired professionals. Some underworld outfits are pretty resourceful."
"If they only wanted to assassinate him, yes. A sniper, someone with a military mortar, that kind of thing. But I can't accept that that sort of people—any sort of people—could have secretly abducted him."
"Which brings us," I said, "to the major reason for suspecting someone in the church."
Thomas shook his head, a strong, decisive rejection. That's when I told him we'd been bogged down badly on the case, and if something hadn't developed soon, we might have dropped it, or mothballed it. But then someone had bombed Tuuli's old apartment. That must have been done by the church, I told him, and told him why. I thought he'd deny it, but he only frowned. I also told him we had a contract with the LAPD to compile evidence for an indictment on the bombing, which was true as far as it went.
His face turned wooden. "Thank you, Mr. Seppanen," he said. "You have been very helpful. I'm going to have you returned to your car. We have nothing to fear from your investigation, because Mr. Christman's retirement was entirely his own decision. And I can absolutely assure you we had nothing to do with any bombing. Also, I assume you are astute enough to realize that there is no way you can prove that this little discussion ever took place. As you said, in the Church we are a very close group. 'Impenetrable,' I believe the media have called us."
As I put down the electrodes, Thomas looked past me. "Mr. Collins, take Mr. Seppanen to the security entrance and hold him there till a vehicle comes for him. I want you to see personally that he arrives back where he came from."
Fischer had come back, and Collins told him and Miller to take my arms. Then Collins, with a gun in his hand, led the three of us into and through a big kitchen to a service elevator. He pushed a button, the door opened, and a few seconds later we were on our way down to the basement.
I didn't like the look of the room at the bottom. The floor was smooth-finished concrete, sloping to a central drain, and there was a large meat-cutting table near the middle. The ceiling was low, and there was an overhead track with rolling meat hooks that led to what appeared to be a reefer door.
Collins turned. By the light of the fluorescents, he looked as pale as anyone I'd ever seen, as if he might faint or puke, but his face was set. He pointed his gun at me. "Miller," he said, "I know you'll be disappointed if you don't get to do the honors."
Miller let go my arm and slugged me in the kidneys. Except he didn't, quite. He'd been just high, banging me in the floating ribs from behind. It hurt all right, but not as much as I pretended. Then he stepped around in front of me, police baton in one hand. He could just as well have clubbed me from behind, but he wanted me to see what was coming, which was stupid—right in character.
Miller was just slapping the baton against his left palm when I stomped down as hard as I could on Fischer's instep. He let go my arm with a yell. At the same instant I launched a flying sidekick that took Miller in the breastbone. In the gym I'd have been criticized for it; it leaves you vulnerable to a quick counter. But Miller wasn't quick, and it slammed him backward into Collins, who swore as his gun went off, possibly into Miller. The greater danger had been that, with my hands manacled in front of me, I might have lost my balance after the kick, but I didn't. I was on Collins before he could recover, kicked the side of his knee, and about the time he hit the concrete, kicked him hard in the gut, then the ribs. He rolled into a ball, a natural reaction, and stepping around, I kicked him once more, in the neck. He stiffened with spasm, then went slack.