And then I realized he was speaking to Josella, not me.
We rode for hours in that plane, Sam jabbering across the aisle to Josella while I sat beside him, staring out the window and fuming. Greg sat on the window seat beside Josella, but as I could see from their reflections in the glass, Sam and Josella had eyes only for each other. I went beyond fuming; I would have slugged Sam if we weren’t in so much trouble already.
Two of the Daughters sat at the rear of the cabin, guns in their laps. Their leader and the other one sat up front. Who was in the cockpit I never knew.
Beneath my anger at Sam I was pretty scared. These Daughters of the Mother looked like religious fanatics to me, the kind who were willing to die for their cause—and therefore perfectly willing to kill anybody else for their cause. They were out to get Sam, and they had grabbed me and the other two as well. We were hostages. Bargaining chips for the inevitable moment when the Peacekeepers came at them with everything in their arsenal.
And Sam was spending his time talking to Josella, trying to ease her fears, trying to impress her with his own courage.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “It’s me they want. They’ll let you and the others loose as soon as they turn me over to their leader, whoever that might be.”
And the others. I seethed. As far as Sam was concerned, I was just one of the others. Josella was the one he was interested in, tall and willowy and elegant. I was just a sawed-off runt with as much glamour as a fire hydrant, and pretty much the same figure.
Dawn was just starting to tinge the sky when we started to descend. I had been watching out the window during the flight, trying to puzzle out where we were heading from the position of the moon and the few stars I could see. Eastward, I was pretty certain. East and south. That was the best I could determine.
As the plane slowed down for its vertical landing, I mentally checked out the possibilities. East and south for six hours or so could put us somewhere in the Mediterranean. Italy, Spain—or North Africa.
“Where in the world have they taken us?” I half-whispered, more to myself than anyone who might answer me.
“Transylvania,” Sam answered.
I gave him a killer stare. “This is no time to be funny.”
“Look at my wristwatch,” he whispered back at me, totally serious.
Its face showed latitude and longitude coordinates in digital readout. Sam pressed one of the studs on the watch’s outer rim, and the readout spelled RUMANIA. Another touch of the stud: TRANSYLVANIA. Another: NEAREST MAJOR CITY, VARSAG.
I showed him my wristwatch. “It’s got an ultrahigh-frequency transponder in it. The Peacekeepers have been tracking us ever since we left The Hague. I hope.”
Sam nodded glumly. “These Mother-lovers aren’t afraid of the Peacekeepers as long as they’ve got you for a hostage.”
“There’s going to be a showdown, sooner or later,” I said.
Just then the plane touched down with a thump.
“Welcome,” said Sam, in a Hollywood vampire accent, “to Castle Dracula.”
It wasn’t a castle that they took us to. It was a mine shaft.
Lord knows how long it had been abandoned. The elevator didn’t work; we had to climb down, single file, on rickety wooden steps that creaked and shook with every step we took. And it was dark down there. And cold, the kind of damp cold that chills you to the bone. I kept glancing up at the dwindling little slice of blue sky as the Daughters coaxed us with their gun muzzles down those groaning, shuddering stairs all the way to the very bottom.
There were some dim lanterns hanging from the rough stone ceiling of the bottom gallery. We walked along in gloomy silence until we came to a steel door. It took two of the Daughters to swing it open.
The bright light made my eyes water. They pushed us into a chamber that had been turned into a rough-hewn office of sorts. At least it was warm. A big, beefy redheaded woman sat scowling at us from behind a steel desk.
“You can take their wristwatches from then now,” she said to the blonde. Then she smiled at the surprise on my face. “Yes, Justice Meyers, we know all about your transponders and positioning indicators. We’re not fools.”
Sam stepped forward. “All right, you’re a bunch of geniuses. You’ve captured the most-wanted man on Earth—me. Now you can let the others go and the Peacekeepers won’t bother you.”
“You think not?” the redhead asked, suspiciously.
“Of course not!” Sam smiled his sincerest smile. “Their job is to protect Senator Meyers, who’s a judge on the World Court. They don’t give a damn about me.”
“You’re the blasphemer, Sam Gunn?”
“I’ve done a lot of things in a long and eventful life,” Sam said, still smiling, “but blasphemy isn’t one of them.”
“You don’t think that what you’ve done is blasphemy?” The redhead’s voice rose ominously. I realized that her temper was just as fiery as her hair.
“I’ve always treated God with respect,” Sam insisted. “I respect Her so much that I expect Her to honor her debts. Unfortunately, the man in the Vatican who claims to be Her special representative doesn’t think She has any sense of responsibility.”
“The man in the Vatican.” The redhead’s lips curled into a sneer. “What does he know of the Mother?”
“That’s what I say,” Sam agreed fervently. “That’s why I’m suing him, really.”
For a moment the redhead almost bought it. She looked at Sam with eyes that were almost admiring. Then her expression hardened. “You are a conniving little sneak, aren’t you?”
Sam frowned at her. “Little. Is everybody in the world worried about my height?”
“And fast with your tongue, too,” the redhead went on. “I think that’s the first part of you that we’ll cut off.” Then she smiled viciously. “But only the first part.”
Sam swallowed hard, but recovered his wits almost immediately. “Okay, okay. But let the others go. They can’t hurt you and if you let them go the Peacekeepers will get out of your hair.”
“Liar.”
“Me?” Sam protested.
The redhead got to her feet. She was huge, built like a football player. She started to say something but the words froze in her throat. Her gaze shifted from Sam to the door behind us.
I turned my head and saw half a dozen men in khaki uniforms, laser rifles in their hands. The Peacekeepers, I thought, then instantly realized that their uniforms weren’t right.
“Thank you so much for bringing this devil’s spawn to our hands,” said one of the men. He was tall and slim, with a trim mustache and an olive complexion.
“Who in hell are you?” the redhead demanded.
“We are the Warriors of the Faith, and we have come to take this son of a dog to his just reward.”
“Gee, I’m so popular,” Sam said.
“He’s ours!” bellowed the redhead. “We snatched him from The Hague.”
“And we are taking him from you. It is our holy mission to attend to this pig.”
“You can’t!” the redhead insisted. “I won’t let you!”
“We’ll send you a videotape of his execution,” said the leader of the Warriors.
“No, no! We’ve got to kill him!”
“I am so sorry to disagree, but it is our sacred duty to execute him. If we must kill you also, that is the will of God.”
They argued for half an hour or more, but the Warriors outnumbered and outgunned the Daughters. So we were marched out of that underground office, down the mine gallery and through another set of steel doors that looked an awful lot like the hatches of airlocks.
The underground corridors we walked through didn’t look like parts of a mine anymore. The walls were smoothly finished and lined with modern doors that had numbers on them, like a hotel’s rooms.