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They led him to the end of the hallway, opened the door to the last room on the left, and forced him into a chair. One of the men cuffed his hands to the back of the chair and then, from the footfalls on the floor, it sounded like several people left the room. But he was not alone.

“Don’t move,” he was told, and the voice was a woman’s.

She tugged at his blindfold and removed it. Patrick blinked a few times, and things came into focus. She was wearing a blue baseball cap that readLos Dodgers, which covered everything above her eyes, and a hospital mask that hid everything below, the combined effect of which was to keep the hostage from being able to identify her.

“Hold still and look straight at the wall,” she said.

With a handheld camera, she scanned his face up and down, left to right, right to left.

“Turn your head to the left,” she said, and she scanned his profile, first the right side and then, with another turn of his head, the left. She laid the camera aside, and her fingers danced across the keyboard.

Patrick couldn’t contain his fascination with the sophistication of this group of mountain bandits and their Hostage Hotel. He had expected an interrogation—name, employer, relatives—but he had no identification on him, and he could have told her his name was Mickey Mouse. His captors had a workaround for lying hostages.

“Are you using Façade?” he asked, meaning the face-recognition software.

She ignored him, hitenter,and waited. Patrick couldn’t see the LCD screen from where he was sitting, but his captor and her computer software had converted his face into the technological equivalent of a Google search on steroids. She typed in a few key words to narrow the results, and in short order the internet delivered the kind of personal information that the FARC kidnappers of old could only beat out of their hostages.

“You work for Buck Technologies in Virginia?” she asked, though it wasn’t really a question.

“No, that’s actually Lucas Hedges. My movie-star good looks must have thrown off your software.”

“Bad jokes can get a person killed here, Mr. Patrick Battle.”

He took her point, but his disavowal of any connection to Buck was anything but a joke. It was his employer who’d sent him on this adventure in the Andes in the first place, and it still wasn’t clear to him who was giving orders to Javier, the knife-wielding, cliff-hanging psychopath.

She switched off the LCD screen. Her work was apparently finished, which made Patrick’s heart race. Her job, after all, was to decide whether he was worth more alive or dead.

“What’s the verdict?” asked Patrick.

“I’m sure a company like Buck Technologies will paymuchodinerofor your return.”

“So there’s room for me here?”

“Sí.There’s room.”

He was tempted to request a pool view, but he’d already been warned once. “What now?”

She went to the door, opened it, and called down the hallway for the bellboy or whoever it was who’d delivered Patrick to her. Patrick kept an eye on the doorway as she crossed the room, collected his blindfold, and refolded it afresh. She was doing a better job than the punks who’d blindfolded him outside, and he held little hope that she would leave any openings. Patrick cut one last glance toward the doorway, and he did a double take.

“Don’t move,” she said, annoyed.

His reflex-like reaction had made her drop the blindfold. As she refolded it, he peered more deeply into the dimly lit hallway. His eyes had not deceived him.

It was Olga.

Patrick’s eyes widened and, before he could show any further reaction, Olga raised her index finger to her lips, shushing him, as if to tell him that she wasn’t really one of them and that he was going to get them both killed if he didn’t play it cool.

The cloth slipped over his eyes and all went dark, not a slit of light above or below the blindfold made perfect.

Chapter 27

Wednesday was Kate’s Groundhog Day, a repeat of Tuesday morning. At 8:00 a.m. she was at Lover’s Lane, the pathway to Dumbarton Oaks Park, just as Noah had predicted.

“I see you read every word of Justice Roberts’ opinion,” said Noah.

At the sound of his voice she turned and said, “The operative wording being ‘naïveté.’”

“Walk with me,” he said.

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