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probably—” “As long as you’re not tagged personally, we’ll be okay.” Titus gave him the address.
    He left the Rover at the convenience store and rode with Gilbert Norlin through the winding, wooded roads of the hills while Norlin made the necessary maneuvers to make sure they weren’t being tailed. Titus surprised himself by not being able to speak. Norlin didn’t press him, and they rode in silence for a while. Titus’s tongue-tied confusion embarrassed him, but there literally wasn’t anything he could do about it. Finally he could control his voice, and he began to tell Norlin everything, chronologically, in as much detail as he could remember.
    By the time he had finished, they had arrived at the deserted building site of one of the many new homes under construction in the hills. They got out of Norlin’s car and walked to the house slab where the framing was just beginning. They sat on the slab, surrounded by the smells of lumber and concrete and freshly moved earth.
    Now it was Norlin who remained silent. Titus waited, his heart loping along as if it were trying to outrun what he was sure would be Norlin’s grim appraisal of his dilemma.
    Finally Norlin asked, “How difficult is it going to be to do what he wants, to move the money?”
    “Depends on how much he asks for first. I’ve got, I don’t know, a good chunk in markets I can dump immediately. I’ll take a loss, but I can do it. Beyond that I’ll have to sell pieces of the company. It’s just going to look bizarre to … hell, to everybody. I’ve built CaiText on cautious, conservative business practices, for God’s sake. I’ve got a reputation for that.
    “Just six months ago, after years of planning, I let all the division heads buy into the company. That’s worked great all these years with one other guy who’s been with me from the beginning. But on top of that, six months ago, we borrowed heavily for our expansion program—a program all the division heads planned and proposed to me. Everyone’s excited about it, and we think it’s going to have a huge payoff.
    “Now, can you imagine how this is going to look if I start shifting assets so I can start laying out millions of dollars on foreign investments? This isn’t going to work.”
    “But you don’t have any specific instructions yet, ”Norlin said. “You don’t know the immediate requirements.”
    “No.”
    Norlin wasn’t saying much, and that was making Titus nervous, filling him with the worst kind of dread.
    In the reflected glow of the city lights across the river, Titus could see enough of Norlin to remember him from four years ago. Of middle height, he had thinning hair, a face with no jawline. His shoulders were rounded, tending to a slight hunch.
    Norlin shook his head. “I don’t blame you for not going to the FBI. I wouldn’t have, either. But that’s not what they’d want me to say to you. The conventional wisdom is that the sooner they’re involved, the better.”
    Norlin sat with his arms locked straight, his hands palms down on the edge of the slab, looking at Titus.
    “But this doesn’t look too damned conventional to me, ”he said. “You know what the percentages are for catching kidnappers in the U.S.? Ninety-five percent. That’s mostly because things like this don’t usually happen here in the States. The people who get into it here are loners, emotional basket cases to start with. Crazies who think they’re going to magically solve the sad problems of their empty lives by stealing another living human being.”
    He paused.
    “But if something like this, if this was what kidnapping was like in the States, that ninety-five percent would be shattered. Why? Because this is business, and these people aren’t crazies. Not in the sense I’m talking about, anyway. That thing with the dogs, that was a promise, not a threat. You can expect these people to do exactly what they say they’re going to do.”
    “This is it, then? ”Titus was