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completing your mission, including a last-ditch attempt at our former farm. You may assume, as least hypothesis, that the bombing of the Hilton had as its sole purpose killing you.”
    “Hmm. Boss, apparently you knew that it would be this rough. Couldn’t you have warned me?”
    “Would you have been more alert, more resolute, had I filled your mind with vague warnings of unknown dangers? Woman, you made no mistakes.”
    “The hell I didn’t! Uncle Jim met my capsule when he should not have known the time I would arrive; that should have set off every alarm in my head. The instant I laid eyes on him I should have dived back down the hole and taken any capsule anywhere.”
    “Whereupon it would have become extremely difficult for us to achieve rendezvous, which would have aborted your mission as thoroughly as losing what you carried. My child, if affairs had gone smoothly, Jim would have met you at my behest; you underestimate my intelligence net as well as the effort we put into trying to watch over you. But I did not send Jim to get you because at that moment I was running. Hobbling, to be precise. Hurrying. Trying to escape. I assume that Jim took the ETA message himself—from our man, or that of our antagonists, or possibly from both.”
    “Boss, if I had known it at the time, I would have fed Jim to his horses. I was fond of him. When the time comes, I want to cancel him myself. He’s mine.”
    “Friday, in our profession it is undesirable to hold grudges.”
    “I don’t hold many but Uncle Jim is special. And there is another case I want to handle myself. But I’ll argue with you later. Say, is it true that Uncle Jim used to be a papist priest?”
    Boss almost looked surprised. “Where did you hear that nonsense?”
    “Around and about. Gossip.”
    “‘Human, All Too Human.’ Gossip is a vice. Let me settle it. Prufit was a con man. I met him in prison, where he did something for me, important enough that I made a place for him in our organization. My mistake. My inexcusable mistake, as a con man never stops being a con man; he can’t. But I suffered from a will to believe, a defect of character that I thought I had rooted out. I was mistaken. Continue, please.”
    I told Boss how they had grabbed me. “Five of them, I think. Possibly only four.”
    “Six, I believe. Descriptions.”
    “None, Boss, I was too busy. Well, one. I had one sharp look at him just as I killed him. About a hundred and seventy-five tall, weight around seventy-five or -six. Age near thirty-five. Blondish, smooth-shaven. Slavic. But he was the only one my eye photographed. Because he held still. Involuntarily. As his neck snapped.”
    “Was the other one you killed blond or brunet?”
    “‘Belsen’? Brunet.”
    “No, at the farm. Never mind. You killed two and injured three before they piled enough bodies on you to hold you down by sheer weight. A credit to your instructor, let me add. In escaping, we had not been able to thin them down enough to keep them from taking you…but, in my opinion, you won the battle in which we recaptured you by your having earlier taken out so many of their effectives. Even though you were chained up and unconscious at the time, you won the final fracas. Go on, please.”
    “That about wraps it up, Boss. A gang rape next, followed by interrogation, direct, then under drugs, then under pain.”
    “I’m sorry about the rape, Friday. The usual bonuses. You will find them enhanced as I judge the circumstances to have been unusually offensive.”
    “Oh, not that bad. I’m hardly a twittering virgin. I can recall social occasions that were almost as unpleasant. Except one man. I don’t know his face but I can identify him. I want him! I want him as badly as I want Uncle Jim. Worse, maybe, as I want to punish him a bit before I let him die.”
    “I can only repeat what I said earlier. For us, personal grudges are a mistake. They reduce survival probability.”
    “I’ll risk it for this