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when he phoned you.”
    Ortega nodded somberly.
    “I found my wife in that hotel. Dead.” Confronting his memories made Balenger’s hands and feet numb. His rapid breathing caused him to feel lightheaded. “I also found Amanda there.”
    Ortega’s gaze intensified.
    “The physical resemblance isn’t coincidental.” Balenger rushed on, unable to control the speed of his words. “We know who kidnapped my wife. The same man who kidnapped Amanda a year ago. He was fixated on young women with blond hair, blue eyes, and similar features. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he did this. But I saw Amanda beat him to death with a two-by-four. After it broke, she used it as a stake and rammed it into the bastard’s heart. I keep having nightmares about him. But he couldn’t have done this.” Balenger felt desperate as he turned toward Cochran, needing reassurance.
    “Right. That’s all he is–something in nightmares,” Cochran said. “I saw the corpse on the beach. I saw it in the morgue. I saw it in the autopsy. Later, I spoke to witnesses who saw it cremated.”
    Balenger’s anguished voice reverberated through the cellar. “So what other son of a bitch would want to make this happen a second time?”

LEVEL TWO
    “WELCOME TO SCAVENGER”

    1
    “But before the ceremony occurred, someone stole the capsule from an unattended van,” a voice droned.
    Amanda felt as if she floated upward from a deep pool.
    “The second most-wanted time capsule is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
    Amanda drifted to the surface.
    “In 1939, MIT engineers sealed various objects in a container and deposited it under a huge cyclotron they were building. The cyclotron was eventually deactivated, but the time capsule was forgotten for more than fifty years.”
    Her eyes opened.
    “It might as well have stayed forgotten. Short of tearing the building apart, no one knows ...”
    Amanda discovered that she lay on a bed.
    “. . . how to remove the capsule from under its eighteen-ton shield.”
    She felt groggy and nauseous. Her head throbbed. But its rhythm didn’t match the sudden, frantic pounding of her heart.
    “The third is the M*A*S*H Capsule.”
    Amanda jerked upright. Where’s Frank? she thought. Stifling a moan, she scanned the room. Beamed ceiling, stone fireplace, log walls, wooden floor. Sunlight streamed through a window, hurting her eyes. In the distance, she saw jagged mountains capped with snow. She feared she was going insane.
    “In 1983, cast members of the popular television program M*A*S*H put costumes, props, and other items related to the series into a capsule and buried it on the Twentieth Century Fox film-production lot.”
    The voice belonged to a man and came from everywhere around her.
    “But the studio changed so much in the intervening years that no one can identify the capsule’s location. Possibly it lies under a hotel constructed on property the studio once owned.”
    Amanda rolled from the bed. She realized that the voice came from audio speakers hidden in the ceiling and walls.
    “The fourth is George Washington’s Cornerstone. In a Masonic ceremony in 1793, George Washington supervised the placement of a time capsule into the cornerstone of the original Capitol Building.”
    Amanda looked down at her clothes. She wore the same jeans, white blouse, and gray blazer that she remembered putting on. Straining to focus her jumbled thoughts, she sensed that she’d been unconscious for quite a while. But her bladder didn’t ache with the need to relieve it, which meant that the drug she was given, like a date-rape drug, allowed her to obey commands. Someone must have carried her to the bathroom, taken her pants off, and coaxed her to urinate.
    “The Capitol has grown so much since then that the first cornerstone and its unknown contents have never been recovered.”
    Her arms and legs trembled. Her stomach felt heavy. She was as overwhelmed as she’d felt a year earlier when she’d