Briefly, Skip King had contemplated suicide. For what was life without the reassuring steel rungs of the corporate ladder under one's climbing feet?
Then he got angry. Angry at the board of directors who would humiliate him, Skip King, who dared go into the heart of deepest Africa to make their bottom line the greatest in fast-food history.
It was in that cauldron of righteous anger that Skip King decided to get even. And as long as he was in the getting-even business, he thought, no sense in not getting rich in the process.
It had been the easiest thing in the world to set up. Everyone was in place. Like chess pieces. It was just a matter of getting them to jump in a new direction, and not just diagonally. Skip King had never been good at chess. There were too many rules, too many invisible barriers to victory.
As he drove through the Delaware night, wiping his own vomit off his lean wolfish face, Skip King knew there would be no more rules for him.
Not after tonight.
Nancy Derringer awoke with a start.
Her eyes were slow to focus. Her head hurt. There was a funny smell in her nose and a bitter taste in her mouth. The taste was from the dry sponge someone had jammed between her teeth before gagging her with a length of cloth.
Then she remembered the Burger Berets' faces turning to raw meat and the men in the ski masks pulling the bodies from the hauler and taking their place.
They took the bloodied seats and one got the hauler moving while the other pushed Nancy's face to the floorboards and pressed a cold, wet cloth to her face, holding it there until she had passed out. Ether. That was the smell clogging her nostrils.
Nancy looked around. It was dark. The air smelled stale. She was lying in dead, musty hay. There was a nimbus of white light ahead of her. She crawled to it. Boards creaked under her weight.
Gradually, a vista came into view.
She was in an old barn. In the hayloft. The white light made the barnboards look like weathered old tombstones.
In the center of the barn, parked in the hot glow of hanging trouble lights, was the hauler. And stretched out on its bed was the Apatosaur, looking like some prized mutant pumpkin awaiting judging. It looked dead. If it was breathing, Nancy couldn't see it.
There were men moving around the hauler. They wore camouflage utilities, but their faces were bare. Black men. She watched their faces carefully. Five minutes of study confirmed what Nancy had suspected. None matched the faces of the African members of the Congress for a Green Africa.
One of them was speaking now.
"This is one big mother, ain't it?"
"I wouldn't get too close. It might wake up and snap off your fool head."
"It eats heads?"
"Relax," a third voice put in. "It's a vegetarian. A few groats and he's happy."
The accents were American. All of them. They were Americans. But what did it mean?
Nancy crept back from the edge of the loft so she wouldn't be seen. She tried breathing steadily to clear the ether stink from her nostrils. Maybe it would clear her head, too. None of this made any sense and she desperately wanted it to make sense.
Most of all she wanted Old Jack to survive the night.
The honking of a car horn brought her crawling back to the edge. She watched the black men go to a side door, weapons at the ready. They looked nervous.
"Who is it?" one hissed.
A man was looking through a knothole in the barnboard.
"It's King!"
"King?" Nancy murmured.
"Let him in," a man said.
And Skip King, looking nervous and flustered, stepped in through the unlocked door.
"Everything okay?" he asked.
"It just be growling in its sleep, is all."
King went the Apatosaur. He walked around the hauler. "I think it's starting to come around."
"Are we in trouble?"
"You got it cabled down tight?"
"Yeah. But how tight does it need to be? That's the question."
King said, "That bossy blonde knows the answer to that question. I'd better ask her. Where is she?"
One of the hijackers used his thumb to indicate the hayloft. "We stuck her up in the loft."
Nancy wriggled back out of sight before King's gaze could lift in her direction. He was talking again.
"Get ready to make the call. We may have to put the arm on the board sooner than I thought."
"This had better work, King," another voice growled. "If this gets out, we're top of the list of perps."
"Don't sweat it. I know how business works. The board will pay the ransom just to hush things up. The last thing they want is for it to get out that they were planning to sell ground Brontosaurus to the American public."
In the musty gloom, Nancy Derringer blinked her eyes rapidly. She heard the words, but they rang in her ears like some discordant gonging. What did he mean?
Then King was climbing a creaky ladder and his fox face was silhouetted against the back glow of lights.
There was no point in pretending, so Nancy sat up and glared at his approaching figure.
"I see you're awake," King said smugly.
Nancy made an angry noise in her throat. It came out of her nose, buzzing.
"Simmer down," King spat. "Let me get this thing off you." He untied the gag, and reached cold fingers into her mouth for the gag. Nancy spat out the bitter sponge taste then followed it with sharp words.
"You bastard! What are you up to?"