24 Veto Power by John Whitman Page A

in the room. And third, his hands and feet were tied.
    He pulled his knees up to his chest and rolled to a sitting position. The room shook back and forth before his eyes and his stomach twisted, and that gave him more information, none of it good. Nausea. Possible concussion. Worry about it later. There was another change in the room, aside from the fallen bookcase. Another prisoner. The old woman was now completely bound, as were the husband and wife. But the young man had been taken away, and Nazila Rafizadeh had joined them.
    Jack shook his head. “I told you to wait.”
    She shrugged.
    The man whispered, “They said they’d kill us if we talk.”
    “I bet they did,” Jack replied.
    The man and the woman were frightened. The older woman, probably the mother of the husband or the wife, looked the toughest. The man and woman were plump and well-fed, the man’s salt-and-pepper hair so smoothed by hair spray that even dragged from sleep he looked well-coiffed. The grandmother was thin and sharp as a hawk, her nose bent like a beak and her small black eyes glaring at him as though this was all his fault.
    “Are you okay?” Jack asked Nazila.
    She nodded. “I’m sorry. I saw you draw your gun and I thought you were going in to arrest him . . .” She trailed off without finishing.
    The wife, her eyes glazed with tears, whispered, “Are they ...are they going to kill us?”
    Jack said quietly, “I don’t know. Just stay calm and don’t make any trouble and you’ll be okay. They don’t want you. You’ve seen them, but they’re not professionals. They might let you go.”
    He didn’t tell them that they’d been professional enough to station a layoff man who’d snuck up behind him, or that that man had been professional enough to catch him by surprise. He also didn’t tell them that on the sodium cyanide job, the one where he’d betrayed them, they’d planned on killing the plant manager. Jack mentally kicked himself. He’d been in too much of a hurry. He should have cleared the entire house before making contact with the first two. Then he shook those thoughts from his head. There was plenty of time for a postmortem later, as long as it wasn’t his postmortem. Right now he had to focus on getting out.
    He listened. They were in the next room, talking in angry voices. He heard a fourth voice pleading. That was Ramin.
    “Where are your friends? Tell us where they are!”
    “I don’t know what you mean. Please, no!” The sound of a hard slap interrupted his words.
    “Fucking raghead,” said one of the militia men. “We know you know them. We know they’re here. Tell us!”
    Ramin sobbed.
    “My hand’s starting to hurt,” said one of the Greater Nation men. “Let’s try something else.”
    “Get him over to the wall,” said another. “Cut the cord off that lamp.”
    Jack examined the bindings at his ankles. Rip hobble cords. He could feel the same tight plastic strips cutting into his wrists behind his back. Rip hobble cords were strong and unbreakable, a heavy-duty version of the plastic ties people used to seal garbage bags. Police officers used them during mass arrests when they’d run out of handcuffs. If you pulled them tight enough, they were nearly impossible to wriggle out of. There was no release mechanism—they had to be cut off.
    He searched the room and made a mental inventory of its contents: four other prisoners, floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books, one fallen bookcase, small couch, small desk with a reading lamp.
    “How long has that lamp been on?” he asked.
    “What?” the husband asked.
    “That lamp. How long?”
    The man said, “I don’t know. I was in here doing work when they came in. It’s been on for perhaps two hours.”
    That might be long enough, Jack thought. He lay down and straightened himself out, then rolled himself over to the desk. When he reached it, he curled back up, sat up, and slowly got himself to his feet. With his ankles fettered, it was