All at once, Princippi heard a familiar creaking sound. It spurred him to action.

He tried hastily to climb up from the engine well. Too late. The back of his head slammed solidly against his rapidly closing hood.

Princippi saw stars. He saw bright light. As he lay, stunned, on the driveway, he saw figures in pink-and-white robes swoop from the rear of the van and gather him.

Then he blacked out.

IT SEEMED LIKE only a moment later when he came to.

He was lying on his back in the rear of the blue van. The vehicle was bouncing along a street somewhere. There were no windows.

Blandly smiling faces sat on benches on either side of him. They stared down at the former governor.

He took a good, long look at the shaved heads, the flowing robes, the dim expressions. The tambourines.

Tambourines?

"Oh, my God," Michael Princippi wheezed. The air spun crazily around him. "I've been kidnapped by Loonies."

And as the world swirled a midnight dance of fear, darkness took hold of him once more.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was leaving Germany for what he hoped would be the last time in a long, long time.

Remo sat behind the weirdly angled steering wheel of a rented truck. He fidgeted as he drove.

From all outward appearances, Remo was an ordinary man. Lean and dark haired, Remo looked somewhere in his early thirties. Deep-set dark eyes lurked in a skull-like face that many had said was cruel, but nothing greatly beyond the norm. The only things visibly different about him were his freakishly thick wrists. These shifted now as he twisted in the uncomfortable truck seat.

The seat seemed to have been designed specifically to make one's lower back ache.