“And if I refuse, I go to this rehabilitation. Is that right, sir?”

“I certainly consider you a fit candidate for rehabilitation. Your record—” He shuffled through the papers on his desk.

“I choose to volunteer for the project, sir.”

The judge snorted and pushed all the papers into a folder. He spoke to a third man who’d been waiting in the shadows. “Here then is your volunteer, Major.”

Ross bottled in his relief. He was over the first hump. And since his luck had held so far, he might be about to win all the way . . .

The man Judge Rawle called “Major” moved into the light. At first glance Ross, to his hidden annoyance, found himself uneasy. To face up to Eagle Beak was all part of the game. But somehow he sensed one did not play such games with this man.

“Thank you, your honor. We will be on our way at once, before the weather socks us in completely.”

Before he realized what was happening, Ross found himself walking meekly to the door. He considered trying to give the major the slip when they left the building, losing himself in a storm-darkened city, but they did not take the elevator downstairs. Instead, they climbed two or three flights up the emergency stairs. And to his humiliation Ross found himself panting and slowing, while the other man, who must have been a good dozen years his senior, showed no signs of discomfort.

They came out into the wind and snow on the roof, and the major flashed a torch toward a dark shadow waiting for them with rotating blades. A helicopter! For the first time Ross began to doubt the wisdom of his choice.

“Keep away from the tail rotors, Murdock!” The voice was impersonal enough, but that very impersonality got under one’s skin.

Bundled into the machine between the silent major and an equally quiet pilot in uniform, Ross was lifted over the city, whose ways he knew as well as he knew the lines on his own palm, into the unknown he was already beginning to regard dubiously. The lighted streets and buildings, their outlines softened by the soft wet snow, fell out of sight. Now they could mark the outer highways. Ross refused to ask any questions. He could take this silent treatment, he had taken a lot of tougher things in the past.