Lying there, chained up and stripped to his shorts, Jimmy wondered what Krycek was planning to do to him next. He tried to keep his mind off of it by fantasizing what he would do to him when the guys rescued him. Being the captive of a spy was getting old real fast.

One aspect of the reality of captivity was beginning to be a real problem. His bladder was uncomfortably full. Somehow that never happened to heroes in the movies, but Krycek had been giving him water whenever he asked, plus a few bottles of sports energy drinks, and it had been a long time. He wondered if Krycek would uncuff him and let him use the bathroom, and whether he'd insist on following him in there. He always had trouble peeing when another guy was standing too close, and he was afraid to ask to be released and then have it seem like he was lying about needing to go. But now he'd waited as long as he could. Being pee-shy was not going to be a problem at this point.

"Krycek? I need to take a leak."

"No problem." Krycek got something from his luggage. Jimmy groaned when he saw it was one of those bottles they make for peeing in on long road trips. The guys all used them in the Mobile Command Post when they were on long stakeouts. Frohike and Langly disliked using them, and Byers absolutely hated them, but Jimmy had never minded. He'd even volunteered to empty the other guys' bottles as well as his own, but they didn't let him do that anymore, ever since that time he'd gotten the tops mixed up.

Using one himself was okay, but this was different. He looked away in resignation as Krycek pulled his shorts down and stuck his soft cock into the tube. He tried to relax and let nature take its course.

"Anyone call while I was in the shower?" Krycek asked cheerfully as he stepped out of the bathroom. Jimmy didn't bother to answer, knowing the phone was unplugged. Krycek set down the duffel bag with his clothes, which he had taken into the bathroom with him. He had put on some pants, but was still shirtless. After putting the sling around his neck and attaching his arm, he rummaged through Jimmy's personal belongings and pulled out a long-sleeve shirt and began shrugging it on.

"Hey, that's mine!"

"Don't worry," Krycek said, patting Jimmy's bare shoulder. "You won't be needing it. Not as long as I've got you. Maybe not ever. Depending on who I sell you to."

Jimmy's guts clenched in fear.

"Oh, don't worry, with any luck I'll be selling you back to your friends. Anyway, I'll be gone for a couple of hours." He went to the bags and came back with the urine bottle, and Jimmy groaned but did not try to resist as Krycek pulled his shorts down. It took him awhile this time, but Krycek was patient.

While Krycek was pouring the contents into the toilet, Jimmy called, "I still might need to -- you know..."

"You did that at the diner. That's why I put laxative in your juice. And then I gave you another drug to slow down your digestion, and I've been careful what I've been feeding you. You should be okay until tomorrow."

Krycek really planned ahead. Jimmy had to give him that.

His captor walked over to the heating and air conditioning unit and flipped open the control panel. "You know, someone once came this close to leaving me handcuffed in a car with the windows up while he left for a trip to the other side of the world?"

"Wow! What a jerk!"

"Maybe I should turn the heat up full blast while I'm gone."

"No, you're a better person than that, aren't you? You wouldn't do anything like that to me."

Krycek paused to think it over. "No. I won't take it out on you. You sure don't deserve that. I'll leave the air conditioning on. Is this a good temperature right now? Or do you want it up or down a little?"

"I'm good, thanks." As good as a man could be when he's powerless to go and open a window. Or to cover himself.

As if to mock Byers's gloom, it was perfect weather for a day at the beach, past the summer heat but still very warm. The touch of the sun on his body was seductive, luring him toward sleep, as gentle as warmth of a lover's body, and almost as unfamiliar.

He'd stayed up all night trying unsuccessfully to find a clue to where Krycek was keeping Jimmy. He had no business snoozing on a sunny beach when his friend was lying tied up somewhere. Still, lying here was the best thing he could do for Jimmy right now. And surely he wasn't going to drift off to sleep in broad daylight. Not when he was so worried.

He jerked awake at the sound of a voice in his ear. "Take off the sunglasses."

The man crouched beside him was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned, and a bathing suit Byers wouldn't be caught dead in. After a second, he recognized Alex Krycek. The shirt looked very familiar; Byers suspected it was one of Jimmy's. The man radiated a dark, cocky allure. His eyes looked almost green in the sunlight, Byers noticed as he stared up at him. "How did you..." Byers stammered.

Krycek smiled winningly at Byers's startled reaction. "Sneak up on you? Thanks, I was beginning to think I was losing my touch," he said. He reached down and removed Byers's sunglasses. "Didn't I tell you not to wear anything but swimming trunks?" he said with a sly grin, making a show of examining the frames for hidden electronics. There weren't any. They could have hidden an antenna under the towel Byers was lying on, but there was nowhere to hide the wires. That was presumably the whole point of picking a beach as the meeting location. At least Frohike and Langly were observing telescopically from the van. That, and the people all around, should keep Krycek from trying anything.

Tossing the glasses aside, Krycek fished around in a bag he'd brought with him and came out with a digital camera. He snapped a picture of Byers lying there. Byers closed his eyes in resignation. He'd never in his adult life allowed anyone to take a picture of him less than fully clothed, but he wasn't going to argue the point with Jimmy's fate at stake. He wondered if Krycek was doing this solely to humiliate him or if he had some even more twisted purpose.

He opened his eyes when he heard Krycek sit down in the sand next to him. He was now holding a small device with a color LCD screen. "This is what Frohike and Langly are looking at right now, in case you were wondering." He handed it to Byers, who sat up to look at the display. Shading it from the bright sun with his hand, he saw a moving image of four bikini-clad women playing beach volleyball. Krycek pointed toward the surf and to the left, and Byers saw a matching scene in real life. "Can you believe it?" Krycek asked. "They ought to be watching you."

"They're supposed to be." He'd been sure he could count on his friends to watch out for him. In all fairness, though, stakeouts could be pretty boring, and he didn't know how long he'd been asleep.

"Keep your eye on those women," Krycek said.

"Why? What's going to happen?"

"Nothing! But we're pretending to be just two normal guys on a beach, right? If anyone's paying any attention to us, this will dispel any suspicion that we're anything else."

"You think so?"

"It works. Half a minute of staring at the chicks, and we can get away with almost anything. No one will suspect a thing. Funny world we live in, isn't it?" He threw his arm around Byers's shoulders, still pretending to stare at the women. Byers gritted his teeth and played along, wondering if the sleeve touching his skin rightfully belonged to Jimmy.

Byers noticed that Krycek's prosthetic hand was hidden discreetly by the towel it was holding, so it wouldn't draw attention from witnesses. He realized that, even without this cloak-and-dagger stuff, Krycek probably would be uncomfortable appearing shirtless, even just to enjoy a sunny day on a beach. He'd have to choose between wearing an ugly fake arm, or displaying whatever scarred stump the amateur surgery that had left him with. Either way, he'd get a lot of stares. It was a shame; he was otherwise such a good-looking guy. Byers would have felt sorry for him if he weren't such a bastard -- a murder, and now a kidnapper. As it was, he'd probably attracted plenty of stares of a very different kind. Appreciative ones.

"Isn't this better than some smoke-filled diner?" Krycek asked, taking a deep breath of the ocean-scented breeze. "Or some dark and dank parking garage? Those places give me the creeps."

"Let's get to the point, Krycek."

Krycek withdrew his arm and pulled a magazine from the bag. He dropped it in Byers's lap. It was opened to a page that had a snapshot taped over the magazine picture: the original Polaroid of the first image Byers had already seen on the web site. The one showing Jimmy bound and helpless with a message scrawled across his naked chest. The picture Frohike and Langly had been so sure was a fake.

"A friend of yours?"

"You know he is," Byers said hoarsely. No one would have any reason to kidnap Jimmy except to extort something from Byers and his partners. If Jimmy wasn't a close friend of Byers, he'd be safe right now, happily organizing a deaf chorus or wheelchair ice hockey team or something.

Krycek reached over Byers and picked up the bottle of sunblock lying on the towel. He unscrewed the top one-handed, and upended the bottle to fill his good palm with the creamy white lotion. He set it down, and Byers automatically grabbed it and replaced the top to keep the contents from running out onto the towel.

Instead of applying it to his own chest or legs as Byers expected him to, Krycek started smearing the stuff on Byers's back. Byers sat up straight in shock, then hung his head and let his shoulders slump. He didn't dare demand that he stop, and Krycek knew it.

"How much is this man worth to you, Byers?"

"You're expecting us to pay a ransom for him?" Byers closed the magazine and looked at the cover. It was a popular men's exercise magazine. Krycek had pasted a label over the middle of the title so that it now read "Men Helpless."

"Of course not. You guys aren't exactly rich. If I wanted money, I could make a lot more by taking my little web site public, putting up banner ads, maybe adding a webcam. I'd make more in a month than you could possibly come up with for ransom. Of course, then I'd have to start feeding him."

"What do you want?" asked Byers miserably.

"I just need you to look up a few hard-to-find pieces of information for me. And erase certain inconvenient records. The details are on the beer bottles." He took his hand off Byers's shoulder and lifted a six-pack of beer from his bag. He extracted one bottle and reached around to hold it up in front of Byers's nose, with Byers's head held loosely in the crook of his arm in a gesture that would have looked very friendly to anyone paying attention. There was a label pasted on back. It was the right color and wouldn't look out of place from a distance, but it contained a few paragraphs of terse instructions. Byers spotted a numeric IP address that he recognized as being on one of the secure military subnets. Below it was a list of what looked like Unix directory names, judging by how prominently the slash character figured in.

"I'll never help you, Krycek. I have no idea what you're trying to do, but it's a good bet that innocent people will get hurt if you get what you want."

"Don't be so hasty. Why don't you browse through the rest of the magazine and think it over," Krycek said in a soothing voice. He resumed smearing the sunblock down Byers's back, his sliding fingers occasionally slipping under the elastic of Byers's trunks and caressing his buttocks. Byers tried to ignore him, and flipped through the pages. More photos were pasted in, showing Jimmy in various stages of being stripped. Part of him was outraged at seeing his friend humiliated; Jimmy was the last person in the world to deserve it. At the same time, he was chagrinned to find that part of him was actually aroused by the sight of the big man chained up and helpless. A part that was not nearly as well concealed by the bathing trunks as it would be by the dress pants he usually wore. Just when it seemed inevitable that Krycek would notice, Byers came to a picture that showed Jimmy lying face down with pink stripes crossing his back, as if he'd been whipped, and anger and concern overwhelmed his less appropriate reactions.

Krycek gently pushed him down onto his back, opened the bottle again, and shook more sunscreen onto his chest. "I assume you already put plenty of sunscreen on?"

"Yes!"

"Too bad," Krycek said, rubbing it in. "Otherwise I would bury your arms and legs in the sand and write on your chest. In a few hours you'd have 'Krycek's minion' written across you in white letters on a bright red background." He grinned gloatingly down at Byers.

"I'm not your minion. I haven't agreed to anything."

"How much is your friend's life worth to you, Byers? More than your principles?"

Byers buried his head in his hands. It was agonizing! How could he make a decision like this? Stealing secrets to sell to rouge nations? Subverting government records to let conspirators cover up past murders, and maybe help them commit more? It was against everything Byers stood for. Against everything Jimmy believed in, too. Jimmy wouldn't want him to do something like this, not even to save his own life. Would he?

"I... I can't! I can't do it. Please..."

"Fine. I know someone else who can do the job. They don't work as fast as you do, and it will be outrageously expensive." His fingers slid up Byers's side and invaded his armpit, idly playing with the hairs. "But I can afford it -- with the money I earn from selling your buddy into slavery."

"You're... you're bluffing!"

"Don't you think I have the connections? Your own newspaper even helped me find some of them." Krycek paused thoughtfully. "He's practically a giant by Asian standards. He should fetch a good price on the auction block, from customers with certain fetishes."

Byers choked down a sob. "No..." he whispered.

"It'll take you years to track him down, if you're lucky enough to find him at all."

"I'll do what you ask. We'll do it," Byers said, fighting to keep his voice calm.

"That's better," Krycek said softly, swirling sunblock around on Byers's belly. Again his fingers slid intimately an inch or two past the waistband of the trunks, touching skin that Byers never planned on exposing to the sun in his life.

Suddenly Krycek snatched his hand back and grabbed his little LCD display. He didn't look alarmed, just purposeful. "Just lie there for a minute," he said, backing off a few yards and studying the display.

After half a minute he came back. "They haven't forgotten you," he said. "Apparently they figure they're doing their job if they glance in your direction a few times per hour. Good thing they didn't spot me. I'd just as soon we had some privacy." He pulled Byers's trunks down just a little, exposing his navel and two inches of white belly, which he stroked lightly.

Byers found himself almost agreeing. Since he couldn't do anything to keep Krycek from humiliating him like this, it would just make it worse to have his friends watching. He knew he could fight Krycek off, maybe even overpower him and hold him while someone called the police. But he'd be dooming Jimmy. Krycek might have left him with a henchman with orders to kill him if he didn't come back by a certain time. He might have left him buried alive somewhere, for all he knew. Even if he were simply tied up in a remote cabin somewhere, he might die of thirst if Krycek didn't divulge his whereabouts.

"So, we have a deal?" Krycek asked.

"Please. I'll do what you ask, but you have to give me some time. It's not going to be easy to do it undetected." He was exaggerating. He knew he could get Langly to help, and he was sure Langly could do it in a matter of hours, if the other five bottles weren't much harder tasks than the first one.

"Sure. How much time do you need?" His fingertips, dipping inside his trunks again, had found the place where Byers's pubic hair began. He toyed with it as he pretended to watch the volleyball game with renewed interest.

Byers forced himself to concentrate. "Depends on the other five bottles. At least a day altogether. Maybe longer?"

"How about three days? Does that work for you?"

"Um, I think so."

"Good. That works for me, too. It'll give me time to run some experiments." His hand, still creamy, started on Byers's legs.

"Experiments?"

"On your friend."

"Krycek! Krycek, please! I said I would--"

"I'll expect one bottle done every twelve hours. Or you can expect a body part in the mail for every deadline you miss."

He waited for Byers to plead some more, but Byers knew it was useless. And if he said anything more, he might break down.

"You can choose whatever order you like. Of the bottles. I'll choose the order of the body parts." His fingers stole up the leg of Byers's trunks, tickling his scrotum, which retracted defensively.

"You're contradicting yourself. A minute ago you threatened to sell him. I would think ... mutilating him would reduce his value."

"Depends what use the customer has in mind. They may prefer a slave who can't walk. Or, there's still a small market for harem guards among a few rich traditionalists in the Middle East. Maybe before I start cutting, I should solicit some offers today and see who he's worth the most to." He ran his hand lightly down Byers's torso.

"I assure you," Byers said, forcing himself to sound calm, "that he's worth more to me than he is to anyone in the world you could sell him to."

"Then you'll get him back in one piece, if you and your friends are as good as your reputation says you are." Krycek checked his watch. "I'd better get back to him. He must be getting thirsty. Here's what I want you to do now. You're going to go for a little swim. Wade out past the breakers and swim out for another minute. Then come back, pick up these beer bottles, and go and tell your friends what they missed while they were checking out the babes."

Byers didn't move.

"Don't make me have to go in there with you. If I do, I'm taking your trunks out with me. That ought to keep you here awhile."

"Give me one good reason I shouldn't turn you in to the authorities right now and take my chances with Jimmy dying of dehydration. He might prefer a clean death to what you have in mind for him."

"Because I just promised you not to hurt him, if you cooperate."

Byers sighed. "I guess that's a good reason."

"No permanent harm, at least," Krycek amended.

Byers waded into the surf and swam out, as he was told. It was what he felt like doing anyway. It helped to wash away the memory of Krycek's unwanted touch. Better yet, Byers found that the ocean could absorb all the tears a man was capable of crying, and never even notice.