Earlier in the evening, Ershut and Abdul-Wahaab had been given the assignment to chain Zula by her ankle to the grab bar in the shower stall. Like so many of the routine chores that filled the day-to-day lives of this roving band of terrorists, this one had occasioned a huge amount of what sounded to an Iowan like violent argument. Ninety percent of this had focused on the mysterious padlock that they had found locked to the last link of the chain. No one seemed to know where it had come from. This, of course, was because Zula had put it there when none of them had been looking. But as she had been hoping, they never cottoned on to it. Jones, becoming annoyed by the sheer volume of their debate, had glanced at it and, after a few moments, identified it as the lock that had formerly belonged to the toolbox from the stolen truck. Rummaging around in the external pocket of a knapsack, he had found that truck’s key chain and thrown it to Ershut, who, after a few minutes’ trial and error (for it had a lot of keys on it) had managed to get the new lock open. He had then used it to fix that end of the chain to the shower stall grab bar and pocketed the key—which, quite naturally, he’d assumed was the only key. The next and final phase of the operation had been to adjust the length of the chain around Zula’s ankle, giving her enough slack that she could get to the toilet, or retreat into the bedroom and curl up on the floor, but not enough to climb up on the bed; for that would have put her within reach of the windows. For this they used the padlock for which Zula didn’t have a spare key.