Geezus, he was impressed. The girl was fast, damn fast, and she was solid on her gun, her draw needing no improvement whatsoever. She looked good, deadly, like that piece of rubber tubing floating around had better be saying its prayers. She looked like she knew exactly what she was doing, except for the fact that they were in a rather cramped space, and she’d be shooting into a couple of feet of water onto a concrete floor.
“Uh…no, no, sugar,” he said, slogging forward, talking fast. “Don’t shoot. I got it. Everything’s okay. It’s just a length of tubing.”
“Where is it?” she asked, her gaze glued to the top of the water. “It was moving.”
“Everything down here is moving,” he pointed out. The water was rippling and streaming, and starting to eddy up against stuff, and all around them was the echoing clang and thump of the pumps and the gurgling, rushing sound of the swamp draining away down through the cisterns.
As a first date, he had to admit that this one had pretty much sucked, except for the kiss. They’d gotten that right, and for a moment, as he came up next to her and quietly but firmly told her to holster her weapon, he got to thinking about a better date, something with cold beer, fresh limes, and expensive tequila. Something with live, sultry music, spicy food, and a warm evening breeze.
Something that didn’t involve mud, blood, and other people’s guts spilling out all over would be a real step up. Something they could negotiate without a flashlight or a.45 would be a huge improvement.
Not that he ever went anywhere without a.45.
The sound of water rushing down the cisterns eventually started to slow, until it was no more than a trickle, the last few gallons of the overflow sliding toward the openings in the floor and getting pumped into the main line, and as soon as the water was gone, the great clanging and thumping of the pumps stuttered and clanked to a halt.
He shifted his gaze and the beam of his flashlight back to the cage, to see if they’d missed something while the place had been underwater.
And lo and behold, he’d be damned. There it was, the prize, a small wooden packing crate tucked up under the iron grate on the cistern, the perfect size for the Memphis Sphinx, and the perfect hiding place for something of inestimable value. With the cistern flooded, no one would ever know it was there, and the smell and looks of the place made it obvious that it flooded quite regularly.
“Do you see something?”
“No.” He kept the beam of his flashlight moving, swinging it across the floor and up to her. He’d only been on the crate for a second, but he knew what he’d seen.
She slid her hand back through her hair. She had mud on her arms, a streak of mud on her face, mud on her clothes. God, she looked like hell, like he’d put her through the wringer.
“Come on, let’s get back to the Posada. I’ll go get us something to eat, and we can come up with a Plan B.” He took her by the arm and headed for the stairs.
Yeah, he had a conscience, but fifty-fifty was never going to work. Erich Warner wanted the Sphinx, and it wasn’t a cash deal. Whoever Suzi was working for was just plain out of luck.
He’d make it up to her, if he got the chance. But first he needed the name of some asshole in Texas who thought he was going to take his shot at the U.S.A.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Costa del Rey
Con loved this time of night.
Crickets chirping, tree frogs singing, and Scout’s pretty patio lights illuminating the Costa del Rey compound. The river was running dark and deep, heading toward Argentina and the Iguazú Falls. A soft wind soughed through the trees.
Leaning back against the cool stone wall of the house, looking out over the deck to the water and the jungle beyond, he took a heavy draw off his cigar. For a long time, he held the smoke deep in his lungs, longer and longer, until slowly, he began to let it out.
Softly, he opened his mouth in an O and blew smoke rings, one after the other, each more perfect than the last, and he watched as, ring by ring, the smoke settled like the loops of a necklace around the statue he held in his hand. A small fortune in gold was draped in a headdress from the Sphinx’s brow to its leonine shoulders, slivers of regal lapis lazuli decorated the frontispiece of the crown, and rock-crystal eyes caught the light of the waxing moon and reflected a glittering shimmer deep into the beast’s granite skull.
Tomorrow night the deed would be done.
He took another draw off the cigar and felt a subsiding flicker of pain in his arm.
He was running out of time. He felt it with each passing day, and he wanted Erich Warner dead. The fact would bring him a small measure of peace, and if he should triumph over the spymaster as well, he could die a happier man. It was the only doubt he had, that he could get to the man in Washington, D.C.
He held his last inhalation of smoke in his lungs-longer, and longer, and longer, seconds passing one after another. At a minute, the smoke started drifting out of his nostrils.
He certainly didn’t doubt that he would die-probably badly, considering what he’d seen in Bangkok, considering how Scout’s father, Garrett, had died.
Hopeless.
Hopeless.
Helpless.
If Con could have reached him, he’d have slid a knife up into the back of Garrett’s skull and severed his brain stem, would have given him instant death, anything rather than watch the slow, twisting devastation that had allowed Garrett Leesom to linger and suffer.
But they’d been more than a cage apart, and the man in the cage between them had been dead for days by the time Garrett’s meds had started to fail.
Fuck.
It could just as easily have been him.
Since then, Con had learned how to control his situation, but not without some failures of his own-and the failures weren’t worth the living it took to get to them. So he kept his meds close, and he kept his supplier very close, and he kept his.45 closest of all. The fools who touted “no pain, no gain” didn’t have a fucking clue what pain was all about, or how long it could last.
Long enough to make a man fear that even death wouldn’t stop it-and, baby, that was taking fear right down to the soul. What if… what if even death won’t stop it?
What then, kemo sabe? What then.
Religion, of course.
Con loved religion. It was so damned fearless, not only answering his biggest, scariest question about life but throwing it right back at him, utterly fearless. Pain, pendejo? it said. Live right, or we’ll show you pain, guaranteed everlasting pain, Promethean pain.
No matter what he sometimes thought, pain had not been invented in Bangkok by Dr. Souk.
But it could be alleviated by the pills and by the brujo in Danlí, Honduras, who hand-rolled the cigars for him. A brujo, a shaman, a witch doctor-God only knew what the man put in the things. Con didn’t, but neither did he care. The long filler was dark, almost oily, and the wrappers were faintly green, and whatever blessings Mario Sauza Orlando chanted over the cigars, they worked.
He let the rest of the smoke drift out of his mouth and took another long draw, feeling the sounds of the night wash over him.
Tobacco was a drug-his favorite.
“Con?”
He’d heard her coming, the soft tread of slippered feet on the cool tile floor.
“Scout.”
“I’ve got those names for you from Jo-Jo, the gringos staying at the Posada Plaza, and the intel you wanted on Levi Asher and Suzanna Toussi.” She was standing in the light of the doorway onto the deck, and there wasn’t a thing about her that didn’t fill him with pride. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, this love he had for her, that her welfare was so important to him, sometimes even more important than the justice he sought-and that was saying a lot.
She’d been such a lost little wild thing when he’d finally found her, living on the streets of Bangkok, seventeen years old and looking about twelve, but most definitely Garrett’s daughter, with her father’s warrior spirit running true. It was the only thing that had saved her.