She felt absolutely straggly. Cripes.
“Hundreds and hundreds of years old,” the young man said with amazingly misplaced confidence.
Try four thousand years old, she thought, refraining from a weary sigh. She’d had a long day, coming off a long night and a long flight, and for a few brief moments, before Ruiz had unveiled his fake statue, she’d hoped her job here was done, and not only done, but done exceptionally well. She wouldn’t have simply located the darn Sphinx, she would have had it in hand, saving Dylan, and Hawkins, and any other wild boy down here running around Paraguay the trouble of stealing it, and from what Dylan had told her when he’d contacted her this morning, she knew there were a couple extra SDF boys in country and headed her way, maybe already in the city, and it was a good chance the two of them would be tagged for the snatch-if she could verify the Sphinx’s location.
Which she had not done.
Dammit.
So much for her moment of mission glory. Ruiz’s fake had sealed her fate. She was doomed to at least one night in Ciudad del Este, and from what she’d seen so far, that was about as sketchy a situation as she’d ever encountered. She was damn glad to have a 9mm. Ruiz at least hadn’t let her down in that department.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking at the statue, and that was the truth. The artful amalgamation of plaster, composite something-or-another, paint, and plastic was very sleek, very well executed-except for the flat-out dead giveaway of the bottom of the statue. Anyone who turned it upside down was bound to notice the letters and numbers written in black marker on an unpainted patch of white plaster on the base. This one said GV 3/5, which she was sure meant that Galeria Viejo had ordered five of these babies made. She had to admit that the blue stamp of the Great Sphinx of Giza next to the numbers made the whole thing look very official-if four thousand years ago Sesostris III had commissioned a plaster sphinx.
He had not.
The legend of the Memphis Sphinx, and Howard Carter’s notes, distinctly described a granite statue.
Granite. Not plaster.
“You have the money?” Ruiz asked.
God, he really did think she was an idiot.
“Half a million American? Right?”
“Así es. This is correct.”
“It can be arranged.” Not that she was going to bother. “I’ll need a couple of days to authenticate the statue, and also a bank account for the deposit.”
“No,” he said adamantly, shaking his head and leaning over to pick up the papers he’d laid on the table next to the Sphinx. “No. There is no time for waiting. The documents for the statue are all in order, and the money, it can be transferred through my cambista. Everything inmediatamente.“
He handed the papers over with a small lift of his head, as if to say, Read them, read them now. This is all very perfect.
She accepted the documents with a brief smile and quickly glanced through them, duly noting that they appeared very authentic, very official, complete with tea-stained edges and lots of rubber stampings in various colors of ink. He and Beranger must have been busy as a couple of beavers getting their scam together.
And Ruiz’s plan with the cambista, well, that would definitely speed things up, to use the underworld freeway of cash transactions. Bags of cash given to a cambista entered the cambio pipeline in one country and, with a few phone calls, would be matched by the same amount of cash in another country, minus a sizable commission.
“I don’t believe the congressman will be willing to deal with…” Hmmm, with a moment’s reflection, she revised her original thought of a bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, money-laundering lowlife to something with a bit more cachet. “With anyone who might be running afoul of the law. He wants the Sphinx, not a scandal.”
She also didn’t know where in the world Ruiz thought a United States congressman would come up with half a million dollars in cash inmediatamente. That kind of money was always dirty.
He looked at her with a dubious expression on his face, as if he couldn’t believe whom he’d been stuck with on this deal.
She knew the feeling.
“You do know that this statue is worthless after Sunday night?” he asked.
Actually, the statue on the coffee table was worthless now, despite the little batch of provenance papers he’d given her, but she went ahead and nodded. “Yes, I understand that some people believe a certain alignment of cosmic forces on Sunday night can be channeled through the Sphinx.”
“And you don’t believe?” For the first time since they’d met at lunch, he sounded impressed.
“I believe in acquiring for my clients whatever they hire me to find, Señor Ruiz, and I let them believe whatever they want, as long as I get my cut of the deal.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, and she could practically see the gears turning in his mind.
“I have the same beliefs, Señora Royal,” he finally said. “And I have a lot of connections for finding these sorts of mystical objects.”
She just bet he did-starting with Remy Beranger and whoever had manufactured the knock-off Sphinx sitting on her table.
“What I no longer have is a partner with connections to buyers in the United States.”
Well, that was damned interesting. General Grant hadn’t mentioned that the U.S. Treasury agent currently in custody for tax evasion and treason had also been hustling antiquities-talk about a mixed bag of felonies.
“Perhaps if we can negotiate an…arrangement,” he concluded.
An arrangement. Sure. She could do that, if it enabled her current mission to go forward to a satisfactory conclusion-which it just might. She sure as hell didn’t have the Memphis Sphinx yet, and all signs pointed to the real thing being in this damn town somewhere, despite the fake Ruiz had delivered.
“An arrangement could be negotiated,” she said.
“Then you should call your congressman. I can give you the name of someone he can deal with in Illinois, someone who can accept the cash. Chicago or Springfield, his choice.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised. Given the size of the world’s black-market economy, which was huge, every state in the Union was probably knee-deep in cambistas shoveling drug money in and out of the country, and her getting the name of one of them from Jimmy Ruiz was not such a bad idea. Half of what she always got for General Grant was somebody’s name, but Jimmy Ruiz getting any money simply wasn’t going to happen. She could make a phone call, though. She could always make a phone call.
She walked over to the suite’s bar to get her cell phone out of her purse, when the room phone rang, its soft beep and discreet blinking giving her a moment’s pause.
Present company excluded, to her knowledge, only four people knew where she was: whoever was manning the front desk at the Gran Chaco, General Grant and Dylan Hart, neither of whom would be calling her on the hotel phone, and the man who had put her in the cab in front of the Posada Plaza.
Dammit.
“Excuse me,” she said to Ruiz.
Taking her purse with her, she walked past him and the Sphinx to take the call more privately in the suite’s bedroom. She closed the heavy doors behind her and threw the bolt before going over to the bedside table to answer the phone.
“Yes?”
“Señora Royal,” a softly spoken, very officious man said. “This is Rodrigo at the front desk. A reporter from The Daily Inquirer is here to interview you. Should I have the guards pass him through?”
A discomfiting mix of curiosity and alarm held her firmly in place-a reporter? Here in Ciudad del Este? She couldn’t possibly have screwed up that badly.
For one, she hadn’t had time to screw up that badly. She’d only left Washington late last night. She hadn’t even been gone twenty-four hours yet.
“Oh…ah, yes, the interview, I’d almost forgotten,” she said, stalling for a moment, thinking. “Tell me, Rodrigo, what is the reporter’s name again?”