“Twenty thousand, and that’s if I’m back in five days or less,” she said, when she finally spoke. “It’ll be a thousand a day every day longer that I’m there, and don’t even think about quibbling on the price. Ciudad del Este is a hellhole, and you know it.”
Yes, he did, and he didn’t like it either, but it was what it was.
“Twenty,” he agreed. “And you don’t have five days. The DIA needs their Sphinx secured by Sunday, which means our courier either needs to have it in a lockdown situation or be on a plane out of Paraguay with it in hand. Factor in a minimum of twelve hours for our team to recover the object, and it means you need to do your part in one day or less, preferably less, which means you leave tonight. I’ve got you booked on a seven-thirty flight out of Dulles.”
“That’s pretty damn short notice, Buck, for me and your team. What’s the rush? Why Sunday?”
It was a legitimate question, but the answer was definitely filed in Buck’s BS deck.
“Things are lining up Sunday night, some planets and things, like meridian lines and the tides, and some…uh, energy planes, and the guys over at Moonrise want the Sphinx back to…uh, channel some kind of astral… uh, shield to…uh-oh, hell, Suzi, it’s all in the file. Read it on the plane.”
“You’re not on board with any of this, are you?”
Actually, that was putting it mildly. He was royally teed off by the whole damn thing, that he was putting one of his assets and two of his operators in the line of fire for some damn piece of junk.
“I do my job,” he said.
She held his gaze for a moment before returning her attention to the photograph. “And I’ll do mine. You can count on it, Buck.”
He knew that. She was good, a certain edgy part of her always rising to the challenge, thrilling to the game, to the win, and she was tougher than she looked, far tougher. She’d needed to be for as long as he’d known her. He knew what drove her, the same way he knew what drove Dylan, or Kid, or Skeeter. So he kept hiring her, and she kept working for him, and if she kept saving lost girls on the side, despite her setbacks, good for her.
Hell, life was hard all over.
“We’ve arranged an introduction to a man named Jimmy Ruiz. We own him, to some extent, which means you’ll have some leverage, but watch your back.”
“I always watch my back.”
“Good. As usual, you’ll be traveling as Suzanna Royal,” he told her, “a rich American art dealer working for an even richer client, a U.S. congressman this time, who is looking to round out his collection of pre-Columbian goldwork and whatever else you can find on the side, like Twelfth Dynasty Egyptian statuary. There’s a shop down there, in the market, Galeria Viejo, the Old Gallery. Ruiz will vouch for you. The man who owns the gallery, Remy Beranger, came up in the DIA’s intercept, and he has a confirmed reputation for trading in illegally acquired artifacts. You’ll start there.”
“And find the Memphis Sphinx in one day?” she said, lifting the photograph closer into the light, not sounding too daunted by the task, which was why she was standing in his office-and he’d bet the damn Sphinx that she knew it as well as he did.
“I need someone who knows a real four-thousand-year-old statue from a fake and can hit the ground running.”
“Then I’m your girl, Buck. Assignment accepted.” She bent further over the eight-by-ten glossy of the Memphis Sphinx again, and suddenly Buck was staring at her cleavage-again.
Yeah, she was his girl, all right.
But he was ignoring her cleavage.
Just completely ignoring it.
CHAPTER ONE
Ciudad del Este, Paraguay -Saturday afternoon
Sitting at an outside table in front of the Mercado cantina, possibly the slummiest bar in the southern hemisphere, Dax Killian made one more careful check mark in his notebook, right next to the word “asshole.” It was the third such mark he’d made in the last hour-sixty minutes, three assholes.
Not bad.
Things were heating up.
Taking a short swallow of beer, he keyed a number into a small receiver and held it to his ear, tapping back into one of the transmitters he’d planted in the Galeria Viejo down the street.
Three days in this hellhole of a city, with one day left to go, and all Dax really had to show for his efforts was the notebook, and his check marks, and an appointment for later tonight that he hoped to hell panned out.
He was ready. More than ready with the deadline looming ever closer-Sunday, tomorrow. Do the deed by then, or have the rest of his life to nurse his regrets. It was a helluva deal. He’d been handed an opportunity here, and he didn’t want to fuck it up.
He took another swallow of beer, then popped the last piece of his empanada into his mouth.
Asshole number three was dawdling, taking his sweet time getting to the gallery. Short and dark-haired, dressed in black slacks and a brown polo shirt, he stopped at one of the market stalls bordering the street and looked at a couple of cheap-ass nylon duffel bags.
Maybe he was a guy looking for a deal on cheap-ass nylon duffel bags, but Dax was betting not. He knew a wiseguy when he saw one. A few more moments passed, with the guy moving a couple of stalls closer to the gallery, then he knelt down to tie his shoe, and Dax figured that maybe his ship was about to come in. The man was signaling somebody-somebody with three potential bodyguards now in place on the premises.
Lucky, lucky day, if this thing actually turned into a party.
The two earlier arrivals were still in the gallery’s back office with the owner, a thin, harried-looking man given to crumpled linen suits and Panama hats named Remy Beranger. The men were still regaling the French expat with an account of their latest debauchery and the superior quality of the new crop of whores at the club down the street, La Colonia, The Colony.
Whatever. Dax pulled his phone out of a cargo pocket on his pants and pressed a couple of buttons. He could see The Colony from his prime spot in front of El Mercado, and the girls looked as tired and lifeless and bored as any he’d seen, maybe even worse. Regardless, nothing of relevance to the problem at hand had been said in the office since the first two guys had gone in, and Remy Beranger had hardly said a word at all, relevant or otherwise, but that was the nature of surveillance-hours and days of next to nothing, and then bingo.
Lifting the phone to eye level, Dax took a look at the screen, zoomed in, then took the polo shirt guy’s photograph. Keying in another sequence sent the photo to his computer in his room at the Posada Plaza, two blocks away. He had quite a little yearbook of gofers, traders, tourists, and customers accumulating on his hard drive in the dumpy room, but no kings, no real movers and shakers, and if they didn’t start showing up here pretty damn quick, then he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and his appointment with Remy Beranger later tonight was going to be one big bust, just him and maybe a couple of no-name hustlers playing patty-cake in Beranger’s back room.
He couldn’t afford that, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, not this week. Time was running out. He’d been chasing this damn score for months.
With the photo sent, he returned his attention to his handheld receiver, just in case somebody decided to talk about something, anything, besides nooky. He’d wired the gallery his first morning in town. Nights in Ciudad del Este tended to be extremely busy, the streets and alleyways rocking and rolling with the transport of illegal everything, but in those quiet couple of hours before sunrise, things settled down, and that’s when Dax had accessed a small rooftop patio tucked into the back of the building and broken into a second-floor window to go to work inside.
He took another short swallow of beer, and when the guy stood up and looked down the street, Dax followed his gaze. A black Range Rover bristling with antennas was nosing its way through the crowds, heading for the Old Gallery.