Bingo. Game on.
Dax knew the Range Rover. It belonged to Esteban Ponce, the youngest son of a large, obscenely wealthy family based in Brazil, with Ponce money fueling businesses from one end of South America to the other. According to Dax’s intel, Esteban Ponce’s “moving and shaking” included a lot of low-end women and upper-end antiquities, especially anything connected with the occult, like maybe something from Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty, possibly a sphinx with rock-crystal eyes that enabled a viewer to see the past, the future, and the present at locations far removed from the statue itself.
Or not.
Dax was a little on the skeptical side of the hocus-pocus equation, but he didn’t have to believe. He just had to get the damn thing and deliver it to São Paulo, Brazil, by Sunday night, where one crooked piece-of-crap German named Erich Warner was waiting for it, and for his trouble, he’d been guaranteed two names.
That’s all he needed, two goddamned names, one of a man, the other of a place, somewhere in Texas, and he’d be good to go. He could call his old Special Forces commander, Colonel Hanson, who’d been kicked up to the E-ring at the Pentagon, and rest a little easier at night, knowing the good guys could chalk up one more win in the war on terrorism.
So here he sat, waiting for his chance with Remy Beranger, hoping to gather some workable information from the afternoon, or some actionable intelligence. Cut a deal or steal the guy blind, either option worked for Dax. He just needed to know the Memphis Sphinx was in play and where it was-at the gallery, or stashed elsewhere, or worst case, not within a thousand miles of this damn place.
He sure hoped to hell not on that last scenario. There wasn’t time to put together another search, and he’d all but guaranteed Warner that the damn thing would be here, this weekend, in Ciudad del Este.
Fortunately, he worked well under pressure…quite well.
No, no, no. No sales, not today, and not tomorrow, Beranger had said, when Dax had shown up at the gallery, flashing his cash. Later, monsieur, in two, maybe three days.
Two or three days hadn’t cut it for Dax, though, not on this deal, so he’d pushed until he’d gotten a more workable schedule on the table, knowing guys like Beranger didn’t turn down cold cash in U.S. dollars, not unless something was up, like an even bigger score.
Tomorrow night, then, late, Beranger had finally agreed. I have some very nice Moche ceramics I can show you, very nice, the erotic style, just as you wish.
Eighteen-hundred-year-old erotica-Dax couldn’t remember ever being in the market for anything stranger, but apparently, for those in the know, Galeria Viejo in Ciudad del Este was the place for acquiring a little ancient pornographic pottery.
He slipped his hand into the cargo pocket again and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. His lighter came next. Settling a little deeper into his chair, he lit up, and through a thin veil of smoke, watched the Range Rover muscle its way through the crowds of people and vehicles, until it reached a spot in front of the gallery.
Lowering the cigarette, he flicked off the ash and readied the phone in his other hand. One, two, three more bodyguards exited the Rover. Then the boy from Brazil stepped out-Esteban Ponce, tall and noticeably thin, dark hair hanging in a long braid down the middle of his back, expensively dressed with lots of flash, black slacks, white sports coat, red silk shirt, and sporting a long gold chain strung with a crucifix, an Egyptian ankh, and a pentacle, and yeah, Dax figured that should just about cover all the other-world crap that could ruin a guy’s day.
Geezus.
Every overrich, inbred family Dax had ever worked for could lay claim to one of their own as the resident fuckup, and Esteban was the Ponces’. No guts, no brains, no glory, but plenty of time and money on his hands, most of it spent trying to carve a niche for himself in a pack of world-class wolves and jackals.
Personally, Dax doubted if there was much competition for resident Honcho of the Voodoo Hoodoo in the Ponce clan. He took everybody’s picture, including a couple of group shots and a zoomed-in close-up on the Range Rover’s license plate. While he forwarded all the photos to his computer, the Brazilian contingent moved inside the gallery, leaving two guys to guard the door.
Clamping the cigarette between his teeth, Dax typed in a brief, coded text to São Paulo, then returned the phone to his pocket and went back to listening to the handset.
“Señor Ponce, my pleasure. So pleased, so very pleased…” Remy Beranger finally came to life, his words verifying Dax’s identification of Esteban Ponce, not that he’d needed much verification. He’d started doing his South American homework as soon as he’d realized where the game was heading. “Oh, yes, señor, the others will be here very shortly. Very shortly, indeed.”
Others? Dax thought.
Good. Maybe this thing was going to roll.
He took another drag off his cigarette and checked both ends of the street while he exhaled. A silver Mercedes was heading his way, looking promising. The luxury sedan passed him by and kept going almost the length of the block, before it pulled to a stop a couple of cars down from the Range Rover, in front of a bar so seedy it almost made the Mercado look like it had some class. Two men got out of the front. Only one got out of the back-Levi Asher, short, balding, narrow through the shoulders, rumpled, potbellied in a pale blue suit, and sweating like a pig in the heat.
Perfect.
Under any circumstances other than a stakeout, Dax would have grinned. The day was definitely looking up. Levi Asher was exactly the guy Dax had wanted to see in Ciudad del Este, the same way he’d seen him in Milan, and in London, and in that nondescript little spot on the road north of Washington, D.C., the two of them on the same damn trail.
Sonuvabitch. Third-rate Remy Beranger and his fourth-rate gallery had actually scored the Memphis Sphinx, and in the nick of time. Everybody had heard the stories, they knew the legend of what was supposed to happen Sunday night. They’d all just been waiting for the damn thing to show up somewhere, and to a man, everybody Dax had met or dealt with over the past four months of his investigation believed that what was supposed to happen Sunday night would happen, that the Gates of Time, whatever the hell those were, would open and reveal the secrets of the ages, possibly even the secrets of immortality.
Everybody believed, that is, except Dax. But he got paid to be skeptical. Fortunately, he was very good at that, too.
Yeah, that was him, just one damned fortunate guy.
Erich Warner sure as hell believed in the Sphinx’s powers. The guy was desperate to get his hands on the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III, which in Dax’s book made him more than a little unstable on top of already being a psychopathic asshole.
He dropped his cigarette to the pavement and ground it out with his boot, all the while watching a dark blue Land Cruiser ease its way down the street through the crowds.
The Cruiser came to a stop next to Levi Asher’s silver Mercedes, and a minor player named Jimmy Ruiz got out from behind the wheel and crossed in front of the car. Dax recognized him as an associate of Remy Beranger’s from the file he’d compiled on Galeria Viejo. When Ruiz stopped next to the passenger door and started to open it, Dax set aside his handset and pulled his phone back out of his pocket. Then he reached for his beer.
There were three things he knew for certain about the Memphis Sphinx: Erich Warner wanted it; Dax was going to get it; and there wasn’t a nutcase from here to Cairo who wasn’t after it. He already had Asher and Ponce. That was enough to assure him he was in the right place at the right time. Anyone else was either a pure bonus or an unnecessary complication.