She turned to Don Fernando. “I’m thirsty. Where’s the flight attendant?”
“I sent the cabin crew back to Paris last night,” he said, not looking up.
She returned to her brooding. She realized that she had become unmoored in a world in which she had been certain she knew all the angles. She was confronted now with one she could not have anticipated and did not know how to play. She felt like a little girl again, lost and alone, wanting only to run from where she was into the void of the unknown. She was dizzied, as if falling from a great height. It was only now that she realized how completely Maceo Encarnación had fashioned a world around her, an environment in which she could function—but as what? His iron fist or his puppet, dancing to the tune of each new assignment. Death, death, and more death. She saw now how he had mesmerized her into thinking that killing was all she was good for, that without him, without the assignments he brought her, without the money she received from him, she was nothing.
“You live for the moment of death,” Maceo Encarnación had told her. “This makes you special. Unique. This makes you precious to me.”
She saw now the load of goods he had sold her, how he had flattered her, stroked her ego, caressing her with his words. She had a mental image of herself as a puppet, dancing to his tune. An icy wind knifed through her, and she shuddered inwardly.
“What do you think of this new Falcon 2000S?” Don Fernando said, plopping a two-page spread featuring the private jet onto her lap. “This plane is due for a major overhaul. Instead, I’m thinking of upgrading.”
“Are you serious?” She looked at him, not the photos of the Falcon. “This is what’s on your mind?”
He shrugged and took the magazine back. “Maybe you don’t have a feel for jets.”
“Maybe you don’t have a feel for what’s going on,” she said, a good deal more hotly than she had intended.
He put aside the magazine. “I’m listening.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“That’s entirely up to you.”
She shook her head, exasperated. “Do you not understand? If I don’t kill you, Maceo Encarnación will kill me.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do. I won’t be able to escape him.”
“Again, I understand.”
“Then what am I—?”
“Are you still planning to kill me?”
She snorted. “Don’t be absurd.”
He turned toward her fully. “Martha, this sort of change of heart is not so easily accomplished.”
“No one knows that better than me. I’ve seen the mess it can make. At the last minute—”
“The person can’t go through with it.”
“Even though they want to.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “sensing no exit, they kill themselves instead.”
She looked at him levelly. “That won’t happen to me.”
He took her hand in his. “How can you be certain, Martha?”
“In Gibraltar, you took my heart and dissected it, picked out all the black bits, then put it back together.”
“No,” he said. “You did that.”
A smile formed slowly on her face. “Who handed me the scalpel?”
The plane was descending, touching the top of the clouds, and then, all at once, it was in them, the sky going gray and featureless, as if they were alone in the air, lost to the world. The drone had become a kind of silence, a shroud.
“We’ll be landing soon,” Martha said. “I’ll have to call him.”
“By all means do.”
“What will I tell him?”
“Tell him what he wants to hear,” he said. “Tell him you have completed your assignment. Tell him I’m dead.”
“He always demands proof.”
“Then we’ll give him some.”
“It will have to be convincing.”
“It will be,” Don Fernando assured her.
Her brows knit together. “I don’t understand.”
Unbuckling his seat belt, he stood up. “The plane isn’t going to land.”
The waters of Acapulco were turquoise, clear down to the rocky bottom.
Diving into them from great heights took both skill and lungs of steel. To survive the depths to which a cliff diver plunged, to hold your breath for the time it took to descend and then fight the currents, eddies, and undertow on your way up to the frothy surface took long practice and, again, lungs of steel.
By the time, he was eleven, Tulio Vistoso, the best cliff diver in the sun-bleached resort city, could hold his breath for just under nine minutes. By the time he was fifteen, it was at least a minute longer.
The water around Dockside Marina was black as oil, but the lack of light was no deterrent for the Aztec. He had let go of jefe Marks’s legs when the bullets hit the water; there was no sense in being stupid. If he didn’t pull Marks under then, he knew it was just a matter of time. Not that Maceo Encarnación had given him much time. In fact, half of it was gone. He had to return to Mexico City with someone’s head and at least the promise of the return of the thirty million.
The moment the bullets stopped and jefe Marks was pulled out of the water, Don Tulio made his move. He knew it would be only a small matter of time before Marks’s people dropped divers into the water. He had to be either securely hidden or out of the water entirely before that happened. With the boats in the water, he could hardly swim out of the marina. Besides, he had to assume the Gringo federales would already have established a secure perimeter.
Rising near one of the slimy piers near the Recursive, he felt the vibrations of other boats. Then powerful floodlights were switched on, probing the darkness of the water, pushing back the shadows in which he had thought to secret himself. Clearly, now, that would not do. Neither would the network of pilings and crossbeams beneath the pier, his next choice. As he popped his head experimentally out of the water, he heard the panting and sniffing of dogs. They’d find him for sure under the pier.
That left only one alternative, one he was reluctant to use. Ducking back down to avoid a moving spotlight, he moved slowly and deliberately, causing no ripple at all, moving stealthily into the narrow crevasse between the dock and the starboard side of the Recursive. He edged his way along until he was directly beneath the second, and larger, bumper.
Feeling only with his fingertips, he found the metal ring, painted the same color as the hull. If you didn’t know it was there, you would never have seen it. But the Recursive was, first and foremost, a smuggler’s boat; it contained all manner of tricks and traps. This particular one ran along the starboard side just above the waterline. It was meant for plastic bags of china white or heroin, but it could, in an emergency, accommodate a man. The trouble was that it wasn’t entirely watertight, not, at least, with the Aztec’s weight in it. This was why he had been reluctant to consider it. Being able to hold your breath for over nine minutes was one thing, but being trapped in a coffin-sized space while it slowly filled with seawater was quite another.
Still, entombment was the only chance Don Tulio had now, and he took it. Twisting the ring, he opened the hatch from the top and swung himself into the space. Water splashed in with him, filling the bottom. Quickly now, he closed the door and turned the ring into the locked position from the inside so it could not be seen.
Then, his heart beating fast, he began to pray to a god he had long since abandoned, except in name.
Forty minutes after he reached the ER, Peter was allowed to sit up while he was hydrated with fluids via an IV. He called Hendricks, waking him up.