The Dogs of Mexico

By John J Asher

In this noir literary thriller, former government agent Robert Bohnert has left the life behind—but it won't leave him. Broken by the destruction of his family, he agrees to one last job—this time for the other side. When a "straightforward" diamond smuggling operation goes south—literally—Bohnert finds himself trekking through Mexico, pursued by killers, including, a cross-dressing hit man, a psycho meth head, and a fellow operative who was once a close friend. An unlikely love story complicates his flight when the woman who defects from his pursuers becomes the one person who might offer him salvation. The question becomes, ultimately, will they make it out of Mexico alive, and does the canister really contain diamonds, or is Robert being used to import an unimaginable horror into the U.S.?  “…(K)ill a few hours enjoying the suspense and human drama.” — Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brazos River Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781386981497

Book preview

Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States.

—Porfirio Díaz 1830 – 1915

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Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.

—Mark Anthony

The Inciting Incident

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ROBERT BOHNERT PUSHED through the second set of doors and was halfway across the bank lobby to Claude Rankin’s office when the old security guard realized something was up. The sudden movement of the guard leaping from his chair caused the two women tellers and the elderly Mrs. Langston, depositing a three-dollar rebate check, to turn and look.

In the next moment, everyone’s attention was drawn back to the entrance as Robert’s wife Tricia burst in, limp-stomping after him in one high-heeled shoe, the other clutched in her fist like a hammer. Her lips were drawn back in a snarl, hair coming undone, mascara smudged. Her belted dress shifted on the unbalanced bias of her hips as she stumble-swung across the lobby, one heel pinging on the tiles.

Before the tellers and old Mrs. Langston could comprehend what was taking place, and before the guard realized he was going to have to earn his keep, Robert reached Claude’s office and slammed the door back so hard the glass broke and fell out, crashing to the floor.

Claude, a big well-built man in his forties who had given up bull riding only two years before, rose straight up from his chair. He grabbed the trophy on his desk — a rider straddling a twisting Brahma bull atop a marble pedestal — as Robert soared across his blotter, carrying both Claude and his trophy backward, taking down the Texas and U.S. flags with their respective poles, plowing into a mural-sized map of Nolan County, Texas on the wall behind.

Tricia hovered over the two men, shoe raised, while on the other side, the old guard shuffle-footed in place, trembling, pistol pointed at the ceiling.

By now the tellers were desperately pushing alarm buttons and dialing 9-1-1.

The elderly Mrs. Langston regained her wits. A surge of exhilaration rushed through her as she realized a spectacular event was taking place right before her eyes, and she would be the center of attention at the Hardwater, Texas, Senior Citizens Recreation Center for weeks to come.

Robert and Claude struggled free of their mutual chokeholds, disentangled themselves from the flags and — bloodied, huffing for breath — awkwardly tried to protect themselves while slugging the other at close range. Tricia dipped in and popped Robert on the head with her shoe. The guard considered shooting his pistol into the ceiling, then reconsidered as they might hold him liable for damages.

Three policemen charged into the office, two with guns drawn. The third hooked his baton around Robert’s neck from behind, hauled him backward off of Claude, and slammed him to the floor. The other two cops were on him, forcing his arms up behind, snapping handcuffs on his wrists.

Tricia, eyes flashing, spit trailing, leaped in and tried to pop Robert again, but one of the cops grabbed her by the arm and hustled her out into the lobby. She stopped fighting, sagged against one of the marble pillars and began to cry.

Claude got to his feet and tried to kick Robert in the face, but Robert ducked aside just as the cop with the baton jerked him upright. Robert, hands cuffed behind, turned and kneed the cop in the groin. The cop folded and went down with a sharp suck of air.

Robert spun around just as the other cop charged, swinging the bull-riding trophy like a baseball bat. Robert ducked, but too late. An explosion of light flared and blinded him. My God! You done killed ’im! he heard the old guard shout, his voice going metallic into the distance as Robert pitched backward, the sudden ringing in his ears lost in an onrush of darkness.

1

Home Is Where the Heart Is

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ROBERT PUSHED AN old chug-popping lawnmower he had stolen from the maintenance shed, mowing his way back and forth toward the entrance to the state hospital. There wasn’t a gate, only two brick columns, one on either side of the narrow blacktop where it intersected Highway 87 on the outskirts of Big Spring, Texas.

The iffy patients were kept under lock and key, but Robert had exhibited model behavior in the week he had been under observation, and Dr. Eisenberg had pretty much given him the run of the place. Eisenberg had lost his grandparents at Auschwitz and perhaps had a built-in resentment against anything resembling a police state. And it had been the police who delivered him first to the emergency room in Hardwater and then to Dr. Eisenberg at Big Spring after the cops peeled his hairline back with a marble-based trophy. Robert saw the irony in it, that both Dr. Eisenberg and the police may have reacted differently had they known what he did for a living.

If Robert had entertained any hope that the Company might intervene on his behalf, he wasn’t surprised by their silence. After all, the CIA frowned on its operatives making public spectacles of themselves. Just as well. He was done with them anyway.

He took the plastic hospital bracelet he had cut off in the tool shed from his pocket and fed it through the mower with a short snapety-pop-snap sound. He idled the engine down, then knelt and pretended to tinker with the carburetor while scanning the compound. The grounds were empty but for an attendant standing watch over two wheelchair patients in a designated smoking area near the north end of the complex. Beyond, the sun touched down toward a stand of live oaks. Long shadows reached toward the maze of three-story redbrick buildings that comprised the hospital. The air smelled of the day’s heat, engine exhaust and fresh-cut grass.

Robert left the mower idling and slipped behind one of the brick columns where he stripped off the baggy pants and gray shirt with STATE HOSPITAL stenciled across the back. Underneath, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. He spotted someone watching him from a second-floor window. But the window was barred.

A hundred yards down the highway, he stepped off the shoulder and hid the rolled-up hospital garb in a clump of bristle grass along the fencerow. A hot dry wind lifted white caliche dust from the shoulder ahead, carried it toward him and let it down in silence. In addition to a natural absence of trees the scattered buildings on the outskirts of Big Spring were low and flat, pale with dust. Even the utility poles were invasive against the thin sky, and Robert felt singularly conspicuous — a lone figure on an endless plain, walking, in a part of the country where no one ever walked anywhere.

A roar like a distant waterfall sounded from a quarter of a mile farther on where Highway 87 intersected I-20 near a truckstop. The complex was already lit though the sun hadn’t quite touched down, dragging stringy red contrails in its wake.

A black-and-white patrol car sat nosed up to the curb in front of the adjoining restaurant. Any law officer seeing him would doubtless check him out — a man with a bandaged head, hitching the Interstate? If so, he was done for, having no identification and no money, his personal belongings confiscated by the Hardwater police, then transferred by a deputy sheriff to the Big Spring facility after his wife had had him committed for observation.

He sauntered past the patrol car, inhaling the smell of grilled hamburger and onions, hot asphalt and diesel exhaust. He crossed the access road and half slid down the embankment alongside the overpass to the I-20 shoulder below. He dusted himself off, then dodged across west- and eastbound lanes, traffic whooping past. A state highway sign on the eastbound side read: FORT WORTH – 258 MILES. He stood under the overpass looking toward the bridge abutment opposite, only the truckstop’s sign on its high pole visible above.

He stepped out from the overpass’s  shadow, thumb out. Traffic whipped by, the whappety-whappety-whappety of eighteen-wheelers on asphalt ridges, semis trailing heat-wrinkled exhaust from twin stacks.

Five minutes later a patrol car appeared in the distance behind. Robert considered making a run for it. But run where? The cruiser slowed, turned his overheads on, then eased off the pavement and came to a stop on the apron of dust-powdered grass between Robert and the frontage road atop the slope to his right. A city cop. Watching him steady through the open window. The radio making noise, somebody saying Jeff had just called in a ten-sixty-six over on the interstate.

The officer squinted. Evening, Where you headed if I might ask?

Robert took a step toward the car. Sure. Separation. About twenty miles south of Hardwater.

The officer eyed him closely. What happened to your head?

Got mugged. I’m trying to get home.

Identification?

Robert’s pulse had picked up, but there wasn’t a lot more anyone could do to him. That’s the thing, he said. They took my wallet, money, credit cards, everything.

Yeah? Where’d this happen at?

El Paso, he said, not thinking it through.

That got the officer’s attention — El Paso, Texas’s own backyard to the land of drug cartels and murder by the truckload.

Okay. Stand back. Put your hands on your head.

Robert did as told. Took my damn pickup too.

Spread your legs, the officer said, stepping out, right hand cupped over his holstered pistol. Put your hands on the car. Now!

He put his hands on the car. Why? What’d I do?

Okay, spread your legs. Hands behind your back. Easy.

You’re taking me in? For what? Getting mugged?

The radio was going again, a note of urgency in the dispatcher: Jeff? Anson? We got a two-one-one, guy with a sawed-off shotgun at the 7-Eleven on Birdwell. Repeat, this is a two-one-one, a thirty-three priority. Use caution. Repeat.

God damn, said the officer, looking at Robert, a moment of indecision as the dispatcher continued to issue orders for all units to converge on the 7-Eleven — a thirty-three, urgent.

The officer already had his handcuffs out, but replaced them in the cuff holster on his belt. He snapped the flap shut, opened the cruiser door and slid in behind the wheel — calling the dispatcher: Dispatch? Jeff here. I’m on my way. ETA five minutes — yelling back at Robert — God damn son, this is your lucky day. He threw the cruiser in gear and peeled out onto the Interstate east, lights flashing, siren winding out, traffic getting out of the way. A few hundred yards down, he braked hard, throwing up a cloud of dust as he skidded across the median back onto the Interstate west before shooting off onto the frontage road. Lights, siren, engine — wide open. The cruiser disappeared behind the embankment with only the truckstop’s sign visible above. Robert could hear the siren. Then another one in the distance.

Whoa. Thank you, thank you, Robert breathed, either to himself or to whoever was in charge of the fortuitous timing of human events.

He put his thumb out and within minutes a Silverado Crew Cab pulling a horse trailer braked and slowed to a stop. Robert trotted up alongside and hopped in.

The driver, a middle-aged Mexican in jeans and a shirt with snaps and piping, eyed him closely, wishing perhaps he hadn’t been so quick to stop.

Where to? The driver’s gaze lingered briefly on Robert’s bandaged head.

Hardwater. About sixty miles straight on down the road here, if you’re going that far.

Robert explained that he had wrecked his pickup and bunged himself up a bit. They talked ranching, the lack of rain, the pros and cons of miles and miles of wind turbines standing out across the country — ugly as hell, said the driver, unless you owned a dozen or so.

Robert spotted one Highway Patrol just off a side road, radaring traffic, and another coming out of Colorado City. But that was it. Darkness had closed over the long country when the driver pulled off near an overpass skirting Hardwater and let him out.

Thanks again, Robert said.

He walked steadfast in the lingering heat past shotgun houses of stucco and native rock interspersed with prefabricated metal buildings — pawnshops, insurance offices, auto repair. Crickets made gritty music from the shadows. June bugs banged over and over into the outside lighting, popped under the tires of traffic and smelled like burnt plastic. Staying to the shadows, Robert strolled past the darkened courthouse and skirted the Texas State Bank. In semidarkness he crossed the railroad tracks, the ground flagged with pinches of cotton from the cottonseed oil mill. He made his way through a neighborhood of rundown houses and barking dogs to where his pickup waited under a high porch fronting the old boarded-up Igloo Ice House.

He took a key from under the frame and unlocked the driver’s door, smiling now, seeing the cab full of cardboard boxes. He hadn’t realized he was hungry until the smell of fried chicken and homemade rolls caused his saliva glands to act up. In addition to chicken and rolls Ziploc’d beneath two towels, there were Tupperware containers of garden-fresh tomatoes, sliced cantaloupe, a big serving of peach cobbler and a quart Mason jar of tea, the ice melted. Three more boxes contained clothes and a Dopp kit with a safety razor, toothbrush, floss, aftershave.

An envelope taped beneath a box flap held ten hundred-dollar bills, ten twenties and a note:

Dear Robbie, I pray we are

all doing the right thing.

Let us know where you are.

We love you, Mom and Dad.

Robert sat for a moment, already missing the life he was never to have again — his parents, Tricia, little Nick. Robert visualized his four-year-old son in his room surrounded by his toys.

His son. Nick. Dead.

If only to stand once more in Nick’s little world, his personal space, to breathe some residual essence. And, since Trish and Claude were out of the country...

He folded the note into his pocket, then drove south out of Hardwater, chicken wing in hand. The loamy odor of fresh-plowed earth and the perfumed smell of wildflowers seeped through the air vents, stirring his memory — tractors and combines and long fields of red sorghum. 

In another twenty minutes he drove into Separation.

More than fifteen years before, he and the other FFA boys at the high school had put up a sign between the blacktop and the football field: GO MUSTANGS, and under that, SEPARATION TEXAS – POP 347.

On his left a brick schoolhouse and gymnasium stood back from the highway. On the right a general store, post office and cafe huddled shoulder to shoulder among a half-dozen little shoebox houses. Here and there a window was lit, TVs flickering behind drawn shades.

Five miles farther he slowed and turned in over a cattleguard near a mailbox that still had his name on it. As expected the house was dark. Empty.

He stepped down out of the pickup and stood in the yard, listening to the silence, gazing up at the Milky Way — a shower of crushed ice tossed across the night sky. He recalled a night some two years before standing on this same spot with a rapt Nick cradled on his forearm, both of them looking at a big full moon as Robert tried to explain it in terms of the autumnal equinox. But of course Nick was too young to— Goodnight Moon! Nick’s picture book. That’s the memento he would take.

He removed the spare key from behind the rain gauge on the stone fence and let himself in. Already the house was airless and smelled of dust. He turned the lights on, drawn immediately to the master bedroom where for five years he and Tricia had slept cuddled in intimacy, forever catching up after months of separation. His chest felt constricted. Hard to breathe.

He slid open the mirrored doors to Tricia’s closets. Her things were typically disordered. Expensive clothes wadded into closet corners, strewn on the floor. He smelled her intimate musky scent, experienced a moment of déjà vu, the two of them together.

Claude’s banking suits filled Robert’s closets. Neater than Tricia’s.

Robert stepped into the hallway and paused before his son's door. He braced himself for the emotional impact of standing once again among Nick’s things — his bed with its stuffed animals, the toy box with his trucks and balls and LEGO’s, the table with his Thomas and Friends train set — each item so identifiable with Nick that his very presence was palpable. Robert relived moments — tucking Nick in at night, the clean baby-powder smell, the eager, trusting eyes, the mop of unkempt hair.

He pushed the door open and stopped cold. It took a moment to accept that the room was entirely bare. Not a stick of furniture. Not a single Sesame Street poster. Nothing.

Robert stumbled back against the wall and slid to the floor, hugging himself, clutching his elbows. A grainy blackness began to materialize in the peripheral of his vision, drifting, floating down like a thin curtain of metal filings. He sat still, barely breathing, determined to keep his wits. The curtain began to dissolve and soon disappeared into nothingness. Willful, scrabbling on hands and knees, he managed to get to his feet.

He tore open Nick’s closets. Empty. He ripped through the hall closets, scattered blankets and sheets, towels, placemats, and tablecloths. He went through the boxes in Tricia’s closets.

No Goodnight Moon.

No anything.

Tricia’s Honda Pilot was parked in the garage. But his tools were gone. Table saw. Air compressor. Lawnmower. The pegboard above the workbench, empty.

Two cardboard boxes stood at the rear, stacked one on the other. Inside, wrapped in newspapers, he found cut-crystal bowls and porcelain platters that had belonged to his great-grandmother. Folded within a baby blanket was an eight-by-ten framed photo, one of those Olan Mills jobs with the soft background. In the photo Robert stood with Tricia, three-year-old Nick between. She was a beautiful woman, a blue-eyed brunette smiling with what he had once thought of as innocent seductiveness. They had sat for it the previous year when he was home on leave. Later, she sent a copy to him in Afghanistan and the Company forwarded it to his NSP address in Cairo — NSP: No Such Place. The photo had been signed: Love Always, Trish.

He took it back inside and propped it near the front door.

He lit six candles in the candelabras on the teak dining table. After propping open the French doors to the kitchen, he pulled the gas range out of its slot in the island, took hold of the flexible metal line behind and jerked it back and forth until a hissing noise jetted out and he smelled the rotten-egg stink of propane.

He took a last look around. Then picked up the Trish photo, locked the door on his way out, and replaced the key behind the rain gauge.

He was driving past the GO MUSTANGS sign when a flare of light blossomed on the horizon in his rearview mirror. Almost immediately a soft thud shivered the pickup.

2

Inner Sanctum

Three Years Later

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DUANE FOWLER SAT at the Louis XVI roll-top secretary in his study. The upstairs room was little more than an alcove in a large redbrick 1880s Georgian he shared with his wife Susan in Society Hill, an upscale neighborhood of tree-lined cobblestone streets near the downtown center of Historic Philadelphia.

It was a house he could scarcely afford, the desk a repository of accumulating bills Susan dutifully collected in an old Easter basket that she kept out of sight beneath the roll-top, awaiting his attention.

At forty-five, when many of his peers were already anticipating early retirement, Duane was wrestling with the specter of financial ruin. He hated the damn house, he hated the faggy Marie Antoinette French Provincial furniture, and at the moment he hated his wife and his two sons. Bankrupting him. His wife by way of Saks and Bergdorf’s, the boys by way of Yale and Purdue.

Shouldn’t you be getting dressed? Susan said.

She had stepped out of her bedroom into the hallway, tilting her head as she attached antique pearl earrings. At forty-three Susan was still a beautiful woman, especially striking tonight in a new black dress. He went a little mushy against his will. Truthfully, it wasn’t Susan he hated but the weakness he fell prey to in her presence. To his way of thinking, every relationship had its dominant partner. That was the guiding principle on which he had built his career within the confines of the CIA — you were either in charge or someone else was. And while it had been suggested that he might not be a team player, he hadn’t gotten this far by playing subservient. Susan was the only human alive capable of manipulating him, and then only because he cared too much for her. In his weakness he indulged her, then struck out at her in resentment. Susan. His Achilles heel.

He lifted the Easter basket with its mound of bills. Just how the hell do you expect to pay for all this?

Susan hesitated, her expression falling, beggarly. Please. Not tonight. Let’s do try to enjoy the evening.

He tossed the basket back on the secretary. You enjoy the evening. I’m not going.

Not going? But... the mayor, he’s expecting you.

Duane appraised her, remote, willfully cruel. You may be interested to know that your VISA and MasterCard are cancelled. Maxed out.

She paused. What’re you saying?

We’re flat on our ass broke. That’s what I’m saying.

She went pale, her whole stance suddenly altered. Duane, what’re we going to do?

I have no idea what you’re going to do. Me, I’m going back to the office.

But, the mayor, Violet... they’re expecting us...

Screw the mayor. Screw Violet too.

*

The office, as Duane called it, was a studio apartment in the Kensington District of Inner City Philadelphia, not all that far from Society Hill in terms of distance, but eons in every other sense. In spite of Philadelphia’s model program for the homeless, derelicts still panhandled the streets and slept in doorways. An inordinate number of the old buildings were boarded up. Even so, the studio had become more of a home — more of a refuge, actually — than the big Georgian with all its baggage.

Duane felt a small stab of guilty pleasure at having left Susan to attend the fundraiser by herself. On the other hand, he had prepaid the tickets and Susan did enjoy that sort of thing — the mayor and Violet, and the rest of that snobby crowd. A thousand bucks a plate? Who the hell did they think he was, Bill Gates?

*

One of the six dedicated phones near Duane’s office bedside rang. A nearby computer screen lit up. The green line. North Africa. That would be Abda Mufti — Eduardo Agustino, as Duane had known him at Georgetown University and then later as a fellow operative. Eduardo’s mother was Lebanese, his father a Mexican diplomat. Eduardo had managed to embed himself in a North African terrorist cell under his uncle’s name on his mother’s side.

Duane saw now that the call wasn’t from the Cairo sector after all, but was registering Cartagena on the coast of Colombia. His pulse quickened. He dug one knuckle at the sleep in his eyes, touched the incoming scrambler and picked up. Flax, he said.

Flax is fine but cotton is the thing in Cairo, Eduardo replied.

You’re out of pocket.

Get back to me.

Your number? Duane jotted it down, though he had it on the screen. Fifteen minutes, he said. He hung up and entered the number in the Company’s database. He hardly had time to pull his pants on when HOTEL SANTA CLARA CENTRO, PLAZA SAN DIEGO, CALLE DE TORO, CR 8... 39–29, CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, SOUTH AMERICA appeared on the screen.

Duane tucked a nine-millimeter Sig semiautomatic in his belt and pulled a sweatshirt on over. He keyed the three deadbolts on his way out.

The streets in the Kensington District were bleak in the first gray light. Delivery trucks clanged over manhole covers. An old Vietnamese man swept the sidewalk fronting a fishy-smelling delicatessen. A couple of derelicts huddled in a shallow doorway on scraps of cardboard in the chill air.

Duane ducked down a set of steps under the stoop of a boarded-up townhouse he had bought years before on the cheap. He unlocked the iron gate, deactivated the alarm, unlocked the deadbolts and switched on the lights to reveal a plain basement room with a small kitchen, TV, three computers, a shelf of phones and one office chair. Not so different from the studio office, except this basement room wasn’t connected to the Company in any way. It was his view that one couldn’t have too many layers of subterfuge. Not in the business he was in. Deception, artifice — the name of the game.

He tapped one of the keyboards. The screen blinked on and again displayed the name of the hotel and the number Eduardo had given him.

Duane dialed.

Eduardo picked up. Yes?

What the hell’s up with you?

Listen to me, Eduardo said, breathless, this is important.

Let’s have it.

You will please shut the recorder off.

Duane tapped the set lightly with a fingernail, affecting a click sound. It was a foolish contrivance as all the electronics were soundless. Nevertheless, if it gave Eduardo a sense of security... So, he said, we’re on override. What’s up?

It is what you call the old good-news bad-news scenario, so brace yourself.

Hit me.

I have been outed. That is the bad.

Outed— Shit, Eduardo—

But wait, there is good news.

Dammit to hell shit!

You and I, we have done some things in our day, but this is it. The big one.

Duane mentally withdrew, cautious.

Fowler, said Eduardo, I have had enough. I’m through.

What’re you saying?

This is no life. And you, you are not so happy either.

Hey, speak for yourself.

No, you listen to me, Eduardo said with growing excitement. We can help each other.

Duane paused. Good news? What’s the good news?

Are you ready for this? We just took down a De Beers courier, a priceless collection of rare diamonds en route from South Africa to Switzerland. We took them.

Duane was jolted by the sheer audacity of it. Shit, Eduardo. Those people, they’ll nail your ass before you can pucker good.

Several million dollars. But I need your help. The two of us, we can get out of this thankless business once and for all. How is that for good news?

Wait a minute... you’re saying you have the diamonds? Yourself?

Is this not good news?

Duane was aware of his accelerated pulse, all receptors alert to the potential for opportunity.

But you could dispose of them at any of a hundred places. Why do you need me?

This is true. But you are the only one to give me what I want in exchange. I want you to get me back into the States.

You have connections. You know how to manage that.

Not this. I want also for you to get my family out of Morocco into the U.S.

You have family in Morocco? He knew it was a mistake the moment he said it. Slow down, he told himself. Self-control. Think.

A small silence. Then: What are you saying? You know that.

Suspicion flickered in Duane’s mind at the sharp spike of anger evident in Eduardo’s tone. It wasn’t the first time he’d had such a moment with Eduardo. But then, everyone was suspicious of everyone. The nature of the business.

Of course, Duane said, trying to recall the particulars of Eduardo’s domestic situation. That can be arranged.

Listen, I have contacts in the diamond district in New York. You do this and we will split the take. The two of us, right down the middle.

Where are you now? Duane asked, though he had it on the screen.

Duane heard an audible sigh in the receiver. Are you in, or shall I look elsewhere?

And you have the diamonds?

Even as we speak.

Mm-hm. So not only is De Beers after you, but every terrorist in North Africa as well.

Are you in or not?

Listen, I’ll make arrangements and call you back.

No, no. I will call you. We meet on neutral ground. I’m thinking Acapulco. I will send information for birth certificates, legitimate citizenships. So, please, you will have everything in order when you arrive.

Duane couldn’t help but smile at Eduardo’s attempts at caution. Sure, he said. That’s doable.

This one is going to set us free. Free at last, free at last! Eduardo sing-songed in a Martin Luther King parody.

Call me. Two days.

Duane broke the connection, moved to another station, dialed again. He checked with two stringers, one in Cape Town, the other in Gibraltar. From Cape Town: Yes, a well-armed gang thought to be a splinter of some North African terrorist group knocked over a De Beers Consolidated Mines courier and got away with millions in diamonds. De Beers was keeping it out of the news. Bad press.

The Gibraltar call was less successful, but the stringer promised a callback. In the meantime, Duane checked out the Hotel Santa Clara Centro for any info not in the database: The hotel was once a convent — Don’t miss seeing the downstairs bar with its tombs, the copy read. Duane sighed. The world was full of irony.

He felt bad for what he was about to do. On the other hand, he visualized Susan’s cheerful smile, credit cards reinstated, heading off to New York for a day of shopping. He hated this in himself. This weakness.

In less than ten minutes the phone rang. Gibraltar: Yes, Abda