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“Thank you, sir,” the bellman said, “but it is not necessary.”

“Da,” Graham replied gutturally. “It’s only money.”

The bellman gave him a very odd look, but Graham pulled the door closed, gave the helicopter pilot the thumbs-up, and put on his seat belt. Moments later the seven-passenger chopper lifted off and headed to the east, out over the lake.

The shipping lanes were busy this morning. Graham counted at least twelve tankers headed north toward the narrows out to the Golfo de Venezuela, and at least as many still docked at their loading platforms strung out as far as the eye could see. This place represented Venezuela’s lifeblood, just as the Panama Canal represented the lifeblood of nearly half the planet.

He was the only passenger aboard the helicopter, and he closed his eyes for a moment to compose himself. He’d been tempted to get roaring drunk last night, like he’d done in the old days before he’d been kicked out of the Royal Navy. But he’d finished the bottle of Dom Pérignon and had left it at that. He was going to need his wits about him for the next few days, all of his wits.

But when it was over he would get drunk and stay drunk until the next mission. It was the only way he could live with his memories. If only she hadn’t died, if only she’d been strong enough for him.

THREE

GUANTANAMO BAY

Nine pale green, ghostly figures emerged from the drainage pipe at tower two east, hesitated for a moment as if they were expecting an ambush, and then headed south. They kept to the brush above and parallel to the no-man’s zone. Four of them were armed with what looked like Heckler & Koch carbines that the tower-mounted low-lux closed-circuit cameras picked up in reasonably good detail.

Lieutenant Commander T. Thomas Weiss looked up from the surreal images on his computer monitor and shook his head. No one in Ops had picked up on the break. There would be some serious shit coming down from above, of course, but it would be nothing he couldn’t take care of.

The CO, Brigadier General Lazlo Maddox, had already jumped his ass this morning, wanting to know, “What the hell in Christ was going on with security?” And he was just the first. The director of the Office of Naval Intelligence was sending down a hit squad to find out how Weiss had managed to screw the pooch so badly.

He turned back to his computer as Ibenez and Talarico emerged from the drainage ditch, and his jaw tightened.

“The CIA has no business here,” he’d told them ten days ago. “We’ve got the press snooping around, and if that isn’t enough of a headache, Amnesty International has inspected us three times in the past five weeks. Now you.”

“You’re naval intel, Commander, which means we’re supposed to work together,” Ibenez had said sweetly. “And as long as you can refrain from the obvious shit like they pulled at Abu Ghraib, and keep a lid on your people if something does go down, we’ll all be okay.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Weiss had shot back, his anger spiking. His boss had sent the woman’s jacket down last week, to give him a heads up, and it had chapped his ass that not even the Pentagon could stop the CIA from sending people to stick their noses into navy business. Not only that, they’d sent a woman who thought she was hot shit.

At thirty-two, Weiss was still in superb physical condition; he worked out nearly every day not only to keep the same edge he’d maintained lettering in football three years at Annapolis, but to keep his same physique that he knew women found attractive. He was six-two, at two hundred pounds; his face was craggy, what an old girlfriend had once said made him look stalwart. Along with snow-white hair and wide, coal-black eyes, he cut a dignified figure. It was an image he’d carefully cultivated since high school when he first realized that he was good-looking.

Weiss turned back to the digital images on his computer monitor, these now from the rescue helicopter’s nose camera, as the mujahideen incursion team opened fire on the prisoners they’d broken out from Echo.

As the helicopter came around for another pass, the first of the mujahideen committed suicide in a bright flash. “At least one kilo of plastic,” the chopper pilot reported. “I saw the same thing in Iraq.”

Weiss could not tear his eyes away from the screen.

In addition to the five prisoners and four intruders, three MPs were down, and the bitch’s partner had taken a round in the head. This was truly a cluster fuck, and a lot of heads were going to roll.

It was the navy way.

And so was covering your own ass. He was damned if he was going to take any heat because the CIA had come down here and fucked up.

* * *

Gloria Ibenez lay propped up in bed at the hospital while she talked via encrypted satellite phone to her boss, Otto Rencke, at Langley. He was in charge of Special Projects under the DDO. She’d been working for him nearly three years, and every minute of that time had been nothing short of amazing. And at times like these she felt close to him, as if he were her uncle, or a very longtime dear friend. She had a lot of respect for him.

“It wasn’t your fault, ya know,” Rencke said. “You were doing your job. Anyway, it could have been you taking the bullet. Would you have liked that better?”

Rencke was the most brilliant man she’d ever met. He was also the strangest, and at times, the sweetest person. He’d designed the CIA’s entire computer system from the ground up, but he seldom dressed in anything fancier than old blue jeans, torn and dirty sweatshirts, and battered sneakers that never seemed to be tied. Most of the time he came across as an aloof genius, his head in the clouds, his brain processing some esoteric mathematical equations, when suddenly he would come out of his daze, hop back and forth from one foot to the other with a big grin on his face, and tell you what a fine person you were.

“I was in charge, and I went against a direct order not to follow the prisoners outside the fence,” Gloria said. Her drug-induced dreams from the painkillers she’d been given last night had been like watching a sci-fi movie. She was inside Bob’s head when the bullet exploded in his brain. She’d seen a billion stars, but there’d been no pain. She hoped there had been none for Bob, but she couldn’t be sure and it was driving her nuts.

“Adkins got a call from General Maddox complaining about you,” Rencke said. Adkins was Director of Central Intelligence. “You must have struck a nerve.”

Gloria’s husband Roman Ibenez had been a good man, with a sweet face and a disposition to match. He’d fancied himself an opera singer and he did have a wonderful voice. But he was also a fine intelligence officer, and they’d made a great pair working together in Havana. Until the evening Cuban Intelligence Service operatives had stormed their apartment, and dragged him away. Gloria had gone around the corner to get a bottle of wine for their late supper and she’d stepped back into the shadows as Roman was being dragged down the stairs. She’d been close enough to see the look of resignation on his face. He was as good as dead; he’d known it and so had Gloria.

She’d been as helpless then as she had been last night, unable to prevent the death of someone she cared deeply for. And she didn’t know how many more times she could go down this path.

“Apparently I did,” she told Rencke. “But the prison break was a setup by someone inside who had the cooperation of the Cubans.” She’d already come to that conclusion last night, and yet she had led Bob under the fence. For what? Her ego?

“Okay, Gloria, what do you want to do about it? Stay down there and create some waves? See what shakes out?”