Night was coming on, and the girls and the trash were coming out on the streets of Ciudad del Este. The town was full of movers and shakers and big bad ball breakers. Remy Beranger must have known it, and he should have known better than to let himself get killed.
“Jeemee,” the next girl said with a short laugh, standing hipshot next to a blue door. “Jeemee Hendrix.”
“Sí, cariño.” He smiled back. Yeah, darlin’-that was the voodoo child on his T-shirt.
And he kept walking. He’d spent over an hour at Beranger’s, almost two, trying to find the Memphis Sphinx, before he’d finally located the prize inside a well-hidden wooden crate. The lading document he’d found in Remy’s pocket had been a fake, but he hadn’t needed a lading document. He knew who had sent Beranger the Sphinx, and he knew why-bait.
To catch him.
The last of his grin faded.
It was no accident that the Memphis Sphinx had ended up in his backyard. He’d returned to Paraguay four years ago and made Ciudad del Este his home base, and without a doubt, the statue had been deliberately placed here by a knowing hand-a hand compelled by hope, by the hope that it could reach across the waters and the continents and close so very tightly around his throat, tighter and tighter, holding him down and letting him thrash and convulse, to hold him hard to the ground and strangle him, breath by missing breath, until he was dead.
Fat fucking chance. In this game, the spymaster had bet on the wrong boy.
But the bait was good-the Memphis Sphinx to lure Erich Warner to Ciudad del Este, and Erich Warner to lure Conroy Farrel back to his Paraguayan lair. Talk about chumming the waters. It all worked for Con, even with the rest of the high-class riffraff coming out of the woodwork for a chance at the ancient statue. Levi Asher, the fat man in the blue suit, and Suzanna Toussi, the auburn-haired woman, were definitely people of interest. He needed to find out about them. And the guy from the Mercado who’d gone in the back, off the second floor, and hauled her over to the Posada Plaza? The man Con had grabbed inside the gallery hadn’t known his name, but the Mercado guy was no street gangster. That guy had been trained to the breaking point. It showed in every move he made. It made him worth watching. But all any of them were ever going to find at the Old Gallery was the crate.
For what they really wanted, they were going to have to come to him now. He could feel the weight of the statue in the backpack hanging from his right shoulder, all four thousand years of it, and beneath his green shirt, he could feel his.45 on one side, and on the other the long, battery-packed composite barrel of his TacVector, ten pounds of Molecular Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, a maser, a virtual death ray he kept locked on stun, unless he needed it locked into “fry mofo” mode.
In most cases, if he wanted somebody dead, the.45 more than sufficed.
Immortality.
People needed to be more careful with what they wished for, not that he thought anybody was going to get immortality off a hunk of granite and gold with quartz-crystal eyes. No, that’s not the way it worked. Immortality, or damn close to it, came in a syringe these days, a lot of syringes and a pile of pretty pills, and nobody with half a goddamn brain would have asked for it, let alone chased it halfway around the world to Ciudad del Este.
Except for Erich Warner, who’d seen the syringe method up close and personal and had decided to bet his everlasting ass on the occult.
Con wished him good luck with that, the best, and given that he hadn’t gotten a shot at the bastard this afternoon, he was going to go all out to make sure Herr Warner had a chance to bask in the moonlit glow of the Sphinx’s rock-crystal eyes tomorrow night. The German needed protection, desperately, hopelessly, but Warner was looking for it in all the wrong places, and frankly, there were no right places. Nothing could protect him from Con, not the German’s whore, no matter how many knives she was wielding or pills she was popping, and not an Egyptian Middle Kingdom statue with a reputation. Quite the opposite. With the Memphis Sphinx baiting Con’s trap, Erich Warner was a shoo-in for catch of the day.
“Hola, chico,” the next girl in front of the Colony Club said. “Qué sucede?” What’s up?
Con smiled and shook his head. There was nothing about a fourteen-year-old whore in a Little Mermaid T-shirt and too much lipstick that did anything but make him move on.
People thought Ciudad del Este was such a hole-and they were right. But he’d seen worse places. He’d been in worse places, inside and out, and he could thank his enemies for that.
No shortages in that category, including the very cagey bastard in Washington, D.C., who’d sent the Sphinx to Beranger. Without a doubt, he’d stolen it from the Defense Intelligence Agency, because that’s where it had been for the last decade or two, a very ballsy move. Con had seen it there, and he was impressed, though he knew damn well that the spymaster wouldn’t have done it himself. The guy had a legion of pawns to do his bidding, some with that pitch-black CIA group out to kill Con this year, and last year, and next year, if he didn’t get to them first, and other guys with another acronymed group out of the Department of Defense.
Hell, Con had been one of those pawns once, along with a lot of other good men…good men who…
Yeah, good men who-that was as far as that thought ever went. He had a lot of thoughts like that, the kind that only went so far and never reached any sort of satisfactory conclusion. He’d learned to let them go, and like everything else, he’d learned it the hard way. It could be his middle name-Conroy Hard Way Farrel.
Lucky for him, most of his thoughts went the distance these days. Yeah, he was a lucky boy, especially this week. He had the Sphinx-which he knew played precisely into the spymaster’s grasping hand, to get him out of the shadows and into the open.
Girl Scout at two o’clock, holding up a BMW, all long legs, slim hips, and a serious green-eyed gaze.
“Con.” The girl pushed off the Beemer she’d been leaning against and fell in beside him.
“Scout.”
“You get him?” Her whole life was wound up in those three words, but she didn’t let it show. The question was casual, tossed off.
“He didn’t come to the gallery.”
She nodded once, not letting her disappointment show either, and that was just like his girl.
“What about the Sphinx?” she asked, easily keeping up with him, matching him stride for stride in a pair of camouflage BDUs and a white T-shirt.
“Got it,” he said.
She smiled at his news, a bright, wide grin that always did his heart good. The girl didn’t have enough of those.
“So what do we do now?” she asked.
“Does Miller have anything for us yet?” Miller was a guy in Nevada, a wounded vet with spooky computer skills. He could not only hack, he could chop, slice, dice, and, when needed, puree databases, all kinds of databases. Four months ago, when word of the Sphinx had first started hitting the streets, Con had tagged him to find and follow Warner’s private jet, to get locations and flight plans.
Scout checked her watch. “Last time I talked to him, he said to give him another hour, and we’re close to that now.” She pulled a phone out of a cargo pocket on her pants and speed-dialed a number.
The girl was twenty-two, lanky, brilliant, and tough enough, with café-au-lait skin and a head full of wild dark curls that nothing could tame.
“Scout,” she said, after a few moments. “You know what I need… Yes… Yes… Good… Yes. I’ll get back to you on that.” She hung up and met his gaze. “Miller’s got a lock on Warner’s location.”
“Where?”
“Just about where you said he’d be, within a couple of hours’ range-São Paulo, Brazil.”
For a second, Con had to work to contain the sharp thrill that ran through him. The monster was close-but not close enough, and there was no victory until Warner was dead.