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  He had been appointed to one of the top posts in Sword, a post that had, in fact, been created especially for him, with a commensurate raise that boosted him into an income bracket he’d never even considered within reach. Yet he felt a total lack of achievement or gratification, a gnawing absence of confidence that he was suited to the role. Making him, what, some kind of pretender?

  Because he knew how much faith was being placed in him by people he respected and cared for, how much rested on his shoulders, Thibodeau was ashamed of himself for feeling as he did.

  And then there was Tom Ricci, one of the most galling, cocksure bastards he’d ever met, always pushing fire. Thibodeau hated sharing the job with him, and to compound matters, was angered over the position he’d just been put in because of him. Of being forced to either nix or okay a move to which he’d vehemently objected when it was proposed and that he still maintained was wrongheaded, but that everyone else involved in the decision-making process had been convinced was worthy of a go.

  “On a trial basis, ” Pete Nimec had qualified when soliciting his approval. “With constant oversight. ”

  As he’d listened to him, Thibodeau had felt increasingly boxed in despite the repeated attempts to allay his concerns. Sometimes, he’d thought, one bad move could cost you the whole game.

  Now he clipped the end of the cigar with his Swiss army knife, forgoing the expensive double-blade guillotine cutter he’d received as a fare-thee-well from his crew in Brazil. Having been relegated to the back corner of a desk drawer, it was a gift that was much appreciated for the sentiments it represented but was also much too fancy for his liking.

  Thibodeau struck a match and lit up, carefully holding the tip of the cigar at the edge of the flame, turning it in his hand until it caught all the way around. Then he raised the cigar to his mouth and smoked.

  Looking across his desk at the empty chair where Nimec had sat only minutes before, Thibodeau again recalled his limber pitching style, so reminiscent of Megan’s approach that he’d wondered if she had been offering pointers.

  “We proceed either unanimously or not at all,” Nimec had said, after first relaying the news that Gordian and the others had come down in favor of establishing an RDT section. “Decision this important, it’s got to have your support.”

  Thibodeau’s reply was blunt.

  “My opinion’s what it is,” he said. “Don’t expect me to change it to suit the boss.”

  “Nobody wants that, Rollie. I’m here to see whether I can convince you to agree to this, not accede under duress.”

  “An’ Gordian?”

  “Gord shares some of your qualms, and he’s especially concerned about stretching the hospitality of countries where we might have to send in teams. You spent over a year in Brazil dealing with their government and law enforcement agencies—”

  “An’ way before that, a couple back-to-back tours of duty with the Air Cav commandin’ a long range recon patrol in Vietnam,” Thibodeau interrupted. “Choppers would drop us into enemy territory, we’d search and destroy. My units knew our mission an’ were the best at what we did. But the bigger mission, one sunk us into the war, that wasn’t so clear, an’ we both know how it ended.” He’d snorted with disgust. “Lesson learned, least by me.”

  Nimec was undeterred. “What I was about to say, Rollie, is we were hoping you could draw on your experience. Help to define the circumstances that would warrant launching an RDT into the field, stipulate the rules and constraints it would operate under to avert political incidents, and so forth. Give us a total strategic framework.”

  Thibodeau shook his head.

  “Say I ain’t willin’,” he said. “What then?”

  Nimec had looked him straight in the eye.

  “Then I walk out of here and into Gord’s office and report that the plan’s DOA,” he replied. “I said ‘unanimous,’ and I meant it.”

  Thibodeau was quiet. Nimec’s embracing reasonability was hard to argue with, but he couldn’t stop himself from trying.

  “An’ where’s Tom Ricci fit into the plan?” he asked. “What’s he supposed to do while I’m cookin’ up strategy?”

  Nimec had seemed prepared for the question. “My idea is for Ricci to concentrate on tactical issues,” he said.

  “Tactical.”

  “And on training,” Nimec added.

  Thibodeau wondered why that stung him. And tried not to show it did.

  “You discuss that with him yet?”

  “No, but—”

  “So how you know he gonna take to it?”

  “I don’t think he’ll object. The field’s where his talents would be best applied and where he’s most at home,” Nimec said. “It’d be a kind of dual-path approach, with Megan and yours truly coordinating.” He paused. “I recognize that you two have had trouble meshing, and for the present it seems like the most balanced, workable arrangement.”

  More silence from Thibodeau. Again he’d felt that he was groping for a reason not to cooperate.

  Nimec had moved forward in the chair opposite him, his hands on the edge of the desk, his gaze unwavering.

  “Come on, Rollie,” he’d pressed. “Give it a try.”

  Thibodeau waited another few seconds to answer, then expelled a relenting sigh.

  “Go ahead an’ count me in,” he said. “But I got my doubts. Mighty ones.”

  “Understood,” Nimec said.

  Thibodeau shook his head. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “This ain’t nothin’ between me an’ you, but I want my feelings on record.”

  Nimec responded with a quick nod.

  “It’ll be easy enough for me to note them in my memo to Gord and carbon copy it to you,” he said. “Settled?”

  After a moment’s further hesitation, Thibodeau had told him it was, more or less concluding their parley on a note of accord. Although that had done nothing to resolve the inner conflict he was experiencing — and still didn’t fully understand.

  He snapped back to the present, puffing on his Montecristo. As always, he enjoyed the rich flavor of its tobaccos, the mild tingle it left on his tongue. But why wasn’t it having its usual calming effect on him? Lifting away his cares in puffs of aromatic smoke?

  He pushed himself out of his chair, feeling a sudden need to get out from behind the desk. Fragments of his conversation with Nimec refused to leave his mind — one in particular — and he wanted desperately to shake it. To quiet the mingled resentments swirling around inside him like some sort of nebulous cloud, now swelling in his gut, now sending flares of heat into his chest.

  “My idea is for Ricci to concentrate on tactical issues. The field’s where his talents would be best applied… where he’s most at home. ”

  Thibodeau strode around the desk and paced the office with his hands behind his back, the cigar thrust straight out between his lips, smoke pouring upward from the corners of his mouth.

  Then, abruptly, he ceased to pace. He realized he was standing in front of his desk, staring at his heaping in box.

  Staring at it with eyes that burned fiercely with anger and frustration.

  Ricci. Tactical issues. Field’s where he’s most at home.

  His hand shot out with sudden violence, sweeping the in box off his desktop. It struck the wall with a crash, papers spilling from it, littering the floor. Thibodeau felt the vicious urge to take a giant rushing step over to the box and kick it across the room like a soccer ball, to stamp it to pieces before getting down on his knees and tearing up its scattered contents as he came upon them, flinging the tiny shreds of paper into the air, watching them drift down on his office furniture like tiny bits of confetti….

  And then he got hold of himself. All at once, got hold. The red haze of anger peeled from his vision to leave him looking at the strew of forms and documents that had flown from the overturned in box, his expression marveling and horrified, hardly able to believe his eyes.

  What had he done?

  What in God’s n
ame was wrong with him?

  Thibodeau stood there as if waiting for an answer.

  When it didn’t come after a long while, he knelt and slowly began gathering the papers off the floor.

  * * *

  In his navy blue blazer, olive golf shirt, and dark khaki slacks, Enrique Quiros might have been a particular brand of contemporary executive: Ivy League, thirtyish, perhaps the founder of some Internet-based corporation. The cut of his wavy black hair was short, neat, and un-fussy. The glasses through which his intelligent brown eyes peered out at the world were lightweight tortoise-shell with wire stems. His slender build was that of a careful eater and dedicated exerciser.

  He was, indeed, an alumnus of Cornell Business School. The prismatic lettering on the door of his third-floor office suite in downtown San Diego read Golden Triangle Services, a corporate name apparently referring to the area northeast of La Jolla, where it was clustered in among many of the city’s upstart, high-tech businesses.

  The office decor was bright and open, with smooth plexiglass surfaces, beige carpeting, some muted abstract prints on the walls, and a spacious conference corner where a pair of his bodyguards now sat on a raw-sienna leather sofa, looking respectable and respectful, eyeing Quiros’s visitor indirectly, as feral wolves might to signal cautious nonaggression.

  The slight bulges of the firearms hidden under their sport jackets would have been unnoticeable to the average observer, but Lathrop had discerned them immediately as he arrived for his appointment. He wasn’t at all bothered. The guns were solely for their employer’s protection, and Lathrop intended no threat. Also, he himself was carrying and had confidence he’d be able to take both men out before their hands got anywhere near their weapons, in the unlikely event of a problem.

  “Nice new office, Enrique,” Lathrop said, approaching his desk. “You’re moving up.”

  Quiros smiled and indicated the chair opposite him.

  “The economy chugs along, whistle blowing,” he replied. “Like everyone else, I try my best to ride the curve and, if possible, stay a little ahead of it.”

  Lathrop sat. He could remember when Enrique’s speech had been thickly accented with what they called Spanglish on the peninsula. This was before he had gone off to school, when his father was still alive and running the operation. Now he sounded like a TV news announcer, having acquired the flavorless pronunciation and intonation that was known as General American Dialect in college diction courses, absent any trace of ethnicity or regionalism. The benefits of a higher education.

  Quiros shrugged his wristwatch from under the sleeve of his jacket and checked the time.

  “You called just at the right moment, Lathrop,” he said. “A half hour later, and I’d have already left for an appointment.”

  “I won’t be long.”

  “Frankly, I was surprised to hear from you at all. You’ve been doing a lot of work for the Salazars, and it made me wonder if you’d chosen to give up your independence for steady employment.”

  Lathrop shook his head.

  “Freelance is more enjoyable,” he said. “Make your own rules, don’t have to ration your sick days.”

  Quiros was smiling again. “I’d have thought Lucio and his brothers would run a looser ship than your former taskmasters.”

  Lathrop shrugged.

  “Life gets confusing when people think they know things that they don’t,” he said.

  Quiros looked at him. “What do you have for me?” he said, dropping the banter.

  “Information more valuable than any dollar amount I can lay on it.”

  Quiros’s eyes came alive with interest behind his lenses.

  “If I can depend on its accuracy,” he said, “you can depend on being satisfied with my money.”

  Lathrop took a moment to review the latest modification of his story line. It was becoming a little complicated, and he needed to stay on his toes.

  “Four nights ago, your nephew Felix and his friends grabbed a shipment the Salazars were bringing up from Mexico,” he said, getting right to it. “I’m talking sixty kilos, maybe more, a major load. Took out a bunch of Salazar’s people and cut up a few of them to send him a message.”

  Quiros had immediately begun shaking his head in denial.

  “You’ve got to be mistaken,” he said. “Felix has been troublesome in the past, but doing something like that isn’t in him.”

  Lathrop shrugged mildly.

  “I’m telling you what happened. You don’t want the rest, fine.”

  Quiros studied him a moment, then gave out a long exhalation.

  “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  Lathrop hadn’t expected any other answer.

  “Since you started running with the top dog in South America, word from my sources is Felix has been acting like he’s untouchable,” he resumed. “When he got tipped off about the product that was being muled over, it hyped him up to where he couldn’t resist pissing in the Salazars’ front yard to mark territory.”

  “What are you saying? That knowing I’d be opposed to an action that rash, Felix went ahead and moved without my consent?”

  Lathrop nodded. “So you wouldn’t interfere.”

  Quiros was still trying to push off acceptance. “Felix is impulsive and sometimes acts in ways that aren’t very smart, but he has enough sense to realize I’d find out about the theft. And I won’t question his loyalty. If you’re suggesting he didn’t tell me because he means to keep the profits to himself—”

  “You didn’t hear me say that, Enrique. Maybe he figures to make a quick turnover on the product, impress you with a surprise jackpot. All I know is, he did this thing. I don’t know why he did it. And I’m not here to speculate on his motives or put myself in the middle of your family business.”

  Quiros was frowning unhappily.

  “Okay.” He produced a sigh that was even longer than the first. “What else can you give me?”

  Lathrop prepared to cinch his knot of deception.

  “Like I said before, Felix made a mess at the scene of the rip-off, but from what I hear, one of the Salazars’ men lived long enough afterward to tell who was responsible,” he said. The lie sounded good as it left his mouth. “Lucio holds you personally to blame. He can’t see Felix having the cajones to go ahead with something this heavy without you ordering it or at least giving it your blessing.”

  Visibly agitated, Quiros didn’t say a word for perhaps a full minute. The fingers of both his hands were outspread on the desk in front of him, arched as if he were pounding chords on a piano, pressing down hard enough to make them white around the nails.

  Lathrop waited. He was sure now that Enrique had bought his story, and could practically visualize the question forming in his mind. The trick was not to show he saw it coming.

  “I’d like to find out how Felix learned about the shipment,” Enrique said at length. Clearly, he understood that there would be dire repercussions if Salazar was truly convinced the hijack had been done with his authorization and if he didn’t move quickly to correct that impression. “Do you have anything on that?”

  Lathrop shook his head no. Convincingly. And thought about the meet he’d set with Felix to ensure Enrique never found out.

  “You want me to do the research?” he said.

  “It would be helpful.” Quiros abruptly checked his watch again and straightened. “We’d better put a wrap on this. I have to be going.”

  Lathrop’s head tilted back a little, the hinges of his jaw relaxing, his lips parting as if to taste the air. Upset as Enrique had been a second ago, he’d managed to compose himself — outwardly anyway — and Lathrop gave him credit for that. But the way he’d almost jumped from his seat when he looked at his watch seemed very peculiar. If the appointment he’d remembered was pressing enough to cut their business short, given the significance of what they’d been talking about… well, it would have to be pretty important itself, wouldn’t it?

  Damn important, in fact.
<
br />   Careful not to appear the least bit curious, Lathrop stood, told Quiros he’d be in touch, then turned and walked past the two bodyguards in the conference area and left the office.

  He was eager to find out what was in the wind.

  SEVEN

  VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 4, 2001

  For better or worse, Lathrop supposed it always had been his nature to look at the dark side of things. Probably, he’d been born with that disposition… an “insufferable gloom,” wasn’t that the phrase in the Poe story? Always, always, he’d been compelled to poke around under the rug or lift up the rock and see whether some secret nastiness might be exposed underneath.

  As he moved between the joggers and strollers on the path leading around the carousel in Balboa Park, Lathrop remembered reading somewhere — in his downtime he would go through stacks of books, gobbling them the way some people did potato chips — that in French, carrousel meant “tournament,” while the Italian word carosello translated to “little war,” giving origin to the English carousel when one of the later crusading armies, composed of knights and mercenaries from throughout Europe, went marching off to relieve their boredom through a healthy dose of bloodshed and noticed that Ottoman Turk and Arab cavalrymen would practice their lancemanship by charging toward a tree on horseback and trying to jab the weapon’s tip through a ring hung from a branch. When the industrious European warriors brought the idea back home — those who hadn’t been slaughtered because they were too wasted from drinking and debauchery to put up any kind of fight — the tree became a rotating pole, and the real horses became wooden mounts that got cranked around by a chain-and-mule contraption, but the purpose of the whole rigmarole was still a martial exercise.