was so hoping for Third World electronics.” Max finally sat up.
“Not a chance. This place is wired up like the White House.”
Only Logan’s gaze moved, indicating the camera secured to the corners. Their identities were compromised and although it would be very difficult for them to get a face or fingerprint match, parading them before the press was the least of their problems.
If they learned they were Americans, the U.S. was screwed.
Hours later, when the cell door scraped open and the guard held a jangle of leg irons, Logan knew—they were, too.
Four
A knock startled him and Eloisa quickly answered it, throwing the door wide. Sexually satisfied without removing a stitch, she was almost eager to be gone. It amused Ramos and warned him that she used him as well…enough to not notice he wasn’t Garcia.
“I have a few questions,” a deep voice said from beyond the door, and Ramos frowned.
Eloisa nodded and waved the man in, then looked back. “I’ll leave you two,” she said. Ramos caught the Cheshire cat smile she threw him before she disappeared.
The man stepped into the room and Ramos recognized him. Not from a past meeting but from a photo in Garcia’s files. Diego Salazar. Ramos knew he was looking at his own counterpart. Highly trained and well funded, Salazar was deadly. Not in his skill but in his cunning use of power. If Garcia was to be believed, this man worked several sides of the box at once. He was in the hip pocket of the President, which meant his loyalty stretched to Eloisa. It was rumored he was once an advisor to Fidel, and was an intelligence officer.
Salazar would be his biggest opponent because he’d once served with Garcia. Ramos knew Garcia’s enemies, and Salazar was one of them.
“Questions?” Ramos asked with authority. “Shouldn’t you be learning how they got past your men, Commander?” He didn’t want this guy anywhere near Logan and his teammates.
“I will see to that personally, señor. What were you doing in here alone?”
“Reading.”
“And you had no suspicion that these men would attack?”
“No, or I would be armed. Protection is your job, Salazar.”
The man’s features sharpened. The only sign the reprimand had hit the mark.
“If it were anyone else, I’d be dead.”
Salazar opened his mouth and Ramos put up his hand. “Enough. Let me clarify it for you.” He stood and, forcing an iron grip on his balance, he walked to behind his desk. He’d be damned if he’d let this man see him fall. “I was reading and they appeared from there.” He pointed across the room to a set of doors he knew led to the roof. He assumed they came in that direction. It was the least patrolled. “No, I did not speak to them, and the moment I saw them, I hit the alarm.”
“Wise, wise,” Salazar said, rocking back on his heels. “They gave you that?” He indicated his swollen nose.
“Obviously.”
Salazar wasn’t ruffled and moved to the window, brushing back the curtains, then peering out to the grounds below. He studied it at length, and Ramos frowned. Salazar couldn’t have seen her.
“Find out how they got in here, Commander. Now.”
Salazar glanced from under a lock of black hair, his smile almost fiendish as he straightened to attention. He did it slowly enough to be insubordinate and Ramos met his gaze, warning in every fiber. He wouldn’t mince words with this man. He meant nothing to him and for a breath of time, Ramos thought, Is that what I’ve become?
“You have your orders.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll leave you to your…recuperation.”
Ramos sat at the desk, shuffling papers, effectively dismissing him. He didn’t look up as the man exited the room. All his hope lay in Tessa getting cleanly away with the map. If Salazar had seen her, he’d hunt her, and the results wouldn’t be pretty.
Eloisa threw off her suit jacket, tossing it to a servant as she hurried toward her rooms, cornering the halls. At her bedroom, she threw open the doors, striding briskly to the nightstand. She lifted the inlaid wooden box, then sitting on the bed, she drew it to her lap.
Gold and pearl dragons sprawled across the box and for an instant, she admired the puzzle within a picture, then glanced around at her own collection before coming back to her most prized. She pressed the eyes of the dragon, then swept her finger against the grain of the scales carved from mother-of-pearl. The head popped up, the claws springing from the sides of the box. She flicked them upward, then turned the box counterclockwise twice. She pulled the head and the box opened.
She stared down at the empty silk lining, her heartbeat increasing as a wash of heat swept her skin. She looked up, searching the room for anything disturbed. Everything was as she’d left it. Her maid wouldn’t have attempted this, too stupid to understand the mechanisms. The only person who’d been in this room was her husband and he hated her puzzles. Enough that he’d banned them from the rest of the house. Anger boiled in her. It had been safe, under her control. Was this box a replica? she wondered briefly. She had the only one in existence that could have been copied.
She reversed her moves to close the box, then set it carefully back. Her hands shook as she realized what this meant. For her, for Venezuela.
There was a total news blackout on the assault, everything wiped away. For an attack on the private residence, the buzz was pretty low-key. Good that the world didn’t need to know about it, and bad if no one pried, because then Logan and the others would just cease to exist. Tessa knew this was foolish, but she couldn’t let them go to some prison. For hours, she’d sat in her car and watched the residence. A few of the reporters had remained, and she’d camped out with them on the lawn across the street, using her NGS credentials to chum up.
When figures finally appeared, being led to a black van, she’d had to get two sleeping men off her car to follow. The van was moving slowly and she pushed on the gas to catch up. The little VW screamed up the road, and she drove two streets over and parallel, thinking if she could get ahead of them, she’d have a great plan by the time she got there.
Man, she really missed the cannibals.
“Who are you?” Joe McGill held a cleaned-up photo of the woman that had been fed into the computers for a match. It wouldn’t take long. She had a bewitching face and wouldn’t be hard to spot. But the only people he could send after her, for the moment, didn’t exist.
He glanced at the link to Dragon One. Dead air. They had intelligence only from the outside, from above. Satellite and thermal imaging. A cluster of thermal images put the team in the basement level of the estate next to the boiler room. That told McGill the area wasn’t normally used as a prison. No one would put felons next to the one spot where they could blow the building back to the Incas.
He tossed the photo aside and watched the satellite reposition itself as another picked up the feed. There was a minute span where alignment gave them garbage between two screens, yet he watched it just the
