"Where'd it happen?"

"Poland. A meet went down bad - I mean, something just felt bad and I blew it off. My guy got away clean and I boogied the other way. Two blocks from the embassy I hopped over a wall. Tried to. There was a cat, just a plain old alley cat. I stepped on it, and it screeched, and I tripped and broke my fucking hip like some little old lady falling in the bathtub." A rueful smile. "This spy stuff ain't like the movies, is it?"

Jack nodded. "Sometime I'll tell you about a time when the same sort of thing happened to me."

"In the field?" Harris asked. He knew that Jack was Intelligence, not Operations.

"Hell of a good story. Shame I can't tell it to anyone."

"So what are you gonna tell J. Robert Fowler?"

"That's the funny part. It's all stuff he can get in the papers, but it isn't official unless it comes from one of us."

The stewardess came by. It was too short a flight for a meal, but Ryan ordered a couple of beers.

"Sir, I'm not supposed to drink on duty."

"You just got a dispensation," Ryan told him. "I don't like drinking alone, and I always drink when I fly."

"They told me you don't like it up here," Harris observed.

"I got over that," Jack replied, almost truthfully.

"So what is going on?" Escobedo asked.

"Several things," Cortez answered slowly, carefully, speculatively, to show el jefe that he was still somewhat in the dark, but working hard to use his impressive analytical talents to find the correct answer. "I believe the Americans have two or perhaps three teams of mercenaries in the mountains. They are, as you know, attacking some of the processing sites. The objective here would appear to be psychological. Already the local peasants have shown reluctance to assist us. It is not hard to frighten such people. Do it enough and we have problems producing our product."

"Mercenaries?"

"A technical term, jefe . A mercenary, as you know, is anyone who performs services for money, but the term most often denotes paramilitary services. Exactly who are they? We know that they speak Spanish. They could be Colombian citizens, disaffected Argentines - you know that the norteamericanos used people from the Argentine Army to train the contras , correct? Dangerous ones from the time of the Junta. Perhaps with all the turmoil in their home country, they have decided to enter American employ on a semipermanent basis. That is only one of many possibilities. You must understand, jefe , that operations such as this must be plausibly deniable. Wherever they come from, they may not even know that they are working for the Americans."

"Whoever they may be, what do you propose to do about them?"

"We will hunt them down and kill them, of course," Cortez said matter-of-factly. "We need about two hundred armed men, but certainly we can assemble such a force. I have people scouting the area already. I need your permission to gather the necessary forces together to sweep the hills properly."

"You'll get it. And what of the Untiveros bombing?"

"Someone loaded four hundred kilos of a very high-grade explosive into the back of his truck. Very cleverly done, jefe . In any other vehicle it would have been impossible, but that truck..."

" S ! The tires each weighed more than that. Who did it?"

"Not the Americans, nor any of their hirelings," Cortez replied positively.

"But - "

"Jefe, think for a moment," F lix suggested. "Who could possibly have had access to the truck?"

Escobedo chewed on that one for a while. They were in the back of his stretch Mercedes. It was an old 600, lovingly maintained and in new-car condition. Mercedes-Benz is the type of car favored by people who need to worry about violent enemies. Already heavy, and with a powerful engine, it easily carried over a thousand pounds of Kevlar armor embedded in vital areas, and thick polycarbonate windows that would stop a.30-caliber machine-gun round. Its tires were filled with foam, not air, so that a puncture wouldn't flatten them - at least not very quickly. The fuel tank was filled with a honeycombed metal lattice that could not prevent a fire, but would prevent a more dangerous explosion. Fifty meters ahead and behind were BMW M3s, fast, powerful cars filled with armed men, much in the way that chiefs of state had lead- and chase-cars for security purposes.

"One of us, you think?" Escobedo asked after a minute's contemplation.

"It is possible, jefe ." Cortez's tone of voice said that it was more than merely possible. He was pacing his disclosures carefully, keeping an eye on the roadside signs.

"But who?"

"That is a question for you to answer, is it not? I am an intelligence officer, not a detective." That Cortez got away with his outrageous lie was testimony to Escobedo's paranoia.

"And the missing aircraft?"

"Also unknown," Cortez reported. "Someone was watching the airfields, perhaps American paramilitary teams, but more likely the same mercenaries who are now in the mountains. They probably sabotaged aircraft somehow, possibly with the connivance of the airport guards. I speculate that when they left, they killed off the guards so that no one could prove what they had been doing, then booby-trapped the fuel dumps to make it appear to be something else entirely. A very clever operation, but one to which we could have adapted except for the assassinations in Bogot ." Cortez took a deep breath before going on.

"The attack on the Americans in Bogot was a mistake, jefe . It forced the Americans to change what had been a nuisance operation to one which threatens our activities directly. They have suborned someone in the organization, executing their own wish for revenge through the ambition or anger of one of your own senior colleagues." Cortez spoke throughout in the same quiet, reasoned voice that he'd used to brief his seniors in Havana, like a tutor to an especially bright student. His method of delivery reminded people of a doctor, and was an exceedingly effective way of persuading people, particularly Latins, who are given to polemics but conversely respect those who control their passions. By reproaching Escobedo for the death of the Americans - Escobedo did not like to be reproached; Cortez knew it; Escobedo knew that Cortez knew it - F lix merely added to his own credibility. "The Americans have foolishly said so themselves, perhaps in a clumsy attempt to mislead us, speaking of a 'gang war' within the organization. That is a trick the Americans invented, by the way, to use the truth to deny the truth. It is clever, but they have used it too often. Perhaps they feel that the organization is not aware of this trick, but anyone in the intelligence community knows of it." Cortez was winging it, and had just made that up - but, he thought, it certainly sounded good. And it had the proper effect. Escobedo was looking out through the thick windows of the car, his mind churning over the new thought.

"Who, I wonder..."

"That is something I cannot answer. Perhaps you and Se or Fuentes can make some progress on that tonight." The hardest part for Cortez was to keep a straight face. For all his cleverness, for all his ruthlessness, el jefe was a child to be manipulated once you knew the right buttons to push.

The road traced down the floor of a valley. There was also a rail line, and both followed a path carved into the rock by a mountain-fed river. From a strictly tactical point of view, it was not something to be comfortable with, Cortez knew. Though he had never been a soldier - aside from the usual paramilitary classes in the Cuban school system - he recognized the disadvantage of low ground. You could be seen a long way off from people on the heights. The highway signs assumed a new and ominous significance now. F lix knew everything he needed to know about the car. It had been modified by the world's leading provider of armored transport, and was regularly checked by technicians from that firm. The windows were replaced twice annually, because sunlight altered the crystalline structure of the polycarbonate - all the faster near the equator and at high altitude. The windows would stop a 7.62 NATO machine-gun bullet, and the Kevlar sheets in the doors and around the engines could, under favorable circumstances, stop larger rounds than that. He was still nervous, but through force of will did not allow himself to react visibly to the danger.