A cab pulled up at the curb, and she started forward.

He matched her stride for stride, and when they reached the taxi, he opened the door for her, then stood by while she moved past him to get in. At the last moment, he reached for her arm again, stopping her with a light touch.

She turned to face him, the obvious question on her lips, but he beat her to the punch.

“You’re making the right decision here,” he said. “I’ll let you know how it all turns out when I get to Denver.”

Classic strategy, reinforce the goal, which idiotically seemed to be that damned dinner date, once he wrapped up his whole trading-the-ancient-Egyptian-statue-for-the-intel-on-a-terrorist-sleeper-cell-in-the-heartland-of-America mission.

“I’ll hold my breath,” she said, her eyes unmistakably focused on him through the amber lenses of her sunglasses.

Cool, cool Suzi Toussi-he just shook his head and stood back as she finished getting in the cab, and he closed the door for her when she was settled.

Reaching in his pants pocket, he pulled out a roll of bills and thumbed off a few, then leaned down into the passenger side window of the front seat and handed the bills across to the driver.

“Gran Chaco,” he said. There was only one.

“Está bien,” the driver replied with a broad smile, noticing the healthy tip Dax had added to the fare. “Muy bien.”

Turning to look in the back seat, Dax had only one word for her. “Home,” he said, and he meant it. He didn’t want to see her in Ciudad del Este again. The congressman was out of luck on this deal-and really, when he thought about it, few things were scarier than the thought of a congressman looking for immortality.

She glanced at him over the tops of her sunglasses, and he figured that was as good as he was going to get. The message had gotten through. That’s all he wanted. He stepped back on the curb, and even after the cab pulled away, he stayed there, watching her leave.

Home-it’s what he’d said. It’s what he expected.

What he didn’t expect was to see a goddamn blue Land Cruiser with Jimmy frickin’ Ruiz at the wheel pull out of a side street and take off after Suzi’s cab.

Geezus. He was starting to feel like he was in the middle of a beehive, with all the worker bees buzzing around trying to steal the honey and snatch the queen.

Dammit.

Suzi or the Sphinx-it wasn’t really a contest, but one of those prizes was going one way, and the other-he hoped to hell-was still at Beranger’s. Or if it wasn’t, that’s at least where the trail would start.

Again, dammit.

He pulled his radio receiver out of the cargo pocket on his pants and started down the street at a fast walk, heading for his rent-a-Jeep, and trying not to draw any attention to himself. Ciudad del Este was the shopping capital of Paraguay, racking up billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise sales every year, most of it illegal. In the market, the streets were always packed, not just with shoppers, fruit sellers, guys hawking all kinds of crap out of handcarts, armed security guards for the big stores, and the occasional, oddly open-market drug dealer selling his goods off the hood of his car, but with hundreds of hormiguitas, “little ants,” men who made their living smuggling goods across the border on their backs.

Walking along, weaving his way through the crowd, Dax ran through the frequencies of the transmitters he’d hidden in the gallery. The one in the entrance was silent, which was to be expected, considering that everyone had already left the damn place. He checked Beranger’s office, where Ponce’s men had been discussing the new whores at the Colony Club, and got nothing but static; the same as in the junk room-so who knew what in the hell had happened in those two places. The last transmitter was in the main gallery room, what might be left of it anyway, after the police had trashed and crashed their way through it. He dialed in the frequency and listened, then came to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk.

There was something coming through, something very human-sounding.

Checking both directions, he waited for a break in the stream of shoppers, then made his way into the doorway of an electronics store to stand next to a burly security guard holding a pistol-gripped 12-gauge-and he listened.

Breathing, that’s what he was hearing, heavy breathing coming through the receiver, like someone was right against the transmitter. He was getting it all, a whole chorus of the raspy, rattling struggle, an inhalation of infinite, pained complexity. It could be Beranger. The man was not well.

The guy with the 12-gauge gave him a dark look, like he was taking up important space, and Dax gave him a half-assed smile and shrugged.

“Mi mujer,” he whispered, my woman, like there was just no help for this little moment of togetherness in the doorway. The security guy was not his fight.

He hoped the guy was nobody’s fight, not with him carrying a shotgun for curbside security. The streets and sidewalks were jam-packed full of people. If some cholo decided to steal something, the only safe place for a hundred yards was going to be behind the guard. Nothing in the wild, wild West back home could hold a candle to this place. There were no rules in Ciudad del Este.

Another sound came through the receiver, commanding his attention, a scraping noise echoing in rhythm with the breathing, like someone was getting dragged, like…like he didn’t know the hell who, but the visual he got was of somebody dragging Remy Beranger, who was breathing loudly, across the main gallery room to do…well, something horrible-that was the visual he got from the raspy, pained sound. He wasn’t an alarmist, far from it, but the gallery had been coming down around the Frenchman’s ears when Dax and Suzi had bailed off the roof.

Geezus. Whatever he thought of Remy Beranger, he needed the guy.

He looked down the street. The cab and the Land Cruiser were gone, but he knew where they were going-the Gran Chaco, and honestly, he didn’t doubt that Suzi could take care of herself at a luxury hotel, especially when she was packing a pistol, and most especially since it had been the SDF guys who had taught her how to use it. He knew guys like that. He was a guy like that, and guys like him not only would have taught her how to shoot, they would have taught her when to shoot, which in the case of self-defense was well and often, and quickly-very, very quickly. A couple of shots in a second and a half would do the trick nicely. Hawkins would have taught her that.

Beranger, though, he’d been about half done in every time Dax had seen him, and if that really was him breathing like that and getting dragged across the floor-well, then Dax had to do something, or he was going to lose the only person he knew who might have actually seen the Memphis Sphinx.

He looked up the street again, then swore under his breath. Half an hour, that’s all it would take for him to check on Beranger, get the damn Sphinx out of him if it was there to be gotten, and then get back on the road to the Gran Chaco.