CHAPTER THIRTEEN

All Suzi wanted was to get the hell out of Ciudad del Este, but from what she was looking at, she wasn’t going to be getting what she wanted anytime soon.

Jimmy Ruiz must think she was a total idiot.

“Twelfth Dynasty, you say?” She looked up from the “Memphis Sphinx” he’d set on the coffee table in her suite, the one he’d taken out of a padded leather bag and carefully arranged next to a thick stack of papers he’d also taken out of the bag. For the record, he looked like hell, even more frazzled than when she’d last seen him at the gallery.

For the record, she knew she didn’t look much better. She’d torn her skirt, lost a button off her jacket, and scratched her face, up high on her cheek, all while getting out of the gallery window. She’d also broken a nail and had barely had time to wash God knew what off her feet before Ruiz had come knocking on her door.

“That must make it…how old?” she asked.

Her beautiful peep-toe pumps, needless to say, had been ruined by their immersion in Paraguayan garbage. She’d lost her hat, and her hair had all but completely fallen out of her French twist.

She felt absolutely straggly. Cripes.

“Hundreds and hundreds of years old,” the young man said with amazingly misplaced confidence.

Try four thousand years old, she thought, refraining from a weary sigh. She’d had a long day, coming off a long night and a long flight, and for a few brief moments, before Ruiz had unveiled his fake statue, she’d hoped her job here was done, and not only done, but done exceptionally well. She wouldn’t have simply located the darn Sphinx, she would have had it in hand, saving Dylan, and Hawkins, and any other wild boy down here running around Paraguay the trouble of stealing it, and from what Dylan had told her when he’d contacted her this morning, she knew there were a couple extra SDF boys in country and headed her way, maybe already in the city, and it was a good chance the two of them would be tagged for the snatch-if she could verify the Sphinx’s location.

Which she had not done.

Dammit.

So much for her moment of mission glory. Ruiz’s fake had sealed her fate. She was doomed to at least one night in Ciudad del Este, and from what she’d seen so far, that was about as sketchy a situation as she’d ever encountered. She was damn glad to have a 9mm. Ruiz at least hadn’t let her down in that department.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking at the statue, and that was the truth. The artful amalgamation of plaster, composite something-or-another, paint, and plastic was very sleek, very well executed-except for the flat-out dead giveaway of the bottom of the statue. Anyone who turned it upside down was bound to notice the letters and numbers written in black marker on an unpainted patch of white plaster on the base. This one said GV 3/5, which she was sure meant that Galeria Viejo had ordered five of these babies made. She had to admit that the blue stamp of the Great Sphinx of Giza next to the numbers made the whole thing look very official-if four thousand years ago Sesostris III had commissioned a plaster sphinx.

He had not.

The legend of the Memphis Sphinx, and Howard Carter’s notes, distinctly described a granite statue.

Granite. Not plaster.

“You have the money?” Ruiz asked.

God, he really did think she was an idiot.

“Half a million American? Right?”

“Así es. This is correct.”

“It can be arranged.” Not that she was going to bother. “I’ll need a couple of days to authenticate the statue, and also a bank account for the deposit.”

“No,” he said adamantly, shaking his head and leaning over to pick up the papers he’d laid on the table next to the Sphinx. “No. There is no time for waiting. The documents for the statue are all in order, and the money, it can be transferred through my cambista. Everything inmediatamente.“

He handed the papers over with a small lift of his head, as if to say, Read them, read them now. This is all very perfect.

She accepted the documents with a brief smile and quickly glanced through them, duly noting that they appeared very authentic, very official, complete with tea-stained edges and lots of rubber stampings in various colors of ink. He and Beranger must have been busy as a couple of beavers getting their scam together.

And Ruiz’s plan with the cambista, well, that would definitely speed things up, to use the underworld freeway of cash transactions. Bags of cash given to a cambista entered the cambio pipeline in one country and, with a few phone calls, would be matched by the same amount of cash in another country, minus a sizable commission.

“I don’t believe the congressman will be willing to deal with…” Hmmm, with a moment’s reflection, she revised her original thought of a bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, money-laundering lowlife to something with a bit more cachet. “With anyone who might be running afoul of the law. He wants the Sphinx, not a scandal.”

She also didn’t know where in the world Ruiz thought a United States congressman would come up with half a million dollars in cash inmediatamente. That kind of money was always dirty.

He looked at her with a dubious expression on his face, as if he couldn’t believe whom he’d been stuck with on this deal.

She knew the feeling.

“You do know that this statue is worthless after Sunday night?” he asked.

Actually, the statue on the coffee table was worthless now, despite the little batch of provenance papers he’d given her, but she went ahead and nodded. “Yes, I understand that some people believe a certain alignment of cosmic forces on Sunday night can be channeled through the Sphinx.”

“And you don’t believe?” For the first time since they’d met at lunch, he sounded impressed.

“I believe in acquiring for my clients whatever they hire me to find, Señor Ruiz, and I let them believe whatever they want, as long as I get my cut of the deal.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, and she could practically see the gears turning in his mind.

“I have the same beliefs, Señora Royal,” he finally said. “And I have a lot of connections for finding these sorts of mystical objects.”

She just bet he did-starting with Remy Beranger and whoever had manufactured the knock-off Sphinx sitting on her table.

“What I no longer have is a partner with connections to buyers in the United States.”

Well, that was damned interesting. General Grant hadn’t mentioned that the U.S. Treasury agent currently in custody for tax evasion and treason had also been hustling antiquities-talk about a mixed bag of felonies.

“Perhaps if we can negotiate an…arrangement,” he concluded.

An arrangement. Sure. She could do that, if it enabled her current mission to go forward to a satisfactory conclusion-which it just might. She sure as hell didn’t have the Memphis Sphinx yet, and all signs pointed to the real thing being in this damn town somewhere, despite the fake Ruiz had delivered.

“An arrangement could be negotiated,” she said.

“Then you should call your congressman. I can give you the name of someone he can deal with in Illinois, someone who can accept the cash. Chicago or Springfield, his choice.”

She shouldn’t have been surprised. Given the size of the world’s black-market economy, which was huge, every state in the Union was probably knee-deep in cambistas shoveling drug money in and out of the country, and her getting the name of one of them from Jimmy Ruiz was not such a bad idea. Half of what she always got for General Grant was somebody’s name, but Jimmy Ruiz getting any money simply wasn’t going to happen. She could make a phone call, though. She could always make a phone call.

She walked over to the suite’s bar to get her cell phone out of her purse, when the room phone rang, its soft beep and discreet blinking giving her a moment’s pause.