“Yeah, but she lost that one in Ukraine, and I think she took it real personal.”

She had. Creed knew it for a fact. His wife, Cody, did a lot of footwork for Suzi on the girls, and more often than not provided tactical support. But Cody hadn’t been able to get into Ukraine three months ago, some problems with her passport, the Ukrainians had said. Some problems with her past, was what she and Creed and Suzi had figured, and maybe some trouble with what she and Suzi had been doing the last couple of years in that part of the world. Cody and Suzi had decided to abort the mission-but the girl, some little southern chick, had not been able to keep her cool, and her house of cards had tumbled down on her real hard. She’d ended up dead, and Suzi had ended up finding her, and it was just a big mess, with everybody feeling guilty, except Viktor Kravchuk, the guy who had killed the girl. Creed could guarantee Viktor had not lost a wink of sleep over the murder. There was nothing weighing on that guy’s conscience.

Suzi, though, she’d gotten herself all locked up over Lily Anne Thompson. She was tough, though, he’d known that about her for a long time. She’d work it out.

“I don’t like it,” Dylan said, looking at the cigar before putting it back in his mouth and puffing on it quietly, looking around, thinking. That’s what the boss did best, thinking.

After a few moments, he took the cigar out of his mouth and blew out a large cloud of smoke.

“I’m changing the lineup,” the boss said. “I don’t care how good she is, I want her out of here. Grant gave her an RFID scanner to pick up a signal off the statue, and I want you to go get the scanner, get Suzi on a plane out of Paraguay, and get back here. We’ll do what we can with the DIA’s magic sphinx business, but Farrel is here, right now, and he is our priority mission.” That was a set of orders, not a string of suppositions, and Creed didn’t misunderstand for a second.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

And that was the right answer, the only answer Creed had, no matter what Dylan asked him to do.

Suzi followed Dax into the gloomy interior of the Galeria Viejo. She knew she’d shown her hand by taking out the scanner, but she hadn’t had a choice. The day’s events had narrowed her options at a dramatic rate, and she wasn’t about to search this damn place by herself in the dark, even packing a pistol. Oh, hell no, but she still needed a solid hit on the scanner. From there, one phone call would complete her mission-maybe. If the SDF operators wanted eyes-on, she’d give them eyes-on, if she could, but if it got to eyes-on, it was going to be hands-on, and one set of those hands was going to belong to Dax, and her money said he wasn’t going to play nice and let the girl have it, even if he had kissed her.

Fifty-fifty. Right. He’d been lying, too. Nobody cut a fifty-fifty deal on immortality-and that’s what everything was about. Not the inherent value of an ancient antiquity. Not its historical significance. And not its price on the open market.

Everyone was in Paraguay because of what the statue was supposed to be able to do tomorrow night.

Carefully picking her way across the floor behind him, she really did wish she was anywhere else in the world. The stench was awful, and she could hear the loud buzzing of flies in the dark.

God, she didn’t even want to imagine what they were doing.

Ahead of her, Dax swung the beam of his flashlight around the room, and for a second, it followed along the edge of Remy Beranger’s body.

Oh…my…God. A wave of heat washed through her, and she was afraid she might be sick.

Dax had warned her. So help her God, he’d warned her.

Beranger, that skinny, sick little man, was dead on the floor, his body covered in a flying, buzzing, crawling cloud of flies.

General Grant was going to owe her tactical support for a year for this.

“I’m… uh, going to go search the office,” she said, backing away from the body, trying to talk and not breathe.

“Good idea. If you hear or see anything you don’t like, call out. When we’re done on this floor, we’ll head for the basement.”

Oh, hell. A basement. She didn’t even want to think about a damn basement.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

There oughta be a law, Dax thought two hours later, tilting his head slightly to one side.

“You’re shining your flashlight on my ass,” Suzi said, bent over a stack of crates in Beranger’s basement.

Yes.

He was.

“No, I’m not. I’m looking for the Sphinx. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me where you got this scanner?” he said. “Because I think we should file a complaint.”

“I told you I thought it might be broken.” She sounded even more frazzled than she looked, which was plenty, and yes, she’d given him her opinion on the scanner, but the more he looked around, the more he was beginning to think it was another problem at work here.

He sure as hell hoped so, because there were hundreds of crates in Beranger’s basement, a lot of them sitting in water, and he’d be damned if he wanted to be down here long enough to look through all of them.

“Dammit,” she muttered, sorting, and bitching, and griping, and moaning.

She was on the edge.

He was, too, actually. The day was getting too damn long to be trying to get through it on what he’d had for breakfast and a bag of chips.

She tossed another piece of junk off to the side, and he got hit with the splash-not that it made any difference, not at this point.

On its lowest level, the Old Gallery had turned out to be a swamp. He and Suzi had been sloshing their way through floating junk and whatnot for half an hour, after spending two hours searching the upper floors, and in his book it was all starting to be about two and a half hours too long.

He slid the beam of his flashlight off her lovely backside and up to the ceiling. It took effort. Looking at her ass was the closest thing to a pick-me-up he’d had since they’d gotten here.

“Tell me again the sequence of events when you were standing next to Beranger in the Chapel Room.” There was something here, something niggling at him.

Three meters, that’s what she’d given him as the scanner’s range-nine feet, ten inches.

“It blinked twice, then I took a couple more steps, stopped, and after a minute or so, the GPS locked in a position.”

He swung his flashlight back to her. She was standing outside one of two floor-to-ceiling wire mesh cages in the basement, one cage for each concrete cistern built into the floor-the overflowing cisterns. Both of the cages had stacks of crates and boxes and junk piled around the outside and nothing inside besides the cisterns. When he shone his flashlight down on them, he could see the pumps that should have been emptying the water out. Of course, if those things had been working, his boots would be dry.

Still, it was the wire cages that finally clicked into place.

“Well, Sugar, it could be that the statue was here when you first arrived.” He sloshed over to where she was standing and stepped inside the open door of the first cage with the scanner in his hand.

Nothing registered, and he waded over to the other cage. The mesh was too fine for him to stick the scanner through, so he swung that wire door open as well and checked to see if the scanner registered anything inside.

It didn’t.

He looked back up at the ceiling. It was low, seven feet maximum, which when she’d been standing next to Remy had given her a range from the floor of the basement to almost three feet above the floor of the Chapel Room. He swung his flashlight beam back to where she was standing, plenty of room to catch a signal, and the door on the cage she was next to had been open when they’d entered the basement.

“You got mixed signals, because when you first arrived at the gallery, the Sphinx was inside the cage where you’re standing now,” he said very matter-of-factly even though he was impressed as hell with himself.