“Positive identification. That’s Suzi,” Dylan said.

“And Farrel?” Hawkins asked.

“Who looks a lot like our boy,” Dylan said. “A helluva lot.”

Sonuvabitch, Creed thought, and he knew he was thinking it for all of them. No way should Suzi have ended up in the company of a man who’d killed four CIA agents, two of whom were still rotting in the jungle.

“We shouldn’t let this play out all day,” Hawkins said, looking up from his scope at Dylan. “I say we offer this guy a deal, our girl for his girl, and hit him with the tranquilizer gun while we’re talking. We get Suzi, we get this guy, and we go home.”

“Aye, aye,” Creed whispered, flat on his belly, watching everything in the compound and the house below. They were all keeping their voices down. “I’m with Superman.”

“And you’re both with me,” Dylan reminded them, unnecessarily and sounding a little snappish in the heat. “We’ll hold our-” The boss stopped talking and turned his head, listening. They all fell silent.

Dylan signaled for Creed to move out. They could all hear it, a boat coming up the river.

Suzi’s Big Day-God, if she’d kept a diary, she would have written those words at the top of the page.

Costa del Rey, that’s what he’d told her, the name of his home, King’s Coast. He’d also told her his name was Conroy Farrel, but that she should call him Con.

Conroy Farrel, for the love of God.

He pulled a chair out for her, and Suzi sat down to a beautiful meal laid out on an exquisitely crafted teakwood table. Warm croissants, sliced bananas, fresh pineapple, rich coffee with cream, petite filets mignons grilled to perfection, sliced cheeses, scrambled eggs-it briefly crossed her mind that maybe she should get kidnapped more often.

It also, more than briefly, occurred to her that the gray backpack lying on the table might hold the answer to all her problems. It was so out of place on the elegant table, and without a doubt, it was there for a reason.

She took a sip of coffee and helped herself to a wafer-thin biscuit with a tiny dollop of crème fraîche topped with some kind of tropical fruit preserves on it, all while safely ensconced in a beautifully cushioned rattan armchair, under a gently wafting, slowly whap-whap-whapping ceiling fan.

Heaven would be like this-quiet, subdued, wood floors, stone walls, teak paneling, slatted ceilings, white furniture, and big windows framing a tropical forest and a slow-moving river.

She’d woken up to the sound of birds singing, her room flooded with sunlight, and her window open onto a large wooden deck. There had been clothes laid out for her on the edge of the bed, a white T-shirt, khaki pants with a leather belt, and on the rug, a pair of flip-flops and a pair of canvas boots and cotton socks, none of it new, but all of it spotlessly clean, with the clothes pressed.

She’d awakened twice more in the night, and every time he had been sitting quietly in the corner of her room, next to the fire, an oddly comforting presence, and every time, she’d drifted back off to sleep, the day’s exhausting cares and woes lifting off of her, becoming burdens of the past, not of the present.

He had the most soothing voice, deep and calm and certain. The voice had not changed, not since she’d first met him.

There had been a girl in the night, too. A young woman, no more than mid-twenties, by Suzi’s estimation, she’d been tall and lanky with a wild mop of curling dark hair, and Conroy had called her Scout, but Suzi hadn’t seen her this morning.

“Suzi,” he said, “Suzi Toussi,” as if he simply liked the feel of how it rolled off his tongue.

He didn’t smile much, but when he did, it was dazzling-a quick grin, a boyishly lopsided curve of white teeth accompanied by a twinkle in his eye. He had that kind of eyes, dark hazel and utterly depthless, like the stars and the cosmos were in them, and when he grinned, she felt like she could see all of it, all the way down through the ages of the universe.

“I realized last night that I had made a mistake,” he continued. “And I usually don’t.”

She believed him. He wasn’t the type to make mistakes, never had been, and yet things had happened to him, bad things, and they were easy to see-the scars on his arms, the scars on his neck and face. Interestingly, they didn’t mar his looks. He was as beautiful as he’d ever been, and J. T Chronopolous had always been a beautiful man-tall, and strong, and muscular, his face cleanly chiseled, an older, tougher-looking version of his brother, Kid Chaos.

“What mistake?” She wanted to know everything, especially what had happened to him. Just looking at him made her heart pound. He was a friend, a street runner from way back, one of the best of a crew of former juvenile car thieves who had become Special Defense Force. She and J.T. went back years, and yet not even the faintest glimmer of recognition lit his eyes when he looked at her.

“You’re not the one I should have taken last night,” he said.

Well, it was hard not to agree with that, but she went ahead and asked.

“Why not?” Good Lord. She’d gone to his funeral six years ago, and she’d cried her heart out with everyone else who had been at that gravesite, and if he wasn’t dead, then she needed an explanation.

Everyone at Steele Street would need an explanation. She felt like a Saturday morning hero, some kind of intrepid adventurer, to have gone off into the wild jungles of Paraguay in search of an ancient Egyptian statue purported to have the power to grant everlasting life-and to return with the lost chop-shop boy risen from the dead, the one who’d changed them all.

He smiled and reached for the backpack.

Oh, yes, that was her all right, Indiana Jones and some Crystal Temple of the Covenant-type thing, except what he pulled out of the backpack was a granite and gold statue known far and wide as the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III, the Memphis Sphinx, and he set it down on the table between the coffee urn and the butter, next to the salt and pepper.

The real deal. Just sitting there. Defying all the death and destruction it had left in its wake in Ciudad del Este and probably everywhere else it had been for the last four thousand years. A tingling rush of excitement coursed up her spine.

She would have known it anywhere.

“Go ahead and look it over if you want to,” he said. “It’s lasted for millennia. I don’t think it’s going to fall apart on my kitchen table.”

And he didn’t much sound like he cared if it did.

J. T. Chronopolous and the Memphis Sphinx-Suzi’s Big Day, indeed.

Geez.

She reached out and picked the statue up and immediately felt the weight of it, not just the granite, but the gravitas, the seriousness of it.

“So how long have you been working for the DIA?” he asked.

Her heart took a start, and she looked up from where she was running the tip of her finger over the Sphinx’s paws.

“What in the world would make you think that?” She was shocked, truly. No one could possibly know whom she was working for in Paraguay.

He shrugged. “It’s their statue. They’ve had it for over ten years, squirreled away in a lab, using it for experiments they and the CIA conducted in remote viewing under the code names Stargate and Moonrise. The Memphis Sphinx, in particular, was associated with the Moonrise part of the program.”

Her nerves, which she thought she’d been doing an amazing job of controlling, started to fizzle and spark.

“And you know this because?”

“I think I was part of that program.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

He shook his head. “I know Erich Warner, though, and I brought you here because I thought you were working for him.” There was just enough question in the statement that she felt she needed to answer.

“No,” she said. “I’m not working for a world-class degenerate psychopath.”