Cooper said, “You mind if I just…” and, keeping the salesman’s smile plastered on his face, headed past the card table and on down the hall.

Standing, the receptionist pronounced her objections at great volume, then punched a button on her telephone console and began yelling something about “Seguridad!” into the phone. Cooper opened one of the double doors at the back of the short hallway, entered, then closed and locked the door behind him. He turned and encountered exactly what-or at least who-he had expected to find, only on a much larger scale than anticipated.

Seated before a tropical fish tank that looked about twenty feet long by eight tall-Cooper putting it at fifteen, twenty thousand gallons-was a man with one of the largest heads ever seen on a human being. Adorned with a wireless telephone headset, outfitted in an off-white three-piece suit that made Cooper think of Tom Wolfe, the man Cooper presumed to be Ernesto Borrego was digging in-big-time.

Cooper watched as the man called the Polar Bear, unfazed by his entrance, continued working from a tub the size of a deep sea charter’s bait bucket. He used a serving fork to stab a mound of the pasta within, wound it in a tight spiral with the aid of a ladle-size spoon, then lifted the fork-bound coil of semolina and sauce into his monstrous facial cavity.

Skin the color of the moon on the clearest of Caribbean nights, suit protected from the elements by a gigantic red-checked napkin, Borrego was working on a bottle of red too, a decanter’s worth resting on his big desk alongside the tub.

Eating the food the way he was, the man not the slightest bit disturbed by his entrance, it struck Cooper that Borrego looked about like…a polar bear.

Borrego shoveled another mouthful of noodles into his maw. When he’d chewed and swallowed, washing it down with a sip taken directly from the carafe, he wiped his mouth with the bib and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

As far as Cooper could tell, Borrego hadn’t yet looked up to examine him.

“May not resemble one,” Cooper said, “but I’m a canary.”

Borrego chewed a new spool of noodles. He looked to Cooper to be conducting two operations: the sensory function of enjoying the flavors of the pasta, and the intellectual act of solving the half-ass riddle. When he’d finished masticating, Borrego made a clicking sound somewhere in his huge mouth before returning for another backhoe-dig with the serving fork.

“Canary in a mine shaft, you mean,” he said. His English was clean-middle-America news-anchor clean.

Muted voices came from beyond the door Cooper had his back against. Somebody tried the knob; Cooper wrapped his hand around it just in case the lock hadn’t done the trick. There came more muted chitchat from the hall.

“More or less,” Cooper said. “I’m not expecting to pass into bird heaven anytime soon, but the fact remains that the people who’re currently considering offing me will probably come after you next. Or even first.”

Borrego looked at him while continuing to eat, seemingly observing him for the first time.

“So am I the canary,” he said, “or you?”

Cooper shrugged.

“How’d you get in here?” Borrego said.

“The guards in your booths don’t concern themselves with the trains.”

Borrego stopped chewing for a moment then started up again.

“Have to fix that,” he said.

The knob spun in Cooper’s hand and he was yanked backward by the opening door as he tried to keep it in his grasp. He’d expected the intrusion but still had to switch his weight from one foot to the other to avoid falling. He soon found his fancy footwork didn’t matter, since as he regained his balance, the well-muscled shoulder of an exceedingly large individual plowed into his spine, a pair of muscle-bound arms wrapped around him, and what Cooper pegged for a three-man private security detail gang-tackled him. As he hit the floor chin first it felt to him as though he were being pig-piled, and once they had him pinned they jammed both his wrists against his respective shoulder blades and crammed his face into the wall-to-wall carpeting Borrego kept in his office. Somebody found and took from him the Agency-issue FN Browning tucked against his back, and it began to occur to Cooper he’d been a little too thrilled with his infiltration game. It became equally apparent these boys didn’t appear to possess handcuffs, since by now they’d have slapped him with a pair.

A powerful hand was keeping Cooper’s face against the rug, so he couldn’t see Borrego as the Polar Bear said, “Careful there-canaries are known for their delicate constitutions.”

Cooper felt a little easing of the pressure of the tough spirals of rug against his lips.

Probably deserve that.

None of the people who had entered the room said anything. He heard the bong bong of the switching engine, the distant sound of a ringing phone, but that was about it-until there came a low rumble, which Cooper first thought to be coming from the floor. It began as the sort of trembling bass you got from a subwoofer, then clarified and sharpened to a more familiar noise-at which point Cooper realized Borrego had just performed a polar bear’s equivalent of a chuckle. The chuckle soon accelerated into a great, braying belly laugh.

“Ah, shit,” El Oso Blanco said, the laughs crashing from his larynx like southern California surf. “Ah, puta mierda…!”

Finally the laughing surf retreated. As it did, so too did the pressure from the hand on Cooper’s head. The hands that had been holding his arms against his back released too, and soon he was lying unrestrained on the carpet. Realizing that Borrego must have given his security team some kind of gesture ordering his release, Cooper turned on his side to get a look at the security men and saw, to his consternation and embarrassment, the nature of the army that had just subdued him: there stood looking down at him only one man, a behemoth with a wafer-thin waist who looked more velociraptor than human despite his half-decent suit and not-inexpensive wingtips.

Cued by another unseen gesture, the velociraptor stepped away from Cooper and retreated to a place against the wall beside the double doors. He clasped his hands in front of his groin.

“That was funny,” Borrego said. “Funny.” As Cooper worked his legs around and sat upright on the floor, he could see Borrego smiling over the tub at him. “So again,” he said, “who the hell are you, what the fuck do you want, and what or who is it that’s poisoning the mine?”

Cooper checked his lips for blood but they were dry-rug-burn dry. He started slowly, mainly because his numb lips had some trouble mouthing the words.

“A trail of bodies has begun to turn up in the wake of a shipment of gold artifacts,” he said. “The artifact shipment would be the same load of boxes you checked aboard the good ship Seahawk in La Guaira. One note you may find equally discouraging is that the artifacts themselves were destroyed too. Or at least sunk to the bottom of the Caribbean.”

Borrego, who had begun eating again, shrugged.

“That’d be one of the reasons they call it the black market,” he said. “Involves some risk.”

“I’m assuming you’d be one of the bodies now too-especially considering how easy it is to get past your security detail-”-Cooper flipped a look in the direction of the velociraptor-bodyguard as he said this, hoping for a reaction but earning none-“except, by my best guess, whoever’s leaving the trail of bodies doesn’t know you’re the one holding the luggage tags.”

The Polar Bear made a humph sound. “They’d be right,” he said. “I’m not. At least not anymore.”

Cooper stood, sort of bending at the hip in hopes of readjusting his spine as he did it. No such luck-there remained a sharp pain in one of the meaty muscles in his lower back. He pulled himself into one of the chairs that faced Borrego’s big desk while he thought aloud through what Borrego had meant.