He had to wait longer than he wanted before making his move, but approximately nine minutes in, the other guards synched up their cycles and appeared to all be looking out at the mountains at once. He got the body propped up, clambered down the tower’s interior ladder, and strode across the fifteen yards of grass with as calm a nonchalance as he could muster.

Then he rolled his way into the banana palm beds and crawled quickly away, out of the splash of the lights.

Still no screams, whistles, shots, or sirens.

Per his pre-mission conversations with Laramie and her guide, this was the moment when he was to report in by way of his sat phone. Made it inside the perimeter, he might have told Laramie. Taking a look at the type of video surveillance they’ve got on the exterior of the house but will need to get in ASAP. You won’t hear from me after I get inside.

Unfortunately, because of the plastic shards in the pouch that had once been his sat phone, there would be no such conversation. He assumed the GPS homing beacon that marked his position on their monitoring equipment would, without battery or logic board, also have failed to work the minute he’d plowed into the tree.

The radio he’d swiped from the shack-guard suddenly made a chuck-pfft sound that almost popped him out of his combat boots, but the noise wasn’t followed by any dialogue. He turned around and took in a view of the mansion that loomed above him, looking ominously like the Spanish fort it had once been.

Cooper didn’t like the look of the place.

He’d read that the fort had originally been built in the late-seventeenth century for the Spanish land baron overseeing the territory. Perhaps-but it looked, for Cooper’s tastes, too much like the same kind of seventeenth-century fort where those ruthless, mustached bastards had kept him locked in a subterranean cell almost twenty years ago now.

He knew this place too would contain its own underground labyrinth of dungeon cells and related facilities-after all, no self-respecting Spanish land baron, acting more or less as imperial governor, could manage the savages without his own private chamber of horrors in which to enforce his reign.

Cooper could practically feel the tunnels beneath his feet-the ghosts of those fucking Mayans, or whatever cousins of the golden princess statue had been tortured and killed beneath him, calling out from six feet under the endless emerald meadow. Oh, yeah, Cooper, those pals of the golden priestess screeching to him, welcome back, old friend. It’s been too long a time coming. But there’s no salvation waitin’ for you here-only pain. Pain and sufferin’ enough to last an eternity. Come share in our misery, you tired, drunken fool!

He shook off the ghost-talk thoughts and checked his watch. It was almost a quarter to five. At best-unless President Márquez was as lazy as he, and preferred to sleep in-he had an hour to get in while Márquez was still asleep, and the sun had yet to rise.

If not less.

“All right, Island Man,” he said in a croaking whisper. “Time for the hard part.”

His own voice sounded oddly unfamiliar to him.

48

Detective Cole let Laramie into Knowles’s room at the Flamingo Inn and closed the door behind her. She held in her hand another Styrofoam cup loaded with bad black coffee, Laramie utterly confused in her caffeine addiction: what had once been a two-cups-per-morning habit seemed to have graduated to a 24/7 unquenchable need that offered no real effect.

They’d summoned her because there had been activity from one of the sleepers, but Laramie asked a different question first.

“What about our operative,” she said. “Anything?”

“No,” Knowles said, planted in his throne before an array of monitors that had multiplied yet again-the monitors alone now took up one entire wall in the room. “May or may not speak to his status, but I’d say that homing-beacon signal is gone for good.”

Cole came over to join Laramie alongside Rothgeb and her guide in a loose semicircle behind Knowles and the ever-expanding computer setup. Seven additional monitors had been added; the largest offered a highly detailed but entirely static map of El Salvador. A few hours ago, when Laramie had last been in the room, a blinking set of circles, designed to resemble the outwardly expanding circles made by a rock hitting the surface of a pond, had kept the view on the El Salvador screen fairly entertaining. The graphic had represented Cooper’s whereabouts as he approached the drop point in his plane-the homing signal from his GPS device.

Nineteen seconds after the pilot instant-messaged them that he’d “dropped his cargo,” the homing signal, and its accompanying on-screen graphic, had vanished.

The other monitors displayed low-resolution digital signals from six separate videophones of the sort made famous by the embedded reporters during the war in Iraq.

Five of the images were of the exterior of a house or apartment; it was dark outside four of the homes, with dawn just breaking on a fifth. The sixth feed looked like something from a tamer portion of an episode of America’s Wildest Police Videos, a shot captured out the front windshield of a car that appeared to be following another vehicle. The sun had risen already in this image.

Laramie knew this last monitor to represent Scarsdale, New York. The other images were in the central and Pacific time zones, but live, just like the Scarsdale camera. The video was being shot by private investigators, selected jointly by Cole and Laramie’s guide. The PIs were working in teams of two outside the homes of each of the six probable sleepers. The last time she’d seen the sixth feed, it had shown the front of a single-story ranch sandwiched between a pair of nearly identical houses. There had been no apparent activity, outside of a strobing blue light they assumed was the man’s television.

Knowles turned from the monitor showing the map of El Salvador.

“If our operative’s alive,” he said, “there’s a pretty good chance he could be inside the residence by now. We’ve been over it, but seven here is six there-be dark or close to it for another half hour based on the Almanac’s sunrise schedule.”

“Fine,” Laramie said.

She’d left the room once Cooper’s signal had come up blank for an hour and a half. She hadn’t done anything since but sit and stew.

Something was bothering her about all this-the whole scheme as ordered by Ebbers, from the assassination order to the method they were using to perform surveillance on the six potential sleepers-including the plan that would kick into effect once any of the sleepers began to engage in some form of suspicious activity. Laramie hadn’t been able to put her finger on what it was that was bothering her, but after thinking things over in frustration in her room, she’d begun to figure it out. Now it seemed one of the sleepers was up to something, perhaps no good, and that meant one of the parts of the plan Laramie was beginning to have a major problem with would need to be put into effect.

She blinked herself back to the situation at hand and jutted her chin at Knowles.

“Let’s get on with this,” she said. “What’s the story here?”

She noted that the car being followed by the camera was an SUV-same as Benjamin Achar. The ultimate assimilation disguise.

“You got it,” Knowles said. He spun around in his seat and clicked away with one of his mouses. The moving image on the screen zoomed in a notch. “As you can probably guess from the video feed, our boy in Scarsdale’s on the move. Took off around five till seven. In case you’ve lost track, which we all have more than once, today’s Saturday, so he isn’t headed for work. Usually leaves at seven-thirty anyway when he does.”

Rothgeb chimed in. “Based on what we know from the private investigator about the neighborhood, we’ve got a pretty good idea where he’s headed.”