She marched the three miles along the coastal road to Miramar, the area of Santo Domingo where most of the Haina CIA staff lived in a single apartment block, letting the sea breeze slowly cool her anger.

The United States had a chequered recent history with the Dominican Republic. The country had been under full-scale American occupation for eight years between 1916 and 1924 during the Banana Wars. Then, forty-one years later, the Yanks had returned. Much of Santo Domingo’s population were grateful for America’s help quelling the civil war. But some weren’t, which was why all but the most senior CIA personnel lived in the same, high-fenced, pastel blue building in Miramar, and were ferried to and from Haina every day in a short convoy of discreetly armoured buses.

Bennett had realised over the months she’d been in the country, however, that she wasn’t treated the same as the other Americans. She didn’t know if it was because she was the only woman working at Haina, or because in the Caribbean’s melting pot of genes and skin tones, hers meant that the Dominicans could tell that she wasn’t one of them but weren’t exactly sure what she was. Either way it gave her a strange kind of freedom. For once being the outsider made her more accepted, and able to freely walk the streets of Santo Domingo without worrying about getting lynched.

By the time Bennett reached Miramar the sun had started to fall, but this close to the equator that meant evening was just beginning. She didn’t want to go straight to the little, one-room studio she’d been given at the bottom of the CIA block, and lie on her bed, staring at her ceiling fan for hours before she fell asleep. She wanted a drink.

Doralis’s Bar was a squat, yellow box that sat between two empty plots of land a street over from the apartment building. Its walls were pockmarked with bullet holes and missing chunks of plaster from the running battles that had spread through Santo Domingo the previous spring, but it had survived the fighting mostly intact. Whatever had once stood on either side of it hadn’t been so lucky.

Doralis, the owner, was an ancient Dominican woman who made everyone welcome and turned no one away, as long as they paid their bill. Anyone was free to order a beer or rum and pull up a plastic chair under a strip-light or an overturned crate beneath the stars. Doralis also had a knack for knowing when people needed someone to talk to, or when they needed to be left alone. And she liked Bennett.