She sunk to the floor, too. Although by her count she had now taken care of all the militia men, there was no guarantee more guards weren’t stationed down here. The intelligence data sets were never perfect and there was always a chance she missed someone in her surveillance. She heard movement and a slight groan to her left, where she had dropped the deputy.

Caitlin rolled, drawing her Gerber combat knife as she went, mounting the man’s chest and slitting his throat in one efficient movement. The groan became a wet gurgling sound that persisted for a few seconds as he struggled desperately for air. When all of the life had run out of his body, she relaxed fractionally.

‘Are there any more guards down here?’ she called out in Spanish.

The confusion of voices that came back at her was practically impossible to decipher. They begged for release, for mercy, for the indulgence of their gods.

Rolling off the dead man, she asked again, more loudly this time: ‘Are there any more militia down here?’

‘¿Señora?’ A slight hesitation, disbelief, as they realised that this killer was a woman.

‘No, no more guards,’ replied one cracked and faltering voice. ‘He was the only one. He hid down here when the shooting started.’

Caitlin’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the low-light environment, but she took a moment to fit her NVGs and power them up. The scene resolved itself into opalescent green, fogged by the residual smoke from the stun grenades. The body of the deputy commander, lying next to an old World War I vintage rifle, was bleeding out on the flagstone floor. A line of four cells ran away from her down one side of a long rectangular room; a bare wall faced them. Material she took to be heavy black plastic had been taped up over the high window openings she’d noted during her surveillance that morning. All the better to disorient the prisoners, of course; to create the impression that time had no meaning down here. She would’ve bet good money that the officer she had just killed was responsible for this innovation. It was almost sophisticated.

The man in the cell directly in front of her was not Ramón Lupérico. He looked about twenty years too old, and fifty pounds too heavy. He was a jabbering mess and had wet himself.