"Are you really just going to talk to the factory workers?" Aideen asked.

María nodded once. "Do me a favor?" she said. "Call Luis. Autodial star-seven. Ask him to locate General Rafael Amadori. Tell him why."

"No encryption?"

María shook her head. "If Amadori is listening somehow and comes after us, so much the better. It'll save us the trouble of finding him."

Aideen punched in the code. Luis's cellular beeped and he answered at once. Aideen passed along María's request and told him about Adolfo. Luis promised to get right on it and call them back. Aideen folded away the phone.

"Who is Amadori?" she asked.

"A scholar," she said. "He's a military general too, but I don't know much about his career. I only know him as a published author of articles about historic Spain."

"Obviously, they alarm you."

"Very much so," María said. She lit a cigarette. "What do you know about our national folk hero El Cid?"

"Only that he beat back the invading Moors and helped unify Spain around 1100. And there was a movie about him with Charlton Heston."

"There was also an epic poem and a play written by Corneille," María said. "I staged it once at my theater. Anyway," she went on, "you are partly right about El Cid. He was a knight-Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar. From around 1065 to his death in 1099 he helped the Christian king, Sancho II, and then his successor, Alfonso VI, regain the kingdom of Castile from the Moors. The Moors called him el cid-'the lord.' "

"Honored by his enemies," Aideen said. "Impressive."

"Actually," María said, "they feared him, which was his intention. When the Moorish stronghold of Valencia surrendered. El Cid violated the peace terms by slaughtering hundreds of people and burning the leader alive. He was not the pure knight that legend has made him-he would do anything to anybody to protect his homeland. It's also a myth that he fought to unify Spain. He fought for Castile. As long as the other kingdoms remained at peace with Alfonso, as long as they paid him tribute, neither Alfonso nor El Cid cared what happened to them.

"General Amadori is an authority on El Cid," María continued. "But I've always detected in his writings the desire to be something more."

"You mean, to be El Cid," Aideen said.

María shook her head. "El Cid was a glorified soldier of fortune. There is something more to General Amadori than waging war. If you read his essays in the political journals you'll find that he is a leading proponent of what he calls 'benevolent militarism.' "

"Sounds like a fancy name for a police state," Aideen said.