“One day,” Javier continued, “this young lieutenant was out on a patrol, and he was captured. A week later, three of the towns where my soldiers were hiding were bombed to rubble. A week after that, I received a package in the mail. It contained the lieutenant’s severed ear. It was wrapped in a note that read, ‘He told us everything this ear ever heard.’” Carpio chewed a slice of cheese thoughtfully.

“What is your point?” Soh asked.

“I never had any reason to question this soldier’s loyalty, but loyalty may not be in the front of a man’s mind when his ear is being cut off his head.”

Soh considered this for a moment. “Juan Suarez has already experienced tortures worse than most men can conceive of,” he said. “He has his orders if he is captured, and I believe he will follow them.”

“And if not?”

Soh picked up the last slice of cheese on the table in front of Carpio. “I have a contingency plan.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Joe Konicki didn’t go into the doctor’s office with Diamond. He had planned to, but when they pulled up to the medical building near the University of Massachusetts in South Boston, and he saw the sign with the doctors’ names listing their specialties as “Obstetrics and Gynecology,” he decided that she would probably be safe in the building; he preferred to wait outside.

He sat in his car in the parking lot fighting the urges for the first fifteen minutes. He was on his tenth day without a cigarette, and the withdrawal had him losing his mind. Some of it was physical—he knew that his addiction to the nicotine was a major part of his need—but he could temper that with nicotine patches and gum. As he sat in the car, he’d already powered through three pieces of the expensive chewables. But no amount of nicotine could wipe away the psychological addiction. His hands fumbled for something to do, and continually touched his face and mouth out of habit. The need to engage in the same repetitive motion that had comforted him for over fifty of his sixty-five years was overpowering, and in the end he gave into it.

He climbed out of the car, into the cold, and walked up the street to the nearest convenience store. A pack of Marlboro Lights was nearly ten dollars in Massachusetts because of all of the punitive state taxes that had been largely successful in reducing the number of smokers in the Commonwealth. He’d have gladly paid twice that at the moment, though, and he forked over the cash.