“No, but after I trained her, they changed their tune.” His voice roughened. “Yeah, I heard all the bullshit about putting a little street kid to work with the CIA when she was barely a teenager. They even thought I was some kind of pervert because I wouldn’t back down. Why not find some social service agency to give the girl a decent life? Only at that time Caracas was teeming with starving kids just trying to survive, and I didn’t want to lose this one. It’s not as if I was particularly warmhearted. God knows, no one ever accused me of that. I managed quite well ignoring all those other kids I’d see out there in the gutters.” He paused. “Until I ran across Alisa. She wouldn’t let me ignore her. She was always there on the street outside the hotel. Skinny. Dirty. Running errands. Selling information. Watching everything. Fierce as a tiger. When I first saw her, she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. I did my best to not pay any attention to her. But I found myself counting the bruises, wondering if she’d had to sleep out in the rain the night before, trying to judge if she’d lost weight again. Finally, I started to talk to her.” He was silent a moment. “And that’s when I knew she had me. I could have withstood all that schmaltzy sweetness-and-light crap, but she was probably the most intelligent person I’d ever run across. She took my breath away. I couldn’t let that go. I knew I could train her into something extraordinary.”

“And did you? I notice she’s extremely good at picking a lock.”

“It was one of the many directions I pointed her in. That’s all I ever had to do. Did you know she has a photographic memory? Show her the way and she’d take off and run with it. Failure was never an option. She learned some rough lessons on the street, and she never forgot them.” He chuckled. “She regarded your alarms as a challenge. I believe she had a bit of a crush on you after she started delving into your work. She said you were fantastic. She couldn’t wait for the XV-17 to come out.”

“Wonderful,” he said sarcastically. “But I didn’t call you to delve into her talent at safe breaking. I was more interested in asking you if I could trust her word.” He paused. “And what do you know about Jorge Masenak.”