For the drop site we had only been given coordinates, but we were in dense forest on the eastern slopes of the Cordillera Central range, somewhere above the city of Ibagué. There were highways south of us leading through the passes between the cities of Bogota and Armenia, but here the roads were little more than tracks. Juan Charles, whose father I discovered was an American and explained his fair complexion and blond hair, drove the big 4x4 along the rutted trail like a pro. His darker companion, Hector Nunez, brought us up to speed with the latest communication from Walter.

“The man responsible for hiring Luke Rickard has been identified as Jorge Gutierrez. This may surprise you: he is not a key player in any of the well-known cartels and hasn’t featured in any recent intelligence reports.”

“Maybe he’s good at concealing his involvement,” I said.

Nunez, who appeared to be the more talkative of the two, nodded. “There is that. But we”—he indicated his blond friend at the wheel—“have been thinking this through. We think that Gutierrez is yet another front concealing the real person.”

That made a great deal of sense. “What is his background?”

“DAS.” Nunez almost spat out the acronym.

“He’s a police officer?”

“Not like us.”

The way he said it told me that despite being an agent of the American government he was also very proud to be a member of the elite Junglas. By the intensity in his gaze he bore no love for the Department of Administrative Security. Not surprising, really. There had been scandals where directors of the Colombian secret police were accused of feeding information to right-wing paramilitary death squads, giving them the names of rebel sympathizers who opposed the president. One director had been imprisoned, such was the strength of the accusations. The DAS had gone down a long way in the seven years since I’d worked alongside Victor Montoya.

It put a whole new slant on who Rickard could be working for. Bryce Lang had been convinced that the murders were tied to the hit we’d carried out on Jesus Henao Abadia and I realized now that I’d been going along with him for want of another motive. Now I wondered if we’d been on the wrong track all along.

Rink and Harvey held their peace but I could feel the heat radiating from them as they made sense of this new information. I leaned forward, resting a forearm on the back of Nunez’s seat. “You’re leading us to do a hit on a member of the security services?”

“Gutierrez is a traitor to his country,” Nunez said.

“You said that he did not feature in any recent intelligence reports, but now you’re saying he’s a traitor . . . that’s some jump.”