“Calm yourself, Bryce. If I thought you were involved, I’d have already broken your neck. I’m thinking someone else.”

“There is no one else.”

“There are plenty. There were officers from the Drug Action Service along for the ride. Any one of them could’ve been forced into feeding him the information he’d need.”

Bryce looked pensive. “Victor Montoya was the first to die. It’s possible that someone led Abadia to Victor and then the other names were extracted from him. Remember he was tortured. Maybe it was because he wouldn’t speak that his family were murdered in front of him.”

It sounded feasible.

“Next question: who does Abadia use to get his revenge? All of us are highly trained; he doesn’t send someone incapable of getting the job done.”

“Has to be ex-military,” Rink said.

“A mercenary,” Bryce offered.

“Probably Special Forces,” I said. “Someone just like us.”

“That doesn’t narrow things down very much,” Bryce said. “There have got to be thousands of ex-Special Ops out there looking to make a buck.”

“Most of them are men of honor. They wouldn’t make war on women and children.” Rink stared directly ahead into the growing storm. “Most of them.”

“Why would they have to be Special Forces?” Bryce asked.

“Could be something else,” I concurred. “Whoever it is, he’s highly trained and highly efficient. He has experience with sniper rifles. It’s possible that he’s a freelance assassin or a cop or maybe even a run-of-the-mill soldier. But I’m still running with the Special Forces angle.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“The guy I spoke to on the phone sounded Caucasian. I think that Abadia—or whoever—met the killer while he was on active duty in Colombia. British and American Special Ops guys have been in and out of Colombia for years, training and equipping the anti-narcotics cops down there. The SAS were there back in the nineties, more recently it’s been the U.S. Army Rangers.”

Beside me Rink grunted. Rink had been a Ranger before he joined my unit.

“Next time we stop,” he said, “I’ll get Harvey on to it.”

Harvey Lucas also had been a Ranger in his past life. He still had connections: maybe he could draw information from someone that would send us in the right direction. If not, Harvey was still a good man to have at our backs.

“If he’s a Ranger, we’re in for one helluva fight,” Rink said. He squirmed a little, as though his loyalty to his old troop meant he had to give the killer a modicum of respect. It was an abrasive notion.

“We’re surmising an awful lot,” Bryce said.

“Yeah.”

Maybe I was way off base in my thinking. But as usual I was going to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Anything less would be a welcome bonus.

Chapter 15

15