He started moving again, now focusing upward instead of at the ground. The new strategy paid off. A bright pink streamer appeared, hanging about twenty feet up in a tree that looked climbable. He started up, carefully testing each branch before committing his full weight to it. Except for all the heavily armed psychotic cult members, it was just like when he was a kid.

The streamer took a few good yanks to free, but he was eventually rewarded with a single sheet of laminated paper. Despite his awkward position, he couldn’t help skimming it before starting back down. When he did, a faint smile spread across his face. Whoever had created the document was both very smart and very thorough.

Every cache had a separate set of instructions and he went through them, trying to find the closest. After a couple of minutes of reading and cross-referencing with the topo map on the back, he decided that cache 9 was the most promising.

From where you camped when you found the butterfly you think is a new species: there is an obvious square rock about two feet across embedded in the ground. With your heel in the middle of it, start walking one foot directly in front of the other in the direction you’d take the highway from your old office in Chicago to your house there. The distance in steps is the first and fourth digits of your Social Security number.…

13

“I JUST made another grand,” Coleman said.

At some point, he’d realized that he was making a thousand dollars a minute on this job and had taken to calling out his income at regular intervals.

Rapp searched blindly for the Coke next to his lawn chair, lacking the energy to turn his head. A rare heat wave had pushed temperatures into the low nineties and caused a cloud of humidity to rise from the jungle and settle on their camp. Despite the shade from a chopper to their right and the baby pool their feet were soaking in, it was suffocating. Nothing like the dry heat of the Middle East.

His hand finally brushed the icy can and he brought it to his lips.

“While you were looking for your drink, I just made another five hundred bucks,” Coleman pointed out gleefully.

Rapp didn’t respond. There was no doubt that working for Nicholas Ward had its benefits. The money pretty much grew on trees, obviously. More than that, though, he was smart, reasonable, and knew when to stay out of the way.

Maybe it was the perfect job to usher in the next phase of his life. Profitable. Strategically interesting. No shooting. He had to admit it. A little dabbling in the private sector going forward wouldn’t be the worst thing.

“What do you think?” Coleman asked after a long silence.

“About what?”

“Chism.”