Amy cursed. She pushed the salad Chino had made for her down the bar. She couldn’t eat now. She had tried, even after Gregory had scared her witless. Chino knew all about it — when he had come into the bar, he had kissed her on the cheek, saying, “What did you expect? I told you he was a sadist.” The salad was delicious, too, half an avocado filled with shrimp, crowned with smoked salmon and thinly sliced onion, and covered with Thousand Island dressing — a Colombian specialty, Chino assured her. He was watching the television set, sipping champagne. Sam was making his way along the mineshaft-like passageway to the main gallery of the excavation.

“What are you going to do now?”

Chino’s eyes did not move. “Allow him to accept his fate, his life for yours.” He looked at her. “I meant to ask you the same question. What are you going to do now?”

“What do you mean?”

He gave her a I’m not stupid! Look. “You’ve run out of excuses.”

“Gregory said he was watching us.”

He shrugged. “It fuels his rage, I think.”

“It doesn’t bother you?”

“It doesn’t impair my performance, if that’s what you mean.”

Sam was peering into the brightly lighted main gallery. Even with the three tripod-mounted cameras on the floor, the camera angle indicated that there was another camera up near the ceiling. She said, “It would impair mine.”

“His life for yours.”

“At this point, Sam doesn’t know I’m alive!”

“You’ll tell him. So he can tell the world you’re dead. So you can be reborn.”

“In your image?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” He filled his lungs. “When you get to know what that means better than you do now, you will see what an extraordinary act of patience all this has been for me. Especially at this moment in hist — in my development.”

“They’re one and the same?”

“Yes.” He reached for her salad and made a show of selecting and eating shrimp. On the screen, Sam was walking around the thing that looked like an upside-down cannon, studying it. Chino said, “Every once in a while events come together so one individual, by force of his will, by a single act, can change everything. Adolf Hitler, in spite of the self-serving propaganda of his regime, was not such a man. History has folded over him like a taco. Nothing remains of him. Gandhi, on the other hand, was just such a man. He toppled an empire, nailed it to its own cross of Saint Andrew —”

“Gandhi was a good man. Isn’t there a lesson in that for you?”