“It is a nuclear artillery shell!” Chino yelled between bursts. Merrill’s ears hurt so much he could hardly hear at all. Without the strobe lighting of the muzzle flashes, the room was so black the blackness seemed to press up against the eyes. “High yield! I have no idea how many kilotons! Who cares? How does Rolls-Royce describe its horsepower, dimwit? Adequate. Adequate!”

For all he knew, Chino could be yelling in an empty room. Merrill was sure the man was blinded by the muzzle flashes. “That pile driver, as you call it, is a high-speed horizontal hole borer. You wanted to know this! It goes into the earth at an angle, to get at the oil under another man’s land. An American invention, needless to say. The device is three miles down, almost two miles offshore. And it is quite beyond defusing.”

Merrill thought Chino was moving back and forth on the ramp just overhead, but the noise in Merrill’s ears made him unsure — and he had to be sure: he had only the one chance. “Commander, you will not be the icing on the cake I hoped you would be, but you will be dead, and the people manipulating you will be forced to pull in their horns. And I will be on my boat, pleasuring myself with your wife, rest assured.”

He stopped.

“Rest in peace, asshole,” Merrill whispered.

“Gregory has her now, Commander! Did you see what he did to Rosario? Do you think anybody actually controls Gregory, you stupid, stupid bastard? One keeps him calm, like a beast in a pit.”

A telephone was ringing. Ruiz’s chauffeur’s cell phone, on the console in the center of the room. “It’s about time,” Merrill heard Chino say, from the ramp, ten or twelve feet to Merrill’s left. Chino opened fire again, and in the flashes of light Merrill saw the console topple like a felled buffalo. Merrill rolled the grenade up onto the ramp and pulled his head down.

The speakerphone in the dashboard suddenly stopped. Gregory smiled, put the car in gear, and backed up, the fan whanging away at the radiator. “That fixes him.”

“There was no connection — you didn’t say anything,” Amy said. “How can you be so sure?”

“It was Chino’s plan, to locate your husband in the dark. When Chino makes a plan, you can believe in it.”

“He’s going to skin you alive when he sees what you’ve done to me.”

Gregory laughed again. “Which one of the two are you rooting for?”

“Sit me up. Come on.”

“I can’t see up your clothing. It’s too dark. When we pass under a street lamp, I will look.”