O’Malley showed Merrill where this Chino had owned a condominium two years ago, a sandspit of a peninsula called Bocagrande not much different from Miami Beach. O’Malley had been told that Chino had since given up the place, but what the condo had been spoke to O’Malley about the man’s character. “Three stories at the top of a modern building, the lowest floor for his bodyguards and household staff, the middle floor for his business, and the top floor for his pleasure. You couldn’t get within a hundred yards of the building without your picture showing up on monitors and being fed into computers tapping databases all over the world. Chino is a computer genius. In systems and analysis, nobody can touch him. He feels that the world’s databases are there for his use. He chased after politics before going into the international banking. What he told me was that he had traveled to Moscow and Peking as a student and what he had seen had left him unimpressed.”

“Peking?” Is that where he got his nickname?”

“Chino is the most popular nickname in South America. You’ll see why. This is not a simple or easily understood guy. Wherever he is, you can be sure he is as well-protected and pleasured as he was in that condo.”

“What is a guy like that worth?”

“You can’t even imagine it.” O’Malley watched a tramp steamer disappear beneath port wing. “Let me put it to you this way: he has a room full of money. For emergency use only, presumably, but he’s never had an emergency. He builds homes and gives them away to the poor. He raises dogs. People think of him as a gift of God. A saint. He has people who are ready to die for him. He’s not stupid.”

“And he likes them docile.”

“Well, around a guy like him, they usually are.”

They had made room for Amy by the window where she watched the eastern sky turning to slate. The pilot had been on the radio for almost half an hour in his native language, a tiresome negotiation, presumably because he didn’t want to say anything she could understand.