“A lickspittle. If you talked to him, his next call was to them. He represents himself first, which may explain the seeming ignorance of your leadership. He doesn’t tell Washington what it doesn’t want to acknowledge anyway.”

The car turned left, back toward the airport. The Bocagrande peninsula was in the other direction. Ruiz was looking out the window. “No country is perfect, Merrill, but your America goes out of its way to make trouble for itself.”

“O’Malley told me you live at the beach.”

Ruiz chuckled. “We’re not going there. I have a ranch in the hills that’s safer. We want to be out of the city before tomorrow anyway. Now just sit back and relax.”

Merrill wasn’t ready to relax when from the front seat, down low, as if the passenger had his hands between his legs to muffle the sound, Merrill heard a faint but distinct metallic click. Merrill recognized the sound, the slow pull of a slide to chamber a round into an automatic. He sat back, lowering the shoulder bag to the floor next to the door so the flap slipped open. Ruiz was looking at the scenery. The driver took a battery-powered cell phone out of his center armrest, pressed two buttons, and after a moment, started to speak in Spanish. Merrill was memorizing the numbers he pressed.

Four

FOUR

Amy was handcuffed on the armrest on the door of Gregory’s Lexus. Between the heavily tinted glass and the power window control set so that only Gregory could operate it, she might as well be on the floor of a delivery van, for all the attention she could call upon herself. Instead, she tried to memorize the route they were taking, looking for landmarks in the dark, trying to keep from quitting on herself.

Almost as if to demonstrate his power over her, Gregory spent most of the half-hour it took to get out of town talking on his flip-top phone. The little she understood of what he said had to do with his expected time of arrival –- plus something he found very entertaining. He waited until they were climbing into the hills before he spoke to her.

“I learned English at university, and so I am not sure of American idiom. There is an expression for going from bad trouble to worse trouble —”

“Going from the frying pan into the fire.”

“Yes, that’s the one. Your husband has just done it, I’m afraid. He is in our hands, having just escaped the police, who would have given him to us only after the payment of some outrageous bribe.” He braked and turned up a drive lined with small, young trees. “And of course they would not have delivered him to us in a timely way, because the police have to enjoy their power even when they betray it.”

“You’re a philosopher, Gregory. What do you mean by ‘a timely way?’”