Merrill hadn’t thought the passenger was going to do what he did, and now he didn’t know what he was going to do with the bodies. He had no time to waste over the problem. He got into the car, put it in gear, and pulled away.

Soon enough people were going to know he had killed two men in two countries on the same day. Some of the people who had been in his corner were going to conclude regretfully that he had snapped, that he wasn’t going to stop killing until somebody stopped him. It was clear that the local authorities weren’t going to let him out of this place until he had answered to them; answered to the people behind them, people like Ruiz, and Chino.

The weight of what was happening began to fall like a boulder on Merrill again. He had poisoned his luck at the start. He wanted to scream, but he was too well-trained to see that as anything but a stupid waste of time that would do nothing to advance a solution to his problem. He wanted to rage at Cody – but Cody was another waste of time. For all Merrill knew, Cody had been sucking up to everybody’s orders, including those of the government of the United States. O’Malley had had this world right in theory if not in application.

On a dark stretch of road Merrill stopped at the car and turned off the lights. He emptied the pockets of the dead men and pulled their bodies into the weeds. Now he had Colombian money, plenty of it, the passenger’s nine millimeter automatic, two clips for it, Ruiz’s keys, his gold ballpoint pen, a small, leather bound notebook that bore no entries, and, from the glove compartment, two more of the hand grenades the passenger had dropped in the street outside the hotel. Merrill emptied the wallets and threw them back onto the bodies.

If the bodies couldn’t be identified and the murders looked like part of a robbery, Merrill might have a little more time. He’d have none at all if someone got a look inside the car, which stank of drying blood, or at the roof, with its three jagged tears grouped together like the holes in a bowling ball. Merrill’s hand hurt: the cut he had gotten on the barbed wire at the airport had opened and closed twice now. He drove down the road another mile, fired up the computer and opened Ruiz’s leather bound notebook to a fresh page.

He pressed the two buttons on the cell phone the driver had pressed earlier. On the lighted liquid crystal screen appeared a series of numbers that he quickly wrote down as he heard a telephone ringing. It stopped.

“Hola.”

“Let me speak to Mrs. Amy Merrill, please.”

A pause. “Whom shall I say is calling?”