“Her Husband.” Merrill was hearing the hiss of a cellular telephone. There had been no hiss while the telephone had been ringing. The man was moving around.

The silence was broken. “It isn’t possible at this time. Would it be possible for you to call back in, say, five minutes?”

“What’s your name?”

“Gregory.”

“Gregory what?”

“It’s not important. In my experience, Anglos such as yourself usually find the name unpronounceable. Let me ask you a question, Commander Merrill. How did you get this telephone number?”

“I’ll let you figure that out.”

“I might surprise you.”

“You have five minutes.”

“An eternity,” Gregory said, and disconnected.

Merrill called Scott Waller, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Jennifer Waller answered. When Merrill started to speak, she let out a shriek and called her husband. “Where are you?” Jennifer asked. “You’re all over CNN. Is Amy all right?”

“Listen on the extension,” Merrill said, as Waller picked up the other line.

“Just when I thought I could go back to watching sports on TV, there you are, like horseshit, all over.” He asked about Amy, and Merrill told the truth. Jennifer gasped and said she had to get off the telephone. Quickly Merrill continued to tell his second-in-command the story, pausing to read the coordinates off the screen of the laptop. “That sounds about right,” Waller said. “You said this O’Malley character gave you a cellular telephone?”

“I’m using one I took from O’Malley’s friend’s chauffeur, another cell phone.

“Worse. The Colombian police use trucks to triangulate the cell phones of the heavies they choose to go after. And you got this other guy’s number off the recall read-out? They could be all over you like dog shit on a new pair of shoes. You have to make a new plan, Van.”

“See if you can get anything on a guy named Chino. I don’t have a last name.”

“Okay. Look, I’m going to start by working the phones. Let me give you Jennifer’s cell number so you have a way of reaching me anytime. Remember that overseas calls are monitored – under the circumstances, maybe tonight more than ever.”

“Thanks, pal.” Merrill wrote the number under Chino’s in Ruiz’s little address book.

“Amy will be all right,” Waller added. “You’d better take off.”

Merrill was programming Jennifer’s number into the cell phone’s memory. He already had another idea.