The politicians had been so eager to make capital of the incident that no one had bothered to find the answers to even the basic questions, including him. He had been the very model of an all-American Coast Guard buffoon while the politicians had done their Maypole dance around him. What hadn’t they told him? What had they known?

O’Malley had been the one to tell Merrill that Ghost had belonged to Chino. How had O’Malley learned that? Had the information been planted? But the information seemed to be true. O’Malley had been wrong about Ruiz. He just happened to be on the island the same day Chino attempted to kidnap the Merrills. The idea of Chino having O’Malley in reserve was too elaborate to stand up to common sense.

Was Chino the kind of criminal that killed people working for him? Implicit in O’Malley’s comment about Chino was the belief that the man was capable of anything. What had pulled O’Malley down was his assumption that his goodness, such as it was, would be enough to get him through. The important thing was that Chino had known just where to look for the Merrills the moment they had stepped out of the United States. This was the same man careless enough to lose one billion dollars in cargo?

How do you know you haven’t been set up?

Merrill looked out the rear window as the taxi wheeled into the narrower streets inside the fort that was the oldest part of the city. No one was following—at least, not obviously. Merrill had known that Gregory’s invitation to call back in five minutes had been as much to arrange tracing the call as getting the cell phone within reach of Amy. Either Ruiz’s chauffeur had checked in or Gregory was smart enough to figure out that Merrill had acquired custody of the telephone the chauffeur had used earlier, with Gregory’s number stored in memory. Remembering what O’Malley had told him about Chino and his love of high technology, Merrill had to assume that Chino or Gregory had the capacity to triangulate the cell phone.

And after Amy reported on Gregory’s shit-eating grin, it was clear the two men had the capacity to trace land-line calls, too. Had they figured out Merrill’s next move in advance? That he would dump Ruiz’s BMW and walk many blocks to pay a telephone? How about this move? Was that too paranoid?

How dead was O’Malley?