The trucks halted. The men on the passenger sides got out first, jogging to the rear of the trucks and dropping the tailgates so that the Thai workers could begin unloading the hogs. As the hogs were being unloaded, the drivers and the Caucasian also left the trucks, nine men gathering in a small circle, conversing with an idle familiarity as they waited for the hogs to be slaughtered, dressed, and packed back into their trucks.

Condley watched them intently as he moved slowly toward a concrete wall off to his right that made the outer boundary of the nearest slaughter pen. The Caucasian was thick and heavily muscled. His head was shaved to the scalp, and his round face was gashed with a long, full mustache. For a moment Condley stutter-stepped, unsure of himself. He could not be certain that this was the computer-enhanced face of Deville that he had studied for so many hours. Deville had not been so bulkily built. The face should have been squarer. Or maybe it was just that the computer enhancement had given Deville hair. Lots of hair.

“Professor, get inside that slaughter pen.”

Muir’s voice came from behind him. “With the hogs? You’ve got to be kidding!”

One of the Vietnamese men took a package out of his truck cab and walked back to their little group, handing it to the Caucasian man. The package was about the size of a briefcase and was wrapped in brown paper. The Caucasian man took it, holding it in both his hands. It all seemed to be happening too quickly, but with the Caucasian man’s hands full and with the others so distracted, there could be no better time. And if he did not act now, there might not be another time.

Condley leapt inside the slaughter pen. The concrete wall was waist-high in front of him. He drew the Glock from under his shirt and started to aim. But then he stopped. A lot of trucks came through the slaughterhouse district. A lot of packages passed back and forth. Even a few Caucasian men made it there with the trucks from time to time. Condley himself had done so in another life.

He was ready to kill this man. But before he did, he wanted to know.

“Deville!” He screamed it as loudly as he could. His voice echoed off the nearby trucks, above the screams of the dying animals and the sounds of machetes hacking through pork and bones. The Caucasian man dropped the packet, looking toward him and racing for the cover of a nearby truck. And Condley knew that he was right.