Rojas shook his head. He heard the noisy rumble of the Beech's engine starting up, and looked out toward the head of the airstrip. The cocaderos had emptied their trucks and were moving them back onto the dirt road as the plane prepared for takeoff. His general practice of never traveling with a shipment aside, he almost would have preferred to be on board. He did not think his nerves could stand the company of these men much longer.

"I should be leaving," he said. "There are very few flights out of the country and their schedules are erratic."

DeVane nodded, then signaled to one of his bodyguards with a wave of his fingertips. The guard nodded slightly and spoke into a handheld radio.

"Your car is on its way," he said. "We wouldn't want you to be stranded here."

Rojas manufactured a smile.

"Muito obrigado, you are most kind," he said, sickened by his own toadying subservience, and thinking with disgust that the example of the tin miners was one he had followed for some time without allowing himself to acknowledge it.

Like them, he had ventured into a place where it was hot and dark, and learned all too well how to appease its gods.

SEVEN - PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA APRIL 18, 2001

SEVEN

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA APRIL 18, 2001

THE THING WAS, SHE NEVER PLAYED MUSIC BEFORE having her morning coffee, and that puzzled him.

In the veranda of his Palo Alto home after many long hours on the telephone, Roger Gordian sat with an untouched plate of scrambled eggs and toast on the table in front of him, a steaming cup of coffee near his right hand, and his cordless within fast reach of his left. Making decisions was for him an adaptive reflex, a coping mechanism that pressure only honed and energized, and he'd reacted to the news from Brazil as he would to any emergency, gathering whatever information was available, then digesting as much of it as circumstances allowed before settling upon a logical and systematic plan of action.

In this instance, the information-gathering process had kept him in his study all night. There had been a string of updates from Cody, interspersed with his own calls to advisors and political contacts, including one to a high-placed official in the Department of State, and a subsequent late-night conversation with his close friend Dan Parker, who had been the congressman from California's 14th District until his recently lost reelection bid, and was somebody whose opinion Gordian never failed to solicit in times of crisis.