As the soldiers finally slid the boss into the dead-mobile, Reyland nodded to himself, pleased. There were still some long hard miles to go before he slept, but at least the press was already swallowing the Rome thing like a widemouthed bass. By tomorrow, the arrow of the bullshit wheel would be firmly landed upon one of the grandstanding press’s all-time favorite chestnuts, A Nation in Mourning.

As the marines headed back to the hangar, Reyland glanced over at the tears flowing freely past the soft bud of Belinda’s brilliant diamond-pierced earlobe a foot in front of him.

As she began to tremble, Reyland leaned ever so slightly forward and placed his hand on her perfect shoulder, careful to keep his chin up for the photographers as he mournfully closed his eyes.

30

It was coming on 3:00 a.m. when the vrooming Honda Ruckus moped slowed and came to a puttering halt on a dirt road on the southeast outskirts of Culiacán, Mexico.

There was a fork in the high-desert country road, and the handsome middle-aged man astride the rumbling bike sat for a moment before it with a ruminative look on his face.

He sat studying the two roads, the moonlit plains of chaparral they carved through, the mountains in the far distance. After a moment, he removed a pair of reading glasses from his crisp shirt’s breast pocket and carefully consulted the GPS on the phone in a holder between the moped’s handlebars. Then he put the glasses back and kicked up some dust as he rolled up the right-hand branch.

The small up-country compound he stopped before ten minutes later had a solid steel plate gate in the center of its nine-foot-high cement block outer wall. He unlocked the gate with the key from his pocket and squealed it open. Then he rolled in the moped and squealed the gate back and firmly relocked it.

The small building inside had once been a gas station. Before one of its old rusted pumps was a portable gasoline generator with a cord that went in under the station’s closed door. He ripcorded the generator on and unlocked the old station’s front door and came through its unlit empty front room into the back.

Beneath the tarp he pulled back was a steel cellar door built into the concrete slab floor. It was secured with a thick Master key padlock that he unlocked with his key ring. The well-oiled hinges made no sound at all as he opened the door up and out.

He squatted, looking down into it. Seven feet below was a dirt-walled cell that looked like a large grave dug into the earth. Light from the standing floodlight below fell across just the legs of the prisoner in the corner.

One couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was just a figure, a small pale bare-legged figure with the knees drawn up and the arms hugging the shins. The feet were black with filth.