The shabbily dressed man who had stopped to attend to a lace stood up. He was close to one of the two cartel sentries that Chase had identified and, his voice just about audible across the street, said something to the man. The sentry shook his head. The shabbily dressed man pointed down the street, and the sentry turned to look, presenting his back to the man. A knife was drawn and sliced across the sentry’s throat; a hand clamped across his mouth as the body was dragged into the alley that ran along the north side of the safe house.

The second sentry was making his way up from Calle 49b, the road that formed the boundary on the south side of the building. The white van from the ambush had been parked at the junction, and it provided shelter for a second soldier. He waited for the sentry to turn left to head up the hill and then rushed out, intercepting him in ten quick paces, grabbing him from behind and opening the man’s throat with an efficient slice of a knife. The sentry’s body was dragged back down Calle 49b and dumped on the sidewalk.

Three teams of soldiers hurried forward. One team of five ran up the hill to the junction of the main road and Calle 49b. Another team of five emerged from a narrow alley opposite the building. A final team descended the hill. All fifteen men were dressed in black, moving with the slight stiffness of those wearing light body armour. They wore black helmets and were armed with submachine guns.

There was a short pause, no longer than ten seconds, and then the breaching team at the top of the building commenced the assault. Each man went to one of the four protruding skylights that Chase had noticed and, on the signal of a man at the front of the building, smashed the glass.

104

La Bruja left the room and made her way up the stairs to the floor above. Thorsson waited for her to go and then turned his attention back to Milton.

“You don’t have to do this,” Milton said.

“You know I do. It’s not personal.”

“It never is.”

Thorsson reached down to his belt and the knife that he wore in a scabbard. He popped the restraining strap with his thumb and slid the handle into his palm, beginning to withdraw the blade.

Milton brought his hands above his head and then brought them down, quickly, into his stomach. He flared out his elbows like chicken wings and made as if to touch his shoulder blades together. The motion applied pressure against the ties, all of it directed against their weakest point: the mechanism. The locking bar jerked against the tracks of the tie and then slipped free, sliding all the way through it so that the ties loosened enough for Milton to jerk his right wrist through the widened loop.