The captain’s voice came over the PA, announcing that they would be landing in twenty minutes. Ellie closed down her tablet and slipped it back into the Faraday bag that protected it from external interference. Her previous visits to Colombia suggested that this operation would present interesting challenges. The country was founded upon a precarious relationship between legitimacy and criminality that meant that the functions of the state and the underworld often blurred together. El Centro was the pivot upon which the edifice was balanced; there was a risk that removing its leadership would be destabilising, and that the whole structure would come crashing down.

But those assessments were for others to consider.

Ellie had been given her orders. She was excited to start.

14

Ellie had once again been booked into the Four Seasons in Casa Medina. Early check-in had been arranged, and she went through the formalities before following the clerk’s directions to her room on the fifth floor. She went to the minibar and took out a bottle of Diet Coke. She popped the top and went to drink it at the window.

Good morning, Bogotá. She gazed out over the city and found herself wondering what her father would have said if he could see her now. Her career had taken a crooked path to bring her to this point. She had never doubted that she would one day end up working for the government. She had spent a year at college convinced that she was going to join the Secret Service, but her old man had been in the bureau, and she had eventually decided there was no point in fighting it; she was going to end up there, too. Her career there had been decent, and then she had found herself in the woods up in Michigan and dealing with a local militia that was planning on blowing up a trailer full of fertiliser during the vice president’s visit to Minneapolis.