‘That’s the spirit.’ Cordelia nods. ‘Works damn well on its own, that one. Good old-fashioned Texan preacher leads a group of indigenous Mayans out into the thickest part of the jungle and builds a village? Then the military come in and chuck them off so they can drill for oil? That’s some righteous fury, right there. No wonder Walt got him on-side, gathering intelligence for the Angels. He even had a pilot’s licence. Could get in and out of Belize with barely a blip. The Guatemalan authorities shot him down, you’ve worked that out, yes? He had a couple of Walt’s assets on board with him, coming back from a drop. You won’t be able to prove it but it was a CIA cable that alerted the Guatemalans to what the reverend was doing.’

‘The Angels,’ says Fergus, shaking his head. ‘There really was a unit set up to do good?’

Cordelia grins at that, filling her glass from the decanter. She takes a sip and appreciates the flavour. ‘After a fashion,’ she says with a shrug. ‘Walt was a nuisance but he was good at what he did. His intelligence network was the best around and the US needed him more than ever with all the uprisings happening on their doorstep. He was happy to share when President Carter was doing a half decent job of turning the US away from its deals with dictators. It was a different story when it became clear to him, to me, to bloody everybody, that a different type of politics was in the ascendency. He wasn’t going to betray his network to a country that was funding the people who were responsible for genocide. Carter had pulled funding. Told the Guatemalans there’d be no more aid or arms until they cleaned up their act. Reagan made it clear that once he got in power, he’d turn America into heroes; a force for good battling the evil of communism. It was a vote-winner. And he did what he said he would. Made friends with a dictator who was later convicted of war crimes and told all his voters that he’d received a bum deal in the media and was actually one of the good guys, even as his own intelligence services were telling him that the death squads were killing people in their thousands. He got them everything they wanted. Even sent in the US Marines to help train the Kaibiles in the kind of counter-insurgency tactics they’d used in Vietnam. The one who got caught in the video – we never identified him but I know that the son of one of the US diplomats who were at the house in ’82 was serving with the Marines at that time.’

‘Can you give me a name?’ asks Fergus.