Pierce listened, willing his ears to open wider. Then he heard them. Two sets of footsteps climbing over the pebble-covered ruins. But the sound wasn’t from outside the temple of Castor and Pollux, it was from within.

And close.

King leaned in to Pierce. “If one of them gets off a shot or shouts a warning, the others out there”—he motioned to the forum with his head—“are going to have an army of police descend on us. And even if we do escape, security will be beefed up for a long time to come. When was the last time you were in a fight?”

Pierce felt like he might vomit. “You fought all my fights for me.”

“Not this time,” King said. “I can’t be in two places at once. All I need is a few seconds.”

The shuffling shoes came closer, this time complimented by a pair of equally hushed voices speaking Italian. “When I tap you, count to three Mississippi, then go. Don’t hold back.”

“Okay.”

The tap came thirty seconds later, when the sound of footfalls was only a few feet away, just on the other side of the foundation they were hiding behind. Pierce counted.

One Mississippi …

Two Mississippi …

Chapter Twenty-Five

TWENTY-FOUR

Chaco Province, Argentina

THE SHOULDER-DEEP WATER of the Negro River slowed Bishop and his team, but also helped quiet their approach. It didn’t, however, help the nerves of the team following his leadership. Designated Bishop’s Pawns One through Five, they followed his orders without question. But that didn’t stop them assigning two men to watch the water for crocodiles. Not that their night vision goggles could penetrate the river, which really was as black as its name implied.

During the daylight hours Bishop and his team, dressed as tourists, split into three teams of two, casually seeking out a sixty-seven-year-old man named Miguel Franco and his forty-five-year-old son, Nahuel. The pair lived together in downtown Resistencia with the single son supporting his out-of-work father.

Casual interviews with neighbors, local bars, shops, and churches revealed that the pair often spent nights camped out on the Negro River where the father would make up for his unemployment by catching a haul of fish, sometimes enough to sell at the local market.

Bishop could feel several of those large fish swimming circles around his legs. He pushed through them, closing on the campfire that revealed the team’s two targets sitting on a small sandy beach, lines cast and fishing rod handles buried in the sand. A half-finished twelve-pack of beer sat between them, which complicated the fact that a shotgun, presumably for warding off crocs, lay in the younger man’s lap. He had no doubt that anything bigger than a fish emerging from the water would be greeted by an explosion of lead pellets.