Adrenaline throbbed through his veins. He coughed hard now, bent over, ridding his lungs of the smoke. He scanned the hall, saw there were four other doors, and then ran for the steel elevator at the end.

It took him five seconds to understand that the car would go nowhere without a key. The other doors then—and quickly. An alarm had been raised.

Casius ran to the first door, found it locked, and fired a slug through its lock. He kicked it in, hit a light switch, and stepped into the room under stuttering fluorescent tubes. The room lay bare except for a single table and three chairs. Charts lined the walls. There was no exit from here.

Blueprints, darkening purple with age, were taped to the wall on his left. The architectural drawing nearest him showed a cross section of the black cliffs. And nestled in the hill between the plantation and the cliffs, a cross section of a three-story structure. This structure. Casius shifted his eyes to another blueprint, next to the first. This one showed an expanded view of the underground construction, complete with an elevator at one end.

No less than twenty drawings lined the walls, detailing the complex. Long blue lines shaped a passage that ran through the mountain. Red-dotted rectangles showed the tunnel’s purpose. Cocaine was refined in a large plant on the second floor and then loaded into logs that were shot through the mountain into the Orinoco River and carried out to sea.

Casius left the room and closed the door.

The next door opened easily with a turn of its knob and revealed a utility closet. He snatched a machete from the corner and ran back to the elevator. Surprisingly, the red indicator still had not lit, which caused him pause. Either they hadn’t bothered to install any alarms in the lower level—figuring that any threats would come from above—or they waited for him, knowing that the elevator was the only way out.

But they were wrong.

With the clank of steel against steel, Casius shoved the blade between the doors and leaned into the machete. The doors resisted for a moment and then yielded. He surveyed an empty shaft that fell to another basement level and rose to the bottom of the car, one story above.

He had to find the woman. Sherry. It was ironic—he had stalked a terrorist like Abdullah for years and he had planned for the fall of the CIA nearly as long. And yet here was a woman and he knew he had to save her. She was somehow different.

Or was she?

The black fog lapped at his mind.