disoriented from the concussion.
Lathrop pressed the snout of his MP7 between his dazed eyes, shot him, and pushed his corpse toward the passenger door. Then he leaned in and put the Caddy into reverse to get it rolling backward. As it moved off the service pit, he tossed a second flashbang down inside.
He gave the smoke a moment to clear, rushed to the edge of the pit, thumbed on the slimline tac light mounted to his weapon. Almost directly below him at its bottom the shooter had fallen in a heap and was struggling up onto his hands and knees. Lathrop ripped into him with a volley and sprayed more fire through what was left of the smoke to take out the other men sprawled around him. Grabbing the rail’s handhold, he swung a leg over the side of the pit and dropped into it.
There was plenty of light from glowing tube fixtures on the walls of the little space, rendering the flashlight inessential. Lathrop looked around, took a quick count of the bloodied men on the floor. He’d killed most of them. A couple of them stirred, trying to gather themselves. One was slouched back against the wall spitting up blood and mucous.
Lathrop finished off the survivors and cut his eyes over to a door on his left. It was plain steel with a push bar and had been shoved wide open. On the other side was a lighted, cement-walled underground passage that ran out of the pit. There was a man kneeling in the doorway, blinking and groaning, his stooped form blocking the narrow passage. Armand Quiros was moving unsteadily forward just beyond him.
Lathrop plunged toward the entrance, triggering his weapon at the back of the kneeling man’s head as he ran through. Armand staggered on a few feet before he caught up, grabbed him by the back of his shirt, and drove him face-first against the wall.
Lathrop shoved his gun barrel between Armand’s ear and the hinge of his jaw, pressing his face into the wall.
“One good woman,” he said.
THREE
“Can you believe that airport down there?” Annie said from her window seat.
Belted in for landing, Nimec hadn’t noticed the view. A stickler for punctuality, he was checking the time on his WristLink.
“Mhmm,” he said. He’d taken an aisle seat aboard their Continental Airbus flight out of San Francisco, which, according to the analog watch display he’d selected, was right on the mark for its scheduled noon arrival.
Annie turned to him.
“Dear me, such enthusiasm,” she said. “How will I ever manage to keep up?”
Nimec felt like a killjoy. He supposed Annie would agree that he ought to.
“It’s nice,” he said a touch guiltily, looking past her out the window. “I think it’s a very nice airport.”
“Pete, when you told me Los Rayos was a bona fide destination for international passenger flights, I wasn’t sure what to expect,” she said. “But this just knocks me out… I’ve been to cities back home with fields that aren’t anywhere close to its size.”
Nimec scanned the rows of interconnected terminal buildings and warehouses, the sometimes parallel, sometimes converging bands of service roads and runways below. An airport, and a largish one, yup. Nice, nice, very impressive, and yet he couldn’t muster too much excitement. Still, he should have figured it was the sort of thing Annie would be keen on. Between her dad having been a pilot, and all those years she’d spent with the Air Force and NASA, she’d been around planes and runways forever. Earned a license to fly when she was, what, seventeen or eighteen? Whatever the minimum legal age might have been in Kansas. Hard to fathom, but she was a special case. He’d been different. The opposite, really — a slow starter. The highest Nimec had gotten off the ground before leaving South Philly to enlist in the service was a tenement rooftop, and he supposed the pigeons he’d flown out of the coop up above Boylston Street might have had a broader outlook on the world than he could have formed at the time.
Now he felt the thump of the Airbus’s deploying wheels, quietly sat back for its descent, and five minutes afterward was on the taxiway waiting for the call to disembark, along with the handful of other passengers bound for Los Rayos. The rest would presumably fly on to Piarco in the Trinididian capital, the plane’s final destination.
Annie leaned down and slid her carry-on from under her seat. It was an old — she proudly called it vintage — Samsonite leather train case her mother had brought to San Jose with her, passing it on to Annie as a functional keepsake.
She snapped open its lid.
“Here,” she said, reaching inside. “You might want to stuff this into your computer bag.”
Nimec glanced over at her, happily saw that she’d fished out his Seattle Mariners baseball cap.
“Hey, thanks.” He snatched the cap from her hand. “Guess I forgot to pack it.”
Annie nodded.
“That’s how come I remembered,” she said, and shut her case with authority.
The cabin intercom crackled out a pleasant thank-you-and-enjoy-your-stay, and then they were shuffling past the air crew and flight attendants into the jetway.
Nimec had expected to be met at the arrivals lounge by Henri Beauchart, the director of resort security, but they were instead received by his subordinate while looking for someone that matched the ex — GIGN chief’s description. A slight, dark-haired, olive-complected man who spoke with a faint British accent, he introduced himself as Kalidas Murthy (“Please feel free to call me Kal.”), and explained that his boss had gotten unavoidably detained at the last minute.
Nimec found this annoyed him, and got the sense Murthy had picked up on it.
“I offer a sincere apology on Mr. Beauchart’s behalf, madam and sir, and convey his desire that you might be his personal guests at dinner tonight,” he said, looking straight at Nimec as he addressed them. “Meanwhile, you must be eager to settle into your villa after what I hope was a good trip.”
He waved over a skycap to take their suitcases and then guided them through the terminal’s entrance, where a driver stood waiting by a gray stretch limo. As he opened the trunk for their bags, Nimec paused in the hot sun to admire the car’s gleaming body.
“A Jankel Rolls-Royce,” he said. “Pre ninety-eight.”
Murthy smiled.
“You know your automobiles.”
“Some,” Nimec said. “This one’s a classic.”
“It’s been refitted with the latest modifications and vehicle technology,” Murthy said with a nod. “You should enjoy chatting with Mr. Beauchart, who is quite an afficionado, and can better discuss its features… but come, I see your luggage is in the boot.”
They climbed into the limousine’s rear, Annie first, then Nimec, Murthy following to take the jump seat opposite them.
“I hope you won’t mind my pointing out a scenic highlight or two as we go along,” he said, another smile flashing across his dark Asiatic face.
Nimec leaned back without response. Although his irritation at being stood up by Beauchart had faded under the bright tropical sun, he wasn’t really in the mood for sightseeing. But what could he say? He was going to be here awhile and wanted to be courteous.
“Above all else, our planners have made it simple to orient oneself on the island,” Murthy was explaining. “This road leads north from the airport, as the signs generally indicate, and will take us beyond our commercial shipping facilities into the resort areas. The area to our south, over a third of the island, is an environmental preserve and wildlife refuge… forty miles of mangrove forest, coastal plain, and tidal waterways explicitly prohibited
