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‘I understand.’

‘Without that assurance,’ the fat man continued, ‘he can be moody.’

Two Indians ran from the hacienda. They were young and hungry-looking and carried AK-47s across their chests. One opened the Range Rover’s door and invited the Nortamericano out with a strong tug. He stepped down slowly to the bricks. He was lanky and taller than the fat man. The Indians spoke Mam to each other and broken Spanish to the driver. The driver smiled, showing gaps in his tobacco-stained teeth. He leaned against the hood and lit a Marlboro. His face gleamed in the match’s flare.

The Indians patted down the tall man as if they did not trust the fat man, the driver, or the others who had accompanied them from Pajapita. They made as if to pat down the driver but he cursed and pushed them away. This was an awkward moment but the fat man barked some words in Mam and the Indians backed off with sour looks. They swaggered and jerked the barrels of their guns. The driver turned away with patient eyes and continued smoking.

The tall man wiped his face with a handkerchief. Somewhere a generator hummed. The roads at the end had been brutal, rutted and covered with broken branches from the recent hurricane. Still the hacienda seemed to have suffered no damage and glowed with lights in the dusk. In the center of the courtyard a small fountain cast a single stream of greenish water two meters into the air. The stream splashed through a cloud of midges. Small bats swooped back and forth across the blue dusk like swallows. A lone little girl with long black hair, dressed in shorts, a halter top, and pink sandals, played around the fountain. She stopped for a moment to look at the tall man and the Range Rover, then swung her hair and resumed playing.

The fat man walked to the back of the truck and opened the gate. He pulled down a quintal bag of coffee. It thudded and hissed on the bricks as the beans settled.

‘Mr. Guerrero uses no drugs but for coffee, and that he drinks in quantity,’ the fat man said. He squinted one eye. ‘We will wait for you here.’ He tapped his platinum watch. ‘It is best to be brief.’

A small old woman wearing a long yellow and red cotton dress approached from the hacienda and took the tall man by the hand. She smiled up at him and led him across the courtyard. The little girl watched with a somber expression. Beneath a fine dark fuzz, her upper lip had the faint pink mark of a cleft palate that had been expertly repaired. The bronze gates before the hacienda’s patio were decorated with roughly cast figures of putti, little angels doing chores such as carrying fruit. The angels’ eyes, sad but resigned, resembled the eyes of the old woman and their color was a good match for her skin. Beyond a serious iron door and then a glass door, the hacienda’s centrally cooled air stroked the tall man’s face. Music played through the broad white rooms—light jazz, Kenny G. The old woman showed him to a white couch and pushed him back until he sat. She knelt and removed his shoes, replacing them with sandals from a pouch concealed in the folds of her dress.

Mr. Guerrero appeared alone in the doorway to the dining room. He was small and well-formed and he wore a yellow and black Hawaiian shirt tucked in and white linen pants and a rope belt. His hair was thick and dark. He looked like a well-to-do man pretending to be a beachcomber.

‘Mr. Santerra, welcome,’ Guerrero said. ‘I trust your ride was sincerely terrible.’

The tall man, whose name was not Santerra, held up a small cloth bag. Glass vials jingled softly inside. ‘At least nothing broke.’

Guerrero’s cheek jerked. ‘It is done, then?’

‘Proof of concept,’ the tall man said. ‘Pure and lethal. Try it on someone you no longer need.’

Guerrero held up his hands. ‘I am not that kind of man,’ he said. ‘We will test it in a lab, with animals. If it is what you say, you will be given your next money at a place of our choosing. Money is not safe here or in the islands. Terrorism has forced your nation to pay too much attention to world banking.’

A large balding black man in a black suit entered from the kitchen and walked around Guerrero. He stood in front of the tall man and held out his hand. He received the bag and opened it carefully. Three vials filled with fine powder tinkled into his pink palm. ‘You realize this is not the final product,’ the black man said in a reedy voice with an Austrian accent, to Guerrero. ‘It proves nothing.’

Guerrero waved his hand, dismissing that concern. ‘You will tell me if they have proven good faith before the next payment. Correct, Seńor Santerra?’

The tall man nodded.

‘I may never see an end to this trouble,’ Guerrero said. He had not taken a step closer since the tall man held up the cloth bag. ‘But I hope my children will. Have you viewed the movie, M, Seńor Santerra?’

The tall man shook his head.

‘The underworld of Germany seeks out a child molester and puts him on trial because he is bringing down so much heat on their operations. It is so here. If you keep your promise, we will give those thoughtless monsters what they deserve.’ He paused, allowing the black Austrian to leave the room with the bag. Then he sat on a heavy wooden chair. His face was lined with years of worry. ‘You have a dangerous quality. It makes me want to trust you.’

The tall man did not acknowledge this compliment, if it was one.

‘I appreciate that you have come in person. When can I expect news?’

‘Within three months, at most six.’ The tall man held out his hand to shake on their deal.

Guerrero looked down at the hand. His cheek twitched once more. He looked decades older than his forty years. ‘Now you will go,’ he said.

The old bronze woman hustled into the room again and knelt to replace the tall man’s shoes. He stood and walked to the door.

In the courtyard, they had kept the engine running. The little girl had gone inside. The driver extinguished his cigarette and deposited the butt in a tin he drew from his pocket.

The fat man opened the door to the Range Rover and dangled the hood from one hand, smiling. ‘There are too many bats around here,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is because there are so many insects.’

CHAPTER TWO Iraq Year Minus One (#ulink_c519480d-68c2-55aa-880d-00107bc29b54)

The red plastic beads on the curtain rattled like finger bones in a cup.

The man who stepped down into the coffee house had yellow hair. He wore sunglasses, as did almost every man in Baghdad, a city of thieves, killers, and merchants. Fine dust swirled from his shoes as he pushed them through a double brush set in the bricks. For a moment, he turned up his nose and frowned as if possessed by some noble doubt, and his temple and cheek were lit by a false hope of rubies. A hero, obviously—an Englishman perhaps—tall and slender and possibly strong, though that was difficult to judge beneath the baggy cut of his linen coat.

Ibrahim Al-Hitti watched from the small round table and pulled in his polished black shoes, not wishing them to be trampled. There was little room in the basement, few tables and fewer customers. A one-eyed cousin of a cousin owned the establishment and had been persuaded it could be used on occasion as a place of personal business, not to be asked after. He would literally turn a blind eye to any activities. That plump and ill-dressed relative now stood behind the small black bar surrounded by a rising cloud of steam from an old espresso machine imported, so he boasted, from Italy. The steam frightened two horseflies seeking refuge from the outer heat. They buzzed and batted until settling on the plaster wall beside a small fogged mirror. The air in the basement café was humid and hot like the rest of Iraq this time of year, a climate fit for sordid talk and deeds.

Al-Hitti had been born in Yemen but had spent most of his youth in Egypt and England. He had no love for Iraq and he did not like Iraqis in general. This part of town, near Firdos Square—allegedly cooled by breezes off the Tigris—was frequented by businessmen mostly and the secretaries and office workers of Shiite clerics. Businessmen he despised. Of clerics he held no opinions.

Though a Muslim and a Sunni, Al-Hitti was of that pragmatic sect that had proliferated in the Middle East in the last century—a nonaligned brotherhood most interested in diverting the rivers of power. Religious passions had divided Muslims for too many centuries and only made them weak. What would bring them together and restore lost glory were the cool efforts of the mind, working to enact difficult, some would say sordid deeds.

The tall man removed his sunglasses, unafraid to reveal his face. Al-Hitti saw immediately that he was American, not English—they were as different in step and behavior to his discerning eye as Ethiopians and Somalis. So this was the one whom he was scheduled to meet. It was an appointment he had not looked forward to. A disappointment.

He enjoyed playing with English words.

And he was even less happy now that he saw that the man he would have to kill was in fact a decent-looking fellow with strong features and even a respectable tan. That English word, tan, appeared in his head, surrounded by half-naked women. This irritated him.

The American caught his eye and stepped forward, walking lightly around the tables to the rear of the shop. To Al-Hitti he offered his right hand and in low, mellow tones introduced himself. His name was John Brown. He was from Massachusetts—a silly, sneezing sort of name for a place. His Arabic was of the Cairo variety and surprisingly good.

‘You are just as I imagined you,’ Al-Hitti told the American, a lie. He had imagined instead a small, furtive man wearing loose clothing.

‘Is it so?’ the American said, and pulled back a flimsy wrought-iron chair to sit. They both measured out tiny smiles.

The cousin arrived to take their orders. He pointedly ignored the American, turning his good eye from that part of the room. John Brown did not seem to mind.

As Al-Hitti waited for a glass of thick sweet tea, he examined the American closely. Their silence drew out. His first impression had been one of quiet strength, a man who would appeal to women. But Al-Hitti’s deeper instincts made him less certain. There were telling lines in the American’s face and a determined sadness that reminded Al-Hitti of an old fighter—not a soldier, who could be casually cruel and blame others, but a mountain guerilla, used to working and living alone for months and having no one to blame but himself.

John Brown’s appearance was made more striking by the fact that he had one blue eye and one green eye. Al-Hitti had never seen such a thing.

The American put his hand to his chest. ‘Before you decide whether or not to kill me…’ He reached swiftly into his coat pocket and pulled out a heat-sealed plastic packet full of beige powder.

Al-Hitti reacted as if stung by one of the horseflies. He pushed back, eyes wide, and his chair banged into another chair. ‘What is this?’

‘A sample,’ the American answered.

‘Complete?’ Al-Hitti asked, his voice rising in pitch.

The American raised his chin. ‘Not yet. Soon.’

Al-Hitti refused to handle the package until he saw his courage was in question and that the American was rapidly losing confidence. It was probably fake, anyway. Anything else would be too much to hope for. He took it. The plastic was beaded with sweat from the American’s hands, but inside, the powder was miraculously fine and light, clinging and dry.

A handful of a hundred thousand miseries.

‘Tell your scientists, or your graduate students at university, to examine it with great care,’ the American instructed. ‘It will behave like a gas, penetrating everywhere if not properly handled. They will tell you that it is pure and that it has been genetically modified, but it is not complete. Not yet. Try it on someone you wish dead. Let your subject breathe a few grains, or swallow it, or touch it to his skin. In time, examined in the dark, his lesions will glow green and then red. These inserted genes are proof that we can do what we say.’