to secure his prisoner while he made his escape. He did, after all, have the prize he’d come for, and unless Imolene caught up with him and took it, the Englishman could make a great deal of money from the artifact. A great deal, if he could gauge such a thing from the Israelis’ interest in it.
His arrangement with the Israelis was something else he had to consider, especially if he didn’t succeed in retrieving the artifact. This had been only his second job for them—the first a more sordid affair that had paid quite well. And so when this opportunity had come along, he’d jumped at it. If he failed in this one, he doubted there would be another.
The Yugo hit a deep rut in the road, and Imolene mouthed a curse when his head hit the ceiling for what seemed the hundredth time. He moved his knee so he could downshift and navigated a turn around a line of boulders that seemed out of place in the middle of nowhere. The next village was a little over forty kilometers ahead, and as the next concentration of civilization was almost a hundred past that, he guessed that Templeton would have stopped at the nearer one.
If he was traveling this way. And if he was even in the country.
Imolene grunted and pushed those thoughts away. He was seldom wrong when it came to finding someone he wanted to find. And he very much wanted to find Martin Templeton.
10
As Duckey set his phone on the seventeenth-century desk with the Boston-manufacture imprint that he had the luck to acquire from a little old lady at a garage sale in Des Moines, he pondered the advances in technology that made the procurement of multiple flight manifests a thing accomplished with a single phone call, rather than the arduous labor it had been when he was cutting his teeth at Langley. On one hand, he understood that the ability to do something like that signified a level of technological sophistication rightly lauded. On the other, well, it just seemed too easy.
Even just three years earlier, when he’d performed a similar service for Jack, the technology had not been as advanced as it was now. He’d had to make two phone calls and one fax. And even then he’d not felt as if he’d really accomplished anything. After all was done, he’d come to understand the importance of the role he’d played, but he hadn’t felt the fulfillment he thought one was supposed to feel. No wonder, then, that he felt less so as he pushed away from the desk and took a draw from a cigar he’d been nursing since dinner. He would get the manifests within the hour and, if one of them had Jack’s name on it, he’d call Esperanza with the news. Until then, there wasn’t a great deal for him to do.
His office adjoined the family room and from it he could hear that his wife had settled down to watch the evening news. Duckey removed the cigar from his mouth and ground it in an ashtray. When he entered the family room, Stephanie was curled up on the sofa, book in hand. She didn’t look up as he crossed the room and settled down next to her. A few moments passed before she placed a bookmark between the pages and set the book on the end table. As soon as her eyes moved to his, Duckey saw the sly smile in them—the one meant to inform him that she knew something was going on.
Duckey could muster only a weak smile in his defense.
“So are you going to tell me what’s got you so excited?” she asked, to which Duckey only returned a feigned puzzled look.
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You’ve been bouncing off the walls since dinner.”
Duckey, who thought he had a pretty good handle on the events of the evening, none of which had him engaged in any sort of bouncing, nonetheless understood what his wife meant. Except that, by his reckoning, the energy she referred to had been building for quite a while, and the reason it was so noticeable tonight was because it had a focus. Even if that focus wasn’t a very exciting one.
“I’ve just been doing a small favor for a friend,” he said.
Stephanie took that in and parsed it. “My guess is it’s the sort of favor that requires a call or two to Langley?”
“Just one call,” he said. “And not even