to the floor, pulling a cloth bag over his head and closing a set of handcuffs around his wrists. He resisted his natural urge to snap their necks. Driving around in an SUV full of corpses asking random people if they knew where Carlos Esparza lived wasn’t going to get him very far.
It was impossible to measure the passing time, partially because his watch was secured behind him and partially because the warmth and vibration of the vehicle’s floorboard finally put him to sleep. For some reason, lying there with two cartel killers’ feet on his back was a lot more relaxing than the time he’d spent getting sucked into his own mind on the flight. There were no longer options to consider. No secondary concerns. No political agendas. His only job now was to survive long enough to find Sayid Halabi and kill him.
The trip started out on smooth pavement, eventually degenerating into rough asphalt and then a dirt track that jerked him fully awake. In the last half hour or so, they crossed two streams deep enough for water to seep under the door and a few ruts that seemed even deeper.
After what Rapp guessed was somewhere between three and four hours, they finally came to a stop. He was immediately dragged from the vehicle and shoved to his knees on the damp ground. Voices speaking Spanish swirled around him for a few minutes before the bag was pulled off.
He squinted into the filtered sunlight and counted eight guards within his field of view. All were wearing camo, all were armed with AKs, and all had the look of former Mexican cops or army. Nothing special, but head and shoulders above the men he’d killed in California.
Much more interesting was the house intermittently hidden by the jungle in front of him. From the exterior, it had the look of a primitive village, with clapboard sides, scavenged materials, and a roof of corrugated tin and palm fronds. From the air, it would be completely indistinguishable from the other tiny villages in the area, but from where Rapp was kneeling, it was quite the architectural marvel. Massive windows revealed a luxurious modern interior of marble and glass. A swimming pool was hidden under a roof held up by pillars designed to look like trees. Behind and to the north, some kind of crop—food, not drugs—had been planted in a way that suggested subsistence farming.
A man in slacks and an open-collared shirt appeared from the house and approached to within ten feet of Rapp. He was probably in his early thirties, with vaguely stylish glasses and an expensive haircut. Certainly not Esparza. More likely some kind of business advisor. Rapp ignored him, craning his neck to get a better feel for his operating environment. It wasn’t too complicated. Jungle. Men with guns. Big house.
Another five minutes or so passed in silence before a second man appeared. He was probably in his mid-forties, with medium-length hair that was a little wild, a gold and diamond watch that looked like it weighed as much as a brick, and clothes that seemed to have been chosen based on the number of digits on the price tag. It was one of the strange things about these cartel bosses. They spent half their time obsessing over accumulating obscene amounts of money and the other half trying to figure out what to do with it.
“We had a bet whether you’d come,” Esparza said in solid English. According to Claudia he’d spent a fair amount of his youth in Arizona.
“Who won?”
The man just smiled and pulled a gold .44 Magnum Desert Eagle from his waistband. He aimed it at Rapp, who began instinctively running through the sequence of moves necessary to survive: Drop the cuffs that he’d picked in the first few minutes of the drive there. Roll forward, letting the round go harmlessly over his head. Get hold of the man, disarm him, pull him in close enough that no one would dare take a shot . . .
That was a good way to kill Esparza and escape into the jungle, but Rapp had to remind himself again that that wasn’t why he was here. He was here to make friends and figure out how to get close to Sayid Halabi.
“Seems like we’ve both gone through a lot of trouble for you to just shoot me,” Rapp said.
“Oh, I’m not going to shoot you. I’m going to torture you. For months. Until there isn’t anything left of