In San Ysidro, Faroe put together enough of the rush of words to understand. Lane had hacked the file. “Good job! What’s in the file?”

“A bunch of numbers, bank names, and dollar amounts. Greek to me. Here, I’ll read you some. There’s a January eighth date, then Bank of Vanuatu, a ten-digit number, and the figure, two million three hundred thousand, to Sparbuch…”

Faroe closed his eyes, visualizing the data. Ted Franklin had used a blind overseas account to transship a hefty sum of money, then converted it to an Austrian savings passbook account.

“…followed by another sixteen-digit number,” Lane said. “Do you want me to read the number to you?”

The Sparbuchen were anonymous. Period. Creating new accounts was difficult, but existing accounts were still as protected from money-laundering investigations as they ever had been.

“I don’t need the number yet,” Faroe said. “How many entries are there?”

Lane juggled the phone between his ear and his shoulder while he wiped steam from the shower off the computer screen. “About sixty. No, more like seventy. Some of them look like duplicates.”

He glanced over his shoulder. The guards were shouting for him to come out.

“Give me a minute to dry off!” he yelled back at them in Spanish.

Then he punched a button on the laptop keyboard.

“Lane, what’s happening?” Faroe asked.

The keyboard popped up slightly.

“They’re getting impatient,” Lane said.

Someone began hammering on the door with something harder than a fist.

Lane grabbed the computer’s hard drive.

Wood splintered.

He pushed the hard drive into one of the many deep pockets in his cargo shorts and fastened the Velcro tab.

Wood groaned and popped.

He slammed the keyboard back in and shoved the gutted computer beneath a pile of damp towels. The charging cord stuck out like a flag. He yanked the cord out of the wall and buried it with the computer.

The door shuddered on its hinges.

“I’m coming!” Lane shouted, turning off the shower with one hand and reaching for the bathroom lock with the other.

The door burst open, shoving Lane backward. He tripped and went down. The satellite phone flew against the toilet, then bounced against the shower curtain and into the bathtub.

Kicking, cursing, and slinging punches, Lane tried to get free of the hands reaching for him. Something hit him on the cheek. His head roared and things went fuzzy.

A deep male voice snarled commands. Then the man picked up the phone.

“?Digame!” he ordered.

Faroe didn’t.

“Who you talk?” the guard shouted at Lane in English.

“His name is Ivegot Thedrive!” Lane yelled toward the cell phone.

Something connected with his head.

The world exploded into a nasty shade of red, then faded to the kind of black Lane had never seen before.

SAN YSIDRO

MONDAY, 7:34 A.M.

FAROE STARED AT THE handset. It took every bit of his discipline not to throw the phone against the wall.

Grace felt the rage tightening the muscles in his body. She spun toward him. “Lane? Is it Lane?”

“He’s okay,” Faroe said quickly, despite the sound of fists hitting flesh he’d heard. Some of those blows had undoubtedly been scored by Lane. He was a tough, wiry kid well on his way to becoming a man. “The guards are onto the phone. They turned it off. They’re moving him somewhere.”

“Is the phone with him?” Steele asked.

“Would you leave the phone with him?” Faroe asked sarcastically.

Steele didn’t bother to answer.

Someone from the back of the bus said, “Sat phone hasn’t moved from previous location.”

Faroe looked like he’d rather have been wrong about the phone. “Put someone on the real-time sat photos.”

“There are too many groups of people on the school’s grounds to be certain we have Lane,” Steele said. “The resolution simply isn’t that good.”

“Do it anyway.”

Grace watched Faroe. He looked calm, yet she sensed the waves of rage and frustration radiating from him. Suddenly he spun and hit the wall with his fist. A shudder went through the heavy motor coach.

No one said a word.

Everyone but Steele and Grace retreated to the far end of the motor coach, giving Faroe some room.

“Talk to me, Joseph,” Steele said quietly.

“If they get Lane away from All Saints, they’ll drag him down that rathole called Tijuana, and we’ll have hell’s own time finding him,” Faroe said.

What he didn’t say was that Lane would already be dead if and when they did find him.

Faroe didn’t have to say it aloud. It echoed in the silence that followed his words.

“We have one helicopter, one sniper, and two lightly armed shooters,” Steele said finally. “Even if we had three times that much firepower, I still wouldn’t allow an air strike on a school where an army company is bivouacked.”

The look on Faroe’s face told Grace that Steele wasn’t saying anything Faroe didn’t already know.

“Lane cracked the security on Ted’s file,” Faroe said. “I was right. He ran between fifty and a hundred million dirty dollars through some offshore business accounts and then parked it in some clever little Austrian passbook savings accounts. Nobody’s going to find it without the file, not even Ted.”

“In other words, the computer is the key to a huge amount of narco dollars,” Steele said.

“It was,” Faroe said.

“But now?”

“Now it’s time to look at our hole card.”

“Which is?” Steele asked.

“Father Magon.”

“So you trust him,” Grace said to Faroe.

He smiled thinly and turned away.

“Joe?” she asked.

“When you’re down to your hole card,” Faroe said, “trust is the least of your problems.”

ALL SAINTS SCHOOL

MONDAY, 7:36 A.M.

FATHER MAGON WAS DRESSED for the soccer field rather than the confessional. Loose shorts, black T-shirt, and athletic shoes.

Maybe that was why the soldiers ignored him.

“What are you doing?” he demanded in colloquial Spanish. “That boy is a student here. You have no right to-”

“Get out of our way,” one of the soldiers shouted back.

Lane was slung over a big soldier’s shoulder like a sack of beans, held in place by a large hand. The man’s other hand held a school duffel hastily stuffed with clothes.

The boy’s eyes were open, furious. There was a cut on his cheek that was already swelling into a bruise.

Magon stood in front of the soldier who was carrying Lane and said loudly, “Lane, are you hurt?”

The boy said something that sounded like “…hell no…rat bastard pussies…”

Two soldiers grabbed Magon and jerked him away.

“Where are you taking him?” Magon demanded.

The soldiers just kept on walking.

Magon started to follow.

One of the guards turned around and leveled his assault weapon at the priest. “Stay out of this. It has nothing to do with the church.”

Magon waited until the soldiers were out of sight before he turned and ran into the cottage. Some of Lane’s clothes were scattered around. The bed was a tangle. The bathroom door was smashed, hanging drunkenly by a single hinge.

The priest locked the front door and went to the bathroom. Towels lay in a damp pile. The mirror was a haze of cracks and splinters. The shower curtain had been torn off the rod.

There was a cell phone tangled in the curtain.

Magon picked up the phone, studied it, and hit the button that redialed the number of the most recent outgoing call.

“Who is this?” a male voice asked instantly.

“A man of God,” Magon said, recognizing Faroe’s voice but not knowing if it was safe to speak openly.