I flicked my fingers just a little, waving his statement away. “Maybe so. Maybe not. Either way, I can’t help you.”

Vega seemed to shrink as quickly as he had drawn himself up. “Please, Mr. Cutter. Ours is a poor country, and our movement is a movement of the people. But we can offer you twenty thousand dollars.”

“You’d be wasting your money. There’s nothing I could do that wasn’t done already by the police seven years ago when the evidence was fresh.”

“But as I said, they were focused on capturing the kidnapper, Alejandra Delarosa. They were not interested in proving that she has no connection to the URNG. Your questions will be different.”

“I have other commitments.”

“Surely not, since you were just released from the hospital.” He cocked his head slightly, looking at me as though the distance between us was much greater than it was. I looked back at him, not liking how much he seemed to know about me. He continued, “There is also your last client to consider. Can you truly have so much business after making a mistake like that?”

I felt the swirling distance rise behind my eyelids. The numbing unreality. I tried to remember the sessions, the advice from the professionals in lab coats. Focus on the truth you know. Be in this world now. Find what’s real and cling to it. I recalled something a marine chaplain had sent me on a get-well card, all the way from Afghanistan: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” But the simple fact was that I had sat by doing nothing on the night Haley died.

Haley had been forty-nine. I was thirty-four. Because of the age difference between us, I had known that she would probably die before me. But I had never seriously considered that her life might be in danger. I would live the rest of my life regretting that. I had been her bodyguard as well as her husband. I should have been ready. It didn’t matter that the same drugs that killed her had also driven me insane. It only mattered that I hadn’t been there for her in the end.

I looked down the street at the men inside the parked Suburban, the two of them still sitting there, still facing us. They didn’t seem to realize that the pile of junk in the shopping cart beside them was alive with serpents. Inside my head I fought back.

Vega said, “Everybody makes mistakes, Mr. Cutter. We are not interested in yours. We believe in you. Surely you can spare us just a few days? Think of it as a way to… what is that excellent expression? Ride again the horse that dropped you?”

Over by the limousine, Vega’s so-called bodyguard ground his cigarette butt into the sidewalk with a slow rolling motion of his toe. Castro’s yellow eyes were still hidden behind dark lenses, but his lips had curled into something ugly, which he probably thought of as a smile. I was pretty sure I knew what he was thinking. What I didn’t know was whether he was right. If it made me nervous just to drive, was I up to the rest of the job? The doctors didn’t think so. I shivered at the possibility that the awful disconnectedness might still take me too far.

“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to walk back to the car.

Behind me, Vega said, “It is possible you may reconsider. If you do, you have only to ask for Mr. Brown at the Renaissance Hotel. I will be there for some time, attending to other business.”

A minute later, as I rolled slowly past the two men in the Suburban down the street, neither of them turned to watch me pass. I stole glances at them in my rearview mirror until the traffic cut off my view. Their vehicle remained parked at the curb, so I figured they were Castro’s problem. I had problems of my own. I turned left at Hollywood and Vine, heading for the 405 and Newport Beach, and the cool, dark comfort of my bed.

4

In a northern African nation where our armed forces never did officially exist, I once led a squad of five good men into a village of mud-brick buildings. We’d been assigned to extract a couple of marines who had been kidnapped the day before. Our primary mission was supposed to be peaceful. We were in country only to escort some diplomats who had come to negotiate with the commander of a rebel force that threatened oil fields in the region. The rebel commander had denied involvement in the kidnapping, blaming it on “hooligans.” But he had also warned us not to enter the village to search for our marines. He had claimed such an action on our part would be offensive to his men.

This was unacceptable, of course. Our captain sent us into the village as soon as local informants told us where the marines were being held.

The intelligence had estimated a force of about twenty, but as we moved through narrow alleys, we soon realized there were at least one hundred hostiles firing on us from the rooftops. Two of my men were wounded in the first five minutes. One of them was still mobile, but we had to carry the other. Our extraction point was a sort of plaza several blocks away. By the time we understood our true situation, it was just as far back to the insertion point at the edge of the village. Since those were the only two locations where we could get the wounded men into a helicopter, we had nothing to gain by turning back. And besides, the building where the captured marines were being held was between us and the central plaza. In spite of the heavy resistance, we decided to proceed as planned.

As we made our way deeper into the village, the enemy fired from doors and windows. They fired quick bursts from around corners. They hurled Molotov cocktails at us. We were outnumbered twenty to one, but they were amateurs and we were marines. We remained calm. We killed them by the dozens as we moved steadily on. We reached the objective, but when we entered the building without resistance, I knew it was too easy. We found the two marines. They were already dead. The condition of their bodies filled me with a quiet rage. It was obvious their deaths had been long and painful.

When one of my men suggested that we remain in town a little longer, I agreed. We went back outside. We went hunting. And by the time we left that village, not one armed man in it remained alive.

I got a nickname in the Corps. They called me “the Artist,” not only because I used to spend a lot of time on liberty drawing sketches of my surroundings, but also because I became very good at bringing my men back alive from missions with suicidal odds. There hadn’t been one moment when I didn’t know the odds, and not a single moment when I was fool enough to think I was invincible. The missions might have been suicidal, but I wasn’t, so fear was always there. But fear was just another enemy to vanquish. I had been a different man back then, a man in nearly perfect control. Whenever my boots had hit the ground, fear became the first to die.

Part of special-operations training had involved teaching us to find a hidden place inside our minds where we could go to endure desert heat, arctic cold, sleepless nights, thirst and hunger, and even slow and agonizing torture. As long as a man has that calm and distant place inside, he can face almost anything. A marine in special-ops needs one place where he absolutely, positively cannot be overcome, one place where he is always in complete control. That place must travel with him wherever he is sent. It must be inside his mind. He goes there when he’s in a helicopter or a Humvee or a medium tactical vehicle replacement, a MTVR, heading for a hot insertion. It’s not a question of escapism. He only reminds himself that such a place exists, and that alone is good enough. In Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and half a dozen other situations that never made the headlines, it was always good enough for me.