"Hurry up, Rodrigo!" said a male voice in Spanish.

"This ain't as easy as it looks, damn it!" came the reply.

Fisher took a step forward, pressed himself against the left-hand wall. Now he could see around the lamp. On the bed were two pair of calves--one set on the bottom, unclothed and toes pointed up; the second wearing pants, toes pointing down. Their owner was kneeling on the bed over van der Putten. The bed was rocking from side to side.

Fisher cocked his right arm, took aim, and hurled the soap dish into the master suite. The dish flew true, striking the sliding-glass doors dead center. Even as the glass shattered, Fisher was moving through the door.

At the threshold he looked right and saw one man standing over van der Putten's naked girlfriend. He had a booted foot pressed into her neck and a noise-suppressed 9mm pointed at her skull. Predictably, he was gaping at the shattered doors. Fisher spun, shot the man in the head, and he stumbled sideways and slid down the wall. Fisher turned again and took aim at the man kneeling over van der Putten.

"Don't move," Fisher ordered in Spanish.

The man had been in middle of turning his head. He stopped, his face in profile. His hands were out of sight, held in front of him.

"Let me see your hands," Fisher ordered.

The man didn't move.

Fisher repeated his order.

The man raised his left hand above his head; it was bloody up to the wrist.

"The other hand."

Fisher knew what was coming. He could see it in the man's posture, in the flick of his eyes.

The man turned his head back toward the sliding-glass doors, and said, "Okay, okay . . ."

Fisher took a wide step to his left, and a half second later the man made his move. Left hand still raised above his head, the man spun his torso counterclockwise, revealing his right hand and the 9mm it held. The muzzle flashed orange. The bullet thunked into the wall where Fisher had been standing a moment earlier. Fisher fired twice, both bullets entering within an inch of each other directly beneath the man's armpit. Both bullets shredded his heart. Already dead, he pitched forward over the edge of the bed, his legs jutting skyward for a few moments before he crumpled into a ball on the carpet.

Behind him the woman whimpered.

"Don't move. Don't look up," Fisher told her. "You're going to be okay."

She didn't answer.

"Say yes if you understand me."

He got a feeble siin response.

Fisher walked to the doors and pulled the curtains shut, then checked van der Putten. The former mercenary lay facedown on the bed, a Rorschach of blood staining the white sheets beneath him. He'd been shot once behind the right ear--or what little remained of the right ear. It had been sawed off, along with the left, by the bloody tanto knife that lay beside the body. The ears lay side by side on a nearby pillow. They looked like miniature, dehydrated pork chops.

Karma,Fisher thought.

HEquickly searched both men, taking everything he found, then grabbed a spare blanket in the linen closet and covered up the woman. After some coaxing, she got to her feet, and Fisher led her out of the bedroom and downstairs to the living room couch.

"What happened?" she murmured, barely coherent. She was in shock. "Who were those men? Why did they kill Heinzie? Who are you? Why did they . . . ?"

Fisher let her ramble as he went into the kitchen and found a plastic grocery bag, into which he dumped the men's wallets, pocket litter, and a set of car keys. He then went back upstairs and rummaged in van der Putten's medicine cabinet, where he found a bottle of Ambien. He gave the woman a tablet and a shot of Scotch, both of which she accepted without protest. He knelt before her.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Isobella."

"Isobella, does Heinzie have a safe? Someplace he keeps important information? Maybe a hiding place?"

"What?" Fisher repeated the question, and Isobella shook her head. "He just has a watch and some rings. No jewelry--"

"I'm talking about documents. Important papers."

"Why do you need that?" For the first time since sitting down, Isobella lifted her head and seemed to truly focus on Fisher. Seeing his balaclava-covered face, she withdrew and her eyes went wide.

"I'm a friend," Fisher said. "I'm sorry I didn't get here in time to save Heinzie. Those men were after information." This was likely untrue, but the woman wasn't coherent enough to dissect the argument. "If I don't find it and get it out of here, more men will come. Do you understand?"

"More? More men?"

"That's right. Where did Heinz keep his important documents?"

"There's a safe. Upstairs. Under the sink . . ."

"Do you know the combination?"

"My birthday."

Fisher felt a fleeting pang of sadness. Clearly, Isobella had meant more to van der Putten than Fisher had guessed. "What's your birthday?"

Isobella blinked a few times and her head lolled. The Ambien/Scotch cocktail was taking hold. "What?"

"What's your birthday?"

"June 9, 1961."

Fisher laid her down on the couch, then went back upstairs. As advertised, he found a safe built into the floor of the bathroom vanity. He pushed aside the rolls of toilet paper and bottles of cleaning solution and spun the dial to 6-9-61. Nothing. He tried different combinations and sequences until 61-19-6-9 produced a click. Inside the shoebox-sized safe Fisher found nothing except a 2 GB SD memory card. He pocked it and went downstairs.

"I'll call the police," Fisher told Isobella. "You rest."

She nodded wearily, then rolled over on the couch.

Fisher left.

They'd parked their gray compact two blocks away. He searched it, taking every pertinent scrap of paper he could find and dumping it into the grocery sack before locking the doors and tossing the keys down a nearby sewer drain.

20

MADRID, SPAIN

"IT'Spossible," Fisher told Grim, "but I've never been a big believer in coincidences."

"Me neither," she replied from the LCD screen. "With luck, I'll have something for you in a few hours."

The night before, after dumping the keys to the gray compact in the sewer, Fisher had walked back toward the center of town, stopping briefly to buy a newspaper, in which he wrapped his blood-speckled polo shirt. When he reached the bullring, the community party was in full swing and a huge bonfire was burning. He tossed the newspaper and shirt into the blaze, then spent fifteen minutes dancing and drinking and generally making a spectacle of himself before walking to another convenience store, this one close to his hotel. He used the pay phone to dial 112--Spain's version of 911--and told the dispatcher in hurried Spanish that he'd heard gunfire near the intersection of Cuesta de los Yeseros and Calle del Alamillo Bajo. He'd then hung up and returned to his hotel.

The choice to call the police and remain in town rather than simply driving away was a tactical gamble, Fisher knew, but given Chinchon's size a foreigner leaving town in the dead of the night following a brutal triple murder wouldn't go unnoticed.

Fisher completed the ruse by waking up before dawn the next day, dropping his packed duffel bag off the balcony, and stopping in the lobby to ask the clerk when the bullfight was to begin and how to reach Guadalupe and whether the monastery there was open to the public. Once out the door he picked up his duffel, walked to his car, and drove away, taking the M-404 west out of town before turning north at Ciempozuelos and heading for Madrid and the Third Echelon safe house, where he packaged up his take from van der Putten's killers and sent it via International Next Flight Out. Grim had the package sixteen hours later.