“Unconfirmed reports insist,” read the FBI investigation, which was forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee but never put on the record as being too sensitive, “that American trainers exhorted these young soldiers with voodoo rituals, thought-control processes and animal sacrifices that went well beyond the range of normal professional military training.”

The file identified several of the trainers, and as Nick gazed at the abstracted dossiers, he saw nothing that surprised him. The trainers were drawn from the various American elite units that had fought secret battles all around the world since the war in Vietnam. The honcho appeared to be an ex-Green Beret lieutenant colonel named Raymond Shreck, of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a heavily decorated veteran of Korea, where he had been the youngest master sergeant in the United States Army at nineteen, an early Green Beret who’d helped train the Bay of Pigs volunteers in the early sixties when he was a young major, and a heavy-action three-tour ’Nam vet until, in 1968, he’d been court-martialed for torturing suspected Viet Cong agents. Somehow the Agency had taken care of him; he joined RamDyne the next year. His number-one man was Master Sergeant John D. (“Jack”) (“Payne-O”) Payne, of New York, New York, a former special forces noncommissioned officer, also with an extraordinary combat record in Vietnam. After the war, however, he had trouble readjusting to duties, was nabbed in an elaborate scheme to defraud the PX out of several thousand dollars, and, in lieu of a jail sentence and a dishonorable discharge, took an early retirement in 1978.

I’ll bet you’re a couple of tough pricks, thought Nick.

So maybe Payne and Shreck, pissed off the way their careers had gone belly-up, with their extraordinary records in combat and their flat-out willingness to go all the way were the true authors of what happened next. But there were other authors, as well. There was the increasingly hysterical right-wing fervor of the government of El Salvador; there was a stunning leftist victory, where a battalion of government troops had gone to sleep without putting out perimeter security and got badly shot up the next morning, losing twenty-eight men, all of them in front of American network news cameras; there was the pressure from Washington for results, results, results, something to show that American policy was working; and there was the anger, the fear, the bravado of Panther Battalion itself.

On June 8, 1991, Panther Battalion was airlifted from its secret mountain training camp into Ocalupo Valley, three hundred miles away, to conduct operations against a well-established guerrilla infrastructure. As the Panthers – so called because of their black and green striped jungle fatigues and their black berets – moved into the village of Cuembo, they came under sporadic sniper fire from a tree line flanking the village. The commander, Brigadier General Esteban Garcia de Rujijo, sent a reconnaissance squad into the village. Moving through the village square, the recon squad was caught in a clever crossfire. Two automatic weapons killed every single man. The guerrillas then mutilated the corpses and moved out.

It was the village of Cuembo that felt the full rage of Panther Battalion. Later (but unconfirmed) reports insisted that American training officers accompanied Panther Battalion into Cuembo but this was never proved. What is beyond dispute is that within the space of two hours on the afternoon of June 9, 1991, Panther Battalion killed over two hundred men, women and children. They were herded to the banks of the Sampul River, and there machine-gunned by the Panthers’ automatic weapons. Dead children floated in the Sampul for days.

He made a face, and blinked, realizing that either out of rage or horror he’d begun to weep.

Shaking, he turned to the last page. No, it wasn’t the famous Annex B, which was presumably locked up somewhere in the National Security Office or the Pentagon or FBI headquarters or out at Langley. But it was something quite interesting nevertheless.

It was an export order for an Electrotek AMSAT LC-L5400 series Directional Electronic Intercept Vehicle, on consignment to Salvadoran Military Intelligence, cleared by Customs, as delivered by RamDyne.

It was the kind of thing that could enable men in it to listen to a desperate man in a hotel room call FBI headquarters in New Orleans and ask for one Nick Memphis, and then go in and hack him to death with axes.

LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION, said the stamp. NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B).

It was a war party.

Shreck, the hard-looking black man who was called Morgan State, and the serious Hatcher were waiting for him.

“Colonel Shreck, I – ”

“Listen to me, Dobbler. I need a fast assessment. Try not to get this one wrong.”

Shreck’s face was hooded and taut; he looked like the statue of a violent medieval German knight in the armor room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that had briefly fascinated Dobbler when he was a child.

“Just before Swagger was killed, he spent some time in that truck with an FBI agent. Now, what I have to know, would he have talked? As we break the incident down, they were not together more than four minutes, all of it highly stressed. Is it possible that during that period of time, Swagger could have told the agent something, convinced him of certain things?”

“Ah – ” said Dobbler, stalling for time.

But then, “No. No, it’s not probable. Swagger was a private, taciturn man, we saw it here. And he couldn’t have trusted anyone and he couldn’t have known who it was he’d have picked up. No, it’s not likely.”

“Possibly he passed him something,” said Morgan State.

“But Colonel Shreck, there was no direct link to us. We operated under dummy institutions, and left no trail. What could Swagger have known?”

The colonel nodded imperceptibly.

“May I ask what’s happening?” Dobbler said.

“Tell him,” Shreck said to Hatcher.

“We’ve learned from a friend that an FBI special agent named Nicholas Memphis – the agent Swagger kidnapped – has requested access to the FBI’s RamDyne file. It’s exactly the sort of thing that Lancer is supposed to protect us from. And somehow – stupidly, incredibly, by one of those bureaucratic screwups that happen, the transmission was authorized. He has the file. He knew Swagger and he has the file.”

“Good lord,” said Dobbler, a cold stab of fear coming into him. “Could he go to the press? Or to a politician? Or to – ”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Shreck impatiently, turning to Morgan State. “Get Payne. Tell him we want this Memphis taken, interrogated, and all his secrets removed. Then Payne can kill him.”

The phone was ringing. Nick stopped drying his breakfast dishes and went to pick it up.

“Yeah.”

“Nick?”

“Uh, yeah?” The voice, a female’s, had a familiar lilt to it.

“Nick, it’s Sally Ellion in Rec – ”

“Sure, hi, what’s up?”

“Nick, you’ve got me in so much trouble.” She was whispering.

“Oh. The file.”

“I didn’t know you were on suspension.”

“Ah. Yeah, yeah, it was crummy of me not to tell you. I’m very sorry. It wasn’t honest behavior. I just had this damn case I was really hot to clear. I thought…oh, it was so stupid, I thought in my time off I’d just be able to concentrate on it.”

“Nick, I’ve got a directive to return that file by special courier instantly.”

“Oh, Jesus. I hope you’re not in any trouble.”

“I have to have that file back. You weren’t even supposed to leave the building with it.”

“Yeah, but since I couldn’t stay in the building, I couldn’t read it there, could I? Anyway, Sally, I’m very sorry to have disappointed you. I’m done with it, I’ll leave in ten minutes and have it back to you in an hour. Okay? And could this be our little secret, I mean, the fact that I actually looked at it?”