Payback

12

“How’d the food look?” asked Karr as Dean slid into the front seat of the car outside the café.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Jeez, Charlie. You have to work on your powers of observation. How are we supposed to gather intelligence, if you’re not watching?”

Karr put the little Toyota in gear and began talking about how hungry he was. Dean didn’t pay attention. He’d heard the complaint many times.

He’d never heard Lia say she was scared.

She didn’t look scared, and she certainly didn’t act it.

Not that there was anything wrong with fear. Fear was a natural reaction in any number of circumstances. Everybody got scared sometime. You handled it as best you could.

It was the admission, and the look in her eyes accompanying it, that worried him.

Immediately after the assault in Korea, Lia had insisted on going back into the field. She’d pulled off a difficult mission, and if it weren’t for her, half of Europe would have been wiped out by a nuclear-seeded tsunami.

She hadn’t once mentioned the word “fear” or talked about being scared after the assault. Angry, maybe, but not scared.

Dean had never been a person who thought talk did much good. If something bothered you, you attacked it — you stalked and you fought it; you dealt with it. That was what he’d done as a sniper. It was what he’d done as a Marine and as a small businessman and what he did now with Deep Black.

Lia was the same way. Harder, really.

If she was worried, maybe he should be, too, About her.

“You figure that guy is with the Peruvian intelligence service, or somebody else?” asked Karr.

Dean looked up to see who he was talking about: a man sitting in a van across from their hotel’s main entrance. The truck had a florist’s logo on the front and side.

“Probably a local,” said Dean. “If he’s an agent.”

“You think somebody delivering flowers is going to take the trouble to find a parking spot, let alone sit there?” said Karr. “He’d double-park, run inside, get going. Not wait.”

They circled around the block. The truck was still there when they came back.

“I doubt he’s looking for us,” said Dean. “But let’s not fool around. We’ll just go for roof number two. The Leon.”

“OK with me,” said Karr.

The uplink unit was in the trunk and could be set up just about anywhere with an unobstructed view of the heavens. The transmitter looked like a standard satellite dish and had a slot specially designed for the voter card. The transmission rate was relatively slow, and from setup to teardown the process would take about a half hour. Their hotel had been chosen partly because it had a roof terrace that was rarely used and would be perfect for the transmission. But just in case, they had scouted several other possible transmission spots the day before.

Dean took Karr’s handheld computer and brought up the map and a position locator so he could give him directions to the Leon, a business-class hotel in the Miraflores district. The side entrances were not equipped with alarms, and though they were locked from the outside, this didn’t present much of a problem; Dean slid a plastic card into the jamb side and tickled the door open in a matter of seconds. Ten minutes later they were on the roof, leaning against the small service shack above the elevator shaft.

Karr handled the transmitter, donning a set of headphones to help him find the proper angle for the satellite. Dean stood guard, using the PDA to monitor the feed from two different video bugs they had left in the stairwell to warn them if anyone was coming.

“Here we go,” announced Karr finally. He tightened one of the screws on the dish’s tripod, pushed the card into the slot, and stood back.

“Good,” said Karr, practically singing. “So what do you think, Charlie? Can we get in the bank vault?”

“Looked pretty well guarded.”

“Yeah. But that’s what makes it an interesting challenge, don’t you think? I mean, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid couldn’t get in. And we can.”

“Maybe we can, and maybe we can’t.”

“Oh, we can.”

“Easier to take them on the road, once they ship them to the rest of the distribution points Thursday,” said Dean. “And I prefer easy.”

“Too many. We’ll never get it done in time.”

“Then Lia has the easier shot, going in tomorrow or the next day,” said Dean. But as he said that, he reconsidered.

“Ah, you’re no fun.” Karr sat down next to Dean. “You’re worried about Lia?”

Dean shrugged. He was surprised Karr had picked up on that.

“She’ll be OK,” Karr told him. “She’s tough.”

“What did Clint Eastwood say? ‘Sometimes tough ain’t enough.’ ”

“I say we do the vault ourselves. Keep her inspection as a backup.”

“Yeah, that’s probably best.”

“Let’s check out the bar downstairs when this is done. I kinda want to know what Peruvian beer tastes like.”