“That’s what we call a sailor. Clearly someone needs to standardize all this. It can get so confusing.”

  “Two countries, divided by a common language,” Khan said, and she laughed.

  “Samir,” she said. “Indian?”

  He nodded. “The old man came over from Punjab. And went right back there after I started to look like this. What about you?”

  “I was born in Tehran. We left when I was two, when the Ayatollah took over. But I’ve been well and truly British ever since. Much to the dismay of my parents.”

  “I know that tune all too well,” Khan said.

  She lowered her voice a little for effect. “They’d be scandalized that I am in a hot tub with a strange man in my underwear. They think I’m way too modern to find a good husband. I suspect they are right. At least as far as their definition of ‘good husband’ is concerned.”

  “Well, they have nothing to fear, right? I mean, it’s not like we’re on a date or anything.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Nope. Just some friendly proximity.”

  He hadn’t really been aware that their faces had been gradually drifting closer to each other until she kissed him. It was a short, careful, exploratory sort of kiss, and the pleasant shock of it traveled through his nervous system like an electric surge.

  “Close proximity,” he murmured when she pulled back.

  “Very close,” she said. Then she leaned in to kiss him again. When he responded in kind, she scooted closer until her body was up against his, and he wrapped his arm around her to keep her from drifting away. This kiss lasted a lot longer than the first one. When their lips parted again, Khan felt his heart beating in his chest as if he had just run a sprint, even though he had barely moved a muscle in the last few minutes.

  “That felt different,” Maryam said. “In a pretty good way.”

  He nodded his agreement, unwilling to speak and risk sounding like a stammering imbecile. It felt like the temperature in the pool had increased by ten degrees. From the way his boxers had billowed out again in a way that had nothing to do with water movement, it was pretty clear that his body agreed with her assessment as well. Maryam put her hand on his chest, right on the demarcation line between skin and fur, and followed it down, tracing the line precisely. When she reached the waistband of his boxers, she didn’t stop there.

  “My,” she said. “This certainly feels different.”

  Only the sound of approaching voices kept Khan from blowing multiple circuit breakers in his brain all at once at her touch. There were people coming up the walkway toward the moonlit pools, announcing their presence by softly talking and laughing in the darkness. Khan didn’t know who they were, but right now he hated them more than he had ever hated anyone in his entire life.

  She pulled her hand away and scooted back on the sitting ledge to create a little bit of space between them again, much to his regret. The voices came closer until they were right on the other side of the big tree stump behind them. They were talking in a language Khan didn’t understand, maybe Portuguese, and the hushed giggles he heard made him think they had spotted the discarded clothes on the ground nearby.

  “What are the blooming odds?” Maryam whispered. She pushed back a bit more until she slid off the seating ledge and stood in the deep part of the little pool once more. “Let’s go,” she said in a low voice. “Back to my cabana. Before I lose my nerve.”

  “I’m going to need just a minute,” he replied.

  She smiled and rolled her eyes slightly. “Puritans. I’m in Unit Five, last one on the right, by the water. Five minutes. Do not make me wait or there will be a nuclear explosion.”

  With that, she climbed out of the pool and picked up the towel she had left on the ground. She wrapped herself in it and walked off toward the spot where they had left their clothes.

  “Hey,” he whispered after her. Maryam turned around, and he mimicked covering himself up to the neck. She walked out of sight, then returned with a fresh towel from the rack and tossed it in his direction. He caught it before it could land in the water in front of him.

  Five minutes, she mouthed. Then she strode off, a smile on her face.

  * * *

  —

  When he got to her cabana, she met him at the door, and he didn’t make it five steps into the place before she wrapped herself around him and initiated a fast and furious Round One, which took place against the wall of the hallway. For Round Two, they migrated to the bedroom a little while later, and she turned down the heat to a slower boil, straddling him and controlling the rhythm and energy of their coupling. An indeterminate time later, he took the reins for a Round Three in the living room, causing the catastrophic structural collapse of a coffee table that had looked much sturdier than it turned out to be.

  Round Four started under the shower in the bathroom and ended up back in the bedroom. However long Khan thought his dry spell had been, hers seemed to have been at least as long, because her willingness to keep ringing that bell appeared to have no limits in sight yet. Eventually, they disengaged from sheer physical exhaustion in the middle of Round Five, and they both stretched out on the bed underneath the labors of a ceiling fan that was utterly inadequate for dissipating the heat or evaporating their sweat.

  “Now my parents would definitely be scandalized,” Maryam murmured as they were lying next to each other, and they both chuckled.

  “I thought you said you weren’t looking to pick anyone up,” Khan replied. He felt like he had just done a marathon with a hundredweight of bricks strapped to his back.

  “Well,” she said. “Something came up that made me change my mind.”

  The lights in the cabana turned off all at once, and the fan above the bed started to slow down. They watched the blades spin until they came to a stop, too drained to do anything else at the moment.

  “Eleven o’clock,” Khan said. “It’s candles and torches from now until sunrise.”

  “Too bad. That fan was the only thing keeping me from combusting.”

  He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the animals and the splashing of the water on the riverbank a few dozen yards outside the bedroom window. He’d had no shortage of sexual encounters since he had become Khan—in the sorts of circles he moved as a bodyguard, there was always someone interested in an exotic fling—but nothing he had ever experienced had come even close to what had happened in the last hour or two.

  “We could go back to the pools,” he suggested without opening his eyes. “Or take a dip in the river. Take our chances with the caimans.”

  “My muscles are pudding right now,” Maryam replied. “All of them. Let’s take a bit of a breather first, shall we?”

  “Let’s,” Khan agreed.

  He listened to the world outside again. By now, he was in tune with the sounds of the jungle, and it was much easier to let his brain filter all the auditory input to find potential threats and dangers. But nothing out there was amiss as far as he could tell. The music from the central lodge had stopped, and there was a blissful silence coalescing as people left the restaurant bar and made their way to their cabanas for the night. The steady background murmuring of the nearby river was almost as good a soporific as the sexual release he’d just had. Together, they managed to make his limbs feel like they weighed five hundred pounds.

  Next to him, Maryam’s breaths had turned deep and regular. Khan gave himself permission to drift off as well, and he could feel the fog descending on his brain almost immediately.

  Just a bit of a breather, he thought as he fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  When Khan woke up again, it was still dark outside and a light rain was falling.

  He looked over toward the window and saw raindrops splashing against the mosquito screen and bouncing off the sill, darkening the wood of the bedroom floor underneath the open window with moisture. When he turned his head the other way, he saw that Maryam was gone.

  He sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed. The tired achiness from earlier had disappeared again, wiped away by his rapid recovery factor while he was asleep. He got to his feet and walked over to the window to look outside. There was a light breeze driving the rain squall, and he welcomed the cool sensation of it on his face.

  Khan walked out of the bedroom and through the other rooms of the cabana to look for Maryam. The hut was dark and quiet. All the windows were open for airflow, and the smell of moist soil was everywhere. He didn’t know the exact time, but he could tell that it was well before first light. There were faint voices and laughter coming from the middle of the resort, where Galante and Ernesto were still socializing with their entourage in the lodge by candlelight.

  Maryam was nowhere in the cabana. The place still faintly smelled like her, but his nose was not good enough to sniff out any clue to where she could have gone. His bodyguard sense was stirring again in the back of his brain and refusing to be quieted this time, as much as he wanted to suppress the notion that something wasn’t quite right.

  He found his clothes and put them on. Then he walked out of the cabana and stopped just outside to get his bearings without wooden walls all around him.

  There was a new sound on the wind, very faint but noticeable in its out-of-placeness. It was a mechanical flapping, barely more than the idea of a whisper. He turned his head to let his ears pinpoint the source of the noise. Whatever was making that rhythmic flapping whisper was coming from the southwest, from upriver, the direction of the nearby city. He stood for a few moments to let the sound sink in, to let his brain dissect and analyze the pattern. When he realized what he was hearing, the surprise and nausea he felt almost lifted him off his feet.

  I really am the world’s biggest dumbass, he thought.

  He took off running down the path toward the central lodge. The sodden ground splashed under his feet as he dashed for the lodge in the straightest possible line, ignoring the illuminated path of tree slices. The distant sound was louder now, close enough for him to hear it over the splashing of his shoes in the wet grass and the thumping of his heart in his own ears. Any remaining doubt in his mind about the possible source of the noise was gone from his mind. He knew what was coming toward them through the rainy night, and he knew what it meant because there was only one plausible reason why it was coming.

  The helicopter appeared above the edge of the resort clearing, right by the riverside above Maryam’s cabana, just as Khan leapt up the stairs of the lodge and wrenched the doors open. The staff had shuttered all the windows to keep out the wind and rain, and the inside was only dimly lit by some candles and oil lamps over by the bar and at the only occupied table in the room. Just as he had suspected, Galante and Ernesto were still up and drinking, along with their entire entourage. From the looks of it, they were far further in the bag than just a bottle of Peruvian white. When the door banged open, the twins whirled around in unison and stood up from their chairs, but one of them swayed and the other had to reach out to keep his brother on his feet.

  We are so very fucked, Khan thought.

  “Helicopter,” he shouted at the group. “Coming in overhead from the city.”

  Ernesto cursed in Spanish. Rafe and Jax got to their feet as well, and they were only moderately steadier than Ernesto’s twins. The women who were still with the entourage looked at each other in alarm.

  “Fuckin’ narcs,” Galante said. He pushed back from the table but didn’t make any move to rise like his bodyguards. Outside, the sound of the helicopter rotors was now drowning out all the other noises. Khan looked back through the open door and saw the dots from red and green laser beams dancing on the grass between the lodge and the edge of the jungle. Overhead, the helicopter pulled into a sharp nose-up flare and slowed to a halt in midair. With his tiger eye, Khan could see that the doors were open, and that someone was kicking ropes out of the chopper. They fell down, one on each side, and hung just above the ground, twitching and swaying in the downdraft from the rotors.

  Khan pulled the doors shut and retreated into the restaurant. “We got a team fast-roping down,” he said. “Are we fighting or running?”

  “No fucking where to run,” Rafe said. “And nothing to fight with.”

  “Let them come,” Galante said. “If they’re narcs, we can post bail by tomorrow afternoon. If they’re some other cartel, we’re fucked anyway.”

  Ernesto didn’t seem to agree with Galante’s assessment of the situation. He launched an angry diatribe in Spanish at Galante that went almost entirely over Khan’s head except for “tu puta madre,” which gave him the rough gist of it. Then he barked an order at his twin bodyguards, who squared off toward the door in the middle of the restaurant as if they were truly getting ready to take on whoever was about to come through.

  Khan gave them space and went back toward Galante. “We don’t want to be here if those lunkheads start fighting,” he said. “I don’t want to die in the middle of a crossfire. Kitchen. Back door. Now.”

  Outside, the helicopter revved its engines and climbed back into the sky, which told Khan that the strike team was on the ground and moving in. He pushed Jax aside and grabbed Galante by the arm to pull him out of his chair. He barely had his boss on his feet when the front door behind them burst open with the sound of splintering wood and groaning metal. Khan pulled Galante down onto the ground, then kicked the table over behind them, as inadequate as it would be as a ballistic shield. He knew the standard cop procedure, and he knew what was going to happen next, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He covered Galante with his body and cupped his own ears with his hands.

  The flashbang grenade went off in the room by the door. Knowing it was about to go off didn’t make it hurt any less even though he had his hands firmly on his ears. The explosion shook the room and killed his hearing instantly, replacing all the auditory richness of the nighttime environment with a shrill whistling sound that made his brain feel like it was getting bisected by a bandsaw at full speed.

  When the initial pain had started to lift a little, Khan rolled over and peeked around the edge of the table he had tipped over. The restaurant was crisscrossed with aiming lasers and high-powered flashlight beams from half a dozen weapons. Two people in black uniform were lying off to one side, writhing in pain or at the edge of consciousness. Three more stood in the room just a few steps beyond the door. “What the fuck?” Khan said out loud. His voice sounded distant and muffled even to his own ears.

  In the middle of the room, in the spot where Ernesto’s bodyguard twins had squared off just a few moments earlier, a gigantic crocodilian took up most of the space between the overturned table and the door. It looked as black as the night in the beams of the weapon lights aimed at it, and it had two heads and a pair of thick tails. When it rose on its legs and raised its stance, Khan saw that it had six legs, three on each side.

  Not a crocodilian, Khan thought. An alligator. A two-headed fucking caiman. The motherfuckers are aces. Or one single ace together.

  The Antonio-Bernadino-caiman seemed to be in no mood to surrender. It whipped its heads around and let out a warning hiss that cut even through Khan’s still-impaired hearing, and the insides of its mouths looked like something out of a capybara’s nightmares, all teeth and black-streaked velum. Two of the cops opened fire with their submachine guns. From the effect it was having on the pissed-off two-headed caiman, it was no more effective than if they had thrown tennis balls. It lunged at one of the cops and snapped at him with two enormous jaws. The cop saved himself with a mighty leap backward, and the jaws snapping shut on thin air sounded like a double thunderclap in the confines of the restaurant. Another one of the cops tried to dash around the flank of the caiman, but one of the alligator tails whipped around and knocked him across the room and into a wall. Everyone except Khan was shouting—the cops, Ernesto, Galante, Jax, and even the usually cool and levelheaded Rafe. The women who had kept the cartel boys company were screaming as if someone had started a decibel contest.

  Enough of that shit, Khan decided. He rolled over, grabbed Galante by the wrist, and made a low dash toward the bar and the kitchen beyond, dragging the other man with him.

  They were three steps into the kitchen when the back door flew open and three black-clad narcs in body armor and face masks burst into the room, guns at the ready. Khan pushed Galante to the ground and launched himself at the nearest of the trio. He seized him by the front of his body armor and shoved him into one of the other cops with all the force he could muster. They both went down, yelling in distress and surprise. The third narc leapt to the side to avoid his colleagues and brought his gun up to aim it at Khan. Even with his reflexes and the quickness of his tiger arm, he barely got his hand on the suppressor at the end of the muzzle in time to deflect the weapon. It barked out a short burst of gunfire that hit a rack of pots and pans on the wall behind Khan. He seized the gun by the suppressor and ripped it out of the narc’s hands, but it was attached to his body with a sling, and the man got jerked forward along with his weapon. Off balance, the cop stumbled and crashed into Galante, who was still prone on the floor where Khan had pushed him. Khan jumped forward and pulled the narc off Galante by the back of his vest. Then he threw him headfirst into the nearest dish rack, six feet away. The rack collapsed under the impact with a loud crash and buried the cop in a noisy avalanche of plates and bowls.

  The other two narcs were scrambling to their feet behind Khan. They had almost made it when he reached them again. He cut their weapon slings with his claws, shredding the ballistic cloth on their vests in the hurried process, and ripped the guns away from them. Then he threw them through the open door and out into the darkness. One of the narcs backed away, hands raised in surrender. The other reached down for the pistol holstered on his thigh and closed his hand on the grip. Khan made a fist with his right hand and smashed it into the narc’s helmet. The cop dropped to the ground so hard that his helmet bounced off the wooden floorboards of the kitchen. The other one still had his hands up, yelling something at Khan in Spanish that was beyond the scope of his high school language classes. It sounded genuine enough in its panicked fear, but he couldn’t take chances and end up with a bullet in the back. He grabbed the narc and hurled him over to his unconscious colleague in the remnants of the dish rack, where he bounced off the edge of the nearby counter and joined the other cop in the pile of broken dishes.