I had been wrong about the jungle hut. We were taken to an abandoned office building inside the city limits. It was built of brick and painted a dusty white. I had been right about the thugs. The building teemed with them. There was a whole gang. At least forty of them. They were dirty and uncouth and most of them were leering openly at Anna. I hoped they weren’t going to separate us.

  They separated us immediately. I was thrown in a cell that had once been an office. There was a heavy iron grille over the window and a big lock on the door. A bed, and a bucket. That was all. The bed was a hospital cot made of metal tubes. The bucket was empty, but it hadn’t been empty for long. It smelled. I was put in handcuffs with my arms pinned behind my back. My ankles were shackled and I was dumped on the floor. I was left alone for three hours.

  Then the nightmare started.

  The lock rattled and the door opened and a guy came in. He looked like the boss. Tall, dark, a wide unsmiling mouth full of gold teeth. He kicked me twice in the ribs and explained that this was a political kidnapping. Some financial gain was expected as a bonus, but the real aim was to use Anna as leverage against her politician father to get a government inquiry stopped. She was the ace up their sleeve. I was expendable. I would be killed within a few hours. Nothing personal, the guy said. Then he said I would be killed in a way that his men would find entertaining. They were bored, and he owed them a diversion. He was planning to let them decide the exact manner of my demise.

  Then I was left alone again.

  * * *

  Much later I learned that Anna was locked in a similar room two floors away. She was not in handcuffs or ankle shackles. She was free to move around, as befitted her elevated status. Her furniture was basically the same as mine. An iron hospital bed, but no bucket. She had a proper bathroom. And a table, and a chair. She was going to be fed. She was valuable to them.

  And she was brave.

  As soon as the door locked she started looking for a weapon. The chair was a possibility. Or she could smash the bathroom sink and use a jagged shard of porcelain as a knife. But she wanted something better. She looked at the bed. It was bolted together from iron tubes, flattened and flanged at the ends. The mattress was a thin thing covered with striped ticking. She hauled it off and dumped it on the floor. The bed had a base of metal mesh suspended between two long tubes. The long tubes had a single bolt through each end.

  If she could get one free she would have a spear six feet, six inches long. But the bed frame was painted and the bolts were jammed solid. She tried to turn them with her fingers, but it was hopeless. The room was hot and she had a sheen of sweat on her skin and her fingers just slipped. She put the mattress back and turned her attention to the table.

  The table had four legs and a veneered top about three feet square. Surrounding it was a short bracing skirt. Upside down it would have looked like a very shallow box. The legs were bolted onto small angled metal braces that were fixed to the skirt. The bolts were cheap steel, a little brassy in color. The nuts were wingnuts. They could be turned easily by hand. She unfastened one leg and hid the nut and the bolt. Left the leg where it was, propped up and vertical.

  Then she sat on the bed and waited.

  After an hour she heard footsteps in the corridor. Heard the lock turn. A man stepped into the room, carrying a tray of food. He was young. Presumably low man on the totem pole, confined to kitchen duties. He had a gun on his hip. A black automatic pistol, big and boxy and brand new.

  Anna stood up and said, “Put the tray on the bed. I think there’s something wrong with the table.”

  The young man lowered the tray onto the mattress. Anna asked, “Where’s my friend?”

  “What friend?”

  “My bodyguard.”

  “In his room,” the guy said. “But not for long. Pretty soon he’ll be downstairs and we’ll be having some fun with him.”

  “What kind of fun?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’m sure it’ll be something pretty imaginative.”

  “A game?”

  “Not exactly. We’re going to kill him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t need him.”

  Anna said nothing.

  The boy said, “What’s wrong with the table?”

  “One of the legs is loose.”

  “Which one?”

  “This one,” Anna said, and whipped the leg out. She swung it like a baseball bat and caught the guy square in the face with it. The edge of the corner hit him on the bridge of the nose and punched a shard of bone backward into his brain pan. He was dead before he hit the floor. Anna took the gun off his hip and stepped over his body and walked to the door.

  The gun said Glock on the side. There was no safety mechanism on it. Anna hooked her finger around the trigger and stepped out to the corridor. Downstairs, the boy had said. She found a staircase and went down and kept on going.

  * * *

  By that point they had dragged me to a large ground floor room. A conference hall, maybe, once upon a time. There were thirty-nine people in it. There was a small raised stage with two chairs on it. The boss man was in one of them. They put me in the other. Then they all started discussing something in Portuguese. How to kill me, I presumed. How to maximize their entertainment. Halfway through a door opened in the back of the room. Anna stepped in, swinging a large handgun from side to side in front of her. Reaction was immediate. Thirty-eight men pulled out weapons of their own and pointed them at her.

  But the boss man didn’t. Instead he yelled an urgent warning. I didn’t speak his language, but I knew what he was saying. He was saying, Don’t shoot her! We need her alive! She’s valuable to us! The thirty-eight guys lowered their guns and watched as Anna moved through them. She reached the stage. The boss man smiled.

  “You’ve got seventeen shells in that gun,” he said. “There are thirty-nine of us here. You can’t shoot us all.”

  Anna nodded.

  “I know,” she said. Then she turned the gun on herself and pressed it into her chest. “But I can shoot myself.”

  After that, it was easy. She made them unlock my cuffs and my chains. I took a gun from the nearest guy and we backed out of the room. And we got away with it. Not by threatening to shoot our pursuers, but by Anna threatening to shoot herself, with me backing her up. Five minutes later we were in a taxi. Thirty minutes later we were home.

  A day later I quit the bodyguarding business. Because I took it as a sign. A guy who needs to be rescued by his client has no future, except as a phony.

  THE GREATEST TRICK OF ALL

  I could have shot you in one ear and out the other from a thousand yards. I could have brushed past you in a crowd and you wouldn’t have known your throat was cut until you went to nod your head and it rolled away down the street without you. I was the guy you were worrying about when you locked your doors and posted your guards and walked upstairs to bed, only to find me already up there before you, leaning on the dresser, just waiting in the dark.

  I was the guy who always found a way.

  I was the guy that couldn’t be stopped.

  But that’s over now, I guess.

  None of my stuff was original. I studied the best of the best, long ago. I learned from all of them. A move here, a move there, all stitched together. All the tricks. Including the greatest trick of all, which I learned from a man called Ryland. Back in the day Ryland worked all over, but mainly where there was oil, or white powder, or money, or girls, or high-stakes card games. Then he got old, and he slowly withdrew. Eventually he found the matrimonial market. Maybe he invented it, although I doubt that. But certainly he refined it. He turned it into a business. He was in the right place at the right time. Getting old and slowing down, just when all those California lawyers made divorce into a lottery win. Just when guys all over the hemisphere started to get nervous about it.

  The theory was simple: A live wife goes to a lawyer, but a dead wife goes nowhere. Except the cemetery. Problem solved. A dead wife attracts a certain level of attention from the police, of course, but Ryland moved in a world where a guy would be a thousand times happier to get a call from a cop than a divorce lawyer. Cops would have to pussyfoot around the grief issue, and there was a general assumption that when it came to IQ, cops were not the sharpest chisels in the box. Whereas lawyers were like razors. And, of course, part of the appeal of a guy like Ryland was that evidence was going to be very thin on the ground. No question, a wife dead at Ryland’s hands was generally considered to be a lottery win in reverse.

  He worked hard. Hit the microfilm and check it out. Check newspapers all over the States and Central and South America. Look at Europe, Germany, Italy, anyplace where there were substantial fortunes at stake. Look at how many women went missing. Look at how old they were, and how long they had been married. Then check the follow-up stories, the inside pages, the later paragraphs, and see how many hints there were about incipient marital strife. Check it out, and you’ll see a pattern.

  The cops saw it too, of course. But Ryland was a ghost. He had survived oil and dope and moneylending and hookers and gambling. No way was he going to get brought down by greedy husbands and bored wives. He flourished, and I bet his name was never written down in any cop’s file. Not anywhere, not once. He was that good.

  He was working back in the days when billionaires were rare. Back then, a hundred million was considered a threshold level. Below a hundred mil, you were poor. Above, you were respectable. People called a hundred mil a unit, and most of Ryland’s clients were worth three or four units. And Ryland noticed something: rich husband, rich wife. The wives weren’t rich in the sense their husbands were, of course. They didn’t have units of their own. But they had spending cash. It stands to reason, Ryland said to me. Guys set them up with bank accounts and credit cards. Guys worth three or four units don’t like to trouble themselves with trivia down at the six-figure level.

  But the six-figure level was where Ryland worked.

  And he noticed that the blood he was spilling was dripping all over minks and diamond chokers and Paris gowns and perforated leather seats in Mercedes Benzes. He started searching purses after a while. There were big checking balances in most of them, and platinum cards. He didn’t steal anything, of course. That would have been fatal, and stupid, and Ryland wasn’t stupid. Not stupid at all. But he was imaginative.

  Or so he claimed.

  Actually, I like to believe one of the women handed the idea to him. Maybe one a little feistier than normal. Maybe when it became clear what was about to transpire, she put in a counter-offer. That’s how I like to think it all started. Maybe she said: “That rat bastard. I should pay you to off him instead.” I know Ryland’s ears would have pricked up at that. Anything involving payment would have gotten him interested. He would have run the calculation at the same hyperspeed he used for any calculation, from a bullet’s trajectory to a risk assessment. He would have figured: This chick can afford a six-figure coat, so she can afford a six-figure hit.

  Thus, the greatest trick of all.

  Getting paid twice.

  He told me about it after he got sick with cancer, and I took it as a kind of anointment. The nomination of an heir. The passing of the baton. He wanted me to be the new Ryland. That was okay with me. I also took it as a mute appeal not to let him linger and suffer. That was okay with me too. He was frail by then. He resisted the pillow like crazy, but the lights went out soon enough. And there it was. The old Ryland gone, and the new Ryland starting out with new energy.

  First up was a stout forty-something from Essen in Germany. Married to a steel baron who had recently found her to be boring. A hundred grand in my pocket would save him a hundred million in hers. Classically, of course, you would hunt and strike before she ever knew you were on the planet. Previously, that would have been the hallmark of a job well done.

  But not anymore.

  I went with her to Gstaad. I didn’t travel with her. I just showed up there the next day. Got to know her a little. She was a cow. I would have gladly killed her for free. But I didn’t. I talked to her. I worked her around to the point where she said, “My husband thinks I’m too old.” Then she looked up at me from under her lashes. It was the usual reassurance-seeking crap. She wanted me to say. “You? Too old? How could he think that about such a beautiful woman?”

  But I didn’t say that.

  Instead, I said, “He wants to get rid of you.”

  She took it as a question. She answered, “Yes, I think he does.”

  I said, “No, I know he does. He offered me money to kill you.”

  Think about it. How was she going to react? No screaming. No running to the Swiss cops. Just utter stunned silence, under the weight of the biggest single surprise she could have heard. First, of course, the conceptual question: “You’re an assassin?” She knew people like me existed. She had moved in her husband’s world for a long time. Too long, according to him. Then eventually, of course, the inevitable inquiry: “How much did he offer you?”

  Ryland had told me to exaggerate a little. In his opinion it gave the victims a little perverse pleasure to hear a big number. It gave them a last shot at feeling needed, in a backhanded way. They weren’t wanted any more, but at least it was costing a lot to get rid of them. Status, of a sort.

  “Two hundred thousand US dollars,” I said.

  The fat Essen bitch took that in and then started down the wrong road.

  She said, “I could give you that not to.”

  “Wouldn’t work for me,” I said. “I can’t leave a job undone. He would tell people, and my reputation would be shot. A guy like me, his reputation is all he’s got.”

  Gstaad was a good place to be having the conversation. It was isolated and otherworldly. It was like there was just her and me on the planet. I sat beside her and tried to radiate sympathy. Like a dentist, maybe. When he has to drill a tooth. I’m sorry … but it’s got to be done. Her anger built, a little slow, but it came. Eventually she got on the right road.

  “You work for money,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “You work for anyone who can pay the freight,” she said.

  “Like a taxicab,” I said.

  She said, “I’ll pay you to kill him.”

  There was anger there, of course, but there were also financial considerations. They were forming slowly in her mind, a little vaguely, but basically they were the exact obverse of the considerations I had seen in the husband’s mind a week previously. People like that, it comes down to just four words: all the money, mine.

  She asked, “How much?”

  “The same,” I said. “Two hundred grand.”

  We were in Switzerland, which made the banking part easy. I stuck with her, supportive, and watched her get her fat pink paws on two hundred thousand US dollars, crisp new bills from some European country’s central reserve. She gave them to me and started to explain where her husband would be, and when.

  “I know where he is,” I said. “I have a rendezvous set up. For me to get paid.”

  She giggled at the irony. Guaranteed access to the victim. She wasn’t dumb. That was the single greatest strength of Ryland’s idea.

  We went for a walk, alone, on a snow-covered track rarely frequented by skiers. I killed her there by breaking her fat neck and leaving her in a position that suggested a slip and a fall. Then I took the train back to Essen and kept my rendezvous with the husband. Obviously he had gone to great lengths to keep our meetings secret. He was in a place he wouldn’t normally go, alone and unobserved. I collected my fee and killed him too. A silenced .22, in the head. It was an article of faith for people like Ryland and me. If you get paid, you have to deliver.

  So, two fees, and all those steel units cascading down to fractious heirs that would be calling me themselves, soon enough. All the money, mine.

  It went on like that for two years. Check the microfilm. Check the papers. North America, Central, South, all over Europe. Cops in a lather about anarchists targeting rich couples. That was another strength of Ryland’s idea. It rendered the motive inexplicable.

  Then I got an offer from Brazil. I was kind of surprised. For some reason I imagined their divorce laws to be old-fashioned and traditional. I didn’t think any Brazilian guy would need my kind of help. But someone reached out to me and I ended up face to face with a man who had big units from mineral deposits and an actress wife who was sleeping around. The guy was wounded about it. Maybe that’s why he called me. He didn’t strictly need to. But he wanted to.

  He was rich and he was angry, so I doubled my usual fee. That was no problem. I explained how it would work. Payment after the event at a discreet location, satisfaction guaranteed. Then he told me his wife was going to be on a train, some kind of a long private club-car journey through the mountains. That was a problem. There are no banks on trains. So I decided to pass on Ryland’s trick, just this one time. I would go the traditional single-ended route. The old way. I checked a map and saw that I could get on the train late and get off early. The wife would be dead in her sleeper when it rolled into Rio. I would be long gone by then.

  It was comforting to think about working the old way, just for once.

  I spotted her on the train and kept well back. But even from a distance I saw the ring on her finger. It was a gigantic rock. A diamond so big they probably ran out of carat numbers to measure it with.

  That was a bank right there, on her finger.

  Traceable, theoretically, but not through certain parts of Amsterdam or Johannesburg or Freetown, Sierra Leone. Potentially a problem at customs posts, but I could swallow it.

  I moved up the train.