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upward into a perfect smile. “I’ll see you then.”
    Hawker slammed the door, just as the engine roared to life. As she drove off, his mind replayed the conversation and the decision he’d just made. There would undoubtedlybe more to the journey than archaeology, but how much more was difficult to determine. The presence of civilians made it unlikely that anything too outlandish was in store, but the personal attention of NRI’s director suggested just the opposite. The contradiction bothered him; it left him wondering which direction the danger would come from, a sickly familiar feeling.
    As he watched the Rover take the main road, another thought occurred to him, the kind that flashes into one’s head and then pretends to disappear, only to lurk in some dark corner of the mind and whisper incessantly at the consciousness.
    He could understand why the NRI didn’t want a Brazilian pilot. Having someone like himself enhanced security no matter what type of operation they had in mind. But the NRI was a big organization, with people all over the world. They had to have their own pilots; probably had them in spades, and
nothing
could be more discreet than using an insider for the job. So why go through all the trouble and expense of hiring him when it would have been easier and even more secure to bring in one of their own? The thought nagged at him as the Land Rover vanished into the setting sun. It was a question, he decided, that could not have a healthy answer.

CHAPTER 3
    T he man in the black jacket stared down the alleyway that ran out before him, a street made of dust and sand and cobblestones held together by what appeared to be dried and hardened mud. Most of Manaus was modern, even thriving in a way not seen since the rubber boom of the 1920s, but every city had its barrios, and Manaus was no different. The nameless jumbled street lay in one of them, and as he started walking down it, the man in black could feel the eyes of its inhabitants upon him.
    His name was Vogel, and he had a business meeting to attend in such auspicious surroundings. He followed the street back, walking between faded buildings that sagged with age. Halfway down, where the road bent slightly to the right, two chickens pecked at something in the corner and a scrawny, lazy dog panted quietly in the shade. Just beyond, a man wearing a narrow fedora sat on an overturned five-gallon bucket, smoking a cigarette in the afternoon sun. The man seemed to notice his approach, but did little more than stare.
    “Are you Remo?” Vogel asked, walking up to the man and failing to hide a German accent.
    The man looked up, revealing a gap in his teeth. “Depends,” he said, “on who you are.”
    Vogel recognized the voice; to this point they’d only spoken on the phone. “You know who I am,” he said. “So tell me what happened.”
    Remo stood up, flicked his cigarette into the cobbles and pushed his hat back. “I did what you wanted,” he said. “That captain, he ain’t gonna be taking any charters from them for a while. No matter how much they pay.”
    “Good. What else?”
    Remo shrugged. “Not much. They met with another trader. Bought some more junk. Those two are like tourists with their souvenirs. And then yesterday the girl drove up to the mountains … alone.”
    Vogel knew that. In fact, there wasn’t much the NRI agents did that he didn’t know about beforehand. “Moore is going back to America,” he said. “We don’t want that. We want you to take the girl out, so that he has to stay behind.”
    Remo looked at Vogel as if he had said something crazy. “We could have done that yesterday. Why the hell didn’t you tell us? It would have been easy.”
    Vogel understood that. In fact, it would have been a perfect chance to take her, but the people he worked for had continued to hesitate, preferring to stall the NRI instead of confronting them head-on. The reasons were not revealed to him.
    “We didn’t want that