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. . . liaison. He is one of only two of my bodyguards that I absolutely trust. The other one is at the gate. That one will accompany me to my home when our business is finished. Pedro has a car, a taxi I had him purchase—yes, it’s properly licensed; you never know—and will take you anywhere you need to go, or do anything you need done, that requires a degree of camouflage. In addition, there is an old estate in Hagonoy—Pedro will take you there—big enough to house the few of you coming initially in considerable secrecy. A small boat comes with the estate. It is also isolated enough—by which I mean very isolated, that no one is like to hear anything from a . . . shall we say . . . ‘rigorous’ interrogation. There is also a very small airstrip.”
    Lox sent Welch a glance that as much as said, I dunno about you, but I’m impressed.
    “Well, of course you’re impressed,” Paloma Ayala said. “My husband didn’t marry me just for my bygone looks.”
    “Madame,” Lox said, in Tagalog, “I assure you; you are just beautiful.” He meant it. Even great age could permit and retain its own kind of beauty.
    “And I didn’t marry him because of his flattery,” she snapped back.

CHAPTER FOUR

    If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve
    his ship, he would keep it in port forever.
    —Saint Thomas Aquinas

    MV Richard Bland , Georgetown, Guyana

    M Day, Incorporated, owned a dozen freighters of varying sizes. Only two of those had really mattered, so far. These were the MV Merciful and the MV Richard Bland , the latter named for one of Biggus Dickus Thornton’s boys, killed in action during a boarding mission. While the other ten had, typically, three members of the corporation (or members of the regiment, if they were alone among themselves) aboard; usually the skipper, his exec, and the engineering officer, the rest being hirelings from anywhere where manpower came cheap, Merciful and Bland were fully corporate crewed. They had to be for the kind of things they did.
    The other ships might run the odd questionable cargo. They might, even, with a little switching of crews, support an underwater demolition team to, say, mine and sink a large number of boats and ships bringing fortification material, rockets, and mines to Gaza under the guise of humanitarian aid. Typically, Bland and Merciful launched armed attacks from ship to shore. Of course, they also carried innocent cargoes frequently enough to disguise their purpose.
    Though about of a size, each carrying just under twenty-eight hundred TEU, and a bit over thirty thousand gross registered tons; where Merciful had a single gantry that moved fore and aft, Bland had three cranes, one forward to port, the other just abaft the beam, to starboard, and a third, centered, just behind the superstructure that housed the crew, overlooking the eighty-foot rear deck. It just wouldn’t do to have to give up the use of one, once compromised, because it looked too much like the other.
    The paint helped there. Merciful was painted up in a montage of clasping hands, olive wreaths, and doves, suitable for the purely fictive humanitarian organization that, so far as a records check would have showed, owned it. Bland ’s hull above the waterline was a straight gray, though darker than Navy gray, with the superstructure painted white. Both hull and superstructure showed enough streaks of rust to ensure the ship didn’t stand out as a combat vessel.
    The rust bothered the crap out of Bland ’s new skipper, Captain Tom Pearson, even if he understood and agreed with the purpose. Standing a couple of inches under six feet, broad in the shoulders, balding, Pearson looked at a minor rust stream marring his command’s white superstructure and scowled.
    Pearson, new to the ship, didn’t know yet what the vessel’s problems might be. He was still trying to locate all the property alleged to be there on the secret manifest. Bland hadn’t been used as an assault carrier in