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counterfeit medicines and organ transplants and arms, the bigger the better.
    Di Stefano almost choked on the mouthful of stale nachos as sounds came from his partner’s headset. Something going down! At last!
    “What? What did he say?” Di Stefano rounded on Alexei and fought the urge to grab the smaller man’s grubby sweatshirt and shake the words out of him.
    Slowly, deliberately, Alexei lifted one earphone away from his ear. The other he kept covered with the foam rubber earpiece. Alexei had been offered earbuds and even a sleek, pricey Bang & Olufsen headset that conducted sound through the ear bone, but he’d refused them all. He wanted to hear everything, he said, and for that he needed the big old-fashioned foam rubber pads that covered his ears.
    They couldn’t operate the laser beam at night. The light beam became visible in the dark. But from first light to last, Alexei was on duty, eating and drinking and pissing and crapping with at least one ear covered at all times, listening.
    This was what the Unit was all about—a secret government agency tasked with studying the growing contacts between terrorism and international organized crime, bringing together military operatives and law enforcement officers to combat this unholy alliance.
    Alexei blinked as if coming out of a trance. “Not much. He picked up the phone and said hello, listened, then said excellent , then listened some more, then said have a safe journey, my friend. That’s all I heard him say.”
    John’s mind raced. “Okay, okay. He’s happy about something. He’s happy about something that’s moving. Or rather someone that’s moving.” Di Stefano closed his eyes at the thought of all the bad people who could be moving around. “So now all we have to do is find out what it is that he’s so happy about, if it’s coming here and when.”
    Alexei, who was a 36-level Doom player, grinned and lifted his can of diet Coke. “Piece a cake.”

Four
    Parker’s Ridge
Da Emilio’s
    To Nick Ames.
    Nick lifted his glass and drank to himself. Or rather to Nicholas Ames, jolly retired stockbroker, nonexistent though he might be.
    Ames had a pretty good deal, sitting here in this elegant restaurant across the table from one of the prettiest women he’d ever seen in his life.
    It sure as hell beat his last undercover job, as Seamus Haley, former PIRA fighter who was hiring himself out to the highest bidder as an enforcer after peace broke out in Belfast. Nick did a very credible Northern Irish accent—it was probably in his DNA—even if Guillermo Gonzalez couldn’t tell the difference between an Irishman and a Frenchman. As far as Gonzalez was concerned, Nick was one more corrupt gringo he paid to break legs and deliver packages.
    Nick had spent twelve very long months rising through the ranks in Gonzalez’s organization, step by step. Living and breathing and acting the part of a scumbag.
    He’d even had to fuck Consuelo, Gonzalez’s sister. Christ, that had been hard. Not because she was ugly—no, Consuelo was a looker. Worked at it, too. She spent more than the education budget of some third world countries on clothes, jewelry, and cosmetic surgery.
    The instant she’d laid eyes on him, she’d staked her claim. Guillermo found it funny. He’d once walked in on Consuelo giving head and had stayed to watch, critiquing her style.
    Nick had had more sex in that twelve-month period than a teen pop star and every second of it had been sheer, unadulterated vomit-inducing hell. Consuelo was heavily into pain—her pain, not his, thank God. He drew the line at that.
    Still, her pain had been bad enough. She was into bondage and whips, with a hellish range of sex toys and sex paraphernalia she kept in a big red chest. She liked her sex so rough he sometimes spent the rest of the night driving the porcelain bus when he finally crawled back into his small, spare bedroom.
    Nick never got used to it, never found it got easier. When he fucked her