Read Due Diligence: A Thriller for Free Online Page B

That was really something.
    The cab moved up Eighth. It stopped at a set of lights somewhere in the Fifties. On the corner across the street, a bunch of people were lining up to get into a club.
    Sammy had told him to be back at seven. Seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. With fourteen selected companies to value. In one day.
    A guy with a shaved head stood at the door outside the club. His scalp gleamed yellow in the lamplight. Rob saw him say something. A couple of girls at the front of the line laughed. Rob watched them. It was one o’clock on a Friday night. Those people were out having fun, and he was in a cab after eighteen hours shut up in an airless room with maybe five hours’ sleep ahead of him before he had to be back there again. He should have been pissed.
    But he wasn’t. Rob realized that he didn’t envy the people outside the club one bit. Instead, he felt a strange exhilaration. He had worked plenty of late nights at Roller Waite, but he had never felt like this, not once in his time there. This is what he’d gone to Cornell for. This is what he had studied two years and gone deeper and deeper into debt to do.
    Maybe it was tiredness playing games with his mind in the back of the cab that Friday night, but when he thought about the war room, Rob couldn’t wait to get back there.

 
    7
    The thunderclouds had been building up all afternoon. Storms are frequent in October on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The tropical air became denser, the sky darker. Finally, at around six o’clock, the storm broke. Thunder rolled through the air, forks of lightning jagged across the sky. The fronds of palm trees bent back until they were almost snapping. A wall of water came down, drenching the streets of the colonial town of Cartagena. The rain swept across the tarmac of the airport outside the city, pelting into the sleek white shape of the executive jet that was parked there for the second day running.
    The rain went on for hours. Downtown, in the casinos of the Bocagrande district, no one noticed.
    Tourists favored the Las Vegas–style places like the Casino Royale. But there were others. The Casino del Rio didn’t admit yankee tourists in shorts. It had no slot machines. Its open gaming room was small, with only a dozen tables. The clients who went upstairs came with recommendation. Eduardo Velazquez, the general manager, knew their likes and dislikes, and made sure that each was catered to.
    Velazquez came out of his office. He was a small, fine-boned man, dark-complexioned, with thin black hair slicked back from his forehead. He walked along the corridor on the upper floor. Each room in the casino was named for one of the rivers of South America and decorated with murals of river scenes. Velazquez stopped at the Orinoco Room and went inside. He exchanged a glance with the croupier, then with the auditor, who had discreetly called him from his office. The serving girl, Concepción, was out of the room, getting a drink for one of the clients.
    Velazquez stood unobtrusively beside the auditor. With a practiced eye, he appraised the value of the chips in the middle of the table. Eighty thousand dollars. Two of the men at the table were Colombian. One was a son of one of the wealthiest ranching families in the country, claiming ancestry of pure blood back to sixteenth-century Spain. Eduardo Velazquez doubted that. No one’s blood in Colombia is pure. The young man was pale, thin, with elegant hands. Usually, those hands put down more chips than they picked up. The second Colombian was shorter, darker, pockmarked. The source of his wealth was shady. Narcotrafficking was rumored. Velazquez had no idea if this was true. In Colombia, whenever the origin of a man’s wealth is unknown, cocaine is mentioned. Whatever the source of his money, at least ten times a year he would come to the Del Rio to squander it. He always had a cigar in his mouth. The air of the room was heavy with its smoke.
    The third man at the table