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him down the hall to a room full of dead bodies and one very pissed off Chance Vaught, who sat in a chair, handcuffed to a steel doorknob.
    “Why is he handcuffed?” Crosswhite asked in Spanish, glancing around at the dead cartel members. “Is this your work?”
    Mendoza nodded.
    “I’m handcuffed because he’s a fuckin’ bastard,” Vaught said in English.
    Mendoza explained that he’d needed to take a dump and couldn’t trust Vaught not to leave. Afterward, it had been easier to leave the increasingly mouthy American handcuffed to the door.
    Crosswhite looked at him. “You ready to go, champ?”
    “Go where?”
    “I got you a room at the fuckin’ Hilton. You ready or not?”
    Vaught looked sullenly at the floor. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
    NINETY MINUTES LATER, Vaught sat in a chair in Crosswhite’s kitchen, flexing his wounded arm, examining the suture work. “It’s not exactly straight.”
    “Well, this ain’t exactly a triage unit.” Crosswhite snapped off a pair of rubber gloves. “And I’m not exactly a medic.”
    Paolina sat staring at Vaught from across the table, her gaze flatand reproving. She wanted him out of her house but knew they were stuck with him unless and until Pope’s man Fields found someplace else for him to hide out.
    Vaught smiled, asking Paolina her name in Spanish. “ Como se llama? ”
    “Paolina,” she said, not overly friendly. She glanced at Crosswhite.
    “Nice to meet you. I’m Chance. I appreciate you welcoming me into your home like this.”
    “If it were up to me,” she said, getting up from the table, “you wouldn’t be here.” She caressed Crosswhite’s arm where he carried a scar identical to the one Vaught would now carry in almost exactly the same spot. “I’m going to buy food,” she told him. “I’ll be back soon.”
    “Careful,” Crosswhite said. “We’re working now.”
    She nodded, kissing him. “Valencia is playing in her room.” Paolina left the house.
    Vaught stared after her, unable to deny his attraction. “She’s Cuban, isn’t she?”
    Crosswhite went to the sink to wash his hands. “Yeah. If you touch her, I’ll kill you.”
    Vaught nodded, reaching for his can of Copenhagen. “Roger that. So what’s next?”
    Crosswhite dried his hands and shook a cigarette loose from its pack. “We wait to hear from Ortega at Mexico station.”
    “Who’s Ortega?”
    Crosswhite lit the cigarette, tucking the lighter into his pocket. “CIA’s chief of station here in DF.”
    “So you work for Ortega?”
    Crosswhite stood leaning against the ceramic-tiled counter. “Never met him.” He went to the fridge and took out a couple of Coronas, setting them down on the table. “Ortega has to wait on orders from Clemson Fields—who takes his orders directly from Bob Pope. It’s my guess you’ll be kept out of sight until the PFM needs you to testify against Serrano. So in effect you—”
    “Building a case against Serrano could take months!”
    Crosswhite popped the tops from the beers with a church key. “Welcome to the CIA, amigo.”
    “I don’t work for the CIA.” Vaught took a pull from his beer. “And I sure as hell don’t work for the PFM. I’m a DSS agent. That means I—”
    “You don’t belong to DSS anymore. You belong to the CIA by executive order—at least, you will within the next few hours, or however long it takes to get the paperwork shuffled across the president’s desk—and there isn’t jack shit you can do about it.”
    “So who the fuck is Clemson Fields?”
    Crosswhite took a drink. “Shit,” he muttered to himself. “I hope she remembers limes. Fields is the last of the old guard—a right bastard.”
    “I don’t follow.”
    “Okay, look.” Crosswhite sat down. “During the Cold War, the CIA wasn’t restricted to using personnel from special mission units like Delta Force and SEAL Team Six the way they are today. We were fighting the big, bad Soviets, so they were allowed their own in-house