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blindly assist in their own
humiliation. Salgado was so pleased that he allowed the girl to
finish with him quickly and then sent her away.
    He got dressed in casual clothes, not his uniform, and left
the villa's spacious study, walking along a covered flagstone
path that bordered the courtyard in the center of the villa. The
courtyard was a beautiful, tranquil place filled with flowerbeds arranged around a central fountain.
    Salgado had no interest in beauty or tranquility tonight.
He went to the guest quarters and knocked on a door. A low,
well-modulated voice with a slight British accent told him to
come in.
    He stepped into the room and nodded to his visitor, who
stood at one of the windows with his hands clasped behind his
back. The man still wore his robe and kaffiyeh. He turned to
look at Salgado, dark eyes flashing over the hawklike nose and
the gray-shot beard.
    "You have news, General?"
    "Everything is going according to plan," Salgado said.
    The visitor smiled. "Senor Garcia-Lopez told me that you
were a good man and could be trusted. I am glad to see that he
appears to have been right."
    "It does me honor to be deemed trustworthy by such a man
as Senor Garcia-Lopez."
    Hector Garcia-Lopez was the head of the largest drug cartel
in Mexico, perhaps the largest in the entire Western hemisphere. Like a spider, the cartel had webs that spread out all
over the world, to South America, to the Middle East, to the
Orient. General Salgado's hawk-faced visitor was an associate
of Garcia-Lopez's. Unlike the cartel's leader, however, profit
was not Yar Ali Al-Khan's primary motivation.
    He hated America, and that hatred was the most important thing in his life. It lived and breathed with an existence of its
own and a hunger that would perhaps never be satisfied, at
least not until every American infidel had been struck down
by the sword of Islam.

    Though Salgado's hatred of the Americans--especially the
ones from Texas-had nothing to do with religion, it, too, was
so strong as to be the defining element of his life. So he understood Al-Khan quite well.
    "You are prepared to do whatever is necessary, General?"
the Arab asked now.
    "We have a saying here among those who have joined my
movement," Salgado replied. "No quarter"
    A smile creased Al-Khan's deeply tanned face. "Ah. No
quarter. I like it."
    Yes, they understood each other, Salgado thought. Though
they came from opposite sides of the world, they spoke the
same language.
    Death to their enemies.

     

    Not surprisingly, Evelyn Harlow's financial people had
signed off on the terms of the proposal Phil Cody had presented to her. Phil's company, SecureTech, would be providing security not only for the offices of Evelyn's business, but
also their computer network. That meant Phil would have an
excuse to see Evelyn more often. Definitely a good thing.
    Good enough that Phil hadn't been bothered for several
days by memories he'd just as soon forget. He had never told
anyone about the vividness of the things that he sometimes
saw and heard and smelled. Ever since Vietnam, some people
had had this crazy idea that veterans who had seen combat
were all walking time bombs, primed to flash back to those
days and go berserk. The idiots who thought that were usually left-leaning idiots who had no understanding or even
sympathy for the military. All they had was their simplistic
philosophy that America was to blame for all the problems
everywhere in the world and that inside, soldiers were all
brutal, civilian-killing lunatics. They would seize on any
excuse they thought confirmed those ridiculous, agendaladen assumptions-and unfortunately, most shrinks fell into
that category. Phil had no desire to listen to some tweedy, pipe-smoking, NPR-subscribing dimwit tell him that his
memories were caused by his guilt over having helped a corrupt administration carry out its jingoistic, imperialistic, warmongering policies.

    He was driving across