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  Harry Toledo clearly remembered the bright lights of his birth at the turn of the millennium fifteen years ago, he remembered the blood-stink and the noise. The blessing of his extraordinary memory had turned on him as often as it had given him comfort. The stink came back to him now as he nursed his broken nose. The lights and the noise had been with him all along.

  “Your father used to hate to fight.”

  Grace Toledo raised her voice loud enough so that Harry could hear her over the running water.

  He always did a good job of it, Harry thought.

  Grace Toledo was washing her hands for the fourth time in an hour. Harry studied his battered face in the hallway mirror and didn’t say anything. If it weren’t for the cuts, bruising and the swelling, he would be a dead ringer for the Colonel at fifteen. They shared the same gray eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones, full lips. The Colonel wore his hair short and crisp; Harry’s curled over the back of his shirt collar.

  We sure as hell don’t share attitude, Harry thought.

  He listened to the whirr of his terminal down the hall as it copied his personal network and files into his Sidekick for travel.

  Harry saw that he would resemble his father, too, in the break that pushed his nose just a hair to the left.

  Great, he thought. Another tender reminder of paternal affection.

  Harry hadn’t been shaving long enough to tell what kind of beard he might have. At fifteen, he hoped that it would fill out more. Nothing much in Harry Toledo’s life was normal. He was an information junkie who finished high school three years early from his home station. For the last year he showed up at American School only to take his exams and fill out paperwork. He didn’t miss having to explain his constant bruising.

  The water stopped.

  “Do you think he’ll die?”

  “I don’t know,” Harry said. “They had to strap him down to get him out of here. . . .”

  Now that he and his mother were alone, they could consider such things. The house Watchdog system had notified security and the embassy, who responded with their own people. The Costa Bravans would be brought in first thing in the morning.

  That will not be pretty, Harry thought.

  Costa Brava’s Hacienda Police would not bother themselves over a coffee worker’s wife who stabbed her husband, even if he died. But when the stabbed husband is a famous North American colonel, someone’s head must roll. Harry looked at his watch.

  Five-twenty.

  He keyed the Watchdog scanner for the departure of the last of the embassy’s investigators.

  05:04:58.

  Harry’s mother didn’t have much time.

  It doesn’t pay to be famous, he thought.

  Some of the time it paid. Being a liaison for the new Confederation of Costa Brava had brought Colonel Toledo and his family this mansion in the Colonia Escalon neighborhood, one of the most exclusive in all of Central America. It came with a full security system, including guards, who might be good at defending against outside attack, but so far they had not saved Harry from his father’s wrath inside.

  “Are you sure I’m clean?” Grace asked.

  Harry looked at her outstretched hands, red from their scrubbing.

  “Yes,” he sighed, “they’re clean. Have you read Macbeth lately?”

  “Humor me,” she said. “I just wanted him to stop. He would have killed you this time. I didn’t expect. . . There was so much blood.”

  She patted his shoulder and checked the Watchdog.

  “How many did they finally leave?”

  “Two out front,” he said, “and two behind. And the binoculars in the apartment beside the power station.”

  The security contingency for their protection also meant they were prisoners. His terminal ceased its telltale hum. He pocketed his Sidekick, then ran a large magnet over the drive section of his terminal. He pressed “format,” gave its warm top a pat, and turned back to the mirror and the antiseptic.

  His mother turned on the faucet again.

  “We can’t wait,” she whispered. “I don’t trust any of them. I’ll tell you what we’ll have to do.”

  Harry listened with the detachment that comes with fatigue and an adrenaline letdown. He and his mother had been up all night while the Agency reviewed its protocols on “extreme domestic incidents involving Agency personnel while in-country.” People who had sat at Grace Toledo’s table for dinner now debated whether she would be arrested, deported or dragged back to Washington for an inquiry.

  Harry felt a little giddy from no sleep and from the beating his father had given him. His nose stopped bleeding before daybreak but his right eye kept swelling until it puffed shut. This time, antihistamines didn’t help. Every time he sat down he got up slower.

  Harry couldn’t remember what he’d said that set his father off. His parents had started off arguing about vaccinations. It turned to Harry and his time spent at the terminal and on the webs.

  “It’s the only way he can get privacy,” his mother had argued. “He’s bright, he’s doing fine.”

  “He’s not doing fine,” his father shouted. “It’s not normal for a boy to stay inside, alone, at a terminal.”

  “He’s not normal” Grace shouted back. “He grew up here and this country’s not normal. We’re not normal. It’s not his fault that you don’t do anything with him anymore.”

  “Oh, I suppose it’s my fault.”

  Harry had interrupted, but he couldn’t remember what he had said. It hadn’t been the first time, but he was sure that it would be the last. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and pried open his right eyelid. No wonder his mother avoided looking at him: his iris was a gray cameo framed in blood.

  “Raw-hamburger sandwich,” he muttered.

  That was what his eye looked like, one of his father’s raw-hamburger sandwiches on white bread.

  Grace Toledo was still on the phone to Washington, so when the intruder alarm sounded, Harry hurried down the hall to check the screens. It was their neighbor, Yolanda Rubia, and not the Hacienda Police. She was actually no longer their neighbor, since her recent divorce, but her family still held the property, along with the largest coffee plantation in the country.

  Nobody stopped her at the gate, he thought.

  Neither guard was in sight.

  Yolanda was one of the “embassy wives” that he and his mother both liked. She had a three-year-old boy with Down syndrome and three teenage daughters who attended private Catholic school. Harry had nursed a terrible crush on the oldest, Elena, who was two years his senior. Since the divorce and Yolanda’s subsequent employment at the Archbishop’s office, they had seen very little of her or the children.

  Her driver, a black, middle-aged North American, mopped his balding head with a huge white handkerchief. All the drivers carried big white handkerchiefs in case of cross fire. At fifteen, even Harry knew that this war had no etiquette.

  The security scan verified that it was this Gilbert Williams who had driven Harry and his father, the Colonel, from the airport one night.

  Colonel Toledo, Harry thought. He’s not my father anymore. He’s just Colonel Toledo.

  If rumor proved true, he wouldn’t be a colonel much longer, either. If the Colonel survived the scissors slash that had saved Harry’s life, he would be very lucky to stay out of jail. A fearful nausea washed over Harry at the thought of his father, so he swept that thought aside.

  Harry pressed the bolt release himself and opened the front door. Francesca hadn’t shown up for work but Harry had taught himself the security drills. He had seen Williams only the one time, three months ago, and he’d looked so much younger.

  “Jesus, kid!” was all Williams said.

  Grace Toledo met them at the door and Yolanda Rubia handed her a plain envelope, the kind that might hold an invitation to one of the embassy parties.

  “The Colonel, he did this?” Yolanda asked, nodding at Harry.

  Neither Harry nor his mother answer
ed. Grace Toledo glanced around the courtyard as she pocketed the envelope.

  “The men?” Grace asked.

  Her blue eyes indicated the unlocked gate behind the Archbishop’s car. Harry saw no sign of either of their guards, and neither did his mother. His part of the plan had worked. The kids that Harry had signaled were shooting off firecrackers down the block, and Williams wiped at his sweat as his quick brown eyes sought snipers on the rooftops.

  Later, Harry would remember this as the day no roosters crowed, the day the crippled parrot in the mango tree did not bark at the cats, the day the cats and Francesca and even the fruit flies disappeared. He could never be sure about the truth, but that’s the way he would remember that last sunrise in Colonia Escalon with his mother.

  Two concussions shook the house. Harry recognized the whap-WHUMP of “un tigre,” an antipersonnel mine that the army set up around power transformers, substations and relay towers. Harry flinched, though he’d been practicing not to. Gilbert Williams flinched, too. Harry’s mother didn’t, and neither did Yolanda.

  “The gate was open,” Williams said. “I didn’t see anybody.”

  “They’re throwing us to the wolves, the bastards.”

  “There is much that you do not understand,” Yolanda said. “Whatever happens, I am with you. You must hurry. I will be in touch.”

  Yolanda hugged Grace Toledo and kissed her cheeks, then shook Harry’s hand.

  “Ciao,” she said, and hurried down the drive to disappear around the wall.

  Williams had the door open for Harry; Grace was already inside. Harry limped quickly over to the car and slid into the back seat beside his mother.

  She has a plan, and it doesn’t include the law.

  Harry felt better already.

  Another tigre blew on the block behind them. Neighborhood children taught Harry to find where they were buried. They lobbed water balloons made from the government’s free condoms to set them off. The substation behind them had been taken out three times this month by guerrillas. This time they did it as a favor to him.

  “What about the kid?” Williams asked. “Nobody said anything about a kid.”

  Harry suppressed a smile. Williams was getting very exasperated. Transporting the Colonel’s wife after she’d cut up the Colonel was not the most secure duty of the day.

  “You’re a driver,” his mother said. “Drive.”

  Harry said nothing and looked straight ahead. His mouth tasted like pennies and he could barely control his breathing. He concentrated on not touching his eye, which throbbed deeply with his pulse.

  Someone would have to pay. The embassy had distanced itself from them overnight, the usual political precautions. Harry was surprised that his mother had a plan, and not one of the embassy’s contingency plans, but one of her own. The darkened windows of the Archbishop’s car helped Harry to relax.

  His mother removed the envelope from her pocket and read the first line, and smiled.

  “Do you have an address, Mrs. Toledo?”

  Harry saw the hint of a smile twitch the corner of Grace’s mouth, something that Gil probably would not notice. Harry did not know what to feel, but he knew he didn’t feel like smiling. Besides, it would probably hurt his eye and his split lip.

  “Show us the guesthouse.”

  Harry watched Gil’s eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. They widened in disbelief, then Gil turned to protest.

  “Guesthouse,” his mother repeated.

  There were a lot of code words in Costa Brava, this Harry well knew. He knew several for use with security or the embassy and they all carried standing orders that did not require confirmation. Their driver might not like whatever Grace just told him, but he wouldn’t dare take a chance and disobey.

  Before turning back to the wheel, Gil gave Harry’s mother a long, appraising look. Then he grunted, punctuating some personal decision, and drove. He kept his white handkerchief on the seat beside him, draped over a pistol. He attempted conversation only once.

  “Mrs. Toledo . . . ”

  “Call me Grace.”

  “Yes. Well, I had something personal to say and now it looks like there won’t be time.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “I don’t want to disturb the boy.”

  “Harry knows everything.”

  “I see.”

  Harry saw a tic of disapproval in Gil’s cheek reflected in the rearview mirror.

  They were leaving the posh suburb of Colonia Escalon and entering the first of several shantytowns that lined the roadway circumnavigating the capital. Skinny pigs dozed in potholes, veiled in the blue smoke of a thousand charcoal fires. The scent of fresh tortillas breached the car’s air-conditioning. Williams cleared his throat and continued.

  “I wanted you to know that a lot of us know what you went through with your husb—with Colonel Toledo. You did what had to be done.”

  Harry watched a barefoot boy and girl his own age pushing a cartful of broken metal towards the city. The curbside tire wobbled under the weight and made the going tougher. A piece of chrome trim nailed to the side said “Mitsubishi.” A makeshift cage with two scraggly chickens teetered atop the load. The dark boy bent to his traces, his bare back a study in tendon and bone. Two Down kids, deficientes, followed behind, holding hands and the tail end of a rope.

  The swell-breasted girl glanced up from her chore and their gazes met. Harry waved and she flashed a smile and waved back. The brother never looked up. The Down kids compared tongues and laughed at some unspoken joke.

  “Yes,” his mother said to Williams, “thank you.”

  Her voice sounded weak, detached, unlike her.

  Harry had not seen much of his father during the last few years, and what he had seen he did not like. His father didn’t take him to the gym for karate on Saturdays anymore, and Harry was too old to play hostage-and-escape. Harry’s father had spent most of his military career in Central America, first as an advisor and then as chief of intelligence. Costa Brava was a new country, rising out of the ashes of four old ones. Colonel Toledo had made that happen, at the expense of his family.

  The Colonel kept two households, the one in Colonia Escalon and an apartment across from the embassy. Grace Toledo, young and lonely, lately had outmaneuvered the advances of a half dozen junior officers who paid casual visits, but seldom when the Colonel was home. To her, and to Harry, this was a sign that his father’s affair with the red-haired embassy staffer was more than rumor.

  Finally, the Colonel’s increasingly bizarre and violent behavior brought her to an ultimatum: they would live together as a family or split up for good. Grace Toledo, like her husband, was a Catholic, and this was a decision that she had not made lightly.

  Costa Brava seethed with secrets, with codes within codes. Harry’s movement within the country had been tightly restricted all his life, which was true of all dependents of embassy personnel. Still, he had versed himself in the hot fluidity of the politics and he had learned a decent Spanish, though only English was permitted at the private American School on the embassy grounds. Harry had just graduated at fifteen and looked forward to never going back.

  Grace Toledo told Harry everything she knew because Harry was her most constant companion. Still, a black hole of secrecy ruled Costa Brava with Colonel Toledo as choreographer. Neither Harry nor his mother had been able to penetrate its veil. She briefed him on the usual security precautions as they were passed to her.

  “See how our cannibals dance” meant that all personnel were restricted to embassy grounds or to quarters, due to an undisguisable incident involving the internal law of the country. Action against Americans was imminent. Harry was sure that this message had already flashed among embassy personnel due to the incident between his parents.

  According to the official embassy releases, no guerrilla activity penetrated within fifty klicks of the capital, yet the power substation on the block behind them blew up with chilling regularity. Harry had stopped believ
ing the embassy, and his father, long ago.

  Williams pulled up behind a bunker-like building fronted by a row of shabby garages on the Avenue of the Martyrs. Harry recognized the structure immediately as a “hot-sheet” motel. He understood now the meaning of the word “guesthouse.”

  This particular motel was a singularly unremarkable place on a narrow street that offered plenty of cover behind burned-out cars but few options for escape. His father had taught him to observe these things, and he did so now out of habit. Much of the embassy’s intelligence was gathered electronically, but the Costa Bravans still relied on real eyes staring out real windows, on real ears against the right doors.

  Grace Toledo dismissed Williams in the street across from the motel garages. Three of the roll-up doors stood open for business. After the Archbishop’s car disappeared around the corner, Grace hurried Harry through the leftmost of the three.

  Hot-sheet motels provided the ultimate accommodations for the clandestine affairs of a traditionally Catholic nation. Designed to meet the illicit playtime needs of diplomats, politicians and the occasional priest or nun, the hot-sheet motels also hid guerrillas, political refugees and bandits.

  They made perfect temporary isolation units for “hot ones,” the unvaccinated infected, or “cold ones,” the vaccinated but infected. The unvaccinated and the uninfected, like Harry, they simply called “lucky.” The latest vaccine, one that his father’s Agency helped the World Health Organization to distribute, was supposed to end the need for vaccination once and for all. His parents’ last argument had exploded over the subject of vaccinations.

  A hot-sheet motel had no office. The client drove into one of the open double garages. A locked door led from garage to accommodations. To the left of the driver’s door a large drawer jutted from the wall. This drawer held a tray for cash and a rate schedule that boasted the convenience of a one-hour minimum fee.

  Harry’s mother counted out some bills into the tray and closed the drawer. She drummed her fingernails on the handle and Harry heard someone rustling on the other side of the wall. A small red light winked on and the sign next to it said “Listo.” She slid it open and took out a stack of towels with a key on top. She handed the towels to Harry and opened the door.