And then the front window exploded.

Chapter Six.

Eduardo "Get the girl too," Eduardo Morais shouted the order as he sent his men into the house.

He'd seen Finch's friend. That guy wasn't going to respond to torture any better than Finch had. But the man seemed to have grown fond of the little wh.o.r.e. Maybe if they tortured the wh.o.r.e in front of him...

Eduardo wasn't going to fail his brother, Marcos, this time.

He stayed outside, at a safe distance, listening to the sounds of fighting, furniture crashing. A gun popped. Then another.

Few people were out on the street after dark, and those who were weren't bothered by the sounds of violence. They weren't much interested either. They took a look at Eduardo, dressed as an important man, in a suit, the silver of his gun glinting in his hand, and they hurried by.

The crashing and yelling continued inside.

Eduardo had brought six men from Rio. If he lost one or two... He was a businessman who understood the cost of doing business. And there was no way Finch's friend would fight off all six.

As if to underscore that thought, the house fell silent. No more crashes, no shouting, no gunfire. Just the sweet silence of success.

Now that's how you take care of business. Eduardo smirked to himself as he strode in. Then... Meu Deus. For a moment, he faltered.

Bloodied men covered the floor.

Six.

All his.

Fernando, the bald one, was shaking his head, coming to, his nose broken and bleeding. His shoulder stuck out at the wrong angle, dislocated.

Merda.

Fury burned through Eduardo. "What the h.e.l.l happened?"

"They went out the back." Fernando gasped out the words in a nasal tone. "The wh.o.r.e can fight like a freaking ninja."

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about, you useless piece of s.h.i.t?" Eduardo kicked him. "Get up. Get after them."

He finally had to help the guy up-carefully, so his suit wouldn't get b.l.o.o.d.y. Then the two of them, with guns drawn, hurried out back into the darkness together. Or, more correctly, Eduardo hurried, and the idiot Fernando limped behind him.

Something in the river caught Eduardo's eye as soon as they were down the backstairs. A white fishing boat chugged across the black water.

Monte de merda.

He ran to the end of the dock and knocked the sole fisherman coming home from the night into the water, jumped into the man's ancient motorboat, waited for Fernando, then headed after the people he was chasing.

Nothing but jungle waited on the opposite side of the river. The foreigner and the girl weren't going to escape him there.

Ian Ian looked up from under the tarp that covered Daniela and him as they lay pressed together on the bottom of a small canoe stuck in the mud on the riverbank.

They were a tight fit lying down like that, but lack of room was the least of his worries. He was more concerned about poisonous snakes or spiders that might have bedded down for the night in the canoe. He hadn't had time to check.

"We'll go upriver." He whispered because water carried sound a little too well.

They climbed out and pushed the canoe into the water. He did look for other occupants in the moonlight then, but they lucked out. Nothing too scary save a few bugs here and there.

Daniela smashed the biggest one with her rubber flip-flop without missing a beat. "The bite makes you hear things that are not there," she whispered.

He gave her an appreciative nod. Tonight would be a bad night to start hallucinating.

They climbed in, then paddled hard, keeping to the river's edge where the current was much slower and more easily overpowered than in the middle. And here, near the bank, the shadows of overhanging trees would soon hide them.

Moving upriver in a canoe required hard work, but between the two of them, they managed.

Once the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who'd attacked them realized that the fishing boat Ian had sent across the river for twenty US dollars held only a lone, local fisherman, they would search for Ian and Daniela downriver. People fleeing nearly always went downriver. Easier. Just like on dry ground, people fleeing went downhill, nine times out of ten.

When you ran from someone, instinct said to get as far away from your pursuers as quickly as possible, so you picked the fastest path. Of course, most professional trackers knew that. Doing the opposite was a basic evasion tactic Ian had learned in the army.

He paddled hard, and the canoe made decent progress. They both put muscle into it, as much as they each had.

Daniela didn't burst into tears, didn't freak out, didn't go into shock.

He hadn't been sure she wouldn't. Being tough while training was wholly different from reacting to a live, armed attack where bullets flew at your head.

He respected the h.e.l.l out of her for the way she'd responded. But at the same time, he hated that an armed ambush wasn't even the worst thing that had happened to her in her life. Being attacked by killers was something she could take in stride, and it hadn't been only because of the training he'd given her.

They pa.s.sed two sleeping villages, each no more than a smattering of huts. Hours pa.s.sed before they reached the next town, smaller than Santana. A brightly lit-up house sat at the edge of the water, sounds of music floating from inside.

"That's Rosa's house," Daniela whispered.

Ian's blood boiled. His paddle stilled in the water. He would have liked to have a few words with Rosa, or, say, set the d.a.m.n place on fire. But now was not the time to cause that kind of disturbance. He began paddling again.

He wanted to know what Daniela was thinking, but she didn't say anything, and he couldn't see her face.

"How far is it to your village?"

"Another hour, I think."

She sounded winded. So was he. But he was willing to get more winded to get her to safety.

"We'll go there."

If the men behind them did search for them up this way, they'd search the first town they came across. They wouldn't think anyone would want to go farther, against the current, on the night river.

He didn't like doing it either. A floating log could easily capsize them. But Daniela sat in the front, and she had excellent night vision. He trusted her. He ignored his aching muscles and kept working against the current.

They reached Daniela's village in a little under an hour and a half. Fewer than a hundred huts scattered on a hillside, nothing but shadows in the scant moonlight. The village slept.

Ian and Daniela pulled up the canoe and got out. They didn't stop to rest.

Daniela took his hand and drew him forward. "I'll show you my home. We can spend the rest of the night in the hut."

Had that been excitement in her tone? She walked fast, clearly happy to be here. He followed her, ruled by entirely different emotions: anger and protectiveness.

He wanted to go from hut to hut and shake people. Why in h.e.l.l had n.o.body protected her?

A couple of dogs ran up to them, but they were friendly-small jungle dogs to keep houses free of snakes and rats. They sniffed the visitors, then licked their hands, tails wiggling in greeting.

Goats bleated in their pens.

Daniela led the way up an overgrown path to a small hut that was leaning off its stilts, the roof in tatters.

The spring went right out of her step. She came to a lurching halt and stared at the ruin. And in the moonlight, Ian saw tears roll down her face for the first time ever. He'd seen her with tears in her eyes, seen her with tear streaks that one morning. But she had never once cried in front of him.

She cried silently now, her slim arms wrapped around her.

First he thought, What the h.e.l.l is here to cry over? But then, in another minute or two, he began to understand. This had been her home. The hut symbolized her mother and what little childhood she'd had. This was where she'd come from, and it was just about erased, would be erased in another year. The jungle would claim the hut; the vines and weeds would simply overgrow the small ruin.

She'd had a hard upbringing, and yet...

Her past was a part of her, as Ian's past was part of him. Neither of them could divorce themselves from the things that had happened to them. And if they couldn't erase the past...

We will have to make peace, the thought came to him. But can we?

As he watched her, something in his chest began to ache-the first time in years that he felt he might still have a heart.

He didn't care for the feeling.

He liked his chest numb. h.e.l.l, he'd drunk barrels of whiskey to make sure his feelings were good and drowned and nothing could make them surface again.

Daniela wiped her eyes. Sniffed.

Ian wanted to give her a rea.s.suring hug. He didn't. He'd put a distance between them for a reason, and he meant to keep it. But that didn't mean that he wasn't going to help her.

He moved over to the nearest tree, kicked the ground clean, and sat, leaning against the trunk. "If you want to leave the country, if you want to come with me, you're going to need some kind of papers."

He'd never seen anything at the house in Santana.

She walked over to him, stopping in front of him and looking down. "What kind of papers?"

"Pa.s.sport?" He doubted she had that. "Birth certificate?"

She sighed. "I don't think so."

Looking at the village that could have come straight out of the Bronze Age, he believed her. "Did you ever see your mother with any papers?"

She sat down next to him, pulled up her knees, and wrapped her arms around them as she thought. For one minute. Two. Three. Then she jumped up.

"My mother kept a metal box buried in the ground at the back corner of the hut." She hurried over.

A metal box had potential.

"In the morning," Ian called after her, relaxing. He closed his eyes. "Let's sleep."

After a moment, she returned to the tree and sat back down. "Are you really going to take me with you?"

"We'll see."

She stayed silent for a while, but not for long. "You are not going back to Santana to take revenge for Senhor Finch?"

That was the question of the day, wasn't it?

He'd been a right idiot about that. He'd gone around town, asking about Finch. How in h.e.l.l had he thought he was going to bait a bunch of killers and not have Daniela hurt in the process?

He could go off on his own, go after whoever killed Finch, figure out what in h.e.l.l Finch had died for. But he'd have to leave Daniela here in the village alone, or send her off to some other place she'd never been.

Buying Finch's house for her to live in after Ian had gone back to the US wouldn't work. Ian cursed himself for being stupid enough to have ever thought of that as a solution. Finch's enemies knew the place.

Now that Ian thought about it, he hated the living s.h.i.t out of the idea of sending her off alone into the great unknown. Which left one option: give up on taking out the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who'd killed his friend, and get her out of here.

Ian hated that option too.

But when it came right down to it, bottom line was, he wasn't prepared to sacrifice Daniela. For anything.

"We'll go someplace safe," he said. "To the United States if we can."

Then he could find her a safe place to live, set her up with a safe life. And then he could return to Brazil and take care of business.

In his pocket, he had a cell phone he'd picked up as they'd run from Finch's house. The phone had to have been dropped by one of the attackers in the fight. That cell phone would have numbers in its memory. And those numbers would lead him to names.

Daniela shifted next to him. She blended into the shadows of the tree, a part of the jungle.

Would it be a mistake to take her someplace else?

"If you could be anything, what would you be?"

She didn't have to think about it. "A teacher." Then she asked, "Did you always want to be a soldier?"

He'd told her that was how he'd met Finch.

Ian looked up into the starry sky. "When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. Someone who flies in a s.p.a.ceship to the moon," he explained, in case she didn't know the word.