Perhaps Quesada would wave to his militiamen. Perhaps, once inside the finca, the lead truck and the Silverado carrying only the bodyguards would take a different road while Quesada sped in his Silverado to his luxurious home in the center of the valley.

No rocketflashes came from the mountains. No machine guns fired on the convoy. The lieutenant watched as the trucks roared across the last straightaway. The drivers screeched the trucks' brakes to slow for the series of speed bumps. Once they passed through the gate, they accelerated to a hundred kilometers per hour.

As his men muttered curses and gathered their equipment, the lieutenant kept his binoculars on the trucks inside the plantation. The lead truck — the Toyota Land Cruiser — turned onto a side road. But both Silverados continued directly to the gardens and homes of the Quesada family.

Lieutenant Lizco returned his binoculars to its case. He had not determined which truck carried Colonel Quesada, but he had confirmed several other important details. Though his soldiers cursed the informant who had misled them and condemned them to an all-night wait in the storm for nothing, Lieutenant Lizco considered his unit's operation a success.

No Communist assassins had waited for the fascist convoy, contrary to what the lieutenant had told his commander. Lieutenant Lizco had lied. True, an informant did tell the lieutenant of the colonel's rare overland commute to the finca. Only a few times in recent years had the weather forced the colonel or any of the other members of the family to risk the highways; now, in this year of strange weather when God sent violent storms to warn of His wrath, when weather denied the Quesadas their inviolate passage through the skies, the family would take the highways more often.

No Communist assassins lay in wait today. But soon the lieutenant himself hoped to ambush Quesada. He would not murder Quesada. He would kidnap him for the humiliation of public trial and judgment in the courts of the United States.