The man liked to refer to himself as Drano, and Hilger hadn’t liked that from the start. Nicknames bestowed by comrades were an honor. If you tried to invent one for yourself, it was a joke, a sign of narcissism and an underlying lack of confidence. Hilger had known better at the time, but he’d lost so many men in the last two years that he’d ignored the warning from his gut as he went about restaffing. Stupid. Never time to do it right, always time to do it over.

The guy had come highly recommended, true. Former Navy SEAL, combat duty in Afghanistan. But that kind of background was merely necessary, and not always sufficient, for what Hilger demanded of his men. Anyway, even among SEALs there was an occasional loser. Apparently, it had been Hilger’s bad luck to come across one of them.

The man to Demeere’s left rotated his bald head, breaking the silence by cracking the joints in his neck. “Better to wait,” he said, looking first at Demeere, then at Hilger, and ignoring Drano completely. “His villa would be convenient, sure, but it’s no coincidence he built the place in the middle of all those rice paddies. You know how long it’ll take us to slog all the way through to his house? If he’s got sensors deployed and sees us coming, he’ll turn us into fertilizer one at a time. And I don’t want to go in on that zigzagging little access road, either. He knows that’s the only approach, he’s got to have it rigged. And trying to set up there while he’s gone would be worse. I guarantee you he’s got layered systems that would warn him. Better to take him on unfamiliar ground. The downside is more potential witnesses and the other risks you get rendering someone in public, but overall our odds are better.”

The man’s name was Frank Garza, but he was known in Hilger’s organization as Pancho, the name given him by his Mexican mother. While Demeere had a deceptively placid exterior, Pancho tended to radiate a not-to-be-fucked-with aura that he had a hard time concealing.