Faroe had heard all the come-ons since he was fifteen. Once he’d smiled at the grimy tricks. Then he’d become indifferent. Now he was disgusted.

He didn’t know if it was an improvement.

He flagged a passing yellow cab and climbed in the backseat with his parcel. Instantly the driver made eye contact in his rearview mirror and gave him a broad, practiced grin.

“I can find anything for you, senor. Girls, mebbe? I know where the clean ones are.”

“La Linea,” Faroe said. “Go back through the Zona Rio.”

The driver looked at Faroe’s eyes, shut up, and turned north.

In three minutes the taxi left the hustling, squalid streets of Old Town behind. Now Faroe looked out on the broad boulevards of Tijuana’s international district. When he’d first come to Tijuana, this river district had been an open sewer over a marshy land. It had been equal opportunity sewage-some stayed south of the border and some emptied with the Tia Juana River into the ocean at Imperial Beach, U.S. of A.

The river still carried sewage, but it was underground now. On top were streets like the Paseo de los Heroes, whose high-end international shopping rivaled that of any city on earth.

Stores. Discos. Nightclubs. Restaurants.

Banks.

Lots and lots of banks.

Their business towers were modest compared to those in San Diego, but by the one- and two-story scale of the rest of Tijuana, the banks were giant, glistening, new. A mecca for money.

Just shows what thirty billion dollars a year in outside income can do for a city, Faroe thought. Too bad the billions came mostly from ghetto addicts and barrio hypes north of the line.

But that wasn’t his problem anymore. Steele and St. Kilda Consulting be damned, he was through with the crisscross, double-cross, black-is-white and white-is-black world he’d lived in all his adult life.