Page 332 of The Black Trilogy

“If they did, perhaps they got worried he might muscle in on them. You know, imitate Carlos and get inside information or something.”

“Black running a drugs empire?” I scoffed. “Like that would ever happen. No offence.”

“Then they could have feared the opposite. Maybe they thought Black would take Carlos out to protect his own reputation?”

“That’s crazy. They should have tried negotiating.”

“Men like the Ramos family don’t negotiate.”

Didn’t I know it? The whole situation made me feel sick. I cursed them under my breath for forcing me into this position.

“When we see them, perhaps we can ask why they did it,” Seb suggested.

“I’m planning to.”

I didn’t have the network in South America that Eduardo did, so I was reliant on his team doing my legwork. At least by being in Colombia, I could speak freely with the Garcias, something that wasn’t so easy from the United States due to Eduardo’s paranoia that big brother constantly monitored everyone’s phone calls.

Which, to be fair, he most likely did. The NSA was the only part of the government that actually listened to its citizens.

Snippets of information came in, and I set up an old-fashioned corkboard in one of Eduardo’s many living rooms, pinning record cards on it in groups to try and arrange my thoughts. Nick got over his initial anger at me, probably because he was dead wrong about Eduardo even if he wouldn’t openly admit it like Nate did, and we stayed in almost constant contact. He had an electronic version of my board in one of the operations rooms at Blackwood and added information to that from all the sources we could unearth.

Eduardo took care of me in his own special way. He realised how miserable I was and tried to cheer me up. And Eduardo’s way of doing that involved spending money, stacks of it. His wives usually responded well to that approach, I gathered, and he didn’t see why I should be any different.

His current wife, Floriana, was a tiny, quiet woman with surgically enhanced assets and impossibly white teeth, and he’d obviously sent her out shopping on my behalf. When I returned to my room that evening, I could barely get through the door from the amount of bags on the floor, and I counted no less than eighteen bunches of flowers spread all over the place.

Over dinner, which Alejandro turned into a work of art, Eduardo presented me with a tiara. A flipping tiara! What on earth was I supposed to do with that? If I ever happened to re-marry into royalty it might come in handy, but it wouldn’t be much use while I scraped around in the jungle, would it? Unless I used it to dazzle the bad guys into submission.

Still, it was very sweet of him, and I appreciated the gesture. I felt a pang of jealousy for Camilla, completely irrational given that she wasn’t even alive anymore. Why did I feel that way? Because her father cared so much he’d put her needs first, far above his own, even though she never knew him.

We had that much in common—my father wasn’t part of my life either, although I doubted his motives were as noble as Eduardo’s. My mother always claimed she didn’t know who he was, but I’d never quite believed her. When I was a little girl, I used to fantasise that my daddy would come sweeping in to save me from whatever dingy squat we happened to be living in at the time and take me to live in a proper house. A home where I ate a hot meal every evening and he helped me with my schoolwork then read me a story before I went to sleep.

One day, I’d stupidly told my mother I hoped he’d come back so we could be a real family. Big mistake. Huge. I choked on her cigarette smoke as she blew it in my face, and she laughed before she slayed me with her words. “You really are a stupid little cow, aren’t you?”

Although I didn’t get my fairy tale, I did get Eduardo, and also Jimmy, the ex-boxer who’d looked after me between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. So I hadn’t done too badly, after all.

And now? Now I had a tiara.

The next day, Nate called mid-morning. Maryland was an hour ahead of Cali, and he’d just got out from visiting Arthur.

“The old guy’s away with the fairies most of the time. He called me Caroline twice. But he seemed to have moments of lucidity, and if it’s true, what he had to say was interesting.”

“Go on.”

“It seemed like he’d been waiting to get this off his chest for years. Either that or all the medication he’s on loosened his tongue. Once he’d started talking, he wouldn’t stop.”

“Hurry up and tell me, would you?”

“Apparently the circumstances of Black’s birth were a little unusual.”

“In what way?”

“Well, John and Audrey Black were stationed in Colombia for a year before baby Black’s arrival. John was a diplomat, but we all know enough about Black’s father to understand there would have been more to his role than that.”

“Colombia? Black never mentioned that.”

“He probably didn’t know. Anyhow, John asked for a six-month sabbatical rather suddenly, an unusual request according to Arthur, but John had enough clout for it to be granted. When he and Audrey sailed out of Cartagena on their yacht, they told Arthur they were heading back to Florida via the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. Five months later when they turned up in Naples, Charles was with them.”

“Holy cow. So it’s possible Black could have come from Colombia, and they smuggled him onto the boat with them?”

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