(Richard Castle)

Rook told her that two weeks before, he had ridden by cargo ship from Rijeka, on the Adriatic, to Monrovia on the West African coast, where he witnessed what he considered a brazen daylight offload of black market arms. The dealer, who was on the wharf to supervise the transfer of thirty tons of AK-47 rounds, plus crates of grenade launchers, onto waiting trucks, kept glancing up from his Range Rover to the ship’s navigation tower, where Rook was lurking, trying to be inconspicuous. But after the convoy lumbered off the pier, Rook went below to his crew quarters, only to be grabbed by three of the dealer’s goons. They put a hood over his head and drove him for over an hour, to a plantation in the hills. There, they removed the sack but handcuffed him while he waited, locked in an empty horse stall in the barn.

At nightfall, he was taken to the great lawn beside the yellow plantation house, where the arms dealer, a former MI6 operative named—or at least using the name—Gordon McKinnon, was at a picnic table tossing back Caipirinhas under strings of fiesta lights shaped like red chili peppers. Rook decided not to let on how much he knew about McKinnon from his research . . . that the former British SIS man had amassed a fortune brokering black market weapons to embargoed nations in Africa . . . that the blood flow from Angola, Rwanda, the Congo, and recently Sudan could be traced to the drunken, sunburned, ginger-haired man right before him.

“Have a seat, Jameson Rook,” he said, and gestured to a wooden stool across the table. “Oh, come on. I knew it was you when you boarded in Croatia.” Rook sat but didn’t speak. “Call me Gordy.” Then he laughed, and added, “But I guess you damn well know that already, don’t you? Huh, am I right?” He slid a tall glass across the rough timber to him. “Drink up, it’s the best fucking Caipirinha on this whole fucking continent. Both my bartender and my cachaça are flown in from Brazil.” Maybe he was too drunk to remember his guest’s hands were cuffed behind him and he couldn’t reach his glass.

“I read all your stuff. Not bad. Bono and Mick. Bill Clinton. Well done. But come on, Tony fuckin’ Blair? And Aslan Maskhadov? I’ve damn sure got more going than that bollocks you wrote about the damn Chechen. Maskhadov, hah! Only regret is I didn’t sell the grenade that killed him.” He tilted his glass back and some of it sloshed down his face onto his Ed Hardy shirt. His barkeep replaced the glass with a fresh one, and he continued, “Hey now, bottoms up. This is your last drink.”

And then he stood, pointing the biggest handgun Rook had ever seen, an Israeli Desert Eagle .50-caliber, right at him. But then he pivoted, sighting to the left, firing into the night. The thunderclap report of the Eagle was followed immediately by hissing and a white-hot glow that filled the grounds with the brightness of frozen lightning. Rook turned to look behind him. In the searing brilliance he could see magnesium flares lined up along the fence posts across the great lawn. McKinnon fired again. His bullet struck another flare, which sparked to life, huffing and fizzing as it spun off the fence into a pasture, illuminating fleeing horses and a pair of Gulfstream IVs parked in the distance.

The arms dealer raised both fists in the air and war whooped to the Liberian sky. He polished off his drink and said in a hoarse voice, “Know what I love? Rockin’ my own life. Did you know I have enough bloody cash to buy my own country?” Then he laughed. “Oh, wait, I already did! Are you aware, Rook, I have been given—are you ready for this?—diplomatic immunity? They made me minister of some shite or other here. Truly. I do what I want and nobody can touch me.”

He brought up the Desert Eagle and stepped closer, training it on Rook again. “This is what happens when you poke it where it doesn’t belong.”

Rook stared into the gaping muzzle and said, “What was it that I rode up here in, a Range Rover? Have your valet pull it back up. Think I’m ready to go.” McKinnon jerked his hand to menace him with the gun. “Put that damn thing away, you’re not going to shoot me.”

“No? What makes you think so?”

“Because you would have done it back in port and left me floating out to the Canary Islands. Because you put on this whole . . . show for me. Because if you kill me, who will write your story, Gordon? That’s what you want, isn’t it? Of course it is. And you gave me some great quotes. ‘Rocking your life’? ‘Minister of some shite’? Brilliant. It’s tough to be a bad boy and have no fan club, isn’t it? You didn’t bring me here to kill me, you brought me here to make you a legend.”