Friday. Six AM. The SUV was in the loading bay. Cruz was behind the wheel. The morning was gray, the kind that pressed down on Miami like a hand on a chest.
I got in the back. The seat was right. The air was seventy. The silence was the silence I expected from Mateo Cruz, which was no silence at all because no silence was the same as silence when you were sitting three feet from a man who might be building a case against you.
"Eighteenth Street," I said.
He drove. The same smooth drive. The same focused attention. The same man who was either the best driver I'd ever had or the most dangerous person in my organization.
The test was simple. I'd designed it with Carlos. The principle was basic: you give a man information that only matters to someone who matters, and you watch the information. If the information moves, the man moved it. The test was a trap made of words, and the words were the bait, and the bait was real.
