An Acceptable Sacrifice

to be basking in—his own wide-angle face—which was being beamed from his iPad’s camera to the laptop via a surveillance app that Evans had loaded. They could hear the man’s voice too.
    You old devil …
    “He’s in bed, alone,” Evans said. “Good enough for me.” Then he glanced at Díaz. “He’s all yours.”
    “ Sí ?” asked the Mexican agent.
    “Yep.”
    “ Gracias .”
    “ Nada .”
    And without any dramatic flair, Díaz pressed a button on what looked like a garage door opener.
    In Cuchillo’s bedroom, the iPad’s leather case, which Evans had stuffed with the potent incendiary explosive last night, detonated. The explosion was far larger than the American agent had expected. Even the bullet-proof windows blew to splinters and a gaseous cloud of flame shot into the night.
    They waited until it was clear the bedroom was engulfed in flame—and all the evidence of the attack was burning to vapors, as they’d been instructed to do by Washington—and then Díaz started the car and drove slowly through the night.
    After ten minutes of silence, looking over their shoulders for police or other pursuers, Díaz said, “Have to say, amigo , you came up with a good plan.”
    Evans didn’t gloat—or act shy with false modesty, either. It was a good plan. Data-mining had revealed a lot about Cuchillo (this was often true in the case of targets like him—wealthy and, accordingly, big spenders). Evans and Díaz had noted not only his purchases of collectable books, but his high-tech acquisitions too: an iPad, an e-reader app and a number of e-books, as well as a leather case for the Apple device.
    Armed with this information, Evans duplicated the iPad and filled the case with the deadly explosive. This was the actual weapon that Díaz smuggled into the compound and swapped with Cuchillo’s iPad, whose location they could pinpoint thanks to the finder service Evans had hacked into.With Díaz inside, holding the iPad to show Davila’s latest inventory of books, Evans had fired into the windows, scattering everyone and giving his partner a chance to slip into the bedroom and switch the devices. He’d fired into that room’s windows, too, just in case Díaz had not been alone there.
    The bullets would also serve a second purpose—to let Cuchillo and his security people believe the shooting was the assault they’d heard about and lessen their suspicion that another attack was coming.
    Lessen, but not eliminate. The Knife was too sharp for that.
    And so they needed a second misdirection. Evans let slip fake information about himself—to Carmella, the beautiful woman who was part of Cuchillo’s entourage at Ruby’s Bar (phone records revealed he called her once or twice a month). He also fed phony data-mined facts that suggested he and Díaz might have snuck a bomb into the library. He’d hollowed out a copy of Schiller’s The Robbers —Sorry, Fred—and filled it with real explosives and a circuit, but failed to connect the detonators.
    Cuchillo would know his library so well it wouldn’t take much to find this out-of-place volume, which Díaz had intentionally planted askew.
    After finding this device, they would surely think no more threats existed and not suspect the deadly iPad on Cuchillo’s bedside table.
    Díaz now called José, the security chief for the late drug baron, and explained—in a loud voice due to the chief’s sudden hearing loss—that if any bus attacks occurred he would end up in jail accompanied by the rumor that he had sold his boss out. As unpopular as Cuchillo had been among the competing cartel figures, nothing was more unpopular in a Mexican prison than a snitch.
    The man assured them that there would be no attacks. Díaz had to say goodbye three times before the man heard him.
    A good plan, if a bit complicated. It would have been much easier, of course, simply to get a real bomb into the library and detonate it when drone surveillance revealed Cuchillo inside.
    That idea, however, hadn’t even been on the table. They would never have destroyed the library. Aside from the moral issue—and P.Z. Evans did have his standards—there was the little matter of how such a conflagration would play in the press if word got out about the identity of the two agents who’d orchestrated it and who their employers were.
    You can kill drug barons and their henchmen with impunity; 20,000 destroyed classics were not acceptable sacrifices. That was the sort of mar from