Plan B

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There’s nothing more dangerous than stealing a powerful man’s most prized possession.

But I had no choice.

I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an ambulance in a very wealthy neighborhood in Barcelona. It was two in the morning on a moonless night, and since there were no streetlights in this very upscale part of town, we were shrouded in darkness. The ambulance was a boxy white Nissan van whose black vinyl seats were cracked and sprung. The interior stank of stale cigarette smoke. The medical equipment did not inspire confidence. But I wasn’t complaining: The ambulance was borrowed.

“What I don’t get,” said the man behind the wheel, “is why.”

The man was named Benito, and he was a private investigator, formerly an officer with the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía. He was small and scrappy, with dyed black hair and a soul patch and an ugly white scar on his right jaw. He had the small dark button eyes of a rag doll. His teeth were tobacco stained. He smoked almost constantly, but out of deference to me, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over an hour. I’m not one of those antismoking fascists; that’s not why I don’t like being around lighted cigarettes. The problem was that, even though I hadn’t smoked in years, since the army, I was always on the verge of backsliding.

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