Richard Castle - Wild Storm

What they didn’t see — unless they looked very carefully — was Rivera’s favorite part of the fish tank, the reason he commissioned it for his home in the first place. Camouflaged in the craggy recesses of the imitation coral, just below all those oblivious fish, was the drawn, menacing, monstrous face of a moray eel, watching, waiting, needing only to decide which part of the smorgasbord he wanted for his lunch before he struck.

Some moray eel owners went out of their way to make sure they stocked fish that the creature wouldn’t eat. Not Rivera. He often kept the eel in a small side section of the tank, separated from the other fish, so it would be plenty hungry when he unleashed it. He loved watching it hunt.

Rivera thought of himself as being just like that moray eel. He was not as pretty as the other inhabitants of the tank. He was, truth be told, overweight and somewhat homely. He certainly wasn’t as beloved as, say, the clown fish. His flesh may well have been toxic, just like the eel.

But he never went hungry. The moray eel could lie in wait for hours or even days, never moving, until it became part of the scenery. And then it snatched what it wanted.

Patience. It was all about patience.

Take, for example, the bottle of Ardbeg whiskey he had pulled from his liquor cabinet on the wet bar that occupied the other side of his home office, the one opposite the fish tank. It was Scottish in origin, naturally, and was already aged more than twenty years when he bought it. Rivera was under the mistaken impression that whiskey continued to age even after it had been bottled, so he waited another ten years to open it. He had been biding his time for just the right occasion.

There just hadn’t been many of them lately. Not until tonight, anyway.

He pressed a button on his desk, paging his personal secretary, who sat outside his office in a small sitting area. It was a space she shared with Hector and Cesar, Rivera’s well-armed and well-paid bodyguards, who kept an eye on a bank of security cameras.

“Is he here yet?” Rivera asked in raspy-sounding Spanish.

“No, sir. But security just called to say his Cadillac has pulled into the parking garage. So I expect him any moment.”

“Excellent,” Rivera said.

He needed a little celebration, given the events of the past year. Rivera was the founder and sole proprietor of the Grupa de 2000, an engineering and construction firm that specialized in dredging, marine construction, and commercial diving. He had been a young man when he founded it in 1977, the year the United States agreed to return the Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty by the year 2000.

Back then, in the seventies, Rivera liked to joke that there were three wheelbarrows and two shovels in the entire country. He exaggerated — but only slightly. Panama in 1977 was woefully unprepared for the responsibility of maintaining and operating the most economically and strategically important waterway in the world. Its capital city was an embarrassment, not even third rate.

Things had changed much in Panama since that time and it was because of men like Rivera. He was part of the new breed, one that learned at the knee of U.S. contractors until it had the technological know-how needed to be autonomous. The ascendance of these native-controlled companies brought both pride and prosperity across the tiny isthmus. It spurred a building boom that transformed Panama City into a first-rate metropolis with a skyline that rivaled that of Miami or Boston. The growth had only accelerated after authority for the canal was officially returned to Panama on December 31, 1999.

It was quite a moment for Panama, one that was euphoric but also bittersweet. The country had long fought for leadership of its most important resource. And yet by the time it finally won it, the canal was already slowly starting to become obsolete. Larger container ships, ones that could not fit through the canal’s narrow locks, were bypassing Panama and going around the tip of South America. The ships were called post-Panamax and super post–Panamax, and their very names spoke to the urgency of Panama’s situation. The riches from the most lucrative trading relationship in the entire world, the one between China and the East Coast of the United States, were slowly slipping away.

The announcement, a few years later, of the Panama Canal expansion project — an ambitious widening of the locks that would allow larger ships (and more of them) to begin routing themselves through Panama — looked like it would solve all that. As long as the expansion happened, the boom would continue.

Then the construction delays hit. And the world credit crunch occurred. And the project surged wildly over budget.

The Autoridad del Canal de Panama, the authority that oversaw all aspects of the canal, continued to insist publicly that all was well. Meanwhile, it had begun a series of desperate appeals: first to the Panamanian government, which pleaded poverty, then to the United States, which had, so far, refused all entreaties.

Construction had ground to a virtual halt. Panama kept pretending all was well. But Rivera, who had leveraged himself under the belief the expansion project would continue unabated, knew better. The Autoridad del Canal de Panama had paid his company for two days of work in the last thirty. He had more than a thousand workers who depended on him for their livelihoods, leases that were past due, and loans that were in danger of slipping into default. He was on the brink of a crisis, of losing all that he had worked for over the last four decades.

The phone on Rivera’s desk bleeped twice.

“Sir, Mr. Villante is here,” he heard.

Rivera went to the fish tank and raised the partition that separated the eel from the other fish. The creature darted to the other side. The other fish gave it a broad swath, but it was no danger to them. Not then. The eel always preferred an ambush. Rivera would enjoy watching it later.

“Send him in, send him in,” Rivera said.

Carlos Villante was a deputy director of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama, a dashing sort blessed with good looks and style. As the man who oversaw the expansion project and had a heavy hand in awarding the contracts for it, he was Rivera’s most important contact within the authority — the moray eel’s cash cow, as it were.

Rivera had opened the door to his office before Villante could even reach it to knock.

“Come in, Carlos, come in,” he said.

“It is nice to see you, Eusebio.”

Rivera shook with his right hand, while displaying his prized Scotch in his left. “This is the bottle I have been telling you about, the one I have been saving for happy news,” Rivera said. “I am glad you will be able to enjoy this with me. Come, come.”

Villante allowed himself to be escorted to a sectional couch that overlooked the canal and the skyscrapers that lined it, most of them built with the money made by the canal, either directly or indirectly. As a deputy director of the authority that ran the canal, Villante was considered important, influential. Rivera knew he was not the only man to court Villante’s attention.

Yet Rivera did so cautiously. In a region of the world where graft flowed freely, Villante made it known to Rivera and others he would not accept a bribe.

However, he did drive a Cadillac, so it stood to reason he was accepting money from somewhere. Rivera and others had gone to great lengths to figure it out, with no success. To be sure, he was in someone’s pocket. And once Rivera figured out who, he would have it as a bargaining chip to use with the deputy director. In the meantime, Rivera employed the lower level of inducement that was perfectly aged Scotch.

“What are we celebrating?” Villante asked, lowering himself into a suede-covered captain’s chair.