"Cor, stone the crows is right," Jed whispered to himself when he noticed the scavengers waiting for his return to the posada. It wasn't happenstance that Rice's partner had picked him out of a crowd on the street.

On the way south Jed and Jenny had leapfrogged every change of plane. They had cancelled one flight at the last moment, substituted another. It was extremely unlikely that Sayer realized that the horsepacker and his girlfriend had anything to do with the missing files. Yet, there was that face again, hidden behind a tall drink, at an open air cafe, watching the hotel.

Jed directed the driver to "vamoose" up the street, where he switched cabs to take another look. On the second pass he spotted two more "gringos" who seemed to have an extraordinary interest in the rambling, colonial style architecture of the posada.

By extended use of hand signals, and a series of grunts, Jed was able to direct the driver on to the library. No Jenny. Fortunately, he found a clerk who spoke excellent English and remembered that Senorita MacPherson had been directed to the Canal Authority Museum and Reading Room.

Hoping that he wasn't too late, directing yet another hack driver on with Looney Tunes cartoon character Spanish — "adelante, adelante, arriba"— he decided to take the risk that if Jenny was under surveillance, his face, in the Americanized zone might not be as noticeable, or familiar to Jenny's shadow.

His judgment was correct. Whoever "they" were, had chosen to avoid the possibility of Jenny losing her tail by making a quick exit through a women's lavatory, so the person watching Jenny was herself noticeable as being a farm fresh, Fort Wayne, Indiana, style filly.

Jed approached Jenny, who was concentrating on taking notes out of bound copies of old newspapers, with an open book in his hand. Coming up behind, as if reading to himself, he instructed her in a loud whisper, "Do not look up, Jenny. Do not pay any attention to me. I am going to set a book down on the table. Wait five minutes, casually pick it up. There is a note inside. Love you."

He ambled out through the glass door and took up a station where he could look at both the exit doors, and an ingenious working model of one of the canal's locks. No one seemed to pay him the slightest interest. When Jenny, following his written directions, walked past without a glance, it didn't take long to determine that the American girl was a tail.