When Byron J. Timmons, Jr., saw what was causing the airport-bound traffic to be stopped and backed up for at least a kilometer, he muttered an obscenity that was absolutely not appropriate for an assistant legal attaché of the embassy of the United States of America.
The twenty-nine-year-old—who was six feet one and weighed two hundred five pounds—had a reservation on the Aerolíneas Argentinas five-thirty flight to Buenos Aires and it looked to him to be entirely likely that these bastards were going to make him miss it.
Timmons looked at the driver of his embassy vehicle, a lightly armored Chevrolet TrailBlazer.
Franco Julio César—a quiet thirty-nine-year-old Paraguayan national who was employed as a chauffeur by the U.S.
embassy—was silently shaking his head in frustration. He, too, knew what was going on.
These bastards were officers of the Paraguayan Highway Police and they were running a roadblock. There was a Highway Police car and a Peugeot van on the shoulder. The van had a sliding side door—now open—so that it could serve as sort of a mobile booking
station. Inside was a small desk behind which sat a booking sergeant.
He would decide whether the miscreant caught by the roadblock would be simply given a summons or hauled away in handcuffs.
