Night Work by David C. Taylor

through the embrasures and had waited for a hundred years to take on any brig or frigate that might sail in to test the harbor’s defenses. At the next corner, Cassidy hung back until the others disappeared, and then walked away.
    He went back to where they had left the cars and stopped there for a moment to try to reconstruct where Fuentes’s Jeep had taken them the day before. That road, or the one that went to the right? Why hadn’t he paid more attention to where they had gone the day before? All right, that way, if not, then think again.
    He walked quickly, not so fast that someone would remark on his pace, but with purpose, a man with a briefcase and a place he had to be, perhaps a bit late, or maybe he just wanted to be on time. Nothing remarkable in that. No reason to pay attention.
    Two lieutenants in SIM uniforms stood talking and smoking outside an office door. They watched him cross the plaza. One said something and pointed toward Cassidy. Would they call him over and ask him what his business was? It’s the prerogative of power to stop someone and demand an accounting. What’s the point of having the power if you don’t demonstrate it? The other one said something, flicked his cigarette away, and turned back into the building. The first one watched him for a while. Was he worth the trouble? No. He followed his friend inside and Cassidy walked on.
    The road slanted down between gray walls. At the bottom three narrow roads, little more than alleys, branched from a small square. Which one? He had some vague memory that the Jeep had followed the one on the left. A hundred yards along he discovered he was wrong. The road made an abrupt right angle that no Jeep could have navigated. He went back and tried the one on the right.
    The walls rose high above him, and the stone roadbed was in deep shadow. He was a hundred yards along when he heard gunfire. He stopped to listen. It had not been the individual shots of men on a firing range, but a ragged volley of half a dozen rifles. Moments later he heard three spaced shots. Snap. Snap. Snap. Coups de grâce. First the firing squad, and then three pistol shots to make sure. His heart jumped.
    The narrow street widened out into a plaza. On the left he recognized a building, a long two-story block of cut stone with deep-set barred windows and a red tile roof. The wooden double doors were banded with black iron. The cellblocks were in its basement. Gunfire rattled from somewhere past the end of the building. It was followed by two spaced single shots.
    Four civilian workmen in cotton jumpsuits came around the corner. They carried a ladder, paint buckets, and long-handled brushes, and they walked fast with their heads down. They knew Cassidy was there, but they refused to look at him, and they hurried into the narrow road, eager to get away from whatever was happening past the end of the plaza.
    Cassidy touched his gun at the back of his belt under his jacket. What the hell was he going to do with it? Six shots against a firing squad with rifles. If it came to that he might do better to shoot himself.
    Beyond the building the wide pavement ran through a low wall to broad steps. The steps descended into a wide, dry moat that was backed by the exterior walls of the fortress that rose thirty feet from its floor. This was part of the old defense architecture. If you breached the outer wall you were faced with the deep, wide moat. If you made it up from the moat you faced the thick walls of the cellblock. If you made it past its defenders you were channeled into the narrow high-walled street where no more than five or six men could walk abreast. If you made it down the street, maybe you deserved to have the fortress.
    Voices came from the moat, but Cassidy could not make out what they said, only that some of it had the weight of command. He moved to where he could see. Uniformed soldiers carried the bodies of two men in rose-colored shirts from the wall where