Mateo Sandoval clapped his hands and pointed at the barefoot boy trembling next to the titanium safe.
“One hundred million dollars,” he shouted, smiling like a man who fed on cruelty. “All the money is yours if you crack this beauty. Well? What do you say, little street rat?”
The five businessmen around him laughed so hard they wiped tears from their eyes.
For them, it was the perfect spectacle:
An eleven-year-old child — in torn clothes, with a dirty face — staring at the most expensive safe in Latin America as if it had fallen from the sky.
“This is pure comedy,” howled Rodrigo Fuentes, a forty-nine-year-old real estate magnate. “Mateo, you’re a genius. Do you really think he understands what you’re offering him?”
