Market Forces Part 29

'My father died when I was young,' he said, surprised at how easy it had become to say it. 'I don't remember him well. My mother died later, when I was in my teens. Of thorn fever.'

Barranco's eyes narrowed. 'What is that? Thorn fever.'

Chris smoked for a moment, checking his memories for leakage before he answered. He thought he had it locked down.

'It's a TH variant. One of the antibiotic-resistant strains. We lived in the zones, what you'd call the favelas, and there's a lot of it there. She couldn't afford the smart drugs, no one there can, so she just took basic ABs until she collapsed. No one's sure what killed her in the end, the thorn fever or something else her immune system was too wasted to cope with. It took---'

He didn't have it locked down. He looked away.

'I am sorry,' said Barranco.

'It,' Chris swallowed. 'Thanks, it's okay. It was a long time ago.'

He drew on the cigarette again, grimaced suddenly and flung it away from him into the water. He pressed the back of his index finger against his eyes, one by one, and looked at the scant streaks of moisture they left.

'My mother was taken away,' said Barranco from behind him. 'In the night, by soldiers. It was common at the time. I too was in my teens. My father had long ago left us, and I was out, at a political meeting. Perhaps it was me they came for. But they took her instead.'

Chris knew. He'd read the file.'They raped her. Echevarria's men. They tortured her for days, with electricity and with a broken bottle. And then they shot her in the face and left her to die on a rubbish tip at the edge of town. A doctor from La Amnestia told me they think it took her about two hours.'

Chris would have said sorry, but the word seemed broken, drained of useful content.

'Do you understand why I am fighting, Sefior Faulkner? Why I have been fighting for the last twenty years?'

Chris shook his head, wordless. He turned to face Barranco, and saw 188that the other man had no more emotion on his face than he'd shown when they were discussing cigarettes.

'You don't understand, Sefior Faulkner?' Barranco shrugged. 'Well, I cannot blame you. Sometimes, neither do I. Some days, it makes more sense to take my Kalashnikov, walk into any police station or barracks bar and kill everything that wears a uniform. But I know that behind those men are others who wear no uniform, so I change this plan, and I begin to think that I should do the same thing with a government building. But then I remember that these people in turn are only the front for an entire cla.s.s of landowning families and financiers who call themselves my compatriots. My head spins with new targets.' Barranco gestured. 'Banks. Ranches. Gated suburbs. The numbers for slaughter rise like a lottery total. And then I remember that Hernan Echevarria would not have lasted a year in power, not a single year, if he had not had support from Was.h.i.+ngton and New York.' He raised a finger and pointed at Chris. 'And London. Are you sure, Sefior Faulkner, that you want me in your capital city?'

Chris, still busy hauling back in the emotional canvas, mustered a shrug of his own. His voice rasped a little in his throat.

'I'll take the chance.'

'Brave man.' Barranco finished his own cigarette and pinched it out between finger and thumb. 'I suppose. A brave man, or a gambler.

Which should I call you?'

'Call me a judge of character. I think you're smart enough to be trusted.'

'I'm flattered. And your colleagues?'

'My colleagues will listen to me. This is what I get paid for.'

'Yes. I suppose it is.'

Chris caught the drip of it in Barranco's voice, the same thing he'd seen in the other marquistas' eyes in the shack.

Suck He'd overplayed it, too much macho boardroom acceleration coming off the emotional bend. He was leaning in for damage limitation, but what he wanted to say twisted loose on its way out. Aghast, he heard himself telling the truth, raw.

'What have you got to lose? You're in s.h.i.+t-poor shape, Vicente. We both know that. Backed up in the mountains, outgunned, living on rhetoric. If.Echevarria comes for you now, the way he did for Diaz,you're history. Like Marcos, like Guevara. A beautiful legend and a f.u.c.king T-s.h.i.+rt. Is that what you want? All those people in the NAME, going through what your mother went through, what good are you to them like that?'

For a moment that froze as the last word left his mouth, he imagined 189the world caving in around him with the deal. Barranco's eyes hardened, his stance tightened. Telegraphed so clear it sent the security guard on the patrol boat's deck smoothly to her feet. An a.s.sault rifle hefted.

Chris's breath stopped.

'I mean '

'I know what you mean.' Barranco's posture relaxed first. He turned to the woman on the boat and made a sign. She sank back to her seat.

When he turned back, something had changed in his face. 'I know what you mean, because this is the first time you've come out and said it. You can't imagine how much of a relief that is, Chris Faulkner. You can't imagine how little all your numbers have meant to me without some sign that you have a soul.'

Chris breathed again. 'You should have asked.'

'Asked if you had a soul?' There wasn't much humour in Barranco's parched laugh. 'Is that a question that can be asked in London? When I am seated around the table with your colleagues, discussing what slices of my country's GDP I must offer up to gain their support. What crops my people must grow while their own children starve, what essential medical services they must learn to live without. Will I ask them where they keep their souls then, Sefior Faulkner?'

'I wouldn't advise it, no.'

'No. Then what would you advise?'

Chris weighed it up-- f.u.c.k it, it's worked so far --and told the unbandaged truth again.

'I'd advise you to get what you can from them with as little commitment on your side as possible. Because that's what they'll be doing to you. Leave yourself escape clauses, remember, nothing's ever written in stone. Everything can be renegotiated, if you can make it worth their while.'

A pause. Barranco laughed again, warmth leaking into the sound this time. He offered the cigarettes again, lit them both with the Russian knock-off.

'Good advice, my friend,' he said through the smoke. 'Good advice. Ithink I would hire you as an adviser, if I could afford you.'

'You can. I'm part of the package.'

'No.' The trawlerman's gaze settled on him. 'I know a little about you now, Chris Faulkner, and you are not part of any package in London.

There is something in you that resists incorporation. Something.' t Barranco shrugged. 'Honourable.'

It flickered across Chris's memory before he could stop it. Liz I i Linshaw's body in the white silk gown that untied and opened like a { gift. The curves and shadowed places within. The sound of her laugh. I 190'I think you are mistaken about me,' he said quietly.

Barranco shook his head. 'You will see. I am not a bad judge of character myself, when it counts. You may get paid by these people, but you are not one of them. You do not belong.'

Lopez got him back to Bocas by nightfall, and they sat in a waterfront cafe waiting for the late flight to David. Across the water, the sequin twinkle of restaurant lights on another island seemed threaded directly onto the darkness. Local-owned pangas puttered about in the channel between, cruising for taxi custom. Voices drifted out over the water like smoke, Spanish shot through with an occasional English loan word.

Kitchen noise clattered in the back of the cafe behind them.

The whole meeting with Barranco already seemed like a dream.

'So it went well,' Lopez asked.

Chris stirred at his c.o.c.ktail. 'Seems that way. He's going to come to London, anyway.' His mind cut loose the replays of Liz Linshaw and went wearily to work. 'I want you to set that up as soon as possible, but safe. Above all, safe. Quick as you can without endangering his life or his strategic position. I'll move things around at my end to fit in with whatever that means.'

'Billing?'

'Through the covert account. I don't want this to show up until...

No, better yet you pay for it yourself. Cash. I'll have the money dumped to you in Zurich soon as I get back. Mail me an advance estimate at the hotel tomorrow morning. Oh yeah, you got anything that'll help me sleep?'

'Not on me.' Lopez dug out his phone. 'You're at the Sheraton, right?'

'Yeah. i ioi. Jenkins.'

The phone screen showed a cosy green glow. Lopez punched his way down a list and held up the instrument to face him. After a couple of rings, a voice answered in Spanish.

'En ingl& guei,' said Lopez impatiently.

Whoever he was looking at grumbled something filthy and then switched. 'You here in town, man?'

'No, but a friend of mine will be shortly. And he needs a little something to help him sleep.''Is he afizi?'

Lopez looked up from the phone at Chris. 'You do a lot of this sort of stuff?.'

'Christ, no.'

The Americas agent dropped his gaze to the phone screen again.

'Definitely not. Something gentle.'

191'Got it. Address.'

'Sheraton, room i ioi. Mr Jenkins.'

'Charge card or account.'

'Very f.u.c.king funny. Hasta luego.'

'Hasta la cuenta, amigo.'

I.

He folded up the phone. 'Stuffll be waiting for you at the desk. You i go in, just ask if you got any messages. There'll be an envelope.'

i 'You can vouch for this guy, right.'

I.

'Yeah, he's a plastic surgeon.'

Chris couldn't see why that was supposed to rea.s.sure him, but he was getting past caring. The thought of crus.h.i.+ng his jetlag beneath the soft black weight of seven or eight hours of chemically guaranteed sleep was like a finis.h.i.+ng line ahead. Liz Linshaw, Mike Bryant and Shorn, Carla, Barranco and the skipper's scrutiny; he let them all go like a pack he'd been carrying. Sleep was coming. He'd worry about everything else tomorrow.

But behind the aching relief, Barranco's words floated like the voices out on the water.

I.

You do not belong, j i 192TWENTY-FOUR.

He woke in the standard issue luxury of the Sheraton, to the softly insistent pulse of an incoming signal from his laptop. He flopped over in the bed and glared blearily around the room. Located the f.u.c.king thing, there on the carpeted floor amidst the trail of his dropped clothes. Bleeee, bleeee, f.u.c.king bleeee. He groaned and groped, half out of bed, one hand holding his body rigidly horizontal off the floor. He snagged the machine, dragged it onto the bed and sat up to unfold it in his lap.

Mike Bryant's recorded face grinned out at him.

'Morning. If I timed this right, I figure you've got about three hours before your flight, so here's something to think about while you're waiting. You are under attack. And this time, you are going down!'

Groggy from the plastic surgeon's special delivery, Chris felt a sluggish spasm of alarm rip through him. Then the other man's face blinked out and a stylised chessboard took its place. Mike had launched an unlooked-for rook-and-knight a.s.sault on him while he slept. It looked bad.

'Mother f.u.c.ker.'

He got up and shambled about, packing. Still not flushed clean of the sleeping fix, he reacted unwisely to Mike's gambit over breakfast and lost a bishop. Bryant, it seemed, was playing in real time. He went to the airport smarting from the loss and picked up the pieces in the exec lounge. It was Sat.u.r.day and Mike, if he'd known what was good for him, should have let the game ride for the weekend. He could have thought it out over the next couple of days and taken Chris apart at leisure, but Chris knew him better. Bryant was lit up with the taste of his victory and he'd stay in real-time play now. View, absorb, react, all night if he had to. Chris had lent him Rakhimov's Speed Chess and the Attack Momentum a couple of months ago, and the big man had swallowed it whole. He was in for the kill.

Somewhere over the Caribbean, Chris beat off the attack. It cost him his only remaining knight and his carefully constructed castled defence was in ruins, but Mike's attack momentum was down. The flurry of moves slowed. Chris played doggedly across the Atlantic and by the time they touched down in Madrid, he had Bryant nailed to a lucky stalemate. Mike sent him a Tony Carpenter clip attachment in response 193- the post-tght stand-off from The Deceiver. Carpenter's trademark lack of acting talent, lines creaking with the burden of clich& We are well matched, you and L We should fight on the same side. It was so bad it was almost camp.

Chris grinned and folded the laptop.

He got off the flight with a bounce in his step, grabbed a sauna and a shower in the exec lounge while he waited and slept naturally on the shuttle back to London. He dreamed of Liz Linshaw.

At Heathrow, leaning on the barrier at arrivals, made up and dressed in clothes that hugged at her figure, Carla was waiting.

'No, it's just. You didn't need to. You know, I'm running on the Shorn clock. They'd pick up the tab for a taxi all the way home.'

'I wanted to see you.'

So why the f.u.c.k'd you go to Tromso'? He bit it back, and watched the curving perspectives of the road ahead. Sat.u.r.day morning traffic on the orbital was spa.r.s.e, and Carla, with the easy confidence of the professional mechanic, had the Saab up to a hundred and fifty in the middle lane.

'How was your mum?'

'She's good. Busy. They want to bring out an interactional version of the new book, so she's been rewriting, slotting in the GoTo sections with some datarat from the university.'

'Is she s.h.a.gging him?' It didn't quite come out right. Too harsh, too much silence around it. There was a time Chris could get away with these riffs on Kirsti's s.e.x life, and Carla used to laugh in mock outrage.

Now she just looked across at him and went back to watching the road, tight lipped. The chill filled the car almost palpably.

'Sorry, I '

'That was nasty.'

'It wasn't meant to be.' Helplessly.

What the f.u.c.k is happening to us, Carla. What the f.u.c.k are we doing here?

Is #just me? Is it?

He saw Liz Linshaw again, the easy smile in the spare room, face and hair dappled with street lighting through the tree outside, the gla.s.s of water in her hand. She had navigated the moment with the same ease that Carla drove the Saab. Stepping closer than necessary to hand himthe water, the warm tang of whisky on her breath. A soft, surprised oh, in ladylike tones her newscasts had never seen, as he pulled at the raw silk belt and the gown fell open. Broken street light across the curves within. The feel of her breast, as he laid one hand on it, was burnt into his palm. The soft sound of the laugh in her throat.

Highgate.

194Involuntarily, he opened the hand at the memory. Looked at it, as if for some sign of branding.