Market Forces (24 page)

“Yeah, for the moment. The military stuff ought to hold him for a while, and that smear about U.S. involvement will stave off junior’s Miami connections. But in the end, it’s a slum block waiting to come down. Old Hernan doesn’t really buy anything we said in there, he’s just biding his time to see what he can get out of us. And he’s not going to stay bribed with a handful of cheap cluster bombs, which is about all we can afford right now, the state things are in. No, the Americans are going to get him, sooner or later, and I want a player of our own in position before that happens.”

“Yeah, but who?” Chris gestured out through the glass to where Makin still sat at the table, staring into the middle distance. “Fuckhead there’s managed to trash Diaz. Who does that leave us?”

“We’ll have to go with Barranco.”

“Barranco?”

“Chris, he’s what we’ve got. You said yourself, Arbenz isn’t going to be in any position to lead an armed insurrection this year.”

“Yeah, but
Barranco.
He’s committed, Mike.”

“Ah, come on. They all start out that way.”

“No, he’s a real fucking Guevara, Mike. I don’t think we’re going to be able to control him.”

Bryant grinned. “Yeah, we will. You will.” He glanced back through at Makin. The other executive hadn’t moved. “I’m going to take this shit to Hewitt and get Nick reassigned. It’s high fucking time. Meanwhile, you get Barranco to sit down. I don’t care what it takes. Fly out there yourself if you have to, but get him to a table.”

There was a brief rush off the words, an image from the Hammett McColl visit, a Caribbean night sky shingled with stars, the warm darkness beneath and the noises of the nighttime street.

“You want me to go out to Panama?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“Hewitt isn’t going to like this. She gave the account to Makin in the first place. It isn’t going to look good if he’s written off as the wrong choice. And that’s without her feelings about me. She’s hardly a fan.”

“Chris, you’re fucking paranoid. I told you before. Hewitt’s a fan of money, and right now you’re making plenty of it. Bottom line, that’s what counts.” Mike grinned again. “And anyway, she gives me any static, I’ll go talk to Notley. You are in, my friend, like it or not. Welcome to the NAME account.”

Out in the conference room, Makin stirred in his chair and turned to look toward them. It was as if he’d heard the conversation. He looked beaten and betrayed. Chris stared back at him, trying to chase out a faint disquiet that would not go away.

“Thanks.”

“Hey, you earned it. Run with it.” Bryant slung an arm around his shoulders. “Besides, we’re a fucking team. Now let’s kick Hernan Echevarria into touch and make some fucking money.”

S
OMEONE HAD TIED
up a damaged speedboat beside the jetty and then left it to drown. The boat’s prow was raised, roped tightly to a mooring iron, but behind the fly-specked windshield the water was up over the pale-leather-upholstered interior almost to the dashboard. Chris saw a fish hanging suspended below the surface like a tiny zeppelin, nibbling at something on the lower arc of the submerged steering wheel. Twigs and decaying leaf matter floated around the sunken stern, shifting sloppily back and forth as the wake of a passing water taxi rolled up to the jetty. Wavelets slapped at the wooden supports. Out across the lagoon, low cloud adhered like gray candyfloss to trees on the islands and drifted across the seaward view, trailing rain. The sun was a vague blot on the lighter gray overhead. The air was warm and clammy.

Chris turned away. It wasn’t the Caribbean as he remembered it. He went back to where Joaquin Lopez sat with his back to the wooden shack that justified the jetty’s existence.

“You sure he’s coming?”

Lopez shrugged. He was a tall, tightly muscled man, mostly Afro-Caribbean, and he radiated a calm at odds with the panic he’d shown over the phone from Medellín. “He has every reason to. I wouldn’t have brought you for nothing, man. Smoke?”

Chris shook his head. Lopez lit a cigarette for himself and plumed smoke out across the water. He scratched absently at a scar on his forehead.

“It will not have been easy for him. There’s a lot of heat along this part of the coast. The turtle patrol have authority to stop and search anyone they think is poaching. And you sometimes got U.S. drug enforcement boats up from the Darien. They don’t have any authority, but . . .”

He shrugged again. Chris nodded.

“When did that ever stop them, right?”

“Right.” Lopez looked away and grinned.

“What?”

“Nothing. You don’t talk like a gringo.”

Chris yawned. He hadn’t slept much in the last couple of days. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Keep it up. It may help with Barranco.”

It was piling up behind his eyes now. London, Madrid, San José, Costa Rica. A blur of airports, executive lounges in muted pastel shades, the gray whisper of air-conditioned flight. Chasing down the sun, gaining a day. Helicoptered out of San José at dawn and across the border into Panama. Touchdown on a sun-drenched airfield outside David where Lopez had sneaked out of Panama City and west to meet him. Another short hop north to Bocas del Toro, a series of shacks and people Lopez knew, a gun on loan, a water taxi out
here,
wherever exactly it was, and waiting, waiting for Barranco.

“You ever meet him?”

Lopez shook his head. “Spoke to him on the videophone a couple of days ago. He’s looking tired, not like the pinups they did of him back in ’41. He needs this, Chris. This is his last throw.”

The year echoed in his head. In ’41 Edward Quain had died in smeared fragments on the cold asphalt of the M20. At the time it had seemed like some kind of ending. But Chris had woken the next day to find the world intact and nothing he’d begun at Hammett McColl even close to tidy, let alone finished. It had dawned on him only then that he’d have to go on living, and that he’d have to find some new reason to do it.

A soft snarling, out across the water.

“Boat coming,” said Lopez.

The vessel came into view around a forested headland, raising a bow wave to match the noise of its engines. It was a big, navy gray vessel, built for speed and, judging by the twinned machine guns mounted behind an impact-glass cupola on the foredeck, for assault. A flag flapped at the stern, white design on a green background. Lopez breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it.

“Turtle patrol,” he said.

The powerboat slowed and settled in the water as the motors cut to an idle. It nosed into the jetty, and someone dressed in khakis came up on the foredeck. Yells in Spanish. Lopez responded. The deckhand gathered up a line and jumped blithely to the jetty with it. He landed with a practiced flex in the legs. A woman, similarly attired, came and leaned on the machine-gun cupola, staring at them. Chris felt caution creep through him.

“You’re armed, too, right?” he muttered to Lopez.

“Sure. But these are turtle guys, they aren’t—”

The next man off the boat wore the same army fatigues and had a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He passed Chris without a glance, ambled up to Lopez, and rapped out something in Spanish. When he got the answer, he disappeared into the shack behind them. Chris looked at the water on the other side of the jetty and wondered how deep it was. He’d want a good half meter over his head to be sure of not getting shot. The Smith & Wesson Lopez had lent him was apparently guaranteed to fire wet, but against assault rifles—

Let’s face it, Chris, you wouldn’t last five minutes. This isn’t a Tony Carpenter flick.

“Señor Faulkner?”

He jerked back to the boat. Another khaki-clad figure had joined the woman on the foredeck. As the man vaulted to the jetty, Chris caught up with the voice. It was Barranco.

It was the same weathered set of features Chris remembered from the HM meeting just over a year ago—a face darkened by sun and altitude, broad across the cheekbones, chipped with the blue of eyes tossed into the gene pool by some European colonist decades or centuries absorbed. The same close-cropped graying hair, the same height and length of limb as Barranco moved to greet him. The same callused grip, the same search in the eyes when you got up close. It was a gaze that belonged on the bridge of some warship from the last century, or maybe the last of the pirate trawlers, scanning the gray horizon for signs.

“Señor Faulkner. I remember you now, from the Hammett McColl mission. The man with the laptop. You were very quiet then.”

“I came to listen.” Chris reached into his jacket. “This time I—”

“Very easy, please.” Barranco raised his own hands. “My companions are a little nervous this far from home, and it wouldn’t do to let them think you’re planning to use that badly concealed gun in your belt.”

He gestured in turn at a woman by the cupola and the first deckhand ashore, who now straightened from the mooring iron with a pistol gripped in one fist. Chris heard the snap of a weapon being cocked, looked back at the shack, and saw the man with the assault rifle emerge from the building again, weapon cradled at his hip.

“So,” said Barranco. “Welcome again to Latin America.”

T
HE INTERIOR OF
the shack was equipped with basic facilities—a toilet behind a wall of plastic partitioning, a tiny stove in a corner, an ancient wooden table two meters long scarred with decades of use and carved with what looked like whole generations of grafitti. Half a dozen tired-looking plastic molded chairs were gathered around the table—Chris’s choice from among the untidy pile they’d found behind the shack when they arrived. Hardly Shorn conference standard. The windows were small and liberally grimed, but bulbs from an aqualight system hung suspended at intervals in the roof space and the long uptake taper was still intact, dangling down through a crudely bored hole in the floorboards and into the water below the pilings. Chris had tested the system earlier, and the taper was well soaked. Now he flipped the wall switch, and gentle light sprang up in three out of the five bulbs.

Barranco glanced around the shack and nodded.

“Well, it’s not the Panama Hilton,” he said. “But then, I suppose I am not Luis Montoya.”

It seemed to require a reaction. Chris tried a chuckle and gestured toward the table. “Please sit down, Señor Barranco. I’m afraid our concern so far has been security rather than comfort. Outside of one or two deluded drug enforcement diehards, Luis Montoya has no real enemies in the Americas. You, unfortunately, have many.”

“A problem you are offering to solve for me, no?” Barranco did not sit down. Instead, he nodded at his own security, two of whom had followed him in. Without a word, they moved to positions at the windows and took up an at-ease stance that fooled no one. Neither of them spared Chris more than a glance, and that filled with easy contempt.

Chris walked to the table and pulled out the chair for Barranco. “I’m sure that, given time and a little luck, a man such as yourself is probably capable of solving the problem without any help from men like me. Given time and luck. Please. Have a seat.”

Barranco didn’t move. “I am not susceptible to flattery.”

Chris shrugged and took the seat for himself. “I didn’t think you were. I was making a statement of fact. I believe—which is to say we, my colleagues at Shorn and I—believe you are capable of resolving a number of the issues facing Colombia at present. That is why I am here. This visit is a demonstration of our faith in you.”

It brought Barranco to the table, slowly.

“You call it Colombia,” he said. “Is that how your colleagues refer to it in London?”

“No, of course not.” Chris brushed at the tabletop and held up his hands, seeking the gaze of Barranco’s security before he reached slowly into his jacket and brought out the folded laptop. He thought he made it look pretty cool, considering. “We call it the North Andean Monitored Economy, as I’m sure you’re aware. As I’m also sure you’re aware, we are hardly alone in this.”

“No.” There was a flat bitterness in the words. Barranco’s hands had fallen on the back of the chair opposite Chris. “You are not. The whole world call us that way. Only that son of a whore in Bogotá uses the name
Colombia
as if we were still a nation.”

“Hernan Echevarria,” Chris said softly, “milks the patriotism of his countrymen to shore up a regime that rewards the top five percent of the country with riches and keeps the remainder with their faces in the dirt. You do not need me to tell you this. But I think you need me to help you do something about it.”

“How quickly we move.” There was a look on Barranco’s face, as if he could smell something bad seeping through the plastic partition from the toilet. “How quickly, from flattery to bribery. Did you not say that a man such as myself could resolve—”

“
Given.
Time.” Chris locked gazes, made sure he’d stopped the other man, then set placidly about unfolding the laptop. “I said given time. And given luck. And I said probably.”

“I see.” Chris wasn’t looking at him, but Barranco sounded as if he was smiling.
How quickly we move. From a sneer to a smile.
But he didn’t look up yet. The laptop was heavily creased in a couple of places, and it was taking a while to warm up. He busied himself with flattening out the screen. He heard the chair opposite him scrape out. Heard it take Barranco’s weight.

The screen lit with a map of the Monitored Economy.

Chris looked up and smiled.

L
ATER
,
WITH THE
numbers wrung out to dry, they walked out along the jetty and stood at the end, watching the weather. To the east, the sky was clearing in patches.

“Smoke?” Barranco asked him.

“Yeah, thanks.” Chris took the proffered packet and shook out a crumpled cylinder. Barranco lit it for him from a battered silver gasoline lighter that bore engraving in Cyrillic around a skull and crossbones and the date 2007. Chris drew deep and promptly coughed himself to tears on the smoke.

“Whoa.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and blinked at it. “Where’d you get these?”

“A shop you haven’t been to.” Barranco pointed what looked like southwest. “Seven hundred kilometers from here, up in the mountains. It’s run by an old woman who remembers the day Echevarria took power. She won’t sell American brands. It’s black tobacco.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” Chris took another, more cautious draw on the cigarette and felt it bite in his lungs. He gestured. “And the lighter? Military issue, right?”

“Wrong.” Barranco held up the lighter again, rubbing a finger back and forth across the Cyrillic characters. “Advertising. It says
DEATH CIGARETTES
—
TOO BAD YOU
’
RE GOING TO DIE
. But it’s a, what do you call it in English, a knockout? An illegal copy?”

“Knockoff.”

“Yes, a knockoff. Some crazy English guy back in the last century, he actually made cigarettes with that name.”

“Doesn’t sound too smart.”

Barranco turned and breathed smoke at him. “At least he was honest.”

Chris let that one sit for a while. Barranco wandered the width of the jetty, smoking, waiting him out.

“I think you should come to London, Señor Barranco. You need—”

“Are your parents alive, Señor Faulkner?”

It stabbed him through, punctured the slowly inflating sense of a deal done that was filling him up.

“No.”

“Do you remember them?”

He shot a glance across at the face of the man beside him, and knew this was not negotiable. This was required.

“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.”