Out in the conference room, Makin stirred in his chair and turned to look towards 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.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Someone 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 windscreen, 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 grey candyfloss to trees on the islands, and drifted across the seaward view, trailing rain. The sun was a vague blot on the lighter grey 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 Medellin. ‘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 patrols have authority to stop and search anyone they think is poaching. And you sometimes got US 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 Jose Costa Rica. A blur of airports, executive lounges in muted pastel shades, the grey whisper of air-conditioned flight. Chasing down the sun, gaining a day. Helicoptered out of San Jose 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-grey 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 practised 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 metre over his head to be sure of not getting shot. The Smith and 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.
‘Senor 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 greying hair, the same height and length of limb as Barranco moved to greet him. The same calloused 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 grey horizon for signs.
‘Senor 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 the 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.’
The interior of the shack was equipped with basic facilities - a toilet behind a wall of plastic partitioning, a tiny stove in a corner and an ancient wooden table two metres long, scarred with decades of use and carved with what looked like whole generations of grafitti. A half dozen tired-looking plastic moulded 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 gest
ured towards the table. ‘Please sit down, Senor 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 table top 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 calls us that way. Only that son of a whore in Bogota uses the name Colombia, as if we were still a nation.’
‘Hernan Echevarria,’ said Chris softly, ‘milks the patriotism of his countrymen to shore up a regime that rewards the top five per cent 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.
Later, 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 petrol lighter that bore engraving in Cyrillic around a skull and cross bones and the date 2007. Chris drew deep and promptly coughed himself to tears on the smoke.
‘Whoh.’ 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 kilometres 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 knock-out? An illegal copy?’
‘Knock-off.’
‘Yes, a knock-off. 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, Senor Barranco. You need—‘
‘Are your parents alive, Senor 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.’
Chris smoked for a moment, checking his memories for leakage before he answered. He thought he had it locked down.
‘It’s a TB 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, Senor Faulkner? Why I have been fighting for the last twenty years?’
Chris shook his head, wordless. He turned to face Barranco, and saw that the other man had no more emotion on his face than he’d shown when they were discussing cigarettes.
‘You don’t understand, Senor 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 class of landowning families and financiers who call themselves my compatriots. My head spins with new targets.’ Barranco gestured. ‘Banks. Ranc
hes. 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 Washington and New York.’ He raised a finger and pointed at Chris. ‘And London. Are you sure, Senor 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.
fuck
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 shit-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 fucking T-shirt. 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 the 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 assault rifle hefted. Chris’s breath stopped.
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