The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

Carl entered the equation with no local axe to grind, and nothing to lose but his bounty for Stéphane Névant. For two quiet weeks, he did his research, and then one night he held up one of tayta Manco’s trucks on the precipitous, winding highway down from Cuzco to Nazca and the coast. The armed muscle in the passenger seat took exception, which from a logistical point of view was a blessing in disguise. Carl shot him dead, then gave the driver the option of either joining his companion in the white powdered dirt by the side of the road, or helping Carl roll the vehicle over the edge with an incendiary grenade - Peruvian army stock, he’d bought it from a friendly grunt - taped to its fuel tank. The driver proved co-operative, and the hardware worked. The truck exploded spectacularly on its first cart-wheeling bounce, trailed flame and debris down into the canyon below and burned there merrily for an hour or so, releasing enough exotic long-chain pollutants into the atmosphere to attract the attention of an environmental monitoring satellite. Not many things burnt with that signature, and the things that did had no business being on fire outside of COLIN jurisdiction. Helicopters gathered in the night, like big moths around a campfire. With them came the inevitable journalists, and not far behind them a sprinkling of local politicians, environmental experts and Earth First reps, all keen to get some media profile. Presently, an official recovery team made its painstaking way down into the ravine, but not before a lot of embarrassing spectrographics had been shot and a lot of equally embarrassing questions sharpened to a fine edge on the whetstone of starved journalistic speculation.

  By then, Carl was long gone. He’d given the truck driver a lift down to Nazca and a message to hand on to tayta Manco with a number to call. Bambaren, who was no fool, called the next day, and after a certain amount of male display rage, asked what exactly the fuck Carl wanted, motherfucker. Carl told him. Thirty-six hours after that, Stéphane Névant walked back into his Arequipa hotel room and found himself looking down the barrel of the Haag gun.

  Subtlety, Carl had discovered, was a much overrated tool where organised crime was concerned.

  He dialled accordingly.

  ‘This had better be life or fucking death,’ Greta Jurgens said coldly, when she finally answered. The screen showed her settling in front of the phone, pulling a grey silk dressing gown closer about her. Her face was puffy. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  Carl made a show of consulting his watch.

  ‘Yeah, it’s October. I figure that gives me another couple of weeks before it’s your bed-time. How’s things, Greta?’

  The hibernoid squinted at the screen, and her face lost all expression. ‘Well, well. Marsalis, right? The bogeyman.’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘That’s what I like about you, Greta. Charming small-talk.’ Carl floated a casual, open-handed gesture. ‘It’s nothing much. Wanted to talk to Manco. Strictly a chat, old-times stuff.’

  ‘Manco’s not in town right now.’

  ‘But you know how to get hold of him.’

  Jurgens said nothing. Her face wasn’t just puffy, it was rounder than he remembered it, smooth-skinned and chubby with late-cycle subcutaneous fat uptake. He guessed her thinking was groggier than usual too - silence was the safe option.

  Carl grinned. ‘Look, we can do this one of two ways. Either you can tell Manco I want a word and we arrange a friendly sit-down, or I can start making your lives difficult again. What’s it going to be?’

  ‘You might find that a little harder to do these days.’

  ‘Really? Made some new Initiative friends, have we?’ He read the confirmation in the hibernoid’s face. ‘Do yourself and Manco both a favour, Greta. Trace this call and find out whose wafer I’m running on. Then decide whether you want to piss me off.’

  He killed the line and Greta Jurgens inked out in mid-retort.

  Carl got up and went to stare down at the lights of La Paz. A couple of hours at worst, he reckoned. Jurgens had specialists a phone call away who could run the trace, and it wouldn’t take them very long to nail it to COLIN’s dedicated Hilton suite. Marstech-level systems showed up in the dataflow like implanted metal on an X-ray plate. The familia datahawks probably wouldn’t be able to get past the tech. In any case Jurgens probably wouldn’t ask them to. But it would still be pretty fucking clear what they were looking at, thank you very much. Say an hour to do all that. Then, allow that Jurgens had been telling the truth and Manco Bambaren wasn’t with her in Arequipa. Wherever he was, he could be reached and that wouldn’t take long either. And with what Jurgens had to tell him, he’d call back.

  Ertekin came back through from the other room. She’d changed into the NYPD T-shirt and a pair of running sweats.

  ‘Food’s here,’ she said.

  In the buffered quiet of the suite, he hadn’t heard it arrive. He nodded. ‘Shouldn’t eat too much at this altitude. Your body’s working hard enough as it is.’

  ‘Yeah, Marsalis,’ She gave him a hands-on-hips sort of look. ‘I have been on the altiplano a couple of times before. COLIN employee, you know?’

  ‘That’s not what it says on your chest,’ he told her, looking there pointedly.

  ‘This?’ She pressed a hand to one breast and tapped the NYPD logo with her fingertips. A grin crept into the corner of her mouth. ‘You got a problem with me wearing this?’

  He grinned back. ‘Not if you let me take it off you after breakfast.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, unconvincingly.

  But after breakfast, there was no time. The phone chimed while they were still talking, sitting with the big clay mugs of mate de coca cupped in both hands. Outside call, the system announced in smooth female tones. Carl took his mug through to the next room to answer. He dropped into the chair in front of the Bang and Olufsen and thumbed the accept button.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Manco Bambaren’s weatherblasted Inca features stared out at him from the screen. His face was impassive, but there was a slow smoking anger in the dark eyes. He spoke harsh, bite-accented English.

  ‘So, black man. You return to plague us.’

  ‘Well, historically, that ought to be a change for you guys.’ Carl sipped the thin-tasting tea, met the other man’s eyes through rising steam. ‘Better than being plagued by the white man, right?’

  ‘Don’t play word games with me, twist. What do you want?’

  Carl slipped into Quechua. ‘I’m only quoting your oaths of unity there. Indigenous union, from the ashes of racial oppression, all that shit. What do I want? I want to talk to you. Face to face. Take a couple of hours at most.’

  Bambaren leaned into the screen. ‘I no longer concern myself with your scurrying escapee brothers and their boltholes. I have nothing to tell you.’

  ‘Yeah, Greta said you’d gone up in the world. No more fake ID work, huh? No more low-level Marstech pilfering. I guess you’re a respectable criminal these days.’ Carl let his voice harden. ‘Makes no difference. I want to talk anyway. Pick a place.’

  There was a long pause while Bambaren tried to stare him down. Carl inhaled the tea steam, took down the damp, green-leaf odour of it, and waited.

  ‘You still speak my language like a drunken peasant labourer,’ said the familia chief sourly. ‘And act as if it were an accomplishment.’

  Carl shrugged. ‘Well I learnt it among peasant labourers, and we were often drunk. My apologies if it offends. Now pick a fucking place to meet.’

  More silence. Bambaren glowered. ‘I am in Cuzco,’ he said. Even in the lilting altiplano Quechua, the words sounded bitten off. ‘I’ll see you out at Sacsayhuaman at one this afternoon.’

  ‘Make it three,’ Carl told him lazily. ‘I’ve got a few other things I want to do first.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  He still had the deep oil-and-salt scent of Sevgi Ertekin on his fingers later as he sat in the COLIN jeep with his chin propped up on his thumb, staring glumly at the scenery and waiting for Manco Bambaren. It was his sole source of chee
r in an otherwise poisonous mood. Jet-lag and the showdown with Névant were catching up with him like running dogs. He’d bought two new sets of clothes through the hotel’s service net, didn’t much like any of them when they arrived, could not be bothered to send them back and start again. They were black and hard-wearing - like me, he thought sourly - and top of the line. The latest generation of declassified Marstech fabrics, released to the high-end public amidst a fog of testimonials from global celebrities and ex-Mars personnel. He hated them, but they’d have to fucking do.

  Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, he kept the S(t)igma jacket.

  ‘He’s late,’ she said, from behind the jeep’s wheel.

  ‘Of course he’s late. He’s making a point.’

  Through the windscreen, the grassy terraces of Sacsayhuaman rose on walls of massive, smoothly interlocking stone, dark under a glaring white clouded sky. This late in the day, they had the ruins almost to themselves, and the emptiness lent the ramparts a brooding air. There were a few late-season tourists wandering about the site, but the scale of the Inca building blocks dwarfed them. Similarly reduced, a small knot of locals in traditional dress had withdrawn to the margins, women and children minding long-suffering llamas done up in ribbons, all waiting for a paying photo opportunity. They made tiny flecks of colour against the sombre stone.

  It wasn’t the first time Carl had seen Sacsayhuaman, but as always the stonework fascinated him. The blocks were shaped and finished but hugely irregular, echoing the slumped solid enormity of natural rock formations. The jigsaw lines between them drew your eye like detail in a painting. You could sit there just looking at it all for quite a while, which - he glanced at his watch - they had been.

  ‘You think he’s making a point with this as well?’ Ertekin nodded forward, at the walls. ‘Land of my fathers, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But you don’t think so?’

  He shot her a side glance. ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘You might as well have.’

  He went back to staring at the stonework. Ghostly beyond, Névant grinned at him out of a blood-stained, broken-nosed face, pale with hospital lighting. Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.

  He made an effort.

  ‘You could be right,’ he admitted. ‘The guy does talk like a fucking poet half the time, and he’s seriously impressed with himself. So yeah, maybe he is getting all cultural on us.’

  Ertekin nodded. ‘Thought so.’

  Ten more minutes crept by. Carl was thinking about getting out to stretch his legs when an armoured black Range Rover rolled bumpily across the rough turf parking area to their left. Smoked glass windows, glossy curved flanks, anti-grenade skirt almost to the floor. Carl dropped his introspection. The jet-lag folded away.

  ‘Here we go.’

  The new arrival braked to a halt and a door cracked in the black carapace. Manco Bambaren stepped out, immaculately attired in a sand-coloured suit and flanked by minders in Ray-Bans that matched his own. No visible weapons, but there didn’t need to be. The stances and blank, reflective sun-shade menace were old-school South America. Carl had seen the same thing deployed all over, on streets from Buenos Aires to Bogota. The mirror patches Bambaren and his minders had in place of eyes talked up the same exclusive power as the shiny bomb-proof flanks on the Range Rover. You saw yourself thrown back in the reflecting surfaces, sealed outside and of no importance to the eyes within.

  Carl climbed out of the jeep.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ said Ertekin quickly.

  ‘Suit yourself. It’s all going to be in Quechua anyway.’

  He crossed the turf to the Range Rover, pushing down an unnecessary surge from the mesh. He intended to lean on Bambaren, but he didn’t think it’d come to a fight, however much he’d have liked to smash the mirror shades back in splinters into the eyes behind, take a limb from the bigger of the two minders and-

  Whoa, Carl. Let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?

  He reached the familia chief and stopped, just out of reach.

  ‘Hello, Manco. Thanks for coming. Could have left the kids at home, though.’

  ‘Black man.’ Manco jerked his chin. ‘Nice coat you have there. Jesusland threads?’

  Carl nodded. ‘South Florida State.’

  ‘Thought so. Got a cousin had one just like it.’

  Carl touched finger and thumb to the lapel of the S(t)igma jacket. ‘Yeah, going to be a major fashion any time now.’

  ‘It was my understanding,’ said the familia chief urbanely, ‘that in Jesusland it already is. Highest incarceration rate on the planet, they say. So who’s your tits and ass?’

  Carl turned casually and saw that Ertekin had got out as well, but hadn’t followed him. As he watched, she leaned back on the jeep beside the COLIN decal and put her hands in her pockets. The movement shifted her jacket aside, showed the strap of her shoulder holster. She’d put on her shades.

  He held down a grin. ‘That’s not tits and ass, that’s a friend.’

  ‘A thirteen with friends.’ Bambaren’s eyebrows showed above the curve of the sunglasses. ‘Must go against the grain for you.’

  ‘We adapt to circumstance. Want to walk?’

  Manco Bambaren nodded at his security and they relaxed, opening space around their tayta. He took a couple of paces away from the Range Rover, in the direction of the stone walls. Carl fell into step. He saw the familia chief squinting sideways behind his sunlenses, towards the jeep and Ertekin’s casual watchfulness.

  ‘So you work for COLIN now?’

  ‘With.’ Carl let his grin out. ‘I work with COLIN. It’s a co-operative venture. You should understand that.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning you’ve made a niche career out of co-existing with the Initiative, and from what Greta said it’s a flourishing relationship.’

  Bambaren shook his head. ‘I don’t believe Greta Jurgens discussed my business associations with you.’

  ‘No, but she tried to threaten me with them. The implication was that you have bigger friends these days, and you keep them closer.’

  ‘And this is what you wanted to talk about?’

  ‘No. I want to talk about Stéphane Névant.’

  ‘Névant?’ A frown wrinkled the tayta’s forehead. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Three years ago, he was trying to talk your people up here into an alliance. I want to know how far that went.’

  Bambaren stopped and looked up at him. Carl had forgotten how short and stocky he was. The palpable force of the familia chief’s personality wiped the physical factors away.

  ‘How far it went? Black man, I gave Névant to you. How far do you think it went?’

  ‘You gave him to me because it was less trouble than having me disrupt your business in the camps. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t offering you something of value.’

  The tayta took off his sunglasses. In the harsh glare from the altiplano sky, his eyes barely narrowed. ‘Stéphane Névant was up here scrabbling for his miserable twist life. He had no friends and no allies. He had nothing I could use.’

  ‘But he might have done, given time.’

  ‘I do not have the luxury of dealing in what might have been. Why don’t you ask these questions of Névant himself?’

  Carl grinned. ‘I did. He tried to kill me.’

  Bambaren’s eyes flickered to the glued-up wound on Carl’s hand. He shrugged and put on his sunglasses again. Resumed walking.

  ‘That is not an indication that he had anything to hide,’ he said tonelessly. ‘In his place, I would very likely have tried to kill you as well.’

  ‘Quite.’

  They reached the wall. Carl put up a hand to brush along the smooth, dark surface of interlocking blocks each the size of a small car. It was instinctive, the edges of the stone sections curved inward to meet each other with a bulged organic grace that made him think of female flesh, the swell of breasts and
the soft juncture of thighs. You wanted to run your hands over it, your palms twitched with the desire to touch and cup.

  Manco Bambaren’s ancestors had put together this jigsaw of massive, perfectly joined stonework with nothing for tools but bronze, wood and stone itself.

  ‘I’m not suggesting you personally bought into Névant’s plans,’ Carl offered. Though if you didn’t, why did he choose you to deal with? ‘But you’re not the only tayta around here. Perhaps someone else saw the potential.’

  Bambaren paced in silence for a while.

  ‘My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.’

  ‘Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that didn’t stop you all going to war with each other in the summer of ’03, or cutting deals with Lima afterwards. Come on, Manco, business is business, up here the same as anywhere else. Racial affectation’s got to come a poor second to economics.’

  ‘Well, it’s not really a race thing where thirteens are concerned,’ said the other man coldly. ‘More of a species gap.’

  Carl coughed a laugh. ‘Oh, you wound me, Manco. To the core.’

  ‘And in any case, I see no fruitful business application, for myself or any other tayta, to be had from association with your kind.’

  ‘We make very convenient monsters.’

  Bambaren shrugged. ‘The human race has more than enough monsters as it is. There was never any need to invent new ones.’

  ‘Yeah, like the pistacos, right? I heard you were busy playing that card back in ’03 as well.’

  A sharp glance. ‘Heard from who?’

  ‘Névant.’

  ‘You told me Névant tried to kill you.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we had a little chat first. He told me he applied to be your tame pistaco, maybe funnel some more thirteens in to do the same trick. Form some sort of elite genetic monster squad for you. Ring any bells?’

  ‘No.’ The familia chief appeared to consider. ‘Névant talked a great deal. He had schemes for everything. Streamlining for my ID operation, leverage tricks in the camps, security improvements. After a while, I stopped listening.’