Espinosa spoke. “These policemen will tell you I am a good man, an honest business man.” He nodded at them. They waited for me so give them permission to speak. They were terrified. I put my hand in the air, my palm toward them, they understood. Them I pulled a disc-monitor from my breast pocket and placed it in the air, where it hung. All the eyes in the room glared at the disc in wonderment.
“Sally, show them taking money.”
The monitor sprang to life, the four men standing took a step backwards. It was a Three-D video of the taller of the two policemen. He was standing by his car on a dirt road. A man in a black hat, wearing jeans and a dirty, long-sleeved light brown shirt held an envelope at arm’s length toward the policeman. His pock-marked face split with a wide grin, his teeth were broken, yellow. The tall policeman took and envelope and examined the contents, he pulled out a wad of bank notes. Then he looked up and smiled.
“Freeze it, Sally.” The video froze.
“You take money from this man,” I said, indicating Espinosa. “Either leave now, both of you, or this video and many others will be sent to the magistrate in town.” I left it at that. The tall policeman looked at his compadre and then at Espinosa, then they both left.
I turned to Espinosa. “You can’t win,” I said, “I know everything. Even though you are an evil man, I offered you a life with a quarter of your wealth and you turned it down. Now you must pay.” Espinosa’s face crumpled in terror, he grabbed at his left wrist with his right hand and screamed.
“Do it!”
His left hand fell onto the table then bounced like an uninflated ball onto the floor. Drips of blood splashed from the falling hand. Espinosa watched his limb drop, his eyes so wide they covered half of his face. In the first few seconds he didn’t feel anything, adrenaline pumped around his body cutting off the pain that would soon burn his wrist. Blood spurted from the wound, it hit the food on the table and even splashed a little on his wife’s plate. Instinctively Espinosa gabbed the stump with his right hand, blood oozed between his fingers. He sucked in a deep breath and screwed up his face as the pain now began. The cut was professional, as good as any surgeon, he pressed hard on the stump, stemming the red tide that ran along his forearm and dripped on the floor.
I watched, incredulous to the power that I possessed, my face rigid, no pleasure emanated from my eyes, just a reality that in less than two weeks I could do something so repugnant.
“You have until tomorrow to close down your business or I will return and remove your right hand and leave you with nothing.”
I bounced back to the hotel room and went to the fridge that contained a small bottle of Black Label Scotch. I emptied almost half in a glass nearby, no ice and downed it in one gulp. Sally was seated on a chair by the sofa, her legs crossed. She said nothing, she didn’t need to, she was immensely happy. This was her way, there was not one iota of doubt that Espinosa deserved his fate.
For fifteen minutes I sat silently on the sofa, looking at nothing, but seeing Espinosa’s hand fall from his wrist. The scotch seeped gratefully into my system, drowning the tension. I rose from the sofa and left the room, I didn’t ask Sally to join me. Outside the sun was glorious, but the air cool. People rushed about in every direction carrying on as if nothing had happened. I walked for an hour, then entered a restaurant and devoured a mountain of pasta. No more drink. Slowly my actions resolved themselves in my mind and I accepted them as right. I remembered Fuentes, it was so easy, I wasn’t there, I didn’t see him die.
I returned to the hotel suite and called Sally. She appeared in the chair, with her legs crossed as if she hadn’t moved.
“What’s Yerchenkov doing?”
Sally didn’t flinch, she didn’t smile, maybe she was beginning to developed enough human feeling to understand. “He’s at his home in Nice watching the news about all the people being rounded up by the police, he’s alone, but he’s drunk, very drunk. There are two bodyguards outside the room. It’s almost eleven there.”
“Did he do anything to shut down his business?” Sally shook her head.
I changed back to Jo-el and bounced into the room with Yerchenkov. He looked at me with a blank stare. His eyes were red and glazed, he didn’t seem to care that I was there. I watched as his brain switched to the on position and he sat up ever so slightly on the couch. He spoke English to me.
“It’s you,” he gestured at the TV. “Ya bastard.” He belched and tried to lift himself up again but failed and flopped even lower on the couch. He was drinking sixteen-year-old Lagavulin, single malt scotch, a fine choice. He saw me eyeing the bottle. “Ya want one?” He belched and farted.
“You haven’t done anything to close your business,” I said.
He tried to roll over a little but didn’t make it and came back to rest as before. “Ahh… I can’t. It’s my baby…. Eh!”
I was concerned he wouldn’t understand what I was going to say to him. I walked over to the door and beckoned the two bodyguards to come in. They were shocked to see me and immediately drew their weapons and fired them at me. The rounds ricocheted around the room without harm, but the noise was piercing. They ran out of bullets and began to reload from a new clip.
“Burn the weapons, Sally.”
No sooner said than done. The automatic pistols became too hot to hold and both men dropped them on the carpet.
“Whack them in the leg, I’m done with their antics.”
It was Charlie Chaplin all over again. Both men leaped sideways for no apparent reason and fell to the floor. They didn’t bother to get up.
“You assholes are here so you can tell your boss, who’s too drunk to remember, what I have to say, okay?”
They nodded. I told Yerchenkov what I’d told Espinosa about shutting down the business or I’d be back, then Sally amputated his left hand. It didn’t seem to bother him at first, he kept looking at it, holding it up in the light, the blood trickling down his arm and laughing. Gotta love that single malt. Then he started crying and scrunched himself up on the sofa into a fetal position. I told his bodyguards to take him to a hospital and then left.
Chapter 43
TV
I had an hour before the appearance on CNN. I’d told Cathy Vogel that this was not going to be an interview, more of a statement by me. I agreed that I’d listen to a couple of questions but I’d reserve my decision about answering. I struggled with how I was going to inform the world why I had suddenly appeared. I still felt the need to demonstrate my intentions. I could show people what I could do and the incredible technology but when it came to Cirion, I had no way to prove it was real. I couldn’t take anybody to Cirion. The video of that planet could be made in Hollywood. It was impossible for me to understand what the reaction would be. So much had been written about the possibility of life on other planets but we hadn’t seen it and much of our expectation was that the life would be very simple, like plants or simple organisms. The idea that there were many ‘human’ planets and one in particular was hundreds of millions of years more advanced than our own was going to stretch most people’s belief system. Only Pippa knew of Cirion and anyone she’d told and I didn’t know if she had told anyone, she had been out of Sally’s range, underground. I toyed with visiting her so I could hear the reaction, but the bad feeling between us was too new.
My plan was simple enough. Get the world on board with me, believing everything I said and then hit them with the bad news coming in seventy or so years. Eradicate all the evil on our planet so that we didn’t need our military and police forces, which would free up enormous funds to finance the building of spacecraft. It seemed totally logical to me and I hadn’t thought of anything else so far that solved the problem. I was aware that many people wouldn’t trust me, but I had to get the big players on board, the US, Europe, China, even Russia. If they all started building spacecraft, I truly believed we had a chance.