Spends all his time in Miami doing the casinos, powdering his nose and fucking the local gringas.’
Chris offered another shrug. ‘Sounds okay. Easy enough to control, anyway.’
‘Not on present showing.’ Bryant punched a couple of points on the datadown screen and the display shifted. ‘See, Echevarria junior’s making a lot of friends in Miami. Investor friends.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, oh. Fresh money, most of it homegrown, but some from Tokyo and Beijing via US management funds. Have a look at this little snap.’ Bryant turned the datadown screen to face Chris. ‘Taken aboard Haithem Al-Ratrout’s private yacht last week. You’ll recognise some faces.’
It was a standard paparazzi shot. Hurried and unflattering angles on people who usually only appeared in the public eye coated in a high media gloss. Chris spotted two Hollywood pin-ups of the moment displaying the cleavage for which they were famous, the US Secretary of State caught picking the olive out of his martini and—
‘Over on the left you’ve got Echevarria junior. The one in the Ingram suit and the stupid hat. And that next to him is Conrad Rimshaw, executive head of Conflict Investment for Lloyd Paul New York. On the other side and towards the back you’ve got Martin Meldreck from Calders Rapid Capital Deployment division. The vultures are gathering.’
‘But the father’s still ours so far, right?’
‘So far.’ Bryant nodded and touched another part of the screen. The photo minimised and gave way to a spreadsheet. ‘But it’s an uphill struggle. These are from the budget review I mentioned. The stuff in red is contested. He wants more, we can’t let him have it.’
There was a lot of red.
‘The Echevarrias have been with Shorn’s Madrid office ever since Hernan pulled the coup back in ‘27. Good solid clients. Our Emerging Markets division backed them all through the civil war and the crackdown afterwards.’ Bryant bent back fingers one at a time as he enumerated. ‘Fuel and ammunition, medical supplies, helicopter gun-ships, counter-subversion trainers, interrogation technology. All at knockdown prices, and for over twenty years it’s all paid off big time. Quiescent population, low wage economy, export-oriented. Standard neoliberal dream.’
‘But not any more.’
‘But not any more. We’ve got another generation of guerrillas in the mountains screaming for land reform, another generation of disaffected student youth in the cities, and we’re all back to square one. Emerging 3Markets got scared and dropped the whole thing like a hot brick -straight into Conflict Investment’s lap. Hewitt gave it to Makin.’
‘Nice of her.’
‘Yeah, well this was just after Guatemala, so Makin’s rep was riding pretty high. Top commission analyst for the year and all that. I guess Hewitt thought he’d swing it in his sleep. But things didn’t work out, so they brought me in to assist. Now Makin’s having to share Echevarria with me and I’ve got to say,’ Bryant walked across to the door and pressed it completely closed. His voice lowered. ‘I’ve got to say he’s not handling it all that well.’
Chris leaned against the edge of Bryant’s desk, feeling the friendly warmth of trust and a shared conspiracy coming off the other man.
‘So what’s the problem?’
Bryant sighed. ‘Problem is, Makin doesn’t know how to handle Echevarria. See, he’s used to these penny ante revolutionaries holed up in the jungle with their peasant education programmes and he thinks Echevarria’s just the same animal made good.’
‘Oops.’
‘Yeah, I’ve told him. The Echevarrias are as close as you get to nobility in that part of the world. That’s how come the link with Europe. Old Hernan traces his ancestors right back to Pizarro’s original conquistadors. As he never fucking tires of telling us. ‘course, all that means is he’s descended from some dirt-poor younger son mercenary glory-roader who grabbed a seat on the boat over from Spain, but it isn’t cool to mention that in budget meetings.’
‘Makin said that?’
Bryant laughed. ‘No, I’m exaggerating. Makin’s too damn good a negotiator for that. But it smokes off him every time Echevarria starts in on that nobility rap. You can almost see his lip curl. Echevarria sees it too, and that fucking Hispanic pride stokes up, and Makin’s lip curls some more, and there we are, deadlocked. We’re trying to lock him into something long-term, so that when he finally croaks the NAME’ll be stable and, more importantly, ours, but he gets more hostile every time we talk to him. Now he wants double-figure percentage increases in the military budget to put down the rebels, and there’s no way we can afford to give that to him and keep the fund managers happy. The problem is, he’s taking the whole thing personally.’
‘So he won’t sign?’
‘He might eventually,’ Bryant picked up the baseball bat again, twirled it through the air and shipped it across one shoulder. ‘If I can talk him round. But eventually might be too late. He’s not a well man. If he dies or his condition deteriorates too much, junior takes over and then we’re fucked. Junior hasn’t got his old man’s illusions about the European connection, and he’s pissed off with Makin for his attitude -he’ll bring in Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap just to snub us. And they’d just love to buy us out.’
Chris sipped at his coffee and thought about it while Bryant paced towards the window, playing imaginary curveballs off the bat. When the other man turned back to face him, he set the styrofoam canister down on the desk with studied calm.
‘What about the rebels?’ he asked.
‘The rebels?’ Bryant spread his hands in supplication. ‘Come on, who the fuck are they? This is a twenty-year client we’re talking about. You can’t write that off against some bearded campesino hiding out in the hills. There’s probably half a hundred different factions and fronts, all squabbling about their revolutionary lineage. We don’t know them, we don’t have the time to get to know them and anyway—‘
‘I know them.’
‘What?’
‘I said I know them. HM Emerging Markets did an in-depth survey of the ME’s radical factions last year.’ Chris gestured, open-handed. ‘We flew out there, Mike. I’ve got the files at home somewhere.’
Bryant gaped. ‘You’re bullshitting me.’
‘Do you a profile by Thursday.’
‘Jesus. What did you do, just come up here to make my day?’
‘Oh.’ Chris picked up his coffee and crossed to the low table where Mike kept the chess board. He hooked up a knight between index and second finger and relocated it. ‘Almost forgot. Check.’
Bryant grinned and feinted at him with the bat. Chris caught it with his other hand.
‘Motherfucker.’
‘Yeah.’ Chris looked at the board. ‘And mate in seven, I reckon.’
Chapter Sixteen
The HM files were in the garage, stacked on an upper shelf next to a box of worn gear bearings that Carla had hung onto for some unfathomable reason. Chris went up on a stepladder to retrieve the disc he wanted and nearly turned an ankle jumping down afterwards.
‘Fuck.’
Had Carla been there to see it, he thought, she would have laughed. She would have laughed out loud, and he would have joined in, pretending that his ego was not pricked through, and after a few moments the fleeting anger at being mocked would have leached out for real.
But Carla was at an evening course with two other mechanics from Mel’s Autofix, learning about developments in virtual design technology, and the house echoed with her absence.
He went through to the study and fed the disc into the datadown. A search protocol swam up onto the screen.
‘North Andean Monitored Economy,’ he told the machine. ‘Hernan Echevarria, political opponents.’
The search protocol dissolved and in its place a series of thumbprint photos began to spring up like multicoloured blisters. Chris stood and watched for a moment as the programme resized the rapidly multiplying images, trying vainly to fit them all onto a single screen page. Then he went out to the lounge, to fetch the whisky.