‘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. Ranches. 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?’