Chris winked.
Ten minutes later they cleared the main gate at the airbase and a uniformed attendant waved them through into the parking segment. The place was packed with corporate battlewagons and hired limos. Here and there, one or two khaki-drab armed forces utility vehicles had been left out, mainly, Chris suspected, to enhance the genuine feel of the fair. On occasion, new developing world clients remained resolutely unimpressed by the suited godparents they had come to depend on. It helped to accentuate the military aspect, gave dictators and revolutionaries something to relate to.
As they climbed out, a trio of venomous-looking fighter planes came screaming across the airfield at rooftop height, then trailed the gut-crunching roar of lit afterburners back up into the azure sky. Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Barranco flinch.
‘Fucking clowns,’ he said. ‘Don’t know why they got to do that.’
‘Those are Harpies,’ Barranco told him quietly. ‘Demonstrating a strafe run. They are made in Britain. Last year you sold fifteen of them to the Echevarria regime.’
‘Actually,’ said Mike, alarming the BMW, ‘they’re made under licence to BAe in Turkey. Have been for a couple of years now. This way, I think.’
He set off in the direction of the hangars, where a loosely knotted crowd could be seen drifting about. Chris and Barranco followed him at a distance.
‘You did not need to bring me here,’ muttered Barranco.
Chris shook his head. ‘I think you’ll be glad we did. The North Memorial pulls in state-of-the-art weaponry from every leading manufacturer in the world. Not just the big stuff, you’ve got assault rifles, grenades, shoulder launchers, area denial systems. New propellants, new ammunition, new explosives. Vicente, even if you don’t buy much of this stuff, you need to know what Echevarria might be deploying against you.’
Barranco fixed him with a hard look. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what Echevarria’s got, and save us both some time.’
‘Uh…’
‘You know, don’t you? You supply him, you pay for it all.’
‘Not me.’ He stamped down the coil of guilt inside him, shook his head again. ‘That’s not my account, Vicente. I’m really sorry. I’ve got no more access to it than you do.’
‘No, but you could get access.’
Chris coughed. Bent it up into a laugh. ‘Vicente, that’s not how it works. I can’t just walk into another executive’s office and go through his client files. Quite apart from the security systems, it’s a question of ethics. No, seriously. I mean it. I could lose my job over something like that.’
Barranco turned away. ‘Okay, never mind. Forget I asked. I realise you have a lot to lose.’
It didn’t seem to be meant ironically, and Chris thought he was beginning to get the measure of Vicente Barranco enough to spot these things. Over the past two days, he reckoned he’d built some pretty solid scaffolding for his relationship with the Colombian. He’d had the man out to dinner at his home and actively encouraged Carla to reprise her solidarity of the night at the Hilton. He’d gone drinking with him in some semi-risky clubs at the edges of the cordon. And on the Saturday morning after, at Barranco’s insistence, he’d even taken him on a short tour of the eastern zones in the Saab. This last, the Colombian sat through in almost total silence until he asked the single question. Is this where you grew up, Chris?
It was the first time he had used Chris’s first name on its own. A watershed. Chris considered a moment, then he spun the wheel of the Saab and made a U turn in the empty street. He headed southward through a maze of deserted one-way systems and roads he thought he would have forgotten by now, but had not. He found the abandoned, half-built multi-storey car park that overlooked the riverside estates to the west and drove up the spiral pipe to the roof. He parked at the edge and nodded forward through the windscreen.
‘Down there,’ he said simply.
Barranco got out of the car and wandered to the edge of the deck. After a while, Chris got out and joined him.
Riverside.
The name was like a taste in his mouth. Metallic bitter. He stared down at the low-stacked housing, the shaggy green of miniature park spaces allowed to run wild in between, the oil-scummed expanses of water the estates backed onto on three sides. It wasn’t the Brundtland, he told himself, it wasn’t the labyrinthine concrete expanse of homes never designed for any but the dregs. That wasn’t it. Something altogether different had gone wrong here.
‘In my country,’ said Barranco, echoing his thoughts with uncanny accuracy, ‘you would not be considered poor if you lived here.’
‘It wasn’t built for poor people.’
The Colombian glanced back at him. ‘But poor people moved in.’
‘Well, no one else would, you see. After the domino recessions. No facilities. No local shops, no transport unless you could afford taxis or fuel and a licence. Which, increasingly, no one could. You want to get anywhere?’ Chris turned and pointed north. ‘The nearest bus stop is two kilometres that way. There used to be a rail link, but the investors got scared and pulled out. When I was growing up, a few of the ones who had jobs used to cycle, but the kid gangs started throwing stones at them. They knocked one woman right off a dock into the river. Kept dropping stones on her ’til she went under for good.’ He shrugged. ‘Having a job, a real job, marked you out.’
Barranco said nothing. He stared down at the estate as if he could push the whole place back in time and spot the woman floundering in the oiled water.
‘A couple of the kids I used to play with died that way too,’ said Chris, remembering clearly for the first time in a long while. ‘Drowned, I mean. No security fence along the wharf, see. They just fell in. My mother was always telling me not to—’
He fell silent. Barranco turned to him again.
‘I am sorry, Chris. I should not have asked you to come here.’
Chris tried on a smile. ‘You didn’t ask me, exactly.’
‘No, and you brought me nonetheless.’
The obvious question hung there in the air between them, but Barranco never asked it. Chris was glad, because he didn’t have an answer.
They got back into the car.
‘Do you guys want to see this stuff, or what?’
It had dawned on Mike Bryant that Chris and Barranco were lagging behind and he’d come back for them.
Barranco exchanged glances with Chris and shrugged.
‘Sure. Even if I don’t buy much, I’ll need to see what Echevarria might be deploying against me. Right?’
‘Exactly!’ Mike clapped his hands and snapped out a pointed pistol finger. ‘That’s the spirit.’
Inside the hangars, big air conditioning units blasted warm, spice-scented air down from the ceiling. The exhibits sat in pools of soft light, interspersed with crisp repeating holos showing them in sanitised use. Brand names hung in illuminated capitals. Logos badged the walls.
Bryant made for the assault rifles. An elegant saleswoman glided forward to meet him. They seemed to know each other far better than Mike’s visit yesterday with Echevarria would explain.
‘Chris. Señor Barranco. I’d like you to meet Sally Hunting. She reps for Vickers, but she’s a freelance small-arms consultant in her spare time. Isn’t that right, Sal? No strings.’
Sally Hunting shot him a reproachful look. Beneath her Lily Chen suit and auburn tumbling spike haircut, she was very beautiful in a pale, understated fashion.
‘Spare time, Mike? What is that, exactly?’
‘Sally, behave. This is Señor Vicente Barranco, a valued client. And my colleague, Chris Faulkner.’