‘Fact remains. You stay gone much longer, Nicholson and Roth are going to start barking.’
She grinned. ‘So that’s what you’re pissed about. Come on, Tom. You can handle them. I saw the press conference. You played Meredith and Hanitty like a pair of cretins.’
‘Meredith and Hanitty are a pair of cretins, Sev. That’s the point. Whatever you say about Nicholson, he’s not stupid, and he’s our boss, and that goes double for Roth. They won’t wear this for long. Not without more payback than your new playmate’s hunches.’ Norton’s gaze flickered across the quadrants of the screen, scanning the space over her shoulders. ‘Where is wonderboy, anyway?’
‘Asleep’ – she caught herself – ‘I’d guess. It’s a pretty anti-social hour here as well, you know.’
In fact, when the phone rang, she’d rolled over in the bed and felt a shivery delight as she found the bulk of him there at her side. The frisson turned into a jolt as she saw, at a distance of about ten centimetres, that he was awake, eyes open and watching her. He nodded in the direction of the ringing. COLIN apartment, he said, I figure that’s for you. She nodded in turn, groped over the side of the bed for her T-shirt and sat up to pull it over her head. She could feel his eyes on her, on the heavy swing of her breasts as she completed the move, and it sent another quiver of jellied warmth through her. The feeling stayed as she blundered out to the phone.
‘On COLIN’s endeavour, the sun never sets,’ quoted Norton, deadpan. ‘Anyway, if you’re going to Peru, you’ll need an early start.’
‘Have you talked to Ortiz?’
He grew sombre. ‘Yeah, earlier today. They put him through to a v-format for about ten minutes. Doctors won’t run it for longer than that, they say the mental strain’s the last thing he needs. They’ve got nano-repair fixing the organ damage, but the slugs were dirty, some kind of trace carcinogenic, and it’s fucking up the new cell growth.’
‘Is he going to die?’
‘We’re all going to die, Sev. But from this, no, he won’t. They’ve got him stabilised. Still a long road out, but he’ll make it.’
‘So what did he say, in the virtual?’
A grimace. ‘He told me to trust your instincts.’
They got a late morning suborb to La Paz – like most nations aligned with the western nations colony initiative, Turkey ran connection to the altiplano hubs every couple of hours. Sevgi had the COLIN limo pick them up at the door – no leisure to ride the ferries this time around.
‘We could have waited for the Lima hook,’ Marsalis pointed out as they neared the airport at smooth, priority-lane speed. ‘Less rush that way. I’d have time to buy those clothes you were bitching about.’
‘I’m under instructions to rush,’ she told him.
‘Yeah, but you know there’s a good chance Bambaren might be in Lima, anyway. He does a lot of business down the coast.’
‘In that case, we’ll go there.’
‘That’ll take some time.’
She gave him a superior grin. ‘No, it won’t. You’re working for COLIN now. This is our backyard.’
To underline the point, she had a reception detachment meet them at the other end. Three unsmiling indigenas, one male, two female, who brought them out of the terminal with hardened, watchful care to where an armoured Land Rover waited under harsh lighting in the No Parking zone. Beyond, was soft darkness, a smog-blurred moon and the vague bulk of mountains rising in the distance. As soon as they were all inside the Land Rover, the female operative gave her a gun – Beretta Marstech, two clips and a soft leather shoulder holster. She hadn’t requested it. Welcome to La Paz, the woman said, with or without irony Sevgi could not decide. Then they were in motion again, shuttled smoothly through the sleeping streets to a dedicated suite in the new Hilton Acantilado, with views out across the bowl of the city, and Marstech level security systems. A beautifully styled Bang and Olufsen data/comms portal sat unobtrusively in the corner of every section but the bathroom, which had its own phone. The beds were vast, begging to be used.
They stood at opposite ends of the floor to ceiling window and stared out. It was, once again, obscenely early in the morning – they’d outrun the sun, dumping it scornfully behind them as the suborbital bounced off its trajectory peak and plunged back down to Earth. Now, the pre-dawn darkness beyond the windows jarred, and the inverted starscape bowl of city lights below them whispered up a weightless sense of the unreal. It all felt like too much time in virtual. Thin air and hunger just added to the load. Sevgi could feel herself getting vague.
‘Want to eat?’ she asked.
He shot her a glance she recognised. ‘Don’t tempt me.’
‘Food,’ she said primly. ‘All I’ve eaten so far today is that cimit.’
‘Price of progress. On a flatline flight, they would have fed us twice at least. The untold downside of the suborb traveller lifestyle.’
‘Do you want to eat or not?’
‘Sure. Whatever they’ve got.’ He went to the Bang and Olufsen, checked the welcome screen protocol and fired the system up. She shook her head, took a last look at the view and went to order from the next room.
Midway through scanning the services menu, she accidentally brought up the health section. Her eye caught on the sub-heading tab stimulants and synaptic enhancers, and she realised with a slight jolt that she hadn’t taken any syn for the best part of twenty-four hours.
Hadn’t wanted any.
The first time Carl wanted Manco Bambaren’s attention, three years back, he’d got it by the simple expedient of sounding out the tayta’s business interests and then doing them as much rapid damage as he easily could. It was an old Osprey tactic from the central Asian theatre, and it transferred without too much trouble.
Bambaren’s particular limb of the familias was moving exotic fabric out of prep camp warehouses in quantities small enough not to trigger a COLIN response, amassing the scavenged gear in isolated village locations and then trucking it down to Lima to feed the insatiable maw of the Marstech black market. It wasn’t hard to get detail on this – pretty much everyone knew about it, but bribes and kickbacks kept the much-vaunted but badly paid Peruvian security forces out of the equation, and Bambaren was smart enough to limit his pilfering to relatively commonplace tech items no longer sensitive at a patent level. The corporations claimed on their insurance, made the right noises but no great effort otherwise to plug the leaks. In tacit quid pro quo, Bambaren stayed out of their hair on the more vexed issue of local labour relations, where the familias had a traditional influence that could have been problematic if it were ever deployed. Local loyalties and Bambaren’s ferocious Cuzco slum street rep did the rest. It was a sweet-running system, and since it kept everyone happy, it showed potential to run that way for a long time to come.
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.