By then, Carl was long gone. He’d given the truck driver a lift down to Nazca and a message to hand on to tayta Manco with a number to call. Bambaren, who was no fool, called the next day, and after a certain amount of male display rage, asked what exactly the fuck Carl wanted, motherfucker. Carl told him. Thirty-six hours after that, Stéphane Névant walked back into his Arequipa hotel room and found himself looking down the barrel of the Haag gun.
Subtlety, Carl had discovered, was a much overrated tool where organised crime was concerned.
He dialled accordingly.
‘This had better be life or fucking death,’ Greta Jurgens said coldly, when she finally answered. The screen showed her settling in front of the phone, pulling a grey silk dressing gown closer about her. Her face was puffy. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
Carl made a show of consulting his watch.
‘Yeah, it’s October. I figure that gives me another couple of weeks before it’s your bed-time. How’s things, Greta?’
The hibernoid squinted at the screen, and her face lost all expression. ‘Well, well. Marsalis, right? The bogeyman.’
‘The very same.’
‘What do you want?’
‘That’s what I like about you, Greta. Charming small-talk.’ Carl floated a casual, open-handed gesture. ‘It’s nothing much. Wanted to talk to Manco. Strictly a chat, old-times stuff.’
‘Manco’s not in town right now.’
‘But you know how to get hold of him.’
Jurgens said nothing. Her face wasn’t just puffy, it was rounder than he remembered it, smooth-skinned and chubby with late-cycle subcutaneous fat uptake. He guessed her thinking was groggier than usual too – silence was the safe option.
Carl grinned. ‘Look, we can do this one of two ways. Either you can tell Manco I want a word and we arrange a friendly sit-down, or I can start making your lives difficult again. What’s it going to be?’
‘You might find that a little harder to do these days.’
‘Really? Made some new Initiative friends, have we?’ He read the confirmation in the hibernoid’s face. ‘Do yourself and Manco both a favour, Greta. Trace this call and find out whose wafer I’m running on. Then decide whether you want to piss me off.’
He killed the line and Greta Jurgens inked out in mid-retort.
Carl got up and went to stare down at the lights of La Paz. A couple of hours at worst, he reckoned. Jurgens had specialists a phone call away who could run the trace, and it wouldn’t take them very long to nail it to COLIN’s dedicated Hilton suite. Marstech-level systems showed up in the dataflow like implanted metal on an X-ray plate. The familia datahawks probably wouldn’t be able to get past the tech. In any case Jurgens probably wouldn’t ask them to. But it would still be pretty fucking clear what they were looking at, thank you very much. Say an hour to do all that. Then, allow that Jurgens had been telling the truth and Manco Bambaren wasn’t with her in Arequipa. Wherever he was, he could be reached and that wouldn’t take long either. And with what Jurgens had to tell him, he’d call back.
Ertekin came back through from the other room. She’d changed into the NYPD T-shirt and a pair of running sweats.
‘Food’s here,’ she said.
In the buffered quiet of the suite, he hadn’t heard it arrive. He nodded. ‘Shouldn’t eat too much at this altitude. Your body’s working hard enough as it is.’
‘Yeah, Marsalis,’ She gave him a hands-on-hips sort of look. ‘I have been on the altiplano a couple of times before. COLIN employee, you know?’
‘That’s not what it says on your chest,’ he told her, looking there pointedly.
‘This?’ She pressed a hand to one breast and tapped the NYPD logo with her fingertips. A grin crept into the corner of her mouth. ‘You got a problem with me wearing this?’
He grinned back. ‘Not if you let me take it off you after breakfast.’
‘We’ll see,’ she said, unconvincingly.
But after breakfast, there was no time. The phone chimed while they were still talking, sitting with the big clay mugs of mate de coca cupped in both hands. Outside call, the system announced in smooth female tones. Carl took his mug through to the next room to answer. He dropped into the chair in front of the Bang and Olufsen and thumbed the accept button.
‘Yeah?’
Manco Bambaren’s weatherblasted Inca features stared out at him from the screen. His face was impassive, but there was a slow smoking anger in the dark eyes. He spoke harsh, bite-accented English.
‘So, black man. You return to plague us.’
‘Well, historically, that ought to be a change for you guys.’ Carl sipped the thin-tasting tea, met the other man’s eyes through rising steam. ‘Better than being plagued by the white man, right?’
‘Don’t play word games with me, twist. What do you want?’
Carl slipped into Quechua. ‘I’m only quoting your oaths of unity there. Indigenous union, from the ashes of racial oppression, all that shit. What do I want? I want to talk to you. Face to face. Take a couple of hours at most.’
Bambaren leaned into the screen. ‘I no longer concern myself with your scurrying escapee brothers and their boltholes. I have nothing to tell you.’
‘Yeah, Greta said you’d gone up in the world. No more fake ID work, huh? No more low-level Marstech pilfering. I guess you’re a respectable criminal these days.’ Carl let his voice harden. ‘Makes no difference. I want to talk anyway. Pick a place.’
There was a long pause while Bambaren tried to stare him down. Carl inhaled the tea steam, took down the damp, green-leaf odour of it, and waited.
‘You still speak my language like a drunken peasant labourer,’ said the familia chief sourly. ‘And act as if it were an accomplishment.’
Carl shrugged. ‘Well I learnt it among peasant labourers, and we were often drunk. My apologies if it offends. Now pick a fucking place to meet.’
More silence. Bambaren glowered. ‘I am in Cuzco,’ he said. Even in the lilting altiplano Quechua, the words sounded bitten off. ‘I’ll see you out at Sacsayhuaman at one this afternoon.’
‘Make it three,’ Carl told him lazily. ‘I’ve got a few other things I want to do first.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
He still had the deep oil-and-salt scent of Sevgi Ertekin on his fingers later as he sat in the COLIN jeep with his chin propped up on his thumb, staring glumly at the scenery and waiting for Manco Bambaren. It was his sole source of cheer in an otherwise poisonous mood. Jet-lag and the showdown with Névant were catching up with him like running dogs. He’d bought two new sets of clothes through the hotel’s service net, didn’t much like any of them when they arrived, could not be bothered to send them back and start again. They were black and hard-wearing – like me, he thought sourly – and top of the line. The latest generation of declassified Marstech fabrics, released to the high-end public amidst a fog of testimonials from global celebrities and ex-Mars personnel. He hated them, but they’d have to fucking do.