‘Yeah, very fucking poetic.’
Sevgi drove back down the twisting road into Cuzco, taking the curves with a deliberate lack of care. Marsalis held onto the rough-ride strap above his door.
‘Well, he has a point.’
‘I didn’t say he didn’t. I’d just like to know what you got out of him – apart from cheap poetics – that was worth coming all this way for.’
Marsalis said nothing. She shot him a sideways glance. The jeep drifted a little with her inattention, back towards the centre of the corkscrew curve on the road, and they met an autohauler rig head on. Sick, sudden jump of adrenalin and sweat through her pores. But slow – she was still a little soggy from the near showdown with Bambaren’s men. She dragged the wheel back, they swerved out of the rig’s path, bumped a kerb. The autohauler’s collision alert blasted at them as it crawled past, machine irate. People on the pavements stood and looked. The man sitting next to her said nothing.
‘Well?’
‘Well, I think you should keep your eyes on the road.’
She slammed the heel of her palm into the autocruise button. Let go the wheel. The jeep’s navigational system lit blue across the dashboard and chimed.
‘Please state your destination.’ Fucking Asia Badawi’s perfect dulcet tones again.
‘City centre,’ she snapped. They’d come direct from the airport, had no hotel as yet. She evened her voice, turned across the space between the seats to face him. ‘Marsalis, in case you hadn’t noticed, we came close to a firefight up there. I got your back.’
‘I know that.’
‘Right. Now I don’t mind taking risks, but I want to know why I’m doing it. So you start fucking telling me what’s in your mind before it explodes all over us.’
He nodded, mostly, she thought, to himself.
‘Bambaren’s clean.’ He said it reluctantly. ‘I reckon.’
‘But that’s not all?’
He sighed. ‘I don’t know. Look, I sprang the Martian angle on him, he didn’t blink. Or rather, he looked like I was talking in tongues. The war’s still on, and I’d bet everything I made last year that no one up here has seen or heard anything to change that. I don’t think he knows anything about our pal Merrin’s trip home.’
She heard the raised tone at the end. ‘But?’
‘But he’s jumpy. Like you said, we nearly got into it up there. Last time I had to deal with Manco Bambaren, I’d just blown up a truck full of his product and killed one of his thugs, and I was promising to do it again, if I didn’t get what I wanted. He was about as emotional about it as that wall of stone up there. This time around, all I want to do is ask him some questions and he nearly gets us all killed for it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.’
She grunted. She knew what it felt like, the nagging, loose thread itch of something not right. The sort of thing that kept you awake and thinking last thing at night, stole your mind from elsewhere in your caseload during the day and had you staring a hole in the detail while your coffee went cold. You just wanted to pull on that thread until it unravelled or snapped.
‘So what do you want to do about it?’ she asked.
He stared out of the side window. ‘I think we’d better talk to Greta Jurgens. She’s getting near the sleepy end of the season, and hibernoids generally aren’t at their best when that happens. She might let something slip.’
‘That’s Arequipa, right?’
‘Yeah. We could drive it overnight, be there in the morning.’
‘And be approximately as fried as Jurgens when we talk to her. No thanks. I’m sleeping in a bed tonight.’
Marsalis shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Just, it takes us off the scope if we go by road. Chances are Manco’s going to have someone at the airport checking when we leave, checking where we leave to. And if he sees it’s Arequipa, well, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what we want there.’
‘You think he’d try to stop us seeing Jurgens by force? You think he’d risk that with accredited COLIN reps?’
‘I don’t know. A couple of hours ago, I’d have said no. But you were there when the mirrorshade twins got twitchy. What did you think was going to happen?’
Long pause. Sevgi recalled the way it had gone, like her reaction to the near-collision a couple of minutes ago, the sudden, pore-pricking sweat as the familia minders moved, the surge of adrenal overdrive in her guts and up the insides of her arms. It had taken conscious will to keep her hand away from the butt of her gun, and she’d been afraid, rusty with too long away from the brink and not trusting her judgement, not knowing if she’d be fast enough or just call it wrong.
She sighed.
‘Yeah, okay.’ She sank back into her seat, thudded an irritable elbow into the padding a couple of times. ‘Inshallah, we can get a halfway decent recline out of these things.’
Then she pitched her voice louder, for the jeep.
‘Course correct. Long haul, Arequipa.’
Scribbles awoke on the displays.
‘This journey will take until the early hours of tomorrow morning,’ Asia Badawi told her coolly.
‘Yeah, fucking tell me about it.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
The centre of Cuzco was solid with traffic, most of it driven by humans. No co-operation, no overview – the late afternoon air rang with irate hornblasts and the queues backed up across intersections. Drivers went to the brink in duels to change lanes or inject themselves from filter systems into already established traffic flow. Windows were down to facilitate yelled abuse, but most people just sat rigidly behind the wheel and stared ahead as if they could generate forward motion through sheer willpower. That, and continual, frustrated blasts on the horn. Traffic cops stood amidst it all with arms raised as if stuck in a swamp, gesturing like manic orchestra conductors and blowing whistles incessantly, to no appreciable effect. Perhaps, Sevgi thought sourly, they just didn’t want to be left out of the noise-making process.
The jeep was a car-pool standard. Its automated systems, safety-indexed down to a patient deference, could not cope. After they’d sat at a particularly fiercely contested intersection for twelve minutes by the dashboard clock, Marsalis shifted in his seat.
‘You want to drive?’
Sevgi looked out gloomily at the unbroken chain of nose to tail metal they were trying to break into.
‘Not really.’
‘You mind if I do?’
The lights changed and the truck blocking the intersection crept out of the way. The jeep jerked forward half a metre, jerked to a halt again, as the vehicle behind the truck surged to take up the slack. The opening vanished.
Behind them, someone leaned on the horn.
‘Right.’
It was the matter-of-fact tone that slowed her down. Before she realised what was going on, he’d cracked the passenger door and swung down onto the street. The sound of the horn redoubled. He looked back, towards the car behind them.
‘Marsalis, don’t—’
But he was already gone, striding back towards the car behind them. She twisted in her seat and saw him reach the vehicle, take two steps up and over the hood – she heard the clunk as his foot came down each time – and then jump lightly down again beside the driver’s side window. The hornblast stopped abruptly. He leaned at the window a moment, she thought he reached in as well, but couldn’t be sure.
‘Ah, shit.’
Checked her gun in its holster, was turning to open her door when he appeared there beside the window. She scrabbled it open.
‘What the fuck are you—’
‘Scoot over.’