“Do you want to eat or not?”
“Sure. Whatever they’ve got.” He went to the Bang & 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 subheading tab stimulants and synaptic enhancers, and she realized 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 Bambarén’s attention, three years back, he’d gotten 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 theater, and it transferred without too much trouble.
Bambarén’s particular limb of the familias were 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 Bambarén 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, Bambarén stayed out of their hair on the more vexing issue of local labor relations, where the familias had a traditional influence that could have been problematic if it were ever deployed. Local loyalties and Bambarén’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 had entered the equation with no local ax to grind and nothing to lose but his bounty for Stefan Nevant. For two quiet weeks, he’d done 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 cooperative, and the hardware worked. The truck exploded spectacularly on its first cartwheeling 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 burned 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.
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. Bambarén, 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, Stefan Nevant 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 organized crime was concerned.
In the Bolivian predawn, he dialed 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 gray 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 bedtime. 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 sitdown, 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 favor, 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 blinked out in midretort.
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; Jurgens in any case 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 Bambarén 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 & Olufsen and thumbed the accept button.