“Yeah?”
Manco Bambarén’s weather-blasted 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.”
Bambarén leaned into the screen. “I no longer concern myself with your scurrying escapee brothers and their bolt-holes. 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 Bambarén tried to stare him down. Carl inhaled the tea steam, took down the damp, green-leaf odor of it, and waited.
“You still speak my language like a drunken peasant laborer,” said the familia chief sourly. “And act as if it were an accomplishment.”
Carl shrugged. “Well, I learned it among peasant laborers, and we were often drunk. My apologies if it offends. Now pick a fucking place to meet.”
More silence. Bambarén glowered. “I am in Cuzco,” he said. Even in the lilting altiplano Quechua, the words sounded bitten off. “I’ll see you out at Sacsayhuamán at one this afternoon.”
“Make it three,” Carl told him lazily. “I’ve got a few other things I want to do first.”
CHAPTER 29
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 Bambarén. It was his sole source of cheer in an otherwise poisonous mood. Jet lag and the showdown with Nevant were catching up with him like running dogs. He’d bought two new sets of clothes through the hotel’s services 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 amid a fog of testimonials from global celebrities and ex-Mars personnel. He hated them, but they’d have to fucking do.
Out of sheer contrariness, he kept the S(t)igma jacket.
“He’s late,” she said, from behind the jeep’s wheel.
“Of course he’s late. He’s making a point.”
Through the windshield, the grassy terraces of Sacsayhuamán rose on walls of massive, smoothly interlocking stone, dark under a glaring white-clouded sky. This late in the day, they had the ruins almost to themselves, and the emptiness lent the ramparts a brooding air. There were a few late-season tourists wandering about the site, but the scale of the Inca building blocks dwarfed them. Similarly reduced, a small knot of locals in traditional dress had withdrawn to the margins, women and children minding long-suffering llamas done up in ribbons, all waiting for a paying photo opportunity. They made tiny flecks of color against the somber stone.
It wasn’t the first time Carl had seen Sacsayhuamán, but as always the stonework fascinated him. The blocks were shaped and finished but hugely irregular, echoing the slumped solid enormity of natural rock formations. The jigsaw lines between them drew your eye like detail in a painting. You could sit there just looking at it all for quite a while, which—he glanced at his watch—they had been.
“You think he’s making a point with this as well?” Ertekin nodded forward at the walls. “Land of my fathers, that kind of thing?”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so?”
He shot her a side glance. “Did I say that?”
“You might as well have.”
He went back to staring at the stonework. Ghostly beyond, Nevant grinned at him out of a bloodstained, broken-nosed face, pale with hospital lighting. Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.
He made an effort.
“You could be right,” he admitted. “The guy does talk like a fucking poet half the time, and he’s seriously impressed with himself. So yeah, maybe he is getting all cultural on us.”
Ertekin nodded. “Thought so.”
Ten more minutes crept by. Carl was thinking about getting out to stretch his legs when an armored black Range Rover rolled bumpily across the rough turf parking area to their left. Smoked-glass windows, glossy curved flanks, anti-grenade skirt almost to the floor. Carl dropped his introspection. The jet lag folded away.
“Here we go.”
The new arrival braked to a halt, and a door cracked in the black carapace. Manco Bambarén stepped out, immaculately attired in a sand-colored suit and flanked by bodyguards in Ray-Bans that matched his own. No visible weapons, but there didn’t need to be. The stances and blank, reflective sun-shade menace were old-school South America; Carl had seen the same thing deployed all over, on streets from Buenos Aires to Bogotá. The mirror patches Bambarén and his guards had in place of eyes talked up the same exclusive power as the shiny bombproof flanks on the Range Rover. You saw yourself thrown back in the reflecting surfaces, sealed outside and of no importance to the eyes within.
Carl climbed out of the jeep.
“I’m coming with you,” said Ertekin quickly.
“Suit yourself. It’s all going to be in Quechua anyway.”
He crossed the turf to the Range Rover, pushing down an unnecessary surge from the mesh. He intended to lean on Bambarén, but he didn’t think it’d come to a fight, however much he’d have liked to smash the mirror shades back in splinters into the eyes behind, take a limb from the bigger of the two guards, and—
Whoa, Carl. Let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?
He reached the familia chief and stopped, just out of reach.
“Hello, Manco. Thanks for coming. Could have left the kids at home, though.”
“Black man.” Manco jerked his chin. “Nice coat you have there. Jesusland threads?”
Carl nodded. “South Florida State.”
“Thought so. Got a cousin had one just like it.”
Carl touched finger and thumb to the lapel of the S(t)igma jacket. “Yeah, going to be a major fashion anytime now.”
“It was my understanding,” said the familia chief urbanely, “that in Jesusland it already is. Highest incarceration rate on the planet, they say. So who’s your tits and ass?”
Carl turned casually and saw that Ertekin had gotten out as well, but hadn’t followed him. As he watched, she leaned back on the jeep beside the COLIN decal and put her hands in her pockets. The movement shifted her jacket aside, showed the strap of her shoulder holster. She’d put on her shades.
He held down a grin. “That’s not tits and ass, that’s a friend.”
“A thirteen with friends.” Bambarén’s eyebrows showed above the curve of the sunglasses. “Must go against the grain for you.”
“We adapt to circumstance. Want to walk?”
Manco Bambarén nodded at his security and they relaxed, opening space around their tayta. He took a couple of paces away from the Range Rover, in the direction of the stone walls. Carl fell into step. He saw the familia chief squinting sideways behind his sun lenses, toward the jeep and Ertekin’s casual watchfulness.
“So you work for COLIN now?”