Ramon waved proudly at the walls and said, “My son Pepe brought these back with him from Delos on his last trip. Pepe is very up-to-date, very civilized.”
There was no sign on the streets of the gunmen who had been omnipresent throughout Potosi since the survey team arrived. Civilians moved in nervous spurts, like birds on the verge of a violent storm.
The table in the center of the room was a black synthetic oval. There were thumb controls at eight points around its circumference. Each was a shallow dome paired with a shallow depression.
Coke casually fingered the bump nearest him. Nothing happened. If the system had been operating, his touch would have brought live a workstation linked to the data bank within the table.
“I am Raul Luria,” the old man at the head of the table said without rising or preamble. “Potosi is mine, Cantilucca is mine. For too long I have allowed the Guzman syndicate to exist—out of affection for the late Pablo, so close a friend of mine. But after last night—”
Raul Luria rose with the staggering difficulty of a ship’s mast being stepped by amateurs. The man seated to Raul’s left looked alternately bored and disquieted by the rhetoric.
“—after last night, I have no more compassion. They must be crushed!”
The old man—the Old Man—pointed a crooked index finger at Coke. “Where do you stand in that, foreigner? Shall we crush you too?”
“I represent a business firm, sir,” Coke said mildly. “We can supply personnel and equipment that will permit you to achieve your stated goal faster and more cheaply than you could in any other manner. I don’t see why we can’t strike a deal that will benefit both parties.”
“One of the possible problems, Major,” Ramon Luria said with his back to the door behind Coke, “is the sort of arrangement Friesland has already made with the Astras.”
“And what you had to do with the raid last night,” Raul Luria grunted as he bent, joint by joint, back into his chair. “If you’re working with those pigs, I’ll see to it that you’re slaughtered with them. I swear it!”
“Father, we agreed there’s no profit in discussing the past,” Ramon said, his voice quivering between fear and contempt. “Isn’t that so, Master Suterbilt?”
The businessman grimaced. “There’ll be no profit in anything for the best part of a year,” he said. “It’ll take at least that long to rebuild gage stocks. And what is the Delos cartel going to say?”
“There’s no arrangement between Astra and the FDF,” Coke said. “Zip. Nada. Do you have a chip projector here?”
He glanced over his shoulder. Ramon looked blank. “I can bring one,” he offered.
“Here, you can use mine,” Suterbilt said. He slid a palm-sized belt unit across the table to Coke.
The businessman was stocky and probably no older than Coke, now that the Frisian had time to focus on him. At the moment, Suterbilt wore a scowl that amplified the angry appearance of his ruddy complexion.
Coke looked at the projector, then unclipped the one from his own belt instead. “That’s all right,” he said. “Mine will do.”
The Frisian unit was half the weight of the older Delian projector Suterbilt used. Coke had hoped for a console model—the equipment built into the table itself would have been perfect, if the cursed thing had worked—but it didn’t really matter. Cantiluccans probably wouldn’t feel comfortable with the sort of crystalline images which the civilized universe took for granted.
Coke dropped into the reader the chip he’d prepared. He turned up the gain. “This is why we have no deal with the Astras,” he said.
The negotiations in Astra headquarters shimmered in a hologram a meter across. The image had a gray translucence and there was considerable distortion toward the edges of the field, but it was both visible and audible.
“A company of infantry and a company of combat cars,” said Matthew Coke’s image. The scene was assembled from recordings made by the commo helmets of the three Frisians present at the meeting.
The image cut forward a few seconds. Barbour had spliced the data into the continuous form Coke wanted, but that meant the visuals were choppy. “Approximately three thousand Frisian thalers per day,” the Coke hologram said, “perhaps ten percent over.”
Raul Luria was trembling with rage. His mouth worked, but no words came out. Ramon, who had moved to the side where he was visible out of the corner of Coke’s eyes, wore a fixed smile. Suterbilt, the factor for Trans-Star Trading, simply frowned in puzzlement.
The Frisians vanished abruptly. The three Astra principals remained. Through the excellence of Barbour’s editing, Adolpho Peres’ lips moved in near synchrony with his words: “So our Frisian visitors clean up our problem. They board the ship we provide, though they don’t know the ship’s ours. And the ship never gets home.”
The bug Daun had left beneath the Astra conference table was audio only. You couldn’t have told that when Barbour had finished mixing input from the bug with images culled during the two-party conference. When the Peres image “spoke” the final words, his face froze in a grin of murderous triumph …which was certainly true to the spirit of the plan the gigolo had outlined to his fellows.
Coke shut off the recorder and smiled at the L’Escorial leaders. “So,” he said. “I’ve recommended to my superiors that we not do business with Astra. Shall my team and I go home, or …?”
Raul Luria began to laugh. For the first moments, Coke thought the old man might be having a stroke instead. The paroxysm continued for nearly a minute.
Ramon pulled out a lace handkerchief and stepped to his father’s side. He stood there, looking worried but unable to act. Raul hacked and wheezed and drooled from the corners of his mouth.
Suterbilt swallowed. His body tilted slightly away from the L’Escorial patriarch, and he was careful not to look to the side.
The old man finally regained his composure. “You’re a right clever bastard, aren’t you, boy?” he said. “What’s your name? Coke, is it?”
Coke nodded.
“You planning to eavesdrop on us the way you did those Astra gutter-sweepings, then?” Raul demanded.
“No sir,” Coke replied. “I am not.”
Not in the same way, at any rate. The devices Daun and Margulies had emplaced all up and down Potosi’s main street would keep an eye—and ear—on both syndicates.
Raul nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “So, that’s your price for two companies of your Frisian Defense Forces?”
“That’s an estimate,” Coke said. “It’s a good estimate, but the final figure will have to be determined at Camp Able.”
Raul looked puzzled, glancing toward Suterbilt.
“FDF Command on Nieuw Friesland,” Coke clarified. “Ah—and I gather it may not be possible to bring heavy vehicles like combat cars in through the port here without getting the Marvelan Confederacy concerned. The price would be comparable for three infantry companies.”
“That’s a very high price,” Suterbilt said. He glared at the Frisian representative as though he’d like to throttle him. The factor’s hands, Coke noticed, remained flat on the black surface of the table, spread wide and patently innocent.
“Compared to the losses you received last night?” Coke said. “Because your present personnel and equipment are of such low quality?”
Suterbilt tightened his lips. He gave a quick toss of his head. It could have implied either assent or disdain.
“Infantry and tanks is better than just infantry?” Ramon Luria asked. “And the price is the same?”
Coke nodded to the plump man. “Roughly the same daily rate,” he agreed. “And combat cars aren’t exactly tanks, but they’re big. The folks down the street didn’t think we could ship them in. If we could, the concentrated firepower would be better.”