Black Man / Thirteen

Carl gri

“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 ru

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 ru

“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 gri

“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 a

“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 ru

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 gri

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.