“It’ll settle down once it warms up,” Mariana told him and dropped the car into gear. She waved at the guard, who was watching her with a scowl on his face. Mathieu had probably counted on neither of them being able to drive the car. They would have been forced to bargain with him again for a driver or a more modern vehicle. She laughed and deliberately took off hard and fast, spraying dirt and billowing fumes.
There was only one track. Mathieu had assured them it would reach the east-west road that would take them back to the highway. Once on the highway, they merely had to turn south and keep going, for the highway would take them all the way to Macapá.
Mariana settled into steering the car down the bumpy, wildly overgrown track. She kept it in low gear, not rushing it. It had been well over a year on her subjective timeline since she had driven one of these, although the skill was coming back in a rush.
“You’re a woman of very unexpected talents and depths, aren’t you?” Laszlo said.
She glanced at him. He was turned on the seat to face her, his back against the door. The dashboard had few working dials or lights, so he was a dark shadow against dimly-lit jungle on that side of the track. There was only one working headlight, too.
“Make sure that door is locked if you’re going to lean against it that way,” she told him. “It might not hold your weight, otherwise.”
“You don’t get to change subjects now. There’s no one around to hear but me. Will you tell me what happened with the account? How did we pay Mathieu?”
“We haven’t. Not yet.”
“Yet you said we went to a great deal of trouble to do so. Not that I recall doing any such thing.”
“You will.” She frowned. “That’s the problem with playing around with time. There’s no language you can use that adequately describes it.”
“Wait… time?” He gave a soft exhalation. “Of course, of course. Time travel. Your agency’s specialty. We went—we will—go back far enough in time and do something so the money arrived in Mathieu’s account. That’s why you wanted the exact time.”
Mariana nodded. “It might not be us who goes back. But the money arrived in the account at the exact right moment, which tells me that someone did—someone in our future at this point in time.” She glanced at him. “I can scrape up almost half of the five hundred thousand, if you don’t mind providing the rest?” She had a robust savings account since she rarely spent the money the agency paid her. Everything she needed was right there at the villa.
“Don’t be stupid,” Laszlo said. “You’re a working girl. Half the ransom would cripple you. Of course I’ll pay it all. I owe you that much for getting us out of this jam.”
Mariana smiled at his description. It had been a long time since anyone had called her a girl and even longer since she had stopped thinking of herself as one. “Thank you for the offer. But if you don’t mind, I don’t want to feel I owe you anything.”
He stayed silent. Mariana listened to the sound of the wind whipping past them through the broken window. She could hear the jungle, live and busy.
“You really must think I’m a monster.”
“No, that’s not it—” she began, uncomfortable.
“Why did you agree to come out with me, if you think so little of me?”
Mariana recognized the position she was in, from watching Nayara and Ryan maneuver through political discussions strewn with verbal landmines. Nothing but truth was going to do, now. She sighed. “I was so flattered you asked me, of all the women in the world you could have asked, I couldn’t resist saying yes. I’m not your….usual type.”
“And now that any hope of having a quiet romantic evening has blown itself completely out of the sky and you’re stuck with a Lothario as a companion in this adventure you’re in, you’re wishing it was someone with a more sterling character?”
“No,” she said flatly. “That, you most definitely have wrong. I did want to find out why you have such a way with so many beautiful women. That part is true. I just….I don’t know why you asked me.”
“You distrust my motives,” he finished softly.
Truth, she reminded herself. “I’m sorry, but yes. It’s a horrible thing to believe that someone has an ulterior motive, but I just can’t see how asking me out has anything to do with wanting to know me better. I’m afraid your reputation is making me very biased.”
He was silent for much longer, this time.
“That’s why I want to pay my half,” she added, after the silence stretched on too long.
Again, he didn’t rush to respond. She couldn’t see his face. It was too dark. So she couldn’t tell if he was angry, or what his reaction was. Cáel Stelios was fond of saying that truth-telling was a delicate and dangerous thing. Mariana was learning that first hand.
When Laszlo did answer, his voice was low. “Very well,” he said, his tone even and perhaps even a little amused. “I will let you pay your half.”
“Thank you.” Relief touched her. He had taken it well, in the end. He must surely be aware of his public persona and what most of the world thought about him. He had access to the same nets she did.
Then he startled her by sliding along the bench seat until he was very close to her. She drew in a quick breath as he picked up stray locks of hair that had escaped the rough knot she had pinned it into and pushed them behind her ear. It was a gentle movement.
“You underestimate how strong and interesting a person you are,” he said. “You always have. We’re going to have to work on changing that. Just give me a chance to prove it to you. Will you do that?”
Her heart was stuttering. Her breath evaporated. He was so close she could feel the heat of his body radiating against her flank. It made it suddenly hard to think properly. “I....” She cleared her throat and started again. “You don’t want to prove how nice a person you are, instead? Wouldn’t that make more sense?
“I already know myself.” His voice held a touch of dryness. “I want you to know you. The real you. Then you’ll be able to see me properly, without all the filters and gossip skewing the picture.”
Mariana glanced at him. “Public perception is skewed about you, huh? There’s a surprise. The neural nets are usually so accurate.”
“Ouch. That sounds bitter. Who took a cyber-bite out of you?”
Mariana sighed. “Old experience, best forgotten,” she told him. “A while ago, my entire social life and…actually, make that all my life, except for the attentions of a single cat who didn’t like me…everything came from the nets.” She grimaced. “Pretty pathetic, huh?”
“It’s better than being lonely,” Laszlo said.
“I embraced it,” Mariana said frankly. “Anyone’s life seemed far more interesting than my own. I ended up coordinating a…” Could she confess this? It was more than pathetic. “…A vampire fan group. One of the biggest in the world. That’s how I ended up working for the Agency.”
“You wrote that book, didn’t you? The one about the CEO and the President.”
Mariana shrugged. “They wanted someone who understood vampires and would write about them with empathy. I fit the bill, although they came behind me and cleaned up everything before it was published.”
“Publishers do that with every book ever written. You’re still the author.” He shifted away from her and she let out her breath. “So, you like vampires. A lot.”
“Actually, I have a hard time remembering they’re vampire at all, now,” Mariana confessed. “They’re just a group of some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met.”
“I can see that. Justin, the consultant organizing my tour, caught my attention and I’d only known him a few minutes. Are they all like him?”
“They’re all different from each other, like night is different from day,” Mariana said. “Each of them is so highly individual. It has to come from living so long, I suppose. There are very few humans I’ve met who are like them and the humans who are have usually lived a long and very full li
fe.”
“I’m beginning to see why you look at me sideways like you do. I’ve only been around for a mere forty-plus years. I must seem very superficial to you compared to them.”
Mariana shook her head. “I don’t think like that about humans, either. I don’t compare. We’re different from vampires, that’s all.”
“And she answers in the general when I spoke in the specific.” He gave a dry laugh. “I can see I’ve got a long way to go to impress you with my better qualities.”
There was nothing she could say that would amend his impression, for it was true. He had inherited his money and he did nothing with it, except live a fast life that entertained millions of net users and kept divorce lawyers busy. It was the most clichéd life she had ever come across.
“Why is it so important I get to know your better qualities?” she asked.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
“For what?”
“For believing I have better qualities in the first place.”
“My question still stands.”
“Ask me again in three weeks’ time. I’ll answer truthfully, then.”
“Aren’t you making a huge assumption?” Mariana asked. “What makes you think we’re still going to be talking to each other in three weeks’ time?”
“If we are still talking, then in three weeks’ time you can ask me that, too.” He moved back to leaning against the door and let silence settle over them once more.
It was a warmer and friendlier silence than before. He had given her plenty to think about and Mariana didn’t mind being alone with her thoughts like so many humans did. Proper thinking always led to interesting insights.
Forty-five minutes later, they reached the highway, the single strip of old tarmac tunneling through the wilderness, green growing things arching over it. Through the thin strip of night sky above, Mariana could see the moon, down low toward the horizon. “It’s getting late,” she murmured and turned the car onto the highway and changed up through the gears to a moderate cruising speed. The gas tank indicator was broken, of course, but that was a worry she kept to herself for there was nothing they could do about it. Gasoline was next to impossible to get and from the way the car was running, she suspected the gasoline in it was bootleg and full of impurities.
But running out of fuel wasn’t what halted them. Barely thirty minutes later, there was a loud crack that sounded almost like a rifle shot. The left side of the hood sank and the car began to hobble.
Mariana pulled it over to the side, as close to the jungle growth as she could get, which still left the car half-straddling the lane. “Damn,” she muttered.
“Tire?” Laszlo asked as they both climbed out of the car.
The smell of hot metal was strong in the night air. The tire was flat on the road, the metal rim scraped raw and shiny where it had revolved over the tarmac. She sighed and leaned against the hood.
“Didn’t these old things have spare tires?” Laszlo asked.
“The cars that were maintained did. I’m not even going to bother looking. There won’t be one.”
Laszlo stepped back and studied the car. “Where would a spare be, if it had one?”
“In the rear compartment, under the floor.”
He went back to the rear and after a minute of fumbling, figured out how to open it. She heard him scrabbling in the back, as he lifted the flooring. Then he dropped the lid back down and walked back to where she was leaning against the car. He settled his rear on the hood next to her.
“Probably better to check, anyway,” Mariana told him.
He looked down the road. “We could walk, I suppose.”
Mariana shook her head. “Let’s just wait.”
“You really think someone is going to come along at one in the morning and give us a ride?”
“Someone will give us a ride, although we might have to wait a bit.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do, actually.”
He studied her, his profile in the dark once more which hid his reactions. “Okay, let’s wait then,” he said finally, in a way that told her the subject had only been put on hold, not dropped. “I don’t suppose you have any food in that carrysak you’ve got in the car?”
“When I left Rome, I thought I was going out for dinner.”
Laszlo snorted. “So did I.”
After an hour of listening to the jungle noises, Mariana found herself yawning hugely. Laszlo insisted she get back in the car and sleep. She refused for another thirty minutes, but she could feel her brain and body trying to shut down on her anyway. Reluctantly, she climbed onto the front seat and rested, using her carrysak as a pillow.
She was woken by Laszlo’s hand on her shoulder. He was reaching through the window. “There’s something coming,” he said.
It was daylight. A bright, early morning. She had slept for hours. “You should have woken me,” she chided him. “You must be exhausted.”
“I don’t like sleeping all that much,” he confessed, “and staying awake gives me more time to worry.”
She looked at him, startled, then her attention was drawn by the sound of an approaching vehicle. It sounded loud and big and lumbering. The vehicle that appeared around the curve matched the noise it was making. The bus looked nearly as ancient as the car they were leaning against. In the morning light filtering through the trees, Mariana could see that the bus was crowded, with luggage strapped to the roof and dogs hanging their heads out the windows.
The bus stopped next to them with a squeal of brakes and the door flipped open. The bus driver waved at them, a big smile on his face. He spoke in Portuguese.
“There’s our ride,” Mariana told Laszlo.
He was staring at the bus, his brows lifted. Then he looked at her darkly. “We need to talk a few things through,” he muttered and stepped up into the bus.
The driver spoke rapidly. At least, it sounded rapid to Mariana, but it wasn’t French or Patois. She stepped up behind Laszlo, who was watching the driver speak.
“Try French,” she suggested.
Laszlo said something. The driver shook his head, but a woman sitting on the front seat directly behind him leaned forward. “He wants you to buy a ticket. You need one to travel to Macapá.” Her Standard was slightly accented.
“How much?” Laszlo asked, reaching into his trouser pocket.
She spoke to the driver in Portuguese as Laszlo dug into the other pocket, a frown bringing his brows together.
“Son of a bitch!” Laszlo cried. He looked up at the roof of the bus and swore again.
“What’s wrong?” Mariana asked, although she already suspected what the matter was.
“Those kids at the village, on the truck. They stole my blasted cards. Everything. This is just perfect. Why did I think landing on that stupid beach was as bad as it could get?”
Mariana tried to hide her smile. Then she settled for not laughing. But it was too funny, too richly ironic. She clutched the bar in front of the windscreen to hold herself up and let the laugh loose. It came out loud and long and it felt good.
Every time she looked at Laszlo’s indignant face, the laughter rose up again.
The driver and the woman were both half-smiling, puzzled by her amusement.
Laszlo was watching her, just as puzzled, but he wasn’t smiling.
Mariana sighed and wiped her eyes of tears. “I’m so sorry,” she told him. “It’s just your face when you realized your wallet was gone. Of everything that has happened, you could have lost it over something way more serious, but some children picking your pockets is what did it.”
Laszlo rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not the kids,” he said roughly. “It’s—”
“Just the last straw,” she finished for him. She put her hand on his arm. “It’s okay. I have a card. Let me get the tickets.”
“They didn’t clean you out, too?”
“They took my wallet,” she said. “But I took all my ID
out before the truck stopped by.” She reached into the top of her dress and retrieved one of her cards from where it rested against her breast and held it out to the driver.
The driver and the woman had been watching their conversation with deep interest. The woman smiled as Mariana reached into her dress and the driver beamed when he saw the card. He picked a portable terminal up off the dash and processed her card, happy once more.
Mariana had no idea how much it would cost them and didn’t care. At this point in time, a few square feet of floor on this bus would be a pleasant luxury she was happy to pay over the odds for.
The driver gave her back her card. Mariana thanked him and looked down the length of the bus. Finding a seat was going to be next to impossible. “Come on,” she told Laszlo.
He gusted out a great breath, venting frustration and more and followed her along the corridor. It was slow going, for people were sitting three across on seats designed for only two, whole families seemed to be squeezed into a pair of seats, along with the family pets, with everyone talking loudly. From the glances they were getting, Mariana guessed that most of the conversations were about them.
She stopped three-quarters of the way down, by the back doors, which were closed. “This is as good as it’s going to get. Perhaps someone will get off, somewhere down the road.” She strung her carrysak over her head and one arm, so the opening was against her chest. It would be impossible for someone to get their hands inside it, there.
Laszlo grabbed the vertical rail above her hand. “At least this thing goes faster than that one.” He nodded toward the ancient wreck they were now passing as the bus began to roll.
They stood for a few minutes in silence and Mariana checked the passengers closest to them. They all looked like normal South Americans.
Laszlo leaned closer. “Figure anyone near us knows Standard?”
“Probably,” she told him. “It’s Standard for a reason.”
“Can I speak quietly?”
She barely heard him. “You’ll have to get closer,” she told him.
He grinned. “Damn, I should have thought of this hours and hours ago.” He leaned closer, lowering his head so that his lips were right by her ear. His hot breath fanned her flesh, making her shiver. “Tell me how you knew this bus was coming.”
Spartan Resistance Page 9
