by Tom Kratman
Carrera watched the Santandern approach. Odd, really; he doesn't look like a particularly bad sort. Just a regular working stiff, seems like. Maybe a little better fed and better dressed than most. Hmmm . . . who was that Old Earth philosopher who talked about "the banality of evil?" Maybe this one's a good husband and father? Oh, well; no matter.
The Santandern was a lawyer by the name of Guzman. Guzman officially worked for the former law firm of the rump President of Balboa, Rocaberti. Unofficially he thought of himself as the Counsel General of the Huánuco Processors, Shippers, and Vendors Free State. Guzman didn't much like what he did. He didn't even much like himself. But he had a family to support and debts to pay.
The lawyer looked Carrera over carefully as he approached his table. Another brainless soldier? he wondered. Corrupt? Somehow I think . . . not. Wordlessly, Carrera motioned for Guzman to sit. As the lawyer sat, he thought, Too dainty a hand to go with his reputation. A Napoleon, making up for a physical defect with aggression? Possibly.
Carrera brusquely asked, "Why are you here and what do you, or the people you represent, want?"
None of my contacts informed me that the bastard was rude, Guzman thought. Or maybe he doesn't think he is being rude. Be flexible.
Guzman decided to go directly to the point. "I am here to offer you . . . you and General Parilla, a substantial amount of money for you to stop hindering the people I represent."
"Indeed?" Carrera lifted an eyebrow. "Santander, Atzlan, or both?"
"Both, actually, although I normally answer to someone in Santander."
"And your offer . . . your principal's offer?"
A waitress approached. Guzman shut up and pretended to peruse his menu. "What's good?" he asked.
"Most anything, really," Carrera answered. "I'm having the corvina al ajillo."
Guzman closed his menu and said to the waitress, "That sounds fine."
The lawyer had come prepared to bargain. He began low. "Three million drachma per month, each, to you and General Parilla, for you to stop interfering with our business."
Carrera just laughed, surprisingly mildly. "You insult me, señor."
Well, thought the Santandern, that's a nice start. No screaming rage; just staking out a bargaining position.
"Very well, then. I'll double it to six million."
"I don't think so."
"Well what do you want?" Guzman asked.
"I want the shit kept out of Balboa and its territorial waters. Where it goes I couldn't care less about, as long as it doesn't come through here or to here. Moreover, I want you to get control of any, shall we say, 'random elements,' and force them to the same rule."
Guzman snorted. "You want us to take on the guerillas? That would be even more expensive than bribes. How about ten million? One hundred and twenty million a year."
The waitress returned, bearing their plates. These she set down in front of each man, the garlicky smell rising into their nostrils.
It's almost tempting, thought Carrera. Even Parilla might want go for it. We could buy a lot of training, a lot of equipment, and a lot of caring for our people with that much. But the cost is far too high. How many low level bureaucrats will be corrupted with bribes if we took them, even if we didn't keep them? How many soldiers and policemen will start getting in the habit of looking the other way? It isn't that I care a shit what happens to drug addicts in the Tauran Union or the Federated States, except insofar as I think the planet would be better off without them. I didn't care about them even before I came here. But this would be just a sort of moral disease in Balboa. Besides, even if I were whore, we'd still have to haggle over my price.
The lawyer tried hard to read Carrera's face. It was, after all, a good part of his job to read what people were thinking from their expressions. If I up it by another million or two now, he'll go for it.
Guzman decided on two. "Duque Carrera, for your cooperation I am prepared to offer you twelve million . . . each . . . every month . . . to both yourself and Presidente Parilla. Of course, for that amount, we would require a certain degree of active assistance."
Carrera frowned, shook his head, and answered, "Eat. Your food's getting cold."
Something in the tone suggested to Guzman the phrase, "And the condemned ate a hearty last meal." He suddenly lost his appetite, placing his knife and fork down on the plate with finality.
"Not hungry?" Carrera enquired, his voice full of false concern. "What a pity." Carrera beckoned to McNamara. The tall, slender, well aged black sergeant major took long strides to the table."
"Sergeant Major, Mr. Guzman seems to have lost his appetite. Arrest him, please, and deliver him to Legate Fernandez for questioning."
The Santandern immediately blanched.
McNamara hesitated, thinking, We just got him back. We've got him nicely cocooned in . . . well, for lack of a better term, "righteousness." It isn't worth throwing that away for whatever little advantage we might get from destroying this Santandern.
The sergeant major's expression must have told. Carrera asked, "You disapprove?"
"Sir . . . I t'ink t'at's a really bad idea. Sir, whet'er he represents an official country or not, he's still a diplomat. Wrong not to let him go, sir. Bad precedent. Even if he is a scum-sucking lawyer."
Carrera took in a half breath, then bit off a retort. If Mac says it's wrong, he thought, then there's a good chance that it's wrong. He rocked his head from side to side a few times in indecision. Finally he admitted, "I suppose you're right, Sergeant Major. Please escort Mr. Guzman to the airport; he has an airship to catch. And Mr. Guzman? Don't come back to Balboa uninvited; I won't be responsible for your safety. And tell your people to keep their shit out of my country."
On a whim, Carrera reached up and took from around his neck a golden crucifix on a chain. "Give this to your masters," he said, handing it to Guzman.
Belalcázar, Santander, Terra Nova
Even in an organization as egalitarian and non-traditional as the unofficially named "Huánuco Processors, Shippers, and Vendors Free State" there were some members who were a little more equal than others. Jorge Joven was one among them. Indeed, his only true peer in the organization was Pedro Estevez. It was Estevez whom Belisario Endara had dealt with in preparing a team to get rid of Parilla and Carrera. All three sat now, along with Guzman, in a secure room, heavily and not too tastefully decorated, in the basement of Joven's palatial, isolated mansion, in the hills overlooking the city.
"Son of a bitch," cursed Estevez. "Offer him money . . . a decent offer you said it was, right, Guzman?"
"Si, patron," the lawyer confirmed. "A huge amount, twelve million FSD monthly."
"And he won't take that? He's a mad dog, then, and mad dogs need shooting."
Endara sighed, conscious that he'd been doing a lot of that lately. "A mad dog he may be, Pedro, but he is more of a rabid mad dog. Very dangerous, too dangerous to fuck with lightly, as I have tried to explain to my uncle."
"That was my impression, Padron," Guzman confirmed to Estevez. "If his assistant hadn't talked him out of it, I'd be in prison now."
"Oh, no," Endara said. "I assure you, you would never have made it to prison." Endara's look grew contemplative. "You know, it's odd that he let you go. It's really not his style at all."
"So I gathered," the lawyer agreed. "Indeed, I am so sure I was within inches of doom that I've paid to have a special mass said for his tall black."
"Was that Jimenez or McNamara?" Endara asked.
"I don't know. He called the man 'sergeant major.' "
"Ah. That would be Sergeant Major General McNamara. Tough old man who manages to keep a very young and very beautiful wife very happy. He's one of the four or five people who actually have any personal control over Carrera."
"Well no one is going to need to control the son of a bitch once he's dead," Estevez said.
"I was rather hoping you would talk my uncle out of this," Endara said, shaking his head, "since he won't listen t
o me on the subject."
Estevez nodded, seriously, even judicially. "And so I would have if this man had not insulted me and mine," Escobedo's head tilted toward Joven, "by refusing our very generous offer."
At the word, "generous," Guzman remembered something. He bent over and reached into his briefcase and withdrew from it a golden crucifix on a chain. This he handed to Escobedo with the words, "Carrera said to give this to you."
"What?" Escobedo raged. "Is he trying to tell me to make my peace with God?"
"No . . . no," said Endara, who knew a great deal about Carrera. "I think Carrera meant something rather different."
Once Estevez and Joven had heard just what Endara thought Carrera had meant by sending a crucifix, both their anger and their intentions expanded radically.
Federated States Embassy, Ciudad Balboa
Ambassador Tom Wallis came around from behind his desk to shake Carrera's and Fernandez's hands, then McNamara's. He then gestured to introduce them to another man, this one with a plainly cultured tan, heavily muscled, blue eyed, blond, tall, and gringo. Sunglasses hung suavely from the gringo's pocket; and—to blend in with the locals—he wore a guayabera which successfully failed to hide a Bertinelli high-fashion holster.
"This is Mr. Keith, gentlemen," Wallis said.
"Gavin Keith," the gringo added.
Carrera disliked Keith instinctively. He thought of a piece of advice once given by a Federated States Marine Corps acquaintance on how to find a "Sea Lion," the FS Navy's underwater recon and demolitions commandos: "Go to the nearest high water mark and follow it until you come to the bodybuilder, laying in a lawn chair, catching rays, wearing sunglasses, and stylin' with an PM-6 submachine gun."
"You used to be a Sea Lion, didn't you?" Carrera asked, suppressing a smile.
"Team Six out of Big River," Keith answered. "How'd you know?"
"Just a lucky guess," Carrera answered.
If Keith suspected that he was somehow the butt of a private joke, his self image couldn't permit further inquiry.
Wallis also suspected that some sort of criticism had been passed. He decided to change the subject. "Mr. Keith's organization has some information that might be useful to you. In fact, it might be critical."
"What's that?" Carrera asked. "And what organization?" Who knows; maybe the muscles haven't cut off the blood supply to the brain in this case.
"I'm with DITF," Keith answered, "the Drug Interdiction Task Force. We've got people inside the Belalcázar organization. We think you're going to get hit, soon and hard."
Carrera raised an eyebrow. "Do you mean me, personally, or do you mean my family and friends? Or Balboa, generally?"
"All of the above," Keith answered. "We've got no details, not yet, anyway. We're working on it. There is one thing, though . . ."
"Yes?"
"They've got shoulder fired surface to air missiles available. If I were you I wouldn't take any aircraft anywhere anytime soon."
Fernandez frowned, nodded, and then admitted, "I've got nothing, no sources whatsoever, among the narcotraffickers, Patricio. Only when we grab one . . . and this report of light SAMs sounds . . . plausible, certainly.
"Is it just the Santander people or is Atzlan involved, too?" Fernandez asked.
"Atzlan is . . . interested," Keith said, "but, so far as we can tell, not involved. They're on the other side of the supply chain. What you're doing here doesn't affect them that much, if at all."
And it doesn't hurt, thought Fernandez, that I had my wet work people, especially Khalid, exterminate one group of the bastards some time ago. Hmmm. Maybe it's time to put Khalid back to work again; he's my best. But in Santander this time.
Hmmm. Wet work? Have to work on Patricio myself to get him to agree, these days.
Police Headquarters, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa
The afternoon sun cast long shadows from the trees lining the main thoroughfare on both sides. Striped by those shadows, a dirty white van, old and badly used, pulled into a parking space next to the former headquarters for the Transitway Area Police. The building itself, less than forty feet from where the van parked, was a one story, light brown painted, stucco structure. A group of policemen and women, numbering perhaps twenty-five, stood on the grass fronting the building. Another police officer, this one wearing sergeant's stripes, read aloud from his clipboard the duty instructions for the night shift.
A young police officer, Emilio Alvarez, half ran from a side door of the police station to his car parked a few hundred meters away, opposite the Balboa Knights of Pius V hall. As he passed, Alvarez took little notice of the t-shirted passenger exiting the van. Like all new members of the police force inducted of late, Alvarez was a member of the Reserves, in his case of the 10th Infantry Tercio. He hastily tucked a fatigue shirt in as he rushed to be on time for his weekend drill.
Amidst a cacophony of fruitlessly honking horns and mostly good-natured cursing, Alvarez crossed the street, weaving his way through crawling "rush hour" traffic. On reaching his automobile, he bent slightly to unlock the door. Opening the door, he looked up to see two men, one of whom he thought he had just seen getting out of a white van, cross the street at a very fast walk. The men broke into a fast run.
Afterwards, Alvarez was to remember everything which followed in remarkable detail: the approach of two running men toward his car, the way the desk sergeant turned to look at the van, the small puff of smoke that escaped from underneath it, the blinding flash, and then the bodies—and parts of bodies—of the night shift being smashed into the crumbling wall of the police station.
Alvarez was thrown to the ground by the blast. He rolled over to his belly and then arose to all fours. Paying no attention to the cuts on his face and—where his own car's windows had shattered—his chest, Alvarez drew his sidearm and rushed into the street. Now he really did notice the two men, one in a dirty white t-shirt, the other in a cheap looking guayabera, that arose from the asphalt, swearing about something. Whatever it was they were cursing, Alvarez was too deafened by the blast to hear. It didn't matter.
One of the two bombers, the one in the guayabera, began to reach under his shirt for a gun. Alvarez quickly took a firing stance. The gunman put both his hands into the air, followed by his companion a moment later.
A female Tauran Union corporal, Gallic by birth, and shapely enough even through her battledress, had also survived the blast. She rushed over to where Alvarez had the two bombers covered. Seeing another uniform, Alvarez beckoned the corporal over with one hand, the other keeping the pistol steady-aimed on the bombers. He handed over his pistol and said, "Watch these two. Kill them if they make a move."
The languages were just close enough. The Gallic corporal nodded, angrily, then took the pistol and held it on the bombers. Alvarez raced for the ruins of the police station. On the way he passed dozens of dead; men, women, and children. Still others cried or screamed. He left those for what aid the other survivors could give them. He had to get to the police station.
When he reached the smoking yard in front of the station, Alvarez began to throw up. He had seen dead people before, but never so many in one place, never so many so completely ruined. Fighting his nausea, Alvarez returned to the wounded on the streets. There he could still do some good.
Estado Major, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
As reports rushed in—a bombing in Cristobal, another two in Ciudad Balboa, a fifth in Ciudad Cervantes to the east—Fernandez gently held a framed portrait of his daughter, his only child, killed years before by a terrorist's bomb.
What a terrible world we live in, child. I would have thought—though I should not have thought it—that those days were past. Silly me.
The reports of casualties were fragmentary, at best. Even so, there were well over a hundred known dead, and possibly as many as twice that. Of wounded there may have been a thousand. Among the dead were half a dozen elderly tourists from the Federated States, killed while dining at a small and quaint resta
urant overlooking the sea. This, of course, had the Federated States enraged.
Fernandez placed the portrait back down on his desk, then stood. His normally ferret-like face twisted into a hate-filled sneer. "Revenge," he said aloud, then repeated, "Revenge."
Casa Linda, Balboa, Terra Nova
The boy stood in front of his father's grand desk, hands clutched behind his back and head thrust forward. A sea breeze wafted through the window, bringing with it the not unpleasant aroma of the salt sea to the north. Outside birds chirped in the trees below the balcony. Closer still, on that balcony, a half dozen trixies, plus one, took turns grooming each other.
"What now, Dad?" Hamilcar asked.
"Now we bring the war to them in ways they probably never even imagined," Carrera answered.
The boy frowned, slightly. "Did you know this would happen?" he asked.
Carrera sighed, chewing his lower lip and looking up towards the ceiling of his office. His face scrunched of its own accord. "I knew something like this would happen. That's not really your question though, is it?"
The boy shook his head. "No. I really want to know why it's worth it."
"It's complex," Carrera said. The boy looked directly at his father as if to ask, Do you think I'm not bright enough, even at nine years old, to understand?
The father understood the unstated question. "All right, then," he said. "We are going to war with the Taurans in anywhere from one to three years. We can win that war, provided the Federated States stays at least neutral. To make them stay neutral, we have to deal with their concerns. Of those, a big one is the drug trade."
"But you've told me before that that problem is entirely of their own making, entirely their own fault."
