A soft snarling, out across the water.

‘Boat coming,’ said Lopez.

The vessel came into view around a forested headland, raising a bow wave to match the noise of its engines. It was a big, navy-grey vessel, built for speed and, judging by the twinned machine guns mounted behind an impact-glass cupola on the foredeck, for assault. A flag flapped at the stern, white design on a green background. Lopez breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it.

‘Turtle patrol,’ he said.

The powerboat slowed and settled in the water as the motors cut to an idle. It nosed into the jetty and someone dressed in khakis came up on the foredeck. Yells in Spanish. Lopez responded. The deckhand gathered up a line and jumped blithely to the jetty with it. He landed with a practised flex in the legs. A woman, similarly attired, came and leaned on the machine-gun cupola, staring at them. Chris felt caution creep through him.

‘You’re armed too, right?’ he muttered to Lopez.

‘Sure. But these are turtle guys, they aren’t—‘

The next man off the boat wore the same army fatigues and had a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He passed Chris without a glance, ambled up to Lopez and rapped out something in Spanish. When he got the answer, he disappeared into the shack behind them. Chris looked at the water on the other side of the jetty and wondered how deep it was. He’d want a good half metre over his head to be sure of not getting shot. The Smith and Wesson Lopez had lent him was apparently guaranteed to fire wet, but against assault rifles—

Let’s face it, Chris, you wouldn’t last five minutes. This isn’t a Tony Carpenter flick.

‘Senor Faulkner?’

He jerked back to the boat. Another khaki-clad figure had joined the woman on the foredeck. As the man vaulted to the jetty, Chris caught up with the voice. It was Barranco.

It was the same weathered set of features Chris remembered from the HM meeting just over a year ago - a face darkened by sun and altitude, broad across the cheekbones, chipped with the blue of eyes tossed into the gene pool by some European colonist decades or centuries absorbed. The same close-cropped greying hair, the same height and length of limb as Barranco moved to greet him. The same calloused grip, the same search in the eyes when you got up close. It was a gaze that belonged on the bridge of some warship from the last century, or maybe the last of the pirate trawlers, scanning the grey horizon for signs.

‘Senor Faulkner. I remember you now, from the Hammett McColl “mission. The man with the laptop. You were very quiet then.’

‘I came to listen.’ Chris reached into his jacket. ‘This time I—‘

‘Very easy, please.’ Barranco raised his own hands. ‘My companions are a little nervous this far from home, and it wouldn’t do to let them think you’re planning to use that badly concealed gun in your belt.’

He gestured in turn at the woman by the cupola and the first deckhand ashore, who now straightened from the mooring iron with a pistol gripped in one fist. Chris heard the snap of a weapon being cocked, looked back at the shack and saw the man with the assault rifle emerge from the building again, weapon cradled at his hip.

‘So,’ said Barranco. ‘Welcome again to Latin America.’

The interior of the shack was equipped with basic facilities - a toilet behind a wall of plastic partitioning, a tiny stove in a corner and an ancient wooden table two metres long, scarred with decades of use and carved with what looked like whole generations of grafitti. A half dozen tired-looking plastic moulded chairs were gathered around the table — Chris’s choice from among the untidy pile they’d found behind the shack when they arrived. Hardly Shorn conference standard. The windows were small and liberally grimed, but bulbs from an aqualight system hung suspended at intervals in the roof space and the long uptake taper was still intact, dangling down through a crudely bored hole in the floorboards and into the water below the pilings. Chris had tested the system earlier and the taper was well soaked. Now he flipped the wall switch and gentle light sprang up in three out of the five bulbs.

Barranco glanced around the shack and nodded.

‘Well, it’s not the Panama Hilton,’ he said. ‘But then, I suppose I am not Luis Montoya.’

It seemed to require a reaction. Chris tried a chuckle and gestured towards the table. ‘Please sit down, Senor Barranco. I’m afraid our concern so far has been security rather than comfort. Outside of one or two deluded drug enforcement diehards, Luis Montoya has no real enemies in the Americas. You, unfortunately, have many.’

‘A problem you are offering to solve for me, no?’ Barranco did not sit down. Instead, he nodded at his own security, two of whom had followed him in. Without a word, they moved to positions at the windows and took up an at-ease stance that fooled no one. Neither of them spared Chris more than a glance, and that filled with easy contempt.

Chris walked to the table and pulled out the chair for Barranco.

‘I’m sure that, given time and a little luck, a man such as yourself is probably capable of solving the problem without any help from men like me. Given time and luck. Please. Have a seat.’

Barranco didn’t move. ‘I am not susceptible to flattery.’

Chris shrugged and took the seat for himself. ‘I didn’t think you were. I was making a statement of fact. I believe, which is to say we, my colleagues at Shorn and I, believe you are capable of resolving a number of the issues facing Colombia at present. That is why I am here. This visit is a demonstration of our faith in you.’

It brought Barranco to the table, slowly.

‘You call it Colombia,’ he said. ‘Is that how your colleagues refer to it in London?’

‘No, of course not.’ Chris brushed at the table top and held up his hands, seeking the gaze of Barranco’s security before he reached slowly into his jacket and brought out the folded laptop. He thought he made it look pretty cool, considering. ‘We call it the North Andean Monitored Economy, as I’m sure you’re aware. As I’m also sure you’re aware, we are hardly alone in this.’

‘No.’ There was a flat bitterness in the words. Barranco’s hands had fallen on the back of the chair opposite Chris. ‘You are not. The whole world calls us that way. Only that son of a whore in Bogota uses the name Colombia, as if we were still a nation.’

‘Hernan Echevarria,’ said Chris softly, ‘milks the patriotism of his countrymen to shore up a regime that rewards the top five per cent of the country with riches and keeps the remainder with their faces in the dirt. You do not need me to tell you this. But I think you need me to help you do something about it.’

‘How quickly we move.’ There was a look on Barranco’s face, as if he could smell something bad seeping through the plastic partition from the toilet. ‘How quickly, from flattery to bribery. Did you not say that a man such as myself could resolve—‘

‘Given. Time.’ Chris locked gazes, made sure he’d stopped the other man, then set placidly about unfolding the laptop. ‘I said, given time. And given luck. And I said “probably”.’

‘I see.’ Chris wasn’t looking at him, but Barranco sounded as if he was smiling. How quickly we move. From a sneer to a smile. But he didn’t look up yet. The laptop was heavily creased in a couple of places and it was taking a while to warm up. He busied himself with flattening out the screen. He heard the chair opposite him scrape out. Heard it take Barranco’s weight.

The screen lit with a map of the Monitored Economy.

Chris looked up and smiled.

Later, with the numbers wrung out to dry, they walked out along the jetty and stood at the end, watching the weather. To the east, the sky was clearing in patches.

‘Smoke?’ Barranco asked him.

‘Yeah, thanks.’ Chris took the proffered packet and shook out a crumpled cylinder. Barranco lit it for him from a battered silver petrol lighter that bore engraving in Cyrillic around a skull and cross bones and the date 2007. Chris drew deep and promptly coughed himself to tears on the smoke.