‘Whoh.’ He took the cigarette out of his mouth and blinked at it. ‘Where’d you get these?’

‘A shop you haven’t been to.’ Barranco pointed what looked like southwest. ‘Seven hundred kilometres from here, up in the mountains. It’s run by an old woman who remembers the day Echevarria took power. She won’t sell American brands. It’s black tobacco.’

‘Yeah, I noticed.’ Chris took another, more cautious draw on the cigarette and felt it bite in his lungs. He gestured. ‘And the lighter? Military issue, right?’

‘Wrong.’ Barranco held up the lighter again, rubbing a finger back and forth across the Cyrillic characters. ‘Advertising. It says Death Cigarettes - too bad you’re going to die. But it’s a, what do you call it in English, a knock-out? An illegal copy?’

‘Knock-off.’

‘Yes, a knock-off. Some crazy English guy back in the last century, he actually made cigarettes with that name.’

‘Doesn’t sound too smart.’

Barranco turned and breathed smoke at him. ‘At least he was honest.’

Chris let that one sit for a while. Barranco wandered the width of the jetty, smoking, waiting him out.

‘I think you should come to London, Senor Barranco. You need—‘

‘Are your parents alive, Senor Faulkner?’

It stabbed him through, punctured the slowly inflating sense of a deal done that was filling him up.

‘No.’

‘Do you remember them?’

He shot a glance across at the face of the man beside him, and knew this was not negotiable. This was required.

‘My father died when I was young,’ he said, surprised at how easy it had become to say it. ‘I don’t remember him well. My mother died later, when I was in my teens. Of thorn fever.’

Barranco’s eyes narrowed. ‘What is that? Thorn fever.’

Chris smoked for a moment, checking his memories for leakage before he answered. He thought he had it locked down.

‘It’s a TB variant. One of the antibiotic-resistant strains. We lived in the zones, what you’d call the favelas, and there’s a lot of it there. She couldn’t afford the smart drugs, no one there can, so she just took basic ABs until she collapsed. No one’s sure what killed her in the end, the thorn fever or something else her immune system was too wasted to cope with. It took—‘

He didn’t have it locked down. He looked away.

‘I am sorry,’ said Barranco.

‘It,’ Chris swallowed. ‘Thanks, it’s okay. It was a long time ago.’

He drew on the cigarette again, grimaced suddenly and flung it away from him into the water. He pressed the back of his index finger against his eyes, one by one, and looked at the scant streaks of moisture they left.

‘My mother was taken away,’ said Barranco from behind him. ‘In the night, by soldiers. It was common at the time. I too was in my teens. My father had long ago left us, and I was out, at a political meeting. Perhaps it was me they came for. But they took her instead.’

Chris knew. He’d read the file.

‘They raped her. Echevarria’s men. They tortured her for days, with electricity and with a broken bottle. And then they shot her in the face and left her to die on a rubbish tip at the edge of town. A doctor from La Amnestia told me they think it took her about two hours.’

Chris would have said sorry, but the word seemed broken, drained of useful content.

‘Do you understand why I am fighting, Senor Faulkner? Why I have been fighting for the last twenty years?’

Chris shook his head, wordless. He turned to face Barranco, and saw that the other man had no more emotion on his face than he’d shown when they were discussing cigarettes.

‘You don’t understand, Senor Faulkner?’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Well, I cannot blame you. Sometimes, neither do I. Some days, it makes more sense to take my Kalashnikov, walk into any police station or barracks bar and kill everything that wears a uniform. But I know that behind those men are others who wear no uniform, so I change this plan, and I begin to think that I should do the same thing with a government building. But then I remember that these people in turn are only the front for an entire class of landowning families and financiers who call themselves my compatriots. My head spins with new targets.’ Barranco gestured. ‘Banks. Ranches. Gated suburbs. The numbers for slaughter rise like a lottery total. And then I remember that Hernan Echevarria would not have lasted a year in power, not a single year, if he had not had support from Washington and New York.’ He raised a finger and pointed at Chris. ‘And London. Are you sure, Senor Faulkner, that you want me in your capital city?’

Chris, still busy hauling back in the emotional canvas, mustered a shrug of his own. His voice rasped a little in his throat.

‘I’ll take the chance.’

‘Brave man.’ Barranco finished his own cigarette and pinched it out between finger and thumb. ‘I suppose. A brave man, or a gambler. Which should I call you?’

‘Call me a judge of character. I think you’re smart enough to be trusted.’

‘I’m flattered. And your colleagues?’

‘My colleagues will listen to me. This is what I get paid for.’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

Chris caught the drip of it in Barranco’s voice, the same thing he’d seen in the other marquistas’ eyes in the shack.

fuck

He’d overplayed it, too much macho boardroom acceleration coming off the emotional bend. He was leaning in for damage limitation, but what he wanted to say twisted loose on its way out. Aghast, he heard himself telling the truth, raw.

‘What have you got to lose? You’re in shit-poor shape, Vicente. We both know that. Backed up in the mountains, outgunned, living on rhetoric. If Echevarria comes for you now, the way he did for Diaz, you’re history. Like Marcos, like Guevara. A beautiful legend and a fucking T-shirt. Is that what you want? All those people in the NAME, going through what your mother went through, what good are you to them like that?’

For a moment that froze as the last word left his mouth, he imagined the world caving in around him with the deal. Barranco’s eyes hardened, his stance tightened. Telegraphed so clear it sent the security guard on the patrol boat’s deck smoothly to her feet. An assault rifle hefted. Chris’s breath stopped.

‘I mean—‘

‘I know what you mean.’ Barranco’s posture relaxed first. He turned to the woman on the boat and made a sign. She sank back to her seat. When he turned back, something had changed in his face. ‘I know what you mean, because this is the first time you’ve come out and said it. You can’t imagine how much of a relief that is, Chris Faulkner. You can’t imagine how little all your numbers have meant to me without some sign that you have a soul.’

Chris breathed again. ‘You should have asked.’

‘Asked if you had a soul?’ There wasn’t much humour in Barranco’s parched laugh. ‘Is that a question that can be asked in London? When I am seated around the table with your colleagues, discussing what slices of my country’s GDP I must offer up to gain their support. What crops my people must grow while their own children starve, what essential medical services they must learn to live without. Will I ask them where they keep their souls then, Senor Faulkner?’

‘I wouldn’t advise it, no.’

‘No. Then what would you advise?’

Chris weighed it up—

fuck it, it’s worked so far

         and told the unbandaged truth again.

‘I’d advise you to get what you can from them with as little commitment on your side as possible. Because that’s what they’ll be doing to you. Leave yourself escape clauses, remember, nothing’s ever written in stone. Everything can be renegotiated, if you can make it worth their while.’

A pause. Barranco laughed again, warmth leaking into the sound this time. He offered the cigarettes again, lit them both with the Russian knock-off.

‘Good advice, my friend,’ he said through the smoke. ‘Good advice. I think I would hire you as an adviser, if I could afford you.’