Beluga Fay (Dragon Bone Hill) (27 page)

“But they do not have the ability to hurt a large number of people.” Leaning back in his seat, Pym looked at her and wondered whether restraint would be of any use here. Whether or not it would, he chose to forge ahead.

Choose? There is room for doubt as to whether this was a rational rather than an emotional response. Whatever the case, it came spilling out of him. “It is extremely doubtful whether or not you and yours have the ability to do much more than to flop about on your bedroom floors refusing to go to sleep.”

She lowered her menu stared at him. “What,” ice in the voice, “do you mean by that?”

“You could turn me over to your father and maybe buy yourself some more time.” He was in it now—even if he had wanted to, there’d be no turning back.

“I would...”

“That’s what you’ve been saying to me since we’ve met today—it’s been implicit in your litany of fears and concerns for your family. Well, if you were to hand me over, they’d find out everything I knew. However, what if you had me assassinated—I
know
the idea has occurred to you and yours. Then you had better hope you were successful—if you weren’t, I’d know I’m not getting out and would turn your plan over to Salazar. If you were successful in assassinating me, then how would you get past Torres? Do you know all the elements of the plan I do? Let’s face it; we are stuck with each other. I need you and your contacts; you need me and my ability to deal with Torres. Then there is what will happen on the other side of the Wall when you are all being hunted.”

“You too,” the woman’s voice hard, but near to breaking.

“Who knows of me? Who knows who I really am? Descriptions are vague and no real facts are known—not even by you.” Pym had gone a lot harder than he’d intended and tried to dial the edge in his voice back. Even as he had decided to do this, the first tear rolled from the inside of her left eye.

“I,” with a napkin to this, “never meant to threaten you.” There was no sense, at this time, in pretense any longer.

“You can dry your eyes—I’ve seen enough to know this is not you.”

She looked at him a long shocked moment and dropped the napkin beside her wine glass. “What now?” The frigidity in the voice triggered a tremor in the man’s coccyx.

“Just know that there are few outcomes which would be favorable to you and unfavorable to me—I may end up dead but so would you, or exposed at the very least.”

“So,” voice easing as though it realized how much it had just laid bare, “what do you need from us?”

“Be aware we need each other and will only get out if we work together. An adversarial relationship will only place us in a position in which we will all lose—if not lose, then it will seriously impede our success.”

“Our situation in Makati is becoming desperate—father is being investigated, my brother’s company is being investigated, and it will be only a matter of time before I will be investigated. We need to act quickly.”

“I realize that and am moving as fast as possible. For the moment, it appears we are at the last hurdle—it is just a matter of Colonel Torres finding a time that will be workable for those on the Wall, and perhaps the Federals.”

“Why the Federals?”

“There will be oversight the Colonel will have to deal with. I am not certain how much there will be, but it will be there.”

Glenna nodded and turned back to her menu. “Please, do not take too much longer. I know you have little, if any, control over the schedule, but you will have to find some. My people and I are exposed; that makes all of us nervous and seeking whatever we may to mitigate our situation if we are revealed to the Salazar government. You must understand this.”

“I do.” Pym understood her anxiety and that the woman had to keep the spoiled and privileged children of officials, industrialists, and old money feeling as safe as houses. This wouldn’t work—everything about the Wall screamed high risk. That risk, if extended longer than necessary, would destroy their resolve.

Titus supposed that part of what was being communicated here was the cabal’s fracturing nerve. Take much longer and this would implode. Not just that of Glenna and Chrislann, but all the others—which should he fear more? To Pym’s mind, the weakest link he was aware of was Chrislann—after the beating he took from Tomás’s men, he was never around. This suggested both fear and humiliation. Of the two, humiliation would be the most dangerous—but for whom? Certainly there would be hatred for Titus; Pym knew this, having witnessed the beating Glenna’s brother took, Chrislann would have lost, in his own mind if nowhere else, the respect and deference his position would normally trigger in all about him. Then there would have been his impotent rage concerning both Tomás and his guards. Chrislann was the most dangerous. Yet, Glenna could be far more so. She was intelligent, devious, calculating, immoral, and hard. Titus feared the woman far more than her brother. The others remained beyond his experience, but that did not mean he should ignore them.

The whole affair needed concluding, and quickly.

The meal, after the position of each had been made plain, continued pleasantly enough. Conversation veered away from the fears of Glenna and her group and toward more general comments on the quality of the chicken, the salad, and the agricultural plots north of the marina and how they’d turned some of the multi-storied buildings into greenhouses. They experimented with this in the past, before the Sweats, but then entrepreneurs had been experimenting with flowers the sub-tropical climate was unable to support. It had been a small success, but mostly with the residents of Makati. The cost of the flowers was such that only the rich and corporations could afford them.

Once the Sweats hit, the entrepreneurs, not managing to get out in time, had turned their spirit of innovation and greed to a more practical purpose. From this emerged the agricultural zone. Though the innovation rewarded them with a situation in Makati, their greed was not adequately slaked. The general rumor was that they had attempted to get more out of the zone than the government had been willing to part with, and the end result was that they remained a disgruntled, though important, minority in the city’s state economy. As long as the Wall remained intact and Salazar remained in power, they would have no recourse. This in itself made them dangerous—where both the Wall and the government prevented them from escape and a fair compensation for their efforts. Still, they had no power—power in the sense as it had become understood since the Sweats appeared.

Soft power, attraction, and co-opting, was replaced by coercion in little more than a political heartbeat. They should have seen this coming from a mile off, but it wasn’t seen; wasn’t predicted; wasn’t, even supposed. Pym had considered the possibility of leveraging the entrepreneurial classes when he’d first entered the Beluga Fay, but then he’d met up with Glenna Budiman and her band of sycophantic narcissists. If he didn’t trust her, though sometime Titus was almost prepared to, he didn’t know what to make of these. They wanted out, but they weren’t prepared to risk themselves and their comfort to any serious degree. What didn’t make sense to him was what they’d expected to find beyond the Wall. There was no talking to them, not even Glenna had had much success. What the woman used to keep them in line, he was guessing, was fear and coercion. Seemed she learned a great deal from Henry Salazar.

Eventually, with the meal in ruins, they had to decide what to do next. Titus had promised to take her to Makati, but after the confrontation over lunch, getting any closer to the Makati gates than was necessary seemed out of the question. This hadn’t put the woman’s mind at ease or blessed her with an easy manner. In the end, Pym and Glenna agreed that he would take her as far as one of the surrey taxis. These had sprung up first in the upper middle-class districts north of Makati then made their way west toward the Timog districts and environs. Once fuel rationing infiltrated the surrounding districts of Makati, they became almost sheik. Some were simple conversions of the horseless carriage and back to a horse drawn one. Others had taken their inspiration from the American surrey designs of the Nineteenth Century.

Glenna was looking for one of these when the first of the police patrols crossed the intersection north of them. With the police presence, both withdrew to Pym’s car. Titus wanted to go back because he was afraid what Glenna might do caught between the two of them, and Glenna—or so she said—was afraid what they might do if caught in Pym’s presence. It wasn’t that any had a clear idea of what he looked like, but her father was under investigation and, by extension, this meant her as well. Titus would raise eyebrows because he wasn’t part of Makati and had no ID papers that would stand up to serious investigation. So meeting up with the police would not be useful and could only trigger an event that would expose both of them.

Back in the car, they withdrew south, until there was what appeared to be a Militia/Military column. Swinging southwest and away from this, the pair got as far as the northern tip of the agricultural zone before they felt safe enough to find an abandoned house to holdup in. There weren’t too many of these between the zone and Makati, but there were a few. Normally these had For-Sale signs planted in their front yards—mostly stone gardens. It took a few of these before Titus was certain enough of the subterfuge that he was prepared to stash the car in the garage and hide, with Glenna, in the house.

“I’m sorry,” she said, nervously staring out between the slats of the closed blinds, “I didn’t think they’d be so close.”

“We both should have known they were there. Truth is we probably would not have been stopped. All you’d have needed to do was smile and they’d know you—then we could have moved along.”

“Maybe, but things are tense now.”

“Let’s stay here until dusk, then we can slip back north—I’ll get you back to the restaurant, and you can get a surrey from there.”

“Yes, or I can get Chrislann to pick me up.”

“The phones still work up there?” Pym was a little surprised.

“Yes—at least in the restaurants.”

“What’s that smell?” Titus asked.

“Oh, that’s the sea and the agri-zone. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Combination of salt and shit.”

“Literally. I’m told they use human waste as fertilizer. More animal now that we’ve taken on horses, cattle, and oxen, but still a great deal of human.”

“Gives Salazar something to do with much of the waste the new economy has been producing.”

“Some, but much of the waste is produced in areas it is not safe to collect it from. For the moment, they are focusing on Makati and the surrounding districts and the agri-zone. Since you took the southern fish markets, they have put all of their resources into protecting these areas and their food resources.” Pym would not have minded getting his hands on both the agri-zone and the cattle and oxen. Seafood got the job done, but he continued to lust after red meat.

Still, Pym was not about to risk his new found stability in order to feed a craving. As they waited, the couple found the bedroom still had a stripped down queen and used this to good effect. It was an interesting encounter since both were angry with the other and neither, as far as Pym could tell, trusted the other. After the third time, anger, it seemed to Pym, had its value. The sun was beginning to grab the western horizon, and they headed north again. Even now, many of the columns did not patrol the outer districts unless they moved in force. The time between dusk and evening is when they re-equipped and ate before coming out in heavily armed columns for the evening patrols.

Because of this, Pym could get Glenna back up to the restaurant and find her a surrey that would take her as far as the South gate. The parting was visibly warm, but beneath this was a calculating coolness on the part of both. He tried to find a point of rapprochement, but there was something about her acceptance of this that suggested she was less interested in it than in finding some way, some time to feed the man to her rage. Still, they needed each other, and that was more important, he hoped, than getting her own back.

He hoped.

Days folded into weeks and nothing happened. Nothing happened relative to the Wall. Beyond this, a great deal was happening. The Sweats had broken out of the districts south of the New Industrial Zone—southwest of Makati and directly east of the former Federal buildings—the capital and the president’s official residence. For the most part, the president did not live there—the city, officially the capital, had never been a healthy place. Historically it had been malaria that had been the greatest killer, but the capital, the oldest city in the country, had been the seat of more epidemics than it had been of political power. Because of this, when the Diet was not sitting, the president, Cabinet, and Assembly would disperse to their hereditary seats.