flanked each craft, like twin torpedoes wrapped in skin. Ricos carried the metal containers back to the Cadillac, stacking them by the rear bumper as Conover got in.
Jonny nodded at the brick. 'Real cocaine?' he asked.
'Theoretically.'
'That's an awful lot.'
'You would think so, wouldn't you?' The smuggler lord pushed some bottles out of the way, and set the brick on the traveling bar.
With his thumb nail, he gouged a hole in the plastic. He touched the finger to his tongue ad grunted, motioning for Jonny to have a taste.
Wetting the end of his middle finger, Jonny touched it to the pile.
'What's wrong?' he asked, putting the finger gingerly to his tongue.
'You tell me,' said Conover as he spooned a small portion of the powder into a test tube half-filled with a clear fluid. Swirling the mixture together, the smuggler lord fastened the test tube into the twin metal receptacles on the front of the compound analyzer. He punched a switch and a beam of pale laser light lit up the sample from the inside.
Jonny found the taste of the powder to be odd. Alkaloid bitterness, with a sweet after-taste. There was a thickness and a graininess that was wrong.
'Feel anything?' asked Conover.
'Nothing,' said Jonny. 'They've cut the hell out of it.'
Conover said 'Show,' to the PC and the terminal's screen lit up with the rainbow-bar that was a spectrographic read-out of the contents of the test tube. A list of chemicals and percentages to five decimals places was displayed on one side of the screen. The smuggler lord snorted and snatched up the brick, spilling white grains onto the seat.
'Good god,' Conover said. Milk powder, sugar and probably baking soda. 'Christ, you could bake a cake with this stuff. It's been cut, recut, and cut again. These lads have probably selling my drugs to freelancers all the way up the coast and filling in the weight with whatever was at hand.' He shook his head sadly. 'These people think because they have that gun boat they're immune.' He tossed the brick onto the bar.
Something occurred to Jonny then. 'You gave it to them, didn't you?' he said.
'Gave them what, dear boy?'
'The transmitter. You put it in the box with the money, didn't you?'
Conover smiled, removed a cigarette from his case, and lit it. After bringing the last two boxes to the car, Ricos got in the front seat.
'I consider it a fair exchange. Loaded money for loaded coke,' he said, chuckling. 'The hormones and the retinas?' he asked. Ricos shook his head.
'Paralizados. Look like they break the seal and go poking inside. Es all spoiled.'
The smuggler lord nodded. 'Let this be a lesson to you, Jonny: there are always going to be assholes. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you have to be on guard. If you're not, the fools and the tiny minds of this world will drag you right down into the gutter with them.'
Jonny leaned back in the seat and felt a slight tingling begin on the end of his tongue. 'It was not much, though. You think Zamora will go after them?' he asked.
'Why not? That was a nice piece of hardware we dug out of your shoulder. Hitachi, military issue. VHF for short-range monitoring and neutrino broadcasting for long-range. The Colonel has no way of knowing you're not international. He thinks you're buying dope from moon men, remember?'
Jonny made a face at that. 'This whole set-up was very-professional of you.'
Conover looked at him curiously, one hand toying with the rip in the white brick. 'You find my methods uncouth? Maybe you'd be happier if the Colonel followed us back to my place. That would end the party pretty quickly, wouldn't it?'
'Let's say I'm a little disillusioned, how's that? I mean, I was kind of under the impression that the people running dope were on our side, you know?' Jonny bit the end of his tongue to see if it was numb yet. It was not. 'Pretty stupid, right? You don't have to explain it to me. I know how the song goes: it's all economics. It always is.'
The smuggler lord picked up the brick and held it before Jonny.
'Get place and wealth, if possible with grace; if not, by any means get wealth and place.' Alexander Pope. 'It's the algebra of need, son. As long as the need exists, somebody is going to service it and take advantage of it, like those gentlemen from the Sangre Christi. They understood, or did until they got greedy. It's mother's milk- consumerism- the Big Teat. The trouble with you, Jonny, is that you're in business, but you're not a business man.'
Conover opened his door and turned the white brick upside down, dumping its contents into the sand. In business, sometimes you've got to take a loss in order to make a gain.
'I'll try to remember that,' said Jonny.
'It would do you well.'
Ricos shivered in the front seat. Conover found a bottle of aguardiente, and poured him a glass. Soon, the driver returned, wearing a dun-colored windbreaker and heavy pair of night vision goggles. He was carrying a shoulder-held Arab mini-gun, its twelve massive barrels running with condensed mist. Conover explained that the man had been hiding in the dunes some distance away waiting for the jetfoil to pull out. After the driver stowed the gun in the trunk (scattering the ruined hormones and retinas on the beach for the gulls) Conover gave him a drink and told him to take them home.
SEVEN
They drove in silence. Jonny dozed in the back, waking every few minutes when the Cadillac would hit a patch of broken concrete, causing the car to shake violently. Then he would look out the window and see hillsides covered with brightly-colored fabric or a group of chrome palm trees constructed from stolen jet engines and lengths of industrial piping. A gift from the Croakers, he thought, giving the finger to the world. Closer to the city were squatter camps, long walls of corrugated tin and dismantled billboards. Jonny could make out a word here, a face there. A woman's eye. FLY. EAT. The curve of a hip. LOVE.
Just outside Hollywood, they turned off the ruined freeway and drove through an old suburban sector before starting a steep climb into the hills.
The driver switched off the carbon arcs on the roof and skull-plugged into an infrared array set into the car's headlight housings.
The only light visible to Jonny was the pale green mercury vapor glow of the suburbs and the jittery firefly of Conover's cigarette.
They passed through tunnels of rotted concrete where fungus padded the walls. Even with the air conditioner on full blast, there was a strong smell of decomposing vegetation. Outlines of burned-out cars down the embankment, overgrown with weeds. As they gained altitude, the road grew narrower and more hazardous. They passed the ruins of the ancient Hollywoodland development, the New Hope of its day. The well-heeled residents had tried to seal themselves off, Jonny remembered, but it didn't work. They had brought all their madness with them, into the hills. And when it all came crashing down around their ears, no one had been surprised. The rot had set in before the first foundation had been laid.
The car slowed, finally, and came to a stop. Looking out the window, Jonny could see nothing but rocky hills and the ribbon of leaf-cluttered road curving off into the distance. The driver punched a code into a key pad on the dashboard (Paranoid reflexes had Jonny leaning on the seatback, memorizing the digits as he read them out of the corner of his eye.). Then portions of the hillside, perfect squares of stone and grass, began to wink out. Jonny realized that he was looking at a hologram.
After about a dozen of these segments had disappeared, Jonny could see a paved driveway leading off the
