The Lotus Eaters

arms.

'Hah! You really are a whore. I should have known.' Half mad with desire to rut, Rocaberti had eyes only for the glistening head of his penis, and the nether lips approaching it.

And then the woman's right hand was full of something brassy and bright, which was the last thing young Rocaberti saw before it plunged through his eyeball, cracked the bone behind the eye, and was then spun like a pestle, Lourdes twisting the letter opener furiously to turn a good sized chunk of his brain to bloody froth.

'I belong to Patricio, you son of a bitch,' she whispered into a corpse's ear. Then she looked at the blood again and proceeded to vomit on the corpse, the vile smelling puke running out through her fingers to mix with dripping blood.

* * *

Lourdes was dressed in denims and leather. She had a bottle of Thymoline mouthwash in one hand and a stubby firearm slung across her shoulder when she opened the door to the adjacent room holding Artemisia and their children. She was furiously swishing the solution as she placed one finger over her lips to command silence, before beckoning for Arti to come and bring the children. She spat the solution out onto the floor and began calling out, 'Oh, God . . . oh, God . . . Faster . . . Oh, God,' even while she pushed and prodded the others toward the door that led to the balcony.

Arti's eyes flew wide when she saw the corpse with the exposed penis and an onyx letter opener handle sticking straight out from under his forehead. A rivulet of blood ran down one cheek. She didn't ask about that, but did ask, in an urgent whisper, 'What about Mac?'

'They sent him to the hospital,' Lourdes whispered back. Plenty of time later to tell her the truth. I hope. 'Oh . . . oh, Jesus . . . Fuck me, Moises, fuck me!'

'Hurry on ahead,' she ordered Arti, still whispering. 'Head to the boat. It's straight down hill. Follow the path.'

'Can you run the boat?' Arti asked.

'I can push the button to start it and turn the wheel to steer it. Now go.'

'What about you?'

'I have to ummm . . . to come . . . Ahhh . . . aiii . . . —go, dammit—aiiii . . . ahhhh . . . ahhhh . . .' Lourdes waited until she heard footsteps on the walkway behind the house before letting out a soul searing scream of utter, and utterly fake, pleasure. Then she followed. It wasn't until she had the boat well out to sea that Lourdes told Artemisia she was a widow. Indeed, they were almost far enough out that attentive people on land wouldn't hear the scream.

Estado Major, Balboa City, Balboa, Terra Nova

Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda's job was, frankly, torturer in chief, even though the title he held was merely 'Senior Interrogator.' Most of the time, in fact, he really didn't have to resort to torture, though he always made the threat or promise to do so plain enough. An immigrant from Sumer, and former senior interrogator with the late dictator of that country's secret police, he got more results than any three of Fernandez's other interrogators, and did so much more quickly and reliably. 'It's a shitty job,' he admitted, 'but someone has to do it.'

In relation to his job, he took the private elevator from the sub-basement, where interrogations and, it must be admitted, the occasional killings were done, directly up to the waiting room outside Fernandez's personal office. As soon as he stepped out of the elevator, he sniffed something odd but still familiar.

Gunpowder? Here? 'Legate?' he called out.

Mahamda walked briskly into Fernandez's office, took one look and the body on the floor, and rushed over. Though unconscious and ghastly pale, he saw that the chief of intelligence was at least still breathing. The red froth oozing from his chest said as much.

On autopilot from his own otherwise none too impressive basic training in the Sumeri armed forces, Mahamda went through the drill: Clear the airway, Stop the bleeding, Treat for Shock, Protect the . . . Screw that for now.

He picked up the phone with bloodied hands and discovered it was dead. Shit. Now what? Maybe . . .

The internal intercom was not dead. In practiced Spanish Mahamda said to the guard room, 'I want an ambulance here ten minutes ago! If you can't get one, get something—anything!—that will fly or roll. And I need a medic and four men with a stretcher in Legate Fernandez's office five minutes ago. Move!'

Only then did he rifle the desk, such part of it as wasn't locked, and come up with something non-air permeable. This he slapped over the exit wound that seemed to be frothing the most.

Fernandez's eyes opened. They were glazed and unfocused.

'Who did this?' Mahamda asked.

'Bar . . . B . . . Barlet . . . Barletta.'

'We'll get him,' Mahamda said.

'S . . . Screw him. Save the black box.'

Chapter Twenty-eight

In the final analysis, then, everything else appears to have been tried and nothing has ever worked very well for very long. That the system we propose is unlikely to work well in perpetuity does not strike us as a sufficiently good argument to prefer systems that work, if indeed they work at all, for a very short time only.

The objection that such a system has 'never been done before' strikes us as extremely unpersuasive, given that