The Lotus Eaters

Carrera's lips tightened even as his eyes turned Heavenward. I wish I could tell you about one other important thing. You see, we're already a small nuclear power. If you read that . . . that contract, carefully, you'll see that, in effect, I turned release authority over to the President. And I hope and pray we never have to use them. Again.

But I can't tell you because, even though you're all handpicked and vetted, that must be kept quiet or the Federated States will come down on us like a ton of bricks.

* * *

Back in their bedroom, after the select committees had left, Lourdes was still glowing from an altogether too long delayed session of serious lovemaking.

'You are looking awfully happy, Patricio,' she said, 'for a man who just gave away over seventy-five billion in Federated States Drachma.'

'Closer to a hundred and fifty billion if you count the value of everything, land, equipment, buildings, and such,' he corrected. 'Not to mention the pension fund, and the value of trained men over untrained. Are you sorry I did?'

'No,' she said without the slightest hesitation. 'It's a small price if it makes you happy again.'

Carrera leered, meaningfully. 'You know what would really make me happy again?'

She leered right back. 'I can think of a couple of possibilities,' she said, while ostentatiously running her tongue over her lips. 'Why don't you sit on the side of the bed and we'll try one of them?'

Prey Nokor, Cochin, Terra Nova

'Nokor,' Sig said, as his eyes opened wide to the sun streaming in through the blind over the window. The mattress of the bed on which he lay was lumpy, but at least the linen was clean.

'Shit, still in Nokor.'

A former colony of the Gauls, and then of the Red Tsars, Cochin had all the decay—physical, economic, and moral—that one might associate with either of those two bits of history, or with suffering a major civil war in recent memory. Because the Cochinese had endured all three, the decay was not just trebled but cubed.

Proof of that decay, over and above the lumpy mattress, occupied a fraction of that mattress in the form of a fifteen or sixteen year old Cochinese hooker who was effectively owned by the house. At least Sig hoped she was only fifteen or sixteen. This was not from any perverse preference for very young girls, but merely because a hooker of that age was most likely to be just a hooker, rather than a spy for either Cochinese Intelligence or the Secret Police.

The girl's name was Han. She'd told a more than half drunken Siegel, down in the hotel bar, that it meant 'moral.' She'd told him, moreover, in French and then laughed her cute little rear end off.

'Moral? Me? Isn't that just too funny?'

Sig had shrugged it off. 'We all sell ourselves, Han,' he'd said. 'Some of us even get a fair price.'

* * *

It had been an ugly scene, with Siegel's soon to be ex-wife, shortly before he'd departed Balboa. It was uglier still when he'd called Fernandez who had come immediately with an escort of military police. These had handcuffed her, forced her to sign some papers, and then escorted her to the airport with her passport stamped to prevent readmission to the country.

As Carrera had, Fernandez said, 'I'm sorry, Sig.'

'Don't be,' Siegel had answered. 'Right now I'm too pissed off to be hurt. Besides, I'm going to the land of the two drachma blow job. It could be worse.

'Would it have been better, do you think,' Siegel inquired, 'to have kept her on and fed her disinformation?'

Fernandez shrugged. 'Close question. If we don't bust the occasional spy, the Tauros, who are not necessarily stupid, will assume we choose not to bust any. They might assume then that we know about all of them. This could make it problematic to feed disinformation when we want to. Then, too, busting one validates the perceived secrecy of the rest. We've even had it happen that we busted one—that one we shot—and fear from that caused two more to panic, do something dumb, and reveal themselves.

'Better, I think, to take one into custody occasionally. And, too,' Fernandez added, 'you're one of us and if you want the bitch out of the country and an in absentia divorce, I think we owe it to you to help. Patricio agreed. Besides, you don't need any distractions, where you're going and what you'll be doing there.'

* * *

Distractions? Sig thought, while Han, straddling his loins, performed a slow corkscrew. Now this is a distraction. The best kind. Except that I need a distraction from the distraction, or it will be over much, much too soon.

'Hey, Han,' he asked, 'how much to rent you from the house . . . as a translator?'

The girl didn't miss a beat . . . or a twist. 'Five million Cochinese Bac a day,' she answered. 'Or six Federated States Drachma.'

Must delay . . .

'And of that, how much do you get to keep?' Sig asked.

'In FSD? Two,' she answered, switching from a corkscrew to a slow and graceful up and down. 'One of which goes to my debt.'

Always the way, isn't it, then? Someone else gets most of the girl's profit. Oh, Jesus that's . . . MUST DELAY.