The Lotus Eaters

'We know,' Villepin replied. 'It is . . . worrisome. It is even worrisome to my . . . superior, General Janier. We must put an end to it before that generation grows to manhood.'

'Never mind all that,' said another of the men present. Pigna recognized him as, the old head of the police, one of the Arias brood, now reduced to lording it over the couple of companies of police left to the old president in the old city. 'We all know what the problem is and why we're here. We have to put a stop to all this . . . this . . . madness.'

'It would be better if you could do that for yourselves,' said Villepin. 'Oh, yes, we would help behind the scenes. But still, in the long run, it is best if you take the initiative.'

'With what?' said the policeman. 'I've got less than five hundred men that I control and no more than that number that would go along with me in the hope of restoring old times again.'

'Ah,' said Pigna, 'but I have over four thousand. And by the time I am in a position to do anything it will be closer to ten thousand.'

'In a position?' Villepin enquired.

Pigna sighed. 'On the scale of the force being created my one legion doesn't count for much. Applied in the right place, it could count for a lot. But I can't just mobilize it and move it. We'd be intercepted and destroyed on the road or in the air. On the other hand, in about a year or fifteen months we'll do our annual training at the Centro de Entrenamiento Nacional, at Fort Cameron, not all that far from here. That would put us in a position to seize certain key facilities.'

'You've been giving this some thought,' Arias accused.

Pigna didn't deny it, but did say, 'Enough to know that I can't do it alone. I can possibly hoodwink my men into seizing President Parilla, for example, if I told them it was Carrera's order, but they would never, not in a million years for a billion drachma, seize Carrera. I can get them to, say, take over the television and radio stations, and seal the City off from traffic. They would not attack other regiments in the Legion, unprovoked.'

He looked very pointedly at de Villepin and added, 'Any plainly Tauran activity, any attack, made openly, would shatter the illusion I would create for those men, and lose me control over them.'

De Villepin nodded agreement. This one had been giving it some thought.

'We can probably restrict our activities to the fairly clandestine,' the Gallic intelligence chief agreed. 'Say, using a commando group to take Carrera and sundry other of the Legion's highest ranking men. And perhaps Parilla if we decide that's would be best.'

'The corps commanders and General Staff,' Pigna said. 'Get them and I'm a fair shot for first among equals. If my legion is in a position of control, I would be first among equals.'

'I doubt we could keep such a vast enterprise secret, or hide our involvement long before being discovered,' the Gaul objected.

'Block the road from the City to Valle de las Lunas and you would take more than half out of the picture, at least for a while. And, if you chose the right place and right method of blocking, it could be many days before anyone discovers your involvement.'

This, de Villepin considered. 'Perhaps,' he conceded. 'It would help if we could somehow convince the Federated States that we were acting in their interest in doing all this.' He mused, 'Perhaps a bit of lawfare would be in order.'

Belalcazar, Santander, Terra Nova

The place was by no means upscale. Waitresses bantered with customers, cooks shouted out for orders to be picked up, flies buzzed lazily from table to table. In this restaurant of no great name or reputation, two men who took some pains to have neither name nor reputation sat over coffee. One was an assistant to one of the members of the increasingly powerful Belalcazar Drug Cartel; the other a specialist in moving drugs from Santander, where they were grown and processed, to Southern Columbia and Taurus where they were avidly consumed. Neither felt any guilt at being in the drug trade. Either, if asked about guilt, would probably have answered that drugs were a South Columbian and Tauran problem; that, even if the trade from Santander stopped, those who craved the drugs and those who profited from the craving would simply look to new sources and new—even home made—drugs.

After several hours of conversation the two men reached across the table to shake hands. The deal was struck. Seven tons of nearly pure 'huanuco' paste (in fact, a extract of the leaves of a primitive plant, apparently brought to Terra Nova by the Noahs, that might or might not have been an ancestor to or relative of the terrestrial coca plant but which at least produced a very similar alkaloid) would leave Santander within the week to travel through Balboa on their way to the Federated States, Secordia, and the Tauran Union.

Aduana (Customs), Herrera International Airport, Ciudad Balboa, Terra Nova

As with many public servants in the less developed parts of Terra Nova, Senor Donati was much underpaid. As with nearly all of those, he supplemented his income, where possible, through a mixture of cash for favors. Sometimes these were trivial, both the favors and the cash. Sometimes they could be quite substantial.

Chief of the main airport's customs office, Mr. Donati was well placed for both the doing of great favors and the receipt of great rewards. He was at the moment engaged in the former, in anticipation of the latter.

And it's so easy, he though, quietly filling out the necessary forms to insure the easy passage of several crates of what he assumed were drugs. The crates were due in on a flight from Belalcazar later this afternoon. Twenty thousand drachma were already in the chief's wife's account; fair payment for little more than looking the other way and approving and amending a few forms. The payment had started considerably larger. But, of course, the chief had not been able to keep everything the Santanderns had given him. Some few thousands went to his men in the Aduana. Rather more went to certain high-ranking people in the rump government of the Republic, which still had considerable influence among the civil police and customs service.

In particular, thought Donati, the office of the President—the old