Metrophage

SIX

Mister Conover, relaxed and smiling, was sporting that season's newest suit style from Milan (high-waisted pants, shoulder pads in the jacket, all woven from Russian silk. There was a Cyrillic character on each of the gold buttons. In all, the suit violated a dozen U.S. trade embargoes against pro-Arab countries.). He was the most powerful smuggler lord in Los Angeles, single-handedly controlling most of the drug traffic in and out of southern California.

Many of the other lords were working small, furtive drug deals of their own, deals designed to boost their cash flow and their self-esteem, and while they were, technically, cutting into Conover's action, he did not mind. Allowing the other lords to have their little deals helped to keep them happy and in line. And that, Conover knew, was a form of power he could not buy or do without.

Rumor had it that Mr. Conover's influence reached far beyond the limits of Los Angeles, into the governor's mansion, and the offices of the multi-nationals in Osaka and Mexico City. Part of this was due to an elaborate kick-back scheme he had reputedly concocted with several pharmaceutical firms decades before, a scheme having to do with the scuttling of artificial intelligence controlled-cargo blimps and tankers, allowing the companies to collect on the insurance, then returning the vessels with new names and computer logs, while he kept the cargo. However, a portion of his influence had simply to do with his age. He had been born in the previous century, making him older than most of the corporations and politicos he was dealing with.

Through the years, he had become a link to a golden age when the foundations for the power structure of their world was being laid, a sort of icon to commerce and stability.

Mr. Conover was also a Greenies addict. Originally marketed in the late nineteen nineties as a longevity drug, Greenies were later found to be responsible for a whole range of bizarre side effects.

However, these effects manifested themselves only after decades of use, and by then it was usually too late; the drug had already bonded with and re-inscribed large segments of the addict's DNA. To stop taking the drug would have killed Conover. The drug's street name derived from its peculiar tendency to slow the oxidation of blood in the user's system, giving the addict's skin a brittle, greenish-blue quality.

The final irony was that Greenies turned out to be an exceptionally effective life extender. Thus, the user could look forward to decades (centuries?) of addiction and slow physical disintegration. No one really knew how old Mr. Conover was, but what he had become was obvious to all.

Conover's small grayish-green skull of a head bobbed between narrow shoulders set above a thick torso. His nose was little more than a mass of jagged scar tissue surrounded by livid clusters of red tumors. He puffed constantly at gold-tipped Sherman clove cigarettes which he held in a long mother-of-pearl holder, an affectation which, like his clothes, was another symptom of his compulsion to accentuate his own ugliness. When he smiled, which was often, his thin lips stretched back from a stained jumble of teeth. His appearance always gave Jonny the feeling that he was in conversation with a well-dressed corpse.

The Cadillac moved swiftly along an all but abandoned stretch of freeway. Sand was blowing in off the desert, carried to the city on the backs of freak Santa Ana winds. Carbon arcs mounted on the roof threw the cracked roadbed into stark relief, made the sand look like static on a video screen. Jonny looked out the double-glazed windows, but there was not much to see. They were driving through hills northwest of the city, on the edge of the German industrial sector, a bleak dead zone of strip mining equipment and half-finished bunkers housing the Krupp Corporation's experimental tokamak. The leached hills depressed Jonny, reminded him of a painting by Max Ernst that Groucho had shown him: Europe After the Rain. The landscape brought back uneasy memories of evenings on the Committee shooting speed with Krupp's young shock truppen.

The German's did not have Meat Boys, instead, it was common for young recruits to display their machismo by replacing their limbs with unfeeling myoelectric prosthesis. Jonny had the patchy, drunken memory of a laughing boy holding a cigarette lighter to his fingertips until they melted and dripped away, revealing the silicon sensors and black alloy mesh beneath.

Jonny relaxed on the soft leather seat in the rear of the limousine. Seated next to him, Conover pulled out an ornate silver cigarette case and offered him a smoke. Jonny accepted the cigarette and a light, pulling the harsh, sweet clove smoke deep into his lungs and letting it trickle out through his nose.

It had been months since he last smoked a cigarette (Sumi had guilted him into stopping when a Croaker working out of the back of a taqueria told him he had a shadow on one lung), but his past seemed to be catching up with him at such a rate that Jonny figured he might as well get into the spirit of it. He coughed wearily as the smoke caught in his throat. Resting his head on the seatback, he watched the road slide by. Conover's chauffeur, a heavy-set ex-Guardia Nacional man, was skull-plugged into a radar/navigational unit in the dashboard, following a trail of military sensors under the road bed. Conover was one of the few men in the city Jonny trusted, certainly the only lord. For the moment, he felt safe. Conover leaned over and spoke to him quietly.

"You seem to have brought down the wrath of god, old son. Or at least you pissed off Zamora, which amounts to the same thing. What in the world can you have done?"

Jonny ran a hand through his hair. "I wish I knew," he said. "Maybe I'd feel like I deserve all this special attention."

"Much as he'd like to, the Colonel does not stage raids just for fun. He must have had some reason for singling you out." Conover put a hand on Jonny's arm. "No offense, you're a charming boy, but-"

"The man's insane. He thinks you and I are playing footsie with the Alpha Rats," Jonny said. "I suppose that's assuming they have feet. I don't know. This whole thing's crazier by the minute."

"The Alpha Rats," Conover said, half as a question, half a reply.

He smoked his pastel Sherman, laughed mildly. "The Colonel never ceases to amaze me. Did he happen to mention what, specifically, you and I were doing with the Alpha Rats?"

"No. He just said we'd had contact and that we're into some kind of deal," Jonny explained. He gave up and ground out the cigarette in an ashtray gouged from a crystal lump of Amazon quartz.

His throat burned.

"And that's all he said?" Conover asked.

"Yeah." Jonny hesitated before saying anything about Zamora's demand that he turn Conover. Just saying the words, Jonny felt, implied a kind of betrayal. But how will it look, he wondered, if I don't say anything and he finds out? "Zamora's really got the hots for you," he said. "He cut me loose and told me I had to deliver you in forty eight hours or-"

"— Or we get the little scene back at the warehouses. Tell me, did Easy Money ever come up in your talk?"

"I don't think so."

"Take a moment. I want you to be sure. Did Colonel Zamora mention Easy Money?"

"No, never."

"You didn't seem so sure a moment ago."

"Well, I wasn't then; I'm sure now," said Jonny. He looked at the smuggler lord.

"Good," said Conover, nodding in satisfaction. "Forgive me for being insistent, but it's important that I get to Easy before the Committee. He's made off with something of mine and I do not want Zamora involved, on any level, with its recovery."

"For what it's worth, Groucho, the Croaker, said Easy's gone to work for Nimble Virtue."

Conover reached forward and picked up a bottle of tequila from a well-stocked traveling bar set into the seatback before them.

Next to the bar was an array of sleek matte-black Japanese electronic gear; Jonny recognized a Sony compound analyzer, a cellular videophone and a voice-activated PC. Conover poured a shot of tequila into a glass and handed it to Jonny.

"I'd heard about Nimble Virtue," said Conover. "In fact, I've been trying to set up a meet with her, but the witch is on the run. Paranoid, that woman is. My sources say she might have a pied a terre in Little Tokyo, but only time will tell."

Jonny finished his tequila and Conover refilled his glass. "Right now, though, why don't you relax and tell me, from the beginning, everything that went on with you and Zamora. Take your time, we have a bit of a drive ahead of us."

Jonny took a gulp of the liquor, bracing himself with its cool heat. He was not wild about the idea of reliving that night, but he knew had known it was coming, ever since the smuggler lord had picked him up. Conover, meanwhile, was using a tiny spoon to scoop a fine white powder from a glass vial he pulled from the back of the bar. That done, he cut the pile the into several neat lines with a gold single-edged razor blade.

As the lord snorted up a couple of the lines, Jonny began to talk, telling Conover everything he could remember, from the moment Zamora had picked him up, until he had found himself alone behind the prison, confused and outraged. It was painful; all that had happened since came crashing down on him. Ice was gone. Sumi was gone. Skid was dead. He even found Groucho's absence disturbing.

When he finished, Conover had him run through the whole thing again, focusing on Zamora's theories about their connection to the Alpha Rats. After going through it a second time, Jonny was drained.

Conover patted his arm, and nodded. "A very good job, Jonny."

"Thank you," he said.

"You look like you could use a break."

"I could use a new life. But what about Zamora and the Alpha Rats?"

Conover handed the tube he had used to snort the coke to Jonny. "It all sounds fascinating. I never would have suspected the Colonel of having an imagination. It almost makes me wish it were true. Without you to pull out of the fire, Jonny, my life would be unbearable. Don't let anybody try and sell you on immortality. There simply isn't enough of interest to make it worthwhile. Do your time and get it over with; that's the best way. It's not polite to be the last one to leave a party."

Jonny snorted up the white lines and asked: "Then there's nothing to all this spaceman stuff?"

Conover shook his head, his eyes fixed miles and centuries away. "No, nothing," he replied. Then he said something else; Jonny thought it might be: "Empty."

Jonny found himself beginning to feel a certain odd sympathy for the smuggler lord. For all his power, Conover had trapped himself in the decomposing body of a junky fop through a single miscalculationhis urgent will to live. On the other hand, Mr. Conover was no fool. Had it really been a mistake? Jonny wondered.

Or was it a stage in some other, infinitely more complex and subtle plan that Jonny and the rest, condemned to a pitiful handful of years, could not see? If the smuggler lord was working on something else, Jonny hoped it was very big. The price of it seemed high.

Conover lit another in his constant stream of cigarettes. Tossing the match out the window, he let in a sudden blast of hot air and dust. His mood seemed to have grown lighter.

"I hope you don't mind, but I've a little side trip to make before we can go home. Just some business, you understand. I have a boat coming in from the south with some goodies on board: pituitary extracts, frozen retinas, a few kilos of cocaine. We wouldn't want to be late and give our neighbors the impression that we keep a sloppy shop, eh?" He laughed, amused by his own rambling. "Besides, I believe these boys are going to try and burn me. And I wouldn't miss that for the world."

"Yeah? What would you do for the world?" Jonny asked, feeling pleasantly numb and reckless, buzzing on the coke. Objects in the car had taken on a warm internal glow.

Conover looked at him, not without affection. "Only a lunatic would want to run this dump," he said. "I'm content to farm my small bit and be done with it. L.A. has been a very good investment for me, in money and time."

"I always wondered why you didn't move into someplace like New Hope. I mean, those people have got to have some expensive habits."

Conover raised his ruined eyebrows. "More than you could know," he said. "But New Hope is a ghost town. The corruption there is a closed system. The same families have been running drugs and data through there for generations. Old families, very powerful. We're talking here about the Yakuza and the Panteras Aureo. The families connected to the multinationals have their own internal organizations to keep their people happy and restful. There's no freedom in that sort of set-up. Little potential for growth." He carefully ground out his cigarette and placed another in his mother of pearl holder. "Besides, like Lucifer in the poem, I much prefer to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven."

Jonny grinned up at him. "I thought you said you didn't want to run this dump."

"It's all semantics. You can't buy Heaven, either."

Outside, the sand had let up. Heat lightning crackled silently across the horizon. Inside the Cadillac, they had passed into what Jonny had come to think of as a pocket of silence, one of those odd conjunctions of time and place where conversation vanished of its own accord; at those moments, Jonny believed, all words became dangerous and banal. He had come to attach a certain sacredness to the silence. All things were at rest. It was a ritual from boyhood, no different from stepping around cracks so that he would not break his mother's back. Meaningless, he knew, but when the feeling passed, he missed it and in trying to force it back, came up, instead, with the twin images of Ice and Sumi.

"Hey Mister Conover, anything in this stuff we're picking up have to do with the new strain of leprosy?"

"No," said the smuggler lord. "Why do you ask?"

"I just figured you might be looking around for something. It's getting pretty bad in some neighborhoods."

"Have you seen the epidemic yourself?" asked Conover. "You know how these things can get blown out of proportion. With AIDS in the last century and the new hepatitis strains at the beginning of this one, people are very susceptible to rumors of a new plague. Then the Link gets hold of the talk, and broadcasts it right into people's skulls, reinforcing their belief in their own delusions. Couldn't this plague just be some mass psychogenic reaction?"

"Yeah, I've seen it. People aren't really talking plague- not yet. The Croakers have a roomful of lepers quarantined. Say this new strain is viral and that it kills, maybe through some kind of secondary infection," said Jonny. "We're not talking about a few hysterical whackos here. The whole city's in trouble."

"Calm down, son," said Mister Conover, laying a hand on Jonny's arm. "Remind me not to give you stimulants in the future." He smiled.

"Actually, I do know this new strain is real. Looks like a bacteria, acts like a virus and all that, right? I was just trying to get an untainted perspective. As I said, all I hear are rumors. Like in east L.A. they've taken to burning their dead. That neighborhoods are beginning to seal themselves off. The social effects of the disease are certainly real enough. Tell me, have the Croakers had any success in isolating reverse transcriptase from the virus samples?"

"You think it's a retro-virus?"

"AIDS was. And that little fellow practically had the medical community reading Ouija boards before they got anywhere."

"What about going after it with a general virus-killer like ribovirin or amantadine?" asked Jonny.

The smuggler lord shook his head. "That's been tried," he said. "Amantadine seems to have some preventative applications, but if you're already infected, it's useless."

"You know about this new strain, don't you, Mister Conover?"

"It's my job."

"You don't seem too concerned."

"Personally? No. The Greenies took care of that long ago. I doubt my blood would be very appetizing to these little bastards." He rocked with some internal laughter. "I haven't had a cold in over forty years."

"Then you don't know any treatments we could get hold of for the new strain?"

"No one is even sure how it's transmitted," Conover said. "And without the disease vector, curing a few individuals isn't going to stop an epidemic."

Seated beside the driver in the front of the car, a hawk-nosed man with an oily pompadour turned to face the back. One of his eyes was blackened, and his upper lip was swollen badly, drawing it downward, giving him a childish, sullen look. Jonny recognized the man as the one whose teeth he had loosened with his boots earlier that evening. The man appeared to be slightly embarrassed. He would not look at Jonny.

'Scuse me, Mr. Conover, but I read un transmissor en la auto," he said.

"Jonny, my boy, you wouldn't be wired for sound, would you?" asked the smuggler lord.

Jonny looked at him. "Hey, you know me, Mister Conover."

Conover nodded and turned to the front. "What do you say, Ricos? You sure your little gadget's reading correctly?"

"Si, no cuestion. The maricon es only new baggage 'round here. I'm not reading nothin' till he get in."

"Friend, if you can read at all I'd be surprised," said Jonny.

Ricos made a quick grab for Jonny, but Conover shoved the man back in his seat. "That's enough, children. Jonny, could somebody have planted something on you?"

"No," Jonny said. "Those Committee boys never got near me and these clothes are Croaker cast-offs. They'd have no reason to tail me to their own hideout." He looked at Ricos, pointed to his skull "Tu tener un tornillo flojo."

Conover puffed thoughtfully at his cigarette, leaned forward and touched the driver's shoulder. "Pull over up ahead," he said.

"Ricos, bring your remote. Come on, Jonny."

The car stopped near an old dumpsite for a mining operation that had flattened the surrounding hills. Conover slipped on a white Panama hat as he led Jonny out and around to the back of the Cadillac. Cottony tracers of gas clung to gummy, bitter smelling waste pits. The smuggler lord pointed to Jonny with his cigarette holder.

"Find it," he said to Ricos.

Ricos moved very close to Jonny and began moving a small electromagnetic device over Jonny's clothing, tracing the outline of his body. Jonny glanced over at Conover and wondered what was going through the smuggler lord's mind, but it was impossible to read that face. He concentrated, instead, in affecting a look of extreme uninterest as Ricos studiously moved the device around his crotch.

"Ai!" Ricos yelled. He held the box to Jonny's bandaged shoulder. "Got you, maricon."

Jonny looked at the man and then at the box in his hand.

"Jesus," said Jonny miserably. "Oh fucking hell-"

"Jonny?" said Conover.

He slumped against the back of car, Ricos standing over him delightedly. It took several seconds for the image to assemble itself; it appeared to him much the way he imagined visuals formed through skull-plugs: an out of focus mass of phosphenes settling slowly, like a reverse tornado, around a central spiral. In truth, he did not want to understand it, but in admitting that, he gave the thought form and terrible substance.

"Zamora did this," Jonny said. The image was clear. The prison infirmary had fixed him up nicely and, all their doctors were Committee recruits: bloodless and faceless; company men all the way.

"It was obvious. He had lead the Committee to the Croakers. Right to Ice's room. Now he was leading them to Conover. Oh fucking hell-"

"What is it, Jonny?" ask Conover.

"Jonny's hand moved involuntarily to his cast. I got shot earlier," he said. "I got shot and Zamora had them wire me. It's in my goddam shoulder."

Conover approached him, shaking his head sympathetically.

"I'm truly sorry, son. It's an awful thing to have done," he murmured.

"We'll have to cut it out, of course. You can't go around beeping the rest of your life."

Jonny laughed, when he thought about it. Zamora could not let him off that easily. The insult had been there all along; all that had been required was for him to recognize it. There was, Jonny had to admit, even a kind of twisted beauty to it.

Conover called the driver out, and spoke to him for some time in quiet Spanish. When they parted, the driver opened the trunk and unrolled a cloth-bound set of surgical instruments. He helped Jonny off with his coat and pulled back the top of the Pemex jumpsuit.

When he removed Jonny's cast and xylocaine patch, he did it with such sureness that Jonny was sure the man had been a medic at some time.

Jonny felt a cool punch of compressed air on his arm as the driver injected him with something from a pressurized syringe.

Seconds later, Jonny was flying. The driver set him on the rear fender and hooked a small work light to the inside of the trunk lid.

Before Conover retreated inside the car, Jonny heard him say: "When you find it, bring it to me."

The driver held out a small device that looked like an old fashioned tattoo needle, but which Jonny recognized as an Akasaka laser scalpel. In Spanish, the driver told Jonny to concentrate on the hanging light.

He did not feel a thing.

Later, when the car was moving and Jonny was sacked out on the back seat, still high on whatever they shot him with, he heard voices in the midst of conversation. His shoulder ached with each heartbeat. But he seemed to recall that his shoulder always hurt, didn't it? Eventually he recognized Conover's voice.

"We each do our bit as best we can, of course. Zamora is a vicious, greedy prick, but a sterling leader of men. I've seen him pull many strange stunts in my time. However, I have never before known him to betray a sense of humor." He glanced at Jonny. "Have you?"

Jonny just rolled away and fell asleep. "I'd like to go home now," he said, but nobody heard him.

A dark, sour smelling harbor glittering oily rainbows amidst sluggish waves. Men talking in a circle some distance off, a litter of shapes around their feet; another painting came to him, Tanguy, this time. Sharks- the bleached carcasses of dead sharks, stripped of their flesh by birds and their jaws by souvenir hunters, strewn across the sand like some hallucinatory crop ready for harvest. Down the beach, a roofless merry-go-round, half-collapsed, dangling a string of bloated wooden horses into the dirty water. The flares of gas jets miles away.

Jonny rubbed grit from his eyes and tried to focus on the circle of men outside on the beach. He had no idea how long he or they had been here. He was very thirsty.

From what Jonny could see, only two men were doing all the talking. One was Conover, who was easy to spot, towering above the rest, the glowing dot of his cigarette tracing erratic patterns in the air. Behind Conover stood Ricos, scowling into the ocean wind, his pompadour flailing around his ears like a dying animal.

The man Conover was talking to was considerably shorter, but very board, wearing the white dress uniform of a Mexican Naval officer. A jet foil with the name Sangre Christi painted on the bow floated a few meters out in the harbor, rolling gently with the surf.

Two small Zodiac crafts were beached nearby, one overloaded with sealed metal containers. The identification numbers on the Sangre Christi indicated that the ship was from the Gobernacion fleet stationed in San Diego, but she was running no lights, and the flag on her mast was Venezuelan, not Mexican. When the moon broke through the heavy cloud layer, Jonny got a good look at her crew, spread out in a semi-circle around the Zodiacs. About half wore naval uniforms; the others were dressed variously in jeans and leathers, pale gringos and dread-locked blacks numerous among the crew.

"That's it then," Jonny thought. "They're pirates."

Picking up the tequila from Conover's traveling bar, Jonny took a drink. The pirate captain pointed back to his ship and shouted something. Warmed by the tequila, Jonny's thoughts drifted back to his own time as a dealer.

Jonny always picked up a buzz when he was pushing or setting up a meet that was wholly divorced from the rest of his life. Part of it was the thrill an ex-Committee boy felt at having gone over to "the other side." Another part of it had something to dowith vague notions of changing the world, but he attributed this to youthful folly, regarding it as a consequence of spending too much time sober.

Groucho's casual remark equating Jonny's dealing with revolutionary politics had disturbed him. It saddled him responsibilities he had no intention of trying to fulfill. The world (at least Los Angeles, which was all he knew of the world), as Jonny perceived it, was little more than the natural battle of competing organisms, like the virus he had seen on the micrograph at the Croakers' clinic. Each viral unit was incomplete until it had taken over a living cell and used that organism to replicate itself, and the one-percenters and gangs of the city followed the virus's pattern. Inertia swept them along in a perpetual hustle, moving in time to the endless rhythm of commerce; most knew nothing else. And, as was the way of nature, the strongest viruses ate the weaker. The strongest viruses were the Committee, the lords and the multinationals, Jonny thought, forces that were overwhelming and, in the end, incomprehensible to him.

Did the Croakers really believe they could change a world run by Zamora or Nimble Virtue? Even Conover was just a business man who had his own reasons for being there. And Groucho was too damned small to play Atlas, Jonny thought.

He wondered where Ice was at that moment. He felt certain that she was all right; she seemed to have a talent for staying alive.

In his mind, however, Sumi had become one with the ruined apartment. If Zamora really had her, she was lost. Jonny loved both women (something which he was quick to point out as the single distinguished feature of his character) but he felt he owed them something more that.

The door opposite Jonny opened and Conover leaned in. Salt mist sparkled on the smuggler lord's shoulders and the wide brim of his hat. He smiled at Jonny. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "We'll be through here in just a few minutes. These boys are playing it to the last row. Hand me that box by your feet, will you?"

Jonny looked at the floor of the Cadillac and found a small black lacquered box with brass fittings in the shape of lotus petals.

His head spun as he picked the box up. Conover smiled as he took it.

"Thanks, son. Sit tight. Have a drink," he said.

Watching the smuggler lord cross the colorless sand, Jonny was overcome by a sudden and overwhelming sense of loss. As if he were adrift in some vast and infinite ocean with no land in sight. He had the strong urge to bail out right there, to run from the car and to keep running. But for some reason he stayed. If he drifted long enough, he thought, a landfall was bound to appear. Besides, he was drugged silly. Where would I go if I ran, he wondered. On the beach, the pirates were smoking and passing a bottle. Jonny raised his tequila to them and decided to remain in the car. Drifting, he knew, was what he was best at.

Outside, the pirate captain was nodding as Conover ceremoniously handed him the small box. The pirate opened it for a moment, waved briskly to a couple of men by the Zodiacs. They made their way through the sand slowly with several containers, setting them a few meters from Conover and Ricos. That done, they retreated quickly from the smuggler lord's presence. Jonny caught a quick movement of one pirate's hand. He had crossed himself, Catholic-fashion.

Ricos flicked open a butterfly knife and slit the metal strips that bound the top of one container. Reaching inside, he pulled out a white brick wrapped in heavy plastic and handed it to Conover.

Jonny looked around the car, wondering where Conover's chauffeur had gone. When he looked back at the beach, the pirates were moving out, pushing their Zodiac's into the surf. The moon lit, briefly, the rubber floats that 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.