Free Wild Country by Dean Ing Page B

planning to buy clothes for the big noon event. Something severe and dark; something suitable and sinister to impress a drug buyer.

Chapter Fifteen
    Sandy's journal, Wed. 20 Sept. '06
    Ted's call has disinterred an old nightmare and grafted it to a bad joke! Somehow I always thought it would be a bunch of local vigilantes — but a Brit officer, alone ?
    Well, mad dogs and Englishmen! This one has two million acres to cover, aside from WCS land. Ted claims this man Wardrop has foresworn bullets, which means Ba'al will not be enraged by the smell of gun oil. The poor man will grow old searching, if Childe can explain the problem to Ba'al in proper detail. Yes. but will he listen? If a lieutenant will not. why should a pig?

Chapter Sixteen
    Any striking latina woman who shows up alone in the North Kaycee slums with an off-purple Ocelot and a half-million dollars' worth of poppy concentrate is a woman well worth watching, if you can catch her. The syndicate's contact man passed up the noon meeting on Tuesday, warned that the woman's plum-colored racer contained a police ID unit. Later he lost her on Vivion Road, unwilling to match her speed on public highways. But the syndicate boasted a good comm grid, and they located the Ocelot at the new Ringcity Motel before dark. After that, every move and telephone conversation by Marianne Placidas was monitored until she left Kansas Ringcity.
    Wednesday she tried again. By then they understood, and envied, her use of that ID unit; their channels were that good. This time she placed the overnight bag in full view in the little Italian restaurant. She felt a tidal flush of relief as a little man left the Chianti he was nursing and walked with tiny precise steps to her table. His face was the color of pasta; his suit was expensive, playing down the paunch under his belt; his manner was very courteous. He whisked the bag under the table while sitting down, and something in his face told her not to complain.
    He knew the pass phrase and advised her that the lasagna was good. She ordered it even though she was far too nervous to eat much of it. Marianne needed several minutes of cautious small talk to realize that he was nervous, too.
    He had good reasons for a case of nerves. She was an amateur, though a courageous one; she could still be a plant from the Department of Justice. He had taken a very special commission from another group to pass an offer to Sorel's "man," who'd turned out to be a woman, and a real hotsy at that. Okay, this was soldiering time. This was what his sources paid him for.
    He was wholly unaware of his own fidgets but. watching him, Marianne found her own anxiety dying. Eventually she found herself wolfing lasagna. While he talked he unzipped his beltpouch. He scratched his blue chin. He tapped his forefingers together; cleaned under his nails with his opposite thumb; patted his knees, interlaced the fingers of both hands, scratched his little potbelly, rezipped his beltpouch. Then he did it all again in different order. Marianne was positively at ease by the time he took her bag to the men's room.
    When he returned he was smiling, and his was the kind of smile to unsettle a tummyful of lasagna: the smile of a well-fed rat. He suggested that she repeat what he had told her and paid close attention while she did it. He corrected her several times, too scornfully to suit a Placidas. Then he gave her a thin envelope, told her fair exchange was no robbery, and left with the bag.
    While scanning the single sheet of polypaper, Marianne realized that there must be some trust among really big thieves, for the man had paid for that heroin with only a code for a numbered account in a Sao Paulo bank. She knew the advantages of Brazilian banks well enough. Idly, she wondered what Felix Sorel would do if she used that code for her own purposes—and then she shuddered and sought the waiter's eye.
    An amateur, yes; but Marianne was not stupid. She did not write down the little