Free The Jaguar by A.T. Grant Page B

getting angry about global warming? England was incomprehensible. He wanted to throw something at the screen. Instead he stomped into the bathroom. There he cleaned his teeth so hard that blood mixed with the paste and patterned the spittle he projected violently into the basin. Although he knew it was pathetic, he was homesick.
    Chapter Nine
    Rochas Blancas
    Rochas Blancas was a non-descript prison in the midst of equally non-descript rolling scrubland. It was set a few hundred metres outside a small town of the same name, which was built around cattle stockyards and provided a staging post for a railroad meandering its way the few remaining miles to the US border. Beyond its rectangle of whitewashed walls and razor wire stood a scattering of staff accommodation, a visitors’ car park, and a small police station and pound.
    Inside the jail, Felipe Contadona watched the sun dipping below the same whitewashed walls, one hand in a back pocket and the other clasping the window grill. Not even an unusually strong odour from the nearby stockyards could pierce his sense of serenity. Felipe knew almost the exact order in which the stars would shortly appear above the faint orange glow of the unseen township. He would greet them as old friends, after several days of blank, rain-sodden skies. The three stars marking Orion’s Belt were his first target, as he had recently acquired a book which mapped the major constellations from his older brother, Paulo. Betelgeuse, the red supergiant star that marked Orion’s left shoulder could easily be traced from this bright marker, and its story was his favourite. Grand though it was, it was a dying star, struggling with the last vespers of fuel to maintain the nuclear reactions that were its only defence against gravity. Tomorrow, or in a million years’ time, it would die and in its death throes turn night into day on Earth and appear like a second sun, even though it was 640 million light years away.
    Felipe had only rarely, in all his fifty-seven years, been happier than here in this jail. He occupied a suite of three rooms originally designed for the prison governor. He shared his quarters and its extensive facilities with a relay of unobtrusive minders who took care of every chore. Behind him he could hear one of them laying the table for dinner. The local mayor and the assistant governor were due to dine with him tonight. The news about Alfredo’s misdemeanours, which he had received alongside the book from Paulo, could have been a concern, but he had heard it all before. Only Alfredo’s departure for Europe aroused any sense of disapproval. Felipe had long since learned that, in the end, it all came down to money. Once Felipe had outlined the family’s enhanced concerns about security, the mayor and the governor would demand more cash. But there was always more money for Las Contadonas. There was so much that the greatest problem was what to do with it all, forcing his clan to continually expand into new territory and trade. Money could be found in thick wads of used banknotes in every home the family and its many lieutenants occupied, stuffed into draws, in suitcases under beds, or at the back of kitchen cupboards.
    Hearing his guests approaching, Felipe turned to greet them. The two men who entered the room were not those he was expecting. He assessed the situation. Over the shoulders of the bulky intruders he could see two other men guarding the door. His minders were nowhere to be seen. He considered making a dash for the bedroom and the handgun in his bedside cabinet, but he would be stopped within a couple of paces, and the gun had almost certainly been removed anyway. A flush of fear coursed through Felipe as he comprehended the gravity of his situation. To his intense chagrin a warm trickle of urine descended the inside of one leg. His fear was followed in turn by a rising tide of anger, partly in response to this little humiliation and partly as he