start flying routes into southern Sudan beside the Nuba. I’m talking the no-go zones, for independent NGOs.”
“You’ve got contracts with these NGOs or are you betting on the come?”
“We’re going to get them,” Braithwaite said in the tone of card-counter who knew, just knew, he was going to hit blackjack on the next deal.
“Lemme have one of those,” Dare said to the Kenyan, who’d pulled out a pack of Embassies.
“I was about to offer,” he said, shaking a cigarette loose.
“You were bein’ too leisurely about it.” Then, turning back to Braithwaite, Dare said, “Still sounds like it’s on the come.”
“Mr. Dare”—Dare considered telling Braithwaite to call him by his first name but decided he preferred the deferential sound of Mr.—“in two years, Knight Air is going to be as big as Pathways and maybe bigger.”
“What’s Pathways?”
“Our competition. It’s run by a woman named Tara Whitcomb.”
“Yeah. Think I’ve heard her name around.”
“We’re offering you a shot at getting in on the ground floor, and in the process, you’d be doing a helluva lot of good for a helluva lot of people.”
To avoid wincing, which might have offended Braithwaite’s sensibilities, Dare canted his head back and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“The part I like best is thumbin’ your nose at Khartoum. I like that part. I never did care for askin’ for permission.”
“I can’t say we like it,” Braithwaite said solemnly. “It’s something that has to be done. I expect you’ll want to think things over?”
“Sure will,” Dare declared.
“We’ll be at Barrett’s place till noon tomorrow. It’s hard to get hold of us in Loki, so—”
“Let you know tomorrow morning.”
Double Trouble was singing to him as he pulled through the gate into his apartment compound and parked under a bottlebrush tree, between a rust-pitted van and a hibiscus bush whose blossoms looked plastic in the parking-lot lights. Double Trouble—“DeeTee” for short—was Dare’s pet canary; he’d named it after Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band. DeeTee lived in his head, and it warbled infallible warnings whenever something or someone did not look, sound, smell, or feel quite right. Its senses were capable of detecting the faintest trace elements of falsehood or fraud, the slimmest cracks in a man or woman’s character, the smallest potential for danger or disaster in any given situation. DeeTee’s acuity, coupled to its absolute loyalty to its master—it never, ever lied to him—had made it indispensable. It was the partner of Dare’s luck. Without DeeTee, he reckoned he would now be dead, languishing in some third-world prison or putting up his feet in a homeless shelter. Conversely, if he’d listened to DeeTee every time it sang a premonitory song, he would now be living out his dream as a gentleman rancher in the sweet Texas hill country, driving around in a new Cadillac convertible, as LBJ used to do along the Perdenales, and basking in the warm assurance of a peaceful and prosperous old age. He listened most times, but now and then one of his many vices or flaws caused him to pay no heed to the faithful bird.
Lust. DeeTee had tipped him off that his first wife was going to make him miserable before he married her, but Margo’s tits, which approached Dolly Parton’s in shape and volume and were besides the first pair of white tits he’d set eyes on after years of gazing at tits of color in Laos, flipped his canary override switch. Over the next three years Dare was stunned by the accuracy of the bird’s forecast, and a very traditional divorce toted up the cost of ignoring it.
Greed. When Joe Nakima had asked for the papers for the G1, DeeTee chittered loudly, “Don’t let him get his hands on them!” But with a contract to run mirra into Somalia at stake—nine to ten grand gross a week!—Dare plugged his ears. He was still living with the consequences of that willful deafness, and they had produced other consequences, in a kind of ripple effect, and the ripples had washed him into the Red Bull tonight.
So what was the vice this time? Pride. He hated the position he now found himself in, peddling his services door to door like an encyclopedia salesman, begging his lawyer to give him another week or another month to pay his fees, suffering bouts of acid reflux when he looked at his bank statements. It was undignified, it offended his sense of who and what he was. Becoming partners with a Gen-X crusader didn’t exactly fit his self-image either, but he