helped plan the assault on Portobello. By that logic, you killed friends of mine.”
“No I didn’t,” she said. Quick, intense, lying.
“You killed them while I was intimately connected to their minds. Some of them died very horribly.”
“No. No.”
“Don’t bother to lie to me. I can bring people back from the dead, remember? I could have destroyed your village with one thought. And I can tell when you’re lying.”
She was silent for a moment, considering that. She must have known about voice analyzers. “I am the mayor of San Ignacio. There will be repercussions.”
“Not legal ones. We have a warrant for your detention, signed by the governor of your province.”
She made a spitting sound. “Pepe Ano.” His name was Pellipianocio, Italian, but her Spanish converted it to “Joe Asshole.”
“I take it he’s not popular with the rebels. But he was one of you.”
“He inherited a coffee plantation from his uncle and was such a bad farmer he couldn’t make a radish grow. You bought his land, you bought him.”
She thought that was the truth, and it probably was. “We didn’t coerce him,” I said, guessing. I didn’t know much about the town’s or province’s history. “Didn’t he come to us? Declare himself—”
“Oh, really. Like a hungry dog would come to anybody who put out food. You can’t pretend to think that he represents us.”
“As a matter of fact, Señora, we were not consulted. Are your soldiers consulted before being given orders?”
“We . . . I don’t know anything about such matters.” That one set the bells off. As she knew, their soldiers were in on the decision-making process. That cut down on their efficiency but did give some logic to calling themselves the Democratic Army of the People.
The helicopter suddenly lurched left and right, accelerating up. I put out a hand and kept her from falling.
“Missile,” I said, in touch with the flyboy.
“A pity it missed.”
“You’re the only living creature aboard this craft, Señora. The rest of us are safe in Portobello.”
At that she smiled. “Not so safe, I think. Wasn’t that the point of this little kidnapping?”
* * *
the woman was one of the lucky ninety percent who survived jacking intact, and she did give Alliance questioners the names of three other tenientes who had been in on the Portobello massacre. For her own part in it she was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was sent to the large POW camp in the Canal Zone, the jack in the back of her skull guaranteeing that she wouldn’t be part of any conspiracy there.
Unsurprisingly, during the four hours it had taken to get her to Portobello and install the jack, the three other tenientes and their families had dissolved into the bush, driven underground—perhaps to return. Their fingerprints and retinal patterns tagged them as rebels, but there was no real guarantee that the ones on file were authentic. They had had years to effect substitution. Any one of them might show up at the entrance to the camp at Portobello with a job application.
Of course, the Alliance had fired every Hispanic employee at the Portobello camp, and could do the same everywhere else in the city, even the country. But that might be counterproductive in the long run. The Alliance provided one out of three jobs in Panama. Putting those people out of work would probably add one more country to the Ngumi ranks.
Marx and others thought and taught that war was fundamentally economic in nature. No one in the nineteenth century, though, could have foreseen the world of the twenty-first, where half the world had to work for its rice or bread and the other half just lined up in front of generous machines.
* * *
the platoon returned to the town just before dawn, with warrants for the three rebel leaders. They entered the houses in groups of three, simultaneously crashing inside in clouds of smoke and vile gas, lowering real estate values but finding no one. There was no effective resistance, and they sped away in ten separate directions.
They rendezvoused at a place about twenty kilometers downhill, a feed store and cantina. The cantina had been closed for hours, but one customer remained, collapsed under one of the outside tables, snoring. They didn’t wake him up.
The rest of the mission was an exercise in malice dreamed up by some half-awake genius who was annoyed at not taking any more prisoners that night. They were to go back up the hill and systematically