us,” Phoebe replies in the same language.
I nod. “We're going to need your help, Pedro. You understand the risk, don't you?”
“Yes,” the boy says. “Señor, are you going to kill me later?” His voice is flat and calm, but he swallows a couple of times and his eyelids flutter. He's putting on a brave face. Helping the nice American lady who had been staying in the villa hadn't turned out the way he had hoped.
“I'm Silas,” I say, and then I nod to my left. “That's Phoebe, and like she says, you're in no danger from us. Other people, though, are going to want to talk to you. They won't be very nice. We can protect you from them. You help us, and we'll take care of you. Okay?”
He looks at Phoebe and me, and then at Mere, who has a more honest expression on her face than either Phoebe or I. “Okay,” Pedro says. “New scooter,” he adds in English, speaking for Mere's benefit. “Italian. Aprilia.”
Phoebe laughs again. “Done,” she says.
I nod to Pedro and sit back in my seat. The boy nods too, and turns back around. Mere is looking at me in the rearview mirror, her eyebrows raised.
“The boy knows how to negotiate,” I tell her. “Why wouldn't we want him along?”
* * *
The presence of Secutores in La Serena suggests two things: one, that they're working through the same suppositions as Mere and looking for Arcadian-friendly areas where we might have gone to ground; and two, our theory that they're still working on grabbing an Arcadian is sound. On a purely business level, keeping after Phoebe and me if they have access to Hyacinth, doesn't make sense. They're losing too many men trying to track us down. It's possible that Hyacinth and Secutores are working together and Secutores is cleaning up loose ends, but the fact that we haven't called Arcadia should also tell Hyacinth that they're in no immediate danger from us calling the cavalry. We're still on our own, but like I told Belfast, the enemy of my enemy might be a friend. The trick is figuring out which enemy is the right one to befriend. Or not. I know Phoebe wants to play them off each other, and I'm not convinced that isn't Escobar's plan with us and Secutores.
If I was under the gun to figure out a counteragent to the weed killer, I'd be buying time by getting my enemies to fight among themselves too. Us biting back against Secutores may give us a bit of breathing room from Hyacinth as well.
None of this solves the bigger problem of Arcadia and the poison within the Grove. And the question of how much Callis knows. I can't help but think he is the one who put me on to the idea of going to Rapa Nui.
After a few hours of driving, we stop and let Pedro and Mere eat. Phoebe and I stay in the car, talking about what we're doing next. Well, mostly I talk and Phoebe listens. There's a lot of brain dumping to do from the overnight session I did with Mere's computer.
Mere has the highly structured mind of a good reporter, and all of her research over the last week had been gathered into a tidy stack of well-labeled folders. I read journal abstracts, stockholder notices, corporate SEC filings, news articles, forum discussions, and more than a few conspiracy theory blog posts. There was no dearth of data to sift through, and it was a long night of reading and thinking. But when I finally read Mere's assessment, a short list of bullet points, I thought she was on the right track.
“She's methodical and tenacious,” Phoebe says after I've given my assessment of Mere's thinking. “Every night, she'd talk the whole time she was making dinner. She wasn't telling me what she had learned so much as summarizing it all. Out loud. It wasn't necessary for me to be in the room, but I stayed and listened. She's a good asset. A good strategist. I see why you saved her.”
I stare out the window. “The Grove thinks I had an ulterior reason.”
“Because you had fallen for a mortal?” Phoebe snorts. “It happens more often than you know, Silas. But that has little to do with anything. You're trying too hard to see a conspiracy when the basic issue is that they're idiots. They've been idiots for a long time. We could have done something. We should have. But they