Voyagers III - Star Brothers Page 3

  “One moment,” said his father. “Today we live in peace…”

  “You live dirt poor!” Paulino spat. “Those men from the city, they take your crops and give you so little you can barely stay alive!”

  “We live simply, the way we have always lived, since the time when the Great Inca ruled all the world.”

  “That’s not good enough for me,” Paulino said.

  His father saw how the young man shook and sweated. “Yes. I understand. Because you cannot control yourself, one day the soldiers will come and destroy us all.”

  Now Paulino stood rooted by the closed wooden door of the old stone barn, staring in the direction of the valley road, as if he could make the soldiers go away if he stared hard enough. In the distance the Andes rose to snow-capped magnificence. The sun burned hot in the cloudless sky, but the wind from the mountains was cool and dry.

  And Paulino saw a cloud of dust rising above the valley road. He wanted to run.

  Instead he pushed through the creaking barn door. Inside, six men in goggles, breathing masks, and stained plastic aprons were bending over a complex apparatus of glass and heavy metal levers.

  “Put on a mask!” yelled one of the men.

  “Soldiers!” shouted Paulino. “Soldiers coming to the village!”

  All six men froze for an instant. Then they rushed for the door, throwing their masks and goggles to the floor of the barn.

  Outside in the sunlight their leader, a wiry hard-faced Frenchman, dashed across the village street to the ramshackle shed where they kept their truck. He came back with a pair of binoculars in his hands. And a heavy black pistol jammed into the waistband of his pants.

  Clambering up the rough stones of the barn like a monkey, he flattened himself on the roof and peered through his binoculars.

  “Merde! It must be a whole battalion of them! Armored cars and everything!”

  The others raced to the truck and jammed themselves into it. The motor coughed twice and then roared to life as their leader scampered down from the roof.

  “But you said what you’re doing is not illegal!” Paulino clawed at the Frenchman as he hurried across the road.

  “You knew that was not true,” the Frenchman snarled, twisting free of Paulino’s grasp and climbing into the truck’s crowded cab.

  “But you told me…”

  Paulino found himself staring into the muzzle of the gun.

  “Get away, you stupid fool, before we run you down.”

  The truck lurched out of its hiding place and down the street, coughing and sputtering, throwing up a little storm of dust and grit as it raced for the road that led out of the valley. Paulino stood in a daze, wondering what he should do. By the time he heard the engines of the approaching government troops, he had made his decision. He ran.

  Just as he had done when he was a child hiding from his mother’s wrath, Paulino dashed up the slope of the hillside behind the village’s houses, scrambled past the terraced gardens where the women grew their kitchen vegetables and the men cultivated a few wine grapes, and hid in the secret cave beneath the lip of the moss-covered hilltop.

  It was no more than a low niche in the hillside, but from that hiding place he could see the entire village and all the valley. As a child he had spent long hours there, flat on his belly, watching the villagers at their work while he daydreamed whole afternoons away. Now he lay in the low narrow cave, trembling in the damp darkness as the soldiers entered the village in their trucks and armored cars. The trucks stopped in the village’s only plaza and the troops jumped to the ground. These were not Peace Enforcers, they were troops from the capital. Their uniforms were ugly brown battle dress and they carried automatic rifles, deadly looking with their curved magazines and flash suppressors on their muzzles.

  Paulino watched as two of the armored cars sped down the road after the Frenchman’s truck. Watched as a squad of troops raced straight to the old stone barn, kicked in the door, and tossed in half a dozen grenades. The ancient stone walls held, but the explosions blew out the roof and started a fire that sent oily black smoke bubbling into the pristine sky.

  Then the soldiers went to every house and pulled out every person. Truckloads of soldiers trundled out into the fields and rounded up the men working there. Paulino watched in sickening shame as the fields went up in smoke, the yellow tractors were blown to pieces, and a dozen of the elder men of the village put against a wall and shot before the horrified eyes of the whole village. One of the old men was Paulino’s father.

  Then the looting began. And the raping. Paulino cried bitterly and clawed at the grass until his fingertips bled. It was all his fault. He had brought this destruction down upon the village just as his father had warned.

  But he did not move from the safety of his cave until long after dark night had fallen and the soldiers had left the wailing, bloody, burning, sorrowful village.

  CHAPTER 4

  THREE months later the Brazilian ambassador to the United States gave a lavish dinner party at the embassy’s newly-finished complex of buildings in suburban Bethesda.

  Ambassador Branco, a cousin of the president and a more distant relative of a general who had overthrown the government of Brazil half a century earlier, graciously accepted compliments from the stream of guests flowing past him in the reception line. The men were in traditional black dinner clothes, the women in the most expensive gowns and jewels they possessed. The ambassador himself wore a conservatively-tailored tuxedo with the sash of his office bearing merely a few of his huge collection of medals and decorations.

  Jo Camerata, tall and stunning in a low-cut strapless gown of midnight black, reached the ambassador and allowed him to take her hand in his.

  “A beautiful new embassy, Miguel,” she said, in a carefully modulated voice. “You must be very proud of what you have accomplished.”

  “Its beauty pales to insignificance now that you have graced us with your presence,” said the ambassador, in English.

  Jo smiled at him and moved to the next flunkey in line. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, a centimeter or two taller than the ambassador, with dark hair to her bare shoulders and even darker eyes. The lush figure of a Mediterranean empress. Her fingers and wrists and throat flashed with gemstones and precious metals; over her heart was a diamond pin in the shape of a stylized V.

  The crowd mixed and milled as Jo, unescorted but never alone for very long, wandered through the opulent rooms admiring the rich draperies, the exquisite furniture, the paintings and sculptures that adorned every wall, every corner. Brazil was a rich nation, and this new embassy proudly proclaimed its nation’s wealth and newfound power.

  “Don’t you think the ambassador looks tremendously relieved?”

  Jo turned to find Sir Harold Epping standing beside her: lean, dignified, bushy white eyebrows, trim white mustache and ruddy cheeks. He held two slim crystal flutes of champagne. Jo deftly handed her empty one to a passing waiter and accepted Sir Harold’s.

  “Thank you, Harold.”

  “You’re quite welcome. It’s good to see you here.”

  “Bored already?”

  Glancing at her cleavage, “Quite the contrary, dear girl. Quite the contrary.”

  Sir Harold was one of the few men on Earth who could call Jo “girl” without risking emasculation.

  “You said you thought Miguel looked relieved?”

  The English diplomat smiled and dabbed at his white mustache. “You are the only person I know who can get away with calling everyone by their first name. I’ve known you for years, yet I never know if I should call you Ms. Camerata, or Mrs. Nillson, or perhaps Josephine. Or is it Josette? Are you descended from Frenchmen?”

  Jo laughed. “You may call me Jo,” she said graciously. “I haven’t been Mrs. Nillson for more than fifteen years.”

  “Widowed?”

  “Divorced,” Jo answered stiffly, “although my first husband died shortly after.”

  “Can’t say I blame him. P
robably broken-hearted.”

  “Hardly!”

  “And you never remarried? There’s hope for me?”

  Laughing again, “I’m afraid not. I remarried almost fifteen years ago.”

  “Really? I had no idea. Who’s the lucky fellow?”

  “No one you’d know.”

  “H’mm.” Sir Harold sipped at his champagne. The dinner guests drifted from room to room, chatting, laughing, telling each other stories they had all heard at similar parties, but pretending they were amused and amusing. Jo wondered why Sir Harold was showing interest in her marital status. Surely he has access to all the information he wants. Is he trying to get to Keith?

  “The Brazilians have done themselves proud with this place,” Jo said as she and Sir Harold paused before a marble fireplace with a huge portrait of President de Sagres above it. “It must have cost half their gross national product.”

  “Hardly. But did you observe that there’s not a military uniform to be found anywhere among our hosts? And how relieved the ambassador appears to be?”

  “You mentioned that before.”

  “Yes. De Sagres thwarted the army’s coup attempt in Brasilia, you know.”

  “So I heard.”

  “The president appears to have gained the upper hand over the generals. His cousin seems happy about it.”

  “Shouldn’t he be?”

  “I had always wondered about him,” said Sir Harold. “Which way he would jump when the fire got hot.”

  Jo gave him a sly smile. “Miguel doesn’t jump at all. He merely stays here in Washington and waits for the smoke to clear in Brasilia. Whoever is in power, that’s who he supports.”

  “You think so?”

  Jo nodded.

  “I suppose you have better sources of information than I do,” Sir Harold admitted. “You have the farflung operations of Vanguard Industries at your beck and call. All I have is British Intelligence.”

  A series of musical tones chimed out over the hubbub of conversations.

  “They’re calling us to dinner,” Jo said. “Just like on a cruise ship.”

  “How gauche!”

  The crowd streamed in to the formal state dining room with its three magnificent chandeliers, where a dozen circular tables had been set with flawless damask, sparkling crystal, and beautiful figured chinaware from Coimbra. Liveried servants showed the guests to their tables. Jo was placed next to the ambassador and his wife, an overweight former video star in a grotesquely green gown with a plunging neckline and enough emeralds to make a maharajah jealous. Seeing that Sir Harold was being seated several tables away, Jo spoke briefly with the ambassador, and the Englishman was asked to change places with one of the Brazilian flunkies at the ambassador’s table.

  Senora Branco glared at Jo, who ignored her and welcomed Sir Harold to their company.

  Less than twenty kilometers away, but more than thirty meters below ground, three technicians sat at their monitoring stations, exchanging exaggerated tales of their daring and bravery to pass the long hours.

  “So there I was,” said the youngest of the three, traces of acne still blemishing his jovial round face, “at the top of the jump with a busted fitting on my right ski and nowhere to go but down the chute.”

  On the other side of the steel walls that enclosed their station, a thermonuclear fusion generator quietly converted isotopes of hydrogen and helium to energy. Deep in the heavily shielded heart of the fusion generator blazed a man-made star, a core of plasma a hundred million degrees hot that duplicated the unimaginable forces existing in the heart of a star. Incredibly powerful magnetic fields held the fierce blazing plasma in a cage of energy. The forces at play inside the fusion generator, if let loose, could have destroyed the city of Washington in an eyeblink.

  But the monitor screens showed that everything was under control: more energy than the entire power grid of the United States had been able to produce a mere generation earlier was routinely created and used while the three technicians swapped stories.

  “There were three of ’em,” the second technician was saying, unconsciously toying with his thick red mustache. “Mako sharks, and man did they look hungry!”

  A fraction of the energy generated by the fusion reactor was converted into the electricity that powered most of the government buildings in Washington. The White House, the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the office buildings for the House and Senate and all the administrative departments from Agriculture to Space, all the agencies from FBI to IRS—their lights, their air conditioners, their coffee makers and paper shredders and computers and even their pencil sharpeners were all powered by electricity from the man-made star.

  The largest part of the fusion-generated energy, however, powered a strangely small device that made no noise, no vibration, and seemed to be doing nothing. Energy went in, but to the unappreciative eye, it seemed that absolutely nothing came out. The device, little more than a hemisphere of polished metal gleaming in the overhead lights, seemed to swallow the energy and give nothing in return.

  Except that the city of Washington, and all its suburbs out to a twenty-kilometer radius, were shielded by an invisible, impalpable bubble of energy. Airplanes could fly through it. Cars could drive through it. People could even walk through it without feeling a thing, except perhaps a slight momentary tingling along the skin, as if the tiny hairs on the back of one’s neck had been stirred.

  But a nuclear bomb could not pass the energy bubble. It would explode, and the protective screen would absorb the heat and blast and radiation the way a sponge soaks up water, only more efficiently. Much more efficiently. The best physicists on Earth still did not completely understand how the energy screen worked. It was a gift from the stars, from the alien spacecraft that had entered the solar system more than thirty years earlier. As was the fusion generator.

  Together, the fusion generator and the energy screen had ended the Cold War. Removing the threat of nuclear holocaust and providing cheap, abundant energy had changed the world enormously. Gifts from the stars.

  “Our command post was being overrun,” the third technician was saying, “so I took the automatic rifle from the sergeant who had just been hit and sprayed the bastards a good, long burst. Then somebody threw a grenade…”

  She was older than the two males who worked with her; almost a full generation separated them. The two young men listened with envious eyes and mouths hanging agape to her tale of valor in Central America, while the gifts from the stars quietly, unobtrusively protected them all.

  Dinner was pretty much of a bore, Jo thought. The ambassador spoke glowingly of a “new era” in Brazil.

  “Our president has a unified congress behind him. The army has been purged of its more adventurous elements, and the people support our president totally.” Jo knew it was an optimistic view of the situation. The Brazilian congress was far from unanimous and there were still young military officers who harbored dreams of glory.

  But, undeniably, Brazil had avoided an army takeover and President de Sagres was starting to move in the direction of devoting the nation’s immense wealth to raising the standard of living of the people who created that wealth.

  Sir Harold leaned close to Jo and whispered, “What on Earth is so amusing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re smiling like one of Rubens’ pink little cherubs.”

  “Was I? I had no idea.” Jo consciously kept her face straight through the rest of the dinner. She had no intention of telling Sir Harold or anyone else that President de Sagres’s newfound strength had been a gift from her husband.

  But as she said goodnight to the ambassador and his green-eyed wife and headed down the broad marble steps toward the line of limousines waiting for their owners, Jo was accosted by two other dinner guests.

  Li-Po Hsen looked distinctly out of place in a tuxedo. The Hong Kong industrialist, head of Pacific Commerce Corporation, would have been more at home in a flowing silk robe or even in
a lightweight tropical suit. The tuxedo was too formal, too western, for his ascetic oriental face with its hollow cheeks and menacing hooded eyes.

  Wilhelm Kruppmann, on the other hand, looked more like the bouncer in a rough Hamburg rathskeller than the financial genius behind a multinational banking cartel headquartered in Geneva. His neck bulged out of his collar; his tuxedo jacket seemed to strain across his shoulders and thick chest.

  “Do you mind if we ride downtown with you?” asked Hsen. Despite his oriental looks, he was completely westernized; none of the painfully indirect eastern politeness for him.

  “Both of you?” asked Jo. “Your drivers on strike?”

  They laughed, but it was uneasily, Jo thought as she allowed her chauffeur to help her into the plush rear seat of her limo. Hsen and Kruppmann took the two seats flanking the TV console, facing Jo.

  The car pulled smoothly away from the Brazilian embassy and started toward the corporate office towers in the heart of Washington, its electric motor whisper-quiet. For several moments Hsen and Kruppmann remained silent as the limousine whisked down tree-lined Bethesda streets. Jo watched their faces carefully. This was not a social visit.

  “You can speak freely,” she told them. “There are no recording devices in here and the partition behind you is soundproof. Besides, my chauffeur speaks only Italian.” Two of her three assertions were true.

  Kruppmann and Hsen glanced at each other. Jo smiled patiently.

  “This business of Brazil,” the Swiss financier blurted. “It has me very worried.”

  “We had expected the Brazilians to proceed with their plans of expansion,” said Hsen. “Now, suddenly, abruptly, de Sagres has thrown out the military leaders and threatens to invest the better part of his nation’s wealth in internal improvements.”

  “Unbearable,” muttered Kruppmann.

  “It is something of a surprise,” Jo said carefully. “But we can all do business with de Sagres. Brazil will still be a major market…”

  “For Vanguard Industries’ fusion generators, yes. For Vanguard’s electronics and pharmaceutical divisions, yes. But what about the armaments that Pacific Commerce was going to sell them? What about the increase in their exports that would have been necessary to support their expansion program?”