Power and Empire

Someone at the rental car company finally owned up to the mistake and promised to deliver the two larger cars to the hotel. Chavez, Midas, and Jack would cab it to the Panamericano with the bulk of the luggage. The pilots would drop Adara and the weapons off later and then return to their hotel nearer the airport with Lisanne. Clark had been clear that he didn’t want them near any kind of surveillance operation, no matter how much Lisanne offered to help — which she did. A lot. They were crossing the line by having her help retrieve the pistols and comms gear, but that couldn’t be helped unless they wanted to go in naked.

Chavez and Midas rode together in one cab while Jack, who spoke only enough Spanish to order a beer, piled into another one by himself with the rest of the luggage. His cabbie was an avuncular man named Rodrigo. Rodrigo, who had sandy hair and a philosophical bent, started speaking the moment Jack’s door slammed shut.

It was rush hour and the Autopista Luis Dellepiane was bumper-to-bumper and door-to-door. Drivers appeared to pay no attention to the lane markings or the rain and oozed forward in a magma flow of steaming gridlock. Periodically, a motorcycle would find a gap and roar between the slower-moving cars, splitting lanes. Sometimes they missed the side mirrors. Sometimes they did not.

In the first five miles Jack counted at least a half-dozen billboards displaying a variety of beautiful and long-legged women in classy clothing that, as far as he could tell, advertised various clinics that removed unwanted body hair. He would have joked with Midas about it, but then he considered all the crazy crap hawked on billboards in the United States and thought better of it.

Inching toward a tollbooth, Rodrigo pulled a one-hundred-peso note from his pocket. He must have seen Jack looking from the large bill to the sign above the booth that said he was in the lane for exact change.

“No one pays attention to the signs,” Rodrigo said in a slow but earnest voice. “The price of toll changes every week or two.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Inflation in my country… It is…” He held his hand in front of his face, fingers together in the gesture used to explain something important. “It is… subir como pedo de buzo

—how do you say? It rises like the fart of a scuba diver.”

Ryan wanted to chuckle at the imagery of bubbles shooting toward the surface, but the look on Rodrigo’s face said the euphemism was no laughing matter.

They continued through the tollbooth after paying, inching down the autopista in the heavy traffic. Rodrigo used the time to give Ryan a crash course in Argentina, enlightening him on everything from the economy — he had to pay his mortgage in U.S. dollars — to the beauty of Iguazu Falls — Ryan and everyone else in the world simply had to see this place at least once.

In a tediously slow but earnest voice, Rodrigo went on to declare that Argentine beef was the most delicious, Argentine women were beautiful beyond all description — especially when dancing the tango — and Argentine footballers possessed a superhuman talent at the game. Ryan was an Arsenal fan, but he kept quiet about that, knowing football — soccer to Americans — was a touchy subject in many parts of the world. Argentine fans often seemed to treat the act of simply attending a match as a blood sport.

Rodrigo continued. “God gave Argentina the most beautiful rivers in all the world. He blessed Argentina with incredible mountains and fruits that are sweet above all others. Here in Argentina, God has planted fields that yield bushels of grain and endless pampas of grass, filled with herds of fat cattle and fine horses—”

Just then the driver of the car ahead of the taxi rolled down his window and tossed a full bag of trash onto the wet roadway. A piece of sopping-wet paper flew up and stuck to the cab’s windshield, forcing Rodrigo to roll down his window and reach around to remove it.

The cabbie smoothed his sandy hair with a rain-soaked hand and glanced at Jack in the rearview mirror. “And then God messed it all up by putting the Argentines here.”

• • •

The two cabs arrived within moments of each other, dropping Ryan, Chavez, and Midas at the Panamericano on Carlos Pelligrini, a short walk from the city’s famous obelisk on a small one-way street that ran adjacent to the greenbelt and the fourteen-lane-wide Avenida 9 de Julio.

Ryan retrieved the luggage from the back of the taxi and paid the seven-hundred-peso fare — around forty U.S. dollars. Rodrigo nodded and wished him well in a droning voice that sounded as if the cabbie was certain something ominous was going to befall him.

Ostensibly the Panamericano was a five-star hotel, and its limestone façade and turn-of-the-century signage looked welcoming enough after the long trip south, but it had just enough sketchy online reviews to make it unlikely the Campus team would run into anyone they were supposed to be watching.