Chapter 9: The Job
Saying goodbye to Phyllis went better than I expected.
"When will you be back?"
"I don't know. I might not be."
She absorbed it. And then she said, "Okay." She really wasn't, but she didn't break down or beg me to stay. Things would've just gotten stranger and stranger, and although I hinted I might come back, I didn't really plan on it.
It goes without saying that Paul got us a job. There was a fellow down in Peru, a wealthy landowner with a wife and several kids. He'd made the "mistake" of funding political activity on the behalf of a coal miners' union, and made an enemy out of the Shining Path. I pretended to know what Paul was talking about--I guess he was excited because the Shining Path was a bunch of dirty Commies and he didn't enough of shooting them in 'Nam. That much, I gathered.
So, Mr. Ignacio Quispe got in touch with Paul through a friend of a friend of a friend, and we had a gig. He didn't think there was anyone he could trust, locally, so he outsourced. Three white guys would stick out like sore thumbs in the sweltering jungles of Peru, but our guns would stick out more.
Payment? Mr. Quispe offered to put us up for free, pay our travel expenses, and pay us three thousand neuvos soles a month, each. That worked out to about thousand US dollars, according to Paul. Not great money here, but serious cash in Peru.
Speaking of money, how about those stock tips? As it turned out, Paul took my $600 and doubled it within a week. I gave him some more tips and a little more money, but he assured me he could take his retirement nest egg and balloon that in short order, based on the info I fed him. I think he'd warmed up to the idea of using my knowledge once he realized it was accurate and he couldn't discern any way I could have come by it illegitimately. He thought I was playing dumb when he talked about current events, but honestly, I just had no fucking clue. I picked up pieces here and there, read some papers, but it took me quite a while to catch up the global situation. I guess people were slowly calming down about this "Cold War" thing, thanks to a dude named Gorbachev and the efforts of the current United States President--who was leaving office early next year, and his Vice President had been picked to succeed him.
Paul told me we could have had a lot more freelance work about fifteen years ago, when both sides were throwing money into weapons and proxy conflicts like it was going out of style. The Cold War environment did, however, make it surprisingly easy to come by powerful hardware. He picked up some M16A1s. Sag didn't mind--he'd used them when he was with SASR.
I sure wasn't going to be the odd man out, so I gave the gun a once-over and analyzed its features. Steel, aluminum, and plastic. Seemed a little big--it was a rifle, after all. I preferred handheld weapons, but whatever. I could still kill a mouse at a thousand meters, with my cybernetic acuity. It had two firing modes: semi-automatic and fully-automatic. One thing I'd learned about automatic weapons was not to hold down the trigger--you'd just waste a lot of ammo and probably not hit anything, thanks to the constant recoil. Best to fire in shorts bursts, assuming we had to fire at all. Not like I was eager to actually shoot anyone, but it was nice to put my skills to use again.
Paul ran down out itinerary: fly out from JFK to Panama City, then to Lima. Quispe's driver would pick us up there.
We had a solid plan of action, so we all concurred on departure in two weeks. Paul agreed to let me crash at his apartment in the meantime, and I'd get familiar with the M16A1. That also gave me the opportunity to feed him stock tips more directly, although his broker started getting kind of nervous about it. I listened in on their phone conversation once. You could practically hear him sweating on the other end.
"The SEC's not gonna have my balls in a vice for this, are they?"
"Trust me," Paul said, "I've just taken an interest in investing. All I need you to do are the trades, like I asked. You get your fee. Everybody's happy, right?"
"Yeah... everybody's happy." No, he hardly sounded convinced.
But it didn't matter. Even if the SEC, the IRS, the FBI, and every other letter of the alphabet came after us, we'd be long gone by the time it mattered. Once we got the Quispe job under our belts, we could move on to bigger, better things.
Everything looked so promising. I should have known it would all go straight to hell, the first chance it got.
Chapter 9
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