“And what do we get out of it?” Briess asked, surprised at the dryness of his throat.
“You get your population problem solved without having to argue about sex or religion or human rights. Let people have as many offspring as they want, the young ones are juicier anyhow. We prefer to maintain a large gene pool by eating only third birth order or higher persons, so we won’t be reducing you by much.”
“We can handle our own population problems,” growled Briess.
“Never in a million years,” said the voice, the translator managing to imply a chuckle. “Not with all your taboos. Aren’t you sick of them? By Charm the Great, between your religions and your laws, you can’t have a good gang rape without being hauled up short! That’s what you get with a differentiated society like the Pistach. Everything smoothed out, ironed over. Well, with us, it’s different. You let us hunt, we’ll do you favors, give you some technology that’ll advance you a few centuries.”
“You’ll restrict your hunting by agreement?” asked Briess. “How would that work?”
“First, you can tell us where the hunting shouldbe done. Second, you can tell us what individuals or groups you’d like eliminated. Political foes, maybe? Certain foreign elements? Certain dictators that’ve been hard to handle? Just imagine, you want it, it happens, but nobody can trace it back to you!”
“If we make a deal with you, do we still get to join this Confederation the Pistach keep talking about?” asked Dink.
“Go ahead and join, just don’t tell the Pistach about our agreement. You can go ahead and become neighborly. It won’t hurt you. But … on the side, when you get bored, we’ll take you hunting with us.”
There was a long silence. Briess asked, “Won’t the Pistach find out about it?”
The voice made a grating noise they interpreted as laughter.
“With all your terrorists and warfare and tribal conflicts. Not so they can prove it.”
Briess said, “We’d like to talk about this, a bit.”
“Take your time,” said a voice. “Take all the time you need. Meantime, just to illustrate our goodwill, give us a few names. We’ll find the being or beings, wherever it is or they are, and we’ll either make them disappear or deliver them to you. Just to show how useful we can be.”
Silence in the van. It was McVane who spoke at last. “A woman named Benita Alvarez. The intermediary for the Pistach envoys.”
“Dead? Dismembered? Or delivered?”
McVane started to speak, but Briess reached through the opening to put a hand on his shoulder, silencing him.
“Delivered,” said Briess. “It has to be done surreptitiously, no alarms, no havoc, no wreckage. She has to disappear, and she has to be in good condition. Call one of us when you’ve got her.”
“Where is she?”
“If we knew that, we wouldn’t need you,” said McVane.
“Excellent,” purred the voice, losing some of its mechanical edge. “We enjoy a challenge. She has family, perhaps?”
“A husband in Albuquerque. A son and daughter at school in California.” He rumbled for a pocket notebook and read off Angelica’s address, Carlos’s address, Bert’s address.
The voice purred again. “We may need to use her family as bait. We’ll let you know when we have her, and we’ll bring her here.”
The voice went away. The other men sat silently while the technician fiddled with his dials and screens. “Here’s something in infrared,” he said at last, pointing at his monitor.
They got into the back to see what he had, an image of something or things tall and tangled, looming at the side of the ramshackle house. And something smaller but numerous on the ground between the armored car and the house. And something else, that they couldn’t at all make out, more an absence than a presence.
Dink gulped, saying in a slightly panicky voice, “I’m not sure I like this . . .”
“We’ve made alliances before,” said McVane. “Hell, we had an alliance with Stalin once.”
“There’s a difference,” murmured Briess. “I doubt Stalin ever looked at us and imagined how we’d taste served rare, with sautéed mushrooms.”
Dink started the car and eased it into motion, turning in a wide loop to put them back on the isolated road. “First thing we have to do is tell Morse about it,” he murmured. “Let’s see what he has to say.”