THE INCIDENT by Lars Emmerich

Author:Lars Emmerich [Emmerich, Lars]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lars Emmerich

Kittredge found himself again in the passenger’s seat of a dilapidated pickup, this one a Datsun. He wouldn’t have guessed there were any operational Datsun trucks left on the planet, and he was certain the one that was currently rattling his teeth loose on a jungle trail didn’t have many miles left before it too fell completely apart.

El Grande drove, and treated the travel time back to Caracas as an indoctrination opportunity. “You must learn a new mentality,” he was saying. “It is not a pleasant thing, but your life is not the same any more. You must be careful about everything. Everything that you say, everything that you do, it must be done carefully. Otherwise?” He squeezed his hand into a fist. “They will squash your cojones.”

“You talk as if I’ve decided something,” Kittredge said. “I haven’t.”

El Grande laughed. “You are young, no? Maybe you have not seen the world in this way before. Let me assure you, you have most definitely made decisions.”

He stopped speaking to negotiate a particularly tricky rut in the road, then continued. “You are having confusion, I think. You must choose a way forward, but you think that going backward is also a choice.”

El Grande shook his head. “There is no going backward for you. You cannot make unseen what you have already seen.”

Yes, Jedi Master. Kittredge didn’t appreciate being patronized.

But he was also aware that he lacked perspective on El Grande’s world.

And he knew that he was in a very precarious position. Quinn and Fredericks had already demonstrated a surprising degree of ruthlessness; El Grande and his people had already demonstrated a surprising degree of organized opposition. Kittredge got the sense that he had stepped into a mature conflict. It was not yet large, but it certainly wasn’t new.

And he wasn’t particularly enthused about joining either side. Jungles and campfires were tolerable in small doses, but Kittredge knew that he wasn’t cut out for life as a guerrilla, even part-time.

On the other hand, Fredericks and Quinn had crawled so far up his ass that they could undoubtedly see daylight, and Kittredge’s resentment had only grown deeper over the past day.

He had signed the immunity agreement, naked and shackled to the cement in the Virginia safe house, and he had understood in an abstract sense that he had merely exchanged one type of prison sentence for another. But over the past few days, he had glimpsed the nature and extent of his indenture, and also the extent of the Agency’s brutality.

The iconoclast in Kittredge rooted for El Grande and his ragged band of little guys against the giant, grinding American machine.

The pragmatist in him recognized that El Grande didn’t stand a chance. Big Oil would summon its military and political servants, and it would win. Just like always.

He couldn’t really make up his mind to cast his lot with either side, but he couldn’t easily hedge his bets, either. He wasn’t a fool, and he knew that he lacked the skill and subtlety to play one side against the other.

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