This was more difficult than her other skill: that of making speech incomprehensible and communication impossible. That side of her ace was far simpler to handle. Confusion was always easier than understanding. She knew that too well.

They reached the Secretary-General. As they did, Klaus closed his remaining eye momentarily, encasing himself in the shining, white armor of ghost steel, though he left his head and long blond hair uncovered, displaying the black eye patch surrounded by the facial scars that had left him half blinded. He grounded the blade of his greatsword in the grass below. “Let’s get this done,” he said.

“Excellent,” Jayewardene answered. “I had a dream last night that this went well, so the omens are good. Though other things, elsewhere…” He frowned and shook his head. “Well, that’s for later, on the flight back. As you said, let’s finish this.”

The trio strode under the tent’s shadow, Klaus ducking his head to get under the flap. The round table—as it had in the mythical time of King Arthur—promised that no person was more important than any other, but everyone here knew that for the farce it was. Barbara glanced around as the furious, muting clicking of cameras from the press section began.

Babel thought Curare, one of the two Shining Path leaders, more deuce than ace—his frog-like, thin body was clad only in ridiculous red- and yellow-striped spandex swimming trunks that clashed badly with his black-spotted, eye-searing blue skin. He sat on his haunches on a wooden platform made specially for him since normal chairs couldn’t accommodate his body. His huge golden eyes shifted as he glanced from Cocomama, seated next to him, to the last arrivals to the table.

Cocomama was a young woman dressed in traditional Andean clothing with an intricately beaded and feathered headdress over long, raven-black hair just beginning to be touched with premature grey around the temples. At Secretary-General Jayewardene’s insistence, she wore cotton gloves, even in the heat: her cocaine-laced touch was able to drug a person into submission.

Barbara smiled at the two as Jayewardene, Lohengrin, and she took their seats. Curare and Cocomama, from her observations and the intelligence on them that they’d been given, had a complicated relationship. The twin heads of the New Shining Path rebels were lovers, and their organization was funded by the seemingly unlimited resource of the cocaine Cocomama’s ace could provide. Over the last decade and a half, they had shepherded the New Shining Path from a minor, fading annoyance to a full-fledged danger to the stability of Peru. In the Andes region, especially, the New Shining Path now controlled the roads and main towns.

Curare was the titular leader and spokesperson, but Barbara suspected that it was Cocomama who was the true head of the organization, that it was her will that dominated the group’s decisions, and she had advised Jayewardene accordingly. Then there was the mysterious Messenger In Black, and no one knew his role with the New Shining Path at all. However, there were dark-winged moths flitting all around the terrace and under the tent’s fabric: whoever the Messenger was, he would know what happened here.