Major S’pense made eight or nine calls, trying to locate Wanda Ases. The last person he spoke to, assured him that she was gone forever. Captive in some jungle slave-camp or dead in a trench. Such disappearances were routine in Buena Salida and no amount of money or influence had ever returned even one of the missing.
S’pense sweated fiercely over the decision, but his time frame just could not accommodate a personal quest for one American businesswoman. New orders had come through and he’d been assigned to assist the engineers from Seven International. Somebody was finally bringing in the hardware for Project Rock’n’Roll, and S’pense had barely twenty minutes between meetings to catch a bit of sleep.
He assigned two of his more ruthless squad leaders to go door to door, if necessary, to find Wanda Ases. But he held very little hope that they’d manage to do more than frighten lots of people and let lots of blood.
S’pense had to assume that Seven International also had its people out looking for her. With a helpless resignation, he bent over the blueprints for Project Rock’n’Roll’s first gigantic stage.
There were to be eleven of them in all, one for each month of the ancient Saadamite calendar. Eleven massive concrete and steel installations in some of the remotest corners of Buena Salida. Eleven hydroelectric or nuclear plants to power them, eleven railway lines to supply them, and anywhere from eleven to one hundred and twenty one fledgling communities where workers would work and teachers would teach, and bankers would bank.
Since the near default of Mexico, International Capital had learned much about securing its foreign investments. Most Institutions had begun some form of active development policy in regions like Buena Salida. If they were called upon to finance the building of hospitals and orphanages, or to prop up the economies of corrupt and crumbling aristocratic fiefdoms, they first secured vast free-holdings of land as collateral, and Import/Export exemptions.
And so had come about the industrialization of Buena Salida, a tiny equatorial nation with a population estimated at four times that of New Jersey. A population that, if it was to be fed and housed and clothed, would also have to learn to be wage-earners and Rotarians.
Major S’pense started from reverie and glanced at his watch. 5:27 pm. Twenty minutes late for his meeting with the Marionite Brethren. He hurriedly packed his briefcase and called for his car.
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