On the plane, Araari brings up being incompetently threatened. “Two men stopped me yesterday. From Captain Walker. They wanted me to tell you that continuing on this path is dangerous. —They meant because of them, because they will hurt you if you continue, but I suspect they are not the most dangerous thing we will encounter if we continue.”
"Sounds like a good first step. And if not - I might have the name wrong, I'm sorry, maybe I could just look around a bit and make sure? I'm sure I'd recognize his face if I saw him."
"Well," she says, "it's technically against the rules... if I could have a little tip, for going out of my way..."
You can bribe most people although Anita guesses if there were an exception it might be a nun or her actual sister
She thanks the nurse and looks around some more.
Ooh.
Hmm. Rich people give money to hospitals a lot, but she supposes that if you were going to run a drug selling operation out of a hospital then a wing added with your money might end up being part of it? Maybe they should check it out?
Anita is going to see if she can get a sense of where the drugs are being kept, or coming from, even though she appears to be off her blending in game today.
Anita tracks one of the nurses to a closet full of Nectar, then watches her collect some of it and take it somewhere else.
The nurse dilutes the Nectar with saline, then prepares to inject it in a patient.
The nurse says, "here's a little drug we call orange juice! It'll make you lively and give you some pep. It's experimental. You can only get it in the Hospital Superbissima."
Well. That's a good trick, isn't it, selling your experimental drugs to a hospital. She wonders how complicated something like that is.
Aha.
That seems like a good point at which to bring her findings back to the others. Trying to reach Dr. Solazzio alone sounds likely to lead to... hiccups.
The next morning--
Inaaya sends Mordred a note asking him to spend time with her that afternoon.
"Okay so... so far we know that the peaches deal Nectar, and that the nurses give it to patients, and... Montgomery Donovan is in charge of all this somehow? Do I have that right? Am I missing anything?"
"And we know that a Dr. Solazzio is working with the drug in some capacity."
"We also know that Donovan is working with the group we met in Ethiopia, the one that thinks we're fellow cultists, and I don't know what we want to do regarding what Donovan ends up thinking our deal is but we probably shouldn't wing it."
"They think you were working for Trammel, right? And then he supposedly died? Could be useful for me to steer clear of that, if you think you might need someone to approach them from a different angle than you later on."
"What exactly are we hoping to do here? Just learn more about Nectar and the cult? Disrupt their operations? Expose them?"
"Just to learn more, I think--in case of war, it is better that we already know everything there is to learn from Malta."