Christopher Brookmyre (50 page)

His hand relaxed, left her neck and drifted down, the backs of his fingers brushing across her chest. Parrier slipped two digits beneath her bra-strap and delicately tugged it down her arm, exposing her left breast. Then he reached to cup it with his palm, but she intercepted him, gripping his wrist tightly with her right hand.

They stared into each other's eyes at point-blank.

'Forgive me,' he said. 'You'll understand that in this business it pays to be paranoid.'

'Don't mention it,' she told him coldly. 'But now that we're that bit more intimate, perhaps we can cut the flirting shit and talk about why we're both here.'

She took a step away and stood against the back of a settee, doing up her buttons. Parrier remained where he was next to the bureau and had another drink of champagne.

'Why are we both here?' he asked.

She stared at him, letting what was unsaid hang in the air between them a moment. Then she sighed deeply.

'I don't know, Pascal, maybe it's because I just had my tit hanging out a minute ago, but I'm suddenly all through being coy. I'm talking about what you're here to buy. I'm talking about the auction. And I think we might be able to help each other.'

He put the glass down and folded his arms.
Now
they were talking. 'How?'

he asked, intrigued.

'I believe we could improve our chances by combining our bargaining power. In fact, I'm not sure you're in with any chance otherwise. I know for a fact that Gieselcorp and Arutech are both ready to break twenty million.'

'How can you possibly know--'

'It's my business to know. The people I represent can go higher, but a combined bid would cost both of us a lot less.
If
our interests can be demonstrated to be compatible. How much were you planning to offer him?'

Parrier bit his lip for a second, then coughed up.

'We can go as high as anybody, but above twenty it's not worth our while.'

'All the more reason to consider a joint bid.
He
wouldn't need to know, either: we'd be a silent partner. We both understand what the greedy bastard's like: if he found out you had a bigger reserve to draw from, he'd raise the auction floor.'

'So what's your end?' Parrier asked. 'How would this partnership work?'

'I'm not sure it would, yet. That's what I'm here to ascertain. I'm guessing, unlike the other bidders, you're not particularly interested in acquiring the technology. OSE doesn't have the investment or the infrastructure to spend twenty years and hundreds of millions on development. I think you're interested in stopping it.'

Parrier said nothing, just grabbed his glass and took another gulp. He sat himself up on the bureau, scattering some printouts.

'Clearly that would be in your interest,' Jane went on, 'but it would also be in the interests of a great many people in this industry. Now, I know you're not averse to a bit of unilateral action, but your previous attempt only cost you a couple of men.'

Parrier's eyes widened. He just about managed to stifle a response, understanding that she wasn't going to tell him how she knew this. Hopefully his busy little mind would now be making few assumptions about what else she did or didn't know.

'Shelling out twenty million, however, strikes me as a very generous piece of unilateral action to be taking. So I'm guessing there's something else.'

She folded her arms and offered him a smile, intended to suggest she knew what it was but that she wanted to hear it from him.

'Stopping the technology is not our only motivation,' he confirmed. 'It's Deimos we're after. More specifically, Marledoq.'

[?] [?] [?]

'Shit, she's good,' Lex whispered, now sitting between Bett and Armand as they watched the two-hander unfold. Jane was bullshitting with aplomb, dangling a nebulous temptation before someone as greedy as he was curious, just to keep him talking. 'She's real good.'

Bett nodded sincerely, his finger still muting the mike.

'I'll be more impressed if he ever mentions
the name
,' said Armand.

'She's not just after the name,' Bett told him. 'The name might save her son today, but she wants to keep him safe tomorrow too.'

'She's going after the leak,' Lex realised with a gasp. She hoped it merely sounded like she was impressed, as opposed to suddenly terrified. Parrier's voice resumed from the speakers.

'We wanted an underground facility for our own research and testing, and we were preparing to table a bid for Deimos, lock, stock and barrel, in order to get Marledoq. Deimos was idling, costing Phobos too much money. I knew Nicholas Willis's patience with the non-lethal research was running out. He's a tired and disillusioned old man, and I knew he was ready to sell up. We'd done some sounding out, estimated he'd accept a bid of forty million euros just to be rid of it. Comparable facilities elsewhere would cost us twice that.'

'By sounding out . . . '

'We put out feelers, found ourselves a willing contact inside.'

'Poker being easier if you can get a look at the other guy's hand.'

'Indeed. But not all of the cards had been dealt. Segnier--'

'Segnier?'

'Our man on the inside; there's always someone willing to suck up to his potential new bosses, especially for a decent kickback. Segnier warned us there was something in the pipeline that could change the game. It was topsecret, and he wasn't even sure himself what it was at the time.'

'But he sure found out, didn't he?'

Lex held her breath, staring at the screen, forcing her eyes to stay there and not look at Bett, who was sitting two feet away. One fleeting reference now and she'd be lost.

'Oh yes. He managed to get some computer files smuggled out. There was a
window
, an opportunity, I don't know what, but I do know we paid top dollar for them.'

'You and everybody else.'

'Indeed. Once he knew what he had, the bastard sold the files all over the place. Suddenly everybody knew what Deimos was developing.'

'And Deimos's value just as suddenly went stratospheric.'

Nuno's voice broke across the speakers again. Armand automatically pulled on his headphones to continue following Jane and Parrier's conversation.

'Sir, it's Dirlos. Someone from reception just handed him a piece of paper. I couldn't see what it was, but I'm guessing it had to be a fax. He took one look at it and now he's dialling his cellular.'

Bett turned a dial on the audio console and jacked up the volume from the OSE suite. The phone sitting next to Parrier on the bureau began to ring.

'Shit,' Bett muttered. He lifted his finger from the mute button, but as he did so, Parrier pressed something on the keypad to silence the ringing and continued talking, unwilling to be interrupted mid-flow. Bett switched channel on the mike, transmitting only to Nuno.

'What's Dirlos doing now?'

'He's giving the piece of paper back to the receptionist with instructions and he's waving to someone down the lobby. Big guy on his way.'

Bett switched channel again.

'So now everybody wants to acquire Deimos,' Parrier said. 'Not just to be first with the new technology, but to have a head start on developing weapons that will circumvent it. Willis could name his price. Two hundred million, three hundred, who knows? But as everything in the files was pertaining to one man, to this Fleming, we guessed it was some solo genius rather than a team effort we were dealing with.'

'
Get out of there
,' Bett's voice stated, calm but insistent. '
Now. Dirlos knows
something's wrong.
'

Jane held her position, two things keeping her from obeying. One, the secondary consideration, was that there was a guard outside the door. The primary consideration was that she still didn't have the name, and if she ran now, she wouldn't get a second chance.

'I figured: take him out and the project dies too,' Parrier went on with a shrug, the planned murder of her son merely a logical transaction to this prick. 'Deimos's price tag drops back down to what we wanted.'

'
Jane, get out of there. Dirlos is heading for the lifts. He's got another OSE

security officer with him. You are out of time.
'

She had to get him to say it.

'But before you can get to Fleming yourselves,' she prompted, 'he ends up in the hands of . . . '

'Our mutual friend,' Parrier replied. 'So now we're back in the same situation: everybody bidding up the price.' The phone rang out again, but on this occasion only once. Parrier looked at it, clearly this time not required to take any action. Alongside him, the printer hummed into life. 'The problem for us,'

he went on, 'is that if someone else gets it, they'll want Marledoq too, otherwise they'd be recreating the project from scratch. And that sucker Willis will sell it to them despite everything, because he'll have nothing left and whoever it is will be offering a decent price. Nothing like what it would have cost them if Deimos still had Fleming, but still cheap to the bidder, even factoring in whatever they end up paying out to that thieving asshole R . . . '

He stopped, his lips forming the first letter of the name he was about to speak. His eyes had fallen upon the sheet of paper that had just glided out from the printer on to the desk next to his thigh. It was upside down, but Jane was only four feet away, close enough to recognise her own photograph, a head-andshoulders crop from a shot Ross had taken of her posing with Rachel. Parrier's gaze lifted from the paper and alighted once more on Jane, his mouth now slack, that crucial word melted away. Then his eyes suddenly narrowed as it all fitted together.

He took a step forward and swung an open-handed slap at Jane's face. It didn't connect. She had repeated certain movements thousands of times in the past few days, a process of 'retraining reflexes'. It nonetheless surprised her how automatically her response came, though it was made easier by how early Parrier had telegraphed his strike. He was a man used to having someone else do his fighting for him. Jane blocked with her left hand, her torso rotating at the waist, before recoiling as she drove her right fist into his throat, aiming as she'd been trained to, at a point two feet behind him. He buckled, clutching his neck, breathing in with a strangulated gasp, but somehow managing to utter a cry of 'Denis' as he exhaled. The door opened almost immediately, but Jane had already drawn the Walther from her ankle. She stepped behind the dazed and reeling Parrier, and pulled him off-balance towards her with an arm around his neck as Denis came through the door, pistol in hand. She got off three rounds, hitting him with two, both in the chest. He fell backwards against the door, the gun tumbling from his startled grip, but not before firing one desperate shot, which hit Parrier in the stomach. Jane released her arm from his neck and let him fall to the carpet, where he curled up in the embryo position, clutching his wound. In the brief moment of silence that followed, Jane could hear the chop of rotor blades outside.

'
The roof
,' Bett's voice insisted. '
Get there now. Dirlos is in the lift.
'

But she still didn't have what she'd come for.

She placed a heel on Parrier's shoulder and dug down, spinning him around so that he was looking up at her.

'Stings a wee bit, eh?' she said. 'Not such a big fan of guns now, are we?'

He grimaced, trying to roll on to his side. She kicked him on to his back again and pointed the Walther at his face.

'Who is the vendor?' she asked.

He looked baffled amid the racking pain. She was worried for a second that Bett was wrong and somehow the name had remained secret, but realised the source of his confusion was that until very recently Parrier had been under the impression that the vendor's identity was something she already knew.

'WHO IS HE?' she shouted. 'HIS NAME. NOW.'

Parrier looked towards the door. Denis was lying motionless, blood pooling beneath him, but more help was on the way. She swung her arm a few short degrees and shot him in the right thigh. He bucked and howled in response, trying to turn, trying to grab at the source of the pain, but her foot kept him pinned.

'His name,' she repeated. 'Or I keep shooting.'

Parrier spluttered, snot and tears exploding from his nose.

'Roth,' he gasped. 'Marius Roth.'

'I don't believe you,' she told him, angling the Walther to point at his other thigh.

'I SWEAR,' he screamed. 'It's Marius Roth. Marius Roth.'

'Ring any bells?' she asked Bett.

'
More than Quasimodo. Now get the
fuck
out of there. Dirlos will be up any
second.
'

Jane stepped off of Parrier, who immediately curled up on his side like a poked woodlouse. He was squirming and helpless but, she realised, he was also still a threat.

'He could warn this Roth, couldn't he?'

There was a pause.

'
Not could. Will. There'd be money in it.
'

Jane looked into Parrier's face, now staring back up, eyes wide in horrified realisation as he deduced what her last words meant. She feared she'd see all the things Alexis had told her about, and that it would stay her hand, but instead she saw Ross in the same position, Michelle, Rachel, Donald, begging for their lives from this man and those he sent to do his bidding. She emptied the Walther, firing the remaining four shots into his chest, then reached to her right calf for a change of clip. As she slotted the new magazine home, she looked around the suite but couldn't see which, if any, of the windows slid open. From outside in the corridor she heard the chime the lift made to herald its arrival moments ahead of its doors opening. Dirlos, plus one.

She ran across the room and picked up the pistol that lay on the carpet next to Denis's dead hand, switching the lighter Walther to her weaker left. She tried not to look at his face. She'd only seen it twice before she'd killed the guy, but now wasn't the time to get philosophical.

Jane threw the door open to the wall and peered around the frame as she heard the lift slide open at the far end of the corridor. Dirlos emerged, drawing a handgun as he did so, a second man at his back. She crossed her wrists and leaned into the gap, opening fire with both weapons. The two men dived to the floor, Dirlos scrambling for the nearby stairwell and the other back into the lift. She didn't fancy her chances of taking down two armed pros, especially not at that distance, but she did think she might buy herself some time to escape. It was Bett's technique but it was as much Nuno's psychology she was banking on, something he'd told her as he was teaching her a particular blow. 'Make your first strike very hard, very fast and very controlled, and most opponents will fear they're beaten already.' These guys weren't likely to throw in the towel, but they'd be that bit more slow and careful about approaching this door.