Market Forces (11 page)

He was shaking his head. He crouched to her level and took both her hands gently in his own.

“Carla, this isn’t about you and Chris. It’s barely about you at all. Benito’s talking about
internal
contradictions. Living with what you are, with what your society is. At Hammett McColl, Chris could do that because there was a thin veneer of respectability over it all. At Shorn, there isn’t.”

“Oh, bullshit. You’ve read what these people are like. Dad, you used to write about what they were like, back when there was anyone with the guts to publish it. The only difference between Conflict Investment and Emerging Markets is the level of risk. In Emerging Markets, they don’t like conflict or instability. The guys in CI thrive on it. But it’s the same principle.”

“Hmm.” Erik smiled and let go of her hands. “That sounds to me like Chris talking. And he’s probably even right. But that’s not the point.”

“You keep saying that, Dad.”

Erik shrugged and seated himself again. “That’s because you keep missing it, Carla. You think this is about a rift between you and Chris, and I’m telling you it’s not, it’s about a rift inside Chris. Now you’re saying there’s no difference between what he used to do and what he’s doing now, and aside from a few semantic quibbles that may be true. But Chris hasn’t just changed what he does. He’s changed where he does it, and who he does it for, and that’s what counts. Along with Nakamura and Lloyd Paul, Shorn Associates is the most aggressive player in the investment field. That applies to their Arbitrage and Emerging Markets divisions just as much as Conflict Investment. They’re the original hard-faced firm. No gloss, no moral rationalizations. They do what they do, they’re the best at it. That’s what they sell on. You go to Shorn because they’re mean motherfuckers, and they’ll make money for you, come hell or high water. Fuck ethical investment, just give me a fat fucking return and don’t tell me too much about how you got it.”

“You’re making speeches, Dad.”

There was a taut silence. Carla stared into the heater, wondering why she found it so easy to sink these barbs into her father. Then Erik Nyquist chuckled and nodded.

“You’re right, I am,” he said cheerfully. “Sorry about that. I miss seeing myself in print so much, it all just balls up inside me. Comes out whenever I have someone to talk to.”

“I don’t mind,” she said distantly. “I just wish . . .”

“Wish what?”

She had a vivid flash of recall, toothpaste white. She would have been about six or seven at the time, staying with grandparents in Tromsö and cocooned in the cold outside–warm inside security the visits there always brought. She remembered Erik and Kirsti Nyquist on skis, propped against each other for support on the hill behind Kirsti’s parents’ house and laughing into each other’s faces. Having fun in the definitive Nyquist fashion that she, as a child, had always imagined would characterize her future married life the way it would always characterize her parents’.

The flash faded into the dull red glow of the electric heater. She reached for her father’s hand.

“Nothing.”

“D
RINK
?”

Mike Bryant shook his head. “Still dealing with a hangover, thanks, Louise. Just water, if you’ve got it.”

“Of course.” Louise Hewitt closed the steel-paneled door of the office drinks cabinet and hefted a blue two-liter bottle from the table beside it instead. “Sit down, Mike. Drinking—or whatever—midweek, that can be a pretty lethal mistake.”

“Not lethal,” said Bryant, massaging his temples a little as he sank onto the sofa. “But definitely a mistake at my age.”

“Yeah, must be hell being thirty-four. I remember it vaguely.” Hewitt poured water into two glasses and sat on the edge of the sofa opposite. She looked at him speculatively. “Well, I won’t toast you with water, but congratulations do seem to be in order. I just got off the phone to Bangkok. That sketch on Cambodia you dropped last time you were out there finally landed on the right guerrilla head.”

Bryant sat up straighter and forgot his hangover.

“Cambodia? The smack war thing?”

Hewitt nodded. “The smack war thing, as you so elegantly define it. We’ve got a guerrilla coalition leader willing to deal. Khieu Sary. Sound familiar?”

Bryant drank from his water glass and nodded. “Yeah, I remember him. Arrogant motherfucker. Had ancestors in the original Khmer Rouge or something.”

“Yeah.” There was the slightest hint of mockery in Hewitt’s echo of the grunted syllable. “Well, it looks like this Sary needs arms and cash to hold the coalition together. The Cambodian government’s on the edge of offering an amnesty to any of the heroin rebels who want to come in and disarm. If that happens, the coalition’s gone and Sary loses his power base. But if he can hang on, our sources in Bangkok reckon he’s in line to march on Phnom Penh inside two years.”

“Optimistic.”

“Local agents always are. You know how it is, they pitch rosy so you’ll bite. But this guy’s been on the money in the past. I’m inclined to go with it. So you’d better break out your copy of Reed and Mason, because this one’s yours, Mike.”

Mike Bryant’s eyes widened. “Mine?”

“All yours.” Hewitt shrugged. “You made it happen, you’ve got the executive experience to cover it. Like I said, congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“The proposal is not uncontested,” Hewitt said casually.

Bryant grinned. “What a surprise. Nakamura?”

“Nakamura and Acropolitic both. Nakamura must have parallel information on Sary; they’re offering him essentially the same deal you put together in Bangkok, and the bastard’s smart enough to know that forcing us all to tender will bring the prices down.”

“And Acro?”

“They’ve got the status quo mandate. Official economic advisers to the Cambodian regime. They’re in it to squash the proposal before it gets off the ground. It’s all already cleared with Trade and Finance.”

“What’s the ground?”

“North. Three-hundred-kilometer duel envelope, contracts to be signed in conference auditorium six at the Tebbit Centre. Turn up with blood on your wheels or don’t turn up. The word is Nakamura have pulled Mitsue Jones for this one. Flying her in to head up the UK team. Acropolitic don’t have anyone in her league, but they’ll no doubt be sending their finest. Against all of that, you get a team of three, including you. Suggestions?”

“Nick Makin. Chris Faulkner.” There was no hesitation in Bryant’s voice.

Hewitt looked dubious. “Your chess pal, huh?”

“He’s good.”

“You don’t let personal feelings get in the way of professional judgment around here, Mike. You know that. It’s bad for business.”

“That’s right, I know that. And I want Faulkner. You said this was mine, Louise. If you don’t—”

“Makin doesn’t like Faulkner,” Hewitt said sharply.

“Makin doesn’t like anyone. That’s his secret. The problem here, Louise, is that
you
don’t like Faulkner. And it isn’t much of a secret, either.”

“May I remind you that you’re speaking to the executive partner of this division.” Hewitt’s voice stayed level, just a shade cooler all of a sudden. She poured herself more water while she talked. “For your information, Mike, personal feelings have nothing to do with this. I don’t think Faulkner is up to a tender of this magnitude. I also think that you’re letting a friendship cloud your professional judgment and I’m going on record with that. This is going to go badly wrong if you’re not careful.”

“Louise, this is going to go like a dream.” Bryant grinned wolfishly. “Makin and Faulkner are both proven hard men on the road and as far as I’m concerned that’s the bottom line. We don’t have anybody better and you know it.”

There was a pause in which the loudest sound was Louise Hewitt swallowing water. Finally she shrugged.

“All right, Mike, it’s your call. But I’m still going on record against it. And that makes Faulkner one hundred percent your responsibility. If he fucks up—”

“If he fucks up, Louise, you can fire him and I’ll hold the door open.” Bryant flashed the grin again. “Or the window.”

Hewitt took a disk out of her pocket and tossed it onto the table between them.

“If he fucks up, you’ll all be dead,” she said shortly. “And Shorn’ll be out of a medium-term CI contract worth billions. That’s the briefing. Route blowups, road-surface commentaries. Make sure they both get copies. Make sure Faulkner understands what he’s got to do. Blood on the wheels, Mike, or there’s no deal.”

“I remember a time”—Bryant let just a hint of his American burlesque tinge the words—”used to be enough just to
get
there first.”

Hewitt smiled despite herself. “Bullshit, you do. You just heard Notley and the others talk about it. And even they barely remember when it was that cuddly. Now get out of here, and don’t disappoint me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Bryant picked up the disk and got up to go. At the door, he paused and looked back to where she was still sitting at the desk, sipping her water.

“Louise?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks for giving me this.”

“Don’t mention it. Like I said, don’t let me down.”

“No, I won’t.” Bryant hesitated, then took the plunge. “You know, Louise, you go on record against Faulkner now and you run the risk of looking very silly when he works out.”

Hewitt gave him an icy, executive partner smile.

“I’ll run that risk, thank you, Michael. Now, was there any other advice you’d like to give me on running the division?”

Bryant shook his head wordlessly and left.

H
E STOPPED BY
Chris’s office and found the other man standing at the window, staring out at the hail. Winter was hanging on unseasonably long in London, and the skies had been gusting fistfuls of the stuff for weeks.

“ ‘S happening?” he asked as he stuck his head around the door.

Chris jerked visibly as Bryant spoke. Clearly he’d been a long way off. Coming across the office to the window, Bryant was hard-put to see anywhere visibly more attractive than the fifty-third floor of the Shorn tower, and was forced to conclude that Chris had been daydreaming.

“Mike.” Chris turned away from the view to face his visitor. His eyes were red-rimmed and angry with something not in the immediate vicinity. Bryant backed up a step.

“Whoa, Chris. You’ve got to lay off the crystal edge.” It was only half a joke, he admitted to himself. Chris looked like shit. “Remember Rancid Neagan. Just say
No, not till the weekend.
”

Chris smiled, a forced bending of the lips as he rolled out the time-honored Dex and Seth comeback.

“Hey, I don’t do that shit no more.”

“What, weekends?”

Reluctantly, the smile became a grin. “You come up with a move or what?”

“Not yet. But don’t worry, the turnaround is in sight.”

This time they both grinned. The match, currently their fifth, was well into the endgame, and, barring a brain hemorrhage, Chris couldn’t lose. Which would make it four to one against Bryant, a score that the big man didn’t seem to mind as much as Chris had thought he might. Bryant played a flamboyant, queen-centered game, and when Chris inevitably worked out a fork and took that piece away from him, Bryant’s strategy usually went to pieces. Chris’s cautious defensive earthworks stood him in good stead every time, and Bryant continued to be perplexed when his assaults broke on the battlements of pawns while a pair or a trio of innocuous pieces chased his exposed king around the board and pinned it to an ignominious checkmate. But he was learning, and seemed content to pay the price of that process in defeats. His calls on weekends came far faster than they had in the beginning, and Chris was taking longer to respond each time. This last match had, at more than two weeks, already lasted twice as long as the preceding games. Chris thought it might be time to go up in the loft and bring down some of the battered strategy books his father’s brother had given him as a child. He needed to sand off the rust if he was going to hold his lead.

Maybe in return, Mike was teaching him to shoot. They were down at the Shorn armory a couple of times a week now, firing off Nemex rounds at the holotargets until Chris’s gun hand was numb with the repeated kick of the big weapon. To his own surprise, he was turning out to have some natural aptitude. He hit things more often than he missed, and if he didn’t yet have Mike’s casual precision with the Nemex, he was certainly making, in the midst of the crashing thunder on the firing range, a quiet kind of progress.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

“Got something for you,” said Bryant, producing the briefing disk from his pocket with a conjuror’s flourish. He held it up between index and ring fingers. The light caught it and opened up a rainbow-sheened wedge on the bright silver circle. Chris looked at the colors curiously.

“And that is?”

“Work, my friend. And this season’s shot at the big time. TV fame, as many drive-site groupies as you can handle.”

C
HRIS RAN THE
disk at home.

“Look it over,” Bryant told him. “Kick back and relax, take off your tie and shoes, pour yourself a shot of that iodine-flavored shit you drink, and just let it wash over you. I’m not looking for feedback for at least forty-eight hours.”

“Why can’t I just run it now?” Chris wanted to know.

“Because”—leaning closer, with a
secret-of-my-success
air—”that way you’re keyed up with anticipation and you eat it up at a deeper level. Your brain really sucks it in, just like the forty-eight-hour wait after gives it time to really stew, and by the time we meet to talk about it, you’re ready to boil over with insight.” He winked conspiratorially. “Old consultancy trick from way back.”

“This just you and me?”

Bryant shook his head. “Three-man team. You, me, Nick Makin.”

“Oh.”

“Is there a problem with that?” Bryant’s eyes narrowed. “Something I should know about?”

“No, no.”

Watching the closing sequences of the briefing disk, he turned it over in his head and tried to work out why he did feel there was a problem with Nick Makin. Makin hadn’t exactly come across as friendly, but neither had Hewitt, or Hamilton for that matter, and a lot of Shorn execs had probably heard the story of Elysia Bennett and Chris Faulkner’s sentiment attack.

The disk ended with the Shorn Associates logo engraved into a metallic finish on the screen, then clicked off. Chris shelved his thoughts, picked up his drink, and went to look for his wife.

He thought for a moment she’d gone to bed with a book, but as he passed the kitchen he saw that the connecting door to the garage was open and the lights were on. Led by the clinking sounds of tools, he walked through and around the bulk of the Saab, which was jacked up on one side. Carla’s coverall-clad legs and hips protruded from under the car beside an unrolled oilskin cloth full of wrenches. As he watched she must have stretched out to one side for something, because the angle of her hips shifted and the plain of her stomach changed shape beneath the coveralls. He felt the customary twinge of arousal that her more sinuous movements still fired through him.

“Hey.” He kicked one of her feet. “What’re you doing?”

She stayed beneath the car. “What does it look like I’m doing. I’m checking your undercarriage.”

“I thought you’d gone to bed.”

There was no response other than the creak of something metallic being tightened.

“I said I thought you’d gone to bed.”

“Yeah, I heard you.”

“Oh. You just didn’t think it was worth answering me.”

From the stillness he knew she had stopped work. He didn’t hear the sigh, but he could have cued it, accurate to milliseconds.

“Chris, you’re looking at my legs. Obviously I haven’t gone to bed.”

“Just making conversation.”

“Well, it’s not the most engaging conversational gambit I’ve ever heard, Chris. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up on it.”

“Jesus! Carla, sometimes you can be so—” Anger and dismay at the idea of having a fight with his wife’s feet gave ground in a single jolt to mirth. It was such a ludicrous image that he suddenly found himself smirking and trying to stifle a snort of laughter.

She heard it and slid out from under the car as if spring-loaded there. One hand knuckled across her nose and left streaks of grease.