Market Forces (13 page)

“Can you get these motherfuckers off me?” Bryant tried for a nonchalant tone, but sweat was beading on his face. Every move he tried to break free was matched. “They’re going to head-to-head me.”

A side impact jarred through Bryant.

“No fucking way,” Chris yelled. “They’re locked on tight, Mike. You’ve got to crash-stop.”

“Can’t afford to lose the momentum, Chris. You know that.”

“You can’t afford to stay in theah, Mike.” The crisp edge of control in Makin’s tone made him sound almost prissy. “Chwis is wight. Dwop out, pick it up after.”

“No fucking way.”

Up ahead, the long, low Mitsubishi battlewagon whipped around on shrieking tires and came back up the highway toward the locked-up Shorn leader.

“Nick”—Bryant’s voice was strained—”that’s Jones up ahead. Get out there and see if you can’t derail her.”

“On it.” Makin’s BMW flashed on the edge of Bryant’s vision as it accelerated away from the three-vehicle clinch. Bryant blew out breath, hard and fast, and settled into his speed.

“What about me?”

“You hang back, Chris. This doesn’t work, I’m going to need you.”

Up ahead, he watched as Nick Makin drove hard at what had to be Mitsue Jones’s vehicle. A hot knot of hope pulsed through his guts in defiance of the icy knowing that told him Jones would not be stopped. The Nakamura team had set him up with consummate skill, and they’d left him with only two options. Slam-stop and lose the duel inertia—in effect drop out of the combat, admit Nakamura’s tactical superiority, and have to drive catch-up for the next two hundred kilometers—

An image of Chris’s chessboard flashed through his mind.

Symbolic defeat.

Or—

The Mitsubishi flinched aside and left Makin stalled across the highway. Bryant grimaced and floored his accelerator. The two Nakamura vehicles matched it effortlessly. The battlewagon came on.

“Chris, this is going to be messy,” he gritted. “Get yourself clear.”

Seconds from the chicken head-to-head, the two Nakamura wingmen peeled away as if their vehicles were under the command of a single driver. Bryant caught a face grinning at him from the left-hand vehicle and a hand lifted in farewell. Jones’s car was almost on him. The radio crackled at him.

“Sayonara, Bryant-san.”

Mitsue Jones must have jerked the wheel at the last possible moment. Bryant misread it and stayed in line, but Jones had left the rear of the Mitsubishi in his path. The BMW hit at speed, and the front left wing of the car kicked into the air. Bryant yelled, incoherent with shock as his vehicle left the road. The Omega turned lazily in the air and came down on its side, trailing a carpet of sparks across the asphalt. Three seconds into the skid, it plowed into the median.

Jones heard the yell but had no time for anything other than fighting her own vehicle back under control. The Mitsubishi whipped about on the impact and staggered sideways. For three seconds the wheel was like a live thing under her hands, and then she had it back. She braked the cruiser toward a smoking halt, facing back the way she’d come.

Bryant’s BMW lay on one side, jammed into the median barrier and leaning jauntily. The vehicle’s roof faced out, the windshield showing spiderweb cracking in the weak spring sunlight. Bryant was pinned in clear view, struggling with his belt. Jones snarled a grin and came off the brake, slamming in the gear as the cruiser freewheeled backward, accelerating hard against the inertial drag. The Kaigan’s engine shrilled and the cruiser sprang forward.

Trapped and twisted against his own seat belt, Mike Bryant heard the sound and flailed about to look. By the time he had forced his head around far enough to see, the Mitsubishi was almost on him.

He just had time to scream.

“Ah, fu—”

And the cruiser was gone, jolted past, and there was a titanium-gray Saab crunched to its tail. Two engines in savagely low gear, roaring against each other, and the shriek of steel under stress.

“Chris?”

Chris’s voice drifted into the upturned space, laconic.

“Be right back.”

Metal tore down one wing of the Nakamura car and ripped clear, exposing the driver’s-side rear wheel. Jones shrieked abuse in Japanese, her English abandoned in momentary fury. Chris was already past, yelling into his mike with sudden urgency.

“Makin, where are you?”

“Up ahead.” There was a tight edge of panic in the other man’s voice. “I’ve got both these motherfuckers on my tail. I think they’re going to lock me up same as Mike.”

“On my way.”

Chris spotted the Nakamura wingmen a pair of seconds later, dancing spirals behind and alongside Makin’s BMW. As he watched, the left-hand car slipped in and struck the Shorn car a glancing blow. Makin jerked sideways, and the other Mitsubishi rammed him from the rear. It was consummate teamwork, Chris had time to reflect briefly, something that the young guns at Shorn could learn from and probably never would. Then he was on the left-hand car. He hit it at full acceleration and felt the impact down to the roots of his teeth.

“Right,” he muttered.

The Nakamura car tried to pull away but didn’t have the power. Chris gave up a handbreadth of space, then floored the pedal and hit again. This time the wingman tried to skate sideways right. Chris matched the move. He gave up the handbreadth again and when the Nakamura driver slewed to the left, he let him. He went with the move and forced it. Another jolt and he was jammed onto the rear fender, driving the other car toward the grass bank that lined the left-hand hard shoulder.

It could have been better—could, for example, have been the drop on the other side of the roadway—but it would have to do.

Something flashed in his peripheral vision, the glossy black of the other Nakamura car. The other wingman was coming to his comrade’s aid. Chris fought down the urge to let go and face the new threat. His voice went gritted into the mike: “Makin, get rid of this fucker, will you.”

“Done.”

The BMW was there, twilight blue jostling with the black for position. The two cars peeled away as the Nakamura driver fled. Chris turned his full attention back to killing the man in front of him.

The rapid rumble as they crossed the reflector line of the hard shoulder and the wingman finally panic-braked as he neared the bank. It was far too late. Chris hit the overdrive on the Saab’s transmission and drove his opponent hard up the fifty-degree incline. As soon as the other vehicle was fully off the road, he braked savagely and dropped back. Denied the power of the Saab pushing and subject to his own desperately applied brakes, the wingman slithered back down the grass, hit the road surface with an overload of kinetic energy to shed, and tumbled across the three lanes into the crash barrier.

The Mitsubishi exploded.

“Bonus,” Chris said to nobody in particular, and threw the Saab into a U-turn crash stop.

A kilometer back along the highway, he saw what he’d been expecting: Mitsue Jones’s battlewagon heading directly for him, trailing wreckage from one wing like a shark with seized prey in its jaws. Chris engaged the Saab’s launch gear. The rear wheels squealed on the road, scrabbled for purchase, and found it. The Saab leapt forward.

Past the egg-yolk-yellow and billowing black smoke of the crashed-and-burned wingman, back down the slope toward the bridge where the duel had kicked in. The hungry roar of the engine seemed to recede as he plunged back toward the Nakamura car. He had time to notice the marred lines of the other vehicle as it ballooned in his windshield, time to notice the pewter cloud formations smeared across the sky behind, time even to see the gusting wind blowing the grass flat along the embankment to his right—

At the last possible moment, Jones flinched left, covering the torn wing damage as he guessed she would. He plowed into her right-hand rear side with brutal precision. The Saab’s spaced armoring held and opened a huge gap over the Mitsubishi’s rear tire. Chris hit the brakes, and at the relatively low speed he’d developed the U-turn came comfortably. He was back on Jones’s tail before she’d made five hundred meters of road away from him.

The Mitsubishi was crippled, limping at barely a hundred. He matched speeds and glanced across at the other car. Polarized glass hid Jones from view.

Finish it.

He slewed sideways, caught the exposed rear tire on the leading edge of his front fender, and braked. Textbook maneuver. The tire ripped and exploded with a muffled
bang.
He felt the front fender unstitch along half its length with the force of the impact, but the rest held.

Yes! Carla, you fucking beauty!

The Kaigan jerked and began to skid. Chris worked his pedals, gunned the engine, and rammed into the rear of the Mitsubishi as it floated past ahead of him. The skid built; the car wallowed on the road, and Chris steered back across and around. Another sharp jab at the retreating side of the car. The driver’s-side door dented inward, and Mitsue Jones was irretrievable. The Nakamura battlewagon skated a figure-eight in toward the bank and hit with an audible
crump.

Chris brought the Saab to a screeching halt, braking clouds of rubber smoke off the asphalt as he slid past Jones’s wreck. A 360 sweep showed no other vehicles in either direction. He engaged the reverse and backed up gingerly to check on his handiwork.

“Chris?” It was Bryant’s voice, distorted over the comset.

“Yeah, Mike. I’m here.” The strange calm was back, the sky and windswept landscape pressing down on his consciousness like a thumb on an eyeball. He gave the status report through lips that felt slightly numb. “One wingman down, flamed out. Think Makin got the other. You okay?”

“I will be as soon as someone comes and cuts me out of this fucking wreck. What about Jones?”

He stared at the ruined battlewagon. The sleek body work was torn and crumpled, sunk on tires that had blown out somewhere in the crash. Steam curled up from the gashed radiator grille like smoke, was whipped away by the wind. And in amid all that calm, it looked as if Jones was trying to kick the driver’s-side door open. The buckled metal quivered but didn’t shift.

Finish it.

“Jones is out of the game,” he said.

Mike’s whoop came through bristling with static and overload distortion. Chris dropped his hand to grasp the gear lever and with the motion, a small ripple arose in the pit of his stomach. It was nothing much, the feeling of having eaten too much sweet food, but as his hand touched the lever, he was suddenly slightly sick of the whole thing.

Then finish it!

Burn her up.
The thought belched abruptly up from the deepest mud geyser recesses of his being, and it gripped him like claws. It was the sickness of the moment before, turned up to full. The edgy thrill of roller-coaster exhilaration as he turned the sticky new idea over in his mind.
Ram the tank and barbecue that bitch. Go on! If it doesn’t blow when it ruptures, you can go and light her from close up. Like—

He shook himself free of it with a shiver. Impossible to believe he’d even been considering it. After all, what if the tank blew when he hit—

They almost never do.

“Too risky.” He heard himself talking out loud to the hot mud thing in his head, and what he heard sounded too much like whining. He grimaced and dropped the car into reverse again. Much better just to—

He backed up another twenty meters, aligned the nose of the Saab, and then crushed the accelerator smoothly to the floor. The Saab leapt across the short gap and slammed into the driver’s-side door. Metal crunched, and the Mitsubishi rocked on its springs. The glass in the side window cracked and splintered. He backed up and watched carefully to see if there was any movement.

Do it again! Finish it!

She
is
finished.

Hewitt, with the Nemex in her hand.
You bring back their plastic.

He heard his own voice in the Shorn conference room two months ago.
Nobody likes ambiguity.

Yeah and this is real fucking ambiguous, Chris. So either you go for the burn, or you take that pistol in your pocket and go and recover Jones’s fucking plastic
right now.

“Chris, are you okay?” Bryant, sounding concerned. His voice ruptured the ominous quiet on the comlink, and every second that Chris left without replying was a stillness that prickled.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” He unlatched the door and pushed it open. The Nemex had already somehow found its way into his hand. “Be right back.”

He climbed out and advanced cautiously toward the Mitsubishi, gun hand extended and trembling slightly. Steam was still boiling from the engine space, hissing as it went, but there was no scent of gas. The car’s fuel system, classic weakness in most Mitsubishi battlewagons, had apparently not ruptured.

Chris stopped less than a meter away from the smashed glass of the polarized window and peered in over the sight of the Nemex. Mitsue Jones lay, still strapped into the driver’s seat, face bloodied and right arm hanging slackly at her side. She was still conscious, and as Chris’s pale shadow fell across the car window she looked up. Blood had run into her right eye and gummed it shut, but the other eye was desperately expressive. Her left hand came up and across her trapped body in a futile warding gesture.

Finish it!

Chris shielded his face with one hand and leveled the Nemex on Jones’s face.

Nobody likes ambiguity.

The shot echoed out flatly across the pewter-smeared sky. The blood splattered warm on his fingers.

“W
OULD YOU SAY
that this tender was excessively bloody?”

Chris’s face felt stretched tight under the makeup. Studio lights made his eyes ache with glare. Beside him, Bryant betrayed no discomfort as he tilted his head back at an angle and swiveled slightly on his chair.

“That’s a tricky question, Liz.”

He paused. Pure theatrical bullshit; the bloodshed question was a staple of all business news post-tender interviews. Bryant had had nearly a full day to think about his answer.

Liz Linshaw waited. She crossed long, tanned legs and readjusted the datadown clipboard on her short-skirted lap. From where he was sitting, slightly to the left of Bryant’s center stage, Chris could see liquid crystal sentences spilling down the clipboard screen. Her next set of cues from the studio control room.

From where he was sitting, he could also see the swell Liz Linshaw’s left breast made where it squeezed up in the open neck of her blouse. He shifted his gaze uncomfortably, just as Bryant launched into his answer.

“The thing is, Liz, any competitive tender is bound to involve a certain degree of conflict. If it didn’t, then the whole market ethos of what we’re doing here would be lost. And in the case of a tender of this magnitude, obviously the parties involved are going to play hard. That, sadly but necessarily, means bloodshed. But that’s exactly the way it should be.”

Liz Linshaw made out that she was taken aback. “There
should
be bloodshed? You’re saying that it’s
desirable
?”

“Desirable, no.” Bryant put on a schoolmasterly smile that looked Notley-derived. Beside him, Louise Hewitt nodded sober agreement. “But consider. The situation in Cambodia is extreme. These people are not part of some theoretical economic model. They are involved in a life-and-death struggle to determine the future of their nation. At Shorn we’ve just been appointed their financiers. We are supposed to fund and advise these people and, I might add, take a fair chunk of their GNP as a fee. Now, if you were a Cambodian, what kind of exec would you want? A suited theoretical economist with computer models he says define their reality half a world away? Or a warrior who has put his own life on the line to earn his place beside them?”

“You call yourself a warrior.” Linshaw made an elegant gesture that might have been acceptance. “And obviously the fact that it’s your team here at the Tebbit Centre this evening proves your credentials in that department. All right. But does that necessarily make you the best economist for the job? Does a good economist have to have blood on his hands?”

“I’d say a practicing free market economist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t doing his job properly. It comes with the market, and the decisions it demands. Hard decisions, decisions of life and death. We have to make those decisions, and we have to get them right. We have to be determined to get them right. The blood on our hands today is the blood of our less determined colleagues, and that says something. To you, Liz, to our audience, and most of all to our Cambodian clients, that blood says that when the hard decisions come, we will not flinch from them.”

“How do you feel about that, Chris?” Liz Linshaw swiveled abruptly to face him. “You eliminated Mitsue Jones today. What do you think the Nakamura team lacked that gave you the edge?”

Chris blinked. He’d been drifting.

“I think, ah. Ah, they were very polished, but—” He scrambled after the answer they’d worked out earlier when they ran the question checklist with the program’s producer. “—but, ah, there didn’t seem to be much flexibility of response in the way they played as a team. Once they’d sprung the trap and it failed, they were sluggish.”

“Was this the first time you’d driven against Nakamura, Chris?”

“Yes. Ah, well, apart from a few informal skirmishes, yes.” Chris got his act together. “I drove against Nakamura junior execs in two consortium bids when I was working at Hammett McColl, but it’s not the same. In a consortium bid, people tend to get in each other’s way a lot. They usually haven’t had a lot of time to train. It’s easy to break team wedges. This was a whole different engine.”

“Yes.” She smiled brilliantly at him. “Was there any point where you were afraid Shorn were going to lose to Nakamura?”

Hewitt sat forward, bristling.

“I don’t think we ever came that close,” said Bryant.

“Yes, but you were trapped in wreckage for most of the duel, Michael.” There was just a hint of acid in Linshaw’s voice. “Chris, you were the one who actually took Jones down.
Was
there ever a critical point?”

“I—” Chris glanced across at Bryant, who was wearing a rather thin smile. The big man’s shoulders lifted in the barest of shrugs. Beyond him, Hewitt showed as much emotion as a block of granite. “I think the missile ploy caught us the way it was intended to—and the jury’s still out on whether that was a legal maneuver or not—but after Nakamura actually engaged, we were never really up against it.”

“I see.” Liz Linshaw leaned forward. “This is a great moment for you, isn’t it, Chris? The hero of the hour. And coming so soon after your transfer. You must be over the moon.”

“Uhh, yes.” He shrugged. “It’s my job.”

“A job you enjoy?”

Mindful of Hewitt’s gaze, Chris manufactured a smile. “I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t like it, Liz.”

“Of course.” Linshaw seemed to have gotten what she wanted. She turned her attention to Hewitt. “Now, Louise, you made all this happen. How do you feel about the way your team performed?”

Chris switched off again as Hewitt began to mouth the viewer-consumable platitudes.

“W
HAT WAS THAT
all about?”

He asked Bryant the question later, as they sat in front of whiskey tumblers in the hotel bar of the Tebbit Centre. Outside, wind-driven rain lashed impotently at big glass panels that gave a view out onto drenched and darkened hills. Makin had begged off early, pleading tomorrow’s crack-of-dawn start. It was pretty obvious he was choked about Chris’s guest spot on the Liz Linshaw evening special. Standard practice in post-tender reports was to interview only the team leader and the divisional head, but Bryant had been crowing about Chris’s performance from the moment they cut him out of the wreckage of his BMW. Makin had gone conspicuously unmentioned.

“That?” Bryant gave him a wry grin. “Well, let’s just say I’m not flavor of the month with Ms. Linshaw at the moment.”

Chris frowned. His nerves were still a little shot from the duel, and he found his mind tended to skitter when he tried to concentrate. At the same time, as if compensating for its poor performance in other areas, it spat chunks of memory at him with near-total recall. Now, as if listening to it on tape, he heard the words Liz Linshaw had used over the radio that first morning as he drove in to the new job at Shorn:
Still nothing on the no-name orbital call out for Mike Bryant at Shorn Associates, don’t know where you’ve got to, Mike, but if you can hear me we’re anxious to hear from you.
He strained to remember Bryant and Linshaw’s body language the evening of the quarterly review party, but his recall was too alcohol-damaged to trust.

“Were you two, ah . . . ?”

Bryant grinned and sank half his whiskey. “If, by that delicate
ah,
you mean
fucking,
then yes. Yes, we were fucking.”

Chris sat still, remembering Suki.

As if reading his mind, Bryant said, “It was no big deal. Scratching an itch, you know. She gets off on drivers the way some guys do on Italian holoporn. It was back when Suki was, you know, off sex. Just after Ariana was born.” He shrugged. “Like I said, no big deal.”

Chris tried to think of an appropriate question to fill the space. In the background, something insipid lilted from the bar’s sound system.

“So how long did it last?”

“Well.” Bryant turned to face him, getting comfortable. “In the initial stages, about eight months. I’m telling you, Chris, she was hot. We both were. She was doing this in-depth study of Conflict Investment, for a series and then, you know, that book,
The New Asphalt Warriors.
So we saw a lot of each other without anyone wondering. She used to do these interviews and then we’d get off camera and fuck like rabbits wherever there was a lockable door. I used to get hard-ons just talking to her on camera. Even after the series was wrapped, we were fucking two or three times a week in hotels around the city, or the car. She really liked that, the car. Then it sort of cooled off. Once a week, sometimes not even that. And Suki came back online, so there was that as competition. I’d missed Suki, you know, and that whole pinup buzz thing was fading anyway. There were about six months when Liz and I didn’t see each other at all.” Another grin. “Then she made, like, this amazing comeback. She asked me out to the studio one night, after everyone had gone home. I wasn’t going to go at first, but I was curious, you know. Man, I’m glad I went.” Bryant leaned closer, still grinning. “We fucked on the interview set and she filmed the whole thing with one of those big studio cameras. Then she
mailed me the fucking disk at work.
You believe that? I mean, I didn’t know at the time she was doing it, otherwise I’d never have agreed. Then suddenly there’s this Studio Ten disk on my desk with
SOUVENIR
written on it.”

“Jesus.”

Bryant nodded. “I thought at first she was going to send it to Suki. Fact, I thought she already had when I got my copy. But when I called her she just asked how I’d liked it and if I wanted a repeat performance. So the last six months we’ve been repeat performing a couple of times a month and it’s still as hot as ever.”

“And Suki?”

“She doesn’t know. You know, the weird thing is, you’d think I’d go back to Suki too tired to perform but it’s not like that. I’m more buzzed when I get home from a session with Liz than I would be if I hadn’t had sex all week. It’s that fucking disk, man. It makes you feel like a fucking porn star.”

“So what’s the problem now?”

“Ah, nothing really. We had this big fight the last time we met up to fuck.” Bryant’s gaze floated off into the corners of the bar. The carnal shine faded from his face. He seemed disinclined to go on.

“What about?”

Bryant sighed. “Ah, shit. Chris, do you think I was right to shoot those gangwit motherfuckers that night at the Falkland?”

“Yeah, sure.” Chris heard himself and stopped. “I mean—”

“See, that’s what I think.”

“They were—”

“Fucking going to trash us, right?”

Chris gestured. “Uh, yeah.”

“Right, that’s what I said. It’s what Suki says, it’s what the fucking corporate police inquiry says. So what’s the big deal?”

“She doesn’t buy it?”

Bryant glanced at him. “What’s to buy? I told her the truth.”

“What about the machetes?”

“Machetes? Wrecking bars? What’s the fucking difference. I don’t even remember which thing I told her.” Bryant swallowed more whiskey and waved his glass laterally. “Didn’t matter. She said I was a fucking animal. Get that. I,
I
was an animal. Never mind the fuckers with the crowbars.
I
was a fucking animal. You understand that?”

Chris crowded Carla’s voice out of his head with a pull at his own drink. “She wasn’t there, man.”

“That’s right, she wasn’t.” Bryant stared broodingly at the bottles behind the bar. “Fucking reporters.”

Chris snapped his fingers, and the liveried barman arrived as if on rails. Bryant didn’t look at him. Chris indicated their glasses. “Fill us up.”

The liquor drizzled down, catching the light.

“Got work to do tomorrow,” Bryant said gloomily. “Makin’s right, you’ll see. They’ll want twenty-five fucking drafts of that contract before it’s put to bed. Bentick from the DTC, I know that motherfucker, and he wants every
i
double-dotted, just in case his precious minister runs into embarrassing questions on civilian casualties or some such shit.”

“Worry about it tomorrow.” Chris raised his glass. “Here. Small wars.”

“Yeah, small wars.”

Crystal chimed between them. Bryant knocked back the whiskey in one and signaled the barman again. He watched the glass fill up.

“
I’m
an animal,” he muttered with bitter disbelief. “
I’m
a fucking animal.”

T
HEY KICKED IT
in the head about an hour later, when it became clear that no amount of drinking was going to extract Bryant from his sudden puddle of gloom. Chris half carried his friend to the elevator and along the corridor to his room, where he propped him against the wall while he fumbled with keys. Once inside the room, he hauled Mike most of the way onto the pristine expanse of king-size bed and set about unlacing his shoes. Bryant began to snore. Chris took off the shoes and shoveled Mike’s unshod feet up onto the bed with the rest of him.

As Chris bent over him to remove his tie, the other man stirred.

“Liz?” he queried blearily.

“Not a chance,” said Chris, loosening the knot on his tie.

“Oh.” Bryant heaved up his head and made an attempt to focus. “Chris. Don’t even think about it, man. Don’t even think about it.”