Market Forces (27 page)

I
T RAINED HARD
most of the next week, and the roads turned treacherous. As usual, patchwork repairs hadn’t stood up to the summer weather, and the various service providers were still squabbling about whose responsibility it was to put it right. Chris drove the Saab at careful velocities, getting in to Shorn later than usual and doing a lot of his phone work from the car. The datadown ran remote scrambling and patched through flagged callers on automatic.

Back to work. Back to the pretense.

It was easier now he was committed. Two weeks of jittering uncertainty, of not knowing if they’d get away with it, knowing even less what would come of the meeting—now it all gave way to solid data. He knew they wanted him now, knew at a level he could trust more than Carla’s wishful-thinking assurances and his own mixed feelings. Now it was just a matter of waiting to see if they could afford him. A no-lose situation. They could afford him, he went. They couldn’t afford him, he stayed. Either way, he had work, he had guarantees. He had
income.

A small part of him knew that he would lose Carla if he stayed, but somehow he couldn’t make that matter as much as he knew it should.

Back to work.

Wednesday morning, turning onto the Elsenham ramp, he heard from Lopez. Confirmation of Vicente Barranco’s arrival date.

“It’s good,” said the Americas agent through the crackle of the scrambler and a bad satellite link. “The way I figure it, you’ve got North on. You could show him around, maybe buy him a few assault rifles.”

“Yeah, that’s.
Fuck.
” His foot came off the accelerator as the realization hit. He nearly braked.

“Chris?” Lopez sounded concerned. “You still there?”

He sighed. The car picked up speed again, down the ramp. “Yeah, I’m still here. I don’t suppose there’s any way you can set that date back about a week?”

“A
week
? Jesus, Chris, you said as soon as possible. You said you’d move things around to—”

“Yeah, I know.” The rain intensified as he came off the ramp. Chris turned up the wipers. “Look, forget it, send him anyway. My problem, I’ll deal with it here.”

“Is this something I need to worry about?”

“No. You did the right thing, it’s fine. I’ll be in touch.” He cut the connection and redialed.

“Yeah, this is Bryant.”

“Mike, it’s Chris. We’ve got—”

“Just the man. You in yet?”

“On the way. Listen, Mike—”

“How about lending me some of that old Emerging Markets background you don’t like to talk about these days, huh? You wouldn’t fucking believe what happened in Harbin this morning.”

“Mike—”

“You remember that thing we were putting together with the guys in EM? The transport net sell-off?”

Chris gave up and searched his memory. The northeastern end of the former People’s Republic of China wasn’t his sphere of interest. Outside the tendencies of ethnic Chinese where Tarim Pendi was concerned, he didn’t pay the area much attention. And his dealings with Shorn’s Emerging Markets division had been minimal so far. They were a hard enough bunch, but still pretty urbane by CI standards.

Still, listening to Mike’s tale of woe might help take the sting out of the minor fuckup he had to report.

So think.

He recalled a late-night wine bar bitching session a week back. Mike and some elegant Chinese woman from Shorn EM. Crossover with an old CI account, guerrilla figures from the last decade, now snugly installed as political leaders. Privatization schematics and character assassination of the major players. Who could be trusted farther than they could be thrown. Macho stuff. The wine had been crap.

“Chris?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He groped after a name. “The Tseng thing, right?”

“Right.” It was hard to tell if Bryant was angry or amused. “Had it all lined up and ready to roll. Now some shithead civil servant has taken out, get this, a fucking
injunction
to prevent the sell-off. They’re claiming it’s unlawful under the ’37 Constitution.”

“Well, is it?”

“How the fuck would I know? I’m not EM, am I. Irene Lan’s team handle the legal stuff.”

“Well, can’t you, I don’t know, pass a law or something? Change the current law? It’s not like this is Conflict as such. You
are
the government out there.”

Mike sighed audibly. “Yeah, I know. Fucking politics. Give me a Kalashnikov and a dickhead to fire it any day. So. What’s up?”

“What?”

“You sounded worried.”

“Ah, yeah. Just a glitch. Barranco’s down to arrive in London on the eighteenth—”

“The eigh
teenth.
Ah, fuck, Chris. That’s two days after Echevarria.”

“I know.”

“Couldn’t you have—”

“Yeah, my fault, I know. I gave Lopez carte blanche to get him here ASAP. No other parameters.”

“Carte Blanche?” He could hear Mike grinning. “Who’s she? Yeah, all right, I don’t suppose it matters much. We’d better just make sure they don’t bang into each other in a corridor.”

“Or at the North Memorial. I was thinking—”

Impact!

The meaty crunch of metal on metal. The Saab jolted hard left and started to skid from the back. His foot slipped on the accelerator, and he felt the treacherous slither as the wheels spun in water.

“Fuck!”

“Now what?” Bryant, through a yawn.

He fought the skid, shedding speed as fast as he dared. Eyes ripping across the mirrors, searching for the other car. Teeth gritted.

“Where are you, motherfucker?”

“Chris? You okay?”

Another crunch from the rear. He wasn’t yet fully out of the skid, and it sent him slithering again. He hauled on the wheel.

“Mother
fucker
!”

“Chris?” By now, Mike had gotten it. His voice came through urgent. “What’s happening out there?”

“I’m—”

Impact, again. He thought the Saab might spin clear around this time. Fighting it, he caught a glimpse of the other vehicle as it pulled clear. Primer gray, looked like an old Mitsubishi from what he could see of the lines, but with the amount of custom-built armoring, it was hard to tell.

No-namer?

It was coming back, and the skid—

He made the decision too fast for it to register until afterward. As the other car leapt forward, he jerked the wheel back the way he’d hauled it and opened up the skid. His guts sloshed. The no-namer struck, but Chris had read the maneuver correctly. With the spin on the Saab, his attacker’s impact was a barely felt jab, in a direction he was already sliding.

The Saab spun about.

For a heartbeat they were parallel, facing each other. He saw a pale face, staring through the windshield of the other car. Then it was gone, past him southward as he braked the Saab to a wagging halt, pointed north.

Rain drummed down on the roof. He felt his pulse catch up.

“Chris?”

“I’m fine.” He slammed the car into gear and cut a sharp U-turn, peering through the sluicing water across his windshield. Up ahead, he spotted brake lights. “Some. Motherfucker. Is about to have his chassis squeezed.”

“You’re fighting a challenge?”

“Looks like it.” He took the Saab up through the gears, pushing each one as hard as he dared in the rain. The brake lights ahead of him went out, and he had to work to spot the outlines of the other car. “Guy just landed on me, Mike. No-namer, and no warning.”

He frowned.
And no proximity alarm.

“Chris, call Driver Control.” Bryant sounded worried. “You don’t have to drive this, if he hasn’t filed. He’s in breach of—”

“Yeah, yeah. Be with you in a minute.” The car was swelling in his forward view, moving but throttled back, waiting for him. “Come on, you
fucker.
Let’s see what you’ve got.”

The gray car braked suddenly, trying to get behind him. He matched the maneuver and slewed into the vehicle’s side. Metal screeched and tore. His wing mirror went, ripped free and bouncing away in their wake like a grenade. He looked across and made eye contact through windows streaming with rain. He saw the other driver flinch.

The side-to-side clinch came apart. The no-namer picked up escape speed. Chris grinned savagely.

Rattled.

He went after him.

His own shock was ebbing now, pulse coming down, brain working.
Time to kill this piece of shit.
Bryant seemed to have rung off, and the only sound was the roar of the engine and the hammering rain. The other car held him off. Neither driver could afford to go flat to the floor in a rain duel, and the no-namer was cool enough to know it. Chris stopped trying to close the gap, and thought about the road ahead.

“This is Driver Control.”

He glanced down at the radio in surprise.

“Yeah?”

“Driver clearance 260B354R, Faulkner, C. You are engaged in an unauthorized duel—”

“Hardly my choice, Driver Control.”

“You are required to disengage immediately.”

“No fucking way. This piece of shit is going down.”

A pause. Chris could swear he heard a throat being cleared.

“I repeat, you are required to disengage and—”

“Have you tried telling that to our little primer-painted friend?”

Another pause. The gap was less than ten meters. Chris upped his velocity, higher than he could afford on the rain-slick road. He felt a tiny bubble of fear rising in his chest with the knowledge.

“Your opponent does not respond to radio address.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll just go talk to him.”

“You are required,
immediately,
to—”

He flattened the accelerator, momentarily, and clouted the no-namer across the driver’s-side rear wing. Driver Control wittered from the speaker as the Saab slipped and he dropped speed, fighting the urge to brake hard. The no-namer was trying to slow down. He drifted across and blocked the move. Another
clank
as they jammed together nose-to-tail. The other car flailed spray off the road as it tried to pull away and lost purchase in the wet. Chris felt his upper lip peel back from his teeth. He pulled fractionally left, shivery with the lack of firm control he had over the Saab, and accelerated again.

“
Good
night, motherfucker.”

He hit at an angle and the skid kicked off in both cars. He felt the Saab start to skate from the front, saw the other car doing the same from the rear, in graceful mirror image. Fragments of control left him, like sand through his fingers. He made a noise behind his teeth and fed all he had to the engine. Hard and fast and raking uncontrolled across the no-namer’s sideways-skating rear fender. Enough to push the whole thing beyond any hope of redemption for either of them. The nose-to-tail clinch came apart like a stick broken across a knee.

It was like cutting a cable.

Loss of control, seeming weightlessness, something approaching calm as the Saab spun out. For a timeless moment, it was almost quiet. Even the snarl of the frustrated engine seemed to fade. Then he felt a sideswiping impact as the two cars glanced off each other in drunken ballet. The Saab lurched. Time unlocked again. He was on the brakes. His hands were a blur on the wheel, hopelessly late behind the uncontrolled motion of the vehicle. The rain took over. In the windshield, it seemed to curtain back momentarily, to show him the embankment, coming up fast.

Deep breath.

The Saab hit.

The force of impact lifted the car up on two wheels. It hung there for a moment—he had time to see the grass on the bank flattened against the passenger-side window—then fell back to the asphalt, hard. The landing snapped his teeth together and clipped a chunk out of his tongue.

For what seemed a very long time, he sat in the stilled car, arms on the wheel, head down, tasting the blood in his mouth.

The steady drumming of rain on the roof.

He lifted his head and peered out across the highway. Fifty meters off in the slashing gray, he spotted the other car jammed against the crash barrier. There was steam pouring out of the crumpled hood.

He grunted, and sucked at the damage to his tongue. One hand crept out more or less automatically, knocked on the hazard lights, killed the Saab’s engine, which—
I fucking
love
you, Carla
—had not cut out. He opened the glove compartment and found the Nemex. Checked the load and snapped the slide.

Right.

He cracked the door and climbed out into the rain.

It drenched him before he’d gone half the distance to the other car, plastered his shirt to transparency on his body, turned his trousers sodden and filled his Argentine leather shoes. He had to blink the stuff out of his eyes, rake his hair back from his face to peer into the wrecked car. It look as if the other driver was trapped in his seat, struggling to free himself. Oddly, the expected victory surge didn’t come. Maybe it was the rain that dampened the savagery, maybe a rapidly assimilating picture of angles that didn’t fit.

No proximity alarm.

No filed challenge.

He stared at the side of the primer-painted vehicle. There was no driver number anywhere on the body.