Market Forces (33 page)

Chris remembered the bruised nose from a few weeks back.

“That’s what you told me, too.”

“Well, yeah. Didn’t want to force you to lie for me if it ever came up with Suki.” Mike Bryant’s expression grew musing. “You know, if it weren’t that I already had Suki and Ariana, I really think Liz might have been the one.”

“You think so, do you?”

Mike nodded sagely. “Yeah, I do. She’s really something, Chris.”

O
N THE
S
HORN
car deck, the Saab stood isolated in the gloom. Anyone else clocking weekend time had gone home for dinner. Chris sat in the car for a long time before he started up. The quiet whined in his ears. Across the deck, a faulty roof light spattered on and off like an obscure distress signal. It felt as if he was waiting for someone.

When he finally powered up the Saab and got out into the streets, it was like driving in a dream. The city slid by on either side of him as if cranked past on rollers. The Saab’s interior was a bubble of neurasthenic calm, a safe place he was scared he might not be able to leave easily. The dashboard and wheel, pedals and shift, gave him remote control and a distant, autopilot strength. Options murmured in his ear. Let’s go
there.
No,
here.
No. Fuck
going
anywhere, let’s just
leave.

Leave it all behind.

He was almost into the streets of Highgate before the autopilot neurasthenia cut out and he realized this was not the way home.

File #4

CAPITAL VOLATILITY

C
ARLA WAS ALREADY
asleep when he got in. He vaguely remembered she’d told him something about a crack-of-dawn start with Mel’s recovery unit on the western periphery. Partnership trials in some structural adjustment consultancy. Chris had never heard of them, but these days that wasn’t so unusual. He had a lot less to do with adjustment programs now he was out of Emerging Markets, and new SAP consulting groups were always springing up, like mushrooms on a manure heap. It wasn’t rocket science, after all. Slash public health and education spending, open to foreign capital flows, dynamite local blockages in the legal and labor sectors. Lie about the results, and get the local military to crush inconvenient protest. A trained ape could do it. You could get the paper qualifications by distance learning inside ten weeks. Then all it took was a suit and a driver’s license.

He stood in the bedroom, watching Carla sleep, and was overcome by a wave of almost unbearable tenderness. He pulled the quilt up a little higher around her shoulders, and she muttered something without waking. He slipped out, closed the door gently behind him, and went downstairs to the study. Behind another closed door, he ran the porn segment of Liz Linshaw and her plastically enhanced playmate.

He sat for an hour, head propped on one hand, trying to sort out what he felt.

H
E SLEPT BADLY
, twisted by brutal dreams that evaporated in vague traceries of impending menace when he finally woke. Carla was gone, her side of the bed was almost cold, and light was streaming in through half-open curtains. The bedside clock said ten past eight.

“Fuck.”

He got out from under the quilt, groped after shirt and trousers, and got them on. In the bathroom mirror he stared at the angry eyes and the stubble, picked up a razor, then flung it into the basin and settled for sticking his head under the cold tap. Chilly water trickled around his neck and down his back. He raked it out of his hair, crushed a towel over his head without taking it off the rail, and closed his shirt. Slung a tie around his neck. Shoes and cuffs. Wallet and watch. Into the jacket and out the d—

Keys, fuckwit.

He ran back upstairs, couldn’t find them on the bedside table. Remembered his vigil in the study, darted in and grabbed them up off the desk. He kicked the Saab backward out of the driveway, swerved untidily around in the road at the bottom, and left rubber on the worn gray asphalt as he took off westward. He made the Elsenham ramp in record time.

Rolling in past junction ten, he checked his watch. Couple of minutes off quarter to nine.
Great. Fucking great.
He put through a call to Barranco at the Hilton. There was no answer from the room. Growing irritation sprouted suddenly into irrational fear. He cut the connection, redialed for the security detail. Someone answered on a yawn.

“Yeah?”

“Faulkner. What happened to Barranco?”

“What’s the matter, he not turn up yet?”

Chris felt a spike of ice run him through the heart.

“Turn up where?”

The voice on the other end got suddenly deferential. “At Shorn, sir. Weren’t we supposed to let him go? He took the secure limo. Called Shorn for it to come and get him.”

Foot to the floor, now. Head still fogged.
Think.

“Who authorized the fucking limo?” he grated.

“I, uh, I can check.”

“You do that. Do it now. And stay on the line.” He summoned a map of the day from memory and tried to place Hernan Echevarria on it. His head refused to cooperate. Breakfast with the partners, or was that Tuesday? Touring Mil-Tac’s new smart-mine facility in Crawley? If that was it, he was already out of town, under Mike Bryant’s watchful eye. He felt the tension ease a little.

Security came back on line from their room in the Hilton. “Transit was authorized at partner level,” the voice said, smug with belated relief. “Louise Hewitt. She said she was surprised you weren’t around to cover it.”

“Ah,
shit.
”

“Was there anything else? Sir?”

Chris made a noise in his throat and killed the connection. The Saab barreled down the approach road to the first underpass.

He was on the raised section that ran across the northern zones when he suddenly remembered where Mike Bryant and Hernan Echevarria were that morning.

He floored it again.

T
HE DAMAGE WAS
done.

He knew. Jolting the Saab into a space as close to the elevators as he could get, he knew and wondered why he was still bothering. Riding up alone with the chatty elevator voice for company, he knew and nearly screamed aloud at the waiting. Shouldering past a brace of startled admin assistants on the fifty-second floor, he knew beyond doubt. Staring at the coded entry door to the covert viewing chamber, the nightmarish confirmation of its carelessly ajar angle, he knew. Still, through all the knowing, as he threw the door all the way open and saw Barranco standing there, it hit him like sludge in his guts.

Beyond the glass, Nick Makin and Mike Bryant sat with Hernan Echevarria and another uniform, apparently discussing interrogation training. Their voices strained through into the chamber. A brittle burst of laughter rang so sharp it was almost static.

“Vicente . . .”

Barranco turned the face of a corpse toward him. He was pale beneath his tan, mouth drawn down tight. A vein beat at one temple.

“Hijos de puta,”
he whispered. “You—”

In the conference room, Echevarria was nodding sagely.

“Vicente, listen to me—”

He flinched back, went halfway to a karate guard as he saw Barranco’s eyes. The Colombian was trembling. He wondered fleetingly what combat skills honed in genuine combat would look like up against his corporate shotokan training. Barranco looked at him with sick wonder and then turned away. He stood staring down at the desk, where someone had left a bound copy of the Echevarria schedule.

“I. Did not believe,” he said quietly. “When the assistant told me. Asked me if I was with Hernan Echevarria. If I had gotten
lost.
And brought me here, smiling, fucking
smiling.
Let me in here to watch you—”

“Vicente, this isn’t what it looks like—”

“It is exactly what it looks like!”
The yell rang in the confines of the chamber. It seemed impossible those beyond the glass wall could not hear. Barranco lashed out with one foot. The desk skidded, spilled schedule, associated disks and papers. A chair fell, caught Mike’s baseball bat and sent it rolling.

“Vicente.” In his own ears, Chris could hear the pleading in his voice. “You must have known Echevarria was still at the table. But he’s out now. You’re in. Can’t you see that?”

The Colombian turned back to face him, crook-handed.

“In,” he hissed. “Out. What is this, a fucking game to you? What do you have in your veins, Chris Faulkner? What the fuck kind of human being are you?”

Chris licked his lips. “I’m on your side, Vicente—”

“Side? On my
side
?” Barranco spat on the floor. His voice scaled up again. “You grinning, fucking whore, don’t talk to me about sides. There are no sides for men like you. A friend to murderers.” He gestured at the glass, eyes glistening. “To torturers, if it pays. You are a fucking
waste,
a soulless gringo
puto,
a
stench.
”

Something ripped open behind Chris’s left eye. He felt himself flinch physically with the impact. Red-veined wings billowed upward in his head. The HM file opened for him like a brightly colored trapdoor. He saw helicopters hanging from a tattered-cloud rain-forest sky, whine and clatter of Gatlings,
whoosh-thump
of rockets. Villages in flames, cremated trees, charred bundles scattered across the scorched earth. He heard discordant jail cell screams spiking a tropical night. A visitation he hadn’t had since the death of Edward Quain was there beside him, shouting hoarse in his inner ear.

The bat.

It was in his hand.

The door code. Five tiny queeping touches across the keypad. The glass door hinged back and he erupted into the conference.

“Faulkner, what the
fuck
ah you doing?”

Makin, voice almost girlish in shock.

Mike, turning from a side table where he was mixing drinks.

Echevarria, eyes fixed past Chris on Barranco. His swollen, old man’s face mottled and worked as he struggled to his feet. Voice reedy with outrage.

“This is—”

Chris hit him. Side-on, both hands, full swing with the baseball bat and all he had behind it. Into the dictator’s ribs. He heard the bones go, felt the brittle crunch through the bat. Echevarria made a noise like a man choking and slumped against the edge of the table. Backswing, in again. Same spot. The old man shrilled. Mike Bryant waded in. Chris stabbed him handily in the solar plexus with the bat end. Bryant staggered and sat down against the wall, whooping for breath. The other uniform bellowed and tried to get around the table to his boss. He tangled in his own chair and went over backward. Chris swung again. Echevarria raised an arm. The bat broke it with an audible
snap.
The old man screamed. Back up, and swung again. He got the face this time. The dictator’s nose broke, the bone over one eye caved in. Blood ripped out, spraying warm and wet on his own face and hands. Echevarria went down and lay on the floor, curled fetally and still screaming. Chris spread his stance low and wide, and chopped down as if he were splitting logs. Head and body, an indiscriminate frenzy of blows. He heard hoarse yelling, and it was his own. Blood everywhere, running off the bat, in his eyes. The white glint of exposed bone in the mess at his feet. Choking, bubbling sounds from Echevarria.

The other uniform came flailing around the table at last. Chris, down now to adrenaline-cold clarity, swung about and let him have the bat sideways across the throat with full swing. The man jerked back as if tugged on an invisible string. He hit the floor like an upturned beetle, strangling noisily.

Everything stopped. On the floor, Echevarria made a bubbling sigh and fell silent. A meter and a half off, Nick Makin had finally made it to his feet.

“Faulkner!”

Chris hefted the bat. His face twitched. His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a well, rasping tones unrecognizable in his own ears.

“Back off, Nick. I’ll do you, too.”

He heard Mike crawling to his feet. He looked back to the door he’d come in, where Vicente Barranco stood staring at the carnage. Chris wiped some of the blood off his face and grinned dizzily at him. The trembling was starting to set in. He tossed the bat to the floor, next to Echevarria’s crumpled form.

“Okay, Vicente,” he said shakily. “You tell me. Whose fucking side am I on?”

“Y
OU KNOW
,
THAT
wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever seen you do.”

Mike Bryant handed him the whiskey glass and went back to sit behind his desk. Chris huddled on the sofa in the blanket the paramedics had lent him, still shivering. In front of him on the table, the chessboard pieces faced off against each other in the silence. The onyx gleamed.

“Sorry I hit you.”

Mike rubbed at his chest. “Yeah, with my own fucking bat. Could have done without that as well.”

Chris sipped at the whiskey, both hands cupped around the glass as if it were hot coffee. The spirit went down, warming. He shook his head.

“I just lost it, Mike.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Bryant glared at him. “Think I spotted that one, too. Chris, what the fuck was Barranco doing at Shorn unsupervised? You knew we had Echevarria in for budget review today. Why didn’t you take Vicente out for a drive or something? Or at least keep him in the Hilton until you could check with me.”

Chris shook his head again. The words limped out of his mouth. “I was running late. He went out without me.”

“That doesn’t explain how he got in here. Who cleared him for the tower?”

“That’s what I tried to tell you earlier. Hewitt authorized a limo to bring him here.”

Mike’s eyes narrowed. “Hewitt?”

“Yeah. Louise fucking Hewitt. I’m telling you, she’s been gunning for me since the day I walked in here. She wants—”

“Oh,
bullshit
!” Bryant came to his feet, hands braced on the desk. He shouted for the first time since the aftermath in the conference room.
“For Christ’s sake!
Now is not the fucking time for your bullshit paranoia and hurt feelings. This is
serious.
”

The anger evaporated as fast as it had arrived. He sighed and sat down again. Swiveled the chair away and stared out the window. One hand opened in Chris’s direction. “Well, I’m open to suggestions. What do
you
think we should tell Notley?”

“Does it matter what we tell him?”

“Fuck, yes.” Mike jerked back around to look at him. “What’s the matter, you
want
to lose your job or something?”

Chris blinked. “What?”

“I
said.
Do you want to lose your job?”