Market Forces (35 page)

He paused. He seemed to be waiting for something to fill the gap. Chris hurried to oblige, mesmerized by the intensity coming across the desk at him.

“You still had to drive, though? Right?”

“Oh yes.” A casual gesture. “The Domino
gave
us competitive driving. Hard-edged solution for hard-edged times. But it was still pretty civilized back then, still pretty close to its roots. You know how road raging started?”

Chris stumbled, wrong-footed. “What? Uh, yeah, sure. Those formula cars, ones you see on the history channels, looked like little rockets, right? They started getting owned by the same people who made the money. And then, uh, with the roads empty and everything . . .”

He stopped. Notley was shaking his head.

“No?”

“Not really. Well. Yes, sure, you had that dynamic. That’s part of it, I suppose. But it all goes back a lot farther than that. Back to late last century, the premillennial stuff. Stuff my father told me about. Back then some of the harder-nosed firms were already experimenting with conflict incentives for their new recruits. It was an American thing. Eight trainees in a section, sectional office space, and only seven desks.” Notley made a
QED
motion with both hands. “So. Get to work last, you had to work on a window ledge. Or beg space from someone with a better alarm clock. Let that happen to you more than a couple of times, you can see how the group dynamic starts to lean. The late guy’s the weakest link. So the rest gang up on him. Chimp behavior. Lend him your desk space and
you’re
weak, by association. You’re making the wrong alliances. So you don’t do it. You can’t afford to.”

Chris couldn’t decide, but he thought he saw a faint distaste rising in Notley’s eyes. Or maybe it was just the energy again.

“Now. You transfer that idea, not just for trainees but for everyone. Think about the times. The Domino Recessions are scratching at the door, you’ve got to
do
something. Most investment houses and major corporations are waterlogged with top-end personnel. Ex-politicians on sinecure nonexecutive directorships, useless executive directors shipped around on the old-boy network from golden handshake to golden handshake, headhunted bright young things staying the obligatory two years then shipping out for the next move up on rep vapor and nothing else, because I ask you what, in two years, have you really achieved in a corporate post? And that’s just how we were fucking things up at the Anglo end of the cultural scale. Elsewhere, you’ve got fuckwit younger sons and daughters being cut in on Daddy’s pie straight out blatantly, because in those cultures who’s going to tell Daddy otherwise? And all of this is teetering on the brink as the dominoes start to fall. Something has to be done, at a minimum something has to be
seen
to be done. Something harsh.

“So what do you do? You go right back to that eight-trainee section with seven desks, and you extrapolate. Late to work, you don’t lose your desk. You lose your job. At a time when you had a dozen identically qualified people for every real executive post, why not? It was as real as any other measure. You sure as hell couldn’t depend on sales figures or productivity, not with a global economy in a tailspin. And since no one could afford to lose a job at a time like that, you got some pretty fierce driving. Some genuine road rage. But back then—” Notley produced another of his smiles, wintry this time. “Back then, it was still enough to just
get
there first. Do you have anything to drink in here?”

“Uh.” Chris gestured across at Mike Bryant’s brushed-steel, built-in drinks cabinet. “I don’t know, it’s Mike’s office. He’ll have some stuff in there.”

“I imagine so.” Notley hulked to his feet and wandered over to the cabinet. “You want anything?”

“I, uh, I’ve got to—” He nodded at the datadown. “You know, finalize. The, uh—”

An impatient wave. “So finalize it. I’ll make you a drink in the meantime. What do you want?”

“Uh, whiskey. Laphroaig, if it’s there.” He knew Mike kept that around—he produced it with a flourish every time they ended up in the office late.
Chess juice,
he’d taken to calling it. “Just a small one. No ice.”

Notley grunted. “Think I’ll join you. I’m a gin man, myself, but I’m buggered if I can see any in here.”

Chris bent to the datadown. Nailed the explosives along with the cheap Russian machine pistols he’d already selected and thumbed it all down to issuing, tagged with Mike’s notification code. Notley placed a brimming tumbler at his elbow, swallowed some of his own drink, and glanced over the onscreen detail.

“You done? Good. So put on a tolerant expression and listen to the old man’s story.” He went back to the seat and hunched forward over his drink. “Let’s see, I was working at Calders UK, I would have been what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, something like that. Younger than you, anyway. About as stupid, though.”

No smile with that. Notley took another chunk off his drink.

“I had this promotion play-off. Not the first I’d driven, not even one of the first, but it was the first time I’d thought I might be in trouble. Barnes, the other analyst, was my age, good rep, on the road and off, and he drove this flame-red Ferrari roadster. Very fast, but very lightweight. Nothing like the ones they make now. I was on Audis at the time, no choice back then, it was what I could afford. Good wagon, in its own way, but heavy, very heavy.”

“No change there, then.” For the first time in the conversation, Chris felt he was on familiar ground.

Notley shrugged carelessly. “Armoring is what they do. Same with BMW. Maybe it’s a German thing. Look, I knew if I could just get in front of Barnes, I could hold him off all the way there. Nothing that little roadster could do to my back end that wouldn’t straighten out in the shop. Back then it was the rule everybody knew. You didn’t have to kill anyone, you just had to get to work first. So that was it. Get ahead, stay ahead. Block and cover. And I had Barnes like that, every mile till the last. Then the little cunt slipped past me.”

He raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden profanity.

“To this day I don’t know how he did it. Maybe I was too confident. Maybe it was a gear change I left too loose, do that on a heavy wagon, you know how it is, suddenly you’re underpowered.”

Chris nodded. “Happened to me a couple of times, before I got the Saab.”

“Yeah, you’ve got that spaced armoring now, right?”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t sure if it was the whiskey, or just the slide after the hours of tension and the roller-coaster ride of facing Notley’s gun, but Chris could feel himself starting to relax. “Works like a dream. I hear BMW are trying to get past the patents and do their own version.”

“Quite possibly.” Notley stared into his glass. “But we were talking about Barnes. Barnes, and that last bend on the overhead as you come into the eleven off-ramp. It used to be a lot narrower then, barely even a double lane. We hit it with Barnes ahead, and I knew there was no way past him. And the way I remember it, there was no Roberto Sanchez making headlines then; no Harry Rice, either. Could be it was just still under wraps, all denial and cover-up until Calders decided what needed to go into the shredder and what they could get away with. But I don’t remember any precedent, I just remember fury. Fury that I was going to lose by a couple of fucking meters.”

He took another mouthful of whiskey and held on to it. Swallowed, grimaced.

“So. I pushed him off. Down a gear, pedal flat, revs up to the red on that last bend. Into the back of that little roadster as if I was giving it one up the ass. It went through the crash barrier like a fist through tissue paper, right over and nose-first into the Calders parking lot. Hit another car and one of the tanks blew, then the other one. By the time I got down there, it was all over. But they showed me security camera footage later.”

Notley looked up and gave Chris a grin that slipped just a little.

“He tried to get out.
Was
almost out, when the tank went. There was this two-minute sequence of Roger Barnes lit up in flame, still tangled in the belt. He tore free, he was screaming, screaming all the way. It must have been the pain that got him out, finally. He ran about a dozen steps on fire, and then he just seemed to. Melt. Collapsed and folded over himself there on the asphalt, and stopped screaming.

And the next time I checked, I was a pinup. Magazine covers, car ads, introduced to the CEO of Calders in Chicago. It was out in the open all of sudden. It was precedent, Chris, it was
legal,
and Calders were the new field leaders. Pointing the way out of the Domino trap. Turn up with blood on your wheels, or don’t turn up at all. It was the new ethic, and we were the new breed. Jack Notley, Roberto Sanchez, transatlantic mirror images of the same new brutalist dynamic. Worth our body weight in platinum.”

Notley seemed to have coasted to a halt. He looked up at Chris again.

“Precedent, Chris. That’s what counts. Remember Webb Ellis. In the elite, you don’t get punished for breaking the rules. Not if it works. If it works, you get elevated and the rules get changed in your wake. Now. Tell me Barranco is going to work.”

Chris cleared his throat.

“It’ll work. The NAME’s a special place. We’re talking about the radical restructuring of a regime that’s been in place almost since the beginning of the century. It’s time for that change. Echevarria was just a, a—”

“Yeah, yeah, a bag of pus waiting to be. I remember. Go on.”

“With Barranco, we can build a whole new monitored economy. He believes in things, he believes in change, and he can get other people to believe. That’s a power we can harness. We can use it to build something out there that no one in this fucking business has ever seen before. Something that gives people—”

It was the whiskey. He clamped shut.

Notley watched him, features shrewd and attentive. He nodded, set his whiskey on the edge of the desk, and got up. Abruptly the Nemex was in his hand again, but gripped flat in his upheld palm.

“Careful,” he said, enunciating the word as if to demonstrate its meaning. “I like you, Chris. If I didn’t, make no mistake about this, they’d be taking you out of here in plastic. I think you’ve got what not one Shorn exec in ten has, what we can’t ever get enough of around here, and that’s the ability to
create.
To build new models in your head without even realizing you’re doing it. You’re a change maker. And we have to have the guts to let you be what you are, to take the risk that you
may
fuck up, and to trust that you won’t. But you need to be clear on what we’re about here, Chris.

“Shorn exists to make money. For our shareholders, for our investors, and for ourselves. In that order. We’re not some last-century bleeding-heart NGO pissing funds into a hole in the ground. We’re part of a global management system
that works.
Forty years ago we dismantled OPEC. Now the Middle East does as we tell it. Twenty years ago we dismantled China, and East Asia got in line as well. We’re down to micromanagement and the market now, Chris. We let them fight their mindless little wars, we rewrite the deals and the debt, and it
works.
Conflict Investment is about making global stupidity work for the benefit of Western investors. That’s it, that’s the whole story. We’re not going to lose our grip again like last time.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did. And it’s natural to feel that way sometimes, above all when you’re rubbing up against someone like Barranco. You said it yourself, he can make other people believe. Do you think, just because you wear a suit and drive a car, that you’re immune to that?” Notley shook his head. “Hope is the human condition, Chris. Belief in a better day. For yourself, and if they really get to you, for the whole fucking world. Give Barranco time and he’ll have you believing in that. A world where the resources get magically shared out like some global birthday tea for well-behaved kids. A world where everyone’s beaming content with a life of hard work, modest rewards, and simple pleasures. I mean,
think
about it, Chris. Is that a likely outcome? A likely
human
outcome?”

Chris licked his lips, watching the gun. “No, of course not. I just meant that Barranco is—”

But Notley wasn’t listening. He was lit up with the whiskey and something else that Chris couldn’t get a fix on. Something that looked like desperation but wore an industrial-wattage grin.

“Do you
really think
we can afford to have the developing world
develop
? You think we could have survived the rise of a modern, articulated Chinese superpower twenty years ago? You think we could manage an Africa full of countries run by intelligent, uncorrupted democrats? Or a Latin America run by men like Barranco? Just imagine it for a moment. Whole populations getting educated, and healthy, and secure, and aspirational. Women’s rights, for Christ’s sake. We can’t
afford
these things to happen, Chris. Who’s going to soak up our subsidized food surplus for us? Who’s going to make our shoes and shirts? Who’s going to supply us with cheap labor and cheap raw materials? Who’s going to store our nuclear waste, balance out our CO
^₂
misdemeanors? Who’s going to buy our arms?”

He gestured angrily.

“An educated middle class doesn’t want to spend eleven hours a day bent over a stitching machine. They aren’t going to work the seaweed farms and the paddy fields till their feet rot. They aren’t going to live next door to a fuel-rod dump and shut up about it. They’re going to want prosperity, Chris. Just like they’ve seen it on TV for the last hundred years. City lives and domestic appliances and electronic game platforms for their kids. And cars. And vacations, and places to go to spend their vacations. And planes to get them there. That’s
development,
Chris. Ring any bells? Remember what happened when we told
our
people they couldn’t have their cars anymore? When we told them they couldn’t fly. Why do you think anybody else is going to react any differently out there?”

“I
don’t.
” Chris spread his hands. He couldn’t work out how things had gotten back up to this pitch. “I know this stuff. I don’t need convincing, Jack.”