Market Forces (29 page)

“The week from hell.”

Mike grinned. “That’s right. So tonight, let’s just forget about the whole fucking thing and get wrecked. What time you reckon Carla’ll be here?”

“She said before eight.” Chris glanced at his watch. “Maybe she got held up at the checkpoints.”

“Want to call her?”

“No, it’s.” He realized how it looked. “Yeah, maybe I should.”

C
ARLA WAS RUNNING
an hour late, for no reason she felt like offering. Chris bit back his annoyance.

“Well, when—” he began thinly.

“Oh, Chris, just start without me. I’m sure you’re already having fun.”

He looked around at Mike and Suki, glad he’d used the cell and not the videophone. Bryant was leaning against his wife and nuzzling at her ear through the immaculate auburn mane. She laughed, flinched away, then reached around to grab the ends of his loosened tie and pull him close. The little scene radiated groomed marital content, a synthetic blend of sex and wealth and domesticity straight out of a screen ad. He thought suddenly of a kitchen in Highgate, and an unforgivable wish surged up in him.

“Well, get here as soon as you can,” he said, and hung up.

Mike looked up. “She okay?”

“Yeah, be here in about an hour. Some kind of crisis with a lubricant system.” He smiled weakly. “Suppose I should be glad she’s that obsessive.”

“Shit, yeah. If Suki was my mechanic, I’d never let her out of the fucking garage. Ow!”

“Bastard.”

He tried to join in with the laughter, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“Chris, you know the horse joke?” Bryant poured more wine. “Guy goes into a bar and sees a horse standing there. So he goes up to him and says
So. Why the long face?
”

More laughter, filling up the beautiful kitchen like the smell of cooking he wasn’t invited to share. He wished Liz would hurry up and

Carla!

He wished
Carla
would hurry up and

And what? Come on, Chris. Finish that thought.

It must have shown on his face. Mike came across and clapped him on the shoulder. “Ah, Chris. Come on, man. Honestly. I really don’t think you should be worrying. I mean, in the end, you trashed the little fucker. He’s smoked meat. And let’s face it, with the rep you’ve got, no one smarter than a fuckwit gang sprog is going to want to drive against you.” He raised his glass. “You got
nothing
to worry about, man.”

M
IDWEEK
, R
EGIME
C
HANGE
was quiet. Cheap cocktails and genteel pole dancing brought in a scattering of suits from the local offices and recently paid zone workers who knew they’d never get in on a Friday or Saturday night. By eight thirty or nine they were mostly leaving, the zone types headed home with their shallow finances drained, the suits going on to less genteel clubs where you could get your hands on the dancers.

“I would have suggested somewhere else.” Chris gestured at the center of the Iraq Room, where a veiled woman naked from the neck down flexed around a newly installed silver pole to the unwinding cadences of Cairo Scene. The spectators sat at pipe tables or stood about in small knots, staring. “I didn’t realize.”

Liz Linshaw laughed and sipped at the pipe between them. She plumed whiskey-scented smoke in the dancer’s direction.

“You don’t approve?”

“Uh.” He spread his hands helplessly. “Well, it’s just not what I had in mind when I. You know, called you.”

“Chris.” She leaned closer to beat the music, grinning. “You really don’t have to work so hard at not looking at her. I already know you’re an honorable man. Way past honorable, in fact.”

The dancer bellied up to the pole, slid it up and down between her breasts. Chris took a deep interest in the low hammered-copper table the pipe stood on. Liz Linshaw laughed again.

“Look.” She leaned across to place one hand gently against his cheek and pushed his head back toward the performance. He fought down a jagged impulse to grab the hand and twist it away. “I mean,
look,
really look at her. Let’s get this over with. She’s sexy, isn’t she? Young. No, don’t look away. It’s a great body. Worked out. And worked
on,
obviously, unless someone invented antigravity fields recently. Yeah, if I were a man, she’d do it for me. She’d make me
Chris,
hey, Chris you’re
blushing.
”

“No, I’m—”

“You
are.
I can feel it. Your face is hot.” She laughed again, delightedly. “Chris, you really are in trouble. You’re a grown man, you’ve got a dozen kills under your belt, and you can’t look at soft porn without flushing like a teenager. I mean, what do you and Carla Nyquist
do
in the bedroom?”

She must have seen the change in his face. Before he could move, she reached out and touched his arm.

“Sorry. Chris, I’m sorry. That was bitchy.”

This time he did take hold of her hand. He pushed it back across the table and sat looking at her in silence.

“Chris, I said I’m sorry.”

They were saved by the pipe waitress. She sauntered across, lifted the cage, and cast a practiced eye over the glowing embers of tobacco in the pan. She glanced at Chris.

“Bring you another?”

He hadn’t smoked much of the first; it was just the price of sitting there while he waited for Liz Linshaw. He shrugged.

“No, I think we’re pretty much done here.”

The waitress left. He met Liz Linshaw’s gaze and held it.

“Chris—”

“Reason I asked you here, Liz. You’ve got friends in Driver Control, right?”

She looked away, then back. “Yes. Yes, I have.”

“Inside sources? People who can get information for you?”

“Is this really why you called me, Chris?”

“Yes. You have sources, right?”

A shrug. “I’m a journalist.”

“There’s something I need to know. I need to find out if—”

“Whoa, Chris.” She gave him a hard little smile. “Slow down. Now, I may have just gone over the line a little with that bitchy crack about your wife. But that doesn’t mean you own a part of me. Why the fuck would I put pressure on one of my hard-won sources for you? What’s in it for me?”

“You’re writing another book, right?”

She nodded.

“So this is a whole chapter if you’re lucky.” He hesitated at the edge, looking for something to fill the gap that had suddenly opened up between them. “You heard I was up against a no-namer last week?”

“Yes. Inconclusive, I heard. Driver Control had to come in and mediate.” She smiled, a little more warmly this time. “I’m sorry, Chris. I like you but I don’t shadow you through the net on a day-to-day basis. There was something about a software failure, the challenge didn’t register in the system or something?”

“Yeah, that’s the official line.”

One eyebrow arched. He thought there was a little mockery in it. “And the
un
official line?”

“The no-namer was never registered in the first place. Some zone kid jacked a battlewagon and tried to take me down in the rain. No challenge issued. And Driver Control didn’t mediate, they turned up with an enforcement copter after I drove the kid off the road and they fed him a couple of cans of Gatling shells for breakfast.”

He saw, with some satisfaction, the way the shock went through her. How her carefully constructed cool fractured open. Her voice, when it came, was almost a whisper.

“They killed him?”

“Pretty conclusively, yeah.”

“But haven’t they traced the car?”

Chris nodded. “To an unemployed datasystems consultant. He reported it stolen from outside his house in Harlesden about an hour after the duel.”

“He must have known before that!”

“Not necessarily. He hadn’t driven it for a while, apparently. Couldn’t afford to renew the license this quarter.”

“Do you believe that?” Journalistic interest kindling.

“From the look of him in the interview tape, he’d be hard-pressed to afford a full tank of fuel, let alone a license to use it, so yes, I do. But in the end it doesn’t matter. Whoever set this up is a long way up the chain from either him or the kid who nicked the car. And whoever set this up also has their claws into Driver Control.”

“All right, I’ll buy that. What else do you have?”

“That’s the lot.” He wasn’t about to get into the Mandela estate connection. Troy Morris was already running down rumors across the southside, asking softly after Robbie Goodwin’s displaced family, trying to find a safe approach to Khalid Iarescu’s underworld machine. The last thing he’d need was a high-profile journalist crashing the zones and stirring things up. Liz Linshaw was most use where she already was—highly placed in the world of competition driving, reeking of cachet and connection.

She smiled, as if she could read his thoughts.

“No, there’s more. You just don’t feel like telling me right now.” She shrugged. “ ‘S okay, I can live with that. Sure, I’ll talk to some people I know. Shouldn’t take much leverage to see if something’s being covered up. I can take it from there.” She picked up the pipe and drew on it. Inside the cage, the last of the embers flared. “You understand, this doesn’t come for free. I do it, and you’ll owe me, Chris. Big time.”

“Like I said, it’ll make a chapter of—”

“No.” She shook her head, and her hair fell across her face. It made him want to clear it away with one hand. “That’s not what I mean.”

“So what do you mean?”

The corner of her mouth quirked and she looked away. “You know what I mean, Chris.”

That sat between them for a while, smoldering out like the pipe.

“Listen,” he said.

“I know, Chris. I know. In fact, I’ve seen it all before. You’ve got some stuff you’ve got to work through. Don’t worry about it and. Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not short of male company, believe me.”

“You seeing Mike again?” It was out before he could stop himself.

She raked fingers into her own hair and grinned up at the corner of the room. “That
really
is none of your business, Chris.”

“I’m not like him, Liz.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I don’t see the women around me as. Product.” The images from the porn segment glowed in his head. Studded leather parting buttocks, encircling breasts impossibly full.

Fully clothed, the Liz Linshaw sitting opposite him shrugged. “Mike Bryant knows what he wants, and he takes it and then he looks after it as best he can. I don’t think his morality stretches much farther than that, but he does at least know what he wants.”

Her eyes flickered up to meet his. She was still smiling.

“Listen, Liz. That night, I.” He swallowed. “I’m having some problems with my marriage, but that doesn’t mean I—”

“Chris.” He’d never in his life been interrupted so gently. “I don’t care. I want to fuck you, not replace your wife. But I’ll tell you something for nothing. You came home with me that night, and you grabbed hold of the merchandise when it was on display. Whatever’s going on in your relationship with Carla, you might as well have fucked me then. You’ve got the same guilt, and the same hard-on for me. The fact you didn’t do it is a technicality.”

“You—”

She waved it off. Getting up, shouldering her way into her jacket.

“I’ll get back to you about Driver Control. But the next time you get a bed for the night at my place, you’ll work your passage.”

I
N THE END
, the pipe waitress came and told him he’d have to order something else if he wanted to sit there any longer.

L
OPEZ ROUTED
B
ARRANCO
’
S
flight plan through Atlanta and Montreal before a dawn arrival at Reagan International, New York, where a Shorn jet would pick the two of them up under paperwork that identified them as economic advisers for the Paraná Emergency Council. Lopez spoke Brazilian Portuguese almost as well as his native Spanish, and Barranco, like most political figures in Latin America these days, had enough to get by. Lopez was betting security at Reagan International would neither know the difference nor care.

Apparently, his assessment was on the nail. The Shorn jet lifted without incident and touched down in London just after lunch. Chris rode the courtesy copter out to meet it.

“Señor Barranco.” He had to shout above the racket of the rotors and the unseasonally cold wind that came buffeting across the asphalt of the private carriers’ terminal. His grin felt sandblasted onto his face. Armed security stood around in suits, jackets whipping up constantly to reveal their shoulder holsters. “Welcome to England. How was your flight?”

Barranco grimaced. He looked good in the smart-casual mobile consultant wardrobe Lopez had disguised him with, but above the knit wool jacket his face was smeared with jet lag.

“Which flight do you mean? I seem to have been in transit for a week. And now a helicopter?”

“Believe me, Señor Barranco, you wouldn’t want to drive through this part of London. Is Joaquin Lopez with you?”

Barranco jerked a thumb back at the Shorn jet. “He’s coming.”

Lopez appeared in the hatch and clambered down, followed by two more men with baggage. He grinned and waved at Chris. No sign of the weariness you could see on Barranco. Beneath his mobcon clothing, there was a prowling energy that Chris guessed was chemical. In the absence of any other escort, he’d been Barranco’s only security since leaving Panama City.

Chris ushered everybody aboard the copter and into seats. The door cranked itself closed and shut out the wind with an airtight
clunk.
The pilot turned to look at Chris.

“Yeah, that’s it. Take us home.”

The copter drifted into the sky. They bent away over the city. Barranco leaned across to the window and peered down at the sprawl below.

“This doesn’t seem so terrible,” he remarked.

“No,” Chris agreed. “From up here, it’s not.”

The tanned face turned to look at him. “I would not be safe walking in those streets?”

“Depends on the exact neighborhood. But as a general rule, no, you wouldn’t. You might be attacked and robbed, maybe just have stones thrown at you. At a minimum you’d be recognized as an outsider and followed. After that—” Chris shrugged. “Depends on the kind of crowd you draw.”

“I am not dressed like you.”

“Wouldn’t matter. They don’t care about politics in the zones. It’s tribal. Localized gangs, territorial violence.”

“I see.” Barranco’s gaze went back to the city sliding past beneath them. “They have forgotten who did this to them.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

The rest of the flight passed in silence. They crossed the westward cordons and picked up the beacon for the West End cluster. Machines took the controls, read the flight data, and drew the helicopter along a preprogrammed path. Hyde Park opened up under them. The hotels beckoned at its edge, like moored cruise liners from an earlier age.

Mike had Hernan Echevarria buried in the heart of Mayfair, well away from the modern hotels. They were playing to the dictator’s Old World pretensions. A royal suite at Brown’s, the whiff of two centuries’ tradition, and the dropped names of European royalty amid the historical guest list. An armored Shorn limo collected Echevarria daily at the Albemarle Street frontage and ferried him about on a carefully balanced program of meetings with senior banking officials, A-listed arms dealers, and one or two house-trained political figures. Evenings were given over to opera and dinners with more tame dignitaries.

“I’ll keep him busy,” Bryant promised. “And I’ll keep him away from the park end. You stash Barranco in the Hilton or something. Get a tower suite. I’ll cross-reference with you on program, we’ll make sure these two guys never come within a couple of klicks of each other.”

The Hilton it was. They touched down on the tower helipad and were met by liveried attendants who busied themselves with the baggage and led Barranco and Lopez off in the direction of the access elevators. Chris went with them, mainly to take care of tips.

“You won’t have to do that,” he said, as the last attendant slipped out and closed the door with trained noiselessness. “Just sign gratuities on any room service you ask for, and we’ll cover it. I’d recommend about ten percent. Expectations are a lot less than that, but it never hurts to be generous. So anyway, uh. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

“Comfortable?”

Barranco stood in the midst of the suite’s opulence, looking like a hunter whose large and dangerous quarry has suddenly disappeared into the surrounding undergrowth.

Chris cleared his throat. “Yes, uh. Joaquin Lopez will be staying on the floor below. Room 4148. I’ve put two armed security guards into 4146 as well. The hotel has pretty good security of its own, but you can’t be too careful, even up here.” He produced a small matte-black cell phone and held it out. “This is a dedicated phone. A scrambled line direct to me. Wherever I am. Any problem, night or day, call me. Just press the
DIAL
key.”

“Thank you.” Barranco’s tone was distant, but if there was irony in it, Chris couldn’t hear it.

“I thought you’d probably want to rest now.”

“Yes, that would be good.”

“I’d like to introduce you to a colleague of mine later on, and also to my wife. I thought perhaps we could have dinner together. There’s a good Peruvian restaurant in the hotel mezzanine. We could eat late, say about nine thirty. Or if you’d prefer to stay here and leave it for another night, that’s entirely up to you.”

“No, no. I would.” He drew a deep, jet-lagged breath. “Like to meet your wife, Señor Faulkner. And your colleague, of course. Nine thirty will be fine.”

“Good, that’s great. I’ll call here just after nine, then.”

“Yes. Now I think I would like to rest.”

“Of course.”

He let himself out and went down to talk to the security detachment. They were pretty much what he’d expected—two hard-faced men past their physical prime in shirtsleeves and shoulder holsters. They answered the door and then his questions with impassive calm. The surveillance equipment he’d ordered wired into Barranco’s suite stood unobtrusively on a low table to one side. Standby lights winked below the row of small liquid crystal screens. On one of them, Barranco had already collapsed onto a bed, fully clothed. Chris bent and peered.

“He asleep?”

“Out like a light.”

“You sure he isn’t going to be able to find any of these cameras?”

“Yes, sir. Unless he’s a surveillance specialist. And he hasn’t shown any signs of looking for them yet.”

“Well, let me know if he does start looking.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if he moves from the suite, I want to know before it happens. You’ve got my direct line?”

They exchanged weary glances. One of them nodded.

“Yes, sir. It’s under control.”

He took the hint and left to check on Lopez. The Americas agent had been waiting for him. Chemical impatience made his movements about the room erratic and irritating. Chris tried to project calm.

“No transit problems then?”

“No, man. Onward tickets.” Lopez grinned speedily. “They don’t give a fuck who you are, so long as you’re going someplace else.”

“And Barranco? Did he talk to you at all?”

“Yeah, he told me I was a running dog for the global capitalist tyranny, and I ought to be ashamed of myself.”

“No change there, then.” Chris wandered across to the window and stared out over the park.

“Yeah, you want to watch him, Chris. He’s out of his depth with all this corporate stuff, he’s going to be defensive. Most likely, he’ll cling to what he knows. My guess is you’re going to hear a shitload of out-of-date dogma this week.”

“Well, he’s entitled to his point of view.”

That cracked Lopez up.

“Yeah, ’s a free country,” he chortled. “Right? Everyone’s entitled to their point of view, right? ’S a
free
country! That’s right!”

“Joaquin, you need to take some downers.”

“No. Less time around these Marquista hero types is what I fucking need, man.”

The sudden, bright vehemence brought Chris around from his contemplation of the view. Lopez was standing glittery-eyed in the center of the room, fists knotted, surprised by his own sudden rage.

“Joaquin?”

“Ah,
fuck
it.” The anger fled as rapidly as it had come. Lopez looked abruptly drained. “Sorry. It’s just my kid brother hands me the same fucking line all the time. Running dog capitalista, running dog capitalista. Ever since I got my PT-and-I license. Like a fucking skip-burned disk.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“Yeah.” The Americas agent waved a hand. “I don’t advertise the fact. Little squirt’s a union organizer in the banana belt, up around Bocas, where we were. Not the kind of thing you put on a Trade and Investment CV if you can avoid it.”

“I guess not.”

Lopez’s eyes went hooded. “I try to keep the worst of the shit from raining on him. I made contacts that are good for that much. And when the strikebreakers do come around, I pay his hospital bills, I feed his kids. Gets back on his feet and he drops by to insult me again.”

Chris thought feelingly of Erik Nyquist. “Family, huh?”

“Yeah, family.” The agent lost his drugged introspection. Shot Chris a sideways look. “We’re just talking here, right, boss? You’re not going to go telling tales on me to the partners?”

“Joaquin, I don’t give a shit what your brother does for a living, and neither would any of Shorn’s partners. They’ve got altogether bigger game to shoot. Everyone’s got an Ollie North or two hanging in the classified record. So long as it doesn’t interfere with business, so what?”

Lopez shook his head. “Maybe that’s a London attitude, Chris, but it wouldn’t wash that way with Panama T and I. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find myself served with a Plaza de Toros summons like you did to old man Harris.”

“Hey, Harris was a fuckup.”

“Yeah, not much of a knife fighter, either, even for a gringo.” Lopez skinned an unpleasant grin, but something desperate leaked from the edges, around the eyes. “Time I reach that age, I want to be out of this fucking game. I do good work for you, Chris. Right?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Chris frowned. Candor wasn’t something he’d looked for here, weakness still less. The naked anxiety in the agent’s tone was touching him in places he’d thought long sealed away.

And we’re still not into the brutal honesty shitstorm with Barranco yet. Jesus fucking Christ.

“I mean, I called it right everywhere you asked me, right? I set up what you need, soon as you needed, right?”

“You know you have.” He didn’t know which direction to roll this. Maybe—

“I know I lost it back there in the NAME, I still owe you for that, but—”

“Joaquin, you’ve got to drop that shit.” Chris made for the mini bar. Shipped bottles and ice up from the chiller unit onto a table, talking as he worked. “Look, it was a problem at this end. I told you that, and I told you we look after our own. Just think about it. Christ, if you don’t trust me, think about the logistics of the thing. Would I have hauled your ass out of there, with all the expense we incurred, just so I could can you six weeks down the line?”

“I don’t know, Chris. Would you?”

“Joaquin, I’m serious. You
really
need to take something.”

“You know Mike Bryant, right?”

Chris stopped, a glass in each hand. “Yeah. He’s a colleague, so watch what you say next, all right.”

“You know he’s working a Cono Sur portfolio at the moment? Running contacts through Carlos Caffarini out of Buenos Aires?”

“Yeah, I heard. Didn’t know it was Caffarini, but—”

“It isn’t anymore,” Lopez said abruptly. “Last week Bryant canned Caffarini because there were call-center strikes in Santiago, and he didn’t see it coming. Or maybe he didn’t think it was important enough to chase. Now he’s on a ventilator in intensive care until his health cover runs out, and some fucking seventeen-year-old is running the portfolio at a quarter the old retainer. They were only
strikes,
Chris. Management abuse of female workers, localized action,
no
political demands. I checked.”

Chris put down the glasses and sighed. Lopez watched him.

Fuck, Mike, why can’t you just

“Look, Joaquin. Strikes can get out of hand, whatever the original rationale. Reed and Mason, it’s chapter one stuff. You know that.”

“Yeah.” The Americas agent had the manic splinter in his tone back. “So tell me this, Chris. What’s going to happen to me if a banana strike gets out of hand on a certain plantation up near Bocas?”

Chris looked at him. “Nothing.” He kept Lopez’s eyes while it sank in. “All right? Got it?
Nothing
is going to happen to you.”