Market Forces (39 page)

“Yeah.” Chris looked incuriously at where the other exec lay, still masked. Up close, you could see the wounds in his chest and belly. His whole body was drenched with the blood. “Dead.”

Mike looked around judiciously.

“I think they all are. Oh, wait a minute.” He crossed to the man Chris had hit when he tangled with Makin. He crouched and put two fingers to the man’s neck, shrugged. “On his way out, I reckon. Still.”

He got up and pointed the Nemex down at the man’s masked face. He was already turning away as he pulled the trigger.

“How did you know I’d be here?” Chris asked him.

Another shrug. “Carla called me this morning at home. In tears. Told me you’d had a fight, you’d gotten out in the middle of the zones, and now she couldn’t get hold of you. I came in looking for you. Had to break into your office. Sorry about that, I was pretty worried. Anyway, I spotted that message from Liz. Thought I’d catch you up. Took a while, my ribs are still killing me.”

Chris looked at him narrowly. “You just happened to be carrying twenty grand in cash?”

“Oh, that.” Mike grinned again and crossed to where the bundle of currency still lay on the street. “Improvisation. Look.”

He tossed the money across, and Chris caught it awkwardly with his left hand. The notes were twenties. There were a thousand euros in the bundle at most.

“Best I could do on the spur of the moment. You really walk in from the zones last night?”

“Yeah.”

“Must have been some fight.”

They stood amid the carnage, the scattered weapons and spreading pools of blood, and very slowly Chris became aware that, among a small knot of people gathered at the end of India Street, Liz Linshaw was watching him.

He walked toward her.

“D
O YOU HAVE
any idea how bad this looks?”

Louise Hewitt stood stiff-legged at the head of the conference table and gestured at the projection. Blown-up surveillance camera footage ran grainy and silent behind her, Mike Bryant giving the coup de grâce to the two masked gunmen still breathing.

“Do you have any idea what this kind of
brawling
does to our image as a serious financial institution?”

Chris shrugged. His side was numb where the Shorn medic had dosed him with contact anesthetic prior to digging out the shotgun pellets. The rest of him was past feeling very much of anything, either. “You should be talking to Makin. He started it.”

“This is not a fucking playground, Faulkner!”

“Louise, you’re being unreasonable.” Mike Bryant met Philip Hamilton’s eyes across the table, and the other man looked away, toward Hewitt. Beside him, Jack Notley stared into the middle distance, seemingly oblivious to the storm building around him. “Makin called this one, all the way down. If I hadn’t been there, Chris’d be dead now and the blame’d be farmed out to zone gangwits. We wouldn’t even know we had a loose cannon aboard.”

On the projection screen, Chris walked away from the bodies and out of shot. It was odd, watching himself disappear, back into the past of three hours ago and the confrontation with Liz Linshaw.

You set me up.

She took it like a slap. For the first time he could recall, he saw open hurt in her face. The sight of it licked the pit of his belly.

You fucking set me up, you bitch.

No.
She was shaking her head.
Chris, I don’t—

And then Mike was there, and they both slid their masks back on. Passion sheathed. There was control, there were words that meant something factual, there was the long, verbal comedown. Explanations, talk and shots of rough, blended whiskey in Break Point to combat the shakes. Sanity leaking into the nightmare aftermath like blood across asphalt.

I just got a call. This guy said he worked Driver Control, he knew what really happened to Chris on the M11, did I want to know, too? Meet him here. Five grand in cash.

She brandished the money out of her wallet. Like proof of innocence.

When Mike went to the bathroom, she reached out across the cheap plastic-topped table and took Chris’s hand in her own. No words, only a cabled look eye-to-eye. Spinning sudden vertigo, and then the flush of the toilet through cardboard-thin walls and their hands leapt apart like matched magnetic poles.

Louise Hewitt was talking to him, but he couldn’t make it matter. He levered himself to his feet, faced her disbelieving fury.

“I’ve had enough of this shit, Louise. It’s pretty fucking clear what happened here.”

“Sit down Faulkner, I haven’t—”

“Makin couldn’t hack the NAME account. I took it from him, and it hurt. He couldn’t take me on the road, so he hired a gangwit kid to do what he didn’t dare do himself. When that didn’t work—”

“I told you to
sit dow
—”

He shouted her down. “When that didn’t
fucking
work, Louise, he hired some more
sicarios
and tried this. He couldn’t beat me playing by the Shorn rules, so he broke them. And now he’s dead. Everybody in fucking black.”

“Chris.” Notley’s voice didn’t seem to have raised much, but there was an edge on it that cut across the air like tire screech. “You don’t talk to partnership like this. You’re overwrought, but that’s no excuse. Now get out.”

Chris met the senior partner’s eyes, and saw the man who had almost shot him dead in his own office a week ago. He nodded.

“Fair enough.”

They watched him go in silence. Mike Bryant looked around the table again. He shook his head.

“This isn’t right, Jack. I mean, it’s a fucking mess. But Makin called it. He’s been a fuckup since he took over the NAME, he was way too impressed with himself from day one. I would have called him out myself, but what’s the point. Anyone could have seen he’d blink first.”

Hamilton blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t have to drive against someone to know you’re better than he is, Phil. That’s crude. Sometimes you just know what the outcome’d be, and that’s enough. This kill-or-be-killed shit just gets in the way.”

The look ran among the partners like current. Up on the projector screen, the surveillance film had looped. The gun battle was starting again. Jack Notley cleared his throat.

“Mike, perhaps you could give us some time to discuss this from a partner perspective. We’ll get back to you again on Monday morning.”

Bryant nodded. “Sure.”

When the door closed, Louise Hewitt spun on Notley.

“Did you hear that? You know where that comes from, don’t you? That’s chess and bullshit neo-Jap philosophy, courtesy of Chris bloody Faulkner. The man is a fucking toxin, Jack. He’s the real loose cannon around here.”

“It doesn’t show up like that in the numbers, Louise.”

“It’s not
about
the numbers.”

“No?” Notley raised an eyebrow. “Am I missing something here? Would you care to tell me what Shorn CI is about besides the numbers?”

“Don’t be obtuse. It’s about an ethic. A corporate culture. A way of
doing
things. And if we let that go,
this
—” She jabbed a finger at the surveillance film. Masked figures, collapsed like unstrung marionettes. Pools and snakes of blood. “—is what happens. Structural breakdown, anarchy in the streets. It’s axiomatic. Does anyone sitting around this table have any inkling why Nick Makin might have acted the way he did? Why he found it necessary, even believed perhaps that it would be acceptable, to breach Shorn etiquette like this? Think hard, Jack. Think about a certain major client, beaten to death in conference a week ago. Think about the way you rewarded Faulkner for that. Does anyone see a connection?”

For a fraction of a second Notley closed his eyes. When he spoke, there was a soft warning in his voice.

“I don’t think we need to revisit that, Louise.”

“I think we do, Jack. You gave Chris a green light for behavior beyond any acceptable limits. And Makin learned the lesson, resulting in this mess. And meanwhile we’ve got Bryant, our best driver, talking like a fucking ombudsman. Any way you look at it, Jack, you’ve destabilized what we’re about. And we can’t afford that.”

“I wonder if Martin Page would see it that way?”

Hamilton and Hewitt traded a glance. Hewitt came to the table and seated herself carefully.

“Is that some kind of accusation?”

Notley shrugged. “Let’s just say that your talk of loose cannons is selective, Louise. Page was a junior partner. What you did to him ran counter at least to an unspoken
understanding
of how partnership works here.”

“I resent that, Jack. Page was a filed challenge.”

“Yes, a challenge without a vacant post to justify it. Executive brawling at partnership level. An act of pure, equity-share greed.”

“Which you underwrote, as I recall.”

“Retrospectively, yes. Because back then, Louise,
you
were the loose cannon, and I admired you for it.”

Hewitt smiled thinly. “Well, thank you. But I think there’s a limit—”

“Oh,
shut up.
Don’t talk to me about”—Notley gestured impatiently—”
destabilization,
as if it’s something we have some kind of choice about. As if it’s something we can avoid. What we do here is
built
on instability. It’s a fucking prerequisite.”

Philip Hamilton cleared his throat. “I think what Louise means is—”

“Yes, I thought it was about time you weighed in, you little sycophant.
Christ,
you’re beginning to sicken me, both of you.”

Notley stood up and strode to the head of the table. He stabbed the projector control with two folded fingers, and the wall behind him was abruptly blank. His voice was tight with leashed anger.

“Louise, I helped you climb to the top of this pile, and now you’re up here all you want to do is surround yourself with low-threat colleagues like this bag of guts, and kick away the ladder in case anybody sharper gets to scramble up and
destabilize
things for you. Haven’t you learned
anything
on the way up? Either of you? You can’t
have
stability and dynamic capital growth. It’s textbook truth. Come
on.
What transformed the stock market back in the last century? Volatility. Competition. Deregulation. The loosening of the ties, the
removal of social security systems.
What’s transformed foreign investment in the last thirty years? Volatility. Competition. Small wars. It’s the
same
pattern. And what ensures that we stay on top of it all? Volatility. Innovation. Rule breaking. Loose cannons. Christ, why do you think I hired Faulkner in the first place? We
need
that factor. We
have
to keep topping up with it. Otherwise, we all just turn back into the same fat fuck complacent country-club scum that nearly sank us last time around. Sure, men like Faulkner are unstable. Sure, they keep you looking in your rearview all the time.
But that’s what keeps us hard.
”

For a couple of beats, silence held the conference room. Nobody moved. Notley stared from Hewitt to Hamilton and back, daring them to dispute.

Finally Hewitt shook her head. “It may make you hard, Jack,” she said with measured insolence. “But to me it’s just bad business. We have structures in place to ensure volatility and competition. I don’t think we need to go courting chaos into the bargain. I’m making a recommendation this quarterly that we let Faulkner go.”

Notley nodded, almost affably.

“All right, Louise. If that’s the way you want it. But understand this. We’ve been courting chaos since the day we signed on for Conflict Investment. All of us. It’s what drives us, it’s what gets results. And I’m not going to watch you sell that out, just because you’ve gotten comfortable. You go on record with that recommendation, I will find reasons to call you out. Do you understand me? I will drive you off the road.”

This time no one broke the silence. Notley leaned his neck hard to one side and they heard it click in the stillness.

“That will be all.”

When he had gone, Hewitt got up and went to stare out the window.

Hamilton pushed out a long breath. “Do you think he means it?”

“Of course he means it,” Hewitt said irritably.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” She came back to sit on the edge of the table. She looked down into Hamilton’s face. “But I’m going to need your help.”

O
UT IN THE
corridor, Mike Bryant quizzed security. They told him Chris had taken an elevator to the ground floor.
Seemed pretty pissed off,
admitted one of the guards. Mike called an elevator of his own and bombed downward in pursuit.

He spotted Chris, already halfway across the sunlit cathedral expanse of the lobby. The holos and fountains and subsonics were all switched off, and there was nobody about. In the Sunday-afternoon emptiness that was left, the space felt suddenly steely and inhuman.

Mike cleared his throat and called across it.

“Chris. Hey, Chris. Wait up a minute.”

“Now’s not a good time, Mike.” Chris flung it back over his shoulder, not stopping.

“Okay.” Mike jogged to catch up. Residual bruising across his chest made it painful. “You’re right, it’s not a good time. So why don’t we go and grab a drink somewhere.”

“I’ve got to get my car back from Hawkspur Green. And then check into a hotel.”

“You’re not going home?”

“What do you think?”

Mike put out a hand, breathing heavily. “What I think is, you need to drink some of that seaweed iodine shit you like, and talk about this. And, luckily, I’m here to listen to you spill. All right? Come on, I saved your life out there, Chris. At least buy me a drink. All right?”

Chris looked at him. An unwilling smile bent his mouth.

Mike saw it and grinned back. “All right. I’ll get the car.”

T
HEY FOUND A
tiny antique pub called the Grapes, tacked onto the Lime Street edge of Leadenhall Market, catering mainly to the insurance crowd and powered down to a single barwoman for the Sunday trade. Like most city-based hostelries, it opened seven days a week because the simple fact that it was always open was worth something in itself. Brokers knew they could get fed and watered there whatever day they were working, and the knowledge stuck. There was no room for five-day amateurs.

Three—
or four?
—whiskeys in, Chris had drowned his fury and was slumped on a stool, watching dust motes dance in the streams of sunlight that fell in through the windows opposite the bar. A faint, pervasive odor of alcohol seeped up off the polished wood counter. The Laphroaig sat on top of the cheap three fingers he’d taken in Break Point, the codeine tabs, and no food to speak of. He felt like a mud-smeared windshield.

“Look,” Mike was saying. “It doesn’t matter what Hewitt thinks. You took Makin down. That’s what counts. Sure it was unorthodox, but that’s the point, isn’t it? It ups your
don’t-fuck-with-me
stock through the roof. Builds you the killer rep.”

“Killer rep.” Chris stared into his glass. He coughed up a laugh and shook his head. “You want to know something about me, Mike?”

“Sure.”

“My
killer rep
is a fucking accident.”

He saw how the other man’s gaze narrowed. He nodded, knocked back the rest of the Laphroaig. Grunted, like letting go.

“ ‘S right. I’m a fucking fake, Mike. Hewitt has me, crosshairs and centered. She always did. She’s not wrong. I don’t belong here.”

Mike frowned, finished his vodka, and gestured to the barwoman.

“Same again. Chris, what are you talking about? You’ve been a fuel-injected killing machine since Quain, at least.”

“Ah! Quain.” Chris watched as the whiskey rose two fingers in his glass. “Quain, Quain, Quain. You want to know about Quain?”

“I already know about Quain. Chris, you left him smeared along thirty meters of asphalt. That’s pretty open and shut. You ran him over five fucking times, man.”

“Yeah.”

He sat, remembering. Brilliant spring sunshine, and the crunching impact of his barely legal ten-year-old Volvo Injection against the smooth racing green flanks of Quain’s Audi. The light had gleamed so hard off the bodywork, he’d had to squint.

And Quain spinning out, finally, into the barrier, jammed onto a snapped section of uprights. What Chris had been trying for all through the difficult latter stages of the duel, well past the point when he’d actually won. Quain gaping middle-aged and fearful through the smashed-in driver’s-side window as the Volvo backed up, preliminary to ramming. Gaping as Chris killed the motor and got out.

He felt his face twitch with the memory.

He seemed to make the walk between the two cars at an immense distance from himself. The turnover of his pulse throbbed in his own ears. No Nemexes back then. He walked right up to the window and showed Quain the thing in his hand. The recycled raki bottle, the soaked rag. Perfume of gasoline as he waved it back and forth. Snap of the lighter and the pale flame in the sunny air. Quain started babbling.

Get out,
Chris told him, surprising himself. The plan had been to burn Quain alive. The plan had been to tell Quain why, and then throw the bottle with enough force to shatter on the floor between his feet. The plan had been to watch Quain turned into a shrieking, flailing flame-armed thing, to listen to the screams and—

Get out and run, you fuck.

And Quain did.

Crazed, maybe, with fear of what he saw in Chris’s eyes, hypnotized by the blob of pale, dancing flame. Chris stood there and watched him go, groping about inside his own head for a reason. Something was happening in there, and he couldn’t make out what it was.

He threw the bottle into the Audi anyway, as much in frustration as anything else. It shattered on the dash and the flames sprang up. The sight seemed to switch something back on inside him. He sprinted back to the Volvo, kicked it alive, and floored the accelerator. Fishtail waltz as he hauled the wheel over and his gaze sharpened on the portly, lumbering figure ahead on the road. Quain must have heard the engine and known what it meant. He was making for the median as the Volvo came up on his heels. It wouldn’t have made any difference, Chris realized later. He would have driven straight through it to get to Quain.

He dropped a gear and the engine screamed. Quain looked back over his shoulder just before the Volvo hit. Chris saw his eyes. Then he was gone, a suddenly, impossibly aerodynamic body thudding and tumbling up off the hood, the windshield, the roof. A flash of dark falling in the rearview as Chris braked the Volvo to a screeching halt.

It wasn’t enough.

He never knew if Quain was dead when he reversed back over him the first time. But he saw what emerged under the front wheels as he pulled up five meters back from the body.

It still wasn’t enough.

He did it again. And again.

Five times, before he realized it would never be enough.

“He killed my father,” he said.

And Mike Bryant, staring at him in the sifting dustlight. A look on his face Chris had never seen before. Stalled out, lost.

“Your father?”

Chris sighed. Loading up for the long, tedious climb of explanation. “Not directly. Quain never met my father directly. My father worked for a reconstruction consultancy called IES—International Economic Solutions, but when you said it all together it sounded like
Yes.
Cute, huh? My mother said he used to.”

He clamped his mouth. Shook his head. Cleared his throat.

“Uh, they modeled admin systems, infrastructure, things like that. They were into Central Africa, the Middle East. Pretty small, but hungry and hard on the roads, as far as that went back then.”

Mike nodded. “Enough to just get there first, right?”

“That’s what they say.” Chris stared at a ray of dusty light falling across the bar top. A faint scarring of overlaid glass rings showed up in the wooden glow. “In 2018 Edward Quain was a hotshot young gun in Hammett McColl Emerging Markets. Couldn’t have been older than his early twenties. And he pulled off this cutting-edge piece of incursion for Hammett McColl in Ethiopia. Got backing for a major policy shift. Nothing dramatic by CI standards, this is more than thirty years ago remember. But it was enough to bring down the government. A lot of high-ranking officials lost their jobs. And Quain’s new team publicly reneged on a stack of external contracts. Happened overnight, literally. IES couldn’t take the damage. They went under, bankrupted along with a dozen or so others, and about forty percent of the low-end commercial sector in Ethiopia at the time. They say it precipitated the civil war.”

“Ah yeah, I remember this.” Mike snapped his fingers. “The Ayele Protocol, right? Read about it in Reed and Mason.”

“Right. Quain walked away with a huge commission, Hammett McColl repositioned for regional dominance in the Red Sea zone, and my father woke up with a walletful of dead plastic he didn’t know about. He got shot the same day, arguing with a supermarket security guard. His card wouldn’t scan at the checkout, they wouldn’t take him seriously, and it got.” Chris watched his knuckles whiten around the whiskey glass with absent fascination, as if they belonged to someone else. “Out of hand. My mother says, said, if he’d been dressed better that day, it would never’ve happened. Hated suits apparently, my old man. Dressed scruffy as he could, outside the office. Maybe they thought he’d stolen the card or something. They tried to throw him out, it got rough. Blam. Some fat over-the-hill fuck with a dick extension blew his fucking head off.”

He looked at the whiskey glass. Let go of it abruptly and stared at the palm of his suddenly liberated hand.

“We lost everything. The house, both cars. Health insurance, savings. Stock options. My mother got rehoused in the eastern zones. My father’s friends helped out as much as they could, but most of them were going under, too. They were all at IES or working in related firms.” Chris picked up his drink again, knocked it back. “And then, even that early, they say you could see the Domino coming if you were paying attention. It was still nearly a decade off, the worst of it, but people were already running scared, just hanging on with whatever they had. And Quain had just seen to it that we had nothing.”

“You remember all this?”

“Not really, no. I was two when my father was killed. I was there but—” Chris shivered, dodging the dream. “I don’t remember it. I just remember growing up in the zones with this accent everybody hated. This vague sense that things were better once.
Before.
But I could have picked that up listening to my mother. No way you remember stuff from when you’re two years old.”

“No. But.” Mike gestured helplessly. “How the fuck did you. I mean, Quain. Didn’t he see you coming, the day you joined HM? How did you even get into HM, come to that?”

“I changed my name. My father wasn’t called Faulkner; it was my mother’s maiden name. She died of thorn fever, when I was seventeen. I took her name, sold everything else we owned, and cut myself a new identity. Got a gangwit datarat in Plaistow to fix my records. Probably did a shit job, the money I gave him, but it was what I could afford. I doubt it would have stood up to close scrutiny, but when you’re from the zones who the fuck cares. You’re just cheap, faceless labor. And by the time I got to Hammett McColl, I had five years of new identity behind me. I’d made a lot of money for Ross Mobile and LS Euro, I could drive. That’s all the HM recruiters cared about.”

“Sloppy. Was that their own people?”

“No, contracted out. Some cut-rate two-room outfit off Ludgate Circus. They tendered for HM on straight cost. No duel requirement. Lowest offer wins.”

Mike shook his head. “Fucking amateurs.”

“Yeah, but you know what. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Quain wouldn’t have recognized my father’s name. Some guy he ruined twenty years ago, one name out of hundreds he probably didn’t even know back when it happened, let alone two decades on. What are the chances?”

“Yeah, figures.” Mike puffed out his cheeks. “Jesus, what a story. Does Carla know all this?”

“No. She knows I grew up in the zones, she knows my parents are dead, but we don’t talk about it. I met her after Quain. I’d already buried it all. She used to ask, back when we started seeing each other. Think it might even have been some of the attraction for her, the zone connection. I told her I wasn’t interested in looking back.” He stared down the receding perspectives of the memory. “Snapped her head off whenever she asked. She stopped asking after a while.”

“Yeah, it’s true. You never talk about it, do you.”

Chris shrugged. “Nor do you. Nor do any of us. We’re all too flat-out fucking busy trying to make it big right
now
to talk about the past. You’d think none of us had parents, the way we live.”

“Hey, I’ve got parents. I see them pretty often.”

“Good for you.”

Mike shook his head again, a little blearily this time. “Still can’t believe it, man. It’s like a fucking movie. All the way back from the zones to take down Edward Quain.”

Chris finished his drink. “Yeah, well. Some of us have what it takes, some of us don’t. Remember.”

“Ah, shit, Chris, I didn’t mean
you.
I’m not saying everyone in the zones deserves to be there, you know that. If I’d known, you know, about your parents and stuff, I wouldn’t have said—”

“No? You must have known my background, Mike. You said yourself, that first day I met you in the washroom, Hewitt was batting my details about before I arrived. And it’s not a secret where I grew up. It’s on the résumé.”