Market Forces Read online

  ‘Chris?’ It was Bryant, somewhere off amidst the clang and crackle of the body shop. ‘Chris, where are you?’

  ‘Round here.’

  There was the sound of stumbling, a clatter and cursing. Chris repressed a grin and did not look up from the printout. Ten seconds later Bryant appeared round the opened hood of the Saab, cartons of take-out food in his arms and a huge naan bread jammed into his mouth. He seated himself without ceremony on a pile of worn tyres opposite Chris and started laying out the food. He took the naan bread out of his mouth and gestured with it towards two of the cartons.

  ‘That’s yours. Onion bhaji, and dhansak. That’s the mango chutney. Where’d Makin go?’

  Chris shrugged. ‘Toilet? He looked pretty constipated.’

  ‘Nah, Makin always looks like that. Anal-retentive.’

  A shadow fell across the food cartons and Bryant looked up, biting on the naan again. He talked through the mouthful.

  ‘Nick. Your tikka’s in there. Rice there. Spoons.’

  Makin seated himself with a wary glance at Chris.

  ‘Thanks, Michael.’

  There was silence for a while, broken only by the sounds of chewing. Bryant ate as if ravenous and finished first. He cast glances at both men.

  ‘Make your wills?’

  ‘Why? I’m not going to die.’ Makin looked across at Chris. ‘Are you?’

  Chris shrugged and wiped his fingers, still chewing.

  ‘See how I feel.’

  Bryant coughed laughter. Makin allowed himself a small, precise smile. ‘Vewy good. It’s good to have a sense of humour. I hear they ah big on it at HM. Must make losing more beahable.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Chris smiled gently back. ‘It can make winning pwetty wadical too, you should twy it.’

  Makin tensed. His glasses gleamed in the overhead arc light.

  ‘Does the way I speak amuse you?’

  ‘Not weally.’

  ‘Hey, you guys,’ Bryant protested. ‘Come on.’

  ‘You know, Chwis,’ Makin looked down at his open right hand as if considering using it as a fist. ‘I’m not a chess player. Not much of a game player at all. Oh, I know you like symbolism. Games. Humour. All good ways of avoiding confontation.’

  He tossed his fork into the cooling sauces of Chris’s carton.

  ‘But tomorrow is a confontation. You can’t laugh it away, you can’t turn it into a game. Mitsue Jones won’t play chess with you. She’ll hit you with evything she’s got and she’ll hit you fast.’

  On the last word he clapped his hands violently and his eyes pinned Chris from behind the rectangular-paned screens of his glasses.

  ‘There’ll be no time to consider your moves out there. You must see it coming.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘And act. Nothing else.’

  Chris nodded and looked down at his food for a moment. Then his hand whiplashed out and snatched Makin’s glasses from his nose.

  ‘I think I see what you mean,’ he said brightly.

  ‘Chris.’ There was a warning in Mike Bryant’s voice.

  Without his glasses, Makin looked a lot less sharkish, for all his clear lack of vision defects. The narrowly watchful face now looked simply thin. When he spoke, his voice had gone thick and slow with rage, but there was nothing to back it up.

  ‘Michael, I don’t think I want to dwive with this clown.’

  Chris held out his hand. ‘Would you like your glasses back?’ he asked innocently.

  Oddly, it was Bryant who snapped.

  ‘Alright you two, that’s enough. Nick, you asked for that, so don’t act so fucking superior. And Chris, give him back his glasses. Jesus, I’m going up against Nakamura with a pair of fucking kids.’

  ‘Michael, I don’t think—‘

  ‘No, you didn’t think, Nick. You just opened your fucking mouth. Louise asked me to head up this team. When she asks you, you can pick who drives with you. Until then, just get in line and keep a lid on it.’

  The small circle of space between the three men rocked with silent tension. Behind them, the two mechanics looking over the Saab had stopped what they were doing to watch the action. Nick Makin drew in a compressed breath, then took his glasses back without a word and stalked away.

  Bryant prodded at the food cartons for a while. Finally he glanced up and met Chris’s gaze.

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to him. He’ll have calmed down by morning.’ He brooded a little. ‘I think this chess thing might be backfiring. Symbolic conflict isn’t what you’d call a popular concept around here.’

  ‘What, no game-playing? Come on, you’re winding me up.’

  ‘Yeah, there’s games, sure. Some of the other Shorn guys I know are into those alliance games on the net. The Alphamesh leagues, stuff like that. But chess.’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Just not cool, man. Makin isn’t the first to mention it. I don’t think it’ll be catching on.’

  Chris picked an onion bhaji out of a carton and bit into it reflectively. ‘Yeah, well. Always happens when you challenge someone’s world view. Means they have to re-evaluate. Most people don’t like to think that hard.’

  Bryant forced a chuckle that loosened up audibly as he produced it.

  ‘Yeah, me included. Still, Makin should know better. No way you start this shit at a time like this.’

  ‘Going to be bloody tomorrow, huh?’

  ‘You heard of Jones?’

  ‘Me and the rest of the Western world, yeah.’

  Bryant looked at him. ‘There’s your answer, then.’

  ‘Well,’ Chris tossed the half-eaten bhaji back into the carton. ‘I always wondered what the big bonuses were for.’

  ‘You keep your mind on that bonus tomorrow,’ grinned Bryant, regaining some of his good cheer. ‘And everything will work out just fine. You’ll see. Easy money.’

  The Acropolitic car caught the central reservation barrier head-on, flipped effortlessly into the air and came down on its back, wheels still spinning. A figure slumped broken and still within. Chris, who’d been expecting a prolonged dogfight with the other car, whooped and slammed a fist against the roof of his own vehicle as he swept past.

  ‘Acropolitic, thank you and goodnight!’

  ‘Nice,’ said Mike Bryant’s voice over the intercom. ‘Now form up and stay tight. Those guys were in pristine condition, which to my way of thinking means Nakamura aren’t on this stretch.’

  ‘Conforming,’ said Nick Makin crisply. Chris smirked, raised his eyes to the roof and, saying nothing, tucked into the wedge behind Mike.

  Behind them, the wrecks of the Acropolitic team lay strewn across three kilometres of highway, like the abandoned toys of a child with emerging sociopathic tendencies. Two of them were burning.

  ‘Conforming.’

  Chris wasn’t the only one smirking at Makin’s fighter-pilot pretensions. Thirty kilometres up ahead, Mitsue Jones grinned disbelievingly as the voice crackled out of her car radio. She grasped the edge of her open door and hinged herself out of the Mitsubishi Kaigan. The wind came and battered at her two-hundred-dollar Karel Mann tumbling spike cut.

  Oh well.

  The face beneath the jagged hair was pin-up perfect, tanned from a month on the Mexican Pacific coast and made up to accent her Japanese heritage. In keeping with Nakamura duel tradition, she went formally suited, a black Daisuke Todoroki ensemble whose sole concession to the driving was the flared and carefully vented skirt. There were flat-heeled leather boots on her feet, sheer black tights on her legs.

  ‘Looking good, Mits.’

  She cranked round in the direction of the shout. Behind the long sunken lines of the Kaigan, her colleagues’ own shorter, blunter Mitsubishi cruisers were parked with raked precision along the overgrown curve of the intersection roundabout. The two Nakamura wedge men were cutting up lines of edge on the sleek black hood of the closest car. One of them waved at her.

  Jones pulled a face and turned to the motorway bridge railing on the other side of the road. Beyond the bri
dge, the green of the landscape rose in a series of granite flecked interlocking spurs that blocked out the view of the road at about five kilometres distance. She crossed the road and prodded at the feet of the fourth Nakamura team member, who sat with his back to the rails, checking the load on his Vickers-Cat shoulder-launcher. He glanced up as Jones kicked him and grinned through his beard.

  ‘Ready to rock ‘n’ roll.’ It came out surfer-drawled. His English, like hers, was West Coast American. The association ran back a couple of years. He nodded across at the other two men and their edge ritual. ‘You cool with that?’

  Jones shrugged. ‘Whatever works. New York says they’re the best we’ve got around here, and they should know.’

  ‘They should.’ The missileer laid his weapon aside and got up. Standing he was a giant, towering over Jones’s diminutive frame. ‘So what’s the disposition?’

  ‘Acropolitic are out of the game.’ Jones leaned on the bridge rail. ‘Shorn did the shit work for us, just like we figured. All we have to do is sweep them up.’

  The missileer leaned beside her. ‘And you’re sure this is going to work?’

  ‘It worked at Denver, didn’t it?’

  ‘It was new at Denver.’

  ‘On this side of the Atlantic it’s still new. Total press blackout until US Trade and Finance thrash out the precedent.’ A cold smile. ‘Which, I’m reliably informed by our government liaison unit, is going to take the rest of the year. The report won’t be out till next spring. These guys aren’t going to know what hit them.’

  ‘It could still be disallowed.’

  ‘No.’ She seemed lost in the southward perspectives of the road below them. ‘I had the legal boys check the rulings back as far as they go. No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle, no substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. We’ll get through the same loophole we used in Colorado.’

  Out of the open door of the Kaigan battlewagon, the radio crackled again. The voices of the men they were waiting for wavered as the set strained to pick up and decode the scrambled channel. There was a sudden increase in volume and clarity as the Shorn team cleared some geographical obstacle in amongst the rising land behind the bridge. Mitsue Jones straightened up.

  ‘Better get in position, Matt. Feels like showtime.’

  Mike Bryant saw the intersection bridge up ahead as they cleared the last spur and he let a fraction of his speed bleed off.

  ‘Watch the bridge,’ he said easily. ‘Watch your peripherals till we’re past. Keep it tight.’

  On the northside ramp, Mitsue Jones heard him and grinned as she slipped her driving glasses on. In the rearview mirror, she saw Matt settle into a firing stance with the Vickers-Cat. She let off the parking brake and the Mitsubishi shifted on the hard shoulder.

  The missile leapt out, trailing a thin vapour thread as it went.

  As they hit the bridge, Bryant saw it. Through the windscreen a column of greasy smoke lifted from the hills up ahead. A muffled crump rolled in to accompany the explosion.

  ‘See that?’ He braked a little more, puzzled. ‘They must be in trouble up ahead.’

  ‘I don’t know, Mike.’ Chris’s voice crashed into the cabin. ‘Trouble with who? Tender was all over the news this week. No one’ll be out here who doesn’t have to be.’

  ‘Maybe one of those fancy Mits’ fuel feeds blew up on them,’ suggested Makin.

  ‘Could be.’ Chris’s tone said he thought it was a stupid idea, but since they’d started the run both he and Makin had shut down the bullshit. ‘I still don’t like, go right!! Right!!!’

  The yell came too late. They were under the bridge and past the access ramp and the sleek black shapes on the left came spilling directly down the grass slope like commandos breaching a wall defence. The lead Nakamura car hit the highway at reckless speed, bounced and slammed into Mike Bryant’s BMW.

  ‘Fuck!’

  Bryant hauled on the wheel, too slow. The second Nakamura vehicle scuttled through the gap behind him and came up on his right flank. There was a long grating clang as the two Mitsubishi cruisers sandwiched him. Bryant caught a flash of a third vehicle, longer and lower, pulling ahead and knew what was going to happen. He wrestled desperately with wheel and brakes, but the clinch was set. The Nakamura wingmen had him.

  ‘Can you get these motherfuckers off me,’ Bryant tried for a nonchalant tone, but sweat was beading on his face. Every move he tried to break free was matched. ‘They’re going to head-to-head me.’

  A side impact jarred through Bryant.

  ‘No fucking way.’ Chris yelled his results. ‘They’re locked on tight, Mike. You’ve got to crash-stop.’

  ‘Can’t afford to lose the momentum, Chris. You know that.’

  ‘You can’t afford to stay in theah, Mike.’ The crisp edge of control in Makin’s tone made him sound almost prissy. ‘Chwis is wight. Dwop out, pick it up after.’

  ‘No fucking way.’

  Up ahead, the long, low Mitsubishi battlewagon whipped around on shrieking tyres and came back up the highway towards the locked-up Shorn leader.

  ‘Nick,’ Bryant’s voice was strained. ‘That’s Jones up ahead. Get out there and see if you can’t derail her.’

  ‘On it.’ Makin’s BMW flashed on the edge of Bryant’s vision as it accelerated away from the three-vehicle clinch. Bryant blew out breath, hard and fast, and settled into his speed.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You hang back, Chris. This doesn’t work, I’m going to need you.’

  Up ahead, he watched as Nick Makin drove hard at what had to be Mitsue Jones’s vehicle. A hot knot of hope pulsed through his guts in defiance of the icy knowing that told him Jones would not be stopped. The Nakamura team had set him up with consummate skill, and they’d left him with only two options. Slam stop and lose the duel inertia; in effect drop out of the combat, admit Nakamura’s tactical superiority and have to drive catch up for the next two hundred kilometres—

  An image of Chris’s chessboard flashed through his mind.

  Symbolic defeat.

  Or—

  The Mitsubishi flinched aside and left Makin stalled across the highway. Bryant grimaced and floored his accelerator. The two Nakamura vehicles matched it effortlessly. The battlewagon came on.

  ‘Chris, this is going to be messy,’ he gritted. ‘Get yourself clear.’

  Seconds from the chicken head-to-head, the two Nakamura wingmen peeled away as if their vehicles were under the command of a single driver. Bryant caught a face grinning at him from the left-hand vehicle and a hand lifted in farewell. Jones’s car was almost on him. The radio crackled at him.

  ‘Sayonara, Bryant-san.’

  Mitsue Jones must have jerked the wheel at the last possible moment. Bryant misread it and stayed on line, but Jones had left the rear of the Mitsubishi in his path. The BMW hit at speed and the front left wing of the car kicked into the air. Bryant yelled, incoherent with shock as his vehicle left the road. The Omega turned lazily in the air and came down on its side, trailing a carpet of sparks across the asphalt. Three seconds into the skid, it ploughed into the central reservation.

  Jones heard the yell but had no time for anything other than fighting her own vehicle back under control. The Mitsubishi whipped about on the impact and staggered sideways. For three seconds the wheel was like a live thing under her hands, and then she had it back. She braked the cruiser towards a smoking halt, facing back the way she’d come.

  Bryant’s BMW lay on one side, jammed into the central barrier and leaning jauntily. The vehicle’s roof faced out, windscreen showing spiderweb cracked in the weak spring sunlight. Bryant was pinned in clear view, struggling with his belt. Jones snarled a grin and came off the brake, slamming in the gear as the cruiser freewheeled backward, accelerating hard against the inertial drag. The Kaigan’s engine shrilled and the cruiser sprang forward.

  Trapped and twisted against his own seatbelt, Mike Bryant heard the sound and f
lailed about to look. By the time he had forced his head round far enough to see, the Mitsubishi was almost on him.

  He just had time to scream.

  ‘Ah, fu—‘

  And the cruiser was gone, jolted past, and there was a titanium-grey Saab crunched to its tail. Two engines in savagely low gear, roaring against each other, and the shriek of steel under stress.

  ‘Chris?’

  Chris’s voice drifted into the upturned space, laconic.

  ‘Be right back.’

  Metal tore down one wing of the Nakamura car and ripped clear, exposing the driver’s side rear wheel. Jones shrieked abuse in Japanese, her English abandoned in momentary fury. Chris was already past, yelling into his mike with sudden urgency.

  ‘Makin, where are you?’

  ‘Up ahead.’ There was a tight edge of panic in the other man’s voice. ‘I’ve got both these motherfuckers on my tail. I think they’re going to lock me up same as Mike.’

  ‘On my way.’

  Chris spotted the Nakamura wingmen a pair of seconds later, dancing spirals behind and alongside Makin’s BMW. As he watched, the left-hand car slipped in and struck the Shorn car a glancing blow. Makin jerked sideways and the other Mitsubishi rammed him from the rear. It was consummate teamwork, Chris had time to reflect briefly, something that the young guns at Shorn could learn from and probably never would. Then he was on the left-hand car. He hit it at full acceleration and felt the impact down to the roots of his teeth.

  ‘Right,’ he muttered.

  The Nakamura car tried to pull away but didn’t have the power. Chris gave up a hand’s breadth of space, then floored the pedal and hit again. This time the wingman tried to skate sideways right. Chris matched the move. He gave up the hand’s breadth again and when the Nakamura driver slewed to the left, he let him. He went with the move and forced it. Another jolt and he was jammed onto the rear fender, driving the other car towards the grass bank that lined the left-hand hard shoulder.

  It could have been better - could for example have been the drop on the other side of the carriageway - but it would have to do.