Market Forces Read online

  Something flashed in his peripheral vision, the glossy black of the other Nakamura car. The other wingman was coming to his comrade’s aid. Chris fought down the urge to let go and face the new threat. His voice went gritted into the mike.

  ‘Makin, get rid of this fucker, will you?’

  ‘Done.’

  The BMW was there, twilight blue jostling with the black for position. The two cars peeled away as the Nakamura driver fled. Chris turned his full attention back to killing the man in front of him.

  The rapid rumble as they crossed the cats-eye line of the hard shoulder and the wingman finally panic-braked as he neared the bank. It was far too late. Chris hit the overdrive on the Saab’s gear box and drove his opponent hard up the fifty-degree incline. As soon as the other vehicle was fully off the road, he braked savagely and dropped back. Denied the power of the Saab’s pushing, and subject to his own desperately applied brakes, the wingman slithered back down the grass, hit the road surface with an overload of kinetic energy to shed and tumbled across the three lanes into the crash barrier.

  The Mitsubishi exploded.

  ‘Bonus,’ said Chris to nobody in particular, and threw the Saab into a U-turn crash-stop.

  A kilometre back along the highway, he saw what he’d been expecting. Mitsue Jones’s battlewagon heading directly for him, trailing wreckage from one wing like a shark with prey in its jaws. Chris engaged the Saab’s launch gear. The rear wheels squealed on the road, scrabbled for purchase and found it. The Saab leapt forward.

  Past the egg-yolk yellow and billowing black smoke of the crashed and burnt wingman, back down the slope towards the bridge where the duel had kicked in. The hungry roar of the engine seemed to recede as he plunged back towards the Nakamura car. He had time to notice the marred lines of the other vehicle as it ballooned in his windscreen, time to notice the pewter cloud formations smeared across the sky behind, time even to see the gusting wind blowing the grass flat along the embankment to his right—

  At the last possible moment, Jones flinched left, covering the torn wing damage as he guessed she would. He ploughed into her right-hand rear side with brutal precision. The Saab spaced armouring held and opened a huge gap over the Mitsubishi’s rear tyre. Chris hit the brakes and at the relatively low speed he’d developed the U-turn came comfortably. He was back on Jones’s tail before she’d made five hundred metres of road away from him.

  The Mitsubishi was crippled, limping at barely a hundred. He matched speeds and glanced across at the other car. Polarised glass hid Jones from view.

  Finish it.

  He slewed sideways, caught the exposed rear tyre on the leading edge of his front fender and braked. Textbook manoeuvre. The tyre ripped and exploded with a muffled bang. He felt the front fender unstitch along half its length with the force of the impact, but the rest held.

  Yes! Carla, you fucking beauty!

  The Kaigan jerked and began to skid. Chris worked his pedals, gunned the engine and rammed into the rear of the Mitsubishi as it floated past ahead of him. The skid built, the car wallowed on the road and Chris steered back across and around. Another sharp jab at the retreating side of the car. The driver’s side door dented inward, and Mitsue Jones was irretrievable. The Nakamura battlewagon skated a figure of eight in towards the bank and hit with an audible crump.

  Chris brought the Saab to a screeching halt, braking clouds of rubber smoke off the asphalt as he slid past Jones’s wreck. A three-sixty sweep showed no other vehicles in either direction. He engaged the reverse and backed up gingerly to check on his handiwork.

  ‘Chris?’ It was Bryant’s voice, distorted over the comset.

  ‘Yeah, Mike. I’m here.’ The strange calm was back, the sky and windswept landscape pressing down on his consciousness like a thumb on an eyeball. He gave the status report through lips that felt slightly numb. ‘One wingman down, flamed out. Think Makin got the other. You okay?’

  ‘I will be as soon as someone comes and cuts me out of this fucking wreck. What about Jones?’

  He stared at the wrecked battlewagon. The sleek bodywork was torn and crumpled, sunk on tyres that had blown out somewhere in the crash. Steam curled up from the gashed radiator grille like smoke, was whipped away by the wind. And in amidst all that calm, it looked as if Jones was trying to kick the driver’s side door open. The buckled metal quivered but didn’t shift.

  Finish it.

  ‘Jones is out of the game,’ he said.

  Mike’s whoop came through, bristling with static and overload distortion. Chris dropped his hand to grasp the gear lever, and with the motion a small ripple arose in the pit of his stomach. It was nothing much, the feeling of having eaten too much sweet food, but as his hand touched the lever, he was suddenly slightly sick of the whole thing.

  Then finish it!

  Burn her up. The thought belched abruptly up from the deepest mud-geyser recesses of his being, and it gripped him like claws. It was the sickness of the moment before, turned up to full. The edgy thrill of rollercoaster exhilaration as he turned the sticky new idea over in his mind. Ram the tank and barbecue that bitch. Go on! If it doesn’t blow when it ruptures, you can go and light her from close up. Like—

  He shook himself free of it with a shiver. Impossible to believe he’d even been considering it. After all, what if the tank blew when he hit—

  They almost never do.

  ‘Too risky.’ He heard himself talking out loud to the hot mud-thing in his head and what he heard sounded too much like whining. He grimaced and dropped the car into reverse again. Much better just to—

  He backed up another twenty metres, aligned the nose of the Saab and then crushed the accelerator smoothly to the floor. The Saab leapt across the short gap and slammed into the driver’s side door. Metal crunched and the Mitsubishi rocked on its springs. The glass in the side window cracked and splintered. He backed up and watched carefully to see if there was any movement.

  Do it again! Finish it!

  She is finished.

  Hewitt, with the Nemex in her hand. You bring back their plastic.

  He heard his own voice in the Shorn conference chamber two months ago.

  Nobody likes ambiguity.

  Yeah, and this is real fucking ambiguous, Chris. So either you go for the burn, or you take that pistol in your pocket and go and recover Jones’s fucking plastic right now.

  ‘Chris, are you okay?’ Bryant, sounding concerned. His voice ruptured the ominous quiet on the comlink, and every second that Chris left without replying was a stillness that prickled.

  ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’ He unlatched the door and pushed it open. The Nemex had already somehow found its way into his hand. ‘Be right back.’

  He climbed out and advanced cautiously towards the Mitsubishi, gun-hand extended and trembling slightly. Steam was still boiling from the engine space, hissing as it went, but there was no scent of petrol. The car’s fuel system, classic weakness in most Mitsubishi battlewagons, had apparently not ruptured.

  Chris stopped less than a metre away from the smashed glass of the polarised window and peered in over the sight of the Nemex. Mitsue Jones lay, still strapped into the driver’s seat, face bloodied and right arm hanging slackly at her side. She was still conscious and as Chris’s pale shadow fell across the car window she looked up. Blood had run into her right eye and gummed it shut, but the other eye was desperately expressive. Her left hand came up and across her trapped body in a futile warding gesture.

  Finish it!

  Chris shielded his face with one hand and levelled the Nemex on Jones’s face.

  Nobody likes ambiguity.

  The shot echoed out flatly across the pewter-smeared sky. The blood splattered warm on his fingers.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Would you say that this tender was excessively bloody?’

  Chris’s face felt stretched tight under the make-up. Studio lights made his eyes ache with glare. Beside him, Bryant betrayed no discomfort as he tilted hi
s head back at an angle and swivelled slightly on his chair.

  ‘That’s a tricky question, Liz.’

  He paused. Pure theatrical bullshit, the bloodshed question was a staple of all business news post-tender interviews. Bryant had had nearly a full day to think about his answer.

  Liz Linshaw waited. She crossed long, tanned legs and readjusted the datadown clipboard on her short-skirted lap. From where he was sitting, slightly to the left of Bryant’s centre-stage, Chris could see liquid crystal sentences spilling down the clipboard screen. Her next set of cues from the studio control room.

  From where he was sitting, he could also see the swell Liz Linshaw’s left breast made where it squeezed up in the open neck of her blouse. He shifted his gaze uncomfortably, just as Bryant launched into his answer.

  ‘The thing is, Liz, any competitive tender is bound to involve a certain degree of conflict. If it didn’t, then the whole market ethos of what we’re doing here would be lost. And in the case of a tender of this magnitude, obviously the parties involved are going to play hard. That, sadly but necessarily, means bloodshed. But that’s exactly the way it should be.’

  Liz Linshaw made out she was taken aback. ‘There should be bloodshed? You’re saying that it’s desirable?’

  ‘Desirable, no.’ Bryant put on a schoolmasterly smile that looked Notley-derived. Beside him, Louise Hewitt nodded sober agreement. ‘But consider. The situation in Cambodia is extreme. These people are not part of some theoretical economic model. They are involved in a life-and-death struggle to determine the future of their nation. At Shorn, we’ve just been appointed their financiers. We are supposed to fund and advise these people and, I might add, take a fair chunk of their GNP as a fee. Now, if you were a Cambodian, what kind of exec would you want? A suited theoretical economist with computer models he says define your reality half a world away? Or a warrior who has put his own life on the line to earn his place beside you?’

  ‘You call yourself a warrior.’ Linshaw made an elegant gesture that might have been acceptance. ‘And obviously the fact that it’s your team here at the Tebbit Centre this evening proves your credentials in that department. Alright. But does that necessarily make you the best economist for the job? Does a good economist have to have blood on his hands?’

  ‘I’d say a practising free-market economist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t doing his job properly. It comes with the market, and the decisions it demands. Hard decisions, decisions of life and death. We have to make those decisions, and we have to get them right. We have to be determined to get them right. The blood on our hands today is the blood of our less determined colleagues, and that says something. To you, Liz, to our audience, and most of all to our Cambodian clients, that blood says that when the hard decisions come, we will not flinch from them.’

  ‘How do you feel about that, Chris?’ Liz Linshaw swivelled abruptly to face him. ‘You eliminated Mitsue Jones today. What do you think the Nakamura team lacked that gave you the edge?’

  Chris blinked. He’d been drifting.

  ‘I think, ah. Ah, they were very polished, but ...’ He scrambled after the answer they’d worked out earlier when they ran the question checklist with the programme’s producer. ‘But, ah, there didn’t seem to be much flexibility of response in the way they played as a team. Once they’d sprung the trap and it failed, they were sluggish.’

  ‘Was this the first time you’d driven against Nakamura, Chris?’

  ‘Yes. Ah, well, apart from a few informal skirmishes, yes.’ Chris got his act together. ‘I drove against Nakamura junior execs in two consortium bids when I was working at Hammett McColl, but it’s not the same. In a consortium bid, people tend to get in each other’s way a lot. They usually haven’t had a lot of time to train. It’s easy to break team wedges. This was a whole different engine.’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled brilliantly at him. ‘Was there any point where you were afraid Shorn were going to lose to Nakamura?’

  Hewitt sat forward, bristling.

  ‘I don’t think we ever came that close,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Yes, but you were trapped in wreckage for most of the duel, Michael.’ There was just a hint of acid in Linshaw’s voice. ‘Chris, you were the one who actually took Jones down. Was there ever a critical point?’

  ‘I—‘ Chris glanced across at Bryant who was wearing a rather thin smile. The big man’s shoulders lifted in the barest of shrugs. Beyond him, Hewitt showed as much emotion as a block of granite. ‘I think the missile ploy caught us the way it was intended to - and the jury’s still out on whether that was a legal manoeuvre or not - but after Nakamura actually engaged, we were never really up against it.’

  ‘I see.’ Liz Linshaw leaned forward. ‘This is a great moment for you, isn’t it Chris. The hero of the hour. And coming so soon after your transfer. You must be over the moon.’

  ‘Uh, yes.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘A job you enjoy?’

  Mindful of Hewitt’s gaze, Chris manufactured a smile. ‘I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t like it, Liz.’

  ‘Of course.’ Linshaw seemed to have got what she wanted. She turned her attention to Hewitt. ‘Now, Louise, you made all this happen. How do you feel about the way your team performed?’

  Chris switched off again as Hewitt began to mouth the viewer-consumable platitudes.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  He asked Bryant the question later, as they sat in front of whisky tumblers in the hotel bar of the Tebbit Centre. Outside, wind-driven rain lashed impotently at big glass panels that gave a view out onto drenched and darkened hills. Makin had cried off early, pleading tomorrow’s crack-of-dawn start. It was pretty obvious he was choked about Chris’s guest spot on the Liz Linshaw evening special. Standard practice in post-tender reports was to interview only the team leader and the divisional head, but Bryant had been crowing about Chris’s performance from the moment they cut him out of the wreckage of his BMW. Makin had gone conspicuously unmentioned.

  ‘That?’ Bryant gave him a wry grin. ‘Well, let’s just say I’m not flavour of the month with Ms Linshaw at the moment.’

  Chris frowned. His nerves were still a little shot from the duel and he found his mind tended to skitter when he tried to concentrate. At the same time, as if compensating for its poor performance in other areas, it spat chunks of memory at him with near total recall. Now, as if listening to it on tape, he heard the words Liz Linshaw had used over the radio that first morning as he drove in to the new job at Shorn: Still nothing on the no-name call out for Mike Bryant at Shorn Associates, don’t know where you’ve got to, Mike, but if you can hear me we’re anxious to hear from you. He strained to remember Bryant and Linshaw’s body language the evening of the quarterly review party, but his recall was too alcohol-damaged to trust.

  ‘Were you two, ah ... ?’

  Bryant grinned and sank half his whisky. ‘If, by that delicate ah, you mean fucking, then yes. Yes, we were fucking.’

  Chris sat still, remembering Suki.

  As if reading his mind, Bryant said, ‘It was no big deal. Scratching an itch, you know. She gets off on drivers the way some guys do on Italian holoporn. It was back when Suki was, you know, off sex. Just after Ariana was born.’ He shrugged. ‘Like I said, no big deal.’

  Chris tried to think of an appropriate question to fill the space. In the background, something insipid lilted from the bar’s sound system.

  ‘So how long did it last?’

  ‘Well,’ Bryant turned to face him, getting comfortable. ‘In the initial stages, about eight months. I’m telling you, Chris, she was hot. We both were. She was doing this in-depth study of Conflict Investment, for a series and then, you know, that book, New Asphalt Warriors. So we saw a lot of each other without anyone wondering. She used to do these interviews and then we’d get off camera and fuck like rabbits wherever there was a lockable door. I used to get hard-ons just talking to her on camera. Even after th
e series was wrapped, we were fucking two or three times a week in hotels around the city, or the car. She really liked that, the car. Then it sort of cooled off. Once a week, sometimes not even that. And Suki came back on line, so there was that as competition. I’d missed Suki, you know, and that whole pin-up buzz thing was fading anyway. There was about six months when Liz and I didn’t see each other at all.’ Another grin. ‘Then she made, like, this amazing comeback. She asked me out to the studio one night, after everyone had gone home. I wasn’t going to go at first, but I was curious, you know. Man, I’m glad I went.’ Bryant leaned closer, still grinning. ‘We fucked on the interview set and she filmed the whole thing with one of those big studio cameras. Then she mailed me the fucking disc at work. You believe that? I mean, I didn’t know at the time she was doing it, otherwise I’d never have agreed. Then suddenly there’s this Studio Ten disc on my desk with Souvenir written on it.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Bryant nodded. ‘I thought at first she was going to send it to Suki. Fact, I thought she already had when I got my copy. But when I rang her she just asked how I’d liked it and if I wanted a repeat performance. So the last six months we’ve been repeat-performing a couple of times a month and it’s still as hot as ever.’

  ‘And Suki?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. You know, the weird thing is, you’d think I’d go back to Suki too tired to perform but it’s not like that. I’m more buzzed when I get home from a session with Liz than I would be if I hadn’t had sex all week. It’s that fucking disc, man. It makes you feel like a fucking porn star.’

  ‘So what’s the problem now?’

  ‘Ah, nothing really. We had this big row the last time we met up to fuck.’ Bryant’s gaze floated off into the corners of the bar. The carnal shine faded from his face. He seemed disinclined to go on.

  ‘What about?’

  Bryant sighed. ‘Ah, shit. Chris, do you think I was right to shoot those gangwit motherfuckers that night at the Falkland?’