Market Forces Page 37

  ‘I said, go home.’ He raised the Nemex where they couldn’t miss it. ‘You don’t want anything to do with me.’

  ‘Baby, that’s a big gun you got,’ said the skinny girl.

  ‘You want to put it somewhere warm?’

  Chris fled.

  He came through the westward cordons at Holland Park, an hour before dawn. The checkpoint detail gave him some strange looks, but they said nothing and once his Shorn card swiped clear, they called him a cab. He stood outside the cabin while he waited for it to arrive, staring back across the barriers the way he’d come.

  His mobile queeped. He looked at it, saw it was Carla and turned it off.

  The cab arrived.

  He had the driver take him to work.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  This early on a Sunday, the Shorn block was in darkness above the mezzanine level and the shutdown locks were still in place. He buzzed security, and they let him in without comment or visible surprise. He supposed, rather bitterly, that it couldn’t be entirely unheard of for a Shorn exec to come in before dawn at the weekend.

  He thought briefly about grabbing a few hours sleep in the hospitality suites, then dismissed the idea out of hand. Outside, it was already getting light. He wouldn’t sleep unaided now. Instead, he rode the lift all the way up to the fifty-third floor, made his way through the cosy dimness of corridors lit at standby wattage and let himself into his office.

  On his desk, the phone was already flashing a message light.

  He checked it, saw it was from Carla and wiped it. He stood afterwards with his finger on the stud for a while, reached once for the receiver but never made it. Reached for the lighting control on the datadown but changed his mind. The grey pre-dawn quiet the office was steeped in had an oddly comforting quality, like a childhood hiding place. Like a pillow under his cheek and a clock in front of his face showing a good solid hour before alarm time. Without the lights, he was in limbo, a comfortable state in which decisions did not have to be made, in which you didn’t have to move forward any more. The sort of state that just couldn’t last, but while it did—

  He muted the phone’s ring tone, went to the built-in cupboards by the door and took down a blanket. Crossing to the sofa-and-coffee-table island in the corner of the office, he shucked his jacket, shoulder holster and shoes and then lowered himself onto the sofa. Then he covered himself with the blanket and lay staring at the white textured ceiling, waiting for the slow creep of morning to soak across it.

  Back down at reception, the younger of the two security guards made bladder excuses and left his colleague while he went up to the mezzanine. He pushed through the swing doors of the toilets, locked himself in a cubicle and took out his phone.

  He hesitated for a moment, then grimaced and punched out a number.

  The phone purred beside a wide, grey-sheeted bed in a space lit by hooded blue softs. A massive picture window in one wall was polarised to dark. On a table under the sill, a chess set of ornate figurines stood next to a screen that displayed the state of play in silver, black and blue. Grecian-effect sculpture stood around the room on plinths in the shadows. Beneath the sheets, the curves of two bodies moved against each other as the ringing tone penetrated layers of sleep. Louise Hewitt poked her head up, reached for the receiver and held it to her ear. She glared balefully at the time display beside the phone.

  ‘This had better be fucking important.’

  She listened to the hastily apologetic voice at the other end, and her eyes opened wide. She twisted, struggled free of the sheet and propped herself up on one elbow.

  ‘No, you were right to call me. Yes, I did say that. Yes, it is unusual, I agree. Of course. No, I won’t forget this. Thank you.’

  She cradled the receiver and turned over onto her back. Her gaze was dreamy on the blue-tinged ceiling, her tone thoughtful.

  ‘Chris just rolled into work on his own. In a cab. Four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Looks like he’s been up all night.’

  The slim form beside her stirred fully awake.

  Chris was dreaming about the supermarket again, but this time he was watching the whole scene from outside, and the car park was insanely, impossibly full of cars. They were everywhere, every colour under the sun, like spilled sweets, and all in motion, cruising and parking and reversing out like some immense robotic ballet, and he couldn’t get through them. Each time he took a step towards the supermarket and the people in its brilliantly-lit interior, a car rolled into his path and stopped with a short squeak of brakes. He had to go round, he had to go round, and his time was running out. The people inside didn’t know. They were shopping in anaesthetised warmth and content and they had no way of knowing what was coming.

  Up on the roof, tube metal groaned and clanked in protest as the reindeer shook its head.

  And the cars, he suddenly saw, were all empty. There were no shoppers in them, no one driving, no one loading, no one anywhere. Everybody was inside. Shopping. Fucking shopping.

  He made it to the doors and tried to open them but they were closed up with impact plastic boarding and metres of heavy steel chain. He tried banging on the windows, shouting, but no one heard him.

  The shots, when they came, rippled the glass under his hands. And as always, they drilled into his ear like something physical.

  He yelped and woke up, fists clenched under his chin.

  For a moment, he cringed there, curled defensively at one end of the sofa. He’d twisted the blanket up in his sleep and now it barely covered half his body. He blinked hard a couple of times, breathed out and sat up. Dawn had come and gone while he slept, and the office was full of bright sunlight.

  He got up from the sofa and found his shoes. Bending to put them on, he felt his head throbbing. He’d drowsed himself into a low-grade headache. He shambled to the desk and opened drawers with myopic clumsiness, looking for painkillers. The phone flashed at one corner of his vision. He fumbled a snarl and checked numbers on the piled up messages. Carla, Carla, Carla, fucking Carla—

  And Liz Linshaw.

  He stopped dead. The call had come in an hour ago. He grabbed a foil of speed delivery codeine tabs out of an open drawer and hit ‘play’.

  ‘Chris, I tried you at home but your wife didn’t know where you were.’ A wry curl to the voice - he could see the faint smile that went with it. ‘She, uh, she wasn’t too helpful but I got the impression you might be coming into work today. So listen, there’s a breakfast bar in India Street called Break Point. I’m meeting someone there at eight-thirty. I think you might want to be there too.’

  He checked his watch. Eight-twenty.

  Jacket, Nemex. He chewed up the codeine tabs on his way down in the lift, swallowed the powder and went out hurriedly into the sun.

  It took him a little longer than he expected to find India Street. He remembered the breakfast bar from a damage limitation strategy meeting he’d had there once when he still worked at Hammett McColl. But because he associated the place with the reinsurance brokers at the meeting, he misremembered the address and found himself in an alley off Fenchurch Street with the wrong name. He cast about for a couple of minutes, blurry with the onset of the codeine, before the mistake dawned on him. Working off the new memory, he plotted a vague eastward course and set out again through the tangle of deserted streets.

  He was walking north up the glass-walled canyon curve of Crutched Friars, when someone yelled his name.

  ‘Faulkner!’

  The word echoed off the enclosing steel and glass walls, bounced away down the curve of the canyon. Chris jerked around, sludgily aware he was in trouble. About twenty metres away, blocking his way to the right turn into India Street, five figures stood spread out across the width of the road. All five wore black ski-masks, all five hefted weapons that to his untutored eye looked like shotguns. They were faced off against him in the ludicrous cliche stance of a Western gunfight, and despite it all, despite the abrupt knowledge of his own rapidly approaching deat
h, Chris felt a smirk creep out across his face.

  ‘You what?’

  Maybe it was the codeine. He laughed out loud. Shouted it.

  ‘You fucking what?’

  The men facing him shifted, apparently discomforted. They glanced inward to the figure at the centre. The man took a step forward. Hands pumped the shotgun’s action. The clack-clack echoed along the street.

  ‘Go foah it, Faulkner.’

  The knowledge hit Chris like cold water. He opened his mouth to yell the name, knew he would be shot before he could get it out.

  ‘Just a minute.’

  Everyone looked round at the new voice. Mike Bryant stood at the mouth of a side alley about ten metres behind Chris, panting slightly. He raised his left hand, right floating close to his belt. Gripped in the upraised fist was a thick wad of currency.

  Makin faltered behind his mask. The shotgun lowered a couple of degrees.

  ‘This has got nothing to do with you,’ he called.

  ‘Oh, but it does.’ Mike ambled out of the alley and drifted up the street until he was lined up beside Chris. There was a thin beading of sweat across his brow, and Chris remembered he couldn’t be more than a day out of the hospital. He still held the wad of cash before him like a weapon. ‘You take down one Shorn exec in the street, where’s it going to end? Eh, Nick? You’re breaking the fucking rules, man.’

  And out of the corner of his mouth, he muttered to Chris.

  ‘You carrying?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m carrying.’

  ‘Loaded this time?’

  Chris nodded tautly. A surge of adrenalin punched through the codeine vagueness, a savage pleasure at the comradeship in the man at his side and the will to do harm together.

  ‘Good to know. Follow my lead, this is going to go fast.’

  ‘We only want Faulkner,’ shouted Makin.

  Mike grinned and raised his voice again. ‘That’s too bad, Nick, because you got me too.’ It was the bright, energetic tone Chris had last heard when Bryant crippled and blinded Griff Dixon in his own living room. ‘And before we start, gentlemen, just look at tonight’s wonderful prizes.’

  He held up the fistful of bank notes again. His voice resonated in the steel canyon acoustics, loud and game-show fruity.

  ‘For the winners! Twenty thousand euros, in cash! Lay down your weapons and walk away with it all! Tonight! Or, take the gamble, lose and die! Ladies and gentlemen, you decide!’

  He hurled the money up and outward. It was bundled together with a thick metallic band that glinted as it turned end over end, high in the bright morning air.

  ‘Now,’ he snapped.

  After that, it all seemed to be happening on freeze-frame advance.

  Chris tugged out the Nemex. It felt appallingly heavy in his hand, appallingly slow to bring round and point.

  Beside him, Mike Bryant was already firing.

  Makin’s contingent were still staring up at the money. Mike’s first slug took the man on Makin’s right under his back-tilted chin, tore through his neck and dropped him in a shower of arterial blood.

  The remaining four scattered across the perspectives of the street.

  Chris held the Nemex out, memories of a hundred shooting-gallery hours like iron tracery in his right arm. He squeezed the trigger, felt the kick. Squeezed again. One of the men ahead of him staggered. Hard to see blood against the dark canvas clothes. He squeezed again. The man folded forward and collapsed on his face in the street.

  A shotgun boomed.

  He pointed and fired at Makin. Missed. Out of peripheral vision, he saw Mike Bryant stalking forward, face fixed in a grin, Nemex extended, shooting in an arc. Another of Makin’s men went down, clutching at his thigh.

  Another shotgun blast. Chris felt a thin stinging of pellets across his ribs. He spotted Makin, pumping another shell in. He yelled and ran towards him, firing wildly. Makin saw him coming and took aim.

  Another figure stumbled into Makin’s path, shooting across the street at Mike. The two men tangled. Chris shot indiscriminately into them both.

  Makin got clear, raised the shotgun again. There seemed to be something wrong with his arm.

  Chris emptied the Nemex into him. The gun locked back, breech open on the last shot.

  And it was over.

  The echoes rolled away, like trucks moving off down the street. Chris stood over Nick Makin and watched as he stopped breathing. Off to his left, Mike Bryant walked up to the shotgunner he’d hit in the thigh. The injured man flopped about weakly. Blood was leaking in astonishing quantities from his twisted leg. Beneath the mask, his head shifted back and forth between Chris and Mike like a trapped animal’s. He was making a panicked moaning noise.

  ‘Look, you’re going to bleed to death anyway,’ Mike told him.

  The Nemex shell punched him flat. The ski-masked head jerked about with the impact. A new rivulet of blood groped out across the asphalt from the torn wool and gore of the exit wound. Mike knelt and checked his handiwork, then looked up at Chris and grinned.

  ‘Five to two, eh. Not bad for a couple of suits.’

  Chris shook his head numbly. The Nemex hung at the end of his arm like a dumb-bell weight. He unlocked the opened breech, put the weapon away, fumbling with the holster. Post-drive shakes, setting in.

  ‘This is nice.’ Mike picked up the dead man’s shotgun and hefted it with approval. ‘Remington tactical pump. Fancy a souvenir?’

  Chris said nothing. Bryant got up, tucked the shotgun casually under his arm. “s okay, I’ll talk to the police, get one for both of us out of evidence, when they’ve finished with it. Something to show to your grandchildren.’ He shook his head, talking a little fast with the adrenalin crash. ‘Fucking unbelievable, huh? Like something off a game platform. Ah. See you got Makin pretty good then?’

  ‘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 rang me this morning at home. In tears. Told me you’d had a row, you’d got 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 was 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 row.’

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

  He walked towards her.

  ‘Do 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 grace 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 anaesthetic prior to digging out the shotgun pellets. The rest of him was past feeling very much of anything too. ‘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, towards 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 whisky 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.