Market Forces (12 page)

“What’s so funny?”

For some reason the irritation in her voice, combined with her rapid ejection from under the car and the grease on her nose, drove the final nail into the coffin of Chris’s seriousness. He began to cackle uncontrollably. Carla sat up and watched curiously as he leaned back on the wall and laughed.

“I said what’s so . . .”

Chris slid down the wall, spluttering. Carla gave up as a reflexive smile fought its way onto her face.

“What?” she asked, more softly.

“It was just—” Chris was forcing the words out between giggles and snorts. “Just your legs, you know.”

“Something funny about my legs?”

“Well, your feet really.” Chris put down his glass and wiped at his eyes. “I, just.” He shook his head and waved a hand with minimal descriptive effect. “Just thought it was funny, talking to them, you know. Your feet.” He snorted again. “It’s. Doesn’t matter.”

She got up from the floor with an accustomed flexing motion and went to crouch beside him. Turning her hand to present the ungrimed back, she brushed it against his cheek.

“Chris . . .”

“Let’s go to bed,” he said suddenly.

She held up her hands. “I’ve got to wash up. In fact, I need a shower.”

“I’ll come with you.”

In the shower, he stood behind her and ran soaped hands over her breasts, down across her belly, and into the V of her thighs. She chuckled deep in her throat and reached back for his erection, hands still gritty with the last of the engine grime. For a while it was enough to lean in the corner of the shower stall together, locked in an unhurried kiss, rubbing at each other languidly in the steam and pummeling jets of hot water. When the last of the dirt and soap had cascaded off them and swirled away, Carla swung herself up and braced her upper body in the corner while her thighs gripped Chris around the waist and her hips ground against his.

It was an inconclusive coupling, so Chris shut off the water and staggered with Carla’s arms and thighs still locked around him into the bedroom, where they collapsed giggling onto the bed and set about running through every posture in the manual.

Later, they lay on soaked sheets with their limbs hooked around each other and faces angled together. Moonlight fell in through the window and whitened the bed.

“Don’t go,” she said suddenly.

“Go?” Chris looked down in puzzlement. He had slid out of her some time ago. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here in this bed with you. Forever.”

“Forever?”

“Well, till about seven thirty anyway.”

“I’m serious, Chris.” She lifted herself to look into his face. “Don’t go on this Cambodia thing. Not up against Nakamura.”

“Carla.” It was almost a reprimand the way he said it. “We’ve been over this before. It’s my job. We don’t have any choice. There’s the house, the cards, how are we going to cover those things if I’m not driving?”

“I know you’ve got to drive, Chris, but at Hammett McColl—”

“It’s not the same, Carla. At HM I already had my rep. I’ve got to carve it out all over again at Shorn, or some snot-nosed junior analyst is going to call me out, and once that starts you’re watching your tail forever. If they think you’re easing up, going soft, they’re on you like fucking vultures. The only way to beat that is to stay hard and keep them scared. That way you make partner, and from then on it’s a Sunday-afternoon spin. They can’t touch you. No one below partner status is allowed to call you out.” A vague disquiet passed over him as he remembered what Bryant had told him about Louise Hewitt and the partner called Page. “And partner challenges are few and far between. You see them coming. You can negotiate. It’s more civilized at that level.”

“Civilized.”

“You know what I mean.”

Carla was silent for a while. Then she rolled away from him and huddled herself into the pillow.

“The disk says Nakamura are going to send Mitsue Jones.”

Chris shifted a little and tucked in behind her. “Yes, probably. But if you’d stayed to watch the rest of it, you would have seen that Jones hasn’t dueled in the last six months. And it won’t be her home turf. There’s a good chance they won’t even use her because of that. Not knowing the road can get you killed a lot faster than going up against a better driver. And anyway, driving on the same team as Mike Bryant and this other guy Makin, I’ve got nothing to worry about. Really.”

Carla shivered. “I saw a profile of Jones a couple of years ago. They say she’s never lost a tender.”

“Neither have I. Neither has Bryant as far as I know.”

“Yes, but she’s driven more than two dozen challenges, and she’s only twenty-eight. I saw her interviewed, and she looks scary, Chris. Really scary.”

Chris laughed gently against the skin at the nape of Carla’s neck. “That’s just camera work. In the States, she’s done centerfolds for
Penthouse Online.
Pouting lips, the works. She’s a fucking pinup, Carla. It’s all hype.”

For a moment, he almost believed it himself.

“When is it?” she asked quietly.

“Wednesday next week. Dawn start, I’ve got to sleep over at the office Tuesday night. You want to come in and stay in the hospitality suites with me?”

“No. I’ll go across to Dad’s.”

“You could always ask him to come and stay here for a change.” Chris frowned and nuzzled at her back. “You know I don’t like the thought of you sleeping in that shithole. I worry about you.”

Carla turned around to face him again. It was hard to tell which was uppermost in her expression, affection or exasperation. “You worry about me? Chris, listen to yourself, will you? Next Wednesday you’re out on the road, dueling, and you’re worried about me sleeping in some substandard housing. Come on.”

“There’s been a lot of violence on that estate,” Chris said doggedly. “If I had my way—” He stopped, not entirely sure what he wanted to say next.

“You’d what?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Forget it. I just think, why can’t Erik come and stay here with us for a change?”

“You know why.”

Chris sighed. “Yeah, because I’m a fucking suited parasite on the lives of honest workingmen and -women.”

“Got it in one.” Carla kissed him. “Come on, I’ll be all right. You just worry about keeping my spaced armor intact. If you come back with the wings all chewed up like last time, you really will see some violence.”

“Oh yeah?”

She jabbed him in the ribs. “Oh yeah. I didn’t put in all that work to have you broadside and stick like a fucking no-namer. You drive like it matters what happens to your wheels, or that’ll be the last blow job you see this year.”

“Have to go to my usual supplier then. Ow!”

“Fucking piece of shit! Usual supplier did you say? Who else are you getting blow jobs from, you piece of—”

“Blowtorch! I thought you said blow
torch.
”

Their mingled laughter penetrated the glass of the window and sounded faintly in the still of the garden beyond. Had Erik Nyquist been there in the darkness, he would have been forced to admit that what he could hear was, indisputably, the sound of his daughter and the man she had married having fun. He might even have been glad to hear it.

Unfortunately, Erik Nyquist was nearly a hundred kilometers southwest of the laughter, listening instead through paper-thin walls to the sounds of an edge dealer beating his girlfriend to pulp. In the garden, the only witness to the noise of Chris and Carla’s hilarity was a large tawny owl that watched the window unwinkingly for a moment, and then turned its attention back to the more pressing matter of disemboweling the half-dead field mouse in its talons.

A
PPARENTLY
,
IT WAS
a long-standing Shorn tradition to do final briefings down among the variously stripped and jacked-up bodies of the company workshops. Chris could see where the custom originated. Nominally, it gave the executives the opportunity to do some corporate bonding with the mechanics overseeing their final vehicle checks. Far more important, the scattered flare of welding torches and the stink of scorched metal put the hard edge of reality on what might have otherwise seemed very far removed from the air-conditioned civility of a more conventional briefing room. In Shorn parlance, it avoided any potential ambiguity.

Accordingly, Hewitt kept it brutally short. Keep it tight, don’t fuck up. Come back with the contract. Leave the others in pieces on the road. She thanked the chief mechanic personally for his team’s hard work, and walked away.

After she’d gone, Bryant went for Indian takeout and Chris sat in the open passenger door of the Saab, leafing absently through the background printout on Mitsue Jones while two mechanics in logo-flashed company coveralls strove in vain to find anything worth doing to the engine that Carla had not already done.

“Chris?” It was Bryant, somewhere off amid the clang and crackle of the body shop. “Chris, where are you?”

“Around 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 around the opened hood of the Saab, cartons of take-out food in his arms and a huge nan bread jammed into his mouth. He seated himself without ceremony on a pile of worn tires opposite Chris and started laying out the food. He took the nan bread out of his mouth and gestured with it toward 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 nan 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 humor. 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. Humor. All good ways of avoiding confwontation.”

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

“But tomorrow is a confwontation. 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 evwything 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.

“All right 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 worldview. Means they have to reevaluate. 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,” Bryant said, grinning, regaining some of his good cheer. “And everything will work out just fine. You’ll see. Easy money.”

T
HE
A
CROPOLITIC CAR
caught the median 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
good night
!”

“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.”

“Confowming,” Nick Makin said 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 kilometers of highway like the abandoned toys of a child with emerging sociopathic tendencies. Two of them were burning.

“Confowming.”

Chris wasn’t the only one smirking at Makin’s fighter pilot pretensions. Thirty kilometers 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 pinup 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 around 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 bridge, 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 kilometers 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 in 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 in Denver, didn’t it?”

“It was new in Denver.”

“On this side of the Atlantic it’s still new. Total press blackout until U.S. 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 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 geographic obstacle in among the rising land behind the bridge. Mitsue Jones straightened up.

“Better get in position, Matt. Feels like showtime.”

M
IKE
B
RYANT SAW
the intersection bridge up ahead as they cleared the last spur and let a fraction of his speed bleed off.

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

O
N THE NORTH
-
SIDE
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 vapor thread as it went.

A
S THEY HIT
the bridge, Bryant saw it. Through the windshield 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 defense. 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.