Market Forces (15 page)

“That’s great, Dad.” Finally, with the insult to Chris, she had the anger back. The strength to hurt. Her voice came out flat and cold. “You finally had the guts to say it to my face. The man who paid your rent and bought you a new kitchen last Christmas is a piece of shit. And I guess it’s clear what that makes me.”

She set down the drink on the coffee table and made for the door. She saw how he lifted one arm involuntarily toward her as she passed him, but she shut it out.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to pack my bag, Dad. And then, if I don’t get mugged and raped on the way out by one of your oppressed proletarians, I’m going home.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be on your own in the house.”

He said it sulkily, but there was an undertone of fear and regret in his voice now. Dismayed, she realized that it was exactly what she wanted to hear. She could feel the relish bubbling up, hearing it.

“I didn’t,” she said. “But I’d rather be alone, somewhere safe and sane, than with you in this shithole.”

She didn’t turn to see his face as she said it.

She didn’t need to.

Some damage,
Chris had once told her,
you don’t need to see. You know what you’ve done on impact. You can feel it. All you have to do after that is disengage.

She went to pack.

File #2

ACCOUNT ADJUSTMENT

I
T FINALLY HIT
Chris while he was waiting at the counter in Louie Louie’s for a double-spike cappuccino.

He’d sat up late the previous evening going over the possibilities, and by the time he finally came to bed, Carla was already asleep. More and more, that was becoming the pattern. Work on the Cambodia contract was keeping him later and later at Shorn. He was forced to relegate his self-defense classes and gun practice to lunchtime, which stretched the day even longer. Carla was getting home anything from two to five hours ahead of him during the week, and they had given up any pretense of dining together. He ate the remains of what she had cooked for herself earlier and talked desultorily to her about his day. Loading the dishwasher was usually the only shared activity of the evening; after that one of them would retire upstairs to read, leaving the other marooned down in the living room with the entertainment deck.

There was an air of detached politeness to their lives now. They had sex at increasingly irregular intervals and argued less than they ever had before, because they rarely had the time or energy to talk about anything of significance. They kept meaning to take a long weekend together somewhere like New York or Madrid and use the time to recharge, but somehow it never came together. Either Carla forgot to book the Saturday off with Mel, or Chris was suddenly needed for a weekend meeting with the Cambodia team. Summer came on, pleasantly mellow, but the layer of superficiality continued to thicken over their day-to-day life and Chris found himself enjoying the new weather only in moments of isolation that he was later curiously unwilling to share with Carla.

He lay awake beside her, turning the game over in his mind until he finally fell asleep.

On the drive in that morning he’d tried again, but he’d been too sleepy from the night before. In the last few weeks his habitual driver’s caution had grown lax to a point that under other circumstances might have been called recklessness. As it was, the attitude made perfect sense. Following the Nakamura challenge, word had gotten out about the dangerous new player at the Shorn table, and no one among the young no-name challengers was keen to go up against Chris Faulkner’s clearly identifiable Saab Custom. The vehicle’s spaced armoring and Mitsue Jones’s demise at its owner’s hands were equally thoroughly mythologized among the driving fraternity—detail upon invented detail until it was impossible even for Chris to separate the true facts from the thicket of embellishments that had sprung up around them. In the end, he gave up trying and started to live with the legend. In this, he was probably the last person on board. Amid all the hype, one thing had been universally accepted in the City of London weeks ago—there had to be easier ways to carve a name for yourself than go up against Chris Faulkner.

“Double cap for Chris,” yelled the girl at the counter.

He was on first-name terms with the staff of Louie Louie’s these days—they’d torn out the front cover of
GQ
that month and pinned it up behind the counter. Reluctantly, he’d autographed it, and now, every time he went in, his carefully groomed features grinned back at him from beneath the imprisoning gloss and black ink scrawl. It made him slightly uneasy. Fame had dripped like sap all over him and now it was hardening into amber and he was trapped inside for all to see. Fansites were starting to give him serious coverage for the first time since the death of Edward Quain. East European working girls with unlikely stage names and credit card hot lines were in his mail, plying him with suggestions of varying subtlety.

And you’re pinned down, overdeployed, no way to—

The solution boiled out at him like the milk froth from the steamer, bubbling up on itself as it unfolded. It might have been the crosshatched patterning of the yellow-and-black tiles behind the counter, or maybe just the results of dissociative thinking, a technique he’d picked up from a psych seminar the week before. Whatever it was, he fielded the insight and took it back up in the Shorn elevator with his coffee.

“Cambodia Resourcing continues to lead the rising stock trend,” the elevator informed him as they powered upward. “With end-of-day trading at—”

He tuned it out. He already knew.

Mike Bryant was talking to the machine. Chris could hear him through the door, dictating in jagged pieces to the datadown. It was a chewed-over version of a document to the Cambodian rebels that they’d been working on most of yesterday. The East Asia Trade and Investment Commission were leaning on them for Charter compliance with an uncharacteristic fervor. Indesp reports suggested Nakamura bribes were going in at high level.

“We have no interest in the so-called, no, scratch that, no interest in the areas you have designated resettlement zones, nor are we concerned with what goes on within those zones. The administration of the camps is of course not within our jurisdiction provided no overt human rights abuse, uh—uh, provided no human rights abuse, mhmmm, no, back up again, not within our jurisdiction, uhhh, provided, given that, oh fuck it—”

Chris grinned and knocked at the door.

“What?” Bryant bellowed.

“Having trouble?”

“Chris!” Bryant stood poised in the middle of his office space, arms slung on a polished wood baseball bat that he’d braced at the nape of his neck. It gave him the posture of a man crucified, and the tiredness in his face did nothing to alter the impression. “Would you believe I’ve been on this motherfucker since eight this morning. It has to go to the uplink at noon, and I’m still splitting fucking hairs on the covering letter. Listen to this.” He walked to the desk and read aloud from a piece of hardcopy that curled from the datadown printer. “ ‘The administration of the camps is, of course, not within our jurisdiction, provided no human rights abuse occurs.’ Sary’s going to go through the roof if we send him that—he’ll say we’re implying the Friday statement’s a lie.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Please.” Bryant rolled his neck against the wood of the bat. “I’m trying to do politics here. We can’t imply he’s lying.”

“I thought we were going to go with ‘given that no human rights abuse is occurring.’ ”

Bryant shook his head. “Won’t wash with the UN. There’s an Amnesty report doing the rounds in Norway and no one’s prepared to deny it at ministerial level. We’ve got to stay ‘vague but firm.’ That’s a direct quote from Hewitt.”

“Vague but firm.” Chris pulled a face. “Nice.”

“Fucking Amnesty.”

“Yeah, well. Shit happens.” Chris came and stood at Bryant’s shoulder, reading the hardcopy. “What about . . .”

He tore the sheet from the printer and scanned it. Bryant unslung the baseball bat from his shoulder and parked it in a corner.

“. . . Confident. That’s it, look. Admin of the camps blah blah blah not within our jurisdiction
and
we are confident that no human rights abuse, no, that
none
of the alleged human rights abuse has occurred.” He handed back the sheet. “How about that?”

Bryant snatched it.

“You bastard. Forty-five fucking minutes I’ve been staring at this.”

“Caffeine.” Chris held up his takeout from Louie Louie’s. “Want some?”

“I’m all caffeined out. I was in at six with Makin, and this landed on my desk an hour ago from upstairs. Notley and the policy board. Response required. As if I didn’t have enough else to do. Let’s see . . . ‘that none of the alleged human rights abuse has occurred.’ Right. Now, what about this? ‘However, we cannot permit your forces to obstruct the passage of fuel and supplies.’ ”

“Try ’forces operating in the area.’ Takes the sting out of it and makes him feel like a big man. Like you’re asking him to police the zone generally, not just get a grip on his own troops.”

Bryant muttered and scribbled on the hardcopy as he read it back. “ ‘However, we cannot permit forces
operating in the area
to obstruct the passage of fuel and blah blah blah blah.’ That’s it. Brilliant.”

Chris shrugged. “Ready-wrapped. I used the same scam on the Panthers of Justice a couple of weeks back, and they lapped it up. Stopped the banditry dead. All most of these rebels really want is some kind of recognition. Paternal acknowledgment from some kind of patriarchal authority. According to Lopez, it had them swaggering around posting police directives in every village.”

Mike barked a laugh. “Lopez? That Joaquin Lopez?”

“Yeah.”

“So you put Harris up to tender after all.”

“Well, like you said. It was our investment he was fucking with. And Lopez works flat out for half a percent less of total. Really took Harris apart in the bullring, too, apparently.”

“Yeah, he’s still young enough to have the drive. Harris burned out years ago, it’s just no one ever called him on it. You did the whole industry a service putting him out.”

“It was your idea. If anything, I owe you one for the advice. So anyway, what’s this six
A
.
M
. shit with Makin? Anything I should know about?”

“Nah, shouldn’t think—” Bryant stopped. “Actually, maybe I should bounce it off you. You worked the NAME, didn’t you? North Andean Monitored Economy? Back when you were at HM?”

Chris nodded. “Yeah, we were into the ME in a big way. Anybody with a decent emerging markets portfolio had to be. Why, what’s going on down there now?”

“Ah, it’s fucking Echevarria again. You remember that first day we met in the gents, I told you I was off to see some greasy dictator for a budget review?”

“That was Hernan Echevarria? I thought he was dying.”

“No such luck. The old bastard’s pushing eighty, he’s had major surgery twice in the last decade, and he’s still hanging on. He’s grooming his eldest son, in true corrupt landowning motherfucker fashion, to take over the whole show when he’s gone. And as you’d expect with these hacienda families, the son’s a complete fucking waste of space. Spends all his time in Miami doing the casinos, powdering his nose, and fucking the local
gringas.
”

Chris offered another shrug. “Sounds okay. Easy enough to control, anyway.”

“Not on present showing.” Bryant punched a couple of points on the datadown screen, and the display shifted. “See, Echevarria junior’s making a lot of friends in Miami. Investor friends.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. Fresh money, most of it homegrown, but some from Tokyo and Beijing via U.S. management funds. Have a look at this little shot.” Bryant turned the datadown screen to face Chris. “Taken aboard Haithem Al-Ratrout’s private yacht last week. You’ll recognize some faces.”

It was a standard paparazzo shot. Hurried and unflattering angles on people who usually only appeared in the public eye coated in a high media gloss. Chris spotted two Hollywood pinups of the moment displaying the cleavage for which they were famous, the U.S. secretary of state caught picking the olive out of his martini, and—

“Over on the left you’ve got Echevarria junior. The one in the Ingram suit and the stupid hat. And that man next to him is Conrad Rimshaw, executive head of Conflict Investment for Lloyd Paul New York. On the other side and toward the back you’ve got Martin Meldreck from the Calders Rapid Capital Deployment division. The vultures are gathering.”

“But the father’s still ours so far, right?”

“So far.” Bryant nodded and touched another part of the screen. The photo minimized and gave way to a spreadsheet. “But it’s an uphill struggle. These are from the budget review I mentioned. The stuff in red is contested. He wants more, we can’t let him have it.”

There was a lot of red.

“The Echevarrias have been with Shorn’s Madrid office ever since Hernan pulled the coup back in ’27. Good solid clients. Our Emerging Markets division backed them all through the civil war and the crackdown afterward.” Bryant bent back fingers one at a time as he enumerated. “Fuel and ammunition, medical supplies, helicopter gunships, countersubversion trainers, interrogation technology. All at knockdown prices, and for more than twenty years it’s all paid off big time. Quiescent population, low-wage economy, export-oriented. Standard neo-liberal dream.”

“But not anymore.”

“But not anymore. We’ve got another generation of guerrillas in the mountains screaming for land reform, another generation of disaffected student youth in the cities, and we’re all back to square one. Emerging Markets got scared and dropped the whole thing like a hot brick—straight into Conflict Investment’s lap. Hewitt gave it to Makin.”

“Nice of her.”

“Yeah, well this was just after Guatemala, so Makin’s rep was riding pretty high. Top commission analyst for the year and all that. I guess Hewitt thought he’d swing it in his sleep. But things didn’t work out, so they brought me in to assist. Now Makin’s having to share Echevarria with me and I’ve got to say—” Bryant walked across to the door and pressed it completely closed. His voice lowered. “I’ve got to say he’s not handling it all that well.”

Chris leaned against the edge of Bryant’s desk, feeling the friendly warmth of trust and a shared conspiracy coming off the other man. “So what’s the problem?”