Market Forces (40 page)

“What?” Mike squinted at him. “Well, yeah, but I assumed. I don’t know, accidental son of some slumming exec and a bargirl, a dancer, something.”

“Thanks.”

“Fuck, I don’t mean. I mean, it doesn’t mean anything, but I just assumed. It happens, you know.
Seen
it happen. Come close a couple of times, myself. I just figured, something like that, that’s how you got your break at Ross Mobile, maybe a leg up into LS as well.”

“No.” Chris smiled tightly. “I got Ross through an old friend of my father. Everything else I clawed down myself. Don’t worry about it, Mike. You were right. Some of us have what it takes, and what it takes is hate. I had enough hate to paint a towerblock. I grew up hating. It was like fuel. Like food. You don’t need much of anything else when you’ve got hate.”

“Look—”

“And then one morning I woke up and I’d killed Edward Quain, and the world was still here. I had a job, I had a life, well, a life
style
anyway. Hammett McColl had just promoted me. I had money, a
lot
of money, for the first time in my life.” He tipped his empty glass horizontal. Looked into it and laughed. “It seemed a little ungracious not to go on living.”

The two of them sat there in silence for a while. Finally, Mike shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat.

“Chris.” He hesitated. “You, uh, you want to stay at my place tonight?”

“No. Thanks, no. I’ve got to be alone for a while, Mike. There’s stuff I need to sort out. I’ll get a hotel. But thanks. And.” He waved vaguely. “Thanks for, you know, saving my life and everything.”

Bryant grinned.

“Shit, I always owed you for Mitsue Jones. Just call it even.”

T
HE HOTEL WOULD
not hold him.

He poured himself a whiskey—
another fucking whiskey
—and stared at the phone as if it were poisonous. His mobile was still switched off. No one outside of Mike knew where he was. He’d have to pick up and dial.

He picked up the TV remote instead and zapped through the channels. Endless, mindless, brightly colored shit and an upbeat report just in from Cambodia. He recognized the editing.

He shut down the TV’s painted window and went out on the balcony. Warm night air gusted over his face. A well-lit Kensington street angled past seven floors below. A couple walked along it, arm in arm. Laughter floated up. A cab idled by in the opposite direction, cruising for custom.

He retreated to the bedroom. He lay faceup on the bed and stared at the perfectly molded plaster ceiling. Tension itched down his limbs.

He prowled the suite and gnawed a thumbnail down to the quick.

He lit the laptop and tried to carry out simple database tasks.

He hurled the whiskey glass across the room.

He grabbed wallet, Nemex, jacket, and he left.

S
HE WAS WAITING
for him.

She must have heard the cab in the street outside. The door opened as he pressed the bell. She stood in the clothes she’d worn at Break Point, black leggings and a loose gray running top, face scrubbed clean of makeup, hair gathered back. They stood looking at each other, an arm’s reach apart.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” he started, but she shook her head.

She reached for him as he crossed the threshold. It felt like falling. He was close enough to smell freshly drunk coffee on her breath, behind that the swirl of female scent mingled with orange blossom. The kiss was an openmouthed collision that squeezed tears into his eyes, a mutual assault of tongues, of teeth tugging on lips and hands on clothing below. She was laughing excitedly into his open mouth as they clinched and his hands felt impossibly full of her body, unable to grasp the substance of it with enough force. He kicked the door shut and found a breast beneath the sports top, unsupported and surgically perfect—
the porn segment sprang through his mind like sweat—
hard under soft, a swathe of stomach sprung with taut muscle, the hard length of one thigh and the lift of ass cheek above it. He could not settle on any of it.

Her leg thrust between his and ground upward against his prick. He was already hard. She bit him on the neck. Hands dragged him down the hall, past the kitchen and bathroom and left into an untidy bedroom. Cluttered bedside unit, a teetering pile of books, and a glass of stale water. A pale blue quilt crumpled across an unmade bed. He drank it in and the new intimacy was a tiny itching in the pit of his stomach, an opening to an inner sanctum, built into his prior knowledge of the rest of the house. She let him go with a sudden motion as if he were hot, sank to the bed in front of him and peeled off her leggings in two single stripping motions. Fingers touched the mound beneath the white cotton thong she wore underneath, rubbing the groove up and down. She grinned up at him as she did it. Her free hand scrabbled across to the bedside table, ripped open a drawer, and reached inside.

“No, wait.”

He shed jacket and shirt, dropped to his knees beside the bed, and buried his face in the white cotton, breathing in the undiluted scent of her. She gasped and sank back on the folds of the quilt. The heated heart of flesh between her thighs was moist. He slid his hands up the insides of her thighs fingers-first, pulled aside the cotton, and sank his tongue into her. A hard spasm and her hands came to grip the sides of his head. Her legs lifted and folded over his back like wings. She was panting.

When she came, she ground up hard against him with a deep grunting sound, then flopped to twitching stillness. He shouldered his way gently out from under her legs and straightened up. In the drawer she had opened, he found the Durex can. He rolled its chilly length along the plain of her stomach, got another twitch as it touched her, then lodged it between her breasts and rolled it idly back and forth in the indelible cleavage surgery had given her. She raised herself on her elbows.

“So what do you want
now
?” she asked, mock-tough.

“I want to fuck you, Liz.”

She seemed to consider that for a moment, head tilted slightly. Then she sat up, tugged her hair loose of its binding, and set about unfastening his belt buckle. She liberated the engorged length of his prick from the cloth it was trapped in, handling it with greedy care and sliding it back and forth into her mouth. Then she gripped it at base between thumb and forefinger, picked up the Durex can, and sprayed him steadily from end to end.

It was a long time since he’d needed to use the stuff, and the sudden, cold tightening of the instant membrane was a shock. He gasped and Liz Linshaw grinned again as she heard it.

“That’s just for starters,” she said in the back of her throat and held up the can for his inspection. “This is cocktail-laced. Expensive stuff. You wait till the contact sensitizers kick in. You’re not going to last long.”

He reached for her and she scooted back on the bed, opening herself for him. He sank all the way into her with a groan, cupped one breast in both hands, working the flesh. He sucked in the nipple and it touched the roof of his mouth.

She was right. He didn’t last long.

“C
AN YOU FEEL
my heart?” she asked him, later.

He nodded drowsily against her chest.

“It’s still beating like a fucking drum, Chris. That’s with thinking about what you did to me. I want you to do it again.”

“What, right now?”

She laughed. “Well, ideally yeah. But I can wait.” She craned her neck to look at his face. “Are you staying the night?”

“If you ask me to.”

“Stay the night.”

“No, I got to go.”

“You bastard.” She slapped at his flank. “That’s not funny. I want you to stay, Chris. I want access to you.”

“You’ve got access to me. Look at me.” But beneath the comfortable humor, he felt a vague stirring of alarm. Not at what she wanted. At what he might want from her.

“So we’re going to do this again?”

He thought about Carla. Pushed the thought away again. Let go.

“Yeah, we are. I’m living out of a hotel now, Liz. No more complications.”

And in the back of his head, something heard and lifted its throat to the sky, and laughed like a hyena.

A
MID THE PLINTHED
Grecian sculpture, Louise Hewitt sat on the edge of the gray-sheeted bed and stared past the white blast of a bedside halogen lamp. The room was silent around her. She had hung her jacket away with automated care on her way into the apartment, and now her shoulders slumped under the soft silk of her blouse. There was an unaccustomed ache in her throat.

She looked down at the bed and pressed her lips together. Then she lay sideways on the covers and lowered her face to the pillow. His scent came off the gray cotton, and she clenched her eyes shut.

“Oh Christ, Nick,” she murmured, and her throat clicked as she swallowed. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I
warn
you?”

She lay there for a while, and a single tear leaked out from under her right eyelid. It trickled jerkily to the edge of her face and soaked into the pillow.

When the second and third tear slipped out, she sat up abruptly and wiped them off her face with the angry gesture of someone ripping off a mask. She cleared her throat, got up from the bed, and went through to the study. She stabbed the datadown awake and seated herself before its soft, multicolored glow.

She worked.

File #5

FINAL AUDIT

T
HERE WERE TIMES
over the next few weeks when Chris had to forcibly remind himself that this was his own life he was leading.

Partly it was the hotel. There was something insulated about living out of a box of high-class services long-term, something that felt like wearing thin rubber gloves. Household tasks he was used to performing himself happened distantly, almost invisibly. He put out his dirty laundry and it came back again pristine, as if cleaned by elves. Fresh towels, and little bottles of soap and shampoo appeared daily in the bathroom by a similar magic. He ordered food and it came to his door from a kitchen he never saw, or he fed himself in one of the hotel’s three internal restaurants. Either way, he was saved the tiny increments of physical and emotional effort involved in going outside to look for a place to eat.

At Shorn, he performed with a slightly numb, mechanical competence. The work piled up into account overload as Nick Makin’s abrupt departure took its toll on everyone. He cut a path through it like someone working through dense bush with a blunt machete. Focus ahead,
swing,
grab, clear and step, focus ahead,
swing.
Occasionally he sagged, but habit kept him on his feet.

The pellet wounds in his side healed, fading rapidly from actual pain to inconvenience to vague memory. Dreams of Carla stubbornly refused to follow the same path.

Covert reports came in from the NAME via Lopez. Barranco had taken his first dose of Shorn beneficence—three hundred Kalashnikovs plus ammunition, thirty of the Aerospatiale plane killers, an even thousand King grenades, all brought ashore in the dead of night on some Pacific beach, courtesy of a privatized
Epsilon
-class Russian attack sub and her demobbed crew. The best international bulk-by-stealth couriers money could buy.

On the other side of the globe, Nakamura played Cambodia the way Vasvik had told him they would. Planning for the military coup lurched into motion. Chris had the relevant local tools at hand—he’d mustered them almost absently—days before the indesp intelligence came through. He pretended to study the reports, phoned through prearranged authorization codes to Langley an hour later, sat and waited.

Explosions bloomed across Phnom Penh like a rash. A colonel and his family in a car bomb. A general in a restaurant. An air force commander in a whorehouse, shot three times with an uncharacteristic precision that made Chris suspect the place was a protected Langley franchise of some sort. A couple of others, drive-by and car bomb, respectively. The remainder got the message. The coup fell apart before it could properly gain momentum, and Nakamura recoiled. Word came down to Chris from on high. Notley was impressed.

Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation was launched into the mysterious disappearance of Nicholas Makin. No one outside the Shorn debriefing knew where he’d gone. His corpse was helicoptered out of Crutched Friars with the rest, still masked, still warm. No footage of faces, and no DNA trace—before they left, the rapid-response crew Mike called had hosed down the bloody asphalt with chemicals that would defeat any tissue analysis. The firefight was written off as an overly ambitious gangwit incursion that had met with poetic justice. Carefully massaged media speculation arose that Makin had fallen solitary victim to the same gang before their luck ran out. Chris and Mike gave prepared statements and watched it all from the sidelines.

The media did their job, rather better than anyone had expected. Accurate detail dissolved rapidly in a splash of lurid full color, replayed from the surveillance cameras in Crutched Friars. The gunfighter chic of the thing caught and sold.
Comp Drivers in Eastwood-Style Bloodbath! Zone Gangs Reap High Noon Whirlwind! Police Commend Shorn Heroes!
Coverage went global; TV and the men’s magazines went crazy. Chris and Mike got their souvenir Remingtons, handed over by the chief of corporate police in a white gale of erupting flashbulbs. Everyone grinning into the teeth of the media storm. It made the triumph against Mitsue Jones and her team seem like relative obscurity. One morning Mike came into work and found a call on his phone from a Hollywood agent. Studios, the agent said, were lining up. Options, offers, amounts of money that made even Louise Hewitt blink. There was talk of a book tie-in. A game. Action figures.

Sign nothing,
said Notley with characteristic avuncular tolerance.
Yet.

Corporate police units went into the zones looking for associates and relatives of the four men who had died with Makin. They kicked in doors and broke heads, bullied and bribed and ascertained that no one knew anything worth telling. Arrests were made. The media stood up on their hind legs and applauded.
Shorn Leads Gang Crackdown! Law and Order Priority for Corporate Community! Drug Scum Will Be Stopped Says Shorn Partner! Safer Streets for Our Kids Promise Executives!

Ten days in, the original events surrounding Nick Makin’s death were gone. No one remembered anything but the quick-draw images of Chris Faulkner and Mike Bryant, outnumbered and outgunned, taking down five cold-blooded cowardly drug-dealing masked killers.

Reality blurred out in hype.

Chris gave interviews, looked into cameras. Fended off a spate of calls from the driving fanworld and the London Chamber of Commerce. Requests for after-dinner speaker engagements, pleas for worn pieces of the Saab’s engine, and offers of bizarre sexual services all fogged into a single drag on his attention. Messages piled up once more on the datadown from the same wolfish-looking women with Eastern European names, and from drive sites like Road Rash and Asphalt Xtreme. He read movie treatments and CI reports with the dazed sense that sometime soon he might not be able to tell the difference. He rolled out the official Shorn line, dictated policy down phones. He handled Cambodia, the NAME. Paraná. Assam. Makin’s accounts in Guatemala, Kashmir, Yemen. More.

He took the Remington down to the firing range and took out some of the secreted stress on holotargets. There was a deep satisfaction to the scattered blast pattern it made that not even the Nemex could equal. He grew to like the weapon in a way he had never allowed himself with the pistol. He used the feeling like a drug.

In the evenings, in the anonymous seclusion of the hotel, he had Liz Linshaw, like a jagged sensory overload on the screen of his feelings. Sprawled elegantly naked across his bed, soaped slick in his shower, pressed against the walls of the room, legs wrapped around, tensed with orgasm, damp with sweat, grinning through her tousled hair.

Her, too, he used like a drug. Like a materialized visitation from some soft-porn pay-channel reality the hotel had moored close to. When she wasn’t there—about every third night,
just so we stay sane about this, Chris
—he masturbated thinking of her. She helped him sleep, helped him avoid overly conscious introspection when at the ragged end of each day he arrived back in the hotel and found himself wondering if you really could live out a whole life this way.

E
VENTUALLY
, C
ARLA CAME
to the hotel.

She called first. Several times. He had her screened out of his mobile and the office phone, but somehow she’d gotten the hotel out of Mike. The first time she called, he walked into it head-on. He hung at the end of the phone, weightless, making monosyllabic responses. After a while, she cried.

He hung up on her.

He rang the switchboard and got them to screen and announce all further incoming calls. Then he called Mike, furious. He got an apology of sorts, but what the other man was really thinking came through underneath, loud and clear.

“Yeah, I know Chris. I’m really sorry. She’s been calling for days—I just couldn’t blow her off anymore. She was upset, you know. Really upset.”

“I’m fucking upset as well, Mike. And I could use a bit of solidarity here. It’s not like I go telling tales to Suki behind
your
back, is it?”

“You need to talk to her, man.”

“That’s an opinion, Mike, and you’re entitled to it. But you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me. Got it?”

There was a long pause at the other end.

“Got it,” Mike said finally.

“Good.” Chris cleared his throat, cranked down his tone a little. “I’ll see you tomorrow at eight, then. Cambodia briefing.”

“Yeah.”

“ ‘Night, then.”

“Yeah. Good night, Chris.” There was a flat quality in Mike’s voice that Chris didn’t much like, but he was still too angry himself to care much, either. Liz emerged from the bathroom, naked, toweling her hair vigorously. “Who was that?”

He gestured. “Ah, Mike. Work stuff.”

“Yeah? You look pretty pissed off about it.”

“Yeah, well. Cambodia.”

“Anything I should know?”

He forced a grin. “A lot of stuff you’d
like
to know, probably. But let’s talk about Mars.”

She threw the towel at him.

“I’ll get it out of you,” she promised, advancing.

The next morning on the way to work, Mike’s tone came back to him and he wondered if the other man was going to have another go after the Cambodia briefing. He rehearsed angry rejoinders in his head as the cab swung around Hyde Park corner.

He never got a chance to use them. It was the day Hollywood chose to come calling, and all Mike wanted to talk about were the hallucinatory figures involved and the possibility that they might get to watch themselves immortalized on screen by Tony Carpenter or Eduardo Rojas.

Carla called a couple more times that week, and then, suddenly, she was at the front desk, asking for him. Mercifully, it was a night Liz Linshaw had chosen not to show up. He thought briefly, cruelly, about telling the desk staff to send her away, then caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and grimaced. He changed into something freshly laundered, slipped on a pair of casual shoes, and went down to face her.

She was sitting on one of the sofas in reception, immaculate in faded jeans he remembered buying with her, boots, and a neat black leather jacket. When she saw him, she got up and came to meet him, trying for a smile.

“So. I get an audience with the man of the moment. Feel good, being famous again?”

“What do you want?”

“Can we go up to your room?”

“No.”

She looked elaborately around the quiet, well-bred bustle of the lobby. The hurt barely showed in her voice.

“Have you got someone up there?”

“Don’t be a fucking bitch. No, I haven’t got anyone up there. Jesus, Carla, this isn’t about someone else.
You
fucking left
me.
”

“So I’ve got to stand here while you shout at me?”

He swallowed and lowered his voice. “There’s a bar through there, through that arch. We can sit in there.”

She shrugged, but it was a manufactured detachment. In the corner of the bar, she sat and stared at him out of eyes that shone with unshed tears. She’d been crying recently, he knew. He could tell. He felt a tiny thawing at the edges of his anger at the knowledge, a tiny, aching warmth. He crushed it out. A uniformed waitress appeared with an expectant smile. He ordered Laphroaig for himself, asked Carla whether she’d like something to drink, and watched the formality of his tone stab her through. She shook her head.

“I didn’t come here to drink with you, Chris.”

“Fair enough.” He nodded to the waitress and she went back to the bar. “What did you come for?”

“To apologize.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “Go on then.”

She managed a smile. Shook her head. “You bastard. You’ve turned into a real bastard, Chris. You know that?”

“
You left me in the middle of the fucking zones, Carla.
At two o’clock in the
fucking
morning. You’ve
got
some apologizing to do.”

“You called me a whore.”

“And you called me.” He gestured helplessly, not remembering how the fight had stoked so high. “You said—”

“I said I couldn’t recognize you anymore, Chris. It wasn’t an insult, it was the truth. I don’t recognize you anymore.”

He shrugged. Ignored the tiny acid drip at the center of his chest. “So why come here at all? I’m a write-off, I’m unrecoverable. Tender trash. So why waste your time?”

“I told you why I came.”

“Yeah, to apologize. You’re not making a very good job of it.”

The Laphroaig came. He signed for it, sipped, and put it down on the table between them. He looked back up at Carla.

“Well?”

“I didn’t come to apologize for leaving you in the zones.” He opened his mouth and she made a slashing gesture to silence him. “No, listen to me, Chris. I’d do it again if you spoke to me like that again. You deserved it.”

She stared away across the bar, assembling what she wanted to say. Absently, she reached across the table for the whiskey tumbler, recognized the automatic intimacy for what it was, and stopped herself rigidly. She blinked a couple of times, fast.

“That’s not what I have to apologize for, Chris. I have to apologize because I should have left you a long time ago. I’ve spent the last year, the last two years, I don’t know, maybe even longer than that, trying to turn you back into the man I thought you were when we first met.” She smiled unconvincingly. “And you don’t want to be that man anymore, Chris. You aren’t that man anymore. You’ve found something harder and faster, and you like it better.”