Market Forces (6 page)

“Is that—”

Bryant’s eyes shuttled sideways above the pipe and lighter. Narrowed irritably. “Ah, come on, man. Lighten up. Just a little drive-right.”

The contents of the pipe smoldered and Mike inhaled convulsively. A shudder ran through his suited form. He made a deep grunting sound, and his voice came out squeaky as he offered the pipe.

“So. How does it feel?”

Chris frowned, confused. “What?”

“Conflict Investment, a week in. Go on, take it. How’s it feel?”

Chris waved the pipe away. “No thanks.”

“Pussy.” Bryant grinned to defuse the insult, and drummed impatiently on the table. “So tell me. How’s it feel?”

“What?”

“Conflict fucking Investment!”

“Oh.” Chris marshaled his sludgy thoughts. “Interesting.”

“Yeah?” Bryant seemed disappointed. “That all?”

“It’s not so different from Emerging Markets, Mike.” Trying to think was hard work. Chris began to wonder if he should have accepted the pipe. “Longer-term outlook, but basically the same stuff. Yeah, I like it. Apart from that bitch Hewitt.”

“Ah. I wondered how that was going. Had a run-in, have we?”

“You could say that.”

Bryant shrugged. “Hey, don’t let it get you down. Hewitt’s been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always been harder to cut it as a woman in this field, so they come out twice as tough. They have to. See, these days Hewitt practically
is
Conflict Investment. Big reorganization about five years back, austerity measures. Division got cut to the bone. There’s a lot of pressure to make good, and most of that pressure falls on Hewitt’s shoulders.”

“Notley’s senior partner.”

“Notley?” Bryant piped more smolder. “Nah, it was his baby in the beginning, but once he went senior he downloaded everything onto Hewitt and Hamilton. There was another guy, Page, but Hewitt called him out just before profit share last year. Rammed him right off the Gullet. Believe that?”

“The Gullet?”

“Yeah, you know. Last section as you come up over the zones on the M11. The two-lane narrows. Where you took out that no-namer, well, just after, after the underpass. Where it goes elevated. Hewitt let Page get ahead there, knew he’d have to either slow down or turn around to face her. No chance of just being first to work these days, you’ve got to turn up with blood on your wheels or not at all. So yeah, she lets him go, waits, he’s not good enough to make the one-eighty turn on a piece of road that narrow, so he slows up, tries for a side-to-side, she won’t let him, just rams him off on a corner. Bam!” Bryant gripped the pipe in his teeth and slammed fist into open palm. “Page goes through the barrier, falls right into a low-rise, goes through seven levels of zone housing like they were paper. Gas supply ripped open somewhere in one of the apartments on the way down. Boom.
Adios muchachos,
everybody in black.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, pretty fucking impressive, huh.” Mike squinted at the pipe, tried the lighter again. “See now, what Hewitt did, that’s okay, but now she’s got to prove that she doesn’t need two junior partners to help her run CI. If she can’t, it means she made a bad call. Pure greed call. No one around here minds greed, just so long as it’s good for the company as well. If it works out for Hewitt, she’s saved Shorn the expense of a junior partner, and she and Hamilton get bigger equity. It’s the free market trade-off. Something for us, something for them. But if it doesn’t work out, she’s dead in the water and she knows it.”

“Well, Ms. Conflict Investment doesn’t have a whole lot of confidence in me,” Chris said gloomily. “Not bloody enough for her, apparently.”

“That what she said?” Bryant shook his head. “Shit, after what you did to Quain? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, let’s just say that not all my challenges have been that uncompromising. This kill-or-be-killed stuff is strictly for the moviemakers. It’s crude, man. You
don’t
always need a kill.
That’s
crude.” Chris leaned forward as his enthusiasm kindled. “You ever see any of those old samurai movies?”

“Bruce Lee? Shit like that?”

“No, no. Not those. This is other stuff. Older. More subtle. See, these two guys, they’re about to have a duel. So they both stand there, swords out.” Chris thrust with an imaginary sword and Bryant jerked back in reflex. His eyes narrowed momentarily, and then he laughed.

“Whoops. Scared me there.”

“Sorry. Wasn’t intentional. So yeah, the two of them stand there, and they stare into each other’s eyes.”

He locked gazes with Bryant, who emitted another snort of laughter.

“They just stare. Because they both know that the one who blinks or looks away first, that’s the one who would have lost that fight.”

Bryant’s laughter dried up without fuss. He set the pipe aside. Both men were leaning on the table now, drilling their gazes into each other’s eyes with chemically altered concentration. The shared stillness of the moment stretched. The sounds of the bar receded into a backdrop, surf on a distant beach. Time ran on like a train they had both just missed. The pipe smoldered quietly to itself on the scarred wooden table. Vision wired their stares over it, eyeball-to-eyeball. From somewhere, an internal silence leaked into the world.

Mike Bryant blinked.

Mike Bryant laughed and looked away.

The moment blew away like an autumn leaf, and Chris sat back with a look of tipsy fulfillment on his face. Bryant grinned, a little intensely. Chris was too drunk to catch the upped voltage. Bryant made a pistol of thumb and forefinger. He pointed at Chris’s face.

“Bang!”

The laughter bubbled up again, this time from both men.

Bryant made a sound between a snort and a sigh. “There you are. You stared me out.”

Chris nodded.

“But I blew your fucking head off.”

“Yeah.” Chris leaned back across the table. Enthused. Oblivious to the edge sheathed in the other man’s voice. “But you see, there was no need for that. We’d already established the winner. You blinked. I would have won.”

“Bullshit. Maybe I had a hair in my eye. Maybe all these samurai guys walked away from fights they could have won just because they had a jumpy eye muscle that day. Where’d you read all this shit, anyway?”

“Mike, you’re missing the point. It’s about total control. It’s a duel between two whole people, not just two sets of skills. We could have a fistfight and you could turn up with a gun. We could have a gunfight and you could come with an armored car and a flamethrower. That’s not what a duel’s about.”

Bryant picked up the pipe again. “Duel’s about winning, Chris,” he said.

Chris wasn’t listening. “Look at China, a couple of centuries ago. There were cases there where two warlords sat down on the battlefield and played chess to decide the outcome of a battle. Chess, Michael. No death, no slaughter, just a game of chess. And they honored it.”

Bryant looked skeptical. “Chess?”

“Just a game of chess.” Chris was staring off into a corner. “You imagine that?”

“Not really, no.” Bryant stuffed the pipe into a pocket and started to get up. “But it makes a good story, I’ll give you that. Now, how about we get the car and get out of here before the sun comes up? Because Suki’s going to fucking take me apart if I don’t get back soon. And she’s not into chess.”

T
HEY CAME OUT
of the Falkland through a side door and onto a different street. Cold night air like a slap in the face, and for a couple of moments Chris reeled. He wondered how Bryant was dealing with the pipe high.

“Where’s the fucking car?”

“This way.”

Bryant grabbed him by the arm, dragged him around the corner, and started across the deserted street. Halfway there, he jammed to an abrupt halt.

“Ooops,” he said softly.

The BMW sat on the far side of the street under one of the few working street lamps. Sitting on the car: four men and one woman, all dressed in oil-smeared jeans and jackets. The grime was a uniform, the pale silent faces style-coordinated accessories. Heads shaven and tattooed, feet heavily booted. Hands filled with a variety of blunt metal implements.

None of them looked over eighteen.

They stared at the two suited men on the other side of the street and made no move to get off the car.

“You’ve got to get your contact stunner fixed, Mike,” Chris sniggered, still drunk. “Look at the shit you get all over it if you don’t have it powered up.”

“Shut the fuck up,” hissed Bryant.

The female contingent of the carjackers levered herself off the hood of the BMW with sinuous grace.

“Nice car, Mister Zek-tiv,” she said solemnly. “Got the keys?”

Bryant clutched automatically at his pocket. The woman’s eyes flickered to the move and locked on. She nodded in satisfaction.

“Get off my fucking car!” Bryant barked.

The remaining four jackers obeyed in unison, arms spread and filled with their makeshift weapons.

Chris glanced sideways at his companion. “Bad move, Mike. You carrying?”

Bryant shook his head almost imperceptibly. “In the car, remember. You?”

“Yeah.” Chris paused, embarrassed. “But it’s not loaded.”

“What?”

“I don’t like guns.”

“See, it’s like this.” The woman’s voice jerked Chris back from the disbelieving expression on Bryant’s face. “Either you can give us the keys. And your wallets. And your watches. Or we can take them from you. That’s our best offer.”

She lifted thumb and little finger solemnly to ear and mouth, making a child’s telephone.

“Sell, sell, sell.”

Bryant muttered something out of the corner of his mouth.

“What?” Chris muttered back.

“I
said.
Back the way we came and
fucking run
!”

Then he was gone, sprinting flat out for the corner they had just rounded. Chris went after him, flailing to stay upright in the Argentine leather shoes. Behind him, the incentive—sounds of yells and booted pursuit. He leveled with Bryant and found, incredibly, that the other man was grinning.

“All part of a night out in the zones,” he gritted. “Try to keep up.”

Behind them, someone ran a metal wrecking bar along a concrete wall. It made a sound like a gigantic dentist’s drill.

They looked at each other and put on speed.

Three streets away from the Falkland, the neighborhood plunged from run-down to rotted through. The houses were suddenly derelict, unglassed windows gaping out at the street and tiny gardens full of rubble and other detritus. Chris, brain abruptly adrenaline-flushed and working, grabbed Bryant and yanked him sideways into one of the gardens. Over piles of junk, scrambling. In past a front door that someone had kicked in long ago. Weeds grew up waist-high in the gap it had left. Beyond, a narrow, darkened hallway ran parallel to a staircase with half the banisters torn out. At the end, a tiled room that breathed stench like a diseased mouth.

Chris leaned cautiously against the staircase and listened to the yells of the carjackers as they ran past and down an adjacent street.

Bryant was bent over, hands braced on his knees, panting.

“You mind telling me,” he managed hoarsely after a while, “
why
you’re carrying an unloaded gun around with you?”

“I told you. I don’t like guns. I don’t like Louise Hewitt telling me what to do.”

“Man, after five days that’s a bad attitude to have. I wouldn’t go telling anybody things like that, if I were you.”

“Why not? I told you, didn’t I?”

Bryant straightened up and looked hard at him.

“Anyway, where’s your gun, hotshot?”

“At least it’s
loaded.
”

“All right, old piece of folk wisdom coming up.” Chris gulped his breath back under control. “A gun in the hand is worth
half a fucking million locked in the car.
”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Bryant’s grin flashed in the gloom. “But I wasn’t expecting this kind of trouble. We’re only a couple of klicks inside the zones. These guys are out of their territory.”

“You think they know that?” Chris nodded out toward the street, where voices were coming back. Some of the jacker gang, at least, were retracing their steps. He jabbed an urgent finger upward, and Bryant took the creaking stairs into the darkness at the top. Chris slid back along the hallway toward the tiled room and sank into the shadows there. The stench enveloped him. The floor was slimy underfoot. He tried not to breathe.

A moment later two of the jackers were standing where he had just been. Both were armed with long crowbars.

“I don’t see why we need the keys anyway. Why not just smash the fucking window.”

“Because, moron, this is a BMW Omega series.” The other jacker cast a doubtful glance up the stairs. “State-of-the-fucking-art corporate jam jar. These mothers have alarms, engine immobilization locks, and a broadcast scream to the nearest retrieval center. You’d never move it a hundred meters down the fucking street before they got you.”

“We could still smash it, anyway. Rip it up.”

“Ruf, you got no fucking ambition, man. If it weren’t for Molly, you’d still be smashing up telephone points and throwing stones at cabs. You got to think
bigger
than that. Come on, I don’t think they came in here. Too much chance of getting their suits dirty. Let’s—”

Chris’s foot slipped. Knocked against something that rolled on the tiled floor. Clink of glass. Chris gritted his teeth and slinked one hand down to the butt of his empty gun. The two jackers had frozen by the door.

“Hear that?” It was the ambitious member of the duo. Chris saw a silhouetted wrecking bar raised in the faint light from the doorway. “Okay, Mister Zek-tiv. Game over. Come out, give us your fucking keys, and maybe we’ll leave you some teeth.”

The two jackers advanced down the hall. They were about halfway when Mike Bryant dropped through a gap in the banister rail above. He landed feetfirst on the head of the gangwit bringing up the rear. The two of them tumbled to the floor. The lead jacker whipped around at the noise and Chris exploded from his hiding place. He punched hard, high driving for the face and low for the guts. The jacker turned back too late. Chris’s high punch broke his nose and then he folded as the solid right hook sank into his midriff. Chris grabbed the gangwit’s shoulders and ran his shaven head sideways into the staircase wall. Up ahead, he saw Bryant reel to his feet and stamp down hard on the other jacker’s unprotected stomach. The gangwit moaned and curled up. Bryant kicked him again, in the head.

“Mother
fucker
! Touch my car, you fucking piece of
shit
!”

Chris laid a hand on his shoulder. Bryant hooked around, face taut.

“Whoa, it’s all over.” Chris stood back, hands raised. “Game over, Mike. Come on. There’s only three left now. Let’s try for the car again.”

Bryant’s face cleared of its fury.

“Yeah, good. Let’s do it.”

The street outside was quiet. They checked both ways, then slipped out and loped back toward the Falkland, Bryant navigating. Less than five minutes to relocate the corner pub, and the BMW sat gleaming pristinely under the street lamp as if nothing had happened.

They circled the vehicle warily. Nothing.

Bryant produced his keys and pressed a button. The alarm disarmed with a subdued squawk. He was about to open the door when the shaven-headed woman stepped out of the shadows of a doorway less than five meters away, a piece of iron railing raised in ironic greeting. She put her fingers to her mouth and whistled shrilly. Another jacker, similarly armed, stepped out of another doorway up the street and ambled down to meet them. The woman smiled at Bryant.

“Thought you’d be back. Now, you want to throw me those keys?”

In the moment that her eyes were fixed on Bryant, Chris produced his empty gun and leveled it at her.

“All right, that’s enough,” he snapped. “Back off.”

The other jacker took a step forward and Chris swung the gun to cover him, willing him to believe.

“You, too. Back off, or you’re dead. Michael, get in the car.”

Bryant opened the door. Chris was feeling for the door handle on the other side when the woman spoke.

“I don’t think that gun’s loaded.”

She took a step forward, followed by her companion.

Chris brandished the Nemex. “I said back off.”

“Nah, you would have shot us by now. You’re bluffing, Mister Zek.”

She raised her piece of railing, took another step forward, and Mike Bryant stood up from his side of the car, Nemex in hand.

“I’m not bluffing,” he said mildly and shot her three times in the chest and stomach.

Boom, boom, boom.

The sound of the gun in the quiet street. Echoes off houses.

Chris saw and heard it in fragments.

The woman, kicked back two meters before she dropped. The railing, out of her hand and flying, to clatter and roll across the camber of the street into the gutter.

The other jacker, hands raised, placatory, backing away.

Face implacable, Bryant put the next three shots into him.

Boom, boom, boom.

He reeled and spun like a marionette, crashed into the wall and slid down it, leaving gouts of blood on the brickwork.

“Mike—”

The sound of pounding feet.

The final member of the gang, summoned by the gunshots, sprinting across the street toward the fallen bodies. He seemed oblivious to the two men in suits. He hit the ground on his knees next to the woman, disbelieving.

“Molly!
Molly!
”

Chris looked across at Bryant. “Mike, let’s—”

Bryant made a sideways hushing gesture with his free hand and lowered his aim.

Boom, BOOM.

The kneeling boy jolted as if electrocuted, and then keeled slowly over the woman on the ground. Blood ran out over the street and trickled down to join the crowbar in the gutter.

The echoes rolled away into the predawn gloom like reluctant applause.

T
HEY DROVE BACK
to the checkpoint in silence, Chris wrapped in numb disbelief. The guard let them through with a cursory glance. If he smelled the cordite from Mike’s gun, he said nothing. Bryant waved him a cheerful good night and accelerated the big car away into the well-lit canyons of the financial district. He was humming quietly to himself.

He glanced across at Chris as they were approaching the Shorn block. “You want to sleep over at my place? Plenty of space.”

The thought of the hour-long drive back home was abruptly unbearable. Chris mustered a dried-out voice.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Good.” Bryant speeded up and cornered west.

Chris watched the towering blocks begin to thin out around them. As the BMW picked up the main feeder lane for the London orbital, he turned slightly in his seat to face Bryant.

“You didn’t have to kill them all, Mike.”

“Yeah, I did.” There was no animosity in Bryant’s voice. “What else was I supposed to do? Fire warning shots? This symbolism-of-combat shit you talk about doesn’t work with people like that. They’re gangwit scum, Chris. They don’t know how to lose gracefully.”

“They’d already lost. And they were kids. They would have run away.”

“Yeah, yeah. Until the next time. Look, Chris. People like that, civilized rules don’t apply. Violence is the only thing they understand.”

Outside the hurrying car, the sky was brightening in the east. Chris’s head was beginning to ache.