Wolf in Shadow-eARC (28 page)

“Fethers, Fethers—is that a person or a company?” Shternberg said.

“He was arranging a bailout for Go-Girls,” Jameson said.

“Indeed?”

“Until he was killed.”

“Oh,” Shternberg said with utter disinterest. “Now you mention it, perhaps I do recall the name being brought up in a mind-share at the bank. I believe he was a potential duck shuffler.”

“Duck shuffler?” Jameson asked.

“Duck shuffler,” Shternberg repeated, tracing out a straight line in the air with his hands. “You know, you get all your ducks for a deal nicely in a row and then someone upsets the apple cart.”

“The apples knocking over the ducks,” Jameson said, the surreal image floating across his mind’s eye.

“Precisely,” Shternberg said, with a mirthless smile.

“So Fether’s death was convenient?” Jameson asked.

“Moderately so,” Shternberg replied. “I doubt he had the bandwidth to seriously disturb our battle-rhythm.”

“What made a bankrupt retail chain worth having?” Jameson asked.

“Go-Girls own a number of their own shops in key high-street sites.”

“So you’ll asset-strip the company by selling the premises?” Jameson asked.

“We will certainly leverage our investment across the business units to realize their capital value,” Shternberg replied.

“You will still be left with a bankrupt retail chain.”

“The paradigm is to bucketize the components to core competencies, while right-sizing the administrative resources to reinforce the net-net.”

“You mean fire the admin staff to cut costs?”

“You’ve a talent for succinctness.”

Shternberg smiled, not the type of smile to encourage small children. The expression one imagined was what one might see on the snout of a great white upon encountering a surfer, or a game-show host faced with a contestant whose hearing aid has failed.

“The technical services will be bangalored, the empty suits downsized, and half the sales staff promoted to customers.”

Jameson translated that as farming out the IT jobs to the third world, and firing the management and most of the shop employees.

“Further traction can be gained by pencil-whipping the accounts with creatalytics.”

Or cooking the books, in other words.

“Before selling off the rump of the business as a going concern.”

“And I suppose profits are considered capital gains rather than income, so you will be paying a lower rate of tax than your secretary on your profits.”

Shternberg made another disturbing movement with his mouth that could be construed as a grin if one was feeling charitable. Jameson was not inclined to be.

“Oh dear, surely you are not that vanilla, Commander Jameson. Only little people pay taxes. Greyfriars is owned by my wife, who lives in Monaco, and I’m non-dom so I’ve no tax liability at all.”

Non-dom stood for non-domiciled and was a special status originally offered to attract foreign plutocrats to live in London without officially living in the United Kingdom, taxwise. They paid tax only on money acquired in Britain, which did not include earnings laundered through offshore tax havens like Monaco. The arrangement was so convenient that British nationals who were rich enough were now arranging non-dom status. One generous non-dom British benefactor to a political party had even become ennobled and taken a seat in the House of Lords. Jameson recalled that he voted to up the rate of tax on British citizens—the non non-dom ones, that is.

Jameson paid fifty percent income tax on the top end of his civil-service salary, so he was presumably classed as one of the little people.

“That does not seem very fair or equitable,” Jameson said softly.

Shternberg tilted back his head and laughed out loud.

“You don’t make money with all that kumbaya stuff. Wealth creators like me must be above the morality of the common herd.”

Jameson opened his mouth to point out that vulture capitalists like Shternberg created wealth only for themselves, but the man talked over him.

“You know what drives the financial markets, Commander, fear—fear and greed, but mostly fear. Look up the Fear Index on the Vix, the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index.”

He rotated the swivel chair.

“Well, you’ve used up your time allotment. Unlike you state employees, I’ve work still to do. If you need to dialogue with me again, contact my secretary, but I warn you that my availability is limited.”

Shternberg leaned forward and turned to the computer screen, completely ignoring Jameson and Karla is if they had ceased to exist.

Jameson got up to go. He kept his face impassive at the rudeness. He was damned if he would give Shternberg the satisfaction of a response, but inside he was seething. Karla, of course, felt what he felt. She walked up to Shternberg’s desk. He continued to ignore her so she leaned over and tapped it with her nails, making a metallic click. Shternberg glanced up and Karla smiled at him. He rocked back in his chair, eyes wide.

“Thank you for your cooperation, sir,” Jameson said.

They left the office, ignored by the minimal staff that Greyfriars employed. Jameson waited until they were out on the street before talking.

“I suppose, he was human?” Jameson asked.

“I think so,” Karla replied. “He smelt human and not a magic user.”

“I suppose” Jameson said. “It rather depends on your definition of human. In my opinion, the man is a bloody psychopath.”

CHAPTER 14
NIGHT OF THE WOLF

Security lights snapped on from various directions, bathing the yard in harsh light. Through the glare, Rhian could just make out figures closing the gates behind the BMW. Max slipped the car in neutral and coasted to a stop in front of the Portakabin office at the far end of the yard. Car scrap and trucks formed mazes of metal on each side.

“Ding, ding, everybody out,” Max said.

His eyes glittered. He is enjoying every moment of this, Rhian thought. Somehow his buoyant mood lifted her out of her anger and she found herself smiling back.

“Let’s give them a scare,” she said, jumping out.

“A scare, right,” he said.

The BMW doors closed with solid thumps that would have brought a round of applause from the workers in the Bayerische Motoren Werke.

“There’s at least two hiding on the right and another bunch in among the scrap metal on the left,” Max said.

Charlie strutted out of the Portakabin, followed by a goon.

“We’re shut,” he said.

“You’ll be shut permanently if you don’t keep your nose out of my affairs,” Max said. “You stay clear of the Dirty Duck in future and all who sail in her. Got it?”

“It’s called the Black Swan,” Rhian said.

Rhian caught flickers of movement to their flanks. Charlie’s goons must be closing in. Why didn’t Max just get on with it? He stood, legs apart, head back, right hand in the pocket of his long black mac. Charlie Parkes squared up to him, smiling humorlessly.

“And you’ll make me, will you?” Charlie asked, spreading his hands to exaggerated effect. “You haven’t brought much in the way of backup.”

A willy-waggling contest, Rhian thought. The mayhem couldn’t start until the right challenges had been delivered and rejected. Max was enjoying himself immensely, and so was the wolf. She was close to Rhian’s mind, watching through Rhian’s eyes, leaking her feelings into Rhian’s psyche.

“Sure I have, I’ve brought Snow White,” Max said, indicating her with the back of his left hand. “She’ll be plenty backup just to sort out the local iron and his collection of mincing wooftahs.”

Rhian was not entirely sure what an iron was, let alone a mincing wooftah, but from the jaw-dropping expression on Charlie Parkes face, she confidently assumed that it was uncomplimentary.

Parkes’ mouth worked but no sound issued.

“I would have let her give you a kicking on her own, but when one is a gentleman . . .” Max adopted a suitable expression and spread his hands to convey a sense of noblesse oblige.

“Kill the bastard,” Parkes said, “but save the girl for me.”

The goon behind Parkes stepped round him and leveled a shotgun. Max gave Rhian a hard shove to the shoulder that pushed her to the ground. The shotgun discharged both barrels in rapid succession. Flare and concussion punched past Rhian, and she had a flashback to the subway where she first met Max, a lifetime ago. She rolled onto her paws and surveyed the world through flat monochrome, like the image in a sniper’s night sight.

Max moved to the right, out of the line of fire. He held a pistol in both hands, arms outstretched. Two sharp cracks and the goon with the shotgun went over backwards. No killing, Rhian thought, I wanted no deaths on my conscience. What was she doing here?

The wolf growled and gave a cough that sounded like a laugh. Max changed aim but Parkes dropped out of sight into one of the pools of shadow.

The wolf smelled people all round, smelled their tension, their fear, their lust to kill. Rhian and the wolf’s mind integrated smoothly. Frankie had worked a miracle with her magic, unpleasant though it had been at the time. Rhian could not exactly control the wolf, but she could influence it emotionally. She could guide its choices. She conveyed her fear of guns to the wolf, so it bounded after Max into the shadows among the scrap.

One of those transient tangential thoughts that the brain comes up with under stress floated across Rhian’s mind. If she could emotionally influence the wolf, could the wolf influence her? Had her personality changed since Frankie’s spell in the graveyard? Was she more aggressive than when she had been plain old Rhian? Would the old Rhian have fronted Charlie Parkes’ gang, or would she just have run?

Max had his back to a half-crushed hatchback that had another perched unstably on top. He held his pistol close to his chest, barrel pointed skywards. She skidded to a stop beside him and he glanced down at her.

“Heel,” he said, with a grin.

She snarled at him.

“You look quite dashing in a fur coat,” Max said, unmoved by her flash of teeth.

The wolf heard two metallic clicks on the other side of the wrecks, which Rhian interpreted as a gangster pulling back the hammers on his shotgun. Max stuck three fingers under her nose, using them to count down. At zero he reached up and pushed the top hatchback, causing it to rock.

Taking a firmer grip on the sub chassis, he lifted the wreck up before pushing it firmly away. Metal ripped and protested with grinding shrieks and the hatchback slid off its perch. It rolled over and tumbled down the other side. A man screamed but was abruptly silenced, like someone had turned off his microphone.

The wolf jumped up on the first wreck in a single bound. It smelled fresh blood and leapt to the second car, finding a body pinned under the twisted metal.

“Wayne, Wayne!”

A gangster knelt by the corpse, trying ineffectually to pull it clear. He looked up wide-eyed when the wolf landed with a thud, and for a split moment they stared at each other. It could only have been a microsecond. To Rhian, it stretched out like the start of a summer holiday. The man broke the spell by reaching down for his shotgun.

For the first time, the reality of what was about to happen sunk home. They were going to kill everybody in the yard. That was what Max had meant by solving the problem once and for all. Rhian shut down in shock and the wolf took over.

The wolf leapt.

She hit the gangster hard, catching his face in her jaws and wrenching around his head until the salty taste of warm blood filled her mouth. Movement caught the wolf’s eye. Without hesitation, she dropped her victim and jumped to the right. A shotgun blast rattled the car wreck. The wolf jinked left to avoid the second shot, which tore up the ground where she had been standing.

This gunman was made of sterner stuff than his colleagues, calmly breaking open his weapon to eject the spent cartridges as if he were doing nothing more dangerous than a grouse shoot. He behaved like a professional, an ex-soldier maybe, smoothly reaching into his coat pocket for reloads. The wolf gathered her back legs under her body. The gunman pushed the cartridges home and snapped the weapon shut as she charged.

In two more bounds the wolf would have him, but the muzzles of his levelled shotgun opened wide before her like the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. He pulled back the hammers when she was just two miserable meters away. It might as well have been a mile.

She saw the twin flash before she heard the concussion. Max knocked the shotgun up, the shot whistling over her head. The wolf took the gunman’s throat, dropping him when he stopped moving.

Shots punched through thin metal car bodies and clanged off engine blocks. The wolf bounded across the floodlit yard, jinking left and right. Bullets hammered past her.

A gunman’s nerve broke and he tried to run. The wolf hit him in the small of the back and the gunman fell, arms outstretched, as if he was appealing to a deity for divine protection. He was an easy kill.

The wolf bit into the back of her victim’s neck and he went limp. She shook him a few times, puzzled that something with the arrogance to try to kill her should die so easily.

She and Max moved through the scrapyard, hunting, keeping to the shadows. The wolf was aware of Max close by but ignored him. He was of the pack, a member of the hunt.

“Lenny?” a voice asked from the other side of the yard. “Have you got them?”

“Lenny’s lost his head,” Max replied, adding a low chuckle that might have crawled out from a crypt.

A fusillade of wildly aimed shots from a variety of weapons spanged through the scrap. Max watched coolly, gun extended in one hand in the classic target-shooter’s stance. He fired a single shot that elicited a cry of pain.

An automatic weapon replied with a sustained burst.

The night belonged to the wolf. She put her head up and howled, filling the yard with throbbing sound. Moonlight broke through the London clouds as if Morgana heard the cry and blessed her with a shower of silvery light.

“Jesus Christ!” said a voice from across the yard.

The wolf cleared the BMW in a single bound. Her powerful haunches drove her halfway across they open center of the yard before the first ill-aimed shot sounded. More followed, but she thrust forward, paws only briefly in contact with the ground. Her heart pounded, pumping oxygenated blood from her lungs to her heavy musculature.