Market Forces Part 17

with a decent emerging markets portfolio had to be. Why, what's going 'i on down there now?'

i 'Ah, it's f.u.c.king 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d's pus.h.i.+ng eighty, he's had major surgery twice in the last decade, and he's still hanging on. He's groom ing his eldest son, in true corrupt land-owning motherf.u.c.ker fas.h.i.+on, to take over the whole show when he's gone. And, as you'd expect with these hacienda families, the son's a complete f.u.c.king waste of s.p.a.ce.

116Spends all his time in Miami doing the casinos, powdering his nose and f.u.c.king 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 s.h.i.+fted. '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 US management funds. Have a look at this little snap.'

Bryant turned the datadown screen to face Chris. 'Taken aboard Haithem M-Ratrout's private yacht last week. You'll recognise some faces.'

It was a standard paparazzi 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 pin-ups of the moment displaying the cleavage for which they were famous, the US 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 Ingrain suit and the stupid hat. And that next to him is Conrad Rimshaw, executive head of Conflict Investment for Lloyd Paul New York. On the other side and towards the back you've got Martin Meldreck from 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 minimised 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 afterwards.' Bryant bent back fingers one at a time as he enumerated. 'Fuel and ammunition, medical supplies, helicopter guns.h.i.+ps, counter-subversion trainers, interrogation technology. All at knockdown prices, and for over twenty years it's all paid off big time.

Quiescent population, low wage economy, export-oriented. Standard neoliberal dream.''But not any more.'

'But not any more. 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 117Markets 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.' i 'Yeah, well this was just after Guatemala, so Makin's rep was riding pretty high. Top commission a.n.a.lyst 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 a.s.sist. 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?'

Bryant sighed. 'Problem is, Makin doesn't know how to handle i Echevarria. See, he's used to these penny ante revolutionaries holed up in the jungle with their peasant education programmes and he thinks Echevarria's just the same animal made good.'

i 'Oops.'

'Yeah, I've told him. The Echevarrias are as close as you get to n.o.bility in that part of the world. That's how come the link with i Europe. Old Hernan traces his ancestors right back to Pizarro's original [i conquistadors. As he never f.u.c.king tires of telling us. 'course, all that i means is he's descended from some dirt-poor younger son mercenary iglory-roader who grabbed a seat on the boat over from Spain, but it 'i isn't cool to mention that in budget meetings.'

I.

'Makin said that?'

Bryant laughed. 'No, I'm exaggerating. Makin's to() d.a.m.n good a negotiator for that. But it smokes off him every time Echevarria starts in on that n.o.bility rap. You can almost see his lip curl. Echevarria sees it too, and that f.u.c.king Hispanic pride stokes up, and Makin's lip curls some more, and there we are, deadlocked. We're trying to lock him into something long-term, so that when he finally croaks the NAME'll be stable and, more importantly, ours, but he gets more hostile every time we talk to him. Now he wants double-figure percentage increases in the military budget to put down the rebels, and there's no way we can afford to give that to him and keep the fund managers happy. The problem is, he's taking the whole thing personally.'

'So he won't sign?'

'He might eventually,' Bryant picked up the baseball bat again, twirled it through the air and s.h.i.+pped it across one shoulder. 'If I can talk him round. But eventually might be too late. He's not a well man. If he dies or his condition deteriorates too much, junior takes over and i then we're f.u.c.ked. Junior hasn't got his old man's illusions about the i t 118.

i!European connection, and he's p.i.s.sed off with Makin for his att.i.tude - he'll bring in Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap just to snub us. And they'd just love to buy us out.'

Chris sipped at his coffee and thought about it while Bryant paced towards the window, playing imaginary curveb.a.l.l.s off the bat. When the other man turned back to face him, he set the styrofoam canister down on the desk with studied calm.

'What about the rebels?' he asked.

'The rebels?' Bryant spread his hands in supplication. 'Come on, who the f.u.c.k are they? This is a twenty-year client we're talking about. You can't write that off against some bearded campesino hiding out in the hills. There's probably half a hundred different factions and fronts, all squabbling about their revolutionary lineage. We don't know them, we don't have the time to get to know them and anyway '.

'I know them.'

'What?'

'I said I know them. HM Emerging Markets did an in-depth survey of the ME's radical factions last year.' Chris gestured, open-handed.

'We flew out there, Mike. I've got the files at home somewhere.'

Bryant gaped. 'You're bulls.h.i.+tting me.'

'Do you a profile by Thursday.'

'Jesus. What did you do, just come up here to make my day?'

'Oh.' Chris picked up his coffee and crossed to the low table where Mike kept the chess board. He hooked up a knight between index and second finger and relocated it. 'Almost forgot. Check.'

Bryant grinned and feinted at him with the bat. Chris caught it with his other hand.

'Motherf.u.c.ker.'

'Yeah.' Chris looked at the board. 'And mate in seven, I reckon.'

SIXTEEN.

The HM files were in the garage, stacked on an upper shelf next to a box of worn gear bearings that Carla had hung onto for some unfathomable reason. Chris went up on a stepladder to retrieve the disc he wanted and nearly turned an ankle jumping down afterwards.

'f.u.c.k.'

Had Carla been there to see it, he thought, she would have laughed.

She would have laughed out loud, and he would have joined in, pretending that his ego was not p.r.i.c.ked through, and after a few moments the fleeting anger at being mocked would have leached out for real.

But Carla was at an evening course with two other mechanics from Mel's Autofix, learning about developments in virtual design technology, and the house echoed with her absence.

He went through to the study and fed the disc into the datadown. A search protocol swam up onto the screen.

'North Andean Monitored Economy,' he told the machine. 'Hernan Echevarria, political opponents.'

The search protocol dissolved and in its place a series of thumbprint photos began to spring up like multicoloured blisters. Chris stood and watched for a moment as the programme resized the rapidly multiplying images, trying vainly to fit them all onto a single screen page.

Then he went out to the lounge, to fetch the whisky.

He'd built this file in a no-star hotel room overlooking the luminous night-time surf of the Caribbean. Hammett McColl sent two teams out to the NAME - one highly publicised visit, booked into the Bogota Hilton, whose function was largely cosmetic, and one stealth audit crew, flown in undercover of a shoestring movie company's location scouting. It had been a stupid kind of fun at first, until the policing data started to flow in.

Chris remembered velvet black nights, street life and lanterns strung in the street outside. Sweat rolling off his body and brow, p.r.i.c.ked out in almost equal quant.i.ties by the humidity and the details from the detention records. His fingers leaving damp prints on the keys of the laptop.

He drank cane rum and smoked atrocious local cigarettes and somehow kept it all in perspective most of the time. Just sometimes he paused and lifted his fingers from the keyboard as if he had heard something, 120because even the rum could not keep out the animal-instinctive knowledge that the things the reports described were going on right now in police stations across the city.

He never heard screams, he told himself, then and later. It was the reports talking, working at his imagination like a feeble dentist at an infected tooth. That was all. He heard nothing.

The telephone rang.

He jerked round, one hand on the neck of the whisky bottle and looked out towards the lounge. It was the home phone, the unscreened line. He left the office and stood in the connecting doorway, staring across at the little blue screen. The call bell symbol pulsed on and off in green, in time with the soft chiming.

Who Can't be Carla. He checked his watch. The seminar still had half an hour to run, and anyway he'd had the thought before he knew what time it was. As their separate work schedules chewed off more and more of the time they used to spend together, they'd fallen out of the habit of checking in with each other for anything other than pure necessity.

The telephone rang.

He watched it stupidly, holding the whisky, thoughts locked up.

Work would have used the datadown. From habit and from the manual. There was a Shorn directive against talking shop on unscreened lines.

The phone rang.

Erik, ringing to back down from the ludicrous sulk Carla had described when Chris got back from the north. Chris grimaced. That particular Viking? Not likely.

Just answer the f.u.c.king thing, for Christ's sake.

He crossed to the terminal and thumbed the accept. The blue background blipped out and a picture sank into place.

For a curious moment, Chris wasn't sure what he was looking at. He made out dark glossy hair and a profile, seemingly pillowed on twin cus.h.i.+ons that...

Moaning gusted through the air from the speaker.

The profile turned, mouth open.A hand appeared, enamel red-tipped.

Adrenalin bubbled abruptly through Chris's head as the picture made sense. He was watching a slice of holop.o.r.n, downloaded direct to the phone link..A heavily made-up woman with long black tresses was crouched over an equally painted blonde partner, sucking and nibbling at a pair of b.r.e.a.s.t.s so large and so perfectly rounded it was hard to believe they were physically attached to either partic.i.p.ant.

Chris sank onto the arm of the sofa, watching.

The shot dilated a little and background detail emerged. The two 121women were sprawled on what appeared to be some kind of exercise bench and wore nothing beyond a few studded leather accessories that served only to lift and separate curved areas of flesh. The blonde half of the duo was on her back and upside down, hair trailing to the floor. The other woman had somehow contrived to straddle her partner but leave her own backside raised high in the air like the top of a child-drawn heart. The twin mounds of b.u.t.tocks mirrored the silicone-enhanced globes of the woman below so that a bizarre kind of vertical symmetry was created. You could almost believe you were looking at a single hourgla.s.s-shaped creature with the incidental appendages of limbs and faces added after the event.

Chris felt the blood stirring through his stomach and puddling into his p.r.i.c.k as the two woman faked their way towards a mutual climax.

The dark-haired performer was evidently cast in the role of dominatrix and she worked the other woman's flesh with much snarling and flash ing of purple-painted eyes, while the blonde beneath her moaned and rubbed semi-convincingly at her own improbable b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The dominatrix-- The thought skated almost casually across the rink of his mind, replacing something else he'd been going to think.

--was Liz Linshaw.

He leaned forward uncomfortably over his erection. Confirmed, the recognition sent a small s.h.i.+ver up his spine. Liz Linshaw had aged a few years since the footage was shot, but behind the purple eyeshadow and the dyed black hair, the face was unmistakable. It was the same line of cheekbone and nose, the same long, mobile mouth. The same slightly crooked teeth.

Chris's eyes flickered from the face to the exposed flesh below it. Six weeks ago, at the Tebbit Centre studio, he'd seen the steep curve of her cleavage loaded into just-glimpsed lingerie under an open-necked :I blouse. He'd fallen asleep that night thinking about it and - he only i admitted it to himself now - he'd looked for it on the morning Prom and App bulletins since.

Now, here it was laid out for his perusal at leisure, and it was, he noticed, the same steep curve. Liz Linshaw's b.r.e.a.s.t.s were not of the same epic proportions as those of her performing partner, but they were still cosmetic-standardenough to defy gravity without external support, it The nipples, now being forced mock-s.a.d.i.s.tically into the blonde woman's mouth, were large and dark and blunt. If there were scars where the implants had gone in, they were lost in the all-over tan.

Chris was rock hard.

He watched as the blonde woman's mouth dragged and smeared down the length of Liz Linshaw's body to the juncture of her thighs.

122The panting and moaning grew mutual as the two women got into the inevitable top-to-tail clinch and filled their brightly taloned hands with bronzed flesh. Chris's hand moved unwillingly across the buckle of his belt. Semi-convincing or not-- White lights splashed across the window and drenched the curtains.

The Landrover crunched up the drive.

Chris leapt up and snapped the phone off. The liquid sounds of o.r.g.a.s.m evaporated into stillness. For a moment he stood over the unit, glaring at it. The message option pulsed, download message, dump message, replay message, download, dump, replay, download, dump replay, download He stabbed the screen and the copying bar filled from left to right like a tiny, unrolling carpet in mauve.

The Landrover's engine stilled. A door clunked, open and closed.

He stabbed the eject b.u.t.ton and s.n.a.t.c.hed the minidisc as it emerged.

It fell from his fingers, hit the floor and rolled.

Footsteps on gravel.

He cast about, tiny triphammers in his temples. The disc glinted silver from under an armchair.

Carla's recognition tag sc.r.a.ped on the lock.

He bent and grabbed the disc, buried it in his pocket on the way out of the lounge. He heard the front door open as he reached the study. He made it to his seat.

'Chris? I'm home.'

'Just a minute.'

The erection, he was relieved to find, had melted in the panic. His jeans felt almost loose. He swivelled on the chair as Carla came in and kissed him on the cheek.

'Work?' There was just a hint of weary resignation in the single word as she glanced past him at the screen.

'That's right.' He returned the kiss, feeling as if he fitted badly into his own skin. The words were jumbled and overlarge on his tongue. 'It's some stuff I'm digging out for Michael.'