Market Forces Part 43

'I saw him die,' said Barranco.

Chris shook himself. 'I, uh. Good. I hope that was worth something to you, Vicente. I hope you feel. Avenged.'

'Yes. It is good to know he is dead.'

When the Colombian showed no further sign of speaking, Chris cleared his throat.

'Listen, Vicente. Get some rest. With what's coming down in the next few weeks, you're going to need it. Plane's not 'til noon, so sleep in.

Lopez'll get you up in plenty of time.'

Silence, sifting down.

'Chris?'

'Yeah. Still here.'

'They aren't going to punish you for this?'

'No one's going to punish me for anything, Vicente. Everything's under control, and you and I are going right to the top of this thing, together. I give it six months before you're in the streets of Bogotfi.

Now get so:ne sleep. I'll see you tomorrow.'

He waited for a reply. When there was none, he shrugged, cut the connection and gave hinself to the driving.

changemaker/ He got off at the Elsenham ramp, and picked up the road east,pus.h.i.+ng the Saab faster than was smart. The car jolted in potholes and the engine grew shrill as he dropped gears late on the bends. Trees stood at the roadside, sudden and dusty-looking in the glare of the Saab's lights. When he got to Hawkspur Green, he shed some of his speed, but he was still rolling too fiast. The car snarled angrily to itself as he took theturn into the driveway, and he had to lean on the brakes.

He killed the high beams and up ahead in the sudden dark, the house security lights flared to life. He frowned and glanced at the ID broadcast set. A tiny green active light glowed back at him, rea.s.suring as far as it went. He felt tension go stealing along his nerves, wondering if Notley had, after all, gone conservative on him and sent night-callers 281with s|enced guns. The Saab crunched up the winding drive. He reached across to the glove conpartment and opened it. The Nemex fell out into his palm, still slightly greasy from the factory wrapping oils.

He straightened up again and cleared the last bend.

Carla was waiting for him, wrapped tight in a towelling robe, hair wet and straggling. Bacldit by the security system's lamps, she looked like the ghost of a drowned woman. When she bent to his window, face hard-boned from the wet and the lack of make-up, he almost jumped.

He stopped the Saab short and opened the window.

'What are you doing out here? You'll catch your death of cold.'

'Vasvik,' she said. 'He just called.'

The rest of the week snapped by like scenery.

He got Barranco out of the country, got final signatures on the regime term sheets on the way to the airport. Sandwiched between Lopez and Chris in the helicopter, Barranco signed it all like a man under sedation. Chris waved him goodbye from the asphalt.

He dropped in on Mike at the hospital. The other executive had nothing worse than severe bruising across the ribcage from the machine-gun fire, but it seemed politic to keep him in the intensive care unit for a few days at least. There were news crews queuing in the corridor outside, but Shorn security had them managed.

'So now you're a f.u.c.king celebrity?'

Mike grinned from a chair beside the bed. There were a couple of small cuts on his face, and his left hand was bandaged. He got up, wincing with the effort.

'You see Liz out there?' he asked.

'No. You expecting her?'

'Never know.' Mike poured himself a drink from a pitcher beside the bed. 'Nah, to be honest, she'd be the last thing I need right now-. I'm in enough pain just breathing heavily. You want some of this?'

'What is it?'

'What does it look like? Juice.'

'Maybe later. What happened to your face?''Ah.' Mike waved dismissively. 'Did it myself with a broken bottleneck, beforehand. Good for the media to see a real wound or two, I reckon.'

'And the hand?'

A scowl. 'Sprained any wrist going down on the pavement. Like a f.u.c.king idiot. I was trying to keep Carrasco upright for the machine gun, like this. And then dive out of the way, this way, when they tossed in the grenade. It was awkward.'

'amy witnesses?'

282Bryant shook his head. 'Monday night, and it's a quiet street, anyway.

A couple of people might have looked our way once the firing started maybe, but too late to notice anything odd. There'll be footage from the hotel security cameras, maybe that street scanner we couldn't mask out at the corner of Stafford Street. Elaine's already on it. No problem, she says. Barranco get off okay?'

Back at Shorn, Chris sat in the covert viewing chamber while Nick Makin and Louise Hewitt talked to Francisco Echevarria by uplink.

The young man was pale and hollow-eyed, and it was clear he had been cuing. From the way he kept looking off to the side, it was also clear he was not alone in the projection room at the other end. Hewitt conveyed smooth corporate sympathies, and encouraged him not to concern himself with contractual details at such a time. Shorn's own princ.i.p.al officer for the NAME account was, in any case, unable to leave hospital for the foreseeable future. There was no sense in rus.h.i.+ng into anything.

Shorn CI would be very happy to put the whole issue on ice until the family felt more able to deal with the negotiations.

by which time, Barranco will have your worthless nuts in the ficking vice, you and your whole stinking hacienda clan The sudden violence of his own thoughts took Chris by surprise.

Francisco Echevarria flickered out. They adjourned to Hewitt's office to discuss a tentative calendar for Barranco's revolution.

He went down to the forty-ninth floor to thank the junior execs that had covered the other accounts for them while the crisis was in full swing. He took gifts - cask-strength Islay single malt, Galapagos bourbon ground coffee, single estate Andaluz olive oil - and got into mock sparring sessions with a couple of the known hardcases in the section. No full-force blows, he stayed just the right side of friendly, but he pushed hard and fast and got close-up body contact each time. It wasn't wise to show raw grat.i.tude, untempered by signs of strength. It could get taken the wrong way.

He got back his caseload. Started mechanically through the detail, building back up to operational pitch where necessary.

He took a basket of Indonesian fnfit and a crate of Turkish export beer up to the hospital, and found Liz Linshaw sitting on the corner of Mike's bed. Mike sat there grinning like a post-b.l.o.w. .j.o.b idiot, Liz was a study in her usual off-screen rough-and-ready elegance. She showed Chris exactly the civilised blend of camaraderie and casual flirtation that he remembered from their earliest meetings. The downs.h.i.+ft cut him to the quick.

'Listen, Chris,' Mike said finally, waving a hand at the bedside seat Liz wasn't using. 'We've been talking about your no-namer problem.

Liz says she could ask around, no problem.'283'That's great.' He looked across at her. 'Thanks.'

'My pleasure.'

It was more than he could handle. He caught himself with a barbed comment about Suki rising to his lips, and called time. He made workload excuses and got out.

As he opened the door to go, Liz Linshaw called him back.

'Chris, I'll be in touch,' she said.

Back at Shorn, he went down to the gyn and did an hour of full contact with the autobag.

He worked late.

He took the Nemex to the firing ranges, and emptied two dozen clips into the ghost-dance of holotargets there. The machine scored him high on accuracy and speed, abysmally low on selection. He'd killed too many innocent bystanders.

And then it was Sat.u.r.day.

It was time.

284THIRTY-SIX.

There were police trucks gathered at the entrance to the Brundtland.

Revolving blue lights slashed the poorly-lit walkways and stair stacks with monotonous regularity, each touch fleeting and then gone, giving way again to the gloom. Torch beams and bulky armoured figures moved on the exterior walkways. An ampbox blattered across the night.

'Ahfude.' Chris braked the Landrover to a halt.

Carla stared at out at the lights, wide eyed. 'Do you think...'

'I don't know. Stay here.'

He left the engine running and climbed down, digging in his pocket for corporate ID, hoping the Nemex didn't show under the jacket. A body-armoured police sergeant noticed the new arrival and detached himself from the knot of figures beside the trucks. He strode across the cracked concrete, torch and sidearm held high.

'You can't come in here.'

Chris held his ID out in the beam of the torch. 'I'm visiting someone.

What's going on?'

'Oh.' The sergeant's tone s.h.i.+fted, abruptly conciliatory. He holstered his pistol. 'Sorry, sir. With what you're driving, you know, I didn't realise.'

'Don't worry about it.' Chris manufactured a grin of forbearance.

'Easy mistake to make. My wife's wheels. Sentimental value. So what's going on here?'

'It's drugs, sir. Bathroom edge. A couple of the local gangwits have been bad boys. Exporting their product across the line, dealing in the Kensington catchinent. Hanging around the schools and such.' The sergeant grimaced in the torchlight and shook his head. 'Not the first time either, and the comnmnity leaders have been warned before, so it's the next step. VTe've been told to turn up the heat on cases like this. You know how it's done, sir. Break a few doors, break a few heads. Only thing gets through to these animals in the end.'

'Sure. Look, I need to get up to the fifth floor and see my father-in law. It's quite urgent. Can you do something about that?'

Hesitation. Chris switched on the grin again. Reached carefully into his jacket pocket, well above the Nemex.

285"I understand it's trouble you don't need right now, but it is inpor tant. I'd be very grateful.'

The torchlight gleamed off the edges of the racked plastic and the Shorn a.s.sociates holologo on the front card. At the back, the wallet was stiff with a thick sheaf of cash. The sergeant was looking down at it like someone afraid of falling.

'Fifth floor?' he said. 'That's right.'

'Just a moment, sir.' He dug out a phone and thumbed it to life.

'Gary? You there? Listen, are we working on five? No? So what's the nearest? Okay. Thanks.'

He stowed the phone. Chris handed across a slice of currency.

'Should be safe enough to go up there, sir. I'll have a couple of my men take you up, just to be sure.' He folded the notes into his palm with an awkwardness that bespoke lack of practice, and looked back at the Landrover. 'Your wife too?'

'Yeah. Tell the truth, she wants to be here a lot more than I do.'

Their escort took the form of two helmeted, body-armoured uniforms with pump action shotguns and hip-holstered pistols. They bounded from the rear of the reserve truck like eager dogs when their names were called. One was white, one black, and neither looked old enough to be shaving yet. They covered angles in the stairwell with a kind of self-conscious intensity that on older men might have looked like professionalism, and once or twice they grinned at each other. The white kid chewed gum mechanically throughout, and the black kid appeared to be rapping under his breath. They both seemed to be enjoying themselves. When the party reached the fifth floor, Chris gave them a fifty apiece and they clattered back down the stairs with what sounded like none of the drilled caution they'd exhibited on the way up.

Carla knocked at the door of fifty-seven. Erik answered, looking haggard.

'I tried to call. The police--'

'Just talked to them,' said Chris, luxuriating in the advantage. 'It's an edge bust. Nothing to worry about.'

Erik Nyquist's mouth tightened.

'Yes, I forgot,' he said thinly. 'A different matter when you're a member of the elite, isn't it. When--'

'Dad!''Maybe we could come in,' added Chris.

Nyquist gave him a venomous look, but he stood aside and they filed through into the lounge. Behind him, Chris heard the door being locked and bolted. Almost as loud through the cardboard-thin walls of 286the lounge, he could hear raised voices from the flat next door, and what sounded like a baby crying, lie glanced around the cramped living s.p.a.ce, kept an expression of distaste off his face with an effort, and seated himself gingerly in one of the battered armchairs. He looked up as Nyquist followed Carla into the room.

'Getting on with the neighbours okay?' he asked brightly, nodding towards the noise next door. 'Sounds a little below your level of intellectual debate.'

interfering f.u.c.king c.u.n.t came leaking through the wall.

Erik looked at him stonily. 'He's a dealer. He's probably expecting to have his skull caved in by your stormtroopers out there.'

'No danger of that. Their commander told me they're not working this floor. Want me to go next door and tell him?'

'In those clothes?' Erik sneered. 'He'd probably stab you as soon as look at you.'

'He could try.'

'Oh yes, I forgot. I have a professional killer for a son-in-law.'

Chris rolled his eyes and was on his way to his feet when he caught a glare from Carla that stopped him.

'Dad, that's enough.'

Nyquist looked at his daughter and sighed.

'Alright,' he said. 'Let's get on with this.'

Chris clapped his hands together, pistol-shot loud. The voices next door stopped abruptly.

'Suits me. So where is Vasvik? Hiding in the toilet?'