Market Forces

by Richard K. Morgan

  ‘Notley and I have also agreed that you’d better draft the apology to Philip’s specifications. A first draft by this evening. That’s a minimum requirement if you intend to continue with this firm. Philip’s in uplink conference right now, with Echevarria. But he’ll be done by six. Take it in for his approval then. You might like to add a verbal apology at the same time.’ She looked at him, grim amusement curled in the corner of her mouth. ‘A personal touch, say. A little bridge-building.’

  He walked out, wordless. Louise Hewitt watched him go, and as the door slammed, the smile broadened on her lips.

  It took him the walk to his own office to decide. Two flights of stairs and a corridor. He saw no one. He reached the door with his name on it, stood facing the metalled slab for ten seconds, and then turned away.

  He was a dozen paces away and accelerating before it had properly dawned on him what he was going to do.

  I look after my people.

  He found his way almost absently, most of him thinking about Carla and how fucking delighted she’d be to see his life come tumbling down like this. The main door to the conference room was locked, but the entrance to the covert viewing chamber was on a code he knew. He let himself in. Peered through the gloom and the glass panel.

  In the conference room, Philip Hamilton sat opposite a holo of Francisco Echevarria. The dictator’s son was dressed in his usual Susana Ingram splendour. He looked hard and implacable against Hamilton’s soft and light-suited untidiness.

  ‘—are aware that you have friends in Miami, and we have no desire to exclude them from the proceedings. You should certainly speak with Martin Meldreck at Calders, who will, I’m sure—‘

  Enough. He coded himself through the connecting door, stood abruptly behind Hamilton. Echevarria’s eyes widened as he stepped inside the pick-up field of the holoscanner and he knew that in the chamber on the other side of the world he had appeared, like a ghost at the feast.

  Hamilton turned around in his chair.

  ‘Faulkner.’ He wasn’t worried yet, just surprised. Anger edged his cultured tones. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, interrupting me with a client?’

  Chris grinned down at him. ‘You wanted a statement from me.’

  ‘Yes. In due course. At the moment, I’m busy. You can—‘

  Chris hit him. Open-handed, swinging from the shoulder. It took Hamilton across the side of the head and tipped him out of the chair.

  ‘First draft.’ Chris grabbed him up by the hair and hit him again in the face, this time with a fist. He felt the junior partner’s nose break. He punched him once more for security and let go. Hamilton slumped to the floor like a filled sack. He turned about, reached Francisco Echevarria with his eyes.

  ‘Hello, Paco.’ He got his breath back, straightened up the chair. ‘You don’t know me, do you? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m the man who beat your father to death.’

  Echevarria’s face tightened. ‘Are you fuckin’ crazy, man? You di’n kill my father.’

  Chris settled into the chair. ‘No, I did. The terrorist stuff was something we set up to cover what really happened. The CE—, those guys, they went with the claim because it gives them prestige. Your father was a sick fuck, and anyone killing him could claim they’d done a good day’s work.’

  ‘You gonna fuckin’ die for that, man.’ The dictator’s son was staring at him, transfixed. ‘You gonna fuckin’ die .’

  ‘Oh, please. As I was saying, there’s no way the, that bunch, are well enough organised to do something like that on the streets of London and get away with it. So, as I said, I killed your old man. I beat him to death, in this very room, with a baseball bat. All part of a day’s work for the Shorn corporation. Check with Mike Bryant if you don’t believe me, I’m a colleague of his.’

  Echevarria’s voice came out strangled. ‘You—‘

  ‘It’s what we do here, Paco. Neoliberal commercial management. Global mayhem, remote-control death and destruction. Market Forces in action. If you don’t like it—‘

  Hamilton charged him from the side.

  He had time to be impressed - fat fuck didn’t look like he had it in him -then the chair went over and the junior partner was on top of him, bloodied nose spattering down into his face, soft hands digging into the cords of his throat with surprising strength.

  Chris wasted no time struggling. He got a grip on the little finger of Hamilton’s right hand, curled it back and snapped it. Hamilton yelped and let go. Chris came up from the floor like a hinge and punched the partner in the throat. Hamilton lurched back, just on his feet, clutching at the point of impact. Somewhere on the other side of the world, Echevarria was yelling in Spanish. Chris got to his feet, stalked towards Hamilton. The partner’s eyes widened. Chris threw a punch, Hamilton ducked and fended with a rusty boxing move, the other hand still at his throat. There wasn’t much strength in it, and he came up panting. Impatiently, Chris repeated the punch, snagged Hamilton’s wrist with an aikido hold he knew and jerked the partner off balance towards him. He punched low into the expansive gut, and as Hamilton spasmed, he grabbed him round the neck and yanked up and round.

  It had the fury of the whole day behind it.

  It snapped Hamilton’s neck.

  Chris heard the muffled crack, and as the partner went limp in his grip, the rage drained out of him. He let go and Hamilton hit the floor. He turned back to Echevarria and the suited aides who were crowding into the holocast around him. They stared at him like frightened children.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Now—‘

  Something cold and jagged slapped him. He blinked and raised one arm to look at the mass of silvery wire mesh that had come out of nowhere and wrapped around his side. He was starting to turn to the door behind him, when the stungun web sparked and went off with a smell like scorching plastic. The jolt flung him hard against the table, where he clung for a moment, staring.

  In the open doorway, Louise Hewitt stood with the stungun still levelled and watched him collapse.

  The last thing he saw was her smile.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The cell measured about three metres on a side, and smelled very faintly of fresh paint, thick pastel layers of which coated the walls. There was a comfortable steel frame bed against one such wall, a three-drawer desk under the window and an en suite bathroom capsule in one corner. Next to the capsule, plain white towels hung on a heated rack and next to that there was hanging space and boxed shelving for his clothes. The fixtures were good-quality wood and metal, and the window looked out over the river through glass that only betrayed its toughened qualities with the tiny red triangle logo in one corner. The whole place was no worse than some hotels Chris had seen on placement, and it was in considerably better condition than any of the rooms in Erik Nyquist’s Brundtland estate apartment.

  As far as he could work out, he was the only person in the block.

  Guest of honour, he thought vaguely as he went to sleep the second night. Full run of the facilities.

  The truth was, the corporate police didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They’d taken his phone and his wallet on arrival, but beyond that basic security measure, they appeared to be making it up as they went along. They weren’t used to holding executives for anything more serious than drunken affray or the occasional white-collar accounting misdemeanour. Most of their duties went the other way - investigation of crimes and apprehension of suspects where the victims were corporate but the criminals were not. Anyone of that stripe who made it to custody alive would be summarily handed over to the conventional police so that grubby business of state law enforcement could be set in motion.

  Here, the victim was corporate but so was the offender.

  Say what?

  Murder, they were saying, but hell, don’t these guys off each other on the road practically every month.

  That’s different.

  It was confusing for everybody. In the ensuing vacuum, Chris was accorded a status s
omewhere between cherished celebrity and dangerous lunatic. The first role at least, he was learning how to play.

  The days inched along, like slow, bulky files downloading.

  He got meals in his cell at three appointed times daily, delivered on a tray by two uniformed officers, one of whom watched from the door while the other set down the food on the desk. An hour after each meal, the tray was removed by the same team, but only after all items of cutlery and crockery had been checked off on a palm-pad. Both men were friendly enough, but they never let the conversation get beyond pleasantries and they watched him warily all the time.

  Impotence was two clenched fists and a fizzing wire through the head. Lopez, Barranco, the NAME account. Nothing he could do.

  A different team, also all male, escorted him out of the cell for an hour’s exercise after breakfast and lunch. They marched him along well-cared-for corridors and down a stairwell that let out to an internal quadrangle. There was a profusion of plants and trees planted in shingle beds, a complex step-structured bronze fountain and a high, angled glass roof covering a third of the open space. His escort left him alone in the quad, closed the doors and watched him from a glassed-in mezzanine gallery above. The first couple of times, he paced back and forth aimlessly, less out of any real inclination than from a vague sense of what was expected of him. Once he realised this, he stopped and spent most of his allocated hour sitting on the edge of the fountain, lost in the noise it made, knotted, hopeless plans to save Joaquin Lopez from the arena, and daydreams of driving the Saab.

  When it became apparent he wasn’t leaving any time soon, he got clothes. Three changes of good-quality casuals in dark colours and a dozen sets of cotton underwear. He asked the woman who came to fit him how she wanted him to pay, cash or cards and she looked embarrassed.

  ‘We bill your firm,’ she admitted finally.

  He got no visitors, for which he was obscurely grateful. He wouldn’t have known what to say to anybody he knew.

  Between meals, the hours stretched out. He couldn’t remember a time when less had been expected of him. One of his warders offered to let him have some books, but when the promised haul arrived, it consisted of a bare half-dozen battered paperbacks by authors Chris had never heard of. He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.

  He was asked if he wanted paper and pens and said yes, reflexively, then didn’t know what to do with them. He tried to write an account of the events leading up to Philip Hamilton’s death, as much as anything to get it clear in his own head, but he kept having to cross out what he’d written and start further back. When his first line read my father was murdered by an executive called Edward Quain, he gave up. Perhaps inspired by the novel he was trying to read, he wrote an imaginary brief for the NAME account set five years into a future where Barranco had taken power and instituted wide-ranging land reform. It also seemed very far-fetched.

  He started a letter to Carla and tore it up after less than ten lines. He couldn’t think of anything worth telling her.

  The week ended. Another started.

  Shorn came for him.

  He was on morning walkabout, cheated of his usual seat at the fountain by a persistent, heavy drizzle that drenched the exposed patio area and kept him penned under the glass roof. His escort had obligingly dragged a bench out from somewhere for him, and now he sat at one end of it and stared out at the curtain of rain falling a half metre away.

  The plants, at least, seemed to be enjoying it.

  The door to the quad snapped open and he flicked a surprised glance at his watch. He’d only been there twenty minutes. He looked up and saw Louise Hewitt standing there. It was the first time he’d seen her since she shot him with the stungun. He looked back at the rain.

  ‘Morning, Faulkner. Mind if I sit down?’

  He stared down at his hands. ‘I guess they’ll stop me if I try to break your neck.’

  ‘Try to lay a fucking finger on me, and I’ll stop you myself,’ she said mildly. ‘You’re not the only one with karate training, you know.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’

  He felt the bench shift slightly as she lowered herself onto it at the other end. They sat a metre apart. The rain fell through the silence, hissing softly.

  ‘Liz Linshaw says hi,’ Hewitt told him, finally.

  It jerked his head around.

  ‘Well,’ she amended. ‘That’s paraphrase. Actually, she says, you fucking bitch, you can’t hold him without charges this long, I want to see him. She’s wrong about that, of course. We can hold you pretty much indefinitely.’

  Chris looked away again, jaw set.

  ‘We don’t plan to, though. In fact, your release papers should come through some time tomorrow morning. You can go home, or back to that expensive hotel fucknest you’ve been maintaining. Want to know how come?’

  He locked down the urge to ask, to give anything. It was hard to do. He was hungry for detail from outside, for anything to engage the frantically spinning wheels in his head.

  ‘So I’ll tell you anyway. Tomorrow’s Thursday, you should be out by lunchtime at worst. That gives you the best part of a day before you drive. We’ve posted for a Friday challenge, it’s traditional at Shorn. Gives everyone the weekend to get used to the result.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Hewitt?’ The insolence shrouded the question enough that he could justify breaking his silence. ‘What challenge?’

  ‘The partnership challenge. For Philip Hamilton’s post.’

  He coughed a laugh. ‘I don’t want Hamilton’s fucking job.’

  ‘Oh yes, you do. In fact, you issued a formal notice of challenge just before you killed him. Citing unprofessional conduct over the NAME account, ironically enough.’ She reached into her jacket and produced a palm-pad. ‘I can show you it if you like.’

  ‘No thanks. I don’t know what shit you’re cooking up, Hewitt, but it won’t start. You know the policy, you told me yourself last week. No partner-employee crossover.’

  ‘Well, yes, granted your actions were unorthodox. But, as you know, our senior partner is a big fan of policy-making by precedent. He’s agreed that we can blur the distinction in this case. Apparently, he’s had you in mind for partner status for quite a while. You or Mike Bryant, of course.’

  And then it all came crashing down on him, like a slum clearance he’d watched as a kid. Explosions ripping through what he thought was solid from one side to the other, clean straight lines of structure tipping, curtseying and dissolving into a chaos of tumbling rubble and dust while a huddled crowd watched. He couldn’t see the resulting wreckage clearly yet, but he sensed its outlines.

  ‘Mike won’t drive against me,’ he said without conviction.

  Hewitt smiled. ‘Yes, he will. I’ve talked to him. More precisely, I’ve talked to him about equity, capital wealth, partner-safe status, professional versus unprofessional behaviour and the dangers of unmanageability. Oh, and the identity of your mystery hotel guest over the last couple of weeks.’

  ‘The fuck are you talking about?’ But as he said it, the sliding sense of despair was overwhelming, because he already knew.

  ‘Don’t be obtuse, Chris. I’ve got indesp microcam footage from Liz’s house and the hotel too. Should have seen Mike’s face when he saw that stuff.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘No,’ she said almost kindly. ‘I’ve been modelling this one for months, Chris. I mean, come on. Who do you think sent you Donna Dread’s little performance in the first place?’ She waited for a response, saw she was getting none and sighed. ‘Okay, Linshaw was already leaning pretty hard in your direction, she’s such a little tart with the driving thing anyway. But even so, I think I deserve some credit. If it weren’t for me, you’d probably still be grinding through the sa
me stale old fidelity numbers with your Norwegian grease monkey.’

  Chris nodded to himself. The shock was still coming, in waves. ‘You set me up with Hamilton, didn’t you. You knew what I’d do.’

  ‘It seemed likely.’ Hewitt examined her nails modestly. ‘To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I’d get a result this good. Putting you and Hamilton on a collision course was an obvious no-lose strategy, the Lopez-Barranco stuff looked likely to pull you in, you proved that with Echevarria senior. Little favour called in at the Langley end, tip you off the account and off we go. But even so, Chris, I was impressed . You really managed to fuck up beyond my wildest dreams. I don’t know what you were thinking. If you were thinking.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Chris said distantly.

  ‘No, I do understand. You’re hooked on Barranco’s shiny new dream - actually, it’s a pretty grubby, old dream, but let’s leave that - and some macho loyalty thing for Joaquin Lopez. I just wonder what you think trashing Hamilton was going to achieve.’

  It was a ray of light, worth an almost-grin. ‘You’re wrong, Louise. Trashing Hamilton was incidental. He was just in the way. The point is, your deal with Echevarria is fucked. He’ll never touch Shorn again.’

  ‘Well, that remains to be seen. He’s a smarter young man than you give him credit for, and if we can show him your charred corpse with Mike Bryant’s boot on it, well, who knows?’

  He folded his arms. ‘I’m not doing it, Louise.’

  ‘Oh, yes you are.’ Her voice turned momentarily ugly. ‘Because if you don’t drive, then Phil Hamilton’s death is just murder, and you’ll be getting a swift ride to the organ bank. Those are your choices, Chris. Die on the road or die strapped to a gurney at St Bart’s. Either way is fine with me.’

  She leaned closer. Close enough that he could smell her perfume under the rain, clean and sharp and lightly spiced. Her voice was a serrated murmur.

  ‘And whichever it is, Chris, when it happens, as you’re going under, you just remember Nick Makin.’

  Chris looked at her, not really surprised. ‘Makin, huh?’