The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  He put down the glass, patted her on the shoulder again and walked off into the press of suited bodies. Hewitt stayed where she was until Hamilton appeared noiselessly at her side.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  On the other side of the room, Chris was in fact deep in nothing other than the classic party nightmare. He was becalmed at the edges of a group he had only passing acquaintance with, listening politely to conversations he had no interest in about people and places he did not know. His jaws ached from trying not to yawn and he wanted nothing more than to bow out quietly and go home.

  Five days into the new job? I don’t think so, pal.

  Out of boredom he went to the bar for a refill he didn’t want. As he was waiting, someone nudged him. He glanced round. Mike Bryant, grin on full beam, with a Liz Linshaw clone in tow and a tray full of drinks in his hands.

  ‘Hey, Chris.’ Bryant had to raise his voice above the crowd. ‘How did you like Hewitt? Talks up a storm, doesn’t she?’

  Chris nodded noncommittally. ‘Yeah, very inspiring.’

  ‘You’re not kidding. Really gets you in the guts. First time I heard her speak, I thought I’d been personally selected to lead a holy fucking crusade for global investment. Simeon Sands for the finance sector.’ Mike did a passable burlesque of the satellite-syndicated demagogue. ‘Hallelujah, I believe! I have faith! Seriously, you look at the productivity graphs following each quarterly address she gives. Spikes through the roof, man.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Hey, you want to join us? We’re sitting back on the window flange there, see. Got some of the meanest analysts in creation gathered round those tables. Isn’t that right, Liz?’

  The woman at Bryant’s side chuckled. Shooting a glance at her, Chris suddenly realised this was no clone.

  ‘Oh, yeah, sorry. Liz Linshaw, Chris Faulkner. Chris, you know Liz, I guess. Either that or you don’t have a TV.’

  ‘Ms Linshaw.’ Chris stuck out his hand.

  Liz Linshaw laughed and leaned forward to kiss him on both cheeks. ‘Call me Liz,’ she said. ‘I recognise you now. From the App and Prom sheets this week. You’re the one that took down Edward Quain in ’41 aren’t you.’

  ‘Uh, yeah.’

  ‘Before my time. I was just a stringer on a pirate satellite ’cast in those days. Quite a kill. I don’t think there’s been one like it in the last eight years.’

  ‘Stop it, you’re making me feel old.’

  ‘Will you two stop flirting and grab some of these drinks,’ demanded Bryant. ‘I’ve got a dozen thirsty animals back there to water. What do you want in that, Chris?’

  ‘Uh, Laphroaig. No ice.’

  ‘Yyyeurgh.’

  They carried the glasses over to the tables between the three of them and unloaded. Bryant pushed and shoved at people, joking and cajoling and bullying until he had space for Chris and Liz to sit at his table. He raised his glass.

  ‘Small wars,’ he said. ‘Long may they smoulder.’

  Approval, choral in volume.

  Chris found himself squeezed in next to a tall, slim executive with steel-rimmed glasses and the air of a scientist peering down a microscope lens at everything. Chris felt a ripple of irritation. Affected eyeware had always been one of Carla’s pet hates. Fucking poverty chic, she invariably snarled when she saw the ads. Fake fucking human imperfection. It’ll be cool to ride around in a fucking wheelchair next. It’s fucking offensive. Chris tended to agree. Sure, you could run a datadown uplink projected onto the inside of the lenses, but that wasn’t it. Carla was right, it was zone chic. And why the fuck pretend you couldn’t afford corrective surgery when everything else you were wearing screamed the opposite.

  ‘Nick Makin,’ said the narrow face behind the lenses, extending a long arm sideways across his body. The grip belied his slender frame. ‘You ah Faulkner, ahn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Mike Bryant leaned across the table towards them. ‘Nick was our top commission analyst last year. Predicted that turnaround in Guatemala over the summer. Went against all the models for guerrilla conflict that we had. It was a real coup for Shorn.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Chris.

  ‘Ah.’ Makin waved it off. ‘That was last season. Can’t live off things like that indefinitely. It’s a whole new quarter. Time for fesh meat. Another new appoach. Speaking of which, Chris, ahn’t you the guy that let a pomotion challenger off the hook at Hammett McColl last year?’

  Probably imagination, the way the whole table was suddenly listening to this sharkish young man with the carefully masked speech impediment. Probably. Chris’s eyes flickered to Bryant. The big blond was watching.

  ‘You heard about that, huh?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Makin smiled. ‘It seemed kind of. Odd, you know?’

  ‘Well,’ Chris made a stiff smile of his own. ‘You weren’t there.’

  ‘No. Lucky for Elysia Bennett that I wasn’t, I’d say. Isn’t she still awound somewhere?’

  ‘I assume so. You know, Nick, I tend not to worry too much about the past. Like you said, it’s a whole new quarter. Bennett was two years ago.’

  ‘Still.’ Makin looked around the table, apparently to enlist some support. ‘An attitude like that must make for a lot of challengahs. Shit, I’d dive against you myself just for the expewience if I thought you’d have a sentiment attack like that after the event. If I lost, that is.’

  Chris realised abruptly that Makin was drunk, alcohol-fuelled aggressive and waiting. He looked at his glass on the table.

  ‘You would lose,’ he said quietly.

  By now it wasn’t his imagination. The buzz of conversation was definitely weakening as the executives lost interest in what they were discussing and became spectators.

  ‘Big words.’ Makin had lost his smile. ‘Fom a man who hasn’t made a kill in nearly four years.’

  Chris shrugged, one eye on Makin’s left hand where it rested on the table top. He mapped options. Reach down and pinion the arm. Snap the little finger of that hand, take it from there.

  ‘Actually,’ said a husky voice. ‘I think they’re quite small words from the man who took down Edward Quain.’

  The focus of attention leapt away across the table. Liz Linshaw sat with one long-fingered hand propping her tousled blonde head away from the back of her seat. The other hand gestured with a cigarette.

  ‘Now that,’ she continued, ‘was the mother of all exemplary kills. No one ever thought Eddie Quain was coming back to work. Except maybe as lubricant.’

  Somebody laughed. Nervous laughter. Someone else took it up, more certainly and the sound built around the table. Bryant joined in. The moment passed. Chris gave Makin one more hard look and then started laughing himself.

  The evening spread its wings under him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  An unclear space of time later, he was relieving himself in a scarred porcelain urinal that reeked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a week. Yellowed plaster walls crowded round him. Sullen, gouged graffiti ranged from brutal to incomprehensible and back.

  PLAISTOW GANGWITS IN YER SOUP

  YOUR RAGS SUIT THEM

  FUCK OFF MARKEY CUNT

  MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO BROWN

  EMMA SUCKED MY PRICK HERE

  U SUCKED IT USELF

  ZEK TIV SHIT

  BRING THE OMBUDSMEN

  FUCK THE U.N.

  PISS ON YOU TOO

  MEAT THE RICH

  It wasn’t always clear where one message ended and the other began. Either that or he was very drunk.

  He was very drunk.

  Bryant’s idea, as numbers in the hotel bar began thinning; carry the party over into the cordoned zones.

  ‘They may be shit-poor over there,’ voice blurred as he leaned across the table. ‘But they know how to have a good time. There’s a couple of places I know you can buy all sorts of interesting substances over the counter, and they’ve got floo
r shows you wouldn’t believe.’

  Liz Linshaw wrinkled her sculpted features. ‘Sounds strictly for the boys,’ she said. ‘If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m for a cab.’

  She kissed Bryant on the lips, causing a small storm of whoops and yells, and left with a sideways grin at Chris. A couple of other women excused themselves from the group in her wake and Mike’s expedition began to look in danger of fizzling out.

  ‘Oh, come on, you bunch of pussies,’ he slurred. ‘What are you afraid of? We’ve got guns.’ He yanked out his Nemex and brandished it. ‘We’ve got money, we’ve got this city by the balls. What the fuck kind of life is it when we own the fucking streets they walk on and the blocks they live in and we’re still fucking scared to go there? We’re supposed to be in charge of this society, not in hiding from it.’

  It wasn’t speech-making of Louise Hewitt’s calibre, but Mike managed to rope in a half dozen of the younger men round the table and a couple of the harder-drinking women. Ten minutes later, Chris was in the passenger seat of Bryant’s BMW, watching the emptied streets of the financial district roll by. In the back seat sat a nameless young male executive and an older woman called Julie Pinion - macho sales talk snarled back and forth between them. In the wing mirror, the following lights of two other cars. Shorn was descending on the cordoned zones in force.

  ‘Okay, you two keep it down,’ said Mike over his shoulder as they turned a corner. Up ahead the lights of a zone checkpoint frosted the night sky. ‘They won’t let us through here if they think there’s going to be trouble.’

  He brought the BMW to a remarkably smooth halt at the barrier and leaned out as the guard approached. He was, Chris noticed, chewing gum to mask the alcohol on his breath.

  ‘Just going down to the Falkland,’ Bryant called cheerfully, waving his Shorn Associates plastic. ‘Take in the late show.’

  The guard was in his fifties, with a spreading paunch beneath his grey uniform and broken veins across his nose and cheeks. Chris saw the cloud of vapour he made when he sighed.

  ‘Have to scan that, sir.’

  ‘ ’course.’ Bryant handed over the card and waited while the guard ran it through his hipswipe remote and handed it back. The unit chimed melodically, and the guard nodded. He seemed tired.

  ‘You armed?’

  Bryant turned back into the car. ‘Show the man your peacemakers, guys.’

  Chris slid the Nemex out of its shoulder holster and displayed it. Behind him he heard the two backseat disputants doing the same. The guard flashed his torch in the windows and nodded slowly.

  ‘Want to be careful, sir,’ he told Bryant. ‘There’s been layoffs at Pattons and Greengauge this week. Lot of angry people out getting drunk tonight.’

  ‘Well, we’ll stay out of their way,’ said Bryant easily. ‘Don’t want any trouble. Just want to see the show.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ The guard turned back to the checkpoint cabin and gestured to whoever was inside. The barrier began to rise. ‘I’ve got to check your friends as well. You want to park just past the gate till we clear them?’

  ‘Be glad to.’ Mike beamed and drove the BMW through.

  The second car passed muster but with the third there was some trouble. They peered back and saw the guard shaking his head while suited forms craned from the windows front and back, gesturing.

  ‘The fuck is going on back there?’ muttered Julie Pinion. ‘Couldn’t they even act sober for a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Stay here,’ Bryant said, and climbed out into the night air. They watched him walk back to the third car, lean down and say something to those leaning out. The heads disappeared back into the vehicle, as if on wires. Bryant put his hand on the guard’s shoulder and dug in his pocket. Something passed between them. The guard said something to the driver of the third car. A clearly audible whoop of delight bounced out of the windows. Bryant came back, grinning.

  ‘Gratuities,’ he said as he got into the car again. ‘Ought to be compulsory, the shit they pay those guys.’

  ‘How much did you give him?’ asked Pinion.

  ‘Hundred.’

  ‘A hundred! Jesus.’

  ‘Ah, come on Julie. I’ve tipped waiters better than that. And he’s going to take a lot more heat than a waiter if this dinner party goes awry.’

  The little convoy pressed on into the cordoned zone.

  It was an abrupt transition. In the financial district, street lighting was a flood of halogen, chasing out shadows from every corner. Here, the street lamps were isolated sentinels, spilling a scant pool of radiance at their feet every twenty metres of darkened street. In some places, they were out, lamps either fused or smashed. Elsewhere they had been destroyed more unambiguously, rendered down to jagged concrete stumps still attached to their trunks by a riot of cables and metal bands.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Pinion disgustedly. ‘What a bunch of fucking animals. It’s no wonder nobody wants to spend money fixing these places up. They’d just tear it all down again.’

  Even the street beneath their wheels changed. Within a hundred metres of the checkpoint the ride turned bumpy and Bryant had to slow down and negotiate rain-filled potholes the size of small garden ponds. On either side, the houses huddled. Here and there, for no visible reason, one had been taken down, sprawling smashed brick and spilled interior in the space in which it had stood. There were no other vehicles on the streets, moving or parked. A few figures moved on the pavements on foot, but they grew immobile as the twilight-blue armoured saloons with their Shorn Associates logos rolled by. Most turned up their collars or simply sank back into the shadows.

  ‘Fucking creepy,’ said the young executive behind Chris. ‘I mean, I knew it was bad out here but—’

  ‘Bad,’ Julie Pinion coughed laughter at him. ‘You think this is bad? Mike, you remember the suburbs in that shithole we got seconded to for Christmas last year.’

  ‘Muong Khong, yeah.’ Bryant looked in the rearview. ‘Gives you a whole new perspective on what real poverty is, man. Chris, you ever been on secondment? With Emerging Markets, I mean?’

  ‘Couple of times, yeah.’

  ‘Pretty awful, huh?’

  Chris remembered the call of a muezzin in the warm evening air, smells of cooking and a small child prodding three goats home-wards. Later, he’d been walking past a stone-and-thatch dwelling when a young girl of about fourteen came out and offered him fruit from their dinner table because he was a guest in the village. The unlooked-for kindness, with its hints of an antique and alien culture, had pricked tears out on the underside of his eyes.

  He never told anyone.

  ‘It wasn’t somewhere I would have wanted to live,’ he said.

  Pinion smirked. ‘No shit,’ she agreed.

  The Falkland - a squat brick building at the intersection of two streets still boasting a picturesque scattering of car wrecks. The vehicles looked old enough to have burnt leaded fuel when they were alive. Mike Bryant’s little convoy swept to a disdainful halt and disgorged suits.

  ‘No cars,’ said the young executive, wonderingly. ‘I only just noticed.’

  ‘Of course, no cars,’ said Pinion, rolling her eyes in Chris’s direction. ‘Who, outside of criminals, do you suppose can afford a tank of fuel around here? Or a licence, come to that?’

  ‘Price of the green agenda,’ said Mike as he alarmed the car. ‘You guys coming or what?’

  The door of the Falkland was beaten steel. Two black men in coveralls stood outside, one dangling a sawn-off shotgun negligently from his left hand, the other, older, watching the street, arms folded impassively across his chest. When he spotted Mike Bryant, he unwrapped and his face split into a huge grin. Mike lifted a hand in greeting as he crossed the street.

  ‘Hey, Troy. What’re you doing on the fucking door, man?’

  ‘Protectin’ my investment.’ The rich treacle of a Jamaican accent. ‘Bein’ seen. It’s more than I can say for you, Mike. ’Ave not seen you in a fuckin’ long ti
me. What’s the matter? Suki not let you out to play any more?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Mike winked. ‘Chopped it off and locked it in the bedroom dresser. That way she can take it out and play with it while I’m at work. Which, by the way, is all the fucking time.’

  ‘That is the motherfuckin’ truth.’ He looked at the entourage Bryant had brought to the bar. ‘These are friends of yours?’

  ‘Yep. Julie, Chris. Meet Troy Morris. He owns this shithole. Among others. Troy, Julie Pinion, Chris Faulkner. The rest I don’t remember.’ Bryant waved back at the entourage he was trailing. ‘Just sycophants, you know how it is when you’re an important man.’

  The Jamaican reeled off a deep chuckle. ‘Faulkner,’ he rumbled. ‘No relation of William, right?’

  Chris blinked, confused. Before he could ask, Mike Bryant broke in again.

  ‘They’re all carrying, Troy. Left mine in the car, but these guys are new and they don’t know the rules. Bear with us. You got a bag for the hardware?’

  With the dozen-odd pistols dumped into a greasy holdall clearly reserved for this specific purpose, they pushed inside. Quiet slammed down through the smoke-hung bar. Even the girl on the stage stopped in mid writhe, one doped boa constrictor gripped in each fist. Music thumped on behind her, suddenly unchallenged by voices. Mike nodded to himself, took a chair to the centre of the bar and climbed onto it.

  ‘As you may have noticed,’ he said, pitching his voice above the music. ‘We are zek-tivs. I know that may pass for a crime around here, but we don’t want any trouble. All we want is to buy a drink for everyone in the house, and have a few ourselves. Anyone who has a problem with that can come and have a word with me, or my friend Troy Morris, and we’ll sort your problem out. Otherwise, it’s open bar for the next ten minutes and the drinks are on me.’ He turned to the girl on the stage. ‘Please. The show must go on. It looks like we got here just in time.’

  He climbed down and went to talk to the barman. Conversations resumed slowly. The dancer went back, a little stiffly, to what she was doing with the two boas. People drifted to the bar, a few at first, then the bulk of those present. Bryant appeared to know a couple of them. Chris was introduced, promptly forgot names and cornered Mike.