The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  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 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.’

  ‘Oops.’

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

  ‘Makin said that?’

  Bryant laughed. ‘No, I’m exaggerating. Makin’s too damn good a negotiator for that. But it smokes off him every time Echevarria starts in on that nobility rap. You can almost see his lip curl. Echevarria sees it too, and that fucking 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 shipped 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 then we’re fucked. Junior hasn’t got his old man’s illusions about the European connection, and he’s pissed off with Makin for his attitude - 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 curveballs 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 fuck 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 bullshitting 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.

  ‘Motherfucker.’

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

  CHAPTER 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.

  ‘Fuck.’

  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 pricked 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, pricked out in almost equal quantities 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, because 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 fucking 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 cushions 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 holoporn, 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 breasts so large and so perfectly rounded it was hard to believe they were physically attached to either participant.

  Chris sank onto the arm of the sofa, watching.

  The shot dilated a little and background detail emerged. The two women 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 buttocks 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 hourglass-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 prick 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 flashing of purple-painted eyes, while the blonde beneath her moaned and rubbed semi-convincingly at her own improbable breasts.

  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 shiver 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 blouse. He’d fallen asleep that night thinking about it and - he only 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 breasts were not of the same epic proportions as those of her performing partner, but they were still cosmetic-standard enough to defy gravity without external support. The nipples, now being forced mock-sadistically 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. The 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 Land Rover crunched up the drive.

  Chris leapt up and snapped the phone off. The liquid sounds of orgasm 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 Land Rover’s engine stilled. A door clunked, open and closed.

  He stabbed the eject button and snatched 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 scraped 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.’

  ‘You eaten?’

  ‘Yeah, the rest of the curry. You?’

  ‘On the way.’ She grimaced. ‘Kebab.’

  ‘Yeah, I can smell it.’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’ She stopped abruptly and leaned back a little, holding his head between her palms. ‘You okay? You look a bit pale.’

  ‘I’m.’ He gusted a sigh, pushing out some of the tension. Jerked his head at the screen so she had to let go. ‘It’s just some of this stuff. We’re looking at the North Andean Monitored Economy. I’d forgotten the shit they get up to in police cells out there.’

  She moved away. ‘No worse than what’s going on in Cambodia, from what I hear.’

  ‘We’re leaning on them to stop that,’ he told her.

  ‘Yeah?’ There was a dull disinterest in her voice as she walked out of the room, a coat of detachment they had both started to evolve as an alternative to the rows there was no longer time or energy for.

  He went after her. Back into the lounge, where the phone terminal stood in the corner. He remembered with a jolt through the stomach that he had not erased the original message.

  ‘Carla.’

  ‘What?’

  He moved up close to her and put one arm on the juncture of neck and shoulder. The gesture felt clumsy, unaccustomed. It was weeks since they’d fucked. She looked at him out of suspicious eyes.

  ‘What, Chris?’

  He ran his fingers up into the hair behind her ear and tugged through until his hand was clasping the back of her head. It was a caress that invariably set her cooking, but it still felt awkward. He closed the final gap between them, relieved to find that his erection had returned in force. She felt it pressed between them and a thin little smile appeared on her lips.

  ‘So what’s got into you?’

  He kissed her. After a couple of moments she warmed to it. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said when their mouths split apart.

  ‘I’ve missed you too.’

  ‘Come upstairs with me.’

  She had started to rub at the crotch of his jeans with one hand. The other worked at the buckle on his belt. ‘What’s wrong with right here?’

  He hesitated. The passion in the moment guttered down. She looked up from what her hands were doing, terrifyingly attuned to the confusion fogging his head.

  ‘Chris?’

  ‘I don’t want you getting carpet burns,’ he said, and hauled her off her feet. The classic wedding threshold lift. One hand went to her breast, cupping and

  the blonde gobbles down Liz Linshaw’s nipple, smearing crimson lipstick

  She laughed.

  ‘Well, well. Romance.’

  Staggering a little, he got her upstairs. They crashed onto the bed and shed their clothes. Carla turned towards him, naked, and he felt a tiny crystal of warmth drip and slide somewhere deep inside him. He had forgotten how beautiful her body was, the broad-shouldered, long-boned pale expanse of it, the flat width of stomach and the full breasts above, breasts that would have been large on a smaller-framed woman but here

  the swollen hemispheres, flesh taut to breaking point, kneaded by red taloned hands

  He blinked and forced the image aside. Focused on the woman he was with, slotting into the old, comfortable sequence of postures and pressures, the places she liked to be touched, the eventual coupling

  Liz Linshaw�
�s mouth, burrowing

  He could not lose it. Even when Carla got on her hands and knees ahead of him the way they both liked to finish, he fantasised the other two women into existence on the bed with them. He imagined them vampire-like, clutching and sucking at Carla’s flesh and his own, and he came with that last image printed indelibly across his eyes.

  They left then, dragging his post-coital warmth away with them like the fur of a newly slaughtered animal. And afterwards, when Carla shifted and murmured and tightened her arms around him, all he could feel was trapped inside something that wasn’t his.

  ‘This is fucking great stuff.’

  Mike Bryant paced about the office space, leafing through the sheaf of hardcopy. Chris sat in a corner armchair and watched him. He hadn’t slept well, and there was a spreading ache behind his left eye. He was having a hard time getting up to the same level of enthusiasm as Bryant.

  ‘I mean, Jesus, these guys have got some grievances. Just look at it. Better than a dozen different insurgent leaders and every single one has got family tortured to death or disappeared. Fantastic. Primary Emotional Motivation, PE fucking M, right out of Reed and Mason. Textbook diehard revolutionaries. They’ll never quit. Listen, we only need to hold about a third, no, less than a third, of this stuff over Echevarria’s head, and he should cave right in.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’

  ‘Of course he will. What’s wrong with you? We’d only need to persuade about three of these groups to team up, give them some second-hand Kalashnikovs out of stock - and Christ knows we’ve got enough of those - they’d piss all over Echevarria’s regular army.’

  Chris’s temple throbbed. ‘Yeah, but what if he doesn’t scare?’

  ‘Chris, come on.’ Mike looked at him reproachfully. ‘You’re ruining my day here.’

  ‘What if, Mike. Fucking think about it.’

  ‘Jesus, you got out of bed the wrong side today. Alright.’ Bryant threw himself into another armchair opposite, dumped his feet on the coffee table between. ‘Let’s be grown up about it. What if. Contingency planning. Like I said, we wave about a third of these guys in his face. And we tell him there are double as many more where those came from, right?’