‘This’ll do.’ Mike slid into a booth and beat a drum riff on the tabletop with the flat of both hands. ‘I’m starving.’
There was a menu scrawled in luminous purple marker across the quickwipe surface of the table. Chris glanced across it and looked away again, nervous of the standing queue at his back. He knew the food. He’d eaten in places like this most of his teens, and occasionally, after a mechanic’s night out with Carla and the others from Mel’s Autofix, he still did. Like prime-time satellite programming, it would be a loudly flavoured blend of low-grade bulking agents seasoned with garishly advertised vitamin and mineral additives. The sausages would average about thirty per cent meat, the bacon came swollen with injected water. He was glad he had no appetite.
A waitress appeared at the booth.
‘Getya?’
‘Coffee,’ said Chris. ‘White. Glass of water.’
‘I’ll have the big breakfast,’ said Mike expansively. ‘You get eggs with that?’
‘They’re Qweggs,’ said the waitress sullenly.
‘Right. Better give me, uh, six of those then. And plenty of toast. Coffee for me too. Black.’
The waitress turned her back and strode off. Mike watched her go.
‘Friendly here.’
Chris shrugged. ‘They know who we are.’
‘Yeah, which means a massive tip if they can just secrete a little common courtesy. Pretty fucking short-sighted attitude, if you ask me.’
‘Mike.’ Chris leaned across the table. ‘What do you expect? The clothes you’re wearing cost more than that girl makes in a year. She probably lives in an apartment smaller than my office, damp walls, leaking drains, no security, and about two-thirds her weekly wage just to cover the rent.’
‘Oh, and that’s my fucking fault?’
‘It isn’t about—’
‘Look, I’m not her fucking mother. I didn’t pop her out in the zones, just so I could claim breeding benefit. And if she doesn’t like it here, she can make her own sweet way out, just like anybody else.’
Chris looked at his friend with sudden dislike. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘That’s right. Listen, Troy was born and bred in the zones, he made it out. James is off to the Scratcher in six weeks, he could end up making more money than both of us. So don’t tell me it can’t be done.’
‘And what about Troy’s cousin? The one got raped two nights ago by Dixon and his pals. How come she hasn’t made it out?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’ Bryant’s anger collapsed as rapidly as it had sprouted. He slumped back in his seat. ‘Look, all I’m saying, Chris, is some of us have what it takes. Others don’t. I mean, this isn’t some cut-rate little African horrorshow of a nation. You don’t have to live in the zones because of your tribe or something. No one cares what colour you are here, what religion or race. All you’ve got to do is make the money.’
‘They seem to care what colour you are in Dixon’s neighbourhood. ’
‘Yeah, that’s fucking politics, Chris. Some maggots’ nest of little local government thugs looking for a way to build a powerbase. It’s got nothing to do with the way the real world works.’
‘That’s not the impression I get from Nick Makin.’
‘Makin?’
‘Yeah, you heard him in that meeting. He’s a fucking racist, that’s why he can’t handle Echevarria.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Mike brooded. ‘Might have to do something about Makin.’
The coffee came. It wasn’t as bad as Chris had expected. Bryant drained his and asked for another cup.
‘There going to be an investigation?’ wondered Chris.
‘Nah, shouldn’t think so.’
‘They got you for those jackers at the Falkland.’
‘Yeah, that’s a whole different story. Civil rights activists, off the back of grieving family members, my little Jason was a good boy, he only stole cars because social deprivation blah, blah, boo, hoo. That kind of crap. This thing with Dixon is different. There’s an agenda. Dixon’s political friends are on the anti-globalism wing. Britain for the British, immigrants out, fuck multiculturalism and tear down the international corporate power conspiracy. Right now, the last thing they need is for that to come out into the open. They’ll sit on this.’
‘But the zone police—’
‘They’ll buy them off. They’ll get some paycop outfit to dig the slugs out of Dixon’s floor and the street under that other piece of shit we wasted, and they’ll make them as Nemex load.’ Bryant grinned. ‘That should send a message.’
Chris frowned. ‘Isn’t that going to be a whole stack of political capital for them? The big bad corporations, off the leash. They’ll milk it ’til it bleeds.’
‘Oh, yeah, on a local level, of course they will. They’ll turn Dixon into a fucking martyr, no doubt. If he lives, they can have him in a wheelchair at the local Young Nazi fundraisers, and if he dies they can have his weeping widow do the same thing. But they aren’t about to take on Shorn in the public arena. They know what we’d do to them.’
‘And Dixon?’
Mike grinned again. ‘Well, I’d say Dixon’s got his hands full for the next six months just learning to walk again. And if he ever does, well he’s got a family and another eye to worry about before he does anything stupid. Plus, you know what? Somehow, I don’t think the civil rights crowd are going to be there for him. Just not the right profile.’
Mike’s breakfast arrived on a tray and the waitress set about laying it out. While she worked, Bryant grabbed a Qwegg off the plate with finger and thumb, and popped it in his mouth. He chewed vigorously.
‘You going to work today?’ he asked through the mouthful.
Chris thought about the house, cold with Carla’s absence or, even worse, with her unspeaking presence. He nodded.
‘Good.’ Mike swallowed the Qwegg, nodded thanks at the departing waitress and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Listen, I want you to call Joaquin Lopez. Tell him to catch a flight down to the NAME and start sounding out the names on that list. Today, if possible. We’ll pick up the expenses.’
Chris felt a small surge go through his guts, not unlike the feeling he’d had talking to Liz Linshaw the night before. He nursed his coffee and watched Mike eat for a while.
‘You think we’re going to have to do it?’ he asked finally.
‘Do what?’
‘Blow Echevarria out of the water.’
‘Well,’ Bryant chased another Qwegg around his plate and after some effort managed to puncture it with his fork. ‘Believe me, I’d love to. But in this case, you know how it goes. Regime change is our worst-case scenario. We’ll only go that way if we absolutely have to.’
He gestured at Chris with his fork.
‘You just get Lopez on the case. Get the names to Makin, make sure there’s a clear strategy locked down for the uplincon next week.’
‘You want me in on that?’
Bryant shook his head, chewing. He swallowed.
‘Nah, you stay out of it. I want a clean break between current negotiations and whatever we need you to do. Echevarria doesn’t know about you, he doesn’t know about your contacts. There’s no line for him to follow. Better that way.’
‘Right.’
Bryant grinned. ‘Don’t look so disappointed, man. I’m doing you a favour. I tell you, every time I have to shake hands with that piece of shit, I feel like I need to disinfect. Murderous old fuck.’
They gave it another half hour to let the queues subside, then paid and left. Despite his grouching, Bryant left a tip almost as much as the cost of the whole meal. Outside, he yawned and stretched and pivoted about, face turned up to the sun. He seemed in no hurry to get in the car.
‘We going to work?’ asked Chris.
‘Yeah, in a minute.’ Mike yawned again. ‘Don’t feel much like it, tell you the truth. Day like this, I should be home playing with Ariana. Playing with Suki, come to that. Christ, you know, we haven’t fucked in nearly two week
s.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Bryant cocked his head. ‘Carla giving you grief about that?’
‘Only all the time.’ Chris considered the reflexive lie. ‘Well, recently not so much. We’re both tired, you know. Don’t see a lot of each other.’
‘Yeah. Got to watch that shit. Come the end of quarter, you ought to take some time out. Maybe get out to the island for a week.’
‘You see Hewitt signing off on that?’
‘She’ll have to, Chris, the profile you’ve got on Cambodia. It’s turning into the year’s premium contract. Shorn owe us all some serious downtime before the end of this year. Hey, who knows, maybe me and Suki’ll get out there the same time as you guys. That’d be cool, huh?’
‘Yeah. Cool.’
‘Well, don’t sound so fucking enthusiastic about it.’
Chris laughed. ‘Sorry. I’m wasted.’
‘Yeah, let’s kick this in gear.’ Bryant disarmed the BMW’s alarm and cracked the driver’s side door. ‘Sooner we get out of here, sooner we can get home and act like we have a life.’
They cleared the checkpoint without incident, threaded onto the approach road to the bridge and accelerated up across the river. Sunlight turned the water to hammered bronze on either side of them. Chris fought down a wave of tiredness and promised himself a take-out from Louie Louie’s as soon as they hit the Shorn tower.
‘Be good to get some real coffee,’ he muttered.
‘That coffee wasn’t bad.’
‘Ah, come on. It was about as real as the eggs. I’m talking about something with a pedigree here. Not fucking Malsanto’s Miracle beans. Something with a hit you can feel.’
‘Fucking speedfreak.’
They both laughed, as if on cue. The BMW filled up with the sound as they left the river behind and cruised into the gold-mirrored canyons beyond. To Chris, groggy with no sleep and the events and chemicals of the night before, it felt good at a level deeper than he could find words to explain.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mike dropped him outside Louie Louie’s and drove off into the car decks with a wave. Chris shot himself full of espresso at the counter, then ordered take-out and another coffee to carry up to his office. Shorn was unusually quiet for a Saturday, and he barely saw anyone on his way in. Even the security shift was made up of men and women he barely knew well enough to nod at.
It was the pattern for the day. Outside of the datadown, there was no one to talk to. Makin had not shown, which was going to make for a tight squeeze when they tried to put together the NAME package on Monday. Irritated, Chris rang Joaquin Lopez anyway and told him what he wanted. Lopez, at least, was keen, but it was still the early hours of the morning in the Americas and Chris had got him out of bed. His conversation wasn’t sparkling. He grunted back understanding, possible flight times and hung up.
Chris rang Carla at Mel’s and discovered she’d taken the day off. He checked his mobile, but there was no message. He phoned home, and heard her voice telling anyone who rang she was flying up to Tromsö to see her mother. She would probably stay the week. It sounded, to Chris’s tutored ear, as if she had been crying. He threw the mobile across the office in a jag of caffeine-induced rage. He rang Mike, who was on the other line. He retrieved the mobile, got a grip on himself and went back to talking to the datadown.
By five o’clock, he’d had enough. The work was a seamless plane, extending to the horizon in all directions. Cambodia, Assam, Tarim Pendi, the Kurdish Homeland, Georgia, the NAME, Parana, Nigeria, the Victoria Lake States, Sri Lanka, Timor - in every single place, men were getting ready to kill each other for some cause or other, or were already about it. There was paperwork backed up weeks. You had to run just to stand still.
The desk phone rang. He snapped the ‘open’ command.
‘Faulkner.’
‘You still here?’
Chris snorted. ‘And where are you? Calling from the island?’
‘Give me time. Listen, rook to bishop nine. Check it out. Think I’ve got you, you bastard.’
Chris glanced over at the chess table.
‘Hang on.’
‘Yep.’ He could hear the grin in Bryant’s voice.
It was a good move. Chris studied the board for a moment, moved the piece and felt a tiny fragment of something detach itself from his heart and drop into his guts. He went back to the desk.
‘Pretty good,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t think it’s locked up yet. I’ll call you back.’
‘Do that. Hey, listen, you and Carla want to drop round tonight? I rang Suki and she’s just bought a screening of that new Isabela Tribu movie. The one that won all the awards, about that female marine in Guatemala.’
‘Carla’s away at the moment.’ He tried to make it sound casual, but it still hurt coming out. ‘Gone to see family in Norway.’
‘Oh. You didn’t mention—’
‘No, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I mean, we’d talked about it.’ Chris stopped lying abruptly, not sure why he suddenly needed to justify himself to Bryant. ‘Anyway, she’s gone.’
‘Right.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, look Chris. Why don’t you come across anyway? If I’ve got to watch this fucking tearjerker, I’d sooner not do it alone, you know.’
The thought of escaping the silence waiting for him at home for the warmth and noise of Mike’s family was like seeing the distant lights of a village through a blizzard. It felt like cheating Carla out of something. It felt like rescue. On the other hand, given the fury of the last knock-down drag-out bare-knuckle bout with his own wife, he wasn’t sure he could face Suki Bryant’s saccharine Miss Hostess 2049 perfection.
‘Uh, thanks. Let me think about it.’
‘Got to be better than going home to an empty house, pal.’
‘Yeah, I—’ The phone queeped. ‘Hang on, I’ve got an incoming. Might be Lopez from the airport.’
‘Call me back.’ Mike was gone.
‘This is Chris Faulkner.’
‘Well, this is Liz Linshaw.’ There was a dancing mockery in the way she said it, a light amusement that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite touch. He groped after words.
‘Liz. What, uhm, what can I do for you?’
‘Good question. What can you do for me?’
The last twenty-four hours fell on him. Suddenly, he was close to angry. ‘Liz, I’m about to call it a day here, and I’m not really in the mood for games. So if you want to talk to me—’
‘That’s perfect. Why don’t I buy you dinner this evening?’
About half a dozen reasons why not suggested themselves. He swept them to the edges of perception.
‘You want to buy me dinner?’
‘Seems the least I can do, if we’re going to cooperate on a book.
Look, why don’t you meet me uptown in about an hour? You know a place called Regime Change?’
‘Yes.’ He’d never been inside. No one who worked Conflict Investment would ever have considered it. Just too tacky.
‘I’ll be in there from about six-thirty. The Bolivia bar, upstairs. Bring an appetite.’
She hung up.
He called Mike back and made some excuses. It was tougher work than he’d expected - he could hear the disappointment in the other man’s voice, and the offer of the night with the Bryants now carried added overtones of comfortable safety compared to—
‘Look, to be honest with you, Mike, I need some time on my own.’
A brief silence down the line. ‘You in trouble, Chris?’
‘It’s.’ He closed his eyes and pressed hard on the lids with finger and thumb. ‘Carla and I aren’t getting on too well right now.’
‘Ohhh, shit.’
‘No, it’s. I don’t think it’s that serious, Mike. It’s just, I wasn’t expecting her to take off like that. I need to think.’
‘Well, if you need to talk . . .’
‘Yeah. Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.’
‘Just take it
easy, huh.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I will. I’ll talk to you Monday.’
He wandered aimlessly about the office for a while, picking things up and putting them down. He studied Mike’s move, tried out a couple of half-hearted responses. He leaned on the window glass and stared down at the lights of Louie Louie’s in the street fifty floors below. He tried not to think about Carla. Tried, with less success, not to think about Liz Linshaw.
In the end, he killed the office lights and went down to sit in his car. The enclosed space, recessed instruments, the stark simplicity of wheel and gearshift, were all more bearable than life outside. As the Saab’s security locks murmured and clunked into place, he felt himself relaxing measurably. He sank back into the seat, dropped his hand onto the gearstick and rolled his head side to side in the neck support web.
‘Now then,’ he told himself.
The car deck was almost deserted. Mike’s BMW was gone, the other man no doubt well on his way home to Suki and Ariana. There was a thin scattering of other BMWs across the luminous yellow-marked parking ranks, and Hewitt’s Audi stood off in the partners’ corner. It dawned on Chris how little he’d seen of the executive partner since Cambodia took off. There’d been the usual brushes at quarterly functions, a few team briefings and a couple of congratulatory mails, copies to himself, Bryant and Makin. For the rest, Hewitt had ignored him as completely as was possible given the work they both had to do.
For a moment he entertained the fantasy of waiting behind the wheel until she came down to the car deck. He thought about ramming the vehicle into drive and smashing the life out of her. Smearing her across the deck surfacing, the way Edward Quain—
He shook it off.
Time to go. He fired up the engine, rolled the Saab up the ramp and out into the street. He let the vehicle idle westward. There was no traffic to speak of, Regime Change was five minutes away, and with the corporate ID holoflashed into the windscreen glass he could park anywhere.
He left the Saab on a cross street filled with the offices of image consultants and data brokerage agencies. As he alarmed the car and walked away from it, he felt a slow adrenal flush rising in his blood. The buzz of a London Saturday evening drifted to him on the warm air, streets filling slowly with people, talk and laughter punctuated with the occasional hoot from a cab trying to get through the tangle of pedestrians. He slipped into it, and quickened his pace.
The Complete SF Collection Page 175