The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  Chris shook his head, wordless. He turned to face Barranco, and saw that the other man had no more emotion on his face than he’d shown when they were discussing cigarettes.

  ‘You don’t understand, Señor Faulkner?’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Well, I cannot blame you. Sometimes, neither do I. Some days, it makes more sense to take my Kalashnikov, walk into any police station or barracks bar and kill everything that wears a uniform. But I know that behind those men are others who wear no uniform, so I change this plan, and I begin to think that I should do the same thing with a government building. But then I remember that these people in turn are only the front for an entire class of landowning families and financiers who call themselves my compatriots. My head spins with new targets.’ Barranco gestured. ‘Banks. Ranches. Gated suburbs. The numbers for slaughter rise like a lottery total. And then I remember that Hernan Echevarria would not have lasted a year in power, not a single year, if he had not had support from Washington and New York.’ He raised a finger and pointed at Chris. ‘And London. Are you sure, Señor Faulkner, that you want me in your capital city?’

  Chris, still busy hauling back in the emotional canvas, mustered a shrug of his own. His voice rasped a little in his throat.

  ‘I’ll take the chance.’

  ‘Brave man.’ Barranco finished his own cigarette and pinched it out between finger and thumb. ‘I suppose. A brave man, or a gambler. Which should I call you?’

  ‘Call me a judge of character. I think you’re smart enough to be trusted.’

  ‘I’m flattered. And your colleagues?’

  ‘My colleagues will listen to me. This is what I get paid for.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

  Chris caught the drip of it in Barranco’s voice, the same thing he’d seen in the other marquistas’ eyes in the shack.

  fuck

  He’d overplayed it, too much macho boardroom acceleration coming off the emotional bend. He was leaning in for damage limitation, but what he wanted to say twisted loose on its way out. Aghast, he heard himself telling the truth, raw.

  ‘What have you got to lose? You’re in shit-poor shape, Vicente. We both know that. Backed up in the mountains, outgunned, living on rhetoric. If Echevarria comes for you now, the way he did for Diaz, you’re history. Like Marcos, like Guevara. A beautiful legend and a fucking T-shirt. Is that what you want? All those people in the NAME, going through what your mother went through, what good are you to them like that?’

  For a moment that froze as the last word left his mouth, he imagined the world caving in around him with the deal. Barranco’s eyes hardened, his stance tightened. Telegraphed so clear it sent the security guard on the patrol boat’s deck smoothly to her feet. An assault rifle hefted. Chris’s breath stopped.

  ‘I mean—’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ Barranco’s posture relaxed first. He turned to the woman on the boat and made a sign. She sank back to her seat. When he turned back, something had changed in his face. ‘I know what you mean, because this is the first time you’ve come out and said it. You can’t imagine how much of a relief that is, Chris Faulkner. You can’t imagine how little all your numbers have meant to me without some sign that you have a soul.’

  Chris breathed again. ‘You should have asked.’

  ‘Asked if you had a soul?’ There wasn’t much humour in Barranco’s parched laugh. ‘Is that a question that can be asked in London? When I am seated around the table with your colleagues, discussing what slices of my country’s GDP I must offer up to gain their support. What crops my people must grow while their own children starve, what essential medical services they must learn to live without. Will I ask them where they keep their souls then, Señor Faulkner?’

  ‘I wouldn’t advise it, no.’

  ‘No. Then what would you advise?’

  Chris weighed it up—

  fuck it, it’s worked so far

  —and told the unbandaged truth again.

  ‘I’d advise you to get what you can from them with as little commitment on your side as possible. Because that’s what they’ll be doing to you. Leave yourself escape clauses, remember, nothing’s ever written in stone. Everything can be renegotiated, if you can make it worth their while.’

  A pause. Barranco laughed again, warmth leaking into the sound this time. He offered the cigarettes again, lit them both with the Russian knock-off.

  ‘Good advice, my friend,’ he said through the smoke. ‘Good advice. I think I would hire you as an adviser, if I could afford you.’

  ‘You can. I’m part of the package.’

  ‘No.’ The trawlerman’s gaze settled on him. ‘I know a little about you now, Chris Faulkner, and you are not part of any package in London. There is something in you that resists incorporation. Something.’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Honourable.’

  It flickered across Chris’s memory before he could stop it. Liz Linshaw’s body in the white silk gown that untied and opened like a gift. The curves and shadowed places within. The sound of her laugh.

  ‘I think you are mistaken about me,’ he said quietly.

  Barranco shook his head. ‘You will see. I am not a bad judge of character myself, when it counts. You may get paid by these people, but you are not one of them. You do not belong.’

  Lopez got him back to Bocas by nightfall, and they sat in a water-front café waiting for the late flight to David. Across the water, the sequin twinkle of restaurant lights on another island seemed threaded directly onto the darkness. Local-owned pangas puttered about in the channel between, cruising for taxi custom. Voices drifted out over the water like smoke, Spanish shot through with an occasional English loan word. Kitchen noise clattered in the back of the café behind them.

  The whole meeting with Barranco already seemed like a dream.

  ‘So it went well,’ Lopez asked.

  Chris stirred at his cocktail. ‘Seems that way. He’s going to come to London, anyway.’ His mind cut loose the replays of Liz Linshaw and went wearily to work. ‘I want you to set that up as soon as possible, but safe. Above all, safe. Quick as you can without endangering his life or his strategic position. I’ll move things around at my end to fit in with whatever that means.’

  ‘Billing?’

  ‘Through the covert account. I don’t want this to show up until . . . No, better yet you pay for it yourself. Cash. I’ll have the money dumped to you in Zurich soon as I get back. Mail me an advance estimate at the hotel tomorrow morning. Oh yeah, you got anything that’ll help me sleep?’

  ‘Not on me.’ Lopez dug out his phone. ‘You’re at the Sheraton, right?’

  ‘Yeah. 1101. Jenkins.’

  The phone screen showed a cosy green glow. Lopez punched his way down a list and held up the instrument to face him. After a couple of rings, a voice answered in Spanish.

  ‘En inglés, guei,’ said Lopez impatiently.

  Whoever he was looking at grumbled something filthy and then switched. ‘You here in town, man?’

  ‘No, but a friend of mine will be shortly. And he needs a little something to help him sleep.’

  ‘Is he a fizi?’

  Lopez looked up from the phone at Chris. ‘You do a lot of this sort of stuff?’

  ‘Christ, no.’

  The Americas agent dropped his gaze to the phone screen again. ‘Definitely not. Something gentle.’

  ‘Got it. Address.’

  ‘Sheraton, room 1101. Mr Jenkins.’

  ‘Charge card or account.’

  ‘Very fucking funny. Hasta luego.’

  ‘Hasta la cuenta, amigo.’

  He folded up the phone. ‘Stuff’ll be waiting for you at the desk. You go in, just ask if you got any messages. There’ll be an envelope.’

  ‘You can vouch for this guy, right.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s a plastic surgeon.’

  Chris couldn’t see why that was supposed to reassure him, but he was getting past caring. The thought of crushing his jetlag beneath the soft black weight of sev
en or eight hours of chemically guaranteed sleep was like a finishing line ahead. Liz Linshaw, Mike Bryant and Shorn, Carla, Barranco and the skipper’s scrutiny; he let them all go like a pack he’d been carrying. Sleep was coming. He’d worry about everything else tomorrow.

  But behind the aching relief, Barranco’s words floated like the voices out on the water.

  You do not belong.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  He woke in the standard issue luxury of the Sheraton, to the softly insistent pulse of an incoming signal from his laptop. He flopped over in the bed and glared blearily around the room. Located the fucking thing, there on the carpeted floor amidst the trail of his dropped clothes. Bleeee, bleeee, fucking bleeee. He groaned and groped, half out of bed, one hand holding his body rigidly horizontal off the floor. He snagged the machine, dragged it onto the bed and sat up to unfold it in his lap. Mike Bryant’s recorded face grinned out at him.

  ‘Morning. If I timed this right, I figure you’ve got about three hours before your flight, so here’s something to think about while you’re waiting. You are under attack. And this time, you are going down!’

  Groggy from the plastic surgeon’s special delivery, Chris felt a sluggish spasm of alarm rip through him. Then the other man’s face blinked out and a stylised chessboard took its place. Mike had launched an unlooked-for rook-and-knight assault on him while he slept. It looked bad.

  ‘Motherfucker.’

  He got up and shambled about, packing. Still not flushed clean of the sleeping fix, he reacted unwisely to Mike’s gambit over breakfast and lost a bishop. Bryant, it seemed, was playing in real time. He went to the airport smarting from the loss and picked up the pieces in the exec lounge. It was Saturday and Mike, if he’d known what was good for him, should have let the game ride for the weekend. He could have thought it out over the next couple of days and taken Chris apart at leisure, but Chris knew him better. Bryant was lit up with the taste of his victory and he’d stay in real-time play now. View, absorb, react, all night if he had to. Chris had lent him Rakhimov’s Speed Chess and the Attack Momentum a couple of months ago, and the big man had swallowed it whole. He was in for the kill.

  Somewhere over the Caribbean, Chris beat off the attack. It cost him his only remaining knight and his carefully constructed castled defence was in ruins, but Mike’s attack momentum was down. The flurry of moves slowed. Chris played doggedly across the Atlantic and by the time they touched down in Madrid, he had Bryant nailed to a lucky stalemate. Mike sent him a Tony Carpenter clip attachment in response - the post-fight stand-off from The Deceiver. Carpenter’s trademark lack of acting talent, lines creaking with the burden of cliché. We are well matched, you and I. We should fight on the same side. It was so bad it was almost camp.

  Chris grinned and folded the laptop.

  He got off the flight with a bounce in his step, grabbed a sauna and a shower in the exec lounge while he waited and slept naturally on the shuttle back to London. He dreamed of Liz Linshaw.

  At Heathrow, leaning on the barrier at arrivals, made up and dressed in clothes that hugged at her figure, Carla was waiting.

  ‘No, it’s just. You didn’t need to. You know, I’m running on the Shorn clock. They’d pick up the tab for a taxi all the way home.’

  ‘I wanted to see you.’

  So why the fuck’d you go to Tromsö? He bit it back, and watched the curving perspectives of the road ahead. Saturday morning traffic on the orbital was sparse, and Carla, with the easy confidence of the professional mechanic, had the Saab up to a hundred and fifty in the middle lane.

  ‘How was your mum?’

  ‘She’s good. Busy. They want to bring out an interactional version of the new book, so she’s been rewriting, slotting in the GoTo sections with some datarat from the university.’

  ‘Is she shagging him?’ It didn’t quite come out right. Too harsh, too much silence around it. There was a time Chris could get away with these riffs on Kirsti’s sex life, and Carla used to laugh in mock outrage. Now she just looked across at him and went back to watching the road, tight lipped. The chill filled the car almost palpably.

  ‘Sorry, I—’

  ‘That was nasty.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ Helplessly.

  What the fuck is happening to us, Carla. What the fuck are we doing here? Is it just me? Is it?

  He saw Liz Linshaw again, the easy smile in the spare room, face and hair dappled with street lighting through the tree outside, the glass of water in her hand. She had navigated the moment with the same ease that Carla drove the Saab. Stepping closer than necessary to hand him the water, the warm tang of whisky on her breath. A soft, surprised oh, in ladylike tones her newscasts had never seen, as he pulled at the raw silk belt and the gown fell open. Broken street light across the curves within. The feel of her breast, as he laid one hand on it, was burnt into his palm. The soft sound of the laugh in her throat.

  Highgate.

  Involuntarily, he opened the hand at the memory. Looked at it, as if for some sign of branding.

  I, uh, I can’t do this, Liz, he’d lied, I’m sorry, and he’d turned away to stare out of the window, pretty sure this was the only way to stop the landslide. Trembling with the force of it.

  Fair enough, she told him and in the window he watched her bend to leave the glass on the table by the futon. She stood for a moment at the door before she left, looking at his back, but she said nothing. She had not retied the gown. The gap between its edges was black in the reflected image, empty of detail that his own mind was feverishly happy to fill.

  In the morning, he woke to find the gown draped across the quilt he had slept under. At some point during the night she had come in, taken it off and stood naked, watching him sleep. Even through the layers of mild hangover, it was an intensely erotic image and he felt himself hardening at the thought.

  The house was silent around him. Birdsong from the tree outside the window, a solitary car engine somewhere distant. He lay propped up on one elbow in the bed, vague with last night’s drinking. Without conscious thought, he reached for the gown, dragged it up the bed and held it to his face. It smelled intimately of woman, the only woman’s scent outside of Carla’s that he had breathed in nearly a decade. The shock was visceral, dissolving the hangover and dumping him out into reality like an exasperated bouncer. He threw off the gown and the quilt in a single motion, threw on clothes. Watch and wallet, off the bedside table in a sweep, stamping into shoes. He slid out of the spare room and paused.

  There was no one home. It was a feeling he knew well, and the house echoed with it. A handwritten note lay on the kitchen table, detailing where breakfast things could be found, the number of a good cab company and how to set the alarms before leaving. It was signed stay in touch.

  He got out.

  No appetite for breakfast, no confidence that he wouldn’t do something really stupid like go through her things or, worse still, wait around for her to come back. He triggered the alarm set-up and the door closed him out on a rising whine as the house defences charged.

  He found himself on a tree-lined hill street that swept up behind him and down then up again in front. A couple of prestige cars and a four track were parked at intervals along the kerbs, and down near the base of the parabola the street described, someone was walking a German Shepherd. There was no one else about. It looked like a nice neighbourhood.

  He didn’t know Highgate, had been in the area only a couple of times before in his life, to drink- and drug-blurred parties at the homes of HM execs. But the air was mild and the sky looked clear of rain in all directions.

  He chose the downslope at random, and started walking.

  The Saab jolted on a badly mended pothole. Dumped him back into reality. The memory of Highgate dropped away, receding in the rearview.

  ‘Carla.’ He reached across the space between them. He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything about your mother. I
t was a joke, alright.’

  ‘Ha fucking ha.’

  He held down the quick flare of anger. ‘Carla, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve only been in each other’s company half an hour, and we’re fighting already. This is killing us.’

  ‘You’re the one who.’ She stopped, and he wondered what she was biting back the way he’d bitten back words a few moments earlier.

  Is this it, he wondered dismally, is this the only way to survive a long term relationship? Hide your thoughts, bite back your feelings, build a neutral silence that won’t hurt. Is that what it’s all about? Neutrality for the sake of a warm bed?

  Is that what I turned Liz down for?

  Liz, waiting, wrapped in the white silk that carried her scent.

  ‘Carla, pull over.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pull over. Stop. There, on the hard shoulder. Please.’

  She shot him a look, and must have seen something in his face. The Saab bled speed and drifted across the lanes. Carla dropped a gear and brought the car under a hundred kilometres an hour. Onto the hard shoulder and they crunched to a halt. Carla turned in her seat to face him.

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘Carla, listen.’ He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling his way towards what he needed to say. ‘Please don’t run off like that again. Like you did. I missed you. I really did. I need you, and when you’re not here I really. I miss you so much. I. I do stupid things.’

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘Things like what?’

  And he could not fucking tell her. He couldn’t.

  He thought he was going to, he even started to, started with Troy Morris’s party, even got as far as talking about Liz and her book proposal, but he couldn’t do it, and when she knew there was more behind it and pushed for it, he veered off into the zones and what he and Mike Bryant had done to Griff Dixon and his friends.

  She whitened as he told it.

  ‘That can’t be,’ she whispered. ‘You, they can’t,’ scaling almost to a shout. ‘People can’t do things like that. It’s not legal.’

  ‘Tell that to Mike. Ah, Christ, tell it to the whole fucking Shorn corporation, while you’re at it.’ And then it all had to come tumbling out, the morning after, the NAME contract, the fuck-up with Lopez and Langley, the dead in Medellín and the quick-fix burial of the facts, Panama and Barranco and his quiet insistence. You do not belong. Chris found he was trembling by the time he got to the end and there was what felt like a laugh building in his throat, but when it finally came out his eyes were wet. He unfastened his belt and leaned across the space between the seats. He pulled himself across and against her, teeth gritted on the fraying shreds of his control.