‘You should be overjoyed I did. Wasn’t that my job tonight? Make your client feel good. Relax him. Isn’t that what you said?’
‘Yeh, that didn’t mean hang me out to dry in front of him.’
‘Well perhaps you should have made yourself clearer. I’m your wife, remember, not some grinning whore out of the escort pages. I don’t do this shit for a living.’
‘You fucking enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me!’
It drew a sideways look from her. For a full two seconds she stared at him in silence, then her eyes went back to the road.
‘You going to shout like that at Mike Bryant tomorrow?’ she asked quietly. ‘For his bathroom manners?’
‘Don’t avoid the fucking question, Carla!’
‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked me one.’
‘You enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me, didn’t you?’
‘You sound pretty convinced already.’
‘Just fucking—’ He clenched a fist, clamped his mouth. Locked down the fury. Forced out the words close to normal volume. ‘Just answer me the question, Carla.’
‘You answer mine first. You ever shout at Mike like this?’
‘Mike Bryant is on my side. Whatever else he might do, whatever problems he might have, I know that much. I don’t need to yell at him.’
‘Don’t need? Or don’t dare?’
‘Fuck you, Carla.’ It was almost a murmur. The sheeting fury had guttered out inside him. It wasn’t gone, but abruptly it was cold, and that frightened him more. Frightened him because in the chill he thought he could feel something slowly dying.
‘No, fuck you, Chris.’ Her voice was barely louder than his had been, but it hissed at him. ‘You want an answer to your question? Yes. I enjoyed it tonight. You know what I enjoyed? I enjoyed seeing a man who’s fighting for something more than his fucking quarterly bonus get the upper hand for once. I enjoyed hearing someone who cares what happens to other people telling the truth about the way your sick-making little world works.’
‘A man who cares.’ Chris bounced the loosely curled edge of his hand off the window in the weary ghost of a punch. ‘Oh, sure. A man who wants to sell crack cocaine and edge to children in the zones. Yeah, he’s a real fucking hero, Barranco is. You heard what he said.’
‘Yes, and I heard Mike Bryant promise to hook him up with Langley, who supply eighty per cent of North America’s inner cities. Langley, who you work with on a day-to-day basis. And this weekend, the two of you are taking Echevarria and Barranco both to the North Memorial to sell them the weapons they need to fight each other. And now you’re taking some kind of moral stance here? Jesus Christ, you could give lessons in hypocrisy to Simeon fucking Sands. What choice have we left these people, Chris? What favours have we done them? Why shouldn’t they swamp us all in crack?’
‘I didn’t say they shouldn’t.’
‘No, because the truth is you don’t care about that either. You don’t care about anything, in fact, except making your end of the deal stick so you can stay at the top table with the other big players. That’s what this is about, isn’t it Chris?’ She laughed, something that was almost a sob. ‘Chris Faulkner, global mover and shaker. Observe the cut of his suits, the cool command he brings with him to the table. Princes and presidents shake his hand, and when he speaks, they listen. Oil flows, where and when he says it will, men with guns rise up and fight at his command—’
‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Carla.’ The anger was suddenly warming again, heating his guts, looking for the way to do damage. ‘You got such a thing for Barranco and his moral crusade, maybe you should have just gone up to his fucking room with him instead of coming home with me. Maybe a man of conscience’ll light you up a little better than I do.’
Sudden pressure across the chest, almost pain. The belt gripped him into his seat. He heard the brief shriek of tyres as the Saab slammed to a halt.
‘You fucking bastard, Chris. You fucking piece of shit.’
She sat with her fists clenched on the wheel, head down. The car stood slewed fractionally off centre beneath the sodium glare of the motorway lamps. The engine rumbled to itself. As he watched, she shook her head slowly and lifted her face. There was an unsteady adrenalin-shock smile pinned to her mouth. She shook her head again, whispered it like a discovery.
‘You piece of shit.’
It was her end-of-the-line insult, the one she’d never used on him except in play. In the whole seven years of their relationship, he’d only heard her label perhaps a half dozen acquaintances with it. Men, and on one single occasion a woman, that she wanted to wipe out of her life, and in most cases had. For Carla, it meant total shutdown. Beneath contempt.
He sat and felt it dripping off him like a physical thing.
‘You’d better mean that,’ he said.
She would not look at him.
‘This is a new level, Carla.’ He looked at his hands in the stained orange radiance coming down through the windscreen. There was a fierce exhilaration pumping through him that he dared not examine closely. ‘We haven’t been getting on, but. This is new. This is.’
He lifted a hand to gesture. Gave it up half-formed.
It must have caught her peripheral vision. She stole a glance at him. Behind her eyes he saw fear, not of him.
‘I ought to make you get out of this fucking car.’ Her voice was shaking, and he knew she was going through the same pounding near-the-edge rush. ‘I ought to make you fucking walk home.’
‘It’s my car,’ he said gently.
‘Yeah, and every centimetre I built for you, and rebuilt and rebuilt again, you ever, Chris, you ever speak to me like that again, you—’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was out of his mouth before he realised he’d said it.
And then they were groping for each other across the space between, tears spilling down her cheeks, stopped up unshed in his throat, both of them held back by the idiot grip of the belts on their bodies. The solid ground of the relationship was suddenly back under their feet, the edge was gone, shoved back from convulsively, the thundering pulse of the drop receding in his ears, the familiar warm sticky slide of remorse and regret, the
safety
of it all again, bearing them up and binding them together.
They fought loose of the belts and held each other without speaking. Long enough for the hot, wet tear ribbons on her cheeks to cool and dry against his face. Long enough for the swollen obstruction in his own throat to ease, and the locked-up trembling to stop.
‘We have to get out of this,’ she said at last, muffled, into his neck.
‘I know.’
‘It’s going to kill us, Chris. One way or the other, on the road or not, it’s going to kill us both.’
‘I know.’
‘You’ve got to stop.’
‘I know.’
‘Vasvik will come back to you. I know he will. Please, Chris, don’t fuck it up when he does.’
‘Alright.’ There was no resistance left in him. He felt drained. It occurred to him, for the first time in the whirl of the last three days: ‘Have you heard anything more?’
She shook her head, still pressed against him.
He found a single tear welling up in one eye. He blinked it away. ‘They’re taking their sweet fucking time.’
‘Chris, it’s a lot of money. A big risk for them. But we haven’t heard and that means, Dad says that means they’re going to do it. He says otherwise we’d have heard by now. They’re raising the finance, justifying it at budget level, that’s what he thinks.’
Chris stroked her hair. Even the irritation at Carla’s constant undying faith in her father’s superhuman bloody wisdom was gone, temporarily dynamited in the shock of how close they’d come to the break.
‘Okay, Carla.’ There was a mirthless smile creeping out across his face now. ‘But whatever they’re doing, they need to hurry it up. Someone out there’s trying to kill me. Someone connected. And if they c
an’t take me down on the road, then they’ll find some other way.’
She raised her head to look at him.
‘Do you think they know? About Vasvik?’
‘I don’t know. But I do know that if Vasvik and his pals don’t get a move on, they’re going to be too late to do anything except clean up the blood. Just like Nigeria and the Kurdish homeland and every other fucking gig the UN have ever played.’
He found, oddly, his smile was gaining strength. He couldn’t pick apart the knot of feeling behind it. Carla drew back from him as if he wore a stranger’s face. He looked away from her and along the night-time perspectives of the road.
‘Doesn’t give you much hope, does it?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
They got a good day for the North Memorial. The unseasonal gales drove out the cloud over the rest of the week and by Sunday the Norfolk sky was scraped almost clear. They spotted a big jet banking lazily against the blue while they were still a dozen kilometres off.
‘Surveillance mother,’ was Mike’s opinion. ‘Probably the new Lockheed. I hear they finally ironed the bugs out of the drone retrieval. They’ll be showing off. Ah, here we go. Junction seventeen. ’
He swung the BMW into the off-lane. Behind him, someone hit a horn with what sounded like both feet. Chris turned across the back seat and saw a streamlined red Ford jockeying to get past them. Beneath the tinted glass of the windscreen, he made out an angry young face.
‘Should have indicated, Mike.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mike squinted up at the mirror. ‘Fucking asshole. If this strip wasn’t triple-monitored for the fair, I’d fucking have you, my son.’
‘What is it?’ Barranco had been catnapping in the front passenger seat.
‘Nothing,’ said Bryant. ‘Just someone looking to die young.’
Barranco craned round to look. Chris shook his head not to worry and grinned. The traffic had been heavy all the way up from London. They must have seen close to a hundred cars since they left, and as they drew closer to the Lakenheath turn-off, the density went steadily up. Bryant wasn’t used to driving in these conditions. No one was.
The red car edged up beside them as they hit the ramp. Bryant grinned and accelerated up the slope.
‘Maybe we should have flown,’ said Barranco nervously.
‘On a day like this?’ Mike was still grinning. ‘Come on!’
The Ford came level, on the right. Chris cast an eye over the vehicle’s lines and reckoned cheap, look-good armouring. Probably a junior analyst or a recruitment sprog. No contest. He braced himself without thinking and a second later Bryant feinted sideways. The other driver spooked, braked and slewed aside. Mike carved up the space he’d left and straightened out in the middle of the lane. He started to brake a couple of dozen metres off the summit, and came to a smooth halt at the roundabout junction. He waited, eyes on the mirror. After a couple of moments, the Ford crept up and queued respectfully behind them.
‘Thank you,’ said Mike, and turned sedately onto the curve.
Barranco looked back at Chris for guidance. ‘Did this mean something?’
‘Not a thing,’ said Bryant breezily. ‘No challenges permissible on this stretch today. Just teaching the guy a little something about respect.’
Chris winked.
Ten minutes later they cleared the main gate at the airbase and a uniformed attendant waved them through into the parking segment. The place was packed with corporate battlewagons and hired limos. Here and there, one or two khaki-drab armed forces utility vehicles had been left out, mainly, Chris suspected, to enhance the genuine feel of the fair. On occasion, new developing world clients remained resolutely unimpressed by the suited godparents they had come to depend on. It helped to accentuate the military aspect, gave dictators and revolutionaries something to relate to.
As they climbed out, a trio of venomous-looking fighter planes came screaming across the airfield at rooftop height, then trailed the gut-crunching roar of lit afterburners back up into the azure sky. Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Barranco flinch.
‘Fucking clowns,’ he said. ‘Don’t know why they got to do that.’
‘Those are Harpies,’ Barranco told him quietly. ‘Demonstrating a strafe run. They are made in Britain. Last year you sold fifteen of them to the Echevarria regime.’
‘Actually,’ said Mike, alarming the BMW, ‘they’re made under licence to BAe in Turkey. Have been for a couple of years now. This way, I think.’
He set off in the direction of the hangars, where a loosely knotted crowd could be seen drifting about. Chris and Barranco followed him at a distance.
‘You did not need to bring me here,’ muttered Barranco.
Chris shook his head. ‘I think you’ll be glad we did. The North Memorial pulls in state-of-the-art weaponry from every leading manufacturer in the world. Not just the big stuff, you’ve got assault rifles, grenades, shoulder launchers, area denial systems. New propellants, new ammunition, new explosives. Vicente, even if you don’t buy much of this stuff, you need to know what Echevarria might be deploying against you.’
Barranco fixed him with a hard look. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what Echevarria’s got, and save us both some time.’
‘Uh . . .’
‘You know, don’t you? You supply him, you pay for it all.’
‘Not me.’ He stamped down the coil of guilt inside him, shook his head again. ‘That’s not my account, Vicente. I’m really sorry. I’ve got no more access to it than you do.’
‘No, but you could get access.’
Chris coughed. Bent it up into a laugh. ‘Vicente, that’s not how it works. I can’t just walk into another executive’s office and go through his client files. Quite apart from the security systems, it’s a question of ethics. No, seriously. I mean it. I could lose my job over something like that.’
Barranco turned away. ‘Okay, never mind. Forget I asked. I realise you have a lot to lose.’
It didn’t seem to be meant ironically, and Chris thought he was beginning to get the measure of Vicente Barranco enough to spot these things. Over the past two days, he reckoned he’d built some pretty solid scaffolding for his relationship with the Colombian. He’d had the man out to dinner at his home and actively encouraged Carla to reprise her solidarity of the night at the Hilton. He’d gone drinking with him in some semi-risky clubs at the edges of the cordon. And on the Saturday morning after, at Barranco’s insistence, he’d even taken him on a short tour of the eastern zones in the Saab. This last, the Colombian sat through in almost total silence until he asked the single question. Is this where you grew up, Chris?
It was the first time he had used Chris’s first name on its own. A watershed. Chris considered a moment, then he spun the wheel of the Saab and made a U turn in the empty street. He headed southward through a maze of deserted one-way systems and roads he thought he would have forgotten by now, but had not. He found the abandoned, half-built multi-storey car park that overlooked the riverside estates to the west and drove up the spiral pipe to the roof. He parked at the edge and nodded forward through the windscreen.
‘Down there,’ he said simply.
Barranco got out of the car and wandered to the edge of the deck. After a while, Chris got out and joined him.
Riverside.
The name was like a taste in his mouth. Metallic bitter. He stared down at the low-stacked housing, the shaggy green of miniature park spaces allowed to run wild in between, the oil-scummed expanses of water the estates backed onto on three sides. It wasn’t the Brundtland, he told himself, it wasn’t the labyrinthine concrete expanse of homes never designed for any but the dregs. That wasn’t it. Something altogether different had gone wrong here.
‘In my country,’ said Barranco, echoing his thoughts with uncanny accuracy, ‘you would not be considered poor if you lived here.’
‘It wasn’t built for poor people.’
The Colombian glanced back at him. ‘But poor people mo
ved in.’
‘Well, no one else would, you see. After the domino recessions. No facilities. No local shops, no transport unless you could afford taxis or fuel and a licence. Which, increasingly, no one could. You want to get anywhere?’ Chris turned and pointed north. ‘The nearest bus stop is two kilometres that way. There used to be a rail link, but the investors got scared and pulled out. When I was growing up, a few of the ones who had jobs used to cycle, but the kid gangs started throwing stones at them. They knocked one woman right off a dock into the river. Kept dropping stones on her ’til she went under for good.’ He shrugged. ‘Having a job, a real job, marked you out.’
Barranco said nothing. He stared down at the estate as if he could push the whole place back in time and spot the woman floundering in the oiled water.
‘A couple of the kids I used to play with died that way too,’ said Chris, remembering clearly for the first time in a long while. ‘Drowned, I mean. No security fence along the wharf, see. They just fell in. My mother was always telling me not to—’
He fell silent. Barranco turned to him again.
‘I am sorry, Chris. I should not have asked you to come here.’
Chris tried on a smile. ‘You didn’t ask me, exactly.’
‘No, and you brought me nonetheless.’
The obvious question hung there in the air between them, but Barranco never asked it. Chris was glad, because he didn’t have an answer.
They got back into the car.
‘Do you guys want to see this stuff, or what?’
It had dawned on Mike Bryant that Chris and Barranco were lagging behind and he’d come back for them.
Barranco exchanged glances with Chris and shrugged.
‘Sure. Even if I don’t buy much, I’ll need to see what Echevarria might be deploying against me. Right?’
‘Exactly!’ Mike clapped his hands and snapped out a pointed pistol finger. ‘That’s the spirit.’
Inside the hangars, big air conditioning units blasted warm, spice-scented air down from the ceiling. The exhibits sat in pools of soft light, interspersed with crisp repeating holos showing them in sanitised use. Brand names hung in illuminated capitals. Logos badged the walls.
The Complete SF Collection Page 186