The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘That’s not what Makin says.’

  ‘Well.’ Mike gestured. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Nick is running scared from his own mistakes. Come on, Louise, you know he’s fumbled this one since the outset. Why else did you call me in?’

  ‘Not to do this, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Look, let’s sit down for a moment.’ Mike gestured at the sofas around the chess table. ‘Come on. There’s no point in yelling at each other. It’s not an ideal situation, but it is manageable.’

  ‘Is it?’ Hewitt raised one immaculate eyebrow. Some of her customary cool seemed to be reasserting itself. ‘This I’ve got to hear.’

  They sat. Mike bundled up the paramedic blanket and dumped it casually over the side of the sofa.

  ‘The thing is, Louise, Vicente Barranco’s our only shot. Echevarria was on his way out the door to the Americans. He was playing with us. And Barranco’s the only viable insurgency alternative. Chris’ll tell you. There are no other available choices.’

  Hewitt switched her gaze to Chris. ‘Well?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Chris tried to snap out of his daze at the suddenly civilised turn events had taken. He’d expected by now to be either sitting in a holding cell or clearing out his desk. ‘Yeah, it’s true. Arbenz is dead or dying of a collapsed immune system. MCH bioware ammunition. And Diaz is either on the run or already caught and we just haven’t heard yet, in which case Echevarria’s secret police will have tortured him to death by now.’

  ‘There you go.’ Mike nodded along. ‘Barranco’s what we’ve got, and we nearly didn’t have him an hour ago. All we had was Echevarria getting ready to grab the hardware we’d advanced him and then kiss us goodbye and head out for Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap. And Barranco thinking we’d sold him out. Under the circumstances, I think Chris did the only thing that had any hope of salvaging the situation. Now, at least, we have a chance.’

  Hewitt shook her head.

  ‘This has got to go to Notley.’

  ‘I agree. But it can go to Notley as a handled package, or it can go as a mess.’

  ‘It is a mess, Mike. Barranco should never have been allowed anywhere near Echevarria in the first place.’

  ‘We all make mistakes, Louise.’

  Something in Bryant’s tone brought Hewitt round. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, you did authorise the limo for Barranco.’ Mike was all innocence. ‘I mean, sure, you probably assumed that Chris would be here to meet him. And then Chris was at the Hilton instead, so—’

  ‘Chris was fucking late,’ said Louise Hewitt delicately.

  ‘Yeah. That was a mistake. The limo was a mistake. Shit, it was my mistake, or Nick’s, leaving the viewing-chamber door open. Not to mention the idiot who told Barranco where to find us. You’re right, Louise, we have made a mess of this. But there’s no percentage for any of us in presenting it that way to Notley. We need to accentuate the positive.’

  For a pair of seconds, Hewitt was silent. Chris could almost hear the whine of concentration as she played it through. Then she smiled sourly at both of them and nodded.

  ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Let’s spin it, shall we.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Echevarria died just before noon, of repeated internal haemorrhaging. He never regained consciousness. Vicente Barranco was there to watch him die. Everybody else was too busy.

  They’d been scrambling since Hewitt gave the green light.

  ‘Get his phone records from Brown’s,’ she flung at them on her way out to find Notley. ‘See if he posted any forward calls for this afternoon, and find out if he was checking in with anyone regularly. That way, we’ll have some idea of how much time we’ve got to play with. And start coming up with a disposal plan.’

  Chris spent the next hour digging through files on useful terrorists.

  Mike Bryant’s office became the command post. Chris commandeered the datadown while Mike paced about with his mobile, talking to people. They sent Makin after the phone records. All incoming business got routed down to the forty-ninth floor where junior analysts had orders to shelve it unless there was a NAME connection. In the cleared space it gave them, they built the contingency plan. A Langley shadow unit was hired out of Miami, sent to find and track Echevarria junior. The conference-chamber recordings were isolated from all external dataflow ports, and played back on a stand-alone projector to a grey-haired datafake expert on secondment from Imagicians. The expert tut-tutted like a disappointed schoolmistress, hit replay and started making notes. A stony-faced internal security squad with high-level clearance arrived, courtesy of Louise Hewitt, and Mike sent them to clean up the blood.

  Makin called in from Brown’s with the phone data. There were no forward calls placed on Echevarria’s account.

  ‘Praiiise the Lord,’ said Mike, doing Simeon Sands with remarkable good cheer, given the circumstances. He flourished with his free hand. ‘There is a God because I am saved. Good work, Nick. They give you any static down there? Uh-uh. Good. No, but you never know. Bite the hair of the cliché that fed you and all that. What about regular stuff? Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Yeah, well, to be expected, I guess. Yeah, we’ve got the hounds out in Miami. Yeah, Langley, best we could do at short notice. They’re on a tight leash. What? Ah, come on, Nick, this isn’t the fucking time for recrimin—Yeah, well I’m sure he knows that too.’ He glanced at Chris and rolled his eyes. ‘Look Nick, we haven’t got the time for this. Pay them off, get copies of everything and get back here.’

  He cut off the call, held the mobile away from him and massaged his ear.

  ‘Like a dog with a fucking bone. Blame, blame, blame, like it’s going to fucking help now. So what do you reckon, Elaine?’

  The datafake expert froze the tape and raked a hand through her silvered hair. On the pastel shaded wall, Chris towered four metres tall, leaning into the swing, face blind with fury.

  ‘Does it need to stand up in court?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that.’

  She shrugged. ‘So we can fix it. Just tell me what you want.’

  ‘Okay, good. Chris, how you doing?’

  Chris nodded at the datadown. ‘Got a few possibilities, yeah. But Mike, none of these guys have pulled off a successful bombing in London for years.’

  ‘Yeah, well, they won’t have to. All they need do is claim responsibility. There ought to be plenty of the little fuckers up for that. No effort, no risk, instant media coverage. What more could they want?’ Mike flicked a finger at the screen. ‘What about them? They look ugly enough.’

  ‘No good.’ Chris shook his head. ‘Christian militants, anti-gay, anti-abortion. No axe to grind. Besides, they’re too fucking inept for anyone to believe they could get something like this together.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’ Mike’s phone queeped in his hand. ‘Yeah, Bryant. Uh-uh. Alright, thanks. What about the other one? Uh-uh. Okay, well keep him that way then. No, I don’t know how long. Alright. Yes. Goodbye.’

  He weighed the phone in his hand and looked pensively at it.

  ‘Echevarria’s dead. Just now. Dead and cooling fast. And Nick reckoned he promised to call his son in Miami some time this evening. We’re losing our window.’

  In the end, they opted for a group of antique revolutionary socialists with a complicated acronym no one was likely to remember very well. The group had enjoyed a sudden resurgence in recent years, drawing disaffected zone youth in a number of European cities, staging the machine-gun assassination of low-level executives and causing big explosions in, or at least in the vicinity of, rather vaguely designated ‘globalist strongholds’. They’d managed to kill nearly two dozen people in the last five years, often including their intended targets. They used a wide range of military-grade automatic weapons and explosive devices, acquired mainly through Russian black-market channels and very easy to get hold of. Their justificatory rhetoric was a dense mesh of outmoded Trotskyist sentiment and anti-corporate eco-babble, and it appeared they spent almost as much energy purging the r
anks and backbiting as they did killing people. Shorn’s infiltration ops wing had labelled them noisy but essentially harmless.

  They were perfect.

  Mike went to get fitted for a Weblar vest.

  Chris was chasing up the hardware, when Jack Notley walked into the office unannounced and stood looking around with the nonchalance of someone on a guided tour. His Susana Ingram jacket was buttoned closed and he held his hands lightly clasped in front of him. He nodded pleasantly at the Imagicians consultant, who’d been back and forth from the imaging studio down the hall with variations on the requested footage and now, in Mike’s absence, was packing up her stuff.

  ‘Elaine. Glad to see we’re keeping you busy.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be here otherwise, Jack.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ Notley’s gaze switched to Chris and he lost his smile. His eyes were unreadable. ‘And you. Are you busy as well?’

  Chris fought down a tremor. ‘I, uh, we’re pretty much done here. But I need to check in with Vicente Barranco. He’s been—’

  ‘I’ve had Señor Barranco taken back to his hotel. Elaine, could you give us a few minutes?’

  ‘Sure. I’m done here anyway. I’ll come back for this stuff later.’

  She slipped out. Chris watched her go with a pang of envy. Notley came round the desk to stand at his shoulder.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked flatly.

  ‘Hardware profile.’ Chris gestured at the screen, scrabbling after composure. He found, oddly, that he was more embarrassed than afraid. ‘We’ve found a group to take the fall for Echevarria. I’m matching most-used weapons against our local inventory. We’ll need to use our own people, of course, there’s no time for anything else.’

  ‘No. We are pressed for time, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes, although to be honest it’s probably better this way.’ His throat was dry. ‘It, uh, lowers our exposure, and it means we can control the situation.’

  ‘Control, yes.’ He felt Notley move behind him, out of his peripheral field of view. It took an effort of will not to twist round in the seat. Now the warm blush of embarrassment was shredding away into cold fear. The senior partner’s voice was hypnotically tranquil at his back. It felt like hands laid on his shoulders. ‘Remind me, Chris. Why are we in this situation, exactly?’

  Chris swallowed. He drew a deep breath.

  ‘Because I fucked up.’

  ‘Yes.’ Now Notley had moved back into peripheral view on the left. ‘Putting it mildly, you have indeed. Fucked. Up.’

  He came round the side of the desk and he had the Nemex levelled. This time, there was no fighting down the tremor. Chris flinched, violently. Notley stared at him. There was nothing in his face at all.

  ‘Is there anything you want to say to me?’

  Chris felt the pounding calm of a road duel descend on him. He measured angles, knew he was caught. His replacement Nemex was back in his own office, still not out of the factory wrapping. The desk pinned him. He couldn’t rush Notley, and there was nothing on the desktop worth throwing. He was used to making these calculations at combat speed, measuring and acting in the time it took for the Saab to cover a handful of asphalt metres. The immobility and the limping time scale made it unreal, a floating fragment of a dream.

  the supermarket swam before his eyes, the painful bang of the gun in his ears, the sudden warm rain of blood

  He wondered if

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I think.’ Suddenly it was easy. All he had to do was let go. ‘I think you’re making a big fucking mistake. Echevarria was a bag of pus waiting to burst. All I did was save you the trouble.’

  Notley’s eyes narrowed. Then, out of nowhere, he lowered the Nemex and tucked it away in his waistband. He shook his head.

  ‘Nice image, that. A bag of pus, waiting to burst. Charming. You need to refine your act, Faulkner.’

  He cast about and found a chair, pulled it up to the desk and sat down. Chris gaped at him, still swamped in chemicals by a nervous system expecting to be shot. Notley smiled.

  ‘Tell you a story,’ he said comfortably. ‘Guy called Webb Ellis. Went to my old school about two hundred years before I did. What does that tell you, incidentally?’

  Chris blinked. ‘He was rich?’

  ‘Very good. Not wholly accurate, but close enough. Webb Ellis was what, these days, we’d call jacked-in. He had connections. Father died when he was still young, but his mother bootstrapped him up on those connections and come sixteen he was still a student. Among other things, he played a pretty sharp game of football and cricket. And apparently, during one of those football games he broke the rules pretty severely, by picking up the ball and running with it. You know what happened to him?’

  ‘Uh. Sent off?’

  Notley shook his head. ‘No. He got to be famous. They built a whole new game around running with the ball.’

  ‘That’s.’ Chris frowned. ‘Rugby.’

  ‘That’s right. In the end they named it after the school. You can see why. Webbellisball would have been a bit of a mouthful. But that’s the legend of how rugby got started. There’s even a plaque on the wall at the school, commemorating old Webb Ellis and the day he broke the rules. I used to walk past it every day.’

  Quiet soaked into the room.

  ‘Is that true?’ Chris asked, finally.

  Notley grinned. ‘No. Probably not. It’s just a useful piece of school mythology, graven in stone to resemble the truth. But it is representative, in all likelihood, of what a whole gang of different elite schoolkids were doing at around that time. Breaking the rules, and making up new ones. Later that century, you get a formalised game and creative back-marketing lays it at the door of one man, because that’s what people relate to. But the interesting thing is this, Chris. The game was never new. It dates back to Roman times, at least. They’d been playing games just like it for centuries in the streets of villages and towns all over Britain. And you know what? Just around the time Webb Ellis and his friends were making sporting history, the common people were being told, by law and by big uniformed men with sticks and guns, that they weren’t allowed to play this game any more. Because, and this is close to a quote, it disturbed the public order and was dangerous. Do you see, Chris, how these things work? How they’ve always worked?’

  Chris said nothing. It wasn’t five minutes since this man had held a gun on him. He didn’t trust the ice enough to walk on yet.

  ‘Okay.’ Notley leaned back in the chair. ‘Fast forward a couple of centuries. Here’s something you should know. Who made the first competition road kill?’

  ‘Uh, Roberto Sanchez, wasn’t it? Calders Chicago partnership challenge, back in, no, wait a minute.’ Chris sieved an unexpected chunk of information from the sea of TV junk he’d been letting wash over him in recent months. ‘Now they’re saying it wasn’t Sanchez, it was this guy Rice, real thug from the Washington office. He beat Sanchez to it by about three months or something?’

  Notley nodded. He seemed, for a moment, to be lost in thought. ‘Yes, they say that. They also say it was Begoña Salas over at IberFondos. That’s the feminist revisionist angle, but it holds some water. Salas was cutting edge around then, and she always drove like a fucking maniac. There’s another school of thought that says Calders stole the idea from a strategic-thought unit in California. That people like Oco Holdings and the Sacramento Group were already trialing it secretly. You want to know what I remember?’

  Once again, the distance behind Notley’s look, the sense that most of him was suddenly elsewhere.

  ‘Sure. What?’

  Notley smiled gently. ‘I remember it being me.’

  Fleetingly, Chris recalled his first impression of the senior partner, the day he came to work at Shorn. Like a troll in the elf pastel shades of the interview room. He looked at Notley now, at the brutal crackle of power about the man, shoehorned into the Susana Ingram like too much upper body muscle, and an initial urge to match the partner smile f
or smile slid abruptly away. His pulse began to pick up slowly.

  Notley seemed to shake himself.

  ‘It was a different time, Chris. We’re all used to it now, but back then you could smell the change in the air.’ He breathed in, deep. ‘Fresh, like spilt fuel. Reeking with potential. The domino recessions had come and gone, we’d been bracing ourselves for it all that time, for the worst we could imagine, and it came and went, and we were all still standing. Better than still standing. We’d barely missed a step. A few riots, a few banks out of business, that nuclear nonsense in the Punjab. We surfed it, Chris. We rode it out. It was easy.’

  He paused. He seemed to be waiting for something to fill the gap. Chris hurried to oblige, mesmerised by the intensity coming across the desk at him.

  ‘You still had to drive, though? Right?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ A casual gesture. ‘The domino gave us competitive driving. Hard-edged solution for hard-edged times. But it was still pretty civilised back then, still pretty close to its roots. You know how road-raging started?’

  Chris stumbled, wrongfooted. ‘What? Uh, yeah, sure. Those formula cars, ones you see on the history channel, looked like little rockets, right? They started getting owned by the same people that made the money. And then, uh, with the roads empty and everything . . .’

  He stopped. Notley was shaking his head.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not really. Well. Yes, sure, you had that dynamic. That’s part of it, I suppose. But it all goes back a lot further than that. Back to late last century, the pre-millenial stuff. Stuff my father told me about. Back then some of the harder-nosed firms were already experimenting with conflict incentives for their new recruits. It was an American thing. Eight trainees in a section, sectional office space, and only seven desks.’ Notley made a QED motion with both hands. ‘So. Get to work last, you had to work on a window ledge. Or beg space from someone with a better alarm clock. Let that happen to you more than a couple of times, you can see how the group dynamic starts to lean. The late guy’s the weakest link. So the rest gang up on him. Chimp behaviour. Lend him your desk-space, and you’re weak, by association. You’re making the wrong alliances. So you don’t do it. You can’t afford to.’