‘Thus we convert,’ Hamilton declared vibrantly, ‘the uncertainty of change, the certainty of post-land-reform unrest, and the probable budget deficit of the classic revolutionary regime, at a stroke, into a return to the profitable status quo we have enjoyed in the NAME for the last twenty years. It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen, that there is really no question or choice here, only a course of action that common sense and market return dictate. Thank you.’
Applause rippled politely round the table. Murmured comments. Hamilton inclined his head and stood back a couple of steps. Louise Hewitt stood up.
‘I think that’s pretty clear, thank you, Philip, but if there are any questions, perhaps we could have them now?’
‘Yes.’ Jack Notley raised a hand with completely superfluous deference. Every exec in the room shut up on the instant, and pinned their gaze on the grizzled senior partner. Louise Hewitt folded herself back into her chair, and Philip Hamilton moved to take up the space she had left him. It was, Chris thought bitterly, choreographed tightly enough to be a Saturday Night Special dance act.
‘Yes, Jack.’
‘The Americans,’ said Notley with heavy emphasis that earned a sprinkling of laughter. The old man’s nationalist eccentricity was well known in the division. ‘We know from Mike here’s painstaking research that Echevarria junior has, shall we say, a predilection for our transatlantic cousins and they are, unfortunately, far closer to him, both geographically and culturally, than are we. I appreciate, Phil, that you’re factoring in Calders RapCap with the liaison work, and obviously, Martin Meldreck, well he believes in a free market about as much as Ronald Reagan did.’ More laughter, louder this time. ‘So the secondary contractors he brings in will be exclusively US firms. That much is clear. My question is, will this be enough? Will it hold off Conrad Rimshaw at Lloyd Paul, for example? Or the Saunders Group, or Gray Capital Solutions, or Moriarty Mills & Silver? Francisco Echevarria has had close dealings with all these gentlemen, or at least their Miami officers, at one time or another. Can we be confident he will not bring them into play as soon as a budget review fails to please him?’
Hear fucking hear, sleeted through Chris. Glad someone in this bunch of fucking sycophants spotted it.
Hamilton cleared his throat.
‘That’s a fair concern, Jack. I think it’s indicative that the firms you’ve just named, with the exception of the Saunders Group, are all fast, hungry players from the New York corner. Sure, they’ll all bear watching. But the point with Calders is that they have the US state department’s ear. That’s long-term relationship - in the case of Senator Barlow, we’re talking fifteen years, and there are others with ties almost as old. And of course, as you say, the secondary contractors Calders RapCap’s people will bring in should have their own lobby network in place. If we combine all that pull with the influence we have on our own Foreign Office here in London, I feel sure we’re in a position to repel any prospective boarders.’
He got the laughter too. He beamed round the table.
‘Any more questions?’
‘Yeah, I’ve got a question for you.’ Chris climbed to his feet, trembling slightly. He stared at Hamilton. ‘I’m curious as to why the fuck you’re throwing away a guaranteed regime change, with a leader who is guaranteed one hundred per cent proof against US involvement of any kind - in favour of this. Fucking. Carve up.’
Sudden slither of shock around the table. Gasps, shuffling, the shaking of wiser heads. At his side, Mike Bryant was looking up at him in disbelief.
‘Ah. Chris.’ Hamilton smiled briefly, like a comic to his audience just before the straight man gets it. ‘Now before you go and get Mike’s baseball bat, could I just point out that we’re trying for a non-violent model here.’
A couple of sniggers, but battened down. Officially, no one below partner level was supposed to know what had really happened to Hernan Echevarria. Nick Makin would have talked, Chris knew, he would have made sure word got out, but just how far they could all go along with Hamilton’s indiscretion was unclear. Once again, gazes sought Jack Notley for his reaction, but the senior partner’s features could have been pale granite.
‘You stupid fuck,’ said Chris clearly, and the silence that followed it was absolute. ‘Do you really think Vicente Barranco is going to be stopped by some pissant cokehead dressed up in his old man’s uniform? Do you really think he’ll just go away?’
He saw Louise Hewitt on her way to getting up. Saw Jack Notley lay a hand on her arm and shake his head almost imperceptibly. Philip Hamilton spotted the exchange as well, and his mouth contracted to almost anal proportions.
‘Might I remind you, Mr Faulkner, that you are talking to a partner. If you can’t show the proper respect in this meeting, I will have you removed. Do you understand me?’
Chris’s eyes widened slightly, and an unpleasant smile floated onto his face.
‘Try it,’ he said softly.
‘Chris.’ Notley’s voice cracked across the room. ‘If you have anything to contribute, I’d like you to contribute it now, and then sit down. This is a policy meeting, not the Royal Shakespeare Company.’
Chris nodded. ‘Alright.’ He looked round the room. ‘This is for the record. I know Vicente Barranco, and I’m telling you, if you try to fuck him over like this, he’ll fade back into the highlands like he has before and he’ll take the disenfranchised of the NAME with him by the thousand. And then, some day, maybe five years down the road, maybe next year, he’ll be back. He’ll be back, and he’ll do what we were going to ask him to do in the first place, and when he’s sitting in the Bogotá parliament chamber, and Echevarria junior is facing a firing squad somewhere for crimes against humanity, we’ll find ourselves on the wrong fucking side. He’ll go to someone else, maybe Nakamura, maybe the Germans, and he will cut us out. No GDP percentage, no enterprise zone licences, no arms trade, no supply side contracts, no commodities angle, nothing. We’ll just have a roomful of angry Americans, and nothing to feed them with.’
More silence, glances up and down the table in search of where this was going. Chris jerked his chin at Hamilton and sat down.
Hamilton looked at Notley. The senior partner shrugged. Hamilton cleared his throat.
‘Well, Chris. Thank you for that, ah, academic insight. Of course, I appreciate you taking the time to come and give your view on an account you’re no longer working on, but let me just say, I think we can handle one disgruntled marquista and indeed there are already initiatives in place—’
Chris grinned like a skull.
‘He won’t be there, Hamilton. I already called Lopez, told him to steer Barranco well clear of the beach. When the Cobain doesn’t show up, and junior’s pet thugs do, either they’ll find nothing, or better yet Barranco’ll catch them in an ambush and slaughter them. After that, he’ll fade like a fucking ghost.’
The room erupted before he finished. Uproar from the gathered ranks of execs, half of them on their feet, pointing and shouting, not all wholly opposed to Chris, it seemed, Hamilton yelling across the mêlée of voices, something about fucking professional misconduct, Notley bellowing for order. The door burst open and security rushed the room, wielding non-lethal weaponry. Louise Hewitt went to stop them, hands and voice raised to make herself understood above the noise.
In the midst of it all, Mike turned to Chris, face distorted with shock and anger. ‘Are you fucking insane?’ he hissed.
It took ten minutes to clear the conference room, and even then security weren’t happy about leaving the partners with Chris. They’d heard their own set of rumours about the Echevarria incident.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Notley. ‘Really, Hermione. I appreciate your diligence, but we’re all colleagues here. Just tempers flaring, that’s all. A bit of misplaced road rage. Just keep a couple of your people outside the door, that’ll be fine.’
He ushered the guard captain out and closed the doors, then turned back to the table. In the places they had occupied wh
en the room was filled, Chris, Mike, Louise Hewitt and Philip Hamilton sat staring at their respective patches of polished wood. Notley came back to the head of the table and stood looking at them.
‘Right,’ he said grimly. ‘Let’s sort this out, shall we?’
Louise Hewitt made an impatient gesture. ‘I don’t see anything to sort out, Jack. Faulkner’s just admitted to gross professional misconduct—’
‘Yeah, that’s—’
‘Chris, you will shut up,’ roared Notley. ‘You are not a partner, nor will you ever be if you cannot behave in a civilised fashion. Do as you’re told and be fucking quiet.’
‘Louise is right, Jack.’ Hamilton’s voice was soft and calm, at odds with the rage he’d shown earlier. He was back on comfortable ground. ‘Warning Barranco has endangered a delicate piece of policy restructuring. At a minimum, it’s cost us a possible bargaining chip with Echevarria. At worst, it’s given succour to a terrorist who could provide us with insurgency problems for the next decade.’
‘He was a freedom fighter last week,’ muttered Chris.
Louise Hewitt turned a look of distilled contempt on him. ‘Let me ask you a question, Chris,’ she said lightly. ‘Would it be fair to say that you’ve become political where the NAME is concerned? That you’ve been contaminated by local issues?’
Chris looked at Notley. ‘Am I allowed to answer that?’
‘Yes. But you’ll keep your tone civil, and show some respect, is that understood? This isn’t some basement fight club in the zones.’
‘Yes, I understand that.’ Chris jabbed a finger at Hamilton. ‘What I don’t understand is our junior partner’s system of communication. Until this morning, I had no idea either that I had been relieved of duty on the NAME account, or that we were reversing our established client relationship.’
‘Echevarria is the established—’
‘Philip.’ Notley wagged a finger at the junior partner. ‘Let him finish.’
‘In fact,’ Chris saw the opening and accelerated into it. ‘The client change was news to me until this meeting, which wasn’t helpful. If I warned Barranco off, it was because I thought someone was running infiltration into the account—’
‘Oh, please.’ Louise Hewitt pulled a face. ‘This is your job on the line, Chris. Surely you can do better than that.’
‘This morning, Louise, I received a direct call from the captain of the sub freighter we’re using to ship Barranco’s arms. She’s stuck in Faslane, waiting for freight that isn’t coming because this,’ Chris indicated Hamilton, ‘genius has had it rerouted to the NAME military. Only he didn’t think to inform me of the fact, so all I can assume is outside interference. I act accordingly, I protect our client as best I can. I get slammed for it, when the real problem here is a lack of top-down communication.’
‘You’re lying,’ said Hamilton angrily. He also had seen the loophole.
‘Am I, Philip?’ Chris turned to gesture at Mike Bryant. ‘Ask Mike. He’s been as much in the dark as I have, he knows all about the sub freighter call, because the two of us were both trying to work out what the fuck was going on this morning. Right, Mike?’
Bryant shifted in his seat. For the first time ever that Chris could remember, he looked uncomfortable.
Notley’s gaze sharpened. ‘Mike?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Bryant sighed. ‘Sorry, Phil. Louise. Chris is right. You should have told us earlier.’
Hamilton leaned across the table, flushed. ‘Bryant, you knew—’
‘I knew there was a policy meeting, and yeah, from the hints you dropped, I guessed the way it was going. But there was nothing solid, Phil. And nothing about the shipments. You know,’ a sideways glance at his friend, ‘I didn’t know what Chris was going to do, but I couldn’t tell him for sure what was going on either. I can see why he would have played it the way he did.’
The room was still. A glance crackled between Hamilton and Hewitt. No one spoke. Jack Notley steepled his fingers.
‘Is there anything else?’ he asked quietly.
Louise Hewitt shrugged. ‘Only that what we’ve heard is a pack of lies designed to hide the fact that Chris has gone political on us.’
‘Anything constructive,’ asked Notley, still more softly.
‘Yes,’ said Chris, thinking of Lopez, tossed into the arena and up against a twenty-year-old blade sicario who’d be savage with favela poverty and sight of a way out. Thinking of Barranco, machine-gunned to death on a darkened beach, blood leaking into the sand under a shattering of glass shard stars. ‘I am not political. My reasons for backing Vicente Barranco have nothing to do with politics. And anyone who wants to call that into question can see me on the road.’
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
‘You are a lying motherfucker, Chris.’ Mike Bryant paced back and forth in front of the BMW, furious. His feet crunched in the hard shoulder gravel. Off to one side, a breeze stirred the grass beside the motorway ramp. He stopped and jabbed a finger at Chris. ‘You have turned political, haven’t you? Fucking Barranco got to you, didn’t he?’
Chris leaned on the still warm hood of the car, arms folded. The orbital stretched away below them, deserted as far as the eye could see in both directions. After the confines of the Shorn block, the sky over them seemed enormous. They’d driven for less than an hour, but it felt as if they stood at the edge of the world.
‘Oh, give me a fucking break. You’re accusing me of politics. A week ago, Barranco was the horse to back. Now suddenly, he’s unprofitable? What is that, Mike? That’s not political?’
‘The numbers make sense,’ said Bryant.
‘The numbers?’ Chris came off the hood of the BMW, taut with rage. ‘The fucking numbers? That shit is made up, Mike. You can make the numbers tell you any fucking thing you want them to. What about the numbers that made sense for Barranco? What happened to them? What are we, economists all of a sudden? You want to draw me a fucking curve? It’s got nothing to do with reality, Mike. You know that.’
Mike looked away. ‘That fact remains, Chris. You’re in way too close with Barranco. You’ve got to come off the account. Let Hamilton run with it, see what happens.’
‘Great. And meanwhile what happens to Joaquin Lopez?’
‘That’s not important!’ Bryant made fists, punched exasperatedly off into the wind. ‘Fuck Chris, pay attention, will you. You can’t get personal on this thing. It’s just business. Lopez has been undercut, that’s all there is to it. If this new guy can do the same work for a percentage point less commission, what the fuck are we doing still working with Lopez anyway?’
‘It’s a half per cent, Mike. And he’s a twenty-year-old sicario, straight out of the favelas. How do we know what he’ll do?’
‘If he’s hungry, he’ll do well. They always do.’
‘Oh, what the fuck are you talking about, Mike? You were at the briefing. This guy is cheap and aggressive, and that’s all we know. He could be fucking illiterate for all the background Hamilton’s shown us. This is a bad call, Mike. This isn’t business, it’s a fucking greed call. Can’t you see that?’
‘What I see, Chris, is that you’re cruising for a fall.’ Mike’s voice softened, but it was the gentle tug of a steel tow cable, taking up slack. He moved in, stood close. ‘I see why you’re acting like this, but it’s no good. You’re out of control. You’re unmanageable. And we can’t afford that, not in any of us. I’m sorry about what happened to your dad, really I am.’
Chris flinched away. Mike caught his arm.
‘No, I am. I’m sorry about the zones and your mum and everything that’s happened to you. But that’s the past, Chris, and it’s over. It doesn’t give you an excuse to fuck up everyone else’s life around here. Now I’m telling you, listen to me, Chris, I’m telling you, you’re off the NAME account. End of story. I’m the one that brought you aboard in the first place, and now I’m cutting you loose. It’s not like you haven’t got enough else to worry about. Fuck, Chris, why don’t you
go home? Talk to Carla, sort your life out.’
Chris shoved him away, both palm-heels into the chest. For a flashpoint second, both men almost dropped into a karate stance.
‘I’ve told you before, Mike. I don’t need marital advice from you.’
‘Chris, you’re throwing away the best—’
‘Shut the fuck up!’ The yell lashed out, fury etched with pain. ‘What do you know about it, Mike, what the fuck do you know about it?’
‘I know—’
Chris cut across him savagely. ‘Try staying faithful to Suki for ten minutes, why don’t you? Try acting like a responsible father and husband for a change. Get your dick out of Sally Hunting and Liz Linshaw and whoever else you’re dipping it into these days. There. You enjoying this, Mike? Doesn’t feel good, does it?’
‘I’m not seeing Liz at the moment,’ said Mike quietly. ‘She’s got a lot of work on. And I haven’t fucked Sally Hunting in better than six years. You want to make sure of your facts before you start mouthing off.’
‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’
They stood twitchily, facing each other across one corner of the BMW’s hood. Very distantly, the sound came of a single vehicle on the orbital. Finally, Mike Bryant shrugged.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way you want it. But what I said before stands. You’re off the NAME account, you’re—’
His phone queeped for attention. He grimaced and fished it out, pressed it impatiently to his ear. ‘Yeah, Bryant. Out on the orbital, why? Yeah, he’s right here.’
He handed the phone to Chris.
‘Hewitt,’ he said.
Louise Hewitt sat behind her desk, hands spread on its surface as if she might find built-in weaponry there to blast Chris into grease on the carpet. Her tone was chilly.
‘Well, I’m glad you’re back from your picnic in the country. There are a couple of things we need to clear up.’
The Complete SF Collection Page 198