The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘Don’t be obtuse, Chris. I’ve got indesp microcam footage from Liz’s house and the hotel too. Should have seen Mike’s face when he saw that stuff.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘No,’ she said almost kindly. ‘I’ve been modelling this one for months, Chris. I mean, come on. Who do you think sent you Donna Dread’s little performance in the first place?’ She waited for a response, saw she was getting none and sighed. ‘Okay, Linshaw was already leaning pretty hard in your direction, she’s such a little tart with the driving thing anyway. But even so, I think I deserve some credit. If it weren’t for me, you’d probably still be grinding through the same stale old fidelity numbers with your Norwegian grease monkey.’

  Chris nodded to himself. The shock was still coming, in waves. ‘You set me up with Hamilton, didn’t you? You knew what I’d do.’

  ‘It seemed likely.’ Hewitt examined her nails modestly. ‘To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I’d get a result this good. Putting you and Hamilton on a collision course was an obvious no-lose strategy, the Lopez/Barranco stuff looked likely to pull you in, you proved that with Echevarria senior. Little favour called in at the Langley end, tip you off the account and off we go. But even so, Chris, I was impressed . You really managed to fuck up beyond my wildest dreams. I don’t know what you were thinking. If you were thinking.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Chris said distantly.

  ‘No, I do understand. You’re hooked on Barranco’s shiny new dream - actually, it’s a pretty grubby, old dream, but let’s leave that - and some macho loyalty thing for Joaquin Lopez. I just wonder what you think trashing Hamilton was going to achieve.’

  It was a ray of light, worth an almost-grin. ‘You’re wrong, Louise. Trashing Hamilton was incidental. He was just in the way. The point is, your deal with Echevarria is fucked. He’ll never touch Shorn again.’

  ‘Well, that remains to be seen. He’s a smarter young man than you give him credit for, and if we can show him your charred corpse with Mike Bryant’s boot on it, well, who knows?’

  He folded his arms. ‘I’m not doing it, Louise.’

  ‘Oh, yes you are.’ Her voice turned momentarily ugly. ‘Because if you don’t drive, then Phil Hamilton’s death is just murder, and you’ll be getting a swift ride to the organ bank. Those are your choices, Chris. Die on the road or die strapped to a gurney at St Bart’s. Either way is fine with me.’

  She leaned closer. Close enough that he could smell her perfume under the rain, clean and sharp and lightly spiced. Her voice was a serrated murmur.

  ‘And whichever it is, Chris, when it happens, as you’re going under, you just remember Nick Makin.’

  Chris looked at her, not really surprised. ‘Makin, huh?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She sat back again. ‘Makin.’

  ‘So I called it from the beginning. Your toy boy got bumped for me, and you sent him to kill me.’ He shook his head. ‘Him and his gangwit proxies. That was brave of you.’

  ‘There’s no sent about it, Chris. He hated you for free. If anything,’ she closed her mouth, looked away. She blinked. ‘If anything, I tried to talk him down because I knew it wasn’t necessary. I knew you’d fuck up sooner or later. And don’t talk to me about brave, Chris. Not with Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range while she was injured and trapped in wreckage. Not with the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands. You’re no fucking different to me in the end.’

  ‘No?’ He spotted the weak spot and stabbed at it. He mimicked her savagely. ‘Tried to talk him down? Come on, Louise, if you’d wanted to stop Makin, you could have. He wasn’t that strong. You let it happen because it suited the play. Tell yourself what you like in the wee small hours, but don’t try and sell that shit to me. In the end, he was just another pawn.’

  ‘Pawn. Ah, yes, the chess player.’ Her colour was hectic again, but her voice had evened out. ‘You know, I play a little chess myself, Chris. I never made a big splash about it, like some people, but I play. And it’s a very limited game. In the end, it’s just you and the other guy. That’s not a good model for what we do, Chris. Not a good model for life in general. Of course it’s very male, one-on-one combat, nice and simple. But it isn’t real. You need to upgrade, play something like AlphaMesh or Linkage. Something multi-sided, something with shifting alliances.’

  ‘Yeah, that sounds more like your speed.’

  ‘It’s the speed of the world, Chris. Look around you. See the chess players? Sure you do, they’re the stupid third-world fucks sending out their pawns to kill each other over a fifty-mile strip of desert or what colour pyjamas God likes to wear. We’re the AlphaMesh players, Chris. The investment houses, the consultants, the corporates. We shift, we change, we realign, and the game keeps flowing our way. We move around these horn-locked back-and-forth testosterone dickheads, we play them off against each other and they fucking pay us for the privilege.’

  ‘Thanks for the insight.’

  ‘Yeah well.’ She got up to go. ‘Here’s another one. When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you - when that happens, just remember. You didn’t lose to him, you lost to me.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  It rained on and off through the night and into the next morning. The last of the showers sputtered out as Chris was eating breakfast, and by the time he finished, the sky was brightening. His release order came through about an hour later. The meal tray detail turned up, looking unusually cheerful, and told him he could leave whenever he wanted. They’d brought his phone and wallet, a small black carry-all for his clothes, and the one who’d loaned him the books said he was welcome to keep anything he was still reading. Chris said he couldn’t possibly.

  Outside, the city was still damp from the rain, and the air smelled rinsed. The weather had cleared the streets of people, leaving a forlorn Sunday feel on everything. A moisture-beaded Shorn limousine was waiting for him at the kerb, engine idling.

  ‘We’ll need to hurry, sir,’ the chauffeur told him. ‘The press release said four this afternoon, but you never know. Even the corporate cops have been known to leak. Always a price for drive data, eh?’

  In the event, his cynicism proved unfounded. The drive to the hotel was uneventful, and the chauffeur left him alone. Only once, as his passenger was getting out, did the man’s professional lacquer crack. He waited until Chris started up the steps to the hotel, then climbed half out of the driver-side door and leaned across the roof of the limo.

  ‘Good luck, sir,’ he said.

  Chris turned to look at him. ‘Not a Bryant fan, then?’ he asked, not quite steadily.

  ‘No, sir. Didn’t want to say anything before, in the car, in case you thought I was brown-nosing. But I’ll be watching you tomorrow, sir. Betting on you too.’

  ‘That’s. Very kind of you.’ The attempt at irony wavered away, unnoticed. ‘Any particular reason you’re not backing Bryant?’ Because he sure as fuck is a better driver than me.

  The chauffeur shrugged. ‘Can’t bring myself to like the man. ’course, you didn’t hear me say that, sir.’

  ‘Say what?’

  The chauffeur grinned. ‘Like I said, sir. I’ll be watching.’

  Chris watched him drive away, gripped by a powerful desire to exchange places with the man. Secure service job, preferential housing as likely as not. Modest means, a modest life and a probable future measured in decades, not days. Look at him, not a care in the fucking world.

  Suddenly, he felt sick.

  When he got up to his room, the sense of unreality was complete. The only visible change since he left for work the day he murdered Philip Hamilton was the absence of Liz Linshaw’s sleeping form curled into the bedclothes.

  And the document pouch on the desk.

  He ripped off the seals and skimmed through the paperwork - standard challenge documentation, agreement to waive normal legal protection, itemised rules and references
to the 2041 (revised) corporate road charter. Duel envelope details, satellite blow-ups and recent road surface commentary from the relevant service providers. It was the M11 run, practically from his front door, down through the underpass and up over the vaulted section, the Gullet, across the north-eastern zones and down. The old favourite. No motorway changes, no ramps, just into the pipe and drive. Brutal, simple stuff.

  In his jacket pocket, the mobile queeped. After ten days without the phone, it took him a moment to realise what it was. He took it out, identified a video call from Liz and accepted.

  ‘Chris.’ She stared out of the tiny screen at him, a little haggard around the eyes, he noticed, and couldn’t help being slightly flattered. ‘Thank Christ for that, you’re out.’

  ‘You must be paying a lot for your tips.’

  Her smile was strained. ‘Tricks of the trade, Chris. Journalism, I mean. You know what’s happening, I take it.’

  ‘Yeah, I got a full briefing yesterday. Has Mike been in touch?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She winced. ‘Not a conversation I want to repeat.’

  Chris tried to think of something vaguely intelligent to say. ‘I guess he was a lot more serious about you than he liked to show.’

  ‘Yeah, and about you too, Chris. That’s what really hurt, apparently. As far as I could make out between the expletives.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  A long pause.

  ‘Chris, are you really going to—’

  ‘I don’t really want to talk about it, Liz.’

  ‘No. Right.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

  Again, the pitching sickness in his stomach. The sheer fucking disbelief at what was going to happen. A rising, swelling bubble of fear.

  ‘I, uh . . .’

  ‘Fine. It’s okay, I understand.’

  ‘Good.’

  The conversation fizzled for a few more seconds, then died. They said goodbyes that were almost formal, and he hung up.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the phone for a while. Finally, he called Mike.

  ‘Hello, Chris.’ There was a flatness in Bryant’s voice and eyes that told him everything he needed to know. He could have hung up there and then.

  He gave it a shot.

  ‘Mike, you can’t be serious about this shit.’

  ‘What shit is that, Chris? The trail-of-bodies-in-Shorn-conference-chambers shit? The political-alignment-with-terrorists shit? Or did you mean the fuck-your-best-friend’s-woman shit?’

  ‘Hey. You’re married to Suki, not Liz.’

  ‘Do the words you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me sound familiar?’

  ‘Listen Mike, I’m coming in to the office. We’re going to talk about—’

  ‘No, we’re not. I’m taking a half day today. Spending it with Suki, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

  ‘Then I’ll come and see you there.’

  ‘You do and I’ll kick your fucking teeth down your throat on the doorstep.’ Mike’s top lip drew back from his teeth. ‘You just stay where you are and fuck Liz a couple more times, while you’ve still got the chance. If you can get it up right now, that is.’

  Chris snapped.

  ‘Ah, fuck you then. Asshole! I’ll see you on the fucking road!’

  He hurled the phone across the room. It hit the wall and bounced, undamaged, to the floor.

  He made one more call. Two, to be completely accurate, but when he called the house in Hawkspur Green, no one answered. He shrugged philosophically and dug Erik Nyquist’s number out of the phone’s memory. Leaking oil in a head-on collision. It could hardly hurt more than what he’d already swallowed.

  The Norwegian was curiously gentle with him.

  ‘She’s not here, Chris,’ he said. ‘And honestly, even if she was, I doubt she’d talk to you.’

  ‘That’s fine, I uh, I understand. Uh, do you know if she’s gone home? To the house, I mean. I tried her there, not to talk to, only to warn her I’m coming, I mean.’ He heard the choppy stumbling of his own speech and stopped. He rubbed at his face, glad Erik didn’t have videophone capacity. ‘I’m going out to collect the Saab this afternoon. I didn’t want to surprise her, you know, if she didn’t want to, uh, to see me.’

  ‘She hasn’t gone to the house,’ said Nyquist, and Chris knew then she was there, maybe standing next to her father in the cramped, damp smelling confines of the hall, maybe off in the kitchen, back to it all, trying not to listen.

  ‘Okay.’ He cleared his throat of an unlooked-for obstruction. ‘Listen, Erik. Tell her. When you see her, I mean, tell her she needs to stay resident in the UK for the next six months. Otherwise, uh, the terms of my will are invalidated. You know, the share options and mortgage insurance on the house? If she’s gone, back to Norway, Shorn’ll get the lot. So, uh. Makes sense for her to stick around, you know.’

  There was a lot of silence before Erik answered.

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ he said.

  ‘Great.’

  More silence. Neither man seemed ready to hang up.

  ‘You’re going to drive then?’ Nyquist asked him finally.

  Chris was relieved to find he could still manage a laugh. ‘Well, let’s just say the other options aren’t great.’

  ‘You can’t run?’

  ‘Shame on you, Erik. Run, from the filthy corporate monsters of Conflict Investment?’ He grew abruptly serious, fighting the up-bubbling fear. ‘There’s no way, Erik. They’ve got me checked, filed and monitored. That fucked-up system you’re always raging about? That system’ll be locked up against any move I try to make. Plastic selectively invalidated, corporate police checking ports and airports. To put not too fine a point to it, if I don’t roll out the wheels tomorrow, I’m a common criminal on my way to the jag gurney.’

  Nyquist hesitated. ‘Can you beat him? Carla says—’

  ‘I don’t know, Erik. Get back to me tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have an answer for you.’

  The Norwegian chuckled dutifully. Chris felt his own face take up the echo. He was suddenly, almost tearfully thankful for the older man’s unhostile presence on the line. The instinctive male solidarity, the shoring up of his desperate bravado. He suddenly understood how badly he had failed to do the same thing for Erik at the crisis points in his father-in-law’s life. How he’d taken the Norwegian’s own cornered bravado at face value, failed to see it for what it was, berated him for it and cut him loose to suffer alone. With the realisation, something lodged in his throat.

  ‘From what I understand,’ Nyquist was saying, ‘we’ll all know by then. In fact we’ll all be watching you crack open the champagne. The networks have been ad-screaming about full coverage since yesterday. Sponsored by Pirelli and BMW, they say.’

  Chris’s grin melted into a grimace. ‘So. No prizes for guessing who they think’s going to win, then.’

  ‘Almost worth beating him just to piss them off, huh?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He could feel another bubble of fear coming up. He cleared his throat again. ‘Listen, Erik. I’ve got to go. Things to do, you know. Got to get ready for all that publicity tomorrow. Interviews, fame, all that shit. It, uh, it isn’t easy being a driving hero.’

  ‘No,’ said Nyquist very gently. ‘I know.’

  He signed the challenge documentation, got the hotel to courier it across to Shorn and sat waiting for receipt confirmation. He studied the route blow-ups and the surface reports with desultory attention, tried vaguely to imagine his way inside something resembling a strategy.

  He could not focus on anything. He kept skittering off into daydreams. His thoughts slowed down, fragmented to useless shards.

  He heard Carla’s voice.

  Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.

  Hewitt’s voice.

  When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you - when that happens—

  He remembered Bryan
t’s driving. Bryant’s chess playing. Headlong, full on, joyous in its savagery.

  Bryant and the car-jackers. The boom of the Nemex, the tumbling bodies.

  Bryant and Griff Dixon. Implacable, precise.

  Bryant and Marauder, daring the gangwit forward, grinning into the possibility of it.

  Bryant on Crutched Friars, walking empty handed into the duel against five men with shotguns.

  He stared at it all, behind the curtain of his closed eyes.

  And heard Hewitt again.

  —Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range while she was injured and trapped in wreckage—

  —the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands—

  You’re no fucking different to me in the end.

  He wondered if she was right.

  Recoiled automatically as soon as he thought it.

  Found himself lying face up on the bed an hour later, exploring the idea gingerly, like a broken bone or a gaping wound he didn’t dare look at directly.

  Caught himself, finally, hoping it might be true.

  Because, in the absence of the consuming hatred that had driven him after Edward Quain, he didn’t know what else he could summon to keep him alive tomorrow.

  He had the cab leave him at the end of the drive.

  It felt strange to walk up the gravel S-curve and see the house emerge gradually through the trees. Just being there felt odd enough - he hadn’t seen the place in weeks, and even then, before his life broke in half, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d walked from the road. One weekend, one evening, out with Carla in the village maybe. Back at the start of the summer. He couldn’t remember.

  He reached the turning circle at the top, and the Saab was there, quiet and sequined with rain. He wondered if Carla had looked at it recently, wondered in fact when it had last been moved. He’d need to road-test it. Check it for—

  A memory arrowed in past his defences - Carla under the Saab post test-drive, calling out questions about handling, while he stood with a whisky in his hand, watching her feet and answering. Warmth of shared knowledge, shared involvement.