Slim Jim snorted around a mouthful of rump steak. He chewed and swallowed most of it before replying. Wasn’t hard. These Frenchies knew how to cook a good steak. He’d give them that.
“Of course the Russians are cheap,” he said. Putting down the heavy silver knife and fork, he removed an errant strand of beef lodged between his teeth and went on. “Because they’d be cracking your satellite open like a fucking Easter egg as soon as you took your eyes off them. We both know you’re never going with the Russians because you can’t trust them. And the Europeans and NASA are too expensive. Fuck, the Euroweenies are a joke too. An expensive fucking joke. All the other start-ups, they’re small fry. It’s my rockets or Howard Hughes’. We’re the only guys with the capacity you need. And my rockets don’t blow up on the launch pad. That’s why they cost a little more, baby.”
He grinned, satisfied. Slim Jim loved it when he was right, and he was right about this. Davidson Aerospace remained unchallenged on the high frontier, no matter what Halabi said.
She smiled and leaned forward over her plate. He had to admit she was a classy piece of work. Wasn’t even showing any tit. She’d taken only a sip of her wine, an expensive sip at seven hundred bucks a bottle, and she hadn’t really touched her meal, some unpronounceable French thing he guessed was a fish stew. There was some big ass shrimp floating in the broth. His own steak and fries was almost gone. He went back to mopping up the tasty sauce when he’d finished cleaning his teeth and saying his piece.
“Mister Davidson,” she said, still refusing to call him Slim Jim, like everyone did. “You’re not just a little bit more expensive. You are asking more than twice what Hughes wants. It’s not sustainable. Boeing wants to work with you. We can sign a contract tomorrow that guarantees you will remain the market leader for another twenty years, even if you do nothing else but put our satellites into orbit. And I shouldn’t have to explain that you’d be setting yourself up to do a lot more than that. The work you’d do for us would put you well on the way to locking up the asteroid-mining business you keep talking about. Nobody else is talking about that. Nobody else is planning for it. Only you. Because you are the man who seized the future when we came through. Let us help you seize it again.”
Slim Jim knew what she was doing, stroking him up and down like this, getting him hard by telling him what a big boy he was, but it didn’t matter. It was still working. He was full of hot red meat and cold German beer and he was falling for it because all he wanted was a head job for dessert. A sweet treat he was never gonna get. Slim Jim Davidson, the man who had stolen the future, not seized it, was probably going to give this uppity bitch everything she wanted, and all because he didn’t take his lawyer’s advice and get laid before dinner.
How did he get himself into these things?
The way he always did, of course. Chasing money and pussy. His two favorite things in the world. The chase had led him to Paris this week, for a commercial aerospace conference. It could be Sao Paolo or Rome or Melbourne the next. He never really knew. He had people for that shit. For the set-up. But he still liked to close the big deals himself, and this contract with Boeing would be a big deal. Halabi wasn’t squeezing his dick about that. Slim Jim hadn’t just stolen the future. He’d studied it. He knew that the man who controlled the high ground controlled everything, and there was no ground higher than space.
He frowned.
The ground in space? That didn’t sound right.
But the fucking point was still the point, right? You didn’t get to be the richest motherfucker in the world by sitting on your ass, and you sure as hell didn’t get to stay the richest motherfucker that way. Of the thousands of men and women caught up in the first moments of the Transition, when the ships of the Multinational Force had materialized on top of, and even inside of, Ray Spruance’s Midway fleet, only Able Seaman James Davidson had seized that fucking moment. He’d grabbed up a bunch of flexipads and smart phones and, instead of trying to sell them on the black market like a chump, he’d hidden them away. Studied them, taken their secrets and moved before anyone else, turning his knowledge of the future and just a little head start into a hurricane of money. He’d started small, betting on sports to begin with, but he’d gone big, fast. He’d made enough scratch to buy—okay then, to bribe—his way out of the navy within months. He’d invested in industries that didn’t even exist yet. Some of them he willed into being. You could say that about him without lying, or even bending the truth. He was a pioneer. In media. In technology. And now in space.
He was going to be the Elon Musk of the 1960s, the way he’d been the Rupert Murdoch, the Steve Jobs and the Ronald fucking McDonald of the 1940s and 50s. He wasn’t going to colonize Mars, of course. There was nothing there worth having. But he was going to own space before anyone else. It was the smart play. The fact that Halabi was sitting across the table trying to bury him in Boeing bucks was proof of that.
He knew then he was going to give her the launches she needed. Not because he was drunk or horny but because it was the smart play. She was right that his rocket guys would learn lots of useful shit boosting those satellites for Boeing. Straight up, he could see her paying for his reusable rocket program the same way the Japs and Koreans had paid for his silicon fabs.
“Look, I’m not gonna make a decision tonight,” he lied. “And if I did, because I drank too much beer, my lawyers would strangle it before my hangover cleared tomorrow.”
He raised his glass and tipped it slightly towards her.
“I don’t expect you to make a decision tonight,” she said, taking another dainty sip of her stupidly expensive wine. No way could it be six or seven hundred bucks tastier than his beer. “I’m just asking you to give our offer the consideration it deserves. We can underwrite your moonshots for a decade.”
That caught him by surprise. He frowned. “I’m not shooting for the moon. There’s nothing there.”
“Sorry,” she smiled. “Poor choice of words. What I meant was this contract would give your aerospace division the certainty it needs to take risks elsewhere. And you want to take those risks. That’s who you are, Jim.”
Oh man, she was good, he thought.
“Okay,” he said, putting up his hands in mock surrender. “No decision tonight. But…”
She frowned then, and looked at her watch.
“Sorry,” she said. “I told them I wasn’t to be interrupted.”
He could see she was reading a notification.
“Your husband finally found us,” he joked.
She did not smile.
“No. The vice president.”
She looked up, shaking her head.
“I’m really sorry. I’m going to have to go.”
Slim Jim didn’t need to be a shrink to see the conflict playing out on her face.
He shrugged.
“I finished my steak anyway. It was good.”
His attention was drawn to the entrance where two anonymous suits had entered. They wore sunglasses, despite the late hour. He could tell from the thickness of the frames that they were powered models.
Secret Service, he thought.
His guys, and Halabi’s for that matter, would have worn much better suits.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was a hell of a thing forcing a guy to choose between the dollar and the dick. Most guys couldn’t make that choice, not sensibly, but Slim Jim was not most guys. As much as he loved to attend to the needs of his dick, he understood that he could best see to those needs when he had unlimited dollars to piss away. He did not sit for long after Halabi left. A younger, dumber Slim Jim would have hit the town. The older, wiser Slim Jim called his attorney.
Maria O’Brien was an uptimer, a Marine Corps lawyer who came through the Transition near the end of her term. She hadn’t rejoined like a lot of those guys. She’d come to work for him, and she had done a good job. Slim Jim didn’t owe everything to her. His own good luck and rat cunni
ng in seizing the moment of the uptimers’ arrival had set him on his path to fortune. But Maria had ensured he never fell from that path. Tens of thousands of people worked directly for Slim Jim Davidson these days, but Maria remained his favorite and most valued employee.
He hadn’t even tried to hit on her in years, that was how good she was.
He knew she’d be working back at the hotel. That’s what she did when they traveled. She worked. Hell, that’s pretty much all she did, all of the time. She was his general, his champion, his designated hitter.
She answered his call before the second ring.
“Jimbo? Everything all right?”
She sounded suspicious.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re good buddy. No sexual harassment suits this time.”
“Excellent, so what’s up?”
Slim Jim accepted a bourbon from the waiter with a thumbs-up. The restaurant was roaring with customers now, the air thick with smoke. At least that was one thing they got right here. Back home it was getting so a man couldn’t enjoy a cigarette anywhere. Slim Jim didn’t doubt it was bad for you. He’d even cut his own habit back to one coffin nail at each meal. But he’d be damned if he was going to give them up entirely. You were a fucking long time dead.
“Halabi just blew me off, and not in a good way,” he said. “She got a better offer and just lit out of here.”
“Seriously? That’s weird,” said O’Brien. “She really wants those launch windows. You sure you didn’t grab just a little bit of her ass?”
“Not even. She got a call from your old boss. Kolhammer. It was like he tipped a bucket of cold water over her head. She was gone within, like, a minute.”
“Huh,” said his lawyer, not hiding her surprise.
Slim Jim nailed his bourbon in one hit. It was some small batch label that he didn’t recognize, but it was pretty smooth. He coulda easily chased it with another.
“Is this some kind of uptime thing, Maria? I know you guys do this all the time. Going behind our backs and shit.”
Her voice came back with no hint of duplicity.
“Jimbo, if it was some secret time traveler thing, would I tell you?”
“I guess not,” he conceded. “But I never know when you’re joking about these things.”
“That’s the idea,” she said.
It was a game they played, pretending there was some secret time traveler conspiracy he knew nothing about. In truth, he knew he owned her. He had no secrets from O’Brien, and she had none from him.
“But it is weird,” she continued. “Her people went all out to set up that meet with you. She wouldn’t just bail without good reason. You were a gentleman, weren’t you?”
“Tucked in my bib before dinner and everything.”
He folded himself around the tiny handset, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Do you think you can find out what’s going on?” he asked. “There has to be something. Some development, some change, and if there is we should get ahead of it. That’s where the easy money is. That’s where it always is.”
Her voice came back, a little distorted by the heavy encryption protecting their conversation.
“I agree. Can you give me an hour or so to work this? There’re a lot of people in town we can reach out to. Most of the military appropriations committee is over here for your aerospace conference. I can interrupt their dinner plans given how much money we put into their campaigns. Just leave it to me.”
Slim Jim nodded, satisfied.
“I always do, baby,” he said.
He signaled to the waiter to bring his check, but the man shook his head to indicate it was already taken care of. Halabi.
“Okay.” Davidson continued, “I might head out and—”
“And you might get yourself back here to the hotel,” said O’Brien, cutting him off. “If something is happening, I don’t need to spend half the night looking for you in the better brothels of Paris.”
“Hey,” he protested. “I was just thinking about going out and getting a drink.”
“You have a minibar here. And you can afford to use it. In fact, you have a real bar here. You own it. Remember?”
“What about the casino, downstairs?” he said, part of him wondering why he had to ask permission to do anything. “Can I get a drink and a few hands in down there? You won’t need to send search parties. Just come and get me from the blackjack table.”
“All right then,” said O’Brien. “But don’t drink too much and don’t get in any fights.”
He was almost genuinely offended. He had never been a fighter.
“I got bodyguards to do that,” he said.
“And they have orders from me to keep things quiet. So I mean it, no starting any fights for them to finish. Have a drink, two at most, and lose some money. I’ll come get you when I have something.”
He signed off, grinning a little. She knew him well. He left a couple of fifties on the table for the wait staff, and a hundred on the bar for the cutie who’d been pouring his drinks. You never knew. It could be an investment which might pay off with a blow job if he came back. The bar girl was a hottie, and he was pretty sure she’d been checking him out.
She even looked a little bit like a younger Karen Halabi. Just around the mouth.
###
Slim Jim’s hotel, the Dupleix, was in the 7th arrondissement, a twenty-minute drive from his dinner meeting with Halabi. It was well situated to profit from the high-end business and diplomatic travelers who clustered in the 7th. It wasn’t one of his signature venues. Some trust, which owned some shell company, which lived in a post office box in Ireland and pissed money into his back pocket via some two-dollar limited liability company in the Cayman Islands or something, had purchased the Hotel Dupleix shortly after the war. It wasn’t much more than a facade and a bomb crater then, but it’d been rebuilt in its original style, with all of the augmented technology for which Slim Jim’s insanely expensive six-star boutique resorts were famous. Unlike them, it also boasted a casino, which is why he stayed here when he was in Paris.
He rode alone, and in silence, in the back of his armored luxury sedan. His driver and principal bodyguard sat up front, invisible behind darkened glass. Back home he would have had his entourage. His rat pack. They weren’t the real rat pack of course. Those guys were now in their prime, but they’d had a head start on fame thanks to one of Slim Jim’s talent management agencies which had snapped most of them up when they were starting out. Sinatra, he’d rescued from the Tommy Dorsey Band. So yeah, he had actually tied a few on with Frank and Dean and their crew, but like most people, he felt better in the company of his own. His rat pack was made up of guys he’d served with in the navy and met in the joint. They were a good crew, but not the sort you took along on a gig like this. Unlike Slim Jim, they hadn’t learned to play well with super-rich knobs and political types.
It was raining and the streets were mostly empty even though it was not yet late. People had retreated indoors, to bars and restaurants. Paris rolled past his windows, an electric smear of light and rain. An SUV with a reaction team followed his limousine. Another car, an anonymous Citroen, with a second reaction team, led them towards the hotel. Any hostile observers would have had trouble tying the lead vehicle to the other two. The Citroen was just part of the traffic, not his little convoy.
He thought about playing some music, but couldn’t be bothered searching his phone for a tune. There was a larger flexipad, real antique uptime kit too, in the driver-side seat pocket and he could have played a game or watched some porn on that, but instead he pondered his meeting with Halabi and what might come of it. He’d already decided he’d tell Maria he wanted to give Boeing the launches they were after. It wasn’t for the profit, although the pay-off would be huge. It was something closer to what Karen Halabi had said, even though she had only brushed up against the truth of it.
All of those Boeing bucks would free up his aerospace d
ivision to take a few “moonshots”, as she had called them. But he wasn’t taking those shots because he was yearning for the high frontier. He was not an adventurer, nor a hero.
He was bored.
It turned out being the world’s richest guy was a bit dull. Awesome, but dull. He had been a grifter, and not a great one, he could admit that. After all, it had landed him in the joint that time, didn’t it? But he had mostly been good enough to get by on his wits and other people’s stupidity. And when he’d built his business, at least in the early days, it felt a lot like grifting. It had been fun, it had been a little dangerous, and it paid off, delivering him unimaginable and frankly insane wealth.
But now?
Now he had people like Maria O’Brien, thousands of them, and they were all grifting for him. He didn’t need to do anything anymore but lie back and wait for the next blow job which, all things being equal, would be along any moment now. But when you didn’t have to grift for anything? When it just fell in your lap and starting sucking your knob…
Ah, fuck it, he thought as his limo pulled up at the hotel. He was just being a crybaby.
Would you trade this life for that Charleston chain gang? The hell you would.
A guy in a top hat opened the door for him, and Slim Jim climbed out. Bodyguards discreetly fell in place behind him as he slipped the top hat a twenty and pimp-rolled into his own hotel. In spite of, or perhaps because of the bad weather, The Dupleix was jumping. A jazz band played covers of 1990s grunge rock in the foyer. Dozens of people, Parisians and visitors, mingled and chatted over drinks and canapés. A couple of hours earlier, the drinks would have been free, the wine and champagne at least, showcasing the best vintages from Slim Jim’s Californian and Chilean wineries. Although using the word “vintage” was playing a bit fast and fucking loose with the truth. Most of those Californian wineries were less than five years old, the wine aged by uptime science, not the slow beat of years. Still, a free drink is a free drink, and it brought people in.
Stalin's Hammer: Paris: A Novel of the Axis of Time Page 4