Market Forces (43 page)

“Yes, Jack.”

“The Americans,” Notley said 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 U.S. 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 U.S. State Department’s ear. That’s a 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 whom the Calders RapCap 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 around 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 percent proof against U.S. involvement of any kind—in favor 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 nonviolent 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,” Chris said 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 tense 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, Mister 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. “All right.” He looked around 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 thousands. And then, someday, 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 licenses, 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, 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 melee of voices, something about
fucking
professional misconduct, Notley bellowing for order. The door burst open and security rushed the room wielding nonlethal 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.

I
T 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 rumors 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 when 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 civilized 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 succor 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,” Hamilton said 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”—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.”

“Y
OU 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. “The 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 half a percent, 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 who 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,” Mike said 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.

“All right,” 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.

L
OUISE
H
EWITT 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.”

Chris waited.

“Primarily, I’m concerned to get your files for the NAME transferred to Philip Hamilton’s desk as soon as electronically possible. He’ll need your Panama City contacts, the background data on Barranco and any of the other insurgents you did work on for Hammett McColl.” She offered him a thin smile. “Since we’re now back in the business of helping the regime flatten its opponents, anything you have will be of some value.”

“Then maybe you should shut down the agency tender on Lopez. He knows the ground. That’s value, right there.”

She looked him up and down, like a specimen of something she’d thought was extinct. “Remarkable, Chris. Your capacity for inappropriate loyalty, I mean. Quite remarkable. However, I think we all agreed at the briefing that a clean break is essential. There’s no telling what inconvenient loyalties Lopez himself may have. Perhaps he has, uh,
bonded
with Vicente Barranco as strongly as you have. The man is, by all accounts, quite inspiring.”

Nothing. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

“But I digress,” Hewitt said smoothly. “In addition to the file transfer, I want you to prepare a formal statement of apology for your behavior today. For posting on our intranet. First and foremost, that means an apology for your zone-mannered outburst in Philip’s briefing, but it’s not limited to that. There are other matters. I feel, and our senior partner concurs, that the apology had better also cover your failure to consult your colleagues before taking client-related decisions.”

“Notley said that?”

The thin smile again. “He’s not on your side, Chris, whatever you think. Don’t make that mistake. Notley’s concerned wholly with the success of Shorn Conflict Investment, with maybe a side interest in waving the Union Jack when he gets the chance. Call it a hobby. That’s it, that’s the whole story. At the moment, he still thinks you’re a necessary component for the division to do well. Thus far, I’ve failed to persuade him otherwise, but I think, with your help today, he’s coming around. I told you once you’d disappoint him, and I think we’re closing on that.”

“That’d make you happy, would it?”

“What’d make me happy, Chris, is to take back our plastic from your lightly charred and broken corpse.” She shrugged. “I’m unlikely to get that chance, of course. Policy doesn’t allow us to duel across partner–employee lines. But I will, I think, live to see you booted out of Shorn and back to the riverside slum existence you so eminently suit. I’ve told you before, and it’s becoming clearer by the day, you do not belong here.”

Oddly, the line made him grin. “Well, you’re not the only person who thinks that, Louise.”

It got him a sharp look, but Hewitt wasn’t biting. “Notley and I have also agreed that you’d better draft the apology to Philip’s specifications. A first draft by this evening. That’s a minimum requirement if you intend to continue with this firm. Philip’s in uplink conference right now, with Echevarria. But he’ll be done by six. Take it in for his approval then. You might like to add a verbal apology at the same time.” She looked at him, grim amusement curled in the corner of her mouth. “A personal touch, say. A little bridge building.”

He walked out, wordless. Louise Hewitt watched him go, and as the door slammed, the smile broadened on her lips.

I
T TOOK HIM
the walk to his own office to decide. Two flights of stairs and a corridor. He saw no one. He reached the door with his name on it, stood facing the metaled slab for ten seconds, and then turned away.

He was a dozen paces away and accelerating before it had properly dawned on him what he was going to do.

I look after my people.

He found his way almost absently, most of him thinking about Carla and how fucking delighted she’d be to see his life come tumbling down like this. The main door to the conference room was locked, but the entrance to the covert viewing chamber was on a code he knew. He let himself in. Peered through the gloom and the glass panel.

In the conference room, Philip Hamilton sat opposite a holo of Francisco Echevarria. The dictator’s son was dressed in his usual Susana Ingram splendor. He looked hard and implacable against Hamilton’s soft and light-suited untidiness.

“—are aware that you have friends in Miami, and we have no desire to exclude them from the proceedings. You should certainly speak with Martin Meldreck at Calders, who will, I’m sure—”

Enough.
He coded himself through the connecting door, stood abruptly behind Hamilton. Echevarria’s eyes widened as he stepped inside the pickup field of the holoscanner, and he knew that in the chamber on the other side of the world he had appeared, like a ghost at the feast.

Hamilton turned around in his chair.

“Faulkner.” He wasn’t worried yet, just surprised. Anger edged his cultured tones. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, interrupting me with a client?”

Chris grinned down at him. “You wanted a statement from me.”

“Yes. In due course. At the moment, I’m busy. You can—”

Chris hit him. Open-handed, swinging from the shoulder. It took Hamilton across the side of the head and tipped him out of the chair.

“First draft.” Chris grabbed him up by the hair and hit him again in the face, this time with a fist. He felt the junior partner’s nose break. He punched him once more for security and let go. Hamilton slumped to the floor like a filled sack.

He turned about, reached Francisco Echevarria with his eyes. “Hello, Paco.” He got his breath back, straightened up the chair. “You don’t know me, do you? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m the man who beat your father to death.”

Echevarria’s face tightened. “Are you fuckin’ crazy, man. You di’n kill my father.”

Chris settled into the chair. “No, I did. The terrorist stuff was something we set up to cover what really happened. The CE—, those guys, they went with the claim because it gives them prestige. Your father was a sick fuck, and anyone killing him could claim they’d done a good day’s work.”

“You gonna fuckin’ die for that, man.” The dictator’s son was staring at him, transfixed. “You gonna fuckin’
die.
”

“Oh, please.
As
I was saying, there’s no way the, that bunch, are well enough organized to do something like that on the streets of London and get away with it. So, as I said,
I
killed your old man. I beat him to death, in this very room, with a baseball bat. All part of a day’s work for the Shorn corporation. Check with Mike Bryant if you don’t believe me, I’m a colleague of his.”

Echevarria’s voice came out strangled.
“You—”

“It’s what we do here, Paco. Neoliberal commercial management. Global mayhem, remote-control death and destruction. Market forces in action. If you don’t like it—”

Hamilton charged him from the side.

He had time to be impressed—
fat fuck didn’t look like he had it in him
—then the chair went over and the junior partner was on top of him, bloodied nose spattering down into his face, soft hands digging into the cords of his throat with surprising strength.

Chris wasted no time struggling. He got a grip on the little finger of Hamilton’s right hand, curled it back, and snapped it. Hamilton yelped and let go. Chris came up from the floor like a hinge and punched the partner in the throat. Hamilton lurched back, just on his feet, clutching at the point of impact. Somewhere on the other side of the world, Echevarria was yelling in Spanish. Chris got to his feet, stalked toward Hamilton. The partner’s eyes widened. Chris threw a punch, Hamilton ducked and fended with a rusty boxing move, the other hand still at his throat. There wasn’t much strength in it, and he came up panting. Impatiently, Chris repeated the punch, snagged Hamilton’s wrist with an aikido hold he knew, and jerked the partner off balance toward him. He punched low into the expansive gut, and as Hamilton spasmed, he grabbed him around the neck and yanked up and around.