Market Forces Part 46

Chris was dreaming about the supermarket again, but this time he was watching the whole scene from outside, and the car park was insanely, impossibly full of cars. They were eve,yz,he,-e, every colour under the sun, like spilled sweets, and all in motion, cnising and parking and reversing out like some immense robotic ballet, and he coddt't get throzgh them. Each tine he took a step towards the supermarket and the people in its brilliantly-lit interior, a car rolled into his path and stopped with a short squeak of brakes. He had to go round, he had to go round, and his time was running out. The people inside didn't know.

"Fhey were shopping in anaesthetised warmth and content and they had no way of knowing what was coming.

Up on the roof, tube metal groaned and clanked in protest as the reindeer shook its head.

And the cars, he suddenly saw, were all empty. There were no shoppers in them, no one driving, no one loading, no one anywhere.

Everybody was inside. Shopping. Fzcki,g shopping.

lie made it to the doors and tried to open them but they were closed up with impact plastic boarding and metres of heavy steel chain. He tried banging on the windows, shouting, but no one heard him.The shots, when they came, rippled the gla.s.s under his hands, eMad as always, they drilled into his ear like something physical.

301He yelped and woke up, fists clenched under his chin.

For a Inoment, he cringed there, curled defensively at one end of the sofa. He'd twisted the blanket up in his sleep and now it barely covered half his body. He blinked hard a couple of times, breathed out and sat up. Dawn had come and gone while he slept, and the office was full of bright sunlight.

He got up from the sofa and found his shoes. Bending to put them on, he felt his head throbbing. He'd drowsed himself into a low-grade headache. He shambled to the desk and opened drawers with myopic clumsiness, looking for painkillers. The phone flashed at one corner of his vision. He fumbled a snarl and checked numbers on the piled up messages. Carla, Carla, Carla, f.u.c.king Carla-- And Liz Linshaw.

He stopped dead. The call had come in an hour ago. He grabbed a foil of speed delivery codeine tabs out of an open drawer and hit 'play'.

'Chris, I tried you at home but your wife didn't know where you were.' A wry curl to the voice - he could see the fiaint smile that went with it. 'She, uh, she wasn't too helpful but I got the impression you might be coming into work today. So listen, there's a breakfiast bar in India Street called Break Point. I'm meeting someone there at eight thirty.

I think you might want to be there too.'

He checked his watch. Eight-twenty.

Jacket, Nemex. He chewed up the codeine tabs on his way down in the lift, swallowed the powder and went out hurriedly into the sun.

It took him a little longer than he expected to find India Street. He remembered the breakfast bar from a damage limitation strategy meeting he'd had there once when he still worked at Hammett McColl. But because he a.s.sociated the place with the reinsurance brokers at the meeting, he misremembered the address and found himself in an alley off Fenchurch Street with the wrong name. He cast about for a couple of minutes, blurry with the onset of the codeine, before the mistake dawned on him. Working off the new memory, he plotted a vague eastward course and set out again through the tangle of deserted streets.

He was walking north up the gla.s.s-walled canyon curve of Crntched Friars, when someone yelled his name.

'Faulkner!'The word echoed off the enclosing steel and gla.s.s walls, bounced away down the curve of the canyon..Chris jerked around, sludgily aware he was in trouble. About twenty metres away, blocking his way to the right turn into India Street, five figures stood spread out across the width of the road. All live wore black ski-masks, all five hefted weapons that to his untutored eye looked like shotguns. They were faced off 3O2against him in the ludicrous cliche stance of a Western gunfight, and despite it all, despite the abrupt knowledge of his own rapidly approach ing death, Chris felt a smirk creep out across his fiace.

'You what?'

Maybe it was the codeine. He laughed out loud. Shouted it.

'You fncking 'hat?'

The :nen fiacing him shifted, apparently discomforted. They glanced inward to the figure at the centre. The man took a step forward. Hands pmnped the shotgun's action. The clack-clack echoed along the street.

'Go foah it, Faulkner.'

The knowledge hit Chris like cold water. He opened his mouth to yell the name, knew he would be shot before he could get it out.

'ffust a minute.'

Everyone looked round at the new voice. Mike Bryant stood at the mouth of a side alley about ten metres behind Chris, panting slightly.

He raised his left hand, right floating close to his belt. Gripped in the upraised fist was a thick wad of currency.

Makin faltered behind his tnask. The shotgun lowered a couple of degrees.

'This has got nothing to do with you,' he called.

'Oh, but it does.' Mike ambled out of the alley and drifted up the street until he was lined up beside Chris. There was a thin beading of sweat across his brow, and Chris remembered he couldn't be more than a day out of the hospital. He still held the wad of cash before him like a weapon. 'You take down one Shorn exec in the street, where's it going to end? Eh, Nick? You're breaking the f.u.c.king rules, man.'

And out of the corner of his mouth, he muttered to Chris.

'You carrying?'

'Yeah, I'm carrying.'

'Loaded this time?'

Chris nodded tautly. A surge of adrenalin punched through the codeine vagueness, a savage pleasure at the comradeship in the man at his side and the will to do harm together.

'Good to know. Follow my lead, this is going to go last.''We only want Faulkner,' shouted Makin.

Mike grinned and raised his voice again. 'That's too bad, Nick, because you got me too.' It was the bright, energetic tone Chris had last heard when Bryant crippled and blinded Griff Dixon in his own living room. 'And before we start, gentlemen, just look at tonight's wonderful prizes.'

He held up the fistful of bank notes again. His voice resonated in the steel canyon acoustics, loud and game-show fruity.

'For the winners! Twenty thousand euros, in cash! Lay down your 303weapons and walk away with it all! Tonight! Or, take the gamble, lose and die! Ladies and gentlemen, you decide!'

He hurled the money up and outward. It was bundled together with a thick netallic band that glinted as it turned end over end, high in the bright morning air.

'Now,' he snapped.

After that, it all seemed to be happening on freeze-frame advance.

Chris tugged out the Nemex. It felt appallingly heavy in his hand, appallingly slow to bring round and point.

Beside him, Mike Bryant was already firing.

Makin's contingent were still staring up at the money. Mike's first slug took the man on Makin's right under his back-tilted chin, tore through his neck and dropped him in a shower of arterial blood.

The remaining four scattered across the perspectives of the street.

Chris held the Nemex out, memories of a hundred shooting-gallery hours like iron tracery in his right arm. He squeezed the trigger, felt the kick. Squeezed again. One of the men ahead of him staggered. Hard to see blood against the dark canvas clothes. He squeezed again. The man folded forward and collapsed on his face in the street.

A shotgun boomed.

He pointed and fired at Makin. Missed. Out of peripheral vision, he saw Mike Bryant stalking forward, face fixed in a grin, Nemex extended, shooting in an arc. Another of Makin's men went down, clutching at his thigh.

Another shotgun blast. Chris felt a thin stinging of pellets across his ribs. He spotted Makin, pumping another sh.e.l.l in. He yelled and ran towards him, firing wildly. Makin saw him coming and took aim.

Another figure stumbled into Makin's path, shooting across the street at Mike. The two men tangled. Chris shot indiscriminately into them both.

Makin got clear, raised the shotgun again. There seemed to be something wrong with his arm.

Chris emptied the Nemex into him. The gun locked back, breech open on the last shot.

And it was over.The echoes rolled away, like trucks moving off down the street. Chris stood over Nick Makin and watched as he stopped breathing. Off to his left, Mike Bryant walked up to the shotgunner he'd hit in the thigh. The injured man flopped about weakly. Blood was leaking in astonishing quant.i.ties from his twisted leg. Beneath the mask, his head shifted back and forth between Chris and Mike like a trapped animal's. He was making a panicked moaning noise.

'Look, you're going to bleed to death anyway,' Mike told him.

304The Nemex sh.e.l.l punched him flat. The ski-masked head jerked about with the impact. A new rivulet of blood groped out across the asphalt from the torn wool and gore of the exit wound. Mike knelt and checked his handiwork, then looked up at Chris and grinned.

'Five to two, eh. Not bad for a couple of suits.'

Chris shook his head numbly. The Nemex hung at the end of his arm like a dumb-bell weight. He unlocked the opened breech, put the weapon away, fumbling with the holster. Post-drive shakes, setting in.

'This is nice.' Mike picked up the dead man's shotgun and hefted it with approval. 'Remington tactical pump. Fancy a souvenir?'

Chris said nothing. Bryant got up, tucked the shotgun casually under his arm. "s okay, I'll talk to the police, get one for both of us out of evidence, when they've finished with it. Something to show to your grandchildren.' He shook his head, talking a little fast with the adrenalin crash. 'f.u.c.king unbelievable, huh? Like something off a game platform. Ah. See you got Makin pretty good then?'

'Yeah.' Chris looked incuriously at where the other exec lay, still masked. Up close, you could see the wounds in his chest and belly. His whole body was drenched with the blood. 'Dead.'

Mike looked around judiciously.

'I think they all are. Oh, wait a minute.' He crossed to the man Chris had hit when he tangled with Makin. He crouched and put two fingers to the man's neck, shrugged. 'On his way out, I reckon. Still.'

He got up and pointed the Nemex down at the man's masked face.

He was already turning away as he pulled the trigger.

'How did you know I'd be here?' Chris asked him.

Another shrug. 'Carla rang me this morning at home. In tears. Told me you'd had a row, you'd got out in the middle of the zones and now she couldn't get hold of you. I came in looking for you. Had to break into your office. Sorry about that, I was pretty worried. Anyway, I spotted that message from Liz. Thought I'd catch you up. Took a while, my ribs are still killing me.'

Chris looked at him narrowly. 'You just happened to be carrying twenty grand in cash?'

'Oh, that.' Mike grinned again and crossed to where the bundle of currency still lay on the street. 'Improvisation. Look.'He tossed the money across, and Chris caught it awkwardly with his left hand. The notes were twenties. There was a thousand euros in the bundle at most.

'Best I could do on the spur of the moment. You really walk in from the zones last night?'

'Yeah.'

'Must have been some row.'

305they stood amidst the carnage, the scattered weapons and spreading pools of blood, and very slowly Chris became aware that, amongst a small knot of people gathered at the end of India Street, Liz Linshaw was watching him.

He walked towards her.

'Do you have any idea how bad this looks?'

Louise Hewitt stood stiff legged at the head of the conference table and gestured at the projection. Blown-up surveillance camera footage ran grainy and silent behind her, Mike Bryant giving the coup de grfice to the two masked gunmen still breathing.

'Do you have any idea what this kind of brawling does to our image as a serious financial inst.i.tution?'

Chris shrugged. His side was numb where the Shorn medic had dosed him with contact anaesthetic prior to digging out the shotgun pellets. The rest of him was past feeling very much of anything too.

'You should be talking to Makin. He started it.'

'This is not a f.u.c.king playground, Faulkner!'

'Louise, you're being unreasonable.' Mike Bryant met Philip Hamil ton's eyes across the table and the other man looked away, towards Hewitt. Beside him, Jack Notley stared into the middle distance, seemingly oblivious to the storm building around him. 'Makin called this one, all the way down. If I hadn't been there, Chris'd be dead now and the blame'd be farmed out to zone gangwits. We wouldn't even know we had a loose cannon aboard.'

On the projection screen, Chris walked away from the bodies and out of shot. It was odd, watching himself disappear, back into the past of three hours ago and the confrontation with Liz Linshaw.

You set me up.

She took it like a slap. For the first time he could recall, he saw open hurt in her face. The sight of it licked the pit of his belly.

Fou f.u.c.king set me up, you b.i.t.c.h.N0. She was shaking her head. Chris, I don't-- And then Mike was there, and they both slid their masks back on.

Pa.s.sion sheathed. There was control, there were words that meant something factual, there was the long, verbal comedown. Explanations, talk and shots of rough, blended whisky in Break Point to combat the shakes. Sanity leaking into the nightmare aftermath like blood across asphalt.

I just got a call. This guy said he worked Driver Control, he knew what really happened to Chris on the MI , did I want to know too? Meet him here.

Five grand in cash.

She brandished the money out of her wallet. Like proof of innocence.

306When Mike went to the bathroom, she reached out across the cheap plastic-topped table and took Chris's hand in her own. No words, only a cabled look, eye to eye. Spinning sudden vertigo, and then the flush of the toilet through cardboard-thin walls, and their hands leapt apart like matched magnetic poles.

Louise Hewitt was talking to him, but he couldn't make it matter. He levered himself to his feet, faced her disbelieving fury..

'I've had enough of this s.h.i.t, Louise. It's pretty f.u.c.king clear what happened here.'

'Sit down Faulkner, I haven't--'

'Makin couldn't hack the NAME account. I took it from him, and it hurt. He couldn't take me on the road, so he hired a gangwit kid to do what he didn't dare do himself. When that didn't work--'

'I told you to sit dozv--'

He shouted her down. 'When that didn't fiching work, Louise, he hired some more sicarios and tried this. He couldn't beat me playing by the Shorn rules, so he broke them. And now he's dead. Everybody in f.u.c.king black.'

'Chris.' Notley's voice didn't seem to have raised much, but there was an edge on it that cut across the air like tyre screech. 'You don't talk to partnership like this. You're overwrought, but that's no excuse. Now get out.'

Chris met the senior partner's eyes, and saw the man who had almost shot him dead in his own office a week ago. He nodded.

'Fair enough.'

They watched him go in silence. Mike Bryant looked round the table again. He shook his head.

'This isn't right, Jack. I mean, it's a f.u.c.king mess. But Makin called it.