The Mitsubishi was crippled, limping at barely a hundred. He matched speeds and glanced across at the other car. Polarised glass hid Jones from view.
Finish it.
He slewed sideways, caught the exposed rear tyre on the leading edge of his front fender and braked. Textbook manoeuvre. The tyre ripped and exploded with a muffled bang. He felt the front fender unstitch along half its length with the force of the impact, but the rest held.
Yes! Carla, you fucking beauty!
The Kaigan jerked and began to skid. Chris worked his pedals, gunned the engine and rammed into the rear of the Mitsubishi as it floated past ahead of him. The skid built, the car wallowed on the road and Chris steered back across and around. Another sharp jab at the retreating side of the car. The driver’s side door dented inward, and Mitsue Jones was irretrievable. The Nakamura battlewagon skated a figure of eight in towards the bank and hit with an audible crump.
Chris brought the Saab to a screeching halt, braking clouds of rubber smoke off the asphalt as he slid past Jones’s wreck. A three-sixty sweep showed no other vehicles in either direction. He engaged the reverse and backed up gingerly to check on his handiwork.
‘Chris?’ It was Bryant’s voice, distorted over the comset.
‘Yeah, Mike. I’m here.’ The strange calm was back, the sky and windswept landscape pressing down on his consciousness like a thumb on an eyeball. He gave the status report through lips that felt slightly numb. ‘One wingman down, flamed out. Think Makin got the other. You okay?’
‘I will be as soon as someone comes and cuts me out of this fucking wreck. What about Jones?’
He stared at the wrecked battlewagon. The sleek bodywork was torn and crumpled, sunk on tyres that had blown out somewhere in the crash. Steam curled up from the gashed radiator grille like smoke, was whipped away by the wind. And in amidst all that calm, it looked as if Jones was trying to kick the driver’s side door open. The buckled metal quivered but didn’t shift.
Finish it.
‘Jones is out of the game,’ he said.
Mike’s whoop came through, bristling with static and overload distortion. Chris dropped his hand to grasp the gear lever, and with the motion a small ripple arose in the pit of his stomach. It was nothing much, the feeling of having eaten too much sweet food, but as his hand touched the lever, he was suddenly slightly sick of the whole thing.
Then finish it!
Burn her up. The thought belched abruptly up from the deepest mud-geyser recesses of his being, and it gripped him like claws. It was the sickness of the moment before, turned up to full. The edgy thrill of rollercoaster exhilaration as he turned the sticky new idea over in his mind. Ram the tank and barbecue that bitch. Go on! If it doesn’t blow when it ruptures, you can go and light her from close up. Like—
He shook himself free of it with a shiver. Impossible to believe he’d even been considering it. After all, what if the tank blew when he hit—
They almost never do.
‘Too risky.’ He heard himself talking out loud to the hot mud-thing in his head and what he heard sounded too much like whining. He grimaced and dropped the car into reverse again. Much better just to—
He backed up another twenty metres, aligned the nose of the Saab and then crushed the accelerator smoothly to the floor. The Saab leapt across the short gap and slammed into the driver’s side door. Metal crunched and the Mitsubishi rocked on its springs. The glass in the side window cracked and splintered. He backed up and watched carefully to see if there was any movement.
Do it again! Finish it!
She is finished.
Hewitt, with the Nemex in her hand. You bring back their plastic.
He heard his own voice in the Shorn conference chamber two months ago.
Nobody likes ambiguity.
Yeah, and this is real fucking ambiguous, Chris. So either you go for the burn, or you take that pistol in your pocket and go and recover Jones’s fucking plastic right now.
‘Chris, are you okay?’ Bryant, sounding concerned. His voice ruptured the ominous quiet on the comlink, and every second that Chris left without replying was a stillness that prickled.
‘Yeah. I’m fine.’ He unlatched the door and pushed it open. The Nemex had already somehow found its way into his hand. ‘Be right back.’
He climbed out and advanced cautiously towards the Mitsubishi, gun-hand extended and trembling slightly. Steam was still boiling from the engine space, hissing as it went, but there was no scent of petrol. The car’s fuel system, classic weakness in most Mitsubishi battlewagons, had apparently not ruptured.
Chris stopped less than a metre away from the smashed glass of the polarised window and peered in over the sight of the Nemex. Mitsue Jones lay, still strapped into the driver’s seat, face bloodied and right arm hanging slackly at her side. She was still conscious and as Chris’s pale shadow fell across the car window she looked up. Blood had run into her right eye and gummed it shut, but the other eye was desperately expressive. Her left hand came up and across her trapped body in a futile warding gesture.
Finish it!
Chris shielded his face with one hand and levelled the Nemex on Jones’s face.
Nobody likes ambiguity.
The shot echoed out flatly across the pewter-smeared sky. The blood splattered warm on his fingers.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Would you say that this tender was excessively bloody?’
Chris’s face felt stretched tight under the make-up. Studio lights made his eyes ache with glare. Beside him, Bryant betrayed no discomfort as he tilted his head back at an angle and swivelled slightly on his chair.
‘That’s a tricky question, Liz.’
He paused. Pure theatrical bullshit, the bloodshed question was a staple of all business news post-tender interviews. Bryant had had nearly a full day to think about his answer.
Liz Linshaw waited. She crossed long, tanned legs and readjusted the datadown clipboard on her short-skirted lap. From where he was sitting, slightly to the left of Bryant’s centre-stage, Chris could see liquid crystal sentences spilling down the clipboard screen. Her next set of cues from the studio control room.
From where he was sitting, he could also see the swell Liz Linshaw’s left breast made where it squeezed up in the open neck of her blouse. He shifted his gaze uncomfortably, just as Bryant launched into his answer.
‘The thing is, Liz, any competitive tender is bound to involve a certain degree of conflict. If it didn’t, then the whole market ethos of what we’re doing here would be lost. And in the case of a tender of this magnitude, obviously the parties involved are going to play hard. That, sadly but necessarily, means bloodshed. But that’s exactly the way it should be.’
Liz Linshaw made out she was taken aback. ‘There should be bloodshed? You’re saying that it’s desirable?’
‘Desirable, no.’ Bryant put on a schoolmasterly smile that looked Notley-derived. Beside him, Louise Hewitt nodded sober agreement. ‘But consider. The situation in Cambodia is extreme. These people are not part of some theoretical economic model. They are involved in a life-and-death struggle to determine the future of their nation. At Shorn, we’ve just been appointed their financiers. We are supposed to fund and advise these people and, I might add, take a fair chunk of their GNP as a fee. Now, if you were a Cambodian, what kind of exec would you want? A suited theoretical economist with computer models he says define your reality half a world away? Or a warrior who has put his own life on the line to earn his place beside you?’
‘You call yourself a warrior.’ Linshaw made an elegant gesture that might have been acceptance. ‘And obviously the fact that it’s your team here at the Tebbit Centre this evening proves your credentials in that department. Alright. But does that necessarily make you the best economist for the job? Does a good economist have to have blood on his hands?’