‘Chris! Jesus fuck, you’re alive. I thought. You had me worried for a moment there. Congratulations!’
Chris stared at him. Stared past him, like the zombie he so closely resembled. Notley grabbed his shoulders.
‘You’ve done it, Chris. You won. You’re a partner at thirty-three years old. Fucking unprecedented. Congratulations! You know what this means?’
Chris looked sideways at him. Focused.
‘What does it mean?’ he whispered.
‘What does it mean?’ Notley was almost burbling. ‘Chris, it means you’re at the top. From here on up, there’s nothing you can’t do. Nothing. Welcome aboard.’
He thrust out his hand. Chris looked down at it as if the gesture didn’t make sense. He made a coughing noise that it took Notley a moment to realise was laughter. Then he stared up into the senior partner’s face and off past it again. The Saab. Hewitt.
‘Uh, Chris—‘
‘Excuse me.’
He pushed past Notley, pacing a steady line for Hewitt. She saw him coming and tensed. A brief nod to the tactical captain, and the man was at her shoulder. Chris came to a halt a metre away, swaying a little.
‘Louise,’ he husked.
She manufactured a small smile. ‘Hello, Chris. Well done.’
‘This is for you, Louise.’
He held it out. The Shorn Associates card, Mike Bryant’s name engraved and streaked across with new blood.
‘I don’t think now is—‘
‘No, it’s for you.’ Chris took another, sudden step in and tucked the card into Hewitt’s breast pocket. He nodded to himself, already turning away. ‘For you. Because that’s the way we do things around here, right?’
Hewitt’s smile was frozen on. ‘Right.’
‘I’ll see you on the road, Louise.’
He walked away, dipping in his pocket for keys. The door of the Saab was still wide open. Driver Control personnel busied themselves around it, measuring and photographing. When he tried to get in behind the wheel, one of them barred his way.
‘Sorry sir, we’re not finished here ye—‘
He backed up as Chris looked at him.
‘Get. Out of my way.’
The man retreated. Chris eased himself into the seat, teeth clenching up as his hastily taped ribs grated with the move. The medics had shot him full of something warm, but the pain was still getting through in flinty little flashes. He sat for a while, breathing it under control. He thought it would probably be manageable.
He closed the door. Reached for the ignition.
The Saab fired up growling. Around him, up and down the Gullet, activity stopped at the sound. Heads turned. He saw people gesturing.
No one seemed interested in stopping him.
He moved his head, a little awkwardly. Coughed and tasted blood. Checked the rearview and cut a smooth circle in reverse, so the car was pointing southward, towards Shorn. He shifted gear, let the vehicle start to glide forward.
‘Sir, wait.’ Muffled through the seal of the closed doors and windows. A uniformed tactical hurried across and rapped on his window. He cranked it down and waited, foot light on the clutch, barely holding the Saab back. The tac hesitated.
‘Uhm, sir, it’s just. The shooting down there. Well, we arrived sort of in the nick of time, sir, so it was a bit rushed. Just trying to get them off you, you know.’
‘Yes.’ His voice still wasn’t working properly. It had taken him whole minutes, lying there on the concrete, to make sense of the thunder, the screams of men dying and then the urgent voices of the tacs as they circled him. The ring of concerned faces peering down. ‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Yes, well, uhm. Thing is, a firefight like that, you don’t always get everyone dead centre, and now it looks like at least a couple are going to live. I, well, I assume you’re going to be pressing charges, sir.’
‘Yes, alright.’
‘Well, I’ll need a number for you, sir. For the statement. Obviously, we can get you at Shorn, but we like to provide a full personalised service in cases like this. Victim support, one-to-one interviews, we can come out to you any time. And I’m the officer assigned, so. Do you, uh, have a home number, sir?’
Chris closed his eyes briefly. ‘No, not really.’
‘Oh.’ The tac looked at him for a moment, puzzled. ‘Well, anyway. I’ll get you at Shorn, then.’
‘Yes.’ He tried to curb a flooding tide of impatience. He wanted to be gone. ‘Is that all you need?’
‘Oh. Yes sir. But, uh, you know, congratulations. The duel and everything. My whole family were watching it. Well done. Fantastic driving. Uh, my son’s a huge fan, sir.’
He fought down the urge to cackle. Hid it in a cough.
‘That’s nice.’
‘I expect you’ll be on the screen a lot the next few weeks. Probably even get an interview with that Liz Linshaw, eh?’ The tac saw the look on his face and stepped back. ‘Anyway, I’ll. Let you go, sir. Thanks.’
‘No problem.’
He let the Saab roll forward. People got out of the way. He moved past Louise Hewitt and then Jack Notley, gathering speed. By the time he passed the last of the uniforms and the parked police vehicles, he was closing on ninety. The Saab took the curve on a rising growl. He hit a pothole, but the suspension and the onset of the painkillers damped it out. He reached for the phone, jabbed it on. Winced only a little this time as his cracked ribs jarred. He placed a forward call to Joaquin Lopez in Panama, ten minutes ahead. Then he dialled Shorn’s priority client operator and told them to get him Francisco Echevarria immediately.
They didn’t like it. They didn’t know if—
‘Tell him it’s a national emergency,’ Chris suggested.
It took a couple of minutes, but Echevarria grabbed the call. He wasn’t pleased. Chris got the impression the ride in the last week had been bumpy.
‘Bryant? That you? Now fuckin’ what? What national fuckin’ emergency you talkin’ about?’
‘The one that’s going to put you in front of a fucking firing squad, you piece of shit. This is Chris Faulkner.’
Strangled silence, then fury. ‘You motherfuckin’—‘
‘Shut up and listen, Paco. I don’t know what line of shit they’ve been handing you in my absence, but things just changed for the better. Mike Bryant is dead.’
‘You’re lyin’.’
‘No, I’m not. I killed him myself. With my bare fucking hands. So I’m now junior partner at Shorn Conflict Investment, which means executive partner for the NAME account. Which means you, Paco. And I’m telling you, I’m going to have Vicente Barranco in the streets of Bogota by the end of this fucking month. So if I were you, I would gather up as much of your father’s stolen loot as you can get in a Lear jet, and I would fuck off out of the NAME right now, while you can still walk to the plane.’
Echevarria lost English in the storm of his fury. Spanish washed down the line, beyond Chris’s ability to follow. He cut across it.
‘You’ve got forty-eight hours, Paco. That’s it. After that, I’m sending Special Air to put a bullet in your face.’
‘You cannot do this!’
This time, Chris really laughed. Across the pain in his broken ribs, across all the pain. The drugs were numbing him nicely.
‘You still don’t get it, do you, Paco? From where I’m sitting, I can do whatever the fuck I want. Men like me, there’s nothing you can do to stop us any more. Understand? There is nothing you can do any more.’
He killed the call.
Fed power to the Saab and watched as his speed climbed.
Gave himself up to the snarl of the engine, the spreading numbness of the drugs in his system, and the onrushing emptiness of the road ahead.
THE END