‘Michael, I don’t think I want to dwive with this clown.’
Chris held out his hand. ‘Would you like your glasses back?’ he asked innocently.
Oddly, it was Bryant who snapped.
‘Alright you two, that’s enough. Nick, you asked for that, so don’t act so fucking superior. And Chris, give him back his glasses. Jesus, I’m going up against Nakamura with a pair of fucking kids.’
‘Michael, I don’t think—‘
‘No, you didn’t think, Nick. You just opened your fucking mouth. Louise asked me to head up this team. When she asks you, you can pick who drives with you. Until then, just get in line and keep a lid on it.’
The small circle of space between the three men rocked with silent tension. Behind them, the two mechanics looking over the Saab had stopped what they were doing to watch the action. Nick Makin drew in a compressed breath, then took his glasses back without a word and stalked away.
Bryant prodded at the food cartons for a while. Finally he glanced up and met Chris’s gaze.
‘Don’t pay any attention to him. He’ll have calmed down by morning.’ He brooded a little. ‘I think this chess thing might be backfiring. Symbolic conflict isn’t what you’d call a popular concept around here.’
‘What, no game-playing? Come on, you’re winding me up.’
‘Yeah, there’s games, sure. Some of the other Shorn guys I know are into those alliance games on the net. The Alphamesh leagues, stuff like that. But chess.’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Just not cool, man. Makin isn’t the first to mention it. I don’t think it’ll be catching on.’
Chris picked an onion bhaji out of a carton and bit into it reflectively. ‘Yeah, well. Always happens when you challenge someone’s world view. Means they have to re-evaluate. Most people don’t like to think that hard.’
Bryant forced a chuckle that loosened up audibly as he produced it.
‘Yeah, me included. Still, Makin should know better. No way you start this shit at a time like this.’
‘Going to be bloody tomorrow, huh?’
‘You heard of Jones?’
‘Me and the rest of the Western world, yeah.’
Bryant looked at him. ‘There’s your answer, then.’
‘Well,’ Chris tossed the half-eaten bhaji back into the carton. ‘I always wondered what the big bonuses were for.’
‘You keep your mind on that bonus tomorrow,’ grinned Bryant, regaining some of his good cheer. ‘And everything will work out just fine. You’ll see. Easy money.’
The Acropolitic car caught the central reservation barrier head-on, flipped effortlessly into the air and came down on its back, wheels still spinning. A figure slumped broken and still within. Chris, who’d been expecting a prolonged dogfight with the other car, whooped and slammed a fist against the roof of his own vehicle as he swept past.
‘Acropolitic, thank you and goodnight!’
‘Nice,’ said Mike Bryant’s voice over the intercom. ‘Now form up and stay tight. Those guys were in pristine condition, which to my way of thinking means Nakamura aren’t on this stretch.’
‘Conforming,’ said Nick Makin crisply. Chris smirked, raised his eyes to the roof and, saying nothing, tucked into the wedge behind Mike.
Behind them, the wrecks of the Acropolitic team lay strewn across three kilometres of highway, like the abandoned toys of a child with emerging sociopathic tendencies. Two of them were burning.
‘Conforming.’
Chris wasn’t the only one smirking at Makin’s fighter-pilot pretensions. Thirty kilometres up ahead, Mitsue Jones grinned disbelievingly as the voice crackled out of her car radio. She grasped the edge of her open door and hinged herself out of the Mitsubishi Kaigan. The wind came and battered at her two-hundred-dollar Karel Mann tumbling spike cut.
Oh well.
The face beneath the jagged hair was pin-up perfect, tanned from a month on the Mexican Pacific coast and made up to accent her Japanese heritage. In keeping with Nakamura duel tradition, she went formally suited, a black Daisuke Todoroki ensemble whose sole concession to the driving was the flared and carefully vented skirt. There were flat-heeled leather boots on her feet, sheer black tights on her legs.
‘Looking good, Mits.’
She cranked round in the direction of the shout. Behind the long sunken lines of the Kaigan, her colleagues’ own shorter, blunter Mitsubishi cruisers were parked with raked precision along the overgrown curve of the intersection roundabout. The two Nakamura wedge men were cutting up lines of edge on the sleek black hood of the closest car. One of them waved at her.
Jones pulled a face and turned to the motorway bridge railing on the other side of the road. Beyond the bridge, the green of the landscape rose in a series of granite flecked interlocking spurs that blocked out the view of the road at about five kilometres distance. She crossed the road and prodded at the feet of the fourth Nakamura team member, who sat with his back to the rails, checking the load on his Vickers-Cat shoulder-launcher. He glanced up as Jones kicked him and grinned through his beard.
‘Ready to rock ‘n’ roll.’ It came out surfer-drawled. His English, like hers, was West Coast American. The association ran back a couple of years. He nodded across at the other two men and their edge ritual. ‘You cool with that?’
Jones shrugged. ‘Whatever works. New York says they’re the best we’ve got around here, and they should know.’
‘They should.’ The missileer laid his weapon aside and got up. Standing he was a giant, towering over Jones’s diminutive frame. ‘So what’s the disposition?’
‘Acropolitic are out of the game.’ Jones leaned on the bridge rail. ‘Shorn did the shit work for us, just like we figured. All we have to do is sweep them up.’
The missileer leaned beside her. ‘And you’re sure this is going to work?’
‘It worked at Denver, didn’t it?’
‘It was new at Denver.’
‘On this side of the Atlantic it’s still new. Total press blackout until US Trade and Finance thrash out the precedent.’ A cold smile. ‘Which, I’m reliably informed by our government liaison unit, is going to take the rest of the year. The report won’t be out till next spring. These guys aren’t going to know what hit them.’
‘It could still be disallowed.’
‘No.’ She seemed lost in the southward perspectives of the road below them. ‘I had the legal boys check the rulings back as far as they go. No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle, no substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. We’ll get through the same loophole we used in Colorado.’
Out of the open door of the Kaigan battlewagon, the radio crackled again. The voices of the men they were waiting for wavered as the set strained to pick up and decode the scrambled channel. There was a sudden increase in volume and clarity as the Shorn team cleared some geographical obstacle in amongst the rising land behind the bridge. Mitsue Jones straightened up.
‘Better get in position, Matt. Feels like showtime.’
Mike Bryant saw the intersection bridge up ahead as they cleared the last spur and he let a fraction of his speed bleed off.
‘Watch the bridge,’ he said easily. ‘Watch your peripherals till we’re past. Keep it tight.’
On the northside ramp, Mitsue Jones heard him and grinned as she slipped her driving glasses on. In the rearview mirror, she saw Matt settle into a firing stance with the Vickers-Cat. She let off the parking brake and the Mitsubishi shifted on the hard shoulder.
The missile leapt out, trailing a thin vapour thread as it went.
As they hit the bridge, Bryant saw it. Through the windscreen a column of greasy smoke lifted from the hills up ahead. A muffled crump rolled in to accompany the explosion.
‘See that?’ He braked a little more, puzzled. ‘They must be in trouble up ahead.’
‘I don’t know, Mike.’ Chris’s voice crashed into the cabin. ‘Trouble with who? Tender was all over the news this week. No one’ll be out here who doesn’t have to be.’