They were perfect.
Mike went to get fitted for a Weblar vest.
Chris was chasing up the hardware, when Jack Notley walked into the office unannounced and stood looking around with the nonchalance of someone on a guided tour. His Susana Ingram jacket was buttoned closed and he held his hands lightly clasped in front of him. He nodded pleasantly at the Imagicians consultant, who’d been back and forth from the imaging studio down the hall with variations on the requested footage and now, in Mike’s absence, was packing up her stuff.
‘Elaine. Glad to see we’re keeping you busy.’
‘Wouldn’t be here otherwise, Jack.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Notley’s gaze switched to Chris and he lost his smile. His eyes were unreadable. ‘And you. Are you busy as well?’
Chris fought down a tremor. ‘I, uh, we’re pretty much done here. But I need to check in with Vicente Barranco. He’s been—‘
‘I’ve had Senor Barranco taken back to his hotel. Elaine, could you give us a few minutes?’
‘Sure. I’m done here anyway. I’ll come back for this stuff later.’
She slipped out. Chris watched her go with a pang of envy. Notley came round the desk to stand at his shoulder.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked flatly.
‘Hardware profile.’ Chris gestured at the screen, scrabbling after composure. He found, oddly, that he was more embarrassed than afraid. ‘We’ve found a group to take the fall for Echevarria. I’m matching most-used weapons against our local inventory. We’ll need to use our own people, of course, there’s no time for anything else.’
‘No. We are pressed for time, aren’t we.’
‘Yes, although to be honest it’s probably better this way.’ His throat was dry. ‘It, uh, lowers our exposure, and it means we can control the situation.’
‘Control, yes.’ He felt Notley move behind him, out of his peripheral field of view. It took an effort of will not to twist round in the seat. Now the warm blush of embarrassment was shredding away into cold fear. The senior partner’s voice was hypnotically tranquil at his back. It felt like hands laid on his shoulders. ‘Remind me, Chris. Why are we in this situation, exactly?’
Chris swallowed. He drew a deep breath.
‘Because I fucked up.’
‘Yes.’ Now Notley had moved back into peripheral view on the left. ‘Putting it mildly, you have indeed. Fucked. Up.’
He came round the side of the desk and he had the Nemex levelled. This time, there was no fighting down the tremor. Chris flinched, violently. Notley stared at him. There was nothing in his face at all.
‘Is there anything you want to say to me?’
Chris felt the pounding calm of a road duel descend on him. He measured angles, knew he was caught. His replacement Nemex was back in his own office, still not out of the factory wrapping. The desk pinned him. He couldn’t rush Notley, and there was nothing on the desktop worth throwing. He was used to making these calculations at combat speed, measuring and acting in the time it took for the Saab to cover a handful of asphalt metres. The immobility and the limping time scale made it unreal, a floating fragment of a dream.
the supermarket swam before his eyes, the painful bang of the gun in his ears, the sudden warm rain of blood
He wondered if
‘Well?’
‘I think.’ Suddenly it was easy. All he had to do was let go. ‘I think you’re making a big fucking mistake. Echevarria was a bag of pus waiting to burst. All I did was save you the trouble.’
Notley’s eyes narrowed. Then, out of nowhere, he lowered the Nemex and tucked it away in his waistband. He shook his head.
‘Nice image, that. A bag of pus, waiting to burst. Charming. You need to refine your act, Faulkner.’
He cast about and found a chair, pulled it up to the desk and sat down. Chris gaped at him, still swamped in chemicals by a nervous system expecting to be shot. Notley smiled.
‘Tell you a story,’ he said comfortably. ‘Guy called Webb Ellis. Went to my old school about two hundred years before I did. What does that tell you, incidentally?’
Chris blinked. ‘He was rich?’
‘Very good. Not wholly accurate, but close enough. Webb Ellis was what, these days, we’d call jacked-in. He had connections. Father died when he was still young, but his mother bootstrapped him up on those connections and come sixteen he was still a student. Among other things, he played a pretty sharp game of football and cricket. And apparently, during one of those football games he broke the rules pretty severely, by picking up the ball and running with it. You know what happened to him?’
‘Uh. Sent off?’
Notley shook his head. ‘No. He got to be famous. They built a whole new game around running with the ball.’
‘That’s.’ Chris frowned. ‘Rugby.’
‘That’s right. In the end they named it after the school. You can see why. Webbellisball would have been a bit of a mouthful. But that’s the legend of how rugby got started. There’s even a plaque on the wall at the school, commemorating old Webb Ellis and the day he broke the rules. I used to walk past it every day.’
Quiet soaked into the room.
‘Is that true?’ Chris asked, finally.
Notley grinned. ‘No. Probably not. It’s just a useful piece of school mythology, graven in stone to resemble the truth. But it is representative, in all likelihood, of what a whole gang of different elite schoolkids were doing at around that time. Breaking the rules, and making up new ones. Later that century, you get a formalised game and creative back-marketing lays it at the door of one man, because that’s what people relate to. But the interesting thing is this, Chris. The game was never new. It dates back to Roman times, at least. They’d been playing games just like it for centuries in the streets of villages and towns all over Britain. And you know what? Just around the time Webb Ellis and his friends were making sporting history, the common people were being told, by law and by big uniformed men with sticks and guns, that they weren’t allowed to play this game any more. Because, and this is close to a quote, it disturbed the public order and was dangerous. Do you see, Chris, how these things work? How they’ve always worked?’
Chris said nothing. It wasn’t five minutes since this man had held a gun on him. He didn’t trust the ice enough to walk on yet.
‘Okay.’ Notley leaned back in the chair. ‘Fast forward a couple of centuries. Here’s something you should know. Who made the first competition road kill?’
‘Uh, Roberto Sanchez, wasn’t it? Calders Chicago partnership challenge, back in, no, wait a minute.’ Chris sieved an unexpected chunk of information from the sea of TV junk he’d been letting wash over him in recent months. ‘Now they’re saying it wasn’t Sanchez, it was this guy Rice, real thug from the Washington office. He beat Sanchez to it by about three months or something?’
Notley nodded. He seemed, for a moment, to be lost in thought. ‘Yes, they say that. They also say it was Begona Salas over at IberFondos. That’s the feminist revisionist angle, but it holds some water. Salas was cutting edge around then, and she always drove like a fucking maniac. There’s another school of thought that says Calders stole the idea from a strategic-thought unit in California. That people like Oco Holdings and the Sacramento Group were already trialing it secretly. You want to know what I remember?’
Once again, the distance behind Notley’s look, the sense that most of him was suddenly elsewhere.
‘Sure. What?’
Notley smiled gently. ‘I remember it being me.’