‘You stupid fuck,’ said Chris clearly, and the silence that followed it was absolute. ‘Do you really think Vicente Barranco is going to be stopped by some pissant cokehead dressed up in his old man’s uniform? Do you really think he’ll just go away?’
He saw Louise Hewitt on her way to getting up. Saw Jack Notley lay a hand on her arm and shake his head almost imperceptibly. Philip Hamilton spotted the exchange as well, and his mouth contracted to almost anal proportions.
‘Might I remind you, Mr Faulkner, that you are talking to a partner. If you can’t show the proper respect in this meeting, I will have you removed. Do you understand me?’
Chris’s eyes widened slightly, and an unpleasant smile floated onto his face.
‘Try it,’ he said softly.
‘Chris.’ Notley’s voice cracked across the room. ‘If you have anything to contribute, I’d like you to contribute it now, and then sit down. This is a policy meeting, not the Royal Shakespeare Company.’
Chris nodded. ‘Alright.’ He looked round the room. ‘This is for the record. I know Vicente Barranco, and I’m telling you, if you try to fuck him over like this, he’ll fade back into the highlands like he has before and he’ll take the disenfranchised of the NAME with him by the thousand. And then, some day, maybe five years down the road, maybe next year, he’ll be back. He’ll be back, and he’ll do what we were going to ask him to do in the first place, and when he’s sitting in the Bogota parliament chamber, and Echevarria junior is facing a firing squad somewhere for crimes against humanity, we’ll find ourselves on the wrong fucking side. He’ll go to someone else, maybe Nakamura, maybe the Germans, and he will cut us out. No GDP percentage, no enterprise zone licences, no arms trade, no supply side contracts, no commodities angle, nothing. We’ll just have a roomful of angry Americans, and nothing to feed them with.’
More silence, glances up and down the table in search of where this was going. Chris jerked his chin at Hamilton and sat down.
Hamilton looked at Notley. The senior partner shrugged. Hamilton cleared his throat.
‘Well, Chris. Thank you for that, ah, academic insight. Of course, I appreciate you taking the time to come and give your view on an account you’re no longer working on, but let me just say, I think we can handle one disgruntled marquista and indeed there are already initiatives in place—‘
Chris grinned like a skull.
‘He won’t be there, Hamilton. I already called Lopez, told him to steer Barranco well clear of the beach. When the Cobain doesn’t show up, and junior’s pet thugs do, either they’ll find nothing, or better yet Barranco’ll catch them in an ambush and slaughter them. After that, he’ll fade like a fucking ghost.’
The room erupted before he finished. Uproar from the gathered ranks of execs, half of them on their feet, pointing and shouting, not all wholly opposed to Chris, it seemed, Hamilton yelling across the melee of voices, something about fucking professional misconduct, Notley bellowing for order. The door burst open and security rushed the room, wielding non-lethal weaponry. Louise Hewitt went to stop them, hands and voice raised to make herself understood above the noise.
In the midst of it all, Mike turned to Chris, face distorted with shock and anger. ‘Are you fucking insane?’ he hissed.
It took ten minutes to clear the conference room, and even then security weren’t happy about leaving the partners with Chris. They’d heard their own set of rumours about the Echevarria incident.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Notley. ‘Really, Hermione. I appreciate your diligence, but we’re all colleagues here. Just tempers flaring, that’s all. A bit of misplaced road rage. Just keep a couple of your people outside the door, that’ll be fine.’
He ushered the guard captain out and closed the doors, then turned back to the table. In the places they had occupied when the room was filled, Chris, Mike, Louise Hewitt and Philip Hamilton sat staring at their respective patches of polished wood. Notley came back to the head of the table and stood looking at them.
‘Right,’ he said grimly. ‘Let’s sort this out, shall we?’
Louise Hewitt made an impatient gesture. ‘I don’t see anything to sort out, Jack. Faulkner’s just admitted to gross professional misconduct—‘
‘Yeah, that’s—‘
‘Chris, you will shut up,’ roared Notley. ‘You are not a partner, nor will you ever be if you cannot behave in a civilised fashion. Do as you’re told and be fucking quiet.’
‘Louise is right, Jack.’ Hamilton’s voice was soft and calm, at odds with the rage he’d shown earlier. He was back on comfortable ground. ‘Warning Barranco has endangered a delicate piece of policy restructuring. At a minimum, it’s cost us a possible bargaining chip with Echevarria. At worst, it’s given succour to a terrorist who could provide us with insurgency problems for the next decade.’
‘He was a freedom fighter last week,’ muttered Chris.
Louise Hewitt turned a look of distilled contempt on him. ‘Let me ask you a question, Chris,’ she said lightly. ‘Would it be fair to say that you’ve become political where the NAME is concerned? That you’ve been contaminated by local issues?’
Chris looked at Notley. ‘Am I allowed to answer that?’
‘Yes. But you’ll keep your tone civil, and show some respect, is that understood? This isn’t some basement fight club in the zones.’
‘Yes, I understand that.’ Chris jabbed a finger at Hamilton. ‘What I don’t understand is our junior partner’s system of communication. Until this morning, I had no idea either that I had been relieved of duty on the NAME account, or that we were reversing our established client relationship.’
‘Echevarria is the established—‘
‘Philip.’ Notley wagged a finger at the junior partner. ‘Let him finish.’
‘In fact,’ Chris saw the opening and accelerated into it. ‘The client change was news to me until this meeting, which wasn’t helpful. If I warned Barranco off, it was because I thought someone was running infiltration into the account—‘
‘Oh, please.’ Louise Hewitt pulled a face. ‘This is your job on the line, Chris. Surely you can do better than that.’
‘This morning, Louise, I received a direct call from the captain of the sub freighter we’re using to ship Barranco’s arms. She’s stuck in Faslane, waiting for freight that isn’t coming because this,’ Chris indicated Hamilton, ‘genius has had it rerouted to the NAME military. Only he didn’t think to inform me of the fact, so all I can assume is outside interference. I act accordingly, I protect our client as best I can. I get slammed for it, when the real problem here is a lack of top-down communication.’
‘You’re lying,’ said Hamilton angrily. He also had seen the loophole.
‘Am I, Philip?’ Chris turned to gesture at Mike Bryant. ‘Ask Mike. He’s been as much in the dark as I have, he knows all about the sub freighter call, because the two of us were both trying to work out what the fuck was going on this morning. Right, Mike?’
Bryant shifted in his seat. For the first time ever that Chris could remember, he looked uncomfortable.
Notley’s gaze sharpened. ‘Mike?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Bryant sighed. ‘Sorry, Phil. Louise. Chris is right. You should have told us earlier.’
Hamilton leaned across the table, flushed. ‘Bryant, you knew —‘
‘I knew there was a policy meeting, and yeah, from the hints you dropped, I guessed the way it was going. But there was nothing solid, Phil. And nothing about the shipments. You know,’ a sideways glance at his friend, ‘I didn’t know what Chris was going to do, but I couldn’t tell him for sure what was going on either. I can see why he would have played it the way he did.’