Hewitt smiled. ‘Yes, he will. I’ve talked to him. More precisely, I’ve talked to him about equity, capital wealth, partner-safe status, professional versus unprofessional behaviour and the dangers of unmanageability. Oh, and the identity of your mystery hotel guest over the last couple of weeks.’
‘The fuck are you talking about?’ But as he said it, the sliding sense of despair was overwhelming, because he already knew.
‘Don’t be obtuse, Chris. I’ve got indesp microcam footage from Liz’s house and the hotel too. Should have seen Mike’s face when he saw that stuff.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘No,’ she said almost kindly. ‘I’ve been modelling this one for months, Chris. I mean, come on. Who do you think sent you Donna Dread’s little performance in the first place?’ She waited for a response, saw she was getting none and sighed. ‘Okay, Linshaw was already leaning pretty hard in your direction, she’s such a little tart with the driving thing anyway. But even so, I think I deserve some credit. If it weren’t for me, you’d probably still be grinding through the same stale old fidelity numbers with your Norwegian grease monkey.’
Chris nodded to himself. The shock was still coming, in waves. ‘You set me up with Hamilton, didn’t you. You knew what I’d do.’
‘It seemed likely.’ Hewitt examined her nails modestly. ‘To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I’d get a result this good. Putting you and Hamilton on a collision course was an obvious no-lose strategy, the Lopez-Barranco stuff looked likely to pull you in, you proved that with Echevarria senior. Little favour called in at the Langley end, tip you off the account and off we go. But even so, Chris, I was impressed . You really managed to fuck up beyond my wildest dreams. I don’t know what you were thinking. If you were thinking.’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Chris said distantly.
‘No, I do understand. You’re hooked on Barranco’s shiny new dream - actually, it’s a pretty grubby, old dream, but let’s leave that - and some macho loyalty thing for Joaquin Lopez. I just wonder what you think trashing Hamilton was going to achieve.’
It was a ray of light, worth an almost-grin. ‘You’re wrong, Louise. Trashing Hamilton was incidental. He was just in the way. The point is, your deal with Echevarria is fucked. He’ll never touch Shorn again.’
‘Well, that remains to be seen. He’s a smarter young man than you give him credit for, and if we can show him your charred corpse with Mike Bryant’s boot on it, well, who knows?’
He folded his arms. ‘I’m not doing it, Louise.’
‘Oh, yes you are.’ Her voice turned momentarily ugly. ‘Because if you don’t drive, then Phil Hamilton’s death is just murder, and you’ll be getting a swift ride to the organ bank. Those are your choices, Chris. Die on the road or die strapped to a gurney at St Bart’s. Either way is fine with me.’
She leaned closer. Close enough that he could smell her perfume under the rain, clean and sharp and lightly spiced. Her voice was a serrated murmur.
‘And whichever it is, Chris, when it happens, as you’re going under, you just remember Nick Makin.’
Chris looked at her, not really surprised. ‘Makin, huh?’
‘That’s right.’ She sat back again. ‘Makin.’
‘So I called it from the beginning. Your toy boy got bumped for me, and you sent him to kill me.’ He shook his head. ‘Him and his gangwit proxies. That was brave of you.’
‘There’s no sent about it, Chris. He hated you for free. If anything,’ she closed her mouth, looked away. She blinked. ‘If anything, I tried to talk him down because I knew it wasn’t necessary. I knew you’d fuck up sooner or later. And don’t talk to me about brave, Chris. Not with Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range while she was injured and trapped in wreckage. Not with the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands. You’re no fucking different to me in the end.’
‘No?’ He spotted the weak spot and stabbed at it. He mimicked her savagely. ‘Tried to talk him down? Come on, Louise, if you’d wanted to stop Makin, you could have. He wasn’t that strong. You let it happen because it suited the play. Tell yourself what you like in the wee small hours, but don’t try and sell that shit to me. In the end, he was just another pawn.’
‘Pawn. Ah, yes, the chess player.’ Her colour was hectic again, but her voice had evened out. ‘You know, I play a little chess myself, Chris. I never made a big splash about it, like some people, but I play. And it’s a very limited game. In the end, it’s just you and the other guy. That’s not a good model for what we do, Chris. Not a good model for life in general. Of course it’s very male, one-on-one combat, nice and simple. But it isn’t real. You need to upgrade, play something like AlphaMesh or Linkage. Something multi-sided, something with shifting alliances.’
‘Yeah, that sounds more like your speed.’
‘It’s the speed of the world, Chris. Look around you. See the chess players? Sure you do, they’re the stupid third-world fucks sending out their pawns to kill each other over a fifty-mile strip of desert or what colour pyjamas God likes to wear. We’re the AlphaMesh players, Chris. The investment houses, the consultants, the corporates. We shift, we change, we realign, and the game keeps flowing our way. We move around these horn-locked back-and-forth testosterone dickheads, we play them off against each other and they fucking pay us for the privilege.’
‘Thanks for the insight.’
‘Yeah well.’ She got up to go. ‘Here’s another one. When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you - when that happens, just remember. You didn’t lose to him, you lost to me.’
Chapter Forty-Five
It rained on and off through the night and into the next morning. The last of the showers sputtered out as Chris was eating breakfast, and by the time he finished, the sky was brightening. His release order came through about an hour later. The meal tray detail turned up, looking unusually cheerful, and told him he could leave whenever he wanted. They’d brought his phone and wallet, a small black carry-all for his clothes, and the one who’d loaned him the books said he was welcome to keep anything he was still reading. Chris said he couldn’t possibly.
Outside, the city was still damp from the rain, and the air smelled rinsed. The weather had cleared the streets of people, leaving a forlorn Sunday feel on everything. A moisture-beaded Shorn limousine was waiting for him at the kerb, engine idling.
‘We’ll need to hurry, sir,’ the chauffeur told him. ‘The press release said four this afternoon, but you never know. Even the corporate cops have been known to leak. Always a price for drive data, eh?’
In the event, his cynicism proved unfounded. The drive to the hotel was uneventful, and the chauffeur left him alone. Only once, as his passenger was getting out, did the man’s professional lacquer crack. He waited until Chris started up the steps to the hotel, then climbed half out of the driver-side door and leaned across the roof of the limo.
‘Good luck, sir,’ he said.
Chris turned to look at him. ‘Not a Bryant fan, then?’ he asked, not quite steadily.
‘No, sir. Didn’t want to say anything before, in the car, in case you thought I was brown-nosing. But I’ll be watching you tomorrow, sir. Betting on you too.’
‘That’s. Very kind of you.’ The attempt at irony wavered away, unnoticed. ‘Any particular reason you’re not backing Bryant?’ Because he sure as fuck is a better driver than me.
The chauffeur shrugged. ‘Can’t bring myself to like the man. ‘course, you didn’t hear me say that, sir.’
‘Say what?’
The chauffeur grinned. ‘Like I said, sir. I’ll be watching.’
Chris watched him drive away, gripped by a powerful desire to exchange places with the man. Secure service job, preferential housing as likely as not. Modest means, a modest life and a probable future measured in decades, not days. Look at him, not a care in the fucking world.