‘That’s confirmed, Faulkner. Your challenger is Simon Fletcher, freelance legal analyst.’
Chris grunted. Unemployed lawyer.
‘Challenge filed at 8.04. There’s a bulk transporter in the slow lane passing junction eight, automated. Heavy load. Otherwise no traffic. You are cleared to proceed.’
Chris floored it.
He made a full car length and slewed back in front of the other vehicle, forcing Fletcher to a split-second decision. Ram or brake. The tan car dropped away and Chris smiled a little. The brake reflex was instinctive. You had to have a whole different set of responses drilled into you before you could switch it off. After all, Fletcher should have wanted to ram him. It was a standard duel tactic. Instead, his instincts had got the better of him.
This isn’t going to last long.
The lawyer accelerated again, closing. Chris let him get within about three feet of his rear fender, then hauled out and braked. The other car shot ahead and Chris tucked in behind.
Junction eight flashed past. Inside the London orbital now, almost into the zones. Chris calculated the distance to the underpass, nudged forward and tapped at Fletcher’s rear. The lawyer shot away from the contact. Chris checked his speed display and upped it. Another tap. Another forward flinch. The automated haulage transport appeared like a monstrous metal caterpillar, ballooned in the slow lane and then dropped behind just as rapidly. The underpass came into sight. Concrete yellowed with age, stained with faded graffiti that pre-dated the five-metre exclusion fencing. The fence stuck up over the parapet, topped with springy rolls of razor wire. Chris had heard it carried killing voltage.
He gave Fletcher another shove and then slowed to let him dive into the tunnel like a spooked rabbit. A couple of seconds of gentle braking, then accelerate again and in after him.
Shutdown time.
Beneath the weight of the tunnel’s roof, things were different. Yellow lights above, two tip-to-tail rows of them like tracer fire along the ceiling. Ghostly white ‘emergency exit’ signs at intervals along the walls. No breakdown lane, just a scuffed and broken line to mark the edge of the metalled road and a thin concrete path for maintenance workers. A sudden first-person-viewpoint arcade game. Enhanced sense of speed, fear of wall impact and dark.
Chris found Fletcher and closed. The lawyer was rattled – telegraphed clear in the jerky way the car was handling. Chris took a wide swing out into the other lanes so that he’d disappear from Fletcher’s rearview mirror and matched velocities dead level. One hundred and forty on the speedo again – both cars were running dead level and the underpass was only five miles long. Make it quick. Chris closed the gap between the two cars by a yard, flicked on his interior light and, leaning across to the passenger side window, raised one hand in stiff farewell. With the light on, Fletcher couldn’t fail to see it. He held the pose for a long moment, then snapped the hand into a closed fist with the thumb pointing down. At the same time, he slewed the car one-handed across the intervening lane.
The results were gratifying.
Fletcher must have been watching the farewell gesture, not the road ahead and he forgot where he was. He jerked his car aside, pulled too far and broadsided the wall in a shower of sparks. The primer-painted car staggered drunkenly, raked fire off the concrete once more and bounced away in Chris’s wake, tyres shrieking. Chris watched in the mirror as the lawyer braked his vehicle to a sprawling halt, sideways across two lanes. He grinned and slowed to about fifty, waiting to see if Fletcher would pick up the challenge again. The other car showed no sign of restarting. It was still stationary when he hit the upward incline at the far end of the underpass and lost sight of it.
‘Wise man,’ he murmured to himself.
He emerged from the tunnel into an unexpected patch of sunlight. The road vaulted, climbing onto a long raised curve that swept in over the expanses of zoneland and angled towards the cluster of towers at the heart of the city. Sunlight struck down in selective rays. The towers gleamed.
Chris accelerated into the curve.
CHAPTER TWO
The light in the washroom was subdued, filtering down from high windows set in the sloping roof. Chris rinsed his hands in the onyx basin and stared at himself in the big circular mirror. The Saab-grey eyes that looked back at him were clear and steady. The bar-code tattoos over his cheekbones picked up the colour and mixed it with threads of lighter blue. Lower still, the blue repeated in the weave of his suit and on one of the twisted lines in his Susana Ingram tie. The shirt shone white against his tan and, when he grinned, the silver tooth caught the light in the room like an audible chime.
Good enough.
The sound of splashing water ran on after he killed the tap. He glanced sideways to see another man washing his hands two basins down. The new arrival was big, the length of limb and bulk of trunk habitually used to model suits, and with long fair hair tied back in a ponytail. An Armani-suited Viking. Chris almost looked for a double-bladed battle axe resting against the basin at the man’s side.
Instead, one of the hands emerged from the basin and he saw, with a sudden, visceral shock, that it was liberally stained with blood. The other man looked up and met his gaze.
‘Something I can help you with?’
Chris shook his head and turned to the hand-dryer on the wall. Behind him, he heard the water stop in the basin and the other man joined him at the dryer. Chris acknowledged the arrival and gave a little space, rubbing away the last traces of moisture on his hands. The dryer ran on. The other man was looking at him closely.
‘Hey, you must be the new guy.’
He snapped his fingers wetly. There was still some blood on them, Chris saw, tiny flecks and some in the lines of his palm.
‘Chris something, right?’
‘Faulkner.’
‘Yeah, Faulkner, that’s it.’ He put his hands under the flow of air. ‘Just come in from Hammett McColl?’
‘Right.’
‘I’m Mike Bryant.’ A hand offered sideways. Chris hesitated briefly, eyeing the blood. Bryant picked up on it. ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was just in a no-namer, and Shorn policy is you’ve got to recover their plastic as proof of the kill. It can get messy.’
‘Had a no-namer myself this morning,’ said Chris reflexively.
‘Yeah? Where was that?’
‘M11, around junction eight.’
‘The underpass. You take him down in there?’
Chris nodded, deciding on the spur of the moment not to mention the inconclusive nature of the engagement.
‘Nice. I mean, no-namers don’t get you anywhere much, but it’s all rep, I guess.’
‘I guess.’
‘You’re up for Conflict Investment, aren’t you? Louise Hewitt’s section. I’m up there on the fifty-third myself. She was batting your résumé about a few weeks back. That stuff you did at Hammett McColl way back was some serious shit. Welcome aboard.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I’ll walk you up there if you like. Going that way myself.’
‘Great.’
They stepped out into the broad curve of the corridor and a glass-wall view of the financial district from twenty floors up. Bryant seemed to drink it in for a moment before he turned up the corridor, still scratching at a persistent speck of blood on his hand.
‘They give you a car yet?’
‘Got my own. Customised. My wife’s a mechanic.’