‘Wait! This isn’t the way home!’
He grinned again, then hauled on the wheel. Chris heard his feet hit the pedals at the same moment and was just too late to brace himself and Suki as the BMW executed a perfect U-turn dead stop in the centre lane.
‘Michael,’ said Suki severely. ‘Stop it.’
‘Let’s try that again,’ said Bryant and kicked the BMW into another wheel-spinning takeoff. They flashed back towards the intersection, swerving into the slow lane on the slight incline under the bridge. Bryant turned round to look at Chris and Suki.
‘Now, you know that—’
They trampled him down with their voices.
‘Michael!’
‘Look at the fucking r—’
‘Don’t tur—’
In the time it all took to begin saying, Bryant had turned back to a more conventional driver’s posture and they were under the bridge and climbing the incline up on the other side.
‘Shit, sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just going to say, you know that truck we passed a couple of klicks back—’
The interior of the car flooded with light as the automated transporter cleared the crest of the rise ahead and bore down on them. Suki, Chris and Carla uttered another multiple yell and this time Bryant yelled with them, louder than anyone. The transporter’s robot brain blasted them with an outraged hoot from the collision alert system and bands of orange hazard-warning lights lit up on the cab. Mike’s burlesque Sands accent reappeared, cut with wide-eyed, breathless psycho.
‘I’m sorry, honey. I guess I. Just shouldna. Taken all those drugs.’
He laughed maniacally and, at the last moment, he yanked the wheel and the BMW swung violently to the left. They slid out of the path of the oncoming juggernaut and past the high side of the transporter’s wagon, so close that through the side window Chris saw individual dents in the metal surface of the freight container. He heard the hissing explosion of brakes across the night air, and knew that Bryant had just gone ahead and done what he’d asked Carla to do earlier. He’d deliberately tripped the transporter’s collision systems. He’d been playing chicken with the machine’s reflexes. For fun.
Much later, back in his own car, he watched the same stretch of road again while Carla drove them home. Had he been a little more aware of his immediate surroundings, he would have seen Carla open her mouth to speak several times before she finally made up her mind.
‘I’m sorry, that was my fault. I didn’t—’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘I didn’t think he’d force it like—’
‘He was just making things clear,’ said Chris distantly.
They rode in silence.
‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ said Carla after a while.
Chris nodded wordlessly.
‘Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.’ She laughed without humour. ‘And to think I said you were going to wreck him in a couple of years’ time. Jesus, irony or wha—’
‘Carla, I’d really prefer not to talk about it, alright.’
Carla looked sideways at him, eyes narrowed, but if she’d planned to be angry, what she saw in his face drained the anger out of her. Instead, she reached across to take his hand in hers.
‘Sure,’ she said very quietly.
Chris took up the offered clasp, squeezing her fingers tightly. A faint smile twitched at his mouth, but his eyes never left the road ahead.
CHAPTER NINE
In architectural echo of service pyramid theory, the Shorn block had rented out its bottom two levels to a series of shopping and eating units that collectively went under the name Basecamp. According to the Shorn promotional literature that Chris had read, Basecamp provided employment for over six hundred people and, together with the Shorn-owned vehicle repair shops in the basement, was a working embodiment of the virtues of trickle-down wealth creation. Prosperity spread out from the foundations of the Shorn block like vegetation from an aquifer, said the literature warmly, though the metaphor that occurred to Chris was water leaking from the cracked base of an old clay flowerpot. Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.
On the street opposite the Shorn complex the prosperity had blossomed – or leaked – into the form of a tiny corner restaurant called Louie Louie’s. Originally set up in the previous century to serve the butcher’s market that had once stood where the Shorn complex now loomed, the place had closed down briefly during the domino recessions and then reopened under new management, supplying coffee and snacks to the post-recessional influx of workers in Basecamp. This much Chris had gleaned from Mike Bryant when they went across for coffee one morning. What he noticed on his own was that the place never seemed to close and that, whether through inverted snobbery or genuine quality, the execs in the Shorn tower sent out to Louie Louie’s in preference to almost any other eating establishment in the district.
The coffee, Chris was forced to admit, was the best he’d had in the UK, and he derived a further, ridiculously childish, satisfaction from drinking it out of the tall styrofoam canister while he stood by the window of his office and gazed down fifty-odd floors to the dimly illuminated frontage of the place it had been made. He was doing exactly that, and bluffing his way through an audiophone local-agent call from Panama, when Mike Bryant came to call.
‘Well, you go and tell El Commandante that if he wants his Panthers of Justice to have bandages and mobile cover next month he’d better reconsider that stance. All the phones—’
He broke off as someone banged on the half-open door. Turning from the window, he saw Bryant shouldering his way into the office. In the big man’s arms were two packages wrapped in fancy black and gold paper. The bottom package was wide and flat and about the width of Bryant’s shoulders, the top one about the size and shape of two hardcopy dictionaries taped together. Both looked to be heavy.
‘I’ll call you back,’ Chris said and clicked the audiophone off.
‘Hi, Chris.’ Bryant grinned. ‘Got something for you. Where do you want it?’
‘Over there.’ Chris gestured at a small table in the corner of the still minimally furnished office space. ‘What is it?
‘Show you.’
Bryant put down the packages and ripped back the wrapping on the flat package to reveal the chequered surface of a marbled chess board. He grinned up at Chris again, freed the board from the wrapping entirely and set it straight on the table.
‘Chess?’ Chris asked stupidly.
‘Chess,’ agreed Bryant, working on the wrapping of the other box. It came loose and he tipped the box sideways, spilling carved onyx pieces across the board.
‘You know how to set this up?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’ Chris came forward and picked up some of the pieces, weighing them in his hand. ‘This is good stuff. Where’d you get it?’
‘Place in Basecamp. They were having a sale. Two for the price of one. I’ve got the other one set up in my office. Here, give me the white ones. You do the black. Who was that on the phone?’
‘Fucking Harris in Panama. Got problems with the Nicaraguan insurgents again, and of course Harris won’t take a fucking decision on his own because he’s five hundred klicks off the action. He’s not sure of the angles.’
Bryant paused in mid-action. ‘He said that?’
‘More or less.’
‘So he called someone who’s five thousand klicks off to decide for him? You ought to call in the audit on that guy. What’s he on anyway, three per cent of gross?’