‘Chris?’ It was Bryant, somewhere off amidst the clang and crackle of the body shop. ‘Chris, where are you?’
‘Round here.’
There was the sound of stumbling, a clatter and cursing. Chris repressed a grin and did not look up from the printout. Ten seconds later Bryant appeared round the opened hood of the Saab, cartons of take-out food in his arms and a huge naan bread jammed into his mouth. He seated himself without ceremony on a pile of worn tyres opposite Chris and started laying out the food. He took the naan bread out of his mouth and gestured with it towards two of the cartons.
‘That’s yours. Onion bhaji, and dhansak. That’s the mango chutney. Where’d Makin go?’
Chris shrugged. ‘Toilet? He looked pretty constipated.’
‘Nah, Makin always looks like that. Anal-retentive.’
A shadow fell across the food cartons and Bryant looked up, biting on the naan again. He talked through the mouthful.
‘Nick. Your tikka’s in there. Rice there. Spoons.’
Makin seated himself with a wary glance at Chris.
‘Thanks, Michael.’
There was silence for a while, broken only by the sounds of chewing. Bryant ate as if ravenous and finished first. He cast glances at both men.
‘Make your wills?’
‘Why? I’m not going to die.’ Makin looked across at Chris. ‘Are you?’
Chris shrugged and wiped his fingers, still chewing.
‘See how I feel.’
Bryant coughed laughter. Makin allowed himself a small, precise smile. ‘Vewy good. It’s good to have a sense of humour. I hear they ah big on it at HM. Must make losing more beahable.’
‘Yeah.’ Chris smiled gently back. ‘It can make winning pwetty wadical too, you should twy it.’
Makin tensed. His glasses gleamed in the overhead arc light.
‘Does the way I speak amuse you?’
‘Not weally.’
‘Hey, you guys,’ Bryant protested. ‘Come on.’
‘You know, Chwis,’ Makin looked down at his open right hand as if considering using it as a fist. ‘I’m not a chess player. Not much of a game player at all. Oh, I know you like symbolism. Games. Humour. All good ways of avoiding confontation.’
He tossed his fork into the cooling sauces of Chris’s carton.
‘But tomorrow is a confontation. You can’t laugh it away, you can’t turn it into a game. Mitsue Jones won’t play chess with you. She’ll hit you with evything she’s got and she’ll hit you fast.’
On the last word he clapped his hands violently and his eyes pinned Chris from behind the rectangular-paned screens of his glasses.
‘There’ll be no time to consider your moves out there. You must see it coming.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘And act. Nothing else.’
Chris nodded and looked down at his food for a moment. Then his hand whiplashed out and snatched Makin’s glasses from his nose.
‘I think I see what you mean,’ he said brightly.
‘Chris.’ There was a warning in Mike Bryant’s voice.
Without his glasses, Makin looked a lot less sharkish, for all his clear lack of vision defects. The narrowly watchful face now looked simply thin. When he spoke, his voice had gone thick and slow with rage, but there was nothing to back it up.
‘Michael, I don’t think I want to dwive with this clown.’
Chris held out his hand. ‘Would you like your glasses back?’ he asked innocently.
Oddly, it was Bryant who snapped.
‘Alright you two, that’s enough. Nick, you asked for that, so don’t act so fucking superior. And Chris, give him back his glasses. Jesus, I’m going up against Nakamura with a pair of fucking kids.’
‘Michael, I don’t think—’
‘No, you didn’t think, Nick. You just opened your fucking mouth. Louise asked me to head up this team. When she asks you, you can pick who drives with you. Until then, just get in line and keep a lid on it.’
The small circle of space between the three men rocked with silent tension. Behind them, the two mechanics looking over the Saab had stopped what they were doing to watch the action. Nick Makin drew in a compressed breath, then took his glasses back without a word and stalked away.
Bryant prodded at the food cartons for a while. Finally he glanced up and met Chris’s gaze.
‘Don’t pay any attention to him. He’ll have calmed down by morning.’ He brooded a little. ‘I think this chess thing might be backfiring. Symbolic conflict isn’t what you’d call a popular concept around here.’
‘What, no game-playing? Come on, you’re winding me up.’
‘Yeah, there’s games, sure. Some of the other Shorn guys I know are into those alliance games on the net. The Alphamesh leagues, stuff like that. But chess.’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Just not cool, man. Makin isn’t the first to mention it. I don’t think it’ll be catching on.’
Chris picked an onion bhaji out of a carton and bit into it reflectively. ‘Yeah, well. Always happens when you challenge someone’s world view. Means they have to re-evaluate. Most people don’t like to think that hard.’
Bryant forced a chuckle that loosened up audibly as he produced it.
‘Yeah, me included. Still, Makin should know better. No way you start this shit at a time like this.’
‘Going to be bloody tomorrow, huh?’
‘You heard of Jones?’
‘Me and the rest of the Western world, yeah.’
Bryant looked at him. ‘There’s your answer, then.’
‘Well,’ Chris tossed the half-eaten bhaji back into the carton. ‘I always wondered what the big bonuses were for.’
‘You keep your mind on that bonus tomorrow,’ grinned Bryant, regaining some of his good cheer. ‘And everything will work out just fine. You’ll see. Easy money.’
The Acropolitic car caught the central reservation barrier head-on, flipped effortlessly into the air and came down on its back, wheels still spinning. A figure slumped broken and still within. Chris, who’d been expecting a prolonged dogfight with the other car, whooped and slammed a fist against the roof of his own vehicle as he swept past.
‘Acropolitic, thank you and goodnight! ’
‘Nice,’ said Mike Bryant’s voice over the intercom. ‘Now form up and stay tight. Those guys were in pristine condition, which to my way of thinking means Nakamura aren’t on this stretch.’
‘Conforming,’ said Nick Makin crisply. Chris smirked, raised his eyes to the roof and, saying nothing, tucked into the wedge behind Mike.
Behind them, the wrecks of the Acropolitic team lay strewn across three kilometres of highway, like the abandoned toys of a child with emerging sociopathic tendencies. Two of them were burning.
‘Conforming.’
Chris wasn’t the only one smirking at Makin’s fighter-pilot pretensions. Thirty kilometres up ahead, Mitsue Jones grinned disbelievingly as the voice crackled out of her car radio. She grasped the edge of her open door and hinged herself out of the Mitsubishi Kaigan. The wind came and battered at her two-hundred-dollar Karel Mann tumbling spike cut.
Oh well.
The face beneath the jagged hair was pin-up perfect, tanned from a month on the Mexican Pacific coast and made up to accent her Japanese heritage. In keeping with Nakamura duel tradition, she went formally suited, a black Daisuke Todoroki ensemble whose sole concession to the driving was the flared and carefully vented skirt. There were flat-heeled leather boots on her feet, sheer black tights on her legs.
‘Looking good, Mits.’