Then finish it!
Burn her up. The thought belched abruptly up from the deepest mud-geyser recesses of his being, and it gripped him like claws. It was the sickness of the moment before, turned up to full. The edgy thrill of rollercoaster exhilaration as he turned the sticky new idea over in his mind. Ram the tank and barbecue that bitch. Go on! If it doesn’t blow when it ruptures, you can go and light her from close up. Like—
He shook himself free of it with a shiver. Impossible to believe he’d even been considering it. After all, what if the tank blew when he hit—
They almost never do.
‘Too risky.’ He heard himself talking out loud to the hot mud-thing in his head and what he heard sounded too much like whining. He grimaced and dropped the car into reverse again. Much better just to—
He backed up another twenty metres, aligned the nose of the Saab and then crushed the accelerator smoothly to the floor. The Saab leapt across the the short gap and slammed into the driver’s side door. Metal crunched and the Mitsubishi rocked on its springs. The glass in the side window cracked and splintered. He backed up and watched carefully to see if there was any movement.
Do it again! Finish it!
She is finished.
Hewitt, with the Nemex in her hand. You bring back their plastic.
He heard his own voice in the Shorn conference chamber two months ago.
Nobody likes ambiguity.
Yeah, and this is real fucking ambiguous, Chris. So either you go for the burn, or you take that pistol in your pocket and go and recover Jones’s fucking plastic right now.
‘Chris, are you okay?’ Bryant, sounding concerned. His voice ruptured the ominous quiet on the comlink, and every second that Chris left without replying was a stillness that prickled.
‘Yeah. I’m fine.’ He unlatched the door and pushed it open. The Nemex had already somehow found its way into his hand. ‘Be right back.’
He climbed out and advanced cautiously towards the Mitsubishi, gun-hand extended and trembling slightly. Steam was still boiling from the engine space, hissing as it went, but there was no scent of petrol. The car’s fuel system, classic weakness in most Mitsubishi battlewagons, had apparently not ruptured.
Chris stopped less than a metre away from the smashed glass of the polarised window and peered in over the sight of the Nemex. Mitsue Jones lay, still strapped into the driver’s seat, face bloodied and right arm hanging slackly at her side. She was still conscious and as Chris’s pale shadow fell across the car window she looked up. Blood had run into her right eye and gummed it shut, but the other eye was desperately expressive. Her left hand came up and across her trapped body in a futile warding gesture.
Finish it!
Chris shielded his face with one hand and levelled the Nemex on Jones’s face.
Nobody likes ambiguity.
The shot echoed out flatly across the pewter-smeared sky. The blood splattered warm on his fingers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Would you say that this tender was excessively bloody?’ Chris’s face felt stretched tight under the make-up. Studio lights made his eyes ache with glare. Beside him, Bryant betrayed no discomfort as he tilted his head back at an angle and swivelled slightly on his chair.
‘That’s a tricky question, Liz.’
He paused. Pure theatrical bullshit, the bloodshed question was a staple of all business news post-tender interviews. Bryant had had nearly a full day to think about his answer.
Liz Linshaw waited. She crossed long, tanned legs and readjusted the datadown clipboard on her short-skirted lap. From where he was sitting, slightly to the left of Bryant’s centre-stage, Chris could see liquid crystal sentences spilling down the clipboard screen. Her next set of cues from the studio control room.
From where he was sitting, he could also see the swell Liz Linshaw’s left breast made where it squeezed up in the open neck of her blouse. He shifted his gaze uncomfortably, just as Bryant launched into his answer.
‘The thing is, Liz, any competitive tender is bound to involve a certain degree of conflict. If it didn’t, then the whole market ethos of what we’re doing here would be lost. And in the case of a tender of this magnitude, obviously the parties involved are going to play hard. That, sadly but necessarily, means bloodshed. But that’s exactly the way it should be.’
Liz Linshaw made out she was taken aback. ‘There should be bloodshed? You’re saying that it’s desirable?’
‘Desirable, no.’ Bryant put on a schoolmasterly smile that looked Notley-derived. Beside him, Louise Hewitt nodded sober agreement. ‘But consider. The situation in Cambodia is extreme. These people are not part of some theoretical economic model. They are involved in a life-and-death struggle to determine the future of their nation. At Shorn, we’ve just been appointed their financiers. We are supposed to fund and advise these people and, I might add, take a fair chunk of their GNP as a fee. Now, if you were a Cambodian, what kind of exec would you want? A suited theoretical economist with computer models he says define your reality half a world away? Or a warrior who has put his own life on the line to earn his place beside you?’
‘You call yourself a warrior.’ Linshaw made an elegant gesture that might have been acceptance. ‘And obviously the fact that it’s your team here at the Tebbit Centre this evening proves your credentials in that department. Alright. But does that necessarily make you the best economist for the job? Does a good economist have to have blood on his hands?’
‘I’d say a practising free-market economist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t doing his job properly. It comes with the market, and the decisions it demands. Hard decisions, decisions of life and death. We have to make those decisions, and we have to get them right. We have to be determined to get them right. The blood on our hands today is the blood of our less determined colleagues, and that says something. To you, Liz, to our audience, and most of all to our Cambodian clients, that blood says that when the hard decisions come, we will not flinch from them.’
‘How do you feel about that, Chris?’ Liz Linshaw swivelled abruptly to face him. ‘You eliminated Mitsue Jones today. What do you think the Nakamura team lacked that gave you the edge?’
Chris blinked. He’d been drifting.
‘I think, ah. Ah, they were very polished, but…’ He scrambled after the answer they’d worked out earlier when they ran the question checklist with the programme’s producer. ‘But, ah, there didn’t seem to be much flexibility of response in the way they played as a team. Once they’d sprung the trap and it failed, they were sluggish.’
‘Was this the first time you’d driven against Nakamura, Chris?’
‘Yes. Ah, well, apart from a few informal skirmishes, yes.’ Chris got his act together. ‘I drove against Nakamura junior execs in two consortium bids when I was working at Hammett McColl, but it’s not the same. In a consortium bid, people tend to get in each other’s way a lot. They usually haven’t had a lot of time to train. It’s easy to break team wedges. This was a whole different engine.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled brilliantly at him. ‘Was there any point where you were afraid Shorn were going to lose to Nakamura?’
Hewitt sat forward, bristling.
‘I don’t think we ever came that close,’ said Bryant.
‘Yes, but you were trapped in wreckage for most of the duel, Michael.’ There was just a hint of acid in Linshaw’s voice. ‘Chris, you were the one who actually took Jones down. Was there ever a critical point?’
‘I—’ Chris glanced across at Bryant who was wearing a rather thin smile. The big man’s shoulders lifted in the barest of shrugs. Beyond him, Hewitt showed as much emotion as a block of granite. ‘I think the missile ploy caught us the way it was intended to – and the jury’s still out on whether that was a legal manoeuvre or not – but after Nakamura actually engaged, we were never really up against it.’