Richard Morgan: Market Forces

They didn’t like it. They didn’t know if—

‘Tell him it’s a national emergency,’ Chris suggested.

It took a couple of minutes, but Echevarria grabbed the call. He wasn’t pleased. Chris got the impression the ride in the last week had been bumpy.

‘Bryant? That you? Now fuckin’ what? What national fuckin’ emergency you talkin’ about?’

‘The one that’s going to put you in front of a fucking firing squad, you piece of shit. This is Chris Faulkner.’

Strangled silence, then fury. ‘You motherfuckin’—‘

‘Shut up and listen, Paco. I don’t know what line of shit they’ve been handing you in my absence, but things just changed for the better. Mike Bryant is dead.’

‘You’re lyin’.’

‘No, I’m not. I killed him myself. With my bare fucking hands. So I’m now junior partner at Shorn Conflict Investment, which means executive partner for the NAME account. Which means you, Paco. And I’m telling you, I’m going to have Vicente Barranco in the streets of Bogota by the end of this fucking month. So if I were you, I would gather up as much of your father’s stolen loot as you can get in a Lear jet, and I would fuck off out of the NAME right now, while you can still walk to the plane.’

Echevarria lost English in the storm of his fury. Spanish washed down the line, beyond Chris’s ability to follow. He cut across it.

‘You’ve got forty-eight hours, Paco. That’s it. After that, I’m sending Special Air to put a bullet in your face.’

‘You cannot do this!’

This time, Chris really laughed. Across the pain in his broken ribs, across all the pain. The drugs were numbing him nicely.

‘You still don’t get it, do you, Paco? From where I’m sitting, I can do whatever the fuck I want. Men like me, there’s nothing you can do to stop us any more. Understand? There is nothing you can do any more.’

He killed the call.

Fed power to the Saab and watched as his speed climbed.

Gave himself up to the snarl of the engine, the spreading numbness of the drugs in his system, and the onrushing emptiness of the road ahead.

THE END