Market Forces Read Free Page B

bounced to a halt. “Fifty-third floor,” it said brightly. “Conflict Investment division. Please ensure you have a code seven clearance for this level. Have a nice day.”
    They stepped out into a small antechamber where a well-groomed security officer nodded to Bryant and asked Chris for ID. Chris found the bar-coded strip they’d given him at ground-floor reception and waited while it was scanned.
    “Look, Chris, I’ve got to run.” Bryant nodded at the right-hand corridor. “Some greasy little dictator’s uplinking in for a budget review at ten and I’m still trying to remember the name of his defense minister. You know how it is. I’ll catch you at the quarterly review on Friday. We usually go out after.”
    “Sure. See you later.”
    Chris watched him out of sight with apparent casualness. Beneath was the same caution he’d applied to the no-name challenger that morning. Bryant seemed friendly enough, but almost everyone did under the right circumstances. Even Carla’s father could seem like a reasonable man in the right conversational light. And anyone who washed blood off his hands the way Mike Bryant did was not someone Chris wanted at his back.
    The security guard handed back his pass and pointed to the twin doors straight ahead.
    “Conference room,” she said. “They’re waiting for you.”
             
    T HE LAST TIME Chris had been face-to-face with a senior partner was to hand in his resignation at Hammett McColl. Vincent McColl had a high windowed room, paneled in dark wood and lined along one wall with books that looked a hundred years old. There were portraits of illustrious partners from the firm’s eighty-year history on the other walls, and a framed photo of his father shaking hands with Margaret Thatcher on the desk. The floor was waxed wood overlaid with a two-hundred-year-old Turkish carpet. McColl himself had silvery hair, buttoned his slim frame into suits a generation out of date, and refused to have a videophone in his office. The whole place was a shrine to hallowed tradition, an odd thing in itself for a man whose primary responsibility was a division called Emerging Markets.
    Jack Notley, Shorn Associates’ ranking senior in Conflict Investment, could not have been less like McColl if he’d been on temporary reassignment from an inverted parallel universe. He was a stocky, powerful-looking man with close and not especially well-cropped black hair that was just beginning to show a seasoning of gray. His hands were ruddy and blunt-fingered, his suit was a Susana Ingram original that had probably cost as much as the Saab’s whole original chassis, and the body it clothed looked fit for a boxing ring. His features were rough-hewn, and there was a long, jagged scar under his right eye. The eyes were keen and bright. Only the fine web of lines around them gave any indication of Notley’s forty-seven years. Chris thought he looked like a troll on vacation in Elfland as he moved across the light-filled, pastel-shaded reception area.
    His handshake, predictably, was a bonecrusher.
    “Chris. Great to have you aboard at last. Come on in. I’d like you to meet some people.”
    Chris disentangled his fingers and followed the troll’s broad back across the room to where a lower central level housed a wide coffee table, a pair of right-angled sofas, and a conspicuously unique meeting leader’s armchair. Seated at either end of one sofa were a man and a woman, both younger than Notley. Chris’s eyes focused automatically on the woman, a second before Notley spoke and gestured at her.
    “This is Louise Hewitt, divisional manager and executive partner. She’s the real brains behind what we’re doing here.”
    Hewitt unfolded herself from the sofa and leaned across to take his hand. She was a good-looking, voluptuous woman in her late thirties working hard at not showing it. Her suit looked Daisuke Todoroki—severe black, vented driver’s skirt to the knees, and square-cut