Which he’s not saying Ashes is, but -
What the fuck is the guy up to? He needs to blow off a little steam or something? Scare the shit out of everyone?
Really?
The first shots are unlike any Szymanski has ever heard, and he’s heard thousands of the motherfuckers. These have a quality to them, an unreality, it’s like even they don’t believe they’ve been discharged.
But the second burst is business as usual, as is the third.
At which point, no more than about three seconds into this, with Tube’s radio voice crackling ‘STOP HIM, STOP HIM’ in the background, Szymanski piles out of the passenger side of the SUV, hits the ground and rolls forward into the back of Ray Kroner’s legs, bringing the dumbass cracker down in an awkward pile on top of him.
And right in front of the passenger door of the middle car.
The handle of which Ashes uses for leverage to get himself up again.
But also, in the process, manages to pull toward him.
So that from below, through the open door, Szymanski gets to see the terrified package flailing inside, one hand gripping the headrest in front of him, the other hand holding onto the door jamb.
Ashes facing him now, the muzzle of his M4 pointing in.
And as Szymanski scrambles to get up, his arm hurting like shit, he catches a flash of someone through the lowered window of the car door… Tube… rushing forward… kicking the door shut again, raising his hand with a Sig Sauer pistol in it and putting a bullet point blank into the side of Ray Kroner’s head.
There is silence, but only for a second. What follows it isn’t the delayed wailing of women and children, as Szymanski might have expected, it’s the agonised screaming of their executive package here who’s just had his hand badly crushed in the car door…
When Tube slammed it shut with his boot.
But hey, fuck him.
Szymanski staggers backwards a few feet – away from Ray Kroner’s crumpled body, and his twisted face, away from what at first you might be forgiven for thinking was the ‘primary scene’.
But then he gets it, gets why there’s no screaming other than that of the suit in the car, why there’s no wailing of women and children.
They’re all fucking dead.
Up ahead, and everywhere around him, he sees it.
Three short bursts of fire.
Over to the left, splayed against the wall of the concrete structure, his skull fucking daubed against it, is the tall skinny man with the bloodshot eyes. Over to the right, the wooden huts look all riddled to shit. And there, directly in front of the convoy, in a heap, along with their baskets of spilled produce, rivulets of blood trickling out in different directions, are the two women and the three small children.
4
‘SO,’ DAVE CONWAY SAYS, ‘what do you think of our chances?’
As he considers how to respond to this, Martin Boyle swivels his chair from side to side. He’s in his early-sixties, grey and paunchy, a solicitor for forty years, third generation, the law ingrained in his face, in his posture, in his syntax.
‘That depends.’ He clears his throat. ‘Notwithstanding all the work we’ll have completed here by, with any luck, Sunday night, your best chance with these people will actually be down to something else entirely, something quite intangible.’
Conway has just learnt there’s to be a make-or-break meeting with the Black Vine people on Monday. A team at McGowan Boyle is trying to come up with a convincing business model – which is what Boyle insists on calling it, having issued a blanket ban on the term ‘survival plan’.
Conway looks at him. ‘What’s that?’
‘You. The Conway Holdings brand.’ Boyle leans forward and plants his elbows on the desk. ‘Black Vine aren’t stupid, they see what’s going on. You’ve overextended, the market’s dead, it’s a simple equation and if they were a bank they wouldn’t give you a second look, but they’re not a bank, they’re an equity fund, they play a smarter game than that, they look five, ten, fifteen years into the future. They look for value in the long term. And I’m convinced that when they sit down with you that’s what they’re going to see.’
‘Hhmm.’ As Conway gives this some thought, he glances around the office, at the messy piles, on every surface, of folders, lever-arch files and back numbers of law journals. The window behind Boyle’s desk is slightly opaque, long made grimy by the Dublin rain.
‘Look, Dave, I know you might be a bit disheartened at the moment, but believe me, Conway Holdings has a serious track record. This is the first real speed bump you’ve ever hit, and everyone else is hitting it at the same time. With a little luck, you’ll recover. Most of them won’t.’
Maybe Boyle has a point.
For thirty years, under Dave’s late father, Conway & Co. was a solid, profitable operation that had started out in cement and building supplies and then diversified into mining and property development, with interests in the UK, Eastern Europe and Africa. When Conway took over he expanded the development portfolio, but he was always fairly cautious. A turning point in the company’s history came when he sold First Continental Resources, a virtually abandoned copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the multinational engineering giant, BRX.
For a huge profit.
That freed things up and the newly named Conway Holdings just mushroomed. If Conway was ever guilty of being reckless, it was only at the end of the boom.
In its last five minutes.
And only with Tara Meadows.
He pumped everything he had into it, and when he needed more, he started borrowing.
Like everyone else.
Like every other pig at the fucking trough.
‘The thing is,’ Boyle goes on, waving his hand in the air, indicating the surrounding offices, ‘this business plan we’re drawing up here, the new accountants’ reports, the fresh valuations, it’s all smoke and mirrors, it’s for show. You’re what counts. Dave Conway, the serious businessman, the dealmaker. Not some flash git who lost his head in the boom. I’ve met these Black Vine guys and I know how they think. They’ll look at the record. They’ll want to talk about stuff like that First Continental Resources deal – which, by the way, I don’t mind telling you, they are very curious about.’ He sits back in his chair. ‘Go in there and talk about that, tell them that story, and you’ll have them eating out of the palm of your hand.’
Conway flashes Boyle a look. What does he know about the First Continental deal?
McGowan Boyle only came on board afterwards – new solicitors, new accountants, new arrangements. A lot of things changed for Conway around that time.
New house, new lifestyle.
‘OK,’ he says, ‘but it’s still a crapshoot, right?’
‘There’s always an element of the crapshoot to these things. But go in there and explain to them how you got a multinational corporation to bend over like that, how you got them to shell out a hundred million dollars for an abandoned copper mine in some godforsaken shithole, and I think the odds just might tilt in your favour.’