Free Afterburn by Colin Harrison Page A

expat lonesome for conversation; since then, the rest of Hong Kong had been built up and torn down and built up all over again, but the FCC still stood, tucked away on a side street.
    "I just want to get my times right," Charlie told Jane when she was done. "It's now a few minutes after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday in Hong Kong. What time are you in London?"
    "Just after 2:00 p.m."
    "London markets are open about an hour more?"
    "Yes," Jane said.
    "New York starts trading in half an hour."
    "Yes."
    "I'll be able to watch the market from here, Jane."
    "Yes."
    "But I need you to stay in your office and handle New York for me."
    She sighed. "I'm due to pick up my son from school."
    "Need a car, a new car?"
    "Everybody needs a new car."
    "Just stay there a few more hours, Jane. You can pick out a Mercedes tomorrow morning and charge it to my account."
    "You're a charmer, Charlie."
    "I'm serious. Charge my account."
    "Okay, will you please tell me?"
    Of course he would, not only so that she could score a bit of the action herself, but because he needed to get the news moving. "Sir Henry Lai just died. Maybe fifteen minutes ago."
    "Sir Henry Lai . . ."
    "The Macao gambling billionaire who was in deep talks with GT—"
    "Yes! Yes!" Jane cried. "Are you sure?"
    "Yes."
    "It's not just a rumor?"
    "Jane. This is Charlie you're talking to."
    "How do you know?"
    "Jane, you don't trust old Charlie Ravich?"
    "Please, Charlie, there's still time for me to make a play here!"
    "I saw it with my own—"
    "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
    "—eyes, Jane. Right there in front of me."
    "It's dropping! Oh! Down to sixty-four," she cried miserably. "There it goes! There go ninety thousand shares! Somebody else got the word out! Sixty-three and a—Charlie, oh Jesus, you beat it by maybe a minute."
    He told her he'd call again shortly and stepped out of the cab, careful with his back, and walked into the club, a place so informal that the clerk just gave him a nod; people strode in all day long to have drinks in the main bar, a square room with many of the famous black-and-white AP and UPI photos of Asia: Mao in Beijing, the naked little Vietnamese girl running toward the camera, her village napalmed behind her, the sitting Buddhist monk burning himself to death in protest, Nixon at the Great Wall. Inside sat several dozen men and women drinking and smoking, many of them American and British journalists, others small-time local businessmen who long ago had slid into alcoholism, burned out, boiled over, or given up.
    He ordered a whiskey and sat down in front of the Bloomberg box, fiddling with it until he found the correct menu for real-time London equities. He was up millions and the New York Stock Exchange had not even opened yet. What do you know about war, Mr. Ravich? Please, tell me. I am curious . Ha! The big American shareholders of GT, or, more particularly, their analysts and advisers and market watchers, most of them punks in their thirties, were still tying their shoes and kissing the mirror and reading The New York Times and soon—very soon!—they'd be buying coffee at the Korean deli and saying hello to the receptionist at the front desk and sitting down at their screens. Minutes away! When they found out that Sir Henry Lai had collapsed and died in the China Club in Hong Kong at 8:45 p.m. Hong Kong time, they would assume, Charlie hoped, that because Lai ran an Asian-style, family-owned corporation, and because as its patriarch he dominated its governance, any possible deal with GT was off, indefinitely. They would then reconsider the price of GT, still absurdly stratospheric even after its ride down in London, and they would dump it fast.
    Maybe it would go that way. He ordered another drink, then called Jane.
    "GT is down almost five points," she told him. "New York is about to open."
    "But I don't see panic yet. Where's the volume selling?"
    "You're not going to see it here, not with New York opening. People may think New York will buy before they