Free Afterburn by Colin Harrison Page B

know the news. I'll be sitting right here."
    "Excellent, Jane. Thank you."
    "No, thank you ."
    "Oh?"
    "I got in with my own account at sixty-four and out at sixty-one, so I made a nice sum this afternoon, Charlie."
    "Why didn't you hold?" he asked. "I think it's going down further."
    "Maybe I don't have your guts."
    "Jane. Jane . You think old man Charlie is going over the edge—I can hear it in your voice."
    "Not at all. Call me when you're ready to close out the play."
    He hung up, looked into the screen. The real-time price of GT was hovering at fifty-nine dollars a share. No notice had moved over the information services yet. Not Bloomberg, not Reuters.
    He went back to the bar, pushed his way past a couple of journalists.
    "Another?" the bartender asked, perhaps noticing the scar on Charlie's hand.
    "Yes, sir. A double," he answered loudly. "I just got very bad news."
    "Sorry to hear that." The bartender did not look up.
    "Yes." Charlie nodded solemnly. "Sir Henry Lai died tonight, massive heart attack at the China Club. A terrible thing." He slid one hundred Hong Kong dollars across the bar. Several of the journalists peered at him.
    "Pardon me," asked one, a tall Englishman with a riot of red hair. "Did I hear you say Sir Henry Lai has died ?"
    Charlie nodded. "Not an hour ago. Terrible thing to witness. I just happened to be standing there, at the China Club." He tasted his drink. "Please excuse me."
    He returned to the Bloomberg screen. The Englishman, he noticed, had slipped away to a pay phone in the corner. The New York Stock Exchange, casino to the world, had been open a minute. He waited. Three, four, five minutes. And then, finally, came what he'd been waiting for, Sir Henry Lai's epitaph: GT's price began shrinking as its volume exploded—half a million shares, price fifty-eight, fifty-six, two million shares, fifty-five and a half. He watched. Four million shares now. The stock would bottom and bounce. He'd wait until the volume slowed. At fifty-five and a quarter he pulled his phone out of his pocket, called Jane, and executed the option to sell at sixty-six. At fifty-five and seven-eighths he bought the same number of shares he'd optioned, for a profit of a bit more than ten dollars a share. Major money. Sixteen million before taxes. Big money. Real money. Elvis money.
    The whiskey was finding its way around his brain, and now he was prepared to say that soon he would be drunk.
     
    IT WAS ALMOST ELEVEN when he arrived back at his hotel, which loomed brightly above him, a tinkle of music and voices floating out into the gauzy fog from the open-air swimming pool on the fourteenth floor. The Sikh doorman, a vestige from the days of the British Empire, nodded a greeting. Inside the immense lobby a piano player pushed along a little tune that made Charlie feel mournful, and he sat down in one of the deep chairs that faced the harbor. So much ship traffic, hundreds of barges and junks and freighters and, farther out, the supertankers. To the east sprawled the new airport—they had filled in the ocean there, hiring half of all the world's deep-water dredging equipment to do it. History in all this. He was looking at ships moving across the dark waters, but he might as well be looking at the twenty-first century itself, looking at his own countrymen who could not find factory jobs. The poor fucks had no idea what was coming at them, not a clue. China was a juggernaut, an immense, seething mass. It was building aircraft carriers, it was buying Taiwan. It shrugged off turmoil in Western stock markets. Currency fluctuations, inflation, deflation, volatility—none of these things compared to the fact that China had eight hundred and fifty million people under the age of thirty-five. They wanted everything Americans now took for granted, including the right to piss on the shoes of any other country in the world. The Chinese could actually get things done, too; they were rewiring with fiber-optic cable, they were