Market Forces

Chapter One

Awake.

Jackknifed there in sweat.

Fragments of the dream still pinning his breath in his throat and his face into the pillow, mind reeling in the darkened room ...

Reality settled over him like a fresh sheet. He was home.

He heaved a shuddering sigh and groped for the glass of water beside the bed. In the dream he’d been falling to, and then through, the tiles of the supermarket floor.

On the other side of the bed Carla stirred and laid a hand on him.

‘Chris?’

“sokay. Dream.’ He gulped from the glass. ‘Bad dream, s’all.’

‘Murcheson again?’

He paused, peculiarly unwilling to correct her assumption. He didn’t dream about Murcheson’s screaming death much any more. He shivered a little. Carla sighed and pulled herself closer to him. She took his hand and pressed it onto one full breast.

‘My father would just love this. Deep stirrings of conscience. He’s always said you haven’t got one.’

‘Right.’ Chris lifted the alarm clock and focused on it. Three-twenty. Just perfect. He knew he wouldn’t get back to sleep for a while. Just fucking perfect. He flopped back, immobile. ‘Your father has convenient amnesia when it comes to clearing the rent.’

‘Money talks. Why’d you think I married you?’

He rolled his head and butted her gently on the nose. ‘Are you taking the piss out of me?’

For answer she reached down for his prick and rolled it through her fingers.

‘No. I’m winding you up,’ she whispered.

As they drew together he felt the hot gust of desire for her blowing out the dream, but he was slow to harden under her hand. It was only in the final throes of climax that he finally let go.

Falling.

It was raining when the alarm sounded. Soft hiss outside the open window like an untuned TV at very low volume. He snapped off the bleeper, lay listening to the rain for a few moments and then slid out of the bed without waking Carla.

In the kitchen he set up the coffee machine, ducked into the shower and got out in time to steam milk for Carla’s cappuccino. He delivered it to her bedside, kissed her awake and pointed it out. She’d probably drift off to sleep again and drink it cold when she finally got up. He lifted clothes from the wardrobe - plain white shirt, one of the dark Italian suits, the Argentine leather shoes. He took them downstairs.

Dressed but untied, he carried his own double espresso into the living room with a slice of toast to watch the seven o’clock bulletins. There was, as usual, a lot of detailed foreign commentary and it was time to go before the Promotions & Appointments spot rolled around. He shrugged, killed the TV and only remembered to knot his tie when he caught himself in the hall mirror. Carla was just making waking noises as he slipped out of the front door and disabled the alarms on the Saab.

He stood in the light rain for a long moment, looking at the car. Soft beads of water glistening on the cold grey metal. Finally, he grinned.

‘Conflict Investment, here we come,’ he muttered, and got in.

He got the bulletins on the radio. They started Promotions & Appointments as he hit the Elsenham junction ramp. Liz Linshaw’s husky tones, just a touch of the cordoned zones to roughen up the otherwise cultured voice. On TV she dressed like a cross between a government arbitrator and a catered-party exotic dancer, and in the last two years she had graced the pages of every men’s lifestyle magazine on the rack. The discerning exec’s wet dream, and by popular acclaim the AM ratings queen of the nation.

Chris’s eyes flickered from the road to the radio. He touched up the volume a notch.

Chris tuned it out, vaguely annoyed that Bryant’s no-name scuffle had knocked his name off Liz Linshaw’s crimson lips. The rain had stopped and his wipers were beginning to squeak. He switched them off and shot a glance at the dashboard clock. He was still running early.

The proximity alarm chimed.

He caught the accelerating shape in the otherwise deserted rearview and slewed reflexively right. Into the next lane, brake back. As the other vehicle drew level, he relaxed. The car was battered and primer-painted in mottled tan, custom-built like his own but not by anyone who had any clue about road-raging. Heavy steel barbs welded onto the front fenders, bulky external armouring folded around the front wheels and jutting back to the doors. The rear wheels were broad-tyred to provide some manoeuvring stability but it was still clear from the way the car moved that it was carrying far too much weight.

No-namer.

Like fifteen-year-old cordoned zone thugs, they were often the most dangerous because they had the most to prove, the least to lose. The other driver was hidden behind a slat-protected side window, but Chris could see movement. He thought he made out the glimmer of a pale face. Along the car’s flank was flashed the driver number in luminous yellow paint. He sighed and reached for the comset.

‘Driver Control,’ said an anonymous male voice.

‘This is Chris Faulkner of Shorn Associates, driver clearance 260B354R, inbound on M11 past junction ten. I have a possible no-name challenger number X23657.’

‘Checking. A moment please.’

Chris began to build his speed, gradually so that the no-namer would soak up the acceleration without tripping into fight mode. By the time the controller came back on, they were pacing each other at about one hundred and forty kilometres an hour.

‘That’s confirmed, Faulkner. Your challenger is Simon Fletcher, freelance legal analyst.’

Chris grunted. Unemployed lawyer.

‘Challenge filed at 8.04. There’s a bulk transporter in the slow lane passing junction eight, automated. Heavy load. Otherwise no traffic. You are cleared to proceed.’

Chris floored it.

He made a full car length and slewed back in front of the other vehicle, forcing Fletcher to a split-second decision. Ram or brake. The tan car dropped away and Chris smiled a little. The brake reflex was instinctive. You had to have a whole different set of responses drilled into you before you could switch it off. After all, Fletcher should have wanted to ram him. It was a standard duel tactic. Instead, his instincts had got the better of him.

This isn’t going to last long.

The lawyer accelerated again, closing. Chris let him get within about three feet of his rear fender, then hauled out and braked. The other car shot ahead and Chris tucked in behind.

Junction eight flashed past. Inside the London orbital now, almost into the zones. Chris calculated the distance to the underpass, nudged forward and tapped at Fletcher’s rear. The lawyer shot away from the contact. Chris checked his speed display and upped it. Another tap. Another forward flinch. The automated haulage transport appeared like a monstrous metal caterpillar, ballooned in the slow lane and then dropped behind just as rapidly. The underpass came into sight. Concrete yellowed with age, stained with faded graffiti that pre-dated the five-metre exclusion fencing. The fence stuck up over the parapet, topped with springy rolls of razor wire. Chris had heard it carried killing voltage.

He gave Fletcher another shove and then slowed to let him dive into the tunnel like a spooked rabbit. A couple of seconds of gentle braking, then accelerate again and in after him.

Shutdown time.

Beneath the weight of the tunnel’s roof, things were different. Yellow lights above, two tip-to-tail rows of them like tracer fire along the ceiling. Ghostly white ‘emergency exit’ signs at intervals along the walls. No breakdown lane, just a scuffed and broken line to mark the edge of the metalled road and a thin concrete path for maintenance workers. A sudden first-person-viewpoint arcade game. Enhanced sense of speed, fear of wall impact and dark.

Chris found Fletcher and closed. The lawyer was rattled - telegraphed clear in the jerky way the car was handling. Chris took a wide swing out into the other lanes so that he’d disappear from Fletcher’s rearview mirror and matched velocities dead level. One hundred and forty on the speedo again - both cars were running dead level and the underpass was only five miles long. Make it quick. Chris closed the gap between the two cars by a yard, flicked on his interior light and, leaning across to the passenger side window, raised one hand in stiff farewell. With the light on, Fletcher couldn’t fail to see it. He held the pose for a long moment, then snapped the hand into a closed fist with the thumb pointing down. At the same time, he slewed the car one-handed across the intervening lane.

The results were gratifying.

Fletcher must have been watching the farewell gesture, not the road ahead and he forgot where he was. He jerked his car aside, pulled too far and broadsided the wall in a shower of sparks. The primer-painted car staggered drunkenly, raked fire off the concrete once more and bounced away in Chris’s wake, tyres shrieking. Chris watched in the mirror as the lawyer braked his vehicle to a sprawling halt, sideways across two lanes. He grinned and slowed to about fifty, waiting to see if Fletcher would pick up the challenge again. The other car showed no sign of restarting. It was still stationary when he hit the upward incline at the far end of the underpass and lost sight of it.

‘Wise man,’ he murmured to himself.

He emerged from the tunnel into an unexpected patch of sunlight. The road vaulted, climbing onto a long raised curve that swept in over the expanses of zoneland and angled towards the cluster of towers at the heart of the city. Sunlight struck down in selective rays. The towers gleamed.

Chris accelerated into the curve.

Chapter Two

The light in the washroom was subdued, filtering down from high windows set in the sloping roof. Chris rinsed his hands in the onyx basin and stared at himself in the big circular mirror. The Saab-grey eyes that looked back at him were clear and steady. The bar-code tattoos over his cheekbones picked up the colour and mixed it with threads of lighter blue. Lower still, the blue repeated in the weave of his suit and on one of the twisted lines in his Susana Ingram tie. The shirt shone white against his tan and, when he grinned, the silver tooth caught the light in the room like an audible chime.

Good enough.

The sound of splashing water ran on after he killed the tap. He glanced sideways to see another man washing his hands two basins down. The new arrival was big, the length of limb and bulk of trunk habitually used to model suits, and with long fair hair tied back in a ponytail. An Armani-suited Viking. Chris almost looked for a double-bladed battle axe resting against the basin at the man’s side.

Instead, one of the hands emerged from the basin and he saw, with a sudden, visceral shock, that it was liberally stained with blood. The other man looked up and met his gaze.

‘Something I can help you with?’

Chris shook his head and turned to the hand-dryer on the wall. Behind him, he heard the water stop in the basin and the other man joined him at the dryer. Chris acknowledged the arrival and gave a little space, rubbing away the last traces of moisture on his hands. The dryer ran on. The other man was looking at him closely.

‘Hey, you must be the new guy.’

He snapped his fingers wetly. There was still some blood on them, Chris saw, tiny flecks and some in the lines of his palm.

‘Chris something, right?’

‘Faulkner.’

‘Yeah, Faulkner, that’s it.’ He put his hands under the flow of air. ‘Just come in from Hammett McColl?’

‘Right.’

‘I’m Mike Bryant.’ A hand offered sideways. Chris hesitated briefly, eyeing the blood. Bryant picked up on it. ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was just in a no-namer, and Shorn policy is you’ve got to recover their plastic as proof of the kill. It can get messy.’

‘Had a no-namer myself this morning,’ said Chris reflexively.

‘Yeah? Where was that?’

‘M11, around junction eight.’

‘The underpass. You take him down in there?’

Chris nodded, deciding on the spur of the moment not to mention the inconclusive nature of the engagement.

‘Nice. I mean, no-namers don’t get you anywhere much, but it’s all rep, I guess.’

‘I guess.’

‘You’re up for Conflict Investment, aren’t you? Louise Hewitt’s section. I’m up there on the fifty-third myself. She was batting your resume about a few weeks back. That stuff you did at Hammett McColl way back was some serious shit. Welcome aboard.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll walk you up there if you like. Going that way myself.’

‘Great.’

They stepped out into the broad curve of the corridor and a glass-wall view of the financial district from twenty floors up. Bryant seemed to drink it in for a moment before he turned up the corridor, still scratching at a persistent speck of blood on his hand.

‘They give you a car yet?’

‘Got my own. Customised. My wife’s a mechanic’

Bryant stopped and looked at him. ‘No shit?’

‘No shit.’ Chris held up his left hand, the dull metal band on the ring finger. Bryant examined it with interest.

‘What’s that, steel?’ He caught on and grinned suddenly, Out of an engine, right? I’ve read about this stuff.’

‘Titanium. Got it off an old Saab venting chamber. Had to resize it, but apart from that—‘

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The other man’s enthusiasm was almost childlike. ‘Did you do it over an engine block, like that guy in Milan last year?’ The finger snap again. ‘What was his name, Bonocello or something?’

‘Bonicelli. Yeah, like that, pretty much.’ Chris tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. His engine-block altar marriage pre-dated the Italian driver’s by some five years, but had gone almost unnoticed in the driving press. Bonicelli’s ran for weeks, in full colour. Maybe something to do with the fact that Silvio Bonicelli was the hellraising younger son of a big Florentine driving family, maybe just that he had married not a mechanic but an ex-porn star and blossoming manufactured pop singer. Maybe also the fact Chris and Carla had done it with a minimum of fuss in the backyard at Mel’s AutoFix, and Silvio Bonicelli had invited the crowned heads of corporate Europe to a ceremony on a cleared shop floor at the new Lancia works in Milan. That was the trick with the twenty-first century’s corporate nobility. Family contacts.

‘Marry your mechanic.’ Bryant was grinning again. ‘Man, I can see where that would be useful, but I’ve got to tell you, I admire your courage.’

‘It wasn’t really a courage thing,’ said Chris mildly. ‘I was in love. You married?’

‘Yeah.’ He saw Chris looking at his ring. ‘Oh. Platinum. Suki’s a bond trader for Costerman’s. Mostly works from home these days, and she’s probably going to quit if we have another kid.’

‘You got kids?’

‘Yeah, just the one. Ariana.’ They reached the end of the corridor and a battery of lifts. Bryant dug in his jacket pocket while they waited and produced a wallet. He flipped it open to reveal an impressive rack of credit cards and a photo of an attractive auburn-haired woman holding a pixie-faced child. ‘Look. We took that on her birthday. She was one. Nearly a year ago already. They grow up fast. You got kids?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Well, all I can tell you is don’t wait too long.’ Bryant flipped the wallet closed as the lift arrived and they rode up in companionable silence. The lift announced each floor in a chatty tone and gave them brief outlines of current Shorn development projects. After a while Chris spoke, more to drown out the earnest synthetic voice than anything else.

‘This place have its own combat classes?’

‘What, hand to hand?’ Bryant grinned. ‘Look at that number, Chris. Forty-one. Up here, you don’t go hand-to-hand for promotion. Louise Hewitt’d consider that the height of bad taste.’

Chris shrugged. ‘Yeah, but you never know. Saved my life once.’

‘Hey, I’m kidding.’ Bryant patted him on the arm. ‘They’ve got a couple of corporate instructors down in the gym, sure. Shotokan and Tae kwon do, I think. I do some Shotokan myself sometimes, just to stay in shape, plus you never know when you might wind up in the cordoned zones.’ He winked. ‘Know what I mean? But anyway, like one of my instructors says, learning a martial art won’t teach you to fight. You want to learn that shit, go to the street and get in some fights. That’s how you really learn.’ A grin. ‘Least, that’s what they tell me.’

The lift 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 defence 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 their 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.’

The 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, panelled 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 on the desk a framed photo of his father shaking hands with Margaret Thatcher. 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 secondment 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 grey. 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 holiday in Elfland as he moved across the light-filled pastel-shaded reception chamber.

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 jacket. Her shoes had no appreciable heel. She wore long dark hair gathered back in a knot from pale features and minimal make-up. Her handshake wasn’t trying to prove anything.

‘And this is Philip Hamilton, junior partner for the division.’

Chris turned to face the deceptively soft-looking man at the other end of the sofa. Hamilton had a weak chin and a fat bulk that made him untidy, even in his own charcoal Ingram, but his pale blue eyes missed absolutely nothing. He stayed seated, but offered up a damp hand and a murmured greeting. There was, Chris thought, a guarded dislike in his voice.

‘Well now,’ said Notley, in jovial tones. ‘I’m not really much more than a figurehead around here so I’ll hand over to Louise for the moment. Let’s all take a seat and, would you like a drink?’

‘Green tea, if you’ve got it.’

‘Certainly. I think a pot would be in order. Jiang estate okay?’

Chris nodded, impressed. Notley walked up to the large desk near one of the windows and prodded a phone. Louise Hewitt seated herself with immaculate poise and looked across at Chris.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Faulkner,’ she said neutrally.

‘Great.’

Still neutral. ‘Not entirely, as it happens. There are one or two items I’d like to clear up, if you don’t mind.’

Chris spread his hands. ‘Go ahead. I work here now.’

‘Yes.’ The thin smile told him she hadn’t missed the counterblow. ‘Well, perhaps we could start with your vehicle. I understand you’ve turned down the company car. Do you have something against the house of BMW?’

‘Well, I think they have a tendency to overarmour. Apart from that, no. It was a very generous offer. But I have my own vehicle and I’d rather stick with what I know, if it’s all the same to you. I’ll feel more comfortable.’

‘Customised,’ said Hamilton, as if naming a psychological dysfunction.

‘What’s that?’ Notley was back, settling predictably into the armchair. ‘Ah, your wheels, Chris. Yes, I heard you’re married to the woman who put it together. That is right, isn’t it.’

‘That’s right.’ Chris took a flickered inventory of the expressions around him. In Notley he seemed to read an avuncular tolerance, in Hamilton distaste, and in Louise Hewitt nothing at all.

‘That must give you quite a bond,’ Notley mused, almost to himself.

‘Uh, yes. Yes, it does.’

‘I’d like to talk about the Bennett incident,’ said Louise Hewitt loudly.

Chris locked gazes with her for a beat, then sighed. ‘The details are pretty much as I filed them. You must have read about it at the time. Bennett was up for the same analyst’s post as me. Fight lasted to that raised section on the M40 inflow. I swiped her off the road on a bend and she stuck on the edge. Weight of the car would have pulled her over sooner or later; she was running a reconditioned Jag Mentor.’

Notley grunted, a used-to-run-one-myself sort of noise.

‘Anyway, I stopped and managed to pull her out. The car went over a couple of minutes later. She was semi-conscious when I got her to the hospital. I think she hit her head on the steering wheel.’

‘The hospital?’ Hamilton’s voice was politely disbelieving. ‘Excuse me. You took her to the hospital?’

Chris stared at him.

‘Yeah. I took her to the hospital. Is there a problem with that?’

‘Well,’ Hamilton laughed. ‘Let’s just say people around here might have seen it that way.’

‘What if Bennett had decided to have another crack at the post?’ asked Hewitt gravely, detached counterpoint to her junior partner’s hilarity. Chris thought it rang rehearsed. He shrugged.

‘What, with cracked ribs, a broken right arm and head injuries? The way I remember it, she was in no condition to do anything but some heavy breathing.’

‘But she did recover, right?’ Hamilton asked slyly. ‘She’s still working. Still in London.’

‘Back at Hammett McColl.’ Hewitt confirmed, still detached. The jab, Chris knew, was going to come from Hamilton’s corner.

‘That why you left, Chris?’ The junior partner was right on cue, voice still tinged lightly with derision. ‘No stomach to finish the job?’

‘What I think Louise and Philip are trying to say,’ Notley interposed, the kindly uncle at a birthday-party dispute, ‘is that you didn’t resolve matters. Would that be a fair summary, Louise.’

Hewitt nodded curtly. ‘It would.’

‘I stayed at HM two years after Bennett,’ said Chris, keeping his temper. He hadn’t expected this so early. ‘She honoured her defeat as expected. The matter was resolved to my satisfaction, and to the firm’s.’

Notley made soothing gestures. ‘Yes, yes. Perhaps, then, this is more a question of corporate culture than blame. What we value here at Shorn is, how shall I put it? Well, yes. Resolution, I suppose. We don’t like loose ends. They can trip you, and us, up at a later date. As you see with the embarrassment the Bennett incident is causing us all here and now. We are left in, shall we say, an ambiguous situation. Now that couldn’t have happened had you resolved the matter in a terminal fashion. It’s the kind of ambiguity we like to avoid at Shorn Associates. It doesn’t fit our image, especially in a field as competitive as Conflict Investment. I’m sure you understand.’

Chris looked around at the three faces, counting the friends and enemies he appeared to have already made. He manufactured a smile.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Nobody likes ambiguity.’

Chapter Three

The gun sat, unambiguously, in the middle of the desk, begging to be picked up. Chris put his hands in his pockets and looked at it with wary dislike.

‘This mine?’

‘Heckler and Koch Nemesis Ten.’ Hewitt strode past him and filled her hand with the black rubber butt. ‘The Nemex. Semi-automatic, double action hesitation lock, no safety necessary. Just pull it out and start shooting. Standard Shorn issue. Comes with a shoulder holster, so you can wear it under a suit. You never know when you’ll have to give a coup de grace.’

He fought down a smirk. Maybe she saw it.

‘We’ve got a way of doing things here, Faulkner. If you call someone out, you don’t take them to the hospital afterwards. You go in and you finish the job. With this if necessary.’ She pointed the pistol one-handed at the datadown unit built into the desk. There was a dry click as she pulled the trigger. ‘If you can, you bring back their plastic. Speaking of which.’ She reached inside her jacket pocket with her free hand and produced a small grey rectangle. Light flashed on the entwined red S and A of a Shorn Associates holologo. She tossed the card onto the table and laid the gun down beside it. ‘There you are. Don’t get separated from either. You never know when you’ll need firepower.’

Chris picked up the card and tapped it thoughtfully on the desk-top. He left the gun where it was.

‘Clips are in the top drawer of your desk. It’s a jacketed load, should go through the engine block of a bulk transporter. You actually used to drive one of those things, didn’t you? Mobile Arbitrage or something.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris pulled out his wallet and racked the card. He looked back up at Hewitt expectantly. ‘So?’

‘No, nothing.’ Hewitt walked past him to the window and looked out at the world below. ‘I think it was an inspired idea, selling commodities from a haulage base. But it’s not quite the same thing as driving for an investment bank, is it?’

Chris smiled a little and seated himself on the corner of the desk, back to the window and his new boss.

‘You don’t like me very much, do you Hewitt?’

‘This isn’t about like, Faulkner. I don’t think you belong here.’

‘Well someone evidently does.’

He heard her coming back to the desk and turned his head casually towards her as she arrived. Behind her, he suddenly noticed how bleak the undecorated office was.

‘Well, look at that,’ she said softly. ‘Got me back here, didn’t you? Is that the kind of powerplay you’re used to? You won’t cut it here, Faulkner. I’ve seen your resume. Big kill eight years back with Quain, nothing much since. You got lucky, that’s all.’

Chris kept his voice mild. ‘So did Hammett McColl. They saved about fifteen mil in bonus payments when Quain went down. And I haven’t needed to do much killing since. Sometimes it’s just enough to do the work. You don’t have to be proving yourself all the time.’

‘Here you do. You’ll find that out.’

‘Really.’ Chris pulled out the top drawer and looked in at the contents as if they interested him marginally more than the woman in front of him. ‘You got some toy boy lined up to call me out for this office?’

For just a moment he had her. He caught it in the way her frame stiffened at the upper edges of his peripheral vision. Then she drew a long breath, as if Chris was a new flower she liked the scent of. As he looked up, she smiled.

‘Cute,’ she said. ‘Oh, you’re cute. Notley likes you, you know that? That’s why you’re here. You remind him of him, back when he was young. He came out of nowhere just like you, riding one big kill. He had a tattoo, just like you. Stream of currency signs, like tears down from one eye. Very classy.’ Her lip curled. ‘He even dated his mechanic for about five years. Little zone girl, with a smudge of grease across her nose. They say she even turned up to a quarterly dinner once with that smudge. Yeah, Notley likes you, but you notice something about that tattoo? It’s gone now. Just like that little zone girl. See, Notley gets sentiment attacks sometimes, but he’s a professional and he won’t let it get in the way. Hold that thought, because you’re going to disappoint him, Faulkner. You don’t have the grit.’

‘Welcome aboard.’

Hewitt looked at him blankly. Chris gestured with one open hand.

‘I thought one of us should say it.’

‘Hey.’ She shrugged and turned to leave. ‘Prove me wrong.’

Chris watched her go, face unreadable. As the door closed, his eyes fell on the matt black Nemex pistol on the desk and his own lip twisted derisively.

‘Fucking cowboys.’

He swept the gun ceremonially away with the clips and slammed the drawer closed.

There was a list of induction suggestions on the datadown: people to call, when to call them, and where they could be found. Procedures to implement, the best time to access the areas of the Shorn datastack necessary for each procedure. A selected overview of his caseload for the next two months, flags to indicate which needed attention first. The p.a. package had phased everything into a suggested convenience sequence which got the work done as efficiently as possible and told him he would find it most convenient to go home at about eight-thirty that evening.

He toyed briefly with the idea of loading up the Nemex with its jacketed ammunition and repeating Hewitt’s target practice on the datadown.

Instead, he punched the phone.

‘Carla, this is Chris. I’m going to be late tonight, so don’t wait up. There’s still some chilli in the fridge, try not to eat it all, it’ll give you the shits and I’d like some myself when I get in. Oh, by the way, I’m in love.’

He put down the receiver and looked at the datadown screen. After a long pause, he prodded the bright orange triangle marked Conflict Investment and watched as it maximised like an opening flower.

The backglow lit his face.

It was past eleven by the time he got home. He killed his lights at the first bend in the drive, though he knew that the crunch of his wheels on the gravel would probably wake Carla as surely as the play of high beams across the front of the house. Sometimes she seemed to know he was home more by intuition than anything else. He parked beside the battered and patched Landrover she ran, turned off his engine and yawned. For a moment he sat in the still and the darkness, listening to the cooling tick of the engine.

Home for six hours’ sleep. Why the fuck did we move this far out?

But he knew the answer to that.

This place is no different to HM. Live at work, sleep at home, forget you ever had a relationship. Same shit, different logo.

Well, that’s where all the money comes from.

He let himself into the house as quietly as he could and found Carla in the lounge, watching a TV screen tuned to the soft blue light of an empty channel. Ice clicked in her glass as she lifted it to her lips.

‘You’re awake,’ he said, and then saw how far down the bottle she was. ‘You’re drunk.’

‘Isn’t that meant to be my line?’

‘Not tonight, it isn’t. I was wired to the fucking datadown until quarter to ten.’ He bent to kiss her. ‘Rough day?’

‘Not really. Same old shit.’

‘Yeah, done some of that myself.’ He sank into the chair beside her. She handed him the whisky glass just a fraction of a second before he reached out for it. ‘What you watching?’

‘Dex and Seth, ‘til the jamming got it.’

He grinned. ‘You’re going to get us arrested.’

‘Not in this postcode.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He glanced across at the phone deck. ‘Did we get any this morning?’

‘Any what?’

‘Any mail?’

‘Bills. Mortgage repayment went through.’

‘Already? They just took it.’

‘No, that was last month. We’re over the line on a couple of cards as well.’

Chris drank some of the peat-flavoured Islay whisky, tutting learnedly over the sacrilege of ice in a glass of single malt. Carla gave him a murderous look. He handed her back the glass and frowned at the TV screen. ‘How’d we manage that?

‘We spent the money, Chris.’

‘Well.’ He stretched his suited legs out in front of him and yawned again. ‘That’s what we earn it for, I guess. So what same old shit did you do today?’

‘Salvage. Some arms supply company just moved into premises out on the northern verge lost a dozen of their brand new Mercedes Ramjets to vandals. Whole lot written off.’

Chris sat up. ‘A dozen? What did they do, park them in the open?’

‘No. Someone dropped a couple of homemade shrapnel bombs through a vent into their executive garages. Boom! Corrosives and fast-moving metal in all directions. Mel got a contract to assess the damage and haul every write-off away gratis. Paid to clear it, and he gets to keep whatever salvage we can strip out of the wrecks. And here’s the good bit. Some of these Mercs are barely scratched. Mel’s still out celebrating. Says if the corporates are going to insist on this urban regeneration shit, we could have a lot more work like that. He must have put a good metre of NAME powder up his nose tonight.’

‘Shrapnel bombs, huh?’

‘Yeah, ingenious what kids can wire together out of scrap these days. I don’t know, maybe Mel even set them up to do it. Connections he’s got in the zones. Jackers, drugs. Gangwit stuff.’

‘Fuckers,’ said Chris vaguely.

‘Yeah, well.’ An edge crept into Carla’s voice. ‘Amazing what you’ll get up to when you’ve got nothing to lose. Nothing to do but stand at the razor wire and watch the wealth roll by.’

Chris sighed. ‘Carla, could we have this argument some other time, please? Because I haven’t rehearsed in a while.’

‘You got something else you want to do?’

‘Well, we could fuck by the light of the TV screen.’

‘We could,’ she agreed seriously. ‘Except that I always end up on top and I’ve still got carpet burns on my knees from the last time you had that bright idea. You want to fuck, you take me to a bed.’

‘Deal.’

After, as they lay like spoons in the disordered bed, Carla curled around his back and murmured into his ear.

‘By the way, I’m in love.’

‘Me too.’ He leaned back and rubbed the back of his head against her breasts. She shuddered at the touch of the close cropped hair and reached instinctively for his shrunken prick. He grinned and slapped her hand away.

‘Hoy, that’s your lot. Go to sleep, nympho.’

‘So! You just want to fuck me and leave me. Is that it?’

‘I’m,’ said Chris, already sliding headlong into sleep. ‘Not going anywhere.’

‘Just use me, and then when you’ve used me you go to sleep. Talk to me, you bastard.’

A grunt.

‘You haven’t even told me how it went today.’

Breathing. Carla propped herself up on one arm and prodded at the springy muscle in Chris’s stomach. ‘I’m serious. What’s Conflict Investment like?’

Chris took her arm, folded the offending finger around his own and tugged Carla back into the spoon configuration.

‘Conflict Investment is the way forward at a global level,’ he said.

‘Is that right?’

‘It’s what the Shorn datadown says.’

‘Oh, it must be true then.’

He smiled reflexively at the scorn in her voice and began to drift away again. Just before he slept, Carla thought she heard him speak again. She lifted her head.

‘What?’

He didn’t respond, and she realised he was muttering in his sleep. Carla leaned over him, straining to catch something. She gave up after a couple of minutes. The only sense she succeeded in straining out of the soup of mumbling was a single, repeated word.

Checkout

It took a long time to find sleep for herself.

Chapter Four

‘Conflict Investment is the way forward!’

Applause rose, and clattered at the glass roofing like the wings of pigeons startled into flight. Around the lecture theatre, men and women came to their feet, hands pumping together. The entire CI contingent of Shorn Associates were gathered in the room. The youngest, Chris noticed, were the most fervent. Faces gashed open with enthusiasm, teeth and eyes gleaming in the late afternoon sun from roof and picture window. They looked ready to go on applauding ‘til their hands bled. Sown in amongst this crop of pure conviction, older colleagues clapped to a slower, more measured rhythm and nodded approval, leaning their heads together to make comments under the din of the applause. Louise Hewitt paused and leaned on the lectern, waiting for the noise to ebb.

Behind his hand, Chris yawned cavernously.

‘Yes, yes,’ Hewitt made damping motions. The room settled. ‘We’ve heard it called risky, we’ve heard it called impractical and we’ve heard it called immoral. In short, we’ve heard the same carping voices that free-market economics has had to drag with it like a ball and chain from its very inception. But we have learnt to ignore those voices. We have learnt, and we have gone on learning, piling lesson upon lesson, vision upon vision, success upon success. And what every success has taught us, and continues to teach us, again and again, is a very simple truth. Who has the finance.’ A dramatic pause, one slim black clad arm holding a clenched fist aloft. ‘Has the power.’

Chris stifled another yawn.

‘Human beings have been fighting wars as long as history recalls. It is in our nature, it is in our genes. In the last half of the last century the peacemakers, the governments of this world, did not end war. They simply managed it, and they managed it badly. They poured money, without thought of return, into conflicts and guerrilla armies abroad, and then into tortuous peace processes that more often than not left the situation no better. They were partisan, dogmatic and inefficient. Billions wasted in poorly assessed wars that no sane investor would have looked at twice. Huge, unwieldy national armies and clumsy international alliances; in short a huge public-sector drain on our economic systems. Hundreds of thousands of young men killed in parts of the world they could not even pronounce properly. Decisions based on political dogma and doctrine alone. Well, this model is no more.’

Hewitt paused again. This time there was a charged quiet that carried with it the foretaste of applause, the same way a thick heat carries with it the knowledge of the storm to come. In the closing moments of the address, Hewitt’s voice had sunk close to normal conversational tones. Her delivery slowed and grew almost musing.

‘All over the world, men and women still find causes worth killing and dying for. And who are we to argue with them? Have we lived in their circumstances? Have we felt what they feel? No. It is not our place to say if they are right or wrong. It is not for us to pass judgment or to interfere. At Shorn Conflict Investment, we are concerned with only two things. Will they win? And will it pay? As in all other spheres, Shorn will invest the capital it is entrusted with only where we are sure of a good return. We do not judge. We do not moralise. We do not waste. Instead, we assess, we invest. And we prosper. That is what it means to be a part of Shorn Conflict Investment.’

The lecture theatre erupted once more.

‘Nice speech,’ said Notley, pouring champagne into the ring of glasses with an adept arm. ‘And press coverage too, thanks to Philip here. Should profile us nicely for license review on the eighteenth.’

‘Glad you liked it.’ Hewitt lifted her filled glass away from the ring and looked round at the gathered partners. Excluding Philip Hamilton at her side, the five men and three women watching her accounted for fifty-seven per cent of Shorn Associates’ capital wealth. Each one of them could afford to acquire a private jet with less thought than she gave to shopping for shoes. Between the eight of them, there was no manufactured object on the planet that they could not own. It was wealth she could taste, just out of reach, like bacon frying in someone else’s kitchen. Wealth she wanted like sex. Wanted with a desire that ached in her gums and the pit of her stomach.

Notley finished pouring and raised his own glass. ‘Well, here’s to small wars everywhere. Long may they smoulder. And congratulations on a great quarterly result, Louise. Small wars.’

‘Small wars!’

‘Small wars.’ Hewitt echoed the toast and sipped at her drink. She surfed the polite conversation on autopilot and gradually the other partners began to drift back to the main body of the hotel bar, seeking out their own divisional acolytes. Hamilton caught her eye and she nodded almost imperceptibly. He slipped away with a murmured excuse, leaving her with Notley.

‘You know,’ she said quietly, ‘I could have done without Faulkner falling asleep in the front row. He’s too impressed with himself, Jack.’

‘Of course, you never were at his age.’

‘He’s only five years younger than me. And anyway, I’ve always had these.’ Hewitt set her glass aside on the mantelpiece and cupped her breasts as if offering them. ‘Nothing like a cleavage for reducing professional respect.’

Notley looked embarrassed and then away.

‘Oh, come on Louise. Don’t give me that tired old feminist rap agai—‘

‘Being a woman around here makes you tough, Jack.’ Hewitt let her hands fall again. ‘You know that’s true. I had to claw my way up every centimetre of the way to partnership. Compared to that, Faulkner got it handed to him on a plate. One big kill, catch the imagination of App and Prom and he’s made. Just look at him. He didn’t even shave this morning.’

She gestured across the bar to where Chris appeared to be deep in conversation with a group of men and women his own age. Even at this distance, the dusting of stubble on his face was visible. As they watched, he masked another yawn with his glass.

‘Give him a break, Louise.’ Notley took her shoulder and turned her away again. ‘If he can do for us what he did for Hammett McColl, I’ll forgive him not shaving occasionally.’

‘And if he can’t?’

Notley shrugged and tipped back his champagne. ‘Then he won’t last long, will he.’

He put down the glass, patted her on the shoulder again and walked off into the press of suited bodies. Hewitt stayed where she was until Hamilton appeared noiselessly at her side.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Don’t ask.’

On the other side of the room, Chris was in fact deep in nothing other than the classic party nightmare. He was becalmed at the edges of a group he had only passing acquaintance with, listening politely to conversations he had no interest in about people and places he did not know. His jaws ached from trying not to yawn and he wanted nothing more than to bow out quietly and go home.

Five days into the new job? I don’t think so, pal.

Out of boredom he went to the bar for a refill he didn’t want. As he was waiting, someone nudged him. He glanced round. Mike Bryant, grin on full beam, with a Liz Linshaw clone in tow and a tray full of drinks in his hands.

‘Hey, Chris.’ Bryant had to raise his voice above the crowd. ‘How did you like Hewitt? Talks up a storm, doesn’t she?’

Chris nodded noncommittally. ‘Yeah, very inspiring.’

‘You’re not kidding. Really gets you in the guts. First time I heard her speak, I thought I’d been personally selected to lead a holy fucking crusade for global investment. Simeon Sands for the finance sector.’ Mike did a passable burlesque of the satellite-syndicated demagogue. ‘Hallelujah, I believe! I have faith! Seriously, you look at the productivity graphs following each quarterly address she gives. Spikes through the roof, man.’

‘Right.’

‘Hey, you want to join us? We’re sitting back on the window flange there, see. Got some of the meanest analysts in creation gathered round those tables. Isn’t that right, Liz?’

The woman at Bryant’s side chuckled. Shooting a glance at her, Chris suddenly realised this was no clone.

‘Oh, yeah, sorry. Liz Linshaw, Chris Faulkner. Chris, you know Liz, I guess. Either that or you don’t have a TV.’

‘Ms Linshaw.’ Chris stuck out his hand.

Liz Linshaw laughed and leaned forward to kiss him on both cheeks. ‘Call me Liz,’ she said. ‘I recognise you now. From the App and Prom sheets this week. You’re the one that took down Edward Quain in ‘41 aren’t you.’

‘Uh, yeah.’

‘Before my time. I was just a stringer on a pirate satellite ‘cast in those days. Quite a kill. I don’t think there’s been one like it in the last eight years.’

‘Stop it, you’re making me feel old.’

‘Will you two stop flirting and grab some of these drinks,’ demanded Bryant. ‘I’ve got a dozen thirsty animals back there to water. What do you want in that, Chris?’

‘Uh, Laphroaig. No ice.’

They carried the glasses over to the tables between the three of them and unloaded. Bryant pushed and shoved at people, joking and cajoling and bullying until he had space for Chris and Liz to sit at his table. He raised his glass.

‘Small wars,’ he said. ‘Long may they smoulder.’

Approval, choral in volume.

Chris found himself squeezed in next to a tall, slim executive with steel-rimmed glasses and the air of a scientist peering down a microscope lens at everything. Chris felt a ripple of irritation. Affected eyeware had always been one of Carla’s pet hates. Fucking poverty chic, she invariably snarled when she saw the ads. Fake fucking human imperfection. It’ll be cool to ride around in a fucking wheelchair next. It’s fucking offensive. Chris tended to agree. Sure, you could run a datadown uplink projected onto the inside of the lenses, but that wasn’t it. Carla was right, it was zone chic. And why the fuck pretend you couldn’t afford corrective surgery when everything else you were wearing screamed the opposite.

‘Nick Makin,’ said the narrow face behind the lenses, extending a long arm sideways across his body. The grip belied his slender frame. ‘You ah Faulkner, ahn’t you?’

‘That’s right.’

Mike Bryant leaned across the table towards them. ‘Nick was our top commission analyst last year. Predicted that turnaround in Guatemala over the summer. Went against all the models for guerrilla conflict that we had. It was a real coup for Shorn.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Chris.

‘Ah.’ Makin waved it off. ‘That was last season. Can’t live off things like that indefinitely. It’s a whole new quarter. Time for fesh meat. Another new appoach. Speaking of which, Chris, ahn’t you the guy that let a pomotion challenger off the hook at Hammett McColl last year?’

Probably imagination, the way the whole table was suddenly listening to this sharkish young man with the carefully masked speech impediment. Probably. Chris’s eyes flickered to Bryant. The big blond was watching.

‘You heard about that, huh?’

‘Yeah.’ Makin smiled. ‘It seemed kind of. Odd, you know?’

‘Well,’ Chris made a stiff smile of his own. ‘You weren’t there.’

‘No. Lucky for Elysia Bennett that I wasn’t, I’d say. Isn’t she still around somewhere?’

‘I assume so. You know, Nick, I tend not to worry too much about the past. Like you said, it’s a whole new quarter. Bennett was two years ago.’

‘Still.’ Makin looked around the table, apparently to enlist some support. ‘An attitude like that must make for a lot of challengahs. Shit, I’d dive against you myself just for the expewience if I thought you’d have a sentiment attack like that after the event. If I lost, that is.’

Chris realised abruptly that Makin was drunk, alcohol-fuelled aggressive and waiting. He looked at his glass on the table.

‘You would lose,’ he said quietly.

By now it wasn’t his imagination. The buzz of conversation was definitely weakening as the executives lost interest in what they were discussing and became spectators.

‘Big words.’ Makin had lost his smile. ‘Fom a man who hasn’t made a kill in nearly four years.’

Chris shrugged, one eye on Makin’s left hand where it rested on the table top. He mapped options. Reach down and pinion the arm. Snap the little finger of that hand, take it from there.

‘Actually,’ said a husky voice. ‘I think they’re quite small words from the man who took down Edward Quain.’

The focus of attention leapt away across the table. Liz Linshaw sat with one long-fingered hand propping her tousled blonde head away from the back of her seat. The other hand gestured with a cigarette.

‘Now that,’ she continued, ‘Was the mother of all exemplary kills. No one ever thought Eddie Quain was coming back to work. Except maybe as lubricant.’

Somebody laughed. Nervous laughter. Someone else took it up, more certainly and the sound built around the table. Bryant joined in. The moment passed. Chris gave Makin one more hard look and then started laughing himself.

The evening spread its wings under him.

Chapter Five

An unclear space of time later, he was relieving himself in a scarred porcelain urinal that reeked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a week. Yellowed plaster walls crowded round him. Sullen, gouged graffiti ranged from brutal to incomprehensible and back.

It wasn’t always clear where one message ended and the other began. Either that or he was very drunk.

He was very drunk.

Bryant’s idea, as numbers in the hotel bar began thinning; carry the party over into the cordoned zones.

‘They may be shit-poor over there,’ voice blurred as he leaned across the table. ‘But they know how to have a good time. There’s a couple of places I know you can buy all sorts of interesting substances over the counter, and they’ve got floor shows you wouldn’t believe.’

Liz Linshaw wrinkled her sculpted features. ‘Sounds strictly for the boys,’ she said. ‘If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m for a cab.’

She kissed Bryant on the lips, causing a small storm of whoops and yells, and left with a sideways grin at Chris. A couple of other women excused themselves from the group in her wake and Mike’s expedition began to look in danger of fizzling out.

‘Oh, come on, you bunch of pussies’ he slurred. ‘What are you afraid of? We’ve got guns. He yanked out his Nemex and brandished it, ‘We’ve got money, we’ve got this city by the balls. What the fuck kind of life is it when we own the fucking streets they walk on and the blocks they live in and we’re still fucking scared to go there. We’re supposed to be in charge of this society, not in hiding from it.’

It wasn’t speech-making of Louise Hewitt’s calibre, but Mike managed to rope in a half dozen of the younger men round the table and a couple of the harder-drinking women. Ten minutes later, Chris was in the passenger seat of Bryant’s BMW, watching the emptied streets of the financial district roll by. In the back seat sat a nameless young male executive and an older woman called Julie Pinion — macho sales talk snarled back and forth between them. In the wing mirror, the following lights of two other cars. Shorn was descending on the cordoned zones in force.

‘Okay, you two keep it down,’ said Mike over his shoulder as they turned a corner. Up ahead the lights of a zone checkpoint frosted the night sky. ‘They won’t let us through here if they think there’s going to be trouble.’

He brought the BMW to a remarkably smooth halt at the barrier and leaned out as the guard approached. He was, Chris noticed, chewing gum to mask the alcohol on his breath.

‘Just going down to the Falkland,’ Bryant called cheerfully, waving his Shorn Associates plastic. ‘Take in the late show.’

The guard was in his fifties, with a spreading paunch beneath his grey uniform and broken veins across his nose and cheeks. Chris saw the cloud of vapour he made when he sighed.

‘Have to scan that, sir.’

“Course.’ Bryant handed over the card and waited while the guard ran it through his hipswipe remote and handed it back. The unit chimed melodically, and the guard nodded. He seemed tired.

‘You armed?’

Bryant turned back into the car. ‘Show the man your peacemakers, guys.’

Chris slid the Nemex out of its shoulder holster and displayed it. Behind him he heard the two backseat disputants doing the same. The guard flashed his torch in the windows and nodded slowly.

‘Want to be careful, sir,’ he told Bryant. ‘There’s been layoffs at Pattons and Greengauge this week. Lot of angry people out getting drunk tonight.’

‘Well, we’ll stay out of their way,’ said Bryant easily. ‘Don’t want any trouble. Just want to see the show.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ The guard turned back to the checkpoint cabin and gestured to whoever was inside. The barrier began to rise. ‘I’ve got to check your friends as well. You want to park just past the gate till we clear them?’

‘Be glad to.’ Mike beamed and drove the BMW through.

The second car passed muster but with the third there was some trouble. They peered back and saw the guard shaking his head while suited forms craned from the windows front and back, gesturing.

‘The fuck is going on back there?’ muttered Julie Pinion. ‘Couldn’t they even act sober for a couple of minutes.’

‘Stay here,’ Bryant said, and climbed out into the night air. They watched him walk back to the third car, lean down and say something to those leaning out. The heads disappeared back into the vehicle, as if on wires. Bryant put his hand on the guard’s shoulder and dug in his pocket. Something passed between them. The guard said something to the driver of the third car. A clearly audible whoop of delight bounced out of the windows. Bryant came back, grinning.

‘Gratuities,’ he said as he got into the car again. ‘Ought to be compulsory, the shit they pay those guys.’

‘How much did you give him?’ asked Pinion.

‘Hundred.’

‘A hundred! Jesus.’

‘Ah, come on Julie. I’ve tipped waiters better than that. And he’s going to take a lot more heat than a waiter if this dinner party goes awry.’

The little convoy pressed on into the cordoned zone.

It was an abrupt transition. In the financial district, street lighting was a flood of halogen, chasing out shadows from every corner. Here, the street lamps were isolated sentinels, spilling a scant pool of radiance at their feet every twenty metres of darkened street. In some places, they were out, lamps either fused or smashed. Elsewhere they had been destroyed more unambiguously, rendered down to jagged concrete stumps still attached to their trunks by a riot of cables and metal bands.

‘Look at that,’ said Pinion disgustedly. ‘What a bunch of fucking animals. It’s no wonder nobody wants to spend money fixing these places up. They’d just tear it all down again.’

Even the street beneath their wheels changed. Within a hundred metres of the checkpoint the ride turned bumpy and Bryant had to slow down and negotiate rain-filled potholes the size of small garden ponds. On either side, the houses huddled. Here and there, for no visible reason, one had been taken down, sprawling smashed brick and spilled interior in the space in which it had stood. There were no other vehicles on the streets, moving or parked. A few figures moved on the pavements on foot, but they grew immobile as the twilight-blue armoured saloons with their Shorn Associates logos rolled by. Most turned up their collars or simply sank back into the shadows.

‘Fucking creepy,’ said the young executive behind Chris. ‘I mean, I knew it was bad out here but—‘

‘Bad,’ Julie Pinion coughed laughter at him. ‘You think this is bad? Mike, you remember the suburbs in that shithole we got seconded to for Christmas last year.’

‘Muong Khong, yeah.’ Bryant looked in the rearview. ‘Gives you a whole new perspective on what real poverty is, man. Chris, you ever been on secondment? With Emerging Markets, I mean?’

‘Couple of times, yeah.’

‘Pretty awful, huh?’

Chris remembered the call of a muezzin in the warm evening air, smells of cooking and a small child prodding three goats homewards. Later, he’d been walking past a stone-and-thatch dwelling when a young girl of about fourteen came out and offered him fruit from their dinner table because he was a guest in the village. The unlooked-for kindness, with its hints of an antique and alien culture, had pricked tears out on the underside of his eyes.

He never told anyone.

‘It wasn’t somewhere I would have wanted to live,’ he said.

Pinion smirked. ‘No shit,’ she agreed.

The Falkland - a squat brick building at the intersection of two streets still boasting a picturesque scattering of car wrecks. The vehicles looked old enough to have burnt leaded fuel when they were alive. Mike Bryant’s little convoy swept to a disdainful halt and disgorged suits.

‘No cars,’ said the young executive, wonderingly. ‘I only just noticed.’

‘Of course, no cars,’ said Pinion, rolling her eyes in Chris’s direction. ‘Who, outside of criminals, do you suppose can afford a tank of fuel around here? Or a licence, come to that?’

‘Price of the green agenda,’ said Mike as he alarmed the car. ‘You guys coming or what?’

The door of the Falkland was beaten steel. Two black men in coveralls stood outside, one dangling a sawn-off shotgun negligently from his left hand, the other, older, watching the street, arms folded impassively across his chest. When he spotted Mike Bryant, he unwrapped and his face split into a huge grin. Mike lifted a hand in greeting as he crossed the street.

‘Hey, Troy. What’re you doing on the fucking door, man?’

‘Protectin’ my investment.’ The rich treacle of a Jamaican accent. ‘Bein’ seen. It’s more than I can say for you, Mike. ‘Ave not seen you in a Fuckin’ long time. What’s the matter? Suki not let you out to play any more?’

‘That’s right.’ Mike winked. ‘Chopped it off and locked it in the bedroom dresser. That way she can take it out and play with it while I’m at work. Which, by the way, is all the fucking time.’

‘That is the motherfuckin’ truth.’ He looked at the entourage Bryant had brought to the bar. ‘These are friends of yours?’

‘Yep. Julie, Chris. Meet Troy Morris. He owns this shithole. Among others. Troy, Julie Pinion, Chris Faulkner. The rest I don’t remember.’ Bryant waved back at the entourage he was trailing. ‘Just sycophants, you know how it is when you’re an important man.’

The Jamaican reeled off a deep chuckle. ‘Faulkner,’ he rumbled. ‘No relation of William, right?’

Chris blinked, confused. Before he could ask, Mike Bryant broke in again.

‘They’re all carrying, Troy. Left mine in the car, but these guys are new and they don’t know the rules. Bear with us. You got a bag for the hardware?’

With the dozen-odd pistols dumped into a greasy holdall clearly reserved for this specific purpose, they pushed inside. Quiet slammed down through the smoke-hung bar. Even the girl on the stage stopped in mid writhe, one doped boa constrictor gripped in each fist. Music thumped on behind her, suddenly unchallenged by voices. Mike nodded to himself, took a chair to the centre of the bar and climbed onto it.

‘As you may have noticed,’ he said, pitching his voice above the music. ‘We are zek-tivs. I know that may pass for a crime around here, but we don’t want any trouble. All we want is to buy a drink for everyone in the house, and have a few ourselves. Anyone who has a problem with that can come and have a word with me, or my friend Troy Morris, and we’ll sort your problem out. Otherwise, it’s open bar for the next ten minutes and the drinks are on me.’ He turned to the girl on the stage. ‘Please. The show must go on. It looks like we got here just in time.’

He climbed down and went to talk to the barman. Conversations resumed slowly. The dancer went back, a little stiffly, to what she was doing with the two boas. People drifted to the bar, a few at first, then the bulk of those present. Bryant appeared to know a couple of them. Chris was introduced, promptly forgot names and cornered Mike.

‘What did Troy mean about being related to William?’

Bryant shrugged. ‘Search me. Troy knows a lot of people. What are you drinking?’

And so it went on, the night swelling with noise and hilarity for a while, and then paring down again as people left. Chris’s high began to flatten into something more reflective. Julie Pinion went home in a cab, the young executive she’d been arguing with in smug tow. The driver of one of the other cars announced his imminent departure around three a.m. and most of the remaining Shorn crew went with him. By four the party was down to one table - Chris and Mike, an off-duty Troy Morris and a couple of the floorshow dancers, now dressed and divested of most of their garish make-up. One introduced herself as Emma and lurching into the toilets, Chris had to wonder if she was the object of the fellatio-inspired graffiti gouged there amidst the political commentary.

When he got back to the table, Emma had gone and Troy was leaving with her colleague. The gun bag from his doorman duties was dumped on the table, the sawn-off and Bryant’s Nemex nestling together in the canvas folds. Chris joined in the round of farewells and there was much drunken promising to keep in contact. ‘Yeah,’ said Troy, pointing at Chris. ‘You should write, Faulkner.’

He left, chortling inexplicably, with the shotgun slung over one shoulder and his other arm around the dancer’s waist. At that moment Chris found himself possessed of a powerful desire to be Troy Morris, walking out of the Falkland into an entirely simpler and, to judge by the black man’s laughter, more joyous existence.

He slumped into the chair opposite Bryant.

‘I,’ he pronounced carefully, ‘Have drunk far too much.’

‘Well, it’s Friday.’ Bryant’s attention was focused on heating a stained glass pipe. ‘Switch horses, try some of this.’

Chris’s eyes tightened on what the other man was doing.

‘Is that—‘

Bryant’s eyes shuttled sideways above the pipe and lighter. Narrowed irritably. ‘Ah, come on, man. Lighten up. Just a little drive-right.’

The contents of the pipe smouldered and Mike inhaled convulsively. A shudder ran through his suited form. He made a deep grunting sound and his voice came out squeaky as he offered the pipe.

‘So. How does it feel?’

Chris frowned, confused. ‘What?’

‘Conflict Investment, a week in. Go on, take it. How’s it feel?’

Chris waved the pipe away. ‘No thanks.’

‘Pussy.’ Bryant grinned to defuse the insult, and drummed impatiently on the table. ‘So tell me. How’s it feel?’

‘What?’

‘Conflict fucking Investment!’

‘Oh.’ Chris marshalled his sludgy thoughts. ‘Interesting.’

‘Yeah?’ Bryant seemed disappointed. ‘That all?’

‘It’s not so different to Emerging Markets, Mike.’ Trying to think was hard work. Chris began to wonder if he should have accepted the pipe. ‘Longer-term outlook, but basically the same stuff. Yeah, I like it. Apart from that bitch Hewitt.’

‘Ah. I wondered how that was going. Had a run-in, have we?’

‘You could say that.’

Bryant shrugged. ‘Hey, don’t let it get you down. Hewitt’s been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always been harder to cut it as a woman in this field, so they come out twice as tough. They have to. See, these days Hewitt practically is Conflict Investment. Big reorganisation about five years back, austerity measures. Division got cut to the bone. There’s a lot of pressure to make good, and most of that pressure falls on Hewitt’s shoulders.’

‘Notley’s senior partner.’

‘Notley?’ Bryant piped more smoulder. ‘Nah, it was his baby in the beginning, but once he went senior he downloaded everything onto Hewitt and Hamilton. There was another guy, Page, but Hewitt called him out just before profit share last year. Rammed him right off the Gullet. Believe that?

‘The Gullet?’

‘Yeah, you know. Last section as you come up over the zones on the M11. The two-lane narrows. Where you took out that no-namer, well, just after, after the underpass. Where it goes elevated. Hewitt let Page get ahead there, knew he’d have to either slow down or turn around to face her. No chance of just being first to work these days, you’ve got to turn up with blood on your wheels or not at all. So yeah, she lets him go, waits, he’s not good enough to make the 180 turn on a piece of road that narrow, so he slows up, tries for a side-to-side, she won’t let him, just rams him off on a corner. Bam!’ Bryant gripped the pipe in his teeth and slammed fist into open palm. ‘Page goes through the barrier, falls right into a low-rise, goes through seven levels of zone housing like they were paper. Gas supply ripped open somewhere in one of the flats on the way down. Boom. Adios muchachos, everybody in black.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah, pretty fucking impressive, huh.’ Mike squinted at the pipe, tried the lighter again. ‘See, now what Hewitt did, that’s okay, but now she’s got to prove that she doesn’t need two junior partners to help her run CI. If she can’t, it means she made a bad call. Pure greed call. No one round here minds greed, just so long as it’s good for the company as well. If it works out for Hewitt, she’s saved Shorn the expense of a junior partner, and she and Hamilton get bigger equity. It’s the free-market trade-off. Something for us, something for them. But if it doesn’t work out, she’s dead in the water and she knows it.’

‘Well, Ms Conflict Investment doesn’t have a whole lot of confidence in me,’ said Chris gloomily. ‘Not bloody enough for her, apparently.’

‘That what she said?’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Shit, after what you did to Quain? That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Well, let’s just say that not all my challenges have been that uncompromising. This kill-or-be-killed stuff is strictly for the moviemakers. It’s crude, man. You don’t always need a kill. That’s crude.’ Chris leaned forward as his enthusiasm kindled. ‘You ever see any of those old samurai movies?’

‘Bruce Lee? Shit like that?’

‘No, no. Not those. This is other stuff. Older. More subtle. See, these two guys, they’re about to have a duel. So they both stand there, swords out.’ Chris thrust with an imaginary sword and Bryant jerked back in reflex. His eyes narrowed momentarily, and then he laughed.

‘Whoops. Scared me there.’

‘Sorry. Wasn’t intentional. So yeah, the two of them stand there, and they stare into each other’s eyes.’

He locked gazes with Bryant, who emitted another snort of laughter.

‘They just stare. Because they both know that the one who blinks or looks away first, that’s the one who would have lost that fight.’

Bryant’s laughter dried up without fuss. He set the pipe aside. Both men were leaning on the table now, drilling their gazes into each other’s eyes with chemically altered concentration. The shared stillness of the moment stretched. The sounds of the bar receded into a backdrop, surf on a distant beach. Time ran on like a train they had both just missed. The pipe smouldered quietly to itself on the scarred wooden table. Vision wired their stares over it, eyeball to eyeball. From somewhere, an internal silence leaked into the world.

Mike Bryant blinked.

Mike Bryant laughed and looked away.

The moment blew away like an autumn leaf and Chris sat back with a look of tipsy fulfilment on his face. Bryant grinned, a little intensely. Chris was too drunk to catch the upped voltage. Bryant made a pistol of thumb and forefinger. He pointed at Chris’s face.

‘Bang!’

The laughter bubbled up again, this time from both men. Bryant made a sound between a snort and a sigh.

‘There you are. You stared me out.’

Chris nodded.

‘But I blew your fucking head off’

‘Yeah.’ Chris leaned back across the table. Enthused. Oblivious to the edge sheathed in the other man’s voice. ‘But you see, there was no need for that. We’d already established the winner. You blinked. I would have won.’

‘Bullshit. Maybe I had a hair in my eye. Maybe all these samurai guys walked away from fights they could have won just because they had a jumpy eye muscle that day. Where’d you read all this shit, anyway?’

‘Mike, you’re missing the point. It’s about total control. It’s a duel between two whole people, not just two sets of skills. We could have a fist fight and you could turn up with a gun. We could have a gun fight and you could come with an armoured car and a flame-thrower. That’s not what a duel’s about.’

Bryant picked up the pipe again. ‘Duel’s about winning, Chris,’ he said.

Chris wasn’t listening.

‘Look at China, a couple of centuries ago. There were cases there where two warlords sat down on the battlefield and played chess to decide the outcome of a battle. Chess, Michael. No death, no slaughter, just a game of chess. And they honoured it.’

Bryant looked sceptical. ‘Chess?’

‘Just a game of chess.’ Chris was staring off into a corner. ‘You imagine that?’

‘Not really, no.’ Bryant stuffed the pipe into a pocket and started to get up. ‘But it makes a good story, I’ll give you that. Now, how about we get the car and get out of here before the sun comes up? Because Suki’s going to fucking take me apart if I don’t get back soon. And she’s not into chess.’

Chapter Six

They came out of the Falkland through a side door and onto a different street. Cold night air like a slap in the face, and for a couple of moments Chris reeled. He wondered how Bryant was dealing with the pipe high.

‘Where’s the fucking car?’

‘This way.’

Bryant grabbed him by the arm, dragged him round the corner and started across the deserted street. Halfway there, he jammed to an abrupt halt.

‘Ooops,’ he said softly.

The BMW sat on the far side of the street under one of the few working street lamps. Sitting on the car: four men and one woman, all dressed in oil-smeared jeans and jackets. The grime was a uniform, the pale silent faces style-coordinated accessories. Heads shaven and tattooed, feet heavily booted. Hands filled with a variety of blunt metal implements.

None of them looked over eighteen.

They stared at the two suited men on the other side of the street and made no move to get off the car.

‘You’ve got to get your contact stunner fixed, Mike,’ Chris sniggered, still drunk. ‘Look at the shit you get all over it if you don’t have it powered up.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ hissed Bryant.

The female contingent of the car-jackers levered herself off the hood of the BMW with sinuous grace.

‘Nice car, Mister Zek-tiv,’ she said solemnly. ‘Got the keys?’

Bryant clutched automatically at his pocket. The woman’s eyes flickered to the move and locked on. She nodded in satisfaction.

‘Get off my fucking car!’ Bryant barked.

The remaining four jackers obeyed in unison, arms spread and hands holding their makeshift weapons. Chris glanced sideways at his companion.

‘Bad move, Mike. You carrying?’

Bryant shook his head almost imperceptibly.

‘In the car, remember. You?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris paused, embarrassed. ‘But it’s not loaded.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t like guns.’

‘See, it’s like this.’ The woman’s voice jerked Chris back from the disbelieving expression on Bryant’s face. ‘Either you can give us the keys. And your wallets. And your watches. Or we can take them from you. That’s our best offer.’

She lifted thumb and little finger solemnly to ear and mouth, making a child’s telephone.

‘Sell, sell, sell.’

Bryant muttered something out of the corner of his mouth.

‘What?’ Chris muttered back.

‘I said, back the way we came and fucking run!!!’

Then he was gone, sprinting flat out for the corner they had just rounded. Chris went after him, flailing to stay upright in the Argentine leather shoes. Behind him, the incentive - sounds of yells and booted pursuit. He levelled with Bryant and found, incredibly, that the other man was grinning.

‘All part of a night out in the zones,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Try to keep up.’

Behind them, someone ran a metal wrecking bar along a concrete wall. It made a sound like a gigantic dentist’s drill.

They looked at each other and put on speed.

Three streets away from the Falkland, the neighbourhood plunged from run-down to rotted-through. The houses were suddenly derelict, unglassed windows gaping out at the street and tiny gardens full of rubble and other detritus. Chris, brain abruptly adrenalin-flushed and working, grabbed Bryant and yanked him sideways into one of the gardens. Over piles of junk, scrambling. In past a front door that someone had kicked in long ago. Weeds grew up waist-high in the gap it had left. Beyond, a narrow, darkened hallway ran parallel to a staircase with half the banisters torn out. At the end, a tiled room that breathed stench like a diseased mouth.

Chris leaned cautiously against the staircase and listened to the yells of the car-jackers as they ran past and down an adjacent street.

Bryant was bent over, hands braced on his knees, panting.

‘You mind telling me,’ he managed hoarsely after a while. ‘Why you’re carrying an unloaded gun around with you?’

‘I told you. I don’t like guns. I don’t like Louise Hewitt telling me what to do.’

‘Man, after five days that’s a bad attitude to have. I wouldn’t go telling anybody things like that, if I were you.’

‘Why not? I told you, didn’t I?’

Bryant straightened up and looked hard at him.

‘Anyway, where’s your gun, hotshot?’

‘At least it’s loaded.’

‘Alright, old piece of folk wisdom coming up.’ Chris gulped his breath back under control. ‘A gun in the hand is worth half a fucking million locked in the car.’

‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Bryant’s grin flashed in the gloom. ‘But I wasn’t expecting this kind of trouble. We’re only a couple of klicks inside the zones. Those guys are out of their territory.’

‘You think they know that?’ Chris nodded out towards the street, where voices were coming back. Some of the jacker gang, at least, were retracing their steps. He jabbed an urgent finger upward and Bryant took the creaking stairs into the darkness at the top. Chris slid back along the hallway towards the tiled room and sank into the shadows there. The stench enveloped him. The floor was slimy underfoot. He tried not to breathe.

A moment later two of the jackers were standing where he had just been. Both were armed with long crowbars.

‘I don’t see why we need the keys anyway. Why not just smash the fucking window.’

‘Because, moron, this is a BMW Omega series.’ The other jacker cast a doubtful glance up the stairs. ‘State-of-the-fucking-art corporate jamjar. These mothers have alarms, engine immobilisation locks and a broadcast scream to the nearest retrieval centre. You’d never move it a hundred metres down the fucking street before they got you.’

‘We could still smash it, anyway. Rip it up.’

‘Ruf, you got no fucking ambition, man. If it weren’t for Molly, you’d still be smashing up telephone points and throwing stones at cabs. You got to think bigger than that. Come on. I don’t think they came in here. Too much chance of getting their suits dirty. Let’s—‘

Chris’s foot slipped. Knocked against something that rolled on the tiled floor. Clink of glass. Chris gritted his teeth and inched one hand down to the butt of his empty gun. The two jackers had frozen by the door.

‘Hear that?’ It was the ambitious member of the duo. Chris saw a silhouetted wrecking bar raised in the faint light from the doorway. ‘Okay, Mister Zek-tiv. Game over. Come out, give us your fucking keys, and maybe we’ll leave you some teeth.’

The two jackers advanced down the hall. They were about halfway when Mike Bryant dropped through a gap in the banister rail above. He landed feet first on the head of the gangwit bringing up the rear. The two of them tumbled to the floor. The lead jacker whipped round at the noise and Chris exploded from his hiding place. He punched hard, driving high for the face and low for the guts. The jacker turned back too late. Chris’s high punch broke his nose and then he folded as the solid right hook sank into his midriff. Chris grabbed the gangwit’s shoulders and ran his shaven head sideways into the staircase wall. Up ahead, he saw Bryant reel to his feet and stamp down hard on the other jacker’s unprotected stomach. The gangwit moaned and curled up. Bryant kicked him again, in the head.

‘Mother fucker! Touch my car, you fucking piece of shit!’

Chris laid a hand on his shoulder. Bryant hooked round, face taut.

‘Whoa, it’s all over.’ Chris stood back, hands raised. ‘Game over, Mike. Come on. There’s only three left now. Let’s try for the car again.’

Bryant’s face cleared of its fury.

‘Yeah, good. Let’s do it.’

The street outside was quiet. They checked both ways, then slipped out and loped back towards the Falkland, Bryant navigating. Less than five minutes to relocate the corner pub, and the BMW sat gleaming pristinely under the street lamp as if nothing had happened.

They circled the vehicle warily. Nothing.

Bryant produced his keys and pressed a button. The alarm disarmed with a subdued squawk. He was about to open the door when the shaven-headed woman stepped out of the shadows of a doorway less than five metres away, a piece of iron railing raised in ironic greeting. She put her fingers to her mouth and whistled shrilly. Another jacker, similarly armed, stepped out of another doorway up the street and ambled down to meet them. The woman smiled at Bryant.

‘Thought you’d be back. Now, you want to throw me those keys?’

In the moment that her eyes were fixed on Bryant, Chris produced his empty gun and levelled it at her.

‘Alright, that’s enough,’ he snapped. ‘Back off.’

The other jacker took a step forward and Chris swung the gun to cover him, willing him to believe.

‘You too. Back off, or you’re dead. Michael, get in the car.’

Bryant opened the door. Chris was feeling for the door handle on the other side when the woman spoke.

‘I don’t think that gun’s loaded.’

She took a step forward, followed by her companion. Chris brandished the Nemex.

‘I said, back off.’

‘Nah, you would have shot us by now. You’re bluffing, Mr Zek.’

She raised her piece of railing, took another step forward and Mike Bryant stood up from his side of the car, Nemex in hand.

‘I’m not bluffing,’ he said mildly and shot her three times in the chest and stomach.

Boom, boom, boom.

The sound of the gun in the quiet street. Echoes off houses.

Chris saw and heard it in fragments.

The woman, kicked back two metres before she dropped. The railing, out of her hand and flying, clattering and rolling across the camber of the street into the gutter.

The other jacker, hands raised, placatory, backing away.

Face implacable, Bryant put the next three shots into him.

Boom, boom, boom.

He reeled and spun like a marionette, crashed into the wall and slid down it, leaving gouts of blood on the brickwork.

‘Mike—‘

The sound of pounding feet.

The final member of the gang, summoned by the gunshots, sprinting across the street towards the fallen bodies. He seemed oblivious to the two men in suits. He hit the ground on his knees next to the woman, disbelieving.

‘Molly! Molly!’

Chris looked across at Bryant. ‘Mike, let’s—‘

Bryant made a sideways hushing gesture with his free hand and lowered his aim.

Boom, boom.

The kneeling boy jolted as if electrocuted, and then keeled slowly over on the woman on the ground. Blood ran out over the street and trickled down to join the crowbar in the gutter.

The echoes rolled away into the predawn gloom like reluctant applause.

They drove back to the checkpoint in silence, Chris wrapped in numb disbelief. The guard let them through with a cursory glance. If he smelled the cordite from Mike’s gun, he said nothing. Bryant waved him a cheerful goodnight and accelerated the big car away into the well-lit canyons of the financial district. He was humming quietly to himself.

He glanced across at Chris as they were approaching the Shorn block.

‘You want to sleep over at my place? Plenty of space.’

The thought of the hour-long drive back home was abruptly unbearable. Chris mustered a dried-out voice.

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

‘Good.’ Bryant speeded up and cornered west.

Chris watched the towering blocks begin to thin out around them. As the BMW picked up the main feeder lane for the London orbital, he turned slightly in his seat to face Bryant.

‘You didn’t have to kill them all, Mike.’

‘Yeah, I did.’ There was no animosity in Bryant’s voice. ‘What else was I supposed to do. Fire warning shots? This symbolism of combat shit you talk about doesn’t work with people like that. They’re gangwit scum, Chris. They don’t know how to lose gracefully.’

‘They’d already lost. And they were kids. They would have run away.’ ‘Yeah, yeah. Until the next time. Look, Chris. People like that, civilised rules don’t apply. Violence is the only thing they understand.’ Outside the hurrying car, the sky was brightening in the east. Chris’s head was beginning to ache.

Chapter Seven

Chris awoke with the horrified conviction that he had been unfaithful to Carla. Liz Linshaw was sitting up in bed beside him, buttering a piece of toast and wiping the knife casually on the sheets.

‘Breakfast in bed,’ she was saying authoritatively, ‘is so sexy.’

Chris looked down at the stains she was making and felt a hot lump of mingled guilt and sadness swelling in the base of his throat. There was no way he could hide this from Carla.

He opened his eyes with a jolt. Daylight strained through chintz curtains just above his head. For a moment the chintz hammered home the dream - Carla hated the stuff with a passion. He really had gone home with Liz Linshaw, then. He turned on his side with the blockage of unshed tears still jammed in his throat and—

He was in a single bed.

He propped himself up, confused. Matching chintz quilt and pillowcase, massive hangover. Close behind this sensory surge, the events of the previous evening crashed in on him. The street. The jackers. Bryant’s gun in the quiet night. The relief made him forget the pain in his head for a couple of moments. Liz Linshaw was a dream.

He hauled up his wrist and looked at his watch which he had evidently been in no state to remove the previous night. Quarter past twelve. He spotted his clothes hanging on the door of the tiny guest room and groped his way out of bed towards them. The door was open a crack -beyond, he could hear kitchen sounds. The smell of coffee and toast wafted under his nose.

He dressed hurriedly, stuffed his tie in his jacket pocket and picked up his shoes. Outside the guest room, a white-painted corridor hung with innocuous landscapes led to a wide, curving staircase. Halfway down, he met a woman coming up. Auburn hair, light eyes. He made the match with Michael’s wallet photo. Suki.

Suki had a cup of coffee, complete with saucer, in her hand and there was a tolerant smile on her perfectly made-up face.

‘Good morning. It’s Chris, isn’t it? I’m Suki.’ She offered one slim, gold-braceleted arm. ‘Nice to meet you at last. I was just bringing you this up. Michael said you’d want to be woken. He’s in the kitchen, talking to work, I think.’

Chris took the coffee, balancing it awkwardly in his free hand. His head was beginning to pulse alarmingly.

‘Thanks, uh. Thanks.’

Suki’s smile brightened. Chris had the disturbing impression that his hands and face could have been painted with blood and she would have smiled the same way.

‘Had fun last night, did you?’ she asked maternally.

‘Uh, something like that. Would you excuse me?’

He slipped past her and found his way down into the kitchen. It was a large, comfortable room with wooden furniture, and tall windows along one wall letting in the sun. The scrubbed wooden table was laid for three and covered with an assortment of edible breakfast items. At the far end a two-year-old child sat in a high chair, belabouring a plate of unidentifiable sludge with a plastic spoon. Over by the window, and well out of splash range, Mike Bryant watched her with a tender expression on his face and drank coffee out of a mug. There was a mobile pinned between his ear and shoulder and he appeared to be listening intently. He nodded and waved as Chris came in.

‘They certainly were. What, you think I imagined it? Who says that? Right, get him on the line.’

Bryant cupped a hand over the phone.

‘Chris, call your wife at work. She’s been screaming down the Shorn switchboard since eight this morning. You sleep well?’

He pointed at a videophone hung on the wall near the door. Chris put down his coffee, picked the phone up and dialled from memory. He waved at Ariana, who regarded him in silence for a moment and then grinned and started bashing her breakfast again. Bryant went back to his conversation.

‘Yes, this is Michael Bryant. No I’m not, I’m at home, which is where I’m likely to stay until you can promise a little more safety on the streets. I don’t care, we don’t pay you people to stand around scratching your balls. We were less than three, don’t shout me down detective, three klicks inside the cordon. Yes, you’re fucking right I shot them.’

The screen in front of Chris lit up with a grimy, gum-chewing face.

‘Yeah, Mel’s AutoFix.’ He caught sight of Chris. ‘Need a tow?’

‘No,’ Chris cleared his throat. ‘Could I speak to Carla Nyquist please.’

‘Sure. Be a moment.’

Behind him, Bryant went on with his tirade. ‘They were just about to take me and my colleague to pieces with machetes. What? Well, I’m not surprised. Probably got scavenged by someone last night. Listen, there were five of them to two of us. Hardcore gangwits. Now if I can’t claim that as self defence then—‘

Carla appeared, knuckling grease across her nose. There was a fairly obvious scowl under the black marks. ‘What happened to you, then?’

‘Uh, I stayed over at Mike’s place. There was some, uh.’ He glanced at Bryant who was listening to the other end of his own call with a face like thunder. ‘Trouble.’

‘Trouble? Are you—?’

‘No, I’m fine.’ Chris forced a grin. ‘Just a headache.’

‘Well, why didn’t you call me? I was worried sick.’

‘I didn’t want to worry you. It was late, and I was going to call first thing this morning. Must have overslept. Look,’ he turned to Bryant again. ‘Mike, are you going in to Shorn today?’

Bryant nodded glumly, covering the phone mouthpiece again. ‘Looks like it. I’ve got to fill out half a hundred fucking incident reports, apparently. Say an hour?’

Chris turned back to Carla’s waiting face. ‘I’m going in to pick up the car with Mike in about an hour. I’ll pick you up from the garage and tell you all about it then. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ It was grudging. ‘But this had better be a fucking good story.’

‘Deal. By the way, I’m in love.’

Mike Bryant shot him a peculiar glance across the kitchen.

On screen, Carla kept her scowl. ‘Yeah, yeah. Me too. See you at four. And don’t be late.’

She reached for the phone and the image faded. Chris turned just in time to catch the last of Bryant’s call.

‘Yes, I am aware of that, detective. Well next time I’m attacked on the street, I’ll be sure and remember it. Goodbye.’

He snapped the phone shut angrily.

‘Asshole. Get this, the corporate police, our fucking police want to conduct an investigation into whether this was an unlawful shooting. I mean.’ He gestured helplessly, lost for words. ‘Defend yourself, and you’re fucking breaking the law. Meanwhile, some piece of shit gangwit cracks a fingernail in a back alley and you’ve got Citizens’ Rights activists screaming for someone’s neck. What about us citizens? Who’s looking out for us? What about our rights?’

‘Michael!’ Suki appeared in the kitchen doorway, a coffee cup in each hand. ‘How many times have I told you, don’t use that language in front of Ariana. She just comes right out with it at the playgroup, and I get dirty looks from the other mothers.’ She put the coffee cups on the table and went to clean some of the surplus food from around her daughter’s mouth. Ariana made half-hearted protests, all the time squinting shyly at Chris. ‘That’s right, don’t you listen to Daddy when he talks like that.’ She turned a fraction of her multi-tasked attention in the same direction as her daughter. ‘Take no notice, Chris. He’s always moaning about citizens’ rights. This’ll be the second time he’s been in trouble, there, is that better darling, the second time he’s been in trouble with the police this year. Use of undue force. Yes, who’s a clean girl? I think he just likes living dangerously.’

Bryant made a disgusted noise. Suki went to him and put an arm round his waist. She kissed him under the chin.

‘Maybe that’s what I see in him. You’re married, aren’t you Chris? Was that her on the vid?’

‘Yeah.’ To Chris, his own voice sounded unfairly defensive. ‘She’s a mechanic. Got to work most Saturdays.’

He sipped his coffee and watched for a reaction, but Suki either didn’t care one way or the other or had been trained to black belt in social graces. She smiled as she unfastened Ariana from the high chair.

‘Yes, Michael said. You know, one of the Shorn partners had a girlfriend who worked in auto reclaim. Now what was his name?’ She snapped her fingers. ‘I met him at the Christmas bash.’

‘Notley,’ said Bryant.

‘That’s it, Notley. Jack Notley. Well, you must both come over for dinner, Chris. What’s your wife’s name?’

‘Carla.’

‘Carla. Lovely name. Like that Italian holoporn star Mike gets so turned on over.’ She put a playful hand over Bryant’s mouth as he protested. ‘Yes, ask her to come over. In fact, why don’t you come over tonight? We’ve got no plans, have we, Mike?’

Bryant shook his head.

‘Well, then. I’ll cook sukiyaki. You’re not vegetarian, either of you?’

‘No.’ Chris hesitated. There had been some notion of going to visit Carla’s father today, and in the whirl of the week just gone, he wasn’t sure quite how solidified the plan was. ‘Uh, I’m not sure if—‘

‘Not to be missed, that sukiyaki,’ said Michael, draining his coffee and setting down the mug. ‘Beef direct from the Sutherland Croft Association herds. Hey, you reckon Carla’d like a look at the BMW? Seeing as she’s a mechanic and all. That’s the new Omega Injection series under the bonnet. State of the art, not even on general release outside Germany yet. I bet she’d love to watch it turn over.’

Chris, aware suddenly of the exact depth to which he did not want to visit his father-in-law, made a decision.

‘Yeah, she’d like that,’ he said.

‘Good, that’s settled then,’ said Suki brightly. ‘I’ll get the beef this afternoon. Shall we say about eight-thirty?’

Mike insisted on dropping Chris right beside his car. The underground parking decks beneath the Shorn block were largely deserted and the level Chris had parked on showed only three other vehicles. Bryant slewed to a halt across the battery of empty spaces opposite, killed the engine and got out.

‘Hewitt’s,’ he said, nodding at the nearest of the isolated vehicles. ‘Audi built it for her to spec when she made partner. Fancy seeing that coming up in your rearview?’

Chris looked at it. Broad black windscreen, heavy impact collision bars that jutted from the end of the raked hood.

‘Not much,’ he admitted. ‘But I thought Hewitt was a BMW fan.’

Mike snorted. ‘Hewitt’s a fan of money. Back when she made partner, Shorn had this deal with Audi. They supplied all our company cars and hardware, and the partners got special edition battlewagons thrown in for free. Two years ago BMW made Shorn a better offer and they went with it. As a partner, Hewitt can opt for any vehicle she likes but when this baby gets written off or superseded, you can bet she’ll just take a top-of-the-line Omega with all the armour options, free to partners of BMW clients. To her, it’s all just a cost-benefit analysis.’

‘So what does Notley think of all this?’

‘Notley’s a patriot.’ Mike grinned. ‘I mean, in the real, uncut sense of the word. Last of the diehard anti-Europeans. Anti-American too, come to that. He actually believes in the cultural superiority of England over other nations. Shit like that. I mean, you’d think he’d be able to see a little more clearly from the fiftieth floor, wouldn’t you. Anyway, when he made partner, he didn’t want to know about the German makes. He had Landrover build him a customised battle-wagon from scratch. And he’s still driving it ten years later. Fucking thing looks like a tank but it’ll do nearly two hundred kilometres an hour. Except he won’t use metric, so that’d be ... what, about a hundred and twenty-something? Miles an hour? Whatever. That’s what his speedo reads in.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘No, really. He made them fit an imperial speedo. Miles per hour. Ask him to let you look at the dashboard some time.’

‘He’s not here today?’

‘No way. You won’t catch Notley working weekends. Calls it the American disease, working all the hours God sends you.’ Bryant’s eyes flicked away with recollection. ‘I remember one quarterly do, I ran into him in the men’s room, we were both pretty pissed and I was asking him if being a partner was really worth all the extra shit, the weekend work, the all-nighters and he looked at me like I was insane. Then he says, still treating me like I’m a headcase, talking very slowly, you know, he says, Mike, if you make partner and you’re still working weekends then there’s something wrong somewhere. You make partner so they can’t tell you to do that shit any more. Otherwise, what’s the point? You believe that?’

‘Sounds like a decent philosophy.’

‘Yeah, not like the rest of these fucking wannabes.’ Mike gestured around dismissively. He wandered across to Chris’s car. ‘So what have we got here? This looks Scandinavian to me.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris laid a proprietorial hand on the car’s flank. ‘Saab combat chassis. Carla’s family are Norwegian, but she did her apprenticeship in Stockholm. Been around Saabs and Volvos all her life. She says the Swedes were building cars for road-raging decades before anybody even thought of it.’

Bryant nodded. ‘It looks pretty mean. But I reckon you’d still lose on speed to an Omega.’

‘She’s faster than she looks, Mike. A lot of that bulk’s Volvo spaced armouring. Strut-braced stuff. It isn’t solid, and the slipstream channels through flues on the outer edges for stability, but by Christ you’d still know if it hit you. Volvo’ve crash-tested the struts at aeroplane speeds, and they hold.’

‘Spaced armouring, huh?’ Bryant looked thoughtful for a couple of moments, and Chris had the unsettling sensation that he had given something important away to the big man. Then another grin swept the calculating expression out of his eyes. He clapped Chris on the shoulder. ‘Remind me to divorce Suki and get a Swedish mechanic to shack up with.’

The parking deck was filled with a soft chime. The Shorn elevator voice announced two o’clock for the whole building. Mike glanced reflexively at his watch.

‘That’s me,’ he said sourly. ‘Look, Chris, I’d better run. Corporate police can be a real drag when they’re determined to do something by the book. See you tonight, alright?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris watched him stride away towards the double doors that led upwards into the Shorn tower. ‘Hey, Mike.’

‘Yo.’

‘Good luck.’

Bryant raised a hand and waved it sideways. ‘Ah, don’t worry about it. Piece of piss. Be out of here by three. See you tonight.’

‘He said what?’

Carla paused in the act of fastening one earring and stared disbelievingly at Chris in the mirror. Chris looked back at her, confused.

‘He said it’d be a piece of piss and they’d—‘

‘No, before that. That stuff about divorcing Suki.’

‘He said to remind him to get a divorce so he could shack up with a Swedish mechanic’ Chris saw the look on her face and sighed, feeling the edge of the row they were teetering on. ‘He’s just trying to be friendly, Carla. It’s a kind of compliment, you know.’

‘It’s a load of sexist shit is what it is. Anyway,’ Carla finished with the earring and came away from the mirror. ‘That’s not the point.’

‘No? Then what is the point, Carla?’

This time it was Carla that sighed. ‘The point,’ she said heavily, ‘is that I’m not some curiosity for you to show off. This is my wife, by the way she’s a mechanic. I’m sure it’s fun to say. The shock value. The looks you get. I know you get a kick out of taking me to these corporate functions, showing everyone what a rebel you are.’

Chris stared at her.

‘No, it’s because I love you.’

‘I—‘ She’d been about to raise her voice. Something broke in the effort. ‘Chris, I know that. I know. You just, you don’t have to prove it against overwhelming odds all the time. It’s not a-a battle or a quest. It’s just, living.’ She saw the pain flit across his face and went to him. Her hands, scrubbed clean with aromatic oil, cupped his downturned face. ‘I know you love me, but I’m not here just to be loved. You can’t use me as a statement of how strongly you feel about everything, how loyal you are.’

He tried to turn his head away. She held it in place.

‘Look at me, Chris. This is me. I’m your wife. Mechanic is just a job, just a statement of financial disadvantage. I don’t let it define me, and I don’t want you doing it behind my back. We’re more than what we do.’

‘Now you sound like your father.’

She paused for a moment, then nodded and let go of his head. ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ She touched her throat. ‘Should be fucking miked up, huh? And that reminds me, you said we’d go and see him this weekend. Whatever happened to that promise?’

‘I didn’t think we’d—‘

‘Oh, forget it. I don’t really want to go anyway. I don’t feel up to the refereeing. Once you two get at each other’s throats ...’ she sighed again. ‘Look, Chris, about this mechanic thing. How would you like it if I dragged you over to see Mel and Jess and said you’d just love to have a look at their tax returns.’

Chris’s eyes widened with outrage. ‘I’m not a fucking accountant.’

Carla grinned and dropped into a defensive boxing stance. ‘Want to bet? Want to fight about it?’

The bravado ended in a shriek as Chris hurled himself at her and rugby-tackled her back onto the bed. The brief tussle ended with Chris straddling Carla’s body and struggling to hold her flailing arms at bay. He could feel the strength leaking out of his grip in giggle increments.

‘Sssh, sssh, stop it, stop it, behave yourself. We’re going out.’

‘Fucking let go of me, you piece of shit.’ She was laughing as well, breathlessly. ‘I’ll claw your fucking eyes out.’

‘Carla,’ Chris said patiently. ‘That’s not really an incentive. You’ve got to learn the art of negotiation. Now—‘

An incoherent squeal. Carla tumbled him. They grappled at each other across the bed.

Chapter Eight

Out, driving through Hawkspur Green in the waning light of evening, while Carla tried to do something with her dishevelled hair. The sex had taken half an hour, and it still lurked in the grins at the corners of their mouths.

‘We’re going to be late,’ said Chris severely.

‘Ah, bollocks.’ Carla gave up on her hair and settled for pinning it untidily up. ‘I don’t know why we’re doing this anyway. Going out to dinner with some guy you’re going to wreck in a couple of years’ time. It doesn’t really make sense, does it?’

Chris glanced across at her, the implied confidence in the remark warming him inside. There was always an intimacy to the conversations they had while driving, maybe born out of the secure knowledge that the car was clean. Carla swept for bugs on a regular basis, and her knowledge of the Saab meant they were sure of their privacy in a way they never quite could be at home.

‘You know it might not come to that,’ Chris said, feeling his way through his own thoughts. ‘A wreck. We don’t have to run for the same promotions.’

‘No, but you will. Like at Hammett McColl. It always works out that way.’

‘I don’t know, Carla. It’s strange. It’s like he’s just decided he’s going to be my friend and that’s it. I mean, there’s a lot about him I don’t like. That stuff in the zones was pretty extreme—‘

‘No shit. The man sounds like a fucking crackhead psycho to me, Chris. Whatever you say.’

Without actually lying to his wife about anything specific, Chris had somehow managed to omit Bryant’s execution-style dispatch of Molly and her jacker colleagues. The way it came out, it really had been self defence against armed and violent attackers. In retrospect, Chris was almost starting to believe it himself. The gangwits had wrecking bars. Not much doubt they would have used them if Chris’s unloaded gun had given them the chance. Carla remained unimpressed.

‘He’s just like a lot of the guys at Shorn—‘

‘Well, I certainly believe that.’

Chris shot her an irritated glance. ‘He’s worked hard for what he’s got, Carla. He just got angry because someone was trying to take it away from him. That’s a natural reaction, isn’t it? How do you think Mel’d react if someone turned up and tried to trash the workshop.’

‘Mel doesn’t make his money the way you people do,’ Carla muttered.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Forget it.’

‘Mel doesn’t make his money like me and Mike Bryant?’

‘I said, forget it, Chris.’

‘That’s right, he doesn’t, does he? Mel doesn’t do what we do. He just makes a living fixing our cars for us, so we can go out and do it again. Jesus fucking Christ, don’t you take the high moral ground with me, Carla, because—‘

‘Alright.’ Her voice caught on the second syllable. ‘I said forget it. I’m sorry I said it, so just forget it.’

The air between the two front seats frosted with silence. Finally, Chris reached across the chill and took Carla’s hand.

‘Look,’ he said wearily. ‘In the First World War fighter pilots used to toast each other with champagne before they went out and tried to shoot each other out of the sky. Did you know that? And the winners used to drop wreaths on their enemies’ airfields to commemorate the men they’d just killed. That make any sense to you? And we’re talking about less than a hundred and fifty years ago.’

‘That was war.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris made his voice stay calm. ‘A war for what? Lines drawn on a map. Can you honestly say that those men were fighting for anything that made any kind of sense? Anything that makes more sense than a competitive tender or a promotion duel?’

‘They had no choice, Chris. If they laid wreaths it was because they hated what they had to do. This is different.’

He felt his anger twist and jump like a fish in a net: this time it was an effort to hold it down. It looked as if Carla was going to pull her favourite trick and they were going to arrive at the Bryants’ front door in the brittle silence of an interrupted row.

‘You think we have any more of a choice than they did? You think I like what I do for a living?’

‘I don’t think you dislike it as much as you say.’ Carla was digging in her bag for cigarettes, a bad sign on the row barometer. ‘And if you do, there are other jobs. Other companies. Chris, you could go and work for the fucking ombudsmen with what you know. They’d take you. UNECT, or one of the others. The regulatory bodies are screaming for people with real commercial experience.’

‘Oh, great. You think I want to be a fucking bureaucrat. Playing at international social democracy with a fucking placard and a zone-level salary.’

‘Ombudsmen make a lot of money, Chris.’

‘Says who?’

‘My mother used to know some of the guys from UNECT in Oslo. Their field agents pull down near two hundred grand a year.’

Chris snorted. ‘Not bad for fucking socialists.’

‘Alright, Chris.’ It was cold and even, a flip side of her anger he hated worse than the shouting. ‘Forget the fucking ombudsmen. You could get a job with any other investment firm in the city.’

‘Not any more.’ He hunched his shoulders as he said it. ‘Have you got any idea how much Shorn paid to get me out of Hammett McColl? Any idea what they’ll do to protect that investment?’

‘Break your legs, will they?’

The sneer hurt, not least because it sounded like something Mel might have said in workshop banter. Jealousy flared. He hid it and worked at calm.

‘Not mine, no. But the word will be out there, Carla. Every executive search company in London will have been warned off me. Anyone who chooses to ignore it, they’ll find strung up under Blackfriars Bridge.’

She exploded smoke across the car. ‘Come off it.’

‘No? You don’t remember Justin Gray, then?’

‘That was petrol-mafia stuff.’

‘Yeah, right. A recruitment consultant with a flat in Knightsbridge and a house in St Albans is really going to get mixed up with those clowns. Everybody believed that one.’

‘Wearing a suit doesn’t make you smart, Chris. It just makes you greedy.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it.’

‘Look. Two weeks before he died, Gray was instrumental in moving two senior cutting-edge technologies execs out of Shorn and into Calders UK. He told the police he’d been receiving death threats throughout the run-up to that deal. Conveniently enough, they failed to investigate.’

‘I think you’re talking wine-bar dramatics and a coincidence, Chris.’

‘Suit yourself. Gray’s not the only one. There was that guy they found floating in his swimming pool in Biarritz last year. Another one a couple of years before that in a car smash. Mistaken duel call-out, they said, like that happens all the time. Both chasing candidates at Shorn. Coincidence? I don’t think so, Carla. Over the last five years, there’ve been at least a dozen executive search personnel who’ve ended up dead or damaged while, coincidentally, they were trying to prise candidates away from Shorn.’

‘So why’d you go to work for them?’ she snapped.

Chris shrugged. ‘It was a lot of money. Remember?’

‘We didn’t need it.’

‘We didn’t need it, right then. These days, that means nothing. You can’t ever be backed up too much. Besides, Shorn aren’t the only ones to play rough with the reckies.’ He found he was smiling faintly. ‘They’re just better at it than most. More prepared to go to the asphalt, quicker to floor it when they do. Just a harder crew, that’s all.’

‘Yes, and that’s really it, isn’t it Chris.’ There was ice in her voice -she’d caught the smile. ‘It wasn’t the money, it was the rep. You couldn’t wait to get in the running with the hard crew, could you? Couldn’t wait to test yourself against them.’

‘All I’m saying is when you talk about choices, face the facts. Be realistic. Realistically, what choice do I have?’

‘You always have a choice, Chris. Everyone does.’

‘Yeah?’ Finally, his anger slipped its leash. ‘Have you listened to any fucking thing I’ve said, Carla? What fucking choice do I have?’

‘You could resign.’

‘Oh, good idea.’ This time there was a break in his voice that he couldn’t iron out. ‘And then we could go and live in the zones. And when your father gets threatened with eviction again, instead of paying off what he owes, we could just be poor and helpless, and maybe go and help him pick his possessions up off the street where they throw them. Maybe you’d like that better.’

Carla flicked ash off her cigarette and stared out of the side window. ‘I’d like it better than waiting to see this car on fire on the six o’clock news.’

‘That isn’t going to happen.’ He said it reflexively.

‘Isn’t it?’ Now he could hear the unshed tears in her throat. She drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Isn’t it? Why is that, Chris?’

Silence. And the sound of the Saab engine.

Mike grinned. Laughter erupted around the table.

Two hours earlier, Chris would have been willing to bet that he wouldn’t hear Carla or himself laugh for the whole weekend. But here he was, seated in soft candlelight, watching across a food-laden, black wood table top as his wife broke up in peals of genuine hilarity. Against all the odds, the evening with the Bryants had taken off like a deregulation share issue.

‘No, really.’ Suki fought her own laughter down to a smirk. ‘He actually said that. Can you believe it? Would you have gone out with a man who said that to you?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Carla was still laughing, but her answer was absolutely serious.

‘Oh,’ Suki reached across the table and took her husband’s hand. ‘I’m being horrible, aren’t I. Tell us how you met Chris, Carla.’

Carla shrugged. ‘He came in to get his car fixed.’

The laughter rekindled. Chris leaned forward.

‘No, it’s true. You know, she was standing there, in this. T-shirt.’ He made vague female body gestures with both hands. ‘With a spanner in her hand, grease on her nose. And she says, I can give you the best road holding in Europe. And that was it. I was gone. Falling.’

Carla lost a little of her mirth. ‘Yeah, what he doesn’t tell you is, he was beaten up from some fucking stupid competitive tender. He was falling. He could barely stand. Torn suit, blood on his hands. Down his face. Trying all the time to make believe he wasn’t hurt.’

‘Mmm,’ Suki grinned. ‘Gorgeous.’

Carla’s smile faded slightly. ‘No, not really.’

‘Oh come on, Carla. I bet that’s when you fell for him as well. Noble savage and all that caveman stuff. Just like that Tony Carpenter fuck, you know, the one where he fights off all those motorcycle thugs. What’s it called, Michael? I can never remember the names of these things.’

‘Graduate Intake,’ said Mike Bryant, eyes intent on Carla’s face.

Chris nodded. ‘Seen it. Great movie.’

‘That kind of macho shit doesn’t turn me on,’ Carla said flatly. ‘I see too much of the results, working salvage. See, they haven’t always finished pulling the bodies out by the time we get there.’

‘Carla’s boss spends a lot of time separating losers from their vehicles,’ said Chris, miming a pair of salvage shears. ‘Literally.’

‘Chris!’ Suki laughed again, then put one elegantly varnished set of fingernails over her mouth in mock mortification as if she’d just realised what she was laughing at. ‘Please.’

‘Okay, here’s a joke.’ Chris ignored the look Carla was giving him. ‘Who are the lowest-paid headhunters in the city?’

‘Oh, I know this one.’ Suki wagged a finger at them. ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. The guys at Costermans were telling this a couple of months ago. Ohhh, I can’t remember, Chris. Go on, then.’

‘Paramedic crews on the orbital after the New Year playoffs.’

Suki’s brow creased in fake pain. ‘Oh, that’s awful.’ She sniggered, winding up to another full-blown laugh. ‘That’s horrible.’

‘Isn’t it just,’ said Carla unsmilingly, staring across the table at her husband.

Mike Bryant coughed. ‘Ah. Would you like to see that Omega now, Carla? It’s just through the kitchen to the garage. Bring your glass if you like.’

He got up and flashed a glance at Suki, who nodded on cue.

‘Yes, go on. I’ll clear these away.’

‘I’ll help you,’ said Chris, standing automatically.

‘No, it’s just loading the machine. You can help me make the coffee later. Go on, I don’t know the first thing about engines. Michael’s been dying to show it off to someone who understands what he’s talking about.’ Suki reached across and kissed Bryant. ‘Isn’t that right, darling?’

‘Well, if you’re sure—‘ Chris broke off as Carla tugged at his sleeve, and the three of them trooped out after Bryant, leaving Suki at the table. They crossed the kitchen space and Bryant threw open a door that let in a wave of cold air and a view of a wide, concrete-floored garage. The BMW stood gleaming in the light from overhead neon tubes. They filed through the door and stood around the hood end of the vehicle while Mike Bryant reached in and popped the locks. Then he set aside his wineglass on a workbench and lifted up the hood. Service lights sprang up in the engine space and the Omega Injection was revealed in all its matt grey glory.

‘Ain’t that a beautiful sight?’ Bryant burlesqued, some mutilated sub-Simeon Sands idea of an American accent.

‘Very nice.’ Carla walked around the engine, peering down into the clearance on either side. She pressed down hard with one hand on the engine block and nodded to herself. She looked up at Bryant. ‘Cantilevered support?’

‘Got it in one.’

‘Looks like they’ve mounted the weight a long way back this time.’

‘Yeah, well, you probably remember the Gammas.’ Bryant came to lean into the engine beside her, leaving Chris feeling suddenly unreasonably isolated. ‘Never drove one myself, but that was the big complaint, wasn’t it? All that nose armour and the engine too.’

Carla grunted agreement, still groping around down the side of the engine. ‘Yep. Handled like a pig. This one doesn’t, I imagine.’

Bryant grinned. ‘You want to take it for a spin, Carla? Put her through it?’

‘Well, I ...’ Carla was clearly taken aback. She was saved an answer by Suki, who appeared in the door with her hostess smile and a silver foil packet in one hand.

‘How many for coffee, then?’

‘Leave it, Suki.’ Bryant went to her and took the packet away. ‘We’re all going to go for a ride.’

‘Oh no, Michael.’ For the first time that Chris could detect, he saw a crack in Suki’s social armour. ‘You’ve drunk too much, you’re just going to get someone killed.’

‘No, Carla’s going to drive.’

‘Oh, I’ll believe that when I see it. Carla, honestly, the number of times he’s let me behind the wheel, then yanked me out again at the first serious sign of—‘

‘Don’t listen to her, Carla. Suki, it’s the weekend, it’s nearly midnight, there’s nothing on the roads. Just out on the orbital, as far as the M11 hook up. Carla drives there, I’ll drive back. C’mon, it’ll be fun.’

True to Mike’s prediction, the orbital was a ghost highway. Nothing more substantial than waste paper stirred beneath the march of gull-winged sodium lamps. There was no sound other than the rush of their tyres on the asphalt and the comfortable growl of the Omega Injection engine. Carla drove with a rapt expression on her face at a rock-steady hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, occasionally swerving from lane to lane as chunks of decaying surfacing flashed towards them. A faint rain fell on the big oval windscreen, cleaned off meticulously by the gapped speed wipers.

‘Crawler,’ said Mike Bryant from the passenger seat, as the tail lights of a transporter appeared on the sweep of motorway ahead of them. ‘Looks like it’s automated; only a machine drives in the slow lane with this much road to play with. Pass him close, see if you can trip the collision systems.’

Next to Chris in the back, Suki sighed. ‘You are such a child, Michael. Carla, just ignore him.’

The BMW flashed past the transporter, giving it a wide berth. Mike sighed and shrugged. Up ahead, the lights of a junction glowed like a UFO landing site. A massive metal sign announced the M11 ramp. Carla pulled across into the filter lane and eased off the accelerator, letting the BMW’s speed bleed away on the approach slope. They cruised to a gentle halt at the summit, just short of the roundabout. Carla sat for a moment, listening to the engine run, then nodded.

‘Very smooth,’ she said, almost to herself.

‘Isn’t it.’ Mike Bryant cracked open his door. ‘Swap places. There’s a couple of things I want to show you.’

Carla met Chris’s eyes in the rearview mirror for a moment, then she got out and walked round the front of the car, passing Bryant halfway. Bryant high-fived her, came round and fastened himself into the driving seat with a broad grin. He waited until Carla had also belted herself in, then dropped the car into gear and revved hard against the parking brake. Chris heard the wheels spin and shriek for a moment as the BMW held position, then Bryant knocked off the brake and they leapt forward.

‘Always forget that bit.’ Bryant shouted above the engine and he grinned in the mirror. The car plunged down the ramp opposite, gathering speed and hit the main carriageway of the orbital at nearly a hundred and twenty. Bryant let them cover about half a kilometre, then slapped his forehead.

‘Wait! This isn’t the way home!’

He grinned again, then hauled on the wheel. Chris heard his feet hit the pedals at the same moment and was just too late to brace himself and Suki as the BMW executed a perfect U-turn dead stop in the centre lane.

‘Michael,’ said Suki severely. ‘Stop it.’

‘Let’s try that again,’ said Bryant and kicked the BMW into another wheel-spinning takeoff. They flashed back towards the intersection, swerving into the slow lane on the slight incline under the bridge. Bryant turned round to look at Chris and Suki.

‘Now, you know that—‘

They trampled him down with their voices.

‘Michael!’

‘Look at the fucking r—‘

‘Don’t tur—“

In the time it all took to begin saying, Bryant had turned back to a more conventional driver’s posture and they were under the bridge and climbing the incline up on the other side.

‘Shit, sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just going to say, you know that truck we passed a couple of klicks back—‘

The interior of the car flooded with light as the automated transporter cleared the crest of the rise ahead and bore down on them. Suki, Chris and Carla uttered another multiple yell and this time Bryant yelled with them, louder than anyone. The transporter’s robot brain blasted them with an outraged hoot from the collision alert system and bands of orange hazard-warning lights lit up on the cab. Mike’s burlesque Sands accent reappeared, cut with wide-eyed, breathless psycho.

‘I’m sorry, honey. I guess I. Just shouldna. Taken all those drugs.’

He laughed maniacally and, at the last moment, he yanked the wheel and the BMW swung violently to the left. They slid out of the path of the oncoming juggernaut and past the high side of the transporter’s wagon, so close that through the side window Chris saw individual dents in the metal surface of the freight container. He heard the hissing explosion of brakes across the night air, and knew that Bryant had just gone ahead and done what he’d asked Carla to do earlier. He’d deliberately tripped the transporter’s collision systems. He’d been playing chicken with the machine’s reflexes. For fun.

Much later, back in his own car, he watched the same stretch of road again while Carla drove them home. Had he been a little more aware of his immediate surroundings, he would have seen Carla open her mouth to speak several times before she finally made up her mind.

‘I’m sorry, that was my fault. I didn’t—‘

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘I didn’t think he’d force it like—‘

‘He was just making things clear,’ said Chris distantly.

They rode in silence.

‘He’s good, isn’t he,’ said Carla after a while.

Chris nodded wordlessly.

‘Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.’ She laughed without humour. ‘And to think I said you were going to wreck him in a couple of years’ time. Jesus, irony or wha—‘

‘Carla, I’d really prefer not to talk about it, alright.’

Carla looked sideways at him, eyes narrowed, but if she’d planned to be angry, what she saw in his face drained the anger out of her. Instead, she reached across to take his hand in hers.

‘Sure,’ she said very quietly.

Chris took up the offered clasp, squeezing her fingers tightly. A faint smile twitched at his mouth, but his eyes never left the road ahead.

Chapter Nine

In architectural echo of service pyramid theory, the Shorn block had rented out its bottom two levels to a series of shopping and eating units that collectively went under the name Basecamp. According to the Shorn promotional literature that Chris had read, Basecamp provided employment for over six hundred people and, together with the Shorn-owned vehicle repair shops in the basement, was a working embodiment of the virtues of trickle-down wealth creation. Prosperity spread out from the foundations of the Shorn block like vegetation from an aquifer, said the literature warmly, though the metaphor that occurred to Chris was water leaking from the cracked base of an old clay flowerpot. Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.

On the street opposite the Shorn complex the prosperity had blossomed - or leaked - into the form of a tiny corner restaurant called Louie Louie’s. Originally set up in the previous century to serve the butcher’s market that had once stood where the Shorn complex now loomed, the place had closed down briefly during the domino recessions and then reopened under new management, supplying coffee and snacks to the post-recessional influx of workers in Basecamp. This much Chris had gleaned from Mike Bryant when they went across for coffee one morning. What he noticed on his own was that the place never seemed to close and that, whether through inverted snobbery or genuine quality, the execs in the Shorn tower sent out to Louie Louie’s in preference to almost any other eating establishment in the district.

The coffee, Chris was forced to admit, was the best he’d had in the UK, and he derived a further, ridiculously childish, satisfaction from drinking it out of the tall styrofoam canister while he stood by the window of his office and gazed down fifty-odd floors to the dimly illuminated frontage of the place it had been made. He was doing exactly that, and bluffing his way through an audiophone local-agent call from Panama, when Mike Bryant came to call.

‘Well, you go and tell El Commandante that if he wants his Panthers of Justice to have bandages and mobile cover next month he’d better reconsider that stance. All the phones—‘

He broke off as someone banged on the half-open door. Turning from the window, he saw Bryant shouldering his way into the office. In the big man’s arms were two packages wrapped in fancy black and gold paper. The bottom package was wide and flat and about the width of Bryant’s shoulders, the top one about the size and shape of two hard-copy dictionaries taped together. Both looked to be heavy.

‘I’ll call you back,’ Chris said and clicked the audiophone off.

‘Hi, Chris.’ Bryant grinned. ‘Got something for you. Where do you want it?’

‘Over there.’ Chris gestured at a small table in the corner of the still minimally furnished office space. ‘What is it?

‘Show you.’

Bryant put down the packages and ripped back the wrapping on the flat package to reveal the chequered surface of a marbled chess board. He grinned up at Chris again, freed the board from the wrapping entirely and set it straight on the table.

‘Chess?’ Chris asked stupidly.

‘Chess,’ agreed Bryant, working on the wrapping of the other box. It came loose and he tipped the box sideways, spilling carved onyx pieces across the board.

‘You know how to set this up?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’ Chris came forward and picked up some of the pieces, weighing them in his hand. ‘This is good stuff. Where’d you get it?’

‘Place in Basecamp. They were having a sale. Two for the price of one. I’ve got the other one set up in my office. Here, give me the white ones. You do the black. Who was that on the phone?’

‘Fucking Harris in Panama. Got problems with the Nicaraguan insurgents again, and of course Harris won’t take a fucking decision on his own because he’s five hundred klicks off the action. He’s not sure of the angles.’

Bryant paused in mid-action. ‘He said that?’

‘More or less.’

‘So he called someone who’s five thousand klicks off to decide for him? You ought to call in the audit on that guy. What’s he on anyway, three per cent of gross?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Audit the fucker. No, better yet, call a retender. Let’s see him fight for his fucking three per cent like we have to.’

Chris shrugged. ‘You know what it’s like out there.’

‘What, better the scumbag that you know?’

‘You got it.’ Chris put the final black pawn in place and stood back. ‘Very nice. Now what?’

Bryant reached out to the white files.

‘Well, I don’t know much about this game, but apparently this is a fairly good way to start.’

He moved the white king’s pawn forward two squares and flashed another grin.

‘Your move.’

‘Do I have to decide now?’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Call me with it. That’s the idea. Oh, and listen. That thing with Harris. I had the exact same shit with him over Honduras last year. Wish I’d called the retender then, but it was a sensitive time. Is this a sensitive time?’

Chris thought about it for a moment.

‘No. They’re plugged up in the jungle somewhere, nothing going to happen till the rain stops.’

Bryant nodded. ‘Call the retender,’ he said, pointing a cocked finger pistol downward, execution-style. ‘I would. Get that motherfucker Harris either dead or jacked up and working properly for you. You ever been to Panama?’

‘No. Emerging Markets stuff was all further south. Hammett McColl were into Venezuela, the NAME, bits of Brazil.’

‘Yeah, well, let me tell you about Panama.’ Bryant offered his grin again. ‘Just for your information. The place is stuffed full of agents who’ll do Harris’s job twice as well for half the money. You offer one and a half, maybe two per cent of total, they’ll rip his fucking heart out and eat it. Down there they do the tendering in converted bullrings, gladiator-style.’ The American burlesque came on full. ‘Real messy.’

‘Delightful,’ muttered Chris.

‘Fuck it, Chris, he deserves it.’ Bryant’s brow creased with good-humoured exasperation. He held out his hands, palms up. ‘That’s our investment he’s fucking with. If he can’t cut it, well, get someone who can. Anyway, not my account, not my call. Speaking of which, I’ve got some calls to make. You coming out to play tonight? Up for the Falkland again?’

Chris shook his head. ‘Promised Carla we’d eat out in the village. Maybe some other time.’

‘Okay. What about cutting work early, coming down to the firing range with me. Just for an hour or so, before you go home. Get the feel of that Nemex, in case you ever decide to put bullets in it.’

Chris grinned reluctantly. ‘That’s not fair. At least I was carrying mine. Alright, alright. I’ll come down and play in the arcade for an hour. But that’s all. After that, I’m off. Meet you down there at six, say.’

‘Done.’ Bryant shot him with the finger pistol and left.

Chris stood and looked at the chessboard for a while, then he moved the black king’s pawn hesitantly out two spaces, so it was faced off against its white counterpart. He frowned over the move, shifted the piece back a space, hesitated some more then pulled an irritated face and restored the pawn to the face off position. He went back to his desk and stabbed rapidly through a number from memory.

‘Panama Trade and Investment Commission,’ said a Hispanic woman’s voice in English. The speaker swam into focus on the screen and recognised him.

‘Senor Faulkner, how can we help you?’

‘Get me Tendering,’ said Chris.

‘I don’t know,’ he told Carla that evening over margaritas and fajitas in the village Tex-Mex. ‘I thought after that shit on the orbital last week, the battle lines were drawn. I felt like a fucking idiot for all that stuff I’d been saying to you about us staying friends. But I was right. He wants to be my friend.’

‘Or he’s scared of you.’

‘Same difference. I seem to remember someone telling me once that same-sex friendships are just a way of negating competition. Now who was that?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said that’s what Mel thinks. I didn’t say I agreed with him.’

Chris grinned. ‘Well, he’d know about same-sex friendships, I suppose. From a real in-depth point of view.’

‘Don’t be a wanker, Chris.’

‘Hey, come on. It was a joke.’ Chris hung onto his smile, but there was a tiny feeling of slippage somewhere inside him. There had been a time, he was sure, when Carla could read him better than this. ‘You know I’ve got nothing against Mel or Jess. A whole stack of the people I worked with at HM were gay. Jesus Carla, before I met you I was sharing a flat with two gay guys.’

‘Yeah, and you used to make jokes about them.’

‘I—‘ But the oozing sense of unfairness was already setting in, like cold mud, chilling his mood and tugging his smile away. ‘Carla, they used to make jokes about me too. They called me the household het, for fuck’s sake. It was all part of the banter. I’m not homophobic. You know that.’

Carla looked at her food, then up at him.

‘Yeah, I know.’ She mustered a small smile. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just tired.’

‘Who fucking isn’t?’ Chris took an overly large pull at his margarita and said nothing more for a while.

Fajitas are not a dish to be eaten in resentful silence, and neither of them did much more than pick at the food. When the waiter stopped by he sensed the mood radiating out from the little table and took the cooling dishes away without comment.

‘Any dessert?’ he asked carefully when he returned.

Carla shook her head, mute. Chris drew a deep breath.

‘No thanks.’ He made a sudden decision. ‘But you can bring me another margarita. In fact, make it another pitcher.’

‘I don’t want any more, Chris,’ said Carla sharply.

He looked at her with a blank expression he knew would hurt her. ‘Who asked you? Pitcher’s for me.’ He nodded at the waiter, who withdrew with obvious relief. Carla put on her disdainful face.

‘You’re going to get drunk?’

‘Well, looking at the logistics, I would think so. Yes.’

‘I didn’t come here to get drunk.’

‘I didn’t ask you to.’

‘Chris ...’

He waited, going nowhere near the opening the forlorn fade in her voice had left him. Her shoulders slumped.

‘I’m going home,’ she said.

‘Okay. Want them to call you a cab?’

‘I’ll walk,’ she said coldly. ‘It isn’t far.’

‘Fine.’ He buried himself in the margarita glass as she got up. She hesitated towards him for just a second, barely leaning, and then something stiffened in her carriage and she walked away from the table. Chris very carefully did not look round to watch her leave and when she stalked past the window of the restaurant, he busied himself with his drink again. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she did not look in at him.

He worried for a while about her walking home alone, but then stopped himself, recognising the feeling for guilt over the fight. Hawk-spur Green was a hamlet, made ludicrously prosperous by the influx of driver-class professionals and their families. It had crime levels appropriate to a playgroup, nothing beyond occasional vandalism and even that mostly graffiti tagging. Plus Carla could look after herself and the house was barely fifteen minutes away. He was just manufacturing excuses to go after her.

Fuck that.

The pitcher came.

He drank it.

Chapter Ten

South-west zone. The Brundtland.

The decaying concrete bones of the estate squatted mostly in darkness. A handful of unsmashed lights cast sporadic stains of sodium orange on walkways and stairstacks. Isolated lit windows stamped the darkened bulk of buildings in black and yellow code. Child-sized shadows scurried away from Carla’s headlights as she parked the Landrover. Once outside the protection of the vehicle, it was worse. She could feel professional eyes watching her set the anti-theft systems, professional ears listening to the quick, escalating whine of the contact stunner charging from the battery. She walked as rapidly as she could without showing fear, away from the vehicle and into the lobby.

Miraculously, the lifts appeared to be working.

She had stabbed at the button more to vent frustration than anything else, and was almost alarmed when the lights above the battered metal doors blinked and the downward arrow illuminated. She blinked a little herself, wiped angrily at a tear that had leaked out from under one eyelid, and waited for the lift to arrive. Her right hand was wrapped tightly around the stungun Chris had bought for her and there was a can of Mace in her left. The lobby at her back was coldly lit by grating-protected halogen bulbs and starkly empty, but the wired glass portals she’d come through were cracked and pushed in at a height suggesting kicks, and the damage looked recent.

FUCK YOU ZEK-TIV CUNTS said a wall to her left in daubed red lettering. Pointless rage; no self-respecting executive was going to be seen dead in the Brundtland.

The lift arrived, but when the doors opened the stench of urine was so thick she gagged. She deliberated for a moment, then compressed her lips and headed for the dimly-lit stairwell to her right. Holding the Mace, hand extended, and keeping the stungun hidden behind her back, she climbed the five double flights of stairs and marched down the corridor with steps intended to convey to anyone who might hear her that she was at home in this stinking pit.

She stopped at number fifty-seven and hammered on the door with the bottom of the Mace can. There was the sound of slow, slurred movement inside and a light sprang up under the door.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Dad, it’s Carla.’ She tried to keep her voice even, partly out of pride, but more out of a desire not to alarm. Only a year ago, her father had told her, one of the local edge gangs on the estate had forced an elderly woman to open her door by holding a gun to her daughter’s head on the doorstep. Once in, they’d ransacked the flat, raped the daughter while her aged mother was forced to watch and then beaten both women into unconsciousness. Apparently, they hadn’t bothered to kill either of their victims. They knew there was no need. The police attitude to the zones was containment, not law enforcement. Raids were infrequent and unrelated to actual crimes committed. The estate was gangwit-run. Rape and burglary were not considered transgressions of gang law.

‘Carla?’ There was the snap of the lock being unfastened, the solid thunk as the security-bolt system she and Chris had paid to have installed was disengaged, and then the door was thrown wide. Her father stood in the doorway, a pool cue hefted in his right hand.

‘Carla, what are you doing here at this time of night?’ He switched to Norwegian. ‘And where’s Chris? You didn’t come up here alone, did you? For Christ’s sake, Carla.’

‘Hello, Dad,’ she managed.

He ushered her inside, slammed the door shut and engaged the bolt system again. Only then did he relinquish his grip on the cue, dropping the makeshift weapon into an umbrella stand by the door and opening his arms to hug her.

‘It’s good to see you, Carla. Even if it is half past midnight. What the fuck happened? Oh, don’t tell me.’ He nodded as the repressed tears began to leak out and she trembled against him. ‘Not another fight? Is he downstairs?’

She shook her head against his shoulder.

‘Good. I won’t have to be diplomatic then.’ Erik Nyquist stepped back from his daughter a little and took hold of her chin. ‘Why don’t you come and have a whisky coffee with me and we can bitch about him in his absence.’

She choked a laugh. He echoed her with a gentle smile.

‘That’s better,’ he said.

So they sat in front of an antique electric fire in the threadbare living room with mugs of cheap coffee and cheaper whisky steaming in their fists and Erik stared into the reddish glow of the heating element while his daughter talked. The tears were under control now, and Carla’s voice was firm, an analytical tool sifting through the settled sediment, first of the last few hours, then of the last few weeks, finally of the last few years.

‘It’s just,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we didn’t always used to fight this much. Did we? You must remember.’

‘Well, you never drove across the cordoned zones in the middle of the night alone because you’d been fighting,’ Erik admitted. ‘That’s a first, at least. But if I’m honest? I think you’ve been having rows with Chris about as long as you’ve known him to any appreciable depth. Certainly as long as you’ve been married. I couldn’t say if you have more now than you used to, but that’s not really the point.’

Carla looked up, surprised. ‘It isn’t?’

‘No, it isn’t. Carla, marriage is an artificial state. Invented by the patriarchy to ensure that fathers know who their children are. It’s been going on for thousands of years but that doesn’t make it right. Human beings were never designed to live like that.’

‘I think I’ve read this somewhere before, Dad.’

‘The fact that it was written by your mother,’ said Erik severely, ‘does not invalidate the argument. We are tribal, not matrimonial.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Let’s see if I remember how it went. The basic human social unit would have been a matriarchal tribe; a female, child-rearing and knowledge-keeping centre with a protective outer shell of warrior males. Uh, how does it go, children held in common by the tribe, reproduction only understood by the females and—‘

‘The point is, Carla, exclusive pairing is unnatural. Two people were never meant to be so exclusively much to each other.’

‘That’s a pretty fucking poor excuse,’ she said, then bit her lip.

Erik gave her a reproachful look. ‘That isn’t what I meant. Look, even in the recent past you had extended families to soak up some of the strain. Now we live in isolated couples or nuclear families, and either both partners are working so hard they never see each other, or they’re not working and the stress of living on the poverty line tears them apart.’

‘That’s a simplification, Dad.’

‘Is it?’ Erik cradled his mug in both hands and looked back into the red glow from the bar fire. ‘Look at where you live, Carla. A village neither of you knew the name of three years ago. No friends living close, no family, not even a workplace social life unless you’re prepared to drive for an hour and a half at the end of the evening. All these things put a huge strain on you both, and rows are the result. The natural result. It wouldn’t be natural not to fight with someone you share your whole sleeping and waking life with. It’s healthy, it provides release, and if you don’t hold grudges it shouldn’t damage the relationship.’

Carla shivered despite the fire.

‘This is damaging us,’ she said.

Erik sighed.

‘You know what your mother said to me before she went back to Tromso?’

‘Fuck you and that English bitch?’ She regretted it as soon as the words left her mouth, surprised that the anger was still there on tap nearly two decades later. But Erik only smiled wryly and if there was pain behind that, it didn’t show. She reached across to him with one hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’ The smile flickered but held. ‘You’re right, she did say that. More than once. But she also said that it was high time, that she wasn’t really surprised because we didn’t have fun together any more. She said that. We have no fun any more, Erik.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘No, she was right, Carla.’ He looked across at her and this time there was pain in his face. ‘Your mother was usually right about these things. I was always too busy being political and angry to spot the emotional truths. She hit the nail on the head. We didn’t have fun any more. We hadn’t had any real fun for years. That’s why I ended up with Karen in the first place. She was fun, and that was something your mother and I’d stopped trying to do years ago.’

‘Chris and I still have fun,’ Carla said quickly.

Erik Nyquist looked at his daughter and sighed again. ‘Then you hold onto him,’ he said. ‘Because if that’s true, if it’s really true, then what you’ve got is worth any amount of fights.’

Carla shot him a surprised glance, caught by the sudden gust of emotion in his voice.

‘I thought you didn’t like Chris.’

Erik chuckled. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘What’s that got to do with it? I’m not sleeping with him.’

She smiled wanly and went back to watching the fire.

‘I don’t know, Dad. It’s just.’

He waited while she assembled her feelings into a coherent shape.

‘Just since he went to work at Shorn.’ She shook her head wearily. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, Dad. He’s making more money than he ever has, the hours aren’t so different to what he used to clock at Hammett McColl. Fuck it, we ought to be happy. We’ve got all the props for it. Why are we falling out more now?’

‘Shorn Associates. And is he still in Emerging Markets?’

She shook her head. ‘Conflict Investment.’

‘Conflict Investment.’ Erik smacked his lips, then got up and went to the bookcase set against the wall opposite the fire. He dragged a finger across the tightly packed spines of the books on a lower shelf, found what he was looking for and tugged the volume out. Flicking through the pages, he came back to the fire and handed it to her.

‘Read that,’ he said. ‘That page.’

She looked at the book, turned it to see the title. ‘The Socialist Legacy. Miguel Benito. Dad, I’m not in the mood. This isn’t about politics.’

‘Everything is about politics, Carla. Politics is everything. Everything in human society anyway. Just read the passage in highlighter.’

She sighed and set down her coffee mug at her feet. Clearing her throat, she picked up the line with one finger and read aloud. ‘”Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware”?’

‘Yes. That one.’

‘”Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware that in order to bring about a convulsive political change”.’

‘Actually, I meant, read it to yourself.’

She ignored him, ploughing on with the edge of singsong emerging in her voice. ‘ “In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. In populist recog—“ Dad is there a point somewhere in all this bullshit?’

‘Just finish it, will you.’

She pulled a glum face. ‘”In populist recognition of this underlying truth, the cry during the latter half of the last century became if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Aaaagh, new paragraph. “What any survivor of late Marxist ideology would be forced to recognise in the politics of the twenty-first century is that the contradictions are now so heavily disguised that it would be the work of decades simply to reveal them, let alone sharpen them into anything resembling a point.” A bit like this prose style, huh? Alright, alright, nearly there. “An overall problem is now no longer perceived, therefore an overall solution no longer sought. Any distasteful elements within the world economic order are now considered either candidates for longer term fine tuning or worse still an irrevocable by-product of economic laws supposedly as set in stone as the laws of quantum physics. So long as this is believed by the vast majority of the populace in the developed world, the contradictions identified by Marxism will remain hidden and each individual member of society will be left to resolve for themselves the vaguely felt tensions at an internal level. Any effort to externalise this unease will be disdained by the prevailing political climate as discredited socialist utopianism or simply, as was seen in chapter three, the politics of envy.”’ She laid down the book. ‘Yeah, so what?’

‘That’s your problem, Carla.’ Erik had not sat down while she was reading. He stood with his back to the fire and looked down at her as if she were one of his students. She felt suddenly fifteen years old again. ‘Unresolved contradictions. Chris may still be the man you married but he’s also a soldier for the new economic order. A corporate samurai, if you want to adopt their own imagery.’

‘I know that, Dad. That’s nothing new. I know what he does, I know how his world works. I help build and repair the vehicles they use to kill each other, in case you’d forgotten. I’m just as involved in it all, Dad. What?’

He was shaking his head. He crouched to her level and took both her hands gently in his own.

‘Carla, this isn’t about you and Chris. It’s barely about you at all. Benito’s talking about internal contradictions. Living with what you are, with what your society is. At Hammett McColl, Chris could do that because there was a thin veneer of respectability over it all. At Shorn, there isn’t.’

‘Oh, bullshit. You’ve read what these people are like. Dad, you used to write about what they were like, back when there was anyone with the guts to publish it. The only difference between Conflict Investment and Emerging Markets is the level of risk. In Emerging Markets, they don’t like conflict or instability. The guys in CI thrive on it. But it’s the same principle.’

‘Hmm.’ Erik smiled and let go of her hands. ‘That sounds to me like Chris talking. And he’s probably even right. But that’s not the point.’

‘You keep saying that, Dad.’

Erik shrugged and seated himself again. ‘That’s because you keep missing it, Carla. You think this is about a rift between you and Chris, and I’m telling you it’s not, it’s about a rift inside Chris. Now you’re saying there’s no difference in what he used to do and what he’s doing now, and aside from a few semantic quibbles that may be true. But Chris hasn’t just changed what he does. He’s changed where he does it, and who he does it for, and that’s what counts. Along with Nakamura and Lloyd Paul, Shorn Associates is the most aggressive player in the investment field. That applies to their Arbitrage and Emerging Markets divisions just as much as to Conflict Investment. They’re the original hard-faced firm. No gloss, no moral rationalisations. They do what they do, they’re the best at it. That’s what they sell on. You go to Shorn because they’re mean motherfuckers, and they’ll make money for you, come hell or high water. Fuck ethical investment, just give me a fat fucking return and don’t tell me too much about how you got it.’

‘You’re making speeches, Dad.’

There was a taut silence. Carla stared into the fire, wondering why she found it so easy to sink these barbs into her father. Then Erik Nyquist chuckled and nodded.

‘You’re right, I am,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Sorry about that. I miss seeing myself in print so much, it all just balls up inside me. Comes out whenever I have someone to talk to.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said distantly. ‘I just wish ...’

‘Wish what?’

She had a vivid flash of recall, toothpaste-white. She would have been about six or seven at the time, staying with grandparents in Tromso and cocooned in the cold outside - warm inside security the visits there always brought. She remembered Erik and Kirsti Nyquist on skis, propped against each other for support on the hill behind Kirsti’s parents’ house and laughing into each other’s faces. Having fun in the definitive Nyquist fashion that she, as a child, had always imagined would characterise her future married life, the way it would always characterise her parents’.

The flash faded, into the dull red glow of the electric fire. She reached for her father’s hand.

‘Nothing.’

Chapter Eleven

‘Drink?’

Mike Bryant shook his head. ‘Still dealing with a hangover, thanks, Louise. Just water, if you’ve got it.’

‘Of course.’ Louise Hewitt closed the steel-panelled door of the office drinks cabinet and hefted a blue two-litre bottle from the table beside it instead. ‘Sit down, Mike. Drinking - or whatever - mid week, that can be a pretty lethal mistake.’

‘Not lethal,’ said Bryant, massaging his temples a little as he sank onto the sofa. ‘But definitely a mistake at my age.’

‘Yeah, must be hell being thirty-four. I remember it vaguely.’ Hewitt poured water into two glasses and sat on the edge of the sofa opposite. She looked at him speculatively. ‘Well, I won’t toast you with water, but congratulations do seem to be in order. I just got off the phone to Bangkok. That sketch on Cambodia you dropped last time you were out there finally landed on the right guerrilla head.’

Bryant sat up straighter, and forgot his hangover.

‘Cambodia? The smack-war thing?’

Hewitt nodded. ‘The smack-war thing, as you so elegantly define it. We’ve got a guerrilla coalition leader willing to deal. Khieu Sary. Sound familiar?’

Bryant drank from his water glass and nodded. ‘Yeah, I remember him. Arrogant motherfucker. Had ancestors in the original Khmer Rouge or something.’

‘Yeah.’ There was the slightest hint of mockery in Hewitt’s echo of the grunted syllable. ‘Well, it looks like this Sary needs arms and cash to hold the coalition together. The Cambodian government’s on the edge of offering an amnesty to any of the heroin rebels who want to come in and disarm. If that happens, the coalition’s gone and Sary loses his powerbase. But if he can hang on, our sources in Bangkok reckon he’s in line to march on Phnom Penh inside two years.’

‘Optimistic’

‘Local agents always are. You know how it is, they pitch rosy so you’ll bite. But this guy’s been on the money in the past. I’m inclined to go with it. So you’d better break out your copy of Reed and Mason, because this one’s yours, Mike.’

Mike Bryant’s eyes widened. ‘Mine?’

‘All yours.’ Hewitt shrugged. ‘You made it happen, you’ve got the executive experience to cover it. Like I said, congratulations.’

‘Thanks.’

‘The proposal is not uncontested,’ said Hewitt casually.

Bryant grinned. ‘What a surprise. Nakamura?’

‘Nakamura and Acropolitic both. Nakamura must have parallel information on Sary, they’re offering him essentially the same deal you put together in Bangkok, and the bastard’s smart enough to know that forcing us all to tender will bring the prices down.’

‘And Acro?’

‘They’ve got the status quo mandate. Official economic advisers to the Cambodian regime. They’re in it to squash the proposal before it gets off the ground. It’s all already cleared with Trade and Finance.’

‘What’s the ground?’

‘North. Three-hundred-kilometre duel envelope, contracts to be signed in conference auditorium six at the Tebbit Centre. Turn up with blood on your wheels or don’t turn up. The word is Nakamura have pulled Mitsue Jones for this one. Flying her in to head up the UK team. Acropolitic don’t have anyone in her league, but they’ll no doubt be sending their finest. Against all of that, you get a team of three including you. Suggestions?’

‘Nick Makin. Chris Faulkner.’ There was no hesitation in Bryant’s voice.

Hewitt looked dubious. ‘Your chess pal, huh?’

‘He’s good.’

‘You don’t let personal feelings get in the way of professional judgment around here, Mike. You know that. It’s bad for business.’

‘That’s right, I know that. And I want Faulkner. You said this was mine, Louise. If you don’t—‘

‘Makin doesn’t like Faulkner,’ said Hewitt sharply.

‘Makin doesn’t like anyone. That’s his secret. The problem here, Louise, is that you don’t like Faulkner. And it isn’t much of a secret, either.’

‘May I remind you that you’re speaking to the executive partner of this division.’ Hewitt’s voice stayed level, just a shade cooler all of a sudden. She poured herself more water while she talked. ‘For your information, Mike, personal feelings have nothing to do with this. I don’t think Faulkner is up to a tender of this magnitude. I also think that you’re letting a friendship cloud your professional judgment and I’m going on record with that. This is going to go badly wrong if you’re not careful.’

‘Louise, this is going to go like a dream.’ Bryant grinned wolfishly.

‘Makin and Faulkner are both proven hard men on the road and as far as I’m concerned that’s the bottom line. We don’t have anybody better and you know it.’

There was a pause in which the loudest sound was Louise Hewitt swallowing water. Finally she shrugged.

‘Alright, Mike, it’s your call. But I’m still going on record against it. And that makes Faulkner one hundred per cent your responsibility. If he fucks up—‘

‘If he fucks up, Louise, you can fire him and I’ll hold the door open.’ Bryant flashed the grin again. ‘Or the window.’

Hewitt took a disc out of her pocket and tossed it onto the table between them.

‘If he fucks up, you’ll all be dead,’ she said shortly. ‘And Shorn’ll be out of a medium-term CI contract worth billions. That’s the briefing. Route blow-ups, road-surface commentaries. Make sure they both get copies. Make sure Faulkner understands what he’s got to do. Blood on the wheels, Mike, or there’s no deal.’

‘I remember a time,’ Bryant let just a hint of his American burlesque tinge the words. ‘Used to be enough just to get there first.’

Hewitt smiled despite herself. ‘Bullshit, you do. You just heard Notley and the others talk about it. And even they barely remember when it was that cuddly. Now get out of here, and don’t disappoint me.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ Bryant picked up the disc and got up to go. At the door, he paused and looked back to where she was still sitting at the desk, sipping her water.

‘Louise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks for giving me this.’

‘Don’t mention it. Like I said, don’t let me down.’

‘No, I won’t.’ Bryant hesitated, then took the plunge. ‘You know, Louise, you go on record against Faulkner now and you run the risk of looking very silly when he works out.’

Hewitt gave him an icy, executive-partner smile.

‘I’ll run that risk, thank you, Michael. Now, was there any other advice you’d like to give me on running the division?’

Bryant shook his head wordlessly and left.

He stopped by Chris’s office and found the other man standing at the window, staring out at the hail. Winter was hanging on unseasonably long in London and the skies had been gusting fistfuls of the stuff for weeks.

“s happening?’ he asked as he stuck his head around the door.

Chris jerked visibly as Bryant spoke. Clearly he’d been a long way off.

Coming across the office to the window, Bryant was hard put to see anywhere visibly more attractive than the fifty-third floor of the Shorn tower, and was forced to conclude that Chris had been daydreaming.

‘Mike.’ Chris turned away from the view to face his visitor. His eyes were red-rimmed and angry with something not in the immediate vicinity. Bryant backed up a step.

‘Whoa, Chris. You’ve got to lay off the crystal edge.’ It was only half a joke, he admitted to himself. Chris looked like shit. ‘Remember Rancid Neagan. Just say No, not ‘til the weekend.’

Chris smiled, a forced bending of the lips, as he rolled out the time-honoured Dex and Seth comeback.

‘Hey, I don’t do that shit no more.’

‘What, weekends?’

Reluctantly, the smile became a grin. ‘You come up with a move or what?’

‘Not yet. But don’t worry, the turnaround is in sight.’

This time they both grinned. The match, currently their fifth, was well into the endgame, and, barring a brain haemorrhage, Chris couldn’t lose. Which would make it four to one against Bryant, a score that the big man didn’t seem to mind as much as Chris had thought he might. Bryant played a flamboyant, queen-centred game and when Chris inevitably worked out a fork and took that piece away from him, Bryant’s strategy usually went to pieces. Chris’s cautious defensive earthworks stood him in good stead every time and Bryant continued to be perplexed when his assaults broke on the battlements of pawns while a pair or a trio of innocuous pieces chased his exposed king around the board and pinned it to an ignominious checkmate. But he was learning, and seemed content to pay the price of that process in defeats. His calls at weekends came far faster than they had in the beginning, and Chris was taking longer to respond each time. This last match, at over two weeks, had already lasted twice as long as the preceding games. Chris thought it might be time to go up in the loft and bring down some of the battered strategy books his father’s brother had given him as a child. He needed to sand off the rust if he was going to hold his lead.

Maybe in return, Mike was teaching him to shoot. They were down to the Shorn armoury a couple of times a week now, firing off Nemex rounds at the holotargets until Chris’s gun hand was numb with the repeated kick of the big gun. To his own surprise, he was turning out to have some natural aptitude. He hit things more often than he missed, and if he didn’t yet have Mike’s casual precision with the Nemex, he was certainly making, in the midst of the crashing thunder on the firing range, a quiet kind of progress.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

‘Got something for you,’ said Bryant, producing the briefing disc from his pocket with a conjuror’s flourish. He held it up between index and ring fingers. The light caught it and opened up a rainbow-sheened wedge on the bright silver circle. Chris looked at the colours curiously.

‘And that is?’

‘Work, my friend. And this season’s shot at the big time. TV fame, as many drive-site groupies as you can handle.’

Chris ran the disc at home.

‘Look it over,’ Bryant told him. ‘Kick back and relax, take off your tie and shoes, pour yourself a shot of that iodine-flavoured shit you drink and just let it wash over you. I’m not looking for feedback for at least forty-eight hours.’

‘Why can’t I just run it now?’ Chris wanted to know.

‘Because,’ leaning closer, with a secret-of-my-success type air, ‘that way you’re keyed up with anticipation and you eat it up at a deeper level. Your brain really sucks it in, just like the forty-eight-hour wait after gives it time to really stew, and by the time we meet to talk about it, you’re ready to boil over with insight.’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘Old consultancy trick from way back.’

‘This just you and me?’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Three-man team. You, me, Nick Makin.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is there a problem with that?’ Bryant’s eyes narrowed. ‘Something I should know about?’

‘No, no.’

Watching the closing sequences of the briefing disc, Chris turned it over in his head and tried to work out why he did feel there was a problem with Nick Makin. Makin hadn’t exactly come across as friendly, but neither had Hewitt, or Hamilton for that matter, and a lot of Shorn execs had probably heard the story of Elysia Bennett and Chris Faulkner’s sentiment attack.

The disc ended with the Shorn Associates logo engraved into a metallic finish on the screen, then clicked off. Chris shelved his thoughts, picked up his drink and went to look for his wife.

He thought for a moment she’d gone to bed with a book, but as he passed the kitchen he saw that the connecting door to the garage was open and the lights were on. Led by the clinking sounds of tools, he walked through, and around the bulk of the Saab, which was jacked up on one side. Carla’s coverall-clad legs and hips protruded from under the car beside an unrolled oilskin cloth full of spanners. As he watched she must have stretched out to one side for something, because the angle of her hips shifted and the plain of her stomach changed shape beneath the coveralls. He felt the customary twinge of arousal that her more sinuous movements still fired through him.

‘Hey,’ he kicked one of her feet. ‘What’re you doing?’

She stayed beneath the car. ‘What does it look like I’m doing. I’m checking your undercarriage.’

‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’

There was no response other than the creak of something metallic being tightened.

‘I said I thought you’d gone to bed.’

‘Yeah, I heard you.’

‘Oh. You just didn’t think it was worth answering me.’

From the stillness he knew she had stopped work. He didn’t hear the sigh, but he could have cued it, accurate to milliseconds.

‘Chris, you’re looking at my legs. Obviously I haven’t gone to bed.’

‘Just making conversation.’

‘Well, it’s not the most engaging conversational gambit I’ve ever heard, Chris. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up on it.’

‘Jesus! Carla, sometimes you can be so—‘ Anger and dismay at the idea of having a row with his wife’s feet gave ground in a single jolt to mirth. It was such a ludicrous image that he suddenly found himself smirking and trying to stifle a snort of laughter.

She heard it and slid out from under the car as if spring-loaded there. One hand knuckled across her nose and left streaks of grease.

‘What’s so funny?’

For some reason, the irritation in her voice combined with her rapid ejection from under the car and the grease on her nose drove the final nail into the coffin of Chris’s seriousness. He began to cackle uncontrollably. Carla sat up and watched curiously as he leaned back on the wall and laughed.

‘I said what’s so ...’

Chris slid down the wall, spluttering. Carla gave up as a reflexive smile fought its way onto her face.

‘What?’ she asked, more softly.

‘It was just,’ Chris was forcing the words out between giggles and snorts. ‘Just your legs, you know.’

‘Something funny about my legs?’

‘Well, your feet really.’ Chris put his glass down and wiped at his eyes. ‘I, just.’ He shook his head and waved a hand with minimal descriptive effect. ‘Just thought it was funny, talking to them, you know. Your feet.’ He snorted again. ‘It’s. Doesn’t matter.’

She got up from the floor with an accustomed flexing motion and went to crouch beside him. Turning her hand to present the ungrimed back, she brushed it against his cheek.

‘Chris ...’

‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said suddenly.

She held up her hands. ‘I’ve got to wash up. In fact, I need a shower.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

In the shower, he stood behind her and ran soaped hands over her breasts, down across her belly and into the V of her thighs. She chuckled deep in her throat and reached back for his erection, hands still gritty with the last of the engine grime. For a while it was enough to lean in the corner of the shower stall together, locked in an unhurried kiss, rubbing at each other languidly in the steam and pummelling jets of hot water. When the last of the dirt and soap had cascaded off them and swirled away, Carla swung herself up and braced her upper body in the corner while her thighs gripped Chris around the waist and her hips ground against this.

It was an inconclusive coupling, so Chris shut off the water and staggered with Carla’s arms and thighs still locked around him into the bedroom, where they collapsed giggling onto the bed and set about running through every posture in the manual.

Later, they lay on soaked sheets with their limbs hooked around each other and faces angled together. Moonlight fell in through the window and whitened the bed.

‘Don’t go,’ she said suddenly.

‘Go?’ Chris looked down in puzzlement. He had slid out of her some time ago. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here in this bed with you. Forever.’

‘Forever?’

‘Well, till about six-thirty anyway.’

‘I’m serious, Chris.’ She lifted herself to look into his face. ‘Don’t go on this Cambodia thing. Not up against Nakamura.’

‘Carla.’ It was almost a reprimand the way he said it. ‘We’ve been over this before. It’s my job. We don’t have any choice. There’s the house, the cards, how are we going to cover those things if I’m not driving?’

‘I know you’ve got to drive, Chris, but at Hammett McColl—‘

‘It’s not the same, Carla. At HM I already had my rep. I’ve got to carve it out all over again at Shorn, or some snot-nosed junior analyst is going to call me out, and once that starts you’re watching your tail forever. If they think you’re easing up, going soft, they’re on you like fucking vultures. The only way to beat that is to stay hard and keep them scared. That way you make partner, and from then on it’s a Sunday afternoon spin. They can’t touch you. No one below partner status is allowed to call you out.’ A vague disquiet passed over him as he remembered what Bryant had told him about Louise Hewitt and the partner called Page. ‘And partner challenges are few and far between. You see them coming. You can negotiate. It’s more civilised at that level.’

‘Civilised.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Carla was silent for a while. Then she rolled away from him and huddled herself into the pillow.

‘The disc says Nakamura are going to send Mitsue Jones.’

Chris shifted a little and tucked in behind her. ‘Yes, probably. But if you’d stayed to watch the rest of it, you would have seen that Jones hasn’t duelled in the last six months. And it won’t be her home turf. There’s a good chance they won’t even use her because of that. Not knowing the road can get you killed a lot faster than going up against a better driver. And anyway, driving on the same team as Mike Bryant and this other guy Makin, I’ve got nothing to worry about. Really.’

Carla shivered. ‘I saw a profile of Jones a couple of years ago. They say she’s never lost a tender.’

‘Nor have I. Nor has Bryant as far as I know.’

‘Yes, but she’s driven over two dozen challenges, and she’s only twenty-eight. I saw her interviewed, and she looks scary, Chris. Really scary.’

Chris laughed gently against the skin at the nape of Carla’s neck. ‘That’s just camerawork. In the States, she’s done centrefolds for Penthouse Online. Pouting lips, the works. She’s a fucking pin-up, Carla. It’s all hype.’

For a moment, he almost believed it himself.

‘When is it?’ she asked quietly.

‘Wednesday next week. Dawn start. I’ve got to sleep over at the office Tuesday night. You want to come in and stay in the hospitality suites with me?’

‘No. I’ll go across to Dad’s.’

‘You could always ask him to come and stay here for a change.’ Chris frowned and nuzzled at her back. ‘You know I don’t like the thought of you sleeping in that shithole. I worry about you.’

Carla turned round to face him again. It was hard to tell which was uppermost in her expression, affection or exasperation. ‘You worry about me? Chris, listen to yourself, will you? Next Wednesday you’re out on the road, duelling, and you’re worried about me sleeping in some substandard housing. Come on.’

‘There’s been a lot of violence on that estate,’ said Chris doggedly. ‘If I had my way—‘

He stopped, not entirely sure what he wanted to say next.

‘You’d what?’

He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Forget it. I just think, why can’t Erik come and stay here with us for a change?’

‘You know why.’

Chris sighed. ‘Yeah, because I’m a fucking suited parasite on the lives of honest working men and women.’

‘Got it in one.’ Carla kissed him. ‘Come on, I’ll be alright. You just worry about keeping my spaced armour intact. If you come back with the wings all chewed up like last time, you really will see some violence.’

‘Oh yeah?’

She jabbed him in the ribs. ‘Oh yeah. I didn’t put in all that work to have you broadside and stick like a fucking no-namer. You drive like it matters what happens to your wheels, or that’ll be the last blowjob you see this year.’

‘Have to go to my usual supplier then. Ow!’

‘Fucking piece of shit! Usual supplier did you say? Who else are you getting blowjobs from, you piece of—‘

‘Blowtorch! I thought you said blowtorch.’

Their mingled laughter penetrated the glass of the window and sounded faintly, in the still of the garden beyond. Had Erik Nyquist been there in the darkness, he would have been forced to admit that what he could hear was, indisputably, the sound of his daughter and the man she had married having fun. He might even have been glad to hear it.

Unfortunately, Erik Nyquist was nearly a hundred kilometres southwest of the laughter, listening instead through paper-thin walls to the sounds of an edge dealer beating his girlfriend to pulp. In the garden, the only witness to the noise of Chris and Carla’s hilarity was a large tawny owl who watched the window unwinkingly for a moment, and then turned its attention back to the more pressing matter of disembowelling the half-dead field mouse in its talons.

Chapter Twelve

Apparently, it was a long-standing Shorn tradition to do final briefings down among the variously stripped and jacked-up bodies of the company workshops. Chris could see where the custom originated. Nominally, it gave the executives the opportunity to do some corporate bonding with the mechanics overseeing their final vehicle checks. Far more importantly, the scattered flare of welding torches and the stink of scorched metal put the hard edge of reality on what might have otherwise seemed very far removed from the air-conditioned civility of a more conventional briefing room. In Shorn parlance, it avoided any potential ambiguity.

Accordingly, Hewitt kept it brutally short. Keep it tight, don’t fuck up. Come back with the contract. Leave the others in pieces on the road. She thanked the chief mechanic personally for his team’s hard work, and walked away.

After she’d gone, Bryant went for Indian carry-out and Chris sat in the open passenger doorway of the Saab, leafing absently through the background printout on Mitsue Jones, while two mechanics in logo-flashed company coveralls strove in vain to find anything worth doing to the engine that Carla had not already done.

‘Chris?’ It was Bryant, somewhere off amidst the clang and crackle of the body shop. ‘Chris, where are you?’

‘Round here.’

There was the sound of stumbling, a clatter and cursing. Chris repressed a grin and did not look up from the printout. Ten seconds later Bryant appeared round the opened hood of the Saab, cartons of take-out food in his arms and a huge naan bread jammed into his mouth. He seated himself without ceremony on a pile of worn tyres opposite Chris and started laying out the food. He took the naan bread out of his mouth and gestured with it towards two of the cartons.

‘That’s yours. Onion bhaji, and dhansak. That’s the mango chutney. Where’d Makin go?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Toilet? He looked pretty constipated.’

‘Nah, Makin always looks like that. Anal-retentive.’

A shadow fell across the food cartons and Bryant looked up, biting on the naan again. He talked through the mouthful.

‘Nick. Your tikka’s in there. Rice there. Spoons.’

Makin seated himself with a wary glance at Chris.

‘Thanks, Michael.’

There was silence for a while, broken only by the sounds of chewing. Bryant ate as if ravenous and finished first. He cast glances at both men.

‘Make your wills?’

‘Why? I’m not going to die.’ Makin looked across at Chris. ‘Are you?’

Chris shrugged and wiped his fingers, still chewing.

‘See how I feel.’

Bryant coughed laughter. Makin allowed himself a small, precise smile. ‘Vewy good. It’s good to have a sense of humour. I hear they ah big on it at HM. Must make losing more beahable.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris smiled gently back. ‘It can make winning pwetty wadical too, you should twy it.’

Makin tensed. His glasses gleamed in the overhead arc light.

‘Does the way I speak amuse you?’

‘Not weally.’

‘Hey, you guys,’ Bryant protested. ‘Come on.’

‘You know, Chwis,’ Makin looked down at his open right hand as if considering using it as a fist. ‘I’m not a chess player. Not much of a game player at all. Oh, I know you like symbolism. Games. Humour. All good ways of avoiding confontation.’

He tossed his fork into the cooling sauces of Chris’s carton.

‘But tomorrow is a confontation. You can’t laugh it away, you can’t turn it into a game. Mitsue Jones won’t play chess with you. She’ll hit you with evything she’s got and she’ll hit you fast.’

On the last word he clapped his hands violently and his eyes pinned Chris from behind the rectangular-paned screens of his glasses.

‘There’ll be no time to consider your moves out there. You must see it coming.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘And act. Nothing else.’

Chris nodded and looked down at his food for a moment. Then his hand whiplashed out and snatched Makin’s glasses from his nose.

‘I think I see what you mean,’ he said brightly.

‘Chris.’ There was a warning in Mike Bryant’s voice.

Without his glasses, Makin looked a lot less sharkish, for all his clear lack of vision defects. The narrowly watchful face now looked simply thin. When he spoke, his voice had gone thick and slow with rage, but there was nothing to back it up.

‘Michael, I don’t think I want to dwive with this clown.’

Chris held out his hand. ‘Would you like your glasses back?’ he asked innocently.

Oddly, it was Bryant who snapped.

‘Alright you two, that’s enough. Nick, you asked for that, so don’t act so fucking superior. And Chris, give him back his glasses. Jesus, I’m going up against Nakamura with a pair of fucking kids.’

‘Michael, I don’t think—‘

‘No, you didn’t think, Nick. You just opened your fucking mouth. Louise asked me to head up this team. When she asks you, you can pick who drives with you. Until then, just get in line and keep a lid on it.’

The small circle of space between the three men rocked with silent tension. Behind them, the two mechanics looking over the Saab had stopped what they were doing to watch the action. Nick Makin drew in a compressed breath, then took his glasses back without a word and stalked away.

Bryant prodded at the food cartons for a while. Finally he glanced up and met Chris’s gaze.

‘Don’t pay any attention to him. He’ll have calmed down by morning.’ He brooded a little. ‘I think this chess thing might be backfiring. Symbolic conflict isn’t what you’d call a popular concept around here.’

‘What, no game-playing? Come on, you’re winding me up.’

‘Yeah, there’s games, sure. Some of the other Shorn guys I know are into those alliance games on the net. The Alphamesh leagues, stuff like that. But chess.’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Just not cool, man. Makin isn’t the first to mention it. I don’t think it’ll be catching on.’

Chris picked an onion bhaji out of a carton and bit into it reflectively. ‘Yeah, well. Always happens when you challenge someone’s world view. Means they have to re-evaluate. Most people don’t like to think that hard.’

Bryant forced a chuckle that loosened up audibly as he produced it.

‘Yeah, me included. Still, Makin should know better. No way you start this shit at a time like this.’

‘Going to be bloody tomorrow, huh?’

‘You heard of Jones?’

‘Me and the rest of the Western world, yeah.’

Bryant looked at him. ‘There’s your answer, then.’

‘Well,’ Chris tossed the half-eaten bhaji back into the carton. ‘I always wondered what the big bonuses were for.’

‘You keep your mind on that bonus tomorrow,’ grinned Bryant, regaining some of his good cheer. ‘And everything will work out just fine. You’ll see. Easy money.’

The Acropolitic car caught the central reservation barrier head-on, flipped effortlessly into the air and came down on its back, wheels still spinning. A figure slumped broken and still within. Chris, who’d been expecting a prolonged dogfight with the other car, whooped and slammed a fist against the roof of his own vehicle as he swept past.

‘Acropolitic, thank you and goodnight!’

‘Nice,’ said Mike Bryant’s voice over the intercom. ‘Now form up and stay tight. Those guys were in pristine condition, which to my way of thinking means Nakamura aren’t on this stretch.’

‘Conforming,’ said Nick Makin crisply. Chris smirked, raised his eyes to the roof and, saying nothing, tucked into the wedge behind Mike.

Behind them, the wrecks of the Acropolitic team lay strewn across three kilometres of highway, like the abandoned toys of a child with emerging sociopathic tendencies. Two of them were burning.

‘Conforming.’

Chris wasn’t the only one smirking at Makin’s fighter-pilot pretensions. Thirty kilometres up ahead, Mitsue Jones grinned disbelievingly as the voice crackled out of her car radio. She grasped the edge of her open door and hinged herself out of the Mitsubishi Kaigan. The wind came and battered at her two-hundred-dollar Karel Mann tumbling spike cut.

Oh well.

The face beneath the jagged hair was pin-up perfect, tanned from a month on the Mexican Pacific coast and made up to accent her Japanese heritage. In keeping with Nakamura duel tradition, she went formally suited, a black Daisuke Todoroki ensemble whose sole concession to the driving was the flared and carefully vented skirt. There were flat-heeled leather boots on her feet, sheer black tights on her legs.

‘Looking good, Mits.’

She cranked round in the direction of the shout. Behind the long sunken lines of the Kaigan, her colleagues’ own shorter, blunter Mitsubishi cruisers were parked with raked precision along the overgrown curve of the intersection roundabout. The two Nakamura wedge men were cutting up lines of edge on the sleek black hood of the closest car. One of them waved at her.

Jones pulled a face and turned to the motorway bridge railing on the other side of the road. Beyond the bridge, the green of the landscape rose in a series of granite flecked interlocking spurs that blocked out the view of the road at about five kilometres distance. She crossed the road and prodded at the feet of the fourth Nakamura team member, who sat with his back to the rails, checking the load on his Vickers-Cat shoulder-launcher. He glanced up as Jones kicked him and grinned through his beard.

‘Ready to rock ‘n’ roll.’ It came out surfer-drawled. His English, like hers, was West Coast American. The association ran back a couple of years. He nodded across at the other two men and their edge ritual. ‘You cool with that?’

Jones shrugged. ‘Whatever works. New York says they’re the best we’ve got around here, and they should know.’

‘They should.’ The missileer laid his weapon aside and got up. Standing he was a giant, towering over Jones’s diminutive frame. ‘So what’s the disposition?’

‘Acropolitic are out of the game.’ Jones leaned on the bridge rail. ‘Shorn did the shit work for us, just like we figured. All we have to do is sweep them up.’

The missileer leaned beside her. ‘And you’re sure this is going to work?’

‘It worked at Denver, didn’t it?’

‘It was new at Denver.’

‘On this side of the Atlantic it’s still new. Total press blackout until US Trade and Finance thrash out the precedent.’ A cold smile. ‘Which, I’m reliably informed by our government liaison unit, is going to take the rest of the year. The report won’t be out till next spring. These guys aren’t going to know what hit them.’

‘It could still be disallowed.’

‘No.’ She seemed lost in the southward perspectives of the road below them. ‘I had the legal boys check the rulings back as far as they go. No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle, no substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. We’ll get through the same loophole we used in Colorado.’

Out of the open door of the Kaigan battlewagon, the radio crackled again. The voices of the men they were waiting for wavered as the set strained to pick up and decode the scrambled channel. There was a sudden increase in volume and clarity as the Shorn team cleared some geographical obstacle in amongst the rising land behind the bridge. Mitsue Jones straightened up.

‘Better get in position, Matt. Feels like showtime.’

Mike Bryant saw the intersection bridge up ahead as they cleared the last spur and he let a fraction of his speed bleed off.

‘Watch the bridge,’ he said easily. ‘Watch your peripherals till we’re past. Keep it tight.’

On the northside ramp, Mitsue Jones heard him and grinned as she slipped her driving glasses on. In the rearview mirror, she saw Matt settle into a firing stance with the Vickers-Cat. She let off the parking brake and the Mitsubishi shifted on the hard shoulder.

The missile leapt out, trailing a thin vapour thread as it went.

As they hit the bridge, Bryant saw it. Through the windscreen a column of greasy smoke lifted from the hills up ahead. A muffled crump rolled in to accompany the explosion.

‘See that?’ He braked a little more, puzzled. ‘They must be in trouble up ahead.’

‘I don’t know, Mike.’ Chris’s voice crashed into the cabin. ‘Trouble with who? Tender was all over the news this week. No one’ll be out here who doesn’t have to be.’

‘Maybe one of those fancy Mits’ fuel feeds blew up on them,’ suggested Makin.

‘Could be.’ Chris’s tone said he thought it was a stupid idea, but since they’d started the run both he and Makin had shut down the bullshit. ‘I still don’t like, go right!! Right!!!’

The yell came too late. They were under the bridge and past the access ramp and the sleek black shapes on the left came spilling directly down the grass slope like commandos breaching a wall defence. The lead Nakamura car hit the highway at reckless speed, bounced and slammed into Mike Bryant’s BMW.

‘Fuck!’

Bryant hauled on the wheel, too slow. The second Nakamura vehicle scuttled through the gap behind him and came up on his right flank. There was a long grating clang as the two Mitsubishi cruisers sandwiched him. Bryant caught a flash of a third vehicle, longer and lower, pulling ahead and knew what was going to happen. He wrestled desperately with wheel and brakes, but the clinch was set. The Nakamura wingmen had him.

‘Can you get these motherfuckers off me,’ Bryant tried for a nonchalant tone, but sweat was beading on his face. Every move he tried to break free was matched. ‘They’re going to head-to-head me.’

A side impact jarred through Bryant.

‘No fucking way.’ Chris yelled his results. ‘They’re locked on tight, Mike. You’ve got to crash-stop.’

‘Can’t afford to lose the momentum, Chris. You know that.’

‘You can’t afford to stay in theah, Mike.’ The crisp edge of control in Makin’s tone made him sound almost prissy. ‘Chwis is wight. Dwop out, pick it up after.’

‘No fucking way.’

Up ahead, the long, low Mitsubishi battlewagon whipped around on shrieking tyres and came back up the highway towards the locked-up Shorn leader.

‘Nick,’ Bryant’s voice was strained. ‘That’s Jones up ahead. Get out there and see if you can’t derail her.’

‘On it.’ Makin’s BMW flashed on the edge of Bryant’s vision as it accelerated away from the three-vehicle clinch. Bryant blew out breath, hard and fast, and settled into his speed.

‘What about me?’

‘You hang back, Chris. This doesn’t work, I’m going to need you.’

Up ahead, he watched as Nick Makin drove hard at what had to be Mitsue Jones’s vehicle. A hot knot of hope pulsed through his guts in defiance of the icy knowing that told him Jones would not be stopped. The Nakamura team had set him up with consummate skill, and they’d left him with only two options. Slam stop and lose the duel inertia; in effect drop out of the combat, admit Nakamura’s tactical superiority and have to drive catch up for the next two hundred kilometres—

An image of Chris’s chessboard flashed through his mind.

Symbolic defeat.

Or—

The Mitsubishi flinched aside and left Makin stalled across the highway. Bryant grimaced and floored his accelerator. The two Nakamura vehicles matched it effortlessly. The battlewagon came on.

‘Chris, this is going to be messy,’ he gritted. ‘Get yourself clear.’

Seconds from the chicken head-to-head, the two Nakamura wingmen peeled away as if their vehicles were under the command of a single driver. Bryant caught a face grinning at him from the left-hand vehicle and a hand lifted in farewell. Jones’s car was almost on him. The radio crackled at him.

‘Sayonara, Bryant-san.’

Mitsue Jones must have jerked the wheel at the last possible moment. Bryant misread it and stayed on line, but Jones had left the rear of the Mitsubishi in his path. The BMW hit at speed and the front left wing of the car kicked into the air. Bryant yelled, incoherent with shock as his vehicle left the road. The Omega turned lazily in the air and came down on its side, trailing a carpet of sparks across the asphalt. Three seconds into the skid, it ploughed into the central reservation.

Jones heard the yell but had no time for anything other than fighting her own vehicle back under control. The Mitsubishi whipped about on the impact and staggered sideways. For three seconds the wheel was like a live thing under her hands, and then she had it back. She braked the cruiser towards a smoking halt, facing back the way she’d come.

Bryant’s BMW lay on one side, jammed into the central barrier and leaning jauntily. The vehicle’s roof faced out, windscreen showing spiderweb cracked in the weak spring sunlight. Bryant was pinned in clear view, struggling with his belt. Jones snarled a grin and came off the brake, slamming in the gear as the cruiser freewheeled backward, accelerating hard against the inertial drag. The Kaigan’s engine shrilled and the cruiser sprang forward.

Trapped and twisted against his own seatbelt, Mike Bryant heard the sound and flailed about to look. By the time he had forced his head round far enough to see, the Mitsubishi was almost on him.

He just had time to scream.

‘Ah, fu—‘

And the cruiser was gone, jolted past, and there was a titanium-grey Saab crunched to its tail. Two engines in savagely low gear, roaring against each other, and the shriek of steel under stress.

‘Chris?’

Chris’s voice drifted into the upturned space, laconic.

‘Be right back.’

Metal tore down one wing of the Nakamura car and ripped clear, exposing the driver’s side rear wheel. Jones shrieked abuse in Japanese, her English abandoned in momentary fury. Chris was already past, yelling into his mike with sudden urgency.

‘Makin, where are you?’

‘Up ahead.’ There was a tight edge of panic in the other man’s voice. ‘I’ve got both these motherfuckers on my tail. I think they’re going to lock me up same as Mike.’

‘On my way.’

Chris spotted the Nakamura wingmen a pair of seconds later, dancing spirals behind and alongside Makin’s BMW. As he watched, the left-hand car slipped in and struck the Shorn car a glancing blow. Makin jerked sideways and the other Mitsubishi rammed him from the rear. It was consummate teamwork, Chris had time to reflect briefly, something that the young guns at Shorn could learn from and probably never would. Then he was on the left-hand car. He hit it at full acceleration and felt the impact down to the roots of his teeth.

‘Right,’ he muttered.

The Nakamura car tried to pull away but didn’t have the power. Chris gave up a hand’s breadth of space, then floored the pedal and hit again. This time the wingman tried to skate sideways right. Chris matched the move. He gave up the hand’s breadth again and when the Nakamura driver slewed to the left, he let him. He went with the move and forced it. Another jolt and he was jammed onto the rear fender, driving the other car towards the grass bank that lined the left-hand hard shoulder.

It could have been better - could for example have been the drop on the other side of the carriageway - but it would have to do.

Something flashed in his peripheral vision, the glossy black of the other Nakamura car. The other wingman was coming to his comrade’s aid. Chris fought down the urge to let go and face the new threat. His voice went gritted into the mike.

‘Makin, get rid of this fucker, will you?’

‘Done.’

The BMW was there, twilight blue jostling with the black for position. The two cars peeled away as the Nakamura driver fled. Chris turned his full attention back to killing the man in front of him.

The rapid rumble as they crossed the cats-eye line of the hard shoulder and the wingman finally panic-braked as he neared the bank. It was far too late. Chris hit the overdrive on the Saab’s gear box and drove his opponent hard up the fifty-degree incline. As soon as the other vehicle was fully off the road, he braked savagely and dropped back. Denied the power of the Saab’s pushing, and subject to his own desperately applied brakes, the wingman slithered back down the grass, hit the road surface with an overload of kinetic energy to shed and tumbled across the three lanes into the crash barrier.

The Mitsubishi exploded.

‘Bonus,’ said Chris to nobody in particular, and threw the Saab into a U-turn crash-stop.

A kilometre back along the highway, he saw what he’d been expecting. Mitsue Jones’s battlewagon heading directly for him, trailing wreckage from one wing like a shark with prey in its jaws. Chris engaged the Saab’s launch gear. The rear wheels squealed on the road, scrabbled for purchase and found it. The Saab leapt forward.

Past the egg-yolk yellow and billowing black smoke of the crashed and burnt wingman, back down the slope towards the bridge where the duel had kicked in. The hungry roar of the engine seemed to recede as he plunged back towards the Nakamura car. He had time to notice the marred lines of the other vehicle as it ballooned in his windscreen, time to notice the pewter cloud formations smeared across the sky behind, time even to see the gusting wind blowing the grass flat along the embankment to his right—

At the last possible moment, Jones flinched left, covering the torn wing damage as he guessed she would. He ploughed into her right-hand rear side with brutal precision. The Saab spaced armouring held and opened a huge gap over the Mitsubishi’s rear tyre. Chris hit the brakes and at the relatively low speed he’d developed the U-turn came comfortably. He was back on Jones’s tail before she’d made five hundred metres of road away from him.

The Mitsubishi was crippled, limping at barely a hundred. He matched speeds and glanced across at the other car. Polarised glass hid Jones from view.

Finish it.

He slewed sideways, caught the exposed rear tyre on the leading edge of his front fender and braked. Textbook manoeuvre. The tyre ripped and exploded with a muffled bang. He felt the front fender unstitch along half its length with the force of the impact, but the rest held.

Yes! Carla, you fucking beauty!

The Kaigan jerked and began to skid. Chris worked his pedals, gunned the engine and rammed into the rear of the Mitsubishi as it floated past ahead of him. The skid built, the car wallowed on the road and Chris steered back across and around. Another sharp jab at the retreating side of the car. The driver’s side door dented inward, and Mitsue Jones was irretrievable. The Nakamura battlewagon skated a figure of eight in towards the bank and hit with an audible crump.

Chris brought the Saab to a screeching halt, braking clouds of rubber smoke off the asphalt as he slid past Jones’s wreck. A three-sixty sweep showed no other vehicles in either direction. He engaged the reverse and backed up gingerly to check on his handiwork.

‘Chris?’ It was Bryant’s voice, distorted over the comset.

‘Yeah, Mike. I’m here.’ The strange calm was back, the sky and windswept landscape pressing down on his consciousness like a thumb on an eyeball. He gave the status report through lips that felt slightly numb. ‘One wingman down, flamed out. Think Makin got the other. You okay?’

‘I will be as soon as someone comes and cuts me out of this fucking wreck. What about Jones?’

He stared at the wrecked battlewagon. The sleek bodywork was torn and crumpled, sunk on tyres that had blown out somewhere in the crash. Steam curled up from the gashed radiator grille like smoke, was whipped away by the wind. And in amidst all that calm, it looked as if Jones was trying to kick the driver’s side door open. The buckled metal quivered but didn’t shift.

Finish it.

‘Jones is out of the game,’ he said.

Mike’s whoop came through, bristling with static and overload distortion. Chris dropped his hand to grasp the gear lever, and with the motion a small ripple arose in the pit of his stomach. It was nothing much, the feeling of having eaten too much sweet food, but as his hand touched the lever, he was suddenly slightly sick of the whole thing.

Then finish it!

Burn her up. The thought belched abruptly up from the deepest mud-geyser recesses of his being, and it gripped him like claws. It was the sickness of the moment before, turned up to full. The edgy thrill of rollercoaster exhilaration as he turned the sticky new idea over in his mind. Ram the tank and barbecue that bitch. Go on! If it doesn’t blow when it ruptures, you can go and light her from close up. Like—

He shook himself free of it with a shiver. Impossible to believe he’d even been considering it. After all, what if the tank blew when he hit—

They almost never do.

‘Too risky.’ He heard himself talking out loud to the hot mud-thing in his head and what he heard sounded too much like whining. He grimaced and dropped the car into reverse again. Much better just to—

He backed up another twenty metres, aligned the nose of the Saab and then crushed the accelerator smoothly to the floor. The Saab leapt across the short gap and slammed into the driver’s side door. Metal crunched and the Mitsubishi rocked on its springs. The glass in the side window cracked and splintered. He backed up and watched carefully to see if there was any movement.

Do it again! Finish it!

She is finished.

Hewitt, with the Nemex in her hand. You bring back their plastic.

He heard his own voice in the Shorn conference chamber two months ago.

Nobody likes ambiguity.

Yeah, and this is real fucking ambiguous, Chris. So either you go for the burn, or you take that pistol in your pocket and go and recover Jones’s fucking plastic right now.

‘Chris, are you okay?’ Bryant, sounding concerned. His voice ruptured the ominous quiet on the comlink, and every second that Chris left without replying was a stillness that prickled.

‘Yeah. I’m fine.’ He unlatched the door and pushed it open. The Nemex had already somehow found its way into his hand. ‘Be right back.’

He climbed out and advanced cautiously towards the Mitsubishi, gun-hand extended and trembling slightly. Steam was still boiling from the engine space, hissing as it went, but there was no scent of petrol. The car’s fuel system, classic weakness in most Mitsubishi battlewagons, had apparently not ruptured.

Chris stopped less than a metre away from the smashed glass of the polarised window and peered in over the sight of the Nemex. Mitsue Jones lay, still strapped into the driver’s seat, face bloodied and right arm hanging slackly at her side. She was still conscious and as Chris’s pale shadow fell across the car window she looked up. Blood had run into her right eye and gummed it shut, but the other eye was desperately expressive. Her left hand came up and across her trapped body in a futile warding gesture.

Finish it!

Chris shielded his face with one hand and levelled the Nemex on Jones’s face.

Nobody likes ambiguity.

The shot echoed out flatly across the pewter-smeared sky. The blood splattered warm on his fingers.

Chapter Thirteen

‘Would you say that this tender was excessively bloody?’

Chris’s face felt stretched tight under the make-up. Studio lights made his eyes ache with glare. Beside him, Bryant betrayed no discomfort as he tilted his head back at an angle and swivelled slightly on his chair.

‘That’s a tricky question, Liz.’

He paused. Pure theatrical bullshit, the bloodshed question was a staple of all business news post-tender interviews. Bryant had had nearly a full day to think about his answer.

Liz Linshaw waited. She crossed long, tanned legs and readjusted the datadown clipboard on her short-skirted lap. From where he was sitting, slightly to the left of Bryant’s centre-stage, Chris could see liquid crystal sentences spilling down the clipboard screen. Her next set of cues from the studio control room.

From where he was sitting, he could also see the swell Liz Linshaw’s left breast made where it squeezed up in the open neck of her blouse. He shifted his gaze uncomfortably, just as Bryant launched into his answer.

‘The thing is, Liz, any competitive tender is bound to involve a certain degree of conflict. If it didn’t, then the whole market ethos of what we’re doing here would be lost. And in the case of a tender of this magnitude, obviously the parties involved are going to play hard. That, sadly but necessarily, means bloodshed. But that’s exactly the way it should be.’

Liz Linshaw made out she was taken aback. ‘There should be bloodshed? You’re saying that it’s desirable?’

‘Desirable, no.’ Bryant put on a schoolmasterly smile that looked Notley-derived. Beside him, Louise Hewitt nodded sober agreement. ‘But consider. The situation in Cambodia is extreme. These people are not part of some theoretical economic model. They are involved in a life-and-death struggle to determine the future of their nation. At Shorn, we’ve just been appointed their financiers. We are supposed to fund and advise these people and, I might add, take a fair chunk of their GNP as a fee. Now, if you were a Cambodian, what kind of exec would you want? A suited theoretical economist with computer models he says define your reality half a world away? Or a warrior who has put his own life on the line to earn his place beside you?’

‘You call yourself a warrior.’ Linshaw made an elegant gesture that might have been acceptance. ‘And obviously the fact that it’s your team here at the Tebbit Centre this evening proves your credentials in that department. Alright. But does that necessarily make you the best economist for the job? Does a good economist have to have blood on his hands?’

‘I’d say a practising free-market economist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t doing his job properly. It comes with the market, and the decisions it demands. Hard decisions, decisions of life and death. We have to make those decisions, and we have to get them right. We have to be determined to get them right. The blood on our hands today is the blood of our less determined colleagues, and that says something. To you, Liz, to our audience, and most of all to our Cambodian clients, that blood says that when the hard decisions come, we will not flinch from them.’

‘How do you feel about that, Chris?’ Liz Linshaw swivelled abruptly to face him. ‘You eliminated Mitsue Jones today. What do you think the Nakamura team lacked that gave you the edge?’

Chris blinked. He’d been drifting.

‘I think, ah. Ah, they were very polished, but ...’ He scrambled after the answer they’d worked out earlier when they ran the question checklist with the programme’s producer. ‘But, ah, there didn’t seem to be much flexibility of response in the way they played as a team. Once they’d sprung the trap and it failed, they were sluggish.’

‘Was this the first time you’d driven against Nakamura, Chris?’

‘Yes. Ah, well, apart from a few informal skirmishes, yes.’ Chris got his act together. ‘I drove against Nakamura junior execs in two consortium bids when I was working at Hammett McColl, but it’s not the same. In a consortium bid, people tend to get in each other’s way a lot. They usually haven’t had a lot of time to train. It’s easy to break team wedges. This was a whole different engine.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled brilliantly at him. ‘Was there any point where you were afraid Shorn were going to lose to Nakamura?’

Hewitt sat forward, bristling.

‘I don’t think we ever came that close,’ said Bryant.

‘Yes, but you were trapped in wreckage for most of the duel, Michael.’ There was just a hint of acid in Linshaw’s voice. ‘Chris, you were the one who actually took Jones down. Was there ever a critical point?’

‘I—‘ Chris glanced across at Bryant who was wearing a rather thin smile. The big man’s shoulders lifted in the barest of shrugs. Beyond him, Hewitt showed as much emotion as a block of granite. ‘I think the missile ploy caught us the way it was intended to - and the jury’s still out on whether that was a legal manoeuvre or not - but after Nakamura actually engaged, we were never really up against it.’

‘I see.’ Liz Linshaw leaned forward. ‘This is a great moment for you, isn’t it Chris. The hero of the hour. And coming so soon after your transfer. You must be over the moon.’

‘Uh, yes.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s my job.’

‘A job you enjoy?’

Mindful of Hewitt’s gaze, Chris manufactured a smile. ‘I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t like it, Liz.’

‘Of course.’ Linshaw seemed to have got what she wanted. She turned her attention to Hewitt. ‘Now, Louise, you made all this happen. How do you feel about the way your team performed?’

Chris switched off again as Hewitt began to mouth the viewer-consumable platitudes.

‘What was that all about?’

He asked Bryant the question later, as they sat in front of whisky tumblers in the hotel bar of the Tebbit Centre. Outside, wind-driven rain lashed impotently at big glass panels that gave a view out onto drenched and darkened hills. Makin had cried off early, pleading tomorrow’s crack-of-dawn start. It was pretty obvious he was choked about Chris’s guest spot on the Liz Linshaw evening special. Standard practice in post-tender reports was to interview only the team leader and the divisional head, but Bryant had been crowing about Chris’s performance from the moment they cut him out of the wreckage of his BMW. Makin had gone conspicuously unmentioned.

‘That?’ Bryant gave him a wry grin. ‘Well, let’s just say I’m not flavour of the month with Ms Linshaw at the moment.’

Chris frowned. His nerves were still a little shot from the duel and he found his mind tended to skitter when he tried to concentrate. At the same time, as if compensating for its poor performance in other areas, it spat chunks of memory at him with near total recall. Now, as if listening to it on tape, he heard the words Liz Linshaw had used over the radio that first morning as he drove in to the new job at Shorn: Still nothing on the no-name call out for Mike Bryant at Shorn Associates, don’t know where you’ve got to, Mike, but if you can hear me we’re anxious to hear from you. He strained to remember Bryant and Linshaw’s body language the evening of the quarterly review party, but his recall was too alcohol-damaged to trust.

‘Were you two, ah ... ?’

Bryant grinned and sank half his whisky. ‘If, by that delicate ah, you mean fucking, then yes. Yes, we were fucking.’

Chris sat still, remembering Suki.

As if reading his mind, Bryant said, ‘It was no big deal. Scratching an itch, you know. She gets off on drivers the way some guys do on Italian holoporn. It was back when Suki was, you know, off sex. Just after Ariana was born.’ He shrugged. ‘Like I said, no big deal.’

Chris tried to think of an appropriate question to fill the space. In the background, something insipid lilted from the bar’s sound system.

‘So how long did it last?’

‘Well,’ Bryant turned to face him, getting comfortable. ‘In the initial stages, about eight months. I’m telling you, Chris, she was hot. We both were. She was doing this in-depth study of Conflict Investment, for a series and then, you know, that book, New Asphalt Warriors. So we saw a lot of each other without anyone wondering. She used to do these interviews and then we’d get off camera and fuck like rabbits wherever there was a lockable door. I used to get hard-ons just talking to her on camera. Even after the series was wrapped, we were fucking two or three times a week in hotels around the city, or the car. She really liked that, the car. Then it sort of cooled off. Once a week, sometimes not even that. And Suki came back on line, so there was that as competition. I’d missed Suki, you know, and that whole pin-up buzz thing was fading anyway. There was about six months when Liz and I didn’t see each other at all.’ Another grin. ‘Then she made, like, this amazing comeback. She asked me out to the studio one night, after everyone had gone home. I wasn’t going to go at first, but I was curious, you know. Man, I’m glad I went.’ Bryant leaned closer, still grinning. ‘We fucked on the interview set and she filmed the whole thing with one of those big studio cameras. Then she mailed me the fucking disc at work. You believe that? I mean, I didn’t know at the time she was doing it, otherwise I’d never have agreed. Then suddenly there’s this Studio Ten disc on my desk with Souvenir written on it.’

‘Jesus.’

Bryant nodded. ‘I thought at first she was going to send it to Suki. Fact, I thought she already had when I got my copy. But when I rang her she just asked how I’d liked it and if I wanted a repeat performance. So the last six months we’ve been repeat-performing a couple of times a month and it’s still as hot as ever.’

‘And Suki?’

‘She doesn’t know. You know, the weird thing is, you’d think I’d go back to Suki too tired to perform but it’s not like that. I’m more buzzed when I get home from a session with Liz than I would be if I hadn’t had sex all week. It’s that fucking disc, man. It makes you feel like a fucking porn star.’

‘So what’s the problem now?’

‘Ah, nothing really. We had this big row the last time we met up to fuck.’ Bryant’s gaze floated off into the corners of the bar. The carnal shine faded from his face. He seemed disinclined to go on.

‘What about?’

Bryant sighed. ‘Ah, shit. Chris, do you think I was right to shoot those gangwit motherfuckers that night at the Falkland?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Chris heard himself and stopped. ‘I mean—‘

‘See that’s what I think.’

‘They were—‘

‘Fucking going to trash us, right?’

Chris gestured. ‘Uh, yeah.’

‘Right, that’s what I said. It’s what Suki says, it’s what the fucking corporate police enquiry says. So, what’s the big deal?’

‘She doesn’t buy it?’

Bryant glanced at him. ‘What’s to buy? I told her the truth.’

‘What about the machetes?’

‘Machetes? Wrecking bars? What’s the fucking difference. I don’t even remember which thing I told her.’ Bryant swallowed more whisky and waved his glass laterally. ‘Didn’t matter. She said I was a fucking animal. Get that. I, I was an animal. Never mind the fuckers with the crowbars, I was a fucking animal. You understand that?’

Chris crowded Carla’s voice out of his head with a pull at his own drink. ‘She wasn’t there, man.’

‘That’s right, she wasn’t.’ Bryant stared broodingly at the bottles behind the bar. ‘Fucking reporters.’

Chris snapped his fingers and the liveried barman arrived as if on rails. Bryant didn’t look at him. Chris indicated their glasses.

‘Fill us up.’

The liquor drizzled down, catching the light.

‘Got work to do tomorrow,’ said Bryant gloomily. ‘Makin’s right, you’ll see. They’ll want twenty-five fucking drafts of that contract before it’s put to bed. Bentick from the DTC, I know that motherfucker and he wants every ‘i’ double-dotted, just in case his precious minister runs into embarrassing questions on civilian casualties or some such shit.’

‘Worry about it tomorrow.’ Chris raised his glass. ‘Here. Small wars.’

‘Yeah, small wars.’

Crystal chimed between them. Bryant knocked back the whisky in one and signalled the barman again. He watched the glass fill up.

‘I’m an animal,’ he muttered with bitter disbelief. ‘I’m a fucking animal.’

They kicked it in the head about an hour later, when it became clear that no amount of drinking was going to extract Bryant from his sudden puddle of gloom. Chris half-carried his friend to the lift and along the corridor to his room, where he propped him against the wall while he fumbled with keys. Once inside the room, he hauled Mike most of the way onto the pristine expanse of king-size bed and set about unlacing his shoes. Bryant began to snore. Chris took off the shoes and shovelled Mike’s unshod feet up onto the bed with the rest of him.

As Chris bent over him to remove his tie, the other man stirred.

‘Liz?’ he queried blearily.

‘Not a chance,’ said Chris, loosening the knot on his tie.

‘Oh.’ Bryant heaved his head up and made an attempt to focus. ‘Chris. Don’t even think about it, man. Don’t even think about it.’

‘I won’t.’ Chris finished unknotting the tie and stripped it from around Bryant’s neck with a single hard tug.

‘That’s right.’ Bryant’s head fell back on the bed again and his eyes rolled sluggishly closed. ‘You’re a good guy, Chris. That’s you. You’re a. Fucking good guy.’

He drifted off to sleep again. Chris left him there snoring and let himself quietly out of the room. He slipped into his own room like a thief and went to his hotel bed, where he lay awake a while, masturbating to the thought of Liz Linshaw’s tanned thighs and cleavage.

It was very quiet inside the limo now. The torrential rain of the storm had died back to a persistent drizzle that smeared the windows but no longer drummed on the roof. The limo’s Rolls Royce engine made slightly less noise than the rush of its tyres on the wet asphalt outside. The loudest sound in the rear cabin was the chirrup of Louise Hewitt’s laptop as it processed data.

Maps and graphs came and went, summoned and dismissed by the deft ripple of Hewitt’s hands across the deck. Projections for the Cambodian conflict, altered minutely as new potential elements were factored in. Crop failures, what if? Typhoon impact, what if? Hong Kong federation cuts diplomatic ties, what if? Bryant’s preliminary work was an inspired piece of modelling, but Hewitt believed in tracking her subordinates and pushing for potential weaknesses until they emerged. It was an exercise in basic security. As with any alloy, you didn’t know the material well until you knew what would break it.

The car mobile purred up at her from where it was curled on the seat like a red eyed cat. She killed the phone’s video option and picked up the handset, eyes still fixed on the Hong Kong federation variant.

‘Yes?’

A familiar voice crackled in her ear. She smiled.

‘On my way to Edinburgh, why?’

Crackle crackle.

‘No, I didn’t think there was any point. I’ve got breakfast with a client in the Howard at eight and contracts to go over before that.’

Crackle crackle SNAP. Hewitt’s smile broadened.

‘Oh, is that what you thought? Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I wouldn’t have come all the way up here just for that. Good enough to eat though you looked.’

The phone crackled some more. Hewitt sighed and hoisted her gaze to the roof. Her voice became soothing.

‘Yes, media exposure’s a powerful thing. But I was sitting there, remember. I really wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.’

The voice in her ear grew agitated and Hewitt’s good-natured exasperation hardened. She sat forward.

‘Alright, listen. You just let me worry about Faulkner. You leave him alone.’ The crackling stopped on a sharp interrogation mark.

‘Yes, I know. I was there, remember. It’s no big surprise, to be honest. Look, it’s just an angle.’

Snap, crackle. Incredulous.

‘Yes, I do.’

Snap, question.

‘Because that’s what they pay me for. I don’t have the details worked out yet, but it shouldn’t take much leverage.’

Crackle, crackle, crackle.

‘Mike Bryant will do as he’s told. That’s the difference between them, and you need to remember that. Now, we’ve talked about this enough. I’ll be back in London day after tomorrow, we can meet and discuss it then.’

Sullen crackle. Silence.

Hewitt cradled the phone and grinned to herself in the quiet gloom.

Chapter Fourteen

‘Seen enough?’

Erik Nyquist got up and held the cracked remote closer to the screen. The red active light winked feebly a couple of times and the programme credits continued to scroll down, superimposed over an aerial view of Nakamura wreckage. Finally, Erik gave up on the failing remote and snapped on the blue standby screen manually. In the glow it cast, he turned back to face his daughter. Carla sat, glass in hand, and stared at the place where the images had been.

‘The hero of the hour,’ Erik grunted. ‘Jesus, the irony of that. Butcher a couple of fellow human beings to maximise neo-colonial profiteering half the globe away and you’re a goddamn hero.’

‘Dad,’ Carla said tiredly.

‘You heard her. This is a great moment for you, Chris. And your beloved husband sitting there grinning like a Mormon. I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t like it, Liz. Christ!’

‘He had no choice. The woman on the left was his boss, and from what I hear she already doesn’t like him. What was he supposed to do? If he stepped out of line the way you want, he’d probably lose his job.’

‘I know that.’ Erik went to the table that served him as an open-plan drinks cabinet and began to mix himself another vodka and orange. ‘Been there, bought the T-shirt. But sometimes you have to stand by the odd principle, you know.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Carla snapped, surprising herself. ‘And where did that get you in the end, standing by your much-vaunted principles?’

‘Well, let’s see.’ Erik grinned down into the glass he was pouring. Having provoked her, he was now cheerfully backing down again. It was one of his favourite drinking games. ‘I was arrested, held without trial under the Corporate Communications Act, shunned by my so-called friends and colleagues, blacklisted by every news editor in the country and refused a credit rating. I lost my job, my home and any hopes for the future. Nothing that a young man of Chris’s calibre couldn’t take in his stride. The trouble is, he just lacks the vision to make it happen.’

Carla smiled, despite herself.

‘Liked that one, did you?’ Erik lifted his glass in her direction. ‘For once, it’s something I just made up. Cheers.’

‘Cheers.’ She barely sipped at her own neat vodka. It had taken her the whole news report to get three fingers down the drink, and now it was warm.

‘Dad, why do you stay here? Why don’t you go back to Tromso?’

‘And meet your mother in the high street every day? No thanks. I’m living with enough guilt as it is.’

‘She isn’t there most of the time and you know it.’

‘Okay, I’d just see her every time she comes back from some particularly successful book launch or lecture tour.’ Erik shook his head. ‘I don’t think my ego’s up to that. Besides, after all these years, who would I know?’

‘Alright, you could move to Oslo. Write a column back there.’

‘Carla, I already do.’ Erik gestured at the battered computer in the corner. ‘See that. It’s got a wire in the back that goes all the way to Norway. Marvellous what they can do with technology these days.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘Carla.’ The mockery drained from his tone. ‘What am I going to change, moving back there now? It isn’t as if the costs are prohibitive here. Even with the zone tax on top, email is so cheap you can’t realistically cost it on the number of articles I mail out in a month. And even if you could, even if I was walking my work to the editors in Oslo to save money, I’d spend what I saved on winter socks.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, it’s not that cold.’

‘I think you’re forgetting.’

‘Dad.’ Her voice grew very gentle. ‘We were there in January.’

‘Oh.’ She heard, in that single gruff syllable, how much it hurt him. He made a point of looking her in the face. ‘Visiting your mother?’

She shook her head. ‘There wasn’t time, and anyway, I think she was in New Zealand. Chris took me to the Winter Wheels show in Stockholm, and we went across to see Sognefjord on the way back. He’d never been there.’

‘And it wasn’t cold? Come on, Carla. I may not be able to afford flights on a whim, but it hasn’t been so long.’

‘Alright, it was cold. Yes, it was cold. But, Dad, it was so—‘ She gave up and gestured around her. ‘Dad, look at this place.’

‘Yeah, I know I haven’t tidied up for a while, but—‘

‘You know what I mean!’

Erik looked at her in silence for a while. Then he went to the window and tugged back one of the ragged curtains. Outside, something had been set on fire and it painted leaping shadows on the ceiling above where he stood. Shouts came through the thin glass pane. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘I know what you mean. You mean this. Urban decay, as only the British know how to do it. And here I am, fifty-seven years old and stuck in the middle of it.’

She avoided his eyes.

‘It’s just so civilised back there, Dad. There’s nobody sleeping on the streets—‘

‘Just as well, they’d freeze to death.’

She ignored him. ‘—nobody dying because they can’t afford medical attention, no old people too poor to afford heating and too scared to go out after dark. Dad, there are no gang zones, no armoured police trucks, there’s no exclusion like there is here.’

‘It sounds as if you should be talking to Chris, not me.’ Erik knocked back a large portion of his drink in one. It was an angry gesture, and his voice carried the ragged echo of the emotion. ‘Maybe you can persuade him to move up there if you like it so much. Though it’s hard to see what you’d both do for a living without anybody to kill on the roads.’

She flinched.

He saw it and reined himself in.

‘Carla—‘

She looked at her lap. Said nothing. He sighed.

‘Carla, I’m sorry. I. I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘No.’ He set down his drink and came to crouch in front of her. ‘No, I didn’t, Carla. I know you’re just doing what you have to get by. We all are. Even Chris. I know that. But can’t you see. Any argument for me going back to Norway is an equally valid argument for you. How do you think I feel, looking at you, stuck in the middle of this?’

The thought stopped her like a slap. Her hands tightened on his.

‘Dad—‘ She swallowed and started again. ‘Dad, that’s not it, is it? You’re not staying because of me?’

He chuckled and lifted her chin with one hand.

‘Staying because of you? Staying to protect you, with all the money and influence I’ve amassed? Yeah, that’s right.’

‘Then tell me why.’

‘Why.’ He stood up and for a moment she thought she was in for another lecture. Instead, he went to stand at the window again, staring out. The flames were stronger now and they stained his face with orange. ‘Do you remember Monica Hansen?’

‘Your photographer?’

Erik smiled. ‘I’m not sure she’d like the possessive pronoun, but yes, Monica the photographer. She’s back in Oslo now, taking photos of furniture for some catalogue. She’s bored, Carla. The money’s okay, but she’s bored to screaming.’

‘Better bored than sleeping in the streets.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, Carla. I’m not sleeping in the streets. And, no, listen to me a moment, think about it. You said yourself there’s no exclusion there like there is here. So what would I write about. Back in the comfort and safety of my own Scandinavian social system? No, Carla. This is the front line - this is where I can make a difference.’

‘No one wants you to make a difference, Dad.’ She got up from the chair, suddenly angry again, and faced him. She jerked back the other curtain and glared angrily down at the fire below. ‘Look at that.’

The source of the flames, she saw as she gestured, was an overturned armchair. Other items lay scattered around, unrecognisable in the darkness and as yet untorched. A shattered window directly above suggested an origin. Someone had been in one of the first-floor flats, throwing down what it contained. Now figures in baggy, hooded sportswear stood gathered around the fire, making Carla think of menacing negative-image Disney dwarves out of some nightmare where it all definitely did not end happily ever after.

‘Look at it,’ she hissed again. ‘You think those people care what you write? You think most of them can even read? You think people like that care about you making a difference?’

‘Don’t be so quick to judge, Carla. Like Benito says, don’t make 3D judgments of what you can only see on your TV screen.’

‘Oh, for—‘ Her expletives evaporated in an exasperation too old and deep for words. She rapped hard on the glass. ‘This isn’t a TV, Dad. It’s a fucking window, and you live here. You tell me what we’re looking at, community night barbecue maybe?’

Erik sighed. ‘No, it’s probably gang retribution for something. Someone they thought informed on them, someone who spoke out of turn. They did the same thing to Mrs McKenny last summer because she wouldn’t let her son run balloons for them. Of course, then he had to, just to buy some new furniture. You can’t fault the gangwits on psychology.’ He turned away from the window, and suddenly, in the motion, she saw how tired he had become. The vision only fanned the flames of her anger again. Up from the pit of her stomach, a licking, gusting sickness.

Erik appeared not to sense it coming. He was freshening his drink again, working on an ironic grin to match it. ‘Of course, it could just be kids having fun. Random stuff. A lot of those first-floor flats have been empty for longer than I’ve been here. They just break in and—‘

He shrugged and drank.

‘And throw the stuff out the window!’ Suddenly she was yelling at him, really yelling. ‘And set fire to it! For fun! Jesus fucking Christ, Dad, will you listen to yourself. You think this is normal? Are you fucked in the head?’

The flashback caught like magnesium ribbon behind her eyes. Eleven years old again, and screaming at her father as he tried to explain what he had done and why she had to choose. It burned out as fast, afterimage inked onto her retina and the returning dimness of the room. She looked up quickly, caught the expression on Erik’s face, and knew he was remembering too.

‘Dad, I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

Too late.

He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to. Silence was settling around them in little black shreds, like scorched down from a pillow shot through at close range.

‘Dad—‘

She had thought for a moment he might yell back, but he didn’t. He only moved slightly, the way she sometimes saw Chris move when some piece of driving-induced injury caught him awkwardly. He moved and nodded to himself, as if her scream had been a swallow of rough but interesting whisky. She saw the way he was composing himself, and knew what was coming.

‘Normal?’ He said the word with careful pedantry that almost hid the returning gruffness in his voice. ‘Well I think, in the context of the slaughter we’ve just seen committed by the man you share your bed with—‘

‘Dad, please—‘

His voice trampled hers down. ‘I’d call it normal, yes. In fact I’d call it comparatively healthy. Burnt furniture you can always replace. Burnt flesh is a little harder.’

She breathed deliberately, loosening the tightness in her chest. ‘Listen, Dad, I’m not going to—‘

‘Of course, there is always the double standard to consider. As Mazeau would have put it, crime is a matter of degrees and the degree that really matters in society’s eyes is the extent to which the criminal has asserted himself beyond his designated social class and status—‘

‘Oh, bullshit, Dad!’

But the anger had deserted her, and all she could feel now was the edge of tears. She held onto her drink with clumsy, eleven-year-old hands, and watched as her father retreated, swathing himself in the gauze bandage of political rhetoric to hide the hurt.

‘The sons and daughters of the powerful buy and sell drugs amongst themselves with impunity, because all they have done is overstep slightly the licence their class entitles them to, misunderstood the lip service to legality that must be paid if the common herd are to continue grazing quietly. But let one child from the Brundtland enter their fairy kingdom and do the same, and watch the full bloody weight of the law fall on him, because he has presumed to behave as he is not entitled, presumed to not know his place. And that we cannot allow.’

‘Dad,’ she tried one more time, voice pitched low and urgent. ‘Please, Dad, look down there again. Never mind whose fault it is. Never mind the politics of it. Do you think anyone down there gives a flying fuck what you write? Do you think they give a fuck about anything any more?’

‘And my son-in-law does?’ He did not turn to the window, but his eyes were bright with the reflected fireglow. ‘Chris gives a flying fuck for the bodies he left on the motorway today? Or the bodies that they’ll be stacking in the streets of Phnom Penh a year from now? You know what I wish, Carla? I wish you’d married one of those edge dealers down there instead of that suited piece of shit you sleep with. The dealer, at least, I could make excuses for.’

‘That’s great, Dad.’ Finally, with the insult to Chris, she had the anger back. The strength to hurt. Her voice came out flat and cold. ‘You finally had the guts to say it to my face. The man who paid your rent and bought you a new kitchen last Christmas is a piece of shit. And I guess it’s clear what that makes me.’

She set down the drink on the coffee table and made for the door. She saw how he lifted one arm involuntarily towards her as she passed him, but she shut it out.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to pack my bag, Dad. And then, if I don’t get mugged and raped on the way out by one of your oppressed proletarians, I’m going home.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to be on your own in the house.’

He said it sulkily, but there was an undertone of fear and regret in his voice now. Dismayed, she realised that it was exactly what she wanted to hear. She could feel the relish bubbling up on hearing it.

‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But I’d rather be alone, somewhere safe and sane, than with you in this shithole.’

She didn’t turn to see his face as she said it.

She didn’t need to.

Some damage, Chris had once told her, you don’t need to see. You know what you’ve done on impact. You can feel it. All you have to do after that is disengage.

She went to pack.