Market Forces

Chapter Fifteen

It finally hit Chris while he was waiting at the counter in Louie Louie’s for a double-spike cappuccino.

He’d sat up late the previous evening, going over the possibilities, and by the time he finally came to bed, Carla was already asleep. More and more, that was becoming the pattern. Work on the Cambodia contract was keeping him later and later at Shorn. He was forced to relegate his self-defence classes and gun practice to lunch-time, which stretched the day even longer. Carla was getting home anything from two to five hours ahead of him during the week and they had given up any pretence of dining together. He ate the remains of what she had cooked for herself earlier and talked desultorily to her about his day. Loading the dishwasher was usually the only shared activity of the evening; after that, one of them would retire upstairs to read, leaving the other marooned down in the living room with the entertainment deck.

There was an air of detached politeness to their lives now. They had sex at increasingly irregular intervals and argued less than they ever had before, because they rarely had the time or energy to talk about anything of significance. They kept meaning to take a long weekend together somewhere like New York or Madrid and use the time to recharge, but somehow it never came together. Either Carla forgot to book the Saturday off with Mel, or Chris was suddenly needed for a weekend meeting with the Cambodia team. Summer came on, pleasantly mellow, but the layer of superficiality continued to thicken over their day-to-day life and Chris found himself enjoying the new weather only in moments of isolation that he was later curiously unwilling to share with Carla.

He lay awake beside her, turning the game over in his mind until he finally fell asleep.

On the drive in that morning he’d tried again, but he’d been too sleepy from the night before. In the last few weeks his habitual driver’s caution had grown lax to a point that under other circumstances might have been called recklessness. As it was, the attitude made perfect sense. Following the Nakamura challenge, word had got out about the dangerous new player at the Shorn table and no one among the young no-name challengers was keen to go up against Chris Faulkner’s clearly identifiable Saab Custom. The vehicle’s spaced armouring and Mitsue Jones’s demise at its owner’s hands were equally thoroughly mythologised among the driving fraternity - detail upon invented detail until it was impossible even for Chris to separate the true facts from the thicket of embellishments that had sprung up around them. In the end, he gave up trying and started to live with the legend. In this, he was probably the last person on board. Amidst all the hype, one thing had been universally accepted in the City of London weeks ago - there had to be easier ways to carve a name for yourself than go up against Chris Faulkner.

‘Double cap for Chris,’ yelled the girl at the counter.

He was on first name terms with the staff of Louie Louie’s these days -they’d torn out the front cover of GQ that month and pinned it up behind the counter. Reluctantly, he’d autographed it, and now, every time he went in, his carefully groomed features grinned back at him from beneath the imprisoning gloss and black ink scrawl. It made him slightly uneasy. Fame had dripped like sap all over him and now it was hardening into amber and he was trapped inside for all to see. Fansites were starting to give him serious coverage for the first time since the death of Edward Quain. East European working girls with unlikely stage names and credit-card hotlines were in his mail, plying him with suggestions of varying subtlety.

And you’re pinned down, overdeployed, no way to—

The solution boiled out at him like the milk froth from the steamer, bubbling up on itself as it unfolded. It might have been the cross-hatched patterning of the yellow and black tiles behind the counter, or maybe just the results of dissociative thinking, a technique he’d picked up from a psych seminar the week before. Whatever it was, he fielded the insight and took it back up in the Shorn elevator with his coffee.

‘Cambodia Resourcing continues to lead the rising stock trend,’ the elevator informed him as they powered upward. ‘With end-of-day trading at—‘

He tuned it out. He already knew.

Alike Bryant was talking to the machine. Chris could hear him through the door, dictating in jagged pieces to the datadown. It was a chewed-over version of a document to the Cambodian rebels that they’d been working on most of yesterday. The East Asia Trade and Investment Commission was leaning on them for Charter compliance with an uncharacteristic fervour. Industrial espionage reports suggested Nakamura bribes were going in at high level.

‘We have no interest in the so-called, no, scratch that, no interest in the areas you have designated resettlement zones, nor are we concerned with what goes on within those zones. The administration of the camps is, of course, not within our jurisdiction provided no overt human rights abuse, uh-uh, provided no human rights abuse, mhmmm, no, back up again, not within our jurisdiction, uhhh, provided, given that, oh fuck it—‘

Chris grinned and knocked at the door.

‘What?’ Bryant bellowed.

‘Having trouble?’

‘Chris!’ Bryant stood poised in the middle of his office space, arms slung on a polished wood baseball bat that he’d braced at the nape of his neck. It gave him the posture of a man crucified, and the tiredness in his face did nothing to alter the impression. ‘Would you believe I’ve been on this motherfucker since eight this morning. It has to go to the uplink at noon, and I’m still splitting fucking hairs on the covering letter. Listen to this.’ He walked to the desk and read aloud from a piece of hardcopy that curled from the datadown printer. ‘ “The administration of the camps is, of course, not within our jurisdiction, provided no human rights abuse occurs.” Sary’s going to go through the roof if we send him that - he’ll say we’re implying the Friday statement’s a lie.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘Please.’ Bryant rolled his neck against the wood of the bat. ‘I’m trying to do politics here. We can’t imply he’s lying.’

‘I thought we were going to go with “given that no human rights abuse is occurring”.’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Won’t wash with the UN. There’s an Amnesty report doing the rounds in Norway and no one’s prepared to deny it at ministerial level. We’ve got to stay “vague but firm”. That’s a direct quote from Hewitt.’

‘Vague but firm.’ Chris pulled a face. ‘Nice.’

‘Fucking Amnesty.’

‘Yeah, well. Shit happens.’ Chris came and stood at Bryant’s shoulder, reading the hardcopy. ‘What about ...’

He tore the sheet from the printer and scanned it. Bryant unslung the baseball bat from his shoulder and parked it in a corner.

‘... Confident. That’s it, look. Admin of the camps blah blah blah not within our jurisdiction and we are confident that no human rights abuse, no, that none of the alleged human rights abuse has occurred.’ He handed back the sheet. ‘How about that?’

Bryant snatched it.

‘You bastard. Forty-five fucking minutes I’ve been staring at this.’

‘Caffeine.’ Chris held up his take-out from Louie Louie’s. ‘Want some?’

‘I’m all caffeined out. I was in at six with Makin, and this landed on my desk an hour ago from upstairs. Notley and the policy board.

Response required. As if I didn’t have enough else to do. Let’s see ... “that none of the alleged human rights abuse has occurred”. Right. Now what about this? “However we cannot permit your forces to obstruct the passage of fuel and supplies”.’

‘Try “forces operating in the area”. Takes the sting out of it and makes him feel like a big man. Like you’re asking him to police the zone generally, not just get a grip on his own troops.’

Bryant muttered and scribbled on the hardcopy as he read it back. ‘ “However we cannot permit forces operating in the area to obstruct the passage of fuel and” blah blah blah blah. That’s it. Brilliant.’

Chris shrugged. ‘Ready-wrapped. I used the same scam on the Panthers of Justice a couple of weeks back, and they lapped it up. Stopped the banditry dead. All most of these rebels really want is some kind of recognition. Paternal acknowledgement from some kind of patriarchal authority. According to Lopez, it had them swaggering around, posting police directives in every village.’

Mike barked a laugh. ‘Lopez? That Joaquin Lopez?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So you put Harris up to tender after all.’

‘Well, like you said. It was our investment he was fucking with. And Lopez works flat out for a half per cent less of total. Really took Harris apart in the bullring too, apparently.’

‘Yeah, he’s still young enough to have the drive. Harris burnt out years ago, it’s just no one ever called him on it. You did the whole industry a service putting him out.’

‘It was your idea. If anything, I owe you one for the advice. So anyway, what’s this six a.m. shit with Makin? Anything I should know about?’

‘Nah, shouldn’t think—‘ Bryant stopped. ‘Actually, maybe I should bounce it off you. You worked the NAME, didn’t you? North Andean Monitored Economy? Back when you were at HM?’

Chris nodded. ‘Yeah, we were into the ME in a big way. Anybody with a decent emerging markets portfolio had to be. Why, what’s going on down there now?’

‘Ah, it’s fucking Echevarria again. You remember that first day we met in the gents, I told you I was off to see some greasy dictator for a budget review?’

‘That was Hernan Echevarria? I thought he was dying.’

‘No such luck. The old bastard’s pushing eighty, he’s had major surgery twice in the last decade, and he’s still hanging on. He’s grooming his eldest son, in true corrupt land-owning motherfucker fashion, to take over the whole show when he’s gone. And, as you’d expect with these hacienda families, the son’s a complete fucking waste of space.

Spends all his time in Miami doing the casinos, powdering his nose and fucking the local gringas.’

Chris offered another shrug. ‘Sounds okay. Easy enough to control, anyway.’

‘Not on present showing.’ Bryant punched a couple of points on the datadown screen and the display shifted. ‘See, Echevarria junior’s making a lot of friends in Miami. Investor friends.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes, oh. Fresh money, most of it homegrown, but some from Tokyo and Beijing via US management funds. Have a look at this little snap.’ Bryant turned the datadown screen to face Chris. ‘Taken aboard Haithem Al-Ratrout’s private yacht last week. You’ll recognise some faces.’

It was a standard paparazzi shot. Hurried and unflattering angles on people who usually only appeared in the public eye coated in a high media gloss. Chris spotted two Hollywood pin-ups of the moment displaying the cleavage for which they were famous, the US Secretary of State caught picking the olive out of his martini and—

‘Over on the left you’ve got Echevarria junior. The one in the Ingram suit and the stupid hat. And that next to him is Conrad Rimshaw, executive head of Conflict Investment for Lloyd Paul New York. On the other side and towards the back you’ve got Martin Meldreck from Calders Rapid Capital Deployment division. The vultures are gathering.’

‘But the father’s still ours so far, right?’

‘So far.’ Bryant nodded and touched another part of the screen. The photo minimised and gave way to a spreadsheet. ‘But it’s an uphill struggle. These are from the budget review I mentioned. The stuff in red is contested. He wants more, we can’t let him have it.’

There was a lot of red.

‘The Echevarrias have been with Shorn’s Madrid office ever since Hernan pulled the coup back in ‘27. Good solid clients. Our Emerging Markets division backed them all through the civil war and the crackdown afterwards.’ Bryant bent back fingers one at a time as he enumerated. ‘Fuel and ammunition, medical supplies, helicopter gun-ships, counter-subversion trainers, interrogation technology. All at knockdown prices, and for over twenty years it’s all paid off big time. Quiescent population, low wage economy, export-oriented. Standard neoliberal dream.’

‘But not any more.’

‘But not any more. We’ve got another generation of guerrillas in the mountains screaming for land reform, another generation of disaffected student youth in the cities, and we’re all back to square one. Emerging 3Markets got scared and dropped the whole thing like a hot brick -straight into Conflict Investment’s lap. Hewitt gave it to Makin.’

‘Nice of her.’

‘Yeah, well this was just after Guatemala, so Makin’s rep was riding pretty high. Top commission analyst for the year and all that. I guess Hewitt thought he’d swing it in his sleep. But things didn’t work out, so they brought me in to assist. Now Makin’s having to share Echevarria with me and I’ve got to say,’ Bryant walked across to the door and pressed it completely closed. His voice lowered. ‘I’ve got to say he’s not handling it all that well.’

Chris leaned against the edge of Bryant’s desk, feeling the friendly warmth of trust and a shared conspiracy coming off the other man.

‘So what’s the problem?’

Bryant sighed. ‘Problem is, Makin doesn’t know how to handle Echevarria. See, he’s used to these penny ante revolutionaries holed up in the jungle with their peasant education programmes and he thinks Echevarria’s just the same animal made good.’

‘Oops.’

‘Yeah, I’ve told him. The Echevarrias are as close as you get to nobility in that part of the world. That’s how come the link with Europe. Old Hernan traces his ancestors right back to Pizarro’s original conquistadors. As he never fucking tires of telling us. ‘course, all that means is he’s descended from some dirt-poor younger son mercenary glory-roader who grabbed a seat on the boat over from Spain, but it isn’t cool to mention that in budget meetings.’

‘Makin said that?’

Bryant laughed. ‘No, I’m exaggerating. Makin’s too damn good a negotiator for that. But it smokes off him every time Echevarria starts in on that nobility rap. You can almost see his lip curl. Echevarria sees it too, and that fucking Hispanic pride stokes up, and Makin’s lip curls some more, and there we are, deadlocked. We’re trying to lock him into something long-term, so that when he finally croaks the NAME’ll be stable and, more importantly, ours, but he gets more hostile every time we talk to him. Now he wants double-figure percentage increases in the military budget to put down the rebels, and there’s no way we can afford to give that to him and keep the fund managers happy. The problem is, he’s taking the whole thing personally.’

‘So he won’t sign?’

‘He might eventually,’ Bryant picked up the baseball bat again, twirled it through the air and shipped it across one shoulder. ‘If I can talk him round. But eventually might be too late. He’s not a well man. If he dies or his condition deteriorates too much, junior takes over and then we’re fucked. Junior hasn’t got his old man’s illusions about the European connection, and he’s pissed off with Makin for his attitude -he’ll bring in Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap just to snub us. And they’d just love to buy us out.’

Chris sipped at his coffee and thought about it while Bryant paced towards the window, playing imaginary curveballs off the bat. When the other man turned back to face him, he set the styrofoam canister down on the desk with studied calm.

‘What about the rebels?’ he asked.

‘The rebels?’ Bryant spread his hands in supplication. ‘Come on, who the fuck are they? This is a twenty-year client we’re talking about. You can’t write that off against some bearded campesino hiding out in the hills. There’s probably half a hundred different factions and fronts, all squabbling about their revolutionary lineage. We don’t know them, we don’t have the time to get to know them and anyway—‘

‘I know them.’

‘What?’

‘I said I know them. HM Emerging Markets did an in-depth survey of the ME’s radical factions last year.’ Chris gestured, open-handed. ‘We flew out there, Mike. I’ve got the files at home somewhere.’

Bryant gaped. ‘You’re bullshitting me.’

‘Do you a profile by Thursday.’

‘Jesus. What did you do, just come up here to make my day?’

‘Oh.’ Chris picked up his coffee and crossed to the low table where Mike kept the chess board. He hooked up a knight between index and second finger and relocated it. ‘Almost forgot. Check.’

Bryant grinned and feinted at him with the bat. Chris caught it with his other hand.

‘Motherfucker.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris looked at the board. ‘And mate in seven, I reckon.’

Chapter Sixteen

The HM files were in the garage, stacked on an upper shelf next to a box of worn gear bearings that Carla had hung onto for some unfathomable reason. Chris went up on a stepladder to retrieve the disc he wanted and nearly turned an ankle jumping down afterwards.

‘Fuck.’

Had Carla been there to see it, he thought, she would have laughed. She would have laughed out loud, and he would have joined in, pretending that his ego was not pricked through, and after a few moments the fleeting anger at being mocked would have leached out for real.

But Carla was at an evening course with two other mechanics from Mel’s Autofix, learning about developments in virtual design technology, and the house echoed with her absence.

He went through to the study and fed the disc into the datadown. A search protocol swam up onto the screen.

‘North Andean Monitored Economy,’ he told the machine. ‘Hernan Echevarria, political opponents.’

The search protocol dissolved and in its place a series of thumbprint photos began to spring up like multicoloured blisters. Chris stood and watched for a moment as the programme resized the rapidly multiplying images, trying vainly to fit them all onto a single screen page. Then he went out to the lounge, to fetch the whisky.

He’d built this file in a no-star hotel room overlooking the luminous night-time surf of the Caribbean. Hammett McColl sent two teams out to the NAME - one highly publicised visit, booked into the Bogota Hilton, whose function was largely cosmetic, and one stealth audit crew, flown in undercover of a shoestring movie company’s location scouting. It had been a stupid kind of fun at first, until the policing data started to flow in.

Chris remembered velvet black nights, street life and lanterns strung in the street outside. Sweat rolling off his body and brow, pricked out in almost equal quantities by the humidity and the details from the detention records. His fingers leaving damp prints on the keys of the laptop. He drank cane rum and smoked atrocious local cigarettes and somehow kept it all in perspective most of the time. Just sometimes he paused and lifted his fingers from the keyboard as if he had heard something, because even the rum could not keep out the animal-instinctive knowledge that the things the reports described were going on right now in police stations across the city.

He never heard screams, he told himself, then and later. It was the reports talking, working at his imagination like a feeble dentist at an infected tooth. That was all. He heard nothing.

The telephone rang.

He jerked round, one hand on the neck of the whisky bottle and looked out towards the lounge. It was the home phone, the unscreened line. He left the office and stood in the connecting doorway, staring across at the little blue screen. The call bell symbol pulsed on and off in green, in time with the soft chiming.

Who—

Can’t be Carla. He checked his watch. The seminar still had half an hour to run, and anyway he’d had the thought before he knew what time it was. As their separate work schedules chewed off more and more of the time they used to spend together, they’d fallen out of the habit of checking in with each other for anything other than pure necessity.

The telephone rang.

He watched it stupidly, holding the whisky, thoughts locked up.

Work would have used the datadown. From habit and from the manual. There was a Shorn directive against talking shop on unscreened lines.

The phone rang.

Erik, ringing to back down from the ludicrous sulk Carla had described when Chris got back from the north. Chris grimaced. That particular Viking? Not likely.

Just answer the fucking thing, for Christ’s sake.

He crossed to the terminal and thumbed the accept. The blue background blipped out and a picture sank into place.

For a curious moment, Chris wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He made out dark glossy hair and a profile, seemingly pillowed on twin cushions that ...

Moaning gusted through the air from the speaker.

The profile turned, mouth open.

A hand appeared, enamel red-tipped.

Adrenalin bubbled abruptly through Chris’s head as the picture made sense. He was watching a slice of holoporn, downloaded direct to the phone link. A heavily made-up woman with long black tresses was crouched over an equally painted blonde partner, sucking and nibbling at a pair of breasts so large and so perfectly rounded it was hard to believe they were physically attached to either participant.

Chris sank onto the arm of the sofa, watching.

The shot dilated a little and background detail emerged. The two women were sprawled on what appeared to be some kind of exercise bench and wore nothing beyond a few studded leather accessories that served only to lift and separate curved areas of flesh. The blonde half of the duo was on her back and upside down, hair trailing to the floor. The other woman had somehow contrived to straddle her partner but leave her own backside raised high in the air like the top of a child-drawn heart. The twin mounds of buttocks mirrored the silicone-enhanced globes of the woman below so that a bizarre kind of vertical symmetry was created. You could almost believe you were looking at a single hourglass-shaped creature with the incidental appendages of limbs and faces added after the event.

Chris felt the blood stirring through his stomach and puddling into his prick as the two woman faked their way towards a mutual climax. The dark-haired performer was evidently cast in the role of dominatrix and she worked the other woman’s flesh with much snarling and flashing of purple-painted eyes, while the blonde beneath her moaned and rubbed semi-convincingly at her own improbable breasts.

The dominatrix—

The thought skated almost casually across the rink of his mind, replacing something else he’d been going to think.

It was Liz Linshaw.

He leaned forward uncomfortably over his erection. Confirmed, the recognition sent a small shiver up his spine. Liz Linshaw had aged a few years since the footage was shot, but behind the purple eyeshadow and the dyed black hair, the face was unmistakable. It was the same line of cheekbone and nose, the same long, mobile mouth. The same slightly crooked teeth.

Chris’s eyes flickered from the face to the exposed flesh below it. Six weeks ago, at the Tebbit Centre studio, he’d seen the steep curve of her cleavage loaded into just-glimpsed lingerie under an open-necked blouse. He’d fallen asleep that night thinking about it and - he only admitted it to himself now - he’d looked for it on the morning Prom and App bulletins since.

Now, here it was laid out for his perusal at leisure, and it was, he noticed, the same steep curve. Liz Linshaw’s breasts were not of the same epic proportions as those of her performing partner, but they were still cosmetic-standard enough to defy gravity without external support. The nipples, now being forced mock-sadistically into the blonde woman’s mouth, were large and dark and blunt. If there were scars where the implants had gone in, they were lost in the all-over tan.

Chris was rock hard.

He watched as the blonde woman’s mouth dragged and smeared down the length of Liz Linshaw’s body to the juncture of her thighs.

The panting and moaning grew mutual as the two women got into the inevitable top-to-tail clinch and filled their brightly taloned hands with bronzed flesh. Chris’s hand moved unwillingly across the buckle of his belt. Semi-convincing or not—

White lights splashed across the window and drenched the curtains. The Landrover crunched up the drive.

Chris leapt up and snapped the phone off. The liquid sounds of orgasm evaporated into stillness. For a moment he stood over the unit, glaring at it. The message option pulsed, download message, dump message, replay message, download, dump, replay, download, dump replay, download—

He stabbed the screen and the copying bar filled from left to right like a tiny, unrolling carpet in mauve.

The Landrover’s engine stilled. A door clunked, open and closed.

He stabbed the eject button and snatched the minidisc as it emerged. It fell from his fingers, hit the floor and rolled.

Footsteps on gravel.

He cast about, tiny triphammers in his temples. The disc glinted silver from under an armchair.

Carla’s recognition tag scraped on the lock.

He bent and grabbed the disc, buried it in his pocket on the way out of the lounge. He heard the front door open as he reached the study. He made it to his seat.

‘Chris? I’m home.’

‘Just a minute.’

The erection, he was relieved to find, had melted in the panic. His jeans felt almost loose. He swivelled on the chair as Carla came in and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Work?’ There was just a hint of weary resignation in the single word as she glanced past him at the screen.

‘That’s right.’ He returned the kiss, feeling as if he fitted badly into his own skin. The words were jumbled and overlarge on his tongue. ‘It’s some stuff I’m digging out for Michael.’

‘You eaten?’

‘Yeah, the rest of the curry. You?’

‘On the way.’ She grimaced. ‘Kebab.’

‘Yeah, I can smell it.’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’ She stopped abruptly and leaned back a little, holding his head between her palms. ‘You okay? You look a bit pale.’

‘I’m.’ He gusted a sigh, pushing out some of the tension. Jerked his head at the screen so she had to let go. ‘It’s just some of this stuff. We’re looking at the North Andean Monitored Economy. I’d forgotten the shit they get up to in police cells out there.’

She moved away. ‘No worse than what’s going on in Cambodia, from what I hear.’

‘We’re leaning on them to stop that,’ he told her.

‘Yeah?’ There was a dull disinterest in her voice as she walked out of the room, a coat of detachment they had both started to evolve as an alternative to the rows there was no longer time or energy for.

He went after her. Back into the lounge, where the phone terminal stood in the corner. He remembered with a jolt through the stomach that he had not erased the original message.

‘Carla.’

‘What?’

He moved up close to her and put one arm on the juncture of neck and shoulder. The gesture felt clumsy, unaccustomed. It was weeks since they’d fucked. She looked at him out of suspicious eyes.

‘What, Chris?’

He ran his fingers up into the hair behind her ear and tugged through until his hand was clasping the back of her head. It was a caress that invariably set her cooking, but it still felt awkward. He closed the final gap between them, relieved to find that his erection had returned in force. She felt it pressed between them and a thin little smile appeared on her lips.

‘So what’s got into you?’

He kissed her. After a couple of moments she warmed to it.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he said when their mouths split apart.

‘I’ve missed you too.’

‘Come upstairs with me.’

She had started to rub at the crotch of his jeans with one hand. The other worked at the buckle on his belt. ‘What’s wrong with right here?’

He hesitated. The passion in the moment guttered down. She looked up from what her hands were doing, terrifyingly attuned to the confusion fogging his head.

‘Chris?’

‘I don’t want you getting carpet burns,’ he said, and hauled her off her feet. The classic wedding threshold lift. One hand went to her breast, cupping and the blonde gobbles down Liz Linshaw ‘s nipple, smearing crimson lipstick

She laughed.

‘Well, well. Romance.’

Staggering a little, he got her upstairs. They crashed onto the bed and shed their clothes. Carla turned towards him, naked, and he felt a tiny crystal of warmth drip and slide somewhere deep inside him. He had forgotten how beautiful her body was, the broad-shouldered, long-boned pale expanse of it, the flat width of stomach and the full breasts above, breasts that would have been large on a smaller-framed woman but here the swollen hemispheres, flesh taut to breaking point, kneaded by red taloned hands.

He blinked and forced the image aside. Focused on the woman he was with, slotting into the old, comfortable sequence of postures and pressures, the places she liked to be touched, the eventual coupling

Liz Linshaw ‘s mouth, burrowing

He could not lose it. Even when Carla got on her hands and knees ahead of him the way they both liked to finish, he fantasized the other two women into existence on the bed with them. He imagined them vampire-like, clutching and sucking at Carla’s flesh and his own, and he came with that last image printed indelibly across his eyes.

They left then, dragging his post-coital warmth away with them like the fur of a newly slaughtered animal. And afterwards, when Carla shifted and murmured and tightened her arms around him, all he could feel was trapped inside something that wasn’t his.

‘This is fucking great stuff.’

Mike Bryant paced about the office space, leafing through the sheaf of hardcopy. Chris sat in a corner armchair and watched him. He hadn’t slept well, and there was a spreading ache behind his left eye. He was having a hard time getting up to the same level of enthusiasm as Bryant.

‘I mean, Jesus, these guys have got some grievances. Just look at it. Better than a dozen different insurgent leaders and every single one has got family tortured to death or disappeared. Fantastic. Primary Emotional Motivation, PE fucking M, right out of Reed and Mason. Textbook diehard revolutionaries. They’ll never quit. Listen, we only need to hold about a third, no, less than a third, of this stuff over Echevarria’s head, and he should cave right in.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’

‘Of course he will. What’s wrong with you? We’d only need to persuade about three of these groups to team up, give them some second-hand Kalashnikovs out of stock - and Christ knows we’ve got enough of those - they’d piss all over Echevarria’s regular army.’

Chris’s temple throbbed. ‘Yeah, but what if he doesn’t scare.’

‘Chris, come on.’ Mike looked at him reproachfully. ‘You’re ruining my day here.’

‘What if, Mike. Fucking think about it.’

‘Jesus, you got out of bed the wrong side today. Alright.’ Bryant threw himself into another armchair opposite, dumped his feet on the coffee table between. ‘Let’s be grown up about it. What if. Contingency planning. Like I said, we wave about a third of these guys in his face.

And we tell him there are double as many more where those came from, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Then, if he doesn’t see sense, we’ll use someone out of the other two-thirds. That way, whatever reprisals he takes, he’ll be hitting the wrong people. Meanwhile, we talk to the front runner, and if necessary set him up with what he needs. That’d be, let’s see.’ Bryant flipped through the hardcopy again. ‘This guy Arbenz maybe, the People’s Liberation Front for whatever it was. Or Barranco’s Revolutionary Brigade. Or Diaz. They’re all strong contenders. You were there. Who do you make for the best bet?’

‘Well, not Arbenz. He got shot up in a gunship raid a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t you catch the bulletin?’

‘Fucked if I remember.’ Bryant snapped his fingers. ‘Wait a minute, that business with the villages in the south. Echevarria’s been strafing them again, fucking shithead. You know he made me a direct promise those BAe helicopters wouldn’t be used against civilians this year. Lucky we didn’t issue a press statement on that one.’

‘Yeah, well, your BAe gunships shattered Arbenz’s legs from the hips down, and apparently they were running that bioware ammunition, the stuff we saw at Farnborough back in January, slugs coated with immune-system inhibitors. Very nasty. They’ve got him in a field hospital in the mountains, but the last I heard from Lopez, it’s touch and go if he’ll make it.’ Chris rubbed at his eye and wondered about painkillers. ‘And even if he does, he’ll be in no condition to conduct a campaign any time soon.’

‘Okay, so that’s Arbenz out. What about Barranco?’

‘Yeah, I’d leave Barranco alone too, unless you absolutely have to use him. I met him once. He’s committed, and he’s short on ego - tough to win over.’

Bryant pulled a face. ‘You met Diaz too, right?’

‘Couple of times, yeah. He’s a better bet. Very pragmatic, strong sense of his place in history. He wants his name on a statue somewhere before he dies. Oh, and he’s a real Shakespeare nut.’

‘You’re winding me up.’

‘No, seriously. He can quote the fucking stuff. Got a scholarship on some bullshit liberal arts exchange programme in the States when he was a student. He gave me Hamlet, Macbeth, whatsit, King Lear, you name it. All word-perfect.’ Chris shrugged. ‘Well, sounded like it was word-perfect anyway. What do I know? Anyway, he told me, get this; he always wanted to visit Britain and see the mother of parliaments.’1

‘What?’ Bryant barked laughter. ‘You are winding me up.’

‘I swear. Mother of parliaments. That’s what he said.’

‘The mother of parliaments. Man, I love it. I almost hope Echevarria doesn’t cave in, just so we can have this guy across.’

Makin, perhaps predictably, was less amused by it all. He went through the stapled paperwork, one snatched-aside sheet at a time, without saving a word, then tossed the whole thing onto his polished desktop so it slid away from him. He looked across the desk to where Chris and Mike sat in steel frame chairs, bracketing him. He focused on Bryant.

‘I seiously don’t think this is the way to go, Mike.’

Bryant wasn’t up for it. He said nothing, just rolled his head in Chris’s direction.

‘Listen, Nick,’ Chris leaned forward. ‘I’ve worked the NAME before and I’m telling you—‘

‘Youah telling me nothing. I’ve been working Latin American CI longer than you’ve been here. I took top commission in the Americas market last yeah—‘

Bryant cleared his throat. ‘Year before last.’

‘I’m in it for this year as well, Mike.’ Makin’s voice stayed even, but behind the steel glasses his face looked betrayed. ‘When the unwesolveds come in.’

‘Ah, come on Nick,’ Chris felt a tight, feral jag of pleasure as he swung the comeback. ‘That was last season. First thing you ever said to me, man. Can’t live off stuff like that indefinitely: It’s a whole new quarter. Time for fresh meat. Another new appoach. Remember that?’

Makin looked away. ‘I don’t remember saying that, no.’

‘Well, you did, Nick.’ Bryant got up and brushed something off the shoulder of his suit. ‘I was there. Now, this is no longer under discussion. We are going to do it Chris’s way, because, to be honest, your Echevarria game plan is making me tired.’

‘Mike, I know how these fucking spics work. This is the wrong move.’

Bryant looked down at him. He seemed more disappointed with the other man than anything else. ‘This isn’t Guatemala, Nick. Chris is the resident NAME expert, you like it or not. Now you talk to him and get this stuff into a usable form by Monday. I meant what I said. I am tired of dicking about with that old fuck. We go uplincon with Echevarria and his cabinet next week, and I want the axe over his head by then. You coming for a coffee, Chris?’

‘Uh. Sure.’ Chris got to his feet. ‘Nick. You’ll call me, right?’

Makin made a noise in his throat.

At the door, Bryant turned and looked back across the office.

‘Hey, Nick. No hard feelings, huh? It’s just, we’ve let this slide too far. It’s getting out of hand. Time to bring in the riot squad, you know. I don’t want Notley looking in on us like we’re a bunch of kids just set fire to the kitchen. That’s not good for anyone.’

They left Makin with it.

‘You threatening him?’ asked Chris, in the lift.

Bryant grinned. ‘Bit.’

The doors opened at ground level and they walked out into the arching, light filled space of the tower’s lobby area. Fountain splash and an ambient subsonic vibe filled the air. Chris felt his mouth flex into a grin of his own.

‘You pissed off with him, then?’

‘Nick? Nah. Just he’s too fucking impressed with himself, is all. Ever since that Guatemala thing. He just needs to know where the orders are coming from, then he jumps. Jesus, look at that.’

Hanging in the air above one of the fountains, a huge Shorn Associates holo ran back-and-forth flicker-cut footage of the Cambodian conflict. Cross-hair graphics sprang up and tracked selected hardware as it appeared on screen - helicopters, assault rifles, medical gear, camera zeroing in, logistical data scrolling down alongside each sniper-caught item. Make, specs, cost. Shorn contribution and involvement.

‘This the BBC footage?’ asked Bryant. He’d handed publicity to Chris a couple of weeks ago.

‘At base, yeah. We bought it right out of the can in Phnom Penh, in case there was something inappropriate in there. You never can tell with that guy Syal, he’s a real fucking crusader. Won a Pilger Award last year. Anyway, the woman at Imagicians said they’d generate some of the closer detail themselves, like for the medical hardware. They can shoot some real state-of-the-art life-support stuff in the studio, then mix and match on the palette, so it looks like it was really there.’ Chris nodded up at the holo. ‘Looks good, huh?’

‘Yeah, not too shabby. So did Syal cut up rough when they took his footage off him?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Don’t think he got any say. We made sure there was a programme producer out there for the handover. Standard sponsorship terms. And what we handed them back had enough battle sequences to come across as gritty realism. You know, corpses on fire, that sort of stuff.’

‘No women or children, right.’

‘No. Ran it myself on the uplink. It’s clean.’

In the holo, a Cambodian guerrilla commander appeared, face weary. He rattled away in Khmer. Subtitling sprang up in red letters. It is a hard fight but with the help of our corporate partners, our victory is as certain as

‘He really saying that?’ asked Bryant curiously.

‘Think so.’ Chris was tracking a well-endowed blonde woman across the floorspace. ‘Think they give them cue cards or something. You know, sometimes I think I could just come down here and stand under the subsonics for half an hour, save myself buying the coffee.’

Bryant spotted where Chris was looking. ‘That’s not subsonics.’

‘Ah, come on Mike.’

‘Yeah, that reminds me. Want to go to a party tomorrow night?’

‘Party in the zones?’ Chris and Mike had been back across the cordons a few times since the Falkland incident, though never back to that particular pub and never quite as wrecked as they had been that night. At first, Chris was nervous on these visits, but Mike Bryant’s easy familiarity with the cordoned zones and their nightlife slowly won him over. He came to see that there was a trick to handling things there, and that Bryant knew it. You didn’t flaunt your elite status, but nor did you try to play it down. You acted like who you were, you didn’t try to be liked, and in most cases you were accorded a wary respect. In time the respect might develop into something else, but you didn’t expect that. And you didn’t need it to have a good time.

‘Why should it be in the zones?’ asked Bryant innocently.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ They stepped through the armoured-glass doors and into the street. The sun fell warm on their faces. ‘Because the last three were?’

‘Bullshit. What about Julie Pinion’s bash.’

‘Okay, the last two, then. And Julie’s wasn’t far off, come to that.’

‘I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear that, price she paid for that duplex. That’s an up-and-coming regenerated area, Chris.’

‘So it is. I’d forgotten.’

They pushed into Louie Louie’s and nodded at familiar faces in the queue. Chris’s fame had eroded sufficiently that all he got from his Shorn colleagues these days were grunts and the odd grin.

‘So tell me about this party.’

Mike leaned back on the tiled wall. ‘Remember Troy?’

‘From the Falkland. Sure.’ They’d run into the Jamaican a couple more times in clubs on the other side of the wire, but in Chris’s mind he was irrevocably linked with the events of that night.

‘Well. Turns out his eldest son just got a scholarship to the Thatcher Institute. Fast-track international finance and economics programme, guaranteed placement with a major consulting firm at the end of it. So he’s throwing a party at his place. You are cordially invited.’

‘So it is in the fucking zones.’

‘What? Nah, Troy doesn’t live in the zones. He moved out years ago, got a place on the edge of Dulwich.’

‘Which edge?’

‘Look, it’s a better area than Julie Pinion picked, alright. You don’t want to come, I’ll tell him you’re working late. On a Friday.’

‘He invited me?’

‘Yeah, like I said. Cordially. Bring Faulkner, he said.’

‘Nice of him.’

‘Yeah, you got to come. Troy’s parties are fucking cool. Lots of powders and potions, big sound systems. Really good mix of people too. Suits, media, DJs, dealers.’ Bryant’s face fell abruptly. ‘Shit, you know what. I bet fucking Liz’ll be there.’

Chapter Seventeen

‘Look, I really don’t think it’s going to be your kind of thing.’

‘Why not?’ Carla folded her arms and leaned back against the door of the freezer. ‘Too high-class for me? Am I going to show you up?’

‘That isn’t fair. I’ve asked you to come to every Shorn function we’ve had this year.’

‘Yes. Very dutiful of you.’

‘And that’s really not fucking fair. I wanted you there, every time. Including all the times you said no, I wanted you to be there with me.’ Chris lowered his voice. ‘I was proud of you. I wanted to show people that.’

‘You mean you wanted to show off.’

‘Ah,’ Chris made a helpless gesture. ‘Fuck you, Carla. I put myself on the line for you every single—‘

‘If you’re going to talk to me like that ...’ She was already moving, across the kitchen and away from him. ‘I’m going to bed. Goodnight.’

‘Fine. Fuck off, then.’

He stood, fists knotted, surrounded by the twinned debris of another evening’s separate dining, while she walked out on him. Again. Her voice drifted back down the stairs.

‘I’ve got better things to do tomorrow night, anyway.’

‘Fine, then fuck off.’ He bawled the last two words after her, dismayed at the sudden detonation of fury in his guts.

She didn’t answer.

For a while, he crashed plates and cutlery about, loading the dishwasher with a lack of care or interest that he knew could sometimes drag her back into the kitchen to take over. He was kidding himself, and he knew it. This was a new level of hostility they’d reached.

He selected a clean tumbler and went to look for the whisky. Poured the glass half full while he stared into the dead blue glare of the TV. The end titles of whatever mindless terrorists-threaten-civilisation flick they had just spun was already gone, already wiped off the screen as cleanly as the details of plot and action from his mind. Rage evaporating into remorse and a creeping sense of desolation.

A vicious clarity caught up with him, just before he knocked back the drink.

He was glad of the row, he knew abruptly. Glad of the out it had given him.

He was relieved she wouldn’t be coming with him.

Relieved, because—

He took the knowledge by the throat and drowned it.

Troy Morris’s home might not have been in the cordoned zones, but Chris could see a zone checkpoint just down the street from his front door, and the quality of housefronts plunged rapidly on the way there. The street was restored Victorian, Troy’s place and the surrounding facades carefully painted, windows clean. After that it started to get rough - at the checkpoint end, paint was a flecked rumour on most frontages and window glass had become strictly optional. Plastic coverings flapped in a couple of places.

The last three houses on both sides of the street had been demolished to provide open ground on either side of the checkpoint. The rubble had been cleared, and defoliant kept the weeds down. A hundred metres beyond the barriers, the closest structures on the other side were riot-fire blackened and crumbling. A shabby concrete block rose ten storeys high behind the shells, dirty grey facades stained darker with leakage from substandard guttering. Chris spotted someone watching him from a window near the top.

It was a perfect summer evening, still fully light after eight o’clock and the day’s heat was leaching slowly out of the air without the rain that had been threatening all afternoon. Junk salsa thumped out of Troy’s opened sash windows and when Bryant rang the doorbell, the door seemed to blow open on a gust of bassline.

‘Mike! Good to see you, man.’ Troy was kitted out in a Jamaica Test ‘47 shirt with Moses McKenzie’s grinning victorious face poking out behind a holoshot fast-bowled cricket ball that seemed to come right off the fabric at them. In contrast, Troy’s face seemed unusually sombre. ‘Hey, Faulkner. You came. That’s good.’

Chris murmured something, but Troy had already gone back to Bryant.

‘Mike, listen. Need to talk to you later, man.’

‘Sure. What’s the deal?’

Troy shook his head. ‘Later’s better.’

‘Whatever you need.’ Bryant craned his neck to look down the hall. ‘Any chance of a spliff?’

‘Yeah, somewhere I guess. That blonde TV face you like, she’s here, she’s rolling.’

‘Right.’

They went down the hall, into the heart of the party.

Chris had never been much of a fiesta machine. Growing up smart and strangely accented in a zone school had ensured he was routinely bullied nearly every day of his life and didn’t get invited to many parties. Later, he learned to fight. Later still he grew into looks that a lot of the cooler female kids liked. Life got easier, but the damage was already done. He remained withdrawn and watchful around other people, found it hard to relax and harder to have fun if he was surrounded. A reputation for moody cool, approved and codified by male peers and female fans alike, nailed the doors shut on him. By the time he hacked his way into the corporate world, he had exactly the demeanour required for long-term survival. The edgy, peer-thrown parties and corporate functions, rancid with rivalry and display politics, were a comfortable fit. He turned up because he had to, faked his way through the necessary rituals with polished skill, never let his guard down and hated every minute. Just like the parties of his youth.

Accordingly, he was mildly shocked to discover, a couple of hours later, the extent to which he was enjoying himself at Troy Morris’s gathering.

He’d ended up, as he often did at house parties, in the kitchen, mildly buzzed on a couple of tequila slammers and a single line of very good cocaine, arguing South American politics with Troy’s son James and a glossy Spanish fashion model called Patricia, who they’d discovered -wow, you’re kidding me - had appeared in the same issue of GQ as Chris, though wearing a lot fewer clothes. Not, Chris couldn’t help noticing, that she was wearing a lot of clothes at the moment either. There were about a dozen of these exotic creatures sprinkled around the party like sex-interest models at a motorshow. They drifted elegantly from room to room, drawn occasionally into the orbits of the expensively dressed men they appeared to have come with, spoke English in a variety of alluring non-English accents and, without exception danced superlatively well to the junk salsa blasting out of the speakers in the lounge. To judge by Patricia and her end of the South America conversation, they had all been required to check their brains in at the door. Or had maybe just pawned them for the wisps of designer clothing they were fractionally wrapped in.

‘For me, all these bad things they say about Hernan Echevarria, I think they exaggerate. You know, I have met his son in Miami and he is a really quite nice guy. He really loves his father.’

James, perhaps thinking of his imminent entry into the Thatcher Institute and the possible eavesdroppers on this conversation, said nothing. But he was young and unschooled as yet, and his face said it all.

‘It isn’t really a question of his son,’ said Chris, making an effort. ‘The point is that excessive use of force by a regime, any regime, can make investors nervous. If they think the government is stepping up repressive measures too much, they start to wonder how secure the regime is, and what’ll happen to their money if it comes tumbling down. It’s like scaffolding around an apartment block - it’s not the sort of thing that makes you keen to buy in that block, is it?’

Patricia blinked. ‘Oh, I would never buy a flat in a block,’ she assured him. ‘No garden, and you would have to share the swimming pool. I couldn’t stand that.’

Chris blinked as well. There was a short silence.

‘Actually, the right kind of repression is usually a pretty good booster for investor confidence. I mean, look at Guatemala.’

It was the dealer of the high-quality powdered goods. He’d been leaning into the conversation on and off for the last hour, each time making remarkably astute observations about the political and economic salients of Latin America. Chris couldn’t make up his mind if this was a result of close association on the dealer’s part with some of his corporate clients or just exemplary background knowledge of his supply chain. He thought it’d be unwise to ask.

‘Guatemala’s a different game,’ he said.

‘How so?’ asked the dealer. ‘From what I hear their indices are pretty close to Echevarria’s, pro rata. About the same balance of payments. Same military budget. Same structural adjustment.’

‘But not the same governance durability. The last twenty-five years, you’ve had over a dozen different regimes, a dozen regime shifts, most of them with violence. The US military has been in and out of there like it was a urinal. Violent change is the norm. The investors expect it there. That’s why they get such a huge return. And, sure, violent repression is part of the picture, but it’s successful violent repression. You’re right. Which does inspire investment.’

James cleared his throat. ‘But not in the North Andean Monitored?’

‘No, Echevarria’s been in power a long time. Tight grip on the military, he’s one of them himself. Investors expect stability, because that’s what he’s given them for decades. That’s why shooting protesters on the steps of major universities isn’t smart.’

‘Oh, but they were marquistas,’ broke in Patricia. ‘He had to do that to protect the public’

‘Thirty-eight dead, over a hundred injured,’ said Chris. ‘Almost all of them students, and more than half from middle-class families. Even a couple of visiting scholars from Japan. That’s very bad for business.’

‘So are you handling the NAME account for Shorn these days?’

It was Liz Linshaw, suddenly propped against the worktop opposite, a spliff cocked in one upheld hand beside her face, spare arm folded across her body to support the other elbow. He looked across at her and felt her presence turn on a tiny tap in his guts.

He’d seen her a couple of times already, once in passing on the stairs up to the bathroom, once across the cleared space and dancers in the lounge where she was weaving back and forth alone to the junk salsa-beat. She was decked out in classic designer oil-stained Mao jeans, a deep red T-shirt and a black silk jacket. Her riotous blonde hair was gathered up and pinned at one side with an artful lack of care, left elsewhere to tumble down past her shoulder and partly mask that side of her face. There was a tigerish vitality in it all, he saw now, an animation that took the constructed charms of Patricia’s kind and made them plastic and spray.

Now she tilted the hair away from her eyes and grinned at him.

He found himself grinning back. ‘You know I can’t answer that, Liz.’

‘Just you sounded so informed.’

‘I’m informed about a lot of things. Let’s talk about Mars.’

It was that season’s Dex and Seth ultra-cool quote, immortalised in a series of sketches featuring Seth’s fawning, craven TV interviewer and Dex’s high-powered American corporate shark. Whenever the interview steered into politically iffy waters, Dex started to make angry American noises that didn’t actually contain any words and Seth’s interviewer invariably reacted by cringing and suggesting let’s talk about Mars.

With that line, you knew that across Europe, hundreds of thousands of watchers were reeling away from their illegally tuned screens, clutching their sides and weeping with laughter. Apart from being as far removed as you could humanly get from current affairs on Earth, news from Mars was famously dull. After nearly two decades of manned missions and exploration, the rotating teams of scientists were doing nothing anyone cared remotely about. Sure, people might be able to live out there in a century. Big fucking deal. Meanwhile, here are some more red rocks. More Red Rocks was another big Dex and Seth number, the two comedians done up in pressure suits and geeky masks, bouncing in faked low g and singing the lyrics to tunes ripped off from junk-salsa giants like Javi Reyes and Inez Zequina.

‘Let’s not talk about Mars,’ said Liz Linshaw firmly, and everyone in the kitchen broke up with laughter. Amidst it, she leaned across the narrow space between them, and offered the spliff to Chris.

Her eyes, he suddenly noticed, were grey-green.

The dealer sniffed the air with professional interest. ‘That the new Moroccan stuff?’ he wanted to know. ‘Hammersmith Hammer?’

Liz spared him a glance. ‘No. Thai direct.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘I seriously doubt it.’

Chris drew it down, coughed a little. Let it up again almost immediately. He wasn’t a big fan of the stuff. Aside from a couple of parties at Mel’s place with Carla, he hadn’t smoked in years.

Liz Linshaw was watching him.

‘Very nice,’ he wheezed, and tried to hand the spliff back. She pushed it away, and used the motion to lean in close. Close enough that tendrils of her hair brushed his face.

‘I’d really like to talk to you somewhere,’ she said.

‘Fair enough.’ He found a stupid grin crawling onto his mouth and twitched it away. ‘Garden?’

‘I’ll meet you out there.’ She withdrew, nodded casually at James and the powder man, and wandered out of the kitchen, leaving Chris holding the spliff. Patricia watched her go with enough venom in her gaze to poison a city water supply.

‘Who is that woman?’ she asked.

‘Friend,’ said Chris, and drifted off in Liz Linshaw’s wake.

Either Troy’s garden was larger than he’d expected or the Thai grass was already beginning to kick in. It was full dark by now, but Troy had thoughtfully provided half a dozen garden torches, driven at intervals into the long tongue of well-kept lawn. The garden was bordered by a mix of trees and shrubs, amidst which the dwarf palms seemed to be doing the best, and at the far end a gnarled oak tree raised crooked limbs at the sky. From one lower branch someone had strung a simple wooden swing on blue plastic ropes that picked up the flickering light of the nearest torches and glowed. Liz Linshaw was seated there, one long leg drawn up to wedge her body back against one of the ropes, the other on the ground, idly stirring the swing in tiny arcs. There was a fresh spliff burning in her hand.

Chris hung from the moment, and felt something happen to him. It wasn’t just the fact that he knew she was waiting for him. There was something in the air, something that caught in the luminous blue twistings of the swing ropes, in the casual elegance of the way she had folded her body like an origami sketch of sexual appeal. The lawn was a carpet laid out under his feet, and the other people in the garden - he only registered them now - seemed to turn in unison and approve his passage towards the tree.

He grimaced and threw away the spliff. Made his way warily to her.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘You wanted to talk to me.’ It came out rougher than he’d intended.

‘Yes.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I’ve wanted to talk with you since the Tebbit Centre. Since the first time we met, in fact.’

It felt as if the ground beneath his feet had gone suddenly soggy and unsupportive.

‘Why is that?’

She lifted a hand. ‘Why do you think?’

‘Uh, Liz, to be honest, I thought you and Mike—‘

‘Oh.’ The crooked smile was back. She smoked some more and he struggled with his doped senses. ‘He told you about that. Well, Chris, how can I put this? Mike Bryant and I are not some kind of exclusive event.’

The ground was, apparently, gone now.

‘In fact,’ she said very softly, ‘there’s no reason why I can’t ask you for what Mike’s been giving me. Is there?’

He stared at her. ‘Sorry?’

‘Interviews,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Your life so far, Chris. My publishers are promising me a half-million advance, if I can come up with another book like The New Asphalt Warriors. It’s a guaranteed bestseller. And with the Nakamura thing, Cambodia and the rest of it, you’re the man of the moment. Ideal focus.’

The ground came up and hit him in the heels, so hard he almost stumbled.

‘Oh.’ He looked away from the level grey-green gaze. ‘Right.’

She was still grinning. He could hear it in her voice. ‘Why, what did you think I was talking about?’

‘No, I. Yeah. Fine, that, that’s good.’

She pushed with her foot and cranked the swing back a little, then let go. The edge of the wooden seat hit him across the front of the thighs. Her weight swung with it, pressed against him.

‘Was there something else you wanted, Chris?’

Sprawled, airbrushed bodies on the exercise bench, liquid moans

Carla, the house, the stagnant anger through empty rooms

You’re a good guy, Chris. Bryant, lolling semi-conscious on the hotel bed

That’s you. You’re a. Fucking good guy.

It fell through his head like an avalanche, images crushing each other.

Liz Linshaw’s cleavage loaded into an open-necked blouse

Carla, soaping him in the shower, hands still gritty with the work on the Saab

Mitsue Jones, trapped in the wreck of her Mitsubishi, struggling

what we value here at Shorn is resolution

you ‘re a fucking good guy

was there something else you wanted

‘Chris!’

It was Bryant. Chris took a sudden step back from Liz Linshaw and the swing. He saw her face, and the way it changed. Then he was facing Mike as he strode up the garden towards them.

‘Been looking for you everywhere, man. Hi, Liz.’ The conjunction appeared to strike him for the first time. His eyes narrowed. ‘What are you guys doing out here?’

‘Talking,’ said Liz, unruffled.

Chris scrambled for cover. ‘Book deal.’ He made a gesture at Liz that felt like a warding off. ‘She says.’

‘Yeah?’ Bryant gave Liz an unfriendly look. ‘Well, my advice is don’t tell her anything too realistic. You wouldn’t want to get labelled an animal.’

Liz, smiling to herself, turning away, unfolding herself from the swing. Chris shut it out and focused on Bryant.

‘So what’s happening?

‘Ah, no big deal. Troy needs a favour. Liz, you want to give us a little privacy?’

‘Already leaving, boys. Already leaving.’

They both watched her walk back down the garden and into the house. Mike turned and mimed a pistol at Chris’s face. He wasn’t smiling.

‘Hope you know what you’re doing here, Chris.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mike. I’m married. She just wants another half-million advance from her publishers.’

‘I wouldn’t count on that being the whole story.’

‘Mike, I am married.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ Bryant rubbed at his face. ‘Not like you, though, huh?’

‘You said that, not me.’

‘Yeah.’ Bryant smiled sadly and slung an arm across the other man’s shoulders. ‘You’re a good guy, Chris. You’re a good fucking guy.’

Chris stowed the unease slithering through him.

‘So. What’s the deal with Troy?’

It was all in the zones.

Mike said he’d drive, though Chris wasn’t convinced he was in any way the more sober or straight of the two of them. They went out to the car together with Troy, who for the first time since Chris had known him seemed angry and uncomfortable.

‘I’d come with you, Mike ...’

‘I know you would, man. But you can’t.’ Mike held up his corporate plastic. ‘We’re the only ones can do this for you. You know that.’

The Jamaican shook his head. ‘I owe you for this. Big time.’

‘You don’t owe me shit, Troy. Remember Camberwell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Right, well as far as I’m concerned, I’m still paying off the interest, ‘kay? Now give Chris the camera.’

Troy Morris swallowed and handed over the shoulder set. His features were knotted up with rage and frustration. Chris remembered him at the Falkland, the sawn-off shotgun propped against his shoulder as he left laughing, the sense of street competence that radiated off the man. It was a brutal transition to the Troy he saw before him now. Chris felt a jagged pang of sympathy. He knew the feeling of sudden impotence from his own youth, knew how it could cook your brains in your head, chew up your insides until you couldn’t sleep.

He got in the car. Stowed the shoulder set in the back seat.

‘Be back before you know it,’ said Mike as he swung himself in the driver’s side. The engine rumbled awake. Gears engaged and the BMW swept out into the street.

‘What was that about Camberwell?’ Chris asked, as they came up on the checkpoint lights.

‘Yeah, first time I met Troy. About ten years ago, back before he had this place. I was out in the zones, hitting the whiff pretty hard, went home with the wrong woman.’

‘For a change,’ said Chris sourly.

Mike chuckled. ‘Yeah, guess you never can get all the spots off the tiger, huh?’

‘Leopard.’

‘What?’ They pulled in beside the checkpoint. A nervous-looking kid in guard uniform came out of the cabin and glanced into the car. He seemed unsure of himself. Mike leaned out and handed over his plastic.

‘Leopard,’ said Chris, while they were waiting. ‘Tigers used to have stripes, not spots. Leopards were the spotted ones.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, saw it on some nature digest a while back. They used to be able to climb trees, just like a real cat.’

‘What, tigers?’

‘Leopards.’

The young guard finally got his hipswipe unit to work and Mike’s card chimed through. The barrier rose and they were waved across.

‘I swear these guys get younger every time we do the zones,’ said Chris. ‘I mean, is it really a good idea to give automatic weapons to teenagers like that?’

‘Why not? They do it in the army.’

They hit their first pothole. Mike took a left. Around them, the housing grew increasingly haggard.

‘So yeah, Camberwell. This was before I met Suki. I was pretty wild back then. Pretty stupid. Used to get through a can and a half of Durex a month, easily. And the drugs, ah, you know how it is when you’ve got money. Anyway, this tart wasn’t really a tart, or maybe she was a tart and she changed her mind, I don’t know. End result, there were these three guys waiting outside her apartment. They threw me down a flight of stairs and started dancing on my head. Troy was living in the apartment downstairs, he heard the noise, came out and chased them off.’

‘All three of them?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. He’s pretty fucking hard, Troy is. Or could be he faced them down. Don’t know, I was out by then, semi-conscious. But, yeah, maybe he just talked them out of it. See, they were black, I was white, Troy was black. That maybe had something to do with it. Or maybe not. Anyway, the guy saved me getting hospitalised for certain, maybe saved me from a wheelchair. I owe him forever, and then some.’

They drove in silence the rest of the way, parked outside a nondescript little row of three-storey houses and sat for a moment. Mike hauled the camera out of the back seat and dumped it in Chris’s lap.

‘Okay, now just follow my lead. Back me up.’

They got out of the car, went through an ungated garden gateway and up a short, decaying concrete path. The door was cheap beige impact plastic, scarred and ugly. A Sony securicam lens and speaker grille gleamed incongruously from the chest-high panel in which it had been set. The installation looked professional. Mike touched the edge of the panel with one finger.

‘See. Going up in the world. Just like the man said.’

Chris shook his head and whispered. ‘I can’t believe—‘

‘Believe it.’ Mike hit the doorbell. ‘Now turn that thing on.’

Chris found the on-off in the camera’s grip. A cone of hard light leapt out of the front end and splashed on the scarred plastic of the front door. He wondered if this was going to play. Most state-of-the-art shoulder sets these days would shoot the whole range from infra-red to ultraviolet with no external lighting at all.

Movement behind the door. He shouldered the set and tried to look like a cameraman.

‘You know what fucking time it is?’ said a female voice from the speaker grille. ‘This had better be fucking important.’

Mike pitched his voice media bouncy. ‘Ah, Mrs Dixon? This is Gavin Wallace from Powerful People. Is your husband home?’

A silence. Chris imagined her peering into the securicam screen at the two expensively-dressed men on her doorstep. The voice came, tinged with suspicion.

‘You from TV?’

‘Yes, Mrs Dixon, that’s what I said. Your husband has been selected from—‘

A second voice, male and further from the speaker pick-up. The woman’s voice faded as she turned away from the door.

‘Griff, it’s the TV. Powerful People.’

Another pause, laced with muffled voices. Someone had a hand over the pick-up. Mike looked at Chris, shrugged and put on the media voice again.

‘Mr Dixon, if you’re there. We don’t have a lot of time. The helicopter has already left Blackfriars, and we need to get through the preliminaries before it arrives. We’re on a very tight schedule.’

It was the right chord. Half the draw of Powerful People derived from the breakneck pace the programme sustained from the moment the names came out of the studio computer. There was much aerial footage, cityscapes tilting away beneath the swift-flying pick-up copters, locator teams sprinting through the zones in search of the night’s contestants—

The door cracked open the width of a heavy-duty security chain. A lean, pale face appeared in the gap, blinking in the light from the shoulder set. There was a thin pink streak of artiflesh smeared over a cut on one temple.

‘Mr Dixon. Good.’ Mike leaned in, beaming. ‘Gavin Wallace. Powerful People. Pleased to. Oh. That looks nasty, that cut. Make-up’ll need to see that. In fact, I hate to say this but in all conscience—‘

It was a stroke of genius. Powerful People’s selection teams had been known to pass over a candidate for as little as recent dental surgery. The door hinged in, the chain came off. Griff Dixon stood before them in all his midnight glory.

‘It’s just a scratch,’ he said. ‘Honest. I’ll be fine. I’m fighting fit.’

It was an appropriate expression, Chris thought. Dixon was stripped to the waist, taut-muscled torso rising from a pair of jeans with real stains on them. His hair was a razored single centimetre all over, there were heavy black boots on his feet and in his hand was a crumpled-up white T-shirt that Chris somehow knew he had just tugged off.

‘Well,’ said Mike richly. ‘If you’re quite sure you—‘

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Look, you want to come in, right.’

‘Well, alright.’ Mike made a show of wiping his shoes on the doorstep and walked into the threadbare hall, smiling a big TV smile. ‘Hello, Mrs Dixon.’

A thin, worn-looking woman about Carla’s age stood behind Dixon’s sculpted musculature, one thin-boned hand resting on his shoulder. She squinted into the camera light and brushed vaguely at her shoulder-length brown hair.

‘This is my colleague Christopher Mitchell. I’m sorry. Could we maybe film this in the living room?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Sure.’ Dixon’s eagerness was almost pitiful. ‘Jazz, make some tea, will you. Or would you like coffee?’

Bryant glanced round. ‘Christopher?’

‘Uhh, yeah.’ Chris fumbled the question. ‘Coffee. White, no sugar.’

‘And black for me,’ said Mike. ‘One sugar, please. Thank you.’

The woman disappeared up the hall, while Dixon let them pass and closed the door behind them. In his excitement, he forgot the chain. They went left into a small living room dominated by a huge Audi entertainment deck set against one wall. The system didn’t look any older than the securicam in the door.

‘Ah, that corner, I think,’ said Mike, nodding at Chris. ‘I’ll sit here and Griff, do you mind if I call you Griff, if you could sit here.’

Dixon lowered himself onto the edge of the armchair. There was something painfully vulnerable in the expression on his face as he looked at Bryant.

‘You’ll need to get dressed,’ said Mike gently.

‘Huh?’

‘The T-shirt?’

‘Oh. Oh, no, it’s. Filthy.’ He compressed the already crumpled piece of clothing in his hands. ‘Been working on my bike. I’ll go up and get another one.’

‘Well.’ Bryant lifted a forestalling hand. ‘Perhaps in a moment. But we really need to get these questions sorted out. Uhm. You have a child, don’t you?’

‘Yeah.’ Dixon grinned happily. ‘Joe. He’s three.’

‘And he’s,’ Mike gestured at the ceiling. ‘Upstairs asleep, I suppose.’

‘Well, yeah.’

‘Good, good. Alright, now the official questions,’ Bryant reached into his jacket. ‘Where are we, ah. Yes.’

The Nemex.

Even for Chris, the transition was an almost electrical jolt. Mike transformed in a single motion from beaming, chocolate-voiced media host to a man with a levelled gun.

For Dixon, it was clearly beyond the realms of comprehension.

‘What’s,’ he shook his head, grin still licking around his lips. ‘What’s, what’re you doing?’

‘Chris.’ Mike didn’t look round. ‘Close the door.’

Dixon still hadn’t got it. ‘Is this part of—‘

‘Show us the T-shirt.’

‘Wha—‘

‘Show me the motherfucking T-shirt, you piece of shit!’

‘Mike?’

‘Just relax, Chris. Everything’s under control. When Jazz comes back, you just keep her out of the way. We’re not here for her.’

Dixon stirred. ‘Listen—‘

‘No, you listen.’ Bryant took a step forward and drew a fresh downward bead on Dixon’s face. ‘Throw the T-shirt on the floor. Now.’

‘No.’

‘I’m not going to ask you again. Show me the fucking T-shirt.’

‘No.’ It was like talking to a cornered child.

Bryant moved faster than Chris had ever seen another human being move. From standing, he was suddenly at Dixon’s chair. The Nemex whipped out sideways and Dixon was reeling back, clutching at his head with both hands. The T-shirt fell to the threadbare carpet and Bryant scooped it up left-handed. Blood splintered bright through Dixon’s fingers.

‘You’re not on TV, Griff.’ Mike’s tone had gone back to conversational. He crouched to Dixon’s level. ‘There’s no need to be shy.’

He shook the T-shirt out and laid it on the floor, face up. It was clean and freshly ironed, black lettering on soft white cotton.

White Aryan Resistance.

The words were printed horizontally, one under the other, the first letter of each limned in red in case someone didn’t get the message.

The door swung open and Jazz backed into the room, still crouching from the contortion necessary to depress the handle without putting down the tray in her hands.

‘I brought some—‘

Turning, she saw Griff cringing and bleeding in the chair, saw the gun in Mike Bryant’s hand. She dropped the tray and shrieked. The coffee leapt sideways, broad swipes of liquid on its way to the floor. Cheap crockery scattered and broke amidst something else. Biscuits, Chris saw. She’d brought biscuits.

‘Be quiet,’ snapped Bryant. ‘You’re going to wake Joe up.’

Naming the child seemed to do something to Griff Dixon. He dropped his hands from his face. The gouge that the forward sight of the Nemex had opened in his scalp showed clearly through his razored hair, and blood was running down his face into one eye.

‘You fucking listen to me. Whoever you are, I know people. You touch any of us, I’ll—‘

‘You’ll do nothing, Griff. You’ll sit there and fucking bleed, and you’ll listen to me, and you’ll do nothing. Jazz, will you shut up. Chris, for Christ’s sake make her sit down or something.’

Chris got hold of the woman and forced her onto the sofa. She was trembling and making a high keening sound that might have had the words my baby in it somewhere.

‘I know people who—‘

‘You know political people, Griff.’ The scary thing about Mike’s voice, Chris realised, was the energy of it. He sounded like an enthusiastic coach pushing a fighter who wasn’t punching his weight. ‘Political scum. Look at this gun, Griff. Recognise it?’

It was only then that Chris saw the fear appear on Dixon’s face. For the first time since they’d entered the house, Griff Dixon was afraid.

‘That’s right.’ Bryant had seen it too. He grinned. ‘Nemesis Ten. Now you know the only people got access to these babies, don’t you Griff. You’re well enough connected for that. This is a corporate gun. And where it comes from, politicians mean less than a bucket of runny shit.’

Jazz’s keening changed pitch.

‘First question for you, Griff.’ A tremor ran down Mike Bryant’s face. It was the single indication of the fury he was working through. ‘What possible reason does a member of the white master race have to stick his dick in a black woman?’

Dixon flinched as if struck. His wife’s keening broke abruptly into something between a sob and a howl.

‘Didn’t you understand the question? Would you like to phone a friend? I asked you, what possible reason does a member of the white master race have to stick his dick in a black woman? Especially, Griff, if that black woman is screaming and fighting and begging you not to do it?’

The room settled down to quiet and the sound of Dixon’s wife weeping. Bryant crouched again. He pressed his lips together hard. Pushed out a breath.

‘Alright, Griff. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m not going to hurt your wife or your son, because in the end it isn’t their fault you’re a piece of shit. But I’m going to shoot you in both kneecaps and the balls.’

Jazz erupted in shrieks. She tried to get up from the sofa and reach her husband. Chris held her back. Bryant got up.

‘And then I’m going to blind you in one eye. There’s no way around any of this. I want you to understand that. You and your friends picked on the wrong black girl.’

Dixon came out of the chair, screaming. For a brief second he reached Mike with his fists. Then the hollow boom of the Nemex shook the room and Dixon was convulsed on the floor, blood soaking the crotch of his jeans. The new sound that came out of him didn’t sound human.

Mike Bryant got back to his feet, bleeding from the mouth. He got his breath back, then very carefully sighted on Dixon’s left knee and pulled the trigger. The white supremacist must have passed out because the noise stopped. Bryant wiped his mouth and lined up on the other leg. By now Jazz had given up fighting Chris and was holding onto him as if he could rescue her from drowning. Her tears burnt on his neck. He covered her ears with his hands as Mike pulled the trigger for the third time.

In the cordite-reeking quiet, he watched as Bryant stowed the Nemex, took out a steel-cased pen, bent to Dixon’s head, peeled back the eyelid and jabbed hard into the eye beneath. It all seemed to happen very slowly and without sound and somehow he found that his gaze had slipped away by the end and focused on the sleek lines of the entertainment deck.

‘Chris.’ Bryant was leaning over him.

‘What? Yeah, yeah.’

It took both of them to unfasten Jazz’s grip on Chris. When they had finally tugged her away, Bryant crouched in front of her and gripped her lower jaw in one hand. In the other, he held up a folded wad of notes.

‘Alright, now listen to me. This money is for you. Here. Here, take it. Take it, for Christ’s sake.’ Finally, he had to open her hand and fold her fingers around the notes himself. ‘If you want him to live, you’d better get help for him soon. I don’t much care if he lives or dies, but if he lives you tell him. He, or anyone else around here, touches another person with the surname Morris or Kidd, I’ll come back for the other eye, and I’ll kill your son.’

Her whole body jerked. Bryant took her hand and squeezed the money into it again.

‘Now you tell him that, and you make sure he understands I mean it. I don’t want to come back here, Jazz. I don’t want to do it. But I will if your fuckwit racist husband and his friends make me.’

In the car, Bryant put his hands on centre of the steering wheel in front of him and pressed his body back into the padded seat. He emptied his lungs in a long, hard single breath. Then, he just stared at the windscreen. He seemed to be waiting for something. There were lights on in some of the houses, but either no one had heard the gunshots or no one had any interest in finding out what they signified.

‘Did you mean it?’ Chris asked.

‘The eye?’ Bryant nodded to himself. His voice was barely above a murmur. ‘Oh, yes. People like that, they’ve got to have something to lose. Otherwise, you’ve got no leverage on them.’

‘No, his son. Did you mean it about his son?’

Mike looked across at him, outraged. ‘Jesus Christ, of course not. Fuck, Chris, what kind of man do you think I am?’

He was silent for a while. Very faintly, the sound of a siren came wailing to them out of the night. Bryant looked at his watch. He grunted.

‘Fast. She must have called a pricey one.’

He started the engine. The BMW’s lights carved up the gloom in the poorly lit street.

‘Let’s get out of here, huh? We’ve got a lot to do.’

It took them the rest of the night to find the other two men. Both were young, neither had a family and it was Friday night in the zones. Troy Morris’s information gave starting points, but from there on in, it was hard work. Mike drove, Chris checked streets, house numbers, the names on dismal little neon signs. They worked their way through mistaken addresses, dimly-lit pipe houses, underground clubs with promising names like Cross of Iron and Endangered Race, brothels, fast-food stands and even a local paycop garrison near the river. Everywhere they went, Mike Bryant brandished the Nemex or thick wads of cash to almost interchangeable effect. The money worked more often than the gun. It unzipped the right lips, opened the right doors.

They found the first man at a hot-dog stand, drunk and swaying. He didn’t know they were looking for him. No one had bothered to warn him. The white supremacists weren’t big on solidarity, and besides, functioning phones weren’t all that common in the zones. The landlines got fucked up by technosmart vandal gangs and mobile cover was a bad joke, fatally compromised by rolling waves of government jamming aimed at satellite programming like Dex and Seth. Wheeled transport was all but non-existent. People didn’t get about much, messages even less.

Bryant leaned on the stand, bought the man a burger and watched him eat it. Then he told him why he was there. The man took off, trying to sprint. They went after him. Halfway down a side alley they found him vomiting up Mike’s burger and the rest of the night’s intake. Mike shot him four times in the groin and stomach with the Nemex, then bent to peer at the damage in the dim light. When he was sure the man was bleeding to death, they left him alone.

They had to drag the second supremacist out of a bed that wasn’t his own in a fifteenth-floor apartment that reeked of damp and rat poison. The woman next to him didn’t even wake up. When they got him into the living room he was mumbling, incoherent with ingested chemicals and sleep. They took an arm each and ran him head first against the balcony window until it smashed through. Outside, on the glass-strewn balcony, dawn was turning the night air slowly grey and there were birds singing in the trees below. Neither of them were sure if the man was dead or not. They stopped over the body, careful to avoid getting glass in their hands, picked him up and threw him over the rail. The birdsong stopped abruptly with the impact on the concrete below. In the kitchen, Mike left money for the broken window.

Chapter Eighteen

The sun caught them leaving the zones somewhere south of London Bridge. The streets were already full of pedestrians on their way to work and Alike had to hoot repeatedly to get them out of the road as they approached the checkpoint. Queues backed up hundreds long, snaking randomly away from the various turnstile entry points. There was even a queue at the road barrier, three rusting buses that looked almost pre-millennial, one of them belching oily fumes from its exhaust. Beyond the checkpoint, glimpsed through the low rise of preferential South Bank housing, gold light impacted and dripped on glass skyscraper panels across the river.

‘Jesus, look at this,’ said Bryant disgustedly. ‘Emissions monitoring, my fucking arse. Look at the shit coming out of that bus.’

‘Yeah, and it’s packed. We’re going to be here for a while.’

It was true. Armed guards were ordering the passengers out of the first bus, lining them up. The first line had already assumed the position - right hand on the back of the head, passcard held up in the left. A single guard moved down the line, scrutinising the cards one at a time and swiping them through his hip unit. Every second card needed repeated swipes.

‘Don’t know why they bother,’ Chris yawned with a force that made his jaw creak. ‘It’s not like there’s been anything resembling terrorism in London for the last couple of years.’

‘Yeah, and you’re looking at the reason why. Don’t knock it, man.’ Bryant drummed his fingers on the wheel. ‘Still, this is going to take forever. You want to get breakfast?’

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Chris twisted about in his seat. A handful of frontages down the street they had just driven up, a grimed sign said Cafe. People flowed in and out with paper packets and garishly coloured cans.

‘In there?’

‘Sure. Cheap and nasty, plenty of grease. Just what you need.’

‘Speak for yourself.’ Chris still felt slightly queasy when he thought about what Mike had done to Griff Dixon’s eye. ‘Think I’ll stick to coffee.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Bryant plugged the BMW into reverse and punted it back along the street. The engine whined high with unnecessary revs. Pedestrians scrambled to get out of the way. Level with the cafe, Bryant slewed into the curb and jolted to a halt at a rakish angle. He grinned.

‘Man, I love the parking in this part of town.’

They climbed out to hostile stares. Bryant smiled bleakly and alarmed the car with the remote held high and visible. Someone behind Chris rasped something unintelligible and hawked up spit. Twitchy with the events of the night, Chris pivoted about. The phlegm glistened yellow and fresh near his feet. Not what he needed.

He scanned the bystanders’ faces. Mostly they shuffled and looked away, but one young black man stood his ground and stared back.

‘You got something to say to me?’ Chris asked him.

The man stayed silent but he didn’t look away. His white companion laid a hand on his arm. Bryant came round the car, yawning and stretching.

‘Problem?’

‘No problem,’ said the white one, pulling his friend away.

‘Good, you’d better get cracking then.’ Bryant jerked a thumb up the street. ‘That’s a hell of a queue up there. You coming, Chris?’

He shoved back the door of the cafe and they worked their way past the line of people waiting at the take-out counter to the seating area at the back. There were no customers apart from a black-clad old man who sat alone, staring into a mug of tea.

‘This’ll do.’ Mike slid into a booth and beat a drum riff on the tabletop with the flat of both hands. ‘I’m starving.’

There was a menu scrawled in luminous purple marker across the quickwipe surface of the table. Chris glanced across it and looked away again, nervous of the standing queue at his back. He knew the food. He’d eaten in places like this most of his teens, and occasionally, after a mechanic’s night out with Carla and the others from Mel’s Autofix, he still did. Like prime-time satellite programming, it would be a loudly flavoured blend of low-grade bulking agents seasoned with garishly advertised vitamin and mineral additives. The sausages would average about thirty per cent meat, the bacon came swollen with injected water. He was glad he had no appetite.

A waitress appeared at the booth.

‘Getya?’

‘Coffee,’ said Chris. ‘White. Glass of water.’

‘I’ll have the big breakfast,’ said Mike expansively. ‘You get eggs with that?’

‘They’re Qweggs,’ said the waitress sullenly.

‘Right. Better give me, uh, six of those then. And plenty of toast. Coffee for me too. Black.’

The waitress turned her back and strode off. Mike watched her go.

‘Friendly here.’

Chris shrugged. ‘They know who we are.’

‘Yeah, which means a massive tip if they can just secrete a little common courtesy. Pretty fucking short-sighted attitude, if you ask me.’

‘Mike.’ Chris leaned across the table. ‘What do you expect? The clothes you’re wearing cost more than that girl makes in a year. She probably lives in an apartment smaller than my office, damp walls, leaking drains, no security, and about two-thirds her weekly wage just to cover the rent.’

‘Oh, and that’s my fucking fault?’

‘It isn’t about—‘

‘Look, I’m not her fucking mother. I didn’t pop her out in the zones, just so I could claim breeding benefit. And if she doesn’t like it here, she can make her own sweet way out, just like anybody else.’

Chris looked at his friend with sudden dislike. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘That’s right. Listen, Troy was born and bred in the zones, he made it out. James is off to the Scratcher in six weeks, he could end up making more money than both of us. So don’t tell me it can’t be done.’

‘And what about Troy’s cousin? The one got raped two nights ago by Dixon and his pals. How come she hasn’t made it out?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’ Bryant’s anger collapsed as rapidly as it had sprouted. He slumped back in his seat. ‘Look, all I’m saying, Chris, is some of us have what it takes. Others don’t. I mean, this isn’t some cut-rate little African horrorshow of a nation. You don’t have to live in the zones because of your tribe or something. No one cares what colour you are here, what religion or race. All you’ve got to do is make the money.’

‘They seem to care what colour you are in Dixon’s neighbourhood.’

‘Yeah, that’s fucking politics, Chris. Some maggots’ nest of little local government thugs looking for a way to build a powerbase. It’s got nothing to do with the way the real world works.’

‘That’s not the impression I get from Nick Makin.’

‘Makin?’

‘Yeah, you heard him in that meeting. He’s a fucking racist, that’s why he can’t handle Echevarria.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Mike brooded. ‘Might have to do something about Makin.’

The coffee came. It wasn’t as bad as Chris had expected. Bryant drained his and asked for another cup.

‘There going to be an investigation?’ wondered Chris.

‘Nah, shouldn’t think so.’

‘They got you for those jackers at the Falkland.’

‘Yeah, that’s a whole different story. Civil rights activists, off the back of grieving family members, my little Jason was a good boy, he only stole cars because social deprivation blah, blah, boo, hoo. That kind of crap. This thing with Dixon is different. There’s an agenda. Dixon’s political friends are on the anti-globalism wing. Britain for the British, immigrants out, fuck multiculturalism and tear down the international corporate power conspiracy. Right now, the last thing they need is for that to come out into the open. They’ll sit on this.’

‘But the zone police—‘

‘They’ll buy them off. They’ll get some paycop outfit to dig the slugs out of Dixon’s floor and the street under that other piece of shit we wasted, and they’ll make them as Nemex load.’ Bryant grinned. ‘That should send a message.’

Chris frowned. ‘Isn’t that going to be a whole stack of political capital for them? The big bad corporations, off the leash. They’ll milk it ‘til it bleeds.’

‘Oh, yeah, on a local level, of course they will. They’ll turn Dixon into a fucking martyr, no doubt. If he lives, they can have him in a wheelchair at the local Young Nazi fundraisers, and if he dies they can have his weeping widow do the same thing. But they aren’t about to take on Shorn in the public arena. They know what we’d do to them.’

‘And Dixon?’

Mike grinned again. ‘Well, I’d say Dixon’s got his hands full for the next six months just learning to walk again. And if he ever does, well he’s got a family and another eye to worry about before he does anything stupid. Plus, you know what? Somehow, I don’t think the civil rights crowd are going to be there for him. Just not the right profile.’

Mike’s breakfast arrived on a tray and the waitress set about laying it out. While she worked, Bryant grabbed a Qwegg off the plate with finger and thumb, and popped it in his mouth. He chewed vigorously.

‘You going to work today?’ he asked through the mouthful.

Chris thought about the house, cold with Carla’s absence or, even worse, with her unspeaking presence. He nodded.

‘Good.’ Mike swallowed the Qwegg, nodded thanks at the departing waitress and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Listen, I want you to call Joaquin Lopez. Tell him to catch a flight down to the NAME and start sounding out the names on that list. Today, if possible. We’ll pick up the expenses.’

Chris felt a small surge go through his guts, not unlike the feeling he’d had talking to Liz Linshaw the night before. He nursed his coffee and watched Mike eat for a while.

‘You think we’re going to have to do it?’ he asked finally.

‘Do what?’

‘Blow Echevarria out of the water.’

‘Well,’ Bryant chased another Qwegg around his plate and after some effort managed to puncture it with his fork. ‘Believe me, I’d love to. But in this case, you know how it goes. Regime change is our worst-case scenario. We’ll only go that way if we absolutely have to.’

He gestured at Chris with his fork.

‘You just get Lopez on the case. Get the names to Makin, make sure there’s a clear strategy locked down for the uplincon next week.’

‘You want me in on that?’

Bryant shook his head, chewing. He swallowed.

‘Nah, you stay out of it. I want a clean break between current negotiations and whatever we need you to do. Echevarria doesn’t know about you, he doesn’t know about your contacts. There’s no line for him to follow. Better that way.’

‘Right.’

Bryant grinned. ‘Don’t look so disappointed, man. I’m doing you a favour. I tell you, every time I have to shake hands with that piece of shit, I feel like I need to disinfect. Murderous old fuck.’

They gave it another half hour to let the queues subside, then paid and left. Despite his grouching, Bryant left a tip almost as much as the cost of the whole meal. Outside, he yawned and stretched and pivoted about, face turned up to the sun. He seemed in no hurry to get in the car.

‘We going to work?’ asked Chris.

‘Yeah, in a minute.’ Mike yawned again. ‘Don’t feel much like it, tell you the truth. Day like this, I should be home playing with Ariana. Playing with Suki, come to that. Christ, you know, we haven’t fucked in nearly two weeks.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Bryant cocked his head. ‘Carla giving you grief about that?’

‘Only all the time.’ Chris considered the reflexive lie. ‘Well, recently not so much. We’re both tired, you know. Don’t see a lot of each other.’

‘Yeah. Got to watch that shit. Come the end of quarter, you ought to take some time out. Maybe get out to the island for a week.’

‘You see Hewitt signing off on that?’

‘She’ll have to, Chris, the profile you’ve got on Cambodia. It’s turning into the year’s premium contract. Shorn owe us all some serious’ downtime before the end of this year. Hey, who knows, maybe me and Suki’ll get out there the same time as you guys. That’d be cool, huh?’

‘Yeah. Cool.’

‘Well, don’t sound so fucking enthusiastic about it.’

Chris laughed. ‘Sorry. I’m wasted.’

‘Yeah, let’s kick this in gear.’ Bryant disarmed the BMW’s alarm and cracked the driver’s side door. ‘Sooner we get out of here, sooner we can get home and act like we have a life.’

They cleared the checkpoint without incident, threaded onto the approach road to the bridge and accelerated up across the river. Sunlight turned the water to hammered bronze on either side of them. Chris fought down a wave of tiredness and promised himself a take-out from Louie Louie’s as soon as they hit the Shorn tower.

‘Be good to get some real coffee,’ he muttered.

‘That coffee wasn’t bad.’

‘Ah, come on. It was about as real as the eggs. I’m talking about something with a pedigree here. Not fucking Malsanto’s Miracle beans. Something with a hit you can feel.’

‘Fucking speedfreak.’

They both laughed, as if on cue. The BMW filled up with the sound as they left the river behind and cruised into the gold-mirrored canyons beyond. To Chris, groggy with no sleep and the events and chemicals of the night before, it felt good at a level deeper than he could find words to explain.

Chapter Nineteen

Mike dropped him outside Louie Louie’s and drove off into the car decks with a wave. Chris shot himself full of espresso at the counter, then ordered take-out and another coffee to carry up to his office. Shorn was unusually quiet for a Saturday, and he barely saw anyone on his way in. Even the security shift was made up of men and women he barely knew well enough to nod at.

It was the pattern for the day. Outside of the datadown, there was no one to talk to. Makin had not shown, which was going to make for a tight squeeze when they tried to put together the NAME package on Monday. Irritated, Chris rang Joaquin Lopez anyway and told him what he wanted. Lopez, at least, was keen, but it was still the early hours of the morning in the Americas and Chris had got him out of bed. His conversation wasn’t sparkling. He grunted back understanding, possible flight times and hung up.

Chris rang Carla at Mel’s and discovered she’d taken the day off. He checked his mobile, but there was no message. He phoned home, and heard her voice telling anyone who rang she was flying up to Tromso to see her mother. She would probably stay the week. It sounded, to Chris’s tutored ear, as if she had been crying. He threw the mobile across the office in a jag of caffeine-induced rage. He rang Mike, who was on the other line. He retrieved the mobile, got a grip on himself and went back to talking to the datadown.

By five o’clock, he’d had enough. The work was a seamless plane, extending to the horizon in all directions. Cambodia, Assam, Tarim Pendi, the Kurdish Homeland, Georgia, the NAME, Parana, Nigeria, the Victoria Lake States, Sri Lanka, Timor - in every single place, men were getting ready to kill each other for some cause or other, or were already about it. There was paperwork backed up weeks. You had to run just to stand still.

The desk phone rang. He snapped the ‘open’ command.

‘Faulkner.’

‘You still here?’

Chris snorted. ‘And where are you? Calling from the island?’

‘Give me time. Listen, rook to bishop nine. Check it out. Think I’ve got you, you bastard.’

Chris glanced over at the chess table.

‘Hang on.’

‘Yep.’ He could hear the grin in Bryant’s voice.

It was a good move. Chris studied the board for a moment, moved the piece and felt a tiny fragment of something detach itself from his heart and drop into his guts. He went back to the desk.

‘Pretty good,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t think it’s locked up yet. I’ll call you back.’

‘Do that. Hey, listen, you and Carla want to drop round tonight? I rang Suki and she’s just bought a screening of that new Isabela Tribu movie. The one that won all the awards, about that female marine in Guatemala.’

‘Carla’s away at the moment.’ He tried to make it sound casual, but it still hurt coming out. ‘Gone to see family in Norway.’

‘Oh. You didn’t mention—‘

‘No, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I mean, we’d talked about it.’ Chris stopped lying abruptly, not sure why he suddenly needed to justify himself to Bryant. ‘Anyway, she’s gone.’

‘Right.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, look Chris. Why don’t you come across anyway. If I’ve got to watch this fucking tearjerker, I’d sooner not do it alone, you know.’

The thought of escaping the silence waiting for him at home for the warmth and noise of Mike’s family was like seeing the distant lights of a village through a blizzard. It felt like cheating Carla out of something. It felt like rescue. On the other hand, given the fury of the last knock-down drag-out bare-knuckle bout with his own wife, he wasn’t sure he could face Suki Bryant’s saccharine Miss Hostess 2049 perfection.

‘Uh, thanks. Let me think about it.’

‘Got to be better than going home to an empty house, pal.’

‘Yeah, I—‘ The phone queeped. ‘Hang on, I’ve got an incoming. Might be Lopez from the airport.’

‘Call me back.’ Mike was gone.

‘This is Chris Faulkner.’

‘Well, this is Liz Linshaw.’ There was a dancing mockery in the way she said it, a light amusement that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite touch. He groped after words.

‘Liz. What, uhm, what can I do for you?’

‘Good question. What can you do for me?’

The last twenty-four hours fell on him. Suddenly, he was close to angry. ‘Liz, I’m about to call it a day here, and I’m not really in the mood for games. So if you want to talk to me—‘

‘That’s perfect. Why don’t I buy you dinner this evening.’

About half a dozen reasons why not suggested themselves. He swept them to the edges of perception.

‘You want to buy me dinner?’

‘Seems the least I can do, if we’re going to cooperate on a book. Look, why don’t you meet me uptown in about an hour. You know a place called Regime Change?’

‘Yes.’ He’d never been inside. No one who worked Conflict Investment would ever have considered it. Just too tacky.

‘I’ll be in there from about six-thirty. The Bolivia bar, upstairs. Bring an appetite.’

She hung up.

He called Mike back and made some excuses. It was tougher work than he’d expected - he could hear the disappointment in the other man’s voice, and the offer of the night with the Bryants now carried added overtones of comfortable safety compared to—

‘Look, to be honest with you, Mike, I need some time on my own.’

A brief silence down the line. ‘You in trouble, Chris?’

‘It’s.’ He closed his eyes and pressed hard on the lids with finger and thumb. ‘Carla and I aren’t getting on too well right now.’

‘Ohhh, shit.’

‘No, it’s. I don’t think it’s that serious, Mike. It’s just, I wasn’t expecting her to take off like that. I need to think.’

‘Well, if you need to talk ...’

‘Yeah. Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.’

‘Just take it easy, huh.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I will. I’ll talk to you Monday.’

He wandered aimlessly about the office for a while, picking things up and putting them down. He studied Mike’s move, tried out a couple of half-hearted responses. He leaned on the window glass and stared down at the lights of Louie Louie’s in the street fifty floors below. He tried not to think about Carla. Tried, with less success, not to think about Liz Linshaw.

In the end, he killed the office lights and went down to sit in his car. The enclosed space, recessed instruments, the stark simplicity of wheel and gearshift, were all more bearable than life outside. As the Saab’s security locks murmured and clunked into place, he felt himself relaxing measurably. He sank back into the seat, dropped his hand onto the gearstick and rolled his head side to side in the neck support web.

‘Now then,’ he told himself.

The car deck was almost deserted. Mike’s BMW was gone, the other man no doubt well on his way home to Suki and Ariana. There was a thin scattering of other BMWs across the luminous yellow-marked parking ranks, and Hewitt’s Audi stood off in the partners’ corner. It dawned on Chris how little he’d seen of the executive partner since Cambodia took off. There’d been the usual brushes at quarterly functions, a few team briefings and a couple of congratulatory mails, copies to himself, Bryant and Makin. For the rest, Hewitt had ignored him as completely as was possible given the work they both had to do.

For a moment he entertained the fantasy of waiting behind the wheel until she came down to the car deck. He thought about ramming the vehicle into drive and smashing the life out of her. Smearing her across the deck surfacing, the way Edward Quain—

He shook it off.

Time to go. He fired up the engine, rolled the Saab up the ramp and out into the street. He let the vehicle idle westward. There was no traffic to speak of, Regime Change was five minutes away, and with the corporate ID holoflashed into the windscreen glass he could park anywhere.

He left the Saab on a cross street filled with the offices of image consultants and data brokerage agencies. As he alarmed the car and walked away from it, he felt a slow adrenal flush rising in his blood. The buzz of a London Saturday evening drifted to him on the warm air, streets filling slowly with people, talk and laughter punctuated with the occasional hoot from a cab trying to get through the tangle of pedestrians. He slipped into it, and quickened his pace.

Regime Change was the end building on a thoroughfare that folded back on itself like a partially-opened jackknife. Music and noise spilled out onto the streets on either side from open-slanted floor-length glass panels in the ground floor and wide open sash windows above. There were a couple of queues at the door, but the doorman cast an experienced eye over Chris’s clothes and nodded him straight in. Chorus of complaint, dying away swiftly as Chris turned to look. He dropped the doorman a tenner and went inside.

The ground floor bar was packed with propped and seated humanity, all yelling at each other over the pulse of a Zequina remix. A cocktail waitress surfed past in the noise, dressed in some fevered pornographer’s vision of a CI exec’s suit. Chris put a hand on her arm and tried to make himself heard.

‘Bolivia Bar?’

‘Second floor,’ she shouted back. ‘Through the Iraq Room and left.’

‘Thanks.’

Screwed-up face. ‘What?’

‘Thanks.’

That got a strange look. He took the stairs at a lope, found the Iraq Room - wailing DJ-votional rhythms, big screens showing zooming aerial views of flaming oil wells like black and crimson desert flowers, hookah pipes on the tables - and picked his way through it. A huge holoprint of Che Guevara loomed to his left. He snorted and ducked underneath. A relative quiet descended, pegged out with melancholy Andean pipes and Spanish guitar. People sat about on big leather beanbags and sofas with their stuffing coming out. There were candles, and some suggestion of tent canvas on the walls.

Liz Linshaw was seated at a low table in one corner, apparently reading a thin, blue-bound sheaf of paperwork. She wore a variant on her TV uniform - black slacks and a black and grey striped silk shirt buttoned closed at a single point on her chest. The collar of the shirt was turned up, but the lower hem floated a solid five centimetres above the belt of her slacks. Tanned, toned TV flesh filled up the gap and made long triangles above and below the single closed button.

Either she didn’t see him approaching, or she let him get close deliberately. He stopped himself clearing his throat with an effort of will, and dropped into the beanbag opposite her.

‘Hullo, Liz.’

‘Chris.’ She glanced up, apparently surprised. ‘You’re earlier than I thought you’d be. Thanks for coming.’

She laid aside what she’d been reading and extended one slim arm across the table. Her grip was dry and confident.

‘It’s.’ Chris looked around. ‘A pleasure. You come here often?’

She laughed. It was distressingly attractive, warm and deep-throated and once again Chris had the disturbing impression of recall he’d had on the phone.

‘I come here when I don’t want to run into anyone from the Conflict Investment sector, Chris. It’s safe. None of you guys would be seen dead in here.’

Chris pulled a face. ‘True enough.’

‘Don’t be superior. It’s not such a bad place. Have you seen the waitresses?’

‘Yeah, met one downstairs.’

‘Decorative, aren’t they.’

‘Very.’ Chris looked around reflexively. There was a long bar bent into one corner of the room. A woman stood mixing drinks behind it.

‘What would you like?’ Liz Linshaw asked him.

‘I’ll get it.’

‘No, I insist. After all, you’re making yourself available to me, Chris. It’s the least I can do, and it’s tax-deductible.’ She grinned. ‘You know. Research costs. Hospitality.’

‘Sounds like a nice way to live.’

‘Whisky, wasn’t it? Laphroaig?’

He nodded, flattered that she remembered. ‘If they’ve got it.’

Liz Linshaw pressed a palm on the table top and the menu glowed into life beneath her hand. She scrolled about a bit, then shook her head regretfully.

‘No Laphroaig. Lot of bourbons, and, ah, what about Port Ellen? That’s an Islay malt, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, it’s one of the new ones.’ The sense of flattery crumbled slightly. Had she being doing research on him, he wondered. ‘Reopened back in the thirties. It’s good stuff.’

‘Okay, I’ll try it.’

She pressed on the selection and swept a hand across the send patch. At the bar, the woman looked down, face stained red by the flashing table alert on her worksurface. She glanced across at them and nodded.

‘So, Chris.’ Liz Linshaw sat back and smiled at him. ‘Where did you develop your taste for expensive whisky?’

‘Is this part of the interview?’

‘No, just warming you up. But, I’m curious. You grew up in the zones, didn’t you. East End, riverside estates. Not much Islay malt around there.’

‘No. There isn’t.’

‘Is it painful to talk about this, Chris?’

‘You’re a zone girl yourself, Liz. What do you think?’

The drinks came, hers with ice. Liz Linshaw waited until the waitress had gone, then she picked up her tumbler and looked pensively into it. She swirled the drink and the ice cubes clicked about.

‘My zone origins are mostly, shall we say, artistic licence. Exaggerated for exotic effect. The truth is, I grew up on the fringes of Islington, at a time when the lines weren’t as heavily drawn as they are now. My parents were, still are, moderately successful teachers and I went to university. There’s nothing that hurts in my past.’

Chris raised his glass. ‘Lucky you.’

‘Yes, that’s a fair description. You weren’t so lucky.’

‘No.’

‘Yet age nineteen you were driving for Ross Mobile Arbitrage. You were their top paid haulage operative, until you moved sideways into LS Euro Ventures. Two years after that Hammett McColl, headhunted. No qualifications, not even driver’s school. For someone with zone origins that’s more than remarkable, it’s nigh on impossible.’

Chris gestured. ‘If you want out badly enough.’

‘No, Chris. The zones are full of people who want out badly enough, and then some. It gets them nowhere. The dice are loaded against that kind of mobility, and you know it.’

‘I know other people who’ve made it out.’ It felt strange to suddenly be on the other end of the argument he’d had with Mike Bryant that morning. ‘Look at Troy Morris.’

‘Do you know Troy well?’

‘Uhh, not really. He’s Mike’s friend more than mine.’

‘I see.’ Liz Linshaw lifted her drink in his direction. ‘Well, anyway. Cheers. Here’s to Conflict Investment. Small wars.’

‘Small wars.’ But there was something vaguely disquieting in hearing it from her lips. He didn’t like the way it sounded.

She set down her tumbler. Beside it a microcorder. ‘So. How does it feel to be the rising star at Shorn CI?’

The interview went down as smoothly as the Port Ellen. Liz Linshaw had a loose, inviting manner at odds with her screen persona, and he found himself talking as if to an old friend he hadn’t seen in many years. Such areas of resistance as he had, she picked up on and either backed smoothly away from the topic or found another way in that somehow he didn’t mind as much. They laughed a lot, and once or twice he caught himself on the verge of giving up data that he had no business discussing with anyone outside Shorn.

By nine o’clock they were working up to Edward Quain, and he had drunk far too much to be able to drive the Saab safely.

‘You didn’t like him, did you.’ There was no question in her voice.

‘Quain? What makes you think that?’

‘Your form.’

He laughed, slurring slightly. ‘What am I, a fucking racehorse?’

She smiled along. ‘If you like. Look, you’ve made a total of eleven kills, including Mitsue Jones and her wingmate, plus the Acropolitic driver on the same run. Eight before that. Three at LS Euro, two tenders and one Prom and App duel. Then the move to HM, and out of nowhere you take Quain down.’

‘It was the easiest way to get up the ladder.’

‘It was off the wall, Chris. Quain was the top end of your permissible challenge envelope. As senior as it gets without exempted partner status. At that level in some companies he -would have been an exempted partner.’

‘Yeah, or out on his ear.’ Chris drained his current whisky. ‘You want to know the truth, Liz? Quain was a burnt-out old fuck. He wasn’t bringing in the business, he drank way too much, did too much expensive coke, he fucked his way through every high-price whore in Camden Town, and he paid for it all with bonuses taken out of money junior analysts on a tenth his income were generating. He was an embarrassment to everyone at Hammett McColl, and he needed taking out.’

‘Very public-spirited of you. But there must have been easier targets on the way up the HM ladder.’

Chris shrugged. ‘If you’re going to kill a man, it might as well be a patriarch.’

‘And what I find curious is the duels after Quain. Four more kills, none of them even close to as brutal as Quain’s and—‘

‘Murcheson burnt to death,’ Chris pointed out. The screams, he did not add, still came back to him in his nightmares.

‘Yes, Murcheson was trapped in wreckage. It was nothing to do with you.’

‘Hardly nothing. I created the wreckage.’

‘Chris, you ran over Quain five times. I’ve seen that footage—‘

‘What are you, Liz? An X fan?’

The crooked smile again. ‘If I was, I’d have been pretty unhappy with your performance for the next eight years. Like I said, four more kills, all clean bar Murcheson, who was an accidental burn. And alongside that, another seven inconclusives, including one you actually rescued from wreckage and drove to hospital. That’s not going to get you an honourable mention on any of the Xtreme sites, is it.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Relax, Chris. I didn’t say I was an Xer. But when you’re trying to build a profile, this stuff matters. I want to know what you’re made of.’

He met her eyes, and the look lasted. Went on far longer than it should have. He cleared his throat.

‘I’m going to go home now.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re going to drive?’

‘I.’ He stood up, too fast. ‘No, maybe not. I’ll get a cab.’

‘That’s going to cost you a fortune, Chris.’

‘So. I earn a fortune. ‘s not like the fucking army, you know. I get well paid for murdering people.’

She got up and placed a hand on his arm.

‘I’ve got a better idea.’

‘Yeah?’ Suddenly he was aware of his pulse. ‘What’s that, then?’

‘I live in Highgate. That’s a cheap cab ride, and there’s a spare futon there with your name on it.’

‘Look, Liz—‘

She grinned suddenly. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Faulkner. I’m not about to tear your clothes off and stuff your dick down my throat, if that’s what you’re worried about. I like the men I fuck to be sober.’

Unwillingly, he laughed. ‘Hey, give it to me straight, Liz. Don’t let me down gently.’

‘So.’ She was laughing too. ‘Do we get this cab?’

They ordered the taxi from the same table menu as the drinks. This early in the evening, it wasn’t hard to get one. Liz cleared the tab, and they left. There was frenetic dancing in the Iraq Room, harsh, mindless beats drawn from early millennium thrash bands like Noble Cause and Bushin’. They ducked through the press of bodies, got the stairs and made it out into the street, still laughing.

The taxi was there, gleaming black in the late evening light like a toy that belonged to them. Chris fetched up short, laughter drying in his throat. He glanced sideways at Liz Linshaw and saw the hilarity had drained out of her the same way. He could not read the expression that had replaced it on her face. For a moment they both stood there, staring at the cab like idiots, and like a Nemex shell the realisation hit Chris in the back of the head. The sardonic amusement on the phone, the maddeningly familiar note in her deep-throated laugh. The sense of recall about this woman came crashing down on him.

She reminded him of Carla.

Carla when they first met. Carla, three or four years back. Carla before the creeping distance took its toll.

Suddenly, he was sweating.

What the fu—

It was the fear sweat, chasing a rolling shudder across his body. A feeling he’d left behind a decade ago in his early duels. Pure, existential terror, distilled down so clear it could not be pinned on any single identifiable thing. Fear of death, fear of life, fear of everything in between and what it would do to you in time. The terror of inevitably losing your grip.

‘Oy, are you getting in or what?’

The driver was leaning out, thumb jerked back to where the door of the black cab had hinged open of its own accord. There was a tiny light on inside, seats of cool green plush.

Liz Linshaw stood watching him, face still unreadable.

The sweat cooled.

He got in.

Chapter Twenty

Westward, there were mountains spearing up grimly under gathered blue cloud. Weak ladders of late afternoon sun fell through at infrequent intervals, splashing scant warmth where they hit. Carla shivered slightly at the sight. There was no darkness yet - this far north, daylight held the sky as it would for another full month, but the Lofoten skyline still looked like the watchtowers of a troll city.

‘Cold?’ Kirsti Nyquist glanced sideways from the jeep’s driving seat. Her ability to pick up on her daughter’s moods and feelings sometimes verged on the witchy. ‘We can close the hood, if you want.’

Carla shook her head. ‘I’m fine. Just thinking.’

‘Not happy thoughts, then.’

The road unwound ahead of them, freshly carved from the bleak terrain and laid down in asphalt so new it looked like liquorice. There were none of the luminous yellow markings as yet, and they kept passing raw white rock walls that still had defined grooves where the blasting holes had been sunk. A sign said Gjerlow Oceanic Monitoring -15 kilometres. Carla sighed and shifted in her seat. Kirsti drove the big Volvo All-Terrain with a care that, to Carla’s London-forged road instincts, seemed faintly ridiculous. They’d seen five other vehicles in the last hour, and three of those had been parked outside a fuelling post.

‘Tunnel,’ called her mother cheerily. ‘Mittens.’

Carla reached for her gloves. This was the second tunnel of the trip. The first time, she’d ignored her mother’s warning. They were less than two hundred kilometres inside the Arctic circle, and the weather had been pleasant since she got off the plane at Tromso two days ago, but tunnels were another matter. Deep in the mountain rock, an Arctic chill hit you in the lungs and the fingers before you’d gone a hundred metres.

Kirsti flipped on the headlamps and they barrelled down into the sodium yellow gloom. Their breath frosted and whipped away over their shoulders.

‘Now you’re cold, hey?’

‘A bit. Mum, did we really have to come all this way?’

‘Yes. I told you. It’s the only chance we’ll get to see him.’

‘You couldn’t invite him up to Tromso?’

Kirsti made a wry face. ‘Not any more.’

Carla tried primly not to laugh. Kirsti Nyquist was well into her fifties now, but she was still a strikingly handsome woman and she changed her lovers with brutal regularity. They just don’t grow with me, she once complained to her daughter. Perhaps that’s because they’re all young enough to be your children, Carla had retorted, a little unfairly. Her mother’s choices often were younger men, but not usually by more than a decade or so, and Carla herself had to admit most of the options in the fifty-plus male range weren’t much to look at.

The tunnel was six kilometres long. They made the other side with teeth chattering and Kirsti whooped as she drove into the fractured sunlight outside. The temperature upgrade soaked into Carla’s body like tropical heat. The chill seemed to have gone bone-deep. She tried to shrug it off.

Get a fucking grip, Carla.

She was already missing Chris, a lack for which she berated herself because it felt so pathetic alongside her mother’s cheerful self sufficiency. The anger at him that had driven her out of the house was already evaporating by the time her plane took off, and all she had by the time she arrived in Tromso was maudlin drinking talk of distance and loss.

Now, out of the mess she had laid out for her mother the night she arrived, Kirsti had snatched the possibility of meaningful action. Carla wondered vaguely what you had to do to attain operational pitch like that - have a child, write a book, lose a relationship? What did it take?

‘There it is.’ Kirsti gestured ahead, and Carla saw the road was dropping down to meet one side of a small, stubby fiord. On the other side, institutional buildings were gathered in a huddle, lit up shiny in a wandering shaft of sunlight. It looked as if the road ran all the way up to the end of the inlet and then back round to the monitoring station.

‘So this is all new as well?’

‘Relocated. They were based in the Faroes until last year.’

‘Why did?’ Carla remembered. ‘Oh, right. The BNR thing.’

‘Yes, your beloved British and their nuclear reprocessing. Gjerlow reckons it’s contaminated local waters for the next sixty years minimum. Pointless taking overview readings. None of the tests they do will stand the radiation.’

Not for the first time, Carla felt a wave of defensiveness rising in her at the mention of her adoptive home.

‘I heard it was just heat exchanger fluids - not enough to do much damage.’

‘My dear, you’ve been living in London too long if you believe what the British media tell you. There is no just where nuclear contaminants are concerned. It’s been a monumental disaster and anyone with access to independent broadcasting knows it.’

Carla flushed. ‘We’ve got independent channels.’

‘Does Chris buy off the jamming?’ Her mother looked interested. ‘I didn’t think you could do that effectively.’

‘No, he’s exempted. Under licence. For his job.’

‘Oh, I see.’ There was a studied politeness in Kirsti’s voice that didn’t quite shroud her distaste. Carla flushed again, deeper this time. She said nothing more until the wheels of the Volvo crunched across the gravel parking lot beside the monitoring station. Then, sitting still in the passenger seat as Kirsti killed the engine, she muttered, ‘I’m not sure this is such a good idea.’

‘It was a good idea when we had it on Friday night,’ said her mother emphatically. ‘It’s still a good idea now. One of my best. Now, come on.’

Kirsti’s Tromso University ID got them in the front door, and a quick search of the building’s locational database at reception told them Truls Vasvik was up on the top floor. They took the stairs, Kirsti leading by a couple of steps on every flight. Good for the buttocks, she flung over her shoulder in response to her daughter’s puffed protests to slow down. Only five levels. Come on.

They found Vasvik in the staff cafe. He was, Carla thought, a classic Kirsti type — gaunt and long-limbed, radiating self-sufficiency like the effects of some drug recently injected. He wore a crew-neck sweater, canvas work trousers, walking boots and an uncared-for heavy black coat that he somehow hadn’t got around to removing. The clothes hung off him, incidental drapings on his lean frame, and his silver-threaded black hair was long and untidy. He looked to be in his early forties. As they approached, he got up and offered a bony hand.

‘Hello Kirsti.’

‘Hello Truls. This is my daughter, Carla. Carla, Truls Vasvik. It’s good to see you again.’

Vasvik grunted.

‘Have you seen Gjerlow yet?’

‘About an hour ago.’

‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t realise—‘

‘Shall we all sit down. There’s machine coffee over there, if you want it.’

‘Can I get you one?’

Vasvik indicated the cup in front of him and shook his head. Kirsti went off to the bank of self-service machines across the cafe and left Carla stranded. She offered Vasvik an awkward smile and seated herself at the table.

‘So, you’ve known my mother for a while.’

He stared back at her. ‘Long enough.’

‘I, uh, I appreciate you taking the time to see us.’

‘I had to be here anyway. It wasn’t a problem.’

‘Yes, uh. How’s it going? I mean, can you talk about it?’

A shrug. ‘It isn’t, strictly speaking, confidential, at this end anyway. I need some data to back up a case we’re putting together. Gjerlow has it, he says.’

‘Is it a British thing?’

‘This time around, no. French.’ A marginal curiosity surfaced on his face. ‘You live there, then?’

‘Where, Britain? Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’

She bit her lip. Kirsti arrived with coffee cups and saved them both from the rapidly foundering conversation.

‘So,’ she said brightly. ‘Where are we up to?’

‘We haven’t started yet,’ said Vasvik.

Kirsti frowned. ‘Are you okay, Truls?’

‘Not really.’ He met her gaze. ‘Jannicke died.’

‘Jannicke Onarheim? Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Truls.’ Kirsti reached out and put her hand on Vasvik’s arm. ‘What happened?’

He smiled bleakly. ‘How do ombudsmen die, Kirsti? She was murdered. I only got the call this morning.’

‘Was she working?’

Vasvik nodded, staring into the plastic-topped table. ‘Some American shoe manufactury up near Hanoi. The usual stuff, reported human rights abuse, no local police cooperation.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘They found her car run off the road an hour out of town, nowhere near where she should have been. Looks like someone took her for a ride. Raped. Shot. Single cap, back of the head.’

He glanced up at Carla, who had flinched on the word raped.

‘Yeah. It’s probably good you hear this. Jannicke is the third this year. The Canadians have lost twice that number. UN ombudsmen earn their money, and often enough we don’t get to spend it. From what Kirsti says, your man might not suit the work.’

The implied slight to Chris, as always, fired her up.

‘Well, I doubt you’d last long in Conflict Investment.’

The other two looked at her with chilly Norwegian disapproval.

‘Perhaps not,’ said Vasvik finally. ‘It was not my intention to insult you or your man. But you should know what you are trying to get him into. Less than fifty years ago, this was still a comfortable, localised, office-based little profession. That’s changed. Now, at this level, it can get you killed. There is no recognition of the work we do - at best we are seen as fussy bureaucrats, at worst as the enemies of capitalism and the bedfellows of terrorists. Our UN mandate is a bad joke. Only a handful of governments will act on our findings. The rest cave in to corporate pressure. Some, like the United States and so, of course, Britain, simply refuse point blank to support the process. They are not even signatories to the agreement. They block us at every turn. They query our budgets, they demand a transparency that exposes our field agents, they offer legal and financial asylum to those offenders we do manage to indict. We shelve two out of every three cases for lack of viability and,’ he jerked his chin, perhaps out to wherever Jannicke Onarheim’s body now lay, ‘we bury our dead to the jeers of the popular media.’

More silence. Across the cafe, someone worked the coffee machine.

‘Do you hate your job?’ asked Carla quietly.

A thin smile. ‘Not as much as I hate the people I chase.’

‘Chris, my husband, hates his job. So much that it’s killing him.’

‘Then why doesn’t he just quit?’ There was scant sympathy in the ombudsman’s voice.

‘That’s so fucking easy for you to say.’

Kirsti shot her a warning glance. ‘Truls, Chris was born and brought up in the London cordoned zones. You’ve seen that, you know what it’s like. And you know what happens to the ones who manage to claw their way out. First-generation syndrome. If quitting means going back to the zones, he probably would rather die. He’d certainly rather kill. And in the end, we know how closely those two can be intertwined.’

Another smile, somewhat less thin. ‘Yes. First-generation syndrome. I remember that particular lecture quite well, for some reason.’

Kirsti joined him in the smile. She flexed her body beneath her sweater in a fashion that made her daughter blush.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realised it was that memorable.’

It was as if something heavy had dropped from Vasvik’s shoulders. He sat up a little in the moulded plastic chair, turned back to Carla.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I don’t deny it. Someone like your husband could be useful to us. The information he has alone would probably be enough to build a couple of dozen cases. And, yes, a background in Conflict Investment would go a long way to making a good ombudsman. But I can’t promise you, him, a job. For one thing, we’d need an extraction team to get him away from Shorn. But, yes, if he really wants out, I can ask around. I can set some wheels in motion.’

It was what she wanted to hear, but somehow it didn’t fill her with the feeling she’d expected. Something about Vasvik’s clamped anger, the news of sudden death or maybe the bleak landscape outside, something was not right.

And later, when they got up to go and Kirsti and Truls embraced with genuine affection, she turned away so that she would not have to watch.

Chapter Twenty-One

Monday was soft summer rain and a nagging pain behind the eyes. He drove in with a vague sense of exposure all the way, and when he parked and alarmed the car, tiny twitches of the same discomfort sent him scanning the corners of the car deck for watchers.

This early, there was nobody about.

There were phone messages on the datadown - Liz Linshaw, drawling, ironic and inviting, Joaquin Lopez from the NAME. He shelved Liz and told the datadown to dial up Lopez’s mobile. The Americas agent had called four times in the last two hours and he sounded close to panic. He grabbed the phone at the third ring, voice tight and shaky.

‘Si, digame.’

‘It’s Faulkner. Jesus, Joaquin, what the fuck’s the matter with you?’

‘Escuchame.’ There was the sound of movement. Chris got the impression Lopez was in a hotel room, getting up from the bed, moving. The agent’s voice firmed up as he crossed into English. ‘Listen, Chris, I think I’m in trouble. I got down here last night, been making some enquiries about Diaz and now I got a clutch of Echevarria’s political police all over me like putas on payday. They’re in the bar across the street, downstairs in the lounge. I think a couple of them have taken a room on this floor, I don’t—‘

‘Joaquin, calm down. I understand the situation.’

‘No, you don’t fucking understand my situation, man. This is the NAME. These guys will cut my fucking cojones off if they get the chance. They bundle me into a car, and that’s it, I’m fucking history, man—‘

‘Joaquin, will you just shut up and listen!’ Chris went direct from the command snap to enabled conciliatory without allowing the other man a response. Textbook stuff. ‘I know you’re scared. I understand why. Now, let’s do something about it. What do these guys look like?’

‘Look like?’ A panicky snort. ‘They look like fucking political police, what do you want me to say? Ray Bans, bellies and fucking moustaches. Get the picture?’

Chris did get the picture. He’d seen these cut-rate bad guys in operation on his own trip to the Monitored Economy with Hammett McColl. He knew the gut-sliding sense of menace they could generate simply by appearing on the scene.

‘No, Joaquin, I meant. Did you get pictures? Have you got your shades set down there?’

‘Yeah, I brought them.’ A pause. ‘I didn’t use them yet.’

‘Right.’

‘I freaked. I’m sorry, Chris, I fucked up. I didn’t think.’

‘Well, think now, Joaquin. Get a grip. You can fuck up on your own time, right now you’re on the Shorn clock. I’m not paying you to get your arse killed.’ Chris glanced at his watch. ‘What time is it there? One a.m.?’

‘A little after.’

‘Right. How many of these moustaches are there?’

‘I don’t know, two down in the lobby.’ The panic started to seep back into Lopez’s voice. ‘Maybe another two or three more across the road.’

‘Can you get me pictures?’

‘I’m not fucking going outside, man.’

‘Alright, alright.’ Chris paced, thinking. Trying to put himself in the hotel room with Lopez. The Nikon sunglasses and the data transmission gear had been an end-of-quarter gift from Shorn - they were very high spec. ‘Look, can you see the ones in the bar from your window? Go and check.’

More movement. Lopez came back calmer.

‘Yeah, I can see their table. I think I can get a decent shot from here.’

‘Alright, that’s good. Do that.’ Chris cranked his voice down, as soothing as possible. ‘Then I want you to go down to the lobby and get full frontals of the other two. They shouldn’t try anything there. Are you armed?’

‘Are you kidding? I came through US security at the airport, just like everybody else.’

‘Fine, doesn’t matter. Just get the pictures and mail them through to me as quickly as you can. I’ll be waiting. And, Joaquin. Remember what I said. You don’t get killed on the Shorn clock. We’ll pull you out of there. Got it?’

‘Got it.’ A brief pause in which he could hear Lopez breathing down the line.

‘Chris. Thanks, man.’

‘De nada. Stay cool.’

Chris waited until he heard the disconnect. Then he slammed a foot against the desk leg, knotted a fist.

‘Fuck.’ Another kick. ‘Fuck.’

Back to the datadown. He estimated Lopez’s performance time, placed forward calls. Then he went to the window and stared out at the London skyline until the phone chimed.

The images came through, two clear face-and-trunk shots that must have been taken from less than five metres. Lopez had got close. The two parapoliticals were grinning unpleasantly into the Nikon’s hidden lens. Their teeth showed, spotted brown with decay. The cafe snap was less to rejoice about, but there was a pavement table centred in the shot, three clear figures around it, faces turned in the camera’s direction.

The first of the forward calls went through. Even with the forewarning, the other end took a while to pick up, and the first sound to come through was a noisy yawn. Chris smiled for the first time that day.

‘Burgess Imaging.’ The screen caught up, filled with a dark unshaven face in its late teens. ‘Oh, hello, Chris. What can I? Uh, those satellite blow-ups okay?’

‘Yeah, fine, it’s not that. Listen, can you do me step-ups of a street shot, right now? Faces good enough for machine ID?’

Jamie Burgess yawned again and scratched at something in the corner of one eye.

‘Cost ya.’

‘I guessed. Look, I’m wiring it through on inset. Just take a look.’

Burgess waited, blinked at the screen a couple of times and nodded.

‘Nikon shot, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Give me two minutes. Leave the line open.’

‘Thanks, Jamie.’

Another yawn. ‘Pleasure.’

Burgess was as good as his word. The datadown spat back perfect head-and-shoulder shots ninety seconds later. Chris punched them up next to the two he already had from the lobby and nodded.

‘Okay, motherfuckers. Let’s hope you’ve been to church recently.’

The second forward call picked up on the first ring. A grizzled virtual head above crisp army khaki fatigues. The accent was American, the real-life version of Mike Bryant’s Simeon Sands burlesque.

‘Langley Contracting.’

‘This is Chris Faulkner, Shorn Associates, London. Do you have operational units in the Medellin area?’

There was a pause, presumably while Chris’s scrambler code and authorisation cleared at the other end. Then the virtual customer service agent nodded.

‘Yes, we can work in that area.’

‘Good, I need five extreme prejudice deletions with immediate effect. Exact locational data and visual ID attached.’

‘Very good. Please indicate the level of precision required.’

‘Uh.’ This was a new refinement. ‘Sorry?’

‘Please indicate level of precision required from the following five options; surgical, accurate, scattershot, blanket, atrocity.’

‘Jesus, uh.’ Chris gestured helplessly. ‘Surgical.’

‘Please note the surgical option may incur a substantial time delay. Char—‘

‘No. That’s no good. This is with immediate effect.’

‘Do you wish to supersede precision levels with an urgency marker?’

‘Yes. I want this done now.’

‘Charge card or account?’

‘Account.’

‘Your contract is enabled. Thank you for choosing Langley Contracting. Have a nice day.’

Chris looked once more at the five faces floating on his screen. He nodded again and pressed a thumb down on each one to make it go away.

‘Adios, muchachos.’

When the last face had wiped, he wired the datadown line to his mobile and went out to get coffee from Louie Louie’s.

Lopez called him about an hour later. Voice rampant down the line, whooping shrill with delight. Sirens in the backdrop.

‘Chris, you’re beautiful man!!!! You did it. Hijos de puta, they’re all over the street, man! They’re all over the fucking street!’

‘What?’ said Chris faintly.

‘Drive-by, man. Fucking exemplary. They must have used one of those shoulder-launchers. Whole fucking cafe’s on fire. I’m telling you, there’s nothing left but pieces.’

Chris sat down heavily behind the desk. He saw it, lit in tones of night and flame. Pastiche newsreel footage, memories of a hundred such scenes. Bodies and bits thereof, streak-scorched black and red. Screams and blundering panic from the sidelines.

‘The hotel.’ It was almost a whisper, like words he couldn’t be bothered to push out of his mouth. ‘The people in the hotel.’

‘Yeah, they got them too. I heard the shots. Spray guns.’ Lopez made a stuttering machine gun noise. He was drunk on his own narrow escape. ‘Just been down to check, right now. See, I was still looking out the window at the fire when—‘

‘No, Joaquin. Stop. The other people in the hotel. You know, staff. Other customers. Did they hit anybody else?’

‘Oh.’ Lopez stopped. ‘I don’t think so, I didn’t see any other bodies. Man, who’d you call?’

‘Never mind.’ It was like tasting ashes. He could smell the blast, smell the scorched flesh on the scented night air. Over the phone, the sirens sobbed out and he heard screaming in the space it left. ‘You best get out of there. Better yet, get back to Panama City. You’re blown down there for now. You’ll have to work through someone else.’

‘Yeah. What I thought.’ Lopez’s voice shifted. ‘Listen, Chris. I lost it for a while back there, but I know my work. I didn’t make one wrong move in the last twenty-four hours. Those hijos de puta, they knew I was coming.’

Chris nodded drearily, for all it was an audio link.

‘Right, Joaquin.’

‘Give me another two days. We can still make this run. I know the right people. You don’t have to worry.’

He squeezed his eyes shut. ‘Right.’

‘Count on it, man. I’ll hook you up, I swear.’

Behind Lopez, someone started using an ampbox to yell down the noise of the crowd. Chris reached out and cut the link.

Bryant and Makin got in about the same time. Chris went down to the car deck to meet them. Mike grinned when he saw him.

‘Hey, Chris! Jesus, what time did you get in?’

He ignored the greeting and went straight for Makin. Right fist in under the rib cage with the full force of the last stride behind it. Makin doubled up and vomited a spray of breakfast. Chris stepped back and hooked into his face from the side. The glasses flew. Makin hit the deck and rolled, retching. Chris got a single kick in, and then Mike had him pinioned from behind and was dragging him out of range.

‘That’s it, Chris. Time out.’

‘Fucking piece of shit. Sell out my agents, you fuck.’

‘I don’t,’ Makin got to one knee, holding his face. ‘Know. What the fuck. Youah talking about.’

Chris renewed his efforts to break Mike’s hold. Makin straightened, wiped his mouth and looked up. He raised his free arm.

‘I’ll see you on the fucking woad for that, Faulkner.’

‘Hey!’ Mike loosened his hold on Chris’s shoulders. ‘That’s enough of that shit, Nick. Nobody sees anybody on the road in this team. Nobody. You save that shit for the tenders. Chris, I’m going to let you go now, okay. Now you behave. No brawling on the car decks, it’s undignified. This isn’t the zones.’

He let go of Chris and stepped away, carefully poised between the two men, arms spread slightly upward from the waist, ready. Makin prowled sideways and spat. Chris felt the reaction twitch through him from the fist back to the shoulder. Mike Bryant drew a deep breath.

‘Okay, guys. What the fuck is going on?’

‘This piece of shit,’ Chris was still adrenalin fired, thrumming with the need to do violence. ‘Wired through our detail on Diaz to Echevarria.’

‘Yeah, so?’

Bryant blinked. ‘You did that, Nick?’

‘Jesus, yes. You said to light a fiah under Echevaia’s arse.’

Chris felt the fury drop out of him to make room for disbelief. He saw the same in Bryant’s stare. The big man shook his head.

‘But—‘

‘Christ, Mike. I want the axe over his head by Monday, that’s what you said. What was I supposed to do?’

Chris flared. ‘That’s fucking bullshit. You weren’t in here at the weekend.’

‘How the fuck do you know wheah I was? What are you, my fucking mother?’

‘I didn’t see you Saturday,’ said Bryant quietly.

‘I took the stuff home, Mike. Look, Echevaia was holding rallies for the faithful all weekend. It seemed like a good time to shake him. The uplincon is tomorrow, what was I going to do? Wait and then twy and paste it all together today? I’ve got Cambodian logistics to think about, a palace wevolution in Yemen. The Kashmiah thing. Guatemala’s coming apart again. I don’t have time for this shit.’

Chris surged forward a step. Fetched up with Mike Bryant’s arm across his chest.

‘I sent Joaquin Lopez down to the ME, fuckhead, asking after Diaz. He nearly fucking died today.’

‘That’s supposed to be my fault?’

Bryant sighed. ‘Diaz was off-limits, Nick. He was our holdout if old scumbag didn’t fold.’

‘You knew that!’

‘Oh, what am I? A fucking telepath? No one told me not to use Diaz, and he’s the stongest theat we’ve got.’

‘Alright.’ Mike rubbed at his face. ‘Maybe we didn’t make it clear enough. But you should have checked with Chris first. Same goes for you, Chris. You should have run it by Nick before you sent Lopez down there.’

‘But.’ Chris couldn’t identify the sudden feeling in his chest. ‘You told me to send him.’

‘Well, yeah, but not without consultation.’ Bryant looked back and forth between the two men. ‘Come on, people. A little communication. A little cooperation, for Christ’s sake. Is that too much to ask?’

Neither of the other men even glanced at him. Chris and Makin were either end of a hardwired stare.

‘People died, Mike, because of this fucking clown.’

Makin snorted.

Bryant frowned. ‘I thought you said nearly.’

‘Not Lopez. Other people. I had to call in Langley to get the goons off his back, and they blew up a whole fucking cafe.’

Makin traded in his snort for a sneer. Bryant made a noise only slightly less dismissive.

‘Well, what’d you expect? Come on, Chris. Langley? These guys used to be the CIA, for fuck’s sake. Even before deregulation, they were a bunch of cack-fisted incompetent fucking clowns.’ He looked across at Makin, grinned and made an imploring gesture with one hand. ‘I mean, Langley, for Christ’s sake.’

Chris felt himself losing his temper with his friend. ‘There was no fucking option, Mike,’ he snapped. ‘No one else in the ME has the response time. You know that.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s one for the Monopolies Commission.’ Mike pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. ‘Look. It’s a shame about the cafe, but it could have been worse. I mean, with Langley you’re lucky they didn’t kill Lopez for you as well.’ Makin laughed out loud. Bryant joined in. ‘Fuck, the kind of punk sicarios they’re contracting out to these days, you’re lucky they didn’t take out the whole block.’

‘It isn’t funny, Mike.’

‘Oh, come on, it is a bit.’ Bryant shelved his grin. Sobered. ‘Alright. A fuck-up, is what it is. But we can cover the damage. We’ll ride out any waves Echevarria makes tomorrow, keep it in the team, and we’ll bury the Langley account. Pay it off, I don’t know, through one of the Cambodia slush funds or something. No one else has to know. Clean hands all round, come the quarterly. Alright?’ He looked round at his team. ‘Agreed?’

Makin nodded. Chris, finally, too. Bryant’s grin came back.

‘Good. But remember, gentlemen. A little more attention to detail next time, please.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Hernan Echevarria, predictably, did not take it so well.

‘You sit this out,’ said Mike, rather grimly, as they stood in the covert viewing chamber, waiting for the uplink to go through. ‘We’ll do the lying.’

As usual when faced with politics, he had slung his baseball bat across his shoulders cruciform, and now he prowled about, rolling his neck back against the polished wood. On the other side of a one-way glass wall, Nick Makin busied himself with bottled water and screen control mice along one edge of the conference table. The rest of the slate grey expanse was bare, but for the shallow slope of recessed display screens near the centre.

‘You think this is the break point?’ Chris asked.

Mike pulled a face. ‘If yesterday’s performance is anything to go by, it’s pretty fucking close. It’s only the fact he is actually yelling at us that makes me think we might still have a chance. If he was planning to walk, I don’t think we’d even be talking. Well, shouting.’

The call had come in a couple of hours before lunch, barely past dawn back in the NAME. Echevarria must have spent all night talking to his forensic experts in Medellin. Mike took it. Chris never heard the detail, but understood it had gone something like what the fuck did you gringo sons of whores think you were doing on my turf, who the fuck do you think you are, talking to this Marquista traitor Diaz behind my back, if you were men of honour and not grey suited scum I would etcetera etcetera, blah, blah, apoplexy.

‘Okay, not quite,’ Mike admitted. ‘Figure of speech. He hasn’t dropped dead, fortunately. Otherwise we really would be in trouble. I don’t rate our chances of negotiating with Echevarria junior at all. So, at the meeting, let’s try and keep temperatures low. Conciliatory approach.’

Later that day, they heard the news. The gunships had flown, the highlands west of Medellin were in flames and the Monitored Economy’s pet press were proclaiming Diaz either dead or fleeing for the Panamanian border where he would be cornered and caged like the cowardly Marquista dog he was. In the cities, the arrests ran into triple figures.

‘He’ll be riding high, we’ve got that going for us.’ Mike, trying for upbeat as the three-minute countdown for the uplink commenced. ‘Taste of blood in his teeth, with a bit of luck he’ll think he’s invincible. With the right amount of cringing apology, I think we can talk him round.’

Chris hauled up a chair and leaned on the back. ‘You sure you don’t want me in there instead of Makin?’

Bryant just looked at him.

‘What?’

‘You going to let this go?’

‘Mike, it isn’t even my fucking account. In the end, I don’t give a shit. But you’re not going to tell me this wasn’t deliberate.’

‘Oh, give me a fucking break with the conspiracy theories, Chris. Why can’t you just accept it was a communications fuck-up? Is basic incompetence so hard to believe in?’

In the conference room, Makin stood facing them and rapped on the glass.

‘Two minutes, Mike.’

Bryant leaned down to one of the mikes and pressed trans. ‘Be right there, Nick. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen.’

He slipped the baseball bat off his shoulders and leaned it in a corner. Chris put a hand on his arm.

‘Mike, you saw his face when we ran it by him on Thursday. You were there. He resented the change of tack, and he made damned sure it blew up in our faces. He handed up Diaz so we’d have nothing else to work with, and you know it.’

‘And nearly blew out his own account? Cost himself maybe thousands in lost bonuses, come quarterly. Chris, come on. It makes him look bad. Why would he do that? What’s in it for him?’

Chris shook his head. ‘I don’t know, but—‘

‘Exactly.’ Mike gripped his shoulders. ‘You don’t know. I don’t know either. There is nothing to know. Now let it go.’

‘Mike, I’ve got no axe to grind here. I came—‘

Another sharp rap on the glass. ‘Youah cutting it fine, Michael.’

‘I only came on board to help you, and I’m—‘

The shoulders, squeezed tighter. Mike met his eye. ‘Chris, I know that. And I’m grateful. And I’m not blaming you for what happened. But you’ve got to let it go now. Get back to Cambodia. Start worrying about your own quarterly review.’

‘Mike—‘

‘I’m out of time, Chris.’ He squeezed once more, then darted for the door. Chris watched through the glass as he zipped into the seat next to Makin and settled, instants before the uplink chimed.

One thing that every Conflict Investment client Chris had ever dealt with had in common was their love of developed world technotoys. It was basic CI wisdom, handed down from partners to analysts everywhere in the trade. Don’t stint on toys. At the top of every hardware gift list, you placed your state-of-the-art global communications gadgetry. That, and personalised airliners. Then the military stuff. Always that order, it never failed. Echevarria’s uplink holocast was razor-sharp in resolution, and came with about a dozen attached display screens.

Chris knew his face, of course, from the HM files and occasional newscasts from the ME. Still, it had been a while since he’d seen Echevarria for real. He leaned in close to the glass wall and focused on the sagging, leathery face; the pouched eyes and clamped mouth, the scrawny neck, held ramrod straight, disappearing into the neck of a dress uniform laden with medals and awards. The peripheral display screens fanned out behind him unignited, like a black halo. The hands resting on the holocast table top looked bloated.

‘Ah, General,’ said Bryant, with plastic charm. ‘There you are. Welcome.’

Echevarria raised one hand to his lips and looked to his left. The uplink chime sounded again and about a metre down the table, a second holocast image blipped and fizzled into existence.

‘My son will be joining us for these proceedings.’ The dictator smiled, showing brilliant white teeth, clearly not his own. ‘If you gentlemen don’t object.’

The irony was heavy, but worse lay behind it. Francisco Echevarria was currently in Miami, Chris knew. And the speed with which the holocast had come in past Shorn’s databreaks, uninvited, suggested a level of intrusion equipment beyond that usually on offer to guests at the Miami Hilton.

He’s with the fucking Americans. Rimshaw or Meldreck, got to be. Chris scrabbled for a hold. Most likely Rimshaw. Lloyd fucking Paul. Calders aren’t usually this flamboyant.

The new holocast settled down. Francisco Echevarria emerged, darkly handsome in one of his habitual Susana Ingram suits. His face was already flushed with anger looking for discharge.

Mike Bryant took it and ran with it.

‘Of course. We are delighted to have Senor Echevarria with us as well. In fact, the more varied the input at a time—‘

‘Hijo de puta,’ spat Echevarria junior without preamble. ‘The only fuckin’ input I have to tell you is that if my father was not so sentimental about old attachments, you would be drivin’ for tender tomorrow. I am sick of your Eurotrash duplici—‘

‘Paco! Please.’ There was a light amusement in the father’s voice. His English, Chris noticed, had a mannered southern-states drawl to it, at odds with the Miaspanic rhythms of his son’s speech. ‘These gentlemen have an apology to make. It would be rude not to hear them out.’

So.

Chris saw how Makin tautened. He wasn’t sure if the father and son noticed.

‘Certainly,’ said Mike Bryant smoothly. ‘There has been a serious misunderstanding, and I do feel that the responsibility is ours. When my colleague brought our files on the rebels to your attention, he perhaps did not stress enough that we were concerned—‘

Echevarria junior rasped something indistinct in Spanish. His father looked in his direction and he shut up. Bryant nodded grateful acknowledgment to the father, and picked up the threads again.

‘Were concerned that perceived instability was going to draw new and less scrupulous investors than ourselves.’

Hernan Echevarria smiled bleakly from around the globe.

‘This instability you speak of has been dealt with. And you’re right, Senor Bryant. That was not how your colleague presented the matter.’ One of the peripheral screens woke into static prior to transmission. ‘Would you like to see the message?’

Bryant raised a hand. ‘We’ve all seen the message, Colonel. I don’t propose to take up any more of your valuable time here than absolutely

necessary. As I said, it was a case of poor communication, for which we take full responsibility.’

He looked pointedly at Makin.

‘General Echevaia.’ It sounded as if the words were being ripped out of Makin with pliers. ‘I apologise. Unconditionally. For any. Misunderstanding I have caused. It was never my intention to. Suggest that we would be intested in dealing with your political enemies—‘

‘The enemies of my country, senor. The enemies of our national honour, of all Colombian patriots. Condemned, you will recall, by the Catholic church and every other symbol of decency in the Americas.’

‘Yes,’ said Makin stiffly. ‘As you say.’

‘I have something here.’ Bryant came to his rescue. ‘Which you may be interested in.’

One of the recessed screens flickered to life, and Chris knew that on the other side of the world the Echevarrias were watching the image emerge from somewhere over Mike Bryant’s shoulder.

‘This is some of the primary documentation you received from us in its original format,’ said Bryant, steering the control mouse with one casual hand. ‘As you’ll see from the blow-up, it is not a document originating from Shorn. In fact, this, as I’m sure you’ll recognise, is the logo of Hammett McColl.’

It could have been computer-generated fakery, and everyone in the room knew it. But Echevarria had invited HM out to the NAME himself the year before, and he knew it fitted.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

‘From a source.’

Echevarria junior erupted again in mother-related Spanish insults. Bryant waited him out. The father silenced the son again, this time with an irritated gesture.

‘What source?’

‘At this stage,’ said Bryant carefully, ‘I am not prepared to reveal that information. A source is only useful so long as it remains secure, and this link-up is not. However,’ He caught the son’s bristling and moved to beat it. ‘In a genuine face-to-face situation, I would be happy to discuss all and any details pertaining to this matter. I feel that we owe you a certain candour after the weekend’s confusion.’

‘You are suggesting I fly to London?’

Bryant spread his hands. ‘In your own time, naturally. I am aware that you have a number of pressing engagements at home.’

‘Yes.’ Echevarria smiled again, with about as much warmth as before. ‘Notably clearing up the mess created by one of your agents.’

Mike sighed. ‘General, I have done what I can to demonstrate our good faith. I give you my word—‘

A repressed snarl from Echevarria junior.

‘—that whatever this man was doing in Medellin, it was not at our request. He may have been operating at the behest of Hammett McColl, or someone else. I do not deny that our source in HM could very well have sold the same data to anyone else willing to pay corporate prices. I understand this person, let us say, has good contacts in both New York and Tokyo and—‘

‘Alright, Senor Bryant. I believe I have heard this excuse. You have offered a face-to-face meeting. To what end?’

‘Well.’ Mike went back to the mouse. The HM document faded and was replaced by one of the hardware lists he’d shown Chris the week before. ‘There is an outstanding question over the matter of military equipment. In view of these new developments, and the disturbances they are bound to cause, I had it in mind to review the budget.’

Chris caught the reaction. He wondered how Mike managed not to grin.

‘You are saying?’

‘Next month, London hosts the North Memorial arms fair. I am suggesting that you kill two birds with one stone and that we visit the fair together with an eye to your immediate requirements. While you are here, we can discuss the matter of Hammett McColl’s information and its US implications.’

Echevarria’s eyes narrowed. ‘US implications?’

‘I’m sorry, I meant international implications.’ Alike did a good imitation of embarrassment. ‘I tend to leap to conclusions that cannot always be justified, but. Well. We can discuss this further when you are in London.’

After that, it was just noise. Bryant layered on the apologies, with a couple of wheeled-in words from Makin. Echevarria junior growled and snapped at intervals, always brought to heel by his father who just looked thoughtful throughout. Goodbyes were said cordially enough. Mike came storming back into the viewing chambers and slammed the door behind him.

‘Get on to Lopez. I want contact with the rebels by the end of the week. This motherfucker is going to turn on us.’

Chris blinked. ‘I thought you’d hooked him.’

‘Yeah, for the moment. The military stuff ought to hold him for a while, and that smear about US involvement will stave off junior’s Miami connections. But in the end, it’s a slum block waiting to come down. Old Hernan doesn’t really buy anything we said in there, he’s just biding his time to see what he can get out of us. And he’s not going to stay bribed with a handful of cheap cluster bombs, which is about all we can afford right now, the state things are in. No, the Americans are going to get him, sooner or later, and I want a player of our own in position before that happens.’

‘Yeah, but who?’ Chris gestured out through the glass to where Makin still sat at the table, staring into the middle distance. ‘Fuckhead there’s managed to trash Diaz. Who does that leave us?’

‘We’ll have to go with Barranco.’

‘Barranco?’

‘Chris, he’s what we’ve got. You said yourself, Arbenz isn’t going to be in any position to lead an armed insurrection this year.’

‘Yeah, but Barranco. He’s committed, Mike.’

‘Ah, come on. They all start out that way.’

‘No, he’s a real fucking Guevara, Mike. I don’t think we’re going to be able to control him.’

Bryant grinned. ‘Yeah, we will. You will.’ He glanced back through at Makin. The other executive hadn’t moved. ‘I’m going to take this shit to Hewitt and get Nick reassigned. It’s high fucking time. Meanwhile, you get Barranco to sit down. I don’t care what it takes. Fly out there yourself if you have to, but get him to a table.’

There was a brief rush off the words, an image from the Hammett McColl visit, a Caribbean night sky shingled with stars, the warm darkness beneath and the noises of the night time street.

‘You want me to go out to Panama?’

‘If that’s what it takes.’

‘Hewitt isn’t going to like this. She gave the account to Makin in the first place. It isn’t going to look good if he’s written off as the wrong choice. And that’s without her feelings about me. She’s hardly a fan.’

‘Chris, you’re fucking paranoid. I told you before. Hewitt’s a fan of money, and right now you’re making plenty of it. Bottom line, that’s what counts.’ Mike grinned again. ‘And anyway, she gives me any static, I’ll go talk to Notley. You are in, my friend, like it or not. Welcome to the NAME account.’

Out in the conference room, Makin stirred in his chair and turned to look towards them. It was as if he’d heard the conversation. He looked beaten and betrayed. Chris stared back at him, trying to chase out a faint disquiet that would not go away.

‘Thanks.’

‘Hey, you earned it. Run with it.’ Bryant slung an arm around his shoulders. ‘Besides, we’re a fucking team. Now let’s kick Hernan Echevarria into touch and make some fucking money.’

Chapter Twenty-Three

Someone had tied up a damaged speedboat beside the jetty and then left it to drown. The boat’s prow was raised, roped tightly to a mooring iron, but behind the fly-specked windscreen, the water was up over the pale leather upholstered interior almost to the dashboard. Chris saw a fish hanging suspended below the surface like a tiny zeppelin, nibbling at something on the lower arc of the submerged steering wheel. Twigs and decaying leaf matter floated around the sunken stern, shifting sloppily back and forth as the wake of a passing water taxi rolled up to the jetty. Wavelets slapped at the wooden supports. Out across the lagoon, low cloud adhered like grey candyfloss to trees on the islands, and drifted across the seaward view, trailing rain. The sun was a vague blot on the lighter grey overhead. The air was warm and clammy.

Chris turned away. It wasn’t the Caribbean as he remembered it. He went back to where Joaquin Lopez sat with his back to the wooden shack that justified the jetty’s existence.

‘You sure he’s coming?’

Lopez shrugged. He was a tall, tightly-muscled man, mostly Afro-Caribbean, and he radiated a calm at odds with the panic he’d shown over the phone from Medellin. ‘He has every reason to. I wouldn’t have brought you for nothing, man. Smoke?’

Chris shook his head. Lopez lit a cigarette for himself and plumed smoke out across the water. He scratched absently at a scar on his forehead.

‘It will not have been easy for him. There’s a lot of heat along this part of the coast. The turtle patrols have authority to stop and search anyone they think is poaching. And you sometimes got US drug enforcement boats up from the Darien. They don’t have any authority, but. . .’

He shrugged again. Chris nodded.

‘When did that ever stop them, right?’

‘Right.’ Lopez looked away and grinned.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. You don’t talk like a gringo.’

Chris yawned. He hadn’t slept much in the last couple of days. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘Keep it up. It may help with Barranco.’

It was piling up behind his eyes now. London, Madrid, San Jose Costa Rica. A blur of airports, executive lounges in muted pastel shades, the grey whisper of air-conditioned flight. Chasing down the sun, gaining a day. Helicoptered out of San Jose at dawn and across the border into Panama. Touchdown on a sun-drenched airfield outside David, where Lopez had sneaked out of Panama City and west to meet him. Another short hop north to Bocas del Toro, a series of shacks and people Lopez knew, a gun on loan, a water taxi out here, wherever exactly it was, and waiting, waiting for Barranco.

‘You ever meet him?’

Lopez shook his head. ‘Spoke to him on the videophone a couple of days ago. He’s looking tired, not like the pinups they did of him back in ‘41. He needs this, Chris. This is his last throw.’

The year echoed in his head. In ‘41, Edward Quain had died in smeared fragments on the cold asphalt of the M20. At the time, it had seemed like some kind of ending. But Chris had woken the next day to find the world intact and nothing he’d begun at Hammett McColl even close to tidy, let alone finished. It had dawned on him only then that he’d have to go on living, and that he’d have to find some new reason to do it.

A soft snarling, out across the water.

‘Boat coming,’ said Lopez.

The vessel came into view around a forested headland, raising a bow wave to match the noise of its engines. It was a big, navy-grey vessel, built for speed and, judging by the twinned machine guns mounted behind an impact-glass cupola on the foredeck, for assault. A flag flapped at the stern, white design on a green background. Lopez breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it.

‘Turtle patrol,’ he said.

The powerboat slowed and settled in the water as the motors cut to an idle. It nosed into the jetty and someone dressed in khakis came up on the foredeck. Yells in Spanish. Lopez responded. The deckhand gathered up a line and jumped blithely to the jetty with it. He landed with a practised flex in the legs. A woman, similarly attired, came and leaned on the machine-gun cupola, staring at them. Chris felt caution creep through him.

‘You’re armed too, right?’ he muttered to Lopez.

‘Sure. But these are turtle guys, they aren’t—‘

The next man off the boat wore the same army fatigues and had a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He passed Chris without a glance, ambled up to Lopez and rapped out something in Spanish. When he got the answer, he disappeared into the shack behind them. Chris looked at the water on the other side of the jetty and wondered how deep it was. He’d want a good half metre over his head to be sure of not getting shot. The Smith and Wesson Lopez had lent him was apparently guaranteed to fire wet, but against assault rifles—

Let’s face it, Chris, you wouldn’t last five minutes. This isn’t a Tony Carpenter flick.

‘Senor Faulkner?’

He jerked back to the boat. Another khaki-clad figure had joined the woman on the foredeck. As the man vaulted to the jetty, Chris caught up with the voice. It was Barranco.

It was the same weathered set of features Chris remembered from the HM meeting just over a year ago - a face darkened by sun and altitude, broad across the cheekbones, chipped with the blue of eyes tossed into the gene pool by some European colonist decades or centuries absorbed. The same close-cropped greying hair, the same height and length of limb as Barranco moved to greet him. The same calloused grip, the same search in the eyes when you got up close. It was a gaze that belonged on the bridge of some warship from the last century, or maybe the last of the pirate trawlers, scanning the grey horizon for signs.

‘Senor Faulkner. I remember you now, from the Hammett McColl “mission. The man with the laptop. You were very quiet then.’

‘I came to listen.’ Chris reached into his jacket. ‘This time I—‘

‘Very easy, please.’ Barranco raised his own hands. ‘My companions are a little nervous this far from home, and it wouldn’t do to let them think you’re planning to use that badly concealed gun in your belt.’

He gestured in turn at the woman by the cupola and the first deckhand ashore, who now straightened from the mooring iron with a pistol gripped in one fist. Chris heard the snap of a weapon being cocked, looked back at the shack and saw the man with the assault rifle emerge from the building again, weapon cradled at his hip.

‘So,’ said Barranco. ‘Welcome again to Latin America.’

The interior of the shack was equipped with basic facilities - a toilet behind a wall of plastic partitioning, a tiny stove in a corner and an ancient wooden table two metres long, scarred with decades of use and carved with what looked like whole generations of grafitti. A half dozen tired-looking plastic moulded chairs were gathered around the table — Chris’s choice from among the untidy pile they’d found behind the shack when they arrived. Hardly Shorn conference standard. The windows were small and liberally grimed, but bulbs from an aqualight system hung suspended at intervals in the roof space and the long uptake taper was still intact, dangling down through a crudely bored hole in the floorboards and into the water below the pilings. Chris had tested the system earlier and the taper was well soaked. Now he flipped the wall switch and gentle light sprang up in three out of the five bulbs.

Barranco glanced around the shack and nodded.

‘Well, it’s not the Panama Hilton,’ he said. ‘But then, I suppose I am not Luis Montoya.’

It seemed to require a reaction. Chris tried a chuckle and gestured towards the table. ‘Please sit down, Senor Barranco. I’m afraid our concern so far has been security rather than comfort. Outside of one or two deluded drug enforcement diehards, Luis Montoya has no real enemies in the Americas. You, unfortunately, have many.’

‘A problem you are offering to solve for me, no?’ Barranco did not sit down. Instead, he nodded at his own security, two of whom had followed him in. Without a word, they moved to positions at the windows and took up an at-ease stance that fooled no one. Neither of them spared Chris more than a glance, and that filled with easy contempt.

Chris walked to the table and pulled out the chair for Barranco.

‘I’m sure that, given time and a little luck, a man such as yourself is probably capable of solving the problem without any help from men like me. Given time and luck. Please. Have a seat.’

Barranco didn’t move. ‘I am not susceptible to flattery.’

Chris shrugged and took the seat for himself. ‘I didn’t think you were. I was making a statement of fact. I believe, which is to say we, my colleagues at Shorn and I, believe you are capable of resolving a number of the issues facing Colombia at present. That is why I am here. This visit is a demonstration of our faith in you.’

It brought Barranco to the table, slowly.

‘You call it Colombia,’ he said. ‘Is that how your colleagues refer to it in London?’

‘No, of course not.’ Chris brushed at the table top and held up his hands, seeking the gaze of Barranco’s security before he reached slowly into his jacket and brought out the folded laptop. He thought he made it look pretty cool, considering. ‘We call it the North Andean Monitored Economy, as I’m sure you’re aware. As I’m also sure you’re aware, we are hardly alone in this.’

‘No.’ There was a flat bitterness in the words. Barranco’s hands had fallen on the back of the chair opposite Chris. ‘You are not. The whole world calls us that way. Only that son of a whore in Bogota uses the name Colombia, as if we were still a nation.’

‘Hernan Echevarria,’ said Chris softly, ‘milks the patriotism of his countrymen to shore up a regime that rewards the top five per cent of the country with riches and keeps the remainder with their faces in the dirt. You do not need me to tell you this. But I think you need me to help you do something about it.’

‘How quickly we move.’ There was a look on Barranco’s face, as if he could smell something bad seeping through the plastic partition from the toilet. ‘How quickly, from flattery to bribery. Did you not say that a man such as myself could resolve—‘

‘Given. Time.’ Chris locked gazes, made sure he’d stopped the other man, then set placidly about unfolding the laptop. ‘I said, given time. And given luck. And I said “probably”.’

‘I see.’ Chris wasn’t looking at him, but Barranco sounded as if he was smiling. How quickly we move. From a sneer to a smile. But he didn’t look up yet. The laptop was heavily creased in a couple of places and it was taking a while to warm up. He busied himself with flattening out the screen. He heard the chair opposite him scrape out. Heard it take Barranco’s weight.

The screen lit with a map of the Monitored Economy.

Chris looked up and smiled.

Later, with the numbers wrung out to dry, they walked out along the jetty and stood at the end, watching the weather. To the east, the sky was clearing in patches.

‘Smoke?’ Barranco asked him.

‘Yeah, thanks.’ Chris took the proffered packet and shook out a crumpled cylinder. Barranco lit it for him from a battered silver petrol lighter that bore engraving in Cyrillic around a skull and cross bones and the date 2007. Chris drew deep and promptly coughed himself to tears on the smoke.

‘Whoh.’ He took the cigarette out of his mouth and blinked at it. ‘Where’d you get these?’

‘A shop you haven’t been to.’ Barranco pointed what looked like southwest. ‘Seven hundred kilometres from here, up in the mountains. It’s run by an old woman who remembers the day Echevarria took power. She won’t sell American brands. It’s black tobacco.’

‘Yeah, I noticed.’ Chris took another, more cautious draw on the cigarette and felt it bite in his lungs. He gestured. ‘And the lighter? Military issue, right?’

‘Wrong.’ Barranco held up the lighter again, rubbing a finger back and forth across the Cyrillic characters. ‘Advertising. It says Death Cigarettes - too bad you’re going to die. But it’s a, what do you call it in English, a knock-out? An illegal copy?’

‘Knock-off.’

‘Yes, a knock-off. Some crazy English guy back in the last century, he actually made cigarettes with that name.’

‘Doesn’t sound too smart.’

Barranco turned and breathed smoke at him. ‘At least he was honest.’

Chris let that one sit for a while. Barranco wandered the width of the jetty, smoking, waiting him out.

‘I think you should come to London, Senor Barranco. You need—‘

‘Are your parents alive, Senor Faulkner?’

It stabbed him through, punctured the slowly inflating sense of a deal done that was filling him up.

‘No.’

‘Do you remember them?’

He shot a glance across at the face of the man beside him, and knew this was not negotiable. This was required.

‘My father died when I was young,’ he said, surprised at how easy it had become to say it. ‘I don’t remember him well. My mother died later, when I was in my teens. Of thorn fever.’

Barranco’s eyes narrowed. ‘What is that? Thorn fever.’

Chris smoked for a moment, checking his memories for leakage before he answered. He thought he had it locked down.

‘It’s a TB variant. One of the antibiotic-resistant strains. We lived in the zones, what you’d call the favelas, and there’s a lot of it there. She couldn’t afford the smart drugs, no one there can, so she just took basic ABs until she collapsed. No one’s sure what killed her in the end, the thorn fever or something else her immune system was too wasted to cope with. It took—‘

He didn’t have it locked down. He looked away.

‘I am sorry,’ said Barranco.

‘It,’ Chris swallowed. ‘Thanks, it’s okay. It was a long time ago.’

He drew on the cigarette again, grimaced suddenly and flung it away from him into the water. He pressed the back of his index finger against his eyes, one by one, and looked at the scant streaks of moisture they left.

‘My mother was taken away,’ said Barranco from behind him. ‘In the night, by soldiers. It was common at the time. I too was in my teens. My father had long ago left us, and I was out, at a political meeting. Perhaps it was me they came for. But they took her instead.’

Chris knew. He’d read the file.

‘They raped her. Echevarria’s men. They tortured her for days, with electricity and with a broken bottle. And then they shot her in the face and left her to die on a rubbish tip at the edge of town. A doctor from La Amnestia told me they think it took her about two hours.’

Chris would have said sorry, but the word seemed broken, drained of useful content.

‘Do you understand why I am fighting, Senor Faulkner? Why I have been fighting for the last twenty years?’

Chris shook his head, wordless. He turned to face Barranco, and saw that the other man had no more emotion on his face than he’d shown when they were discussing cigarettes.

‘You don’t understand, Senor Faulkner?’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Well, I cannot blame you. Sometimes, neither do I. Some days, it makes more sense to take my Kalashnikov, walk into any police station or barracks bar and kill everything that wears a uniform. But I know that behind those men are others who wear no uniform, so I change this plan, and I begin to think that I should do the same thing with a government building. But then I remember that these people in turn are only the front for an entire class of landowning families and financiers who call themselves my compatriots. My head spins with new targets.’ Barranco gestured. ‘Banks. Ranches. Gated suburbs. The numbers for slaughter rise like a lottery total. And then I remember that Hernan Echevarria would not have lasted a year in power, not a single year, if he had not had support from Washington and New York.’ He raised a finger and pointed at Chris. ‘And London. Are you sure, Senor Faulkner, that you want me in your capital city?’

Chris, still busy hauling back in the emotional canvas, mustered a shrug of his own. His voice rasped a little in his throat.

‘I’ll take the chance.’

‘Brave man.’ Barranco finished his own cigarette and pinched it out between finger and thumb. ‘I suppose. A brave man, or a gambler. Which should I call you?’

‘Call me a judge of character. I think you’re smart enough to be trusted.’

‘I’m flattered. And your colleagues?’

‘My colleagues will listen to me. This is what I get paid for.’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

Chris caught the drip of it in Barranco’s voice, the same thing he’d seen in the other marquistas’ eyes in the shack.

fuck

He’d overplayed it, too much macho boardroom acceleration coming off the emotional bend. He was leaning in for damage limitation, but what he wanted to say twisted loose on its way out. Aghast, he heard himself telling the truth, raw.

‘What have you got to lose? You’re in shit-poor shape, Vicente. We both know that. Backed up in the mountains, outgunned, living on rhetoric. If Echevarria comes for you now, the way he did for Diaz, you’re history. Like Marcos, like Guevara. A beautiful legend and a fucking T-shirt. Is that what you want? All those people in the NAME, going through what your mother went through, what good are you to them like that?’

For a moment that froze as the last word left his mouth, he imagined the world caving in around him with the deal. Barranco’s eyes hardened, his stance tightened. Telegraphed so clear it sent the security guard on the patrol boat’s deck smoothly to her feet. An assault rifle hefted. Chris’s breath stopped.

‘I mean—‘

‘I know what you mean.’ Barranco’s posture relaxed first. He turned to the woman on the boat and made a sign. She sank back to her seat. When he turned back, something had changed in his face. ‘I know what you mean, because this is the first time you’ve come out and said it. You can’t imagine how much of a relief that is, Chris Faulkner. You can’t imagine how little all your numbers have meant to me without some sign that you have a soul.’

Chris breathed again. ‘You should have asked.’

‘Asked if you had a soul?’ There wasn’t much humour in Barranco’s parched laugh. ‘Is that a question that can be asked in London? When I am seated around the table with your colleagues, discussing what slices of my country’s GDP I must offer up to gain their support. What crops my people must grow while their own children starve, what essential medical services they must learn to live without. Will I ask them where they keep their souls then, Senor Faulkner?’

‘I wouldn’t advise it, no.’

‘No. Then what would you advise?’

Chris weighed it up—

fuck it, it’s worked so far

 and told the unbandaged truth again.

‘I’d advise you to get what you can from them with as little commitment on your side as possible. Because that’s what they’ll be doing to you. Leave yourself escape clauses, remember, nothing’s ever written in stone. Everything can be renegotiated, if you can make it worth their while.’

A pause. Barranco laughed again, warmth leaking into the sound this time. He offered the cigarettes again, lit them both with the Russian knock-off.

‘Good advice, my friend,’ he said through the smoke. ‘Good advice. I think I would hire you as an adviser, if I could afford you.’

‘You can. I’m part of the package.’

‘No.’ The trawlerman’s gaze settled on him. ‘I know a little about you now, Chris Faulkner, and you are not part of any package in London. There is something in you that resists incorporation. Something.’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Honourable.’

It flickered across Chris’s memory before he could stop it. Liz Linshaw’s body in the white silk gown that untied and opened like a gift. The curves and shadowed places within. The sound of her laugh.

‘I think you are mistaken about me,’ he said quietly.

Barranco shook his head. ‘You will see. I am not a bad judge of character myself, when it counts. You may get paid by these people, but you are not one of them. You do not belong.’

Lopez got him back to Bocas by nightfall, and they sat in a waterfront cafe waiting for the late flight to David. Across the water, the sequin twinkle of restaurant lights on another island seemed threaded directly onto the darkness. Local-owned pangas puttered about in the channel between, cruising for taxi custom. Voices drifted out over the water like smoke, Spanish shot through with an occasional English loan word. Kitchen noise clattered in the back of the cafe behind them.

The whole meeting with Barranco already seemed like a dream.

‘So it went well,’ Lopez asked.

Chris stirred at his cocktail. ‘Seems that way. He’s going to come to London, anyway.’ His mind cut loose the replays of Liz Linshaw and went wearily to work. ‘I want you to set that up as soon as possible, but safe. Above all, safe. Quick as you can without endangering his life or his strategic position. I’ll move things around at my end to fit in with whatever that means.’

‘Billing?’

‘Through the covert account. I don’t want this to show up until ... No, better yet you pay for it yourself. Cash. I’ll have the money dumped to you in Zurich soon as I get back. Mail me an advance estimate at the hotel tomorrow morning. Oh yeah, you got anything that’ll help me sleep?’

‘Not on me.’ Lopez dug out his phone. ‘You’re at the Sheraton, right?’

‘Yeah. 1101. Jenkins.’

The phone screen showed a cosy green glow. Lopez punched his way down a list and held up the instrument to face him. After a couple of rings, a voice answered in Spanish.

‘En ingles, guei,’ said Lopez impatiently.

Whoever he was looking at grumbled something filthy and then switched. ‘You here in town, man?’

‘No, but a friend of mine will be shortly. And he needs a little something to help him sleep.’

‘Is he a fizi?’

Lopez looked up from the phone at Chris. ‘You do a lot of this sort of stuff?’

‘Christ, no.’

The Americas agent dropped his gaze to the phone screen again. ‘Definitely not. Something gentle.’

‘Got it. Address.’

‘Sheraton, room 1101. Mr Jenkins.’

‘Charge card or account.’

‘Very fucking funny. Hasta luego.’

‘Hasta la cuenta, amigo.’

He folded up the phone. ‘Stuff 11 be waiting for you at the desk. You go in, just ask if you got any messages. There’ll be an envelope.’

‘You can vouch for this guy, right.’

‘Yeah, he’s a plastic surgeon.’

Chris couldn’t see why that was supposed to reassure him, but he was getting past caring. The thought of crushing his jetlag beneath the soft black weight of seven or eight hours of chemically guaranteed sleep was like a finishing line ahead. Liz Linshaw, Mike Bryant and Shorn, Carla, Barranco and the skipper’s scrutiny; he let them all go like a pack he’d been carrying. Sleep was coming. He’d worry about everything else tomorrow.

But behind the aching relief, Barranco’s words floated like the voices out on the water.

You do not belong.

Chapter Twenty-Four

He woke in the standard issue luxury of the Sheraton, to the softly insistent pulse of an incoming signal from his laptop. He flopped over in the bed and glared blearily around the room. Located the fucking thing, there on the carpeted floor amidst the trail of his dropped clothes. Bleeee, bleeee, fucking bleeee. He groaned and groped, half out of bed, one hand holding his body rigidly horizontal off the floor. He snagged the machine, dragged it onto the bed and sat up to unfold it in his lap. Mike Bryant’s recorded face grinned out at him.

‘Morning. If I timed this right, I figure you’ve got about three hours before your flight, so here’s something to think about while you’re waiting. You are under attack. And this time, you are going down!’

Groggy from the plastic surgeon’s special delivery, Chris felt a sluggish spasm of alarm rip through him. Then the other man’s face blinked out and a stylised chessboard took its place. Mike had launched an unlooked-for rook-and-knight assault on him while he slept. It looked bad.

‘Motherfucker.’

He got up and shambled about, packing. Still not flushed clean of the sleeping fix, he reacted unwisely to Mike’s gambit over breakfast and lost a bishop. Bryant, it seemed, was playing in real time. He went to the airport smarting from the loss and picked up the pieces in the exec lounge. It was Saturday and Mike, if he’d known what was good for him, should have let the game ride for the weekend. He could have thought it out over the next couple of days and taken Chris apart at leisure, but Chris knew him better. Bryant was lit up with the taste of his victory and he’d stay in real-time play now. View, absorb, react, all night if he had to. Chris had lent him Rakhimov’s Speed Chess and the Attack Momentum a couple of months ago, and the big man had swallowed it whole. He was in for the kill.

Somewhere over the Caribbean, Chris beat off the attack. It cost him his only remaining knight and his carefully constructed castled defence was in ruins, but Mike’s attack momentum was down. The flurry of moves slowed. Chris played doggedly across the Atlantic and by the time they touched down in Madrid, he had Bryant nailed to a lucky stalemate. Mike sent him a Tony Carpenter clip attachment in response - the post-fight stand-off from The Deceiver. Carpenter’s trademark lack of acting talent, lines creaking with the burden of cliche. We are well matched, you and I. We should fight on the same side. It was so bad it was almost camp.

Chris grinned and folded the laptop.

He got off the flight with a bounce in his step, grabbed a sauna and a shower in the exec lounge while he waited and slept naturally on the shuttle back to London. He dreamed of Liz Linshaw.

At Heathrow, leaning on the barrier at arrivals, made up and dressed in clothes that hugged at her figure, Carla was waiting.

‘No, it’s just. You didn’t need to. You know, I’m running on the Shorn clock. They’d pick up the tab for a taxi all the way home.’

‘I wanted to see you.’

So why the fuck’d you go to Tromso? He bit it back, and watched the curving perspectives of the road ahead. Saturday morning traffic on the orbital was sparse, and Carla, with the easy confidence of the professional mechanic, had the Saab up to a hundred and fifty in the middle lane.

‘How was your mum?’

‘She’s good. Busy. They want to bring out an interactional version of the new book, so she’s been rewriting, slotting in the GoTo sections with some datarat from the university.’

‘Is she shagging him?’ It didn’t quite come out right. Too harsh, too much silence around it. There was a time Chris could get away with these riffs on Kirsti’s sex life, and Carla used to laugh in mock outrage. Now she just looked across at him and went back to watching the road, tight lipped. The chill filled the car almost palpably.

‘Sorry, I—‘

‘That was nasty.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ Helplessly.

What the fuck is happening to us, Carla. What the fuck are we doing here? Is it just me? Is it?

He saw Liz Linshaw again, the easy smile in the spare room, face and hair dappled with street lighting through the tree outside, the glass of water in her hand. She had navigated the moment with the same ease that Carla drove the Saab. Stepping closer than necessary to hand him the water, the warm tang of whisky on her breath. A soft, surprised oh, in ladylike tones her newscasts had never seen, as he pulled at the raw silk belt and the gown fell open. Broken street light across the curves within. The feel of her breast, as he laid one hand on it, was burnt into his palm. The soft sound of the laugh in her throat.

Highgate.

Involuntarily, he opened the hand at the memory. Looked at it, as if for some sign of branding.

I, uh, I can’t do this, Liz, he’d lied, I’m sorry, and he’d turned away to stare out of the window, pretty sure this was the only way to stop the landslide. Trembling with the force of it.

Fair enough, she told him and in the window he watched her bend to leave the glass on the table by the futon. She stood for a moment at the door before she left, looking at his back, but she said nothing. She had not retied the gown. The gap between its edges was black in the reflected image, empty of detail that his own mind was feverishly happy to fill.

In the morning, he woke to find the gown draped across the quilt he had slept under. At some point during the night she had come in, taken it off and stood naked, watching him sleep. Even through the layers of mild hangover, it was an intensely erotic image and he felt himself hardening at the thought.

The house was silent around him. Birdsong from the tree outside the window, a solitary car engine somewhere distant. He lay propped up on one elbow in the bed, vague with last night’s drinking. Without conscious thought, he reached for the gown, dragged it up the bed and held it to his face. It smelled intimately of woman, the only woman’s scent outside of Carla’s that he had breathed in nearly a decade. The shock was visceral, dissolving the hangover and dumping him out into reality like an exasperated bouncer. He threw off the gown and the quilt in a single motion, threw on clothes. Watch and wallet, off the bedside table in a sweep, stamping into shoes. He slid out of the spare room and paused.

There was no one home. It was a feeling he knew well, and the house echoed with it. A handwritten note lay on the kitchen table, detailing where breakfast things could be found, the number of a good cab company and how to set the alarms before leaving. It was signed stay in touch.

He got out.

No appetite for breakfast, no confidence that he wouldn’t do something really stupid like go through her things or, worse still, wait around for her to come back. He triggered the alarm set-up and the door closed him out on a rising whine as the house defences charged.

He found himself on a tree-lined hill street that swept up behind him and down then up again in front. A couple of prestige cars and a four track were parked at intervals along the kerbs, and down near the base of the parabola the street described, someone was walking a German Shepherd. There was no one else about. It looked like a nice neighbourhood.

He didn’t know Highgate, had been in the area only a couple of times before in his life, to drink- and drug-blurred parties at the homes of HM execs. But the air was mild and the sky looked clear of rain in all directions.

He chose the downslope at random, and started walking.

The Saab jolted on a badly mended pothole. Dumped him back into reality. The memory of Highgate dropped away, receding in the rear-view.

‘Carla.’ He reached across the space between them. He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything about your mother. It was a joke, alright.’

‘Ha fucking ha.’

He held down the quick flare of anger. ‘Carla, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve only been in each other’s company half an hour, and we’re fighting already. This is killing us.’

‘You’re the one who.’ She stopped, and he wondered what she was biting back the way he’d bitten back words a few moments earlier.

Is this it, he wondered dismally, is this the only way to survive a-long term relationship? Hide your thoughts, bite back your feelings, build a neutral silence that won’t hurt. Is that what it’s all about? Neutrality for the sake of a warm bed?

Is that what I turned Liz down for?

Liz, waiting, wrapped in the white silk that carried her scent.

‘Carla, pull over.’

‘What?’

‘Pull over. Stop. There, on the hard shoulder. Please.’

She shot him a look, and must have seen something in his face. The Saab bled speed and drifted across the lanes. Carla dropped a gear and brought the car under a hundred kilometres an hour. Onto the hard shoulder and they crunched to a halt. Carla turned in her seat to face him.

‘Alright.’

‘Carla, listen.’ He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling his way towards what he needed to say. ‘Please don’t run off like that again. Like you did. I missed you. I really did. I need you, and when you’re not here I really. I miss you so much. I. I do stupid things.’

Her eyes widened.

‘Things like what?’

And he could not fucking tell her. He couldn’t.

He thought he was going to, he even started to, started with Troy Morris’s party, even got as far as talking about Liz and her book proposal, but he couldn’t do it, and when she knew there was more behind it and pushed for it, he veered off into the zones and what he and Mike Bryant had done to Griff Dixon and his friends.

She whitened as he told it.

‘That can’t be,’ she whispered. ‘You, they can’t,’ scaling almost to a shout. ‘People can’t do things like that. It’s not legal.’

‘Tell that to Mike. Ah, Christ, tell it to the whole fucking Shorn corporation, while you’re at it.’ And then it all had to come tumbling out, the morning after, the NAME contract, the fuck-up with Lopez and Langley, the dead in Medellin and the quick-fix burial of the facts, Panama and Barranco and his quiet insistence. You do not belong. Chris found he was trembling by the time he got to the end and there was what felt like a laugh building in his throat, but when it finally came out his eyes were wet. He unfastened his belt and leaned across the space between the seats. He pulled himself across and against her, teeth gritted on the fraying shreds of his control.

They clung together.

‘Chris.’ There was something in Carla’s voice that might have been a laugh as well, and what she was saying made no kind of sense, but the way she held him that didn’t seem to matter much. ‘Chris, listen to me. It’s okay. There’s a way out of this.’

She started to lay it out for him. Less than a minute in, he was shouting her down.

‘You can’t be fucking serious, Carla. That’s not a way out.’

‘Chris, please listen to me.’

‘A fucking ombudsman. What do you think I am, a socialist? A fucking loser? Those people are—‘

He gestured at the enormity of it, groping for words. Carla folded her arms and looked at him.

‘Are what? Dangerous? Do you want to tell me again how you murdered three unarmed men in the zones last weekend?’

‘They were scum, Carla. Armed or not.’

‘And the car-jackers, back in January. Were they scum too?’

‘That—‘

‘And the people in that cafe in Medellin?’ Her voice was rising again. ‘The people you killed in the Cambodia playoff. Isaac Murcheson, who you dreamed about every night for a year after you killed him. And now, you have the insane fucking nerve to tell me the ombudsmen are dangerous?’

He raised his hands. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You were going to.’

‘You don’t know what I was going to say,’ he lied. ‘I was going to say those people are, they’re losers Carla, they’re standing against the whole tide of globalisation, of progress, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Is it progress?’ she asked, suddenly quiet. ‘Balkanisation and slaughter abroad and the free market feeding off the bones, a poverty-line economy and gladiatorial contests on the roads at home. Is that supposed to be progress?’

‘That’s your father talking.’

‘No, fuck you Chris, this is me talking. You think I don’t have opinions of my own. You think I can’t look around and see for myself what’s happening? You think I’m not living out the consequences?’

‘You don’t—‘

‘You know, in Norway when I tell people where I live, where I choose to live, they look at me like I’m some kind of moral retard. When I tell them what my husband does for a living, they—‘

‘Oh, here we go.’ He turned away from her in the narrow confines of the car. Outside his window, the wind whipped along the embankment, flattening the long grass. ‘Here we fucking go again.’

‘Chris, listen to me.’ A hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off angrily.

‘You’ve got to stand outside it for a moment. That’s what I did while I was in Tromso. You’ve got to see it from the outside to understand. You’re a paid killer, Chris. A paid killer, a dictator in all but name.’

‘Oh, for—‘

‘Echevarria, right? You told me about Echevarria.’

‘What about him?’

‘You talk as if you hated him. As if he was a monster.’

‘He pretty much is, Carla.’

‘And what’s the difference between the two of you? Every atrocity he commits, you underwrite. You told me about the torture, the people in those police cells and the bodies on the rubbish dumps. You put those people there, Chris. You may as well have been there with the electrodes.’

‘That’s not fair. Echevarria isn’t mine.’

‘Isn’t yours?’

‘It isn’t my account, Carla. I don’t get to make the decisions on that one. In fact—‘

‘Oh, and Cambodia’s different? You get to make the decisions on that one, because you told me you do, and I read the reports while I was away, Chris. The independent press for a change. They say this Khieu Sary is going to be as bad as the original Khmer Rouge.’

‘That’s bullshit. Khieu’s a pragmatist. He’s a good bet, and even if he gets out of hand we can—‘

‘Out of hand? What does that mean, out of hand? You mean if the body count gets into the tens of thousands? If they run out of places to bury them secretly? Chris, for fuck’s sake listen to yourself.’

He turned back. ‘I didn’t make the world the way it is, Carla. I’m just trying to live in it.’

‘We don’t have to live in it this way.’

‘No? You want to live in the fucking zones, do you?’ He reached across and grabbed at the leather jacket she was wearing. ‘You think they wear this kind of stuff in the zones? You think you get to jet off to Scandinavia when you fucking feel like it if you live in the zones?’

‘I’m not—‘

‘You want to be an old woman at forty?’ She flinched at the lash in his voice. He was losing control now, tears stinging in his eyes. ‘Is that what you want, Carla? Obese from the shit they stuff the food with, diabetic from the fucking sugar content, allergies from the additives, no money for decent medical treatment. Is that what you want? You want to die poor, die because you’re poor? Is that what you fucking want, Carla, because—‘

The slap turned his head. Jarred loose the tears from his eyelids. He blinked and tasted blood.

‘Now you listen to me,’ she said evenly. ‘You shut up and hear what I have to say, or this is over. I mean it, Chris.’

‘You have no idea,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t try to pull rank on me, Chris. My father lives in the zones—‘

‘Your father?’ Derisively. Voice rising again. ‘Your father doesn’t—‘

‘I’m warning you, Chris.’

He looked away. Cranked down the anger. ‘Your father,’ he said quietly, ‘is a tourist. He has no children. No dependents. Nothing that ties him where he is, nothing to force him. He isn’t like the people he surrounds himself with, and he never will be. He could be gone tomorrow if he chose to, and that’s what makes the difference.’

‘He thinks he can make a difference.’

‘And can he?’

Silence. Finally, he looked back at her.

‘Can he, Carla?’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘Yesterday I was on the other side of the world, talking to a man who might be able to kick Echevarria out of the ME. If I get my way, it’ll happen. Isn’t that worth something? Isn’t that something better than the articles your father hammers out for readers who’ll shake their heads and act shocked and never lift a fucking finger to change anything?’

‘If it matters to you so much to change things all of a sudden, why can’t you—‘

The heavy throb of rotors overhead. The car rocked on its suspension. The radio crackled to life.

‘Driver Control. This is Driver Control.’

The rotor noise grew, even through the Saab’s soundproofing. The helicopter’s belly dropped into view, black and luminous green, showing landing skids, underslung cameras and gatlings. It skittered back a few metres, as if nervous of the stopped car. The voice splashed out of the radio again.

‘Owner of Saab Custom registration s810576, please identify yourself.’

What the fuck for, dickhead? The thought was a random jag of anger. Match me from the footage you’ve just shot through my windscreen, why don’t you? Instead of wasting my motherfucking time.

‘This is a security requirement,’ admonished the voice.

‘This is Chris Faulkner,’ he said heavily. ‘Driver clearance 260B354R. I work for Shorn Associates. Now fuck off, will you. My wife’s not feeling well, and you’re not helping.’

There was a brief silence while the numbers ran. The voice came back, diffident.

‘Sorry to trouble you, sir. It’s just, stopping like that on the carriageway. If your wife needs hospitalisation, we can—‘

‘I said, fuck off.’

The helicopter dithered for a moment longer then spun about and lifted out of view. They sat for a while, listening to its departing chunter.

‘Nice to know they’re watching,’ said Carla bitterly.

‘Yeah.’ He closed his eyes.

She touched his arm. ‘Chris.’

‘Alright.’ He nodded. Opened his eyes. ‘Alright. I’ll talk to them.’