Market Forces

Chapter Twenty-Five

Two weeks.

For Chris, marooned on the fringes of the preparations, it passed like a waking dream. He lived a distorted copy of his real life, tinged in equal portions by nightmarish tension and an odd, unlooked-for romantic nostalgia.

Work was as he’d expected. He acted normal and watched his back. Troop movements in Assam, hostage-taking in Parana, and in Cambodia a handful of executions no one had foreseen. He handled it all with eerie calm.

At home, he dared not talk openly to Carla so they took up a bizarre dual existence, life in the house as if nothing had changed, set against hushed exchanges snatched in the secure confines of the Saab. Carla, somehow, had persuaded Erik and Kirsti to act together as the link with the ombudsmen, and she went regularly to the Brundtland to gather details from her father. Some kind of code was in use over Erik’s netlink, a fake reconciliation underway between the parents to serve as cover for the information Chris and Carla agreed in their hasty conferences in the car.

And here came the nostalgia, the bittersweet taste of something almost used up. The moments grabbed in the Saab had the tang of illicit sexual encounters, and once or twice even ended that way. And the rest of the time, acting out normality for any possible listeners, they treated each other with an abnormal tenderness and consideration. In both aspects of their new existence, they were getting on better than they had in months.

It was weird.

Two weeks, and the ombudsman came.

He disliked Truls Vasvik on sight.

Partly, it was the Norwegian thing - the same irritating aura of easy outdoor competence that he’d noticed in most of Carla’s friends on the few occasions they’d been up to Tromso together. But more than that, it was the clothes. Here was a trained professional who, Carla claimed, earned at least the same as he did, and Chris could have bought the man’s entire outfit for less than he usually spent on a haircut. The grey wool of the jersey was stretched and pilled, the nondescript trousers were bagged in the knees and the walking boots had shaped themselves to Vasvik’s feet with constant use. The coat looked as if he’d slept in it. It only needed the carelessly-tied-back greying hair to complete the image of a teen antiglobalist who’d never grown up.

Which is exactly what he is.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he said guardedly.

Vasvik shrugged. ‘I should thank you. You are taking a far greater risk than I.’

‘Really?’ Chris tried to ignore the jolt Vasvik’s comment delivered to his stomach. The set-up had left him jangled and twitchy. A shrill part of him wondered if the ombudsman was trying to psych him out. ‘I would have thought we’d both be arrested pretty fucking rapidly.’

‘Yes, we would. But your government would be forced to release me intact. That much power we still have. The police might work me over a little while they have me, but it’s unlikely to be worse than some other close encounters I’ve had.’

‘Hard man, huh?’

Another shrug. Vasvik looked around the workshop and spotted an ancient steel bar stool shoved against one wall. He went to fetch it. Chris mastered his irritation and waited for the Norwegian to come back. Again, he couldn’t be sure if Vasvik was doing it deliberately or not. The ombudsman’s detached calm was impenetrable.

Out in the rest of Mel’s AutoFix, tools whined and screeched. The noise raked along his nerves. It hadn’t been easy, finding a safe place to meet, and even now he wondered how far he could trust Carla’s boss.

‘Well.’ Vasvik dragged the stool under the jacked-up Audi Mel had left on the lifter, and seated himself. ‘Shall we talk about extraction?’

‘In a minute.’ Chris prowled the space beneath the Audi. Extraction. The way the word hung there was another jolt in itself, like walking up to Louise Hewitt at the quarterly and asking her out loud if she wanted to fuck. ‘I’m still getting used to this. Maybe I still need to be convinced.’

‘Then we’re wasting each other’s time. I’m not here to talk you into something, Faulkner. We can live without you at UNECT.’

Chris stared at him. ‘Carla said—‘

‘Carla Nyquist cares about you. I do not. Personally, Faulkner, I don’t give a shit what happens to you. I think you’re scum. The ethical commerce guys would like to hear what you have, that’s why I’m here, but I’m not a salesman. I don’t have to reel you in to get my name up on some commission board somewhere, and frankly, I have a lot of better things to do with my time. You come in or you don’t. Your choice. But don’t waste my time.’

Chris flushed.

‘I’m told,’ he said evenly, ‘that UNECT recruit people, scum, like me for the ombudsmen. That’s important, because I need a job. Now. Have I been misinformed?’

‘No. That’s correct.’

‘So we could end up colleagues.’

Vasvik looked at him coldly. ‘It takes all sorts.’

‘Must be hard,’ Chris taunted. ‘Working alongside people that disgust you. Putting up with such a low grade of humanity.’

‘It’s good preparation for undercover work. Living with the stink.’

The workshop Mel had lent them had been swept for bugs an hour ago, and there was too much metalwork going on in the other shops for exterior scanning to be possible. Still, there seemed to be an audience waiting as the pause smoked off Vasvik’s words. Chris felt his fists curling.

‘Do you have any idea,’ he said, ‘who the fuck you’re talking to?’

The other man’s grin was a baring of teeth, a challenge. ‘Why don’t you enlighten me.’

‘I have treated you with respect—‘

‘You’ve got no fucking choice, Faulkner. I’m your escape hatch. You want out so bad I can smell it on you. Your shrivelled little soul has finally got tired of what you do for a living, and now you’re looking for redemption with no drop in salary. I’m your only hope.’

‘I doubt you earn what I’m used to.’

‘Doubt away.’

‘Oh yeah? Blow it all on clothes, do you?’ Chris stabbed a finger at the Norwegian. ‘I know your sort, Vasvik. You grew up in your cosy little Scandinavian nanny state, and when you found out the rest of the world couldn’t afford the same propped-up artificial playgroup economic standards, you never got over it. Now you’re out there sulking and throwing moral tantrums because the world won’t behave the way you want it to—‘

Vasvik examined the palm of one hand. ‘Yeah, but on the other hand I didn’t watch my mother die of a curable illness and—‘

‘Hey—‘

‘And then go to work for the people who made it happen.’

It was like a lightning strike. The slow burning anger sheeted to split second fury, and Chris was in motion. Attack raged at the edges of his control. A Shotokan punch to the temple that would have killed Vasvik, had it landed. Somehow, the ombudsman was not there. The stool staggered in the air, tumbled sideways. Vasvik was a whirl of black coat and reaching hands, off to one side. Chris felt his wrist brushed, turned in some subtle way, and then he was hurled across the workshop on the wings of his own momentum.

He crashed into the bench, hands trying to brace. A sound behind him and something hooked his legs out from under him at the ankles. His face smashed the bench surface among scattering drill bits and bolts. Something sharp gouged his cheek in passing. He felt Vasvik’s weight on him and tried to kick. The Norwegian locked his arm up to the nape of his neck, grabbed his head by the hair and rammed it back down on the bench sideways.

‘Mistake,’ he gritted in Chris’s ear. ‘Now, you going to behave, or am I going to break your fucking arm?’

Chris heaved up once against the weight, but it was useless. He slumped. Vasvik let go suddenly and was gone. Somewhere behind him, Chris heard the ombudsman picking up the stool. When he got himself upright and turned, Vasvik was seated again. There was a faint beading of sweat across the pale forehead, but otherwise the fight might never have happened.

‘My mistake,’ he said quietly, not looking at Chris. ‘I shouldn’t have let you get to me like that. In a Cambodian enterprise zone, that kind of giveaway’d get me a bullet in the back of the head.’

Chris stood there, blinking tears. Vasvik sighed heavily. His voice was dull and weary.

‘As an operational ombudsman, you’ll earn approximately a hundred and eighty thousand euros a year, adjusted. That includes a hazardous-duties bonus, which you can reckon on getting for about sixty per cent of the work you do. Undercover assignments, swoop raids, witness protection. The rest of the time they keep you on backroom stuff. Admin and forward planning. That’s so you don’t burn out.’ Another deep breath. ‘Housing and schools for your kids are free, accommodation and expenses while on assignment, you claim. I’m sorry for that crack about your mother. You didn’t deserve that.’

Chris coughed a laugh. ‘Told you I made more than you.’

‘Yeah, well fuck you then.’ Vasvik’s voice never lifted from the tired monotone. His gaze never shifted from the corner of the workshop.

‘Do you like it?’ Chris asked him finally.

The ombudsman looked at him. ‘It matters,’ he said, pausing on each word as if English were suddenly difficult for him. ‘You’re doing something that matters. I don’t expect you to understand that. It sounds like a bad joke, just saying it. But it means something.’

They faced each other for a while. Then Chris reached into his jacket and pulled out a plastic sheathed disc.

‘This is a breakdown of the accounts I service for Shorn. There’s nothing here you can use, but anyone who knows the ground will be able to work out what I know. Take it back and ask them if I’m worth extracting. I want the package you just talked about, plus a million-dollar or -euro equivalent payout on extraction.’

He saw the look on Vasvik’s face. He heard his own voice harden.

‘It’s not negotiable. I’m losing heavily if I pull out now. I’m plugged in here. Comfortable. Stock options, executive benefits. The house. Industry rep, client connections. All of that’s worth something to me. You want me, you’ve got to make it worth my while.’

He tossed the disc across. Vasvik caught it and examined it curiously. He looked back up at Chris.

‘And if we don’t want you that badly?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Then I’ll stay here.’

‘Yeah? You sure you’ve still got the stomach for that?’

‘I’m not like you, Vasvik.’ Chris wiped at the gouge in his cheek and his fingers came away specked with blood. ‘I’ve got the stomach for whatever they can feed me.’

Vasvik left in the back of a covered truck, supplied by Mel and on its way to Paris for Renault parts. Jess drove, no shotgun rider along. UNECT operatives would vanish the ombudsman at the other end. No questions. Carla had sold the whole thing to Mel as wrangling over preferential supply contracts, a new covert bid from Volvo coming in to upset the BMW status quo at Shorn. Both Mel and Jess hated BMWs with a deep and abiding passion, and as far as they were concerned anything that might reduce the number of them on the streets of London just had to be a good thing, dear, just had to be.

Carla came in a couple of minutes later, a welding mask still pushed up on her head. Chris was trying to assess the damage to his face in a propped-up fragment of mirror he’d found on the floor.

‘What did you say to him?’ she asked angrily.

Chris pressed at his cheek, peering at the gouge in the mirror shard. ‘I told him our terms. And I gave him the disc. Went like swimming.’

‘You had a fight, didn’t you.’

‘We had a minor disagreement.’ He gave up on the mirror and turned to face her. ‘I said some things I shouldn’t have. Then he said something he really shouldn’t have. Took a while to straighten out.’

‘He’s trying to help you, Chris.’

‘No.’ He couldn’t keep the snap out of his voice. ‘He’s looking for benefits, Carla. Just like every other fucker in this world. Quid pro fucking quo.’

She stared at him, wordless for a moment, then turned away and walked out of the workshop. He let her go.

Chapter Twenty-Six

It rained hard most of the next week, and the roads turned treacherous. As usual, patchwork repairs hadn’t stood up to the summer weather, and the various service providers were still squabbling about whose responsibility it was to put it right. Chris drove the Saab at careful velocities, getting in to Shorn later than usual and doing a lot of his phone work from the car. The datadown ran remote scrambling and patched through flagged callers on automatic.

Back to work. Back to the pretence.

It was easier now he was committed. Two weeks of jittering uncertainty, of not knowing if they’d get away with it, knowing even less what would come of the meeting - now it all gave way to solid data. He knew they wanted him now, knew at a level he could trust more than Carla’s wishful thinking assurances and his own mixed feelings. Now it was just a matter of waiting to see if they could afford him. A no-lose situation. They could afford him, he went. They couldn’t afford him, he stayed. Either way, he had work, he had guarantees. He had income.

A small part of him knew that he would lose Carla if he stayed, but somehow he couldn’t make that matter as much as he knew it should.

Back to work.

Wednesday morning, turning onto the Elsenham ramp, he heard from Lopez. Confirmation of Vicente Barranco’s arrival date.

‘It’s good,’ said the Americas agent through the crackle of the scrambler and a bad satellite link. ‘The way I figure it, you’ve got North Memorial on. You could show him round, maybe buy him a few assault rifles.’

‘Yeah, that’s. Fuck.’ His foot came off the accelerator as the realisation hit. He nearly braked.

‘Chris?’ Lopez sounded concerned. ‘You still there?’

He sighed. The car picked up speed again, down the ramp. ‘Yeah, I’m still here. I don’t suppose there’s any way you can set that date back about a week?’

‘A week? Jesus, Chris, you said as soon as possible. You said you’d move things around to—‘

‘Yeah, I know.’ The rain intensified as he came off the ramp. Chris turned up the wipers. ‘Look, forget it, send him anyway. My problem, I’ll deal with it here.’

‘Is this something I need to worry about?’

‘No. You did the right thing, it’s fine. I’ll be in touch.’ He cut the connection and redialled.

‘Yeah, this is Bryant.’

‘Mike, it’s Chris. We’ve got—‘

‘Just the man. You in yet?’

‘On the way. Listen, Mike—‘

‘How about lending me some of that old Emerging Markets background you don’t like to talk about these days, huh? You wouldn’t fucking believe what happened in Harbin this morning.’

‘Mike—‘

‘You remember that thing we were putting together with the guys in EM? The transport net sell-off?’

Chris gave up and searched his memory. The north-eastern end of the former People’s Republic of China wasn’t his sphere of interest. Outside the tendencies of ethnic Chinese where Tarim Pendi was concerned, he didn’t pay the area much attention. And his dealings with Shorn’s Emerging Markets division had been minimal so far. They were a hard enough bunch, but still pretty urbane by CI standards.

Still, listening to Mike’s tale of woe might help take the sting out of the minor fuck-up he had to report.

So think.

He recalled a late night wine bar bitching session a week back. Mike and some elegant Chinese woman from Shorn EM. Crossover with an old CI account, guerrilla figures from the last decade, now snugly installed as political leaders. Privatisation schematics and character assassination of the major players. Who could be trusted further than they could be thrown. Macho stuff. The wine had been crap.

‘Chris?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ He groped after a name. ‘The Tseng thing, right?’

‘Right.’ It was hard to tell if Bryant was angry or amused. ‘Had it all lined up and ready to roll. Now some shithead civil servant has taken out, get this, a fucking injunction to prevent the sell-off. They’re claiming it’s unlawful under the ‘37 Constitution.’

‘Well, is it?’

‘How the fuck would I know? I’m not EM, am I. Irene Lan’s team handle the legal stuff.’

‘Well, can’t you, I don’t know, pass a law or something? Change the current law? It’s not like this is Conflict as such. You are the government out there.’

Mike sighed audibly. ‘Yeah, I know. Fucking politics. Give me a Kalashnikov and a dickhead to fire it any day. So. What’s up?’

‘What?’

‘You sounded worried.’

‘Ah, yeah. Just a glitch. Barranco’s down to arrive in London on the eighteenth—‘

‘The eighteenth. Ah, fuck, Chris. That’s two days after Echevarria.’

‘I know.’

‘Couldn’t you have—‘

‘Yeah, my fault, I know. I gave Lopez carte blanche to get him here asap. No other parameters.’

‘Carte Blanche?’ He could hear Mike grinning. ‘Who’s she? Yeah, alright, I don’t suppose it matters much. We’d better just make sure they don’t bang into each other in a corridor.’

‘Or at the North Memorial. I was thinking—‘

Impact!

The meaty crunch of metal on metal. The Saab jolted hard left and started to skid from the back. His foot slipped on the accelerator and he felt the treacherous slither as the wheels spun in water.

‘Fuck!’

‘Now what?’ Bryant, through a yawn.

He fought the skid, shedding speed as fast as he dared. Eyes ripping across the mirrors, searching for the other car. Teeth gritted.

‘Where are you, motherfucker?’

‘Chris? You okay?’

Another crunch from the rear. He wasn’t yet fully out of the skid and it sent him slithering again. He hauled on the wheel.

‘Motherfucker!’

‘Chris?’ By now, Mike had got it. His voice came through urgent. ‘What’s happening out there?’

‘I’m—‘

Impact, again. He thought the Saab might spin clear round this time. Fighting it, he caught a glimpse of the other vehicle as it pulled clear. Primer-grey, looked like an old Mitsubishi from what he could see of the lines, but with the amount of custom-built armouring, it was hard to tell.

No-namer?

It was coming back, and the skid—

He made the decision too fast for it to register until afterwards. As the other car leapt forward, he jerked the wheel back the way he’d hauled it and opened the skid up. His guts sloshed. The no-namer struck, but Chris had read the manoeuvre correctly. With the spin on the Saab, his attacker’s impact was a barely felt jab, in a direction he was already sliding.

The Saab spun about.

For a heartbeat they were parallel, facing each other. He saw a pale face, staring through the windscreen of the other car. Then it was gone, past him southward as he braked the Saab to a wagging halt, pointed north.

Rain drummed down on the roof. He felt his pulse catch up.

‘Chris?’

‘I’m fine.’ He slammed the car into gear and cut a sharp U-turn, peering through the sluicing water across his windscreen. Up ahead, he spotted brake lights. ‘Some. Motherfucker. Is about to have his chassis squeezed.’

‘You’re fighting a challenge?’

‘Looks like it.’ He took the Saab up through the gears, pushing each one as hard as he dared in the rain. The brake lights ahead of him went out and he had to work to spot the outlines of the other car. ‘Guy just landed on me, Mike. No-namer, and no warning.’

He frowned. And no proximity alarm.

‘Chris, call Driver Control.’ Bryant sounded worried. ‘You don’t have to drive this, if he hasn’t filed. He’s in breach of—‘

‘Yeah, yeah. Be with you in a minute.’ The car was swelling in his forward view, moving but throttled back, waiting for him. ‘Come on, you fucker. Let’s see what you’ve got.’

The grey car braked suddenly, trying to get behind him. He matched the manoeuvre and slewed into the vehicle’s side. Metal screeched and tore. His wing mirror went, ripped free and bouncing away, in their wake like a grenade. He looked across and made eye contact through windows streaming with rain. He saw the other driver flinch.

The side-to-side clinch came apart. The no-namer picked up escape speed. Chris grinned savagely.

Rattled.

He went after him.

His own shock was ebbing now, pulse coming down, brain working. Time to kill this piece of shit. Bryant seemed to have rung off, and the only sound was the roar of the engine and the hammering rain. The other car held him off. Neither driver could afford to go flat to the floor in a rain duel, and the no-namer was cool enough to know it. Chris stopped trying to close the gap, and thought about the road ahead.

‘This is Driver Control.’

He glanced down at the radio in surprise.

‘Yeah?’

‘Driver clearance 260B354R, Faulkner, C. You are engaged in an unauthorised duel—‘

‘Hardly my choice, Driver Control.’

‘You are required to disengage immediately.’

‘No fucking way. This piece of shit is going down.’

A pause. Chris could swear he heard a throat being cleared.

‘I repeat, you are required to disengage and—‘

‘Have you tried telling that to our little primer-painted friend?’

Another pause. The gap was less than ten metres. Chris upped his velocity, higher than he could afford on the rain-slick road. He felt a tiny bubble of fear rising in his chest with the knowledge.

‘Your opponent does not respond to radio address.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll just go talk to him.’

‘You are required, immediately, to—‘

He flattened the accelerator, momentarily, and clouted the no-namer across the driver-side rear wing. Driver Control wittered from the speaker as the Saab slipped and he dropped speed, fighting the urge to brake hard. The no-namer was trying to slow down. He drifted across and blocked the move. Another clank as they jammed together, nose to tail. The other car flailed spray off the road as it tried to pull away and lost purchase in the wet: Chris felt his upper lip peel back from his teeth. He pulled fractionally left, shivery with the lack of firm control he had over the Saab, and accelerated again.

‘Goodnight, motherfucker.’

He hit at an angle and the skid kicked off in both cars. He felt the Saab start to skate from the front, saw the other car doing the same from the rear, in graceful mirror image. Fragments of control left to him, like sand through his fingers. He made a noise behind his teeth and fed all he had to the engine. Hard and fast and raking uncontrolled across the no-namer’s sideways-skating rear fender. Enough to push the whole thing beyond any hope of redemption for either of them. The nose-to-tail clinch came apart like a stick broken across a knee.

It was like cutting a cable.

Loss of control, seeming weightlessness, something approaching calm as the Saab spun out. For a timeless moment, it was almost quiet. Even the snarl of the frustrated engine seemed to fade. Then, he felt a sideswiping impact as the two cars glanced off each other in drunken ballet. The Saab lurched. Time unlocked again. He was on the brakes. His hands were a blur on the wheel, hopelessly late behind the uncontrolled motion of the vehicle. The rain took over. In the windscreen, it seemed to curtain back momentarily, to show him the embankment, coming up fast.

Deep breath.

The Saab hit.

The force of impact lifted the car up on two wheels. It hung there for a moment - he had time to see the grass on the bank flattened against the passenger side window - then fell back to the asphalt, hard. The landing snapped his teeth together and clipped a chunk out of his tongue.

For what seemed a very long time, he sat in the stilled car, arms on the wheel, head down, tasting the blood in his mouth.

The steady drumming of rain on the roof.

He lifted his head and peered out across the carriageway. Fifty metres off in the slashing grey, he spotted the other car jammed against the crash barrier. There was steam pouring out of the crumpled hood.

He grunted, and sucked at the damage to his tongue. One hand crept out more or less automatically, knocked on the hazard lights, killed the Saab’s engine, which — I fucking love you, Carla — had not cut out. He opened the glove compartment and found the Nemex. Checked the load and snapped the slide.

Right.

He cracked the door and climbed out into the rain.

It drenched him before he’d gone half the distance to the other car, plastered his shirt to transparency on his body, turned his trousers sodden and filled his Argentine leather shoes. He had to blink the stuff out of his eyes, rake his hair back from his face to peer into the wrecked car. It looked as if the other driver was trapped in his seat, struggling to free himself. Oddly, the expected victory surge didn’t come. Maybe it was the rain that dampened the savagery, maybe a rapidly assimilating picture of angles that didn’t fit.

No proximity alarm.

No filed challenge.

He stared at the side of the primer-painted vehicle. There was no driver number anywhere on the body.

No point.

He circled the wreck warily, Nemex held low in both hands, as Mike had shown him. He blinked rain out of his eyes.

The other driver had the door open, but it looked as if the whole engine compartment had shifted backwards with the impact and the steering column had him pinned back in the seat. He was young. Not out of his teens, by the look of it. The unhealthy pallor of his skin suggested the zones. Chris stared at him, Nemex down.

‘What the fuck did you think you were doing back there?’

The kid’s face twisted. ‘Hey, fuck you.’

‘Yeah?’ The anger came gushing up, the memory of the attack suddenly there. He sniffed the air and caught the scent of petrol under the rain. ‘You got a cracked fuel feed there, son. You want me to fucking light you, you little shit?’

The bravado crumpled. Fear smeared the kid’s eyes wide. He felt a sudden flush of shame. This was some car-jacker barely out of nappies, some joy-rider who

just happened to jack an unnumbered crash wagon? Some joy-rider who just happened to be cruising a motorway ramp an hour out of town? Who decided to take on an obvious corporate custom job whose proximity alarm just happened to fail? Yeah, right.

Chris wiped rain from his face, and tried to think through the adrenalin comedown and the drenching he was getting.

‘Who sent you?’

The kid set his mouth in a sullen line. Chris lost his temper again. He took a step closer and ground the muzzle of the Nemex into the boy’s temple.

‘I’m not fucking about here,’ he yelled. ‘You tell me who you’re a sicario for, I might call the cutters for you. Otherwise, I’m going to splash your fucking head all over the upholstery.’ He jabbed hard with the gun, and the kid yelped. ‘Now, who sent you?’

‘They told me—‘

‘Never mind what they told you.’ Another muzzle jab. It drew blood. ‘I need a name, son, or you’re going to die. Right here, right now.’

The kid broke. A long shudder and suddenly leaking tears. Chris eased the pressure on the gun.

‘A name. I’m listening.’

‘They call him Fucktional, but—‘

‘Fucktional? He a zoner? A gangwit?’ He jabbed the gun again, more gently. ‘Come on.’

The kid started to cry out loud. ‘He run the whole estate man, he’s going to—‘

‘Which estate?’

‘Mandela. The crags.’

Southside. It was a start.

‘Okay, now you’re going to tell me—‘

‘STAND AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE.’ The sky filled with the metal voice. ‘YOU ARE NOT AUTHORISED ON THIS STRETCH. STAND AWAY.’

The Driver Control helicopter swung down from the embankment where the Saab had wound up and danced crabwise across the air to the central reservation, ten metres up. Chris sighed and lifted his hands, Nemex held ostentatiously by the barrel.

‘STAND ASIDE AND PLACE YOUR WEAPON ON THE GROUND.’

The kid was looking confused, not sure if he was off the hook yet. He couldn’t move enough to wipe the tears off his face, but there was an ugly confidence already surfacing in his eyes.

Well, whoever said a good driver had to be smart as well.

‘I’ll be talking to you later,’ Chris snapped, wondering how the hell he was going to ensure it happened. Estate ganglords had a nasty habit of disappearing their sicarios when they became a liability, and he didn’t have much faith in the regular police’s ability to keep undervalued zone criminals alive in custody. He’d have to call a contractor, get private security onto the cutting crew and trace the kid to whatever charity clean-up shop they dumped him at. Then talk to Troy Morris about the southside gangs.

He backed off a half-dozen steps, bent and placed the Nemex on the ground, then straightened up and spread his arms at the helicopter.

‘RETURN TO YOUR VEHICLE AND AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS.’

He went, arms still raised, just in case.

He was about halfway back when the gatlings cut loose.

The sound of whining, whirling steel and the shattering roar of the multiple barrels unloading. He hit the asphalt, face down, a pair of seconds before the realisation hit him, that they were not firing at him, could not be because he was still alive. He lifted his head a cautious fraction, craned it to look back.

The helicopter had sunk almost to asphalt level, and swung around, nose to nose with the wrecked car. Later, he guessed the manoeuvre was intended to keep him out of the field of fire. The zone kid must have got it head-on, the full fury of the gatling hail as it tore through the windscreen and everything behind it.

The tank went up with a dull crump. Chris clamped his hands over his head, face to the road. An insanely calm part of him knew there wouldn’t be much shrapnel off a vehicle that armoured, but you always had glass. He heard some of it hiss past.

The gatlings shut off. In their place, there was a greedy crackling as the fire took hold in the wreck. The departing throb of the helicopter. He lifted his head again, just in time to see it disappear over the embankment the way it had come. Flames curled from the strafed car, bright and cheery through the rain. Thinking about getting up, he heard a sudden ripple of explosions and flattened himself to the asphalt again. Slugs in the abandoned Nemex, he guessed, cooked to ignition point by the backwash of heat from the fire. He stayed down. The fucking Nemex. He found himself grinning.

Louise will be pleased.

Finally, he judged it safe and picked himself up. He lifted his arms wide and stared down at himself. His shirt was sodden and grimed from contact with the road, but there was no blood that he could find. No pain but the faint sting of abrasions on his palms and a couple of numb spots on hip and knee. He couldn’t tell if he’d done any serious damage to the suit trousers, but he guessed they were as soiled as the shirt. In the wreck, the rain was already beating out the flames.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The inquest was held, in stark corporate style, around a huge oval table in Notley’s penthouse conference chamber. Shorn had given the public sector three days - overly generous in my opinion, was Hewitt’s comment -and now it was smackdown time.

The conference chamber was an apt arena. The walls were full of violent commissioned art from the new brutalist school, solid blocks of primary colour dumped amidst vague scattered scrawls that might have been writing or crowds of tiny people. Obvious videoscan units gleamed beadily from the ceiling, but there was a standard forty-second delay on the recording system, and two Shorn lawyers sat in, to make sure anything potentially awkward got stopped before it was halfway said. In the run-up, Chris and Alike both got repeated briefings from the legal team until they were coached almost to a line. Louise Hewitt and Philip Hamilton joined Notley to form an operational quorum, though everybody on the corporate side of the table knew no serious decisions would be taken at this particular meeting. This was noise-making. Shorn was coiled up like a rattlesnake, signalling loud offence. Any genuine strike would come later, when no one was around to take notes.

Across the table from Chris sat the crew of the helicopter and the Driver Control duty officer from the day of the duel. They were recognisable by their suits - you could have bought any three of the outfits they wore for the price of Jack Notley’s shoes.

Between Notley and the duty officer sat the Assistant Commissioner of Traffic Enforcement and the District Police Superintendent for London South Nine. Holographically present at the opposite end of the table, the current Minister for Transport floated like an apologetic ghost.

‘What remains most disturbing about this matter,’ said Notley, as the recriminations began to run down. ‘Is not the type of response elicited from Driver Control, but the rapidity of that response. Or should I say the lack of rapidity.’

The duty officer flinched, but stoically. He’d already had a pretty rough ride and he was learning not to react. Any attempt at defence from the public sector players around the table had led to a shredding at the hands of the Shorn partners. Hewitt led, wet razor-swift and slicing, Hamilton provided soft-spoken, insolent counterpoint and Notley came in behind, picking up the points and swinging the mace of Shorn’s corporate clout. There wasn’t a person in the room, the Minister included, whose job was secure if Notley decided the time had come to slop the coffee cup hard enough.

The Assistant Commissioner, nobly, essayed a rescue. She’d been working salvage throughout the meeting. ‘I think we’re agreed that the response team would have been scrambled earlier if Mr Bryant’s original emergency call had been supported by Mr Faulkner’s responses to radio communication. The recording shows—‘

‘The recording shows an angry executive, acting unwisely,’ said Louise Hewitt, with a thin smile in Chris’s direction. ‘I think we can all understand how Chris Faulkner felt, but that does not mean he reacted correctly. He was, shall we say, overwrought. As duty officer, with the advantage of a detached view, it was your job to realise that and react accordingly.’

The duty officer met her gaze bravely. ‘Yes, I appreciate that. I should not have allowed an executive to override my professional instincts. I shall not let it happen again.’

‘Good.’ Hewitt nodded and scribbled on her display pad. ‘That’s noted, and appreciated. Superintendent Lahiri, can we go back to the matter of the criminal who, according to Chris Faulkner’s testimony, was responsible for hiring the sicario.’

The superintendent nodded. He was a wiry, tough-looking man in his fifties, an obvious hangover from the autonomous days. He had kept quiet for most of the proceedings and watched the interplay with shrewd attention. When he spoke, it was with the precision of a man who measured and cut his sentences before uttering them.

‘Khalid Iarescu, yes. He has been arrested.’

‘Has he confessed?’

Lahiri frowned. ‘He is a career criminal, Ms Hewitt. Simply arresting him has caused serious injury to three of my men. We are unlikely to extract a confession.’

‘Can’t we put pressure on his family?’

‘Not without further large-scale incursions into the southside, and that I would not recommend. The populace is already stirred up more than we’d like. And Iarescu has unchallenged control of the Mandela estate, as well as agreements with the ganglords in neighbouring areas. His immediate family are doubtless already well hidden and protected. And his lawyers are now attempting to have him released under the Citizen’s Charter.’ Lahiri spread his hands. ‘I can have him charged with resisting arrest, maybe with one or two outstanding drug offences, but beyond that, I am not hopeful. Even within that framework I am not hopeful that we can secure a conviction. Khalid Iarescu is a well-connected man.’

Bryant snorted. ‘He’s a fucking gangwit, is what he is.’

Notley cut him a sharp look. ‘The name, Superintendent. It’s what, Hungarian?’

‘Romanian. That is, his father was a Romanian immigrant. His mother is Moroccan.’

‘Can we threaten him with expulsion?’ Notley had shifted focus. The question was addressed to the Minister.

The holo shook its head regretfully.

‘No, I’ve examined the files. Both parents were naturalised. He is, in technical terms, as English as you or I.’

Notley rolled his eyes.

Hamilton made a sleepy gesture. ‘Just a thought. The boy who actually stole the car. He had family?’

‘Yes.’ Lahiri looked down at his notes, did not look up again while he spoke. ‘The Goodwins. Mother and father, two brothers and a sister. They’ve been evicted. As per policy.’

‘Yes, good.’ Hamilton reached for his glass of water and sipped at it. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance that this Iarescu will be seen to associate with them. Offer them succour, so to speak. Solidarity from the estate patriarch. The, uh, big man ethos.’

Lahiri shook his head. ‘It doesn’t work like that, sir, outside of the movies. Iarescu is a successful criminal. He knows the ropes both within and without the zones. If anything, he will distance himself from the whole affair. In fact,’ - a hesitant look at Chris - ‘I’m afraid there really is nothing substantial to make the connection in the first place.’

Chris held down his temper. They’d been round this block before. ‘I told you what I heard, Superintendent. I didn’t imagine it. The boy named the estate, and Iarescu.’

‘Yes, I understand that, sir. But you must see that this in itself is not evidence. No, please.’ He raised a hand. ‘Hear me out. In gang culture, status is accorded by association. The boy may have believed that by naming a major player as his sponsor, he could protect himself.’

‘Fascinating,’ murmured Hamilton. ‘Almost talismanic, isn’t it. Almost tribal.’

Lahiri’s lip almost curled. ‘Moreover, the tag Fuktional is close to generic. In the southside zones alone, you have gang leaders styling themselves Fuktion Red, Sataz Fuktion, Fuktyal, Fuktyal Bass. The list goes on. Gang culture is mimetic, imaginative only within very limited given parameters. To my ears, what you heard has the ring of stock response.’

Chris shook his head.

‘Do you have something fresh to add, Chris?’ asked Louise Hewitt sweetly.

Silence. Some shuffling from the duty officer. The Minister’s holo checked its watch, surreptitiously. Jack Notley uncapped an antique fountain pen with a loud snap.

‘Well, then,’ he said briskly. ‘If we can proceed to recommendations.’

‘Motherfucking whitewash bullshit.’ Chris wasn’t sure if Mike’s place was secure or not; pre-Vasvik, he’d never even have given it consideration. Now he just didn’t care. The long squeeze of keeping to the Shorn script had festered in him for too long. ‘Fucking lies and shit-mouthed expediency from end to motherfucking end.’

‘You think so?’

Mike leaned across the kitchen table with the rioja and topped up his glass. Behind the gesture, he raised his brows at Suki, who shrugged and went on sculpting roses into the carrot sections on her chopping board.

Chris missed it. ‘Of course it was. Stock response, my fucking arse. That kid was hired by Iarescu to grease me, and someone hired Iarescu to get it done. Someone with money.’

Mike was silent. Chris gestured with his wine glass.

‘You heard what Lahiri said. Iarescu’s connected, in the zones and out. This is corporate, Mike. This came down from on high.’

‘Chris, you realise how paranoid you sound?’

‘I was there, Mike. They blew that kid away to stop him talking.’

Bryant frowned and leaned back in his chair. ‘The report says he went for a weapon.’

‘Oh, Mike. He was pinned in the fucking wreckage.’ Chris caught Suki’s glance at the ceiling. She’d only put Ariana to bed an hour ago. He lowered his voice. ‘Sorry, Suki. I’m just. Upset.’

‘We’re all upset, Chris.’ Mike got up and prowled the kitchen. ‘Obviously. I mean, yeah, we can’t have just anybody on the roads, raging without authorisation. The whole damn system’ll collapse.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, Mike. This wasn’t just anybody. This was allowed to happen. They didn’t scramble the heli until they knew I’d driven that little shit off the road. They did what they were told, and they let it happen. I mean, why’d you think no one got sacked? The heli crew, the duty officer—‘

‘Come on. They all got reprimands. It’ll go—‘

‘Reprimands?’

‘—on their file. Christ, the duty officer got three months’ suspension without pay.’

‘Yeah, and did you see how happy he was with that? He’ll be taken care of, Mike.’

‘I think,’ said Bryant sombrely, ‘that he was happy because he still has a job to go back to. Notley could easily have kicked him into touch.’

‘Exactly. So why didn’t he? Someone’s got dual control here, Mike, and you know it. Someone’s cranking Notley’s cable.’

This time Mike Bryant laughed out loud. Suki frowned at him.

‘Michael, that’s not very nice. Chris is upset.’

‘Okay, I’m sorry. It’s just the thought of someone cranking the cables on Jack Notley. I mean come on, Chris. You know the man. Suki, you’ve met him. He’s not exactly malleable.’

They both looked at Chris. He sighed.

‘Alright, maybe not Notley. Maybe not that high up. Maybe Hewitt, she’s never liked me. Or, listen, maybe it’s as simple as Nick Makin looking for payback on that punch I landed.’ This time he caught the exchange of glances between husband and wife. ‘Alright, alright, I know. But I’m not paranoid, Mike. Someone tampered with my proximity alarm.’

‘The report said it was the rain, Chris. You saw that crack.’ Bryant turned to include Suki. ‘The mechanics at Driver Control found a leak in the access panelling on Chris’s security masterboard. It shorted out the whole alarm system.’

‘Oh bullshit, Mike. Carla checks those panels every—‘ He gestured, suddenly unnerved by his lack of certainty. ‘I don’t know, every week, at least. She would have spotted it.’

He didn’t tell them that he’d had a screaming row with Carla when the preliminary results of the Shorn investigation came in. That he’d jumped automatically towards blame and belief in what Mike obviously still believed, that Carla had missed the leak.

It had taken her over an hour to talk him down.

I know what I’m fucking doing, she told him grimly, when the row had burnt itself out. If there was a crack in that panelling, someone fucking put it there, and not that long ago.

‘Carla knows what she’s doing,’ he said, staring into his wine glass.

Nobody answered him. The silence started to creak under its own weight. Chris stared at the table top, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound deranged.

‘You really believe this, don’t you, Chris,’ said Suki. It didn’t come out as supportive as she was obviously trying to be.

Chris shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I believe. Look, Mike, is it possible this is something to do with the NAME contracts? Somebody outside Shorn, I mean. Maybe I was tagged getting in and out of Panama.’

Bryant gestured. ‘You said you were careful.’

‘I was. But something is going down, Mike. I can feel it.’

Sure, something’s going down. You’re about to sell out your colleagues for a public sector sinecure with the bleeding-heart UN leech gang. That’s what’s going down, Chris.

And maybe someone knows that.

The paranoia made icy tracks down his spine.

‘Okay.’ Mike sat down again. He steepled his fingers on the table. ‘Tell you what. We’ll look into it. Unofficially, I mean. I’ll talk to Troy, get him to ask around. He’s got friends in the southside zones. We’ll see what he turns up. Meantime, we’ve got other stuff to worry about. Echevarria—‘

Chris groaned. ‘Don’t remind me.’

‘—flies in Tuesday, Chris. And we’ve got Barranco arriving right behind him. Not even two full days between.’

‘The week from hell.’

Mike grinned. ‘That’s right. So tonight, let’s just forget about the whole fucking thing and get wrecked. What time you reckon Carla’ll be here?’

‘She said before eight.’ Chris glanced at his watch. ‘Maybe she got held up at the checkpoints.’

‘Want to call her?’

‘No, it’s.’ He realised how it looked. ‘Yeah, maybe I should.’

Carla was running an hour late, for no reason she felt like offering. Chris bit back his annoyance.

‘Well, when—‘ he began thinly.

‘Oh, Chris, just start without me. I’m sure you’re already having fun.’

He looked round at Mike and Suki, glad he’d used the mobile and not the videophone. Bryant was leaning against his wife and nuzzling at her ear through the immaculate auburn mane. She laughed, flinched away, then reached round to grab the ends of his loosed tie and pull him close. The little scene radiated groomed marital content, a synthetic blend of sex and wealth and domesticity straight out of a screen ad. He thought suddenly of a kitchen in Highgate, and an unforgiveable wish surged up in him.

‘Well, get here as soon as you can,’ he said, and hung up.

Mike looked up. ‘She okay?’

‘Yeah, be here in about an hour. Some kind of crisis with a lubricant system.’ He smiled weakly. ‘Suppose I should be glad she’s that obsessive.’

‘Shit, yeah. If Suki was my mechanic, I’d never let her out of the fucking garage. Ow!’

‘Bastard.’

He tried to join in with the laughter, but his heart wasn’t in it.

‘Chris, you know the horse joke?’ Bryant poured more wine. ‘Guy goes into a bar and sees a horse standing there. So he goes up to him and says So. Why the long face?’

More laughter, filling up the beautiful kitchen like the smell of cooking he wasn’t invited to share. He wished Liz would hurry up and

Carla!

He wished Carla would hurry up and

And what? Come on, Chris. Finish that thought.

It must have shown on his face. Mike came across and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Ah, Chris. Come on, man. Honestly. I really don’t think you should be worrying. I mean, in the end, you trashed the little fucker. He’s smoked meat. And let’s face it, with the rep you’ve got, no one smarter than a fuckwit gang sprog is going to want to drive against you.’ He raised his glass. ‘You got nothing to worry about, man.’

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Midweek, Regime Change was quiet. Cheap cocktails and genteel pole dancing brought in a scattering of suits from the local offices and recently-paid zone workers who knew they’d never get in on a Friday or Saturday night. By eight-thirty or nine they were mostly leaving, the zone types headed home with their shallow finances drained, the suits going on to less genteel clubs where you could get your hands on the dancers.

‘I would have suggested somewhere else.’ Chris gestured at the centre of the Iraq Room, where a veiled woman, naked from the neck down, flexed around a newly installed silver pole to the unwinding cadences of Cairo Scene. The spectators sat at pipe tables or stood about in small knots, staring. ‘I didn’t realise.’

Liz Linshaw laughed and sipped at the pipe between them. She plumed whisky scented smoke in the dancer’s direction.

‘You don’t approve?’

‘Uh.’ He spread his hands helplessly. ‘Well, it’s just not what I had in mind when I. You know, called you.’

‘Chris.’ She leaned closer to beat the music, grinning. ‘You really don’t have to work so hard at not looking at her. I already know you’re an honourable man. Way past honourable, in fact.’

The dancer bellied up to the pole, slid it up and down between her breasts. Chris took a deep interest in the low hammered copper table the pipe stood on. Liz Linshaw laughed again.

‘Look.’ She leaned across to place one hand gently against his cheek and pushed his head back towards the performance. He fought down a jagged impulse to grab the hand and twist it away. ‘I mean, look, really look at her. Let’s get this over with. She’s sexy, isn’t she. Young. No, don’t look away. It’s a great body. Worked out. And worked on, obviously, unless someone invented anti-gravity fields recently. Yeah, if I were a man, she’d do it for me. She’d make me, Chris, hey, Chris, you’re blushing.’

‘No, I’m—‘

‘You are. I can feel it. Your face is hot.’ She laughed again, delightedly. ‘Chris, you really are in trouble. You’re a grown man, you’ve got a dozen kills under your belt, and you can’t look at soft porn without flushing like a teenager. I mean, what do you and Carla Nyquist do in the bedroom?’

She must have seen the change in his face. Before he could move, she reached out and touched his arm.

‘Sorry. Chris, I’m sorry. That was bitchy.’

This time he did take hold of her hand. He pushed it back across the table and sat looking at her in silence.

‘Chris, I said I’m sorry.’

They were saved by the pipe waitress. She sauntered across, lifted the cage and cast a practised eye over the glowing embers of tobacco in the pan. She glanced at Chris.

‘Bring you another?’

He hadn’t smoked much of the first, it was just the price of sitting there while he waited for Liz Linshaw. He shrugged.

‘No, I think we’re pretty much done here.’

The waitress left. He met Liz Linshaw’s gaze and held it.

‘Chris—‘

‘Reason I asked you here, Liz. You’ve got friends in Driver Control, right?’

She looked away, then back. ‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

‘Inside sources? People who can get information for you?’

‘Is this really why you called me, Chris?’

‘Yes. You have sources, right?’

A shrug. ‘I’m a journalist.’

‘There’s something I need to know. I need to find out if—‘

‘Whoa, Chris.’ She gave him a hard little smile. ‘Slow down. Now I may have just gone over the line a little with that bitchy crack about your wife. But that doesn’t mean you own a part of me. Why the fuck would I put pressure on one of my hard-won sources for you? What’s in it for me?’

‘You’re writing another book, right?’

She nodded.

‘So this is a whole chapter if you’re lucky.’ He hesitated at the edge, looking for something to fill the gap that had suddenly opened up between them. ‘You heard I was up against a no-namer last week?’

‘Yes. Inconclusive, I heard. Driver Control had to come in and mediate.’ She smiled, a little more warmly this time. ‘I’m sorry, Chris. I like you but I don’t shadow you through the net on a day-to-day basis. There was something about a software failure, the challenge didn’t register in the system or something?’

‘Yeah, that’s the official line.’

One eyebrow arched. He thought there was a little mockery in it. ‘And the unofficial line?’

‘The no-namer was never registered in the first place. Some zone kid jacked a battlewagon and tried to take me down in the rain. No challenge issued. And Driver Control didn’t mediate, they turned up with an enforcement copter after I drove the kid off the road and they fed him a couple of cans of gatling shells for breakfast.’

He saw, with some satisfaction, the way the shock went through her. How her carefully constructed cool fractured open. Her voice, when it came, was almost a whisper.

‘They killed him?’

‘Pretty conclusively, yeah.’

‘But haven’t they traced the car?’

Chris nodded. ‘To an unemployed datasystems consultant. He reported it stolen from outside his house in Harlesden about an hour after the duel.’

‘He must have known before that!’

‘Not necessarily. He hadn’t driven it for a while, apparently. Couldn’t afford to renew the licence this quarter.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Journalistic interest kindling.

‘From the look of him in the interview tape, he’d be hard-pushed to afford a full tank of fuel, let alone a licence to use it, so yes, I do. But in the end it doesn’t matter. Whoever set this up is a long way up the chain from either him or the kid who nicked the car. And whoever set this up also has their claws into Driver Control.’

‘Alright, I’ll buy that. What else do you have?’

‘That’s the lot.’ He wasn’t about to get into the Mandela estate connection. Troy Morris was already running down rumours across the southside, asking softly after Robbie Goodwin’s displaced family, trying to find a safe approach to Khalid Iarescu’s underworld machine. The last thing he’d need was a high-profile journalist crashing the zones and stirring things up. Liz Linshaw was most use where she already was - highly placed in the world of competition driving, reeking of cachet and connection.

She smiled, as if she could read his thoughts.

‘No, there’s more. You just don’t feel like telling me right now.’ She shrugged. ‘ ‘sokay, I can live with that. Sure, I’ll talk to some people I know. Shouldn’t take much leverage to see if something’s being covered up. I can take it from there.’ She picked up the pipe and drew on it. Inside the cage, the last of the embers flared. ‘You understand, this doesn’t come for free. I do it, and you’ll owe me, Chris. Big time.’

‘Like I said, it’ll make a chapter of—‘

‘No.’ She shook her head, and her hair fell across her face. It made him want to clear it away with one hand. ‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘So what do you mean?’

The corner of her mouth quirked and she looked away. ‘You know what I mean, Chris.’

That sat between them for a while, smouldering out like the pipe.

‘Listen,’ he said.

‘I know, Chris. I know. In fact, I’ve seen it all before. You’ve got some stuff you’ve got to work through. Don’t worry about it and. Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not short of male company, believe me.’

‘You seeing Mike again?’ It was out before he could stop himself.

She raked fingers into her own hair and grinned up at the corner of the room. ‘That really is none of your business, Chris.’

‘I’m not like him, Liz.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘I don’t see the women around me as. Product.’ The images from the porn segment glowed in his head. Studded leather parting buttocks, encircling breasts impossibly full. Fully clothed, the Liz Linshaw sitting opposite him shrugged.

‘Alike Bryant knows what he wants, and he takes it and then he looks after it as best he can. I don’t think his morality stretches much further than that, but he does at least know what he wants.’

Her eyes flickered up to meet his. She was still smiling.

‘Listen, Liz. That night, I.’ He swallowed. ‘I’m having some problems with my marriage, but that doesn’t mean I—‘

‘Chris.’ He’d never in his life been interrupted so gently. ‘I don’t care. I want to fuck you, not replace your wife. But I’ll tell you something for nothing. You came home with me that night, and you grabbed hold of the merchandise when it was on display. Whatever’s going on in your relationship with Carla, you might as well have fucked me then. You’ve got the same guilt, and the same hard-on for me. The fact you didn’t do it is a technicality.’

‘You—‘

She waved it off. Getting up, shouldering her way into her jacket.

‘I’ll get back to you about Driver Control. But the next time you get a bed for the night at my place, you’ll work your passage.’

In the end, the pipe waitress came and told him he’d have to order something else if he wanted to sit there any longer.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Lopez routed Barranco’s flight plan through Atlanta and Montreal before a dawn arrival at Reagan International, New York, where a Shorn jet would pick the two of them up under paperwork that identified them as economic advisers for the Parana Emergency Council. Lopez spoke Brazilian Portuguese almost as well as his native Spanish, and Barranco, like most political figures in Latin America these days, had enough to get by. Lopez was betting security at Reagan International would neither know the difference nor care.

Apparently, his assessment was on the nail. The Shorn jet lifted without incident and touched down in London just after lunch. Chris rode the courtesy copter out to meet it.

‘Senor Barranco.’ He had to shout above the racket of the rotors and the unseasonally cold wind that came buffeting across the asphalt of the private carriers’ terminal. His grin felt sandblasted onto his face. Armed security stood around in suits, jackets whipping up constantly to reveal their shoulder holsters. ‘Welcome to England. How was your flight?’

Barranco grimaced. He looked good in the smart-casual mobile consultant wardrobe Lopez had disguised him with, but above the knitted wool jacket his face was smeared with jet lag.

‘Which flight do you mean? I seem to have been in transit for a week. And now a helicopter?’

‘Believe me, Senor Barranco, you wouldn’t want to drive through this part of London. Is Joaquin Lopez with you?’

Barranco jerked a thumb back at the Shorn jet. ‘He’s coming.’

Lopez appeared in the hatch and clambered down, followed by two more men with baggage. He grinned and waved at Chris. No sign of the weariness you could see on Barranco. Beneath his mobcon clothing, there was a prowling energy that Chris guessed was chemical. In the absence of any other escort, he’d been Barranco’s only security since leaving Panama City.

Chris ushered everybody aboard the copter and into seats. The door cranked itself closed and shut out the wind with an airtight clunk. The pilot turned to look at Chris.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Take us home.’

The copter drifted into the sky. They bent away over the city.

Barranco leaned across to the window and peered down at the sprawl below.

‘This doesn’t seem so terrible,’ he remarked.

‘No,’ Chris agreed. ‘From up here, it’s not.’

The tanned face turned to look at him. ‘I would not be safe walking in those streets?’

‘Depends on the exact neighbourhood. But as a general rule, no, you wouldn’t. You might be attacked and robbed, maybe just have stones thrown at you. At a minimum you’d be recognised as an outsider and followed. After that,’ Chris shrugged. ‘Depends on the kind of crowd you draw.’

‘I am not dressed like you.’

‘Wouldn’t matter. They don’t care about politics in the zones. It’s tribal. Localised gangs, territorial violence.’

‘I see.’ Barranco’s gaze went back to the city sliding past beneath them. ‘They have forgotten who did this to them.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

The rest of the flight passed in silence. They crossed the westward cordons and picked up the beacon for the West End cluster. Machines took the controls, read the flight data and drew the helicopter along a preprogrammed path. Hyde Park opened up under them. The hotels beckoned at its edge, like moored cruise liners from an earlier age.

Mike had Hernan Echevarria buried in the heart of Mayfair, well away from the modern hotels. They were playing to the dictator’s old-world pretensions. A Royal Suite at Brown’s, the whiff of two centuries’ tradition and the dropped names of European royalty along the historical guest list. An armoured Shorn limo collected Echevarria daily at the Albemarle Street frontage and ferried him about on a carefully balanced programme of meetings with senior banking officials, A-listed arms dealers and one or two house-trained political figures. Evenings were given over to opera and dinners with more tame dignitaries.

‘I’ll keep him busy,’ Bryant promised. ‘And I’ll keep him away from the Park end. You stash Barranco in the Hilton or something. Get a tower suite. I’ll cross-reference with you on programme, we’ll make sure these two guys never come within a couple of klicks of each other.’

The Hilton it was. They touched down on the tower helipad and were met by liveried attendants who busied themselves with the baggage and led Barranco and Lopez off in the direction of the access elevators. Chris went with them, mainly to take care of tips.

‘You won’t have to do that,’ he said, as the last attendant slipped out and closed the door with trained noiselessness. ‘Just sign gratuities on any room service you ask for, and we’ll cover it. I’d recommend about ten per cent. Expectations are a lot less than that, but it never hurts to be generous. So anyway, uh. I hope you’ll be comfortable.’

‘Comfortable?’

Barranco stood in the midst of the suite’s opulence, looking like a hunter whose large and dangerous quarry has suddenly disappeared into the surrounding undergrowth.

Chris cleared his throat. ‘Yes, uh. Joaquin Lopez will be staying on the floor below. Room 4148. I’ve put two armed security guards into 4146 as well. The hotel has pretty good security of its own, but you can’t be too careful, even up here.’ He produced a small matt black mobile and held it out. ‘This is a dedicated phone. A scrambled line direct to me. wherever I am. Any problem, night or day, call me. Just press the dial key.’

‘Thank you.’ Barranco’s tone was distant, but if there was irony in it, Chris couldn’t hear it.

‘I thought you’d probably want to rest now.’

‘Yes, that would be good.’

‘I’d like to introduce you to a colleague of mine later on, and also to my wife. I thought perhaps we could have dinner together. There’s a good Peruvian restaurant in the hotel mezzanine. We could eat late, say about nine-thirty. Or if you’d prefer to stay here and leave it for another night, that’s entirely up to you.’

‘No, no. I would.’ He drew a deep, jet-lagged breath. ‘Like to meet your wife, Senor Faulkner. And your colleague, of course. Nine-thirty will be fine.’

‘Good, that’s great. I’ll call here just after nine, then.’

‘Yes. Now I think I would like to rest.’

‘Of course.’

He let himself out and went down to talk to the security detachment. They were pretty much what he’d expected - two hard-faced men past their physical prime in shirt sleeves and shoulder holsters. They answered the door and then his questions with impassive calm. The surveillance equipment he’d ordered wired into Barranco’s suite stood unobtrusively on a low table to one side. Standby lights winked below the row of small liquid crystal screens. On one of them, Barranco had already collapsed onto a bed, fully clothed. Chris bent and peered.

‘He asleep?’

‘Out like a light.’

‘You sure he isn’t going to be able to find any of these cameras?’

‘Yes, sir. Unless he’s a surveillance specialist. And he hasn’t shown any signs of looking for them yet.’

‘Well, let me know if he does start looking.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And if he moves from the suite, I want to know before it happens. You’ve got my direct line?’

They exchanged weary glances. One of them nodded.

‘Yes, sir. It’s under control.’

He took the hint and left to check on Lopez. The Americas agent had been waiting for him. Chemical impatience made his movements about the room erratic and irritating. Chris tried to project calm.

‘No transit problems then?’

‘No, man. Onward tickets.’ Lopez grinned speedily. ‘They don’t give a fuck who you are, so long as you’re going someplace else.’

‘And Barranco? Did he talk to you at all?’

‘Yeah, he told me I was a running dog for the global capitalist tyranny, and I ought to be ashamed of myself.’

‘No change there, then.’ Chris wandered across to the window and stared out over the park.

‘Yeah, you want to watch him, Chris. He’s out of his depth with all this corporate stuff, he’s going to be defensive. Most likely, he’ll cling to what he knows. My guess is you’re going to hear a shitload of out-of-date dogma this week.’

‘Well, he’s entitled to his point of view.’

That cracked Lopez up.

‘Yeah, ‘s a free country,’ he chortled. ‘Right? Everyone’s entitled to their point of view, right? ‘s a free country! That’s right!’

‘Joaquin, you need to take some downers.’

‘No. Less time around these Marquista hero types is what I fucking need, man.’

The sudden, bright vehemence brought Chris around from his contemplation of the view. Lopez was standing glittery-eyed in the centre of the room, fists knotted, surprised by his own sudden rage.

‘Joaquin?’

‘Ah, fuck it.’ The anger fled as rapidly as it had come. Lopez looked abruptly drained. ‘Sorry. It’s just my kid brother hands me the same fucking line all the time. Running-dog capitalista, running-dog capitalista. Ever since I got my PT& I licence. Like a fucking skip-burned disc.’

‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’

‘Yeah.’ The Americas agent waved a hand. ‘I don’t advertise the fact. Little squirt’s a union organiser in the banana belt, up around Bocas, where we were. Not the kind of thing you put on a Trade and Investment CV if you can avoid it.’

‘I guess not.’

Lopez’s eyes went hooded. ‘I try to keep the worst of the shit from raining on him. I made contacts that are good for that much.

And when the strike-breakers do come round, I pay his hospital bills, I feed his kids. Gets back on his feet and he drops by to insult me again.’

Chris thought feelingly of Erik Nyquist. ‘Family, huh?’

‘Yeah, family.’ The agent lost his drugged introspection. Shot Chris a sideways look. ‘We’re just talking here, right, boss? You’re not going to go telling tales on me to the partners?’

‘Joaquin, I don’t give a shit what your brother does for a living, and nor would any of Shorn’s partners. They’ve got altogether bigger game to shoot. Everyone’s got an Ollie North or two hanging in the classified record. So long as it doesn’t interfere with business, so what?’

Lopez shook his head. ‘Maybe that’s a London attitude, Chris, but it wouldn’t wash that way with Panama T & I. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find myself served with a Plaza de Toros summons like you did to old man Harris.’

‘Hey, Harris was a fuck-up.’

‘Yeah, not much of a knife fighter either, even for a gringo.’ Lopez skinned an unpleasant grin, but something desperate leaked from the edges, around the eyes. ‘Time I reach that age, I want to be out of this fucking game. I do good work for you, Chris. Right?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’ Chris frowned. Candour wasn’t something he’d looked for here, weakness still less. The naked anxiety in the agent’s tone was touching him in places he’d thought long sealed away.

And we’re still not into the brutal honesty shitstorm with Barranco yet. Jesus fucking Christ

‘I mean, I called it right everywhere you asked me, right? I set up what you need, soon as you needed, right?’

‘You know you have.’ He didn’t know which direction to roll this. Maybe—

‘I know I lost it back there in the NAME, I still owe you for that, but—‘

‘Joaquin, you’ve got to drop that shit.’ Chris made for the mini-bar. Shipped bottles and ice up from the chiller unit onto a table, talking as he worked. ‘Look, it was a problem at this end. I told you that, and I told you we look after our own. Just think about it. Christ, if you don’t trust me, think about the logistics of the thing. Would I have hauled your arse out of there, with all the expense we incurred, just so I could can you six weeks down the line?’

‘I don’t know, Chris. Would you?’

‘Joaquin, I’m serious. You really need to take something.’

‘You know Mike Bryant, right?’

Chris stopped, a glass in each hand. ‘Yeah. He’s a colleague, so watch what you say next, alright.’

‘You know he’s working a Cono Sur portfolio at the moment? Running contacts through Carlos Caffarini out of Buenos Aires?’

‘Yeah, I heard. Didn’t know it was Caffarini, but—‘

‘It isn’t any more,’ said Lopez abruptly. ‘Last week Bryant canned Caffarini because there were call-centre strikes in Santiago, and he didn’t see it coming. Or maybe he didn’t think it was important enough to chase. Now he’s on a ventilator in intensive care until his health cover runs out, and some fucking seventeen-year-old is running the portfolio at a quarter the old retainer. They were only strikes, Chris. Management abuse of female workers, localised action, no political demands. I checked.’

Chris put down the glasses and sighed. Lopez watched him.

Fuck, Mike, why can’t you just

‘Look, Joaquin. Strikes can get out of hand, whatever the original rationale. Reed and Mason, it’s chapter one stuff. You know that.’

‘Yeah.’ The Americas agent had the manic splinter back in his tone. ‘So tell me this, Chris. What’s going to happen to me if a banana strike gets out of hand on a certain plantation up near Bocas?’

Chris looked at him.

‘Nothing.’ He kept Lopez’s eyes while it sank in. ‘Alright? Got it? Nothing is going to happen to you.’

‘You can’t give me—‘

‘I am not Mike Bryant.’

The snap in his voice came out of nowhere, jolting them both. He clamped down on it. Made his hands work on the drinks. He dumped ice into two glasses, decanted rum over the cubes and swirled the mix. Spoke quietly again.

‘Look. I’m happy with what you’ve done for us and I don’t give a shit about what happened in Medellin. Forget about Caffarini and whatever’s going on in Buenos Aires and Santiago. I give you my word, you’re secure with us. Now let’s drink to that, Joaquin, because if you don’t crank down soon, you’re going to pop. Come on, this is expense account overproof rum. Get it down you.’

He offered the glass. After a couple of seconds, Lopez took it. He stared into the drink for a long moment, then his face came up.

‘I will not forget this, Chris,’ he said quietly.

‘Nor will I. I look after my people.’

The glasses chimed in the room. The liquor burned down. Outside the windows, something happened to the light as afternoon shifted smoothly towards evening.

Chapter Thirty

‘I still don’t see why you want me there.’ Carla checked her make-up again in the drop-down roof mirror as Chris rolled the Saab down into the Hilton’s parking deck. ‘It’s not like I know anything about the NAME.’

‘That’s exactly the point.’ Chris scanned the crowded deck, found nothing to his liking and steered down the ramp to the next level. ‘You can get him to tell you about it. I don’t want this guy to feel he’s surrounded by suited experts. I want him to relax. To feel in control for a while. It’s textbook client handling.’

He felt her eyes on him.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

The lower level was all but empty. Chris parked a good half dozen spaces away from the nearest vehicle. Since the proximity alarm had failed on him, he’d taken to parking out in the open where the security cameras could see him. It was irrational, he knew - no one short of a full covert ops squad was going to breach the perimeter defences of the Hilton or the Shorn block in the first place, let alone have time and skill to get through the Saab’s security locks before they were noticed. But the proximity alarm had failed. How exactly was still up for grabs, but in the meantime he didn’t intend it to happen again.

‘I’ll go up and get him,’ he said, killing the engine. ‘The restaurant’s on the mezzanine level. El Meson Andino. Mike said he’d meet us there.’

‘You don’t want me to come up with you?’

‘There’s really no need.’

He didn’t tell her that he wanted to check in on the security squad on the way, and that in some undefined way he felt ashamed of the two blunt middle-aged men and their assemblage of little screens and mikes.

‘Suit yourself.’ She dug out a cigarette and put it to her lips. She seemed to draw into herself as she lit it.

‘I’ll see you there, then.’

‘Yes.’

The security men had nothing to report. On the screen, Barranco prowled back and forth like a prisoner in a cell. He had dressed in a black dinner suit a decade out of fashion. Chris went up to collect him.

‘I don’t know much about Peruvian food,’ he said as they rode down in the lift together.

‘Nor do I,’ said Barranco shortly. ‘I’m from Colombia.’

The food turned out to be excellent, though how Peruvian it was became a matter for dispute a few glasses of wine into the meal. It broke the ice with a resounding crack. Barranco argued that a couple of dishes were pure Colombian, and Chris, casting his mind back to his time in the NAME, had to agree with him. Mike, on good social form, reasoned with great persuasiveness and almost no evidence, that the cuisine of the different regions must have interpenetrated over time. Carla suggested rather acidly that this probably had more to do with marketing than regional mobility. Peruvian was a consumer label here, not a national identity. Barranco nodded sober approval. He was obviously quite taken with Carla, whether because of her blonde good looks or her unorthodox political attitudes, Chris didn’t know or much care. He stowed an unexpected twist of jealousy and resisted the temptation to shift his chair closer to his wife’s. Relief at the way the evening was going closed it out.

Business leaked into the conversation in low-intensity bursts, mostly from Barranco’s side and nurtured by the warmth of Carla’s genuine interest. Chris and Mike let it run, sonar-tuned for the dangers of political reefs and set to steer rapidly away where necessary.

‘Of course, solar farms are a beautiful idea, but it is the old instability argument. The infrastructure is too costly and too easy to sabotage.’

‘Doesn’t that go for nuclear power too? I thought the regime was going to build two of those new Pollok reactors.’

‘Yes.’ Barranco smiled grimly. ‘Francisco Echevarria is a close personal friend of Donald Cordell, who is CEO of the Horton Power Group. And the stations will be built a long way from Bogota.’

Carla flushed. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Yes.’

Mike shot Chris a warning glance and picked up the bottle.

‘Senor Barranco. More wine?’

‘I had a question about Bogota,’ said Chris, feigning memory failure. ‘Oh, yeah. Last time I was there, I saw this really beautiful church in the centre of town. I was wondering ...’

And so on. If Barranco resented the steerage, it didn’t show. He let the tides of the conversation carry him, and stayed polite throughout. Chris knew from the look on Carla’s face that she saw what was going on, but she said nothing.

Only once, when Mike Bryant retired to the toilets for the second time, did the veneer crack. Barranco nodded after him.

‘That kind of thing’s not a problem where you work?’

‘What kind of thing?’

Carla sniffed delicately. Chris looked in the direction of the toilets. He’d honestly not thought anything of it.

‘Well,’ said Barranco. ‘I wouldn’t say your colleague has a problem. But nor is he particularly subtle about it. In the Bogota Hilton, in a restaurant full of people, things would be a little different. Even our ruling families have to watch their drug stance in public these days.’

‘Must be why Francisco Echevarria spends so much time in Miami.’ It hit Chris, just too late, that he’d drunk a little too much.

Barranco’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes, I imagine it is. Meanwhile, his father uses the helicopter gunships you buy him to firebomb coca farmers into oblivion. Ironic, isn’t it.’

The silence opened up. Carla made a small noise into it, a mixture of amusement and disgust that told Chris he’d get no help from that quarter.

‘I, uh, that isn’t,’ he stumbled. ‘Shorn policy as such doesn’t outlaw coca production. In fact, we’ve done feasibility studies on bringing the crop into the legitimate commodities market. Shorn’s Financial Instruments division actually commissioned work along that line.’

Barranco shrugged. ‘You expect me to be impressed? Legitimisation will only send coca the way of coffee. Rich men in New York and London will grow richer, and the farmers will starve. Is that part of the package you plan to sell me here, Chris Faulkner?’

That stung. More so, with the fierce satisfaction he saw rising on Carla’s face. Mike had not reappeared. Feeling suddenly very alone, he scrambled to salvage the evaporating good humour around the table.

‘You do me an injustice, Senor Barranco. I merely mention the study to demonstrate that at Shorn we are not blinded by moralistic prejudice.’

‘Yes. I find that easy to believe.’

A small, colourless smile from Carla. Chris plunged on doggedly.

‘In fact, I was going to say, the study found legitimisation on the commodities market would be too problematic to consider seriously. For one thing, there’s a very real fear that it would drain immediate finance out of practically every other investment sector. And clearly we can’t have that.’

It was meant to be funny, but no one laughed. Barranco leaned across the table towards him. His blue eyes were bright and marbled wet with anger.

‘I give you fair warning, Chris Faulkner. I have little compassion to spare for the spoilt stupid children of the western world and their expensive drug problems. I look through the lens that your free marketeers have sold us, and I see a profitable trade. So.’ A short, hard gesture, one upward-jutting calloused palm, halfway between a karate blow and an offer to shake hands. ‘Sell us your weapons, and we will sell you our cocaine. This will not change when the Popular Revolutionary Brigade takes power in Colombia, because I will not sacrifice the wealth it can bring my people. If your governments are so concerned about the flow of product, let them buy up the supply on the open market like anybody else. Then they can burn it or put it up their noses as they see fit.’

‘Hear, hear!’ Mike Bryant was back, clapping slow applause as he circled the table back to his seat. His eyes burned bright enough to match Barranco’s pale blue glare. ‘Hear, hear! Outstanding analysis, really. You were right, Chris. This is the man for us. No doubt about it.’

He seated himself with a grin.

‘Of course, it’ll never happen. Our governments don’t really care enough to take that rather obvious step. They operate a containment policy in the cordoned zones, so crack and edge addiction there costs them almost nothing. And the rich, well, you can always rely on the rich to take care of their own misdemeanours without recourse to public process.’

Barranco looked at him with open dislike. ‘Strange, then, Senor Bryant, that there should have been so much loudly publicised military activity devoted to destroying the coca trade over the last seventy years.’

Mike shrugged and helped himself to more wine. ‘Well, of course, things weren’t quite as clearly defined a few decades back. There was a lot of playing to the gallery back then.’ He smiled again. ‘Something we don’t have to worry about these days.’

‘And yet the frigates sit at anchor in Barranquilla harbour still, flying foreign flags. Our coastal waters are smart-mined in contravention of UN law and our people are showered with napalm for trying to make a living.’

Another shrug. ‘Matters of control, Senor Barranco. I’m sure you’re familiar with the dynamic. It’s distasteful, I agree, but it is the stance the Echevarria government and its creditors have settled for. That, in a very real sense, is one of the reasons why we’re all here right now. If we can reach a realistic agreement with you, Senor Barranco, you could be the man to change that stance.’

Barranco’s lip curled. Bryant, seeming to miss it, sniffed and rubbed with a knuckle at both sides of his nose.

‘In the meantime, you have my word as a representative of the Shorn Conflict Investment division that until the time comes to implement those changes, you’ll be given access to the same covert export routes Hernan Echevarria currently turns a blind eye to.’

‘You’re going to take me to the table with Langley?’ Barranco’s gaze shuttled back and forth between Chris and Bryant. His tone had scaled towards disbelieving.

‘Of course.’ Mike looked surprised. ‘Who did you think I was talking about? They’re the premier distributors of illicit narcotics in the Americas. We don’t believe in doing things by halves at Shorn. I mean, we’ll hook you up with some other European and Asian distributors as well, naturally, but to be honest none of them are in the same class as Langley. Plus you’ll probably shift the bulk of your product in Langley’s back yard anyway, and they can do pretty good onward sales to most of the western Pacific Rim if you’re interested. More wine? Anybody?’

Carla drove them home, focused wholly on the road ahead. In the dashboard-lit warmth of the car, the silence came off her in waves. Chris, still smarting from the way she’d lined up with Barranco, turned away and stared out of the passenger-side window at the passing lights of the city.

‘Well, that was fucking great,’ he said finally.

Carla picked up the motorway feeder lane. She said nothing. If Chris had looked at her, he would have seen how close to the edge they were.

‘Mike in the bathroom powdering his fucking nose, Barranco on a political rant and you backing him up every fucking—‘

‘Don’t start with me, Chris.’ The Saab never wavered from its accelerating trajectory up the feeder ramp, but there was a ragged edge in Carla’s voice that did finally make him look across at her face.

‘Well, didn’t you?’

‘You should be overjoyed I did. Wasn’t that my job tonight? Make your client feel good. Relax him. Isn’t that what you said?’

‘Yeh, that didn’t mean hang me out to dry in front of him.’

‘Well perhaps you should have made yourself clearer. I’m your wife, remember, not some grinning whore out of the escort pages. I don’t do this shit for a living.’

‘You fucking enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me!’

It drew a sideways look from her. For a full two seconds she stared at him in silence, then her eyes went back to the road.

‘You going to shout like that at Mike Bryant tomorrow?’ she asked quietly. ‘For his bathroom manners?’

‘Don’t avoid the fucking question, Carla!’

‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked me one.’

‘You enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me, didn’t you?’

‘You sound pretty convinced already.’

‘Just fucking—‘ He clenched a fist, clamped his mouth. Locked down the fury. Forced out the words close to normal volume. ‘Just answer me the question, Carla.’

‘You answer mine first. You ever shout at Mike like this?’

‘Mike Bryant is on my side. Whatever else he might do, whatever problems he might have, I know that much. I don’t need to yell at him.’

‘Don’t need? Or don’t dare?’

‘Fuck you, Carla.’ It was almost a murmur. The sheeting fury had guttered out inside him. It wasn’t gone, but abruptly it was cold, and that frightened him more. Frightened him because in the chill he thought he could feel something slowly dying.

‘No, fuck you, Chris.’ Her voice was barely louder than his had been, but it hissed at him. ‘You want an answer to your question? Yes. I enjoyed it tonight. You know what I enjoyed? I enjoyed seeing a man who’s fighting for something more than his fucking quarterly bonus get the upper hand for once. I enjoyed hearing someone who cares what happens to other people telling the truth about the way your sick-making little world works.’

‘A man who cares.’ Chris bounced the loosely curled edge of his hand off the window in the weary ghost of a punch. ‘Oh, sure. A man who wants to sell crack cocaine and edge to children in the zones. Yeah, he’s a real fucking hero, Barranco is. You heard what he said.’

‘Yes, and I heard Mike Bryant promise to hook him up with Langley, who supply eighty per cent of North America’s inner cities. Langley, who you work with on a day-to-day basis. And this weekend, the two of you are taking Echevarria and Barranco both to the North Memorial to sell them the weapons they need to fight each other. And now you’re taking some kind of moral stance here? Jesus Christ, you could give lessons in hypocrisy to Simeon fucking Sands. What choice have we left these people, Chris? What favours have we done them? Why shouldn’t they swamp us all in crack?’

‘I didn’t say they shouldn’t.’

‘No, because the truth is you don’t care about that either. You don’t care about anything, in fact, except making your end of the deal stick so you can stay at the top table with the other big players. That’s what this is about, isn’t it Chris?’ She laughed, something that was almost a sob. ‘Chris Faulkner, global mover and shaker. Observe the cut of his suits, the cool command he brings with him to the table. Princes and presidents shake his hand, and when he speaks, they listen. Oil flows, where and when he says it will, men with guns rise up and fight at his command—‘

‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Carla.’ The anger was suddenly warming again, heating his guts, looking for the way to do damage. ‘You got such a thing for Barranco and his moral crusade, maybe you should have just gone up to his fucking room with him instead of coming home with me. Maybe a man of conscience’ll light you up a little better than I do.’

Sudden pressure across the chest, almost pain. The belt gripped him into his seat. He heard the brief shriek of tyres as the Saab slammed to a halt.

‘You fucking bastard, Chris. You fucking piece of shit.’

She sat with her fists clenched on the wheel, head down. The car stood slewed fractionally off centre beneath the sodium glare of the motorway lamps. The engine rumbled to itself. As he watched, she shook her head slowly and lifted her face. There was an unsteady adrenalin-shock smile pinned to her mouth. She shook her head again, whispered it like a discovery.

‘You piece of shit.’

It was her end-of-the-line insult, the one she’d never used on him except in play. In the whole seven years of their relationship, he’d only heard her label perhaps a half dozen acquaintances with it. Men, and on one single occasion a woman, that she wanted to wipe out of her life, and in most cases had. For Carla, it meant total shutdown. Beneath contempt.

He sat and felt it dripping off him like a physical thing.

‘You’d better mean that,’ he said.

She would not look at him.

‘This is a new level, Carla.’ He looked at his hands in the stained orange radiance coming down through the windscreen. There was a fierce exhilaration pumping through him that he dared not examine closely. ‘We haven’t been getting on, but. This is new. This is.’

He lifted a hand to gesture. Gave it up half-formed.

It must have caught her peripheral vision. She stole a glance at him. Behind her eyes he saw fear, not of him.

‘I ought to make you get out of this fucking car.’ Her voice was shaking, and he knew she was going through the same pounding near-the-edge rush. ‘I ought to make you fucking walk home.’

‘It’s my car,’ he said gently.

‘Yeah, and every centimetre I built for you, and rebuilt and rebuilt again, you ever, Chris, you ever speak to me like that again, you—‘

‘I’m sorry.’ It was out of his mouth before he realised he’d said it.

And then they were groping for each other across the space between, tears spilling down her cheeks, stopped up unshed in his throat, both of them held back by the idiot grip of the belts on their bodies. The solid ground of the relationship was suddenly back under their feet, the edge was gone, shoved back from convulsively, the thundering pulse of the drop receding in his ears, the familiar warm sticky slide of remorse and regret, the safety of it all again, bearing them up and binding them together.

They fought loose of the belts and held each other without speaking. Long enough for the hot, wet tear ribbons on her cheeks to cool and dry against his face. Long enough for the swollen obstruction in his own throat to ease, and the locked-up trembling to stop.

‘We have to get out of this,’ she said at last, muffled, into his neck.

‘I know.’

‘It’s going to kill us, Chris. One way or the other, on the road or not, it’s going to kill us both.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve got to stop.’

‘I know.’

‘Vasvik will come back to you. I know he will. Please, Chris, don’t fuck it up when he does.’

‘Alright.’ There was no resistance left in him. He felt drained. It occurred to him, for the first time in the whirl of the last three days: ‘Have you heard anything more?’

She shook her head, still pressed against him.

He found a single tear welling up in one eye. He blinked it away. ‘They’re taking their sweet fucking time.’

‘Chris, it’s a lot of money. A big risk for them. But we haven’t heard and that means, Dad says that means they’re going to do it. He says otherwise we’d have heard by now. They’re raising the finance, justifying it at budget level, that’s what he thinks.’

Chris stroked her hair. Even the irritation at Carla’s constant undying faith in her father’s superhuman bloody wisdom was gone, temporarily dynamited in the shock of how close they’d come to the break.

‘Okay, Carla.’ There was a mirthless smile creeping out across his face now. ‘But whatever they’re doing, they need to hurry it up. Someone out there’s trying to kill me. Someone connected. And if they can’t take me down on the road, then they’ll find some other way.’

She raised her head to look at him.

‘Do you think they know? About Vasvik?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that if Vasvik and his pals don’t get a move on, they’re going to be too late to do anything except clean up the blood. Just like Nigeria and the Kurdish homeland and every other fucking gig the UN have ever played.’

He found, oddly, his smile was gaining strength. He couldn’t pick apart the knot of feeling behind it. Carla drew back from him as if he wore a stranger’s face. He looked away from her and along the nighttime perspectives of the road.

‘Doesn’t give you much hope, does it.’

Chapter Thirty-One

They got a good day for the North Memorial. The unseasonal gales drove out the cloud over the rest of the week and by Sunday the Norfolk sky was scraped almost clear. They spotted a big jet banking lazily against the blue while they were still a dozen kilometres off.

‘Surveillance mother,’ was Mike’s opinion. ‘Probably the new Lockheed. I hear they finally ironed the bugs out of the drone retrieval. They’ll be showing off. Ah, here we go. Junction seventeen.’

He swung the BMW into the off-lane. Behind him, someone hit a horn with what sounded like both feet. Chris turned across the back seat and saw a streamlined red Ford jockeying to get past them. Beneath the tinted glass of the windscreen, he made out an angry young face.

‘Should have indicated, Mike.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mike squinted up at the mirror. ‘Fucking asshole. If this strip wasn’t triple-monitored for the fair, I’d fucking have you, my son.’

‘What is it?’ Barranco had been catnapping in the front passenger seat.

‘Nothing,’ said Bryant. ‘Just someone looking to die young.’

Barranco craned round to look. Chris shook his head not to worry and grinned. The traffic had been heavy all the way up from London. They must have seen close to a hundred cars since they left, and as they drew closer to the Lakenheath turn-off, the density went steadily up. Bryant wasn’t used to driving in these conditions. No one was.

The red car edged up beside them as they hit the ramp. Bryant grinned and accelerated up the slope.

‘Maybe we should have flown,’ said Barranco nervously.

‘On a day like this?’ Mike was still grinning. ‘Come on!’

The Ford came level, on the right. Chris cast an eye over the vehicle’s lines and reckoned cheap, look-good armouring. Probably a junior analyst or a recruitment sprog. No contest. He braced himself without thinking and a second later Bryant feinted sideways. The other driver spooked, braked and slewed aside. Mike carved up the space he’d left and straightened out in the middle of the lane. He started to brake a couple of dozen metres off the summit, and came to a smooth halt at the roundabout junction. He waited, eyes on the mirror. After a couple of moments, the Ford crept up and queued respectfully behind them.

‘Thank you,’ said Mike, and turned sedately onto the curve.

Barranco looked back at Chris for guidance. ‘Did this mean something?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Bryant breezily. ‘No challenges permissible on this stretch today. Just teaching the guy a little something about respect.’

Chris winked.

Ten minutes later they cleared the main gate at the airbase and a uniformed attendant waved them through into the parking segment. The place was packed with corporate battlewagons and hired limos. Here and there, one or two khaki-drab armed forces utility vehicles had been left out, mainly, Chris suspected, to enhance the genuine feel of the fair. On occasion, new developing world clients remained resolutely unimpressed by the suited godparents they had come to depend on. It helped to accentuate the military aspect, gave dictators and revolutionaries something to relate to.

As they climbed out, a trio of venomous-looking fighter planes came screaming across the airfield at rooftop height, then trailed the gut-crunching roar of lit afterburners back up into the azure sky. Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Barranco flinch.

‘Fucking clowns,’ he said. ‘Don’t know why they got to do that.’

‘Those are Harpies,’ Barranco told him quietly. ‘Demonstrating a strafe run. They are made in Britain. Last year you sold fifteen of them to the Echevarria regime.’

‘Actually,’ said Mike, alarming the BMW, ‘they’re made under licence to BAe in Turkey. Have been for a couple of years now. This way, I think.’

He set off in the direction of the hangars, where a loosely knotted crowd could be seen drifting about. Chris and Barranco followed him at a distance.

‘You did not need to bring me here,’ muttered Barranco.

Chris shook his head. ‘I think you’ll be glad we did. The North Memorial pulls in state-of-the-art weaponry from every leading manufacturer in the world. Not just the big stuff, you’ve got assault rifles, grenades, shoulder launchers, area denial systems. New propellants, new ammunition, new explosives. Vicente, even if you don’t buy much of this stuff, you need to know what Echevarria might be deploying against you.’

Barranco fixed him with a hard look. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what Echevarria’s got, and save us both some time.’

‘Uh ...’

‘You know, don’t you. You supply him, you pay for it all.’

‘Not me.’ He stamped down the coil of guilt inside him, shook his head again. ‘That’s not my account, Vicente. I’m really sorry. I’ve got no more access to it than you do.’

‘No, but you could get access.’

Chris coughed. Bent it up into a laugh. ‘Vicente, that’s not how it works. I can’t just walk into another executive’s office and go through his client files. Quite apart from the security systems, it’s a question of ethics. No, seriously. I mean it. I could lose my job over something like that.’

Barranco turned away. ‘Okay, never mind. Forget I asked. I realise you have a lot to lose.’

It didn’t seem to be meant ironically, and Chris thought he was beginning to get the measure of Vicente Barranco enough to spot these things. Over the past two days, he reckoned he’d built some pretty solid scaffolding for his relationship with the Colombian. He’d had the man out to dinner at his home and actively encouraged Carla to reprise her solidarity of the night at the Hilton. He’d gone drinking with him in some semi-risky clubs at the edges of the cordon. And on the Saturday morning after, at Barranco’s insistence, he’d even taken him on a short tour of the eastern zones in the Saab. This last, the Colombian sat through in almost total silence until he asked the single question. Is this where you grew up, Chris?

It was the first time he had used Chris’s first name on its own. A watershed. Chris considered a moment, then he spun the wheel of the Saab and made a U turn in the empty street. He headed southward through a maze of deserted one-way systems and roads he thought he would have forgotten by now, but had not. He found the abandoned, half-built multi-storey car park that overlooked the riverside estates to the west and drove up the spiral pipe to the roof. He parked at the edge and nodded forward through the windscreen.

‘Down there,’ he said simply.

Barranco got out of the car and wandered to the edge of the deck. After a while, Chris got out and joined him.

Riverside.

The name was like a taste in his mouth. Metallic bitter. He stared down at the low-stacked housing, the shaggy green of miniature park spaces allowed to run wild in between, the oil-scummed expanses of water the estates backed onto on three sides. It wasn’t the Brundtland, he told himself, it wasn’t the labyrinthine concrete expanse of homes never designed for any but the dregs. That wasn’t it. Something altogether different had gone wrong here.

‘In my country,’ said Barranco, echoing his thoughts with uncanny accuracy, ‘you would not be considered poor if you lived here.’

‘It wasn’t built for poor people.’

The Colombian glanced back at him. ‘But poor people moved in.’

‘Well, no one else would, you see. After the domino recessions. No facilities. No local shops, no transport unless you could afford taxis or fuel and a licence. Which, increasingly, no one could. You want to get anywhere?’ Chris turned and pointed north. ‘The nearest bus stop is two kilometres that way. There used to be a rail link, but the investors got scared and pulled out. When I was growing up, a few of the ones who had jobs used to cycle, but the kid gangs started throwing stones at them. They knocked one woman right off a dock into the river. Kept dropping stones on her ‘til she went under for good.’ He shrugged. ‘Having a job, a real job, marked you out.’

Barranco said nothing. He stared down at the estate as if he could push the whole place back in time and spot the woman floundering in the oiled water.

‘A couple of the kids I used to play with died that way too,’ said Chris, remembering clearly for the first time in a long while. ‘Drowned, I mean. No security fence along the wharf, see. They just fell in. My mother was always telling me not to—‘

He fell silent. Barranco turned to him again.

‘I am sorry, Chris. I should not have asked you to come here.’

Chris tried on a smile. ‘You didn’t ask me, exactly.’

‘No, and you brought me nonetheless.’

The obvious question hung there in the air between them, but Barranco never asked it. Chris was glad, because he didn’t have an answer.

They got back into the car.

‘Do you guys want to see this stuff, or what?’

It had dawned on Mike Bryant that Chris and Barranco were lagging behind and he’d come back for them.

Barranco exchanged glances with Chris and shrugged.

‘Sure. Even if I don’t buy much, I’ll need to see what Echevarria might be deploying against me. Right?’

‘Exactly!’ Mike clapped his hands and snapped out a pointed pistol finger. ‘That’s the spirit.’

Inside the hangars, big air conditioning units blasted warm, spice-scented air down from the ceiling. The exhibits sat in pools of soft light, interspersed with crisp repeating holos showing them in sanitised use. Brand names hung in illuminated capitals. Logos badged the walls.

Bryant made for the assault rifles. An elegant saleswoman glided forward to meet him. They seemed to know each other far better than Mike’s visit yesterday with Echevarria would explain.

‘Chris. Senor Barranco. I’d like you to meet Sally Hunting. She reps for Vickers, but she’s a freelance small-arms consultant in her spare time. Isn’t that right, Sal? No strings.’

Sally Hunting shot him a reproachful look. Beneath her Lily Chen suit and auburn tumbling spike haircut, she was very beautiful in a pale, understated fashion.

‘Spare time, Mike? What is that, exactly?’

‘Sally, behave. This is Senor Vicente Barranco, a valued client. And my colleague, Chris Faulkner.’

‘Of course, Chris Faulkner. I recognise you from the photos. The Nakamura thing. Well, this is a great pleasure. So what can I do you gentlemen for?’

‘Senor Barranco is fighting a highland jungle war against an oppressive regime and well-supplied government forces,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s our feeling he’s under-equipped.’

‘I see. That must be very difficult.’ Sally Hunting was all mannered sympathy. ‘Are you relying on Kalashnikovs? Mmm? Yes, I thought so. Marvellous weapons, I have clients who won’t look at anything else. But you may want to consider switching to the new Heckler and Koch. Now, it’s a little more complicated to operate than your basic AK, but—‘

Barranco shook his head. ‘Senorita, my soldiers are often as young as fourteen years old. They come from bombed-out villages where most of the adults have been killed or disappeared. We are short of teachers, even shorter of time to train our recruits. Simplicity of operation is vital.’

The saleswoman shrugged. ‘The Kalashnikov, then. I won’t bore you with details, they’ve been making essentially the same gun for almost a hundred years. But you might like to have a look at some of the modified ammunition we have here. You know, shredding rounds, toxic jacket coatings, armour piercing. All compatible with the standard AK load.’

She gestured across at a display terminal.

‘Shall we?’

Barranco left the North Memorial armed - on paper - to the teeth. Seven hundred brand new Kalashnikovs, eight dozen Aerospatiale shoulder-launched autoseek plane-killers, two thousand lightweight King antipersonnel grenades and two hundred thousand rounds of state-of-the-art ammunition for the assault rifles. They were unable, despite Sally Hunting’s best efforts, to sell him landmines or a complex automated area-denial sentry system.

‘No big deal,’ she told them while Barranco was with one of the clinical experts, having immune-inhibitor toxins explained to him. ‘I’ll get standard commission on the AKs. Not as much as the Heckler and Koch, obviously, they’re still trying to break the lock Kalashnikov have on the insurgency market, and they’re being very generous this year. Still, with what I’ll make off the Aerospatiale stuff and the grenades, I’m not complaining.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ growled Mike, ‘because my impression was I just handed you a crippled rabbit on a four-lane drag. You owe me big time for this, Sally.’

She twinkled at him. ‘Collect any time, Mike. I’m a busy girl, but I can always fit you in, you know.’

‘Behave.’

On the drive back, Barranco was quiet. If his new acquisitions pleased him, he gave no sign. For the whole journey he held a single jacketed rifle slug in his hand, rolling it back and forth between his fingers like a cigar. His face invited neither conversation nor comment. He looked, Chris thought in one particularly morbid moment, like a man who has just been told he has a disease for which there is no known cure.

Chapter Thirty-Two

They dropped Barranco at the Hilton, and were about to pull away again when the security entry alarms went off in violently coloured LEDs and nasal braying. Still buried in his brooding, the Colombian had tried to walk through the scanner with the AK round in his hand. Chris nipped up the steps to the entrance and unwrinkled things, clapped Barranco on the shoulder and told him to get some rest. He’d see him at nine the next morning to go over contractual stuff. Then he piled back in the BMW and they drifted out into the sparse traffic. Mike hooked around Marble Arch and picked up Oxford Street heading east. Still plenty of light in the sky.

‘Want to get something to eat?’ Mike asked him.

‘Sure, why not.’

‘Noodles?’

‘Sounds good to me.’ Chris jerked a thumb back the way they’d come. ‘You think he’s okay?’

‘Barranco? Yeah. Just shellshocked. Probably never seen so much hardware in a single day.’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t look happy.’

Mike snorted. ‘Well he bloody should be happy. That’s the biggest single credit-card payment I’ve ever made.’

‘You didn’t buy any toys for Echevarria yesterday?’

‘On account.’ Mike grinned at him. ‘Sixty-day cancellation clause.’

‘You route that stuff through Sally Hunting as well?’

‘No way. Total account separation, remember. Anyway, Sally doesn’t get her commission unless the money clears. Wouldn’t want—‘

The BMW’s phone lit up with a priority call. Mike made a quiet gesture at Chris, and answered.

‘Yeah, Bryant.’

‘Mike. It’s Troy. That stuff about Faulkner you ran past me? Something came up.’

‘Right, he’s here with me, Troy. Tell us what you got.’

There was a brief pause. ‘It’s better we meet. I don’t want to talk on this line. Can you come out to my place?’

Mike glanced across at him. Chris nodded.

‘We’re on our way.’

Troy’s house seemed strangely quiet in the early evening light. It took Chris a moment or two to understand that he was comparing it with memories of the last time he’d been here, when the party was in full swing. He got a determined lock on his creeping paranoia, and followed Mike up to the front door.

The worry must have shown on his face. Mike grinned encouragingly at him.

‘Be alright,’ he said.

Troy Morris answered the bell by securicam before he opened up, ushered them in as if there was a storm coming, and then threw every bolt and security device the door had before he spoke again. The anti-tamper unit whined rapidly up to full charge. Mike looked at Chris and raised an eyebrow.

‘Little jumpy, aren’t we?’

‘You’d better come through,’ said Troy. ‘Someone I want you to meet.’

In the lounge, a thin black man in his early twenties sat twitching restlessly in one of Troy’s armchairs. There was a scar across his lower jaw and his clothes said zone gangwit. He surveyed the new arrivals without enthusiasm.

‘This is Marauder.’ Troy told them. ‘Marauder, this is Mike Bryant. Chris Faulkner. Friends of mine.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever.’

‘Mike, Chris, you want to sit down? Get you a drink?’

Mike Bryant nodded, most of his attention fixed on Marauder. ‘Some of that Polish vodka you keep in the freezer. Small one.’

‘Chris? Single malt, right?’

‘Yeah, if you’ve got it. Thanks.’

‘Aberlour or Lagavulin? Or I’ve got Irish.’

‘Lagavulin’s good. No ice.’

‘Marauder?’

The gangwit rolled his head once back and forth, slowly. He said nothing. Troy shrugged and went out to the kitchen. They sat and waited.

The silence stretched.

‘Who you run with?’ asked Mike suddenly.

Marauder lifted his jaw. ‘Fuck’s it got to do with you?’

Chris tensed. Neither he nor Mike were carrying, and Marauder looked street enough to be a problem in a straight fight. He checked Mike out of the corner of his eye, but saw no signs of impending violence.

‘Just curious,’ said Mike lazily. ‘Just wondered what kind of fuckwit outfit lets its soldiers get strung out on the merchandise.’

Marauder sat up. ‘Hey birdshit, you want to fuck with me?’

‘You don’t understand.’ Mike Bryant’s voice was patient. ‘I’m a suit. I represent the establishment. I wanted to fuck with you, you’d be in a penal hospital donating a kidney to society and your momma’d be out on the street, evicted and giving blowjobs to pay your post-op. Sit down.’

The gangwit was up out of his chair. On the way there, he’d magicked a blade out between the knuckles of his right hand. He brandished it.

‘Hey, fuck you, birdshit.’

‘I’d put that away as well, if I were you. Touch me, and I’ll have your fucking house bulldozed. That’s a promise.’

Marauder dithered, rage etched into his stance. If Mike had got up to meet him, Chris reckoned the gangwit would already have slashed at him.

‘Ernie, put that fucking thing away before I take it off you myself.’ It was Troy, back with a tray of bottles and glasses and an exasperated look on his face. ‘What do you think this is, the Carlton Arms lounge bar? This is my fucking home.’

‘Ernie?’ A huge grin lit up Bryant’s face. ‘Ernie?’

‘You behave as well, Mike. You should know better.’ Troy nodded at the gangwit, who looked away and snicked the blade back out of sight. He lowered himself onto the front edge of the armchair. Chris felt the tension leaking slowly out of him, and breathed again. Mike examined the nails of his right hand. Troy Morris hadn’t even put down the drinks tray.

‘That’s better.’

‘Call yourself a black man,’ muttered Marauder weakly. ‘Fucking line up with them every time, you’re nearly birdshit yourself.’

‘Ah, belt up.’ Troy wasn’t even looking at him any more. He handed drinks round and parked the tray on a coffee table. Settled into the remaining armchair with a whisky of his own, and gestured. ‘This fine example of urban youth has a story to tell. I told him you’d pay him.’

‘Well.’ Mike looked up at the ceiling. ‘That seems fair. Let’s hear it. Ernie.’

There was a sullen, hate-filled pause. Everyone looked at Marauder.

‘Going to cost you,’ he said finally, looking at Chris.

‘Two hundred.’ Chris told him. ‘That’s a promise. Maybe more, if I like it.’

‘You ain’t going to like it at all,’ the gangwit sneered. He seemed to be getting back his poise. ‘You’re Faulkner. Knew that ‘cause I seen you on the TV. Big popular driver, right. Well, turns out you ain’t so fucking popular after all. Turns out someone thinks you’re a fucking sellout.’

Chris felt his guts chill. ‘Go on.’

Marauder nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s it. Crags Posse got the word. Jack a wagon, put a sicario behind the wheel. Someone paid out fifty grand to have you bunnied.’

‘That’s not so much.’

‘It is around the crags, Alike,’ Troy said sombrely. ‘You can get a sicario hit on Iarescu’s patch for a grand, grand and a half. Maybe five, if they have to go into town.’

‘Well, expenses.’ Mike gestured. ‘Jacking the car.’

Marauder sneered again. ‘Wasn’t no fucking jack, birdshit. That guy, he knew they were coming. Iarescu sent a sparkman and datarat up to Kilburn to wire that wagon two days before it was jacked. Fucking suit knew, man, they paid him for it.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Chris asked him.

‘Defector. I run with the Gold Hawks—‘

Mike Bryant threw up his hands. ‘Well, why was it such a big fucking secret before, you’re telling us now like it was nothing? Fucking—‘

‘Mike, shut up.’ Chris looked back at the gangwit. ‘Yeah, the Gold Hawks. And?’

Marauder shrugged. ‘Like I said, defector. The sparkman, he came over. He’s black, the Crags are a birdshit gang, they only ever tolerated him for the wirework. He’s got a new girl in Acton now, suits him to get out from under Iarescu. He told me this shit couple of nights ago. I heard Troy was asking, so. Like that.’

Troy leaned forward. ‘Now tell them what the sparkman was doing to the wagon.’

‘Yeah. Said they put in a frequency jammer.’

Chris and Mike looked at each other.

‘A what?’

‘Sparkman didn’t know much about it.’ Marauder seemed to be settling into his role as storyteller. ‘The datarat did most of the work. Seems like he told him it was a system to trick out some kind of alarm. Very expensive, he said. Iarescu got it given to him specially.’

Chris nodded to himself. ‘Uh uh. Mike? Believe me now?’

‘Shit.’ Mike threw himself to his feet. Marauder twitched, but by then Bryant was at the window, staring out. ‘Shit.’

‘You said someone thinks I’m a sellout.’ Chris focused on the gang-wit. He had to ask. ‘What does that mean? Who told you? The sparkman?’

‘Sure. Iarescu was full of it, talking up how the suits were selling each other out. How this guy Faulkner wasn’t a team player, he didn’t belong and that’s how come he was getting greased.’

‘Chris, that could just be Iarescu reinforcing his own loyalty system. Look how much better we are than these fucking suits. Fucking each other over at every opportunity. Not like us, we stand together, and I’m the best fucking boss you ever had. Someone outside Shorn could have got hold of the prox frequencies on the Saab, if they were jacked in at the right level. Lloyd Paul. Nakamura, maybe. Any of them could have bought the information.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Outside the car, it was getting dark. The buildings of the financial district loomed around them as Mike threaded the BMW through deserted streets towards the Shorn block. Most of the lights in the towers were out, and there was a ghost town hush over the whole place. The emptiness of Sunday dying, like the last day of some cycle of civilisation now reaching its end. Chris felt the chill leaking into him again.

‘Why would they do it that way, Mike? It doesn’t make sense. Why trust some punk sicario more than one of their own drivers? Comes to another tender, they can field the best they’ve got against me.’

‘Not if they wanted to use that trick with the jammer. Trade Standards authorities’d be all over them like a crack whore. They’d fine them into bankruptcy.’

‘Exactly.’ Chris shook his head. ‘It doesn’t pay a major corporation to break the rules for the sake of a single driver. Not when there’s no money in it.’

‘So maybe it was personal. Mitsue Jones’s family or something.’

‘Same applies, Mike. They lose the insurance, the pension, the bereavement pay. Fuck it, they go to jail. Nakamura would drop them like vomit, and with no corporate protection more than likely Shorn would have them greased just to make an example.’

‘If they get caught. And revenge is a powerful—‘

‘You think I don’t fucking know that. I—‘ Chris got a leash on himself, appalled at what he’d been about to tell the other man. ‘You’re reaching, Mike. How many families of men you crashed have come after you?’

‘None, but—‘

‘That’s right. None. This is the way things get done, Mike. Road-raging is here to stay. No one breaks the rules any more. They test, they probe, they hammer out new road precedent, but nobody does this. Nobody goes to the trouble unless there’s a hard cash reason. And that means someone inside Shorn.’

‘You’re thinking Makin?’

‘Or Hewitt.’

Bryant shook his head. The Shorn block appeared and he drew to a halt a few metres off the car deck security entry. He leaned his arms on the steering wheel. Stared up at the blank face of the tower.

‘Alright.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s assume you’re right.’

‘Yes, let’s.’

‘Let’s assume the fix was in, like you said, from inside Shorn. That means you were right about Driver Control as well. You know Liz has got contacts with those guys. Maybe I’ll give her a call, get her to do me a favour and ask some questions in the right places.’

‘What?’ Chris looked round, tried to squeeze the sudden pulse of alarm back out of his voice. ‘Liz Linshaw? Ah, maybe that’s not, I mean, is that a good idea? Involving her?’

‘Relax. You could trust Liz with your life.’

‘Yeah, but. I thought you and her were, you know. Over.’

Mike grinned. ‘That woman? No way. It runs hot and cold, depends on what else is going on in our lives. But it’s like gravity. No escape for either one of us. Longer we stay apart, hotter it is when we finally fuck. The last time, she left this bite on my shoulder you wouldn’t believe.’

Chris stared hard at the dashboard. ‘Yeah? What did Suki have to say about that?’

‘Well.’ Mike’s grin turned conspiratorial. ‘You’re not going to believe this either, but you know what I did? Went back to the office, smashed myself in the nose with the end of that baseball bat I’ve got.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. Fucking agony. Gave myself a serious nosebleed. Dripped it all over my practice gi. Told her I’d snagged a psycho in a sparring session.’

Chris remembered the bruised nose from a few weeks back.

‘That’s what you told me, too.’

‘Well, yeah. Didn’t want to force you to lie for me if it ever came up with Suki.’ Mike Bryant’s expression grew musing. ‘You know, if it weren’t that I already had Suki and Ariana, I really think Liz might have been the one.’

‘You think so, do you?’

Mike nodded sagely. ‘Yeah, I do. She’s really something, Chris.’

On the Shorn car deck, the Saab stood isolated in the gloom. Anyone else clocking weekend time had gone home for dinner. Chris sat in the car for a long time before he started up. The quiet whined in his ears. Across the deck, a faulty roof light spattered on and off like an obscure distress signal. It felt as if he was waiting for someone.

When he finally powered the Saab up and got out into the streets, it was like driving in a dream. The city slid by on either side of him as if cranked past on rollers. The Saab’s interior was a bubble of neurasthenic calm, a safe place he was scared he might not be able to leave easily. The dashboard and wheel, pedals and shift, gave him remote control and a distant, autopilot strength. Options murmured in his ear. Let’s go there. No, here. No. Fuck going anywhere, let’s just leave.

Leave it all behind.

He was almost into the streets of Highgate before the autopilot neurasthenia cut out and he realised this was not the way home.