Market Forces

Chapter Thirty-Three

Carla was already asleep when he got in. He vaguely remembered she’d told him something about a crack-of-dawn start with Mel’s recovery unit on the western periphery. Partnership trials in some structural adjustment consultancy. Chris had never heard of them, but these days that wasn’t so unusual. He had a lot less to do with adjustment programmes now he was out of Emerging Markets, and new SAP consulting groups were always springing up, like mushrooms on a manure heap. It wasn’t rocket science, after all. Slash public health and education spending, open to foreign capital flows, dynamite local blockages in the legal and labour sectors. Lie about the results, and get the local military to crush inconvenient protest. A trained ape could do it. You could get the paper qualifications by distance learning inside ten weeks. Then all it took was a suit and a driver’s licence.

He stood in the bedroom, watching Carla sleep, and was overcome by a wave of almost unbearable tenderness. He pulled the quilt up a little higher around her shoulders and she muttered something without waking. He slipped out, closed the door gently behind him and went downstairs to the study. Behind another closed door, he ran the porn segment of Liz Linshaw and her plastically enhanced playmate.

He sat for an hour, head propped on one hand, trying to sort out what he felt.

He slept badly, twisted by brutal dreams that evaporated in vague traceries of impending menace when he finally woke. Carla was gone, her side of the bed was almost cold, and light was streaming in through half-open curtains. The bedside clock said ten past eight.

‘Fuck.’

He got out from under the quilt, groped after shirt and trousers and got them on. In the bathroom mirror, he stared at the angry eyes and the stubble, picked up a razor then flung it into the basin and settled for sticking his head under the cold tap. Chilly water trickled around his neck and down his back. He raked it out of his hair, crushed a towel over his head without taking it off the rail and closed his shirt. Slung a tie around his neck. Shoes and cuffs. Wallet and watch. Into the jacket and out the d—

Keys, fuckwit.

He ran back upstairs, couldn’t find them on the bedside table. Remembered his vigil in the study, darted in and grabbed them up off the desk. He kicked the Saab backwards out of the driveway, swerved untidily round in the road at the bottom and left rubber on the worn grey asphalt as he took off westward. He made the Elsenham ramp in record time.

Rolling in past junction ten, he checked his watch. Couple of minutes off quarter to nine. Great. Fucking great. He put through a call to Barranco at the Hilton. There was no answer from the room. Growing irritation sprouted suddenly into irrational fear. He cut the connection, redialled for the security detail. Someone answered on a yawn.

‘Yeah?’

‘Faulkner. What happened to Barranco?’

‘What’s the matter, he not turn up yet?’

Chris felt a spike of ice run him through the heart.

‘Turn up where?’

The voice on the other end got suddenly deferential. ‘At Shorn, sir. Weren’t we supposed to let him go? He took the secure limo. Called Shorn for it to come and get him.’

Foot to the floor, now. Head still fogged. Think.

‘Who authorised the fucking limo?’ he grated.

‘I, uh, I can check.’

‘You do that. Do it now. And stay on the line.’ He summoned a map of the day from memory and tried to place Hernan Echevarria on it. His head refused to cooperate. Breakfast with the partners, or was that Tuesday? Touring Mil-Tac’s new smart-mine facility in Crawley? If that was it, he was already out of town, under Mike Bryant’s watchful eye. He felt the tension ease a little.

Security came back on line from their room in the Hilton. ‘Transit was authorised at partner level,’ the voice said, smug with belated relief. ‘Louise Hewitt. She said she was surprised you weren’t around to cover it.’

‘Ah, shit.’

‘Was there anything else? Sir?’

Chris made a noise in his throat and killed the connection. The Saab barrelled down the approach road to the first underpass.

He was on the raised section that ran across the northern zones when he suddenly remembered where Mike Bryant and Hernan Echevarria were that morning.

He floored it again.

The damage was done.

He knew. Jolting the Saab into a space as close to the lifts as he could get, he knew and wondered why he was still bothering. Riding up alone with the chatty elevator voice for company, he knew and nearly screamed aloud at the waiting. Shouldering past a brace of startled admin assistants on the fifty-second floor, he knew beyond doubt. Staring at the coded entry door to the covert viewing chamber, the nightmarish confirmation of its carelessly ajar angle, he knew. Still, through all the knowing, as he threw the door all the way open and saw Barranco standing there, it hit him like sludge in his guts.

Beyond the glass, Nick Makin and Mike Bryant sat with Hernan Echevarria and another uniform, apparently discussing interrogation training. Their voices strained through into the chamber. A brittle burst of laughter rang so sharp it was almost static.

‘Vicente ...’

Barranco turned the face of a corpse towards him. He was pale beneath his tan, mouth drawn down tight. A vein beat at one temple.

‘Hijos de puta,’ he whispered. ‘You—‘

In the conference room, Echevarria was nodding sagely.

‘Vicente, listen to me—‘

He flinched back, went halfway to a karate guard as he saw Barranco’s eyes. The Colombian was trembling. He wondered fleetingly what combat skills honed in genuine combat would look like up against his corporate Shotokan training. Barranco looked at him with sick wonder and then turned away. He stood staring down at the desk where someone had left a bound copy of the Echevarria schedule.

‘I did not believe,’ he said quietly. ‘When the assistant told me. Asked me if I was with Hernan Echevarria. If I had got lost, and brought me here, smiling, fucking smiling. Let me in here to watch you—‘

‘Vicente, this isn’t what it looks like—‘

‘It is exactly what it looks like!’ The yell rang in the confines of the chamber. It seemed impossible those beyond the glass wall could not hear. Barranco lashed out with one foot. The desk skidded, spilled schedule, associated discs and papers. A chair fell, caught Mike’s baseball bat and sent it rolling.

‘Vicente.’ In his own ears, Chris could hear the pleading in his voice. ‘You must have known Echevarria was still at the table. But he’s out now. You’re in. Can’t you see that?’

The Colombian turned back to face him, crook-handed.

‘In,’ he hissed. ‘Out. What is this, a fucking game to you? What do you have in your veins, Chris Faulkner? What the fuck kind of human being are you?’

Chris licked his lips. ‘I’m on your side, Vicente—‘

‘Side? On my side?’ Barranco spat on the floor. His voice scaled up again. ‘You grinning, fucking whore, don’t talk to me about sides. There are no sides for men like you. A friend to murderers,’ he gestured at the glass, eyes glistening. ‘To torturers, if it pays. You are a fucking waste, a soulless gringo puto, a stench.’

Something ripped open behind Chris’s left eye. He felt himself flinch physically with the impact. Red-veined wings billowed upward in his head. The HM file opened for him like a brightly-coloured trap door. He saw helicopters hanging from a tattered-cloud rain-forest sky, whine and clatter of gatlings, whoosh-thump of rockets. Villages in flames, cremated trees, charred bundles scattered across the scorched earth. He heard discordant jail-cell screams spiking a tropical night. A visitation he hadn’t had since the death of Edward Quain was there beside him, shouting hoarse in his inner ear.

The bat.

It was in his hand.

The door code. Five tiny queeping touches across the keypad. The glass door hinged back and he erupted into the conference.

‘Faulkner, what the fuck are you doing?’

Makin, voice almost girlish in shock.

Mike, turning from a side table where he was building drinks.

Echevarria, eyes fixed past Chris on Barranco. His swollen, old man’s face mottled and worked as he struggled to his feet. Voice reedy with outrage.

‘This is—‘

Chris hit him. Side on, both hands, full swing with the baseball bat and all he had behind it. Into the dictator’s ribs. He heard the bones go, felt the brittle crunch through the bat. Echevarria made a noise like a man choking and slumped against the edge of the table. Backswing, in again. Same spot. The old man shrilled. Mike Bryant waded in. Chris stabbed him handily in the solar plexus with the bat end. Bryant staggered and sat down against the wall, whooping for breath. The other uniform bellowed and tried to get round the table to his boss. He tangled in his own chair and went over backwards. Chris swung again. Echevarria raised an arm. The bat broke it with an audible snap. The old man screamed. Back up, and swing again. He got the face this time. The dictator’s nose broke, the bone over one eye caved in. Blood ripped out, spraying warm and wet on his own face and hands. Echevarria went down and lay on the floor, curled foetally and still screaming. Chris spread his stance low and wide, and chopped down as if he was splitting logs. Head and body, an indiscriminate frenzy of blows. He heard hoarse yelling, and it was his own. Blood everywhere, running off the bat, in his eyes. The white glint of exposed bone in the mess at his feet. Choking, bubbling sounds from Echevarria.

The other uniform came flailing round the table at last. Chris, down now to adrenalin-cold clarity, swung about and let him have the bat sideways across the throat with full swing. The man jerked back as if tugged on an invisible string. He hit the floor like an upturned beetle, strangling noisily.

Everything stopped. On the floor, Echevarria made a bubbling sigh and fell silent. A metre and a half off, Nick Makin had finally made it to his feet.

‘Faulkner!’

Chris hefted the bat. His face twitched. His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a well, rasping tones unrecognisable in his own ears.

‘Back off, Nick. I’ll do you, too.’

He heard Mike crawling to his feet. He looked back to the door he’d come in, where Vicente Barranco stood staring at the carnage. Chris wiped some of the blood off his face and grinned dizzily at him. The trembling was starting to set in. He tossed the bat to the floor, next to Echevarria’s crumpled form.

‘Okay, Vicente,’ he said shakily. ‘You tell me. Whose fucking side am I on?’

‘You know, that wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever seen you do.’

Mike Bryant handed him the whisky glass and went back to sit behind his desk. Chris huddled on the sofa in the blanket the paramedics had lent him, still shivering. In front of him on the table, the chess board pieces faced off against each other in the silence. The onyx gleamed.

‘Sorry I hit you.’

Mike rubbed at his chest. ‘Yeah, with my own fucking bat. Could have done without that as well.’

Chris sipped at the whisky, both hands cupped around the glass as if it was hot coffee. The spirit went down, warming. He shook his head.

‘I just lost it, Mike.’

‘Yeah, no shit.’ Bryant glared at him. ‘Think I spotted that one too. Chris, what the fuck was Barranco doing at Shorn unsupervised? You knew we had Echevarria in for budget review today. Why didn’t you take Vicente out for a drive or something? Or at least keep him in the Hilton until you could check with me.’

Chris shook his head again. The words limped out of his mouth. ‘I was running late. He went out without me.’

‘That doesn’t explain how he got in here. Who cleared him for the tower?’

‘That’s what I tried to tell you earlier. Hewitt authorised a limo to bring him here.’

Mike’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hewitt?’

‘Yeah. Louise fucking Hewitt. I’m telling you, she’s been gunning for me since the day I walked in here. She wants—‘

‘Oh, bullshit!’ Bryant came to his feet, hands braced on the desk. He shouted for the first time since the aftermath in the conference chamber. ‘For Christ’s sake! Now is not the fucking time for your bullshit paranoia and hurt feelings. This is serious.’

The anger evaporated as fast as it had arrived. He sighed and sat down again. Swivelled the chair away and stared out of the window. One hand opened in Chris’s direction. ‘Well, I’m open to suggestions. What do you think we should tell Notley?’

‘Does it matter what we tell him?’

‘Fuck, yes.’ Mike jerked back round to look at him. What’s the matter, you want to lose your job or something?’

Chris blinked. ‘What?’

‘I said. Do you want to lose your job?’

‘I. But.’ Chris gestured helplessly and nearly dropped his whisky. ‘Mike, the job’s already lost. Isn’t it? I mean, you can’t just go round clubbing the clients to death, can you.’

‘Oh, I’m glad you realise that now.’

‘I’m. Mike, of course I don’t want to lose this job. I like what I do.’ Chris made the curious, prickling discovery that he was telling the truth. ‘We’re just getting somewhere important at last. I’m telling you, Barranco’s the one. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work. He can make us the. What?’

Mike Bryant was watching him narrowly.

‘Go on.’

‘Mike, I’m good at this. The people stuff. You know that. And after this, I’ve got Barranco for keeps. We’re close now. Really close. This one matters.’

‘And Cambodia doesn’t?’

‘That’s not what I mean. There’s nothing new in Cambodia. They’ve been down this road at least four times before. Same old song, just a different decade. All we have to do is ride the wave, and make sure the enterprise zones don’t catch any damage. The NAME’s different. You’re looking at a radical restructuring of a regime that’s been in place almost since the beginning of the century. How often do you get to do work like that any more?’

Mike said nothing for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he nodded and got up from the desk.

‘Alright, good. We’ll go with that. Radical restructuring. Tone down the stuff about Cambodia, though. All our accounts are important, and whatever Sary eventually does or doesn’t achieve, we stand to make a lot of money over there. Remember that.’

Raised voices from outside Mike’s office. The unmistakable tones of Louise Hewitt arguing with security. Mike made a wry face.

‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Block and cover. Start talking. And get rid of that fucking blanket, you look like an evicted criminal.’

‘What?’

‘Something about the NAME, Chris. Relevant detail. Come on, quick. Try to sound intelligent.’

‘Uh,’ Chris groped. ‘The, uh, the urban situation’s no better. Sure you’ve got a pretty contented overclass but that’s only—‘

‘The blanket.’

He shrugged it off. Got up and started to pace. Voice strengthening as he picked up the thread again. Improvising. ‘The thing is, Mike, that business with the students was crucial. Some of those kids were from the overclass, okay not many, but with an extended family system like the one you’ve got in the NAME, pretty much everybody knows someone who—‘

Louise Hewitt burst into the office.

‘What the fuck have you done, Faulkner?’

He turned to look at her and what struck him like a physical blow was how drop dead gorgeous she looked angry.

He’d always been aware that Hewitt was attractive in a hard, dark fashion, but it wasn’t the kind of look that drew him. Too severe, too buttoned up and in the end, let’s be honest here, Chris, blonde was really what did it for him. Louise Hewitt was manifestly a dark-haired woman in utter control of her own destiny. It didn’t help matters that he hated her guts.

Now, with colour burning in her cheeks, her hair in light disarray and her jacket settled with less than perfect attention on her shoulders, he suddenly saw through to the woman beneath. She stood with legs braced slightly apart, as if the fifty-second floor was the deck of a yacht in suddenly choppy waters, hands floating just off her hips like those of a movie gunfighter. The stance was unconsciously sensual, stretching the fabric of her narrow knee-length skirt and highlighting the lines of her hips.

One tiny part of Chris’s mind stayed rational enough to register the bizarre perversity of his sexual programming. The rest of him was shit-scared of what was going to happen next.

‘Louise,’ said Mike Bryant cheerfully. ‘There you are. I imagine you’ve heard, then.’

‘Heard? Heard?’ She advanced into the room, still half-focused on Chris. ‘I’ve just come from the fucking sickbay, Mike. They’ve got Echevarria on a ventilator. What the fuck is going on?’

‘Is he likely to die?’

Hewitt pointed her finger. ‘I asked you a question, Mike. Spare me the executive deflection techniques.’

‘Sorry.’ Mike shrugged. ‘Force of habit. The Echevarria end of things is played out. He was making the situation unmanageable.’

‘So you beat him to death?’

‘It’s unfortunate, but—‘

‘Unfortunate? Are you—‘

Chris cleared his throat. ‘Louise, Barranco is—‘

‘You,’ she swung on him like combat, ‘shut the fuck up. You’ve done enough damage today.’

Mike Bryant came out from behind his desk, hands lifted, soothing. ‘Louise, we had no choice. It was lose Echevarria or lose Barranco. And Barranco is the key to this. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work.’

Chris just stopped himself staring as he heard his own words coming out of Bryant’s mouth. Hewitt looked from one man to the other. Her anger seemed to crank down a notch.

‘That’s not what Makin says.’

‘Well.’ Mike gestured. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Nick is running scared from his own mistakes. Come on, Louise, you know he’s fumbled this one since the outset. Why else did you call me in?’

‘Not to do this, that’s for sure.’

‘Look, let’s sit down for a moment.’ Mike gestured at the sofas around the chess table. ‘Come on. There’s no point in yelling at each other. It’s not an ideal situation, but it is manageable.’

‘Is it?’ Hewitt raised one immaculate eyebrow. Some of her customary cool seemed to be reasserting itself. ‘This I’ve got to hear.’

They sat. Mike bundled up the paramedic blanket and dumped it casually over the side of the sofa.

‘The thing is, Louise, Vicente Barranco’s our only shot. Echevarria was on his way out the door to the Americans. He was playing with us. And Barranco’s the only viable insurgency alternative. Chris’ll tell you. There are no other available choices.’

Hewitt switched her gaze to Chris. ‘Well?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris tried to snap out of his daze at the suddenly civilised turn events had taken. He’d expected by now to be either sitting in a holding cell or clearing out his desk. ‘Yeah, it’s true. Arbenz is dead or dying of a collapsed immune system. MCH bioware ammunition. And Diaz is either on the run or already caught and we just haven’t heard yet, in which case Echevarria’s secret police will have tortured him to death by now.’

‘There you go.’ Mike nodded along. ‘Barranco’s what we’ve got, and we nearly didn’t have him an hour ago. All we had was Echevarria getting ready to grab the hardware we’d advanced him and then kiss us goodbye and head out for Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap. And Barranco thinking we’d sold him out. Under the circumstances, I think Chris did the only thing that had any hope of salvaging the situation. Now, at least, we have a chance.’

Hewitt shook her head.

‘This has got to go to Notley.’

‘I agree. But it can go to Notley as a handled package, or it can go as a mess.’

‘It is a mess, Mike. Barranco should never have been allowed anywhere near Echevarria in the first place.’

‘We all make mistakes, Louise.’

Something in Bryant’s tone brought Hewitt round. ‘Meaning?’

‘Well, you did authorise the limo for Barranco.’ Mike was all innocence. ‘I mean, sure, you probably assumed that Chris would be here to meet him. And then Chris was at the Hilton instead, so—‘

‘Chris was fucking late,’ said Louise Hewitt delicately.

‘Yeah. That was a mistake. The limo was a mistake. Shit, it was my mistake, or Nick’s, leaving the viewing-chamber door open. Not to mention the idiot who told Barranco where to find us. You’re right, Louise, we have made a mess of this. But there’s no percentage for any of us in presenting it that way to Notley. We need to accentuate the positive.’

For a pair of seconds, Hewitt was silent. Chris could almost hear the whine of concentration as she played it through. Then she smiled sourly at both of them and nodded.

‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Let’s spin it, shall we.’

Chapter Thirty-Four

Echevarria died just before noon, of repeated internal haemorrhaging. He never regained consciousness. Vicente Barranco was there to watch him die. Everybody else was too busy.

They’d been scrambling since Hewitt gave the green light.

‘Get his phone records from Brown’s,’ she flung at them on her way out to find Notley. ‘See if he posted any forward calls for this afternoon, and find out if he was checking in with anyone regularly. That way, we’ll have some idea of how much time we’ve got to play with. And start coming up with a disposal plan.’

Chris spent the next hour digging through files on useful terrorists.

Mike Bryant’s office became the command post. Chris commandeered the datadown while Mike paced about with his mobile, talking to people. They sent Makin after the phone records. All incoming business got routed down to the forty-ninth floor where junior analysts had orders to shelve it unless there was a NAME connection. In the cleared space it gave them, they built the contingency plan. A Langley shadow unit was hired out of Miami, sent to find and track Echevarria junior. The conference-chamber recordings were isolated from all external dataflow ports, and played back on a stand-alone projector to a grey-haired datafake expert on secondment from Imagicians. The expert tut-tutted like a disappointed schoolmistress, hit replay and started making notes. A stony-faced internal security squad with high-level clearance arrived, courtesy of Louise Hewitt, and Mike sent them to clean up the blood.

Makin called in from Brown’s with the phone data. There were no forward calls placed on Echevarria’s account.

‘Praise the Lord,’ said Mike, doing Simeon Sands with remarkable good cheer, given the circumstances. He flourished with his free hand. ‘There is a God because I am saved. Good work, Nick. They give you any static down there? Uh-uh. Good. No, but you never know. Bite the hair of the cliche that fed you and all that. What about regular stuff? Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Yeah, well, to be expected, I guess. Yeah, we’ve got the hounds out in Miami. Yeah, Langley, best we could do at short notice. They’re on a tight leash. What? Ah, come on, Nick, this isn’t the fucking time for recrimin— Yeah, well I’m sure he knows that too.’ He glanced at Chris and rolled his eyes. ‘Look Nick, we haven’t got the time for this. Pay them off, get copies of everything and get back here.’

He cut off the call, held the mobile away from him and massaged his ear.

‘Like a dog with a fucking bone. Blame, blame, blame, like it’s going to fucking help now. So what do you reckon, Elaine?’

The datafake expert froze the tape and raked a hand through her silvered hair. On the pastel shaded wall, Chris towered four metres tall, leaning into the swing, face blind with fury.

‘Does it need to stand up in court?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

She shrugged. ‘So we can fix it. Just tell me what you want.’

‘Okay, good. Chris, how you doing?’

Chris nodded at the datadown. ‘Got a few possibilities, yeah. But Mike, none of these guys have pulled off a successful bombing in London for years.’

‘Yeah, well, they won’t have to. All they need do is claim responsibility. There ought to be plenty of the little fuckers up for that. No effort, no risk, instant media coverage. What more could they want?’ Mike flicked a finger at the screen. ‘What about them? They look ugly enough.’

‘No good.’ Chris shook his head. ‘Christian militants, anti-gay, anti-abortion. No axe to grind. Besides, they’re too fucking inept for anyone to believe they could get something like this together.’

‘Yeah, but—‘ Mike’s phone queeped in his hand. ‘Yeah, Bryant. Uh-uh. Alright, thanks. What about the other one? Uh-uh. Okay, well keep him that way then. No, I don’t know how long. Alright. Yes. Goodbye.’

He weighed the phone in his hand and looked pensively at it.

‘Echevarria’s dead. Just now. Dead and cooling fast. And Nick reckoned he promised to call his son in Miami some time this evening. We’re losing our window.’

In the end, they opted for a group of antique revolutionary socialists with a complicated acronym no one was likely to remember very well. The group had enjoyed a sudden resurgence in recent years, drawing disaffected zone youth in a number of European cities, staging the machine-gun assassination of low-level executives and causing big explosions in, or at least in the vicinity of, rather vaguely designated ‘globalist strongholds’. They’d managed to kill nearly two dozen people in the last five years, often including their intended targets. They used a wide range of military-grade automatic weapons and explosive devices, acquired mainly through Russian black-market channels and very easy to get hold of. Their justificatory rhetoric was a dense mesh of out-moded Trotskyist sentiment and anti-corporate eco-babble, and it appeared they spent almost as much energy purging the ranks and backbiting as they did killing people. Shorn’s infiltration ops wing had labelled them noisy but essentially harmless.

They were perfect.

Mike went to get fitted for a Weblar vest.

Chris was chasing up the hardware, when Jack Notley walked into the office unannounced and stood looking around with the nonchalance of someone on a guided tour. His Susana Ingram jacket was buttoned closed and he held his hands lightly clasped in front of him. He nodded pleasantly at the Imagicians consultant, who’d been back and forth from the imaging studio down the hall with variations on the requested footage and now, in Mike’s absence, was packing up her stuff.

‘Elaine. Glad to see we’re keeping you busy.’

‘Wouldn’t be here otherwise, Jack.’

‘No, I suppose not.’ Notley’s gaze switched to Chris and he lost his smile. His eyes were unreadable. ‘And you. Are you busy as well?’

Chris fought down a tremor. ‘I, uh, we’re pretty much done here. But I need to check in with Vicente Barranco. He’s been—‘

‘I’ve had Senor Barranco taken back to his hotel. Elaine, could you give us a few minutes?’

‘Sure. I’m done here anyway. I’ll come back for this stuff later.’

She slipped out. Chris watched her go with a pang of envy. Notley came round the desk to stand at his shoulder.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked flatly.

‘Hardware profile.’ Chris gestured at the screen, scrabbling after composure. He found, oddly, that he was more embarrassed than afraid. ‘We’ve found a group to take the fall for Echevarria. I’m matching most-used weapons against our local inventory. We’ll need to use our own people, of course, there’s no time for anything else.’

‘No. We are pressed for time, aren’t we.’

‘Yes, although to be honest it’s probably better this way.’ His throat was dry. ‘It, uh, lowers our exposure, and it means we can control the situation.’

‘Control, yes.’ He felt Notley move behind him, out of his peripheral field of view. It took an effort of will not to twist round in the seat. Now the warm blush of embarrassment was shredding away into cold fear. The senior partner’s voice was hypnotically tranquil at his back. It felt like hands laid on his shoulders. ‘Remind me, Chris. Why are we in this situation, exactly?’

Chris swallowed. He drew a deep breath.

‘Because I fucked up.’

‘Yes.’ Now Notley had moved back into peripheral view on the left. ‘Putting it mildly, you have indeed. Fucked. Up.’

He came round the side of the desk and he had the Nemex levelled. This time, there was no fighting down the tremor. Chris flinched, violently. Notley stared at him. There was nothing in his face at all.

‘Is there anything you want to say to me?’

Chris felt the pounding calm of a road duel descend on him. He measured angles, knew he was caught. His replacement Nemex was back in his own office, still not out of the factory wrapping. The desk pinned him. He couldn’t rush Notley, and there was nothing on the desktop worth throwing. He was used to making these calculations at combat speed, measuring and acting in the time it took for the Saab to cover a handful of asphalt metres. The immobility and the limping time scale made it unreal, a floating fragment of a dream.

the supermarket swam before his eyes, the painful bang of the gun in his ears, the sudden warm rain of blood

He wondered if

‘Well?’

‘I think.’ Suddenly it was easy. All he had to do was let go. ‘I think you’re making a big fucking mistake. Echevarria was a bag of pus waiting to burst. All I did was save you the trouble.’

Notley’s eyes narrowed. Then, out of nowhere, he lowered the Nemex and tucked it away in his waistband. He shook his head.

‘Nice image, that. A bag of pus, waiting to burst. Charming. You need to refine your act, Faulkner.’

He cast about and found a chair, pulled it up to the desk and sat down. Chris gaped at him, still swamped in chemicals by a nervous system expecting to be shot. Notley smiled.

‘Tell you a story,’ he said comfortably. ‘Guy called Webb Ellis. Went to my old school about two hundred years before I did. What does that tell you, incidentally?’

Chris blinked. ‘He was rich?’

‘Very good. Not wholly accurate, but close enough. Webb Ellis was what, these days, we’d call jacked-in. He had connections. Father died when he was still young, but his mother bootstrapped him up on those connections and come sixteen he was still a student. Among other things, he played a pretty sharp game of football and cricket. And apparently, during one of those football games he broke the rules pretty severely, by picking up the ball and running with it. You know what happened to him?’

‘Uh. Sent off?’

Notley shook his head. ‘No. He got to be famous. They built a whole new game around running with the ball.’

‘That’s.’ Chris frowned. ‘Rugby.’

‘That’s right. In the end they named it after the school. You can see why. Webbellisball would have been a bit of a mouthful. But that’s the legend of how rugby got started. There’s even a plaque on the wall at the school, commemorating old Webb Ellis and the day he broke the rules. I used to walk past it every day.’

Quiet soaked into the room.

‘Is that true?’ Chris asked, finally.

Notley grinned. ‘No. Probably not. It’s just a useful piece of school mythology, graven in stone to resemble the truth. But it is representative, in all likelihood, of what a whole gang of different elite schoolkids were doing at around that time. Breaking the rules, and making up new ones. Later that century, you get a formalised game and creative back-marketing lays it at the door of one man, because that’s what people relate to. But the interesting thing is this, Chris. The game was never new. It dates back to Roman times, at least. They’d been playing games just like it for centuries in the streets of villages and towns all over Britain. And you know what? Just around the time Webb Ellis and his friends were making sporting history, the common people were being told, by law and by big uniformed men with sticks and guns, that they weren’t allowed to play this game any more. Because, and this is close to a quote, it disturbed the public order and was dangerous. Do you see, Chris, how these things work? How they’ve always worked?’

Chris said nothing. It wasn’t five minutes since this man had held a gun on him. He didn’t trust the ice enough to walk on yet.

‘Okay.’ Notley leaned back in the chair. ‘Fast forward a couple of centuries. Here’s something you should know. Who made the first competition road kill?’

‘Uh, Roberto Sanchez, wasn’t it? Calders Chicago partnership challenge, back in, no, wait a minute.’ Chris sieved an unexpected chunk of information from the sea of TV junk he’d been letting wash over him in recent months. ‘Now they’re saying it wasn’t Sanchez, it was this guy Rice, real thug from the Washington office. He beat Sanchez to it by about three months or something?’

Notley nodded. He seemed, for a moment, to be lost in thought. ‘Yes, they say that. They also say it was Begona Salas over at IberFondos. That’s the feminist revisionist angle, but it holds some water. Salas was cutting edge around then, and she always drove like a fucking maniac. There’s another school of thought that says Calders stole the idea from a strategic-thought unit in California. That people like Oco Holdings and the Sacramento Group were already trialing it secretly. You want to know what I remember?’

Once again, the distance behind Notley’s look, the sense that most of him was suddenly elsewhere.

‘Sure. What?’

Notley smiled gently. ‘I remember it being me.’

Fleetingly, Chris recalled his first impression of the senior partner, the day he came to work at Shorn. Like a troll in the elf pastel shades of the interview room. He looked at Notley now, at the brutal crackle of power about the man, shoehorned into the Susana Ingram like too much upper body muscle, and an initial urge to match the partner smile for smile slid abruptly away. His pulse began to pick up slowly.

Notley seemed to shake himself.

‘It was a different time, Chris. We’re all used to it now, but back then you could smell the change in the air.’ He breathed in, deep. ‘Fresh, like spilt fuel. Reeking with potential. The domino recessions had come and gone, we’d been bracing ourselves for it all that time, for the worst we could imagine, and it came and went, and we were all still standing. Better than still standing. We’d barely missed a step. A few riots, a few banks out of business, that nuclear nonsense in the Punjab. We surfed it, Chris. We rode it out. It was easy.’

He paused. He seemed to be waiting for something to fill the gap. Chris hurried to oblige, mesmerised by the intensity coming across the desk at him.

‘You still had to drive, though? Right?’

‘Oh yes.’ A casual gesture. ‘The domino gave us competitive driving. Hard-edged solution for hard-edged times. But it was still pretty civilised back then, still pretty close to its roots. You know how road-raging started?’

Chris stumbled, wrongfooted. ‘What? Uh, yeah, sure. Those formula cars, ones you see on the history channel, looked like little rockets, right? They started getting owned by the same people that made the money. And then, uh, with the roads empty and everything ...’

He stopped. Notley was shaking his head.

‘No?’

‘Not really. Well. Yes, sure, you had that dynamic. That’s part of it, I suppose. But it all goes back a lot further than that. Back to late last century, the pre-millenial stuff. Stuff my father told me about. Back then some of the harder-nosed firms were already experimenting with conflict incentives for their new recruits. It was an American thing. Eight trainees in a section, sectional office space, and only seven desks.’ Notley made a QED motion with both hands. ‘So. Get to work last, you had to work on a window ledge. Or beg space from someone with a better alarm clock. Let that happen to you more than a couple of times, you can see how the group dynamic starts to lean. The late guy’s the weakest link. So the rest gang up on him. Chimp behaviour. Lend him your desk-space, and you’re weak, by association. You’re making the wrong alliances. So you don’t do it. You can’t afford to.’

Chris couldn’t decide, but he thought he saw a faint distaste rising in Notley’s eyes. Or maybe it was just the energy again.

‘Now. You transfer that idea, not just for trainees but for everyone. Think about the times. The domino recessions are scratching at the door, you’ve got to do something. Most investment houses and major corporations are waterlogged with top-end personnel. Ex-politicians on sinecure non-executive directorships, useless executive directors shipped around on the old-boy network from golden handshake to golden handshake, headhunted bright young things staying the obligatory two years then shipping out for the next move up on rep vapour and nothing else, because I ask you what, in two years, have you really achieved in a corporate post? And that’s just how we were fucking things up at the anglo end of the cultural scale. Elsewhere, you’ve got fuckwit younger sons and daughters being cut in on Daddy’s pie straight out blatantly, because in those cultures who’s going to tell Daddy otherwise? And all of this is teetering on the brink as the dominos start to fall. Something has to be done, at a minimum something has to be seen to be done. Something harsh.

‘So what do you do? You go right back to that eight-trainee section with seven desks, and you extrapolate. Late to work, you don’t lose your desk. You lose your job. At a time when you had a dozen identically qualified people for every real executive post, why not? It was as real as any other measure. You sure as hell couldn’t depend on sales figures or productivity, not with a global economy in tailspin. And since no one could afford to lose a job at a time like that, you got some pretty fierce driving. Some genuine road rage. But back then,’ Notley produced another of his smiles, wintry this time. ‘Back then, it was still enough to just get there first. Have you got anything to drink in here?’

‘Uh.’ Chris gestured across at Mike Bryant’s brushed steel, fitted drinks cabinet. ‘I don’t know, it’s Mike’s office. He’ll have some stuff in there.’

‘I imagine so.’ Notley hulked to his feet and wandered over to the cabinet. ‘You want anything?’

‘I, uh, I’ve got to—‘ He nodded at the datadown. ‘You know, finalise. The, uh—‘

An impatient wave. ‘So finalise it. I’ll make you a drink in the meantime. What do you want?’

‘Uh, whisky. Laphroaig, if it’s there.’ He knew Mike kept that around; he produced it with a flourish every time they ended up in the office late. Chess juice, he’d taken to calling it. ‘Just a small one. No ice.’

Notley grunted. ‘Think I’ll join you. I’m a gin man, myself, but I’m buggered if I can see any in here.’

Chris bent to the datadown. Nailed the explosives along with the cheap Russian machine pistols he’d already selected and thumbed it all down to issuing, tagged with Mike’s notification code. Notley placed a brimming tumbler at his elbow, swallowed some of his own drink and glanced over the on-screen detail.

‘You done? Good. So put on a tolerant expression and listen to the old man’s story.’ He went back to the seat and hunched forward over his drink. ‘Let’s see, I was working at Calders UK, I would have been what, twenty-four, twenty-five, something like that. Younger than you, anyway. About as stupid, though.’

No smile with that. Notley took another chunk off his drink.

‘I had this promotion playoff. Not the first I’d driven, not even one of the first, but it was the first time I’d thought I might be in trouble. Barnes, the other analyst, was my age, good rep, on the road and off, and he drove this flame-red Ferrari roadster. Very fast, but very lightweight. Nothing like the ones they make now. I was on Audis at the time, no choice back then, it was what I could afford. Good wagon, in its own way, but heavy, very heavy.’

‘No change there, then.’ For the first time in the conversation, Chris felt he was on familiar ground.

Notley shrugged carelessly. ‘Armouring is what they do. Same with BMW. Maybe it’s a German thing. Look, I knew if I could just get in front of Barnes, I could hold him off all the way there. Nothing that little roadster could do to my back end that wouldn’t straighten out in the shop. Back then it was the rule, everybody knew. You didn’t have to kill anyone, you just had to get to work first. So, that was it. Get ahead, stay ahead. Block and cover. And I had Barnes like that, every mile ‘til the last. Then the little cunt slipped past me.’

He raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden profanity.

‘To this day, I still don’t know how he did it. Maybe I was too confident. Maybe it was a gear change I left too loose, do that on a heavy wagon, you know how it is, suddenly you’re underpowered.’

Chris nodded. ‘Happened to me a couple of times, before I got the Saab.’

‘Yeah, you’ve got that spaced armouring now, right?’

‘Yeah.’ He wasn’t sure if it was the whisky, or just the slide after the hours of tension and the rollercoaster ride of facing Notley’s gun, but Chris could feel himself starting to relax. ‘Works like a dream. I hear BMW are trying to get past the patents and do their own version.’

‘Quite possibly.’ Notley stared into his glass. ‘But we were talking about Barnes. Barnes, and that last bend on the overhead as you come into the Eleven off-ramp. It used to be a lot narrower then, barely even a double lane. We hit it with Barnes ahead, and I knew there was no way past him. And the way I remember it, there was no Roberto Sanchez making headlines then, no Harry Rice either. Could be it was just still under wraps, all denial and cover-up until Calders decided what needed to go into the shredder and what they could get away with. But I don’t remember any precedent, I just remember fury. Fury that I was going to lose by a couple of fucking metres.’

He took another mouthful of whisky and held onto it. Swallowed, grimaced.

‘So. I pushed him off. Down a gear, pedal flat, revs up to the red on that last bend. Into the back of that little roadster as if I was giving it one up the arse. It went through the crash barrier like a fist through tissue paper, right over and nose first into the Calders car park. Hit another car and one of the tanks blew, then the other one. By the time I got down there, it was all over. But they showed me security-camera footage later.’

Notley looked up and gave Chris a grin that slipped just a little.

‘He tried to get out. Was almost out, when the tank went. There was this two-minute sequence of Roger Barnes lit up in flame, still tangled in the belt. He tore free, he was screaming, screaming all the way. It must have been the pain that got him out, finally. He ran about a dozen steps on fire, and then he just seemed to ... melt. Collapsed and folded over himself there on the asphalt, and stopped screaming.

‘And the next time I checked, I was a pin-up. Magazine covers, car ads, introduced to the CEO of Calders in Chicago. It was out in the open all of a sudden. It was precedent, Chris, it was legal, and Calders were the new field leaders. Pointing the way out of the domino trap. Turn up with blood on your wheels, or don’t turn up at all. It was the new ethic, and we were the new breed. Jack Notley, Roberto Sanchez, transatlantic mirror images of the same new brutalist dynamic. Worth our body weight in platinum.’

Notley seemed to have coasted to a halt. He looked up at Chris again.

‘Precedent, Chris. That’s what counts. Remember Webb Ellis. In the elite, you don’t get punished for breaking the rules. Not if it works. If it works, you get elevated and the rules get changed in your wake. Now. Tell me Barranco is going to work.’

Chris cleared his throat.

‘It’ll work. The NAME’s a special place. We’re talking about the radical restructuring of a regime that’s been in place almost since the beginning of the century. It’s time for that change. Echevarria was just a, a-‘

‘Yeah, yeah, a bag of pus waiting to be. I remember. Go on.’

‘With Barranco, we can build a whole new monitored economy. He believes in things, he believes in change, and he can get other people to believe. That’s a power we can harness. We can use it to build something out there that no one in this fucking business has ever seen before. Something that gives people—‘

It was the whisky. He clamped shut.

Notley watched him, features shrewd and attentive. He nodded, set his whisky on the edge of the desk and got up. Abruptly the Nemex was in his hand again, but gripped flat in his upheld palm.

‘Careful,’ he said, enunciating the word as if to demonstrate its meaning. ‘I like you, Chris. If I didn’t, make no mistake about this, they’d be taking you out of here in plastic. I think you’ve got what not one Shorn exec in ten has got, what we can’t ever get enough of round here, and that’s the ability to create. To build new models in your head without even realising you’re doing it. You’re a changemaker. And we have to have the guts to let you be what you are, to take the risk that you may fuck up, and to trust that you won’t. But you need to be clear on what we’re about here, Chris.

‘Shorn exists to make money. For our shareholders, for our investors and for ourselves. In that order. We’re not some last-century, bleeding-heart NGO pissing funds into a hole in the ground. We’re part of a global management system that works. Forty years ago, we dismantled OPEC. Now the Middle East does as we tell it. Twenty years ago we dismantled China, and East Asia got in line as well. We’re down to micro-management and the market now, Chris. We let them fight their mindless little wars, we rewrite the deals and the debt, and it works. Conflict Investment is about making global stupidity work for the benefit of Western investors. That’s it, that’s the whole story. We’re not going to lose our grip again like last time.’

‘I didn’t mean—‘

‘Yes, you did. And it’s natural to feel that way sometimes, above all when you’re rubbing up against someone like Barranco. You said it yourself, he can make other people believe. Do you think, just because you wear a suit and drive a car, that you’re immune to that?’ Notley shook his head. ‘Hope is the human condition, Chris. Belief in a better day. For yourself, and if they really get to you, for the whole fucking world. Give Barranco time and he’ll have you believing in that. A world where the resources get magically shared out like some global birthday tea for well-behaved kids. A world where everyone’s beaming content with a life of hard work, modest rewards and simple pleasures. I mean, think about it Chris. Is that a likely outcome? A likely human outcome?’

Chris licked his lips, watching the gun. ‘No, of course not. I just meant that Barranco is—‘

But Notley wasn’t listening. He was lit up with the whisky and something else that Chris couldn’t get a fix on. Something that looked like desperation but wore an industrial-wattage grin.

‘Do you really think we can afford to have the developing world develop? You think we could have survived the rise of a modern, articulated Chinese superpower twenty years ago? You think we could manage an Africa full of countries run by intelligent, uncorrupted democrats? Or a Latin America run by men like Barranco? Just imagine it for a moment. Whole populations getting educated, and healthy, and secure, and aspirational. Women’s rights, for Christ’s sake. We can’t afford these things to happen, Chris. Who’s going to soak up our subsidised food surplus for us? Who’s going to make our shoes and shirts? Who’s going to supply us with cheap labour and cheap raw materials? Who’s going to store our nuclear waste, balance out our CO2 misdemeanours? Who’s going to buy our arms?’

He gestured angrily.

‘An educated middle class doesn’t want to spend eleven hours a day bent over a stitching machine. They aren’t going to work the seaweed farms and the paddy fields ‘til their feet rot. They aren’t going to live next door to a fuel-rod dump and shut up about it. They’re going to want prosperity, Chris. Just like they’ve seen it on TV for the last hundred years. City lives and domestic appliances and electronic game platforms for their kids. And cars. And holidays, and places to go to spend their holidays. And planes to get them there. That’s development, Chris. Ring any bells? Remember what happened when we told our people they couldn’t have their cars any more? When we told them they couldn’t fly. Why do you think anybody else is going to react any differently out there?’

‘I don’t.’ Chris spread his hands. He couldn’t work out how things had got back up to this pitch. ‘I know this stuff. I don’t need convincing, Jack.’

Notley stopped abruptly. He drew a deep breath and let it out, hard. He seemed to become aware of the Nemex in his hand for the first time. He grimaced and put it away.

‘My apologies. Shouldn’t touch the hard stuff this early.’ He picked up his glass from the edge of the desk and drained it. ‘So. Getting back to practicalities. You’ve got the disposal handled.’

‘Yeah. We pin the rap on the CE—, I mean CA—, uh—‘ Chris gave up and gestured at the screen. ‘These guys. Mike’s down sorting out the limo and the logistics, but basically we’re all set.’

‘Louise tells me there’s another body. Echevarria had an adjutant? Is that correct?’

‘Yes. That’s right.’

‘And I understand you battered him too, in the same rather impulsive fashion you took care of Echevarria.’

‘Yes. He, uh, he got in the way.’

Notley raised an eyebrow. ‘That was inconsiderate of him. So, is he dead?’

‘No, not yet.’ Chris hurried into explanation. ‘But that’s okay. Sickbay have got him on life support, sedated until we’re ready. In fact, that’s one of the strengths of the way we’ve set this up. If I can just show you the—‘

‘No, that won’t be necessary. As I said before, this is about having the guts to let you run with the ball.’ A faint smile. ‘Just like our old friend Webb Ellis. Illustrious company you find yourself in, Chris Faulkner. Maybe they’ll put up a plaque for you too, one day.’

Chapter Thirty-Five

He caught it on the radio as he drove home. Some general news reporter from the scene, a woman but not—

Cut that out.

‘—were shocked by this terrorist attack in the heart of London’s West End. I’m standing outside the famous Brown’s Hotel, only a few metres from the spot where less than an hour ago visiting head of state, General Hernan Echevarria and his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Rafael Carrasco, were fired upon by masked gunmen. Details aren’t clear as yet, but it seems two men opened fire with machine pistols as General Echevarria was brought to his hotel in a Shorn Associates limousine. The general’s aide and an unnamed Shorn executive were both hit by machine-gun fire as they exited the vehicle ahead of the general. The terrorists then threw some kind of anti-personnel grenade into the interior and made their escape on a motorcycle. All three men and the driver of the limousine have been rushed to intensive care at—‘

He turned it off. He knew the rest. Michael Bryant, thrown miraculously clear of the explosion, recovers from gunshot wounds in hospital. The limo driver, protected by the armoured partition, gets off with burns, abrasions and shock. General Echevarria and his aide go home in body bags, scorched and shell- and shrapnel-riddled beyond useful autopsy. State funeral, full military honours. Rifles volley, women weep. Closed caskets. Everybody in black.

In the highlands, Barranco’s insurgents stir to freshly-equipped life.

You ‘re a changemaker, Chris.

He felt it rising in him, stirring like the hard-eyed men and women in the NAME jungle. He saw himself. Embodied purpose, rushing over asphalt in the darkness, carving a path with the Saab’s high beams like some furious avatar of the forces he was setting in motion on the other side of the globe. Riding the quiet power of the engine across the night, face masked in the soft backwash of dashboard light. Bulletproof, careproof, unstoppable.

He called Barranco at the Hilton.

‘You heard?’

‘Yes, it’s on the TV. I’m watching it now.’ For the first time that Chris could remember, Barranco’s voice sounded unsure. ‘You are okay?’

Chris grinned in the dark. ‘Yeah, I’m okay.’

‘I, would not have believed. Something like that. To do something like that. In front of your colleagues. In your situation. I did not expect—‘

‘Skip it, Vicente. The old fuck had it coming.’

Barranco was silent. ‘Yes. That is true.’

And more silence across the connection, like snow drifting to the ground on the other side of the world. For a beat, Chris could feel the cold out there, like something alive. Like something looking for him.

‘I saw him die,’ said Barranco.

Chris shook himself. ‘I, uh. Good. I hope that was worth something to you, Vicente. I hope you feel. Avenged.’

‘Yes. It is good to know he is dead.’

When the Colombian showed no further sign of speaking, Chris cleared his throat.

‘Listen, Vicente. Get some rest. With what’s coming down in the next few weeks, you’re going to need it. Plane’s not ‘til noon, so sleep in. Lopez’ll get you up in plenty of time.’

Silence, sifting down.

‘Chris?’

‘Yeah. Still here.’

‘They aren’t going to punish you for this?’

‘No one’s going to punish me for anything, Vicente. Everything’s under control, and you and I are going right to the top of this thing, together. I give it six months before you’re in the streets of Bogota. Now get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

He waited for a reply. When there was none, he shrugged, cut the connection and gave himself to the driving.

changemaker!

He got off at the Elsenham ramp, and picked up the road east, pushing the Saab faster than was smart. The car jolted in potholes and the engine grew shrill as he dropped gears late on the bends. Trees stood at the roadside, sudden and dusty-looking in the glare of the Saab’s lights. When he got to Hawkspur Green, he shed some of his speed, but he was still rolling too fast. The car snarled angrily to itself as he took the turn into the driveway, and he had to lean on the brakes.

He killed the high beams and up ahead in the sudden dark, the house security lights flared to life. He frowned and glanced at the ID broadcast set. A tiny green active light glowed back at him, reassuring as far as it went. He felt tension go stealing along his nerves, wondering if Notley had, after all, gone conservative on him and sent night-callers with silenced guns. The Saab crunched up the winding drive. He reached across to the glove compartment and opened it. The Nemex fell out into his palm, still slightly greasy from the factory wrapping oils. He straightened up again and cleared the last bend.

Carla was waiting for him, wrapped tight in a towelling robe, hair wet and straggling. Backlit by the security system’s lamps, she looked like the ghost of a drowned woman. When she bent to his window, face hard-boned from the wet and the lack of make-up, he almost jumped.

He stopped the Saab short and opened the window.

‘What are you doing out here? You’ll catch your death of cold.’

‘Vasvik,’ she said. ‘He just called.’

The rest of the week snapped by like scenery.

He got Barranco out of the country, got final signatures on the regime term sheets on the way to the airport. Sandwiched between Lopez and Chris in the helicopter, Barranco signed it all like a man under sedation. Chris waved him goodbye from the asphalt.

He dropped in on Mike at the hospital. The other executive had nothing worse than severe bruising across the ribcage from the machine-gun fire, but it seemed politic to keep him in the intensive care unit for a few days at least. There were news crews queuing in the corridor outside, but Shorn security had them managed.

‘So now you’re a fucking celebrity?’

Mike grinned from a chair beside the bed. There were a couple of small cuts on his face, and his left hand was bandaged. He got up, wincing with the effort.

‘You see Liz out there?’ he asked.

‘No. You expecting her?’

‘Never know.’ Mike poured himself a drink from a pitcher beside the bed. ‘Nah, to be honest, she’d be the last thing I need right now. I’m in enough pain just breathing heavily. You want some of this?’

‘What is it?’

‘What does it look like? Juice.’

‘Maybe later. What happened to your face?’

‘Ah.’ Mike waved dismissively. ‘Did it myself with a broken bottleneck, beforehand. Good for the media to see a real wound or two, I reckon.’

‘And the hand?’

A scowl. ‘Sprained my wrist going down on the pavement. Like a fucking idiot. I was trying to keep Carrasco upright for the machine gun, like this. And then dive out of the way, this way, when they tossed in the grenade. It was awkward.’

‘Any witnesses?’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Monday night, and it’s a quiet street, anyway. A couple of people might have looked our way once the firing started maybe, but too late to notice anything odd. There’ll be footage from the hotel security cameras, maybe that street scanner we couldn’t mask out at the corner of Stafford Street. Elaine’s already on it. No problem, she says. Barranco get off okay?’

Back at Shorn, Chris sat in the covert viewing chamber while Nick Makin and Louise Hewitt talked to Francisco Echevarria by uplink. The young man was pale and hollow-eyed, and it was clear he had been crying. From the way he kept looking off to the side, it was also clear he was not alone in the projection room at the other end. Hewitt conveyed smooth corporate sympathies, and encouraged him not to concern himself with contractual details at such a time. Shorn’s own principal officer for the NAME account was, in any case, unable to leave hospital for the foreseeable future. There was no sense in rushing into anything. Shorn CI would be very happy to put the whole issue on ice until the family felt more able to deal with the negotiations.

by which time, Barranco will have your worthless nuts in the fucking vice, you and your whole stinking hacienda clan

The sudden violence of his own thoughts took Chris by surprise.

Francisco Echevarria flickered out. They adjourned to Hewitt’s office to discuss a tentative calendar for Barranco’s revolution.

He went down to the forty-ninth floor to thank the junior execs that had covered the other accounts for them while the crisis was in full swing. He took gifts — cask-strength Islay single malt, Galapagos bourbon ground coffee, single estate Andaluz olive oil - and got into mock sparring sessions with a couple of the known hardcases in the section. No full-force blows, he stayed just the right side of friendly, but he pushed hard and fast and got close-up body contact each time. It wasn’t wise to show raw gratitude, untempered by signs of strength. It could get taken the wrong way.

He got back his caseload. Started mechanically through the detail, building back up to operational pitch where necessary.

He took a basket of Indonesian fruit and a crate of Turkish export beer up to the hospital, and found Liz Linshaw sitting on the corner of Mike’s bed. Mike sat there grinning like a post-blow job idiot, Liz was a study in her usual off-screen rough-and-ready elegance. She showed Chris exactly the civilised blend of camaraderie and casual flirtation that he remembered from their earliest meetings. The downshift cut him to the quick.

‘Listen, Chris,’ Mike said finally, waving a hand at the bedside seat Liz wasn’t using. ‘We’ve been talking about your no-namer problem. Liz says she could ask around, no problem.’

‘That’s great.’ He looked across at her. ‘Thanks.’

‘My pleasure.’

It was more than he could handle. He caught himself with a barbed comment about Suki rising to his lips, and called time. He made workload excuses and got out.

As he opened the door to go, Liz Linshaw called him back.

‘Chris, I’ll be in touch,’ she said.

Back at Shorn, he went down to the gym and did an hour of full contact with the autobag.

He worked late.

He took the Nemex to the firing ranges, and emptied two dozen clips into the ghost-dance of holotargets there. The machine scored him high on accuracy and speed, abysmally low on selection. He’d killed too many innocent bystanders.

And then it was Saturday.

It was time.

Chapter Thirty-Six

There were police trucks gathered at the entrance to the Brundtland. Revolving blue lights slashed the poorly-lit walkways and stair-stacks with monotonous regularity, each touch fleeting and then gone, giving way again to the gloom. Torch beams and bulky armoured figures moved on the exterior walkways. An ampbox blattered across the night.

‘Ah fuck.’ Chris braked the Landrover to a halt.

Carla stared at out at the lights, wide eyed. ‘Do you think ...’

‘I don’t know. Stay here.’

He left the engine running and climbed down, digging in his pocket for corporate ID, hoping the Nemex didn’t show under the jacket. A body-armoured police sergeant noticed the new arrival and detached himself from the knot of figures beside the trucks. He strode across the cracked concrete, torch and sidearm held high.

‘You can’t come in here.’

Chris held his ID out in the beam of the torch. ‘I’m visiting someone. What’s going on?’

‘Oh.’ The sergeant’s tone shifted, abruptly conciliatory. He holstered his pistol. ‘Sorry, sir. With what you’re driving, you know, I didn’t realise.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Chris manufactured a grin of forbearance. ‘Easy mistake to make. My wife’s wheels. Sentimental value. So what’s going on here?’

‘It’s drugs, sir. Bathroom edge. A couple of the local gangwits have been bad boys. Exporting their product across the line, dealing in the Kensington catchment. Hanging around the schools and such.’ The sergeant grimaced in the torchlight and shook his head. ‘Not the first time either, and the community leaders have been warned before, so it’s the next step. We’ve been told to turn up the heat on cases like this. You know how it’s done, sir. Break a few doors, break a few heads. Only thing gets through to these animals in the end.’

‘Sure. Look, I need to get up to the fifth floor and see my father-in-law. It’s quite urgent. Can you do something about that?’

Hesitation. Chris switched on the grin again. Reached carefully into his jacket pocket, well above the Nemex.

‘I understand it’s trouble you don’t need right now, but it is important. I’d be very grateful.’

The torchlight gleamed off the edges of the racked plastic and the Shorn Associates holologo on the front card. At the back, the wallet was stiff with a thick sheaf of cash. The sergeant was looking down at it like someone afraid of falling.

‘Fifth floor?’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Just a moment, sir.’ He dug out a phone and thumbed it to life. ‘Gary? You there? Listen, are we working on five? No? So what’s the nearest? Okay. Thanks.’

He stowed the phone. Chris handed across a slice of currency.

‘Should be safe enough to go up there, sir. I’ll have a couple of my men take you up, just to be sure.’ He folded the notes into his palm with an awkwardness that bespoke lack of practice, and looked back at the Landrover. ‘Your wife too?’

‘Yeah. Tell the truth, she wants to be here a lot more than I do.’

Their escort took the form of two helmeted, body-armoured uniforms with pump action shotguns and hip-holstered pistols. They bounded from the rear of the reserve truck like eager dogs when their names were called. One was white, one black, and neither looked old enough to be shaving yet. They covered angles in the stairwell with a kind of self-conscious intensity that on older men might have looked like professionalism, and once or twice they grinned at each other. The white kid chewed gum mechanically throughout, and the black kid appeared to be rapping under his breath. They both seemed to be enjoying themselves. When the party reached the fifth floor, Chris gave them a fifty apiece and they clattered back down the stairs with what sounded like none of the drilled caution they’d exhibited on the way up.

Carla knocked at the door of fifty-seven. Erik answered, looking haggard.

‘I tried to call. The police—‘

‘Just talked to them,’ said Chris, luxuriating in the advantage. ‘It’s an edge bust. Nothing to worry about.’

Erik Nyquist’s mouth tightened.

‘Yes, I forgot,’ he said thinly. ‘A different matter when you’re a member of the elite, isn’t it. When—‘

‘Dad!’

‘Maybe we could come in,’ added Chris.

Nyquist gave him a venomous look, but he stood aside and they filed through into the lounge. Behind him, Chris heard the door being locked and bolted. Almost as loud through the cardboard-thin walls of the lounge, he could hear raised voices from the flat next door, and what sounded like a baby crying. He glanced around the cramped living space, kept an expression of distaste off his face with an effort, and seated himself gingerly in one of the battered armchairs. He looked up as Nyquist followed Carla into the room.

‘Getting on with the neighbours okay?’ he asked brightly, nodding towards the noise next door. ‘Sounds a little below your level of intellectual debate.’

interfering fucking cunt came leaking through the wall.

Erik looked at him stonily. ‘He’s a dealer. He’s probably expecting to have his skull caved in by your stormtroopers out there.’

‘No danger of that. Their commander told me they’re not working this floor. Want me to go next door and tell him?’

‘In those clothes?’ Erik sneered. ‘He’d probably stab you as soon as look at you.’

‘He could try.’

‘Oh yes, I forgot. I have a professional killer for a son-in-law.’

Chris rolled his eyes and was on his way to his feet when he caught a glare from Carla that stopped him.

‘Dad, that’s enough.’

Nyquist looked at his daughter and sighed.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with this.’

Chris clapped his hands together, pistol-shot loud. The voices next door stopped abruptly.

‘Suits me. So where is Vasvik? Hiding in the toilet?’

Carla made an angry gesture at him. Erik moved to a table loaded with bottles and glasses. His voice was toneless with suppressed anger. He picked up a bottle and studied the label intently.

‘Perhaps you’d like to act as if you were civilised for a change, Chris. I’m aware that the strain might be too much, but maybe you should try. This man is a guest in my house, and he, in fact everyone in this room, is taking chances for your benefit.’

‘Glem det, Erik.’ Truls Vasvik had appeared in the lounge doorway, scruffily dressed and running stubble. He looked tired. ‘Faulkner’s here to negotiate, just like me. The only favours he owes are to you for getting involved.’

Chris shook his head. ‘You’re wrong about that, Vasvik. I’m not here to negotiate. I’ve told you what I want and it’s not negotiable. Simple yes or no will do.’

‘Well then.’ Vasvik dropped into the other armchair, eyes speculative on Chris’s face. ‘The answer is yes. UNECT will take you. But I’m afraid there’s a catch. A sub-clause, I guess you’d call it.’

Chris looked up at Carla, whose face had gone from tension to relieved delight to puzzlement in as many seconds. He felt a petty, jeering sense of vindication rising in him.

‘What sub-clause?’ he asked.

‘You’ll have to wait.’ Vasvik was still watching him carefully. ‘For the extraction, I mean. We will extract you, and you will be paid what you ask. But we need you in place for another three to six months. Until the Cambodia contract has matured.’

‘What the—‘ Chris stopped himself with an effort of will and worked back to the easy confidence he’d come in with. ‘What the fuck do you know about the Cambodia contract, Vasvik?’

‘Probably more than you imagine.’ The ombudsman made a dismissive gesture. ‘But that isn’t really the issue—‘

‘No,’ snapped Chris. ‘The issue is, you’re fucking with me.’

Vasvik smiled faintly. ‘I don’t believe a time-frame was mentioned at any point. What did you think? I would come here and magic you out with one sweep of my UN wand? These things take time, Chris. You have to wait your turn. For a change.’

Pushing. The realisation seeped into Chris’s consciousness, damping down the instinctive anger to an irritated curiosity. Why’s he pushing me?

The previous meeting in the workshop at Mel’s. Vasvik’s face, hard with distaste.

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—

But the ethical commerce guys have sent you back here, haven’t they, Vasvik? Chris felt the answer light up in his head like an arcade game. You warned them not to bite, but they overruled you and they sent you back for me, and now you’ve got to swallow that shit whole.

Unless, that is, you can trip me into blowing out the offer of my own accord.

He felt a grin building. The manoeuvring room was immense. And at the back of it all he had Notley’s avuncular indulgence spread like dark, protecting wings. He could run Vasvik ragged, grind his bony nose up against his own controllers’ orders to acquire Chris Faulkner at asking price, and even if he pushed the ombudsman over the edge and blew it, he could walk away from the wreckage of the deal. Fuck ‘em if they couldn’t take a joke. He’d stay at Shorn.

‘Alright.’ He grinned. ‘Let’s talk about Cambodia then.’

The tension in the room eased. Carla seemed to sag slightly with it, and Chris saw how her hand fell on her father’s shoulder. Erik reached up and clasped it without looking back from the drink he was building. Neither of them looked at Chris.

‘Good,’ said Vasvik. ‘So. The way we see it at the moment, you’ve got Khieu Sary on the customary long-leash arrangement, nominally acting in line with the accords you all signed up to, but in actual fact pretty much doing what he feels like. Recruiting from the villages that’ll listen to him, burning the ones that won’t. Standard terror tactics. My question is, what are you going to do about the enterprise zones?’

Chris shrugged. ‘We’ve got an understanding with him about that whole area. Gentleman’s agreement, nothing on paper.’

‘I see. Any reason why he should stick to that any more than he’s stuck to the Geneva Convention stuff so far?’

‘Yeah. If he doesn’t, we pull the plug on his mobile cover. Ever tried coordinating a guerrilla war by landline?’

Erik Nyquist leaned over and handed Vasvik a tall glass. There was a conspicuous lack of a drink in his other hand as he turned to look at Chris, and a familiar anger rising on his face.

‘Very neat,’ said Vasvik thoughtfully.

‘Yeah, because that kind of thing matters, doesn’t it, Chris. Can’t have some first-world sportswear manufacturer losing productivity, can we.’

Chris sighed.

‘Erik, you still got any of that Ardbeg non-chill filtered I bought you for your birthday?’

‘No.’

‘Oh. Can I get some of that cheap blended stuff you like, then?’

Erik’s right arm twitched at his side. Chris saw the fist knot up. Then Vasvik murmured something in Norwegian, and the older man stopped himself.

‘Get your own fucking drink,’ he said, and stalked across to the lounge window. The police lights outside pricked the blue in his eyes as he stared downward. Chris shrugged, pulled a face at Vasvik and rose to follow his father in law’s advice. Carla turned away from him as he got there. She disappeared into the kitchen, arms wrapped around herself. Chris shrugged again. It was a view he was getting used to. He selected a clean glass and a bottle from the table, poured four inches of something apparently called Clan Scott.

‘I don’t see where you’re going with this, Vasvik,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It’s standard CI operating procedure. Protect the foreign capital base at all costs. Sary understands that, like all the rest of these toy revolutionaries.’

‘And presumably you have informed those with interests in the EZs that this is the state of play.’

‘Yeah, sure. Most of them are buying their protection through our reinsurance arm anyway.’ Chris sniffed dubiously at the Scotch and took it back to his armchair. ‘Why?’

‘Did you know that Nakamura are modelling for a military coup against the Cambodian government?’

‘No.’ Chris swallowed some of his drink and grimaced. Next door the shouting seemed to be starting up again. ‘But it doesn’t surprise me. With Acropolitic still holding the official advisory angle, it’d be their only chance of carving themselves a slice of the action. Our indesp guys should bring it in before they make any substantial moves.’

‘Industrial espionage might give you backroom detail on the models, but it won’t help you on the ground. What are you going to do if it looks like Nakamura can get the Cambodian army to do what they want?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Call Langley, I suppose. Have the relevant uniforms capped at home.’

At the window, Erik Nyquist made a noise in his throat. Chris glanced across at him.

‘Hey, I’m sorry if that upsets your sensibilities, Erik. But this is the way the world is run.’

‘Yes. I know that.’

fucking bastard screamed the woman next door. The baby was crying again. Chris frowned into his drink.

‘Well, Erik, maybe you’d prefer it if we left these generals with their skulls intact, and then they could roll their tanks out to play in the streets of Phnom Penh and slaughter a few thousand people.’

‘The way Khieu Sary is going to, you mean?’

‘That’s not the way we’ve modelled it.’

‘Oh, good:

Again, Vasvik said something in Norwegian, and Erik looked back out at the night. He seemed to see something of interest down below.

‘Your friends are leaving,’ he said flatly. ‘That’s obviously enough law enforcement for this month. We must have used up our credit.’

‘Hey, not my friends, Erik.’ Chris grinned at the older man. ‘I just paid them off, that’s all. Just because I give someone money, doesn’t mean I like them. You should know that.’

‘The point,’ said Vasvik sharply, ‘is that we would like you to remain in position until the Nakamura move is completed one way or another. The Cambodian EZs are under investigation—‘

Chris hissed through his teeth. ‘Yeah, so what else is new. Don’t tell me you’re actually getting ready to take someone to that joke court of yours.’

Something smashed against the wall in the next flat. The male voice was back, competing for air time with the woman. The baby’s crying scaled up a couple of notches, maybe in an attempt to be heard over all the yelling. Chris raised an eyebrow and drank some more Clan Scott.

‘We need inside information from after any move by the Cambodian military.’ For all the change in Vasvik’s voice, the fight going on next door could have been on TV. ‘I don’t want to disclose details but if we don’t have clear data then a number of the people we’ve got our eye on will be able to use the confusion of the coup to muddy the waters over their own actions. They’ll get through the reasonable doubt loophole and they’ll walk. We’ll lose the whole case.’

‘Don’t you usually?’

cunt, cunt, cunt screamed the guy next door. Fucking CUNT

A blow, and someone falling. A broken shriek.

The baby, wailing.

Carla came out of the kitchen, as if fired from a gun.

‘Dad, what the fuck is he doing to—‘

‘I know.’ Erik came to take his daughter’s hands. He looked suddenly very old. ‘It’s, he’s. It happens a lot. There’s nothing you can—‘

Vasvik stared into the middle distance with no more emotion than a cat.

Another shriek. A meaty thump. Chris stared around and coughed out a laugh.

‘You guys are fucking hysterical, you know that. Erik, with your fucking writing, and the fucking ombudsman here. All going to change the fucking world for the better.’ Suddenly he was yelling himself. ‘Look at yourselves. You’re fucking paralysed, all of you.’

Something hit the wall, big enough to be a body. Blows followed, regular, spaced. Chanting.

you cunt, like that? you cunt, like that? you fucking like that cunt?

He was in motion, and it was like the Saab ride home all over again. Embodied purpose, unstoppable. He went out, along the tiny entry hall, out the front door, left, along to the next door. He kicked it in. Cheap wood splintered in the frame, the door flew back. Slammed into the wall, rebounded. He kicked again and erupted into the space beyond, through the hall and into the lounge.

They’d heard him come in. The woman was sprawled across the carpet, dressed in a short, moth-eaten, grey towelling robe and moving weakly like an injured soldier trying to crawl to cover. She was bleeding from the mouth. Below the hem of the robe, her thighs were mottled with old bruises. The baby was in a plastic carry chair, marooned atop a cheap entertainment stack near the kitchen door, mouth open wide as if in surprise. The father was turning, garish purple shellsuit bottoms and a red sleeveless T-shirt tight across a boxer’s physique. MEAT THE RICH was inked across his chest in white capitals stretched wide. His eyes were defocused with fury and his fists were clenched. Blood on the knuckles of the right hand.

‘You’re making too much noise,’ said Chris.

‘What?’ The man blinked. The lack of uniform registered. Maybe the cut of Chris’s clothes too. ‘Fuck are you doing in my house, cunt? You looking for a fucking fight?’

‘Yeah.’

Another blink. ‘You fucking what?

‘Yeah. I’m looking for a fight.’

For some reason, the answer seemed to stall the other man. Chris, who’d been worried about the baby, used the moment to take two neat steps sideways and give himself a clear field of fire. The other man gaped as if the executive in front of him had just done a pirouette. Chris cleared the Nemex and pointed the weapon in a single fluid move that he reckoned Louise Hewitt would have been proud of. The man gaped some more.

‘Never mind.’

Bang

Chris shot as low down the thigh as he trusted himself to hit. The target screamed and collapsed, clutching at his leg. Chris reversed his grip on the gun, stepped in close and clubbed the man hard, sideways across the head. He went down, eyes rolled up. The woman on the floor shrieked and scuttled backwards into a corner.

‘It’s okay,’ Chris said absently. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

‘Chris!’

Carla stood in the doorway, face ashen. Staring at him.

‘It’s okay, he’s not dead.’ Chris thought about it for a moment, then put the Nemex to the man’s knee, just below the first wound, and pulled the trigger. The man jerked with the impact, but didn’t come round. Carla and the other woman’s screams seemed to blend in the wake of the shot. The baby started wailing again. He looked across at the woman, whose left eye was rapidly swelling closed. Thought some more. He placed the Nemex muzzle on the man’s right elbow—

‘Chris -don’t.’

—and pulled the trigger again.

Carla jerked back as if it was her he’d shot.

He put the Nemex away and crossed to where the woman was crouched in the corner. He took out his wallet and gave her about half of the cash he was carrying.

‘Listen,’ he said, pressing it into her hand. ‘Pay attention, listen. This is for you. Call him an ambulance if you like, but don’t let them take him in. They’ll try to. It’s what they’re paid to do, that’s how they make the big money. Don’t let them. They’ll dress the wounds here if you ask them to. It’s cheaper and it’s all he needs. He’s not in any danger. He won’t die. Do you understand?’

She just stared at him.

He sighed and folded her hand around the money. She flinched as he touched her. He sighed again and got up. Looked at the baby. The mess around him. He shook his head and turned away.

They were all there now. Erik Nyquist, features tight with disgust. Carla, hugged in her father’s arms, face buried in his chest. Vasvik silent and impassive.

‘What?’ he asked them. ‘What?’

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Landrover jolted over another pothole, hard and too fast. Coins and other dashboard detritus cascaded onto the floor. Chris swayed in the grip of his seatbelt. He glanced across at Carla.

‘You want to slow down a bit?’

She looked back at him, then away. Said nothing. The Landrover bounced again. High beams splashed jerkily across the curve of the unlit street and a ravaged concrete structure that looked as if it might once have been the back end of an arena. Dead street lamps stood at intervals, most of them remarkably intact and upright.

‘For Christ’s sake, Carla, this is the zones. You really want to have to stop and change a flat tyre around here?’

She shrugged. ‘You’ve got a gun. I’m sure you can cripple anyone who gives us a hard time.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

They left the curving street and swung left past decayed low-rise housing and steel-shuttered frontages. The usual graffiti leered from the walls, incoherent tribal rage and abstract flashing that looked like stretched purple and white skulls. Carla stared ahead, tight-lipped. Chris felt his post-fight mellowness charring at the edges.

‘Hey, perhaps you’d rather he’d beaten her to death while we all sat there and listened to it. Good training for my future in the ombudsmen. Observe, take notes and never, never fucking intervene in anything.’

No response.

‘Your father lives next door to that every fucking day of his life, Carla. And he does nothing. Worse than nothing. He just shakes his fucking head and writes his agonised social commentary and he feeds it to people who’ll never know the realities of the situations he describes, and they all shake their heads and do nothing. And next door, a thug goes on beating his wife to pulp.’

‘My father’s a man in his sixties. Did you see the size of that piece of shit?’

‘Yeah. That’s why I shot him.’

‘That’s no solution!’

‘I don’t know - it seemed to slow him down.’

‘And what about when he recovers, Chris? When he’s back on his feet and twice as angry as he ever was.’

‘You’re saying I should have killed him?’

‘This isn’t fucking funny!’

Chris twisted round to face her. ‘No, you’re right Carla, it isn’t. It’s sick. You’re trying to get me, out of some twisted sense of moral outrage, to quit my job at Shorn and go work for men like Vasvik. And you saw how concerned he was back there. What a moral stand the fucking ombudsmen are prepared to take in the face of injustice.’

‘He wasn’t there for that, Chris.’

‘Neither was I, Carla. But I did something about it. Just like I’m going to do something in the NAME. Jesus, you think you can go through this life with your pristine ideals, taking notes and trusting some fuckwit UN judge to make everyone play nice. You think—‘

The Landrover leaned abruptly on its suspension. The road swung away in the high beams, replaced by the cross-hatching of an empty parking area. An abandoned supermarket loomed up ahead, facades smashed in and boarded up in about equal measures. There seemed to be a white tubular metal reindeer riveted to the roof, face turned blankly to greet the shoppers in their cars. Vague, tangled debris that had once presumably been a sleigh trailed from the animal’s rear and spilled down the roof as far as the sagging gutters. For one bizarre moment, the image reversed for Chris and he saw an amorphous tentacled creature dragging the reindeer down to its death.

Carla braked them to a halt in the middle of the car park.

For a moment, they both sat staring out at the mall front. Then she turned to look at him.

‘What’s happened to you, Chris?’ she whispered.

‘Oh, Christ, Carla—‘

‘I.’ She gestured convulsively. ‘I don’t. Recognise you any more. I don’t know who you are any more. Who the fuck are you, Chris?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘No, I mean it. You’re angry all the time, furious all the time, and now you carry that gun around with you. When you started at Shorn, you told me about the guns, and you laughed about it. Do you remember that? You made fun of it. You made fun of the whole place, just like you used to at HM. Now you barely laugh at anything. I don’t know how to talk to you any more, I’m scared you’re going to just snap and start yelling at me.’

‘Keep on like this,’ he said grimly, ‘and guess what, I’ll probably snap and start yelling at you. And no doubt it’ll be my fucking fault again.’

She flinched.

‘You want to know who I am, Carla?’ He was leaning across the Landrover towards her, in her face. ‘You really want to know? I’m your fucking meal ticket. Just like I always have been. Need new clothes? Need tickets to Norway? Need a handout for Daddy? Need to move out of the city and live somewhere nicer? Hey, that’s okay. Chris has got a good job, he’ll pay for it all. He doesn’t ask much, just keep the car clean and the odd blow job. It’s a fucking bargain, girl!’

The words seemed to do something coming out. He felt tearing, somewhere indefinable. He felt dizzy, suddenly weak in the numb quiet that swallowed up what he’d said. He propped himself back away from her and sat waiting, not sure what for.

The silence hummed.

‘Get out,’ she said.

She hadn’t raised her voice. She didn’t look at him. She hit the central locking console and his door cracked open.

‘You’d better be sure about—‘

‘I warned you before, Chris. You called me a whore once. You don’t get to do it twice. Get out.’

He looked out at the deserted parking area, the darkness beyond the Landrover’s lights. He smiled thinly.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not. Been coming to this for long enough.’

He shouldered the door fully open and jumped down. The night air was warm and comfortable, edged with a slight breeze. It was easy enough to forget where you were. He checked he still had the Nemex in its holster, his wallet in the jacket pocket, still thick with cash.

‘See you then, Carla.’

Her head jerked round suddenly. He met her eyes, saw what was in them and ignored it.

‘I’ll be at the office. Call me if the bills need paying, huh?’

‘Chris—‘

He slammed the door on it.

He strode away without looking back, aiming only to get beyond easy hailing distance. Behind him, he heard the Landrover put in gear and moving. He wondered briefly if she’d come after him at kerb-crawl speed across the car park, and what, in that ridiculous scenario, he would do. Then the high beams washed once over him and fled left, away across the white boxed acreage of the parking area. The engine lifted through the gears as she picked up speed.

He felt a single stab of worry, that she might not be safe getting home on her own. He grimaced and slammed a door on that as well.

Then she was gone. He turned, finally, to look, and was in time to catch the tail lights of the Landrover disappearing amidst the low-rise huddle of housing on the other side of the car park. A few moments later the engine noise faded into the vehicle-free stillness of night in the zones.

He stood for a while, trying to get his bearings, geographical and emotional, but it was all utterly unfamiliar. There was nothing recognisable on the skyline in any direction. The supermarket faced him with its wrecked frontages, and he felt a sudden insane desire to lever loose some of the boarding, use the butt of the Nemex to do it, and slip inside, looking for—

He shivered. The dream marched through his head in neon-lit pulses.

sudden warm rain of blood

falling

He shook his head, hard. Turned his back on the facade. Then he picked an angle across the car park at random and started walking.

Up on the roof, the tube metal reindeer watched him go through eyes empty of anything except the cool evening wind.

Saturday night, Sunday morning. The cordoned zones.

He’d expected trouble, had even, with some of the same twisted joy that had driven his actions at the Brundtland, been looking forward to it. The Nemex was a grab away beneath his jacket. His hands were Shotokan-toughened and itchy with the desire to do damage. Worst-case scenario, his mobile would get him a police escort out, should he really need it.

Rather coldly, he knew he’d have to be literally fighting for his life before he’d make that call.

Anything less, he’d never live it down.

He’d expected trouble, but there was nothing worthy of the name.

He walked for a while through anonymous, poorly-lit estates, emerging once or twice onto main thoroughfares to take his bearings from scarred and vandalised road signs and then plunging back in, heading what he estimated was east. TV light flickered and glowed in windows, game-show noise escaped through the cheap glazing. Occasionally figures moved within. Outside, he saw children perched on walls in the gloom, sharing cigarettes, two-litre plastic bottles and crudely homemade solvent pipes. The first set he ran across spotted the clothes and came jeering towards him. He drew the Nemex and met their eyes, and they backed off, muttering. He kept the gun where it could be seen after that, and the other groups just watched him pass with bleak calculation. Whispered invective slithered in his wake.

Eventually, he came out onto a main road that looked as if it might run due east. Between the buildings on his left he thought he could make out the vaulted march of the M40 inrun converging from the north, which suggested he was somewhere near Ealing. Or Greenford, if he’d miscalculated how far out Carla had dumped him. Or Alperton. Or

Or you’re lost, Chris.

Fuck it, you don’t really know this part of town, so stop pretending you do. Just keep moving. Pretty soon the sun’s got to come up, and then you’ll damn well know if you ‘re heading east or not.

Keep moving. It had to be better than thinking.

He started to see signs of nightlife. Clubs and arcades at intervals along the street, in various stages of turnout. Junk food carry-outs, most of them little more than white-neon-blasted alcoves in the brickwork. The low-intensity stink of cheap meat and stale alcohol, laced once or twice with acid spikes of vomit. Little knots of people in the street, eating and drinking, shouting at each other. Turning to stare at him as he passed.

It couldn’t be helped. He lengthened his stride, kept the Nemex lowered but clearly in view. Kept to the centre of the street.

In theory, he could have tried to call a cab. He had landmarks now, identifiable club frontages and, if he was prepared to look hard enough in the gloom, street name plaques. In practice, it was probably a waste of time. The companies his mobile knew numbers for mostly wouldn’t come more than a few hundred metres the wrong side of the cordons, especially at this time of night. And those few that would tended to follow an esoteric driver’s mythology on exactly which streets were safe to pick up from. Get the wrong configuration in this tarot of zone codes, and you could wait all night. Hearing a location they didn’t like -better yet hearing some idiot raving about the comer of Old Something Smudged street, some nameless club and a pink neon rabbit with tits and a top hat - individual drivers were going to chortle grimly, ignore the controller and shelve the fare. There just wasn’t enough zone custom to push things the other way. You went to the zones, you drove. Or you walked home.

He caught eyes, made no attempt to look away. He remembered Mike’s demeanour on their previous expeditions to the zones, and aped it.

Be who you are, and fuck ‘em if they don’t like it.

The gun helped.

No one wanted to push it any further than a curled lip. No one came close. No one said anything.

Outside one of the clubs, two crack whores broke his run of luck. They registered the clothes and stumbled across the road towards him like kids wading into cold water on a shingle beach. Their bare legs worked as if badly jointed, their feet were wrenched on ludicrous stiletto heels. They wore push-up bras and black mesh microskirts cinched savagely tight. Their make-up was sweat-streaked and caked, and their eyes looked bruised half shut. One was skinnier than the other, but otherwise the pre-dawn whore’s makeover rendered them uniform, wiped difference away.

They were all of fourteen years old.

‘You want to get sucked?’ asked the skinny one.

‘You got a place we can go?’ The other was clearly the brains of the outfit, the forward thinker.

Chris shook his head. ‘Go home.’

‘Don’t be harsh, baby. Just want to do you good.’ The skinny girl amplified her sales pitch with a finger-licking display. She stuck the wet finger inside one cup of her barely necessary bra and rubbed it back and forth with a fixed little smile. Chris flinched.

‘I said, go home.’ He raised the Nemex where they couldn’t miss it. ‘You don’t want anything to do with me.’

‘Baby, that’s a big gun you got,’ said the skinny girl.

‘You want to put it somewhere warm?’

Chris fled.

He came through the westward cordons at Holland Park, an hour before dawn. The checkpoint detail gave him some strange looks, but they said nothing and once his Shorn card swiped clear, they called him a cab. He stood outside the cabin while he waited for it to arrive, staring back across the barriers the way he’d come.

His mobile queeped. He looked at it, saw it was Carla and turned it off.

The cab arrived.

He had the driver take him to work.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

This early on a Sunday, the Shorn block was in darkness above the mezzanine level and the shutdown locks were still in place. He buzzed security, and they let him in without comment or visible surprise. He supposed, rather bitterly, that it couldn’t be entirely unheard of for a Shorn exec to come in before dawn at the weekend.

He thought briefly about grabbing a few hours sleep in the hospitality suites, then dismissed the idea out of hand. Outside, it was already getting light. He wouldn’t sleep unaided now. Instead, he rode the lift all the way up to the fifty-third floor, made his way through the cosy dimness of corridors lit at standby wattage and let himself into his office.

On his desk, the phone was already flashing a message light.

He checked it, saw it was from Carla and wiped it. He stood afterwards with his finger on the stud for a while, reached once for the receiver but never made it. Reached for the lighting control on the datadown but changed his mind. The grey pre-dawn quiet the office was steeped in had an oddly comforting quality, like a childhood hiding place. Like a pillow under his cheek and a clock in front of his face showing a good solid hour before alarm time. Without the lights, he was in limbo, a comfortable state in which decisions did not have to be made, in which you didn’t have to move forward any more. The sort of state that just couldn’t last, but while it did—

He muted the phone’s ring tone, went to the built-in cupboards by the door and took down a blanket. Crossing to the sofa-and-coffee-table island in the corner of the office, he shucked his jacket, shoulder holster and shoes and then lowered himself onto the sofa. Then he covered himself with the blanket and lay staring at the white textured ceiling, waiting for the slow creep of morning to soak across it.

Back down at reception, the younger of the two security guards made bladder excuses and left his colleague while he went up to the mezzanine. He pushed through the swing doors of the toilets, locked himself in a cubicle and took out his phone.

He hesitated for a moment, then grimaced and punched out a number.

The phone purred beside a wide, grey-sheeted bed in a space lit by hooded blue softs. A massive picture window in one wall was polarised to dark. On a table under the sill, a chess set of ornate figurines stood next to a screen that displayed the state of play in silver, black and blue. Grecian-effect sculpture stood around the room on plinths in the shadows. Beneath the sheets, the curves of two bodies moved against each other as the ringing tone penetrated layers of sleep. Louise Hewitt poked her head up, reached for the receiver and held it to her ear. She glared balefully at the time display beside the phone.

‘This had better be fucking important.’

She listened to the hastily apologetic voice at the other end, and her eyes opened wide. She twisted, struggled free of the sheet and propped herself up on one elbow.

‘No, you were right to call me. Yes, I did say that. Yes, it is unusual, I agree. Of course. No, I won’t forget this. Thank you.’

She cradled the receiver and turned over onto her back. Her gaze was dreamy on the blue-tinged ceiling, her tone thoughtful.

‘Chris just rolled into work on his own. In a cab. Four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Looks like he’s been up all night.’

The slim form beside her stirred fully awake.

Chris was dreaming about the supermarket again, but this time he was watching the whole scene from outside, and the car park was insanely, impossibly full of cars. They were everywhere, every colour under the sun, like spilled sweets, and all in motion, cruising and parking and reversing out like some immense robotic ballet, and he couldn’t get through them. Each time he took a step towards the supermarket and the people in its brilliantly-lit interior, a car rolled into his path and stopped with a short squeak of brakes. He had to go round, he had to go round, and his time was running out. The people inside didn’t know. They were shopping in anaesthetised warmth and content and they had no way of knowing what was coming.

Up on the roof, tube metal groaned and clanked in protest as the reindeer shook its head.

And the cars, he suddenly saw, were all empty. There were no shoppers in them, no one driving, no one loading, no one anywhere. Everybody was inside. Shopping. Fucking shopping.

He made it to the doors and tried to open them but they were closed up with impact plastic boarding and metres of heavy steel chain. He tried banging on the windows, shouting, but no one heard him.

The shots, when they came, rippled the glass under his hands. And as always, they drilled into his ear like something physical.

He yelped and woke up, fists clenched under his chin.

For a moment, he cringed there, curled defensively at one end of the sofa. He’d twisted the blanket up in his sleep and now it barely covered half his body. He blinked hard a couple of times, breathed out and sat up. Dawn had come and gone while he slept, and the office was full of bright sunlight.

He got up from the sofa and found his shoes. Bending to put them on, he felt his head throbbing. He’d drowsed himself into a low-grade headache. He shambled to the desk and opened drawers with myopic clumsiness, looking for painkillers. The phone flashed at one corner of his vision. He fumbled a snarl and checked numbers on the piled up messages. Carla, Carla, Carla, fucking Carla—

And Liz Linshaw.

He stopped dead. The call had come in an hour ago. He grabbed a foil of speed delivery codeine tabs out of an open drawer and hit ‘play’.

‘Chris, I tried you at home but your wife didn’t know where you were.’ A wry curl to the voice - he could see the faint smile that went with it. ‘She, uh, she wasn’t too helpful but I got the impression you might be coming into work today. So listen, there’s a breakfast bar in India Street called Break Point. I’m meeting someone there at eight-thirty. I think you might want to be there too.’

He checked his watch. Eight-twenty.

Jacket, Nemex. He chewed up the codeine tabs on his way down in the lift, swallowed the powder and went out hurriedly into the sun.

It took him a little longer than he expected to find India Street. He remembered the breakfast bar from a damage limitation strategy meeting he’d had there once when he still worked at Hammett McColl. But because he associated the place with the reinsurance brokers at the meeting, he misremembered the address and found himself in an alley off Fenchurch Street with the wrong name. He cast about for a couple of minutes, blurry with the onset of the codeine, before the mistake dawned on him. Working off the new memory, he plotted a vague eastward course and set out again through the tangle of deserted streets.

He was walking north up the glass-walled canyon curve of Crutched Friars, when someone yelled his name.

‘Faulkner!’

The word echoed off the enclosing steel and glass walls, bounced away down the curve of the canyon. Chris jerked around, sludgily aware he was in trouble. About twenty metres away, blocking his way to the right turn into India Street, five figures stood spread out across the width of the road. All five wore black ski-masks, all five hefted weapons that to his untutored eye looked like shotguns. They were faced off against him in the ludicrous cliche stance of a Western gunfight, and despite it all, despite the abrupt knowledge of his own rapidly approaching death, Chris felt a smirk creep out across his face.

‘You what?’

Maybe it was the codeine. He laughed out loud. Shouted it.

‘You fucking what?’

The men facing him shifted, apparently discomforted. They glanced inward to the figure at the centre. The man took a step forward. Hands pumped the shotgun’s action. The clack-clack echoed along the street.

‘Go foah it, Faulkner.’

The knowledge hit Chris like cold water. He opened his mouth to yell the name, knew he would be shot before he could get it out.

‘Just a minute.’

Everyone looked round at the new voice. Mike Bryant stood at the mouth of a side alley about ten metres behind Chris, panting slightly. He raised his left hand, right floating close to his belt. Gripped in the upraised fist was a thick wad of currency.

Makin faltered behind his mask. The shotgun lowered a couple of degrees.

‘This has got nothing to do with you,’ he called.

‘Oh, but it does.’ Mike ambled out of the alley and drifted up the street until he was lined up beside Chris. There was a thin beading of sweat across his brow, and Chris remembered he couldn’t be more than a day out of the hospital. He still held the wad of cash before him like a weapon. ‘You take down one Shorn exec in the street, where’s it going to end? Eh, Nick? You’re breaking the fucking rules, man.’

And out of the corner of his mouth, he muttered to Chris.

‘You carrying?’

‘Yeah, I’m carrying.’

‘Loaded this time?’

Chris nodded tautly. A surge of adrenalin punched through the codeine vagueness, a savage pleasure at the comradeship in the man at his side and the will to do harm together.

‘Good to know. Follow my lead, this is going to go fast.’

‘We only want Faulkner,’ shouted Makin.

Mike grinned and raised his voice again. ‘That’s too bad, Nick, because you got me too.’ It was the bright, energetic tone Chris had last heard when Bryant crippled and blinded Griff Dixon in his own living room. ‘And before we start, gentlemen, just look at tonight’s wonderful prizes.’

He held up the fistful of bank notes again. His voice resonated in the steel canyon acoustics, loud and game-show fruity.

‘For the winners! Twenty thousand euros, in cash! Lay down your weapons and walk away with it all! Tonight! Or, take the gamble, lose and die! Ladies and gentlemen, you decide!’

He hurled the money up and outward. It was bundled together with a thick metallic band that glinted as it turned end over end, high in the bright morning air.

‘Now,’ he snapped.

After that, it all seemed to be happening on freeze-frame advance.

Chris tugged out the Nemex. It felt appallingly heavy in his hand, appallingly slow to bring round and point.

Beside him, Mike Bryant was already firing.

Makin’s contingent were still staring up at the money. Mike’s first slug took the man on Makin’s right under his back-tilted chin, tore through his neck and dropped him in a shower of arterial blood.

The remaining four scattered across the perspectives of the street.

Chris held the Nemex out, memories of a hundred shooting-gallery hours like iron tracery in his right arm. He squeezed the trigger, felt the kick. Squeezed again. One of the men ahead of him staggered. Hard to see blood against the dark canvas clothes. He squeezed again. The man folded forward and collapsed on his face in the street.

A shotgun boomed.

He pointed and fired at Makin. Missed. Out of peripheral vision, he saw Mike Bryant stalking forward, face fixed in a grin, Nemex extended, shooting in an arc. Another of Makin’s men went down, clutching at his thigh.

Another shotgun blast. Chris felt a thin stinging of pellets across his ribs. He spotted Makin, pumping another shell in. He yelled and ran towards him, firing wildly. Makin saw him coming and took aim.

Another figure stumbled into Makin’s path, shooting across the street at Mike. The two men tangled. Chris shot indiscriminately into them both.

Makin got clear, raised the shotgun again. There seemed to be something wrong with his arm.

Chris emptied the Nemex into him. The gun locked back, breech open on the last shot.

And it was over.

The echoes rolled away, like trucks moving off down the street. Chris stood over Nick Makin and watched as he stopped breathing. Off to his left, Mike Bryant walked up to the shotgunner he’d hit in the thigh. The injured man flopped about weakly. Blood was leaking in astonishing quantities from his twisted leg. Beneath the mask, his head shifted back and forth between Chris and Mike like a trapped animal’s. He was making a panicked moaning noise.

‘Look, you’re going to bleed to death anyway,’ Mike told him.

The Nemex shell punched him flat. The ski-masked head jerked about with the impact. A new rivulet of blood groped out across the asphalt from the torn wool and gore of the exit wound. Mike knelt and checked his handiwork, then looked up at Chris and grinned.

‘Five to two, eh. Not bad for a couple of suits.’

Chris shook his head numbly. The Nemex hung at the end of his arm like a dumb-bell weight. He unlocked the opened breech, put the weapon away, fumbling with the holster. Post-drive shakes, setting in.

‘This is nice.’ Mike picked up the dead man’s shotgun and hefted it with approval. ‘Remington tactical pump. Fancy a souvenir?’

Chris said nothing. Bryant got up, tucked the shotgun casually under his arm. “s okay, I’ll talk to the police, get one for both of us out of evidence, when they’ve finished with it. Something to show to your grandchildren.’ He shook his head, talking a little fast with the adrenalin crash. ‘Fucking unbelievable, huh? Like something off a game platform. Ah. See you got Makin pretty good then?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris looked incuriously at where the other exec lay, still masked. Up close, you could see the wounds in his chest and belly. His whole body was drenched with the blood. ‘Dead.’

Mike looked around judiciously.

‘I think they all are. Oh, wait a minute.’ He crossed to the man Chris had hit when he tangled with Makin. He crouched and put two fingers to the man’s neck, shrugged. ‘On his way out, I reckon. Still.’

He got up and pointed the Nemex down at the man’s masked face. He was already turning away as he pulled the trigger.

‘How did you know I’d be here?’ Chris asked him.

Another shrug. ‘Carla rang me this morning at home. In tears. Told me you’d had a row, you’d got out in the middle of the zones and now she couldn’t get hold of you. I came in looking for you. Had to break into your office. Sorry about that, I was pretty worried. Anyway, I spotted that message from Liz. Thought I’d catch you up. Took a while, my ribs are still killing me.’

Chris looked at him narrowly. ‘You just happened to be carrying twenty grand in cash?’

‘Oh, that.’ Mike grinned again and crossed to where the bundle of currency still lay on the street. ‘Improvisation. Look.’

He tossed the money across, and Chris caught it awkwardly with his left hand. The notes were twenties. There was a thousand euros in the bundle at most.

‘Best I could do on the spur of the moment. You really walk in from the zones last night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Must have been some row.’

They stood amidst the carnage, the scattered weapons and spreading pools of blood, and very slowly Chris became aware that, amongst a small knot of people gathered at the end of India Street, Liz Linshaw was watching him.

He walked towards her.

‘Do you have any idea how bad this looks?’

Louise Hewitt stood stiff legged at the head of the conference table and gestured at the projection. Blown-up surveillance camera footage ran grainy and silent behind her, Mike Bryant giving the coup de grace to the two masked gunmen still breathing.

‘Do you have any idea what this kind of brawling does to our image as a serious financial institution?’

Chris shrugged. His side was numb where the Shorn medic had dosed him with contact anaesthetic prior to digging out the shotgun pellets. The rest of him was past feeling very much of anything too. ‘You should be talking to Makin. He started it.’

‘This is not a fucking playground, Faulkner!’

‘Louise, you’re being unreasonable.’ Mike Bryant met Philip Hamilton’s eyes across the table and the other man looked away, towards Hewitt. Beside him, Jack Notley stared into the middle distance, seemingly oblivious to the storm building around him. ‘Makin called this one, all the way down. If I hadn’t been there, Chris’d be dead now and the blame’d be farmed out to zone gangwits. We wouldn’t even know we had a loose cannon aboard.’

On the projection screen, Chris walked away from the bodies and out of shot. It was odd, watching himself disappear, back into the past of three hours ago and the confrontation with Liz Linshaw.

You set me up.

She took it like a slap. For the first time he could recall, he saw open hurt in her face. The sight of it licked the pit of his belly.

You fucking set me up, you bitch.

No. She was shaking her head. Chris, I don’t—

And then Mike was there, and they both slid their masks back on. Passion sheathed. There was control, there were words that meant something factual, there was the long, verbal comedown. Explanations, talk and shots of rough, blended whisky in Break Point to combat the shakes. Sanity leaking into the nightmare aftermath like blood across asphalt.

I just got a call. This guy said he worked Driver Control, he knew what really happened to Chris on the M11, did I want to know too? Meet him here. Five grand in cash.

She brandished the money out of her wallet. Like proof of innocence.

When Mike went to the bathroom, she reached out across the cheap plastic-topped table and took Chris’s hand in her own. No words, only a cabled look, eye to eye. Spinning sudden vertigo, and then the flush of the toilet through cardboard-thin walls, and their hands leapt apart like matched magnetic poles.

Louise Hewitt was talking to him, but he couldn’t make it matter. He levered himself to his feet, faced her disbelieving fury.

‘I’ve had enough of this shit, Louise. It’s pretty fucking clear what happened here.’

‘Sit down Faulkner, I haven’t—‘

‘Makin couldn’t hack the NAME account. I took it from him, and it hurt. He couldn’t take me on the road, so he hired a gangwit kid to do what he didn’t dare do himself. When that didn’t work—‘

‘I told you to sit dow—‘

He shouted her down. ‘When that didn’t fucking work, Louise, he hired some more sicarios and tried this. He couldn’t beat me playing by the Shorn rules, so he broke them. And now he’s dead. Everybody in fucking black.’

‘Chris.’ Notley’s voice didn’t seem to have raised much, but there was an edge on it that cut across the air like tyre screech. ‘You don’t talk to partnership like this. You’re overwrought, but that’s no excuse. Now get out.’

Chris met the senior partner’s eyes, and saw the man who had almost shot him dead in his own office a week ago. He nodded.

‘Fair enough.’

They watched him go in silence. Mike Bryant looked round the table again. He shook his head.

‘This isn’t right, Jack. I mean, it’s a fucking mess. But Makin called it. He’s been a fuck-up since he took over the NAME, he was way too impressed with himself from day one. I would have called him out myself, but what’s the point. Anyone could have seen he’d blink first.’

Hamilton blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You don’t have to drive against someone to know you’re better than they are, Phil. That’s crude. Sometimes you just know what the outcome’d be, and that’s enough. This kill-or-be-killed shit just gets in the way.’

The look ran between the partners like current. Up on the projector screen, the surveillance film had looped. The gun battle was starting again. Jack Notley cleared his throat.

‘Mike, perhaps you could give us some time to discuss this from a partner perspective. We’ll get back to you again on Monday morning.’

Bryant nodded. ‘Sure.’

When the door closed, Louise Hewitt spun on Notley.

‘Did you hear that? You know where that comes from, don’t you. That’s chess and bullshit neojap philosophy, courtesy of Chris bloody Faulkner. The man is a fucking toxin, Jack. He’s the real loose cannon around here.’

‘It doesn’t show up like that in the numbers, Louise.’

‘It’s not about the numbers.’

‘No?’ Notley raised an eyebrow. ‘Am I missing something here? Would you care to tell me what Shorn CI is about besides the numbers?’

‘Don’t be obtuse. It’s about an ethic. A corporate culture. A way of doing things. And if we let that go, this,’ she jabbed a finger at the surveillance film. Masked figures, collapsed like unstrung marionettes. Pools and snakes of blood. ‘Is what happens. Structural breakdown, anarchy in the streets. It’s axiomatic. Does anyone sitting round this table have any inkling why Nick Makin might have acted the way he did? Why he found it necessary, even believed perhaps that it would be acceptable, to breach Shorn etiquette like this? Think hard, Jack. Think about a certain major client, beaten to death in conference a week ago. Think about the way you rewarded Faulkner for that. Does anyone see a connection?’

For a fraction of a second, Jack Notley closed his eyes. When he spoke, there was a soft warning in his voice.

‘I don’t think we need to revisit that, Louise.’

‘I think we do, Jack. You gave Chris a green light for behaviour beyond any acceptable limits. And Makin learnt the lesson, resulting in this mess. And meanwhile we’ve got Bryant, our best driver, talking like a fucking ombudsman. Any way you look at it, Jack, you’ve destabilised what we’re about. And we can’t afford that.’

‘I wonder if Martin Page would see it that way?’

Hamilton and Hewitt traded a glance. Hewitt came to the table and seated herself carefully.

‘Is that some kind of accusation?’

Notley shrugged. ‘Let’s just say that your talk of loose cannons is selective, Louise. Page was a junior partner. What you did to him ran counter at least to an unspoken understanding of how partnership works here.’

‘I resent that, Jack. Page was a filed challenge.’

‘Yes, a challenge without a vacant post to justify it. Executive brawling at partnership level. An act of pure, equity share greed.’

‘Which you underwrote, as I recall.’

‘Retrospectively, yes. Because back then, Louise, you were the loose cannon, and I admired you for it.’

Hewitt smiled thinly. ‘Well, thank you. But I think there’s a limit—‘

‘Oh, shut up. Don’t talk to me about,’ Notley gestured impatiently, ‘destabilisation, as if it’s something we have some kind of choice about. As if it’s something we can avoid. What we do here is built on instability. It’s a fucking prerequisite.’

Philip Hamilton cleared his throat. ‘I think what Louise means is—‘

‘Yes, I thought it was about time you weighed in, you little sycophant. Christ, you’re beginning to sicken me, both of you.’

Notley stood up and strode to the head of the table. He stabbed the projector control with two folded fingers, and the wall behind him was abruptly blank. His voice was tight with leashed anger.

‘Louise, I helped you climb to the top of this pile, and now you’re up here all you want to do is surround yourself with low-threat colleagues like this bag of guts, and kick away the ladder in case anybody sharper gets to scramble up and destabilise things for you. Haven’t you learnt anything on the way up? Either of you? You can’t have stability and dynamic capital growth. It’s textbook truth. Come on. What transformed the stock market back in the last century? Volatility. Competition. Deregulation. The loosening of the ties, the removal of social security systems. What’s transformed foreign investment in the last thirty years? Volatility. Competition. Small wars. It’s the same pattern. And what ensures that we stay on top of it all? Volatility. Innovation. Rule-breaking. Loose cannons. Christ, why do you think I hired Faulkner in the first place? We need that factor. We have to keep topping up with it. Otherwise, we all just turn back into the same fat-fuck, complacent, country-club scum that nearly sank us last time around. Sure, men like Faulkner are unstable. Sure, they keep you looking in your rearview all the time. But that’s what keeps us hard.’

For a couple of beats, silence held the conference room. Nobody moved. Notley stared from Hewitt to Hamilton and back, daring them to dispute. Finally, Hewitt shook her head.

‘It may make you hard, Jack,’ she said with measured insolence. ‘But to me it’s just bad business. We have structures in place to ensure volatility and competition. I don’t think we need to go courting chaos into the bargain. I’m making a recommendation this quarterly that we let Faulkner go.’

Notley nodded, almost affably.

‘Alright Louise. If that’s the way you want it. But understand this. We’ve been courting chaos since the day we signed on for Conflict Investment. All of us. It’s what drives us, it’s what gets results. And I’m not going to watch you sell that out, just because you’ve got comfortable. You go on record with that recommendation, I will find reasons to call you out. Do you understand me? I will drive you off the road.’

This time no one broke the silence. Notley leaned his neck hard to one side and they heard it click in the stillness.

‘That will be all.’

When he had gone, Hewitt got up and went to stare out of the window. Hamilton pushed out a long breath.

‘Do you think he means it?’

‘Of course he means it,’ said Hewitt irritably.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’ She came back to sit on the edge of the table. She looked down into Hamilton’s face. ‘But I’m going to need your help.’

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Out in the corridor, Mike Bryant quizzed security. They told him Chris had taken a lift to the ground floor. Seemed pretty pissed off, admitted one of the guards. Mike called a lift of his own and bombed downward in pursuit.

He spotted Chris, already halfway across the sun-lit cathedral expanse of the lobby. The holos and fountains and subsonics were all switched off, and there was nobody about. In the Sunday afternoon emptiness that was left, the space felt suddenly steely and inhuman.

Mike cleared his throat and called across it.

‘Chris. Hey, Chris. Wait up a minute.’

‘Now’s not a good time, Mike.’ Chris flung it back over his shoulder, not stopping.

‘Okay.’ Mike jogged to catch up. Residual bruising across his chest made it painful. ‘You’re right, it’s not a good time. So why don’t we go and grab a drink somewhere.’

‘I’ve got to get my car back from Hawkspur Green. And then check into a hotel.’

‘You’re not going home?’

‘What do you think?’

Mike put out a hand, breathing heavily. ‘What I think is, you need to drink some of that seaweed-iodine shit you like, and talk about this. And, luckily, I’m here to listen to you spill. Alright? Come on, I saved your life out there, Chris. At least buy me a drink. Alright?’

Chris looked at him. An unwilling smile bent his mouth. Mike saw it and grinned back.

‘Alright. I’ll get the car.’

They found a tiny antique pub called The Grapes, tacked onto the Lime Street edge of Leadenhall Market, catering mainly to the insurance crowd and powered down to a single barwoman for the Sunday trade. Like most city-based hostelries, it opened seven days a week because the simple fact that it was always open was worth something in itself. Brokers knew they could get fed and watered there whatever day they were working, and the knowledge stuck. There was no room for five-day amateurs.

Three - or four? - whiskies in, Chris had drowned his fury and was slumped on a stool, watching dust motes dance in the streams of sunlight that fell in through the windows opposite the bar. A faint, pervasive odour of alcohol seeped up off the polished wood counter. The Laphroaig sat on top of the cheap three fingers he’d taken in Break Point, the codeine tabs and no food to speak of. He felt like a mud-smeared windscreen.

‘Look,’ Mike was saying. ‘It doesn’t matter what Hewitt thinks. You took Makin down. That’s what counts. Sure, it was unorthodox, but that’s the point isn’t it? It ups your don’t-fuck-with-me stock through the roof. Builds you the killer rep.’

‘Killer rep.’ Chris stared into his glass. He coughed up a laugh and shook his head. ‘You want to know something about me, Mike?’

‘Sure.’

‘My killer rep is a fucking accident.’

He saw how the other man’s gaze narrowed. He nodded, knocked back the rest of the Laphroaig. Grunted, like letting go.

“s right. I’m a fucking fake, Mike. Hewitt has me, cross-hairs and centred. She always did. She’s not wrong. I don’t belong here.’

Mike frowned, finished his vodka and gestured to the barwoman.

‘Same again. Chris, what are you talking about? You’ve been a fuel-injected killing machine since Quain, at least.’

‘Ah! Quain.’ Chris watched as the whisky rose two fingers in his glass. ‘Quain, Quain, Quain. You want to know about Quain?’

‘I already know about Quain. Chris, you left him smeared along thirty metres of asphalt. That’s pretty open and shut. You ran him over five fucking times, man.’

‘Yeah.’

He sat, remembering. Brilliant spring sunshine, and the crunching impact of his barely legal ten-year-old Volvo Injection against the smooth racing green flanks of Quain’s Audi. The light had gleamed so hard off the bodywork, he’d had to squint.

And Quain spinning out, finally, into the barrier, jammed onto a snapped section of uprights. What Chris had been trying for all through the difficult latter stages of the duel, well past the point when he’d actually won. Quain gaping, middle-aged and fearful, through the smashed-in driver-side window as the Volvo backed up, preliminary to ramming. Gaping as Chris killed the motor and got out.

He felt his face twitch with the memory.

He seemed to make the walk between the two cars at an immense distance from himself. The turnover of his pulse throbbed in his own ears. No Nemexes back then. He walked right up to the window and showed Quain the thing in his hand. The recycled raid bottle, the soaked rag. Perfume of petrol as he waved it back and forth. Snap of the lighter and the pale flame in the sunny air. Quain started babbling.

Get out, Chris told him, surprising himself. The plan had been to burn Quain alive. The plan had been to tell Quain why, and then throw the bottle with enough force to shatter on the floor between his feet. The plan had been to watch Quain turned into a shrieking, flailing, flame-armed thing, to listen to the screams and—

Get out and run, you fuck.

And Quain did.

Crazed, maybe, with fear of what he saw in Chris’s eyes, hypnotised by the blob of pale, dancing flame. Chris stood there and watched him go, groping about inside his own head for a reason. Something was happening in there, and he couldn’t make out what it was.

He threw the bottle into the Audi anyway, as much in frustration as anything else. It shattered on the dash and the flames sprang up. The sight seemed to switch something back on inside him. He sprinted back to the Volvo, kicked it alive and floored the accelerator. Fishtail waltz as he hauled the wheel over and his gaze sharpened on the portly, lumbering figure ahead on the road. Quain must have heard the engine and known what it meant. He was making for the central reservation as the Volvo came up on his heels. It wouldn’t have made any difference, Chris realised later. He would have driven straight through it to get to Quain.

He dropped a gear and the engine screamed. Quain looked back over his shoulder just before the Volvo hit. Chris saw his eyes. Then he was gone, a suddenly, impossibly aerodynamic body thudding and tumbling up off the hood, the windscreen, the roof. A flash of dark falling in the rearview as Chris braked the Volvo to a screeching halt.

It wasn’t enough.

He never knew if Quain was dead when he reversed back over him the first time. But he saw what emerged under the front wheels as he pulled up five metres back from the body.

It still wasn’t enough.

He did it again. And again.

Five times, before he realised it would never be enough.

‘He killed my father,’ he said.

And Mike Bryant, staring at him in the sifting dustlight. A look on his face Chris had never seen before. Stalled out, lost.

‘Your father?’

Chris sighed. Loading up for the long, tedious climb of explanation. ‘Not directly. Quain never met my father directly. My father worked for a reconstruction consultancy called IES — International Economic Solutions, but when you said it all together it sounded like Yes. Cute, huh? My mother said he used to.’

He clamped his mouth. Shook his head. Cleared his throat.

‘Uh, they modelled admin systems, infrastructure, things like that. They were into central Africa, the Middle East. Pretty small, but hungry and hard on the roads, as far as that went back then.’

Mike nodded. ‘Enough to just get there first, right?’

‘That’s what they say.’ Chris stared at a ray of dusty light falling across the bar top. A faint scarring of overlaid glass rings showed up in the wooden glow. ‘2018, Edward Quain was a hotshot young gun in Hammett McColl Emerging Markets. Couldn’t have been older than his early twenties. And he pulled off this cutting-edge piece of incursion for Hammett McColl in Ethiopia. Got backing for a major policy shift. Nothing dramatic by CI standards, this is more than thirty years ago, remember. But it was enough to bring down the government. A lot of high-ranking officials lost their jobs. And Quain’s new team publicly reneged on a stack of external contracts. Happened overnight, literally. IES couldn’t take the damage. They went under, bankrupted along with a dozen or so others, and about forty per cent of the low-end commercial sector in Ethiopia at the time. They say it precipitated the civil war.’

‘Ah yeah, I remember this.’ Mike snapped his fingers. ‘The Ayele Protocol, right? Read about it in Reed and Mason.’

‘Right. Quain walked away with a huge commission, Hammett McColl repositioned for regional dominance in the Red Sea zone, and my father woke up with a walletful of dead plastic he didn’t know about. He got shot the same day, arguing with a supermarket security guard. His card wouldn’t scan at checkout, they wouldn’t take him seriously and it got.’ Chris watched his knuckles whiten around the whisky glass with absent fascination, as if they belonged to someone else. ‘Out of hand. My mother says, said, if he’d been dressed better that day, it would never have happened. Hated suits apparently, my old man. Dressed scruffy as he could, outside the office. Maybe they thought he’d stolen the card or something. They tried to throw him out, it got rough. Blam. Some fat over-the-hill fuck with a dick extension blew his fucking head off’

He looked at the whisky glass. Let go of it abruptly and stared at the palm of his suddenly liberated hand.

‘We lost everything. The house, both cars. Health insurance, savings. Stock options. My mother got rehoused in the eastern zones. My father’s friends helped out as much as they could, but most of them were going under too. They were all at IES or working in related firms.’ Chris picked up his drink again, knocked it back. ‘And then, even that early, they say you could see the domino coming if you were paying attention. It was still nearly a decade off, the worst of it, but people were already running scared, just hanging on with whatever they had. And Quain had just seen to it that we had nothing.’

‘You remember all this?’

‘Not really, no. I was two when my father was killed. I was there but,’ Chris shivered, dodging the dream. ‘I don’t remember it. I just remember growing up in the zones with this accent everybody hated. This vague sense that things were better once. Before. But I could have picked that up listening to my mother. No way you remember stuff from when you’re two years old.’

‘No. But.’ Mike gestured helplessly. ‘How the fuck did you. I mean, Quain. Didn’t he see you coming, the day you joined HM? How did you even get into HM, come to that?’

‘I changed my name. My father wasn’t called Faulkner, it was my mother’s maiden name. She died of thorn fever, when I was seventeen. I took her name, sold everything else we owned and cut myself a new identity. Got a gangwit datarat in Plaistow to fix my records. Probably did a shit job, the money I gave him, but it was what I could afford. I doubt it would have stood up to close scrutiny, but when you’re from the zones who the fuck cares. You’re just cheap, faceless labour. And by the time I got to Hammett McColl, I had five years of new identity behind me. I’d made a lot of money for Ross Mobile and LS Euro, I could drive. That’s all the HM recruiters cared about.’

‘Sloppy. Was that their own people?’

‘No, contracted out. Some cut-rate two-room outfit off Ludgate Circus. They tendered for HM on straight cost. No duel requirement. Lowest offer wins.’

Mike shook his head. ‘Fucking amateurs.’

‘Yeah, but you know what. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Quain wouldn’t have recognised my father’s name. Some guy he ruined twenty years ago, one name out of hundreds he probably didn’t even know back when it happened, let alone two decades on. What are the chances?’

‘Yeah, figures.’ Mike puffed out his cheeks. ‘Jesus, what a story. Does Carla know all this?’

‘No. She knows I grew up in the zones, she knows my parents are dead, but we don’t talk about it. I met her after Quain. I’d already buried it all. She used to ask, back when we started seeing each other. Think it might even have been some of the attraction for her, the zone connection. I told her I wasn’t interested in looking back.’ He stared down the receding perspectives of the memory. ‘Snapped her head off whenever she asked. She stopped asking after a while.’

‘Yeah, it’s true. You never talk about it, do you.’

Chris shrugged. ‘Nor do you. Nor do any of us. We’re all too flat-out fucking busy trying to make it big right now to talk about the past. You’d think none of us had parents, the way we live.’

‘Hey, I’ve got parents. I see them pretty often.’

‘Good for you.’

Mike shook his head again, a little blearily this time. ‘Still can’t believe it, man. It’s like a fucking movie. All the way back from the zones to take down Edward Quain.’

Chris finished his drink. ‘Yeah, well. Some of us have got what it takes, some of us haven’t. Remember.’

‘Ah, shit, Chris, I didn’t mean you. I’m not saying everyone in the zones deserves to be there, you know that. If I’d known, you know, about your parents and stuff, I wouldn’t have said—‘

‘No? You must have known my background, Mike. You said yourself, that first day I met you in the washroom, Hewitt was batting my details about before I arrived. And it’s not a secret where I grew up. It’s on the resume.’

‘What?’ Mike squinted at him. ‘Well, yeah, but I assumed. I don’t know, accidental son of some slumming exec and a bargirl, a dancer or something.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Fuck, I don’t mean. I mean, it doesn’t mean anything, but I just assumed. It happens, you know. Seen it happen. Come close a couple of times, myself. I just figured, something like that, that’s how you got your break at Ross Mobile, maybe a leg up into LS as well.’

‘No.’ Chris smiled tightly. ‘I got Ross through an old friend of my father. Everything else I clawed down myself. Don’t worry about it, Mike. You were right. Some of us have got what it takes, and what it takes is hate. I had enough hate to paint a towerblock. I grew up hating. It was like fuel. Like food. You don’t need much of anything else when you’ve got hate.’

‘Look—‘

‘And then one morning I woke up and I’d killed Edward Quain, and the world was still here. I had a job, I had a life, well, a lifestyle anyway. Hammett McColl had just promoted me. I had money, a lot of money, for the first time in my life.’ He tipped his empty glass horizontal. Looked into it and laughed. ‘It seemed a little ungracious not to go on living.’

The two of them sat there in silence for a while. Finally, Mike shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat.

‘Chris.’ He hesitated. ‘You, uh, you want to stay at my place tonight?’

‘No. Thanks, no. I’ve got to be alone for a while, Mike. There’s stuff I need to sort out. I’ll get a hotel. But thanks. And.’ He waved vaguely. ‘Thanks for, you know, saving my life and everything.’

Bryant grinned.

‘Shit, I always owed you for Mitsue Jones. Just call it even.’

The hotel would not hold him.

He poured himself a whisky - another fucking whisky - and stared at the phone as if it were poisonous. His mobile was still switched off. No one outside of Mike knew where he was. He’d have to pick up and dial.

He picked up the TV remote instead, and zapped through the channels. Endless, mindless, brightly-coloured shit and an upbeat report just in from Cambodia. He recognised the editing.

He shut down the TV’s painted window and went out on the balcony. Warm night air gusted over his face. A well-lit Kensington street angled past seven floors below. A couple walked along it, arm in arm. Laughter floated up. A cab idled by in the opposite direction, cruising for custom.

He retreated to the bedroom. He lay face up on the bed and stared at the perfectly moulded plaster ceiling. Tension itched down his limbs.

He prowled the suite and gnawed a thumbnail down to the quick.

He lit the laptop and tried to carry out simple database tasks.

He hurled the whisky glass across the room.

He grabbed wallet, Nemex, jacket, and he left.

She was waiting for him.

She must have heard the cab in the street outside. The door opened as he pressed the bell. She stood in the clothes she’d worn at Break Point, black leggings and a loose grey running top, face scrubbed clean of make-up, hair gathered back. They stood looking at each other, an arm’s reach apart.

‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ he started, but she shook her head.

She reached for him as he crossed the threshold. It felt like falling. He was close enough to smell freshly drunk coffee on her breath, behind that the swirl of female scent mingled with orange blossom. The kiss was an open-mouthed collision that squeezed tears into his eyes, a mutual assault of tongues, of teeth tugging on lips and hands on clothing below. She was laughing excitedly into his open mouth as they clinched and his hands felt impossibly full of her body, unable to grasp the substance of it with enough force. He kicked the door shut and found a breast beneath the sports top, unsupported and surgically perfect - the porn segment sprang through his mind like sweat — hard under soft, a swath of stomach sprung with taut muscle, the hard length of one thigh and the lift of arse cheek above it. He could not settle on any of it.

Her leg thrust between his and ground upward against his prick. He was already hard. She bit him on the neck. Hands dragged him down the hall, past the kitchen and bathroom and left into an untidy bedroom. Cluttered bedside unit, a teetering pile of books and a glass of stale water. A pale blue quilt crumpled across an unmade bed. He drank it in and the new intimacy was a tiny itching in the pit of his stomach, an opening to an inner sanctum, built into his prior knowledge of the rest of the house. She let him go with a sudden motion as if he was hot, sank to the bed in front of him and peeled off her leggings in two single stripping motions. Fingers touched the mound beneath the white cotton thong she wore underneath, rubbing the groove up and down. She grinned up at him as she did it. Her free hand scrabbled across to the bedside table, ripped open a drawer and reached inside.

‘No, wait.’

He shed jacket and shirt, dropped to his knees beside the bed and buried his face in the white cotton, breathing in the undiluted scent of her. She gasped and sank back on the folds of the quilt. The heated heart of flesh between her thighs was moist. He slid his hands up the insides of her thighs, fingers first, pulled aside the cotton and sank his tongue into her. A hard spasm and her hands came to grip the sides of his head. Her legs lifted and folded over his back like wings. She was panting.

When she came, she ground up hard against him with a deep grunting sound, then flopped to twitching stillness. He shouldered his way gently out from under her legs and straightened up. In the drawer she had opened, he found the Durex can. He rolled its chilly length along the plain of her stomach, got another twitch as it touched her, then lodged it between her breasts and rolled it idly back and forth in the indelible cleavage surgery had given her. She raised herself on her elbows.

‘So what do you want now?’ she asked, mock tough.

‘I want to fuck you, Liz.’

She seemed to consider that for a moment, head tilted slightly. Then she sat up, tugged her hair loose of its binding and set about unfastening his belt buckle. She liberated the engorged length of his prick from the cloth it was trapped in, handling it with greedy care and sliding it back and forth into her mouth. Then she gripped it at base between thumb and forefinger, picked up the Durex can and sprayed him steadily from end to end.

It was a long time since he’d needed to use the stuff, and the sudden, cold tightening of the instant membrane was a shock. He gasped and Liz Linshaw grinned again as she heard it.

‘That’s just for starters,’ she said in the back of her throat and held up the can for his inspection. ‘This is cocktail-laced. Expensive stuff. You wait ‘til the contact sensitisers kick in. You’re not going to last long.’

He reached for her and she scooted back on the bed, opening herself for him. He sank all the way into her with a groan, cupped one breast in both hands, working the flesh. He sucked in the nipple and it touched the roof of his mouth.

She was right. He didn’t last long.

‘Can you feel my heart?’ she asked him, later.

He nodded drowsily against her chest.

‘It’s still beating like a fucking drum, Chris. That’s with thinking about what you did to me. I want you to do it again.’

‘What, right now?’

She laughed. ‘Well, ideally yeah. But I can wait.’ She craned her neck to look at his face. ‘Are you staying the night?’

‘If you ask me to.’

‘Stay the night.’

‘No, I got to go.’

‘You bastard.’ She slapped at his flank. ‘That’s not funny. I want you to stay, Chris. I want access to you.’

‘You’ve got access to me. Look at me.’ But beneath the comfortable humour, he felt a vague stirring of alarm. Not at what she wanted. At what he might want from her.

‘So we’re going to do this again?’

He thought about Carla. Pushed the thought away again. Let go.

‘Yeah, we are. I’m living out of a hotel now, Liz. No more complications.’

And in the back of his head, something heard and lifted its throat to the sky, and laughed like a hyena.

Amidst the plinthed Grecian sculpture, Louise Hewitt sat on the edge of the grey-sheeted bed and stared past the white blast of a bedside halogen lamp. The room was silent around her. She had hung her jacket away with automated care on her way into the apartment, and now her shoulders slumped under the soft silk of her blouse. There was an unaccustomed ache in her throat.

She looked down at the bed and pressed her lips together. Then she lay sideways on the covers and lowered her face to the pillow. His scent came off the grey cotton and she clenched her eyes shut.

‘Oh Christ, Nick,’ she murmured, and her throat clicked as she swallowed. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I warn you?’

She lay there for a while, and a single tear leaked out from under her right eyelid. It trickled jerkily to the edge of her face and soaked into the pillow.

When the second and third tear slipped out, she sat up abruptly and wiped them off her face with the angry gesture of someone ripping off a mask. She cleared her throat, got up from the bed and went through to the study. She stabbed the datadown awake and seated herself before its soft, multi-coloured glow. She worked.